Riverine

by Angela Palm

  In college, when I still couldn’t shake my feelings for Corey, I had written him a letter. I was sure that some part of me had been locked up with him. I heard his voice in his reply. At first, his words were a deep comfort and a reminder of the boy who had always taken care of me, tending to me as if I were a fickle houseplant. But as the months of school passed, he became guarded. He lectured me about the actual ins and outs of prison gangs as I learned about them, theoretically, in my criminal justice classes. I drew the symbols of a dozen prison gangs on my midterm exam and wondered whether Corey had any of them tattooed onto his skin. In addition to the prison education he was getting, he was taking college classes in anthropology and sociology. At times he was more open, relaying to me what was required of a person in prison and how survival sacrifices humanity and reason. How there was so little light, so little sustenance. Almost no growth save for what he could create for himself. He told me he was fighting, building muscle, boxing, making a name for himself. What did that mean? A reputation that people would fear? He had no choice, he said; he was preparing for the long haul of a lifetime in prison. Nineteen to ninety, if he lived that long. Part of me hoped he would, and part of me hoped he wouldn’t. I couldn’t imagine him at seventy with the onset of Alzheimer’s, which ran in his family, still sitting in a prison cell five decades after the bad in him had run dry. “That’s justice,” he’d say. “That’s what I deserve.” At some point, the reputation he made for himself would have to be stronger than his physical body. It would have to protect him.

  Corey asked me about how I found an address to which to send that first tentative letter. In turn, I told him about my search on the Internet and the e-mail I had sent to the correctional facility staff late one night from my college dorm room, in hopes of obtaining a mailing address for him. I told him that he had been my first love, a confession made on paper out of desperation—if I could admit to that, I thought, I could let it go. Be happy with a real boy in the real world. Or just be me, something that rarely occurred to me as a pursuit worthy in and of itself. He did not acknowledge my confession in his reply. Eventually, I became a little bit scared of who he had become and stopped writing, only to start again and again, year after year, with the same unsent letter: Dear Corey, I’ve been thinking of you. I’ve never stopped. Do you think of me? It was the only thing left to say, some catch of water in my throat that I could not clear.

  That same year that I wrote Corey for months, I paid a man to tattoo my back. I paid another man to pierce my belly button as I lay on the floor of my dorm room. On a date with a guy named Tony, we had the cartilage of our ears pierced. There was some comfort in this control. Some relief in knowing exactly how and where pain was inflicted on my body. Here, I might have said. Right here, this is where it hurts. This is why. In three days, I’ll feel nothing.

  After prison, Mike Tyson got a tattoo on his face while he was partying in Vegas. The tattoo, scrawling wisps that lap at the edges of his left eye like black flames, is a symbol of the Maori tribe. When he was asked what he thought immediately after getting it, he said it made him look “sexy.” He acknowledged that he had no knowledge of its meaning at the time.

  After prison, Mike Tyson returned to organized violence and finally did fight Evander Holyfield. In the first fight, Holyfield achieved a technical knockout after seven rounds. In the second fight, Holyfield head-butted Tyson, who was disqualified when he bit off a chunk of Holyfield’s ear in retaliation. The media outcry after that offense was louder than the one after his rape conviction. Some types of violence can still shock us. After prison, after biting Holyfield’s ear, Tyson lost and regained his boxing license. He made a movie and apologized to Holyfield on Oprah. If only we all had the world’s ear for the making of our amends. “It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know,” writes Andrew Solomon in a New Yorker article. Mike Tyson had done bad things. So had Corey, so had Uncle Pat. I didn’t hate any of them.

  Violence happens in a negative plane, like a dug hole. First you’re digging, aware of the shovel in your hands, aware of the pressure as the dirt flies behind you, and then you’re simply standing over a hole, black and gaping like a foul mouth. Regret is fill dirt, settling and settling, always leaving a dimpled impression—one that never quite smoothens—in the topsoil. Domestic abusers will apologize, swear up and down to never do it again, swear they didn’t know what they were thinking. Inmates who have had long enough to think will walk themselves through their crime, again and again, not only to understand it but to pinpoint the moment that brought them to prison, to imagine the inertia of the decision that would wreck lives landing instead a fraction to the left or right, avoiding the knockout punch with a sidestep. But instead, this happened, then this happened. Then suddenly, everything went awry. Cut straight to the bruised and bloodied aftermath.

