Her back to Beam, Emma stood in the kitchen in her, now deceased, mother-in-law’s house at the end of Skeleton Road. Planting herself at the sink, her hipbones pressed to the counter—cold green tile against skin and bone—she stared at the sea. It would be better, she thought, if I don’t look at him. It was better to face the immense sprawling blue canvas of the Pacific Ocean because it never changed. Of course, there were variations in color as the seasons changed, from December’s rough dead grays to the azure rebirth in spring. From the pale blue mirror of the summer sky to the purplish plain of the sea come fall. The color changed, but other than that, at any given time, on any day of the year, it seemed monotonous. Running off in every direction at once, but never getting anywhere, it was, like Emma, quite lonely. A sense of isolation that seemed to calm her.
Emma watched the sea because she couldn’t stomach what was happening, the sights and the sounds, mostly the sounds, in the house around her. Beam, propped up at the table, was crying non-stop, though slobbering was the way Emma chose to think of it. Sniveling and weeping and wiping his runny nose along his sleeve, he carved a footpath of slime from cuff to shoulder. His arms folded, his head resting on his wrist, when he wasn’t running his nose back and forth on his arm, Beam sat in what had always been his chair when he was a boy, muttering. Babbling Emma considered most useless; the ‘what ifs.’ What if he’d come up on Friday as she asked…what if he called over the weekend…what if he had been a better son…what if?
Emma closed her eyes and ears to Beam’s rambling, but she couldn’t ignore the sounds coming from the second floor, in Missus Seaton’s room at the back of the house. The footsteps falling across the ceiling, the patent leather thuds of the doctor and coroner moving around the bed. The heavy boots of the paramedics clomping up and down the stairs. Voices, hushed and solemn, giving instructions to other, quieter, voices.
The whispering had already begun, Emma realized; upstairs, in that room at the far end of the hall, where a body was being lifted from the bed and placed on a stretcher. Murmurings that would sweep out of the Seaton house and across Skeleton Road, rippling over the fields of wild grass, up and down the coast. There had been a suicide in Beal’s Landing; an old woman, who lived all alone in a crumbling house at the end of what the locals called Skeleton Road, had taken handful after handful of sleeping pills and pain killers. Offed herself right in her own home.
Unmoving, Emma was waiting for the phone to ring, yet it remained silent. She was the one who called Irene, Beam’s sister, because he could do no more than sit at the table and ‘what if’ himself into a stupor. Therefore, it was up to Emma to make the call, but she had only gotten the answering machine. It was, however, the first time she’d ever heard Irene’s voice. The first time Irene would hear of her.
Hello?…Yes, um, your mother’s dead.
But Irene wasn’t home, and she hadn’t called back. Well, Emma decided, I won’t call again. Beam could goddamn do it himself. She was worn-out from calling everyone with the news. There was the call to a doctor in town, who suggested she first try the Fort Bragg Police; they advised she call a paramedic. She called the paramedics, who gave her the number to the coroner. When she phoned her boss to say she wouldn’t be in that day, instead of condolences, he offered a list of people who might cover for her; before he had uttered the second name Emma hung up.
The voices, all so full of false sympathy and pity; Emma hated them. Bessie Daggett agreed to sit with Lyle, but not before she could get in a dig: “I thought Beam had gone up on Friday. Jerry is always at his mother’s place…Oh, Emma, that poor woman.”
The sympathy was neither for Beam, whose mother had taken her own life, nor for Emma, who, no doubt, would clean up this mess for her husband. The sorrow was only for Missus…for Barbara, Emma scowled. Insinuations masquerading as condolences; that ‘poor woman living alone out there…nobody caring enough to help her;’ Where were you, Emma, when she was swallowing those pills? Why weren’t you helping?
I wasn’t helping because this isn’t my mess; because I do everything. I work while he merely looks for work. I cook and clean and feed the baby while he hangs around on Charlie Bloom’s boat. I make dinner; he grabs a burger at Creighton’s Diner. He drinks in town; I wash and fold the laundry he pushes off the bed so he can take a nap. I do and do and do while he naps and drinks and fishes. Here I am again, doing everything because he won’t; because he can’t.
