After Eli (4 page)

I
didn’t meet Isabelle first though. First I met the twins.

There aren’t any twins in my Book of the Dead. The closest I’ve got are the two little Princes in the Tower, who were smothered to death when they were just kids by order of their wicked uncle, King Richard III. Their skeletons were found two hundred years later, stuffed under a staircase in the Tower of London.

On the other hand, after spending fifteen minutes or so with the twins, you start thinking maybe King Richard had a point. I saw a picture of those princes once in some book, looking pretty harmless, with long golden curls and these little black velvet outfits. But looks can be deceptive. Maybe the little princes were real pains in the ass too.

Isabelle’s family moved here just before school got out, sometime at the beginning of June. Her parents had taken a summer’s lease on the old Sowers house, because Isabelle’s father, who teaches history at some college, wanted a relaxing atmosphere in which to write a monograph about Oliver Cromwell and his pivotal role in the English Civil War, and Isabelle’s mother, who is an artist, wanted to experience the rural countryside and paint interpretive pictures of fields and cows.

My dad said they’d been taken for a ride, and that if Harry Sowers weren’t as tight as a duck’s ass, he’d have bulldozed that damn place ten years ago and built some condos on top of the rubble and this time put in some insulation and modern plumbing. But I was just as glad he hadn’t, because I always thought the old Sowers place was cool.

The Sowers house is the oldest house on our road. It’s big and gray, with a porch with pillars all across the front and a funny little cupola up on top and a lot of huge tall windows with little panes of thick old wavy glass and about a million rooms. At the end of the driveway, there’s a pair of stone gateposts where some past Sowers was thinking of putting something impressive in the way of statues, but whoever it was went broke before he did.

The Sowerses used to be rich way back when, but they lost all their money in 1929, when the stock market crashed and started the Great Depression. So the lions or griffins or Greek goddesses or whatever never got put on the gateposts, and ever since then, the house has been going downhill. Grandma O’Brian, my mother’s mother, said that
her
mother remembered when there were dances and banquets at the Sowers house, and there used to be a French cook and maids in little ruffled aprons and caps and a chauffeur in a uniform with gold buttons and a cap with gold braid.

By the time Isabelle and her family moved in, though, the yard was nothing but hay, and there were bats in the attic, and a lot of the wallpaper was brown with damp and peeling off the walls. But Isabelle didn’t care. She liked the crown molding in the old Sowers dining room, and the claw-foot bathtubs, and the parlor with the gold peacocks on the walls.

The first I knew anybody was living there was when I was riding my bike past the house like I always did, and there were these two little kids running around in the hay that used to be a lawn with swords. Not real swords, but they looked pretty good for fakes. They had cross-shaped hilts trimmed with gold paint, and some kind of padded blades that were wrapped with duct tape.

“Have at thee, miscreant!” one of the kids screeched, lunging and slashing down a lot of hay. “Lay down thy arms and kneel! Know me for thy rightful lord!”

“No
way
!” the other one screeched back. “
I
am the rightful lord! Kneel down your stupid self! Or die!”

Then they both screamed “AARGH!” and started whacking each other.

So I stopped pedaling because in this neighborhood a hayfield sword battle with possible death involved is not something that you see every day.

They whacked each other back and forth for a while, yelling stuff like “Vile knave!” and “Cowardly churl!” and “Poltroon!” and then the first one turned and caught sight of me, and pointed a sword, and yelled “Hold! An enemy spy!”

Which gave the second one a chance to lay a pretty impressive whack across his back.

“OW! Lay off, Journey!” he said. “I said ‘Hold!’ Didn’t you hear me say ‘Hold’?”

“No,” the second one said.

“Well, I did,” the first one said, rubbing his back.

Then they both came up to the edge of the road, and I figured right then that they were twins because they looked almost exactly alike. They both had the same short dark hair, though the girl’s was a little longer, and the same pointy chins and the same blue eyes with little flecks of gray and the same hard evil stare. The girl was wearing a Hello Kitty outfit that didn’t go very well with the sword. The boy was wearing a T-shirt that said
MWAHAHA!

The boy leveled his sword and pointed it at my chest.

“Cavalier or Roundhead?” he said.

“Oh, come on, Jasper,” the girl said disgustedly. “Roundhead. Look at his hair. And his pants.”

We all looked at my pants. As far as I could see, they were pretty much like everybody else’s pants. Except Walter’s, which are always too short due to his abnormal height and his tendency to wear his belt up around his chest.

“What’s wrong with my pants?” I said.

“They’re Roundhead pants,” the girl said, staring at a point embarrassingly below my belt buckle.

“They’re Levi’s,” I said. The staring was making me nervous. But when I looked, nothing was unzipped.

“It’s just a game we play about people,” the boy explained. “We decide what kind of dinosaurs they’d be if they were dinosaurs or what kind of dog they’d be if they were dogs or what side they’d fight on in different wars. Like would they be Yankees or Confederates.”

He gave the girl an accusing look.

“If Journey was a dinosaur, she’d be a velociraptor. You can tell by how she scorns fair play.”

“I didn’t hear you say ‘Hold,’” the girl said.

Journey.
What kind of a name is that?
I thought. Like naming your kid Trip. Or GPS.

“If
Jasper
was a dinosaur, he’d be a stegosaurus,” Journey said. “It had a brain the size of a Ping-Pong ball.”

“What’s a Cavalier?” I said hastily.

“The Cavaliers fought for the king in the English Civil War,” Journey said. “They wore plumes in their hats and gave parties.”

The twins, even though they were only nine, knew a lot about the English Civil War due to their father, the professor, and his monograph about Oliver Cromwell, who won it. Isabelle told me later that the English Civil War was the world’s most tedious topic of dinner conversation, but was good for the figure since after twenty minutes on the political implications of the Long Parliament, you’d do anything to get away from the table, even give up banana cream pie for dessert.

