“Maybe you shouldn’t,” said Bella.
And probably Bella was right, but Judy bent at the knees this time, doing her best to ignore the vice-like pinch at the base of her right hip as she measured up Bella’s backswing, then gripped her little butt, and pushed off with everything she had. She was directly under Bella when she let go, and she didn’t even have to duck. By the time she turned to look at the girl, she was already on her way back, wide-eyed and grinning, and Judy was ready to execute ten more underdogs if that’s what it took.
Faint Traces
Dave walked in the shadows as much as possible, limping slightly on his aching hip, eyes to the pavement, as he wound his way through the streets of his youth, the sidewalks a little dirtier, the houses a little more worn. In front of the library, he managed to dodge Wes Hayes, his high school student body president, and proceeded inside, directly to the children’s section where he selected seven or eight middle grade books he thought might appeal to Bella.
Dave yearned for something to read himself, but had no idea what. Maybe something about physics, but why? He had zero interest in anything theological, along with an imperative aversion to anything political. So he chose horticulture and geology, two subjects that might help him better understand and master his new home.
At checkout, the librarian was perfectly fine with not chatting, limiting the entirety of their interaction to, “Those are all due back August twenty-eighth.”
If only all his interactions in town could’ve been executed so painlessly and efficiently.
Walking past the high school, Dave doubled down on his efforts to ward off the past. But when he passed the football field it caught up to him. God, but he’d known that playbook inside out. As a halfback, he was patient to break and quick through the hole. He trusted his blockers. As a receiver out of the backfield, he had a tricky release, and ran crisp routes. He was good in space. Never mind that Tatterson couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. Walking past the western goal post, Dave couldn’t help but wonder what Rolla, Missouri, might have been like.
Navigating the center of town with his backpack, he managed to evade those inquisitive eyes upon him, knowing what he must’ve looked like to them: at the very least a curiosity, at worst a nut job. Striding purposefully past the newspaper boxes, he avoided reading the headlines. Head down as he passed the crowded patio of Cascade Coffee, he all but tuned out the random snatches of conversation. He didn’t want to know what was going on in the world. He could guess that already: the same old bullshit, but worse. Same old fat, white, incomprehensible madness. Same old orange menace. He didn’t want to hear anyone’s opinion. He didn’t care what was being done to stop the madness. Let it burn.
At the credit union, Dave checked the balance on his savings account, which amounted to seven hundred and thirty-six dollars. He considered draining it for a fleeting instant, but instead withdrew a hundred and twenty dollars. Sooner or later, he would have to ask Travers or his mom for money if he was going to remain dependent on town to any extent, but that was a bridge he would cross when he got to it.
On his way out the door, Dave heard his name, but ignored it, proceeding briskly on his way. The voice followed him out the door, then down the sidewalk. Finally he turned to find Nadene’s brother, Jerry, approaching. Before Dave could escape, Jerry locked him in an embrace.
“Brother,” he said. “You’re back. Glad you came to your senses.”
“No,” Dave said. “Just for the day.”
Jerry held Dave captive at arm’s length, inspecting him with kind, somber eyes, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Somehow, Jerry defied the diminishing effects of time. His face was as smooth and hairless as it was senior year of high school.
For years, throughout high school, and throughout his marriage to Nadene, Jerry had been like a big brother to Dave, at times more of a brother than Travers. Two years before Dave ever played varsity, Jerome Charles was the best quarterback the Vigilantes ever saw. He could’ve been the next Sonny Sixkiller if it hadn’t been for a torn labrum. It was Jerry who explained the finer nuances of offensive schemes to Dave freshman year, the same year Dave started seeing Nadene. Even when Dave was at odds with Nadene, Jerry always seemed to have his back.
Now, half a lifetime later, there remained nothing but the distance Dave had created between them, as if Nadene’s life had been bridging the chasm all along.
“You don’t look bad, brother,” Jerry said. “What are you doing down here?”
