The Mask Keeper

Chapter 11: Open Face

Chapter Eight

Open Face

Hollis had been looking at the mask for a while before he said anything about it. He had his chin down and one finger working at the underside of his jaw, which was what he did before he had an opinion.

"I know a woman in Ohio makes those," he said. "Basswood. She steams it and carves it warm, and she keeps her clamps in a bucket of water so they don't take the bench with them when they let go. I sat in her shop most of an afternoon one time, watching her cut a set for a lodge up there that does its own rite in the spring." He turned his head, not quite toward Theo and not quite away from him. "That's a wood thing, in my experience. Everywhere I've been. Wood."

"It's paper," Theo said.

"I can see it's paper. What's the paper for?"

"Might be a cost thing," Voss said, from the side. She had her clipboard against her hip and her pen in her hand and she was looking at the mask and not at him. "They've got the whole operation running. Not that I'd know. At least it isn't printed plastic."

"It isn't a cost thing."

Theo heard how flat that came out. He heard it land, and he let it stay where it landed.

Two days in this county, and he had said more about his family's business to these people than he had said to anybody outside the family in three years, and now they were standing around a tray of his mother's cooking with their hands behind their backs, discussing the family like it was a company with a purchasing department.

He put two fingers on the table.

"Wood is for the one being asked," he said. "The whole face goes under wood. Sealed, and nobody's face is behind it. It hangs at home with the others and it doesn't belong to the man who carved it."

He tapped the paper above his own brow.

"The ones who do the asking wear paper, and paper doesn't cover you. Open face. Anybody standing in front of you can see whose chin is under it. That's what it's for. If it slips, or a tie goes, or somebody in a crowd turns it round on you, then nobody has to stand there afterward and argue about who was where."

"So it's paper because of an argument," Quarles said, pleased, and wrote it on the inside of his folder flap in small ink letters.

"It's paper because of an argument that ended badly," Theo said.

Quarles stopped writing. He looked up, and then he wrote that down as well.

Hollis took his hand off his jaw and put it in his pocket. He looked at the paper another second, and at the tray, and at the boy wearing it, and whatever he had been going to say he took away with him and stood with the rest of them.

Behind the table, in the corner by the coffee machine, one of Nye's students leaned in to the other.

The two of them had come in the same gray rain shells and Theo had to go by the notebook to tell them apart. Marisol had the notebook.

"—off the feathers," she said, not low enough.

"The bronze," Wes said. "The thing they pulled out of the pit. It had feathers on it."

"Right. So why isn't he asking the mother?" A page turned. "The big one. If the son's standing right there and the mother's standing right there—"

"You don't trouble two for one job," Wes said.

"Huh," Marisol said, and turned another page.

Theo kept his eyes on the tray.

It was a fair guess. It was very nearly the right one.

There was no schedule in his house. There was a wall. Nine feet of it, paper and wood and one black lacquered thing older than the house, and the understanding was that a man had one up there he went to first. Theo did not have one of those.

For a year he had taken whichever face came nearest his hand. For two summers he had taken whichever came nearest the door, so that people coming up the walk would see a good one while they paid. He was sixteen. Behind a table was where he stood most of the year, and a face was a thing you showed.

What he had not told these people, and would not, was the other reason.

In the pit, with the bronze under his glove and the feathers rough through the cotton, something had gone up his wrist and into his arm. It had not been cold. It had not been a word. It had been the feeling of being looked at from an angle he could not turn his head to, and it had stayed with him up the ladder and through the rest of that day, and four hours later, wet-handed and hurrying, he had reached up and taken down the one with the feathers.

He wet his lips and began.

The tune had no notation. It rode high in the middle of the line, stepped down at the end, and came back up a step higher:

*Before the singing, the branch knows the year.*

*Before the asking, the fire is lit.*

*Smoke makes a room into a hall.*

*The gate is open. The name comes through.*

He held the last word longer than it wanted and let it fall, and started again from the step above.

The trailer had gone quiet, and it was not the quiet of people listening. It was the quiet of people who have decided to make no noise at all.

The pump knocked four beats and held and knocked again. The oil from the frying still sat in the air over the food and the heat had nowhere to go, and the plastic on the windows moved in and out a little with the door.

Theo closed his eyes.

Orange at first, off the work lamp, and his own breath going in and out over the hum.

Then the orange went out from the inside of his lids and the trailer was not there.

Two eyes.

Sideways on. The outer corners of them ran up, so that the shape went out toward the temple instead of straight across, and the left lid sat a fraction lower than the right. There was no brow, no cheek, no line of jaw. Nothing to hold them in. It was like finding two coins in the road with nobody standing near them.

Theo held still and looked back.

The pump had stopped. When he listened for it, it went off somewhere and he could not find it again.

The eyes did not come closer. The lower lid came up, a little, and that was all, and in the long smoke-lit nothing that small closing was the largest thing that had happened to him all night.

He went on singing. The eyes stayed.

The smoke came to him first: sweet gum, cold and thin, one stick in a tin lid and not a bundle of it, and under the smoke the fat of a fish cooked twice.

He knew the boy.

He had seen him before, in the years when the food went out cold. Cut small. Set out by somebody who had thought about it. He had liked that food, and he had not been given it a second time.

Nobody had asked him for anything in a long while. That was not a complaint. It was a count.

The boy sang. The words were old and the mouth was young and the mouth was getting them right.

He looked at him.

The boy's eyes were shut, and he saw anyway, and his breath went out of him and stayed out, and his hands did not move.

It was no wonder to him. People who saw him did not forget it, and this one had seen him once and had come back with better food.

His eyes were bright. He was not aware of it, and it made no difference.

