Nina Revoyr

by Wingshooters

  “Small letters,” she said slowly, as if I didn’t understand. “You wrote all these words in capital letters.”

  I continued to look up at her. Since I’d written in capital letters all that school year and the year before, I didn’t see why anyone should have a problem with it now. Looking more closely at the words that she held two inches from my face, I saw that she hadn’t corrected any spelling. And yet the paper was covered in red, because what she had done was rewrite every single word in small letters.

  “Michelle,” she said, with a hostile edge to her voice, “do you even know how to write in small letters?”

  And it must have occurred to us both, and to everyone else, that I didn’t.

  Around me, I heard snickers. One boy hissed, “What a dummy!”

  Miss Anderson shook her head and looked at me distastefully. “They must not have taught you very well over there in Japan.”

  But they did, I wanted to tell her. Thanks to my mother, I could read and write more kanji than any other child in the Japanese school, even those who had two Japanese parents. I knew characters that fifth graders didn’t know. I had learned the math that she was teaching us two years before and had always scored first in my class. But I didn’t tell her any of this; it wouldn’t have helped.

  Instead, I just sat there silently while she declared in a loud voice, “You’re going to really have to work to catch up with the rest of the class. They probably should have held you back another grade.”

  That afternoon when I got home from school, my grandmother was already setting the table for company. It was Friday, which meant that Jim Riesling would be coming over for supper. But to my surprise, several of the other coffee shop regulars showed up, too—Earl Watson, Ray Davis, and eventually Uncle Pete, who was a little late, as always. They had come to discuss the Garretts. Because I was the only one who’d actually seen one of them, I was included in the conversation. They let me sit at the dining room table with them while my grandmother ate alone in the kitchen. Normally I would have been thrilled at such an arrangement, at being included in the circle of men. But it didn’t feel like such a privilege that day. Grandma had made my favorite supper—chicken-fried steak, peas, and mashed potatoes—but my food sat untouched while they questioned me. Beneath the table the dog lay on my foot, my only anchor to something gentle and comforting.

  “What does he look like?” Earl said, leaning across the table. “I asked Kevin but that boy don’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”

  “What do you mean, what does he look like?” said Ray. “He looks like they all do—black and ugly.”

  “Did he try to talk to you?” Earl pressed, ignoring his friend. His eyes were red from anger or beer, and he leaned so close I could see the veins lacing through them. The light shone off his bald spot, which was ringed with the same black hair as his son’s. I looked down to avoid his stare and my eyes settled on his arms. There was a curved, protruding scar on the inside of his right wrist, just where his shirt sleeve ended.

  “No,” I lied. “I only saw him in the cafeteria.”

  “He ate with you?” Uncle Pete asked, surprised. He was generally so good-natured that it was troubling to see him troubled, to see his handsome face screwed into an angry scowl.

  “You know, we don’t need to do this,” Jim said, dropping his hands heavily on the table. “Let her be. He has nothing to do with her.”

  “He has something to do with all of us, even Mike here,” said Charlie, and the others nodded. I didn’t like the expression on his face—it was angry and impatient—so I looked past him at the faded reproduction of the Last Supper, and then to his right, at his gun case. It was like a small wooden hutch for china, lifted up and nailed to the wall. Two shotguns and a rifle leaned with their barrels in grooved slots, their muzzles pointing up toward the ceiling. His pistols—a Colt .38 Special and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum—hung from metal hooks in the back. On the top shelf were my grandfather’s sharpshooting trophies and Brett’s trophies from field trial competitions. Surrounding the handguns, taped to the wood, were yellowed old newspaper clippings from Charlie’s marksman days, and from his time as a baseball player in the amateur leagues.

  It bothered me that my grandfather was upset about Mr. Garrett. I had known that he didn’t think particularly well of blacks—I’d heard him say that they were lazy and dependent on welfare, and he seemed to think sensational stories of crimes committed by black people were an indictment of the entire race. But I’d taken these remarks in the same vein as his grunting disapproval of bell-bottoms, or hippies, or war protestors—as general displeasure with difference, a resistance to the world shifting around him. I hadn’t really thought he was serious. And it was one thing to hear his opinions about people out there, on TV. It was another to see him directing those feelings toward a real person, someone I knew.

