Mumbo Jumbo

Mumbo Jumbo

 

Pleasure and Progress--Chapter 8

Tom Bass

Flying from America to Europe is treacherous in the 1970s. Few know where Europe actually is, least of all in Salt Lake.

Her eyes sunken under her white cotton hat, her posture upright and tense, Noemi enunciates to herself the cities embroidered on the posters at the travel agency.

Sienna.

Marseilles.

Bressanone.

Portsmouth.

The feather-permed, piste-blonde representative gazes at the map of the world spread under the fluorescent lights of the agency. Tammy wonders if Honolulu, Chicago, or even Saigon is the solution to get there, but Tammy can’t connect the posters with actual places; can’t fathom if they’re cities or countries, edible or inedible; affirm if they aren’t addenda to America or something distinct from it like cookies or taffy.

Noemi explains to Tammy, who shifts in her chocolate leotards, surfs through her binders for flight codes with her glitter-coated nails.

Inordinately cute, Toby pulls down his cowboy hat, bangs on his metal sheriff’s star and then stabs his fingers over the Atlantic. He croaks. “Planes!”

Noemi cannot restrain her young son, so anxious to travel again.

That afternoon the Pleasure family visits a hot thirsty park. Few kids choose the heat of the day to play but Wyatt fills the park with his energy. The sole steep hill works great for wet or dry toboggan runs.

The boy and his father have scavenged a piece of cardboard on this summer day. The dry grass crackles underneath like thunder. They’re wedged together on the cardboard, their last chance to bond before Toby leaves for the summer.

Wyatt does it once.

Noemi stews in the car.

Wyatt fills his pipe and relaxes under the braided brim of his cowboy hat. Toby careens down the hill, small and indestructible, enjoying the falls and tumbles as much as riding a pony.

His ears are stuffed with gravel and grass and he doesn’t pay a lick of attention to the calls to return. He’s almost up the hill again. Waves of pain expand in his arms and everywhere else, but he has the gumption for another massive go.

The cardboard slides with frightening alacrity on the lawn. His hands slip under the torn cardboard and he plummets down the slick brown surface. A yank at any bump results in some air — cement harder than ice, grass softer than cement. ice faster than grass. Insect cities wait for his fall. The words knock out of the boy as he lands in a joyous heap of agony. He hasn’t got any edges and he’s made of hollow parts, like his parents.

Wyatt sucks on the stem of his pipe, wrinkles his brow at the ongoing rodeo and leans on the bonnet of the Nova. He wipes at the bugs desiccated on the windshield and nods in his son’s direction.

Noemi hails her boy from inside the white speck of the car. “Your father wants to go to the antique shop. Come along, petal.” She always says what he wants.

“Broken?” Toby asks his deceitful arm. He’s smiling a bit too.

“My fault he’s that way,” she says. She knows.

Wyatt pulls his driving gloves over his Seiko. His scarf swirls around his neck and it gently touches the Nova’s white exterior.

Dipping his head forlornly, Toby asks, “One more go?”

Wyatt stuffs him in the back seat. He whines about his arm as the V8 roars to life. The light and shadows move through the Nova’s compartment. It smells of green vinyl and black tobacco—revolting, sexual, mesmerizing.

“Move it, cowboy,” says Wyatt in his determined way, gripping at the green steering wheel, taking in Toby’s arm with his calm brown eyes.

“Yeah, um, sure, yeah, dad.”

“Then it’s not broken—that’s bone-setting.” The Nova slips into the bowl of Salt Lake City along the interlude of sun-bleached fences and yellow lawns.

“I wish your children will cause you as much grief as you cause us,” he remarks.

“Is it awful for you two?” Noemi whispers; her comment sneaks out the passenger window. No one answers that question.

Toby’s nostrils flare out to the crack of air. The steep face of the Wasach Range glints under the clear, radiant sun. The Rockies shimmer over the wide streets, a reminder that the nearby mountains are a blockade. The studs in the tires drub onward, turning, braking, and there is the low crackling white flow of football on the radio until the engine is silenced in a parking lot outside the antique mart, a Quonset hut, its corrugated ends buried in cement.

