I say, 'He's rotting flesh now, and long fingernails. You don't want to see that.'
'I would pay dearly to see a thing like that. Name your price.'
That was months ago, before she developed her theory that he wasn't really dead at all. During the latter period she spent a great deal of time behaving in a clairvoyant fashion. Placing her index fingers to her temples she would pronounce, 'Right this minute he's sitting beside a puddle no, a pool. I see a swimming pool and a. . checkered bathing suit, a wet bathing suit. I see a diving board and. . what's this? I see a cocktail napkin that reads. . 'Fort Cheswick' no, I take that back! It reads 'Port Selznick. . Country Club.' There's something written beneath it. . something in very tiny letters. . I'm seeing the letter H. . and the letter V and. .' At this point she would surrender her head to the tabletop. 'Goddamn you,' she would say. 'I've lost it. I was this close, Dale, and then I lost it when you cracked that ice tray.'
I would then pour my Pepsi and remind her that we had both seen his body after the accident. We saw his arm torn off at the shoulder and lying in a separate bag beside him.
'He was in a drawer,' I'd say. 'Normal, healthy adults do not choose to spend their time in a refrigerated morgue. If he had it in him to play this sort of joke, chances are we would have known it before now.'
'He lied to me for fifteen years so why should I believe him flow? Maybe he's alive with one arm. It happens.'
My mother's sister Margery refers to this as 'Evelyne's stage of denial.' Since my father's death my mother has grown closer to her sister Margery, who provides her with slogans such as 'God doesn't close one door without opening another,' 'One day at a time,' and, my mother's favorite, 'You're only as sick as your secrets.'
I feel sick.
I'm cleaning the refrigerator in the basement apartment when I find two squirrel tails in the crisper and another one, attached to the genuine article, wrapped in newspaper in the freezer. The squirrel looks pathetically eager, its paws frozen beside its terrible, crowded mouth.
'Oh, that Nick Papanides was one sick customer,' my mother says, referring to the former tenant. 'He and I were standing in the backyard one day last month when Popeye dragged home a squirrel, the way he'll do sometimes it wasn't quite dead yet. It was putting up a fight but you could tell this one wasn't going to climb any more trees. It was pitiful. We're standing there when Nick asks, 'May I?' So I said, 'Hell, it's a free country knock yourself out.' Then he throws a towel over the damned thing, stomps on it a few times, and carries it into the apartment. He used to cook them with eggplant,' she says. 'I can't say I'm too sorry to see him go. You couldn't pay me to eat a goddamned squirrel it's nothing but a rat with long fingernails and a pretty tail.' She pauses to scratch at her ankle with the rough side of a sponge. 'There's a type that rents basement apartments,' she says. 'They need a low ceiling to match their self-esteem. You couldn't pay me to live with pipes eight inches over my head. We should try renting out the attic get some cheerful people around here for a change.'
I thought Nick was cheerful enough. He was no Shirley Temple but neither was he the despondent mole my mother would have me believe. Before he moved away, Nick and I would lie upon his big water bed, naked, listening to my mother's voice and footsteps as she paced back and forth with the telephone.
'She is laying each of her cards upon a table tonight,' Nick would say.
It killed me, the way he put a phrase together. Instead of 'off the deep end,' he'd say 'into the part where the water is more high than your head.'
One way or another you find things out about people. After a tenant leaves, we always find something, objects hidden and for-gotten about or just left behind. We've found bottles of pills and birthday cards, cassette tapes and jewelry and pictures drawn on the backs of playing cards. We use these things to put together a better idea of the people we thought we knew.
Tom Dodges, for example, left behind two ink-stained bras, a mason jar of gasoline, a book on ventriloquism, and a pillow-case stuffed with dog hair. Tom Dodges, a grown man! He moved out to attend a technical college and was replaced by a loud, chumpy dope my mother and I refer to as 'The Sportsman.' The Sportsman worked as a printer and presented me with dozens of single-sheet calendars picturing naked women leaning against motorcycles or bent over the hoods of troubled cars: women holding tools as if they were trophies they had won for being pert and shameless.
