The Squirrel House
by CHARLES TIMM
It started with Mom’s tears as my brother and I drew near to her. There she sat in her faithful kitchen chair, looking at her lap. And after she told us, the morning sunshine went right on turning everything a glorious yellow, whether it was yellow or not, like we still had no divorce in our family.
All that afternoon the house was an astonishing silence of three people who lived alone. My mother mumbled on, half inside the refrigerator, with a strange, unhinged bravery. My brother, faintly twitching, flung himself outside. And I dug out the big books from the cabinet in the living room and tried, again, to care about the Civil War.
I clanked and wobbled the china cabinet door. I walked fast enough through the house to feel a breeze on my face. I looked for my father.
On the cellar shelves, his trophies flashed like the walls of a gold mine. His books gently waited, thin with dust as white as a wise man’s beard. His laundry lay in piles that I lifted, hoping that he might be hiding there. I shifted the outgrown toys consigned to storage by childhood ambivalence, cluttered in cardboard boxes like sculptures of crashes.
Out in the garage, his glass jars of sorted hardware stood as neat as a display in a new store. I found my brother fixing the brakes of his own brand-new bicycle. But no Dad. Only gone, only no more.
That night, I snuck into the golden incandescence and shadows of my parents’ bedroom, pausing on the creaks, my mother sleeping with muttered prayers. A pair of Dad’s blue jeans hung where he’d left them. I took up the sleeve of a shirt of his and shook his manly hand, which I imagined I could see and feel below the cuff.
In my own room, I lay down on moonlight in the comradeship of my sheets and wished that Dad would come again and make me close the windows and the drapes. I couldn’t sleep—until I remembered that the next day was a Saturday. I would ride my bike around the neighborhood and find my father.
***
The next morning, after breakfast, I left my mom talking in blubbery whispers and my little brother making repairs to other things that needed none, and boarded my own steel stallion, yellow with victory, to pedal a hummy buzz of tires into the asphalt streets. I pedaled hard by gray-screen doors, white-spotted with curious eyes. I pounded screams out of the sprocket, up the hill to the reward of level street, where the bike almost pedaled itself and the flowing air that cooled my sweat almost lifted me into flight. But more, I watched for my dad. I roamed to the reach of my old newspaper route, where he sometimes drove me when it rained, and where I knew I’d find him now, that happy hoaxer, with another lecture for me.
After three times around the route, I decided it was time for a visit home, where I found women on our block bringing my mother soup and offers to clean. Their husbands, clenching manly smiles, shot at me with index fingers loaded with courage. And there was Mom, as pale as concrete with two red, wet, enduring eyes, telling me that I had homework, telling me that I might have to let go the search.
Boldly spoken, woman, I thought. But battle’s for a man. How many times was I going to look for him? How many stars were in the sky?
Pedaling off again, I saw signs of my father everywhere I rode. He was the blowing sheet of paper stopped at a curb, the rabbit running its cottontail away. When my bike slipped, and I tumbled almost enough to break a leg, I forgave like love itself and wiped off, practicing what I’d say when we laughed, going home together.
***
It was during that day’s fourth time around the route that the streets began to look to me like aisles of a supermarket, and I remembered long ago being lost in one. Back and forth I’d walked, on either side of the toy aisle, searching for my mom, panicking a little more with each fruitless pass, till a notion lit up my brain, and I took in a couple more aisles. On the next pass, I went farther still, then farther still, till there she was, last aisle, at the back. And, so, I widened my search for my father now.
I pedaled fast, sizzling around the corner and onto the long street, straight with trees, heading toward the park, when a sight blew me back. Bullies perched like vultures on bicycles by the road.
Stunned by his luck was their leader. A denser head had rarely been obeyed. Black-hair oily and rodent-arm skinny in a brown T-shirt, he scurried them to his bright idea—abusing me—the pack of them rising with rushed purpose to their feet and bicycles.
As he raced his filthies toward me, my terror found one foot, banging down on the pedal, a fiasco of pain reaching to my hip. Feeling helpless to do more, I braced myself in that perfect hiding place called plain sight, awaiting punishment for being good, when, somehow, I relaxed enough to turn my bicycle around and ride for my life. And it was only when I’d put a couple of trembling corners between myself and them that I saw how I, like a fool, was leading them home. So, I rolled up onto the nearest sidewalk, squeezed my hand brakes hard, and screeched to a stop.
