White Nights in Split Town City

by Annie DeWitt

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Father said from his chair.

  11.

  When it came to private property, the Steelhead brothers taught me everything I know. They lived alone in a big brown house on the top of the mountain. According to local legend, they were fatherless. What they saw of their mother was what time she had between men. It was said they killed dogs in their basement. Rumor had it, they even tried killing a pony once. Tethered it to a stake in back of their house and watched as the pony walked itself in circles until it dug a track so deep it walked into the ground.

  What I knew of the Steelheads’ story I’d gleaned from hearsay and what I’d observed from our front door. Each Sunday, I’d seen Mrs. Steelhead’s Impala clamor its way over the gravel and up the drive. Her hair she kept wrapped in a towel piled on the crown of her head. She came with some regularity and always at this hour, the hour of morning when the night was just burning off and the sun was rising over the road. Her Impala moved at such a clip that, if I nodded off, I feared I might miss the site of her gunning it up the hill.

  One morning before Mother left us while waiting for Mrs. Steelhead, I had nodded off in my sleeping bag in the front hall. Mother had stumbled upon me on her way downstairs for breakfast.

  “Who you waitin’ on, Jean?” she’d said, taking my feet off the tile and rubbing them between the palms of her hands.

  “Mrs. Steelhead,” I’d said.

  “Mother of three boys and the woman rolls home Sundays at six in the morning,” Mother’d said. “I bet that hussy’s still wet.”

  I remembered this now, as I made my way toward their house. The Steelheads’ dwelling sat in a small clearing in a densely wooded knoll at the top of the mountain. More pothole and frost heave than surface, the road took a good bit of leg just to manage the weave. Macadam flew up under my bike wheels, nicking the backs of my legs. I avoided the big ruts for fear of getting a flat.

  The house itself wasn’t the ramshackle structure I’d imagined. It looked like the first in a long series of houses that populated the new breed of pre-suburban developments: the fantasy of an old turn of the century carriage house standing on the foundation of its character and convictions, but recreated with a skeleton of new plywood and plaster. In premise, the layout embraced something of the great wide open. There was air in the rooms. Even a good deal of light. Somebody’d had money once. Somebody’d once proposed trying her hand at familial structure. Someone’d once wanted to care for these brothers.

  They had a Lazy Boy, an old braided rug of the sort I’d seen in Grandmother’s house where the dog laid in the kitchen, and a big screen TV. Beyond that, the house lacked furniture and decoration. The front rooms were empty save for a few cardboard boxes and a large inflatable palm. The tree functioned as a punching bag. Here was WWF, monster trucks, and a sanatorium of white walls. Someone had punched a hole in the bathroom door.

  The elder Steelhead boys had nothing of Fender’s wit or charm. Tall and dark-haired, there was a shiftiness to them I distrusted, a raw meanness that comes from experiencing some rupture in human dignity. History was afoot in that house. That stale acrid thing which eats children from the inside leaving the outside to blow around without consequence or intention like a dried out husk. Some days the brothers were harmless, their menace reduced to ghostly indifference. Others, they were entirely flammable. To add insult to injury, Fender’s looks eclipsed theirs. This made them a shade meaner.

  Fender was the first person to call me on the phone. K was watching us that day. It wasn’t her habit to answer the phone when it rang. I kept a list of calls on the sticky notes. When it rang, I had to run for it.

  “It’s me,” Fender said as I was about to hang up.

  We met at his house. I told K I was going to the farm stand for dinner. I arrived at the Steelheads’ looking for evidence. Dogs in cages. A pile of horseshoes. The remains of the pony on the chain who’d walked himself into the ground. What I saw were the relics of an old blue and white motorboat decomposing in the glen to the side of the drive. The only evidence that lived up to legend was what looked like an animal run, a small stake in the ground with a metal chain. As I walked toward the porch, an old collie nosed at my leg.

