Riverine (20 page)

One Christmas, Uncle Pat returned to Indiana with three dogs in tow. “Meet my kids,” he said, flinging the bed of his truck open wide, looking and sounding well. He introduced the enormous beasts one by one—a German shepherd, a rottweiler, and a Lab mix of some kind. He explained their personalities and their lineage, and shared heartwarming anecdotes from their life together. I had never understood dog love, but I tried to mirror his enthusiasm.

I pointed at the rottweiler. “What’s that one wearing? A diaper?”

“That’s Ginny,” he said. “She’s in heat.” Ginny shook her hips, trying to free herself from the plastic chastity belt. The German shepherd wouldn’t leave her alone.

It was determined that the dogs would stay in the garage, against my father’s wishes. Uncle Pat would check on them periodically to ensure that nothing had been destroyed, and that Ginny was penned away from the two males. At dinner, as my father began to carve the Butterball ham, we heard a desperate yelp from one of the dogs. Uncle Pat stood up, on parental alert, and rushed to the garage. “God damn it, the kids got out.”

No one made a move to help. But the garage could not have opened itself.

Uncle Pat flew out the front door, took two quick steps, and then thought better of it. He hollered for them by name, then collectively. “Kids!” he called. “You kids come back here.”

The rest of us sat at the table, smirking as the German shepherd caught the rottweiler and tried to mount her in the front yard. We watched her break free, run a little way, and then get caught again. My father continued slicing the ham. Had he let them out of the garage? On purpose?

“Shit,” Uncle Pat said. “Ginny’s gonna get nailed.”

At twenty-three, I moved to Indianapolis. Life in the city was quite different from life in rural Indiana. In the city, my new friend Rachel introduced me to good food. I ate sushi and curry for the first time. I drank wine and dirty martinis and we went to art exhibit openings. I got credit cards and bought expensive shoes and pants at Nordstrom. I took taxis and branched with new girlfriends. I joined a book club, where I met Jen. She was smart and empowered and beautiful. We went to museums, festivals, and political rallies together. We shared bottles of wine and our impressions of novels we had read. Meeting these two women was a saving grace. I hadn’t had close girlfriends, other than my cousin Mandi, who were sharp and worldly. Who read the news and formed educated opinions. The world was opening up more widely for me, and they were a part of that growth.

My discernment with respect to both wine and men became more advanced. I dated a fairly successful musician, a surgeon, a former NFL player, then a couple of attorneys. Men my father would approve of. When I fell in love with an actual man, rather than the idea of one, I was relieved. He too had a real job, a career even, as an airline pilot. Mike was sweet and generous and steady. But I began to rub off on him: I was a party girl. He slept less, drank more. He stopped training for cycling races. He burned through his savings account as we toured Indianapolis’s best restaurants and went on vacations to Colorado and England and Canada and Washington, D.C.

Mike and I could never determine when it was time to go home, when to turn off the lights, and so we sometimes had to call off work. Together, we made friends who were similarly reckless, who also had a hard time differentiating between fun and self-destruction. Our friend Martin came over one night to swap records—My Bloody Valentine for the new GusGus album. After the trade we went out, as usual. We’d been a dynamic threesome of friends for a time, our nights unfolding across the city’s haunts. We had no destinations, only arrivals. We walked to one bar, then took a cab to another. The west side, the east side. The near north, downtown. One night, we ripped a paper towel dispenser from a bathroom wall. We left wads of cash to compensate for the damage and went dancing at a gay bar. Later that night, I was in love with both of my companions. At one point, I crossed over into another plane of consciousness. I became suspicious of my own face in the mirror and then of Mike. A plane ticket stub fell out of his pocket, and I couldn’t remember his telling me he had been in the city listed on the stub for any reason. I’d lost track of the sprawl—mine, his, ours. It was bound to happen with how much he traveled. Still, I was enraged.

