Shelter in Place

by Alexander Maksik

  Anyway, fuck it, I’m going to allow her to speak that sentence even if she didn’t.

  “Some people have to fight every moment of their lives.”

  And Seymour said, “I’m not one of them.”

  And then off they went back and forth in this invented dialogue, until it quickly came to the real point, the crucial question, which was:

  “Will you help us?” or “C, will you help us?” or “Seymour, will you help us, please?”

  He looked at me then. “What is this, Joey? What is it exactly?”

  “Why are you asking him?”

  Tess was up again lighting one of Seymour’s Virginia Slims.

  “What are you asking Joey for?” She chucked the pack at him. “Your fucking cigarettes are ridiculous.” She yelled it loud and I laughed as hard as was possible in those days. “Answer me, C. You fucker. What are you asking him for?”

  He ignored her and nodded at me.

  “What’s this little team? What’s the plan, Joe?”

  “I’ve sworn my allegiance,” I said.

  “Kill or be killed, huh?” He smiled to himself and refilled our glasses. “You two are something else, man. I’ll tell you what.”

  Tess came over to him with the cigarette burning between her lips. She sat sideways on his lap, and took the back of his head in her strong right hand.

  “Will you help us?”

  She said it quietly, and where the tip of her tongue caught on the filter, there was the faintest lisp.

  I could see her hands in my hair. Could feel her pulling. Can see it now.

  I had to look away.

  Seymour said, “I’m not killing anyone. You understand me? You fucking lunatics, I’m not killing anyone.”

  And like that we were an army of three.

  84.

  I wake to find Tess fast asleep, my heart battling my ribs. I’m up and dressed and in the truck as if by command. Ten minutes later I’m running the Spine with all the windows down, impervious to the cold, unmoved by the icy air. As the road breaks right and descends toward the prison, I get the truck up to ninety and flick the lights off. That’s when the high frenzy truly begins, a pitch-black rhapsody. Mom, I am coming to free you. It is faster to skip the road entirely, I think, to veer off and sail out into the sky instead. I’ll need more speed. If I can get it to a hundred and ten, I’m certain I’ll make it fine. Land easy in the soft wheat. I drop the accelerator. Pedal to the metal, Dad, I’m coming for her. Don’t you worry. I’m coming to bust her out. Somewhere very far away the truck is shaking and moaning, the tires whispering to me. I’ve got my eyes on the red needle. It won’t go past ninety-seven. I tighten my grip on the wheel and pull myself up to stand on the gas. I put my head out the window and send my war cry into the night, but the road is flattening, dissolving into the prison plane.

  The needle falls.

  My command is gone.

  The orange lights are too bright and the walls rise up too tall.

  I drive off the road and nearly flip the truck

  Then it’s all gone.

  I walk out into the field with a blanket, stretch out onto my back and wait with my mother and the receding tide.

  85.

  Jack Dugan hanged himself with a belt last week. A local farmer. Nine acres of apples mostly, some berries, some asparagus. The paper says he’d been in debt for years. And now there’s his picture on the front page. I’d seen him around—at the diner, drinking a little too hard at The Alibi—though until now I’d never known his name.

  It was unusually hot here this morning. In the 90s and no air. There were slow-gathering clouds coming from the west and I couldn’t sit still so I walked to town. I thought maybe they’d have the AC going at the diner. The sky was that luminous slate color you see only in storms and animals.

  By the time I made it I was dripping with sweat and the thunder was just starting to roll. I got lucky with the AC, bought a paper, took a booth by the window, ordered bacon and eggs, toast and coffee. I could almost see Tess and my mother sitting across from me. I could nearly feel my father’s shoulder against mine.

  I have always loved to sit in restaurants and watch the bad weather come. When we had our bars, it made me so happy to have people use them for shelter.

  ’Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood/When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud/I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.

  Another my mother sang and sang and sang.

  I loved watching the umbrellaless run across the street and dive inside. That was something that made me happy. The sense that we were providing refuge to strangers. Something about the way a storm disorients and frightens people. Makes them sheepish and vulnerable. Hair soaked, makeup running, skirts blown above our waists, everything wild and out of place.

  An afternoon in one of those early Seattle years when our bar was still struggling, the rain pounding, and all at once, in a burst, just the way they say, as if the sky opened up. The wind and water and all those people diving in for shelter, splashing through our door, it flipped the switch and then I was standing on the bar with a bottle of Jameson in my hand, another between my knees, lightning running my spine, the bartender tossing me shot glasses and I’m passing out whiskey as if the place is just a hobby for a king and not our last and only hope. I’m up there holding court, the most charming man on earth, while Tess stands by the bathrooms trying to take me down with her killer eyes. But even she can’t shoot me from that sky, can’t stop me from giving our money away. Me, I fall of my body’s own accord, so I stay where I am, benevolent lord, pouring my drinks, bowing to the shrieking crowd.

  Anyway, this morning I was feeling okay there at the diner with my family and a farmer in a red cap at the booth next to mine, both of us watching the rain starting to fall. When the thunder got loud and the lightning close, he glanced at me and said, “Big one. Hope there’s no fire.” I smiled and nodded and felt all right. I didn’t want to talk, but I didn’t want to be alone. I liked his face.

