Waltz of Shadows

6

I started out with home in mind, but didn’t keep thinking that way. It was like I didn’t know what I was doing, least not on a conscious level. I begin to feel the way Bill said he had felt. Driven. Not really wanting to do what I was doing, but doing it anyway.

The direction I took wasn’t even near home. I live east and I went west, right on out of Imperial City, out into the country.

The trees thickened and the roads narrowed. It had started to drizzle and the wind had picked up. Oak and maple and sweetgum leaves blew across my path so thick it was like a colorful snow storm. The wet ones stuck to my windshield, and I turned on my wipers to bat them away, but that only bunched them up.

I drove until I came to the blacktop I had been looking for all along, went down it until it broke into an unpaved road that wound its way into the depths of the east Texas woods.

I cruised along for a short ways until the trees grew thick enough to drape over the road and wind their limbs together. I went along that way for a while, then pulled over to the side of the road underneath a massive oak. I sat for a moment with my hands on the wheel, letting the lint inside my head spin around, then I looked at the photo album lying on the seat beside me and felt a chill jump up my spine and spread to the base of my skull.

I got out of the truck and didn’t slam the door. I walked around front and got hold of the leaves bunched on the windshield and removed them, even as more swirled out of the woods and twisted over the truck and planted themselves on the glass.

I pulled my collar up against the wind and drizzle and leaned on the bumper of the truck. About a hundred yards in front of me the trees were less thick and there was a partial clearing. In the center of the clearing was an ugly double-wide mobile home with a shiny aluminum skirt that went all the way aroun ^’atal cd the bottom, except for a large gap beside and underneath a set of black iron steps that led up to the front door. Jutting out of the opening at an angle to the steps was the rusty handle of a lawn mower.

Arnold’s place.

The home had once been brown, but was now grey with weathering and age and the little flagstone walk out front of it had dried weeds sticking up on either side of the stones. Underneath a carport/shed that had been built against the home was a dirty white Dodge pickup and a hooded barbecue grill that looked well used.

Hung by string, dangling like fruit from the branches of a barren iron wood tree at the edge of the car shed, was a batch of beer bottles. When the wind blew and went into the bottles, they gave out with a shake and a sound like haints moaning.

I had seen trees fixed up like that before. Mostly in the yards of old black people. Someone had told me the story behind the bottles when I was a kid, but now I couldn’t quite remember what it was all about. Something to do with spirits. I certainly hadn’t a clue why Arnold had fixed his tree up that way. That seemed out of place for him.

Beyond the double-wide, I could see the woods. It was very thick near Arnold’s place, because that’s where the creek ran through. I figured, come summer, the mosquitoes would rise off the water and muddy banks in a mass so thick and black they’d look like a fishing net being lifted, about to be dropped over the property.

Behind, and to the left of the trailer, at an angle from the woods, was a couple of acres of junk cars and car parts.

Way out back was a large, old-fashioned red barn that looked newer and cozier than the mobile home. That would be where Arnold’s wrecker lived.

I wondered what Arnold was doing inside his double-wide. Most likely sitting around in his underwear drinking beer, watching the wrestling matches, maybe racing the dial with his channel changer, scratching his belly, listening to the wind blowing through his bottle tree.

Or maybe he was having an early supper. Eating beanie-weenies out of a can. Spearing the weenies with his pocket knife, sucking the beans and juice straight from the container, wiping his mouth with the back of his arm as he watched thumb-sized roaches run out and around an oily-bottomed, brown paper sack at which he tossed his garbage.

I was taken aback by these thoughts. If that’s how I thought of him, then why had I driven out here to spy through the trees on Arnold’s trailer and suddenly wonder what he was doing after not speaking to him for ten years and not having the urge to?

When I was a kid, Arnold had been my hero, and I grew to love him the way a younger brother should love an older brother. He came around to our house some, but my mother was never relaxed with him. She tried to treat him right because of my father, but you could tell she wasn’t comfortable with the idea. My father didn’t know what to do about it. He loved Arnold, I know, but his firstborn was from a time when Dad had been a boy himself; hadn’t had the experience then that he had with his new family. I think seeing Arnold made Dad feel like a failure. When they talked to each other, it was around things, and Dad always had a kind of desperate look about him when Arnold was about, as if there was something he wanted to say, but c togs, the language in which it needed to be said was unknown to him.

One night, when I was twelve, a noise in the kitchen woke me up, and I got up and found Dad in there breaking up some cornbread in a half glass of milk, eating it with a spoon.

I got a glass, went over and sat down by him and took cornbread from the pan and broke it into my glass and chunked it up with the spoon and poured milk on it. He put a big arm around me while I sat there and ate the cornbread and drank the crumbed milk, and I saw then that he had a bunch of old school pictures of Arnold spread out on the table and was looking at them. I didn’t know where he got them or kept them, but they were well-creased and a little greasy.

