The Secret Society of Demolition Writers (8 page)

“Teresa, right?”

“Who are you? Did my father send for you?”

“No, I just came. I’m the one who opened the safe. I saw the girl that day. She talked to me. She said her name was Lucy.”

Teresa’s eyes widened.

“Then you believe me?”

Brian nodded.

“I believe you. Have you talked to her?”

Teresa nodded.

“What did she tell you?”

“She, um, doesn’t know what is happening. She said she came through the door. That’s all she says about that.”

“What about what happened to her? Does she know?”

“She said there was a pool and she didn’t know how to swim.”

Brian closed his eyes for a moment.

“She’s confused,” Teresa continued. “I said when did it happen and she said it didn’t happen yet. She didn’t make sense.”

Brian nodded. It did make sense to him.

“When does she come?” he asked. “When do you see her?”

“I don’t know, anytime. It’s not like there is a schedule. Sometimes I close my eyes and when I open them she’s there.”

“Do you know where she goes when she isn’t here?”

“I think she must go back through the door she talks about.”

“Would that be where she is now?”

“I don’t know. I guess. I don’t see her.”

“Thank you, Teresa.”

Brian turned back toward the door.

“Who is she?” Teresa asked.

Brian looked back at her.

“She’s my daughter. She’s coming in a few weeks.”

“You mean she’s not born?”

“Not yet. I think she came through the door to warn me. Now I have to go close the door.”

Robinette was standing in the upper hallway when Brian came out. It was like he couldn’t venture into his daughter’s room.

“We have to put the door back on the safe,” Brian said. “This all started with the safe.”

“We can’t. The trash was taken yesterday. You put—”

“I have the door. It’s in my truck.”

Brian headed to the stairs and started down. As he went he looked back up at Robinette.

“Do you want me to bring it in through the service door?”

Robinette looked at him as if not comprehending the question. Then he spoke in a quiet voice.

“No, that won’t be necessary.”

THEY WERE ON the back porch of the house. It was a warm night—summer was coming on strong. And Laura with the extra weight and the extra heart beating inside her had to get out of the unair-conditioned house. They sat side by side in lawn chairs, holding hands. Brian had forgiven her. There were more important things to concentrate on. Besides, he knew the cops could convince anybody of anything. Years back they had done it to him with his old man, practically had him believing that his father had shot the mark in cold blood.

He had not told her the whole story of his return to the house on Shell Island. He didn’t want to upset her, especially now that it was almost time for the baby. He only told her that he had gone back to see Robinette, to set things right.

“So there might be some money in it,” he said now on the porch. “It could really help us with you taking the extra time off and all.”

“What money? For what?”

“He said all of this with his daughter and the safe and stuff made him think about writing again. He said he has an idea for a story and since he’ll want to know about safes and being a box man, he’ll pay me for it. Like to be an expert for his story.”

Laura sat up straight in her folding chair. She was excited by the proposition.

“How much will he pay?”

“We didn’t get to that yet. I’m supposed to go back over there tomorrow. I’ll find out then.”

“Those writers make a lot of money. . . .”

She didn’t say anything else. She was leaving it to him but making it clear she expected him to get a good chunk out of Robinette.

“We’ll see what he says,” Brian said, not wanting to promise anything or push anything.

They were quiet for a moment and then she let go of his hand and leaned forward.

“You know what I want to do?” she asked. “With the money, I mean.”

“I don’t know. To keep paying the bills?”

“No, we should get more than just that. I want air-conditioning, Brian. We deserve that. And then we should put in a pool. I want to go swimming at night to cool off.”

Brian stared straight ahead and off the porch into the distance. He realized that the backyard was just big enough for a pool. Without a word he stood up and went back inside.

Sweet

EARL STRUGG WOKE TO THE WARMTH of a ten o’clock sun on his face. He rolled away from the building that had been his headboard and looked down the concrete mattress to his parking-meter bedpost. He stretched luxuriously and drew his arm across his eyes like a window shade, to dampen the brightness of the morning sun. And he listened.

