by Camille Roy
—How big was that sack?
—Really, really big, Willa answered vaguely.
It suited my mood to be there, after it was over. That feeling of missing it. Being in the right place at the wrong time. The whole crew had been at that party, waiters, bartenders, maids, the crowd that had streamed into town to nourish the tourists. They were abnormally muscular and sleek, that was a requirement. It was a brilliant afternoon. People sat by the river, drinking beer and strumming guitars, or they waited in a line outside the cabin. No one was allowed to stay in there for more than fifteen minutes, but you could go back as many times as you wanted. Inside the cabin there were rows of bent backs and haunches in gleaming bike shorts.
I never got to the river to swim with Shane and Willa. They left before me and I was supposed to hitch a ride and get there later. I did climb into a tan Buick, where I sagged into the bucket seat and closed my eyes. I was meditating. I did that for a long time, and it was a good thing, to tumble in the dead space, with ghosts. When I opened my eyes, I saw I’d gotten a ride with a demon.
It’s all in the past, which means it’s here now and also in the future. That’s why stories don’t work; there’s no real sequence. It’s always breathing and dying and spitting resemblances up. Try it: grab one. It’ll squirm like jellyfish and carry a mean sting. It’ll make your hands sticky, and if you’re lucky, it won’t be blood. I’m talking about the past.
—Do you carry life insurance?
That’s what the demon asked me. I told him I was only fifteen and life insurance wasn’t a big issue yet.
—I sell it, I know. Everyone should carry life insurance.
—Yup, he said.
He kept saying that. His cock looked like a big frog.
—Yup, yup, I wanna fuck you.
I can spot the gruesome a mile away and normally I react. But this stuff just floated into my empty head. Whatever was in there to begin with had completely cleared out. You got in the wrong car this time, kid.
—Hey, I said carefully, and then I added a tinge: annoyance. This won’t work cause I’m a dyke.
That’s a fucking big word. Dyke. I hadn’t known that. I discovered it that day. A swerve and a shove and then I was getting to my feet, my hands and knees all scraped up.
I carried a switchblade for years after that. It was a kind of marriage. On that day my pockets were empty. I turned and watched the Buick pull away. It had a big trunk; it wouldn’t have been a tight fit.
Writing a story is a little like dragging a tree out of a dark wood and then wrapping it with strings of starry lights. I’m partial to the flashing green jalapeño peppers, even the little spotted jersey cows that twinkle on and off. Why is it that no one makes clowns? Whatever. I have a couple more strings and then I’m done.
I hitched a ride back to town. The driver didn’t even come to a complete stop. After skipping along for a while, I managed to hop in, he hit the gas, and we were rocking to the Grateful Dead. Driving that train, high on cocaine, Casey Jones you better watch your speed… Swirls of psycho colors radiated from Dead posters. The van smelled like dog. The driver looked too stoned to live.
As I was sitting cross-legged on a purple cushion with orange tassels, thoughts fell out of my brain like hisses from a snake. I’ve never fucked a guy and now, I still haven’t. For the most part I don’t remember these thoughts, which is a good thing, probably, because I also had the feeling that my brain was shrinking and hardening into some sort of turd.
That was just another mystery, and I didn’t question it. I felt unbearably agile, lucky, and bitter, but all that was the past. In the future, I was going to call Isabelle. What would I say? The word dyke, of course. Dyke dyke dyke. Perhaps I’d mention the hot and friendly feeling which was spiking my chest. It was about weaponry.
She hadn’t left me her number. When I got to a phone, my fingers were shaking so bad I could barely dial Santa Monica information. It took several tries and attempted spellings of her father’s last name. Finally, I got something. The phone rang for a long time, and then a loud rasping voice splattered my ear.
—Where are you! it screamed, I’m waiting and waiting!
The accent was heavy Italian. All I said was Isabelle, but her name was Gina. After hearing about diabetes and bad teeth, I finally understood she thought I was a home care nurse, sent by the county.
