This River

by James Brown

  VI

  You’re pushing forty now, a little beaten up for all the years of abuse, but for the most part you’re still mentally and physically intact. You have no right to whine. No right to bitch. It’s a minor miracle you’re alive at all, and after a year or so of sobriety you start to get back some of the things you lost. Maybe it’s your job, if you have an understanding boss. Maybe it’s visitation rights with your kids, if only for every other weekend. But don’t count on patching it up with your wife. She’s already moved on to another man, the guy who consoled her while you were out partying. The house, too, she’s keeping that and everything in it. You feel so much guilt for destroying your marriage that you don’t dare fight for what’s yours.

  Where every night you used to get whacked out of your head, now you attend A.A. meetings. You arrive early and make the coffee. You set out the donuts and fold-out chairs, and when things are underway and you’re called on to speak, when you’re asked to “share,” you follow the A.A. protocol and first announce yourself as an alcoholic and addict. This is an important tenet of your sobriety: to remember always and forever that you are marked, that there is no cure for your affliction. One drink triggers the craving, and once the craving is on you’re off and running—next stop the dope man’s house. Beating the physical part of addiction is a cakewalk compared to silencing that voice in your head, the one that never goes away, telling you it’s okay to have a drink, a line, or a pill, because you’ve been clean and sober for a while. Because you can control it now. Compulsion is your soul mate, till death do you part, and your hold on sobriety is never more than tenuous.

  But cheer up.

  You’ve lost a lot but you’ve gained too. If not wisdom, at least the return of your self-esteem. Your self-respect. And even though you’ve been condemned to a life sentence of A.A. meetings, even though you’ll always wrestle with your addiction and may wind up back in rehab, at least for now, if only for this day, you are free of the miracle potions, powders, and pills. If only for this day, you are not among the walking dead.

  REMEMBERING LINDA

  Late at night, Linda slips out of her bedroom window. She moves quietly across the backyard. She opens the gate and just as quietly closes it behind her. A lowered Chevy Impala is parked at the curb with its headlamps turned off. When the door opens, the cab light comes on, and I see him, the man behind the wheel. He’s too old for her, in his early twenties probably, and he has a ponytail, the hair pulled back tight across his skull. Linda wears a high school varsity jacket and tight Levis that show off the smooth, rounded curves of her hips. She slips into the car and they kiss. A light rain has begun to fall. I am watching this scene, as I have twice before, through the broken slat in the blinds covering my window.

  At breakfast the next morning, all is as usual. Linda is dressed in the uniform required of the students at Saint Francis: a plaid skirt with a white cotton blouse, black leather shoes, and white socks that reach to the knee. She sits across from Helen, who wears the same. They’re both seventeen but Helen is the quiet one, in part, I think, because her teeth have grown in badly. The top incisors project at odd angles, forcing the others into a crooked row so that whenever she smiles or laughs, which is not often, she hurriedly covers her mouth with her hand. She is a small girl, barely five-feet; her skin is dark, and her hair is thick and coarse.

  Aileen is the woman who owns this house, and this morning she serves up plates of bacon, scrambled eggs, tortillas, a small bowl of salsa, and a bottle of ketchup for my father because he doesn’t much like salsa. He sits at the head of the table, his face hidden behind the morning paper. Aileen only accepts female foster kids, for the boys, she says, can be dangerous, and she has no time for the girls who don’t mind her. There are too many others willing and waiting to take their place. She pauses over Linda as she sets a glass of milk in front of her.

  “You look tired,” she says.

  “I was up late.”

  “How come?”

  “Homework,” Linda says. “Tons of algebra.”

  “Maybe you should get started a little earlier.”

  “I will.”

  “I hope you’re not wasting your time. You know the rules. No boyfriends. No dating. Your job is to get good grades in school, and my job is to make sure you do.”

  “I understand.”

  “Just keep your nose to the grindstone like Helen, and you’ll be just fine here.”

