The Dark Will End the Dark, page 8
Last seen wearing a blue Detroit Lions jersey with number 17 and the word “Hipple” on the back.
For as much as his folks professed to care about him after he was devoured, it’s worth mentioning that I had to provide the police with all the above information, except for age and hair color. My story for the cops, by the way, was that Barney had simply run into the woods for no apparent reason. That was the last I saw of him.
•••
My first clue that Barney had fallen in love was the smell of Dove soap. One day, his hands reeked of it. He’d never smelled like anything other than burped-up Cheetos and bologna sandwiches, so the change was pretty obvious. I found out later that he was washing himself in excess of ten times a day. If he wasn’t showering or taking a bath, he was scrubbing—face, neck, arms, hands—any area he could reach in his two-minute trips to the bathroom. One day his book bag spilled and four bars of Dove tumbled onto the floor. I wanted to mock him for his new hygienic obsession, but I couldn’t. He looked so damn pathetic kneeling down to pick them up. I also didn’t want to get punched.
Talking to Barney wasn’t something one could just “do.” The moment had to be right, and it had to be on Barney’s terms. Most days he showed no emotion other than anger and apathy. If he laughed, it was at somebody else’s misfortune. He talked tough. He talked football, MTV, cigarettes, bikes, boobs. I don’t think he ever talked about food. Food didn’t interest him unless it was covered with cheese.
Once in a while, however, Barney opened up. It was impossible to predict when this would happen. After baseball practice one day, we walked to my house. On the shoulder of the road we came across a dead squirrel. It was crushed and split open, with flies dancing on it. Expecting Barney to lift it by the tail and hurl it at me, I started running. Eventually, I turned around. He hadn’t moved. He was staring down at the squirrel. I went back.
He said, “I don’t think this was an accident.”
“You think somebody killed it?”
“Of course somebody killed it. But they didn’t mean to.”
“You should go look up the word ‘accident.’”
“This squirrel committed suicide.”
Then he told me about his Uncle Lincoln, who had shot himself with an old Army pistol. He said it wasn’t really a tragedy since his uncle had wanted to die. Even his family agreed. Everyone was sad and everything, because Linc had been a good guy, but the consensus among the Hesters was that everyone had the right to do it if it felt like the proper thing. Barney told me that every death was a suicide.
“What if your plane crashes?” I asked him.
“Then it’s the pilot committing suicide on behalf of the passengers.”
“You can’t commit suicide for someone else.”
“Jesus killed himself.”
We went to a Catholic school, so this revelation shocked me. “That’s not what Father Brophy says.”
“He could’ve saved himself, but he didn’t. That’s the definition of suicide.”
I let it rest. Barney didn’t open up very often, and I didn’t want to risk having ants stuffed down the front of my jeans. Barney took off his shirt and used it to peel the squirrel from the pavement. I followed him into the woods. He tossed the roadkill as hard as he could. He said it was embarrassing for the squirrel, with everyone looking at it and commenting about it. He said the squirrel deserved to be away from all those eyes.
•••
A week later Barney told me about the girl who lived down the street. She was a few years older than us. Barney was smitten with her. He scrawled her name in his notebooks and textbooks. I finally knew why he’d taken such an active interest in washing himself. I was sleeping over at his house one Friday night when he gave me the dirt.
“Her house is around the bend, on the right-hand side,” he said. “She has really big tits. Her hair’s long and black and stringy, and when she sits on her porch reading a book, she likes to twist the hair with her fingers.”
That’s all Barney could tell me about her.
I asked him, “Where does she go to school?”
He didn’t know.
“Where did she move from?”
He said he hadn’t noticed anyone living in that house before; maybe they’d always been there.
I asked him if he’d seen her tits, her actual tits, like through her bedroom window.
He slapped the side of my head for even thinking about her tits.
It became part of our ritual to ride back and forth past her house on our dirt bikes, hoping to catch a glimpse. There was an agreement that if she ever came out, I wouldn’t open my mouth. Only Barney could talk to her, and I was to laugh extra hard at anything Barney said.
