Bootstrapper

by Mardi Jo Link

  The old woman rips the target down, takes a drag on her cigarette, and looks at the paper herself this time instead of showing it to Luke.

  “Winner,” she says, exhaling. Then she yells “WINNER!” at the people passing by. The small crowd that has gathered claps politely, and a big man in a trucker hat steps up to the booth, holding out his own strip of tickets.

  The old woman climbs up on a step stool and pulls down a bright-green stuffed snake with white triangle teeth and hands it to Luke. Up close, it’s pretty big. He doesn’t say anything at all, just grins.

  “Cool!” Owen says, grabbing the animal’s fuzzy head and looking it in the eye.

  “Wow, Luke! Wow, Luke!” Will cheers, bouncing around his brother in a circle. “Can I hold it? Huh? I want to hold it!”

  “Nope,” Luke answers, wrapping the snake around the back of his neck and over his shoulders like a yoke.

  I put my arm around his waist and pull him to me while we walk away from the booth, pressing my cheek to the top of his blond head. Luke is a boy filled more with action than talk. He is my introspective son, an old-fashioned boy of aiming and exploring and building campfires and carving wood with tools, in a new-fashioned world.

  I have bonds with his brothers too, but this is the one I have with him. Acceptance of our outmoded life skills—moon gazing, gardening, shooting—is something Luke and I have in common. Together, I believe, we could’ve survived the wagon trip north, the American frontier, even the Dust Bowl.

  “That. Was amazing,” I tell him.

  He looks up at me and grins his happy boy grin.

  “I can’t wait to tell Dad,” he says.

  I feel my chest tighten. I bought him his BB gun and his bow and arrows. I showed him how to shoot them, just like my dad showed my brother and me in our backyard when I was about Luke’s age. I tore apart a cardboard box, painted a target on it for him, and tacked it up on a couple of hay bales. All me.

  “Why don’t you call him and tell him about it when we get home?” I force myself to say.

  I am the one divorcing their father, they’re not. This seems like an easy concept to grasp until it is you that has to do the grasping.

  The last of Luke’s tickets are sticking out of his back pocket. He still has ten left. In the excitement of winning, we’ve forgotten all about them.

  “What do you want to do with those?” I ask him, pointing.

  We are standing in front of the bumper cars. The sound of squeaking rubber and humming electricity and laughter emanates from inside the ride. There is already a line for the next go-round, but it isn’t very long.

  “I want to go on these with Owen and Will,” he says.

  The bumper-car ride costs three tickets. Paying for his brothers to go on the ride with him will leave him with just one ticket out of his original twenty. You can’t go on anything with one ticket. He already knows this, he says, and doesn’t care. He just wants to crash cars with his brothers.

  That is just like him, my kindhearted, fine-boned, middle boy, always thinking of everyone else first. The peacemaker who just happens to have really good aim.

  I am oblivious to anything else right now except my happy sons, and how fun this day has turned out to be despite my initial misgivings, and so the next few moments unfold like the clicks of a View-Master, the tiny square scenes a mystery until they arrive, one after the other, right in front of my eyes.

  Just as Luke is climbing the steps toward the bumper cars, a long white arm reaches out from the crowd. The arm snatches the tickets from Luke’s hand, and Luke’s face collapses in confusion. The body to whom the white arm belongs is running. He is running toward me, and then he is almost to me. This is an arm that never sees the sun, never works in a garden. There is an ornate cross tattooed on the arm, and letters—a word?—on the knuckles of the big white hand.

  The white hand that just ripped Luke’s tickets out of his small one and is stealing them away. Tickets I bought with the thirty dollars I can’t afford—we can’t afford.

  The knuckle word is spelled A-V-E-D. What is A-V-E-D? I wonder. Some drug gang? Click, click, click, goes the View-Master. I see gold necklaces swaying in the V-neck of the thief’s basketball jersey.

  Then I feel more than see that jersey gripped in my own fist. A man’s chin is level with my forehead, and my eyes meet his shoulders. I’m tall, but I have to look up to be face-to-face with this pale, pimpled skinhead with a scar on his neck and a lip ring.

  He smells bad. Of liquor—something sweet, like peppermint schnapps—and old sweat.

  “Shit, lady!” he shouts, trying to jerk away. He doesn’t release the tickets, though, and I don’t let go of his jersey. My whole hand hurts. Or maybe it’s just my finger.

  “Give my son … back his tickets,” I say. Quiet, because I don’t want to upset my sons. I don’t want to cause a scene that could ruin this good day.

  My sons are twenty feet away, still in line for the ride, but their eyes aren’t on the cars, they’re on me. They look scared now, not confused anymore.

  “What the fuck! It was just a joke!”

  The skinhead is trying to jerk away. Really, really trying. And he is strong, but not that strong.

  “Give my son … back his tickets.”

  My hand really hurts now. Bumper cars are stopped. Strangers are looking at us, then looking away. Nearby, a ride shaped like giant strawberries is still spinning around in its well-ordered circle. Happy music plays.

