She’s on fire, her lungs are burning; she could spew dragon breath. But her words clink like stones into an empty pail. She steps back, then hurls a kick at him, all her nuclear heat compressed into the warhead of her foot. She feels no pain, just heat in the side of her foot, and she kicks again. He sits like a rock. She continues to kick but with decreasing force, as if she were kicking underwater, as if there were no bones in her legs.
Only when she stops does she realize that something is wrong with her foot, but it’s far back in her consciousness. She lies down beside her brother and wraps her arms around him in the blanket that contains him. “Garth, baby. Sweet, sweet Garth.” With her cheek to his, she dreams their lives together exactly as he described them to her, the two of them joined against their parents and the world, laughing, conspiring. He always closes his eyes when he laughs and she loves his eyelashes, darker and thicker than hers. She loves the smell of his breath, clean and sweet unlike the breath of older boys. A pulse in her foot vies for her attention, but it’s mere sensation. She lies with Garth on the blanket on the sandy leaves in the shallow woods, waiting for things to change back to how they were.
Gradually, she becomes aware of Saint watching her, his nose dripping blood. “I can tell you what happened,” he says in his strained, blank voice.
The fact of Garth’s death assaults her again, and she sits up, her back to Saint and his bleak, ruined presence. She shudders, trapped between flesh into which she can’t breathe life and living flesh that she loves and abhors.
Saint is still trying to speak, to lay it out before her as he ought to and as she deserves. She puts her hands over her ears. Nothing will change anything. They sit in the dark in the little clearing while she waits for the universe to respond to the catastrophe. The earth could open at their feet, for example. When nothing transpires, she stands abruptly, knowing at least what to do next. “Let’s get moving. We can’t just leave him here.”
—
Garth’s death, the just-before and the moment of it, is a balloon in Saint’s skull, pressing his brain flat. The little mental space in working order is busy trying his case, not that he grants himself a case. An observer might see Garth’s death as an accident, but the word “accident” seems shameful to Saint, a plea for forgiveness he doesn’t deserve. That the gun went off as a result of the interplay of both their hands doesn’t weigh in his favor. Without a gun he’d have strangled Garth or broken his neck; his hands burned to do it. That Saint isn’t a hundred percent sure he wishes Garth back alive is the final damning piece of evidence. Case closed. He’s glad Vera doesn’t want to know the story. Whatever he’d say would sound like he was excusing himself.
So, mindless, a humble servant, Saint follows Vera’s directions and lifts Garth’s body in its shroud of a blanket onto his shoulder. They are a funeral procession heading to the lake, Vera in front. It’s slow-moving. After a few steps the blanket loosens and flaps in his face. Already his shoulder hurts, though it might be from the beating that Vera inflicted. “It doesn’t hurt enough,” he whispers.
“What?” she says shrilly.
“Nothing, thanks. I’m sorry.” An odd spate of courtesy. Though he’s not sure he spoke loudly enough to be heard. It’s hard to separate inside from outside. His load is getting heavier by the minute, but it might just be the burden of his thinking, over which he has no power. Nam myoho renge kyo passes through his mind, words he’s unworthy of, but they come again. Foot after lumbering foot he treads the hard-packed sand of the path to the lake.
Then the sand is dry and gives under his weight. He hears waves, smells water. They are near the low point in the bluff where the stairway of railroad ties slants down to the beach. He wants to shift the bundle to his other shoulder, but he’s scared he’ll drop it. He tries to rotate his sore shoulder.
“Is there a problem?”
“No.”
He firms his grip, toeing for the top stair. It’s too dark to gauge the spaces between things. He kicks his shoes off, toes off his socks, trusting his feet more than his decrepit brain. After several steps the back of his load snags a branch. He moves forward, then back; the blanket is caught. He’s streaming sweat but gives a last determined tug and the branch snaps. Time to rest. But there’s no resting for him. He steadies the body on his shoulder, his arm tight around Garth’s legs, then sees Vera beside him holding her brother’s hand. Her lover’s hand? Below, waves crash on the rocks but not loud enough to stop his mind. Turning ninety degrees on the narrow path, he drags Vera into the brush until she lets go. In full, solitary charge of his burden, he plunges down the tilting steps.
