“Sure.”
“What kind of book?”
“Novel,” said Gus.
“And you . . . that would be you, you wrote it?”
Gus looked down at the tablecloth. It was hot in the apartment, and Benilda’s big lids, silver with sweat from being in the kitchen, lifted to Gus a look so patient and intimate that Wally knew she knew the story of what had happened to his poem. He took hold of the table edge. “Just kidding.”
Gus said, “Nope, you’re serious.”
“Aaah, man, no I’m not. I’m not serious. Hey, listen. My hat’s off. My hand’s out.”
“Thanks. Thank you.”
“What’s the title?”
“Strike.”
“It’s about bowling?”
“It’s about the general strike. Seattle. 1919. You know. More or less about that. Hard to say what it’s about.”
“It’s about brothers,” Benilda said.
“Strike,” Wally said in a tone of wonder. Something stirred in him and he knew it would come out if he chose to allow that. “The general strike.” He stood up from the table and crossed the room at a dignified pace. Benilda had opened the window to the fire escape where they had a big potted fern. He was pretty sure a plant on a fire escape was against the law. He pushed the window up and without making the decision to do so he climbed out. There was room for him out there with the plant but he stepped on its tray of gravel. Whatever he did next made the big clay pot turn over and dump out a lot of dirt on the good shoes he was wearing. “Jesus!” he yelled, kicking the dirt before finding he could sweep it through the grating with his foot. “Hey!” He waved a branch broken off the fern. “Got a view out here. I can see my car.” Far below was his rental, small and white, not the model he had specified. “Come on out!”
“Hey, man, don’t be out there.” Gus reached and got him by the arm. Wally pulled the arm free and let it swing back, hitting Gus at the jawbone. At that he saw what was meant by “fire in the eyes.” Saw what a fifth grader might see if he made Gus Horn mad. “Look, buddy,” Gus said with a teacher’s quietness.
“Buddy!” Wally swung again, this time missing Gus with his loose fist and whacking the window frame. From that position, crouched and cradling his hand, he could see Benilda start for the window, but Gus moved her aside by the shoulders, saying in the same classroom voice, weary and stern, “Por favor.” Wally put his fists up and this time Gus came after him.
Next there was a little boy standing in the room in dinosaur pajamas, watching them get Wally up off the floor and stretch him on the couch. The boy said, “Are you OK, Daddy?”
“We’re all OK,” Gus said. He knelt down in front of his son. “Mr. Stover had a fall. Not out there, just here on the floor. That was the noise you heard. He’s going to sleep here. But honey, you know what I told you, mi cariño? You never get out on that. You never get out there.”
“Nunca,” Benilda said, kneeling too, both of them speaking to the child with an intensity that suggested they were alone with him.
Wally was on the couch with his head back when Benilda came in with a pillow and blanket in her arms. He sat up; he wasn’t sure how long he might have been sitting there. “Oh, no you don’t,” he said, without getting up. “No.” He patted the arm of the couch with a sore hand. Gus. Gus had done to him whatever was hurting his shoulders. He had been on the floor and that would be because Gus had thrown him there. Of exactly what had been said or done immediately before or after that he could not be certain. He could see himself in the tiled mirror, waving his hand back and forth to say no, in a manner he would have made comical if he had been telling somebody the story. “No, no, you think I’m gonna just bed down on your new couch?”
Benilda made a gesture of serene dismissal of the couch they must have just bought with Gus’s advance. If a novel about brothers in Seattle could have commanded an advance.
He put his head back and tried to picture Gus’s little brothers. The times he saw them they had been doing homework or watching football. High school kids. One played football. He was bigger than Gus but ready to do what Gus asked of him—bring in the chips and salsa, give up the armchair, move his feet. The other . . . wasn’t he a lot younger, maybe not smart? Three boys with a mother in the hospital. Where was the father? Gus was little more than a boy then himself. What did he even look like? What made the editor—sports editor, was it?—what made somebody go and pull Gus Horn out of the mailroom?
