Worthy told him everything would work out. Worthy told him sometimes an infant takes fluid into the lungs while in the womb and has trouble breathing and the infant must clear the fluid by herself.
Mortality is a strange thing, Worthy told Steve. You can put your wife in the best hospital in the world and the same thing would happen. The NICU doc will say the same stuff that yours told you, and then they’ll wait to see if the fluid clears. The same as if she was born in a war zone. Or a coffee plantation nowhere close to a clinic.
I don’t know if that makes you feel better, Worthy told him, but it’s the truth.
They got stuck in traffic in San Sal, on the way to Costa del Sol. Anja with her legs crossed in the front seat next to Worthy. Worthy said there was an FMLN rally at Estadio Cuscatlán. They’d seen the leftists, the farmers and machete men from plantations, coming in from the countryside, from the mountains. The back of every oil-burning pickup filled with young men. Which was normal anyway.
Anja told them what she knew about the war in El Salvador. Part of a poem from memory, something an American wrote. The colonel pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing.
They ate ceviche at Costa del Sol. They drank coco loco. They stayed at Costa del Sol until sunset and Steve drank cervezas in the Subaru on the way back to San Salvador. In the morning Worthy would drive him to the airport and he’d go home.
I have to piss, Steve told Worthy. Worthy stopped the Subaru at a gas station outside the city. The gas station didn’t have a restroom.
Steve went to piss behind the gas station, into the weeds and tall yellowing grass by the edge of a ravine. From the edge of the ravine he could see the orange twinkling lights of San Salvador and the valley.
The young man with a shotgun snuck up behind him. The young man with a shotgun told Steve something in a quiet voice that made Steve jump at how quiet it was, that it came from nowhere at first, then the young man with a shotgun was saying it again.
Short with shaggy hair, the young man, shotgun shells snug in the cartridge loops of his khaki shirt.
Steve didn’t know what the young man with a shotgun told him. He stood there and said nothing back, his belt undone, his dick out. The young man pointed to his dick with the shotgun and then to the ravine edge.
The kid’s a guard, Worthy told him, leaning out of the Subaru. A friendly. Gas stations have guards. The guard says, Go piss.
Steve heard Worthy and Anja and the guard laughing as he stepped into the yellowing grass at the edge of the ravine. He pissed and had no problem pissing. Let them watch. Let them laugh. He was going home.
(Elisabeth Hindmarsh)
Elisabeth Hindmarsh lived on the second floor of a partitioned Victorian in Lincoln. There was an inside stairway to get to her door. Aaron walked in off the street, late at night, but she didn’t care. It was after a party and he was going to help her finish the gin.
It was a tiny place. A living room, a kitchenette, a bathroom with black and white checkerboard tile. Red paper lanterns hung on wires sheathed in cloth insulators. Elisabeth was thick-bodied, athletic, her hair dyed a bluish shade of black. She wore a dress over jeans to hide her porcine legs. Aaron dressed like Charles Starkweather, those days when he wandered student neighborhoods, a plain tee shirt tight over his weakling chest, blue jeans fitting loose on his skinny hips. He hoped his wispy mustache and brown felt hat made him look like the singer of a band.
Elisabeth was in the bathroom. Aaron talked to her from the adjacent room anyway, reciting the records in her collection that he approved of. Pet Sounds and John Wesley Harding and Once Upon a Rhyme. She laughed at him when she returned.
“You know I wasn’t standing behind you anymore.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
It felt safe there, warm in a boozy way.
“Would you dance with me?” he asked, stepping into her space.
The LP he’d put on was a live recording of Piaf. It was warped and scratchy. Elisabeth blushed when it started playing. Surprised he’d picked her favorite.
How to Die Young in a Nebraska Winter
I listened to sound of my parents dressing in the dark. It felt like I’d fallen asleep just a few minutes before, still night. I heard them in their closet through the wall. A jacket hanger pulled from the rack, the slide of plastic on oak, the pulling of a zipper. These were sounds I’d memorized, my father getting ready for work. He sighed as he sat on the bed. Mom helped with the suit jacket, letting his arms in before sliding it up and over his shoulders. She flattened the lapels and patted the shoulders and spoke some trembling magic into his ear.
