Daddys Caliban | Page 6

the door to Mommy and Daddy's room, I put my hand up. "Wait here. I'll get the keys."
"I'm coming, butt crack," Cameron hissed, and pushed me into Mommy and Daddy's room ahead of him.
Their bed was almost as high as my chest, with a quilt made from a lot of strange-colored old scraps. It looked like autumn leaves to me sometimes, and sometimes like bloodstains from a secret murder. Two dressers, a lamp made from an old woman's shoe, and a little shelf with a few books. Plus more of Mommy's weird things.
There was an oval mirror and two pictures on the wall. One picture showed a desperate woman in a rowboat, a tapestry trailing into the water over the side. I chose to take that as a sign that we were doing the right thing in stealing Caliban's rowboat.
Borrowing, I corrected myself. We'd put it back when we were though.
The other picture showed a battle, men on horses with long spears and banners flying, flowing over a wall to meet an army with guns and cannon. We were losing. Even though it was only done in shades of gray, by someone who wasn't an expert hand with a pencil, that picture seemed to be a glimpse of a real moment in time.
Was that how Daddy's spear had broken?
It caught Cameron's eye, too, and he stopped to stare. I slipped open the closet door while he was looking at the wall and fished for the catch to the trapdoor. I didn't really want Cameron to know about Daddy's closet of glory -- bad enough that my almost-brother was upstairs in the first place.
Not bad with me, I meant, but bad with Mommy and Daddy. If Cameron was okay, he wouldn't have been living in the basement.
I stopped, one hand brushing the edge of the opening above me. I'd never thought of it that way before. When I was little, I figured everybody had a brother in the basement. Later on, it was just the way things were.
Why did he live down there? Like a big rat or something.
Then I hopped up to grip the edge with one hand and reached around for the keys with the other. The effort made the muscles of my arm shiver.
"What you got up there, Henry?" Cameron asked. He startled me and I yelped, dropping to the ground to crush one of Mommy's hatboxes. The keys came with me, but there was a cracking sound above.
"Bones of god," I cursed -- something I almost never did. Cameron was the privy mouth of the two of us.
He jumped up and chinned himself into the closet of glory.
"Get out of there," I almost shouted, tears of frustration standing in my eyes. There was no way I could hide that I'd been in the closet. Now I'd have to think of a really good story to explain why, and I was afraid I couldn't.
Cameron leaned over the opening to look down at me. His eyes and teeth seemed to gleam in the shadows above, which made him a monster version of me. "There's some cool crap up here. How come you never told me about this?"
"Because Daddy would kill us both and tan our hides for seat leather. We're already in deep doo-doo. Get back down here before you make it worse."
He stuck his tongue out at me, then dropped in a cloud of attic grime and his own special burnt stink of coal dust.
The closet was an unholy mess.
"We'd better clean up here," I said.
"Rowboat!" Cameron shouted, snatching Daddy's work keys out of my hand and sprinting for the front door.
It took me a moment to figure out that Cameron with the keys was worse trouble than the mess we'd already made, then I was after him.
*
Midsummer Avenue was the main street on the west side of town, where we lived tucked up against the bluff. It petered out south of Mabton to a gravel lane among orchards of hazelnuts, but in front of our house it was wide enough for mill busses, automobiles and horse carts to all pass each other at once. To the north it ran through downtown, where it acquired a double row of guardian cherry trees, then into the mill district before it ended at the gates of Caliban Products.
When he was feeling proud of his work Daddy liked to say the Puca family needed no other street. If Mommy was around, she would smile at him and remind him that the church was on Oak Street, and didn't we need that, and that his horrible little tavern was on Coal Street, and he seemed to need that as well against all common sense.
Right then Midsummer Avenue was the Puca family racecourse. Cameron was ahead of me by fifty feet or more.