Ghouljaw and Other Stories (34 page)

Here was the offer: someone stops in a few times a week and cleans the pool and details the yard at the Crawley house—roll the push-mower over the lawn, pull weeds from the flagstone sidewalk, that sort of thing.

Again: the Crawley son was not offering money. Curt was the one providing the stipend, and Luther instantly registered pity braided in his father’s proposition. Nevertheless, Luther twitched the bangs off his brow—“Sure”—and proceeded out of the house.

And so it went that Luther would occasionally retrieve the ancient push mower from the small shed out back and mill around the yard. He’d skim and clean the pool, making sure the chemicals were in proper proportion. He had no clue what the hell he was doing.
pH levels?

It didn’t take long for Luther to flirt with the idea of actually getting into the locked home. Not long after this novel notion, Luther, one morning while his old man was in the shower, helped himself to his father’s cell phone and discovered the three-digit code to the bulky lockbox on the front door: H . . . A . . . G.

Luther had cased the house for an electronic alarm system and found none upon his first unofficial break-in. Initially it was just Luther. He’d wait until dark, until after the lights began winking out in the elderly-affluent neighborhood, before parking the car down the street, taking a stroll along the sidewalk, keying in the code on the lockbox, and blending into the black house like a resident wraith. Of course, Luther always left the lights off, using only a small flashlight or the illuminated screen from his cell phone to navigate the dark home. There were quite a few rooms in the belly of the house with no windows, and Luther discovered a study with a leather recliner and a television.

Luther would toke up (beforehand, of course, on the drive over or something) and get comfortable in the study, sometimes bringing along a slim bottle or a flask and getting dreamy drunk in the dark, windowless room, his face silvered by coruscating light from the TV.

One night, Luther—sitting in the leather recliner, eyes slit-lidded—was aimlessly flipping through the late-night channels when he stalled on a public-access channel airing a program called
Mother Mary Angelica and the Nuns of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery
. The elderly nun—or mother or sister or whatever you called her—was wearing the full outfit, her wrinkled, plumply jowled face framed by a headpiece and black veil. Luther momentarily pursued and gave up on recalling the word “habit” for the costume nuns wore. And in addition to the cloaked uniform, the old nun was wearing a black eye-patch, which fascinated Luther as he floated on a cloud of inebriation. The nun was seated in a chair on a studio set profusely with pastels, directly addressing the camera. Luther thumbed up the volume and listened. She was doing a monologue about something, that one glassy eye blinking at the camera with soft-spoken sincerity. From time to time a tremor of gaspy, almost mournful agreement—
“Amen . . . Glory to God”
— came from the studio audience. “Most of us live in the worst moment of our lives over and over again,” said the eye-patched nun. “At this moment, here I am talking to you . . . don’t weigh yourself down with yesterday or tomorrow . . . be like Jesus today . . . Jesus showed me the way (
Amen
). Remember, my dear friends and family, be a child of light . . . do not tolerate darkness. Stand tall, not in disobedience but in truth—truth is truth, and we must teach truth (
Amen
). And truth is light and truth is joy and the truth is happiness. If you want to be filled with the joy Jesus promised, we must speak the truth from our hearts and live the truth . . . be generous . . .”

Whatever
. Luther had numbly moved his thumb to change the channel when, with absolutely no transition, the nun leaned forward and scowled directly into the camera. Directly toward Luther. The old lady’s expression contorted, and her wrinkle-pinched face, hooked nose, and bony chin appeared almost liquidly to penetrate the screen as she said, “How would you like it if a stranger was desecrating your house without permission?”

Fumbling with the remote control, Luther lurched upright, but as he did so he noticed a strange, fabric resistance over his forearms and swept a startled gaze over his body to discover a black material draped over his chest and legs. A nun’s robe. Something chaffed his forehead. With a shiver of nausea, Luther slapped his palm to his brow—the movement impeded slightly by those heavy sleeves—feeling the constrictive hood and the hem of the white coif and hanging veil. And then something on his sternum caught the blue light from the TV: a silver-beaded rosary attached to an ornate crucifix resting cock-eyed on his chest.