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Emma practically had to carry him inside the house after Beam ran home from Skeleton Road. She had watched him labor up the hill, sweating and moaning, saw him latch onto the gate like a drunken movie scarecrow, a straw man with too much hay at the midsection. Beam, wheezing and crying, rambling absurdly as Emma dragged him inside before the neighbors caught sight of his latest spectacle and assumed he was drunk again. Emma was certain he had wrecked the car; sure he’d done something stupid to screw up their lives yet again.
“She’s dead…Em! I shoulda gone up…Oh God!” He stammered and stuttered after she dragged him inside and settled him into a secondhand chair beside the buck stove. “My mother…she was…. Oh fuck! I shoulda gone…Oh fuck!”
“What are you talking about? Beam?” Emma looked at him in fear. This wasn’t drunk Beam; drunk Beam was stupid and sometimes mean. This Beam was terrified; and that scared her. Emma shook him by the shoulders. “Goddamn you, Beam! What have you done now?”
Holding him down, Emma remembered an old movie she’d seen on the late show one night when she couldn’t sleep, a black-and-white something-or-other, where a man had to slap an hysterical woman to calm her down. Emma, without taking even a second to think, raised her arm and backhanded her husband. Her knuckles grazed his cheek and her chewed and brittle fingernails ripped a piece of skin from his lip, but that slap didn’t quiet him. He merely sank further into the corduroy cushions, stained with beer and riddled with cigarette burns, blubbering on and on, his face in his hands. He ranted about dead bodies and clean houses full of flowers.
“What the fuck is going on, Beam?” Emma struck him once more; and felt good about it. Open palm, flat against the side of his head, right above the ear. “Damn you!”
His eyes, full of red, as bloodshot as if he had spent the evening at the Bait Shack—Missus Seaton called it a ‘fast house’—met her own eyes, feeling red, full of anger. His shoulders lurched as he wept, then collapsed as he fought for air. Breathing roughly, he spit saliva and snot all over the front of Emma’s blue jeans. With his left hand, he rubbed his face, turning crimson now with a bloody handprint in scarlet. The thumb of his right hand went to his lip, pushing the blood into his mouth. He licked it clean and stared up at Emma.
“My mother killed herself.”
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Her arms crossed, her right hand babying a cigarette, Emma stayed near the sink, unable to look at, or even think about, Beam. Plunging the cigarette butt into her mouth, she inhaled a lung full of nicotine and tar, then jerked it from her lips and spat out the fumes. She tapped the Salem 100 over the sink, adding more ash to the pile on the porcelain washbasin. Her eyes went back to the sea as she spoke, finally.
“I checked the machine at home. Your sister hasn’t returned my message.”
Behind her, sitting, rocking quietly, Beam grunted something like ‘who cares.’ An admission of defeat as he sat there, fingers entwined as he had done as a boy and been waiting for his mother to retrieve him from the Principal’s office. Beam rocked and rocked to shut out the sounds coming from his mother’s room. That incessant creaking, as men paced the floorboards; the wheels of the stretcher as it made its way down the long hall, dead silent on the rugs, then clattering on bare wood loud enough to wake the dead.
“Beam? Did you hear what I said? I want you to call your sister.”
“I, uh…” He held his eyes shut, but it didn’t help. Emma was still shouting at him and his mother was still dead upstairs. God, he thought, when am I gonna wake up? Yet, eyes opened or closed, this was no dream. He could still see his mother, lying on her bed, one eye open, staring at him, accusing. Her nightgown pulled up, exposing white flaccid legs frozen in a death crawl toward the phone; all the life drained out of them. He had seen the short dark hairs on her calves, the thin blue veins. The smell of puke.
It covered everything in that room, that smell, and now it was all over him. Beam gagged, remembering the vomit crusting on the side of her face, and how it stiffened the once-soft fabric of Grandmother Pierce’s quilt; the vomit from bourbon. Beam knew that odor well, and realized that no matter what happened to the house he would always think of it in the same breath as the Bait Shack bathroom. You could never scrub that scent off, no matter how hard you tried, or what you used; bleach didn’t work; Lysol, ammonia and Bon Ami were no good. The smell wormed its way into the walls and underneath the baseboards and then, like termites feasting on rotten timbers, it multiplied.
