“What about you?”
“I was arrested, taken straightaway, which was unfortunate. There were things I’d left behind here, things from my mom I really wanted to keep.”
“You can get them now, yes?”
“If they’re still here. Yes.”
“So you went to jail?”
“I was only fourteen, under the sway of a con man. I had no birth certificate, no idea what my mother’s real name was. I went to the state.”
“Foster kid?” This makes Ruth smile.
“Yes, dear. Just like you.” He doesn’t look away from Ruth.
“So that was the last time you saw him?” Nat asks.
“Well,” Mr. Bell says, and then nothing.
RUTH’S KNAPSACK DOES NOTHING. It sits between the beds without blinking. I unpack it like I’m cataloging evidence from a crime, like I’ve overlooked some essential clue. A flannel. Seven books of matches and some newspapers to start fires. A pair of socks, five pairs of plain underwear. The Book of Ether. Chocolate bars, nuts, pepperoni. The tarp. A compass. A flashlight. Two water bottles.
I turn on the TV. When the Wizard of Oz sends Dorothy off to get the witch’s broomstick, he’s sending Dorothy to her death in order to preserve his lie-based life. I lock the door from the inside. I think that’s awful. I can’t believe we’re supposed to forgive the Wizard at the end.
There’s a knock just after eight. The young woman from the office is wearing a mechanic’s coat with the word Mike embroidered in red. “I’m Sheresa. Ready?”
I put Ruth’s pack on my back. “I’m Cora. Yeah.”
Sheresa drives a Crown Victoria with brown velvet seats. She’s too short for such a car, so she has duct-taped hunks of two-by-fours to both the brake and gas pedals. She’s even rigged an extension on the radio tuner, placing it within easy reach. On the dashboard there’s a bumper sticker for an amusement park called House of Stairs and the odd slogan below, “It’s Vertiginous!” The car turns over, and the radio announces the theft of a rare early American bill from the Museum of Coin and Currency.
“So. Where are you heading?” Sheresa asks.
“My aunt’s trying to take me somewhere, a place she knows.”
“Trying?”
“We’re on foot.”
“I noticed. No car. You’re walking there? Aren’t you pregnant?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you religious or something?”
“No. Nothing against cars. We just don’t have one anymore.”
Sheresa’s eyes get very wide. “Strange!” A compliment coming from her. “You must get tired.”
“I did at first. But we take it easy. No more than five or six miles a day. Sometimes less. Not walking makes me more tired. I don’t like to stop now that I’ve gotten used to it.”
“Looks like you’re going to have to stop pretty soon.”
“I guess so. Maybe not.” Maybe the baby will be a walker too. It’s getting darker, but I can still see the landscape. St. Eugene is in a valley. The houses we pass are from a fairy tale. Deep in the woods, yellow lights in the windows. “Where are we going?”
“It’s an event.” Sheresa smiles.
“An event?”
“Yeah.”
The air in the car is warm. The brown velvet seats of a big American sedan and someone else who doesn’t want to tell me where we’re going.
Sheresa parks. There are a number of other cars, odd rigs culled together from a post-apocalyptic junkyard. She checks her lipstick and hair in the rearview. “Ready?”
“For what?” There’s a forest in front of us.
Her eyebrows lift twice, and she starts down a path into the woods. “Mind your step. Trees poison the ground so that nothing else can grow near them. Not even their own children.”
“I’m not a tree.”
“Right.”
The other day a stranger in a grocery store told me that my baby has fingernails and, if it’s a girl, the eggs that will be my grandchildren.
I have to move quickly to follow Sheresa. The path is amniotic, dark, humid, and inviting. I lose up and down, left and right. I navigate by listening to her feet. I break the back of a twig underfoot. Up ahead there’s light. Safe haven. Sheresa’s spreading a blanket beneath a weeping tree on the shore of a river. It’s a wide stretch of the canal. Torches, lanterns, and candles glow, lights float on the water. It’s a very quiet party. Everyone assembled keeps his voice low. I worry I’ve stumbled into some witches’ coven.
“It’s just begun.”
