“Damn, that’s cold to shit in somebody’s desk drawer,” Lee said.
I told him this was different though. This was not your ordinary robber. This was a robber who actually took the time to shut the drawer afterward. Most people would have left the drawer open and took off, but this guy was different. This guy was something of an artist.
We found out that Bill had been arrested that afternoon. The police asked me if Bill had been home last night. I told them I didn’t know. The police went through the numbers of absent students for the day and when they went by Bill’s mom’s apartment they found him asleep on the couch with five or six empty salt and vinegar potato chip bags sitting on the floor.
There was only one thing to learn from this.
The world was a weird world.
The world was a joke.
Oh well.
I WENT BACK
So I tried not to think about Bill over the next couple of weeks. I went to school and I studied. They sent Bill away to juvie because he wasn’t an adult. I came home to Bill’s mom’s apartment in the evenings and I studied. I thought about Nathan and I thought about Ruby and I thought about long ago. I thought about long ago so much that I wondered if they were really dead.
But she was dead. I knew she was dead when they all showed up at Ruby’s house over the next couple of months and started gathering up all the stuff they wanted. There was somebody who wanted the pictures (half of them were gone already). There was somebody who wanted the dolls. There was somebody who snuck out the back door with four garbage bags full of stuff. There was my cousin who bought the bed off my uncle and paid for it a couple months later — COD. We watched the rest of them go inside and gather up all the things they wanted in garbage bags. We watched people pull pickup trucks to the front door and fill them full.
Stanley just sat and watched them all and said, “It’s like a bunch of damn vultures. It’s like a bunch of damn vultures licking a bone clean.”
Of course, we got something too, but we didn’t call ourselves vultures. A couple of days earlier, I told my uncle that all I wanted was Nathan’s checkerboard. And so the day after the funeral, my uncle came home holding the checkerboard and said, “Here.”
It was my Uncle Nathan’s checkerboard, all beat up and taped together in the middle. I sat and ran my fingers over the checkerboard and I thought about ghosts.
After it was all done, I saw them again. One night I dreamed we were all back at Grandma Ruby’s and we were all sitting around the table in a big circle. Grandma was in her recliner in the kitchen, talking and ordering people around just like always. Then the rest of the family sat around in a circle, except there wasn’t any table now. Then all of the sudden this man walked in. It was Nathan. At least it looked like Nathan. He was taller and he had a beard. And it was like he had never even suffered from cerebral palsy.
Everybody was like, “You’re walking. You’re walking.”
He walked around the circle, and he shook our hands. He shook my Uncle Terry’s hand. And then he shook my Uncle Stanley’s hand. And then he shook my hand. And that was the thing about it. He wasn’t like I remembered him at all. He was all different now.
He was fucking angry.
I found a video my Uncle Terry made of my Grandma Ruby’s last days. I’d been watching it for weeks now. On the side of it he wrote Ruby Irene Goddard 1917–1997. And so I pushed play and watched the video of my Grandma Ruby in her deathbed, all broken-looking and little. And my Uncle Terry was sitting beside her bed and she was dying.
I started hanging out with this girl Charity. She was over at Bill’s mom’s apartment one night and I asked her if she wanted to watch this video.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Oh it’s this video of my grandma dying.”
She shook her head. “Fuck no. That’s weird.” Then she asked me if this was my idea of being romantic.
So I went back. I took Bill’s car and I took Charity and I drove down to the old house. As I drove up the road I swore I was going to see the house again just like I always saw it. I swore I was going to see the house from far away with its lights on, glowing golden in the night. I swore I was going to see blankets covering the trees and leading up to the door. I wondered if it was going to be like this — if I was going to see the front door open and the screen door closed like in the summertime, and I wondered if I was going to be able to see everything inside the house — Nathan sitting at the head of the table and Ruby hobbling around on her old cane. I wondered if I would see myself from years earlier walking around as well. And that’s what I expected driving by Grandma Ruby’s house in Danese.
But as I drove closer to the house, I realized there wasn’t anything like that anymore.
THERE WEREN’T ANY BLANKETS.
There was just the house and it was all locked up and alone. And it was all boarded up too and there weren’t any lights on anymore. And so I looked to see Nathan sitting at the table but he wasn’t there. And then I looked to see Ruby hobbling around and cooking chicken and gravy on the stove, but she wasn’t there anymore either. I stopped imagining it all because Ruby was in the ground now.
I walked with Charity around the house and found an unlocked door, which I opened and went inside. I felt like a burglar. And it was strange.
It was so empty inside. It looked so empty and broken down. There was the smell of musty carpet in the air and grooves in the floor from where the furniture sat for years. I walked with Charity into where Nathan always leaned against the footrest when he watched Walker, Texas Ranger. And then I walked her back into what they called Terry’s room. I saw that the ceiling was falling and water stains were running down the walls and so I said that it was just an old thrown-together place that didn’t even have a foundation really. Now it was falling down. It wouldn’t take long before it would all be gone.
I went into the kitchen and there was an old box of tapes on the floor. It was full of Nathan’s old VHS tapes I used to always watch. There were Gaither Gospel tapes, a couple of workout tapes Nathan bought because there were women wearing bikinis on the cover, and there was an old Johnny Cash tape I always watched on Sundays after dinner. Then we walked through the house to the back. The roof was caving in near the bathroom. There was a hole in the floor in the back porch. We walked out into the backyard where the Johnny house was. I showed her the field where all of the children used to work. Then we heard this squealing.
“What the fuck is that,” Charity said and grabbed my arm. Then she pointed to this possum struggling to walk towards us. It struggled to walk by the tree, but then it fell over, and then it tried to get up again. It looked bloody and there was a sore or a hole in its side where it looked like it had been shot.
“Is it hurt? What’s wrong with it?” Charity asked.
I walked closer to it and looked at it. It wasn’t playing possum.
“Be careful, Scott,” Charity whined.
“It’s rabid,” I said. I circled around and it stared up at me with its tiny, little eyes. I told her it was the strangest thing, but they always come around people when they got to this point. I told her it probably smelled us out here and came running.