“No tree?” the sheriff observes.
“Mom’s got the best ornaments, too.” Tommy says. “The snowflakes and dolls.”
“And the angels with her name in pink thread? I loved them,” Jimbo says. “Hey, I’m looking for power lines going down. Maybe people trapped in cars. Want to help out?”
Tommy shakes his head no.
“It’s your civic duty. I’ll deputize you,” Sheriff Murphy offers. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Tommy follows Jimbo over snowdrifts with a flashlight. Just outside town proper, a power line is dragging in snow, partially buried and emitting sparks. Jimbo hands him a fire extinguisher and tells him what to do. They find Mrs. Rossington in her car in a snow bank and dig her out with shovels. The sheriff wraps a blanket around her shoulders and calls paramedics.
Tommy hasn’t seen the Christmas decorations in town yet. They stop and walk to the square. The Christmas tree is thirty feet high and encrusted with sparkling lights, large red balls and extravagant layers of tinsel. An angel sits on top.
“Want a beer?” the sheriff asks.
He shakes his head no.
“Hot chocolate?” Jimbo offers.
Tommy accepts hot chocolate and stares at the tree. He’s forgotten what Christmas decorations are. Their elegant, fierce sparkle is fearless and assured. Holidays are a punctuation, too. They’re a pause or semi-colon in the winter, a flare promising the possibility of spring.
When the phone rings, he assumes it’s an ambulance or hospital. The governor declared a state of emergency and Sherriff Murphy closed the highway in both directions.
“Now, son, your mother’s had some trouble in Chicago,” his grandfather Horace begins. “Seems she burned her underwear. Got arrested for indecent exposure. I bailed her out. Don’t know where she went.”
The snow outside is four feet deep, almost halfway up the lampposts. He likes the way Grandfather Horace calls him ‘son.’
“Why did she do that?” he asks.
“Some women’s liberation protest,” Horace Bowen says.
“Why do I have to call dad Captain?” Tommy wonders.
“Well, son, he believes he’s gambling on a riverboat in a past century,” Horace reveals. “Truth is, he was born bad. Forty-six hours in labor and eleven pounds, ten ounces. Nearly killed his mother. She ended up dying at thirty-one.”
“Did she have red hair?” he wants to know.
“Nobody in six generations of this colony had that hair,” his grandfather assures him. “Born like that, he was. Full head of crimson curls. Whole scalp covered. Some thought it disturbed his thinking.”
Tommy is blond like his mother, small-boned and blue-eyed. His father has a mutation that interferes with his judgment. It’s a form of plaque barricading his syntactical flow like a dam in a creek. It’s a genetic heresy animals sense. In fact, Captain’s antipathy to the limited animal repertoire may have a more complex source. Maybe he’s receiving encrypted signals from another galaxy. When he’s a biochemist, he’ll analyze this abnormality.
“He didn’t file a missing person report,” Tommy tells the man who is his mother’s father.
“She’s not exactly missing, son,” Horace replies. “She was in Cook County Jail last week.”
School will be closed tomorrow and the roads impassable. Tommy knows he’ll be inside all day, scooping up dead angelfish with a ladle and eating canned tomato soup. His mother used the a Betty Crocker cookbook and he knew what dinner would be when he woke up. Meatloaf on Monday with beans and mashed potatoes. Wednesday was lasagna and raison and carrot salad.
“Maybe I could visit sometime,” he offers, cautiously. Tommy is shy and frightened and trying to man up. He’s in a cross current and has the sensation that he may fall down. He has frequent episodes of vertigo that he doesn’t mention to anyone. He’s grown five inches this year and feels his bones straining. His voice has changed, and he barely recognizes it. He may look entirely different when school resumes. Maybe he can assume an alias and start his life over. Or maybe he’ll be invisible.
Tommy knows he’s a compendium of accurate observations, but when he tries to assemble them, they collapse as disassociated images. Maybe he has a touch of his father’s contagion. That’s why Captain didn’t want him to join Boy Scouts and get an astronomy badge. In Boy Scouts he might have stumbled on Captain’s mystery with a telescope.
He wonders what his grandfather Horace Bowen thinks about the Heisenberg Principal of Uncertainty and reincarnation. What exactly is human nature? Do the Amish believe in Jesus and eternal damnation? Are they pacifists like his parents?