Four vessels float on the Erie Canal, at the edge of the light. Each boat is more festive than the next. One has sails cut from a fur coat. One has sails made from a bridal gown. One is an assemblage of logs powered by paddle wheels. The last boat is two fiberglass tubs hinged into a pod. A periscope guides its small crew.
“What is it?”
Sheresa pulls a quart of malt liquor from her bag. “Captain Ahab and Huck Finn versus Lord Nelson and some sort of German U-boat.” She takes a bite from a sandwich. “Last month Amerigo Vespucci beat the Rime of the Ancient Mariner in record time. A real upset since fiction always wins. Not to mention, I was the Mariner.”
“You?”
“We’re the Society for Confusing Literature and the Real Lies, aka TLA, History.”
“TLA?”
“True Love Always. Dominic!” Dominic passes with a wave.
“What is it?”
“Oh,” she says. “It’s art. Sandwich?” She passes me a submarine of hummus, vegetables, and mustard. The crowd on the beach looks like a nomadic Ren Fair troupe from the year 2200. Every last part of the beast has been used for their dress. Sandals made of bald tires, lots of knickers and lacy thrift store blouses. Old leather, an aviator’s cap and goggles, a hoop skirt, facial hair, suspenders, straw hats. Picnic hampers. Young people. Old people. Children and everyone so cool they must be freezing.
“Where’d you meet these people?”
“College.”
“Not the college I went to.”
The ships, rafts, and miniature frigates have made their way a bit closer to shore. A series of lanterns rigged on tall branches driven into the dirt reveal a crew of gypsies on the deck of each vessel. Sailors aboard the Pequod are already frantically bailing.
“They’re not always seaworthy.”
“I guess I don’t know much about art.”
Sheresa thinks that’s funny. “Oh, that’s funny,” she says.
It doesn’t take long for Huck Finn to win. The Pequod sinks of its own shoddiness while Huck’s raft, simply constructed, goes on to triumph over history. Lord Nelson waves his one arm as his boat sinks. The Germans curse, “Scheisse! Scheisse!” Most of the people on the shore charge into the water to make sure history does not surface again. Huck Finn’s raft is dragged onto the beach and added to a bonfire that the man Dominic starts with a canister of lighter fluid, shooting streams of flame high overhead. Fire falls and ignites the wood. Music begins to play. Three drummers, a trumpet, a trombone, tin whistles, and a violin. People dance. Sheresa takes my hand. Someone takes my other hand. We run up to the fire and back again, up to the fire and back again. There’s singing, chanties loud and obscene. One made up on the spot: “Finn! Finn! The mightiest win! Down on your knees, Krauts, a blowjob for Jim!” The Jim from the raft, played by a young woman in overalls, accepts her pantomimed fellatio from one of the Germans dressed in a Boy Scout uniform.
My clothes stick to me on the ride home, sweat from dancing by the fire. I was a popular partner. Everyone wanted to dance with the pregnant lady, my belly a totem of good fortune. Sheresa is still making up songs that are vaguely about the ocean, vaguely about screwing. “So. What’d you think?”
“Fun.”
“‘Fun’? I say nuf to fun, Cora. People call some really messed-up shit ‘fun.’ Right?” She takes a deep breath. “I suppose it comes down, as it always does, to the question, Is it art? Right?”
That
wasn’t the question I had.
“Then, logically, what are the perimeters of art? And what purpose does this serve our lives?”
I confuse perimeter with protractor, which brings to mind my elementary school pencil box. Scissors, erasers, crayons, and pens. The pencil box smelled good. It smelled of beauty and art. It’d be nice to have friends like Sheresa.
“You need to remember artifice,” she says. “Art isn’t a hawk making lazy circles in the sky. Beauty doesn’t equal art, and it can’t just be the world in a package. It’s got to take the world and mess it up some. Add the artifice as a lens, right?”
“It might seem like art to the hawk.”
“True. True. But then everyone would be an artist, and I don’t think that’s right. Are you an artist?”
“I walk. A lot.”
She misunderstands. “A walking artist. OK. I like that. That’s good. Walking can definitely create things. Thoughts. Footsteps. Lines that intersect. Lines that connect us historically. Ley lines, right? You could connect every place in New York where daisies grow. Or the places where girls named Lisa live. Or sites where meteorites crash-landed. Right? What would that map look like and how would you read it? What message is that map trying to tell us?”
