Ya not gonna take ahf ya shoes? she said, or something like that.
He knelt between her knees and held himself in one hand.
What do you care, baby, you interested in my shoes or this?
She smiled.
Whatavah.
He nudged it in.
Was thinking while they made the bedsprings creak slowly in the room so still he could see the dust motes suspended in the angled block of window light, so quiet otherwise he could distinguish individual springs on the bed and began to imagine each as having its own coiled and violated integrity, suffering the indignity of old brittling steel. He notched the toes of his Thom McAns into the edge of the frame at the mattress edge and began to push at her a little harder.
Oh-kay, she whispered, her head back and eyes closed, a half-smile on her lips.
It wasn’t leverage, though, it was the stink he couldn’t ever get rid of, embarrassing with him being a shoe man, but it was biological. Birdie made him take his shoes off outside the bedroom and sometimes still got up in the night and took them onto the back porch to get them farther away. Made him wash his feet in the tub with soap and water before coming to bed. Then still wouldn’t give him any. Was it she just didn’t like it, or she didn’t like him? She seemed to respect him, treat him with respect.
Yeah, like that, whispered the six-and-a-half, teeth on her bottom lip, digging into his back with her nails.
She knew he fooled around but like with everything else pretty much just acted like she didn’t. Acted dumb. She was naive, maybe, but she wasn’t dumb. She knew a man had to have what he had to have, and when he wasn’t poking around at her anymore she knew he was poking it elsewhere, but the subject did not come up, and would not. As far as Birdie was concerned, it would seem, the world would get along just fine without that. Maybe she thought it’d be better if grown women just played with baby dolls instead of having babies, if that was what you had to go through to get them, the babies. That family she came from had to be the most powdery dry and sexless family in the world, he was surprised they even ate meat they were so modest in their ways. A thing like that should enter a man’s mind before he marries, should mingle with his knowledge of his own family’s ways. Which in Earl’s case included an old pussyhound of a papa and a mama obsessed in her own way, she might go off to every tent meeting in twenty square miles but her main obsession was sexual, all right, every woman did this or that was a whore. Wore makeup, a whore. Wore high heels, a whore. Wore short hair, whore. Smoked cigarettes, a streetwalking whore. Painted fingernails, toenails, don’t even think it. Whore whore whore.
Now he wanted a cigarette, thinking about that, even with the six-and-a-half moving beneath him, making his prick bend up and begin to tingle. She began to get urgent, wanting to buck, and he put his whole mind to her. She had nice soft handles around her hips. He braced the heels of his Thom McAns against the cot’s railing and held her in to him. They bucked together, walked the cot out into the room. A banging on the floor more than the cot’s legs, Angelo and Angela hitting their ceiling with a broom and shouting below, the six-and-a-half shouting beneath. Even he was shouting something, huffing in a blind heat, the whole room suffused with the stink of his poor goddamn adulterous whoring feet.
Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! the six-and-a-half was laughing, as tears ran down into her pale pretty ears.
TIME AND SPACE had no purchase on her. Just beyond the graveyard Birdie came upon a little glen she remembered as a child wandering off from the house to sit and look at the trees and their leaves turning and glinting in the breeze. On a little sawn trunk sat her pappy.
This is the way it happens, he said, glancing up. Like in dreams, like the way you wished it would happen in life, that you’re going along and you come upon one you love and then you go together. As it happened with the prophets and the angels.
His long white beard was beautiful in this light. His eyes no more than little pieces of sky full of fragile light, his delicate hands holding a little hickory branch, the bark peeled off its smooth surface the size of his pale fingers, little twig knobs on it like his own knuckles. She noticed something about the way he worked it.
You have your arm back.
I never missed it too much, after I learned to write again.
You stayed old. I believe I’m younger.
I was happier, old.
They went to an old house falling in upon itself in the downtown as it used to be, seventy years before. Inside in a parlor where the old sweetly rotting wallpaper peeled away in poor light, in front of a cold fire, there was a reunion of sorts of the Urquharts, her tormentors. Their teapot sat cold on a little serving table, their hair thick and brittle with growing in upon itself and no outlet. A thickening and coarsing so that it became more like the fur of animals than human hair, and their features swollen like with some long night of debauchery, a permanent hangover of sorts it seemed. And no solace. At their entrance a barely audible low and mournful howl seemed to seep from one of them, she couldn’t tell which. Old Junius squatted near the cold fire in a set of dirty white long johns, his pointed bald head with just the wisp of white hair on top no more than a bushy eyebrow’s worth, and his mean little eyes unfocused and blind.
Who’s there? he said.
His lascivious eyes put out, no light there, Pappy said. Remember how he used to could cry at will, get people to buy life insurance from him. He leaked the life out of them.
It’s the old loony son of a bitch, Merry said, her voice like the dry discordant wheeze of an old squeezebox.
I don’t like living in this house, little Levi said. He was that little boy again she’d had to carry all around Mrs. Urquhart’s house, something wrong with his legs, or so he said. Must’ve been he almost had polio.
Was always a little actor, that one, Pappy said. And wanting to be taken care of.
I don’t like this house, Levi said again. It was the repetitive tone of a pull-string doll, a simple recording he was reduced to, Levi.
She could have peeled away their gossamer clothing as easily as cobwebs. They were no more than a feather in weight, any one. This was just dust gathering into the bygone shapes, held together by her and Pappy here.
All time is in a moment, Birdie, Pappy said. These shapes are just the forms of memory and imagination.
Merry wheezed her disgust. She waved her hand and a little comet trail of dust motes suspended. She looked up at Birdie. Don’t you think yourself so pretty, she said. I held up better.
Birdie became aware of something, the dry-rot stench of Merry’s breath, even now unextinguished. If she’d known her herbs she could’ve chewed some parsley during her days anyway, she thought.
I could use a drink, Merry said.
Junius groaned at that, looked out the window, so dust-filmed the day outside seemed overcast and dull.
I think you all owe Birdie here an apology, Pappy said. All she ever wanted was peace on this earth, and to get along, and all you ever did was set upon her with lies, and jealousy, and thievery, and attacks upon her good name and character. I’ll not have it, though. God will forgive you. Apologize and let’s all go, now.
As he finished there became evident to her such an undercurrent of groans and something near quiet weeping, though all their faces remained unchanged, they dissipated into little shifting mounds of dust, sifting over the edges of their seats, and the dust of old Junius swirling in an indoor dust devil and gently up the chimney. She and Pappy followed him roaming down the deserted streets of town in which there was no one grown or prosperous but only streets full of tattered and beautiful angelic little beggars tugging and nipping at his fine suit, asking him for pennies and grabbing at his crotch and bottom, licking his hands as if to get some sweetness or else in a perversely erotic dumb show, who could say? He grew distant and diminishing, a fading figure slapping about himself as if beset with biting flies, a mere whirl of black and white receding below her and changing beyond her perception as there are ineluctable shifts of time and place in dreams, she was slipping from her own skin and felt an easy and effortless unmooring of her self here in an openness and was not fearful at all.