quivering for vibrations of the next explosion, ready to run.
And then, in the lazy span of a summer's afternoon, it was over.. the woods behind our house are thick with slash pines and lob lollies the ground covered with a soft mattress of brown needles studded with fallen cones, and I spend my days sheltered by the soft-spoken trees. I built a tree-fort in an ancient live oak and though the fort is a rickety jumble of chip board and two-by-fours and other rescues from construction site burn piles, the heavy branches of the oak hold it securely. I feel safest in the woods, in my tight and shadowed fortress a dozen feet above the ground. Lately my father has been making me more scared than ever. He is starting to see me and he's never done that before.
His eyes are so angry. He says I'm stupid.
I am nine.
Once from behind the boards I saw my brother…
Jeremy is fifteen.
Once, from behind the boards of my fort I saw my brother come running into the woods with a squealing shoat under his arm, a baby pig from the Henderson's farm down the road.
I laid flat on my belly and watched my brother wire the pig to a tree and do loud things to it with a big knife. I was sure he looked up and saw my eyes between the broken wood and leaves. But he must have been looking at something else and started up with the pig again. It took a long time, and then he buried the red things deep in the pine-needled ground. He wiped the knife on leaves and stuck it in his pocket…
Then, one day not long after, I saw flashing lights at our house. I was alone in my tree fort and ran to find the county police right in front of our house.
Up close the flashing lights hurt my eyes and I looked instead at the policeman's hands. The knuckles were like rocks and he held his hat over his privates. His eyes were hidden under mirrors. Jeremy watched from the porch glider, one foot on the floor, softly swinging the glider to and fro.
'We don't know how it…'
'Close down the county roads until we find…'
'Coroner there now, he's…'
'You don't want to go there… your husband… it's not a fitting sight for…'
'We'll find this madman, ma'am. I'm so sorry for your…'
After a while, the policemen pulled away. I lifted my eyes from the ground and saw only dust above the road. Mother was a gray statue in the front yard. I saw how she must have been talking to Jesus, her words were so quiet.
And I saw Jeremy wink at me and make the sound oink.
CHAPTER 15
There's a short story by Sartre called 'La Chambre,' and in it a man named Pierre is tormented by malevolent statues that buzz around his head, driving him deeper into insanity. His sole control over them comes through his zuithre, strips of cardboard glued together in a spider shape. On one strip is the word Black, the words Power Over Ambush on another, a third holds a drawing of Voltaire. I was sitting in the dark with the heads of Jeremy and my parents buzzing around me like shadowy statues, wishing I had a zuithre, when a car crunched into my drive. I heard a long bleat of horn and saw a taxi in my driveway, the white dust of crushed shells drifting past its headlamps. It bleated again and I yanked open the door thinking, God grant me a zuithre for the idiot taxi drivers of the world as well.
'I didn't call for a cab,' I yelled. 'You got the wrong damned address.'
A heavyset guy with a black pompadour leaned from the driver's window.
My security light was in his eyes and he porched his hand above his brow like a salute.
'You owe me sixty-three bucks,' he called up. 'Fare from Mobile.'
'Listen, buddy, I don't owe you '
The back passenger-side door opened and Ava stumbled out. She took two halting steps toward the house before her knees crumpled and she dropped to the ground.
'Carson, help me, please,' she cried as she tried to push from the sand, her voice a slur of tears and alcohol.
The driver and I wrangled her up the steps and onto the couch. I peeled four twenties into his palm and he looked happy to escape. Ava tried to push herself up, brushing sand from her face and mumbling semi coherently 'I got drunk, Carshon, I fuck tup and got drunk and I wasn't goin' to again but I got drunk and '
'Shhhh. You don't need to explain.'
'I need assistance'
She stunk of booze and sweat and fear. I stripped her to her underwear and guided her to the floor of the shower and adjusted a spray of tepid water. Her head was on her knees and she shivered and sobbed while I sponged water over her.
Several minutes later I helped her to stand, covering her with a robe as she fumbled from bra and panties. She was more coherent and her words made halting and desultory pictures of her last few hours. She worked Saturday, with Sunday and yesterday off. She'd gotten drunk Saturday night after work and couldn't stop drinking. This morning she'd arisen sick and ashamed. She'd called in ill and gotten Clair, who'd tongue-whipped Ava for her absence, an increasingly common event.
Ava looked at me through eyes more red than white. 'I thought I'd sober up today an' go in tomorrow and get through it somehow and I'd stop this… ugliness. Yesterday would be the last.' She hugged herself and shivered.
'But as soon as you hung up you started drinking.'
Her hands made the hard gripping motion I'd overseen from Will Lindy's office. 'I can't stop. What's wrong with me what's wrong with me what's…'
'You have to go to a detox center, get the poison out of you.'
She grabbed my sleeve with the iron fingers of someone at the edge of hysteria. 'No! I can't. People'd find out. I can't do that. No.
'All right, it's fine, calm down. We can do it here.'
'You didn't tell anyone about Friday night… I kep' waiting for people to look at me, to know. You said you didn't and you didn't..
..'
'Of course not. It wasn't anyone's business.'
She wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her hand.
'I don't know anyone else here… I feel so alone. Then I saw you at my house, I saw you… You didn't tell anyone and then you came over and watered. I wanted to, I couldn't go out, I couldn't let the neighbors see '
'Sleep time,' I said, taking her hand and leading her toward the bedroom. 'We'll talk tomorrow, get you well.'
'She hates me,' Ava blurted. 'She just hates me. I don't blame her, I fuck up so much, ever since I got there '
'Who hates you?'
'Dr. Peltier. Even when I'm at my best she hates me, I I '
I grabbed a wastebasket and Ava got sick. I waited it out and guided her to the bed.
'All I ever wanted to do was my work and I'd study more at night and review and try to learn more and more and the more she'd hate me the more I drank and some days I just want to die. I just want to die I just want…'
I got her calmed and covered and put a wastebasket beside the bed. She stared at the ceiling and squeezed an invisible ball in her fists.
Tears poured silently down her cheeks. I closed the door and tiptoed away.
Ava tossed and moaned most of the night, her rhythms ripped apart by three days of drinking. At daybreak she found deeper escape and her face looked at peace when I inched open the door. I hoped she'd pull some
