I watched them a moment longer from the woods, savoring my own antic.i.p.ation. I thought again of McCrae"s horrified face, the skin pulled tight, teeth bared. An owl hooted and the sound echoed across the lake. Captain Marvel"s ribs twitched. I tightened my grip on his mane.
But just as I was readying myself, McCrae jumped to his feet and held his hand out to Lex. She took it and he pulled her up and started leading her toward the edge of the lake. I felt a tingle of worry at the back of my neck. He was going to throw her in. He was going to drown her. I raised my heel. But then, instead of wading out into the water, McCrae stepped out onto its surface, pulling Lex after him. For a moment I was bewildered, but then I saw that the edge of the lake had frozen over. How far out the ice reached, though, I couldn"t tell. When I craned my neck, I saw ripples at the lake"s center.
Disappointment overwhelmed me as I realized I"d have to wait for the two of them to return to sh.o.r.e before I could make my charge. I watched as McCrae dragged Lex farther and farther out onto the ice. She wobbled clumsily as she slid behind him. At one point she lost her balance and screamed. The sound made me burn to race out there and scoop her up. I knew I"d been wrong to think McCrae would go so far as to toss her into the lake, but still, it was reckless of him to take her out there. The ice couldn"t have been more than a few inches thick. Thin as a windowpane. I could practically hear the cracks veining out beneath their feet. How could he be so careless with her? And why was she letting him drag her out there? Then, even more surprisingly, she began struggling to catch up to McCrae, taking quick little steps toward him. Soon she was sliding past him, and now she was the one towing him out toward the lake"s center. The sight of her hurrying away with him confused and angered me, and I wondered how McCrae had cast such a spell over her.
They wandered out farther, so far that I could barely make them out in the moonlight. Finally, McCrae began to slow and gesture for her to stop. Lex tugged on him, but he planted his feet wide and held her in place. She yanked on him, trying to pull him farther out, but McCrae reeled her back toward him. Next she made to kick his feet out from under him, but slipped and fell on her behind. Even from that distance I could hear their laughter blowing across the lake.
I watched as they lay down together on the ice. For a while, they lay with their faces cupped to its surface, peering into the gla.s.sy blackness. Later, they flipped onto their backs and gazed up at the night sky. Every few moments one of them would point to something that was invisible to me through the branches. I strained to listen to what they were saying, but all I heard was the wheezing of my face. Eventually, McCrae laid his head on Lex"s stomach, and for a long time they stayed like that, his ear resting right above those damaged kidneys of hers.
I grew painfully cold. I leaned close to Captain Marvel and tried to warm myself in the vaporous heat coming off his neck. A lone cloud wheeled slowly across the moon. I rubbed my hands together to keep the circulation going.
Finally, Lex and McCrae got up and began walking back toward the sh.o.r.e. I shook the fatigue out of my shoulders and steeled myself. But as they stepped back onto the beach I found that I was unable to charge. I could feel the muscles in Captain Marvel"s legs trembling beneath me, tensed and ready. I knew that now was the time. But an image appeared to me and made me hesitate, an image of myself on horseback, hiding in the woods, waiting like a fun-house clown for his chance to jump out and terrify someone. But that wasn"t the truth, I told myself. I was about to help my friend. I was going to save Lex. My teeth were chattering now. I felt like the cold was shaking me apart. I tried to conjure up the vision of McCrae ejecting Lex from his embrace, throwing her beneath Captain Marvel"s hooves, but it wouldn"t materialize. I tried to imagine Lex"s grateful smile as I pulled her up behind me.
McCrae came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. I made myself remember those birds, the words tagged to their ankles. I said the words out loud to myself, listing them one after the other, chanting them into Captain Marvel"s ear. Each one was an attack on McCrae, an ugly truth about him. I started spouting off new ones.
"Trash," I said as I watched him kiss Lex on the shoulder.
"Reject," I said as she pulled his hands tighter around her. "Piece of s.h.i.t."
I watched until I couldn"t think of anything else to call him, and then I turned Captain Marvel around and tried to find my way back to the main road.
My seven hundred and sixty hours at About Face ended soon after that. For the week and a half until I left, I asked that other drill sergeants drive Lex to the hospital. She came looking for me, but I avoided her as best I could. When we did talk, the feeling between us was different, awkward, and even though she kept pursuing me, looking for me in the lunchroom or out by the canteen, I could sense her growing more and more frustrated by our strained encounters.
