He didn't know that he was being followed. He wasn't aware that behind him hovered a pair of dark shapes, two girls disguised as boys. You'd turned your backs and were standing side by side at the window of the Wendell Ford dealership on Second Avenue. You were looking past the ghosts of your own reflected faces, past the bright colors of the new cars, and when the salesman inside waved at you, it must have seemed to him that you were gaping stupidly back, but what you were really seeing there was the large dark figure of Josef Krejci superimposed on the surface of the glass.
The light changed, and he moved on. You waited, let him go, and then you were moving on too. You skittered across the street at the last second, against the red. It didn't matter—it was Sunday and there wasn't any traffic anyway. The smell of his pipe smoke was so strong and so familiar, you might have followed him by that alone. All the way downtown you hung behind him, slipping from shadow to shadow, along Second Avenue, across Tenth Street and on down to Sixth, over the railroad tracks, behind the factories and the warehouses and then out into the open again, to where the office buildings were, and the stores.
Why would he go there on a Sunday afternoon, when everything was closed? There was nothing to do. The streets were mostly empty. There were hardly any cars. The lights around the marquee of the World Theater blinked on and off, but no one came or went. First the big show windows of downtown Fairchild's, and after that a shoe store, then the music shop, Haden's furniture, Woolworth's, a jewelry store.
He turned at Second Street, went half a block and then turned again, into the alley where you almost lost him. You stopped and watched as he walked down the middle of the alleyway, past the garbage cans, the locked back doors, loading docks, a delivery truck parked. Pipe smoke wafted after him.
Libbie grabbed your arm and dragged you away—she had a plan. You would circle the block. A woman in a red and green headscarf was coming toward you from the other way. She ducked her head and clutched her purse close to her body, wary of the two wild-looking boys who were bearing down on her. Libbie glared fiercely at her as she passed, and when the woman cringed away, you tried to smile, to let her know that it was okay, really. It was just a game you were playing, that's all.
At the corner you stopped and look left and right, and left again. He should have been there, but he wasn't. He was gone. Nowhere in sight. Libbie held onto your arm, and you stood together looking up and down the street—nothing. She pulled you forward, and you walked carefully, sniffing the air for his pipe smoke.
You were at the front door of the Fielding Hotel. A man in a blue suit brushed past, in a hurry, and the doorman helped him into a waiting car. Libbie's grip on your arm had tightened, and you turned to look past the dizzy spin of the revolving door to see your father, there in the bright lights of the lobby of the old hotel. Above him, a bright cascade of a crystal chandelier.
He was standing by a high-backed green velveteen chair, one hand on its wing. He leaned over for a moment, then stood straight again. A woman, responding, rose to her feet and was turning to face him. She wore a short skirt, fishnet stockings, black high-heeled shoes, a bright orange blouse. Her hair had been pulled up away from her face and piled on top of her head, with dainty tendrils dangling down. She was smiling as she helped Josef Krejci out of his heavy overcoat. He bent and kissed her cheek. She leaned into him, and he held her for a moment—in those heels they were almost the same height.
As they crossed the lobby together he looked up, and when his eyes met yours it was as if he'd reached out and thumped you hard on the forehead with his thumb. But he didn't move. He just held you as you stood there, stunned by his gaze for one long frozen moment, because he wanted to be sure you understood that you'd been seen. And then he frowned, shook his head, and turned away.
The man behind the desk had hooded eyes and a long-jowled face without expression, and he took a key from a hook and handed it to the woman. She carried Josef's coat over her arm as she led him to the elevator. He didn't look at you again. The doors slid open, then shut, and then both of them were gone.
You took the bus home. You and Libbie sat at the back, side by side—two tom-girls in hooded sweatshirts and dark pants and sneakers. A man with a shopping bag balanced on his knees turned and smiled at you. Libbie made a face, and said, "Take a picture, it'll last longer." She nudged you, smirking, then asked, "So, what about that woman? Who do you think she is?"
