“I wasn’t smiling in Whitmanville.”
“Actually, you were. Even there. That was part of the weirdness of it.”
There weren’t many birds to watch in the dog days anyway. Once territory had been claimed and breeding accomplished, it was to no small bird’s advantage to make itself conspicuous. Walter took morning walks in refuges and parks that he knew were still full of life, but the overgrown weeds and heavily leafed trees stood motionless in the summer humidity, like houses locked against him, like couples who had eyes for nobody but themselves. The northern hemisphere was soaking up the sun’s energy, plant life silently converting it to food for animals, the burring and whining of insects the only sonic by-product. This was the time of payoff for the neotropical migrants, these were the days that needed to be seized. Walter envied them for having a job to do, and he wondered if he was becoming depressed because this was the first summer in forty years he hadn’t had to work.
The national Free Space battle of the bands was scheduled to happen on the last weekend in August and, unfortunately, in West Virginia. The state was uncentrally located and hard to reach by public transportation, but by the time Walter had proposed changing the location, on his blog, his fans were already excited about traveling to West Virginia and shaming it for its high birth rates, its ownership by the coal industry, its large population of Christian fundamentalists, and its responsibility for tipping the 2000 election in George Bush’s favor. Lalitha had asked Vin Haven for permission to hold the event on the Trust-owned former goat farm she’d always had in mind for it, and Haven, dumbfounded by her temerity, and as helpless as anybody else to resist her velvet-gloved pressure, had consented.
A grueling haul across the Rust Belt pushed their total trip mileage past ten thousand, their petroleum consumption past thirty barrels. It happened that their arrival in the Twin Cities, in mid-August, coincided with the first autumn-smelling cold front of the summer. All across the great boreal forest of Canada and northern Maine and Minnesota, the still substantially intact boreal forest, warblers and flycatchers and ducks and sparrows had completed their work of parenting, shed their breeding plumage for better camouflaging colors, and were receiving, in the chill of the wind and the angle of the sun, their cue to fly south again. Often the parents departed first, leaving their young behind to practice flying and foraging and then to find their own way, more clumsily, and with higher mortality rates, to their wintering grounds. Fewer than half of those leaving in the fall would return in the spring.
The Sick Chelseas, a St. Paul band that Walter had once heard opening for the Traumatics and guessed would not survive another year, were still alive and had managed to pack the Free Space event with enough fans to vote them on to the main event in West Virginia. The only other familiar faces in the crowd were Seth and Merrie Paulsen, Walter’s old neighbors on Barrier Street, looking thirty years older than everybody else except Walter himself. Seth was very taken with Lalitha, could not stop staring at her, and overruled Merrie’s pleas of tiredness to insist on a late, post-battle supper at Taste of Thailand. It became a real noseynessfest, as Seth prodded Walter for inside dope on Joey and Connie’s now notorious marriage, on Patty’s whereabouts, on the precise history of Walter and Lalitha’s relationship, and on the circumstances behind Walter’s spanking in the New York Times (“God, you looked bad in that”), and Merrie yawned and arranged her face in resignation.
Returning to their motel, very late, Walter and Lalitha had something resembling an actual quarrel. Their plan had been to take a few days off in Minnesota, to visit Barrier Street and Nameless Lake and Hibbing and to see if they could track down Mitch, but Lalitha now wanted to turn around and go straight to West Virginia. “Half the people we have on the ground there are self-described anarchists,” she said. “They’re not called anarchists for nothing. We need to get there right away and deal with the logistics.”
“No,” Walter said. “The whole reason we scheduled St. Paul last was so we could take some days here and rest up. Don’t you want to see where I grew up?”
“Of course I do. We’ll do it later. We’ll do it next month.”
“But we’re already here. It won’t hurt to take two days and then go straight to Wyoming County. Then we won’t have to come all the way back. It doesn’t make any sense to drive two thousand extra miles.”
“Why are you being this way?” she said. “Why don’t you want to deal with the thing that’s important right now, and deal with the past later?”
