Shelter in Place

by Alexander Maksik

  “I wish I could, Tess,” he whispers. “You know how much I wish I could.”

  I loved him even if I was frightened by what he knew of my mother and their secret world.

  He wasn’t like most of the men who run a door. Washed-up football players, or wrestlers, or off-duty cops, or local fighters. Even if Seymour was a washed-up football player. He may have been sad, but he wasn’t bitter. And he wasn’t like those guys who are in it for the authority, who are more often looking for someone to punch than they are to stop a fight. He wasn’t one of those give me a reason guys. He liked looking after people.

  I worked bars from the time I was eighteen years old. From back to owner. From LA to Cannon Beach, to White Pine, and on to Seattle. And in all those years I never met anyone like Seymour. People outside never see these things. They’re blind to it. The skill it requires, the combination of physical strength and intelligence, intuition and style. Artistry. You know how rare it is to find a good waitress? A good bartender? A good bouncer? How difficult it is to be one of those things? And yes, I know I’m supposed to say server, but I don’t like the word. Anyway, I’d rather wait than serve. And fuck if I’m going to say waitperson. Or associate. Or team member. Or any of the other bullshit those drones insist we use.

  People walk into a place and sit down and order a drink like they’re talking to a machine. They don’t even glance up at you.

  Anyway, Seymour wasn’t looking to break anyone’s jaw. Not at the bar, not at the prison. Everyone liked him. Me and Tess. The other waitresses. The manager. The regulars. He did the thing he was supposed to do. He made The Owl feel safe. He knew names. He smiled. He didn’t do that raised chin, arms crossed thing. He didn’t wear sunglasses. He didn’t need any of that shit. He was calm and he was tough and he didn’t have to pretend. He was gallant too. Those frat boys got away with nothing. I liked him for all those reasons.

  And because he was a little lonely. I could see that right away, something familiar in the eyes.

  We liked him and he liked us. As a couple. Gravitated, as they say. At the start I thought he had a thing for her, but soon I realized it wasn’t that. He liked us together. Not me, not her: us.

  Strange families are born in bars.

  What else about Seymour? Mostly he worked days at the prison. He was a guard and had been for a while. He said The Owl was to make extra cash, but I don’t think that had much to do with it. He lived alone in a little apartment down by the beach. He didn’t have much to pay for. The prison was a union job. Gave him a pension, health insurance, a good salary. He wasn’t in debt. There’s so much freedom in living like that. It was the same for Tess and me. Just like it had been in Cannon Beach.

  On the other hand, too much freedom will get you into trouble. You start thinking about what you want. What’s next. What’s right and wrong. And what you might change. If you’re working three jobs, taking care of your kids, and paying off a mortgage, there’s no time for that juvenile nonsense.

  Anyway, Seymour liked to get away from the prisoners, the other guards. And I think he liked the warmth of the bar. The spirit of it. The nightly celebration to counter the miserable gloom of The Pine. He didn’t go to Lester’s much. He said being with civilians kept him even.

  When people asked about the prison, he always made the same bad joke: Difference between The Owl and The Pine? Fewer assholes out there.

  The other thing about Seymour is that he rarely talked about my mother. Even with all the shit we gave each other in the course of a shift, he never brought her up. So when Tess suddenly said what she did that evening, it was like something had been broken, changed. A Breach.

  55.

  That night an hour before closing, after Seymour went out for a smoke, Tess said, “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you want to hear about it?”

  “No.”

  “Baby,” she said, “petulant little Joey,” and walked away.

  The last drinkers came. Tess worked the floor. I worked the bar. Seymour on the door. I kept away from her. We didn’t play our mid-shift games. But later, when it was over, after I’d cashed out and delivered my drawer, I came down to find Tess and Seymour sitting at a corner table, a bottle between them.

  I brought a glass of ice.

  “Strout doesn’t want to hear it either,” Tess said. “Nobody wants to hear it.”

  Seymour shrugged. “Your girl here’s been drinking.”

  “I think you should both know that something important is happening out there. I think you should both know that your mother who you don’t want to see, who spends her life in a prison, isn’t just anyone. She’s your mother and something important has happened. Not that either of you gives a fuck.”

  Seymour smiled at me. “You see?”

  “Neither of you sees,” Tess said. “Why would you? Boys. Everywhere I go, little boys.” She poured herself another bourbon. “Why don’t you tell him what’s happening, Strouty? Maybe he’ll listen to you.”

  He laughed. “And what’s happening?”

  “What’s happening is that Anne-Marie March is a hero. And even if neither of you wants to hear it, a lot of people are saying it, and a lot more believe it and that’s what’s going on.”

  Seymour stirred the ice in his glass with his finger. I watched because I couldn’t look at Tess.

  “Nothing? Neither of you boys has anything to say? She gets letters. Hundreds of them. And the other women in there think it too. Isn’t that right, Strout? Ain’t that right?”

  I looked at Seymour who was watching his finger chase a shard of ice.

