Ghouljaw and Other Stories (35 page)

“Small?” said Mrs. Crawley, rousing Luther from his vivid reflection. “Bah,” was the old woman’s good-natured dismissal. “I’m sure your home is lovely. If there’s anything I’ve learned about the character of a home, it’s not about the size or the ornamentation, it’s about the memories you fill it with that give it true energy and personality.”

Which edition of
Chicken Soup for the Soul
did you steal that chestnut from?
“That’s a really nice way of looking at things.”
More like
Chicken Shit for Soul.

Luther had been so preoccupied with playing the part of haplessly cordial handyman that he was only now beginning to notice the smell. A tremor of electric panic pulsed through him—his first thought was that he and Misty had left out some food that was now permeating the room with the subtle aroma of putrid produce. He gave a furtive assessment of the kitchen but saw nothing noticeable on the counters or on the table. Besides, they’d been careful. So what was it? Maybe, thought Luther, he was just paranoid. Maybe it was simply the old-skin scent of the elderly.

To dispel the silence, and out of genuine interest, Luther blurted out, “So what brings you back to town?”

Irene Crawley hobbled a few paces and rested her withered hand on the smoothly curved back of a chair. “Robert—” she said but interrupted herself with a ragged succession of phlegmy coughs. She recovered after a few moments. “Dear,” she said, blinking rapidly. “Robert, my son, has to attend a seminar at a university in . . .” Suddenly, she steadied her rheumy eyes on Luther. “It’s not important.” She smiled. “My eldest found it incumbent to return me temporarily home so I could be taken care of while he and my daughter-in-law and their family were away.”

Quilt-thick quiet again hung between them. Luther: “So you said you needed help moving something?”

“Well I’m afraid
I
won’t be of any
help,
but yes, I’d be grateful if you could move a piece of furniture for me . . .” Her voice trailed off as she twisted at the hip and commenced her fragile ambulation, leading the way into a dark hallway that connected to the family room.

Luther followed, his sneakers squelching slightly on the glossy planks of hardwood flooring. But as he rounded the corner of the murky, pictured-framed corridor he nearly collided with Mrs. Crawley, who’d stopped and was pointing at a stretch of unlit hallway, toward the study and first-floor bedrooms. Luther and Misty had, many times in recent weeks, acquainted themselves with these private recesses of the home. Looking into the dark alley of the hall, Luther had the crazy notion that the eye-patched hag dressed up like a nun was down there sitting in the pitch-black den, waiting for him to open the door, a widening shaft of pale light slowly throwing itself across the floor, to the folds of her black cloak, across her gray, grinning, expectant face.
Glory be to God
. And why then, in his imagination, would she be salivating? Luther dusted away the dumbass idea.

As we said, Luther and Misty had been cautious. No lights, save for Luther’s small flashlight or the glow from their cell phones illuminating their surreptitious illicitness. Mostly they used the floor. Sometimes used the couch. But never on the beds. On several occasions, however, they’d wandered deeper into the house, up to the second floor, the mercury light from their mobile phones throwing shadows into strange angles, as if matte-black figures were stealthily shifting out of sight at the last millisecond; as if something—the uncatchable presence of black-clad vandals, perhaps—had preemptively beaten them to occupying the house.

“My husband, Harold, was born in this house, right back there”—a crooked finger extended toward the gloom—“in the master bedroom.” She let that sink in for a few beats. “It was quite a common occurrence back then.”

“What was?”

“Giving birth in the home.”

The image of placenta-stained sheets and a blood-soggy mattress—whether in the nineteen-thirties or any other decade for that matter—gave Luther the creeps.
They probably washed and reused that stuff for years
.
Sweat and piss and shit and umbilical gore
. “You’re kidding.”

“Not at all. It really is amazing, isn’t it?”

Amazing that people used to give birth in the same bed in which the baby was conceived?—Yes . . . stunning.
“It certainly is.”

The old woman’s hand balled into a fist and went to her mouth, and her frail frame was again wracked by a succession of wet-ragged coughs that echoed down the tall rectangle of hallway.

