Zero at the Bone (5 page)

I managed to get through the details of the fire and mentioned that some of the firefighters turned out to be women when they took off their helmets.

“Working around all those men,” said Paula.
“Magnifique!
”

Paula could only think about the differences between men and women, and not just between the legs. If I said I had to go back into the house for my sunglasses, she would say, “Just like a man.” I used to find this vaguely flattering, as though every time I popped a stick of gum into my mouth I was doing something macho.

“Brave boy,” she said huskily, when I was done telling how I had been prepared to battle the fire with one portable fire extinguisher.
Brave boy
, in a little baby-talk voice.

The trouble was, it worked. She could peel me right off my good intentions like so much steam. “When are you coming over, Cray? I need you to rub my back.”

“What time is it?” I found myself asking, before I could stop myself.

“I'm lying here on my tummy,” she said. “I have a terrible crick in my neck.”

She said
crick
like it was a code word for something tantalizingly obscene.

I reached the end of the long backyard, and looked out at the view. This was why we had bought the house, two years before. San Francisco glittered across the Bay. It wasn't just explosions I liked, devastation. I liked the stars, the tiny traffic.

“I'm nowhere near a clock,” I said.

“You mean I have to move my body?” she said. She said that last word carefully, deliberately spacing it apart,
baw-dy
.

My dad had big plans for the backyard. A pile of gravel glowed in the light from the kitchen, next to a small mountain of sand. The gravel was gradually scattering outward, the peak growing shorter with the months, and neighborhood cats loved the sand.

Stakes and staves laid along the ground marked out where Dad was going to put in a sidewalk. Walking around back there, I was always tripping over a bag of cement or some of Dad's cement-working tools, the scabby hoe and the assortment of trowels, all of them getting rusty where the cement had blistered away.

She treated me to a moan as she rolled over and announced, “It's 10:05, Cray. And thirty seconds.”

Paula once told me she could speak five languages. She could insult someone's mother in phrases from all over Europe. She knew Cantonese slang for
white person
, and knew the word for
whore
in languages I had never heard of. She could fire off delicious-sounding syllables and say, “That's Japanese for
Don't touch me there.
” I can say, “The red house behind the tree is very handsome,” in Spanish, except I forget the word for
behind
.

“Tomorrow night,” I said. I felt like telling her, “I am not having a conversation with you. You are talking. But I am watching an airplane glide overhead, red lights winking.”

“Eight,” she said. “Seven-thirty.”

Strangers in Safeway see me, a tall, broad-shouldered kid, built like a lumberjack, and they smile. And I smile, too. And I mean the message smiles send out to people: I am nice, and you can trust me.

But sometimes in the back of the smile, behind the real niceness that fills up 98 percent of my mind, there is a small room with a gray creature in it, someone broadcasting nonstop, twenty-four hours a day, the Cray Buchanan World Service.

Detras
and
atras
. They both mean
behind
.

I didn't think Paula had ever heard of either word.

As I was heading into the house I could hear him coming from a long way off, making his noise. I hadn't seen him for days, and I stood there marveling in an absentminded way that he was still alive.

7

Anita had said we could not have him fixed because it wasn't natural, castrating a cat. He ran toward me through the dark, stiff-legged and crippled. I couldn't see him yet, but I could tell what he was doing, avoiding the chain-link fence along the hill, taking the long way around the blackberry hedge. He probably fell down once or twice. And he kept up his noise all the while, a very old and stubborn creature saying, “Ow, ow,” over and over.

I felt sorry for Bronto, but I didn't like to pet him. He had little scars in his head where you usually scratch a cat. He couldn't even stand straight in the porch light, leaning into my pant leg, purring. I scratched him a little, with two fingers.

My dad was sitting with his head thrown back, his glasses crooked, his mouth agape like someone very old or very sick.