  “Tell him,” Tess said.

  “Not my place.”

  “Go on, Seymour,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “She gets a lot of letters.”

  “And the women?” Tess knocked her knuckles on the table like some kind of belligerent lawyer.

  “She gets along well in there,” he said. “People seem to look up to her.”

  “Go on, tell him. She’s a hero to them, Joseph.”

  “She’s not Christ, Tess.”

  “Goddamn right she’s not.” Tess pounded the table again. Seymour caught the bottle before it fell. “She’s Joan of Arc, you assholes.”

  She stood up and headed to the bathroom.

  Seymour shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Is it true?”

  “Well, she’s popular in there, yes. She’s a smart lady who killed a man. A man who was a piece of shit. That’s a pretty good combination for prison cred.”

  “So, they like her?”

  “They do.”

  Neither of us spoke for a bit. Just drank and studied the table.

  “What do you think?” I asked him.

  “Of what?”

  “What she did.”

  Seymour wiped his face with the towel and looked up at the ceiling.

  “What do I think? You know, Joey, I spend a lot of time around those women. Maybe I’m not the best person to ask.”

  “Why not?”

  “Things get fucked up. They get distorted. It’s hard to remember who did what. Why someone’s there. You react to the way they are now, not to what they did. If someone’s a pain in the ass, then you don’t like her. Someone’s nice, she lets you do your job, then you like her. That’s the way it works for me anyway. Other guards it’s the opposite. They don’t give a shit about the way you are now. They forgive nothing. That’s not the way I live, but maybe that makes more sense, maybe that’s better because sometimes the ones who did the worst shit, they’re the easiest to handle. And the biggest assholes, they’re the ones who probably shouldn’t be in there in the first place. So everything goes all upside down.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Well, your mom, she’s polite. She’s not a p
ain in the ass.”

  “So you like her.”

  “I do.”

  “Even if she did the worst shit?”

  “I didn’t say that. And believe me, there are women in there who make your mom look like a nun.”

  “Like what?”

  “You don’t want to hear about it.”

  “I do,” I said.

  Seymour took a mouthful of bourbon and looked at me carefully. It was like my father trying to decide if I was ready to hear about sex. There were times Seymour seemed a lot like my father. Not like my dad, the guy who lived down the street, but like my father. Another father. A different kind. A father with a little more violence in him, a few more secrets, a man with a darker heart. And then other times it felt more like I was his. Or that me and Tess were his parents and that he was our enormous son.

  Seymour swallowed his bourbon, crunched the ice between his teeth.

  “A woman in there set her children on fire. Another beat her son half to death for forgetting to turn the lights off. There’s one who chained her twelve-year-old daughter to a bed and sold her for sex to neighborhood men. It goes on and it gets worse and worse. Much worse. There are things in this world you just don’t want to know about. Things you want never to have heard.”

  “And you like some of these people?”

  He shrugged. “I’m glad they’re locked up. If you’ve fucked with a kid like that, you get treated pretty rough inside. By the guards, by the other inmates. You get beat up, you don’t always get fed, privileges disappear. You’re always in danger. You can never rest, you can never stop worrying. Being inside is supposed to be the punishment. It’s being locked up that’s supposed to be the torture. So what am I going to do? Torture them more? No. As long as they’re inside, I’ll treat them the way they treat me.”

  “As long as they’re inside?”

  “It’s different out here. If I saw something like that. Came across it on the street.” He shook his head.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “What do I think of what she did? Did that man need to die? I don’t know. Probably not. But a coward like him? I think about what I’d have done. If I’d been walking by and saw it. Shit, Joey. I’d have done the same. It’s just the kind of thing that sets me off. And who knows? Would I have hit him only once? Would I have stopped? When the string breaks and you lose your mind, who knows how long it takes to remember the rules? To remember you’re a person.”

  I’d never heard Seymour talk so much.

  “You ever been in a fight?”

  I nodded.

  “You ever won?”

  I laughed and nodded.

  “Then you know what I mean,” he said. “Look, I know she’s your mom, Joey. I know it must be hard to think of it.”

  Tess came back from the bathroom, put her arm on Seymour’s shoulder.

  “What did I miss?”

  “Just us, Tess,” Seymour said, and smiled at me.

  “With an aching in my heart,” she said and sat down. “So what’s next, kids? What’s the next thing?”

  Seymour said, “I think you should go to bed. That’s what I think is next.”

  “I don’t mean now, you fucker. I mean bigger. I mean in the days, boys. The days to come.”

  “What do you want to happen?” I asked. “Now that we live here in fucking White Pine, Washington. What do you want to happen?”

  She slid her chair forward, inching it along the floor, making as much noise as possible. Then she put an arm around my shoulder, and an arm around Seymour’s.

  “What I want, boys. Lean in here. Huddle up.”

