by Sue Halpern
“Your parents named you Rusty? Did you have red hair or were you the squeaky wheel?” Carl asked, and then laughed at his own joke.
“No. Rusty’s what they called me. My given name is Cyrus. Cyrus Allen. Cyrus Ingram Allen. Ingram was my mother’s maiden name.” And then, for clarity: “She was adopted.”
“Where are your people from?” This was Patrick. Tall and bony, with a full head of waxy white hair and milky blue eyes, he liked to start at the beginning.
“Minnesota. I guess. If you don’t count my mother’s biological parents.”
The Four considered this for a minute or two.
“You used to do that, too, didn’t you, Paddy?” Hawaiian shirt Rich said to Patrick.
“Do what?” he said.
“You know, help girls who had gotten into trouble.”
“Doctor-patient confidentiality,” Patrick said. “But between us, yes. More times than you’d imagine.”
“I think it worked out okay for my mother,” Rusty said.
“Maybe so,” the doctor said. “Maybe so. But tell us, young squire, why have you come to our fair city?”
Rusty cleared his throat. “Long version or short version?” And before anyone could answer, he said, “Actually, they are the same: I lost my job. My firm went out of business and I lost my job.”
“Two and a half million people lost their jobs,” Rich the former executive said, “but they didn’t come to Riverton.”
“True enough,” Rusty said.
Kit was leaning forward toward her desk, pretending to read the paper, but listening carefully to what Rusty was saying and, more than that, how he was saying it. He was a charmer, that’s for sure—able to sit with a bunch of crusty old-timers he’d never met before and fit right in. It probably helped in his business, Kit thought, being able to insinuate himself among strangers until they no longer thought of him as anything other than a buddy. Better to invest with a buddy than someone you didn’t know. Your buddy will take care of you. He was genial, likable, and appropriately deferential. He was also, Kit noticed, wearing socks.
“Where did you say you were born?” Patrick was saying. His memory was beginning to dull, and he sometimes asked the same question more than once or failed to make connections that were obvious to everyone else.
“Paddy was our town baby doc,” Carl explained. “The next thing you know, he’ll want to know who pulled you out of your mommy.”
Rusty laughed. (Genuinely, Kit noted.) “Near Duluth,” he said.
“Why?” This was Rich the executive. “It’s so cold there. Makes Riverton seem like Florida.”
“Or at least, you know, Rhode Island,” Carl said.
“My father was a steelworker,” Rusty said. “He worked for U.S. Steel until U.S. Steel pulled out of Duluth, and then he worked at the port unloading ships. Duluth is right on Lake Superior, that’s why it can get so bitter. The wind coming off the lake.” He nodded at Rich the executive. “Good hockey, though.”
“That’s hard work. Steelworker. Dockworker,” Carl said, as if he knew this from experience. The others nodded in agreement.
“It was,” Rusty said, and stopped and rubbed his hands together as if he were cold. He lowered his gaze, stared at his feet. “He was crushed in a crane accident.”
“Sheesh,” Carl said.
The others looked away. Even Kit, who had been acting as if she wasn’t in on the conversation, bowed her head. It was a reflex, like tapping a knee and watching the leg kick up: say someone had died, but especially say that he had been killed, and people turned away. She should know. So they shared that: a dead father, his life extinguished, and with it the simple assumptions of family life.
“How old?” one of the Riches asked after a while. Kit didn’t know which. She wasn’t looking. They often sounded alike.
“He was thirty-eight. Younger than I am now,” Rusty said. “I was eleven. Sixth grade.”
“That’s rough,” that same Rich said.
“It was bad,” Rusty said, “but the company gave my mother some money, I guess so she wouldn’t sue, and set up a college fund for us, and the longshoremen had a fund, and the weird thing was that we had more money after he died than we had when my dad was alive—so that when all my friends started working off the books at fourteen, I didn’t have to. My mother wanted my life to be easier than my father’s. She told me that if I didn’t go to college—my father didn’t go to college—and get a desk job she would consider herself, and me, a failure. The happiest day of her life was when I got offered the job at Morris, Maines. It didn’t matter what I was doing there, just that I carried a briefcase, wore a suit, and sat at a desk. People who sit at desks don’t get crushed by cranes.”
