by Brett Lott
MARY KENAGY is the managing editor of Image, a quarterly journal focusing on the intersection of art and faith. Her fiction has appeared in the Georgia Review, Image, and Beloit Fiction Journal, and is forthcoming in the anthology Peculiar Pilgrims: Stories from the Left Hand of God. Her awards include an individual artist's grant from the Seattle Arts Commission and a special mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She teaches fiction writing at Seattle Pacific University.
EXODUS
JAMES CALVIN SCHAAP
THE STRENGTH OF "EXODUS" LIES NOT JUST IN ITS CLEAR-EYED, matter-of-fact storytelling, but also—and more importantly—in the way a rough-edged father, clueless to what it means to truly love his wife and children, finds the faith and courage needed in this moment of crisis. That courage, not only to see his daughter and her husband as the lost souls they both are, but also to see himself as a failed father desperately in need of learning the love necessary to begin the healing of his fractured family, makes "Exodus" a story worth measuring against our own understanding of the ways in which we love those with whom God has blessed us.
—BRET LOTT
Even though it came first, Nebraska seemed the longest stretch, land so flat and ordinary, so dark green in August along the Platte, but only the start of a long trip he and Eleanor had taken—what?—ten times and even more. Coming up on the silhouette of the Rockies was always a thrill otherwise, the mountains in an outline of haze, Pike's Peak on the right when finally you turn south to New Mexico. That pretty red rock he'd missed in the darkness, driving all night, the dawn finally coming up in his rearview when he'd turned west again from Albuquerque. Then, desert country so naked he felt forever guilty about what the white man had done in giving it up like some prize to the Indians. A whole day and a whole night he'd spent on the road before that three-hour drop-off from Flagstaff to Phoenix, a road where you spend more time footing the brake than the gas. A long, long way he'd driven, even though it didn't seem that far now that he was there, and he never once got tired, because the Lord knows this was no pleasure trip and he didn't spend a moment sight-seeing. It was a good thing he'd bought that Travelall for the boat, because he needed the space to move Janna's stuff back—and the kids.
Wilfred Staab had his own reasons why his daughter's marriage had failed, and it had less to do with Craig's drinking than it did with what his son-in-law did for a living—police work. Television said it all the time, how cops couldn't come home without dragging the job along; but it wasn't just that either, he thought, since nobody worth his salt can go home and turn it off just like that, whether it was laying concrete or raising hogs or catching crooks. It wasn't just being good at what you did; it was what Craig did specifically—being a cop and always having to see so much evil. That's what did him in, Wilf thought. That's what made him drink, and that's what did in their whole dream of living in Arizona—Craig and Janna, who'd hardly ever been out of Iowa, and their two little ones, who, since their parents had moved to the Promised Land, had hardly ever been back home.
He parked the truck in front of a 7-11 across the road from the station where he stopped to refuel, then went inside and asked for quarters, five bucks' worth, even though he didn't mean to make a long call, just to tell Eleanor he'd arrived. Almost twenty-six hours, straight through, but he wouldn't have to tell her how long, because Eleanor would know the minute the phone rang.
The instructions were in two languages, one of them Spanish, but the place was full of Mexicans, jabbering just like Vietnamese used to back in Saigon, as if they were all hard of hearing. He knew what kind of target he made too—this old, overweight white guy driving a Travelall with Iowa plates—easy tourist pick-ins, and he'd heard far too many of Craig's horror stories, so many in fact that if Craig were his own boy, he'd have told him to cool it with the blood and guts. Back home, Craig could get a crowd in church or at the bowling alley or anywhere downtown inside five minutes, everybody wanting to hear what life was like for a big-city cop—all the gory details, how people are pigs.
Scared?—yeah, darn right scared, he told himself, just like Vietnam. I'm a fish out of water here, and he'd have likely told the operator exactly that if those three hombres standing by the air hose had come any closer while he had the phone in his hand. Scared?—sure I'm scared, he told himself, but mad too, and full of hate, and not for them either.
