Little Wrecks Read online

  “Can I just ask, what are we gonna do with this weed besides smoke it?”

  “Hello, Isabel? I tried. So far I’m the only one who has. We can’t sell it to anyone we know, because Matt and Charlie know them too.”

  “If we roll it up and sell joints at school, he’ll know right away. We’ll be dead. What do you think, Ruth?”

  “I thought Matt would suspect my mom and Danny of being in on it, but he definitely didn’t. Mom was going over there the other night to cheer Matt up. He owes the money, though, you guys. He’s scared. It’s messed up.”

  “Isabel, what about your brother or your sister?” Magda says. “Can’t we sell it to them to take back up to college?”

  “Oh yeah, I’ll just tell them I have a hookup in Colombia now. They won’t ask any questions. I don’t think so, hon.”

  “Magda, did you even hear me?” Ruth holds up her candle and flashes a piece of mirror at them like a beacon. “Matt owes the money to the guys that fronted it. What if something happens to him?”

  “All right, all right.” Magda puts her lighter back in the inside pocket of the toolbox coat and passes the joint to Isabel. “I’ll figure it out. Again.”

  “Well, I helped you steal it and it was my idea in the first place.” Isabel talks without breathing, like someone squeezing through a tight space. There isn’t enough air in the world lately.

  “Yeah, it was your idea, Isabel. I was just the one trying to fix it, so we don’t all get killed or go to jail. You want credit for that? Be my guest.”

  “Of course she does.” Ruth sits against the wall with shards of mirror sparkling around her, staring at Isabel with cutting eyes. “You relax, Isabel. I’m sure it’ll all be fixed up and rosy just in time for you to wake up and take a bow.”

  “You guys, we should get out of here,” Magda says. “It’s after nine o’clock. The tide was dead low at eight fifty-five.”

  Isabel can hear the metal clinking in Magda’s pocket when she puts her lighter away. She looks over at Ruth holding a shard of mirror glass in one eye like a monocle, flashing light back.

  Nothing between any of them seems to be working anymore. The engine is banging, something’s come loose. These are supposed to be the two people Isabel can say anything to, so why hasn’t she? They all look back and forth at each other, frozen and trying to feel their way forward. Isabel hits the same piano key three times, low like a tolling bell, then she and Ruth both speak at once.

  “I don’t have to be crazy,” Ruth says.

  “I think I killed someone,” Isabel says.

  “Take it down a notch, you two.” Magda looks at her like it can’t possibly be true, and she must be exaggerating. “Isabel, what are you talking about?”

  “I’m not daydreaming all the time, Ruth, trust me. The cops came to my house. I don’t know if he’s dead.”

  She can hear her own voice, low and flat as her mother’s. She isn’t crying, or even breathing hard. After all that time holding it in, it just comes out now without her even trying.

  “He, who? You need to sit down and start at the beginning.” Magda pulls her over to the bar, pushes her up onto a stool, and says, “Talk, woman.”

  “He grabbed me and put his dirty fingernails up under my Navy sweater and Charlie only wants to fuck me if I pretend I don’t want him to. What the hell is that about? I had to burn my Navy sweater at the beach. I really loved it.”

  “Charlie?” Magda says. “Charlie is not dead, Isabel. You need to calm down. You’re stoned. You’re just freaking out.”

  “Not Charlie, the greasy one from Dunkin’ Donuts. The one with the napalm jacket. You saw him. You were there.”

  Isabel looks at Magda, but really she’s talking to Ruth. She can’t tell if Ruth is listening, though. She just sits there against the wall, turning a piece of mirror over in her hands so it sends the candlelight into Isabel’s eyes. Soon Isabel is blinded and there is nothing but the sound of her own voice. When she gets to the part where the vet with the napalm jacket walked towards her across the parking lot, Ruth drops the piece of mirror and stands up. She doesn’t even look interested. She just moves past them to the door, feeling her way along the damp wall, then turns back from the doorway with her foot held out over the space above the steps.

  “I don’t have to be crazy,” she says again. She steps down and closes the door behind her, leaving Isabel alone with Magdalene and the broken mirror and the story filling up the room.

