Suspicious River (13 page)

“Leila, that’s how I feel like I want to do for you. Like that guy done for her. Beat the crap out of any son of a bitch who tries to hurt you. Because I understand that you got to be doing what you’re doing—for whatever reason, sweetheart, and you don’t have to tell me why, but I know you got to have the money. And you need somebody to be lookin’ out for you.” He put his hand over mine, and it felt heavy. “The money is important, baby, but the money is not as important as your life. Money is nothing without that, baby.”

The clock on the wall seemed to snap its cold hand forward each time he said
money
.

I thought of that.
The money
.

It’s what anyone would think I was doing this for.

But the money was nothing.

The money just bulged out of my jewelry box, green and dry. I only thought about the money when I added more money to it.

Gary Jensen pressed his hand down harder on mine, and sun warmed the plate glass. A bright box, a house of mirrors, a white truck, a palace of ice. What was it? What was I saving the money for?

“Well,” he said. “Listen to me, goin’ on like a fool. You probably don’t have any feelings for me at all, for all I know. I better get back to my room. But, Leila, I wondered if I could see you tonight, when you get done down here, so we don’t have to hurry for once. Maybe we could drink a beer. Please?” He laughed at the palms of his hands and said, “God! Listen to me beggin’ you like a lovesick kid, Leila. This must make you sick.”

I swallowed, smiled. “No. It’s O.K.,” I said, “I’ll come up about eleven.”

“Great,” he said, still looking at me, backing up to the door, touching the edge of his baseball cap. “That’s so damn great.” He blew me a kiss.

T
HE GROUND IS RAGGED
with brown leaves. When the wind blows, the leaves sound like women in paper petticoats rustling down the aisle of a hushed and empty church. The trees are naked, the sky is purple. The neighbors’ garden is twisted and blond, all the flowers collapsed into one another since summer. The smell of mulch and fusty withered marigolds travels across the chain-link fence in a puff of amber and old bulbs. Damp seeps up from the Michigan dirt, full of Indian bones, tangled tree roots, hard white kernels of corn like teeth buried by squirrels for the winter, worms burrowing into the center of the earth to die or sleep.

The sun is weak, but it shines, and I can feel it flush my face—a cool November sunburn—as I lie on my back on the ground. It’s Thanksgiving, and I’m six. From inside the house I can hear the distant tin of TV—a crowd, angry or ecstatic, as my father and Uncle Andy watch the Lions buck and clap against the Chiefs. After dinner, they’d sat down exhausted on the couch, side by side. My mother had her hands in gray, soapy water in the kitchen, feeling the bottom of it carefully for a knife, rinsing it off when she found it. “Leila, why don’t you go outside? It’s nice outside,” she’d said.

I am wearing a plaid jumper with an old, shrunken sweater of my father’s. The red sleeves are loose around my wrists, like tongues. I feel how solid and flat the earth is against my back, and I put a forearm over my face. But I can’t smell my father in that red wool at all. Just the rusty autumn sun, winter on the way.

I stay out there, on my back, until the sun becomes colorless, threadbare, dipping a cool tin spoon behind the branches, spooning a watery glaze across the sky—and when I go back, slip in through the back door of the house, I see them in the kitchen, but they don’t see me. I stand near the hooks where we snag our coats—my father’s beige salesman one, flaccid, close to my face—and I watch them around the corner with my eyes nearly closed, holding my cool breath in my mouth and throat.

My uncle unbuttons my mother’s blouse, puts his mouth on her breasts. Her skirt is pushed up over her hips with his hips between her legs, moving. His shirttails are down over his thighs, but still I can see the inch of naked flesh there. My mother is pressed up against the sink, her fingers clinging and relaxing at his collar, white as bones in his black hair. I hear the front door open then, and my father hollers, like a question, “I’m back?”

Where has my father been?

My uncle pulls away from her fast. Maybe two minutes pass, slow as heavy church doors with a frantic crowd behind them and maybe someone has shouted, “Fire!” When my father steps into the kitchen, he holds up a sack of, what? Beer? He looks hurried, but he stops dead when he sees them.

