Two Rivers (21 page)

O
n Sunday morning, Maggie said she was feeling better, and so she and Shelly went to church. After they left, I went to visit Brooder’s widow.

I found her address in the phone book, but I didn’t call first. They lived in town as well, just down the street from the bowling alley, in an apartment above the Laundromat. When I opened the main door to her building, I was greeted with a blast of hot, soapy smelling air. At her door, I knocked quickly, before I had time to change my mind.

“Brenda?” I asked.

She stood in the doorway, clutching her robe with one hand. She was strikingly pretty, even without makeup. But she looked tired; beneath her long-lashed black eyes were dark circles. Her skin was the color of sunshine though; she was a Florida girl after all. Her hair was tousled, on top of her head in a messy ponytail. I felt like an intruder.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I’m a friend of Brooder’s. Of
Tony’s
,” I said.

“And?”

“And I just wanted to offer my condolences.” I hadn’t thought much further than this.

“Thank you,” she said, and started to close the door.

“Is it Daddy?” a little boy asked, and I saw her wince. And then between her legs was Brooder’s son, scowling at me.

“He doesn’t understand,” Brenda said, shaking her head.

“Listen, can I just come in for a minute?” I asked. “I just wanted to talk for a minute.”

Brenda looked at me suspiciously and then opened the door.

Inside the fresh laundry smell persisted, creating a feeling of cleanliness even amidst the filth. I could tell that Brenda was embarrassed by the state of her home.

“I’m sorry, things have sort of fallen apart since Tony…” she said, scrambling to pick up a pair of dirty socks, a glass of curdled milk.

“Oh no, no,” I said. “It’s fine. I understand.”

“You’re a high school friend?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Most of his high school friends sort of fell by the wayside after he came home from the war. At least that’s what Tony said. Hey, do you mind if I throw something more respectable on?”

“Not at all,” I said. “Please.”

Brenda disappeared into a room off the living room, leaving me with the little boy, who had parked himself on the couch and was watching me.

“Who are
you
?” he asked.

“My name is Harper. I was a friend of your daddy’s.”

“My daddy don’t have no friends.”

“Now, I’m sure that’s not true,” I said.

Roger got off the couch and grabbed the cushion. He picked it up and put it on the floor. There were cigarette butts, bottle caps and silverware where the cushion had been.

“Wanna play Swamp?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Daddy and I always play Swamp. You have to shoot the alligators or else they’ll eat your legs off.”

“Okay,” I said, glancing quickly at the bedroom door. No sign of Brenda.

“Your feet can’t touch the water. You have to stay on the rocks. These are the rocks.” Roger pointed to a variety of objects that were strewn on the floor: a pizza box, a crumpled up T-shirt, a stack of bills. He got down off the couch and jumped from one to the next, like stepping stones.

“There’s one!” he screamed, pointing at a cat that had slithered into the room from the kitchen. He cocked his gun and aimed. The cat licked its paw and slithered away.

“Now you,” he said.

Thankfully Brenda emerged from the other room before I had to kill any imaginary alligators. She was dressed in jeans and a low-cut blouse. Her hair was loose, and she smelled perfumed. “Now, what’s your name again?” she asked.

“Harper Montgomery,” I said.

“Oh! It’s nice to meet you.” She nodded, smiled.

I felt something then that I hadn’t felt in a long time, a sort of warmth rising up through my legs, spreading into my lap. I wanted to stand up from the couch, to thank her for her hospitality, and then leave, but I was stiff as a brick, and mortified. I coughed, sniffed, tried to will it away.
What was I doing there anyway?
I wanted answers to questions that she certainly didn’t have. Brooder was gone now.

“You’re the only one to come by, you know,” she said.

“Really?” I asked.

She cocked her head, looked at me as if she were trying to figure something out. “You want some coffee?”

“Sure,” I said, relieved to find that my problem seemed to have resolved itself.

“All I got’s decaf.”

“Decaf’s fine,” I said.

She went into the kitchen and I stood up, looking around at the place where Brooder had lived for the last several years. There was a fake fireplace along one wall: the cardboard kind they sell at the hardware store around Christmas. Above it was a bunch of framed photos. Most of them were of Roger as a baby. I recognized the snarled brow. There were a couple of Brooder and Brenda. One of the whole family standing in front of Cinderella’s Castle at Disney World. There was also a professional photo of Brenda in her mermaid costume, posing on a pier. She looked happy. Sexy.

“This you?” I asked.

She leaned her head into the living room. “Sure is, before I traded in my tail for these.” She smiled, lifting her pant leg to reveal one magnificent expanse of leg.

“That’s a big sacrifice. For Brooder?”

“Yep,” she said.

“Will you go back now?” I asked. “To Florida?”

