Criminals (27 page)

“Mary Catherine says her dad doesn't know our names!” Laura marveled.

“He may not know theirs,” my father said from the next room. “Gil Ott is always minding the store,” he would say, raising his eyebrow in the way we liked, “the store being himself. If he gets any gloomier they'll have to put windshield wipers on him.”

No one said “depression.” We didn't know the word, even my mother. We knew my father was never in a bad humor and did not believe in being down in the mouth or bored, or in mentioning it if you were. If we were sick he was in our room with plans for our being well the next day. He would bring in his
Brehm's Life of Animals
, or a volume of the Century Encyclopedia, so we could go through everything that began with A through C and forget our complaints.

Privately Laura and I drew up explanations for the bad luck of the Otts, every one, including the dog Mosquito.
They just don't know. Mosquito has never been trained.
Mosquito was tiny, a terrier of some kind, with splayed whiskers that made him look like one of those fish that suck the algae off aquarium sides. His joints were stiff and he bit. Often he had worms, from eating whatever he came across when he rooted in the ivy to find a place to lie down away from the Otts. When they found him he would come out snapping, pawing his fringed eyes. A car had hit him on our street, tearing his nose and dislocating his jaw so it stuck forward in an expression of fury. After she drove Audrey back from the vet, my mother said, “Mosquito's going to live. For once things went right for them.”

“Yes and no,” said my father.

Mosquito did not like to be petted or taken for walks. He was sensitive about the pads of his toes and could lick them for an hour at a time. He barked in his high, outraged register at cars, kids on bikes, flies on the windowpane, noises in the house at night.

Laura and I had no dog but we had rules for the treatment of animals. We instructed Mary Catherine, but not teasing animals was another doctrine mislaid or forgotten in their house. Mosquito was often trapped in Annie's doll carriage, being wheeled around panting. “He's carsick!” moaned Laura, who could not ride any distance in a
car without throwing up, and could not even ride her new bike, to her bitter chagrin, because it made her dizzy. If James saw Mosquito in the carriage he would lift him out, under the arms, and cradle him away from Annie. For this, and for the long eyelashes that hid his opinions, we excused James from our dinnertime stories of the Otts, and even Mary Catherine left him out of her denunciations of her family.

Our house and the Otts' next door were on a street that was really a road, at one time a country road, my father said, with yards big enough to hold a horse and chickens. Some of the yards had tractor tires with flowers planted in them. We were in the broad valley south of Seattle, with the mountains in the near distance, close to the Boeing Company plant where the men worked, and behind our two houses was what we called the ivy field. It was a steep bank running up to dense holly trees that had marked the beginning of woods, though now there were houses you could see through the line of trees.

The ivy field was blanketed with a second crop of vines, morning glory, making it a lush, varied green from a distance. But it was dusty if you got into it, with things embedded in the vines: bottles, broken china, doll heads, and square gray sponges that had been newspaper, and pieces of stiff plaid shirt with the outlines of stems pressed into them. Cats and raccoons had made trails you could follow and broaden if you went in on your hands and knees through the anthills and cat leavings. Higher up you ran into fallen brown holly leaves that could stab you like thumbtacks, and thousands of dried-up holly berries that my father said were the toes of children who never found their way out. The smell inside the ivy was of many things dried and maybe edible, like pepper or tea.

For a while we played there with five of the Otts, Natalie being too little and bare, but eventually the ivy field came to belong to James and Owen, with Clark as guard because he was a crybaby who didn't go in under the vines, while we played at the edge, Laura, Mary Catherine, and I, and Annie if we couldn't escape her. Sometimes we would receive from James a password that allowed us to crawl in.

If you crawled in far enough, about halfway up to the holly trees, you dropped into a dusty cave in the slope where the vines went on
uninterrupted above and the space seemed deliberately hollowed out for three or four to lie down in. There we played dead.

You had to get onto your back, feet down the bank, and be still, not even scratching. You could look up and see bits of sun running like mercury up the vines. At the same time we had made the provision that although dead, you could speak in a singsong voice and give reports of the place you had gone when you left your body.

