Piper Page 4

  After dark, Willard said he had to walk back over to the house on Socket Street and get his dog. It was about twelve blocks, but that was nothing for him. He’d tramped half the county since Dad had de-keyed him. He knew which sidewalks were tilted, which ones were cracked and which ones were overgrown with blackberries. He’d marked his paths like a bloodhound, sometimes with his own urine when he couldn’t wait to get home. I wasn’t worried about Willard getting lost. Blowing town maybe, but he wasn’t going to get lost in Stampede.

  I was reading in bed when I heard the screen to the basement door slam. After my little talk with Willard, I’d decided I might have been too harsh with him and went downstairs to welcome him home for his first night.

  When I opened the door to his room, the bed was full of wagging dogs! I counted five of them: a black and white border collie, an Irish terrier with wheat red fur, a smooth off-white mongrel with lemon markings, a black and tan hound with bloodshot eyes and droopy ears, and a pug with a tiny body, massive head, smashed in nose, and wrinkles in his face like elephant hide. Willard was propped against the headboard, feeding them kibbles out of his hand.

  “Jesus, Willard, Dad’s gonna call that nursing home so fast! Whose are these?”

  He bowed his head. “They’re from dead bowling pals. Except for Freeway here.” The border collie brightened at Willard’s touch. “Police found him in a plastic bag out on the highway. I could hardly turn down the law, could I?”

  “There’s no way you can hide this many dogs down here.” Besides the dishonesty, I knew Dad wasn’t that fond of dogs. Mom told me how when he delivered newspapers as a kid, he’d slammed a double-folded paper into someone’s door and a German shepherd bounded through a bay window and tore a hole the size of a crabapple out of the fleshy part of his calf. There was still a dent there.

  I thought I’d succeeded in intimidating Willard, but a big grin spread across his face, revealing a set of tobacco-stained dentures that were his only perfect feature. “Say, what was the name of that doctrine again?” he teased. A boil of spit worked its way to the edge of his mouth and he just left it there the way a dog would.

  Since Mom’s death, I’d developed a passion to touch everything she owned, to run my fingers over her canvasses, to put her patchouli behind my ears, even to use her pillow and slip under the sheets on her side of the bed when Dad wasn’t home. It was all there was left of her.

  As I stood on the chair at the foot of my bed and studied myself in the mirror, it was obvious I bore no resemblance to her. My left rib stuck out like there was an elbow inside. My fingernails were bitten off, my skin pale and bloodless, and my face a combination of flat planes. I hoisted up her belly-dancing skirt, tucked it into the sash, and gathered the extra material at the waist and wadded it into a ball that I stuffed into the back of my underpants. Even though she always thought she was too short, Mom had a perfect figure. I tried to sashay my hips and make the dress swish, but I had no sideways motion. I was the tin woman who only moved forward and backward. When Mom came into a room, she was a study in gyrating circles. It was no wonder that men looked at her and had to reach out and touch her on the arm or rest their hand in the small of her back when she came to rest.

  She took me once to an astrologist named Gemini who lived in a decrepit Victorian house with chrome and vinyl kitchen chairs and a warped card table on the front porch. We passed through the kitchen, which had dirty dishes and corn flakes spilling across the counter and a plastic cat litter tub with pieces of poop sticking out of the sand like Almond Roca candy. Gemini was obese and I could smell her perspiration in the cramped, curtained room she called the chambers, but she had dark, possessive eyes. Mom treated it as a rite of passage, my introduction to the world of the supernatural. I thought Gemini was as phoney as the rhinestones on her fingers, but I went along with the gag for Mom’s sake. When it was done, the only thing I remembered the astrologist telling me was that I was too skinny. “There’s no milk in your breasts,” she said. Mom defended me. “I was a late bloomer myself,” she said, neglecting to add that I was adopted and, therefore, not even traveling in the same genetic constellation. Mom later developed another theory. “Girls with small breasts have more testosterone,” she told me. “Your sexual prowess will be centered in the genitals.”

