“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.