Inside, it’s the inevitable weekend quest. Wyatt combs for an inventory of potential objects: a beehive, a roll of copper wire, a chest, PVC, a corner cabinet, a plane, a spiral of solder, a saw, a cardboard box of screws or old paint. Some grease is smeared on his denim jacket. Wyatt pushes back his hat. He’s in ecstasy at the junk spread out on the tables and tarps—dioramas of cheap and real possibilities where everyone is hoping to turn something into something. His enthusiasm leads him deeper into the antique-mart. One vendor offers a collection of historic guns: a replica of the pistol used to kill Lincoln; a brace of pistols reputedly belonging to Buffalo Bill; and even one of the rifles that executed Garry Gilmore. That definitely attracts a crowd. Wyatt splurges on a bucket of antique cavalry bullets. He’d rather have too much than too little.

“Take them to the car,” Wyatt says.

Outside, Toby carries the heavy bucket of bullets, crawling like slugs. He wobbles in his boots. The sweat collects in his kerchief.

Alone in the car, he turns the keys, turns on the radio. Out come possibilities—talk, ads, sports, jingles, sermons, songs. A vapor trail tracks across the windshield. He aims at the miles of air separating him from earth, pumped into the chamber of his imaginary rifle.

The hot wind blows his Noemi across the parking lot outside the corrugated building.

“He’s found a cast-iron bed,” she reports. “From a fire station, from New Orleans.”

That clinches it: surely he will be drafted for days to scrub off the rust. His hands can get where his father’s cannot. Wyatt will buff the brass ornaments with the same care with which he polishes cutlery, lamps, chandeliers or shoes. It’s going to be Toby’s bed, every wrought inch of it.

The two grown men fight to get the pieces into the back of the broad Nova, now streaked with rust. The car fills with its earthy scent. Wyatt rolls a cigarette with one hand while he drives with the other, beaming about the assignment, but he’s forgotten: Toby will be leaving soon and dad will have to do it all because his son will just fuck it up anyway.

Like any juvenile vaquero, in the future Toby will come to ride the frame of the iron bed. It will twitch and buck, canter and gallop. The sun will shine between its haunches. Then, the ultimate greenhorn, he will somersault into the ironwork and smash up his face, his blood replacing the rust. It will drag him across the room and the rodeo clowns of his imagination will lure the bronco away. His lip will burst and pulse, and the blood will tell him that he is truly alive, both blue and red at once.

“Hair don’t grow on steel, boy,” Wyatt will say that afternoon, his overalls covered in grease and glue, sawdust and snot as he tootles in his shop, far away from his wife or son’s need for companionship, not really aware that anyone might need stitches or attention to stop the pain for a moment.

“Can you smile?” he asks. “If you can smile, you’re fine. Shucks, cowboy, you aren’t even missin’ a tooth.”

Toby sets the round table: silverware, china, salt, pepper, butter. He’s hungry.

Noemi’s silent, a pale ghost that neither speaks nor eats. Something’s wrong. Even the radio’s off. Anything might trigger a reaction in the kitchen.

The Nova is parked in the garage and Wyatt has filled his whisky glass. He changes into jeans and a snappy, rhinestone cowboy shirt smelling of gasoline. Eating peanuts, he rights wrongs about his workday, regresses to mention a new trip to the field.

Noemi isn’t paying attention to the fact that he will be gone again. At the counter she steams asparagus and mixes a sweet vinaigrette.

Even when home, he’s gone.

The asparagus is scrumptious, but the mealy cod in the kedgeree sets her off. Tears flush her eyes.

“Nothing’s ever right.” She moans into her hands.

The American desert is too much for an alien like her, overwhelmed in its magnitude and cruelty, the desert appreciative only of the respect and knowledge that will allow a cowboy to survive.

Wyatt shrugs his shoulders and deposits a bit of poorly thawed fish in his napkin. A branch is tapping at the window. Without water, the city’s nothing.

The implements clink together on the table, consorting. Today, no choice words about the burned blue cheese omelet, the trotter soup poisoned with mace, the runny blancmange rescued with grape sauce, laced with one of Noemi’s new gray hairs. It’s best to stay quiet.

After dinner Wyatt barricades himself below the thick beams of the house. On a nightly basis he engineers a new system of drip irrigation, re-plates candlesticks or adjusts the vice on some gluing-in-progress, always smoking the furnace of his pipe.

