Lies & Ugliness Read online

  First we took in the sights, all the points of the compass, a panorama of new horizons from our black tar mesa. We saw buildings we never knew existed, people we could’ve spit on. I was a king and Paulie a prince, and the world below there to serve us.

  Inside, outside, on grass, on asphalt — we’d done it a hundred times, your basic dodgeball game for two. One point scored for a hit, none for a miss, one point lost if the other guy caught your throw. I usually tried to make it sting. As big brother, it was my right.

  Soon, after a fling when I banged my knee against a steam vent, I looked back up and didn’t see Paulie anywhere, gone from the spot where he’d been seconds ago, and the first thing I thought of was school. We’d been studying big birds and it was as though some giant condor had swooped down and carried him off and I’d missed the whole thing, and for the first few minutes I think that was what I decided to believe, it happened exactly that way, except the condor had dropped him.

  Our neighbors were very kind, and brought lots of food, and some of the women made offers to babysit, and the day before the funeral there came a knock at the door and when my dad opened it there stood Mr. Cavanaugh, without his coat and hat, a crutch under one arm and a plate in the other hand.

  It was the first time I’d really seen his face, a creased old thing you knew had been lived in for a long time, but even so, it didn’t droop, just settled there snugly across his skull under a bristly thatch of iron gray hair.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” he said, and left the plate in my dad’s hands, and thumped softly down the stairs.

  My breath froze as we uncovered the plate, but it only held cookies — not store-bought, either. I ate one and it was warm from the oven, the chocolate chips half-gooey, and ate another because if they were poison I wanted to be the first to go. I deserved it.

  But I didn’t even get sick. So he did know how to make pretty good cookies, and that night when I heard him coughing down there, for the first time I felt sorry for him.

  It was toward the end of the school year when a longstanding feud boiled over and sent me home bloody. The kid with the fists had taken a quick dislike not long after we’d moved and I started in this different school with the textbooks that looked as old as Mr. Cavanaugh’s wallpaper. He hated me mainly for smarts but had never really acted on it until now. It wasn’t fair, because if he knew how my assignments were being graded now, instead of months ago, he’d see we weren’t really that far apart anymore, that he was beating on an undeserving innocent, because those higher grades had been earned by some other me that we’d both lost track of.

  If on my way home I’d been paying attention maybe I would’ve noticed a hand pulling back from Mr. Cavanaugh’s curtains, but I wasn’t, and didn’t. I trudged through the vestibule and was two stairs up before seeing him standing in his doorway.

  “Let’s do your poor mother a favor, why don’t we?” he said. “Let’s not let her see you looking this way.”

  By now I was satisfied he wasn’t a cannibal, plus I’d been losing weight so there was less of me anyway. I’d already braved the worst a few weeks ago, committing the once-unthinkable act of knocking on his door after my mom had sent me down to return his plate with a thank-you note.

  So I went in, into that uncharted territory of his home, and it wasn’t as alien as I’d thought, just a few musty old smells was all. After I washed away the blood and grime in his bathroom, Mr. Cavanaugh inspected my face and elbows and a knee that had gotten it bad through a fresh hole ground out of the denim. He doctored me with cotton balls sprayed with Bactine. It stung, but the fresh clean medicine smell reminded me of bug bites and summers past.

  “Well, that’s about the best we can do,” he said, and I could tell he’d been hoping for better. “We’re not going to be able to hide those scrapes unless we paint you.”

  I didn’t say anything, just looked at the bathroom floor.

  “The other fella,” he said, graver now. “Did you get a few licks in on him too?”

  I shrugged, because everything I’d done had seemed to bounce off. Then it all came back at me, the fists and how much they’d hurt and the helpless rage. I started to fight the tears and lost that one too. Mr. Cavanaugh pretended not to notice.

  “I was going to pour you some lemonade,” he said. “Probably take me a few minutes to make it.”

  He left me alone until I’d gotten it all out of my system and dried my eyes. When I came out of the bathroom he was standing at the kitchen sink, his spoon clinking inside the pitcher as his arm moved in slow circles.

