Wishing she'd asked Ethel for the car key so that she could wait for her outside. She needed to get out of this place, fast.
"We could go outside, have a smoke. I got plenty."
The fattish boy persisted, following Miriam. He seemed amused by her, as if he could see through her pretense of shyness to an avid interest in him. Asking again if she wanted a smoke, tapping his thumb against a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket with a suggestive leer. Miriam shook her head: no, she didn't smoke. She was aware of the boy's shiny eyes on her, a kind of exaggerated interest, like something on TV. Was he flirting with her? Was this what flirting was? Miriam was only thirteen, but already her body was warmly fleshy like her mother's, her face roundly solid, not beautiful but attractive sometimes. When her skin wasn't broken out in hives. The boy was saying, "I saw you in there, hon. Talking to who's it, your old man?" Miriam backed away, smiling nervously. She was becoming confused, wondering if somehow the boy knew Les, or knew of him. He was saying, mysteriously, "There's something nobody ever asks in here—who's an inmate," and Miriam said quickly, "I have to go now, I have to meet my mother." Again the boy spoke mysteriously, "Not what you think, hon. What nobody ever asks." Miriam was trying to avoid the boy, making her way along the wall of vending machines where people were dropping in coins, punching buttons, but the boy followed her, eating from his bag of Cheese Stix. "We're up from Yonkers visiting my brother, he's gonna max out at six years. Know what that is? 'Max out'? Six years. What's your old man in for? Involuntary manslaughter—that's my brother." The boy laughed, sputtering saliva. "Like my brother didn't intend what happened, that's the deal, only know what, hon? That's bullshit. Bullshit he didn't. You max out, you don't get no fucking parole officer breathing down your neck." Miriam was walking more quickly away, not looking back, trying not to be frightened. They were back at the entrance to the lounge, where another corridor led to restrooms. The boy loomed over her, panting into her face. "Hey, hon, nobody's gonna hurt you. Why you walking away? Think somebody's gonna rape you? Any guy tries to talk to you, think he's gonna rape you? That is so sick, hon. What d'you think, Baby Tits? Your ass is so sweet, a guy is gonna jump you, the place crawling with guards?" The fattish boy spoke in a loud, mocking drawl. Miriam heard the anger beneath. She hadn't understood; something was wrong with this boy. Like the special-ed students at school you tried to avoid because they could turn on you suddenly, like Lana Ochs.
A female guard approached them. "Miss, is this guy bother ing you?" Miriam said quickly, "No." She hurried to the women's restroom, to escape.
Igneous. Sedimentary. Metamorphic.
Miriam was underlining words in her earth science workbook in green ink, writing in the margin of the page. Beside her, driving, Ethel seemed upset. Wiping at her eyes, blowing her nose. Each time they visited Les at Ogdensburg, Ethel came away upset, distracted. But today seemed worse. Miriam pretended not to notice.
Miriam hadn't told Ethel about the fattish boy in the camouflage jumpsuit. She would recast the experience, in her imagination, as a kind of flirtation. He'd called her hon. He'd seemed to like her.
Ethel said suddenly, as if the thought had just surfaced, in the way of something submerged beneath the surface of the water that suddenly emerges, "I wanted to go to nursing school at Plattsburgh. You know this, I've told you. Except that didn't happen." Ethel spoke haltingly, with an embarrassed laugh. "Seems like my life just skidded past. I loved Les so much. And you, and the boys. Except I'm not old"
Miriam could make no sense of her mother's words. She dreaded hearing more.
They were headed south on Route 58, nearing Black Lake. A windy November day, gray sky spitting snow. Ethel drove the old Cutlass at wavering speeds.
Miriam especially dreaded to hear why Ethel had dropped out of high school at seventeen to marry twenty-year-old Les Orlander.
"Miriam, I told him."
Now Miriam glanced up from her textbook. "Told him—what?"
"That I've been seeing someone, and I'm going to keep seeing him. I have a friend now. Who respects me. In Tupper Lake."
Ethel began to cry. A kind of crying-laughing, terrible to hear. She reached out to touch Miriam, groping for Miriam's arm as she drove, but Miriam shrank away as if a snake had darted at her.
Ethel said, "Oh God. I can't believe that I told him ... and he knows now." Repeating, as if her own words astonished her, "He knows."
Miriam shrank into herself; she had nothing to say. She was stunned, disgusted, and frightened. Her brain was shutting off; she wasn't a party to this. Maybe she'd known. Known something. Her brothers knew. Everyone knew. Les Orlander, whose relatives visited him at Ogdensburg, had probably known.
"...nothing to do with you, honey. Not with any of you. Only with him. Your father. What he did to us. 'I don't know what happened. What came over me,' he said. My own life, I have to have my own life. I have to support us. I'm not going to lose the house. I'm not going down with him. I told him."
