Dysphoria Page 5

  "John Harper?” Paul asked.

  "Yeah, coulda been it was John. He moved off after his daddy and brother died. I think the mama died just a little while after and then he moved. Came and got all the stuff out. Man, they left a good business! Wouldn't sell, neither. Believe me, I tried. So the whole thing went to shit after that. Nobody to run it, you know, keep it up.” He stopped and pulled out a pouch of tobacco, pushed it with three fingers into the corner of his jaw, and spit flecks of black into the floor. "How come?"

  "I met a man on my way back home from Dad's funeral," Paul said. "Do you think that could have been him, the guy you're talking about?"

  Cramer scraped his boot against the concrete flooring of the front office and crossed his feet, one over the other. He looked at Larry, who was still eyeballing the countertop. Larry's fingers moved slowly over the counter and neither Paul nor Cramer could tell that he was counting dozens of scribbled squares and rectangles drawn by the hands of hundreds of people. Some were circles, drawn in pencil, and others were x's or just staggered lines, and Larry counted them all, grouped them into separate categories. He didn't look up at Cramer, but could tell from the corner of his jittering eye that he was watching, and, had he been alone with Paul, he might have explained what he was sure Cramer was about to say to him.

  But Cramer didn't saying anything when he looked back to Paul. He only reset his gaze quickly back to another object, the checkerboard and then the row of Havoline 10W-40. These objects were less questioning.

  Paul tossed his hand out from his sides and held them up in the air. "What? What is it?"

  Now Larry stopped his counting, but he wasn't talking. He just glanced at Paul. He tried on a look that said maybe the best thing to do would be to drop it, but the look failed and it seemed to Paul that Larry was joining Cramer in the silent game.

  "What?” It was less of a question now, more demanding, laced with far less patience. "What!"

  "John Harper, the youngest son, didn’t move off right away after all that sadness hit his folks," Cramer finally said. "It was a strange thing — I’m pretty sure he had that hearse sent out there to throw folks off. He was still there, and there for a good long while. Later on he moved out to Maysville. Only reason I know that is because Phillip Sherington was working in the deeds room for the county around that time. He told one person, they told two, they told six others. That kind of thing. He sold the property and the house to the county for development, which never happened, you know.” He paused, perhaps for dramatic effect or maybe because he was just trying to think of the right words. "But now listen here, John Harper died not more than two years ago, and that's a fact."

  Paul didn't even give Cramer's words time to echo from the corners of the matching concrete walls before he was slinging the door open onto the night air. "Bullshit," he spat. "Bad joke. Poor taste."

  Larry jumped and caught the glass door before it shut and followed Paul out to the pumps and then across the parking lot toward the corner. The cowbell that hung from the station's front door shook violently just before the two cleared the corner of the building.

  Cramer stuck his head out the door. "Dammit, Paul, go up there and get some rest. You got too much on your mind is all it is. Shit, I never said you was crazy! I was just telling the facts, that's all."

  But Paul was already turning the corner with Larry close behind.

  9

  There was a small window in the kitchen situated just above where his mother once kept her spices and just to the left of a plaque fixed with a phrase he remembered from childhood. May you be in Heaven a half hour before the Devil even knows you're dead, the plaque read. John Harper smiled, brushed the plaque with the edge of one long fingernail, and leaned closer to the window.

  The boys were back. The Shannon boys, Tommy Stanton and Larry Fenner, Joe Fenner's boy. They had started coming about two weeks ago, as soon as summer weather started in. He rubbed his chin and scratched his head and then started to the kitchen door that led outside. He stopped two feet from the doorknob, his legs numb, and then finally leaned against the wall. He braced his spindly frame with one arm and returned to the window.

  The boys had come across the field in a mad rush, full of youthful impatience, and were now climbing the ladder to the top of the tipple. He thought again to step outside and call to them but this time only made it three small steps before moving back to the window. The curtains were pinned back from the window to let in some sunlight, but that was too high risk now. He pulled them slowly closed until he felt safely tucked away. Taking a glass from the dish drainer, he filled it half full from the tap and took a long drink. Water could sometimes help with the anxiety, stave off a panic attack. Another drink and another peek out to the tipple.

  The boys had cleared the ladder. Now they bounced around on top of the tipple. Larry had wandered to the edge straight from the top of the ladder and was sitting with his feet dropped over the side. It seemed he was looking directly into the window. John backed up into the middle of the kitchen, losing sight of the boys for a moment while he considered the phone on the wall next to the refrigerator. It hadn't offered a ring in ten years, not once. He only used it once a week to phone in groceries and other supplies. He could call the sheriff’s department and give a report. He wouldn’t, he knew that, but he could if he wanted.

  John knew the sheriff, a hateful but loyal man named Bob Tack Thompson. John’s father had employed Bob’s grandfather as a driver for two years. That connection alone would give him the open door to call and explain that some boys were out on his property, trespassing, he might say, and ask him to send somebody to take care of the problem. But that would involve a report, a conversation, maybe even a trip onto the porch, out of the sweltering furnace that was his house in early summer. It was complicated enough already, having to send payments for bills to keep up the house through Bob on the solemn oath and all his father had done for him that he would say nothing about his still living at the homeplace.

