Emperor of the Air (15 page)

“Women are afraid of getting old,” he said.

“So?”

“So, you play on that.”

I tried to look behind us again without turning my neck. Mrs. Silver was asleep with her head leaning back over the seat. Her mouth was open and I saw her throat. She was married to a drunk. I knew that much. I also knew that her husband had been in prison. I paused while we passed some telephone poles. “That’s what you were going to tell me, isn’t it?”

“Nope.”

I couldn’t imagine what could be more important than that. Mrs. Silver’s throat was white as bath soap, and she was in our house practically every day. When she waxed her legs they shone like my polished clutch plates. I looked at the road and tried to think of what it was like. I imagined waking up one night in my room to find her at the side of my bed, whispering. “Edgar,” she would say. Her voice would be low and soft. “Edgar, I can’t resist.” At a party that year I had felt the breasts of a girl two grades ahead of me.

That afternoon Lawrence and I were in a gas station bathroom. We were drying our hands under the heat fan. “Lawrence,” I said. I rubbed my hands together a few times. “Did
she
ask
you?
”

“Did who ask me?”

“You know,” I said. The dryer stopped and I put my hands in my pockets. “Did Mrs. Silver ask
you?
”

“In a way.”

“In what way?”

“In the way women ask for a thing.”

“How do women ask for a thing?”

He walked out to the parking lot and I followed him. We were in the desert. The tar was soft under my shoes, and Darienne and my mother and Mrs. Silver sat on towels on the car hood. Mrs. Silver was wearing a halter top tied high over her abdomen. “They ask for a thing by making you think of it,” said Lawrence.

When we got home from our trip that year I started my diary. I hadn’t written anything in it before. It was leatherette, with my initials embossed, and it locked. The key was attached by a piece of yellow string. I opened it and reread the inscription. Then I turned to the first page.

J
UNE
21st—

I wrote.

LAWRENCE IS LEAVING
.

I thought of writing about Mrs. Silver. I closed the diary and locked it, then got a paper clip from the desk. When I tried it, the paper clip opened the lock. I decided not to write about her.

Darienne knocked on the door and came in. “I have to tell you something,” she said. She looked at my desk. “You’re using that,” she said.

“What did you have to tell me?”

“That you can’t tell anybody about the cyanide.” She stepped behind me. “And you can’t write about it, either.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not even cyanide,” she said. “It’s a diet pill. You wrote about it, didn’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“Let me see.”

I closed the diary and locked it. She took two oboe reeds from her shirt pocket and put them in her mouth. “You ought to wash those first,” I said.

“I knew you’d already written about it.”

“I have not. And what do you care if I did?”

“I don’t want Lawrence to know. I want him to remember good things about me.”

“What if he does know? He knows everything else about you.”

“He does not.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

“It does so.”

I looked at her. There was always something about her that made me angry. I didn’t know what it was. She looked at me as if I were about to hit her. I turned and faced right into her eyes. “It doesn’t matter,” I said, “because he hates you anyway.”

She stepped back and felt for the door handle, and for a moment I thought she was actually going to fall. Then she left, and I didn’t see her again until that afternoon, when she came outside to the yard. Lawrence and I were patching the muffler. She stood off to the side of us, humming the Bellini concerto. Even when she hummed, she repeated parts, went over and over bars as if she were practicing. It was a warm afternoon and I didn’t want anything to bother me. I was cutting squares of fiber-glass mesh to fit the rust holes in the tailpipe. Lawrence was mixing the hardener. Darienne stopped and repeated a phrase. Then she repeated it again, louder.

“Hi, Dary,” I said.

“Hi, Edgar. Hi, Lawrence.”

“You’re crossing railroad tracks,” Lawrence said.

“What?” said Darienne.

“You’re crossing a set of railroad tracks,” he said, “when the car you’re driving stalls.” He squeezed out a ribbon of fiber-glass putty onto the plastic spatula and mixed it with hardener. Darienne had stopped humming. “You look up and see that around the bend the locomotive is coming. You’re right in the middle of the track and the engineer won’t see you in time to stop.” He picked up the mixture with a spreader and pressed it into the dent in the rear of the tailpipe. “What are you going to do?”

