His brother whispered something unintelligible in his ear.
He was the do-right man.
When the men came up the stairs, they carried Michael’s mother’s voice up with them. They heaved the weight of it room to room, looking for him, their feet creaking on the wood. And when he rose up from his hiding place and his legs moved with infinite slowness toward the door and into the hall, then down the stairs and across the living room, he felt an odd pulling just below his stomach and imagined, in the seconds before he plunged out the front door into the bitter cold and shifting light, an umbilical cord trailing behind. He ran across yards, jumped over walls and fences. After a few blocks, his legs began to cramp. He came out of an alley, turned up Montrose Avenue toward the brightly lit L.
They found him in front of a small bakery. A police car cut him off at the corner and the officers inside leaped out and chased him. They didn’t even know who he was. It didn’t matter. They caught him by his umbilical, slung him to the snowy ground.
When he tried to tell them that it was all a mistake, what he said made no sense. One of the officers Tasered him as he rose off the ground, and his body ignited and he could see the branching veins at the back of his retina. But to his great surprise he could still move, as if there was a bad connection, as if his body was wired wrong. He flung an arm up to ward off what was coming and struck one of the officers in the face. And then something unbearably hard shattered his ribs on his left side. And he heard one of the officers shout that he’d better get the fuck down, and, as he was retching in the snow from the pain, he thought how strange it was that the officer couldn’t see that he was down. Above him, one of the officers fumbled with the Taser, cursing its unreliability. The second time Michael rose, he thought he saw, at the edge of his vision, his mother’s old Buick station wagon that she’d traded in years ago, pull to the curb. The front passenger door was open and there beside his mother on the seat sat Alice, looking out at him with great curiosity. And in her eyes was the boundless lake.
Beyond them, down the street, the L platform gleamed. He could hear a train approaching.
When one of the officers grabbed his shoulder, Michael clutched at the man’s jacket, his belt, spun himself loose. The officer grimaced and grabbed his own neck. Blood was on the snow. Michael stood in front of the bakery windows, his breath pluming, the officer’s utility knife in his hand. And then Michael knew the man staggering there was his brother and that the blood on the snow was his blood and Michael moved toward him to carry his burden. And the other officer raised his gun and shot Michael in the chest.
53
KATE IS FEELING her way along a rope. Down in all that dark and smoke and water. It’s not a place to be but a place to not be. She knows this. Even so, she’s here. Every so often she feels a knot, a knuckle along a spine. Every so often she feels a small tug at the other end. There’s a tip-of-the-tongue taste of something sweet in the air. Her heart beats faster.
She’s groping along like this for hours, it seems, ankle-deep in water. And then the rope, which she’ll still feel between her hands when she wakes, comes to an end.
54
THIS IS WHAT Darnell imagines:
In a movie, the director would use a jump-cut shot to compress time and heighten tension: the father character (early fifties, graying) working in his woodshop with a skill saw and lathe. Sawdust in the air. He’s wearing earplugs, so instead of the tool’s high-pitched whine we hear only a distant humming. He won’t hear the detectives knocking at his front door or calling his cell phone. The father is building something in the shape of something else, a movie prop. A Comanche bow or a roadhouse sign or a weathervane. A likeness to anchor the movie in time and space. Here we might see a cutaway shot of the father’s hands at work—callused, sun-freckled. His hands the steadying forces of his life, you’d think. Never still. Then we’d pull in close: the father’s face concentrated, eyes behind protective glasses narrowed to blade and board, the penciled line where they meet. Closer still, an eye fills the screen and we see, reflected in its blue iris, tiny particles of sawdust that whirl about his face. Inside the iris, these particles miraculously recombine to form a younger, dark-haired version of the father and his former wife down on their knees, giving their two boys a bath. The boys—three and six—make faces, splash water out of the tub. The younger one is fussy, ready for bed. The older one, always testing them, is climbing out. The boys’ mother—arms outstretched—tries to coax him back into the tub. The father leans back from all the splashing, the commotion, turns his head. A bemused smile on his face. He could be any father, really, helping out with the kids at the end of the day. Fears and hopes roiling through him. We might see in the father’s turning away, his bemused smile, something portentous. But the father and his family aren’t watching the movie; they’re in it. They’re not even aware yet of the forces tugging at them. How one thing will pull another along. Floating there in the father’s iris, the rest of their lives can’t be imagined.
