by John Brandon
Swin drove Johnna’s hooptie to Kentucky. It had been weeks since he’d asked if he could use her car, and finally she didn’t have to work and Kyle didn’t have chores planned and there was no trip to go on and no dead body to deal with and even the weather was pleasant. Swin had told Kyle he was making a trek to a liquidation sale at a huge book and music store somewhere in Alabama, and he’d asked Johnna, if Kyle inquired, to go along with this fib. When Swin returned, he’d say he’d been too late, that the place was already cleaned out. Or he could just buy some books somewhere. You couldn’t have too many.
Swin, steering absently, felt anxious in a hopeful way, a man with a full and cryptic heart. Taking a trip for personal reasons was freeing. Kyle wasn’t there deciding when they would stop and what, if anything, they’d listen to. Swin found a blues station out of Jonesboro and heard a song that went, “Crying is my business, and business is good.”
It took forever to get past Little Rock, but then Memphis and Jackson whipped by and Swin was bearing down on Nashville. He decided to stop for lunch at an upscale Asian place just off the Vanderbilt campus. He saw the medical building and the stadium and a shady spot where he used to sit with a book and watch girls in shorts walk by. It was like he’d only been gone a week. The same banners hung over the same walkways. The same signs were tacked to the same telephone poles. Kids dressed like vampires scuttled from corner to corner. Kids. Kids in ties and hunting hats. Eastern Europeans reading Tennessee Williams. Krishnas. There was twenty-four-hour sushi delivery in little foam coolers embossed with dragons. Laptops. Marxists. Espresso. Swin felt at home and alive in this jumble of ambition, this mess of intent.
He ate grilled duck, enjoying the under-thump of foreign hip-hop, trying to convince himself that the grass was always greener, that if he ever got back to a university, he would get sick of it. Of what, though? He loved it all, and now he was an intruder here. Swin heard a familiar voice. One of his old professors, the guy that had confronted Swin about his gold chains, walked by with a spiffy, middle-aged woman. Swin put his hands in front of his face. He was so jealous, it felt like his ribs were straightening. He couldn’t get up from his table. He ordered tea and prepared it and sniffed it. It tasted bad but Swin was going to drink the whole miniature pot.
He would never be a professor. This knowledge was an old wind that had just grown cold. Now that he’d been out in the world earning money, setting his own schedule, committing felonies, how would he ever fit into a place where you got pissy at copy machines and devised attendance policies? Swin had to get the idea of cushy professorship out of his head. No one would want him. They’d want a token Rican who strove for gold stars, a Rican they could set up next to their token black guy and token Eskimo woman.
Swin felt betrayed by his mind. He put both hands on the table and lowered his face to the steaming tea. If he ever lived in a college town, it would be as a hanger-on, one of those too-old young guys that the students looked at sidelong. Or as a drug dealer. Universities didn’t hire people with diverse backgrounds; they hired people with similar backgrounds who appeared different. They wanted you to have been reading Jung and Plato and Henry James in Trinidad, rather than in Maryland. They wanted accents. It had never occurred to Swin that his life was tragic, but it was. His sadness was a stiff jacket that his mind was racing to shed. His mind was fumbling with the zippers and buttons. He gulped his tea.
He would still write his book. It would be a groundbreaking book. It would include every murder and every drug deal, down to the day and the hour and what the breeze felt like. It would include Bright’s phantom wood-shavings and the boss in pink’s art quotations and Her’s rare disease. Kyle’s moods. Johnna’s tits. There was always a chance Swin could become an authentic genius, one with cult status, one that never goes within a hundred miles of a college, one that hates professors and, mostly for that reason, gets taught in their classes.
