Shelter in Place

by Alexander Maksik

  32.

  My dad took me to Lester’s, a pizza place up the hill and well removed from the fading charm of the waterfront. Sawdust on the floors. Wooden booths. A jukebox. Two coin-operated pool tables. A long bar facing the front door, the requisite Bud mirrors and neon Pabst signs. It was one of those good places. Worn without being dirty. Something about the proportions, the lighting, the height of the stools. It’s that golden combination. Certain bars have it, others don’t. All the wood helped. That’s one thing, so little plastic in that place.

  We came in happy to be there and we took a booth we’d later claim as our own. The two of us turned a little sideways, watching the room, a pitcher of Olympia between us, the pizza in its metal pan landing on the table. Pepperoni, mushroom, onion, always. The two of us eating with such pleasure. The slice-shaped spatula. The indestructible white ceramic plates. Chili flake shaker.

  “Good place,” he said, so pleased to have me there, to show me this element of his new life.

  “You come here a lot?”

  He nodded.

  “You know anybody?”

  He shrugged. “Few familiar faces. Some of the waitresses. Bartenders. But no, not really.”

  “Takes a while, I guess.”

  He leaned back from the table.

  “I don’t like them much.”

  I looked over at him. “Why not?”

  “This place? It’s the prison here. Most of these people are guards.”

  He nodded at a table across from ours. A few burly guys. Some sturdy women.

  “So what?”

  He leaned toward me. “These fuckers have your mother in there, Joe. These are the people opening and closing her cell. They’re the ones with the keys, the ones dragging her away every time I go to visit.”

  “So what are you doing here all the time? What are we doing here now?”

  “You saw the papers, Joe. What they wrote about her.”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

  He looked at me for a long second. “No?”

  I shook my head.

  “There wasn’t a lot of sympathy. Let’s put it that way. Not a lot of sympathy.”

  “So what, you think there should have been?” I couldn’t contain it. My adolescent tone. My generic contempt for him, for the bar, for the town.

  “Hey, hey. Look at me. I’ve been there every minute from the beginning. I went to that jail. I slept on a bench. I went to the courthouse. Every single day. I sold all we owned to be here. I’ve given up everything to do this, while you and Claire did nothing. So don’t give me that bullshit. Don’t bore me with your bullshit. Every day I’ve been there. Meanwhile you and your sister? Who the hell knows where you were.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said after a long time.

  “Look at me,” he said.

  I did.

  “I don’t need you to be sorry. Just be an adult, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “They know who I am, Joey. You understand? I see the same guards here as I see there. And pretty soon they’ll know who you are, too.”

  “So why come here then?”

  He turned away from me.

  “I want them to know. I want them to know, Joey. You understand?”

  “No.”

  He sighed. I’d never seen such impatience and frustration in my father. I hated it as much as I hated my own insolence, that piercing sense of irritation.

  “Look,” he said, “These are the people who have your mother. They’ve got her in there, Joey. What do we know about what they’re doing to her? Nothing. Are they beating her? Starving her? Is it worse? Half these guards are men. They think she’s a goddamn animal.”

  “She was protecting those kids.”

  “One crack with the hammer, sure. But not seven, Joe. Seven changed everything. Seven, seven, seven, seven, that’s all they talked about.”

  “They called her an animal?”

  “Joey, listen to me. I’m here to protect her. Do you understand that? I want them to know I’m around, you see?”

  There was no reason to it, no logic. I didn’t like his desperation. None of it was like him.

  “So I keep going out to the prison. And I keep coming back here. It’s the only thing I can do. Force them to see me. Force them to look. Show them what else we are.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “Sorry isn’t the point. Just think, okay? Look around. I wish it hadn’t, but the world’s changed.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. That’s what I mean. I’m sorry you were all alone.”

  “It was better that way. Saved you some pain. The thing is, you’re here now. And I’ll tell you, kiddo, goddamn am I happy about that.”

  He reached across the table and squeezed my shoulder. “I’m happy to have my son here. It makes me so happy to have my son here.”

  We were both a little drunk by then.

  “You make me strong, Joe.”

  We listened to the jukebox for a while. I wanted to be strong too, but I wasn’t sure what that would mean. Or how either of us could protect her. Or what good we could do for her or for anyone else.

  That night in bed, on my back, listening to the sounds of the house, I tried not to imagine what might happen to my mother inside that place, or the things people do to each other.

  33.

  I found a job pouring drinks at The Owl, a college bar down by the water. One of their guys had quit the day before I walked in, and they hired me on the spot. Three prime shifts a week—Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights plus lunch on Wednesday.

  What fortune I had in White Pine.

  I was able to help with the rent, with the expenses, but there wasn’t much left after that. Until the house sold, my father didn’t have any money. And even afterwards, with the loss he took, and all the debt he carried, and my mother’s income gone, things were tough.

