Nick

by Michael Farris Smith

  The fire wavered but then caught and smoke began to fill the hallway. Colette hurried into her room and she sat on the edge of the bed and shoved everything into the knapsack. All that belonged to him and all that belonged to her and the simple joining of the relics of their lives into the same knapsack raised in her the hope of reconciliation. The smoke curled around her doorway and once she had it all gathered in the sack she covered her mouth and made for the stairs, the fire cracking and growing behind her. When she reached the bottom floor she grabbed her coat and made sure the pistol remained in the pocket. She then slung the knapsack over her shoulder and walked out of the building and left the door open behind her. The streets had awakened with the break of day as horsedrawn wagons moved goods toward the market and the workers slouched to work and cargo ships blared their horns from the wharf as if to announce that this day of transformation was here.

  57

  He was still talking to Judah at first light when he heard the sirens. He stood in the window and looked out but then his attention turned when the apartment door opened.

  Colette stood in the doorway. And then she stepped inside and closed the door behind her. She looked into the bedroom and saw Judah. Nick moved from the window. She raised her eyes to him and looked back and forth between Nick and Judah but did not speak.

  She set the drawstring sack on the floor. She shrugged out of her coat and then without looking she reached behind her and hung it on a coatrack on the back of the apartment door. She took one more look at Nick and then she picked up the sack and stepped into the sitting room. Nick moved to the bedroom door and watched her move around the room, touching her fingertips to the smooth wood of chairs and tables. Standing in front of photographs and staring at the faces staring back at her. She moved over to the shelves and let her eyes fall across each book or flower vase as if to catalogue it in her mind. She took it all in. Each step in the room. Each corner. Each piece of furniture. Each pair of eyes captured in black and white.

  She then stood at the table in the center of the rug and she opened the sack. She emptied the contents onto the table. The stacks of cash and documents. The medals and the photographs and the letter that pronounced Judah dead. She lifted the Purple Heart by the ribbon and looked around the room. Settled on the bookshelves. She took a handful of books and turned them on their sides. Lifted the top two books and slid the ribbon between and the medal hung. She did the same thing with the Victory Medal and the two medals hung and looked across the room like two offset eyes of valor.

  She then picked up the photograph of Judah’s parents in front of the saloon and the wedding photograph and set them aside. She lifted two frames from the wall and removed the pictures inside. She inserted the photograph of Judah’s parents in one frame and returned it to the wall. Then she held the wedding photograph. Looked at the words written on the back. I dont want to be in this world anymore. Then she placed their picture in the frame and hung it next to Judah’s parents.

  The next piece of their life that she took from the table was the letter that had been handed to her by the representative of the United States Armed Forces. She crossed the room and took a box of matches from the coat hanging on the back of the door. She struck a match and held the letter out in front of her and held the flame to the paper’s edge. It lit and the flame danced upward, black frills of smoke reaching through her fingers. She then carried it to the bathroom and dropped it into the sink and watched it until it was no more.

  She returned from the bathroom and looked at Nick. Outside the sirens wailed across the morning and hurried to the fire that Colette had created.

  “Tell Judah I couldn’t do it,” he said.

  “Do what?”

  “Any of it. Tell him I am not the answer he’s looking for. You are.”

  Colette sat down. The adrenaline draining from her and she let out a heavy sigh. Nick took his coat and hat from a rack in the corner.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  He moved to the apartment door and opened it.

  “What did you do with him?” he asked. Meaning Kade.

  “I shut him up until we decide if it is better if he lives or dies.”

  “We?”

  “Yes. We.”

  Nick moved into the doorway and she asked again. Where are you going? He did not answer and he closed the door behind him and later when she crossed the hallway and knocked on his door there was no response. When she went inside the apartment and called out there was no answer. The bed was made and there was nothing in the closet or the dresser drawers. In the small kitchen a knife and fork and spoon lay in a row next to the sink and the handful of plates and cups were on the shelf. An empty and wiped ashtray sat in the windowsill and the floors had been swept. It was quiet and clean and it was as if no one had been there at all.

  IV

  58

  He holed up in a small hotel room two blocks from Union Station in Chicago and waited for Christmas to pass by, not wanting to make that day any more than it had to be. The buildings and sidewalks were dressed in bows and wreaths and a steady snow gave the sense of purity to the concrete and glass and steel. In the day he milled around Union Station and though he had been through the station many times, for the first time he stopped to admire the architecture. The arches and columns. The detailed ceilings and draft of natural light.

  The crowd weaved through the station as so many hurried for home. He believed that he might recognize a familiar face through the sea of travelers but he only noticed reflections of those he knew. Names popped into his head and he had conversations with each name, safe conversations where he was the only one allowed to make inquiries about what has happened in your life. In between these conversations Nick sipped coffee and stayed out of the way and admired those who did not seem to flinch at the frantic nature of travel.

  At night he walked through the snowcovered park and touched the tips of icicles hanging from tree limbs. Snowmen stood at random and some had eyes and noses and arms and had been created by careful hands while others stood as lumpy suggestions. Footprints of children crisscrossed and birds stuck their beaks into the frozen ground. As he left the park he walked along the water where the wind howled but he faced it and felt a strange solace in its bite.