  All of us, Claire and Tess, Mom and Dad, we watched as the storm passed through, and for a while I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

  Once it had gone, and the heat broke, I opened the paper and saw Dugan’s face. I don’t why he matters exactly. Just that his story twisted in me and from the start I promised myself I’d put everything in.

  All of it. Whatever comes through.

  86.

  My father called on a clear morning in October. This is in White Pine. We’d had days and days of rain. Storm after storm and then, one morning, blue sky.

  Tess refused to be still. She no longer read. Wouldn’t sleep. Was always at a window. Despite the gloom, the fires I lit, she wouldn’t stay with me beneath the blankets, wouldn’t slip her feet beneath my legs. I tried to read, but mostly I watched her patrolling, leaving and returning. She wasn’t eating much and her face had taken on an angular severity, which made her eyes appear wider-set than they were. All her softness was gone, and in its place, an unmitigated fierceness. She paced the house like a fighter waiting for the ring. Tess, her constant moving and the ceaseless rain had caused me such a sense of suffocating claustrophobia that when the phone woke me that morning, and I heard my father’s voice, and saw the sky, I was gone before she’d opened her eyes.

  He was on a bench down at the waterfront with a bag of donuts and coffee for us both. I was so glad to be there. I think that deep comfort had to do with the relief of having him next to me right as the shell was cracking.

  I was dominated by fear. Once again, the world felt precarious and fragile and I was grateful to have my father, upright, still, the way he had always been.

  Constancy, kindness and faith, his greatest gifts to me.

  It is what I imagine offering to my own son one day.

  Steady, I would so much like to be st
eady.

  I kissed the top of his head and sat with him. He put his arm around my shoulder. Whenever we met, after a day, or a month, always there in his face was a flash of boyish excitement. I don’t ever remember meeting him, not once in my entire life, without seeing it. This expression indistinguishable, really, from that of a boy meeting his father. And sometimes it caused a pressure in my chest, something unsettling I couldn’t identify. But today when I saw him, his eagerness, there was no irritation. I only loved him.

  His warmth in the cool morning. The soft, round smell, Right Guard and Royall Lyme and some other thing that language can do nothing for.

  There’s a smell of coffee too, and of those fresh donuts. Glazed and maple.

  White seagulls circling above and strutting in front of us.

  “I saw Mom the other day,” he said.

  “How is she?”

  “Seems the same. She always seems the same.”

  “Does she still tease you?”

  He laughed. “Not for a while.”

  The teasing was about being a Quaker. It had been me who’d told her and it was the last time I’d seen my mother smile. I mean smile with her whole mouth, with a little glee.

  “You like that,” I said.

  She closed her eyes and nodded her head, suppressing a laugh.

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, Joey. It’s just that your father is extraordinary. The man cannot be broken. He sees peace everywhere. Calm in all corners. You and me, we see war. Not your dad. You should learn from him all you can.”

  “You mean you and Tess,” I said.

  “Me and Tess what?”

  “See war in all corners.”

  “And not you, Joe?”

  I shook my head. “Not the way you two do.”

  She nodded in her deliberate way, looking at me as if she were trying to work something out, trying to find a quality in my face she could not.

  “What?”

  “Well, you are, after all, a man. No way around that in the end. A fact’s a fact.”

  “Sink or swim,” I said and smiled at her.

  “That’s it, Joe. Sink or swim. Fight or die.” She leaned forward and took my hands in hers. “Despite those facts, I love you. And I love that girl of yours, too.”

  “I know you do,” I said.

  “Which? Which do you know?”

  “Both, Mom, both.”

  Now my father was talking. We’d finished our donuts, the coffee was nearly cold, the sun was up high enough to cut the air, to warm our bare necks.

  “I get the impression she’s drifting. Faster and faster,” he said.

  It was true. As if her eyes were draining out. A recession, a withdrawal. Something she couldn’t help. What I kept thinking, but never said to him, was that what it was, what she couldn’t help, was dying in there.

  “Anyway,” he said. “She told me something I don’t understand.”

  “About what?”

  “What are you planning, Joe?”

  “What did she tell you?”

  He finished his coffee, crumpled the cup, shot and missed the trash can across the walkway.

  “Joey. Please don’t do anything stupid. We’ve had enough. You and I. We’ve had enough of it all.”

  We watched a decrepit fishing boat kill its engine and glide into the harbor.

  “I don’t know what she’s planning,” I said.

  “She?”

  “Tess.”

  He stood up, grabbed the cup and dropped it into the can. He took his time, but when he came back to the bench, he said, “It’s not just Tess.”

  “I have no plans, Dad. I don’t know what’s wrong. I don’t know what’s happened to her. And I don’t know what she’s planning.”

  “It’s Mom, too, Joey.”

  “She’s what? Giving instructions?”

  He shrugged. “Impression I have.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “She doesn’t really tell you anything, does she? But that’s not the point. What I’d like, Joe, is for you to stay away from it. And I’d like for you to talk to Tess. Keep her away, too.”

