Mr. Splitfoot Page 12

  There’s lots Ruth would like to tell the Mother, but she’s distracted by the room: laundry both ways; a pink starter kit from Mary Kay cosmetics, including twelve shades of lipstick, skin regimens for oily, normal, and dry, and seven eye shadows. None of it yet sold. On top of the kit there are several afghans, a few issues of More magazine, and two two-liter bottles filled with ocher pee. There’s a stack of word puzzle magazines, a box of Almond Roca, two artificial flowers, a fringed leather jacket hanging below a poster of Stevie Nicks. The Mother’s built a fortress from things purchased at the 24-hour pharmacy. An Easter basket with plastic green grass, a white teddy bear holding a red embroidered heart, a pillow with electronic massaging balls. Four pairs of Isotoner slippers. Padded envelopes. Acrylic yarn. Three jumbo boxes of Special K with freeze-dried strawberries. “I’m fine.”

  “So Zeke,” the Father says. “Seems you’ve caught his eye. And we’re proud of you, Ruth. Mother and I wish you the best. We hope your marriage will be a fruitful one.”

  The Mother belches loudly. “Pardon. IBS,” she explains.

  Ruth has no idea. IRS? “Marriage?”

  “Yes. I didn’t even know you two were friendly.”

  “We aren’t.”

  “There’s so much about your life these days I don’t know,” the Father says. “And I figure if you’re already grown and gone, you might as well actually go.” The Father waves something out of the air, enjoying his moment of cruelty less than he’d hoped. “You’ll need our consent, seeing as you’re only seventeen. But we’re happy to give it.”

  “Consent to—”

  “Get married.”

  Ruth’s head tilts hard to the left. “You want me to marry a stranger?”

  “Heavenly Father has led me to believe that this is exactly what you were made for. That’s why your appendix ruptured. Now I understand why my prayers couldn’t heal you that night.” He moves slowly, taking her shoulders in his hands, squeezing hard enough to grind her bones. “Happy for you,” he says. “I worked this out special. Zeke’ll take care of you.”

  “How old is he?”

  The Father shrugs. “My age?”

  “Old.”

  “Not that old and, you know, there’s never charges when you’re married.”

  “Charges?”

  “Rape.”

  The Mother experiences a further wave of cramps.

  “If I get married, I’m allowed to move out of the home?”

  “Of course.”

  Ruth focuses on the Father’s fly. “What about Nat?”

  “Once you’re married to Zeke, you could probably start adoption proceedings. The state is more or less giving away dysfunctional seventeen-year-olds.”

  “Make me Nat’s mother?”

  “If your husband approves. Everybody wins. Most importantly”—and the Father, his chest puffed up, points an index finger up to the sky before deflating, acknowledging that not everything in his plan is lovely. “What am I supposed to do, Ruth? Turn you out on the street?”

  She shakes her head no. “I won’t end up on the streets. I’ll find a job.”

  “I know it’s scary, but it’s less scary than aging out with nowhere to go and no one to take care of you.”

  “Nat’ll take care of me.”

  “Nat can’t take care of his shoelaces.”

  “That’s not true. I’ll take care of me. I always have.” This pisses off the Father.

  “You want to give me some more lip?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “Now we need to discuss some things about your wedding night.”

  The Mother’s sick gut pinches her mouth into a turnip. “Happy for you, honey, but I need to visit the commode.” She takes that cue, exiting the bedroom quickly before more poison leaks out.

  “You want me to get married?” Ruth asks.

  The Father doesn’t answer that question. “Let’s see.” Chin in his hand. “So. You’ve seen the rabbits, when they’re in a fever?”

  “Sick?”

  “No, dear. When they cleave to one another. Inserted, bred—”

  He’s talking about fucking. “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s nearly the same with humans, but I’d like to explain a few things. There is a loving way a husband treats his wife. Caresses and movements privy only to those wed in God’s eyes. Certain actions and membranes.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You don’t know this yet, Ruth, but your body conceals private chambers open only to your husband’s probing key.” He lifts his hands, fingers splayed like a shining sun. “Secret cavities that belong to him alone.”

  Ruth feels sick. Is he kidding?

