Prudence (18 page)

My Dearest,

One of the problems I never expected to have over here is that I’ve got too much time to think. And the best thing, the easiest thing, is to try and spend all that time finding ways not to think at all. I never succeed, of course. I always end up going over that day in my mind, thinking how it could have, how it should have, turned out differently. But it didn’t. No matter how often I return to that afternoon in my mind, it always turns out the same. That poor girl. That poor, poor girl.

Up till very recently I always added “and poor poor me” to the end of that. But that’s not really fair, and it’s not really true, either. There were many who suffered that day.

I worry about you most of all. And that’s the truth. I worry about what happened to you. You had to stay there, at least for a while. I got out of there so quickly and then everything happened so fast with my training and my deployment. I’m sorry I haven’t written you till now. Truly sorry. I just didn’t know what to say or how to say it, and so I thought it best not to say anything. But that’s not right, either. That’s not the right thing to do. I didn’t think about how what happened affected you. Really affected you most of all.

It took him the better part of an hour to read it. “Hmmm,” he said aloud when he was done. And again, “Hmmm.”

He took the letter and put it back in the envelope addressed to Billy. He took it and the telegram and put them both between his mattress and the mattress boards.

The wick could be trimmed tomorrow. And maybe if the wind wasn’t too strong and the temperature held and the sun was out, he really would try and spear a nice muskie. The flesh was so firm and flaky and clean this time of year.

Felix cupped his hand over the mantle of the lantern and blew out the flame. He raked the coals in the barrel stove and added two more sticks of green birch. The bark caught and crackled and the light jumped around the cabin, but only for a moment, and then it dulled. He closed the door but left the grate open, and then he changed into his sleeping clothes by the firelight and closed the curtain that separated his bed from Prudence’s. It got cold near the wall, with the curtain between him and the stove, but he was used to it. And Prudence deserved the heat. She liked it hot. He smiled a bit at the thought of her under her blankets, nested there, her knees drawn to her chest.

In his narrow bed, with the wool blankets pulled up daintily to his chin and his eyes closed, he couldn’t sleep. When would she be back? When would she come staggering through the door, and what would her mood be? It was so hard to guess when she would be cruel and when she would be a girl, just a girl. God, she could be terrible, her silences as cruel as her words. The hours and even days when she wouldn’t speak to him. And the nights she stayed out and drank. Didn’t she know what that did to him, to his peace of mind? She must know and not care. But then she’d say something and smile and all those dark times would burn up and float away. Or he’d coax her out on the trails behind the Pines to check snares with him and she’d complain. She’d complain about her boots and the cold and the unevenness of the trail. But then she’d dart ahead and pull a snare from under the snow, a dead rabbit dangling there, and she’d shout, “Well, lookee here!” And she’d grab him by the shoulder and spin him around so she could, on tiptoe, put the rabbit in his pack basket.
And then, some mornings, he’d hear her moving about the cabin while he was still in bed, and then the door would open, cold gushing in, and she’d be gone, outside in the predawn. He’d rise and creep to the window and see her over the burn barrel, putting in her bloody underthings, dripping kerosene on them and setting them on fire, burning the evidence of her monthly blood. Why would she bother with that? At these times, he’d know she could not stay there, and yet she could not leave.

Maybe all she needed was more time. Another year or two, maybe three. Enough time for the hate to rust away and for the love to shine through. What else could you call his feelings for her, the care he showed her? Someday she’d see it. Someday she’d see. Frankie would come back and she’d see the truth for herself.

He closed his eyes and tried to see her walking across the ice—so vulnerable in her dancing shoes, her arms wrapped around her own waist, hugging her jacket to her body. Heedless. Heedless of the ice and the current underneath. Heedless of the wind. She had no idea how frail she looked, how thin, how unsteady she seemed when she crossed the ice.

