He walked through the house to his old bedroom, noting the new furniture, a new piece of sewing work that lay in jumbles of yarn and needles on the table by his mother’s easy chair. Was she making a sweater for his father? A scarf? He looked at the photographs on the mantel of the fireplace—in color! They were his parents, but they were not. Their brilliant flesh tones and bright fabrics and blue skies leered at him, courtesy of the miracle of Kodak. They were people who were childless, who smiled at the camera, but their eyes belied the emptiness of those who had lost, whose eyes you could not look at for long for fear that you would fall into that deep well with them, unable to return, instead looking awkwardly into your lemonade or scotch and scratching your neck, wondering where your wife had gone. He picked one up, relieved it was not dusty, that the requirements of the household were not being neglected by his mother, that a prolonged depression had not let everything go the way of the planter. He put the picture back. These were not his parents. They were people who had simply gotten old.
Shit. His room was as he had left it. He sucked in his breath so that he would not begin to cry again. On his desk lay unopened letters. Their envelopes were yellowed, and he took them in his hands, feeling the weight of years on their delicate fabrics. His pulse quickened when he saw the return addresses, New York, NY, but then his hopes dipped when he saw the postmarks, 1947 and 1948.
Dear Calvin, the first began. I hope you’ve been taking care of yourself. Fall in New York is lovely! The energy, the bustle of the taxis and subways, the awfully smart people at parties, interesting classes—it was as if New York were gift-wrapped just for me.
I think of you often and miss you. I can’t quite explain what there was between us, but I can feel its absence. Will you come to New York to visit? Yours, Kate.
He folded the letter back into the envelope and opened the second. How long had they lain like this, along with his parent’s hopes for his return, on the desk?
There were three more letters from New York, before it appeared she had given up. But he had not. Twenty years, more, had been taken from him, and he deserved to get them back. He deserved another chance. Or did he? The rules that had existed in this room, this house, this earth, before he left for war—the passage of time, the guarantee of death—seemed a fallacy. He did not know what the rules were anymore. They were his to make. He would find her in New York, at least try—a day, a week, maybe longer—before trying to find Stanley. But he was down to his last few dollars from Maggie, enough to get on a bus. He would figure out how to get around in New York once he got there, eat trash if he had to.
The letters were opened now; there was no way to undo that, for his parents to know someone had been here. He put them in the back pocket of his jeans. They were his, he told himself, and he shouldn’t feel guilty about coming here and taking them. He opened a drawer and pulled out a folded undershirt, where his mother had always put them, sliding it over his bare chest, then opened the closet and found a sweatshirt, one he used to chop wood in during the late falls. He put the grey fabric against his cheek and felt it wet with his tears before he pushed it to his face to muffle his cries. He was home now. He could wait for his parents to return. They wouldn’t care how he looked, what had happened. They would only care it was him.
But who or what was he? He went into the bathroom and removed the bloody tissue. The bleeding from his stump had stopped, and the pain had receded to a hot, uncomfortable throb. He felt for the pinky in his pocket and took it out, pressing it to the still-open wound. Then he undid the shoelace and wrapped it around both parts, criss-crossing the thread until the pinky was loosely secured on the stump. Carefully, he washed it and wrapped it in toilet paper, flushing the bloody paper towel down the toilet. The waiting began.
He heard a car on the road. He could stand in the living room, mangled hand in his pocket, and wait. Hopefully his father’s heart was still strong. He could tell them—what would he tell them? Perhaps they wouldn’t ask. Perhaps his coming home precluded any explanation for his absence. He could still find Kate and Stanley. There was time for everything. After a few minutes, he heard the turn of the Buick onto the half mile of dirt road to their home, the fat of the rubber tires on gravel.
He held his breath and slowly unraveled the toilet paper. Already he could see that the blood had congealed, that healing was taking place at some accelerated pace. The skin on the edges of his fingers was already beginning to stretch over the bone and muscle and touch the pinky, to connect the two parts.
