Canada (15 page)

“Why would you ever get married?” Berner said and looked disgusted. “You pay for what you can get for free.” She carefully spit down between her tennis shoes onto the grass of our front lawn. I’d never thought to ask that question, though I sometimes believed Berner knew what I thought before I thought it. She
was
growing up quicker than I was. She didn’t like anything she didn’t understand.

“Rudy’s parents aren’t even married,” she said. “His real mother lives in San Francisco, which is where he’s headed when he busts out of here. I’m thinking about going with him. You can’t tell them or I’ll strangle you.” She grabbed my arm and pinched me so hard my ears hurt, even with her white gloves. She was much stronger than I was. “I mean it,” she said. “You little turd.”

She’d said things like that to me before. Called me a turd. A mollyhop. A peter. I didn’t like it, but I thought it meant things were still close between us. It made me feel better than I’d been feeling.

“I wouldn’t say anything,” I said.

“Nobody’d listen, anyway,” she said and sneered at me. “Mr. Chess Man. That’s who you are.” She went up the steps into the house.

OUR FATHER
was sitting at the dining room table, applying Cat’s Paw to his black cowboy boots. I’d seen him do it to his Air Force shoes a hundred times. His wooden polish kit was open on top of the
Tribune
my mother’d been reading. He’d also been paring his fingernails. The half-moon slivers were scattered on the paper.

He had taken the globe off my dresser and set it on the table in front of him. The room smelled sweet with the polish. He’d turned on KMON for the Saturday farm report. He had on his regular Saturday attire—rubber sandals and Bermudas and a red-flowered Hawaiian shirt that showed his coiled snake tattoo on his forearm. It spelled the name of the Mitchell he’d dropped bombs out of.
Old Viper.
He had another one on his shoulder: Air Force wings, which hadn’t been earned by being a pilot—something he’d always been disappointed about.

He put on a big smile for me. He’d looked glum and concentrated when we came in. He didn’t act like he felt well. He hadn’t shaved, but his eyes were gleaming the way they had when he’d come back from his first business trip.

Berner kept on walking through the room and didn’t stop. “I got hot,” she said. “I’m going to sit in a cold tub, then feed my fish.” No one had turned on the attic fan, but Berner did when she went down the hall. Air began moving. I heard her door close.

“I want to talk to you,” my father said, carrying on with his rag and his paste polish. “Take a seat here.”

I wasn’t used to being completely alone with him, even though I was supposed to spend more time with him and less with my mother. Normally she was close by. He always wanted to engage in a serious discussion when he got me alone. It usually had to do with wanting me to know he loved us, and that he was always working for our welfare, and that he had a personal stake in our individual futures—about which he was never specific. It always made me feel he didn’t know Berner and me very well, because we took those things for granted.

I sat beside the clutter of rags and blackened toothbrushes and the round Cat’s Paw tin. The globe was turned around to show the United States. “I certainly wish I could take you to the State Fair.” He stared straight at my eyes, as if he was saying something that meant something else. Or as if I was caught in a lie, and he was trying to make me understand the importance of not lying. I didn’t lie at that particular time.

“Today’s the last day it’s on,” I said. The announcement was in the paper he was cleaning his shoes on. He’d probably seen it, which was why he’d brought it up. “We could still go.”

He looked out the window as a car went past, then looked at the globe. “I know that,” he said. “I just don’t feel top flight today.”

Once in Mississippi we’d gone to a traveling county fair that set up its tents not far from where we lived. He and I went one night. I threw rubber balls at rag dolls with red pigtails, but didn’t knock any over. Then I shot a rifle loaded with corks and knocked over some swimming ducks and won a packet of sweet chalky lozenges. My father left me while he went in a tent for a show I wasn’t old enough to see. I stood outside on the sawdust, listening to people’s voices and the music of the rides and the sound of laughter from the fun house. The sky was yellowed by the carnival lights. When my father came out with a crowd of other men, he said that had been an experience, but said nothing else. We rode the Dodge-em cars together and ate taffy, then went home. I’d never been to another fair and hadn’t cared much for that one. Boys in the chess club had said the Montana Fair showcased livestock and poultry and agriculture and was useless. But I was still interested in the bees.

