Zero at the Bone Read online

  It’s surprising how many of the fossil parts are pieces from some animal’s head. Mom explained that this is because the lower jaw is the hardest bone in any body, and the cranial bones are almost as strong, and, of course, the teeth. Maybe this is why my concussion had a special impact on all of us, with a shelf full of fossilized head parts upstairs.

  “We’re making a profit,” I said.

  I liked saying we. For the first time in my life, my dad had let me into his world, even though it was only part-time, just for the summer, and my official job was assistant foreman, which meant I did what Jesse told me to do. Ziff Furniture had a big contract, fifteen hundred nightstands for a chain of motels headquartered in the City of Industry in Southern California.

  “It’s wearing him out,” she said. “He comes home and falls asleep in front of the eleven o’clock news.”

  She never put it so nakedly. Sometimes she acted as though the factory was a slightly unnecessary preoccupation of my dad’s, something he took up the way some husbands take up getting a pilot’s license. I knew how she really felt, how worried she was about my father, how concerned that he might get injured, or get another ulcer like the one that Dr. Pollock could still see on the X ray, the scar like a ghost.

  “Why doesn’t Anita go back to work with Dad?”

  “You know why,” said Mom.

  I did know, but it was sometimes hard to draw Mom into the conversation at the angle I wanted. It was hard to get her to talk at all, sometimes. You could rush in, say hello, talk about the weather, show her the mail that had just arrived, ask if there was any news on TV, and all Mom would do in response is give a little wave, one finger, like a little puppet. Then she would say something like, “You like to hear about disaster, don’t you?” Sometimes it was as if she was an anthropologist. She was doing research on our family and, against the rules, had grown to love us.

  She liked to be alone. If she was in her room drawing a fossil, it was a rule: Don’t talk if you can’t see me. It was the opposite of my dad, who had to be all over the place, talking to everyone, helping lift this, helping nail down that.

  So I switched tactics, and decided to take Mom’s mind off Dad, because I knew that was what bothered her. “Did you go by the university today?”

  “Sure,” she said. This was a habit she had picked up from Dad, and she gave a little laugh.

  “So, are you going to be famous?”

  She answered by moving one finger—this was a painful subject.

  “Do you get to name the new species or not?”

  “No news,” she said.

  “Why does it take so long?”

  She gave a shrug—not like most people’s, a shrug that expressed ignorance. She meant that the problem of whether or not she had discovered a new species of bay tree was an example of life’s complexity, a tiny fragment, proving the big problems of existence. It was also her way of telling me that she was trying not to let it bother her.

  “Maybe Dad and I should go in and lean on someone.” I liked sounding like this, a tough guy. I was joking, but I knew if I wanted to threaten someone, I could.

  Mom squinted at the broccoli stalk in her fingers, looking hard, like she had just discovered a new species of bug. “I don’t know how much more of this I can eat.”

  “You look good,” I said encouragingly. It was true. I like to cheer people up, but I don’t believe in lying just to be nice.

  She smiled. I had her full attention now, the way I had when Anita and I used to put on puppet shows for the family, Mom saying she wanted to see the part where Grandma punched the wolf in the snout one more time.

  “You could go get the bay tree report,” she said, “but it’s in Anita’s room.”

  I liked the challenge—could I slip into Anita’s room undetected? It posed a slight ethical problem: I knew Anita wouldn’t like me poking around in her room. She’d try to be polite about it, but my family made a big point of respecting each other’s privacy.

  But I was just stalling, not wanting to talk about what was on my mind. I knew how Mom would react, even though she had a way of surprising me, of laughing at the same stupid movies I did. She didn’t usually mind when Anita and Dad got into one of their arguments. At times like those, Mom wasn’t pretending to be above it all. I think she really liked the sound of the two of them debating the rights of trees versus human beings, while I couldn’t stand hearing two people I loved getting furious about sequoias. It wasn’t that Mom liked bickering—I think she liked hearing us talk for the same reason people like to hear birds chirping.

