Acre Under a Green Sky

The next morning, the street was deserted except for Austin from across the street. Austin was a large, old, auburn-colored retriever; and as dear a friend to everyone on the street as any human. He lumbered across the street and joined me on our porch.

Children and dogs ran loose in those days. Everyday was a great adventure beginning with stepping outside your door in the morning. Alone. Just you and the sun. Summers were long; seemingly endless. And there was absolutely nothing to be afraid of. We were unleashed. Free. The dogs and the kids. But no more. Murderers now lurked unknown; unseen.

Austin seemed as mystified by this turn of events as I was. I truly loved Austin. He was very much like my grandfather; big and smelly and always willing to have a good time. Always happy to see me. But where were the others? The dogs and the kids?

The Luka house across the street loomed like a funhouse monster. Yesterday, the police were all over it like ants; and the street was crowded with people. People I had never seen before with their dogs and kids. There were police cars and ambulances neatly parked along the curb sometimes in double rows making Luka's cockeyed Dodge look bewildered and frightened like a backward dog caught in the middle of traffic with its tail between its legs. No one had thought to move the car; to legitimize it, to make it right. And so there it stood this morning; less fearful but no less shamefaced.

Only then did it occur to me that I would never see the people who lived in that house again. I didn't care. I didn't much like them anyway, except for Luka. Marilyn was a scabby-kneed sneak thief with long, stringy yellow hair and a mean baton. She was my age, and she beat me mercilessly with that thing. It was a perfect weapon; a cold, sleek and wondrous shiny rod with a large gray rubber knob at one end and a smaller rubber knob at the other. The rod was etched with stars at each end so that it appeared encrusted with diamonds when the light hit it right. Marilyn loved shiny things. She was a pack rat for shiny things –– preferably other people's shiny things. Marilyn carried that baton everywhere; twirling, twirling, but secretly hoping some innocent boy would wander by so she could beat the crap out of him. She was vicious and all-powerful. She knew that we weren't allowed to hit girls; and she knew that much as we wanted batons of our own, no self-respecting boy would so much as touch a girl thing. I hated Marilyn.

Her little brother, Jeff, was Danny's age and had the remarkable ability to disappear. He and Danny were best friends so I had the opportunity to see a lot of him when and if he wanted me to. If you spoke to him directly, he would answer so feebly that you had to bend down over him to ask what he said and he would become smaller and smaller and smaller until you were on your hands and knees shouting, "What?!" to the sidewalk. We soon learned to speak to Jeff through Danny who obviously had learned the art of lip reading when nobody was looking. Everything we came to know of Jeff's wit and exploits, we learned from Danny –– often while Jeff was standing right next to him like a vacant-eyed ventriloquist's dummy. It was Danny who discovered Jeff's hidden talent. Jeff did a perfect impersonation of Jerry Lewis. The transformation was alarming.

My mother was not impressed. Everyone did Jerry Lewis. Even so, she often asked Jeff to perform; because when Jeff was doing Jerry Lewis, he was not only visible, he was big. My mother loved Jeff. She referred to him as "Danny's imaginary friend".

Mrs. Luka was like my mother only not as pretty. Her long brown hair was always carelessly pulled up at the back of her head and magically held there in a kind of knot. Fine ropes of hair; often of different red and golden colors, would escape the knot and drape about her neck and face. Then, with a deft maneuver of her slender fingers, she would collect them and exquisitely reassemble the knot all the while explaining why we can't swim for at least an hour after eating. If there was a hairclip back there, I never saw it. My years in the Cub Scouts never taught me a knot that would accomplish what she did so handily, so prettily.

I never dared ask her for instructions, of course. It would be wrong to show any interest at all in such things, so I secretly admired that particular feminine skill just as I secretly envied Marilyn her baton. My curiosity did arouse a kind of innocent lust in me; but then all curiosity is lust, especially in little boys. Mrs. Luka was a good mom. She was even-tempered and liked to laugh. Only sometimes, like my mother, she was preoccupied with a busy kind of sadness. You left her alone then.

