Something Rising (Light and Swift) Page 7

  “‘So, Cassie, I hear you’re quite the billiards player. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it. You’ve turned out exactly like your dad, haven’t you. A charming man, as I understand it.’” Emmy’s imitation of Diana was perfect. “‘Is this, now, is billiards going to be the way you—’”

  “Emmy.”

  Emmy looked at her.

  “I don’t give a shit about what your mom thinks of me.”

  “I know.”

  “No offense.”

  “None taken.” Emmy looked out the window.

  Cassie turned on to the highway, headed out of town.

  The house had been in bankruptcy for a year, and there didn’t seem much of a chance that anyone would buy it today, Puck was fond of saying when Emmy fretted about them getting caught. Someone might eventually buy it, but not today. It was a gruesome little place on a floodplain; a gruesome house, that is, but anyone could see why the people who owned the land would be tempted to build there. The lane leading back to it was a quarter mile long, a straight lane traveling down a hill and into what looked to be a thirty-acre bowl surrounded by old hardwoods. You couldn’t see the house or anyone visiting it from the road, and from the house there seemed to be no other world. When Cassie and Emmy arrived, there were already four or five pickup trucks backed around the big fire ring they’d built as a group, the fire was just getting started. Somebody was playing a Lynyrd Skynyrd tape in his truck—this was the usual fare, along with the Stones, Little Feat, Grand Funk Railroad. Cassie parked the car, and Emmy hopped out barefoot because Brian was there and she was compelled by the baroque and unyielding urges of mating, according to Laura.

  Cassie walked around the perimeter of the house. It looked the same as it had last week, an ugly, ugly dwelling. It was a cube made of cinder blocks trimmed with cheap pine painted to look like California redwood; one corner of it was windows that looked into what had been the living room. The flimsy screen door would no longer latch, and after the house flooded, the storm door wouldn’t close, either. Cassie stepped inside. Something here never ceased to be interesting: the fishy, moldy smell, or the brick floor unevenly laid, the freestanding corner fireplace wrapped in a metal bell like a woman’s skirt. There must have been a rug on the floor, and maybe bookcases. Probably not bookcases. The couch would have sat here, facing a television. Life, Laura would have said, faced the television. But not at her house. It had been allowed when Cassie and Belle were little, but it had since become Forbidden, and had been given away. Cassie didn’t walk into the kitchen. There was a gap where the refrigerator had been that glared like a missing tooth, and the cabinet doors had swelled and now hung open on their hinges. But here, in the living room, she could see again the interesting thing—The Line—all around the room and only six inches from the ceiling, where the water had stopped. The Waterline. This room, this house, had been completely submerged. There were moments when the elements converged in such a way that this ridiculous cube, badly planned and poorly constructed, had taken on the majesty of a sunken ship, and everything inside, the silverware and the coffee cups, the floating end tables, became poignant.

  “Where is Miss Cassie?” she heard Puck call. “Where is yon Cassandra? Get away from the stinky house, maiden! Be not obsessed with the stinky house!”

  Or this could be one spot, one tale, in a town that voted to flood itself. Perhaps the government had said they would no longer rebuild, no longer declare a state of emergency, your bad planning does not constitute, et cetera, and the only option the cinder-block people had was to sell. Cassie had had dreams of houses: she had a long series of dreams in which she drove along roads she recognized, a grid, and arrived finally at her house—her house—and there was so much to be done to repair it. The inside was filled with old furniture, debris, clothes left lying as if the Rapture had come and the righteous didn’t even get to keep their pink dresses and coveralls.

  “Cassandra! Put down your tape measure! The cause is lost!”

  She walked into the hallway, and there was The Line. The bedrooms were also cubes, the visual representation of inner desperation, Laura would have said. In Cassie’s dream house, the front door had three stained-glass panels: on the left was a perfect rendering of a small and twisted tree. In the middle was a boy kneeling in prayer, looking up at the sky. On the right was the sky itself, deep blue, a moon, a star. And the staircase in the parlor was dangerous and wide, and led up into pure darkness, and every night she could work on only one room. So she had started at the beginning, in the parlor, its mountain of debris, the hulking old piano. She had worked all night, hauling things out to the truck and studying the damage to the hardwood floors, and before morning she had taken a sledgehammer to the disintegrating walls and discovered that the plaster was mixed with horsehair, and in her dream the hair waved through the walls like seaweed.