Mornings were usually the quietest, though he couldn’t always count on it. The voices, like their declarations, were unpredictable. Earl Strugg never knew when they’d come or what they’d say, but mornings were usually the best. Mornings were clarity’s prime time—no
kill my budga-freekack
, or
rubber freaker
nose bicker-knobfucker
—no howling or moaning. No explosions. No thunderclaps. Just cars honking and a wind in the trees— sweet when it came and he took it when he could get it, mornings usually, but he could never tell. So with his arm drawn like a shade, he listened. As the city roared around him, a slow smile spread across his lips. All the way down through the mind of Earl Strugg, for now anyway, it was quiet.

Pedestrians cut a wide path around him. Only the tourists were so bold as to attempt a look at his face. What they saw when they did was a spinning maze. Earl’s face whirled. It spiraled inward—wrinkles like a hundred fine parentheses around halogen blue eyes, a black rim marking the edges of his iris and tiny pinprick pupils and the whole thing turning, somehow, slowly inward. Ripples of skin at his forehead lapped at the banks of a whirlpool of hair that was as fierce and unbound as anything in nature. The left side of his face wore a permanent expression of inquiry—the lasting effect of a mild stroke he suffered several years back. His eyebrow arched high above a stretched open eye and the one side of his mouth screwed impossibly down—like the face you make during an argument when you don’t hear the other person and you want them to say again. The effect of this was that anyone who happened to glance at Earl would almost always do a double take and politely stop to lean in, since it looked like he might’ve just spoken and was urgently waiting for a response. As rag-tattered and difficult to look at as he was, Earl could draw people into his spiral face without even breaking a sweat.

ON HIS BACK with the shade still drawn, he listened to footsteps falling around his head and felt a sudden urge to shout out a list of U.S. presidents and then another, just as sudden, to stand and sit three times. Instead, he pulled the neck of his shirt and grabbed his shoulder. His fingers found the scab almost entirely on their own, and began where they left off yesterday— probing and digging slowly but surely. He turned to watch them for a moment, his face like a child watching ants.

From the corner of his eye he saw a pay phone at the curb with its receiver off the hook. The steel cord was dangling, swaying slightly back and forth and he just couldn’t take that. He could take about anything else and often had to, but he just could
not
take that. He sprang up and tumbled over to it on morning legs. He took the receiver into his hand, cleared his throat, and put it to his ear. He said hello two times. Then he said no, and that he was very, very sorry. He glanced at the ants digging the scab on his shoulder and thought for a moment about how they looked more like his own hand and fingers. Then he laughed wildly into the receiver and carefully placed it back in its cradle. There was a phone across the street with its receiver resting neatly in its cradle and it was a good thing. The sight of another dangling handset could send him off on a hunt for others that would take him across the city into neighborhoods unknown. It had happened before and it wasn’t good. The only thing Earl Strugg had was his neighborhood. Some nights when the noises were at their worst, harrowing his ears with their filth, sometimes when it got that bad, a familiar turn of the sidewalk or the reassuring beer light in the window of the local bar—blue lettering across white neon rocks and pounding surf—sometimes the bark of an old familiar dog from the second-floor apartment or the friendly hello of a shop owner who’d seen him a thousand times was all he had. Earl Strugg’s home was about seven square blocks and he didn’t often venture outside it. He only went out when he had to and it was never good when he did.

