‘Back to me, sitting here in Palookaville – that’s how you think of it now, isn’t it? – with nothing better to do than wait for you to decide I’m not so bad after all.’
‘That’s not true,’ he said again.
‘Maybe it isn’t.’ Her voice lifted for the first time. ‘But how can I tell? I don’t know what to believe any more.’
‘Be fair.’
‘Fair? Like you were to me? Listen, I know people change and things happen and life doesn’t go on in the same way for ever. But I didn’t think things had changed between us.’
‘They haven’t.’ When she didn’t reply he said, ‘Let me prove it. Please, Cassie. I’ve missed you. Say you’ll see me again.’
‘I’ll see you, Michael, but I’m not sure I want to sleep with you. Not for a while anyway.’
‘That’s okay,’ and then an awful thought entered his mind. ‘Is that because you’re sleeping with someone else?’
‘No,’ she said, sounding disappointed by the question.
‘Donny said Ronald Duverson was back in town. He said you’d been seeing him.’
‘Fuck Donny.’ She almost spat the word, which he had never heard her say before. ‘Honestly, you men. Is that all you ever think about? I went to the movies with him, all right? He sent me flowers on my birthday – look at you, you didn’t even send a card. He walked me home once from basketball practice. And yes, sometimes he’s called me on the phone. So what? Why is it Donny’s business anyway?’
‘It isn’t,’ he said, trying to reduce her anger.
‘And you can’t talk either. You haven’t told me the truth about anything, and all you want to know is whether I’ve been sleeping with anybody else.’
‘It was just that Donny said Ronald was in love with you.’
‘In love with me? Did Donny use those words?’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t think so. So Ronald’s got a crush on me, so what? I like Ronald. I know what you’re about to say – and yes, I know his reputation. But he has never been anything but sweet to me. Gentle, and polite.’
‘Tell that to his last victim.’
She was shaking her head impatiently. ‘He hasn’t been in a fight in months.’
‘How would you know? He only got back from Texas last month.’
‘Because he told me so. He said he’s not going to fight any more. And half the problem is that once people think you’ll fight they like to pick them with you.’
‘Oh, I see. That’s why he has to fight so much.’
‘I just told you he’s stopped. Give him a break.’
Sure, he thought, and let him do the same for me. He could see the vanilla pickup truck in his mind’s eye.
‘Anyway,’ Cassie said, ‘I don’t want to talk about Ronald. Maybe he is “an admirer”, but that doesn’t mean I reciprocate the feeling. If I were in trouble I could count on him, but I just like him as a friend.’
‘So you’ll see me again?’
‘Yes, I will,’ she said firmly, ‘and doubtless you’ll get me into bed again, too. I love you, Michael. But understand one thing. Next time, if you get tired of me, you better have the decency to tell me. Because if you disappear again I don’t think I could bear it.’
Michael reached over and kissed Cassie until, eventually, she kissed him back. There was a thump from below and Michael looked down. The man in the rowboat was holding onto Nelson’s dock with one hand and the oars with the other.
‘Excuse me folks,’ he said, ‘but do you have permission to be here?’
4
IT HAPPENED AS quickly as an accident. Michael was sitting reading the want ads in the Burlington Daily News, when he heard a door slam in the driveway, tipped down his paper to see, and found Ronald Duverson coming at full run towards him. He managed to stand up but then found himself paralysed, unable to move away from Ronald’s first punch, which hit Michael so hard that he felt a hammer had been driven into his cheek.
Oddly, he didn’t fall down, stunned into immobility by the force of the blow. Then bam! Again, this time the other hand slammed suddenly into the hollow between his right cheek and jaw, loosening a tooth. Blood spurted out of his mouth like water from a playground fountain.
This time he did fall, backwards against the deckchair he had been sitting in, hitting his head against the thin wooden frame, then sliding awkwardly and hard onto the stone patio. He rolled instinctively onto his front and something hit his back with the dull force of a sledgehammer. Then he was hit again and again in rapid succession, a tattoo of punches against his back and the back of his head. There was the briefest of pauses, then he felt an explosively fierce pain in his side and heard something crack as he was kicked in the ribs.
