The Burning Ground

by Adam O'Riordan

  There was only one story that neither of them ever mentioned. On an afternoon in the early summer of 1949, McCauley got home from Metro. The lead in the picture he was working on had fallen ill and this had led to a contractual wrangle between her lawyer and the studio, which in turn had meant closing down the set early that day as both parties attempted to negotiate a compromise. He experienced a pleasant lift as he drove home from the studio, a few hours stolen back from his working day. As he parked outside the house in Venice he noticed that the front door was open. There was music drifting out of the porch and onto the pathway. As he got to the gate he could see Patricia in her underwear asleep in the living room with the ceiling fan slowly beating at the air above her. McCauley remembered how he was laughing when he saw Patricia and thinking that he had missed one hell of an afternoon. Then as he looked farther into the house he saw Moe Charr, with his shirt off, and his cousin who they’d met a couple of weeks ago up at Malibu—both large, handsome men who between them could have formed half of a decent set of linebackers on a football team. Then he saw Dolores dancing sandwiched between them in the kitchen. He watched the three of them moving slowly across the tiles that he’d laid himself a few months ago. As McCauley walked up the pathway that led up to the house, he saw Dolores drop to her knees, and then lost sight of her behind the kitchen counter. He saw Moe leaning back, spreading his large hands across the kitchen counter. Then Moe’s cousin running his hand through Dolores’s hair. McCauley saw the cousin’s hand tightly at her jaw, the way you might fit a muzzle on to a greyhound. The next thing McCauley saw was Dolores’s hand gripping at the counter. This came into focus as he walked up the path. McCauley remembered how Moe’s head was tipped back now and how his Adam’s apple was bobbing up and down as he swallowed hard. And as quickly as it had happened, Dolores up and laughing and then both men taking her by the wrists and pulling her into the bedroom at the front of the house. McCauley froze outside, halfway along the path and through window screens looked on for what might have been seconds or hours at the blurred shapes the three of them made. Obscured behind the screens and farther through the drawn lace curtains.

  McCauley did not know what had happened in the bedroom. He walked into the living room and shook Patricia awake, saying her name as loud as he could manage. He stood and watched her come around noticing something childlike, innocent almost, about the way she roused herself from her drunken sleep. It was several minutes before Dolores came through. She had on her dress now. She wrapped her arms around McCauley and kissed him on the cheek. A few seconds later Moe came through buttoning up his shirt, rubbing his eyes. He let it be known, looking at Patricia but addressing McCauley, that he’d been sleeping it off in the den. He shook McCauley’s hand and patted him on the back and asked him if he knew his cousin? Pointing his thumb at the large man with bloodshot eyes who stood behind him. McCauley told him he did and then Moe Charr poured McCauley a tumbler from the Seagram’s Gin, one of two they had got through over the course of the afternoon, saying to him, “Tough day, huh?” Then the two men sat there talking in the living room for a few minutes before Moe and his cousin said they better be on their way. Patricia asked them if she could get a ride. That evening Dolores was teary. She crouched on the sofa crying. Then stayed up crying in the hallway all night. The next morning McCauley found her slumped by the wicker table where they kept the telephone, the nightdress he had put out for her pulled across her like a sheet. For days afterward she didn’t talk. McCauley had to phone in sick for her for three days in a row. Then one morning she snapped out of it and continued with their life as if nothing had happened. Not long after, Moe went off to Waikiki for the surf and never came back, but they ran into his cousin once on the forecourt of a gas station.

  McCauley wanted to talk to Dolores about that afternoon when she was up at Sinai. The things he hadn’t asked her had pressed on him. He remembered her lifting up her hand from the hospital bed and putting two fingers at his lips. Telling him to hush now. She had beautiful hands, McCauley remembered, soft and small, the cuticles and half-moons always perfectly neat. McCauley guessed there were other stories she wanted to talk about more while she still had time to listen. And anyway, he was decades late with his questions. In her final month McCauley visited Dolores on the female-only ward at Sinai every day. In her last week he moved her into a private room. Then the time came when he couldn’t stand to see her suffering any more. Couldn’t stand the daily drive up there to see the frail, unlovely thing she had become, the machines doing her breathing for her. Her cheeks sunken and her skin yellowed like a smoker’s fingers, its elasticity all lost. Standing there in those last days looking at Dolores, McCauley felt stupid. It was an error that they never had children, that there was no pretty, patient daughter taking time from her own busy life and family to help soothe her mother as she died. An error that they hadn’t tried again after her first miscarriage in 1949. How the sight of her bleeding in a bathroom stall in Reno where they had gone to get their relationship back on track had shaken them both. And now there he was, an old man with no family, no sons or daughters, just a sick wife being kept alive by wires and drips.

  It was clear to McCauley what he needed to do, what he should have done weeks earlier when the pain was at its height, not now when Dolores was just a husk of herself, slipping in and out of consciousness. The curtains in her room were drawn already as McCauley kissed Dolores on her forehead, softly as if her skull were made of paper, the slightest pressure might damage it.

