Silent Retreats (26 page)

My best memories are from this neighborhood, and the exhaustion from running seems cleansing, but even so, the fear and regret, the wrenching isolation of secrets, they stalk me, and sometimes they prevail over me like the lightning in a hot summer thunderstorm once prevailed over the large belfry crucifix here at St. Paul's, our neighborhood parish.

My friends suggest I marry again, or seek absolution. When I pass this church, I always think of that. Absolution—they're on to something there. In 1957, jerking off was the moral equivalent of murder in the dim light of the confessional. Casey's voice, from behind the plastic mesh screen, made the whole empty church vibrate with his priestly authority. Absolution was grudgingly granted to frightened children whose mistakes were limited to the scale of childhood and whose problems were gloriously solvable—even then none of us ever felt completely forgiven.

I think sometimes of form: raise the knees higher and the speed increases, lengthen the stride to heel-toe and feel the therapy in the hamstring.

I remember 1957 as a clean, well-mothered time, and I wonder sometimes what went wrong later. I remember that year as one long baseball summer—textures of wood and leather, grass stains in cotton; the science of raking the infield dry and raking it wet, waiting for the dew to evaporate, learning to spit and other initiations—watching clouds billow up and get black, checking the sun for lunchtime. Establishing a reputation: good arm, good glove, good power to right; vaulting the fence, good form.

That was years before the nights of parking spots like Black River Road and the Hanging Tree, time-honored lovers' lanes deep in the hills left when the glacier melted. I guess I love this day, red and waning; I guess I love this town, falling down. After the fire at St. Paul's we attended mass for what seemed like years in a forest of gray, towering scaffolding inside the church. These old houses, I know them like familiar faces. These streets, I know where they lead. (Skidmore goes by again—he wants to stop, offer me condolences on my poems, show me his latest metafiction, razz me about my knee.) This town and I have deep, dark confidentialities. I twisted my knee in the steering wheel, 1962, in a glen on the Black River Road while missing basketball practice on an earnest, determined mission to discover what made Carol Canfield tick. Even now I think of 1962 as the long vibrato whine of a car horn echoing through the glacier hills on a cold autumn evening. No regrets. They told me she became a nurse in later life.

I'd left the car to pee and when I got back she wasn't wearing anything. She just sat there, the girl of my dreams, smiling, enjoying my embarrassment—her, a tall feisty senior cheerleader—me, a tangled-up, over-anxious second-string forward, Dad's car. Until the day he died, my dad thought I hurt the knee going to the hoop.

J. Richard Peck Hollander, rest his soul, was president of the draft board, and he told my dad no twisted knee nor allegation of color blindness would defer this doctor's son from his duty.

"If doctors' sons don't serve, then why should anyone else?" he asked, my question precisely, but my dad was insulted—of course I would serve. I went and talked to them myself. I asked, "How is this thing in Asia a threat to our security?"

J. Richard said, "You won't wonder that when the communists come up Scott Street and rape your sister."

"But these guys, they don't even have a boat. How they going to get to central Illinois? How they going to get past the Pennsylvania National Guard, the Indianapolis police department?" Forget it. I was drafted.

One afternoon right after I got back, I climbed those steps at St. Paul's and caught Casey just at the end of confessions when no one else was there. He opened the little window and waited. I could see his dim shadow, his profile, waiting. I could see the Roman collar and the ceremonial stole. I tried to think how to begin. I was trying to separate sins from duty. He waited several minutes, neither of us saying anything. Finally, he slid the window closed.

I note my knee almost twenty years later—in recent years the ankle has twisted several times. Maybe, after the steering wheel thing, the alignment never got quite right again, hip to toe. No regrets. I turned the ankle pretty bad in basic training; then I broke it pretty good in Vietnam in a fall off a personnel carrier when the dumb shit driving it drove through a small mine crater at forty miles an hour. A lot of guys were hurt more than me.

I've learned from experience that it takes me a mile and a quarter to break a sweat in reasonable weather, eighty degrees or less. I can feel myself operate, or I can disengage my mind from it, closing around the usual daydreams or some comfortable mantra. Tell you this: I'd never remarry.

