White Nights in Split Town City

by Annie DeWitt

  praise for

  White Nights In Split Town City

  “Annie DeWitt takes us to the strange and stirring depths of language and shows us, with equal parts pain and beauty, how we really feel. A bold, word-drunk novel by a wonderful new writer.” —Ben Marcus

  “Annie DeWitt’s fiction, with its lush precision, its daring leaps, its sly wit and rhythmic beauty, breaks hearts and takes names and names a vivid world anew.”

  —Sam Lipsyte

  “White Nights in Split Town City is a ferocious tumble of a book, told from the wild edge of the 90s. Follow the sharp wonder of Jean’s voice through the electrifying night of this novel and you will emerge breathless, exhilarated, changed.

  Annie DeWitt is a daring and spectacular new talent.” —Laura van den Berg

  “Thirteen year-old Jean is the luminous, clear hearted voice and eyes of Annie DeWitt’s gorgeous debut novel. Though this slim novel takes place in a single summer, on a small dirt road, in a rural town—this couldn’t be a bigger or bolder story. DeWitt renders the known world with originality of language and vision.

  Every page of this book is surprising and wonderfully moving.” —Victoria Redel

  “In White Nights in Split Town City Ann Dewitt writes of a family during a single summer, both mundane and transformative. In scene after lovely and telling scene she mines the subtle emotions between mother and daughter This is a sad and beautiful story. I was engaged and enchanted from the first pages.”

  —Darcey Steinke

  “Annie Dewitt is like Kesey in the Sometimes a Great Notion era mated by Didion in her Play It As It Lays years. That much intensity, that much might and clear minded provoking of the story to careen forth through her hungry hammering of prose and the keen eye of her heart. That middle finger from the arm of the boat on the river, too, is present, and yet there is warmth and remembrance and truth from DeWitt and the eras that are all her own, the 90’s we grew of age in. This book will become a classic for this era.”

  —Luke Goebel

  “A very cool blue-collar country novel filled with such strong sentences that I could feel the dirt-road dust and summer sun on my skin.” —Shane Jones

  Tyrant Books

  426 West 46th Street Apt. D

  NYC 10036

  www.NYTyrant.com

  Copyright © Annie DeWitt 2016

  ISBN 13: 978-0-9913608-4-0

  First Edition

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and organizations portrayed herein are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations in critical reviews and articles.

  Front cover photo Copyright Summer Kellogg / Offset.com

  Cover design & author photo by Jerome Jakubiec resilientandoverwhelmed.com

  Interior design by Adam Robinson

  WHITE NIGHTS IN

  SPLIT TOWN CITY

  Annie DeWitt

  Tyrant Books

  I wonder, now, only when it will happen,

  when the young mother will hear the

  noise like somebody’s pressure cooker

  down the block, going off. She’ll go out into the yard

  holding her small daughter in her arms,

  and there, above the end of the street, in the

  air above the line of trees,

  she will see it rising, lifting up

  over our horizon, the upper rim of the

  gold ball, large as a giant

  planet starting to lift up over ours.

  She will be standing there in the yard holding her daughter,

  looking at it rise and glow and blossom and rise,

  and the child will open her arms to it,

  it will look so beautiful.

  —“When” by Sharon Olds

  For Diane Williams and Alan Ziegler,

  Thank you for opening the doors to the house

  and showing me inside.

  With love to Gian,

  for taking the gamble.

  To my sister, who witnessed it all with me.

  1.

  The car appeared to descend from the sky like the old gray pigeons that skirted the power lines tracing the upheaval of the mountain. Fender, the youngest of the abandoned Steelhead brothers, was sprawled out horizontal over-top of the Jeep, a dare the older boys had put him up to. Maybe he was shackled at the ankles. Maybe he was relying on his own grip. It looked as though his brothers had strapped him there, turned the nose of the 4x4 down the trail, and put the vehicle in neutral. The Jeep had gained enough speed by the time it reached the turnoff onto our little road that its body absorbed any imperfections in the macadam and it surfed over the frost heaves and skids of gravel, catching a bit of warm summer air. Mother stood beside me. We were on our way out to the garden. We stared at the back of Fender’s head as it hurtled toward us. The wind took his shirt and its colors billowed up around his face.

  Liden, the eldest Steelhead brother, was at the wheel. One of his arms rested across the horn. The other straddled the shoulders of a young girl in a neon tank. The rest of the boys were in the back tending the beer. A long-haired kid tossed cans of Miller High Life out the rear, exploding them over the road. The gold of a can flared in the sunlight before the aluminum burst from the pressure.