In the end, I did little those last days at About Face but play reveille and taps. Sometimes I ran stock. Now and then I worked custodial. When I finally left, Brill let me buy the trumpet from him for a cheap price, and I still have it. It"s what I use today. I work at a small museum of natural history near Albany, collecting tickets at the desk. Groups of schoolchildren come by a few times a week and tour the museum with their teachers. Once in a while my new boss, an elderly woman named Reese, has me play my trumpet to let the children know when it"s time to return to their buses.
The museum isn"t much. The wood floors creak. Some stuffed birds dangle from the ceiling. There"s one dinosaur, but it"s the size of a chicken and has lovers" graffiti scratched all over its bones. Still, the museum is a quiet, pleasant place to work. Now and then, dust in the air reveals secret scaffoldings of sunlight descending from the windows.
One day, about three months after being hired, I was printing up tickets in the office when Reese came in and told me I had a visitor.
"Tell Ronald I"ll be out in a second," I said, separating a sheet of ticket stubs.
"It"s not your cousin," she said. "They say they"re from a camp? Somewhere you used to work?"
I looked past Reese, at the doorway, but it was empty. I felt the blood rushing to my head. I hadn"t spoken to Lex since I"d left About Face. Maybe McCrae had finally done what I"d always known he"d do. Maybe he"d broken her heart and she"d come to say she was sorry. I"d been thinking about her a lot lately, sitting next to me in the camp van, her eyes closed as I painted the brush across her legs. Leaning back on her elbows on the doctor"s table, laughing, joking with me while all the blood in her body was being drawn out of her.
I left the tickets on the table and went out to the admissions counter. I scanned the room, but the only person around was a young man standing with his hands in his pockets. He wore an old army jacket and blue jeans and it took me a moment to recognize him.
"It"s okay, music man," said Haden McCrae, smiling at me. "I"m not used to me in civvies yet either." His hair had grown into a bright orange shock that he"d wetted and wore smoothed back from his face.
"What do you want?" I said. I felt a liquid heat rising in me.
He dug his hands deeper in his jacket pockets and shrugged. "I don"t know. I just came to say I"m out."
"Congratulations. I"ve got to get back to work," I said, and turned to leave.
"Wait. I want to tell you something," he said.
I stopped and looked at him over my shoulder.
He kicked at the splintered end of a floorboard. "I want to tell you thank you," he said.
"You"re welcome. For what?" I said, sensing a trick.
"Lex told me you said nice things about me when we first started up together. She said you told her I was a stand-up person."
I didn"t know what he was talking about, and I was just about to tell him what I actually thought of him, right there at the museum entrance, when the memory returned. I had; I"d said he was a stand-up guy the afternoon I"d been trying to find out from Lex which nights they went down to the lake.
I said to McCrae that, yes, I guessed I"d told Lex that.
McCrae nodded. "Why"d you say that about me?"
"I don"t know," I said. "You made her happy."
He seemed to think about this for a moment. "I was never really going to let those birds go, you know. I was just tagging their feet to mess with you guys. I thought you all hated me."
I sighed. "I don"t hate you, Haden," I said. "Like I said. I think you"re a stand-up person."
He smiled at me. "I think you are too, Sergeant Fergus," he said.
I told him I had to get back.
McCrae saluted. I saluted back, and then he turned to leave. "I"ll tell her you said h.e.l.lo," he said, and then he was gone.
The museum only has one impressive exhibit. It sits at the back of the third-floor hall, in a square, dusty gla.s.s case: the skull of an ancient human, a skull nearly two million years old. The skull doesn"t look human. The top of the face looks familiar enough, from the nose up, but the bottom half is monstrous: the jaw is a ma.s.sive hinge of bone with crushing rows of giant teeth. Under the harsh lighting inside the case each tooth looks mountainous, rising in k.n.o.bby peaks, pitted with deep valleys of shadow.