  I thought of her looking down on the street from our bedroom window, the black mask, her visits to The Pine.

  I hadn’t seen him so angry at my mother in many years.

  “Easy to preach crime from prison,” he said.

  87.

  One evening I went for a run down along the waterfront, out past the meetinghouse and beyond to the narrow beach stretching far north toward the Olympic Peninsula.

  I came home thinking Tess had gone out. But at the top of the stairs I saw her through the open bathroom door.

  The water was running. She was sitting naked on the edge of the cracked claw-foot tub.

  There are few images that exist in me the way this one does. That remain with its clarity. Clarity not only of shadow, color and line, but of sound and smell, of tone, texture and atmosphere.

  I cannot do it justice:

  There was the water thudding against the enamel, and the green, corroded drain. Up on her toes, heels raised. Elbows on her knees. Her left palm upturned and resting in her right. Her head down, eyes down. The light entering from the bathroom’s single window filling the small angular space beneath the undersides of her breasts. There is a smooth, elegant line that falls from her shoulders, turns at her lower back, swells around her ass, along her thigh, turns in the dark corner of her knee, drops around her taut calf, tapers to her narrow ankle and begins again where her toes touch the floor.

  There is a soft breeze stirring the toilet paper poorly torn and hanging long from its roll.

  The light makes its rough end glow.

  Her face is turned slightly toward me and what is absent in her expression strikes me hardest.

  She is incautious. She is undefended.

  I lean against the wall and feel a blow of sadness.

  What is its source?

  The depth of her grace, yes. And the relief of seeing this other part of her again, at last, returned. Still, contemplative, gentle. And the intimacy of it, yes. All of these.

  But there is dread too.

  Many years later, Tess and I took a train into Canada and somewhere along that line we stopped in a wide-open plain of snow. There was some problem with the tracks ahead. We’d been going for days and then all at once the noise ended. The chatter, the constant rattling, the speeding landscape.

  All at once, the world was still. We were alone in the center of a vast white world.

  This was like that.

  Sudden stillness.

  Space opening up around me.

  A cooling of my eyes.

  A slowing. The machine hissing, shuddering, shutting down.

  Silence.

  It was just like that.

  She slipped into the bath and turned the faucets with her toes.

  She closed her eyes and sighed.

  I waited and when it was unbearable I went to her and I kneeled on the white tiles and I washed her hair.

  Neither of us spoke.

  All that night the train went nowhere.

  88.

  Fuck you, Tess. This morning, furious again, I got out of bed, dressed, ran below the sky low and heavy through the woods where the trees closed in so dark I couldn’t see the ground. Ran hard enough along those deep snaking trails to burn my lungs. Looping home terrifying a feeding deer which went leaping into the underbrush as I came swooping by so close I could hear it breathe and all those branches cracking beneath its hooves and behind my eyes and when the grey light of the clearing appeared I sprinted full-blast driving with my knees just the way you taught me, Dad. Fuck you for leaving, Tess. Fuck you for quitting, you child, you coward, deserter, defector, traito
r. Fuck you, turncoat bitch, you so proud and principled and sure all those years ago condemning my sister for doing just what you have done yourself. Fuck Claire, you said. Such certainty. Such moral clarity, my exquisite hypocrite, liar, deceiver, failure, renegade. Home I was sweating, pacing the deck, chasing my breath, adrenaline rolling, I wanted you back only to slap your face hard, the violence building in me, saw my palm against your skin, heard the cracking sound. And do you see how with that fantasy, that visceral hunger, I am no better than Sam Young? Another terrified man run out of language, absent imagination. Me, the usual. Me, the same old shit, clutching the same dull script. Showered, dressed, lit a fire. Usually it all subsides after swimming through the dark woods where I fight it, hammer it to the ground, but not today.

  Today I could not win. I could not get it out.

  Tess, I kneeled at our sacred wall of books and withdrew The Once and Future King from a low shelf: hardback, horizontal stripes of blue and green and black and blue, crowned lion rearing up on one hind leg, claws pawing the air, jaws open, roaring.

  You are the knight, your mother wrote across the top of the third page. Happy Birthday. October 30, 1981.

  You were ten.

  I am ashamed to tell you: I burned that book.

  89.

  The day I followed Sam Young the clouds raced across the sky while I waited in my truck hidden by shade watching both the front door and the still black surface of the trampoline.

  He left his house in a tweed suit, Thermos in one hand, leather satchel in the other, got into his car and drove away. Something silver. I followed him all the way to Emerson. And then from a parking lot on foot to the great quad, into a brick building, up the stairs, along a corridor where I passed him as he stopped to unlock his office door.

  I read a book on a bench and waited, followed him to a raked hall and watched from the dark back row as he clicked through slides and gave a lecture on something I can’t remember. It would be helpful if I could. It might lend a little weight here, a layer or two of meaning. The story of a great battle, perhaps. Maybe I should invent something. The Barbarian Invasions. The Crusades. The Inquisition. Good and evil. Let Sam Young foreshadow his own fate.