  “There’s good timing,” he said, “it’s just now ready,” and poured. I drank it gratefully, the coldest, sweetest drink I’d ever tasted, and carried the glass into the main room where I was drawn to what I’d deliberately been ignoring until now.

  The jars.

  I was finally seeing them up close, racks and racks of them in no order I could make out, clear glass with their pale murk and dusty lids and jaundiced labels, nothing here the sort of thing you’d ever dream of eating, although some jars held bits of things that once might not have been shy about eating you, instead.

  In one of the largest lay the inert green coils of a snake with two heads branching from the same body. The faded ink on the label read Corbin, KY with a date over twenty years before. Even older was the tiny pig’s head in another. Older still, a pale gray mass of spongy, fibrous tissue crowned with a cup as big around as a half-dollar. When I picked it up a cloud of particles stirred, like I’d shaken a snow globe but snow globes never made me queasy.

  “That’s a sucker off an octopus tentacle, washed up on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. That’s in Florida.”

  “The whole octopus?” I said.

  “Nah. Just the tentacle. Probably got bit off by a whale, way out to sea. Twenty feet of it if there was an inch.”

  Thrilled and horrified by the idea of actual monsters, rising from the watery dark undertow of my imagination, I continued the search, more eager with each new discovery sunk in preservative or rattling loose and dry.

  Eyeballs and sharks’ teeth, backbones and claws, arrowheads and seashells. A centipede as long as a wiener. A huge slug the same bright yellow as a banana. A scorpion, and the brain from a monkey’s skull. And most pitiful of all, a tiny, hairless kitten with a fifth stunted leg jutting from its shoulder, and a ragged bite chewed from the back of its neck.

  “Its mother did that,” he explained. “Sometimes a mother cat’ll do that when something’s wrong.”

  “Why?” I whispered. “Doesn’t she love it?”

  “I guess she loves it too much to let it grow up the way it is. It’s a mercy to them, in the long run.”

  This bothered me greatly, because I felt sorry for the tiny newborn, never having a chance, never even seeing anything of its world because it had been killed before its eyes opened, and then I couldn’t help but think of Paulie, and my part in that. I might as well have bitten away the back of his neck myself.

  Mr. Cavanaugh said, “Maybe you shouldn’t see these today.”

  Oh, but I had to. They’d tantalized me for so long that I couldn’t turn loose of them now. I owed it to Paulie to see them all, no matter if they repelled me as much as they drew me closer.

  While most had labels, not all of them did, and for some jars labels weren’t necessary to know what they held, like the grinning monkey’s skull that had donated the brain, but for others I had no clue. Several held glazed, dried-out curls of what looked like jerky, and others, what might’ve been the same thing only fresher, in thick, irregular shapes. Others held bugs, with lots of legs, but I couldn’t have said what kind, and neither could he.

  “This whole collection,” he said, “I’ve been accumulating it for more than forty years. I guess that’s even longer than your folks have been around.”

  I nodded, but didn’t ask why he’d been doing it because this never occurred to me. Why is a question for five-year-olds. When you’re ten you�
�re focused on why not. It seemed perfectly natural to me that somebody, somewhere, would collect things like this and I just happened to live upstairs from one of them. I was lucky.

  When I was ten I didn’t know anything of statistics. My world wasn’t big enough to need them. But now I know that more than half the couples that lose a young child split up eventually. I think I can even understand how it happens.

  Paulie was gone and nothing was the same. Before, everything had been so balanced, each of us like one of the five points of a star that connects with every other point so that the whole structure is enclosed and protected. Now Paulie was gone and everything felt weak and exposed and out of balance.

  Sometimes when nobody suspected — and they never did because in my own way I’d become invisible — I would watch my mom and dad and the way each of them acted around Lindsey. My little sister had learned to walk and was up to talking now, but they behaved as though she’d regressed and needed help again.

