Vandal Love

by D. Y. Bechard

  In the distance, as if carried on the breeze, was the glow and hum of the highway. He could hardly breathe. He climbed towards it and fell against the steep incline. He scrambled up through the trash and dust until he reached the side of the pavement. His lungs froze. Veins throbbed in his temples. He lay there, unable to move, his body a strobe of adrenaline.

  A passing truck slowed and stopped. A tarpaulin was tied to the metal posts of the sidewalls, and a few men crawled from underneath. They were small and dark. In Spanish they offered words of muted encouragement to each other. Two climbed off. They paused to tug at their dirty jeans, then bent to examine Sat Puja. They muttered and shrugged, then lifted him. The others came out and carried him back.

  The truck started forward, the tarpaulin rippling. They took turns keeping the edges from flapping. Harvey felt his chest easing. The wind seemed a new air. The men watched him silently. Suffocation held him in a timeless lull. Then the first cough broke, and he twisted until his lungs pounded, his mouth open as if to cry. He lay on the uneven planks, aware of rushing, of nothing to hold to, the tarpaulin flapping like giant wings. He breathed, great breaths across those blind ranges, the engine battering beneath, the highway receding to far-off houselights against a dark outer rim, gasping.

  epilogue

  Louisiana

  The hardest years were those when Isabelle was still too young for nursery. Bart had to work the night shift in a drab motel to be with her, half-asleep during the day or later, at the counter with her basket as he napped, chin on his fist and poorly paid. When she was three, the dial of his brain had been set to nights and he got the same shift at the Conoco plant and left her at daycare, regretting every minute of it, relieved only when he discovered that she was the one eating other children’s food and snapping toys with the audacity of a carnival strongman. She remained big for her age through elementary, and waiting for her after school he’d seen her knock boys down, freely distributing charley horses and snake burns. He’d feared for her grades, but her leanings had been determined by their time together, lying around reading novel after novel, quietly or to each other or flipping through the library’s stock of picture books until she said, Let’s do something else, and he asked, Do we have to? Even after-school detention did her no harm because she managed to finish her textbooks and skip a grade.

  By junior high she was a jock and a brain, almost expelled for running a pair of stained underwear up the flagpole after having written the principal’s name on them, and kept in only because they couldn’t win the regional basketball tournament without her. Though Bart had worried that she would turn out lumbering and ugly like himself, she was lean enough, muscular with a pretty tanned face. In high school she was the youngest in her grade by two years, ready, he knew, for the cataclysm of love. She was fifteen, six foot three, the boy she chose six-eight, a cut-up, a quarterback, a grin like a pirate’s. Together they’d gone in the night to the high school of their regional contenders and spraypainted its name, Sacred Heart, and a few other words that the local papers declined to print but referred to as symbols of our national decay. Her aura of love wounded Bart so deeply that she saw and sat down with him and asked why he’d chosen to stay single all these years.

  By then at the Conoco plant he’d been promoted from clean-up to general maintenance to pipefitting and finally, after a period of training, to foreman. When she’d been five he’d seen a cheap house on a list of foreclosures and had made a down payment. It was set off a quiet road, a stone’s throw from a narrow bayou and a marsh. That first day, while he was painting, she’d snuck around back, through the overgrown pasture, past the old barn to the bayou. From yellow water, gars surfaced into sunbeams, big fish with torpedo bodies and eyes like rubber plugs, their duck’s bills opening on floating insects. On the other side was a junkyard, the low trampled stretch near the shore heaped with tires and car seats, vacuum hoses and dashboards. Above the trees the sky was the colour of wet cotton. After her father this was her first love. For years, she would leave the house alone, go out past the shed and barn, in along the woods to where the roots were washed clean from years of rain and the dense, dark air smelled of mud.

  Bart first tried to deter her, then simply kept the house stocked with insect repellent and bought her a hat with a protective screen like a mourning veil so that mosquitoes wouldn’t land on her face, though she never used it. At the bayou she asked her first questions of life. He’d explained that her mother had died in a car accident, and she had a photo of a woman near a lamppost, head tilted, each cheekbone as strong as the heel of a hand. Her hair was copper in the fading light, her lips pale. She’d mused each feature, even the grey street, which, with its few lettered storefronts and an old marquee, seemed grateful. Later, when she’d become interested in genealogy, Bart had hooked up to the Internet for her.

