Wingshooters (9 page)

I liked to go to the market, or maybe I just liked how important I felt when I was running an errand for my grandmother, and there was one cashier, a dyed red-head named Gloria, who always gave me candy. That day, because I could handle the load with one bag, I took my bike up to the store. I skipped inside and passed the end displays of potato chips and Pabst, and as I turned the corner into the freezer aisle, I almost ran right into them—Mr. Garrett and the woman who must have been his wife, a thin, dark-skinned woman of about his age. He was leaning on the shopping cart while she opened the freezer door and pulled out a carton of strawberry ice cream. They were talking easily, unguarded, and when Mrs. Garrett turned back from the freezer I saw how she looked at him, eyes showing a pleasure I wasn’t used to seeing expressed between married people. She had strong, high cheekbones and slightly hollowed cheeks that were so polished and smooth they might have been carved of stone. There was something in her bearing and the set of her shoulders that made her look regal, even there in the freezer aisle. She was wearing a neat blue dress and carrying a handbag, as if they’d just come from church. (And now I wonder—
had
they been at church? Did they drive up to Wausau or all the way to Steven’s Point to find a community of other black congregants? Because they couldn’t have worshipped in Deerhorn, of course. No local church would have had them.)

I stood and watched them as he poked her like a teenage boy trying to get a girl’s attention—and it was hard to believe that these two people, this playful man and his dignified wife, had thrown the town into such frenzy. I didn’t think they would notice me—I was so used to people ignoring me that I’d almost come to believe I was invisible—but as Mrs. Garrett turned back toward the freezer, she stopped in mid-movement.

“What?” her husband asked.

She nodded in my direction and he turned. When he saw me, his face broke into a smile.

“That’s just Michelle,” he said to his wife, and I was both scared and thrilled to realize he knew who I was.

“Oh, right,” his wife said, and the guardedness that had started to come into her manner was gone again, and she smiled too.

“Hello, Michelle,” he said gently, in a tone of voice he might use to coax a cat out from under a bed. He was looking right at me—they both were—and suddenly I felt exposed, painfully aware that there was no corner I could easily slip around, no crowd of people into which I could blend. I knew I should answer but all I could manage was a nod and half a smile.

“Are you here with your family?” Mrs. Garrett asked. Her tone was friendly, but there was something about her that made me want to stand up straighter, a self-assurance I wasn’t used to seeing in a woman. “What are you looking for?”

I couldn’t get anything out of my mouth—it was like the muscles in my throat had cramped up—so I gestured toward the ice cream. I took a few steps forward, opened the freezer door, and pulled out a frost-covered carton. It was strawberry, just like theirs.

“That’s good stuff,” Mr. Garrett said. “My wife and I got some, too. Well, I’ll see you at school tomorrow, Michelle. You have a good day, now.”

I looked from them to the carton of ice cream and back again, wanting to speak, unsure of what to say. But finally I got so nervous that I just waved goodbye. Then I ran past them down the aisle, feeling their eyes still on me, and hurried to the counter to pay. My heart was beating a hundred miles an hour as I handed over the money and waited for Gloria to bag my item. After receiving my usual Peppermint Pattie, I biked home as fast as I could. I was so flustered that it wasn’t until I mounted the stairs that I realized I’d forgotten the milk. But this I could handle—at the end of the block was the Cloverdale Dairy, and so I walked up and bought half a gallon.

After I’d given my grandmother the ice cream and milk, I took the dog up to the attic, to my father’s old room, and thought about what had happened. I’d seen the Garretts, both of them. And they’d been nice to me. And they’d excused or overlooked my inability to speak, my awkwardness in their presence. I felt like I’d been let in on a secret, and I knew instinctively that I couldn’t tell my grandparents about it, or anyone at school. But something important had happened; I felt like part of something. For the next hour and a half, before my grandmother called up for supper, I sat there smiling, thinking about my chance meeting in the store, holding it, turning it over like a jewel.

