She meant her own. Of course Patsy saw it. It was right in front of her, staring at her like a peeled tangerine with eyes. She nodded.
“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: With a face like that, no man would marry her. You know, nobody in my life ever called me ‘pretty.’ That’s a word I only heard about. I heard it applied to the other girls and then to the women I knew, but I sure never heard it applied to me. Bad skin all my life, and nothing the doctors could do. Dermatologists! Everybody said, ‘Oh, Brenda, she’s so polite and kindly,’ and then they’d go off behind my back and say that my face looked like the craters of the moon. Soon as somebody’s down, they start kicking at her just for the fun of it. And now here you come around, asking this and that, as if you got the right.”
Patsy sat silent while Emmy continued to squirm, arching her back. She was crying quietly. Gathering her wits, Patsy said, “That wasn’t what I wanted to inquire about. It was all these children, trying to look like Gordy. And the blame for what happened to Sam Cole.”
“What do you think I have to do with them?” Brenda asked. “You think I’m giving them orders? You can’t give a child orders. Well, you can, but it’s a joke.”
“No. It’s just. . have you been saying things about Saul and me? Anne McPhee said we were outcasts of God.”
“Are you? Didn’t know that God cared that much. Well, that’s just her opinion. I don’t know as I’ve said that.”
“People listen to you.”
“People certainly don’t listen to me.”
“Oh, I’m sure they do.”
“They never have. You think I have any influence with anybody? Where’d you get that idea?”
“Anne McPhee,” Patsy repeated.
“What does she know about outcasts of God?”
“I don’t know what she knows,” Patsy said, feeling as if her time was up.
“I’m the expert on outcasts of God,” Brenda Bagley said huffily, and with an odd touch of snobbery. “I’ve got everyone beat on that score.”
“Would you do me a favor, then?” Patsy asked. “Would you please tell people that Saul and I had nothing to do with Gordy’s death? We didn’t do it, we didn’t influence it, we’re sorry it happened, we’re miserable about it — can you say that, please, if people start asking?” She did not mention that Gordy’s ghost was, at this very moment, sitting in the car, waiting. The time was not right for a revelation of that sort.
“I guess I could say that if you want me to,” Brenda Bagley muttered, as if she was thinking about something else. “If anyone cares to know. I might mention it. But I want you to come see something first.”
“What?”
“Gordy’s bedroom.” She stood up without warning, then clumped down the narrow hallway in the opposite direction from the kitchen. After a pause, she made a windmilling motion for Patsy to follow her. Patsy picked up Mary Esther, who seemed to be watching something floating invisibly in the air in front of her, and carried her into Gordy’s bedroom.
The room smelled of boy-mildew and had one overhead light. On the north wall Gordy had cut out and pasted up, with adhesive tape, magazine photos of soldiers in camouflage clothing, holding their guns. They were walking through jungles. They were crawling through rice paddies and marshes. They had determined and brave killer expressions on their faces. In other pictures they were firing their guns or shouting the war shout as they plunged into battle. Movie stars dressed as soldiers were among them. It was standard stuff. So were the cartoons of superheroes cut out and pasted next to them. Near these pictures was a small poster of Wolverine, the superhero, the X-man, with his razor fingers, and another one of the same guy, in rage-against-the-world mode, beast mode. Patsy wondered why, if Gordy couldn’t read, he had all these comic-book figures pasted onto his bedroom wall.
“He loved Wolverine,” Brenda Bagley said.
Patsy felt herself indeliberately startle. In the midst of all this warfare and welter was a photo of Mary Esther as a small baby, the one with her leaning against the back of the sofa, her stuffed gnome in her lap. It was the picture that Saul had handed out in class. She rested there, an illustration of a baby, among the soldiers and superheroes and archvillains.
Patsy was finding it difficult to breathe.
“People said he couldn’t read,” Brenda Bagley was saying, “but he sat in here with those comic books of his, and the other magazines, X-men and so on, and I sure thought he was doing something, and if it wasn’t reading, I don’t know what it was.”
Also on the wall above the headboard was a picture of a beehive. Good Christ, the sadness of things.
“He was a strange boy,” Brenda Bagley said.
Patsy changed Mary Esther’s diaper in the car, in the front seat, throwing the old diaper into a baggie and tying it closed. Then she put her daughter into the child seat in the back, and after starting the car, she turned on the radio and headed home. Because the radio was broken, no sounds came out of it.
How was it? You weren’t in there for very long.
Well, Patsy thought, under her breath, you know how it was, you have your nerve, you lived there.
I was just kinda wondering what you thought of it.
It bothered me, Patsy thought. I couldn’t breathe in there, the big TV and the cigarette smoke and everything.
I couldn’t breathe in there, either. How’d you like the
walls? Didja like the pictures I put up?
They were okay. You must’ve read a lot of comic books. But I was surprised: no computers. No computer games. I guess your aunt could never afford one. Gordy, why did you kill yourself with that gun? In our yard? While we were looking? Would you just please explain that to me? I really, really need to know the answers to those questions. If you’re going to hang around with us, you could at least do me the favor of telling me why you did all that. To yourself. And to us.
But no new words descended into her brain, emerging from the backseat, where it was now very quiet, with Mary Esther sleeping. The car advanced through pool after pool of buttery light cast from the lamp posts, and Patsy took a route circling the downtown area. She felt a vague movement in her uterus and also noticed that she was feeling distinct emotions, as if they were hands slipping out of the gloves that usually held them. She passed by a green sign on the outskirts announcing Five Oaks as a sister city of Nikone, Japan, and of Tübingen, Germany. But those cities were ancient and historically identifiable, and this one had almost no history at all and very few identifying marks. It was on the map, but in no other respect was it on the map. Patsy tightened her hold on the steering wheel. The local pride in anonymity ate away at everything. It devoured lives and turned the inhabitants into ghosts both before and then after their deaths. Resignation was the great local spiritual specialty, resignation and a fleeting recklessness, a feverishly hypnotic and prideful death-in-life. All the Himmel kids were acute cultural critics, she decided. They had a point. If the city of Five Oaks had any true siblings, they wouldn’t have names like Rheims or Pisa. They would be the close relatives with names like Terre Haute or Duluth or Flint or Grand Forks or Davenport or Burlington or Scranton or Kenosha — cities you had heard of but couldn’t quite picture, cities that called nothing in particular to mind except for an eagerness to be larger and more prosperous than they were, and an all-consuming late-stage boosterism that was mostly insecurity and worry masked by bluster. The wolves were never far from the door in cities like these, and sometimes the wolves got in. The churches tried, with varying success, to keep people calm when the members of the congregation felt like screaming. Five Oaks would always be the sort of place you had to apologize for whenever visitors from out of town — from larger towns, real cities — arrived at the airport on their little turboprop commuter planes, shaken up and curious about what had brought them there.