'Add this to your collection,' he would whisper. After a while I stopped opening them.
The Sportsman was clinically obsessed with any game involving a ball. Any round object that moved along the ground or through the air; smacked with a bat or club, kicked, dribbled, passed by hand or prodded with a cue, mallet, or paddle it commanded his full attention. He followed all games, either on television or radio, the volume so loud that it could be heard all the way down the street. It was his habit to coach the players from wherever he happened to be. 'Cahill, you shithead, what's your problem? Jesus Christ, you couldn't catch a fucking cold. Hand that uniform over to your mother, why don't you, you faggoty piece of shit.'
It got on my nerves in a big way. Even with tissue stuffed into my ears I could still hear him from my bedroom. I made it a point to avoid him, but certain people can't take a clue. The moment I passed his window or open door he would call out, 'Hey, Dale, you watching the game?'
'No.'
'You're kidding me, right? The Stallions are ahead by eight points with twenty minutes left in the game and you mean to tell me you're not watching? What are you, some kind of an apple-polisher, running off to polish some goddamned apple?'
He would rapidly rub his hands along the sides of his sweaty beer can, a dopey illustration of the verb polish, and then, thank-fully, the televised ball would regain his attention and I was able to pass.
The hands-down worst day of my entire life was the October afternoon when the Sportsman took me to an actual football game. He had bought the tickets in advance and arranged everything with my father. I would sooner eat a Vaseline sandwich than witness two minutes of a football game on TV, let alone an actual, live game. I began feigning illness three days in advance, unforgiving chills accompanied by memory loss and a stiffening of the joints. I was in my bedroom, moaning, when the Sportsman arrived at my door, accompanied by my father.
'Who are you and what do you want with me?' I asked, my stiff arms raised against the light. 'I'm so cold, so. . cold. When will it stop being winter? So. . cold. If you have any decency, sirs, you will leave me alone to die with dignity.'
'Get up and get dressed,' my father shouted, ripping the blankets from the bed. 'Either that or you'll go in your pajamas.'
I gave it another shot. 'Go? Go where? Are you taking me to the hospital? Will it be warm there? Who are you? Are you one of the soldiers who visited yesterday? I told you, we have no more bread. We've had no bread for weeks.'
'Hey, my man,' the Sportsman said when I met him a few minutes later on the sidewalk. 'Give me five.'
We took a bus to the stadium and this bus, it crawled while Mr. Congeniality struck up a game-related conversation with every passenger, all of whom seemed to find him charming. The stadium was even worse. Once the game began, the Sportsman was riveted, screaming and leaping up from his seat, rooting with the best of them. It was a safe bet that he wasn't going anywhere until long after the last ball was mauled. I excused myself and took the next bus home. Nobody was there, so I rooted through the kitchen drawers and found the spare key to the Sportsman's apartment, figuring I would go down and investigate for a while. I've done it with every tenant, and why shouldn't I? It's my house too, partly. I wanted to discover the Sportsman's pathetic secrets: the sheets stained with urine and decorated with hairs, the magazines beside a foul toilet, the medication and letters they all keep.
One time, while Tom Dodges was out of town, I found, beside a shit-smeared pillow, a magazine picturing naked men, women, and children summering at a nudist colony. These people went about their business, picnicking, cycling, enjoying a barbecue they were just like anyone else except that they were naked. Most of them, the parents, were uninviting in their nudity. I mean, you really wouldn't want to see them that way, but in this magazine you had no choice. Someone, probably Tom, had accentuated this magazine, with a ballpoint pen. The nudists were provided with thoughts and dialogue, crudely contained within cloud-shaped bubbles that poured from their mouths. 'You want a nice big hot dog?'
When Tom returned from his vacation I looked at him differently. I acted the same, but in my mind he became a specimen. Every time he greeted me I pictured those nudists and the filthy pillow. I had always liked Tom and my experience in his apartment made a deep impression on me. Any of us could die tomorrow. It happens all