  Fender met me at the door. “Do you want a soda or something?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  The kitchen was the gut of their loneliness. Half-eaten bags of Utz chips and beef jerky occupied the majority of counter space. Boxes of Muscle Milk and packages of Creatine were stacked in the corner. Near the basement door there was a large black garbage bag. Several flies buzzed around its mouth. The refrigerator was empty except the bottom two rungs, which were lined with cans of generic soda. I went for the cream. When I opened it, the cap popped, unleashing a current of fizz. Instinctively I put my mouth over it and guzzled. The eldest boy, Liden, was yelling at the wrestling match on the television. He barely blinked as Fender and I crossed the room toward the stairs.

  Fender’s room housed two single beds fashioned from cheaply varnished pine. The beds were shorter than they should have been for a boy his age. We sat at the base of the one in which he slept while Fender showed me his collection of cards. Father never had much interest in scores or teams. I wasn’t sure how to react to such men’s things. As Fender listed off names of the players, all I could think about was the thickness of his sheets. Here was the boy who smoked cigarettes on the playground still sleeping between spaceships and stars.

  “They’re a bitch to crack,” Fender was saying when I regained focus. He was talking about his collection of geodes. “You never know what’s inside until it’s broken.”

  “I’ve never tried,” I said.

  “Limestone,” he said. “The best spot to go looking is the stone wall. There’s so much you trip over it.” Fender got up from his bed and walked toward the window, pointing toward the stretch of wall that lined Otto’s pasture.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  As we turned to leave, Liden stood in the doorway.

  “Quit it, man,” Fender said.

  “No worries,” Liden said. “I can see you’ve got company.”

  “Leave her alone,” Fender said.

  Liden eyed me for a moment then laughed.

  “How about that new video game?” he said.

  “Maybe later,” Fender said.

  “Just one game and I’ll let you go,” Liden said.

  The hallway to the attic was dark and stuffy, padded with tufts of insulation. As we made our way up the stairs, Liden trailed behind us. I imagined him grabbing me the way I’d seen Father grab Mother on the stairs. There was something thick and oniony on Liden’s breath.

  “You were right,” he said to Fender in the darkness. “She’s nothing but a baby.”

  The attic was lit by a single exposed bulb that hung from the ceiling. In one corner there was a small television. On the floor beside it was a mattress. Piles of videos and magazines were strewn about.

  “Have a seat,” Liden said.

  We took our seats on the mattress and flicked the television on. The thing about porn is that it’s nothing without the windup. Without the story or the stripping, it’s all just a mess of appendages. I’d seen horses rear up on each other similarly in the paddock. Two geldings sparring over a mare. Though I understood the violence of it, the sexuality for me was missing.

  “Let’s see you two go at it,” Liden said. He gripped my knee on the mattress from where I sat between them. With his other hand he tugged on the fray of my cut-offs. “I’ll watch. You don’t look like you’re built for two at once.”

  Fender leapt over my body and pinned Liden on the mattress with his elbow, crushing his nose with one of the controllers. Liden rolled away from me in pain.

  “Go fast,” Fender said, grabbing my arm.

  “You get home safe now,” Liden yelled down the stairs after u
s.

  Outside, Fender and I sprinted through the woods in back of the house. Fender picked his way through the underbrush. By the time we reached the stone wall we were walking. He’d mined this spot before. A small wooden shelf built of two-by-fours was nailed into a tree. It held a flashlight and a toolbox. A red crow bar and a thick handled ax leaned against the trunk. In the space next to the wall there was a patch of earth devoid of grass. This was his splitting spot.

  Our first day was a gutting. It took Fender nearly an hour to split anything off. We were hoping for a clean break down the middle. By the time darkness set in, the wheelbarrow was lined with small boulders.

  “Get in,” Fender said. I sat perched on our pile as he pushed.

  We made our way down the long drive that led to the Bottom Feeder. A breeze rushed over the flat parts of my face. Every now and again Fender let the slope of the hill take the wheelbarrow and I felt as though we were gliding. He chose the grassy part of the hill next to the drive where the ground was soft and even. The sky had on the kind of hue that precedes certain sunsets in the heat of summer when even the air is tired, all shade having burnt off by the end of the day, revealing streamers of violet and blood orange.

