Hieroglyphics Page 9

  Frank and Lillian Wishart. 524 Ivy Trail. She could ring their doorbell. She could show up and surprise them.

  “He better be careful back there,” Harvey had whispered that day, shaking his head and holding on to her leg; he was wearing a beach towel around his shoulders and holding the lid to the trash can and a broom handle. “That’s where some of the bad ones stay.”

  The camera was aimed away from the birds and at the front door, but Harvey said now it has Vaseline all over it and is aimed at the ground. “The ghost,” Harvey had said yesterday, but she knows Harvey could have done it himself, because she has caught him playing with Vaseline, putting thick coats of the stuff on a vase and one of his Hot Wheels, and though she knows she needs to talk to him about it, there has just been too much to think and worry about. Harvey says that someday he will have a great big mustache and drive a convertible, except when he goes to Munchkinland, and then he will put the top up and lock the doors. Every day, he pretends to be a masked bandit or a surgeon, or he drapes his lip with a big fake mustache and begs her to let him wear it to camp. She taught him the Frito Bandito song, a song she associates with her mother and a time in her life when she thought things might be better than they were. Harvey loves that song and sings it over and over. Brent once asked her how she had all of that in her head, and why, and she wanted to explain the many, many mantras she’d had before she knew there was such a thing, the many repetitions and words and phrases and songs that allow her to disappear, like climbing onto a raft on the swells of the ocean and simply rolling and rolling and rolling. Not long ago, she heard a circuit judge say “the weight of fate,” and the words got stuck in her head for days after. The weight of fate, the weight of fate.

  “It’s okay, Harvey,” she says a million times a day, and she tries to keep him from calling Jason. “Jason is in college now.”

  “He said I can always call him for any reason at any time.”

  “Let him enjoy summer, okay? We will, too.”

  “I need to tell him we have a ghost.” He was wearing a thick black handlebar mustache that made it hard not to laugh, or cry—Harvey often left her feeling she didn’t know which to do.

  “What do you mean, we have a ghost?” She asked the question, her own skin prickling with the knowledge that she hadn’t been dreaming the sounds and visions after all.

  “I see it at night.”

  Harvey is obsessed with all the local scary or weird stories his older brother and kids at school have told him—and doesn’t every town have them?—the underlying message always, It could happen to you. There’s the Beast of Bladenboro and the Glencoe Munchkins and the maniac under the bed. “It was all just terrible,” Harvey has said about the Beast of Bladenboro, sounding more like someone sixty years his senior. “It was awful, and it kilt everybody’s dogs so there wouldn’t be nobody to bark when it come after people.” They had had this conversation more times than Shelley can count—Harvey worried that the Beast of Bladenboro would try to kill Peggy, and that it might be the maniac under the bed, because both of them killed dogs. Every time Shelley told him that the Beast of Bladenboro had attacked before she was born and had not attacked since, and that it was probably a wild bobcat or something, and the maniac under the bed is completely made up to scare people, and the Glencoe Munchkins were poor children born with terrible deformities who couldn’t walk and were left to sit on the porch all day while their parents worked and people teased and mistreated them. “Something we would never do,” she stressed. She told him this, and his hand instinctively went up to his mouth and lingered there. “It’s not a scary story,” she said. “It’s a heartbreaking story. It’s a story about people being cruel and hateful, and we have more than enough of those.”

  “People teased the Munchkins. They threw rocks at them,” Harvey whispered, his own hand curled into a fist. “And I can’t stop thinking about them.”

  “It’s okay, Harvey!” Shelley tries to lead him to other topics he is interested in that will make him laugh. He loves tiny horses and Ninja Turtles and knock-knock jokes. Orange you glad I didn’t say banana again? Yes, yes, indeed I am. Harvey is fascinated by animal droppings and has been since Brent took him to some nature hike in the mountains, where they met someone known as the Scatman Explorer who had a booth with all kinds of samples; Harvey came home and surprised her with some earrings made of petrified raccoon turds and porcupine quills; Roadkill Jewelry, it was called, and on the card there was a photo of the cute little woman named Virginia who had made them. Harvey was barely four but still talks about it all like it was yesterday.