Rusty stopped to catch his breath. The Four were all looking at him now. Kit was looking at him. He was rubbing his hands on his knees as if he were trying to erase a stain.
“But then a different kind of crane fell out of the sky and landed on me and a lot of other people sitting at their desks. And here I am.”
Chapter Six
7.12.10–7.18.10
Sunny/winter
We stayed at #3 till after the first couple of snowfalls. My foot had healed, though it would ache when rain clouds, and then snow clouds, settled over us. The first snow came early, at the beginning of September. I wouldn’t have known it was early—I’d never lived there before—but I heard Willow talking to Steve about it, and she said that if it was already snowing in September we might be able to stay there only another month. And then where would we go? That question was on my mind, but I knew better than to ask. Steve said that the September snow was a freak thing and that it would get warm again soon—Indian summer, he called it—and it turned out he was right. The snow was gone within hours, and by the next week we were back to wearing shorts and Willow didn’t bring up leaving again, at least not when I could hear. (I’d sometimes pretend to be asleep so I could listen to my parents talking, since it was the only way I’d find out what was really going on.)
When I think about it now, I realize that I had no idea then what was really going on, and I still don’t really know. The whole thing was like a dream. At night Willow would read The Swiss Family Robinson, about another family on a wilderness adventure, and sometimes as I was falling asleep I’d imagine we were shipwrecked, too, and chased by pirates, and then feel relieved when I woke up and there were no pirates and we weren’t on an island, even if it often felt like we were, and our car wasn’t too far away. Steve would drive it sometimes and come back with food, only we didn’t call it food, we called what he’d bring back “provisions.” We must not have been vegans then because he’d usually return with chocolate, graham crackers, and marshmallows so we could make s’mores. Willow was not thrilled with me getting so much sugar, but Steve (I heard him talking one night) said it was important that I have good associations with our time in the woods. And I do when I think of searching for green sticks, being trusted to use a camp knife to peel back the bark, and standing over glowing coals roasting marshmallows, waiting for the inside to melt and the skin to separate and turn the perfect shade of brown. And not to catch on fire, and not to fall into the fire.
The second snow was a bigger deal. It started before we woke up, and by the time Steve went out to put more wood on the fire so he and Willow could have their coffee, the fire pit was blanketed. Steve came back into the tent and told us that the best thing to do would be to go back to sleep, but none of us could do that because the wind had started to howl—we could hear it coming down the lake—and the walls of the tent were shaking.
“This is fun,” Willow kept saying. “Isn’t it fun?”
I thought it was fun, but then I got hungry, and since there was a “no eating in the tent” rule, was pretty certain I was going to starve to death, which got me crying. Willow said I was crying because my blood sugar had dropped so much and that Steve needed to get our provisions down from the tree, which made him grumpy, which Willow said
was also because of his blood sugar dropping, but Steve said it was because his boots were back in the car and he only had sandals. He went out anyway, and we could hear him swearing in the distance.
Willow was afraid to leave me alone in the tent, and she was afraid to leave Steve out by himself in the blizzard, and she kept saying “I don’t know what to do” over and over, which is not the best thing to say when you’re with a child who is scared out of her wits. Eventually she went into the vestibule and unzipped the door and stuck her head out just in time to see Steve running back, clutching the bear bag.
“I was worried about—” Willow said, and before she could finish the sentence Steve told her that the wind had knocked down the branch supporting the bag and carried it into the underbrush and it took him a while to find it. He was shivering. His toes were white. He stripped down and got under the covers and Willow stripped down, too, and covered her body with his.
