Keeper, The Read online

  Paul knew that he was a magnet for nuts. In the same way that they had something inside them that made them sick, he had something inside him, some special pheromone, that drew them to him.

  He sipped his drink again, swallowing hard to keep it from coming back up. “Cheap shit,” he muttered, because it sounded funny, like something a hard-core drinker would say. But you are a hard-core drinker, a familiar and unwelcome voice whispered in his ear. He ignored it.

  He pulled out Bobby’s paper, then put it away. The mood he was in, he’d probably give the kid a D. He pulled out Louise’s paper. Now she was a lot like Susan Marley, at least in the looks department. Except Susan probably knew what the EEC stood for. That was one thing, he could never say Susan was stupid. A borderline schizophrenic with a mean streak the size of Texas, but not stupid.

  And the nuts go marching on.

  Paul took another drink. Louise had confused imports and exports. He drew a double-ended arrow between the two, then wrote: “Do they still teach English in English class? Look it up.”

  He was on his fifth paper when he heard a knock at his classroom door. He dropped his thermos into a drawer and called, “Yes.” Kevin Brutton, the principal, walked in. Kevin was always wearing these cheap suits like he picked them out at the Salvation Army thrift store and threw a little starch on them. He also always smiled. No matter what he said, he was always smiling. It was the politician in him. “Heya, Kev.”

  “Hello, Paul.” Kevin brushed his finger across the souvenir conch shell from Mississippi that Paul’s elder son had given him five years before. “I always wondered how they did that,” Kevin said.

  “What?”

  “Made these carvings—this picture of the water and the beach with the tree in it without cracking the shell.”

  “Tiny elves, Kev.”

  “Yeah.” Kevin replaced the shell. “Sleep well last night?”

  Paul shrugged.

  Kevin rubbed his eyes. “Well I didn’t. I had a nightmare about that friend of yours. Susan Marley. My wife, too.”

  Paul rolled his eyes. People around here were obsessed with Susan Marley. They thought they saw her behind their mirrors, outside their houses at night, and even in their dreams. Paul was safe from such things: Never once in his adult life had he been able to remember his dreams.

  “Dreamed the mill was on fire,” Kevin said.

  Paul looked at him. This was what happened when you lived in the sticks. You turned into a half-wit. “Mmm, Kev. That’s a real coincidence. Maybe you and Allie should be special guests for the Psychic Friends’ Network.”

  Kevin’s voice got far away. “There’s something wrong with that girl, Paul. Anyone can see it.”

  Paul cleared his throat. “You stop by to say hi?”

  “No,” Kevin said.

  Paul swallowed a burp, and the air got caught somewhere between his esophagus and stomach. “Then what is it?”

  Kevin walked over to the open window, stuck his hand out, and felt the rain on his palm. They all liked to do that, the people of this town. They liked to touch the rain. Kevin spoke with his back to Paul. “I never said anything about the girls, although I didn’t agree with it, you know that.” He waited for Paul to offer some sort of confirmation, but Paul offered none. Kevin shrugged. “Forget the legal problems. It’s just not smart.”

  Paul stood. “You’ve been listening to crap.”

  Kevin turned from the window. For the first time that Paul had known him, he wasn’t smiling. He leaned over Paul’s desk and they locked eyes. “Yeah, Paul. It doesn’t matter. That’s not why I’m here. I’m here because they used to like you. Not because you hung out at their little dive bars, but because you did your job. Now they’re coming into my office asking for transfers because you’re staggering around the classroom.”

  “What does staggering mean?”

  “Drunk, Paul.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I’m saying it.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “I do my job. I grade the damn papers. I get up in front of four classes every day and I teach.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  Paul looked down. His desk drawer was partially open, and his thermos peeked out at him. “They’re just pissed because I don’t pass ’em unless they deserve it,” he said. “They think they can doodle their way through and I’m gonna be a nice guy because they’re about to graduate.”

