Criminals

by Valerie Trueblood

  She questioned her mother about whether a sister was the person to watch over Cart any more. Whether he might need to be where there were professionals to steady him.

  Something unexpected happened. He met a woman. He didn’t really meet her; she was the big sister of Chrissy Campbell, who was serving her time for shooting the banker’s wife, who had almost died. That it was a crime of passion had shortened the sentence. The sister taught English at the high school and Cart had seen her around for years. He met her again when he visited Chrissy. Maureen Campbell. She took him out afterward and gave him a talking to, the kind his sister had been the only one allowed to sit him down for.

  He told Mary Beth what Maureen Campbell had said. “Told me I’m acting like I’m crazy and I’m not crazy.”

  But you are, Mary Beth said in her heart. Aloud she said, “How come you went and saw Chrissy?”

  “She asked me to.”

  “You do what some girl asks you.”

  He gave her the slanted look. “Some.”

  “Not me.”

  “What’d you ask me?”

  She couldn’t say, you said you would always love me.

  “You know what?” Cart said. “She’s not ashamed. Maureen. She acts like Chrissy just did what a lot of people would in the situation. She’ll sit in intake with people the Campbells wouldn’a ever spoken to. Mostly it’s men, visiting wives. It’s a side of life you never would feature. The women in jail, the men the ones who behave.”

  “So you’re the only non-husband.”

  *

  He began to go out with Maureen. In a year they were planning a wedding. Mary Beth said, “You better watch yourself or Chrissy might shoot you when she comes out. Or shoot Maureen.”

  “Nope, right there in the jail she blessed Maureen.”

  “Were you there?”

  “Course I was.”

  It hurt Mary Beth that he said this. The wedding hurt her. On the day of it and for days afterward, scenes from it kept landing hot and spitting on a kind of inner skin she didn’t know she had. Maureen Campbell in her dress saying, “Now I’m your aunt.” Thinking back on the wedding Mary Beth almost wished she was the crazy one so she could have made a scene the way the movies had people do when they gave a toast at the reception, usually but not always women, the way a woman never would in real life. She thought of what she would say. There are things Cart doesn’t remember. They shocked it out of him. To the groom. She raises her glass. You don’t remember. That’s how you are.

  A year later they were all talking about Trey. “You let him go to war,” Cart said with his new judiciousness.

  “What do you mean? I did not.”

  “You coulda stopped him.”

  “What are you talking about, Cartwright? Uncle Cartwright.”

  “You. You just allot a certain amount to one fellow and a certain amount to the next,” he said, raising his beer. Maureen had changed all the rules; she turned a blind eye on beer.

  “That’s a cruel thing to say.” There were other people on the porch or Mary Beth would have cried.

  “Now, kids,” said Mary Beth’s mother.

  It was the word “allot” that crystallized the second stage of her love. Where did he get that word? No school, little reading. Yet in him there was the word “allot.” She was filled with shame. He had looked at her and said that word to himself, in judgment. If he was not crazy, if he could say “allot,” why could they not have gone on and on forever as they had begun?

  Cart was saved in Maureen’s church and he managed the big Campbell farm that became Maureen’s. Worst, for Mary Beth, he completed his domestication, the steps of alteration she will not call a metamorphosis, by having a family. There are two children, she knows, a girl and a boy, the boy with copper hair and a look in his eye. In the photographs they send her in Boston, he could be Cart.

  It was said that at the sight of her Uncle Cart, the baby Mary Beth would run up to him and with a precocious sidelong glance drop her chewed-on cracker into his palm.

  For years they played the play of children and they went beyond it. Cart was sent away to camp, something no one in that part of Virginia did with children at the time, when his mother discovered him with Mary Beth in the cattle trough. Mary Beth saw no reason to consider that this boy was her uncle. He was a boy, a particularly lithe and swift, funny and cruel boy.