Upstairs, Noemi turns on the Trinitron, her answer to loneliness. The careful, moderated tone of Dick Cavett curls up with her on the cold leather sofa.

Toby creeps down. The basement smells like yeast from the jugs of failed ginger beer. Around Wyatt, turpentine, smoke, putty, dust.

A cabinet is tipped over on its back. Wyatt sits on a metal stool and picks through a pan of nails on the workbench scarred with holes; it’s cluttered with ideas in motion.

Toby needs his father’s help to fashion a papier-mâché bull’s head, Plastocine arrowheads, moccasins, alabaster jars — whatever the extracurricular assignment.

Wyatt screws, soaks and solders his way to heaven. The Jazz versus the Lakers snarls through the radio, just white noise to Wyatt’s methodical progress. Sparks fly from the interior of the drill. Sawdust gathers on the floor. A row of binders filled with endless sketches and plans neatly plotted on graph paper rests on a makeshift shelf. The cabinet reclines like a patient. Wyatt strips the doors with some flammable toxic mixture.

“Lot of work, doors,” he says. “Never underestimate doors.” The sanding block moves over the cuts and scrolls but it won’t get in the details.

“You try,” he suggests.

It snugly fits in Toby’s hand like a mouse.

“Not so hard, dummy. Don’t scratch the wood.”

Later that night, Wyatt impregnates the cabinet with quick-dry juice and uprights the thing. The wood is gaining a robust rose color.

Toby abandons the restoration with the best excuse, homework, even if Wyatt knows third-graders don’t have that much to do.

He lights a kerosene lamp, like Wyatt has taught him, and reads in sight of the television and Noemi marooned in the darkness.

Pipe smoke and hammering issue from the basement. The drill interferes with TV reception and Dick Cavett disappears from view at a crucial moment. A buffalo skull vacuously gazes from a wall. Underneath are display boxes of arrowheads, a duo of Colts and a sheriff’s star, the old objects that pacified the Rockies, the desert east and west. Noemi lets out a huff.

Often she escapes to a semi-funky part of Salt Lake when the remoteness becomes too daunting, and she brings her son along for robinish company. The apostle-like peaks burnish the white bonnet of the car. They do not let in strangers. Toby is definitely not missing any social opportunities accompanying her, segregated as they are by the untouchable religious condition of being gentiles, non-Mormons.

The Nova floats over the high intersections cruising down to Salt Lake’s sole funky block, the bookshop Toby’s favorite stop. The entrance smells of print and paper. A secular selection, a few strategically placed armchairs and unlimited browsing is the creed. Toby morbidly leaves through some photography titles. Pictures of sex or death are what he’s after, but he abandons the project, worried Noemi will catch him, worried what he will dream later. Then he scouts the westerns for something for Wyatt, skipping through the stacks, wondering who tells the best lies about the legend of the West—Lamour or Gray? Undecided, he breezes down the broad stairs to the basement for the comics.

He collides with Noemi and she’s recovered two unexpected volumes of Gourmand in French. “I’ll add them to my library,” she says, knowing full well how dear knowledge is out here on the sandy prairie wiped clean of words by the wind.

Today it’s not to be. No comics. No westerns or science fiction. Just French cookbooks from the cellar.

They retire for jelly doughnuts afterwards.

Noemi sips at the weak coffee and calls her son, “Pet,” to which Toby cheerily responds, voice muffled in jam and fried dough, unaware that he is indeed his mother’s pet in what she considers a hostile environment, and as for his abhorrent insistence on dressing like a gunslinger, she’s mute in the face of Wyatt’s neat approval of the act so long as he’s “pet,” a friendly round face.

Her sanctuary isn’t Utah but England. The degrees of separation between the meeting of reality and the ideal are insurmountable. She’s stranded far across the Atlantic, across the Continental Divide, where the isolation of being distracts her from happiness, flowing west instead of back home to the east.

Few people join their raft cum home. But some weekends Part joins them for afternoon barbecue. But not too often due to a proclivity for rowdiness, which fills everyone with dread and excitement.

In a town of frowns, Part is a true spark. Noemi adores him because he’s “a bit of a rogue and boozer, but we do like those kind of types if they’re kind and a good laugh,” and he fits into her English sense of conviviality.

To Toby, he’s a living saloon, everything he’d imagine to be—cardsharp, rogue, killer.

