Criminals

by Valerie Trueblood

  “I’m not giving them anything except bread. Bread with accompaniments.” But he had made the bread. There were men like this in Seattle still.

  In the mornings his room was filled with dusty sunbeams, and when she lay trying not to wake up all the way she could feel sawdust in the sheets. Though he did not have to, Michael shared the house, like most people on his street, in his part of town just across the freeway from the university. Several houses on his street were starting to receive new roofs and paint and to have their deep porches, which had been converted to front bedrooms, opened back up. He was taking part in all this, happily but with a certain fixedness, as if he had to invent the methods of renovation.

  His housemates were away bicycling for the weekend. She had stood beside him to wave them off yesterday morning, with their bikes locked in frames on top of their van, two kids even younger than he, in those shiny black skintight pants everybody wore now to bike in, with small helmets and goggles, and tight mesh sleeveless T-shirts. They had shown her their slim packs of dried food. “Well, have fun,” they said together, and smiled at the couple on the porch being left alone in the house, new lovers, seemingly. They were sincere, wishing Michael well, the one with his coppery beard and the other blond and open-faced. They were so direct, like Michael, that looking into their eyes Jean thought, I must stop lying all the time and just tell the truth, just say . . . nothing. That is the truth. Nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing.

  Why do I pretend to be nice? she thought, shaking their strong hands. I had friends of my own and they let me be. Why am I standing here with friends of his, as if I were nobody? Because I’m nobody, she replied to herself, nobody and nothing. But she didn’t mean it. She was something. Something high up and loosely put together, like a cliff nest of debris and bones and shed, hollow feathers.

  Why would he have put his arms around a person like that when the car broke down?

  They had met when her car stopped on the freeway. It was late at night, raining, after she finally went to see a movie. Her first in seven months. Coming out into the parking lot in the rain she could not have said what movie had played, but her head was aching with chagrin at all the color, the woman’s careless babbling, the foolishness, the man’s inconsequentiality, the failure of anyone to account for the emotions being enacted. Children are born because of characters like you, she thought, born and made to live and made to go through whatever happens to them because you—you—

  With a pounding in her head she drove onto the freeway.

  The timing belt, Michael said later. The car just sank to a stop. She was a good driver; she had time to realize what was happening, change lanes, steer onto the narrow shoulder against the wall of the on-ramp, all before it came to a stop, like a top spinning its last and falling on its side. The rain droned on, the windshield wipers had not stopped. Of all the possible passers down the freeway at midnight—the murderer, the guy strung out on drugs who would force her to let him into her house where he would torture her—the man who walked into the red of her taillights with his arms out from his body to show no ill intent was Michael.

  He came into her rearview mirror as a shape, outlined in rain by his own headlights.

  While she was explaining, she let him get into the car out of the rain, because he was short. I’m taller, she thought, probably stronger. He can’t hurt me. Though when she sagged against him she felt the muscles, like small sandbags.

  His pleasantness in response to her tight voice explaining that she had never had any car trouble brought on one of the bad episodes. She cried for fifteen minutes. My son is dead! she said repeatedly, shouting almost, in the shut car. He was ten years old! Ten! And he, turned in his seat facing her with his arm on the dashboard, had drawn a black 10 with his finger on the fogged windshield. There was traffic, cars passing so close they shook hers with a whump. So this is hysteria, she thought. It was exactly like being drunk, the impossible load of wrath coming up from somewhere, the operatic gestures with hands on slimy face. And I, she whispered coldly, raising her head, when she got herself stopped, I was at the wheel.

  Did he say, What happened? No, he must have said very little, but mysteriously conveyed his nonresistance to being told. Finally he put his arms around her. He was a hard, small man like a jockey. She accepted his offer of coffee at the International House of Pancakes.

