Northwest Corner

by John Burnham Schwartz

  “Sporting goods?”

  “You name it, we sell it. Need anything?”

  “I need to see Sam.”

  After what seems like ages, staring at her as if she’s crossed the country just to be near him, he replies, “I’ll get my stuff and be right out.”

  Through the plate-glass window she watches him talking to a pretty young Latina behind the register. Leave it to Dwight, she thinks, to find his livelihood (if that isn’t too grand a word for it) in a business that manages to combine his boyish passion for sports with the fig-leaf ambience of Hooters.

  But, to be fair, he seems to be doing all right. He is decently clothed and well enough fed. He doesn’t look broken or unhinged or permanently scarred, isn’t covered with the ugly ghosts of removed tattoos or missing an arm. Beyond that, she assures herself, she doesn’t care to know. She hasn’t come all this way to exchange personal information. He isn’t a prospective anything but the opposite—an island she’s already visited, lived on, explored, and forcibly quit. She knows every inch of that terrain and wouldn’t believe in its reinvention as a luxury resort if the Four Seasons itself vouchsafed it.

  The fact is you can put up palm trees where once there were elms ravaged by beetles, shine the sun all day and banish winter, bronze your skin and whiten your teeth; and still the pale depressed people who stayed behind will go on telling their pitiable or outraged stories of the old days. Because the place where they live isn’t in the end some artificial stage set that can be struck down after the show’s disastrous run, not just home but a constant reminder; because every dead tree and every endless winter are headstones beneath which lie the long-buried memories that no one, anymore, wants to hear.

  DWIGHT

  Got a ride to L.A. Back tomorrow.

  These unfortunate exit lines Sam has scribbled on the back of the morning note I left him the previous weekend—which he’s either been saving as some sort of voodoo memento or has simply forgotten to throw out. In any case, Ruth is standing in the kitchen reading and rereading his words as if they were clues to a tragic treasure map, the edges of the paper vibrating in her hands, while all I can do is stare at my own handiwork on the reverse side:

  Okay, so Solvang’s kind of a ridiculous tourist trap. But trust me, Sport, those Danish waitresses in the pancake house across from the Best Western are worth the trip anyway. Don’t forget the bus map. We’ll talk about car and $$ situation when I get home. Call you later. Dad.

  My note, I must say, seems more egregiously idiotic the second time around.

  Slowly, Ruth lowers the paper. Her green eyes have turned the color of smoke. Sensing where her accusations might be headed, I quickly explain that Monday is Sam’s day off at the store and that he announced zero of his plans to me when I left the house this morning. I got his voice mail during the day, but nothing unusual about that. He could easily have caught a ride from one of the various members of Tony’s extended family who are always shuttling back and forth between Arenas and L.A., I say, and, whatever the individual deficiencies of some of the Lopez clan, they have a strong family sense and, I feel confident, will look after Sam just fine. He’ll certainly be back in time for work tomorrow morning.

  When I’ve finished all this, Ruth takes a few seconds to stare at me. Her look and what it says about my judgment are eloquently familiar from our marriage. Then her eyes fix on the wall and she flips open her cellphone. Soon the automated message on Sam’s line that I heard earlier spills tinnily out of her earpiece. After dialing twice more with the same result, she sinks wordlessly onto a chair.

  Her purse is lying on the table; now she opens it and starts fumbling through a heap of feminine junk. Whatever she’s looking for in such a desperate manner is her own business, but inevitably I find that just the sound of her trinkets being pawed through takes me back to a place I don’t wish to go. That first day in Somers, I emptied my pockets and removed my watch, and a man in uniform sorted and bagged it all, keys and coins and money clip grating against the metal table, till all of it was gone. And then, thirty months later, the same junk was returned to me, only it wasn’t the same, it was invisibly tainted and always would be, and I threw every last item, except for the money, into the trash.

  “I thought I had the number for a school friend of his on a piece of scrap paper,” Ruth says miserably. “But I can’t find it.”

  I pull a bottle of Chardonnay from the fridge—it’s the bottle Penny brought me, I realize just after I’ve opened it—and pour a glass and set it on the table in front of her.

  Ruth shakes her head.