  Linda’s face reddens, from embarrassment or anger, I can’t tell. Helen is quiet and seems distant. But she hears everything, and I sense it, that she’s somehow pleased.

  I attend Fredrick Martin Middle School, but it’s on the way to Saint Francis, and the best part of my day is walking there with Linda. Helen comes with us, though she usually trails a few steps ahead or behind, and she rarely contributes to the conversation. I don’t say much, either, but that’s only because I have to be on top of things. We live in a bad neighborhood in East San Jose where people install bars over their windows and doors, where teenagers hang out on the corners, drink and smoke dope, and where at night you sometimes hear gunfire. I am Linda’s protector. I am here to defend her honor. To take on all comers regardless of age or size. I am fearless. I am tough, and as we walk I keep my hand in my pocket, rubbing my thumb along the pearl-white casing of my jackknife.

  But it’s hard not to drift, and occasionally I forget my role as bodyguard and slip into another imaginary world. This one belongs to Linda and Key West and Cancun and Jamaica and their beautiful sandy white beaches with clear, blue water that is always warm. She says she’s been to them all. Then there are the stories about her father and their old house in Santa Monica with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Pacific.

  “In the summer,” she says, “we used to walk down to the pier and ride the roller coaster. Once my dad took me on it six times in a row. Can you believe that?” she says.

  “Believe what?”

  She lightly punches me in the arm.

  “Six times in a row, man. Shit,” she says, “were we dizzy.”

  I know she’s lying. I lived in L.A. for seven years with my mother, brother, and sister, and I know for a fact that there is no roller coaster on the pier in Santa Monica because I’ve been there. It was torn down, I was told, back in the ’30s. But Linda, like Helen, is a foster child from the County of Santa Clara, and I don’t care if she lies because it’s the lies that make her feel better about herself, and I believe Linda needs that. I need it for her, too, and it’s why I listen. It’s why I don’t question or show doubt because most people who take in children from the county, Aileen included, really only do it for the money, and Linda knows it. So must Helen. They’re not necessarily wanted, and maybe they never have been, not even by their own parents, assuming they ever knew them. Linda had been living here for about four months when my father and I came along. As for myself, I’d just left L.A. and moved in with my dad barely five months ago. For Helen, she’d been here four years.

  “Next July, when I turn eighteen,” Linda says, “I’m going back to Cancun. Of course I also want to go to college, so I’ll probably only stay a year.” She looks over her shoulder. Helen has fallen behind. “Hey,” she says, “hey, Helen, how about you? What do you want to do?”

  Either she doesn’t hear Linda or else she’s ignoring her. I don’t know. In any event Helen doesn’t answer. I take up the slack.

  “She wants to be a nun,” I say.

  “Really?”

  “I heard her and Aileen talking.”

  Being a nun is a serious vocation, requiring vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and for what seems a long while none of us say a word. Finally Linda breaks the silence.

  “You know,” she says, as if she’s given the matter considerable thought. “That’s a good thing. To serve our Lord. I know for an absolute fact you’ll make a great nun.”

  Helen smiles, then she remembers her bad teeth and quickly catches herself. By now we’ve reached
the gates of Saint Francis, and after saying our goodbyes I continue on alone.

  In school I find it impossible to concentrate. All I can think about is Linda. Linda Hernandez. I like how her last name rolls off the tip of my tongue, and I repeat it to myself, silently, several times. At fourteen I am caught in those most tender years of adolescence where even the smallest difference in age presents a vast, insurmountable divide for my love. But somehow, someway, I want to believe that she will in time come to realize the depth and intensity of my feelings for her. And in knowing this depth, in knowing that no man could ever possibly match such love, she will vow to wait for me. It will be hard at first, and for a while people will talk bad about us, especially against Linda, but we’ll survive. In the end, we’ll be stronger because of it.

