He was walking me now, half-pulling me, back to the cement benches that lined the mall. I could feel Duff reaching for my hand. I wanted to talk, but my throat had sealed. I couldn’t get my breath, it was like asthma.
We were standing by the traffic light at Ninety-sixth Street, at the bottom of Riverside Drive’s longest hill. “Tell me what’s wrong, for god’s sake. Can I get you anything?”
“That was the man who killed my husband,” I said, between long gasps. “He knows … he knows me. He knows I’m here.”
“For god’s sake, we’ll call the cops,” said Taylor. He was shaken. I told him everything: the marriage, the bombing, the murder. I had been until that time an innocent child he’d picked out of the gutter, discovered, and made whole, then fallen in love with.
“Don’t you see that’s impossible? I’m illegal here, he knows that. I can’t come out and challenge him. I’m very exposed, I’m alone all day, I’m out in the park—” I remembered Wylie’s Stuart having observed me for months, and suddenly I felt filthy, having been observed, tracked, by Sukhwinder.
“New York’s huge. We can move downtown, go to Jersey—”
“This isn’t your battle. He’d kill you, or Duff, to get at me.”
In my life, I have never dithered. God’s plans have always seemed clearly laid out. I said to him, “I’m going to Iowa.”
He said I was crazy to leave New York. Iowa was for little old ladies in tennis shoes and for high-school girls in trouble. He said if ghosts were scaring me, he was the best ghostbuster available.
“Iowa? You can’t go to Iowa—Iowa’s flat.”
24
HARLAN KROENER shot Bud on December 23, two years ago. Du had been with us for about eleven months, but this was his first real American Christmas and we’d tried to make it special. Bud, of course, was a traditionalist who’d gotten away from it after his sons were grown. He was back into it in a big way. He’d even wanted to get a model train, but didn’t have time to set it up.
We had each given Du as many presents as a large tree could shelter, making up for all his missed Christmases past. I was a veteran of American Christmases, since Taylor and Wylie were aggressive sentimentalists, for Duff’s sake, they said, but really because they’d both come from traditional American families, where a Christmas goose was cooked, presents wrapped, family ornaments packed in protective paper all year, and nothing opened until Christmas morning. They loved to go caroling, holding candles and singing their way down Claremont Avenue. In the Christmas season, New York became just another small town for them, like Taylors upstate New York and Wylie’s Maryland. They took me to the midnight church services, and the weekend trips upstate for skiing and sleigh rides.
I was stooped under the large tree in the corner of the living room, sweeping pine needles off the presents and the white sheet that was supposed to be snow, when I heard the whomp of a heavy mans winter boots on the front steps which Bud had just been shoveling. In fact, I thought it was Bud coming back.
When I turned, straightening up, to see who it was—why shouldn’t I have hoped that it was the UPS man bringing me a gift from Taylor and Duff, or maybe Wylie and Stuart, or even another pair of knitted pink wool slippers from Lillian Gordon?—there was Harlan Kroener filling the front door. I’d seen the rifle under his coat, but I hadn’t thought it strange. Well, strange, yes. I’ve gone through this moment a thousand times. Is it the wife’s job to sort out possible assassins?
When the police came round I said yes, I had seen the rifle. And I’d thought, Shouldn’t he be leaving it in his truck? But in those days Bud didn’t talk to me about his problems, or the bank’s problems. The name Harlan Kroener wasn’t red-flagged in any way. And Bud’s shooting was the first. There’d been some suicides, but never a murder attempt. So Harlan didn’t register on me as a disturbed and violent farmer who saw himself betrayed by his banker. And no, he didn’t manifest any signs of violence, except for the flat authority of his voice. I should know these things—I know them now. The inexpressive voice comes from a demented man. Flat affect is the sign of murderous rage. Learn to read the world and everyone in it like a photographic negative of reality.
“Where’s Bud?” He said that very quietly. “I’m going to take him with me.” I’d been in Baden less than two years, and though Bud made me feel that without my typing and filing the bank would collapse, I hadn’t caught on to how tense November and December are for the Ag Loans men.
For every banker who can’t overderelict, there’s a farmer who can’t keep up his payments. “Bud,” I called out, “there’s someone here to see you.”
