Chapter 17

The pictures were stiff and mysterious. Faces loomed out of featureless black backgrounds: pop-eyed, jug-eared Russian farm boys, awkward farm girls with process waves in their hair, everyone looking like they'd been stuffed and mounted. I guess they were her relatives, because if you squinted at them and cocked your head, you could kind of see her features in theirs, but not saggy and wrinkled and three-chinned, but young and tight and almost glowing. They all had big shoulders and clothing that looked like the kind of thing the Hasids wore, black and sober.

The faces were interesting, especially after I figured out that one of them might belong to Auntie, but it was the blackness around them that fascinated me. The boys had black suits and the girls wore black dresses, and behind them was creased blackness, complete darkness, as though they'd put their heads through a black curtain.

But the more I stared at the blackness, the more detail I picked out. I noticed the edge of a curtain, a fold, in one photo, and when I looked for it, I could just pick it out in the other photos. Eventually, I hit on the idea of using a water glass as a magnifying lens, and as I experimented with different levels of water, more detail leapt out of the old pictures.

The curtains hanging behind them were dusty and wrinkled. They looked like they were made of crushed velvet, like the Niagara Falls souvenir pillow on Auntie's armchair in the living room, which had whorls of paisley trimmed into them. I traced these whorls with my eye, and tried to reproduce them with a ballpoint on paper bags I found under the sink.

And then, in one of the photos, I noticed that the patterns disappeared behind and above the shoulders. I experimented with different water levels in my glass to bring up the magnification, and I diligently sketched. I'd seen a *Polka Dot Door* episode where the hosts showed how you could draw a grid over an original image and a matching grid on a sheet of blank paper and then copy over every square, reproducing the image in manageable, bite-sized chunks.

That's what I did, using the edge of a nail file for a ruler, drawing my grid carefully on the paper bag, and a matching one on the picture, using the blunt tip of a dead pen to make a grid of indentations in the surface of the photo.

And I sketched it out, one square at a time. Where the pattern was, where it wasn't. What shapes the negative absence-of-pattern took in the photos. As I drew, day after day, I realized that I was drawing the shape of something black that was blocking the curtain behind.

Then I got excited. I drew in my steadiest hand, tracing each curve, using my magnifier, until I had the shape drawn and defined, and long before I finished, I knew what I was drawing and I drew it anyway. I drew it and then I looked at my paper sack and I saw that what I had drawn was a pair of wings, black and powerful, spread out and stretching out of the shot.

#

She curled the prehensile tips of her wings up the soles of his feet, making him go, Yeek! and jump in the bed.

"Are you awake?" she said, twisting her head around to brush her lips over his.

"Rapt," he said.

She giggled and her tits bounced.

"Good," she said. "'Cause this is the important part."

#

Auntie came home early that day and found me sitting at her vanity, with the photos and the water glass and the drawings on the paper sacks spread out before me.

Our eyes met for a moment. Her pupils shrank down to tiny dots, I remember it, remember seeing them vanish, leaving behind rings of yellowed hazel. One of her hands lashed out in a claw and sank into my hair. She lifted me out of the chair by my hair before I'd even had a chance to cry out, almost before I'd registered the fact that she was hurting me -- she'd never so much as spanked me until then.

She was strong, in that slow old Russian lady way, strong enough to grunt ten sacks of groceries in a bundle-buggy up the stairs to the apartment. When she picked me up and tossed me, it was like being fired out of a cannon. I rebounded off the framed motel-room art over the bed, shattering the glass, and bounced twice on the mattress before coming to rest on the floor. My arm was hanging at a funny angle, and when I tried to move it, it hurt so much that I heard a high sound in my ears like a dog whistle.

I lay still as the old lady yanked the drawers out of her vanity and upended them on the floor until she found an old book of matches. She swept the photos and my sketches into the tin wastebasket and then lit a match with trembling hands and dropped it in. It went out. She repeated it, and on the fourth try she got the idea of using the match to light all the remaining matches in the folder and drop that into the bin. A moment later, it was burning cheerfully, spitting curling red embers into the air on clouds of dark smoke. I buried my face in the matted carpet and tried not to hear that high note, tried to will away the sick grating feeling in my upper arm.

