Short People (Vintage Contemporaries) Read online

  The strain and clank of the garage door wakes Shawn from light sleep. He blinks at the carpet. It takes too much effort to move, and for what? The commotion of his parents in the kitchen bores him.

  His father’s voice shoots down the hallway, “Shawn? Shawn, what are you doing with all the lights on?”

  Shawn doesn’t move. He thinks about how still he’s lying.

  “I’ve told you before, Shawn—only in the room you’re planning on being in.”

  It seems like the living room is full of water, like his emotions are floating somewhere on the surface while he lies here on the floor, separated from the impetus to care about reprimands, lights, his parents, Jesus Himself, by the dense mass of liquid that is pressing down on him. His body is alive, tingling with low-grade panic, but he is dead inside it.

  Room by room, the house is going dark and his parents are coming toward him. Their presence in the room sucks the water from it. He feels claustrophobic. The panic moves through his bloodstream more quickly now, without the water weight to slow it down. Holding back tears asphyxiates him; it’s like there’s a balloon inflating in his throat.

  His mother clicks out the seconds with her tongue. She steps over him and he can feel the air shift as she sweeps past and swoops down, picking things up off the floor.

  His father sits on the edge of the couch, his knees wide; he leans low between them, his face bulging in toward Shawn’s head. “Come on, Shawn. Let’s sit up now.”

  With an abrupt, clumsy motion, almost like a rag doll, Shawn flops his head away. He sees his mother—her hands anyway— hiding the baggie and vial back in the box.

  “Shawn, sit up and talk to us,” his father says. “You’re not a nine-year-old anymore.”

  He waits long enough to feel like it’s his choice before doing what he’s told. His every slight movement reverberates like sound through the shell of a bass drum. He scoots away, cradles his knees, and picks a point at which he can’t see his parents to glare at.

  “So, now, what’s going on?” his father asks.

  He promises himself not to say a word. He’ll let his insolence speak for him, and when they ask questions, his silence will be close to that of God.

  “Look at this place, Shawn. It’s—the lights are on, there are cleaning products strewn all over the kitchen, there’s greasy stuff all over the bathroom sink—”

  “Hand goop,” Shawn says before he can stop himself.

  “—And look at this, Shawn, you destroyed your cross. I’m thinking, what’s going on?” His father’s face goes slack, waiting for an answer. “Shawn?” His head wobbles back and forth. “I can’t even—Shawn, what happened here?”

  “I . . .”

  His father studies a cluster of matches. “I can’t hear you, Shawn.”

  Shawn slumps his shoulders. He shrugs.

  “Is this the game we’re playing? You think if you don’t say anything then everything will be okay? You going to wait us out and maybe it’ll go away?”

  “Chad, it’s just a little matchstick cross.”

  This is wrong, too, to let her defend him.

  “I’m not angry. I’m not—look, we’re having a conversation. About responsibility and grown-up things like that. It’s not like I’m going to . . . we’re just talking. Right, Shawn?”

  Shawn combusts. His body is on fire. The water has fled and he’s grown dry and brittle. Now he’s in flames, his every cell bursting. His skin cracks and crackles. His sinews shrink in the heat. He speaks and it’s as if the words are all one long syllable popping out in a sparkle of red coal.

  “I didn’t do it on purpose I was trying to make it clean and it broke and it doesn’t matter cause I don’t care cause it doesn’t matter.” The words catch and tangle on top of each other; for a moment, they squeeze into gibberish, guttural sounds that feel like they’re springing from Shawn’s pores, not his mouth. “It’s cause you’re drug addicts.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t pretend.”

  “Shawn, what? We’re drug addicts?”

  “What’s that, then? That’s drugs. You’re drug addicts.”

  “Shawn, we’re . . . this is catnip.”

  “See? You’re lying now. I knew you were going to lie, cause you’re liars and drug addicts and liars and you’re bad. You’re just bad and you made me bad, too.” He’s gutted now. Everything has been burned out.

  “It’s catnip. Look. You put it in the little mouse and the cat plays with it.”

  “Then what about the bottle? That’s not catnip. What about that, then?”

  “That’s for his worms.”

  “Izzy doesn’t have worms.”

  “Not anymore, because this stuff got rid of them. Look at it . . . See? Don’t you remember? We had to hold his mouth open and take the dropper and push the medicine down his throat.” Shawn’s mother holds the bottle up for his inspection, but he turns his head away. He won’t be lied to.