Now he had a blanket over him and a fat, hard pillow. The blanket had a cord dangling, not plugged in because the big couch occupied the middle of the room like a lap pool. Didn’t these people know an electric blanket put you in an electrical field all night? He opened his eyes. “Hey,” he said to Gus, who was in the room. “That kid. That kid you have is like the kid, remember, in that movie? Perfect kid, played piano, flew a plane?”
Gus said, “Yeah, he turned out to be a robot.” He was in his pajamas.
“I mean, the kid’s polite. You don’t see a kid like that around.” Why did he keep saying “kid,” a word that grated when his colleagues said it? “My kids.” In the courtroom you said “child.” “The child is harmed.” “Best interests of the child.”
“Sure you do.”
“I know guys—their kids are monsters. Right there in the house with them, right in the car. And they don’t even notice.”
“Who’s that?”
“Nobody you know. Nobody from the paper. Those guys, wherever the hell they got to . . .”
“I hear from Kovalek. Hear from Janine.”
“Are you kidding me, Janine? DARYL. That was the movie. Acronym.”
“My brother loved that movie.”
“Your brother—what was his name?”
“His name was Joe.”
“Pardon me, I meant”—Wally got his head up off the pillow—“what is his name.”
“He died.”
“He died?” Wally tried to remember the brother. Not the football player. The young one. Something about him. Slow. “Jeez, that’s—I dunno, man, sorry to hear that. When did that happen? How—?”
“His condition.”
Little slouching guy who never had anything to say. Wally’s memory would not supply a face, though he could see the room, the TV with a game on, hear the beat of the soundtrack behind the news that kept flashing on with the six clips at a time they put up in those days, the red and orange logos. And himself. There he was. In the house with its smell of smoke and hotdogs, he, Wally, a man as he thought, was standing, yelling over the TV to Gus about the coming war. His poem still to come.
lightning
When Mary Beth’s uncle Cart got his draft notice he went north by bus and got off in Canada, where for two years he wrote Mary Beth every week. Some of the problems he went into in his letters were women, about whom she wrote back, “Don’t tell me that stuff, just say why you got arrested.” Still, he didn’t really go crazy until he had been home a month—facing charges because the war was nowhere near over—and had the accident. He ran over a kid on a bicycle. It was not his fault; the boy was riding fast downhill on the shoulder, and for no reason that anyone could establish, veered left into the road. Cart heard the bike crunch and felt the tire heave up into the wheel well.
For everybody in the family except his mother, Mary Beth’s grandmother, this was the end of the belief that while Cart might not seem cut out for a normal life, like most people he would eventually live one anyway. No one else from any family in the county had left for Canada. Coming back after two years, he had found his past waiting for him, a sheaf of papers recording truancies and scrapes, errors of judgment leading to misdemeanors and some minor felonies such as intimidation with a registered firearm, and charges of Interference with Marriage—the very things that had led the average person in town to think the army was just the right place for him.
But a change had come. He had lost the attitude that had cast him as the hero of these episodes, and althoug
h the ruling was that he was not at fault in the boy’s death, he had a breakdown. He lay in his room staring, he didn’t change his clothes or get in the car or chase women, and after weeks of this his sister, Mary Beth’s mother, found a rope coiled under his bed. From the hospital he wrote letters to Mary Beth in crayon because they wouldn’t give them pens or pencils. “They want to jolt me back a ways. Maybe back to the water tank.” That was a memory between them. He had agreed, as an of-age patient, to a course of electroshock.
“We will think of it as beneficial lightning,” Mary Beth’s grandmother said. The notion came from a tattered little volume she had on her shelf, Smith’s First Book in Geography, in which lightning served to cool and purify the air, as every piece of nature had a share in lending happiness to man. “Q. With what animals do rivers and most other waters abound? A. With fish for the benefit of man.” Years ago her grandmother had read the book aloud to them, even though they had modern schoolbooks and the Weekly Reader and she was modern in her own reading and respected at the library for it, a farmer’s wife.