  “Listen,” Earl said, and his eyes were piercing. Although it had been over a year since he’d met me, I don’t think he’d ever really looked at me before. “If you see him at school, don’t talk to him. Don’t talk to him, don’t smile at him, don’t treat him like he belongs. He needs to understand that he ain’t welcome here, and everybody in town has to let him know it. That means everybody—even you, little girl.”

  I looked down and moved some peas around my plate. I wondered if he’d given a speech like this about me when I first came to town. One way or another, the message had been conveyed—Earl’s wife and sons never talked to me.

  “I heard the wife’s got people seeing her,” Jim said now, and I was relieved that the men’s attention had been drawn away. “She’s been helping a lot of patients at the clinic.”

  “Must be people from out of town,” my grandfather remarked, and he was probably right. It was hard to imagine anyone from Deerhorn going to see her, but people from larger towns like Wausau and Steven’s Point might have felt less uneasy. And those towns had a few black residents too, maybe some who were willing to come all the way to Deerhorn to be treated by a black nurse. She might even have been seeing some black soldiers who were home from the war, since there was no veterans’ hospital in the area. I knew, though, that the other men weren’t happy to hear this.

  “Well, the buck’s losing customers, that’s for sure,” Charlie said. “Mike told me there was only ten kids in Janie’s class today.”

  “He sounds like a nice enough fellow,” Jim said, seeming almost defiant. “I heard he offered to give some extra help to kids who were having trouble with their schoolwork.”

  “Help?” Earl said. “From a nigger?”

  With this reproach, Jim settled into silence. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, eyes cast down at the table. I’d always wondered if my grandfather and the other men tolerated some of his unconventional views—like his belief that women should be hired as police officers and that draft dodgers shouldn’t have to serve jail time—because they didn’t take him seriously. But now he was even less aligned with them than usual. After the other men left and we moved into the living room, Jim barely said a word, working slowly on a single beer and staring blankly at the television. He was joined in silence by my grandmother, who didn’t speak to Charlie, but whose sudden, unusual attention to me—a hot chocolate, an extra piece of pie after dinner—let me know she wasn’t pleased about what had happened that evening. I wasn’t feeling very sociable either, and as soon as the Friday Western was over at nine, I escaped into my room.

  The room I slept in was actually a guest room, and that’s exactly what it looked like. Because we’d all assumed my stay was going to be temporary, my grandparents hadn’t changed it when I arrived. The furnishings were heavy and wooden, pieces they’d inherited from their families, and the wardrobe was full of my grandmother’s winter clothes. Although the old furniture was big and mismatched, I liked it; it felt substantial and permanent. And I especially loved the old bed. It was huge and enveloping, and that night I dove straight into it, rolling around on the
handmade quilt.

  I wanted to forget the last few hours; I wanted not to feel how I felt. And because it wasn’t comfortable, all of a sudden, to be in that house, I pulled myself up out of the bed and looked at the postcards I’d tacked to the wall. They were from my father, from his various stops on his way out west the year before—Des Moines, Topeka, Denver, Salinas, Salt Lake City, and Reno. At first, they all said more or less the same thing: I hope things are good there. I haven’t talked to her yet.

  When he arrived in California, though, his writings had changed. He had talked to her, eventually; he’d found her in Sacramento. Then he followed her to Stockton, San Francisco. For a while the letters—they’d turned to letters once he was more or less settled—included descriptions of where he was staying, whatever odd local radio or newspaper jobs he picked up, the new friends he made or the older ones with whom he’d reconnected. You’re going to love it here, he’d written from San Francisco. You’ll feel right at home. It’s wild and beautiful and everyone can be who they are.