The Squirrel House loomed before me.
***
From the outside, I had always known The Squirrel House. Falling down for a ton of years, it was the neighborhood's one overgrown squalor. Hiding in the secretive shadows of its tall, spreading trees, it stayed dressed in its generations of twigs and clumps of many winters’ leaves fused by damp decay atop the cracked and weathered asphalt shingles of its roof. High above, it swayed a windy scratch of branches as from a gentle, puzzling nightmare where chores had, long ago, died. Peering into the center of the gloom, in a look for dwellers, my eyes, like always, fell to the porch, where bent boards drooped delinquent, slighted, dry, and gray, on their way to nature’s reclaiming.
My bike felt heavier, now, than a giant anvil bolted to the Earth. I had to keep home a secret. Yet I heard the bullies coming. And it was then that I noticed a dark vapor watching me from the porch.
In my head, I yelled at myself, “Ride away!” But only my thigh could obey, banging the handlebar, rolling the bike forward, stumbling me onto the property, a visitor.
“You don’t have to keep riding by,” the vapor said, and, to my surprise, without a growl. No grin of cracked and missing teeth. When it floated into view at the front edge of the porch, it was a gangly girl of straight black hair and ill-white skin. But she’d misunderstood completely. Like I'd ever be interested in her. And I was about to tell her so, when a woman moved into view beside her from behind the thick, motley wall of the porch’s guardian bushes.
“Come and have some cookies,” the woman said to me, in a caring voice like any other neighborhood mother. She sure looked different from the other mothers, though, her short, jelly-roundness bending over under a loose dress, her black and gray hair hanging like long-winded sentences of protest from the hippie days.
The bullies were clanking, so close and loud. But these two neighbors were taking away my need to tell that embarrassing truth. So, I got off my bike and walked it towards the house.
I only said, “Hi,” as I neared the porch, laying down my bike to sit on the top step as quickly as I could without rudely rushing.
The woman, pointing with one of her fingernails, yellow like dirty, ocean froth, told the girl she called something like Janty to join me. But I didn’t bother to ask about the name, as that was when the bullies pulled up short, two riding past and having to turn around, as shocked as anyone in the neighborhood would be to find living souls at this house.
Keeping my seat, I tensed up a little and readied for them to peacock in across the tangled lawn, but they never left their bikes. The spooky house, pale Janty, and her greasy mother made them ride back around the corner in a clear cloud of shouted alternative schemes.
Watching them go, I breathed a sigh of relief, and I stood up, heading for home, when I noticed that the woman had disappeared. I thought it must have been in past the screen door and the solid one behind it, though they both looked sealed for years. Thrown off balance, I sat back down on the top step of the porch, and Janty sat beside me.
***
From that top step, the neighborhood looked both different and the same, and I felt rather proud of my brave, new view. I watched for my father, who might drive by, and I cautiously looked around me.
About the porch there climbed an impossible thickness of bushes. A deep-green lushness crawling in everywhere, like a sort of malevolent Eden gaining on me.
Like a dim delinquent, I pressed one sneaker, hard then harder, against a chalky porch column, testing the powdery timber, until I realized that I might collapse the house, and I bent back my foot in slow, deliberate penance.
I sat up straight and turned one eye, dreading the sight of the murder of crows and hive of bees living in creepy mutual sympathy that I feared I’d find stirring in review of my tender neck. Only dry, gray, wooden porch beams rested overhead. But when my relieved gaze fell back upon the girl, Janty, I found that a pair of cookies had come to rest between the two of us on an old ceramic saucer of artichoke-green.
I recognized the cookies as the brand my widowed grandmother served—the cheap, store brand that came lined up like little blonde infantry in a flimsy plastic tray. Lined up like my dad’s great, flawless jars of hardware.
The girl raised the saucer, and I politely took one cookie, crunched the fake super-sweet, and said, through parted, crumb-spilling lips, like a bad ventriloquist, “Delicious!”
