After the Parade

by Lori Ostlund

  “Jerry, pull over so we can get you cleaned up,” Aaron’s mother said, staring forward, as though reading the words from a sign up ahead.

  His father veered onto the shoulder, braking with such force that the keys jangled in the ignition. He climbed out, holding his soiled arm away from him. As Aaron’s mother worked to retrieve the wet washcloths from the glove compartment, jiggling its tricky latch, he yanked open Aaron’s door and leaned in.

  “Eat it,” he said, mashing his arm hard against Aaron’s mouth.

  Aaron clenched his jaw, but the vomit leaked back in between his lips. He tried not to move it about with his tongue, but he could taste it, sour and bitter like a rotten walnut, and beneath that was the faint sweetness of the syrup and the bacon’s clear salinity. He told himself that it had all come from him, but this realization only made things worse and he vomited again.

  Then, his father was gone, replaced by his mother, who handed him one of the washcloths. “Clean yourself up,” she whispered.

  He pressed the cloth to his face, taking in its musty smell, and scraped it hard across his tongue. His parents were behind the car, and he boosted himself onto his knees so that he could watch them through the rear window. “See if I give a shit,” he heard his father say, but a semi hurtled by, taking his mother’s reply with it. At last, his father held out his arm and let his mother run a washcloth along it, the vomit piling up like snow before a plow. They drove away in silence, the washcloths in a heap beside the road, the remains of their emergency.

  * * *

  For two weeks they drove, his father staring at the road, his mother at maps. Aaron did not find maps appealing. “They’re wonderful tools,” his mother said, which made him think of hammers and drills and noisy activities like those in which his father engaged in the basement, activities that Aaron found as unappealing as maps. “You know,” she added, “we couldn’t make this trip without a map.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Well, because we need the map so we know where we’re going.”

  It had not occurred to him that his parents did not know where they were going.

  The trip was marked by statues: a large otter in a park in Fergus Falls; the Happy Chef, who warned them to stuff cotton in their ears because he felt like singing; and Mount Rushmore, which featured the faces of very important men called presidents, whom he would learn about in school his mother said. His father held up a dollar bill, and Aaron was surprised to see that it bore the face of the man on the left, George Washington. His father said that George Washington had wooden teeth, as though this were the most important thing to know about him.

  Bookending the trip were the Paul Bunyan statues, the standing one in Bemidji and the sitting Paul Bunyan in Brainerd, their final stop. It was there at the sitting Paul Bunyan’s feet that something happened, a small thing that had nonetheless offered Aaron a glimmer of hope about his potential as a son. In the photograph that remained of that day, he was standing beside Paul’s big, brown boot. He liked to imagine there was something unusual in his stance, defiant, though the look on his face was clear panic, the result of having been made to stand in line with the other children to meet Paul Bunyan while their parents waited to the side, eyeing them like 4-H calves at the fair.

  He had watched as two girls in matching yellow bonnets approached the statue. “How old are you?” bellowed Paul Bunyan, and the older girl, her arm firmly around the other’s shoulders, said, “I’m seven. How old are you, Mr. Bunyan?”

  “Have you seen Babe, my blue ox?” asked Paul Bunyan, not mentioning his age.

  Aaron tried to prepare for his turn by thinking back on what he had learned from the tall tales, but as the line moved forward, he realized that Paul Bunyan did not respond to any of the questions put to him. Finally, when only one child stood between him and the uncooperative giant, he began to sob. The slow simmer of his fear gave way to full-blown panic—like a teapot whistle shrieking inside him—and he leaped forward and kicked Paul Bunyan.

  Immediately, he was sorry. “Did you feel that, Mr. Bunyan?” he asked in a voice meant to suggest contrition.

  The only response came from the parents, in the form of enthusiastic laughter and clapping. A man in plaid shorts called out, “Knock ’im again. Bust his kneecaps,” and as the parents cheered, his father pushed forward to stand beside him. More than anything else about the trip, Aaron remembered the warmth of his father’s hand on his head.

  “Hello there, what’s your name?” Paul Bunyan shouted, his voice echoing from the area of his lap, but nobody was paying attention.

  Aaron’s father steered Aaron past the other parents, nodding at them casually, as if to suggest that his son provided such amusing fare daily. A burly woman with a large wooden cross riding atop her bosom called out, “You’re a regular little David, aren’t you?”

  “My name is Aaron,” he replied, and even this made people laugh.

  5

  * * *

  The morning they left on the family vacation, Aaron’s father had set his coffee cup on the table as he went out the door, triggering the usual response from Aaron’s mother, who wanted to wash it right then, an argument that his father won by threatening to leave without her. When they returned two weeks later, the dirty cup sat where his father had left it, calling his parents to battle, but they averted their eyes and kept silent. In the days that followed, the truce established in front of the sitting-down Paul Bunyan hung over them, its fragility palpable. They sat at the supper table each night, afraid to speak, the hope that they had carried home settling on them like a yoke.