Luther gasped and spilled out of the chair and onto the floor, clawing at the costume and the rosary. He rolled and squirmed and stopped, bringing stillness back to the small room. He was on all fours, gazing at a gray blanket that he now remembered had been thrown over the back of the recliner. His heart was beginning to slow to a mad but manageable rate, and he took a shuddered breath, his hand shakily going to the silver device looped around his neck, dangling in front of his face. In the soft light Luther hesitantly inspected his father’s dog tags, chromed in the blue glow from the television, making sure they were precisely the hostile accessory he’d intended them to be and nothing more. He ran his thumb over the aluminum, over the indented name there. Curt T. Hume.

For the next few days Luther abstained from partaking in any herb.

He let Misty Chambers in on his little house-sitting secret a few days later. And together, in the dark, they had found more entertaining ways to play house. Luther and Misty—an unambitious Bonnie and Clyde. But that sort of symbiotic indolence infused their entire relationship, and it was as though one was waiting for the other merely to shift a degree one way or the other so that moving on—in one way or the other—would be made less arduous.

Misty, in her current social incarnation, was not the type of girl you invited to a sit-down dinner in your house—at least not in this town. Misty, by all accounts, was indeed considered a slut in high school, and the appellation—earned or otherwise—remained with her long after. She had done nothing to repair her reputation and didn’t appear to be in any hurry.

But let’s get back to
now
—to the backyard pool—to the face in the window.

As Luther approached the back porch he mentally rifled through the inventory of last night’s trespassing: The house was spotless, he was certain—in fact, his meticulous assessment of the place was the thing that kept his recent intimate intrusions with Misty Chambers in a threadbare balance. It had occurred to him that if he’d been this thorough with the rest of life he might actually be building something that could enable him to get out of town.

In the backyard pool area, a few wood-planked steps led up to the screened-in porch. Inside, a short corridor that gave into a laundry room and then a few paces later into the kitchen was separated from the porch by a pair of French doors, which slowly opened with a genteel squeal. The feeble-gaited woman emerged.

“Hi there,” said Luther—a simple greeting made salesman-saccharine by its intonation. “I hope I didn’t startle you.” The woman said nothing as she continued to hobble forward. “My name’s Luther Hume, my dad—”

“I know your father,” Mrs. Crawley said, her warbled voice sounding frail and phlegmy. She stopped moving a few feet from the screen door, appraising Luther.

“Cool.” The sound of a lawnmower buzzed to life in one of the adjacent yards. “So I was just cleaning the pool, making sure it looked nice for the agents showing the house. I think your son and my dad had discussed—”

“I’m aware of the arrangement.”

Luther nodded and cleared his throat. “All right.” He involuntarily looked over his shoulder at the pool, squinting against the sun before turning to peer again at the small old woman on the other side of the screen, the mesh of dark material making her features and body language difficult to gauge. They stood this way for some time; the lingering silence and steadfast staring nearly coerced Luther to drop the altar-boy act entirely. He held fast, jabbing a thumb at the pool. “I don’t know what it is, but even with the plastic cover that pool collects a lot of bugs.”

Mrs. Crawley said, “Must be the heat. I’ve seen it like this before.”

It’s about time you chimed in, chatterbox
. “Is that right? Well, I’m new at this whole pool-boy thing, so I hope you’ll not judge me too harshly.”

“Putting in a pool was my son’s idea.” Luther wasn’t sure but thought he’d seen the porcelain flash of teeth in what might have been a smile. “In my opinion it’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

Luther bobbed his head and rubbed his chin. “Yeah . . . I can see your point.” He glanced around, but the tall wooden privacy fence prevented him from seeing the street or neighboring yards. “Well, I’ll just be wrapping up here.”

“Is he paying you?”

Luther had started edging away but stopped. “Pardon me?”

“Your father.” She shuffled closer to the screen door, and now Luther could see that her expression was not as severe as he’d initially thought; in fact, she was wearing a pleasant, lopsided grin. “You don’t mean to tell me that you’re slaving away in the sun for
free
.”

Luther rubbed the back of his neck. “Oh, no, ma’am. He’s giving me a small allowance.”

She nodded slowly at that. “Would you like to add a few more dollars to that allowance?”

Luther bowed his lower lip. “Sure—what can I do?”

