Northwest Corner

by John Burnham Schwartz

  Coming to the notch of missing flesh now, her fingers instinctively jump away, still refusing to acknowledge. She forces them back to the task at hand, to which they go reluctantly—showing, she guesses, that her mind is still strong enough to enforce its confused will. Nonetheless, the moment is disheartening. In the parlance of healing this is called spiritual, this not knowing whether something is going to kill you dead, this wool-over-the-eyes perplexity. And maybe it’s that. But, more than that, it’s simply a disgrace. At forty-seven, she has long accepted gravity’s attack on her better parts—she had great tits once, and the ass to go with them—but this cutting out of herself with a blade, this cold-blooded removal, however precise and necessary, is more than she can take. It makes her feel, unbearably and every day now, how little of her there was from the start.

  The TV is on across the room, tuned to Good Morning America: a commercial for frozen pizza; another for hemorrhoid ointment. She is waiting with a certain embarrassing passivity for the preposterously jovial weatherman to come on and tell her where today in our great and hopeful nation there will be rain, and where there will be sun.

  Where, indeed.

  The cream is gone, traceless. She takes her fingers away. And the breast remains, inert yet screaming. She’ll try not to count all the things it’s saying to her—the stage whispers and threats, the self-pitying beseechments and raging monologues—because they are hers. Somehow, without ever intending to, she’s become the mad ventriloquist of her own body.

  She thinks about Sam. Who is hers, too. Who will bring her back to wholeness, if anyone can. So many times during their years together (which seem to her now the only years she can remember with any color), no matter what was happening to her personally, this small victory or that massive mistake, just the thought of him, mother to son, was enough to situate her in his life rather than in her own, to grab her by the hair if necessary and yank her out of the self-regarding muck of her own existence and into the fertile, ever-changing garden of his.

  In order to see him she’s had to imagine him. To imagine him she’s had to truly love him. To truly love him she’s had, by some alchemical extension, to love herself, the mother she can be.

  SAM

  THE SCREAM BELONGS TO THE GIRLFRIEND. The barroom hums with shock.

  On the sawdusted floor of O’Doul’s, a young man is slumped.

  Sam feels the air around him contract. Whirling blindly, bat still in hand: people large and small scatter to safety.

  A muffled groan draws him back to the room’s sickening center, where the body writhes on the floor.

  “Nic,” the girlfriend begs, “stay down. Stay down.”

  Sam opens his hand. The metal bat strikes the floor with a cracked bell’s dead echo. A second later, he feels his arm roughly grabbed, as behind him the bartender grunts, “And don’t you fucking move.”

  Silently, with everything he has, Sam wills the hurt guy to get up.

  “I called the cops,” someone shouts from the back.

  With sudden urgency, groaning and huffing, the hurt guy forces himself to one knee. “No cops …”

  “Nic, stay down.”

  “No cops.”

  “You crazy fucks.” The bartender again, in Sam’s ear. “You crazy, stupid fucks.”

  With brutal effort, like a man trying to scale a shifting heap of garbage, the hurt guy claws himself almost upright. So threatening a few minutes ago, crouched and panting now, he will look no one in the face; his eyes are wounded pits of shame. A Chaplinesque wobble, three stumbling steps—then, clutching his stomach and gasping curses, he abruptly folds at the waist.

  “Wait for the goddamn ambulance,” implores his girlfriend.

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  A wild arm flopped across her shoulders; the deadweight almost drags her down. Somehow, the entire room staring on mutely, they shuffle out of the bar like a single wounded animal and disappear into the night.

  In O’Doul’s, awkwardness and confusion follow. With no body to point to, it is not entirely clear what has just happened.

  From the floor nearby, the UConn duffel gapes at Sam like a judging eye, its letters glowing white.

  There is still a narrow pathway, carved by violence, to the door. Another moment or two, he thinks, and it will close.

  EMMA

  WHEN SHE THINKS BACK to the beginning, she can’t remember meeting him. He is simply there, part of the general fabric, her brother’s schoolmate at the Sherman R. Lewis Public School in Wyndham Falls, two years older than her, kind of small for his age, with hair the color of sun streaming on a yellow-sand beach and white teeth that rarely see daylight. He plays the trumpet but not very well, despite the fact that his mother is the school’s music teacher. His talent on the trumpet never comes close to equaling Josh’s on the violin. Not that it has to, but later on, no fault of his own, there will be no getting away from the comparison. Sometimes she sees him waiting for the bus after school, always off by himself a little, carrying the instrument in its black padded case like some weary vacuum salesman. The difference being that he’s still just a little kid, not at the end of his life but at the beginning.

  Then, in ’94, after a thirty-eight-year-old lawyer from Box Corner named Dwight Arno finally turns himself in to the police for the hit-and-run killing of her brother, the killer’s son—that boy in Josh’s school, Sam Arno, the loner, small of stature and shy to smile, the boy she’s never paid special attention to and can’t remember meeting—becomes, locally, a negative celebrity.

  Think of the backside of a billboard along I-95, with its ugly scaffolding and hidden graffiti: if you happen to get a good look at it, you are by definition heading the wrong way into hostile, oncoming traffic.