  So I dared myself a little. Go ahead, I urged myself. Tell her you want to play football.

  5

  Mom had a tropical garden at one end of the living room, coffee bushes and sensitive plants, a mimosa that folds a leaf when you touch it. I knew this small, happy jungle was her territory, even though she would be happy to see me among the glossy coffee plants, enjoying them. My family had long since sectioned the house into private domains. No one would ever go into my room looking for a pencil.

  So I hesitated. Anita’s door swung open silently, but I didn’t hurry in. I was about to break an unspoken promise.

  Her room was very neat that evening, and this surprised me a little. It was never this well ordered. High on a shelf perched old toys, an old teddy bear worn free of fur everywhere except deep in his ears and under his arms. One button eye dangled. In two weeks Anita would be eighteen, and she had graduated from high school just a few weeks earlier.

  It struck me how adult her room was, the refuge of a grown woman, with a few relics of childhood and high school years kept around fondly, for historic reasons. Her plan was to take a year before she went to college, save up some money. The clutter of paperbacks and clothes I remembered from earlier years was gone. Kyle smiled from the top of her dresser, his graduation photo, blankly handsome like one of those pictures you see in barbershops, the kinds of hairstyles you can choose.

  She still had her Ping-Pong paddles right where she could find them, the set with leather handles I had given her last summer. She had a filing cabinet on wheels, white, with a white handle. The blue plastic tabs on the folders were labeled—Resumes, Letters/Senate, Letters/Congress—but the files hung nearly empty. I was trespassing in her room, all the way across to her desk. Right beside the American Shelf and Filing Employee Handbook was my mother’s report, with a yellow Post-it folded and stuck together as a bookmark. The yellow bookmark was between the last page and the cover, not really marking a place at all.

  Arranged along one side of the desk was a series of five snapshots, pictures I had taken, Anita as she ran from the surf at Santa Cruz the summer before. I had snapped the camera as quickly as I could. She ran from the ocean, her light brown hair looking darker because it was wet, her T-shirt and cutoff jeans soaked through, a bra strap showing at her shoulder. She ran toward the camera, and you could tell she was laughing at having her picture taken, getting closer and closer. In the last picture she posed a little, one hand on her hip. Anita wasn’t someone who needed makeup. She had color, in her cheeks, her smile.

  Something smelled new, fresh-from-the-factory. I found the source of the scent, a new pair of jeans, still stiff, folded neatly on a chair. I almost wanted Anita to come home early. I wanted her to burst into the room tugging off her sweater or hopping on one foot to peel off a shoe. I wanted to ask her how her job was going, and then I would tell her about mine.

  Even that night, when he came home with his shirt-tail hanging out and his hair sticking up in wild spikes all over his head, he kept up a running patter, asking Mom how everything was, telling her the timber all got unloaded, telling her there was a fire in the hopper.

  Mom didn’t answer. She watched him, following him with her eyes, not trusting talk to tell her that he was all right.

  “Lasagna,” Dad was saying. “Two minutes on high,” he said, poking the numbers on the face of the microwave. “Or, wait a minute; I don’t want t
o nuke it crisp. Maybe medium high.”

  “How did it start?” asked my mother.

  My dad was getting utensils out of the drawer. “Fork, spoon, I don’t need a knife.” Sometimes I sneak up on him while he’s in another room getting dressed or waiting for his cinnamon oatmeal to cook, and he’s talking, quietly. Being around people makes him keep up a running stream, as though we were blind and wouldn’t know what he’s doing unless he tells us. But even when he’s alone, he says things, patting himself, asking the empty room, “Where are the keys? What did I do with my belt?”

  He sat across from Mom and peeled the Saran Wrap off the lasagna, and told her all about the saws, how they hit gnarls in the lumber and sometimes send up a tiny spark of hot steel. She knew all this, but she was brooding over the factory and looking at my dad, really seeing him. It made me look at him, too, seeing a man who was very thin, with gray in his hair, his glasses slipping down his nose a little as he ate. He pushed them back up with his finger.

