Nina Revoyr

by Wingshooters

  For that was how far they’d go in explaining his actions. It wasn’t simply that he had killed someone; it was that it was understandable, even justified, considering what the Garretts had subjected him to. Because Earl Watson, good Earl Watson, war hero and business leader and upstanding citizen, couldn’t possibly have burned and beaten his own child. The general facts of the murder had played out so publicly that they could not be covered up or disputed. And so instead people created a digestible reason for them—a justification that allowed them to remember Earl Watson in the most favorable possible light.

  But Alice Watson couldn’t take part in this fiction, or maybe she just couldn’t keep living in a place where people knew so much about her family. Within six months she and Kevin had moved to her parents’ place in Wausau, which was only an hour from Deerhorn, but was far enough. Her older son, Jake, didn’t join them in the move. He continued to live in Deerhorn with one of his friends’ families, and I imagine he lives there to this day.

  My grandfather’s fate was more complicated. Oh, he too was given the benefit of the doubt. Yes, he had shot Earl, people said—but only to protect his granddaughter, since Earl was crazy, and my life had been at risk. Because the shooting was seen as self-defense, he and Uncle Pete were not arrested, and there was never any talk of a trial. Charlie LeBeau had done what he had to do, and so he was forgiven.

  Except he couldn’t forgive himself. He spent hours and hours alone now, sitting on the porch, or working on household projects in the basement. In the immediate aftermath of the killings he’d gone up to the coffee shop as usual, but the constant questions and morbid curiosity and even sympathy had gotten to him, and so he didn’t venture up there anymore. He had visitors—Ray Davis, Uncle Pete and Aunt Bertha, and even Jim Riesling, once. But mostly he stayed alone, not talking much to my grandmother, who made his meals and did his laundry and watched over him with a worried eye, but who didn’t know how to penetrate his sorrow.

  The only person whose presence Charlie seemed to tolerate was mine. And since I was miserable and lonely and missing my dog (my clothes were still covered with his long white hair; we’d left out his bed and water bowl, still filled with water, as if he might return at any moment), I stayed around him as much as I could. One Saturday afternoon in February, Charlie called me out to the porch. He patted the couch and I scrambled up beside him. He threw an arm around my shoulders and took a gulp from his can of Pabst. Several empties stood on the table in front of him.

  “In the spring,” he said, “I want you to help me plant the vegetable garden. Beans and potatoes, and cabbage and carrots, and maybe some corn and tomatoes. What do you say, Mike? Would you be interested in that?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I imagined how good that would feel, working outside with my grandfather. But he had started to move more slowly now, even simple things like getting up off the couch were taking more visible effort, and it was hard to imagine him working a shovel or bending over to plant seeds in the earth.

  “Or better yet—you’re getting old enough to have your own garden. Maybe we’ll give you a little patch at one end and you can plant whatever you want.”

  “When will we do that, Grandpa?” I asked. We were in the heart of winter, and the ground was covered with snow, and it was hard to imagine a time when things flowered and grew instead of withering and dying.

  He took another gulp and sighed. “I don’t know. When it’s warm enough. Hopefully in May. The groundhog went back into his hole, you know, so it looks like we’ll have a late spring.”

  I rearranged myself so I was closer to him. “Don’t the Bombers start playing in May?” I asked. “Can we go to see a game?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure. And maybe this summer, you and me can drive down to watch the Brewers.”

  I sat up straight, excited in spite of my knowledge that Charlie did not like to travel. “Can we really, Grandpa?” I asked. And even though I knew that it would probably never happen, that he was just talking about it to please me, it made me happy anyway; it made me glad that my feelings were important enough for him to attend to.

  He squeezed me tight around the shoulders and laughed. “Sure we can, Mike. Sure, kiddo. We can do whatever you want.”

  We didn’t talk about the killings that day—we never did, actually—but there were things I wondered about even then, and those questions have only deepened with time. Why did Earl aim his gun at me, for instance, when he knew that Charlie would never let anyone hurt me? He must have realized that my grandfather would choose me over him, and maybe that’s why he did it. Maybe he wanted to make my grandfather choose and then have to live with his choice.