  I had to give up on Corey. Though he was always in the back of my mind, I had to live my life. I moved on without fully letting him go. There were many boyfriends over the years, and I wasn’t picky about who they were. Men were distractions for me, placeholders. A way to keep me from being alone with my thoughts, a way to keep the darkness of my mind at bay.

  Just after college, I was living back home, sharing a little apartment with Jo, my closest high school girlfriend, while I was working on a political campaign. I fell blindly in love with the idea of a man named Steve. Politics is a training in optimism; you learn to inflate positive qualities to make up for negative ones. The relationship lasted four months. And during that time, I was enamored of Steve’s vision of his future self, which he described to me in detail, as if it were part of a stump speech, over screwdrivers that he’d sweet-talked the bartender into giving him for free. Steve was starting a construction business. He was making a website. He was an entrepreneur. He complimented me generously, and in return I was going to help him connect his current self with his future self. He could get to his construction jobs if only he had a car, so I loaned him money to buy one. He could call me more often and line up more construction work if only he had a cell phone, so I added him to my cell phone plan for a mere $9.99 a month, which he would repay to me in cash on the fifteenth of each month. I liked to help where I could, I told myself. A few weeks later, he lost the car he had purchased with the money I’d loaned him; he put the car up as collateral for a title loan, the sum of which he squandered in less than two hours at an Indiana casino. As an apology, he took me on a date to a Vietnamese restaurant in Chicago. I drove. When we left without paying, a wave of shocking regret jolted through me as we hauled away in my Mustang like Bonnie and Clyde. I did not recognize my own eyes in the rearview mirror. Shaking, I dropped him off at his mother’s house. I changed my phone number and locked my bedroom door, donned sunglasses and poured a bottomless gin martini. Thank goodness I never slept with him, I thought, as if that mattered. Thank goodness I had only needed his feigned affection. Like Harlow’s monkeys, I would have curled up with a wire doll if I thought it would love me back.

  The guilt was unbearable. The next day, I mailed cash to the restaurant, along with an anonymous note that explained in rough terms that I had forgotten to pay. Steve came to my apartment the following Saturday and pounded on the door for a full twenty minutes. I sat inside with the lights off and the blinds drawn tight, holding a flashlight over my phone bill. He had racked up a debt of $863 in four weeks. A very deep hole.

  After prison, Uncle Pat’s freedom was relative. He had difficulty obtaining a job due to his felony conviction and mental health state. Whatever issues he’d had before prison had been exacerbated by his four-year stint. After the attempted suicide, Uncle Pat entered a period of reentry and recovery, respectively, names for the new shape of his life. He determined that a move to Michigan, away from people, would suit him well. He planned to breed rottweilers and write a screenplay. He planned to watch the snow pile up around him, whitewash for a new future. He would buy a tractor to mow a big lawn to stretch out the summers. But even a
new life is a kind of prison after prison. In Michigan, he began composing lengthy e-mails to members of our family, berating me and my cousins and aunts for not making the six-hour trip to visit him frequently enough. It was unfair to his nieces and nephews—we were starting our own lives and could not, in our early twenties, save his too. He called me once and told me that he had been used by the government for information that only he had about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. When I raised concerns to my mother, she conferred with her sisters. But ultimately, nothing happened. No one could force him to get help. I wasn’t even sure they recognized it as mental illness. They resisted such labels, tending to sweep undesirable facts of life under the rug. Meanwhile, Uncle Pat entered long, intermittent periods of no contact, going silent and electronically dark for months on end. Sometimes, my mother and aunts persuaded neighbors or friends who lived within driving distance to check on him. They held their breath through the long winters, awaiting the reports. Alive? Well? Alive, at least?

