Riverine

by Angela Palm

  At the River, a man named Dave, who had known my mother for more than twenty years, stayed at the bar from early afternoon into early evening when it wasn’t harvest time. He talked to me about planting and irrigation, about books, about nature, about the presidential election, which I could now vote in, about taxes, about the Farm Bill, and about the college I would go to the following year on a partial scholarship, where he used to party when he was my age. An avid reader of the Farmer’s Almanac and in possession of an MBA plus his father’s farm, he knew much about nearly everything. One day while we were talking about waterfowl that make their habitats along the old Kankakee marsh—blue herons, wood ducks—he told me that only some wood ducks migrate south along the Atlantic Flyway, while some stay put through winter. “You can’t tell which are which, not by looking at them, or by where they live.” He meant that it was determined genetically. “They’re programmed as one or the other—to stay or leave,” he said. The ducks had the get-up-and-go gene or they didn’t. Dave was very tan, year round, from having worked outside all his life. He was always alone, always at the bar, elbows up and smiling wider as liquor took hold of him. A happy drunk. Once, I had gone to his house with my family for the Fourth of July and swum in his pool. I could feel him looking at me from time to time, and later we were alone, briefly, in his big empty house. He told me it would sure be nice if I were ten years older. And I felt like I already was, standing there in a bikini and dripping pool water all over his floor. I went back to the pool and dove down to the bottom, where I lay on my back holding my breath and looked straight up to the sun, wondering what was programmed in my own genetic code.

  At the River, I read on my work breaks, and everyone got mad because I took the full fifteen minutes. It was only fair—I didn’t smoke and everyone else took a smoke break every hour. That logic was lost on them, so I ignored them. I read books about witchcraft, the Louisiana bayou, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and apartheid. I read books by V. C. Andrews and Stephen King and Thomas Hardy and Mary Higgins Clark and anything by the Bronte sisters and anything Oprah said to read. One day while I was reading, a boy with long hair whom I’d never met sat down with me. He bought my meal at my discounted employee rate. He told me he had read Jude the Obscure already. He said that I was beautiful and that he would like to sit there all day until I was done working. “And then what?” I asked. He said then he’d take me to a real dinner. I thought he might be crazy, but I also loved his candor. It was not every day that someone had read the books I was reading or said I was pretty—men I knew only implied it by assuming I was available to them, that I was appreciative of their advances—so I was an easy sell. He asked me to meet him in the parking lot after my shift. I found him sitting on the hood of a blue car with a guitar, waiting for me. He patted the hood, inviting me to join him. Then he got up, stood five feet from me, and sang to me in broad daylight, putting my name into the refrain and looking me straight in the eyes. He didn’t tell me his name, didn’t try to kiss me or touch me. Just a smile and a good-bye. I never saw him again. He was proof of something, but I wasn’t sure what.

  At the River, I took dollar bills from men who wore guns in black holsters beneath their overshirts but over their undershirts. I picked the music, and they smiled. We listened to all the Hanks, the Stones, Stevie Nicks, the Judds, Merle Haggard, Joni Mitchell, Aerosmith, Genesis, Bon Jovi, and the Eagles. I danced and sang while I worked—with Kimmy and Dave and Lonnie and Tim and Harvey, and by myself. I called home to lie: they asked me to stay till close. I put on more makeup in the bathroom and stayed late at the employee table because I was still too young to sit at the bar. The regulars, who were friends with my dad, friends with me, took turns sitting with me, and everyone tried to get the bartender to give me a drink, a real drink, but she wouldn’t and I didn’t want one anyway. I wouldn’t learn until college how much I liked to drink. Then, the company was enough.

  The men told stories about dogs and ex-wives and fishing and teenagers and motorcycles. The women talked about men who were farmers and steelworkers and carpenters and bricklayers and alcoholics and wife beaters and no good and a little bit good. One night, when the talk went a bit sideways and the pours of liquor went a bit heavy, two of the men argued and tumbled onto the patio, where they drew their guns. But the women were swift to cull their brutes, reducing them back to size, and with a few soft moves no shots were fired.

