The Rope Walk (27 page)

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Authors: Carrie Brown

BOOK: The Rope Walk
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But soon the rope walk would be finished, and then he could step out into the trees by himself, into the perfect silence. Kenneth still taught them a word almost every day. Today's had been
sempiternal
.

“It means never-ending,” he told them, “as in the prayer: world without end, Amen. As in: this summer.” And he had closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the chaise longue. But Alice had stayed awake, cross-legged on the terrace with her chin in her hands, looking back and forth between Kenneth and Theo, who had curled up, his hands tucked between his knees, and fallen asleep with his mouth open.

Alice made her imaginary camera and took a picture, her tongue clicking soundlessly against the roof of her mouth.

ELEVEN

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
for the first time in weeks, Alice woke up early. She knew it was early; the trees were thick black shapes against a faint light in the sky, and the house was as silent as if a spell had been cast over it. Not only was she up early, she thought, suddenly alert; she was
up first
. And it was Saturday; Elizabeth would not be coming, and Archie would be sleeping in.

Alice sat up in bed. Theo was sprawled sideways in the bed next to hers, his head half under the pillow, his feet hanging off the edge of the mattress. When Alice looked at Theo's palms and the pink soles of his feet, which at this moment were turned up vulnerably in her direction, she was always struck by how dark the rest of his skin seemed by comparison. Unless you looked at his hands and feet, she thought, Theo didn't look especially black at all.

The surface of the table between the two beds was cluttered with objects Theo had been collecting, including a quart Mason jar filled with ants and grasshoppers and beetles that was Theo's earthquake early-warning device. Cockroaches, which Theo said were the best insects for the job and easy to come by in New York, though apparently pretty scarce in Vermont, had been
proven by scientists to go into a frenzy of activity before an earthquake, thereby serving as reliable predictors of disaster.

The day he had brought the jar into the bedroom, Alice had looked at the insects scrambling like people in a terrified mob stepping on each other in their haste to flee. “They look like they're in a frenzy now,” she'd said.

Theo bent over next to her to look into the jar. “That's normal behavior,” he said. “That is not a frenzy, Alice. A frenzy is …” He made a wild-looking face, tongue out, and shook his head violently as though trying to clear his ears.

Now, with Theo sleeping beside her and the house quiet, she leaned over from her bed to look into the jar. Only one beetle seemed to be alive still, scaling the glass and fruitlessly falling back onto the heap of its dead brothers and sisters. It always seemed to be Alice who noticed that all the early-warning system participants had died, sending Theo back outside to collect more. It would be better, he had told her, if they could keep a bird in their room; birds had “sub audio traducers” on their legs, he explained, that allowed them to tune in to frequencies beneath human hearing; these “traducers,” he said, would alert them to an earthquake rumbling their way. Archie, however, had said no to a bird and Alice had felt secretly glad. Even though she didn't think she believed completely in the insects’ power to anticipate an earthquake, the jar held her attention in a worrisome way. It was hard to fall asleep with the insects’ desperate, fruitless assault on the glass walls of their prison taking place inches from your eyes, and she did not think she could ever look away from a bird in a cage whose only job was to warn you if disaster was coming. Plus, it seemed cruel.

Along with the Mason jar/earthquake early-warning system, Theo had also collected stones from the river, a dusty piece of honeycomb they'd discovered at the base of a tree while they
were working on the rope walk, a lopsided bird's nest fallen from a rafter in the barn, and, one day, in the soft bed of needles under the pine trees, some grubby things made out of what looked like sticky, chewed-up dirt that Theo said were weevil nests.

“What's a weevil?” Squatting down on the pine needles, Alice inspected the objects Theo held in his hand. She had never heard of a weevil.

“You don't know what a
weevil
is?” Theo looked amazed. He had stood up, the nests held reverently in his cupped hands, and he and Alice headed inside. “A weevil is a parasite, Alice,” he said, adopting his professorial tone. “It eats the bugs on animals, like raccoons and skunks and opossums, and then it makes these little nests out of its own poop. There's probably a hundred eggs in here.”

They reached the bedroom, where Theo laid the nests carefully on the bedside table. He tapped one of them with his finger.

Alice looked at the nests. “Will they hatch?”

Theo looked at her blankly.

“The eggs,” she said.