She was wreathed in smoke, choking, when she finally turned to me. For a moment, I refused to meet her eye, sure that she would kill me if I did, would see the guilt and the knowledge in my face and keep her secret with murder. I'd watched enough daytime television to know about dark secrets.

But when she bent down to me, with the creak of stretching elastic, and she lifted me to my feet and bent to look me in the eye, she had tears in her eyes.

She went to the pile of oddments and junk jewelry that she had dumped out on the floor and sorted through it until she found a pair of sewing shears, then she cut away my T-shirt, supporting my broken arm with her hand. My wings were flapping nervously beneath the fabric, and it got tangled, and she took firm hold of the wingtips and folded them down to my back and freed the shirt and tossed it in the pile of junk on her normally spotless floor.

She had spoken to me less and less since I had fixed the television and begun to pick up English, and now she was wordless as she gently rotated my fingerbones and my wristbones, my elbow and my shoulder, minute movements, listening for my teakettle hiss when she hit the sore spots.

"Is broken," she said. "*Cholera*," she said. "I am so sorry, *lovenu*," she said.

#

"I've never been to the doctor's," she said. "Never had a pap smear or been felt for lumps. Never, ever had an X-ray. Feel this," she said, and put her upper arm before his face. He took it and ran his fingertips over it, finding a hard bump halfway along, opposite her fleshy bicep.

"What's this?" he said.

"It's how a bone sets if you have a bad break and don't get a cast. Crooked."

"Jesus," he said, giving it another squeeze. Now that he knew what it was, he thought -- or perhaps fancied -- that he could feel how the unevenly splintered pieces of bone mated together, met at a slight angle and fused together by the knitting process.

"She made me a sling, and she fed me every meal and brushed my teeth. I had to stop her from following me into the toilet to wipe me up. And I didn't care: She could have broken both of my arms if she'd only explained the photos to me, or left them with me so that I could go on investigating them, but she did neither. She hardly spoke a word to me."

She resettled herself against the pillows, then pulled him back against her again and plumped his head against her breasts.

"Are you falling in love with me?" she said.

He startled. The way she said it, she didn't sound like a young adult, she sounded like a small child.

"Mimi --" he began, then stopped himself. "I don't think so. I mean, I like you --"

"Good," she said. "No falling in love, all right?"

#

Auntie died six months later. She keeled over on the staircase on her way up to the apartment, and I heard her moaning and thrashing out there. I hauled her up the stairs with my good arm, and she crawled along on her knees, making gargling noises.

I got her laid out on the rug in the living room. I tried to get her up on the sofa, but I couldn't budge her. So I gave her pillows from the sofa and water and then I tried tea, but she couldn't take it. She threw up once, and I soaked it up with a tea towel that had fussy roses on it.

She took my hand and her grip was weak, her strong hands suddenly thin and shaky.

It took an hour for her to die.

When she died, she made a rasping, rattling sound and then she shat herself. I could smell it.

It was all I could smell, as I sat there in the little apartment, six years old, hot as hell outside and stuffy inside. I opened the windows and watched the Hasids walk past. I felt like I should *do something* for the old lady, but I didn't know what.

I formulated a plan. I would go outside and bring in some grown-up to take care of the old lady. I would do the grocery shopping and eat sandwiches until I was twelve, at which point I would be grown up and I would get a job fixing televisions.

I marched into my room and changed into my best clothes, the little Alice-blue dress I wore to dinner on Sundays, and I brushed my hair and put on my socks with the blue pom-poms at the ankles, and found my shoes in the hall closet. But it had been three years since I'd last worn the shoes, and I could barely fit three toes in them. The old lady's shoes were so big I could fit both feet in either one.

I took off my socks -- sometimes I'd seen kids going by barefoot outside, but never in just socks -- and reached for the doorknob. I touched it.

I stopped.

I turned around again.