55
MARGO LEANS AGAINST a pillar in the pool bathhouse, braces for the next contraction. The limestone is cool against her face. She’s left her cell phone in her knit bag down by the Springs. She often swims her laps here alone after closing to avoid the crowds. She’d begun to feel more buoyant in her seventh month, despite her doctor’s warnings about hypertension. As if the baby is making slow peace with inside becoming outside. Water seeking its own level. But right now her bowels are filling with concrete. Panting here in the dusky light, she’s seized by the thought that Darnell has done this to her—scooped pails of sand from the collapsed backyard sandbox, mixed it, and spoon-fed her in bed. She’d tried to say something to him about it, but her tongue was stifled by the spoon, her teeth grinding against grit. Just a little more, Darnell would say. To keep up your strength. He’d touched the side of her cheek with the spoon to get her to open, the way you’d do a baby. Darnell was patient. He was building a monument to patience inside her bowels. Patience abides. Its weight holding you steady and balanced in the water, like ballast for a ship.
But then it isn’t Darnell at all, who she knows she’ll soon leave. It isn’t Darnell’s sons’ undoing, isn’t her worry over Alice back with her unsteady mother, or Margo’s own mother and father, fading quickly now, paper-thin versions of the people they’d been. It isn’t Kate, who’d called her about Michael that morning, her voice a mix of sympathy and accusation. Who was it then, filling her up this way?
The next contraction hits, doubles her over. She steadies herself against the pillar. Calls out. Someone will hear, she thinks, someone will come. One of her fingernails bites into the flesh of her palm, but she hardly notices. And it occurs to her that it’s her own doing. That she’s filled up with herself but will always feel empty. It’s a sleight of hand. A box with a false-bottom mirror where you could hide anything. How could she have forgotten? She’s conceived herself.
Her breath comes in great heaves now. In the bruised last-light, she leans against the pillar in the great temple knowing she can bring it down or hold it up—it’s up to her. Only she is left to tell the tale.
56
IN SAM’S DREAM, her mother is swinging an aluminum baseball bat through their house. She smashes the bay windows in the den and then the tall windows in the living room. She shatters the antique chandelier she’d bought on a trip to Houston soon after she married Sam’s dad, one that still hangs in their house. She explodes the sconce lights and the stained glass in the hallway. In life, in the throes of her aneurysm, she’d only broken out the three bay windows in the den. In the dream, she spares nothing. Her mother is deliberate, thoughtful as she goes along, a quality Sam thinks admirable and lacking in herself. Sam is vaguely aware of the chaos raging in her mother’s brain, which in the dream sounded like a crazed Geiger counter. Her mother moves through the house but reads to her in the voice of Sam’s third-grade teacher, Mrs. Swatzel. Little House in the Big Woods. Pa and the bear. Her mother, who is
also Mrs. Swatzel, goes on smashing with the bat, pausing only to readjust the crossing-guard sash Mrs. Swatzel used to wear after school. In life, everyone wondered: Had her mother shattered the windows out of anger? Frustration? The random heat lightning in her brain? No one knew. They found her sprawled on the kitchen floor one morning after a jogger passing the house had heard the ruckus, seen the jagged openings. Someone had called her dad at the station. At first they’d thought there had been a break-in, an intruder. Wasn’t that what the baseball bat in the hallway closet was for?
In the dream, her mother pauses between one window and the next, and despite the Geiger counter noise turns to Sam and says, See? I’m calling to you. I can’t speak anymore, can’t dial a phone, can’t even think straight. But I’m calling to you. Her mother seems elated at the news. You will hear me. These are the shouts of my body. This is how I love you.
