Criminals

by Valerie Trueblood

  In the last picture I have, you can see she is heavier, though she stands behind the three tall sons. The arms are plump, the blond hair short. We have all changed, and any of us may change again, although Orlenko, strange sacrifice, will never come to her again in her beauty, nor a secret list extract itself from a torso, nor the Pentagon wheel back up into the sky.

  kisses

  One of the residents kissed Shannon. No one had done that for some time; her husband Garth did not kiss. A staff manual for the retirement village was already in print and it had a paragraph for moments like the one in the Kralls’ living room: inappropriate situation arises, staff member reacts with calm, makes a report. But Shannon was her own supervisor, so there was no one to report it to. And she had returned the kiss, which began in sympathy but held for a beat. When Shannon stepped back Mr. Krall’s eyes were still closed, lids dark as his wife’s eye shadow. He did not look like an old man, he looked like a young man exhausted.

  She had met him days ago but on this day he entered the room with his hand outstretched, so she turned off the vacuum cleaner and shook hands with him. “Not Mr. Krall, no. Ivan.” And did she, with her high cheeks—he swiped his own cheekbone with his thumb, admiringly, she thought—come from central Europe? No? Where did her family originate? How many in the family? So small, no brothers, no sisters! No matter, what did she study in school? And no mathematics? And her parents? Ah, divorce, divorce. And her husband, the young man digging and planting, who was not here in the early weeks? A soldier. And was he from some other country, that he worked so hard?

  And when she was on the porch next door—yesterday morning, was it not?—had she been crying? In the early morning, with the dog. Yet this was not, of course, for him to ask. And yet, her face. . . . For tears swell the lips.

  The Kralls, Ivan and Duška, were the poster couple for a magazine piece about the village and its green ethos, though Shannon had to clean hard before anybody got in there to photograph their lifestyle. She had warned the founders, Mark and Dane. Mark said, “They’ve been here a month, how bad can it be?” About a house once the roof was on, Shannon saw, Mark knew nothing. He might be learning the ropes of construction but he was still a computer guy.

  “‘Green ethos,’” Garth said when he was first home and Mark was showing him around, telling him about the job. “Sounds like an MRE.”

  “Mark doesn’t know what that is,” Shannon said.

  “I do happen to know what that is,” Mark said. “Meals Ready to Eat.”

  In the old days Garth would have made friends with somebody like Mark. With anybody. He would have grinned and said, “Ever eat one?”

  The counters, of a composite Mark said would outsell granite one day, were already hidden under dead plants, egg cartons, books held open with potatoes, cutting boards stacked wet, but the Kralls themselves looked good: a tall, lean, white-haired pair in turtlenecks, Duška with silver rings on her thumbs, Ivan with a voice as deep as Garth’s smoker’s voice and blue eyes wasted on an old man.

  Duška was older than he and had something that affected her motor skills but not her mind. Her name had a little v over the s that made it a “sh.” “You pronounced it wrong,” Shannon told Mark and Dane. “Say Dooshka.” At home she said to Garth, “I get to boss those guys around. Mark and Dane. They like it. Employee input. How you get to, like, consensus.”

  She was supposed to act out showing Duška the cupboards hung so low there was no need for reaching, but first she had to use the sink sprayer to run the dirt of plant roots off Duška’s hands. “This child is an angel,” Duška told the photographer. “Do you see her washing me? Take a picture! My dear, angels are often given this plain beauty that you have. You see? She does not hear. That is the mark of an angel.”

  The photographers kept wanting Shannon in the pictures. When the sun came out they stood her in front of the old truck with its painted sign, “Neat & Green.” They wanted her plaid shirt and the soft broom from the Asian grocery store where she bought Garth’s beer cheap. Her blond ponytail.

  Duška laughed at her apology. “It is you, my child, who will sell the houses for them. Before our eyes, you prepare the home. To Ivan—ah, what a good thing you don’t cook for him, he would be lost. I see you understand this. You understand men.”

