by Tim O'Brien
“I cannot see the relevance of—”
“Let me finish this. I go to reform school, I come home, I’m nine years old, packed to the gills with guilt. Bad shape, you could say. And Lorna Sue wasn’t exactly the same person either. Superpious. Superreligious. Hanging out in the church basement, playing nun, talking with God. Delusions almost, except there was this incredible hatred too. Lots of it. I mean, you can’t blame her—blame me—but it seemed like she despised the whole world. Everything. Even God. Especially God.” Herbie turned and looked at me. “Those fires, remember? In the church.”
“That was you,” I said.
“No.”
“Don’t try to—”
“Tommy, wake up. She’s sick.”
Instinctively, I looked out at the lawn. The fireworks had died out; the backyard was sheathed in a flat, impervious dark. Something twitched at the back of my thoughts. The word sick. Disbelief, at first. Then certainty.
“The bombs,” I said sharply.
I swung away from the window. Five or six items occurred to me in rapid succession. A Shell/Hell sign. A fountain pen. A summer day in 1952, the three of us sitting in a withered apple tree, Lorna Sue urging us to fill our jars with gasoline. (“It’s a dare,” she’d said. “You aren’t scared, are you?”) And the interrogation in Father Dern’s office. How Herbie had withheld things, so mute and evasive. Other items too: the girlish graffiti on the church steps, the defiled statue of Christ on his cross—lipstick and mascara and breasts. And Herbie’s constant watchfulness over the years. Headlights in the dark. (That night back in high school, parked in her driveway, those smudgy faces at the window. “They’re watching,” Lorna Sue had said. “He’s watching.”) Old facts, new spin.
I turned toward Herbie.
“It seems feasible,” I said, “that I’ve misjudged you a little. I always thought—”
“I know what you thought, Tommy.”
“A blunder,” I said. “Incorrect call.”
“But incest, for God’s sake?”
“I’m human.” I glanced out at the backyard again, where an explosive finale was in progress. “Those bombs,” I said. “I think she might have them.”
“Come on, you aren’t serious?”
“Mason jars, gasoline. They were in the garage, now they’re gone.”
A web of wrinkles formed along Herbie’s forehead—a puzzled expression, then anger. He pushed to his feet, roughly seized my elbow. “Let’s hear it. Fast.”
Over the next several minutes, under a measure of physical compulsion, I outlined my activities of recent date. Near the end Herbie grasped my shoulders, shook me hard. “For Christ sake, why? What the fuck were you thinking?”
“Thinking?” I said.
“The purpose, Tommy. Bombs—what were they for?”
I pulled free.
This was not the proper moment to call attention to his inelegantly suspended preposition.
“Some noise, some thunder,” I said fiercely. “I wanted her to notice me, that I’m alive, that we used to—”
Sadly, my voice box was not functioning properly, nor my sense of self. (Like Herbie’s preposition, my spiritual health dangled from the most tenuous of threads.) I managed to blurt out a few words more, but these were largely lost amid what had become a wailing noise, a childish blubbering that mortified me even as it rushed from my throat. I sank to the floor, rocked on my knees, and tried to explain that the whole idea was to make her care, to make her remember. “I was her prince!” I yelled. “She used to love me—that’s a fact! She did!” I took a breath. “Didn’t she?”
Herbie hoisted me to my feet. “Sure,” he said.
“There, you see? Real love.”
I sobbed again, then laughed.
Because I knew otherwise. A Lady Whitman had come to mind, and separate bedrooms, and noodles with onion powder, and a greedy night in Vegas, and the word if, and that cold, opaque, practical look in her eyes when she finally instructed me not to be an eighteen-year-old. Yo-yo, I thought.
Herbie led me down the hallway to the front door.
“Go on home, Tommy,” he said. “Sit tight, don’t budge. I’ll handle this.”
Which in a sense, I now understood, was exactly what he had been saying to me all his life.
But then he did an odd thing.
He took my hand. He pressed it to his cheek, held it there for a moment.
“Lock your doors,” he said.
I did not immediately rejoin Mrs. Robert Kooshof. Rather, minutes later, I found myself standing at the old white birdbath in the backyard. For some time I simply existed in the summer dark. A great fatigue pressed down upon me, the weariness that a lost hiker must feel after a long, circular journey that has taken him back to the embers of last night’s campfire.