The schoolchildren that visit the museum always find the skull soon enough, and even after they"ve wandered off to see other exhibits, they eventually return to it and look some more. There"s a plaque on the wall beside it, which explains that the skull in the case belonged to a particularly unsuccessful species of man, a species that followed an embarra.s.sing evolutionary path. It seems clear, states the plaque, that just before this species evolved, back when man was still a hunched, ape-like creature, a great climate change occurred in ancient Africa, where man was then living. Fruit puckered, leaves shriveled, and a deep frost came upon the land. All at once, man began to adapt, to change into a number of different versions of himself in order to find one that might survive the freeze. Where almost all these new species of man advanced or developed was in the area of the brain: they grew bigger, more complex minds so that they might figure out new ways of getting food. It was one of these species-a species that used its new intelligence to make tools and hunt animals-that would eventually go on to become early modern man, then man of today, you and me. But there was another, lone species, says the plaque, that didn"t put any energy at all into developing its mind. (Here you can see the children becoming more interested, straining to read over each other"s shoulders, squinting.) What did this species see as its source of promise? Its mouth. It grew a giant mouth so that it might chew up more of the garbage left behind to scavenge, so that it might actually eat up bones, droppings, everything. It"s this, a species of ancient man called Paranthropus, that the skull in the case belongs to.
There"s a drawing of Paranthropus next to the display, and in it he looks sadly bewildered, gazing down at a clutch of stringy gray gra.s.s in his hairy palm. He"s forlorn; he seems to understand that at some point, long ago, he took a wrong turn somewhere, and now he"s ended up looking like a fool. From his eyes, though, you can tell that, for the life of him, he can"t remember how this mistake happened; he has no idea where or when he made the error. Often, as the time approaches to call the children to the buses, I imagine that it"s him, Paranthropus, that I"m calling to. Sometimes when I play I close my eyes and I can see myself doing it, aiming the bell of my horn at his ugly face and leading him back this way.
i.
MY GIRLFRIEND AND I ARE NOT RICH PEOPLE. NOT BY A LONG shot. But together we own a mansion-one of the last real mansions in central Florida. It was built by a family of lemon farmers back in 1869, almost one hundred and fifty years ago. We put less than eleven hundred dollars down, hardly anything, but the house has over twenty rooms in all: five bedrooms, a library with a vaulted ceiling, a study, even a garden room that looks out on three full acres of wild backyard.
The morning the realtor first showed us the place, I was sure she"d made some kind of mistake. The other houses she"d taken us to see had been small: one-and two-bedroom apartments mostly. And then, out of nowhere, this.
For a long time, Laura and I stood on the front lawn, just staring up at the house. It had a wraparound porch. There were four stone chimneys rising from the roof. Laura had a good job at the aquarium, and I managed a major wrecking yard, but even so, how could something like this be in our price range?
"I know what you"re thinking!" said the realtor. She had to speak loudly to be heard over the persistent buzzing from insects hidden in the foliage. "But the price is just what I said. I"m tempted to buy this one myself."
I studied the house, trying to take in the whole giant sprawl. Granted, it would need work. The place looked like it had stood vacant a long time, abandoned for ten, maybe even fifteen years. Ferns had sprouted though the slats of the porch. The columns were covered in a scaly silver mold. There were mushrooms growing in one of the rain gutters, a whole row, white with red spots, like tiny bloodstained umbrellas.
The grounds were in bad shape too: everything wild and overgrown, choked by weeds and bramble. Long tatters of moss hung from the trees.
Still, there was no disguising what lay beneath all the disrepair. With time and effort, this could be a wonderland for us.
Laura must have sensed my excitement. "This house is incredible. But it"ll be way too much work. I mean, look." She waved a hand over the tall, weedy gra.s.s, which came all the way up to our thighs. "The yard alone will take weeks to clear."
"We wouldn"t tackle the whole thing all at once," I said. "We could just do a little every day."
Laura turned to examine the house again. I spotted a tick crawling up the back of her shirt and quickly plucked it off before she could notice.
"I don"t know, Jake," she said. "If it"s so great, why has it been standing here, empty, year after year? What"s wrong with it?"
"So," I said to the realtor. "What"s wrong with it?"
The realtor shrugged, mopping the sweat from her face. Her name was Joyce. She was an older lady, a grandmotherly type; she wore her white hair in a bun; her sneakers were brand-new. The house had been hard to find. It lay off the main road, hidden behind the old lemon fields. Walking over from where we"d parked had been a big exertion for Joyce.