  He returned to the window and took another drink of water.

  The last time he was outside the house was at his brother's funeral. On the way to the church, his truck had stalled in a curve along Clark Mountain. The moments of the actual stall out was mostly a fog of panic and fear, distorted in his mind by his brother's death two days before and therefore distorted to him even now in memory. What happened shortly afterwards was clear in his mind. He could recall the headlights and then the sudden punch to his chest from the steering wheel, air escaping his lungs in a long whistle.

  He opened the refrigerator. A pack of bacon and two gallons of milk sat alone on the top rack, one gallon that was two days old and the other apparently outdated that morning. He grabbed the most recent and took a glass from a nearby shelf. Inside were two bowls capped with hand towels and a block of cheese that had hardened to a rubbery cube; various, hard to discern items were shipwrecked along the bottom rack with a head of lettuce. Otherwise it was empty, filled more with blinking white light than anything else.

  Returning to the sink, he propped onto his elbows and turned his attention back to the tipple. All the boys, save Larry, had huddled near the center of the tipple top. They were focused and seemed to be laboring at some task. Larry still sat plopped along the side with his legs dangling over. That boy’s for sure going to fall, John thought, and reached in for the block of hard cheese. He took a knife from the drainer and pushed it through the tough center. He trimmed the hardened orange rubber away and made a second slice. What he was left with a half-inch thick section of the middle about the size of a money clip. He popped the piece of cheese into the side of his mouth. What he saw when he turned back to the window forced him to swallow prematurely. The Fenner boy was standing at the edge of the tipple. He had his arms held stiff to his sides.

  10

  Paul watched Larry's chest move up and down under the covers. He still hadn’t went to see Hill. Larry had been his excuse for not going up to this point, but all along
, if he was being honest with himself, a part of him didn’t want to hear what his uncle had to say. So for now he watched Larry sleeping easily in the small bed beside his, the bed that used to belong to him when he was much younger. His dad’s old friend breathed quietly, a slow rhythm, easy and comfortable.

  Had Larry’s life always been that way beneath the surface? In spite of all he had been through and been made to endure, had his inner mind, childlike and protected, managed to hang onto a peace not offered to those damned to ponder away those hours reserved for sleep? Larry continued with his peaceful rhythm and Paul tried to use its hypnotic quality to lull him to sleep. Larry Fenner was blissfully ignorant. This notion was only supported by the stories he had told Paul in recent days.

  Most of the stories were not original to Paul. He had heard versions of them before, mostly from Hill, though his grandparents had told a few. But, despite the clear memories of those accounts, Larry's stories were different by degrees, such as his being asked to ride a twenty-inch bicycle across the rail of the train tunnel bridge. The story was familiar, but Hill’s version had Larry volunteering to make the ride, in fact boasting that he could do it in record time. Hill’s stories, he was beginning to realize, were full of embellishments, as well as the single detail of Larry choosing to do whatever particular feat in question. It was this common infraction that most often came out in Larry's stories about his times growing up with Dave and Hill Shannon. Much like Tommy Spencer, Larry fancied himself an honorary Shannon brother. But Paul had already allowed himself to, perhaps reluctantly, accept the fact that Larry was most likely less of a brother and more akin to a form of entertainment. A television show on tap, and live. Larry was probably a human distraction for the kids back then from what may have otherwise been a boring small-town life.

  Paul, desperate for sleep but unable to bring together the positions needed for rest, or maybe simply unable to summon the peace of mind to close his eyes for very long, moved from his bed and nestled into his grandmother's rocking chair near the door to the bedroom. From here, rocking slowly, he drifted into a light half-sleep. He thought about the importance of small details, tiny infractions, and how they had started to accumulate clearly in what was the family mythology of Larry Fenner.

  The next morning, lacking sleep but armed with maybe the first clear and purposeful trip he had taken since arriving back in Red Knife, Paul left his grandparents' house early.

  Larry was still asleep when he slipped through the screen door, holding it gently while it hissed closed. When he turned, he found had not gotten up early enough to avoid a bleary-eyed meeting with his grandfather.

  William was in the front yard, bent closely to the fence, struggling intently with a row of waning fall beans. The vines had grown weakly, but persistently, through the mesh aluminum fencing and although fighting for survival, seemed to be losing. The leaves and vein-like vines were brown around the edges and generally gnarled together making any work to be done a losing fight.

  "Where you headed to so early?” It was a strict question, less probing and more idle, but still curious enough to elicit a raised head and a halt to any more work to be done, pending an answer.

  Paul stumbled rhetorically through a reply of some kind and instantly shifted his eyes toward the early morning sky, pretending to examine something there with great interest. But his light sense of guilt wasn't enough to keep from stepping around his grandfather and parting through the gate and onto the street.