  I have other more intimate thoughts about Linda and what I’d like to do to her. Typically they come at night as I lie awake beside my father, too restless to sleep. We share a queen-sized bed in a room that was once a two-car garage, and though it’s been nicely remodeled, it’s still basically a cold, drafty garage with a window built on a concrete slab. This is winter time, and for a carpenter, when the weather turns bad and stays bad for very long, and when some of your customers are slow paying up, it’s easy to find yourself in a fix. Our being here is only supposed to be temporary until we can get back on our feet, but there’s more to it than that: Aileen and my father are a couple. They’ve been in love for years, even before they both divorced, and I can see how our present situation might easily become permanent. Meanwhile, they sleep in separate rooms, if only for appearance’s sake—for Helen mostly, I suppose, and for Linda and the county social workers. I certainly hope they don’t think they’re doing it for me because I’ve already had the embarrassing misfortune of having walked in on them.

  For now, however, they go about pretending.

  For now, my father is asleep. For now, it’s close to midnight when I hear the opening of her bedroom window again.

  It’s been two weeks since she last sneaked out to meet him, the guy in the lowered Chevy Impala, and any dreams I might’ve had of them breaking up are dashed. Slowly, quietly, so as not to wake my father, I climb out of bed and look through the broken slat in the blinds covering the window. It’s the same scene, only tonight she wears a dress, and when the car door opens, as Linda slides across the seat and they kiss, I turn away.

  She comes back about an hour later.

  In the morning, when the house begins to stir, I hear her footsteps in the hallway outside my room. I hear the opening and closing of the bathroom door, the knocking of the pipes in the wall, and then the spray of water beating against the porcelain tiles of the shower stall. I imagine her holding her hand to the water, testing it, then letting her robe fall gently to the floor. I wait for the water to shut off. I wait for the sound of the door knob turning, and I time it so that we meet when she steps out of the bathroom. Her hair is wrapped in a blue towel, fashioned into a turban, and I like how our shoulders brush as we slip by each other in the hall. I like how she smiles, out of one corner of her mouth, and in passing I inhale deeply, taking in the scent of her freshly washed body.

  “Good morning,” she says.

  “Morning,” I say.

  She smiles at me.

  I look away. I look down at the floor.

  “What’s a matter?” she says.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  It’s only shyness, of course. I’m just a boy, but it’s the gesture, the simple gesture of looking away, as if in disgrace, that later would’ve led her to believe that I had informed on her when in fact nothing could’ve been further from the truth. I am guilty of a betrayal I never committed.

  That morning she does not come to breakfast, and when I ask about her, Aileen tells me that Linda isn’t feeling well. That she won’t be going to school today. Helen and I walk the route without her, and I don’t recall us talking, though I’m sure we exchanged good-byes at the gates of Saint Francis. At this point, I have no reason to hate. The thing is, Linda isn’t there when I get home from school, and on the way down the hall I pass her room. The door is open but the bed has been stripped to the mattress. All the small colorful bottles on top of her dresser are gone. The nightstand is also bare.

  In the living room, I find Helen in the leather recliner, her feet curled beneath her, running her fingers through decade after decade of her rosary. “Where’s Linda?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer. On her face I detect the faint hint of a smile, and suddenly I realize what she has done. I look away, as I did with Linda, only this time it is with disgust. At fourteen, my eyes burning, I don’t fully understand the source of my contempt. I am blinded with fury. But in remembering Linda, decades later, my sight has cleared. I recognize the girl. I recognize both girls as only children, each abandoned, wanting only to love and be loved.

  THE APPRENTICE

  My father is spreading tar on the roof of a tract home during a rainstorm. He’s sixty-seven years old. I’m seventeen. He’s teaching me how to patch a leak. You have to isolate it first. You have to find the cracks, usually several feet above where the water drips through the ceiling in the house, and then you clean them. “Remove any loose gravel,” he tells me, “scrape out any debris.” We’re thoroughly soaked, it’s freezing cold and I’m shivering, but still I listen. Still I watch, paying close attention to how he smoothes the tar with a spatula, the same one we use for drywall, and then fans it out, above and below the cracks, as well as into them. In the distance, I hear the rumble of thunder, and for a moment the dark sky brightens with lightning.

