Chickenshit.
As if he’d reached the end of thought and need go no further, he arrived without warning at the main gate, draped with its national and city flags, lights still blazing even though no one but himself was there to see them.
A little mist was seeping in through the ancient gate. The car park too was illuminated with a grid of overhead lights, a doleful concrete island in the ground fog. It was nearly empty except for a couple of older wrecks that looked as if they lived there and, in its own marked square, his rented Fiat.
Ryan approached it, tried the driver’s door, which was open. The keys were on the floor mat. He got in and engaged the ignition. It started right up.
Had he been mistaken before, had the car been there all along? Or had someone taken it for a joyride and then returned it? He put the car in gear and started off, with exemplary caution, on the road back to the villa. He guessed he’d never know. He guessed it didn’t matter, and he was the beneficiary of a small piece of dumb luck, accent on dumb.
• • •
They took more pictures, they bought the last of their souvenirs, they packed and tidied and made arrangements for their travel and it had been a great trip, a success in all the ways they had imagined. They were glad to have attempted it and now they would be glad to have it behind them. It was a beautiful country in so many respects, but they’d had enough of being foreigners.
The car was packed and Ryan made a last circuit of the rooms to make certain that important items had not been forgotten. The wet towels from the children’s last swim spread out to dry on the terrace, the money for the maids set out on the kitchen table. The beds stripped, the linens gathered into bundles. Satisfied, he crossed the tiled floor to the front door, passed through and locked it from the outside.
The sound of the car’s engine faded. Little by little, silence regained the rooms. The sun rose higher and the morning light grew and trembled, almost liquid, like a drop of honey on the lip of a jar.
By design, Ryan and Ellen had left behind them for future tenants some paperback books and a few magazines, added to the pile in the main room. Neither of them had found much entertainment in the available selections. Although if Ryan had paid real attention to one of the high-end magazines, he would have been struck by a particular name in the table of contents. Understandably, he’d only glanced at it. It wasn’t the sort of thing he read, those serious, artsy productions with their daunting pages, and besides, the god of coincidences couldn’t be expected to attend to everything.
SPRING, 1975
Long ago, on a far road
A hundred blackbirds perched.
They were young, they loved the day with song.
We were young too, uncertain of our real
natures. Were we free to fly,
like blackbirds? Was that pretense? Would our road
take us back and back again, to our real and
far from airborne selves? We loved
to think we were the road itself,
and blackbirds sang their far and farther
songs to lead us into love. Was any of it
real, or were we simply young?
In that far spring our road
found its real end. We did not know enough
to say how much was pride, careless,
like the blackbird, love just one more song
when so many might be sung. My road
was the blackbird’s wing, yours was the bird’s real
nature. I never got better at love.
You went too far and vanished into air.
Were you? Was I? Too late to know. We were so
young. Ah, love, the blackbirds at least were real.
Iowa
DECEMBER 2000
Friday morning. Squalls of light snow blew up and down the length of Main Street, twisting like a curtain come loose. Chip Tesman looked out from the first floor of the old bank building, watching the snow ride the wind. He guessed it was going to keep up the rest of the day like this, pissy little stuff. He still didn’t have any use for snow.
The great state of Iowa, celebrated for its agriculture, commerce, and industry. Land of the good neighbor and the firm handshake. Cold enough for you? Hot enough for you? Weather was one thing you were allowed to complain about. Sturdy, cheerful, hardworking folks. Soul of generosity. Salt of the earth. They looked at him cross-eyed. What had he expected, the key to the city? He’d never wanted to be back here.
Chip left the shop by the side door, not bothering to lock up, and climbed the stairs to Torrie’s place. She was playing some of her old Dylan music and he had to knock pretty loud.
“Holy Bob,” Chip said, once she let him in. “I’m gonna get you some new tunes.”
“I like this one.” Torrie tilted her chin to smile at him.
“Yeah, I figured that out. You coming with me?” Torrie shook her head. “Come on, a little expedition. Don’t you get tired of the four walls?”
She shook her head again and Chip knew it was time to stop asking. He turned to the huge windows and watched this new view of the snow, as if it was a drive-in movie, a movie about snow. The movie would go on all day and night sometimes. Where else was there snow? Lots of places he’d been. Bits and pieces of them. They spooled out behind his eyes. Then he was noplace.
“Chip?”
He turned away from the window, crisp, smiling. “Right.”
“Careful driving.”
“Yes, extracareful, I promise. If I don’t get back tonight? It doesn’t mean anything bad happened. Just that I didn’t make it back.”
He probably shouldn’t have said that about not coming back. Now she was giving him this stricken look.
“You have to quit worrying about stuff all the time.”
“I’m don’t.”
“Seriously, cut it out. Why won’t you come with me? What if Dylan never toured again after his motorycle accident?” She wanted to laugh at that but she wouldn’t let herself. “I got it. You should take some skydiving lessons, jump out of a few planes. Face your fears.”
“Dumbass,” she said affectionately.
“Hey, I like your hair these days.” She’d grown it out just past her shoulders and it looked like she might be putting some blond stuff on it to hide the gray.
She touched the hair above her ear. “It’s just hair.”