A heavy logging truck had pulled up behind the Cutlass and was swinging out now to pass, at sixty-five miles an hour on the two-lane country highway. Ethel's car began to shudder in the wake of the enormous truck. Miriam felt a sudden desire to grab the steering wheel, turn the car off the road.
I hate you. I love Daddy, and I hate you.
"Can't you say something, Miriam? Please."
"What's there to say, Mom? You've said it."
The rest of the drive to the house on Salt Isle Road passed in silence.
5.
...in silence for much of the drive to Gettysburg. And hiking in the hilly battlefield, and in the vast cemetery that was like no other cemetery Miriam had ever seen before. All these dead, Les marveled. Makes you see what life is worth, don't it! He hadn't seemed depressed or even angry, more bemused, shaking his head and smiling as if it were a joke, the grassy earth at his feet was a joke, so many graves of long-ago soldiers in the Union Army, dead after three days of being slaughtered at Gettysburg: a "decisive" battle in the War Between the States.
They would question Miriam about that day. Afterward.
The long drive in the car with Les, what sorts of things he'd said to her. What was his mood, had he been drinking. Had he given any hint of how unhappy he was, of wanting to hurt himself...
Wanting to hurt himself. The words they used. Investigating his death. Hurt, not kill. Les's relatives, friends. Miriam's brothers could hardly speak of it, what he'd done to himself. At least, not that Miriam heard. And Ethel could not; there were no words for her.
Les had been paroled five months when they'd made the trip to Gettysburg they'd been planning so long. Five months out of Ogdensburg and back in Star Lake picking up jobs where he could. The roofing contractor he'd worked for for years wasn't so friendly to him now. There was a coolness between Les and his brother-in-law Harvey Schuller. Les had served three years, seven months of his sentence for assault. In Ogdensburg he'd been a model prisoner, paroled for good behavior, and this was good news, this was happy news, the family was happy for Les, the relatives. If they were angry with him for what he'd done, bringing shame to the family, still they were happy he'd been paroled, now his drinking was under control, his short temper. Though Ethel had her own life now, that was clear. Take it or leave it, she'd told Les; those were the terms he'd have to accept if he wanted to live with her and their daughter. I am not going to lie to you, I don't lie to any man, ever again. By this time Ethel had been disappointed with her man friend in Tupper Lake. More than one man friend had disappointed her; she'd acquired a philosophical attitude at age forty-seven: You're on your own, that's the bottom line. No man is going to bail you out. Ethel had gained weight, her fleshy body a kind of armor. Her face was a girl's face inside a fleshy mask through which Ethel's eyes, flirty, insolent, yearning, still shone. Miriam loved her but was exasperated by her. Loved her but didn't want to be anything like her. Though Ethel had a steady income now, comanaging a local catering service, no longer one of
the uniformed employees. Ethel didn't need a husband's income, didn't need a husband. Yet she'd taken Les in; how could she not take Les in, the property was half his, he'd built most of the house himself, they'd been married almost thirty years, poor bastard, where's he going to live? Nowhere for Les to take his shame; his wife had been unfaithful to him and, worse yet, hadn't kept it a secret, his wife barely tolerated him, felt pity for him, contempt. Maybe she loved him, maybe that was so—Ethel wasn't sentimental any longer; all that was drained from her when Les lifted the ax to bring the blunt edge down on another man's skull—but what kind of love was it, the kind of love you feel for a cripple; Ethel didn't mince words. Take it or leave it, she'd told him, things are different in this house now. So far as the Ogdensburg parole board knew, Les Orlander was living at home with his family, P.O. Box 91, Salt Isle Road, Star Lake, NY. Makes you see what life is worth, Les said. Dying for a good cause.
It was early June. A few days after Memorial Day. Everywhere in Gettysburg Cemetery were small American flags, wind-whipped. Miriam had never seen so many graves. And such uniformity in the grave markers, in the rows of graves. Row upon row of small identical grave markers it made you dizzy to see. Miriam imagined a marching army. Ghost army of the doomed. She felt a shudder of physical revulsion. Why for so long had she and Les planned to come here?
For an hour, an hour and a half, they walked in the Civil War memorial. It was a cool bright windy day. Warmer in southern Pennsylvania than it would have been in Star Lake, in the Ad irondacks. Of course there were other visitors to the memorial. There were families, children. Les was offended by their loud voices. A four-year-old boy clambering over graves, snatching at miniature flags. Les said something to the child's father that Miriam didn't hear, and the young father pulled at his son's hand, rebuked. Miriam held her breath, but there was nothing more.
