White Nights in Split Town City

by Annie DeWitt

  “Show them,” she’d said. “How to do it.” Her hair parted across her forehead as she leaned across the table.

  I thought, too, of Otto and Callie and their greed. “It’s perfectly quiet here,” said the correspondent on the television. In his golf jacket, he looked as though he were going on vacation, somewhere warm. “No activity whatsoever,” he reported. “Looking out from the hotel where most of the foreign journalists are kept, the lights of the city are still on. You can see to the horizon. Taxi drivers are asking passengers nearly $200 to drive to the Turkish border.”

  “A sign of the times,” Jennings said.

  I pictured reams of taxis crossing a long drawn-out desert. Their thick yellow paint brocading the dry wastes of air like a fleet of canaries flown south for the winter.

  The war began. Large green flares that looked not unlike the fireworks on the Fourth of July set off from the town green. “Lit up like Christmas trees,” the correspondent on the ground described it.

  The screen went dark. I switched to another station. “You have no idea how good it is to hear your voice on this remarkable night,” I heard a young news correspondent say. “I’m going to go to the window so that our viewers can stay as much in touch with the scene as possible. I’ve just seen a blue flashing light down on the streets below. You can hear what I can hear, I imagine. More of that eerie silence from before the attack began.”

  “Is everything OK with you and the crew?” the man in the suit on the screen said.

  “We’re a little excited,” the disembodied voice of the reporter in the Baghdad hotel laughed.

  “You’ve had a lot of experience being under attack in Vietnam and other places,” the anchor said.

  I couldn’t believe Mother wasn’t there. I stood in the darkness of the living room and stretched toward the ceiling, trying to occupy as much of the house as I could. “Where are you?” I said aloud. “Where is anyone?”

  Margaret came back with Mother and Father from the funeral. I watched the headlights turn down the drive. I heard their keys jiggle the front lock. I pictured Mother in the foyer hanging their coats. I imagined Otto sitting in the dark across the street in the armchair in the corner of his bedroom. Bent at the knee with his feet firmly planted, his legs would look like they were waiting for a kid to crawl up into his lap.

  “White nights,” he’d say as Callie made her way across the room towards the bed.

  An old transistor would be playing in the background. He still kept the game on. Soft enough that you can’t hear the calls, just the occasional roar of the crowd.

  Alone in the quiet, he waits for the swing, the steady crack of the bat.

  All Callie cares about is the win.

  In the bed Otto’s got his wait on, still shirt-tied and clammy. His hands hover, like he’s searching for something bigger than what she is.

  When she offers him a seat in the saddle, he says, “These days I’m more of a walking man.”

  She thinks what he means is, company: some beers in a dimly lit pool hall.

  She thinks what he means is: I’ll stick.

  Backlit by the moon, she lets the evening work her body. She takes her time gearing him up. Stands at the window. Smokes a cigarette. Lets him wrap his greed around her.

  “This,” she says as he unzippers her dress. “Is the whole of our glory.”

  As I walked into the foyer, Margaret and Mother were reclined among the pillows. I wondered if Mother knew yet. I wondered if any of them did.

  “I always wanted a boy for my second,” I overheard Mother say from where she and Margaret sat in front of the window. The old blind man drove by in his yellow Volvo on his way home from the funeral.

  “Really?” Margaret said. “What would you have done with a boy?”

  “I’d have named him Samson,” Mother said.

  “Everything is big,” Margaret said.

  “My big bruiser,” said Mother. “He was going to pull us out of this mess.”

  “Go Samson,” Margaret said.

  “Go Uncle Sam,” Mother said.

  They chuckled nervously then. That was a good one. I chuckled a little too from my place in the doorway where I had stopped to watch them.

  “If you’re going to eavesdrop, why don’t you just join?” Mother said.

  I took my place on the cushion where they’d made room.

  Margaret’s withered breath was thick on my shoulder.

  “What do you see?” Mother said nodding out the window at Otto’s place across the street.

  A flock of small black birds flew over Otto’s barn. The wind upset the electric wire where they’d been roosting. I wanted to tell her how their bodies cut through the sky like the mouth of a scissor when it got wide, peeling back the clouds and letting loose the flap. I wanted to tell her about getting the infection out. How the bottom of a hoof turns up everything. “Sometimes it comes out natural,” the vet had said. I wanted to tell her about the hole in His Helene’s stomach, how her kidneys let loose their blood. “What she has doesn’t jump,” Otto had said. “Smell her.”

  I wanted to tell her about K or Kat or Katherine. All the boys she’d fucked in her bed. How I’d looked at the napkin in the basket next to the toilet that night where she’d showed it to me, where she’d pointed it out, and wondered how the blood would well up if you wrung it. Was there that much of the kill in our bleeder? I’d had dreams where I put my finger on someone’s arm and pressed down a little and their skin broke open into some fetid wound. The skin wouldn’t heal. The sun wouldn’t let off. Even the flies were sick. They flew through the air waiting to welt you. To deliver their happiness. “It means you give someone something happy,” Mother had said. She’d said, “Here’s my thrill. It might be instructive.”

  My parents once said you could change your personality. Mother and Father were sitting at the kitchen table. They were leaning towards me in their chairs. They were trying to get their teeth into something.

  It was right after Mother returned from Schenectady and her almost perfect man in the diner who made his one film.

  “You don’t have to end up that way,” they’d said. They were talking about Sterling and the factory. And then they were talking about talking and how little of it I had done lately.

  “Blank face,” they’d said.

  They’d said, “Act your age. Let loose. Go crazy. There’s enough time.”