  “And in the moment a husband and his wife’s flesh are bonded as one, certain fluids will be exchanged. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I don’t want to, Father Arthur. Please don’t kick me out.”

  The Father shuts his eyes. He remembers El and the day she had to go. He’d heard she’d found nothing but trouble down in Troy. “You’re scared, girl,” the Father says, “and I understand, but a woman can’t bow her knee to God until she bows her knee to her husband. Find Christ and lose your fear.” He smiles. He takes her hand. “A blushing bride, my, you’ve grown. We’ll work it out for you, dear. Happy for you.”

  Ruth looks up at the Stevie Nicks poster, meditating on this beautiful woman. Marriage would mean no more state. A kitchen, a refrigerator of her own. Zeke humping up on her front and back each night until she’s eighteen, but if Nat could come with her, she’d be OK. I’ll go see the man, she thinks. See what sort he is. What’s coarse in her life will lift her up, carry her down past the industrial park and the anonymous block of buildings whose sign reads TOOL AND DIE. All the way to the self-storage office. Her fingertips will buzz, freedom in there, for Nat and her, lovely as the sun through a bottle of old pee.

  Each séance takes place in a different home. “My cousin’s boss is out of town.” Mr. Bell picks Ruth and Nat up at the appointed time and takes them to a new address. The car windows are rolled down even though it’s cold. The outside air smells of balsam and rain. In the back seat Ruth fingers a realty sign that’d been yanked from the ground. She watches Mr. Bell drive. He’s a creature who makes his own tools. She admires that.

  “What did Father Arthur want?”

  “Some loose ends from the hospital.”

  Nat nods. Mr. Bell parks.

  Some of the houses have books. Some have TVs that cover entire walls. One has a room given over to a collection of dull-looking rocks. One has no furniture in it at all. “My uncle’s condo,” Mr. Bell explains.

  Nat and Ruth dress in clothes provided by Mr. Bell. He tells them that their clothes, the stuff from the Father, scare people. “Children of the Corn,” he says.

  “What’s that? Like we’re farmers?”

  “No. Sociopaths.” He gives her a wink.

  Nat and Ruth wait in the bedroom until he comes to fetch them. She sits in a windowsill. “You know I’m making my bit up?” she tells Nat.

  “I’m fine with that.”

  “But you’re really talking to dead people, right?”

  “How many times are you going to ask me that?”

  “Can you just tell me the truth?”

  “I talk to dead people. Yes, yes, yes, I do.” To the tune of “Skip to My Lou.”

  “Good because otherwise it would be stealing. I don’t want to steal from people who are already so sad.”

  When Nat and Ruth are led into the living room, the guests are sitting cross-legged on the floor as if telling ghost stories around a campfire. Ruth and Nat join them there.

  “But they’re children.” One man wrenches his spine to complain to Mr. Bell.

  “Precisely.” Mr. Bell pats the man’s shoulder, a familiar gesture. The man smiles as if the teacher just praised his correct answer. “Children have not yet hardened the divide between life and realms of the undead. In India”—Mr. Bell lifts a curled fing
er to his temple—“the most attuned mediums are always children. India,” he repeats, “and Brazil. And”—feeling inspired—“Morocco, of course.”

  “Brrrriiinnnng!” Nat’s off. He twists his hands, tuning in. “I’m speaking with a man named Lester. Yes. Anyone have a Lester? Sorry Leroy. No Leonard.”

  “Yes!”

  “Brrrinnnggg! Yes, sorry. Leonard. Now Leonard was your—”

  “Grandfather.”

  “I was about to say that. Brrrrriiiinng! Served in World War II, yes?”

  “How did you know?”

  “He told me.” Nat had practiced too.

  “Grandpa.”

  “You’re a hick, and nobody ever helped a hick but a hick himself!”

  “Pardon?” the man asks.

  “I’m standin’ here on my hind legs. Even a dog can do that. Are you standin’ on your hind legs?”

  The man looks around himself. He remains sitting.

  Nat foams, spits, rails, swinging his arms. “Here it is, ya hicks! Nail up anybody who stands in your way! Give me the hammer and I’ll do it myself!”