  When Isabel stops talking, Magda just says, “Okay, let’s go.”

  That’s it. She doesn’t look disgusted or worried or proud, or even disinterested. It’s like Isabel didn’t say anything at all.

  When they get back into the tunnel it’s much darker than when they came in, but it also seems quicker. Isabel holds the sleeve of Magda’s coat, feeling like a tall version of Henry, tugging on her for comfort. There are a few inches of green water at the mouth of the tunnel, and their feet get wet. Magda pokes her head out, looking from side to side and then up at the starry sky.

  “So that was Underground Highbone,” Magda says. “Are we impressed?”

  Isabel lets go of her sleeve and takes a step back.

  “You go, Magda. I’ll stay in. If I go back up to the piano room, I’ll be above the tide. No one’s gonna find me in there. You can bring me some stuff tomorrow.”

  “Listen.” Magda grabs both of Isabel’s shoulders and looks her in the eye. “One: you have a right to defend yourself. Two: if the guy was dead the cop wouldn’t have said assault. Think about it. Three: if they could have, they would have arrested you already. The most important thing is to act normal. Haven’t you ever watched a single movie, woman?”

  “Normal? Magda, we are not normal. Nothing about any of us is normal. Don’t you get it?”

  “Yes, Isabel, I get it. It is normal. Your reaction was extraordinary, but the shit that happens to us is everywhere, happening all over the place, all the time. That is the actual definition of normal. The idea of normal is just something people invented to control us. Now get in front of me and walk out there. Look straight in front of you and move.”

  She gives a little shove, and Isabel stumbles and splashes out onto the mud.

  “Okay, see?” Magda says. “Sky still up there where it’s supposed to be. It’s all good.” Isabel looks up, but it isn’t comforting. The sky looks like it could drop down on her at any moment and pierce her with thousands of sharp stars.

  “Stop trying to be chipper, Magda. This is serious. My life is over. Someone else’s too, maybe.”

  “I am being serious, Isabel. Let’s concentrate on the task at hand. I can’t say that was a boring excursion, but we’re no closer to world domination, the overthrow of Highbone, or the ultimate destruction of the American way.”

  “Oh, well.” Isabel looks down and laughs. “Maybe next time?”

  “On second thought, maybe we are closer to world domination. Who’d have thought it would be you that hit back? Everyone always expects it to be me.”

  fourteen

  “THE DEAD SUFFER from a lack of pockets. Where will they keep their matches? It’s dark there. How will they see? See, I can’t C if I don’t have my ABCs. Then there’s the one I always leave out when I’m naming the seven seas.”

  Lefty’s voice is quiet and he’s upright on the bench facing the docks at the end of Main Street. He’s looking down at where the water would be if the tide weren’t on its way out. Now there’s only mud that smells brackish, and whiffs of methane and diesel.

  The mud is soft and shiny. It’s silt, like silk. Girls are whispering inside the tunnel underneath him. The short one is scared. He can hear it in her voice. That voice is not tall, it’s frightened, it’s lightened, it doesn’t stay on the ground at all. It isn’t tall.

  The bookstore man is walking by with his shaking father. His earthquake old father. Soon the flaking father will lose all his pockets and the bookstore man will need a hanky. Where do you get a hanky
when your father has no pockets? Where is the woman who makes the handkerchiefs for them? Where is the lady with the needle in their lives? Dead, dead too. But women never have pockets, not even when they’re alive.

  “Listen,” Lefty says to them in the same soft, shouting whisper as those girls, but the loneless homey old men don’t. Don’t listen. They look straight at him and smile, though. That is so nice, so . . . nice. Lefty smiles right back with every tooth in his head. He works so hard that every tooth smiles individually, shines up at them. Golden gifts for them, hanky-less but never cranky. They deserve a prize.

  The little boy is following, but the girls can’t see. Henry the fourth, fifth, eighth. Oh Henry behind them, back of the line. Henry in a different time. The old men shedding their pockets don’t see. Only Lefty can see the secret boy. Not bookstore men or candle girls.