  Dirk Thurgood came by later and flung a pebble against my window, and I yelled at him to come up. If I were normal I probably wouldn’t have let a guy come into my room while I was trying on clothes and strutting in front of the mirror to ripen my breasts. But Dirk often came over after school to get away from all the “Yes, sirs” and “No, sirs” at his house. His dad was retired Army and Dirk had to keep his bed made and stand for inspection on Saturday mornings. If his socks weren’t rolled and rowed just right or there were dirty clothes under the bed, he’d have to drop for push-ups or be confined to his room. I’d seen bruises on Dirk’s forearms that I knew were from his dad. The guys his dad played handball with at the YMCA in Everett and drank beer with afterward at the Comet Tavern called him “Colonel,” even though Dirk told me his dad didn’t get past Master Sergeant.

  Dirk was puffing when he reached my room. “What’re you doing?”

  “Just fiddling around.”

  Not a minute later the door downstairs slammed and I knew it had to be Dad because Willard always used the basement entrance.

  Dirk looked startled. “I thought you said he didn’t come home this early.”

  “You’re fine. Relax.” Dirk had become particularly jumpy since Mom’s drowning, like he didn’t know what to say or do that wouldn’t remind me of her. When kids at school teased me about what Mom might have been doing at Carlisle’s that day, Dirk told me to blow it off. “They’re just making up shit to entertain each other.” Basically, we didn’t talk about the drowning. If I brought it up, Dirk changed the subject, which was unlike him. Normally, he reveled in the weird, although he didn’t like my shaved head. “You look like a convict,” he told me.

  “Piper! Come on down, we’ve got company.”

  Dirk backed into the walk-in closet and hid behind the hanging clothes Mom had stored there. “Don’t tell him I’m here,” he whispered from between a leather jacket with fringed sleeves and a parcel post colored smock dabbed with paint. Of course, his legs showed from the knees down. The cuffs of his jeans broke across a pair of scuffed Nikes that were pointed away from each other as the result of a lifetime of duck-walking.

  “He won’t come up,” I told Dirk, picturing exactly where Dad was standing, with one foot on the black rubber runner he’d tacked on the stairs to save the threadbare carpet from total destruction. He’d put the runner down the weekend before Mom died and I could still smell the rubber each time I went to my room.

  “Just for a minute,” Dad called again, and I could imagine his arms around the banister post that teetered in its socket like a loose tooth.

  “How about later?” I yelled.

  There was no reply.

  “How do you know he won’t come up?” Dirk said. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought Dirk was scared of my dad.

  “’Cause I know.” Dad hadn’t set foot in my room since Mom made me start wearing a bra, which was a non-event. To please Mom, I had started putting olive oil on my salads and processed cheese spreads on my toast the way the astrologist had suggested, but my breasts were still dollar pancakes. Dirk had better breasts than I did.

  When I didn’t hear anything more from Dad, I went back to trying on Mom’s clothes and Dirk parted the hangers. His face was red and there was a bush of hair sticking up in the front like a miniature whisk broom. Although Dirk was a little pudgy, he wasn’t a bad looking guy. With his lazy eyes and broad face, Mom thought he was a dead ringer for Jackie Gleason. He was sensitive about his weight though and made jokes to deflect attention away from it. If he’d jogged or ridden a bicycle or done anything physical, he’d have been fine as far as his physique was concerned, but Dirk was more into sedentary
adventures. He’d recorded over a thousand movies on the VCR in his room, stacking them alphabetically in his dresser drawers and on his bookshelves. Whenever I went to his house, he’d insist on running one. If I seemed bored, he’d fast forward to the good parts. What he said were the good ones, like Top Gun, he watched over and over until he could lip-synch the lines. He’d never even seen all of those he’d recorded in the middle of the night or while he was at school. I didn’t know exactly why we’d befriended each other. I’d rather have read a book than watch his videos. Where Dirk loved the familiarity of contemporary America, I preferred reading about people and places I’d never been and never would be. Nevertheless, the videos stuck on my brain like chewed gum.

  I tied the tails of Mom’s blouse together to show some stomach skin.

  “Bitching, Piper. You look like a stripper.”

