At the end of the garage lot was the old dog pen I had used as a secret clubhouse. Where I had kissed Sally Bakken in my tenth year. Where I had uncrossed my heart and risked death. Now honeysuckle vines choked the fence, and the roof of the doghouse had collapsed under the weight of tireless rot.
In the distance, a cornfield stood, waving young starchy arms. The wind cut over the tops of the stalks and pressed out gentle patterns that resembled ocean waves searching for a shore. Many times I had sailed away in my mind, across that imaginary green sea and over the horizon, to a land where little boys were never punished.
I went to the closet. My clothes hung there as if from gallows. The person who had worn them had been prosecuted for his crimes. Not in the halls of human justice, but in the highest court. Judgment had been passed, with appeal denied. Richard Allen Coldiron was condemned to serve a life sentence as himself.
I turned and walked out of the room, leaving it to gather cobwebs and cracks.
Mother was halfway through her drink when I entered into the kitchen. Flies buzzed around her head, frantic now that their food supply had disappeared. One landed on Mother’s nose and fiddled its front legs as if washing up before dinner. She didn’t notice, and it drank freely of her toxic sweat.
“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” Her voice was cracked and coarse.
“No,” I said. “I don’t care enough to be mad.”
“Why don’t you sit down and tell me about what’s going on in your life? Talk to your Mom?”
“There’s nothing to say.”
“You know how hard I tried to change.”
“People never change.”
“I need to drink. It’s the only way I can forget. But it only works once in a while.”
“That’s good for you, but what about me?”
“What about you?” She finally noticed the fly and brushed it away.
“Don’t you think I’m trying to forget, too? And that coming back just makes it harder? Why do you think I left?”
“Because of that...and the drinking?”
“You make me sick, Mother. Just look at yourself. You can’t even make it to the sink to vomit. How much longer before you can’t get to the bathroom?”
“But you love me,” she said, giving me that crooked, watery smile.
“Because I have to.”
“Is Mommy pretty?”
People never changed. They only got worse.
“Ask the mirror.” I wished I hadn’t come. I wished I had never left. I wished.
I turned at the door and looked back at her. She was a well-known stranger, a familiar alien. We had been through so much together. Too much to ever be close again.
“When are you coming back?” she said, running her trembling, knotty finger over the rim of her jar. Mercifully, she had drawn her robe so that it once again covered her chest.
“I’ll be back. But not to stay.”
“Do you need money?”
“I’m fine.”
“You be good now.” Her voice had taken on a faraway quality, as if she were speaking to the golden boy I had never been. That I had never been allowed to be.
I looked back a final time as I walked out into the unforgiving sun. Mother’s eyes were like searchlights, their wavery beams crawling across the floor, looking for an undrained bottle. She had already forgotten I had been there. She had boarded her ship. She was sailing across a sea of her own, to a land where mothers never had to say they were sorry.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I drove back to the football field to meet Virginia. Despite the bright beauty of the spring evening, and what little snatches of fragrant blossom I caught among the smell of burning motor oil, I found no peace in nature. The encounter with Mother lingered, leaving an acrid aftertaste. I negotiated the straight flat streets as if I were being pulled along by an outside power, like reluctant electricity drawn through a circuit.
Virginia was waiting when I got there, arms folded, leaning against her car. I was cheered by the sight of her expressive face. She had selected navy blue slacks in place of her camouflage. The fabric clung tightly to her flesh, showing the sleek promise of her curves. I felt underdressed since I had on a twice-worn red flannel shirt and blue jeans hardened with overuse. But she was wearing her brazen leather jacket and her usual arrogant pout, so I decided maybe not much had changed.
She grinned at me. I don’t know if I was openly ogling her or if my mind was away, back in the hellhole of Mother’s apartment. I caught myself and adopted my role as the Poet, putting on my subliminal smile. Even without giving my face over to the people in the Bone House, I had learned to fake it.
