SEPARATE KINGDOMS by Valerie Laken
1.
“Bear-Face, will you be all right for an hour or so?” Larry’s wife, Shirley, leans over him, breasts safed away in that monstrous cotton jogging bra. Her lycra-skinned legs are green with white racing stripes. Tae-bo. She is going to the basement to kick herself silly.
He’ll be fine. He’s reclined on the couch in the back room – the old couch, in the reject room – convalescing. Hank, their sheltie-mutt, stands at the end of the couch, eyeing Shirley in anticipation.
“You’re not going anywhere, Stench,” she says to Hank. She strokes Larry’s stubble one last time and walks out.
She is sucking up to him, endlessly sympathetic. The dogs are not, and he respects them for it.
Larry balances the remote control against his thigh with the heel of one bandaged hand and carefully, without moving his fingers too much, gets himself to the Animal Planet channel. They say before long he’ll have full range of motion in all the remaining fingers, but for now they are thick and sluggish with trauma, anxious for any wrong move.
Eddie, the McGradys’ other dog, a twelve-year-old liver-colored shorthair, lumbers in from the kitchen and stands between Larry and the TV, looking up and down the couch for an open space. “Urrrrrl,” he says. “Urrrrrl?”
“Oh, all right, whiner.” Larry lifts his legs up off the couch. “Well, come on.” With his jaw he gestures toward the area under his knees, and Eddie climbs up warily, for the rules about furniture fluctuate. The dogs settle in donut shapes side by side, and Larry sets his legs gently down on their backs. Eddie stares up at Larry for a few minutes and then closes his eyes, content.
It’s six o’clock and the Croc Hunter is on. Larry hates Steve Irwin, the Australian crocodile hunter, hates his whole Homo Sapient soul. But he harbors a vicious hope that one day the animals will win, one day the crocs will bite off Steve’s arms and legs, leave him screaming, “Hey, look at that!” in his Disney Dundee accent, and Larry doesn’t want to miss that episode.
“Crocodiles have a sharp eye for food,” says the female Croc Hunter assistant, who may or may not be Mrs. Steve Irwin. They have a strange intimacy. “And when they’re hungry, they size up anything that moves as a potential meal.” It must have been a slow day in the outback; they’re just tormenting the crocodiles at the zoo today.
“Dad?” Jack stands skinny in the doorway, just twelve, and spooked too, by the hands.
“Mom says I’m supposed to come and sit with you.”
Jack is a boy with imagination but he doesn’t understand about the animals, those sweet-souled, lost-in-the-suburbs moose, or the baby tiger sharks using their fins to walk in the sand. Jack doesn’t understand the envy that swells in Larry every time he watches their pure, single-minded movements.
“Do I have to?”
Larry shakes his head no, and Jack goes back to the living room, to the God almighty Playstation.
“This is how a crocodile will catch a bird in the bush.” Steve Irwin leans out over a fenced-in pier, holding a duck-sized bird by its feet over the water. The bird flaps its wings and squawks as a crocodile thrusts itself high out of the water, searching at the air with its open mouth. On shore, the audience ahhhhs and screeches, and the croc’s jaws snap shut in a flurry of feathers. But Steve Irwin has pulled the bird away just in time; it is maimed but still bound in his tidy fist, and the croc sinks into the water unsatisfied. “We ask our animals to work for their food, because it’s a natural way for them to behave.”
“Asshole,” Larry says to the TV. He grabs for the remote in haste, forgetting to be careful, and is startled back to reality by the strange pain there, under the bandages, where his thumbs aren’t any more.
“We have to remember to be grateful for what we do have,” Father Henry said in the hospital when Larry woke up after the accident.
Yes, grateful.
“You’ll adapt,” Father Henry said with confidence. “You’ll still be able to do everything you did before.”
Yes, everything. Larry had nodded dimly; he was sedated with horror and analgesics. One minute it was 4:30 a.m. in the shop and he and Mauricio were on a coffee-and-ephedrine buzz trying to finish that last batch of tractor wheel covers before seven. They had opened the computer boards on the punch presses and bypassed the interlock to speed things up – which was against policy, sure, but how else would they finish? And the next minute – well, there were those minutes in between.
He didn’t remember them in the hospital yet, but they had been coming back to him since, in fits and flashes. All he knew in the hospital was that they’d been making very good time with those wheel covers that night, in and out, in and out, stacking them up for shipping, and the next minute Father Henry and Shirley were hovering over him, telling him he was going to be just fine.
You try it, Larry now wishes he had said to Father Henry. You pick up a beer can, zip your fly, grab a coffee mug. Beat off. Can you do it?
The doorbell is ringing. Eddie and Hank blink and struggle out from under Larry’s legs. Over the TV and the Playstation and the basement videotape strains of Billy Blanks and his spandexed karate-chopping women, you can hear it. You can hear them not giving anyone ten minutes of peace in their own home. It rings again, and Hank will not stop yelping. Larry pokes one finger awkwardly at the volume button.
“I was wondering why he’s so skinny.” Steve Irwin is knee deep in some river now, black night all around him, and his canoe bangs with a hollow sound against the rocks. He is holding a little croc, two feet long. It writhes and squawks in his hands like a baby pterodactyl. “But you can see what’s happened to him. He’s had part of his jaw broken off. And actually it’s gone. You’re missing part of your jaw, buddy! Quite debilitating to him. But he’s been able to get enough feed. He’s in fat enough condition. Are you all right mate, you all right?”