  He’d say a bit about my mother—I talked to her on the phone the other day, or, I caught up with her outside the place she works—and always tried to sound upbeat. He promised that he’d come and get me soon, that we’d all be together again.

  But as the months passed he began to refer to her less, or with a different tone—he hadn’t seen her in a while, he wrote at one point, but he was sure that he’d speak to her soon. She gradually faded from his letters until finally, a couple of months before, he stopped mentioning her altogether. Then he had written from Kansas City, worrying my grandmother. And now there was a new postcard that I hadn’t put up yet, which had arrived just that week from Springfield, Missouri. He was on the move again, but heading east, maybe toward Wisconsin.

  Although I tried not to dwell on it, I missed my father. He wasn’t a bad man, or even a particularly bad parent—I had good memories of him bouncing me on his knee and ruffling my hair, and singing songs while he fried bacon and eggs in the morning. He was gentle and big-hearted, and he cared about things being right in the world. It was just that he wasn’t centered, the way that Charlie was. He couldn’t really focus on anything, except on the one thing that he could never hold, my mother. Even when the three of us were still living together, she had seemed to be leaving already. I could still recall her perfume and her high, impatient voice—but I couldn’t, despite the pictures in the attic, conjure her face at all.

  I didn’t want to think about my mother, though, so I got up and went over to the bureau where the postcard from Springfield lay. It was a picture of a Civil War—era cannon in front of a church, against a backdrop of clear blue sky. I’m staying with some friends I met this summer at the music festival, my father had written. I’ve got a job here with a radio station starting next week, and I’m going to save some money. As soon as I do, I’m coming to get you—and then we can go back to California!

  There was a hopefulness to this postcard that was different, that seemed real this time, and it raised my own hopes too. I thought about writing back, but as usual, there was no return address. In my shirt drawer were half a dozen letters I’d written, waiting for when I’d have a place to send them. If he was staying in one place long enough to work and save some money, maybe that time would be soon.

  But while I stood looking at the postcard, I felt jumbled, confused. As unsettled as I’d felt at the dinner table that night—and as uncomfortable as I felt with most of the people in town—I still loved living with my grandparents. The everyday routines of their house and their lives, the meals and chores and evenings at home, were comforting and solid. And I loved wandering in the country; I loved my life outside, I loved playing and biking with the dog. It was a different kind of life than I had with my father, and with both of my parents; living with them had been shifting and uncertain. I wasn’t sure I was really eager to go back to that life. But I did want to feel like they wanted me.

  Thinking about all of this, I felt a sudden surge of loneliness. Then I heard scratching at the door. When I opened it, I found Brett there, ears lifted in concern and questioning. I leaned over and petted him on the head, kissed him on the snout. I brought him into the room and invited him to jump up on the bed, which he did, and then I hugged him until I drifted off to sleep.

  FOUR

  During the fall of 1974, time seemed to move both faster and more slowly than usual, with each event brightened and magnified like the leaves on the maple trees, which were bursting then with color. I remember that time vividly, the particular tensions in the air, the way that all of us faced the morning with a heightened awareness, as if we were preparing ourselves for whatever the day might bring. The uneasiness in town was sharpened by events in the larger world—the resignation of the president, long lines at gas stations, the kidnapped heiress who was still missing even though her captors had been killed or arrested, the escalating crisis in Boston. Everyone seemed to be on edge, and at nine years of age I felt suddenly old, as if I knew that the things I was witnessing then would propel me into an early adulthood.

  But there was more to those weeks than tension and difficulty. Some good days were mixed in, too. And as those days grew increasingly rare, I held on to them more tightly.

  The Saturday after I’d been questioned about the Garretts at dinner, Charlie and I loaded the car up with several bats, two gloves, about three dozen baseballs, and headed out into the country. My grandparents’ car was a lime-green ’64 Pontiac LeMans, so big it could have fit eight people in its long bench seats, one short of a starting lineup for a baseball team. The car had clocked 22,000 miles in the ten years they’d owned it, just slightly more than I rack up now in a single year in California, and it’s a measure of my grandfather’s view of the world, of his essential satisfaction, that he never saw reason to drive more than fifty miles from Deerhorn, and then, really, only to hunt.

