Shelter in Place

by Alexander Maksik

  She lifts me from the curb into her arms, even if I’m too old for it, too heavy. I am terrified. Of the Carlsons. Of the man in the car. Of her. Of the wind. She looks at me. Really looks. Joey, she says, and pinches a blade of grass from my lip. Joey, she says as she carries me to the house. My chin is on her shoulder now. She says in my ear, to herself, Those little fuckers, those little shits.

  Right there on that corner, here in this clearing.

  We were all there once. As enduring as the yellow fire hydrant. We were all there. Me and the man in the car and the Carlson brothers and my mother, my wild savior.

  We turn left onto Auburn Place East and I feel a pulsing within my head.

  Is it my brain doing that? I am dizzier.

  Once I lived here with my family. My parents in their bedroom. Claire in hers. Me in mine.

  Golden wood dust floating in the light hair of my father’s arms.

  There was my mother’s wide tortoiseshell barrette on the coffee table.

  There was a way to make it a catapult for paper clips.

  My purple bike on its side in the yard. Chrome tire caps. White Huskies handlebar pad.

  All of it at once a single sense. It moves in me as we walk the block.

  How do I explain this?

  As if an entire childhood exists in a lone sensation. It is in my chest. It is in my mouth.

  This is what I mean by tone.

  Do you understand?

  I am drugged by it.

  It is everywhere.

  It possesses me.

  I am no longer on the street.

  I have not met Tess Wolff.

  My mother is a nurse.

  Claire is ten years old.

  My father is in his shop working the belt sander.

  There is dinner.

  There is school.

  There is the park.

  There is nothing else in the world.

  “This is where little Joey grew up,” my father says, and puts his arm around me.

  We stand across the street, looking at the house.

  The sensation has turned to pain. I don’t know what it is made of.

  Who knows its composition?

  For a moment I’m afraid I may fall. I lean against my father.

  “Joe,” he says, “can you believe it?”

  I shake my head.

  “That was us four. Right there.”

  I nod.

  “Takes your breath away,” he says.

  It does that. It does that, but also it does something worse.

  Something below the breath, something meaner.

  Tess crosses the street and knocks.

  I don’t want anyone to answer.

  I don’t believe my father does either. I believe we’re both praying together. Me and him. Waiting, watching Tess at the clean white door, the shining brass knocker.

  No response.

  She turns and shrugs and off we go back across the park, across the drying grass, to our apartment, and my father’s truck.

  Tess wraps her arms around him. She kisses his cheek.

  “Drive safely,” she says.

  I hug him tight.

  “I’m proud of you, Joe,” he says, “whatever you’ve done. I love you always, kiddo. I’m sorry for all these years.”

  He climbs in and fastens the seat belt.

  As he drives away he extends his hand out the open window.

  Maybe he watches us in the rearview with our arms around each other.

  Maybe he watches us disappear.

  There he goes.

  He is waving. He is feeling the air.

  116.

  This morning running through the snow my footfalls made no audible sound. There must have been six inches on the forest paths. The high boughs held piles of it. I went an hour deep, stopped then and waited on a dead tree for my breathing to slow. There it seemed as if I were the only moving thing. No wind. No animals. The sun filtering through the pines. The silence was an ecstasy.

  I think I may return and make a camp. Make a bed.

  Hike in with a sleeping bag and tent. The .45.

  By the time I was out of the shower it was snowing again. I turned on the radio and made toast and coffee. A poached egg the way my father taught me—four inches of boiling water in a pan, a teaspoon of vinegar.

  Last night I dreamed of Tess fucking another man. She was both old and young. Bent over the table, he was behind her, his face blurred. Only hers was clear. Of course, it’s not the first time I’ve seen some version of this in my sleep. What is unusual is that it didn’t upset me. Not while I was dreaming, not when I woke. And it doesn’t upset me now. Certainly, I take no pleasure in it, but neither was I chained to a wall, fighting to get free, to stop it, as I have been before. Last night, we watched each other. I made no effort to move.

  The snow fell harder. Not in my dream, but here at the house. I lit a fire and lay on the couch and listened to the radio. I’d run for two hours in the cold. My body was so tired, but my mind was sharp and constant.

  After a while the woman whose voice I like came on the radio and began talking about Schumann’s Dances of the League of David. I knew nothing about him, or his dances, and I thought, here, listen, idiot, maybe you’ll learn something beyond feeling. But as she spoke about the music in her odd radio cadence—removed from meaning, emphasis on all the wrong words—I fell asleep. Every now and then the piano would become frantic and wild and I’d wake up, but as soon as it turned gentle, I was out again.