  They were sitting in their underpants in the round concrete tank, having combed out the drools of algae with their fingers. The cows had been shut in along the creek and had not used the tank in months, but several hills away Cart’s father, Mary Beth’s grandfather, shouting to his herd, alive as anybody and having no thought of dropping dead later in the summer, had opened a gate and tolled them through to the back of the farm. Following the lead cow over the ridge and down to the water tank came a hundred Herefords, including the bull, as bulging and sleek as the hippos in the zoo in Washington where Mary Beth’s father had moved his family so that he could try his hand with a big law firm. The cows were fat with grazing in her grandfather’s famous clover, the mixed Lespedeza and Big English Red of which he was so proud.

  Mary Beth had been lying in the clover with Cart when they decided to get into the tank. As they lowered themselves into the water, a purple cloud had unrolled overhead, so heavy it looked as if could sink onto the woods.

  “Watch out for that bug,” Cart said. There was a big black beetle drinking at one of the puddles on the rim of the trough.

  “I’m not scared of a bug,” she said.

  “I mean don’t squash it.”

  She giggled.

  “I mean it,” Cart said. “Don’t hurt it.”

  “You mean it,” she said, reaching for him under the water.

  When she comes to think of it, he never hurt her, whatever was said of him. She was only a little younger. He never hurt anything except the boy he ran over, and himself with his mistakes. With the herd surrounding them she didn’t want to get out of the water. Cart had climbed in and out several times to show her there was no danger, but she was timid; the bull was near; four years away had turned her into a city child. It was the summer they were moving back to Virginia, where her father would settle down again in an office in the county courthouse and they would all, as her mother said, breathe a sigh of relief.

  For Mary Beth and Cart it was the summer before the seventh grade. He had failed, as they all said then, the seventh grade. There was no such thing as “held back.” He was tall for his age, and showing the family’s heavy lids and high cheeks in a way that gave the family, though they were only Irish, a foreign, commanding look, traceable in portraits to Mary Beth’s great-grandmother. This was her mother’s, and Cart’s, own grandmother, who had died during her first childbirth while her husband was fighting World War I. “My mother grew up an orphan,” Mary Beth’s mother always said, causing Mary Beth and her brothers a shudder—though they never saw the tragic person, the orphan, when they got out of the car and ran into the arms of their grandmother.

  Mary Beth’s mother, too, had the eyes, and they were part of her authority. Mary Beth did not have them. They made Cart look older than he was. He did not look like a child at all and in fact was not one, as Mary Beth knew by this time. The feeling she had about him in this summer of coming back was the strongest she had yet had for another person. It was new to her that there could be a person who had no say over you but ruled you anyway, even made you go in fear of him, and yet sometimes gave up everything and let you rule him.

  Over the hill her grandmother came striding. “Here comes Mama,” he said. They remembered they had been out all day. They saw her before they heard her faint voice. When she scanned the field and spied them at the bottom she pointed at the sky, which was a purple-toned gray across its whole expanse, pressing down on the one strip of bright afternoon light still left, like a stripe around a bowl, close above the fence buried in honeysuckle, and the woods behind, with thick arms of poison oak around the tree
s. They had had a run-in, both of them, with poison oak in the woods that summer.

  “Better git out,” Cart said. “Right quick.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause it’s going to rain. Going to lighten.” He said “goan-latten.” Living in Washington DC her family had lost some of the talk.

  “Lightning?” she said, pleased with the progress she was making at having him see the absurdity of the way he talked.

  “What I said.” There is a pleasant “say-id” used for “said” in that county. She knows now it is pleasant; then it was laughable, because she had gone away and been seduced into another way of talking.

  “She’s coming down to make us go in, I just know it. Why can’t we sit here while it rains. Come on.”

  “Come on, y’self, and git out. These ole cows don’t care.” He was out, sleek and wet, and the cows lowered their heads and crowded backward getting away from him.