I sat up on my elbow and hushed my brother’s name across our room.
“Todd. Are you awake?”
“Be quiet. It’s just Dad.” Todd was two years older. He was about to turn thirteen and spoke in a soft, deepening voice. “Go to sleep,” he said.
It was five in the morning when Charlie, our father, came to wake us. We sat on the beds, bare legs hanging down, crouched over to hold our water, feet pale and freezing in the early morning air. We were old enough to know something was wrong.
Mom came and stood between the beds in front of Charlie. She tried to explain things to us. Nothing came except a mournful vibrato. She couldn’t say what had happened, so Charlie turned her around, pulled her into his chest, one hand steady in her curly, black hair, one hand smoothing out her tremors.
Charlie looked at us over her shoulder. He was getting old in a visible way. His cheeks were full, red and flaky after shaving. His ears hung big off the side of his head.
“Brandon asphyxiated last night.” Charlie was a lawyer, he was good at breaking bad news. “Brandon was goofing around and choked on popcorn. The choking triggered an asthma attack. That’s what killed him.”
Services were held at a Presbyterian church in Bancroft that smelled like formaldehyde. All churches have smelled the same way to me since.
If Brandon had died in a bigger city we could have gone to a funeral home, but in places like Bancroft everything was done at the church. The visitation and the funeral and the reception after the burial. In a few days, on Sunday, normal services would resume. It was the same backdrop for weddings and baptisms too, red curtains and stained glass, polished organ pipes. There was a small room adjacent to the sanctuary that stored variations of plastic foliage for the ceremony that occasioned them. Its door was open when we arrived. We weren’t supposed to see those blooms of celebration, the Christmas poinsettias, the Easter lilies. A woman closed the door, and I was relieved she did.
I stared at my feet the whole visitation. My shoes were black suede, stained a cloudy white by road salt. The laces were dirty gray. I wasn’t prepared for this kind of thing to happen. My suit was stiff, bought the day before, and I refused to wear the new shoes that came with it. Todd and I sat in the second pew, hands between our knees.
Brandon’s mother was a woman Charlie knew from college named Brenda. She had red hair and was muscular in a rural way. Apparently she and Charlie hooked up at a party the summer before his first year of law school, sitting in each other’s arms next to a bonfire and drinking keg beer before moving to the backseat of his car. She was just visiting for the weekend and was back in Bancroft before the afterglow wore off. When Charlie found out she was pregnant he made it clear that he was willing to take responsibility for the kid, to finance the pregnancy and pay child support, or for an abortion if she wanted one. Marrying Brenda, however, was not an alternative. That wasn’t the life he’d planned—Brenda wasn’t the kind of woman he wanted as a wife. Her family was angry but there was nothing they could do about it. Charlie was hours away, and his parents supported his decision. “I feel horrible about it,” he told her. “I’m going to pay for my mistake, but there’s nothing else I can do.”
She sat in front of us during the visitation, talking with my mom about Brandon while Charlie stood off to the side. Brenda and my mom didn’t usua
lly talk, but they drew solace from each other in that moment, the two moms. After the funeral, it would never be that civil again.
All ten rows of pews in the sanctuary were full. Most of the townsfolk knew who I was even though I’d never met them. They were the middle-aged friends of Brenda who’d seen us drive through their town with Brandon. They wore polo shirts and blue jeans and smelled like aftershave, like they were going to a country club dance. Some of them talked in the back but most kept silent. When anyone parted their lips to speak, most all the townspeople stared at them. They mostly watched Charlie. My father was the type of man who made enemies.
“How is everyone?” Pastor Harold sat next to Brenda in the front pew. “I hope we’re all hanging in there.”