  My mom would follow her around constantly, scarcely letting Lindsey out of her sight, and when she’d lose track of her for a minute, rush to scoop her up and clutch her tight and tell her to never ever run off like that again. My dad would follow her with his eyes, instead, and whenever Lindsey’s short legs took her near the edge of a table, for instance, his breath would lock in his throat and his hand might slowly crumple the outer columns of the want-ads he was reading and he wouldn’t even realize it.

  I came home one day to find the floor covered with sawdust, because he’d taken a file and rounded off the corners of all the tables, and now was smoothing them with sandpaper. After he tried to restain the raw wood and couldn’t get it to match, he and my mom got into a fight that lasted a week, because she said he was ruining the last nice things we had, and he said he’d choose that over a daughter with a split skull any day, and my mom accused him of accusing her of not being able to protect her own daughter.

  They’d say just about anything in front of me now.

  Because I was invisible and they didn’t notice whether I was around or not, I figured I might as well not be. I roamed some, but more often stuck close to the building, hanging out on the fire escape, or with Mr. Cavanaugh.

  He didn’t seem to mind. I’d come in and gravitate toward the jars and ask “Anything new?”, and he’d chuckle to himself and tell me he was too old to track down anything very interesting. Then he’d hold up a jar in his hand, examining what was inside, and I’d pretend to, but examine him instead, his gray hair and creases, and think, People look like this someday. Dad will look like this.

  I liked being there, because Mr. Cavanaugh really did see me instead of through me, but didn’t expect anything. We didn’t have to talk but if I wanted to, then he would.

  “Did you ever kill anything to put it in a jar?” I asked one summer afternoon.

  First he told me he didn’t remember, then mused it over and said, “The starfish. I think that was probably alive when I put it in. But it would’ve died anyway.”

  “Did you ever have to throw any away? Like, you had something for a long time but then it fell all apart, so you had to throw it away because you couldn’t even tell what it was anymore?”

  He nodded immediately. “Two years ago I dropped my jellyfish. It wasn’t any good after. Just made a big sonofabitching mess.”

  Then one day I got around to asking him if he’d ever killed anything that he didn’t put in a jar.

  “Hunting or fishing, you mean?” he said, and I nodded, then said, “Or anything bigger, like … people,” and he stared at me.

  “Why do you want to know a thing like that?” he asked.

  So I tried to tell him without really telling him, wondering how it had affected him, if he still had the same friends after, or if they didn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore. He watched the floor for a long time, then told me he had and how long ago it had been, and I said, “Oh, okay, World War Two, I’ve heard of that,” and I knew it wasn’t the same thing at all.

  What I really wanted to ask was if he ever thought of killing somebody, but I could tell he didn’t want to talk about this, and even at ten I couldn’t blame him. I felt awful about it myself.

  It wasn’t that I wanted to hurt Lindsey, as much as I’d been wishing she’d never been born at all. I’d look at cleaners and bug sprays in the cabinet and wonder what they’d do to her. I knew how wrong it was to think it, so I’d shut myself in my room and punch myself on the shoulder until it got red and sore, and pretty soon it would be bruised, and for the next few days if I still needed to punish myself, all I’d have to do was press it hard.

  The more I visited Mr. Cavanaugh, the more I got used to his coughing on the days he had his attacks, and it wouldn’t scare me so much as make me wince at the power of it. That had to hurt.

  On the worst days he wouldn’t even let me stay. He’d hobble into the kitchen and grab a dishtowel and clamp it over his mouth. His face would turn deep red and he’d choke out what were almost words, furiously waving at me and then at the door, once grabbing me by my sore shoulder and pulling me there himself when I wasn’t moving fast enough. The door would slam behind me and I’d hear the click of the lock, then his gruesome hacking would fade away as he went lurching back toward the bathroom.

  As the months passed from summer to autumn to winter again, and my parents got worse and Mr. Cavanaugh got no better, I began to wonder if it was my imagination that his collection of jars was growing even though he always denied it. Every week or two I was sure there were more, although I couldn’t find anything I didn’t already recognize even if I didn’t know what everything was.

