Shelter in Place

by Alexander Maksik

We went to D4 and High Dive and Rock Candy. We saw Mudhoney and Hammerbox, Nirvana and Sound Garden. In the smoking dark we flung ourselves against all the others like us while King Cobain hid behind his hair.

  We told each other we were angrier, wiser, and more serious. We insisted we had done something to prove it, to earn it. We were not posing. We of experience had blood on our hands and somehow that terrible fact would mark us as people of distinction.

  We were furious and drunk and stupid, and sometimes still we were terrified the police would come crashing through our door.

  In our damp apartment we slept badly and stayed in bed late watching the ships come in off the horizon, listening to gasping trucks leaving the market. We tried so hard to convince ourselves it was all part of our revolution, that we were still at war and living this way, afraid, broke, adrift, in possession of our cold secret, was all a form of battle.

  But it didn’t last long.

  I was always only in it for Tess, and Tess had so terrified herself that it was just a matter of time before all that pretense would become a kind of venom, a reminder of another person, of what she had lost.

  One night at Showbox, we watched a woman onstage take a circular sander to the steel bra of her bandmate. Sparks scattered over the crowd. The drummer played in time. “I am not my body, I am not my body,” the singer sang.

  Tess, she’d had enough.

  She took my hand and pulled me out of there. She said, “I’m done, Joe. Fuck these people.”

  And that was the end of it. We gave up the clubs. We drank less. Our vigilante days formally ended. Just like that. In a weary word.

  I never believed I was any kind of artist. I was no revolutionary.

  It’s just that I was in love with Tess Wolff and I’d have done anything she wanted.

  102.

  Claire, it was night when Dad died.

  Or early morning.

  Seven years after Tess and I left White Pine for Seattle, his heart stopped beating.

  Hank said, “He went in his sleep.”

  But how can any of us be sure? He might have been wide-awake, staring at a circle of blistering paint. He could have been praying. He could have been drafting a letter.

  Dear Joey, Dear Tess.

  And for all I know, Dear Claire, too. Did he write to you? He must have and I want to believe that you read his letters, that you too keep a stack of them bound in some drawer.

  His ragged box of stationery was open on the kitchen table, strapping tape neatly reinforcing the corners. There was a roll of stamps. A couple of blue ballpoint pens.

  Hank found him in the morning.

  He’d gone over to meet Dad for their walk, but there was no answer. He’d brought two large coffees from that new place they liked on the boardwalk. A bag of donuts between his teeth.

  Not that there’s any evidence of this.

  It’s just the way I always see it: Hank outside the front door, a cup in each hand, knocking the brass kick plate with the toe of his boot calling, Richie, Richie, up and at ’em. Richie, Richie, rise and shine.

  103.

  Tess and I were home in Seattle when he called. We had to be at the bar early that morning to meet an investor and were irritated to be disturbed.

  Tess pulled the phone under the covers, said, “Hello, handsome,” and pushed it at me, the cord cold against my ribs. “Hank,” she said.

  And then his weak and cracking voice: “Your father died, Joe.”

  No euphemisms from Hank Fletcher. No bullshit from that man.

  I gave the receiver back to Tess. She returned it to the cradle.

  Half-conscious, she said, “What’s new in White Pine?”

  I didn’t answer and she fell back to sleep.

  The talons dug deep into my throat, sharp into my heart. The tar spread with vicious speed. It was everywhere. It was ruthless. I kept thinking the same thing.

  I don’t know how much time passed between that phone call and the moment Tess turned on her side and rested her warm palm on my stomach.

  “What is it? What is it, Joe?”

  I thought, this is an irrevocable thing. This is a thing that cannot be altered.

  I began to speak to myself with a new formality, as if I were a lecturing professor, an expert of the absolute.

  I don’t know if I spoke out loud.

  I couldn’t shake Sam Young. I wanted only to think of my father, but there he was clinging to me, striding across his wet lawn.

  “Joe?” Tess was sitting up now.

  I did not want to tell her what I had learned. I thought, Is there any way to defend her from this?

  “My father died,” I said.

  She began to cry. She lay next to me on her side with her head on my chest and her legs wrapped around mine. She was quiet, but she was shaking.

  I said, “I wish I’d been kinder, Tess.”

  We stayed together like that all morning.

  It was an irrevocable thing.

  104.

  We drove down to White Pine and stayed in my father’s house. His landlord was generous the way everyone in his later life seemed to be.

  She said, “Take your time. What a lovely man he was,” and gave me a plate of peanut butter cookies covered with foil.

  We went to the prison to see my mother, who had already been notified of her husband’s passing. She was frail and whatever had been left of her first or second or third self was now gone, but she was not impassive. She was affectionate with us both. She cried for my father and said that he’d been to visit her just a week before, that he’d seemed so well. He’d told her about his trip to Seattle, about us two, about our life there, our apartment, our bar, how proud he was. He had told her about the house, that it was the same, that he missed us all in it.

  She leaned across the table and held our hands.

  We told her that he’d been cremated. There would be a service, we’d asked permission for her to attend and it had been granted.