“Can’t ever go back.” She laughed. “Like the fairy tale. I’m just a regular girl now.”

I smiled.

“Coffee’s ready,” she said.

Roger sat with us at the kitchen table, slamming a plastic hammer over and over again on a pile of plastic dinosaurs. Dinosaurs littered the linoleum under our feet.

“No banging, honey,” Brenda said.

I sipped my coffee, and Roger kept banging.

“Tony was the one who disciplined him. He always said I was too easy on him.”

“I’ve got a daughter. I’m raising her by myself too. It’s hard. I never seem to do the right thing. Her mother,” I started, but then wondered why I was telling her this. What Betsy had to do with this beautiful woman,
Brooder’s wife
. I stopped. “I lost my wife too.”

Brenda’s eyes went soft.

In some pathetic effort to get back to the subject, I said, “Brooder, I mean Tony, and I grew up together. He and Ray Gauthier and I. The three stooges.” I chuckled. I wanted her to know that I was more than a casual acquaintance. For some reason, I suddenly really wanted her to trust me.

“Tony didn’t have a lot of friends,” she said. “People were afraid of him. The scars, you know.”

I thought about Brooder’s face. I could only remember it in fragments now, in flickers of orange light. Nose, lips, chin. Scars like rivers underneath his skin.

“It’s nice to meet somebody who knew him before,” she said softly. “This whole town thinks he’s just a lunatic that finally got what he deserved.”

I nodded, took another long pull on my coffee.

“Can I show you something?” she asked. She looked at me hard, again as if she were sizing me up.

“Sure,” I said.

“Okay.” She nodded and smiled. When she leaned over to push away from the table, her blouse opened a little, revealing the golden skin at the top of her breasts. I blinked hard, feeling guilty.

She disappeared into the back room again and came out with a piece of notebook paper.

“This is the closest thing I have to a note,” she said, unfolding the yellow piece of lined paper and pressing it onto the table.

On it was what looked, at first, like a grocery list. But as I glanced quickly over the items (
coonskin cap, Schwinn 10 speed, $24.00 cash, small sack of weed
), it clearly was neither suicide note or grocery list.

“May I?” I asked, and Brenda handed me the sheet of paper.

Jenny Noyes. Lisa Grimes. Nancy Lessard.
These were all girls from high school. Girls Brooder had dated.
Six packets cherry Kool-Aid, silver lighter, one pack Chesterfields, dental floss, rations and boots—size 13.

I looked at Brenda, confused. She shrugged her shoulders. “That’s stuff that would have been in his pack, during the war.”

“19" TV, Martin D-21 acoustic guitar, father’s cuff links,”
I read aloud.

“Our apartment got broken into a while back. That’s what they took.”

I read the remaining two items to myself:
1958 Chevy pickup. Betsy Parker.

These were the stolen things, each item on the list something that had been taken from him. This was his ledger of everything he’d lost at someone else’s hands.

W
e lost almost everything in the fire.

The next morning, as steam rose off the ground where our home used to be, Betsy and I made our way through the wreckage. In the first thick white light of dawn, there was dew on the grass, and the air was dense with late summer humidity. The blackened skeleton of our house was similarly damp, soaked by the firefighters’ attempts to put out the fire. We waded through this strange river, holding hands, afraid to touch anything.

The smell after a house fire is simultaneously familiar and alien. It might initially seem innocuous: just the scent of burned wood. The smell following a bonfire. A campfire.
Extinguished.
But beyond this was something more pervasive and disconcerting—like the feeling that lingers after a nightmare: the recollection of terror, sharp at first and then fading. Even the few artifacts we were able to salvage from the wreckage retained this scent. It was as if everything we owned carried the memory of the fire. For years, even the smallest of items could conjure that night again if I held them close enough to my face to smell.

There was no logic to those things that were spared. While my mother’s library of books perished, a copy of
TV Guide
lay unharmed next to where our sofa used to be. My mother’s clothes were turned into a pile of ash, but my father’s ties remained untouched. We gathered what we could recognize, bent over and searching as if we were only berry picking. My Red Sox baseball cap, an embroidered handkerchief, a pair of blue jeans, rivets still hot. Jewelry melted, tools melted, silverware melted. We were careful not to burn our fingers on the glowing embers.

We stood at the edge of the foundation and looked down into the basement, where my father’s workshop was covered in a blanket of gray ash and shattered glass.

“Jesus,” I said.

And Betsy wept.

After the fire, my mother feared for her life. But despite the neighbors’ initial outpouring of sympathy (casseroles and blankets and bags of used clothes), it was clear that most people in Two Rivers believed that, while the fire was a tragedy, my mother’s radical behavior was somehow to blame. Because the neighbors who had donated pillows and towels still smelling of mothballs were the same neighbors who would not look her in the eye when she asked for help posting
WANTED
signs to catch the arsonist. Voices hushed when she entered any of the shops in whose windows she asked to post a copy of the missive left in our driveway.