Somewhere, I’d read that “nutrition,” in Latin, meant breastfeeding. My eyes remembered and, all by themselves, they came to rest on the front of the girl’s T-shirt, searching the dark-red cotton for shapes. Startled, I got them up off of there, but like two balls in a pocket tilt ball puzzle, they dropped with magnetic precision into the holes of the girl’s noticing eyes.
Thinking I’d better just watch the street, I scanned its lifelessness. Where could my father be? Might he have found another house? There would be a second one for us now. Maybe one like this one.
The thought made me stand up again, about to suggest a walk around back, when Janty, lost in staring at some grievous vision on the lawn, said, “I never go back there.” But she stood up, too, and led the way.
***
We walked around to the right, where the bushiest bushes were like never-trimmed Afros grown over a fairy-tale gate of dark planks. The rusty, iron latch looked heavy enough to break bone. It gave Janty’s tiny hands a little trouble. But she opened it, and we went in deeper.
The grass of the backyard was folded-over long, bordered by the peeling house and a mismatch of towering shrubs and trees that a spark would have burst into holocaust. Craftily perched somewhere above, a gloating crow cawed. A frenzied, feathery splash in a birdbath made me think of contagious disease. And from someplace in the bushes there came a low, seething hum. The hive that I’d expected to find out front was here. Off the back of the house’s other end leaned an old screened porch, too dim inside to see its objects. But my father was nowhere there, as far as I was from home.
Above the privacy of that macabre yard, the air blew in sweet, windy terror. Janty stood so close beside me then that, looking below the faded, peeling letters of her shirt, I could see a darker-burgundy spot of girl-sweat like something holy.
I wanted to put my arm around her, but I wondered if she’d shriek. Those two sad, brown eyes of hers, squinty and moist from the glare, were looking up at me, now, searching for something. But would they let me into the house?
Janty seemed, again, to know what I was thinking. For a moment, her eyes went to another long-faced thought, but then she stepped away. And though I stayed to scan the yard for but a moment more, I turned to find her already trying to open the back door.
I coolly followed, noticing the concrete patio, mossy and mottled like gravestone worn of dates, until the sounds of dark, nocturnal things flapping by behind me made me hurry. But the back door was locked.
***
Walking along the street-side of the house again, Janty never even gave the front door a glance. She led us to the garage. Bending over, she pulled up on the handle, and a junk-band of hardware reluctantly clanked and wobbled, as each row of dirty, white door panels bent back before her tiny will.
The air inside the garage felt as chilly as a cave and smelled as oily as a mechanic’s old rag. The frame of a motorcycle—a real hippie chopper—leaned against one wall. On the floor in a corner lay a damp paper sack, near in half. The “C” of CEMENT almost missing, I first read EXCREMENT.
Either Janty said, “Needs cleaning,” or I imagined it, but my eyes went to the brooms, most of them leaning together against one wall, brooms that seemed to hiss at me like wind through which they’d lately flown, and I helplessly picked one up and was looking around for where to start when my brother steered his bicycle onto the cracks and chunks of Janty’s asphalt driveway.
“Mom’s in bed,” he said to me. “You have to come.”
Looking down, I bounced the broom’s bristles in the floor’s oily cracks. Then, I looked for Janty—somehow already at the door into the house. She’d opened it. And though she was again lost in a vision, she swung the door back and forth, its cries for lubing telling me that she was waiting.
“In a while,” I told my brother. Then I walked toward Janty’s lost, brown eyes.
***
The shyest little daylight tiptoed in across the threshold, and I stepped inside wondering if there was even a floor. The door clicked shut behind me in a final way, plunging the grayness into pitch blackness chillier by many degrees. And I could feel the acrid odor of many cats.
I was about to call to Janty, when I heard stairs being climbed. And in the light that appeared at their head, I saw her stepping into a kitchen.
With what little light there now was, I could see my own breath, and that I stood on the hard, dirt floor of a cellar with a single sagging beam of wood held up by a pipe on which the whole house counted for support. In a corner, lay a pile of stones like a cowboy’s grave. It was old. It could not be my father’s. I climbed the stairs.
In the kitchen, much of the wallpaper had been ripped away in shapes like uneven fangs. A gerbil slept in a cage. The spines of a window-sill cactus pointed stiffly like the finger nails of Janty’s mother. A layer of mud skinned the window.