57
KATE’S EX-HUSBAND RAY is still here, and sometimes that’s enough. Other days, his failures haunt him. He has a maintenance job for the park district and he drives one of the groundskeeper carts along the hike and bike trail, taking care of small repairs, cleaning up after park events, removing graffiti from bridges and benches. He likes the solitude and the city benefits. Doesn’t like the swollen ankles or the heat, which he’s grown less tolerant of. He often thinks of Kate and the girls. A life he once had that now seems like someone else’s. He’d gone to the girls’ anniversary vigils but had grown a beard for the occasions, stood anonymously in the back, and left early. He knew Kate had moved into one of the condos downtown that he and Kate used to make fun of. Boondoggles, they’d called them. Californication. Months ago, he’d gotten her number from a friend (who advised him, of course, not to contact her) and called Kate. He wanted to tell her that he knew he’d failed them. That maybe if he’d been there, he could have prevented it. That he carries the weight of those forty-seven missing minutes like a stone in his belly. But when he called, he didn’t say anything, just listened to her voice saying hello hello who’s this? and for some reason thought of a bird, its head jerking this way and that. He remembered a wren once getting into the house and he and the girls had closed the curtains and turned off all the lights, and Kate held the cat in her arms, until, in the dark, the wren grew calmer and he placed a towel over it. Silly old bird thinks it’s night, Elizabeth had said, delighted. On the phone, Kate said, “Jack, is this you?” When Ray didn’t say anything, she hung up.
Ray is near the hike and bike trail on Riverside Drive when he sees the fat man on the train trestle that crosses the river. On night shifts, he sometimes chases off kids or drunk university students trying to climb it. He calls his supervisor, says someone’s up on the trestle, maybe a prank, maybe a jumper, hard to tell. He waits but nobody comes, no supervisor, no cop, no siren. The man seems to be frozen up there, staring down at the water. Ray calls up at him. Nothing. Swallows dive around one of the trestle piers. So Ray climbs up, despite his bad ankles and fear of heights, goes out on the trestle, thinking maybe he can talk him down. From up top he can see most of the park and bike path. The high-rises across the river loom over him. When he gets about thirty feet away, he can see that the man is barefoot, his pants rolled up like he’s wading in a creek or in the surf. His shoes are draped around his neck by their laces. He turns toward Ray, calm, like he expected Ray would be along any minute. Is the fishing any good here? the fat man asks. He peers down as if he’s watching a school of them dart around. Ray explains the trestle is off-limits, asks if he can help him, you know, get down. The fat man says maybe so, maybe so. He wants to tell Ray something but first he needs to know a few things, for instance, what was the exact distance from the trestle to the water’s surface? Ray thinks: Just my luck, bat-shit crazy and I stumble on him. Ray tells him he’s only here to be sure the man gets down safe. He appreciates that, the fat man says. Then he doesn’t say anything but Ray can see his wheels are turning. The fat man says he’s fond of weights and measurements. They can tell you the shape of something even if you never saw it. Consider this trestle, he says, and leans out, the metal rail disappearing into his big gut. Ray shoots forward, his heart thudding. But the fat man just eyes the girders and supports down there. Points to this and that. Says something about spandrels and cables and the weight of the thing. All this, he says, only ideas, measurements in a person’s head before it’s built.
Ray looks for his supervisor, a cop car. The sun glares off all that high-rise glass. Heat’s coming on. Ray moves closer to the fat man, but the height is starting to make him dizzy, a little wobbly in the legs.
The fat man says he worked as an assistant engineer for Amtrak for many years, had ridden over hundreds of bridges like this. Ridden across them on the City of New Orleans, which nightly bisected the country from Chicago down through the South. Crossed the five-hundred-foot Pit River Bridge in California, the tallest cantilever train bridge in the world, which also lured the desperate and forlorn. A bridge, the fat man says, is made in the pattern of man, his insides. Cables and trusses, sinew and bone. But, of course, a bridge is also a pattern of the void it spans. Where they touch.
That’s something, Ray says, because he doesn’t know what to say to that.
I was fond of that life, the fat man says.
Well, we’re all fond of life, Ray says.
Ray can see the man is measuring something in his head.
