The thing about your house is there’s nothing just for looking at. It’s all for using. There’s that massive stereo with all those separate parts: turntable and receiver and CD player and huge speakers. Even a cassette deck. There are all those stacked wooden crates full of records and books and cassettes. And I mean there must be at least ten different musical instruments in your living room. Some I didn’t even recognize, like that long wavy one with the little hearts carved into it and that rectangular one with the big silver circle under the strings.
On our way out the door Sylvan asked Lyle about this clocklike object made of brass and wood on the wall. A barometer, Lyle said. My son dragged it home from somewhere. He’s a fan of the obscure and the obsolete, aren’t you, Jojo?
There were two words on the face of your barometer: regen and mooi. When I got home I looked them up. They’re Dutch words that mean rain and fair. Apparently what a barometer does is measure changes in air pressure and tell you whether it’ll rain soon. Useful as well as beautiful, see?
I’ll see you tonight, Jo. Thank you for specifically inviting me.
Sincerely,
AK
Tuesday, October 13, 10 p.m.
Dear Kurl,
Your uncle Viktor strikes me as a difficult man to please sometimes. He seemed pleased enough with the meal (Lyle makes a decent enchilada, doesn’t he?) and the drink (you have to admit that breaking the vodka out of the freezer even before we sat down to the table seemed another stroke of brilliance on Lyle’s part. My father is a genius at anticipating needs).
My sister had to be fetched down for dinner. Lyle had called up the stairs three times, but she hadn’t responded. I found her humped under her blankets like a badger, dead asleep. From what I could tell she’d been in there all day. I knew she wasn’t at school, anyway.
“I’m not hungry,” Shayna mumbled, when I was finally able to rouse her.
“We have company,” I said. “The Kurlanskys, remember?”
She came downstairs fifteen minutes later wearing a pajama top and a pair of overalls, rubbing her eyes like a toddler, her hair a comical tangle.
Viktor was in the midst of addressing Lyle, adult to adult. He was complaining about you, Kurl. “You would not believe how much trouble it is to get this lazy son of a bitch to lift a finger. The biggest and dumbest of them all, and he thinks he’s too good for a day’s work.”
“Adam’s in school, Uncle Vik,” Sylvan said. He sounded somewhat weary, like he’d had this argument with your uncle about a thousand times before.
“But why? Why is he in school?” Viktor said. “He has no reason to be in school. He doesn’t even have football anymore. All that big muscle for no reason.”
Shayna looked around the table with sudden interest. She asked, as an obvious-bordering-on-sarcastic change of topic: “So have any of you guys ever been to this bar downtown called the Ace?”
You Kurlanskys shook your heads.
“It’s this awesome music venue nobody knows about. Lyle, didn’t the Decent Fellows used to play there a million years ago?”
“Nope.”
Everyone looked at Lyle, who picked up a leaf of cilantro from his plate and shredded it into smaller pieces over his pork al pastor.
“There’s a picture of Mom on the wall, over the bar,” Shayna said.
And I suddenly recalled that the Ace was pictured on the postcard Shayna showed Bron and me at school, the one with what she thought was Raphael’s handwriting on the back.
Lyle stared at her. “What were you doing there? You’re underage.”
Shayna rolled her eyes.
“These kids,” said Viktor. Again he appealed to Lyle, as if the two of them were out at some pub together, commiserating about their good-for-nothing children, and we children weren’t all sitting there listening. He pointed again at you, Kurl. “You know this one can lift two bundles of shingles with one arm. Like Popeye!” A nasty laugh. “He is costing us money every day he isn’t up there with his family. His own brother, his own father.”
“You’re not my father,” you said.
This produced a decidedly awkward silence. The rest of us stared politely down at our plates. It occurred to me that the vodka bottle next to Viktor’s glass was nearly empty, though Lyle and Sylvan had only had one shot each. I couldn’t remember whether the bottle had been completely full when it came out of the freezer, but I think it was close.
Why am I recounting this whole scene detail by detail? Why have I just written all this out, pausing to remember as accurately as possible the vocabulary each person used, the precise tone of voice, the glances exchanged among the others sitting at the table? You were there, after all. You don’t need me to reconstruct the scene for you.
Perhaps I’m retelling it in order to understand something in it, something about its emotional undercurrents. Obviously Shayna is trying to get under Lyle’s skin by flouting her breaking of rules like that in front of company. But that’s nothing new. Or rather, I suppose it’s new in that it’s more dramatic, more in-your-face. Your family dynamic is more mysterious to me, of course, because I haven’t observed it often. Kurl, I honestly don’t know how to describe what I was feeling as your uncle talked about you like that. I kept trying to read the expression on your face—but as I’ve observed before, your expression is always perfectly, immaculately serene.
Yours truly,
Jonathan Hopkirk
Wednesday, October 14
Dear Little Jo,
So I found the part you were talking about in Walt’s book, about the butcherboys. It goes,
The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes, or sharpens his knife at the stall in the market,
I loiter enjoying his repartee and his shuffle and breakdown.
I wasn’t actually looking for it specifically. It just jumped out at me, and it was exactly like you said—right away I pictured that little jerkoff Dowell. It’s the way he walks I think. The way he shuffles along with his head down and his shoulders hunched.
Meanwhile there’s you. This morning I saw those gray felt things you were wearing over your shoes. They reminded me of baffles, these things you use on a roof along with insulation to stop heat transfer. So I thought about how all your Walt outfits operate kind of like baffles for you. A way of stopping school from leaking in and stopping you from leaking out. I looked up those shoe covers, so now I’m aware that what they’re actually called is spats.
I guess I never really explained about my uncle, did I? He married my mom three years after my dad died. I was thirteen. Sylvan had had his own place for a while by then, and Mark left for the army that spring right after graduation, so it was just her and me left with Uncle Viktor.
Shuffle and breakdown. Somehow it’s really hard to picture Walt the poet just hanging around the slaughterhouse listening to the butcherboy talk. I wonder how he gets away with it. I mean he never gets beat up or anything, does he? Nobody says, Why don’t you put down the goddamn poetry notebook and quit staring at us? I don’t know. Somehow Walt is immune to all these people. He just gets to enjoy everybody and everything in the world.
Sincerely,
AK