But the trail was where they remembered it, angling uphill from the back edge of the clearing. Ivan beat back the brambles with his cane, while Tim took the rear and shone a flashlight at their feet. Dang Kim Tiffany refused their elbows and instead waded through the dark as if she were crossing a river, going by feel, her bare feet seeking out the bare ground where the deer had trotted on their errands. Ivan’s cloak made her look like a dark shrub with a tiny human head. Whenever she stepped on something sharp, she’d flinch but not permit herself to say a word.
This was the same trail they’d taken Sam up when he’d visited six years back, though now, with the trailers gone, the undergrowth had reclaimed it. With Sam, they’d hiked slowly, and now they hiked slower still, Ivan humming “Cat Scratch Fever” and dragging his bad leg while a nearly naked woman walked behind him. So there was beauty, Tim thought, and also decay, and the years were just a factory for changing one into the other.
But the Patriarch was something that did not change — at least not perceptibly, to Tim’s relief. A good six feet in diameter, big enough that each side of the tree had a climate of its own. Mossy on the uphill side, with roots that sat atop the soil like hands, the other side bare, the roots disappearing in the duff. Six years ago, when he finally reached the base of it, his father had tipped his head back and emitted one long whistle.
“Well, son, you got me,” he said. “When it comes to trees, I’d call this one right here chapter and verse.” But then immediately he’d turned and started walking back.
“Okay, I seen it,” he called over his shoulder. “Now I guess we can head on home.” And when Tim opened the box and shook it gently to let the ashes scatter, they did not. Instead, the wad of them thudded to the ground and rolled into some prickly underbrush.
“That’s it?” she asked. “That’s what you bozos call a decent burial?”
No way, José, over her dead bod: she said Tim would have to fish Sam out and break him into pieces small enough for the wind to carry. Maybe they’d have to dry the ash to make it light enough: she dispatched Ivan to gather firewood.
“No green sticks,” she called as he shambled off. “Do you even know the difference, Library Man?”
Ivan’s voice came from the other side of the night’s black wall when he said, “You may not believe this, but we were rangers once.” And though Tim knew his father’s send-off was getting way too complicated for this time of night, he also knew he had no choice but to follow the woman’s orders. The first step meant finding Sam, and to do that he had to get down on his knees.
THE WATER CYCLE
1. ICE
Don’t ask Aurora where she has been. Seventeen nights in seventeen different states, seventeen transmitters on seventeen different mountains. Clear across the country, only she was going backward: Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, Maine, where somebody recognized her from the TV. TV is how we know what we know about Aurora, like that they found her in a town called Bath. Aurora living and not a dead girl. Seventeen nights, seventeen motels, seventeen Bibles in the nightstand. Seventeen buckets from the ice machine. It must have seemed like a vacation, no school and after all he was her father, though we did not know this when he stepped into Mr. Lentini’s class, so quiet that we barely noticed him. We were doing the water cycle, Mr. Lentini showing three of us who did not know the trick how to make a cloud look like it had three dimensions. You had to draw some curves in the middle, not in an organized pattern, which looks fake. And Mr. Lentini asked, May I help you? very polite before it clicked a second later about the shiny thing at the end of the man’s arm being a gun. Then Mr. Lentini, who normally did not touch us though sometimes the girls wished that he would, scooping us under his arms, where there was a powdery b.o. smell. And saying, Everyone under the desks, soft enough that at first nobody moved until they saw Mr. Lentini pressing the three of us against him, which was how come everybody was jealous of us later on the most after Aurora. Who let the word Dad! escape from her like an animal breaking free from a trap. He had his arms in their camo-jacket sleeves wrapped all the way around her, the gun pointing out from the base of her neck. He was dancing her backward out the door, hugging her so tight the nubs of her breasts must have hurt, oh yeah he was touching her for sure but then again he was her father.
