Who cares! she’d have screamed if there were time. But sliding into her own jeans she hears—click-click—the open and shut of a glove box she knows is her father’s. It’s clearly audible to her although he closes it quietly, always quietly, because it’s important to care for your things. Once at age five or six, after climbing down from his car, she slammed the door too hard, a shiny blue door that she pushed with both hands and all the strength of her small body to make sure it stayed closed (there was a distinct and satisfying ka-thunk), and he placed her bad hand on the clean, oiled inside of the door and pretended to slam it—“That’s how the car feels!”—grand in the righteous anger of punishment. “Learn to value what belongs to you!” He didn’t hurt her, but she couldn’t stop crying. Her father believes in punishment, its sacred necessity. She pulls at Saint’s arm. “You must have a death wish.”
“I thought we wanted to die.”
“Not like this.”
“I’m not afraid of your father.”
“You dick!” She turns his jeans right side out, pushes a leg hole at his foot. “This is a cop we’re talking about. He has a fucking gun. He’s licensed to kill in the state of Michigan and he isn’t crazy about you.” Saint doesn’t seem to hear. His leg doesn’t lift. “Do it yourself,” she cries. Across the field, steps crunch the gravel of the parking lot. She stumbles to her feet and bounds through the trees toward the deepest darkness, her heart as loud in her ears as the crash of her running—too loud for her to know if some burly, outraged emissary of justice is running after her.
She runs the straightest line she can manage, simply away, till the trees thin and the wind is strong. She has arrived at the bluff to the south of where they meet, closer to the beach. Scrub trees, dark sky over water. Her lungs burn, and so do the bottoms of her feet. She has her jeans on but no shirt or shoes. Her hair is matted with twigs and leaves like a wild boy’s.
She puts her arms around a narrow tree trunk, the last entity this side of the void. The bark moves in and out against her chest as if it too is breathing. Once upon a time there might have been people she hugged like this, but she can’t remember whom. Her Texas grandpa, who died when she was eight? He’s not even a smell anymore. Her eyes closed, she is breathing into the bark, deciding how long to stay here, when from the woods behind her comes a crack of branches too clumsy for an animal. A murmur: “Diana. Goddess of the moon.”
It’s Garth. He sings “Diana” into her ear. Yes, he is young and she is old—she feels eons older than he is. His voice soars into falsetto, still as sweet as an angel’s: “Oh please, stay by me…” She turns around and steps back, crossing her arms over her chest. “You total shit.”
He jabs an imaginary knife into his breast, staggers, drops to the ground, and writhes at her feet, which would have been funny at one time.
“You’re out of your mind,” she says. He grabs her foot. She shakes him off. “How could you? How could you sic Dad on me!”
He flaps his empty arms on the grass. “You don’t exactly run like an Indian scout.”
He hasn’t cut his hair this summer. It’s a wild mass all around his head. She wonders, irrelevantly, if their father asked him to cut it and he refused. “Garth, listen to me. I have my own life. Please don’t ruin it.” Moonlit, his face is pale and bony as death, but he is more beautiful than ever. His body is shuddering; she kneels down and touches his shoulder. “I have my life and you have your life. Did you hear me?”
He lies on his back, sprawled and still.
Stop that! she wants to shriek. But she speaks softly, keeping her arms modestly folded. This is her brother, whom she used to babysit, whom she taught to read, whose lunches she made when their mother was drunk. “Garth, don’t you see, this desire thing? It’s hormones, the juice your glands secrete.” She fixes on the hand covering his eyes. “It’s just a state of mind. Which you can get control over.” She scoots closer, pleased, moved, strengthened by her lucidity. “The bad stuff too! When Dad calls me a slut, I have a choice! I can take it in and feel like shit. Or I can barricade my mind against him. I don’t even have to convince him, I just say to myself: If a slut is someone who has lots of sex, then I’m a slut, so what? The good or bad is just society’s opinion, and who’s society but you and me? We have our own opinions: Sex is good, therefore a person who has a lot of sex does the world some good. Is good! So I’m good, I’m great! What’s the matter? Is this something you already know?”