There was a stain forming under Auntie, piss and shit and death-juice, and as I looked at her, I had a firm sense that it wouldn't be *right* to bring people up to her apartment with her like this. I'd seen dead people on TV. They were propped up on pillows, in clean hospital nighties, with rouged cheeks. I didn't know how far I could get, but I thought I owed it to her to try.

I figured that it was better than going outside.

She was lighter in death, as though something had fled her. I could drag her into the bathroom and prop her on the edge of the tub. I needed to wash her before anyone else came up.

I cut away her dress with the sewing shears. She was wearing an elastic girdle beneath, and an enormous brassiere, and they were too tough -- too tight -- to cut through, so I struggled with their hooks, each one going *spung* as I unhooked it, revealing red skin beneath it, pinched and sore-looking.

When I got to her bra, I had a moment's pause. She was a modest person -- I'd never even seen her legs without tan compression hose, but the smell was overwhelming, and I just held to that vision of her in a nightie and clean sheets and, you know, *went for it*.

Popped the hooks. Felt it give way as her breasts forced it off her back. Found myself staring at.

Two little wings.

The size of my thumbs. Bent and cramped. Broken. Folded. There, over her shoulder blades. I touched them, and they were cold and hard as a turkey neck I'd once found in the trash after she'd made soup with it.

#

"How did you get out?"

"With my wings?"

"Yeah. With your wings, and with no shoes, and with the old lady dead over the tub?"

She nuzzled his neck, then bit it, then kissed it, then bit it again. Brushed her fingers over his nipples.

"I don't know," she breathed, hot in his ear.

He arched his back. "You don't know?"

"I don't know. That's all I remember, for five years."

He arched his back again, and raked his fingertips over her thighs, making her shudder and jerk her wings back.

That's when he saw the corpse at the foot of the bed. It was George.

#

He went back to school the day after they buried Davey. He bathed all the brothers in the hot spring and got their teeth brushed, and he fed them a hot breakfast of boiled mushroom-and-jerky stew, and he gathered up their schoolbooks from the forgotten corners of the winter cave and put them into school bags. Then he led them down the hillside on a spring day that smelled wonderful: loam and cold water coursing down the mountainside in rivulets, and new grass and new growth drying out in a hard white sun that seemed to spring directly overhead five minutes after it rose.

They held hands as they walked down the hill, and then Elliot-Franky-George broke away and ran down the hill to the roadside, skipping over the stones and holding their belly as they flew down the hillside. Alan laughed at the impatient jig they danced as they waited for him and Brad to catch up with them, and Brad put an arm around his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek in a moment of uncharacteristic demonstrativeness.

He marched right into Mr. Davenport's office with his brothers in tow.

"We're back," he said.

Mr. Davenport peered at them over the tops of his glasses. "You are, are you?"

"Mom took sick," he said. "Very sick. We had to go live with our aunt, and she was too far away for us to get to school."

"I see," Mr. Davenport said.

"I taught the littler ones as best as I could," Alan said. He liked Mr. Davenport, understood him. He had a job to do, and needed everything to be accounted for and filed away. It was okay for Alan and his brothers to miss months of school, provided that they had a good excuse when they came back. Alan could respect that. "And I read ahead in my textbooks. I think we'll be okay."

"I'm sure you will be," Mr. Davenport said. "How is your mother now?"

"She's better," he said. "But she was very sick. In the hospital."

"What was she sick with?"

Alan hadn't thought this far ahead. He knew how to lie to adults, but he was out of practice. "Cancer," he said, thinking of Marci's mother.

"Cancer?" Mr. Davenport said, staring hard at him.

"But she's better now," Alan said.

"I see. You boys, why don't you get to class? Alan, please wait here a moment."

His brothers filed out of the room. and Alan shuffled nervously, looking at the class ring on Mr. Davenport's hairy finger, remembering the time that Davey had kicked him. He'd never asked Alan where Davey was after that, and Alan had never offered, and it had been as though they shared a secret.

"Are you all right, Alan?" he asked, settling down behind his desk, taking off his glasses.

"Yes, sir," Alan said.