  This went on for eight days. On the morning of the ninth, Aaron’s father fell off a parade float and died. Aaron witnessed the whole thing, beginning with his father perched on the back rail of the float with three other policemen, waving and tossing candy, and ending when the tractor pulling the float lurched into a higher gear and his father tumbled backward, landing on his head in the street below. It looked so natural—his uniformed father rolling through the air like a scene from Adam-12—that Aaron thought it had been planned, until the float crashed to a halt, the Shriners in their go-karts veering wildly to avoid his father, their fez tassels going limp as horsetails. One of the other policemen leaped from the float, put two fingers to his father’s neck, and, with something approaching awe in his voice, announced, “By God, Englund’s dead.”

  It was not the first time Aaron had heard the word dead, but when he asked his mother exactly what it meant, she told him that dead was “a state, a permanent state.” Flustered by her inability to make death clearer, she added, “Permanent means forever, Aaron.” This made no sense, for when she went to the beauty shop, she got something called a permanent, which lasted just a few months, the curls uncoiling week by week. There was also the dead he associated with cold winter mornings, when his father would stomp back inside the house to pull on gloves, muttering, “The damn battery’s dead.” From the window, Aaron watched him lift the hood on his squad car and back the Oldsmobile out of the garage, attaching cables from its battery to the squad car’s battery. Minutes later, his father drove off, the squad car’s dead battery resurrected.

  At the funeral, his father’s colleagues gathered awkwardly around Aaron and his mother. They pressed pennies into his hand, which he slipped into his trouser pockets, alternating between left and right. That night he emptied the pennies into a bowl. As he dressed the next morning, indeed each morning, he redistributed the coins in the same way, enjoying the even weight of them. He came to think of death as this, the steady tug of pennies holding him down, keeping him balanced.

  Technically, his father had died in the line of duty, and the funeral reflected this. At the cemetery, Aaron closed his eyes, enjoying the dizziness that overtook him as he stood above the gaping hole that would soon hold his father. The gun blasts, however, had come as a surprise and he wet himself, a warm sensation in his suit pants passing into his consciousness just as the echoes of the gu
nshots faded. In the days afterward, he and his mother rose and ate and slept, a routine punctuated by the sound of his mother crying in a room where he was not. One night just after the funeral she appeared with a framed photograph of his father, which she set on Aaron’s night table in the spot where she usually set a glass of water. “He looks like this because he was squinting into the sun,” she said, pointing at his father’s small, scowling face.

  His father glared at him as he lay in bed each morning, dry-mouthed, waiting for his mother to come for him. He always waited, a habit that had once been a simple function of age, though on his fifth birthday in March, everything changed. He had awakened early that morning and crept down the hallway to his parents’ bedroom, planning to surprise them with his newfound independence, but standing in their half-open doorway, he witnessed a terrifying sight: his father, dressed in his police uniform, had his mother, his naked mother, pressed face-first against the wall, her legs apart, arms reaching upward. “Please, Officer,” his mother said. As Aaron watched, his father handcuffed his mother. He knew what would happen next. He had heard his father run through the drill dozens of times. His mother would be put into his father’s squad car, into the backseat, which was reserved for criminals, and taken to jail. He would be left alone with his father.

  He went back to his room and lay with the covers pulled up to his chin. He stayed like that for what seemed a very long time. Finally, his door opened, and his mother peeked in. “Come on, sleepy boy,” she said. “Time to get up. We have a birthday to celebrate.” She held her index finger to her lips, the signal the two of them used to indicate collusion against his father. “Once your father’s gone, we’ll make pancakes.” When she leaned over to pull back his covers, her body gave off a strange almond odor.

  * * *

  One morning, Aaron opened his eyes to find his father still staring at him from the nightstand. His mouth felt drier than usual, perhaps because he had been dreaming about the iron ore mines, which they had visited near the end of their vacation. They had stayed with Uncle Petey, who was twelve years older than Aaron’s mother. Petey spent his days at his kitchen table sorting buttons for his wife, Charlotte, who was a seamstress. She was German; they had met when Petey was stationed in Germany after the war. Charlotte was so thin that you could see the bones of her spine beneath her cotton shirt as she bent over her sewing machine. Aaron’s mother said she had always been this way, that she could not control her nerves except by smoking, and so, possessed of just one mouth, she had sacrificed eating. Everything in their house smelled of smoke.

  Uncle Petey had once worked in the mines, but his mine had stopped producing and become a tourist attraction, which Aaron and his parents toured one afternoon. In the car on the way over, Aaron’s father said that there was more to it than the mine closing, that Petey had stopped working even before that. “He woke up one day and he was afraid of the dark,” his father said, chuckling as he usually did when discussing other people’s fears, while Aaron’s mother stared out the window.

  The tour was led by former miners, who spoke to one another in a language that was not English. “Damn Finns,” his father whispered. “They run this place.” It was dark in the mines and wet, and when his father said “Finns” like that, Aaron felt as if he were underwater with everything closing in. He gasped for air.

