Wireman

CHAPTER 9

IT WAS EARLY EVENING at the Ringer house and the three people living there were tense and morose.

Nick was in an especially bad mood. For months he had insisted Madra, this “handmaiden to a Paris fag,” this ” bride of Dracula,” this “poor little peasant girl with the starry eyes,” had to be disposed of—let go, run off, sent away. Daley ignored the verbal abuse when he could, but lately his own temper erupted more often, and he found himself out-shouting his brother simply to be heard.

Madra, on the other hand, was coming close to imitating an incoherent babbler. The seizures that surfaced soon after she moved in and grew steadily worse as the emotional atmosphere in the house grew more tense.

For a long time Daley did not know what was wrong. For a while he thought her merely dreamy, preoccupied, perhaps absentminded. But when the dazed looks came so frequently they frightened him, he searched the college library for medical books to pinpoint the problem. It did not take long. Madra’s symptoms were more blatant than ever. Five-second trances grew to a full minute. There were times when she was absolutely unaware of her surroundings.

Epilepsy. Mild form that resulted in lost of consciousness. Petit mal.

Daley worried, but he did not tell Madra what he had discovered. She called it daydreaming, and she was close enough. If only Nick would leave her alone. Couldn’t he see Madra was a woman with troubles?

Perhaps Daley would speak to his brother after dinner. This constant bickering was too hard on all of them.

Madra had cooked pasta. The spaghetti sauce had simmered all day, and the delicious smell of garlic, onion, and oregano permeated the house. It smelled wonderfully homey, unlike anything the brothers were used to. At the table, however, Nick looked up from his place and gave Daley a nasty grin. Daley knew what was coming.

“Too much tomato paste,” Nick commented dryly, sampling a forkful of steaming spaghetti, the sauce dripping onto his plate. “Tastes like an acid bath.”

Madra quietly stood and wrapped the cape over her shoulders. She tied it at the neck, then sat down stiffly.

Nick grinned, and at that moment Daley hated him. Why did his brother work so hard at being disagreeable?

“Too much salt too. Did you dump the Morton’s box in it, Madra?” Nick asked conversationally.

“Nick. Drop it,” Daley saw Madra’s eyelids fluttering. She had not looked at either man.

“I ought to drop it. Right on the goddamn floor.”

“Don’t pay him any attention, Madra. It’s delicious,” Daley said as he patted her hand.

“It fucking stinks. I think you should go back to cooking, Daley. I don’t like wop food anyway. Gives me heartburn.”

“You don’t have to eat it,” Madra said softly, her eyes still staring at the table.

“What choice do I have? What am I gonna fucking eat around here, peanut butter?” Nick asked.

With a sudden flourish that took both men by surprise, Madra stood up and threw back the sides of her cape, her chair falling to the floor several feet behind her.

“Oh, what now, another dramatic crying fit? Gonna rush from the room, baby? Huh? Huh? Quick, I can’t wait.” Nick clapped his hands in glee.

Madra marched into the kitchen and sank to the floor in front of the sink. Daley got to his feet, afraid she had fainted or was having a convulsion. But she had the lower cabinet doors open and was searching for something inside.

Nick turned around in his chair. “What the fuck’s she doing?”

“Can it, Nick. You’re going too far,” Daley warned.

She stood up, the folds of the cape closed in front of her. She was rigid and ghostly coming toward them without a hint of expression on her face. She walked to Nick’s place at the table and halted. While Daley watched in fascination, and Nick watched in horror, Madra slowly withdrew her hand from the cape—and with it a tiny gray mouse, its head flattened and bloody from the mousetrap it had been caught in. Carefully Madra laid the mouse crossways on Nick’s plate of food.

“This is probably more to your liking,” she said softly, and left the room, the cape thrown back and trailing behind her.

“Jesus Fuckin’ Christ!” Nick screamed as he overturned his chair trying to get away from the dead mouse in his plate. “Bitch!” He hurled his plate at the wall where the spaghetti dribbled to the floor. The dead mouse bounced back to lie at his feet. “Not in my food!” he shrieked, slamming both his fists to the table, overturning the glasses. “Not in my… not in my…”

Daley was roaring with laughter, holding onto the table for support, his stomach aching, his eyes welling with tears at the unexpectedness of the scene.

“Look what she did!” Nick continued to bellow. “I can’t believe what she fucking did, Daley!”

Daley still was holding himself around the middle. He was laughing so hard it hurt to try to get his breath.

A dead mouse in his brother’s plate! Even he had never done anything so outrageous as that to his brother, his big, frightening monster of a brother.

Finally Daley noticed the ominous silence and straightened up to find Nick glaring at him. The room’s temperature dropped twenty degrees. The giggles suddenly dried up. Daley’s hands dropped to his sides and he had to look away from Nick.

“That was pretty cute,” Nick said harshly. “She’s a winner, this girl of yours.”