“The Roundheads fought with Oliver Cromwell against the king,” Jasper said. “They were Puritans.”

“The Roundheads had stupid haircuts and never had any fun,” Journey said. “
Jasper
would have been a Roundhead.”

“The Cavaliers all ended up exiled in France or with their heads chopped off,” Jasper said. “Have you ever been to France?”

“No,” I said.

“Je parle français,”
Journey said. “That means ‘I speak French’ in French. I have an unusual aptitude for languages.”

“No, you don’t,” Jasper said.

“So you’d be a Roundhead,” Journey continued, still disturbingly eyeing my pants, “because your hair is short and you have plain clothes and stuff. If you were a Cavalier, you’d be fancier. Like you’d have an earring.”

She gave Jasper a dirty look and whacked some hay viciously with her sword.

“And I do so speak French.”

“If Journey was a mechanical device,” Jasper said, “she’d be a Kalashnikov automatic rifle.”

He glared at Journey.

“And you don’t.”

These kids should be in an institution,
I thought. The kind with padded walls where they don’t let you use anything but plastic knives and forks.

“We play Cavaliers and Roundheads all the time,” Journey said. “Except when we’re doing the Crusaders and the Saracens or Attila the Hun and the barbarian hordes. When we do the Crusaders, Jasper is always Richard the Lionheart. He doesn’t like being a Saracen because then he has to have a harem full of wives. Would you want to have a harem full of wives?”

“No,” I said feelingly. I remembered what Peter Reilly went through with his first five serious girlfriends.

“Nobody would,” Jasper said to Journey. “I told you.”

“If Jasper was a blanket,” Journey said, “he would be a cold wet blanket.”

“So where did you move here from?” I said.

“Jasper says he is a member of an alien race,” Journey said. “He is from a galaxy far far away and is only here observing this planet until the mother ship comes to take him home.”

It made me nervous how much sense that made to me.

“But Isabelle says that’s crap,” Journey said cheerfully.

Which was the first time I heard Isabelle’s name.

I said, “Who’s Isabelle?”

H
ere’s something Isadora Duncan once said: “Don’t let them tame you.”

Isadora was a dancer, but she hated classical ballet. Instead she invented modern dance, which involved barefoot people wearing togas and pretending to be the wind. When she wasn’t wearing her toga, she wore long flowing silk scarves.

She was wearing one of those scarves in 1927 when she leaped into a car, made a grand gesture, and cried, “Good-bye, my friends, I am off to glory!” When the car started up, the scarf somehow got tangled up in the wheel, yanked tight, and broke her neck.

I could see Isabelle dying like that. Wild and beautiful and kind of crazy, but untamed. And making a grand gesture. That’s something Isabelle would do.

By the time I met Isabelle, it was the second week in June and school was just out for the summer. The lilacs had come and gone by then, the blackflies had come and stayed, and the temperature had gone so fast from cool to hot that Corrigan’s Hardware Store had to scramble, setting out window screens and ice-cube trays and fans.

On the last day of school we all got rowdy on the back seat of the bus on the way home, yelling and laughing and shoving each other around. Partly it was because it was just a great day outside and there was a whole summer in front of us, and partly, at least in my case, it was because I knew that for two whole months now I wouldn’t have to worry about my untapped potential and my crappy grades and how disgusted my dad was going to be when I got like a 10 on the PSAT. So we were whooping and hollering like idiots, and punching each other in the arm, especially Peter Reilly with his Bowflex biceps.

When Walter got off the bus at Cemetery Hill Road, we yanked the window down and started throwing Ryan Baker’s gourmet jelly beans at him, pinging them off his shoulders and the back of his head, the ones with flavors nobody liked, like mango and grape jelly. Walter didn’t even look up, just hunched over and trudged off down the road, lugging his funky briefcase.

Peter Reilly yelled after him, “Hey, Wally! What are you going to do this summer? Read
Play-Doh
?” and Mickey Roberts yelled, “Say hi to the Living Dead!” and all the rest of us went, “Woo-oo-oo-oo!” like horror-movie noises, but Walter didn’t so much as turn around. I thought for a minute how he looked sad and lonely there, scuffing along in the dust where the county hadn’t come out yet to put calcium chloride down on the dirt road, but then Ryan Baker got up in the aisle and started playing air guitar and Earl Keever bellowed at him to set his scrawny rump back down, and I didn’t think about Walter anymore.

Final exams had been pretty excruciating, though a bright spot was that we’re allowed to wear anything we want within reason to school in exam week, and Amanda Turner showed up in a halter top and a pair of little shorts that barely covered her rear end. Peter Reilly said at lunch that it was her fault if he flunked ninth grade because every time he looked up from thinking about algebra or American history, there was that halter top across the aisle and then everything would go right out of his head. Peter said he’d heard somewhere that men think about sex every ten seconds, but he figured Amanda in that halter top brought it down to five.

The teachers must have realized this too, because Amanda got called to the office, and when she came back, she was covered up from neck to knees in one of those baggy white coats from the chemistry lab.

I ended up with one B, four C’s, and one A, which was in physical education, which yet again dashed my dad’s hopes of me ever making something of myself someday. I knew he looked at my report cards and thought what a waste I was, and how Eli could have been out of medical school by now, with a profession and a title. That’s what Eli was going to be, a doctor. Except he decided to go to Iraq and be a combat medic first.

“Yeah,” my dad said, looking at my card like it was an HIV-positive blood test. “You know, I don’t think Eli ever got less than a B in high school, and he only got one of those.”

He dropped my report card on the coffee table.

“It was in German,” he said. “He got a B in German. From that bald guy who didn’t like him. The one who looked like a Nazi.”