  And I wondered something, too, about my grandfather’s actions. His first shot had hit Earl in the shoulder; Pete’s had hit him in the side. These did not have to be mortal blows, and they might have saved him if they’d gotten him to a hospital.

  But Charlie hadn’t stopped with one shot. He’d gone after Earl a second time, and that time he’d shot for the kill.

  Why did he do it? Why did he kill his best friend? Was it to save him from the shame that would surely ensue—the shame of Kevin’s scars and bruises, yes, but now also the shame of murder? Was it because he felt responsible for what Earl had done and so also felt bound to make up for it? Was it because he truly feared for my life—not only then, but into the future? Or was it because he knew something else, something that my grandmother and Father Pace and other people of faith can’t admit to—that there are sins for which there is no redemption?

  Charlie didn’t make it to spring. He got up to plow the driveway one morning in March, and I was awakened by the familiar sound of the snowblower being started. But when that sound wasn’t followed by the usual noise of the machine making its long sweeps down the driveway, I knew that something was wrong. My grandmother and I both rushed out together and found him lying just inside the garage. She cried out, “Charlie!” and fell to her knees. His hands were clasped over his chest and his eyes were half-open. When I touched his face I felt the rough stubble there. The skin on his cheek was still warm.

  It would be easy to say his death was of natural causes. It would be easy to say that years of eating fatty foods and drinking beer had hardened his arteries and weakened his heart, and maybe there would have been some truth to that explanation. But I believe that my grandfather died of heartbreak. He had already, for all intents and purposes, lost his only son, and the events of the last eight months had created an unbridgeable divide between him and the people who loved him most. He had sided with Earl Watson, stood by his friend and even stoked his anger—and then watched him die by his own hand. No one would ever know what these choices had cost him. But eventually, they might have cost him his life.

  That summer, the summer of ’75, I moved out of my grandparents’ house. In the wake of Charlie’s death, my grandmother’s health began to fail; she could barely even take care of herself, let alone an unhappy child. At the end of the school year I was placed in the county group home just outside the town border with half a dozen other leftover children. For months, I hadn’t been doing my schoolwork or answering my teacher, and after Charlie died, I stopped speaking altogether. This wasn’t because of anything that anyone did—after what happened in the clearing, people left me alone, out of sympathy or because they no longer cared. Or maybe everyone was finally just tired of creating conflict where it didn’t need to be.

  There was one exception, and that was Jeannie Allen. She left me alone all winter and spring, but one morning in late May, she stepped out on the sidewalk in front of her house and said, “Don’t think you’re off the hook.” I lowered my eyes and tried to walk by, but she took a step sideways to block me. “You don’t belong here,” she said. “Don’t think I forgot you!” I moved forward again, and now she shoved me with both hands. “Go on home! Go back to your country!” she insisted. “Nobody wants you, don’t you get it? That’s why your parents dumped you here.” And I didn’t mov
e but Jeannie shoved me again, so hard I almost lost my footing. “I heard your grandparents didn’t even want you, but they had to take you in, ’cos no one else would take care of a half-breed. They—”

  She didn’t finish, because I was on her. Although I was smaller, the combination of my anger and her surprise made it easy to knock her over. I hit her like a linebacker, both arms around her body, and shoved her down onto the pavement. I straddled her chest and held her hands and punched her twice, three times in the face. Then I wrapped my hands around her throat, digging my thumbs so deeply into her flesh that the nails drew blood. I felt her try to pull my hands away, saw her eyes bulge with pain and fear. I watched all of this calmly, quietly, and I don’t know what would have happened if her father hadn’t come out and pulled me off.

  My encounter with Jeannie led to a conclusion that my silence had not—that something was seriously wrong with me. It was said that I’d endured too much for a child to handle—the deaths of Earl Watson, Mrs. Garrett, my dog, and my grandfather; a gun pointed straight at my head. It was said that my mind was addled because my parents had abandoned me—and since we hadn’t heard from my father in seven months now, there was no way to tell him what had happened. It was said that the group home would be good for me; I would have structure and the very best counseling there, which would help me come to terms with all the things that had happened and eventually improve my behavior.

