Sweet Hush

by Deborah Smith

  “What happened here?” the judge demanded. He prodded Kenney with his gavel. “Kenney. Don’t bleed in my courtroom.” He didn’t like Kenney, either.

  I looked straight into Edwina’s worried eyes and started to admit I’d hit the asshole, when the old man spoke up. “Man fainted, Your Honor. I saw the whole thing. Just passed out and fell forward and whacked himself in the mouth. This young man here tried to catch him, but it was too late.”

  The judge gave me, the old man, and Kenney a shrewd assessment. “Sounds reasonable,” he said. “Couldn’t happen to a more deserving member of the press.” Edwina nodded.

  “Quiet,” the judge ordered. “Somebody check his pulse.”

  Edwina pressed her fingertips to his throat. “He’ll live.”

  “Too bad,” the old man said.

  When Kenney came to, he took a long, woozy look up into the warning faces of the unfriendly judge, the smirking bailiffs, the stubborn old man, Edwina, and me, then picked up his tooth and clamped his bloody mouth shut. But one day not long after that he walked by Edwina and me in a courthouse hallway and said, “Just give me time. I’ll get you and Al and your rat-bastard charity-case nephew, too.”

  Edwina arched a brow. “You’re about as frightening as the Wicked Witch Of The West. ‘I’ll get you, Dorothy, and your little dog, too.’ At any rate, I can’t imagine what you mean, Mr. Kenney, but next time, you’ll need more than one tooth repaired.” Then, pulling me by the arm like a little blonde tractor, she breezed by.

  “I think it’s time we insisted on channeling your energy away from the courtroom,” Al declared. “Edwina can take care of yourself, and you need something to do that’s more constructive than punching reporters. There are too many Haywood Kenneys in the world to devote yourself to rearranging their teeth.” He said all that with an arm around my shoulder, then added, “So it’s time, pal, for us to incarcerate you. In high school.”

  I couldn’t stand that—I’d never attended a real school for more than a few months here and there, and none at all after my mother moved us to Mexico. “I’m ditching this shit,” I muttered to myself after the first week. I took a bus to the southside, lied about my age, and got a job skinning steer carcasses at a meat packing plant. When Al found out, he was mad as hell.

  “You lied to me. Don’t ever lie to me, again. Sorry, pal, but you have to go to school.”

  “I don’t need to sit in a classroom listening to teachers who’ve never been anywhere or done anything except take care of their own little pile of shit. You can’t turn me into a monkey in a cage.”

  “Before your arrogance completely overwhelms your view of life, Mr. Monkey, at least take a few tests and show us how well you can count your own bananas.”

  “Try me.”

  I took their damned tests. They didn’t know that my mother, when she was sober, had kept me in the company of smart people, educated people, and she’d pushed me to learn from them. Plus I liked to read. And I’d had my share of helpful women as tutors, not that I was going to tell Al and Edwina about them. A mathematics professor from the Universite del Sol had taught me algebra and trigonometry then took me to bed. I was twelve when she made a man of me, so to speak. By god, I knew how to solve an equation in bed. Some lessons you never forget.

  So I took the tests, and everyone was shocked. I qualified for college level courses, especially in math.

  “Our teenage monkey has quite a brain,” Edwina said to Al, prodding me with a finger as she talked, as if testing to see whether I had monkey fur under my shirt. Then, to me: “All right, so what do you want to be when you grow up, monkey boy?”

  “I don’t have a clue.”

  “You won’t get a clue by skinning cows.”

  “I’m not like you and Al. I don’t know how to save the world the way you do at the D.A.’s office.”

  “You don’t even know how to save the cows.”

  That was true, but I got my high school GED without ever sitting in a classroom, and I refused to listen when they encouraged me to sample a few early college courses. I worked at the meat plant and kept to myself, saving money, insisting on paying Al and Edwina rent, pissing them off but earning their respect, grudgingly, the same way they’d earned mine. I lived a hidden life between their wide circle of educated friends and sophisticated interests and the dark, blood-stained world of the meat plant, where even the toughest SOB’s on the factory line left me alone after I knocked out a few of their teeth.