“Now who’s a dumbass.”
The plain honest truth was, he’d never thought Torrie’s face or anything else about her was so bad. Maybe if you didn’t see somebody for, what, twenty-odd years, all their growing-up time, you didn’t have some big expectation of how they should look anyway. When he first got back, he saw how everybody fluttered around, making a big deal out of not making a big deal, waiting for him to have some kind of horrified reaction. And he just couldn’t come up with one. Torrie looked sort of cracked, but he’d seen worse. It wasn’t like he was any beauty queen himself.
Sure they felt sorry for her. Were so proud of themselves for being nice to her. Were so pleased to have her around to feel sorry for. Torrie must have learned to ignore them a long time ago.
She said, “There’s lots of places . . .”
“What, baby? What about them?”
“Nothing going places.” She shook her head, frustrated. She still did that sometimes, got her words backward and on top of each other. But he thought he knew what she was saying. Lots of places she’d like to go. If only.
You didn’t give up wanting things because your life had put them out of reach. Even if everybody else tried to make you into some kind of crippled saint.
“What’s this?” He picked up a print from her worktable. “It looks new.” It was a blue-green swirl, like those pictures of Earth taken from outer space. But blurred and threatening to unravel. It had a floating, almost 3-D quality. “How’d you do this?”
“I don’t know. Just a trying.”
“Ms. Artist.”
“Yeah yeah yeah.”
“
All right, you change your mind, I’ll be downstairs for a while. Hey, can I take that print with me?”
When Chip got back to the shop he found, not unexpectedly, one of his regulars, Ferd, making himself at home in an armchair with a vintage copy of Silver Surfer. “Dude,” Chip said, slapping hands with him.
“What up, Chip.” Ferd was fifteen, a spotty, furtive, ignored kid. The kind who moped his way through school, spoke in monosyllables, beat off in the shower. The kind of kid Chip knew pretty well, from having been one himself.
“I’ve got to close up today, I got some business to tend to.” Ferd looked stricken. “But you can hang out here, if you don’t let anybody else in.”
“Yeah?”
“You can do inventory if you feel like it. You remember how to do inventory?”
“Yeah, sure I do.” The kid looked as close as he ever got to happy. You’d think he’d been asked to sweep up piles of gold coins.
“And don’t mess with my shit. There’s some Cokes in the fridge. Here.” Chip took a $5 bill from the register. “Get yourself a sandwich or something from Lena’s.”
“Thanks, man.” Ferd had to struggle to maintain a properly indifferent face. Chip knew he’d just given the kid the gift of a perfect day. He could hunker down by himself, singled out, made special. He wouldn’t have to go back home, hide in his bedroom, listen to his mother ask him for the ten-thousandth time what on earth he did in there.
He hadn’t been meaning to start a business. He’d just been looking for something to do with his old comic book collection. Then he’d added to it at swap meets, along with Magic cards, Dungeons & Dragons, posters of wizards, space aliens, warriors. He had to admit, he got a kick out of all that stuff. What everybody really wanted was video games, so he sold those too: GoldenEye, Counter-Strike, Warcraft. And he’d ended up with this dandy clubhouse for the town’s lost boys.
“Ferd? How much snow are we supposed to get?”
Ferd looked up from his comic book. He had thatchy hair long enough to get in his eyes, giving him the look of a small, furtive animal. “Ah, I dunno. Some.”
“Right.” He guessed Ferd wasn’t a guy who paid much attention to anything real, like weather. Chip went into the back room for his coat and keys. He pretty much lived back here, had a bed and a little bit of a kitchen, even a shower set up in what was meant to be a mop station. Illegal as hell, so if anybody asked, he lived at his dad’s.
Not that they were likely to do anything to piss off Ryan, who might be persuaded to dump more money into downtown one of these days. Even if Chip’s establishment wasn’t exactly what the Chamber of Commerce had in mind for the space. Still not too many people taking advantage of all the swell retail opportunities. And the ones who’d always dreamed of opening their own flower shop or knitting boutique had smacked their heads into a pretty solid economic wall.
Everybody thought he was a drug dealer. Him and the boys, sitting around smoking or snorting or cooking. Every so often somebody he didn’t know came by, acting all curious and interested. You had to figure that was Officer Friendly keeping track.
Sorry to disappoint them. It wasn’t like the old days. He’d learned to be very, very careful.
He locked the door to the back room, also the shop’s front door. “So, go out by the side. Pull it shut behind you, switch off the overhead lights. Leave it open if you’re coming back.”
By the time Chip got out to the sidewalk and looked in through the shop window, Ferd had curled himself around the armchair like a snail, like an advertisement for bad posture, moving his lips slightly as he read.
The snow had stopped for the moment, leaving the thinnest, sifting layer on the pavement. Chip waved at Lena as he passed her window. She was cooking up a grill order, her wild hair held back with a red bandanna. He was rooting for her to stay in business and she just might make it. She served lumpy whole-grain bread and alfalfa-sprout salads, but also the kind of food people didn’t cook for themselves anymore: pot roast, scalloped potatoes, lemon meringue pie. Good solid Iowa chow, and it didn’t seem to matter that Lena was a Jewish girl from New Jersey who’d followed a husband out west and then lost him to the usual kinds of bad luck. She cooked like she’d grown up winning blue ribbons at the state fair.