“Start the car,” said Darienne.

“It won’t start.”

“Give it gas.”

“It still won’t start. The train is coming,” he said. He looked at me.

I cut four neat corners on a square of mesh. “Get out of the car,” I answered.

“Bingo,” said Lawrence.

Darienne took a step toward us, reached with her leg, and kicked our parts tray upside down. “You’ll never get a job with that hand,” she said.

Lawrence laughed. “What did you say?”

“It’s a beautiful day out here,” I said.

“I said you’ll never get a job with that hand of yours.”

Lawrence turned around in his crouch. “Damn you,” he whispered. He gathered up a couple of bolts that had rolled next to him. Then he picked up a hammer from the tool chest. So quickly that it seemed to be done by someone else, not by any of us, but by a fourth, by another person, he grabbed Darienne and threw her to the ground. She hit hard on her hip. She was alongside the motorcycle, on her side in the dirt, and he raised the hammer over her face. For a moment its shiny head was above us. My brother’s arm was cocked back, stiff with anger. I watched it. I saw the hair and the sweat on his wrist. I saw the hammer’s rubber handle and the red steel of its shaft. American beauty hardware, it said. The words were printed on aluminum tape wrapped at the neck. There was a rose emblem, black and silver, at the top. At the height of his swing it reflected brilliant light. I didn’t say anything. I stood behind them. Darienne screamed. I stepped forward and grabbed Lawrence’s hand.

His arm relaxed, and while Darienne scrambled up beside him he let the hammer fall from his grip. Darienne stood. Her skirt was marked with dust and oil. She brushed her cheeks, first one, then the other. Then she turned around and ran into the house.

I turned the parts tray over and began picking up springs and bolts. “Jesus, Lawrence,” I said.

“She’ll get over it.”

In front of me, in the pan, bits of dust floated on the oil. “But you wouldn’t have hit her.”

“Probably not.”

“You can’t hit somebody like that.” I looked up at him and smiled. “Come on.”

He picked up the hammer and put it back in the toolbox. “What the hell would
you
know about anything?” he said.

We brought Lawrence to the bus station the week before baseball camp started. He left Darienne’s painting behind because, he said, he would be back to get it. After breakfast we hung it in the living room. Lawrence said goodbye to Caramel and we got into my mother’s Dodge and drove to the station.

When the bus came I helped him on with his stuff. The driver put his duffel underneath and I carried his small suitcase, which had been our father’s, into the coach for him. The bus was blue inside and smelled of smoke. It didn’t have a skylight. Lawrence took a seat toward the back, next to a middle-aged woman. The driver got back in. I could see Darienne and my mother waiting at the front door. Lawrence went up the aisle and kissed my mother. I watched Darienne let him kiss her also. I got out.

When the bus started to move my mother held Darienne’s arm. “When will he be back?” asked Darienne.

“He walked in all the ways of his father,” said my mother.

“Dary, you’re not thinking about what’s important,” I said.

We watched the bus go out to the highway before we got back in our car. On the ride home we stopped for ice cream cones. That evening Mrs. Silver came over and drank vodka cranberries with my mother in the back yard. I drank one too, without ice, and it made me a little drunk. Darienne stayed inside.

I sat on an aluminum chair, my hands tingling from the liquor, and thought of a time when I would barely remember my brother. He would be in California in two days. Then, for as long as I could imagine, I would be living in this house with my mother and my sister. I knew I would never finish the motorcycle. It would lie out in the yard and the rust would eventually enter the engine. But that didn’t bother me. I looked at my mother. She was stirring the ice in her glass. Darienne was probably upstairs drawing one line and then another, changing the shading, changing the edge. The light was fading. It seemed to me that all of them, she and my mother and Lawrence, had suffered a wound that had somehow skipped over me. I drank more of my vodka cranberry. Life seemed okay to me. It seemed okay even now, the day my brother left. It even seemed pleasant, which was the way, despite everything she said, I thought it probably seemed to Mrs. Silver.