  “I do,” said Shannon without surprise. “Some of them.”

  House, barn, silos were gone. You crossed a bridge over a wide stream where the cows would have drunk, and arrived at the farm’s original driveway, where a cow-sized boulder had been set, engraved with the name of the place, “Greenholm.” The stream was waist deep in places, with currents tugging at the willow roots. Here the trees had all been left standing, their limbs brushing the water and already, to the photographers’ satisfaction, littering it with yellow leaves. Sometimes Shannon took her sandwich and sat on the bank with the dog. The first week Garth was back from Afghanistan she had waded in with her shoes on and stood where it was deep and cold, to wash her eyes, but that had disturbed the dog, who splashed in and swam to her and back, and in and back again, and then ran in circles on the bank until she came out.

  Eventually a pool and fitness center would go in, along with an assisted-living compound and a low cedar building devoted to continuing care, with wheelchair paths through the vegetable gardens, but for now the people moving in would be retirees roughly like the Kralls, still active and driving, the founders said.

  Everybody working on the site met regularly with Mark and Dane—guys had to come down off the backhoes and sit with investors—to have their say about the village, or the first two paved circles of what would be a village in a year or two. Only three houses were occupied while the heavy construction was going on: the Kralls, a younger couple who had already driven away in their camper—the guy so frail Shannon didn’t see how he would get the gas cap off—and now two old sisters, the Newells. But if one of them asked a question, or a visitor did, anybody working on the site was expected to know the brochure and answer.

  Green Retirement, the website said. “A way to keep your footprint small when you’re packing it in.” That was Dane, at one of the early meetings. Mark said, “And for saying ‘packing it in,’ there will be a fine.” They were two nice guys who had made a lot of money in software. More than a lot. They rode to work on the bike trail, and one or both of them would make a face when a backhoe fired up, even though Garth said it was all hybrid machinery they had out there, the new diesel electrics.

  While they talked, sitting down, tipping back in their chairs, Shannon thought, the whole thing was going right past them on its own. Mark said, “We’re offering our residents a way they can stay in the fight. They’ve been progressive people.”

  Dane raised his hand. “‘Have been?’”

  He and Mark would admit it was themselves they were thinking of, down the road. They had that quirk of rich people, agreeing ahead of time with whatever you might accuse them of. Shannon knew this from working in a good restaurant, where a woman would say, “I just take forever to make up my mind,” and her husband would say with some pride, “I can attest to that.”

  When Garth first got home she showed him the brochure. “So these guys have no clue. They’re like, ‘Knees bad? Widowed? Here, have an ice cream sandwich!’” His squint made her add, “But they’re OK guys. You’ll like them, I bet.”

  A minute later he jumped up. “My jacket,” he said, because he couldn’t think of where anything was.

  “On the hook,” she said. “Pretty hot out, though.”

  “Ice cream. I’ll go get some.” He was back in fifteen minutes with beer. She didn’t know whether he forgot things or never meant to do them.

  Sod waited on pallets for Garth to unroll it in the main square for the only grass that would require mowing. Solar panels were up, on bungalows sited low so rooflines wouldn’t mar the hills running up to woods they owned as well, said to cover hundreds of acres. Deer wandered out in the evenings to eat the grass, and t
ore out the surveyor’s flags or chewed the salt from a cap left on the seat of a backhoe. They picked their way down into the excavations, where something would spook them back up the sides in sprays of dirt. “Deer will come to fresh dirt,” Mark said.

  Shannon said, “Ha ha, it says so on the deer website?”

  The backhoes started so easily—Garth had shown her—that she said she wondered if a deer could hit something and start one, getting up on the track the way a little buck with antler nubs had done. Or activate the bucket, propped ready to start mouthing lump after lump like an animal that couldn’t actually eat. She was always looking for a subject, now. She didn’t really wonder, she knew about the dead man’s switch so you couldn’t jump off and run over yourself, and Garth didn’t answer anyway, he slapped his cigarette pocket. “Left ’em in the truck.” He went at a run-walk, straight downhill like the deer into and out of the pit instead of around it. When she got to the parking lot there was no one, but the air had the smell of his lighter fluid.