Part arrives later than expected with two bottles of tequila and the day-glo mixer from the state liquor store. But his Thunderbird is dinged.

He growls. “Skunk cops try me for drunk drivin’ but the seals weren’t broken on them two bottles. Made me drive home to the Nerve Center to get my damn license before I come over.”

It has ended before it has started when Part retires to the garden to smoke a cigarillo in his underpants, silk-screened with Roy Rogers, and Nubuck cowboy boots. His legs are blue, thin. He throws chicken and lamb leftovers into the street. The accident has made Part nervous. To compensate he’s now ornery and drunk. His umpteenth margarita is in a crystal glass; it squirts green prisms over the lawn.

“Mo’ bordellos in Salt Lake than Reno!” Part hoots. The neighbor’s vizsla joins in next door, howling from behind the chain link fence.

Sometime he departs and weaves the damaged car to the Nerve Center, his roost an old peeling pine house. From there he plots missions to the Gold Coast of Australia and the Mexican Pacific. He’s already convinced Toby they are both fine places, standing half naked in the yard, tossing bones in the air.

As a way of apologizing, Part invites the Wyatt and the boy  to the YMCA.

The boy shakes with anxiety about the locker room, but that eases with Part’s easygoing manner with the many Mormon members.

Part religiously punches the bag and his wiry body sweats in the sauna. He smuggles in a fifth from time to time, but Part and Wyatt are dry today.

“Know a Jack Mormon, little cowboy?” Part speaks as if he is filing his own tongue.

“That’s a Mormon that don’t obey the rules, the Book of Mormon and the hierarchy of New Jerusalem. He’s into drinking, adultering, and having a good time, into stimulating himself. In other words, a good friend.”

Toby is too naïve to really understand what he’s talking about.

“Lay off, Part,” Wyatt says. He doesn’t want to be reminded about the bachelor life, an occupation for which Part is an expert.

Later that evening, after relaying the whole episode, Noemi discloses that Part’s two kids are a stock car mechanic and a stripper. She’s sure that explains everything, including the invitation to ski at Alta at the weekend.

Part’s fridge is a zone of penicillin-coated lemons, smelly hotdogs, soft pickles and stale bread. Crumbs bob in his handlebar mustache. The Nerve Center is tacked up with geology maps, a rack of minerals and cores. The sheet rock is knocked out of the walls and wiring and wood is exposed. Wyatt and Part share smokes and bourbon.

“That Prince Albert tobacco and them Dutch Master cigars stuffed in your pocket are classy, man,” Part says. His eyes twinkle with Scotch, indicating the stash in Wyatt’s pocket.

The nylon ski bibs shish and shush as they reach for the ashtrays and glasses on the Formica table. It doesn’t take much for Part to start slurring.

They bundle up for the ride up to Alta, wedge the skis in Part’s T-bird and scrape off the ice. Ash, bottles, greasy papers and a spare are just some of the contents. In the last moment Wyatt transfers over the survival kit—a kettle, a box of tea, packets of soup, Saltines and candles. Part guns the muffler-less T-bird and the car soon veers into the valleys above Salt Lake.

Part lashes on the obligatory snow chains if the car is to navigate any further. The snow falls in big, thick flakes, but the T-bird presses up Little Cottonwood Canyon. The two men are sustained with doughnuts and a thermos. Toby lives on Starbursts. Snowplows move along the road, scraping and salting the meat. A broad frozen lake leers like a big green eye. People are ice-skating on the lake, the spruces wearing snow mascara.

The car throbs up into the Wasach Range. The trash quakes on the wet floor. Toby is nauseous, but he brightens at the sight of the slopes, alluring, peaceful, crackling with carving skiers.

He stretches for his felt cowboy hat, ropes it under his chin, pins his sheriff’s star to his bib and takes his skis now that they have stopped at Alta: a no-frills hut occupied by a cafeteria and ski school, a kiosk for lift tickets, no more.

They snap into their bindings and slither into line with a few skiers. The chairs worm around. A worn wood paddle soon scoops them into the sky. The two men smoke, gloveless, huddle in green army jackets on the planks. The chair rocks through the threshold of clouds. They lift up the tips of their skis, dip off and promptly join another lift. The mountains rise above the mud of clouds: carcasses, joints, cartilage and skulls push against the sky. Wind walks through the pines, kicking snow from the branches.