I delivered him to his crippler. Bud was still in his jacket and boots. He’d been in the shed, tinkering with the snowblower. Even a banker is still a farmer at heart.
Bud was such a big, hearty man. He was fifty-three, but I couldn’t calculate the thirty years between us even as a gap, as an October-May kind of thing. He was so fit, so determined to remain fit. He’d quit smoking. He cross-country skied and tried to get me started. In the summer he played tennis and racquetball. He said he’d made his adjustments to the eighties, to cutting back from all the things that spelled manhood to his father’s generation.
“Harlan,” he said real evenly, “how nice to see you.
Won’t you come into the kitchen? Have some coffee, take off your coat—”
“Banker,” Harlan said, the way you might say “Reverend” or “Professor.” “Banker, I don’t reckon you and me’s got a whole lot to talk about.”
“Honey, you might want to ring up Jimmy Yoder,” said Bud, in that same friendly way of his, but I was rearranging the Christmas gifts under the tree and I didn’t understand why I should call the ineffectual sheriff that Bud was always complaining about when I had plenty of other things to do right here in the living room. “Soon as I get this done,” I said.
“That’s a nice tree, Banker. Lots of nice presents. And that’s your new little wife, ain’t it? Real pretty. Real nice, warm, comfy home, too.”
“Where’d you have in mind us going, Harlan?”
“Oh, maybe just driving. Maybe over t’my place. I’d like to show you my Christmas tree and the presents I’m getting my wife and kids.”
“What say I come by tomorrow?”
“I say now, Banker.”
“Sure thing, Harlan. Honey, we’re going over to Harlan Kroener’s, case Jimmy Yoder asks. Got that?”
When he kissed me, there by the tree, he whispered something in my ear that I wasn’t expecting and so didn’t catch. Now of course I know: He’s going to shoot me, and he gave me a fierce hand pull that made me flinch.
If Du had been in the room too, he would have heard Bud’s whisper. Du would have known what to do. He would have saved Bud. But he was in his own room. I could hear his television going.
A couple of weeks ago, when Bud was in Des Moines for a conference, a strange man drove into our yard in a dusty Eldorado. I watched him from behind the kitchen curtain. He got out and looked over at the abandoned harrow with the rusty disks and tines, the barn with the caved-in roof, the empty silo. He didn’t look any different from the men in Elsa County; he had their same tumbling walk and fairness and thick-bodiedness. He might have stopped at Earnie’s Tavern up the road.
I opened the back door before he could knock. It was cool out. The moon was a pale half-pie in the clear sky. It didn’t look or feel like evening yet. Peril felt on hold.
“Your husband at home?” The man distractedly rubbed a denim sleeve up his muscled forearm. I made out a two-color tattoo.
“Not yet.” My voice suggested I had a protector who was gunning his pickup home, that very minute.
“I’ll come back, then. I have some information to relay to rural folk.”
“Who should I say stopped by?”
“I’ll be back. My instructions are to read this to the whole family at one time.” He didn’t show me any brochure.
I watched the Eldorado with N
ebraska plates pull out and take the road to Darrel’s, real slow.
Du called from his room. “Was that the guy with important information to lay on rural folk? Did he refuse to tell you anything?”
“That’s the man, Du.”
“He must think there are weird people in this house.” He came out, looking a little worried.
“Weird? The weird man thinks we’re weird?”
“Well, look at it his way. First time he comes, he gets me. Second time he gets you. Just think what kind of father he expects.”
A little later, I called Darrel. “Did you have a visitor?” I asked.
“No,” Darrel said. I heard corn popping on the stove. “Probably a poor fellow selling insurance. Relax, Harlan’s dead. That business is over for good.”
“Okay, I’m taking your advice. Maybe he’s a concerned environmentalist.”
Du picked up his extension. “Did he call this place ‘a federal post’? Did he say organic law transcends man’s law? Did he talk about the international banking conspiracy?”
“Stop it!” I’d never heard Darrel that angry. “You scare your mother one more time and I’ll come over and personally thrash you one.”