  “Okay, Shawn? Is that all that’s wrong?”

  Is that all that’s wrong.

  “Well, then, how come . . . then, how come it’s all hidden like drugs?”

  “It’s just hidden from the cat.”

  “But, then . . . then . . .” Suddenly, exhausted, he falls onto his back and covers his eyes. Tension spikes through his jaw, into his chest. Behind his eyelids, splotches of color flicker and ghost and then disappear. His pulse pounds in his neck. They’re lying and he knows it. Otherwise, Jesus would talk to him—no, that’s not true, he knows better than that. The truth is that his mother’s telling the truth, and this disturbs Shawn more than anything—to have gone through all he’s gone through tonight and discover it was for naught. His faith has left him and in its place there’s just wind.

  Without looking, he feels his parents lingering. Its like he’s a sensor and they’re infrared; heat patterns on either side of him. Or sentries from someone else’s religion, guarding his cold body against the night. They make no noise as they shift on their haunches. He surmises that they’re communicating with each other in a parent language made up of hand signs and grimaces. One of them places a thumb to his forehead; the lightness of touch, the tenderness with which the thumb trails toward his brow before it’s whisked away, tells him it’s his mother. He wants to reach up and be held by her, but now they’re gone from the room and the air chills behind them.

  Later, when he opens his eyes, the house is dark.

  Shawn catches himself asking, Jesus, please help me get a good grade as he sits at his school desk behind a math test. He shudders and stops himself. What’s the use?

  At recess he stands on the edge of the soccer field, watching his classmates play French tag. His arms are crossed and his face is stern. He’s not condemning them, though that’s what it looks like. He is condemning himself for his urge to condemn them. They run in circles like chickens, tackling each other, kissing and groping and kissing. He can no longer say with conviction that what they’re doing is wrong—Jesus is no longer on his side. Maybe He never was. He feels like a very old man, and his classmates are far away from him. They are children, innocents, somehow able to act without thinking, to run and tackle and kiss and grope without worrying about the meaning of their actions. Shawn imagines that as opposed to him—who pours his every urge through a moral filter, and then does nothing for fear of doing something wrong— they live on impulse, with immediacy, and are able to interpret what happens to them through ad hoc, ever-changing conceptions of their connection to the life around them. He’s in a gray zone between what he believed just last week and an alternative he can’t conceive of. He wishes he could join the other kids and play, simply play. He surveys the girls chasing around the field. They’re mostly flat-chested and lanky, distinguishable from the boys only by haircut. One girl attracts his attention, though. Her thin brown hair blows like flax in the wind; her vineyards are, if not in bloom, at least budding; her fawns nuzzle their heads against her sweater. Unlike most of the other girls,
she isn’t chasing a specific boy. Instead, she kicks around the field halfheartedly, awkward and shy as she loops through the throng. Shawn could catch her easily. She’s a grade above him, and he doesn’t even know her name. If he caught her, he could pull her to the ground like the other boys do and lie on top of her. He could clamp her wrists above her head and then he could kiss her and then he could, he’s not sure, maybe say something that would make her smile so she wanted to kiss him too. Even though he’s pretty sure that God wouldn’t crack lightning down on his head for this—God isn’t listening, God isn’t looking—Shawn can’t bring himself to act. For one thing, he’d get dirty rolling around in the grass, stains on his jeans and his white oxford shirt, scuffs on his shoes, his hair all affray. For another, just because God doesn’t care, because God isn’t there, does that mean it’s okay to tackle the girl? She might cry and pull his hair. She might be angry with him. She might bite his tongue off. Shawn wanders away from the soccer field and contemplates the four-square court painted on the pavement in front of the school, hoping his thing relaxes before he’s called in from recess.

  When he gets home, Shawn sits in the new chair and stares out the window, spinning his finger in figure eights across his left temple. He leaves his post for dinner only at his father’s command. He cleans his plate quickly, mumbles “Can I be excused?” and then leaps back into his plastic-wrapped throne. He’s looking for something out there in the night, but he doesn’t know what it is. There’s no word for it. He doesn’t bother to ask God for insight. Instead he derides himself: he is too timid, he hides behind faith, when, really, why shouldn’t he have chased down the girl on the soccer field and kissed her? There are so many things he’s turned away from for fear of where he’d end up if he walked toward them. Why shouldn’t he have looked at the Playboy the tough boys in the bathroom tried to force on him before they gave him a swirly? Really, what’s so wrong with rock-and-roll music that he should deny himself its pumping beat? Why shouldn’t he do whatever he wants? Why not? There are no reprisals. There’s just him gazing out at the phone lines and streetlights, the brown matted grass, the houses and houses that look just like his.

