“That’s what this is about?”
“These weeks without you . . .” Color spread up Jeannie’s neck. Even through the pain and doubt of the past weeks, her desire for Lee had endured, a sickness that wouldn’t break.
“I know.” Lee smoothed a lick of hair behind Jeannie’s ear. “But this is more important. I know you understand that.” She brushed her hand down Jeannie’s arm, letting their fingers mesh; spines pricked Jeannie’s skin.
“I can’t worry about the world right now,” she said, clasping her fingers with Lee’s. “I’ve got to take care of my own.”
Lee frowned, and she tugged her fingers away, pushing her hands into the pockets of her shorts. Jeannie’s hand fell awkwardly to her side, and the wind touched her skin. Lee’s eyes drew narrow. “’Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me, scatters.’” Her voice was flat, like she was rehearsing a line; they were the Reverend’s words, one of a clutch of hellfire quotes he served up when faced with doubters.
Jeannie gave a half laugh, and, noticing the hard set of Lee’s face, said, “You’re not serious?”
“You said you were with us.”
“I can’t do it again. Everything’s a mess.”
“She’s a mother, Jeannie.”
“She’s a crook.” Lee’s lips parted in disbelief, and Jeannie felt a tiny squeeze of satisfaction. “This whole thing is crooked.” Lee recovered herself, her face wrinkling in impatience as she waved her hand, as if this were a slander she’d heard so often, it couldn’t touch her anymore.
“Don’t talk shit,” she said. “These are lives we’re dealing with. Real, flesh-and-blood boys. Slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails—boys you played Catch-and-Kiss with, boys you were raised with.”
“Lee,” said Jeannie, reaching her fingers toward the younger girl. “I just can’t get involved. You’ve got to understand that.” She touched Lee’s arm.
Lee’s mouth screwed into a pout. “Unbelievable,” she said. “You just—disappear—and now you want out?”
“For Christ’s sake,” said Jeannie. “Do you have any idea how it’s been for us?” Lee shrugged her shoulders, the suggestion of a sneer on her face. Jeannie stepped away to the edge of the sidewalk. “I should never have gotten involved with a damn kid.” She felt tears press her eyes; she turned her head to hide them and searched for a cab.
“I might be a kid, but you’re selfish as hell,” said Lee. “It’s the fucking Jeannie Show.”
Jeannie turned toward Lee; the distance between them suddenly vast, like they were standing on opposite shores. “You have no idea.”
“I get the idea,” said Lee. “Kit’s okay, so screw everybody else.”
“It’s Kip.” A flush of cold at Jeannie’s heart lifted the fine hairs on her skin. “Jesus. I’m an idiot.” She saw the yellow of a cab and waved her arm.
“No shit.”
“Don’t be a brat,” said Jeannie. The cab pulled up. Jeannie closed her fingers around the door handle, but Lee stepped forward and prized Jeannie’s hand away.
“What are you doing?”
“You can’t just leave.” Lee moved to block Jeannie’s second attempt to open the door, stepping so close their bodies touched. In a crackle of violence and wanting, Jeannie grabbed Lee’s arm and yanked her aside.
“You getting in, or what?” yelled the driver.
“She’s not,” called Lee.
He cursed, and the cab pulled away. Jeannie saw unease reaching across Lee’s face.
“You should leave all this behind too, Lee,” she said.
The fear disappeared from Lee’s face, her features settling into their familiar cocksure expression. “I’m not like you.”
They stood in silence, Jeannie turning from Lee to watch for another cab. A long, uncertain moment passed; then Lee spoke.
“What happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happened to him? How did he survive?”
“He wasn’t there.”
“Where was he?”
“He was in jail.”
“What?”
Jeannie sighed. “He’s accused of—they’re saying he blew up his superior. An American. On purpose.”
Something faint but electric crossed Lee’s face. She placed her hand on Jeannie’s wrist; Jeannie didn’t move away.
“We only just found out,” said Jeannie. “It’s a mess, it’s a stupid mess.”
Lee’s face was sharpening into a look of comprehension. “He’s one of us,” she said. Her fingers closed around Jeannie’s wrist.
