by Mark Powell
“They killed him?” she asked.
Her father-in-law pressed the power button. Out the window the children and Glenda were crossing the yard, coming to her, coming to Tess.
“Cut his head off,” he said.
“Is this the American?”
“British guy. An aid worker. A real humanitarian it sounded like.”
“But it’s not the American?”
“The bastards,” he said. “Killing a man over there trying to save their starving children.”
16.
Sunday morning John drove to the cemetery. He’d known ever since he agreed to meet Stone this would happen, the proximity, the gravitational pull. He wasn’t thinking about what Stone had said, his offer or his threat or whatever it was. John had spent the evening at a Red Roof Inn off 285 considering nothing else. But when he woke it seemed not so much silly as settled, decided so that it became the least of his concerns. Beside the prospect of visiting Karla’s grave it appeared paltry, and it was. He knew what he was doing with Stone. It was everything else that was confusion.
He drove north on I-75 toward Peach Creek, felt the tug of the exit before he saw it.
Despite living an hour away it had been years since his last visit. There was no reason to come, besides the greatest possible reason. But reason in the shadow of grief always appears small, to the extent it appears at all.
He drove Main Street and it was tienda, pizza joint, Vape Shoppe, E-CIGS HERE, Western Wear, boarded window, Thrifty’s Discount Drugs, boarded window, LEASE THIS SPACE CHEAP . . . FOR RENT . . . FOR SALE. Folks inside with their SNAP cards and reruns of Barney Fife. The Kuntry Kupboard in the fellowship hall of what had been the First Baptist before they rebuilt near the interstate. The brick chimney of the old Turner’s mill. The old rail freight lines, four tracks narrowing to two and leading to the high loading bays, dockless and opening onto cracked asphalt, weeds, trash. The cover of a softball split like a hickory shell. The All-America City sign no one even bothered to shoot.
It shouldn’t have surprised him. Peach Creek had never been one of the hip left-leaning suburbs that ring Atlanta with their coffee shops and baby strollers and MARTA stop. This was red clay Georgia, a part of the state too distant to even attempt to crawl toward the city. But it had tried just the same, and crippled itself in the process.
The city had declared bankruptcy and there were no municipal services—no fire or police, no garbage pickup. The local elementary school had been taken over by the state. The roads potholed and the traffic lights dark or blinkered, forever flashing.
A few gas stations were still open.
A 7-Eleven. A Scotchman.
Yellow and red condom wrappers tangled and blossoming in the limbs of a dead shrub.
It was like a natural disaster except it wasn’t natural, and anyone with the means to leave had left. The people with pensions or savings had gone to Chattanooga or Atlanta proper. The rest, the elderly, the poor, the folks who would rather die clinging to what they had earned—they stayed.
His parents had left, of course. That continued to amaze him.
Packed the house, held a big yard sale, and drove to the old home place as if they’d never lived anywhere else. Out of the world of fast-food heat lamps and the power line cancer clusters on to what? Back to the world they thought they knew, he supposed. The world they had both been raised in and by. Never thinking that the last thirty years had changed them, never thinking the selves they carried home were no longer the selves they’d carried out.
The last time John had visited alone had been months ago. Tess thought he took the boys there for breakfast but he didn’t, couldn’t, if you got down to it. He took them to the pancake place in town and then to his office where they played games on his computer. Once, he’d driven them all the way to Sevierville where he sat outside the 24 Hour Fitness where his daughter worked the desk. Wally wanting to know what they were doing here and weren’t they getting out and John just shushing his son, barely hearing him because through the angle of glass he could see Kayla, ponytailed and smiling. He sat there until she stepped out of sight and then dropped the car into reverse, drove back in a glaze of uncried tears, downshifting through the rust of memory. Got the boys Frosties at a Wendy’s in Dalton to buy their silence.
But his parents . . .
His father watched old NBA games on ESPN Classic. The Celtics—Bird, McHale, Danny Ainge—versus the Lakers, versus Magic and Kareem. He’s a Muslim, ain’t he, son? I never much liked Kareem. It wasn’t racism, not exactly. They were his parents and what they were witness to was the falling away of everything they had ever known: observers trying to keep track of a universe that wouldn’t quit undoing itself, wouldn’t quit tearing apart the only world they had known. And they weren’t bitter. This amazed John, this cool acceptance, and only with time did he come to see it for what it was: a shedding, a last (necessary?) step before one is given over fully to death.
They watched the Jazz versus the Bulls, the Sixers, the fuzzy images of a floating Julius Erving. When his father’s diverticulitis calmed they watched the vaunted Knicks, Bill Bradley and crew decades before they leveled the old Garden. The brilliant blue and orange. Clyde Frazier postgame in an aquamarine suit.
His father had exchanged three fingers for the mortgage on the Peach Creek house and the bulk of John’s college tuition, and the idea, John’s idea, had always been law, something useful. I’ll come back. I’ll take care of both of you and he carried that line in his head long after he knew it wasn’t true. He wasn’t coming back. He wasn’t going to take care of anyone beyond himself.