Knit together, they shuttle upward, the sun simultaneously hot and cold, until deposited very near the summit.

The first run is when nerves and skill may or may not meet.

Wyatt turns into a bowl and shelves of powder. Part slaloms after him, bashing down a bit, pausing for a swipe of booze from a flask, bashing down a bit more.

“Faster you go, the better!” Part yells at the adolescent body recklessly cannoning down the run.

Wyatt moves with an agile, free manner, plumes of exhaust piping from his mouth, until he suddenly disappears from the piste, after something.

Toby stops in a fan of snow.

Shortly, the branches burst open. An animal thrashes in Wyatt’s hand, hissing, squirming.

“Pickin’ up the sucker’s the secret,” he says.

The porcupine writhes, coils, and Toby fears the defense, thankfully insufficient, the tail in Wyatt’s hand. A few brown and ivory quills dart into the snow, some toboggan down the slope. Three of the clever barbed straws have caught in his ski bib. They’re like submarines or planes, sleek and perfect.

“You try, cowboy.” He nods.

Toby can’t refuse, not with Part around. He eases his hand onto the glassy tail. The rods of skin crinkle under his skin.

“Now I’ll take my hand off and you hold him up.”

The weight is incredible. Toby needs two hands and the porcupine dashes his head on the snow, scratches his feet to escape, thrashing and turning to bite with his ugly yellow teeth. It’s as big as he is.

“Drop him, kid. He’s not gonna trouble us no more.”

The porcupine backs away and skitters into the trees.

“With my gun I’d shoot the fellow.” Wyatt spits. “Pests.”

“I’d sure shoot a hell of a lot more than goddamn porcupines,” Part utters, wiping at the ice, snot and liquor drops on his mustache.

“Secret’s sneaking up.” Toby’s voice is cheery at the thought of stealth, a new kind of lying, a new way of finding Tonto in the front yard underneath the shrubbery.

“Yep, like at Alta. My modus operandi.” Part breathes satisfactorily, charmed by the empty slopes and the day of great skiing ahead. “I’d recommend it to anyone.”

The jumbo starts its bumpy descent. The wing punctures the haze. Below is a gray-green isle. Not Iceland. Nor Greenland. Nor the Faeroes. It’s England. The ocean smashes at its inhospitable spiny edges. Fields and farms tile the island’s rural mosaic. Smokers stub out in the smoking section once the orange light comes on. Knots of towns appear, tied to the island’s surface. Passengers snap together their seatbelts and swallow at the unlikely possibility no one wants to consider plausible. Rows of squat, stubby houses glare at one another like owls.

Noemi readies a bag for her pale son, drugged with Dramamine but nonetheless more than capable of returning the in-flight meals. The Thames’ black coils are below. Arrival is approaching and the interval is peaceful, expectant tension.

The slug of metal, people, baggage and little remaining kerosene agitates together when the land catches it. The rivets shake in their sockets like too many loose bones until the force of landing subsumes into a gentle hum. Already everyone is disobeying and rifling for hand luggage. Many emit an odor of relief, gathering for the long walk from the gate.

Toby assembles the complimentary crayons, exercise book and cards. Noemi has yet to give the signal that he too may retrieve his pill-like red TWA plastic handbag, plastic cowboy hat, plastic gun.

The sick bag is poised for action, even when he walks down the aisle littered with cups, magazines, blankets and headphones, past those mysterious, empty first-class seats.

His feet touch the spongy surface of the concourse.

People move with purpose, focused on arrival or transfer. Toby pushes his feet into the blue carpet that lines the terminal, his feet joining the queue of legs poised for the first hurdle. He can smell crisps and sweets oozing through the barrier.

The immigration officer asks with a register of amusement in his voice, “Who are you, kid?”

Toby stammers, forgetting all about himself. “She’s my mom…”

He gulps. “Mum!”

“Clever little bugger, aren’t you,” he purrs. “Where you hailing from, madam?”

She’s tense enough without the harassment, since no one is here to meet her. It’s up to her to get home and almost too much of a punishment to admit, “Salt Lake.”

Film clings inside the airport.