Even the operator was Mexican. She told him that he couldn't use quarters on this pay phone, that if he'd like to call long distance, he had to use his card or else reverse charges. "I don't have a card," he told her. "Then reverse charges," he said; "make it collect," and immediately he felt dumb for not thinking of it himself. So now what was he going to do with a pocket full of quarters jingling in his pants like a come-on?
"Your name, sir?" she said. Behind her voice, the phone back home was already ringing. He glanced at his watch, then remembered Iowa was an hour ahead.
"Wilf Staab," he said, "S-T-A-A-B. But she'll know my name—it's my wife I'm calling."
The phone line bleated three times before Eleanor picked it up.
"I'm here," he told her after the operator let them alone. "You know where we always get gas? I'm across the street." One of the kids whipped an empty bottle into the air. It turned and gleamed in the bright lights and crashed in a dark parking lot next door. "She call?"
"Four, five hours ago or so. Wondered when you'd get there," Eleanor told him. "She's not crying. Seemed to me the kids were quiet—at least I didn't hear 'em."
"You okay?" he said.
"Worked my fingers to the bone on that couch of Eric and AnnLynn," she said. "You should'a let me come along, you know."
"A whole day in that truck with you, and I'd be dead," he said. "You just make the nest. Keep yourself busy 'til you can't anymore, and then hit the sack. You can figure when we'll be back."
"What time is it?" she said.
"Hour earlier than it is up there," he told her.
"I'm not thinking well," she told him.
"Was he there?"
"What do you mean?"
"Was Craig there when Janna called?"
"No, but I don't remember, Wilf. I'm all upset. Now, you be careful—you hear me? You keep a civil tongue and all, and—"
"You know me. I can't talk. I'm just like Moses," he told her.
"Just bring her home, sweetheart," she said. "Make sure they got toys out when you leave so the kids got something to play with in the truck."
"Whyn't you make something out of those blueberries you bought?" he said. "Cobbler or something, something the kids'll like?"
"I got a ton of muffin mix all ready, and I canned some—"
"Just try to get some sleep, then," he said. "Everything's going to be fine. I'm going to bring your daughter home."
"It isn't fine, Wilf, and you know it," she told him.
"Well then, at least it's going to be better tomorrow than it was today. Think of it that way."
When he put down the phone, the first thing he heard was the whine of a siren, and he thought the same thing he always did when they visited their kids—how some people get used to that sound when they hear it all the time. He picked up the quarters and turned back to his truck in thick desert heat that always seemed to him unnatural.
The boys he'd seen at the side of the building were coming his way—three of them, all of them taller than he was. He stood up straight like military. He hadn't dressed up for this trip. He'd gone home right away, as soon as Eleanor had come to where they were pouring concrete to tell him Janna said to come pick her up because she couldn't take it anymore. He'd filled up with gas, picked up some cash, and left town in a half hour—never even changed clothes, streaks of concrete still on his jeans. Right then he was happy about that. He'd have felt scared in Sunday clothes or a sport shirt. Work clothes were like fatigues.
"Mister," one of the boys said, "you got any cash?"
He'd already had his hands in his pockets, so he scooped out the quarters, all twe
nty of them, and rolled them in his hands until he had them in a stack, then grabbed the hand of the kid who'd asked and banged them in his palm. "Now, get lost," he said, "before I whale on your ass."
Scared?—sure, he thought, as he got back into the truck he bought just for fishing, but maybe he shouldn't have said what he did exactly.