“I hope those people up there can explain beneficial lightning to me,” said Mary Beth’s father, in the light tone he took with his mother-in-law. He had tried a case involving electroshock. But she was Cart’s mother and as someone not well herself, she made a point of going along with the doctors, while her son-in-law made a point of not arguing with her past a certain point.
Everyone in the house, which now belonged to him and to her daughter, gave in to her as they always had. Until Cart came along years after her other four, the rules of her household had always stood, and she had not changed her ways for a late and wayward child. The rules were a mixture of strict and careless, but if one of her children committed an offense she was always practical, and did not look beyond the immediate occasion of it.
Once she was widowed and her daughter and son-in-law had come back home to stay, she turned over the reins of the farm to them and she let Cart fall more or less into their family. She continued to live there, fading from cancer in her sixties but making ready to die young in the same way she had readied herself to give birth old, and showing her lingering preference for Cart only by asking over the course of one feverish week when he would be coming home from the hospital, and rasping to her daughter and granddaughter, “Watch out for him, now.”
When Cart got out of the hospital he was twenty-one. Mary Beth was nineteen, a junior in college. By then she was safe from him, from her old subjection to the eyes half-hidden by the slant of his high cheekbones, her adoration. And his in return, as she learned, at a time when an attraction between an uncle and a niece, whatever their ages, would be thrown into a great locker of unnamed things.
But she had grown up, she had a boyfriend at home and another at school, and Cart was crazy.
Not long after he came home he took her brothers’ bikes, which they hardly rode any more because they were in high school and both of them drove, and he wheeled both bikes, at night, to the cliff above the old gravel quarry secured with chain-link fence and padlocks, and dropped them into the pool of clay at the bottom.
“Cart, you’d done just as well to take them to the dump,” Mary Beth’s mother said when the man who had bought the quarry land called her. Cart allowed her, as his sister, some latitude with advice and even reproach.
How did the owner know the bikes belonged to their family? He wouldn’t say. Probably Cart was seen. He was known in the area, though he hardly ever went out. Anybody on the road that late would have noticed a man wheeling two bicycles in the dark.
“No reason to ride a bike.” That was Cart’s answer in the flat voice he had adopted, perhaps to let them know he was now separate from them with their noisy family ways.
Mary Beth’s mother treated him like the little brother he was, but without any patronizing; always with him she was logical and unalarmed, and that seemed to help. Cart was redheaded, and looking at him run his anxious hands through his dull uncombed hair she must have remembered, as Mary Beth did, the bright, coppery charm that had always spun off him when he was a boy. “Well, Cart, it was good of you to think of the boys,” she said. It was odd how she did this, talking to him as a grown man who was at the same time a child. “Of keeping them safe. But anymore, they drive.”
Mary Beth was sitting with her boyfriend Trey on the porch swing. When everybody went in he said, “What’s that I heard about you and old Cart?”
“I don’t know what you heard.” She didn’t know which of her brothers would have said it, or even known it.
“Heard you fooled around.”
“Well, I’d have to say we did.”
“Guess you were a hot little number.” He knew this anyway.
“It wasn’t that. He was my prince.”
Trey was going to run his dad’s beef operation one day and had no desire to go to college. He didn’t read books and he let Mary Beth’s remarks pass by him like the mosquitoes that didn’t light on his tanned skin. He lived in a state of equilibrium. He was waiting for her, though.
“It was different for us,” she said, to give herself, her child self, an air of mystery. “It was love.”
“Sure it was.” He pulled her against him without bothering to grin. “What do you say we take a ride?” he said, as if it were a new idea, and they drove out to a farm near his where the kudzu had taken down some of the buildings. Two machine sheds and a chicken run and a little house with a side porch were all being dragged to earth by big heart-shaped leaves blue-green and stirring, as if they had just come out at nightfall. The house was a tenant house, in a corner of a parcel that the tenant had stopped bothering with when the farmer’s sons moved away and the farmer got old in his house and didn’t come around in his truck any more to check on things. If you forget a tractor for long enough, kudzu can take it and grip it so that even if you poison the vines brown and leafless, you can see the machine inside bound like a fly you could never unwrap.