  One Christmas, Uncle Pat returned to Indiana with three dogs in tow. “Meet my kids,” he said, flinging the bed of his truck open wide, looking and sounding well. He introduced the enormous beasts one by one—a German shepherd, a rottweiler, and a Lab mix of some kind. He explained their personalities and their lineage, and shared heartwarming anecdotes from their life together. I had never understood dog love, but I tried to mirror his enthusiasm.

  I pointed at the rottweiler. “What’s that one wearing? A diaper?”

  “That’s Ginny,” he said. “She’s in heat.” Ginny shook her hips, trying to free herself from the plastic chastity belt. The German shepherd wouldn’t leave her alone.

  It was determined that the dogs would stay in the garage, against my father’s wishes. Uncle Pat would check on them periodically to ensure that nothing had been destroyed, and that Ginny was penned away from the two males. At dinner, as my father began to carve the Butterball ham, we heard a desperate yelp from one of the dogs. Uncle Pat stood up, on parental alert, and rushed to the garage. “God damn it, the kids got out.”

  No one made a move to help. But the garage could not have opened itself.

  Uncle Pat flew out the front door, took two quick steps, and then thought better of it. He hollered for them by name, then collectively. “Kids!” he called. “You kids come back here.”

  The rest of us sat at the table, smirking as the German shepherd caught the rottweiler and tried to mount her in the front yard. We watched her break free, run a little way, and then get caught again. My father continued slicing the ham. Had he let them out of the garage? On purpose?

  “Shit,” Uncle Pat said. “Ginny’s gonna get nailed.”

  At twenty-three, I moved to Indianapolis. Life in the city was quite different from life in rural Indiana. In the city, my new friend Rachel introduced me to good food. I ate sushi and curry for the first time. I drank wine and dirty martinis and we went to art exhibit openings. I got credit cards and bought expensive shoes and pants at Nordstrom. I took taxis and branched with new girlfriends. I joined a book club, where I met Jen. She was smart and empowered and beautiful. We went to museums, festivals, and political rallies together. We shared bottles of wine and our impressions of novels we had read. Meeting these two women was a saving grace. I hadn’t had close girlfriends, other than my cousin Mandi, who were sharp and worldly. Who read the news and formed educated opinions. The world was opening up more widely for me, and they were a part of that growth.

  My discernment with respect to both wine and men became more advanced. I dated a fairly successful musician, a surgeon, a former NFL player, then a couple of attorneys. Men my father would approve of. When I fell in love with an actual man, rather than the idea of one, I was relieved. He too had a real job, a career even, as an airline pilot. Mike was sweet and generous and steady. But I began to rub off on him: I was a party girl. He slept less, drank more. He stopped training for cycling races. He burned through his savings account as we toured Indianapolis’s best restaurants and went on vacations to Colorado and England and Canada and Washington, D.C.

  Mike and I could never determine when it was time to go home, when to turn off the lights, and so we sometimes had to call off work. Together, we made friends who were similarly reckless, who also had a hard time differentiating between fun and self-destruction. Our friend Martin came over one night to swap records—My Bloody Valentine for the new GusGus album. After the trade we went out, as usual. We’d been a dynamic threesome of friends for a time, our nights unfolding across the city’s haunts. We had no destinations, only arrivals. We walked to one bar, then took a cab to another. The west side, the east side. The near north, downtown. One night, we ripped a paper towel dispenser from a bathroom wall. We left wads of cash to compensate for the damage and went dancing at a gay bar. Later that night, I was in love with both of my companions. At one point, I crossed over into another plane of consciousness. I became suspicious of my own face in the mirror and then of Mike. A plane ticket stub fell out of his pocket, and I couldn’t remember his telling me he had been in the city listed on the stub for any reason. I’d lost track of the sprawl—mine, his, ours. It was bound to happen with how much he traveled. Still, I was enraged.