  He’s hopelessly violent and isolated, everyone told Al. Your charity will come back to haunt you.

  Why do you still keep those awful coyote skulls in your dresser drawer? Edwina’s elegant sisters asked me nervously. Edwina had shown my skulls to her sisters without my permission. At the time, it felt like a major violation of my faith in her and Al.

  Because they’re the only family I can really trust, I said.

  I WAS SEVENTEEN, still working at the meat plant, with no big plans and no idea how to decide what or who I should become. Al and Edwina had almost given up trying to soften me, or polish me, or convince me I might learn the secret to peace of mind in a college classroom. I’d saved a lot of money but with no real purpose other than to buy myself a new flute and a 35 mm camera with dark-room equipment. I took pictures of buildings and beef carcasses and good-looking girls and men on the factory line who threatened to cut my balls off if I snapped that fuckin’ camera one more fuckin’ time, which gave the whole hobby a dangerous edge I liked.

  But underneath I hated myself and hated the dark void of uncertainty that wouldn’t tell me where I fit in. So I planned to save the world in my mother’s honor? How? When? Hell, not so far. I had blown off Great Aunt Sophie’s melodramatic hints, but deep inside, I wanted to know.

  And then we got a call.

  Sophie was dying, and she wanted to see me.

  And I went.

  I sat by her bed while a great-granddaughter hovered, casting worried glances from me to Sophie’s wizened face. Like I might hurt the old lady.

  Sophie finally looked at her with as much disgust as she could muster. “Leave the room, you bother me,” she ordered. “What do you think—Nicholas scares me? Don’t be a fool.”

  The great-granddaughter sighed and shut the door on her way out.

  Sophie and I looked at each other for a minute. “Thank you,” I said gruffly.

  “You keep my rosary beads hanging on your mirror. I asked Aleksandr. He told me so.”

  I clenched my hands on my knees. “You told me to have faith in our family. I’ve tried for three years, now. But I still don’t fit in.”

  “But you want to fit in. You’re loyal to Aleksandr and Edwina. Anyone can see that.”

  I shrugged. “They put up with me. I put up with them.”

  “Not good enough. Ask the question you fear the worst. Open your heart.”

  “What really happened to make my mother leave here?”

  Sophie struggled for a moment, then lifted a tiny, decrepit hand and put it over one of mine. “Your mother and Aleksandr were raised by their father, and they adored him. But he was very strict.”

  I nodded. “Al’s told me all about him.” My grandfather had been dead for years when Al found me. Al said he was a great man. Had his portrait on the living room wall. Said the old man had the courage of his convictions.

  “Everyone tried to find her when she ran away,” Sophie went on. “Her cousins, and poor, worried Aleksandr, and all the other relatives. They looked for years. No one could understand why she thought she had no choice but to run away and never come home with her baby. Sins such as hers are easily forgiven by kind people. We are kind people. Margisia was a beloved girl. Why, why, why did she run, the family asked?”

  “My mother only told me she couldn’t go back. That she got pregnant with no husba
nd, and she knew she wasn’t wanted.”

  “Poor Margisia.” Sophie paused, struggling for strength. “No one but me knows what I am about to tell you. It is your choice whether you tell Aleksandr and the others. It would break Aleksandr’s heart. And I know what I have to say will hurt you, too, but you will be hurt much more if you go on blaming your family for her sorrows.”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  Sophie shut her eyes, then opened them and looked at me with hard, sad resolution. “Her papa told her she could not come home unless she gave her baby away. He called her names. Said she ruined her life. Said she broke his heart and he’d never forgive her. Said he would rather take her child and throw it in the river than raise a bastard under his roof. He said if she wouldn’t give the baby away she should leave and never come home, again. I know. I was there when he spoke all those terrible words to her.”