Stocky and muscled, in a hooded pullover, jaws unshaven, and a baseball cap pulled down low over his forehead, Les wasn't a man another man would wish to antagonize, unless that man was very like Les himself. Was your father angry about anything, did he seem distracted, what was his mood that day, Miriam would be asked.
As if, after her father's death, Miriam would betray him!
She did tell Ethel what was true: on the drive down, Les had been quiet. He'd brought tapes and cassettes and a few CDs of music he wanted to hear or thought he wanted to hear, rock bands with names new to Miriam, music of a long-ago time when Les had been a kid, a young guy in his twenties just growing up. Miriam was disappointed: some of the songs Les listened to for only a few seconds, then became impatient, disgusted. Telling Miriam to try something else.
It was awkward in Les's company. Just Les alone, not Ethel or one of Miriam's brothers. She had to suppose it was the first time they'd ever been alone together in the car like this, though she could not have supposed it would be the last time. Somehow the trip to Gettysburg had come to mean too much. They'd planned it for so long. It seemed to have something to do, Miriam thought, with her father's memory of his own father. Not that Les said much about this. Only a few times, in the way of a man thinking out loud. If Miriam asked Les what he'd said, he didn't seem to hear. She was sitting beside his right ear, which was his bad ear. You didn't dare to raise your voice to Les; he took offense if you did that. Even Ethel knew better than to provoke him, for sometimes he seemed to hear normally and other times he didn't; you could not predict. And so sometimes he talked without hearing, without listening. In the cemetery at Gettysburg, the wind blew words away. Miriam saw how Les walked stiffly, like a man fearing pain. Maybe one of his knees. Maybe his back. His shoulders were set in a posture of labor; he'd done manual labor most of his adult life. Roofers are particularly prone to neck and spine strain. Miriam watched her father walk ahead of her, along the rows of grave markers, hands jammed into the deep pockets of his jersey pullover. He seemed to her a figure of mystery, still a good-looking man though his face was beginning to look ravaged, his skin sallow from prison. After he shot himself to death with his deer rifle a few weeks later, in a desolate stretch of pine woods beyond the property on Salt Isle Road where he'd used to hunt white-tailed deer and wild turkey with Miriam's brothers, Miriam would be asked if he'd said much about the cemetery at Gettysburg, or about his father, or Gideon, who was stationed in Iraq, and Miriam said evasively she didn't remember.
Les hadn't said much about Gideon. He hadn't seen Gideon in nearly a year. He was bewildered and angry that Gideon had enlisted in the army without consulting him. Iraq was a dirty war, a sham war like they'd said of Vietnam. Like Gideon had wanted to put distance between himself and Star Lake, was that it? Between himself and his family.
Miriam was walking fast to keep pace with Les. She'd thought he was going to head back toward the parking lot, but he seemed to be walking in the opposite direction, back into the cemetery. Overhead, clouds were shifting in the sky like soiled sailcloth. Miriam didn't want to think that the trip to the Gettysburg memorial had gone wrong somehow. Maybe it was too late. Les should have gone with the family, all of them, years ago, when Miriam's brothers were young and Miriam was a little girl. Somehow the trip had come to be too important to Les and Miriam; there was a strain to it, like the strain of a balloon being blown bigger and bigger until it threatens to burst. And then it bursts.
There was a tall plaque beside the roadway. Miriam read aloud, in fragments: "'...Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863, the greatest speech of the Civil War and one of the greatest speeches ever given by any American president. Four score and seven years ago. All men are created equal. Brave men, living and dead, who struggled here. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here—'" and Les interrupted: "Bullshit. Who remembers? Who's left? Just Lincoln people remember."
It was the afternoon of June 3, 2004. Miriam's father would disappear from her life on June 28.
6.
Months after the funeral, after Labor Day, when Star Lake emptied out and the downstate homeowners were gone, they trashed one of the new houses on East Shore Drive. Stoned on crystal meth like lighter fluid inhaled through the nostrils and a match lit and whup! whup! whup! it was like a video game, wild. A replica of an old Adirondack lodge of the 1920s, except the logs were weatherized and insulated; there were sliding glass doors overlooking the deck and the lake. Maybe it was a house their father, Les, had worked on; the brothers weren't sure. Not Gideon—after the funeral he'd flown back to the Mideast; his duty had been extended—but Martin and Stan and some of their friends. Forced a back door, and no security alarm went off that they could hear. Trashed the place looking for liquor and found instead above the fireplace mantel a mounted buck's head, sixteen-point antlers; shining their flashlights, outraged to see a Mets cap dangling from one of the points, a small American flag on a wooden stick twined in the antlers, sunglasses over the glass eyes, so they pulled down the buck's head to take away with them, stabbed and tore leather furniture with their fishing knives, smashed a wall-screen TV, smashed a CD player, tossed dishes in a frenzy of breakage, overturned the refrigerator, jammed forks into the garbage disposal, took time to open cans of dog food to throw against the walls, took time to stop up toilets (six toilets!) with wadded towels, in the bedrooms (five bedrooms!) took time to urinate on as many beds as their bladders allowed. It had something to do with Les Orlander, though they could not have said what. Sure, they'd remembered to wear gloves; these guys watched TV crime shows. Martin wanted to torch the place, but the others talked him out of it. A fire would draw too much attention.
