Sign Languages

BACKYARDS

Richard put the groceries on the table and walked back to close the door against the summer heat. For a moment he breathed deeply and inhaled the fishy odor he’d noticed yesterday the second day in his brother’s house. And though he’d looked for its source, he hadn’t found it.

Tom, his only brother, had begged him to house-sit the month he and his wife, Megan, would be in Chile on a faculty summer program. “It’d be great,” Megan had said over the phone. “You’d get out of that damned Houston in July. What’s the humidity there, 98 percent?” And she’d laughed. Her laugh convinced him. That and the unexpected realization he was tired of Houston and the one woman he’d slept with in the last five years and she only recently; a new assistant accountant at work. Their recent months of sex becoming tangles of clothes because of her impatience. And once she’d bitten him on the forearm. After she was asleep, Richard went into the bathroom and examined the purple wound for a long time. Then he slept on the couch, waking often to watch the door to the hallway, afraid she’d come through it, her teeth bared. Now, though the wound had disappeared, he put his finger to his skin.

At the last minute, Tom and Megan had left early in the sort of frenzy Richard should have expected from his brother. It was very much like him to have gotten the dates wrong or the plane tickets or something. Richard was sure that was why Megan had phoned with the news, her voice layered and deep — the only woman’s voice he paid much attention to. He hadn’t seen them in over two years — since the Christmas the ice storm had rushed into Texas fiercely and killed the power at their parents’ house, bent pine saplings almost to the ground. There’d been candles and kerosene lamps — the old days for his parents — and quilts on knees and early bedtimes. A lot of looking out of windows into deep gray afternoons.

Coming from his bedroom at the front of the house, he’d seen Megan naked in the mirror in their bedroom. She was alone, at the window, her fingers slightly parting the blinds. She hadn’t heard him. He stopped on the cold oak floor amazed. There had been few women in his life, none before his second year in college. And he’d never seen such a sight before. The demanding woman in Houston was nothing like her.

Richard had flown to St. Louis and taken the bus two hours to the northwest. There’d been a manila envelope in the mail chute with door keys, instructions about appliances, a pad of signed checks for incoming bills. And a brief note from Megan saying she hoped he would enjoy the slow pace of Coalston. She jabbered on so about mental health and locating our centers that Richard wondered about her own well-being here in a town a long way from Denver, where’d she been born. And besides, hadn’t they both just escaped to Chile? Richard couldn’t imagine such an impetuous action. It was hard enough for him to make it from Houston. He was much like his father, who’d once been offered a high-paying job in Europe but couldn’t leave the piney woods of East Texas he’d adopted as a young husband.

But what had he done his first afternoon in their house? Richard shook his head. He’d taken a shower and tried to get beyond the memory of the Houston woman lying on the couch and asking him to play rough with her. Then he’d thought about the few women he’d seen naked, Megan in the mirror. In high school there’d only been hands, opened blouses, sweating windshields.

Unhappy with the soft mattress in the guest room, he had taken his suitcase into their room and dropped it on the beautiful quilt he recognized as his mother’s work. He opened their dresser drawers; he opened the closet, pushed back clothes, poked through shoe boxes, found a snub-nosed revolver in one and felt as if he’d found cocaine. This wasn’t like Tom at all. Then, Richard smelled Tom’s strong and spicy colognes and, in the third bureau drawer, put his hands into her underwear. Pulling out a fistful of panties, he scattered them on the bed.

For an hour or more he went through everything he could. He told himself that here was a chance to piece everything together — an opportunity to know them both better than he ever could any other way. Far more complete than what one learns over telephones, from infrequent letters about the superficial details of health, money, parents, work. Tom was his brother and Megan his sister-in-law. But their lives were secret and foreign, and here, suddenly, he had the perfect chance to find out who they were.

So he took out things, examined them, put them back, fighting, all the time, his conscience, guilt, amazement, the fear of being caught by their sudden return. Their faces in the door of the small study dumbstruck at Richard sitting at the desk, rummaging through old bills, lecture notes, memos concerning the League of Women Voters.

My God, he kept thinking, what am I doing? I’m the most secretive, private person I know. How would I feel? And he saw himself returning once from the kitchen and finding her with a book she’d taken out of his bedside table. He couldn’t comprehend such an action. He had thought then how he’d have to keep an eye on her.

“Jesus,” she’d said, oblivious to her crime, “you keep this sort of thing in the bedroom? Wow, everything there is to know about junk bonds.”

But he hadn’t stopped himself. Not until a folder had buckled and spilled across the floor, and, bending down, he’d read the medical expenses for artificial insemination at a hospital in St. Louis. They were enormous, and evidently the college insurance didn’t cover them. There were several angry letters from Tom to the insurance people and one from Megan, less angry, her approach one of quiet logic.