I stripped naked, dipped my hands into the birdbath, rinsed the charcoal away, lay in the grass to dry.
Lovely night, I thought. Stars.
A squandered life.
All those years of willful ignorance. Hiding from the truth. Fooling myself. The girl of my dreams—my one and only—but like the summer stars she was beyond reach, utterly unknown, a bright and very distant mystery.
I stood up, naked as a baby, and let the Fourth of July bathe me.
Each of us, I suppose, needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred.
But what a waste.
* Should you question any of this, I recommend a perusal of your own volatile history. In those weeks after your husband departed for Fiji, accompanied by a tall young redhead, did you not one evening open up an old album of photographs? Did you not caress your husband’s image? Did you not whisper to him? (You said, “Come home.” You said, “Please.”) But in the next instant you screeched his name and rose to your feet and flung the album into your fireplace. (You did. You yelled, “Burn in hell!”) And then barely a moment later, giddy with sorrow, did you not scorch your fingers in the act of rescuing that tattered old album? Did you not clutch it to your breast? And did you not wonder, if only briefly, about your own ferocious contradictions, your own capacity to love and to loathe with the same blistering force?
(Late Night)
I showered, shaved, slipped into my unlaundered robe, prepared two cups of tea, moved to the bedroom door, knocked, stepped inside, and begged Mrs. Robert Kooshof to marry me. I made promises the saints could not keep. I meant virtually every word.
An hour later, near 10:00 P.M., her eyes betrayed her. She was a woman; she adored me. Her better judgment, I reckoned, was good for another two hours, tops.
At midnight, on schedule, she said, “Well, maybe it’s possible, but you need help, Thomas. The professional kind.” (Uncanny echoes of the past, obviously. Nonetheless I nodded and slid beneath the covers.)
“Done,” I said.
“No phony shrinks. I’ll be watching. I’ll check under the mattress.”
“Indubitably. Who could blame you?”
“I mean it,” she said.
And I am very sure she did mean it, insofar as words can ever carry firm meaning. (Note the vaporous flexibility of the following: “I love you.” “I do.” “Ja, und Gott helfe mir.” “Sacred.”) Much more significantly, Mrs. Kooshof then looked at me, rolled her eyes, and laughed—loud, husky laughter. At what, or why, I cannot be certain. Granted, there was a patently mirthful aspect—even, dare I repeat, a ridiculous aspect—to our beleaguered relationship, yet on this occasion I saw no cause for such foolish sniggering. I felt cuddly; I felt safe.
After a second Mrs. Kooshof snapped off her bedside lamp.
We lay in the dark for a time, silent, thinking our thoughts. Even with my ear fast to her bosom, I could barely detect her breathing.
“Your last chance,” she finally said, but then laughed again, as if to resign herself to the mutability of such ultimata, the elasticity of the English language and the human heart.
I held her tight, then
tighter.
“Make love to me,” she said.
Fireworks, indeed! A Fourth of July extravaganza! A lusty, withering, half-hour cannonade—the barrels melted; I had to spike my guns—after which I collapsed into the edgy sleep of a survivor.
Then came a wild late-night dream. Bloodcurdling, to say the least.
In one unforgettable episode, an all-female Congress had been convened: hundreds of very angry (hence resplendent) young women milling about the floor of a great convention hall, the place seething with taut buttocks and placards and denunciatory feminist rhetoric. I spotted Toni in a Shriner’s hat, Megan in next to nothing. The tattooed Carla was there too, and a buxom little businesswoman with a Toshiba, and Deborah and Karen, and a nurse named Rebecca, and Peg and Patty, and Little Red Rhonda, and the sputtering young Sissy, and Laurel in a red choir robe, and Masha and Fleurette and Jessie and Evelyn and Faith and Signe and Katrina and Caroline and Deb and Tulsa and Oriel and blue-eyed Beverly and many, many, many others, whose names and vital data had long since blurred into the larger panorama of things erotic. Curiously, the crowd seemed displeased with me. Much taunting and fist shaking—pandemonium, in fact. At one horrifying point I tried to make my escape, scampering down a long, narrow aisle, but the throng immediately cornered me near the podium, wrestling me into a wooden chair, roping me in tight and lifting me overhead like some captured beast.