Her mother, on the other hand, was funny. She never meant to be, but she was in spite of herself. Her name was "Estelle", but they called her "Gran", and she was always bickering about one thing or another. There was always too much noise, too many kids. Luka drank too much and didn't work enough. The house was never clean enough. No one ate properly or went to bed at a respectable hour. The children were dirty and dressed in rags. The house was falling down around her ears. Her daughter didn't have a decent thing to wear. All true, of course.

Estelle's eyes were dark and wide; perpetually startled by the horrors around her and the fact that no one else appeared to see. Her shoulders were set in a fixed shrug. Her mouth was tightly pursed with spoked lines radiating out from it. She was clean and gray and totally ineffectual. No one heard a word she said. She was a mosquito no one swatted or even waved away. She was ludicrously funny. If only she had taken the hint and stopped complaining, she wouldn't have become such a fool.

But, of course, she did stop complaining. Sometime late that night after the high school graduation and the picnic in their back yard, someone killed them all.

Suddenly their house with its brown shingles seemed to expand as if it had lungs. Austin saw it, too, and made a move to go over there, but I grabbed his collar and pulled him close to me. It had a secret; that house. It appeared to boast its secret; to dare me to imagine what happened in there. It was not ashamed like the car jig-nosed out on the lawn. Neither was it exactly proud. For the first time, it had a presence of its own apart from the people who had lived there, and that presence was resolute: I will not let you rest until the truth be known. I will be a torment to all those around me until I am turned inside out and the horrors I have witnessed are exposed. I am not murdered, and I am not going away.

I could hear my mother and father arguing. I was glad to turn away from that house across the street and to enter my own home even if there was fighting.

"It's not their job to do it, that's why." My father was pacing the living room floor.

"And I suppose it's mine!"

"I'm sorry, Nora. I don't know what to tell you. There is no one else. There's no one left. Luka sure as hell can't do it."

My mother always argued from inside the kitchen. The quarrel might begin anywhere in the house, but my mother always found her way to the kitchen and argued from there. I don't know why she chose the kitchen. It was her least favorite room.

If she wanted to make a point, she would frame herself in the kitchen doorway. Otherwise, you saw her darting this way and that past the kitchen doorway. My father paced in the adjoining living room with his head down as if he were listening to a particularly disturbing radio broadcast.

"We have a little boy in the other room who is heartbroken because his best friend is dead. Do you know that?"

"Yes, I know that," my father said.

I didn't know that. Danny never said a word to me about that. Just then my little sister teetered into the kitchen right on cue. She took to raised voices like a referee to a clinch. Later, I would find out she felt responsible for their fights.

"You really ask too much," my mother went on. "You really do."

"Someone's got to bury them."

"Why us?! Why not Will and his storm troopers? Or someone else? Anyone else?! What are you getting us into? Do you know that?"

Baby Ruth was trying to latch onto my mother's leg, but it was moving too fast. It looked like she might be run over.

"Over here, Baby Ruth," I called to her.

My mother turned on me:

"Don't call her that! Her name is 'Ruth'!"

"They want it done today," my father went on, "In and out. They're sending a man over at three."

"Is he a client then? Is that what you're telling me?"

"We're talking about Luka and Gwen here."

"I know who we're talking about!"

"All right," my father said, "I'll do it myself."

My mother appeared quiet in the doorway with Baby Ruth attached to her leg.

"You wouldn't know what to pick," she said, "You'd get all the wrong things. I'll do it."

"I'm sorry, Nora."

I could see her dragging Baby Ruth across the floor and opening the kitchen cabinet. She spiked her coffee with vodka, took a sip, and looked up to the ceiling.

"They're really dead, aren't they?"

My father went to my mother and put his arms around her. He rocked her gently from side to side. I had never seen my father hold my mother before. He was not in the least awkward about it, but it looked awkward. Baby Ruth was hugging their legs. My mother started crying, and dammit, so did I. It was involuntary, and it enraged me. I threw an ashtray to the floor as hard as I could, and ran out of the house.