Middle Age (72 page)

A middle-aged woman awkwardly rowing a boat on a lake in northern

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Minnesota, at the onset of mosquito season, shocked by how quickly her shapely body has wearied, her arm, shoulder, back and thigh muscles have begun to ache, may simply row the boat until she gives up, and returns wincing to the dock. Outboard motorboats roared past her, rocking her in their wakes. There were no sailboats on this lake. Certainly there were no yachts. On a dock, a boy yelled what sounded like “Gus-sie!”—or was it

“Hus-sie!”—at a black retriever splashing in the water.

Yet: that evening Augusta was approached in the Red Lantern Tavern, where she was drinking whiskey before ordering something to eat, and there was the Ogden County sheriff to speak with her. He introduced himself as Rick Hewitt. Augusta put out her blistered hand to be shaken.

Hewitt was a white-haired man in his late fifties with a coarse, shrewd face and eyes that reminded her of—whose?—Roger Cavanagh’s. Shifty and reptilian but maybe friendly? Hewitt told Augusta he’d been hearing she was asking after his old friend Frank Brady. He offered to buy her another drink but Augusta deftly countered by insisting upon buying him a drink, if he’d talk to her a little about Frank Brady. “Is Brady somebody you’re mixed up with, back where you come from? You doing a check on the guy, or what?” Hewitt asked. Augusta said, summoning her Salthill-hostess smile, “You answer the questions here, Sheriff. Not me.”

Hewitt laughed. You could see he was impressed with this good-looking, obviously classy woman from somewhere back east who was trying to fit in with the locals.

He sat across from Augusta in her booth. He accepted the drink. He told her he’d known Frank Brady “pretty well”—“as well as anybody got to know Frank” in Red Lake. For a while they worked at the same lumberyard. They were both in their early twenties, unmarried, kicking around, living in town. Hewitt had come back from Vietnam in ’6 after a two-year tour and he’d temporarily had enough of guns and being in uniform and he wasn’t in a mood to get married, yet. “Frank hadn’t any relatives in Minnesota, or maybe anywhere, from the way he never talked about them.

He liked women but was shy of getting involved, which I didn’t blame him for, at the time. We were together a lot, I mean like four, five nights a week sometimes, from ’6 till September ’6 when Frank left Red Lake.

Though Frank didn’t drink, which set him apart from the rest of us.” “Did he say why?” Augusta asked. “Ma’am, he said the stuff was ‘poison’ to him, it drove him ‘crazy.’ He said he’d had a drinking problem as a kid.” “A drinking problem! How young?” “Like maybe junior high. He wasn’t in a
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mood to talk about it, much. He didn’t care to talk about himself. He’d ask me about Vietnam. Lots of questions. He didn’t think the war was justi-fied but he felt guilty about not going in. He’d have wanted to join the Marines, his dad had been a Marine, but with his blind eye, for sure they didn’t want him. Nobody wanted Frank Brady in any kind of uniform.”

Augusta said, disbelieving, “Frank Brady wanted to fight in Vietnam, though he didn’t approve of the war?” Hewitt said, with a smirk, “What I told you, ma’am. Frank felt guilty about not going in. On account of the other guys, like me, going in. And some of us shot up pretty bad. Or worse.” Augusta absorbed this revelation in silence. Well, Adam had been a boy at the time. Younger than her own sons were now. There wasn’t the retrospective knowledge then, and the moral disgust spawned of that knowledge, of the Vietnam debacle.

Hewitt said, watching Augusta’s face, “Another thing Frank confided in me, ma’am, he didn’t want it generally known but he had a record, too.

He’d been incarcerated in a youth facility out in Montana.” Hewitt spoke so matter-of-factly, Augusta had to touch his arm to make him pause.

“Excuse me, officer? A what? ‘Facility’?” “Helena State, it’s called. It’s a kind of camp, midway between a state penitentiary for older felons and a juvenile home.” “But—why was Frank Brady incarcerated?” “For almost killing somebody, ma’am.” “Almost killing somebody! Who—was it?” “His

‘foster father,’ he said. Frank was a ward of the county. His parents were dead, he was twelve years old when he came into the system. He got shunted around in foster homes and when he was fourteen he didn’t get along with the ‘foster father,’ a drinker and s.o.b. who was said to push kids around, and one night Frank loses it, and pushes the guy back, and they get into a serious fight, and Frank comes close to beating the guy to death with a pickax.” Hewitt shook his head, and took a swallow of his whiskey. “And this guy wasn’t any runt, either. I did some inquiries, a few years later.” Augusta was listening in horror. Adam Berendt? A boy of fourteen wielding a pickax? Nearly killing a man? Hewitt said, “At Helena, some Ojibways ganged up on Frank and beat him, blinded him in one eye. Indians and whites are always fighting in these facilities. Frank was fifteen when he lost the eye. He’d say, ‘I’m God-damned lucky to be alive. I don’t mind being half-blind if that’s the price.’ ” Hewitt laughed.

