The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai

Author:Rebecca Makkai
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-07-10T04:00:00+00:00

PART III

1929

IN THE FIELD: THE TRIBE

Zilla was a moving statue in the torchlight. If Eddie could, he would love her: her hair a black puddle, her teeth a broken necklace. Her white throat, thrust forward when she laughed. Viktor, though—Viktor Osin did love her, or else what was this filament between them, across the night?

There were only the eight: Samantha had stayed back.

Marlon Moore led them all to the teepees, which were just as he’d described: cloth cones in the field, big enough for all to squeeze inside just one. They passed the flask again. Vital to maintain the drunken state in which the plan was hatched, lest they sober up and discover themselves ridiculous. It was only a few drinks into the evening that Marlon had volunteered his story—dragged by a colleague’s wife to last year’s Chippeway Ball—and several drinks later that the joke had started: A true Chippeway Ball should feature more scalping and war whoops and nudity. The sun had set, additional bottles brought to the terrace, when it became a plan, when Viktor and Marlon and Eddie drove to the college where Marlon taught, and broke into the theater’s costume shop and returned with headdresses and face paint.

Across the lawn, windows full of elegant locals. Long tables, candles.

The eight undressed in the open teepee by torchlight, laughing and shushing, leaving clothes in distinct piles to speed escape. Zilla, muscled, flat as a board. Viktor—with his impossible limbs, his dancer’s limbs—staring at her like a drugged man. Ludo, pale for an Italian, a thatch of dark fur on his chest. Fannie and Josephine, the White Rabbits: one doughy, one thin as rope. Armand Cox (preposterous name!), his whole being covered in golden hairs. Marlon with his little potbelly, stretching his legs to run. Two weeks ago, Eddie hadn’t been able to keep them all straight. And now he imagined he’d know their voices to his dying day.

Another adjustment: All day long, in front of his pen or typewriter, he was as alone as he’d ever been. But at night, he was a “we.” Something he hadn’t felt since childhood, since he’d climbed in bed with his sister in the afternoons, since she’d let him wear her shoes. He was part of a first-person plural.

Some of them wore the headdresses, and the others stuck loose feathers in their hair. Their faces: red and black stripes, yellow down the nose.

Armand and Ludo, leading the parade, each grabbed one lawn torch to hold aloft.

Zilla started the war cry, hand pulsing on her open mouth, and the others joined and rode the wave of noise onto the club porch and through the open glass doors to the dining room.

The first thing Eddie saw, he told the others later, was the fat woman in the green dress, the way her fork flew from her hand, lettuce still speared on the tines.

The tribe whooped and screeched and circled the sea of tables three times. A great deal of anatomical flapping: some high, some

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