  He remembered how he walked over to the wall and turned off the switches on the machines she was connected to. One by one the small red and green lights went out on the gray plastic monitor. McCauley waited ten minutes sitting on the folding chair by her bedside, holding Dolores’s hand, which was cold to touch, then he walked back to the wall and flicked the switches on and pulled the red plastic triangle which hung at the end of the alarm cord. In those moments waiting for the nurse to arrive and take her pulse, and tell him Dolores had passed and offer him her condolences, it was that summer afternoon in ’49 with Moe Charr and his cousin that McCauley thought about. He thought of Patricia asleep on the sofa, a dark nipple half-exposed from her brassiere. Moe, the big, handsome, powerful man he was, who McCauley had admired so much out there on the waves in Malibu, their stilted conversation over two fingers of warm gin, and how he wouldn’t look him in the eye as he left but shook his hand and encouraged his cousin to do the same.

  Black Bear in the Snow

  “Black bear in the snow, tra-la la-la-la,” Randall sang as he lifted the baby up and over the plastic bars of the crib. He ran his fingers lightly over the indent at the back of the infant’s skull where the bone plates had yet to fuse. Randall knew there was a name for this, something elegant sounding. A word that made him think of sunlit squares in Paris when he first heard the midwife use it. “Black bear in the snow,” he sang again softly, the words fuzzy and half-formed as he paced with the baby across the laminate flooring, stepping through the patches of light that fell from signs on the strip mall that overlooked the apartment.

  “Brown girl in the ring!” Thelma would have corrected testily had she been at home. But Thelma was at Gunnerson’s Restaurant, working a late shift. After a late shift she always came home angry, the eczema blooming raw on her inner arms. It was an anger Randall could never defuse, not now and not when they had met as awkward freshmen in their first semester at college in Minnesota. Randall’s father had refused to speak to him for a week when he told him this was where he intended to study and not at the seminary, as had been his mother’s dying wish. Whenever Thelma got home from a late shift, Randall would be up at his computer, the TV muted and glowing in the corner of the apartment. Setting her keys down with a sigh, she would pull the night’s tips from her apron pocket. Randall would sit typing lines of code onto the green screen, trying to avoid her gaze, the towering processor and external hard drives piled up around him, like a child inside a makeshift fort. Th
elma would look up from the crumpled dollars on the Formica counter to Randall and then back again. But Thelma wouldn’t be home for an hour yet. Randall was alone with Joey ( Joey, not Joseph, as his own father had been). As he sang he remembered the drive he had taken to Alberta with his father, the spring his mother went into the hospital. How his mother’s sisters, Frances and Annie, had arrived on the Greyhound bus from the soupy warmth of Fulton County to the chill of that Illinois spring. His aunts, with their battered brown suitcases each fastened with a piece of frayed elastic, standing in the hallway of the house his father would default on that coming winter. Frances tutting as she looked around the entrance hall, Annie running a finger across the dust on the sideboard, imagining how their younger sister lived with this salesman she had met at a dance when she was seventeen.

  Soon after his aunts arrived, Randall remembered his father saying they were going to take a trip. “How about it, sport? Just you and me, two guys gone a-huntin’.” He had pinched Randall’s cheek, and the stinging flesh seemed to signal his entry into the world of men. Aunt Annie had bought him a hat to wear, red-and-black check with ear flaps that folded down and fastened under the chin. Randall remembered moving through the bright silence of the boreal forest, the late snow creaking as he stepped inside his father’s boot prints. Stamping his own tightly laced boots through the thawing muskeg. The frost lingering on the iron-colored pools of water as he and his father moved toward the hide. Walking into the forest between the boughs of the blue spruces that looked like they need only to be hung with lights to be fit for a front room at Christmastime. Behind them, deeper into the woods, the mottled trunks of firs and poplars rising up from the shadowy dark, melting snow dripping from their branches. The forest seemed to fold the light in on itself. His father consulted his map and took a pull from his hip flask. Then with a backward glance and a wink, “C’mon kid, almost there.”

  When they had reached their destination, they pulled away the trimmed pine stems that covered the mouth of the hide. They had hunkered down in the smell of wet soil and stale piss that Lambrey, who his father served with in the Marines and now ran the lodge, had led his father to the day before. Randall’s father rested his binoculars on the slot of the hide, a low plywood pillbox someone had painted green last summer and strewn with leaves and netting. Five hours they sat there, his father nursing his rifle in the crook of his arm, without a hint of movement from the spot where Lambrey had promised a bear was sure to appear. And this despite the money Randall’s father had given him to bait the mouth of the cave. No bear ever emerged.

  Randall remembered the long walk back to the lodge at dusk. The flurries of birdsong from the wild canaries and warblers that seemed to follow them out of the forest, back to where they’d parked the truck, through the bare and budding branches as they walked with their heads down. That night, in the bar of the lodge, Randall watched his father drinking beer after beer, unable to slake his thirst. The same four songs playing on the jukebox, the mechanical arm raising and lowering the disks as Randall sipped a watery Pepsi. He remembered the web of veins in his father’s reddened eyes, the tubular, pale pastel threads on the edges of his bulbous nose. “We always wanted a sister for you, Randy. A little girl. But now . . .” His father shrugged, then looked away, working his tongue into the corner of his mouth as if trying to dislodge a piece of meat stuck between his back teeth.