Tommy’s perceptions are vivid but contradictory. He believes in the scientific method and also the surreal and fantastic — charms and spells, demons and the afterlife, voodoo and the curses of shaman. In this plateau of overlapping riptides, he’s afflicted by alternative selves diverging and reappearing with clarity.
He’s convinced some can foretell and move objects with their thoughts. It’s a sensitivity some are born with like perfect pitch and eidetic memory. He wonders if the Amish believe in ghosts, vampires, evolution and a flaming hell. Who qualifies for punishment? Do they support capital punishment and hang the guilty? Do they cut off the hands of thieves? Is there a hierarchy of transgression? What about mothers who run away from their sons?
Tommy exists in spasms of sharp insight and overwhelming grief. He’s so many ages at once, he entertains the notion that he’s living his incarnations simultaneously. Galileo recants but gets house arrest anyway. Leo Szilard crosses a London street in 1922 and invents critical mass. He patents it and doesn’t get a dime. Copernicus’s books are banned and burned. Marie Curie is enraged and demands the return of her hands. At White Sands, Oppenheimer chants, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” in Sanskrit. Teller calls the FBI and rats him out.
“I know a lot about bluetongue and colic, abscesses and bacterial infections,” he finally offers.
“Sure you do, son,” Horace says. “I’ll think on it.”
His grandfather telephones the following summer. Tommy is observing pink finches with binoculars. They’ve constructed nests in the eaves of the porch between twisted branches of Wisteria his mother planted. There are blue finches, too, and huge raucous blue jays. A pack of grackles stayed a noisy week and flew away. Robins with burnt orange breasts search for worms on the lawn. A pair of small cardinals keep crashing into the front windows.
“Kamikazes,” his father says, walking out to the Buick. Captain has a particular distaste for birds. “Somebody dares bring me a parrot or canary, I’ll eat it.”
Tommy has read the biographies of physicists, chemists, biologists and astronomers. Many began as naturalists. Science is about observation. He has a book titled Birds of Pennsylvania with photographs and descriptions he finds confusing. He can’t establish an absolute border between black and charcoal gray. It depends on the sunlight, passing clouds and sight angles. The question of how they are flying is ambiguous. He’s watches nuthatches, Carolina wrens, and chickadees. If he’d joined Boy Scouts, he’d instantly recognize raptors. Their wings flutter and ripple as they fly. Are they hawks or turkey vultures? Captain is in a poker tournament at Flaming Arrow. Last month, he finished third.
“Your mother got in some trouble in Tucson, Arizona, son,” Horace Bowen tells him. “Seems she was sleeping on a golf course. They charged her with trespassing and vagrancy. Dragged her away in cuffs.”
“Is Mom crazy?” he finally dares to ask.
“More like scratching an itch with a blowtorch,” Horace says. “She used to chase lightning. Didn’t play with dolls. Wouldn’t touch them. She treated them like poison. She was barn building at 10. Then she wins the Gold Crescent. First time a girl won. Just turned 16. She had a perfect score. They couldn’t deny her. She had scholarship offers from Harvard and McGill. She was packing her suitcase.”
“Where was she going?” he wants to know.
“Ber
keley, California.” Horace says.
“What happened?” Tommy asks.
“He came back on a motorcycle. Claimed he bought it for twenty dollars. He’s wearing a black silk cape and top hat. Looks like he’s going to a party with the royal family. He’s moving like a feral cat, fast and balanced and graceful-like. So tall, you have to look up to see his face. It sets an attitude. Everybody’s craning their neck and he’s acting like nature exalted him. Big as a hill, he is, and a certified veterinarian. Talking all lofty about Woodstock and stopping the Vietnam War. He’s waving his arms around like an orchestra conductor. Few years before, he won the Governor General’s Gold Crescent, too.”
“I know,” Tommy says.
“Her score was better,” Horace informs him.
“Why did you let them stay?” he wonders.
“They were purified by sincerity,” Horace answers. “Two wildfires, they were. We thought they’d put each other out naturally.”
“What happened?” Tommy asks.
“Wind changed direction,” his grandfather replies.