He wanted to roll out of the way but under the barrage of hammering blows he couldn’t move at all. He thought, This isn’t going to stop. He is going to kill me and I can’t do anything about it. Fear of dying overtook his fear of pain.
‘Stop it,’ came a loud voice with bass finality. It sounded much like his father, Michael thought hazily. And then he heard the unmistakable click of a breech closing – smooth, machined, well-oiled.
‘You touch him one more time,’ the voice announced from somewhere above, ‘and I’ll pull this trigger.’
The only response from Ronald, who had not said one word or uttered the briefest phrase, was a snarl.
‘You go get into your truck and get out of here. Right now. I’m going to count to three, and if you’re not in that cab by then I’ll shoot. So help me God, I will. One . . .’
And Michael heard, as he slowly rolled over, wincing as his back touched the patio, the sound of boots running across the paving stones and onto the driveway. Then a door slammed, an engine started, and the tyres squealed as in a movie and Ronald was gone.
Michael listened as footsteps came down from the porch. He sensed his father’s great arms reaching down to encircle him, then winced as he was hoisted up in one powerful heave. His father steadied Michael, then half-pushed and half-carried him up the porch steps, as Michael tried to pick his feet up and keep them from hooking onto each step. Then they were in the house, staggering through the kitchen like marathon dancers, then through the dining room and into the living room, where his father released him and Michael fell onto the sofa and passed out.
Cool, the water felt so cool and fresh. He came to and found his father working carefully on his face with a wash rag. ‘Cuts and bruises,’ said Henry. ‘You’ve looked prettier, but I don’t think anything’s broken. How’s your ribcage?’
Michael felt down and didn’t wince until he pushed hard. But then he flinched with the sudden sharpness of the pain. He was cross with himself for checking – he didn’t want to reveal how much it hurt. ‘Could be cracked,’ said his father. ‘The only way to tell for sure is to get an x-ray. I’ll take you over to Fennville tomorrow. First though, I’d like Doctor Fell to have a look. I called him but he’s up fishing on the Pere Marquette. Back tomorrow.’
Dr Fell – his father’s closest friend, the attendant physician throughout the family’s history: delivering Michael, then Gary, tending their mother as she slowly died before their eyes. A historical intimacy that Michael hadn’t chosen and didn’t think he could stand right now. ‘There’s no point having an x-ray,’ Michael said harshly. ‘They don’t do anything for cracked ribs these days. Taping it is pointless.’ His father looked surprised but said nothing. Michael was beginning to understand how badly he had been beaten up. A growing sense of humiliation was taking hold, and he wished he could be alone to lick his wounds. He desperately wanted to cry, but was equally determined not to cry in front of his father. ‘I don’t need Doctor Fell, either. Let him fish.’ Suddenly he snapped, ‘I just want to be left alone!’ Anger seemed the only way to avoid tears.
‘I’ve got to report this. That kid was trying to kill you. If I hadn’t come along . . .’
He left the sentence unfinished, for Michael was shouting again:
‘Don’t call Jerry Dawson whatever you do. If you call him, I’ll deny it.’
‘Why?’ Henry sounded genuinely baffled.
‘I just don’t want you to call him. Please.’ He struggled for arguments to keep his father from calling anybody. He was desperate now. He felt thoughts racing by him, and like a frantic commuter running for his train, jumped onto the latest one to enter his head. ‘I’ll tell him you beat me up, that’s what I’ll do.’
Michael could see his father was shocked by this, and he was shocked himself. Part of Michael yearned to take the words back, and to admit how bad he felt – not physically, because for all his soreness and hurt he could sense he would recover quickly. It was his impotence that really hurt.
Now Henry spoke slowly, with a show of calmness. ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow. You get some rest now. I’ll get you a blanket – you can sleep here tonight.’