He was not normal. He had been a Christian in the traditional American sense; reverence for a god that seemed as natural and unquestionable as Santa Claus had been when he was five. There would be nothing in his parent’s Bible—theirs or anyone else’s—that would explain him. And if God did not allow him to exist, then God could not exist for him, either. The chasm that was formerly God’s place in his heart had been filled with cement. He thought of Kate. How could she possibly love a man who was not a man, in body or heart? How could she love a man almost thirty years—to her—gone?
And his parents, how could they understand? How could they parade him around town, their seemingly prodigal son, freak of nature? Or, they simply wouldn’t believe it was him. Or maybe it was he who was scared, to see them so fragile, so aged. So human. He wadded the blood-soaked flannel shirt into a ball and ran down the stairs and, stopping before the mantel and—there was no time for aesthetic debate—took the first picture he saw. It was one he had seen before, knew very well—a black and white of his parents together before he was born. He stuffed it into the bloody hobo bundle of his shirt, hurrying through the house. He closed the back door behind him and dropped the key back onto the circle of earth.
There was nothing he could do now but wait until they’d entered the house from the front before running for his life. The cornfields, still in their spring infancy, could not hide him, nor could the dirt road that caterpillared unobstructed to town. He heard the front door close, a small locust of voices—his mother and father and probably another couple from church they’d invited to brunch and bridge—inhabit the parlor. Then he tore across the back yard, his heels kicking up the earth like a tractor hoe.
He made it to the road when he heard her voice, warbled and weaker than the bell of sound that had rung through the house many years ago.
“Calvin?!? Calvin?!? Wait!”
The toilet paper unraveled from his pinky as he ran, and he grabbed at his hand to keep his hanging digit from dropping to the earth. But, to his surprise, it was almost attached, like a maggot to a piece of meat.
He wanted to turn back and look at her, to take one last mold of her face that he could cast in his mind, and perhaps leave one for her as well, that her son was alive, healthy, and hadn’t aged a day in almost thirty years.
He kept running.
The last time Johnson had been to the bus station in downtown Bowling Green, he had been coming home, from the war, to start his life. That life was now over; it had not ever actually begun. Now life would start again. Kate and Stanley were part of his past, and now perhaps they would be part of his future. But they had never felt like the present. The present was confusion, loneliness. And low on funds. He took the last few dollars of the money Maggie had given him and bought a ticket to New York, a hot dog, a cup of coffee, two packs of cigarettes, and the daily. In the back of the Greyhound he opened the paper and scanned the headlines. Where to start, to find out about the world? The Olympic summer games were being held in Munich. Germany, now a friend to the world? President Richard Nixon announced that 12,000 more soldiers would be withdrawn from Vietnam, from a peak of 543,400 in 1969. Johnson looked at the advertisements. Watches that kept time with quartz crystals. Televisions the size of ovens, with color screens. It was like visiting a foreign country, except he knew the language.
As the bus vibrated to life, he sat up in his seat. His foot slipped, and he bent over, wondering whether he had dropped a section of the newspaper. Th
e glossy cover of primary colors, the arching red and yellow letters, comforted him.
A Superman comic. Some boy, twelve or maybe thirteen, must have left it behind. Johnson opened the pages and settled into reading. He had spent many hours on his own bed as a boy, turning the pages, reading about the man of steel and his nemesis, Lex Luther, the love of his life, Lois Lane. He was fascinated that the forces that pulled on Superman in different directions shared the same initials. He was not smart enough to think further into the implications. Instead, he concentrated on Superman’s strengths. A man who could perform amazing feats, who could not die. Who had no friends, could tell no one, as Clark Kent, of his plight. Could love no one. Was revered as a hero. And was completely misunderstood.
It had been forty years, maybe. And every month, Superman, now more muscular, more handsome in 1972 than ever, saved the world, saved damsels, saved puppies. And he never lived happily ever after with Lois, never retired to his farm or a cabin or a houseboat in Cuba, needing time to himself. He never had a superboy or a supergirl. He kept being super. He was too young to remember his parents, Jor-El and Lara, paying homage to them in his fortress of solitude.