  And she knows she is no different, not really.

  They are like two satellites: hurled into space to orbit the same barren moon, once in a while catching curious glimpses of each other through the ash-colored murk, but never stopping to question their weirdly shared circumstances or motives.

  Which maybe is understandable: by then his father is in prison; and, deep in the thrall of their emotional devastation, so are her parents.

  SAM

  IT IS CLOSE TO FIVE IN THE MORNING when he returns to the dorm. The leftovers of his uniform stink of old beer and frightened sweat. His body hurts in many unseen places. Since fleeing the bar, for the past couple of hours, on familiar streets and unknown fields, he has run, walked, run, and sat for long periods of stillness that are like falling, not knowing what to do or where to go.

  Now, in the common room, a single lamp is on. His roommate, Jake, slouches unsmiling on the broken-down vinyl couch.

  “It’s my fault. I should’ve stayed with you.”

  “I really need to crash,” Sam mumbles, but his legs won’t move.

  “I was at a party at McMahon. An hour ago, guy showed up saying his buddy’d just gone for emergency surgery. Bar fight in O’Doul’s. Internal hemorrhage or something. Very fucking serious.” Jake leans forward, his gaze nailing Sam into frame. “Somebody gut-whacked him with a baseball bat. The rumor already going around is maybe it was you.”

  The duffel in Sam’s hand has begun to feel like fifty pounds. He sets it down.

  “And don’t fucking try to tell me how he hit you first. I don’t give a shit. I told that asshole at the party, I swore to him on my mom’s goddamn wedding ring that there was no way—no fucking way, Sam—that my roommate would ever be stupid or crazy or just plain wrong enough to do a fucking thing like that.”

  • • •

  There is more, but the words turn fluid. Part of Sam absorbs their acidic implications; part repels them like accidental rain.

  Until, at some point, Jake stands and says he needs to take a shower; it will help him think. After that, they will head to breakfast. Over breakfast, they will come up with a game plan.

  A game plan, yes. Sam nods at his friend, or believes he does. He takes the UConn duffel into his bed
room. He closes the door.

  Alone with himself, he stands looking at the brightening stain of sunrise that spreads from the window to his feet.

  Something inside him has ruptured; something hideous has come out of hiding. He is leaking enough poison to kill another man, or himself. What toxin he can’t identify, but he’d swear that he now understands, at the level of blood, the meaning of the word ruin. A sudden conviction, like a dog’s yelp, impales him: to keep running and never look back. To find someone as far away as possible who might take him in and hide him from the clean world.

  For the second time in twelve hours, he thinks of his father.

  Unzipping the duffel, he dumps the contents on the floor. Amid the day’s profane waste are the clothes he was wearing before the game.

  Quickly now, he begins to pack.

  DWIGHT

  TWELVE-THIRTY ON THE NOSE, I look out the store’s front window and see Tony Lopez’s cream-colored Mercedes coupe pulling into the lot.

  Tony gets his car washed every other morning on the way to work. I watch him now, stopping to inspect a recent smudge or scratch, invisible to me from this distance. A quick buff with his shirt hem and he’s on the move again, eyes critically scanning the store sign; the front window displaying the impressive collection of trophies that he and his brother Jorge amassed on the baseball diamond and football field of Arenas High School; the security gate I left not quite rolled up. He frowns to himself and corrects my error, then enters the store and, shooting a look at Sandra behind the registers, orders her to get some clothes on, pronto.

  “What?” she complains, hands on her hips.

  He’s got a point, I can’t help noticing: her halter top a Day-Glo display case for her own particular trophies; her name tag an extremesports enthusiast about to tumble to a happy death off the face of Mount Shasta.

  Sandra shouts to Derek to cover for her, before strutting down aisle nine and through the security door into the stockroom.

  “That girl,” Tony grumbles, shaking his head. “She thinks she can just show it like a free movie and everybody’s happy.”

  “Some people probably are happy,” I venture.

  “She’s my niece,” Tony says, ending the subject.

  • • •

  Once every couple of weeks, Tony and I have lunch together at a nearby Mexican cantina that’s another small piece in the modest business empire he’s gradually building. The lunches began not long after his hiring me as a sales assistant six years ago—no doubt as a way for the boss to keep tabs on a rookie employee with a certain kind of track record. But, to Tony’s credit, the meals don’t make me feel as if Big Brother’s watching. A few years younger than me and exponentially more set on his feet, he seems to have no interest in overtly contrasting our situations, save for the obvious reality that I now work for him. He respects the fact that, prior to my troubles back East, I went to law school and for a while was a practicing attorney. (And possibly, out of a desire not to cut off this unexpected avenue of goodwill, I’ve been guilty of not giving him a fuller picture of my former professional vicissitudes.) He also takes a sincere interest in my estranged relationship with my son.

