Morrow - The uninnocent : stories

THE UNINNOCENT

THE UNINNOCENT

STORIES

BRADFORD MORROW

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK

For Joyce Carol Oates

& Cara Schlesinger

CONTENTS

THE HOARDER

I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN a hoarder. When I was young, our family lived on the Outer Banks, where I swept up and down the shore filling my windbreaker pockets with seashells of every shape and size. Back in the privacy of my room I loved nothing better than to lay them out on my bed, arranging them by color or formwhelks and cockles here, clams and scallops therea beautiful mosaic of dead calcium. The complete skeleton of a horseshoe crab was my finest prize, as I remember. After we moved inland from the Atlantic, my obsession didnt change but the objects of my desire did. Having no money, I was restricted to things I found, so one year developed an extensive collection of Kentucky bird nests, and during the next, an array of bright Missouri butterflies preserved in several homemade display cases. Another year, my fathers itinerant work having taken us to the desert, I cultivated old pottery shards from the hot potreros. Sometimes my younger sister offered to assist with my quests, but I preferred shambling around on my own. Once in a while I did allow her to shadow me, if only because it was one more thing that annoyed our big brother, who never missed an opportunity to cut me down to size. Weird little bastard, Tom liked calling me. I didnt mind him saying so. I was a weird little bastard.

When first learning to read, I hoarded words just as I would shells, nests, butterflies. Like many an introvert, I went through a phase during which every waking hour was spent inside a library book. These I naturally collected, too, never paying my late dues, writing in a ragged notebook words that were used against Tom at opportune moments. He was seldom impressed when I told him he was a pachyderm anus or festering pustule, but that might have been because he didnt understand some of what came out of my mouth. Many times I hardly knew what I was saying. Still, the desired results were now and then achieved. When I called him some name that sounded nasty enougheunuchs tithe would run after me with fists flying and pin me down, demanding a definition, and Id refuse. Be it black eye or bloody nose, I always came away feeling Id gotten the upper hand.

Father wasnt a migrant laborer, as such, and all our moving had nothing to do with a field-worker following seasons or harvests. He lived by his wits, so he told us and so we kids believed. But wits or not, every year brought the ritual pulling up of stakes and clearing out. His explanations were always curt, brief like our residencies. He never failed to apologize, and I think he meant it when he told us that the next stop would be more permanent, that he was having a streak of bad luck bound to change for the better. Tom took these uprootings harder than I or my sister. He expressed his anger about being jerked around like circus animals, and complained that this was the old mans fault and we should band together in revolt. It was never clear just how we were supposed to mutiny, and of course we never did. Molly and I wondered privately, whispering together at night, if our family wouldnt be more settled had our mother still been around. But that road was a dead end even more than the one we seemed to be on already. Shed deserted our father and the rest of us and there was no bringing her back. We used to get cards at Christmas, but even that had stopped some years ago. We seldom mentioned her name now. What was the point?

Like the sun, we traveled westward across the country all the way to the coast, though more circuitously and with much dimmer prospects. Id made a practice of discarding my latest collection whenever we left one place for another, and not merely disposing of it, but destroying the stuff. Taking a hammer to my stash of petrified wood and bleached bones plucked off the flats near Mojave, after the word came down to start packing, was my own private way of saying good-bye. Molly always cried until I gave her a keepsake, a sparrow nest or slug of quartz crystal. And my dad took me aside to ask why I was undoing all my hard work, unaware of the sharp irony of his questionwho was he to talk? He told me that one day when I was grown up Id look back and regret not treasuring these souvenirs from my youth. But he never stopped me. He couldnt in fairness do that. These were my things and just as Id brought them together I had every right to junk them and set my sights on the new. Besides, demolishing my collections didnt mean I didnt treasure them in my own way.

We found ourselves in a small, pleasant, nondescript ocean-side town just south of the palm-lined promenades of Santa Barbara and the melodramatic Spanish villas of Montecito, where the Kennedys had spent their honeymoon a few years before. By this time I was old enough to find a job. Tom and I had both given up on school. Too many new faces, too many new curricula. Father couldnt object to his eldest son dropping out of high school, since he himself had done the same. As for me, having turned fifteen, Id more or less educated myself anyway. It was a testament to Mollys resilient nature that she was never fazed entering all those unknown classrooms across this great land of ours. My responsibility was to make sure she got to summer school on time and pick her up at days end, and so I did. This commitment I gladly undertook, since I always liked Molly, and she didnt get in the way of my schedule at the miniature golf course where I was newly employed.

Just as California would mark a deviation in my fathers gypsy routine, it would be the great divide for me. Whether I knew it at the time is beside the point. I doubt I did. Tom noticed something different had dawned in me, a new confidence, and while he continued to taunt me, my responses became unpredictable. He might smirk, Miniature golf now theres a promising career, baby, but rather than object I would cross my arms, smile, and agree, Just my speed, baby. When we did fight, our battles were higher pitched and more physical, and as often as not, he was the one who got the tooth knocked loose, the lip opened, the kidney punched. Molly gave up trying to be peacemaker and lived more and more in her own world. It was as if we moved into individual mental compartments, like different collectibles in separate cabinets. I couldnt even say for sure what kind of work my father did anymore, though it involved a commute over the mountains to a place called Ojai, which resulted in our seeing less of him than ever. The sun had turned him brown, so his work must have been outside. Probably a construction jobso much for his touted wits. Tom, on the other hand, remained as white as abalone, working in a convenience store. And Molly with her sweet round face covered in freckles and ringed by wildly wavy red hair, the birthright of her maternal Irish ancestry, marched forward with patience and hope that would better befit a daughter of the king of Uz than of a carpenter of Ojaiwhich our dear brother had by then, with all the cleverness he could muster, dubbed Oh Low.

The change was gradual but irrevocable, and would be difficult if not impossible to describe in abstract terms. To suggest that my compulsion to hoard shifted from objects to essences, from the external worlds castoffs to the stuff of spirits, wouldnt be quite right. It might even be false, since what began to arise within me during those long slow days and evenings at work had a manifest concreteness to it. Whether my discovery of glances, fragrances, gestures, voices, the various flavors of nascent sexuality, the potential for beautiful violence that hovers behind those qualities came as the result of my new life at Bayside Park or whether it would have happened no matter where I lived and breathed at that moment, I couldnt say. I do know that Baysidethat perfect world of fantastical architecture and linked greens and strict ruleswas where I came awake, felt more alive, as they say, than ever before.