Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 54

They finished their oatmeal in silence, while Adam puttered around the apartment, stripping the cheese-smelling sheets and oily pillowcases off his bed, rinsing the hairs off the soap, cleaning the toilet. Erasing the signs of their stay.

"Well," he said at length. "I should get going to the shop."

"Yeah," Ed said, in George's voice, and it cracked before he could close his lips again.

"Right," Adam said. "Well."

They patted their mouth and ran stubby fingers through their lank hair, already thinning though they were still in their teens. They stood and cracked their knuckles against the table. They patted their pockets absently, then pocketed the hundred and the ten.

"Well," Adam said.

They left, turning to give him the keys he'd had cut for them, a gesture that left him feeling obscurely embarra.s.sed and mean-spirited even though -- he told himself -- he'd put them up and put up with them very patiently indeed.

And then he left, and locked the door with his spare keys. Useless spare keys. No one would ever come to stay with him again.

What I found in the cave,

(he said, lying in the gra.s.s on the hillside, breathing hard, the taste of vomit sour in his mouth, his arms and legs sore from the pumping run down the hillside)

What I found in the cave,

(he said, and she held his hand nervously, her fingers not sure of how hard to squeeze, whether to caress)

What I found in the cave,

(he said, and was glad that she hadn't come with him, hadn't been there for what he'd seen and heard)

What I found in the cave was the body of my first girlfriend. Her skeleton, polished to a gleam and laid out carefully on the floor. Her red hair in a long plait, brushed out and brittle, circled over her small skull like a halo.

He'd laid her out before my mother, and placed her fingernails at the exact tips of her fingerbones. The floor was dirty and littered with rags and trash. It was dark and it stank of s.h.i.+t, there were piles of s.h.i.+t here and there.

The places where my brothers had slept had been torn apart. My brother Bradley, his nook was caved in. I moved some of the rocks, but I didn't find him under there.

Benny was gone. Craig was gone. Ed, Frankie, and George were gone. Even Davey was gone. All the parts of the cave that made it home were gone, except for my mother, who was rusted and sat askew on the uneven floor. One of her feet had rusted through, and her generator had run dry, and she was silent and dry, with a humus-paste of leaves and guano and gunk sliming her basket.

I went down to the cave where my father spoke to us, and I found that I -- I --

I found that I couldn't see in the dark anymore. I'd never had a moment's pause in the halls of my father, but now I walked falteringly, the sounds of my footsteps not like the steps of a son of the mountain at all. I heard them echo back and they sounded like an outsider, and I fell twice and hurt my head, here --

(he touched the goose egg he'd raised on his forehead)

and I got dizzy, and then I was in the pool, but it didn't sound right and I couldn't hear it right, and I got my clothes off and then I stood there with them in my arms --

(his hand came back b.l.o.o.d.y and he wiped it absently on the gra.s.s and Mimi took hold of it)

Because. If I put them down. It was dark. And I'd never find them again. So I bundled them all up and carried them over my head and I waded in and the water had never been so cold and had never felt so oily and there was a smell to it, a stagnant smell.

I waded out and I stood and I s.h.i.+vered and I whispered, "Father?" and I listened.

I heard the sound of the water I'd disturbed, lapping around my ears and up on the sh.o.r.e. I smelled the sewage and oil smell, but none of the habitual smells of my father: Clean water, coalface, sulfur, gra.s.s, and lime.

I picked my way out of the water again and I walked to the sh.o.r.e, and it was too dark to put on my clothes, so I carried them under one arm and felt my way back to the summer cave and leaned against my mother and waited to drip dry. I'd stepped in something soft that squished and smelled between my mother and my father, and I didn't want to put on my socks until I'd wiped it off, but I couldn't bring myself to wipe it on the cave floor.

Marci's eye sockets looked up at the ceiling. She'd been laid out with so much care, I couldn't believe that Davey had had anything to do with it. I thought that Benny must be around somewhere, looking in, taking care.

I closed my eyes so that I wasn't looking into the terrible, recriminating stare, and I leaned my head up against my mother, and I breathed until the stink got to me and then I pried myself upright and walked out of the cave. I stopped and stood in the mouth of the cave and listened as hard as I could, but my father wasn't speaking. And the smell was getting to me.

She got him dressed and she fed him sips of water and she got him standing and walked him in circles around the little paddock he'd collapsed in.

"I need to get Georgie out of the car," he said. "I'm going to leave him in the cave. It's right."

She bit her lip and nodded slowly. "I can help you with that," she said.

"I don't need help," he said lamely.

"I didn't say you did, but I can help anyway."

They walked down slowly, him leaning on her arm like an old man, steps faltering in the scree on the slope. They came to the road and stood before the trunk as the cars whizzed past them. He opened the trunk and looked down.

The journey hadn't been good to Gregg. He'd come undone from his winding sheet and lay face down, neck stiff, his nose mashed against the floor of the trunk. His skin had started to flake off, leaving a kind of scale or dandruff on the flat industrial upholstery inside the trunk.

Alan gingerly tugged loose the sheet and began, awkwardly, to wrap it around his brother, ignoring the grit of shed skin and hair that clung to his fingers.

Mimi shook him by the shoulder hard, and he realized she'd been shaking him for some time. "You can't do that here," she said. "Would you listen to me? You can't do that here. Someone will see." She held something up. His keys.

"I'll back it up to the trailhead," she said. "Close the trunk and wait for me there."

She got behind the wheel and he sloped off to the trailhead and stood, numbly, holding the lump on his forehead and staring at a rusted c.o.ke can in a muddy puddle.

She backed the car up almost to his s.h.i.+ns, put it in park, and came around to the trunk. She popped the lid and looked in and wrinkled her nose.

"Okay," she said. "I'll get him covered and we'll carry him up the hill."

"Mimi --" he began. "Mimi, it's okay. You don't need to go in there for me. I know it's hard for you --"

She squeezed his hand. "I'm over it, Andy. Now that I know what's up there, it's not scary any longer."

He watched her shoulders work, watched her wings work, as she wrapped up his brother. When she was done, he took one end of the bundle and hoisted it, trying to ignore the rain of skin and hair that shook off over the b.u.mper and his trousers.

"Up we go," she said, and moved to take the front. "Tell me when to turn."

They had to set him down twice before they made it all the way up the hill. The first time, they just stood in silence, wiping their cramped hands on their thighs. The second time, she came to him and put her arm around his shoulders and gave him a soft kiss on the cheek that felt like a feather.

"Almost there?" she said.