Strange Weather Read online

  • A crying man, mid-fifties, on his knees in a gravel driveway, fleshy and naked and holding out a pair of car keys in a desperate offering. He was cut all over, lots of fine red slashes trickling blood. The big white Caddy—the one the Phoenician went around in—could be seen in the background, parked under a willow, so shiny and clean it might’ve just rolled out of a 1950s-era magazine ad.

  • A snapshot of a reflection in the Caddy’s driver’s-side mirror: dust roiling over a dirt drive, partially obscuring a naked man, facedown in the road with what looked like a garden trowel in the small of his back. I could not tell you why this picture was so joyous, so carefree. Some quality of the late-spring light. Some sense of escape, of effortless motion.

  • A child—a girl—in a winter cap with earflaps, clutching a lollipop of enormous size. She smiled uncertainly for the photographer. A Paddington Bear peeked out from under one arm, where she held it clutched against her side.

  • The same child in a coffin, her plump hands folded on the velvet bodice of her gown, her face smooth and untroubled by dreams. A scarf the color of darkest wine had been arranged artfully around her throat. Paddington Bear was under the same arm, peering out in much the same way. A gaunt hand reached into the frame, as if perhaps to push a curl of yellow hair back from the girl’s brow.

  • A basement. The background was a wall of old whitewashed brick, with a narrow cobwebbed window set six feet above the floor. Someone had crudely drawn black marks in what I am sure was Phoenician script just below the window. Three rings of ash, slightly overlapping one another, had been sketched on the cement. In the one farthest to the left was a circle of smashed mirror. In the one farthest to the right was a Paddington Bear. In the central circle was a Polaroid camera.

  • Old people and more old people. There had to be at least a dozen. A scrawny old man with an oxygen tube in his nose. A baggy old hobbit of a fellow with a peeling, sunburned nose. A dazed-looking fat woman, one corner of her mouth twisted in the snarl of someone who has suffered a severe stroke.

  • And, finally . . . me. Michael Figlione, standing beside Shelly’s bed, an expression of sick terror on my moon-shaped face, the Solarid in my hands, the flash igniting. It was the last thing he’d seen before I started shooting.

  I collected the slippery squares into a stack and put them in the deep pockets of the fluffy white robe.

  The Phoenician had rolled back onto his side. Some clarity had returned to his eyes, and he watched me with a foolish look of fascination. He had wet himself, a dark stain soaking his crotch and down his thighs. I don’t think he knew.

  “Can you get up?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s time to leave.”

  “Oh.”

  He didn’t move, though, until I bent and took his shoulder and told him to stand. Then he did, docile and bewildered.

  “I think I’m lost,” he said. “Do . . . we . . . know each other?” He spoke in little bursts that suggested he was having trouble finding the right words.

  “No,” I said firmly. “Come on.”

  I steered him down the hall and to the front door.

  I thought I had absorbed all the shocks the night had to offer, but there was one more waiting. We got as far as the front step, and then I caught in place.

  The yard and the street were littered with dead birds. Sparrows, I think. There had to be almost a thousand of them, stiff little black rags of feathers and claws and BB-pellet eyes. And the grass was full of fine, glassy pebbles. They crunched underfoot as I walked down the steps. Hail. I sank to one knee—my legs were weak—and looked at one of the dead birds. I poked it with a nervous finger and discovered that it was flash-frozen, as stiff and cold and hard as if it had just been pulled out of an icebox. I rose again and looked down the street. The feathered dead went on and on, for as far as the eye could see.

  The Phoenician rocked on his heels, brainlessly surveying the carnage. Shelly stood behind him, just inside the open front door, a far more serene expression on her face.

  “Where’d you park your car?” I asked him.

  “Park?” he said. His hand had dropped to the front of his trousers. “I’m wet.” He didn’t say it like it bothered him.

  The thunderheads had blown off to the east, coming apart into mountainous islands. The sky to the west was a bright burning gold, darkening to a deep red along the horizon—a hideous shade, the color of the human heart. It was a hideous hour.