“Oh, no. Not now,” he said airily.

“Why not?”

Theo looked exasperated. “Well, they can't be fertilized in
here
, can they?”

Theo spoke with his usual conviction, but something about it did not seem right to Alice. “I think maybe these are just clumps of dirt,” she said. “I've never heard of a weevil. Maybe you mixed it up with
weasel
.”

“Alice,” Theo said with infinite patience. “You do not watch television. There could be a new species discovered every day and you would not know about it because you are out of the loop, man. I saw this whole science show about weevils. They burrow
in the guts of dead animals. This”—he indicated the nest— “could be part of a possum's bladder.”

Alice made a disgusted face and turned away, but a moment later Theo jumped on her from behind. She sank under him in surprise, buckling onto the floor with Theo draped on top of her like a rug.

“Alice is a weevil,” he said breathily in her ear. “Alice is a
wascaly
weevil.”

“Stop it. Get off,” she said, laughing.

“You are my weevil
pwisoner
,” Theo said. “Now I'm going to …
wick
you on your ear,” and he stuck out his tongue.

Alice shrieked and rolled over, scrabbling under the bed for safety.

Theo crawled in after her. “I see you,
wittle
weevil,” he said in a high voice, clutching at her ankle.

Alice shrieked again and crawled out the other side.

“I
wuv
you,
wittle
weevil,” he called as she clattered downstairs, screaming and laughing. “Come back,
wittle
weevil. Come back!”

He had chased her all over the lawn and into the barn that afternoon. By the time he'd finally caught her, she was weak-kneed from hysterical laughter, and he was panting. He tackled her in the hay bales in the barn and they lay there, his arms around her waist, his head resting for a moment on her stomach. She felt the surprising weight of it; for its size, she thought, a head was a very heavy thing.

“Your head is heavy,” she said.

He rolled away and lay in the hay beside her. “That's because my brain is so big.” He turned and smiled at her.

“I knew you were going to say that,” she said.

His face was close to hers, his tawny lion eyes behind curly eyelashes traveling over her hair.

“Your hair is so weird,” he said. He reached out a hand to touch one of her curls. “It's like mini-tornadoes.”

Alice stayed still. Sometimes his hand brushed her cheek as he lifted a curl and watched it spring back into place, and she felt a strange fluttering in her chest at the accidental touch of his fingers against her skin, as though her heart had leaped upward on little wings, only to drop back to earth.

“Hey, Alice,” he said. “When they come get me, let's hide, okay?”

“You mean, when you have to go home?”

“Yeah. Be thinking of good places to hide, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Maybe we should store food there,” he said.

“And a flashlight. And water.”

“Now you're thinking.” He tapped the side of her head and smiled at her. “Your brain is big, too, Alice,” he said. And then he grinned. “Not as big as mine, but big.”

The truth was that Theo's brain seemed to be in motion almost constantly, along with his body and his mouth. He reported one night at dinner that in fourth grade he had won the class chatterbox award.

Archie caught Eli's eye across the table and smiled. “Really!”

“I have a certificate,” Theo said, as if Archie had asked for proof.

He loved to snap his fingers and to whistle and sing and he could make a convincing array of the percussive sound effects of rap music. He loved the names of rap artists, too, rattling them off for Alice as if speaking a foreign language: Busta Rhymes, Butta Babees, Wyclef Jean, Talib Kweli, Ludacris, Del tha Funkee Homosapien, 50 Cent. He especially loved to watch television,
and he was appalled at Archie's restrictions, eventually wheedling Saturday-morning cartoons out of him, a novelty Alice enjoyed. Glancing at Theo as he sat on the floor beside her in front of the television set with his mouth hanging open, Alice thought that maybe he liked TV so much because it was the only time his brain was not in charge of things and he could rest. He was always planning something, or explaining something, or worrying about something. Alice discovered that he worried about bird flu, for instance, and he had persuaded her that she ought to be worried, too. He was in possession of terrifying statistics about the last pandemic; he said he had heard on a radio science show that the next one was just around the corner. For this reason, he informed Elizabeth one day, he had decided that he would no longer eat chicken, or duck, or any sort of fowl; it was too bad, he said, because Peking duck was one of his favorite Chinese dishes, but it really wasn't worth the risk.