  I could have stripped right there in front of him without so much as getting a goosebump. Dirk was safe. Dirk was a buddy. Most everyone else thought Dirk was a dork. It wasn’t as if we didn’t talk about sex; in fact, it had become one of his main topics. We’d had a scattered history of our own failed attempts at intimacy. Watching videos in the dark in his room, his hand had wandered over to my chest a few times. Once, when we slow danced to Stand By Me, I could feel his hard-on against my leg, but it did nothing for me. I thought it was just Dirk, because I still had fantasies about other guys then, even Condon Bagmore. At seventeen, without ever having to go through the messy business of fighting off temptation, Dirk and I had reached a kind of Platonic love that freed us to talk about his other sexual interests.

  We’d become best friends by default, for lack of other offers. Apparently, I was the only one who saw potential in a kid who could name every movie made by W.C. Fields, but couldn’t tell you who played in the last Superbowl. And I’d become his sexual pathfinder. “You’re a girl,” he told me. “You know what makes ’em tick.”

  “Piper!” Dad was in the hallway and knocking on my door. Dirk’s hand froze in mid-reach to my belly button. I motioned him into the closet and his shoes squeaked as he backed across the hardwood floor on his tiptoes. “John Carlisle wants to talk to you.”

  “Tell Carlisle to write it on a brick and shove it up his ass,” Dirk whispered. This was where it helped to have a coconspirator. For as long as I could remember, Dirk had curried John Carlisle’s favor, mowed and watered his lawn, washed his windows, accepted rides from him any chance he got. I was heartened when I found out that Dirk had quit as John Carlisle’s errand boy after the drowning.

  “Tell him I’m starting my period,” I told Dad.

  Dirk poked his head out of the closet. There was silence on the other side of the door and I felt guilty for lying. Dad wasn’t good with female stuff, which was surprising because he was so bold in other ways.

  The door knob to my bedroom turned, like he was checking to see if it was locked, and I stiffened. “You can’t live in your room, you know.” There was a long pause while I thought sure he was going to burst in. “How ‘bout you and me going to a baseball game or something this weekend? We can sit outside and watch the Aquasox.”

  “Maybe some other time, Dad.” I was sure he was going to call my bluff and Dirk would see what a poor judge of human behavior I really was. There was a shuffling of shoes, then I could hear him sifting change through the keys in his pocket. The truth was I hated to see him disappointed.

  “We’re going over to Marge’s to grab a bite to eat. Join us if you change your mind.”

  His footsteps padded down the rubber runner and Dirk emerged from the closet. “You should have told me you were having your period.”

  “What for?”

  “Well …”

  “It’s not as if I have to be sedated or something.”

  “I just thought, you know, you’d want to be alone.”

  “Have you ever been constipated?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s all it is.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and pulled up on his belt. His cheeks were still pink from hiding in the walk-in. “You sure know how to handle your dad. The Colonel would slap me if I talked to him that way.”

  We always had this debate about our fathers. Even though there’s no way I would have traded for Dirk’s dad, I found myself trying to convince Dirk that his dad wasn’t so bad. The Colonel worked for a linoleum shop when I was little and I remembered him installing the speckled linoleum that was still in our kitchen. He wore one of those men’s undershirts with shoulder straps, snubbed out his cigarettes in the kitchen sink, cussed every time he had to cut for the outlets sticking out from the baseboards, and sweated profusely in a way I’d never seen my dad do. The Colonel kept a good yard, kept himself in excellent physical condition, and had an extensive gun collection in his basement under lock and key with a cardboard sign you could buy in any hardware store that said, “Keep Out.” There were rifles, pistols, swords, whips, bayonets, Billy clubs, an iron collar Dirk told me was a garrote, and even a set of brass knuckles. The Colonel collected weapons the way Dirk collected videos. Although his dad was tough, he and Dirk at least had the same agenda: Dirk’s manhood. Since Mom’s death, I’d come to appreciate one other thing about the Colonel. He looked down on John Carlisle for not following his father’s footsteps into the military service.

  Of course, Dirk didn’t know I was adopted, which lent an air of make-believe to these debates. Dirk’s family had moved to Stampede when the Colonel retired from the service and, even though the Thurgoods weren’t Catholic, they put Dirk in St. Augustine because of the discipline. That’s where we met, in second grade.