  Halfway through the tour, the group stopped walking. The Finns began ushering people over the edge of what appeared to be a drop-off, but as Aaron got closer, he saw that they were actually stepping onto a ladder and disappearing into the darkness below. Soon, only he and his parents remained at the top, along with one of the Finns. Aaron’s father swung over the edge and onto the ladder. “Let’s go,” he called to Aaron.

  “I can’t do it,” Aaron whispered to his mother.

  “It’s like walking down stairs,” she said. He knew this was not true.

  “You go now,” the Finn told him, the light on his helmet shining into Aaron’s eyes. “It’s not hard,” he added in a kind voice, and Aaron knew the Damn Finn had seen that he was crying. Below them, the others were getting restless.

  “Aaron, get your ass on this ladder now or I’m coming back up there and we’ll see if a good spanking won’t help,” said his father from the darkness. The others stopped talking, and without their chatter the mine seemed vast. With the Damn Finn’s help, Aaron knelt, his right foot reaching down for the top rung. A hand seized his ankle. He kicked, but his father held on, pulling him into the darkness.

  His sheets were tangled around his legs. He worked himself free, got out of bed, and tipped the photograph forward, bringing his father face-to-face with the nightstand. He found his mother sitting at the kitchen table with the map of Fargo-Moorhead open before her. She could no longer go anywhere near the parade route, which had turned simple errands into full-day events that began here at the table with his mother marking out a route and ended with them driving in circles through newly developed neighborhoods that did not exist on the map.

  “You need shoes,” his mother said. “Remember, school starts Monday.” The very thought of starting kindergarten filled him with dread. It was not that he did not want to learn. He did, but he did not want to sit in a room full of other children to do so. “Go get dressed,” his mother said.

  “I like my shoes,” he said, but he did not argue because after the funeral Uncle Petey had pulled him aside. “The doctor says your mother needs lots of peace and quiet,” Uncle Petey told him, in a tone suggesting that peace and quiet was something he believed a boy Aaron’s age could not provide. Aaron wondered when the doctor had said this to his mother. She hadn’t been sick. It was true that she slept a lot, but that was something she did not do when she was sick because she always said that the best medicine was having him sit by her bed and tell her things.

  He went into his bedroom and put on his pants, dividing the pennies between his front pockets. Then he sat on the floor and wiggled his feet into his shoes. They had become tighter, but that did not change the fact that these were the shoes with which he had kicked Paul Bunyan. He could not imagine starting school without them.

  * * *

  The store carried only children’s shoes and was decorated to appeal to its audience: a carousel horse stood out front, its coin slot filled with gum, and just inside the door was a gumball machine, flanked by dusty statues of Buster Brown and his dog, whose tail had been broken off and propped against his leg. When they entered, a bell above the door rang.

  “And what can we help you with today?” the saleswoman called out to them.

  “Aaron is starting school next week,” his mother told the woman.

  “Starting school?” the woman said, bending toward him. “And what grade are you going to be in, young man?”

  Aaron looked up at the woman. Everything about her was exaggerated—the tone of her voice, the redness of her lipstick, the puff of her hair—each feature rivaling the others like choir members who had decided to out-sing one another. He put his hands in his pockets, letting the pennies trickle through his fingers. “Kindergarten,” he said.

  “Kindergarten!” the woman repeated, making her eyes large as if to suggest that meeting a boy about to start kindergarten was rare indeed in her line of work.

  “Do you carry cowboy boots?” he asked.

  “We do,” she replied, looking at his mother for guidance.

  “Absolutely not,” his mother said. “I’m not going to spend all day polishing boots.”

  “I would polish them,” Aaron mumbled.

  His mother picked up a pair of dress shoes, checked the price, and held them out to him. “Now aren’t these nice?” she said. Aaron looked at them. They were not nice.

  “That’s a really snazzy pair,” the saleswoman said. “They’ve been very popular with boys your age.”

  Aaron succumbed to the process, allowing the woman to pry off his old shoes, measure his foot, and lace him into a pair of the cheap dress shoes.

 
“How do they feel?” his mother asked. He stood and paced for her, realizing that the carpet was so worn because all day long other children did as he was doing, walked back and forth while their mothers looked on. His mother and the saleswoman took turns pressing on the toes. “I guess we’ll take them,” his mother said, sighing as she got to her feet, and he could tell then that she did not think the cheap dress shoes were nice either.

  “I like them,” he declared.

  They moved to the counter, where the saleswoman wound a length of string around the shoebox while chatting about the weather. His mother stood writing a check, her lips moving as though she were dictating the information to her hand. In the past, she had been able to carry on a conversation while writing checks, but lately most tasks required her full concentration so that even when she did get out of bed to make supper, for example, she no longer invited him to cook with her, did not show him how to measure salt in the palm of his hand or check the temperature of the roast.

  “Looks like we’ll have a lot of rhubarb this year,” the saleswoman said.

  “I used to make rhubarb crisp,” his mother told the woman as she handed her the check.

  “I love crisp,” the woman replied. “May I see your driver’s license?”