“This is what you do, Sunny, if someone gets really cold,” Willow said.
“Yeah,” Steve said after a while. I could tell his hands were gripping Willow’s rear end. “First aid.”
“I’m hungry,” I said, and before they could stop me I’d opened the bag and taken out a jar of peanut butter and buried my first two fingers past the knuckle. “Peanut butter lollipop,” I said, pulling them out and jamming them in my mouth.
“Let me have some of that,” Steve said, and plunged his hand into the jar. But instead of putting the peanut butter into his mouth, he put his fingers into Willow’s and said, “Lick,” and laughed.
“That’s disgusting,” I said, and he laughed some more.
“Someday, my peanut butter lollipop, you will not think so.”
I can say for sure that that day has not arrived.
* * *
Sunny/out of the wilderness
I don’t know what month we left #3, only that Steve didn’t want to go and Willow did, and they talked about it a lot, especially when they thought I wasn’t listening or couldn’t hear. Steve said that things would get more complicated when we were “back on the grid,” which to my ears sounded like “back on the griddle,” but when I asked what a griddle was, Willow said it was a kind of pan to cook with, which made no sense. Willow said staying in the woods was no longer sustainable, which sounded like “stainable,” which also made no sense. It was a confusing time for me, and both of my parents were preoccupied and didn’t notice when I went down to the lake one morning, saw that it had skimmed over with ice, and decided to go skating. I didn’t have skates, of course—I was wearing my puddle boots. I tested the edge with my toe and the ice seemed strong enough, so I stepped out and took two, then three, then four steps, and without warning I had fallen through. The water wasn’t deep yet, but it was cold and my boots were filling with water and I couldn’t move more than an inch, even though I was flapping my arms, trying to swim. Luckily, my parents had stopped talking (which is to say arguing) long enough to hear me call for help and they were there in a minute, Steve fishing me out and running us up to the tent with Willow shouting “You’re okay!” between taking deep, noisy, theoretically relaxing breaths that sounded like she was pumping up a tire. They stripped off my soaking wet clothes, wrapped me in a blanket, and sat me downwind from the fire pit, where the morning coffee was heating.
“Here, drink this,” Steve said, pouring me my first taste of coffee. Disgusting. If my teeth weren’t chattering, I would have spit it out.
Not long afterward, we left #3. Steve pulled our food down from the tree where he’d re-roped it after the second storm, Willow folded our bedding and set it on the picnic table, we gathered our clothes and put them on the table, too, and before long the tent was empty and I got to go around the perimeter and pull up the stakes. Then Steve and Willow removed the tent poles and the whole thing started to deflate and then collapse like a balloon that had lost its air, and it was my job to roll it up and stuff it into its sack. I don’t know how many trips we made to the Subaru, but eventually the campsite was empty and Steve was raking it over with his feet because he said that the first rule of the woods was “to leave no trace.” I asked him if that’s why we didn’t sign in when we first got to #3 and if that’s why we weren’t signing out, and he said, “Sort of.”
We spent that night in a motel. In a real bed. And got to take a real bath. And the bathwater was filthy, because ever since it had turned cold Willow had been heating up water and giving me sponge baths, which I hated because even though the water was warm, I was always freezing, standing there as she wiped me down. It felt delicious to be clean—“delicious” was the word that Willow used, and once she did I knew exactly what she meant—and delicious to slide between the clean sheets and put my head on a real pillow. Steve slept on the floor. He said that after months at #3, the bed was “too plush.” Willow said, “Suit yourself,” and got into bed with me.
* * *
Fortune and men’s eyes . . .
—William Shakespeare
The Four had a lot of questions for Rusty, and he had a lot of questions for them, so he started to come to the library in the morning with his own refill mug, springing for doughnuts now and then. The guys wanted to know about Wall Street—was it as crazy as they said on the news?—and Rusty told them stories that made their eyes open wide and their jaws drop, stories where the protagonist, always, was money.
