by Dan Chaon
“Shut up!” Judy says sharply, and claps her hands, a gesture she remembers from childhood, from her mother, when they lived on a farm outside of town and sometimes encountered strange stray dogs. “Git!” she says, and claps her hands again. “Go on now!” And Pluto, impressed, stops barking and watches her warily. The neighbors, the Woodwards, are a childless and cordially unfriendly couple of whom she knows little. They are perhaps in their thirties. The woman, Bonnie, a secretary at the courthouse; the husband, Sherman, a worker at the feedlot outside of town. He is a hunter, and nearly every fall will bring home a deer that he skins and dismembers in the backyard. Beyond this, she knows little about them, and she is glad that they show no interest in her. She is an older divorced lady: Mrs. Keene, they call her respectfully. She suspects that they have probably heard some gossip about Loomis and his parents, some version of that unpleasant story, but they have said nothing, and she appreciates that.
——
She is beginning to get flustered now—somewhere between alarmed and annoyed. Where is Loomis? She is now of the mind that when she finds him she will give him a spanking, though she has never struck the child before. She unlatches the backyard gate—did he climb over it?—and walks into the driveway. The folding garage door is shut, but she peers in through the windows anyway, and then she goes into the garage and looks in the car. She remembers, in a suddenly vivid way, how her daughter Carla used to sit in the driver’s seat when she was a child, holding the steering wheel in her small fists and pretending to drive. But Loomis is not in the car. She calls his name, very loudly and angrily now. “Loomis Timmens!” she calls. “If you don’t answer me this minute, you’re going to get a spanking!” And she strides down the drive toward the sidewalk, her thongs making sharp clacking sounds as she walks. Otherwise, the street is enormously silent.
She will spank him, she thinks. She will have to now. He has disobeyed, he has frightened her, and a lesson will have to come out of it. She thinks forward to this: dragging Loomis angrily down the street by his arm, turning him facedown on her lap in the kitchen and bringing the flat of her hand down on his bottom. Ten hard slaps, no more, no less. Sending him to his room without lunch. He may or may not cry—he seldom does, but she hopes that he will this time. Tears will mean that she has been effective, that she has impressed herself upon him and that he has repented. No tears will mean, what? Something to worry about.
That’s the fear, she thinks, looking quickly to the right and left. That’s the fear. He has been such a good boy, and the idea that this might change makes her heart sink. Loomis’s mother, Carla, had been a good child, too, and look how she turned out.
Sometimes Judy tries to pinpoint the exact moment when things had gone wrong with Carla. Maybe it had been a simple moment, like this one with Loomis—willfully running off, without any concern for the consequences, without any concern for the feelings of others. She couldn’t remember anything so specific, but she knew that Carla had started out like Loomis: quiet, bright, easily pleased. But then, outside of Judy’s control, she had begun to transform. By the time she passed into her teenage years, she had become secretive, vindictive, addictive, in and out of alcohol/drug rehabilitation facilities since she was fourteen.
She pauses on the sidewalk. She has begun to perspire, and she looks up and down her street, Foxglove Road, the small one-story houses with their striped awnings and boxes of petunias and neat, tiny front yards. “Loomis! Loomis!” she calls, and her voice sounds like a parched hen crying for water.
——
Loomis has been in her care for almost a year now—the only stable year of his life, she thinks. Before that had been a series of trashy catastrophes, starting with his parents’ marriage. Judy’s daughter—Loomis’s mother—Carla, had never been a mature or responsible person. Even at age twenty-eight, Carla was not ready to be married, Judy felt, but her choice of husband was even more ridiculous than Judy could have imagined. The husband’s name was Troy Timmens, and he was some six years Carla’s junior, twenty-two years old when they married but still an adolescent in Judy’s estimation. Troy seemed to have no future plans beyond working as a bartender and turning his late father’s home into a partying den on the weekends. When Carla found herself pregnant a year or so later, Judy had tried to tactfully suggest that Carla consider other options, such as abortion. But this had only led to another of their typical arguments—and another period of icy coldness between them.