“I wish my mom and dad would hurry up and die and get here!” Laura said, transported wholly into death and breaking, as she often did that year she was six, the rule that parents did not exist as part of any game.

“Not them!” Mary Catherine hissed, although she had been underfoot in our house trailing our mother all year, on the days she stayed home from school with her headaches.

Mary Catherine did not have headaches, Laura and I felt sure. She had the idea from her father and she wanted to be with our mother when we were not home. Around our mother, my father said, Mary Catherine was like a cat hoping to be stroked.

“I miss Mosquito,” said Annie in the whine she thought was the dead voice, scrambling up so that her head hit the woven roof and showered us with seeds.

“Well, go get him then,” said Mary Catherine, pushing Annie, knowing she would never crawl out alone. “He can be dead, too.”

We had to stay there until the boys found us. When they did, they fell into the cave with their weapons, taking up all the room, jabbing us with sticks and knees and elbows. “We're dead,” Mary Catherine protested angrily. Being found by her brothers, and by the unsmiling, intently playing James in particular, did not carry the queasy excitement for her that it did for Laura and me. But they drove us back along the slanting passageway and out into the sun where, once we were upright and squinting, captive, with dirt in our hair, they lost interest and went off to play basketball.

James was two years ahead of me in school when the Otts moved in, though he was to fall back. The third year after they came, when I was in the sixth grade, he got polio.

He just disappeared one day, into polio. Polio was vaguely related to what my father called the “conditions” at the Otts', which covered everything we could report of their shorted-out TV set, the scorched enamel of their stove, the failure of Owen and Clark to be properly toilet trained, their bent lawn mower that had run on its own up into the ivy, where the next spring all but the handlebars sank out of sight under the morning glory that wound itself onto the ivy.

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” my mother said. “You girls are as prissy as a couple of parakeets. I'm going to write all of this down and read it to you when you have kids.”

“Only please don't have six,” my father said.

My mother said, “Audrey Ott does what she can with the situation.”

“What situation?” we wanted to know.

“Mr. Ott,” said my father with a wink.

But my father couldn't find anything to say when James got polio. During the school year he had put up a basket for James on our garage and taught him to shoot. James was out at the garage every morning before school and every afternoon when he got home. In no time he was better than my father. It was getting so he would call his orders out to us from under the basketball net, rather than lead the way into the ivy or be there barring us from it. “Go on in,” he would say to me over his shoulder, which had changed shape. His upper arms showed muscle giving on muscle, sinking and locking in a way that offered a kind of rudeness to someone looking at them. “Go on in there, I don't care.” But I didn't want to.

My father said, “That boy's going to play ball. This year. Hasn't got the height but he's accurate and he'll make the JV with his speed. The boy floats, Billie.”

“I see that,” my mother agreed. It was taken for granted that a man wanted a son.

After the basket went up Mr. Ott came out onto the porch and my father invited him to shoot with them. He put up his stiff hand to ward off the idea.

“Oh, Neil, he's heading down again, he's sad,” my mother said. She always waved to Mr. Ott in the yard and sometimes sent my father
over to help him with the lawn mower, before he aimed it at the ivy and let it go.

“There are the sad,” my father said, “and there are the sad sacks.”

Mr. Ott would be rubbing his little finger with his thumb, and then he would give the mower a heavy kick and wrench it over onto its side so that nuts popped or the gas cap came off and the gasoline ran into what grass was left in the yard. It was hard to say why these things were not funny when Mr. Ott did them.

My mother said, “If you men got together, Neil, Gil Ott could ride with you, and Audrey Ott could have the car once in a while.” Once or twice when his car was not running Mr. Ott rode to work with my father, but this did not become a habit.

When James got polio, all the activity in the boys' room that we had watched from the tree came to an end. The boys went somewhere else in the house, where you couldn't see them, although their voices and the barking of Mosquito could still be heard. The doctors decreed a long period of quarantine, during which we were not allowed to play with the Otts. Any one of them could get polio and all of them probably carried it. During this time my mother's eyes followed us wherever we went. Every day she would look at our throats and feel our necks at the jawline and say with a tense look, “You don't feel achy anywhere?”

