“What do you have to kill around here to get a little privacy?”
“Boredom,” I say.
Brodie nods and finishes his banana.
“So why you creepin’ in?”
He puts the peel back into his bag and fishes out an apple and a bottle of orange juice. He takes a swig of juice and starts laughing.
“The cops, the army, and my old man.”
“Oh, shit, Brodie—you didn’t join, did you?”
Brodie doesn’t say a word. He just sits there eating his apple and drinking. When he’s done, he takes his sunglasses out of his bag, puts them on, and stares at me.
“Ya know, Sweet girl, it’s like you don’t know me at all….”
Then he gets up and smiles down at me and says—
“You should find a better Dumpster than the pizza parlors. I’d find something more toward the township.”
I look up at him.
Then Brodie walks toward class, turns around, shrugging, and yells—
“I’m just saying …”
And it’s like I don’t know him all over again—but like him more than almost anybody.
When I finally get to bed tonight, I listen to the creek and imagine the groundhogs underneath the cabin. I listen for Curtis, who hasn’t been back since the night I read the letter from the army….
Now when I come home from work and school I go for walks along the edge of the woods, cook because I want to get used to it, or get in Alice and drive around town.
Sometimes I go by Jos’s house and listen to him and his mother annoy each other after he’s closed the store.
Yesterday I hung out with his mother, Willa, who makes me laugh and is a whole lot more crazy than anyone I’ve ever met.
She yells for me to come in when I knock and ask if Jos is home.
“Come on in, honey. Jos went to Cleveland to pick up something from a supplier. Some woman who makes charms or something—I don’t know.”
I walk into the living room, and she’s knitting.
There’s yarn—everywhere.
Jos’s mom has a graying curly Afro, weighs about eighty pounds, and is what my mom would call a serious hippie chick. But I wouldn’t say that. I think she’s living in the here and now even though Jos was born in a commune.
“Sit, kid,” she says, and pushes about twenty balls of yarn out of the butterfly chair.
So I just sit and watch her knit.
“Tea,” she says after a while, and I say, “I’ll get it”—and do.
Willa puts down her knitting and starts drinking her tea.
“Good tea, kid.”
“Thanks.”
Then she stares at me for a long time. Jos told me way before I met her that she was always trying to see inside people’s souls. Freaky.
“You happy?”
Okay—that shit shocks me, ’cause I was just thinking how I wasn’t…. I don’t want to lie, so I say, “Sometimes.”
She picks up her knitting again. “Well, sometimes—sometimes has to be enough.”
“I always thought so,” I say.
“Maybe you ought to go back home. Maybe you miss your family.”
I say, “Maybe.” And then think about my brothers at home. “But I don’t think so—I’m all right where I am.”
Willa nods her head and turns to look out the window.
“Well, from everything I’ve heard, you’ll be okay with that Wright boy. Knew his family before they left for parts unknown. Nice. And he seems lovely and sincere.”
I take a roll of yarn in my hand and start squeezing it.
“Have you ever met him?”
Willa laughs. “As a matter of fact he drove me and a couple of my friends to a demonstration out by the campus. Parking was gonna be a mess, and we didn’t want to get towed. He overheard a few of my girlfriends and me in the coffee shop talking. He offered to take us, ’cause he had a parking permit. He actually drove us there in his uniform and was waiting for us by his car when it was all over.
“Amazing young man. Lovely, sad, but amazing.”
I squeeze the soft pink yarn harder.
“Yes, yes he —is….”
She stares at me again while I start to wrap the yarn around my fingers.
In and around.
After a while Willa starts talking about her volunteer work and how impossible it is to get anything organic in Heaven after the summer vegetable stands close up. And she’s really sick of having to haul ass to another cute overpriced market in one of the rich suburbs.
I feel warm and safe when she talks, and I pour myself more tea and get lost in her world of feeding the homeless, antiwar protests, and the never-ending quest for food that won’t eventually kill you. I like Willa. And when she talks about anything and everything, it smoothes over the fact that I will have to go back to a place that I love—but that is quiet and lonely.
Lonely and quiet.
And it’s going to be that way until it isn’t anymore.
The evening sun starts to go down while I listen to the calm and Willa.
22
SO THE STORY IS (AND EVERYBODY THINKS they know it by now) that I either ran away or was kicked out of my parents’ house for drugs, drinking, being pregnant, or—if you listen to the most messed-up story—all of them. After all these months of living in the cabin people just now are asking what happened! And when it looks like somebody is going to ask me, I just stare right through ’em and dare them to ask.
Nobody has so far.
So the bullshit just keeps rolling down the hill, and I don’t do anything to stop it.
Why?
Why not?
Curtis says people like to be knee-deep in it anyway.
I say it makes ’em feel better about their boring lives when they think of a tragic one for somebody else. We love to hear the tragic stories. The news is full of them, and it makes me feel good that I live where I never have to watch it.