By the end of the summer, it was clear that the town just wanted to forget what had happened, and even the police seemed to have no interest in capturing the criminal who had stolen everything from us. My parents had been staying at a motel, and I’d been sleeping on Betsy’s couch. A week after I returned to school, my parents loaded up a rented truck and left, moving into an apartment just outside of Boston. My father was hired by Sappi Fine Paper, and my mother took a job as a music teacher at her old elementary school. My mother smiled broadly as they drove away, the window rolled down and her hair loose around her face.

“A fresh start,” my father said when I asked him what he thought about leaving.

I still had two years of college left, an eternity. Betsy pleaded with me to draw it out as long as possible. Maybe fail a class or two. The longer I stayed in school, the longer I could avoid making a decision about what to do when I graduated and went from being safe to being 1-A,
registered and ready for service
. Betsy had started her own antiwar campaign in Two Rivers, though her legion was, so far, pretty small: a few girls from our high school class, a hippie couple with twin babies who had just moved to Two Rivers from New York. For the most part, Two Rivers was a town of patriots. Boys were still enlisting, lured equally by their allegiance to the flag and the potential for heroism. Three boys from our high school had died in Vietnam by then. Brooder was there. Howie Burke was there too. And Middlebury (which required all of its male students to serve in the Army ROTC program for at least two years) seemed to be directly violating the unwritten law that college was supposed to protect boys like us. It infuriated Betsy. It infuriated Freddy too, though he had a plan, as he always did.

Freddy came from money, a lot of money. His father could easily have paid a psychiatrist to “diagnose” Freddy with any number of mental illnesses. I’d heard all sorts of stories about Middlebury alums found unfit to serve by reason of insanity. You’d think school was an asylum what for all the psychotics and schizophrenics in our midst. But despite the power Freddy’s father had, he was a former military man himself. Army. A decorated veteran of WWII. And he was more proud of his military history than he was of his millions. On the few occasions when he visited Freddy at school, he’d shaken my hand so hard it had nearly brought me to my knees. He was the kind of man who would grab you in a headlock rather than embrace you in a hug. He’d insisted that Freddy stay in ROTC so that he could graduate and immediately become an officer.

My own parents had been pleading with me to declare myself a conscientious objector. My mother knew people from the Society of Friends who could assist, but for some reason, I had a hard time bringing myself to go to the Friends meetings, which were held at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Burlington. I went to an informational meeting once, ate their sugary doughnuts, listened to their arguments for pacifism and peace. But even though by that time I was growing more and more opposed to the war (standing with a burning candle at more than one of Betsy’s midnight vigils), I felt like a hypocrite. Other than the few visits I’d made to Mass with Ray, I had very little experience with God. Using religion to get out of going to war seemed underhanded.

Freddy lamented our predicament on a daily basis, particularly as he trudged off to his various ROTC activities. His lack of athletic prowess might have gone unnoticed had it not been for these required exercises. Freddy was good at faking most things, but athleticism was not one of them. He was a heavy smoker; even at twenty years old his voice was raspy with it. Girls thought it was sexy or else he probably would have quit.

“If I were you, I’d go to Nova Scotia,” he said. “Either that or shoot my foot off,” Freddy said on my birthday as we sat eating cake and smoking cigarettes in our room. While he had been doing endless sit-ups, I’d been reading Dante’s
Inferno
. He’d had cheesecake mailed to our dorm from a favorite deli in New York City, and we were going at it with forks without even taking the thing out of the box. It was the most delicious cake I’d ever tasted. The autumn sunset outside made the room glow orange. Smoke hung low in the room, and even as the sun set, we didn’t turn on the lights.

“Either Canada or amputation? Is there a Latin phrase for that?” I laughed, scooping up a huge fork full of cheesecake.

“Me duce tutus eris,”
he whispered. “Under my leadership you will be safe.”

Freddy showed me photos of Nova Scotia he had torn from books and guides in the library’s travel section. Though defacing books of any sort was a sacrilege as far as I was concerned, there was something so enticing about the pictures of fishing villages and cliffs and lighthouses, I quickly forgave him his vandalism. Over the course of our junior year, Freddy worked quietly, planting the seed. The wall where he had hung the first photo, of a lighthouse perched at the end of a rocky peninsula, became a collage of stolen images designed to entice: coves and waterfalls and a rocky shore. It reminded me of Maine. He knew me so well. He knew I was picturing Betsy there, sitting on the edge of a rock with wind in her hair.