Larry can hear them in there, the latest snot-nose out of law school looking to make his way in the door and grab a beefy percentage of the retail price of Larry’s thumbs. They clutch suspiciously new brief cases in clean pink lobster claws with fancy pens on the ready, sign here. Try it, Father Henry, sign something. Shake a man’s hand.
It sickens Larry to think of them hovering in his own living room. He sinks lower into the couch, draws the afghan up.
“Eddie?” he calls. “Eddie, get in here!”
Hank won’t listen, it’s useless to try. But Eddie, loyal and wise old Eddie, comes back, if reluctantly. He’s conflicted. He stands beside the couch and looks longingly toward the living room.
“Sit.”
Eddie groans and shifts his weight, then stands up again.
“You disobedient little beast.”
Usually Shirley can get rid of the lawyers within five minutes, often without letting them in the door. But she is plagued by courtesy, his wife. “I’m so sorry,” he has heard her saying to these ambulance chasers all week long.
– Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh –
“Sweet Christ,” Larry groans, and Eddie shudders slightly. Jack’s at the drums again. Two hours a day, every day, without fail. The boy’s obsession is everybody else’s misery.
“I’m telling you he won’t sue,” Larry can hear her moaning in the living room. Always it’s “He,” not “We,” as if she’s saying, “Don’t give up on us just yet. Please. He’ll come around.”
Now she walks in and perches on the edge of the couch, blocking his view. Sweat shimmies down her neck, and the veins there duck and pulse like dark worms in good soil. “Another lawyer,” she says.
“You know my –”
“I know, Larry.”
He shuts out her gaze. She’s right: of course it’s foolish, plain crazy, not to go for the money.
But he just can’t bring himself to care about it.
“Tell me, Larry,” she starts to say, as if to challenge him. But as soon as she glances at his white-bound hands, her voice turns milky and
undemanding, as usual. “Tell me anything,” she says softly. He’s that harmless now.
Larry shakes his head and closes his eyes, ashamed.
She shifts out of his view of the TV and turns to watch it for a minute. Her hand, her long pale fingers, come to rest on his thigh, and she moves them up and down, getting warmer. “I brought you some pop. Do you want some pop?”
“Who was this one?”
“His name is Marcus. Marcus Harmon or Hammond or something. He seems pretty normal.”
“He’s still here?”
She pulls her hand away. “Well.”
“Get rid of him, Shirley.”
“Larry, you know. Honey. Would it hurt you to talk to him?”
“Yes.”
“I’m serious, Larry,” she flares up. So she has reached her limit at last. “I know this is all just awful. Horrible. And it’s going to take some time to . . . get back to feeling normal, but –”
“I am not going to be normal again.” He is determined, not bitter, about that.
“That’s just what I mean, Larry. Do you see what I’m saying?”
He stares at her, then past her. Croc Hunter is back after a commercial for cat food.
“Right now you’re, like, ravaged, Larry.”
It’s an Oprah Winfrey word. She’s on a roll.
“And depressed, obviously. Who wouldn’t be?”
Her words blur together in the dark room. The flow of his own breathing sounds like an ocean in here.
“But the fact is the world doesn’t end here, and the bills won’t either, Larry.”
Larry sucks in another great pocket of air and releases: “Squaaaaaaaaaaawk!” The sound rifles past his voice box and fills the room beautifully.
Her face contorts and recomposes. “Pardon?”
He sighs, defeated, and peers out the dark window. “Digga Digga.”
Now it is blank, her face, and her teeth come out, yellowed and harmless. She is trying to smile, make light. The Croc Hunter paddles through the Coola Coola Swamp with his voluptuous female assistant, who does not have an Australian accent.
“OK. I don’t know what you’re doing, Larry. If you think this is fun for me.” She bobs her head up and down when the words fail her, then tries again in a squeaky voice. “It’s just . . . I worry, you know? I’m scared.”
It’s a blue sky banner day in Coola Coola, and Mr. and Mrs. Croc Hunter have taken their dog, an amicable mid-size black lab, along for the ride, and he trembles at the front of the boat, making himself small. He would make great crocodile bait, Steve notes, so they’ll want to be very careful with him.
“Larry.” She snaps her fingers. “You’ve got a kid here, Larry. You are not alone in this choice.”
“Sure, use him.”
“That’s great. That’s very mature.”
“Nothing about this is great, Shirley. A million dollars is not going to make this any greater.”
She stands up to leave but hesitates in the doorway. “Three million, Larry, just in case you’re interested. There’s a case in Wisconsin last year that got 2.9 million dollars.”
“You take it,” he shouts, wishing he could throw something. “Take the goddamn money and kickbox your way to China, why don’t you? And take the little drummer boy with you!”
She is shaking now, trembling in the doorway, and she comes at him with her hand out, pointing her finger at his face.
“We are a family,” she says. “You can sit out here with your animal channel and mope all you want, but we’re not going anywhere.” She snatches the remote off his belly, turns the TV off, and leaves the room with it.
