The Outside Lands

by Hannah Kohler

“So why didn’t you?”

  He tightened his grip on my shoulders, then released me. “I came home from the war, and I had a family to take care of.” He dropped his head like something had run over his foot; a frog-croak leaped out of his mouth, and I saw that he was crying. He looked into my face, snot and spit webbing his mouth. “Mommy always wanted you to get a college education.”

  Mommy? I was waiting for him to hear it himself, but he just made that strange froggy noise again and his shoulders jumped. Whatever was holding me to the ground came loose and I felt myself fly up like a balloon.

  “Your mommy was so proud of you.” The voice was somewhere else, like a TV movie with the sound turned low. But that word again, I couldn’t help it—I couldn’t tame the smile that roared over my face.

  “Come here,” my dad said, bringing his arms around me, and I stepped back, and something naked peeked out of him, then disappeared.

  “Something funny?” he said. He smudged his words and I realized he was snockered.

  “You’re pathetic,” I told him. I saw the words lift out of my mouth in a speech bubble like I was Charlie fucking Brown.

  The old man blinked.

  “What did you say?”

  “You’re pathetic,” I repeated, nice and loud.

  My dad came close; I could see the hairs wriggling from his nose. “Say that one more time,” he said.

  “You heard it,” I told him, and stepped back inside the house.

  “Get the hell out of here,” he said, standing all blaze-eyed with his legs wide, like Tuco in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. “Before I beat you sorry.” His hands went to his waist but stopped at his flannel belt.

  I felt a laugh snort up from my throat; next thing I knew my dad was inside with me, his hand on my neck.

  “You’re going to hurt me now?” I said, but his hand was shrinking the words. “Been taking tips from Mr. Marshall?”

  He squeezed, spit leaking from his teeth. “You get out, you hear me?” He let go.

  I pushed him away. He staggered and danced to find his balance. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’m gone.”

  A kitchen chair blocked me; I took it and threw it. A leg cracked on the wall and I looked for my dad’s face. He was slow-watching me, his eyes all dark and doomy, his fingers twitching like he was going to draw.

  “Fuck you. Fuck high school and college and fuck this place.” Energy was shooting through me like a firework; I kicked the kitchen counter, but it didn’t leave a nick, just struck my foot dead.

  “Stupid kid,” my dad said in his bourbon-blasted, slow-fast way. I turned and his expression was loose and open and I saw all the way into him and it came to me how I was going to win this one.

  “I’m gonna enlist tomorrow. And I’m gonna get the fuck out of here.”

  There they were, those words popping out of me, and it was decided, there was no unsaying it; and I’ll tell you something, it slapped the old guy sober. I slammed the door behind me, and the fog wet my face; and I felt it again—that nasty, damp-eyed Devil, watching me from the bushes.

  When I came home it was past midnight, and the air was stuffed with swelter. The door was unlatched and the drapes and windows were open, like the house was trying to breathe. No sound; but if you were sharp, you could catch the white noise roar of the Pacific Ocean. I was sneaking a look to see if that pie was waiting for me when I saw him perched like a bat on the kitchen counter. Nearly scared the shit out of me.

  “You’re back,” he said.

  “Looks like it.” I pulled the pie from the refrigerator and found a spoon.

  “You don’t want a plate?”

  I scooped straight at the pie, letting chunks of cream splat the floor. A car drove past the windows, and its headlights lit us up.

  “I’m sorry, son.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I dropped the pie-scabbed container in the trash.

  “You’re not going to do anything crazy.”

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “Wait.” He took my wrist in his skinny-strong hand. The smell of stale liquor floated from his mouth. “You sign up, they’ll send you to war.”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  “You don’t know what it means, Kip.” He was gripping a rolled-up newspaper in his other hand; he shook it out with a crack. “The Marines just took one hundred fifty casualties on some rinky-dink hill in Vietnam. One hundred and fifty dead boys, kids just like you and Pete and Bobby coming home in caskets.”

  “Bobby’s already in a casket.”

  My dad flinched like he’d been bit by a no-see-um. “This is a nasty war, Kip, and we’re fighting for I-don’t-know-what and we ain’t winning. I’m not giving you up for that.”

