The Fall of Alice K. (15 page)

Alice looked at her watch. She had left home only an hour ago.

When they got to the porch, Alice picked up the bag with the dagger and pulled it out. It was heavier than she remembered. She felt relieved to hold it, as if it were giving her the assurance that it could have been worse if they had brought it with them. “What would you have done with this thing?”

Mai paused for a long moment, then said, “That was a ceremonial dagger—
rab ntaj neeb.
It's not used to cut people. It's used to chase away bad spirits. I probably shouldn't have been using it.”

“Better this than one of your kitchen knives. Those suckers look like they could kill a steer.”

“They've got heft, all right: you can use them to club or cut.”

They went inside and started toward the kitchen, but Lia's voice stopped them. The voice made Mai hold Alice back.

“She needs ten more minutes. She's just gotten to the important part.” Nickson's little groans expanded through the house.

Alice walked around the living room looking at the pictures that
hung on the wall. They didn't look like violent people, but there was something in the eyes. If she could have translated what the eyes said, it would have been “Don't cross me.”

“Where are all these people now?” asked Alice. “Do any of them come to visit?”

“They're all dead,” said Mai.

Alice looked again. “Even this one?” she asked. “She looks so young.”

“She's dead, all right,” said Mai. “A real fighter.”

“She died in the war?”

“Not exactly,” said Mai. “She died killing herself and the man who betrayed her.”

They stood in silence with the sounds of Lia and Nickson coming faintly from the kitchen.

Alice kept studying the pictures, always returning to the young woman. She didn't know what to say.

“All the women in my family are fighters,” said Mai. “Drives the old patriarchs nuts.”

And then she told Alice the story of her aunt and what some would call the murder-suicide that ended her life.

“It was in Laos,” said Mai. “This guy had a really big crush on my aunt but she wasn't interested in him. When it was clear to him that she wanted nothing to do with him and wouldn't marry him, even though his family was from a different clan and had plenty of silver bars for a good bride price, he started bad-mouthing her to everyone. Ruined her reputation. Called her a slut.”

“I don't understand,” said Alice. “Why would you kill yourself and the other person just because he bad-mouthed you?”

“No, you don't understand,” said Mai. “It's an honor thing.”

Alice looked at her red hands and rubbed her thumbs across her palms. “How did she do it?”

“You really want to know?”

“I'm not sure.”

“She invited him over like she was going to make up to him, but she planted a trip-wire bomb between two trees, ten times the powder that goes into a hand grenade. She opened her arms to him, but when the
jerk's foot caught the trip wire, they were both blown to smithereens. That's how women in my family handle men who do them wrong.”

“But she killed herself too,” said Alice and looked back at the picture, the sweet, round, smiling face.

“Of course she killed herself. He had bad-mouthed her so bad that her life was ruined anyhow. It was the only honorable thing for her to do. A no-brainer, really.”

“This makes sense to you?”

“Perfect sense.”

“If that had been a cutting dagger, you would have used it.”

“I would rather have set a booby trap and been ten miles away.”

How odd: that such a story could be a comfort to Alice just then. Maybe what they had done was not as terrible as she was feeling. Alice wondered how soon Mai would tell this story to a guy she was dating.

Lia had finished her work on Nickson and invited Mai and Alice back to the kitchen. Nickson sat with his left arm resting on the table, and the calculus book had been shoved aside. He still had his shirt off and the big heel mark, now blue, had been covered with a paste that had dried to a chalky color. One eye was swollen to leave only a slit. At the sight of him, Alice felt a comforting relief moving through her. They had avenged this crime at Perfect Pizza. Perfect justice.

“You're looking better,” said Mai.

“I don't feel so good,” he said. “I'll be all right.”

He looked at Alice and opened his good eye wider. Alice could see his chest while staring at his face. His lips were lavender. It was hard to tell if that was their natural color or if they were bruised. Her right palm was still warm and it wanted to reach out and touch his shoulder. Mai's hand reached out to his shoulder instead. “Does this hurt?”

“Not much. Where you guys been?”

“Long story,” said Mai.

Nickson turned both eyes toward Alice. “Stay a while. Those calc problems were hurting my eyes already before I went out.”

“Thanks. I can't—and I've got to call my folks.”

“You hungry?” Mai said to Nickson.

“I could eat a pig. My dinner is in a million pieces in that alley.”

“I could comb some out of your hair,” said Mai. “You go call your folks. I'll get Nickson some food.”

Alice prepared excuses to her mother. She'd fudge by saying she'd explain when she got home and then get her story straight in the company of the 150.

Busy signal. Her mother was phoning around, trying to find out where she was. She looked at her watch. No. No. It wasn't even that late. This was Roger's time to call: Aldah was on the phone with her sweetheart.

Alice hung up the phone to say good-bye to the Vangs. Nickson was eating rice with a spoon. He paused between bites, looked up at Alice, and said, “I'd like to join the debate team.”

Alice nodded to hide her gulp. Her emotions were going through a series of such quick changes that she couldn't keep up with them. “You can't be serious! I mean, there's an awful lot of research.” The words jumped out of her mouth. They must have sounded like a challenge. They must have sounded as if she didn't trust him to do the hard work, but anybody who could ask that question with his body all banged up had to have something going for him.

“I've already started,” he said. “I did some research to see if this was something I'd like to do. I'd like to do it. I need speaking experience, you know, and I want to learn how to argue.” His words did not come out very clearly, but it was a wonder he could talk at all.

While Alice still struggled to pull her mind and emotions into some kind of equilibrium, into a place where she could think clearly, Nickson pulled his beat-up body up straight and said, “Resolved: That the federal government should establish an education policy to significantly increase academic achievement in secondary schools in the United States.”

