Metamorphosis Read online

  Wooden stairs, two flights of them, brought him to a deep cellar, where there was a feeling in the air of vast space, although he couldn’t see beyond the pool of candlefish light in which he stood. It was unnaturally warm, almost tropical, the air smelling like riverbank vegetation. He reached blindly for the pull cord to the ceiling lamp, knowing without actually seeing it that it hung there within easy reach. When the light blinked on, there was a quick draft of air and the candlefish went out. The cellar came to life around him. He heard the sound of bubbling and the sigh and whir of mechanical apparatus, as if the cellar itself was a vast clockwork mechanism. There were other rooms, perhaps many rooms, with illuminated terrariums and aquaria bubbling away, driftwood and waterweeds and darting fish, tropical plants moving and rustling. Wood framed glass incubators sat atop a nearby wooden bench under the glare of heat lamps, curious-looking eggs just visible in the sand, two or three of them already broken open.

  He caught sight of scattered paperwork lying on the bench near the incubators, and he stepped across to have a look. A manila envelope lay there with the papers, already stamped and addressed. He didn’t recognize the postage, a three-penny stamp with a picture of a toad on it—surely not enough postage to move the envelope across the street, let alone to Terre Haute, which was the destination. The paperwork was a catalogue from a firm called Benson’s Living Wonders. His uncle had filled out an order for the prehistoric fish that Max had been reading about just a short time ago. He had ordered three trilobites, also, and a nautilus from the late Devonian period. There was a drawing in the catalogue of a squid-looking cephalopod in a narrow cone-like shell. “Guaranteed live delivery,” the catalogue read. “C.O.D.”

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement, a big lizard, if it was a lizard, lumbering back into the shadows of an adjacent room, and he realized that Elmer had reappeared. He looked strangely satisfied with himself, sitting near a door in the wall nearby, a door that might easily lead to farther rooms.

  Max wondered, though. It was a heavy door, with a mail slot cut into it covered by a hammered copper flap, and with a cat door at the bottom. Elmer turned abruptly and bolted through the cat door, which swung back on its hinges, revealing a rectangle of daylight beyond, despite its being the middle of the night in the world upstairs.

  There were no more rooms beyond the door, Max realized, and his uncle’s house was built on flat ground. He slipped the catalogue order form into the envelope with a shaking hand. This was obviously unfinished business of Uncle Jonathan’s, who was traveling, Max was now certain, somewhere below the horizon of the world, for want of a better way to put it. Now it had become Max’s business, trilobite business, three-cent stamp business. Feeling giddy with anticipation he put his hand on the knob and opened the door wide, stepping out into the bright sunlight, just in time to see a zeppelin, its tiny propellers whirling, disappear beyond the peak of a nearby, orchard-covered hill.

  P-38

  [with Brittany Cox]

  THE SUN CAST dusty afternoon shadows on the sidewalk, and Anderson occasionally glanced back to see if his own shadow was still there. It was looking faded today despite the cloudless sky, as if it had been washed and hung out to dry so many times through the years that it had grown as thin as old muslin curtains. The air was cool, the leaves already falling from the trees and the Bermuda grass getting thin and scraggly in front of the French Street houses. It came into his mind that something had gone out of them in the declining years, and it was certainly true that back in the fifties when he had grown up here things had been different—cleaner, brighter, the shadows sharp and clear on the sidewalk. The air had simply had more oxygen in it back then. A person could really breathe. He tried to recall the names of the persons who had lived in these houses during his childhood, but the memories were as faded as everything else, and anyway nobody was left except him.

  He stopped near the corner at Tenth Street and looked at an old bungalow that badly needed paint. He had played in the house as a child, but he couldn’t remember much about it except that the kitchen had been white, hung with wallpaper decorated with cherries. That had appealed to him. He remembered that much. The stone foundation of the front porch had sunk into the ground at one end, and the eaves sagged overhead, following it down. Collapse wasn’t imminent, but it was inevitable. Abruptly he remembered the porch swing that had hung at the edge of that porch and the wisteria vines that had wrapped through its chains, putting out clusters of purple flowers for a couple of weeks in spring. He wondered whether any departed memories would return to him if he could step inside and have a look around.

  He realized abruptly that someone inside was peering out at him through the window, and he waved and moved on, not knowing whether they had waved back. At the corner a street vendor pushed a cart past him on the sidewalk, selling fruit and plastic-wrapped cotton candy and homemade ice cream bars, heading into the neighborhood to make his rounds. Anderson walked up Tenth Street toward Main, passing bodegas and taco joints and a Chinese takeout that also rented videos. There were plastic representations of egg rolls and noodle dishes in the window, dusty and flyspecked. Too many stores were simply empty. Where the book store had been there was a wedding shop, the signs in the window in Spanish, and beyond that, in what had been the old drugstore and soda fountain there was a bar now, dark inside the open door, mariachi music on the jukebox and the smell of spilled beer and some kind of pine-scented floor cleaner.