I like the idea that Ruth and I are walking artists, as if our tracks leave color behind. Blue and green. Orange painting the map we make each day. But if everybody in the world were a walking artist, the land would be so jammed with traces of everyone who ever came before. Haunted, polluted.
“And what about mothers? Mothers-to-be? Are they artists?”
I have no idea.
“Then there’s the never-ending battle over what’s real. Or realer. What does reality mean? True things that happen? What are those? My grandma says she saw a UFO. Is that more real? My uncle believes in angels. Whatever. Is fiction the real thing or is history?”
“History.”
“Urr. Wrong. Want to guess again?”
I keep my mouth shut this time.
“If history’s real, how come people can’t stop making up lies when they try to write it down? Another fake memoir. Another fake memoir. The only truth is that fiction wins every time.”
“So you’re not real?”
“Oh, I’m real. I’m the story of Sheresa. I write a little bit of the fiction of me every day. You see what I’m talking about? Then once you have the boundaries of history and fiction secure, where does everything else fall? Somewhere in between the two. History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other. Mother, father. Birth, death, and in between, that’s where you find religion. That’s where you find art, science, engineering. It’s where things get made from belief and memory.”
“I should have gone to college up here.”
Sheresa thinks I’m being funny again. As we pull into the motel parking lot, she asks, “When’s your baby due?”
“Soon?” I make a guess. Her headlights shine into my room. It’s still dark.
“Here’s something crazy to think about: You have two deaths inside your body right now. That’s the only time that ever happens.”
“That would make some Mother’s Day card.” I wonder why everyone I meet wants to tell me the bad parts of being a mom.
“Maybe that’s why you’re here at the motel.”
“Maybe.” I’m tired. I also have two births inside me. At least. “Thank you. I’ve never had an evening like this one.”
“You’re welcome.” She bends to whisper something to my stomach, but I pull away. I’m the baby’s mom, and while I like Sheresa, she talks about dead things a lot. My baby’s not going to die. I’m not going to die. At least not for a while. She lifts her head. “OK. Good night. Good luck.”
I get out of the car. “See you tomorrow?”
“I wouldn’t miss tomorrow for all the world.”
I wave. Sheresa backs out of the spot and puts her car into drive. As she’s pulling away, she stops. The passenger-side window slides down, smooth old American. “Cora,” she calls, though I’m standing right there.
“Yeah.”
“I almost forgot. Ruth left a message.”
“What?”
“She asked me to tell you.”
“She talked to you?”
Sheresa glances for a moment to the asphalt illuminated by her headlights. She looks back to me. “She said don’t leave him there alone. At the end.”
“Leave her?”
“No. Him.”
“Who?”
Sheresa shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Ruth talked?”
Sheresa’s shoulders and nose scrunch up, as if saying, Isn’t that cute? She releases the brake and her car pulls away. She gives a floppily enthusiastic wave goodbye, like waving to a puppy. Her headlights swing back out onto the road.
Alone in the parking lot, I do not wish to be. Leave who? Where? I’m pooped.
The lack of light in the room doesn’t mean anything. Maybe Ruth is sleeping. Maybe she’s come back. I unlock our door. It’s not the room I left behind. Someone has trashed it. Thrown empty dresser drawers out of their bureaus, tossed the blankets on the ground. The TV is on the floor, face-down. Ruth and I don’t have anything except for the backpack I’m wearing, and even that doesn’t hold much. Someone was just angry. I think to flee, to catch Sheresa, but a shadow moves over me, and with the shadow comes a fantastic blow to my head, one that sends me all the way straight back into the dark, dark, dark.
IT’S STILL SNOWING. Icicles smash off the roof in a rush. The wind’s making weird sounds down the chimney. After breakfast Nat finds a wardrobe of winter garb in the mudroom—parkas, snowshoes, mufflers. He finds a compass. “Who wants to see the storm up close?”
Mr. Bell’s playing solitaire. Ruth is distracted by a paperback mystery, The Keening Wind by Wanda La Fontaine. “No thanks.”
“Not I.”
So Nat fills the pocket of his coat with cereal and wanders out alone.