Johnson pulled out the picture of his parents. At the bus station bathroom he liberated it from its bulky frame and slid the black-and-white photo into the wallet he had bought at a bus station in Illinois. He looked so much like his father, the slightly wavy brown hair, the broad forehead and wide-spaced eyes, full lips. It was a face that held gravity, that was weighted with action and with heavy, laborious thoughts moving like damp sand through a straw. His mother’s slightly pointed chin and dimples gave the bottom of his face more playfulness, like a rock formation whose bottom had worn smooth where it met the waterline.
Here, his parents, standing on the shores of Put-In-Bay Island, Ohio, arms linked like lace, were even younger than he. He had not even been born. And as his memory of them faded, they would remain young, their smiles, their eyes aglow with the continued sunrise of their lives.
He returned the picture and wallet to the inner pocket of his leather jacket (bought at an Army Surplus store in Montana), where they brushed against Kate’s letters. How would he find Kate in New York? Would she be married, working in a museum? Would she be happy? Would she be happy to see him? Or had she moved on, like time, leaving him with his own Lex Luther, loneliness, also beginning with an L?
He held the comic tightly in his hands, like it was the Bible, or a fortune cookie. It may as well have been written in Chinese, like the rest of the world. The sun was behind them now, the bus plowing eastward, the orange horizon slipping, impossibly, into the color of typewriter ribbon. He put his hand on the window, making a fist. If his hand went through the glass, it would bleed. The blood would cover the window and the seat and his clothes, enough to kill someone. But not him. If he knew, during the war, that he could never die, would he have fought differently? If they all could not die, what would be the point of the war? What would be the point of anything? Death made so many things possible: domination, fear, gratitude.
Now, he was only scared of living. He leaned his head against the glass and tried to sleep. He was not scared of sleep, of the bus flying off the road and turning over and over, propelling him from the window like a bottle rocket, of the bus bursting into the flames and burning him to ash. He might be happy, perhaps, if those things happened, if he did not survive. He was scared that, no matter how many times he went to sleep, no matter how many times the world faded to black, he was always guaranteed of waking.
1973
She was on the television sometimes, the Grand Ole Opry and the Lawrence Welk show, and the camera panned close, framing her little heart-shaped face, fuller with age or maybe the weight of the road or the rainbow assortment of uppers, downers, and diuretics, her liver straining against the rye and vodka and wine, or maybe the weight that success, angel or demon, places on the eyelids, the corner of the mouth, the shoulders. The powder on her cheeks gave them a slightly metallic hue in the studio lights, and the heat cracked her lipstick, making little rivers, maps, in her lips that aged her like a tree.
But she was still beautiful. A shiny doll, painted and powdered and each eyelash separated, coated with mascara, her lips forming every word so carefully, so emphatically, that the deaf could hear her, the muscles of her mouth pouring the sound into one’s eyes, a vessel of mouth that poured sugar water and the smell of gardenia and the flicker of twilight stars.
Stanley always watched. He sat on the edge of the couch, every muscle tense, a gazelle gauging the movements of a lion fifty yards away, far enough away, on the television, in the clearing, but close enough to leap the river, to jump from the picture tube, and sink its teeth, her grip, into his neck as he staggered across the savannah, the living room, feeling his blood, his will, drain from him.
He did not drink or smoke or talk. He merely watched, blotting time and circumstance away, her voice, the glint of her eyes, the curled and set bouffant of her hair, all for his pleasure, his pain, and no one else’s. He wondered whether she knew he watched, whether she sang a special phrase for him, whether the wink between the second verse and the last chorus was for him or for someone else.