My father breathed out through his nose as he worked polish into his boot leather. He had a forceful smell, stronger than the Cat’s Paw—an acrid odor that I believed had to do with not feeling good. He sat back, put down his cloth and rubbed his hands over his face as if his hands had water in them, then pushed them back through his hair, which released more of the odor. He squeezed his eyes closed and opened them.

“You know when I was a little boy in Alabama, I had a friend down the street from us. And one of our neighbors, this old doctor, had his office in his house, and he invited my friend in one day. This old doctor tried some foolishness with my friend that wasn’t right.” My father’s gleamy-dark eyes focused down on the polish tin, then rose to me dramatically. “You understand what I mean?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, though I didn’t.

“My friend, whose name was Buddy Inkster, made him quit, of course. He went straight home and told his mother. And do you know what his mother said?” My father blinked at me and tilted his head inquiringly.

“No, sir.”

“She said, ‘Buddy, you tell that ole man to cut that stuff out!’ ”

My sister began running her bath water. Even with the fan going I was hot in my clothes. I’d begun sweating under my shirt collar. The bathroom door closed and went locked.

“Do you know what his mother was saying?” My father picked up the shoe-polish lid and carefully squeezed it back on with two fingers. It made a soft click. “
Now
, of course, if that happened, he’d—I mean the old sawbones—he’d be put in jail and people would be out after him with pitchforks and torches. You know?” I didn’t know. A car honked outside on the street, its motor revved, then it roared away. My father didn’t seem to hear it. “Well, she was saying that Inkster should learn to live with things and go on about his business. Do you understand that?”

“I think so.” It was what I’d thought.

“Bad things can just happen to you,” my father said. “And you live on through them.” He was trying to make his story have an effect on me. He seemed to be saying you can miss important parts of what people do and say, but you still have to rely on yourself to understand them. What I thought he was really telling me, though—not quite using those words—was that something bad might be approaching
me
, and I needed to figure out my own ways to get through it. He wanted me to be responsible for Berner, too. Which was why he told me and not her, and only proved he didn’t know Berner nearly as well as he didn’t know me.

“Do you and your sister think about what you should do with your lives?” His eyes looked dry and tired. His fingertips were smudged with polish. He was wiping them off finger by finger on his flannel rag. He seemed to be addressing me from a distance now.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“So. What do you think?” he said. “About the future.”

“I want to be a lawyer,” I said, for no reason except that a boy in the chess club said his father was one.

“I wish you could hurry up, then,” he said and appraised his fingernails after his cleaning job on them. Black was still under their edges. “You have to find ways to make everything make sense.” He smiled faintly. “Make a hierarchy. Some things are more important than others. It may not be what you expect.” He turned his gaze out the front window onto SW First. Lutherans were mingling under the trees in the park across from their church. The wedding was letting out. People were fanning themselves with their hats and paper fans, and laughing. My mother was just exiting Mildred Remlinger’s Ford at the curb. In her green-and-pink plaid wool suit, she looked tiny and unhappy. She didn’t say anything back into the car, just closed its door and began walking up toward the front porch. Mildred’s car drove away. “Here comes trouble,” my father said. I expected him to say I mustn’t discuss our conversation with her. He often said that, as if we had significant secrets—which I didn’t think we did. But he didn’t say that. Which made me understand that our conversation had been agreed to by them, though I hadn’t understood what it was really about: them being caught, and what Berner and I would do after.

My father smiled at me his conspirator’s smile. He stood up from the table. “She’s going to have everything all figured out,” he said. “You wait and see. She’s a smart cookie. Smarter than I am by a long way.” He went to open the door for her. Our conversation ended there. We didn’t have another one like it.

Chapter 22

Y
OU HEAR STORIES ABOUT PEOPLE WHO’VE COMMITTED
bad crimes. Suddenly they decide to confess it all, turn themselves in to the authorities, get everything off their conscience—the burden, the harm, the shame, the self-hatred. They make a clean breast of things before going off to jail. As if guilt was the worst thing in the world to them.