Karin, Bud’s ex, once called me a gold digger. We were in front of the frozen-foods section of the Hy-Vee. I was embarrassed that she’d caught me reaching for an apple pie. She must have baked them from scratch for Bud. Her cart was stacked neat with Weight Watchers frozen dinners. She, too, was planning changes. Bud is gold, I retorted, and if digging him out of the sadness he was in when I met him was what she meant, then, yes, I was a gold digger.
Karin might have talked Harlan into handing over the rifle. She runs counseling sessions in church basements. Get your hate out into the open, she tells troubled men. Make a banker doll out of papier-mâché and bury it in a hole in your garden.
That first fall I was so busy loving Bud and settling Du in school and fighting off Karin that I missed what was happening between Bud and Harlan. I thought of Bud as a secular god of Baden, and everyone in town as his devotee. Shooting Bud was unthinkable, a deicide, worse than assassinating the Mahatma.
Mother Ripplemeyer got me the job in the bank. I met her in the Personnel Office of the University Hospital. One minute I was begging a potato-faced woman behind the widest, cleanest counter for a job, any job (telling her that I would do whatever needed doing, the psychiatric ward, the deathwatch, anything, because I was desperate and I didn’t know anyone in Iowa), and the next minute a woman with the curtness and directness of Lillian Gordon, only older, tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You need a meal as well as a job, dear. I’m going to take you home for lunch; then I’m going to call Bud and see if he doesn’t need a pretty new teller.”
Lillian Gordon, Mother Ripplemeyer: one day I want to belong to that tribe.
Wednesdays are Mother’s days to help out in the gift shop in the hospital lobby and to have lunch with Mrs. Bloomquist, the potato-faced woman, in the staff cafeteria. If I’d begged Mrs. Bloomquist on any day other than a Wednesday, my life would have skidded to a different groove.
A crazy kind of logic made me pick Iowa to run away to. Duffs mother had had Duff, Wylie’d told me, at an Elsa County hospital. Duff, conceived in impulse and error, had given her mother a chance to go to college and me the chance to break out of Flushing. Iowa was a state where miracles still happened.
Taylor, who didn’t believe in miracles, wanted me to stay, at least until Wylie had decided between lover and husband. Then he would decide between Wylie and separation. Duff was in bed in the room that she and I shared, and Wylie was in Frankfurt. “Sleep with me tonight,” Taylor whispered. “Jase, please.”
I have had a husband for each of the women I have been. Prakash for Jasmine, Taylor for Jase, Bud for Jane. Half-Face for Kali.
* * *
I am leading Taylor to a bed as wide as a subcontinent, I am laying my cheek on his warm cheek, I am closing his eyes with my caregiving fingertips, I am tucking the mosquito netting tight under his and Wylie’s king-sized mattress. He is snoring soft, happy, whispery snores of a sleeper safe from Sukkhi and Half-Face, from nothing more horrible than Stuart Eschelman.
Stop!
It’s Bud who tries to make me happy now.
Bud says he knew he shouldn’t have walked in front of Harlan. I didn’t know it then, but Harlan’d parked his pickup a hundred yards up the highway from us. He should have parked in our driveway, but he didn’t. Karin would have read the signals: a man does the least little thing out of the ordinary and he’s planning. If he had kept Harlan in front of him, he could have reacted in time. He was stupid, believing in John Wayne bravery and codes of Hollywood honor. Good men might weaken and get pushed to the brink, but they would never, never shoot their targets in the back. If I keep him behind me, I’ll be all right, he thought.
Harlan shot Bud twice in the back as Bud was reaching for the door handle on the passenger side. Shot in the cauda equina, the doctor at the University Hospital explained to me, resting his wide, firm palm in the middle part of my lower back. And because I was stunned I said, “Cauda equina? Masterji didn’t teach me that word.” The doctor gave me Valium.
After Harlan shot Bud, he blew his own head off. It was Du who came out of his room and said, “What was that? Sounded like a rifle.” I’d heard nothing. We listened; we heard the prairie wind between the windows. Du, again, half an hour later, heard one long scream, like the screams he remembered of a man in agony. He called the police.