  Though she was never able to track down Bart’s father, she did manage to place Jude. She sent out photocopies of his driver’s licence, and a genealogist told her he thought the White name was false, once commonly used on fake IDs. Bart recalled that her grandfather had been a boxer, and searching the web, she’d found Jude White mentioned on a site that was the work of an aficionado. He’d compiled information on the lost great up-and-comers, boxers with undefeated records and unexplained disappearances. Who was Jude White? he wrote. The man who broke Leon Brown’s jaw and his own hand … The article mentioned facts from across the continent and that, before his last fight, Jude had filled out his release with Jude Hervé. Isabelle was off and running. The next connection, after extended work, was to a family in Québec, in Gaspésie, the birthdate the same, just three years off. From there she laboured as if rebuilding a lost history, discovering the name Hervé in out-of-the-way places, isolated occurrences like virulent outbreaks. And so she sent more letters. One day Bart gave her a discoloured package from a private investigation agency. It contained information on her grandmother and mentioned Jude White in connection with a child theft not two hours from where they lived. She had just started the search for this woman, sending out letters again, when she fell in love.

  That fall and winter she went everywhere with her boyfriend on his motorcycle. They rode for simple pleasure, following the interstate to where it lifted onto pillars above treetops and swamps, to New Orleans or the shacks on back roads where they ate platters of bright red crawfish and cooled their illegal hearts with beer. On the gapped planks of the loft they listened to hooting in the rafters. The highway was loud in the darkness. They went out and lay on the roof’s overhang, the tin panels still warm from the sun. After school, when she was a girl, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormon elders had talked to her of God, their suits soaked through with sweat and humidity right down to their strange undershirts. She imagined God as nothing more than a feeling—what she felt now, her fingertips at the inside of her arm, her hair in her eyes so that she could look at him.

  When, one day, he told her of his desire to see the country, she understood and wanted to go too but rather on her own and to meet him somewhere. She imagined hitchhiking, sleeping in strange places, catching rides or taking buses across dusty plains, gradually becoming what she would be. That month had been cool, chill mist, rain thrashing windowpanes, and she walked the bayou often, pleased with sweet winter mud. She followed the path towards the windy rumble of the highway, the heavy turning of engines and wheels. She inhaled diesel exhaust, hot rubber and metal and grease. Rainbow blooms of oil moved in the ebb. She stared at the thin golden surface that made her think she was seeing deep until a gar lifted, barely moving from below, and she realized the murk went down and down.

  Low clouds filled the highway sky. Rain found its way along her scalp, her throat and shoulders. Wind rattled the trees. Shoes sopping, she returned, the tall grass of the pasture matted into whorls like eddies on water. The living room looked dark in water-rippled light. She gathered a few things. At the mirror she waited for the storm to pass.

  Her father had called he
r a pagan for her love of the bayou and for what she’d named the Burn Season, when the junkyard men heaped trash and car parts—a fifth season like the Chinese New Year, she’d told him, and one that always coincided with her birthday. She saw her father as a good man, simple and unambitious, who lived for her and hid his love in quiet manias, cooking or historical novels or gangster movies. He was heavy-set, with a knobbed chin and a bulbous nose. She’d admired his big smudged hands, had believed there was nothing stronger in the world. When developers on the rise began building closed neighbourhoods with manors and clearing the forest along the bayou, he became an outspoken member of a local conservation group. All that fell within the limits of his little world he cherished. He remodelled frequently, tearing out divisions and letting in sunlight and jacking up the foundation so that doors no longer closed and faults appeared in the drywall, all of which he happily set right. He studied modern architecture and painted one outside wall sky blue and bottom-lit it. He took a course in making furniture and redesigned the interior for their proportions. On a chill February night, he drove her north while she slept and woke her in the mountains of Tennessee so that she could walk in the snow for the first time.

