Mr. Rogers at Night

MR. ROGERS AT NIGHT /Katherine Estill HIS WIFE told him at the dinner table that it wasn't right for male and female cousins to be living together under one roof. "It was bad enough when their grandmother was alive," Alice Rogers said. "Cora was so deaf those two could have been humping till daylight for all she'd know." "She was only deaf in one ear," Orson Rogers said, extracting a piece of gristle from his mouth. His wife always bought cheap roasts, and he felt swindled. "She only heard what she wanted to hear." Alice Rogers tapped her finger on the table in a precise, aggravating beat. "I asked Cora Hendricks which side she slept on at night, and she said the right. That's her good ear! Orson, that woman winked at me; said it was a blessing to be deaf in one ear. Ail you had to do was sleep on the good one. The walls could fall down around you for all you cared." Alice wiped her fingers over her mouth. "What do you suppose kind of noises she was shutting out?" His wife's voice took on a hypnotic depth and power whenever she talked about other people. Initially, it had been the husky magnetism of her voice that had drawn him to her. For several Sundays during the summer he was twenty-five, he had listened to her read the Bible, then proposed to her like a man spellbound. Her oratory had stirred him to imagine what passion lay behind her words. After he married her, he decided it had been the idea of burning in the afterlife. Alice said, "I bet you anything he's been in her pants." The coarseness of his wife's phrase produced for him an image of Loretta Hendricks' underpants, worn out and almost grey as they flapped from the clothesline behind their house next door. He imagined Loretta pulling them loosely over her hips. "It's incest," Alice said. "And they're also under age." "The boy's eighteen," he said, as he swallowed a half chewed lump of meat. "Loretta's sixteen—the same age their mothers were when they made those two. It's just a matter of time, Orson, before he knocks her up." She leaned over the table. "They've got the same blood." As this· revelation made little impression, she lowered her voice. "You know, I had a dream that girl brought a baby with scales into this world. It was hideous," she said. "But worse still was the feel of it. You ran your hand over that butt, and scales would flake up against your palm." Orson wondered how it would have been the first time the boy had The Missouri Review · 143 gotten into her pants. They grew up in the same house. As children, Orson had seen them splashing naked as monkeys in the rubber pool behind the back porch, where the old woman sat with her hands folded, absorbing the coolness of the shade. Always there were children's games, he thought. At first innocent—but later, by the time the boy was, say fourteen, it would have been natural for him to step over. He must have been feeling her up for the last four years. Four years, he thought. The boy, Frank, was tall and lean now. In summer his hair went blonde at his forelocks, and he liked to saunter shirtless around his yard with a cigarette hanging over his lip. At the barber shop, the men said that Frank belonged to a gang that stole car parts, but he'd never been caught. Orson dabbed on shaving cream with a soft brush, covering the jowls of Darrell Laird. Laird was his wife's brother and manager of the bank. When he finished, he ran his razor over the strop pulled taut from the chair, and watched Laird's pouch-like throat. As a young man, Orson had considered being a barber the perfect profession. He was among men all day; he had his own business and worked for no sonofabitch above him. But now he often considered himself the servant of every man...