  “No,” she said. “I can’t do that.”

  “Look at me,” I said. She raised her eyes. “It’ll be Sunday morning. They’ll bring you there, they’ll take you home.”

  “Joey,” she began, “Listen.”

  I stood up fast. My eyes fell into inordinate focus. I heard Tess say my name, but she was so far away. There was a pressure on my shoulder. It wasn’t Seymour, but once it might have been. I wanted to tear the ceiling down. Rip the bolted bench from the floor. I wanted to break the fucking walls with it. I pulled but nothing moved. I had lost again. The lights hummed their indifferent tune. Everything so goddamned secure, so flawlessly locked in place. With my vision recoiling, the fight leaching away, I hit the table with my open palm hard enough to silence the room, to set a bruise creeping out from my thumb.

  “Goddammit, you will be there,” I said giving in to the hard pressure on my shoulders. “It is the only thing.”

  She nodded and when I was sitting again, said, showing me her hands, “All right. Okay, Joe. Okay.”

  105.

  Tess took a frozen pork chop from my father’s freezer and bound it to my hand with one of his Ace bandages. It smelled of Right Guard. She didn’t say anything about the prison, or the way I’d behaved, or my mother, but it was clear she was exhausted by all of us.

  We slept in the spare bedroom, squeezed together in that tiny bed where once my father had put me to sleep. We separated his things—to trash, to Goodwill, to keep. Tess chose a thick grey cashmere cardigan, which had once been my grandfather’s. I kept his lined Levi’s jacket. His duffel bag. We kept his Wagoneer. Otherwise, there wasn’t much to hold onto really. Photographs. Papers. Books. The record collection. Some clothes. Some wine. The ammo box.

  The booze we gave to Hank, who came to see us on our first night carrying a pizza from Lester’s. We gave him an
umbrella, too. A good black one with a polished-oak handle.

  Hank said my father had begun discreetly using it as a cane.

  106.

  Yes, we called Claire.

  We left messages, but she did not respond and she did not come home.

  I know you want more than that—explanation, resolution. But some people, regardless of blood, choose to live in other ways. What more is there to say? I have tried to grant her this without anger, without contempt. I know no better way to love her. It is what my father did, and would have always done.

  I tried to hate her, to cling to the wound, to protect myself with it, but it did me no good.

  She was lost to us, like so many other people we’d known through the course of our lives.

  What difference does it make that she is my sister, that she was his daughter?

  What difference does blood make?

  Although lately I have wondered whether I missed some signal, whether all those years ago, in looking so carefully at my mother, I ignored Claire.

  Was she too possessed by the bird and the tar? Is she still?

  If so, perhaps this is her way of fighting.

  We all have different methods of waging war.

  You want reason and resolution, I know. Clean systems. As do I. As did my father. As do we all.

  But time goes along anyway.

  There is nothing to be done.

  107.

  The service was out at the meetinghouse on a Sunday morning. There was little difference between this and any other meeting of Friends, except that I stood and spoke, except that I carried a squat brass urn, except that it was more crowded than usual. Hank said it was evidence of how much the people of White Pine had cared for my father. Guards and bartenders and waitresses and college kids from the new café.

  There was little difference except the crowd and the urn and the presence of my mother, who sat back by the entrance flanked by two guards. It was the first time in many years that I’d seen her in sunlight. She was so small there between those massive men, beneath that vaulted ceiling, with the great ocean and giant sky outside. For such a long time I had seen her always in that terrible visit room, in that sickening fluorescent light where the perspective was always the same—woman to chair, woman to table, woman to wall, woman to guard.

  She kept her shoulders hunched and her arms crossed. She watched the ocean as if she were trying to find some specific object out on the water.

  Her skin was pale, so fine. There was so little fat on her body. So little muscle. I thought of her filters. I thought, they must be so much worse than mine.

  There was nothing to defend her from the blitzing light, the roar of all those people pouring in, whispering and shifting in their seats, the waves, the creaking building, the wind pushing against the glass. I saw it all driving into her, passing through her rice paper skin, swirling behind her eyes, swelling and twisting in her chest.

  I wanted to protect her. Wrap her in a blanket. Cover her eyes with dark glasses.

  I wanted to say, I know what it means when the filters fail. I understand. But you sink or swim, I wanted to say, Mom, you fight or you die.

  Though now, I have to allow for the possibility that I was wrong, have been wrong all this time. Perhaps my mother knew nothing of tar and filters and all the rest of that bullshit.

  Perhaps my insistence on some magical correlation between us is only wishful, an invention without evidence. Perhaps in the end there is no shared beast, no common fog.

  108.

  Some of them watched the vicious killer in the back of the meetinghouse, the mad widow at her husband’s funeral.

  It was difficult for me not to tear their pews from the ground, difficult not to fling those tourists through that glass. But Tess squeezed my hand, she kept me still. As always, she knew before I did. She knew and I stayed where I was.

  Someone rang a bell.

  Then we were all quiet.

  We waited and we listened for God.

  After a while, I stood. I had to break my hand away from her.