Sunday he found he could stand and, after a fashion, walk around the house, though his ribcage was very tender and if he jarred his feet at all, the bones in his cheek burned with soreness. Gary came home from his sleepover and stood in the kitchen as Michael sucked soggy cereal from a spoon. ‘What truck did you hit?’ his brother asked.
‘Gary.’ Their father called him out to the living room and when Gary came back he made no further remarks. It was only after supper, when Gary had gone upstairs to listen to music, that his father brought up the subject of Jerry Dawson again. He spoke with a mixture of decisiveness and resignation. ‘Tomorrow morning I want you to come with me and see Jerry. And I want you to tell him the truth about what happened. I didn’t bring you up to be a liar.’
When Michael didn’t argue his father seemed satisfied, and went to bed early. He was sleeping soundly at four in the morning when Michael tiptoed down the stairs, carrying his duffel bag, uncertain which was bothering him more – the pain brought by his movements or the worry that he’d wake his father up. Once outside, he opened and closed his car door carefully, then sat catching his breath and waiting for his ribs to produce only manageable amounts of pain. He reversed quickly out of the drive, then drove at speed through the empty streets of the town. It was only when he was halfway to Fennville on the interstate that he realized he was running away.
But he had no choice. He felt frightened and, at the return of his old friend Fear, depressed. Having spent so much time fighting the incapacitating effects of fright, he had begun to think he had won not just the battle, but the war. His panic attacks and his odd fear of violence had begun to seem so irrational that they lost their ability to unnerve him. His early fear of Alvin had been entirely forgotten; even his greater fear of Ronald Duverson had come to seem overblown, almost ridiculous.
But it wasn’t ridiculous at all. He felt the bruise on one cheek with his fingers, then turned on the car’s interior light and looked in the mirror at the mauve mess of his face. That wasn’t evidence of neurosis; that, he thought, lightly tracing over his wounds, was real. He had been right all along to be scared.
And he was still scared now, driving through the night, climbing the hills before New Era, seeing a solitary light in a farmhouse in the dark valley below, then descending down through the beech and birch forest. If he stayed in Stillriver he knew that Ronald would just come and do it again – he could visualize Ronald running at him, and even in the mere imagining found himself agitated, taking short, jerky breaths as he gripped the steering wheel and drove on.
The only way to stop Ronald would be to file a complaint with Jerry Dawson, and for reasons of humiliation rather than fear, he couldn’t face that either. It was bad enough that his father had witnessed his son being beaten half to death, but two hours after an interview with Jerry the whole town would know. That’s how it worked; he’d seen it happen enough while working in the drugstore, how by an unseen bush telegraph anything dramatic that happened got sent racing through the loose-lipped inhabitants of the town, moving from point to point until there wasn’t a man, woman, or child alive in Stillriver who wasn’t in the know. And after that, how could he stand behind the counter at the drugstore all summer long, knowing that the locals coming in knew what had happened, and worse, knew that he knew they knew? That’s Henry Wolf’s boy, the one Ronald almost beat to death.
News, know, knew – for a moment the words thundered like a symphony in his head, but the effect of every word was exposure, the certainty that his humiliation would be public. But worst of all, worse even than the public humiliation, would be facing Cassie. He had never thought one way or another about whether he deserved Cassie, simply thought ever since meeting her that life had at last stopped playing tricks on him, and had decided to do something nice. Nice? More than that – wonderful. But now he felt for the first time he didn’t deserve her; suddenly they seemed divided by a river he didn’t know how to cross. Oh sure, she might act understanding, would probably urge him to press charges and ignore the inevitable resulting talk. But how would she help him recover the manhood he’d left lying on the paving stones outside his father’s house? What would he do when he went walking with her and Ronald suddenly loomed ahead, walking towards them menacingly? Just thinking of that made him feel impotent and incapable.