  I left him in the yard and went looking for his car. Are you surprised by that? That I left the Phoenician alone in the yard with Shelly Beukes, just walked away from the both of them? It never crossed my mind to worry. By then I understood the stunning effect of exposure to the Solarid multiplied, each time the camera went off. After zapping him more than fifty times, I had just about lobotomized him—temporarily anyway. Even now a part of me thinks I did enough damage inside his head to leave him permanently impaired.

  Certainly Shelly never recovered. You knew that, didn’t you? If you were hoping somehow that that kind, brave old woman was going to get it all back in the end, then this story is going to disappoint you. Not one of those birds got up and flew away, and not a bit of what she lost was ever returned to her.

  Almost as soon as I was walking up the street, I began to cry. Not out-and-out racking sobs—just a weak, miserable trickle of tears and a hitching of breath. At first I tried not to step on any of the dead birds, but after a couple hundred feet I gave up. There were too many of them. They made muffled snapping sounds underfoot.

  The temperature had dropped while I was inside, but it had started climbing again, and when I found the Phoenician’s Caddy, steam was rising from the wet blacktop surrounding it. He hadn’t parked far away, just along the curb around the corner, where the development hadn’t really developed yet. There were ranch houses along one side of the road, pretty spread out, but a dense wall of forest and scrub brush on the other. A good place to leave a car for a while if you didn’t want anyone to notice.

  When I returned to the Beukeses’ house, the Phoenician had sat down on the curb. He was holding a dead bird by one scaly leg and inspecting it closely. Shelly had found a broom and was futilely sweeping the lawn, trying to collect up the little corpses.

  “Come on,” I said to him. “Let’s go.”

  The Phoenician put the dead bird in his shirt pocket and obediently stood.

  I walked him down the path, up the street, and around the corner. I didn’t notice Shelly following us with her broom until we were almost to the Phoenician’s big Caddy.

  I opened the car door, and after a moment of staring blankly into the front seat the Phoenician slid behind the wheel. He looked at me hopefully, waiting for me to tell him what to do next.

  Did he still remember how to drive? I wondered. I leaned in to pat his pant pockets for his keys, and that’s when I caught an eye-watering reek of gasoline. I glanced into the back and saw a red fuel can sitting on the rear seats, next to the stack of photo albums. I knew then what it would ultimately take arson investigators another three weeks to determine: that the fire at Mr. Beukes’s Cupertino gym had been caused not by a stroke of lightning but by a stroke of malice.

  The power outage in the neighborhood, on the other hand, was really just a by-product of the storm. I’m less sure that the storm itself was a purely natural event. An hour earlier, I had considered the possibility that the Phoenician might have some occult influence over the weather and rejected the idea with a certain amused disgust. But the notion seemed less absurd as I looked out upon those acres of slaughtered birds. Did he have a hand in the storm after all? Perhaps—perhaps not. I said there was a lot about that evening I don’t understand.

  I imagined reaching into the back of the Caddy and sprinkling what little was left in the can on the Phoenician, then dropping the car lighter in his lap. But of course I wasn’t going to do that. I felt sick about stepping on a dead sparrow. I was hardly going to murder a li
ving man. I left the gas can where it was, but on impulse I grabbed the topmost photo album and stuck it under my arm. I discovered the keys in the dashboard ashtray and started the Caddy for him.

  The Phoenician gazed at me devoutly.

  “You can go now,” I said.

  “Go where?”

  “I don’t care. As long as it’s nowhere near here.”

  He nodded slowly, and then a sweet, dreamy smile appeared on his leprous face. “That Spanish gin will fuck you up, huh? I should’ve stopped at one! I got a feeling I’m not going to remember any of this tomorrow morning.”

  “Maybe I ought to take your picture,” Shelly said from behind me. “So you don’t forget.”

  “Hey,” he said. “That’s a good idea.”

  “Smile real big, bucko,” Shelly said, and he did, and she thudded him in the teeth with the handle of her broom.

  It made a bony thwack and snapped his head to the side. She cackled. When he looked up, his hand was clapped over his mouth, but there was blood dribbling between his fingers. His eyes were childlike and frightened.