“Supplies,” said Dave, shrugging free of his brother-in-law’s clutches.
“Ah, salt, I bet. You should be catching your fill of Chinook up there this fall. It’s gonna be a good run.”
“Built a smokehouse,” said Dave.
“Smart,” said Jerry. “You’re gonna need the fat this winter. Supposed to be a cold one.”
“They’re all cold,” said Dave.
“And how’s my niece?” Jerry said.
“She’s great, doing great.”
Jerry searched him, eyes visibly doubting Dave.
“Really,” Dave assured him. “She’s great. She’s healthy, she’s happy, and she’s smart as a whip.”
“If you say so, brother. But sooner or later, they’re going to come for her.”
“I’ll be ready,” said Dave. “Look, I’ve gotta go, Jerry. It was really good seeing you.”
“Don’t be a stranger,” said Jerry. “Maybe I’ll come up this fall for a visit.”
“Ok,” said Dave. “I’ll be looking for you.”
“How will I find you?”
“I’m up past the falls, a couple miles south of the canyon. Look for a bluff above the meadow.”
“Maybe I will,” said Jerry.
But it was Dave’s hope that he would not.
“See you around, Jer,” he said.
Then he turned and walked off without looking back.
At Red Apple, Dave bought two Tony’s frozen pizzas and licorice tea, along with five pounds of brown rice, five pounds of wheat flour, five pounds of oats, and ten pounds of sea salt. He bought honey, raisins, and walnuts in bulk. He bought a little pink brush for Bella, though there was not much hair on her head left to manage. He bought a deck of cards, four spiral notebooks, and a pack of twenty-four colored pens.
At the checkout stand, the woman with the nametag that said “Kiki” was snapping gum as she scanned Dave’s groceries.
“Still camping, huh?”
“We’re all camping,” said Dave, packing the supplies directly into his backpack.
At the end of town, Dave was relieved when the sidewalk ended, and he could walk in the shadows once more. The town was haunted. Practically every square inch of the place still bore the faint traces of Dave’s erstwhile footsteps. Everywhere he looked, he seemed to have a memory attached. All those good times with Nadene, and Fishel, and Wettleson, and Spaz. All those weekend nights driving around to no purpose, all those late-night breakfasts at Dale’s, all that Friday night glory under the lights. When he thought of those times now, they only depressed him, for he could not help but compare them to what his life had become.
With forty pounds on his back, Dave walked as fast as he could back to his mom’s house.
The following morning, when they were readying to leave, Dave’s mom took him aside in the kitchen.
“Leave her with me, Davey, please.”
“I can’t do that, Mom.”
“Why not?”
Dave knew he didn’t have a good answer, at least not one that would persuade his mother. As though on cue, Bella arrived in the kitchen to save him.
“I want to go back, Nana,” she said.
His mom eyed her doubtfully. Then she turned to Dave and searched his face, but Dave just lowered his eyes.
“C’mon, baby,” he said to Bella. “Let’s beat the rain.”
Third Time Is the Charm
Midway through his first tour in Iraq, Dave began losing faith in the cha
in of command. The rule of three was a cruel math. In combat it tended to look a lot like subtraction. It didn’t take too many patrols for Dave to see that his staff sergeant, whose name shall not be uttered, was a self-serving prick, routinely volunteering the lives of his platoon to make himself look good. And make no mistake: lives were sacrificed to this end. It was the grunts and the unlucky reserves who put their butts on the line, while the superiors used them like human stepping stones.
By the end of his second tour, Dave had not only lost all faith in the chain of command, but also his faith in military enterprise as a whole, which he began to see less and less as service, and more and more as political enterprise, an industry in which he occupied the most thankless of roles. But he took the twenty grand, and re-enlisted anyway.
