Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work (13 page)

Andrew sealed his mouth shut. He wasn't going to answer her.

“Now that his grandma drank herself into the hospital for the last time, I guess he'll be living here in Vaughn.”

“Is she dead?” Andrew asked.

She paused before answering. “She won't live. The postman found her facedown in her driveway—she was there the whole weekend. They found Eddie in the house watching TV. He didn't call anyone or do anything, just sat there.”

She straightened his bangs flat. The dull edge of the scissors pressed on his forehead and with a slow grinding snip his bangs flecked into his lap. She ran her hand over his brow, smoothed the hair against the back of his neck, and rested her hand briefly on top of his head. The weight of her fingers made him tired and he closed his eyes as she continued cutting.

“There's someone at the door,” she said, even though no one had knocked.

It was Eddie, Andrew knew, before he even looked out the kitchen window. His mother opened the door and Eddie came into the dark room. He stood by the counter with his hands at his sides and his lower lip clamped over his upper. He brushed the hair out of his face, but it fell back in place again.

“Please sit down,” Andrew's mother said and put the comb and scissors back in the drawer, her hands fumbling.

Eddie did as he was told, burying his hands so far under the table that his back curved over his lap.

“Do you want something to drink?” she asked as she folded the dish towel.

“No, ma'am. I ate before.”

His mother stiffened with her back turned, as if Eddie had cursed at her. Eddie raised his head and looked around as he tapped his heels slowly and quietly.

“My grandmother was born in this house,” he said. “But I never was inside it.”

Andrew's mother turned around and opened her mouth several times but couldn't get started. “My father bought the place in 1950,” she finally said.

“I know,” Eddie said without looking up. “He bought it from my grandpa.”

“The one who owned the garage.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, and raised his face, his eyes flashing faster than a cat's tongue.

Andrew's mother stared at Eddie for a full minute. Andrew got up and moved around the kitchen, trying to get his mother to look away, and finally she did, walking into the next room where she simply stood half-turned in front of the window, her hands on her hips and her eyes opening and shutting.

“We're gonna go out for a while,” Andrew called.

His mother looked at him, and he thought her eyes defied him to leave; he stared straight back at her until he couldn't stand it anymore, and then he walked out the door.

Eddie left, too, and with his head lowered he walked down the hill. Andrew followed five steps behind until they reached the landing, a green the size of a playing field, on the bank of the river where people launched their boats. There didn't seem to be anyone there. A faded green T-Bird was parked on the street. Eddie kicked a stone across the grass, and on the far side of the field the brother stood up. His eyes were copper, reflecting the light in the current of the river, and wet, as if they had been cut with a cold wind. His blond hair was parted carefully in the middle and it curled in delicate wisps. Instead of going over, Eddie stood in front of the dock and wrapped his arm around one of the tarred posts. The brother was naked above his cutoffs, and so skinny that every bone and ridge flexed as he moved. He shook his hair and pulled a yellow Frisbee from under his elbow. Without bending his body, he twisted his arm and flicked the Frisbee, which sailed across the brown backdrop of the ebb tide where seagulls picked in the mud. The Frisbee hovered and dropped gently into Andrew's hands. He didn't know if he was supposed to throw it back or hold onto it. The brother had turned away with his hands in his pockets and his elbows angled out. His pale shoulder blades twitched like nervous eyelids.

Eddie held out his hands and Andrew threw him the Frisbee, which Eddie then tossed to the brother. It was a perfect throw, soaring through the air to land in the brother's bony hands. For several minutes, the
brothers continued tossing it between themselves, as if they had forgotten Andrew. The brother caught the Frisbee with one hand, turned it over, and tossed it back with the other hand. He had a way of setting the Frisbee aloft so that it lingered and spun in the liquid air.