“Careful,” Ruth calls after him, then, “Come back soon.”
The door closes. A quiet hour passes. Mr. Bell repairs a broken chair. Ruth finds a collection of LPs. Cher, Electric Light Orchestra, Peaches and Herb, something called the Bevis Frond. Every record in the collection is old. No one has lived here for a while. No one buys records anymore. Whatever the reason, each album feels like a forgotten archive of the way life once was here on Earth. She chooses the Bee Gees, Spirits Having Flown. She likes the title. After figuring out the stereo, the needle begins to pop. The song opens with three-part, falsetto, brotherly harmony. “With you.” A disco beat drops in loud and rolling. “Baby, I’m satisfied.” It is inescapable. It is fantastic. Ruth and Mr. Bell eye each other. He rises from the couch and starts by swiveling his shoulders, lifting his arms overhead as if climbing up a beanstalk. He grooves slowly. Ruth is still seated. Mr. Bell clears a coffee table out of the way. He does the breaststroke, slides down the fire pole, sashays left, makes the pizza, sashays right. He drops to his knees, hops up to his toes. He turns up the volume, kazatskies and cabbage-patches. Mr. Bell moonwalks.
Ruth shuffles and straightens the cards he was playing. She sets the deck aside and stretches in preparation, shaking her hips gently, nearly by accident. Mr. Bell and Ruth dance wildly. He keeps the music coming or she does. Flipping the record, finding new ones. They boogie through Hall and Oates, Françoise Hardy, The Chi-Lites, Joan Jett, Doris Troy, the Orange Blossom Special, Harry Belafonte, and one record simply called Wine, Women and Cha Cha. The snow keeps falling. Mr. Bell cues up “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” Ruth blushes. He does not flinch. He takes her in his arms, leaving a tiny channel for mystery between them. They slow dance, spinning, sometimes close enough to feel the shapes beneath their clothes. Mr. Bell looks at her directly. “Shall?” the record asks, then skips. “Shall I? Shall I? Shall I?” It skips again. Without letting her out of his arms, without looking away, Mr. Bell delicately applies pressure to the stylus. “Come back?” Skip. “Com
e back? Come back?” He nudges the needle forward once more. “Again?”
When the song finishes, Ruth pats her brow dry. She’s on fire. She tucks her chin and thanks Mr. Bell for the dance. “Cocoa?” She slips away from him.
“Thanks. I’m all set.”
Ruth disappears into the kitchen, and the house falls silent again.
Nat finds many things outside, chief among his finds is the old mining town. A handful of buildings still stand. Others have been weathered so harshly that their private chambers—bedrooms, toilets, and attics—are twisted inside out. Windows and walls are filed parallel to the ceilings and floors. Electrical spiders dangle from the plaster. Exposed floral wallpaper. Snow is free to drift inside these half-homes. Some are in better shape than others. Nat snowshoes through.
Past the ghost town, he scrambles down an embankment, using tree trunks as anchors. He slides and falls just the same, landing at the base of the blast furnace. Its walls are like a castle’s tower. The blocks of stone, anorthosite or sandstone, are as big as bears. Tie rods lash the old rocks in place, but the hole where hot iron once ran from the chamber into sand pigs has eroded into an entrance. Nat steps through into the gigantic chimney, and the storm disappears inside. Temperatures here once climbed as high as 2,500 degrees, even when ten feet away winters dipped to thirty below. A round light shines on him from the opening far above. He listens but hears nothing. He tosses a small stone up the chimney, then ducks. The rock falls back to earth as a good idea pushes up through the soil, not unlike the hand of a zombie reaching up to grab some brains.
Ruth is alone by the fireplace. Nat does not remove his winter clothes. “I want to show you something. Get suited up.” The gear room is small and tangled with wooden water skis, jarts, snow pants, mittens, towlines, ice axes, snowshoes. Ruth chooses a pair made from guts.
They climb over drifts taller than their bodies. Though the snow is blowing in every direction, the path to the ghost town is a bit easier to tread now that Nat has stomped it down twice. He stops her in the woods. “There are a finite number of snowflakes here, which means you could count them.”
Mr. Splitfoot Page 23