Most times the house looked uninhabited. Once in a while a light would turn on or off and we would get really excited. Barney would stop his bike and pretend to tie his shoe. The drapes in the front window were always drawn, though, so we only saw shadows inside.
This went on for two months. I didn’t see the mystery girl. Not once. Barney said she obviously didn’t like me, since she came out of the house “a lot” when I wasn’t around. I was ready to give up hope. I’d decided that this girl was nothing more than a fantasy, a diversion Barney had created because I wasn’t entertaining enough for him. A snowless December came and went as I tried unsuccessfully to draw Barney into playing Coleco football, hunting birds with our BB guns—anything that didn’t involve the dirty gray house at the bottom of the hill.
•••
In January there was a blizzard, and with the snow came the girl. Her face was bleeding. She was ushered into the Hesters’ house by the grotesquely overweight Mr. Hester, who normally filled his custom-made recliner from the moment he came home from the Keebler factory until Mrs. Hester woke him to get into bed. But with the twelve inches of snow came a lot of shoveling, and doctors had told Mr. Hester he needed the exercise.
He burst through the door with Tanya squeezed under his arm, her face squashed against his enormous stomach. I think Mr. Hester was, in his arrested condition of social development, attempting to both console and restrain her. She was squirming. She screamed. She bit his hand. Cursing, he let her go. She ran to me and started shoving, perhaps in her dazed state thinking that I was the one who’d hit her with the rock-filled snowball.
Barney was frozen to his spot on the carpet. I think there were a couple of things going on in his mind at that moment: first, he was paralyzed at the sight of his dream woman standing in his own house; second, he was horrified that it was me she was touching, rather than him, albeit in a rude fashion. If Mr. Hester hadn’t thrown his bulk between us, I believe Barney would’ve joined in with Tanya’s assault and I wouldn’t be here today to tell this story.
The mess got sorted out. Danny was hauled inside by his ear. He was made to apologize, which he grudgingly did, before flipping Tanya the bird as he stepped out the door. Mrs. Hester brought rubbing alcohol and bandages. Tanya snatched these petulantly. She plopped to the carpet and applied them to her cuts.
Barney and I sat motionless at opposite ends of the couch. His rapid blinking and unsteady breath pattern told me that his brain was going into overdrive. He didn’t want to look at the fantasy girl, but his eyes, those pea-green things which for so long had only expressed rage and apathy, were pulled to her. He was terrified.
Barney’s parents left the room. Tanya took her sweet time swabbing her wounded temple. I felt unable to move or speak. Barney hadn’t lied when he’d said she had big breasts; they were gigantic. In fact, her whole body was rather large. If I can tell the truth, I thought she was homely and dumpy. Her hair was like black seaweed. Her nose looked like it’d been pinched into the shape of a shark’s dorsal fin. She had unusually long fingers, which she used to tug absentmindedly at her detached earlobes. They were pale, bony fingers. They reminded me of icicles. Judging by the dark ditches beneath her eyes, she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in months.
The silence had grown unbearable when Tanya startled us. “What the hell are you looking at?” she asked Barney. I was almost knocked off the couch by the force of her voice.
Before Barney had the chance to answer, Mrs. Hester shocked us all by coming into the room with a tray of hot chocolate. In two years she’d never even offered me a glass of water.
Barney threw me a look that meant I was supposed to help his mother. I obeyed, handing out the mugs before resuming my seat. Mrs. Hester asked Tanya how her head was feeling. Tanya performed a courageous feat. She screwed up her face, distorted it into a queer, mocking grimace, then answered in a perfectly level voice, “Just fine, ma’am. Thanks for the hot chocolate.”
I prepared myself for Mrs. Hester’s wrath. She was an alcoholic with a mean streak. Although she was blind, she exhibited an impeccable knack for reading intentions behind people’s voices, like a dog that smells another dog’s shit on the wind. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d hurled the tray at the wall and gone rabid on Tanya’s ass. Instead, Mrs. Hester simply said, “You’re welcome,” and walked away.
•••
After that, Tanya began coming over regularly. Barney had promised her that we’d “fuck Danny up” for the snowball.