  “Jesse had nothing but praise about Cray today,” said Dad, telling Mom as though I was in another part of the house and couldn’t hear. “I’m not surprised,” he said, and then he looked at me, smiling crookedly as he chewed.

  One of the annoying things about my dad is that he will not clean his glasses even when they are dirty, and you have to look into his eyes through a snow of sawdust. People will do anything for him. The cabinet workers voted against striking a few months before out of loyalty to Dad, not wanting to hurt his chances with the nightstand contract. Maybe I inherited some leadership quality from him, but I knew I was imperfect inside. I didn’t always say what I was thinking. Like now, I knew it was better to not mention football. I was even wondering if I could forge their signatures on the permission slip.

  I could fake my dad’s kangaroo scrawl, I was sure. But my mother has surprisingly delicate handwriting, very neat. I don’t think my father would ever think like this—how to lie on a legal piece of paper. My dad is someone you can hear in a distant room, laughing. When he is in the kitchen alone reading the newspaper he makes sounds of surprise or annoyance.

  My mother tugged his glasses from his face without saying anything. She washed them off at the sink while he blinked, gazing around, trying to make something out of what he saw. He looked at where he knew I was and said, “We’ll have to have the ducts checked tomorrow.”

  She wiped the glasses very carefully with a paper towel. When she gave them back to him, she had a little smile, as though something private had passed between them.

  I called Merriman from my room. I had picked out a red portable phone. I had figured a red phone would be easier to find. Now I wished I had a squat black one, like the ones detectives use in black-and-white movies. His sister answered, Kentia, a suave, cool freshman at Stanford. Kentia is a beauty. Even her name is special: Ken-tee-yah. When I told her who I was, she said, “Who?” Not because there was anything wrong with my voice or my name. She was too elegant to hear things the first time.

  My room has pictures of stars and planets, posters that came in The National Geographic and others I bought at the Nature Company, novas, craters. Anita had once pointed out that it wasn’t the infinite horizons of space I found intriguing, it was the residue of explosions. There was a silence, and muffled shuffling sounds, and I pictured Merriman on crutches, hunching his way to the phone.

  Sometimes I have trouble with words. It’s like coming right out and saying it makes it all worse. I felt myself wanting to blurt, I’m sorry you shot yourself in the foot. “Shelly moved to L.A.,” I said, as though that was the reason I had called, not mentioning handguns.

  “Do you know what pain is?” Merriman asked, not bothering to comment on a criminal like Shelly.

  I wasn’t really very interested in galaxies anymore. A picture I had put on my wall more recently was a picture of the last man to play in the National Football League without a helmet. The photo was one I had blown up at Copymat out of a book on the history of the sport. He was being led off the field with a grimace on his face. It was the last time he ever took the field without headgear.

  “Sure,” I said—my family’s word. But it was a reflex. I knew he was talking about the kind of pain you see on the news and in movies, gunshot wounds.

  “I mean pain,” he said.

  “I think so.” Guys do this to each other, challenge each other, and you end up claiming that you know all about something you don’t.

  “I mean pain in your bones, Buchanan. Bone pain.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened,” I said. But I wanted to know: was he loading the gun when it happened? Was he showing off how cool he was, holding a gun like an accessory, what the well-dressed man of today is wearing?

  “It’s not so bad,” he said, after a moment of silence.

  I was a little confused. Did he want pity, or did he want respect for being tough? Or was he just being truthful? I realized that while I knew Merriman well, I had never really had much of a conversation with him. I had almost never called him on the phone.

  Even that time we changed a tire beside the freeway, our talk had been swear words and complaints about how you couldn’t find anything in a new car, not even the manual in the glove compartment. Now, voice to voice, I knew what it must be like to be Merriman, scouts driving down from the University of Oregon to watch him play in his junior year, and now all of it gone.

  “You’re going to be a fine quarterback,” he said.