  Wind scoured the sidewalk, kicking up leaves, and he found that he was standing outside the hobby shop, which had clearly been his destination, since that’s where he had ended up, here at the edge of the neighborhood, with nothing ahead of him but the traffic on Main Street. He pushed in through the door, in among tables of what was mostly unidentifiable electronic junk. An old, hand-painted sign over the counter read “Anderson’s Model Airplanes and Hobby Shop,” and under his breath, he muttered, “Hey, I’m Anderson,” which was true, although it wasn’t all that funny, largely because it was no coincidence. In the distant past the hobby shop had belonged to Anderson’s father.

  The old man behind the counter, a party by the name of Miles Buxton, nodded at him, but didn’t show any enthusiasm. A couple of months back, when Anderson had returned to the neighborhood after the death of his father, he had been surprised to see that the hobby shop was still up and running, the lone remnant of bygone days. It had declined since his father had sold it twenty years back, which Anderson had noticed straight off when he had stepped inside on the day after his father’s funeral, aware that he was looking for his own past, and finding a remnant of it in the familiar sign over the counter and in the smell of old pine boards and racks of model airplanes. “Hey,” he had said out loud, “I’m Anderson,” and had smiled and introduced himself to Miles Buxton, who hadn’t shown any enthusiasm that time either, and didn’t apparently see anything remarkable in Anderson’s story of growing up in this shop back in its heyday. Anderson had the sneaking suspicion that the old man had simply thought he was lying.

  “Who’re you calling old?” he muttered to himself, and he looked over a plywood table loaded up with ancient ham radios and CB setups, wondering what had possessed him to open the door and come in when he knew just what he’d find. The ten-cent table, which had been his favorite when he was a kid, still stood near the counter. He had found jackknives and bottle openers and marbles on it back in the day, although where his father had found the perpetual supply of these things Anderson couldn’t say. Now there wasn’t apparently much on it that was worth having, let alone worth a dime, which was perhaps the consequence of inflation.

  “What’s the good word?” he asked Buxton.

  “Everything half price,” Buxton told him. “Whatever you see, it costs half of what’s on the price tag.”

  “Is that right? Trying to move some stock?” Anderson leaned against the Formica counter, noticing that the years had rubbed the pattern away except along the edges, where you could still mak
e out the blue and pink swirl.

  “I’m moving all of it out, closing up shop. Today’s my last day.”

  Anderson stood listening to the silence, taking this in, looking at the old cash register and at the spindle where his father had skewered carbon copies of handwritten receipts. There were a couple skewered on it now, but only a couple. “Retiring?”

  “Well, that’s the silver lining. Forced out. Maybe it’s time. The school over across the way bought up this end of the block, and they’re tearing the shops down and putting up a theatre or some such thing. Part of the downtown redevelopment. God knows it needs it.”

  “There’s stores up Tenth Street that are empty,” Anderson said. “Why not move a couple of blocks down? Probably cheaper rent than out here on Main.” For a moment he thought of offering to lend a hand. He had a pickup truck, after all. It wouldn’t take much….

  “That’s the problem,” Buxton told him. “Empty stores. People don’t come downtown to shop anymore, and the ones who do don’t speak the language and they don’t buy what I’m selling. I’m done. I’ve got a jobber coming in tomorrow to give me a bid on the whole shebang. Me and the wife have a place up in Big Bear, and once we start up the hill, I don’t mean to look back.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Anderson said.

  He had been living in Fort Lauderdale when he had gotten word about his father’s death, making ends meet with a two-bit job working for the county. The lawyer’s assurance that he had come into an inheritance had left him stunned. He hadn’t spoken to his father since his mother had passed away, which was ten years ago now. In the ten years prior to that he had spoken to him only once or twice, and only early in the day when his father was sober. The inheritance had turned out to be the house and enough money to get by on when you added the interest to Anderson’s small retirement. For that he was grateful, although when he had flown in from Lauderdale carrying his two suitcases, his sense of coming home again had been fleeting.

  He looked over the rack of model airplanes now, picking up a Cessna and putting it back down again. He had built no end of model planes when he was a kid, at first with the help of his father. But he had gotten pretty good at it once he’d figured out not to go hog wild with the glue. After you’d built a particular model, though, there was no point in building another one of the same, and he had built a Cessna and a couple of dozen other planes, mostly what his father had called “Warbirds.” The old man had been generous that way, giving him the model planes right off the rack, especially late in the afternoon when he had taken a couple of belts from the bottle under the counter. Even back then Anderson had the feeling that the old man half-regretted his generosity the following morning when he was sober again, but next month or the month after that there was another afternoon. The shelves in his bedroom had held quite a collection.

  His father had been full of apocryphal-sounding stories about the Air Force, about the planes he’d flown across Europe during the war, the fifty-six missions over Italy, the night sky lit up with flak like the Fourth of July, the half-smoked cigarettes left in the ashtray back at the base, waiting for him to return and smoke the other half. Once when Anderson was nine or ten his father had come home in a rented truck carrying a pile of cut-in-half telephone poles, and with a chain saw he had chopped the cedar poles into lengths and then hand-split them into roof shingles, which he had used to re-roof the back half of the house. For a month the yard had been littered with cedar shingles. Anderson’s bedroom window had been right under the second story eaves, and for years after that the sun brought out the smell of creosote. There wasn’t much that his father couldn’t do with his own two hands, including pour a drink. When Anderson was older, and could have learned a thing or two from him, it was too late.