Swin watched his oldest sister, Rosa, from a park down the street. She was trimming bushes over at the neighbor’s, a skinny widow who wore running shoes with pantyhose and spent the winters with her niece in Florida. Rosa was a patient trimmer—stepping back often to survey her work and pluck off individual leaves with her fingers. Her hair was pulled under a ball cap and a rag hung from her jeans pocket. Swin slipped up the street, avoiding the eye-line of passing drivers, and cut behind the widow’s house. He stepped right up to Rosa, who froze mid-clip but kept her eyes down. She dropped the shears. Next she was smiling and saying she was doing great and hugging Swin. She smelled like nuts and candy. She was taller. Her skin glowed. Swin struggled to get his bearings. He was in his neighbor’s yard, in his sister’s arms.
“I knew you’d come back,” Rosa said.
“You’re the only one that can know I’m here.”
Rosa reached up and skimmed her palm over Swin’s hair.
“Seriously,” Swin told her.
Rosa’s smile waned. She picked up a thermos and chugged. Swin knew it was grapefruit juice. He hated the stuff, and she didn’t bother offering him any.
“I want to say I’m sorry I made up all those theories,” Swin said. “So you guys would hate the Blond Baron. He’s a good guy, in case you were wondering. Better than our real father.”
“It didn’t work,” said Rosa. “We don’t hate him.”
“I had him checked out.”
“Checked out how?”
“You know, his background.”
“Like on the Internet?”
“Something like that.”
Rosa looked at him. “And?”
“He’s got a couple black marks, but they’re honorable black marks.”
“Was he ever married?”
“Nope. And no other kids.”
“You got all this off the computer?”
“Not all of it.”
“He said he felt like somebody was following him.”
“I guess the guy I hired wasn’t too good.”
Rosa blinked. “Did you have this guy spy on us?”
“Of course not,” Swin said. “No.”
Rosa picked up her shears and led Swin around to the front porch, which had a cloistered garden area that would keep them from sight. She began snipping a shapeless shrub.
“Those are clip-on earrings,” Swin said.
“Can’t get our ears pierced until we move out.”
“You’re seventeen, just get them pierced.”
“Rebellion?” She scrunched her nose. “No thanks.”
“How’s Mom?”
“Down lately.”
“Why?”
Rosa shrugged. “She’s like the stock market. She surges back.”
“I can’t think of her as my mother, but I can’t think of her as a regular person, either.”
“She’s both.”
“She’s like somebody I only know from dreams, somebody it would be creepy to see when I was awake. I don’t feel like we owe each other anything.”
The top of the shrub was taking shape under Rosa’s shears. Swin sat on a wicker lawn chair and voiced his wishes—that Rosa would get all her sisters together and go for ice cream, so he could watch them from a distance.
“Ice cream might work on Lizzie,” Rosa said.
“Well, shopping or... I don’t know.”
“We’ll all be at the track meet tomorrow at Shorn Hills. Rita’s running at four-thirty.”
Rosa was now boring holes in the bush. She worked in silence a few minutes, clipping and extracting stems one by one, then she stood tall and regarded Swin.
“Stealing, right?”
Swin winked.
“Do whatever you want,” she said. “Just don’t start hating everything. The only things Dad liked were salt water and Cuban sandwiches. The only things in the world.”
“I hate an awful lot of stuff.”
“It doesn’t matter if you never get a master’s degree or have a corner office. You can do whatever you want with your own brain.”
“They’re persistent.”
“You can outlast them.”
“If they’re in love with me, I can.”
“They are.”
Rosa had fashioned the bush she’d been trimming into a B. Swin recalled that the widow’s last name was Bunson. The B leaned to one side but was well proportioned. Rosa sat down and told Swin she’d been working on becoming sane. Sanity was a thankless achievement. It was rising above indulgences like stress. One had to avoid meetings, leave phases behind. She was working, in particular, on fickleness. She didn’t want to change her opinion of people because of one isolated act of meanness or ingenuity or haste. She classified Swin as a bursting, elite human, she told him, and wherever his bursting, elite humanity led him, that was where he needed to be.