Richard sat for a while, completely convicted, and then he had straightened up and unpacked in the guest room and drunk a large glass of sherry from the serving cart in the dining room.

That night in their bed he listened to them talk about him. My poor brother Richard, he could hear Tom say. He doesn’t have much of a life there in Houston. Oh, he’s perfectly fine. He could hear Megan’s rich voice. But his life really is mostly work, work, work. He’s always been that way, you know. And Richard winced at Tom’s voice and, for a while, was glad he’d gone so drastically out of control and had searched their house.

The next morning he’d woken to the fish smell he’d been unable to locate and now guessed he’d just have to get used to.

In midafternoon Richard was interrupted by a series of sharp raps on the front door. He laid his autobiography of Henry Ford on the end table and got up from the couch. Out the big bay window the sky was cloudless, the leaves on the maples along the street drooped. He knew how hot it was; this summer was defined by drought and crop failure throughout the country and, in the west, tremendous forest fires. At night, on the news, it looked as if the whole nation was hot and weary.

When he opened the wooden door, he looked down on a short, broad woman in her late fifties, her hands full of brochures, small plastic bowls, flyswatters. Richard shook his head. “I don’t live here; the owners are away.”

The broad, moon face broke into a smile, and she came up the steps and under Richard’s arm. “Of course you don’t, honey. You’re Rich, Tom’s baby brother. Bet it’s hotter in Houston now, huh?” Her lime-green, shiny dress was all reflection and motion as she laid the items on the coffee table and dropped heavily onto the couch. “Whew, it ain’t no picnic here, is it hon?” And she wiped her forehead and chin with a handkerchief from her huge purse. Richard smelled the sharp bitter lemon odor of perfume as she clicked her bag shut.

“Barbie Glass,” she said, leaning back to look up at Richard. She patted the couch at her side. “Have a seat, Rich; I can’t stay a minute you know.” She shook her head. “Can’t leave the old man alone these days. You know how they are.”

Richard sat and nodded his head. He looked through the window, but there wasn’t a car anywhere. He realized she was a neighbor.

“Anyway, Megan and Tom told me all about you,” she reached out and patted his arm. “Big-time accountant, CPA,” and she rolled her eyes. “So, how’s little ole Coalston shaping up? I’d have come over earlier — saw the taxi out the kitchen window,” she twisted herself around. “That’s us — me and Buddy — right over there. But I thought I’d give you a day to get settled in.”

Richard turned too and nodded at the small brick house with green, mismatching trim.

“Anyway, it’s an old people’s neighborhood, you know. Tom and Megan the youngest in a dozen blocks. And we all love ‘em, the honeys. You’re a lucky man, you know.”

Richard nodded.

“Anyway, here’s the Welcome Wagon,” and she rolled her head back and laughed loud. Richard laughed too and looked down at the coffee table.

“Really, I’m one of two of us. Me and Julie Hutchinson,” she wrinkled her heavily powdered nose. Her eyes were small and the depthless blue of water in a swimming pool. “So, I thought, I’ll leave Buddy just a minute and meet Rich and why not take him the usual, huh? Why not?”

Richard nodded and smiled. And Barbie went quickly through the assortment of pizza coupons, bottle openers, flyswatters — from a funeral home. “Can you believe that?” Barbie cackled. Richard said he couldn’t. She rattled on about the quality of the schools, troubles with the few blacks who were ruining everything in the county, the weather, the nearby lakes.

“Well,” she said, and stood up surprisingly quickly for so large a woman. “Buddy’s missing me for sure by now.” And she reached out a hand that Richard, puzzled, met to shake. But instead, Barbie grabbed his wrist in a cool grip and led him through the living room to the adjoining dining room that opened onto the rear deck. She brought them close to the large sliding door. Richard looked out with her. Barbie’s finger jabbed the glass.

“You’d better watch out for ‘em.” She stared up into Richard’s eyes, and he felt compelled to nod.

“Who?”

“There, in that mess of a garage apartment, the green one — right there.”

Richard hadn’t taken the time to sit on the deck yet. There was no shade, and the planks and metal lawn chairs looked scalding in the harsh sunlight. Now he took time to notice the house at the end of Barbie’s finger.

The backs of all the yards ended in a wall of dense woods that lined the banks of an invisible creek. The lawn to his left was manicured; he’d seen the old thin man who lived there mowing at noon. The house to the right was a bit closer to the street than Tom and Megan’s. And, obviously, the owners had built some sort of garage apartment, or perhaps had sold the back half of their large lot. The faded kelly-green house was unusually dilapidated for this neighborhood. Its gray roof buckled in several places. A low fence of raw cinder blocks surrounding it was almost obscured by high weeds. Abandoned pieces of rusting machinery lined the fence. There was a tangle of scaffolding and a cement mixer with a split bucket. It reminded Richard of housing in some third-world country — poorly planned, hand-built, unfinished.