“Call your goddamned sister!” Emma howled and Beam, forgetting termites, for the moment, twisted his head like a mindless dog that couldn’t comprehend the command. He looked at his wife, wondering exactly when it was that Emma had begun to sound like his mother; the same tone, reedy thin but razor sharp, accusing him.
“I will, Em, just gimme—.”
“No! Do it now!” Emma shot a cold stare out the kitchen window and Beam caught a flash of the blackness in her eyes. “You need to call Harry, too. I didn’t see his number in the book by the phone so you’ll have to check upstairs.”
“I can’t go…up…” Beam wouldn’t go back into that room while his mother was in there. He could not climb those stairs without seeing that one open eye of hers, without smelling the puke and the lilies; the booze. Grabbing the seat cushions, he shook his head, no…no…no…until, without warning, Emma turned and flew at him. Her hand lashed out and clipped the back of his head. She’s getting too good at this, Beam thought. There was a flash of fingernail, red and chipped, bitten to the quick, when she wrapped her fingers around his arm. He moaned, “I can’t Em, not yet,” but she jerked him from the chair and dragged him through the dining room like one of Lyle’s stuffed bears. He crashed into the sideboard and knocked over a vase of roses before careening into the hallway just as the men were coming downstairs with the body.
Annoyed, as though caught waiting at a traffic light while an old man crossed the street, Emma tapped her foot and stood off to one side, making way for the men and the bulky stretcher. Beam, on the other hand, was horrified and mashed himself into the wall; a wall covered in forty-year-old paper that now reeked of 409 and vomit. The smell had begun its march down the stairs like an army of foot soldiers, stomping on every step and touching every surface. Soon, the whole house would stink; the entire town, too.
Unable to look at the men, much less the stretcher, Beam fixed his gaze across the foyer, into the parlor. But it was so clean, and filled with flowers—huge arrangements of stark white roses—that his eyes couldn’t stay in there. He glanced toward the ceiling; the afternoon sun was breaking through the rear windows and casting shadows along the hall. Sinewy silhouettes of two men struggling with a monstrous burden. These shadows crept down the wall closer to him, and Beam could hold back no longer. There was nowhere else to look and his eyes dropped onto the stretcher. And his mother.
The body was inside a sturdy plastic sack textured like a Ziploc freezer bag; only this one was black, and so coarsely grained it resembled snakeskin. His mind conjured up an enormous anaconda slithering into the house and swallowing his mother whole. He thought of the two men as rangers from some wildlife park who had come to wrestle the beast from the house. Actually, he also knew, that wasn’t far from the truth.
The black bag passed by and he saw her face pressed against the stiff vinyl; a death mask in plastic. The hollows of her eyes; the point where the fabric flexed along her nose; the slight bump—the Seaton bump—still evident. Another indentation—her mouth; an unsmiling grimace ready to snap. Encased in oily snakeskin, her face appeared eternally petrified in a scream.
“GET HER OUT OF HERE!” Beam shrieked. “GET HER THE FUCK OUT OF THIS HOUSE!”
This time Emma was the horrified one.
____________________________
A beer in one hand, a bottle of Mother’s favorite—Jack Daniels—in the other, Beam was back at the table the moment the corner’s van pulled away from the house. His mother had been taken…somewhere…far away where her voice couldn’t reach him and, with two bottles, bourbon and beer, he sat at the table exactly as she’d done over the years.
Gulping from one, then the other….left, right, left, right…Beam listened to Emma move around upstairs, in his mother’s old room. Bureau drawers opened, fingers rifled through them, and then she slammed them shut, unable to find what she needed. He heard her pace around the room, stopping beside the bed, papers rustling and paperback books dropped to the floor. His mother had boxes of two-dollar novels all over the house.
Emma’s curses plunged downstairs as the armoire door crashed closed. Windows were raised and lowered….bam, bam, bam…and the he heard water running in the sink. He imagined she was trying to scrub the stench from her hands. Too late, Em. Once it’s in the skin, it’ll never come off.