  Then in the early afternoon, as if someone had driven an adrenaline shot into my thigh, I was on my feet, my mind rushing to catch up to my body, which was already naked beneath the shower, and when the two things fused I was flying, dressed, walking the road, in search of the farmer’s daughter. The beginning of my new life, the first mark on my freshscrubbed slate. Twice a week they set up their stands in front of the public park and there she was sitting in a white plastic folding chair, beneath a red canopy, third table from the east. The winter market is jellies, jams, pickles, whatever the fuck else they can preserve in a jar. Cakes and pies, too. Cheese and honey, which is what she was selling, little pyramids of each laid out at her narrow wrists, and I came to her if not in the way I first glided to Tess, then with the same spirit, the same glittering clarity. There was her father standing over by one of the heaters talking with another man in a red knit beanie, pouring Bushmills into their coffee cups. She raised her eyes and smiled in a way I liked—lips together, knowing, expectant. Just as if she’d been waiting for me all day and here I was, her missing person. I was giddy with my blood crackling like that, my heart still shifting up gear after gear and her light eyes spinning my stomach, her pretty skin causing a buzzing in my legs, just the way it feels before I sprint the clearing.

  I said, “What are you doing here?”

  She laughed. “I’m here twice a week.”

  “That I know. I mean in this town.”

  One step away from a girl like you in a place like this.

  “Same thing you are, I guess.”

  I was looking at her feeling the same good radiant power, that absolute confidence and courage, in pure possession of myself, and yet, still, there was something faded about it. Some absent element.

  Maybe it’s age.

  Or maybe, Tess, I’m getting better.

  I said, “My name’s Joey.”

  “Beth.”

  “A pretty name,” I said, though I didn’t think so at all. You barely have to move your mouth to say it. A weak sigh of a name. I could still feel the fatigue, a far-off, subterranean stream, but I went on.

  She gave me her hand. I took it and said, “Short for Elisabeth?”

  “No. Just Beth.”

  I nodded like I knew something about her,
but I was only hoping the rise would come on stronger to obliterate my hesitation.

  “Where’s your wife?”

  I smiled. “She’s not my wife. Anyway, she’s gone now.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yes.”

  There was that chemical thing between us. Even if it was low-grade, I liked feeling it again.

  A young couple came to the table and stood behind me while their son cried and, by his teeth, clung to his father’s jeans.

  “I’ll let you get back to work. Meet me for a coffee when you’re done.”

  “Maybe. Aren’t you going to buy something?”

  “What should I buy?”

  “Cheese or honey.” She lingered on the third word, gave me that smile again.

  “Honey,” I said, playing along, but my heart wasn’t in it. The engine was stuttering out.

  At the diner I sat in a booth by the window and waited with a cup of coffee. In a near lifetime of rising and falling, I had never felt that undercurrent slipping along beneath the high. It was a modulating, evening force, an unfamiliar sound—distant, quiet and calm. Which was neither tar nor bird, but was something else like caution or, perhaps, even reason.

  I waited, light and sharp, listening to it, feeling its watery counterweight. Beth arrived so lovely, her long black hair bulging and bound to her neck by a blue scarf, her cheeks pink, and then I wanted to stand on the table and sing to her, wanted to lift her up and run. Go down on my knees. Marry me, Beth.

  But somehow I stayed where I was.

  Not somehow. It was the fade. The exhaustion. It was the new sound.

  She sat across from me and we drank coffee together. Beth was funny and brash, confident and intelligent. She held the honey jar in her hands and told me about her life here. The farmer was not her father, but her brother. Was married once, too young. With her then-husband, had once owned a restaurant in Portland. Had once worked a cruise ship. Had come here where her brother owned a farm with his wife who’d died in a car accident half a mile away and now she was thirty-six years old amidst a life she’d never expected in a diner on a cold night in the foothill farmland of northwestern Washington smiling her ravenous closed-lipped smile.

  All was as it should have been—the snow beginning to fall outside, the upswing, the chemicals crackling between us, the relief of new company, the hot kick of fresh desire.

  She said, “Show me your house.”

  We walked out to her truck and in the air I laughed, felt the gears shift up again, internal, external. She drove us out of town, along the highway, turned where I told her, and then there was our house at night, lamp on in the living room, yellow porch lights, white spot upturned to the alder where those red-tailed hawks had built their nest.

  “Oh,” Beth said when she saw the house. “It’s beautiful.”

  I can’t remember the last time we’d had anyone over, shown what we’d made to someone else, and I liked doing it. Even if it was thin pleasure. I lit a fire and then left her in the living room standing before the bookshelves while I went for the scotch she’d asked for.

  Her coat was thrown over the white easy chair where Tess loves to read.

  I handed Beth the drink.

  “You live in this house alone?”

  “Lately,” I said.

  “What a waste.”

  I took her out to the deck where we looked over the clearing, the soft light of the house reflecting in the new snow.

  “What’s out there?”

  “Forest,” I said.

  “No neighbors?”

  “Not in that direction.”

  I was watching myself slashing barefoot through the light and snow, breaking the dark, even line, dissolving into the woods. The wind blew the clouds away to reveal an eyelash of moon and because of it I moved so that I was behind her. I couldn’t feel the cold. I wanted to push her hard against the railing. My mouth was so close to her neck.