No one paid much attention when the following item appeared in the paper two days later:

Free Satellite Clinic to Open; Will Serve Outlying Areas

As part of its planned expansion, the Deerhorn/Central Wisconsin Clinic will provide free care once a week at a satellite location serving the outlying areas of Deerhorn, a clinic official said today. The clinic will be open on Wednesdays, and will operate out of the old Carver Package Store building that is currently managed by Henderson Realty. “We want to be able to serve people who don’t normally come into town for medical care,” said Dr. Del Gordon, the clinic’s chief administrator. “There are a lot of people out there on the old farms and in the backwoods who never see a doctor.” Free services will be provided by licensed medical staff and students in the clinic’s new nursing program, and will include immunizations, tuberculosis tests, mammo-grams, and physicals. The Deerhorn Central Clinic will be absorbing all costs of renovating the building, Dr. Gordon said. “We want to extend our appreciation to the town of Deerhorn and both our old and new staff for helping turn our clinic into the medical jewel of Central Wisconsin.” The satellite clinic will be open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., every Wednesday, at 342 Besemer Road, just off of Route 5.

Deerhorn was not a generous place. Almost everyone in the town had once been poor, or had at least struggled hard to get by. Every family had stories of crops that didn’t flourish, businesses that folded, farms that closed up as country people moved into town; and the Depression was still so fresh in the memories of my grandparents and their friends that it might have occurred within the last decade. Years before, a local boy—the son of a poor farmer, a veteran—had been elected to the House of Representatives, and had eventually become one of the most conservative members of Congress. People in town believed that if
they
had made it, if
they
had struggled and fought successfully to keep their heads above water, then everybody else could too. The people I had seen the previous week, living in tin shacks and cobbled together hand-me-down trailers, did not evoke their sympathy or sorrow. And so no one seemed to care that those same people would now have access to medical care. An institution whose presence the townsfolk resented was helping a set of people they chose not to see.

Those next few days at school, it seemed like the contro-versy around Mr. Garrett had settled down, or at least had leveled off. The number of students who came to his class held steady at ten or eleven. From what I could gather, no one from the school called the other students’ parents to demand that they return; some of them had enrolled in the Catholic school. There had been talk that the two fifth grade classes might be combined, putting Mr. Garrett out of a job, but nothing came of it. Things were quiet. Miss Anderson had settled into a kind of tense determination, and we all started to learn again, at least a little. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday rolled by, and I was almost lulled into believing that the school was accepting Mr. Garrett and that everything would be all right.

Then on Wednesday afternoon the telephone rang, just as we were sitting down for supper. My grandfather answered it and his expression grew darker. His fingers curled into a fist, which he placed on the desk. “All right,” he said into the phone. “Come over after supper and we’ll get our heads together. Call Jim and Earl too.”

He hung up and sat at the table in front of his empty plate. My grandmother, who’d been getting ready to bring in the food, looked at him expectantly.

“That clinic out there for the country people,” he said. “That nigger nurse was out there today.”

We looked at him, waiting for more.

“That
nurse
,” he repeated, looking up at us now. “She gave people shots. She was giving them physicals.
She laid her hands on our children
.” And as he said this he cringed, physically withdrawing from his words, as if from the actual hands he found so offensive.

I looked at my grandmother and saw her eyes open wide. “She shouldn’t have gone out there,” she said, sounding more surprised than anything, as if one of her friends had played out of turn in bridge. “They should have
told
us she was going to be working there.”

“Those people had no warning,” my grandfather said. “No warning at all. It just got sprung on them.” He got up from his chair and walked out to the patio, letting the screen door slam shut behind him. My grandmother looked from the door to the table back into the kitchen, but it was clear we weren’t eating just then. After a moment or two, she went into the kitchen and I walked over to the patio door. I opened it gingerly and peeked my head around the corner. My grandfather was sitting on the old worn couch they’d dragged out there, staring absently across the street at the Miller children as they climbed their apple tree in the fading light. He didn’t speak or move when the door creaked open, so I stepped out and sat down beside him. It was mid-October and cool enough for sweaters, although neither of us had one on. Normally it would have been dark by now, but because of the gas shortage, daylight savings was in effect all year so there was still a bit of light. I waited for him to take my hand with his rough, callused fingers, but he didn’t move; he just stared out the window.