Janty led me into the living room, where piles of twisted laundry crawled with cats. The one photograph might have been of her father. It wasn’t of mine.
From another room came the sucking sound of a door being opened, and Janty’s mother soon returned, walking in her house dress to a sloshy sound like wavelets on the gravel of a beach.
Greeting me with a face now almost expressionless, she said, “Hello,” turned to Janty, folded her lowered fingers, and schooled her daughter, “Take him to your room.”
Janty huffed but went, carrying in her hand a near-empty package of the cookies, which I did not remember her picking up.
The upstairs bore the silence of stuffy rooms. An old, flowered bedsheet covered most of the bathroom window. Nothing of Janty reflected in the mirror that we passed. Her mother's bedroom door was a blanket passing cloudy daylight through its worn thinness. Outside of Janty’s room sat a pair of small shoes, black and shriveled like a witch’s.
“Just a second,” Janty said, going in and closing the door most of the way.
By now almost overpowered by the smell of the cats, I listened to rumbling in a closet, until the bedroom door swung open and Janty, a silhouette before the interrogating light of one bare bulb, stepped back to let me in before closing the door behind me.
***
In that sad cell, I stood aghast. The plaster walls were a yellower, sicker shade of avocado green, troweled to a nauseating sea. Messy crayon marks, posters of unknown female rock-and-rollers, and blood-like sauce that had dried sliding downward were helping to keep it hidden. But one whole section had broken away in a continental shape, its moldy, mortary layers framing a sagging stack of lathe that time and clammy draft had turned to every earth-tone, cream to gray. Off to the right, a one-door cabinet, mustard yellow, nearly reached the ceiling. And something fuzzy—a cat, dead or stuffed—lay on the wooden floor sunken in spots from years of walking and heavy decor.
Shoved against the far wall was a boy’s wooden bed, the bedding still gymnastic with girlish waking. And it was over this that Janty threw a chenille spread and dropped onto it with such out-of-school emancipation that my blood jumped. She sat, Indian style, her feet, bare and filthy, bottoms black.
There was no chair, and as Janty had seated herself toward the left, nearer the headboard, I felt that the rest of the bed was for me. Fingers of cold air climbed my back and seemed to push me in that direction.
“Do you have a stereo?” I asked, walking forward.
Janty gave her head a vague shake, then opened the drawer of a boy’s nightstand, her dipped hand lifting out a black-and-purple notebook. Mostly black.
“What’s that?” I asked, as I sat on the bed, my feet on the floor, Janty’s dirty toes falling against my leg.
“Song lyrics,” she said, “And poems.”
Flipping pages, she looked at me sideways, smiling, now, from a place of perverse talent, like I was, at last, in danger.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
As my heart raced and pounded with fear, I dropped my folded fingers into my lap, nodded an uneven yes, and listened like an obedient schoolboy as Janty read.
Her voice was low and graveled, yet as bright as the sunny snow of March. I imagined the band of babies that she might one day have. To have and to hold. In sickness and in hell. And I listened, as the bitterest words flew from her lips like bloodied bats. She spoke of suicide and hidden secrets and cold bodies and her many dark hours. And her penmanship! I glimpsed it, leaning closer, trying to smell her hair. No curling, feminine hieroglyphs and fun punctuation in pretty shades, but black scratch, varicose-jagged, like the backs of her mother's legs, like someone who needed extra help in school.
***
When she finished, she stared once more at the floor. This must have been a habit with her, to see the uselessness that some part of her believed. Then a brighter thought moved her, and she picked up a pair of scissors that couldn’t have been there before. She positioned them awkwardly, like she’d never used scissors, then frantically, like she hated them. And I watched, helplessly, feeling an injury coming.
When she finally scratched a knuckle, I took her poor, punished hand, all reddened white and soft and gentle, and sucked at the salty wound. I glided my fingertips up her arm. Then, I moved my hand up one of her legs, a thing I’d never done to any girl before, and, yet, I remembered it like one of my earliest happy memories.