I didn’t say anything to him, but all of a sudden, he said: “I keep thinking I’ll learn to do something right. You think you live long enough, you ought to learn something right. You have a kid, you got this pure little thing, and a chance to do everything right by it, and every day you just screw things up ’cause you don’t know nothing worth a damn in the first place. You end up teaching this pure little thing everything you don’t know, and nothin’ you do know, ’cause you don’t really know nothin’. You’re just putting dirt on a snowflake, and the harder you try to clean it up, dirtier it gets. Goddamn, Baby-man, I hope I ain’t making you and Rick so dirty.”

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, and it worried me some because he had milk on his breath and not beer. Beer might make you talk like that, but milk and cornbread? It was as if he were speaking Greek. He had tears in his eyes, and I’d never seen that before. I didn’t know he could cry. I thought he was stone and wisdom rolled into one, and that night I knew he was neither. He was human as the next person, and I loved him all the more for it.

What he meant that night came to me later, of course, when I had kids of my own and saw that they were snowflakes that I was handling with dirty hands.

All I knew was what he said had something to do with me and Arnold, and mostly Arnold, but I didn’t know what that something was, except there was some kind of regret buried in his words.

When I was twelve, Arnold looked and seemed pretty neat with his greasy ducktails, tight pants, souped up Chevy pickup with the flame licks on the side, and he had money from little jobs he did here and there, and now and then he came over and had dinner with us, and afterwards he’d treat my little brother like a kid and me like a man. Me and Arnold would go out back of the house and throw knives in the dirt and he’d tell me about the girls he was seeing, and then he’d wink at me, just like I knew what he was winking about.

One time he gave me a pocket knife with a yellow handle that he’d burned my name into with a woodburning set, I kept that knife until the night my life got a thorn in it.

When I turned fourteen Arnold started coming around more, and Mama didn’t like it period. She saw what she called “a hole” in Arnold, and thought maybe she could hear the beat of leathery wings when he was around. She said to me, “You hang around with Arnold, you’re gonna catch something bad, and I don’t mean a cold.”

I listened like most kids listen. Not at all. One fall night, a few days short of Halloween, I went out with Arnold in his truck when I was supposed to cs sten have gone to the skating rink. He had some homemade hooch, and he gave me some in a paper cup. I got tight quick, because I’d never had any, and while we were sitting in his truck drinking the stuff, he said, “Let me show you something,” and he reached under his seat and pulled out a. 38 revolver, said, “You know, we’re about out of liquor, and I ain’t got no money. But if we went over to ole Ben’s liquor store and I stuck this in his face, I bet we could get both from him.”

I remember thinking that idea was the funniest thing in the world, because I didn’t think he meant it. I was drunk and didn’t know it.

We drank some more and Arnold talked some more and smiled some more, and pretty soon we were on our way over to Ben’s liquor store, positioned just over the county line where drink was legal. I thought we were just playing a game. I figured Arnold had lied about not having any money.

Arnold had worked at Ben’s one summer stacking liquor crates, and he knew just where to go. There was a little road went off in the woods and came out at the back of Ben’s place. You could park out there behind some trees and walk up the back circle drive. Near the door was a key in a wide-mouthed pipe stuck down in the ground with a rock over it.

We parked in the trees and sat and waited for a while, looking at the dark store, because it had been closed an hour by the time we got there. Finally Arnold said, “He don’t go home for a while after he closes. Has some things he does after the stock boys leave. He counts his money and takes it home with him. He makes pretty good money.”

I still thought he was kidding, but he kept drinking until all there was to drink was gone, and I said, “You’re just funnin’. Take me home, Arnold. I’ve got nothing against Ben. You used to work for him. You don’t want to do nothing to him.”

“He skimmed on my hours some. I reckon I got a hundred, maybe hundred-and-fifty dollars coming. I could take a hundred-and-twenty-five and call it even.”

“He’ll know you,” he said.

“Not if we tie these shop rags over our faces, way they do in cowboy movies.”

We got out of the truck, and Arnold tied a rag around my face and another around his. We got the key from the pipe, and Arnold unlocked the door, quiet like. We slid inside, moved through the stock room, pushed open the swinging door that went into the store itself. There at the counter, sitting on a stool, bent over the register, a little gooseneck lamp beside him, was Ben, scrawny and birdlike with a nose the size of a hammer handle. He was rolling pennies into paper rollers. When he heard us come in, he looked up.

Arnold pointed the gun, said, “Give it up.”

Ben looked at Arnold and said, “Arnold Small. I know you. That mask don’t do you no good. You don’t want to do this. You go on now, I’ll forget this.”

Arnold jerked his mask down and said, “You owe me money. You owe me money.” Then Arnold said to me: “Git what’s in the register, up to a hundred-and-twenty-five.”