  For beyond the snappy shirts and expensive summer-weight slacks and the gold-rimmed designer shades perpetually perched on his bronzed, balding head, Tony is a genuine family man. His pretty blond wife, Jodi, and their twin seven-year-old daughters, Ruby and Jade (Tony and Jodi are fans of a certain Home Shopping Network strain in the naming of American children that would now seem to be the norm), are his delight, and he’s given to handing out wallet-size photos of them to near-strangers. He often mentions his beloved mother (Papi cut out when Tony and Jorge were still in Pampers) and the Los Angeles barrio he grew up in, and to me, anyway, it never feels like just a line. As Tony and I have become friends over time—he’s near the top of my very short list of guys to watch football with—I’ve occasionally gone to his and Jodi’s home at the foot of the Santa Ynez Mountains for big, festive family dinners that, after a couple of tequilas, always make me feel as if there are balloons and piñatas tied up everywhere, even when there aren’t.

  At lunch today, I order the large chicken taco salad (it comes in a kind of crispy sombrero that you’re free to wear out of the restaurant if you’re in the mood) and silently vow to ignore the chips. Since moving out to California, Diet Dr Pepper has become my daytime beverage of choice and, on the whole, I try to eat like a native. I exercise most days and am not averse to fresh fruit.

  One of the ironies of enforced institutional life is that the hours of nothing time that threaten to drown you can also lead you to get yourself in pretty good fighting shape. It’s possible in certain locales to see a murderer’s handprints—or, for that matter, a tax evader’s, and wouldn’t you know it, they look much the same—faintly worn into the grimed cement floor. He’s been doing his push-ups and crunches for months now, years, day after day, preparing himself for some test with no name or prize money attached to it. There our man sits, lats and delts and traps getting bigger, finding abs he hasn’t seen since he was a high-school virgin, but the truth is he ends up scaring no one but himself. Because for all the work on his body, the rock-hard carapace he daily attempts to fashion, the absolute mystery of the overall scheme—the tragedy by which he got here in the first place—grows no plainer to him, and never will.

  Then one stupendous day, according to the calendar that never lies, he gets spit out by the state. And if our man is unusually lucky and tenacious he’ll eventually find his way to some situation that looks a lot like human society. A diorama, but with real sunshine. And there he’ll continue his daily exercise routine—we won’t call it a “regimen,” which might suggest good health and a required monthly membership—that he learned inside. A certain number of reps, a certain series of poses. Disciplined man that he is, he’ll order the salad and stay off the chips. And the irony of it all won’t escape him: how he’s keeping himself strong in order to endure, or fight back, the very thing he can’t understand. Which, like the fine California weather, keeps coming at him, relentless. At this rate, he could live for a very long time.

  “Hey,” Tony says mildly, snapping his fingers. “I’m talking business here.”

  “Right.”

  “Want to be more involved, you gotta be on the ball.”

  “I’m on the ball, Tony.”

  “Yeah?” He eyes me skeptically, in no rush whatever. A hint of ownership in his gaze, as if I’m a second car and he’s checking me for dings. And it occurs to me, and not for the first time, that he’s the only person in the state who knows my official record. Information that from the start he’s promised to keep confidential, so long as I live up to the responsibility given to me. As it’s turned out, I’ve earned his trust and we’ve become friends. Not partners but teammates of a kind—the way I guess the lug man in the pit crew is a member of the team, due his share on payday, even if not cut out for the bright lights of the winner’s circle.

  I take a swallow of diet soda and prepare for Tony’s verdict. In my position I seem to spend a lot of time simply waiting, stuck on like a limpet, for other people to give me the news.

  Finally, he flashes his telenovela smile. “Just keeping you on your toes, hombre.”

  I smile back.

  “That bakery out near the 217 overpass? Feeling they getting ready to sell. Low foot traffic and rising value of the underlying asset. I could do better with that site. Maybe time to take a look.”

  “You thinking sporting goods?”

  “Maybe a gym. Athletic center. Start a chain.”

  “That would be a new direction,” I reply carefully.

  “New and not new.” Tony finishes his mineral water and cocks a frowning glance into the kitchen, where a disorganized clatter can be heard. “Matter of branding.”

  I nod, because it seems the right thing to do at the moment, and because I have nothing worthwhile to add to the conversation. He isn’t asking for my opini
on, anyway. There was a time—as a young lawyer in Hartford (my first stint in that beleaguered northeastern city), billing hundreds every hour—when I had something to say, for a price, about almost anything you could imagine.

  According to the law, as I still recall it, words are our fate, perhaps our character, too: they will make us or break us. But the gloomier truth is that the breakage usually happens in an instant, life changing in a single wordless act. The words are the last thing you hear before you slip into the darkness of afterward, mere nails in the coffin.

  RUTH

  BY HER STANDARDS, she believes, the message she leaves this evening on Sam’s cellphone—the only phone he has, its monthly contract paid through his summer-job savings—is unimpeachable in its lack of emotional Velcro: he can bounce right off it if he likes, and never think of getting stuck.

  She does not say: I am looking increasingly like a woman I would give a dollar to on the street.

  Nor: The real reason I play the piano so often and with such desperate zeal at home is not because of my lifelong passion for music but, rather, to rule out the possibility—more and more likely—of conversing aloud with myself, which, as we both know, would be embarrassing.