  Father’d said, “Don’t end up like me.”

  I thought he’d ended up fine. I thought he’d ended up a little silent. I thought so what if I end up a little silent too. So what if sometimes when people were talking I let my eyes wander. What if sometimes Mother wished Father’s heart would leap a little more out of his chest? So what if the rest of the world came in and drowned them out. There were so many words to know. I sat there watching their lips. I wondered if they had night-lights in the back of their throats. Was there enough light in the hall at night to get up to pee? Had I turned off the faucet in the paddock where I’d let the water into the trough? If I prayed enough maybe Granny Olga’s mechanic heart would give her enough kick to go skating on the reservoir again. “Untouchable combination,” the neighbor had said. He’d said there was a possibility of a fourth cut that fall. Mother’d said, “No one cares whether he keeps his heels on the ground or goes flying.”

  Once, I’d dreamed I’d put Granny Olga in the microwave. Someone held me down on the couch and held my eyes open, made me watch her spin in that glowing box. She’d turned into one of the small Russian dolls she kept on the shelf, the one with the golden hair that looked like Birdie. I’d watched the doll as it went around on the carousel. “It looks like you,” I’d said taking the doll off the shelf and putting it in Birdie’s hands. “All the way from White Russia.” Birdie’d fingered the doll’s hair and made a little face. She’d made the same little face when the s
cout had stopped Mother in the mall. “Pretty mouth,” he’d said, nodding at Birdie. He’d said, “She could sell cereal. She would show up well on film.”

  “She’s got my eyes,” Mother had said.

  The scout had made Mother dance a little then. He’d pulled some string in her back. Maybe he’d pulled the same string that made Wilson dance that night in the barn.

  “Rake her,” Wilson had said.

  So what if my teeth fell out. So what if that little girl at the barn was right. “Down there” she’d said, touching herself. “You’ll figure it out.” And when I’d gone home that night, I’d felt around a little too. “Nothing came,” I’d told her. “Except this doomed little squeeze.”

  A patch of clouds shifted in the sky overhead. The sun cast a glare over the window. I could see the places where it was dirty. The sand from the road in front of the house kicked up and flew. Bird droppings clung to the corner of one of the panes. I imagined scraping them off with a chisel as I had scraped the back of the house that day with Birdie before we’d applied the paint. “It’s all about getting on a good cover,” Father had said.

  “Look,” I said, pointing out the window in front of Margaret. “A low glider.”

  A small passenger plane hovered over the power lines that lined the far side of the mountain. There was a commuter airport in the nearby industrial city where Sterling had lived. He’d taken a small six-seater to Vegas once.

  The glider was moving slowly. The body of the plane was so compact it appeared toy like. At a distance it looked about the size of the model Father had brought home from the office. The model was mechanical. It was set on a long stick that you flew through the air. The wings shifted with the current. But this drone in the sky was more lyrical. It hovered so close over the wire, chugging cylinder over cylinder, like a child reeling in a kite, watching it dive and rise. The closer the plane got to the house, the more the air thinned. It hovered in the stillness searching for a current. I imagined blowing up under the body but there wasn’t enough air in my lungs to keep it aloft. “Birdie,” I said, watching it spin. “Keep your eye on the birdie,” Father always said, his feet firmly planted on the other side of the net. “Keep your racket lifted. Don’t wait for the dive.” It felt good all this letting go. I felt lighter in a way. We sat there, the three of us watching the plane train its way down the mountain and closer to home.

  The landscape was silent except for the birds on the wire above the barn. I’d sat there in that same spot where I sat now with Margaret and Mother so many mornings. But this time I knew the news. It was me who held some knowledge over them. Pretty soon it would be spring. I thought of the apple trees and their big white blossoms. I envisioned K standing under the branches with all their flowers. She tossed her match. The whole head of them went up in flames. At first, the burning was bountiful. Small flecks of light bouncing off the petals where the flame leapt. After a while the smell set in.

  I thought of all this as I looked out the window at Otto’s barn.

  “What do you see?” Margaret said.

  “I see a lot of people screaming,” I said.

  “What are they saying?” Margaret said.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Acknowledgments

  To these folks I am forever indebted: Thank you Sam Lipsyte and Ben Marcus for giving me the courage from the beginning. Thank you early readers: Katherine DeWitt, Caroline Dowling, Luke Goebel, Darcey Steinke, Heidi Julavitz, Rebecca Curtis, Anya Yurchyshyn, and Kristen O’Toole for your invaluable insight. Thank you to Diane Williams and NOON for publishing excerpts of the novel in progress. And to Alan Ziegler for your unwavering mentorship. Alan: you have given me two perfect mirrors on the world —your spirit and a profession, both of which I adore. To HH for showing me the way out the tunnel. To Tracy Halford for thirty-five years and counting of “discovering the woods.” Thank you, Pop, for: the piano, the horses, Susan Sontag, reading me adult books as a child and cycling ahead of me on the “Free Spirit.” And to Mom, for: the scope of the city, an innate sense of beauty, and always hoping the “weather was with us.” Thanks, Uncle Lee, for my first Joni Mitchell cassette and showing me how to live your own vision. Thank you Ralph Woodrow DeWitt for your silent support. You never knew how far it carried me. And to Grandma for dancing to Elvis. With thanks to Kirby Kim and Giancarlo DiTrapano for making it happen. To Catherine Foulkrod for her tremendous eye. And to the MacDowell Colony for providing me peace and solitude in the final hours. And most of all to my partner, Jerome Jakubiec, without whose strength and belief I would have surrendered long ago. This is for all the spirits who long to run free.