“Junie Miller lets those kids run wild,” he said, and I looked across the street. The two oldest ones, Jarrett and Karen, were up in branches fifteen feet off the ground; they were eight and ten, old enough to be climbing trees. But the baby John, who was only three, was trying to get up too, his little arms reaching futilely for the lowest branch.

“They’re okay,” I said, by which I meant that at least they—unlike so many other children in the neighborhood—generally left me alone.

“Jim Miller’s gone so damn much,” my grandfather continued. “And when he
is
here, all he does is drink beer.”

Jim Miller was a long-distance truck driver, and it wasn’t unusual for him to be on the road for two or three weeks at a time. I always knew he was in town because the big red cab of his truck would be parked in the Millers’ front yard, dwarfing their garage. When I thought of his loud voice, though, laughing with the kids, the way he threw them over his shoulder and made them squeal with delight; when I thought how he was home at least part of the time, those kids seemed pretty lucky to me.

“Grandpa,” I said now, “what’s wrong with the nurse working at the clinic?”

He sighed and patted my hand and kept looking out the window. “You wouldn’t understand yet, Mike,” he said. “Some things you’ve got to grow up to understand. But people don’t like to mix with people different from them. They like to be with their own kind.”

I understood what he was saying about the Garretts, about himself. But what exactly was my kind?

I couldn’t ask him, though, because he was still staring out the window, and I knew it wasn’t the Millers he was thinking about. Five or six times in the year I’d lived in Deerhorn, there had been tornado warnings on TV. Each time, my grandfather planted himself out on the porch, looking angrily out at the horizon as if daring the storm to approach. I usually sat with him through these hours-long vigils, despite my grandmother’s pleas that we come inside and take shelter in the cellar. He would tell her to stop worrying, it would be all right, and then turn to me and wink and say, “Women.” Then we’d sit together quietly and watch the sky. Twice, we actually saw the funnel-shaped cloud twisting across the horizon, hesitating, teasing, as if considering all the houses and trees on the ground before deciding which ones to touch down upon. But even when one funnel got so close that it ripped out a stand of trees two blocks away from us; even when we were looking at the storm eye-to-eye; even when I got so scared I covered my head with my arms and burrowed into his side, my grandfather would not retreat. He stood firm and stared the tornado down. He would not let it come any closer.

And that was what he was like that night, the night we found out about Mrs. Garrett and the clinic. He was looking out the window, staring straight into the face of the storm, and there was no way he was about to back down. The difference this time, though, was that he wasn’t squaring off against an act of nature. The thing he was trying to hold at bay wasn’t dangerous at all. I wondered if he had sat on the porch like this when he’d heard about my mother; whether he’d steeled himself against my parents’ union. And I wondered if
he
was the reason my mother hadn’t liked to visit; whether his influence, his legacy, were also why she couldn’t stay with my father, or with me.

I sat outside with my grandfather for a good half an hour before the first of his friends arrived. It was Jim Riesling, who said, “This isn’t an emergency, Charlie. We don’t really need to do anything.”

And my grandfather, as he often did when someone said something he didn’t like, simply acted as if he hadn’t heard him. In the next few minutes Earl Watson appeared, too. Ray Davis arrived a bit later, and eventually Uncle Pete. My grandmother made me eat quickly in the kitchen and then shooed me into my room, where try as I might, I could not make out the conversation. But the men stayed up late, talking around the dining room table, huddled together against the gathering storm. They didn’t seem to realize that the danger was not
out there
, on the other side of the window. They didn’t realize that the storm was right there in the room, contained in their own minds and hearts.