I pulled my car up beside hers. We got in her Mitsubishi and looked across the handbrake at each other.
“Where to now?” she asked, leaning back and stiff-arming the wheel like a race-car driver.
“Let’s just get out of here,” I said.
I was replaying the scene with Mother in my head, and I had to let that episode fade to gray before I could relax. I stared through the windshield as we went across the parking lot and down the black ribbon of asphalt. Virginia must have thought I was being reflective, thinking deep poetic thoughts. End the line with whatever rhymes with “fake.”
She hadn’t lied about her craving for speed, because as soon as we hit the long stretches of road that were lined with nothing but cornfield and flood ditch, she bottomed out the gas pedal. We were doing over a hundred miles an hour, a black bullet shot from an aimless gun, hurtling through the Iowa evening. I looked out the passenger-side window and everything was a green blur, and farther out was the fixed point of the horizon, as if we were at rest and the Earth revolving under us at an insane speed. At any moment, the world would lose its integrity, disintegrate into pieces, and gravity would fail, flinging us into the vast emptiness of space.
Air, its peace broken and cleaved, roared angrily beneath and around the car. The engine whirred at a frantic pitch, pistons protesting the extreme stress. The tires were making contact with the road only as an afterthought. My body unconsciously braced for a crash, but my mind was unmoved, an impartial observer.
I looked at Virginia, and her face was clenched, her eyes perhaps seeing beyond the highway. Seeing and desiring. The tip of her tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth and her eyes shone like motor oil in a mud puddle, iridescent and madly beautiful. I could tell she wasn’t showing off. She was simply showing.
Maybe our lives are defined by specific moments. Perhaps we each have a photograph hanging in some vast hall in an afterworld, our essence captured for eternity. If so, that was Virginia’s snapshot, hunched in ecstasy, mocking mortality, straddling the dividing line and ready to roll either way, into death or further life. But if that was her photograph, some dismal cosmic curator had to shuffle down the hall and replace it, because of what happened later.
I was pushed back against my seat by the invisible hand of inertia. My senses were heightened by danger, the primitive fight-or-flight syndrome. Nervous sweat collected in my armpits and along my scalp line. I could smell cinnamon from the gum wrappers in the ashtray, even over the chemical odor of the vinyl upholstery. I could smell Virginia’s hair, enriched by expensive shampoo and twice as potent as Hope Hill’s, and underneath that, the stale honey of her feminine skin. I could feel dirt under my fingernails and microscopic lice tilling the dust of my flesh. The virginal stubble under my chin tingled. Bittersweet coppery death played in my mouth, frolicking around my teeth and tickling my tonsils, gaily tempting me to swallow.
We hit a small ridge in the road and became briefly airborne. The gyrating world had thrown us, finally giving us to the heavens. Six eternities passed, hundreds of stars consumed the gases of their own bellies and collapsed, galaxies pinwheeled in reverse until they were handfuls of nothingness, gods spilled their seed prematurely. Virginia gasped, her cheeks flushed from simultaneous orgasm with those gods. Then we touched down with a groan of metal and rubber, back
among mortals, the Earth reconstituted.
Virginia eased off the pedal and we slowed to a speed that was merely unsafe. Her eyes widened as her system greedily produced and devoured adrenalin. We crossed a bridge that spanned a small creek, our slipstream rattling the rusty “Caution” sign as we passed. The silvery waters underneath swept on to the Mississippi Delta, unimpressed.
Virginia looked at me to see if I was afraid. I wasn’t there. I had been replaced. Mister Milktoast was in my driver’s seat, protecting me. These little pretend games of death were antique hat to him. After surviving boots, these were tiddlywinks and jacks, played in safe sunshine.
“That was fun, wasn’t it?” she said, her sultry voice pitched higher in her excitement.
“That’s what I like,” Mister Milktoast said, stifling a mock yawn. “Going nowhere backwards.”
“Well, I’m a good driver. I might become an Indy car racer someday.”