I’m willing to say now that guilt has less to do with it than you might think. Rather, the intolerable problem is of everything suddenly being so confused: the clear path back to the past being cluttered and unfollowable; how the person once felt being now completely changed from how he feels today. And time itself: how the hours of the day and night advance so oddly—first fast, then hardly passing at all. Then the future becoming as confused and impenetrable as the past itself. What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed—caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present.

Who wouldn’t want to stop that—if he could? Make the present give way to almost any future at all. Who wouldn’t admit everything just to gain release from the terrible present? I would. Only a saint wouldn’t.

ANOTHER BLACK-AND-WHITE
police car cruised past our house several times that Saturday. The uniformed driver seemed to take careful notice of our house. Our father went to the front window several times and looked out. “Okay. I see you,” he said more than once. He and our mother had been friendly and talkative to each other the day before. Now, though, they operated
around
each other in a way I was more used to. Our father seemed to have not enough to do. She, on the other hand, was purposeful. Not much was talked about. I attempted to interest Berner in “the positional concept” and in the “aggressive sacrifice,” which I’d been reading about and demonstrated to her on my bed, with my roll-up board. She said she didn’t feel good and I couldn’t understand because it was about life and wasn’t a game.

SINCE OUR MOTHER
had come home from seeing Miss Remlinger, she’d gotten busy again in the house. She washed a load of clothes in the tub washer and hung them on the pulley line in the backyard—standing on a wood box to reach the clothespin sack. She cleaned the bathtub—which Berner always left dirty—and swept the front porch where the wind had blown grit into the cracks. She washed the dishes that had been left in the sink the night before. Our father went out in the backyard and sat in one of the lawn chairs and stared at the afternoon sky and practiced the eye exercises he’d learned in the Air Force. After a while he came in and brought the card table out of the hall closet and set it up in the living room and got down a jigsaw puzzle and sat in front of it with the pieces spread across the table top. He liked puzzles and believed they asked a special intelligence. He’d also done several paint-by-numbers pictures over the years, which he’d put briefly on display, then placed in the same closet and never looked at again.

He pulled up a dining room chair for anybody who wanted to collaborate on the puzzle, and began getting the pieces spread out and turned over, and studying them and fitting the obvious ones together like tiny islands. He asked Berner if she wanted to work on it, because it would make her feel better. But she said no. It was the puzzle that formed a painting of Niagara Falls, painted by Frederic E. Church. It showed the great, rushing green water melting over low red rocks and turning white and yellow as it fell into the white-aired chasm. We’d put it together many times, and it naturally made me remember our mother’s photograph of her parents and her, who’d been underneath the falls in a boat. It was our father’s favorite because it was dramatic. It represented the Hudson River School of painting, the box said, which made no sense to me because the box also said it was the Niagara River—not the Hudson. I always wondered if there wasn’t a formula for joining the pieces so you could put the whole puzzle together in an hour or less. Figuring out the picture every time and searching for the right pieces seemed like the hardest way of doing it. Plus, I didn’t know why you’d want to do it more than once. It wasn’t like chess, which could seem the same every time you played, but the number of different moves you could make was endless.

For a while I stood beside our father and pointed out purple-and-blue sky pieces and the parts that were clearly the river. Berner asked our mother if she could be allowed to leave the house and go for a walk, because the fan was bothering her sinuses, but both of them said she couldn’t.

Our mother spent a good period of time again on the telephone in the hall—something my father pretended not to pay attention to. She finally took the phone on the long cord into their bedroom and closed the door. I could make out her buzzing voice underneath the rattle of the fan. “No, we wouldn’t be doing this under ordinary circumstances, but . . . ,” I heard her say. And “. . . No reason to think that’ll last forever . . .” was something else. These bits of conversation spoken to who I didn’t know made our father, sitting in the living room piecing together Niagara Falls, seem strange to me—as if our mother was his mother, too, and had to look after him as well as us.