The Locktender's House Hardcover - 2008 - 1st Edition

Chapter One

The bomb that blew a hole in Wednesday morning and in Private Danks as he walked barefoot—barefoot despite the recent disciplinary write- up—through the desert sand, back from the commissary with a tube of anti-itch cream and a bottle of hypoallergenic shampoo, the explosion not only wreaked its upward havoc upon him but also surged through the earth’s web of tectonic capillaries, pulsed from beneath the great bodies of water so uniformly that the schools of damselfish and chubs dithering at the various coasts turned en masse, and simultaneously, toward some primordial idea of safety, the ensuing waves lapping and licking at the remnants of a pier in Pamlico Sound, off the North Carolina coast, with just enough vigor to rouse the baker’s dozen of plovers or gulls or pelicans clacking their beaks or squawking atop the creosoted pylons, the flap of wings and the shuddering that followed coinciding with a gust of salty wind that stirred the sea grass then rode the tops of the skinny pine trees inland, across the Piedmont, traveling 6,347 miles away from the dead boy in the desert, where, as if coming home, the percussive essence of that bomb climbed two flights of stairs in the middle of a sprawling apartment complex on the outskirts of Greensboro, then, without pause, rattled unit 33’s door in its jamb, and shook the interior wall imperceptibly, but with all the force necessary to jostle Private Danks’s dusty, out-of-tune banjo hanging from its peg head by a thin leather strand on a nail above his Easy-Boy recliner.

The brittle strand broke. The banjo fell, the twang and clang upending the sleep of Private Danks’s girlfriend, Janice, on the other side of the shared wall. Janice bolted from the bed and ran headlong into the worst migraine of her life.

The headache knocked her to the ground. Instantly. Blurred her vision. She fell, with the faintest cry, and curled into a tight ball beside the bed. The pounding pounding pounding filled her head. There was no space for questioning the noise from the next room. Had she imagined it? Like buckets of thunder pouring over her, the pain drenched Janice’s trembling body from her skull to the soles of her feet. Movement equaled pain, even slight movement. A ligament in the fingers going taut, pulling against bone and muscle, became a heavy rope squealing and biting against a wooden mooring post. The eyelid’s soft closure rang out like a cell door slamming shut, steel against steel. She tried not to move.

Was there someone in the apartment? Janice hurt too much to worry about possible intruders. Did something really fall in the next room? Or did the thump and discordant clanking—so loud it even penetrated the earplugs she’d taken to wearing not long after moving in—did those sounds originate inside her own body? Janice wanted, wanted badly, to reach up and pluck out the dense foam plugs from her ear canals. They’d failed her that night. Whether or not the noise of the falling banjo had insinuated itself into her head, now the earplugs seemed to stop tight the flow of blood surging through the locks and channels of her veins. Pounding, pounding, pounding against eardrum, vitreous humor, cranium.

She’d had migraines before. She knew the pain would subside eventually. Would ebb and flow. She just had to endure. Janice lay motionless on the floor beside the bed. Some time later, hours maybe, she tried to look at the clock on the night table, but the blocky red numbers threw too much light. She couldn’t sit or stand, or pull herself onto the bed. The phone, beside the clock, was within reach, but Janice had no one to call. Janice mustered her strength, reached up, through the pain, and grappled until she was able to drag a pillow and a blanket down to the floor. She covered her head, and lay as still as possible for the next two days.

For the next two days pain stormed around her mind, kicking open and kicking closed doors of semiconsciousness, doors of nightmare. Here, the bomb exploded again and again. There, the banjo pot struck the floor over and over; its strings grated against the bridge and the goatskin head. She lay, chilled and sweating by turns. She smelled bread. Biscuits. No, not just biscuits. Burned biscuits. As a teenager, Janice had lost her sense of smell, and so, even through the pain of the migraine, she was grateful for this olfactory gift. The phone may or may not have rung, several times. And if it had, would it have been anyone but her boss, and would he have made anything more than cursory efforts to find her? She couldn’t stand, couldn’t eat, couldn’t make her way across the floor to the bathroom. Sometimes the sound took shape, becoming an umbral presence moving through the apartment and her sleep. Sometimes it became Private Danks plucking away on the old stringed instrument, furiously chasing, but never catching, rhythm or melody. Sometimes it was nothing more than stampeding, hooves against wooden planks. Still other times, the sound droned without source or form. Janice dreamt of walking, so much walking. She walked through strange landscapes, equally unknown and familiar. Had she been there before? She walked along a narrow channel cut through dark, brown earth, the sides damp, cold and muddy. She walked alone, in and out of dream. It may or may not have rained, in the dream, or outside her apartment. The pin oaks lining the parking lot may or may not have iced over in the night, may or may not have shivered and shucked off their cloaks of ice in the morning sun. Janice didn’t know.

