Norman Rush - Mortals

“So, dinner. We’re all emotionally ravaged. My father had been savage, emotionally. Not something any of us had ever seen. We all drag ourselves to bed, ostensibly. But a little while later I hear something and I go to my window and someone with a flashlight is out there — my father, digging. No, the digging was later. That first night he’d had the inspiration that Rex had pushed this canister into one of the drains set into our retaining wall. There were about twenty of these and he was out there probing them with a broomstick. It wasn’t a bad idea to check them. My father was out there for a long time. And no luck. It was the middle of the night.

“No, the digging was later. We had a big lot and only the parts close to the house were really landscaped. There was a patio on one side, the lawn and fish pond were on the other. But the bulk of the lot was given over to ground cover, ice plant and some other creeper that gives you purple flowers in the summer and attracts hordes of bees. The digging was sad because my father felt he could only do it at night, when he wouldn’t be seen by the neighbors. He was afraid to do it during daylight. And people would have wondered. He had never done any part of the yard work. We did it, Rex and I, what there was. Lawn mowing.

“And the digging was going on, of course, because Rex was still absolutely defiant. Rex knew this was going on in the middle of the night. How could he be so cruel? This went on for … at least a week. Maybe two weeks. My father sits down opposite Rex at breakfast, stares at him, tells him in a steely voice that today is the day Rex is going to tell him where the tube is. Then he changed it to saying Rex was, that day, going to bring the tube to him, and then it was leave the tube in his den … Rex was mute. He was mute a lot during this period.

“Then it was the gamut of punishments you’d expect. Cutting off his allowance, no playing with Michael, stay in the house all weekend, like that. But Rex kept doing the things he always did to earn his allowance, like cleaning up in the kitchen. He was even extra sprightly about it. Then there were threats to send him away to boarding school, which were absolutely pointless because we all knew there was no money for it. The store in Piedmont was on a knife edge.

“The next stage of this was really bad. It was brutal. My father turned his attention to the house. The tube had to be in the house somewhere. It’s a big house with lots of crawl spaces, a big attic, a big basement. He would come home from the store and change into work clothes and plunge into the business of rummaging around inside the walls upstairs, cursing, loud curses we could hear. He tore up Rex’s room like it was a prison shakedown. Rex was shocked, but I thought he’d asked for it. My mother got very protective of Rex at this point, was on his side again, and to tell you the truth I think my father never forgave her for that. That was one of the aftereffects. There were plenty.

“Next up, a campaign of kindness, fatherly kindness. This was a process of erasure and it fooled nobody. There would be kindness and then there would be an appeal for Rex to please turn the thing over, slipped in. Then the kindness would continue. Rex went along with acting his prior self. I mean, he was still the same nasty, intricate person he’d been, but he was willing to be civil.

“Before it ended there was one return to total terror. My father shook Rex and yelled into his face like a madman. It went on for a long time.

“What triggered this last resort to brute terror was a feint my father tried that didn’t work out. One evening he announced that he’d found the time capsule. Announced it triumphantly. He called it the crime capsule. He did his best to show that now all his worries were over. I think he also implied he hadn’t read what was in it, whatever that was, and that he was going to destroy the whole thing unread. All this was a crude trick to get Rex to go out and check to see if this was true. Rex did something cruel, being Rex, like slipping out after dark and fooling around near one of the storm drains near the corner, which caused my father to pounce and embarrass himself, fishing around on all fours and finding nothing. Rex had seen through the trick. We all had. It was pitiful.

“So then there was an all-day armageddon of threatening. I think he might have hurt Rex if my mother and I hadn’t been there. It took place all over the house. My mother and I stayed with them, wherever they went, so nothing would happen. I don’t know if Rex was trying to provoke my father into some damaging act or not. Maybe the secret point of the whole exercise was to drive my father into violence, proving that he was a hypocrite or a brute. I don’t know. He kept shaking Rex, hard. My mother intervened. Then it was just verbal for hours. My father had a very nasal voice when he was infuriated, pretty unattractive. And it was all fruitless.

“Then it was dropped. I guess I have to give my father credit for grasping that he had to accept defeat and let this go if we were going to continue as anything remotely resembling a happy family.

“But it was never the same. He took our house off the market. To be fair, I don’t know if this was because of the time capsule. Rex got to continue his friendship with his beloved Michael, until Michael’s parents interfered with that. Michael moved. We were somehow wrecked. I don’t know. The store didn’t work. He was conducting business for a long time from the house. The house filled up with antiques. It was like living in a warehouse and you had to explain to your friends. I think we all wanted to escape, after that.”

“I have many questions,” Iris said.

Ray wanted this to be quick. He had other things to do with what was left of his Saturday. This wasn’t his normal sort of work, anyway. He was filling in. He didn’t mind doing it but he wanted it over with quickly. It was a simple enough assignment. He was taking attendance, in essence.

He breathed on the front lenses of his binoculars, then wiped them clean with a tissue. He raised the binoculars and got a hard focus on the ridgeline of the low red hill above the donga where the Codukukwane Hotel dumped and occasionally burned its trash. His situation was perfect. His exit route back to the VW parked at the closest corner of the parking lot was a short straight line. He felt like reminding somebody that there were things he was very good at. This site was tricky. Here was a hotel stuck out all by itself in raw bush ten miles from Gaborone. The hotel proper, laid out flat against the road, was a thatched, one-story unpainted cement structure like a couple of boxcars set end to end. In its shadow, spaced irregularly around the back patio, were nine dank rondavels, or as the staff insisted on calling them, chalets. The site would be getting trickily active shortly.

His cover was perfect. The hotel was to his west. He was deep to the rear of it, behind a block of vacant utility sheds, backed by the main shed and nicely masked eastward by a bracket of clothesline loaded with freshly hung laundry, bed linen for the most part. I’m hidden, he thought. He liked being hidden, the moment, the act. He could admit it. Also he was well outside the fun zone developing around the patio and he should be long gone before the braai and the disco joy got too unrestrained. The hill he was studying was two hundred yards farther to his east. Parting the sheets anywhere gave him safe quick vantages of the rendezvous point his targets thought was so secluded, somewhere toward the end of the highest terrace on the hill, where it dipped and made a shallow pocket. The sun was where it should be, in their eyes instead of his. He loved Iris. She was on his mind too much. It was a problem. Being obsessed with someone you had been married to for seventeen years was probably a first. He needed her to recede a little, was all.