Red Ant House

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Red Ant House

  Trapeze

  The Shiprock Fair

  Blue Fly

  Where I Work

  Crazy Yellow

  Headhunter

  Dr. War Is a Voice on the Phone

  The Hypnotist’s Trailer

  Bitterwater

  Starburst

  Billy by the Bay

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2003 by Ann Marie Cummins

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Cummins, Ann.

  Red ant house : stories / Ann Cummins,

  p. cm.

  “A Manner original.”

  Contents: Red ant house—Trapeze—The shiprock fair—Blue fly—Where I work—Crazy yellow—Headhunter—Dr. War is a voice on the phone—The hypnotist’s trailer—Bitterwater—Starburst—Billy by the bay.

  ISBN 0-618-26925-8

  1. Southwestern States—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.U657R4 2003

  813'.6—dc21 2002192153

  eISBN 978-0-547-34655-7

  v2.1017

  Some of the stories in this collection appeared elsewhere in slightly different form: “Headhunter” in Hayden’s Ferry Review; “Billy by the Bay,” “The Hypnotist’s Trailer,” and "Red Ant House” in McSweeney’s; “Bitterwater,” “The Shiprock Fair,” and “Starburst” in The New Yorker; “Where I Work” in A Room of One’s Own; and “Dr. War Is a Voice on the Phone” in Sonora Review.

  FOR S.E.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Nancy Johnson, Steven Schwartz, and Tilly Warnock: best of readers and friends. To the Lannan Foundation, whose generous support gave me both the time to write and the confidence to continue. To Dave Eggers and the McSweeney’s staff, who took a chance on my weirder stories. To Curtis Berkey, Sean Wilsey, and Dan Menaker, all of whom have been voices in the wilderness for my work. To Susan Canavan, an editor with an eye for the story under the story and the talent for calling it forth. And to my agent, Jenny Bent, a gracious, tenacious, wicked needier who makes things happen.

  Red Ant House

  The first time I saw this girl she was standing at the bottom of the coal pile. I thought she was a little wrinkled dwarf woman, with her sucked-in cheeks and pointed chin. She had narrow legs and yellow eyes. They had just moved into the old Perino house on West 2nd. This was the red ant house.

  “I’m having a birthday,” the girl said. She was going around the neighborhood gathering up children she didn’t know for her birthday party. She told us they had a donkey on the wall and beans in a jar.

  “What kind of beans?” I asked her.

  She shrugged.

  “Hey, you guys,” I said to my brothers. “This bean wants us to go to her birthday party.”

  “My name’s not Bean.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “Theresa Mooney.”

  “You don’t look like a Theresa Mooney.”

  She shrugged.

  “Hey, you guys. This girl named Bean wants us to go to her birthday party.”

  She didn’t say anything then. She turned around and started down the street toward her house. We followed her.

  In her yard was a grease monkey. Her yard was a junker yard with car parts and cars all over the place, and a grease monkey was standing up against one car, smoking a cigarette.

  “Joe,” the little dwarf girl said, “what do you think of a name like Bean?”

  He considered it. The man was handsome, with slick black hair and blue eyes, and he gave the dwarf a sweet look. I couldn’t think of how such a funny-looking child belonged to such a handsome man. “It’s an odd one,” he said. The girl looked at me, her eyes slant. “One thing about a name like that,” he said, “it’s unusual. Everybody would remember it.”

  That idea she liked. She looked at me with a little grin. She said, “My name is Bean.”

  Just as if the whole thing was her idea.

  Rosie Mooney was this Theresa’s mother. When she moved in she had not known there would be ants in the house. These were the ants that had invaded the Perinos’ chickens two summers before. Nobody wanted to eat chicken after that.

  The ants came through the cracks in the walls. Rosie Mooney had papered those walls with velveteen flowered wallpaper. She had a red room and a gold room. She had wicked eyes to her, Rosie Mooney—could look you through and through.

  These were trashy people, I knew. They had Christmas lights over the sink. They had hodgepodge dishes, and garlic on a string, and a book of matches under one table leg to make it sit straight. When the grease monkey came in, he kissed Rosie Mooney on the lips, a long wormy kiss, and then he picked the birthday girl up and swung her in a circle.

  For us, he took off his thumbs.

  “It is an optical illusion,” the girl told us.

  He could also bend his thumbs all the way back, tie his legs in a knot, and roll his eyes back and look at his brain.

  “Your dad should be in the circus,” I told the girl.

  “He’s not my dad.”

  “What is he?”

  She shrugged.

  The grease monkey laughed. It was a shamefaced laugh.

  There were two prizes for the bean jar event: one for a boy, one for a girl. The boy’s prize was a gumball bank. Put a penny in, get a ball of gum. When the gum was gone you’d have a bank full of pennies. Either way, you’d have something.

  The girl’s prize was a music box. I had never seen such a music box. It was black with a white ivory top made to look like a frozen pond, and when you wound it up, a white ivory girl skated over the top. It was nice.