—I’m sorry, Ma’am, but I’m not a nurse. I’m just looking for a girl named Isabelle.
—No Isabelle here! She hung up the phone.
After that it goes blank. I don’t think there was that much summer left. I’m sure I got back to the Budd house just fine. I probably lay around on my couch reading copies of Appaloosa Stud magazine for the rest of the afternoon. I still like that idea: spotted horses with barely any tail. Someone should string them up, fasten little plastic horseshoes to their pink hooves, and make them twinkle. I’d decorate my living room with something like that.
Now I longed to get back home, to the streets of sturdy brick apartments and familiar drunks. I even missed Tina, the girl with mismatched eyeballs who hung out on my block night and day. Her eyes bulged out and pointed in opposite directions, and she had one kid after another, losing them all to foster care. She always wore something flowery, even when it was cold.
One day the scrape in the gravel outside the Budd house was Pearl in the blue Mustang. When she came in the kitchen door, there was a fierce moment of recognition and relief. Of course, all I could do was mumble Hi and Okay. My head was a blur of monster words: faggot-pussy-dyke. They had a shimmer and a slickness as I held them back in my throat. It felt better than a secret.
I gave Pearl the autographed copy of Mina’s book. The Lunar Baedeker, 1923 edition. She practically pinched my cheeks off.
I did hear from Isabelle again. I got a postcard a few months later. From what I remember, it went something like this:
“dear Camille.
I still like you, believe it or not. But, silence is
golden…”
It had no return address, so I burned it.
It was a weird moment to grow up in a historical district. For us, the past existed—there were its buildings, after all, ruined mansions with marble entrances and broken-down elevators. They were solidly constructed of red brick, as if ‘red brick’ signaled the emphatic end of something better, and it gave them durability, after the roofs collapsed, even after the windows had blown out. One mansion was filled with dog shit.
The present, where we played and ate and fought and went to school, stretched across the scene like a yellow police line. We were living in the aftermath, a time of wearing down, so palpable it was almost a physical sensation, like grinding. The shops on our streets stayed the same, or closed. When windows broke in our school, it got colder. We felt innocent in our actions, but knew that our surroundings entered us, and made us wicked. We got to live in big houses, and the houses that weren’t lived in, we could plunder and explore.
A crime is an intimate form of knowledge. It breaks you, then remains present, like the water running in the sewers. When I’m lonely, the faint background gurgling seems to turn into a whisper—Your history is unbearable. But whose history, I want to know.
Amy Brooks lived next door to the mansion filled with dog shit. Her house was small and normal—perhaps it was built to be the carriage house. Red brick, of course, two story, with elms in the front. The elms were going to die soon but we didn’t know that. The rest of the block was taken up by the grounds, which were surrounded by a fourteen-foothigh brick wall topped with rusted cast iron spikes. Behind this fortification, a rotting and craggy mansion rose, looking weirdly Scottish according to the affectations of turn-of-thecentury money. It even had a name: Isher House. It seemed outraged by its own neglect.
Amy Brooks went to sleep every night to the howling of the guard dog in Isher House. For fifty years only dogs slept there. The owners had left decades before white flight had hit the neighborhood. Not because
they were prescient but because their son had been murdered. A couple of rich young men, sharing an idle moment while being chauffeured somewhere, dreamed up what they thought was the perfect crime—a kidnapping and ransom. Things went awry, and the little boy they snatched never went home. The parents of the boy surprised everyone by refusing to sell the house. They moved away, and kept it empty, except for the guard dog. Generations of guard dogs lived their entire lives in that house.
One day in the schoolyard, Amy ran towards me, breathless, the baby fat around her belly jiggling. From a squat, I rocked back on my heels.
—The dog quit howling. I think he’s gone or dead or something.
—So, was Doggy run over or did Doggy get shot?
