Criminals

by Valerie Trueblood

  “Some will,” Wells said.

  “I’m sorry Cham got into it. Sorry she hit you. I didn’t see that coming. But Cham had children.” Angie had a vision of Cham running into flames, while soldiers went about some awful business. “Cham lost everything.” She tried to think of some reparation that could be made when someone had lost everything. There was nothing. After all the marching and chanting from that war, there was nothing. What must they look like, all of them, to Cham? And she had worried that Cham didn’t like her. Didn’t like her. “Cham lost everything,” she said again. “But she still takes care of her skin. She oils her face every night when she goes to bed. That’s a good sign.”

  “Got herself an altar in there, just like back home in Saigon. Incense sticks, oranges, the whole works.”

  “Except not Saigon. She’s Cambodian. You’re telling me you went into her room?”

  “I opened a couple doors. Went by the john the first time. This place is a hotel.” Clearly he had figured out it wasn’t Angie’s place. “Lucky she can’t swing, no arm on her. Anyway, the kid went after me, if you noticed. I let him off. I’m not going to beat up on a kid. I’ll keep ’em away from her highness, though, I’ll do my job. These kids can smell money.”

  “I don’t think it’s money he’s after. And you just quit your job.”

  “If I had it after tonight. But you’d be surprised. Pappas knows the score. He’s onto that little gal. Last time she run off she went clear to Bellingham on the bus. Met this fella there and they went to the doctor, if you know what I mean.”

  “Ah,” Angie said.

  “I know stuff he don’t want to know, her dad. He can forget about watching that one, he’s running the company but she’s running the show.”

  “They grow up,” Angie said sagely.

  “Thirteen, fourteen—everything works. All systems go.” He sat forward. “Uh-oh.”

  Angie followed his eyes. Erika was on the metal bridge and she was naked. With her arms outstretched and hands flat against the air she was treading slowly backward, holding the frieze of girls who followed her at bay. Meghan came first, soothing her, “Come on now, Rika, come on,” but Erika was climbing onto the metal banister. When she got herself positioned she hooked her ankles and rocked.

  Kirby Wells had the shawl whipped from Angie’s legs and Jonah was out in the open staring up, knees bent, curved lips caught under his teeth as if he were going to shoot a basket. Ha! Angie thought, kicking to get her legs off the couch. See that? You’ll find out! It’s way more complicated than you think, with your fists and your kisses.

  “You don’ know!” Erika croaked. “How do you know? We were too going to Alaska! I was going. We were gonna see the Northern Lights!” She righted herself, grasped the rail with both hands. “I wanna, I wanna go!” She teetered on the rail. “We were too going!”

  Angie got to the stairs but Wells was already at the top. With a heave, the way lumbermen threw bagged sawdust, he had Erika off the rail. “My dad!” Erika howled. “He’s in Alaska! Get off me! And Jonah’s! He’s there. His real dad! You don’ know! Tell ’em, Jonah! Jonah!”

  Tamiko, holding her own cheeks in her hands like a flowerpot, leaned over the rail and raised her melodious voice. “Grandmother! Grandmother! She took pills!”

  “What pills?” Wells had Erika wound tight in the shawl. “Spell it!”

  “X-A-N-A-X. Two pills! From her mom’s room! And—she drank wine, a lot of wine,” Tamiko quavered as an afterthought. “It spilled all over her nightgown.”

  “How many pills? Get ’em!” With a knot of tassels, Wells doubled Erika over in the shawl while he stuck what looked like his whole forearm into her mouth. Obediently she retched, groaned, and vomited a stream that dropped in pink flags through the grate. Wells shook off his fingers and plunged them back in. “We got pills in this mess?” he snarled down to Angie. “Don’t just stand there. Look.”

  “I don’t see . . .”

  “Get down and look. Two pills? Is that it?” He shook Erika, who flopped against him. “Answer me! That’s all?”

  “Tha’ss—all.” Erika came to herself enough to hide her face in his jacket.

  Tamiko was back with the pill bottle. “Here it is! I know it was two, I swear, I saw.”