  Kevin leaned closer, so close that Paul could smell the tuna salad on his breath. “What, Paul? I just want to get this straight. I just want to know so I can write it down, Paul.”

  It surprised Paul, this petty bureaucrat who’d never taught a class in his life with his cheap suits and his doltish smile, talking to him like he was some bum off the street. It made him wonder at what point he had changed so much that someone like Brutton could do this. Whether it had happened slowly or if there had been a single, watershed event that he could have prevented. Paul said nothing.

  “Consider this your warning, Paul. I don’t like you so you’ll get only one.” Brutton shut the door behind him.

  Paul fished his thermos from the drawer and emptied it in one gulp. Then he set the rest of his papers aside and closed his eyes. If he were to rate this day on a scale of one to ten, he would give it a three. A memorable tune, but the lyrics lacked soul.

  He knew he should go home and get something to eat. He didn’t feel like going home. He looked around his classroom, the same classroom he had been decorating for seventeen years. The same classroom he had come home every night to Cathy from: Every night as it Was, Is, and Ever shall be, Amen. The classroom with the copies of the Wall Street Journal that he paid for out of his own pocket and nobody ever bothered to take home. The classroom with its posters: “Remember to Register,” and the one of Uncle Sam saying, “I Want You,” pointing at him like a menacing Mark Twain dressed up for a costume party. He went to Montie’s Bar because he couldn’t stand to be there any longer.

  THREE

  A Locked Door

  It took eighteen years for Georgia O’Brian to grow into her teeth. They were big and sharp and when she was little she soaked her pillow with drool because she could not close her mouth around them. Paul Martin, back in the days of Paul Martin, had called them crocodile’s teeth.

  At twenty-seven, her choppers fit perfectly into an admittedly spacious mouth. She was a tall woman with long, red hair and an overripe body. At times she wondered if someone had sneaked human growth hormone into her now deceased mother’s prenatal vitamins, because Georgia was six feet tall and she could never find shoes that fit. When she was at the Chop Mop Shop where she cut hair, and a new customer, a rarity in this town, sounded the jangling bells above the front door, he or she would often ask, “You Irish?” or better still, “You from the old country?” To which she would reply, “No, Borneo.”

  Georgia’s son, Matthew, had curly brown hair like his father, the merchant marine. Well, not a merchant marine, but if she lived in a port city during the 1950s, that’s what she would tell people. She’d tell them that Matthew’s father had been lost at sea rather than admitting that he was a local man twenty years her senior. For a long time she hadn’t even known his last name. He was just some guy she’d met, drunk at a bar, underage, the back of a pickup like a bad white trash movie. These things happen.

  She acquired the marine’s particulars during her sixth month of pregnancy, assuming that the existence of a child was something he’d want to know about, but when she called and he didn’t remember who she was, she hung up. Not fair to him or her son maybe, but how fair was life anyway?

  Right then, Matthew was trying to pump himself into the sky on a swing at the park five blocks from their house. When he came home from elementary school, she had asked him what they could do together on her day off. She’d suggested the Paris Theater, a misnomer at best, sarcasm at worst, that had been screening Spider-Man 2 in second run for the l
ast month. He’d said no, he wanted to go to the park, and she suspected he chose this location because none of his schoolmates would be there to identify him as the nine-year-old who still played with his mother.

  And of course, no one else was at the park, because in addition to the drizzling rain that had been falling for hours and soaked her red hair into a clowny frizzle, the park was also covered in snow. Feet of snow were piled all over Bedford; on lawns, up high on the sides of driveways, and atop roofs where it fell to the ground in little increments, making thudding sounds all winter long. They found the swings because they had spotted the points of the ten-foot-tall supporting bars. With mittened hands, they had dug for an hour, inter-spersed with snow angel breaks, until they cleared a path for the arc of one of them. And now, victorious, Matthew pumped his feet with a look of grim determination on his little brow, under the apparent impression that if he swung high enough, he might actually get somewhere.