But Judy was right, of course. Carla was no more prepared for motherhood than she would have been to pilot a jet plane, and Judy found herself called upon to baby-sit for the infant regularly while the nominal parents partied and fought. The marriage had dissolved under the pressures of young parenthood, coupled with a decadent lifestyle. Things grew worse and worse, until at last, when Loomis was three, Carla left town with a man she was having an affair with, taking Loomis with her and this man to Las Vegas, where she proceeded to become involved in drugs again. Troy retrieved Loomis and brought him back home to St. Bonaventure, and then was shortly thereafter himself arrested for possession of marijuana with intent to sell. At which time Loomis came into Judy’s custody.
Thinking of these details, she is always surprised at how grotesque and depraved they seem. They are the kinds of things that happen to poor people—to trailer trash, to Indians on the reservations or black people in their ghettos—people whose environments put them at a disadvantage. Carla was raised in a solidly middle-class home. Judy was divorced, it was true, but she was college-educated, an elementary school teacher. Judy’s life was supposed to be different. She had been the first person in her family to seek higher education; the first woman who didn’t regularly spend her autumn canning food; the first, as far as she knew, who had seen an opera; the first who read literature. She had read Virginia Woolf’s novels! And at the same time, she hadn’t ignored her family in their times of trouble. She had loaned her brother thousands of dollars. She had spent much of her savings to pay for a nursing home for her mother, who had died with extreme slowness. She had gone into debt to commit her daughter to a decent rehabilitation facility.
Why should it be this way? Why should she have worked so hard to end up with so little, to end up fat and sixty-three, a divorced woman in a flowered shirt and tight shorts and flip-flops, a woman with a heart that palpitated irregularly at night and who was frightened by visions of raccoons? “Loomis!” she cried, and her voice broke, there was the edge of tears in it. There were times when she thought that this child, Loomis, her grandson, would make her life different, when she thought he was the child she should have been given all along, that he was a kind of reward for her hardship.
Why didn’t he answer?
She hadn’t yet let herself think of the bad things. The grown-up hand and the sack, the things she’d read about. The people who prey on children. The idea of disappearance.
But the more she thought about it, the more she remembered the last time she’d seen Loomis. She’d looked out the window, and he had been standing there by the lilac bush, his hands clasped behind his back, talking to himself, as he always did.
Talking to himself? She felt herself shrinking, even as she paced through the neighborhood, even as she hopefully expected to see him rounding a corner, running out of a bush in a yard, playing together with some group of neighbor children. In the alley, crouched behind a garbage can. In the house, somehow, sitting there and playing Nintendo and wondering where she was.
No, she thought suddenly. And then she could picture it, as if it were a memory. Loomis wasn’t talking to himself.
5
1993
After Jonah’s mother died, he took the old car and drove to Chicago, the city of his birth. It seemed as good a place as any in which to become a different person. He was twenty-two years old, and his intention was that he would never think of his past again. He would forget his mother, his grandfather, the shacklike yellow house; he’d forget the long humiliating desert of hi
gh school and afterward, a job washing dishes in the cafeteria of an old folks’ home, a period of months and months and months when he felt certain that he’d finally reached the very bottom of his life.
All that would be erased, he thought. He remembered the way his grandfather had described the death of Jonah’s grandmother, years and years before Jonah was born. “Excaping this world,” Jonah’s grandfather had said with wistful admiration, as if the grandmother’s death had involved something masterful and Houdini-like instead of a mere car accident. It was an idea that Jonah felt friendly toward. “Excaping,” he murmured under his breath as he crossed the Missouri River into Iowa. And then he corrected himself. “Escaping,” he said. “Escaping.”
