“Someday—!” René threatened, suddenly storming as badly on the inside as it looked like it might do out her window.
They were just passing Bear Butte, Mato Paha, the legendary birthplace of Crazy Horse, a sacred power mountain where Indians still gathered to seek holy visions and make offerings to the Great Spirit. On the far horizon, against a backdrop of distant hills, the sky was dark and heavy with clouds. There was something like a solid black wall moving in their direction.
“Someday, what? What are you going to do?” Eve said, goading, sick to death of all the screaming and hollering.
“Someday I’m going to take a knife and I’m going to kill you,” René said, rage lifting her, elevating her beyond the ordinary, dissolving even the most highly fortified boundaries. She stretched up and let the words sail, fully formed, right out of her mouth. “How about that?”
It wasn’t that René had been nurturing the idea, keeping it locked away, waiting for an opportunity, but she also wasn’t shocked to hear herself say it. It hadn’t come out of nowhere. It was like a simple warrior, waiting quietly at the back for just the right moment, then stepping up, ready. And once she’d said it, there was no taking it back. There’d be no un-saying something like that.
After a long, strained moment, Eve said, “Well, that sounds about right. You and crazy Lizzie Borden.”
“Leave me alone! Just leave me alone.”
And the rest of the ride was silent.
There would be no apology. Not from René. Eve could pretend all she liked, but no matter how nicely she acted with friends and strangers, or how sweetly she answered the phone, René knew her. She was someone willing to stand by as her own child was beaten just outside her window; she was someone willing to wallop her kid in the face and just keep on truckin’; she was someone willing to send a child away if things didn’t work out just right. She was willing to be rid of people. So what René had said came close enough to what she’d wanted to say for a long time.
* * *
—
They set up the church hall as the snow started to come down. It kept coming, falling harder and heavier through the Pre-Ballet class, the Beginners class, the Intermediate and Advanced Intermediate class. By the time they were finished, the car was buried and the roads were covered with a thick layer of white, maybe two feet deep.
They dug the car out and edged their way back to the highway, then—slowly, slowly—crawled up the on-ramp, into the enclosure of a blinding snowstorm.
“Open your door, René,” Eve said harshly, going maybe three miles an hour. “See if you can find the line. I can’t see a thing.”
René opened her door. She could sometimes just make out the line marking the edge of the highway.
“Are we still on the road?” Eve said.
“We’re still on the road.”
It took four hours to get home. René spent the whole drive with her head hanging out her open car door, saying, “A little left, a little back, oh, watch out, go back.”
Finally, they arrived like they’d started out, in the pitch black. Al and Jayne were standing in the breakfast nook, staring out the window at the falling snow.
“We were beginning to wonder about you two,” Al said as they came through the door.
“Good God,” Eve said, shaking the snow off her coat and stomping her boots. “It’s terrible out there. Just terrible.”
“I’ve got some goulash on the stove,” Al said.
“Thanks, Al. I’m just pooped.”
“I don’t doubt that.” Al came over and brushed the snow out of René’s hair, then tickled her back. “Come on, Pumpkin Eater,” he said. “Get yourself some good hot soup, why don’t you.”
“Okay,” she said, shivering, and she could have cried and she could have hugged him, she was so happy to be home and finished with yet another exhausting, horrible, boring, wasted Saturday with Eve.
* * *
—
Mrs. G came through the back door unexpectedly one morning.
“Can you believe it, Eve?” she said, and as Eve set two places at the kitchen table, she went on to explain that Deanne Johnson had made it clear to her—just after Mrs. G had signed over the Academy of Ballet “lock, stock, and barrel”—that she shouldn’t be coming around the studio anymore. “Before the ink even dried on the paper,” Mrs. G said, dropping into a chair.
It was a shocker.