  I want to learn the trade.

  My father is good at what he does. I want to know what he knows. I want the knowledge of a lifetime pounding nails, building and remodeling homes. Still, when more fortunate men are retired, he’s patching leaks in the middle of a storm.

  “Be generous with this stuff,” he says. “Better more than too little.”

  It’s the winter of 1973, and I’m in my senior year of high school. In a few months I have to make a decision about whether I should attend college or continue on with my father, learning the trades, from plumbing to carpentry. When I know enough, I could take over his small business and expand it, because I am young. Because I am strong and ambitious. Though I like to think I’m smart, I’ve never done well in school, struggling for Cs and Ds in every subject except English and P.E. My SAT scores are barely average, and I can’t see myself spending another four or five years sitting in a cramped desk in a cramped classroom, listening to some burned-out teacher.

  Another bolt of lightning brightens the sky. It strikes closer than the last, and the crack of thunder seems louder.

  “Let’s get off this roof,” my father says. “We’re done here.”

  He reaches for the bucket of tar, but I grab it first. It comes in a five-gallon can, like paint, and because it’s heavy I prefer to carry it. My father climbs down the ladder and then steadies it for me. The rungs are wet and slick. With the rain in your eyes, and hauling this bucket, it would be easy to slip. It would be easy to fall, and it’s a known fact that a young man heals better and faster than someone my father’s age. This is another reason why I don’t want to go to college. I’m scared that one day I won’t be there and he’ll lift something too heavy, lumber maybe, or drywall, and seriously damage his already injured back.

  Or worse, he could have a heart attack.

  He could have a stroke. Although my dad and Aileen are still together, in fact they’re talking marriage, I worry that something bad might happen. I worry he’ll need me, and where will I be, miles away, kicking back in some warm and cozy classroom talking about books and stories.

  In school, I am listless. Except for my creative writing class with Mrs. Bettencourt, where I’m able to write whatever I please, I am bored. That I don’t yet understand all the rules of grammar doesn’t matter much to this teacher. Of course she circles my misspellings in red pen and corrects my most egregious errors
, but she also makes all sorts of generous comments in the margins. On one page she might remark on how the dialogue sounds authentic. On another she may compliment me on the way I’ve described a young girl, say, or the light from a streetlamp on a foggy night.

  But Mrs. Bettencourt is only a substitute teacher, albeit a long-term one, and once, after class, she confides in me: Although it’s been a dream of hers to become a teacher, the pay is awfully low, jobs are scarce, and at the end of the semester she is returning to her position as the manager of a bank. “Practical concerns,” she says. “Sometimes you just have to get real.” And those words stay with me, reinforcing what I already know to be true. Even my school counselor, back in my junior year, suggests I drop out of regular classes and attend the vocational center where I can learn a trade. My father, however, refuses to sign the release form, and when I press him he gets angry.

  “How come?”

  “Because I want you in school.”

  “But vocational school is school.”

  “No,” he says. “No, not really. You tell that sonofabitch counselor I said to stick it where the sun don’t shine.”

  I think my father is wrong.

  I think, given my lousy grades, that he has to get real. At night, as the days toward summer drag on, I often find myself unable to sleep. We’ve moved out of Aileen’s house and are on our own again, just me and my dad, and I feel a great, unyielding pressure. I have to make a hard decision, and it needs to be the right one, and I need to make it very soon. Part of me wants to please my father who dropped out in the eleventh grade to work and help his father. Part of me wants to break the cycle of the men in our family working the trades and be the first to attend college. My older brother did it his own way by becoming an actor, and a successful one, too, right out of high school. And I admire him for it. But I also need to realize that I’m not nearly as smart and set my sights accordingly.