He’d made a list of ways that he could improve himself, just to start out with. Grammar, posture. Training himself to say “library” instead of “lieberry,” “picture” instead of “pitcher.” Straightening his cowardly stoop and squaring his shoulders when he walked. Looking people in the eye when they spoke to him. Smiling. Easy stuff. As he drove along I-80, as glowing green-and-white signs caught his headlights and shimmered with the names of exit numbers and towns, he listened to a tape he had borrowed permanently from the Little Bow Public Library. Fifteen Steps on the Ladder of Success, it was called, and as he edged the speedometer up toward eighty, a man with a resonant, vowel-thick voice read aloud. Happiness and Unhappiness were choices that we made, the man said. They were states of mind. “ ‘Problems’ have no life of their own,” the man explained. “ ‘Problems’ are mirages that seem to exist from a low state of mind, and they gain importance only because we choose to give it to them.” Jonah listened, running his tongue over his dry lips, the glare of westbound headlights passing over his car, over his face, sliding up the body of the old Mustang like the palm of a hand, his mother’s ashes in an urn in the passenger seat beside him. The stuff the man was reading sounded a bit like bullshit to him, but he hoped it wasn’t.
——
Of course there were things he couldn’t change about himself, things he couldn’t slip loose of. There were, for example, the scars that had been left on him by the dog Elizabeth all those years ago, and every time he walked into a gas station or a wayside cafe, he was aware of the way people lifted their heads, turning their eyes sidelong to observe him, tracing over his skin. He tried to nod firmly at particularly frank gapers—an old farmer in coveralls, sipping his watery coffee, a tattooed motorcycle man, a little boy. He dipped his head, let his bangs fall into his eyes as he walked down the rows of vinyl booths, following a waitress he had flustered by his attempt to smile and make eye contact. There was a flutter among the people, as among grazing animals who sense a predator, and they glance away quickly when he nodded at them. Jesus Christ, they thought. What happened to him?
The scar they noticed first ran along his cheek from the edge of his eye to his lip. A keloid: a smooth, raised line of healed skin which they might associate with a cesarean section or appendectomy but not with a face. Not in America, not in the twentieth century. It made them think of a pirate, a thug from a pulp novel, a hideous blind beggar in a third-world country, and though there had been several revisions over the years, attempts at plastic surgery, the scar remained Jonah’s most prominent feature. He had grown used to certain looks and their variations: the small-mouthed, wide-eyed gaze of frightened, judgmental middle-aged women who associated him with crime; the assessing once-over of macho worker guys who wondered if he’d had harder fights than they; the liberal-benevolent assumptions that he’d had a tragic life, and the subsequent game of pretend, the shifty act of direct eye contact, the ones who tried to make believe they hadn’t noticed. But no matter where they looked they couldn’t help but see damage: the nick of missing ear, the thin lines that ran along the backs of his hands, and others that pull down the side of his neck and past the collar of his shirt.
He had never known what to say to those looks. Sometimes he said cheerfully “Car accident,” or some other lie. Sometimes he just smiled. Take a good look.
He hadn’t decided what he would say to the wife of the building superintendent when she showed him the apartment. Sometimes it was better to gauge people face-to-face, to study their expressions, get a fix on them. But he knew he’d have to tell her something. He had called her beforehand and was prepared, he thought, for the kind of look she would give him. Even over the telephone there was an abrupt European-accented suspicion in her voice that made him act guilty. “Hello!” she said when she answered the phone, snapping through the receiver in a sharp, alarmed voice, as if addressing a shadowy figure who was slinking out of an alleyway toward her.
Jonah hesitated. He was calling from a pay phone, holding the folded and pen-marked newspaper in his hands while keeping an eye on his illegally parked car. Her voice unnerved him, and he tried to affect a very mild, harmless tone. “Yes,” he said, and cleared his throat. Don’t mumble was one of the items on his list. “I’m calling about the advertisement that was advertised in the Chicago Reader. There was an advertisement for furnished . . . eff-efficacies?” He winced. The newspaper actually said “EFFCY’S,” which he knew was an abbreviation but he couldn’t imagine for what.
“Efficiency?” the woman said in a booming foreign voice.
