Mr. Splitfoot

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NAT’S DRESSED AS the guilty caretaker in a mystery for kids, the guy at the end who’s unmasked as the villain and you knew he was guilty the whole time. Then Nat moves and his body is golden wheat in a blue wind, disciplined and heroic as an oversaturated Western, an approximation of what America looked like when it was young. Not a villain at all.

The house is quiet, huge. There are dusty rugs, a chandelier of antlers and cobwebs overhead, throw blankets, and a case of books that’s sat untouched for so long, the covers have grown together. I’m nervous as a jackrabbit. “Ruth isn’t dead,” I tell him.

“How’d you get here?”

“We walked.”

“Who brought you? Who knew the way?”

To say it again is embarrassing. “Ruth brought me.”

He squints into my left temple. “Ruth isn’t dead?”

“No.”

“What the fuck?” He’s calm. “How?”

“How is she not dead?”

He fixes his gaze. “How’d you get here?”

“We walked from my mom’s.”

He points to my belly. “You walked?”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re not dead?” The absurdity of the question even makes Nat smile.

“What are you talking about?”

“Sorry.” He hides his hands in his pockets. “You grew up, Cora.”

I nod.

“You’re pregnant.”

“I am.”

“So she’s here and she’s not dead?” He sets his jaw with anger. “Where is she?” He slams into the kitchen, getting angrier each time he moves.

“She’s just out—”

“What did she tell you?” Nat turns back, postpones seeing her.

“—side. She didn’t tell me anything. She doesn’t talk. When was the last time you saw her?”

He thumbs his chin. “Last time I saw Ruth was here.” Nat grabs the back of his neck and ducks into it. “Right before she and her husband stole all our money and left me alone up here in the dead of winter.” Each of his words is hand-carved, sharp.

The muscles in my abdomen squeeze a moment before letting go. “She didn’t tell me that. She doesn’t talk.”

He leans on a windowsill, back to the water. He resets his face. “The morning we were supposed to leave, I woke up early because we had to shovel our way out of the snow. They were already gone.”

“Ruth has a husband?”

“Last time I saw her she did. I don’t know now. It’s been fourteen years.”

“Long time.”

“Yeah. A really long time. We’d taken care of each other since we were five years old, so I kept thinking she’ll come back. She has to come back, but she never did. Eventually I convinced myself that she must be dead.” Nat’s teeth are set like pointed sticks around a fort. Five thousand one hundred and seven days behind his molars. “Now you’re saying she’s not.”

“Well.” I’m getting less sure every minute. “Why else would she leave you here alone?”

Nat lowers his hand with a fast swat. Dust swims in sunlight. “Maybe she was mad. We used to play a game, talk to dead people. She found out I was faking it, and to her that meant everything was fake. There was no God, no magic, and we could have used some magic. Except we found a big box of money and that was magic. Everything hard about our childhood was about to quit. We were going to be OK. Then she and Mr. Bell disappeared with the money.”

“This money?” I jerk the cardboard box.

Nat looks from me to the box, from me to the box. He flips back the flaps and stares inside. Blocks of information get rearranged in his head until some of the blocks no longer fit. “Where’d you get this?” He drives his thumbs into his chin.

“In that old cottage. The one that’s falling down.” I point to the woods.

“Ruth’s. I never fixed it up because she never came back.”

“You never even looked for the money?”

“Why would I? If she wasn’t cutting me out of the cash, why else would she leave without me?”

Nat and I meet eyes. It doesn’t sound like something Ruth would do. Certain ideas creep in between us, a clock hand’s ticking forward. I interrupt the ideas by talking. “Well. She’s back now.”

“But how is she back?” Nat taps his forehead, banging an old engine to make it start.

I don’t have a good answer.