  Going over her business plan with the bank, Shannon had lied. Or not an outright lie, but a certain picture of herself and Garth. The bank guy had a brass paperweight of that dollar-bill eagle with arrows in its claws, so she mentioned the war. “My husband would be at this meeting but he’s still over there because you know, stop-loss.” She could see the guy did not know. She told him how Garth had built a hand-cranked generator in shop, and rebuilt a vintage Sears bike—he would have laughed at the word “vintage”—instead of driving a car. She didn’t say nobody who knew Garth Moran in high school had ever heard him say the word “environment,” and that the bike was to get around on because his dad wouldn’t let him drive the car. To get a car, his brother had quit school and gone to work in a body shop. After hours he worked on a totaled van until he had the money for it, and then he got in and drove away. At first Garth thought it was just a trip. But although he would send Garth money, and call him every week from LA where their mother was, and listen to his despairing arguments for an hour at a time, he would not come back.

  Shannon didn’t say that right after they got married the boss in Lawn and Garden broke a promise to switch Garth to full time, and he walked off the job and enlisted. Walked into the army. Things went fast after that. Before he had his orders his father got him a T-shirt that said “Born to Fight Trained to Kill.” At the pre-deployment picnic his father said, “Guess he’s on his way.”

  “Sure is,” Shannon said.

  “Nothing to stop him,” his father said. He looked like Garth but mean. She had the grill in front of her and she could have messed up his sleeve accidentally with the tongs but she stood there clicking them until he walked away.

  Garth was coming, carrying a tray of bratwurst that he set down on the ground so he could get his arms around her while the smoke stung tears out of her eyes.

  Garth looked good to the bank. The military, the jobs in high school. Knowing how to lay sod and bed stone looked good, she could tell, despite the fact that the man behind the desk spent the whole time studying her, up and down. When she finished talking about Garth he sat back and gave her a grin she recognized. “I’m hearing high-school sweethearts. Kids! But hey, you got married.” She didn’t answer because she knew they weren’t supposed to ask about anything like that. He knew, too, because he wiped the grin off his face and said, “Sounds like a well-put-together plan.”

  “Some old guy,” she told her friends. “Thought you got married so you could have sex.” She still had all her high school friends and they got a laugh out of that.

  A boy born to kiss finds that out the way you might realize you can draw, or do math. His ways come naturally to him. He will not smile first. Sometimes he’ll kiss you without putting his arms around you at all, just holding you at the mouth. You always know he’s not just kissing, he’s kissing you. His face will have a concentration like they get when they’re playing Counter-Strike. She was explaining this to her friends, who were a few steps behind her at that time.

  It was when the new shooter games were first in stores and she complained to her friends at sleepovers because Garth and his brother didn’t own any games, so the two of them were always at some kid’s house when she was looking for Garth. But this look she was describing was his, when they were alone. Think of the movies, where they’re about to kiss and the man looks like he’s ready to dive off a building. Her friends shivered. They all wanted Garth Moran or somebody like him. In the halls his teammates called him The Lover and shoved him against the lockers. He shoved back but not hard. He was easy on everybody and everybody was easy on him. “How did you get like this?” she said.

  “My brother taught me stuff.”

  She was watching him take his shirt off. She said, “I don’t see how he taught you this.”

  “So how did you get like you are?” he said. “Tough. But a little crybaby.” She was as tall as he was and when she played soccer they weighed the same. “My little crybaby.”

  “You better hope your dad don’t hear what you two are up to.”

  Shannon said, “Somebody would have to tell him and they would have to see him to tell him.” Her mother was tired and had a funny little slowed-down shrug that Shannon hated when she was fifteen. People said their hair was the same color but it was not.