The old Chevy coughed and rumbled and took its time warming up. He felt the cold in all the usual places: ears, back of the neck, rib cage, thighs. He was too skinny to live in this damned climate. Not enough fat on him. The Chevy was a tank, a bumper-dragging wreck with 175,000 miles on it. It didn’t get crap for mileage but in bad weather it was the safest thing on the road short of a garbage truck.
The snow picked up again just outside town, heavier now, enough to coat the ground. It was blowing in from the south so it was going to be in his face all the way to Des Moines. Kaleidoscope snow. The kind that burst into patterns on the windshield. Tricky shit. Hypnotizing in a way he didn’t like. He pounded the car’s radio on and off, singing when he wouldn’t find a station. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily merrily merrily merrily, any dumb thing he could think of, anything to keep himself in the right here and the right now.
He’d done something to his head, or something had been done to it so that he had these moments of free-floating confusion, a blackout, he guessed, except it had a grainy look, like an old movie. Once he’d been talking to—somebody? in the shop?—he was pretty sure of that much, and the next he was out on the sidewalk, squinting up into the sky with his mouth open. Like chickens who drowned when it rained because they were too stupid to swallow.
He understood how people went out in public naked, or had long arguments with themselves, or any other genuinely crazy thing. The movie in their head skipped a few frames. So he was crazy too, but just a little bit around the edges, just enough to need careful tending. The last thing he wanted to do was tell some doctor who would load him up on big chalky unfun pills or alert the pain-in-the-ass concerned authorities.
After all, your head only had so much room in it. No surprise if it overflowed once in a while with little bits of sparkle and electrical fizz. He’d finally quit smoking—had to, the lungs were shot—and sometimes he wondered if that was part of the problem, his brain having to adjust to a nicotine-free state, no soothing pillow of smoke to cushion it.
He’d got a map of Des Moines and spent time studying it, so once he reached town he had it knocked. Without so much wind the snow was back to acting like normal snow, the kind you could reasonably trust to fall from up to down without any weird stuff, so he could keep his head balanced right where it was supposed to be and didn’t have to worry about its sliding off one or another shoulder. Ha ha.
And here was the college, showing up just where it ought to. It took him some driving around to find the building he needed, but he’d left himself all kinds of time, a couple of hours. Fine with him. He could look the place over, figure out if this was any kind of a good idea.
He parked and entered through the big double doors. Cool, echoing tile floors, white walls, one of them glass. The snow outside mounding up, another layer of white. Students coming and going, the artsy sort, with big portfolio cases and scuffed boots and funky knit hats, and they looked at him kind of strangely because after all he didn’t belong here and it showed and it was funny that these kids who were all about looking peculiar and different seemed to draw the line when it came to his peculiar self.
He could have ended up as one of them. It wasn’t so hard to imagine. He’d always had a knack for drawing. Just not much of a knack for school, for sitting still and paying attention and giving a shit.
Here was the gallery, a hallway branching off into a couple of different rooms. Nobody was standing guard or charging admission, so he walked on in and found himself face-to-face with a poster, a black-and-white photograph of a long, dark hillside, a slice of sky above it, and a single tree silhouetted against the sky. Only when you looked closely at the tree did you see it was really part of a painted
backdrop, a billboard maybe.
On the poster:
NATIVE LAND:
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELTON POTTER
December 2–January 31
Allen B. Drinkwater Gallery
Chip made a circuit of the room, stopping in front of each picture. All black and whites. Some of them were landscapes, out west by the look of them, canyons, highways edged with scrub, mountains reflected upside down in a long trough of rainwater. All of it with a sense of being borderless, stretching out to empty space. Other pictures were cityscapes: windows, wires, traffic, signs, a solitary man crossing a street. A shot of a kid who reminded Chip of a young Elton, waiting at a bus stop, his round face sullen with loneliness.
On a table near the gallery entrance was a stack of flyers, and he picked one up. They went along with the show. There was a list of different exhibitions and talks and other art stuff that Elton had been up to. It looked like he’d kept busy. There was a picture of him and Chip studied it for a time.
Then there was something called Artist Statement:
When people learn that I’m a Native American, they often have certain expectations of me and of my work and life. I find it necessary to explain to them that I don’t know how to track a wolf or catch a salmon with my bare hands. I don’t have a totem animal or a medicine pouch. I grew up with bits and pieces of my own history coming at me sideways, filtered through television and movies and cartoons, Chapter One in American Studies, a story that was supposed to be over by now. I never felt like a “real” Indian, even though I could trace my lineage back through three Northwest tribes who had lived on the same land a thousand years before Columbus.
Tribes. It all came back to that, one way or another. He read on.
I think I started taking pictures because I didn’t (and still don’t) have the right words to express the unease of a life lived outside of categories, boundaries, and ready-made narratives. My photographs are informed by a sense of loss, myself made strange to myself, and a country that too often has seemed to belong to everybody except me.
The Year We Left Home Page 31