Wild Blues

by Beth Kephart

  There is such a thing as honor.

  Once Matias asked me this and now I ask you: Can you imagine Tiburcio sitting in a Santa Tecla jail? Every single day Matias’s mother visits. Sometimes she brings Nicha. Sometimes she brings Matias. Always she brings something for Tiburcio. Yuca frita. Chiles rellenos. Of course pupusas. Every day, for four years, she does this, until the judge shortens the sentence, or maybe Matias’s mother convinces the judge, and does it really matter, because Tiburcio is free. Free to be Matias’s best friend out in the open, to walk everywhere beside him like a shadow.

  To the school. To the market. To the barber. To the club. Don’t let anything happen to Matias.

  That braided hat. That busted guitar. That machete in its leather holster with its beaded strap and leather pouch.

  Can you imagine?

  I bet you can imagine.

  I imagined too.

  I imagined like it was my own El Salvador.

  Anything can happen, everything has happened, and this part goes before the next part, because if it doesn’t, the rest of it won’t matter, you will not be able to see, you will not be able to imagine the beginning to the end of it.

  What happens is always mixed up with who it happens to. One thing is not alive, one thing cannot be fixed, without the other. What matters is the truth and how it’s very complicated, how one story builds into another story. El Salvador isn’t your country and Matias wasn’t your friend, and we are here, in Pennsylvania, near New York, four hours and a couple of bumps away from what you think you want to know.

  Are you sure you want to know?

  Think about it.

  Victim impact.

  We are here, and far away gold leaves float on the stream and the least bittern is hiding and good people do bad and bad people do good and you have to forgive more or less within the lines of their intentions. You have to act according to your heart.

  I can see the heat of right now through the window.

  16

  IT’S LEMONADE. WITH ORANGE SLICES.

  I thought maybe you would want a glass of it too.

  I thought a thousand things and I’m still thinking.

  When is a secret not a secret?

  When is telling a story stealing?

  When is telling a story giving your own self away?

  When is telling giving your friends away, your uncle, your mom?

  How is any of this healing?

  The ice in my glass cracks and cracks and now it’s melting. An orange seed floats on my lemonade, like a ship on a sea of sugar.

  17

  THAT AFTERNOON I CAME BACK from the rock full of stories. I told Uncle Davy everything new. About Matias and his pupusas and his New York City. About the trees and the streams and the birds.

  “Lizzie.” Uncle Davy came to me when I was sitting outside, after dinner on the stoop. I had Keppy on my lap, but I wasn’t reading. “Call her. Please.”

  He handed me his old portable phone, size of a car battery (or almost). He went back up the steps. He closed the door. I dialed. I heard him crank Sinatra up on his old record player.

  Privacy. Distance.

  “Sweetie?”

  “Mom.”

  “How are you?”

  I told her how not anything had happened. No bobcat on the prowl. No sizz of snake. No scat of bear or even skunk. I told her about Matias and the rock and the steam, and she sighed. I told her about the overdose of paprika on the Deviled Eggs Express, and how Uncle Davy had a new estate sale that was coming up—no secrets in that story, no busting estrangement rules. I didn’t tell her about the fire and I didn’t tell her about Uncle Davy’s knee, but I told her how it was to sleep again on the trundle at night, and how I’d finally found a way to be so that the new four inches of my body fit. I told her I hoped I wouldn’t grow any longer.

  “Sweetie,” she sighed. “Growth is in you. In your genes.”

  I shook my head. I mouthed “no,” even though she couldn’t see it.

  I tried to imagine Mom while we were talking. Wondered if the tornado of her hair was still whirling, if the radioactive iodine was already streaming through her, if she was feeling the thick of it, the symptoms. I tried to think if she was lying down or sitting up, then I predicted lying down. I wanted to do something good for her. I opened up my Keppy.