*   *   *

T
he door opened and slammed shut. Felix could smell the alcohol before she even had time to trip over the fire rake and curse. She shucked her coat and sat down on her bed. “Jesus,” she said, and she sighed and said again, “Jesus, I hate . . .” but didn’t finish the thought.

Felix stiffened with nervousness (could it be called fear?) when Prudence came back to the cabin in such rough shape. The next day, after a few cups of tea, she would be manageable, and she wouldn’t be sorry for what she’d said to him. But she’d do her chores, fighting her headache and the bruises. She’d stagger around with the ax and
curse the log rounds she was supposed to reduce to kindling. At war. Fighting. Fighting everything.

“There’s something for you,” said Felix finally. “There’s something from Frankie, in that box there.”

Prudence didn’t say anything, but Felix heard her suck in her breath and get up from her bed, so slender, so light, that the bedsprings didn’t even notice.

“Oh,” she said. The cabin was suddenly still. “Oh, look.”

He sat up and saw her turning the locket in the lamplight.

“There’s a letter, too,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Bekaa
,
”
he said.
“Bekaa, daanis.”
He reached under his mattress and removed the letter from the envelope with Billy’s name on it and stuffed the envelope and the telegram back under the mattress. He rose and handed her the letter and then let the curtain fall back in place and sat quietly on the edge of his bed. “It’s for you.”

“Of course it is,” she said dreamily. “Of course.”

She took it and sat at the table, her back turned from him, her face toward the light. A few minutes passed.

“He’s coming back.”

“He could.”

“Is. He is. He’s gonna come back and get me out of this shithole.”

“This place has been good to us. The Washburns have been good to us.” Oh, he couldn’t help it, there it was, the memory of her head on his shoulder. Her smile when, once, she lifted a bass into the boat. And then, when he’d been seated as the belt man on the drum, she had helped him sew all those blankets and even come with him to the drum dance. That wasn’t nothing. Felix placed his hand over his heart to make sure it was still beating.

“Did you read this? Did you?”

“No,” he said toward the ceiling.

“You’d know if you did. You’d know like I know.”

“Maybe he will,” murmured Felix, just to close down the conversation, just to quiet whatever storm always raged inside this girl.

He watched her raise her arm over her head in the firelight.

“He’s gonna come and get me away from this place,” she said, slurring.

“Maybe he won’t.”

“Why wouldn’t he? Why wouldn’t he come for me? See? No reason. None at all. No reason. I can give him what he wants. And I will, too. It don’t matter what anyone says about it. I don’t care what they say.”

“He’s all the way in England. And there’s a war. Lots could happen.”

“It won’t stop him. He said so.” She pushed the curtain aside, holding on to it for support. If it fell down, he’d have to fix it immediately, because otherwise he’d have to sleep without anything between them, and if he woke in the night he’d see her, sleeping hot next to the stove, her blankets thrown off, her mouth open.

“He’s never coming back here,” said Felix, and he turned away from her and faced the wall.

“You don’t know anything. You don’t know anything at all. Especially about him. He saved me. Understand?” She stepped closer. “He saved me.”

The girl was so blind. But he had helped make her that way. He didn’t know how to undo it.

“You know what?” She moved closer. Her voice was low and close to his ear. “You know what? You’re just jealous. You’re just jealous because you don’t got anything. Even this. This. This place isn’t even yours.” Her whiskey breath was close. “You’re jealous of him. Of all of them.”

“No. Please, Prudence. Please stop, Prudy.”

“Yeah, you are. You want this. That’s all you’ve ever wanted. That’s why I’m stuck here.”

“No.”

“So that’s not what you want? It’s not?” He could feel her weight on the bed. Her hand slid under the wool blanket.

“No.”

“No?”

She pushed the blanket aside and straddled him. He was hard already, and that was as much a surprise as everything else. It had been so long, so many long years. She reached down and, with her hand around the base of it, put him inside her.

Her dress was still buttoned to the top. Her sleeves reached to just above her elbows, and Felix was surprised at how slender her forearms were. How slender and strong.

