"Sometimes it’s messy," he said. "Sometimes things stick to your feet, so you better get on my bed so you don’t crush nothing important, okay?"
''Okay.”
Tacked over his bed was a map, not Denmark, but some- where else, somewhere with wide ranges and long valleys, indistinct, very blue and strange. And the bed -- where he asked me to sit -- just a drooping cot, the sheets a green sleeping bag, the pillow a bunched ski jacket.
"I got treasure,” he was saying, on his knees, reaching beneath the cot. "I’m rich sometimes. I discover fortunes.”
Then he hauled out a tackle box, setting it in my lap. I watched as he knelt between my legs, unfastening the clasps and lifting the top, revealing his prized booty, mostly small things. A gold cuff link, his blue goggles, Army the arm, a bulging Christmas stocking.
And pennies -- maybe a thousand, or a zillion?
"Fifty-four. That's almost a hundred, I think. Look at these, I found these sornewhere.”
A pair of false teeth; I held them, pretending the teeth were biting Cut ’N Style’s head.
"Chomp chomp,” I said. "Chomp chomp chomp.”
Dickens frowned.
"Don’t do that,” he said. "That’s wrong.”
Then he took the teeth, exchanging them for the bulky Christmas stocking.
My stomach grumbled.
"Is there candy in it?”
"No, the secret," he told me, shaking the stocking, letting the contents drop to the cot.
"Dynamites," I whispered.
Dynamite, he explained, with time fuses and blasting caps; both sticks weren’t really sticks at all -- not even red like in cartoons -- but slender tan tubes, fashioned from wood pulp or paperboard. In my hands, they felt lighter than rocks.
"How do you boom them?”
"Like firecrackers, I think,” he said, his voice rising with excitement. "Like a war bomb!” Then his cheeks puffed and deflated, and he made an exploding noise.
"Kaboom!” I said, tapping a tube with Cut ’N Style’s chin.
His palms slid up my legs, scooting under my dress, stopping on my thighs.
"Like the end of the world. But if you use them you can’t use them ever again. Then they’re worthless junk, just blown to bits. So I’ll keep them ‘til I’m an old man and then I’ll kill that shark with Lisa and be a hero, I'm pretty sure.”
"I’ll help you. That way we can be on TV.”
"‘Cause you love me.”
"I’m your wife forever."
He laid me back on the cot, where I clutched the dynamite -- a tube in each hand -- and gazed up at the odd map. And as he pressed an ear to my stomach, his fingers touched my panties.
"That baby’s sleeping,” he said. "It’s snoring."
"She’s growing," I told him. "She’s coming tonight or tomorrow."
"I bet it’s pretty. I bet it’s pretty like you.”
He was over me now, looking down at my face. But my attention was on the map, on its aquamarine details, the jagged ridges and broad basins.
"Where’s that place?" I asked.
"The whole bottom of the sea,” he told me.
The whole bottom? I couldn’t comprehend it.
He mentioned that the deepest part of the ocean plunged further below the surface than the highest mountain stretched above it. And undiscovered countries existed in the depths, entire cities with people and dogs. There were castles and farms beneath the seas. There were husbands and wives and babies and ghosts.
"And silly kissers too. Kissers that do this-"
He stuck his tongue out and wiggled it at me.
"Yuck.”
Then I wiggled my tongue. We’d never kissed like that, but the idea made the tingles begin. Dickens’ mouth hovered near my mouth. I raised my head, shutting my eyes, forgetting the map and the dynamite in my fists.
Yuck, Cut ’N Style thought. Yuck.
He thrust against me, gripping my wrists, causing the cot to bump bump bump the wall. And as soon as our tongues met, something crashed on the other side of the wall, seemingly rattled loose by the cot’s repeated thumping; I heard it hit the floor and bounce.
My eyes shot open. Dickens’ head jerked sideways.
"Uh-oh," he said, his body tensing. "It’s Momma, I think."
Then he climbed from the cot, crossing to the door, listening for sounds in the hallway.
"Is she awake?” I asked him.
He turned around, facing me, and the overhead bulb reflected off his scarred scalp. He started to hug himself, but stopped.
"Don’t know," he said. "‘Cause that never happens but maybe it happens -- so you stay here, okay? If Momma quit dozing I’ll go see if she needs soup.”
But he didn’t move; he just remained at the door, fidgeting, sticking his hands in and out of his pockets.
All of a sudden my heart raced.
"I’m scared," I told him.
"Me too," he said.
I imagined him going and not returning, leaving me trapped alone in the witch’s cave.
"If we go together we’re safe.”
He nodded, saying, "All right, but don’t tell Dell you saw Momma. If you promise then you can go.”
"I promise.”
And before slinking into the hallway like quiet ghosts, I helped Dickens put his treasure away. We hid the dynamite in the stocking. He placed the secret inside the tackle box on top of the false teeth, then shoved the box under the cot and covered it with clothing.
"It's our treasure,” I said.
"It’s bad news,” he said, taking my hand.
After that, we wandered into the hallway, traveling a short distance, entering the adjacent bedroom -- where candles flickered on a dressing table, dripping red and white and purple wax onto an enameled plate, casting the room in a muted glow. Dickens wasn’t holding my hand anymore. He had left me at the table, had gone forward, vanishing. Then a lamp came on -- and there he was, standing by a four-poster bed, peering at the dozer who lay on the sheets.
Momma.
"Dell says someday Momma will wake,” Dickens whispered. "She says someday there’ll be a pill or a story or something that all you have to do is give it or say it and she’ll open her eyes again. Except it will be a long time, so until then Momma stays like this. It’s better that way. Because if she gets buried or anything then she’s gone for good. So I hope that pill or story gets made pretty soon."
Aside from being smaller, she appeared the same as my father, wrapped in a wool blanket like a mummy, reeking of varnish, her silver hair cropped. I couldn’t quite make out her face -- not from where I stood -- and that was fine; the bees had used her for a pin cushion -- they’d stung her cheeks and nose and eyelids. But now she was sleeping. She hadn’t stirred, hadn’t heard or created the crash.
Dickens glanced at me and shrugged.
What had fallen? What hit and bounced, keeping my husband’s tongue from my mouth? What gleamed when I searched the pitchy floorboards? A baseball. I went for it and picked it up, noticing a pallet alongside the bed, fashioned from quilts -- and my mother’s nightgown, folded into a square, sitting on a pillow.
Dell’s napping spot,I thought. She guards Momma from bees.
"That’s not your toy," Dickens whispered.
He was beside me, lifting the baseball from my hand.
"You can’t play with it."
Then he turned and stepped to the dressing table. I followed, watching as he carefully set the baseball behind the plate. And what the candles obscured, Momma’s bedside lamp illuminated, if only faintly -- the dressing table was a shrine, an altar of photographs and keepsakes. Among the candles were necklaces, a briar pipe, marbles, a crystal fish, my father’s map of Denmark, a Prince Albert tobacco tin, a silver tray with lipsticks and powders and brushes.