  By then his mother was near enough for them to see her face, and Mary Beth became aware that she had stripped down to get into the tank and would have to stand there in her underpants as her grandmother approached, unless Cart snatched up their shorts and T-shirts, there on the grass being nuzzled by the wet sandpapery lip-nose of a cow. The cows’ sides were bulging with the calves Cart told her they were going to have in the fall. Her grandfather liked to bring his calves through a winter young, so they would be tough. The bull stood farthest away, not curious like the cows but watching sideways.

  “Cahhht-wright,” called the voice of her grandmother. “Y’all come right now before it lets loose. Pick up this minute.”

  Mary Beth still sat in the water and Cart stood, while the clouds got darker. They had nothing to say and neither of them knew why they were angry and sad, unless it was that the cows had been too timid to come in and drink while they sat there—the same ones that took feed from the hand of the man who didn’t care about the angry tears his son Cart could shed when their yearling calves were pushed into the squeeze chute and up the ramp to the stock sale. They had waited, they had pretended not to be thirsty, they had stood swinging their heads back at flies while two humans sat in their water tank.

  The lightning came on, lighting the ridge, and then a long growl of thunder. Cart helped Mary Beth climb out, and yes, his mother was right, they were more than children. She was not looking at her granddaughter, she was looking at this son of hers. Unspeaking, she looked all the while they climbed the hill, though he did not glance at her, but only at Mary Beth who kept turning until she couldn’t see the tank any more in the field where all three could read the downward course of their love.

  aiken

  Bridget’s parents had taken somebody from the soup kitchen home with them and installed him in their house as a tenant. A sure sign that the days of their independence were coming to a close.

  Her brother Kieran, who saw them more often, called to tell her. “So now they’ve got this guy, what do they know about him, a guy who mooches off eighty-year-olds?” He paused. “Bridget? Are you listening?”

  “Oh, sorry, I was looking at the rain. There’s a river in the street.” At the window in her nightgown, Bridget rubbed her eyes. She had gone back to bed after Nat left early for a weekend of hiking, even though the radio said rain was sweeping fifty miles inland all up and down the coast. Now it was skidding along the street in wide V-shaped ripples that made her building, from the window, seem to be riding steadily forward.

  Kieran sighed. “I mean, of course, are you free to come up here?”

  If she opened the window and hurled the flat staticky little phone out, away it would skim on its back—unless it snagged in the whirlpool over the storm drain—calling shrilly, while she shut the window and got back under the covers and reentered the dream Kieran had interrupted. She had been wading through a campground, under pine trees, pulling her feet up out of tree sap as she went. She was looking for somebody. One of those exhausting dreams in which a reason for the grief is not made clear.

  “Eighty-year-olds!” her brother said again as if Bridget had denied their parents’ age, or perhaps caused it.

  No, Kieran said, he would not describe the tenant. Bridget would see for herself. The guy was going away for a few days, and while Bridget was driving up from Portland—she did think she could leave? Nat wouldn’t mind? Or was he off “on assignment?” (this was Kieran’s phrase for Nat’s self-assigned efforts to write things that would sell)—Kieran would leave his family for the day and take their parents out so that Bridget could have a look at the house while they were out. They had to make a trip to the dentist anyway. The new one. It had been like pulling teeth to find a dentist who worked weekends—and then the only one who did was a woman—so that Kieran could go along to keep track of the two of them. Make sure they didn’t stagger out full of nitrous and get behind the wheel. That was how they were now.

  Aiken, the man’s name was. Something Aiken, the kind of man people called by his last name. In a very short time Aiken had taken over, hauled things down to the cellar, made the house his own. Not her room? Not her Santana poster, framed by her father with strips of molding, not her frilled lamp and the rug she had hooked in Camp Fire Girls? No, Kieran’s room, not hers. Hers had not been touched.

  “You read about guys like this, drifters.”

  Drifters. Murder. That was the unspoken word.

  She had driven half the day from Portland. In Tacoma the blowing rain had thinned to a drizzle, and by the time she reached the north end of Seattle everything stood out in that clear afternoon light that came in the wake of rain, with vapor streaming up off roofs and tree trunks.