  At the River, I was five and nine and fifteen and eighteen and twenty and sixteen and seventeen. I talked to Kimmy, who had begun dating Dave, and she told me how he made her ache with love. I wanted to ache as she did, but none of the men in the bar produced in me even a flicker of that exquisite pain. I studied the two of them, the way they smoothed one another’s forearms and shoulders in a kind of primal dance, one wood duck spinning gently in the water of its mate’s wake. An undertow that, when seen in miniature, looks almost like love. They were different sorts of people, Dave and Kimmy—as different in appearance as the male and female wood duck. He was mostly quiet and smart, while she was at the edge of unraveling, teetering between precipices of elation and melancholy. Dave talked to me less frequently, and Kimmy never remembered what we talked about, relaying the same anecdotes of her life present and past, again and again. She got lost in her own bubbling laughter, in the perfect harmony of a song only she could hear. And I hoped that I’d grow up to be a little more fun like her, a little less serious, a little more disarming and open-armed and fragile, but I never would.

  Kimmy came to my high school graduation party, all the regulars did, and they hugged me and gave me money and said Good goin’, girl. We’re proud of you. They were the sum of me, divided into different kinds of pain, different kinds of happiness. Or perhaps I was the sum of them, our common denominator the River and a hard-earned history. Kimmy gripped my cheeks with her long fingers and told me that she loved me. It was her lasting memory, a compilation of many smaller, specific ones that had been lost inside a bottle, a feeling that was true. Still, she knew we had shared something important, if not the details of it. She said, “I could be your aunt. I could be your sister.” She told me to stay blond, blond, blond and to marry a man with money and to not get pregnant in college.

  That summer a group of men and women painted my portrait at a watercolor workshop. We stayed in a barn on a sunflower farm for a week where there were flower heads big as pies for acres—I had never seen such beauty. In those days before I knew what the need for morning coffee was, I’d get lost in the flower fields before breakfast and show up for class with yellow cheeks. I was there on a work-study scholarship—my parents had paid half the fee. In exchange for the second half of the fee, I washed the artists’ dishes, helped cook the meals, and sat for portraiture. The participants gathered around me like children at the storyteller’s knee. They could hear me breathing, and I could hear their brushstrokes, the soft spray of their water spritzers, the scrub of their sponges against my paper temples. I heard them whisper, as if I were not there, “The mouth. Can’t get the mouth right.” I was a plate of shapes. Apple cheeks, hay hair. No longer a hostess, no longer a student, no longer a daughter. I wore a sundress and cowboy boots that never made it to the page. At the end of the week, I saw my face in seven interpretations, each more surprising than the last. Did I look the way they saw me? Were these the eyes I’d been seeing with all these years? I couldn’t tell. I felt foreign in my skin, wrong bodied. I have wondered whose closets I haunt. Where those seven alien selves have traveled. Whether anyone knows my name, or gave me one: Plain Girl above Our Fireplace or Nothing Special in the Hallway or Woman Who Could Literally Be from Anywhere. But at the time I only wondered, Where is that woman going?

  By summer’s end, I had paid off my car in full and purchased a computer with leftover graduation money. I’d received three annual scholarships: one from my father’s construction company for keeping a high grade point average, one from the arts council for my painting, and an academic scholarship from the sch
ool itself. One for each of the three things that had paved the way for whatever the future held. I packed the duck painting in a flat cardboard box and took it with me to the one college I’d applied to—one town over from home—and later to several apartments, evidence of my having crossed over from once place to another. But I never hung it up and I never painted again. I was embarrassed by it, having copied it from a picture. Only an idiot would recreate exactly what was already there and call it art.