“It was like Frank in a certain mood, to make the best of a thing. Like losing an eye was a sign of something positive, if you reasoned it out. He always said Helena straightened his head. He had to calm down there, went

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back to school. He’d had a hard time learning to read and write, he was what d’you call it—dyslexic. ‘My brain is wired wrong,’ Frank would say. ‘I got to work twice as hard as anybody else to make it work right.’ They paroled him when he was eighteen. The charge was aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and with intent to kill.” Hewitt spoke slowly, as if reluctantly. But there was a cruel, sly purpose to his words.

Augusta was feeling faint. “Thank you. I see.”

“Not surprised, are you, ma’am? You look a little white. This was all a long time ago.”

“Yes.”

“Frank would be—what?—a pretty old guy by now? Mid-fifties?”

When Augusta didn’t reply, Hewitt said, leaning across the table,

“Frank had a hard time in those foster homes. You can’t blame an excitable kid for protecting himself.”

“Yes. I mean—no.”

“He’d always say he was God-damned lucky, not just the eye, but that the guy he assaulted hadn’t died. That makes a big difference in the system, ma’am, let me tell you.”

Augusta was frightened of Hewitt now. His maleness, his insinuating tone. His eyes on her, his wish to know her. She thought
You brought this
on yourself
.
You have only yourself to blame
.

“Excuse me, please—I must leave.” Augusta slid out of the booth awkwardly, and nearly lost her balance, and Hewitt stood with the agility of a young man. Augusta said, panting, “No! I’m going now. I’m leaving.

Please don’t follow me.” Hewitt followed her out of the noisy tavern and into the parking lot, he was carrying her handbag which she’d left behind—“Say, ma’am? You forgot this.” Augusta had no choice but to take the handbag from him, and to thank him, and to fumble inside for the car key as he watched closely. (But which of these cars was her rental?

She couldn’t remember.) Terror beat in her chest like a trapped, maddened bird. The white-haired, coarse-faced sheriff of Ogden County was saying, in a low, insinuating voice, “Any more questions about my old friend Frank Brady, ma’am, I’d be happy to help you out. You’re staying at the Bull’s Eye Motel, eh? You’re feeling O.K. to drive back there by yourself?”

Augusta managed to locate her car. Hurriedly she checked out of the motel and drove south out of Red Lake and by midnight was checking into a Days Inn, smelling powerfully of disinfectant, outside Bemidji.

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“ H  a wild kid. Not bad, not mean, but unpredictable. This terrible thing that happened—it was an accident. But Frankie caused it to happen.

That was a fact.”

Mrs. Maudie Creznik of the Canyon Creek Mobile Home Campground spoke sadly but vehemently. This was all fresh to her, you could see. More than forty years ago and vivid as last night’s nightmare.

Now in western Montana. In summer. Augusta in jeans and T-shirt, her ashy-silver hair plaited in a single stiff braid at the nape of her neck, found herself seated in a green plastic lawn chair having coffee with Mrs.

Creznik, proprietor of the campground six miles west of Beauchamp, Montana, and approximately twenty-five miles west of the small city of Helena. It was the American West: where everything is oversized except the people. The women were seated on a rectangular strip of cement (“my patio” Mrs. Creznik called it) bordered by blood-red geraniums, in the shadow of Mrs. Creznik’s mobile home, which was a bullet-shaped aluminum vehicle the size of a trailer truck, with complicated TV antenna, window boxes and shutters. The mobìle home was solidly set upon concrete blocks, there were tall grasses surrounding it, which suggested to Augusta that it had been rooted in this place for a long time, like others she’d noticed in the campground. Why then, she wondered, were these
mobile
homes? Why not cottages, bungalows? Beyond Mrs. Creznik’s fussily tended plot of lawn were rows of similar mobile homes, as in a residential housing development. Children were everywhere, and dogs. Young mothers were hanging laundry. In the distance were the densely wooded slopes of the Helena National Forest and several high, ice-capped mountain peaks. This was the legendary Rocky Mountain range, of which in all their years of friendship she’d never heard Adam Berendt speak, though he’d been a boy in literally the shadow of those mountains. At her motel in Beauchamp she’d had pointed out to her the highest peak in the vicinity—

Scapegoat Mountain, , feet.