He turned around in the booth and asked the crowd passing by for the time. There was no response, and so he cleared his throat and asked again, louder. Someone, he couldn’t tell who, shouted that it was just after ten. Earl Strugg bobbed his chin to his chest in acknowledgment and began a quick deluge of remarks that brought the man forward. Earl thrilled as he approached to listen—the blood in his veins turning a brighter shade with every step the man took. He wanted to say hello and how are you but his mind flooded with thoughts. His hand flew to his chin and began stroking furiously. The man listened courteously, but Earl could see that he would be moving on shortly and taking the warmth of his regard with him. He struggled to grab hold in the tangled rush of words flying through his head, to fix on something that would get the man to stay, but all his mouth could find were rambling incantations of conspiracies and paranoid contrivances—cops and the government and aliens—most of which Earl didn’t even believe or understand himself. He was as confused by the words rattling his mouth as the man listening and it made him want to yell and pound his head but that would make the man go away instantly and he didn’t want that so he continued—riding his voice like a rapids, waiting for a smooth spot where he could put down the paddle, take a deep breath, and just say, simply, “How are you this fine day? Thanks for stopping. Listen, I’m about to fall over with hunger and if you wouldn’t mind, I could really use an egg sandwich—two scrambled with cheese on a roll with butter would be divine. Salt and pepper too.”

The man nodded and listened politely. Earl looked up at him for a moment as his mouth motored on uselessly, as if he and the man were standing on opposite sides of a large fish thrashing in the bottom of a boat, only it was his tongue and not a fish that was between them, acting of its own accord with the same aimless intensity as the flexing that throws the catch against the rods and tackle. Earl could stop his wagging tongue no better than the man, so they both just stood there waiting to see if it would tire.

Then he heard the words crack the air almost before the man spoke. They jangled his head as they came out, because Earl knew the face and he knew the backing away and the hand that raises when they say it like they always say it—everyone who stops for a lunatic is on a borrowed minute. The man’s face went apologetic, he stepped back, his right hand raised with the palm down just above waist level, and he said just like they all say, “All right, I gotta go now.” Earl made a mad attempt at coherence but the fish thrashed even harder. The man took another step back and said it again, “Okay buddy, I gotta go now.” He told Earl to take care of himself and then turned and disappeared into a swarm of receding backs. The fish croaked at the bottom of the boat and Earl had a quick mental image of bashing it to a pulp—biting his tongue from his mouth and tossing it under the wheels of a passing truck.

He turned back to the phone and hit the number pad three times. After waiting a moment, he shouted into the receiver that there was no way it was possible, and again, that he was very, very sorry. He laughed cunningly at the dial tone and then hung up. Staring at the number pad, he took a deep breath and thought about making another call. He lost track of time for a moment and it could’ve been a minute or a whole day that passed before he crunched his eyes into fists and rubbed the sides of his head briskly. Then he knew he had to leave or he’d be on it the whole morning, his sanest hours gobbled into the slobbering mouth of another damn compulsion.

So he went back to lie across his belongings and take a roll call of his faculties before heading off to do his chores, which always involved getting some food into his stomach. Today, he would look for a plate of poached eggs with salmon, new potatoes in olive oil with fresh thyme, a slab of country ham, a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and a hot glazed cinnamon Danish on the side. He would read it off the menu in a window as he ate a piece of toast with coffee.

But instead, with the change in his pocket—a dollar and sixty-three cents—he bought a package of chocolate Ring Dings and a bag of Bugles that he devoured soundly. He poured six sugars into a steaming cup of coffee and gulped it down like it was a glass of water. Then he dabbed the napkin at his mouth daintily and followed with a long, holy blow from his nostrils that raised the hackles of most everyone in the store and made the owner ask him to leave. As he stepped out, he turned and begged the pardon of a group waiting for checkout. Then he straightened his back, pulled his legs together, and did a stiff salute followed by two peace signs stretched over his head with a quick shake of the jowls, and then clasped hands, lifted to his left and right, where he clapped three times at either ear and did a quick three-step. The owner of the deli raised his hands to Earl and said please. Earl jerked the pantomime shut and rode out on a tumult of profanities.

Outside the deli, he broke into an indignant stride with his left hand arcing backward and forward and his right sitting high on his hip. He muttered a reprimand to the owner and the people at the checkout for a full six blocks before his mind ticked off the warning that the next street marked the end of his territory. To anyone else, the Burger King on the other side of Thirteenth and Seventh Avenue was nothing special, but to Earl Strugg, the orange and yellow building marked the very edge of the planet.