And when I’m just walking around the cabin in one of Curtis’s old shirts, going window to window—I miss that he was here. His smell. His touch.
Him.
Maybe Willa is right about me going home, but then I walk to a shelf and pull out a book and get lost in it and I don’t have to think about anything else.
The story is about a girl alone in the woods who left home ’cause she couldn’t be happy there no matter how she or anybody else tried to make it so.
I go window to window, and the story never changes.
To the Bone
23
CURTIS HAS NOT COME HOME. THE woods did not give him up the night I almost froze looking for him. But who do I tell? What do I do? In a breath you can be gone from this place—anyplace. And the only thing you leave behind is what you meant to someone.
Curtis hardly ever talks—but the night that he left, he talked more than I’d ever heard him before. Was it a gift?
The first few days I went to school and tried not to think about it. I believed he’d be back. Quiet and sad, maybe, but he’d be back. He is not back, and maybe after a while I’ll have to do something else to look for him.
• • •
For a long time—there were no caskets. Not one. Not one to be photographed, not one to ’cause pain, not one to make people remember.
Where were the caskets?
I want all the yellow ribbons to disappear off of big-assed SUVs.
I want people to stop waving flags like it makes them better than people who don’t.
I want never to hear one more word about being patriotic—’cause most of them don’t even know what the hell patriotism is.
I want to sit in class and not think that some of the people around me might end up shooting or getting shot at by people they’d never know.
The new president now says we can see the caskets come home.
Good.
What if everybody starts forgetting that people are dying again, even with the caskets?
What if everybody fuckin�
�� forgets?
Because there are caskets now, and people still forget.
And what if everybody just starts paying attention to something else and never cares ’cause they’ve never taken the time to see the caskets?
24
BRODIE AND JOS TAKE TO THE COURT after seven little elementary kids in a pickup game finish fighting over their basketball for about the hundredth time. All three of us were leaning against the fence and laughing until about a minute ago, when Brodie took the basketball and shot it up into the tree overhanging the court.
Damn—little kids shouldn’t cuss—but Jos and Brodie just laugh harder at them while they wait for their ball to fall. It doesn’t, and they finally give up waiting. A couple of them are still talking smack as they walk away down the sidewalk.
I take a couple of free shots and make all of them, but then lose interest and let Brodie and Jos have the ball they brought to the court with them.
A few minutes after they start playing, the other basketball finally falls out of the tree and rolls toward me on the other side of the court. I think about chasing the kids to give it back but change my mind, get up, and hide it behind the weeds by the tree.
Maybe they’ll think about looking over there if they come back.
It’s hard to lose things.
“So what’s it about, anyway? Except for the obvious,” Brodie says after making about twenty one-handed layups and jogging around the court.
I know he’s talking to me, ’cause Jos stopped playing about a half hour ago and is reading a graphic novel now with his iPod probably turned high enough to make him deaf for a couple of days.
Brodie sits down on the court beside me.
I smile. “Do we ever talk to each other in chairs anymore?”
Brodie throws the basketball up in the air and lets it roll off the court. “True dat …”
“So what do you wanna know?”
Brodie stretches his legs out.
“Crimes, girl. Crimes against military brochures, locks, military premises.”
“It wasn’t that much. But how come you know so much? You moved too fast the other day to tell me anything.”
“Somebody saw me in the neighborhood around the time you committed your little civil disobedience.”
“Why were you there?”
“Hangin’ out.”
“Downtown—on a Sunday. Everything is closed.”
“Uh-huh.”
I look at Brodie and finally get it.
“You were following me?”
“Damn, Sweet, sometimes you are seriously slow. I worry about you—a lot lately. You’re in some kind of daze. Where you at?”
“Fine—I’m okay Brodie.”
“Just fine—or okay?” he says.
“You are getting on my nerves now.”
Brodie just nods at me, then walks over to the basketball and shoots it one-handed. I remember the summer he wore his right hand in a sling so he could learn how to shoot left-handed. He’s good any way he shoots now.
Jos is still reading and ignoring us.
Brodie pops a few from the corner a few times, then moves back far enough for three points and makes it. Then he goes to the free-throw line and shoots until he misses.
The sun’s starting to go down, and in a minute the street-lights will start coming on. I hear somebody’s mother calling them down the street, a dog barking, and a car starting up across the road from the courts. It’s all the sounds I didn’t think I would ever miss after moving out to the woods. But I do—sometimes now.
Just sometimes.
Jos closes his book, takes out his earphones in time enough for Brodie to ask, “Where is he, Sweet? Where’s your boy Curtis?”
25
I CLEANED THE CABIN FROM TOP TO bottom the day after Curtis left. I mean, I didn’t just clean it; I scrubbed it. Hard. With an old scrub brush I found under the kitchen sink that looked about a hundred years old.
I used soap, bleach, pine cleaner. Anything I could find.