“Prudence. No.”

But she was moving anyway. As was he, anyway.

She put her hands on his chest to steady herself. “This is what you want, isn’t it?”

It wasn’t. It wasn’t. But it was.

“Prudence.”

She closed her eyes. He felt what seemed like drops of cold water on his chest, and then he saw what it was. A necklace, the chain doubled, hung from her slender wrist. A small heart dangled from it. Even in the low light, Felix could tell it wasn’t gold. Just silver.

“Prudence.”

She moved her hips against his a few more times, and he came.

“Merry Christmas, Felix.”

“Niin dash wiin, mii eta go aano-wii-ayaamaan da-odaanisiminaan. Iw sa eta.”
He turned his face toward the wall in shame. He felt the cold seeping through the boards.

“Oh? Well, you’re a
great
dad.”

And suddenly she was off him. His penis, slick and cold and startled in the cold cabin, was already shrinking, retreating back inside
his underwear, which hadn’t even come off. Prudence staggered back to her bed and lay down heavily. She was asleep within minutes.

After everything that had been done and everything that wasn’t, Frankie sent a silver heart? That was all? In a few months her sweat would corrode it. It wouldn’t last any longer than the lie could. The layers of metal were just like the bones in the head of the pike. There was a small bone in there—inside their skulls. It got bigger every year, a layer of new bone for every year it lived. When they had fish-head soup when he was a boy (his mother, for once not shy and proper, would slurp it down), whoever got the pearl, the lobe of bone, was lucky. He’d forgotten that. But for all of them—Felix and Emma and Frankie and Jonathan and Billy and Prudence—life seemed to have the opposite effect. With each and every year, everything got smaller, another layer was worn away. Soon there would be nothing left.

He waited to make sure she was asleep before taking the envelope and the telegram from under his bed. He moved to the stove and squatted down. He opened the door and put the envelope with Billy’s name on it on the coals. One second. Two. It flared up and then died. He read the telegram from Emma again.

FOR FELIX STOP FROM THE AIR FORCE STOP DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON 674448 FRANK CONRAD WASHBURN IS MISSING AS THE RESULT OF AIR OPERATION ON THE NIGHT OF 21/22TH DEC 44 STOP LETTER FOLLOWS STOP ANY FURTHER INFORMATION RECEIVED WILL BE COMMUNICATED TO YOU IMMEDIATELY STOP PENDING RECEIPT OF WRITTEN NOTIFICATION NO INFORMATION SHOULD BE GIVEN TO THE PRESS

He placed it on the coals, on top of the remains of the envelope. It too flared up and died. And then he went back to bed. He turned
once again to face the wall and pulled the blankets around his body. Maybe tomorrow. Prudence would sleep late. Maybe tomorrow, early, if it was sunny, he’d go out on the ice and chop a hole and use the white man’s lures to draw the muskie close. It would come and he’d stab it and bring it up, huge and glistening and uncomprehending, onto the ice. They’d have fish tomorrow night. Just the two of them. Just the two of them, and she would be kind and he would be kind, and the past would crawl back where it belonged. They’d have fish, and with their bellies full they’d think back to the good days they’d had and would have once more.

THE RESERVATION
1952

THE RESERVATION—AUGUST 1, 1952

S
o it must have been past midnight and there was some cunt walking down the side of the road. She was swinging this black purse in her left hand and holding her shoes in her right and putting her feet down on the white line but her feet missed now and then, and when she did, she stepped into the road and then back the other way into the gravel and ditch grass before finding the line again.

Billy slowed the truck and downshifted. What was left of the whiskey he got at the VFW in Grand Rapids sloshed in the bottle between his legs. His eyes itched and he rubbed them and then rubbed his forehead and pushed his hair back across his head. He felt greasy and low and dragged out, as though at the end of another march through the bocage. But those days were well behind him. The truck he was driving was proof of that, if not the day spent at the VA for another visit with the doctor about his shoulder, which just wouldn’t stop hurting. His right arm felt like some useless thing, not good enough to green-chain and stack lumber at the mill any longer, barely good enough to lift Margaret and Junior into the back of the truck on the rare day they went to the lake. His arm’s only purpose was to hang from his body.

