Blood Makes Noise Read Online Free Page B

eleven-year-old mind mind horrifying, thrilling, impossibly important. When it’s over he stands with the gang, wired and anxious and a little sick, making it better with bravado. Making it go away. Finally he remembers Maria, goes to the churning wastepipe, and she’s not there. Annoyed at first, he calls her name harshly, looks briefly around the mushy rise, and decides, even as a shiver rattles his guts, that she got bored and left.
    He starts home, slowly, then faster, then finally in a blind, stumbling panic. Her room is empty and Michael stands on its threshold, feeling the stare of her only doll.
    His parents were in the kitchen, and hadn’t heard him come in. He waited, shivering, till they saw him, blurted out that Maria was gone in a single, tangled breath. Watched his mother’s facegrow and distort into reaches unfathomable. His father leapt from the table, demanded to be taken to the spot. Neighbors followed—the D’Annunzios and Spitalieris, Calabresis and Mottos. They searched the banks, the shrubs, pulled the ears of each boy till they were satisfied none knew. Except Michael. No one pulled Michael’s ears. He was left on the muddy embankment, alone.
    They searched till nightfall, then beyond with lanterns, calling her name, roving like fireflies over the tannery grounds. Michael sat in the dirt and watched as his father—crouched in the wan glow of a neighbor’s lamp, tears streaming his cheeks—plunged both arms to the shoulder in to the roiling entrails of the canal, raising them empty and stiff and bleached with acid.
    And Michael lay down, pulled the earth over his head, and willed himself to die.
    There was never a funeral, just a day they gave up looking. His mother never cried, his father never cried again, and both seemed to lose track of Michael. He lay in his room, missed school, left at first light each day to sit above the pipe, where he coaxed clouds of lye and blood to scald him clean. He tried to imagine Maria in the blurry rush below, tried to imagine her tiny bones rolling and mingling with those of steers and sheep. His mind would reach from there to death and forever empty night, would just touch its truth before disappearing under a smothering curtain of survival.
    They may have tried to carry on as a family, but the rhythm was gone. Meals grew silent, his father came home later and later, and Michael’s mother retreated to a place Michael could not follow.
    She burned herself sometimes now at the wood stove, sometimes forgot to make dinner, sometimes never got out of bed. When one day she didn’t come home at nightfall, her husband and neighbors took to the streets, calling her name. It was Michael who found her, above the tannery pipe, staring into the rust-colored water below. He didn’t know if she’d heard him approach, but sheturned in his direction, looked at him with eyes long moved on to other things, and whispered, “I have nothing. Nothing in this world is mine.”
    And Michael fell howling at her feet. Gurgled in a finished voice that he was sorry—for Maria, for being born—that he would do anything, anything, if she would only come back to him.
    And his mother stroked his hair absently, like he were a vaguely familiar dog, and listened to the rush of tannery waste speak soft, soothing words.
    Eight months later her body burned with cancer. She embraced it, shoveled it her flesh. At the end her husband was there, her relatives, the neighborhood priest. Everyone but Michael. They’d forgotten to fetch him, and on the curb he waited in his Sunday best, drawing pointless circles of chalk, till someone remembered to tell him she was dead.
    The next day his father packed their bags, closed the apartment, and, without a word between them, booked a ticket back to Chicago.
    He died on Michael’s first day of college. No brother to sort through a pile of frozen bodies, no wife to throw herself at his casket, no daughter to weep softly. Only quiet Michael, not tossing