  This was the summer of 1990. The Berlin Wall fell. The Hubble Space Telescope launched. Mandela was released from prison. Microsoft released a disk, which Father brought home from work, called Windows. Mikhail Gorbachev—The Big Red Splot, my sister Birdie called him—was elected. In school we gathered our pennies to save the whales from Exxon Valdez. Ryan White died of AIDS—“What’s AIDS?” Birdie said—“It’s a disease of the blood which came from a flight attendant,” Mother said over breakfast as Birdie and I discussed the image of the missing girl up the street that plagued the side of our milk cartons. McDonald’s had a sign in their window: Moscow! Shenzhen! Father read to us from The Whole Earth Catalog. Mother framed a photo called “The Pale Blue Dot,” which hung over the television. On weekends we watched pirated VHS copies of The Big Chill. When Mother turned up the radio real loud and sang “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” I wondered what the grapevine was and what it was they had heard through it. The night Billy Crystal announced Dances With Wolves beat out Ghost for Best Picture, Father said the whole world had gone soft. “That’s your Dad’s girlfriend,” Mom said to Birdie and I, pointing at Demi Moore on the screen. “I love that you get cold when it’s 71 degrees out,” Dad said, dramatically, taking Mother in his arms and reenacting his favorite scene from When Harry Met Sally. “I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

  “Look around you,” Mother said, motioning to Birdie and I and the house in the background. “It already started.”

  At night, Birdie and I ate Hungry Man dinners from TV trays in the Lazy Boy and watched reruns of I Love Lucy and Dick Van Dyke. The future, as I saw it, was predicted by the likes of Jane Jetson and Hulk Hogan. In twenty years we would all be wearing beehives and driving hovercrafts while R2-D2 floated around the kitchen cooking us the morning’s oats. Operation Desert Storm blasted in the background while stay-at-home mothers drove their Honda Accords around newly minted culde- sacs on the other side of town. Farmers sold off old Indian burial grounds while listening to Billy
Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation.” Every night the man on the news said, “It’s ten o’clock, do you know where your children are?” and Father would laugh, “No. Do you?” For me, the image of Fender Steelhead sprawled out kitelike tethered to the rack of the Jeep was the beginning of some deeper treason. I had never wanted to rescue something in such earnest. I had the feeling this was the moment in life I’d heard Uncle talk about, the one in which fate comes to a halt in the middle of the road in front of you. In such a moment you were outside of your body watching yourself step over a thin white line that represented a wide unforgiving chasm, but in reality looked so small an inkling you almost mistook it for some fissure the wind had drawn in the sand.

  I’d buried a hamster once in a box in the yard. It had cracked its leg on the little wheel in its cage and was only half-dead when I found it, hanging mid-flight on its circuit. Uncle put it out on the porch in a small yellow shoebox to finish dying. Every few hours, he went out and shook the box. It took the whole afternoon before there was no more shake in the body. We buried the box off the end of the cement stoop that lined the front of the house. I didn’t know how long it took for an animal to suffocate. Even as we covered the box with dirt, I wasn’t so sure it wasn’t still gasping a little at its own air.

  “It’s not like you can just snap the neck,” Uncle had said.

  There wasn’t a soul alive or dead that cared whether Fender Steelhead kept his heels on the ground or went flying. For Fender, to fit was the whole of it. He needed to find someway into his brothers’ breed. If it wasn’t the wrestling or the smut or the holes in the wall, it was the flying. The getting pissed and high. The letting go. From the moment I saw him barreling toward me, I knew it would be hard. It would be bitter. There would be that New England fence between us, our feet planted firmly on opposite sides.

  The problem was, Fender had already usurped my own cutting loose.

  “It’s a shame too,” Mother said of the boys as the Jeep turned the corner.

  I stared at the back of Fender’s shirt as the Wrangler sped out of sight.

  “You don’t look at people like that,” Mother laughed, cuffing me gently on the back of the head. It was a phrase she often repeated, though I didn’t yet know its importance.

  “You don’t look at people like that,” Mother said later that summer.

  I recognized the phrase but by then I had lost the memory of its earlier context and felt only the tender surge of familiarity that Mother’s advices sometimes lent.

  “Like what?” I said.

  “The way you were looking at him. It’s not done at your age. It’s unsightly.”

  We were sitting at the table overlooking the window in Otto Houser’s kitchen. Otto had invited Mother, Birdie, and I over for lunch. Father was at work. Granny Olga was down for her nap. Otto wanted to extend his hand back toward Mother’s trust.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Mother had said to Birdie and I on our way over to Otto’s. “I’m not saying it’s their fault. They’re old is all. All they have is their germs.”

  “It doesn’t spread like that,” I said.

  “What doesn’t spread like what,” Mother said.

  “What she has,” I said.

  “What who has,” Mother repeated.

  “His Helene,” I said. “Otto says she been sick so long whatever she’s down with is too worn out to jump anywhere else.”

  Birdie leapt a little then in the road. She liked to try out the tricks they were teaching all the gymnasts at the gym. Small and round and tow-headed, Mother said Birdie was the type of child who would show up well on television. The nickname had stuck despite Father’s better efforts. He thought perhaps Birdie would be blind to her own charm and good looks. He’d wanted to see his youngest fashioned with a name with history behind it. “Don’t turn her into a bore,” Mother had said. “She’s got such a thrust for life.”