  It was warm for February. Under the dripping trees her mother’s bulbs already showed green tips. Bridget was tired and sweaty from gripping the wheel but she did not go in right away. Key in hand she walked a wide path around the empty house, like a prowler.

  In the back, beneath the pines and firs that had dwarfed the house long before the big places came in on either side of it, she came across a patch of the biggest toadstools she had ever seen. She knelt down. The one she touched had unexpectedly firm suede flesh. A dozen or so of the orangey-fawn things were standing up in the dappled shade, eerily straight as if holding still, one or two with pine needles dangling from their heads. She was glad she hadn’t stepped on them. It would have been like mowing down a proud group from a spaceship, with no idea yet of creatures bigger than themselves.

  When she raised her head she was looking into an eye. An animal eye. Catching herself with one hand in the wet pine needles she saw the wire hutch, and the long form of a rabbit pressed against the wire not looking at her, or not seeming to, though the eye must have taken her in. The eye was half-closed, the ears lay flat on the scruffy, gray-brown coat.

  “Hello.” She spoke to it because a human silent and crouched might threaten an animal in a cage. It didn’t move. So. This Aiken had a pet, a sickly-looking rabbit. What was the disease you caught from rabbits? Or maybe it was starving. No, a feeder and a water bottle were clamped to the wire, and darkened lettuce lay in a corner. On the ground beneath the wire floor was a loose pyramid of round black droppings.

  She stood up, dizzy from squatting by the toadstools in a kind of half-witted suspense, and surveyed the yard. Her parents’ house sat some way down from the tall firs in a clearing at the edge of a little lake. When the north end of the city was deep countryside this had been someone’s weekend cottage. Her parents had moved into it when the store began to lose business, when Bridget was still in grade school. It had a front porch big enough for two people to stand on and a drainpipe that still ended in a rain barrel, from the days before the house had plumbing. A metal cup had hung there, out of which she and Kieran had scooped sharp-tasting rainwater to drink, but that was gone. Now on both sides rose the big places built of cedar shake and glass, with steep angles to their roofs.

  What would a man in his thirties be doing here, in walking distance of no shopping or activity, boarding
with old people like her parents? Yet Aiken was not a client of the soup kitchen where they had met him, but a volunteer. Bridget remembered all about that—the thin boundary between the clients and the volunteers, some of them. On Sundays her parents still drove into the city to the old parish, to work on the hot meal served after Mass. Bridget, too, had volunteered there during high school, looking for excuses to get out of it.

  Her parents’ car was neatly parked in the carport. No truck. Aiken drove a panel truck for a carpet store, parking it up under the fir trees, her brother said, so that he could get in the back and smoke dope. He climbed in and out at all hours, and came into the house with a smile on his face even when Kieran was there to smell the smoke on him. And he was getting into trouble of some kind. On one of Kieran’s visits he had a closed, seeping black eye.

  Murder.

  According to their parents, Kieran said, Aiken was beaten up from time to time because he drove a truck and didn’t belong to the Teamsters. It did not surprise her that her parents had come up with this explanation. In his store her father had been removed from the notion of unions, except for the occasional drivers making deliveries in the big rigs, and although through the church her parents had sided with Cesar Chavez, they had not given up selling grapes, or eating them, or drinking the wine that spread a bloom on the fine-grained soft cheeks they both had, Irish cheeks.

  But she could not really blame her parents, sealed as they had always been, even before they were old, in an irreversible blameless ignorance. Her high school friends thought their own younger, more suspicious, angrier mothers and fathers knew nothing, but Bridget could have told them those parents knew a thousand things that could never intrude upon her own.

  She might have blamed her parents, if they had ever thought themselves in the right, if they had ever found fault. If they had not been orphans. But her father had his lifelong diffidence, and her mother, put out to relatives in the blessed country running a Catholic for president in 1928—her mother did not presume then or later to judge the affairs of the country where she had presented herself at thirteen in her moth-eaten cape to be fed and clothed.