  Then this person, this skinny, stinking person, looks around, and for the first time maybe registers that we are in a crowd. He throws the strip of tickets toward Luke, mutters “Bitch,” and when he lets go I see that his thumb is part of that word, that knuckle word. There is an S tattooed on it. The letters on his thumb and fingers spell out S-A-V-E-D.

  From what? I wonder. Then think, From us, if you’re lucky. From me.

  If I have ever felt this kind of rage before, I don’t remember it. We are fine for the rest of this month and most of the next as long as nothing breaks and needs repair, nothing wears out and needs replacement, no one gets sick or hurt and nothing unforeseen happens. This is something unforeseen.

  The tickets are on the ground now, about to be stepped on and probably torn and ruined, but they’re too far away for me to pick them up. Even if they were close enough, my hands tremble so badly that I couldn’t do it anyway. Owen can, though, and he walks over, grabs the tickets off the ground, and hands them back to Luke.

  My sons stare at me, openmouthed. One minute their mother is talking to them about regional agriculture, the next she is a second away from pressing her green thumbs into a thief’s offending eyeballs.

  I unclench my fists and look down at my hands. The ring finger on my right hand is beginning to swell, and half the nail is torn completely off. The place where it was a few moments ago is white for a second, then the blood rushes to the surface and pools. I didn’t feel it tear off and have an odd thought of wondering where it is. I turn my hand over and see that the nail is stuck, whole, into the skin of my palm. I was gripping that basketball jersey so tightly I tore out my own fingernail.

  The gate for the bumper-car ride swings open, but my sons are still staring at me. They step aside and let the rest of the people in line go ahead. Luke is holding his tickets with both hands and the snake he won is still wrapped over his shoulders. I put my right hand behind my back so they won’t see the blood, nod a couple of times, and try to give him a smile.

  Go on, I motion, go on the ride.

  They are the last ones through the gate but finally take their places in the bumper cars and the operator starts it up. The other riders grin and yelp, but my sons’ faces are flat and serious.

  Somewhere behind me I hear chuckling, then deep laughter. I assume it’s sarcastic, hurtful, and whirl around, but this laughter is sincere. Just two old men in khaki pants and straw boater hats, tourists—“fudgies,” we locals call them—leaning against the snack trailer, bent
over and holding their stomachs.

  “We was gonna help,” one gasps, his mouth open in a smile wide enough for me to see the gold wiring on his partial, “but we seen you had it handled.”

  I had it handled? These men are old. They should know better than to believe everything they see. Because now I understand that I don’t have anything handled. Not a blessed thing.

  The four of us are just one swipe away from losing everything: the farm, the myth of divorce being survivable, the idea that I can protect my sons from everything. From anything.

  Our whole lives feel scored together as temporarily as those carnival tickets, just waiting to be torn apart.

  2

  August 2005

  BLOOD MOON

  As many poems as I have written to the moon …

  I would like to shoot along to your ears

  for nothing, for a laugh, a song,

  for nothing at all,

  for one look from you,

  for your face turned away

  and your voice in one clutch

  halfway between a tree wind moan

  and a night-bird sob.

  —CARL SANDBURG, “Horse Fiddle”

  Now that he is beginning to settle in across the road, Mr. Wonderful wants to have the boys come and visit him for the weekend. They can choose their bedrooms, he says, and help him arrange the furniture.

  I close my eyes and press the telephone tight to my ear and know that he is talking, talking, because the whole left side of my head is hot, but I can’t make out exactly what he is saying. His words are garbled and I see an imaginary image, like a twisted home movie, in place of his voice.

  He’s pulling into my driveway in his rusted-out work van, picking our sons up and taking them away. They sit on the floor in the back, without seat belts, because there’s no backseat in this van. No windows, either. They choke on turpentine fumes, because he is not a careful man and has spilled gallons of the stuff, more than once, soaking the fast-food wrappers he wads up and tosses over hunched shoulders. And then he drives away with our sons and doesn’t come back, not ever.

  Divorce, my father wrote on the slip of paper he folded around the check for my attorney, changes people. An odd warning from a man who has been happily married to my mother for almost half a century.

  But Mr. Wonderful is not a treacherous person and I’m not usually so prone to conspiracy theories. And yet, I can’t help it, I wonder if their father finagled his across-the-road rental as a ruse to steal our sons.

  And then the false image fades, my father’s note fades, and I am hearing my husband’s voice again, his words are perfectly clear, and he’s saying he misses our boys something awful. And I know immediately that this is fact, this is truth, and it trumps my doomsday scenario. I hear the father he is to our sons in his voice and my chest aches for him. For us.

  This empathy is good for about, oh, maybe fifteen seconds.

  Because when I hang up the phone and ask the boys if they’d like to go visit their father in his new place for the whole weekend, they say “Yes,” just like that, the little traitors.

  “Mom is like all Negatron now,” Luke, a fan of the nifty Transformers quick-change toys, hisses in warning to his brothers while I boil their tomato soup and burn their grilled cheese sandwiches.

  He’s nailed it, too, because I’m pretty sure this is exactly what it would feel like to be possessed by a giant alien robot. For counsel on how to deal with this strange affliction, I turn not to my Buddhist library book but to my SMILE handbook. Mr. Wonderful and I have both attended something called the SMILE Program, an evening workshop mandatory in Michigan for divorcing couples with children. SMILE stands for Start Making It Livable for Everyone.

