Read Online Memory Wall: Stories by Anthony Doerr - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Anthony Doerr
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former states. He hears no more fromdownstairs except the grandfather clock, banging away in the living room. Roger has been shot, he thinks. Someone has shot Roger. And Roger has the cartridge with the
X
on it in his shirt pocket.
A low breeze drifts through the open window. The pages on Alma’s wall fan out in front of him like a flower, like a mind turned inside out.
Luvo listens to the clock, counts to a hundred. He can still see Harold in the gravel beside the Land Cruiser, his face a mask, dust stuck to his eyes, saliva gleaming on his chin and throat.
Eventually Luvo crawls across the floor and peers down the stairwell. Roger’s tall body is at the bottom, slumped over onto itself, folded almost in half. His hat is still on. His arms are crimped underneath him. A portion of his face is gone. A halo of blood has pooled around his head on the tile.
Luvo lies back on the carpet, sees Alma’s immaculate room at the Twelve Apostles Hotel, sees a mountain range rush past the dusty windscreen of a truck. Sees Harold’s legs twitching beneath him in the gravel.
What is there in Luvo’s life that makes sense? Dusk in the Karoo becomes dawn in Cape Town. What happened four years ago is relived twenty minutes ago. An old woman’s life becomes a young man’s. Memory-watcher meets memory-keeper.
Luvo stands. He plucks cartridges off the wall and sticks them in his pockets. Forty, fifty of them. Once his pockets are full he moves toward the stairwell, but pauses and looks back. The little room, the spotless carpet, the washed window. On the bedspread a thousand identical roses intertwine. He takes the photograph of Harold walking out of the sea and slips it inside his shirt. He sets Cartridge 4510 in the center of the coverlet where someone might find it.
Then he stands at the top of the stairwell, collecting himself. From the living room—from Roger—rises a smell of bloodand gunpowder. An odor more grim and nauseating than Luvo expected.
Luvo is about to walk down the stairs when the rape gate rattles and he hears a key slip into the deadbolt of the front door.
C LOCK
Perhaps the last thing in the world Pheko is prepared to see is a man facedown at the bottom of Alma’s stainless steel staircase lying in a puddle of blood.
Temba is asleep again, a hot weight across his father’s back. Pheko is out of breath and sweating from carrying the boy up the hill. He sees the dead man first and then the blood but still it takes him several more seconds to absorb it all. Parallelograms of morning light fall through the balcony doors.
Down the hallway, in the kitchen, Alma is sitting at the kitchen table, steadily turning the pages of a magazine. She is barefoot.
The questions come too quickly to sort out. How did this man get in? Was he killed with a gun? Did Mrs. Alma do the killing? Where is the gun? Pheko feels the heat radiating off his son into his back. He wants suddenly for everything to go away. The whole world to go away.
I should run, he thinks. I should not be here. Instead he carries his son over the body, stepping over the blood, past Alma in the kitchen. He continues out the back door of the kitchen and into the garden and sets the boy in a lounge chair and returns inside to retrieve the white chenille blanket off the foot of Alma’s bed and wraps the boy in it. Then inside again for Alma’s pill bottles. His hands shake as he tries to read the labels. He ends up choosing two types of antibiotic of whichthere are full bottles and crushing them together into a spoonful of honey. Alma does not look up from the pages as she turns them, one, then the next, then the next, her stare lost and unknowable and reptilian.
“Thirsty,” she says.
“Just a moment, Mrs. Alma,” says Pheko. In the garden he sticks the spoon in Temba’s mouth and makes sure the boy swallows it down and then he goes back into the kitchen and pockets the antibiotics and listens to Alma snap the pages forward awhile, and puts on
X
on it in his shirt pocket.
A low breeze drifts through the open window. The pages on Alma’s wall fan out in front of him like a flower, like a mind turned inside out.
Luvo listens to the clock, counts to a hundred. He can still see Harold in the gravel beside the Land Cruiser, his face a mask, dust stuck to his eyes, saliva gleaming on his chin and throat.
Eventually Luvo crawls across the floor and peers down the stairwell. Roger’s tall body is at the bottom, slumped over onto itself, folded almost in half. His hat is still on. His arms are crimped underneath him. A portion of his face is gone. A halo of blood has pooled around his head on the tile.
Luvo lies back on the carpet, sees Alma’s immaculate room at the Twelve Apostles Hotel, sees a mountain range rush past the dusty windscreen of a truck. Sees Harold’s legs twitching beneath him in the gravel.
What is there in Luvo’s life that makes sense? Dusk in the Karoo becomes dawn in Cape Town. What happened four years ago is relived twenty minutes ago. An old woman’s life becomes a young man’s. Memory-watcher meets memory-keeper.
Luvo stands. He plucks cartridges off the wall and sticks them in his pockets. Forty, fifty of them. Once his pockets are full he moves toward the stairwell, but pauses and looks back. The little room, the spotless carpet, the washed window. On the bedspread a thousand identical roses intertwine. He takes the photograph of Harold walking out of the sea and slips it inside his shirt. He sets Cartridge 4510 in the center of the coverlet where someone might find it.
Then he stands at the top of the stairwell, collecting himself. From the living room—from Roger—rises a smell of bloodand gunpowder. An odor more grim and nauseating than Luvo expected.
Luvo is about to walk down the stairs when the rape gate rattles and he hears a key slip into the deadbolt of the front door.
C LOCK
Perhaps the last thing in the world Pheko is prepared to see is a man facedown at the bottom of Alma’s stainless steel staircase lying in a puddle of blood.
Temba is asleep again, a hot weight across his father’s back. Pheko is out of breath and sweating from carrying the boy up the hill. He sees the dead man first and then the blood but still it takes him several more seconds to absorb it all. Parallelograms of morning light fall through the balcony doors.
Down the hallway, in the kitchen, Alma is sitting at the kitchen table, steadily turning the pages of a magazine. She is barefoot.
The questions come too quickly to sort out. How did this man get in? Was he killed with a gun? Did Mrs. Alma do the killing? Where is the gun? Pheko feels the heat radiating off his son into his back. He wants suddenly for everything to go away. The whole world to go away.
I should run, he thinks. I should not be here. Instead he carries his son over the body, stepping over the blood, past Alma in the kitchen. He continues out the back door of the kitchen and into the garden and sets the boy in a lounge chair and returns inside to retrieve the white chenille blanket off the foot of Alma’s bed and wraps the boy in it. Then inside again for Alma’s pill bottles. His hands shake as he tries to read the labels. He ends up choosing two types of antibiotic of whichthere are full bottles and crushing them together into a spoonful of honey. Alma does not look up from the pages as she turns them, one, then the next, then the next, her stare lost and unknowable and reptilian.
“Thirsty,” she says.
“Just a moment, Mrs. Alma,” says Pheko. In the garden he sticks the spoon in Temba’s mouth and makes sure the boy swallows it down and then he goes back into the kitchen and pockets the antibiotics and listens to Alma snap the pages forward awhile, and puts on
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