There is a pause. It expands like accordion suitcases with concealed compartments with zippers and flaps that snap shut. You could put the forest past 5 Eagle Creek inside, all of Revolution Hill, Gypsy Ridge and Cistern of the Sage. But if the wind abruptly stopped, the suitcase with the forest would drop through the ground. A tunnel would open and you might fall to the core of the Earth.
“Can you make her come back?” his voice has wavered, then cracked.
“I surely cannot,” Horace immediately replies. He’s surprised.
“We can get a private detective. He’ll find Mom and bring her home.” He’s absolutely certain Sheriff Murphy will go with him. They’ll track her down, leap out and grab her. Jimbo can put her in handcuffs and carry her back.
“You can’t pluck somebody from their destiny,” Horace tells him. It’s a chide. “You can’t walk on water or raise the dead. He can call himself Captain. He can say abracadabra. He can dance with a bear. But we each have our own destiny. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Tommy replies.
Captain is preoccupied and rarely speaks. It’s as if words have failed him. He doesn’t eat for days, then devours all the soup in the kitchen in one night. Tommy picks up twenty-three cans from the floor and the wrappers from two boxes of crackers. His father has taken to going to Brenda’s Bakery and buying a dozen donuts. Pink boxes of glazed, jelly and old fashioneds with white icing are stacked next to the soups and scattered on the floor of his study.
His father parks the Buick near the clinic, plays his Best of Dylan cassette, but can’t force himself to get out of the car. He explains that his legs feel like wood and won’t respond to his commands. He goes to a physician in Philadelphia and returns with a bag of medicines. Later he claims he’s allergic to them.
“It’s like dipping my head in a bucket of cement,” Captain says.
His father says he wants to take a shower, but there’s an abnormality with the water. Days aren’t washing off like they should. There’s a thickness to the water, a sense of stained inks, the skin of the drowned, and what’s leaked from gutters. It’s the run-off from ruined lives in apartments with storm clouds in them. Lovers shout insults in a patois implying punishment and exposure. Outside, trees shudder, seized with vertigo, and Cancan in the nervous breeze. Constellations vanish as they scream. Captain says he needs to investigate the pipes for corrosion and rust, or something worse.
His father goes to another doctor in Boston. Captain walks in circles in his study for hours, often all night. Tommy hears his pacing even when Captain is barefoot.
Captain has an entire shelf of medicine bottles. One morning he throws them against the wall, gathers the scattered pills and tosses them in the trash. He can’t fall asleep and he can’t wake up. Then he cuts clinic hours to afternoons only. Blue circles form under his eyes and he’s pale as a toad’s belly.
They don’t celebrate holidays. No one visits and they aren’t invited anywhere. It’s as if they’ve also vanished. Occasionally, they watch football on his father’s TV. They go trout fishing twice.
“I hate all God’s fucking critters,” Captain often says as he passes, humming “Tangled Up In Blue.”
Tommy is torpid and becalmed in his bedroom. Captain claims he won’t extricate himself from Lincoln Street. His father thinks he’ll just carry his bag of dead guppies and the stain of no merit badges into a future he’s already despoiled.
Captain makes it clear that medical school is mandatory. Or else he’ll end up an assistant professor in a make-shift lab with teenage assistants. They’ll break the minimal equipment and he’ll have no budget to replace it. Tommy’s going to put himself in prison with a 25-to-life sentence.
“Studying for the priesthood?” Captain asks, staring down at him. Tommy sits at his desk and feels miniaturized and incompetent.
He checks the mailbox every day. Tommy is convinced a communication from his mother is coming. Logic dictates an exchange of addresses and photographs, and Christmas and birthday cards. She will provide a detailed explanation. At the least his mother will send a postcard.
Tommy wonders if she considered what would happen to him on Lincoln Street in the barricaded late evenings when Captain anchors the Buick and returns from a twelve-day prowl. Captain makes the house shake when he walks in, stamping ice from his boots. His hat, sprinkled with snow, is barely attached to his kelp-red tangle of hair, and his father’s head almost brushes the ceiling. Captain doesn’t say hello. He may fast for days or devour all the soup in an hour. He claims his head is encased in bricks. Then he goes into his study. He closes and locks the door.