Miriam wasn't a witness to the trashing, had not been with her brothers. Yet somehow she knew.
7.
"My damn mother, I wish..."
This second time. The words came out sudden and furious. Whatever was in her bloodstream had got into her brain. And the music was hurting. It scared her, the way the blood arteries beat. "...wish somebody would put that woman out of her misery, she'd
be better off." What was his name, he'd been Gideon's close friend in high school, Oz Newell was Miriam's friend here. Oz Newell was protecting her. Leaning his sweaty-haired head to Miriam, touching her forehead with his own in a gesture of clumsy intimacy, asking what's she saying and Miriam says, "I want somebody to kill my mother, like she killed my father." So it was said. For months it had needed saying, building up in Miriam like bile, and now it was said and the guys stared at her but maybe hadn't heard her, even Oz laughing, so certainly he hadn't heard. Hay Brouwet was trying to tell him something. Nobody could talk in a normal voice; you had to shout so your throat became raw. Hay was cupping his big-knuckled hands to his mouth, so Miriam could see that Hay was shouting, but the music was so loud, must've been she was so stoned, she couldn't hear a thing.
Whatever is done. Whatever you cause to be done. It will have happened always. It can never be changed.
In that other time, before her father killed himself. On the drive home from Gettysburg. If Miriam had said ... what words? If Miriam had said, I love you, you are my father. Don't leave me. Of course, she'd said nothing. Underlining passages in her earth science workbook as her father drove north on the throughway, home.
It was later then. They were somewhere else; the air smelled different. There was less noise. The vibrations had ceased. When they'd left the Star Lake Inn, Miriam didn't know. Possibly she'd passed out. An inky mist had come over her. She remembered laying her head down on her crossed arms on a table to which her skin was sticking. Though she knew better, there was the fear that her brothers would see her, drunk, disheveled, sluttish in the company of older guys, some of them bikers, stoned, excited, looking for a way to discharge their excitement, a dog pack sniffing for blood. In this pack, Oz Newell was her friend. Oz Newell swaying on his feet and oozing sweat would protect Miriam, she knew. There was an understanding between them. Miriam believed this. For Oz carried her to his beat-up Cherokee, lifting her in his arms. Miriam was limp, faint-headed, her mouth slack and eyes half shut; she could feel his arm muscles straining, the tendons in his neck. Oz's face was a strong face, like something hacked from stone. The skin was coarse, acne-scarred. The jaws were unshaven. It was late, it was past 2 A.M. Miriam had to be carried; her feet were bare, very dirty, the soles scratched, bleeding. One of those dreams where you have lost your shoes, part of your clothing, strangers' eyes move onto you, jeering. The stained red T-shirt and cord skirt riding up her thighs—Miriam tried to tug the skirt down, her fin gers clutching, clawed. She'd been running in the gravel parking lot. Hair in her face, panicked. "Don't! Don't hurt—" but no one was listening to her. Kevin had left the inn; the pack had followed him, Miriam clutching at Hay Brouwet's arm, but he'd thrown her off as you'd flick away a fly. Miriam had not remembered that Kevin was wearing a Yankees cap but this had to be Kevin, big-jawed boy with sun-bleached hair straggling past his ears, Kevin with the rich father, Kevin complaining of the sleek white sailboat, he was headed for a Jeep, ignition key in hand he was headed for a steel-colored Jeep parked partway in weeds at the far end of the lot when Oz Newell and Hay Brouwet and Brandon McGraw and their friends advanced upon him cursing—"Fuckface! Where ya goin'!"—and Kevin turned to them with a look of utter astonishment, so taken by surprise he hardly had time to lift his arms to protect his head. The men were whooping and rushing at him, fierce as dogs in a pack; Kevin tried to run but they caught him, cursing him, slamming him against the Jeep, the Yankees cap went flying, Kevin's head was struck repeatedly, Kevin fell to the ground as the men circled around him, punching and kicking with their steel-toed workboots. Miriam clutched at their arms, pulled at them, begged them to stop, but they paid no attention to her, even Oz Newell shoved her from him, indifferent to her pleas. And a part of her was thinking, Hurt him! So he will know.
Give Me Your Heart Page 21