  He drank coffee at a diner down the street from his hotel. He read the newspapers and the word Prohibition littered the headlines and filled the articles and editorials. Only weeks before the crackdown on alcohol became official and despite the outcry and the predicted consequences of such legislation the politicians and lawmakers stood firm and ignored the possibility of extraordinary change that all others seemed to see so clearly. In the diner on Christmas Eve he sat with only the cook and a trio of hardluck regulars. He sat in a booth and they sat at the counter and he listened to them declare that this country is about to be something else and not in a good way. Any fool can see that. As if it hasn’t changed enough already. Who the hell thinks it’s a good idea to tell a whole country who just got done fighting their ass off in another land that you can’t sit down and have a damn drink? Politicians, that’s who. Don’t think they ain’t about to get rich. Along with a whole bunch of other people who got no business being that way.

  Each day he walked the downtown Chicago streets and walked along the water and then he sat in his room and watched it snow. On Christmas Day the city fell silent and all was closed and he took his walk without the trouble of stepping around or between anyone else. He meandered through the heavy flakes, a solitary figure with only his eyes showing between a low hat and a scarf wrapped above his nose. At the park he snapped a frozen branch from a tree and he moved across the clean blanket and trailed the stick behind him as if making a line that would send him back to where he started in case he was lost. Later in the evening the diner lights shined and Nick ate a Christmas dinner of meatloaf and potatoes as he read yesterday’s newspaper and listened to the cook sing Silent Night in an unexpected sweet tenor.

  The da
y after Christmas he folded his clothes into his bag. He walked to Union Station and bought a ticket for home. He stood at the train car and watched others board and he stood next to the porter as he gave the final call. When Nick didn’t move the porter called again and then he asked to see Nick’s ticket. Nick showed it to him and the man said it’s now or never and he hopped up the steps and Nick stepped in just as the door closed behind him.

  59

  The fallen leaves covered the ground in bunches and woolly bushes spread their shoots and vines reached out from untamed flowerbeds and stretched across the windows of the cottage. Sprigs of green grass had begun to protrude from beneath the layers of leaves and buds hung on the tips of tree limbs and promised new leaves and blossoms. It was spring and the night air chilled but offered something refreshing to Nick as he strolled across the sideyard and stared out into the waning night sky.

  He had moved into the cottage earlier in the day. It was furnished with humble, dusty furniture and healthy cobwebs gathered in the corners of the ceilings and between chair legs though he had spent the day wiping windowsills and swatting webs with a broom. He only had a trunk to unpack and he situated his clothes in the dresser and closet of the small bedroom and then he had come outside to find a dog sitting on the front porch. A brown, panting thing with a weathered tail and a dry tongue. He took a pot from the pantry and gave the dog fresh water and then later shared a ham sandwich that the landlady had delivered in a welcome basket. The dog then disappeared but Nick left the pot on the porch just in case.

  The cottage was situated in a quiet and upscale community on a strip of island that stretched east from New York City. It was flanked by two mansions and Nick had the feeling on first sight of the cottage that he was moving into the servant quarters. The cab driver had asked him if he was sure this was the right place and Nick said I guess so. When he stepped onto the porch that was missing a board and then walked inside and saw a mouse dash across the floor he had more of a feeling that the cottage had been simply forgotten. The landlady said herself that she would have had it cleaned had she remembered she was in charge of this property but had been surprised when she received the phone call that asked her to come and unlock the place. A young man is moving in.

  Nick tucked his hands into his pockets. He crossed the yard and passed beneath the trees and looked out at the water. Out in front of the cottage lay the Long Island Sound and the water lapped lazily against the shore. He had been anxious during the day for this first night as he wanted to stand at the water. Look at the stars. Admire the lights of the mansions across the bay. He had already done that once and then slept for a few hours. And here he was again. Only an hour of night remained and then the sun would rise.

  When he had finally arrived in Minnesota there was a moment of disbelief. His own disbelief as he stood in the street and through the windows watched his mother move from one room to the next. Watched his father cross behind her. The snow had been shoveled from the walkway leading to the front steps. Smoke swirled from the chimney. The same wreath on the same front door. An American flag hung from the mailbox. It had seemed like a photograph that belonged to someone else and he knocked as a stranger and when his father had opened the door the first thing he did was take a step back. Not recognizing his own son. A moment of disbelief they shared in as his mother came to see who was at the door and the three of them traded uncertain looks until his mother grabbed him with a gasp and pulled him inside.

  He had then spent the last two years of his life in what seemed like purgatory. The first few weeks of his return were filled with the gladhearted embraces of aunts and uncles and old friends, embraces that he returned and believed in yet he was eager for them to be over. He had answered their questions about the war and France with little more than nods or shrugs and they answered most of their own questions with stories they had already read about in magazines or manufactured through bits and pieces of gossip. Nick marveled at how much those at home claimed to have shared in what had happened abroad and he found ways to politely excuse himself from a room when he sensed an interrogation coming on.