The three of us spent hours in the back yard, huddled over a floor plan of the Hesters’ home that we’d scrawled into the snow. I realized in those moments that three is a good number. In a group of three, you are always next to everyone. It’s a perfect circle. (That’s why Margaret and I have only one child. He’s a five-year-old boy. I wanted to call him Barney, but that would have upset Margaret. So we named him Evan. Barney is his middle name.)
Our idea was to put headphones on Danny while he was asleep, then destroy his eardrums with his own music. We had talked about putting dog poop on his floor. We’d considered shoving broken glass into his tube socks. A floor plan wasn’t necessary for any of the ideas we tossed around, but Barney was a detail-driven boy, and I wasn’t about to argue with him. The true joy of those nights was huddling together against the whipping, frozen breeze, flashlights in hand, watching our breath clouds mingle above the crude snow-sketch, our knees touching.
The actual execution of the plan was anticlimactic. Since we had to wait until Danny was sleeping, we chose a Friday. I spent the night at the Hesters’. We told his mother we were going to sleep in the basement living room, which was next to Danny’s room and which also had a sliding glass door leading into the backyard. In front of the television Barney and I lay in our sleeping bags. Barney stuffed handful upon handful of Cheetos into his mouth.
Barney’s teeth were bright orange when Tanya’s face appeared in all its bloodless glory at the glass door. Barney let her in. It was 2:00 a.m.
We took turns sneaking to Danny’s door and pressing ears against it. We had to flatten our entire ear on the door for ten seconds or it didn’t count. This was terrifying, knowing that Danny could whip open the door at any moment and then do God-knows-what. He was like an ogre in a cave.
After two turns apiece, we determined that he was asleep. The mood turned solemn. We snuck into his room with a flashlight. Barney selected AC/DC’s Back in Black from the leaning stack of records, and I plugged in the headphones. Tanya had insisted on the privilege of placing the headphones over Danny’s ears. As soon as she did, however, he woke up. Barney didn’t even get a chance to drop the needle before Danny flung back his covers and started screaming obscenities at us. He leapt from his bed. Tanya kicked him in the shin with her boot. She ran out of the house, leaving the sliding door wide open. The breeze played on the curtains and stirred up the newspaper that was lying on the sofa. Danny punched Barney a few times in the mouth. That was that.
•••
If Tanya had ever been interested in Barney, which I doubt, she lost interest after that night. That’s not to say she didn’t come over anymore. She did. The three of us took long walks through the woods. We shot BB guns at birds. We threw snowballs at cars on the Beltline. Despite her rotund figure, Tanya proved to be a remarkably fast runner. She had a natural gift for vanishing into the trees, making no sound whatsoever. Whenever a car skidded to a stop and the driver hopped out to chase us, Tanya became a blur, sprinting smoothly over snow mounds and dead branches, through bushes and fallen saplings, until inevitably she was gone, only to announce her appearance later, when the coast was clear, by pelting Barney in the face with a snowball.
Barney took these assaults, as well as others, as signs of affection. How could he not? He was blinded and weak. Love to Barney meant punching, spitting, and ignoring. But I sensed different motives in Tanya. After all, she never spoke to Barney—only to me. When she spit grape seeds at him or thrust her smelly feet in his face, it was with a malevolence I couldn’t ignore. For his part, Barney was so smitten that he could barely talk. So I was constantly in the middle. They talked to me, but never to each other.
Tanya and I were occasionally left alone together. Tanya took these opportunities to criticize Barney’s clothes, his hair, his house—anything she could think of. Because she always whispered these derisions, it imbued them with a sense of urgency and secrecy. Her lips curled into a grin. She dripped profanities from her mouth like molasses. Her eyes moved in her head, glancing to the left and right as if she could sense the presence of another being in the room. I became steadily more focused on her breasts as the days went by. When her fingers wrapped around a throw pillow, I imagined she was grabbing my hands, my head, my shoulders—anything—to pull me in for a taste of her moist lips.
•••
Recently, I was downtown for the annual Thanksgiving parade when I bumped into Danny Hester. He was alone, staring at the newspaper machine. I was reminded of Barney, years before, mysteriously contemplative, hands in his pockets, looking down at the road-kill squirrel.