Nat sucks something, air, back into his mouth. “That first winter without her—” He’s not sure how to describe it. “It’s even lonely here when the trees have leaves and no snow blocks the road. Even with other people around.” He grabs his wrist. “She said we were sisters, even closer. So I waited a year. I waited the next year and the next.” He looks up. With his face like that, I can imagine the skull under his skin. “Eventually, I couldn’t be angry at her anymore. It was killing me. I came to think she was dead.”

“She’s not.” But the more times I tell him that, the less certain it seems. His logic follows better. He’s thought about it longer. “I mean, I think she’s not.”

“So she just left me?” He pushes his pointer and thumb through his eyebrows, ironing a wrinkled sheet.

“No.” I can’t believe that either. “Maybe she can explain.”

“I thought she didn’t talk.”

My body seizes again.

“Do you need anything? Some water? Tea?”

“That’d be good.”

“Come.” He pulls me off the couch with one hand. He smiles when he sees my belly upright. “Man,” he says. “Man, oh, man.”

The kitchen is enormous. Sliding brass cabinet latches, bead board, stained pine shelves. The kitchen’s a mess. There’s a heavy table covered with dishes and boxes of cold cereals. Juice containers, bean cans. Three sinks are filled with hardened dishes. Something’s happening inside my body.

Nat uses an arm to clear two spots at the table for us, sweeping silverware, an empty cracker box, and a round paper canister of salt aside.

“Not much of a housekeeper?”

He rinses two mugs at the sink. Steam from the tap surrounds him. “Not my house. I stay out in the woods.” He pulls a kettle off the floor. He finds tea bags in a tin canister, smells them, plops them into the mugs.

“Whose house is it?”

“Guy named Mardellion. I never met him.”

“What kind of name is that?”

“Crazy name, crazy guy from what I understand. He was a cult leader who wanted a massive meteor to land on this house.”

“Why?”

“Turn his followers back to stardust so they could fly off to outer space and he wouldn’t have to take care of them anymore.”

“What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been here a long time and he’s never shown up.” Nat pushes an empty box of rice onto the floor. “Neither did his meteor for that matter.” The kettle rattles over the flame. Nat shuts the burner down.

I fold my hands across the baby. “Why are you here?”

“How can I leave without her? What if she came back?”

I tilt my head.

“Didn’t she tell you anything?” He looks at me. “All right. All right. She doesn’t talk.” Nat pours the hot water, looks scalded. “I fixed up those old houses. I run a shelter for kids who age out.”

“Nice.” I think of El again. “That’s really nice.”

Nat rests elbows on the table. “Not always. Sometimes we’re hungry. Sometimes there’s fighting. Drugs. Not enough money. It’s hard to escape where we came from. Even all the way up here.” His eyes cross their sockets slowly, loaded tankers on a tight river. “Still it’s better than a lot of other options. I’m sure your mom’s told you.”

“Yes.”

“She did all right by you though, huh?”

“Yes. She did.”

One of the boxes of cereal on the table tips itself over and pours its contents onto the floor like punctuation, a short symphony of grain meeting linoleum. Nat looks at the mess. The tea tastes like metal. Dust motes continue to hang in the late sunlight. Nat picks dirt from under a bitten nail. “You’re here for me?”

“I think so.”

“I’m glad to see you.” He looks at me like no one ever told him not to stare. “What about you? What’s your life been so far?”

My mouth makes a nervous click because all the easy answers to Nat’s question read like an Internet search of my name and feel just as shallow: insurance adjuster, Daisy girl, honor student. I study the floor pattern, the grain of wood on the table. I think of other tables, other kitchens, and people who have sat across from me. “So far I’ve been a daughter. Not always a good one. And I’m a really good walker.”

“And soon a mom.”

“Yeah.”

“How’s El?”

“I need my mom,” I tell him. “In fact, I really need her. Do you have a phone?”

“I do but the reception’s horrible here. Sometimes it works up in the temple.”

“The temple?” My stomach grips. The tightness steals my breath.

“Yup. Come on.”

