Esther Stories

Cousin Tuck’s

SHE HAD TROUBLE getting dates, so some nights she’d march into Cousin Tuck’s and wait for the one-eyed man to finish playing pool. His name was Tito, and he wore a black patch over his left eye. He was a small-time hustler who could clear tables at will, using a combination of ball-smacking power and quiet, surgical, intricacy. He was also a teacher. Really more of a teacher than a hustler, because those of us who were regulars didn’t dare play him for more than a few quarters a game. But some of us would play him to learn. He’d set up your angles, a little left, a little right, pick out spots on the ball, call pockets on shots you would never have dreamed of making had he not whispered that if you hit the 13 into the right edge of the 7 with just enough oomph to bank it off the left side—fuckdawango—you could make that shot. Tito made you feel that you could be consistently good at the game, that you really were capable of mastering the geometry. The click of the balls as beautiful as your own heartbeat. On those nights, after four, five beers, you’d be soaring and people in the booths would start to murmur about you, point the necks of their bottles your way. You standing against the wall, chalking your cue and kissing your knuckles as if all of a sudden Cousin Tuck’s was Bally’s in Atlantic City and you were the guy. Everybody’s guy. But on those nights Tito wasn’t around, you’d be back to hitting slop, back to whacking the ball all over the table, because it was Tito who made you and without him you went back to being nobody.

Her name was Nadine. She was very short and had a flat, almost squashed face, with a little chubbiness all over and eyes that, as Marty Patowski put it, were too big for a single head. But her heart was as wide and as long as the English High School football field across from the bar. She was our, Jamaica Plain’s, locally famous community activist. This was 1987. In our humble edge of Boston, she was like a pioneer. People said that she worked as a paralegal in a legal services office, but she was known for her attendance at any and all J.P. community-based events. She’d be at the Voting Rights for Legal Aliens rally (VRLA), a featured speaker at the bimonthly meeting of Latina Women Against AIDS Project (LWAAP), hustling money for the Youth Build summer employment program for at-risk teens in Roslindale (YBEP). You’d see her on Centre Street stapling flyers to telephone poles with that big carpenter-sized stapler she lugged around in a filthy-bottomed canvas tote bag. You’d overhear her in Woolworth’s quietly grilling the cashiers — Maureen and Donna — about working conditions and insurance plans. Every time you saw her riding her bike in a wobbling rush to a meeting, you’d be reminded of all the contributions you weren’t making to the betterment of society, you gluttonous hog. But Nadine never chastised. She simply tried to infect you with her enthusiasm. Hey, I’m glad I ran into you. Oliver or Cynthia or Fernanda or Carmen or Frankie T. There’s an interactive poetry reading tonight at St. Mary’s to raise money for the Art Council’s day-care center, and all you have to give is three dollars and come up with one line about what day care means to you. No kids? That doesn’t mean Reagan’s evil doesn’t affect you! I’ll have some ideas on notecards that I’ll pass around. So just show up and you can read…

Tito wouldn’t make love to her. That was his rule, because he was honest about the fact that he wasn’t in love with her. Admitted that even with his one eye he was a sucker for beauty and couldn’t get around it, so why lie. But he’d take her home with him after the bar and hold her and kiss the scratchy backs of her arms. His bed always had clean white sheets, hotel sheets, and Nadine would feel a little guilty and decadent in that bed, the sheets slick against her bare thighs. She couldn’t help thinking of all the people who would never know a bed so clean, the men and women wrapped in garbage bags sleeping in the park on Vermeer. But she usually got over it, thinking that a lot of people actually got laid once in a while, damnit, so she should be entitled to her little nibble.

On the mornings after, they’d wake up before seven, and Nadine would make a huge buttery breakfast of heaped eggs, toast, and four flavors of jam. Tito would take a run through Arnold Arb and pick up a Globe and a Herald on his way home. Then they’d sip coffee and read the news silently in Tito’s immaculate kitchen. He was a printer and spent his days covered in ink, but outside of work, because of his work, Tito was fastidious, constantly scrubbing.

He taught her pool. Unlike the rest of us, no more than one-night wonders, Nadine actually had some talent. She wasn’t Tito, but after a couple of weeks of lessons she was quietly clearing tables and disposing of some of the better guys in the bar like Angel Cruz and Blake McClusky, Russell McClusky’s little nothing brother.

“She empties her eyes,” Tito said. “Like Willie Mosconi said, ‘Friends, there is nothing in this world but the balls and the pockets.’ What the master meant was that you have to be like some fool drowning. It’s all blue from there. See? The table’s your ocean. Once the other stuff gets in there, once you start noticing your opponent’s fancy shoes…Once you start hearing the music — even Miles’s battaboop — it’s over. You’re through. And Naddy’s got it. Intuitively, she empties. You don’t teach that.”

Nadine and Tito’s story would circulate among those in the know around the bar. How Tito taught Nadine how to kick some ass — and that some nights he’d take her home. Most guys gave him no grief — hell, a warm body’s a warm body. In Boston in February, there’s guys who sleep with frozen squirrel corpses. Once, when Marty Patowski said that Tito probably put a patch over his good eye when he was delivering the Bob Evans home to Nadine, Sal Burkus shot him a look so deadly that Marty coughed and took it back. “Jesus, I joke. Can’t anyone tell a joke in this friggin’ place?”

Burkus pointed the rim of his beer in Marty’s direction and said, “Not you. You can’t tell any jokes.”

On the summer night he showed her his left eye, Tito was standing in the doorway of the bathroom in his designer underwear. Nadine was sitting on the edge of his bed unbuttoning her blouse. He’d pulled a clean T-shirt out for her, and it lay neatly folded on the bed beside her thigh.

“I want to see your eye,” Nadine said. She’d asked before, but she always backed off when he refused. “It’s a part of you and I want to see it.”

Maybe Nadine caught Tito off guard barefoot in those silk briefs he got on sale at Filene’s. It also could have been that he just figured, finally, it’s only Nadine, what difference does it make if she sees? She of all people should be able to handle this. Right? Doesn’t she volunteer at that nursing home on Childs Street, the place tucked back in the trees where all the inmates are old and deformed, on the edge of death, hollering into the night, a bunch of elderly lunatics clinging to their lives by yelling themselves hoarse? Doesn’t she sit and read to those people and put her hand on their raving arms to calm them? Tito shrugged and lifted the patch. He smiled. “You asked.”

She couldn’t conceal her revulsion. She looked down, at the clean shirt, then back at the eye. It was wreckage. A flap of skin and a gash, half an eyelid only partly covering a blurry mass of tissue, a gobble of iris and blue-white cornea.

Her reaction didn’t surprise him. Tito slid the patch back down. Renee had done the same thing when he finally showed her. Had acted as if she were seeing it over and over again after he put the patch back down. Here was the same gagging look. And like Renee, Nadine was now saying something about blind people, about how much he had to be thankful for with his one good eye. It was as if someone had recorded the same bullshit Renee said and was now playing it from hidden speakers in this very room, as if Renee were under the bed. Baby, of course you aren’t any different to me now. How could I love you less? But Renee was three years ago. She didn’t leave right after. No. That would have been unseemly. But soon enough after. For a clown with two perfect shiny eyes, a greasebag assistant restaurant manager from Quincy. Tito took consolation in knowing that Renee carries the memory of his eye with her. That sometimes in bed with her tomato-sauced boyfriend, his eye floats across her night-mares like a wound.

“I’m sorry,” Nadine said.

“No need.”

“I bugged you.” She stood up and moved closer to him, but Tito backed away. “I should have known.”

“Known what?”

“That it would hurt you to show it.”

“I’m not one of your causes.”

“Did I say that? That you were a cause?”

“Save your bleedy heart for your social work.”

Nadine stepped back to the bed, fisted the shirt, and threw it across the room. She’d promised herself when they first started leaving the bar together that this was only about being with someone, someone to help chew up the meaningless hours when she couldn’t work. That was all this was ever going to be. She turned and faced him. Stood there in her unbuttoned blouse and plum-colored bra. “And I’m some princess, Tito? You taking Princess Fergie home with you?”

“You’re being stupid here now.”

“You can’t look at me. Easier with the light off?”

“Why don’t you put the T-shirt on?”

“What if I love you?”

“Nadine. Don’t—”

“For the sake of argument. Me with my big ass and this face. What if I do?”

“I told you.”

“Right. That you’re waiting for some Brahmin with a ponytail to stray into the bar, a lost lamb in search of directions. Excuse me, I’m looking for the Green Street metro. Oh my!” She put her hand over her heart and swooned. “A hunky to beat all hunkies!”

“Naddy—”

“And he’s Mexican! Or something like Mexican. Oh, they will be absolutely floored on Beacon Hill, floored!”