Carol popped questions as though they were quips. Amy bubbled over with details: Two cars had pulled into the circular driveway, two, two cars, she repeated solemnly. That had never happened before. The usual pattern was that the caretaker, a gloomy and squat Polish dude, came in a black Cutlass twice a month. Always alone, carrying a paper bag. This time, no caretaker and no bag. The dog must be dead! Maybe they buried him on the grounds somewhere…
—You want to dig up the dog? Carol asked.
Amy looked crushed. She smelled great, like baby powder.
—Amy, I said, let’s break into Isher House.
—Oh. Her face relaxed.
—We’ll sleep over at your house on Saturday night. After your parents are asleep, we’ll go over the wall…
We all got excited. What was the necessary equipment? The only thing we could come up with was flashlights. Carol pointed out to Amy the drainage pipes that snaked up the walls of our school.
—You should be prepared to climb up pipes like those, she gravely intoned.
Carol and I had gotten to the roof that way, more than once, and the thrill of being on top of that detested institution was indescribable. John D. Flynn School loomed over the neighborhood like a Victorian mental institution. It was a misery of a school, charged, among other things, with enforcing a form of racial separation known as tracking. It was an exercise in bad faith, in which students were separated into different classrooms supposedly based on ability but really the criterion was race. We heard the teachers of the lower tracks howling through the doors and walls.
Amy gazed up the drain pipes in wonder. For a moment, I loved her open face, flat and a little dumbass-looking.
Maybe we all looked that way. I grew to manhood in an era of dumbass. I’m not a man, not a transsexual, but manhood sounds so much more succinct than adulthood. And womanhood, what is that? There was a sloppiness everywhere then. It was the style. Carol and Amy and I had identical long brown hair, all waving the same raggedy flag. My mother was forever irritably scraping her fingers down my cheeks to pull the long hairs from my mouth, to no avail. Nothing my mother did could impact my sense of my own cool.
Pause. Rewind the story. Carol was the center of something, which I need to summon up.
Amy raced towards us across the blacktop because she wanted something…the avenue of our secret life. Carol and I did have one, even though it consisted of nothing more than creeping about our neighborhood like twin versions of Harriet The Spy. We escaped serious harm because the conflict in our streets was too real to be wasted on us. We dressed to be invisible girls, which meant grubby sweatshirts and jeans. But we lived within the terror and power of place. That is the word I prefer but the one more often used for such fiercely contested urban territory is turf. My word is better, because its slight degree of abstraction resists the histrionics. Once I was telling a white woman from the suburbs about my neighborhood, its racially separate gangs and deadpan, even ironic, criminality. She gasped all over me, “That’s so Hard Copy.” I feel drenched, even now, by her little seizure, her relish.
Carol was my steady companion. We had things in common, and I believed in the significance of those things. Commonality equals solidity, amidst all the fluid perils. That’s why people join gangs. I’ve always had a little gang in my life, and Carol was the beginning of that. That’s why I was so startled when it came to me one day, years later and out of the blue: I’d been to Carol’s house only once.
I thought we were always together, but I guess that was outside, or at my house.
On the day of my visit, Carol had forgotten her house key. She ran into her house for it, and I followed, uninvited. Bertha, her mother, stood at the kitchen sink. Bertha watched me with mild curiosity. I don’t think she spoke but something warm came from her, blurry but sincere. A glass next to her on the counter contained brown-tinged orange juice. Meaty flecks of orange stuck to the ice cubes. Her hair was a frizzy auburn puff with a yellow kerchief awkwardly placed on it.
I scampered out. Carol followed, jiggling her keys on their ring, not saying anything.
Bertha was / was not a problem. Like a dead end road, she never left the property. Whereas Carol’s father was a public figure, of sorts. He was facing down the HUAC, not only by refusing to testify when they called him up, but by filing one of the lawsuits that challenged their legal right to exist. The House Un-American Activities Committee. It really did exist. Fighting it made him a hero in our leftie neighborhood. In fact, having a heroic father was another bond Carol and I had. Although Carol might not have been aware that I felt this way, because her father was the big hero and mine was a little one.
