CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE COPS DROVE ME HOME; AT LEAST I THOUGHT THEY WERE cops, though they were in plain clothes, both had the traditional signifiers—the strangulated formal speech, standard-issue mustaches, and humorless demeanor, although I wasn’t exactly a bundle of laughs.
Pop was waiting on the front porch.
He held me tight to his chest, and then he started to cry. In the dark, helpless and uncomfortable in his clutch, I could see Sykes in ghostly silhouette. He wagged his tail faintly in greeting, and then he jumped up and tried to comfort Pop, but there was no solace to be found anywhere in the world that night.
The screen door banged behind me and the light flooded my eyes as I walked into the kitchen, dogs barking and crushing around, the cops clearly thrown by the melee, Jackdaw and Mambo looking beyond me for Bingo. Then the dogs settled down and drifted off, dropping to the floor, one by one, thumping and banging in separate heaps of hair and bone. And then it grew quiet except for Pop crying and the cops, who kept clearing their throats and asking if we wanted a minister or a priest or maybe a glass of water.
My mother took a long time to emerge from behind the dining room door, appearing to lose her balance at first sight of me, her hands thrust awkwardly over her head, as if she were walking a tightrope suspended over the Grand Canyon. She made the most terrible sound deep in her throat, as if she were rusting, and only then did I realize that my parents had had no idea which one of us had drowned.
Windowless rooms, her eyes never wavered as she walked toward me and, raising her arm, winding up, hit me so hard that she knocked me into the wall, breaking my jaw in two places.
The dogs went crazy, growling and barking, half of them leaping at Ma, the rest charging me, pulling and chewing; a handful got so worked up that they attacked one another, so there were pockets of overwrought dogs rolling around the room in tight balls of fury.
Staggering sideways, I felt nothing at first, and then the whole world came in on me, collapsing on all sides, so excruciating was the pain. Leaning against the wall, my knees buckling, I slid slowly downward, my wet clothes a brush that left a broad, damp mark on the aging palm plaster.
“Holy shit!” the bigger cop said.
“Anais, my God!” Pop gasped, running to my side.
“Hey there! You leave him alone, you Female B!” Uncle Tom, in his long underwear, lurched into the kitchen—he’d been listening at the door, leaning against the wooden frame for support—speech slurred and glasses askew, reeking of urine, so drunk that he couldn’t stand still or straight. Wobbling back and forth, he was on the third or fourth day of a bender.
“The resurrection,” he said, striking a lopsided heroic pose, forefinger pointing heavenward. “O ye of little faith. He’s not dead. There’ll be a resurrection. He’ll rise again. You’ll see.”
“Tom, for Christ’s sake, you’re not helping,” Pop said, kneeling beside me, covering his face with his hands, rubbing his eyes as if he were trying to erase all that was before him.
“Nothing’s changed. Nothing’s changed,” Tom said. “The world’s the same as it was this morning. He ate breakfast with me. I made him bacon and eggs. Sunny-side up, just the way he likes them. He had two cinnamon buns. He drank freshly squeezed orange juice.”
He started to sing: “Tom Flanagan’s makin’ Bingo some eggs and bacon . . . Tom Flanagan’s makin’ his boy some eggs and bacon—”
“Goddamn it, Tom, are you mad? You’ve been holed up in your room for days. Look at you, covered in piss, your mattress putrid, the whole house stinking of you.” Pop stretched his arms up and out, making an expansive V shape, embracing the pantheon. “Is this to be our dead boy’s commemorative perfume, the stench of Tom Flanagan’s piss?”
For my own part, I could hardly breathe; I was gasping for air and swallowing blood with Sykes standing on all fours on my chest, licking my face, as I struggled to pull myself up. Leaning forward, I spat up a mouthful of everything I’d swallowed. My hands and face were streaked with blood and dirt.
“You must have stood and watched as he went under. Did you stare? You should have turned away. People who watch from their windows can expect a bucket of blood thrown in their faces,” Uncle Tom said, suspended over me, his eyes bulging.