  The girls drop something clanky, not cranky, in the tunnel. More shouty whispering. Not steps, not echoing steps, they have soft shoes. Just their voices, three loud, loud, feathery loud voices moving right under his bench now. Then Henry the Fourth voice climbs down the rocks after them.

  “Little mountain man,” Lefty says. He waves back, that lovely little poem of a boy. He belongs to his holy harlot sister. The one who’s carrying things behind her eyes.

  “Little mountain man, little poem on the stones, your sister has a tall voice. She’s not the short one.” It’s hard today. Something keeps happening in between his head and his mouth. The back of his head and his mouth. Mouth in his head, of course. He has got a brain in his head and a . . . a mouth, but words are tangling up in there. That little joyful mountaineer will not hear. Will hear, but not get it, catch . . . it. Won’t know his sister is the one on the left. The one who went left.

  “Under the bench, little man. Their voices are under the bench.” But then he does! He catches it, gets it. Miracle . . . aculous, beatific boy.

  “I know. Thanks, Lefty,” he says with his little butter-flying voice. “Don’t tell on me, okay?” says that curly little one with so many pockets left.

  “Go left!” That has been a miracle and Lefty is going to sit right here and digest it. Little Lazarus boy climbing down the rocks and into the mouth of that tunnel. Little child savior coming right behind those shaky, smiling, old ones, and those feathery girls with things behind their eyes. Everybody waving, Lefty in the middle of all that smiling and waving at the bottom of Main Street.

  Not one golden hair on that diamond boy, dark and curly around his little voice. Just like his dark big sister, his spark of a sister with the soul leaking right out of her eyes.

  It is clear. He, Lefty, is clearly here. He is the pin at the center, of old ones and little one and girls in the middle, all smiling and waving. Not one has seen the others, but he has seen them all. The world is a wheel and he is the axle. Everything is turning and he’ll have to stay right here in the very precise centrifugal center and let it spin around him. It is clear as a ringing bell in the golden air, this is the exact center of the world, holding everything down. If not for him the earth comes undone. He is the one. As soon as it’s all the way dark everyone will be able to see that. Once the sky starts spinning with night.

  Once the sky goes dark and starts that slow turning, he will come clear as the man at the middle. Everyone will know it by the spinning stars.

  RESURRECTION

  one

  RUTH WALKS THROUGH the tunnel until Isabel’s voice dies, then stands with her eyes closed, breathing in the salt and iron air. She leans her face and one flat palm against the slimy crust of the wall. Is that Magda’s voice, vibrating back through the concrete?

  Weird how the sky opens out as it darkens, bigger than in the daytime. It was nicer in the tunnel, where the dark was honest and complete.

  She makes her way through the squelching mud and up the rocks onto the dock. There it all is again, waiting. There is Highbone Village, looking like a movie set waiting for them to play the next scene and then turn into the people they really are when they’re not acting. Because they don’t actually do any of the things they’ve been talking about. Magda, Ruth, and Isabel don’t rob perfectly sweet guys, or threaten to burn down each other’s houses or cause near-fatal accidents. They don’t fight back when slimy bastards grab them in the shadows. They don’t fuck each other. Other people fuck them, and then they get angry and stoned and try to make beautiful things out of the leftover pieces.

  There are still people under the yellow bulbs in the diner, and more people parking and going into Flannagan’s. Others are wandering away from the harbor into the darker sky up the hill. There is a world underneath them, and none of them knows it. Ruth rounds the corner; Mrs. Hancock is coming out of the alley behind Main Street. What is she doing, sneaking down behind there in the dark? She turns her back to Ruth without seeing her, heading up Main Street towards Flannagan’s. Then the alley is empty, like a memory of the tunnel.

  Could she draw what happened under there? Could she freeze the exact moment where something was uttered and everything changed, like in the Rembrandt painting where all the anatomy students are staring at the real truth inside someone’s body?

  I think I killed someone. Jesus.

  There are footsteps on the gravel, crunching their way down from the direction of Attic Antiques. She doesn’t turn her head, just rests it back on the wall and blows smoke up at the planets in the sky. Mackie sits himself down and rests his back on the wall next to her.

  “Well, well, now. Been busy?” He doesn’t pronounce the w in now.