By the end of the deployment, Dave essentially felt like he was serving out his contract. Any noble instincts that once attached themselves to his service had withered long before he was ever deployed the third time. His sense of duty was at an all-time low. The foundation of his marriage was already showing cracks. His drive was down sexually, professionally, and socially. His sleep was already tortured. But he was trying to beat it, trying to pull himself up by the bootstraps. He was finally making progress in his daily life: small steps in redefining his expectations for happiness, in resisting his impulses, in controlling his temper, in pretending to want to interact with people, in bridging washed-out inroads to his past, in blotting out an urgent, unresolvable history that came rushing back at him in feverish waves.
He was making small steps toward feeling human again.
Re-deployment was the worst thing that could have possibly happened to him, though his sense of duty was not entirely flagging. The night before Dave deployed in March, Nadene woke him in the middle of the night, her hot breath in his ear. And no sooner did he stir than she rolled him over on his back and began to straddle him. But before they could ever engage, Nadene broke down crying, and rolled off him, and Dave lay there frozen as his hard-on withered, aware that he was unable to comfort her.
It was a harbinger of things to come.
“It will be okay,” he finally told her, half-believing it.
“I know,” she said without conviction, her voice catching.
His third tour was the worst. The suffocating heat, and the dust. The shitty food. The sweating and chafing and burning. The jangled nerves and the dry throat. The ceaseless tedium of base life, playing cards and chess, and drinking vodka with blue food coloring out of mouthwash bottles. The restless ribbing, and the competing, and the constant shit-talking.
And then, without warning, a security detail, where it seemed nobody was innocent, where it seemed every Iraqi cowering behind a wall or skulking in a doorway wanted to kill you. Dave remembered just about every detail with the odd remoteness of a dream. By then, he was numb to the violence, though his nerves were worn.
Around week six, Dave started to come unhinged. Despite his frayed nerves, and scorched sinuses, his intermittently bleeding nose, his ears that rang at all hours of the day and night, Dave managed to persist. But persistence was a tenuous state of equilibrium. A half-dozen times Dave hallucinated on patrols. Once, on a security detail, he wasn’t sure if he was asleep or awake for a good ten minutes. On five separate occasions, he heard persistent voices. Meanwhile, his head ached, his esophagus burned, and he shit his fatigues with increasing regularity. On patrol, Dave’s thoughts scurried about his head looking for cover like panicked mice, while dark impulses arrived suddenly and decisively, manifesting just as suddenly into actions whose consequences were not even considered.
Somewhere in the heat of engagement, Dave lost his moral compass. He was in crisis, unable to sustain his actions without separating himself from the consequences. It was obvious. Coach Prentice would have read it in his body language immediately. He would have seen it in his eyes and sat him down. For that matter, so would anyone who knew him.
And yet, up the entire chain of command, officials, superiors, politicians, all of them looked the other way. They just kept throwing Dave out there, despite the fact he was clearly traumatized, and clearly a potential danger to himself or anyone else who happened to cross his path. And he kept showing up, not for country or honor or justice, but for the marine standing next to him. And isn’t that precisely what Dave had learned on the gridiron? Wasn’t that the message coach Prentice and all the other coaches before him tried to impart for Dave?
“Play for the guy next to you,” Gordy told him.
And Dave had always been willing to surrender his will to some larger scheme or objective. A platoon, a team, a community, a family, they were all like a web, wasn’t that the message? So, why is it that once Dave got home, all he wanted to do was separate himself from the team, extricate himself from the web, and completely avoid the rest of humanity? Why is it he could no longer be a team player? Why was the man next to him no longer enough reason to try?
Refuge
If there was one thing in Bella’s life that became clear with the arrival of fall, it was that her dad needed her. She couldn’t say why exactly, and she was not quite sure how to serve him beyond obedience, but she knew that if nothing else, her dad needed her to be near him, or he never would have brought her here. And though she was now permitted more freedom to wander, she stuck close to camp most of the time, rarely out of earshot, though there were whole mornings and afternoons when they hardly communicated with each other. So it was not that she felt particularly wanted, only needed.