“What are you talking about, bird flu?” Elizabeth had replied impatiently. “You don't eat chicken, you go hungry.”

Theo was worried about many things: bird flu, tidal waves, terrorists, suicide car bombers, hurricanes, floods, forest fires, global warming, sexually transmitted diseases, cancer, kidnappers, earthquakes, mud slides, easy access to handguns, nuclear attack, asbestos contamination, and being struck by lightning or a meteorite. Alice, who felt as though after a long and shameful innocence, she had woken up finally to the horrible truth about the world, which was that it was falling apart, sometimes found herself wanting to fight the panic he incited in her; he could be pedantic, mordant, and terrifying. And yet, with Theo, Alice felt that she had entered the real world at last, a step as ennobling as it was frightening. The dangers she faced, the principles she would be asked to defend, the wisdom for which she reached would be real: real dangers, real principles, real wisdom. And though along
with these would come real suffering, she thought she was ready. Theo believed he could do anything, and when she was with him, Alice thought she could do anything, too.

Unlike being awake in the middle of the night, usually a sign of emotional or physical distress, being the first one up in the morning had always filled Alice with elation, as if she stood before a secret door opening into a private world. She liked to move about the quiet house undetected, pretending that she was escaping from a jail cell or embarking on a mission to free a fellow captive, feats of daring that required masterful control and caution and stealth. She got out of bed now and peered round her doorway into the dim gray light of the hall.

Lorenzo slept in Archie's room unless he had been banished for snoring. He was overweight, barrel-chested, and short-legged, troubled by arthritis for which Archie patiently fed him pills that had to be wrapped individually in raw bacon, or else Lorenzo would spit them out. Archie had acquired him for James and Wally after their mother's death, but Lorenzo had never in his heart been anyone but Archie's dog, seeming to understand at the time that it had been Archie's need for comfort that had been the greatest, that it had been Archie who could imagine, better than his young sons, the ways in which the care of a puppy could serve as a distraction from pain. James, who could be unashamedly sappy, liked to get down on his knees to hug and kiss Lorenzo, speaking nonsense to him in a ridiculous baby voice, but all the children loved Lorenzo, and each of them throughout their childhoods had wept private tears into his warm shoulder; no one could seem so sympathetic about your sorrow as Lorenzo, nor possessed of such patience for your sad tale, whatever it was.

Theo, whose initial fear of dogs had worn off entirely, trailed
around behind Lorenzo as if after a fascinating and rare species, especially once Tad and Harry had taken the three-legged Sweet-ums Lucille back with them to Frost, and Theo could no longer lavish concerned attention on him. He liked to pretend he was a dog, getting down beside Lorenzo on all fours with his bottom in the air to play, following him around the yard and lifting his leg behind Lorenzo; it was exhausting to be a dog, Theo reported to Alice, who sat on the porch with her chin in her hands, watching Theo pretend to pee on the hydrangeas. He also liked to lie next to Lorenzo on the floor in the living room and mimic Lorenzo's poses, especially the one in which Lorenzo balanced on his spine, front paws curled on his chest and hind legs spread wide like a shameless exhibitionist's, tongue lolling in loony fashion out of the corner of his mouth.

Eli, observing this behavior one day, had stopped to look down at Theo and poke him with the toe of his shoe. “You are one weird little dude, Theo,” he had said, but Alice had been pleased at his affectionate tone. And Theo certainly seemed to amuse Archie, who listened to him with one eyebrow raised and a smile at the corner of his mouth, as if he were about to laugh.

Lorenzo lay now against Archie's closed bedroom door like a rug that had been rolled up and dumped there; Alice could imagine how Archie had had to push him out with his foot over the wood floors. When Lorenzo did not want to move, and he especially hated being evicted from Archie's bedroom, he acted as though he had been lobotomized, his eyes staring straight ahead into a middle distance, his limbs heavy as stone. He opened his eyes now as Alice appeared in her doorway, peeping around the doorframe. His head and tail rose reflexively, preparatory to an enthusiastic and noisy greeting of tail banging. One of the only commands Lorenzo ever obeyed was to flop instantly to the floor, eyes shut, if you pointed your hand like a gun at him. Tad and
Harry had taught him this trick, and it worked every time, proving the interesting scientific point—the twins said—that dogs could recognize and interpret the symbolic representation of a deadly weapon.

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