Sometimes after she sang, she would chit-chat with Lawrence Welk, Conway Twitty, whoever was the host, and she’d touch her hair absently, sprayed and unmoving, laugh a little forced, high-pitched squeal at someone’s joke, talk about upcoming tour dates, an album. Then she’d be gone, some comedy sketch or standup act following her, some commercial for Coca-Cola, and he’d stand out on the porch, looking at the road, wondering how to get to her. Roads connected all of America, he figured. One could find anyone if they took the right combination of roads.
He never got into the truck. He went back into the house, sat at the kitchen table, and drank. He drank until he passed out and if he was lucky, he did not remember the evening in question until it was long past, weeks later, too far to touch or hurt him.
Heidi would be thirteen in two months. Old enough for him to tell her who her mother was. But what purpose, he wondered, did it serve? They’d received no child support, no royalties, not even a Christmas card from Cindy or her accountants, managers, lawyers. They hadn’t received a goddamn cent in the thirteen years they had lived in the farmhouse. Not even a phone call. Years ago, Stanley had sent pictures of Heidi taken at the Sears Portrait Studio to Nashville Records. They probably sat in a mail bag with thousands of other letters from fans. He wondered whether the secretary who finally opened them threw them away or had passed them along, what had been discussed. He had never been offered hush money, although he had thought, from time to time, of asking for it. Not for himself, but for Heidi. He’d been laid off from the shirt factory and, except for an occasional job, relied on his pension to clothe and feed her. There was no money for anything, even as she deserved everything that thus far escaped her—beauty, biological parents, presents.
It would be cruel to tell her, insult to injury. She’d asked, once or twice, as a child, about her mother, cried at parent’s day in kindergarten when Stanley had come and sat on the little kindergartner chairs with all the other mothers, his polyester church paints riding high up his shins, his clip-on tie drooping over his belt like a sad dog. She’d run to the girls room, her face red and strained like an exotic fruit, and the teacher had to bring her out to Stanley.
“Why don’t I have a mommy like everyone else?” She asked in the parking lot as Stanley lifted her into the truck. She was wearing the pink and white dress she had picked out at JC Penney, one she had worn the first day of school. So proud she was of it, of herself, until she had realized that she looked different from the others, her honey skin, her angularity, her green glass eyes, Dumbo ears. She had come home asking what an Oreo was, having overheard the teacher’s aide talking about her to the teacher. It means you’re as sweet as a cookie, he’d replied.
“You have a mommy, baby.” His hands gripped the steering wheel. He’d gone back an
d forth over the years about whether to tell her Cindy had died, had been kidnapped, was a secret agent. How to tell a child her mother hadn’t wanted her, wanted them? “She’ll come home. You’ll see. And she’ll bring with her everything you could ever want. All you need to do is wait.”
Heidi looked out the window. He stole glances at her as she looked far across the fields, the horizon, the cotton candy clouds, and he knew what she was thinking: how to get to her, where to start. He stopped at the Dairy Queen on the way home, and she’d smiled, gotten a chocolate and vanilla twist. It had satisfied her that day. But there would be many others to come, he knew, waves of days crashing harder and faster, pulling him out to sea if he was not careful, both of them unmoored.
That day before Heidi’s birthday, Stanley turned on the television, hoping to catch the Orioles game. Heidi’s presents were wrapped in newspaper in his bedroom: the record album Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player from some nancy boy, Elton John, that she’d asked for and some Bonne Bell lip bubblegum lip gloss that a counter girl at Woolworths had found for him when he asked what fifty-five cents, the last of his money for the month, could buy a young girl. Heidi was in the kitchen, trying to bake a cake. She was taking home economics that year, all the kids were, and she’d bought some cake mix and frosting at the store with what was usually Stanley’s cigarette money.
He turned the dial on the television while looking through butts in the tray, hoping for a cylindrical centimeter of tobacco to smoke, but stopped at stock footage of Cindy on the picture tube. It was not time for the Opry or the Lawrence Welk show or whatever variety show on which she may have been scheduled to appear. Rather, it was a news item, a still photo, her name and dates underneath: 1917-1973. He turned up the volume.
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