  DISPATCHES FROM ANYWHERE BUT HERE

  My need to flee began long before I called it that. It started as a series of adventures, and then it became more pressing, more intentional. Sometimes I thought my aimlessness might have been friction resulting from Corey’s absence. I was still troubled by losing him, though I never spoke of it to anyone. The fact that I still thought of him in this way worried me. Why couldn’t I incriminate him like everyone else and bury it? In addition to English literature, I had decided to study criminal justice in college, and that choice was in large part motivated by the idea that if I could somehow intellectually understand how he had ended up imprisoned for life at nineteen—understand the reasons people commit violent crimes—then with enough education, I could also save him from the fate he’d earned. I could beat the system for him. Or at least make it better for others, on both sides of crime.

  I’d selected a college based on proximity to Greg, my hometown boyfriend. Greg worked as an excavator, rearranging the terrain. I liked his job as a metaphor. On the weekends, we would obsessively scour the newspaper for vacant land that we could buy for a future home, but as soon as I started school, I realized we were worlds apart. I was interested in books, in sociology and criminology. He was interested in fishing and heavy machinery and wrestling.

  Living one town over from home was barely leaving. Tumbleweeds on the plains traveled farther than I did. I’d wanted so badly to leave, but when the time came, I recreated what I’d already known because I couldn’t think of anything different. Greg was a safety net. If I had a boyfriend I was committed to, around whom I could plan my life, I wouldn’t have to figure out my actual life. I hadn’t seen or experienced much else, hadn’t known many educated women, so everything that wasn’t home was foreign and thus frightening. The first sweatshirt I bought from the college bookstore had the school’s year of establishment printed on it: 1889. It had been operating for over one hundred years. The first in my family to go from high school to a four-year college, I was shocked to learn that people my grandmother’s age had gone to college. I’d considered higher education a “new” thing because it seemed as though my family was just now learning of it.

  I still went home on weekends to do my laundry. If I was hungry, I ordered the same kind of fast food I had eaten at home. I stored frozen quarts of my dad’s homemade chili, filled with vegetables from his garden, in my dorm room freezer. If someone had said, “Here is a blank piece of paper, draw a living room—anything you want,” I would have sketched my mother’s sofa and pine furniture. My dad visited me at school once a month when he was passing through for work. He would take me to lunch and we made small talk for thirty minutes, and he offered life wisdom: “Don’t sweat the small things,” he reminded me. Before we parted ways, he’d hand me a fifty or a hundred-dollar bill and I would want to not take it, but then I would pocket it reluctantly and kiss his cheek in thanks.

  Soon, though, even that was too much. I needed more independence. I broke up with Greg and got a campus job tutoring basketball and football players to earn spending money. I imagined myself a satellite gathering information about the unknown world, extending sensors in hopes that an alarm would go off when I’d found a place that “fit.” As if it were easy to know what was what, where one belonged, what one should do. In “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” Joan Didion cites California as one such destination—where people seek destiny, or, at least, a refuge from “somewhere else.” She writes, “Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.” West as a Hail Mary. But I didn’t have the West. I had wherever my car and a few hundred dollars in the bank would take me. It wasn’t California.

  My cousin Mandi’s golden dream consisted of getting a smattering of tattoos, changing majors half a dozen times, massaging hundreds of aching bodies before finally settling on acupuncture school, living in half a dozen states. Eventually, she bought a dog named Bodhi and moved into a small house in Evanston, Illinois. Greg moved to Las Vegas and lived with his friend James in an RV as a remedy to our breakup. He left a fifteen-page letter on my windshield, like a time capsule that recorded our brief history together, before making this journey. I didn’t think he’d really do it, but, to my shock, he never came back. Had he left an address, I would have written him and asked him to return home. Not because I wanted to be with him, but because I couldn’t fathom making a one-way trip to a distant state. People didn’t move to Vegas and stay there.

  My own launch and exploration was more timid and piecemeal, oriented toward a fascination with selvage, run-down places and meaningful interactions with strangers. Sometimes I would visit a place and stand in its center, inviting it to transform me. In truth, I never had a plan for anything. Whatever came my way, I accepted, as if I had no choice in my own tomorrow. But after excavating the river and fields of my home, I turned that curiosity outward and slowly became an eclectic tourist of America’s towns and neighborhoods, an interlocutor in silent commune with other scarred lands and depressed buildings. I set out to my destination, sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose, applying my new knowledge to each new landscape. I analyzed the metallic remains of postindustrial wastelands. I mouthed my secrets into the hallowed valleys that marked the paths of ancient glaciers. I sketched the scenery, recorded my conversations as journal entries or poems, then reported back home to Indiana.