Larry closes his eyes against the new greenish darkness. He hasn’t slept much. There are nightmares. Blood and machines and crunching metal. The sound of the alarms going off, Taylor and Mauricio leaning over him on the dirty cement floor when he comes to, wet screaming hands, shock, all of them shouting, all of them bug-eyed. And then he’s in and out of it. There are masks and white jackets, an angelic, brown-haired paramedic, rubber gloves, rubber gloves, needles and questions, and then stitches. In the end just stitches lined up angrily, and that strange pain, in vague flashes, where there is nothing but air.
They have given him Valium, ten days’ worth, but he has already taken tonight’s pill this morning. He contemplates taking tomorrow’s now.
Nine years on the night shift and they expect him to sleep in the dark now. Just take a pill and sleep, close your eyes, as if nothing were simpler. Close your eyes, close your eyes and stay awake, lamalamalamala. The sky is black out the back room windows. Shamalamadingdong. Shamaoomama. There is no world outside. A dark void yawns open beyond the back door, and he’s alone now, drifting in his ranch house through the luminous, hollow sky, tilting randomly spaceward with no up or down. And then the rooms of the house begin to break off and drift away, unburdening him, and his little room picks up speed. The stars, great fire balls, loom larger, then the walls and windows of his room shudder and are ripped from him in a freezing, galactic gust. His afghan billows up and sweeps away like a torn sail. The dogs are gone, the remote control taken, and he reaches for the couch cushions under him, until the writhing awakens the pain under his bandages, and he is jolted back to life.
Awake, he is released from it. The dogs are curled under his legs again, and Eddie groans. Larry pats him lightly on the head with his finger tips. “Close your eyes.”
He tries to think good things, easy things. He thinks of the shop, where he should be right now, standing around after break, finishing their cigarettes, feet barking, backs bucking. They head to their stations slowly, the coffee still hot on their breath. It is not so bad as people would think, much better than most jobs: no customers to appease, no mindless chit chat, no dress code, and on the night shift, hardly any engineers or bosses anywhere. They’re on their own. And for guys who have babies or loud mouths at home, it is easier still, here in the grind and sway of machines, to keep their heads to themselves. In those dark, dead of night forgotten hours they become machines, all of them, their bodies on autopilot, their brains free to roam. Larry picks up a sheet of metal off the stacks, sets it in the press, fingers under, thumbs on top, and it comes to life in a hydraulic shiver and chug, its jaws bearing down on him, flash.
He’s awake. He is sweating. He’s home on the couch, it is dark, there are eyes on him. Sleep, he was sleeping, he is paralyzed with dream.
He drops into it again heavily, and is back in the shop moving his hands from the stacks to the press to the stacks to the press. His thumbs are intact and callused and strong. He looks from the left thumb to the right, and the press comes down again and again safely as it has done all these years. In other dreams, on other nights, the machine has eaten him piece by piece, and he kept offering himself up to it, powerless as an addict. With each smack of the press now, Larry looks back at his thumbs, takes inventory, left and right, and he grabs another sheet of metal and feeds it into the machine. Crack, still there. Smack, all ten of them. Larry counts the blows. Sixteen, thirty-four, ninety-two, one-oh-eight, two-forty, and loses track and starts over. He stares into the green glow lights of the hydraulic press, that one-ton razor-edged monster, and he slips the metal nimbly in out, in out. His thoughts are eroded in these long voodoo nights. His mind gets away as he gazes into the green eyes of the machine and wonders, could he join it, could he be it, could he ever get beyond it? In the vertigo of that crushing flash, he can’t help but think, What if?
There are murmurs in his living room and animals in his house.
“– hasn’t talked yet to the OSHA officials?” says a man’s voice in the other room.
“He won’t take any calls. I don’t know how much longer I can put them off,” Shirley says.
“Well, it’s complicated,” the lawyer is saying. “If the safety interlock was in fact tampered with, that can be a sticky situation.”
Put a person next to an express train track fifty-two hours a week, fifty weeks a year, and see what happens, Larry thinks. See how long it takes before he gets the idea to step forward as the train rushes in and be consumed by it.
“Disabling or obstructing safety features of the machine is an OSHA violation. So the question is, did J. Rowe machine bypass the safety lock, or did the workers do it?”
“You mean Larry, did Larry?”
They are finding him out, they are catching him. If only he had realized sooner the difference between a quick, gorgeous urge and the eternity of its consequences. It’s as if he swan dived into the Grand Canyon for the view, but instead of flying or dying or breaking away, he got dragged out, broken, humiliated, and they turned their hospital gazes on him.
“Some people have won such cases. If we can demonstrate that the employer placed unfair production expectations, an environment of pressure and risk, that can –”
It’s too much, all too much. Larry kicks away the afghan and upsets the dogs and rushes through the kitchen to the front room. “Listen,” he shouts. “We’re not interested, OK? Do you get it?”
“Larry.” The lawyer wastes no time with getting-to-know-you’s. “It’s natural for you to feel upset, but do you –”
“Listen to me in my home. I just want my disability. I don’t want you nosing around, fucking up things with OSHA! And this is my wife! Wife wife! Lemonade. My lemonade!” He rises up over Marcus, arms overhead in a gorilla charge.
Marcus slides out of his chair and backs toward the door, persisting, “We can win this, Larry, even if you tampered with the machine.”
Larry kicks the door shut with his foot and the noise vibrates through the house.
Shirley releases a moist gasp and starts to cry. “What is going on, Larry?” Her voice is high pitched and tight. “What the hell is going on?”
