The Outside Lands

by Hannah Kohler

  HANNAH KOHLER

  The Outside Lands

  PICADOR

  For Phil

  Contents

  Out of the Sunset

  Jeannie / 1963

  Kip / 1966

  In Country

  Jeannie / 1967

  Kip / May 1968

  Jeannie / May 1968

  Jeannie / May 1968

  Kip / May 1968

  Jeannie / June 1968

  Kip / June 1968

  Jeannie / June 1968

  Kip / June 1968

  Jeannie / June 1968

  Kip / June 1968

  Beyond the Headlands

  Tom / July 1968

  Tom / 1965

  Tom / July 1968

  Kip / July 1968

  Tom / July 1968

  Jeannie / July 1968

  Tom / July 1968

  Jeannie / July 1968

  Tom / August 1968

  Jeannie / August 1968

  Tom / August 1968

  Jeannie / August 1968

  Tom / August 1968

  Jeannie / August 1968

  Tom / August 1968

  Jeannie / August 1968

  Kip / August 1968

  Jeannie / August 1968

  Tom / August 1968

  Tom / August 1968

  Kip / August 1968

  Jeannie / August 1968

  Tom / August 1968

  Jeannie / August 1968

  Tom / August 1968

  Jeannie / August 1968

  Tom / August 1968

  Jeannie / August 1968

  Tom / August 1968

  Jeannie / August 1968

  Tom / August 1968

  Jeannie / August 1968

  Kip / August 1968

  Jeannie / August 1968

  Jeannie / 1969

  Jeannie / 1975

  Acknowledgments

  Out of the Sunset

  Jeannie / 1963

  Every year, after Kip had blown the flames from his cake, their mom told the story of how he’d nearly killed her.

  “Nurse said she’d never seen so much bleeding, and for such a scrap of a boy,” she said, tipping back an old-fashioned.

  “Mom,” said Kip, spraying dark crumbs; they scuttered over the tablecloth.

  “Mom,” said Jeannie.

  Their mom licked her lips and fingered the maraschino cherry from her glass. “Your daddy said he could hear the screaming all the way out in the parking lot.”

  “Nearly turned my wagon around and went straight home.”

  “They fogged me with all those medications, but the nurse said I was clear-mouthed as a preacher, said I called out to the Lord to take me.”

  “The Lord didn’t want her,” their dad said, smiling. Each time their mom told the story it got bloodier, and their dad would rock on his Weejuns and push her words away with a smile, before winding it up with a joke. Then their mom, muss-haired and glitter-eyed, would squeeze the nape of Kip’s neck and fall into the easy chair. Their dad would set an Edith Piaf record on the turntable and a song would play that would make their mom cry.

  “There’s the Texan coming out,” their dad said. “All that humidity growing up, and now she’s all heat and water.”

  Their mom was raised in the Texas Panhandle, on a small-holding with a pick-your-own pecan orchard and six beehives. As a girl, she cracked nuts for three cents a pound until her nails bled; and she’d had nothing to do with pecans since, not even on Thanksgiving. Their dad came from Eureka, California, where the weather was clean and cool, and his mother grew citrus trees in the garden.

  “You grow up with lemons, you end up sour,” said their mom.

  “Lemonade from lemons,” said Jeannie.

  “That’s my girl,” said their dad.

  Her mom had always been superstitious about Kip’s birthday. So when Jeannie was called into Mrs. Harris’s office that November afternoon to take her dad’s telephone call, it felt like a prank. It was dark out; typing drill was nearly through. Jeannie stood at the ink-spoiled desk, looking out at the rain, the receiver tacky on her cheek.

  “Jeannie, you got to come home.” Her dad’s voice was swollen and strange.

  “What’s the matter, Daddy?” A fly landed on the orange on Mrs. Harris’s desk and picked at the rind.

  “Uncle Paulie’s on his way to get you.”

  Jeannie hadn’t seen Uncle Paulie since her dad kicked him out of their house for fooling around with his ceremonial sword.

  “What’s going on?” Jeannie heard the warm sound of men talking. “Who are you with?”