  When she’d fallen in love, he’d started exercising, going to a local boxing gym as a last means of fending off madness. He recalled lost vitality, and in the prolonged pauses when he leaned against the punching bag like an old friend, gasping, he thought more than he might otherwise have. His life, he could see, was fabulous: for more than a decade he’d been famous in his daughter’s eyes, and nothing, not poverty or the silences and gawking stares at their size when they entered a room, had so much as fazed them. Work and raising her had left little time for his regrets or guilt, and he’d learned to let the dead live, to breathe and come to him when they wished, sudden, violent with anger, or forgiving and filled with love. It was a shared space and none questioned the other. Years of being a father had taught him the true imperatives of love, and when he recalled Isa, so much fell away to this one clear impulse, absolute enough for him. The least sure of all roads, he now knew, was that which took you towards God, and only when he thought of his daughter, her beauty despite the violence of her birth—that she was one of the loved ones—did he look to the stars.

  Late one afternoon he came home. He went to the bayou. The forest was as quiet as a guest bedroom but for the distant, low throttle of the interstate. Bright, nameless winter flowers grew from the mud, vivid even in the bluing light. A little gator nosed sadly through the murk. A mullet jumped three times, flashing its pale sides in alarm. Across the marsh indolent men in red shirts and overalls were lighting up tires and seats, slashed ragtops and crushed plastic bumpers on the watery grass. Then he knew. The nearest path to the highway was through the pasture to the new housing development. He caught her there, his gym hours paying off. She had her backpack but had paused with sadness on the rise.

  He tried to tell her why she couldn’t, the dangers, the impossibility, but he met the gaze of that girl who’d overcome fear in oratory contests and spell-outs and lead roles, who’d won her class in wrestling and had thrown firecrackers under the feet of an enemy mascot. Who’d done pull-ups on the bar and measured her biceps daily with a ribbon and told Bart that love could never last because no one had a heart big enough for a girl her size. In whose eyes he’d seen room for the light of it all, the supernova, the crushed beer bottles in gravel, the candle flames in the shards of wineglasses. He’d once warned that her children would be walruses like himself, that the good luck couldn’t last forever. The gods would be jealous.

  The wind carried to them a sulphurous reek. Oh, they’re burning, she said with a voice of breathless regret, one he was familiar with and which had always flabbergasted him. Nearby, at the housing development, young men worked late, unloading sod rolled up like carpets and peeling it over the raked earth. The asphalt leading to the houses was fresh, the bulky structures set in barren spaces, their windows not yet installed so that they looked haunted, plastic flapping in doorways.

  Listen, he said, and she, who’d loved him with tenacity and who’d always thought him understated, too good and calm, listened. Far off the wind was carrying away clouds, and at his words she was struck by the brightness of the sky, like the blue of a television screen when the DVD clicks on. Smoke muscled up. They stood and she listened until the fires flickered in the dead grass, until the sunset was a golden mist over swamps, the trees a single brambly presence.

  I can’t imagine, she said. She thought of everything she could want, hardly able to breathe, of all that she might have and leave, the full fragrance of sweet winter mud, the cool nights reading together, the smell of burning in the wind, sudden and gone.

  Wait, he said. Just a little longer. Wait.

  Every letter brought home an answer, a mystery, a lost piece of history.

  Harvey had been living in St. Louis under the name Juan Elhuésped. He meticulously coloured his moustache and eyebrows with permanent marker, and his home was in a sub-basement apartment in a dilapidated building built at the low end of an old canal and under the overhanging lower levels of an eight-storey parking garage. Only he and his Mexican allies could live comfortably under such low roofs, and with time they developed the large eyes and earthy stoutness of dwarves. He learned to eat tortillas slopped with canned beans, to drink cheap watery beer, to cross himself at the sight of misfortune and to keep his silence while manicuring the lawns of wealthy citizens. He’d picked up a fair Spanish despite the laconic disposition of his friends. Together after work they went downtown and made laser photocopies of his passport.

  Those months he’d kept the money belt hidden, wearing it always. He became savvy, tough, learned to spit long distances and to lie on the spur of the moment so that the few times the nylon belt was noticed, he said it was for intestinal problems and forced himself to pass gas. He contemplated the uses of his wealth, wondering how he could get out of the country, to Central America, where he was told the women were small and that he might live in sunny courtyards with banana trees of his own. He imagined that he could have himself deported to Mexico easily enough but was worried about having the money taken away by a mean Norteño border guard. The letter he’d received at Brendan Howard’s he’d kept only out of consideration that this might provide a possibility, that distant relations might be willing to help repatriate him. But at the moment he saw no reason to change. Being a fugitive had given him a practical edge, a keen sense of appreciation. He liked to pause and stretch and take deep breaths. The fragrances of life finally reached him, cut grass and turned earth, the ripe emanations of his own body. He liked the smell of deserted streets, the music at dusk and the way the black families on their porches paid him no mind. This was the true sadhu, he one day realized, on a neglected sidewalk, eating salty blackberries grown up around a fire hydrant.