"You're getting enough to eat at home? There's a quiet place where you can work?"

"Yes," Alan said, squirming. "It's fine, now that Mom is home."

"I see," Mr. Davenport said. "Listen to me, son," he said, putting his hands flat on the desk. "The school district has some resources available: clothes, lunch vouchers, Big Brother programs. They're not anything you have to be ashamed of. It's not charity, it's just a little booster. A bit of help. The other children, their parents are well and they live in town and have lots of advantages that you and your brothers lack. This is just how we level the playing field. You're a very bright lad, and your brothers are growing up well, but it's no sin to accept a little help."

Alan suddenly felt like laughing. "We're not underprivileged," he said, thinking of the mountain, of the feeling of being encompassed by love of his father, of the flakes of soft, lustrous gold the golems produced by the handful. "We're very well off," he said, thinking of home, now free of Davey and his hateful, spiteful anger. "Thank you, though," he said, thinking of his life unfolding before him, free from the terror of Davey's bites and spying and rocks thrown from afar.

Mr. Davenport scowled and stared hard at him. Alan met his stare and smiled. "It's time for classes," he said. "Can I go?"

"Go," Mr. Davenport said. He shook his head. "But remember, you can always come here if you have anything you want to talk to me about."

"I'll remember," Alan said.

#

Six years later, Bradley was big and strong and he was the star goalie of all the hockey teams in town, in front of the puck before it arrived, making desperate, almost nonchalant saves that had them howling in the stands, stomping their feet, and sloshing their Tim Horton's coffee over the bleachers, to freeze into brown ice. In the summer, he was the star pitcher on every softball team, and the girls trailed after him like a long comet tail after the games when the other players led him away to a park to drink illicit beers.

Alan watched his games from afar, with his schoolbooks on his lap, and Eric-Franz-Greg nearby playing trucks or reading or gnawing on a sucker.

By the ninth inning or the final period, the young ones would be too tired to play, and they'd come and lean heavily against Alan, like a bag of lead pressing on him, eyes half open, and Alan would put an arm around them and feel at one with the universe.

It snowed on the afternoon of the season opener for the town softball league that year, fat white wet flakes that kissed your cheeks and melted away in an instant, so soft that you weren't sure they'd be there at all. Bradley caught up with Alan on their lunch break, at the cafeteria in the high school two blocks from the elementary school. He had his mitt with him and a huge grin.

"You planning on playing through the snow?" Alan said, as he set down his cheeseburger and stared out the window at the diffuse white radiance of the April noontime bouncing off the flakes.

"It'll be gone by tonight. Gonna be *warm*," Bradley said, and nodded at his jock buddies sitting at their long table, sucking down Cokes and staring at the girls. "Gonna be a good game. I know it."

Bradley knew. He knew when they were getting shorted at the assayers' when they brought in the golems' gold, just as he knew that showing up for lunch with a brown bag full of dried squirrel jerky and mushrooms and lemongrass was a surefire way to end up social roadkill in the high school hierarchy, as was dressing like someone who'd been caught in an explosion at the Salvation Army, and so he had money and he had burgers and he had a pair of narrow-leg jeans from the Gap and a Roots sweatshirt and a Stussy baseball hat and Reebok sneakers and he looked, basically, like a real person.

Alan couldn't say the same for himself, but he'd been making an effort since Bradley got to high school, if only to save his brother the embarrassment of being related to the biggest reject in the building -- but Alan still managed to exude his don't-fuck-with-me aura enough that no one tried to cozy up to him and make friends with him and scrutinize his persona close in, which was just as he wanted it.

Bradley watched a girl walk past, a cute thing with red hair and freckles and a skinny rawboned look, and Alan remembered that she'd been sitting next to him in class for going on two years now and he'd never bothered to learn her name.

And he'd never bothered to notice that she was a dead ringer for Marci.