With my son Evan in tow, I tried to hurry past. Danny looked up. He recognized me. I hadn’t seen him in eighteen years. Except for the added age lines, his face was mostly unchanged, but he seemed to have shrunk. And he wasn’t Danny anymore, he was—
“Daniel.” He shook my hand vigorously. “You know…your brother-in-law?” He looked peculiar in his trench coat and three-piece suit. He didn’t ask about Margaret, but he did tell me that Mrs. Hester had “kicked the bucket six months ago” from a stroke. The unspoken message, of course, was that I should pass along the news to Margaret.
For whatever reason—reluctance to get involved in family matters, residual fears of an ass-kicking—I didn’t mention that Margaret already knew about her mother’s death. She’d seen it in the paper and had grieved privately, in her own way. Margaret had divorced herself from them eight years before, and the Hesters seemed to accept this reality in the same way they’d accepted Uncle Lincoln’s suicide: It was unfortunate, but unchangeable. If I’m honest, my attitude wasn’t far from theirs. I’d never pressed Margaret on why, exactly, she’d estranged herself. After all, did I need more fuel for my hatred of the Hesters? Did I need to claw open whatever psychic scabs my wife still bore, just for my own satisfaction?
I expressed my condolences to Danny. I told him Margaret would be devastated.
He smiled at my son, rubbed Evan’s head. I could practically hear the violins as he broke into a sappy, rambling speech about the old days. It was pathetic. He said he felt like crap the way he’d treated Barney when they were boys. He said that Barney had talked about me all the time, even when we weren’t friends anymore. Looking at my watch, I mumbled something about taking my son to the movies. Danny shook my hand again, not wanting to let me go. I peeled myself away.
After walking a few steps, I heard him call after me. I turned around. He said that he’d heard something about Tanya. She’d migrated west, to California, to be an actress, leaving bits of Barney, I presume, in toilets all across the USA.
Now I suppose I should get to the point. My therapists have always told me that writing things down is a way to finalize, to purge, to mend.
•••
One Saturday afternoon at the beginning of April, Barney’s parents announced that it was time to buy the family some new church shoes. Amid protests, they corralled the children. Surprisingly, Mr. Hester offered to drop me off at my house on the way to the mall. (Usually they left me to fend for myself.)
As we all fought our way into the pumpkin-colored station wagon, Tanya materialized on their doorstep. Mr. Hester, trying to be polite, invited her along. She refused with a simple shake of the head. She walked to the car, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me out.
“I need help,” she whispered. Her fingers were crushing my humerus.
“They’re giving me a ride home,” I said, with the inflected meekness I’d adopted in her presence. Whenever possible, I did what Tanya commanded. I’d once seen her pull off the head of a dead crow we found in the woods. She took it home to use its beak as a “pen” for her diary.
“My parents can give you a ride,” she insisted.
The whole Hester family was listening to our exchange as the car idled. Barney wasn’t only listening, of course. He was glaring. I tried to pull away, but her icicle fingers wouldn’t break.
I relinquished. “I’m going to stay and help Tanya,” I said. I stared at the ground, not wanting to make eye contact with anyone.
Mr. Hester spat a vindictive looger onto the driveway and backed the car into the road. He didn’t like Tanya. Nobody did except Barney.
She led me to the rear of the Hester house. I didn’t know what she had in mind, but all possible scenarios seemed both repellent and alluring. She jimmied open the window to the utility room. She boosted me. I climbed inside. She followed. While I brushed myself off I asked her why we were breaking into Barney’s house. As an answer, she ran into the next room. I followed.
For two hours, we wreaked havoc on their home. From the refrigerator we retrieved an onion. We broke off chunks and planted them everywhere—in the teakettle, under the plastic placemats, inside the bottle of dish soap, in the cookie jar. We dumped honey into the coffee maker. We taped together pages of the Merck Manual of Medical Information. We diluted their mayonnaise with Vaseline. We greased doorknobs with butter. As we did these things, we giggled uncontrollably. There was no talking, only giggling. I was delirious, and I couldn’t figure out why. Perhaps it was the freedom of running rampant in this house where’d I’d spent so much time being reserved and polite, constantly afraid.