“How much did you say again you spent on a tie?” Carl wanted to know. He had already asked this question about Rusty’s shirts, his shoes, even his underwear. “Two hundred dollars for a piece of fabric that hangs around your collar like a leash? Jeez. You make me feel rich,” Carl said. “I never wore a tie to work in fifty years I had the shop. That’s like a thousand dollars a year. That’s fifty thousand bucks in my pocket.”
“You could’ve spent it on scratch tickets and gotten some of it back,” said Rich the driver.
“That’s rich, Rich,” said Rich the former executive. “That’s wacky math.”
“It’s better than a noose around your neck,” Carl said.
For his part, Rusty wanted to know about Riverton: what it had been like before all the industrial buildings along the water’s edge were vacant and boarded up, but none of them could really say.
“We’re old, but we’re not that old,” Patrick said. “My grandfather, when he was fourteen, was pulled off the boat coming in from Cork and sent up here with a ticket for a room at a boardinghouse and guaranteed mill job, and you can bet he took it. The place was thriving then. There weren’t enough workers for all the jobs. But it didn’t last. It’s like your thing, down in New York. These things never do.”
“And yet your families stayed and then you stayed,” Rusty said.
“Yup,” said Rich the driver. “We stayed to fight another day. We’re like the last remaining soldiers.”
“Yeah,” Carl said. “We’re like that Japanese officer they found defending his post years after the war was over. No one’s convinced us that the war is really over. But you still haven’t told us why you’ve come into our bunker.”
“That’s easy,” Rusty said. “To seek my fortune.”
* * *
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter . . .
—John Keats
Three weeks into his new life, Rusty woke up one morning as the sun was dribbling through the drapes at the Tip-Top and was startled to realize something: he was happy. This was unexpected, and it made him laugh out loud as he stood under the weak stream of tepid water in the permanently rust-stained shower of room 7. It seemed impossible: here he was, out of work, living in a run-down motel room that looked over a run-down city where, until recently, he didn’t know a soul. The old Rusty, looking at the new Rusty, would have seen a loser, but the new Rusty didn’t care. That was the beauty of it. He didn’t care. He just didn’t care. On the other hand, if someone waved a magic wand and he could go back to where he was and what he’d had, he was pretty sure he would not resist. He hadn
’t completely lost it.
He still had a bunch of résumés circulating out there, and sometimes, when he thought about them, the image that came to mind was flotsam floating on the vast ocean, like those islands of discarded plastic out in the Pacific he’d been hearing about, though other times he imagined they were like the satellites he saw overhead at night, orbiting the globe in perfect, endless, oblique circles. It had been a long time since he asked himself what he wanted to do with his life, and when he thought about it now—which he did as little as possible—he realized that there wasn’t a whole lot that he could do. Experience—fifteen years in the trenches—was his only credential, but fifteen years doing what? He could hardly remember. And the industry was shot to hell anyway. He loved that—the way they congratulated themselves by calling it an industry, as if they were actually producing something and not just moving numbers from one column on a spreadsheet to another and calling it a day.
What should he do? Rusty no longer knew. What was that book everyone on the train seemed to be reading a few years ago—Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff? Why not take it a step further, he thought, and not sweat the big stuff, either? He was happy now when he wasn’t supposed to be, and wasn’t sure he’d been happy before, when he was. He liked where he was—nowhere. He liked the old guys at the library. He liked the librarian Kit, and he liked her sidekick Sunny, too. Kit was cool, like there was a breeze coming off her, and after his brief torrid affairs of the last few years, if they could even be called affairs, it was refreshing to meet a woman who was indifferent to his charms. It occurred to him that this might have something to do with his reduced circumstances, but the more he observed her, the more he was certain that his reduced circumstances would have been the thing she found attractive about him, if she found anything attractive about him, which apparently she did not. In a way, it was a relief. In his experience, romance was always a transaction, you had to pay to play, and his wallet was too thin for that.