  “It’s my new tumble,” Birdie said that morning, cartwheeling in the road.

  “Very good, darling,” Mother said. “That was very good.”

  Even still, Mother insisted we wash Otto Houser’s clean silver before we set the table. She’d seen that boy Ryan White on the television. There was a cancer afoot in Otto’s house and she wasn’t going to catch it, worn out or not. Otto was at the other end of the counter whipping the mayo and mashing the tuna. Mother took the spoons out of the drawer right in front of the old man’s face and washed them again. She heard the whisk of his fork stop against the side of the bowl.

  “You must have been quite lucky once,” Mother said.

  “How do you figure?” Otto said, glancing at Mother from the corner of his eye as he went to cut another can of fish on the opener under the cabinet.

  “Your wife kept quite a kitchen,” Mother said nodding toward the living room where His Helene was asleep on the couch. “Everything at arms length. You can tell it’s just how Helene left it.”

  We started laughing then. Me and the old man. Me and Otto Houser. Me and the Otto that was still hanging on that banister somewhere waiting for his wife and his tap lesson.

  “You two have been spending some time together in my absence,” Mother said. “You and my daughter have adopted the same laugh.”

  This made Otto howl even harder. Wilson was in on it then. He wanted to prove that he spoke his old man’s language. Wilson was full-grown with graying hair that was balding in the back. People said he was slow. Mother said he’d been touched by something. When he spoke, flecks of spittle formed around his mouth so that, if you were made to stand too close to him, you’d feel a fine mist. He lived in the RV out back. The trailer was parked on the lawn close to the porch. When Otto propped open the door, he could sit on his crumbling veranda and keep watch over his aging son.

  That summer Wilson had started gumming a toothpick. Whenever you talked to him, he often repeated whatever you’d said, like he’d gotten stuck on a word and couldn’t get past it. In his confusion, the toothpick dropped out of the corner of his mouth and into the dirt. Without pause, Wilson picked it up off the ground and righted it back between his lips.

  “Beg your pardon,” Otto Houser said to Mother when he’d come down a little. “It’s just been so damn sad around here. You can’t imagine.”

  “I can imagine a lot of things,” Mother said.

  She turned then to Wilson.

  “Your laugh is infectious,” she said. She looked at him, taking his chin in her hand and examining both sides of his face.

  “Infectious,” Wilson said.

  “It means you give people something,” Mother said. “You give them something happy.” She clasped Wilson’s cheeks momentarily and kissed him on the lips. The kiss appeared almost an accident, a way for Mother to direct her focus toward something other than Otto’s laughter.

  Wilson’s body shot up from his chair from the excitement.

  “Infectious,” he chanted under his breath, going over the word with his mouth until he could form it properly. After a while the chanting got louder until he was yelling. There was something garish about watching a big man flail about indoors. Despite his hunch, Wilson cut a good six-foot and a half. His head almost touched the ceiling fan. The house was old. The ceilings were low.

  Wilson kept on until no one was laughing. Otto looked like he’d had the wind taken out of him. The lines in his face deepened. He curled his lips and ran them over the length of his teeth. Otto took great care of himself and his things to be sure they never disappointed him. There was something about poverty of any kind, emotional or otherwise, which he found unsettling.

  “I’m sorry,” Mother said after a minute. “I didn’t mean to start anything.”

  “No harm done,” Otto said. “Sometimes my son stumbles on something new and can’t get past it.”

  “Well,” Mother said. “That’s a
blessing isn’t it. Most days I would kill to find something new to amuse me. One could live for that kind of excitement.”

  “That depends,” Otto said. “On how much newness you can stand witnessing in a man his age.”

  “I think he’s charmed,” Mother said. “I find him refreshing.”

  No one spoke for a minute. I had never known anyone to put Otto so much into his place. Even Wilson sensed the tension and settled back down in his chair.

  “Go on, Son,” Otto said to him. “Like the lady says, dance wherever you damn well please. Burn the house down.”

  There wasn’t much room at Otto’s kitchen table. We all crowded in. Wilson took up nearly two chairs, all his weight settled under the belt. Otto took Birdie on his knee to compensate. Birdie picked at his plate. She didn’t much care for crust or fish. The tuna was thick and moist. There was so much to say between the whole of us, nobody could get any of it out.

  Otto stared out the bay window that looked out over the pasture. After a while, he started talking about a dream he’d had several days previous about an indigenous community that had resurrected a series of tenement houses on stilts to allow the water to pass underneath. The people carried their belongings around on their backs during the day in case their houses were missing when they returned home from fishing. The houses, called kelongs, were built without nails, depending on rattan to bind the tree trunks and boards. Otto had read about it once in a back issue of National Geographic his wife had left behind years ago on his desk in the barn.

  “Kelongs,” Otto Hauser said that afternoon, squaring his fingers in front of his mouth and blowing underneath them like a river rushing forward. The movement of his breath tousled my bangs across the table.