  We unloaded the rocks onto the gravel under the spigot in front of the house. K’s car was parked in the drive. In the thin light it looked like a tin matchbook car which I might press with my thumb and roll down the hill into the marsh. As Fender dropped the last stone in the pile, K appeared on the front porch. She peered down at us.

  “Where did you two get lost?” she said.

  Fender looked up at her under the floodlight. His undershirt clung to his chest. Though he was significantly younger than K, you wouldn’t have known it to watch him.

  “She was with me,” he said.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” K said, pulling the edges of her sweatshirt over her chest.

  We saw two beams of headlights on the horizon.

  “You better be getting on home,” K said, nodding at Fender.

  “Take mine,” I said, nodding at my bike where it was laying in the drive.

  Together K and I stood on the porch and watched Fender disappear up the trailhead. Under the stoop of his stature, the frame of the bike looked dwarfed and circus like. He had to lean over the handlebars and stand on the pedals to steer. The white of his T-shirt and the rim of the bike’s fender glinted in those places they caught the light. I followed them until they disappeared in the wood over the top of the mountain.

  12.

  The next day Father went fishing with Ray. That morning the house sprinted into the world. I woke to the sound of Father crashing about the crawlspace in the basement looking for his pole and box of tackle. Night was still in the air and with it that impermanent glimpse of other seasons with their welcome respite from the sun and the heat. Father had put a pot of coffee on in the kitchen. The dim yellow light shone over the stove when I came in.

  “Who knew a man like that had ever seen the right side of six a.m.,” Father said as Ray powered down the engine of his truck in our driveway, relaxing in the cab for a moment to smoke the last of his cigarette. Birdie and I carried bags of ice onto the lawn. Ray tore open the bags with the back of his switchblade. He unloaded several six packs into the row of coolers closest to the tailgate, stirring the ice around with the back of his hand, burying the bottles under the frost.

  “When those brews are gone, Rick, what do you say we fill those coolers with bass?” Ray said.

  “I’d say you’ve outdone yourself, Ray,” Father said. “I like a man who outdoes himself. I’ll be back with the cold cuts and bread. We might have a hankering for something hearty out there.”

  As the two men made eye contact, Father chuckled, running his hand under the visor on his temples. Father was a man who spent most of his life trying to cultivate a ready laugh. Though he was built like a workhouse, when it came to conversations, he had more of a dancer than a boxer in him. “Back in a minute,” Father said, jogging up the walk to the house.

  “Good man,” Ray said, with that sportiness that came from years of playing football and working in the army. In his eyes, no man who knew the burden of having a wife and kids was outside the purview of an honest day’s fish.

  That day, I was to spend the morning with Margaret. Birdie would stay at home with K. Mother had made arrangements from the city, Father said. Ray was tight lipped on the matter. The bed of the truck loaded, he slammed the tailgate shut and I jumped into the cab.

  “You sure you don’t want to come with us, lady?” Ray said, as he hoisted himself into the driver seat, shutting the door and turning the key to the ignition. “We’ve always got room in the dinghy for a deckhand.” “Mother arranged for me to spend the day with Margaret,” I said.

  “So I hear,” Ray laughed. “Do me a favor. Tell her your old man and I went fishing without a license. That should give her something to rail on for a while.”

  I looked at him for a moment. For a barber, he had a rough face. His stubble was gray and patchy. There was a thin grease in his hair, which appeared rumpled from the last place he’d run his hands through it. Despite the hour, his eyes were alive and fresh. I could tell there was nothing malicious in his jest. He was a man who woke on the right side of circumstance and liked to lend some of his humor to the day when he could.

  “Scout’s honor,” I said.

  Father emerged from the house. He fumbled with his keys in the lock before hustling down the walk toward the truck. He’d slung the old army backpack that he and Sterling used to take hiking over his shoulder. Father was always naming off the mountains they had peaked together. “As boys,” he’d say.