I looked at her. She was leaning back on a lounger, reading the newspaper. She didn’t seem upset about Lawrence leaving. But that’s what I would have expected. She wasn’t like my mother, and she wasn’t like Darienne or Lawrence. Life just flowed over her. It melted over her like wax. I wondered if
she
cared about anybody. She looked up at me then, as I sat watching her, and I saw that her mouth was rimmed with cranberry.

I smiled. She smiled back. I stood up and went into the house, and after I looked at our new painting for a while I walked upstairs to see my sister. When I came into her room the lights were off except for the Bambi nightlight. It lit the baseboard. In its small, yellow glow I could see Darienne on the bed. Her white legs were drawn up against her chest and she was crying. I went over and sat next to her.

“Hi, Dary.”

She didn’t say anything. We sat there for a while. She rocked up and back against the wall.

“You shouldn’t be so sad,” I said. “He was a pecker to you.”

“I don’t care.”

We sat for a few minutes. I thought about things. Then I leaned back next to her. “Dary,” I said, “you are driving on a very hot day.” I could smell the herbal shampoo in her hair. “A day in which it is over one hundred degrees outside, when you notice halfway up a mountain grade that the temperature gauge on the dashboard indicates hot.” I got up from the bed, took a couple of steps across the room, came back. I picked the dirt from my fingernails. “What are you going to do?”

“Edgar, I’m your older sister.”

“Come on.”

She pulled her knees up.

“The car is overheating.”

“I don’t know what to do,” she said.

I sat lower on the bed again. The two of us pushed together on the quilt. Then, next to her, I started to cry too. I was thinking of Lawrence. Last night I had gone down to his apartment to see him. I almost never went in there. The computer was in a box and his clothes were folded in stacks on the bed. The door was open and the sun was setting, so we went and stood together on the steps. He picked up pebbles from his entranceway and threw them into the yard.

“Have a good time,” I said.

“I will.”

“When will you visit?”

“I may not be back for a while,” he said.

“Not for a while.”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll finish the Honda.”

“Good.”

Then Darienne came down from the house. She walked past Lawrence and stood between us. “I have something to ask you, Edgar,” she said.

“What is it?”

“I want to know whether he was going to hit me.”

I laughed. I looked at Lawrence’s back.

“Tell me,” she said.

I laughed again. “Were you going to hit her?” I said to Lawrence.

“I asked
you
, “said Darienne.

“You can’t ask me that, Dary,” I said. “You can’t just ask me whether another person was going to do something.” I put my hand on her arm.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Dary, I can’t tell you that. I can tell you what I would have done.” I leaned down and picked up a couple of pebbles. “But Dary, you knocked over our parts. They’re covered with dirt now. There’s gravel in the transmission. I can’t tell you what Lawrence would or wouldn’t do.”

“Would he have hit me?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

Lawrence tossed a pebble over the hedge. “Tell her what you think,” he said.

She looked into my eyes. I wanted to change the subject, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I smiled. I really tried to think about it. “Yes,” I said. “I think he would have.”

Darienne turned and went back into the house. I stayed behind Lawrence. Even from the back I thought he was smiling. I threw the pebbles in my palm one by one over the hedge.

“Do you think
you
would have hit her?” he said. He didn’t turn around.

“No,” I answered.

He chuckled. I thought he was going to say something more, but he didn’t. He let the pebbles drop from his hand.

“You know what I’m waiting for?” I asked.

“You’re waiting for me to tell you what I was going to tell you.”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” he said. “This is it.” He turned around and faced me. “You’re a bastard, too,” he said.

“What?”

“I mean, yes, you would have hit her too. You just don’t know it yet.” He pointed at me. “But if something ever goes wrong, you’re going to turn into a son of a bitch, just like me.” He smiled slightly. “Just like every guy in the world. You don’t know if yet because everything’s all right so far. You think you’re a nice guy and that everything hasn’t really affected you. But you can’t get away from it.” He tapped his chest. “It’s in your blood.”

“That’s what you were going to tell me?”

“Bingo,” he said.

Then he brushed past me and went into his apartment. I followed and stood behind him in the doorway. A wind had come up and I put my hands into my pockets. He stood with his back to me, placing shirts into a box, not saying anything. He was wearing a jean jacket and chino pants with pleats. We were silent, standing in his darkening apartment, and I tried to imagine what the world was like for him.