In response, Mike handed me a twenty and told me to take a cab home. He left me with Martin, and we kept dancing. When the bar closed, we began to walk toward home. After a few minutes Mike pulled up in my car, too drunk to drive it, and I screamed at him. I overlooked the gesture, that he had come back for me even though I had been unreasonable, and focused on the danger of the situation. I refused to get into the car and demanded that he leave it there, that he walk home the rest of the way with us. When the men tried to quiet me, confining my flailing arms and rendering me immobile so that they could place me in the car, I reacted by pushing and kicking them. In the morning, I remembered very little. I vomited all day, and by evening I still couldn’t stop. First it ran clear, then there was blood. Mike took me to the hospital, where they sedated and rehydrated me. I made him stay in the waiting room so he wouldn’t hear me tell the doctors I’d only had a few drinks. So he wouldn’t hear me say no when they asked me if I drank often.
What are we before we become something else?
I thought as I lay in the emergency room bed. Before I was a woman, I was a girl. Before I was a woman who lived too recklessly, I was a girl who loved too reactively. But can I pinpoint the change? The point at which love and fun and danger and self-destruction had melded into one continuous event? Everything was fine, and then—,—.

One of Uncle Pat’s unique attributes is his ability to recall details that others typically forget. With startling clarity, he has recounted for me, many times, each time he took me to Dairy Queen for hot fudge sundaes between 1985 and 1989; whipped cream, no nuts. He has recounted the dates on which he played video games with me for hours past my bedtime the year he lived with us. He has reminded me that he has, to date, purchased nine books for me, the names of which he can still recite, in order of date of purchase.
The Boxcar Children #1
, 1989;
Nancy Drew and the Secret of Red Gate Farm
, 1990; and so on. I understood that documentation of this nature was proof of his love for me; the only thing he could give me was an accurate recounting of a chain of events that, taken together, undoctored by memory and perception, had a larger meaning. But they were currency in a bank account that I didn’t realize I borrowed against when his phone calls went unreturned, or when I failed to send him a birthday card each November. He kept a close eye on the balance.

The night after the dog incident, we ordered pizza. I rode with Uncle Pat to pick it up. The dogs lay in the bed of the truck. We parked in front of Papa Johns. We were early. “You know,” Uncle Pat said, “you only like pizza because of me. I gave you your first slice of pizza when you were two.”

He turned to me then and delivered a lengthy monologue about how little I appreciated everything he did for me—the account balance apparently well into the red. As he talked, I eased my hand onto the door handle, not out of fear but to ready myself for an escape, should I need to make one. Part of me knew that he had wanted badly to have his own children and, in lieu of that experience coming to fruition, had displaced that desire onto his nieces and nephews. But it was more responsibility than any of us could bear. He did not make it easy to love him. Or, he did, until he didn’t. “You should go visit him in Michigan,” my aunts and mother would say. “That would make him happy.” But I was getting tired of making men feel secure in their broken selves. My mother had said the same sorts of things about my father. When I brought a black boyfriend home to meet my parents, without mentioning his skin color beforehand because I didn’t think it was relevant, my father didn’t speak to me for six months. “You need to talk to him,” my mother had said. But I didn’t. I was done talking. And I was done shifting myself—my own beliefs and behaviors—to fit the preferences of a man, no matter who he was. My mother’s advice was ever mask, bury, deny, submit.

“You know what?” Uncle Pat added, leaning slightly toward me. “I was going to shoot every last one of you when I came down here to visit. Your dad, your mom, everyone. But I didn’t.” He paused, his eyes wide and plucked completely free of lashes, which he claimed was a medical condition.
All of this is a medical condition
, I thought.
Why won’t anyone call it like it is?

I shifted my gaze subtly, as one would if one were confronted with a bear on a hike in the mountains—enough to note that the doors on the car were locked and that there were no nearby weapons. The words
unregistered gun
flashed through my mind. Had he decided not to kill us before driving down from Michigan? Or had he decided just now? Had he brought a gun with him? I imagined for a moment my brains splattered across the dashboard. “Thank you,” I said, disbelieving my own words.
Now I’m thanking a man for not killing me
, I thought.
It has come to this
.

When he exited the truck to retrieve the pizza, I pictured him sitting on his bed in the dark, mindlessly pulling eyelashes out, his blue-green eyes farther away than Neptune.