  On down the freeway to the University District he drove in his loud van, where in the dashboard lights she saw a pointed face with something impassive in it, abstracted, despite all the drama of her crying, which still seemed to echo around them. She looked into the back. No seats. Rope, boards, a gasoline can. He could tie me up and set fire to me, she thought, or lug me down the bank to the lake and roll me in. She looked again. No, there were bags of tied newspapers, bags of flattened cans. Recycling. Not a killer.

  He said, “Don’t worry, I’m not a killer.”

  She entered the House of Pancakes furtively, surprising even herself with the sight of her face, gnarled like a mop, in the dark glass of the door. But it didn’t matter, because, blessedly, nothing mattered. It was the first time in months that these disfiguring tears had soothed her. She was released from all matters, in the steaming room with its brown and orange blinds half down like weary eyelids over the rivers of drips on the windows.

  They sat down. He did not say anything sympathetic but explained again what he thought had happened to the car. Then he went to call the police, and later when she reached for the check he covered her hand with his.

  “What is with you?” she heard herself say. “Are you a pervert?”

  “Am I what?” he said softly, as if asking their joined hands.

  “I mean, do you like suffering middle-aged hags?”

  “Some,” he said with a dignified smile.

  Two of his friends were lawyers, Jean knew that, but most of them had nothing to do with his work; he had friends all over the city who sought him out. Why? Because of his unusual good nature? She ought to listen to the friends, look them in the eye, stop making statements. Of course he had told them about her, and they were prepared to like her. The fresh-faced Lisa, like a diligent little girl, was trying to appreciate everything she said from the perspective Lisa assumed her to have, of a bereaved person.

  The sun shone, the birds in the weedy forsythia along the fence had begun a liquid chatter. This was a Sunday afternoon in life. And she was here. Whereas he, her son . . . had become a soul. The soul did not follow her when she went out, but stayed where it was. Where? If anyone tried to pin her down she could not say. But somewhere in the house. It might be in search of her, because on a Sunday, until recently, she had always been there. Looking for her, in its trapped, groggy, spirit way, in its insistent delaying in the world of things, each move it made for her sake, each wrench out of stillness having, she knew, pain in it beyond anything his years could have prepared him for. She saw it, his soul, not as vapor or smoke, not ghost, but more like something pulled in strands through an underwater lattice, a net, and the strands trying to reunite, and unable to, and pulsing, pulsing to her, through the element that held them back.

  She must go home. It was that feeling, still familiar all these years after his babyhood, of a period of time like a length of rope, which, when you got to the end of it, pulled you. You had to be back in that one room, reach into the crib and draw up to you the bounty, the bounty of his requirements.

  But she was here in a sunny back yard, with people treating her in a friendly way. She had no wish to know them. Yet no saving antipathy was coming to her, of the sort that had yanked her out of her seat at concerts when she first tried to listen to music—how was it she had never realized how she hated the jerking, sanctimonious concentration of chamber musicians?—and driven her to slam herself into booths where she had her rite of pressing herself against the wall and fixing her eyes on a white toilet until it became an unknown thing, a circle in a dark haze. She thought of her ex-husband at those times with sinc
ere feeling, hating everyone but him. He, too, might be somewhere hiding in a booth.

  But now, this much later, she was denied the ecstatic ill will that had been hers, like a dance she had made up. It failed her. Without that fury in her she had to sit and talk like a normal person, like anybody.

  The chuckling Steve and the other woman, the dark-haired one whose name she had forgotten, had fallen silent after Lisa said in a thrilled voice, “Listen, the birds!” The dark woman closed her eyes and threw back her head. They didn’t care that the tiny gray birds had just been chased away by starlings, or that the starlings produced a song like the opening and shutting of scissors.

  “So how’s your book coming?” Michael said to Steve. That jolted her. This silly boy, writing a book?

  “It’s getting there. It will actually appear on earth next March.” Steve turned to Jean with his little idling-motor laugh and laid his hand on his chest. “My firstborn,” he said, and as her being, her whole scalded being leapt in the air, she saw his eyes cloud and his smooth skin darken to the forehead with fright at having said that to her. Firstborn. She shut her lips and detached her eyes from his—even his lids had gone red—with a smile she knew was bizarre, humble.