  “Come on, Ruth. It’ll do you good.”

  “I’m not drinking these days.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I take the glass back and sit down across from her. We stay like this for a while, me drinking the wine I poured for her. The kitchen is bright like any kitchen, and in its harsh light now it’s clear how thin she is. Her blond hair, though neat and pretty enough, looks dry and coarse in the light.

  I sit looking at her.

  “He’s my only child,” she says, after a long silence.

  “I know.”

  We met while I was at UConn law school in Hartford and she was an undergrad in music on the Storrs campus. She came to Hartford to visit a classmate of mine named Donald for the weekend. He was her boyfriend, lover, what have you, and I was just a stranger. She was standing at the jukebox in the corner of my regular bar one Friday night, tapping a quarter against the domed glass and trying to decide which song to play, when I turned and saw her from behind: sand-colored ponytail, faded old Levi’s.

  The song she ended up choosing was “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” I never did learn what happened to poor Donald.

  We moved her piano into our first apartment. A Yamaha upright, well-used but gleaming black; she used to polish it with a chamois cloth. It followed us around during those early years of promise and undone deeds, always taking up half the living room. I never so much as touched those keys, but I used to look at the hulking pretty instrument and admire it, thinking about my old man and what he might have said had he been alive.

  The movers set it up that first day and left. Ruth sat down on the bench, half-emptied boxes and yards of torn wrapping all around her, and started to play some old song I didn’t know. An initiation was what it felt like, or a welcoming. It was a slow song, and I sat on the futon sofa behind her and watched her arms and hands gracefully moving, the graceful curve of her neck, the window light on her hair. The people I came from, my father’s line especially, had been bitter, crimped survivors of the failed textile mills in Lawrence and Fall River, with no appreciation of music or beauty. Growing up, it had never occurred to me that one day in my life I would live in a house with a piano, or watch a beautiful woman with sand-colored hair play that piano for me.

  “You look sad,” Ruth said. I thought she was still playing, but she’d stopped and turned to face me.

  She patted the seat beside her. “Come sit with me while I play.”

  I did, and it was the only time I can remember doing that, before we became parents and all the rest.

  Somewhere near the end of the Chardonnay, Ruth tells me about the call she received from the UConn dean. She tells me what she knows, which isn’t a lot, and yet is more than my son confessed to me, and is enough to cast our scattered family at once forward and backward in time, into a shadowed, threatened place of suddenly diminished hope that is too familiar, I can’t help feeling in my gut, to be merely an accident of fate.

  I start in on the only other wine in the house, Merlot in a box. We move from the kitchen to the living room, and there we sit wordless for long stretches, two people who know the worst about each other and, if need be, are still alive to prove it in court. The TV’s on, CNN on mute, as if information about Sam’s whereabouts and well-being and prospects for his life and his victim’s might at any moment appear in the ticker running beneath the talking heads.

 
; Finally, Ruth gets to her feet.

  “I have a headache and I’m tired. I’m going to get a glass of water now and go to my hotel.”

  “Let me get it.”

  “No, I’ll do it.”

  She goes into the kitchen, and I sit listening to the cupboard opening and the faucet filling a glass. The silence afterward, I guess, is her drinking the water.

  The day has faded out, and the lights are off, all except the voiceless TV. And maybe it’s no more than Ruth’s presence in my house, but the moment feels to me more like Connecticut than California; it feels like the past.

  I know her sounds and habits, the warm sour-sweet smell of her skin in the morning bed. How, coming out of the shower, she dips at the waist like a Russian dancer to wrap her wet hair in a towel. How she warms her coffee mug by running hot tap water into it first. How she slices cucumbers with her pinkie sticking in the air like an old Boston lady drinking tea. How centipedes and bats make her shiver uncontrollably, but how she can use a wrench and fix a toilet as well as any man. How she, not I, was the one to teach Sam to build sandcastles and fly paper airplanes. I know how she communes with a piano before playing or giving some kid a lesson, the first two fingers of her right hand running a simple back-and-forth over the center keys while her left palm presses against the face of the black box, feeling for the music to come. I know how, back in the days of our love, she would hook her thumbs over the waist of my jeans and pull me closer, and the little arching gasp of surprise she made when I touched a certain spot in the small of her back.