The memory of my father’s heroics arouses a tenderness in me, which I suspect is partly nostalgia. He had a stubborn, yet oddly flirtatious, struggle going on with his employer over a loyalty oath. As a card-carrying communist, he couldn’t sign, and after he left the Party, he wouldn’t. It didn’t reach the lawsuit stage, because all the hospital did was hire him on one temporary contract after another. Maybe Helen Chute, his boss, manipulated him to get this result, because he retired without a penny of pension. But he loved their game. And Helen Chute did come to his memorial service, even giving a brief tribute in her thrilling voice.
—That Helen is one smart cookie.
That’s what Dad said, whenever the temporary contract was up and Helen called him into her office to offer him something permanent. Over dinner Dad would replay to my mother and me what enticements had been added to the contract to manipulate him to sign, and then he would sternly rehearse his resistance.
It’s odd that we were resisting Helen, the smart cookie. She was breathtakingly butch. She entered a room with a startling Amazonian stride. Helen wore suits with gold cufflinks and her Italian shoes were so shiny they looked mean. No one commented on this, because the social movements that would generate that vocabulary hadn’t happened yet.
There was real power in her position, but her voice was what held us. Held the neighborhood, even. It was honeyed and deep. We were clasped in the arms of that mellifluous voice. It was a relief to believe in her ability to steer the biggest employer in the neighborhood through the dangerous shoals of white flight, economic decline, and racial tension. DePaul Public Hospital was a beleaguered institution, running low on public money at the same time it was running out of patients who could pay. Its weirdly gothic flying buttresses seemed to be clawing the ground. Helen ran DePaul as well as it could be run, I suppose. It survived the era.
I grew up believing the social body was rotten and powerful, but also endangered. Helen was a mysterious example of this. Dad would come home and report on what Helen had said, and we’d laugh helplessly. One night at dinner, taking on Helen’s voice and body language, he gave us the announcement of the day.
—DePaul Public Hospital will become the first hospital in the country to have its own mobile and armed police force. The unique mission of our police force will be signaled by white cruise cars painted with red crosses.
We got hysterical. It’s what we did as a family. Crack up until we cried. We weren’t done until we were all like damp rags at the bottom of a bucket.
On the other hand. To poke back at Carol’s dad. Something vexed me, that was hard to put my finger
on. His name was Jack Dahl. He was one of those people who walk without swinging their arms. I was passing by once when he was giving a speech, the crowd was gathered in the concrete lot in front of John D. Flynn School. Everybody was watching Jack. Was it a joke? He cried out HUAC repeatedly and jabbed a finger skyward. His eyes were eerily oversized under a broad forehead and sprightly black hair. He quivered with authority. Someone once told me he was a crusader who needed no followers, only lawyers. But the crowd was respectful.
We lived off of resistance. Resistance deepened my intelligence. Perhaps I’m flattering myself.
Amy, Carol, and I did try to break into Isher House. After Amy’s parents went to sleep, we crept down to the kitchen. Amy got us steak knives, in case the dog wasn’t dead after all. We rolled them in newspaper tubes and stuck them in our back pockets. This made us feel serious, though the knives kept tilting backwards as if to fall out. We put the flashlights in a backpack.
Around 2 a.m. we slipped out the back door and pushed through a line of bushes. There it was: an abandoned world. The broad drive was tufted with weeds but neatly laid with brownish red brick. Isher House was the same scabby color. Whorls and medallions of brick in the walls looked undecayed but spiteful. The windows were blanked by large wooden sheets.
I felt breathless, looking up at Isher House. I imagined chandeliers, whose curves we could trace with our flashlight beams, draped in spider webs. Maybe this house had a library, filled with volumes, instead of books. I yearned for volumes.
We went up the wall where it connected to the house near the door. Carol scrambled up first. I saw her butt heave up and over, then thud.
—Are you okay? There was a silence, then,