“We’re okay,” Brenda told him. She handed out Kleenexes. “We’re keeping it together.”
“We’re each other’s backbones,” my mom said.
“That’s right,” Pastor Harold agreed. “These are strong families. Families with roots that run deep and broad. This is never easy, but there’s experience to draw on here.” He motioned to Brenda’s parents. “Together, you will all make it through this.”
The reverend’s mouth seemed to move automatically. I wondered if, after a while, being a clergyman was little more than breaking bread and drinking wine. An old man rubbing his hands together, turning dust to dust.
Brandon’s was the first funeral I went to. It amazed me how much sadness there was. Adults lost their composure. They huddled together to bawl on each other’s shoulders. I wondered if all funerals were so hard. For me, it wasn’t because Brandon was barely a teenager when he died—being young, I didn’t grieve for lost youth—but because of how it made me feel to watch others grieve. And in the way outsiders treated me, offering condolences like I was part dead myself.
I didn’t tell anyone this, but if it had been somehow necessary that Brandon die at that moment, then I wished that he’d killed himself. Then there would have been something to blame. Somehow this would have been an acceptable cause and effect. I’d heard of this happening, at least, learned about it on TV and in school. There would have been physical satisfaction in imagining this. The cool metal slipping between his lips. The buzzing sensation at the back of his cranium. Then the bloom. I could have understood that. It would have made sense to jump off a boat into the waiting mouth of a shark. Dying from asthma made no sense.
How Brandon died was obscene, but it fit the surroundings. I had to remind myself that it was late November in Nebraska. My half-brother hadn’t wanted to die, after all. He hadn’t planned any of this.
Brandon was a regimented kid. He learned to paint by numbers. He’d just turned fifteen and wasn’t unathletic when he could keep his breath. He was a strong reader of Gothic fiction and graphic novels. He woke up at 6:30 to eat three bowls of Lucky Charms every morning before washing his face. He knew a lot about American history, especially as it related to General Motors and Spider-Man.
We saw Brandon pretty often growing up. He was brought along for most of our family vacations. We picked him up from Bancroft for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Charlie stuck true to his promise, being responsible for his first son. They tossed around a football in the fall, saw a couple games at Wrigley in the summer if there were tickets. Brandon was buddies with our father in a way Todd and I never were.
Brenda must have been relieved that Charlie was never a stranger to Brandon. Her parents were supportive—they owned the hardware store in town—and her brothers and sisters helped out when they could, but it must have weighed heavily on her that she wasn’t strong enough, or financially secure enough, to move away on her own. She dreamed aloud of her and Brandon starting over in a new place but was never able to follow through with those plans. She relied on her parents to keep going.
Brandon had been jaundiced and colicky as a baby, and in some ways he never grew out of it. With his asthma, whatever house they lived in was too moldy in summer and too drafty in winter. He couldn’t always run with the other kids but was bright enough to hold his own. There were many things he was good at, non-sequiturs and puzzles.
He was an intelligent kid, there was no doubt. He’d had a lot of potential but was mostly an expert at becoming sick. If there was to be a manual for how to die young in a Nebraska winter, he could have written it.
When Charlie took me up to the casket, Brenda’s boyfriend, Monte, was running his fingers through Brandon’s hair. Brandon had thin blond hair and blue stitches in his scalp, with dried blood around the thread. His face was powdery and white. The makeup they put on Brandon made him look girlish.
Monte wore a white shirt. A tiger tattoo on his forearm showed beneath rolled-up sleeves. He asked my father about the stitches in Brandon’s scalp.
“They have to do an autopsy,” Charlie explained. “It’s state law when a child dies. They need a sample of the brain.”
Monte fingered the stitches. He touched the made-up face and cried under his breath, shaking his head.
“Little guy didn’t deserve it,” he said, trailing off. “Some stupid shit, this happening.”
Charlie put his hand on Monte’s back.