  Lisa said, “Oh my God, congratulations!” Jean got her breath and re-met Steve’s half-shut eyes. She was willing to speak, but nothing came. Lisa said, “Now, it’s about the jails?”

  “About the parole system. How disorganized it is. Nothing having the desired effect. And—and so on and so on, all my deep thoughts on the subject. My master’s thesis. Expanded.”

  “Well, you should know these things,” Lisa said sweetly.

  “Maybe,” said the other woman. “But it all boils down to somebody’s whim, who gets out and who doesn’t.”

  “That’s his point,” said Lisa.

  “You guys, you DAs, I don’t know,” the other woman said sleepily. “Bet you would have been public defenders in the eighties.” Jean looked at her for the first time, thinking maybe she and Steve were lovers, and at the same time, for reasons she could not pin down, feeling sure all of a sudden that the girl beside her, Lisa, had been Michael’s lover. Buttering bread with the same detached expression, the dark woman addressed herself to Jean. “His thesis won a prize, when it came out as an article.”

  Jean fixed an expression on her own face of readiness to hear about the parole system. Finally, when no one else took charge Steve leaned over and said to her, “I’m a parole officer. Juvenile.”

  “He’s a cop,” the woman said. So the lawyer was Lisa.

  Maybe Jean could bring up Michael’s remodeling. What . . . what was involved in stenciling a wood floor? But she could not find the energy to ask, and she turned to Michael and let him put his firm, small hand on hers. This softened the atmosphere, and the four friends resumed the conversation, excusing her from it.

  After a long time, during which she fell by degrees into a familiar unthinking state, Michael said, “Listen, we’ll have to call it a day. Jean has to get back.”

  “I do,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should have gone sooner. But don’t you leave, Michael, I’m fine. Please stay, don’t leave your guests.”

  “Guests.” Steve started up his laugh.

  Michael said, “You don’t have your car here.” Lisa and the other woman and Steve stood up, as obliging as the housemates. Even now giving Jean latitude to be remote, or perhaps rude: was it rude to call them guests? Customs changed between generations. Things became funny. Things became stupid that had been normal. Her son had taught her that.

  “But come in for a minute and see the upstairs. And take a look at this sander,” Michael said. “It’s a tractor.” Steve and the dark woman stood up—she settled against him while she pulled her shoes on, so they were a couple—and followed Michael up the ramp into the house. Lisa stayed behind.

  Lisa said, “I guess you must not like to drive now.”

  Personal. This girl, Jean felt it, had definitely been involved with Michael, and now she was his friend, a switch people he knew seemed to make without a lot of fuss. Now she wanted to be friendly and personal with Jean, cross the distance between the old girlfriend and the new, as well as the established chasm between the afflicted and the unscathed. Although Jean knew, she knew now, that people would always surprise you, most of them would have gone through something or other and not be intact themselves. It was a mistake to think the average person had absorbed no great blow, just because of smiles, the pushing of grocery carts, the driving of cars, remarriage. It was always a surprise, terrible, not kind, that this thing happened, this growth of membrane over a raw opening, and that the membrane thickened, the rawness grew more and more opaque, and slowly vanished, so that you couldn’t tell by looking that a membrane was there, and then it really was not there, it was the skin itself, and the person would be proud of that. “It was bad for a while,” the person would say. “You think it will never end.”

  All right. Suppose you ceased to judge what you had done, your speed and steering, your being on the road at all, with your son strapped beside you in the hopeless indenture of childhood, unable to say don’t take me, not tonight, don’t take me. Suppose you began to see it as something unavoidable. He with ten years’ life in him and no more. Yourself giving birth, at his birth, to this night in which he is to be hurt unto death.

  No, it must not sink into the thread of some hellish tapestry woven in aged, excusing greens and blacks. No, there must be repayment.

  Yes. It must never end.

  She knew she did not want to hear whatever it was Lisa might want to reveal about her own misfortunes. “I never liked driving,” she told the girl curtly.