The cats were her constant companions: Boots and Betty, Boris and Tito, Sugarfoot and Jimmy Stewart. She mimicked their feline mannerisms, their lazy grace as they slunk about the bluff, their lithesome stealth as they stalked the meadow for birds.
“Boris,” she said, one day in the meadow. “Do you ever wish you were someone else? I’ll bet you don’t. I’ll bet you can’t even imagine being somebody else.”
Boris seemed to consider the statement briefly, but soon turned away to lick between his legs.
“What about you, Betty? Do you miss your old life? Are you glad we brought you here?”
But Betty had little patience for these conversations. Motherhood had changed her, or maybe it was this place that had changed her. She’d lost her old playfulness, and she was not nearly as affectionate as she once was.
“I wish you could have met my mom,” Bella said to Jimmy Stewart, curled in her lap. “I think you would have liked her. If it weren’t for my mom, we would’ve never got Betty, and then there never would have never been a you, so I guess you’d have to like her.”
Despite her ability to summon the ancient world of ice at will, Bella could no longer talk to her mother. Of late, when she thought of her mother, she thought mostly of her mother’s empty closet, and the spaces she once occupied: the kitchen table, where she smoked by the window, and bit her nails, and did crossword puzzles; the green sofa, where she sometimes fell asleep with the TV on; the empty spot in the driveway where the Dodge used to be parked. It all seemed like part of a different life to Bella. Every day it seemed like the memory of her mother grew blurrier and a little more distant. If she concentrated really hard, Bella could remember what she looked like, she could recall her scratchy voice, and recall the feel of her calloused fingertips upon her cheek. She could remember her mother telling her stories before bed, but she couldn’t remember the stories, just the sound of her voice washing over Bella as her eyes grew heavy. She could remember not crying at the funeral, and being just about the only one. She remembered knowing without a doubt that her mother was coming back. She remembered trying to explain it to the adults, and how they didn’t know what to say in response. But now, Bella knew her mother was not coming back, and she felt dumb for ever having believed that she would. She only had the memories to keep her mom alive, and she could feel them slipping away. What would happen when Bella no longer remembered her?
“Daddy,” she said, one evening, watching him clean the Winche
sters by the light of the lantern. “Did Mommy die on purpose?”
He paused in his task and lowering the barrel of the rifle rested a hand on her shoulder, looking meaningfully into her face.
“No, baby, no,” he said softly. “Mommy had an accident. Why would you think that?”
Bella averted her eyes.
“I heard a lady at the store whisper it when I was with Nana. She called it a death wish.”
“Well, that lady doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he said. “She ought to mind her own business. Shame on her.”
Bella retreated into silence momentarily, chewing on her bottom lip.
“Do you think about her every day, Daddy?” she said.
“Most days, yeah,” he said.
“What do you remember?”
“Well,” he said. “A lot of things.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“Like, I remember how good she was at Scrabble, how she’d always come up with a word I’d never heard of, and I’d challenge her, and she’d look it up in the dictionary, and she’d be right every dang time.”
“What kind of words?”
“Well, like I think ‘qanat’ was one of them, with a ‘q’ and no ‘u’ in it.”
“What does it mean?”
“Heck if know,” he said. “I doubt I’m even saying it right.”
“What else do you remember?” she said.
“I remember her laugh.”
“It was scratchy,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said with a sad smile. “I guess it was kind of scratchy.”
“Are you crying, Daddy?”
“Yeah, baby,” he said. “Just a little.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“Me, too, honey,” he said, gathering her in his arms and squeezing her.
Bella pressed her face into his itchy flannel shirt and clutched him as hard as she could as she felt her own eyes begin to sting. No matter how hard she clung to her mother’s memory, it was already growing fainter by the day. How was she supposed to keep her alive forever?
Legends of the North Cascades Page 10
