Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

John Joel climbed up in the tree, saying “shit” when he scraped his leg. He weighed more than he had at the beginning of summer, and it was hard to bend his leg as sharply as he needed to to haul himself up on one of the branches. When he got to the limb he usually sat on, or stretched out on, he settled himself and examined the scrape on his leg. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t bleeding. He clamped his hand over it and hoped the pressure would stop the stinging.

There was nothing to do. He stared at the big bumblebees hovering around the abelia, and wished that there were some way to blindfold Mary and lead her into the bush. He looked at the lot between their house and Angela’s. Some butterflies flew up from the brush. It was a sticky, hot day. His stomach felt heavy, but he was also hungry. He swung his legs back and forth, too lazy, after just having climbed into the tree, to work his way down and go back to the kitchen for more food. He thought about Parker’s mother’s orange cake. He had eaten a piece of that cake before. There were thin rounds of orange on the top, around the edge, like little wheels on their sides. When Parker’s mother was making bread, or a soufflé, Parker would go into the kitchen, if she was on the second floor, and jump hard outside the oven. He didn’t do anything to ruin her orange cakes. His mother had stopped making bread. Most of her energy now went into making orange cakes that were perfectly shaped, tall, beautiful. John Joel watched a bird hopping around on the grass. The bird didn’t know he was up in the tree. “Meow,” he said, drawing the word out, speaking in as high a pitch as possible. The bird jumped along. John Joel did it again. The bird flew a few feet forward, continued to hop along the grass. Only when John Joel started to climb down from the tree did it fly away.

He hated to have nothing to do but hang out with his mother or go to Parker’s. For a while he put it off, flipping through comics he had already looked at three or four times, and Pig Fig was really the only funny one. He flipped through that one again, then picked up the comics and decided to return them to Parker and have a piece of orange cake. He remembered to lock the door when he went out, and to leave the key under a big shell that was in among his mother’s iris. He would have liked for Mary to have forgotten her key and be locked out, but she’d probably go to Angela’s until dinner anyway, and if his mother came home and saw that he’d left the back door open, he’d catch hell.

Parker did his usual routine of not answering the door. John Joel rang the bell, and knocked on the door and yelled Parker’s name. Finally, he heard Parker, in no special hurry, coming to answer the door.

“What?” Parker said, opening the door.

“I brought your comics back.”

“Yeah,” Parker said. “You came for cake.”

Parker stood aside, and he walked in.

“I lied about the cake,” Parker said.

“I don’t want any cake,” John Joel said. “I just wanted to return your comics.”

“You want it,” Parker said. “There is one, too. Come in the kitchen.”

He followed Parker into the kitchen. The wallpaper in the kitchen was blue, with a pattern of white chickens, columns of half-inch-high chickens. There was a long plate-rail across one wall, where Parker’s mother kept her collection of old plates with animals and farm scenes. There was a blue tablecloth on the table, and salt and pepper shakers shaped like chickens. Parker lifted up the salt shaker and took it to the sink. He put his finger under the water, and let a single drop of water hit the circle of tiny holes in the chicken’s head. Then he dried it off and put it back on the table. He got a knife out of a drawer, and two plates. He cut two pieces of cake: a large one for himself, and a medium one for John Joel. He got two Cokes out of the refrigerator, and shook John Joel’s can lightly, three or four times, before he grinned and handed it to him. John Joel let it sit there. He only cared about the cake, anyway. And when his piece was gone, he was going to cut another one. He’d like to see what Parker would do to stop him. They ate in silence. Parker thumbed through Pig Fig and laughed as he ate. John Joel finished first and picked up the cake knife, but he didn’t cut another piece. He wiped the icing onto his finger and licked it.

“Come on upstairs,” Parker said. “I want to show you something.”

He had already seen what Parker had to show: the two green fishing tackle boxes, with his grandfather’s things in them.

“Why’d you bring them upstairs?” John Joel said.

“Just felt like it,” Parker said. “He’s away on a trip. He’s not going to know. If she finds them, serves her right for snooping in my room. Let her find them. I’d like to see her face.”

Parker took out the pen with the little lady that did the striptease.

“Hey, Parker,” he said. “I saw that.”

“It’s neat,” Parker said, handing him the pen. “It got screwed up and he doesn’t hit her right. You think there’s somebody who repairs pens like this?” Parker tilted it, smiling. “Look,” he said. “Stupid man’s aim is off.”

Parker put the two boxes on his bed. He lifted the ties out again, and put them in a pile. He had something small in his hand that John Joel couldn’t see.

“Reach out,” Parker said.

“For what?”

“Because I said to. You scared I’m going to blow you up or something?”

“What have you got?”

“Jesus, are you an infant,” Parker said. “Go to shake hands with me. Come on.”

John Joel put his hand out. It was sticky from the cake. Parker’s hand came forward, and John Joel saw a thin ring of metal around Parker’s middle finger, and then something hard pressed into the palm of his hand. It was a palm buzzer. Parker took it off and showed John Joel the small circle of metal with a bulge in the middle that made a loud buzzing sound when pressure was put on it.

Parker put the ties and the palm buzzer back into the box and pulled some comics out from under his bed. He flopped onto his stomach and started to read one. John Joel went to the bathroom. He undid the button at the top of his shorts, and pulled his shirt out, to be more comfortable. He ran the cold water and wiped his wet hand over his face, patted his face dry on somebody’s towel. He felt even stickier. He went back to Parker’s room, thinking about asking for more cake.

He and Parker read comics. Parker got up from the bed and touched his toes. “Bet you can’t,” he said to John Joel. John Joel was pretty sure he couldn’t. He ignored Parker. He ran his tongue over his teeth and thought how much he didn’t want braces. Parker had a magazine about dentists — a picture book, on cheap paper that almost fell apart when you touched it, so Parker turned the pages carefully, like the pages of a rare book. The magazine showed dentist’s instruments, larger than life, and there were pictures of women with their eyes like pinwheels and their legs spread, dentists pressed against their crotches, bending over and probing into their mouths. The writing in the magazine was all in some foreign language, but the people in the pictures looked like Americans.

“You should have seen Marathon Man,” Parker said. “Ask your orthodontist if he saw that.”

After a while, when John Joel said he was going home, Parker got up and offered him another piece of cake. They went to the kitchen and Parker cut two slices, this time even more unequal in size, and flopped them onto the same plates they had eaten off before. The morning paper was on the table, and there was a picture of Rosalynn Carter standing with some foreign woman. “Dumb hag scumbag,” Parker said, examining the paper. He turned the picture of Rosalynn Carter face down on the table and picked up his piece of cake and ate it out of his fingers.