Grime from Rwanda. Skin from Belgium. Sand from Iran. Mud from Queensland. Soot from Yugoslavia. Hair from Argentina. Dust from Utah. Vinegar from England. A mop swims after it, around the swollen feet of the passengers who expect their luggage on the reef-like carousels at any moment. Eventually two brown Samsonites tip from the black tongue. Noemi wrestles the pair of suitcases off the moving reef and onto a trolley. A front wheel swims uncontrollably through nothing-to-declare. Noemi doesn’t announce the comestibles among the inventory of summer gear—the steaks perhaps leaking into the Russell Stouffer chocolates, the apricot jam oozing in the pancake mix.

The intense smell of arrivals, boiled sweets and jet fuel knocks a hole in Toby’s stomach.

The TWA stroganoff is unexpectedly ejected in a slick before the tourist information desk.

“Oh dear,” Noemi announces. She gives him a hanky and he cleans up the corners of his mouth, slightly mortified about his accomplishment, as the clerk peers over her counter. Noemi shuttles him to the women’s toilet. Toby quaffs some water from the tap and rallies for the task ahead, when he will assist in wrestling the two brown cases onto the underground — musty, familiar, greasy—no easy task considering his pockets are stuffed with sweets and crisps, the payoff for good behavior.

Toby’s brown saucers hardly register the people—airport personnel, pallid commuters and marginal types; he’s too engrossed with the crisps, jelly tots and New Scientist to notice.

Mangy lanes are splashed with gray. Graffiti tags walls, trains and underpasses. A clump of factories steam vaguely. Pools of sewage reflect the sky in black mirrors. Nettles cover a logistics yard. A van’s crispy black shell. Shopping baskets.

Dogs snap at trains, dogs pull at chains.

No wonder we live in Salt Lake, thinks Noemi.

Sugar and oil smear most of New Scientist. The supply of crisps is dwindling.

The pigeons and shadows of Paddington move in a symphony of greeting. Noemi’s legs bunch up against the long banks of windows. The rail staff is uncooperative; she doesn’t really expect anyone to help her. The advice of a traveler is the solution (Oxford, Gloucester, Hereford) and she requests her trains, grateful to use money she understands, embellished by Queenie.

Letters and numbers rattle down the big black board. Toby anchors the Samsonites by the phones. Noemi’s excited channel blends with the muffled hubbub of announcements, feet and raindrops obscured by the oblivious rush of adults.

“Dear John! Goodness gracious, malaria? In London? I don’t quite see. You’ve been sacked? Listen — I’m going to the country now. Call me at mummy’s.”

The phone is there to reassure her that she is not a stranger in her own country, but that is the case: she is the one who must travel to her friends since she has already come this far.

Toby wants to tell her that friends are just like that but she fusses more coins in the slot. “Anne? Yes, Anne? Yes, I’d like to, but, well, yes, when I come up then, yes let’s do lunch, if you want to, if it’s all right.”

The last call’s to Momma Empire.

Noemi quavers; her lips tighten when she hazards, “Mummy? It’s me… Yes, by eight at Hereford. It’s not too much trouble?”

A locomotive roars under the crown of glass and iron. A startled prawn sandwich tumbles out of someone’s pocket.

The passage reeks of booze and cigarettes. The blue-green compartment too. Toby’s supplies are arranged next to the window. He smacks at the third tube of fruit gums.

Concertina wire and giant cameras are coupled to ringing alarms and flashing yellow sirens. Signal lights glow down the rails. Robot cranes move sea containers, endlessly shifting and sorting the coffins. Access roads do not access. Road construction sites are abandoned and empty, the space where nothing happens, the edge where the trains are next week.

Toby has stripped some Polo mints by the time the glumness ends. The chalky sweets are the taste of home, a foreign home like crisps or fruit gums mediated by Noemi’s great temper. Toby isn’t surprised to discover such a taste packaged in either a tube of paper or a plastic bag. He likes eating, even things that taste bad.

Noemi, edgy, rehearses Toby on his manners—Ps and Qs—between mouthfuls. Toby will have to wait to brief himself on advances in chemical warfare in New Scientist. She naturally scolds him when he picks his teeth (or nose or navel) too blatantly in the process of her many comments on the placement of courtesies.

“Just remember, please and thank you. And don’t you be a glutton, young man.”

Somewhere on a muddy platform Toby refills with chunks of pork pie, more crisps, a Mars bar and a bottle of Lucozade. He’s permitted to eat anything and everything once he’s across the Atlantic.