  That day, he sat with his right arm thrown across the back of the seat and his knees spread wide, so relaxed he might have been sitting in his living room. His left hand rested lightly on the bottom curve of the wheel, even as we hurtled along at eighty miles an hour down a two-lane country road. I wasn’t scared because everything about the way he held himself made clear that he had this powerful machine completely in his control. Besides, I was eager to reach our destination. There was a baseball field about ten miles into the country, which used to be the home of the Deerhorn Bombers until the new ballpark was built close to town, and which now served mostly as a practice field for the boys who still lived out on the few remaining farms. It was at the far end of a pasture that backed up to the woods, and deer would wander into the outfield at dusk. Charlie drove me out there sometimes when we knew the place would be empty to work on my batting and fielding. We always brought Brett with us, and as we approached the field that morning, he raised his head to feel the rushing air against his face, the wind lifting his black ears like sails. When we pulled off the road onto the gravel parking area he began to circle and whine, as eager as Charlie and me to be outside.

  Is there any place more perfect than a baseball field in autumn? Anything better than the smell of the grass; or the crisp, cool air; or the red and yellow leaves against the clear blue sky, which was paler now than it had been in the summer? I didn’t think so, and this field was my favorite. Because it wasn’t used as much as the fields in town, there weren’t any worn spots in the grass, and the infield was perfectly level. The backstop was simple—about fifteen feet tall and thirty feet wide—not one of the huge, imposing structures they had put on the newer fields. The dugouts were just benches behind a six-foot fence, and the bleachers along the base lines were made of wood. The outfield wall, which was painted a fading Brewer blue, had a few old ads from businesses in town—Dieter Tires, Ronnie’s Bar and Grill, the Deerhorn Herald News. Past the third base line was a wide, unbroken view of the countryside—the slightly rolling hills spotted here and there by stands of wood, a few red barns in sharp relief agains
t the green of the fields. It was quiet there, so quiet you could hear the individual songs and conversations of the birds, the approach of a car on the distant highway. Any home run ball was hit into the woods beyond the outfield, where it became part of the landscape with the rocks and fallen leaves, maybe scaring a deer or two as it landed.

  There was something about stepping out onto a baseball field that always gave me a thrill, as if some energy source, some element in the grass, entered my feet and moved up through my body and set off an extra charge in my heart. I knew that my grandfather felt it, too. He was grinning as we unloaded the gear and carried it to a spot along the first base line. And seeing his worn Brewers cap and the muscles that still lined his arms, I could imagine him at eighteen or nineteen years old, driving out to the country with a duffel bag and glove, just looking for the next field, the next game.

  We played catch for a few minutes to warm up. Brett followed the flight of the ball through the air and ran back and forth, barking, between us. Then my grandfather sent me out to the shortstop position. He stood at home plate and threw the balls up for himself, hitting them as they fell. He sent ground balls, line drives, and pop-ups across the field, moving me left and right, making me charge or take balls on a hop or run backwards to keep them from flying over my head. I was a fairly good fielder for a nine-year-old—proficient at judging hops and even backhanding grounders—although I still flinched at very hard-struck balls that whirred straight at my head. Brett waited patiently through this barrage, sitting between first and second at the second baseman’s spot so he could watch but not be in the line of fire. He knew not to chase balls that were intended for me. But if I couldn’t handle a scorching grounder or a high line drive and the ball went past me into the outfield, he’d chase after it, sprinting full speed, as if he planned to pick the ball up, turn, throw it back toward the infield, and cut the base runner down at home plate. But once he actually retrieved the ball the urgency was gone; he’d trot casually outside the third base line, lifting his head as he readjusted his grip, supremely proud of himself, and drop the ball at my grandfather’s feet. Then he’d run back out to second base and wait for my next miss.