Tommy is certain his mother will come to his high school graduation. That’s why he cut his hair short and bought a three-piece suit he can’t afford. That’s why he’s valedictorian.
Tommy stands at the podium on stage and surveys the auditorium row by row, memorizing family groupings and searching for solitary women. His mother is thirty-three. It’s spring and she’ll wear a pastel suit with high heels dyed to match and pearls around her neck. She’ll have a short stylish haircut and a square hat like Jackie Kennedy. She’ll smell like Hyacinths and blueberries.
“Joining the Marines?” Captain comes up behind him. “You all dressed up for Mommy?”
Captain slaps the back of his new pin-striped suit as if he wants to leave his handprint on the fabric. His father wants to soil and brand him. There’s nothing friendly about it.
“She’s not coming, Thomas. She’s not sending birthday gifts or Christmas cards. No postcards, either. Just like I told you.” Captain smiles.
It’s ambivalent and unconvincing, Tommy decides. His father is afraid she might actually appear. Then he’d be accountable. His father’s face is the wrong postcard.
Captain is wearing his riverboat gambler’s hat, and his one sports jacket. He hasn’t taken it to the cleaners for years. It’s covered with cat and dog fur, and stained with sheep urine, cow pus and blood. Streaks of Betadine resemble skid marks from a collision that permanently scarred a highway. Yellow paint-like smears encrust his sleeves. It’s mucus that leaked from the eyes of sick cows. Hay protrudes from his pocket and sticks in the brim of his hat. Captain doesn’t own a tie. His father calls it a statement.
“I’m going to Cal,” he informs his father.
“You’re never getting off Lincoln Street,” Captain replies.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Jimbo offers. He’s wearing his dress uniform. It’s obsidian black and trimmed with gold. The buttons and braid on his cap are like lanterns. He’s polished his shoes and he’s wearing white gloves. They’re stark against his black uniform and seem pasted on and detached from his body.
“Where’s Cal at?” he asks.
“Across the bay from San Francisco,” Tom tells Jimbo.
“Sounds like he’s leaving town.” Jimbo glances at Captain. “Getting the 49ers, too.”
“We’
ll see,” his father says.
During Tom’s senior year, his grandfather telephones on a warm late afternoon in spring. Redwoods in an accidental row form an uninterrupted dark green fence in front of his bungalow. Their bark smells like wharves and cinnamon. There’s no wind and the bay is a pale blue devoid of whitecaps. It’s asleep. The only motion is seagulls passing.
“She’s done it this time, son,” his grandfather begins. His tone is weary and distant. “Seems she’s been sleeping on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Been there a while, too. Living in derelict hotels and camping under a pier. They charged her with vagrancy, illegal use of public lands, and selling without a vendor’s license.”
“Selling what?” he wonders.
“Seems she had a stall on the boardwalk. She’d find shells and driftwood. Make necklaces and such.” Horace tells him, “I had to get a lawyer.”
Tom envisions his mother wearing an apron with Mt. Kilimanjaro stenciled on the front. She’s sewn on dozens of extra pockets. She’s in the tide line, collecting what’s fallen from cargo ships. She’s found paper umbrellas printed with pink peonies and cranes, and a piece of fuselage from a plane thought lost off Zanzibar. Once she found a swallow’s nest with six undamaged scarlet eggs. She won’t talk to cops. She’s taken a vow of silence and they wouldn’t believe her anyway.
During his graduate school summers, Tom drives to Los Angeles, finds a hotel on the beach, and walks for days searching. He picks up tiny top shells and small-ridged clamshells and carefully places them in his pocket.
In late afternoon, Tom sits on the pier. He recognizes that all ports are mythical and primal. It’s the beginning of time and oceans don’t have permanent names. It’s before the Silk Road. Women are routinely abandoned near wharves. They’re collateral damage from an intrigue gone astray.
His mother wasn’t born in Manitoba. She came from a village on a delta where fields are fertile with sunflowers. Barges brought spices, statues of new gods, perfumes, mirrors, and capes made from the feathers of jungle birds. His mother became a woman of the wharves. When they’re hungry, the women rip barnacles off pilings with their hands and eat them raw. They knock their teeth out and their fingers bleed.
A Good Day for Seppuku Page 21