You didn't answer. You had no idea, and you weren't sure you wanted to find out.
But Libbie wouldn't stop. What if he's in love with her? What if he brought her home for dinner sometime? What if she stayed overnight? What if he married her?
What if she officially adopted you? She was so young and really sort of pretty, wasn't she?
"She could be more than just a mother," Libbie suggested.
She could also be a friend, a fairy godmother, and you could go places, you could go shopping, she might buy you things—shoes and clothes and records—she would understand and take your side and stand up to Josef when you wanted to cut your hair, wear lipstick, pierce your ears.
"And really," Libbie kept asking, "Meena, why would that be so bad?"
You parted on the sidewalk, at the bottom of the pair of driveways between the two houses. By then it was getting dark, and cold, again. You let yourself into the house through the side door. Mrs. Chadima was in the kitchen, standing at the stove over a steaming pot of something, stirring it with a big spoon. Applesauce. And in the oven, a peppered pork roast. Braised vegetables. Brown gravy. The smell of food was nauseating. Mrs. Chadima's rosy face emerged from the steam as she turned, her smile sweet, the wooden spoon held out in her one hand, the other palm cupped under it: "Meena! Want a taste?"
And later, over dinner, you could not stop staring at him: his hands as he ate, his mouth as he chewed, his big shoes on the floor. You were looking past his clothes, imagining his bare feet, his bare chest, his big belly hanging over his belt. While he pretended you weren't there.
You and your father are in his truck, and he is driving you to school. It's been ten days since you followed him downtown to the Fielding Hotel, and he still isn't speaking to you or looking at you.
He keeps his eyes on the road. He has the radio on, they're giving out the farm reports, and you lean forward to fiddle with the knob and tune in some music, but he slaps your hand away and turns the radio off.
"Why do you want to listen to that crap?"
You hold your breath and feel yourself come back into being again at the sound of his words, addressed to you. His nostrils flare as he breathes. He smells of tobacco, whiskey, shaving lotion, limes. His face is round and fat, his chin has begun to double, he seems to be expanding. When he pulls up to the curb outside the school, he turns to you again. "Have a nice day, Meena," he says. "I'll see you tonight." And then he smiles.
You tumble out of the truck and fall away from him to the sidewalk, your body loose with gratitude and relief.
July 2006
When Meena comes to, it's in total darkness, and she has no idea where she is or how she might have got here. She seems to be afloat, again. Drifting, lost and spinning down into the deep eddy maybe, that's what this feels like, and that's what occurs to her, at first. She flails out to try to save herself, struggles to be free of some entanglement, and finds that she's on a hardwood floor, that she's simply fallen out of bed and is caught up now not in the snarls of Julia Bell's mermaid hair but only the thin web of a crocheted summer blanket. She sits up and puts a hand to her face to feel a tenderness here on her chin. Her lower lip seems to be slightly swollen. Her jaw is sore.
As her eyes adjust to the light now she can see that she's in a bedroom of some kind, small and square, with a single bed, a squat dresser, one door to her left and another to her right, and a window on the far wall.
If she could stand up, if she could pull herself to her feet and stand, then she would wrap herself in this blanket and cross the cold floor to the window and loo
k out and see... what? Trees. All around. Tall trees with narrow straight trunks and high needled branches. Lodge pole pines. And among them, clusters of white-limbed aspens. She seems to be in the middle of a forest. She can see that beyond the spread fan of the swaying firs the sky that rises overhead is spattered with the shine of more stars than she has ever seen before.
Has she been kidnapped? Is she being held prisoner? Has she been raped? Has she been robbed? Oh God, she thinks—the money. Her father's roll of bills inside her purse, it will be gone. Those people in that bar, they got her to drink herself into a stupor, then stole her money and brought her here to this place and left her here to die. Probably they saw her coming. Probably the whole thing was just a setup, even the dead dog.