Larry sits down on the couch across from her. He is light-headed. He can smell the antiseptic on him and his own animal scent.
She has asked so little of him.
“What does he mean, tamper with the machine?”
Larry wishes he had taken the Valium, wishes he were asleep, wishes he could obliterate himself, drop off the edge of the planet and let her handle all the details.
He tilts his head down. His hands, strange bundles, are throbbing on his knees. This is what he has left. “Two buttons,” he says at last, and she stops whimpering and wipes her nose against her shoulder.
“Like here and here.” He gestures with both hands. “You put the sheet metal in and then you punch the buttons to bring the press down. One with each hand, so your fingers can’t be in it.”
She nods vaguely. She doesn’t follow, but she wants him to go on. She will never understand the pull of it, the steely magnetic lure, vast as the Grand Canyon without safety rails.
“Cuts your time in half. And then it’s just in out, in out, in out, you know, no buttons.” He traces that gesture through the air, fluid, efficient, precisely instincted into him. “And so.” He pauses and reflects a moment. He is doing a pretty good job, he thinks.
“And so that’s what we do some nights. That’s what we all did.” He can say no more. She comes over to him slowly, puts her arms around his shoulders, weeping, squeezing him, all of him, to her chest tightly.
“I don’t care,” she says at last. “Honey, I don’t care.”
He can feel the thick folds of her jogging bra against his shoulder, and can smell the salty moisture that sticks her clothes to her hot skin, and for a moment he feels them go elsewhere together. They are drifting down the shallow Hidden River without Steve Irwin or the camera crews, just the two of them. They lean out over the edge of the rubber raft and watch turtles paddle and walk, paddle and walk under the clear, shallow water.
But there’s a shift in the room, a presence, a noise from behind them.
“Dad?”
Something inside Larry seizes up.
“Jack, Goddamnit,” he screams. “Would you quit sneaking around this house!”
“I live here!”
“I can change that.”
“Dad, you’re going to regret this someday –” Jack holds his hands out dumbly, wanting wanting, not getting it, and Larry has to break away from here.
He lunges at Jack, who cringes and clings to the wall. “I regret it right fucking now!” Larry brushes past him too hard, knocking him down, and pushes through the kitchen to the back room.
The dogs follow and loiter behind him as he stands at the back door trying to work the handle with both hands. “Fuck,” he says. “Fick fack fuck.” At last he bursts into the night, leaving the door wide open. It’s late October, and cold. The skies are clear, bright stars overhead. Everything is right there just as he left it. He’s in his back half-acre and the grass crunches under his feet with frost. Hank and Eddie set off to mark all of their things, and in the distance a train whistle moans, low, insistent.
Larry steps up to the Grangers’ fence and pushes down the front of his pajamas with both hands, then listens to the sound of his urine slapping the chain link and the ground in the stillness. That’s better. Some fucking cold. When he is done the dogs start barking, yapping, and Larry pulls the elastic waistband back up with two fingers and turns around.
Marcus Harmon is standing near the edge of their property. The dogs herald him with a small dance.
“You have a beautiful family,” Marcus says quietly, his head down in deference.
Hank runs off after a tremble in the hedge, but Eddie comes to Larry’s side.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I just meant I’m sorry I upset you. I won’t come back.”
Larry regards him for a minute. He has a terrible haircut. A boy’s five-dollar haircut. “OK.”
Marcus smiles gently. “And this guy here is gorgeous.” He motions toward Eddie. “My grandfather used to breed shorthairs. Is he a hunter?”
The cold is rustling its way through Larry’s T-shirt and pants. “Eddie here couldn’t find his own turd in a sandbox. Could you, Eddie?” He touches the soft fur on Eddie’s brow with his finger tips. Eddie holds still and looks up with his eyes, tail going. “Used to guard Jack’s cradle like the Secret Service.”
Marcus laughs. “Yeah. They’re great dogs. Great kid too. There’s nothing like a good dog.”
“You don’t have one,” Larry says. He can just tell.
Marcus shakes his head. “Don’t have a yard yet.”
Larry stares at him. He is a dark suited machine.
“Well, I’ll be going then. I just wanted to apologize.” Marcus inhales deeply. “You’d be surprised how often it happens, Larry. You’d be surprised.”
There are gears going around in this Marcus, pistons hammering, steam coming out his mouth.
“Funny as it sounds, people do it on purpose too, and more often than you’d think. And it’s not even unwinnable. It is odd. But I guess you can’t spend fifty hours a week in front of something that powerful and not have it affect you somehow.” He pauses. “People are overworked.”
Larry watches his jaws working up and down in the dark, with his hands poking out for emphasis at odd places. He thinks he understands, but he will never understand.
“There was a woman in Peoria,” Marcus is saying. “Worked at a –”
“Gaah!” Larry shouts.
Marcus blinks. Eddie barks. Hank comes trotting back.
“Worked at a lumber mill, and just laid down on the conveyor one day and got herself –”
“Zeeeeeeeshandagahhh!” Larry screams, moving toward Marcus in monstrous, lumbering steps that shake the earth and rattle the trees and stir all the winged creatures.
“Goodbye,” Marcus says, running away. “Goodbye, Larry!”
