Marvel and a Wonder (17 page)

“Take it.”

After a long drag on her cigarette, she said, “Fuck you and your stupid fucking money,” with as much venom as he had ever heard, then, placing three fingers down, slowly slid the money into the front pocket of her bomber jacket. She crushed out her cigarette and stood, one high heel slightly bent, the other unclasped. At the screen door she paused, her back to him, and said, “You never gave me love. You and Mom, you were always so fucking stingy. That’s why I’m the way I am.”

Jim did not look up. “No,” he responded, putting a hand on the counter. “If you come back, I’ll call the police.” Then there was the sound of the door slamming shut, the screen vibrating in its frame. When he glanced up again, there was only sunlight—obscured by the rectangular shape of the door—and the round, distant sun.

* * *

At eight p.m., the boy came back, trotted up to his room, and locked the door. It was dark and the constant sound of the cicadas and crickets reminded Jim how long he had been gone. He heard the sound of the boy’s music and video games come on, then stood and made his way upstairs. He knocked twice on the door before the boy opened it.

“I’d like to talk to you,” Jim said. “Man to man.”

For some reason the boy had his Walkman on, while the TV and hi-fi were both blaring. He nodded and took a seat on the bed.

Jim grimaced weakly and sat beside him. He cleared his throat once, then again, then put a hand on the boy’s knee. “Your mom . . .” he said.

“Is a bitch.”

“No,” he said. “No. She’s sick. She’s gone to get some help. She won’t be back for a while. I just wanted you to know where she’s at.”

The boy sniffled. “I hate her.”

“No,” the grandfather said. “You love her. We both do. This is why it hurts like it does.”

The boy let out a squeal, then a sob, and the grandfather, hands upraised, feeling unsure, pulled him into an awkward embrace. After some time, he patted the boy on the back, then left him and hurried to his room, happy for the dark.

* * *

Nighttime once again; the moon one evening larger, a glowing porcelain figure, a knickknack on a cloudless mantle.

* * *

There was a gun shop on Route 9 that sold used handguns. The younger brother had no priors and, as it turned out, you didn’t need a license to buy one. They drove out by the Burnham bridge, parked down in a culvert, and blew off a few rounds, broken bottles glinting faintly in the dark. It was frightening—the look on the older brother’s face—as he squeezed the trigger again and again. It was like he wasn’t a real person at all.

After they were back inside the dirty red pickup, after they were headed back to the highway, the younger brother asked, “So when?”

The older brother, Edward, shot him a disapproving look and held a finger to his lips.

“Fuck that,” the younger brother said. “I need to know when. I got a fucking life too, you know. I can’t wait around until you get your head together.”

The older brother nodded, glanced back toward the road, then said it: “Tomorrow.”

_________________

Dawn that morning was a cold one, the fields dewy. The sound of boots on the slick green, brown, yellow grass. The smell of coffee in an old metal thermos. The chickens noisy, their voices the primitive racket of daylight arriving. The horse silent in its stall. The sun like some mythical animal already beginning its western run.

* * *

First they candled the fertilized eggs. The good ones he handed to the boy to be put back with the hens, while the bad ones—the quitters which had stopped growing, already beginning to smell a little off—he tossed into the silver bucket at his feet.

Later that morning, they mucked the horse’s quarters and fed her, then Rodrigo tacked up. He turned to the boy and asked, “You ride again?” but the boy only shook his head shyly.

“Go on,” the grandfather said. “Give it another try.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?” the grandfather asked.

“I’m scared.”

“That’s no reason. I’m scared of plenty of things. I still got to do them. Go on.”

“Do I have to?”

“Just try.”

The boy began to inch away but Rodrigo put an arm around him and helped him up, left foot into the left stirrup, his right leg swinging awkwardly over. On top of the horse he looked less like a child. Rodrigo gently led the horse along the fence line. The farmhand made a few kissy sounds, keeping the horse calm.

“How does it feel?” Jim asked.

The boy smiled nervously.

“Let her run!” Jim shouted.