  That night, Shawn tempts himself to break taboos, to somehow become a normal boy like the ones chasing girls on the soccer field. He searches the family bookshelves for anything that might contain a dirty part, and finding nothing, imagines the girl with flaxen hair stepping into his room on her tiptoes. He knows now that there are no minions; there is only himself. Shawn no longer resists. He lets himself be overcome with impure thoughts and onanizes late into the night. The sex clenches his body, but as it does, his impure thoughts gallop around in his mind. They don’t take control of him, though, not this time. Now he’s in control of them, spurring them on, until he’s just body with no mind at all, eighty-eight pounds of sensation. Proudly, triumphantly, he makes the stain. It looks and tastes like snot.

  There’s no reason to feel guilty, but he does anyway. He’s not sure what to do with this feeling. Guilt is just another something caught in space with him. He has no hierarchy in which to place himself, no gameboard on which to move two spaces ahead or be penalized back to Start; he no longer even understands the objective of the game. There is no reason for anything. Good or bad, right or wrong, none of it really matters. Wherever he goes, whatever he does, this thought keeps rolling back into his head: what does it matter? It doesn’t. He’s at Wal-Mart coveting a cd, and what if he stole it? It wouldn’t matter. The only reason he doesn’t slip the cd under his shirt is that if he’s caught he’ll get thrown in jail. He plays with the condom he took from his dad, rips open the package, unrolls the rubber, tries it on, takes it off, blows it up to watch it fly around his bedroom. He wonders how many hundreds of millions of condoms the condom company makes every year. An entire industry exists solely to sheath people’s things, what’s wrong with that? Nothing, that’s what. He stops folding his clothes. He parts his hair differently, and sometimes, he doesn’t part it at all. He wears dirty underwear now sometimes, and more and more often he doesn’t bother to wash his hands after he pees. What does it matter? Nothing matters.

  The night before Easter, he stays up late and, after his parents have gone to bed, he slinks into the living room, turns the TV on mute and scans the stations. Showtime and Cinemax are the forbidden fruit he has on his mind tonight. The kids at school who know this kind of thing believe Cinemax is better—Skinemax they call it. He gives it a try. His family doesn’t subscribe, so it’s scrambled, but that doesn’t stop him from watching. A greenish-gray bar divides the screen horizontally and a pulsing line of colors divides it vertically, cutting the picture into four pieces, each in the wrong place, like one of those plastic slide puzzles. The image flips and squiggles, but every few seconds it catches and he can make out what he’s watching. Three hands, one red, one green, one blue, mirror each other in a sliding motion over a smooth surface. As the fingers massage this surface, sharp white lines streak behind them like barbs. The picture cuts to a different shot and Shawn sees two green nipples on a blue breast. A man with green lips leans in to kiss them and suddenly there’s only one nipple. The picture breaks up into jerky spasms, then goes back to the flips and squiggles. If he concentrates, Shawn can slow the images down. The parts that are scrambled can be inferred. A man with blue hair is having sex with a woman with green hair. Their lips are white and float free from their bodies. Shawn touches his thing and stares at the screen. He doesn’t go to bed until three-thirty a.m.

  His parents drag him out of the house before dawn, and he sleeps in the family Festiva as they drive through the fog to the sunrise service. Folding chairs have been assembled in a semicircle around the damp knoll east of church, and Shawn’s family, late because he wouldn’t get up, is stuck in a row near the back. He shivers in the early-morning chill and does all he can to stay awake. He fidgets with his program. He frowns through the hymns. During the sermon, he slides off his chair and squirms, plucking blades of grass and tying them in knots. His father casts a look. His mother pats the chair. He climbs off his knees and sits limp, his head swaying back and forth, jolting sometimes when it feels like it’s going to fall off. He draws Easter eggs on his program. He paints his fingernails with the highlighter he finds in his mother’s purse. He doesn’t hear a word Preacher Dan says.