"Nothing"s wrong with this place, love," she said. "People are just afraid of privacy, I suppose."
I waited for her to go on. "You"re sure? There"s no catch?"
"Fess up, Joyce," said Laura.
Joyce sighed and wiped her gla.s.ses on her shorts. "Look. The only thing I can think of that might have kept people away is the camp. There"s a camp nearby."
"A camp? Like a camp for kids?" Laura said.
"No. It"s a camp for ladies," said Joyce. "It"s more like a retreat."
"Like a spa?" I was intrigued; I"d never been to a real spa before. I pictured myself relaxing in pits of bubbling mud.
"Not exactly a spa," said Joyce.
"Not exactly how?" Laura asked.
Joyce picked a daisy from the brush and sniffed the petals. "It"s a federal retreat."
"A federal retreat like a prison?" said Laura, sounding alarmed.
"I suppose it"s sort of like that," Joyce said. "But it"s strictly a white-collar facility. It"s not like there are any violent offenders in there or anything. This is a place for society ladies."
"A jail for them," said Laura.
"Laura, it"s not something to worry about," said Joyce. "It"s practically a resort."
Laura turned to me. "Jacob, I don"t want to live near a prison. What if we were here and there was a jailbreak or something? Those women would make a beeline straight for our house."
I noticed a glimmer of excitement in Joyce"s expression at hearing Laura refer to the house as "ours."
"You heard Joyce," I said. "It"s not that kind of place. It"s for society ladies." I made a tea-sipping gesture.
"I"ve heard of some very high-profile women spending time there," Joyce said, swatting at a cloud of mosquitoes. "Remember Shirley Sayles, the famous golfer? She bet all that money on the U.S. Open? The one she was playing in? She"s at the retreat right now."
"Listen to that," I said. "Shirley Sayles."
"Maybe we should look at something else," Laura said.
"Come on." I stepped onto the front porch, which groaned loudly.
"Jacob," said Laura.
But I was already opening the front door.
The inside of the house was dark and cavernous, with a fog of dust rolling across the floor. Trees stood crowded against the windows, their green-and-yellow leaves pressed to the gla.s.s like children"s hands.
As I stepped into the parlor, I could feel the temperature dropping around me. The room was empty except for a burned-out chandelier reaching down from the high ceiling. I glanced around, examining the peeling wallpaper, the molding sculpted along the ceiling"s edge. I already knew that this was the house for us. It had stood for over a hundred years, like a fortress hidden in the woods. Nothing about it was cheap or makeshift. The beams supporting the ceiling looked like they were carved from stone.
It didn"t take long for the house to win Laura over, either. The touches were what got her, all the charming details: the claw-foot tub in the master bathroom, cracked but still usable. The carved lemons at the ends of the banisters. The small stained gla.s.s window in the parlor door, round as a coin.
What really brought her around, though, was the garden room. It lay at the south end of the first floor and extended out from the rest of the house, overlooking the sloping backyard. The curtains were drawn when we entered, and the room was especially dark, except for a trickle of light seeping in through the far end of the ceiling. I figured there was a crack in the roof, but when we walked over, we saw that in fact, in a certain spot, the ceiling rose and gave way to a small crystal dome. Laura"s face lit up when she saw it, the gentle swell of gla.s.s, the elegant iron webbing. The dome was filthy with soot, but when she reached up and wiped off one of the panels, a spear of sunlight pierced the room.
"Romantic," said Joyce, and then coughed from the dust.
Of course, even now, six months after we moved in, we still have lots to do. If you came over to our house today, you"d find some rooms fully furnished and others completely bare. If you chose to open the sliding door to the library, you"d find it thoroughly decorated-a sofa by the fireplace, a gla.s.s coffee table, the towering bookshelves lined with books. But, on the other hand, if you picked the door at the end of the second-floor hallway to open instead, you"d find a room with nothing in it but an old electric picture of a beach hanging on the wall. When the picture is plugged in, the palm trees sway gently in the breeze, the waves sparkle and roll across the white sand. A flying fish even jumps out of the water, then slaps back down.