Shorn Hills was an old high school, a three-story brick building with brown yards. Swin was early for the meet. He strolled the soundless corridors, looking at graduation pictures from the fifties and trophies from a time when white guys in tight shorts ruled the basketball court. Swin was settling into the idea that his sisters didn’t need him, that no matter where he was, there were bad things that could happen to them that he couldn’t stop. It was a privilege, being depended on by a woman. You got more out of it than they did. Johnna was the woman depending on Swin. Johnna was the chance he couldn’t squander, not his sisters. His sisters were out of his hands. He had to view his sisters the way Rosa viewed him. His sisters were bulbs of cheer that would forever glow in the universe, however dark it got, bulbs that would sometimes pass into Swin’s sight and warm him. He was rationalizing, trying not to miss them, but that was okay. His mind was trying to win back his trust, to prove itself an ally.
He made his way upstairs and went into an empty classroom. On the board were vocabulary words that started with the letter A. Stacks of A Separate Peace crowded a low table. Out the window, a view of the athletic fields. This would be Swin’s perch. He paced, watching birds peck around outside, and then he was struck with the relief of a new plan. He needed a manly skill that would allow his mind to idle. He needed a way to make money that would leave his intellect at leisure, that would remove the shadow of looming trouble a life of crime casts. A person never questioned themselves after a day of physical labor. Johnna would respect him if he could provide for her with steadiness, if he came home smudged and bedraggled and complained about taxes. She’d await him with a healthy dinner and an arched back. And Swin’s brain, knowing what was expected of it and having rested all day, would explode into dexterous profundity each night when Swin sat down at his desk. His book would fly along. Before he knew it, he’d be writing about this very day, this day of spying on his sisters at Shorn Hills. Before he knew it, the literary world would beckon, plying him with readings, interviews, panels, awards, and Swin would look at them with pity and decline. Very kind, he’d say, but I believe I’ll stick with welding. Exceedingly flattering, but I’ll not turn my back on shortwave radio. Swin would learn every trade there was to learn. He had to find out how long all this would take and how much it would cost. He had to figure out whether to use his real identity or be Suarez from the park or be an entirely new person. Would he be in unions? Would he be an independent contractor? He didn’t even know which questions to ask.
He watched the first runners arrive and stretch, then perused a map of Kentucky. He pulled the teacher’s chair over to the window and sank himself into it, falling into an agreeable, shallow reverie and passing a good twenty minutes, until the field below was littered with high-schoolers in tank tops. Rita was lining up with two dozen other girls, staring down the track, making a task out of being calm. The girls put one foot forward and the gun sounded. By the pace, Swin could tell it was a distance race. Rita edged to the inside and stuck with the pack, while a tiny girl with buzzed hair took out a lead. Lizzie, Swin’s youngest sister, was helping with refreshments, peeling oranges and filling water cups. Rosa was off by herself, sitting under a tree, speaking into a handheld tape recorder. There was Luz, cheering, and Cory, Rita’s best friend/boyfriend. The runners went out of sight at the far end of the track, then reemerged in the same order. Rita looked like she knew something, like she was waiting for an inevitable sign.
Johnna slid into her Oldsmobile and aimed it at the tanning parlor. Swin had outlawed tanning, but Johnna wasn’t about to get pale right before winter. Winter was the most important time to be tan. Swin didn’t let her get her nails done anymore, either, so now she bit them and they were gross. There were two kinds of nurses—those with nice nails and those with gross nails. Patients noticed. Doctors noticed. It had been refreshing having Swin gone for a couple days. Johnna still had her place, but she only stayed there when Swin and Kyle went on trips. She pulled some peanut brittle out of her purse and sniffed it. Being pregnant had keened her sense of smell. Her lips were plump. Her balance had improved. She gobbled the brittle and popped a handful of chocolate raisins. No matter what Swin thought, she wasn’t going to deprive this baby of sugar. Or a tan mother.