Those were the exact words of the year's debate topic. Now she felt challenged to regain her composure. This young man could be beat up, go through the pain of his mother's field-tested remedies, and come back into the world ready to debate?

“You're amazing,” she said. “Let's talk to the coach when you're healed a little more. I don't have a partner yet.” Had she really said that?

Alice stared at his lips. They were fuller, larger, darker, and no doubt
softer than her own. At that moment she felt overwhelmingly attracted to Nickson, and even as she had the powerful feeling, some part of her told her that it was a perfectly safe attraction because he was a head shorter than she was and from a culture so foreign to her that being his debate partner would never cross over into anything dangerous or foolish. Anything romantic.

As the 150 took her cautiously out of town, the voice of Rev. Prunesma threatened to come back with the next catechism questions. If his voice started speaking, she'd drown it out with country western music. The caps sat next to her like sleeping rats. Without thinking, she rolled down the window and flung them out. In the rearview mirror, she watched them flup-flup down the road until darkness swallowed them.

She turned off Highway 75 onto the gravel road that led toward their farm. Another car turned onto the gravel road behind her. She didn't remember seeing that car behind her and wondered if a patrolman had seen her throw the caps out the window. Just what she needed to top off the evening: a ticket for littering. She kept her speed at forty. The car stayed back a safe distance but had the eyes of something that was stalking her. When she turned for the last quarter mile to their farm, the car turned too. She accelerated to the driveway and watched for the glint of gun barrels from the windows of the car. The 150 made a right-angle turn onto their yard and scampered toward the garage. The car sped up and whizzed on by. She looked to see if she recognized the car as one of their neighbor's. It was not a familiar car, but it had three people in the front seat. She parked the 150 and stood outside the garage listening to hear if the car was turning around. When the sound of it faded in the distance, she walked to the house.

Aldah was still on the phone, and her parents were still watching TV. She wondered if they even knew she had been gone. She had just had a more varied, exciting, frightening, and confusing experience in the past two hours than she had in the past five years—and no one in her family even noticed she was gone?

When she walked into the kitchen, it felt oddly normal. “Aldah, it's time for bed, my special person.”

Aldah didn't hear her, so she went to her bedroom to review the
year's debate topic. Her arms felt too tired to lift to the keyboard. She looked at her right hand. Except for the calluses, it was as red as the 150. She put it to her cheek to feel its comforting warmth.

She felt like someone who had wandered onto a strange road in a strange neighborhood where there were no familiar road signs telling her where she was or where she might be going. She thought of trying to pray as a way of finding her way back to something familiar, but the idea of trying to pray while she was in this strange place felt sacrilegious.

PART II

16

Dutch Center was not like an Amish or Mennonite Colony that tried to carry on its traditional ways and images. It made no pretense of preservation when it eliminated the old family storefronts on Main Street. Vander Leike's Furniture, Monnema's Hardware, Kolenberg's Bakery, Vaank's Grocery, and DeBloom's Clothing were all wiped out and replaced by a mini-mall and a Hy-Vee. Dutch Center had its Dairy Queen, its Hardee's, and its Kentucky Fried Chicken. Strangers driving through town might miss the windmill in the city park and see only the usual assortment of ostentatious billboards and advertisements. If this was a distinctly religious community, the only visible indicators were the skyline that bristled with steeples and the Good Shepherd Bookstore in the mini-mall.

This was hardly the uniform community that Alice saw in her father's old
Atlas.
Nor was it the island of believers depicted in another book that her father kept in his office. Her father's hero was a Rev. Hendrik de Cock who, in 1834, led conservative country people away from the Dutch Reformed Church of Holland, the official state church that, over the years, had been poisoned by “the invasive effects of the Enlightenment.” Sometimes that war against the Enlightenment came out in Rev. Prunesma's sermons. The boogeyman was Humanism, a way of thinking that diminished God's place in the universe and made man “the measure of all things.” Alice loved those sermons, not so much because she agreed with everything that the Rev said but because they pulled her into the comfortable territory of her mind. They made her think about something other than feeding the steers or maneuvering around her mother's constant assaults.

The forces that chipped away at Dutch Center so that it no longer
looked like a little City of God were not so abstract as a belief in Humanism. They were grounded in practical matters of making money, and through the transformation that accompanied money-making enterprises, Dutch Center had lost its uniformity. Not only the businesses but the faces on the streets had changed with the influx of Mexicans to work in the big dairies and meatpacking and ethanol plants and with the international students that Redemption College brought in.

Strangers passing through town would catch few signals that they were, in spite of outward appearances, still entering a place that harbored an old and stubborn identity, that beneath the facade of modernity and diversity was a core of interrelated majority. If someone wasn't an uncle or aunt, they were probably related by marriage to someone who was; so when the sheriff and his deputy called Alice out of class, she was looking at one of her second cousins and someone who was married to her mother's second cousins—whatever that would make him. They didn't want to talk about what happened at Perfect Pizza so much as what might happen next.

“We maybe should have arrested those three,” said Sheriff Bloemsema.

“Would'na made no differ'nce,” said his deputy. “Some people's just got haturd in 'em. Three days in jail would'na jailed the haturd out've 'em.”

At the very sound of the deputy's voice, Alice thought of the losers at Midwest Christian. So this is what became of C- students who were nursed through school. Law enforcement!

The sheriff knew who the three thugs were and had talked to the Vangs.

“It's not those three small-timers that we're worried about,” said Sheriff Bloemsma. “It's their connections, you see. They have very, very bad connections as far away as Omaha. Chicago maybe. When you see lowlife white fellows like those three talking with the bad apples among your Mexicans, you've got trouble. There are some Mexican criminals who come up here to mix in with the good Mexicans. We're talking drugs. And we're not talking your cannabis. We're talking methamphetamines and crack cocaine and heroin. We're talking dangerous people.”