This little place bordered the quarry where Cart had taken the bicycles. He must have wheeled them a good half hour just to get there.
Her mother said Cart was not a bad boy but one who had always found himself in trouble. He took pleasure in trouble. Nothing corrupt or ugly: he never deliberately hurt man, woman, child, or animal. But he was a danger to himself and others. He ran a tractor too fast. He messed up two fingers with firecrackers. When he had a car of his own he souped it up, putting a V-8 in the rusted-out Falcon he rolled on the way to a dance. That time he got out unhurt. Fortunately the girl he was taking to the dance wasn’t on the seat beside him, she was on the porch at her house waiting for him to get there. Chrissy Campbell. Her daddy never let her go out with him after that.
Mary Beth knew Chrissy Campbell, knew how she went on longing to sit in that little Falcon with Cart, and how in fact if he called her she would go out to meet him even after she became the banker’s girlfriend.
Cart smoked and drank and drag-raced, and he broke into abandoned farmhouses and places where the owners were on vacation, and explored, and took things out the window with him. Stole. Nothing of much value. Year by year he refused to reform, or stay away from girls and women, or organize himself to apply to college. This was all before he went to Canada instead of to the war. Then he ran over the boy and went crazy, if indeed he had not been half crazy all along.
Mary Beth held Trey close and said when she came back from school next time, they would see. Already knew she was leaving him behind, with his sweet breath and his unruffled sigh and hard hay-making arms. When they sat up they saw Cart. He was crossing the top of the field. He had developed the arm-swinging, bounding walk that she recognized from the city where she was in school, where you saw it on schizophrenics and junkies.
At home he paid no attention to her, though he would look in when he passed the door of her room.
“Where’s he off to?” Trey said, tucking in his shirt. It was hot and late.
“I don’t know. He pretty much stays i
n the house. Mom and Dad don’t think he leaves, other than the night with the bikes. They sure don’t know he comes out here.”
“Is he really nuts?” Trey was used to Cart at the dinner table, silent, eyes on his plate unless they suddenly grabbed onto you like a hand from under the bed. A scarred hand, two fingers mauled by the firecracker.
“He’s damaged,” Mary Beth said, sounding not like herself but like girls she knew at school. “He’s better since he got back from the treatment but it didn’t get him over the accident.” That was better, being what her mother said.
“That’d be how long ago now?”
“A while. But somebody died.”
“Can’t get over you, neither.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“He looks at you. At us. Uncle Cart. Pretty sad guy.”
Trey and his father and brothers had a cabinet full of valuable rifles and shotguns. Every farm did. He was a crack shot at target practice and he went out in deer season, but Mary Beth happened to know he never shot anything. That was something even his own father never brought up. No one would have dared accuse Trey of not wanting to hunt.
Only years later would Mary Beth start to think about Trey in Vietnam. She would wonder what the worst thing was. Was it worse to kill deliberately when you didn’t want to?
Or was it worse to kill someone deliberately when you were hot-headed and barely knew any better, as Chrissy Campbell would try to later, when she shot her lover’s wife? Her lover was the banker and she, Chrissy, was head teller by then. She still flirted with Cart if he went into the bank, even though she knew he was crazy. He did go in because Mary Beth’s mother kept a small account for him there, so he could get a haircut or a Coke in town until he had work. She trusted him not to get beer, with its strong effect on him.
Or was it the worst thing to kill somebody totally by accident, as Cart had done? Why had that particular one of the three ways of killing been the one to make someone go crazy, someone who had done things all his life of a reckless nature, unlike a girl who would love first Cart and then the banker and then both, or a boy like Trey who was ordinary and sensible and did what the army told him because he had respect, and lost his life?
Criminals Page 13