“Oh, I know Tom and Megan love kids… and who doesn’t? But they’ll come to see when they get back. They’ll learn. Those kids just moved in a few months ago. Parents never home and they’ve run amok. You oughta hear Buddy,” Barbie chuckled. “‘End of the world,’ he says. ‘Barbie, they’ll be the death of me.’”

“Bad kids,” Richard said lamely.

“Oh hon! I mean, they’ve just moved in. Before it was vacant a year — property’s hard to sell these days — and before that just Mrs. Clemson until she kicked the bucket. Didn’t realize it for a few days, those sorry kids of hers. And it was August, too.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Just been a mess,” Barbie shrugged and walked back to the front room, pulling her purse up on her shoulder. “We’ve never had anything like it here. Most of us have called the cops on them at least once. They steal things — newspapers, lawn ornaments, Mr. Eaton’s three-wheeled bicycle, we think, and wrecked it where the creek crosses under Helena Road over by the fire station. They smashed Madge’s herb vinegar she was steeping on the porch. Now the Bentendorfs say they’ve caught them in their garage sitting in their new Buick. And later found nails all in their aluminum siding. But what can you do?”

Richard shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Well, Rich,” Barbie whacked him hard on the shoulder, “just watch out for ‘em, huh? And if you need anything, Barbie and Buddy are right over there twenty-four hours a day. We never go anywhere… and seldom sleep. It’s a geriatric neighborhood, all right,” and she chuckled and waved a fleshy arm over her shoulder. Richard watched her cross the dry hot yard. Looking down at Megan’s zinnias bordering the porch, he decided he’d water and maybe even trim a few of the wilted hedges late in the afternoon, though Megan had written him about the young college student whom they’d hired to take care of the yard. Yard work was something he’d seldom done since he lived in an expensive condominium complex in Houston and had no yard and couldn’t possibly say who his neighbors were.

Friday morning, a day later, Richard sat up in bed and screamed, his voice rebounding off the walls. The face at the window disappeared.

He sat there and collected himself, breathed deeply before he swung out of Tom and Megan’s firm bed and looked out the window.

It was almost midmorning, the beginning of another endless summer day. The sky was already a milky haze; the bush below the window was dying from the drought, dropping yellow leaves as if it were fall.

A young, thin boy streaked around behind Tom’s metal storage shed. Then another child, a girl fifteen or so, leapt over the low, weed-covered wall and ran after him.

Then another girl, a bit small, but also blond, burst through the back door of the garage apartment; Richard could hear her yelling. It was high and shrill, full of real fear. She had a sandwich in her hand, the bread flapping open at every step. Right behind her came another boy, terribly thin and redheaded.

Richard opened his mouth, rapped on the glass. “No,” he said. “Stop it.” And, not taking the time to grab his bathrobe, he rushed through the quiet house to the rear deck, still damp in the shade from the dew.

Now he heard her scream, high and awful, as she scrambled over the cinder-block wall and crossed into Tom’s yard. Like a pirate, her red-haired pursuer put the butcher knife in his teeth as he raced up the pile of scaffolding, jumped into the high grass, and emerged like some attacking animal.

“Hey, stop it!” Richard pounded the wooden railing. He didn’t know what to do. He looked at the green house, hoping a parent would intervene, but the torn screen door sagged halfway open.

In the middle of the yard, the girl stopped, turned, and flung the meat-and-bread sandwich at her brother, who stopped too, stuck the knife in the ground at his feet, and glared at her.

“You sonofabitch,” she said, taking in gulps of air.

The redheaded boy squatted and pieced together the sandwich. Carefully he wiped the grass off it onto the knee of his pants and then took a bite. He spoke with his mouth full. “Fuck you.”

Richard was appalled. He felt trapped in the balcony at some terrible play. Again he stared at their house, the opened door, the black mouth of it. Some yellowed sheets and underwear hung motionless on a clothesline.

He’d never liked children, never wanted any of his own. Neither had the biting woman in Houston. “Little shits,” she called them. And, for a moment, he admired her, wished she were here to witness this.

“Hey, you two,” he shouted, and they turned and stared at him. The boy reached down and pulled up his knife; the girl shaded her eyes from the morning sun. Richard looked at them but didn’t know, now, what to say. He wished he’d stayed inside; he realized he was in his pajamas. He recalled what had woken him and turned his eyes to the metal shed. He saw two heads duck back around.