  The teacher advised her that he needed a lot of attention—even though he gets attention; he does. Shelley pays him a lot of attention, but she is also exhausted, and who wouldn’t be? She blames exhaustion—worry and exhaustion—for her restless sleeping. She is on her own, and her son is obsessed with things as sweet as My Little Pony and Einstein, the tiniest horse in the world, and as dark and gross as Lizzie Borden and the Menendez brothers, and she never knows which of it he will be focused on. She could throttle Jason for introducing Harvey to all those scary, morbid things, but she’s worried about Jason, too, his own sense of self so fragile. Those are the ones who get in trouble. She has typed or spoken that a million times. A million times, she has heard a judge say something like that. Those are the ones who get in trouble. She’s worried about her own life and whatever truth is ahead, and she’s worried about the outcome of the trial that has the whole town tuned in and waiting. Who wouldn’t be worried? Who wouldn’t feel frightened?

  And will she lose her job? Her brain is firing odd things at odd times, unable to locate the right information when she needs it. Her brain is about to short out, and of course it is. She really needs this job, so much of life so uncertain. There are so many things to worry about and think about right now, she has to write her to-do lists in shorthand. And it was such a simple mistake when at the end of a very long and disturbing day of testimony, she also submitted her grocery list and her made-up little version of the trial, along with her additional shorthand notes for the day. Oh God. For twenty-four hours now, she has swung between, Oh God, how did you do that? And Oh God, of course you did that. Who wouldn’t be making mistakes and dropping balls all over the place with all that you have on your shoulders? “The real report is all there, too, every word of it,” she said. “I am the fastest in the area. Look it up. I average two hundred fifty words per minute, but I have on several occasions done three hundred. The world record is three sixty. I’m good. I’m very good. I made a mistake. Please.”

  The judge will get back to her, they said. There will be questions. They might, for instance, ask how she could both work on things like a grocery list and a made-up account of the trial of a horrible asshole while also transcribing everything that is being said on the stand, and yet she can do that, she can! Like her mind is quick to seize upon words that get used and overused; she notices when the same word is repeated, and she notices when a word becomes popular all of a sudden, like cohort, and purchase—as in “traction,” and not “to buy”—words pulled from the back of the closet and then used and used, gaining purchase as they get used to death by the cohorts far and wide. She has always been able to do that. It’s her gift to be able to think these things, connect the dots, while also working and taking notes on everything else, but clearly the machinery has been screwing up lately. She is alone in the world, and her son is driving her crazy, and she would almost swear that someone did pass by the doorway of her bedroom last night, Harvey asleep for once, Peggy too deaf to hear. Of course she made a mistake; she’s human after all. She’s just a human, a “human bean,” as Harvey always says. She is a human who made an innocent mistake. Hasn’t everyone made mistakes? Hasn’t everyone needed to look away from something that was just too hard to see?

  Harvey

  Before he left for school, Jason decorated Harvey’s bedroom ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars and markers and Harvey couldn
’t wait for it to get dark so he could look up and see. Jason had written Little Dude right over the closet door and then wrote both of their names in Klingon just above the bed. Harvey’s name in Klingon looks like PEFHr and then a bad circle, all done by somebody who can’t do letters good. They do that to trick people. That’s what Jason says. Jason says his J looks like pie, but not the kind you eat, a kind Harvey will learn about someday if he studies and can pay attention to numbers. Jason loves numbers and told a joke to their mom where he said, “Pie aren’t square. Pie are round.” And Harvey laughed too, even though he didn’t get it, because when they all laughed together he felt like he could fly. Jason said if you know numbers you can do just about anything and he made Harvey count out loud when he stuck stars to the ceiling. They did constellations of all of Harvey’s favorite things: doughnuts and turtles, including that one from China that is four hundred years old the camp teacher told about. Sometimes, Harvey pretends that he is there visiting that turtle and when he puts his hand to the glass it swims right up and stays as long as Harvey stays, and people say things like: Look at that smart boy. He knows all about numbers and can speak Klingon, and turtles all over the world love and follow him. He’s the turtle whisperer.