“ ‘As long as you’re around, I’ll never have the respect of the students.’ That’s how she put it, Eve. Like I was keeping the kids from looking up to her. Well, maybe they don’t look up to her because she’s a big fat nobody, that’s what I say.” Mrs. G shook her head and ran a hand through her poof of white hair. “After all these years, wouldn’t you think—”
“You deserve so much better, Helen,” Eve said, pouring the coffee. “I hate to say it,” she added, “but I had a feeling.”
“Poor kids,” Mrs. G groaned.
From then on, Mrs. G started having René come along to her house for Eve’s “teacher’s classes,” where they’d work on René’s extension.
“Well, that weighs a ton!” Mrs. G would say as René held on to the breakfast bar in Mrs. G’s kitchen and extended her leg, settling her ankle on Mrs. G’s shoulder. “Hold it up yourself, René. I’m not supposed to be carrying it for you.” Then Mrs. G would take a step closer, forcing René’s leg higher. “Pull up,” she’d say, adjusting René’s shoulders and hips, pausing to let her muscles stretch out.
They’d work that way to the front and side, but to the back, Mrs. G would simply take hold of René’s leg at the knee and lean into it, pushing it up into penchée arabesque. When it came time for René to try it on her own, without assistance, she’d lose about a foot of extension and her whole body would tremble with the effort.
“You have to build your strength, René,” Mrs. G said, just a few days before she was leaving town for good. “Strength and extension. Not either-or. You keep working on that while I’m away,” she said, as if she were coming back. “Just because I’m not here doesn’t mean you don’t have to work your hardest,” she continued, reading René’s mind. “It means you have to work even harder!”
She took hold of René’s hand, and René walked her back to her chair by the television, where she flopped down, breathless as the raggedy Pekingese on the floor beside her.
And not even a week later, Mrs. G moved away to Phoenix.
* * *
—
It should have been an easy transition, but René soon found that though her new teacher, Miss Dea, could take the class through the proper series of exercises, she couldn’t make their bodies sing or their eyes light up with trying.
Mrs. G had made it clear from the very first day René had ever stood in her class that a correction was the highest form of a compliment. It meant that your teacher saw your potential and believed in you enough to help you try to reach it. But now Miss Dea walked right past her, even taking the trouble to make an arc away from René’s place at the barre as though she’d encountered a reverse energy field. And if Miss Dea gave René a correction at all, it would be something vague about missing a beat or having a “stiff arm,” something that didn’t make any sense, hollered in a high-pitched twang from the far end of the studio.
Though René still went to dance class every day, Eve hadn’t set foot in the studio since Miss Dea had made a point of telling her it would be better for everyone if parents simply waited outside in their cars.
“She’s going to be a pill,” Eve said on the drive home that night. “No doubt about it.”
So, with Leon dispatched to parts unknown, with Mrs. G moved to Phoenix and Eve barred entry, the mantle of improving oneself, of reaching one’s potential, of attaining some increasingly mysterious lofty height settled solely on René’s shoulders. And devoid
of any company or advocate or guide, the whole thing began to feel like a long-deserted party—abandoned, wrinkly balloons littering the floor, the air slowly seeping out of them.
30
Brothers of the Order
After one full calendar year “of lockdown,” as he put it, Leon got kicked out of the military Catholic school, and all of a sudden he was back at home. He set up a room for himself, dragging one of the twin beds from the guest room down to the basement, to the furnace room off Eve’s dance studio. He put up posters of rock bands—Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple with the band members’ heads on Mount Rushmore—and bought a black light. He commandeered an old record player and set an ashtray right next to his bed, and no one said a word about it. He kept the window above his head cracked, wedged open with a paint stick.
He’d been kicked out for marijuana. They’d found a stash in his dorm room, under his bed.
“It wasn’t mine,” he said.
But the dismissal letter said it was his second violation.
“I don’t even know what happened,” he said. “Some kid went running past and threw this bag in the door, and it slid right under my bed. Then Mulligan came in with a whip and started beating me. Even though I kept telling him it wasn’t mine.”