When I was a young boy, the man says, on summer days my friends and I used to climb up this trestle. We’d crouch down on the beams just underneath the tracks. When the train came, there would be a terrible roaring and grinding over us and the sun would be blotted out. The refrigerated cars would pass over and cold water from the condensation would rain down through the timbers. We were quite fond of that. The shock of it. The way it would throw you out of yourself and bring you back again.
The fat man shifts his weight from one foot to the other, his toes as big as spoons.
Ray can hear a siren. Cottonwoods tremble along the riverbank. Something is happening. Ray’s legs go wobbly again. There will be questions about why he didn’t do more, he thinks. Why he wasn’t more persistent or persuasive. Why he wasn’t more capable. Why he wasn’t someone else.
The fat man looks out over the river, shoes yoked around his neck, says he’s never actually been on this train trestle in his life before now. Never been an assistant engineer. Why I tell such lies, I don’t know, he says. He rises up on his toes, grips the sides, and heaves one meaty leg over. The metal seems to groan under him. Then, just as the man is about to go over—and this is the hardest part for Ray to understand—Ray throws himself at the man’s other leg. Grabs him around the thigh, the size of a normal man’s torso. Buries his face in it. The fat man is straddling the trestle wall now. Poised between two worlds. He struggles and twists. Ray’s head hits something hard, once, twice. There’s a roaring in his ears. But he doesn’t let go.
58
JACK AND SAM went to see a double feature of To Have and Have Not and Key Largo at the Paramount Theatre. Sam had gotten a job there that spring at the concession stand. She loved the thick red velvet curtains, the elderly ushers in their uniforms. The timeless feel of the place. On their way in, Jack had spotted Kate in the lobby with Edward, who he’d met at the Christmas party. Jack said hello and they talked a bit about Kate’s new job at a realty company. Sam was friendly but kept her distance. He wanted to ask Kate what the detectives had told her, about the death of the man in Chicago, but he stuck to small talk. Likely the murders would remain unsolved, as the reports said. But maybe now she might get on with things, build a new life. Would he? Talking with her now, a part of him still held out hope.
The last time he and Kate had been together, more than two months ago, she slept beside him in bed, the sheet twisted between her thighs. A pale C-section scar above her pubic bone, faint stretch marks along her breasts, hips. Her freckled shoulder, the shell of her ear. He cupped her hip with his hand as if to test if she w
ere real. And he marveled at being there with her then, in that moment, among the many that might not have been. Tethered to each other. Through grief? Solace? Did it matter? And for a minute or so it seemed that moment would never pass. Our dream has no bottom. And lying there beside her, his hand still on her hip, he heard the newspaper hit the bushes outside the window, and after a little while, the sprinkler start up. And then Sam pulled into the driveway, her headlights flaring off the back wall, and Kate jerked awake beside him.
59
HOLLIS FINGER CROSSES Barton Springs Road in the backhoe he’s stolen from a condo construction site. In Iraq, he’d driven military trucks and even operated a small crane, and this wasn’t so different. True, he had some trouble at the bridge when a tread caught a fire hydrant at the curb and then scraped the corner of the bridge wall, but he’d made it through. The caterwauling of the engines and the condition of the seat cushion—stained, lumpy with moisture—unsettle him. Remain calm, he thinks. I have carved you on the palm of my hand.
At the edge of the park, he sees birds—starlings—wheeling after insects around the moon tower. Before him, an expanse of dew-thick grass, rising and falling, like sea swells.
The true moon arcs over the trees. The false one moves through him like a tide. He lifts rock, soil, and root. He heaves great trees from the ground. He digs deep. Shatters water and utility pipes, colorful maps of which are etched in his head. The shovel groans at its work. Debris, dust flies. The glass cage that houses him grows fissures until his vision is like that of an insect. He is a jealous guardian, a faithful slave, a doting father, an innocent son. He is Abraham and Isaac, wielding the knife above while welcoming it to his throat. And before they lay hands upon Hollis, before he’s dragged from his glass box and beaten by God’s unwitting fists, he carves the girls’ likeness into the earth.
See How Small Page 13