“You two come out from behind there. Right this minute.” He spoke in the office voice he used on subordinates who’d caused him inconvenience.

But they didn’t come out. Instead they laughed loudly.

“Kimmy, Chip, come on… hurry,” a girl’s voice coaxed. And, in a flash, the redheaded boy and girl were gone.

“Stay out of my yard, you little brats,” Richard shouted at them.

“It ain’t your yard,” the older boy’s voice answered.

Richard listened to the sounds of their feet and bodies scurrying through the underbrush. Turning to go inside, he stopped and moaned. All along the porch, where Megan had placed pots of flowers, were clots of wet dirt and shredded plants.

Richard sat on the deck and drank a freshly made old-fashioned. It was too dark to read any longer. He laid the opened book on Peter the Great on the wire end table.

Next door they’d been making noise since sunset, but, out of principle, Richard hadn’t paid attention. Now he watched them come in and out the battered door.

There were no lights on in the house. The older girl had a flashlight. They worked like ants, passing one another, pausing for a second’s contact — a shove, a pounded shoulder. “Ouch.” “You’re asking for it.” “You sissy.” “Little piece of shit.” “Bastard.”

They were loud, oblivious of the neighborhood. They brought out a folding table, straight-backed dining-room chairs, paper sacks.

All of a sudden, with an orange flash, the older boy had lit a fire on the ground.

They yelled behind their low wall and gathered closer to the fire, their faces yellow flickering masks. Richard noticed Kimmy the sandwich girl, wore glasses.

He thought about how, in the city, he didn’t live near children. And, in the malls, he paid them little attention except to sidestep them and their mothers.

Beyond the wall the fire died down until the older girl poured something on it and it erupted, causing them to scream with excitement. Then they began to sing, or maybe it wasn’t a song but a poem or chant of some sort. It was less melody than rhythm. He couldn’t understand the words.

In bed, before he slept, Richard parted the curtains. There was only a flicker of light; the house still dark. He thought he saw their shapes sitting on the chairs. He was sure they’d used the fire to cook their supper. He’d smelled the odor of meat. On the edge of sleep he wondered if they had electricity.

Then, after the memory, everything happened quickly. It was as if everything else was waiting for Richard to recall something he’d never really forgotten. It was early afternoon and he drove under the carport after a late lunch at the Golden Corral. Coming around the corner to enter the house from the deck, he stopped and edged closer to the wall. He felt like a spy as he cautiously looked around the corner. The blue-and-white police car was parked in the apartment’s driveway, and the officer stood by the opened car door. The children stood in a semicircle a few feet from the patrolman, whose lips moved and right index finger wagged. But a hot rising breeze obliterated his words. Richard watched him pull out of the driveway. For a moment the children stood transfixed, and then they shouted one long gleeful shout and scattered in four directions, hopping over upturned bicycles, screaming over the fence.

Richard thought of his own youth and his “country relatives,” as his father disdainfully called them. But this memory had never been cloaked or forgotten. Richard thought of it often, maybe once or twice a year. For him it was an emblem, a definite lesson, the clearest illustration in his life of why he was Richard, this thirty-four-year-old man.

His mother’s cousins were all great sportsmen; they fished and hunted whatever was in season. And he loved visiting in their houses on holidays because they were all full of energy. One wall, in the oldest cousin’s house, was devoted to guns-shotguns, pistols, deer rifles. There was the foreign and raw smell of bourbon on Christmas afternoon. The men laughed loudly as the women cleared the table. His mother joined in cheerfully; she loved the convoluted familial gossip. But his father sat silently at one end of the wagon-wheel couch coddling a bottle of beer. Richard watched him nod and smile and knew, at fifteen, how foreign all this still must be to his father. It was the South to this man born and raised in Milwaukee.

So Richard tagged along as they visited barns, hung on fences to watch stallions mounting frightened mares. Sex, he couldn’t help noticing, was all noise and unwillingness.

They had dozens of calico cats, black-and-tan squirrel dogs. None of the cousins minded horse shit or kennel smells. They wore scarred boots; he and his father borrowed rubber Wellingtons. Slipped them on in a tack room full of saddles and bits, smells of grease and leather.

After he’d begged and whined for weeks, he and his father joined the cousins early on a mid-November morning to squirrel hunt. Already they smelled of whiskey. His father looked drawn and pale, his hands tight around the barrel of the borrowed shotgun. Tom, who was away at college, had never been interested in these people; had never made such demands on their father.

The woods were frigid and silent. They all shot squirrels; Richard watched his fall thirty feet into the mouths of the dogs, and he was amazed at their eager violence. A cousin his own age grinned and waded into them, smacking heads with a gloved fist.