What’s different?

They already have their clothes pieced together, sloppily, but buttoned. Still, it’s there. Electromagnetic. Whether my father notices or not.

The refrigerator kicks in to its automatic humming, square and white, and my uncle picks a dishtowel off the counter and squints at it as if something’s written there in a small, cramped hand. My mother is already up to her elbows again in cool kitchen water. “Daddy,” I say, and they all turn to see me standing there, and they all look relieved.

“Hey,” he says to me. “I got the beer,” he says to them, offering the brown grocery bag of it to his brother and his wife.

The expression on my father’s face could mean anything, I suppose, but I imagine it means hope. For a moment he’s a widower reaching sheepishly into a casket to feel his dead wife’s throat for a pulse: a last-ditch effort. Who could blame him for trying?

Hope. My father’s expression is blank as the expression of a scarecrow crucified in corn—trampled with crows, their orange wire feet stamping over his face, and a big storm coming, while my father pretends not to notice.

That, or he doesn’t notice.

From the back seat of the car I’ve seen those scarecrows in all the fields around Suspicious River all year long—flapping their plaid farmer flannel in the wind, mouths stuffed with straw.

Even as a child I see that nothing is scared of those.

Pretend men.

Ransacked by the seasons, each season with its own slow torture—rain or snow or burning sun.

Those scarecrows are the ones who are scared to death. Standing out there with their arms outstretched like fathers, stiff and dumb.

By eight o’clock I’d checked four couples and a family from Chicago into the Swan Motel.

The family had been a happy one.

A two-year-old leaned against his father’s leg with his face behind the knee, sucking his thumb with loud sloppy sounds, weaving sleepy in a walking trance, looking up with his eyes half open as if from underwater, as if an inch of Vaseline on glass separated that boy from the world. His small forehead was so pale I could see blood under the thin skin, light blue, and looking at his eyes made my own eyes watery and tired, too.

It had grown dark before I noticed, and the air in the office was cold. It tasted like river water when I breathed it, and I wished I’d brought a sweater. I turned the heater on and listened to it hum and shudder. Then, a man began to push into the office through the glass door—until he saw the handle, pull—but I knew what he was there for before he even managed to get in.

“Hi, honey,” he said, taking his wallet out of his back pocket.

The man was tall, wearing a jean jacket and a red baseball cap. He had big white hands, perhaps he was handsome. Thirty-five, I guessed. Blond hair, trimmed blond beard. Six feet tall. “Can I get a room?” he asked, leaning across the counter.

“No problem,” I said, “You don’t have a reservation?”

“No. Did I need one?” He sounded worried.

“No.” I shrugged. “We have plenty of rooms.”

I took a check-in card out of the drawer.

He cleared his throat and inched closer across the counter, his chin in his hand, gold watch ticking at his wrist. He said, “How about reserving some personal time with you, sweetheart? Is there plenty of that, too?”

I held the pen in air, hovering over NAME on the check-in card, then I looked at his eyes. Weak blue. I said, “You don’t need a reservation for that either.” I tilted my head toward him, maybe smirking. “But it’ll cost you.”

“How much?” He lifted his blond eyebrows, nearly invisible, as if he were amused.

“Well.” I had this part memorized, “The room is sixty dollars. I think the company would be worth that, too. Don’t you?”

“I sure do,” he nodded and grinned.

He told me his name was Barber, Charles. I wrote it on the check-in card and then he paid for the room in cash and said he’d give me my own sixty dollars when I came on over to 31—a room I’d given him generously, a room with a sliding glass door to a patio only a few feet from the river itself. He hadn’t asked to be on the river, and he wouldn’t be able to see the swans at night anyway, but I thought maybe he’d like to listen to the river splash past his glass door like a frantic swimmer as he slept. He looked to me like the type of man who might like that—a hunter, maybe, or a helicopter pilot.

“See you in a minute,” I said.