  “Thanks. You’re good, you can apply for my job.” He called down to Angie, “She’s all right, better than she looks. Two of those won’t slow you down much. It’s the wine.” Another girl began to retch. “That’s nothing. Copycat. They’ve all had a few too many, though, the little turkeys. Except this one here, the smart one.” Tamiko stepped back, offended. “Don’t worry,” Wells called to Angie, “I did a couple years on the rescue squad.”

  Angie held on to the metal. Where was Cham? But Cham was shut away in the room with the altar. Cham had taken her at her word. I won’t let anything happen, she had said. She wouldn’t let Cham down; she would clean up the mess before Cham got a look at it. Then she thought, Pat’s going to try to get the whole story out of me. All of it. Then she thought, if my heart stops now I’ll get my chest ripped open by Kirby Wells of the rescue squad.

  “Can’t tell you what-all I shook outa kids,” Wells said sleepily.

  The girls were up. It was too late to go back to bed, it was frank morning and they were taking showers. Three of them were going back and forth along the walkway in a special, created quiet, carrying soft piles of enough towels for twenty bathers, coming down to get lotions out of their bags to offer Erika, who was showering for the second time. Meghan they softly cajoled through a closed door. “OK, here’s the thing, you two have to make up. She will if you will.”

  A feeling of aloneness came over Angie, like the silence when a vacuum cleaner is turned off. Her legs were cold. The room, too, felt cold, and bare as the hall of a castle. One of the old castles. Not the newer ones, as she had seen for herself in Europe, taking the tour Pat had sent her on before Bill Diehl, but the small ruins, maybe from the Middle Ages—she had not held onto her brochures—that stood in the middle of nowhere with thick broken walls. The ones where women must have lived, with children if they were lucky, and few arrivals. Each one a kind of kingdom. A kingdom without a king, no matter how they gazed from the roof and waited, most of the time. The men would be out raiding.

  Not any more, Pat would say.

  Angie leaned back. “Did you ever hear the term ‘pumphead’?” she asked Wells.

  “Nope. Something to do with a bong?”

  “Ha. It refers to somebody who was on the heart pump.”

  He was trying unsuccessfully to stick on the Band-Aid she had brought for his bitten hand. “You,” he said. Glancing into the open neck of her robe he zipped his thumb down his chest.

  “Give me that,” Angie said. “Better see somebody for that. She broke the skin.”

  “You’re a bossy lady.”

  “No, I’m not, actually.”

  “Lucky she got this one—see? Not my chord hand.”

  Funny how chord, the word chord, still went through Angie. She didn’t listen to music. Her records slumped on the shelf; she had never even bought a CD. She had turned her back on music, outsmarting the traps laid by the past. Doing this gave her a stubborn satisfaction, a feeling of concealment, as though from a hiding place she could see people from those crowded days of travel and music and sleeping together but they could not see her.

  Up and down the rungs went the girls’ bare springing feet, their rings on the metal rails making a cross between a rasp and a chime. They took care not to wake Jonah, who sprawled on the couch in the computer alcove, flat morning light on his smooth ribs and tiny nipples and scabs, although they had peered at him long enough to memorize his openmouthed, frowning, half-slain condition and relay it to the two upstairs. They smelled of shampoo; they had pulled their hair back into rubber bands; their eyes shone.

  Angie’s eyelids were sore and she let them droop. She was not going to offer explanations to Pat. And Cham wouldn’t either,
she felt sure. There was Pat’s Xanax, after all. The Xanax had to be absorbing something. Cham must know about that. Maybe Cham looked after Pat that way, kept things from her, mothered her. Even though Pat had a mother. It was her father who had gone staggering away from her with his arm hooked over Angie’s shoulders. “We’ll be back,” Angie had called to the neighbor, who hoisted the child up and made her wave. But Angie had come back alone.