Before noon, one of the cousins sang out, his voice echoing up dry creek beds, and they all converged on a huge snapping turtle the cousin had dragged from its winter home under a fallen oak. It was awfully old, the elderly cousin said. Its high-domed back was obsidian black and spotted with patches of green, live moss. The closed flaps protecting its head and feet were orange. They all admired the turtle until one cousin bent over and put the muzzle of his shotgun to its emerging beak and fired. Then the others stood back and did the same until there were only pieces of shell and flesh.

Richard and his father neither fired their guns nor looked at one another. Later, on the way home, his father called them savages and Richard decided to abandon them. He turned back to his family and their quiet, solitary lives. He had always felt himself lucky; he figured few people had such clear opportunities. Of course it wasn’t only that one moment in the woods, but it had been a telling event, had become a powerful memory. And, over the years, he didn’t think he had embellished it at all when he occasionally took it out and examined it like a valuable jewel.

The sagging apartment door banged shut; Chip, the redheaded boy, howled like an animal. Near the pile of scaffolding, the two oldest children kissed passionately; Richard wondered how they were related.

He wouldn’t deny the allure of their lives. Even after he’d gone inside he thought about them and returned to look out at their house. He felt he was blushing; his forehead was warm to his touch.

So, in a couple of days, the children returned to the yard to play. They made-believe using the storage shed. And Richard watched them from the couch until one morning he stepped quietly out onto the deck and cautiously sat in a webbed lawn chair.

Chip looked up from his howling game, his fingers dug deeply into Tom’s drought-wrecked grass, and watched Richard. In a moment they all fell silent. The older two came out from behind the shed, their faces blushed and drenched in sweat. Richard almost turned his head away.

They formed a tableau. All around them sprinklers clinked and a hot breeze rattled bamboo wind chimes.

Richard stared at them. It’s all right, he said to himself. Don’t worry. I only want to watch. Everything’s just fine.

The older ones spoke quietly to the younger, and they sat together in a circle for a few minutes. Then, like a football huddle, they touched hands and shouted, resuming play.

In a day’s time they had captured Tom’s backyard. Richard watched them work like ants carrying from the garage apartment broken chairs, bicycles with warped wheels, headless dolls, sacks of clothes. The two oldest — the boy stoop-shouldered with pale eyes, the girl with just a hint of breasts, her nipples hard under her tight T-shirt — wrestled and wrote things on sheets of notebook paper. Like sibyls they paid no mind to them afterward, and the scraps, driven by the hot breezes, plastered the base of the house, flew to catch in other people’s hedges. One night, after they’d retired behind their wall to gather around the fire and cook, Richard collected paper until his back ached. Sitting down at the kitchen table, he looked through the damp sheets at the stick figures in sexual positions he’d never imagined. In some there were stick-figure policemen surrounding houses, bullhorns to lips. In all, the houses were repetitions of the green garage apartment down to the low wall, the scaffolding, the split cement mixer. In one, a redheaded child hung from an upper window. In all of them there wasn’t a single scene indoors.

One morning, with his coffee in his hand, Richard emerged to find the two youngest digging furiously with a spade. They’d already crossed half the yard with a shallow trench, the grass uprooted and turned over.

“Hey, you two!” Richard placed the cup on the railing and stepped down onto the brown grass. But Kimmy only turned around and grinned, her teeth yellow and snaggled. “You shouldn’t do that,” he continued, but Chip didn’t break his rhythm. Instead, without glancing up, he tossed a shovelful of dirt in Richard’s direction.

“Now listen here,” Richard said, and stopped ten feet from them, his clenched fist outstretched. Then he dropped his hand and looked over at the dark sagging door of the apartment.

Who are you? he started to ask. What is all of this?

Instead he went inside and, from the couch, saw them fill the narrow ditch with water from Tom’s unrolled garden hose and begin sailing pieces of wood down it. Soon all four of them joined in and dug a second canal at right angles to the first.

All afternoon they romped in the water and dark mud. The older girl’s neck caught the sunlight like gilt, her eyes down-turned to the toy boats. The older boy taunted Chip until they fought in the trench, clawed and bit and screamed.

Kimmy ignored them and put the dribbling hose into her mouth until her cheeks ballooned. Soon they were all yelling, tearing through the neighbors’ yards, and Richard went around to the side and turned off the water. He noticed that their sailing boats were pieces of painted clapboard siding ripped loose; in some the bent nails were still shiny.