His arm lifts, then falls across his eyes. His mouth is a tight seam. She tugs at his hand. “Take incest. What a creepy word. ‘We committed incest.’ ” She makes her voice thin and horror-struck. “But we don’t have to think of it as incest, quote-unquote. The Bible says no to incest because you get weird kids, but that was before birth control. On the level of real there’s nothing wrong with what we did. No one was hurt by it.” She’s not sure what she’s saying is true, but she wants it to be true. It ought to be true. “We can walk away with our heads up!”
She prays for him to move, and he does after a while. “Who’s we?” he says.
“What?” she says, smiling encouragement.
“Who says what we want? Suppose I don’t want to walk away? Even down in Florida, all I thought about was you.” He sits up. His adolescent voice rings like an old bell. “I don’t think of it as incest, quote-unquote; I don’t think of it as anything. I want to hold you. I want to be inside you again. That’s all.”
He takes her hands and presses them to his cheeks. His face is wet and salty. Tears spring to her own eyes. “Teddy,” she says, the name she used to call him when he was three years old, as warm and soft as a stuffed animal. She kisses his head as she did then, like a mother, with simple affection, until she feels his tongue at the junction of her lips where Saint’s had been. And there’s that feeling again, spreading from her groin into her legs and chest, a mélange of pleasure and pain that’s part heaven and part a torture out of the Middle Ages, her limbs tied to horses all raring to go in four different directions. She puts her hands on his chest, though she can’t make herself push him away. “Please. I’m not into that.”
“You were, Vera.”
She swallows. Pushes a little. He doesn’t move.
“You were,” he repeats. “What happened?”
She stands and steps back, inserting salutary space between them. She wrings her hands, the good and the bad one. I love you, Teddy. She wills the words into her brother’s mind, a protective shield for him out in the world. “It shouldn’t have happened, Garth.”
“What do you mean? Don’t you want me anymore?”
The answer to his question is so complicated her mind stalls out. His body twists from side to side with a pain she understands but must not assuage. “You’ve got to get out of here. Away from me. For both of us. Garth, I’m begging you!”
He is shaking as if with fever, in uncontrollable pulses. His eyes and mouth are open wide, pulling her in. She doesn’t move, willing him up, willing him free from their precious and hideous tenderness. Their eyes are locked on each other. Then a sound comes from his lips, lost, forsaken, as desolate as an abandoned house. Dragging his gaze from her face like some poisonous tentacle, he pulls himself to his feet and plunges back into the woods.
23
Saint
Saint feels around in the dark wet grass for his clothes and dresses quickly, but he can’t arouse in himself a sense of urgency. He feels languid, like a sultan so fully satisfied that the aftermath can be only sleep. He puts a sock on, can’t find the other. Should he be frightened? All around him the world seems suffused with love; inside him and out there is love. If a wild beast approached, teeth bared, dripping saliva, he would soothe, welcome it to the happy human world. As for the Pledge—he doesn’t take it seriously, nor does he believe that Vera does. Vera is happy. “Vee,” he says into an imaginary mouthpiece, “where the fuck is my sock? Over and out.”
He puts on his sneaker without the sock, is about to tie
it, his thoughts and his fingers moving very slowly, when he sees two figures near the playground. The beam of a flashlight flits over the ground, illuminating a table, a trash can. This is not, he thinks, a good thing, and he steps back into the trees. He drags the blanket back a couple of feet, along with his book and backpack. But it remains hard for him to locate the spot in himself where fear abides. He picks up Vera’s shirt, so small though it’s big on her, puts it to his face, carefully folds it into his backpack. He rolls up her small pack and squeezes it inside of his. Did she take her shoes? The key to the scooter is in the ignition: He could put it in neutral and try to follow her path, but they made no plan about where to meet. He looks over the ground for more of what belongs to her, unwilling to leave this spot to which she might return. He can’t imagine anything happening to her out in the sparse woods; they are completely familiar to her. His concern is losing her, having to ride home without her, and tomorrow having to face her hurt and anger.