“Why did it have to be him?” Ma said, addressing the cops before turning to face me, her eyes fierce and burning, holding me in place with the vast unregulated power of their feeling. “Why couldn’t it have been you?” She spoke so quietly, I strained to hear.
And then her eyes rolled back in her head, her arms went limp, her knees gave way, skin whitening, hair straightening, toes curling, she fell like scaffolding collapsing and hit the floor with a calamitous thud, narrowly missing Tom, who was already listing like the Titanic.
“Did you see that?” he said, twisting out of her way, teetering back and forth and grabbing hold of the nearest door handle to steady himself. “She tried to kill me. She always said she’d take me with her. Arrest that woman! I want her charged with attempted murder.”
“Lord Jesus, it’s Kristallnacht,” Pop said, calling out, “Anais! Anais! Anais!” as he and the cops pulled dog after dog after dog away from her lifeless body and he dropped to his knees beside her, his hands on her shoulders.
“If you don’t arrest her, I will,” Tom was raving.
“She’s dead, you lunatic!” Pop shouted. “I want that man taken into custody,” he said irrationally to the cops, who must have wondered if they, too, were dead and didn’t know it, stuck in some overlooked corner of purgatory.
“Calm down,” the smaller one said finally. “You’ve all had a terrible shock, well, series of shocks . . . ,” he added, sounding confused.
“If the Catholic Church can dig up Pope Formosas nine months after interment and charge him with perjury, prop him up in the courtroom, and convict him, then I can arrest a dead woman.” Tom wouldn’t quit, he didn’t know how—experiencing Uncle Tom firsthand was knowing what it’s like to be a sedan in one of those coin-operated car washes, water and detergent and hoses and brushes and flaps and hot air coming at you from all sides and no end in sight.
I lay there watching it all unfold from my spot on the floor, bloody hand holding my shattered jaw in place, tears like a waterfall running down my dirty face, my mother small and still, lying across from me. Her face was white, her hair a deep chestnut color, her lips parted slightly, revealing the top line of her lower teeth, as the cops struggled to fend off the dogs. Uncle Tom fell slumped into the kitchen chair and stared over at Ma. Pop rose to his feet but staggered.
Punch, one of the poodles, was trying to get me up off the floor, his front paws digging into my calves. The other dogs were crowding around, wanting me to stand up, wanting things to assume a shape they could recognize, and all the while the screen door was opening and shutting, banging intermittently in the wind.
Pop and the cops finally managed to get all but one of the dogs out of the kitchen and onto the veranda, where they barked at the latched door and pounded on the windows. Lenin hovered like Cerberus over Ma’s body, threatening to murder anyone who came near, and that included Pop, who quickly gave up and lay with his head buried beneath his arms on the kitchen table, his shoulders shaking. Uncle Tom had vanished.
“What in the hell is that thing? Is it a bear?” one of the cops asked as Lenin lunged at him, snarling. He looked at me, and I shrugged and gurgled, unable to speak, trying to hold my face together. Lenin might as well have been a bear—saying that an Ovcharka is a dog is kind of like saying that a gorilla is a monkey. “An Ovcharka,” as Ma loved to proclaim, “is not a Labrador retriever.”
I felt as if I should do something. I dragged myself across the tile as Lenin watched, and as I drew closer, I reached up to touch his face and he wagged the tip of his tail. He relaxed a little as I positioned myself next to Ma, and growing calmer, he curled up alongside her and began to lick her face. Lenin never liked the hours that Ma kept, and he used to jump on her bed late in the afternoon and lie next to her, licking her face until she’d finally agree to wake up.
When the ambulances came to take us away, my last sight of Ma was of the attendants loading her onto the gurney and Lenin on his hind legs, licking her face in the expectation that she might wake up.
Before they closed the ambulance doors, I looked up at Bingo’s room. The window was wide open. I could hear all the windows in all the rooms of the house systematically slide open, one at a time, their curtains blowing.
I heard the back door to the kitchen swing open and watched the dogs pouring in and out. The last thing I saw was Uncle Tom on the veranda, the front door wide open behind him, all the doors and all the windows in the house open wide, Ma and Bingo free to leave, neither door nor window to block their way.