The television was on with the sound off. My mother stared at it with her arms crossed in front of her chest. It was the usual TV mishmash, the Pope followed by an ad for denture cream. Big words jumped across the screen; people with the sound off weren't going to miss anything important.

“The beast is alive,” I said.

My mother gave me a look: It meant either, You must be kidding, or, What on earth are you talking about?

I didn't call him Bronto in front of my mother because that was Anita's name for him. My mother called him Saucers. Five years ago, when the cat was a kitten, Mom had taught him to drink, nudging his face down into plates of milk. Anita said we should gave animals names that smacked of authority.

“He looks awful,” I said.

Mom found a can opener beside the coffeemaker. She made a rattling noise with it, hitting it against the heel of her hand.

The cat door crashed, a paw found its way through the flap, and then the whole cat was inside. In the light he looked thin and moth-eaten, a bald place in his head next to one ear.

“Is he back again?” Mom said in a falsetto she uses only on cats. “Is he back again from being brave out in the world?” Talking to him directly. Mom found a can of Kitty Yummies in the back of a cupboard behind human food.

“When Kyle called earlier tonight,” I said, “what did he want?”

“He wanted to speak to Anita,” she said in her normal, flat voice.

“She'll be home soon,” I said.

“She's late,” said Mom.

I paused at the door to Anita's room and let the door swing slowly open. When Dad and Anita had one of their fights, it could be about anything. Once she had written the entire U.S. Senate, every single senator, about not cutting down the world's tallest sequoia, and she had used Ziff Furniture stationery, with the big green Z. She'd done it with a pen in longhand, no computer, so each senator would be impressed with the sincerity and effort.

Dad had been furious, and said that if she wasn't his daughter, he would have sued her for making the politicians believe Dad's business supported Anita's views. Actually, Dad didn't think the really historically important redwoods should be cut down, either. He just took a more complicated view of issues than Anita did.

Sometimes they argued about ordinary things, how the yogurt containers in her room would attract roaches. And at times like that Dad would say he didn't know what was going to happen to her when she found out what life was really like.

Bay laurels grow in the East Bay hills. They branch in the creek beds and smell like a spice cabinet—spreading, snaking trees with slender leaves. I had hiked up the trails with my mom a few times, and I always loved the way she would look out over the view when we reached a hilltop and tell me what was not there anymore.

“That used to be an inland sea,” she would say. “All the way to the foothills. Saber-toothed tigers and dire wolves hunted these slopes, in what is basically contemporary time, maybe fifty thousand years ago.”

I carried my mother's pack for her, and it gradually filled with rocks, Franciscan formation sandstone. Or maybe chert. Rocks the color of toasted bread the way I like it, light brown. I was there when she found it, chipping with her rock pick at the side of a cliff, breathing hard—this was before she lost all the weight.

I had it there in my room. I could look at it when I got tired of her report on the taxonomic features of an extinct species of bay tree. Paragraph after paragraph told how this was a kind of tree that had died out, and our current bay trees were a different variety—a new species.

The stone was sandwiched together, and as I sat on my bed, I opened the rock, and there it was, just as she had found it that day, so excited she jumped up and down. The fossil leaf was a stain in the rock, the size and color of a deer's eye.

Had Anita read the report all the way through? I wondered. Or had she started and quit right away? It was interesting up to a point, stem diameters, millimeters, and comparisons with bay trees in faraway places. But it was boring, too. Not boring and ridiculous, but dull the way the financial page is—important, but not to me.

There was something a little worrisome about it, too. I could not see any difference between the ancient, sixty-five-thousand-year-old specimen and the leaves we had in the kitchen cupboard, next to the instant coffee.

I wondered if Mother realized this: She might be wrong.

The bed jumped, scaring me a little. Bronto stood in the middle of the bed, and because he was so stiff, he anchored himself like a cat statue, giving me that cat hello, a gentle blink of the eyes. He was licking his whiskers. It was a little unusual for Bronto to come home at all, much less make his way into my room.