The dogs join up and bark at him, and Eddie, lovely, loyal, wise, old Eddie chases after him, though he knows it’s only craziness. He chases Marcus all the way to his car, with Larry at his heels, barking away. Larry feels a little sorry for the man then and tries to form the strange consonants and vowels properly in his mouth. “Aiim nahh,” he cries into the darkness and then tries again one last time: “I am not of your world!”
SEPARATE KINGDOMS
2.
When I get home from school he’s still back there in the reject room. Five days and counting he’s been living there, in his habitat. Whenever he lets out Hank and Eddie he goes outside and pees with them. He leans against the Grangers’ fence with his pajama bottoms pushed down in front and
tilts his head to the sky, for the whole entire neighborhood to see.
The kids on our street told the kids on the bus, and the kids on the bus passed it all around school, so today at band try-outs it went like this: Alex Schoper started staggering around with his fists in his armpits, scratching and picking and making monkey noises, then pushing down at his crotch. “Wooh wooh wooh.” He leaned up against me and Jason and Sadie, pretending to pee on all of us.
“Your dad’s really losing it, Slap-Jack,” he said, as if that was some revelation. He waved his hands around, thumbs tucked in, till he got a good laugh out of everyone.
It would’ve been smarter of me to just walk away. But no. I guess I don’t come from smart people after all.
No sense thinking about it anyway. There are helpless scientists trapped in the House of the Dead, and so far I’ve rescued two from the zombies. 69,200 points and climbing. I’ve blasted the venom spewing Bat-Zombie but still there are the biting spiders and all the little bats.
“Jack, why don’t you take a break and keep your dad company while I exercise?”
As if he wants it. As if he’s said a complete sentence this week at all, to me or her or anyone.
The zombies come at me from all directions and I am shooting, shooting. Their limbs fly off, arm, hand, shoulder, but still they keep on marching.
“Hey, killer.” Mom palms the top of my head and tilts my face upward, and I die. “You alright? You OK?”
I don’t tell her about band try-outs, about the angry call she’s bound to get from Mr. Franklin tonight, and she doesn’t seem to notice the red part of my cheek that feels numb and tingly.
“OK, OK,” I say. “I’m doing it.”
I put down the joystick and go through the kitchen to the back room, which smells like a mixture of hamster and hospital. There are pill bottles and gauze packs and empty cans of pop all over the coffee table. And there he is, under his afghan, my dad. The one everybody’s talking about.
His hands are hard to look at, hard to think about. I lean on the door frame for a long time, waiting for him to notice me.
“Dad?” The way he stiffens up it’s clear I’m the wrong sight, saying the wrong words again.
“Mom says I’m supposed to come and sit with you.”
He turns back to the TV, where it’s another one of those wild animal shows, of course. I swear he’d like to stick his hand through the screen, grab one of those exotic trees, and pull himself right through to that outback or veldt or whatever it’s called. Leave me and Mom behind to fend for ourselves.
“Do I have to?”
He shrugs me off, and now he’ll sit in there sulking, and it’ll be me who was the bad guy.
I mean, Jason Beasley’s dad plays House of the Dead with him. When you go over to Jason’s house, it’s like Mr. Beasley knows your name and your high scores and everything.
Not here. Before the accident it was always night shifts and overtime, then moping around half asleep by the TV looking like he wished he was dead. Nine years he sweats away in that dump hole at the hydraulic press. And then smash, one wrong move, and they send you home like this. Parts of you gone.
I will never get to go to college.
From the top of the basement stairs I can hear my mom down there doing exercise. She’s shouting along all cheery with that creepy Tae-Bo guy, calling out all the punches. Fine, she keeps saying whenever anyone asks. We’re fine. As if she isn’t sneaking back to their bedroom every couple of hours so he won’t catch her crying. We’re all just perfectly normal, if you ask her about it.
But his thumbs are gone. Clean off, never coming back. We aren’t fine. Even Alex Schoper knows better than that.
I go back to the living room and start up the game again. The scientists come out of the mansion, three of them. They’re hysterical, waving their arms and crying, and inside there are seven or eight more, innocents. They need me.
I reload my gun and approach the house. The porch boards are rotted, and if you step in the wrong spot you can stir up swarms of biting spiders. Or fall through to the basement, where the zombies feed and breed and play cards. It’s practically certain death. But I get past the bad spots and kick my way through the front door. Here they come, arms groping and shaggy, I fire and fire and fire.
A man is at the door, staring at me through the little window. Not in the game, in our house.
“Sweet Christ.” I ignore him, hoping he’ll go away before my dad catches sight of him.
It’s another lawyer, of course. You can tell by the suit, by the little beady eyes. They’re after my dad, or after his thumbs, which they figure were worth at least a Ferrari or two.
“I’m on your side,” I’d like to tell him. “But if you ring that doorbell you’re going to be sorry.”
Naturally, he rings it.
Hank comes racing in, starts his battle cries, and Eddie follows behind, howling. “Shut up,” I say, but they’re disobedient little beasts.
“Mom?” I yell toward the basement.
It rings again. “Mom?” I go to the top of the basement stairs. “Am I supposed to answer it?”
She comes huffing up in a second, wiping her face, which is shiny and red and almost healthy looking. “I’ll handle it, Jack. Why don’t you go downstairs and practice?”
When she opens the door I go hide in the kitchen, on the far side of the fridge. His name is Marcus Harmon, and he’s so sorry to intrude at such a difficult time. His delivery is not bad. I’d give him an eight.