And then, for what seemed an eternity, I was womanhandled in the most unspeakable ways. Here, quite literally, was the nightmare of all red-blooded nightmares. A bad dream, I thought, even while dreaming. Yet it would not end. Teetering aboard my fool’s chair, I was assaulted with mucus and spiteful epithets; I was stripped to my lanky essence; I was pawed in private places; I was passed from hand to hand like a rag doll, used like a party toy, gnawed upon like a felled zebra, then rudely hauled up to the speaker’s platform by several burly members of my seminar on the Methodologies of Misogyny. What I had done to warrant all this was beyond me. “Innocent!” I tried to squeal, but my lips had been stapled shut.
And then what?
Loud, venomous speeches. Bitter invective, outrageous accusations, loudspeakers blaring out old hymns and marching anthems. There were guest lectures. The Indigo Girls performed. And then out of nowhere Lorna Sue was there. She seemed to float up to the platform—or levitate, or fly—alighting beside me with a candle in one hand, my leather-bound love ledger in the other. Her eyes had a metallic, cauterized appearance, like polished aluminum. She wore a black cape, a black bonnet, black tights, black gloves, a diaphanous black veil. What her garb may have signified I had no idea, except that she resembled some sort of renegade mother superior. The hall went silent. Heads bowed—even my own.
Slowly, then, Lorna Sue drifted toward me, hovering there, smiling a vague, cold, sightless smile. Once again I tried to speak, to defend myself, but a pair of unmanicured hands instantly grasped me from behind. Electrodes were attached to my naked limbs, a metal headpiece fitted to my skull. Lorna Sue winked. She was chanting now: an incantatory prayer that was soon taken up by the entire assembly. My fate was sealed, obviously, but even then I could not help but take note of Toni’s beckoning brown thighs, Carla’s tattoos, Megan’s navel, Sissy’s moist little tongue, all those firm and fleshy bounties amassed before me like a sumptuous last supper. The girls’ fury bothered me not. Nor their bleats of censure. They were here, obviously, for me. For no other. And had I not been strapped to the chair, I most certainly would have raised a hand in affectionate salute. I did, in fact, manage a forgiving nod, but in the next instant a hooded executioner stepped forward—Miss Jane Fonda, I believe. “We’re people, we’re individuals!” she bellowed. To which, through stapled lips, I replied: “Well, for God’s sake, of course you are, A to double-D, all shapes and sizes.” This got me nowhere. The executioner—indeed, the above-mentioned Oscar winner—took hold of a large red lever at center stage. (Crass symbolism I leave to the quacks.) I steeled myself for the lethal jolt. Oddly, I felt almost no fear—a tingle of anticipation, if anything—but this changed swiftly when Lorna Sue turned toward the crowd and lifted her candle to my priceless love ledger. I jerked upright. At that instant the executioner did her duty. There was a flash of white light—I was sizzling—and the final image was of Lorna Sue putting the flame to my life’s work, my enduring gift to posterity. It all went up in smoke. As I did.
Two stark thoughts had already imprinted themselves on my mind as I awakened. First, fireworks. Second, I had failed to lock the doors.
Mrs. Kooshof’s bedside clock showed 2:46 A.M.
For a time I lay listening, sniffing the acrid night air, and after a few seconds before the word smoke returned to me as if curling out of the dream. I may well have whispered it aloud.
I slipped out of bed, put on my pajama bottoms, toddled to the kitchen. For whatever reason, I felt no great alarm; there was just that wispy smoke at the margins of my thoughts. I poured myself a glass of ice water, stood at the kitchen counter, and not until I had finished drinking and carefully rinsed the tumbler did it occur to me that there was nothing in the least dreamy about the odor in my nose.
Bombs, I thought.
I hurried out to the living room, bolted the front door, checked the den and spare bedroom, returned to the kitchen, stood sniffing again, bolted the back door, then switched on the basement light and made my way down.
(Basements, I add parenthetically, are not to my taste. Cobwebs.)
Yet nothing was amiss.
