David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

Carl thinks Aunt Lissa might in fact have turned into that old woman, but maybe that’s just to scare himself. As a kid, he used to scare himself for real by thinking that his mother, to keep from dying, had magically turned herself into Aunt Lissa on the Connecticut Turnpike when she saw that his father was steering them across the divider. Since his mother and Aunt Lissa were sisters, it seemed believable. He would watch Aunt Lissa’s face and see his mother in there, coming and going.

They take the exit for Catskill and Cairo and pass an abandoned cinder-block store with plywood in the windows and a Henry Craig Realty sign. “Hammerin’ Hank,” Carl says to Aunt Lissa. “Now, that has to make a brother proud.” Zero reaction.

She takes him to Walmart, where he picks out a three-pack of Fruit of the Loom briefs, three black Fruit of the Loom pocket tees, a gray hooded sweatshirt (90-10 cotton-polyester, which is incredible for just some mystery brand), a package of white socks and a pair of Wrangler blue jeans. The darker blue to last him longer. Aunt Lissa says she’ll treat him but he says, No, no, he has money, like flipping his cigarette away before the firing squad.

Coming around the last corner, he tries to see if he can tell independently what it was about the house that spoke to her . It’ll be a test of his—let’s say this exactly—his congruence . He squints and says in his mind, Okay, now what exactly is the charming feature here? Like, There are x number of bunnies hidden in this picture, can you find them? Could it be the wooden filigree along the porch? No, because “form follows function” is a major theme in world aesthetics, and Aunt Lissa takes the train down for shows at the Modern. Yet olden fanciness is also one of her themes; she gardens with heirloom varieties. See, this is the kind of shit he needs to be able to sort out again.

She parks by the kitchen door, then reaches under and yanks the hood release. “Fool me twice, shame on me. Could you get the groceries?” She lifts the hood and pulls a magnetic Hide-a-Key box off the engine block. “Voilà.” Closes the hood and tucks the box up under the front bumper. “Bingo. You don’t think anybody would look there, do you?”

“ I wouldn’t,” he says.

Up the hill behind Aunt Lissa’s house, Henry’s lights are on and white smoke snake-charms out of his metal chimney. Can you actually own a hill ? Half a hill, really, but it’s like the moon in that no one sees the side that’s turned away. Down low in the sky, there’s an orange light that tints the snow. He takes the grocery bags, follows Aunt Lissa onto the screened-in porch and stands shivering while she rattles a key in the storm door. “We never used to lock up,” she says. If this were a movie scene, you’d cut right here.

—

He closes the door behind him and rubs his feet on the hairy brown mat. That old-refrigerator smell of an empty house in winter. Aunt Lissa clomps in her flopping rubber boots to the thermostat and the house goes bump; then she clomps into the kitchen. Carl hears water running. The foomp of a lighted burner.

She comes back in, rubbing the knuckles of one hand, then the other. “It should warm up soon,” she says. “I keep the downstairs at fifty.” She pulls a chair over to the register. “Water’s on for tea.”

“You have coffee?”

“Instant.”

He makes a cross with his index fingers.

“It’s terrible for you anyway.” She sits down, still wearing her coat. “Supposed to be a full moon tonight. I hope it doesn’t cloud over again.”

“ ‘When the moon is in the sky,’ ” he sings, “ ‘tell me what am I, to do?’ So what movie?” He thinks he hears a car, gets up and goes to the window. A Grand Cherokee’s pulling up behind the Volvo, headlights beaming, its grille a toothy smile. “Huh. Looks like a small businessman.”

“Be nice.”

The headlights go out, the car door opens. “Yep,” he says. “Big as life and twice as natural.”

Aunt Lissa turns on the porch light. There’s Henry wiping his feet.

“I saw you drive in, so I thought I’d stop down,” Henry says. “Carl?”

“Yo, mah buvva,” Carl says. “You keepin’ it real, yo?” Henry cocks his head. “You know, like real estate.”

“I’m not up on my jive talk.” Henry turns to Aunt Lissa. “Why don’t you come on up to the house while it’s getting warm in here? Connie’s making soup.”

“Yum,” Aunt Lissa says. “We might stop up later. How about some tea? I just put water on.”

Henry twists the sleeve of his leather jacket. “So how’d it go?”

“Well, I suppose it was fine,” Aunt Lissa says. “I don’t have a lot in my experience to compare it to.”

“Hell, I should’ve done this.”

“But you had your closing. It was perfectly fine.”

Henry looks at Carl. “So what were you doing up this way?”

Carl looks at the tabletop. Honey oak with flamelike grain. “I don’t know, long story.”

“Aren’t they all. The hell happened to your face?”

Carl shakes his head.

“Christ,” Henry says. “Shouldn’t he be back in detox?”

“I hate to do it,” Aunt Lissa says.

“He goes up in front of a judge in this kind of shape, they’ll do it for you.”

“I think what Carl needs most is just to get some rest,” she says.

“ I think what Carl needs most,” Carl says, “is a good old pop of Demerol. Speaking as Carl.”

He knows Henry heard this because something jumps in that fat throat. “They’re probably going to want him in some kind of a program.”

“Hey, Teletubbies ,” Carl says. “Believe it or not that’s an incredibly cool show.”

“This is funny to you?” Henry says.

Aunt Lissa gets up, so whatever the noise is that’s been going on for a while now must be the whistling teakettle. Good that it’s something . “Now, what’s anybody’s pleasure?” she says. “We have Earl Grey, plain old Lipton’s, chamomile…green tea?” Sad: back when she used to read him The Tale of Peter Rabbit , she said camo- myle .

“Actually I better hit it back up the hill.” Henry looks out the window. “Supposed to snow again.”

“Sorry, this is kind of getting to me,” Carl says and goes into the kitchen, where steam’s whistling out of the little pisshole. He takes the kettle off the burner and the noise stops.

“Lissa,” he hears Henry say, “are you sure you’re up to this?” Or maybe he said “listen.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she says.

He hears the door close, and Aunt Lissa comes into the kitchen. “You had to show off for him.”

“He’s a dick. Pardon the expression.” Carl hears the Cherokee start up.

“I know the expression,” she says. “Now help me put this stuff away.”

“Is that a denial?” he says.

“You,” she says, “are wicked.”

—

How all this current shit started, he’d gotten involved with a person in the city who was also originally from Albany—okay, Schenectady—and when they’d been together a couple of days, she’d thought up this idea. Rent a car, both get as much cash as possible from their cash machines (this was like a Saturday night), buy whatever they could find, drive upstate to her parents’ house, her parents being in Florida, and sell it at a major markup to all these people she still knew. This was a very young person: cigarette smoker, chopped-off hair bleached white. Tiny stud in her left nostril like a blackhead and seven gold rings around her left ear, nothing in her right, so when she tried out for modeling jobs she could give them two different looks.