I locked the cash drawer and put
RECEPTIONIST WILL BE RIGHT BACK
on the counter, then took the phone off the hook, turned the heat up another notch, hoping it would be warmer when I got back. I stepped outside, and the air smelled moldy and cool, thick as moss, and I felt it crawl across my back and chest. I crossed my arms over my breasts, holding my shoulders in my hands as I ran around the back of the motel into the damp grass there.

Back there, I could hear river and, beyond it, highway. The sound of tires and wind. There were no stars, just a low frayed blanket of clouds cold in the sky. I rapped on the plate glass of his patio door, and he slid it open for me.

“Here,” he said, handing me the sixty dollars, but he seemed angry to be giving the money to me. He seemed different than he’d seemed in the office just minutes before. Not so casual, not friendly, as if a twin had taken his place—this one all business, grudge, spleen.

I slipped the money into my shoe, which was damp from the grass, and I could feel a cold numbness, like river, settle itself into the white flesh of my feet.

It was cold in his room, too. He pulled the curtains, then came up behind me and grabbed my hair, yanked my head backward until he’d pulled me to the floor. He straddled my hips and held my wrists against the carpet. I could hear it out there, churning and wheezing, when he spit in my face.

He held me to the floor with his weight, tore my blouse and came on my bra, then he slapped me so hard I could taste bad coffee on my molars. But it must have been blood. I’d bitten my tongue. When he got off of me, I rolled onto my side and held a hand over my face until I felt I could stand up, wiped him off my breasts with the edge of the bedspread, fixed my blouse the best I could, and left.

Outside again, the river was invisible in the dark, but I could feel it swell and sink beneath the lawn as I ran back to the office, as if the earth were a membrane, a blister, filling up fast with water or blood, as if I were running across the back of a bruise, thinking it was the world.

It was a three-hour drive to Grand Rapids, a two-lane highway through a tunnel of pines. A deer ran across the road outside Ottawa City, white tail flagging and falling in front of our car, then vanished into the woods on the other side of the highway, and I slowed down after that, afraid I’d come that close to hitting another. I’d been so near to that one I could see the sleek muscles tensing on either side of its ribs as it ran.

My father was asleep with his mouth open in the passenger’s seat beside me. The weather was cool for May, but bright as milk and shimmering with new leaves. Further, then, outside of Ottawa City, I saw two black puppies sprawled in dirt at the side of the road beneath some dusty wildflowers wagging baby blue above their corpses. The puppies looked peaceful there, like boots, not bloody and ruined like roadkill. They looked as if someone had flung them, dead already, out the window of a slow-moving car.

Here and there a turkey vulture soared and spiraled. A crow landed on a telephone wire, buoying it with black weight, while the milkweed pods just nodded at each other in ditches, dumb as swans.

The cauliflower fields between Suspicious River and Grand Rapids were dank that day, and every few miles there were clusters of small migrant shacks huddled at the edges of those fields. No windows, and their plywood sides had gone gray-green, maybe rotten, through the winter and spring rain.

Soon they would be back—dark-haired children licking popsicles and thin men with straw hats scattered around the shacks. Occasionally in the summer a migrant family might be seen at the grocery store in Suspicious River, looking shy and tired under the bright lights in the narrow aisles crowded with cans, holding tightly to the little ones’ hands. But they were seen rarely, and never anywhere but the grocery store—except out there, in those fields, like a human crop.

The migrants had quit coming into Suspicious River and the surrounding towns for anything other than emergencies and bags of bread three summers before when a Mexican boy had been beaten and left to die after a fight at Trim’s Bar & Grill. The fight had started at the pool table and ended in the alley between the bar and the branch library—a small room filled with old books that smelled like wet hair and fire-salvaged dresses behind a plate glass window. Just that one Mexican boy—seventeen, the paper said—against a gang of white drunks. He died, slowly, later, in the Ottawa County Hospital of massive head injuries, and the attitude in Suspicious River seemed to be that it was that boy’s own fault, being beaten to death—an accident, like falling off a roof—for having come downtown at night. For having asked for a beer in a bar.