Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

“You’re gonna get in trouble, Parker,” John Joel said.

“Stick around and I’ll show you something,” Parker said.

Parker was taking another magazine out from under the mattress. It was a GI magazine, and he was tearing off the cover. A Marine, bayonet raised high, was yelling and beckoning troops forward, and behind him a soldier who had stepped on a land mine was being blown sideways, through smoke and flame. John Joel looked at the little soldier. He had a horrible expression on his face, and a blob of blood where his nose should be. John Joel studied the picture, as though the nose might be somewhere else. Then Parker cut out Louise’s face and put it over the face of the screaming Marine, her hair partly obscuring the helmet, and began to tear off small pieces of tape to fasten it in place.

“What do you think I’m going to do with that?” he asked Parker.

“It’s funny,” Parker said, laughing. “Imagine if your mother was a Marine. I should have used this one for Tiffy and the other one for your mother, maybe. This is nice of me, you know. This magazine cost me a buck and a half.”

“I thought you told me you lifted it.”

“Oh yeah?” Parker said. “If I said so, then I did. I forget which ones I bought and which ones I smuggled out. Stupid old baldie who runs the candy store, you could take money out of his cash register and he wouldn’t know it, I bet.”

The gray and white newspaper picture fit in with the gray-green helmet and almost looked as if it belonged there. For some reason, it embarrassed him to look at the picture.

“Here,” Parker said, pushing it toward him.

“I don’t want the thing,” he said half-heartedly.

“You don’t know what’s funny when you see it,” Parker said. “To tell you the truth, you probably wouldn’t get half of what’s going on in Moonraker . It’s got a big snake in it, and you’re even afraid of old garden snakes. You’re even afraid of those Fourth of July snakes.”

“I am not,” John Joel said.

“Maybe when Tiffy’s husband sees it, he’ll squeal,” Parker said. “I’m going out to mail this. Are you coming?”

“Why can’t you mail it later?”

“Come on,” Parker said. “When we come back, I’ll show you something.”

“Why can’t you show me now?”

Parker looked disgusted. He started picking things off the floor without saying anything. He put the magazine back under the mattress, and put the tape and scissors in his desk drawer. When he turned around, he didn’t look as disgusted. “Okay,” Parker said. “Are you going to tell everybody in the world I showed you this?”

“What for?” John Joel shrugged.

“Because you couldn’t wait to tell your mother that I burned the ticket stubs, and she told my mother.”

“She did not. You just told me this morning on the phone that you told her, and that she didn’t believe you, and that she wouldn’t give me the three bucks back.”

Parker smiled. “I was just testing,” he said, “but I’ll bet you told her, didn’t you?”

“What’s it to you? She didn’t tell your mother. She wouldn’t.”

“That illustrates what I was telling you before. That illustrates why Tiffy isn’t going to tell my mother what she got in the mail, and if she does, my mother’s not going to put two and two together. Your mother knows about the diaphragm, doesn’t she, she even knows , and she’s not telling my mother.”

“She doesn’t like your mother.”

“She doesn’t like my mother because my mother’s a tennis pro, just about, and nobody but Marge Pendergast can keep up with her.”

“Talk about who loves their mother.”

“I don’t love her. I just said that she plays pro tennis.”

“You love her,” John Joel said.

“Get off,” Parker said, brushing something imaginary from his arm. He went to the door, opened it, and looked both ways. “Just keep your mouth shut about this,” he said.

“What’s this going to be?” John Joel said.

“Scared?” Parker said.

“What would I be scared of?” John Joel said.

Actually, he was a little scared. He thought the way Parker looked both ways before he came out of his room and crept around the empty house was scary — it was the way people moved in the old movies, when somebody really was hiding and was about to jump out at them. The house was like an old-movie house, too: There were big overstuffed chairs, and there was almost nothing modern around. It had been Parker’s grandmother’s house, and when she died, Parker’s family had moved in.

“This is probably going to be nothing,” John Joel said.

“Oh no, Mr. Bill, don’t go down those steps!” Parker squealed. As they went down, Parker was making sounds of explosions: “Pshew! Whew! Boom!”

The basement smelled like Raid. There was a hum from the sump pump behind the stairs that kept the basement from flooding. It was a creepy basement, full of things that looked like worms but weren’t. Nothing was down there but a washer and dryer and Parker’s father’s workroom. He followed Parker into that room. Above the work table there was a picture of Parker’s grandmother and grandfather, standing beside some hollyhocks. Both of them had on straw hats — hers was wide-brimmed, and part of a hollyhock had been tucked in the band — and they were holding hands and smiling into the camera. The picture was probably from long ago; it was probably taken before Parker was born. There was a picture of three men in Army uniforms, with beer mugs raised — a picture all brown and white, with spots here and there on the picture, like little match flames. And there was a picture of Parker as a baby, sitting in his diapers, holding a toy rabbit. Parker wasn’t a fat baby. He looked nice when he was a baby.

“One of those guys is the guy who only had one ball,” Parker said, pointing to the picture of the three men in uniform. “This one of them married somebody who’s a famous dancer, and the one with one ball runs a bar in Santo Domingo, and that one’s my father.” There was a chain dangling from a fluorescent light above the table. Parker pulled the light on. It blinked a couple of times, and then the table was flooded with bright light. Parker pushed aside a hammer and a jar full of nails and screws and lifted two fishing tackle boxes from below the table onto the tabletop. He opened one and put aside several carefully folded wide ties with geometric patterns on them. Underneath the ties there was a pen that, when tilted, showed a tiny woman becoming naked.

“I’ve seen those,” John Joel said.

“Seen this?” Parker said. He turned the pen slowly, and from the other side a small naked man with his penis sticking out began to come toward the small naked woman, slowly and imprecisely, like someone floating in space when there’s no gravity. The penis touched the woman’s side. Parker smiled and put the pen back in the box.

“Look at this,” Parker said. He held out a little dish, or an ashtray, with a drawing on it of a huge woman, being sculpted out of stone by a man who was carving with his penis.

“This is what I really wanted to show you,” Parker said. He put the things back and opened the other box. In that box there were more ties, some letters and a small black gun. Parker took them out, put them aside, and took out a cardboard box. Inside there was a piece of cardboard that unfolded into the shape of a penis, a narrow black scarf with tiny mothholes in it (Parker held it over his eyes for a second), and a folded piece of paper with a picture of a vagina, pink and brown, about three feet high. “Better than pin the tail on the donkey,” Parker said. Parker chuckled. He zoomed the cardboard penis against the vagina. “It’s not his stuff,” Parker said. “It’s my grandfather’s.” Parker began refolding the piece of paper. “He’s never going to tell me this stuff is here, I bet,” Parker said. He put the two boxes back under the table and pushed the hammer and the jar of screws back into place. “He goes into the boxes. I wet a hair and put it up against that box,” Parker said, pulling the chain to turn the light off. “And the hair was gone.”