It was Christmas senior year when he told them he planned to go to divinity school. He talked for a while about his interest in Christology and Rahner’s conception of the Trinity. He mentioned Bonhoeffer and Óscar Romero, Gustavo Gutiérrez and liberation theology. Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day. As if he might name-drop his way to their blessing.
But there was never any doubt of their blessing. They listened. They didn’t interrupt. They were believers. But more than that, they were his parents.
“And you want to study theology?” his father asked.
“I do.”
“But not be a preacher?”
“No, sir.”
His father’s lined face appeared soft, his fingers—the fingers left to him—knotted in his lap.
“Well, if it’s important to you,” he said, “I think you should do it. Glenda?”
“Of course he should. Of course you should, John.”
That was who they were, it was who they remained. They were his mamma and daddy. He was their boy. They’d sacrificed everything for him and seemed grateful for having had the opportunity.
It was at divinity school that he became interested in trauma theory—Judith Herman and Cathy Caruth, a natural progression because what was the Crucifixion but a great trauma? What was Christianity but collective PTSD?—and when he finished his MA he decided against a doctorate in theology and instead went into psychology. After that it was teaching and writing and somehow it all had led to watching. Working for Peter Keyes. Sitting alone in that tiny control room at Site Nine.
Yet another reason he couldn’t go back.
Yet another reason he was unable to sit there while his mother wore her housecoat and made grilled cheese or slapped out salmon patties.
The game on the TV until the game went off.
Ulcers, his father said, a glass of Pepsi balanced on his thigh.
The game and then the wars.
They sat with the TV on and watched the wars.
Another violent day in Iraq . . . a bloody day for coalition forces in Afghanistan . . .
John and his father and his mother, and all around them were ghosts.
But no one said Karla. No one said Kayla.
*
He drove around town, past the propane tanks and mobile homes, past the Big Lots. He saw the large in their support hose and muumuus, the ones riding electr
ic scooters. But there were also people made lean with need: the garbage pickers, folks stripping the copper from abandoned buildings, stealing the air handlers right out from under the window. The streets felt burned with their hunger, deserted. What was left were Pentecostal churches and health clinics addressing diabetes and Lyme disease. Dairy Queen and Dollar General. The plastic cutlery and wire-caged lights. The miles of chainlink. He passed a Bob Evans marooned in the cattails along the highway shoulder. He passed his old high school, abandoned now, though he heard things still. The sound of the lanyard ringing against the metal flagpole. A wet towel dragged across the locker room tiles. There was graffiti. There was gang violence. Los Zetas wannabes selling pot and OxyContin. White kids hooked on meth and Aryan bullshit.
He drove by their old church. A vast circular structure with an arched roof, a sort of coliseum that had once housed a congregation of several hundred singing evangelicals. Much of his childhood had been spent in a smaller sanctuary, bulldozed years prior to make way for this prefab temple.
The Sunday service was going on as he passed, but he’d seen enough. Eventually, he had. Eventually, he made it to the cemetery.
How could he not?
And what more need be said?
That he sat in the car for a half-hour, Bojangles coffee going cold in his hands? It was a small green rise, a knoll just off a two-lane road, no more than a hundred graves. The grass needed cutting. She was in the back corner, in the shade of the pines. There were birds in the low boughs of the trees and she would have liked that, the little house sparrows and towhees, but they meant nothing to him. None of it did.
The grave was marked with surveyor’s line for the track-hoe operator.
He had no use for this information.
The casket was lowered on belts.
What was he supposed to do with such knowledge?
Sometimes he imagined his daughter beside his wife, how close it had been. Imagined the dimensions of her foreshortened grave, the abbreviated length—just imagining it kept him away. As if he might top the rise to find the past had up and changed, that Kayla had somehow slipped in beside her mother, obedient to the end.
As for Karla, men would see her and wonder, they would hope. Her jewelry opalescent. Her fingers long. She was serious and focused and abundant in her care which seemed to spill into love with everyone she met. Little things. She loved birds. She loved owls and swallow-tailed kites. She loved large dogs. She knew everyone’s name. She would say your name, repeat it. You came to dinner and it would be John this or John that, and it was more than seductive—though it was certainly that. It was kind. It was the simplest of kindness, her knowing, her awareness, and what was left of it was now locked inside an aluminum casket.
He thought of the time when she kept dropping things, this time when things seemed to scatter from her hands. Glasses, keys, books. What was this a sign of, this inattention, this failure—as he had sometimes imagined it—of reflex? This misrouting somewhere between fingers and brain.
The night at dinner she twice spilled her water or the way her purse would skate out onto the kitchen counters. Dear Lord, again! Why am I so clumsy? John had imagined it something physical but it seemed now something more essential. It was like part of her was losing another, smaller, part. She was shedding that physicality, maybe, that part that would keep her soul from lifting while her body flung itself over the guardrail and into the winter trees. He hoped that was true, though much of him suspected it wasn’t.
He stood on the cemetery’s edge, and then went back to his car, back to his cold coffee.
What made him go back to the church he didn’t know. Maybe it was just seeing it, the driving past and all that it conjured. He’d been married there, in the old sanctuary before it was plowed and realizing such made him consider the idea of breakage. That he’d lost his wife when a guardrail failed, lost his daughter in the boozy grief of after when his nerves failed. His father had lost most of his left hand when the shield on a drill press came loose.