“Now we go,” said Rodrigo, giving the horse a pat on its hinds. Then the animal was alive, a kind of curious machine, bounding forward, the boy doing everything he could to stay in the saddle. They were going so fast he forgot to be scared, feeling himself blinking out tears, the animal galloping beneath him, wind whipping in his eyes.

Afterward, Rodrigo helped him down. Though the boy walked stiffly, his legs and groin sore, he was still smiling ten minutes later, his grandfather patting him on the back, his breath coming hard.

“I love her,” the boy said. “We are like brother and sister. I’ll never let anyone ever take her away.”

Jim glanced over at Rodrigo, who smiled back.

* * *

They ate lunch early, the boy spreading the bologna sandwiches with a thin layer of mayonnaise before setting the plate in front of his grandfather. As they ate, Jim stared at the boy’s features once again and asked: “Did I ever tell you about the first Fourth of July I spent over in Korea?”

The boy shook his head, eating around the crust of his sandwich.

“No? Well, when I was over in Korea, I would get homesick. My mother used to send me letters, photographs sometimes, news about the farm, people in town. Once it was Fourth of July and our jeep broke down along this supply road and so we had to spend the whole evening hiding in a ditch. We had a bottle of GI gin, stuff the soldiers used to make themselves, and we sat in the jungle all night waiting for a convoy to come pick us up. It got dark and we could see the lights in the sky; I thought they were mortars at first, but my partner, Stan, he said they were fireworks. The GIs made their own. They were pretty, but it was strange to see them in some other place. The kind of houses they had over there, the kind of trees, it didn’t look right. It made me feel strange, seeing those fireworks. It was the first time I felt like I belonged to anything. To a country. I couldn’t see it until I was over there.”

The boy chewed thoughtfully on the corner of his sandwich.

“I don’t know why it is the way it is,” the grandfather said.

The boy set down his sandwich, quietly contemplating the grandfather’s words.

Jim went on: “You did a fine thing today. You were afraid but you got up there anyway.”

The boy smiled.

“You’re figuring out what it means to love something. Because when you love something, you got to be ready to give up everything.” He patted the boy on the shoulder and wandered from the room.

The boy glanced out the kitchen window, seeing the shadow of the horse as it quietly grazed in its paddock, stretching out upon the ground.

* * *

On Thursday, both brothers woke up late. It looked like their mother had finally decided to go to work. So they both slept on through the morning, undisturbed, one in his bed, the same bed he had known for as long as he could remember, the other curled up fetal-like on a sofa infested with fleas, abandoned on the screened-in porch. They did not wake each other, but somehow, perhaps through telepathy, the kind of which is known to develop between siblings, twins, or participants in phenomenally disastrous events, they both tottered over to the kitchen table, a silent argument then arising over the final contents of a box of Cocoa Krispies, the younger brother, Gilby, having to settle on Honeycombs instead. Before their bowls of lukewarm cereal, they went over the plan: They would each have a gun. Or only Gilby would have a gun, as Edward had already done a stretch in the pen, and if circumstance or dumb luck intervened, and the duo happened to get pinched beforehand, etc., etc. Or they would wait until midnight, when the old man and the boy would be asleep. Or one would wear a mask and knock on the door of the house and keep the inhabitants at gunpoint while the other tended to the horse and trailer. Or they would both wear masks and tie up the old man and the boy—less of a chance of something going wrong that way. Or they would simply pull up in the truck, hook on the trailer, lead the horse inside, and drive off without having to use any guns at all.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“You don’t be stupid.”

Gilby looked down at his cereal bowl, a ribbon of yellowish sugar swirling beneath the remainder of milk. “And then what?” he asked, afraid to look his brother in the eye.

“And then we drive off.”

“When?”

“Tonight. We take off. I already made a couple phone calls. I’m waiting to hear back from a friend of mine who lives outside of Lexington. We get the horse, drive it down there, drop it off, come home. Mom won’t even know we’re gone.”

It was true. Even if Gilby didn’t want to admit it, his older brother almost always had some kind of plan.

There was a faint squeaking and groaning on the stairs, the sound of their youngest brother, high school age, in his stockinged feet, clambering down the steps. The two brothers shot each other the same look, both of them glaring down at their near empty bowls of cereal, the baby-faced Walt scratching his rear before he belched and took a seat at the table.