I've known people who develop a cold view of things. They find their passion in a few close friends and come to expect nothing from the larger world—except blockage and thwartment, puzzlement and consternation. Close to the ground they huddle. Instinctively they limit themselves, away from wind, experience, people, other natural currents. For them the world is an animation viewed through windows, a home movie run at too slow a speed, existential HBO, silent life except for the clicking projector and the occasional comment from the dark. But I know the world is too complicated to relate to on a part-time basis—we spring from it, we're part of it, it's inside us, any separation from it is artificial and doomed. I know what Skidmore means when he says he's sorry he missed the war. Ann Hollander became an example of those insulated people. She became Sister Ann Rene Hollander, even more deeply conditioned to guilt than I am, shrouded under starch, living in the dark linoleum cloister of the most conservative order of monastic housewives of Christ that J. Richard Peck Hollander could find in a new age.

You hear rumors of those who see auras, ghostly hues like halos around people, suggesting their character and destiny. Sister Ann Rene claimed to see a violet aura over the body of her dead father, J. Richard, gaunt like Lincoln, resting on the coroner's slab. Ann dressed him for the grave in the quiet back room of the Waddington Funeral Home down the street. She wrote notes to him and put them in his casket. That's where I got the idea.

Patterson Springs is my halfway point, a place of solitude these days. It's familiar to me from when I was little—I used to play there, and later Skidmore and I would camp among those trees. I rejoice at the wonderful existence of this forest. I take it personally. I marvel at the patience of these oaks. You imagine their roots, reaching down, holding tight. They are my reward for making it this far—the rich fragrance of hickory, white oak, their rotting leaves and cracking acorns, renewal of sprouts.

The old chautauqua ground is located where a deep-running network of pure-water springs suddenly wells up out of the earth. The pioneer Virgil Patterson built his place among these oaks and so honored the blessing of cold, pure water that he built a shrine, now dank and moss-covered, back in the trees where the water presents with a deep rippling sound coming straight up out of the black loam.

The hush of the wind here, blended with the windy brushing sound of my footfalls in bent grass, momentarily absolves me from, rids me of, my depression, even though I know this absolution is nothing but the arrival of my second wind, the sudden alignment of energy, circulation, and chemistry that produces a moment of strength and optimism. I've learned from experience it arrives at three and one-half miles, deep in this forest on the path that leads to the fresh-water springs and, beyond that, the chautauqua ground. During this fleeting moment I can hallucinate God and Peace, I can envision my own reincarnation, I can summon a sense of relative innocence and well-being. In this moment I realize that this moment is the whole reason I'm running.

As I come across the flat here, the trees arch high above me and through them I see the navy-blue sky. I'm running in the last light. By fall I'll have to start earlier or change the route; scrub bushes and abrupt gullies occupy this tract without pattern. But now as I run I can see the burr oak, sixty meters to my right across the flat. Struck by lightning one night in July of 1959, its top is shattered and its trunk is split but it still lives. Its arms reach wide and have old men's elbows, and at the ends the limbs suddenly plunge upward into the sky.

Several years ago I got the idea to bury a time capsule under the burr oak. It was a strange notion, I admit, and I thought about it a long time, years, before I actually went through with it, this summer. It was a project that occupied me for several weeks. Already a bed of weeds, dense and yellow, obscures the spot.

Roger. Lost a hand in Vietnam. And I remember him squinting through smoke and green beer, St. Patrick's Day, Pat's Pub, Charlottesville, 1974, complaining about his life and prying into mine. Twelve years ago. Even though Roger has always worked hard at pissing me off, I keep him as a friend because he's the only person I can talk to who has been ambushed and knows how it feels. Sometimes I have to find him and talk about being ambushed, or just talk about anything, knowing he's been ambushed, too. I watch his pulse beat a rhythm in his neck—he's alive and I can see that; therefore we both are.

"How've you been?" he's asking me. He knows I'm in the middle of a divorce, that my wife took the kids and headed south to be a potter, rolled the VW bus outside of Oklahoma City and sent me the bill.

"Fine."

Up at the bar there's a St. Patrick's Day party going on. We talk louder to get above it.