Janice knew, in those moments of cognizance, that Private Danks wasn’t in the next room. But she didn’t know he was dead. That he’d died the instant the bomb exploded, and stayed dead. She didn’t know that the bomb had stripped away his insignia, his uniform, along with his skin, that it blew out the cracked molar he’d scheduled an appointment to have capped that very afternoon. In fact, she’d never know about the bomb itself, whether it was an improvised explosive device, or a rocket-propelled grenade, or if it was friendly fire, or even if it had been intended for him in particular. She’d never know whether his death was regarded as banal or heroic by those who witnessed it, or by the others he left behind. She’d never know about the brief and soft shower of blood that fell, and its imperceptible hiss as it seeped into the Iraqi sand. Janice would never know any of these things, because the National Guard was only obligated to contact next of kin. And Janice didn’t know Private Danks’s next of kin.

Janice lay on the floor and dreamed herself through the migraine. The pain began to diminish, each pulse less debilitating than the last. She was walking, walking along a dug-out path, walking in half light, or less, the world sepia toned. Somewhere in the distance, farther along the channel, a weak light bobbed and swayed. Never getting closer, never farther. Janice, walking somehow just beneath the earth’s surface. Afraid to stop or to go back. Afraid the walls might cave in upon her. Upon her, mucking through the shadowy slough.

But the walls of earth didn’t fall, and after two long nights the smothering pain began to lift. To rise like fog off the surface of Janice. She was able to open her eyes, to look at the clock on the night table. Almost seven a.m. The early winter morning just barely prying up the dark lid of night. By seven-fifteen, she’d pulled the earplugs from her ears, allowing the potential for sound to rush in. She sat up against the bed. Weak, nauseated, and so dehydrated she felt brittle. But at least the migraine had subsided. Janice didn’t know what day of the week she’d woken into, but even in her misery she considered trying to make it to work on time. Two hours in which to stand, bathe, and feed herself seemed barely doable.

At seven-twenty, just as Janice struggled to her knees, her body weary to the marrow, the bomb from so far away and so long ago exploded one more time. The telephone rang.

“Janice . . . Janice Witherspoon.”

As if she spoke through cotton batting, the words snagged in her mouth, leaked out messy and damaged.

“What . . . ?”

The words coming in splintered and fell apart.

“What . . . ?”

And that was all.

She didn’t even know Private Danks had a brother, and by the time she’d come to terms with that fact, the brother had already told her the boy was dead, that he and their parents were coming down from Virginia, after the body arrived stateside, coming to clean out the apartment, and that they’d appreciate it if she was gone by then.

“What,” Janice said, not why; but the line was empty.

“Okay,” Janice said.

She held the phone to her ear for a while anyway, hanging on the emptiness, knowing intuitively the faint buzz in the line would be more soothing than the silence to follow.

2

After a while, the nausea subsided. A weak equilibrium staked its claim. Janice was able to walk into the living room without holding on to the walls. From the door, she saw no signs of burglary or vandalism. She couldn’t bring herself to look behind the Easy-Boy, but the wall where the banjo had hung, bare now but for the faint dust-ghost of the instrument and small dark head of the twenty-penny nail, told her enough. Whatever presence, whatever intruder had come into the apartment nights ago, it must have limited its damage to the instrument and to several days of Janice’s life.

Private Danks was dead.

She had to be out of the apartment before his family arrived.