"I've always had a thing for redheads," Bradley said. "Because of you," he said. "You and your girlfriend. I mean, if she was good enough for *you*, well, she had to be the epitome of sophistication and sexiness. Back then, you were like a god to me, so she was like a goddess. I imprinted on her, like the baby ducks in Bio. It's amazing how much of who I am today I can trace back to those days. Who knew that it was all so important?"

He was a smart kid, introspective without being moody. Integrated. Always popping off these fine little observations in between his easy jokes. The girls adored him, the boys admired him, the teachers were grateful for him and the way he bridged the gap between scholarship and athleticism.

"I must have been a weird kid," he said. "All that quiet."

"You were a great kid," Alan said. "It was a lot of fun back then, mostly."

"Mostly," he said.

They both stared at the girl, who noticed them now, and blushed and looked confused. Bradley looked away, but Alvin held his gaze on her, and she whispered to a friend, who looked at him, and they both laughed, and then Alan looked away, too, sorry that he'd inadvertently interacted with his fellow students. He was supposed to watch, not participate.

"He was real," Bradley said, and Alan knew he meant Davey.

"Yeah," Alan said.

"I don't think the little ones really remember him -- he's more like a bad dream to them. But he was real, wasn't he?"

"Yeah," Alan said. "But he's gone now."

"Was it right?"

"What do you mean?" Alan said. He felt a sear of anger arc along his spine.

"It's nothing," Billy said, mumbling into his tray.

"What do you mean, Brad?" Alan said. "What else should we have done? How can you have any doubts?"

"I don't," Brad said. "It's okay."

Alan looked down at his hands, which appeared to belong to someone else: white lumps of dough clenched into hard fists, knuckles white. He made himself unclench them. "No, it's *not* okay. Tell me about this. You remember what he was like. What he...did."

"I remember it," Bryan said. "Of course I remember it." He was staring through the table now, the look he got when he was contemplating a future the rest of them couldn't see. "But."

Alan waited. He was trembling inside. He'd done the right thing. He'd saved his family. He knew that. But for six years, he'd found himself turning in his memory to the little boy on the ground, holding the loops of intestine in through slippery red fingers. For six years, whenever he'd been somewhere quiet long enough that his own inner voices fell still, he'd remember the hair in his fist, the knife's thirsty draught as it drew forth the hot splash of blood from Davey's throat. He'd remembered the ragged fissure that opened down Clarence's length and the way that Davey fell down it, so light and desiccated he was almost weightless.

"If you remember it, then you know I did the right thing. I did the only thing."

"*We* did the only thing," Brian said, and covered Alan's hand with his.

Alan nodded and stared at his cheeseburger. "You'd better go catch up with your friends," he said.

"I love you, Adam," he said.

"I love you, too."

Billy crossed the room, nodding to the people who greeted him from every table, geeks and jocks and band and all the meaningless tribes of the high school universe. The cute redhead sprinkled a wiggle-finger wave at him, and he nodded at her, the tips of his ears going pink.

#

The snow stopped by three p.m., and the sun came out and melted it away, so that by the time the game started at five-thirty, its only remnant was the soggy ground around the bleachers with the new grass growing out of the ragged brown memory of last summer's lawn.

Alan took the little ones for dinner at the diner after school, letting them order double chocolate-chip pancakes. At 13, they'd settled into a fatness that made him think of a foam-rubber toy, the rolls and dimples at their wrists and elbows and knees like the seams on a doll.

"You're starting high school next year?" Alan said, as they were pouring syrup on their second helping. He was startled by this -- how had they gotten so old so quickly?

"Uh-huh," Eli said. "I guess."

"So you're graduating from elementary school this spring?"

"Yeah." Eli grinned a chocolate smile at him. "It's no big deal. There's a party, though."

"Where?"

"At some kid's house."

"It's okay," Alan said. "We can celebrate at home. Don't let them get to you."

"We can't go?" Ed suddenly looked a little panicked.

"You're invited?" He blurted it out and then wished he hadn't.

"Of course we're invited," Fred said from inside Ed's throat. "There's going to be dancing."

"You can dance?" Alan asked.

"We can!" Ed said.

"We learned in gym," Greg said, with the softest, proudest voice, deep within them.