  “You old-timers don’t want any other heroes kicking up your parade.”

  He smiled all hard and heavy. “I was eighteen when I shipped out, and out of the entire company, you know how many came back? How many weren’t killed or crippled?”

  That gray old roar again hurling in from the ocean.

  “Forty-two. Out of one hundred and ten Marines.” His hands were on my shoulders now, still as spiders. “I wasn’t a hero. I was just darn lucky.”

  “I never thought you were a fucking hero,” I said.

  We watched each other. I waited for him to say something. He screwed up his eyes like he was trying to bring me into focus, the way Jeannie did in the park—as though, somehow, I’d gotten all of a sudden smudged and blurred. He sighed and slid from the counter, the newspaper hanging limp in his hand.

  “All right, Kip,” he said. “Have it your way.”

  The next morning I went to the kitchen, dressed in my good shirt and clean-ish jeans. My dad sat at the table holding his Snoopy coffee cup, looking flimsy and uneven, veins exploding red in the whites of his eyes.

  “I’m going to the recruitment center,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything, just shook his head and grim-smiled, snuffing a noise like I’d told a bad-tasting joke. I grabbed my jacket and left the house, leaving the front door wide open behind me, letting the wind blow sand over his swept floors.

  I walked twelve blocks to the recruitment center, a big blank building squatting on an intersection, flags stuck on the roof giving the air big noisy licks. The waiting room was rattling with a few whacked-up loons and goons jiggling their legs and chewing gum—I might have been straight back in that jail cell. The guy at the desk wore a green uniform and a pissed-off face, and between scratching his paperwork and hollering names, he fired bad looks at the black kid sitting by the door. I left my name and waited.

  “Kipling Jackson.”

  The recruiter was eight feet tall, with a head like a football and a handshake that could bend steel. “Welcome to the Corps!” he shouted, smacking me on the back. “Take a seat, son.”

  He asked me every kind of question, how old I was, where I was at school, how tall, was I sick or crippled, was I a citizen, was I a faggot, a felon, or a commie. He got deep into the Old Ted business, turned it over to eye all sides of it, then smiled and shook his head, “Dumb kid.” He sent me to stand on the scale and ran his finger over the chart. He frowned a moment before slapping his hands together. “All right, son,” he cried, showing his tombstone teeth. “Hand me your paperwork.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Birth certificate, court papers. And you’ll need a parent to sign here.” He flicked over some papers and penned a sloppy X. “Come back tomorrow.” He leaned over and breathed coffee-breath over my face. “We’ll get you processed—a physical and so forth—and you’ll be on your way.”

  That night my dad came home from work, set down his briefcase, took off his brogues, and sloshed himself an Old Crow on ice. He sat at the kitchen table, twitching his brown-socked feet and hovering his pen over his newspaper crossword puzzle. Thursdays were always hard on him, but a half hour passed and that pen didn’t make one stroke. I took my papers and slid them slow and deliberate across the tabl
e. My dad laid down his pen and stared at me long and steady, like he was about to tell me the Great Awful Truth of Things. Then he took up the papers and read each line ever-so-slow, his head moving along each one like the caboose on a typewriter. He rolled his pen in his fingers, then lifted it and pressed the ink to the paper. He signed in three loop-and-scrawls and handed back the papers, looking me clean in the eye.

  “Thanks,” I said, but my throat had gone tight.

  In the window, something dark moved, and it had the dank eyes of that hide-and-seek Devil.

  “Son,” said my dad, and the word came out all scratched and spoiled.

  As I left the room, I turned to see him holding his tumbler, staring at the table. I heard that glass-skitter sound and thought it was another baby earthquake starting up; but it was just the sound of the ice in my old dad’s drink, rattling.

  In Country

  Jeannie / 1967

  “Gone.”

  Charlie’s eyes were wide, his fat fingers making a starfish.

  “Gone, Mama.”

  “Just a dream, sweetheart,” said Jeannie, lifting him from his crib, feeling the weight and the warmth of him. His hair was stuck damp with sleep, his cheeks flushed. Sunlight had slunk in beneath the drapes and lay waiting. Dawn again, falling on them all of a sudden, and with it all those hours to work and fool away. She set Charlie on a towel in the bathroom, kissed his belly and unfastened his diaper. His head turned at the creak of feet on wood.