Johnna had quit her church. She knew that when she started to show more, the fat ladies would regard each other solemnly and press her hand with big, frozen smiles on their faces, smiles that meant Johnna needed pity. The skinny sons would pull chairs out, hold doors, make her plate, want to sing for her. The pastor would have a private session with her where he would skip from one idea to the next, describing the importance of family and fellowship and whatnot, and the preacher’s son, that idiot, would probably ask her how it happened. They would all say they wanted to meet Swin, would expect Johnna to recruit him into the church. Furthermore, she had missed the last minute of Razorback football that she ever intended to miss. This church was easy-come and easy-go for her; she’d picked it out of the phone book. After she was through nursing and the baby could understand things, she would find a new church. Maybe she’d find a Catholic church, where the services lasted a set amount of time and involved pretty candles and statues. Catholic folks, she knew, liked to drink. They liked holidays.
At the tanning parlor, Johnna got her card punched and locked herself in a room. She stretched out in the dark chamber. A Taylor Dayne song was tinking away in the speakers. Johnna drifted. A couple times she felt that the buzzer had gone off but it hadn’t. She dreamed she was sitting in a big crowd, at a stadium. It was a Razorback game. The roar in the stands was so constant, it was like silence. The Razorback coaches had gotten the wrong weather report, so their players were wearing galoshes. They weren’t, by rule, allowed to change into cleats. The opposing team wore blue and grinned behind their face masks. They were good sports. They kept giving their condolences about the galoshes and helping the Razorbacks up when they slipped, and this enraged Arkansas’s head coach. He stalked the sidelines, screaming, “This ain’t buddy-ball. That’s the enemy over there.” His assistant coaches chewed things—leather straps or pieces of shingle. It was a sunny, sunny day. The players of the blueclad team, while on the bench, donned sunglasses.
Johnna knew a secret. The Razorback quarterback, the day before, had gone to lunch with some old friend he had from the other team. Johnna couldn’t decide whether to share this information with the coach at the weekly meeting she had with him to discuss the game plan. The coach would go apeshit; he’d choke the quarterback dead. But didn’t the quarterback deserve death? Wasn’t he a traitor?
Wendy, the pink boss, called Kyle and told him she’d be in Little Rock in two days and she needed to see him, that he should expect an envelope the next morning containing instructions of a nonbusiness sort, that she would leave her hotel room door cracked so he could barge in.
Kyle bought a shirt, a green button-down with a pointy collar, and drove to Little Rock. He parked in a pay lot across from Wendy’s hotel, stepped into an elevator, located 631, heard a bath running and a television doctor being blackmai
led. Was he going on a date? It was a bizarre idea, Kyle going on a date. Wendy didn’t have the usual ideas of romance, and that had to be good for Kyle; maybe these meetings could be a recurring thing. He took a couple sharp breaths through his nose, then shoved the door open. Wendy called, “Who is it?” from the bathroom and Kyle said, “You know goddamn well who it is.” He jerked Wendy from her tub of bubbles, leaving the water running, then slid open the closet and threw clothes at her. He told her to quit being a tramp. As she struggled into some underwear and a large sweater, he yelled, “Where is it?” and rifled through her suitcase. Wendy yanked Kyle’s elbow and he slung her into a chair. He threw shoes this way and that, flung a curling iron, dumped a pouch of jewelry. Wendy’s makeup case had many compartments and clasps, like a tackle box. Kyle patiently opened each one, forcing her to watch. He asked if she thought any amount of makeup could help her, then turned the case upside down over the trash can, clattering half the compacts and pencils and bottles onto the floor. Finally, Wendy unplugged the alarm clock and chucked it at Kyle, and he caught it and rested it on the bed. She darted for the door but he got her by the arm and gathered her in and swung her into the bathroom, the tub now overflowing. Her lapses into limpness made this fake-drowning harder than Kyle had imagined it would be. The two of them were slipping and splashing and he began to think of the noise, the other guests, the staff, the police. He loosened his grip. Wendy asked what was wrong. Just like that, they were out of character. She patted his face and told him he’d done fantastic, a lot better than she’d expected. She’d known the drowning would be problematic. She asked Kyle to go downstairs and have a drink while she cleaned up. She’d meet him in the restaurant.
The restaurant was silent, and all who worked there seemed stoned. Bus-boys wandered in the distance, nothing to do, grouping and disbanding. Wendy sat across from Kyle. Her dress was the lightest pink, a shade of white.