The truth is that Mike and I probably would have broken up if he hadn’t pitied me. We had both moved into the apartment building, where we met, for different reasons. I had hardly any money despite working two jobs, one low-level government job and one as a barista, but had wanted to live in downtown Indianapolis anyway. He had no money because he was still paying rent on another apartment he had lived in with his ex-girlfriend—he was that generous. He had never wanted to live in Indiana, and only moved there to take his job. He wanted to leave the state as soon as possible. The building, historic and with decent views of the city, had a mixed tenancy. There were students, a few young couples, middle-aged and elderly men and women who lived alone. The neighborhood was rough, though not unlivable, but I chalked that up to life in the city.

Two years after I moved in, though, I learned about Indiana’s online sex offender registry, which was state-of-the-art for its time—replete with details of people’s criminal backgrounds, their photos, their addresses and places of employment. I immediately searched my neighborhood, and no less than sixty hits popped up within a one-block radius of my address. When I widened my search to a half-mile radius, there were over one hundred. My building, as it turned out, neighbored a halfway house for sex offenders who had recently been released from prison, and several others lived in my building. Worse, I had moved from the fourth floor to the garden floor because it was even cheaper.

I had never been afraid of the city. My car had been broken into three times in three years, and I was resilient. I would call the cops, who would write it up because they had to but would inevitably tell me, “Don’t expect to get any of your stuff back.” I would shrug and call the glass company. A standard $140 repair. When I’d lived on the fourth floor, I often curled up in my balcony window with my cat and a notebook, comfortably watching drug deals on the sidewalk below as I penned bad poetry about city life: the catcalling men, the public debauchery, the homeless, the unexpected kindnesses, the insane beauty of it all. But the long list of ex-rapists, some of them with multiple offenses, paralyzed me. I began to fear coming home at dark and being alone, which only made me stay out longer to avoid returning to the building, spend more money, have one more drink, and, before Mike, stay over with men when I didn’t even want to, pushing further into my own danger zones.

I memorized the faces of the men on the registry, memorized their crimes, their scars, their tattoos—all of which were documented in their individual registries. There were three main categories: Sexually Violent Predator, Sex Offender, and Offender against Children. I focused my memorization efforts on the first. Face, Name, Race, Convicted of. Scar on L eyebrow, Tattoo on Upper L Arm (“HONESTY”), Piercing on Face (EYEBROW), Piercing on Tongue (ONE PIERCING), Tattoo on L Hand (4 ACES), Tattoo on R Breast (SKULL), Tattoo on R Breast (BOXING GLOVES), Tattoo on Neck (“SALINA”).

Shortly after I began noticing the people I was crossing paths with regularly, bracing myself when I saw one of the men from the list, a man began harassing me. First he’d say hello to me in the parking lot. Then he’d say hello in the mail room, shuffling in with me, always a bit too near me. When he knocked on my door one afternoon, I opened it a crack. Before I could say anything, his dog, a boxer puppy, nosed its way in and disappeared into my apartment. The man threw my door open, pushed me aside, and ran after his dog. “Sorry,” he said over his shoulder as he stepped into my bedroom. I stood in the doorway, holding the door wide open as I inched into the hallway. There was no one around. “You need to leave,” I called into my apartment. “You need to get your dog out of here.” I wanted to say that if he didn’t I would call the cops, but I didn’t want to provoke him. He did leave, though, carrying his unleashed dog with him. He never mentioned why he had knocked on my door in the first place.

When Uncle Pat had a stroke, my mother went to Michigan to visit him and clean his house while he recovered in a care facility and attempted rehabilitation. It was late winter, and feet of snow buried northern Michigan. When she opened the bed of his truck in search of Uncle Pat’s snow shovel, she found the rottweiler, Ginny, lying dead. Frozen stiff.

We had hoped the dog was in the truck’s bed because the ground was too frozen to dig. Because Uncle Pat’s health was too poor to shovel. We had hoped the burial had been interrupted by his stroke. But we were wrong.

“I was waiting to bury her when she thawed out,” Uncle Pat said, “so her brother and sister could say good-bye.”

“When did she die?” my mother asked him.

“Two months ago,” he said.

When I talked to my mother on the phone, I asked her what she was going to do.