Nebraska

Avis told a Creighton University professor to spend more time around water, but to look out for a Pisces who was intent on injuring his reputation. A Fremont woman said she wanted to give up smoking, but Avis said the problem wasn't cigarettes, it was her marriage. And she was bullying her husband. Avis got a card from the elderly woman in Papillon, with pink begonias on the cover and a crisp twenty-dollar bill inside. And she got a call from a talk-show host, saying he'd like Avis to join him next month on his Coffee Break radio program.

Six or more times per day the telephone would ring, and no one would speak when Claude or Lorna said hello. Avis presumed that was Gary. She got in touch with the Nebraska State Department of Corrections, but an uppity secretary said she couldn't talk about ex-prisoners to just anybody who happened to call. She once woke up, and Claude wasn't Claude but a whiskeyed crazy man lying on a dirty bed, his skin very pale, his haunted green eyes wide open, his mechanic's hands clamped over his ears in order to stop the tramping noise of footsteps on the stairway. When the door opened, the apparition disappeared and Claude walked inside in his pajamas. “Went for a water glass,” Claude said.

Then, one night when she was getting out of her slip, Avis looked at the pink flowers on the chintz draperies and imagined a great mahogany bed angled under the high window. She could see a gray-haired woman sleeping, a purple tube up her nose and her hands greenly wormed with veins. Avis could hear an oxygen tank lightly hissing as a mechanic in green coveralls knocked sneakily at the sewing-room door, sandpaper in his voice as he harshly whispered, “Willal”

Avis went up to the girls’ room and gently tugged Lorna's right thumb from her mouth. She walked over to the twin bed alongside the wall, but Priscilla was sitting up in her nightgown, her right elbow on the windowsill and her jaw in her hand, solemnly contemplating the yard as if she were trying to interpret words that were not being spoken aloud. Avis rapped sharply on the window glass, and Priscilla's dark eyes jumped with shock before she simpered and said, “Hi, Momma.”

“Whatta you up to?”

“I just couldn't sleep.”

Avis inchingly touched a curtain aside and gazed down. No one was there. “You playing me for a fool?”

Priscilla hopped up into her bed and snickered as she covered her face with a pillow.

She'd given Claude some numbers, and he'd used them on the greyhounds in Sioux City, winning four hundred and sixty dollars on a quiniela. Claude learned about it from one of the brothers on the job the next morning and was still joyous when he called Avis from the Fontenelle Park golf course, where they were laying in irrigation pipe. Claude said his supervisor might just let him off early so he could bring home a big celebration. And then he said his cheeseburger was on the hot plate, kissed the mouthpiece, and said good-bye.

Avis heard the clank of the mailbox lid and waited for Lorna to carry it in until she recalled that she was in kindergarten now. And Priscilla would be in the public-school cafeteria, probably not eating, and swapping her cupcakes for change. Avis went out and collected two bills, a letter from a cancer patient in Soldier, Iowa, and a dirty envelope from the weekly newspaper with the name Ed Cziraki crudely printed on the upper-left corner in red ink. She sat down on the porch steps and scooped out some yellowed newspaper photographs from twelve years ago. Wording had been jaggedly torn away from the pictures, but she could make out what looked like “mercy killing” below a snapshot of a big mahogany bed and a sick woman's body, nicely arranged beneath a darkly stained sheet. Another newspaper picture was copied from a high-school yearbook. A joyless boy with yellow hair in an ugly paisley shirt, his hard eyes half an inch too close to his nose and his nose a half an inch too long. She thought, Who's the ferret? And then knew. Gary. The last photograph was of a pretty black girl who'd been hacked apart with an ax. Written over the picture was “Your household haints, I s'pose.”

Avis put the clippings back inside the dirty envelope and shoved it deep in her apron pocket and pulled herself up heavily on the handrail. Eyes were on her as she walked inside and indignantly locked the door.

She tried to nap on the sofa in the parlor but couldn't sleep for the upsetting visions of Gary twelve years ago, a slaughter-house ax in his reddened hands, his clothes sagging heavily with blood and the blood plipping like nickels onto the carpet.

Avis got up and paid her bills, cleaned up the parlor, then emptied the wastepaper baskets into a green plastic bag and dragged it out to the garbage cans in the cinder alley. The day had lost twenty degrees since noon and indigo rain clouds were turtling in. She had a premonition and looked up at the upstairs rooms of her house and at the high windows that Claude had covered with plastic weatherproofing and tape. She pulled her overcoat closed and looked up the alley at a gray old woman clipping her hedges in a see-through raincoat, her black poodle standing between her legs and idly sniffing the air.

She thought, Everything's changed. And she thought, Don't go back, but she did. She walked to the stoop and peered through the windowpanes of her kitchen door and saw the big house as it was when white people lived in it. Aprons and sweaters were hanging from nails, and green rubber boots made tan by yard mud had been slung into a corner. A twelve-year-old Knights of Columbus calendar was tacked up in the pantry, and hooked over the top of the inner door was a rubber-tipped cane.

Avis yelled unreasonably, “Hello?” and paused a second before stepping inside. She walked into the kitchen and called again, “Hello?” She could see the pecan pie she'd made on the stove top, and Lorna's storybooks by the telephone, but she could also make out a rickety table with a checkered plastic tablecloth and on it salt and pepper cellars and a soup bowl of truck-stop matchbooks. She opened cabinets and found her own soups and stews and cereal boxes, but also their ill-matched assortment of cups and plates, potato chips, beef jerky, whiskeys, antacids, cough syrups, and a huge variety of pills. Avis bumped against her own purple sofa in the parlor but only saw a heap of magazines and a frayed green chair no more than two feet away from a round-tube Zenith television. Unwashed clothing was on their sofa, overalls were on the floor, a motor was in pieces on an open newspaper.