“What do you mean?” That headache again, pressing her forehead.
“Wow,” Lee murmured, shaking her head. “That’s something.”
“Lee—”
“He’s resisting.” Lee looked up at Jeannie, glint-eyed. “He’s resisting from the inside. There’s a movement—the Reverend talked about it. They’re dismantling the war from within.”
“That’s ridiculous.” Jeannie pulled her arm free, pain flaring inside her head. Squinting against the sun, she saw another cab loom large, just yards away; she lifted her hand.
“So why did he do it?”
“He didn’t do it.” The cab drew up; Jeannie opened the door before Lee could stop her. Lee stood, dream-faced.
“Bye, Lee.” Jeannie slammed the door and blinked against the needles of light that flashed across her eyes. Lee said nothing, just stared from the sidewalk. As the cab drove away, Jeannie craned her neck to watch Lee recede in the distance. As they reached the end of the block, Jeannie saw Lee lift her arms; it looked as though she was yelling.
Jeannie’s headache had eased by the time the cab drew into Spruce. She asked the driver to wait, then rushed inside the house to search for Charlie, finding him asleep in the crib upstairs. She lifted him and ran downstairs, his body bouncing densely in her arms, his face scrunched in confusion. Fanny stood in the hallway, watching resentfully as they descended.
“Back later,” called Jeannie, and ducked back into the car, settling Charlie on the seat beside her. He was snug and solid against her. She thought of Lee, the shock of what Jeannie could only see as the end of the affair; the sense of loss imminent but held off, like the blister after a burn. And though Lee’s explanation of Kip’s situation was cuckoo, it bothered her. Lee, Dorothy, Billy—they assumed that Kip was guilty, that the question wasn’t whether he did it, but why.
“The Sunset,” she called to the driver. She was going home. He might be angry, drunk, and scared, but her dad was the only one who knew Kip the way she did—the only one who knew that however deluded or misled Kip was, he was the same kid who, every winter at elementary school, would give away his peacoat to the poor Irish kid who lived with his grandmother in the shack near the highway (their mom was too embarrassed to reclaim it), the same kid who spared Jeannie the details of their mom’s death. Kip had done his share of lying, stealing, and fighting, but he was a good kid. He was not a murderer.
The drapes were drawn, bottles of milk separating on the doorstep, mail stuffing the mouth of the mailbox. In all his wanderings, her dad had never been gone overnight, had never left for long enough to let the house get shabby. Jeannie knocked on the front door, noticing the twitch of Mrs. Fleish’s drapes. She fished the key from her purse and let herself in, hearing Charlie’s excited intake of breath: Grandpa’s house, where there was a backyard and taffy and his uncle’s cowboys and Indians. The house was dim, the suggestion of something unwashed in the air.
“Daddy?” Jeannie called.
Charlie whispered to himself in Jeannie’s arms.
She walked into the kitchen, saw scummed plates, a crusted fork lying in the sink, and felt uneasy.
“Daddy? Are you in here?”
She clicked across the linoleum floor, footsteps intruding on the silence, and peered into the living room. It was empty, save for an ugly mess that spilled across the carpet—the drawers of the desk yanked open, dribbl
ing paper, pillows rummaged from the couch, leaves of newspaper strewing the coffee table. A burglary, perhaps—but there was too much order in the derangement of the room: the open-faced books on the floor, the mildewed cups of coffee, the television screen turned toward the wall.
“Mess,” said Charlie.
“Daddy?”
Nothing; just the sound of a lawn mower buzzing a few houses away. Jeannie’s heart thumped. She remembered the story of her dad’s uncle Donald, who was found hanging from a persimmon tree in his backyard right after the Wall Street crash. Jeannie glanced through the back door: the yard was empty, fruit from the tree split and rotting on the ground. A crow clawed at the paving, its beak rooting in the flesh of an orange that was sunken and powdered with mold; sensing her presence, it lifted away.