  The best part is what Jason called the Turdy Way. He held Harvey up on his shoulders and let him draw in all the different turds he learned from the trail where his daddy took him hiking one time. He used the sticky stars and the glow-in-the-dark marker and only he knew which was which: coyote and bear and squirrel and rabbit, fox and raccoon and possum. “Want me to do a people one?” he asked and Jason said yes and then they both laughed so hard that Jason had to lean over and flip Harvey out onto the bed, which was a game they liked to play. Instead of a moon, they did a great big mustache. A handlebar, Jason said, not a Fu Manchu, which made Harvey laugh. A mustache is the trademark of the superhero Harvey has invented and spends a lot of time drawing—Super Monkey. He has a big mustache like Harvey will have someday and he wears a baseball cap and has supersonic ears that can hear anything being said in the whole world. He just tunes his ears and can go to places everywhere in the universe, like Raleigh or Myrtle Beach or Texas, or Lake Titicaca or Uranus, which make people laugh. Jason taught him those last two and kids at school liked it when Harvey said that. They like to say Lake Titicaca and they like to hear about turds and butts and all the words you can call a butt, like fanny or bum or tail or a-s-s. And they also like knock-knock jokes, especially the ones that go on for a long time, like “Banana banana banana banana who?”

  Super Monkey’s specialty is that he hears murderers about to murder and he gets there just in time to make them not do that. Harvey himself wrote in teeny-tiny letters behind his bedroom door Super Monkey’s message to the whole universe: Don’t get kilt. Harvey also has left that message out in the part of the yard where he isn’t supposed to go. Don’t get kilt, he wrote in the dirt with a stick and he also put it on a piece of paper and left it near where he saw a ghost all in black crawling on the ground one night. He peeked out the window and saw that, and the next day what he wrote was gone and he found some fresh rabbit turds.

  Every night before bed, his mom says the same things: “There is no such thing as ghosts, Harvey. No, we are not getting a miniature horse. Lizzie Borden never lived in this house. People cannot live without heads. That is ridiculous and has never happened. It’s okay, Harvey.”

  “Jason?” their mom said before Jason had to move to his school. “Please tell Harvey that there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  Jason said, “That’s right, Harvey,” but he also stood behind her and shook his head no. Jason said Harvey’s dad was not his dad, even though their mom had really, really, really wanted Jason to call him Dad.

  “He’s not your dad?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re my brother.”

  “I’m your half brother.”

  This made Harvey stop and think and then they both started laughing. A half brother. That’s why in the corner of the ceiling is just half a boy: an arm and a leg from a stick body. Harvey said, “What if you had to choose a head or a butt. Which would you choose?”

  Jason shook his head. “I can’t believe you even asked that, Harvey,” he said. “Of course I would want to be the butt.”

  “And what is Mom?”

  “She’s Mom.”

  “But is she your mom, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “So who is your dad?”

  “Dead. My dad is dead and don’t ever mention him, because it will make Mom cry.”

  That was when Jason still lived with them. Now it’s just Harvey and his mom, and old Peggy, who just wants to sleep all day. Harvey pulls Peggy close at night so he can feel her snoring. He wishes he could stay there with her every day and just draw Super Monkey and watch TV and read his comic books. Some kids stay at home for school—that’s what Jason said—and their mom said those were some parents with a lot of time on their hands. Even now that it’s summer, Harvey still has to go to camp while his mom is working. Summer camp, which is where a lot of kids get murdered. There are a lot of movies about that. He hasn’t seen any of them yet, but he knows the killers’ names, like Freddy and Jason and Chucky, and he knows what to look out for if he sees them coming.