“What are you faggots up to?” he asked, pouring himself a generous serving of Honeycombs.

* * *

They walked the mare up into the trailer. The boy made whispering sounds, keeping the animal quiet. They threw the door closed and locked the bolt into place, and as the three of them were climbing into the front seat of the pickup, the boy asked, “Do you think she’ll win?”

The grandfather looked from the boy to the farmhand and shared a bashful smile. “Did you ask her?”

The boy nodded.

“Well, what she say?”

“She said she likes to win. She said she’ll win every time we race her.”

The grandfather smiled. “Do you believe her?”

The boy nodded.

The grandfather grinned wide, slapping the boy’s leg hard, and said, “That’s good enough for me.”

* * *

On Thursday evening, the mare seemed to run faster than ever. There was a crowd of nearly forty onlookers gathered in the hot aluminum stands with three other horses running: Duane Rose’s cobalt-colored mare, its legs splaying out like stilts; Bill Evens’s black, long-necked gelding; and a buckskin stallion from over in Gypsum. After the starting gates were flung wide, the white mare pulled out two lengths ahead, then three, dust rising beneath its hooves, pink nostrils flared, the orange-helmeted jockey hanging onto the irons for dear life. She came in at 19:76, and the grandfather, the boy, and Rodrigo leapt into the air. Duane Rose dropped his cigar and almost fell from his seat.

“We got to get this horse down to Indy,” Bill exclaimed.

“Indy? Heck, she should be over in Oklahoma or Kansas,” Duane Rose grumbled. “You got no business running her around here. What you need is a proper trainer.”

“What you need is a manager,” Bill Evens corrected. “Somebody who knows the ins and outs of the business. A genuine sportsman.”

The grandfather smirked. “Have you got anybody in mind?”

“I’ll get you to one of the futurities. Or Los Alamitos. I’ll make you and your grandson there rich.”

Jim smiled, but did not answer at first, tilting his hat from the setting sun. He put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and said, “We’ll have to see about all of that.”

Later, the grandfather divvied up the winnings—$2,500—half in cash, the other half made out in a check, handing $500 to Bill Evens for his jockey and the use of the track. The rest he stuffed in his pockets, front and back, putting a hundred of it in his left boot like when he was an MP back in Korea.

On the way home, they pulled into the town of Dwyer for an ice cream. There had been a Tastee-Freez that was now a Dairy Queen, and the three of them sat in the cab of the pickup, licking the soft-serve, grinning goofily at each other. It was late, past ten as they drove back, and the lights of the highway made the grandfather squint, causing his smile to appear even larger.

Then they dropped Rodrigo in town. The grandfather put several loose bills in the migrant’s hand. They drove on, the boy beside him, the radio blaring an old cowboy song by Gene Autry.

* * *

The pale-blue truck passed the large wooden fence just before eleven o’clock—turning up the final curve of the drive—the grandfather and the boy having remained silent the rest of the ride home. Jim backed the trailer into place beside the awkward-shaped stable, switched off the engine, and climbed out. The boy followed, unlocking the bolt, sliding it free, and carefully walked the mare down the ramp. The grandfather unhooked the trailer from the hitch and parked the pickup near the house. The boy dawdled near the shed, saying goodnight to the horse, and then headed inside. The boy and the grandfather grinned at each other once more, standing in the kitchen, the grandfather sorting out the remainder of the winnings on the kitchen table.

“Pick one.”

“What?” the boy said.

“Pick a bill. Any one.”

The boy smiled and reached out for a twenty, then seeing a hundred, picked out a Ben Franklin instead.

Both of them climbed the stairs, the boy first, then parted in the hallway with a shared nod of their heads. The grandfather fell into his bed, sleeping more soundly than he had in some time. The boy sat down in front of his video games, turning his headphones down low, dispatching all manner of foes with a renewed interest.

* * *

At half past midnight, the boy thought he heard a car door close. He flinched a little, thinking of his mother, and removed his headphones. He pulled himself up and off the floor and parted the dust-covered drapes slightly. Parked askew in front of the chicken coop was a dirt-flecked pickup, in the dark looking more purple than red.