  “You want to keep that crazy bitch away from me!” he cried. “Hey, bitch! You better watch out. I know some real bad men.”

  “Not anymore,” I said, and slammed the car door in his face.

  He banged down the lock and stared at us with a mute terror. His hand fell away from his mouth to show blood in his teeth and a swiftly fattening upper lip twisted in a painful sneer.

  I didn’t wait to see him take off. I gripped Shelly by the shoulder and turned her around and started back. We were almost to the yard when he drove by. He hadn’t forgotten how to steer his big Caddy after all, and looking back from my more informed adult perspective, I’m not surprised. Motor memory is compartmentalized, set aside from other thought processes. Many people, lost entirely in the blinding white fog of senility, can still flawlessly perform certain piano pieces they learned as children. What the mind forgets, the hands remember.

  The Phoenician didn’t so much as glance at us. Instead he was bent forward over the steering wheel, looking this way and that, his eyes shiny with anxiety. I had seen the exact same look on Shelly’s face earlier in the day, when she was desperately scanning the neighborhood for something—anything—that might seem familiar.

  At the end of the street, he struck his blinker, turned right for the highway, and drove out of my life.

  10

  WHEN I PULLED THE SHEETS over her, Shelly gave me a sleepy smile and reached out to grasp my hand.

  “Do you know how many times I tucked you in, Michael? Lives have bookends, but you have to keep your eyes peeled if you wanna see ’em, bucko.”

  I bent and kissed her temple, which had the soft, powdery texture of ancient vellum. She never said my name again, although there were days when I’m sure she remembered me. There were more days when she didn’t, but now and then her eyes would flash with recognition.

  And I’m certain she knew me at the end. Not a doubt in my mind.

  11

  MR. BEUKES DIDN’T GET HOME until 2:00 A.M. Time enough for me to straighten up and put my clothes through the dryer. Time enough to rake up the dead birds in the yard. Time to pour a glass of strawberry Quik—Mr. Beukes liked to use it as an ingredient in his protein shakes, and I liked to use it as an ingredient in my fat ass—and take stock.

  Time to leaf through the stolen photo album. The one marked S. BEUKES in black Sharpie on the inside cover.

  It could’ve been anyone’s collection of memories, although the oldest Polaroids in the book showed scenes that had occurred well before color photography was available to the masses. And so many snapshots were of things no one would’ve photographed.

  Here was a wooden horse on wooden wheels, with a rope strung through a hole in its head, being pulled along a concrete sidewalk.

  Here was a sunlit blue sky with a single cloud in it, a cloud shaped like a cat, tail curled in a question-mark shape. The chubby hands of a toddler reached up toward it from the bottom edge of the photograph.

  Here was a brawny woman with big, crooked teeth, peeling a potato at a sink, a radio in a walnut case glowing on the kitchen counter in the background. Based on the resemblance, I guessed it was Shelly’s mother and that the year might be somewhere around 1940.

  Here was a twenty-year-old knockout with the body of an Olympic swimmer, wearing white underwear, her arms crossed over her bare chest, a fedora perched on her head. She inspected herself in a full-length mirror. A big mule of a man, completely naked, could be seen in the reflection as well, sitting on the edge of a mattress. He grinned wolfishly and studied her with frank admiration. I had to look at this image for half a minute before it sank in that the girl was Shelly herself and the man behind her was her future husband.

  Midway through the book, I came across a series of four Polaroids that gave me a very nasty shock—four snapshots I cannot explain. It was the girl again—the girl with the Paddington Bear. The dead girl I’d seen in the Phoenician’s mind photographs (“thoughtographs”?). They had both known her.

  In these images it was the late sixties, early seventies. In one the girl sat on a kitchen counter, her cheeks wet with tears, a scrape on one knee. She bravely clutched her bear to her chest, as Shelly’s big, freckled hands reached into frame with a Band-Aid. In another Polaroid, Shelly’s strong, confident fingers worked a sewing needle, stitching Paddington Bear’s hat back on his head, while the girl looked on with dark, grave eyes. In the third picture, the child slept in a rich girl’s bed, surrounded by stuffed bears. But it was Paddington she clutched tight to her chest in sleep.