  Behind the half dozen other models lay a P-38 Lightning in a battered box. The picture on the cover was enough to set his mind going, especially the elaborate triple fuselage and the heavy engines—Allison V1710s, according to the information on the cover, with 1150 horsepower in each one. It had been a hell of an airplane in its day. A cruising speed of 365 miles an hour.

  “That one was built by Lockheed,” Buxton said. “Right out in L.A. That was a home-grown phenomenon when it came out.”

  “That’s the best kind of phenomenon,” Anderson said. “I’ll take it.” He set it on the counter and reached for his wallet.

  “On the house,” Buxton said. “What the hell. For the old days.”

  The uncharitable thought came into Anderson’s mind that Buxton was drunk, but he realized that he was letting ghosts do his thinking for him, and he nodded his head. “Thanks,” he said. “I wish I could return the favor, but if you’re leaving town…”

  “If I’m lucky I’ll get pennies on the dollar for what’s left here, so don’t think twice.”

  “Good luck, then.” Anderson put his hand out, and Buxton shook it, and suddenly Anderson was in a hurry to leave. He looked around the store for the last time and went out onto the street. The sun was just sinking below the rooftops in the west, illuminating the row of storefronts with the golden glow of late afternoon. He glanced back at the shop window, seeing his own reflection cast against the shadows of the junk behind the plate glass. When he crossed Tenth, angling back up French Street, it occurred to him that he could have asked for the sign over the counter. His father had painted it, after all, and the jobber wouldn’t give Buxton a nickel for it….

  Bygones, he thought, going up his own walk and into his house, closing the door against the evening and pulling the curtains across in front of the windows. He cleared off the stuff on the dining room table, covered it with newspaper, and broke the seal on the model box with his thumbnail, laying out the pieces in carefully-arranged order, assessing the difficulty of the project with a practiced eye.

  Anderson sat in his easy chair, looking out at the street through the old muslin curtains, which gave the light from the streetlamps an added radiance. He poured himself a glass of bourbon and splashed in some Canada Dry, and then sat still, listening to the muted sound of traffic in the distance. It was late, the neighborhood quiet. A dog barked twice, and in the silence that followed, Anderson heard the drone of an airplane, apparently flying low in the sky. In the corner of his eye he saw something moving, but he continued to stare out the window, letting the thing come into his field of vision in its own good time. In a moment he saw its shadow on the wall, the triple fuselage and the wings with their heavy engines, the spinning shadows of the propellers as the plane banked around in a tight curve, the pilot setting a course for home, or perhaps to some other destination.

  “Cheers,” he said, to no one and to everyone, and he raised his glass.

  Houses

  [with Alex Haniford]

  MICHAEL FOUND HIMSELF looking out through the living room window again, watching the empty street, where his rental car sat alone at the curb. The woman next door didn’t own a car, and the house across the street was abandoned. It was a late summer evening, the air sultry, the sky heavy with clouds. A summer storm was pending, and he waited for it in anticipation, like a premonition that the telephone was about to ring, or that he would hear a fateful knock at the door. But the telephone had been disconnected a couple of days ago, and there was no one outside.

  He heard the rumble of distant thunder again, and wind stirred the palm fronds in the curb trees. He had wanted to be out of his parents’ house before dark, but he wasn’t quite finished going through their things. Tomorrow morning he would turn the place over to a firm that managed estate sales. The money from the sale of the house and its contents would pay for his father’s care at the nursing home. He had realized shortly after arriving that there was nothing in the house he wanted, except to know what had happened here, and although he could sense that there were the ghosts of unhappiness in the house, they weren’t speaking any language he understood.

  He contemplated the abandoned house, its front yard overgrown as it had been last time he was
here—nearly two years ago, shortly after his parents had moved in. According to his mother’s letters the empty house had become his father’s fixation—the first indication that something had gone wrong with him. He had stood at this very window simply watching, particularly on rainy days, not just lost in thought, but as if he were waiting for something, saying less and less as the weeks went by until he seemed to have disappeared inside his own mind. Now and then his mother would return from an errand and find that he had gone out and only recently returned—rainy footprints on the hardwood floor, or his jacket wet, as if he had been out walking, although he wouldn’t say. One afternoon she had returned to find the house empty, and he hadn’t reappeared for two days, again unable to say, or not knowing, where he had been. She had found him simply sitting in the chair again, in perfect silence.

  Rain, Michael murmured, as if the storm breaking would release the tension in the air. He knew that he had allowed himself to be caught up by his father’s sad obsession, although that knowledge didn’t make him move away from the window. Where had his father gone on those rainy days when there was no one to see him go?

  Michael’s mother’s death had allegedly been accidental. He wanted to believe it was, but he hadn’t been here, and that was partly the problem. After the second of her letters he had flown in for a visit, staying three days. His father had been superficially happy to see him, although Michael suspected that he would be even happier to be left alone again.