2. WATER FROM THE DITCH
Seventeen days in seventeen motels: meanwhile we were supposed to keep drawing clouds and rain and rivers as if nothing had changed, with arrows to connect them because Mr. Lentini said these were all versions of one thing. We put the mountains in the background, an arrow to show the snow melting down, another to show the vapor rising. Wiggly lines for the arrows’ shafts. What the parents did was tie yellow ribbons around the trees out front because of some old song, never mind how stupid it sounded, to think that some old song could save her. Also there was Jake Dumfrey, the nighttime security guard from the mall, who stood by the flagpole wearing his fake foot from Vietnam. When we collected water from the ditch by the road both he and Mr. Lentini walked there with us, Mr. Lentini up front and Jake Dumfrey hobbling behind even though the ditch was just a few yards away, a trickle buzzed by flies. But under the microscope you could see that the water was not so simple as it looked: in the smudge of it there were creatures like the cyclops and the paramecium, the machinery visible inside them, beating. All day long people in cars passed by the ditch and didn’t know about the creatures. But they knew about Aurora from the TV, from the newspaper and posters tacked on all the telephone poles in town. And from the yellow ribbons that made the cars honk when they saw us out there. Like they thought our soccer team had just won the tournament.
3. CLOUDS, AGAIN
Really it was more than seventeen days, because her mother kept her home an extra week after they found her, which gave Mr. Lentini time to warn us about not asking her anything when she came back, Poor Aurora’s been through enough. The only difference was that her black hair was cut in bangs, and we wondered whose idea this was, because what if it was his idea but she didn’t like it and now there was no way to grow her bangs back? We were doing the water cycle all over again so that Aurora wouldn’t think she’d missed it. Don’t do anything that would make Aurora feel uncomfortable, Mr. Lentini told us, and so we let her use the blue crayons even though there were not enough to go around, so that she wouldn’t have to draw uncomfortable rivers that were red or purple. You could use gray or black and still have normal clouds. Aurora’s clouds had spikes on them, like a collar worn by an angry dog, but Mr. Lentini wouldn’t tell her they were incorrect just Very interesting. And when we came to the part where Mr. Lentini had to explain how clouds and rivers were all the same thing, Aurora raised her hand and contradicted him: They’re not. He said, Of course, I meant in a manner of speaking, but her face stayed closed in an angry fist until he backed off. Okay, Aurora, technically you’re right: it’s all water but okay okay it’s not the same.
4. RAIN
How things change: at recess, no one says you dumbfuck anymore, because we are afraid Aurora’d hear, and it might slay her. Also we stopped playing any game that needs an it, because we can’t decide should Aurora be the it or not be it, like which would be less uncomfortable? Also Mr. Lentini stops letting us watch the mouse go in with the Alaska Pipeline, who is the boa constrictor who never does anything now except sit under the warming lamp inside his tank. Mr. Lentini used to let us stand there cheering sometimes for the snake and sometimes for the mouse only now all you can see is sometimes a lump squirming in the middle of the Pipeline’s body in the morning when you get there. And you have to sneak a look so that Aurora doesn’t see. But the truth is that she sneaks looks too, she wants to see the mouse suffering. Just watch her: all morning she’ll dream up a million reasons why she has to walk by the Alaska Pipeline’s tank, she’s the only kid who’s allowed to pee as much as she likes. Then in the afternoon, when school gets out, her mother drives up to the door to get her. If it’s raining Jake Dumfrey even holds an umbrella over
her head while she gets into their Ford Escort, just like she was a movie star.
5. THE RIVERS
Purple river, red river, yellow river, blue river: what’s the difference, only a dumbfuck would mistake these for something real. After we draw the rivers, it’s the same water from the ditch, Aurora getting to walk beside Mr. Lentini, Aurora getting to dip the beaker in. Yeah yeah yeah. When the cars go by she’ll look up and they can’t help it: when they recognize her they almost always hit their brakes. She’s the ghost girl, the one from the TV, they want to honk but then they stop themselves and the horns come out sounding like little gasps. Then Aurora always gets first dibs on the microscope, but who cares. It’s the same paramecium, same cyclops. Same seventeen motels, big deal. In all the towns the McDonald’s would of been the same.