  Michael had told them the details, she knew. It was a story they might have read in the papers. Jean knew people here and there might mention it even now, whether they had ever heard of her and her son or the other victims or not, especially on the peninsula where it happened, where some evil destiny had laid down a road, as if a road could simply be mined out of dark forest, and be traveled, black with rain, by weekenders driving to trailheads and campgrounds, forgetting the road was the den of machines of such weight, such speed—logging trucks with their tall prongs up when they were going in empty and down when they were coming out loaded with logs the circumference of their tires. And so it was not farfetched that a logging truck should appear on a curve, sliding sideways, drifting, with the illusion of slowness, on broad wings of spray, and lose its load. Hit its air brakes hard enough to heave the top logs off and torpedo the oncoming cars. The farfetched thing was that some few should open their eyes in the wet, black New World of the next minute: the truck driver, a teenager from a full station wagon. Jean.

  Lisa began, “I only mention it because . . .”

  “It’s all right,” Jean said, looking up and beginning the rueful smile that said the past, for all its confounding injury, was the past. “Michael has helped.” You had to soothe people. It was the opposite of the popular idea that people did not want to remind you or to be reminded themselves. They did want to talk to you, touch you as Lisa was doing now, hand on her arm, and thereby touch the thing that had happened to you.

  “I know you’ve done a lot for him. But nothing seems to convince him. He won’t accept comfort. I guess that’s it. I don’t mean to butt in, but I’m so worried about him.”

  “About Michael?”

  “He’s leading such a hopeless life.”

  Michael came out onto the ramp. “Lisa, they’re going to leave without you.”

  “I’m coming,” Lisa said. She scooped jam onto her bread and turned. “Good-bye, Jean. I hope—we’ll talk again, I hope.”

  When Michael came back, Jean considered him, his lean face with the symmetrical features that should have been handsome. But something was not in them. After a while she said slowly, “Tell me about your life.”

  “My life. Great. What did Lisa say?”

  “She said you’re leading such a hopeless life.�
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  “Oh, she did? A hopeless life.”

  “I don’t think it’s fair, if that’s true, that you haven’t said anything about the hopelessness of your life.”

  “Wait a second. Do I look hopeless?”

  “Don’t just blow it off.”

  He studied her. “She means my past,” he said, and shrugged.

  “All right.”

  “So I don’t have to tell you.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  He put his hand on the table beside hers so his fingernails fit into the grooves of the wood. “I killed my father.”

  Jean did not move, but after a while she said, “I thought you said you weren’t a killer.”

  “I am, though. So what do you think of me now?”

  “Did you murder him?”

  “Ah. She’s quick. She asks the question.”

  “That must mean no.”

  “I didn’t murder him if you mean first-degree murder. Premeditation. Or second-degree murder. Intent. No. I killed him, though.”

  “I wish you would just say what happened.”

  “It’s a story I prefer not to go into.”

  “But lots of people know it.”

  “Some people. Some friends.”

  “Like Lisa. I bet she’s more than a friend. But not me. All right. Why don’t you take me home.”

  “I thought you wanted to talk.” He took her hand from the table and opened it with his small, hard fingers. “Here’s the story,” he said, flattening her hand palm up on the table and holding it down with his fist. “I was wrestling my father and I had him down. We did that a lot. He liked to do it. Build me up. Because I was small. Premature. The size of a kitten. See?” He threw his shoulders back. “We had been wrestling for a long time, in the basement where my mom made us go. We had a mat. She didn’t like it, because he was big. A big, muscular guy. And me—right? We got into one of those sessions where you just keep on and on. Longer than usual. I wouldn’t stop. I had him down, I was not going to let him up. He let out a groan and I kept on. And by the time I stopped, right? and I decided to let go of him, let him up, by that time—he had died.” He took his fist off her hand. The muscles of his lips had formed a slit smile. “First question, ‘Of what?’ Answer, ‘Cardiac arrest.’”