Mrs. Crawley smiled, “Backbreaking work, I’m afraid.” She chuckle-sighed at that—“Oh, I’m only fooling you”—and made a hobbling retreat away from the screen door. “It won’t take long. Please”—she summoned with that thin hand—“come inside.”

Now that’s brilliant,
thought Luther.
Invite some hood into your house to do a few odd jobs. Jesus—don’t you watch the news, lady? I’m going to con you out of your life savings . . . I’m going lock you in the basement and strip all the copper wire from the house . . . I’m going to bind and gag and torture you and make off with all that jewelry in that coffin-size armoire in your bedroom . . .

This town, simple as it was, had never been much in the way of secular street-smarts. Luther gave a last glance at the pool area before mounting the concrete steps and opening the flimsy screen door, stepping into the porch—a large, cool box filled with russet shadows. Of course, he already knew the French doors gave into a narrow hallway that led into the kitchen, but he followed tentatively, as if unaware of the house’s layout.
The key is to act like everything’s new and remarkable—you can’t even hint that you know your way around this place
.

She walked ahead without waiting for him. Luther moved slowly into the corridor. “Hello?”

“In here.”

When Luther emerged he saw Mrs. Crawley standing at the far end of the kitchen, near the wide threshold that opened into the body of the house. A shaft of mote-swirled sunlight angled through a window above the kitchen sink, glowing on the hardwood floor and tingeing the space with a sepia staleness.

Luther made a show of appraising the immaculate kitchen. “Wow, I wish my kitchen looked like this.”

“Oh?” In the dimness it was still tricky for Luther to assess her attitude toward him. Mrs. Crawley smiled, her small teeth catching some of the light. Though she was on the other side of the kitchen, Luther noted the details of her appearance: the top of her prim nimbus of white hair came about to his sternum, her head supported by the wrinkled stalk of a neck, her back hunched slightly. A typical old lady. Now all he had to do was get out of here and break the news to Misty that they would
not
be enjoying a session of aquatic sex this evening. The old woman said, “What does your kitchen look like?”

Luther grinned. “I don’t know, just”—he gestured awkwardly—“small, I guess.” But there were other words on the sharp tip of his tongue; and if he’d tried harder, as he rarely did, he would have conjured the terms
lonely
,
comfortless, abandoned
. Luther couldn’t remember the last time he and his father had eaten a meal together at the kitchen table—likely the grim lunch following his grandma’s funeral roughly a year earlier. They hadn’t really spoken on that occasion either.

In the intervening years following his mom’s walking out—sneaking out, really, as there was no demonstrative spectacle of her leaving—the house that Luther and his father, Curt, occupied became a museum of sorts, aesthetically minimalized by a pair of provincial bachelors—a father-and-son Odd Couple made uncomic by a tacit dislike for each other—their cohabitive dwelling made cold and quiet by domestic disuse. And just as Luther, seventeen by then, was beginning to get more comfortable with asserting his deteriorating opinion of his dad (Curt Hume was no dandelion, but the shame and humiliation of his wife leaving the way she did was exacerbated by the bridge-table gossip all over town, and the guy’s spirit had simply been deflated—Luther did not know the word, but he wanted to describe his old man as emotionally exsanguinated), his grandma Gladys got sick, too sick to stay alone. Curt suggested she come live with them. And even as her health irrevocably declined over the next few years, Gladys Hume acted like a geriatric generator in their home, positioning herself most days at the kitchen table, writing letters to acquaintances, talking on the phone, playing cards with loyal friends who were mobile enough to visit. She was usually the first person Luther saw in the morning before leaving for school and the last person he saw before going to bed. In the limited years she was with them, Luther had begun thinking of her as a sort of lighthouse attendant, making sure Luther was on the straight and narrow, making sure he could find his way home.

But as Luther’s local reputation began to depreciate, as his and his father’s relationship became more eloquently adversarial as those relationships are wont to do, the lighthouse glow began to wane within Gladys. Eventually, the table was frequently empty at breakfast, and merely a microwave light was left on for Luther at night, often along with a note on the table—a few kind words scrawled in that loopy, elderly script. Sometimes Luther paused and read the note, most times he was too messed up to care.