My father said, “Billie, you are going to have to face the fact that these girls are not going to pass away and leave you their money.”

Mary Catherine waved whenever she passed a window, and stopped to twist her mouth into a scream, roll her eyes, and wind her hair in a strangling motion around her neck. Sometimes her voice on the phone would whisper, “It's awful over here.”

“I know it is,” I said. She belonged, we agreed, where there was no polio and for that matter none of Audrey's dried-up fish on Friday, no sister who couldn't learn to read and brothers whose smelly sheets had to be hauled out to the washing machine on the screened porch by Mary Catherine—a female responsibility that went with not needing punishment—and no father dumb with headache at the dinner table.

At Boeing Mr. Ott did something with chemicals that gave him headaches. When he had one of them he got a decayed look, like the fatigued bears we saw when we went up to the Woodland Park Zoo. He didn't go into his own bedroom and lie down on his own bed, and no wonder, everything in the house ended up there, he would have had to make room among the diapers and newspapers, and crumbs from eating toast in bed, and damp towels because the rods in the bathroom weren't fixed, and laundry, and Audrey Ott's old blue chenille robe with the hanging pocket.

He went into his boys' room and stretched out on one of the lower bunks. Laura and I looked in from the sycamore. You could see James's arm hanging off the bed while he read his comics, and Mr. Ott with his arm across his eyes in the other bunk that formed an L with James's.

Unlike us, with our sense of importance, Mary Catherine found nothing too private to tell. She told where the boys kept things they had stolen, how Owen and Clark both still wet the bed and the test showed Annie had a low IQ and Clark had ringworm on his penis because he played with it with his dirty little fingers. She told when her father worked for weeks on a letter to the newspaper about the Korean War. He had fought in it and had the idea no one understood things that had happened there. His letter was not published on Veterans Day, for which he had written it, and was not published in the ensuing weeks while the family waited. She told when her mother had diarrhea all night, and when she cried. Worst of all she told the story of a shooting witnessed by her father.

The husband of a secretary came in with a gun and shot his wife, and Mr. Ott, who was standing right there, didn't do a thing. Mary Catherine told how afraid he had been, so afraid he had had to drop into a chair with a pain in his chest.

“Hmm,” said my father at dinner when Laura finished with the story.

“Well, I wonder if he shouldn't have made a citizen's arrest,” said my mother in a voice that did not prevent Laura from starting to tell it all over again.

“This is a gal who drove her husband nuts,” my father said. “I do know”—raising his glass of milk to my mother—“I'd want somebody other than Gil Ott to be there if you were going to get shot at.”

“How about these girls?” my mother said.

“You mean you!” Laura shouted, pointing at him. Our father was not out in the open at Boeing the way Mary Catherine's father had been, he had an office.

“Well?” said my mother. “
Well
? Is she dead?”

“She's fit as a fiddle. All he did was wing her.”

“Oh, is that all he did?” said my mother. “Well. Well then. She could just keep right on typing.”

“Now, Billie,” my father said.

The afternoon the police came, Mary Catherine was in our room. The quarantine was over; James was supposed to begin his recovery. “He can't pee, though. Mom's so worried she screamed and yelled at Dad and then she stayed up all night in the kitchen.” How strange, Laura and I thought, to hear your parents speak of things they did not know what to do about, things that made them scream. “And when they make up—they always do that, make up—oh, oh, oh, that's even worse!”

Then James went into the hospital, where he stayed for weeks.

How strange, how possibly unfair, that there was happiness such as ours, and unhappiness such as theirs. Strange that Mr. and Mrs. Ott had married each other and produced six others, who would have been nowhere on earth otherwise, to live in that house among the broken appliances and strange, ignored repetitive prayers. How did one know how many children to have? What if you did not love them once you had them? Worse, what if one of them did not love you?