FIVE

A
lthough no one would ever know it if they looked at me now, I was raised to live in the country. Now I have an apartment in a fashionable section of Los Angeles, close to restaurants and museums and nightclubs. Now I go to grocery stores to purchase my produce, and take my car into a shop for even simple repairs. The people here in L.A. would never believe what I was doing as a child, while they were going to the beach and playing soccer. By the age of eight, I knew how to shoot a gun. I could drive my grandparents’ Pontiac, milk a cow, even operate a tractor if I had to, which I learned to do out on the old family farm still owned by my grandmother’s brother. I knew back pain from bending over in my grandparents’ garden, picking vegetables for dinner and canning. I’d helped scale fish, gut squirrels and ducks, string deer up by their feet in the garage. And while I never actually killed the game I ate and helped prepare, I’d been there when it was shot, with Charlie in the wild, stalking silently through the fields at dawn.

Charlie took me hunting with him and Uncle Pete over the strenuous objection of my grandmother. I don’t know whether she disapproved because of my gender, my age, or fear for my safety, but Charlie prevailed, as he always did. I still remember being shaken awake at four a.m., my grandfather already in his camouflage and hunting cap. If the game was pheasant, grouse, or ducks, the hat he wore was army green. Later in the season, when it was deer, he changed to fluorescent orange. I put on a smaller version of his hunting outfit, left over from my father’s childhood. While I was getting ready, Charlie gathered his ammunition and supplies. He’d take out the shotguns—his Remington Wingmaster and my Ithaca 66—and load them into the back of the car. He’d pack the food—roast beef sandwiches my grandmother had made the night before, canteens of water, a thermos full of coffee. Then we’d put Brett in the car and back down the driveway, pick up Uncle Pete—who often slept in the car—and drive through the pitch-black night, the dog whining with excitement until we’d reached our starting point for that week, twenty, thirty miles into the country. If we were hunting for birds, we’d go to one of the marshy areas east of town. For deer, we would work our way deep into the woods, although not to the makeshift deer stand that Charlie and his friends had built; he would never take me to a place where we might run into other, less careful hunters. We’d walk quickly but deliberately through the cold fall air, me taking two or three steps for every one of Charlie’s. The outfit I wore was more than twenty years old, but it felt unused because my father had only worn it once or twice. (It was bulky and utilitarian, made for function instead of looks—not like the form-fitting camouflage tops and girlish orange caps I see on young female hunters now, in California.) My father hated hunting—the blood and grit, the suffering of the animals, even the cold, dark mornings—and Charlie believed that part of the problem with Stewart, his failure to turn into a proper LeBeau, was that he hadn’t started hunting soon enough. By the time Stewart first went out into the woods, he was ten or eleven years old—and by then, he’d already been influenced by Helen and her womanly, book-reading ways.

I knew already that there was something very manly in holding a gun, in tracking and killing other living creatures. There was an exhilaration, a palpable tightening of the air, as the dog flushed pheasants, grouse, or ducks out of the tall grass, as the men tensed and fired their weapons. It was a heightened sense of excitement, the promise of possession and dominance, that I would have linked, had I been older, with the sexual. These men were never more alive than when they were just about to kill. When they shot something—a pheasant, a duck, or especially a deer; when they watched it struggle and die, there was no doubting their vitality or power. It was men at their purest, most primal state, the state of their highest fulfillment. Later, when they smiled into cameras with a string of captured birds, or stood together holding a buck, they were civilized again. They had assembled themselves for public consumption and the wilderness was gone from their eyes. But they loved those kinds of photographs, their conquest complete, and always brought a camera when they hunted. In so many of the old pictures I have of my grandfather, he’s holding something dead.