  “Anger, disappointment, hurt, grief and a desire for revenge [italics mine] are some normal reactions to separation and divorce,” the handbook states.

  I want to be this mother that SMILE holds out as the ideal: the one who adapts and copes and puts the needs of her children first. I don’t feel like this mother, though, and I sure don’t feel normal, either. I feel small and mean and dark and out of control.

  The boys leave with their father right after our scorched-earth dinner, on foot, with Will even skipping and looking up at him and smiling. In their absence, I try to meditate, or pray, or accomplish some combination of both, but all I manage to do is brood.

  Our farmhouse has been torn apart by the remodeling project, but the builder is gone now, because I don’t have the money to pay him to put it back together again. We were going to have a master suite with a new bedroom, a new tiled bathroom, a walk-in closet, and a balcony. Now there’s just an unfinished staircase, a bedroom with no trim or furniture, and a bathroom with no plumbing.

  The big, open rooms don’t keep things inside themselves anymore; and as I sit here in my flowered chair, eyes closed, shoulders that keep insisting on tensing themselves up to my earlobes, the house sounds different.

  Our Father, who art in heaven, I think, trying out this prayer as a kind of mantra, please let my sons stay whole.

  But the dogs pant, the well pump clicks off and then back on, and I even hear the bumblebees outside, pollinating away as if everything were on schedule, and I can’t focus. Because nothing is on schedule for me when the boys aren’t here, and even sound behaves differently without their constant voices around to fill up the space.

  It’s been two months since my front-lawn bonfire and the grass has since grown back, green as ever. The idea that the hurt I feel over the end of my marriage can be healed just as quickly is tantalizing. Even if a lot of what I read—like this, for example—only mystifies me:

  “Before I had studied Zen, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.”

  I think on this and try my made-up mantra again—Our Father, who art in heaven, please let my sons stay whole—but it’s impossible to appreciate the solitude when all I feel is the loneliness. An emotion that seems to have no theological, geographical, or sociological boundaries. The SMILE handbook addresses it, the Bible addresses it, and so does my growing collection of Zen lit.

  According to the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, there isn’t just one kind of loneliness; there are actually six different kinds, and a self-diagnosis reveals that I suffer from all of them. I want too much, feel too much, expect rescue, lack discipline, assign blame, and, most of all, I brood. And it’s kind of good to know that an emotion that feels uncontrollable is documented so rationally.

  It’s still dark outside when I’m reading about all of this; I’ve gotten up at dawn, because without the boys here, sleep is impossible. I make coffee, get dressed, and take refuge in the barn.

  Here is the one place where I do still feel normal. The smell of new hay, and the presence of big, warm bodies expecting me, and the sound of my horses’ grassy, even breath is the only thing that calms. I feed Major and Pepper their grain as the sun comes up, and I listen to them chew.

  When they’re both finished eating I give them a brush-down, comb burrs out of their tails, pick compacted dirt and pebbles out of their hooves, and then turn them out into the pasture.

  They trot over into the shade of a giant red pine just the way they do every morning, because nothing has changed for them, and they press their bodies together to each other, nose to tail. I can feel their simple equine contentment, and it might even be catching—that Zen book should probably be titled Chop Wood, Carry Water, Care for Horses.

  They are like a balm for my bruised heart, my horses are this morning. I’ve wanted to have my own horses ever since my parents took my brother, Ben, and me on a summer vacation to visit distant relatives out west. Our father’s cousins owned an honest-to-God ranch with an honest-to-God name, the Bar F. I was so proud to learn back then that ranching was, at one time anyway, the Link family b
usiness. And right then I decided I would have horses when I grew up. It was a girlhood dream I’ve kept close at hand for more than three decades—one I was finally able to realize two years ago.

  I watch Major and Pepper nuzzle each other for a few more minutes as the daylight spreads, then top off their water tank and check the charge on the electric fence. On the way back to the house, I open up the valve on the garden sprinkler, listen to the syncopated bursts of water, then take up my post back on the porch, my lap heavy with library books again.

  And the loneliness returns as if it’s been sitting here in one of my empty chairs just waiting for me. At least this time when I greet the new day here, my beverage of choice is coffee.

  “When you wake up in the morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, could you use that as a golden opportunity?” the Buddhist nun asks. “Right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart?”

  Well, I can sure try.

  I can try not to brood, and I can try to relax instead, even if I am oblivious to the existence of the place inside she calls the “limitless space of the human heart.” That’s pretty woo-woo for me, but I am about to close my eyes and try to find it anyway when movement in the yard catches my bloodshot eye.

  An injured water bird is skulking around the yard, looking lost. He is an obvious interloper; the Grand Traverse Bay is three miles north and the closest inland lake is at least two miles east. The only water on my whole property is a little koi pond near the south end of the porch.

  The bird’s black form darts over the grass, and his contorted shadow makes me think not of my own shadow self but rather of Edgar Allan Poe’s Raven. This bird showed up just in time to spare me another failed attempt at relaxing, meditation, or anything of the like.