  There was still light enough to read by—light coming from the schoolhouse, light falling through the crescent-moon windows, light falling from the sky—so I flipped to the first page and read:

  To many a city man there comes a time when the great town wearies him. He hates its sights and smells and clangor. Every duty is a task and every caller is a bore. There come visions of green fields and far-rolling hills, of tall forests and cool, swift-flowing streams. He yearns for the thrill of the chase, for the keen-eyed silent stalking; or, rod in hand, he would seek that mysterious pool where the father of all trout lurks for his lure.

  “Oh,” Mom said. I could hear her listening. I could hear Frank Sinatra behind me, Uncle Davy singing, and then, again, through the phone and all its wires, I could hear Mom lying there, imagined the medicine burning through, a war inside her skin. I could hear the distance between us and the distance between them, the rub of the bugs and the hoot of the owls that were getting ready for their midnight hunting. I could hear the starlight coming.

  “Mom?”

  “I’ll take that to my dreams,” she said, her voice growing paler and paler. “The green fields. The streams.”

  “Good enough,” I said.

  “Good,” she whispered. “Very.”

  “ ‘Goodnight moon,’ ” I said.

  “ ‘Goodnight stars,’ ” she said.

  Like we’d always done, since the beginning of time, or the time that I’ve known through personal living. “Goodnight moon” and “Goodnight stars.” Before Dad and his own disease were gone. When there were three of us in the house, but only two of us with love, when she hadn’t had the courage yet to tell that man good-bye, when she and my uncle were the best of friends, when nothing had yet come between them.

  Mom’s voice was pale. There was nothing more. We said it, and I clicked off, and there was a split in the long distance, and when I came back inside, Uncle Davy turned Sinatra off. He waited for me to tell my mother’s news, but I couldn’t; what was the news, and hadn’t we promised?

  “How is she?” he said.

  “Taking Keppy to her dreams,” I said.

  “That’s good,” he said. “That’ll be a help.”

  He was waiting for more, but I couldn’t say more.

  Uncle Davy’s eyes were brown and also green and I could see myself in them.

  That was dusk. Then came the trundle and the night and the drift of all my thoughts toward my dreams until I was dreaming not of kettles or the trees or the Sinatra or the hoots of the owls, but of my father. I was dreaming the sharp edge of what he called his charisma, the bright flash of his personality, like the fifty-four thousand degrees of a lightning strike, the hard knock of everything he was and everything he wanted, and now in my dream it was my father who had poisoned my mother, made her weak, put the cancer in her. He lifted his finger. He touched her. She sizzed. I could see this in my dream because in my dream my mom wasn’t just pale, she was transparent. She was touched hard and hurt by him, and the cells inside her scattered.

  Narcissistic personality disorder. You already know what it is, so I’ll say it: That was my father. He was like a clump of uranium, tossing off rays, and I am 50 percent him by the laws of science, but some laws are meant to be broken; that law I break each day. That night I waited for morning to come, and finally it did, finally it was all peace in the schoolhouse cabin, it was just me and my new four inches in the antique trundle bed, some bird and bug song beyond the window.

  Uncle Davy was rattling around. He was putting on his green socks. Coming down the ladder. Calling.

  “Lizzie?”

  I didn’t know, none of
us knew, about the break at Little Siberia.

  There are murderers with hearts of gold.

  And then there are murderers. Strictly speaking.

  There’s what’s in your genes and what’s in your heart.

  The blood of it.

  I didn’t know about the break.

  But you did.

  18

  FACTS AS I HAVE READ of them, as they have been reported in the news.

  They were in the honor block. They had plans the size of Hollywood. They had decided in winter that by summer they’d be free. Fireflies and rippling breezes. Peanut butter and marshmallows. The songs of kettles. Fishing.

  Through the wall of one cell, behind the cot where one slept, they hacksawed a hole. Through the crawl of that hole they found a kingdom. Of pipes and wires, steam and catwalks, catacombs and tunnels. They walked around for months at night. They measured out the miles. They had a set of clothes for their prison life and a set for walking in the kingdom. From one side of one tunnel to the long side of another they could see the air beyond, the little town, the acres of trees and owl hoot and abandoned lodges coming. They could see the old railroad trail that cut straight up through it. They could see the mountain ledge.