The form Coach Jack had given me was on the dresser, under a pile of paperbacks, the kind of novels I didn't like anymore, time travel and chopped-off heads. One edge of the release form was still curling from where Coach had rolled the paper up.

My eyes started to itch, and I looked in the mirror. The whites of my eyes were pink, thanks to Bronto. I was starting to look like a boxer who was losing a bout, all puffy and flushed. In another few minutes I wouldn't be able to see. I fumbled through my top drawer.

My room was a museum, the way I used to be. I keep things. I care too much to give favorite toys to Goodwill. I don't keep everything, of course. But here was a beanbag monster, something from my early childhood, and here was a yo-yo that long ago had done tricks. Plastic space creatures, powerful, half-human figures—they were all there, in a great pileup with useful items, dead batteries and virgin batteries all mixed up together.

I wasn't even that interested in galaxies anymore, I just kept the space creatures for decoration. I found some Benadryl in the corner of the drawer, among the lint and yo-yo strings. The pills make me sleepy, but I'm allergic to cats, and the mirror showed me the face of a boxer who was going to be counted out, not because he was hurt, but because he was growing too ugly.

One of my favorite novels when I was younger was a story about a television reporter who hears a voice in his sleep. It is someone from another time, another reach of the universe, someone in trouble with his world. The powers of his time and place want him dead, and he can only escape by finding a person in a distant time to change places with him. And it happens: The drowsing man in Los Angeles wakes up in a landscape with scarlet skies and five moons.

But there is a conversation with this space fugitive, and I can't remember how it goes. I can't remember if the man in L.A. is convinced that he should come to the assistance of this dream voice, or if he is forced to change places whether he wants to or not.

I found one of Bronto's fleas on my ankle, right by the heel bone. When I dug a fingernail into the tiny insect, it broke in two, scrambling and going nowhere, leaking a little bit of my blood.

8

When I woke I sat up at once, thinking: What was that?

Bronto was gone, and there was a light on in the house somewhere. Someone had forgotten to turn it off, I told myself. I could forget about it and go back to sleep.

But the light was bright, a lance of it falling through the bedroom door. The door had opened somehow, and the light was getting brighter the longer I lay there. I would have to climb out of bed, go downstairs, and turn off the lamp. It was one of those simple problems that loom when you are still half-asleep and don't want to get up.

And then I heard my dad's voice. I knew he was on the phone by his tone, and the rhythm of his speech. He would talk, and then there would be a silence. Then his voice again, even more tense, and another silence. He was arguing with someone, keeping his temper. I could not hear the words.

It was one-fifteen. I tried to tell myself that this was one of those Dad problems, an issue that had nothing to do with me. Sometimes he stayed up late, calling Poland, where the bentwood chairs were made and shipped in pieces, spools and chair legs, to be assembled here. I heard my mother's voice, questioning.

I never have figured out what to wear to bed. I hate pajamas, largely because I always outgrow them so fast, and when they are tight not only do you look gawky, with your arms too long, but when you wake up with an early-morning erection it sticks out obviously and embarrassingly. Even when no one is looking, I don't like to feel awkward about what I'm wearing.

These days I tended to wear a large gray sweatshirt to bed, but I still had to pull on a pair of pants to make myself fit for company. Dragging on the pants made this all the more significant—there was something going on.

I padded down the stairs in my bare feet. The wooden steps were cold. The lights were on the living room, every single lamp, but there was no one there, only rumpled places in the chair and the sofa, impressions of their weight.

My dad had just put the telephone down, and he was looking at me without seeing me.

“What's happening?” I said.

“Dad was calling BART police,” said Mom.

I didn't like the way that sounded, and a very bad feeling flickered in my stomach. Then it was gone, and with a certain tenseness in my body I felt myself grow just a little stupid as a form of protection.

Bay Area Rapid Transit is a subway system. BART has its own police department. It is its own world—you buy a ticket and you enter transit land, scenery blurring by.