When Brandon stayed with us, while our new house was being built, he spent most of his time in the swimming pool. This was the summer before he died. To save money on condo rent, Charlie had his dream house put up in sections so we could live in the first half while the second was being finished. This is why Todd and me shared a bedroom that year.
Our house abutted a golf course. The swimming pool overlooked the seventh green. Brandon showed us how to time our cannonballs to mess up a golfer’s putt. We floated in the pool on inflatable mattresses, sipped on Mountain Dew slushies, watched the construction crew work on the house, until Charlie came home from the law firm where he had just made partner.
Brandon was a serious kid—while we watched cartoons in the afternoon, he read Russian novels that I wouldn’t pick up until college—but the pool helped him be immature. We had tea parties at the bottom, sinking plastic lawn furniture in the deep end then holding our breath while he poured imaginary Earl Grey and served raisin scones like my mom did for her friends. This was when Jurassic Park came out, so we pretended to be underwater raptors tearing each others’ flesh. He taught us how to snorkel, to float on our bellies at the surface, telling us what to visualize when we looked at the bottom of the pool. Sometimes he imagined he was a microorganism wading in a petri dish. Or a man whacked by the mafia, adrift facedown in the harbor.
He stayed with us for three weeks that summer. Charlie made sure the pool was finished before Brandon arrived because he knew how much his first son liked to swim. There wasn’t a public pool in Bancroft, so our vacations with Brandon always revolved around swimming or a body of water. Charlie liked to show Brandon things he normally couldn’t see—things that one isn’t able to experience in landlocked Nebraska.
We never used the pool much after the summer Brandon stayed in the new house. There were no swim parties for my birthday, no lazy days tanning beside the water. Mom quit cleaning it the next summer, so the water turned green, the blue-tile bottom slicked with algae. It would have been vulgar to swim in the pool then. After a few years Charlie quit calling the service to uncover and fill the pool in late spring. The tarp was replaced every fall, but there was never water underneath.
It’s hard to think about what it meant to Charlie to keep the pool covered and dry. To see it each morning while he sipped coffee at the kitchen window, staring at the mesh tarp layered over with snow or leaves. When he and Mom had dinner parties, he was the one who explained why we didn’t fill the pool. He never mentioned Brandon, but people seemed to know his death had something to do with it. It’s too much hassle, Charlie would say. Too costly to repair the pump. Too dangerous for the boys. Eventually he said the damn thing leaked, glancing at the empty pool with anger in his eyes. People knew not to talk about it then.
The cemetery was at the top of a hill, on the
outside of town where ponderosa pines coalesced along gravel roads and fields squared-in the acre where Brandon would be buried. There was an area for Protestants on one side of the highway and plots reserved for Catholics and Ponca Indians on the other. Brenda’s parents had given one of their own plots for Brandon. When they died, they would share one, buried one on top of the other.
Charlie left the engine running during the interment so I could stay in the car. My nose ached. It had been running thin mucus all day, but was dry then. My nostrils felt wide open and my sinuses burned. My parents and Todd sat with their arms wrapped around each other under the funeral home tent, near Brandon’s casket, Brenda and Monte next to them. A wispy snow fell. Small pellets were pressed to ice on the ground in the shape of footprints. I curled up in the backseat, too tired to watch.
I imagined what it would have been like to be there when Brandon died, plotting out the manual. Brandon dancing around the living room, lifting his knees above his waist, arms churning, a big goofy grin. He stops. Coughs out half-chewed bits of popcorn, hands at his throat, fingers probing his mouth. He looks at Brenda, eyes watering, then walks to her. She asks him what’s the matter, pats his back then moves behind him for the Heimlich. This makes the boy vomit. They panic, recognizing an asthmatic fit, but he’s still choking. It would happen too quickly to really know what was what.
Of course, I was grateful I wasn’t there. I appreciated that I was allowed to use my imagination instead of having to remember actual details. Still, for many years, I had to watch it in parts, what I could imagine, with eyes closed at high school football games and in conversation at pancake feeds.
Bad Faith Page 4