“What about the other kid,” Eve asked. “Did they catch him?”
“I have no idea,” Leon said. “I didn’t even know him.”
“Well, at least he completed the school year,” Eve said to Mrs. G on the phone, long-distance. “Just one more to go. Lord knows it’s bound to be an uphill slog.”
And not long after that, Leon’s friend Husky—so called because he was skinnier than a toothpick—got kicked out of his house.
“He’s got no place to stay,” Leon said to Eve. “He’s been sleeping in his pickup for a week. He’s only asking if he can park it in the driveway.”
“All right,” Eve said. “But he’s not sleeping in the driveway, for crying out loud. He’ll have to share your room in the basement. And just until he can straighten things out with his folks.”
So Leon and Husky dragged the other twin bed down to the basement, and like comrades at a bar bonding over a winning team, they’d come up the stairs laughing and slapping each other on the back. They were inseparable, sharing a single, secretive sense of humor, holding a common outlook, a unified perspective on the world around them. Nothing could be better than whatever they were doing down there, they seemed to say. Everyone else was simply missing out.
Sometimes when they were gone, René would go down and play darts on the dartboard they’d hung on an exposed pillar. She’d turn off all the lights, switch on the black light, and bask in the heady glow of their posters, then rifle through their albums.
She never found anything but renegade high-school-boy stuff, but many decades later, when Leon was living on disability in an old pull-behind trailer down by Rapid Creek, he told her that he’d started mainlining back when Husky lived with them. They’d tie off when no one was home, Leon said, then shoot heroin or speedballs, take black beauties, drop acid on top of it.
By the time Leon ended up parked down by the creek, he’d long ago traded his wild days for a simpler blend of prescription painkillers, coffee, and cigarettes. The pills were from his doctor, for the chronic pain in his back and legs. He’d had his sciatic nerves deadened with an electric needle, but it hadn’t helped. Though he was barely middle-aged, he walked like an old man, bent over, legs splayed unnaturally wide. Years of opiate use had caused the cushioning between his vertebrae to soften and dissolve, and though he needed the pills to get through the day, they were becoming a sort of slow-motion death sentence, closing the deal on his liver failure.
He’d sit in his recliner in front of the TV, feet up to help ease the swelling. But soon, his feet and ankles would begin to turn black from the pooling blood, the loss of circulation.
It also came out around that time, when he didn’t have much to do other than reminisce, that there’d been some big partyers in the Colorado chapter of the Brothers of the Order of Saint Francis. Leon said the brothers would come to the dorms in the middle of the night and drag him and some of the other boys from their beds, then walk them down the hall, like inmates, to the monks’ quarters, where they’d include the boys in drinking wine and smoking weed.
“And those monks didn’t mind getting touchy-feely,” Leon said. “No kidding.” He shook his head like a dog shaking off pond water.
Sometimes the monks would do things to the boys, and sometimes they’d make the boys do things to them, or to each other. Some of the brothers had to ease themselves into it, but others were comfortable taking a direct approach, simply beating a boy with a doubled-up belt or letting him drink himself nearly unconscious, then helping him take down his pants. It would be early morning by the time the boys were allowed to return to their beds. Looking back, Leon couldn’t imagine that he hadn’t failed all of his classes that year, especially since he’d been one of the regulars on the brothers’ night-scene roster.
“They must’ve just passed us,” he said, considering, taking a deep drag on his cigarette. “Course, they didn’t do it to everybody,” he went on. “They had favorites. Yeah. Sons-a-bitches. And Mulligan was head of the pack. That guy was a real sadist. He was something else,” he said, mostly to himself, eyes adrift in painkillers and memory.
So when Leon finally got home, there was Husky, and Husky had not just weed but quaaludes, cocaine, hash, black beauties, mushrooms, acid, heroin—a banquet.
Leon said that one night he and Husky shot up, dropped acid, then decided to drive to Deadwood, to check in with the prostitutes who were always happy to accept the fish they’d caught that day as payment.