  “You sounded southern just then.”

  “I told you, my parents are crackers. So? Tell me all about it.” It isn’t a question.

  “Mrs. O’Sullivan said I’m not crazy.” That isn’t exactly what she said, but it’s close enough.

  “Did she, really?” He cocks his head at her. “That true, you think?”

  “Yes.” No. Maybe.

  “And, uh, when did you have this heart-to-heart with Mrs. O’Sullivan?”

  Mackie leans his head sideways into her until she can feel the heat of him and smell the warm linen of his trench coat, intimate and a little menacing. He takes out his pocket watch and holds it in his open palm with some screws and a little scrap of cassette tape.

  “I was at Isabel’s house. I was so mad, Mackie. Virgil. I was so mad, I thought I could hurt people, but I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?” he says. “You look tough enough to me.”

  “Is that what it takes, Mackie, toughness?”

  “What else?”

  “She beat some guy, Mackie. Isabel beat some guy, maybe to death. Some lecherous bastard from the VA hospital. He tried to feel her up and she maybe killed him for it.”

  “So, she got there first, eh? Second place for Miss Carter. I had my money on you. Shame.” He pulls his Chuck Taylors under him and slides up to stand against the wall. “Hand up?” He reaches down to her, but she stays where she is.

  “What’s gonna happen to her, Mackie? Will she get busted for it?”

  “Search me, darlin’.” Mackie shrugs the shoulders of his coat.

  “What’s gonna happen to me?”

  She can feel a cold wind blowing through the sudden empty space around her body.

  “You’ll work it out. Like Mrs. O’Sullivan said, you don’t have to be crazy. Not as much fun for me, though.” He kicks up some gravel and walks away up the alley with his watch clinking against the screws in his pockets.

  “Good-bye, Virgil Mackie.”

  He just lifts up his hand and keeps walking.

  As Mackie’s figure shrinks into the distance, everything else falls into perspective around it. She can see Main Street, and Castle Gloom up the hill, casting its squares of colored window light over the ribbon of the road, tree branches dark against it. She pictures the town like an old map, yellowed and crisscrossed with boundaries. Everything but the sea and the sky is marked with the name of its owner. And there is Virgil Mackie, walking east
across the map, on the road out of town. His coat flaps out behind him like the wings of a crow and his sneakers don’t make a sound. He hits the highway and throws a long evening shadow back over Highbone.

  When Ruth comes around the corner onto Main Street, Magda and Isabel are in the doorway of the deli. She can see their legs stretched out across the sidewalk, and hear their voices dipping and falling against each other. It sounds like home. Comforting and stifling, like home.

  And what about Isabel? Well, she came down to earth with a crash, didn’t she?

  Ruth folds herself into the corner by the window, held in by Magda’s coat, feeling sick and safe. When a shadow falls on them it takes her a minute to realize it’s Mrs. Skopek, smoking a cigarette and carrying a cut-glass ashtray in her other hand. She’s using the ashtray instead of flicking her cigarette on the ground.

  “I’m lost,” Mrs. Skopek says. “Can you show me how to get to Normandy Street?”

  “It’s back up out of town, Mrs. Skopek,” Ruth says. Isabel stares back and forth at them, wide-eyed. “It’s pretty far, could someone give you a ride?”

  “No, I had to run away.”

  “Gosh, why?” Isabel says in some kind of Pollyanna voice. She thinks Mrs. Skopek is funny. Mrs. Skopek leans over and whispers.

  “There were Orientals. They killed my husband and now they’ve come for me. They’re pretending to be neighbors, but I know they’re from the camps. Can you hold this, dear?”

  She’s shaking now, glancing from side to side much too quickly. She looks like a nervous person, but speeded up on a jerky film. Ruth takes the ashtray from her and Mrs. Skopek reaches into her handbag. When she pulls out a pair of sewing scissors Isabel shrinks farther back into the doorway.

  “Ruth,” she whispers through closed lips. “What the fuck?”

  “Mrs. Skopek’s my neighbor. Aren’t you, Mrs. Skopek? You know me, don’t you? My mom is Caroline, Caroline Carter.”