  “Joe,” she said. “Come closer. I’m freezing.”

  I wanted her with the old savage violence. Or the violence I imagined I once possessed. Or I tried to conjure it. Wanted to use her body. Wanted to be vicious. Tear into her. Detach myself from feeling. I could have risen straight into the air.

  “Joe. Please.”

  I pulled her back against my chest, but I was gentle. The tidal lust ran out of me. I kissed her neck. Breathed in deep. She pushed back and moaned.

  I said, “Come inside.”

  In the living room she bent over and unlaced her boots. I liked seeing her there, long black hair trailing the floor. The rise came on stronger, the weird fatigue was nearly faded. It was quiet as flowing blood. Then I wanted to dance. I turned on the radio, but it was that goddamn classical woman, still droning on about Schumann.

  Beth was sitting on the couch watching me. She’d pulled her sweater off. Now she was wearing only a T-shirt, light yellow, and jeans. Lust again. I wanted her turned around, white knees on the khaki cushions, wrists bound behind her back, clamped in my fist. I wanted to leap over the coffee table, tear her clothes to pieces. I would be what I had never been. Somehow I would deliver this frantic wildness, which then in an instant felt as if it were near its death, or, at least, its severe dilution.

  She stood and took my hand. “Give me a tour.”

  I showed her the office absent its computer.

  The bathroom where I hide and block the light.

  I took her here into this room, flipped the lights.

  There was the oiled .45 resting on its chamois, a yellow square atop our shining table. I’d turned it three clicks to the right. You see? Despite the distance in time and space, between this table and our Cannon Beach motel room, you see how I still cannot resist a romantic tableau?

  She hesitated. Stiffened. I imagine her wishing she had on her boots.

  She nodded at it, asked, “Worried about something?”

  “It was my father’s,” I said, as if that explained anything.

  She gave me a look that reminded me so much of Tess.

  What was it exactly? Fear. Wary appraisal. I’d kept Tess back all night long, but now it was too late.

  Beth said, “Why’s it out?”

  “I was going through his things.”

  I was so tired, so ground down. My charm was fading. I wanted Tess home.

  Prayed for it right there. Maybe out loud.

  She said, “Are you okay?”

  I told her I was. I could barely keep my eyes open.

  There was no one else.

  “You look sick.”

  “I’m just tired,” I said.

  She nodded and went for her boots, her sweater.

  Said, “Maybe we can do this another night.”

  Her coat, her scarf, her hair, pulled and spun and bound.

  There was Tess’s look again.

  “You know where to find me,” she said.

  I don’t know what she meant.

  Invitation or statement of regret.

  117.

  Every few months we’d drive down to see my mother. Or I would. Or Tess. And always the report was the same. She was getting thinner. She was getting older. She was getting weaker. She had less to say.

  I know you’re tired of this. You want my mother to find God. Want her to appear bathed in golden light, a look of profound peace upon her face. For her to be pardoned, released, restored to her old passion and verve. Free.

  You want us reunited with Seymour.

  You want Claire returned and reborn having seen the error of her ways, so full of explanation and regret.

  You want a long grateful letter from Anna. You want her grown up, an undamaged young woman of real independence and intelligence.

  You want Sam Young crawling to our doorstep broken and heavy with remorse.

  Yo
u want Hank laughing at our dining table.

  You want Tess to return home.

  You want us happy and married with lovely, joyful children.

  Or perhaps not that. Maybe you’re sick of Tess and wish that I would just, for the love of fucking Christ, go sweep Beth into my arms. Or someone.

  Or is it me you’re sick of? Me and all my weeping, my weakness and wretched devotion, my broken filters, whatever the fuck they are, whatever that nonsense is.

  Maybe you’re rooting for Tess to find a true revolutionary, a constant man with high ideals and a good beard, who wears fraying rope bracelets, his long hair loose beneath ragged-brimmed hats, who is devoted to the cause. A man who will never, not for a single instant, tire of war and ambition.

  Ah, but no matter what you want, I will give only what I have.

  But why not lie? Why don’t I invent these things you want? It would be so simple to construct warm reunions, moments of sweet revelation, tender letters from White Pine, a jubilant, lantern-lit dinner around a long oak table in our green clearing.

  It is to do with some foolish idea of honor.

  No good prayer, no true love letter, no great eulogy may be composed of lies.

  Isn’t that right?

  I insist it must be.

  118.

  It takes so much work to run two bars. It requires a constant presence, a heightened energy. It is both theater and sport. All the ritual preparation. Two shows a day. Us against them. So unpredictable. So often on the edge of chaos and disaster. It is physical work. It takes a toll. And after all those years, we were sore and we were tired. Our bodies hurt. My lower back. Her feet. Then my knee, then her shoulder. We had been doing it half our lives. Maybe it was more.