  Can you see us there late at night? Me and Tess and Seymour, the only people in that bar, the three of us leaning forward over a little cocktail table. Tess drunk as hell. Maybe start from outside. One of those gliding shots where you can’t figure out the way the camera moves so seamlessly through the walls. You start way out across the road. Maybe you start with the roaring ocean and then swing over to the nearly empty parking lot, and then that sinister owl smoldering above the dark door. And then you’re inside with the beer, and sawdust and cigarettes. The music’s on low and there at a corner table in this empty bar is our trio, our strange family. A young and very drunk woman sitting between two men, one of them massive, one of them me, and she’s brought her voice down and she’s saying in a stage whisper, “What I want is for something to happen. What I want is to do something. Can you understand that? Before I fucking die, I want to do something.”

  And if you insist on the existence of beginnings. If you believe in that kind of thing. Then this is that.

  56.

  Nothing has changed in the morning. This hangover, as with all her hangovers, was insignificant. I brought her a glass of water. Coffee. Aspirin. Cooked her two fried eggs, bacon, toast. She took a long walk on the beach and by the time she was back she was fine. Me, even then, even in the heart of my youth, when I drank like that, it took me a full day to recover.

  Tess hated it. She had such little tolerance for frailty.

  So after the breakfast, and the walk on the beach, she returned home and she was fine. She was fine and nothing had changed. The night was not forgotten. None of it was nonsense. She returned home and after a shower she came downstairs. It had turned very cold. We had a fire going. I’d stake my life on this memory: her hair a mess, barefoot, wearing the one dress shirt I owned, white, which had once been my father’s. The shirt I’d worn for my interview at The Spruce, The Owl, and every job before that. A cherry stain on the sleeve. Frayed buttonholes.

  She seemed impossible—her skin, her eyes, her knees. I don’t know how else to say it. Impossible that such a woman existed. That she was there in my house, in my shirt. No make-up. No bra. Hair a little longer, a little wilder.

  It caused me such joy to see her.

  And such pain.

  And such fear.

  What combination has more power? And what combination more unusual?

  Through the course of my life, no other person, no other thing has ever given me all of it at once.

  I suspect that a child might.

  It’s what I have often imagined holding my newborn daughter might be.

  I don’t know. I suppose I’ll never know.

  All of it can mean only so much.

  Just like language.

  The stories of our great lovers are always stories of failure.

  I may be a man alone in the woods singing to the invisible and the invented, but it matters that when Tess comes down those stairs she is unlike anything I have ever known.

  57.

  The streets were full of fog. Smoke rose from the chimney of our little house on Mott Street. Tess was pacing.

  “There is a group,” she said. Here she crossed the room and sat next to me. “Out at the college. They’ve been writing. They visit her. They want to organize. They have run out of patience. That’s what they say. How they sign their letters. We have run out of patience.”

  “With what?”

  “With all of it, Joey. But most of all with the violence.”

  “Funny,” I said. “Funny that these women who’ve run out of patience with violence have chosen my mother as their hero.”

  She looked at me with such irritation and disappointment. Why did I provoke her? I hardly needed the explanation. I resisted because it was my mother. Because of Tess, because there was something in her that frightened me, a thing I didn’t want and wasn’t ready for. Not for the change, nor for the disruption, nor the inevitable complication of our lives. Not even in the name of revolution. I didn’t want my mother to be a hero, to become a symbol of some ill-conceived and miniature revolt. I resisted for those, and for a thousand other reasons.

  But mostly I just wanted things to stay as they were. Because I was my father’s so
n.

  “Not funny at all,” she said. “They think what she did is what should have been done. And what should be done. That she was defending another woman, defending two children who could not defend themselves. They think she should be released from prison.”

  “So they want to change the laws.”

  “They think the laws should change, yes. But that’s not what they’re primarily interested in.”

  “What are they primarily interested in, Tess?”

  “Action.”

  “Action. So a bunch of girls from the college, all of whom have run out of patience, will roam White Pine with hammers dangling from their belts?”

  She despised me when I spoke to her like this.

  “They don’t know yet, Joey. They don’t know what they’ll do.”

  “I see. And they go to visit my mother for what? Advice? Leadership? Inspiration?”

  “I don’t know. She told me about them yesterday. And now I’m telling you.”

  “And now what?”

  “She wants me to meet with them.”

  “Meet with them.”

  “Go out to the college, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. To see what can be done.”

  “As her emissary.”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “And will you go?”

  “Yes. With you. We’ll go together.”

  “Is that the word from on high?”

  She nodded.

  “Why? Why would I do that? Why would you?”

  She sighed her exasperated sigh and looked out at the trees while I watched her and waited.

  “Because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a fucking bar. Neither do you. And because, Joey, I am angry. Because I am angry in a way you can’t possibly imagine. You can try, but you cannot understand it. Just like I try to understand you or what has happened to your family. I try but I can’t. It is the kind of anger that comes from too much fear. Do you understand me? Just like your mother. And just like her, I don’t want to ignore it. I won’t. I would rather fucking die.”