Shya Scanlon: The Guild of Saint Cooper

“Remember when I threw a water balloon at a window you were standing behind and the window shattered?”

Alice frowned. We weren’t supposed to talk about the past.

“There were tiny shards of glass in your dress,” I said. “You must have been, what, five? You were startled. It was maybe two full minutes before you began to cry.”

Alice pointed to the north of Queen Anne. “There’s a fire.”

I couldn’t tell if she was paying attention or not. She turned from the fire to the room, her head lowered as if in prayer. She prayed often, though about what and to whom she wouldn’t explain. During these moments she was unreachable. Her small breasts rose and fell slowly.

“I don’t even remember why I threw that balloon,” I lied.

“Did you hear something?”

“Did I hear something? Well, I said something. Did you hear what I said?”

“Something outside. Something in the yard.”

I joined Alice at the window. She wrapped her arms around me and I felt the stubble of her shorn pubis against my thigh. Aside from Fairley’s saw, the notes of which were now organizing into a familiar melody, I heard nothing.

“I don’t hear anything,” I said.

“Wait.”

We stood for thirty seconds, sixty. I didn’t hear anything but the saw, and was beginning to think she’d invented this noise to distract me from the past. I stroked her black, shoulder-length hair, then quickly grabbed a handful and, feeling playful, pulled. Alice let out a small shriek as I exposed her neck and went in to bite it, kiss it.

But as abruptly as I’d grabbed her I let her go, marched to the door.

“I will investigate!” I said.

I was aroused by the kiss, aroused by the baffling surge of dumb manliness, and as I prepared for the small adventure, my sex dove half swollen from between my legs.

Alice looked at me in surprise, then down at her own nakedness. “I’m staying here.”

I quickly descended the stairs, slipped out the front door — my mother’s room was beside the back door, and I didn’t want to wake her. The night air was cool and dry and the moonlight gave depth to the garden, casting a shadow version beneath it, quiet and still. I crept down the driveway at the side of the house and into the back yard, where I looked up at my window. The candle had gone out and I couldn’t see Alice, but I raised my fist into the air as a soldier might, I thought, or a rebel, and just as I did she lit another candle somewhere inside the room and the window came alive, a vibrant hovering screen. And it was as I stood there, naked in the back yard, listening to a now unmistakable and altogether eerie version of “Over the Rainbow” while looking up at my own room, waiting for a glimpse of my teenaged lover, that I suddenly remembered how I knew the name Dale Cooper.

Alice did not come to the window.

Singing Judy Garland under my breath, I waited a moment longer for her to appear before noticing the storage shed’s door wagging slowly in the muggy night air. My mother had left it open. It was not a high-security scenario — no lock — but since in addition to my mother’s garden tools this shed housed the fuel tank, we went ahead and kept it closed. As I drew near, the sharp smell of diesel replaced that of the damp, earthy coffee grounds my mother mixed into the soil and I heard a scrape, a tiny sound, gone almost before it had happened, and in the moment afterward I replayed it in my head to imagine its source, unsure I’d heard anything at all. I reached for the flashlight we kept just inside the door and stepped slowly into the room, far enough from the tank to be safe but in direct view of whatever might be going on — a cat? God forbid a raccoon. I pointed the flashlight and thumbed for its soft rubber button, but before I could switch it on the room flooded with light from a lantern I had to squint to see. A man was standing beside the fuel tank. He had two large blue plastic jugs with him, into one of which ran a red hose.

“I didn’t want this to happen,” Fred said.

I had an urge to cover my penis, but I felt doing so would be unmanly. “That’s a funny way of putting it,” I said.

He pinched the hose and removed it from one jug to put it in the other. The liquid hitting the bottom of the empty tank sounded like someone running a bath.

“What I mean is: I’ll be out of here in five minutes. Ten gallons, five minutes.”

I found that if I held the flashlight at my side, and angled it just so, I could reasonably cover my groin, or at least obscure it, without drawing attention to the fact. Of course, it probably looked like I had light shooting out of my crotch. “That doesn’t sound like two ways of saying the same thing.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Blake. Just let me finish up and I’ll leave quietly. You’ve got five hundred gallons here — you wouldn’t have even noticed.”

I sat on my mother’s rolling gardening stool. I had no intention of intervening, but it seemed odd to leave him there alone. As the jug began to fill, the splashing sounded less like a bath and more like a piss, and perhaps it was because I’d just had sex that I crossed my legs, beginning to feel like I needed to piss, too.

“We would have just given you the gas.”

Fred looked at me with big, dead eyes. “Well, I couldn’t risk it. Because I would have had to take it anyway.”

We let the full implication of this statement settle into the room and listened to the pitch of the splashes slowly rise with the level of the liquid. On the whole, I felt strangely at ease. There was a stagey quality to Fred’s statement that I found comfort in, as though in its inflection lay some subtly crafted escape route, an inversion of the typical trope of evil lurking just beneath the surface. Here the threat was obvious, but wasn’t there a hint of safety in Fred’s return? Wasn’t there a tacit agreement that while we might acknowledge the many paths of disaster, these paths would remain in the subjunctive? We were adults, after all. We were neighbors. I straightened my back and inhaled deeply, confidence regained. It was almost like I wasn’t sitting here naked while he stole my mother’s gas in the middle of the night.

I realized that the sawing had ceased. John had gone to bed.

“Did you ever watch Twin Peaks?” I asked.

“Twin what?”

“It was a TV show made by David Lynch in the ’90s. You know David Lynch? It took place in a small logging town in the Cascades.”

“Lynch, Lynch…Hey, wasn’t he the guy who did Dune? I love that movie.”

Dune , really? I bit my tongue. Still, our rapport had improved.

“‘It is by will alone I set my mind in motion,’” said Fred. “‘It is by the Juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.’”

“Somehow I wouldn’t have guessed you were into sci-fi.”

“Into? I don’t know about into . But I wouldn’t deny an attraction to speculative stories. Isn’t it a pretty basic human quality to ask, ‘What if?’ We’ve been dreaming up alien worlds since we dreamt up Heaven.”

He glanced over at me, eyebrow raised. We’d never discussed religion, and I think he realized the potential sensitivity.

“Good point,” I said.

He seemed relieved, but it could have just been me.

“Of course,” he continued, “I don’t believe in Heaven, and I don’t believe in alien worlds. Aliens are just a potent metaphor for either the part of mankind we can’t control or, if you’re a pessimist, the part we should have been able to control if we’d acted sooner.”

What side was I on? It seemed clear that Fred had recently migrated from the former to the latter. I thought of the broken radio in his kitchen. And the fact that he’d been turned back somehow, that he was here now rather than somewhere in Idaho, suggested he may have been right to do so.