“What about your career as a biologist?”
“You can only go so far. After you get to the bone, there’s nothing left.” She took one hand from the wheel to casually brush back a strand of yellow hair.
“I’m not so sure. They say beauty’s only skin deep, but who really knows?”
“And what do you think?”
“About beauty or about your career?”
“Beauty. What does a poet know about anything else?”
“Okay. Beauty is like pornography. I know it when I see it.”
“Have you seen it?”
“Beauty or pornography?”
She laughed and said, “I guess you can see both at the same time. But I meant beauty.”
“I see it now, with new eyes.” Mister Milktoast loved the sly little play on words. I was the only one in on the joke.
She glanced at me, still giddy from the rush of danger. She slowed further and began looking around at the scenery. We were twenty miles from town, far from the familiar stomping grounds of our lives, but our lives were relentless pursuers. We had briefly escaped, but had now been tracked down and recaptured.
Mister Milktoast gave back my body. Maybe he figured I’d be needing it.
“I’ll live on a farm someday,” she said.
“You don’t sound so enthusiastic about it.”
“It’s so peaceful out here in the country.”
“There’s no place for a negative girl. These hands weren’t made to hang laundry and shuck corn,” I said, reaching over and touching her hand, running my fingers over the pad of her thumb, then holding.
We rode in silence, looking out of our steel and glass bubble like two goldfish, gaping at a world we could never enter. Checkerboards of farms spread out in the distance and the sun was beginning to set, throwing mystical orange light over the land. Silos stood in silhouette, mute witnesses to years both fat and lean. Barns sagged, spine-weary from the constant weight of hay. Dots of brown cattle grazed with enthusiasm, unknowingly speeding their fate. At farmhouse dinner tables, rough-handed men were having plates of steaming biscuits passed to them. Through this lonely country we rolled, silent observers of a land that had no use for the likes of us.
This land owned people. These flat brown fields tied people down like scarecrows. More than seed was planted here. People were planted, too, their roots gripping the soil with feverish, bone-worn desperation. Generations had scratched in this dirt, facing withering drought and suffocating snow with equanimity, reaping their harvests of pain and misery. These were not our people.
I realized at that moment that I had to leave. Graduation was only six weeks away. All I had here was Mother and her bizarre self-torture, the punishment for my past sin that had spilled onto her, indelibly staining both our lives. And, briefly, I had Virginia. I looked over at her.
“What are you doing after you graduate?” she asked, as if she had read my mind.
Her tongue had slipped back out and then in, like a snake poking out of its den to check the weather. Her high cheeks were pink with joy. Her ocean-blue eyes twinkled, mermaid’s eyes, as if she knew of secret underwater places. I fell into those eyes, swam in their crisp waters, bathed myself clean.
“I don’t know yet. Maybe go to college, but not right away. What about you?”
“You mean after my racing career is over?” She laughed and snapped on the radio, music by Kansas or Boston or one of those other bands irrevocably tied to their geography.
“I guess that will keep you busy, but I suspect you’re going to need more than speed to be happy.”
“Well, you have family here, don’t you?”
Family. Mother, the matron saint of bourbon. Father, long dead, but not nearly long enough. Mister Milktoast, who would never leave me. Little Hitler, who would never let me leave him.
“No,” I said, unable to explain. “There’s nothing for me here.”
“Are you already giving up on us, before we’ve even started?”
“I didn’t know there was an ‘us.’ I thought you drove me out here in the country to scare me to death, then leave my body in a ditch by the side of the road.”
“No, that’s only the guys I don’t like.”
“Which is most of them?”
“Check the ditches.”
“Okay, I’m not giving up,” I said.
“I’ve given up. I surrender.”
“To me?” I knew my romantic style was lame, but given my role models, it could have been worse.
“Well, to everything. You know back there, when we going a hundred and ten? I do that at least twice a week. And you know what?”
The mirth had left her voice, and her words were weak with melancholy. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to shock me or impress me.