  I sat for a long time with my head bowed. I said nothing, wanted to feel nothing, because at that moment I knew how much my mother had sacrificed to keep me, no matter how badly she’d managed the rest. In a sense I had been given away as a child, and I hurt enough to do justice to the truth. When I looked at Sophie again she was wheezing lightly but watched me with shrewd eyes. “After your mother disappeared, your grandfather never spoke her name again. His regrets killed him. No one knows why he died of a broken heart, but me.”

  “Everyone in the family honors his memory. And Al thinks he walked on water.”

  “Yes. Now it’s up to you to decide whether to tell Aleksandr the truth, or if you need to tell him anything at all. But no more bitterness toward this family, all right?”

  I stood, bending over her as if I were bowing to her, holding her frail hand like a bird. “You’re my Great Aunt Sophie,” I said simply. “And I trust you.”

  Her eyes gleamed.

  I never told Al what his father did to my mother and thus, to me. I didn’t need to. I didn’t want to. You don’t hurt the people you love.

  I had a family, now.

  I WASN’T TRANSFORMED by Sophie’s confession, but I did start to feel there was some good reason I’d been rescued by Al, and I wanted to make him and the other Jacobs proud of me. When I turned eighteen I found myself outside a downtown storefront, staring at an army recruitment poster as if I’d been struck by lightning. The Vietnam War was over but had left a bad taste in the public mouth. The army seemed sinister. People said the generals were all liars, like Nixon, and a career as a soldier seemed foolish. Al had served in the National Guard during college, and struggled with his own hatred of the war machine versus the fact that two of his favorite cousins had been killed in the marines, and he had not. “It’s not the soldiers’ fault that the goddamned politicians and generals sent them over there to kill and be killed for no good reason,” he would yell, maybe out of guilt.

  I had a simpler view of things.

  A young, bulldog-jawed Green Beret looked back at me in the recruiting poster. He wore a full dress uniform, including a sword. The slogan beneath him said Be A Special Forces Soldier. De Oppresso Liber. To Free The Oppressed. My spine tingled. I could be a soldier. I could be a warrior. A samurai. A knight in shining armor. I’d free the oppressed. Then no one would ask me how I felt about anything, or tell me I ought to learn how to fit in with the ordinary world. Green Berets didn’t have to feel a certain way, or fit in. They were meant to be different. They only had to do the job.

  The job of saving the world.

  I walked inside the recruiter’s office and joined the army.

  “I finally have a mission,” I told Al and Edwina that night. “I’m going to become a Green Beret.”

  “Is that the best you can do?” Edwina shouted. “You aspire to travel to exotic places and kill exotic people?” Then she broke down in tears. In the four years I’d lived there, I’d never seen her cry, before. She had left the D.A.’s office to work as an advocate for a civil liberties group. She’d made a name for herself in city politics. So had Al. He’d won election to the state court. Judge Al, I called him, sometimes. “You have a good heart but a bad philosophy about life,” she moaned, “and the army’s going to twist you into someone we won’t recognize.”

  Al was more logical, but just as upset. “I respect the military, Nick, but I don’t trust the men who lead it, right now. The army is not the noble way of life you think it is. Besides, you hate rules, you hate living by other people’s by-the-books mentality. Then why, in god’s name, do you want to be part of the most regimented, anachronistic, soulless, brainless institution mankind ever created?”

  Whatever I said in return made no difference. I packed my duffel bag and left in the middle of the night, while they were asleep. I posted a note for Edwina.

  You can throw the coyote skulls away, if you want to.

  One week after I entered basic training, I got a package from her and Al. It was full of the funny, ordinary things families send to enlisted men—cookies and new socks, a good razor, a box of stationary, and the rosary beads Great Aunt Sophie had given me.

  There was a note from Al in the package. You think you can get rid of us this easily? he wrote. I told you not to underestimate us. And there was a photo of my bedroom, which had long since ceased to look girly.

  Edwina had hung the coyote skulls on the wall.