  I decided to test this theory by finding out how many there actually were, and one day after school I counted them. I’d made sure he was distracted first, telling him we should listen to his stereo. He had these records of organ music he liked, and I did too. They weren’t anything like hymns; they didn’t make me think of church at all. Low notes swirled like dark clouds, higher notes stabbing in and out like cries for help. Mr. Cavanaugh would lose himself in their desperate melancholy pace, the rhythm like a train he was riding far away from our tenement.

  That first time I counted one hundred and sixty-two jars. A week later it was the same, and the week after that the count went up by one but I allowed I might’ve been wrong before. But by the time I counted one hundred and sixty-six, I knew I couldn’t be off by that many.

  So I had him fix hot cocoa for us, and while he was busy at the stove I’d methodically lift up each jar. Anything with a clean circle beneath it had to have been there a long time, while any jar sitting on top of dust was probably new.

  Slowly, then, while his spoon clinked in the pan, the pattern began to emerge.

  None of the newer jars held anything I recognized. None were labeled with contents or location, but some of the old dusty ones that had similarly puzzling contents had been dated. The oldest of these — the ones that had reminded me of beef jerky — dated back nearly thirty years.

  The newer jars held fresher specimens, sometimes floating in preservative, sometimes not. The textures may have looked the same but their colors varied, pinks and grays, and before I knew it I’d slipped one of the new jars into the pocket of my winter coat. I knew he’d never miss it because there were a lot of them up there.

  “Do you like marshmallows?” he called out, and I said that I did, feeling guilty for tricking him like this.

  But there were so many secrets in our family now, it was a relief to concern myself with somebody else’s for a change.

  The main things I remember my parents telling me during those months were prohibitions. I was never to discuss family matters with anyone, whether friend or relative or stranger. Never to take Lindsey up on the roof. Never to change Paulie’s side of the room we’d shared.

  After all this time it remained the way it was the day he’d fallen, like a museum exhibit that I was supposed to live in but not touch. The worst of it was the stuf
fed clown that sat against the pillow of his smelly, half-made bed and leered at me all night long, holding its fat hands wide as though scheming to wrap them around my throat. I didn’t dare drape a shirt over it at bedtime because I’d done this once and my mom had me write five hundred times that my clothes didn’t belong on Paulie’s furniture. She had a snapshot of the room in her mind. Any deviation caught her eye.

  Sometimes I thought I could feel Paulie there, still, maybe because by holding onto the room we were holding onto him as well. Maybe this was why I’d stolen the jar. I’d brought it into the room and hidden it beneath my bed and that first night set it on the table between the two. A present, or a trophy. That I wasn’t sure what it held made it that much more valuable. We didn’t have to be afraid of it anymore, or the old man I’d taken it from.

  Late that night, after the light was out and I’d quit trying to fall asleep, I heard a tiny tapping noise, totally without rhythm. First I thought a mouse was in the room with me, or at the window, but the more I listened, the closer it seemed. I turned to the jar, and in the cold moonlight coming through the window saw that the meaty little thing inside was clinging near the top, making a noise against the metal lid. It would flex like a slug, thickening in the middle and pushing itself forward as it slid around the rim of the jar, periodically testing for weak spots.

  I watched it awhile, but when I turned on the lamp it froze, then let go and fell to the bottom with a plop. It lay there, playing possum. I stared at it, daring it to move, but before it did, a voice from the hall yelled for me to turn out my light unless something was wrong. I left my fingers on the switch for a minute, because I couldn’t make up my mind whether anything was wrong or not, then did as I was told because that was easiest.

  I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: It’s only in our fears and dreams that anyone truly comes to know the real anyone else. In that spirit I can say I knew Mr. Cavanaugh better than anyone, because he feared death. Often, the things we’ve been and things we’ve done leave a burden inside us, and when death becomes as real as an old friend planning a visit, we dream of more days to pay for the past a little at a time instead of all at once.