“He’s not interested in suing,” Mom says, but real quiet and shifty. Not like she’s looking to push him out the door.
Money like these lawyers mention is enough to move out of this house, to a different bus route, maybe even a different school.
“I don’t hear you practicing, Jack,” she yells toward the kitchen.
I’ve heard all of it before anyway, all week long. We’re so sorry and Think of Jack-here’s future and Wouldn’t you like to teach the machine shop a lesson?
But apparently he doesn’t. I go downstairs and pull the string for the light bulb and sit down at my drum kit. The knuckles across my fists are red and bruisy. My first real junior high fight, not little kid flailing but knock down drag out, with that miserable section at the end where I started to, well, where I had to run off.
It makes you not even want to be in band.
My drums, at least, are the best in school: a primo red Pearl five-piece that Dad and me bought used off some creepo down on Seventh Street with track marks in his arms. The guy sat down to play for a second, like he wanted to show off for us, but it was just painful. He was like a grown up future version of Alex Schoper himself, banging away like a caveman, without any control of the rudiments whatsoever.
Whenever I sit down to practice I think of guys like that, and how I don’t want to be them. So I start up my single stroke roll, real slow and even: Duh. Guh. Duh. Guh. Duh. Guh. Duh. Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh duh guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh Guh Duh. Guh. Duh. Guh. Duh. Guh. Duh. Guh. Duh. Guh. Duh. Guh. Duh. Guh. Duh. Guh. Duh. Guh. Duh. Guh. Duh. Guh.
I like to do these for at least five minutes, but before I’m even halfway I notice a strange thing moving around up by the window well. It’s an arm waving and knocking against the window.
When I go over and climb on the table to look, it’s Sadie, from band. She’s a trombone. She’s crouched down in the window well, with her braids falling in the dirt.
“You forgot your bag,” she says when I open the window. And sure enough there’s my stupid backpack, as if I needed another reminder of how I ran off like a loser, forgetting my drumsticks and everything.
She pushes my bag through the opening.
“I’m not supposed to have people over this week,” I say.
“I’ll be quiet,” she says, wriggling herself through the little window and landing hands-first on the table next to me.
Sadie doesn’t like to follow directions.
She jumps down and stands in the middle of our basement, looking around and blinking. Under the lightbulb, all the little hairs that have rubbed out of her braids make a sort of fuzzy halo.
“So this is your house.”
“Just the basement.”
“It’s like ours.” She nods. They’re all pretty much the same around here.
“These your drums?” She goes over and runs her fingers along the cymbals, which, it’s true, are not very quality, but it’ll be years before we can save up for better ones. I guess.
Now she’s moving around behind my drums, looking at all the pictures taped to the cement wall, which no one has ever really done before. I get this weird feeling suddenly that she’s poking around, that maybe she’s come to get an up-close at my dad, like he’s some kind of field trip exhibit.
But when I walk over and look closer she’s just squinting hard at those pictures, which have nothing to do with my dad. They’re just magazine cut-outs of the greats – Charlie Watts and Keith Moon, John Bonham, Neil Peart. They all mingle around behind me, cheering, whenever I sit down and play.
“I guess it’s stupid,” I say.
“No,” she says. “This guy, look at him go.” She’s got her fingernail on a shot of Buddy Rich all hunched over and fierce, looking like he’s about to take a bite out of his high-hat.
“Apparently he was an asshole,” I say. “But there was nobody better.”
She makes little sighing noises as she goes down the wall, putting her nose to each picture. “It must be hard,” she says.
“I could show you.”
Her eyes flash wide like it’s too good to be true, so I hand her a couple of sticks and show her how to hold them. I let her sit at the snare and I reach in beside her and show her single strokes, double strokes, building up to a nine-stroke roll I do, which has accents in all sorts of weird spots.
“Wow,” she starts to giggle when it’s her turn. She pushes one stick at the snare, then the other, and I have to hold her wrists and jiggle them to show her how to be loose. Duh. GUH. DUH. Guh.Guh. DUH. guh. duh. GUH. DUH.
She stops.
“That’s all right,” I say. I try to explain about how much harder drumming is than it looks. People think it’s all just banging away however the spirit moves you. But really it’s about precision and control, about dividing up the spaces between sounds into the tiniest, quickest little bits. Regular people can’t even hear the difference. But they feel it. You get those sticks moving like hummingbirds, but it’s not a runaway train, not random. It’s all under control, all exactly the way you want it. You’re the most perfectly tuned machine, dead on, precise.
“– and take the little drummer boy with you!” It’s the shouting, from upstairs. It’s my own father, saying things like that. In front of Sadie and everything.
“It’s different from trombone,” I say.
She squints at me, squeezing her shoulders together, like a turtle ducking in at a loud noise. When she gets up and goes over to her backpack I figure she’s going to rush out of here, and I really wouldn’t blame her. But instead she digs around in her bag, and when she turns back she’s holding out her Walkman to me.
“I stole a CD from my brother,” she says. “You might like it.”
She sits down on Mom’s exercise mat and pats the space right next to her. She’s holding out the headphones, looking at me like, I don’t know, all glowy and waiting, like a lady from a soap opera.
It’s like too much, all at once, all in one day. I’m thinking I’d rather just go to bed now, wake up in a week or two when things start making sense again.