But here is the purse, on top of the dresser. And in it, the money. What Meena really needs to do, she realizes now, is use the bathroom.
Still wrapped in the blanket, she sits on the toilet with her elbows on her knees and her head cradled in her hands. She's reminded of Mrs. Grandon, who came wobbling through the living room late at night after some wing-ding at the club, carrying her shoes in one hand and her silver sequined handbag in the other. Hissing and spitting at the girls, waving them away as they watched her head for the stairs to disappear up to her room. Mr. Grandon plodded in behind her, all smiles and twirling his key chain. He whistled and snapped his fingers as he stood at the bar and fixed himself another drink. A nightcap, he said.
The next morning, they'd see that the convertible had been parked cockeyed in the driveway, its left front wheel on the lawn, and Mrs. Grandon would not come downstairs again until after lunchtime. She was sick, she said. She had a headache, a cold, or maybe it was the flu. The girls fixed her a piece of plain toast and a bottle of cold Coke with a lime wedge squeezed and poked down into its neck.
What Meena remembers of last night: she was in a bar and she was drinking whiskey with a fat man who said his name was Will. She had run over a dog. Poor old thing. Woody? She shudders, totters, puts out a hand to steady herself. Dizzy, she wonders whether she's still drunk. Stands at the little sink and slurps cold water from the trough of her cupped hands. Splashes her face, gasping. Steps back and takes a look at herself in the cracked mirror on the back of the medicine cabinet to see a stranger there, bleary-eyed and wild-haired and pale.
She finds that her suitcase is on the floor near the bedroom door. She has no idea how it got here. She's not even sure how she got here, although she thinks she does remember something about walking through a mob of standing trees, along a narrow winding path, with an arm of support around her waist on one side, a bony shoulder on the other. The smell of patchouli and pine needles. She touches her face again, tests the soreness, fingers the swelling.
If they kidnapped her, if they beat her up... what for? And then why leave her purse, her money, and her suitcase?
She peers out through the bedroom door to see a small sitting room furnished with a sofa and leather armchair facing a stone fireplace. There is a kitchenette here too, with an old white icebox, a sink, and an enamel stove. She finds ice in the freezer and paper towels on the counter, makes a compress and holds it to her swollen lip. Above the sink there's another window with a view of more trees, standing still and silent sentry around this cabin, as if posted here to guard it.
The clock on the stove reads three-forty-five. Soon it will be dawn.
Memory returns, flickers the past back into being again.
Meena: drinking whiskey with Will Gidding, listening to him tell her of his belief that the world is going to end soon. That only the few shall be saved when it does. That there will be a great tribulation and a battle of Armageddon before the wolf lies down with the lamb. Or something like that. Last days and end-times and apocalypse and revelation.
Holly: telling Meena to pay no attention to her brother. He's crazy, she said, then stood there gazing at him with a look of expectation in her face that seemed to come straight out of the set of her jaw, working. It was time to go home. But he wasn't ready to leave, he said. Not yet.
Will: patting the seat next to him. "Aw come on Holly, just one more." For a man who was expecting for it to be all over at any moment, he seemed pretty content to linger.
Meena: sitting on the broad seat of the yellow truck next to Holly, beside the door, while Will drove. The truck's big tires bouncing in the deeply rutted road that the headlights carved out of the mountain. Climbing the road, so narrow it seemed as if it couldn't be going anywhere, just winding mindlessly upward, and then there was a gate that they passed through and after that the road got worse. Shale and loose gravel, and the truck shimmying over it, like a bag full of loose bones. Meena leaned away from the deep drop-offs on the left, pressed herself against the door toward the high slope of banked rocks and boulders on the right. And then there was another gate and a sign that arched overhead, in a twist of forged iron leaves and raw wood, caught in the flash of headlights—RAGNAROK.
Will: getting out of the truck. Telling Meena to sit tight, but she wasn't in any condition to be going anywhere anyway.