The copper pipes wheezing behind the plaster, Beam watched the pictures on the wall tremble and shake as Emma drained the bathroom sink. He heard one more slam, and then Emma was on the stairs, her footfalls weary, yet still angry. There was a rush of cold air, obviously brought down from Mother’s room, as she thrust open the kitchen door, and then, without a sound from her, something flat crisscrossed the room and knocked over his beer. The golden liquid pooled into a puddle on the green-and-white-checkered tablecloth, and his attacker, a small leatherette address book with three gold letters embossed on the cover, lay near his elbow.
“It’s under ‘H’ for Harry.” Emma said as she marched away from him. “I’m going to get Lyle. I can only handle one child at a time.”
Nightfall dulled the room as the liquor did his senses, and before long Beam couldn’t remember what color the kitchen had been; twilight faded the jade green cabinets and walls to a dim gray while the white checks on the tablecloth were a dingy cream. Bad milk, he thought, drinking bourbon straight from the bottle—all the beer either drunk or spilled—his fingers drew wide arcs in the pool of Budweiser on the table and every so often he would absentmindedly lick them clean; flat beer tastes like death.
With nothing left to do, and nowhere he needed to be, Beam started thumbing through his mother’s address book. Emma was right; Harry’s phone number was under ‘H’ though it was a name and number only; someone had scribbled out the street address leaving a dark blue scab of ink on the page. He must’ve moved, Beam thought, noticing it was a San Francisco number. It suddenly dawned on him that he hadn’t ever known where Harry ended up after leaving The Landing…what? Fifteen years ago? At least.
His own brother, his big brother, and Beam knew nothing about his life…fourteen years? Maybe. It had been longer for Renny; she disappeared the night she graduated from high school. Still, he knew something of her life; when Mother had a bit of the Jack in her, she would tell stories of Renny, marrying a teacher, or trucker, or somebody, in Eureka the summer she left home; Barbara smiled easily, a bit too easily, as she told him the marriage hadn’t lasted but a few months. Beam had vague recollections of Christmas cards sent from up near Seattle—and something about a second marriage that didn’t last—with Renny’s named scrawled across the bottom. Although Mother used to hang Christmas cards along the mantel, she left Renny’s in the silverware drawer.
These days, his mother had told him, Renny lived down in Sacramento. In a large house in what was called the Fabulous Forties; ritzy neighborhood from the sounds of it. Renny had married once again—third time’s the charm, Mother’d said with a wicked gin grin—to an executive at Apple or IBM. There were a couple of children, a boy and girl, he thought; Beam had seen pictures of them in their school uniforms, all smiles. He was an uncle and didn’t even know their names.
That was all Beam knew of Renny, and most of that came from his mother when she was drunk, so he didn’t know what to believe. He had no idea whether Renny knew about Lyle, though he realized that she knew now, from that phone call, about Emma. How had this happened to them? Why was Renny able to run off to some place called The Fabulous Forties while he could only manage to get seven miles away from their mother?
And what about Harry? Beam must’ve been eleven or so when Harry had taken their father’s duffel bag from the attic and left town. There were memories of listening through a door while Harry and Mother argued; he remembered Mother slapped him several times, and then Harry appeared in the hallway. Beam stood at the head of the stairs, baseball glove in hand; he wanted Harry to throw the ball around the yard, but Harry never played catch. That day, Harry looked especially sad, as he slung the green canvas bag over his shoulder and vanished down the stairs. He got on a bus in Fort Bragg and never came home again.
Beam never knew what happened to Harry because one day, surprisingly, his mother quit talking about him. She still received his letters—Beam had seen them on the table—and Harry sent birthday and Christmas cards, Mother’s Day flowers. But Barbara never opened Harry’s letters and whenever he sent flowers, she threw them into the sea.
About five years ago, she called Beam in the middle of the night and begged him to come to The Landing. Groggy-eyed and barely sober, Barbara asked him to remove Harry’s things, though she didn’t want them boxed and packaged and stored in the attic like dad and Renny’s. Barbara wanted Harry’s belongings taken outside and burned; his clothes, books and sketchpads, records. Photographs of Harry vanished from the house, and Beam realized his mother wasn’t some pitiful movie drunk who scissored her son from the family pictures. More simply, she threw every snapshot of Harry, black-and-white and color, into the fire, letting the edges curl and blacken in the heat.