Tito retrieved the shirt from the floor and tried to hand it to her, but she refused, kept right on talking at him in that screeching voice, what the little lost girl would look like, her curls, her sneery lip, her little yellow shorts, her peek-a-boo thighs…

Tito watched her and listened. Her half-naked rave in the middle of his room. The rain pelted the window like a phantom tap dancer. When he tried to take her in his arms, she whapped him. “Like you’re the bastard that invented loneliness.”

For the first time he didn’t ask her for help scratching his back, and she didn’t offer. That night they slept on opposite edges of the bed. Even the bottoms of their feet didn’t touch. When Tito woke up to news radio at 6:17, Nadine was long gone.

Some say they fled away together. To a cabin in backwoods Maine where they still speak French. Or maybe it was Newfoundland. San Bernardino. Others say they went separate, and not far, that she stuck to her guns and never spoke to him again, that she went to Waltham and he went to Medford. There’s even one guy who swears he saw Tito doing some strange ritual dance outside her apartment, three days after she’d packed up a U-Haul and left J.P. to stew in its own juice. This guy said Tito’s dance was something like half hopping and half praying, and that he kept going around and around in a circle. It all depends on how big a liar the guy who’s telling it is. Because the fact is, there isn’t anybody around here who knows anything more than I do. And what’s it matter, really? Neither of them ever set foot back in Cousin Tuck’s. What else is there?

Before they vanished, Nadine rode her bike into the bar. Pedaled right through the door. It was a hot night, and Moca Joe had propped the door open with a brick. That tote bag dangled from her handlebars. Not stopping the bike, in mid-speech about the uselessness of pool, she pedaled by our row of stools to the table, still going on about pool, how it was a disgusting waste of time and resources. Billiards! The world rides on a highway of shit while we hit glass balls into pockets like oblivious ducklings. And she called Tito all sorts of names. I won’t go into all the particulars, but she let him have it as bad as she could give it, in front of all of us, in the place where he was king. She went right for his throat and said Tito’s rule over Cousin Tuck’s was like Reagan’s, slack-jawed and drooling at the wheel while the crew cuts run the country from the basement. The pool shark racks ’em up again. Another round of opium for the masses. Then she got off the bike, let it drop, and turned to us at the bar. She said something that sounded rehearsed: “Listen up, louts, I LOVE his eye. Not his pool eye, ignorants. Do you hear me? The eye he hides.” She turned around and approached Tito. She placed both hands on the green felt and pulled till it ripped. Then, with one angry finger pointed at him, she said, low and vicious, as if this worst truth had only just occurred to her, “Forty-two years on earth and still dumb enough to be vain. And by the way, we didn’t fuck. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

She got back on her bike and rode slowly toward the door. A couple of guys at the front tables moved their chairs out of the way to give her clear passage. And through the whole thing Tito just stood there holding his cue and looking at the chalk blue tip as if it were the thing exposing him, calling him out.

After Nadine coasted out of the bar (Angel stood by the door, kicked his heels together, and saluted), Tito yanked the triangle off the hook by the Bud Light girl and started to rack. He moved in the slow methodical way a shamed man does when he knows everybody’s watching. His hands wandered around as though they were detached. Nobody — not even any of the newcomers, who could not have understood the significance of what had happened — stepped up to challenge. Tito broke, and the crack of the balls in the silence of the bar was enough to make even Sal Burkus wince. We listened to him knock around. He avoided the tear she’d made in the felt. Nobody made any comments. He waited a decent half hour before leaving, so we wouldn’t think he was chasing her heels, her rattling back fender.

Two Poes

THEY WERE BOTH in town impersonating Edgar Poe. You’d see one or the other charge down the street in a ragged morning coat, cape, and cravat, with a similar wavy crop of unruly hair and wide forehead, but one would be silent and smiling, the other growling like something rabid. Originally, they were part of a festival honoring Poe, but the festival, after a while, became irrelevant. In time, it felt as if they’d always been with us, those two who stomped our streets, hunched and shrouded in black. They gave respective one-man shows on alternate nights, except Sunday. Growling Poe performed on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; Smiling Poe on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Both performances were sparsely attended. In one famous instance, Growling Poe did a beseeching, raging version of his show for one deaf senior citizen who hadn’t even come there for Poe. The woman had stumbled down into the dark catacombs on a far different mission. She was looking, she told the angry, pacing, furious-haired man, for her beloved kitty. Growling Poe was already irate that nobody had shown up that night and imagined that she’d been sent by his enemies to make a clown of him. He repeated her question in a diabolical whisper: Have I seen your kitty? This confused the old woman, because she could read lips. “Yes, that’s what I asked. Have you seen my cat? She likes to roam down here. This isn’t the first time. Naughty pussy crawls in through a window.”

And Growling Poe said it again, except this time it wasn’t a question. “Have I seen your kitty. My dear, Muddy, I’m afraid I have. Something’s happened.”

“To Punim?”

“Yes, to Punim.” He jabbed a finger toward a folding chair. “Sit.” And as the old bird watched in terror, begging him to return Punim alive, Growling Poe launched into his second act, an abbreviated telling of “The Black Cat,” cutting right to the moment when the pet assassin reaches down and gouges out the eye of the feline who torments him with love.

Although on the surface at least, Smiling Poe was a kinder man than Growling Poe — all the merchants downtown would tell you this — Smiling Poe didn’t have much better luck luring people down to the catacombs for his shows. So why, you ask, an Edgar Allan Poe Festival in our town when our idea of theater is the high school’s annual abomination of Li’l Abner? It’s a good question, but if you have to ask, you don’t know Rita Larry-Pontewitz. Rita Larry-Pontewitz is famous for being a thrice-widowed eccentric with incurable boredom and more money than our town’s two savings-and-loans can handle. She likes to pretend that we care more about culture than we actually do. Thus, every few years or so she pours a little of her fortune into a project designed to bring us culture and tourist revenue. “Gonna put us on the map,” she shouts, as she cruises down our sidewalks in her golf cart, handing out flyers for the ballet, the opera, ancient Chinese table dancing. She’s never asked us if we wanted anybody to find us or not, but we tolerate her because she often donates money for things we do need, like a new monorail system connecting our downtown with our new mall and the reconstructed driving range and put-put center we named in her honor.

In the beginning, we were even excited about the festival and hauled out our forgotten copies of Poe from cardboard boxes in the basement and stayed up nights rereading “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Oblong Box,” “Hop-Frog,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” after which we were again surprised and mildly annoyed that those killings were all an innocent monkey’s havoc. We dutifully attended the art exhibitions and the Vincent Price movies, and we happily bought tickets for the one-man shows given in the basement of our Historical Society, which the society president and chief tour guide, Hal Hodapp, renamed the catacombs. The catacombs were a dank, cramped basement filled with stacks of molding telephone books that made people sneeze so loudly and profusely during performances you sometimes couldn’t hear either Poe. But Hal Hodapp, who serves also as Rita Larry-Pontewitz’s unofficial propagandist, circulated the story that the basement of the Historical Society had been an execution chamber back when beheading was still legal in our county. (New Hampshire Puritans don’t mess around.) So the catacombs it was, no matter how much mold, and Hal, who shared Rita’s desire to put us on the map, placed signs along the I-73 corridor to attract tourists to the festival. SEE NOT ONE BUT TWO EDGAR A. POES IN CHAMBER OF LOST HEADS.

Most people in town saw both Growling Poe’s and Smiling Poe’s show at least once. All well and good. We clapped and clapped and we clapped. That was that. Our literary interlude was over. We tromped our books back down to the basement, because they crowded our shelves. Then an odd thing. They didn’t leave. Even after the rest of the festival packed it up and moved on to Ossipee. Even after Rita herself lost all interest in Edgar Allan Poe and disparaged him and his impersonators in the streets, a mother casting stones at her babies. “All right, enough already!” she yowled from her golf cart. “Besides, the real one was a drunk and married his eight-year-old sister! Is this the kind of role model we want to encourage for today’s lusty youth?” She’d already begun to plan her next project, a tribute to our town’s glassblowing heritage. To his credit — though he began to do Rita’s bidding by inventing a glassblowing heritage, complete with an archaeological dig behind Shaw’s — Hal Hodapp stuck with the Poes and didn’t, despite Rita’s thunder, evict them from the catacombs. Hal maintained that their voices kept the rats from coming upstairs and gnawing the carpet.

Neither Poe ever spoke to the other. We assumed, without giving it much thought, that the nature of being Poe is such that there can’t be more than one of you. Why they both decided to stay is anyone’s guess, but I’d say the two Poes agreed on one thing: that art need not be seen by human eyes to be art, even when it’s drama. Still, it was funny to see two identically dressed men in period clothes pass each other on the street without a word, Growling Poe glaring, Smiling Poe raising the corners of his mouth — slightly — but enough for us to notice and remark that the more he smiled, the worse he looked.

They kept at it, week after week, month after month, depending on handfuls of tourists. Hal told us that in February there was no audience for either show for two weeks running. But every weeknight and Saturday they went on anyway, performing entire shows for rows of empty folding chairs. Hal knew because he lived upstairs at the Historical Society and admitted, when Rita Larry-Pontewitz wasn’t around, that he liked to listen to the Poes from the open door of an old laundry chute.