By the spring of 1967, I’d become so disenchanted by my precarious future, I wasn’t sure I’d even bother returning to college in the fall. It seemed pointless with Betsy at home and the absolute lack of control I now seemed to have over my future. I felt like staying at school was just putting off the inevitable, and so I returned to Two Rivers for summer vacation and asked Betsy Parker to go to Nova Scotia with me.

It was early June, and we had just visited Rosemary and Ray and their new baby, J.P. They were living in a house on Rosemary’s folks’ property. It only had one bedroom, but they didn’t seem to mind. I felt a pang of something like longing, watching them in the kitchen together, this brand new family: Rosemary at the stove balancing the baby in one arm, Ray kissing the top of the baby’s head and then his wife’s. I wanted this. I couldn’t
believe
how much I wanted this.

After the baby had gone to sleep, Rosemary served us heaping portions of
tourtière
(pork pie). We played Hearts until long after midnight when Rosemary yawned and excused herself for bed. Ray convinced Betsy and I to stay, and we sat out on the porch drinking (beer for Betsy and me, Coke for Ray, who stopped drinking after the baby came) and talking softly so as not to wake Rosemary and J.P.

“You know Brooder’s comin’ home,” Ray said.

“He is?” I asked. It felt like ages since I’d last seen Brooder. A little part of me thrilled at the prospect of his homecoming.

“He got hurt,” Ray said.

“How bad?” I asked.

“Real bad. Bad enough to get a Purple Heart.”

“What happened?” Betsy asked.

“He got burned, saving his buddy from a fire. Some bass-ackwards village somewhere. That’s what I hear anyway.”

“Where is he now?”

“First he got sent to Japan. Now he’s at an army medical center in Texas. He’s supposed to be sent home soon though. Maybe by the end of the summer.” Ray said he’d heard the burns were mostly on his face and his hands. That the fire was set by Brooder’s own platoon; a whole village of people went up in flames.

At around four
A.M
., Betsy and I got in the car. “You want to go home?” I asked. Since my parents had moved, Betsy’s father agreed to let me sleep on his couch until the first of July. I had three weeks left, and no real plan other than the vague idea of whisking Betsy off to Nova Scotia with me.

“No,” Betsy said. “Let’s drive.”

I had little more to go on than the images imprinted on my brain (of snowcapped mountains and stone houses) and Freddy’s maps. When I packed up for summer vacation, he took the maps down off our wall and folded them carefully before handing them to me. I’d studied them, traced the coastal edges with my fingers, examining the inch of paper water separating the U.S. and this imagined haven.

We drove all the way to Gormlaith, and by the time we pulled up in front of Betsy’s favorite cottage, the one with the stained glass windows and red wooden swing, I was sober now, and my nerves were raw. I opened the glove box where I’d been keeping the maps. I hadn’t thought any of this out, not in any real way.

“See, we just drive to Bar Harbor and take the Blue Nose to Yarmouth,” I said. “We tell them it’s a day trip. Just seeing the sights. It’s as easy as that. We can have our things sent later.”

Outside the sun was rising. I was delirious from staying up all night. My head was spinning, my heart heavy with thoughts of Brooder. I smiled and touched Betsy’s hair, tucking a piece behind her ear. “It’s supposed to be beautiful there. We can get a little place near the water.”

She leaned into my touch, closed her eyes as if she were imagining it herself.

“I’ll catch fish,” I said.

The cottage was dark. Still deserted. “Let’s just go inside.” She shook her head and laughed, starting to open the car door.

“I’m not joking.”

“What about school?” she asked. “You still have another year. The war could be over by the time you get out.”

“The war’s not going to be over in a year. I’ll graduate and get drafted.”

“There are other ways,” Betsy said, still smiling.

My skin prickled. “Sure, I could join the reserves or the National Guard. Would you like that? For me to support this? Or, better yet, I could join the coast guard, then I’d not only be supporting the
war
, but I’ll also be
gone
for five years. Is that what you want?” I felt like my entire world had been narrowed down to a short list of possible futures. None of them even remotely resembled the life I’d envisioned when I arrived on campus three years before.

“You know we can’t leave,” Betsy said, looking up at me, her smile sad and nervous.

“Sure we can,” I argued, but even as I said it, I knew we couldn’t.

“Harper.”

“Why not?”
I asked, knowing perfectly well why not. Her father would die without her here. She
was
trapped. We were both trapped.

My chest hurt. Every muscle in my body was flexed. Lately I’d felt like I was constantly bracing myself for a blow. I was pissed at her father, pissed at LBJ and his cronies, pissed at a world that always, always seemed to be conspiring to keep Betsy and me apart.

“Do you understand what will happen to me if I stay?” I asked, my whole body trembling.

“You can finish college and go to graduate school. It’ll be okay.” Betsy nodded her head, reached for my hand.

“Betsy, there are a
half a million
troops over there. What makes me so special? Why should I be spared?”