  His father had asked him to work for the hardware business, which during Nick’s time away had morphed from retail into wholesale. A real job, his father said. Nick agreed. He only worked half days as the work didn’t take much time or effort. He sat in an office in the back of a downtown building and tallied invoices and updated orders and managed accounts. At noon he would walk out without speaking to anyone and each evening at dinner his father would ask him if he was happy with the job or satisfied to be back in the family business and Nick appeased his mother and father with polite affirmations.

  In the empty hours he had begun to write.

  First of Paris. He wrote long letters to Ella and each letter held the same messages of remorse and love and grief. He wrote in long sentences and the letters were extensive and sometimes rambling and sometimes incoherent but in the words Nick felt the expulsion of loss and he clawed for truth. For the truth about himself and why he was the way he was. He tried to explain to her how he had become a man with such a lack of dreams and ambition and he lamented his inability to grab her and hold on. He fought for the truth and spilled it out onto the page but he soon realized that his truth shifted from one day to the next and then he saw the letters to her as a confession. He felt the unburdening in the slanted cursive, trying to make peace. Admitting freely that he did not know what to do when they had found one another in the park and that except for one clumsy and embarrassing event at New Haven she was his only one. He wrote long letters that he began in the light and finished in the dark and he apologized for making her a creature of his imagination and a visitor to his dreams. He apologized for following the other women along the Paris streets and giving them her characteristics and making her anything but as true as flesh and blood. He thanked her for the sentence that he carried with him. I want to see you when you wake. He asked her where she was and begged her to show herself. He asked her if the baby seemed as real to her as it did to him as he could not help but imagine the child to be out there somewhere. Crying and hungry and looking for a mother and father who had drifted into shadow. He covered page after page and he kept the letters in a pile underneath his bed, trying to remain close to her.

  Then he wrote of Judah and Colette. But he did not write about them with the same emotion or personal sentiment. Instead he treated them as if they were characters he had seen in a play. He described Frenchtown and its dark alleys and crooked streets with a journalistic tone, not in the language of someone who had felt its temptations and been affected by its offerings. He recorded the conversations he had with Judah in the backroom of the saloon and on the sheets of notebook paper the conversations went on for longer and made extreme proclamations and sometimes were intruded upon by a third voice that had never been in the original conversation. He saw a friend in Judah and he recounted meeting the man and helping the man but he created Judah in the way that a nurse might create a patient. He wrote of the love and hate between Judah and Colette and he burned down not only her brothel but several more and he raised the Frenchtown paranoia and destruction to such a level of calamity that the city seemed to be engulfed in a constant cloud of firesmoke. He wrote of Colette returning to the apartment and he created the look in Judah’s eyes when he opened them and saw her there and he wrote of their happy ending one day and their unhappy ending the next. He wrote of doing what Judah had asked him to do and he wrote of Colette doing it instead. The smells of the streets and the calls from the open windows of the brothels created the stage setting and he casually misremembered following the girl into the alley and being beaten and robbed and he casually misremembered being drunk and passing out along the sidewalk. He casually left out the burned child and the devastated father. He wrote of Judah both as a friend and as a favorite and pitiable character.

  He did not write about the war. He did not write about his dreams about the war. He did not write about the panic o
f waking in the middle of the night in the middle of a scream. He brought home two empty boxes from the office and on one of the box lids he wrote Paris and on the other he wrote Judah. He slid the stacks of pages out from underneath his bed and put them in the correct box and tried to compartmentalize his memories and emotions.

  The letters to Paris and the descriptions of Frenchtown gave him something to look forward to each day, away from the desk in the office and away from the smiles from familiar faces along the sidewalk and away from the resignation of returning to the bedroom of his boyhood. He discovered that as he wrote his shaking hand remained calm pushed by language and memory and eventually the hand stopped altogether. Even when he woke with a jerk from gunfire or the rush of men his hand remained still. So he had kept writing.

  He pulled his hand from his pocket now. Flexed the fingers. A boat horn sounded from across the Sound and he looked out into the gloaming sky. In this moment before daybreak he at last noticed a green light on the other side of the water. Seemingly at the end of a dock. A great and intimidating and well-lit house standing behind in the distance. The light flashed in a steady rhythm and Nick counted the time. On for two seconds. Off for two seconds. On for two. Off for two.

  He had read the newspaper that arrived each morning at the hardware store and he had realized the East was running over with money and that was his way out. He had told his father he wanted to go and work in the stock market and his father assured him he knew nothing about it. That is why I want to go and learn, Nick explained. And I can’t do it here. I can’t do anything here. That is not true, his father replied. In response Nick continued to show no interest in the hardware business or the Midwestern life that held his parents so comfortably. He began to go into the office an hour before anyone else arrived so he could leave earlier. He skipped dinner at home to go for long walks, long walks where he talked and debated with himself in an effort to rekindle an intellect. He ignored weekend invitations to dinner parties and he rejected any suggestion of meeting the daughter of so-and-so and when his father explained to him that his behavior was not very becoming of his family’s position, Nick had only taken out a handkerchief and blown his nose.