At this point, I should confess, though I am no one important, that I felt there was something not quite right about Smiling Poe. He had, if this is possible, too much talent for his work. For me, Growling Poe was easier. He was a simple, vengeful man and therefore consistent. His openly hostile demeanor when he walked our streets matched his stage presence. His show was mostly shouted fury. Growling Poe’s Poe anticipated that the world would turn against him — and the world delivered as promised. When I saw Growling Poe’s show, I was depressed, anxious, pessimistic, but never afraid. I didn’t fear death to the degree of a constant squeezing pressure against the temples. Growling Poe didn’t overcome me with dread. But isn’t dread what we ask of a Poe? I, who have never had anybody to lose and am still waiting, know that even Growling Poe’s delivery of “The Raven” was complacent. It was as if he’d always expected to lose Lenore. Growling Poe reveled in the easy and dismal; what could this misery known as life bring you other than the loss of the only one you ever loved? And so, he enjoyed his own anger too much to feel a single word of the poem he had memorized, acted so beautifully. He missed the point. Wasn’t it Emerson who said that every single word is a poem? If anyone ever has, the real Poe understood this too well, as his hand stiffened and he could no longer hold his pen to write even one more of Emerson’s sacred words in that cold house of his. And you know damn well that he couldn’t reach for his wife’s precious little hand, because she, young thing, was as cold as he was, and after that she was dying, and the dying have no warmth to give the living. Forgive me for getting carried away. Because we know all this, don’t we? We’ve heard it all before. We die alone, and the real Poe wrote this out in his own blood, and though Growling Poe had done all his homework (in his program notes he wrote that he’d read all the books in Roderick Usher’s library, including, of course, the Directorium Inquisitorium by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne), he never understood how quickly our anger at being left dissolves into a loneliness no words can describe, not even words on the page. You can’t take hold of the powdered hands of the dead, and this is what Smiling Poe understood too well. Embedded in his quiet smile was always the aloneness of grasping for a hand that’s gone.

He was a short, bulbous man, much smaller than Growling Poe, with a missing front tooth. When he spoke, his voice whistled out in a soft hiss. He had the accent of a far-off place which we couldn’t, even with an atlas, identify. Somebody said he might be from Missouri, but somebody with an Aunt Leona in St. Louis insisted that if he was from anywhere, he was from south of Cape Girardeau. We never asked him directly. None of us ever spoke to either Poe, and Smiling Poe was even more unapproachable than Growling Poe, who, though he spoke harshly to our grocers, florists, and stationers, at least made pretense of conversation. For instance, Growling Poe would say things like: “You call this an avocado?” or “Is there a particular day of the week you don’t cheat people? The Lord’s Day, perhaps?” Smiling Poe, on the other hand, always spoke politely, but always at, never to. He was the one who scared us, and although his show was slow in spots, especially during his ten-minute attack on that vapid Professor Longfellow, the horror of emptiness, the sadness of the tomb, lurked in every word he softly uttered. During “The Cask of Amontillado” you could hear drunken Fortunato’s groans for mercy as if they were pleading from your own chest. It wasn’t pleasant, Smiling Poe’s show, but it was necessary. Yet, twice was enough dread, even for me. Who wants to be reminded more than that that we’re all Fortunato? That we’ll all, every one of us, beg the joke over as the mason walls us in?

The fact of his being still down there began to grate — and it went beyond my nerves. Other people had the same notions, but nobody dared talk about it. You didn’t need to see his show more than once to feel his presence all over town. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, that same death drifting up out of the basement. Monday, Wednesday, Friday were an imitation — this we could tolerate. We started ignoring Smiling Poe harder. When we saw him haunting the sidewalks, we ducked into insurance agents’ offices or the dry cleaners to avoid seeing his face and that missing tooth. Growling Poe got blithery about parking tickets and bad vegetables and bird shit on the hood of his rented Toyota and, though not a stellar actor, was at least human. Smiling Poe walked above us with that grin that jutted from his lips like a knife blade, and after thirty weeks of it we began to sympathize with Rita Larry-Pontewitz’s campaign to ban the real Poe from the library and his impersonators from our city limits. Growling Poe if only because his clothes and big forehead reminded us too much of Smiling Poe.

And still they gave shows — ticket prices had long since been slashed in half — always to unsuspecting tourists hungering for a bargain (who cared what it was?) who’d been lured to town by Rita and Hal, who had put us on the map. We were starting to become known as the town that couldn’t get rid of its Poes. Until. Isn’t there always an “until” in stories of death? And what story is not, finally, a death?

It happened on a Tuesday night during Smiling Poe’s show. It was almost spring, and after a long winter, tourist attendance for the shows had actually been picking up. That night Hal Hodapp, who was handing out flyers in the Historical Society foyer advertising our glassblowing exhibition, had counted five people descending into the catacombs when he noticed that one of them was Growling Poe in disguise. Hal said it wasn’t a very good disguise, but different enough for him that he looked like a new man. He was dressed as an average guy about our town, his hair combed forward, wearing a faded Izod shirt, circa 1972. Hal was curious, because to his knowledge neither Poe had ever seen the other’s show, so he followed the short line downstairs. He told us later at the Blue Parrot that it was a virtuoso performance, the best he’d ever seen in person or listened to from the laundry chute. That Smiling Poe looked like he’d lost weight, that his face had begun to shrivel, raisin-like, and his one front tooth gleamed a hideous yellow in the shallow light. Two cats rubbed against his legs, and what was so terrible, Hal said, was that Smiling Poe acted kindly toward the cats, that often in the middle of the show he reached down with his skull-colored hands and rubbed them. Those cats. Hal said all he wanted was to leave and go upstairs and curl up with his electric blanket turned all the way to twelve, because Smiling Poe emanated cold, even as his hand stroked the cats. But he had stayed because he wanted to watch Growling Poe’s reactions. And at our table at the Blue Parrot, Hal said Growling Poe’s face during the show reminded him of the men he’d imagined about to be beheaded in that very room. Because his eyes never moved, never twitched.

No one will ever know if he planned it in advance or if it came to him in a sudden jolt of jealous inspiration, but during Smiling Poe’s almost entirely whispered “Raven,” Growling Poe threw his voice at the very moment of the bird’s first “Nevermore.” Growling Poe was as mediocre a ventriloquist as he was an actor, Hal said, but it was good enough, and Smiling Poe looked up at the corner to the left of the papier-mâché bust of Pallas, and he didn’t stop, didn’t say, “Nevermore,” just went on with the poem. Each time it was the bird’s turn to talk, he let the corner do it. Hal said that by the third or fourth time, all four tourists from Bangor knew it was the guy in the third row, in the pale golf shirt, but by that time Smiling Poe believed in the voice.

Hal’s eyes got red, and he thrust down the last of his 7-Up. “I tell you, the man thought he’d reached beyond the grave, that after thousands of ‘Ravens’ he’d finally broken through to someone. To the devil, to God, to Poe himself, or—” Hal paused and we all leaned forward. I noticed Hal’s gums had turned the color of ash. “Or, to his own Lenore.”

When he reached the poem’s final moment, Smiling Poe said so softly you had to strain to hear him, like a man swimming to the surface of a dream:

And my soul from out that shadow that lies

floating on the floor

Shall be lifted—

And he waited, as though he actually expected the dread word to come later than before. And he stood there smiling that awful smile, his legs akimbo.

Shall be lifted—

And still there was nothing from the corner.

“I didn’t look at Growling Poe at that point,” Hal said. “How could I? Man so cruel to lead another man into belief and then rip the rug out like it’s nothing.”

Smiling Poe didn’t continue. Hal told us that after his unfinished “Raven,” he just walked out, although there was a good fifteen minutes left in his show and Montresor still had to murder Fortunato. They listened to his slow clod up the stairs. Nobody moved. Everybody, even the cats, watched the corner. Hal said he even prayed. Then Hal backed up his chair, dropped three quarters on the table, and left us. We listened to one of the quarters bounce and spin before landing flat, and we felt ashamed, though we couldn’t have said why. And even now, even years after, when shame still coats us like the fine dust we often wear, thanks to the cement factory north of town, we still can’t say why.

They found him Wednesday morning drooping from a light fixture in his hotel room. There was an unfinished sandwich on the table and two black suits in the closet. The coroner said, medically speaking, Smiling Poe had been dead for at least eight hours, but the cleaning woman who found him swore — she still swears — that when she opened the door he was still writhing, that he didn’t stop moving until she touched him, poor man, never seen anybody look so lonely — not dead, lonely.

Shoe Story

THE PHONE deadly silent, I recall a certain pair of shoes.