“Yes,” Jonah said quickly. “Efficiency.” He tried to imagine why people would use such a word to refer to an apartment, but all he could picture was the manager’s office in the old folks’ home where he had worked back in Little Bow. He pictured Mrs. Blachley, with her look of perpetual and almost painful delight, with her neatly arranged desk, the aligned display of in/out box, stapler, memo pad, pink paper clips, her hands folded restfully over each other. Efficiency. “Of course we’re sorry to see you leaving us, Jonah,” Mrs. Blachley had said, and beamed brightly, her eyes glassing with the effort of looking directly at him and pretending she didn’t notice his scars.
——
The superintendent’s wife, on the other hand, made no such attempt. She was already frowning when she opened the door, a small, thin, bedraggled woman with a mole like the head of an emerging earthworm at the corner of her eyelid and a pelt of gray-black hair on her head. Her jowls and lips were turned down in an exaggerated arc, which nevertheless deepened when she saw him standing there. She stared at him hard, her lower lip protruding and her nostrils widening as if she were furious, as if he were an enemy she were preparing to defend herself against. “Yes?” she exclaimed.
“How do you do?” he said. Despite his determination to the contrary, he found himself starting to adopt that slouching posture he hated so much, hunching, knotting his arms across his chest and tucking his fingers into his armpits. In high school, teachers would always ask him if he was cold, and other students used to imitate him, contorting themselves as if they were in the early stages of multiple sclerosis. “Yes,” he said. “ I called about the eff-eff-” and then he couldn’t get the word out. “Apartments?”
“Efficiencies?” she said, and seemed to glare at the scar on his face. “Furnished efficiencies?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jonah said. He put his arms carefully to his sides, and tried to decide whether he was standing up straight. “I called you this morning,” he said, and smiled at her, as he had told himself he would.
The woman paused grimly. Her name, he would later learn, was Mrs. Marina Orlova, and she had grown up in Siberia. Later, she would tell him that she loathed the American custom of constantly smiling: “They are like chimpanzees,” she said, in her bitterly exclamatory voice. She grimaced, baring her teeth grotesquely. “Eee!” she said. “I smile at you! Eee! It is repulsive.”
But now she only looked at his smile with a sigh of disapproval, and he felt terribly self-conscious. “You wait,” she said, finally. “I will get keys.”
——
The efficiency surprised him. It reminded Jonah a little of a motel room, and he loved it immediately. There was a brown sofa that folded out into a bed, a small two-c
hair table with a standing lamp beside it, a seashore painting on the wall. In an alcove was a kitchenette with narrow counter space: a sink, a midget refrigerator, a microwave, a half-sized stove, a coffeemaker, some cabinets; and beyond that was a little bathroom, a tiny space not much bigger than a closet into which a toilet, sink, and bathtub had all been compressed. He was taken with the compactness of everything. Efficiency, he thought, and turned toward Mrs. Orlova, who stood in the doorway with her arms folded over her breasts.
“This looks great,” he said. “Just . . . fantastic.” He smiled at her again and looked her in the eye, as Fifteen Steps on the Ladder of Success had suggested. “I love it,” he said. And he really did. It was the opposite of the house he’d grown up in, with its smoke-stained stacks of clutter, its thick cobwebs and faucets that ran yellowish, sulphuric water. He cleared his throat. “So, well then,” he said. “Can I just—? How would I go about . . . reserving one?”
Mrs. Orlova raised her eyebrows, a single dark line that met over the bridge of her nose. “You have references?”
“References?”
“Where you live before?” She tilted her head and shrugged, tossing her hand. “You live somewhere, you have references.”
“Oh.” With effort, he prevented himself from assuming the submissive posture again. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I’m from South Dakota. I’m just moving here.”
“South Dakota?” she said, and moved the words in her mouth as if they were a new language. She frowned hard again, deeply and suspiciously, and he shifted from foot to foot. “It’s . . . ah . . . west?”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s over—” and he pointed vaguely, though he didn’t know the direction. In the city his mental compass didn’t seem to work anymore, and he had no idea which way he was pointing. “Four—” he said, “five hundred miles or so?”
“Hm,” she said. She seemed to consider this as if she didn’t quite believe it. He watched as her eyes traveled again along the scar on his face, tracing an interstate on a map.