“What?”
“Every single time, this whole spring, I’ve wanted to turn the wheel and go into the ditch. To tumble and roll until there wasn’t enough left of me to fill a Dixie cup.”
A hush fell over the car, weighty as a boulder, and even the tinny rock music couldn’t squelch it.
“Why?” I said, my voice a whisper.
“Because. I have everything I want. All the money I could ever spend. I’ve got a perfect sit-com family. Dad plays golf and Mom’s the president of the PTA. Both on the goddamned school board, for Christ’s sake. They keep telling me what a bright future I have ahead of me. But I’m fucking miserable.”
I said nothing.
“What would you do if you had everything you ever wanted?” she said.
I started to say, “Get laid a lot,” but that wasn’t the kind of thing you bring up when you’re trying to get laid. Plus, considering the way I lost my virginity, it wasn’t a subject I wanted to broach.
She continued. “Tonight, I was going to take you with me. Get you out here and then wreck us, turn us both into chopped liver. And I almost did it, too. And I don’t even know why.”
A moment of dead silence. Something fell off a shelf in the Bone House.
“What stopped you?” I finally asked.
“Because it wouldn’t be fair. I want to die, I want to go into the hellfire the minister always threatened me with. I deserve it. But I don’t want to go alone. I’m afraid to go alone. Isn’t that lame?”
Some dead president once said there was nothing to fear but fear itself. He died anyway, and he killed a lot of people on his way to the grave. So fuck that. Be afraid.
“Why do you want to die?” I finally asked, because there were no other words.
“How could I make you understand, Richard? You’re weird, but a normal kind of weird. I’m so screwed up all the time, and I don’t have anybody to talk to. I just want to get out of this life, away from the goddamn voices.”
“Voices?” I swallowed my heart. It tasted like licorice.
“Nobody can understand. Not even you.”
“You can talk to me. I’m your Poet, remember?”
“You’re probably just like the others, just want to get between my legs for a little horizontal hoedown, then throw m
e aside like a cum rag. Why the hell did I think you were any different?”
Tears squeezed out of the corners of her eyes, the water of her blue seas spilling hotly down her cheeks. Women and their tears. And they wondered why men took advantage of them. She pulled over to the side of the deserted road and pressed her forehead against the steering wheel. The radio shifted into something with a bass line that sounded like a march into the sea.
After a second that seemed a year, I touched her hair gently and leaned close. What a couple we made, Romeo and Juliet gone insane, huddled in a dark car in the Iowa twilight. Crickets fiddled among the cornrows; otherwise, nothing interrupted the starry silence but noise that drifted from a distant antenna.
We were two souls reaching out to each other across a great gulf, tenuously connecting over a pit of despair and loneliness and bleak imagery. Virginia with her death wish and false bravado, and me with my headful of little friends and a thirst for whatever liquid I could squeeze from the moon. The odds would have been greatly against us no matter the circumstances. As it was, we had no chance.
Maybe we should have died together. A fitting end to nothing. But somebody had other plans.
“Tell me about the voices,” I said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“You’ll think I’m crazy,” Virginia said, between soft sobs.
“This world makes people crazy. It’s a survival mechanism.” I scooted closer to her.
I was disoriented, as if this intimacy was beyond me, as if it were another doing the touching and I was an alien butterfly emerging from a black cocoon, fluttering madly toward the light.
Virginia’s tears had stopped, but I could see the streaks on her face in the lunar glow. Her features were shrouded in darkness except the glint of her eyes. But as I looked at her, it was as if I were peering down a long dark hall, removed from the world of sight and sound. The one looking through my eyes was hard and cold, the one who moved my arms toward her was not me.
I had felt this way before, on that long ago night that I did not want to remember. I could only watch, horrified yet fascinated, as this new thing, this part of me, this hidden self tried on my flesh as it were a thrift shop suit. It liked the fit and gray was always in style.
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