We were at Ike’s, at our table by the window, having burgers and sloppy cheese fries, and I was whining about Devon and how she’d dumped me for the twenty-seventh time. On my ass this time, I said. And this time, this time, I swear I won’t call her back when she calls. This time I’m going to have R-E-S-O-L–V-E. This time when I say I’m going to do something, by fucking God, I’m going to do it. Cal yawned a long yawn. He’d heard it all before and didn’t want to waste his breath on eloquence he’d already orated, as he put it. We were circling again. Ike’s, burgers, cheese fries, Devon dumping me number 22, 23, 24, 25, 26…But during take number 27 something happened, something that pushed us out of our routine. A woman’s voice. Crass and loud and roaring and beautiful and low. A woman’s voice, upstairs, in the apartment above Ike’s.

Liar! Nobody lies like you! Nobody! You lie and you lie and you lie, and when you say you’re not lying anymore, you lie about whether you’re lying.

Bullshit, a man retorted. Meek, but not dead yet. Bullshit. What about Martin Jumbileau?

Martin Jumbileau? she raged. Martin Jumbileau! You mean you’re going to bring him into this? Like I’m some kind of lowlife you pulled off the street and saved. Tanya’s right. You are foul.

Then she winged her shoes at him.

I know this because Cal and I were sitting there listening, wiping our hands on our pants — Ike’s got no napkins — when two white shoes dropped into the street like tiny planes crash-landing. Women’s patent-leather pumps with straps. They lay sprawled on the pavement, toe to toe, linked in the agony of the fall.

Cal and I stared out the window at those snazzy shoes as we listened to the silence of victory unfold in the apartment upstairs. And the world was merciful. It did stop its spin, and those shoes were angels dispatched to rescue ourselves from our own grease-soaked and burbling-over hearts.

Thursday Night at the Gopher Hole, April 1992

ON A THURSDAY NIGHT, in the tiny men’s room at the Gopher Hole in Gilbertsville, Iowa, in the infamous pisser with the hidden step down — ask Candice what happened to Frank Knipp’s forehead when it met the urinal after he tripped in the dark — the other Frank, the quiet one, Frank Waverly, saw something alarming in the mirror. Odd furrows, just above and below his eyes, ruts that looked like they were somehow getting deeper by the moment. And his cheeks were now twin percolating spasms. Frank Waverly stared at himself. He’d had two, three beers; he wasn’t drunk. Frank Waverly rarely got drunk. He was known as a light drinker who thought a lot about things, a methodical man who trolled around for answers before making judgments. For this reason, he was a man who could always be called upon to fix odd things — not because he was so clever with his hands, but because he studied what was wrong with something before he touched any of the parts.

Examining his face more closely, Frank went through some of the possible explanations for this strange turmoil. He knew immediately that whatever it was had nothing to do with fear of marriage, of having to be with Nancy forever even if things didn’t pan out, or fear that sex wouldn’t be any good after. All that crap that Raymond and Pauly Sicosh kept razzing him about. He wasn’t afraid of weddings — it was the only thing he’d ever really wanted. When they were boys, his brother Lance drew pictures of himself as a dentist torturing babies; Frank’s drawings were of tuxedos and veils and four-story cakes the size of the Kickapoo township landfill. So it wasn’t Nancy. Nor was it her last name, which was enough to shrivel the balls of most men in town. You had to tread carefully when dealing with a Degardelle, particularly a female Degardelle. If something went wrong, you’d end up with a posse of mothers and aunts and eighteenth cousins chasing you to Sioux City with shovels and rakes and firearms. Nobody (and this had been true, people said, since the Civil War) embarrassed that family and got away with it. Chick Larson’s stunt with Nancy’s cousin Theresa was an obvious case in point. His famous two-days-before-the-wedding waffle; now he lives under Buicks at the Jiffy Lube in Cedar Falls. But Frank had gone to school with Degardelles (Randall, Stevo, Little Joey). He’d delivered pizzas with Degardelles (Little Joey, Nancy’s older sister Steph). He’d been surrounded his whole life by that locally royal family. He wasn’t intimidated by them and besides — and on this he truly walked alone — he actually liked Nancy’s mother. Not accepted, feared, or stood in awe of, but liked. She had been his third-grade teacher (now she was Superintendent of Schools), and even though she’d stomped on his foot whenever he stuttered his T’s, she’d taught him to read.

The bizarre doings in his face didn’t stop. His gurgling cheeks were beginning to expand. He thought of Nancy after she got her wisdom teeth pulled and came home morphed into Louis Armstrong. And it wasn’t that Nancy talked too much, even though she did. That was what he loved about her, that she never stopped the chatter, that she went on about who knew what half the time. Babbling onward about Nick Desmond’s wife, Suzie, and how nuts she was with her backward jogging. Then she’d switch and talk about summers up at the Degardelle family cottage in Rhinelander. Then, a related story, maybe, about her Uncle Vasco and his seasonally wandering hands. Then she’d inexplicably about-face into another merciless attack on Barbra Streisand. “I mean what the hell do I care how many neuroses she has?” What mattered to Frank was not the content but the dependability of her patter. Nancy filled the often unendurable silences of his life. He didn’t exist in silence literally. S and F Packaging was as loud a place as any. It was just that there were times in the day — even when he was working side by side with people — when he’d feel the silence build to a low whine, as if a mosquito were trapped and slowly dying in his ear. An odd, sometimes nagging, sometimes blissful silence that cut him off from everybody, even his closest friends, guys he’d grown up with and now worked beside. Guys whose kids called him the Other Uncle Frank on the Fourth of July. For the most part he hid the problem well. Nobody except Nancy even knew about it. Whenever it was obvious to others that Frank was trying to read their lips rather than listen to them, most just thought, That’s Frank Waverly, thinking so hard about other things that he can’t keep up.

For a long time he’d been certain that his brother was the cause of what he considered his private condition. He might be filling an invoice code or on hold with a wholesaler when he’d be struck by the simple thudding fact of his brother. That his brother hiccuped, that his brother farted, that he could do both, proudly, at the same time. That it was Lance who once changed the channel for an entire hour. That Lance was the one who squirted his mother’s hair jizz in both his ears and asked him if he could hear the Pacific Ocean now. That he was the one who cross-country skied on the roof of Hoover Elementary and whooped at the fat cop to come up and get him if it was so illegal. That it was Lance who threw the alarm clock and then the basketball to wake him up on the morning of a day he has no other reason to remember now. Sometimes he thinks he’s co-opted his brother’s dumbest memories and made them his own, because remembering what Lance did is easier than remembering the physical Lance, the one with the disgusting fungus toes, the one who slept with his eyes half open, like a bad imitation of a dead guy.

Frank gripped the sides of the sink and glared at himself in the murky light. Someone jiggled the door handle. Frank’s shoulders knotted, the way they did if anyone tapped him from behind when he was in the silence. Except now he was watching it happen in the mirror, and it wasn’t temporary. His shoulders stayed hunched. The ruts around his eyes were deepening into ditches and his cheeks were still blimping. A dark-purple fluid was beginning to drip from his nose into the sink. The handle rattled again. Frank managed a shallow “Still in here.” Whoever it was — it sounded like Tony Lemoyne — said, “Laying an egg in there or what?” Frank didn’t answer. He just kept staring. Not only at everything that was going wrong in his face, but also at the things that remained the same. His skimpy eyebrows, his slightly bucked teeth, his disproportionately fat upper lip. At the mustache he’d hated for six months but didn’t shave off and couldn’t say why not. He pressed the tab of the soap dispenser and caught the pink splat. He foamed up his face and rinsed, but still couldn’t get rid of any of it, what was new or what was him. He checked his pulse, which seemed okay, though the Red Cross class had been years ago and he couldn’t remember how long to keep his fingers on his wrist. But there was a beat there. One, one, one, one, one. Then he said, out loud, “God?” It was unlike Frank in that he didn’t think about it before he blurted. It came from his mouth not his brain. Here in this bathroom that Candice cleans twice a year, once because she always hides Easter eggs behind the toilet and again before the health inspector comes. That asshole Lemoyne kicked the door. “There’s a man out here that’s gonna start squealing like a pig.” Frank laughed, but not at Lemoyne. No one laughed at Lemoyne, even when he was funny. Nancy once asked him if he was an atheist. Her Grandmother Degardelle was worried. He’d lied, said he was a believer. Now here he is, a secret blasphemer, in this stink of a bathroom with Tony Lemoyne holding his legs together outside the door, trying to read his face for a message from on high. Shit, if John Denver can talk to Him in the rearview mirror of a Pinto, why not me? He hoped it didn’t have anything to do with politics, because he hadn’t read the Register in days. Maybe this has something to do with Sadaam again. Another call to arms. Rallying the troops to kill some more Arabs in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. If that was the case, though, why wouldn’t He go through Raymond, because he’d been in Desert Storm the first time around and he was right there at the bar? (Or Nancy, because she videotapes C-Span.) Frank’s eyes turned from their usual hazy brown to black, and his upper lip curled over his mustache and began to dam up the purple fluid, so that he started to breathe it back up his nose. He finally got scared and considered leaving his face and calling Nancy — Candice would let him use the phone behind the bar. He would tell her what was happening, and Nancy would say, Wow, Frank, reminds me of that Bible thumper convention my sister Julia dragged me to: eighty thousand people in a football stadium taking turns narrating their personal experiences with God. God on the call-waiting, God on the intercom at the Department of Motor Vehicles, God in the plastic-only recyclables. What’d you say was wrong with your nose, Frank? Disgusting purple what’s coming out of your nostrils?