  “Jeanie,” Ray said chuckling. “Be a lady and jump into the back to make room for your old man.”

  I moved down the bench toward the center of the cab in order to swing my body over the rise of the seat, upsetting a loose stack of newspapers next to Ray.

  “What are you hiding under there?” I said, brushing aside the papers. Ray’s Colt sat on top of a cheap low-gloss circular advertising the week’s specials. Home goods and electronics.

  “You never know when you’ll find a sand shark trailing you in the water,” Ray said, taking the gun and focusing it through the windowsill in front of him. “Don’t want any predators sneaking up on our big game.” He narrowed one eye as though picking off a fish as it leapt from the water.

  I looked through the windshield in front of us. Father started to run toward the truck.

  “Jesus, Ray,” Father yelled through the window. “Put your gun away. That’s my kid you’ve got in here.” Father’s voice was making that jagged pant it did after he’d galloped Rebel.

  “No harm done,” Ray said. He opened the door to the glove compartment and tucked the Colt under a pile of napkins. “I wouldn’t be caught dead on the open water without some form of protection.” Father slid into the cab.

  “She’ll be safe in there,” Ray laughed slapping Father’s thigh before starting the engine.

  The back of the cab was narrow and dirty. The floor was littered with work shirts, random utility tools, and empty cassette cases. I sat on a pile of newspapers stacked behind Father. The seats in back were short and squat. They flipped down from the walls. The rocks and dust kicked up around us as Ray sped off. The road had that type of lonely exhilaration.

  As we passed the Starlings’ home, there was a light on in the kitchen. A creature of habit, Ruth kept her husband’s hours. She’d gotten up to put a pot of coffee on before Ray’d left for the fish. I imagined her sitting around their kitchen table in a thin pink bathrobe fingering a pile of cards, savoring one of the lone Parliaments she kept in the back of the junk drawer behind her make-up and the piles of bills.

  The road followed the curve of a short steep hill. At the bottom sat the Young residence. Ginny was a nurse in the children’s ward at the loc
al hospital. Dan kept house, an arrangement which was widely suspected but rarely spoken of. The renegade son of the local construction company, Dan had abandoned his share of the business. He’d thrown off his Father’s shadow in favor of Vietnam. He’d returned from the war with a back injury that kept him from steady work. Dan kept a motorcycle and a small fishing boat, which he financed by working odd hours at the auto body. Occasionally you’d see him working in the driveway, fixing somebody’s carburetor.

  Something in this arrangement would’ve irked people had it not been for Dan’s service and the beauty of his wife. Petite and naturally trim with a perky bosom that she showed off while gardening in her two-piece, Ginny had a doll like quality which made men like Father clam up when they spoke to her. People respected Dan for having the courage to keep her around. Such a task required that a man of his means be around on the constant. Dan and Ginny had produced two children. Lissie, Danny Jr. and I rode the bus. The town was not required to fetch us. We offspring of an unpaved road which dead-ended at the town’s border walked each morning to the little bridge near the farm stand where the dirt met the pavement. We waited for the bus on the stump next to the stop sign at the corner. If we were early, we raced sticks under the bridge, a habit Mother had warned me against as the bridge was preceded by a blind turn around which the occasional car came speeding.

  My experience of the Young’s house was based on a single exposure. I’d been invited to dinner once when Mother had class at the feed store and Father was working late. Lissie had prepared a casserole while her father slept on the couch in front of the game. Danny struggled with a load of colors in the basement. A chart of chores on the refrigerator was evidence of their father’s regiment. Despite the abundance of foil stars, bright red and blue assigned to Lissie and Danny respectively, the refrigerator gave the kitchen the effect of Christmas in the barracks of an underground war unit, the iridescent stickers glinting in the light of the overhead halogens every time anyone opened the door. When Ginny returned home from work, her lips were still glossy. Her eyes were the only thing that betrayed her. The brilliant blue replaced by tired blinders of gray.