Invisible Men. Eric Freeze

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      Duplex

      A weimaraner first found the girl’s body, bloated on the shoals of the Hocking River. Garvey, the University’s organ professor, got the dog as a companion after his divorce last fall. He was a first-time dog owner who didn’t know much about canines except that they were social animals and liked the outdoors. Maynard was an exercise dog, an animal that would get him out walking or running, even in those sticky Ohio summers where his pores pooled with sweat and it was so humid that it felt like he was breathing through a sock. Maynard usually ran off-leash when Garvey was out on the bike path and Garvey probably would’ve missed the body had Maynard not refused to follow. The last time Maynard had stopped, he was rolling and rubbing himself with a possum carcass and Maynard had stunk for a week, even with multiple washings. Garvey sprinted to the water’s edge, hoping the dog hadn’t found some other dead animal, but instead he was sniffing and pawing a girl’s grayish skin and whining, high-pitched, confused.

      Nine months previous, I moved to Athens, the Ohioan center of learning, with my mother. We had just bought an up-down duplex with the money from my father’s insurance policy. Mom took the chance to go back to school to get a graduate degree, something she had always wanted to do when my father was alive. Our renter was Mr. Garvey who was on sabbatical and wouldn’t be back in the apartment until the spring semester. The rent, Mom said, gave us a little income on the side. That, combined with her teaching fellowship, gave us more to live on than we were used to back in Ottawa. Mom joked that we’d become capitalists.

      “Do we own it?” I asked Mom.

      “The apartment? It’s ours, but he’s renting from us.”

      “Why doesn’t he have his own house?”

      Mom knifed another box, gave me a set of plastic cups and I put them in the cupboard. “I don’t know honey.”

      “For how long?”

      “I hope for as long as we’re here.”

      “But if it’s ours why can’t we go up there?”

      Mom took out a batch of forks wrapped in a rubber band. “In the dishwasher,” she said. “Look, Jen, it’s his space. That’s how we’re able to live here. He pays for it and we take care of it for him. Just leave it alone.”

      So the door stayed locked and we moved into the rest of the house box by box, put up pictures and laid out our rugs. It was the same furniture as back home, in our house in Ottawa. I took out a punch bowl, a half-moon chipped in the same spot on the glass.

      The girl’s body showed signs of lacerations and bruises. She was tall for a seven-year-old, with hair the color of oatmeal. She had a purple ribbon around her wrist with the ends curled in ringlets like on a birthday gift. When Garvey found the body he was so shocked he didn’t know what to do. He had the feeling that his life was suddenly a movie. There was a camera nearby waiting to see how he would react. Should he put his hand over his mouth? Is this where he should scream? Mostly, he flipped his cell phone open and closed and wondered, do you call 911 if the person is already dead?

      Our second month in Ohio, Mom was thrown in jail. It was over a Super Walmart slated for construction in March. Back home, Mom shopped Canadian: retailers like Canadian Tire or Zellers, where the lowest price is the law. She used to argue for hours with my father about this. Once she came home with a hundred-dollar office chair that my Dad found at Walmart for fifty. He was furious. “It’s the principle,” she said.

      “Fifty dollars is fifty dollars,” he said.

      “Will you lower your voice, please?”

      The chair stayed. So when the police cruiser showed up on our street I wasn’t entirely surprised. I still had that awe and respect for police officers that children do; it was the way he coughed and adjusted his belt and made sure that I understood exactly what had happened. Mom, intent on stopping the workers from digging the new Walmart foundation, had stepped in front of one of the big Caterpillar trucks and refused to move. The next day’s paper would show her with her arms flung to the side like a female crucifix. They charged her and a slew of other protestors for civil disobedience, but someone from school posted bail and Mom was home, irate and uncomfortable, by suppertime. My mother’s total time in jail: two hours.

      “There’s СКАЧАТЬ