Some mornings they were out by the shed. Once the two youngest were on the deck drinking Dr Peppers at seven in the morning. Soon he began cleaning up after them. He filled the trench, patted down the friable grass. He scrubbed the crayon markings off the deck planking. He noticed he no longer opened his mouth to shout at them when they ran headlong into the shed and bounced off in one of their violent games. But he felt his face flush frequently, his head a bit dizzy as if he’d had too many cups of coffee.

But when he demanded of himself a trip away from the house — to the store or a movie matinee — he could hardly wait to return. To sit on the couch in the infinite summer evening or on the deck and watch them howl and fight. The two oldest always touching — hand to elbow to shoulder. The yellow light warm on all their suntanned skins. The apartment door dark and sagging. He’d never seen a light on in a window. He quit reading his book by Henry Kissinger. At night he watched them at their supper fire, faces like masks but also the faces of children. Their motionlessness, rapt attention on the flames, a summation of the day’s abandonment in passionate play.

On one of the rare days they didn’t appear, but could be heard a block away in loud contests, the phone rang.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Hello?”

“Just what do you think you’re doing over there?”

Richard almost hung up. That’s what you do in Houston, in the city.

“It’s me, Barbie Glass. Remember, Rich? The Welcome Wagon lady. Your neighbors, Barbie and Buddy.”

Richard nodded and looked across the street. He couldn’t recall which house she’d said was theirs.

“Yes, of course. Hello, Barbie. How’s Buddy?”

“He’s the one made me call, Rich. He’s mad at you… mad as a wet hen…”

Richard heard a thin voice beyond Barbie’s; it was reedy and angry. “Sonofabitch,” it said. “Sonofabitch.”

“Hush up… shhh.”

“Barbie?” Richard looked out at the houses. Two houses to the north a man sat on the porch in a wheelchair, but he didn’t look toward Tom’s house. Richard kept his eyes on him; he wore a thin robe over pajamas and spat into a handkerchief concealed in a palm.

“You’re letting ‘em take over. You’re letting ‘em overrun us, Rich.”

Richard considered her words and found himself silent. The man in the wheelchair turned his head to the door. There was a voice now behind Barbie’s. Sharp, complaining, angry.

“They’re ruining our neighborhood. Stealing mail, tearing up property. This and that. And we’re old folks, Richard. And you’re encouraging them. After we’ve tried to keep ‘em in their own yard.”

“Goddammit,” the high voice shrieked.

Then he didn’t hear anything; Barbie must have put her hand over the receiver. Richard imagined her small fat palm across his lips.

“What do you think you’re doing, Buddy wants to know? Why ain’t you with us, Rich? Look at what they’ve done to Tom and Megan’s lovely yard.”

Richard stared at the man in the wheelchair.

“Can’t you help us, son? You seemed such a nice boy. Tom’s younger brother, the CPA.”

“Yes, of course. Of course I can, Barbie. But they’re just kids, you know…”

“Bad kids, Rich.”

“I…” And Richard hung up gently. He watched the old man on the porch cough convulsively into his palm, then he went into the kitchen and sat. He felt embarrassed for them all.

It was easier than he thought it would be. On Tuesday morning he went to McDonald’s and bought a half-dozen sausage-and-egg biscuits and cartons of orange juice. He waited on the deck in the dew-dampened chair until they stormed out of the apartment and over the wall to the shed — its sides dented in places from their roughhousing.

“Hey, how about some breakfast?” he said in a stage whisper. The four of them seemed to ignore him. So, for a few minutes they continued to play with the collection of broken chairs, warped boards, and old chenille bedspreads and Richard continued to sit on the deck, his face warm as if he’d had whiskey.

Finally they came running and collected on the deck so close to him he’d stepped back and waved them inside.

That’s the way it would begin. He’d buy sweet rolls or breakfast muffins. Or he’d fry eggs and bacon. After a couple of days they’d be cavorting on the deck, cracking the glaze of empty bonsai pots, picking at torn strips of webbing from the chaise longue, until he slid open the door and they rushed inside to the kitchen.

They seldom talked. They ate like wolves he’d seen on PBS. They jerked at their food, chomped down bacon, ham, and toast. Guzzled their orange juice.

They smelled like cat’s fur — the smell of the sun on things that live out under it. Richard kept his distance, stood with his hips against the edge of the kitchen sink.

And then he let them play in Tom and Megan’s house and they destroyed very little. All they broke he’d replace before the summer was over. There were dropped glasses, a bowl full of wax fruit — Kimmy took a bite from the Red Delicious apple and, in anger and surprise, pushed the whole bowl off the coffee table.

“Mista, you gotta dead rat in heah,” Chip said, wrinkling his nose. “Don’t ya smell hit? Somethin’ wrong with ya nose?” He laughed, his teeth gapped and yellow. Richard saw they were his permanent teeth. He nodded, but he no longer smelled anything; he had gotten used to it.