  The boy would still be in the house when Pat got home. That, Angie would let Erika account for. Erika would know what to leave out. She might not have any notion, anyway—if she had any memory of it—of what had possessed her to parade like that with her clothes off. Or maybe she would. Maybe Erika had worked out, already, that although it might appear otherwise, some things might never be hers. Or they might come to her not by any right but only by being gambled for up to her limit. More power to her, if she did. More power to her. Only don’t give up, Angie thought. Don’t give up. I saw you. And indeed, before she thought of a fall onto stone floor, or of pills, or that she was the one in charge of a granddaughter, all she had seen was a girl on a bridge, tall and naked and beautiful.

  One night on the deck of the cruise ship, with Bill Diehl seasick below, she had felt a pause like that, at the wakeless speed the ship maintained in a narrow bay. She had been watching the sky turn a bold calm purple with the steep land outlined against it. She remembered the rail growing warm in her hands as the color in the sky deepened. Not for years had she been in this state, but she knew it right away. It wasn’t weakness or age. It was something first made known to her at the timber carnival when she was a girl.

  The thin new boy. The boy stubbed out his cigarette carefully to save it, and picked up his guitar, while she sat on cedar logs beside a bonfire and looked at him, suspended. And then . . . and then hardly any time later the doctor came in and told her the boy, now a man with caved-in cheeks, unconscious on a hospital bed, might or might not go on living.

  She had been looking at Rudy’s face, with its parched, invalid’s beauty, all day. It was time to go to the neighbor’s and pick up the baby—they called their little girl the baby, though she was four years old—but Angie just sat there rocking back and forth in the chair. The last time Rudy’s eyes had opened they had stuck open for several minutes. Fever had burned off their expression. Her feeling was not even happiness at the news that he might not die, he might live. It was pure rocking, like a kitten swung in a cat’s teeth. It was not conditional. He didn’t live. It was in this sensation, and her surrender when it came, she thought, watching Kirby Wells as he began to snore, that she knew the girl who had sat on the logs was herself. She knew the girl, and the girl knew her. The boy sat down. His guitar gave out a bass, private note as he propped it. The girl went on looking into the fire and into her life, the life on the way to her. Lives, she knew now. A relay of lives. But the one who caught up with her was herself, passing on the same heart every time.

  the ivy field

  It was Mary Catherine Ott. Below the woman’s white bangs when she turned were the unmistakable eyes of the Otts. She was tall and wore a scarf around the padded shoulders of her coat, an expensive coat. “Mary Catherine?” I said. She put on a willing smile. Who was I? “It’s Karen,” I said.

  “Karen!” she sang back, in the only tone possible, but after a pause, “Karen Lund!”

  We wondered at the thirty-some years. I had stayed in Seattle but she had lived all over the place. We each had two children. As for her brothers and sisters, all was well. Although there had been divorces. “James?” I said.

  “Oh, no, not James, he’s been married forever. He’s in Spokane. He’s a vet, he always loved dogs. He walks fine, he runs.” James had had polio. “His wife is a lawyer.” A lawyer. A woman in a suit, walking with James . . . this I pictured so vividly, down to the sandy hair on James’s arms, that as I saw it I realized, as you sometimes do when you’re surprised like this, that the men with whom I had involved myself and twice even married had all had sandy hair and calm saddish natures like James’s and had deserved kindness and it was too late to repair what I had done.

  “What about Annie?” I said. Annie was married and had four children. Clark too, Clark, the never-toilet-trained, had four children. Natalie and Owen had had some of the divorces.

  Mary Catherine did not put herself on either list, nor did I. “The divorces were very hard on our mother,” she said. “You know how no one divorced in their day. But she got through it, and she’s going strong. She still lives in the same house!”

  Audrey. Audrey Ott. I heard my mother’s voice say it. Sycamore tree and sagging screened porch flew up before me. And the ivy field. I did not say to her, What about your father?

  She had not asked me about my own family—my parents or my sister Laura—but suddenly she said, “Did you ever learn to ride a bike?”

  “Me?” I didn’t think it was possible she had said that. “No, no. That was Laura. That wasn’t me. It was Laura who couldn’t ride a bike.”

  “Oh, yes, right, Laura.”

  “And the baby?” I said. “The baby who was born after we moved?”

  “Paulette. So you moved away before that? How do you remember all this?” Did she, Mary Catherine, not remember?