"Good," he says. "That's good." He moves his beer mug between us with his hook. I call it a hook. Really it's more like a steel clamp.

"What's good?" I say.

He stares at me. "Actually," he says after a while, "I hear you're bonkers."

"Then why'd you ask how I am?"

He doesn't answer me, leans back in his chair.

I say to him, "Do I ask, 'So, how's your hand?'"

We're both laughing, but we're pissed.

"So, how've you been?" I ask him after a while.

"Great," he says. Roger says he remembers a marine who could drink more than anyone he's ever seen, says he heard the guy recently barged into a newspaper office in Anderson, Indiana, and held the whole place hostage at shotgun point until he started crying and gave up.

"I know how he felt," Roger says to me. "I was in a hardware store buying some wire. The clerk, an old guy, was showing me where it was, and we walked by this bin with big wrenches in it. For no reason it hit me that I could kill this old guy, I could smash this guy's skull. I pictured myself doing it. I knew what it would look like. I got out of there."

I recognize that feeling. It makes my stomach roll to hear Roger give it words. It comes from knowing how close death can be, an old ambush lesson. I tell Roger that J. Richard Peck Hollander died, president of the draft board back when we were ushered out of town in the dead of night on a Greyhound bus, the modem equivalent of marching off to war. Roger says he's sorry to hear it, he really is.

He says his dad was a veteran of Guadalcanal, and now every year veterans of Guadalcanal come to some great hotel in Dallas or Denver and have a reunion. He says even the Japanese come. "Now goddamn it, Wilbur, I'm telling you that is proof positive that the world has gone completely crazy." His beer spills. Quietly he mops at it.

He says he'll miss J. Richard at our reunion, when we get in the mood to have one.

"Forget it," I say.

"Forget what?" he says, and we laugh.

"What a pitiful son of a bitch you are," he says to me at the end of the laughing, and we laugh again, guzzle a little green beer, and toast the party at the bar. "The worst is over," he says after a while, and then we say nothing, watch the party.

"Gotta girl?" I say.He looks down, keeps looking down. I try to think of something hilarious to say. Can't.

"C'mon," I tell him. "You're a great-looking guy. There's somebody out there for . . . godDAMN it, don't hold that thing up. That's not the reason. The problem's upstairs . . . the hook's sexy . . ."

Roger laughs, there's relief in the air. "Seriously," I tell him, "you gotta find some other excuse, not that. Women love a good war wound. Signals a hero."

He's retreating. He's being cordial, but he wants no part of that talk. He'll be out the door in another few seconds. Fast, I try to tell him our conversations never turn out the way I hope they will but I can never think of how to improve them. I tell him I want to be real close friends, confidants, and tell him some of these terrible secrets and shit that give me the clangs when I'm trying to sleep. He's sliding his chair back—he's angling for his jacket on the back of it. He doesn't want that stuff. I think of maybe grabbing him to try to keep him there. His face gets flushed—his eyes water. He's afraid, he doesn't know what might be said or if he can handle it, he's running. He doesn't want all that warm friendship and frank talk.

And, getting up to leave, he says, "Wilbur, you know what you need? You need a sophisticated shrink."

And I knew this woman, Erica—my wife. For many years we lived alone together and had children whom she wanted to consider gifts from her to me. Whether she has night terrors like mine, I wouldn't know. For me, marriage is under the burr oak, and fatherhood. With them I buried this poster I had of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima—I had framed it with the caption "The Baby Boom." It hung in our various rented living rooms, later our various rented bathrooms.

That's us, Ann, Skidmore, Roger, Erica—the baby boom. It took us until about 1958 to realize what was happening. For a long time in the fifties we thought we were in the clear because we'd managed to dodge polio.

At this point, I complete a mile loop through the Patterson Springs acreage and am back on the road headed south. I already know I won't sleep well this evening, with Roger and Erica and Skidmore haunting me, with guilt scratching at me inside my chest and stomach. I think I miss my kids. I can see, perhaps a mile ahead, the first lights of the University Park, and I focus right on them, set it to automatic, and move through the dark down the asphalt at 6o percent. I can hear the wind in the drying corn husks in the fields on both sides of me. I try to take my mind into the hush of the drying corn.