I follow Nat up a large center stair. It feels familiar, like following Ruth only now I’m on my way back to El. Velocity equals gravity at last. I had to gain some weight and distance before I could fall back to her. The upstairs hall is a long passage lined with closed doors and dark wood. My head itches with filth. My oily jeans and greasy socks are a carapace so worn, they’d hold their shape if I disrobed. They’d wait like a horse attending its rider, bucking and breathing, hoofing the ground. Good horse carried me so far. I grab the wall. The tightness passes through my middle again.

Nat turns to see if I’m all right. The shape of his shoulders, the cut of his uneven hair, applies more pressure on my lungs. I used to think Nat was so much older than me because we were kids. Now there’s barely any difference. “How old are you?” I ask.

“Thirty-one.”

“Funny a kid like me can catch up to you. I’m already twenty-five.”

Nat stares at my belly. “I’ve never seen anything like that. It’s weird.”

“It’s really weird.”

“Can I?” He extends a hand.

“Everybody else does.”

Nat steps up, puts his left hand on one side, his right hand on the other, making a closed circuit, a conduit for electricity so the baby can study its fingers by Nat’s light. “I didn’t think it would be so hard,” he says. Having stepped into a form, dirt basic and fiery, we stay that way. Two bodies, three, in a shape older than geometry and all this blood between us.

I knew there was going to be something big at the end.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he says.

The temple is white, huge, smooth, rounded, and I’ve never seen anything like it. We’re inside a tremendous egg. The ceiling soars high overhead. Below, tucked in a corner, is a sorry-looking command center: a small color television with coat hanger bunny ears and an ancient Coleco Adam Module #3 computer. “What is this place?”

Nat smiles. He tunes into his phone. “Let me see if I can get this to work.”

I haven’t seen a computer in a long time. Feels like running into an ex-boyfriend. I pull on the TV’s knob, some daytime talk show in the static. Its hum sounds like a hive of yellow jackets, like everything I lost on the road is swarming, trying to flow back into me — Lord, Single Premium Immediate Annuity 1035 Exchange Request Forms, anti-aging creams, a movie starring John Travolta I once watched in a friend’s basement rec room, the World Wide Web. I switch the set off quickly. I shift the mouse and am surprised when the old computer springs to life. A pale blue dot flashes, waiting. “This computer works.”

Nat nods. He holds the phone in front of his waist as one might a flashlight. He paces the temple, searching for a connection.

My stomach muscles grab the baby and squeeze with everything they’ve got. Pale blue dot. I’m having a baby. The cursor blinks onscreen. I close my eyes, but it doesn’t help. The computer’s cursor blinks all the time now, wherever I go. The contraction releases, but the cursor’s still waiting for me to ask something. What do you want to search for?

Nat’s looking for a signal.

What do you want to search for?

Nat curses the phone.

My stomach grips hard. I really want my mom. The cursor’s blink accelerates. Sweat forms on my brow. “Anything?” I ask Nat. I really want to find my mom. The contraction lets me go again.

“I can’t even get one bar.”

A portable record player, a high-design relic from the late ’60s, is perched on a small white dais. A record waits to be spun. I drop the needle to the first track on an amber-colored album, a golden record. Chuck Berry’s guitar, a switchblade, slices the air. Nat looks up and smiles. He closes the phone. “Never ever learned to read or write so well. Play the guitar. Ringing a bell. Go. Go. Go.” The music is tinny and blaring through the small speaker. “Ringing a bell.” Something inside me writhes. “Go, Johnny, go.” The Jerk, the Pony, the Watusi. I angle my fingers as if lightning is streaming from their tips. A sound escapes from deep inside, a moan.

“You OK?” He puts a hand on the small of my back and one under my arm.

A contraction that stops the world again, this pale blue dot. What do you want to search for? My mom. I hold still. The record continues to spin. And Ruth. Where’s Ruth? I look beyond the white ceiling wondering what did I hope for here at the end? Did I want the mystery solved? Or did I just want to know that the mystery has no end? And where, where, where is Ruth?