I called Jos and told him I was sick. I never miss work. I could mess it all up, missing anything about school—even though me and Jos are cool. Sometimes the school checks your vocational employers. They just show up.
I scrubbed the floors.
The walls.
The bathroom.
I scrubbed the front porch, too.
Everything in me told me he wasn’t coming back. I just knew it. I knew it ’cause he was disappearing every day that I was there and had probably started way before I ever left home. And anyway, he’d never promised me anything—just a home for a while. That’s it.
We hadn’t known each other long enough to love each other.
And I hadn’t known him well enough, period.
So I scrubbed until my hands felt raw to the bone.
And even though I’d dream about his arms and eyes and sometimes forget he was gone and imagine that I heard him—I knew.
I knew he was gone forever.
Brodie and Jos read the letter from the army, and there’s this part of me says that the letter is private, meant only for Curtis. Or his family. But they aren’t here. They’re all in Texas now.
“So they were sending him back.” Jos is shaking his head.
I walk over to the couch, sit, and look out the window.
Brodie says, “I guess in a while they’ll be sending out the MPs to get him for going AWOL—huh?”
“He’s not AWOL,” I say.
Brodie and Jos look at me, then at the letter again.
It’s the first time I’ve let anybody in the cabin since Curtis left. I thought anybody would be able to tell like I did that he was gone. It no longer smells or feels like he ever lived here. I mean—there are his books and music, but those could belong to anybody.
“Where do you think he went, Sweet?” Jos asks, then walks across the room and sits next to me on the couch.
I point toward the woods.
“Have you looked?” He asks.
I don’t say I don’t have the nerves to go back into the woods.
Brodie stands with his arms folded, staring out the window.
“It’s been pretty cool at night lately.”
Jos must know what he’s talking about, ’cause he stands up and walks over to Brodie.
“We’ll be back, okay.”
“Just stay here and try to get some rest.”
“Don’t worry—we got this.”
And in a minute they’re both gone.
I watch the door closing and am left sitting on the couch looking out the window at a quiet, sunny day while Brodie and Jos go into the woods.
I walk over and take a CD from the shelf, put it in the stereo, and listen to zydeco for a little while.
Hereafter
26
I LOOK AT THE FRONT PAGE OF THE newspaper now and see Jos standing by the cop looking like an old man. They didn’t take a picture of Brodie (or they did and just didn’t use it).
Nobody knows it, but I was hiding in the bushes, ’cause in the end I’d listened to enough music and decided to go into the woods to look for them. They weren’t in Curtis’s grandpa’s woods. So I kept walking.
The sun was high and hot when I finally found them, cops and EMS on the edge of the woods and blocking Route 306, about a mile past the cabin. They were loading a body into an ambulance. Jos shook his head, and the cop reached over and touched his arm.
That’s when the photographer aimed her camera.
And I walked back through the woods.
27
CURTIS’S FAMILY WILL FLY HIS BODY BACK to Texas. One of his older brothers, Jules, came from Texas to take him back to his family.
I got to see Curtis at the morgue because I begged. I wasn’t family, and he’d already been identified. But I begged as my mother stood beside me—this time. She held my hand as we walked into the room.
The day before Jules leaves with Curtis, he comes to the cabin. I am waiting for him. I have been waitin
g since the day Curtis found out he had to go back to Iraq, then knew he couldn’t. I’ve been waiting for his family.
I’m sitting on the porch. My duffel bag is packed inside when he pulls up in what must be a rental. He’s wearing a black suit and dark glasses. He takes the glasses off when he walks up the steps.
His eyes look just like Curtis’s.
“Sweet?”
“Yes.”
“I remember you from the old neighborhood.”
I smile ’cause I can’t cry anymore.
“Jules,” he says, while putting his hand out for me to shake.
I do and look in his eyes.
He walks into the cabin and starts walking from room to room. Slowly and like a stranger who’s never been there.
“He loved this place. He was the only one in the family who did.”
Jules breathes out and starts looking at Curtis’s books and music—then shakes his head.
“Did you take what you wanted?” he asks me.
“I don’t need anything,” I say, then hold out the key.
He looks at the key, hands me a piece of paper, then turns away and heads out the door.
“Keep it. And if you don’t mind, we’ll need someone to check on the cabin every now and then—if you can and don’t mind.”
I put the key in my back jean pocket and nod my head and read his address and phone number in Texas. In a minute he’s disappeared down the driveway and out onto the road. I walk through the cabin again, only not like Jules. I know this place.
I remember the man who lived here and took me into this safe place—for a while. Then left me here when he couldn’t feel safe anymore.
I sit on the front porch until the sun starts to go down. I take my bags, toss them in the back of Alice, start her up, then slowly drive through the trees.
I look back just as the first groundhog of the night comes out.
The poem Jules put in Curtis’s coffin for me:
In the sweet hereafter
everything
that you ever wanted
in your heart
will float to your
feet.
In the sweet hereafter
Sweet, Hereafter Page 5