In the overcast light Noemi almost looks beautiful, but anxiousness is written in the web of her mouth, a bitter internal, incongruous vertigo, an oblique symptom of her unhappiness away from the windy isle that she claims is home.

The old diesel train moles through tunnels and sidles hedges, noses the Trifid-like moss off the track. Toby nods at the magpies and they return the salutation. Some time he childishly pushes his head in Noemi’s rigid lap; he sleeps to the lull of the train and the burr of the folk in the adjoining compartment.

Something wet and hot is slobbering on Toby’s hand.

A barbed voice recruits someone to drag the baggage off the train.

Someone rattles her silver and brass bangles.

Momma Empire?

Momma pokes Toby with her stubby fingers, kicks at him with her curly Turkish slippers. Her determined companion, Poppy, is sniffing at his face, licking his hand.

“Lazybones!” She hisses.

He rubs his dopey eyes with a doggy paw, stretches for a Polo mint lost between the upholstery and wrappers.

The hem of her caftan rises in wine stripes over her belly obscured in a magenta cummerbund until the stripes resume and gather around her wrinkled neck knotted with three vibrant scarves. Elliptical sunglasses swab her eyes, gold hoop earrings describe her lobes, and as Toby takes in her grand appearance, her cold fingers clench around his wrist and lead him out of the carriage, his hat dangling from his neck.

Momma Empire barges down the corridor to the platform, shoveling aside spare air for Poppy and Toby under the blue and white ironwork of the station.

“Well, a kiss, buckaroo,” she demands when Toby is standing on the platform and the last carriage staggers down the steel line. Toby tiptoes to her hairy red vaguely tacky cheek.

“Yes, grandmother.”

It’s a bit smoky.

“My name is Empire—not Granny—don’t forget it, lad.” She turns her face for another of his timid kisses. Poppy jealously yanks on the lead. Toby cannot avoid the waxy taste of her makeup and whiskers.

Since the rush, Noemi has re-gathered and is attempting to comb Toby’s hair and tuck in his shirt.

Momma Empire interrupts. “Hang on, let’s have a look at you—the two of you. Backs straight… I was wondering if you’d ever come.”

“We did try, mother,” she says a bit too strenuously.

Momma Empire pushes her sunglasses up into her bun of gray hair and pauses to take Toby in with a steely gaze. “Hah, he’s fat! And smaller than you! Right, in the car, you lot.”

Her smart aqua Triumph hardly takes the luggage.

Prior to ducking in the car Noemi gets a kiss and a hug from Momma Empire, what she has been waiting for. The unexpected slap on the cheek, what she needs in her masochistic way, will come later. Momma Empire revs up the engine, lights up a blue Woodbine and the car accelerates through a tunnel of oaks; more nausea wells in Toby’s being.

“So how’s life in America?” she inquires, her low voice filling a gap in constant movement of gears on the country lane. “The Yanks are barbarians, aren’t they?”

“Here the television and sweets and chips—crisps—are better,” he hazards, nodding at Noemi for some assistance, silent and who will not dare confirm for Momma Empire that America is everything a colony can be expected to be.

Momma Empire supplies her own ideas about the answer. “Bah, an immature lot, I’d say. Dodgy, religious, nostalgic, insensible. Go on, lad, say it—you don’t really like it, do you?” Two nostrils of smoke punctuate each breath. She’s a dragon, if not chaos itself, a chaos that is on appearance wild and fearsome and more likely to be reassuring and kind if given time. Noemi, however, mawkish and pale, is perhaps about to vomit herself.

“Blast!” Momma Empire curses as the curled toes of her Ottoman slippers catch on the clutch and the Triumph lurches.

“Wouldn’t you like some other shoes for driving?” Noemi asks.

Momma Empire’s replies with a huff.

The Triumph zips under the canopy of trees. Noemi answers Momma Empire’s questions until Momma Empire tires of the good report, surely all lies, and must provoke a little rancor as the car beams towards a line of low black mountains.

“Life’s in the East, not in the West, dear.” Momma Empire aims her remark at Noemi, but it is also for Toby. “But the West’s winning, you know, so maybe it’s not worth the trouble. It was our world, the East. And still is. Just that we’re not welcome anymore.”