  “I can’t get into it, honey. Just come home.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “Please, Jeannie. I’ll explain.” Her dad’s voice rose.

  “We’re not done with our typing exercises,” said Jeannie. Her face grew hot. “I’m not coming till you tell me what’s going on.”

  She watched the fly climb over the curve of the orange and wondered if they’d been disconnected.

  “There’s been an accident.”

  Jeannie’s heart flickered. “Is Kip all right?”

  A blow of breath down the line. The fly twitched.

  “He’s all right, Jeannie.”

  Something in his emphasis made Jeannie wince.

  “It’s your mother.”

  “What happened?” Jeannie’s hands were wet.

  “The cops are here.”

  Jeannie swallowed. “Is Mom all right?”

  “They said—”

  Jeannie heard the stickiness of her dad’s mouth. “Daddy?”

  “She was in an accident, and Mom—your mother . . .”

  Jeannie’s breath stopped rough and solid in her throat. The receiver slipped against her cheek and she said something, but it lost its shape in her mouth.

  “Uncle Paulie will be outside. Come now, honey.” Her dad’s voice caught, and the dial tone pushed into her ear. The news disappeared down the telephone line, back through the cables and into the earth. Outside on Dolores, two women with shiny-wet overcoats ran arm in arm under the rain, their dark lips stretched in laughter. If she stayed right where she was, if she didn’t move a fiber, the news might not come back for her; it might sink between the rocks that moved beneath the city, back into the slime below.

  “Operator. May I help you?” The voice was far-off, from Oregon or the nineteen forties.

  Jeannie opened her eyes and set down the receiver. She sat in Mrs. Harris’s chair and caught her head in her hands. The thing that had been climbing up from her stomach since she’d been pulled from class (perhaps it had always been there) broke free from her lips in a wheeze of noise and spit. The fly lifted away.

  Uncle Paulie stood on the sidewalk, his face white as milk.

  “Sweetheart,” he said, and collected her in his arms.

  Jeannie pressed her head against him, his smell of dirt and soap. She couldn’t blink to cut the tears from her eyes. Her chest ached.

  Uncle Paulie let go. “Here,” he said, opening the door of his car. He drove and they stared at the rain bleeding on the windshield, listening to the rub of the wipers. He kept his right hand clamped on her knee. They were passing Sunset before Jeannie could ask—

  “What happened?”

  He turned his head to look at her; his face was striped with shadows.

  “You got to talk to your father, Jeannie,” he said.

  At home, Jeannie found Kip and her dad staring at Temple Houston on the television, drinking root beer. It could have been any Thursday; she half expected her mom to be in the kitchen, fixing cheese biscuits. Then Kip turned to look at her, and his expression reminded her of when he was four and he lost his toy jeep at the beach.

&nb
sp; “What happened?” she said.

  Her dad stood to switch off the television. Kip watched the empty screen, his hands moving in his lap like birds.

  “Honey,” said her dad, taking her in his arms and squeezing her too tight. Jeannie felt the spaces between his ribs as he breathed large. She struggled free, knocking him in the chest with her elbow.

  “Tell me what the hell happened.”

  Kip’s shoulders jumped.

  “I’ll go,” murmured Uncle Paulie. He clicked the door behind him.

  Her dad sat back in his chair and rubbed his cheeks. His eyes were small and red. “She wouldn’t have felt anything, honey,” he said. Kip got up, left the room, and slapped his bedroom door shut.

  Her mom had taken Kip to Sears Fine Food for his annual birthday treat. Kip was fourteen now, a baby man, hair burrowing out of his smooth cheeks and pimples budding on his chin. He wasn’t a kid anymore, he’d told Jeannie that morning when she’d caught him slipping a cigarette from their dad’s overcoat. Even so, Kip had allowed his mother to scoop him up from school and take him into the city. It had been a tradition since he’d turned eight: every year, Kip would order the stack of eighteen pancakes with syrup, whipped butter, and links; and every year, he would eat and talk and jiggle until his legs stilled, his jaw stopped, and a thin sheen of perspiration formed across his face. “The kid was sweating sugar!” her mom would say when they returned home, and her dad would swipe Kip’s legs with his Chronicle.