  Cabin fever, she thought. He’s got cabin fever. She felt the same way.

  For most of the year in Bedford, you forgot that there were seasons, or that in other places, you did not need to warm up your car for a half hour every frigid January morning. But at the end of winter, when the sting of cold air lost its bite, you remembered. It happened not only in her own house, where Matthew and her father paced the rooms at night without the concentration to read or even watch television, but all over Bedford, and it felt like a bubble of latent energy, suppressed for half a year, about to burst.

  This rain right now was a prelude, a warning like the dull mist over a humidifier. By tonight it would come down hard, flooding the banks of the Messalonski River, the streets, and the bridge to the highway, as it had done every year for as long as she could remember. And in seven days, after it was over, the world would fill with color and she’d trade her snow boots for a pair of flip-flops.

  Georgia looked up into the sky. Dark clouds were not so much floating as swarming overhead, and she thought that the hard rain might be coming sooner than she’d expected. “Hey, Matt?” she called.

  “Yeah?”

  “Time to go home.”

  He whined and said he wanted to stay, couldn’t they stay for a half hour longer? Fifteen minutes? Five minutes? One minute?

  “Fine,” she said, looking at her watch, “One minute. You have one minute.”

  “Let’s just go, then,” he grunted.

  They lived five blocks south of Main Street, a safe mile away from the Halcyon-Soma Tent and Trailer Park. Things by the trailer park were strange. People who had gotten funds from the Salvation Army had set up camp there. Some of them owned scraggly dogs or cats that roamed the streets, their fur clumpy. Georgia did not touch those animals. They had a hungry look. Occasionally, she saw Susan Marley down by the trailers. Susan lived in a rented apartment near there. Georgia never said hello. Susan had a hungry look as well.

  Georgia had dreamed last night of Susan Marley. In it, she’d been walking down Main Street on her way home from the Chop Mop, when suddenly the sidewalk had turned soft and sticky. She’d tried to run, but her feet sank into the ground. Around her, the trees had turned black. She’d wanted to scream, she distinctly remembered wanting to scream, but when she opened her mouth nothing came out. The rotting trees surrounded her, and the ground sucked her deep inside. And then in the distance Susan Marley had walked toward her, leaving a snaillike trail of blood in her wake. She’d held her hands protectively over her bloated stomach, and Georgia had understood that the girl was pregnant. Understood that something terrible was about to be born. She woke up with a start at six this morning, just as the sky had opened up to rain.

  Now, the rain really started falling. Little streams of water slid down Matthew’s face and dripped off his nose. “It’s only rain, we could have stayed,” he said, kicking at newly formed puddles in the center of the street.

  “It might make me melt,” she said. She joined him in the street and grabbed his hand to hurry him along, but he pushed her away.

  “Oh, I forgot, you don’t hold hands anymore.”

  “Mo-om,” he mumbled, his jaw sticking out.

  “Okay, no hands. Look, no hands!” She pretended that they had disappeared underneath the sleeves of her jacket.

  He rolled his eyes, but she knew that he was amused. She walked ahead in hopes of getting him to move faster, and then felt a splash of water across the backs of her legs. She turned to find Matthew wearing his trouble grin.

  “Oh yeah?” she asked, splashing back but with longer legs so that he was soaked in cold, muddy water, head to toe. “Oops!” she said.

  “Mom!” he cried, lunging at her. His hands were open rather than closed and he pushed lightly just above her waist. She was tempted to hold him there, and he lingered before letting go.

  “You didn’t think I’d do it, did you? You thought I was just your old mother, huh?” she asked softly.

  He ran ahead to another puddle and waited for her to walk by. “I’m gonna get you so-o bad!” he shouted. But despite all earnest attempts, for the rest of the walk home she successfully dodged his splashes.

  When they arrived at the small, neatly kept wooden house, she rang the bell and waited for her father to answer the door.

  Matthew stood close behind her and shivered. “Don’t you have keys?” he asked.