“It’s my fault,” Noemi says, resorting to her best line. “All my fault.”

Silence cloaks the road like acid and the car hums. Toby happily leers from the window at the coming darkness and wishes the movement would not end today after so many mechanical horses.

Momma Empire lodges the Triumph in front of a trough filled with algae and insects dancing under the light. Mist congregates in the valley where they have arrived and licks the blue bridge over the charcoal Wye. A tractor passes, squeezed among the furrows of the town’s houses. Hay’s clock tower chimes not far away, it bells echoing like hounds baying around its square stone base.

Pushing the cases over the slick slate paving stones up into Momma Empire’s narrow house is Toby’s concern. Noemi lugs them up the creaking stairs to the top floor, but not before disgorging the comestibles — steak, jam, honey, pancake mix.

Momma Empire’s hairy knuckles knead pastry on the marble countertop; she stows it in the pantry to rest. In the interval she pours a sherry as Noemi hunkers down to shell peas along the broad table decorated with two pewter vases overflowing with roses.

A collection of African masks scowl on the wall. Ivory carvings form a miniature Serengeti on a shelf, too far from the bars of the electric fire to return to life. Candles burn in the windows and a door blows shut somewhere in the house. Everyone in the family collects artifacts and Toby wonders if he’ll ever gather something he can’t eat.

“Is there someone knocking?” asks Noemi, her eyes haggard with the realization that the journey is over.

“It’s just the draft,” Momma Empire says. Cigarette ash falls into the steak and kidneys she cubes with a butcher knife. “Beware of the draft.”

When the kidneys hit the sauté pan they emit a strange uric odor but the steak soon rebalances the bouquet of the kitchen with the sweet aroma of muscle slowly conjoining into stew. She tips the filling into a Pyrex dish, covers it with the blanket of pastry. Noemi readies the peas with mint.

Momma Empire launches into a diatribe about the important work done by Afghan Relief before turning around like a top to find no one listening. That sets her off, and though Noemi doesn’t want any criticism to spoil her homecoming, Momma Empire isn’t afraid to push.

“You keep people away because you’re afraid people will hurt you. You’re even distant with me, your mother. You’re like a diplomatic stranger who never discloses her position.”

Noemi withdraws into sheepish niceties as Momma Empire aspirates her remarks with her Woodbines.

“You hurt people because you think you’ll avoid being hurt first.”

Their salvation will be when the pie comes out of the oven.

Momma Empire has yet to christen Toby with her hard verbal water. She rightly suspects he’s a liar—he knows lies are there to facilitate a day-to-day order that avoids asking any bigger questions. Lies are details.

Who drinks the vinegar? Who farts in the car? Who wets the bed? Who snips the heads off flowers? Who eats the bees and bugs? Who sets leaves on fire? Whose fingers fall in the light sockets? Who swims in the canal? Who returns with scabs and gravel? Who consumed the last piece of Stilton? Who leaves home, for Momma Empire, the next day because life is difficult and lonely in America? Who’s dependent? Who’s lying?

It’s Toby and feels wonderful. He cannot fix lies like bones and set them in plaster. Deceit is consonant to his own kind of unreliable strategies for getting along. Toby reasons why tell the truth when he can lie his way around the present? It’s an invaluable lesson on what can or cannot be the truth, on what Toby can forget or remember.

Momma Empire knows Toby for who he is under his thick skin and she will pounce on him when deceit has swallowed his tail.

A mobile circulates above his bed. He collapses instantly, but there is so much momentum in his body that it seems to ascend, bank and pull away from the cold covers like a buffalo charging across the sky.

That night tucked in bed he watches fish prowl on the ceiling, eating stars. The stairs groan and the wind whistles through the house. The draft? Can it be the leopard skin somehow revitalized by the menacing black wind that coils over the walls of the garden? Or are Toby’s lies and dreams pacing and consorting on the landing?

The amalgam of sherry, strawberries and cream flavors in his mouth comforts him hidden under the rustling covers. If they can neither touch nor see him, then he is safe, safe with Momma Empire, who tacitly includes him as friend—too little flesh, too many bones.

Poppy waddles in the night, her paws scratching the splintery wood floors, anxious, barred from Momma Empire’s sulfurous bedroom of sense, like everyone.

Up next: Daddy Empire