Well, Beam thought, sneering lazily, Harry was probably married with a few kids of his own and living in some lavish neighborhood in San Francisco. Nursing his bourbon in his mother’s cold gray kitchen, Beam wondered what Harry had done to deserve Barbara’s wrath. Had he left his wife and family, too? Was that why she scratched out the address? Perhaps that was why Mother never told stories of Harry and his life, and why there were no pictures of Harry’s children. Simply enough, Barbara never mentioned Harry again.
On those rare occasions when she did reminisce about family, Barbara would only say, ‘you kids’ or ‘you and Renny.’ She never uttered a word about Harry. His number wasn’t even in the book by the phone; she tucked it away in a drawer somewhere as if she had no use for it. Until today.
With no stars out that night, and the moon barely a sliver, the kitchen grew darker by the minute. Still Beam sat in his chair. He wondered if maybe Harry had died, but that couldn’t be; his telephone number was in Barbara’ address book; her new address book. Emma had given it to Barbara just this past Christmas, with her initials—B.J.S.—embossed in gold on the front. Renny’s number was inside, so Harry’s number had to be good. It was in Mother’s new book.
Beam pushed himself from the table and stood up…too fast, tumbling backwards. “Whoa!” He muttered, “Easy on the sauce there Beamer.” He remained against the wall until the kitchen settled down and the walls stood straight again, until the floor stopped swelling beneath his feet like the ocean tide. Closing his eyes, he rested his head against the cool plaster and let out a huge rush of fowl smelling air. He slowly stood upright, unsteady, using one hand on the wall to guide himself to the phone.
Reaching for the receiver, however, he stopped cold; there was another surprise for him. He stared at the phone, resting in the nook as always. Even in the murkiness of the kitchen, he could see it gleaming like a funhouse mirror; with not one speck of gook; no smudges on the numbers, no fingerprints anywhere. His face showed in every angle and plane; elongated on the receiver and squashed flat in the center of the dial. She had really cleaned the house before going…before…Make the call, he thought. Stop thinking.
Settling in against the wall, Beam picked up the phone, nestling it between his neck and ear as he double-checked the number. Under ‘H’ for Harry. He spun the dial eleven times; one…the area code…then the number. When he heard a faint ringing in his ear, he tossed the book on the table.
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“How come you don’t play baseball, Harry?”
“I dunno. I guess I don’t like it much.”
Jimmy nodded to himself even though he didn’t understand how any boy could not like baseball. Throwing the ball high into the air, he forgot Harry for the moment and raced across the yard just as the ball came down; he caught it smoothly, the supple leather glove folded around the battered baseball like a second skin.
Harry sat on the porch, reading like he always did when he watched Jimmy after school. He would sit outside, reading, until Mother woke up and then he would disappear upstairs, lock his bedroom door and be alone. Free from the looks his mother gave him; far away from questions like ‘Why don’t you play ball?’
“They have a team at your school.” Jimmy was saying. He had no idea how annoying it was talking to someone who was reading. Jimmy thought books were dumb; why read when you could be outside playing ball or down at the beach throwing rocks at the seagulls. “My friend Danny’s brother is on it. Why dontcha play on that team?”
“I said I don’t know, Jimmy!” Harry snapped. “Why don’t you leave me alone until Mother gets up.”
“Danny’s brother says it’s cuz you’re a sissy.”
Harry’s face reddened, though he kept his eyes in his book.
“Are you Harry? Are you a sissy?”
“Shut your mouth Jimmy….”
“Or what?” He said snidely, knowing he’d struck a nerve; even at six-years-old, he could tell. His lower lip shot out in an artificial pout. “What’re you gonna do Harry? Slap me? Ooh, I’m so scared of the sissy.”
Harry slammed the book shut and dropped it off the porch. Trying so hard not to let Jimmy get the best of him, he ran his hands down his thighs, grabbing the thick denim of his jeans and bunching the fabric between his fingers. It was bad enough that school was torture, a dirty look or a shove when he least expected it, but now his own brother was calling him names. Sissy.