For as much as his folks professed to care about him after he was devoured, it’s worth mentioning that I had to provide the police with all the above information, except for age and hair color. My story for the cops, by the way, was that Barney had simply run into the woods for no apparent reason. That was the last I saw of him.
•••
My first clue that Barney had fallen in love was the smell of Dove soap. One day, his hands reeked of it. He’d never smelled like anything other than burped-up Cheetos and bologna sandwiches, so the change was pretty obvious. I found out later that he was washing himself in excess of ten times a day. If he wasn’t showering or taking a bath, he was scrubbing—face, neck, arms, hands—any area he could reach in his two-minute trips to the bathroom. One day his book bag spilled and four bars of Dove tumbled onto the floor. I wanted to mock him for his new hygienic obsession, but I couldn’t. He looked so damn pathetic kneeling down to pick them up. I also didn’t want to get punched.
Talking to Barney wasn’t something one could just “do.” The moment had to be right, and it had to be on Barney’s terms. Most days he showed no emotion other than anger and apathy. If he laughed, it was at somebody else’s misfortune. He talked tough. He talked football, MTV, cigarettes, bikes, boobs. I don’t think he ever talked about food. Food didn’t interest him unless it was covered with cheese.
Once in a while, however, Barney opened up. It was impossible to predict when this would happen. After baseball practice one day, we walked to my house. On the shoulder of the road we came across a dead squirrel. It was crushed and split open, with flies dancing on it. Expecting Barney to lift it by the tail and hurl it at me, I started running. Eventually, I turned around. He hadn’t moved. He was staring down at the squirrel. I went back.
He said, “I don’t think this was an accident.”
“You think somebody killed it?”
“Of course somebody killed it. But they didn’t mean to.”
“You should go look up the word ‘accident.’”
“This squirrel committed suicide.”
Then he told me about his Uncle Lincoln, who had shot himself with an old Army pistol. He said it wasn’t really a tragedy since his uncle had wanted to die. Even his family agreed. Everyone was sad and everything, because Linc had been a good guy, but the consensus among the Hesters was that everyone had the right to do it if it felt like the proper thing. Barney told me that every death was a suicide.
“What if your plane crashes?” I asked him.
“Then it’s the pilot committing suicide on behalf of the passengers.”
“You can’t commit suicide for someone else.”
“Jesus killed himself.”
We went to a Catholic school, so this revelation shocked me. “That’s not what Father Brophy says.”
“He could’ve saved himself, but he didn’t. That’s the definition of suicide.”
I let it rest. Barney didn’t open up very often, and I didn’t want to risk having ants stuffed down the front of my jeans. Barney took off his shirt and used it to peel the squirrel from the pavement. I followed him into the woods. He tossed the roadkill as hard as he could. He said it was embarrassing for the squirrel, with everyone looking at it and commenting about it. He said the squirrel deserved to be away from all those eyes.
•••
A week later Barney told me about the girl who lived down the street. She was a few years older than us. Barney was smitten with her. He scrawled her name in his notebooks and textbooks. I finally knew why he’d taken such an active interest in washing himself. I was sleeping over at his house one Friday night when he gave me the dirt.
“Her house is around the bend, on the right-hand side,” he said. “She has really big tits. Her hair’s long and black and stringy, and when she sits on her porch reading a book, she likes to twist the hair with her fingers.”
That’s all Barney could tell me about her.
I asked him, “Where does she go to school?”
He didn’t know.
“Where did she move from?”
He said he hadn’t noticed anyone living in that house before; maybe they’d always been there.
I asked him if he’d seen her tits, her actual tits, like through her bedroom window.
He slapped the side of my head for even thinking about her tits.
It became part of our ritual to ride back and forth past her house on our dirt bikes, hoping to catch a glimpse. There was an agreement that if she ever came out, I wouldn’t open my mouth. Only Barney could talk to her, and I was to laugh extra hard at anything Barney said.
Most times the house looked uninhabited. Once in a while a light would turn on or off and we would get really excited. Barney would stop his bike and pretend to tie his shoe. The drapes in the front window were always drawn, though, so we only saw shadows inside.