In the white-noise distance of memory Luther heard his own grandmother’s coughing, often between laughter, when he was in a nearby room, watching a basketball game or sketching pictures in his room.

Luther frowned. “Are you okay?”

But as the wet coughing resumed, the small knobs of her shoulders shaking, Luther narrowed his eyes. With each succession of coughs he watched Mrs. Crawley’s body dim out, going visually staticky—not transparent like a ghost, but similar to how the low-quality, antenna-TV images used to act when you slapped the top of the television. Luther endured a nervy pull of panic and made another mental note to take it easy on the psychoactive sleep aid of cheap pot.

After a few moments Mrs. Crawley recovered and the blurry distortion seemed to cease. “Heavens, excuse me. I can’t seem to shake this stubborn cough.” In the muted light, a pale hand directed him to the next room. “Come agrog.” For the first time, it occurred to Luther that the old woman might be having a tidy little stroke.
Agrog?
She cleared her throat—“I beg your pardon. Come
along
.”

The hallway opened into the living room. Like the rest of the old, opulent home, the living room—a great, squarish space furnished with comfortable seating areas and accented with ornate wood trim—was immaculate and decorated in the photo-ready arrangement of slick magazines. Built-in bookcases were imbedded on two sides of the walls. On a few occasions, using the weak light from his small flashlight or cell phone, Luther had eyed the titles of these tomes with a petulant expression, as if those thick, gold-gilded spines—
The Brothers Karamazov
. . .
The Red and the Black
. . .
The House of the Seven Gables . . . Melmoth the Wanderer . . . Don . . .
something—were provoking him to do, well, something. He hadn’t read these books, and while he was certainly literate he didn’t really know
how
to read them. In the end, like everything else, his fury was fleeting.
Fuck. You
. Privately, Luther had tried to articulate the vague notion that his lack of ambition was more than just laziness, that there was some sort of—
what’s the word?
—
current
here in Deacon’s Creek, some sort of restrictive energy. And though it was far beyond his lackadaisical lexicon, he would have loved to capture the notion and isolate the phrase “existential eddy.”

“You must be a busy boy.”

Luther slowed. “Huh?”

A knobby, pointing finger. “You keep looking around . . . like you have somewhere to go.”

Luther chuckled. “Oh, no, ma’am. Just admiring your home. I don’t have anywhere special to be,” he said with a salesman’s flourish. “Let’s see this massive piece of furniture you need moved.”
How the hell can I get out of here?

“Oh . . .” She batted a hand at the air. “You’ve already helped us out so much by taking care of our home.” Mrs. Crawley slouch-hobbled deeper into the living room. “But I need your strong arms and sturdy spine to move this grandfather clock.” She indicated the far side of the room, near another hallway. “It’s a valuable keepsake that belonged to my mother. She brought it over from Rotterdam, believe it or not, back when the family came over.”

Thanks for the minisode of
Antiques Road Show. “Wow. That’s really impressive.” Luther rubbed his palms together, ready to get to work.

Luther surveyed the space, pleased with its pristine state. On the far end of the room was a bulky fireplace, the mantel and hearth composed of large stones mortared together with pretentious asymmetry. The old woman stopped in front of the fireplace, hunched down, and began examining something in the charred chamber. “I knew Gladys, you know.”

Frown lines and a nervous smile appeared on Luther’s face—
Gladys?
—and it took him a second to realize that she was talking about his grandma. “No—well, I guess I knew that. Didn’t you go to the same church?”

Crawley nodded her tiny head but continued inspecting something in the fireplace. “Oh, but we knew each other long before. We attended grammar school together. Harold and I knew your grandfather, too.”

But Luther already knew most of this. Decades earlier, his grandmother Gladys had run afoul of the town elders and matriarchs by apparently expressing some of her more progressive ideas of social and religious reform—Luther had gathered this from snatches of stories and casual conversation—and she’d paid the price: not exactly outright ostracization, but a more sophisticated sort of social banishment that Luther could identify with, though he imagined his grandmother reacting with more dignity and class. Deacon’s Creek did not take to criticism on general principles, but its response was more pronounced when dissent came from one of their own. Either way, she seemed unshaken.