But there was more to those men than violence. They also had a warmth and openness that I never felt from women. In my family, it was the men who were the nurturers. They were the ones—my father included—who grinned widely when I did something funny, who bounced me on their knees, who ruffled my hair in affection. They were the ones who threw their arms around me and wrapped me up in bear hugs. It was Charlie and Pete who got angry when something happened to me at school; who held my hand when I was scared; who always seemed to welcome my presence. The women—my grandmother, my great-aunt Bertha, and even my mother, from what I remember—were more measured in their affections. Their nervousness, judgment, and frequent short scoldings always made me feel disapproved of, un-fitting. They never touched me in a way that wasn’t corrective. I don’t know if they were frustrated with their own circumscribed lives, but I do know they couldn’t imagine any other way of being. To my grandmother and great-aunt, the liberated women of the big cities, who worked corporate jobs or used child care or marched to demand equal rights, were as foreign and unknowable as the bowing, kimonoed women of Japan. They tried to bend and shape me—to fit the town, and to fit their image of what a young woman should do, which included boring things like cooking and sewing. But the men just let me be, and even their mundane tasks—like painting the house, or mowing the lawn—were more appealing to me, more active and exciting. To me, being a woman meant being limited, defined, and always stuck inside. Being a man meant having freedom, and I wanted that freedom. My grandfather was willing to give it to me. And even though he was disappointed in his own son and disapproving of his daughter-in-law, I knew that he was smitten with his grandchild. In several of the pictures I have from the time I lived in Deerhorn, my grandmother is looking into the camera. My grandfather is looking at me.

Charlie taught me how to really see and feel the world around me; there was so much I noticed and still notice because he revealed it. I remember, for instance, when I went out walking with Brett a few days after my grandfather and I sat out on the porch. A new letter had arrived that afternoon from my father, from Springfield, and he said he was coming home for Thanksgiving. He didn’t say how long he was staying, or if he was taking me back with him. But he was coming. My father was coming. And just the thought that he was on his way, especially now, when everything in school and in town was feeling so tense and strange, had filled me with such anticipation and joy that I couldn’t keep still.

I needed to move, to be free. So I rode out to the country and dumped the bike and walked with Brett through the woods. It was late October now, and each tree stood unembellished and bare with its leaves on the ground beneath it, like a woman who’d just stepped out of a colorful dress. We came around a stand of trees and entered a meadow with a small, dark pond in the middle. Right at the place where the land met the water was a small flock of Canada Geese. There were maybe thirty or forty of them, some in the water, some on land, sitting and resting or walking around, picking seeds and insects out of the grass.

Since the day we had seen the flock flying over the baseball field, I had read up on Canada Geese in the old encyclopedia my father had left in his attic room. I knew by now that the flocks not only traveled to the same place each year, but that they rested at the same spots along the way, like a family on a regular driving trip that always stops at familiar restaurants. And I also knew that, like the human family, the geese stopped more often when they were traveling with young ones, who couldn’t go for such long distances—sometimes six hundred miles a day—without more frequent breaks. Although apparently their noise and droppings made them a nuisance to some people, others scattered seeds on their land to attract them. I don’t know if that’s what was happening here, but these geese seemed plump and contented. As Brett and I drew nearer, the dozen or so birds that were still on the land waddled quickly, but without much concern, down into the water. The whole flock moved away from the edge of the shore and into the middle of the pond. This was because we were there—to avoid us—and yet the birds didn’t even bother to glance our way. They looked haughtily off in the other direction, as if our rudeness didn’t warrant acknowledgment.

I stopped to admire them as they swam. They were beautiful birds. They had sleek black heads and white markings that looked like scarves, coming all the way up to their cheeks. Their long, graceful necks spread gradually into their powerful gray-feathered bodies. Even Brett seemed to understand that they were something special, because he, like my grandfather, declined to hunt them. Rather than sprinting through the grass to flush them, as he would have with pheasants and ducks, he simply stood and watched. He looked up at me occasionally to take measure of what I was thinking, and then turned back to consider the geese, working the jowls that nature made soft to carry birds without damaging their flesh. My grandfather had said that the parents migrated with their offspring, but by this time of year, I couldn’t tell which was which. They appeared identical, interdependent, no individual need usurping the whole.

But as majestic as they looked in the pond and on land, it couldn’t compare to what they looked like in the air. Their beautiful, shifting patterns, their throaty calls, were always new, and always exhilarating. Even now, when I see a flock of Canada Geese, I stop whatever I’m doing to admire them. They represent fall to me—the change, the loss, the arrival of a starker beauty. When they fly, a part of me flies with them.