By the time Vera arrives on the beach, he has settled—say it!—the body of the boy he killed onto the damp sand. He has quashed his excuses for what he hopes is the last time, his absurd and shameful need to self-justify. He takes off his belt and buckles it over the blanket around Garth’s waist and one arm. The other won’t fit inside. Vera makes a frustrated, annoyed motion. He wants to tell her he plans to pay for what he did, but even in his mind the words sound phony. Garth’s sneaker must have fallen off; she restores it to her brother’s foot, ties a double knot. “I’m very close to being crazy,” he says, not exactly to her. The words just come out, but they generate more words. “That’s not an excuse, just a fact.” She’s so close he smells her sweat. His flesh creeps and he longs for her, an ambivalence that’s nearly insupportable.
She says, “Should I feel sorry for you?”
He closes his eyes till her heartfelt words echo and die away. “When we’re done with this I’m going to the police. I’m turning myself in.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
He looks at her. There must be something left in him of self or ego, because her words increase his anguish. Her hand moves toward him in a gesture that could be conciliatory. He steps back, stomach heaving. Her pale hair glows in the moonlight, ghostly but still, achingly, pretty. His hands wring each other. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if she touches him. He must do no more harm.
“Tomorrow we have to meet Kay and CJ,” she says. “We owe them.”
He remembers loving Vera, but he doesn’t remember why he ever did what she said. The plan in his mind is to give himself over to community justice. He has read Crime and Punishment. Not that he can repay this sort of debt. But he has to give himself over to something more substantial than Vera. Lay his head on the block if need be. Lay his head down somewhere.
“We have to let them out of the Pledge,” she says. “They aren’t part of this.”
She drops her pack on the sand, takes off her sandals, tucks Garth’s feet inside the blanket, and picks up the end. “Come on. Help me.” She’s walking backward toward the lake, pulling Garth by the blanket. “Take your end!” she cries. “Hurry.”
“I’m not sure we should do this. The police won’t like—” he starts to say; she shakes her head in disgust.
“There are three cops in this town, and one is my father. He’s not going to read you your rights and let you call your mom. Do you understand that?” Her voice breaks, but her face is stony. She peels off her clothes, throws them onto the sand, and drags the blanket and its burden toward the small waves at the shore. “Will you give me a hand?”
He kicks off his shoes and scrambles to do her bidding, realizing too late that he too should have undressed all the way; he’ll freeze in wet clothes. Can he never learn anything?
But half-wading, half-swimming, she’s already got the bundle that is Garth into the water, and Saint is up to his knees, trying to keep a grip on the head and shoulders. The water is icy cold; his feet and legs are going numb. When the cold reaches his waist, he thinks of Socrates on his deathbed, drinking the hemlock as if it were wine. The poison hit Socrates’s veins like ice water, Saint has read, paralysis starting with his feet and moving upward inch by inch. Not that Saint dares to liken himself to Socrates. But in the Socrates execution story, there’s a line Saint keeps repeating as he maneuvers his b
urden through the water: Soon he couldn’t feel his legs anymore. Words that pull Saint ever deeper into the lake till his lungs fill up and his mind freezes like his feet.
—
Garth is dead, Vera knows. But as the floor of the lake slopes down past the sandbar, she can’t stand the thought of her brother’s head under the water. Waves swell and subside. She, Saint, and Garth in the blanket go up and down. “Trade ends with me,” she says to Saint.
“What? Why? This end is heavier.”
“Do it!”
With the water holding the body up, they accomplish the switch. A giant swell lifts them off their feet, but Vera kicks, keeping Garth’s head above the waves, sweet Garth, sweet baby Garth, whom she taught to swim, till she swallows water and, choking, swims for the surface. She treads water, bobbing in the troughs and crests, scanning the frothy horizon. She swims farther out. Now the swells come in flocks. For a moment atop a surge she sees a dark shape against the sky. Then a wave breaks over her, and when she surfaces there is only undifferentiated dark all around, not even a line where lake meets sky.
Back onshore, dressing, she notices for the first time that her foot hurts. But the pain is hard to distinguish from what emanates from other parts of her body, including the tattooed spot between her breasts. She prays for Garth’s soul as if there is such a thing as the soul. She prays to God as if she believes in God. Protect him. Shelter him. She hopes she has done right. Hindus, she has heard, put their dead in the holy water of the Ganges, the midpoint of flesh and spirit. Vikings put their dead on boats or rafts burning in the night. Overhead the sky is cloudless, nearly pure black, and the Milky Way shines the pathway to heaven. She prays for Garth’s soul to be received through Christ our Lord in heaven, as if heaven could exist without the other place. My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. And where does that come from?
She is rotating her ankle to see if it’s sprained, when she glimpses Saint crossing the sand toward the terraced stairs. “Wait!” She lurches after him, foot and all. “Where are you going? Didn’t you hear me back there?”