Now the second figure is gone, but the flashlight seems to be crossing the field. The light bobs; the patches of ground it illuminates swell and shrink. But although the flashes seem random, their movement seems to be in his direction, as if the light is a missile and his heat what it’s seeking. A beam strikes a tree behind him, brushes past the scooter, then seems to linger. Hairs rise on the back of his neck. There are trees between him and the light and the man who wields it, but he feels seen.
In danger mode now, he rights the scooter, wheels it to the far side of the blanket, and leans it against a tree. He unlocks the carryall, removes Vera’s brother’s gun, and loads the one bullet. What a joke, this little gun, next to what they had on the West Side, though all he ever shot at were stop signs and SLOW CHILDREN CROSSING signs to impress the Badger Boys. With a self-conscious flourish he stuffs the gun into his pants under his T-shirt and feels a little safer. Stronger. Calmer. He has done nothing wrong, or at least nothing that will get him arrested. Kids hang out in the summer woods after park hours. At worst they’re told to get their horny asses on home. He smooths out the blanket, sits down, crosses his legs, and tries to count his breaths. Then it’s like the goo has just washed out of his eyes because he can see now between the tree trunks. Vera was right. Walking toward him, in uniform, holster and all, is her father.
Nam myoho renge kyo.
—
In his two years at Lourdes Senior High, Saint hasn’t had what his priest had called an episode, but he has had to be watchful. When Cathy Kirk pretended not to see him, or giggled with her girlfriend as he passed in the hall, he’d wanted to grab her by her ponytail and slap her snotty face. He’d have preferred to put her in her place with a few choice words, but even afterward nothing came to mind, which may have been the problem. He was three, his mother said, before he regularly put words together; complete sentences came slowly to him. And when he tried to speak and wasn’t understood, he’d fly at the person, growling like a dog, or beat the floor with his hands and feet until quelled by the predictable violence of a spanking.
Starting school, though, he was obedient and good-natured. He was intrigued by the mysterious order of the painted circle on the floor, of children his age raising their hands to answer questions, listening to stories and craning to see the pictures in the teacher’s book, singing in a group. He obeyed any rules that were made clear to him. He couldn’t bear doing less than very well, and his occasional outbursts were lost in the daily small violences of the city classroom. In fifth grade he fell in love with Sister Mary Perpetua and labored for her Excellent in red at the top of his paper. Then a test came back with three red X’s and You can do better, St. John, and he rammed his chair against the desk behind him. Then, in the lunch line, a boy named Charles asked to see his quarter, put it in his own pocket, and wouldn’t return it though St. John had explained that it belonged to him. There seemed to be no choice. He head-butted Charles to the tiled floor and kept on punching, even after the boy stopped struggling and blood dripped from his nose and mouth.
In the principal’s office the next morning, St. John learned that he had broken Charles’s jaw. “I was shocked,” said the sister to St. John’s mother. “He’s usually one of the good ones.” In the large wooden chair beside his mother, who wouldn’t look at him, St. John felt himself growing dimmer and more mysterious to himself. He remembered hitting Charles but not the feeling in his stomach and throat that made him hit. If he was no longer among the good ones, where did that place him?
“He’s turning into his father,” his mother said despairingly.
St. John was eleven years old then and rarely saw his father. When his father called, St. John refused to talk to him, and his mother didn’t make him. “Too little, too late,” she said into the phone. Sometimes St. John said it to himself: Too little, too late.
That’s what he said to himself while the principal, who had pale wet eyes and seemed thousands of years old, lectured him about self-control—if everyone did just what they wanted to do, the world would be chaos, as in the time before the birth of government. But he hadn’t wanted to hit Charles. He had wanted, above all, to curl into a ball and roll away. On top of Charles, with the boy’s blood running out of his nose, he felt small and weak and easily hurt. Even while he was punching. Even as they pulled him away.
It was Father Barnett at Most Holy Redeemer who gave him a handhold. His mother had brought him there on her day off. “He has a rotten temper,” she told the priest, a very young man with pimples on his face. “What’ll it be when he’s bigger, that’s what I worry about.”
“Life is long,” said Father Barnett.