  "Paul. Now listen here.” The voice again, this time from behind him, was forceful but technically void of overt authority, a gray area of emotion mastered from years of preaching in local churches in a town where men, sinning men, required prodding with a firm but gentle hand. "I'm going to tell Larry he needs to find him another place to stay for however much longer he plans to stay in Red Knife for all this business. He can maybe get a room at Conley's Motel or something. Point is, it's just time he moved on. Now you know what I'm talking about."

  William was giving his grandson what mountain people called fair warning and felt that should be enough. It wasn't the first time he had been forced to move someone along before they were ready, someone who was brought in as a guest but then became a lingering presence. He had been forced to put many young men out on their ear when Dave and Hill were still at home.

  And now, standing against the fence with a hint of what would quickly become afternoon sun pushing through the early morning fog and nursing an inherited case of messed and tangled hair, it seemed the same thing was happening again. Paul could have easily been his dad leaning lazily against the fence listening to instructions about putting out another friend who had worn out his Christian welcome.

  William squatted against the fence, still holding three or four crumpled bean vines between his fingers, and took the opportunity to catch his breath. The fall breeze spun through the valley and relaxed him.

  "I can take him today and help him look for another place to stay."

  "Huh?” William gazed through Paul very briefly and then met him with a distracted glance. "Oh, yeah. Okay. All right."

  Paul closed the gate to the fence and walked to his grandfather’s car. He knew how to fix Larry’s worn out welcome. He got in the car and headed in that direction now, sure that Larry would be sitting at his grandmother's kitchen table when he got back, waiting for breakfast but afraid to ask for it, trying his grandfather's patience, and still trying to understand where Dave was hiding.

  11

  It was nearly bedtime for Paul, but he wasn't sleepy. His dad paced through the kitchen, nervous and upset. His grandfather had just came in from his basement workshop. He wore a Core Company hat and a work shirt with a patch sewn above the left breast pocket. The patch said, William, and beneath that, Head Electrician.

  He didn't say anything to Paul or his father when he stepped through the door. It was the first day of work for Paul's dad at a factory ten miles outside of Red Knife. He had already told Paul that he wouldn't be working the factory. He would be working security, making sure that while the workers were gone that nobody stole cable or other parts. He was going to be the night watchman.

  Paul liked the sound of that.

  It was five minutes before he needed to go and Paul's grandfather was supposed to drive him the ten miles out to Maysville.

  "We need to go, Daddy," Paul's father said under his breath. "I'm gonna be late if we don't leave here shortly."

  The old man eased across the room like cold molasses and poured a cup of coffee. He then went to the refrigerator and added nearly half a cup of milk. Paul watched from the breakfast bar near the front door. He had slipped behind the bar where strange and dusty artifacts had been stored many years before and found a large roll of yellowed paper. He recognized the paper from Little House on the Prairie. It was the kind the bald storekeeper always used to wrap meats and candies. He had rolled off about two feet of the stiff wrapping paper and located a box of assorted crayons from his toy box. He remembered the feel of the room, a feeling of anticipation, the way a family might feel in the minutes before leaving for a vacation. Except, in the unknown contents of his stomach, there was a sinking feeling. It was like a dream where you wake up one morning to find that the vacation left without you, somehow forgot you in the rush. He thought about this and drew a large, jagged circle with a red crayon, lightly, because he didn't have a peach crayon. He added two large ears and then made two smaller circles inside for the eyes. He drew a drooping arch of a mouth and then searched for a blue crayon while his father continued to pace behind him.

  His grandfather had taken his coffee into the bedroom where he must have been changing clothes. He would drive his son to his first night of taxable work in five years.

  Paul found the blue crayon and finished the picture with the addition of two sagging ovals dripping from two blue eyes. He worked quickly to color in the blue outline tears before his father came up behind him.

  He put the crayon down and held th
e sheet of wrapping paper up, not saying anything, but letting the picture say its thousand words. His father only shook his head. His hair was stuck to his head and looked plastic, wet from a fresh bath, although it was an hour past Paul's bedtime. Thick strands of black hair fell loose as he shook his head, explaining to Paul without words that he had to go, had to work. It was a brief and wordless communication, but Paul started to cry, unable to hold back and preserve the silent understanding.

  He watched the door close lightly behind his father and listened to the car pull from the gravel driveway.

  Nine hours later Paul's father sat on the edge of his only son's bed. He watched the small smooth face lying still against the pillow, smiled when the tiny lips puckered in sleep, smacked together, and then became slack again. He rubbed his fingers through the fine blond hair and then leaned in close and kissed his forehead. He could smell shampoo and soap.

  Outside, the world was waking up. Truck engines turned over stubborn and cold and started. Men who had been pulled from their beds for work coughed into the cold winter air, gripping cups of coffee like life lines, moving through the thick and dark morning like tired fireflies of struggling heat and discomfort.

  His father's lunch bucket sat beside him in the floor, half empty. Dust was smeared across his face. Smears of it blotched his hands and covered his fingers. The ring Paul's mother had pushed onto his hand one day in July shot occasional glints of pure yellow across the room. His clothes smelled of rust and grease. In the inside pocket of his work coat was a piece of yellow chalk used for marking pieces of machinery that had cleared status checks during his shift.