  I wasn’t happy with the way the conversation went after that. We talked to each other like strangers, nice people, but embarrassed to be on the same planet. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I found it very difficult to talk to my parents.

  Afterward I sat there on the bed, wondering if Merriman must hate me. It would be the kind of envy that would wear off, but maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe Merriman would have to use a cane the rest of his life, walk with a limp.

  It’s brave when you have to bear a burden, and one of my favorite kinds of nonfiction stories is about athletes who crash off cliffs in cars or wake up one morning in an iron lung, and they don’t get back into the gym and run the marathon six months later. They stay handicapped and they inspire children. There’s always a picture in this kind of book, the athlete as he is today, beaming from a wheelchair with smiling kids around him, or still blind, an open Braille book in his lap.

  I admire handicapped people, but I wondered, sitting there on my bed, if that kind of story might be a kind of small lie, to make everyone feel better.

  6

  I debated whether to call Paula. But I knew I was going to call her before the inner argument even started. When I did, I was outside in the backyard. I had to be out in the fresh air when I talked to her. I was trying to break my Paula habit, and it was not that easy.

  “Cray,” she said when she heard my voice. She answered on the first half-second of ring, before anyone else in her house could move.

  I started to tell her that there was some excitement at the factory today. I felt foolish, but I had this episode from real life, and I had played a part in it, and I just had to talk about it.

  “I hated all the books I got out of the library today,” Paula said, with that sexy little rasp in her voice.

  Sometimes I hate Paula. She puts on one of these baby-talk lisps and says sexy things and I just about go crazy, getting stiff all over. I wanted someone like Kentia. Not like—I wanted Kentia herself, and it would be okay if she was not insane about the subject of sex morning, noon, and night. That would be the thrill, arm in arm with a woman you would turn to look at and think how cool and otherworldly she was.

  I managed to get through the details of the fire and mentioned that some of the firefighters turned out to be women when they took off their helmets.

  “Working around all those men,” said Paula. “Magnifique!”

  Paula could only think about the differences between men and women, and not just between the legs. If I said I had to go back into the
house for my sunglasses, she would say, “Just like a man.” I used to find this vaguely flattering, as though every time I popped a stick of gum into my mouth I was doing something macho.

  “Brave boy,” she said huskily, when I was done telling how I had been prepared to battle the fire with one portable fire extinguisher. Brave boy, in a little baby-talk voice.

  The trouble was, it worked. She could peel me right off my good intentions like so much steam. “When are you coming over, Cray? I need you to rub my back.”

  “What time is it?” I found myself asking, before I could stop myself.

  “I’m lying here on my tummy,” she said. “I have a terrible crick in my neck.”

  She said crick like it was a code word for something tantalizingly obscene.

  I reached the end of the long backyard, and looked out at the view. This was why we had bought the house, two years before. San Francisco glittered across the Bay. It wasn’t just explosions I liked, devastation. I liked the stars, the tiny traffic.

  “I’m nowhere near a clock,” I said.

  “You mean I have to move my body?” she said. She said that last word carefully, deliberately spacing it apart, baw-dy.

  My dad had big plans for the backyard. A pile of gravel glowed in the light from the kitchen, next to a small mountain of sand. The gravel was gradually scattering outward, the peak growing shorter with the months, and neighborhood cats loved the sand.

  Stakes and staves laid along the ground marked out where Dad was going to put in a sidewalk. Walking around back there, I was always tripping over a bag of cement or some of Dad’s cement-working tools, the scabby hoe and the assortment of trowels, all of them getting rusty where the cement had blistered away.

  She treated me to a moan as she rolled over and announced, “It’s 10:05, Cray. And thirty seconds.”

  Paula once told me she could speak five languages. She could insult someone’s mother in phrases from all over Europe. She knew Cantonese slang for white person, and knew the word for whore in languages I had never heard of. She could fire off delicious-sounding syllables and say, “That’s Japanese for Don’t touch me there.” I can say, “The red house behind the tree is very handsome,” in Spanish, except I forget the word for behind.