  Dirk sat down on the floor, untied his Nikes, and began restringing them to get the laces even. He stuck his little finger in his ear and ratcheted it back and forth, then studied the wax on the tip of it before wiping it on the back of his pants. “If my mom ever kicked the bucket, I’d be outta there.”

  “That’s different.”

  He licked the frayed end of the lace and twisted it into a point. “You’re not shittin’ it’s different. Your dad’s human.”

  “He leaves me alone,” I said, as if that were an asset. In fact, I would have welcomed a little meddling. I’d rationalized Dad’s aloofness since Mom’s death by reminding myself that he wasn’t my real father. In my theory of creation, there was no such thing as genetics anyway; everyone was free-floating, ad hoc. Heaven was filled with amateur artists and each soul was a new canvas. God handed out paint brushes and said, see what you can do with them. They’d painted Dad with a Roman collar, Mom with a great body, and me with no breasts and a giraffe’s neck.

  When Dirk finished tying his shoes and tucked in his shirt, I opened the window over the porch roof to let him out, head first. I had to slide his socks down and hold onto his ankles, which were smooth and hairless, until his hands reached the asphalt shingles. From there, I knew he could shinny his way down the maple tree that had worked its way into the eaves because I’d done it plenty of times myself.

  As I watched him tip-toe toward the alley between the dead corn stalks and barren tomato vines, I remembered one of the big dinners at our house for the newspaper staff when Mom had adorned the house with vases of wildflowers and mustard weeds. Through the rails of the banister, I watched them after dessert begging Dad to do a poem, and he waved them off until Mom dragged a kitchen chair into the middle of the living room and led Dad over to it with her little finger. “He just needs a stage,” she said.

  Dad stood up on the chair, cleared his throat, and recited Yeats’ “Innisfree” by heart. There was an Irish lilt in his voice and the air in the room seemed strewn with Stardust as he spoke. Maybe this was the mysticism Seamus had spoken of. When he was done, Dad pushed the chair back to restore noise to the room and seemed almost embarrassed by the respect they’d paid him with their gaping silence.

  As I stared out the back window, I also thought of running away. It was probably the honorable thing to do in the circumstance
s. But then I remembered how people had bad-mouthed my mother and I felt like a traitor for even entertaining the notion.

  I was needed here in Stampede to make sure no one trampled on her grave.

  4

  While I was waiting for Dad to show up for dinner, Marge brought me a piece of chocolate pie with whipping cream around the perimeter that had been squeezed through a pastry nozzle in a star pattern. The mustard stain on her uniform was at eye level.

  “It’s the first wedge of the pie,” she said, “the one your dad always gets.” For Marge, food was love. She was pleasantly plump and invited others to join in her quest. Love thy neighbor as thyself. I knew what was going on though: Marge was trying to restore normalcy.

  “No thanks, maybe later,” I said, shoving the plate with my thumb to the center of the table. I used to love to come into Marge’s and sit on my legs on one of the stools and joke with her until she gave me someone’s leftover french fries or the part of the milkshake in the steel mixing canister that didn’t fit into the customer’s soda glass, but that was then. Now I wanted change.

  “Shame on you, honey. I can practically see your ribs. Your father must be starving you.” What she really wanted to know was how things were going at home without Mom. She clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth. She must have been a knockout when she was young: high cheekbones, good eyes, full figure. She seemed oblivious to the transformation that time had accomplished on her and she always flirted playfully with my dad.

  “Really, Marge, I’m eating fine,” I said.

  “Got to be well-rounded, honey,” and she put her hands under her breasts and clucked out the side of her mouth, all the time looking straight at my chest. Why did everyone have to have milk jugs for tits?

  “Did my dad leave a message?”

  “You know better than that. Why do you Scanlons always have to be so busy anyway?” She picked up the pie plate and carried it with both hands back to the counter like it was a religious offering and put it into the refrigerated rack next to the coffee makers. I knew it wasn’t the last time I’d see that piece of pie.