He took a drink and slowed down even more and flashed his high beams at the bitch but she didn’t look back, so he flashed them again. She could be killed. She knew he was there because her feet were a
little more cautious, stuck to the line a little more carefully, and her shoulders were extra even and level and her head was held high and she didn’t look back. She had on a floral-print dress, some kind of flowers that weren’t exactly accurate, and the black purse didn’t match up but it was probably the only purse she had. Only dress, too. She was darker than Billy but she had a glow to her skin and she didn’t have any stockings on and her shoes—little slip-on things—were in her right hand. When she lifted her feet Billy saw they were strong feet, narrow, dirty on the bottom from the road. She had a good body, slender but strong. The dress was fitted tight around her hips and the muscles in her ass bunched and swayed with each determined step. A cloud of moths and mosquitoes trailed along behind her, lit up by the headlights.

Billy flashed the lights again, but even when he got right behind her, the cunt still didn’t look back, so he pulled alongside her, and with the truck still rolling leaned across the packages on the seat and cranked down the passenger window.

“I ain’t the sheriff’s deputy, for Chrissake,” he said.

“I know what you’re not.”

“Well, what the fuck? You just out for a stroll, Prudy?”

“If it ain’t Billy Cochran.”

“The one and only.”

“Yeah, there’s only one of you.” She walked faster, not looking at him or the truck.

The truck’s tires crunched in the gravel. “You want a ride or not?”

Prudence stopped and Billy put the truck in park. Prudence leaned back and then leaned in and rested her head on the bottom of the open window, the necklace clinking against the inside of the door.

“Sweet Christ, that feels good,” she said.

“Sure enough. You’re gonna get run over out here. Where you coming from?”

“Oh, you know,” she said, waving back down the dark road with
her purse, which dropped from her hand. “Damn it,” she moaned, and bent out of view to retrieve it. “There was a little something happening over at Judd’s,” she said when she stood up. “Some dancing going on over there.” Billy smelled the gin coming off her.

“Is that what they call it.”

“A big bunch up from Chicago to do some fishing.”

“I bet. You gonna tell me your life story or you gonna get in? I’ll bring you home.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Prudence looked down the road toward the village. “It ain’t far now.”

“It’s three miles yet.”

“I gone further than that, Billy Cochran. A lot further.”

“Not drunk you haven’t.”

“If you say so.”

Prudence grabbed the door handle and pulled, dropped her purse again, picked it up and pulled again, and dropped her shoes. “Lord love a duck,” she said.

“Gotta pull harder than that—she’s stuck,” said Billy.

“Your truck here is a piece of shit.”

“Better than the truck you don’t got.”

Prudence threw her shoes and purse in through the open window, put her foot against the truck, and pulled. The door swung open and she staggered back, and with a little shriek fell down in the ditch. All Billy could see from the driver’s seat was Prudence disappearing from view and then her feet arcing up through the air.

“Jesus, girl,” said Billy, and he got out and went around the front of the truck and down the slope of the ditch, his leather-soled shoes slipping in the dew-slick grass. Prudence was on her hands and knees, feeling around for her shoes. “That must have been some party over to Judd’s,” he said as he helped her stand. Her dress was soaked and the backside was caked with mud and bits of grass. Her knees were dirty.

“Life’s always some party, isn’t it,” said Prudence, and she leaned on him as he walked her up the ditch and got her into the truck. He slammed her door twice before it caught.

By the time he slid himself behind the wheel, Prudence had the bottle raised to her lips, her head thrown back. When she was done, she wiped her lips with the back of her hand and settled into the bench seat with her legs tucked underneath her, her head against the door frame, face into the oncoming wind.