He came back on the freeway from Grant Road, and wondered who could have ever guessed that after eleven years without kids, in a matter of days they'd have two back in town. Already a year after he'd started medical school, their son Eric had been courted by local doctors who wanted him to consider family practice in Neukirk. He and Eleanor hadn't tried to push him to come back—push them —because AnnLynn was a part of the decision, and it had to be what she wanted too. They wanted their kids back in town, but they wanted what was best for them first and foremost; and if Eric and AnnLynn felt some other town was a better option, then that was just fine too. Eleanor came home with the news even before Eric had called to tell them. She knew he'd signed because Doc Beckering told her. They acted surprised anyway when Eric called. Played the fool.
And now Janna. Not that they didn't know things were bad. Janna was always stubborn and hard, not one to complain but never one to throw in the towel. He pulled back into the traffic and remembered the night he and Eleanor had figured this boy—and Janna'd had her choices all right—that this Craig was going to be something special. They had lain in bed talking that night about how you couldn't choose your kids' mates, how really powerless parents were in such a big decision.
"You don't like this guy?" he asked her, looking up at the little glowing stars Eleanor had pasted on their bedroom ceiling years before.
"It's not that," she said. "It doesn't just come out of nowhere is what I'm saying. I can see why she loves him."
"What's he do?" he'd said.
"It's not so much what he does as who he is—"
"Okay, then what is he?" he'd asked.
She waited a minute. "He's a whole lot like her father," she said, laughing.
A long time ago already, when Janna didn't call and didn't write, and when finally both of them could tell she was faking the good times, when she seemed more blessed cheery about things than she'd ever once been, they figured it all for the worst. They weren't foolish, and they'd understood that at least part of the reason for leaving Iowa was this sense that maybe they needed a new start, some hope.
"He drinks too much," she told them a year ago. "Way too much, and I get mad too often," she said, her voice letting out words like steam. Wherever she'd leave gaps, Wilf filled them in with the worst—just as Eleanor must have on the kitchen phone. He had trouble trying to know who to feel for most—Eleanor, who was upstairs bundling Kleenex, or his only daughter, who probably had it worse than she was letting on, if he knew her.
"Maybe you ought to try AA or something," he said, because he knew Eleanor wasn't about to try to talk just then. "You talk to your pastor ever?"
Silence. "You know me," Janna says.
Nobody said a word.
"What am I supposed to do?" she'd said.
He's got the two women closest to him in all the world on separate ends of the phone he's got in his hands, both of them full of hurt, and the two of them leave it up to him to say the right thing, a man who can lay a three-car driveway in half a morning without a ripple but isn't worth a quarter at picking words out of the fray.
"You see if you can't work it out," he told her. "We're not asking for a miracle here, and if things don't get any better, you call. But he's your husband, and you swore to it." That's what he told her—something like that, only maybe not as pretty.
For a year, they'd never heard a word. Vacation came and went—the whole family back to Iowa. Nothing. No mention. Craig out with his old buddies, the three of them home alone at night, kids in bed, and still nothing. Janna could have spilled her guts right there in the family room where she'd grown up watching cartoons, and not a comment. So the moment she left, Eleanor cried.
"Just like my wife to think the sky's falling," he told her. They were standing at the door, the minivan barely out of the driveway. He had to take her in his arms.
"Never once the whole time did they even touch," she told him. "You see that, Wilf ?" she said. "Never once."
"So?" he said. "They got two kids and they been married long enough. All that goosey crap is over"
She dug her face into his shoulder.
Kurtis is awfully young for glasses, Wilf thought, but cuter than a bug's ear anyway. So studious, he looked like his uncle Eric, the big-shot doctor. He sat on the couch with a book that looked way too heavy for a boy his age, never really said much when his grandpa showed up, just smiled. Right then, Wilf felt bad that he'd not changed; if he'd looked presentable the kids would have maybe taken a shine to him—although they hadn't seen their grandparents all that often, twice a year only since they'd been born.
Gracie was reading too, and it made him wonder about how all of this was affecting the kids, whether maybe they were hiding between the covers. She was a doll, toothless, that perfectly blonde hair falling light as down to her shoulders.