  I hear her place the empty water glass on the counter.

  Coming back into the living room, she says in a threadbare voice, “Call me if you hear from him. Otherwise I’ll call you tomorrow.” She slips her purse over her shoulder and walks to the front door.

  I haven’t moved, am still looking at her. She is still beautiful, I see, but her beauty is under some kind of assault; it’s there in her face.

  I say her name. She turns and looks at me: my ex-wife. I have no plan, just a host of feelings I’ll never be able to find words for.

  Ruth puts her hand on the knob. “I hope you’re not thinking about trying to hug me or anything like that. I don’t think I could deal with that right now.”

  My arms dangle by my sides. “Are you sick?”

  She starts to cross her arms over her chest but stops herself. “I found a lump in my breast last winter.”

  “Jesus.”

  “My surgeon said they got all of it. No lymph nodes. There was six weeks of radiation, and I’ve just finished my last cycle of chemo. That’s really the whole story at this point.”

  “I’m sorry, Ruth.”

  “It could be worse.” She opens the door and stands there, a hand rising up to touch her head. “And just for the record? This isn’t my hair.”

  “I kind of figured that.”

  “Okay. Well, good night.”

  “Night, Ruth. It’s good to see you. I’m just sorry the circumstances aren’t better.”

  The ghost of a tired, complicit smile on her face. “Were they ever?”

  SAM

  COMING AWAKE in the reclined front seat of a parked car:

  He sits groaning softly and blinking. His head the flattened roof of a hammered nail.

  A night has somehow passed; it would seem to be Tuesday morning.

  He finds himself in a black Mazda hatchback. On a quiet, semi-industrial side street. Somewhere near Venice Beach.

  There is no evidence of Evander, whose car it is.

  On the car floor: a greasy wad of burrito wrappers and four empty Corona bottles.

  An exact replica of the Mountain Dew sign above the drinks cooler in the Cal-Mex take-out joint on Abbot Kinney suddenly appears naked before his awareness: the image mentally snapped during some blurred period of time following a late show of X-Men 3 with Evander; yet prior to another blurred period of time during which they met up with some girls at the bungalow of some guy Evander regularly sells coke to.

  One of the girls, blond with dark roots, called herself …

  What he remembers instead of her name: under tight jeans, the triangle of black thong printed with vibrant red cherries—“bing” cherries, she enigmatically insisted, right before she knelt in front of him.…

  Sitting bolt upright in the car, Sam cricks his neck left then right, shooting stars of inconsolable pain into his head, and mind. He left the car windows open overnight. The inside of the windshield is opalescent with ocean humidity—a pearled, deadly mirror of nothing.

  He can’t remember what the point was, tearing off down the coast with Evander as if he had somewhere to go. The fear of himself remains, and the need to run that he’s always known; but also the bittersweet sense that another desperate experiment has failed and now there are no more decisions to make.

  With the sleeve of his hoodie he rubs a small aperture, about the size of a plum. Through it he can see a lone figure at the end of the street. A man walking a small dog. The man’s head is down. His shoulders are pressed up by his ears.

  The walking of this dog down this same street every morning, afternoon, and evening, it seems absolutely clear to Sam, the same steps along the same path, is the one thing that this lost man can still do with his life.

  DWIGHT

  “COME HERE A LOT?”

  “Almost never.”

  Ruth nods as if mine is a telling response, some sort of pocket metaphor, when in fact I don’t mean it as much of anything. I take the fishing rod from her—the starter spin kit I borrowed from work for my lunch hour, thinking that a little pier fishing down at the marina might be something to carry us through the difficult Tuesday doldrums while we continue to wait for some word or sign from our AWOL son who—maybe predictably—failed to show up for work this morning. (I told Tony that Sam’s recovering from a bout of food poisoning, and he seemed to believe me.)

  “Is this your community?” Ruth asks.

  I look at her, my sarcasm meter touching red, but her dark sunglasses give away nothing. “Pier fishing?”

  “The marina. This whole shaggy California scene. Long-in-the-tooth beach boys chugging Cape Codders at the clam bar all day.”