  “Daddy,” he said.

  “Daddy’s at the hospital.” It was Eddie upstairs, or maybe Lloyd, fixing coffee or setting the table for breakfast.

  Jeannie knew the tricks time played on mothers: the enchanted hours that wouldn’t pass, each solid minute needing picking up, dealing with, and putting away, one by one, until you were sore with the labor; then whole weeks falling away, like a ladder pulled from your heels. Jeannie had rationed a clutch of errands for the day, and with dropping Billy’s shirts at the dry cleaner’s, picking up soup and Pop-Tarts from Safeway, and looking at the donuts in the window of the bakery on Church, soon enough it would be naptime and they could close their eyes, and then it would be three o’clock and they’d have to think about getting uptown for Dorothy’s fund-raiser.

  Dorothy was president of the San Francisco Republican Women’s Committee (Federated), the leader of a company of women who wore their hair like armor and dispensed smiles like bullets. She was raising money to elect somebody called Rafferty to the Senate, and she’d made it clear that attendance at her fund-raiser was mandatory.

  “Where’s William?” she asked when Jeannie and Charlie arrived at the mansion on Spruce on the nose of six.

  “Caught up at the hospital,” said Jeannie, watching their cab disappear down the street. “He’ll be here as soon as he can.”

  Dorothy opened her mouth and chewed it shut. “Well,” she said. Charlie was at Dorothy’s legs, his hands bunching her silk dress, his head tipped up, face split in a grin. Dorothy pushed her hand through his hair, palmed his chin, and bent—a slight catch in the movement the only tell of her age—to meet him face-to-face. “Let’s go find something in the kitchen for you,” she said.

  The house was full of traffic: Mexican women floating trays of zucchini and glazed ribs to the white tent pinned to the lawn outside; a sweat-glossed colored man carrying a crate of oranges into the kitchen; two girls Jeannie’s age dressed like matrons and whispering over clipboards. Jeannie could tell that her mother-in-law was excited—all the touches and squeezes Dorothy usually saved for her son and grandson spilled over to her: the trail of fingers on her shoulder, the press of a palm on her back.

  “We’re expecting somebody special tonight,” Dorothy whispered, and something thrilling moved across her face— something like youth.

  Jeannie settled Charlie to sleep in one of the guest rooms and took her time fixing her hair. It was a warm fall evening, and the guests were crowding on the lawn, the Pacific breeze lifting the clink of glassware out to the ocean. Across the dark stretch of the Presidio, the Golden Gate Bridge reached across to the headlands in strings of lights. Jeannie wandered the edges of the party looking for Billy, but he was nowhere. Accepting a cocktail from a passing tray, she found a bench under an oak tree, sat, and watched.

  “So you’re the slut.”

  The voice came from above; Jeannie looked up at the windows of the house, but they were fastened dark.

  “A slut or a gold digger, they can’t decide.”

  A shake-and-flop noise, like a book falling to the floor, was followed by a confetti of leaves. A girl was standing in the crook of a thick branch, legs apart, one bare foot steadying against the point where the branch thinned and bent like a bow.

  “Are you talking to me?” said Jeannie.

  The girl brought her feet together, curving the branch almost to a crack, and jumped to the ground. She looked Jeannie’s age, maybe a little younger: stalky-limbed, with damp, dark hair that lay on her shoulders in waves. She wore an unfashionable rosebud-print dress; the fit was bad and it slipped off her shoulder, showing skin tanned the color of root beer.

  “I was expecting more of a Lana Turner type,” said the girl, pulling a pair of stilettos from the base of the tree and pushing them onto her feet. “But you seem pretty normal.” She sat on the bench. “I’m Lee.” She turned to Jeannie, her face surprisingly close. She was smiling, the kind of free smile seen in photographs of children: wide-cheeked, beautiful-ugly.

  Jeannie shifted away. “I’m Jeannie.”

  “You got a cigarette, Jeannie?”

  Jeannie nipped open her clutch, handed the girl her cigarettes and pocket lighter, and waited.