“Jesus, Prudy, you drink like a man,” said Billy.

“I drink like I got to,” she said lazily, her throat thick with booze.

“Gimme that,” he said. She stretched her arm out without looking, and Billy took the bottle and did his own drinking as the truck picked up speed. Prudence shifted in her seat and lifted her dress up past her thighs. She picked some grass off the fabric and let the wind take it. “Ruined,” she murmured.

Billy watched the road and he watched Prudence, too. When they pulled her screaming from the brush ten years earlier she hadn’t looked all that different; her legs bare and covered in grass and blood, her eyes wild and blank, not settling on any one thing. At first she’d been hysterical, wild; and then, with Felix’s arms wrapped around her, she had calmed down and he had talked to her in Indian and she calmed down even more; and by the time Felix had carried her out of the woods she was quiet. She wouldn’t or couldn’t say anything at all when Dr. Washburn checked her out and they put her in the big house. When the sheriff arrived, she still wouldn’t talk. They all wondered where she’d come from, where she’d been, whom she belonged to, and how she ended up on the run.

And Frankie. He couldn’t look at her, not that day and not for a long time after. He wrote her, sent her things. But he’d never looked her in the face. That day he couldn’t raise his eyes off the ground, could barely move one foot in front of the other. It had been old
Felix who took charge till they got back to the Pines. Billy had wanted to help him, to go to him, as Emma swooped in, clucking and crying, asking him if he was okay, but even back then Billy had known that sometimes what a man needed was to be left the fuck alone.

“What are you looking at?” she said now. Billy didn’t say anything but looked away from her long legs, from the sleek skin. The truck smelled of peat and grass and whiskey.

*   *   *

T
he Wigwam was dark. A lone light lit the street in front of the town hall. A dog crossed the street. The town was silent.

“We’re here,” said Billy. Those days with Frankie, those long summer days and the life they held, seemed long gone. Forever gone. On the other side of some other thing that was hard for Billy to name.

“Oh?” Prudence lifted her head from the door frame and uncurled her legs, knocking Billy’s packages to the floor of the truck.

“Easy, Jesus Christ. I just bought those,” said Billy as he bent to retrieve them. His shoulder seized and he had to sit up, straighten his arm, and try again. “Goddamn.”

“Got any more juice?” Prudence asked.

“Some.” Billy handed her the bottle from where he had stashed it again between his legs. “Richard waiting for you up there?” he asked, peering over at the blank upstairs windows of the Wigwam. Billy and Richard had worked the green chain at the mill together. Richard was cheerful in a plain, unthinking way. He had joined the merchant marine and ridden back and forth across the Atlantic for the duration of the war. Probably just as happy doing that as he was sizing and sorting the lumber off the green chain. Since Billy had reinjured his shoulder at the mill and had taken the job as a spotter in the fire tower, he hadn’t seen Richard all that much. When he did, he
was surprised to see him with Prudence, of all people—and acting like he was the luckiest guy in the world. Amazing a man could be that dumb.

Prudence finished the bottle and looked at it curiously, as though she didn’t understand it.

“Well, I suppose,” said Billy.

“Richard’s at his place,” said Prudence.

“I suppose he is.”

She looked up at the dark windows of the Wigwam.

“That’s just my place, just for me. I’m not going to live with a man who’s not ready to make a commitment, you know?”

“You got principles, Prudy. Morals.”

“Unlike some.”

“You mean me.”

“If the shoe fits, Billy.”

“You ain’t wearing any, Prudy.”

“I never hurt no one.” She looked at the bottle again. “You got any more?”

Somewhere, in the direction the dog went, was his house, one among the few that made up the village. It was small but solid enough. And in it, Stella and Margaret and Junior all curled up in the same bed. Sometimes when he came back late he would stand over them, wondering how he would fit in there. He would remove his green U.S. Forest Service shirt and somehow, with his pants on, find his way into the tangled brush of their limbs. The mattress sank lower. When he turned, the whole bed rocked and pitched and the springs bounced, but they never woke, just tossed on the bed as though on the wave of some new dream. They slept the same whether he was there or not.