On her map of Montana, Augusta was intrigued to discover “Berendt Pass,” ,6 feet, north of Scapegoat.

“ ‘Berendt’! That’s where he got the name from.”

Adam
.
Berendt
. Born here.

Augusta herself was “Elizabeth Eastman.” This disguise now coming to an end.

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Still, she’d come this far. She would not be discouraged. More than eight hundred miles since Red Lake. What a long time the drive had taken her! Nearly as long, she was thinking, as the voyage out had been for Adam. Her compact car was buffeted by prairie winds. She heard in these winds the plaintive, hurt cries of her abandoned husband, even her children. She heard Adam’s reasonable plea
Why? Gussie for God’s sake why?

Often she stopped by the side of the interstate, fatigued, a headache behind her eyes. Sometimes she discovered to her horror that she’d been driving without awareness. No memory. Hypnotized by the rushing mo-notonous pavement and the enormous sky overhead.   

the Montana license plate boasted. In the east, in Salthill-on-Hudson, there was virtually no sky. The sky was a painted ceiling. You glanced upward and saw mostly trees, buildings. In the West, everything was distant and what appeared near, often was not. It was a place to inspire trance.

Augusta supposed she was risking physical danger, a woman driving alone in this part of the country; a fanatic, deranged middle-aged woman driving such distances through the high desolate plains of North Dakota, then southward into the more populated, yet still sparsely populated, mountainous center of Montana. After being rebuffed at Helena she’d driven to Beauchamp, and in Beauchamp, where Adam Berendt had been born on March , , in the local hospital, she’d made inquiries,
Morton Brady,
Elsie Brady, Frankie Brady
. . . “Some of us would go to visit Frankie at the Helena camp,” Mrs. Creznik was saying, “but you could see he was ashamed to see us. He must’ve been lonely but it was worse to see us, so we stopped going, finally. When? About 6, I guess. The last time I saw Frankie.”

Maudie Creznik had a large, open, florid, and friendly face, like a sunflower. There were myriad lines, cracks, creases in her stained-looking skin and her teeth (or dentures) were startlingly white. She smiled often, nervously. She was not a woman accustomed to visits from strangers. Yet she had a story to tell she had not told in some time, and there was attractive busty “Elizabeth Eastman” to hear it, camera in her lap. The palms of Augusta’s hands were perspiring. She swallowed hard, and asked where the Bradys’ trailer had been? Mrs. Creznik laughed and said, chiding, “ ‘Mobile home,’ dear. Not ‘trailer.’ These are not ‘trailers’ we live in, dear.”

“Mobile
home
. Of course, I knew that. Sorry!”

“We’ll walk over. Hand me my cane, dear.”

Maudie Creznik would have been a robust older woman in her late
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sixties except she had arthritis in hips and knees. She was cheerful in her complaints as a TV personality. Her hair was a frazzle of gray through which a pale scalp glimmered. She wore a floral pink polyester shift that fitted her lumpy figure like a tent, her pale, hairless legs were marbled with blue-ink varicose veins. Augusta liked her, yet was shy of touching her.

She had to help Mrs. Creznik heave herself up out of the lawn chair.

“It was over that way. I remember well.”

Mrs. Creznik leaned on Augusta’s arm, and on the cane, as she walked.

Augusta steeled herself against the woman’s pungent smell but found it pleasant, comforting, a warm bisquity odor.

“Canyon Creek Campground used to be smaller. Always it extended back to the creek but wasn’t so wide. We’re on six acres now. Then, it was about half. There were just twelve lots. The homes, like the Bradys’, were smaller then. The Bradys’ was secondhand, and not in good repair. One of the camp eyesores. Elsie, Frankie’s mom, was a sweet woman but overwhelmed. What happened to her, marrying so young, and her kids. She loved them but couldn’t take care of them too well. The little girl, Holly, was born with a hearing impairment. Now, you’d get treatment for it easy, but then, I don’t know how it worked out. She was a real cute, sweet, always smiling little girl, very shy, the other kids would tease, ’cause she couldn’t always hear them and she didn’t talk exactly right. Frankie loved his sister, he was a big clumsy kid for his age, husky, and a good swimmer, and he had something wrong with him, too, real restless in school they said, had trouble reading, which made him quick-tempered. Elsie was on the county rolls after her husband left. (That bastard! He took their car.