St. John was startled by the pimples, and by the fact that the priest looked about as old as a high school kid. “Are you truly sorry?” said Father Barnett, his bright blue eyes shining, radiantly resigned to the world’s sins and maybe to his own complexion.
“Yes!” said St. John, to stop further talk on the subject, but he couldn’t stop the priest from clasping his and his mother’s hands and asking God to forgive them all the sin of anger. On the wall over the priest’s desk a wooden crucified Christ looked resigned and radiant like Father Barnett.
Thereafter, when someone pushed into the tender space around him where words refused to assemble, St. John would conjure a resigned, radiant crucifixion. He kept a journal, in which he wrote: I think of Jesus hanging from those nails. One day I will be empty and free. And after they moved to Lourdes, despite the setback with Cathy Kirk, he found that rage came less often. The Buddha replaced Jesus but proffered equal tranquillity. He had friends who wanted to hear what he had to say. And the lake bordering the town spread in all directions, vast enough to absorb almost anything.
—
Saint is seated in meditation, the thumb and middle finger of each hand completing the circle that links his mind to the mind of the universe, when Officer DeVito arrives. The bright police-issue flashlight plays over the Tao Te Ching on the blanket, over Saint’s crossed legs and up past the slight bulge of the gun, which feels unduly warm on Saint’s skin. “Hey you,” says the policeman, loud in the quiet woods. “Friar Tuck!”
Meditating or not, Saint would like to lay the man out. The urge is distinct and unalloyed. He knows Vera’s stories. He could head-butt the officer, knee his nuts, and have his own gun out before the asshole unsnapped his holster. He’d make him crawl to his car, dazed and humiliated. But all his life Saint has been training for this moment of self-governance. He knows how to keep revenge in his pocket like a joint in a baggie or a gun he’ll never use. The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The little gun doesn’t hurt his side when he sits erect. He allows his gaze to reach Vera’s father’s face and says amicably, “Hey, Mr. D, sir.”
The flashlight shines on the book. “Nighttime reading?”
“What?” The light flashes at his eyes, but Saint will not flinch. “Oh. Yessir.” He unlocks his legs deliberately and sees his dangling shoe
lace. The lapse irritates him.
“So what’s happening, bud, a solo picnic? Me, myself, and I?”
“It’s a good place to be quiet, sir.” Should he say he was meditating? It being a hippie thing, he decides against it. He tries to tie his shoe, but his fingers are clumsy. He doubles one lace, winds the other slowly around it, while the light investigates his backpack.
“Anything in there?”
Just a little smack, he wants to say. To sell to the school kids. Do you have a warrant? “Personal stuff,” he says quietly.
“How personal?”
The man steps deliberately onto the blanket. Saint gives up on the tying, puts the book into his backpack, and holding the pack against the gun in his pants he rises to his feet. “I’ve got to get going. Got work tomorrow.” His voice is even. He tugs at the blanket lightly to pull it out from under Mr. D. “Excuse me, sir.”
The man’s flashlight is trained on Vera’s small sandal, on its side at the base of a tree. He plants a heavy foot on the end of Saint’s shoelace. Saint stumbles, lands on his knee. Shame and rage make him gasp, but he is mindful. Who can wait quietly while the mud settles? Who can remain still until the moment of action? Observers of the Tao do not seek fulfillment. Not seeking fulfillment, they are not swayed. He observes the man standing over him. “I haven’t done anything, Officer DeVito. What do you want from me?”
Mr. DeVito isn’t tall—Saint has four inches on him and weighs almost as much—but he seems to swell before Saint like a blow-up doll. He grabs the back of Saint’s neck and squeezes, punctuating his speech with jerks of Saint’s head. “You pathetic piece of dog crap. You tell my daughter to get her ass home if she expects to be able to sit on it anytime soon. Tell her that.”
The hand tightens. Saint’s jeans unsnap. He works his hand around the pack to catch the gun before it falls, imagines it tumbling out at DeVito’s feet. He wants, horribly, to laugh. “I will, sir. If I run into her.”
Once, in Lourdes Page 22