  Later, when he was older, Randall remembered asking what had happened to his mother. His father, bloated, unrecognizable now as the large athletic man who had taken him hunting, reclining in the La-Z-Boy in the state-funded nursing home in Peoria, said, “They cut out her womb but the cancer came back,” as he flicked between a game show and a black and white movie where Frankenstein’s monster stood by a lake with a little girl who held out a bunch of flowers to him.

  Now Randall’s own son, Joey, was fourteen years old. His chin and mouth blistering with acne. Randall always thought the angry, hot pustules must have made it agony to smile. It was thirteen years since he held him in their apartment above the strip mall on Lincoln Boulevard, eighteen since he and Thelma had dropped out of school, Randall convinced there was a fortune to be made in computers; certain, to the point of obsession, that the people at the Palo Alto Research Center—to whom he had written letter after letter—would find a place for him on their team. Randall still remembered the feeling of nausea in the exam room as he flunked the entry test for the organization. His mind a perfect blank, unable to reformat even a few simple lines of code. The long walk back across the parking lot and home to the apartment that he’d been living in with Thelma ever since they found out she was going to have a baby.

  There followed a decade of watching his boy grow in monthly increments. Driving up from San Diego, where he worked as a technician in the computer labs at a Christian high school. The first weekend of each calendar month taking Route 5 along the coast, through Solana Beach and Encinitas, past the Marine Corps Base Camp at Pendleton, which never failed to trigger a memory of his own father, duffel bag slung across his shoulder, back from Saigon, a hero in their neighborhood, having served as an eighteen-year-old in the war in the Pacific in 1945 and then volunteered for Vietnam, walking to greet him across their square of lawn.

  Randall would arrive at the house in Beverly Hills where Thelma had made a home with a lawyer, fifteen years her senior, who she had met, of all places, at Gunnerson’s and who, she screamed at Randall one night, “treats me like a real fucking human being.” That was the night their arguing had grown so loud the building’s manager, an Armenian who Randall had played checkers with only a week ago, called the police. When Randall answered the door, one of the officers had seen Thelma over his shoulder weeping like a fallen woman in a silent film. He had stared at Randall and, without looking in beyond to Thelma, asked, “You OK, ma’am?” his knuckles whitening around the handle of his nightstick.

  On his monthly visits Randall would always park his beige station wagon a street or two away from Thelma’s house, walking through the neighborhood as any other tax-paying resident might. He would often imagine things had played out differently, that he was returning home after a week away in Europe or China, from speaking at a conference on some software he had designed that looked set to revolutionize the tech industry, or some new form of supply chain management for decentralized manufacturing, the applause of conference delegates still ringing in his ears.

  Today as Randall walked the winding path to the door of Thelma’s house, past the patches of well-tended jonquils and violets, the big jacaranda blooming on the corner of the street, he watched a hummingbird alight on a cylinder of red nectar that hung in the doorway, taking sips from the sugared water. He set his thumb on the doorbell, the porcelain button cool in its brass surround. A few moments later the maid answered, a plastic laundry basket under one arm. She ushered Randall into the palms and soft arches of the bright hallway and went to fetch Joey.

  In the five years Randall had been coming to the house, he had never strayed farther than the hallway. Occasionally in the wintertime the maid, whose name he still did not know, would bring him a cup of eggnog—or a fruit cup if it was summer. Here, as he waited for Joey, he was given only hints of the life his boy might lead in the days away from him: the photographs inside their silver frames that over time had grown to cover the top leaf of the black baby grand. Holiday photographs; the family laughing in the sunshine of a Hawaiian beach or crammed onto a gondola by the butter-colored walls of a Venetian canal, their shapes reflected in the muddy water; Thelma and the lawyer and Joey and their two girls with their sickly, bean-curd complexions and lengths of ribbon tied in their hair.

  Joey came down, wiping the sleep from his eyes with the sleeve of his sweatshirt. He offered his hand for his father to shake. Randall hated this. A country club affectation, that Cody, the lawyer, had foisted onto his boy. The attempts to dislodge Randall from his son’s life had lessened over the years. “We need a clean break,” he remember
ed Thelma telling him as he called from a phone booth, at a time when he thought things might still be mended.

  Randall was now tolerated, filed away by Thelma and Cody somewhere between the maid and the graduate student from UCLA who came to tutor math; a low-end domestic who could be relied upon to entertain their difficult eldest child for a few hours each month. Impersonal, distant, to be occasionally thanked and thought of no more. Randall was convinced he once saw Thelma unthinkingly make for her checkbook when he returned Joey one afternoon.

  “Joey,” Randall said, as they stood in the hallway that morning, “I have a proposal I would like to put to you.”

  “OK,” Joey shrugged, his eyes cast down under his long fringe.

  “I would like to take you hunting.”

  “OK,” Joey said, as if his father’s statement had been inevitable.