Talk about embarrassing Degardelles if he walked out of there looking like this. He thought of what Lance would say if he could see him now. You know the real miracle here, Frank, is that you haven’t gotten all that uglier. And it was then that he prayed, for the first time, without watching himself and laughing. Prayed that his brother, though he loved to inflict pain, had felt none. Frank prayed standing, still gripping the sink, still watching the siege in his face. Lance changing a tire too close to the road and the trucker, who maybe dozed for a split second or maybe didn’t see him, edged a sliver to the right and, without even nicking the Impala, ended Lance at seventeen. He prayed for Lance and the trucker who’d scooped him up and brought the bloody mass that was his brother to the emergency room. When the trucker heard that Lance was gone, he’d stormed out of the hospital and dumped his cargo into the parking lot, kicking and dragging boxes, ranting, How late, Mr. Haskins? How fucking late am I now, Mr. Keith Haskins? He went on for hours, whacking away at boxes and cursing Haskins. His mother always insisted that the trucker’s performance in the parking lot was grief over himself, over the potential loss of his job, his license, his reputation. She said she forgave him, but that didn’t mean she had to believe him. I’m sorry to say it, she said, but nobody gets that crazy over a stranger. But Frank had an idea then — and he was only twelve when all this happened — that his mother was a fool. And here was that trucker now staring out from his own bloated face, still furious, still shouting — on his way somewhere then, now going nowhere, still in the parking lot hysterical.

Lemoyne kicked the door harder. Some other guys joined him. He heard Candice say, Maybe he knocked himself out like Frank Knipp did that time. What’s with the Franks? Maybe they should start pissing in the alley behind Daskell’s. And he heard Raymond shout: “You defrosting the tenderloin in there, Frank?” Somebody — it sounded like Cash Lorimer — asked why Candice didn’t just go and get the key, and Candice screamed, It bolts from the inside, dildo! Frank pinched the bulb of his oozing nose and tried to hold his breath. Raymond had once told him that there’s no real difference between faith and endurance. He talked about the waiting and the hoping after he got back from the Gulf, even though he’d confessed in a whisper to Frank that working the computer on the USS Saratoga was about as dangerous as dealing blackjack on the gambling boat in Bettendorf. “Even had women commanders in tight pants. Not like my Uncle Telly getting his ass cheeks shot off at Chu Lai.” He thought of Nancy’s fearless gobble-gobble. How there was always the chance she’d circle around to a point. So he continued to watch himself as the old familiar silence engulfed his ears and the racket they were making outside the door became low and faintly melodious, and then it got so soft he couldn’t hear it anymore, like the moment just after a song fades for good but somehow it’s still there. And even later, when their pounding drifted as far away as his brother, he recalled the shouts, their concern, their alarm, with fondness.

County Road G

HER NAME was Clare Warnoc and she was from Superior, Wisconsin, and she was out in the country on her way to visit her sister in Solan Springs. His name — it came out later — was Vern Troyer, of Vernon Troyer Trucking, Ashland, Wisconsin. The discovery happened roughly like this: Clare, whose vision had always been better than her sister’s (Clare told her bridge friends back in Superior that Evelyn wouldn’t have noticed the murdered man if he had dropped out of the sky and crashed into the hood of her Fairmont), was driving west on County Road G, past Score’s Bait, past the Norwood Golf and Driving Range, when, just before the north entrance to the Nekoosa Industrial Forest, she spotted, through a stand of bare poplars, a pair of blue-jeaned legs and booted feet hanging out of what even from that distance she could see was a bathtub. Clare said she saw the whole picture all at once like that. She said it was one of those rare times when your first view of something from a ways away is right on target. She pulled over, and a closer look verified it: a dead man in a discarded tub. Then Clare, who, unlike her sister Evelyn, had never waited out a shy moment in her life, immediately reached down into the thick green murk of a three-nights-ago rain and yanked up the man’s wrist. Dead and slimy as a trout in a plastic bag. After that Clare stood for a couple of moments and examined the dead man’s face before walking without hurry back to her car. When she arrived at Evelyn’s, Clare called the Douglas County sheriff, a man named Furf, a man with an aching back and sweaty feet, a man who at first didn’t believe her story.

The circumstances of the murder were reported in the Duluth Herald-Tribune, the Superior Telegraph, and the local Spooner paper. The crime was categorized in the police report as domestic in nature. Vern Troyer was involved with someone else’s wife. Her name was Carrie Somskins. The husband was a hothead named Richard. They lived in Hayward, but Carrie had gone to high school with Troyer back in the late seventies. They’d gone to the junior prom together. In April 1988, Carrie and Troyer bumped into each other at the pumps at the Holiday Station in Iron River. They had both been struggling for a while. Carrie’s marriage had never been happy; Troyer was already divorced. It didn’t take a lot to rekindle the high school flames. One thing led to another, and before either of them could catch a breath, the thing was full-blown. Then came crazy talk of Carrie filing for divorce and them moving to the Twin Cities, starting over. They were never serious about it, but that didn’t keep them from talking their dreams. And writing them. One of Carrie’s kids, while raiding his mother’s purse for Tic Tacs, found a letter Troyer had written to Carrie. The boy was loyal to his father.

No one has been able to explain why Richard Somskins stuffed Vern Troyer’s body in an abandoned bathtub only seventeen miles from his house, although more than a few people in Spooner and Hayward and Solan Springs speculated at the time that it had a lot to do with the contents of that letter, which was never found. Richard went mute after his arrest. Refused to say a word to his lawyers, the cops, anybody. That made the papers, too. The “dumbstruck killer” is what they called him in the Telegraph. In court, he just sat there slack-faced and refused to speak to the judge or even enter a plea. His lawyer tried to have him declared insane, but there was no law that said you were nuts if you didn’t talk. When Carrie brought the kids to the county jail in Ashland on the eve of his conviction, he smiled at each of them — including Carrie — but still refused to say even a single word.

There’s this also. Four years after she discovered Vern Troyer’s body, on December 20, 1994, Clare Warnoc spent the last ten minutes of her conscious life talking to a nurse named Meryl Dudziak at Superior Memorial Hospital. Clare told Meryl something she had never told her bridge friends, or even Evelyn, who had passed on in ’92. She told Meryl about Vern Troyer’s face, how it was sticking out of the water so that she could see his eyes and nose. Vern Troyer’s face, purple and fat-cheeked, but kind-looking, too. She could see that for certain. And her instincts were right. People said at the time (and the local Spooner paper reported) that Vern Troyer was known for never being serious, and so, considered always dependable. Never got excited. He’d never turn you down is what a lot of people said. The man would laugh if you asked him to haul scrap at the last minute, laugh because you bothered to ask, as if it would be any trouble…Clare Warnoc told Meryl Dudziak that for a moment she mistook the corpse’s bloated face for her brother Jed’s. Jed, who was killed in the war, dead at twenty-five, fighting Mussolini in Africa. Jed with his stupid jokes and his wild, hairy, pinching fingers. Jed whom she hadn’t laid eyes on since 1943. Jed, who kissed her and swapped her on the head with his flimsy hat. Clare gripped Meryl’s thin wrist and told her that out on that road, in front of that tub, she thought she’d found her brother. I’ve never been a woman to fantasize or make up stories. You probably know that about me already, Meryl dear. But my heart got crushed out there on that road, because for a half a second I wanted to shake him and scream, All these years, Jeddy. All these years.

At the Motel Rainbow

SET BACK beyond the highway trees, the ruins of the Motel Rainbow five miles west of Iron River, Wisconsin. In its day a perfectly respectable place to stop and sleep for the night, but now long abandoned. Since ’91, when the owners, Duane and Theresa Fjelstad, split up for good and the mortgage stopped getting paid. Neither of them wanted or could afford to run the place alone, and they couldn’t live together anymore. Fourteen years and poof, and few people even noticed the Rainbow was no longer, except for a couple of fishermen from Escanaba who’d made a ritual of staying there during the week they fished the Brule. The two of them had camped out in the parking lot the year they found their favorite motel closed. The state bank in Hayward has sat on the land ever since, waiting it out for some white-knight developer with plans for a minimart. Or better yet, for a casino-happy tribe with state authorization to construct a warehouse of slot machines like the one in Black River.