“Just a second,” I say, like there’s something extremely important I just remembered I had to do, and I creep up the basement stairs and sit at the top. I put my cheek against the cool, hard kitchen door, and it’s quiet in there. I can breathe again. I peek in.
Mom’s leaning against the sink, running water on her wrists.
“Mom?”
Nothing. “You OK?”
“We’re fine, honey. Everything’s fine.” But she won’t look at me. “Would you bring this in to that man in the living room?”
It’s a glass of lemonade. I can’t believe she’s still got this lawyer in the house. No wonder Dad’s shouting. But she’s staring at me pretty hard now, so I take the glass into the living room, stopping to peer around each corner to make sure Dad isn’t waiting to pounce on me.
“Thanks,” the lawyer says, holding his hand out to shake as if I’m somebody important.
“My dad won’t talk to you,” I say. And then, because the room feels too quiet, I whisper, “But I think he should take the money.”
Marcus laughs and rubs his hand along the back of his neck. He stretches his neck from side to side and makes a terrible face like this hurts him. “You and me both, buddy.”
“Jack, are you done practicing?” Mom sneaks up behind me.
“I’m going.”
It’s so dark in the reject room that I can hardly see anything when I walk by. The TV is off. I stand in the doorway and look in at him, waiting for my eyes to adjust.
His eyes are shut, his legs are propped up on the dogs. His chest goes up and down in uneven little strokes, like an engine. He’s kicked the afghan off so it’s in a pile on the floor, with one corner of it still tucked under his butt. His hands are resting on those little red and green pillows that Grandma Rose makes every Christmas. The first bandages were big boxing fists but these just wrap around his palms, not his fingers, and they make his hands look weird – longer and thinner than they really are.
And I think: Dad. I think: even now.
I still don’t see why they couldn’t have just sewed them back on. Put the bones in place, in the sockets, stitched the skin back over. And then under the bandages would be his thumbs, curled up and waiting to hatch fresh. They would grow back and we could pretend this never happened.
His body springs awake, and I jump back. What do you want? What have you done to me? His eyes are huge, blinking at me, like he doesn’t know whether to sleep or stay awake here with me. But then, of course, he chooses sleep again.
I go back to the basement.
Sadie’s lying on the mat with the headphones on, eyes closed, tapping her fingers against her stomach. I can hear the beat leaking out around her ears. I kneel down by her and watch.
She notices me. She opens her eyes and smiles up, like I’m the only thing in the world. There’s tingling. “Come here,” she says, so I lie down next to her and she flips the headphones around so I have one ear and she has the other. She presses the side of her head up against mine, which makes it feel like the music is rumbling through both of our brains simultaneously, mixing us together. When I close my eyes it’s hard for me to tell even where my skin leaves off and hers starts, so I just try to stop thinking and listen to the music. It’s an old Pixies CD with a drum beat that’s not exactly revolutionary, but it’s real tight and crisp and impressive, with smooth rolls that fit in just right, real quality, and in the background, over the lyrics and guitars, these strange voices start talking behind the song – a deep creepy man’s voice and then a howling lady’s voice that’s impossible to understand, and I think yeah, it’s not bad. Her brother’s got good taste. Sadie puts the Walkman down on my chest, so I can feel it vibrating over my lungs, a little dancing machine, and it seems incredible to me that so much music could come out of something so small. I feel like saying, “See, Dad? Here’s what we have that they don’t have, your animals.”
Sadie’s hand is half on top of the Walkman and half against my rib cage, and it’s like we’re all one unit, even though we’re not, and so many thoughts start tumbling through me, like for some reason there’s Mrs. Thompson’s voice, our health teacher, saying Your body’s your kingdom, over and over like she does, and my mother saying You OK, killer? and there’s the hospital rooms and the lemonade and the Ferraris and Alex Schoper bleeding from the nose and right in the middle of all of this Sadie comes out of nowhere and kisses me.
“It’s OK,” she says. “You don’t have to be embarrassed.”
And now the song has switched and there are these strange girls singing about monkeys in heaven and I’m just holding the headphone to my ear, watching Sadie’s eyes as she leans toward me again, and for a few seconds it’s like I’m passing out, moving out of the kingdom and into the air, which is like getting free and lost all at once, a queasy sort of feeling that I jump back from, pushing her off.
“OK,” she says. “Jeez, sorry.” Like she’s angry. I can’t do anything right.
And before I have the sense to fix it she’s scrambling her things together and climbing back on the table by the window well, reaching up.
But she can’t get out alone. The window’s too high. She stands there, facing the wall, waiting for something.
“You don’t have to go,” I say.
“It’s late.”
“I liked that CD,” I say.
She shrugs. “Are you going to help me climb out, or what?”
So I do. I get on the table and make a sling with my hands, like in gym class, and she steps in and scrambles up the wall, claws at the window frame, and I help push her through.
“Hey,” I say, hoping she’ll turn around and say goodbye or something, but she just keeps going, and I watch her ankles leave.
Upstairs they’re shouting again.
I take my drum sticks and go sit at the top of the stairs, with my ear on the door. Nothing.
I worry about them. And I would like to just go to bed now, but it’s risky walking through there when they’re going at it. You get sucked in.