Janice stacked half a dozen saltine crackers neatly in the center of a saucer, poured a glass of juice. She tried to eat some crackers and drink.

How did she get to this point?

Janice asked versions of the question over and over as she cleaned herself up, made the bed, and sifted through the closet looking for clothes that she could bear the weight of. Flayed by the migraine, mauled by the news, her entire body felt raw; her spirit, dull. She moved slowly, deliberately. Outside, the winter morning revealed itself by degrees, as if to see the whole day at once would be unbearable. Janice listened as her neighbors began to stir: the slamming of doors, the heavy footsteps echoing in the concrete stairwells, the cars sputtering out to join the throngs headed to work. To work. Her neighbors? Strangers, all. How did she come to live in that apartment: four boxy, lifeless rooms, in a boxy, lifeless cinderblock building, in the middle of fifteen buildings exactly like it, more than three hundred apartments, all rented, and everyone pretending the exotic theme names of the buildings, the halfhearted landscaping, the shallow overchlorinated pool behind an eight-foot chain-link fence, and the proximity to the beltway made it worth the expense? How? Janice could barely remember when she moved in.

How could she live with a man for nearly three years and not know that he had a brother? She knew his parents were still living, and suspected that they didn’t like her, but wasn’t exactly sure why.

Maybe she’d imagined the call too. Maybe it was a continuation of the migraine-induced nightmares, those images still fresh in her mind. From where she sat, on the high chrome chair at the bar dividing the small kitchen and the living room, Janice could see the other telephone, and its message light blinking like an irrefutable visual metronome. There were nine calls.

How could she be so much a part of a man’s life, have him be so much a part of hers, and not cry at the news of his death? The migraine. The migraine must’ve rendered her numb. She’d cry later, Janice promised herself. For now, it was all she could do to figure out where to go. She’d been too addled by the brother’s call—his brusque tone as much as his message—to ask whether he meant for her to just be away while they gathered the dead boy’s things, or if he meant she should leave and stay gone. Where to go, in either case? Should she simply go to work for the day?

For a very little while, Janice allowed herself to be angry at the brother and the parents. Who the hell were they to just push her aside? She had rights, too. She had feelings, too. Or did she? Janice tried for a minute to cry about Private Danks. She tried to hold on to her anger at his family. Neither effort worked.

It wasn’t that she hated him. But she didn’t love him either. Love, like the other hard troublesome emotions, required too much investment, for too little return, the risk of loss so high.

Private Danks was dead.

Janice found it best to just do the days of her life as they came to her, without letting emotion rile things up. Bad spells, she took minute by minute. Janice needed to subdue the noise in her brain, to make some basic decisions about the next couple of days. Years ago, before Private Danks, even before her job at Biggers & Twine Wholesale Foodservice Distributors, she’d succumbed to an infomercial pitch and bought an absurb quantity of fancy yarns, needles of different sizes and styles, and a series of knitting instruction videos. For the next few years Janice was embarrassed by how enthusiastically she embraced the craft. She wouldn’t knit in public; not on the bus, nor the bench while waiting for it; not in the park near the duplex where she used to live. For a while, she’d order her patterns and skeins of yarn online, then eventually she braved the trip to Victoria’s House of Needle Arts. And hundreds of dropped stitches, and dozens of scarves, shawls, and sweaters later, after she’d endured Private Danks’s teasing, after the women at Victoria’s started calling her by name, Janice found the rhythmic click of the needles in her fingers, and the constant attention to pattern, to the thing at hand, she found these to be the perfect distraction for any moment, public or private, needing such.

At lunch, while sitting at her desk in the online catalogue division of Biggers & Twine, Janice regularly took out her current knitting project to help ward off the gossipy eyes of the older women in the office, the ones who handled all the packing envelopes and postal materials, and who found Janice too naturally thin and healthy looking, if somewhat aloof and dour, to invite her to join them at the regular diet and wellness seminars hosted by the Human Services office. The project—whatever its color, texture, or sequence of stitches—also kept her somewhat immune to the indifference of the other, younger, hipper girls in the office. Even the webmaster—a surly young man with expressed disdain for anything not “cutting edge”—had seen her knitting, and Janice barely cared.