“Because this was our plan.”
“It was a plan, not a contract.”
“Well, and I guess I’m a little worried about Mitch, too.”
“You hate Mitch!”
“It doesn’t mean I want my brother living on the street.”
“Yes, but one more month won’t hurt,” she said. “We can come straight back.”
He shook his head. “I also really need to check the house out. It’s been more than a year since anyone was there.”
“Walter, no. This is you and me, this is our thing, and it’s happening right now.”
“We could even leave the van here and fly out and rent a car. We’d only end up losing one day. We’d still have a whole week to work on logistics. Will you please do this for me?”
She took his face in her hands and gave him a border-collie look. “No,” she said. “You please do this for me.”
“You do it,” he said, pulling away. “You fly out. I’ll follow in a couple of days.”
“Why are you being this way? Was it Seth and Merrie? Did they get you thinking too much about the past?”
“Yes, they did.”
“Well, put it out of your mind and come with me. We have to stay together.”
Like a cold spring at the bottom of a warmer lake, old Swedish-gened depression was seeping up inside him: a feeling of not deserving a partner like Lalitha; of not being made for a life of freedom and outlaw heroics; of needing a more dully and enduringly discontented situation to struggle against and fashion an existence within. And he could see that simply by having these feelings he was starting to create a new situation of discontent with Lalitha. And it was better, he thought, depressively, that she learn sooner rather than later what he was really like. Understand his kinship with his brother and his father and his grandfather. And so he shook his head again. “I’m going to stick to the plan,” he said. “I’m going to take the van for two days. If you don’t want to come with me, we’ll get you a plane ticket.”
Everything might have been different if she’d cried then. But she was stubborn and spirited and angry with him, and in the morning he drove her to the airport, apologizing until she made him stop. “It’s OK,” she said, “I’m over it. I’m not worrying about it this morning. We’re doing what we have to do. I’ll call you when I get there and I’ll see you soon.”
It was Sunday morning. Walter called Carol Monaghan and then drove on familiar avenues up to Ramsey Hill. Blake had cut down a few more trees and bushes in Carol’s yard, but nothing else on Barrier Street had changed much. Carol embraced Walter warmly, pushing her breasts into him in a way that didn’t feel quite familial, and then, for an hour, while the twins ran squealing around the child-proofed great-room and Blake stood up nervously and left and came back and left again, the two parents made the best of being in-laws.
“I was dying to call you as soon as I found out,” Carol said. “I literally had to sit on my hand to keep from dialing your number. I couldn’t understand why Joey didn’t want to tell you himself.”
“Well, you know, he’s had some difficulties with his mother,” Walter said. “With me, too.”
“And how is Patty? I hear you guys are not together anymore.”
“That’s true enough.”
“I’m not going to bite my tongue on this one, Walter. I’m going to speak my mind even though it’s always getting me in trouble. I think this separation was a long time coming. I hated to see the way she treated you. I
t always seemed like everything had to be about her. So there—I said it.”
“Well, Carol, you know, these things are complicated. And she’s Connie’s mother-in-law, too, now. So I hope the two of you can find some way to work things out.”
“Ha. I don’t care about me, we don’t need to see each other. I just hope she recognizes what a heart of gold my daughter has.”
“I certainly recognize that myself. I think Connie’s a wonderful girl, with a lot of potential.”
“Well, you always were the nice one of the two of you. You always had a heart of gold yourself. I was never sorry to be your neighbor, Walter.”
He chose to let the unfairness of this pass, chose not to remind Carol of the many years of generosity that Patty had shown her and Connie, but he did feel very sad for Patty’s sake. He knew how hard she’d tried to be her better self, and it grieved him to be aligned now with the many people who could see only the unfortunate side of her. The lump in his throat was evidence of how much, in spite of everything, he still loved her. Dropping to his knees for some polite interaction with the twins, he was reminded of how much more comfortable than he she’d always been with little kids, how forgetful of herself she’d been with Jessica and Joey when they were the twins’ age; how blissfully absorbed. It was much better, he decided, that Lalitha had gone on to West Virginia and left him alone to suffer in the past.