Through this, Janty barely moved. Once, she glanced at my stomach. And I knew that I had to rescue her, to let her know that it didn’t have to be like this, that she could come to my house, where everything smelled lemony and was, usually, very happy.
I put one arm under her knees, the other behind her back, and began to lift her onto my lap. But she only pulled away with a mute shriek. And I knew that I’d made a mistake.
“Sorry,” I said. Then, I tried to repair the friendship. “From outside, I was afraid of this house,” I told her. “But now I'm glad I'm coming here. I think your mother likes me, too.”
Slowly, like a reptile, Janty turned her head toward mine. “Would you do me a favor . . . and open my closet?” she said.
A shrill scream went off deep within my skull. I knew that Janty and her mother had put my father into that closet. I stood up from the bed and walked with careful, deliberate steps, the mustard-yellow door growing larger as I went.
More than once, I looked back at Janty, making sure that she wasn’t—I don’t know—hanging upside down from the ceiling. But it was clear that apparition Janty was gone. Only true Janty remained—her wickedly hypnotic smile persuasively nudging me along, until I stood alone at the closet door, and, with one hand, opened it . . . slowly.
To the sounds of its own hollow plastic sliding across wood, a female mannequin fell hard against me. Headless, nude but for pearls, it struck my face and chest in mean pokes and bangs. My arms went up in a flurry of spastic blocks and swings. And I heard Janty give out with a little laugh.
I propped the mannequin back up in the closet, half-expecting its head from the darkness, and turned to face my saboteur, cold victory in her eyes, her lashes lashing at me from above a satisfied smile.
The mannequin slid once more, turning me toward it and raising my arms. But it stopped short, and I regarded a visible corner of window in the wall behind the cabinet. On the sill below the lower pane of crusted glass, two flies lay on their backs, their legs dry with death, looking, I realized, like Janty and her mother, who’d lost faith in their lives, and whose whole house had gone along. I knew that my house was nothing like this. Sure, things were bad. We’d have to get used to Dad being gone. But we would clean and keep the place up. We had tomorrow.
***
A flash of something caught my eye. Beyond the glass, on the street below, my brother was pedaling by, looking for me or for our dad, but heading toward the bullies.
I whispered out, “No!”
Janty asked, “What?”
And to my great relief, she sounded human—and annoyed.
I turned decisively from the window. I dashed to the door and flung it open, calling “Bye, Janty—if that’s your name,” and ran down the stairs and out what I thought was the front door. It was a different door altogether, one I’d missed among the bushes. But my bike was there, laid over, camouflaged by the foliage.
Running alongside, I rolled the bike to the sidewalk, climbed on, and pedaled like a superhero after my little brother. I took the turn at the corner as though it sucked me into a funnel. I fancied a bronze shield on my back against whatever supernatural pursuit Janty might be giving. And I pounded the pedals, only slowing up alongside my brother.
Seeing my steady, cozy smile, he braked under the lush leaves, a nauseous flush abloom in his cheeks, his bangs hanging damp.
“Everyone is leaving,” he said, “and so am I.”
“Dad’s not coming home,” I told him. “It’s us, now. You, me, and Mom.”
For a moment, he looked toward where he’d been headed and said, “What are we going to do?”
I turned my bike around and waited for him to do the same.
Then, as brothers mouthing mottoes, we rode the side-by-side of motorcycle cops—back out of the funnel, past Janty’s empty porch and whatever eyes were spying on us through its mud-glazed windows, around the corner, and slowly down the hill toward home.
That strange silence of some overcast afternoons encircled our nervous courage. A few cawing crows of a menacing murder—including, perhaps, the one from Janty’s yard—landed, one by one, along the electrical wires overhead, the last claws of Janty clawing me.
But here, my brother and I came to talk like we rode—with easy, meandering purpose. We spoke of chores—the outside ones we’d have to do, now, to help out Mom, and which suddenly seemed more grown-up than grunt work. We pledged to never run away again but to stay and help each other out. And I felt like I did when we were little—knowing what really matters, more alike, and closer. So close that we’d almost reached home before we noticed.
“Look,” my brother said.
At the foot of our porch stood Mom and Dad, in a hug as long as a lifetime. Her cheek slept against his chest. His cheek lay atop her head.
We dropped our bikes and added ourselves.