All this failure, as if it could be an accident.
As if they could be anything but a people around whom things fell apart.
*
The service was over by the time he got there, the building empty and locked. He stood at the front doors with his hands cupped to his face, but could see nothing beyond the dim foyer. It was time to go home, time to do what it was he’d promised Stone he would do. But he wasn’t ready yet. The marquee promised a service at six—JOIN US FOR AN EVENING OF PRAISE!—and he decided he would get some food and come back for it.
He found a sports bar on Lee Street and settled in. Two-for-one drafts while the Falcons made a mess of things against the Saints, an interception, a fumbled punt. Seven-dollar burgers but he wasn’t hungry. He drank his lunch and arrived back at the church leaning into himself, consciously overcorrecting against a world that lurched off plumb.
Welcome, welcome.
One usher shook his hand, double-clasp, firm.
Another gave him a bulletin.
He was welcome here, they all wanted him to know that. How welcome he was.
But more than welcome, he felt sad. He had been in New Life’s current, and surely last, incarnation only twice before, many years ago, but even with such scant familiarity he knew the place had fallen into a sort of fatal decline. The fraying seat cushions. The faded carpet and shuttered coffee kiosk.
And of course the people, less than he’d ever seen. At the height of its dizzying power the church had shepherded a flock of 700 or 800 white folk. The working class like his parents with their family reunions and college-savings plans. The management class with their weekend barbecues and trips to Six Flags or Stone Mountain. All of it for Jesus. All of it in His Name. All of it to the glory of God and Reagan and Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless the USA” while the Blue Angels came screaming low and tight over the lights of Fulton County Stadium, Dale Murphy with his hand over his heart. Paul Harvey on the radio—his father always listened—and that’s the rest of the story.
But that night the cavern of the sanctuary held no more than 200 people, most of them brown. The scattered white people, the few, like his parents, who might remember New Life in all its moderate Republican glory were old, or older, at least, than the families of immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador, the Philippines or Thailand.
He sat exactly where they had always sat, and how strange, that sense of orientation. Right aisle, a quarter of the way down to the altar. John recognized it from the church he knew as a child. Or sensed it at least, this spatial recognition passing as some kind of holy spirit. A few of his parents’ friends came by to ask about his mom and dad and then to brag on him, John the Professor, John the Author. Better, he supposed, than the other things he’d been called: the Absent Father, the Drunk.
When the service started he spotted Erin Porter almost immediately. She was on stage singing, a lone adult face in a sea of children, a choir of some sort. Some after-school social club for inner-city youth. Fifty or so ten-year-olds singing “Hallelujah, Christ is King!” and there, at the back, stood Erin, urging them on.
They’d had how many classes together? All of them, really.
She was the smart girl with the curled arm, her left arm, slim and short, the fingers tucked as if gripping something only she could see. It wasn’t the arm of a baby. It was the arm of a child—it belonged to something that might yet be. It was the slightest of birth defects, mostly hidden by her clothes, but it made every encounter charged and John remembered an awkward moment in ninth grade when she’d turned to him in sixth-period English to ask if you capitalized spring. As in the season. But he’d heard something else, some reference to the braces he wore, the coils that hinged his jaw, and in a strange pantomime had pointed to his own mouth, meaningfully, he’d thought, but more like a captive ape trying to communicate, and she had sat there confused, shaking her head slowly, not daring to speak.
That was as close to friendship as they�
��d ever come, which was to say not at all. She’d been closer to Karla. Though they’d eventually drifted apart, they were nearly inseparable their last two years of high school. He kept looking at her, barely aware of it, and eventually she caught him staring at her, and she mouthed a single word: you! Half-recognition, half-accusatory, so that after the service when she rushed up to him he had no idea what to expect.
“You,” she said again, “I had a dream about you.”
*
They drove to the Mexican place off General Johnston Boulevard, scene of the crime for how many Friday nights John couldn’t say. But the place was nearly empty. Just John and Erin and a few scattered families.
“I work for a services agency,” she said. “Children mostly, but sometimes the parents, too. More and more the parents.”
She operated out of a strip mall, the dress shops and noodle restaurants and nail salons mostly gone. They were privately funded by a foundation in the northeast. Reading programs. Nutrition. Midnight basketball leagues and bags of fruit to take home over the weekends. Lots of talk with the children about the four food groups. But now the parents were coming in as well. Asking questions. Trying to be—but mostly incapable of being—parents. So she was running classes on that too. Changing diapers, cooking, serving meals that didn’t come in paper bags. Money management. Time management.
Pain management, she said, that’s what it comes down to in the end.
“I feel sometimes like I’m alone here.” She was on her second margarita, arms on the table, earnest. “You read about sociological trends. How everyone is fleeing to the coasts and it’s true. Except what they mean by everyone is everyone with money. The rest are stuck here. Most of them are grateful, let me point out, to have what they have. Really, it’s only the white people who are gone.” She looked at him. “Did I hear you were out in California at one point?”