School ended early the following Monday and we were all let out at lunchtime. I waited to leave Miss Anderson’s class until the first rush of kids was gone, so that the hallway would not be so crowded. As I made my way toward my locker, I saw Mr. Garrett, striding down the hall and whistling as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He was headed toward the teachers’ lounge with a brown paper bag in his hand, shoulders high, eyes looking straight ahead. As he came closer, I was afraid he would talk to me—something that would surely be noted by the other lingerers in the hallway—but the feeling was immediately followed, like a gunshot and its echo, by shame. We locked eyes as he approached and the tune he was whistling sailed up briefly into a higher octave. But then, like a coconspirator who knew to keep his partner safe, he winked and passed by without saying a word.

I went home and had lunch with my grandmother. She made sandwiches with the ham that was left over from the night before, and I snuck pieces to Brett whenever she wasn’t looking.

When I was halfway done she went back to her laundry, hanging linens and clothes on the clothesline that stretched across the yard, taking advantage of the Indian summer. After I finished eating I ventured out to help her. But then she went back inside to get more clothes-pins, and I heard her yell, “Brett!”

When I got there, Brett was licking his chops and the bottoms of his ears were coated in something greasy. I didn’t need to be told what had happened: he’d stolen a stick of butter off of the counter and had eaten the whole thing, and he was looking very pleased about it.

“Darn dog!” my grandmother yelled. “Michelle, you need to keep him under control!” So I shut him in my bedroom—he was so happy with himself that he didn’t even mind the confinement—and then left to avoid further scolding. Because I couldn’t think of anything better to do, I walked uptown to look for my grandfather. I passed the grocery store where I’d seen the Garretts a few days earlier, crossed the railroad tracks that divided the near end of Buffalo Street from the main strip, and wandered into Jimmy’s Coffee Shop.

I stood still for a moment just inside the front door. Halfway down the long counter a lone man sat reading the paper, and the two waitresses chatted loudly by the register. In back, I could hear the clanging of dishes being washed from the lunchtime rush. Other than the man at the counter, Charlie and his friends were the only customers. They were sitting in the big corner booth that had seats wrapped around three sides of the table.

Charlie was in his usual corner spot, with Earl Watson and Uncle Pete on either side of him. Next to Earl was John Berger, a tall, rangy man who owned the largest construction company in the area. A young man was with them too, a thin fellow in his early twenties, who appeared to be the only one eating. Except for him, all the men were leaning forward, looking serious. But when I approached the table, my grandfather brightened visibly. “Hey there, Mikey,” he said. “No school today?”

I shook my head and managed to say that the teachers had a meeting. Then I stood in front of the table, not knowing what to do—there was no clear path to my grandfather and Earl and John Berger weren’t moving. Charlie hit Uncle Pete on the shoulder, who hit the young man, and they both piled out of the booth to let me scoot across the orange vinyl seat and sit beside my grandfather. He asked if I wanted a Coke, which I did; Lorraine, the middle-aged waitress, brought one over. The men resumed drinking coffee, but they seemed a bit restrained, not calm and casual as they usually did when they sat around this table.

And then it occurred to me that they’d been talking about the Garretts. In fact, this was probably where they talked about them most, their social gathering transformed into a kind of meeting. I had interrupted their discussion, and they were having trouble shifting to easier topics. Finally, though, my grandfather cleared his throat and gestured toward the new young man.

“This here’s John’s oldest boy, T.J.,” he said. “He did a couple of tours in ’Nam, and now he’s moving back home from Milwaukee.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “And this here is Mike, my only grandchild.” The young man looked up from his sandwich and nodded, but didn’t say a word. Despite the crew cut and the left-over military stiffness, he was unshaven and a bit bleary-eyed. I remembered what I’d heard my grandparents say about John Berger’s oldest son—he also had a thirteen-year-old son named Cody, as well as a nine-year-old daughter, Harriet. What they’d said was that T.J. had always been a bit wild, which had probably served him well in Vietnam. As a teenager, he’d gotten drunk and unruly enough that Ray Davis’s men had apparently had to escort him home on several unrecorded occasions. But he had straightened out, moved to Milwaukee for a while, and enlisted in the army, and now he had finally come home.