So faced with this combination of humiliation and fear, what else could he do but run? He had to get away, find time and some place to recompose what seemed to him to have been shattered – his very sense of himself. He’d collect himself, however long it took, and then he’d see Cassie, be her man again instead of a pathetic, whimpering kid. Maybe the parson will die soon, he thought hopefully as he skirted Muskegon, and then Cassie can come to Ann Arbor. Once she gets away as well everything will be fine. And he hung onto the prospect like a drowning man grabbing a buoy, since he could find hope in none of his other thoughts, only shame and fear.
Back in Ann Arbor, he lay low in the house for the first day, going out only to visit the student health service, where the doctor was nosy but nice, and produced the painkillers Michael wanted. He kept his bedroom door closed and his housemates left him alone. He called Sophie and overcame her slight wariness by explaining it wasn’t her he wanted. Two days later she called back with a name and number her father had supplied, and that same day he wrote Alvin to explain he wouldn’t be back that summer, gave a mail-forwarding address to his housemates as well as strict instructions not to reveal his whereabouts to anyone. Then he left Ann Arbor and drove north along the eastern, Lake Huron side of the state, until he found the construction site seven miles outside Alpena, where he and seventy-three other males were going to erect a small box-girder bridge across the Thunder Bay river.
The first week was spent wheelbarrowing a hand-dug mix of shingle and sand from the riverbank to a vast mound at the back of the site. Sore and stiff from Ronald, he struggled at first to do the job. He barely spoke to any of his workmates, turning in right after supper and sleeping like the dead until roused with the others from his bunk at dawn. By the second week he was less exhausted and by week three he felt himself growing stronger from the exertions of the job, so much so that he declined the offer of a move to a softer position plotting river depths.
Later, much later, when he was living in New York, where such things seemed commonplace, he could look back on his first two months after Ronald and see that he must have suffered some kind of breakdown. But he had no such insight at the time, and lived in a kind of mental cocoon, as if something had been broken inside him, which only he could heal. He received one short letter from his father, forwarded from Ann Arbor, which simply said he hoped that Michael was all right and that he was welcome home at any time, and two from Cassie, which he did not open.
By August he had gained eight pounds, none of it fat, and was able for the first time to think about what had happened to him. The process was helped when two of his workmates staggered back one Saturday night from a bar in Alpena, where they had been beaten up by a bunch of farmhands from the Thumb. To his astonishment they revelled in their injuries, and laughed
about how badly they had lost the fight. From this he acquired for the first time some perspective on what had happened. It is not the end of the world, he told himself. Now he could think about those few minutes when he had almost lost his life, and although the humiliation still ran deep and the fear his memories brought was awesome, neither were quite as crippling as before – when he gave up fighting them he found that eventually they subsided, unable to live off their own energy when deprived of his.
And as the job ended he understood that he would go home before returning to college. He would see his father and Gary, show that he was all right now, and also see Alvin and Marilyn, though he dreaded this, since he knew he had let them down. But chiefly he wanted to see Cassie, and yes, he hoped he could win her back again. Of course she might despise his cowardice; she might even greet him with contempt, since he had run away. There was no ducking that. What had she said? If you disappear again I don’t think I could bear it. But once he had explained the mixture of shame and fear that had driven him away he was hopeful of her understanding, for she had always been understanding in the past. And though Ronald Duverson might well come round to beat him up again, unless he actually killed Michael there would be no way this would scare him off from seeing Cassie. Michael tried not to think about this ‘unless’.
It took him four hours to drive to Stillriver after he collected his final pay cheque, and he arrived late in the afternoon, when the sun was low, its rays filtered in resinous, powdery skeins through the branches of the spruce in the backyard. His father was in the deckchair, reading the paper and drinking a glass of ginger ale. He stared as at an apparition while Michael walked across the drive, climbed the porch stairs and went into the house. Inside Michael deposited his bag in the kitchen, collected one of the wooden chairs and a beer from the icebox, then went outside and sat down beside his father.
‘I didn’t expect you back,’ said his father.
‘I need to see Cassie.’
Stillriver Page 24