  “I know you’re in there, Cassandra! You must come out and join America’s beautiful people!”

  Mornings she felt as if she’d never slept at all, and every night she thought it was surely over, she’d never see the house again, but somehow she returned. She completed the whole ground floor, she did things she’d never attempt in real life, and all alone. The tools she needed were always within reach. Then she moved ahead, into the darkness upstairs, and everything changed again. She was confronted with nostalgia, the discomfort of studying someone else’s family photographs, trunks filled with memorabilia and rotting letters, fur coats, a contraption that might have been a birdcage and which Cassie was loath to study, a nest made of daily leavings. She had dealt with it gently, kept what she could keep, discarded the most intimate artifacts of the lost life, and she had turned the upstairs into one large room made of light, the room she would truly, standing here awake, live in if she could choose.

  “I’m worried about what Brian Whittaker will attempt with our Emmy! I fear his intentions are less than honorable! He’s afraid of you! Please come out!”

  One night, the final night, she had driven the now familiar roads out to the house and pulled into the driveway, and there was the wide front porch painted dark blue, and there was the front door with the boy in prayer, but when she turned the doorknob, it was locked. The back door, too, was locked, and all the windows, and Cassie with no key. And she knew it didn’t bear thinking about, how she had felt in the dream and the questions that had plagued her all the next day. Awake, asleep, the line was so thin, she looked everywhere. She didn’t have the key, hadn’t seen it, wouldn’t know it if she found it. But over the weeks they’d been coming here, to the sad little cinder block on the beautiful land, Cassie had begun to develop a theory: in truth she’d been standing on a precipice all along. Somewhere in the tangled garden behind her dream house, once when she’d explored it surrounded by lazy bees, once when she’d traveled as far as the boneyard, she had dropped it. She’d dropped the key, and it had fallen into the water at the edge of the world, it had fallen past the place where light can penetrate, past the steeple of the sunken Methodist church; it had slid down the curved metal roof and floated on a current completely out of town. It had ended up here, at this ugly house, a site so deep only the blind fish could survive, and a blind fish had swallowed it.

  She stepped out the front door just as Bobby Puck was about to call for her again.

  “There you are,” he said, his spreading smile. He handed her a pint of Southern Comfort, and she took a long drink. “Cassie, we want to watch you dance.”

  * * *

  They all smelled smoky, they had eaten and danced. Cassie was not drunk but not entirely sober when she realized Emmy and Brian and Emmy’s car were all missing. And where was Bobby Puck? Cassie could hear him somewhere at the edge of the flooded bowl; there was a stand of trees there, surrounding swampy land. This season Puck was claiming Satan lived there. He said, That is Satan’s house, and everyone around the fire said, Okey-doke, Bob. And then he would wander over to confer with Satan, who was, he claimed (as many before him
had), merely misunderstood. Ready to patch things up with his Brother. A fallen angel, Cassie, just imagine, there is no idea more intoxicating than that. Most of these summer nights, Cassie liked to reach the point where she wasn’t precisely steady on her feet. Then she stopped. By morning she was fine, or relatively so, and she could practice two or three hours and still work.

  “You can go with us.”

  Cassie turned. Clay and Gary were standing next to Gary’s truck, the two were always together. She went over and slipped in on the driver’s side; the vinyl was still warm from the day’s sun. Gary got in after her; he was a giant, shambling man in an old T-shirt from a Dead show, the sleeves cut off, and overalls. His long hair was down, his beard was full. He was only in his mid-twenties but seemed much older. Cassie imagined him lying down, a bearskin rug. Clay had long red hair tied back in a loose ponytail, a big red beard, more a Viking than a bear. He worked with his father on the family farm east of Roseville. His marijuana crop was legendary for its potency and consistency; he specialized in a Hawaiian variant called Orange, so named for the orange buds, heavy and sticky with resin.

  They pulled away from the house and down the lane lined with locust trees so old they would eventually begin to die and no one would be able to prevent it. Honey locusts, too, the kinder of the species.

  “You’re a pool player, huh?” Clay asked, smoking a cigarette with his elbow out the window.