6. ICE
New clothes new barrettes new Hello Kitty plastic purse. New way of looking older when she looked out from her bangs. New dance steps from MTV new way of putting your hands on your hips and jerking them forward like you were in the middle of a car crash. New stupid world new stupid us. She ruled our lives and was our ruin.
7. EVAPORATION
You could not stay here if you were Aurora; it would only be so long before everyone could not hold the dumbfuck back and that would start the other words and then you’d have to get away. Which is what happened: she used the summertime for her escape. Before the sunny weather came, she vanished — before we saw her in her bathing suit, before anyone even got the chance to ask her about the ice machine. Like whether he let her go get it, the cubes of ice I mean, did he let her walk outside past the other rooms and the parked cars with the little plastic bucket the color of skin lighter than hers? Also if he took her to the swimming pool, if their room had cable TV HBO a whirlpool bath or a coin box attached to the bed for the magic fingers. Once I saw him on TV being led in shackles from the courthouse. But you couldn’t tell much just by looking at him, a bald man in an orange jumpsuit. Like I wondered how he did the checking-in, if he made her duck down in the car while he asked for a room in back, if he made her wait there and then sneak in after dark. Or did he take her into the office with him, saying, “I need a room for one night for my daughter and me,” his hand on her shoulder like anyone’s dad. He’d of bought her a dress, he’d of bought that new haircut. And would she go along with it, because what he said was true.
SAINT JUDE IN PERSIA
Forget trying to argue with my sister about context—the bad words are always bad, she has decreed. This time the context is: I caught my sleeve on the spoon standing up in the jar of molasses and sent it thumping to the floor.
“What bad words?” I ask, playing dumb.
“You know. Don’t try to trick me.”
Louisa has gotten most of her ideas from her special education teachers — put them in a blender with a little of the Home Shopping Network and some MTV and basically what you come up with is a version of Emily Post who knows all the top ten hits. But my sister is also a woman of action, and when she sees the black goo making a run for it, moving like an amoeba, she puts on a pair of oven mitts and uses them to swat the flow.
“Actually, those are very old words given to us by the Anglo-Saxons,” I say as I get down beside her with a roll of paper towels. “Words invented especially for people to use when they’re in trouble,” I add, and here my sister stops to scratch her cheek with a gooey mitt.
“You’re not in trouble,” she reports from behind her thick glasses. “You were just making cookies.”
THE REASON I WAS BACK living at my mother’s was that I had just gotten out of rehab, and the cookies were an attempt to get a little of the domestic thing going again. They’d put me on “administrative leave” from my job at the boat shop, which let’s just say is not the kind of work environment where a little substance abuse is going to damage anyone’s reputation, so long as you keep it to your nose and keep your hands out of the till. At the boat shop, we can all recite the TV commercials that come on late at night: If you don’t get help from us, please, get help somewhere or Saint Jude’s Hospital — your comfort close to home. Then Rusty the wizard of the inboards will put into circulation his version of a Beatles circa-1970 scream: Ju-ju-ju Judy Judy Ju-day! And all the other boat guys will join in with their howls and yips. Aaowh!
It was during my brief incarceration in the Saint Jude’s rehab unit that my father let his bombshell drop, about the woman he’d had on the side for years and about how the time had finally come to cut my mother loose. She said, “That was always his plan, wasn’t it? To stick the rest of us out there on the gulag so he would be free to conduct himself like a tomcat?”
The gulag she was talking about was the place my parents bought when Louisa and I were kids: crooked farmhouse on ten acres forty miles from town, half pastureland and half swampy alder forest, sandwiched between a U-cut Christmas tree lot and a junkyard. “And didn’t I walk straight into his trap, letting myself be kept barefoot and pregnant out there in the wilderness?”—this said to me against the background plink-plink of the Saint Jude’s Ping-Pong table. I figured there was no use in pointing out to Mum that she had not been pregnant since Spiro Agnew was vice president.