She was getting overlapping stations at one spot o

n the radio. She was apparently picking up impressions from another person close by.

And then she went upstairs to the evil past, with apprehension, even chill panic, but also with pity and reverence and the concern of a physician. She could see photographs stair-stepped up the wall: of a young sailor in Navy whites standing with a testy older woman in a tulle wedding dress; a baby boy in cowboy boots in the yard with a 1956 Plymouth; the boy in a blue Cub Scout uniform; and Gary now fourteen years old, at Christmastime, getting a shotgun from his father. And at the top of the stairs was Willa—not a snapshot but an apparition, a girl acting out scenes from the past. Willa just stepping out of the bathtub and prettily reaching up for a towel in the hallway closet as green eyes spied on her nakedness. And Willa in a terry-cloth robe, carrying a food tray, slightly smiling at someone Avis couldn't see. And yet again Willa, in nurse's whites, standing up against the clothes hamper and shutting her eyes with pleasure as she yielded her right breast to Gary's father. Engine grease from his night shift was under his fingernails. Avis could smell gasoline on his green coveralls. And then the hallway was empty.

Avis saw a strip of light beneath the closed door to her bedroom. She put her palms to the door and perceived the room as she'd imagined it days ago, the great mahogany bed underneath the high window, the oxygen tank in the corner, the gray-haired woman sinking into a heap of yellowed pillows under stained patchwork quilts as an orange rubber tube drained into a saucepan. When Avis opened the door, the woman's head lolled fragilely to the right and she gazed at Avis for many seconds before saying weakly, “Gary?”

His mother was the first.

Avis shut the door and walked down the hallway to the second bedroom. Her girls’ room; now a boy's. His orange window shades were down, rumpled airplane sheets were on the bed, jeans were hanging over a chair. Atop a small study desk were a black telephone, high-school geometry and physics textbooks, a German beer stein of pencils and pens, and a green rubber triceratops. Everything preserved as it was twelve years ago—the overhead light was always on, and the program on the big console radio was always at high volume.

She withdrew to the only other upstairs room. Her sewing room. Willa's room. Her own mattress had been rolled up and kept in place in the corner with a clothesline rope, but Willa's mattress was on the iron springs of a pinewood cot just like her own, and the pressed bed linens were sprinkled with cheap perfume. Except for some hangers covered in tissue paper, Avis's closet was empty, but Willa's was deep in nurse's whites and party clothes and seven pairs of shoes. A striped rug was oddly placed on the floorboards in order to cover up the pink stain of spilled fingernail polish.

Avis was surprised at how little else she could pick up in the room; there was only a teaspoon of history in it. She fractionally parted her drapes, as if that were just another orderly step in a mechanical process, and she peered out without passion or emotion as she slipped her heavy overcoat off and let it pour onto her sewing bench. She sat on her own spare bed and then slumped over on the iron springs with her right palm tightly clamped to her purple eyes so she could put all the scenes and pictures together.

Rain pattered against the window glass and gradually increased in power and then it was as hard and gray and vertical as upright piano wire. Avis heard the porch door open and seconds passed and then the porch door closed again. She yelled down, “Priscilla?” and then she heard a heavy tramping up the steps, and she got another horrible glimpse of that night twelve years ago: In the big walk-in closet where her girls’ pretty things were now, Gary sagged among his jeans and paisley shirts and calf-high motorcycle boots, a pop-eyed boy with a pink tongue squeezed out of his mouth, his purpled head jutted to the right by an angled towrope and noose.

And now she could hear him opening his mother's bedroom door, and seconds passed and Gary repeated her killing, his right hand raising up high overhead and slashing down, his left palm up to shield his eyes from the hot spray of blood. Gary was probably hearing over and over again the hard, squelching slugs of the ax and his mother's dying groans of pain, but Avis only heard stillness, and then she heard the boy open the second bedroom door and yank the towrope down from his tie rack, and then, with an angry second thought, Gary shut that door too.

Hairs stood up on her arms and neck, goose bumps pebbled her skin like a rain on a nighted pond, but Avis stayed as she was. His footsteps approached the yellow sewing room, Willa's room, and as the door creaked open, the penny odor of blood and the sink upsurge of corruption were so overpowering that Avis pinched her nose, but she couldn't move in spite of her understanding of what his sleeplessness was and what Gary had meant by being in prison. The iron springs dipped with Gary's added weight, and the springs rang a little as the boy rolled into her and nudged his hard sex between her thighs. His clothes were soaked with the hot blood of more than one body and he stank like a cat rotting in the street. His hand painted her skin red with blood as Gary gingerly touched her cheek and petted back her hair and said “Willa!” raspily, just as his father did. And Avis at last found the voice to say, “It's time to go to sleep, Gary.”

The boy paused and then avidly pressed his lips to her ear in a kiss that was cold as an apple slice. He placed his heavy ax on top of her hip, and Avis could feel its sharp pressure through her skirt as the boy's hand sought her breast. And she could feel his crazy hate and jealousy as Gary again pushed into her, saying, “You want it and you know it.”

Avis took his hand in a motherly way and said, “Gary, please. Don't hate anymore. Give up. Go to sleep. You're a ghost.”

And then she could feel a slight change in him, and Gary was lying on his back, acknowledging her words. She turned, and Gary was just a sickly boy in a paisley shirt, his green eyes windowpaned with tears. Avis said, “Everybody's forgotten,” and she heard the iron springs ease up as his nightmare slowly ended and, at last, Gary slept.

Red-Letter Days