  The truth was, my behavior had started to change even before my grandfather died. It could be that the therapists were partially right, that I’d been altered and numbed by all the deaths. But the biggest loss was more complex than that, and harder to define. For weeks after that night in the clearing, something had bothered me, something beyond all the obvious traumas. And after that day on the porch with my grandfather, I finally understood what it was. It was what my grandfather had said as he held Earl’s body, the anguished cry that Earl shouldn’t have let it get this far, it wasn’t worth it, that he’d done it all for nothing. He had shot Earl to keep him from shooting me—I knew that, everybody knew that. But by what he said to Earl’s body in his moment of despair, it was clear that the Garretts weren’t a part of it. He was not avenging them or defending them or punishing Earl; he didn’t think about the Garretts at all. For Charlie, the equation had been simple—his grandchild or his friend. That the Garretts were involved was incidental.

  This, to me, was unbearable. It was unbearable because my grandfather didn’t care for a human life, for a woman—and a couple—who had been kind to me. It was unbearable because Mrs. Garrett’s death meant as little to him as the deaths of the deer he had hunted. Yes, he’d been willing to turn Earl in, but that had more to do with his innate sense of justice than with the value of the life that was lost.

  And this too: he didn’t see that people treated the Garretts the same way they’d treated my mother—and me. He didn’t see that I had as much in common with them as I did with him and my grandmother. For a while, he’d been able to separate me out—to ignore or disregard an entire half of who I was and still hold me close to his heart. But he couldn’t recognize that the kind of difference he’d rejected in the Garretts was also what he looked past in me. And in his failure to see, he showed me something that I should have known already—that in America, in 1974 and even today, blood does not run thicker than color.

  But I couldn’t fully grasp or articulate these thoughts, so I stopped talking altogether. It was more than a year before I opened my mouth again. Then my grandmother, who had moved into a senior facility, would pick me up once a week and take me to the Grimsons’ diner, where we’d have halting conversations about my schoolwork (I was being taught at a special school now for emotionally disturbed children) and about her plans to sell the house. We’d never had much to talk about, my grandmother and me, and without Charlie there the talk was even harder. At the end of the visits she’d take me back to the group home and give me an awkward hug. I think we were both relieved when they were over.

  There is one memory of my grandfather that sifts itself out from all the hours and days that I spent with him. It was from one of the first times we went driving together. I had arrived fairly recently and I was still getting used to the town, and to life without my parents. Charlie had been taking me around—to the coffee shop, to church, to the gun store—and introducing me to his friends. Even with my shyness and still-halting English, I knew that he was showing me off.

  But this day was different. This day we went out to the country, just the two of us, with the dog stretched out across the backseat. “Just wait, just wait,” he said grinning, when I asked where we were going. Finally he slowed the car down and pulled over to the side of the road. We parked on a patch of gravel and walked into the woods. Charlie was carrying a fishing rod and he made me take one too; I’d already learned that catching fish was mostly an excuse for being out in quiet, beautiful places. We made our way along a leaf-strewn trail through stands of birch and cedar, the dog running back and forth in front of us. After what seemed like an eternity, we came upon a lake—one of those clear, pristine lakes that are like hidden treasures, more valuable because you have to earn them. Above us, the sky was light blue with a few high clouds; around us, birds were calling out their greetings. Two deer stood on the opposite shore, gingerly sipping the water. They lifted their heads and saw us and then lowered them, unconcerned.

  My grandfather turned to look at me. “What do you think?”

  What did I think? I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. The sun was shining at such an angle that the lake was like a mirror, and we could see the reflection of the trees. There was a huge boulder in the middle that I wanted to swim out to. I couldn’t understand how such a place could be so secret, so untouched. I looked up at my grandfather and asked, “How did it get here?”

  Charlie threw his head back and laughed. He had planted the end of his fishing pole down on the ground and he held it upright with one hand. “Well, it wasn’t an accident,” he said. “You see how nice it’s set out here in these woods where no one but us could find it? It was done on purpose, all of this was done on purpose, and it was God that done it, see? God put this here, and when He does work like this, it’s up to folks like you and me to come find it.”