I moved toward the register as if in a dream. Arnold went around front of the counter, pointed the gun at Ben. Then the old man moved. He pushed ced. ist me back with one hand and with the other pulled a pistol from under the counter, thumbed back the hammer, pointed it at Arnold. I grabbed a bottle of whisky off the shelf and brought it down hard on his gun arm. The gun went down and hit the register drawer, went off. Bills flew up like butterflies.

I swung the bottle again, hit Ben solid across the forehead. The bottle broke this time, and down he went, unconscious, me standing there looking at whisky and blood flowing over his head and onto the floor.

Arnold got hold of me, grabbed a roll of pennies from the counter, and we were out of there, in the pickup, roaring away before Arnold realized he’d left his pistol on the counter, like an offering.

Arnold took me to the skating rink and parked out back. From where we sat we could see the skaters in the open rink, and the lights flashing out from the spinning bulbs didn’t seem like lights at all, but strips of brightly colored foil, and the skaters were musicbox figures, wound up tight, going round and round to a grating noise that was supposed to be music. The shrieks and laughter of the skaters mocked us.

Arnold said, “Git out, squirt. Don’t say you been with me. You came here to skate, but stayed out here and watched before going in. Let some people see you. Ben didn’t know you. Your face was covered.”

I untied the shop rag, which was pulled down around my neck, and tried to fold it, but my fingers wouldn’t do the job. Arnold snatched the rag from me, reached across and opened the door. I got out of the truck, and Arnold drove off slow and easy. Gradually, the world slowed down. The music in the skating rink became defined, the lights flashed as lights are supposed to flash, and the shrieks and laughter from the rink no longer seemed directed at me.

It was all over.

Mostly.

Arnold took the rap. The old man recovered with nothing more than a scar, and he couldn’t name Arnold’s accomplice, and Arnold wouldn’t name me. The judge liked the way Arnold had thrown the football in high school, liked the way he had run with the ball on his powerful legs, and he liked Arnold’s loyalty to his unnamed partner. The gun Arnold left on the counter turned out not to have been loaded, and the roll of pennies was worth fifty cents, not exactly big money. Arnold got six months on the county farm instead of a few years in prison.

I went my way, free and easy, and when I saw old Ben on the street from then on, I crossed away from him to keep us from passing, least he recognize the eyes that had looked at him over the top of a shop rag mask. I was secretly glad when he passed on some years later, attacked by another robber, but this time one with a loaded gun and a more severe design.

When Arnold’s time was up, I couldn’t face him. I couldn’t thank him for being silent, because I had come to believe that was exactly as it should have been. That he owed me because I wouldn’t have been in on the deal had he not taken advantage of my age, got me drunk and drove me over there. I came to believe I was better than Arnold. That I always had been, and had only been slumming. I put the knife he gave me in a Prince Albert tobacco can and buried it out back of our house and dismissed him from my life.

I have felt that way since, except on dark nights when it’s three a.m., an chren a d I view myself in a different light. A light that shows me to be less than the man I pretend to be. A man who has never quite taken responsibility for his own actions.

If the thing with Arnold was bad, there was another whammy to come. My father began to sleep less, drink and brood and argue with my mother. But Dad’s guilt and dissatisfaction didn’t last long. One afternoon on his way home from work at a construction site, he stopped off for a beer in his favorite bar on the other side of the county line. While he was having his beer, a drunk pulled a gun on the bartender for some reason, and my Dad lost his temper because the bartender was a friend of his.

He jumped the drunk and took the gun away from him and beat him to the ground with it. He threw the gun behind the bar and the bartender poured Dad one on the house and Dad drank it. The drunk dozed on the floor while the bartender called the cops. The drunk’s girlfriend, who had been sitting calmly in a booth watching the action, took a. 22 pistol out of her purse and popped it at my father.

The shot caught Dad in the right eye and it was all over. She got a year because she was pretty, the drunk got six months because he was the sheriff’s cousin.

After all these times of driving out, just parking and looking at the mobile home, was this going to be the time I actually walked up to his door and knocked?

What was I going to say? Hey, Arnold, how’s the old hammer hanging? Haven’t seen you in ten years, and haven’t ever invited you over or called you or even sent you a Christmas card, and the knife you gave me those years ago I buried in a tin can along with you being my brother, and I know I owe you a debt I can never pay and I resent it, but our stupid nephew has his balls tacked to a board, and since it’s something illegal and dangerous, I thought of you immediately.

He’d probably have punched my lights out, and I wouldn’t have blamed him.

A big yellow dog came out from under the mobile home, squeezed past the lawn mower handle and looked in my direction and barked. I got in the pickup and pulled around in a tight half-circle, backed some, straightened the truck on the road, and started away from there.

As I went, I glanced in my rearview mirror. Through a parting in the trees, I saw the door of the trailer open and a huge, bearded man step out, then I was going around a curve and couldn’t see him anymore.