  “Sea breezes,” I correct her. “And no, Ruth, this isn’t my community. I actually work for a living. But thanks for including me in your heartfelt democratic vision.” I’m annoyed by what seems her persistent downsizing of my prospects, to say nothing of her knee-jerk stereotyping of my adopted home. But then she offers a self-deprecating little smile, and I briefly forgive her everything.

  We go on fishing. The sun-pruned old local next to us reels in his Day-Glo rubber worm and leaves, muttering to himself like an amnesiac. No doubt he’ll settle himself at the bar at Captain Cook’s, up to his soggy gills in sea breezes and invented maritime escapades: the thousand-pound marlin that stared him in the eye and spit the hook.

  “You used to be quite a fisherman,” Ruth muses.

  “I wasn’t so good. But I liked doing it.”

  “We took some nice trips, didn’t we?”

  Her tone is sincere and I fall silent, calling up, in my own version, what it is I imagine she’s talking about.

  The car we’re driving is a Ford pickup, circa mid-eighties, with a camper rig battened over the flatbed. Duffel bags and sleeping and fishing gear piled in back, as well as two rods and two pairs of waders and two pairs of felt-bottom boots, a large of everything for me and kiddie size for Sam. The big-volume item a fisherman’s float like the kind of inner tube I used to frolic with in the North Haven public pool as a kid, but this one fitted out with leg holes and a nylon skirt.

  Sam, five years old and small for his age, sits low on the bench seat between Ruth and me, knees up and Converses resting on the wheel well. He’s wearing a Red Sox cap and a Freddie Lynn jersey that reaches mid-thigh, the bill of the cap brushing against my right arm whenever he turns to ask me a question about something he’s seen out the window or just something
he’s been thinking about.

  Does it ever rain here?

  I tell him that it rains sometimes, but mostly out West what you get is snow. Tons of snow in the winter. Otherwise it’s pretty dry country. Except for the rivers, which are fed each spring by the snow melting up in the mountains.

  Is that cactus?

  No, sagebrush.

  How tall’s that mountain?

  Tall. Very tall.

  Why’s Idaho called Idaho?

  That’s a damn good question.

  Ruth reaches across him and turns up the volume on the radio—Johnny Cash singing “A Boy Named Sue.” We listen to the song and Ruth and I smile at some of the lines, which makes Sam smile, too, though parts of the musical tall tale aren’t exactly clear to him. A son trying to kill his father? A father trying to kill his son? Reconciliation that still sounds a little like hate? And all because some kid was given a girl’s name? It seems simple but isn’t. For no declared reason, Ruth leans over and plants a kiss on top of his head. Her throat and collarbones above her white V-neck are brown from the sun, and so are her arms and her legs beneath the cutoff jeans. She’s kicked off her hiking boots and her feet are bare. Her hair’s held back in a ponytail by a red rubber band that’s been with her since we left Connecticut a week ago. She smells of suntan lotion and mint.

  Then it’s later, don’t know when, somewhere north of Salmon, deep in crazy-militiaman country, but oh the fishing is sweet. The gravel beds in the shallow rivers gleam white under a sun that knows nothing but clean. The water glints and ripples. Wild trout are mere shadows in the light patches, then gone. Cicadas make the world sound electrified.

  Sam, I say, eagle.

  He follows my finger and it’s true and he smiles. The majestic creature circles for a while, just for us, like some little man in an eagle suit, rented by the hour.

  Time up, the bird catches a tailwind and soars away.

  We go back to fishing. The water in which we stand is a foot and a half deep, fast-running, a rubberized mountain cold pressing on our waders. The heavy flat stones slippery beneath our felt-soled boots. We’ve been working on the cast. I count one-two, one-two like a human metronome on Sam’s take-back-and-release, trying to teach him the rhythm that I myself have never come close to perfecting. Though he doesn’t know this yet, bless him. He is enamored not so much of me as of the showboat side of the sport, the mostly unnecessary loading and unloading of the rod as the weighted and coated tangerine-colored line unfurls behind him and then furls forward again, hissing by his ear and mine as it plays out straight and soft, directed at a spot underneath a hanging branch some twenty-five feet away.