Jeannie stepped back through the kitchen, Charlie pushing at her encircling arm—“Too tight”—and down the hallway: the door to her bedroom, Kip’s bedroom, wide open, mouths to the past, the same Pilgrim wallpaper, the high school trophies and stuffed animals and Snoopy figurines that watched over their childhoods. And here, in the recesses of the house, layers of smell: the deep, innate scent of home, of memory and skin; the soft reek of incense hovering at Kip’s door; the stale breath of cigarettes on the walls; and there it was again, the drift of something overripe, growing stronger as she continued down the hallway toward her dad’s bedroom. The door was shut, artificial light seeping from the gap at the floor.
“Hello?” said Jeannie, letting her knuckles brush against the door.
“Where’s Grandpa?” asked Charlie.
Jeannie placed a palm against the door and held it there, as though she might be able to feel what lay behind it. The wood was warm against her fingers—it felt strangely distended, as if bulged out by the room within, holding its breath. She closed her eyes and listened. The throb of her blood, the whispered breaths of Charlie, and beyond these, tiny spores of noise—the gurgle of pipes, the fizzle of a fly, and, so quiet as to seem imagined, another, creaking sound.
Jeannie leaned her forehead against the door, feeling the coolness of her skin against the wood, and listened, her ears casting for clues. Nothing; and then, there it was again.
She stood for a long time, listening to the quiet and the creaking, knowing she was on the threshold of something, holding the moment before whatever was waiting behind the door carried her away. And in that long, still moment, she understood that home, as she knew it, might not exist anymore; and all its familiar intimacies—the smells, the give of the floorboards underneath her feet, the ticks and groans of the living building—might be the near-vanishing remnants of something dying. And there it was again—the creaking sound. She opened her eyes, saw Charlie pressing his hand next to hers, a smile on his lips. Then another noise, loud even against the drumming of her blood: slick-crumple, slick-crumple, like newspaper pages being turned.
“Pap-Pap,” said Charlie; and Jeannie dropped her hand to the doorknob, flinging the door open so hard it bashed the wall.
“Daddy?”
It took a moment for her to see what was in front of her, to unroot the sickening images that had bloomed in her brain as she stood outside the door and to see her dad as he was: unsanitary with life, sitting bony and cross-legged in a circle of light cast by the overhead lamp. He was unshaven, dressed in a set of dirt-seamed pajamas, and surrounded by drifts of paper; he held one piece between a trembling thumb and forefinger, his neck craned to bring its contents into focus.
“Pap-Pap,” said Charlie.
Jeannie’s dad looked up, then returned to his business, setting the piece of paper on the floor and feeling over the others with his hands. “I can’t find it,” he murmured.
“You all right, Daddy?” said Jeannie, her heart still hammering in her chest. “You scared me.” And hearing the shrillness of her voice, she gathered herself, taking a slow breath and setting Charlie on the carpet. “I was worried,” she said. “The house is a mess.” She stepped over the papers to open the drapes. A punch of stale sweat and soured liquor hit her as she passed her dad, and Jeannie held her breath. She pulled at the drapes. Sunlight drifted into the room, showing up its dust and disarray: her dad’s yellowed sheets, twisted in a sweaty confusion on the bed; a collection of variously full water tumblers arranged in a line on the nightstand, like a high school science experiment; empty liquor bottles rolled under the bed. Dismay weighed down Jeannie’s stomach.
“What’s been going on, Daddy?”
“No—” said her dad, folding a piece of paper and setting it back on the carpet.
“You’ve been drinking.”
“That’s not it . . .”
“When was the last time you took a bath? Have you eaten?”
Her dad’s forehead folded in concentration; he closed his eyes and muttered.
“Have Aunt Ruth and Uncle Paulie been by?” Jeannie was half yelling now, an act of near-violence on the quiet. She heard her dad’s alarm clock tick, the fly at the windowpane hum in muted reproach.
Her dad opened his eyes and studied her. “Aunt Ruth’s in the hospital,” he said.
“What? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“She’s going to be fine. Some stomach thing.” He waved his hand to dismiss the subject, then picked up what Jeannie now saw was a letter. He put his face close to it, squinting one eye to bring the handwriting into focus, then flipped the letter with a smack and studied the other side. “Nope,” he said.
“What stomach thing?”
Charlie tottered among the paper; he picked up two pieces and threw them, exclaiming in delight.