This went on for two months. I didn’t see the mystery girl. Not once. Barney said she obviously didn’t like me, since she came out of the house “a lot” when I wasn’t around. I was ready to give up hope. I’d decided that this girl was nothing more than a fantasy, a diversion Barney had created because I wasn’t entertaining enough for him. A snowless December came and went as I tried unsuccessfully to draw Barney into playing Coleco football, hunting birds with our BB guns—anything that didn’t involve the dirty gray house at the bottom of the hill.
•••
In January there was a blizzard, and with the snow came the girl. Her face was bleeding. She was ushered into the Hesters’ house by the grotesquely overweight Mr. Hester, who normally filled his custom-made recliner from the moment he came home from the Keebler factory until Mrs. Hester woke him to get into bed. But with the twelve inches of snow came a lot of shoveling, and doctors had told Mr. Hester he needed the exercise.
He burst through the door with Tanya squeezed under his arm, her face squashed against his enormous stomach. I think Mr. Hester was, in his arrested condition of social development, attempting to both console and restrain her. She was squirming. She screamed. She bit his hand. Cursing, he let her go. She ran to me and started shoving, perhaps in her dazed state thinking that I was the one who’d hit her with the rock-filled snowball.
Barney was frozen to his spot on the carpet. I think there were a couple of things going on in his mind at that moment: first, he was paralyzed at the sight of his dream woman standing in his own house; second, he was horrified that it was me she was touching, rather than him, albeit in a rude fashion. If Mr. Hester hadn’t thrown his bulk between us, I believe Barney would’ve joined in with Tanya’s assault and I wouldn’t be here today to tell this story.
The mess got sorted out. Danny was hauled inside by his ear. He was made to apologize, which he grudgingly did, before flipping Tanya the bird as he stepped out the door. Mrs. Hester brought rubbing alcohol and bandages. Tanya snatched these petulantly. She plopped to the carpet and applied them to her cuts.
Barney and I sat motionless at opposite ends of the couch. His rapid blinking and unsteady breath pattern told me that his brain was going into overdrive. He didn’t want to look at the fantasy girl, but his eyes, those pea-green things which for so long had only expressed rage and apathy, were pulled to her. He was terrified.
Barney’s parents left the room. Tanya took her sweet time swabbing her wounded temple. I felt unable to move or speak. Barney hadn’t lied when he’d said she had big breasts; they were gigantic. In fact, her whole body was rather large. If I can tell the truth, I thought she was homely and dumpy. Her hair was like black seaweed. Her nose looked like it’d been pinched into the shape of a shark’s dorsal fin. She had unusually long fingers, which she used to tug absentmindedly at her detached earlobes. They were pale, bony fingers. They reminded me of icicles. Judging by the dark ditches beneath her eyes, she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in months.
The silence had grown unbearable when Tanya startled us. “What the hell are you looking at?” she asked Barney. I was almost knocked off the couch by the force of her voice.
Before Barney had the chance to answer, Mrs. Hester shocked us all by coming into the room with a tray of hot chocolate. In two years she’d never even offered me a glass of water.
Barney threw me a look that meant I was supposed to help his mother. I obeyed, handing out the mugs before resuming my seat. Mrs. Hester asked Tanya how her head was feeling. Tanya performed a courageous feat. She screwed up her face, distorted it into a queer, mocking grimace, then answered in a perfectly level voice, “Just fine, ma’am. Thanks for the hot chocolate.”
I prepared myself for Mrs. Hester’s wrath. She was an alcoholic with a mean streak. Although she was blind, she exhibited an impeccable knack for reading intentions behind people’s voices, like a dog that smells another dog’s shit on the wind. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d hurled the tray at the wall and gone rabid on Tanya’s ass. Instead, Mrs. Hester simply said, “You’re welcome,” and walked away.
•••
After that, Tanya began coming over regularly. Barney had promised her that we’d “fuck Danny up” for the snowball.