Shoveling the snow off the porch was the last freestanding task Bud ever performed. His last able-bodied act. How I used to hate to shovel! he says now.
Bud says that when Mother called him and told him that she was sending over a starving Indian to save he’d pictured a stick-legged, potbellied, veiled dark woman like the ones he’d seen fleeing wars, floods, and famines on television.
He says, I saw you walk in and I felt my life was just opening to me. Like a door had just been opened. There you were in my bank, and I couldn’t believe it. It felt as if I was a child again, back in the Saturday-afternoon movies. You were glamour, something unattainable. And you were standing there with my mother.
“So you wouldn’t have hired me if I hadn’t been pretty?” I’m teasing. It’s a cherished routine.
“No, no.” He grins. “I’m a good Lutheran. I might have hired you, but I wouldn’t have asked you to lunch.”
Banking in Baden is intuitive. You know in your gut whom to carry and whom to foreclose. He saw me lope in, frightened, jobless, less than a month from New York, and he knew right away that he wanted me more than he’d ever wanted anyone. “Jane,” he likes to say, nuzzling his head between my breasts, “you brought me back from the dead.”
To want anything so much, I wanted to tell him then, was unwise. Too much attachment, too much disillusion.
“I brought you back from a mid-life crisis, don’t exaggerate,” I tease. “I have good timing.”
Bud courts me because I am alien. I am darkness, mystery, inscrutability. The East plugs me into instant vitality and wisdom. I rejuvenate him simply by being who I am.
Bud would have left Karin, or twisted in mid-life until he dropped. I was a catalyst, not a cause. I make him feel what he’s never felt, do what he’s never done. There’s a shape-changing, risk-taking pirate rattling the cage of his heavy flesh. Baden was death until you came, he tells me, you brought me back from the dead. “Rubbish!” I tell him lightly. “I’m a passive person. I’ve done no saving of any kind.”
I did watch him, the pillar of Baden, punch a drunk once. It happened at Earnie’s, the bar six miles on the road to Dalton. A big, dusty, blond man was having a drink at the counter with a sad-looking older man. They looked as if they were trying to wipe out the last three or four years of drought or depression in one dedicated night. When we passed them on our way to the nearest empty booth, they didn’t wave to Bud, so I knew they didn’t borrow from our bank. The ol
der man was boasting about some new research on EPDs that was about to take all risk out of buying bulls and make him a rich man. The younger man managed a wheezy laugh. “Did you see what I just seen? Can you believe that?”
“Estimated Progeny Differences,” said the older man. “A professor’s working out the horsepower of bulls.”
“Shit, that fucker must be older’n you, Woody. Where’s he get off?” That’s when the younger man gave his bar stool a noisy twirl and fixed on me. “Whoa! I don’t know nothing about horsepower, but I know whorepower when I see it!” His next words were in something foreign, but probably Japanese or Thai or Filipino, something bar girls responded to in places where he’d spent his rifle-toting youth.
I wish I’d known America before it got perverted.
But Bud smashed his cigarette out in the tinfoil ashtray, lumbered over to the twirling man, and knocked his head back with a soft, clumsy punch.
Gold digger and Lazarus.
The Sunday after Bud left her, Karin stalked me all morning at the fair the Mennonites put on for their Relief Fund. The Mennonites were raising money for camps full of starving Ethiopians. Women in gauzy white caps smiled encouragingly at me. Every quilt auctioned, every jar of apple butter licked clean had helped somebody like me.
She said, “I’m ashamed of something I did yesterday.”
We were in a large, stuffy shed pretending to examine Depression glass, centennial plates, miniature windmills, and used toys that would later be auctioned. I said, “You don’t have to tell me, Karin. And I don’t have to listen.”
There was misery in her muddy blue eyes. “I wrote your name on a piece of paper. Then I lit it with a match.”
I rocked the hand-carved rocking horses, and spun the tiny wheels of model trains. There was a model tractor commemorating John Deere’s fortieth anniversary. All the dolls had yellow hair. It had been a simpler America. The toys weren’t unusual or valuable; they were shabby, an ordinary family’s cared-for memorabilia. Bud’s generic past crowded the display tables. I felt too exotic, too alien.
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