“Hey,” cried Jeannie’s dad. “Stop that.”
But now it was a game: Charlie bunched another piece of paper in his hand and threw it at his grandfather, rebellion in his face.
“Stop, Charlie.” Jeannie crouched and wrested Charlie into her arms. She smoothed the piece of paper; Kip’s handwriting stepped in uneven legs down the page.
“These are from Kip?” said Jeannie. Charlie wriggled.
Her dad leaned toward her, releasing a wave of body odor. He shook another letter in his fingers. “I’ve read them over and over,” he said, his breath like spoiled food.
“Daddy, what’s going on?” said Jeannie, taking his shoulder, feeling its bone and gristle.
Her dad stared at her, an expression of defeat gathering in his face.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Kip / June 1968
You don’t know shame till a guy with peach fuzz and pimples has stripped you naked so he can look underneath your balls and up your butthole. He searched everywhere—in my mouth, in my armpits, between my fucking fingers. Didn’t find anything but dirt and stink. Then they hosed me down and shaved my head so I was clean and new as a baby rat. I stood in the guard shack, watching a drove of prisoners stringing through the sally port into the brig, heads bowed as they got a frisking and a bitching from the guard. Seated at a makeshift desk in front of me, a fat-gut rear-echelon motherfucker talked at me in a dead-drone voice: rules, regulations, where I’d be assigned.
“Pretrial confinement,” he said, digging a booger from his nose and wiping it on the edge of the desk. “Maximum security.”
They put me in this box.
A Conex container, two big mouths slit into the front and back to let the box breathe. My cell is the size of my hooch back on the firebase, except there’s no cot, just a blanket on the ground and a broken bucket to shit in. Somebody’s left a Bible here, but when I open it, it’s torn up and smeared with something that sure as hell looks like shit. And the heat—something solid, like the roof pressing down. A bumblebee as big as a thumb drifts in through one of the slits, then knocks itself against the steel wall, over and over, buzzing like crazy; stupid bug got in but can’t figure out how to get out again. It’s just me and the bumblebee, locked in the furnace—I can make out seven other cells, but they’re all empty—and still this place reeks of crotch and ass. I pace, touch
the loops and knots of wire that form my cell door, and feel panic getting its hooks in me. Then a yell and a shake of metal, and the light powers in.
“Get in, shit-rat.”
A black dude walks past my cell, naked but for boxers and boots, a small beard sprouting on his lower lip. He watches me as he passes, cold freak-eyes taking in every piece of me. I step back toward my shit-bucket, hear the click of a lock. He starts to whistle, a slow, empty sound, with no rounding of a tune.
More inmates, escorted in one at a time, each in their skivvies, sweat greasing their bodies, all black except one, a skinny white guy with a tattoo of a baby covering his back. I count six inmates in all, hear them mumbling in their cells.
“No bullshit,” orders the guard.
The guy in the cell next to me starts barking like a dog.
“Shut the hell up!”
But the barking keeps up, and down at the end of the box one inmate starts cock-a-doodle-dooing, another snorting like a pig. The guard strides to the far end of the box and slams something hard against one of the cell doors. The barnyard settles, all except for Freak-Eyes, who’s still whistling.
The guard tramps out. Nobody speaks. The door to the Conex is open, and I’m guessing we’re all looking out at the sky, feeling the wash of the breeze. Then shadows fall over the light: the last inmate. Freak-Eyes stops whistling. A tree-tall black guy, hunching under the low ceiling, Afro rising from his head. This guy is beefed—his neck sprouting an extra pair of deltoids, his arms swollen with muscles—and I can tell from his slow walk, his tall hair, the hush-down of the others, that this is where the power is: this guy is king of this stinking sweatbox. The Boss. The guard locks him into the cell opposite mine, then walks out of the container, slamming and locking the door behind him. We are in shadow again. My eyes adjust to the murk to see the Boss standing at the front of his cell, gazing at me.
“What you do, Baby-san?” he says.
The others share their theories.
“He caught ass-fucking his hooch mate.”
“No, I got it, kid went AWOL, couldn’t handle the heat.”
The Outside Lands Page 17