  It had rained all day. The two Cadillacs sat outside the restaurant, creamy pink like strawberry malts, blowing hot air and music onto the line of waiting diners. Jeannie decided that must have been it—the Cadillacs must have hidden the approach of the cable car, muffled its thunder. She imagined her mom stepping out, her eyes digging in her purse for a Tums, her white heel jamming in the track. Or perhaps something had drawn her gaze the other way—perhaps she was distracted by the tramp outside the Sir Francis Drake, who wore dirt for gloves and cursed at pretty women, or by a toddler screaming after a lost balloon. But Jeannie didn’t know exactly how it happened. Kip was full of tales, but this one he wouldn’t tell.

  The day after the accident, things started to accumulate in the house: roses stuck into baby’s breath; a jellied meatloaf; cigarette smoke; and the liquory hit of Aunt Ruth’s perfume. Jeannie’s dad stood at the telephone, murmuring and smoking; Kip had the television dialed loud. Jeannie sat in the backyard alone, the wind pinching her skin.

  “Come on, now, honey, get inside,” called Aunt Ruth, standing at the back door, her ankles sliding over her laced shoes like dough. “That cold’ll burn you up.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Mrs. Luciano brought some nice fat meatballs. You want me to warm them for you?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You got to eat, Jeannie. You’re thin as a whip already.”

  Jeannie was slim, but like Jimmy Collins once told her, she had plenty of squeeze on her. “I’ll stay here,” she said.

  “I better come to you, then.” Aunt Ruth levered herself through the back door and pulled up a deck chair. The fabric gulped under her. “Here,” she said, “take one of these.” She shuffled two Luckies from her pack, cradled them at her mouth, and handed one over.

  They sucked on the cigarettes in silence, Aunt Ruth’s eyes trained on the side of Jeannie’s face. The older woman was shaking out another smoke when Kip came to the door, his face ripped of color.

  “You got to see this.”

  Inside, Jeannie’s dad stood close to the TV set, his cigarette burning down to a wand of ash. Walter Cronkite was on the screen, looking toward a voice off-camera.

  “Well, that’s a repeat of something that you heard reported to you directly a moment ago from KRLD television in Dallas—”

  “What is this?” asked Jeannie. Her dad raised his hand; the ash broke to the floor.

  “The rumor that has reached them at the hotel, that the president is dead—”

  “Shit,” said Kip. Her dad whistled.

  “Totally unconfirmed, apparently, as yet. However, let’s go back to KRLD in Dallas.” Cronkite blinked twice, bent his head, and slid his black frames over his face.

  “Sweet Jesus to hell.” Aunt Ruth crossed herself.

  “No one’s going to give a shit about Mom anymore,” said Kip.

  “Shut up, Kip,” said Jeannie.

  Kip was right. The president’s killing punched the breath out of Forty-Sixth Avenue. Drapes were drawn and housewives sobbed as they swept their front yards.

  “Never seen a thing like it, not even with old King Franklin,” said Aunt Ruth.

  “They’re all acting like his dying belongs to them,” said Kip.

  “It does belong to them,” said Jeannie.

  “Doesn’t belong to nobody.”

  The flowers and dinners stopped as fast as they had started. Her dad had trouble organizing the funeral—Shirley’s Flowers and The Sunset Florist closed out of respect for the president. Over the coming days, as Jeannie watched the wet, blotched film roll over the television screen, it was like her own news was broadcasting on CBS: the cops hanging around; the unfolding burial arrangements; the girl and boy gazing at the casket. Even years later, the sight of that newsreel made Jeannie feel she was watching her loss exploded onto a network screen; and it bothered her that other eyes were gobbling it up.

  Her mom’s funeral went fast-slow, the smell of shoe polish and carnations and cologne. All the while it felt like they were rehearsing a show, until the small casket sailed down the aisle.

  “A real dainty lady.”

  “And always so well put together.”

  “How’s Frank doing?”

  “That man’s seen such a lot of death.”