  Lee slipped out a cigarette and held it, unlit, in her hand.“Look at that,” she said, nodding toward Jeannie’s father-in-law, whose hand was sliding over the buttocks of a heavyset young woman he was guiding to greet his wife. “Richard hasn’t even finished his cocktail and his dirty old fingers are already itching.”

  Jeannie smiled in spite of herself.

  “You too, huh?” said Lee, lighting her cigarette and blowing smoke up into the browning leaves. “Why do you think I was hiding up in that tree?” She laughed, and the sound crackled across the lawn. Dorothy’s head jerked in their direction, and she stared. Lee saw the look in Jeannie’s face and passed her the cigarettes and lighter; Jeannie snapped them back in her purse and stood; and Dorothy turned back to her guests.

  “I better find my husband,” said Jeannie.

  “There’s a snake in the garden,” called Lee, smoke in her voice. “Watch out.”

  Dark fell over the party like mud. A sting in the air sent the guests back inside, pulling their stoles close and setting their glasses on the furniture. In what Dorothy called the drawing room (the only one Jeannie had ever seen—really a large living room), a four-piece band played an old Bing Crosby song. Jeannie had drunk her third sloe gin fizz and had managed to avoid speaking to anybody beyond the odd “Excuse me.” Billy was still missing. Jeannie watched as Richard Nixon arrived to shake the candidate’s hand, before ducking back into his black Cadillac and slipping into the night. His arrival and departure loosened and lulled the party; and Jeannie crept away, liquor-legged, up the stairs to check on Charlie. As she stepped along the hallway, she heard the squashed sound of Charlie’s voice, the murmur of an adult.

  “More story,” she heard Charlie say.

  “I don’t have any more,” said the low voice. “I’ll have to go out into the world and bring some back for you.”

  On the bed, legs crossed, holding a cigarette over an empty glass, sat Lee. Charlie was sitting up, his eyes wide in the half darkness. There was something guilty in the slow way they turned their heads to look at Jeannie.

  “What are you doing?” said Jeannie.

  “Mama.”

  “Kid had a bad dream,” said Lee, tapping her cigarette against the glass. “Found him wandering around, all torn up.”

  “Mama, com
e in bed,” said Charlie. His face was soft with sleep.

  “He looks all right to me,” said Jeannie. She sat on the bed, and delight flashed across Charlie’s face. She shucked him onto her lap. “You had a nightmare, honey?”

  “Story,” he said, nudging his head against her.

  “No more stories,” said Jeannie, leveling a look at Lee, who was grinding her cigarette into the glass, a smile curling up her face.

  “Find your husband?” Lee’s eyes glittered.

  Jeannie heard the reproach in the girl’s question. “You can go,” she said. “I’m just going to settle Charlie.”

  “I’ll stay,” said Lee. The same challenge in her voice, but the girl’s face was gentle in the dusk, and Jeannie, easy from liquor and weary from avoiding everybody else, had no desire to argue.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. “You’re a little out of place.”

  “People always tell me that.” Lee blinked lazily, and Jeannie wondered if she was drunk too. “Dorothy’s my godmother,” she said. She folded her legs underneath her, her dress catching on her foot, showing a long bare thigh. “I’ll tell you a secret,” she whispered.

  Charlie sighed.

  “What?” said Jeannie.

  “Dorothy used to be—” Lee put her mouth to Jeannie’s ear. Jeannie heard Lee’s breath, close and secluded, like the sound of the ocean in a seashell. Then the whisper, hot on Jeannie’s skin. “A swinger.”

  Jeannie snorted with laughter; Charlie moaned and shifted in her lap.

  “You’re full of it,” whispered Jeannie.

  “It’s true.” Lee’s eyebrows drew high on her forehead. “How else do you think she bagged Raunchy Rich?”

  Charlie’s lips smacked against his tongue and his head sagged.

  “She was also beautiful,” conceded Lee.

  Jeannie smiled, and felt the weight of Charlie’s body in her arms. She lowered him onto the bed. He was asleep, and they should get back to the party, where, maybe, Billy was looking for her. In the shadow of the bedroom, on the give of the bed, the liquor felt warm in her blood, and she closed her eyes for a moment to still herself. She felt a lock of her hair fall against her forehead, then quiet fingers on her face, lifting it away.