The truck idled in front of the Wigwam.

“I don’t keep it around.”

“You always were smart.”

“You think?”

“No,” said Prudence. “No, not really.” But then she laughed.

It felt as though they were just starting some kind of conversation they were always meant to have.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s just go.”

“You think?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Let’s just go.”

“Richard gonna care?”

“He won’t unless I do. Stella gonna care?”

“What she don’t know.”

“Yeah, yeah, Billy.”

Billy put the truck in gear and they rolled out of the village.

“Turn left,” she said. And he did, and they were once again on the blacktop.

In a few minutes they passed the place where he had first seen her that night. That, too, seemed so long ago, of another age. She had been a different girl then, walking along the road, and he had been a different man.

They passed the turnoff to Judd’s Resort and the Big Winnie Supper Club, and Prudence pointed at a mailbox set back from the highway. Billy turned and followed the long driveway south through a small potato field and up to a small log house.

“I can’t ask Gephardt,” said Billy. “I just can’t.”

“You don’t have to,” said Prudence. “He’ll sell to me.”

“Germans will sell to anyone.”

“You complaining about that?”

“Does he sleep hard?”

“He never has before. But I guess we’ll find out. You got money?”

“Do you?”

“What do I look like to you? Just hand it over. I’ll take care of it.”

The booze was losing its grip on Billy. He never went to Gephardt’s if he could help it. When he did—to sell rice, or get something
welded or fixed—he ground his jaw and looked down, though Gephardt was always friendly enough. It was strange to think about, but Gephardt had been at the camp that day—he had to have been, when the other prisoner went missing. Germans sure enough fucked everything up. His shoulder hurt.

He dug in his trouser pocket and found four dollars left over from his stop at J. C. Penney in Grand Rapids. He had walked around the racks for a long time, through the women’s clothes and kids’ clothes, over to the men’s and back again. He had no idea what to buy. Too many choices. Too many things he didn’t understand. He didn’t read anymore for the same reason. But how he had once loved the books Frankie sent. The sight of those packages wrapped in brown paper was really something. But there were too many choices now, and no one who could help him make them. Too many changes to everything.

It was summer, and Margaret and Junior usually wore the same thing—overalls and T-shirts. But Billy had wanted to get them something nice. For Margaret especially. He didn’t really know what to say to her most of the time. What does one say to a ten-year-old girl anyway? As it was, she went to school and she did well and she listened to Stella and did her chores. In the summer, on Sundays, he’d put his chair outside the front door and sit there in the sun, and he could see her with her hands on her hips, surrounded by a group of boys, or squatting down in the center of them, all their heads bent low as they listened to some story or instruction. She was in charge of all of them. But around him she didn’t say much. She just studied him, watched him, did what he said, and disappeared.

Just that summer he had added a new chore to her list: she had to bring him lunch every day. Stella would pack it in an old lard pail and tie flour-sacking around the top, and Margaret had to carry it out to the fire tower at noon and climb the two hundred feet up the
stairs with the pail banging against her legs, and then the remaining twenty feet straight up the ladder and through the trapdoor. He made her wait while he inspected the contents and ate the first few bites. She never looked out over the edge or made conversation or gave any sign, really, that she wanted to stay.

He could have brought the pail himself in the morning when he left. It would have been easy enough. And he had eaten enough bad food in the Army, so a stale sandwich or a warm jar of milk was no big thing. But he hoped—well, he wasn’t sure what he hoped—but he hoped something would happen between them in the fire tower, swaying two hundred feet over the trees. He might say something. Or she might. But neither did. And then he’d say, “Go on now,” and down the ladder she’d go, to walk the three miles back to the village and resume doing whatever it was that ten-year-old girls did and thinking whatever it was they thought.