“Really?” Luther slipped his hands deep in the pockets of his baggy shorts. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, as small as Deacon’s Creek is.”

Crawley straightened a bit and made a noise—
“Hm”
—that Luther couldn’t tell was an affirmation or that she simply couldn’t hear. “For these last few years we were widows together.”

Oh, brother, here we go
. “Grandma lived with me and my dad for a while.” Inadvertently Luther almost added,
After mom left,
but decided to leave it alone.

“Oh yes, yes, I had heard that,” she said, her back still to him.

Luther removed a hand from his pocket and shoved his fingers through his hair. He was prepared to navigate his way toward a conclusion of this little discussion when he looked across the room at the coffee table. Luther, his lips slightly parted, blinked a few times and stiffened, his blood seeming to congeal.

In a synaptic flash, his memories of the past ten hours—from this very instant to his activities last night—underwent an instantaneous reversal: following Crawley into the living room, into the house . . . lazily cleaning the pool . . . drowsily driving to the Crawley house . . . his father’s baritone voice booming down the hall at home—
“. . . you need to make sure the yard and the pool are in fine shape for the showing this afternoon . . .”
—a few black hours of sleep . . . drunkenly creeping into the house . . . kissing Misty goodnight, part of him wishing she had some more self-respect, wishing she wasn’t so sexually indecent . . . sex in the pool . . . sex on the floor of the living room in the dark . . .

And Luther paused on this scene, seeing with heart-lurching clarity the mistake he’d made. He remembered Misty, the flashlight throwing strange light on her nude body, lying on the floor, propped up on her elbows, preparing for Luther to ease into her. But as he does so he sees her reach up, taking hold of his dogs tags and removing them.
We’re supposed to be quiet, right?
He can hear the jingle of the ball chain striking the imprinted plates as she settles them onto the coffee table.

And that’s where the dog tags lay now, exposed, casually coiled on the high-gloss coffee table. Luther made a movement, but Crawley twisted around from the fireplace, regarding her guest with a warm smile. “Did you hear what I said?”

Luther severed his attention from the coffee table. “Hear?”

“Did you hear what I said?”

He cleared his throat. “No, ma’am. Pardon me, I missed it.”

“I said that your grandmother always spoke fondly of you.”

“Oh?”

Crawley’s expression grew thoughtful. She shuffled a bit, stretching her birdish arm out toward the fireplace mantel for support. “She delighted in talking about you—your hobbies, your artistic tendencies.” She looked at Luther, glassy-eyed. “Grandchildren, if old folks are fortunate to live long enough to watch them develop, can be a wonderful reward.”

Luther swallowed hard and nodded, watching for the woman to became distracted long enough for him to scoop up the dog tags. “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

“My son’s children”—the old woman shook her head and looked past Luther—“are some of the most ungrateful and spoiled specimens of young people I have ever encountered.”

Luther was trying to re-establish his composure and casual tone. “Really?” A regretful click of the tongue. “That’s a shame.”

Moisture appeared at the crow’s-feet folds at the corner of her eyes. “They try to avoid me. I sit in a room they’ve prepared for me and they walk right past the door, hardly saying a word.” Her gaze wandered for a moment but connected with Luther. “Sometimes I think I’d be better off as a ghost.”

Luther had been panic-pedaling toward a solution for swiping up the dog tags, but now he let that go, removing his grip from his present obsession and letting his mind coast.

Now he thought about a toffee tin filled with cash.

Shortly after Luther’s grandmother moved in with them she had arranged for a small portion of her pension and some other retirement allocations to be mailed directly to their home. Each month, Luther’s dad would cash the checks and deliver the money to Gladys. Yes, it was a small amount of cash (just enough to make her feel safe, he thought later), but Luther only needed a little, twenty bucks here and there—for a bottle, a bag of dope, whatever. He knew she kept the money in her bedroom, in a toffee tin stashed in the center drawer of an antique vanity. Like all lazy thieves, Luther was certain she’d never notice, and by the unwavering state of her warmth and earnest innocence—
Are you still practicing your drawings? Are you going to go back to art school?
—Luther was confident she never suspected a thing.