“It was a joke, Nick. You asked for it. Don’t be a badass and pretend you’re an injured party.” Daley was determined that if this had to turn into a battle of the wills, he would be ready for it. He might not win it, but he’d be ready.

“I want her out of here,” Nick said flatly.

“You don’t have any say about it. I pay my half of the rent. She stays.” Daley paused for emphasis. “And you lay off her.”

Nick’s lips moved as if he wanted to say more, but nothing came out. Daley threw the cloth napkin he still clutched in his hand against the table. At the doorway he turned and repeated, “Lay off her. “

Madra had listened to Daley’s hysterical laughter and Nick’s furious shouts as they drifted up the stairway to the bedroom. She had undressed, placing the black cape over the back of a wooden chair Daley was about to refinish, and donned a flannel nightgown that touched the floor when she walked. She sat cross-legged on the bed, listening, occasionally smiling at what she had done.

Nick deserved his comeuppance, she thought, fingering the massed gown in her lap. He’s always trying to get me; let’s see how he likes feeling like a fool for once.

She heard Daley coming up the stairs. Madra lifted her gaze, expecting him to appear in the doorway.

When he did not, she slipped from the bed and crept to the hall.

The bathroom door stood open. Walking on tiptoe, thinking she would surprise him and make him laugh even more, Madra made her way down the dim hallway. She stuck her head around the corner and opened her mouth to repeat a snatch of poetry from one of Emily’s poems only to be surprised herself. Daley was not in the bathroom.

She turned her head and surveyed the far door, the door to his workshop. It was closed. He had been spending an inordinate amount of time in the workshop lately. Several nights recently he had gone there before joining her in bed. She had thought he was working on a project, perhaps stripping a chair or an old steamer trunk he had bought at an estate sale, but she never heard any sounds from the room, and when she asked what he had been doing, he only said he had been thinking.

She put her ear to the door. Not a sound. Was he sitting and brooding on what she had done to his brother?

Was he angry with her?

Then it happened again. The warm, pleasant sensation of floating right out the top of he head. She did not go anywhere. Not really. She could not tell anyone what happened during these daydreams. It was all too fuzzy, too overlaid with gossamer threads. While it was happening, she was not the least bit frightened. There was no anxiety. The real world was shuttered away. If someone was talking to her when it occurred she did not hear what they said. If she was in the middle of doing something— preparing dinner, smoking a cigarette, reading an assignment for a class—it all waited until she returned. Sometimes the ashes on the cigarette she held were nearly two inches long. But after it happened she always discovered she was trembling, sweaty, her throat dry. Where had she gone and for what reason? When other people noticed, what would they think of her? That she was an idiot. That’s all they could think.

Madra stared without blinking at a scrap of torn wallpaper. Her blood pressure dropped. Her pulse rate slowed. Her heart thumped once, sighed, thumped again, sighed…

She blinked and she was in the world, returned to herself.

The fear that followed her seizures came instantly. Her heart beat erratically. Pressing a hand to her breast she could feel her heart thumping against the bones in her chest. Blood drummed in her ears.

Oh my God, she screamed in her mind, clenching her teeth against the urge to scream aloud. I’m losing my mind! What if I never come back when this happens? What if I get trapped in that nothingness and can never get back?

Her hands went to her temples and massaged them as she closed her eyes. She turned away from the door and went down the hall to the bedroom. She climbed onto the mattress and pulled the long gown tautly around her drawn-up knees. Within minutes she was asleep.

In the workroom Daley was sitting in a green vinyl swivel chair. The cedar wood box containing war medals and the garrote was before him, the lid open.

Nick knew he had the garrote. Well, it should not have surprised him so. How could he keep anything important from his brother?

Daley took the weapon in his hands and sat back in the chair. He held the garrote’s handles in each hand and every few seconds tightened the wire until it vibrated. It produced a slight hum and seemed to electrify the air. His vision began to swim and he let his eyes go out of focus so that he could watch the wire dance between his taut hands as if behind an aquarium of green water. He thought he could hear the vibrations singing in his ears.

I want to go home, it seemed to chant. I’ve been here too long.

Once before the wire had sung the same lyrics. Daley felt his skin prickle and a terrible loneliness came over him.

He shook his head sadly and looked at his watch. It was barely seven-thirty and already the house was quiet as a tomb. Madra was probably asleep and there was no telling what Nick was doing. Tending his wounded pride probably. Daley had never seen him so volatile. Their home was a war zone just as dangerous as Nam had ever been. There were invisible land mines and concertina wire strung throughout the rooms. There was the smell of disaster dancing on the wind. Something dreadful had happened, though Nick had not mentioned it when he had come home earlier. But Daley saw it in the blue of his brother’s shadowed eyes.

He had seen it in the little debate played out at the dinner table.

Daley sighed and closed the lid of the cedar box to block the garrote from view. He did not need to be reminded of death and madness. He had to protect Madra from attack, he had to steer his brother back onto the edge, and keep him from tumbling into the clutches of his demons. It was a burden, but without him they might both be lost. Lost to the real world forever…