  “No, I forgot them,” she said.

  “I always remember my keys when I come home from school and nobody’s home.”

  “I know you do, you’re very good about that.”

  “How come you don’t remember your keys?”

  “Because you’re a freak accident of the gene pool, Matthew.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  He sighed and began to play on the front steps. There were eight of them, all brick, leading to the porch. She banged on the door.

  “He’s not home, Mom.”

  “He might be.” She banged again. Her knuckles started to hurt.

  Matthew waited a few seconds, then reiterated. “He’s not home. He left for those talks he has on Thursdays.”

  She remembered now. Her father had been kept on Clott’s payroll to help the town through its transition. On Thursdays he went to his office at the mill and directed conference calls with management in Boston. “Yeah. I guess you’re right,” she said. “We’ll have to go through a window. I think there’s a good one around back.”

  “I can do it, I’m smaller.”

  “That’s all right, Matt. You wait under the door and try to keep dry.”

  “But if the window isn’t open, I can climb the trellis up to my bedroom. I’ve done it before. I’m really good at climbing.”

  “Don’t tell me these things, Matt. You’re not allowed to do that,” she said with a look of anger that she did not really feel. He was always doing crazy things; scaling the house, climbing trees, bouncing around like he was made of India rubber.

  “Okay,” he told her in a way that said she was missing the point.

  “And stop jumping down those steps, you’re gonna slip and brain yourself,” she hollered.

  “Uh huh,” he mumbled as she turned the corner of the house.

  Around back, the first window she tried was open. She wormed her body through the opening, falling gracelessly to the floor of the living room. It reminded her of one of those old Abbott and Costello movies, the fat-guy-squeezing-through-the-small-space gag. “Very dainty,” she muttered while walking to the front door.

  “Matthew, stop messing around,” Georgia called out as she turned the lock to find her son still playing on the icy steps, her irritation no longer just for show. “Come inside.”

  Just then, a woman appeared from behind the wall of snow piled against the front walk. It was Susan Marley, dressed as if about to attend a Fourth of July barbecue. She wore high-heeled sandals, a blue dress, and no coat. Her curly blond hair had been straightened by the gales of rain, and it spilled down her shoulders to her hips. Her head, wei
ghed down by the water, was tilted back just a little so that Georgia could see the smooth underside of her chin and her long, graceful neck.

  Susan turned. Her gaze settled on Matthew and she grinned in a way that made Georgia uncomfortable. Then she walked on, heading south and out of view. A lump formed in Georgia’s throat, and she thought she was going to cry. What a strange world in which to raise a child, where snow angels and monsters lived side by side.

  “Mom?” Matthew asked, having missed Susan’s appearance.

  Georgia pretended to have some dust in her eyes. “Yeah honey?”

  “Look what I can do!” He jumped down all the steps and landed gracefully on the ground. Then he took a bow and she clapped.

  “Wow. That’s something. Now come on inside. I’m freezing.”

  He looked up at her from the bottom of the steps. His lips spread into a small smile, the trouble smile. She realized what he was about to do. Things suddenly got very slow. She noticed the rain on his nose, his yellow jacket that seemed too bright, the six or so feet of air between her son and the top cement step. “Wait—” she started to say, but there wasn’t time. He took a running leap.

  She reached out to catch him as he propelled himself up over the icy steps. But her hand hit his shoulder in mid-air and knocked him off balance. She lunged again but her fingers only brushed the slick nylon of his jacket. He tumbled down. The back of his head pounded against the last step in a loud thwack.

  The sound reverberated inside her, carving holes into her organs and making them hollow. She ran to the landing just as he sat up. He curled his lip at the offending step like it was his mortal enemy, and then slapped it. She let out a sigh of relief so forceful it sounded like a sob.

  What was he thinking? Who jumps up icy steps? “Come here right now, Matthew O’Brian,” she said. She was thinking about grounding him, spanking him, sending him to his room without television for the rest of his natural life.