  “Does Paulette have four children, too?” Once I had said this I didn’t like the tone, but it didn’t seem to bother Mary Catherine.

  “Oh, they’ve had no luck.” We were outside the store, saying good-bye. I thought of getting her phone number. On the phone I would have been able to find things out without asking. When did anyone have to ask Mary Catherine? But she was saying very little, really. She mostly smiled, and held her leather purse strap with that musing patience, as if she had always been this tall, solid woman, well-off and settled in her mind, and bore no relation to the little girl who had striven with all those sisters and brothers in the noise of that grimy dark house, the girl who had longed to live in ours instead.

  Her lined face had not gone soft in middle age but had taken on breadth and tightness, under the big staining freckles of her mother Audrey. A face oddly reminiscent of both parents. But attractive. Even striking, with the white hair. Certain eyes will do that, carry everything. I wished I had brushed my hair to give it height, and put on some lipstick. I wished I could produce out of myself something extra, some force of existence, to keep Mary Catherine from marveling on the way home, To think! To think I admired Karen Lund, to think I yearned to be part of her family instead of mine! Yearned to be her!

  After our good-byes it developed that our cars were parked in the same lot, so we walked on together for two blocks in the cold spring air. It was then she thought to ask about my parents. “They’re both living,” I said. “Doing fine.”

  “My father died ten years ago,” she said, and tears filled her eyes. That was when she looked at me for the first time as if she remembered me, knew me. She gave me a keen, prolonged look, as if she saw me think, I bet he killed himself. Little changes in the muscles of her face turned it almost mean. “His diabetes killed him,” she said.

  All the way home I thought of my mother and her sadness. I thought of Susie, my father’s wife, saying on their last visit, “Your mother could have married again!” And my father, shaking his head with authority but speaking a bit wearily as he does now that his wife’s energy has come to surpass his own, saying, “Not her. She never could. Not Billie, no, she does a thing once.” He offers this comfort to his younger self. Still, Susie can see no obstacle to my mother’s marrying, even now. “She’s ageless,” she will say generously. “If she’d just smile,” she’ll say, with her touching belief that it was losing my father that gave my mother the sober air we all know her to possess.

  Susie is very like my father. She has nothing against my mother, having been married to him years longer than my mother was, and wishes her the happiness she wishes everyone.

  Soon after they moved in, Laura and I concluded in our pride that six Ott kids did not
add up to any more than the two of us. You could climb the sycamore in our yard, crawl out over the driveway and look squarely into the bedroom where the boys slept and played and fought and were once in a great while—there were hardly any rules in their house to be broken—punished by being kept upstairs. On those nights the punished one, white face with the wide-set Ott eyes, would blindly look out the window, seeming, if indeed he knew we might be there, not to see us in the branches.

  The three girls were not punished. This was not such an unusual practice in families then, at the end of the fifties.

  Laura and I hoped to see the boys undressing and sometimes we did. But it was disappointing: bony legs and loose underpants like the clothespin bag and nothing more. There were shoes and clothes and bedcovers all over the floor, with the dog scrambling in and out of them. We could not see into the girls’ bedroom across the hall. But we didn’t need to, Mary Catherine was always at our house, in our bedroom. It was taken for granted that we would play there. She even spied in the tree with us. Her fat little sister Annie, who was in Laura’s grade but was going to have to take a test for dumbbells, according to Mary Catherine, was allowed upstairs with us at our mother’s insistence. But Annie’s contributions to our games, and her possessions in the dim no-closet room she shared with Mary Catherine, had no importance.

  Our kitchen window looked out on a hummock of dirt that never grew grass, called by our father the termite mound, and the rusted screen of the Otts’ back porch, their clothesline, their woodpile with chair legs in it. In her own family, our mother had been the one to keep things tidy for the drunken neglectful parents who were the old, unbathed grandparents fifty miles away. We never saw them, though our phone rang very early one morning while it was still dark, and my mother gave groans that woke us up, and soon we saw their coffins. At two AM, leaving the Stop Inn at closing time, they drove onto the highway and up under a semi. Tractor trailers, we called them then.