  Anyway, like that, I had a routine. Sunday through Tuesday nothing to do but work on the house, and go out to the prison. The rest of the time, I poured drinks.

  All of it happened so easily. Moving. Finding work. I don’t know why it always took me so long to fully understand that my life had changed.

  One night in those early days, I came home from the bar, pulled the truck up to the house, turned off the lights and killed the engine. It was as if I’d never done anything else, or lived any other way.

  Now I live here with my father. I am a bartender and my mother is in prison.

  That was that. Nothing would ever change again. Now this world was immoveable, irrevocable. There was no future. I didn’t know what else to do, but go to work, and wonder about Tess, and eat pizza with my dad out at Lester’s and make believe we were protecting my mother.

  Once I’d handled all the establishing details, those minor challenges—settling into a room, finding work, learning the streets—what then? All my life, there had been so much movement—one grade to another grade, one milestone after another milestone, and then the road north, and Tess and all our plans, and the two of us looking forward to a vague and expanding life composed entirely of romantic images. In that future we were always moving forward, passing through pretty villages, sunlight in our beer glasses, making love on beaches, racing in quiet trains through one countryside after another. In those days, nothing stopped, not the present, not the future. There would be no end to movement. Everything in our life aside from love would be external.

  And then there in my silent truck out in the early morning dark, I believed I was watching all of it come to a stop.

  How could I ask Tess to live in that town, under those conditions? Why would she want to come and live with two sad men in a prison town? What would she want of our fractured family? So again I convinced myself that the kindest thing, the best way to love her was to leave her alo
ne. And so I did.

  34.

  I went to the prison with my father as often as I could and it was nearly always the same. It felt more like prayer than anything else. She didn’t say much more than our names. Just smiled and stroked the tops of our hands with her thumbs. At first I was relieved by the absence of speech, but slowly it began to frustrate me. So on a Monday morning, I went alone. My father didn’t argue, though I saw he was worried by it. He didn’t like the idea of breaking routine, of giving up our new ritual.

  I went anyway. Drove the Spine. Descended into the valley and parked my truck in the lot. I sat at the table, and waited for her. Soon they brought her out.

  “You’ve come alone to visit the big bad witch of the west.”

  I nodded.

  “Joey. Always the brave one weren’t you.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “Home.”

  The theater had ended. I saw it go out of her face. I watched her as if I were watching myself. And then I was certain we shared the tar.

  “Are you all right in here?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “I’m not sure it’s so obvious. You realize where you are, right? It’s not some resort.”

  She removed her hand from mine, but was otherwise very still. She held my eyes, until I looked away.

  “I do, Joseph, know where I am. Yes.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Her capacity for sudden cold formality had always frightened me as a child. The flipped switch when I was sarcastic with her, or whined, or, worst of all, had been cruel to someone weak.

  Here it became something else, something worse. Trailing behind that anger, that quick shift, was now a history of violence. I could not ignore what she was capable of. I could not prevent myself from seeing her hammer.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I just want to make sure you’re all right. That they’re treating you well.”

  “You said it yourself. Not a resort.”

  “No,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Mom. I’m here. Not for a little while. I’m here. I live here. I have a job.”

  “Why’s that, Joey? Why would you do that? You can go anywhere in the world. Why would you stay here?”

  I looked at her carefully. I was searching for something beyond the language.

  “Why am I here?”

  She leaned back and crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Yes. Tell me,” she said.

  “For you. The same reason Dad is here.”

  “But your father is my husband.”

  “Yes. I understand that.”

  I knew she didn’t like the sarcasm, but I couldn’t help myself. It seemed my only defense. I was angry. I was terrified. I was young.

  “Well, then, you also understand he has responsibilities that you do not.”

  I matched her posture. I wondered whether it was true. Whether my father had a responsibility to be here. Whether any of us did.

  “For better or for worse. Death do us part, Joseph. Mine or his.”

  I’d begun to feel sick.

  “You, on the other hand, may do as you like. Go where you wish. Look at your sister. Claire remains unchanged, it seems. So, what good is it for you to be here?”

  “Dad says we can protect you.”

  She laughed and leaned forward and reached for my hands. “Listen, you have to go on, Joey.”

  Her skin was cool and dry.

  Toward the future, I thought.

  She gave a weak smile, and nodded. “Yes, Joey Boy. Yes.”

  The time was up then. The guards came for her. She hugged me and disappeared behind the closing door.

  I met my dad at Lester’s. He was at our booth with a pitcher and two glasses, back to the wall, rubbing his beard with one hand, caught in some thought, some worry.

  “How’d it go?” He glanced up at me as he poured my beer.

  I shook my head.

  “She doesn’t talk much,” he said.

  “She talked.”

  He looked hopeful. “Yeah? What’d she say?”