  Jason told their mom that the only way he would ever love his little brother is if he got to be the one to name him and so she let him. Jason said it had to be a comic-book name like Marvel, DC, or Harvey. Their mom had liked DC, because then she could really name him something fancy like David Charles but Jason knew what kind of trick that was and how they would have called him Dave or Charlie and it wouldn’t have had anything to do with comics. “I threw a tantrum,” Jason told him (something Harvey is thinking about doing sometime). “And so you got named Harvey.”

  Jason used to tell Harvey jokes he didn’t get and he told him all the scary stories he knew. Real stories—the Glencoe Munchkins and the Beast of Bladenboro and the Gray Man down at the beach who comes to tell you that something really terrible is about to happen, and that’s just the start of it. There’s that girl who worked at the Dog House killed by a killer, and Harvey’s mom has even seen the murderer. There’s a train engineer whose head got cut off and he walks around looking for it, and the statue in the cemetery who used to have ruby eyes but somebody stole them and now she haunts whoever goes there at night because she thinks they must be the ones that took her eyeballs. Jason drove Harvey by her one night and it made him shiver to look at her, even though she didn’t really look scary at all. She actually kind of looked nice, like the music teacher at Harvey’s school, a woman who walked with a cane and farted when she played the piano loud. If you sat right up close you could hear it and you didn’t even need Super Monkey supersonic ears, but Harvey got in trouble for laughing.

  Jason taught him to say, “You can tell it’s Mattel. Just smell!” and everybody at school liked that. Jason had good things to say, like if somebody asked Harvey about his lip he could just say he got sliced by a killer who was hiding under his bed, like that story Jason told him about the maniac under the bed and Harvey had to ask what a maniac was.

  “Crazy. Psycho.”

  “Like Lizzie Borden?”

  “Who knows,” Jason said. “I think she just got mad one day and let her folks have it.”

  At night when Harvey is being Super Monkey, he says things like: “Please, Lizzie, please don’t murder people.”

  “I can’t help it, Harvey. They make me so mad.”

  “Yes, you can, though, Lizzie. You can take a stick and beat on a bush or rock while you pretend it’s who you’re mad at. And then you can say, ‘I am so sorry. I am sorry to spank you. It hurts me worse than it hurts you. Don’t ev-er let me see you do that a-gin.’”

  Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks, and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.

  “Psycho,” Jason had said. This was the same day Jason gave Harv
ey a bunch of things as he packed to go off to school. He gave him the Klingon ring and he gave him the model of the Enterprise that they hung from a hook in his ceiling. He even gave him an old stuffed dog that Jason said he was pretty sure once belonged to his real father.

  “Before he died?” Harvey said.

  “Yes, before he died. Probably when he was a kid.”

  The dog was gray with black eyes and a little collar, and Harvey wasn’t sure if he wanted something that had belonged to a dead person but he didn’t want Jason to be upset.

  “What’s his name?”

  “I have no idea,” Jason said. “That’s crazy, isn’t it?”

  Harvey shrugged. “How do you know who’s psycho and who isn’t?”

  “You don’t,” Jason whispered. “And that’s the scariest part of all.”

  Lil

  October 12, 2016

  Southern Pines

  It’s sunny/warm (where is autumn?), and I’m feeling a little blue. I think I have always felt that if I got a grip on each day, recorded the weather and the mood, that I could hold it all in place. I wish that every day, I had cupped my palm under my heel and raised my leg to full extension. Would there have been a day when suddenly I couldn’t do it anymore, like that morning I woke and found I needed reading glasses? The turn will come when you least expect it, then the unraveling. You forget things you couldn’t imagine you could forget and, in the same moment, you remember something you haven’t thought of in a hundred years, an odd little scrap that blows into your head just because the light slants across the room in a certain way or you hear a strain of music, or smell onions and peppers browning in an iron skillet. Spaghetti sauce was my mother’s best dish, and it always began that way, onions and peppers in a sizzling skillet. I’m sure I have told you that before, Becca.