Janna was heavier again, not that he wanted to blame her. Everybody's got to take refuge somewhere. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse, the kind her mother wore around the house in the summer, and shorts that were too much a reminder of what she used to weigh. He hugged her, but it was awkward because it always was with Janna. Even when she was a baby, she didn't take to being held. Janna was a cat, Eric a dog. Janna had a mind of her own. Eric always tried to please—Eagle Scout, track star, whatnot. Janna wasn't a bad kid, but she'd never really given the sense that she needed her parents at all, not really. She had her share of hard times—seemed, sometimes, to choose them.
The first thing she did when he came in, after the hug and seeing the kids, was stick a cup of coffee in his hand and take him out through the dining room door and into the garage, where she already had the goods lined up—four suitcases, a Ninja Turtles duffel bag, two thick garment bags, and a pair of backpacks loaded with goodies for the trip.
"Where's he?" Wilf asked when they walked back into the dining room.
"Working."
"He knows?"
Janna ran a twist of hair back behind her ears and bit her lip. "He knows," she said. "You can bet he even knows you're here. He's got his buddies watching out for him."
"Cops?" Wilf asked.
Hate was in her eyes. "They watch me constantly—they do."
Behind her, up on the wall at the door to the garage, was a bulletin board full of kids' finger paintings, a list of numbers, and that ugly church picture of Grandpa and Grandma Staab Eleanor had sent.
"Don't tell me to stay, Dad," she told him.
"I didn't come all the way down here for nothing," he said. "I could'a told you that over the phone for a buck and a half."
She smiled.
"So what's the plan?" he said.
"You must be tired," she told him. "You must be shot."
"Not as young as I used to be ," he told her. "It's too hot to lay cement anyway."
"I thought you quit for your shoulders' sake," she said. "I thought you sold the business."
"I did," he told her. "But Buddy's so busy that he can't do without me. That's how valuable I am, even with my shoulders shot."
"I thought you were going to do nothing but fish," she said.
"Just dreams."
She shook her head like she knew about dreams. These little bits of the real her you had to pick up on—a smile once in a while, a tip of her head, a twitch in her eyes. That was her language, always was. She didn't give a thing away.
"I'm sorry about all this," he said. "Your mother and I—" He didn't know exactly how to put it. He looked up at that bulletin board. How in heck could he tell her how dead her mother felt about it, how she'd told him one night that she didn't think she could ever make love again, not with her daughter in the kind of big trouble Eleanor
thought she was?
"It just didn't work, Dad," she told him.
"From the start?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "Maybe I shouldn't have married him. It was the big thing back home, you know—getting out of the house and getting married."
Up on that bulletin board she'd hung a picture of the Colorado Rockies with a little inscription—"Ain't no mountain high enough" and some Bible verse printed in such little print he couldn't read it without glasses. Had to be a Colorado mountain, Wilf figured, because no Arizona mountain was that kind of snowy beautiful.
"I can't anymore. I tried," she told him. "I just can't."
"I know you did, Janna," he told her. "You re our daughter."
"Mom told me once how mad she used to get at you. She told me about a time you had some kind of family picnic or something, and all day long, she said, how you played volleyball with all the men, while she had to run after kids and get this and get that, and put all the food out and whatnot, and how it wore her out, Dad."
Could have been a hundred picnics, he thought.
"She said you were coming home that night in all that heat—"
"In Iowa?" he said.
"Yes, in Iowa. It's worse in Iowa, Dad, believe me." That was the old Janna. "You were coming home on the blacktop from Neukirk. Mom says she can remember the exact spot. She says she'll never forget it. She says you turned to her and you said, 'Boy, that was fun. That was a great day.' And she says she was so mad she could have got out of the car and walked home. She says she'll never forget the exact spot on that blacktop, Dad, the exact spot where you said that."
"I did that?" he said.
"She says you never thought about her that day, chasing kids and keeping them happy. And I asked her how she could do it, and you know what she said, Dad?"