Gypsies

Michael stood still on the cracked sidewalk and regarded his grandfather warily through the rolled-down window of the Fairlane…

“Get in,” Willis said.

Michael said, “I wanted to walk.”

But Willis just reached over and jerked open the door on the passenger side. Michael shrugged and climbed in.

The car was dirty with fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts, but it smelled only faintly of liquor: Willis was sober today.

Willis drove slowly down Main. He looked at Michael periodically and made a couple of attempts at conversation. He asked how Michael did in school. Okay, Michael said. Was it messing him up to be out for so long? No, he figured he could make it up. (As if any of this mattered.) Willis said, “Your old man left?”

Michael hesitated, then nodded.

“Shitty thing to do,” Willis said.

“I guess he had his reasons.”

“Everybody has some goddamn reason.”

Turning up Montpelier, Willis said, “Look, I know what it is you’re ru

Michael raised his head, startled.

“You can only make it worse,” Willis went on, “doing what you’re doing.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do, though. I think you know exactly what I mean.” Willis was talking now from way down in his chest, almost to himself. He downshifted the Fairlane and slowed, approaching the house.

Willis said, “Timmy used to go off like that. Off up into the hills or God knows where. And I knew what he was doing, just like I know what you’re doing. I could smell it on him.” Willis pulled into the driveway and on up into the tiny, dark garage. He pulled the hand brake and let the motor die. “I smell it on you.”

Michael reached for the door but Willis caught his wrist. Willis had a hard grip. He was old but he had hard, stringy muscles.

“This is for your own good,” he said. “You listen to me. It brings him. You savvy? You go out there and make a little door into Hell and he climbs out.”

Michael said, “What do you know about it?”

“More than you think. You don’t give me much credit, do you?”

Michael felt Willis’s huge anger rising up. He shifted toward the door, but Willis held tight to his wrist.

“My Christ,” Willis went on, “didn’t your mother teach you anything? Or maybe she did—maybe she taught you too fucking much.”

Michael remembered what Laura had told him, how Willis used to beat them. He realized now that it was true, Willis could do that, he was capable of it. Willis radiated anger like a bright red light.

“Admit it,” Willis said, “you were up in those hills opening doors.”

Michael shook his head. The lie was automatic.

“Don’t shit me,” Willis stormed. “I’m a good Christian man. I can smell out the Devil in the dark.”

It made Michael think of the sulfurous stink of Walker’s world.

“I don’t do that,” he said.

Willis’s grip tightened. “I won’t have you drawing down that creature on us again. Too many years—I lived with that too goddamn long.” He bent down so that his face was close to Michael’s face. The dim winter light in the garage made him seem monstrous. “I want you to admit to me what you’ve been doing. And then I want you to promise you won’t do it again.”

“I didn’t—”

“Crap,” Willis said, and raised his right hand to strike.

It was the gesture that angered Michael. Made him mad, because he guessed his mother had seen that hand upraised, and Laura, and they had been children, too young to do or say anything back. “All right!” he said, and when Willis hesitated Michael went on: “I can do it! Does that make you happy? I could walk out of here sideways and you’d never see me go! Is that what you want?”

Willis pulled Michael close and with the other hand took hold of his hair. The grip was painful; Michael’s eyes watered.

“Don’t even think it,” Willis said.

His voice was a rumble, gritty machinery in his chest.

“Promise me,” Willis said. “Promise you won’t do it again.” Silence.

Willis tugged back on Michael’s hair. “Promise!”

Michael said, “Fuck you!”

And Willis was too shocked to react.

Michael said between his teeth, “I could do it here! You ever think about that? I could do it now.” And it was true. He felt the power in him still, high-pitched and singing. He said without thinking about it, “I could drop you down through the floor so fast you wouldn’t be able to blink—do you want that?”

Willis was speechless.

Michael said, “Let go of me.”

Miraculously, he felt Willis’s grip loosen.

He wrenched open the door before Willis could reconsider. He stumbled down onto the oily concrete.

“You’re lost,” Willis said from the darkness inside the car. “Oh boy… you are damned.” But there was not much force left in it.

Michael hurried into the house.

2

“I don’t like telling it,” Mama said. “I can’t tell it all. I don’t know it all. But I guess I can tell what I know.”

The kitchen clock ticked away. Karen and Laura sat sipping coffee. Karen understood that silence was best, that her mother was staring past these walls and back into a buried history. Hard for all of us, she thought.

Privately, Karen was frightened. The words pronounced in this room might change her life. Begi

Karen took another sip of coffee, waiting. Beyond the steamy windows a still morning sunlight filled the backyard.

“Well,” Mama said. “I was a girl in Wheeling when I met Willis. You know, this was all so long ago it seems like a story. Your Grandma Lucille was working at the Cut-&-Curl and that year I had a teller job at the bank.”

She settled back and sighed.

“I met Willis through the church.

“It was a little Assembly of God church, what I guess nowadays they would call fundamentalist. To us it was just church. Willis was very serious about it. He went to all the functions. I was there every Sunday but I didn’t do any work or go to the meetings much. There was a Youth Group that met in the basement and I went there sometimes. Willis was always there. He knew me from Group for most of a year before he worked up the nerve to ask me out. Maybe that seems strange, but it was different in those days. People didn’t just, you know, jump into bed. There was a courtship, there was dating. But pretty soon we started going together. And I liked him well enough to eventually marry him.

“He was different when he was younger. I don’t say that to excuse anything. But I want you to understand how it was. He was fun to be with. He told jokes. Can you imagine that? He liked to dance. After we got married a cousin of his got him a job at a mill up in Burleigh, and that was when we moved out of Wheeling.

“I guess it was hard for me being away from family and in a strange town and living with a man, all for the first time. Just being married, it was very different. Willis wasn’t always as gentle or as interesting as he seemed when we were dating. But you kind of expect that. But he was doing a lot of overtime, too. There were days I hardly saw him. I will admit I was lonely sometimes. I made a few friends but it was never like Wheeling—it was always a strange place to me.

“We wanted children. Mostly I wanted them. I wanted them especially because the house we rented seemed so empty. It was not a big house; Willis was not making a great salary those early years. But it felt big when I was rattling around in it on my own. You clean up, you maybe listen to the radio a little bit, and the time slips by. So it was natural to think about children and how there would at least be company, even if it was only a little baby. The neighbors had kids and that woman, Ellen Conklin, she would come by in the afternoons and just drink one cup of coffee after another and complain about her life. Had a little brat named, I think, Emilia who never left her in peace. I mean a truly nasty child. But I envied her even that. A child— it would be something.