  We were all over that jar, counting the beans. It was me, my brothers, the Stillwell boys, the Murpheys, and the Frietags. As I was counting, I thought of something. I thought, This jar is an optical illusion. That was because there would be beans behind the beans. It occurred to me that there would be more beans than could be seen, thousands more.

  The grease monkey was the official counter. He had written the exact number on a piece of tape and stuck it to the bottom of the jar. We all had to write our numbers down and sign our names. I wrote five thousand. When Joe read that, everybody laughed.

  “There are beans behind the beans,” I informed them.

  “This one’s a shrewd one,” the grease monkey said. “She’s thinking.” But when he turned the jar over, the number on the tape said 730. This Joe winked at me. “Don’t want to be thinking too hard, though.”

  I just eyeballed him.

  “You want to count them? You can count them if you want,” he said.

  “I don’t care to.”

  He grinned. “Suit yourself.”

  And he awarded the music box to the birthday girl, who had written 600. Then I knew the whole thing had been rigged.

  The birthday girl’s mother said, “Theresa, I bet you’d like some other little girl to have the music box since you have birthday presents. Wouldn’t you?”

  She didn’t want to.

  “That would be the polite thing,” she said. “Maybe you’d like to give it to Leigh.”

  “I don’t want it,” I said.

  This Theresa looked at me. She looked at the grease monkey. He nodded,
then she held the box out to me.

  But I didn’t want it.

  My mother was down sick all that summer. The doctor had prescribed complete bed rest so the baby would stay in. For the last three years, she had gone to bed again and again with babies that didn’t take.

  Up until that point, there were six of us children.

  There was Zip, named for my grandmother, Ziphorah. Zippy loved me until I could talk. “You used to be such a sweet child,” she would say. “We used to dress you up and take you on buggy rides and everybody said what a sweet child you were. Whatever happened to that sweet child?”

  There was Wanda, named for my other grandmother. Wanda was bald until she was five, and my father used to take every opportunity to bounce a ball on her head.

  There was me, Leigh Rachel, named by the doctor because my parents drew a blank. I’m the lucky one. Once when I was a baby I jumped out a window—this was the second-story window over the rock cliff. My mother, who was down sick at the time, had a vision about it. I was already gone. By the time she got herself out of her bed and up the stairs, I was in flight, but she leaped across the room, stuck her arm out, and caught me by the diaper, just as she’d seen it in the vision.

  Another time, I survived a tumble down Bondad Hill in my grandpa’s Pontiac. We both rolled like the drunk he was. Drunks I know about. My dad’s dad was one, and my mom’s dad was another. I never knew my dad’s mom. She weighed three hundred pounds and died of toxic goiter. My mom’s mom weighed seventy-five at the time of her death. Turned her face to the sky and said, “I despise you all.” Irish like the rest of us.

  There were the boys, Ronald Patrick, Raymond Patrick, Carl Patrick.

  Then there were the ones who didn’t take. One of these I saw, a little blue baby on a bloody sheet. My mother said, “Help me with these sheets,” to Wanda, but Wanda couldn’t stop crying, so I helped pull the sheet away from the mattress, and my mother wadded the sheet up.

  I said, “We should bury that sheet.”

  She said, “It’s a perfectly good sheet. We’ll wash it.”

  Then she took a blanket and went into the living room and wrapped herself up in it. When my father came home he found her half bled to death.

  My mother has Jewish blood in her. When they took her to the hospital, a Jewish man, Mr. Goldman, gave blood. He was the only Jew in town.

  That summer my mother had cat visions. She would begin yelling in the middle of the night. She would come into our dreams: “The cats have chewed their paws off. They are under the bed.”

  “Mother, there are no cats.”

  “Look under the bed. See for yourself.”

  But we didn’t want to.

  Each day that summer I had to rub my mother’s ankles and legs before I could go out to see the shadow, Theresa Mooney, who had started living in my backyard. When I woke up in the morning, there she was on the swing or digging in the ground with a spoon.

  Once out of the house, I didn’t like to go back. If I sneaked back in for any little thing, I had to rub the legs again. This was my job. Zip’s job was to clean the house.

  Wanda cooked. Grilled cheese on Mondays, frozen potpie on Tuesdays, Chef Boyardee ravioli on Wednesdays, frozen potpie on Thursdays, and fish sticks on Fish Fridays. Saturdays were hamburger and pork-and-bean days, and Sundays, Sick Slim brought trout that he caught in the river. Sick Slim had a movable Adam’s apple and finicky ways. He used to exchange the fish for loaves of my mom’s homemade bread until he found out that she put her hands in the dough. After that, he didn’t care for bread, though he still brought the fish. “I never thought she would have put her hands in it,” I heard him tell my father.

  Slim was my dad’s army buddy. He built his house on West 1st, way back from the street, right up against Smelter Mountain. Slim didn’t want anybody at his back: that’s what my dad said.