  Mr. Bell rubs his hands together. He’s really not that much older than Ruth, but he works it with confidence, with his suit, and people believe it.

  “Grandpa Leo?”

  Later Ruth hits on a vein. “I see a toddler in a costume,” she whispers in her trance. “Dressed as a lion.” She pauses. “No, it’s a bear. A dog.”

  One of the mothers explodes, grief on the walls of this foreclosed home. “That was her second Halloween. She was a poodle.”

  “Yes,” Ruth says. “I see jack-o’-lanterns. Candy corn.”

  The mother rolls with sorrow, as if there is a button inside her Ruth can just keep pushing, flooding fresh tears from a never-empty well. At least the mother will sleep tonight.

  Afterward, over chicken with cashew nuts, they count the money. Ruth gets quiet. “Sweetheart, sweetheart.” Mr. Bell touches her hand. “It’s not as if you’re pretending the dead are alive. People want to be told what they already know—the dead were once here and they loved us. You should be happy to tell people that.”

  Ruth nods.

  “Why do we split it three ways?” Nat wants to know.

  Mr. Bell pushes his Adam’s apple left then right in a samba beat. “Because there’s no end to my generosity.” He exhales with an open mouth, blowing breath and insult Nat’s way. Mr. Bell looks to Ruth again. “Buck up, little flower.”

  She and Nat keep their money stuffed up the hollow leg of their metal bed frame. Eventually the bed can hold no more. Nat slices open the lining of his winter coat and fills it, like a transfusion refluffing the flat garment with cash. It’s so much money, Nat doesn’t bring up the three-way split ever again.

  Word spreads. People line up to talk to the dead. Parents who have lost their children. Children who’ve lost their parents. A young woman who survived, in utero, the car crash that killed her mother sits beside the father of a boy who’d mixed a potion of Drano and grapefruit juice for his girlfriend and himself. The town alderman misses his mother. A high school history teacher whose nephew was caught in an undertow. Mr. Bell collects them. It’s not hard. Dead people are everywhere.

  Sometimes the same people return, though Ruth, in the spirit of egalitarianism, has each new person receive word from their dead before issuing repeat performances.

  Mr. Bell counsels a skeptic in the hallway. “Sometimes it’s two or three generations removed. You might not recognize a great-great-aunt. Don’t worry. She knows you.” He squeezes the man’s arm. “Please leave your coats in here,” Mr. Bell requests. “We’ve found it best to be unencumbered by material possessions when spirit is present.”

  And Ruth is quite like a spirit. “Mary?” her voice crackles, the warm static of an old radio. “Is someone here looking for Mary?” Silence. “I’m sorry. The name is Larry. Larry?”

  And a woman whose cardigan is pulled tight as a tourniquet round her middle sucks in her breath. “Harry is my husband. Harry.” Her cheeks spot with blood.

  “Of course. Harry.” Ruth walks like a ballet dancer on her toes. She touches the living, placing hands on their shoulders to calm them. Ruth laughs. “Harry just made a joke. He was quite funny, wasn’t he?”

  Afterward, over souvlaki this time, Mr. Bell asks, “What have you two been learning in school?”

  “We don’t go to regular school. The Father instructs us.”

  “What’s he teaching you?”

  “Sine. Cosine. Jesus,” Ruth says.

  Mr. Bell mulls it over. “Can’t say I remember that.” He looks above their heads. “How about Sherman’s charge on Atlanta? Did you cover that yet?”

  “We’re still working on Herod’s expansion of the Second Temple.”

  The storage center’s sign is big as a billboard. OUTER SPACE. The plastic veneer paneling of the trailer is made to resemble wood. A sign is taped to the wall. RENT DO ON FIRST OF MONTH. Someone had crossed out the misspelling. Zeke’s alone in the office, smiling like there’s no one he’d rather see.

  There are a number of file cabinets, a gun locker, a plastic lunch box, and, behind the desk, a poster of the solar system with all the planets, including Pluto.

  Zeke wears a country-western shirt with pointed pockets unsnapped to his sternum. He looks different today, sweatier, skinnier, more scruff on his chin. His eyes are red.

  I can get divorced in ten months, Ruth thinks.