“So, first we had to go fishing,” Leon laughed. “Yeah,” he said.
He took a minute to glance at the TV, which was droning perpetually in the corner of his trailer.
“So we drove out to Deadwood,” Leon went on, “and after the cathouse—excuse me for saying—we were walking down the middle of Main Street in the dark, with no cars and nobody around, and it was like I could see right over the tops of all the buildings, like I was towering over all the rooftops. I was looking down on all the chimneys and fire escapes and everything. Hell, I could see all the way out to the end of town, past the gold mine, almost all the way back to Rapid, like I was King Kong or Godzilla or something. I wonder how that happens. How can anybody see over buildings and shit like that? Jeez.”
He paused as if René might have an answer, but her only acid trip had been a bad one. Everyone around her had started shrinking. “I’m right here, I’m right here,” her boyfriend had said, holding on to her. “No you’re not, no you’re not,” she’d wept.
“Yeah,” Leon said, lost in the memory of towering over buildings. “That was pretty cool.”
René didn’t say anything. She didn’t know if she believed him about the brothers. Not that many years earlier—as an excuse to have the long weekend off from work so he could get high without interruption—Leon had told his boss that Jayne had died in a head-on collision with an eighteen-wheeler just south of Worthington, Minnesota. His account had been frighteningly specific. René had unwittingly called his office that day, spoken with the receptionist, and ended up collapsed, knocked to her hands and knees, weeping over Jayne, who was actually fine, just not answering her phone because it was out of batteries. So now Leon was sick, but that didn’t mean she was ready to believe him.
She also didn’t know that this would be the last time she’d see him. Just a few weeks later, he’d be admitted to the hospital. That same night, an orderly would find him splayed next to his bed, having not pulled the emergency cord or rung for the nurse. Gone.
The autopsy revealed no sign of trauma, except that his stomach was filled with blood. The doctors couldn’t say for sure, but it seemed likely that one
of his esophageal veins—damaged from a lifetime of drinking—had burst, and he’d just quietly bled to death inside himself.
“We’re getting older, René,” he’d said, out of the blue, that very last day they’d been together, which René had thought was ridiculous.
She wasn’t even forty, and he was just forty-two.
By that point, Leon had told her too many times that he didn’t have anyone to blame but himself. But that was all talk. Because René did. She knew just where to start.
* * *
—
The next spring, after Leon returned home from Colorado, he graduated from high school in a flowing, light blue gown, laughing and throwing his mortarboard in the air, whooping it up with the others while Eve sat beside him in a madras plaid dress, her hair curled, a familiar exhausted smile on her face.
“Hallelujah!” Eve said over the phone to Mrs. G. “Praise the Lord and let the saints rejoice!”
And just after the ceremony, Leon hightailed it up to Hill City with Husky. According to Leon, Husky had found them logging work. Leon would drive a skidder, and Husky would work a chain saw. They’d live with about twelve other guys in one house, and they’d be making money.
“Lots of it,” Leon laughed.
He stuffed his clothes into plastic garbage bags, jumped into Husky’s truck, and they tore away from the house, smiling and waving, “happy as clams,” as Eve said whenever she recounted Leon’s departure.
So Leon was hidden away up in the hills somewhere near Hill City, with no phone, no mailing address, and no way to reach him. Eve spent a whole day driving around up there. It was a small mountain town, and she figured she could certainly find him by asking at the gas station or lumberyard, if not the market or the liquor store. And though folks said they’d seen him and took the time to point her down the road to various mile markers and rock formations, she ended up spending most of the day getting lost on the scenic loops and accidentally winding her way through Custer State Park and Keystone, repeatedly passing the Needles and Horse Thief Lake, endlessly disheartened by once again catching sight of Mount Rushmore out her passenger-side window—a paper bag full of sandwiches and chips for all the boys in the backseat.
The Distance Home Page 20