  My grandfather went to church regularly like everyone else in Deerhorn, and said his prayers at night. But I never really knew that he believed in God until that morning in the woods. At home, in church, his words were dutiful and expected. It was only here he spoke with such reverence.

  “What’s the name of it?” I asked.

  “What’s the name?” Charlie repeated. He scratched his head. “Why, I don’t believe it has a proper name. I found it back when I was a boy, and I’ve never told anybody, not even Jim or Earl, not even your pop or your grandma. No one knows about it except you and me.” And now he put his hand on my shoulder and shook me a bit, grinning ear to ear. “I’ll tell you what. Let’s call it Lake Mikey. How does that sound? Lake Mikey, as named by Charlie LeBeau.”

  It sounded great. But what makes that day stand out so vividly wasn’t the naming of the lake or even the lake itself. It was the way I felt with Charlie. Out of all the things I had to get used to in Deerhorn, this was the most surprising and wonderful: that this strong, handsome man whose company everyone desired seemed to want nobody’s company more than mine. I was not an afterthought or a bother, as I often felt with my parents; I did not have to compete for his attention. In his eyes, I was good enough, complete, and worthy of his love, just as I already was. Even now, no one else has ever made me feel this way. No one else has ever looked at me with such obvious delight.

  The hardest thing about suffering a terrible loss is that you usually survive it. The absence of the thing you loved intensifies and grows until it isn’t something inside of you, but something that contains you, that you inhabit and can’t escape, like a nightmare. And if you are able, through dint of effort and the instinct for survival
, to wrestle it down and stuff it back inside, it hardens and scars so brutally that your heart cannot open again.

  And if you had something to do with that loss, if you had any part in making it happen, then resuming your life is all the more impossible. I’m the one who opened the car door for Brett. I’m the one who let it slip that Mrs. Garrett was alone. I’m the one who drew my grandfather into the clearing, where he made the choice that led to his death. I did these things; I set off these events; I planted the seeds of my own despair. I carry my loss as well as my own culpability, and no matter how much I might want to sometimes, I cannot let go; I can’t die of it. So I have to do something much worse—I have to live with it.

  When I was emancipated from the group home at age eighteen, I moved out to California. Supposedly I came here to look for my parents, but other than checking the phone listings in all the big cities, I didn’t make much of an effort. The truth is, I didn’t come here to search for my parents. I came to get away. And after a couple of years of working in Sacramento and saving my money, I went to college and got my degree. I work now in Los Angeles at an alternative high school for troubled kids, and it would be easy to say I’m doing this because of my own life—because of Kevin Watson, and the Garretts, and because I went to special schools myself. But I don’t work there out of the goodness of my heart. I work there to try and shove down my anger and bitterness, which, if unmanaged, would eventually consume me.

  People sometimes make assumptions because of my job, my race, and the neighborhood I live in. Most people in L.A. have no idea of where I spent my childhood, and those who do see it as a quaint pastoral episode without connection to my current life. A few months ago I was driving in Central California with a woman who was trying to love me. In the foothills just outside of Sequoia National Park, we came across a field trial competition. Even from the road, I could see some of the action: dogs running out to flush planted birds, and then retrieving them when they were shot. I’d never seen a field trial before and I insisted we pull over. When we got out, I talked excitedly to a couple of the spectators about where the dogs had come from and how they’d been trained, what the best guns were for wingshooting now, in 2011. The woman watched my excitement with growing dismay and finally pulled me back to the car. She couldn’t believe I was so intrigued by a competition that simulated hunting. This, after she’d already been upset with me the week before for skipping a fundraiser to go to a Dodgers game, and for showing up to a fancy brunch in a wifebeater. She sat seething in the passenger seat of my Pontiac Grand Am—I’d refused to make the trip in her BMW—and rolled her window up to shut out the sound of gunfire. “I always forget,” she said, arms crossed and cheeks flushed with anger, “that you’re half-Japanese and half-redneck.”