  Chapter 7

  WEAPONS SPECIALIST Nicholas Jakobek, that was me. Sergeant Nick Jakobek. Green Beret. 1981. I was 23-years-old, six-four and 225 pounds, all of it muscle. Five years into my army career, and I was happy enough. I hadn’t killed anybody yet, but I knew how—I’d mastered a dozen different techniques, aside from my obvious talent with every kind of gun in the U.S. Army’s arsenal. I had even begun the slow process of earning a college degree. Whenever I got leave from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, I flew home to Chicago. Al and Edwina still disapproved of my career, so we talked about their careers, instead. They were moving up the ranks in state politics. There was talk of running Al for Congress.

  “Not bad for a dumb guy and a pregnant woman,” Al said.

  “Fuck you, Papa-san-to-be,” Edwina retorted. Then she kissed him. She and Al were in their mid-thirties, and had been trying to get pregnant for several years. They’d almost given up before they hit the jackpot. Now, Edwina walked like a blonde balloon perched on sausages. When I arrived at the apartment that fall, her due date was only two weeks away, and she’d just gone on maternity leave. She commandeered me instantly. “Your mission, Sergeant Nick, is to help me waddle to the park every day for a little exercise.”

  “Will do. Just don’t fall on me.”

  She said some bad things in Latin.

  The next day we put on heavy sweaters and jogging pants, and started along the crowded sidewalk outside the apartment building. Al was in court. Edwina lumbered along with me slightly in front of her, clearing a path in the lunchtime crowds. People tended to step aside when they saw me coming. I could hear Edwina huffing and puffing behind me. “Look how people are dodging us,” I said over my shoulder. “They’re afraid you’ll turn into a human bowling ball.”

  “Nick.” The odd tone in her voice made me turn quickly. She had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. She pointed downward. Large stains were spreading down the legs of her dark sweats. “My water broke. Call a cab.”

  She sounded calm enough. I steered her to a lamppost. “Hold on.” I flagged a cab, got her into the back seat with her feet propped up, then climbed in the front seat. “Cook County. Hurry.”

  “I’m not going to the public hospital,” Edwina complained loudly. “We’ll just take our time and cruise over to . . .” Her voice became a sharp gasp, and she clutched her stomach.

  “Cook County,” I told the driver, again. “Fast.”

  What happened next sounds like a bad joke, but it’s the truth. The traffic in Chicago can stop everything but the clock. Our ca
b got bottlenecked on the way to the hospital, with no hope of moving, and by then Edwina was moaning and punching the back of the seat. “Get on your radio and try to get a cop here,” I told the cabbie, then climbed out and went to the back. I opened the passenger door and stared at the soggy crotch of her jogging pants. I could ford a whitewater river with a hundred pounds of gear on my back, live for days in the desert on cactus leaves and my own urine, assemble any rifle known to modern warfare, and pinpoint a target no bigger than an ant’s balls. But I had no idea what to do with Edwina’s crotch.

  “I’m going to have this baby right now,” she gasped.

  “No. Hold on. Think about something else.”

  “That’s not how it works, Nicholas. Get in here and pull these pants off of me.”

  I knelt between her updrawn legs, hooked my fingers in her clothing, and slid her pants halfway off. Then, I stopped.

  “For godssake, get my panties off, too! I don’t care if you see my ass and the entire theme park of wonders in its vicinity! Just get my clothes off!”

  “All right. Calm down.” With a few quick tugs I jerked everything to her ankles, then tried to look only at her face.

  Flushed and panting, she jabbed a finger toward her thighs. “I think the baby’s head is crowning! Tell me what you see!”

  I started sweating. My hands trembled. I gently pried her thighs open and studied the bulging, heaving scenery between them. Edwina screamed and grunted. The baby’s bloody, filmy skull appeared. “I have eye contact,” I said loudly.

  Edwina yelled, groaned, arched her back, and convulsed. “Put your hands down there. Catch the baby!”

  I cupped my hands in place, and by god, a miracle occurred. A tiny girl filled them, wiggling just a little. Edwina collapsed, moaning and gasping and trying to lift her head enough to see what—who—I held. “Hand me the baby . . . slowly . . . Nicholas. Gently.”

  “I’ve got her,” I said. “Don’t worry.”