He stopped abruptly and looked out across the street, marveling for a moment at the people who crossed, effortlessly moving themselves into the oblivion of the other side. His face screwed up at the sight of a woman in delicate pointed shoes crossing such an impossible chasm. People streamed over the curb and over the edge like ants on the march. One by one and over they go and where they stop, nobody knows—like ants, a whole doomed roiling swarm of ants. There were days when everything was like ants—when there wasn’t a thing he could point to that didn’t seem just exactly like a mealy tickering damn ant. He wiped his face with his forearm and said a quick prayer that it wouldn’t be one of those days. Then he turned to make his way back into the heart of his world.

He walked for six blocks like a man on a mission—steady gait, eyes fixed forward, head low on his shoulders. He would stop for no one, including the trucks and buses whose drivers slammed the brakes and cursed the dashboards as he plowed headlong across the streets, oblivious to all of it. He was breathing heavy at block five and sweating like a wrestler as he began the sixth. He fought his fatigue and did a galloping sprint all the way to the curb, where he hunched forward, grabbed both knees, and fell into a heavy pant. When his breathing slowed to manageable, he did ten deep knee bends with his face fixed to a distant focus point and his arms straight out at his shoulders. Then he did fifteen toe touches with impeccable form and controlled breathing. After that he tried some sit-ups but could only knock off three of them. He was straining on the fourth when he was tapped on the shoulder by the shoe of a waiter from the restaurant he was in front of. He started to his feet with his pockets emptying a collage of cigarette butts, milk-jug caps, balls of paper, rubber bands, stones, pennies, business cards, cotton balls—he didn’t know where most of it came from, but he scrambled to retrieve everything because it was in his clothes so it was his.

Morning exercises done, it was time to work, because he was broke and because a Ring-Ding-and-coffee breakfast doesn’t last long and a handful of pennies and cotton balls is no way to buy dinner. So he did the remaining block to his corner on his knees. Darwin’s theory of evolution works as well for begging as it does for the species, only it’s quarters and dollar bills instead of mating and predators that shape the selection. Over his twenty-two years, Earl found the most profitable go at begging was to simply make his way on his knees. He didn’t need to utter a word. Sooner or later the bills would come. It was easier than constructing a plea and trying to speak it over and over with a fresh delivery—reciting it day and night in rain and shine, without letting the anger seep in and screw the whole thing up. And then when the occasional person decided to give a dollar, they always wanted to talk, give some sort of advice— about where to spend it or to stop drinking or to stop smoking and the endless questions—all for a dollar: do you use drugs and where’s your family and why aren’t you in a shelter? People gave him directions to flophouses they wouldn’t even set foot in, and it had less to do with securing a roof over his head than it did with just getting him off the street so they didn’t have to feel the guilt of having such a nice life with old Earl sucking the tar off the road and calling it a square meal. Going on the knees was just easier. The people who gave were so horrified by the sight of him that they’d drop the money and keep moving, either out of disgust or shock or because they thought he was too far gone but, whatever—it made no difference. Earl didn’t care. They didn’t talk. That was the main thing. They didn’t give any sticky-voiced lectures of outworn advice like a bucket of piss-water over the top of his head and the windchill way below zero and who the hell needs it. They didn’t say a thing to a man on his knees but they did give money and the rest didn’t matter.

HIS POCKETS JINGLED by the time he made it to his corner. A few dollar bills too. And hardly a spoken word. He crawled onto the island of his belongings and laughed hysterically for a full minute. He’d lose the bills before the sun went down, but the coins would stay put and a pocket full of money was as good as it got sometimes—with only one block on the knees. Sweet. He said it out loud, “
Sweet
. . .” and laughed and said it again, shaking his head with a wide grin, and then again several more times—“
Sweet
. . .” as his hips began slowly rolling him back and forth.

And he began to ride.