The three of us spent hours in the back yard, huddled over a floor plan of the Hesters’ home that we’d scrawled into the snow. I realized in those moments that three is a good number. In a group of three, you are always next to everyone. It’s a perfect circle. (That’s why Margaret and I have only one child. He’s a five-year-old boy. I wanted to call him Barney, but that would have upset Margaret. So we named him Evan. Barney is his middle name.)
Our idea was to put headphones on Danny while he was asleep, then destroy his eardrums with his own music. We had talked about putting dog poop on his floor. We’d considered shoving broken glass into his tube socks. A floor plan wasn’t necessary for any of the ideas we tossed around, but Barney was a detail-driven boy, and I wasn’t about to argue with him. The true joy of those nights was huddling together against the whipping, frozen breeze, flashlights in hand, watching our breath clouds mingle above the crude snow-sketch, our knees touching.
The actual execution of the plan was anticlimactic. Since we had to wait until Danny was sleeping, we chose a Friday. I spent the night at the Hesters’. We told his mother we were going to sleep in the basement living room, which was next to Danny’s room and which also had a sliding glass door leading into the backyard. In front of the television Barney and I lay in our sleeping bags. Barney stuffed handful upon handful of Cheetos into his mouth.
Barney’s teeth were bright orange when Tanya’s face appeared in all its bloodless glory at the glass door. Barney let her in. It was 2:00 a.m.
We took turns sneaking to Danny’s door and pressing ears against it. We had to flatten our entire ear on the door for ten seconds or it didn’t count. This was terrifying, knowing that Danny could whip open the door at any moment and then do God-knows-what. He was like an ogre in a cave.
After two turns apiece, we determined that he was asleep. The mood turned solemn. We snuck into his room with a flashlight. Barney selected AC/DC’s Back in Black from the leaning stack of records, and I plugged in the headphones. Tanya had insisted on the privilege of placing the headphones over Danny’s ears. As soon as she did, however, he woke up. Barney didn’t even get a chance to drop the needle before Danny flung back his covers and started screaming obscenities at us. He leapt from his bed. Tanya kicked him in the shin with her boot. She ran out of the house, leaving the sliding door wide open. The breeze played on the curtains and stirred up the newspaper that was lying on the sofa. Danny punched Barney a few times in the mouth. That was that.
•••
If Tanya had ever been interested in Barney, which I doubt, she lost interest after that night. That’s not to say she didn’t come over anymore. She did. The three of us took long walks through the woods. We shot BB guns at birds. We threw snowballs at cars on the Beltline. Despite her rotund figure, Tanya proved to be a remarkably fast runner. She had a natural gift for vanishing into the trees, making no sound whatsoever. Whenever a car skidded to a stop and the driver hopped out to chase us, Tanya became a blur, sprinting smoothly over snow mounds and dead branches, through bushes and fallen saplings, until inevitably she was gone, only to announce her appearance later, when the coast was clear, by pelting Barney in the face with a snowball.
Barney took these assaults, as well as others, as signs of affection. How could he not? He was blinded and weak. Love to Barney meant punching, spitting, and ignoring. But I sensed different motives in Tanya. After all, she never spoke to Barney—only to me. When she spit grape seeds at him or thrust her smelly feet in his face, it was with a malevolence I couldn’t ignore. For his part, Barney was so smitten that he could barely talk. So I was constantly in the middle. They talked to me, but never to each other.
Tanya and I were occasionally left alone together. Tanya took these opportunities to criticize Barney’s clothes, his hair, his house—anything she could think of. Because she always whispered these derisions, it imbued them with a sense of urgency and secrecy. Her lips curled into a grin. She dripped profanities from her mouth like molasses. Her eyes moved in her head, glancing to the left and right as if she could sense the presence of another being in the room. I became steadily more focused on her breasts as the days went by. When her fingers wrapped around a throw pillow, I imagined she was grabbing my hands, my head, my shoulders—anything—to pull me in for a taste of her moist lips.
•••
Recently, I was downtown for the annual Thanksgiving parade when I bumped into Danny Hester. He was alone, staring at the newspaper machine. I was reminded of Barney, years before, mysteriously contemplative, hands in his pockets, looking down at the road-kill squirrel.