  “Yep.”

  “It’s early, you want to go shoot a few games? That okay with you, Gary?”

  Gary shrugged. “Fine with me.”

  “I’ll play you for money. Otherwise, take me on home.”

  Clay laughed. “Play you for money, huh, Spark Plug? Those the rules?”

  “Otherwise, take me home.”

  Gary drove silently.

  “Gary’s not competitive,” Clay said, blowing smoke out the window. “He says of our baser nature, just like cheetahs on the veldt.”

  Cassie looked straight ahead, thinking of the house. “Whatever.”

  Most of the tables were busy at Uncle Bud’s. Cassie got three beers out of the refrigerator; Bud was washing glasses in the sink behind the bar. He couldn’t abide men with beards, or any other characteristic that made them appear escaped from a cave, but he didn’t say anything. Clay had been there before and was widely known. How known he may have been to Bud was not Cassie’s business, or any interest of hers. They each chose a house cue, then Cassie unlocked the glass room and turned on the light. She asked Clay if he wanted a handicap, and he smiled and said no. She said they could play as a team, two against one, but no trick shots on this table.

  “Straight, 9-ball, 8? Which one do you want to play?”

  Clay said he’d only ever played 8-ball, and would ten dollars a game be too much? Cassie said that would be fine. They lagged for the break, which Cassie took, and as she was racking the balls, she realized that in the truck she’d had a warm feeling for the two men, a sort of camaraderie, and it was gone. The best course of action, she decided, would be to kick their asses and take their money, and they could make it up around the campfire some other night.

  She shot so hard on the break that her feet came up off the floor, and the crack of the balls caused Gary to jump. She sank a solid and a stripe and could choose which to take by the layout of the table. She chose highs, moving around the table quickly, sinking the 11 on a slice so thin Clay moaned and slapped his head. When only the 8 was left, Clay whispered to Gary that she couldn’t make it. The cue was on the center spot, and the 8 was an inch or so from the side rail. The 2-ball was between the 8 and the pocket. Cassie used her cue to sight the angle to the opposite pocket, called it, and banked it with a medium shot. Clay took a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket and handed it to her; she asked if they’d like to play another.

  On the next break Cassie pocketed the 1 and the 9. She could have made a long shot on the 3—if the stakes had been higher, she would have taken it—but took a safety instead. A part of her wanted the two men to enter the game. Clay let Gary shoot first for their team, and a lot was revealed about him, first by his shot, which was bored and imprecise, and later by his choice of songs on the jukebox. “Box of Rain”; “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”; “Walkin’ After Midnight.” Cassie guessed he had problems with authority that he disguised with laidback affability.

  The two men blew every shot Cassie gave them, although Clay played better than she would have guessed. After ten games Cassie had taken a hundred dollars from them, and she decided that was enough. Gary, who hadn’t said much all night, asked if they’d like to go back to his house for a nightcap. There was something between the two men that made Cassie think they had nightcaps together on a regular basis. Dependence, commitment. She could vaguely hear Belle’s voice, describing the love between men in ancient Greece—not the merely sexual but a love believed to be higher than any other, even that of a mother and a child. Warriors, of a sort.

  Gary lived in a plain, small house in an old neighborhood in Hopwood.

  “It’s quiet,” Cassie said as he unlocked his door.

  “Lots of old people.”

  “Old people don’t make a lot of noise,” Clay said.

  Inside, two large tapestries hung from the ceiling. One was Indian and depicted two lovers next to a river. The other was a medieval banquet scene swirling with images; men and women, dogs and dishes, musical instruments. A red carpet covered the floor. There were more tapestries on the wall, and lots of places to sit, pillows and a small couch, a futon in the corner. In the center of the room was a low octagonal table, old dark wood Cassie couldn’t name, with lighter inlays forming a six-pointed star. The table held a brass lamp and an elaborate pipe.

  “Have a seat,” Gary said, gesturing toward the pillows. Clay had already settled in: he lit incense from a shoe box full of different scents; he took rolling papers and a dime bag out of a drawer in the table. The large new television was a shock amid the tapestries—the television and VCR, the Swiss stereo, the small speakers tucked into the corners of the ceiling. Gary put in a mix tape and poured them all orange juice. The orange juice would taste brilliant and clean after the bitter taste of the joint. Cassie suspected he was also the sort of man who would turn the heat up too high in the winter, just to enjoy the feeling of stepping out into the snow. A lot of people Cassie knew needed to feel the extremes of available sensations.