The brother just sat down and leaned back. He called something to Eddie without turning away from the river, and the wind swallowed all but the flat tone of his voice. Eddie threw the Frisbee to Andrew and walked along the edge of the bank to see what his brother wanted. Andrew ran his fingers over the faded gold lettering on the rounded edge of the Frisbee and felt a warm buzzing in his head, as he did when he woke from a dream. Eddie and his brother talked about something and then crossed over to the curb. Andrew followed them and looked down at the T-Bird, with its ripped seats and sun-cracked dash.

“Get in,” Eddie said, his voice a current Andrew wouldn't have been able to resist even if he had wanted to. The brother drove past town hall and turned up the hill. They pulled to a stop, idling at the corner opposite the junior high where Andrew's old friends Chris and Tom were tossing a baseball. Chris stopped his throw midway and stared at the car. Tom turned around and dropped his arms at his sides at the sight of Andrew riding low in the backseat. Then the brother hit the gas, and the long car shifted back on its haunches as they banked around the corner and sped east, out of
town. Eddie tuned the radio to a country station, but even with the volume down, the speakers cracked on the low notes. Every few minutes the brother turned and spoke to Eddie, but Andrew couldn't hear a word over the wind that ripped through the open window. He held the Frisbee in his lap and watched the rush of trees pass by. The car floated over the dips and rises as they sped up, sizzling through wet spots in the road left over from that morning's rain. The air was still damp and soft above the ragged spruce tops. The road led them through hay fields that surrounded the Monmouth lakes. Andrew's whole body relaxed. He wanted the drive to go on forever, around and around the lakes, never straying too far from Vaughn but never going back.

They drove in silence around one of the lakes and returned on the same road toward town, finally pulling up in front of the Small's faded red house on a ledge above the tracks. The yard was surrounded by chicken wire, and in the corner next to the coop there was a bunch of old living room furniture. The brother sat down in a rotten recliner. Eddie planted himself on a milk crate and began pulling up grass from between his feet.

Another guy, a friend of the brother's, appeared from around the side of the house and let out a low whistle.

“I told you so,” the friend said and peered down over the ledge at the tracks.

The brother rose to his feet and went over to a clothesline, passing a foot in front of Andrew without seeming to notice him. He trailed a corroded odor that he had either given to or taken from the inside of the T-Bird, and he started picking his clothes off the line; a pair of faded jeans, undershirts yellowed in the pits, a row of gray socks, which he dropped in a cardboard box. The jeans he rolled up like a towel and placed on top.

“We used to be down there for hours playing Frisbee,” the brother said over his shoulder. “One of the first things I was gonna do, but when I got down there I didn't wanna be there.”

The brother's friend nodded without turning away from the tracks.

“So you're the kid whose sister went into the river last March,” the brother said. It took Andrew a minute to realize the brother was talking to him.

“I was in when it happened, but my brother here sent me the papers from Maine. Nothing else to do, except play basketball. I saw this girlie drowned in the river and when I saw her name I thought, shit, I know her from 'fore I went down to Florida, from that bar in Portland—that fuckin' hole on Commercial Street, the Moon. What a friggin' waste, a tough one like that putting herself in the river.”

“She was
tough
all right,” the brother's friend said.

“It made me wish I'd been there,” the brother said. “Have a few words with her. What was the name a that chump she was wet for? MacDougal's friend.”

“Mirack.”

The brother shrugged and looked right at Andrew. “Hey,” he said. “I was thinking you could ask your father about splitting wood for him this fall. I see you got about six cord over the side of the house.”

“He splits it himself,” Andrew said.

“Does, huh? Well, you tell him I'm gonna split it for him this fall. Fast and cheap, you tell him.”

The brother's friend sat down in one of the chairs and leaned back, laughing without sound.

The brother shook his head. “Now don't wake the dee-ceased.”

There was something wrong with them, the brother and his friend. The friend shook his head with his eyes closed, a wide grin across his face. Andrew told himself he should leave, run, but he couldn't move. “She fell in,” he said.

