Ann Beattie - Falling in Place

Parker trailed him home. He kept walking behind him, and when John Joel turned around Parker would puff out his cheeks and waddle.

“You’re so thin yourself,” John Joel said.

“Let’s see you touch your toes,” Parker said.

Parker picked up a rock and threw it at a squirrel. When a car came down the road, he zigged and zagged, so that the car didn’t know if he was going to run out in front of it or not. John Joel didn’t know how Parker could do things like that: What if the person in the car knew him, or his parents? Parker picked up another rock and threw it at a tree. It hit the tree and rebounded, and John Joel ducked. Parker laughed.

“You’re a real asshole,” John Joel said.

He saw his mother’s car in the driveway and was secretly glad that he could get rid of Parker. Parker wouldn’t hang around if his mother was there.

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

“I’m going inside,” John Joel said.

Parker pulled the small black gun out of his pants pocket.

“Get that out of here,” John Joel said. “If my mother sees that, both of us are going to catch hell.”

“What,” Parker said, “there’s a law against it?”

“There is,” John Joel said. “There’s a law.”

“What’s it called: the Scaredy Baby’s Law? Come on. I want to show you something.”

He couldn’t go in the house with Parker carrying the gun, and Parker wouldn’t put it away.

“Come on,” Parker said, walking to the back of the lawn.

Parker climbed the tree. John Joel climbed behind him. He wished that his mother knew he was home, that she would call him. He hoped she might look out the kitchen door and see him. She had put on the sprinkler, and it was turning in a circle, jetting water out over her iris, wetting the abelia bush. The bees hovered anyway, jerking back from the spray, a few flying forward, into the soaking bush. Some bees hung to the wet bright-green branches, clustered almost like Japanese beetles, even though the water kept raining into the bush.

“What do you want now?” John Joel said.

“Ambush,” Parker said.

On cue — exactly on cue — John Joel saw Angela and Mary, walking into the field.

“Pshew! Pshew!” Parker said, aiming the gun at a bird hopping by the tree. “Wait’ll you see Moonraker , when all those guys floating in space get zapped by lasers.”

“Put that away,” John Joel said. “You’ll scare her. If she sees you with that, it’s going to get me in trouble with my mother.” John Joel stared at Parker. “I mean it,” he said. “I’m telling you.”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Parker said. He seemed more dismayed than angry. He seemed unreasonable. Parker had the gun in his right hand, and John Joel, on his left, couldn’t think how to get it away from him.

“You are really stupid,” Parker said. “You think I’d carry a gun around that had a bullet in it? That would make a lot of sense, wouldn’t it? If you’re so scared, you can hold on to it, so I don’t blow your sister away,” Parker said, handing him the gun. “You love your sister? You fall in love with your sister?”

“I hate her,” John Joel said.

Angela waved and turned back toward her house. Mary walked forward, jumping over something, zigzagging because she knew the path to take to avoid poison ivy. If his mother saw her in the field, Mary would catch hell. He hoped that his mother would come out into the backyard and see her.

Mary didn’t see them in the tree, or if she did, she was doing a better-than-average job of ignoring them. A bird flew away as she was almost out of the field. She turned and flicked something off the back of her jeans. Something small fell back into the field, a burr or a bug.

He called her name, and pulled the trigger, because he thought that Parker had been telling the truth. He didn’t even have the gun aimed, and still he hit her.

Tiffy lifted the slice of lemon out of her glass of iced tea and let tea drip into the glass. She sucked the lemon, put it on the table next to the glass .

“I never thought about it until last night — it never struck me as strange in any way, because I’m so conditioned. I’m so slow to come around to understanding some things. Think about it: The fairy godmother changes a pumpkin into a coach, mice into horses, a rat into a coachman, lizards into footmen, and work clothes into a silver and gold dress, and what does she say when she sends her off to the ball? To be back at midnight. If she had the power to do all those other things, did she really lack the power to make them last past midnight? It’s just another story about virginity. You’ve got to read My Mother, My Self. Nancy Friday can’t be wrong.” Tiffy sucked on the lemon. “Interesting, too, that she doesn’t transform anything into glass slippers — that she touches her magic ring to Cinderella’s work clothes to turn them into fine threads, but the glass slippers are just brought forward, as if they always existed. Do you know what Freud says about shoes?”

Then they heard the shot. They both knew it was a shot, but Louise said to Tiffy, “What was that?” and Tiffy said what it was. They got up from the table together, and Louise heard another sound, the sound of Tiffy’s glass turning over. She looked back at the table and saw Tiffy reaching for the toppled glass, but too late: a pale-brown puddle was washing over Perrault’s Fairy Tales. Louise stared stupidly. She was afraid to look, because she knew what it was. She knew that something horrible had happened, because there had been no sound before the shot, and no sound after it was fired: It just existed in itself, strange and loud, and then there was nothing but whatever it was she was going to see when she got to the door. The door was closed — Tiffy had suggested that, saying that the kitchen would be cooler with the fan going and the door closed, that the screen door let in more hot air than… .

While she was thinking, Tiffy passed her and threw open the door .

CYNTHIA HAD talked to Bobby on the phone, and now she was talking to him in person. Spangle’s old friend had become a writer, and he was on his way to New York to talk to agents. That didn’t delight him, but as he talked he found more and more reasons to like the idea of going to New York. Bagels — he could get bagels there. Bookstores — he might be able to find a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s book about writing a novel at a bookstore he’d heard about off Broadway at 95th. He had heard that a copy was there, and the stupid friend who’d told him — his friend Honig was so stupid he couldn’t believe it — he’d told Honig to look for the book, and Honig hadn’t realized that he had meant he should also buy it. Used-clothing stores — they might have a cowboy shirt similar to one he had lost, with a satin skull that looked as if it had been drawn by Georgia O’Keeffe sewn over the pocket.

“How did you lose a shirt?” she said.

“I was at the laundromat and I think somebody saw it going into the washing machine and pulled it out when I left to buy a newspaper. That’s all I can think. I’ve lost shoes, because I’ve forgotten I was wearing them. You know — at a lake or something, you just walk back to the car not thinking about shoes — but I can’t think myself how else I could have lost the cowboy shirt. Actually, maybe cowboy shirts aren’t really my thing. Maybe it was just that one I liked. I hate cowboy boots . These are what I like.”