Meena: closing her eyes, feeling the world spin.
Holly: lighting a cigarette and handing it to Meena, then lighting another for herself. Holly staring straight out through the windshield, where the twin buds of cinder on the ends of their cigarettes winked back at them.
Meena: trying to coordinate her hand and her mouth.
Meena: falling. The truck door opening and Meena tumbling out. Will trying to catch her, laughing: "Whoa there, Libbie honey. Take it easy now."
Will: holding Meena up and Holly just ahead, pointing out the way.
Meena: singing, "Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket…"
As the wide white beam from Holly's flashlight went swimming through the trees.
Now when Meena cups her hands around her face and peers out the window, she sees there's no sign of her car out there. Only an empty drive and a narrow trail winding away past a woodpile and a stone-circled fire pit before disappearing in the shadows on beyond. When she tries the door, she finds that it isn't locked; it opens easily into the night. From the edge of the shallow plank porch a set of steps leads down to a grassy clearing.
A twig cracks in the woods nearby and Meena starts, loses her balance, nearly falls over, plants a hand on the porch post to steady herself. Just past the clearing there is a shadow moving. A pair of golden discs materialize, gleam, fix on her, then turn away. Meena staggers back into the cabin and leans against the door and locks it.
Her head pounds and she thinks she might be sick, but she wills the nausea away. She's overcome with misery, and shame. She crawls back into the bed and curls in on herself there with the blanket wrapped around her. She closes her eyes and listens to the sound of the forest, which is mostly a deep silence. Some bird twitter and wind flurry, but mostly it's nothing. So quiet that she can hear the zing of her own brain ringing in her ears. She draws herself smaller, becomes a compact self-enfolded bundle, spinning dizzy down toward a deep stupor of sleep.
The Master of Disaster
1963
You were twelve. It was a Saturday, the first warm day of spring, and you were alone at home. Your father was off somewhere, walking. By then that word—walking—had come to be a joke in your vocabulary, a euphemism for something else altogether. Libbie was the one who started this. Said it with a wink. Walking. Walker. Walked. "Ooh baby, walk that walk," Libbie said, screwing up her face, tossing back her hair, one hand on her thrown hip, the other fanned out against the back of her head. Motherwalker. Walking the dog. Walk me. Walk you. You walking son of a bitch. Your father walks with whores.
He would come in later, just at dusk, with his face flushed, cheeks shining pink, and his shirt damp with sweat, and at dinner he would tell you some anecdote about where he'd been, what he'd done, who he'd seen. A man chasing after a rabbit. A woman in a feathered hat carrying something in the crook of her arm—he would swear it was impossible to tell wh
ether the creature was a monkey or a child. Two grown men wrestling with a pig in a puddle of mud. A car engine on fire. A tree full of noisy crows. He never mentioned a doorman. He never described a shining crystal chandelier. He never said a word about a strange young woman in a short black skirt and a bright orange blouse, her hand on his shoulder, his fist in the small of her back. Whether those things that he did talk about were true or not, you couldn't be sure. All you knew was that at the heart of whatever your father said to you, there would always have to be that lie.
But never mind, it didn't matter. You didn't care. This was just the way things were: he was out walking and you were at home all by yourself. Mrs. Chadima wasn't due for hours. Matka was ensconced in her own rooms over the store, where she would be sleeping or watching television or sitting in her chair, soaking her feet and staring out the window, dreaming up more grotesqueries for you to fear.
You had been inside all morning, reading and studying, doing homework, but now you were getting restless and it was hard for you to sit still. The house was too quiet and you'd been nursing a nagging worry that something surprising had happened and maybe the world had gone off someplace else without you. Suppose you'd been left there by yourself, to get by on your own, somehow. Say there'd been a nuclear attack, and you didn't know about it yet, and that not knowing had saved your life in some tricky way, so that it would turn out you were the only one left behind.
The Minor Apocalypse of Meena Krejci Page 12