  One afternoon, when the police raided, he hid himself in an old tire outside. After nightfall he slunk out, gave his limbs a shake, performed a few yogic stretches, then headed south. By now he knew the Mexican underground. In bread, laundry or delivery vans or sitting in compartments with rattling bottles of beer that he drank after popping the caps with his teeth, he made it to Louisiana. A dirt-brown blue-eyed Mexican of indigenous descent, he affected an overbite and a flatfooted step that hugged the earth, and, with his growing belly, looked like an upright squirrel. It was evening when he arrived.

  Something was burning. Petals of ash descended over the yard and leaden billows that didn’t rise or dissipate drifted, dark clouds in the grass like sleeping hoboes. The house had one blue wall and high windows. The steps required that he lift on his knee in order for his foot to reach. He knocked. No one answered, and after he’d waited a while, the sky almost dark, he pulled on the door. He went inside. A few tall lamps were on. A pair of running shoes were big enough to be flowerpots, and the couch looked as if it were cut from living trees and had mattresses for cushions. Doorways were flush with the c
eiling. From where he stood a kitchen stool had a strong soaring quality like that of the Eiffel Tower. With both hands he pulled out a chair and, using the rungs like those of a ladder, he climbed on. He kicked his feet a little, feeling this was a new world, unexpected and good. The final rays of sunset shone golden in the windows. He whistled a sad melody about a crying woman. Then he settled back, tired from his journey, closing his eyes and ready to wait.

  Acknowledgements

  A novel written over eight years, and a first novel at that, requires the acknowledgement of more people than I can possibly name or recall. I’d like to begin by thanking my early teachers T. Wilson, J. Birjepatil and Laura Stevenson, and especially Bob Butler, for his hard-edged criticism and for a piece of sound advice that I have attempted to follow to its conclusion. A few people have provided facts and various information that I may or may not have used: Denise Beaugrand-Champagne, Colette Chenel, Hector MacNeil, Dennis Headrick of the Lompoc Valley Historical Society, and Terry Jones of Catholic-Forum.com. I’d also like to thank the Vermont Studio Centre for a grant and a peaceful work environment. Friends and critics and family, often all of these simultaneously, have offered invaluable support: my brother Marc-André; Korrie Brooks; Tracy Motz; my grandfather James Ellis for his World War II stories; Mr. Hebert for boxing instruction of a quality far superior to my ambition; J. Musi and the Musi family for generosity and for finding me a place to work in Mexico; Katerina Ring for orchestrating one cheap Italian living situation after another; Francesco, Antonio and Iolanda La Torre for providing accommodation in Calabria and for driving me down the mountain when I ran out of drinking water; Matthieu Verrette and Susie Springer, for the occasional social life when I lost contact and for calling the police when I disappeared for a week; Aaron Leff, for years of midnight conversations and pipedreams that have somehow managed to live on; Joanna Cockerline and George Grinnel for friendship, encouragement and (to Joanna) for peddling and pushing my work and at times believing in it more than I did; Greg Foster, for years of friendship and support and for employing me when I was broke, not to mention letting me quit at extremely short notice (often around noon) when I wanted to be writing; aunts and uncles (Francine, Pâquerette et al.) for stories and friendship; Marie-Eve, Wilbert and Pierre Béchard as well as Ermelle Landry, for bringing me into your family and sharing memories; my aunt Colette for genealogical information and also for making me feel part of the family; my grandmother Yvonne Béchard for stories of a world that I would never otherwise have known; my agent, Denise Bukowski, whose enthusiasm is greatly appreciated; her assistant, Kara Bristow; everyone at Doubleday, those that I know and that I do not know, but whose support has been invaluable, and more specifically Maya Mavjee, Susan Burns, Lara Hinchberger and Christine Innes; my mother, Bonadele Ellis, for decades of encouragement; and to my editor, Martha Kanya-Forstner, for patience and peerless criticism.