After making his escape from Carol, and deducing from Blake’s cool good-bye that he hadn’t been forgiven for being a liberal, he drove up to Grand Rapids, stopped for some groceries, and reached Nameless Lake by late afternoon. There was, ominously, a for sale sign on the adjoining Lundner property, but his house had weathered 2004 as middling-well as it had weathered so many other years. The spare key was still hanging on the underside of the old rustic birch bench, and he found it not too intolerable to be in the rooms where his wife and his best friend had betrayed him; enough other memories flooded him vividly enough to hold their own. He raked and swept until nightfall, happy to have some real work to do for a change, and then, before he went to bed, he called Lalitha.
“It’s insane here,” she said. “It’s a good thing I came and good that you didn’t, because I think you’d be upset. It’s like Fort Apache or something. Our people practically need security to protect them from the fans who’ve shown up early. All those jerks in Seattle seem to have come straight here. We’ve got a little camp by the well, with one Porta Potti, but there’s already about three hundred other people laying siege to it. They’re all over the property, they’re drinking from the same creek they’re shitting right next to, and they’re antagonizing the locals. There’s graffiti all along the road leading up there. I have to send out interns in the morning to apologize to the people whose property’s been defaced, and offer to do some repainting. I went around trying to tell people to chill out, but everybody’s stoned and spread out over ten acres, and there’s no leadership, it’s totally amorphous. Then it got dark and started to rain, and I had to come back down to town and find a motel.”
“I can fly out tomorrow,” Walter said.
“No, come with the van. We need to be able to camp on-site. Right now you’d only get angry. I can deal with it without getting so angry, and things should be better by the time you get here.”
“Well, drive carefully out there, OK?”
“I will,” she said. “I love you, Walter.”
“I love you, too.”
The woman he loved loved him. He knew this for certain, but it was all he knew for certain, then or ever; the other vital facts remained unknown. Whether she did, in fact, drive carefully. Whether she was or wasn’t rushing on the rain-slick county highway back up to the goat farm the next morning, whether she was or wasn’t rounding the blind mountain curves dangerously fast. Whether a coal truck had come flying around one of these curves and done what a coal truck did somewhere in West Virginia every week. Or whether somebody in a high-clearance 4x4, maybe somebody whose barn had been defaced with the words free space or cancer on THE PLANET, saw a dark-skinned young woman driving a compact Korean-made rental car and veered into her lane or tailgated her or passed her too narrowly or even deliberately forced her off the shoulderless road.
Whatever did happen exactly, around 7:45 a.m., five miles south of the farm, her car went down a long and very steep embankment and crushed itself against a hickory tree. The police report would not even offer the faintly consoling assurance of an instant killing. But the trauma was severe, her pelvis was broken and a femoral artery severed, and she had certainly died before Walter, at 7:30 in Minnesota, returned the house key to its nail beneath the bench and headed over to Aitkin County to look for his brother.
He knew, from long experience with his father, that alcoholics were best conversed with in the morning. All Brent had been able to tell him about Mitch’s latest ex, Stacy, was that she worked at a bank in Aitkin, the county seat, and so he hurried from one to another of Aitkin’s banks and found Stacy in the third of them. She was pretty in a strapping farm-girl way, looked thirty-five, and spoke like a teenager. Although she’d never met Walter, she seemed ready to assign him significant responsibility for Mitch’s abandonment of their children. “You could try his friend Bo’s farm,” she said with a cross shrug. “The last I heard, Bo was letting him stay in his garage apartment, but that was like three months ago.”