  In the last photograph, the little girl was dead at the bottom of the world’s steepest stone staircase, facedown in a spreading puddle of blood, one arm flung out as if reaching back for Paddington, who had wound up only about halfway down the steps.

  I don’t know who she was. Not Shelly’s daughter. Someone she’d looked after when she was younger, a first nannying job? That steep stone staircase didn’t look like Cupertino; San Francisco maybe.

  I can’t be sure how the girl with the bear connected Shelly and the Phoenician—I’ve said there’s a lot I don’t understand—but I have my ideas. I think the Phoenician was trying to erase himself. That he was visiting people who knew him, or might have known him, before he was the Phoenician. I think every photo album in his car belonged to someone who might’ve remembered the man or boy he’d been before his body became a profane manuscript in a tongue that has been perhaps rightfully forgotten. As to why he needed to scrub that former version of himself from living memory, I will not hazard a guess.

  The last pages of Shelly’s memory album were the hardest to look at. You know what was in them.

  There I was, sitting on a concrete step, placidly allowing Shelly to tie my shoes with worn, age-freckled hands that were so much older than the hands that appeared in the Paddington Bear photos. I sat in her lap while she read me Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. A plump seven-year-old version of me, with hopeful eyes underneath tousled bangs, held up a green-and-golden frog no bigger than a quarter, for her inspection and approval.

  It should’ve been my mother’s arms around me and my father reading to me, but it wasn’t. It was Shelly. Again and again it was Shelly Beukes, loving—cherishing—a lonely fat boy who desperately needed someone to notice him. My mother didn’t want the job, and my father didn’t really know how to do it, so it fell to Shelly. And she adored me with all the enthusiasm of a woman who’s just won a new car on The Price Is Right. Like she was the lucky one—to have me, to have the good fortune to bake me cookies, and fold my underwear, and endure my grade-school tantrums, and kiss my boo-boos. When really I was the lucky one and never knew it.

  12

  IN THE YEAR AND A half that followed, Shelly had two kinds of days: bad and worse. Mr. Beukes and I tried to look after her. She forgot how to use a knife, and we had to cut her food for her. She forgot how to us
e the toilet, and we changed her diapers. She forgot who Larry was and was sometimes frightened of him when he walked into the room. She was never frightened of me, but she often didn’t know who I was. Although maybe there was a little tickle of a memory back there somewhere, because often when I walked into the house, she would shout, “Daddy! The repairman is here to fix the TV!”

  Sometimes when Larry wasn’t around, I sat with her and looked at the Phoenician’s album of stolen memories, trying to get her interested in those thoughtographs with their muddy colors and bad lighting. But usually she would sulk and turn her head away so she didn’t have to see them and say something like, “Why are you showing me this? Go fix the TV. Mickey Mouse Club is on next. I don’t want to miss anything good.”

  Only once did I see her respond to an image in the photo album. One afternoon she looked at the picture of the dead girl at the bottom of the steps with sudden, childlike fascination.

  She pressed her thumb to the photograph and said, “Pushed.”

  “Yes, Shelly? Was she? Did you see who did it?”

  “Disappeared,” she said, and sprayed her fingers out in a theatrical poof gesture. “Like a ghost. Are you going to fix the TV?”

  “You bet,” I promised. “Mickey Mouse Club, coming up.”

  In the fall of my sophomore year in high school, Larry Beukes dozed off in front of the TV and Shelly wandered out of the house. She was not found until four o’clock the next morning. Two cops discovered her three miles away, looking for something to eat in a dumpster behind the Dairy Queen. Her feet were black with filth, ragged and bloody, and her fingernails were broken, her fingers raw, as if she’d fallen into a gully and had to claw her way out. Someone had helped himself to her wedding and engagement rings. She didn’t know Larry when he came to get her. She didn’t respond to her own name. She couldn’t say where she’d been and didn’t care where she was going as long as there was TV.