  At communion, he shuffles up to the front of the line, eats his pellet of baked dough and downs his shot of grape juice. He feels like a huckster, tricking the people into thinking he’s with them in fellowship when, in truth, he’s merely going through the motions, as empty of passion as this ritual is of meaning. The dough is stale, the juice watered down. He misses the sense of purpose, the soaring project, the urgency that blind faith once allowed him. He wipes his lips with the back of his hand.

  As the service ends, Preacher Dan faces the congregation from the top of the hill. He has shaved off his mustache, and without it, the skin around his scar seems puffier. Over his suit he wears a thin white robe, ruffled at the neck and boxy, with no arms, just slits for his hands, which rise now above him, palms out toward Heaven. The robe billows like wings from his wrists to his knees. High wisps of cloud hover pink and gold above him, a sky right out of an uplifting poster. A sliver of sun breaks over the hill and Preacher Dan’s voice booms out across the congregation, “This is the day that the Lord has made.”

  It’s met with exuberance. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it.”

  Shawn is woozy with exhaustion. He grips the chair in front of him to keep from collapsing. He’s so tired he twitches. Preacher Dan seems to be sitting on top of the sun, his legs dangling toward the ground, and Shawn, in his exhaustion, almost believes this is more than an illusion, that Dan really is floating, and not just floating—ascending. Shawn doesn’t want to burn his retinas. He bows his head and blinks the light away.

  “Hallelujah, Christ is risen.”

  Everyone but Shawn raises their hands above their heads.

  Words S
hawn has known his whole life tap through his mind. For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life, forever and ever, A-men. They have such a seductive, treacherous lilt. He thinks about what he was up to last night and wonders if it shows on his face.

  Every voice but Shawn’s soars and swoops, “The Lord is risen indeed, Hallelujah.”

  The sun is free of the Earth now. Preacher Dan stands inside it, his body a silhouette, the robe outstretched, diaphanous, filtering the rays. Warmth tugs at Shawn’s eyelids; he could fall asleep where he’s standing. The morning light makes everything crisp— undeniably real. The texture of the plastic chair back in Shawn’s hands, the bright prints and pastels of his fellow parishioners’ Easter clothes, the dew on the grass on the hill leading to Preacher Dan, all these things are so convincingly what they are. Compared to this world, Shawn feels abstract, vague and hazy, like a scribble that could mean anything.

  He shouts—“The Lord is risen indeed, Hallelujah”—but the rest of the voices have already faded. His cracking soprano flails like an out-of-tune trumpet, alone, announcing how profoundly he’s failed the Lord.

  Preacher Dan is a dark spot on the sun, his face eclipsed by the brilliance behind him. His voice floats to Earth across light-years. “That boy’s going to make a great preacher one day.”

  The congregation sighs. Shawn’s father bows his head. His mother scruffs up his hair.

  Jesus, is that You? Does this mean I’m saved?

  The heat graces Shawn’s skin.

  McNeil, Layla u32.3691341

  She’ll be ten years old the first time. She won’t even notice it’s happened—or she’ll almost not notice. She’ll know something’s not right the way she knows smog’s diseased sky: by the sick feeling she has about it later. But she won’t comprehend what has changed in her life. Because they’ll be an intimate family, prone to backrubs and cuddles and nibbles on the ear, because personal space will be something they share and this sharing will symbolize love and filial devotion, because she’ll be taught to trust in her father, that nothing can hurt her, there’s nothing to fear if her father is within arm’s reach, and his adoring eyes will assure her it’s true and she will believe him and wrap her arms tighter around his neck and burrow her face deeper into his shoulder, for all these reasons, she’ll let him kiss her belly and blow foghorn farts that will rumble throughout her whole body; he’ll get her to laugh and squeal, to quiver in her skin like waiting for Christmas with all its surprise and presents and change. When he lets his finger slip into her, she won’t know it’s wrong: a thin little membrane is all that exists between Daddy protect me and Daddy don’t hurt me and she’ll be too young to have known it was there to be broken. No, the way she will learn is through absence: the pulling away and the public slights and the rigid spike in his muscles when she wraps her arms tighter around his neck. His fear, like an index of what’s in the air, will clue her in to what she’s become. A sunset through smog is more vibrant, smeared with a far broader range of colors, than sunsets naturally are. She’ll dwell in her smog-imbued sunset for forty-odd years before she follows it finally into the dark.