  Broken Windows Theory

  After Corey disappeared from his bedroom window forever, I was fascinated by abandoned structures. Places that once held people, businesses, animals, cargo, but were empty now. Barns, silos, houses, warehouses, Cabrini Green. Places where the past was scooped out and the shell remained. I liked to imagine the stories that happened inside—the chain of events that culminated in each place’s specific emptiness, the people involved, and where they were now. How it had changed them. I still remembered watching the news when residents of Cabrini Green, a Chicago housing project, were evicted, then watching its demolition on television. They had to drag the last few people out by force. Where on Earth would they go? I wondered. What would happen to them all? There was no way to know whether emptying out and dispersing the violence-plagued community would scatter the people, the problems, or both.

  The Sandman Motel was a different kind of empty, a rural empty. It had been vacant since I was a kid, having closed down for good in the late 1970s. I wanted to stay there for a night. I thought if I could sleep there, spend some time there alone, I’d learn its stories. I remembered my mother’s face when I asked her if we could rent a room there. She looked at my father as if to say, “See what I mean about this one?”

  She called one day when I was away at school to tell me the motel was on the news. “They’re calling him ‘the chicken fucker.’”

  I wanted to see it for myself. My preoccupation with dissecting crimes now extended beyond Corey’s. At night I watched Unsolved Mysteries with my roommate, and by day I read the local police blotter. In my criminal justice classes, I had learned a number of criminal theories. Policing theories, behavioral theories, psychological theories, economic theories, theories of socialization. There were endless theories to learn, and I wrote them all down on three-by-five note cards. I had also learned the names for the various crimes one could commit: larceny, burglary, murder one, murder two, manslaughter, trespassing, criminal trespassing, rape one, rape two, and so on. I memorized them and regurgitated them for exams, wrote papers about a growing, untenable Amer
ican prison population that teemed with broken men and women, an untenable lower class, an untenable middle class, white-collar crime, the escalation of violence, the effects of the misguided war on drugs, earning perfect scores in all my classes. It was easy to understand the world from the top down. It was easy to comprehend a massive, layered problem when it was flattened out, two-dimensional as a flowchart, or as a series of smaller problems and solutions into whose connective tissues you could interject theories on little note cards like heroic antidotes and create a kind of sense. A way out of the mess. But in practice, it falls apart. Theories are not useful as cultural medicine.

  The broken windows theory stood out as being particularly troublesome. The theory, developed by criminologists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson in the early 1980s, was based on the idea that the appearance of neglect in a given neighborhood lends itself to actual crime. In other words, in a neighborhood whose residents didn’t maintain its upkeep and safety, criminals were emboldened to commit crimes. A “no one else cares, so why should I?” mentality. Though likely only coincidence, the theory emerged as gang-related crimes at Cabrini Green escalated. In interviews, Chicago police officers years after the housing project was shut down for good termed the neglected area the “perfect place to commit a crime.” The buildings in the project had suffered from severe disrepair, and law enforcement and community boards either wouldn’t or couldn’t do anything about the situation. And when they did try, they faced difficulties in gaining access to the buildings, as they had been overrun by criminal operations.

  I never saw Cabrini Green up close, or the redevelopment that followed its demolition. But I could go to the rural motel and see for myself. I remembered the Sandman Motel as a categorically seedy place built as a long line of square rooms with thin walls, each with a separate entrance and a single cheap window framed in faded barn-red trim. Its rooms had held decaying beds, rotting nightstands. Old Bibles. The police had found feathers, and a blood-stained mattress. I saw on the news that the man had stolen chickens from a local farm, and he plucked out their feathers before committing bestiality.