  “You need some storage?” Zeke teases her, friendly as a man with something to sell.

  She should’ve worn her new jeans. She feels like a child in her old dress and apron. “What kind of stuff do you store here?”

  He leans into her. “All manner of celestial wonders.”

  “Pardon?”

  He huffs his shoulders in a fake chuckle. “Just getting started so at the moment I’m primarily storing space.”

  There’s a newspaper on his desk, today’s paper. Upside down Ruth makes out a story about bodies in the Middle East and another piece speculating which movie will earn the biggest box office receipts this weekend. She’s been to a movie theater twice in her life. “Father Arthur told me you talked with him,” she says.

  “Some big stuff is about to happen here. We need you. I do. I want to take care of you.”

  “What sort of big stuff?”

  “The cosmos aligning for the righteous.”

  “Me?”

  “Comets, collisions. One space rock is all it would take to send the whole of us into orbit.”

  “You’re an astronaut?”

  “No.” On Zeke’s desk there are a number of different rock specimens and a tiny souvenir, fake ruins molded out of plastic. He leans forward. “Have you ever been taken care of by a man?”

  Ruth imagines the factory where they specialize in fabricating plastic ruins. “Nat,” she says. “The Father.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m asking are you intact?”

  Zeke reaches for her wrist. He bows into her open hand so she sees the back of his head, the gold in each greasy brown strand. She feels a wet warmth. Zeke separates her fingers. Every filthy word she knows comes into her head. “Intact” seems the filthiest. Moving from thumb to pinkie, Zeke takes each digit in his mouth, licking her clean. She’s unsteady. She’s damp. She couldn’t be intact. Each breath is a labor he can hear.

  When Zeke finishes licking her fingers, he rolls back, dries his meaty lips on the side of his hand, done with his meal. Ruth canters forward.

  “I need—” His voice is loud. Zeke stumbles for the right word.

  “A wife,” she gives him, still reading the upside-down paper. The Pope is angry at some nuns.

  Zeke smiles. “Yes.” He opens his top drawer. “But not just any wife. I need you.” He passes Ruth a foam squeezie toy cratered to look like the moon. The number of the self-storage is printed on it. “I want you to think, Ruth. I want it to be right. Are you ready to go with me? I want you to cogitate
and give me a call. Will you do that?”

  “Cogitate.”

  “Come to me when you hear an answer.”

  Ruth squeezes the moon, letting it absorb the sticky saliva Zeke left behind on her fingers.

  When she gets back to the Father’s house, Mr. Bell and Nat are waiting. While it was a short walk home, she’s long done cogitating.

  “Ready to go, love?” Mr. Bell asks.

  “Yup.” She climbs in back next to Nat. Mr. Bell adjusts his seat and the radio station before putting the car in drive. Ruth stares at his head. “Are you married, Mr. Bell?”

  “Married? My. No.”

  “Want to marry me?”

  His accent goes British. “What a deep honor.”

  Nat cuffs his fingernails in the palms of his hands.

  “You and I get married, then we adopt Nat. No more foster home. No more Father Arthur.”

  “That”—Mr. Bell turns in his seat, twisting a bit of his hair—“is a good one, Ruth.” He laughs but stops when he’s laughing alone.

  “You wouldn’t, you know, really be my husband or anything. Nat and I would get an apartment by ourselves since we have enough money now. You wouldn’t have to take care of us. We’re fine on our own.”

  “A genuine proposal. My goodness.”

  “It’s easy, half an hour at town hall. Soon as I’m eighteen, we can get a divorce.”

  “Ah, a romantic.”

  “Mr. Bell,” Ruth says. “Please.”

  “My,” he says. “Well.” He thinks. “Does marriage require a birth certificate?”

  “Weren’t you ever born?” Nat asks.

  Mr. Bell looks at him in the rearview. “I’ve been born again and again. They just keep forgetting to give me a certificate.”

  When Mr. Bell drops them off that night, the Father’s outside on a metal folding chair. The chair leans to the left on buckling legs. The Father raises his hand to his brow, blocking the headlights’ glare. He’s been drinking. Nat and Ruth climb out of Mr. Bell’s car. Their breath is visible. The Father snickers, imagining bestial actions.