  In response, Mike handed me a twenty and told me to take a cab home. He left me with Martin, and we kept dancing. When the bar closed, we began to walk toward home. After a few minutes Mike pulled up in my car, too drunk to drive it, and I screamed at him. I overlooked the gesture, that he had come back for me even though I had been unreasonable, and focused on the danger of the situation. I refused to get into the car and demanded that he leave it there, that he walk home the rest of the way with us. When the men tried to quiet me, confining my flailing arms and rendering me immobile so that they could place me in the car, I reacted by pushing and kicking them. In the morning, I remembered very little. I vomited all day, and by evening I still couldn’t stop. First it ran clear, then there was blood. Mike took me to the hospital, where they sedated and rehydrated me. I made him stay in the waiting room so he wouldn’t hear me tell the doctors I’d only had a few drinks. So he wouldn’t hear me say no when they asked me if I drank often. What are we before we become something else? I thought as I lay in the emergency room bed. Before I was a woman, I was a girl. Before I was a woman who lived too recklessly, I was a girl who loved too reactively. But can I pinpoint the change? The point at which love and fun and danger and self-destruction had melded into one continuous event? Everything was fine, and then—,—.

  One of Uncle Pat’s unique attributes is his ability to recall details that others typically forget. With startling clarity, he has recounted for me, many times, each time he took me to Dairy Queen for hot fudge sundaes between 1985 and 1989; whipped cream, no nuts. He has recounted the dates on which he played video games with me for hours past my bedtime the year he lived with us. He has reminded me that he has, to date, purchased nine books for me, the names of which he can still recite, in order of date of purchase. The Boxcar Children #1, 1989; Nancy Drew and the Secret of Red Gate Farm, 1990; and so on. I understood that documentation of this nature was proof of his love for me; the only thing he could give me was an accurate recounting of a chain of events that, taken together, undoctored by memory and perception, had a larger meaning. But they were currency in a bank account that I didn’t realize I borrowed against when his phone calls went unreturned, or when I failed to send him a birthday card each November. He kept a close eye on the balance.

  The night after the dog incident, we ordered pizza. I rode with Uncle Pat to pick it up. The dogs lay in the bed of the truck. We parked in front of Papa Johns. We were early. “You know,” Uncle Pat said, “you only like pizza because of me. I gave you your first slice of pizza when you were two.”

  He turned to me then and delivered a lengthy monologue about how little I appreciated everything he did for me—the account balance apparently well into the red. As he talked, I eased my hand onto the door handle, not out of fear but
to ready myself for an escape, should I need to make one. Part of me knew that he had wanted badly to have his own children and, in lieu of that experience coming to fruition, had displaced that desire onto his nieces and nephews. But it was more responsibility than any of us could bear. He did not make it easy to love him. Or, he did, until he didn’t. “You should go visit him in Michigan,” my aunts and mother would say. “That would make him happy.” But I was getting tired of making men feel secure in their broken selves. My mother had said the same sorts of things about my father. When I brought a black boyfriend home to meet my parents, without mentioning his skin color beforehand because I didn’t think it was relevant, my father didn’t speak to me for six months. “You need to talk to him,” my mother had said. But I didn’t. I was done talking. And I was done shifting myself—my own beliefs and behaviors—to fit the preferences of a man, no matter who he was. My mother’s advice was ever mask, bury, deny, submit.

  “You know what?” Uncle Pat added, leaning slightly toward me. “I was going to shoot every last one of you when I came down here to visit. Your dad, your mom, everyone. But I didn’t.” He paused, his eyes wide and plucked completely free of lashes, which he claimed was a medical condition. All of this is a medical condition, I thought. Why won’t anyone call it like it is?

  I shifted my gaze subtly, as one would if one were confronted with a bear on a hike in the mountains—enough to note that the doors on the car were locked and that there were no nearby weapons. The words unregistered gun flashed through my mind. Had he decided not to kill us before driving down from Michigan? Or had he decided just now? Had he brought a gun with him? I imagined for a moment my brains splattered across the dashboard. “Thank you,” I said, disbelieving my own words. Now I’m thanking a man for not killing me, I thought. It has come to this.