  They’d walk around, then crawl back in. They waited until summer came before they broke for freedom.

  You know how when there’s a storm or Earth event, they show you TV maps that have some beating in them? Like, here’s the epicenter and here’s the pulse and here are the red circles spreading? In the days after the break from Little Siberia there were maps like that, which I didn’t see until lots of long weeks later. There were maps and indications, sore spots, trouble zones, and in every map from that time now gone, the schoolhouse cabin was part of the story. There it stood, thirty miles west of Little Siberia, with its purple door and its crescent-moon windows, its tomatoes slowly blooming, its ’69 Dart and its trailer. There it stood, and across the road and up by the stream, balanced on the esker, was a rock the size of a small Gibraltar, with little cracks in it where feet could fit, a rock with its own built-in ladder.

  “Lizzie?”

  My uncle Davy called, while thirty miles away at Little Siberia two straw-stuffed dummies were fast asleep on the cots of two escaping murderers, and there was the sound of something leaving inside the pipes and all those tunnels, and two people out walking their dog thought they saw two men pop the top off a manhole and wave their hands hello.

  Must be two sewer workers, the dog walkers thought, though there wasn’t something just right to it.

  Must be.

  And there they went, the two men running, in their tailored prison best—down the hill, through the town, past the post office and past the deli, to the edge of the trees, turning around one last time and yelling, “Sayonara.”

  “You up?”

  I was already up. I was stirring the pot. I had the Cream of Wheat going and my pack fat with survival tools and snacks and Keppy. At the table, on the cloth, beside the basket of polished acorns, were all the Polaroids and the green note cards that Uncle Davy had piled there the day before, his writing day.

  He had a bow tie at his neck. The strings of his apron tied loose at his back. He lifted the record player needle and put Sinatra on. Then he sat down and I brought the cream, the sugar, the raisins, the Cream of Wheat cooked to perfection.

  “Meesterstuk,” he said.

  He pulled his glasses from his head. He sorted pictures.

  Friday. In the groove.

  19

  THE THING ABOUT COLLECTIBLES IS that you can put a name to them, a guesstimate of value. Mint condition is what you’re going for. And when you find it, how you find it.

  My uncle’s favorite era was Victorian. Victorian with its interiors like miniature museums. Victorian with its beautiful and amusing objects from all around the world. Uncle Davy talked Victorian on his own cable show, and on the shows where he was interviewed and to the estate-sale crowd, even to Luke at Timber, who is inked from tip to tip and dyes his mustache but not his ear hairs. Miniature. Beautiful. Amusing. The Uncle Davy words.

  On that table were his Polaroids, and beside the Polaroids were his note cards, and on the note cards were my uncle’s most extremely cursive words. My uncle’s letters wore big hats. Q loops the size of tidal waves. Ts the girth of a cross. Ss like fishhooks. My uncle’s letters were an art unto themselves. And then there were the words.

  Hope is the thing. Hope and remembering.

  Cursive that comes in close enough:

  Gentlemen never ventured out of the house before first applying their Macassar hair oil during the 1800s. But then what to do about those terrible greasy stains that soon appeared on every parlor chair? Trust the resourceful lady of the house to solve this perplexing dilemma by knitting antimacassars—handmade pieces to protect the furniture from nasty stains. Three-Piece Crocheted Armchair Set: $88.

  It was a Friday. See? The sun streaming through the crescent moons, a touch of the edibles on our Cream of Wheat, Frank Sinatra singing “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive,” which, if you haven’t heard it already, pretty much sounds like you’d expect. Uncle Davy was matching the note cards to the pictures, double-cross-checking the facts. He was putting his one hand up toward his face whenever he laughed, and he was making me laugh and then he was laughing even harder, God’s elastic earth trembling beneath us, until all of a sudden he stopped, put down his spoon, straightened his loose bow tie, and said:

  “Lizzie. You have to tell me. How is your mom?”

  The thing about people who aren’t much talking to each other is that they have to find a way to talk the love that still flows through. Most of the time, no matter what, people want to manage through.