  “Death and taxes, you don’t get used to them—”

  The funeral director, Mr. O’Sullivan, had recommended a closed casket—“Let’s remember her for the lively woman she was.” When it was her turn to pay her respects, Jeannie knelt and pressed the casket with her palms, like a prisoner feeling for a loved one through the wire mesh of his cell. There she was, right there; Jeannie imagined climbing in next to her, like she used to scrabble into her parents’ bed after a bad dream. A grip on her shoulder: her dad, telling her to stand.

  The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing.

  At the wake, old women pressed her with dry hands and slicked her with kisses.

  “You’re the woman of the house now,” said Mrs. Davis, nipping mouthfuls of sherry, her eyes scurrying around the room.

  “How’s your little brother doing, honey?” Mrs. Fleish adjusted the bulge of her breasts beneath her woolen dress.

  “He’s doing all right,” said Jeannie. Kip had been locking himself in his bedroom for hours at a time, silent save for the odd bounce of noise—the throw of a Wiffle ball, a gasp, the cork of a Daisy gun.

  “As well as can be expected,” said Mrs. Davis, holding up her glass for a passing Uncle Paulie to fill. “You’ve got to take care of those men of yours.”

  They watched Jeannie’s dad moving around the room, never saying more than a word or two to any guest, clearing mess as soon as it was made. His cheeks were shaved raw and his suit pants bagged at his waist. He looked like a stranger: a lost, unlucky cousin of the soft-bellied father of her childhood. Jeannie slipped away from the women and pushed through the room to find Kip. Her dad’s friends from the Corps stood outside drinking bourbon, making jokes. They seemed far away, like people standing inside a television screen. In the kitchen, Aunt Ruth was buttering bread, pausing to lick her cracked fingers.

  “Where’s Kip?” asked Jeannie.

  “I don’t know, honey. Here.” She handed Jeannie an overstuffed garbage bag. “Help me out, will you?”

  Jeannie was hauling the bag out front when she saw Kip sitting against the trash can, flipping the pages of a Spider-Man comic. His khakis were smeared with dirt and his face looked sore.

  “What
are you doing?” said Jeannie.

  “I had to get out.”

  “Scoot,” said Jeannie. Kip hauled himself out the way, flinching at the reek of spoiled food.

  “Everybody’s so fucking excited in there,” he said.

  Jeannie thought of all those wine-blushed faces, the old bodies shedding heat and noise, Uncle Paulie pressing through the party with his bottles of liquor.

  “Assholes,” said Kip.

  “I got stuck with Mrs. Davis,” said Jeannie, wiping her hands together.

  “Mom hated her.”

  “She did?” Her mom and Kip always knew each other’s secrets. Kip’s bike was lying on their mom’s sage plant; he went to grab it. “Kip,” said Jeannie. “You got to help me out in there.”

  “Can’t do it.” He swung himself onto the saddle and raced away, standing on the pedals to glide down the street, through the stop sign, toward the ocean.

  It was ten o’clock before the last guests left. Jeannie found Kip asleep in his bedroom, fully clothed, his bedspread kicked to the floor. Her dad tidied, stepping and bending like Kip’s old windup robot. Uncle Paulie picked over the sweaty hors d’oeuvres; Aunt Ruth rubbed her corns. Jeannie sat in her loose black dress, feeling the spell beginning to break.

  Life came knocking. Her dad returned to work at Muni, where they moved him from the planning desk and onto clerical duties for a little while; Kip returned to school. Every morning, as soon as they’d left the house, Jeannie would stop getting dressed and go to her mom’s room, unfolding scarves and sweaters to release the last drifts of her mom’s scent, the smell that held warmth and memory and was always nearly vanishing. She brushed her mom’s face powder onto her wrist, pressing the dusty smell to her nose, and reread the last dog-eared page of the novel her mom had left on the nightstand. Those bright, blustery days of winter, the house was alive with her mom’s ghosts; they would catch Jeannie like spiders’ webs as she walked the rooms. But the smell faded from her mom’s clothes, and the chicken potpie her mom had left in the refrigerator was thrown out, and one day, after Uncle Paulie had driven her dad home late—the slam of the front door, shouts, the sound of glass breaking—Aunt Ruth came to pack up her mom’s possessions.