Briefly, I scanned the furnace and hot-water heater, peeked into a cluttered storage room, then trudged back upstairs. The smoky odor was now quite powerful. I use the word smoky advisedly, for this was not just smoke. There was also the distinct smell of gasoline.
At that point I knew.
I unlocked the back door and in my bare feet stepped out onto the lawn.
The fire had mostly extinguished itself: tiny tongues of flame, a reddish-orange glow, a charred wooden cross burning against the garage. (Pathetic? Trite? Such is our dismal human journey. We are what we were. We end where we began.) I crossed the yard. At my feet, in the lingering red glow, lay several shards of glass—fragments of a mason jar, I surmised. A large swath of grass had been scorched, the garage itself badly blistered.
What my emotions were I could not be certain. Plainly not surprise.
“Lorna Sue!” I yelled.
I waited a moment, then yelled again. There was no response. Crackling sounds from the plywood. The dark Minnesota prairie.
But she was out there, I was sure.
The second bomb went off at 3:28 A.M., the third only a heartbeat later.
I had just returned my weary bones to the side of Mrs. Robert Kooshof when the twin explosions seemed to flare up behind my eyelids. I jackknifed sideways, flailed against the sheets, caught a glimpse of the bomb’s silver afterburn over Mrs. Kooshof’s left shoulder. (She was already at the window: a compelling image by any standard. Profile view. Backlighted breasts. Here, even under wee-hour attack, was the purest evidence of my lifelong philogyny, my rock-solid affection for the more malleable sex.)
I disentangled myself from the bedclothes, sped to Mrs. Kooshof’s side, took up a defensive stance behind her.
The window still shimmied from the blasts.
For a moment or so I felt my very blood wobble. Though partially blinded, I put a hand to Mrs. Kooshof’s waist, steadying myself, and peered out at the incontinent night. Not thirty yards away, kitty-corner across the street, a pair of microwave-size fires blazed upon the broad brick steps of St. Paul’s.
Lorna Sue stood close by, dressed in a long white nightgown, her face oddly childlike, partly solemn, partly ecstatic. Somehow, as if by magic, she seemed to have shed forty-odd years—a kid again, barely of age. After a second she looked up at our window. Perhaps it was my imagination, but she seemed to incline her head slightly. (An acknowledgment of some sort? A farewell? A threat? I will never know.) A few dark moments slipp
ed by, then Lorna Sue giggled and reached down and lifted her nightgown waist high. Once again she looked up at our window, seemed to smile at something, stepped sideways into one of the fires, stood motionless for a time, and then, without the least hurry—without pain, it appeared—stepped out again, lowered her nightgown, and carefully brushed a streak of soot from its hem.
She skipped down the sidewalk toward her house.
Appalling, yes. But what it signified I had no idea.
For a minute or two Mrs. Kooshof and I watched the fires die out. “All right,” she said. “What was that?”
I began to reply—to tell her about fountains pens and burning churches—but right then, as I exhaled the breath of history, the phone rang. It was Herbie. He needed me.
“Fast,” he said. “Get over here.”
I threw on a pair of trousers, a fresh cotton shirt, a tie, and carried myself at a trot to the Zylstra home, a half block away. It was now nearly four in the morning, July the fifth. The front door stood ajar. I stepped inside, followed the sound of sobbing into the living room. (A thousand times in my youth I had trodden the same path; I knew this place—feared it, loved it—and in odd, indelible ways it was truly my second home, as deeply embedded in my dreams as my own childhood abode: a snake named Sebastian; a cat dangling from a third-story window; an honor guard; Lorna Sue playing with her dollhouse up in the attic.) Now, though, I sensed something new and undefinable. In the cluttered living room I found Velva in hysterics, Ned and Earleen doing what they could to comfort her, the tycoon sprawled virtually comatose on the sofa.
I began to turn, looking for Herbie, when Mrs. Robert Kooshof appeared in the hallway to my right. She was clad in her blue negligee, a pair of incongruous spike heels strapped to her feet. Apparently, she had followed only a step or two behind me. (Apparently, too, she had outfitted herself in something of a rush.)
She glanced at Velva, then at the tycoon, and after a hesitation marched to my side, her pretty Dutch face betraying a sort of embarrassed solicitude.