But for now the place remains. One long, narrow, red brick building, with the old manager’s office in the middle painted yellow. A wooden sign with a rainbow out front. A broken neon NO VACANCY/VACANCY light under it. Out of one window hangs the remains of a curtain, twisted like a girl’s braid. And by the road a wind-mangled cardboard FOR SALE sign leaning crookedly out of the ground. The place is mostly boarded up, but somebody did a poor job of it and there are a few gaps, entry points. Local kids from Chetek High School climb through the exposed broken windows and smoke dope and drink in the old rooms. Although most of the rooms are empty now, there is one room—12C — that still has a ratty mattress and a broken television.

Wade brought his own sheets from home. They didn’t fit — the mattress was a queen — but Sue wrapped herself up in them to avoid touching the mattress with her skin and laughed, saying he could at least have taken her to a place that wasn’t condemned. Then she kissed him and told him that she didn’t care, that she’d never care, and that she’d always remember this place like it was the new Ramada in Duluth. Wade was proud of himself, proud that he’d remembered to bring everything. (Sue always busted his balls because he forgot his wallet that time he took her to the Chinese place in Washburn.) Condoms, beer, blankets, sheets, tape player, flashlight, C batteries, double A’s, a magazine so that if Sue got bored he could read to her. They didn’t wait very long. They were both so excited, they went right ahead with it — Wade on top, and the two of them gripping each other’s shoulders as if the other was the seat in front on a crashing plane. It was over quicker than either of them had dreamed, especially Sue, but it was great, and actually different from everything else. And after, Sue squeezed her legs around him and nibbled his chin and told him she loved him a lot and how weird that was considering he was such a complete flake. Wade, who’d forgotten to turn on the music before they started, reached to the floor and found the Play button. The tape was a mix he’d made for the occasion, with Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way” and mellow U2. It was around 9:45 and finally getting dark. This was a Tuesday in the middle of July. Tuesday night, the night Wade had scoped out, the night nobody ever went over to hang out at the Rainbow.

Wade hadn’t thought of bringing a candle, so he stood up and tied the flashlight (using the rubber strap attachment) to a rusty fixture above the bed. The whole time he was fiddling, Sue kept leaping up and kissing his stomach, tugging at the little hairs above his belly button with her front teeth. When he had the light rigged up, he pushed it so that it circled, the beam exposing the room. One of the two big windows was boarded up, as was the door. The other big window was kicked out (that’s how they’d got in), and the small window above the door was also broken. That one probably by a rock, just for the hell of it; the hole in the glass was jagged, star-shaped. The TV was ancient, a big Zenith built into a large wooden case, a throwback to the time when TVs were more like furniture. The knobs were ripped off, and somebody had spray-painted SUCK across the screen. They were sixteen and they had their own room and the flashlight twirled above them. Wade held Sue’s elbows. They squinted at each other, both their expressions a combination of pride, fear, and embarrassment at the line they’d crossed, because now even just walking around the halls at school would be different. Everybody said it was no big deal, and everybody lied, and though they both knew there was no reason to look back at those virgin days, there was equally no point in not reveling in this moment. So they lingered in the fact of sex. The walking around school would come later. They would learn that swagger soon enough.

“Are you going to tell Marcy?” Wade asked.

Sue clucked her tongue. “You want me not to?” The flashlight above their heads stopped circling and now pointed straight down at them like a small spotlight.

“I just wanted to know.”

“No. Not for a while at least. She’s a total mouth.”

Wade squeezed her elbows tighter. Giddiness kicked up his heartbeat. Everybody knowing. He didn’t say anything.

“My stepdad thinks you’re a fuck-up and you probably won’t go to college,” Sue said.

“Tell him next time I feel like mixing paint at Poplar Hardware for the rest of my life, I’ll give him a call.”

“Okay,” Sue said, and kissed his ear. “I’ll tell him, peanut. And he’ll tell me he’s one-third owner of Poplar Hardware, a True Value subsidiary, and then he’ll say my little boyfriend’s afraid of real work.”

“Tell him I’m going to college in California and then I’m going to drop out and just drive.”

“Drive to Mexico, drive to Russia. Drive to damn Hawaii. You think you can drive everywhere and gas money’s going to flow out the glove compartment like a cash machine.”

“You want to come with?”

“To Hawaii, yes. And to Jamaica, maybe.” Sue paused and looked at him straight on. “Wade, this place doesn’t even have a toilet.”

Wade undid the flashlight, and they both pulled on underwear and shoes and stepped out through the window. The temperature had dropped into the sixties, and Wade felt a little wind on his arms. The moon glowed behind the clouds; the night was pale and starless. Sue walked over to the pines and squatted. Wade pointed the light at her. “Don’t be an asshole,” she said, and he swung the light at the row of dead rooms and the yellow boarded-up manager’s office in the middle. Then he walked around the side to check on his car and to take a piss himself. The car was tucked into the trees where he’d left it. He rubbed his trunk. Also back there was an old swimming pool. As he pissed, Wade looked at the hole in the ground and the flimsy and trampled plastic fence that surrounded it. Old danger signs in the mud. He thought of people actually splashing around in that pool, and now look at it. An eyesore, dirty rainwater at the bottom. A couple of times Wade and his friends went to the empty pool to skateboard, that year he skateboarded. He touched his car again before walking back around front. Sue met him in the parking lot. “Next time let’s go real camping, or at least to a place with a real bathroom, like a Yogi Bear. My dad used to take us to a Yogi Bear. The one near Minong. God, did that place suck, but at least it had bathrooms. We could go to a camp-ground next time, Wade.”

“I thought you liked this place — Watch!” Wade turned the flashlight on his own face and shook it hard, moved his head a little. His face blanched and eerie in the handmade strobe.

“Cut it out.”

“But you said before you liked this place. That you’d always remember it.”

“I didn’t say I liked it, Wade. I said I’d remember it. I’ll remember that it was strange.”

“But it’s ours,” he said, and he locked his arms around her hips and started walking backward across the gravel, pulling her with him. Sue was taller, so he walked on tiptoe and lodged his chin in the scoop of her shoulder as he steered them back to the room.

Wade rerigged the flashlight, and they talked some more about Marcy. Sue said she screwed around with Kenny Heetz and Avy Thompson on the same night. She told him that Cindy Balter got another DUI. “They’re going to take her license away, and I say good. She deserves it. She’s already hit two deer this summer.” And they talked about work — they were both lifeguards at Lake Hulbert Beach — and how it was so boring because there was never anybody to save.

“I mean I’d save a dog,” Sue said.

They’d both been sitting in the sun all day. That and the excitement of going ahead and doing what they’d been whispering about since April made them both fall asleep just after eleven.

An hour later Wade woke up in the drainy low-battery light. Sue didn’t move when Wade stood up to flick off the flashlight. He nuzzled closer to her in the now darker but now somehow more familiar room. A shadowy little hideout, like the old fort behind Jay Nichols’s father’s place. That fort was really an old shed swallowed by weeds. He and Jay had painted LOYAL ORDER OF THE ODDFELLOWS #561 in black on the door. Wade had always loved abandoned places more than where people lived. Those collapsed barns along County B between Brule and Lake Nebagamon. The burned-out factories in Superior at the end of Tower Avenue, where the strip clubs are.

Once in Ino, right off 53 heading to Washburn/Bayfield, Wade found a crumbling boarded-up house with a piano. It was just sitting there in the middle of the front room, balanced on supports, because someone had bothered to rip out the floorboards but they didn’t take the old piano. He’d stood there and doodled “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on the corroding keys for a while, thinking about all the long-gone fingers that had once touched them. This abandoned motel room was like that house with the piano, a place you could have as yours while you were there, and not because you’d paid somebody for it. Just like those woods behind Jay Nichols’s father’s place, or even the lake — the real lake, Superior, not Hulbert — because it’s nobody’s and everybody’s. There for the taking if you’ve got the balls and can forget about money once in a while. So he’d taken this room—12C — and here they were. Jesus, Jay Nichols has been gone three years. His mother moved to South Carolina and took Jay with her. Better jobs down there. Or were better jobs. They’d missed whatever boom there was. The eighties are dead and buried, Wade’s father had said, even though there was still a year to go when they left in ’89. Wade’s father was suspicious of anyone who left northern Wisconsin. He said Jay’s mother had to be running from something, because this place is as good as any other place in the country, only colder sometimes…Christ, Wade thought, anybody else, like Avy Thompson, that chronic gloater, would have done it outside, on the beach at Anakoosh Point, or at the mouth of the Brule. But out there you risked a fisherman or an old woman waddling by in the morning and the whole moment ruined. Here they could sleep and wake up in the morning when they wanted. Sure, some of the hideousness of the place would shout at their morning eyes, but who would care? They’d done it. A Tuesday night melting into a summer Wednesday. Neither of them had to work till 12:30.

After, she said it was just a joke. At first that’s what she said. After he’d marched barefoot the five miles back to Iron River and found his car parked on South Cotter Road around the corner from Sue’s parents’ place. After he’d pounded the front door, then the side, then the back. All locked. After he chucked a rock at her curtained window and shattered the pane and shouted. She peered out the broken window and looked down. “It was a joke, Wade.” And she laughed at him. Then she went downstairs and opened the door and told him something closer to truth: “I drove away, Wade. Just like you’re always talking about driving away.”