  I told Uncle Davy about the previous evening’s long distance. I told him the stories I’d told my mom. I tried to remember something actual and direct Mom had said, some kind of news, some progress or some story she had told me that would not, in my retelling, break the promise I had made, and then I realized that it was me who’d done all the talking, right up to “Goodnight moon” and “Goodnight stars.”

  “How is your mom?” Uncle Davy asked, and I sat there, very quiet.

  He watched me. He waited. I lifted my shoulders up. I dropped them. I thought about Mom’s voice—pale and far away. Thought about my dream, call it a nightmare. Thought maybe it hadn’t been a right thing, me coming when Mom was so sick, maybe I should have insisted on staying, maybe she really wanted me to, maybe there would have been a way, despite the doctor’s orders: “Radioactive iodine can make other people sick.” Maybe Mom really meant, when she said “Choose,” that I should choose to stay with her.

  Maybe the doctors were wrong.

  “She’s okay,” I finally said.

  Uncle Davy shuffled his Polaroids and note cards into a sloppy deck. He stacked the bowls and took them to the sink. He collected the raisins and the sugar, then crossed the floor, climbed the loft ladder, walked around up there, quiet as a cat. After a while he came down again, and all that time I sat. The taste of the morning on my tongue.

  “Let me show you something,” he said, walking toward the trundle. I crossed the room. I sat beside him. Frank Sinatra had stopped singing under the force of the needle.

  In his hands he carried a long rectangular box. Its lid was a checkerboard—regular squares against varnished ones. The embossing read, “bloomingdale’s.” Some of the lid corners had been yellow-taped into ninety degrees, and when Uncle Davy slipped the lid from the box, the room whished with the sound of paper crinkle. A smell of old rose up.

  He peeled away the paper. Inside were sepias and pinks and blues, newspaper stories, passports, important stuff, all of it punched through in places, ripped. There were scratches through the jackets, blobs in backgrounds, buckled edges, crookedness, places where the color of the picture had worn off, and if you were to ask me, and since I’m telling you anyhow, I’d say it all had the look of having been torn down in a hurry.
Once on a corkboard. Now in a box. Broken, bruised, and split apart. This was it. This was then. Collectibles, but no mint condition.

  My uncle had the celebrity touch. He made one palm flat. His palm became the past.

  “August 1965,” he said, gliding his palm with the picture closer so I could see. “The boardwalk.”

  I saw a tall boy in a plaid shirt and light shorts past his knees. I saw a girl beside the boy wearing a wide side part and three buttons on her dress. Behind them was a tall woman and a shorter man, old-fashioned, wearing their Sunday best.

  Two sets of two. Four sets of history. Collectibles inside a photograph. You couldn’t see their feet, but they were coming for you. You couldn’t hear a word they said, but you knew. There was a girl. And there was her brother. Mint condition.

  “I was ten,” Uncle Davy said. “And she was four.”

  He stacked another picture on top of that picture, and now the girl had long, dark curls and a cap on her head and my uncle was beside her in a white suit and a tie so red you could see it in the photograph. His hand was up beside his mouth. He was covering a laugh. Her head was not even as tall as his shoulder. There was a certificate in her hands.

  “Army gave me leave,” he said. “She graduated first. Top of her class.”

  He sat and I sat and time ticked. No one was singing but the birds and the bugs that went buzz and then, sometimes, against the crescent moons, splat. With his free hand Uncle Davy rustled in the box again, found what he wanted, and stacked that picture up on top—a woman and, beside her, a man, and between them a baby with one foot tiptoe prancing on each of their laps.

  “The coronation of you,” he said.

  I looked like a puppet, hung from some strings. I had one finger in each one of their hands. I was the smallest thing you could imagine, couldn’t imagine being small as that, and then Uncle Davy dug some more and changed the view and now it was me playing pots and pans, and my mom above me on a ladder, her jeans full of splatter, a paint can like a bracelet hung down from one wrist, a smile the size of a river running cutting from one ear to the other.