My explanation had always been that my father put those miles between us and the pulp mill where he was an engineer because every day then gave him the chance to display his knack for expediting anything that could stand to move a little faster. Forty miles to work, no problem — the distance he compensated for by driving ninety, roaring down the dirt roads in his Lincoln. When he learned there was no municipal garbage collection out there in the sticks, my father’s solution was to buy an old backhoe from the junkyard, a yellow hulk spotted with brown primer that reminded Louisa and me of a giraffe. Cheaper than paying for a private service, he said. Of course, the trash piled up, waiting for him to get around to burying it.
Louisa stumped him, though, because for her he could come up with no quick fix. I’ve seen him walk into what he thought was an empty room, only to find the two of us quietly playing there, making our naked Barbies do the splits. And Louisa he’d stare at without the least quiver of recognition, like she was some wild child who’d just stumbled in from the forest. Then he’d ask me a question to dislodge the particles in the room that had congealed around my sister, something like, “Did you remember to brush out Mister Chester?”
Mister Chester was my father’s horse, though he might as well have been a motorcycle or a magic carpet, since my father’s main interest lay in the speed with which he could be conveyed. But Mister Chester was, at the end of the day, a horse, and that meant someone had to muck his stall and lance his boils and sop his pus, which was where I came in, the pus-sopper, boil-lancer, little miss mucker of the stall. This was why, though I am nowhere near the rider that my father is, Mister Chester had no choice but to tolerate me on his back. The horse was smart enough to realize that if he threw me and broke my neck, in no time he’d be living belly-deep in his own shit.
Shortly after the arrival of Mister Chester, Mum shamed my father into also buying a more docile creature for my sister, a pony the color of curdled milk, whom she named Mister Twinkie. I own only one photograph of her from the family’s brief Mister Twinkie era: ten years old and cowgirl-hatted, her fists full of the pony’s cotton-boll mane. She looks like she’s found the place she was born to be, her and the pony giving off an aura of yellow light. You would not guess from this picture that Mister Twinkie would turn out to be just bad luck with four legs attached: mention his name now and all that light will drain from Louisa in the form of yolky tears.
What happened was that not too long into his time with us, the pony had a heart attack as it trotted along under Louisa’s weight, and Louisa sank to the ground with three hundred and fifty pounds of dog food underneath her. Picture me as the littler sister watching from the far side of the field as the bigger sister squats bowlegged with the carcass in between her fancy boots. Even from a distance I knew that Mist
er Twinkie was dead and I knew that she did not, and I knew that my knowing forever changed the space between us. “Get up!” she hollered, and even tried to drag the pony a few feet, until I came across the pasture and explained that Mister Twinkie could not get up, he never would.
After this, it seemed my mother soured on the whole idea of country living. But at least the demise of Mister Twinkie gave the backhoe a chance to prove its worth. And while he was at it, my father dumped several weeks’ garbage into the hole before he scooped the dirt back in.
MAYBE YOU ALREADY KNOW that “desperate situations” are what Saint Jude is supposed to be the patron of, unlike other saints who could at least pull enough rank to get themselves saddled with a legitimate disease. Not Judas Iscariot with whom he is often confused, but Thaddaeus the apostle, brother of James. And what with his being decapitated by the Persians you might also imagine that he is not going to let anyone easily off the hook: after you get released from inpatient treatment, you’re still looking at outpatient therapy for at least six weeks. Which means sitting around for three hours every morning with the other narcos, drinking coffee that tastes like it’s been perked inside the hospital’s incinerator with all the other medical waste.
How outpatient at Saint Jude’s worked was that we went around the room delivering our bulletins from Loserville, the plots of which were all fundamentally the same: I can’t even make cookies without the whole thing turning into this great big goddamn fucking flop, so how the hell can anyone expect me to dot dot dot, you can fill in the back end of the sentence with the hobbyhorse of your own ineptitude. The professional staff called it “sharing,” one of the bad words in my book, but if you start quibbling about the nomenclature you can forget about them ever signing off on your paperwork.
Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories Page 10