She stood at the door in shorts, and he wanted to hit her. You fucking bitch. But he didn’t say anything, just looked her over. At Sue, with her shorts and bare legs and applesauce yellow-brown hair and headphones on her neck and puggly nose and little sucked-in cheeks like two tiny waterless ponds.

“I thought you were kidnapped, raped. Jesus.”

“Just drove away, Wade.” Now not smiling, now glaring him straight in the face, so it felt as if he was the one being hit. “Just like you’re always blabbing about doing.”

He felt for her across the bed. Nothing. He opened his groggy eyes. Early, not much after seven, but the sun was hot already. Sweating. Alone in the bed. First, he figured she’d gone outside to the bathroom. But when he got up and looked out the window at the trees, he didn’t see her. He shouted for her. No answer. He shouted again and listened, and all he heard was his own sudden panting. He slid his legs into his pants and climbed out the big window. He ran without shoes across the gravel to the stand of pines, knowing she wasn’t there, because he could see she wasn’t there, but checking anyway. Knowing she wasn’t the type of person to take a walk on her own in the morning, and where the hell was there to walk to but the thick mosquitoed woods. Still trying to stay calm. Shouting calmly: Sue! Suzy! Nothing. Then screeching: Suzy! Suzy! He ran around the back and for some reason first looked in the empty pool and thought, Whatever the explanation for this, not waking up with her is the worst thing that will ever happen to me. He thought of his father dying. Thought of himself alone in the house, listening to the clocks. I’m a disgrace of a son. Ashamed but still knowing, even so, that this will always be worse, wherever Sue is, whatever happened, this right now will always be worse than any funeral. He ran on and arrived at the empty space where he’d hidden his car twelve hours earlier and felt in his pocket for his keys. And then — and this he knew with as much certainty as he knew that he’d be buried next to his father behind St. Bartholomew’s — that there would be worse things than even this, so many worse things than this. He knelt down and touched the tire tracks in the mud as if their familiar pattern alone could explain why she’d done it.

Sue peeled out the gravel driveway and thought how kickass it felt to no longer be a virgin and speeding away in your boyfriend’s car. It had everything to do with driving and leaving. But there was more. She loved him. She’d told him that. He’d never told her, but that wasn’t why she stole his keys and took off in his car at dawn. He didn’t have to tell her. She knew he did. That wasn’t it. And she didn’t drive away because he was going to drive away from her sooner or later either. No. She realized as she drove down 53 and away from him and his gaped, sleeping mouth that she was driving away because he thought, One day I’m going to drive away. Because he aspired without her. Like he had some kind of birthright. Her father had gotten away with it. So as she sped by the Ino bar, things made more sense. She was punishing Wade’s thinking. Not the real leaving. The real leaving — if he even had the guts, which was an open question — she could handle, just like her mother had, and maybe by then she wouldn’t even care.

But then her driving became something more, and she drove west, away from Iron River, loving the car and the new blacktop on the two-lane to Poplar. No one on the road that early except for a few trucks. The tall pines of the Brule River State Forest on both sides, towering over the highway. Trees that meant home. The muddy trails that wound through them. The thousand deer. She kept going west and drove all the way to Route B, which circled around Lake Nebagamon, that quiet lake where she and Wade went once in a while to get away from Hulbert. The little beach with the raft. NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY, SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK. A sign they liked. They always did their best to lie on the beach and avoid watching the children splashing — refused to tell any of them not to push each other off the raft. She drove with her head out the window, wind gusting in her face, sometimes seeing glimpses of the lake through the damp green trees, sometimes not. Near the bait shop she got out and walked to the end of the dock and dangled her feet in the waveless water. A man was swimming across the small cove by the bridge, and she watched his slowly arcing arms. She thought of Wade stomping down the highway and his anger and how he wasn’t going to get it and how she was going to have to explain it to him. When she got home, her mother and stepfather were both already at work. A note from her mother was waiting for her on the kitchen table pad. Her mother’s looping, forgiving handwriting. She didn’t read it.

Sitting Theodore

MRS. GOLD down the block in the colossal brick house tried to off her husband, a huge Cadillac-driving guy named Jerry, by hiring two hit men from Bolingbrook to murder him in the shower. Turned out one of the guys was an undercover Chicago cop specializing in spousal homicide. Later, in prison, Mrs. Gold fell in love with the lawyer working on her appeal, my mom’s friend, the formerly unassuming and mousy Fran Swanner. This all happened in Morton Grove, Illinois, in 1981. There’s more. When they sent her down to Five Hills Correctional in Centralia, Mrs. Gold was pregnant with the baby of one of the hit men, the real hit man, the one who wasn’t a cop. Mrs. Gold was sentenced to six years, and for the first two, the baby, Theodore, lived with his mother at Five Hills. Then, on his second birthday, he moved into Fran Swanner’s house on Cedar Valley Road. When Mrs. Gold got paroled a year later, she joined them.

Of course if only it had been that easy. Fran Swanner was married when she and Mrs. Gold fell hard for each other. To a courtly real estate agent named Don, and they had two very bright kids, twins. I think Jeremy ended up at Harvard, Lisa at Johns Hopkins. Or maybe it was the other way around. Anyway, that was after. Fran and Don’s kids were seniors in high school when all this started. Fran had just served them plates of fried fishsticks and hash browns. Don was still at work. “Kids,” she announced, “I’m divorcing your father and intend to live with Lena Gold — whom I love — as soon as she is released from prison, where she is being wrongly held. As soon as my writ of habeas corpus is approved by the Third District of the Appeals Court of the State of Illinois on the grounds of unconstitutional government entrapment…” There was a little Get out of here with your law stories, Mom, until they realized her earnest legal babble was dead serious. After this, there was a lot of shrieking and door slamming. What-the-hell’s-gotten-into-you sort of stuff. But what was done was done. Their mother’s voice didn’t crack and she was matter-of-fact. “This is non-negotiable, but remember, I will always be your mother and your father will always be your father.” Then Lisa and Jeremy took off in Fran’s car, and she remained at the kitchen table with folded hands and waited for Don to return home. He took it better. Don endured the news, as he did every other setback in his life, with a baffled shrug. Fran, although shy, had always been unpredictable in small ways, particularly when it came to sex. He’d spent much of his adult life charting her desires, trying to keep up with her. In 1974 they bought a water bed. In the spring of ’79 they attended a conference, called “Orgies for the Happily Married,” in Scottsdale, Arizona. The year before, the Rosenkrantzes, Glo and Simon, had spent an interminable Memorial Day holiday in Fran and Don’s bedroom. This, of course, was bigger and was going to ruin his life, but what could he say? Our house? Our family? Fran wasn’t a cold woman, and in twenty years of marriage she’d never lied to him. She had always been steadfast in her love. Now her love had changed focus, dramatically. “I ache for her, Don. It hurts. I’ll say that much. It hurts me not to be there with her this very second.” Two days later, Don and Jeremy and Lisa moved into a rented apartment above Don’s Century 21 office on Simonian. He accepted a generous cash settlement as well as a half life interest in the house, split between him and the kids. Fran also contracted to pay both Jeremy and Lisa’s twenty-thousand-plus tuitions.

My mom told me most of this. Not about the murder plot itself. That part was in the Chicago Sun-Times for three days running. She told me the rest, though. She was in on all that. Nothing shocks my mother. When Fran Swanner told her that she’d fallen fast and hard for one of her clients, the infamous bouffant-haired husband-killer Lena Gold, and that she was divorcing Don and he was taking the kids — and that she was going to help raise Mrs. Gold and the hit man’s child — I can see my mom waving away, for the moment, the complications and giving Fran one of her smothering hugs and sloppy lipstick smooches and gushing, “Oh, honey. I’m absolutely thrilled you’re in love!”

I played a cameo role in the saga. I was Theodore’s babysitter after he moved in with Fran. Theodore was a pretty normal kid, considering. A sweet kid who was always handing me presents like half-eaten strawberries. He was also quiet. He never cried while I watched TV. He was mostly content simply to play with his mother’s old shoes. Best of all was that I got ten dollars an hour, which was six dollars more than the going rate in those years. And after she got paroled, Mrs. Gold always tipped me another five when Fran wasn’t looking. Then she’d speak to me in a raspy whisper I have forever associated with the way women talk in prison. “Little Beth,” she’d say, even though I was nearly as tall as she was, “go nuts with the extra.” I always got the feeling that Mrs. Gold tipped me more for not being afraid and not passing judgment than for anything I ever did for Theodore. Whatever the reasons, having Lena Gold’s money in my pocket made my neck sweat. I’d get pricked by the power of it passing into my hand from her long, spidery fingers. As though now I had license to do something dramatic, like break someone’s car windows on the way home. Or better, let my gym teacher — Mr. Carl — see me naked in his shoebox office, with the door locked. Because I knew how much he ached for that.