With my son Evan in tow, I tried to hurry past. Danny looked up. He recognized me. I hadn’t seen him in eighteen years. Except for the added age lines, his face was mostly unchanged, but he seemed to have shrunk. And he wasn’t Danny anymore, he was—
“Daniel.” He shook my hand vigorously. “You know…your brother-in-law?” He looked peculiar in his trench coat and three-piece suit. He didn’t ask about Margaret, but he did tell me that Mrs. Hester had “kicked the bucket six months ago” from a stroke. The unspoken message, of course, was that I should pass along the news to Margaret.
For whatever reason—reluctance to get involved in family matters, residual fears of an ass-kicking—I didn’t mention that Margaret already knew about her mother’s death. She’d seen it in the paper and had grieved privately, in her own way. Margaret had divorced herself from them eight years before, and the Hesters seemed to accept this reality in the same way they’d accepted Uncle Lincoln’s suicide: It was unfortunate, but unchangeable. If I’m honest, my attitude wasn’t far from theirs. I’d never pressed Margaret on why, exactly, she’d estranged herself. After all, did I need more fuel for my hatred of the Hesters? Did I need to claw open whatever psychic scabs my wife still bore, just for my own satisfaction?
I expressed my condolences to Danny. I told him Margaret would be devastated.
He smiled at my son, rubbed Evan’s head. I could practically hear the violins as he broke into a sappy, rambling speech about the old days. It was pathetic. He said he felt like crap the way he’d treated Barney when they were boys. He said that Barney had talked about me all the time, even when we weren’t friends anymore. Looking at my watch, I mumbled something about taking my son to the movies. Danny shook my hand again, not wanting to let me go. I peeled myself away.
After walking a few steps, I heard him call after me. I turned around. He said that he’d heard something about Tanya. She’d migrated west, to California, to be an actress, leaving bits of Barney, I presume, in toilets all across the USA.
Now I suppose I should get to the point. My therapists have always told me that writing things down is a way to finalize, to purge, to mend.
•••
One Saturday afternoon at the beginning of April, Barney’s parents announced that it was time to buy the family some new church shoes. Amid protests, they corralled the children. Surprisingly, Mr. Hester offered to drop me off at my house on the way to the mall. (Usually they left me to fend for myself.)
As we all fought our way into the pumpkin-colored station wagon, Tanya materialized on their doorstep. Mr. Hester, trying to be polite, invited her along. She refused with a simple shake of the head. She walked to the car, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me out.
“I need help,” she whispered. Her fingers were crushing my humerus.
“They’re giving me a ride home,” I said, with the inflected meekness I’d adopted in her presence. Whenever possible, I did what Tanya commanded. I’d once seen her pull off the head of a dead crow we found in the woods. She took it home to use its beak as a “pen” for her diary.
“My parents can give you a ride,” she insisted.
The whole Hester family was listening to our exchange as the car idled. Barney wasn’t only listening, of course. He was glaring. I tried to pull away, but her icicle fingers wouldn’t break.
I relinquished. “I’m going to stay and help Tanya,” I said. I stared at the ground, not wanting to make eye contact with anyone.
Mr. Hester spat a vindictive looger onto the driveway and backed the car into the road. He didn’t like Tanya. Nobody did except Barney.
She led me to the rear of the Hester house. I didn’t know what she had in mind, but all possible scenarios seemed both repellent and alluring. She jimmied open the window to the utility room. She boosted me. I climbed inside. She followed. While I brushed myself off I asked her why we were breaking into Barney’s house. As an answer, she ran into the next room. I followed.
For two hours, we wreaked havoc on their home. From the refrigerator we retrieved an onion. We broke off chunks and planted them everywhere—in the teakettle, under the plastic placemats, inside the bottle of dish soap, in the cookie jar. We dumped honey into the coffee maker. We taped together pages of the Merck Manual of Medical Information. We diluted their mayonnaise with Vaseline. We greased doorknobs with butter. As we did these things, we giggled uncontrollably. There was no talking, only giggling. I was delirious, and I couldn’t figure out why. Perhaps it was the freedom of running rampant in this house where’d I’d spent so much time being reserved and polite, constantly afraid.