But they seldom talked to him, and though they were soon into everything, Richard held his tongue. Kimmy and Chip found pots and pans in the kitchen to play with. He sat on the couch and listened to their wild babble; he heard them argue; they came to blows, swinging pots as weapons. Often one screamed and dropped to the floor weeping. But Richard just listened, knowing that if the pain were too great the child would run out the door and into the woods.

The oldest two played in Tom’s study where there were dozens of old magazines and family photo albums. They typed on the typewriter and giggled. They lay on the carpet — Richard watched their feet stretched out across the doorway. Brown legs in the air, they talked a low foreign language, a dialect all their own. Sometimes, when he came from another room, trying to keep things a bit straight, he’d glance in and they’d be talking head-to-head and then they’d look up at him as if he were a ghost, their faces suddenly ashen and their lips drawn tight. He’d nod at them and smile, but they’d keep staring.

Some days they didn’t come, weren’t waiting for him on the deck. On those occasions he’d drive an hour into the medium-sized city and window shop and eat at some awful restaurant offering local dishes. Taking a mouthful of food, looking out the window at his brother’s Toyota, he considered what it was he was doing. But not for long, and he answered everything with a shake of his head.

When they did arrive his breath caught for a moment at the top of his lungs. He sat on the couch in the living room and listened to all their noise — the crash of pans, the complaint of the abused typewriter. Standing at the back door, Chip scanned the yard with Tom’s binoculars. That afternoon — they always left by two at a sharp command from the older boy, drawn to the sun — Richard couldn’t find the binoculars. He wrote it on a piece of paper in the study, a list he had begun keeping. “Things to Do,” it said, though it meant “things to buy, to replace.” On the floor were dozens of sheets of paper black with typing. “Karen… Bobby… Hates… Kisses.” A stew of typos. Odd pieces of themselves left behind. In the kitchen there were different traces. Puddles of flour, water, sugar. Cake pans full of soggy oatmeal. It took him more than two hours to clean up. Afterward he’d watch baseball on television until it was time to lie down and watch them around their fire.

“Holy Jesus, are you crazy?” The phone clicked dead. Richard looked across the street; behind him, the little ones fought. It wasn’t, he decided, either of their voices. It was a low man’s voice disguised as high.

The day the rain broke the drought, they stayed until almost five. Rising from the couch, Richard walked down the hall. In the study, with the rain pounding on the air-conditioner, the boy was asleep on the floor.

The girl was in Tom and Megan’s bedroom. She wore one of Megan’s Sunday dresses, the shoulders hanging down, the whole dress describing her young body. She sat on the bed watching the rain against the windows.

Richard stood in the doorway. The rain-filtered light darkened the bronze skin of her cheek and the backs of her hands. He thought about the rounder, mature body of Megan.

In the doorway he listened to the rain with her and, beyond her, to the snore of the boy, the sounds from the kitchen. He knew absolutely what he had known for years. He would never have children. He would never live like the cousins or these children.

One breast showed plainly through the thin fabric. It was hard, firm as a fist. She was probably sixteen; the rain-streaked glass softened her sharp girl’s features.

Richard backed from the door, walked quietly past the sleeping boy, and sat on the couch.

Two days after the rain the weather turned cooler. Richard had straightened up and fixed himself a cup of thick, bitter espresso. He stood at the sliding door and listened to them in the woods. Later, he dozed on the couch until the sharp knocks on the flimsy storm door woke him.

“Coming,” he said, and flipped on the yellow porch light. “Yes?” Richard opened the door and looked down on a huge man in greasy coveralls that gapped at every button, strained at the seams.

“So you’re the bastard, huh?” The words slurred from thick lips. The man seemed as broad as he was tall.

Richard held the door open. The yellow porch light failed to repel the moths that fluttered and dipped in front of their faces.

“What do you want?” Richard let the door close a bit, but with a surprisingly swift movement the fat man stopped it and laid a wide hand on Richard’s shirtsleeve.

“You some kinda molester, that it? Bring the kids inside for treats?” He whined the last word and Richard smelled whiskey and realized several things at once.

“No, no, that’s not it at all. Listen…”

But suddenly the fat man, his globular cheeks shaking in rage, his chin sagging like some brown animal’s bloated throat, yanked hard and pulled Richard out the door onto the rough cement porch. Richard heard his shirtsleeve tear on the doorknob, felt his left knee flare in pain as it jammed against the wrought-iron railing.

The huge short man lumbered around on the tiny porch with Richard in his arms. A bear squeezing a foolish thin man. With a broad paw, the man would swat at Richard’s face, and, working an arm free, Richard tried to protect his head.