And even after she got out of prison, Lena Gold still had all that big white hair. It looked the same as it did when I was ten and would see her squatting in her front garden. In hind-sight, I know she was probably masterminding her plan to get rid of Big Jerry, right there among her impatiens and petunias. But if anyone deserved it, he did. Jerry Gold was a loud, crashing guy. A wildebeest in a Cadillac, as wide as his whale of a car, a Coupe DeVille with doors the size of Toyotas. He used to drive 85 down Paulina Street. I’d be riding my bike around no-handed on a Saturday and Jerry would come barreling my way, jamming his horn, a suburban Ahab roaring out his sunroof, “SIDEWALK! SIDEWALK!” I don’t think there was anyone in our neighborhood, including the forever cloistered Mrs. Newton Rimwaller (whom my brother swears he actually saw once in the fall of ’79), who was very sad to hear that Lena Gold had hired two guys to dress up as house painters and assassinate him while he sang and farted in the shower. I know a lot of us were sorry she’d failed so embarrassingly.

But as much as Lena Gold’s story has fascinated me for all these years — the roller coaster element of it, the intrigue of such crimes and domestic upheavals amid the square-lawned primness of my suburban northwest Chicago — when I think back on it, I mostly think of Don, the real estate broker. He was the fawn in the headlights. He was the one the botched attempt really did end up killing. Inadvertently, true. And yes, not literally. My mom tells me he’s doing just fine these days, still living above his office. Oh, you know Don. He’s a trouper’s trouper. But I think I know differently. Something broke in that man, something I doubt even all this time has been able to heal. I’ve had enough of my own blind sides to know that while it may be easy to clear away the wreckage, it’s much harder to stop fingering your scars.

I last saw Don in the winter of ’85, a year after Lena Gold’s early release. I was sitting Theodore. Fran and Mrs. Gold were at the opera. It was a Friday night in February, around 10:30. Theodore was already asleep when the front doorbell rang, which was weird. Fran and Mrs. Gold’s house on Cedar Valley Road was what my mom called a “forget knocking, barge in the back door” kind of house. A house where you didn’t wipe your feet, and where you simply merged into the chaos: Mrs. Gold’s cooking spatter, Fran’s case files all over the place, Theodore’s play shoes, Mrs. Gold’s salsa music. Only the Jews for Jesus rang the front bell, and they were welcome, too. But that night it was late and silent, and I turned on the outside light and opened the front door to a pale, nervous, jacketless man. In the brightness I could see that he’d cut himself shaving. His chin was bleeding.

“Mr. Swanner?”

“Evening, Beth.”

“Hi.” I rubbed my sweater arms. It couldn’t have been more than ten degrees, and Don’s shifting feet creaked in the ancient hard-packed snow.

“I’d like to take a walk around, if you don’t mind. Just for old times.”

I continued to stare at him. His quick small breaths were like puttering exhaust in the cold. I mentioned before that Don was courtly. A beautiful man, as far as men go, I overheard Fran once tell my mother. But this was post — John Wayne Gacy Chicago. I thought, What if this famously mild-mannered ex-husband turned spurned lover suddenly, finally, goes berserk and tries to strangle Theodore — the love child of his wife’s ex-con live-in girlfriend — to death in his angelic sleep? Gacy the clown juggled at birthday parties. Gacy the politician shook hands with Rosalynn Carter. The police found twenty-seven bodies in his crawl space. Lena Gold was a decorated Brownie troop leader at the time of her arrest. I was fifteen and one-third, and I was the babysitter. Don gazed at me with beaten, patient eyes as I stood in the front hall he used to sweep every Sunday.

“I’m not sure I can let you in,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not sure if it’s okay.”

Don examined the way I was squinting at him. He saw that I had the potential to be afraid of him, and this made him laugh. “I know you’re just doing your job, Beth. That you’ve got a responsibility.” He held up his right palm. “I absolutely promise not to run off with the silver, and God strike me dead this moment if I would ever hurt a child.” His eyes pucked out when he said that last part, and he wasn’t laughing anymore.

I stepped aside. He thanked me and offered his hand. We shook as if we’d made some kind of deal, but I wasn’t sure what we were agreeing to. Though Don was at least six feet tall, his hand was so small and sweaty, so fightless, so unlike Lena Gold’s, that I wondered if Fran hadn’t cast him out because of his puny hands. I hovered behind him as he skulked around the house with his hands behind his back, as if he were taking a tour at the Art Institute or, more likely, some frighteningly realistic exhibition dedicated to his previous life. He paused at the bulbous umbrella holder in the back hall. He nudged the faded green Oriental rug back into position. He reset the grandfather clock to match the time on his own watch. After trailing him for ten minutes, I went back to the den. I turned the sound down so I could listen to him creep around the kitchen. I heard him open the refrigerator, as if a look at Lena’s strange and healthy foods (tofu, eight varieties of beets) would somehow explain what had gone wrong. For another ten minutes I heard nothing. I imagined him in a chair at the kitchen table, silently weeping with his head in his hands, antagonized by memories of Fran, pantless and beckoning, clad only in one of his dress shirts. Then, from the living room, I heard the loud swipe of a kitchen-size match. I was certain that he’d at last gone over the edge and had poured gasoline all over the furniture and that Theodore and I were done for, as good as charred. When I skidded into the living room in my socks, Don was squatting before the fireplace, feeding kindling to budding flames. He twisted around and looked at me.

“Thought I’d warm the place up a bit. Okay with you?”

“I guess so.”

He rubbed his hands together. “It’s been so long since I made a fire. I used to make—” He stopped and clapped. “Hey. How about a game of chess? How about it, Beth?” His face was redder than it had been at the door, and his voice was suddenly too perky, as though he was trying desperately to be chipper, to be light. He went to the cabinet above the stereo. “We used to keep the chess set right in here, and maybe—” He yanked a cardboard box, turned around, and shuffled the plastic game pieces at me.

“Sorry, I don’t play.”

He turned back to the cabinet. “Scrabble? Now, there’s a game. I know we’ve got a Scrabble board somewhere in here.” He started dropping game boxes on the floor. Chutes and Ladders. Connect-Four. Gnip-Gnop. Othello. Life. Battleship. Then he laughed. “Christ, Parcheesi! Whenever my brother Burt drove up from Louisville — wait, ah ha!” He held up the Scrabble game in triumph. His goofy pained face was like a child’s, more like Theodore’s when he pressed chewed fruit into my hands than an adult with a job. He unfolded the board on the coffee table.

“I’ve got to call a friend,” I said.

Don set the box on the carpet and looked at the fire. “Of course,” he said. “I understand.”

“It’s kind of an important call.”

“Right.” He sniffed and checked his watch. “Anyway, I’ll just sit here awhile.”

“Maybe I’ll play later,” I said, to give him hope. I walked backward and watched him pull letters out of the box, slowly, one at a time. In the den I picked up the phone and pretended to call a guy from school. His name was Evan Magocini, and he’d never so much as wiped his snot in my direction in four years. He had blond bristly hair like the end of a brand-new broom. I despised him and lusted him.

“Hello, Evan,” I said, loud enough for Don to hear. “I want you to know I despise you and everything you stand for.” I paused and waited for Evan to respond as the operator told me to hang up and please try again. “Another chance!” I shouted. “You want me to give you another chance? What is this, Wheel of Fortune? Am I supposed to sit around and wait for you to get done foaming at the mouth over Luana Palandri?” I paused as the phone began to whine a tone like our school tornado drill. “No, Evan,” I screamed, forgetting about Theodore sleeping upstairs. “No! Never!” Then I rammed the phone into the cradle. The house was still. Don didn’t come running. He had his own misery and he didn’t want to join mine.

But God, did I want him to. Because even though he tried to laugh, he didn’t pretend. Sorrow was in his hands, in his eyes, in the blood on his chin, and I wanted to touch it. I wanted to do more than touch it. It would have been my first time, and I thought how right that would be. Another legacy of Lena Gold. She’d probably have approved. A little love for two who needed it. And I knew he would be gentle. Those teeny fingers unbuttoning my jeans, the same slow way he was picking up those letters, poking my buttons through the penny slits, one after another. But what if he refused me? What if after I went to him and nuzzled close and pushed the Scrabble board out of the way with my knee, he only smiled graciously and said, “Well no, Beth. I couldn’t.” I sat on that blue velour couch and listened to the cackle and spit of the fire in the living room and could not move. I sat and waited in front of the silent television for Don to do something, anything, to acknowledge me again. To say, Beth. To say, Beth, help me. To say, Beth, I want you to help me. I watched the silent television.

When Mrs. Gold clattered into the room in heels, fur, and white leather, Don was gone and the fire had burned down to ashes.

“Honeybaby,” she said as I stared droopily at her tower of hair. “You’re getting beautiful. Since when all of a sudden are you getting beautiful?”