  I didn’t see it, but I know she dropped her head in fear, in fatigue.

  I said that my father had found a home first in White Pine, and then at the meetinghouse. I said that he had found friendship and peace in both places and I believed he had been happy when he died. I said that he had been the strongest, most courageous, kindest man I’d ever known.

  I can’t remember what else. I’m sure there was more, but believe me, it was inadequate.

  I was just trying to fill the room with words.

  I looked at my mother, who smiled at me in a way I hadn’t seen for many years. What was it? Pride? Certainty? Maybe it was simple tenderness. Maybe it was love that I saw.

  Seymour gave me a nod. A greeting, but also, I thought, I hoped, a gesture of approval and encouragement. He was sitting toward the back, not far from my mother. He was heavier, softer. He’d lost a lot of hair. There were none of those frightening angles left in his face.

  I saw a young woman, too. She was the right age, had the right eyes. She seemed to be alone. She could have been Anna. Might have been.

  Whoever she was, when the service ended, she was gone.

  We walked down to the beach. Me and Hank and Tess and my mother and the two stony guards who allowed her to stand in the sunshine with her wrists unbound.

  They allowed her to bend at the waist and remove her shoes and socks.

  The tide was high and the wind was blowing strong offshore. I took the top off the urn and shook the ashes free. They blew across the sand and scattered and dissolved over the water.

  That was it, the end of my father’s funeral, the end of my father’s body.

  My mother was so bright in the sun. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a white sweatshirt. They’d run a piece of webbing through the belt loops and tied it tight with a tidy bow knot. I try to imagine what it must have been for her, after nearly nineteen years locked away, to smell the ocean, to feel the cold sand against her bare feet, the wind on her body, the warm light. To be, all of a sudden, in one fail swoop, in the center of the whole whirling world.

  She closed her eyes and cried. I don’t know if it was for my father, or because she was overcome by sensation, or because she wasn’t free. She began to walk toward the water, but the guards held her back. Maybe they were afraid she’d drown herself.

  Tess said, “Come on, let her feel it, goddamn it, you assholes.”

  But one of them was already kneeling at my mother’s feet, slipping her shoes on, while the other was closing the cuffs.

  We followed those three up past the promenade to the prison van. And then they drove her away.

  In the evening we had dinner with Hank. We invited Seymour, but he didn’t come. I don’t remember much else. Not in terms of event, or language.

  I do remember the physical world, but really, how many more descriptions of the vast ocean and blue sky can you possibly endure?

  109.

  We returned to Seattle. We went on living. The odd thing is that I recall so little of that time. It is an indistinct shape, a hum of years.

  We owned a bar, we bought another. Both thrived. We worked hard. We were making more money than either of us had ever imagined. We were good at what we did. We provided health insurance. We hired more women than men. We paid a wage better than any bar in the city. There was no miniskirt obligation. We had no tolerance for assholes. We had good bouncers, though none better than Seymour Strout.

  We were always on patrol.

  We ran our empire the way we wished to run the world.

  And that, I’m afraid, was the sum total of our activism.

  These the remnants of our war.

  Time passes. It smells mostly of beer and whiskey and searing meat. It is a smear of sensation. It all blends.

&
nbsp; It does not have the sharp edges of our earlier lives.

  On a Sunday morning, our sacred day of rest, I brought Tess breakfast in bed. I put a ring in the center of a pat of butter. I pretended to read the paper. I heard her knife against the metal.

  I said, “Tess Wolff will you marry me?”

  She said, “Joe, Joey, Joseph, it would be my honor. Yes.”

  She put the ring in her mouth, sucked it clean, let it fall from her tongue into my palm, and I slid it onto her finger. We spilled our coffee, and made love and were engaged, but we never married.

  The years went on. We were making our fortune.

  Time was blurred. It was overwhelmed by minutiae.

  Or composed of it.

  110.

  We benefited from our fortune—of circumstance, of class, of education, of race, of our intelligences in their various and respective forms. We replaced passion with work. We replaced desire with work. We were never lazy. We bought property. We were never punished for our crime. We were savvy. We began with a little money and we went on to have more of it. We divided and filled our days. We killed our time. From the moment we abandoned our dreams of war and honor and good, there were tasks to complete. They were to do with the bars. They were to do with the people we knew, with our home, with our possessions. We took our store of time and used it to tend to the life we were constructing. We bought clothes and wore them. We saw doctors. We had our teeth polished. We bought food and we ate it. We bought a new car. We argued about its color. We took it to be repaired. When it was empty, we filled it with gas. We washed its body, its windows. We liked to see it shine. We liked to see the needle on full. We bought so many objects. Thousands and thousands and thousands of objects. We talked about them and celebrated them and argued over them. We arranged them in our minds and on our shelves. We put numbers in columns. We put art in frames and hung those frames on our walls, in our bars. We gave gifts. We made donations and called them acts of principle. We cleaned our skin. We gave things away. We bought new things. We gambled and won. There were periods of satisfaction, and of pleasure. There were periods of frustration and of exhaustion. The tar came and went. As did Tess’s patience.