Later, in bed, Richard saw it all from their point of view — as if he were at Barbie and Buddy’s window. They never sleep. They probably had cups of coffee in their hands.

He touched his face where the man had hit him again and again with his ham fist. Then they’d fallen over the railing like in a western and plowed up the zinnias. Richard had yelled and yelled. He could hear his voice but not his words — he didn’t know what he’d shouted.

“Goddamn molester. Kid fucker. Bastard.” Over and over. With Richard shouting too, trying to cover his face, trying to wrench the horrible fat fingers from his collar, from around his arms.

Finally he’d hit the side of the house with a crack and, after a few minutes, all was quiet. First he’d sat on the steps and looked across at Barbie’s. Then he’d gone to the bathroom and washed his face carefully and done all those things his mother would have done if he’d fallen on the sidewalk. Then he’d lain in their bed and considered everything and how he’d never been hit before and how he still had never struck anyone. He didn’t sleep as such. Instead, in an aching doze he packed and repacked in his mind. Sometimes he discovered he’d included Tom’s pants or Megan’s shoes and he’d dump everything out and start over. Then he’d either forgotten to buy the airplane ticket or had put it in some pants pocket. There were noises, too, as if, offstage, other actors were talking too loudly about their own lives and what they were going to do right after the show.

The next morning Richard could hardly get out of bed. His neck and back were stiff; his wrists felt as if they’d been sprung. His face didn’t look so bad in the mirror, though his cheek was as red as a strawberry and there was a purple bruise on his jaw.

He decided not to shave and fixed himself a cup of bitter instant coffee. He breathed deeply and inhaled a new odor, the pungent smell of leaking gas. But, sniffing around in the kitchen, he recalled that the house was one of those sixties all-electric models. Perhaps, he thought, it’s Chip’s dead rat. Richard imagined its corpse in some cramped, dark place.

He walked out onto the deck. The air was cool. He listened, but the woods were quiet. The only sounds the truncated songs of cardinals. Richard put his coffee cup on the railing and stepped down onto the grass that had greened-up since the rains. He looked across the backyards, left and right, several times as if they were a dangerous street he was about to cross. He imagined faces at all the windows, everyone knowing everything about him and the four children and the father. The memory of the fight caused his sore cheek to ache.

Richard walked across the yard, stepped over the sunken trench he’d inadequately filled in, and pushed his way through the weeds. He’d watched them return home; he knew the route Kimmy and Chip took. Clumsily he climbed the cinder-block fence and stepped onto the pile of scaffolding. He almost fell into the yard. For a moment Richard looked up at the faded green garage apartment.

He walked up the steps to the small wooden porch; his pants leg brushed the ragged screen punched out from the door frame.

“Hello, anybody home?” Richard rapped on door. It felt hollow and rotten under his knuckles. He figured he’d apologize, say something to their huge father, so he could get them back.

“Hello in there, anybody home?” He didn’t know their last name. “Kimmy, are you in there? Chip?”

“Wow! He gave ya some good uns, huh?”

Richard turned and looked down at Chip, who had walked around the corner. Beyond him Richard saw the other three emerge from the woods and sit on the dining chairs around the blackened circle where they built their fires.

“Your dad home?”

Chip came closer, stood beside the porch. He looked at the screen door. “Nope, he ain’t never home.” He looked up again. “He busted ya good, huh? Goddamned if he didn’t.” He grinned.

“Listen, why don’t you come on over and play? I’ve got some new stuff you can play with… you and Kimmy. And we’ll fix hamburgers… on the grill. We’ll eat outside. How’d you like that?” Richard raised his voice and looked at the others.

“Are you kiddin’? Are you foolin’?” Chip jerked his thumb at the door. “He’ll come home sometime.”

“Listen, I know what.” Richard stepped down the steps and looked at Tom and Megan’s house. He was surprised at how it looked from this point of view. He stopped for a moment to examine it all. “What if you come over for a little while and help me look for that dead rat? He’s really smelling today. He’s stinking up the place real good. Help me do that, okay?” Richard turned and looked at the redheaded boy, who stared up at him and then clapped his hands, yelled at the others.

The three jumped up from their chairs and ran ahead. They all vaulted over the fence into Tom and Megan’s yard. Yelling still, they pushed inside.

Richard stood at the fence and listened to them. He could leave a note. But he’d have to go home for a pencil and paper and climb back over the fence. And he couldn’t attach it to the door; he’d have to step inside. Besides, the father would know soon enough.

Richard climbed the wall and dropped to the other side. For a few minutes he watched everything from the cover of the tall saw-toothed weeds.