  “She told me I could do anything I wanted with my life. She wanted to know what I was doing here, why I’d ever want to live in White Pine. She said you’re different. You’re her husband. ‘Death do us part,’ she said. ‘For better or for worse.’”

  He looked at me hard. And then nodded, conceding the point. “Yeah. Well, that’s true. It really isn’t the same. She’s right, Joey. You know, you don’t need to be here. Not the way I do. But I’ll tell you, I’m glad you’re here. Go anytime, but I’m happy you’re here. I wouldn’t want you to leave. I’d miss you. You’re the only thing . . . but that’s not the point, really. She’d miss you. She wants you here too.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  God, I can see him there before me slowly becoming a child. Those eyes. That panic. As if the only thing worse than my mother murdering Dustin Strauss would be me packing up and leaving town.

  “I don’t think she cares. She made it clear. I don’t think she cares. Actually I think she wants me to go. That’s the feeling I get.”

  “I don’t believe that,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “Well, it’s not forever. It’s not as if you’re planning on staying forever.” He turned away from me and brought his boots onto the bench.

  A big table of guards was starting to fill up.

  “How long is it, Dad?”

  “As long as you want it to be. You can always leave.”

  “For you, I mean. How long are you going to stay?”

  “Oh. Well, forever, Joey. I’ll be here forever.”

  A wave of his hand. That was that. Life was life. Where else would he go?

  “And you, Joey? What do you think? Hang around a while?”

  35.

  Father was determined to find a job that might provide him health insurance, but after a while he gave up on that. He’d been called in for an interview at the college, and then at the hospital. Nothing came of either. Both were for janitorial jobs and they’d have made him miserable, but even still, those successive blows took their toll.

  He went on about health insurance and I thought maybe he was suffering from some disease, something rotting him out from the inside. But he was healthy as anything—lean and muscular and solid. He wasn’t a smoker. He ate pretty well. Kept weights and a bench on the little patio out back. He liked his walks. Maybe he drank too much, but who could blame him?

  “It was just the idea,” he said. “Some security. Your mother and I have always had it. It was a point of pride. We swore we’d always have a home, enough food, and health insurance. These were the things we’d never give up. Whatever it took. But now we’re in the wind,” he said. “At least your mother the killer is covered inside. But not us. This fucking country.”

  After a while he gave up on the idea and took a job at Arbus Lumber and Feed where he worked their yard, hauling wood and cutting planks to size.

  In my memory, those first months are often distinguished and delineated by his minor dreams—health insurance, a garden, the protection of my mother, the possibility of her softening, of Claire returning. And then he became focused on Tess.

  In the evenings we were both home he would ask about her. Over dinner, or sitting in front of the fire drinking beer I would tell him what I could. At first I was a begrudging reporter. She grew up in San Francisco. She was an only child. Green eyes, brown hair. Her mother died of breast cancer. Her father remarried quickly. He has two young children now.

  I thought I’d appease him, and then after a while he’d leave me alone to forget her. But he wanted to make that impossible. For my father and me she was a symbol of hope, I guess. As if her presence might provide an
swers to the problems of our lives.

  “Tell me about Tess,” he’d say, but what he meant was, bring her here. He meant that she was the only thing that could save us. Not just me, but both of us. Bring her here, this woman I barely knew. This woman with whom I’d fallen so in love, who terrified me as much as my mother did, as much as the prison, as much as my awful new life, as much as the tar.

  In those days I was constantly afraid. Of the specific and the general, the known and unknown.

  I wouldn’t want to return to that time, but I miss its sense of danger, of fragility. And I miss the fear as well.

  After seeing my mother, I’d always leave exhausted and shaken. The sharp looks of the guards. The proximity to other prisoners. The awful sounds of those locks and doors. My mother herself. But I went anyway.

  “I hear there’s a girl,” she said, though she knew full well there was. She’d twice spoken to Tess on the phone while we were in Cannon Beach.

  “There was.”

  “Was?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not together anymore?”

  “No. I came here. So, no.”

  “Well that was stupid,” she said. “Why would you do that? Didn’t you love her? I hear you did. I hear you do.”

  This was something new in her. The berating. The distance.

  “Joey,” she said, warmer now. “Don’t do that. Don’t walk away.”

  “Do you realize why I’m here? Why I left?”

  “Yes, yes, yes, I know. You’ve said. For me, for me, you’re here for me. But we’ve been over this. Why? Why would you leave the woman you love to be here with your mother? Why would you do that?”

  I shook my head.

  “You want me to be grateful? You want me to thank you for your loyalty? Would you be here if I weren’t in prison?”

  “No.”

  “No. No, you would not be. But because I am, you are. Because I’m here, you give up your life? Because I did this one thing? Because of a few minutes in a parking lot? Does that seem like a good idea?”