“Is that what they told you?” the brother said.

“That's what happened.”

“No it ain't. That's what they told you happened. Was she walking along and fell over? No, cause in March the ice packs ten feet tall along that bank from here to Augusta down to Dresden. I know, I used to pull my uncle's icehouse before the thaw. She'd had to crawl out that drift ice and slide down on her ass to the channel.”

In the dirty window of the house, an old man's face appeared but seemed not to see them. He chewed on his cracked lips until Tiny Small pushed him out of the
way and pressed her forehead to the glass, with her mouth moving, talking either to the old man or to them.

The brother grabbed the friend by the arm. They headed toward the car, and both of them leaned over something the friend had in his hands.

Tiny Small appeared at Andrew's side, her nose and chin curving toward each other, her eyes scrunched like a mole's, her skin the color of paste. Her hair was like Eddie's, ink black. She had been at Andrew's school, in Special Ed, until she stopped showing up. Now she talked at him with the urgency of someone being chased, her hands held out to her sides, fingers splayed, and her words cataloged a list of desires: “I would like a Hostess Fruit Pie and a milk shake have you ever been to Portland I hope it does not rain on Saturday I want to go to Portland it does not rain there my brother Matt said I said I was I was I was I was—Andrew. Andrew,” she repeated and finally closed her eyes with relief, as if all these other words had led her to the right one.

“Leave us alone, Tiny Small,” Eddie said from behind his hair.

At the sound of his voice, she started again: “If I does I is going to buy me something I won't tell me what but do you think I could I could I could I could chop some wood I had a Hostess Fruit Pie this morning Mamma.” She stopped again on this last word and stared at her brother.

“Yeah,” Eddie said and stood up. He took Andrew's arm and pulled him away from Tiny Small. “Come on.” Eddie led them down the hill, and Andrew knew they were going to his house a half mile away. Andrew wasn't sure he wanted to go there, but Eddie took them.

The door to his father's shop was still open, and when they went into the house, he saw that his mother was asleep on the couch. Upstairs, Andrew paused on the way to his bedroom. Stephanie's door was open. Eddie pushed his way inside, where, since this morning, the curtains had been stripped, the rug taken up, the books pulled off the shelves, the room made empty. Even the picture nails had been removed, leaving small black pinpricks. Eddie lay back on the wood floor and closed his eyes. Andrew sat down on the bed and looked out the window.

Across the street, a red glow appeared inside a dim upstairs room of Mrs. Shumaker's house, where a cigarette perched on her fingers. Kids in school said she had been desperate for sex after her husband left for Augusta—a woman in her forties without a husband or kids or family. The red glow flared when she inhaled a long breath. In the rhythm of the glow moving to and from her mouth, Andrew thought he recognized the echo of a pattern that he had never noticed before. He looked at the house next door and had the same feeling. Out on the rope swing, Mr. Sawyer's daughter played her game of twisting the two ropes together into a coil and then sitting on the seat to spin like a top. She
spun in silence, stood in the middle of the lawn for a moment afterward like an unsteady drunk, and then did it again.

In the week before Stephanie drowned, Andrew heard her late at night walking through the house. The floorboards creaked for two beats of his heart, paused, and creaked again. Eventually, he realized she was going from window to window. On the night she drowned, the river boomed as shelves of ice along the banks crashed into the frozen river mud at low tide. He pictured Stephanie walking out the door and down the dark street to the landing by the river, her breath steaming in front of her face. The moon shone full over the neap tide, illuminating the ice flows. She scaled the jagged rubble and looked down through the thin ice where silver air pockets raced like panicked fish in the current. She knew that what was about to happen was no accident.

“Let's go,” Eddie said abruptly, and leapt to his feet. He led them downstairs and out the side door, which he somehow knew how to find, and up the hill behind the house. Andrew asked where they were going, but Eddie didn't answer. After a mile or so, Andrew saw they were headed to Vaughn Stream.