To pass the time I do a little seven stroke roll against my thigh: pa ter pa ter pa ter PAT pa ter pa ter pa ter PAT pa ter pa ter pa ter PAT pa ter pa ter pa ter PAT pater pater pater PAT pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat Pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat paterpaterpaterPat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pater pater pater Pat pa ter pa ter pa ter PAT pa ter pa ter pa ter PAT pa ter pa ter pa ter PAT pa ter pa ter pa ter PAT pa ter pa ter pa ter PAT.
But it’s not really any fun without the noise, and each stroke stings and throbs until that spot on my thigh is welted up. I sit still and try to listen to them again, but they aren’t shouting.
I think about us in a two-story house, someplace different. It wouldn’t even have to be that fancy. Just someplace by the woods with a big picture window, and no reject room furniture, not even a reject room at all. He could sit in a nice chair and look out at the animals, and we wouldn’t bother him too much, we’d just leave him alone. And maybe we could get him some high-powered binoculars for seeing. And when Easter came we could take a vacation, maybe someplace wild like Colorado. We could be like those people who take pictures of themselves and hang them up on the walls.
We could be that way, really. If he got that money we could do all those things, maybe more. It seems like such an easy plan, and things sound so quiet up there and peaceful, I figure I’ll just go up and see, maybe I can explain it to him.
Up in the front room she’s holding him tight on the couch. His arms are around her too, the bundles of his hands resting behind her back, hovering without touching, like everything about the world is hurting him.
Maybe she has already broken through to him, I think. Maybe the storm has blown past us, gone next door or down the street or to another town.
“Dad?”
But it hasn’t, it hasn’t. The storm is right here inside us.
“Jack, Goddamnit,” he screams. “Would you quit sneaking around this house!”
His eyes are round and wild and I lose track of everything I wanted to say. I forget about Colorado, about the binoculars. I try to put together all the perfect lawyer words, but there are so many, jumbled up in my head, that the thing I want to say doesn’t come out at all: You can win this, Dad. We don’t have to get ruined by this.
Then he’s rushing at me, all on fire. I duck against the wall, cover my head, and he sweeps past me like a tornado.
So now I’ve done it.
“Oh, Jack.” Mom reaches her arms out, and I let her take me. I curl up on the floor against her legs, and she leans down to my head and hugs it. We are tangled together. Crying.
“What’s happening to us?”
She shakes her head for a long time. “I don’t know, honey.”
Her face looks like something has died in it. She looks emptied out and scared without even trying to hide it from me. It’s spooky.
As if she sees me noticing something I shouldn’t see, she tucks her head back into my neck and rocks me again for a long time. Then she says, “This is your dad’s choice. He’s your dad, and he has his reasons. You know?”
I nod, because what else can I do?
“It doesn’t really matter,” I say. “The money.”
“That’s right.”
“Alex Schoper has money and he’s still a complete moron.”
“That’s true of a lot of people,” she says.
We’re done rocking and crying, but she keeps holding me there, really tight.
“Yesterday I tried to do everything all day without my thumbs,” I say.
She wipes her nose and pulls back to look at me.
“It didn’t work at all.” It’s true. I only lasted twenty or thirty minutes at a time. Nothing worked right, and on instinct I kept grabbing stuff with my thumbs. Some things, like your zipper or the drums, were entirely impossible.
“I think that’s very sweet, Jack.” She pats my hand. “I think you are a deeply good person. You know that?”
I groan. That’s not what I was talking about.
She rumples my hair. “Maybe we could try it together for a little while.”
It’s been a long day. “The hard thing,” I say, “is that you keep forgetting not to use them, and that ruins everything.”
“I bet.” She thinks that over. Her fingers are making circles and squares in my hair.
“But, you know, we could tape them up.”
She stops with my hair. “That’s a great idea, Jack.”
We go into the kitchen and find some masking tape in the drawer by the garbage can. We each tape our left hands by ourselves, putting the thumb across our palms diagonally toward our pinkies. And then she tapes my right hand, and finally together we get her right hand bandaged up. There’s a lot of giggling. We smell like Band-Aids. My fingers are stiff and awkward.
“Well, Jack. What now?”
“I think we should make cookies.”
Her mouth opens up in a big smile and she laughs.
We do good teamwork but still everything takes twice as long. I drop the vanilla bottle and it breaks all over the floor. We have to hold each egg with both hands and kind of drop it on the edge of the bowl to break it, then fish out the shells. I try to hold the mixing spoon woven through my fingers, under over under, but once the flour’s in, it gets too thick to stir this way.
She gets out the electric mixer and we have to put all four of our hands on the bowl and the mixer to keep it from spinning out of control. We are white with flour and sticky all over by the time they’re cooked. There are egg shells on the counter and chocolate chips on the floor.
Getting them out of the oven is scary. “Stand back.” She holds her hands vertical to keep the mitts on and then pokes the tray around till she gets it in both hands.
But the cookies are good, super good. And she eats over a dozen. “God, I was hungry,” she says.
We lean on the counter with our elbows. Side by side. Outside it’s a dark cold night, the windows are black, and the house starts to shake just a little as a train goes by on the tracks at the edge of the highway.
“Well? Is it bedtime?” She yawns. She pulls out the scissors and offers to free me. My hands are sticky and wet under the bandages, and they kind of itch a little.
“I think,” I say after a minute.
She waits.
“I think we should sleep this way.”
Valerie Laken’s stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. “Separate Kingdoms” presents two interrelated stories concurrently – story “1” on left-facing pages and story “2” on the right.