  We knew a secret on him. My brother Ronnie saw this with his own eyes. A woman drove to West 1st where Sick Slim lived. She had a little blond girl with her, and when the girl got out of the car, Ronnie saw that she was naked. The mother didn’t get out of the car. The little girl walked up that long sidewalk to the porch and up the steps to Slim’s house and knocked on the door, and Slim opened the door, and he gave the girl money.

  Slim was a bachelor and didn’t have anything to spend his money on except naked children and worms for fish.

  We all thought it would be a good idea to try and get some of Slim’s money. My brothers thought I should take my clothes off and go up to his door, though I didn’t care to. But I thought Theresa might like to make a little money, so I told her that there was a rich man on West 1st who would give us twenty dollars if she took her clothes off and walked up the sidewalk and knocked on his door. She didn’t know about that. She was not accustomed to taking off her clothes outside.

  I said, “Do you know how much twenty dollars is?”

  She didn’t know. She was as poor as a rat.

  “You go first, then I’ll go,” she said.

  “It’s my idea.” I figured if it was her idea—but she never had any—then she could say who went first.

  “Mama says not to get chilled,” she said. She was prone to sore throats and earaches and whispering bones. Without notice, she would go glassy-eyed and stiff, and would lose her breath. When she caught it again, she’d say, “My bones are whispering.”

  “What are they saying?” I’d ask.

  “They don’t talk,” she said. “They don’t have words. Just wind.”

  “You are a delicate flower,” I said to butter her up.

  She liked that.

  “I bet we could get thirty dollars for you. You’re better-looking than me.”

  She looked at me slant.

  “It’s easy,” I said. “Don’t think about it. You just think, I am running through the sprinklers. You don’t think, I am naked. If you don’t think about it, it’s easy.”

  She told me she’d get beat if she took her clothes off outside.

  “Maybe even forty dollars,” I said, “because this particular gentleman likes itty-bitty things. Twenty for you, twenty for me. That’s a lot of money. We could go places on that much money.”

  She thought about that. “I don’t think we could go far on forty dollars.”

  “You got to look on the bright side. You’re always looking on the dark side.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You are doom and gloom and whispering bones. Just ask your whispering bones. They’ll say you’re doom and gloom.”

  “You go first,” she said. “Then I’ll go.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay then.”

  My mother was curious about Theresa and her mother. “Where does little Terry go when her mama’s working?” my mother asked me. “If we had any room at all, I’d have that child here. If we weren’t doubled up already.”

  “Hang her on a hook,” I said.

  “Don’t smart-mouth. Do you think she would like to come here?”

  Mother thought all children should like to come to our house because it was so pleasant to have a big family. To have children to do the cooking, and cleaning, and leg rubbing. Her legs were yellow logs. I didn’t like to touch them, and so I would think of them as yellow logs at Cherry Creek—the dried logs split by lightning, with worm silk inside. I would close my eyes and rub the cold legs. Sometimes, if my mother didn’t talk to me, if she only closed her eyes and breathed, I would forget I was in her room. I would put myself someplace else, Cherry Creek or Jesus Rock, and I would think of running my hands through soft things, the sand below Jesus Rock, or worm silk.

  But, mostly, she talked. She wanted to know about Mooney and Joe. She wanted to know about Theresa.

  When she talked she would sit propped up on pillows, her belly a world under the sheet. Her eyes were all glitter.

  “She doesn’t stay with that man, does she?”

  “Joe Martin is his
name.”

  “I don’t care to know his name.”

  “I don’t know where she stays.”

  My mother sighed. Except for the belly, she couldn’t put weight on. She had trouble keeping food down, and she didn’t have the strength to wash her hair so she kept it in a bandanna, one that bore the grease of her head.

  “He has a wife and children, you know. Over in Dolores. I understand he has two little children. You mustn’t say anything to the little girl, though. I’m sure she doesn’t know. I understand,” my mother said, “that he abandoned his family. I don’t know how they make do.

  “Now just look.” She laughed and held her hands out to me. Her fingers were thick. The one ring finger was especially plumped out, and her wedding ring had sunk to the bone. “I have no circulation,” she said, and she laughed again. They were cold, the fingers. “I’ll be glad when this is over, Leigh. I guess we’ll all be glad, won’t we. Let’s get some soap and get this ring off,” she said.

  I went for the soap and water. We soaped her hands good, and I started working the ring. She leaned back and closed her eyes. “Don’t you love the sound?” she said.

  “What sound?”

  “Of the children playing. Listen to them.” My brothers were kicking the can in the street. “You should be out, Leigh. Your poor old mom is all laid up, but you should be out. Why don’t you go on out, now?”

  “Shall I tell Mr. Richter he has to come and cut this ring off your finger?”

  “Go on out,” she said, “and tell little Terry what I told you.” She opened her eyes and smiled. “I know you want to.” An ugly smile.

  “I’m not going to say anything.”

  She shook her head. “I was wrong to tell you. I don’t know why I told you. It was very, very wrong of me. I would not have told you if I were myself. You understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  She frowned and shook her head. “It’s only natural that you should go tell her now. A child cannot keep such a secret.”