There are a few rooms Laura and I haven"t even begun yet, storage closets mostly, little side rooms with shelves built into the walls. We leave the doors to them closed for days at a time, weeks. Sometimes we"ll forget one exists altogether, until one day when we happen to notice a doork.n.o.b sticking out of the wall. Just the other morning I opened the door to a storeroom near the bas.e.m.e.nt and found a dead snake lying on the floor. It must have been there for months; all that was left of the corpse was a skeleton. A winding comb of bones coiled in the dust.
All the s.p.a.ce used to make Laura nervous, the empty rooms, the dark door frames. Now and then she"d panic and call to me from wherever she was in the house and I"d have to come up from the cellar, or down from the study, and stay with her for a while.
Recently, though, I bought a pair of walkie-talkies from a toy store, so that whenever we"re working on different rooms we can stay in contact. We"ve started making up tag names for each other, like truckers.
"Kitty Cat, this is Hunka Luv. What is your twenty? Over," I say, the plastic receiver to my mouth.
"Well, hey there, Hunka Luv," says Laura. "I am currently en route to the shower, over."
We sand, and we paint, and we drill, and every day the house progresses. The old layers of wallpaper are sc.r.a.ped off. Little by little the floors brighten, revealing rich swirls and knots in the wood grain. The chimneys are flushed out, and suddenly a cool, sweet draft flows through every room.
Our bedroom is my favorite place in the house. It sits at the top of a wide central tower, and it"s round, with shuttered windows that look out over the treetops. The ceiling is high and cone-shaped, pointy as a witch"s hat. If we forget to shut the windows at night, fruit bats fly in and hang from the rafters like little leather change purses.
Laura"s almost finished with the garden room. She removed the heavy curtains. She cleaned the dome so that the gla.s.s sparkles in the sunlight. I told her I"d cut down some of the vines lashed across the windows if she wanted me to, as they obscured the view, but she said to just leave them.
"They make the room feel like a tree house," she said. "I like it this way."
She keeps a bunch of pillows scattered around, big satin pillows with ta.s.sels on the corners, and I often wake up on weekend mornings to find her already downstairs, lying beneath the bright dome, reading the newspaper in her nightgown and sungla.s.ses.
I chase Laura up the creaking spiral staircase, laughing, both of us naked. I carry her to the windowsill, her arms around my neck, and I make love to her with the whole blue sky behind us.
Then, when we"re done, I"ll sit with her while she takes a bath in the giant cauldron of our marble tub, her knees poking up through the water like tiny islands of pink sand. Sometimes I"ll read her part of a book or a magazine. Other times, while Laura soaks, I"ll amuse her by spying on the women in the prison near our home, the federal work camp. I bought a telescope from an antique store in town and set it up by the window. When I look into the eyepiece, it"s like I"ve been transported right inside the camp among the residents.
Joyce was telling the truth, too. The camp"s grounds are beautiful, with shaded walking paths and picnic tables set up beneath the many trees. There"s a pond populated by giant goldfish, a vegetable garden that the women tend in the afternoons. The facility is entirely open, too. There aren"t any barbed wire fences or guard towers, just a bright green sprawl of gra.s.s and trees around which the ladies are allowed to wander freely for most of the day. The only thing bounding the property at all is a bright yellow line painted in the gra.s.s along the prison perimeter. The paint contains fluorescent chemicals, and at night the line glows an eerie, s.p.a.ceship green.
"What are they doing now?" Laura said to me the other day. She was lying in the tub.
I used the telescope to scan the grounds for any of Laura"s favorites. The women she most liked to hear about were the high-profile inmates, the society wives and politicians and celebrities who"d lived all sorts of glamorous lives before ending up at the camp. One resident was the owner of a baseball team, another was a restaurateur. There was a famous jazz drummer, the CEO of a baby food company, even a world-renowned eye surgeon. I don"t know about Laura, but sometimes I actually felt a strange surge of pride knowing that such a cl.u.s.ter of accomplished women was gathered so close to our home.
I tried to find something interesting to report, but most of the women had headed inside the canteen for supper. A couple of them were jogging along the gravel exercise path. One, the baseball team owner, was reading the newspaper beneath a tree. It was nearly sunset and the line painted around the prison had just started to glow.
"The chef, the really fat lady? She and your favorite girl, Shirley the golf pro-they"re fighting it out in the yard."