He was owed the food, and he had nearly forgotten to take it, and that had not happened to him in a long time.

Him, then.

Theo came back into the room on the last word of the line with his voice still going, and he put the cup straight at the head of the tray, though it was already straight, and he checked the incense, which had burned down about a third with the ash holding.

The Dipper first: thumb and two fingers open, the hand a man makes to measure a plank he is not going to buy. Then the hook, which is the same hand with the little finger brought round into the palm.

*One point, and the world goes wide.*

*One bar, and the month lies across it.*

*All that is crooked comes up.*

*All of it comes up and goes out.*

His fingertips came down to Nye's left eye and stopped a hair off it. Close enough to see the wet on the eyeball. Close enough to see the red in the white. His hand was steady. He noticed that it was, and there was no time to be pleased about it.

Nye's head went sideways.

That was the whole of the warning. His mouth came open and something came out of it, and kept coming.

It was clear and it was thick and it had a grain in it, white flecks suspended and turning over as they came down. It did not come out of him the way sick comes out of a person. It came in ropes, and it came with force behind it, and it went across the blanket and over the side of the cot and onto the floor, and there was nobody in that trailer holding a bucket, because nobody had believed it would work.

Theo got back two steps without deciding to.

There was enough of it to fill half a stock pot. The smell came a half second behind the sight of it, wet and cold and specific, and everybody in the trailer thought of the same animal at the same moment and nobody said which one.

"Cover that," Hollis said. He had not raised his voice and he had not moved from where he stood. "Soil first, then sweep it out and put it under, past the fence, deep. Not in the barrels. Under."

Wes and Marisol were at the door with the shovel before he finished. Marisol came back for the roll of paper towels and went out again, and the door banged, and through the plastic over the window Theo watched two shapes go sideways across the gravel with their heads down.

By the time the door shut the second time, Nye's arms had come loose.

His hands opened. His knees went flat. His eyes came round the room and found people in it one at a time, and stopped on the work lamp, and then on nothing in particular.

He said one word.

"Hungry."

Theo got in front of the cot with his hands up, like a man working through a crowd.

"Let me—" he said. "Move. I want to see what it did."

His hip complained when he crouched. He ignored it.

The broth had been on the burner since six. He got the bowl off the tray and put it into Nye's hands, and got both of Nye's hands round it, and Nye drank and the sound he made was not a word.

"Curd," Theo said. "Here." He set the plate on the blanket. Then he reached for the fish.

"No," Quarles said. His hand came down flat on the plate.

"Four days on a bag—"

"Four days on a bag, and look at him." Quarles did not lift his hand. "Give him the curd."

Nye looked at the fish for a while. Then he ate the tofu, and he ate it fast, and he did not take his eyes off the plate that had been moved away from him.

Quarles said, to the room, "Are you all here for the rite, or did you come for the dinner?"

Nobody answered him. Everybody's eyes went to the plate and came back.

People ask for the offering food after a rite. It goes out to the children and it is supposed to make them brave. Nobody in Theo's family had ever handed it to a man four days into a locked body, but the chicken was clear and the curd was soft, and he had picked all of it for a man who could not sit up.

Voss wrote the time down on her form. Her hand was not steady and she wrote it anyway.

Nye put the bowl down and sat back against the wall of the trailer and breathed out and rubbed his own stomach with a hand that was still slow.

"I want to say something properly," he said. "Before anybody starts explaining at me." He turned his head. "You. It was you."

Theo still had the mask on his head, tilted back, the ties hanging. He put a hand up and then did nothing with it. "I tried it," he said. "That's all."

"I could hear," Nye said. "The whole time. I could hear everything."

Nobody said anything to that.

"I could hear, and I couldn't—" Nye moved one hand to show what he couldn't. "You're very young to be so—"

He stopped. His eyes had gone past Theo's shoulder to the plate Quarles had taken away.

"—delicious," he said.

Theo said, "What?"

"The fish," Nye said. "That's the fish. I have never had carp like that, and I have been on a bag for four days, and I could smell it the entire time." He put his hand out toward the plate. "That's what I meant. That is a very good fish."

Wes laughed first, and then Hollis, and then it went round the trailer and it went on longer than the joke was worth. Four days of a man not moving, and here he was with his hand out.

Quarles looked at Theo and then at the plate and then moved his own hand off it. Theo carried it over. Nye got two pieces of the carp before anybody could stop him a second time.

"Wait," Marisol said.

She had come back in without the shovel and she was standing in the doorway with her notebook against her chest. Her pen came up off the page.

"That's it? That's the whole thing? You call it, and you feed it, and—" She turned the notebook round and looked at it as though the answer were in it. "Doesn't it have to go back?"

"Sure," Theo said. "You send it off. That's the last part. It's a form."

He set his own plate down and shut his eyes.

Nothing. No eyes, no smoke. No sense of anybody standing at his shoulder, and none of anybody having left it either.

He had never had one work before. He had stood behind a table most of his life and had never once had a man get up in front of him, and when this one did he had gone after him with a bowl in his hands like a man running to a fire.

He did not know whether it had gone. He did not say that either.

"Here," he said. "I'll do it."

He made the crane. One hand, fingers together, thumb out, lifted and let go.

"There."

"That's it?" Wes said.

"That's it."

Wes looked at Marisol. Marisol wrote something down and did not underline it.

Theo got the mask off with one hand. The ties had lain against his neck all night and they were wet, and the paper at the brow was soft with sweat where it had been against his forehead. He turned the mask over and set it face down at the end of the table, on the folded cloth, and the red at the brow came off on the cloth in a print.

The fish was going cold. He picked a piece out with his fingers and ate it standing up, because otherwise it would go in the bin.