  Clay told her that Gary worked with him on the farm, had for ten years. “Strong as an ox,” he said.

  In the background a thin, unnerving voice tunneled through the conversation and reached Cassie. More than this, you know there’s nothing.

  “You’re a helluva pool player,” Clay said, shaking his head. “You spanked us.”

  “Thanks.”

  “My dad always says a horse runs faster against a faster opponent. I’d love to see you play somebody good.”

  “Your dad’s a shithead,” Gary said, from far away. Cassie turned; he was right next to her. “His dad’s a shithead.”

  “So you said.”

  “Aw, he’s all right,” Clay said, coughing. “Old man is all.”

  “A fascist is all. Sieg Heil is all.” Gary sat up, rubbed one eye. “Dude? Don’t get me started.”

  That song ended and another began, and Cassie didn’t know this one, either. The dope was hard, waving and cresting, sometimes so violently Cassie was sure something terrible was about to happen. She could sense it but couldn’t locate it, a dark shape at the edge of her vision. She closed her eyes. “Oh, listen to this, I could die when she sings this chorus,” Gary said as the woman’s voice soared above them, Heathcliff, it’s me, it’s Cathy, I’ve come home. When Cassie opened her eyes again, feeling queasy, everything was so close to her, the room, the colors, the incense, the song so gorgeous it was like a spur against bone. Gary was looking at her, his eyes arctic. For a moment Cassie thought she could sense the edge of her own tendencies, the beginning of her pirate days, thei
r eventual end, she could not articulate this. She picked up a large pillow from the floor, said, “Leave me be for a while,” and went outside and lay down in the bed of Gary’s truck. She could see plots of sky through the trees; there were lots of stars. Belle and Laura and Cassie all hated that the stars were named, and changed the designations on those rare occasions they were all looking at the sky at once. Laura might say, “Look at that group over there, the one that looks like Marleybone’s Back Leg,” or Belle would say, “God, Cassie, pay attention, I’m talking about Poppy’s Pipe, the pipe-shaped cluster.” Cassie could see nothing worth naming in these sections, even stoned. She closed her eyes; the night air on her face was like a live thing. Imagine being blind, she thought, all the amazing pleasures still right there. Blind. She remembered, suddenly, a night years ago, she must have been seven or eight, when she had dreamed she was in school, making a log cabin out of pipe cleaners, and her vision began to fade. It faded a piece at a time. First she couldn’t see the cabin, and then she couldn’t see her teacher, and then her own hands disappeared. When she woke up in her dark bedroom, she thought it was true and stumbled out of bed with her eyes closed, because to open them would be to confirm the bare facts, then crept down the hallway to her parents’ room, touching the walls along the way. She walked first into the linen closet, then backed out, hitting her face on the door. The doorknob to her parents’ room was cold, and when she stepped inside, she was doubly certain she was blind because all of her other senses were heightened. She could hear her mom’s shallow breathing, her dad’s quicker, raspier breaths. She could smell their clothes, their tobacco, the oil from the Yoruba priestess; each scent was discrete, and Cassie could pull one away from another like rose petals, all the way down to the tight, familiar core. This was not how she thought of it at the time but was how it had to be rendered now, by a stoned person. She reached the edge of the bed and felt for her father’s feet, then for his bony knees. She climbed up on the bed and lay down next to him. He smelled like her dad, no doubt about it, but to make sure, Cassie leaned over his chest and put both hands on his face, tracing the shape of his brow, his low, straight hairline, his short, straight nose. Under her fingers, his lips, which had been parted, abruptly closed. Jimmy’s chin was strong, and stubbly with a day’s growth of beard. He had a single dimple in his left cheek, mostly unnoticeable; one of his ears had a bump on the ridge. She had gently rubbed the fringe of his eyelashes, the soft, puffy skin under his eyes. On his right cheek he had three scars: straight lines each about an inch long, running from under his cheekbone to the edge of his mouth. He would never say how he had gotten them.