  She had hold of the back of a kitchen chair and she knew how to fight it out with her mother, but this time she sat down. The cigarette smell rose from her mother as she sat across the table looking down into her bra, undoing the buttons of her UPS uniform. Shannon leaned forward. For the first time she had the thought of explaining something to her mother: how she loved and would always love Garth Moran. At first it was no more than his back in a white T-shirt, in class. His arms. His eyelashes, mentioned in the yearbook. The feeling changed. Into it came something that slowed her, filled her with a power of her own, like what got into her blood just sitting in the bleachers when he was on the football field, gradually stopped her talking about him to her friends. The knowledge that he gave everybody a chance came into it, that he was generous, that in love his concentration was fierce, yet he was always careful of her. That he was nothing like his dad, wanting to hurt somebody, anybody. He was good.

  She looked for words for this love, an enclosure like a tent, with space for two lying down. But the words for the place, the love, did not come, and her mother got up and went to get out of her uniform.

  “I have a name for you.” Duška pronounced some long word in her language. “For the golden hair.”

  In the rubber band Shannon’s hair was thicker than a wrist, streaked with tan and cream. Horse colors, Garth had said, winding it on his arm. Palomino.

  “What are you thinking about?” she would say, in the days when she could ask him anything. “My palomino,” he said. Once in the afternoon. He rolled over on his back to show himself to her. That’s all we thought about, she recalled in wonder.

  A box with five black puppies in it. Her soccer coach said anybody could have one who could get a parent’s signed note that it would be neutered. Shannon ran to find Garth; she beckoned him out of practice and he got the last one. This was their junior year, when he had no job because of football. He tore off his gear, wrapped the puppy in his jacket, and nestled it in the bike rack. It was his for a week, but he couldn’t pay for the vet or the canned food he planned to feed it and his dad didn’t believe in neutering dogs anyway and made him give it back.

  His dad did that kind of thing all the time, but he got a pass from Garth. When Garth was a married man about to deploy he was still trying to find some inside track with his dad, sharpening his mower for him or hauling his old couch away in a borrowed truck. The first thing Shannon did with her business loan was buy a truck, a rusted Ford F-250, full of chaff and spiders from sitting in a barn.

  Her mother had warned her. “Look out for the dad.”

  “I know that,” Shannon said. “Garth’s the opposite of that.”

  “Where’s the mom ag
ain?”

  “LA. She has a whole nother family.”

  “She left those boys. . . .” Her mother sighed.

  “Yeah and they were little, too. He wouldn’t let her have them.”

  “Left them with him. She must have been something.”

  “I guess. But there must have been something good about her because look at Garth. He didn’t get it from his dad.”

  “Left her boys,” her mother said again.

  “Hey, you kicked Dad out.”

  “I did. I know that. I’m sorry.” That was the most her mother would say on the subject. To herself Shannon said, I would never give up the way you did. Never.

  He would come home to a dog. Nothing was going to get in the way of it this time. At the shelter they talked her out of a puppy and into a full-grown dog, a tan Lab mix with short legs and a dark, expectant face. Her name was Zena, and on the way to work every day she sat motionless beside Shannon, watching the road like a driving instructor. With her tan worried eyebrows she was nothing like the glossy black pup, tumbling and squealing, that had been Garth’s for a week. When Shannon ran a floor buffer this dog would sleep through the noise.

  On the site she stayed just ahead of Shannon, often looking back at her, and did not have to be leashed. The first time Shannon took her out in the evening when the deer were out she stiffened but did not chase them. She seemed to operate under rules from somewhere. Maybe she had started out to be a guide dog. Somebody had named her and trained her. Who would have taken such a dog to the pound?

  “Knock knock. Mind if I join you?” Mark stepped over the batts of hemp insulation and sat down in the sawdust where Shannon was leaning on a stud eating her lunch. “That’s the perfect dog.” Zena panted as she looked steadily away from Shannon’s ham sandwich. “Did you train her?”

  “She came trained. She’s super trained.” A lot of the time Shannon thought Mark was coming on to her. Mark didn’t seem to realize it himself; he had a girlfriend from his software days and Shannon had met her.