Marshy, glacially scraped, oreless Aitkin County was the poorest county in Minnesota and therefore full of birds, but Walter didn’t stop to look for them as he drove up dead-straight County Road 5 and found Bo’s farm. There was a large field scattered with the overgrown remnants of a rapeseed crop, a smaller cornfield much weedier than it should have been. Bo himself was kneeling in the driveway near the house, repairing the kickstand of a girl’s bike adorned with pink plastic streamers, while an assortment of young children wandered in and out of the house’s open front door. His cheeks were gin-blossomed, but he was young and had the muscles of a wrestler. “So you’re the big-city brother,” he said, squinting in puzzlement at Walter’s van.
“That’s me,” Walter said. “I heard Mitch was living with you?”
“Yah, he comes and goes. You can probably find him up at Peter Lake now, the county campground there. You need him for something in particular?”
“No, I was just in the neighborhood.”
“Yah, he’s had it pretty rough since Stacy threw him out. I try to help him out a little bit.”
“She threw him out?”
“Oh, well, y’know. Two sides to every story, right?”
It was nearly an hour’s drive to Peter Lake, back up toward Grand Rapids. Arriving at the campground, which looked a little bit like an auto junkyard and was especially charmless in the midday sun, Walter saw a paunchy old guy squatting by a mud-stained red tent and scraping fish scales onto a sheet of newspaper. Only after he’d driven past him did he realize, from the resemblance to his father, that this was Mitch. He parked the van close against a poplar, to catch a little shade, and asked himself what he was doing here. He wasn’t prepared to offer Mitch the house at Nameless Lake; he thought that he and Lalitha might live in it themselves for a season or two while they figured out their future. But he wanted to be more like Lalitha, more fearless and humanitarian, and although he could see that it might actually be kinder just to leave Mitch alone, he took a deep breath and walked back to the red tent.
“Mitch,” he said.
Mitch was scaling an eight-inch sunny and didn’t look up. “Yeah.”
“It’s Walter. It’s your brother.”
He did look up then, with a reflexive sneer that turned into a genuine smile. He’d lost his good looks, or, more precisely, they had shrunk into a small facial oasis in a desert of sunburned bloat. “Holy shit,” he said. “Little Walter! What are you doing here?”
“Just stopped by to see you.”
Mitch wiped his hands on his very dirty cargo shorts and extended one to Walter. It was a flabby h
and and Walter squeezed it hard.
“Yeah, sure, that’s great,” Mitch said generally. “I was just about to open a beer. You want a beer? Or are you still teetotaling?”
“I’ll have a beer,” Walter said. He realized that it would have been kind and Lalitha-like to have brought Mitch a few sixpacks, and then he thought that it was also kind to let Mitch be generous with something. He didn’t know which was the greater kindness. Mitch crossed his untidy campsite to an enormous cooler and came back with two cans of PBR.
“Yeah,” he said, “I saw that van go by and wondered what kind of hippies we had moving in. Are you a hippie now?”
“Not exactly.”
While flies and yellowjackets feasted on the guts of Mitch’s suspended fish-cleaning project, the two of them sat down on a pair of ancient camp stools, made of wood and mildew-splotched canvas, that had been their father’s. Walter recognized other similarly ancient gear around the site. Mitch, like their father, was a great talker, and as he filled Walter in on his present mode of existence, and on the litany of bad breaks and back injuries and car accidents and irreconcilable marital differences that had led to this existence, Walter was struck by what a different kind of drunk he was than their father had been. Alcohol or time’s passage seemed to have expunged all memory of his and Walter’s enmity. He exhibited no trace of a sense of responsibility, but also, therefore, neither defensiveness nor resentment. It was a sunny day and he was just doing his thing. He drank steadily but without hurry; the afternoon was long.
“So where are you getting your money?” Walter said. “Are you working?”
Mitch leaned over somewhat unsteadily and opened a tackle box in which there was a small pile of paper money and maybe fifty dollars in coins. “My bank,” he said. “I got enough to last through the warm weather. I had a night-watchman job in Aitkin last winter.”
“And what are you going to do when this runs out?”
“I’ll find something. I take pretty good care of myself.”
Freedom Page 59