Why can’t I be like everyone else? Harry thought. Why can’t I play baseball or climb the rope in gym? Another torture. ‘What’s the matter, Seaton? Too hard for you, faggot?’ Why can’t everyone just leave me alone?
“Come on sissy,” Jimmy taunted. “Play ball, sissy.”
That was enough. Harry scooped up a handful of pebbles from alongside the porch and threw them at his little brother. His aim was off and the stones scattered all over the front yard, landing everywhere but near Jimmy. Perfect fag throw. He heard the kids from school in his head, although he tried convincing himself that he deliberately missed Jimmy, that he didn’t want to hurt his brother; but that wasn’t the truth. He wanted to hurt Jimmy; he wanted them all to hurt like he hurt. Every last one.
“Aw, man!” Jimmy laughed viciously and ran around the yard like a rabid dog, howling. “You even throw like a girl. Danny was right! You are a sissy! SISSY!”
Squirming, Harry wanted to tell Jimmy to fuck off. Shove it up your ass, you little fucker! But Jimmy would tell Mother as soon as she awoke and Harry felt his skin burn from the slap she would give him for cursing. So, rather than call Jimmy names—which might make him feel better, for a moment—Harry grabbed his book and stood up; he raced through the front door, pushing it so hard it crashed into the oak coat tree. Even from the front yard, Jimmy heard Harry’s bedroom door slam; it was so loud it might have disturbed the neighbors, had there been any neighbors that far down Skeleton Road. Jimmy stayed outside, throwing the ball and shouting,
“Sissy. Sissy. Sissy. Sissy….”
At the window, the big one facing the sea, Harry pressed his forehead to the cool glass and listened to his brother’s hissing. He felt like a foreigner in that house.
_____________________________
“Hello?”
“Yeah, um…” Beam began, the words somewhat garbled and thick. “Yeah…um. Harry?”
“He isn’t home right now.”
A man’s voice. Beam assumed it would be Harry on the other end of the line, but this wasn’t his brother; this was another man’s voice. Did he have the right number? Beam wished he hadn’t thrown the book back on the table; he needed to recheck the number.
“Is there something I can do for you?”
“Yeah…um. I’m looking for Harry Seaton.”
“You said that already.” The man said. “I told you he isn’t home yet. Do you want to leave a message?”
“Yeah.” Beam mumbled. He expected Harry to answer; he had an entire story all worked out, he practiced and everything. Harry? Mom’s dead, but it isn’t my fault. I had to take the baby to the hosp—
“Are you still there?” The man asked.
“Yeah…I’m here. Look, this is Harry’s brother—“
“Jimmy? Jimmy Seaton?”
How did this man know his name? And what was he doing answering Harry’s phone?
“Our mother’s dead.”
“Oh God.” The voice sounded truly sorry. “Jimmy. I’m…I’m waiting for Harry now. He has a late class on Monday and we were…supposed to have dinner with…never mind. Is there…does he have your number?”
He was sorry. This stranger with the pleasant voice who knew his name. He sounded as if he might cry. And yet, his mother hadn’t died; Harry’s mother had swallowed those pills. Why was he so sorry and why was he answering Harry’s phone? He’d said Harry had a late class and they were having…. All at once Beam knew this man.
He understood why his mother stopped mentioning Harry’s name. Why it was suddenly only Beam and Renny. He had all the answers; why there were no pictures of wives and kids; or houses in the Fabulous Forties. Harry was living with a man. A man who was waiting for him because he had a—
“Hello?” Harry’s ‘friend’ said.
“He can call my mother’s house. If I’m not here he can try…” Beam rattled off the phone number as he pictured Harry coming home, flouncing in from his late class. He imagined his friend telling Harry about his mother. All those years ago Beam was right, though he had never wanted to be. He never wanted those stories to be true.
Sissy. My brother says your brother is a sissy because he skips gym, because he won’t dress down. He’s afraid to change clothes in the locker room. He can’t climb the rope. He can’t throw a football. He runs like a girl. He reads and eats lunch alone. Sissy. Beam had called Harry that for years, never knowing. Harry was a sissy with a man waiting for him; never knowing that was why Harry ran away.
“I’m really sorry, Jimmy,” the man said again, but Beam had already set the phone down in its bright shiny cradle.