He is climbing the bluff, fully clothed and dripping onto the sand behind him. Her sandals are down on the beach, but she doesn’t retrieve them. Despite her foot, and her rage—because there is nothing her brother could have done to Saint to merit his death—she follows with one goal in mind: He cannot go to the police. At the top she finds him shivering and trying to wring out his T-shirt. She holds the other end of the shirt and they wring together, turning the cloth at the same time in opposite directions as if they are still a pair. She hangs it on a branch to dry.
There’s a log by the trail. They sit. Her ankle is a bit swollen but doesn’t hurt if she keeps still. It’s the middle of a night that feels endless, although she knows better, knows that dawn will come soon enough, but for once she waits; she doesn’t try to make something happen or try to prevent it from happening, despite her near-overwhelming urge to control her life. And then Saint starts to talk. In the tunnel of overarching trees, where she can’t see her hand in front of her, where she thought she had it all figured out—that Saint’s rage toward her father had exploded at the innocent son—a new scene unfurls in her mind. Saint’s words come slowly, with long pauses between them, but the events ring with their truth, she can hear Garth’s voice telling Saint what he came to tell him. What Saint couldn’t at first believe and tried not to believe, that cannot exist alongside his fragile, mistaken love for her. “Was he lying, Vee?” Saint’s voice is thin and hopeless. “I’m not even sure I want to know.”
Instead of answering she flexes her ankle. She can’t suppress a moan.
“What?” he says.
The pain blooms and shrivels, but there’s no release. “You’re right,” she says. “It was my fault.”
“That’s not my way of thinking.”
“Je suis merde,” she whispers. She was older. The responsible one. She could have said no. “I’m a piece of shit.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, I did.”
He takes a small sip of air, as if that’s all he’s allowed; she could cry for him. She says, “Isn’t it obvious? I should have done it when I planned it. No delay. Alone.” He shakes his head no but without force. “Saint, be straight with me. There’s nothing left to protect me from.” Saint knows everything about her that there is to know. That ought to create some ground for her to stand on. “You hate me, don’t you?”
“Way less,” he says, “than I hate myself.”
She nods. That’s how she feels but in reverse. So they are still confederates. She looks at his face, trying to decide whether it’s ugly or beautiful, as if it will give her an idea of her own face. “Should we run away? To the real Haight? There’s an underground scene. Or L.A. I have cousins there.”
“We could stay with them till they turn us in.”
She isn’t used to sarcasm from him, but she’s glad for talk of any sort. She babbles on, half-aware that she’s reprising Garth’s crazy scenario. “In California we could do mushrooms together. Or peyote? To make us forget?”
“We’ll go berserk and kill innocent people.”
“In L.A. there are no innocent people.”
“Not anywhere,” he says.
She nods fervently, though she doesn’t think he means it. She wants to take his hand but forbids herself, as if Garth were watching. She looks out into the darkness for a sign. “If we lived in Japan,” she says, “we’d commit hara-kiri. It’s what you do in the face of unresolvable conflict.”
“They don’t do hara-kiri in Japan anymore. They throw themselves in front of commuter trains.”
“That would create a lot of civic inconvenience.”
“It does, actually. That’s what I read.”
They smile into the dark with the complicity of bank robbers.
“But before we do anything, we have to meet Kay and CJ.” Vera feels the world starting to reorder itself, at least on the periphery. There are plans to be made. “Kay’s out of jail. But they might feel weird about us. We should call to make sure they show.”
“Why would they feel weird?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. They both have phones in their rooms. What time is it?” She stands up, starts walking.
“You’re still in charge, aren’t you? You think I’ll do what you want.”
“But don’t we want the same thing?”
They walk while bickering, he protesting her authority, she asserting, insisting. It’s surreal and funny and horrible and ordinary. Her foot hurts, but the pain is tolerable, and she conceals her limp till they arrive at the pay phone near the restrooms. “What time is it?” she asks again, without expecting an answer. It’s definitely past midnight, too late to call where a parent might pick up the phone, but CJ has his own number.
She tries CJ but no one answers. She dials Kay. Arlyn picks up. “Hello? Who is it? Who is this? Please answer me!”
Vera drops the phone, then hangs up quickly. “It’s the stepmother. She sounds kind of frantic. Should I call her back?”
They ride the scooter to CJ’s, but his room is dark, the windows shut. Vera has a few dollars left over from babysitting. Saint has a paycheck he can cash. But even if they had enough money they can’t chance a motel.
The answer occurs to them almost simultaneously—Vera’s hideaway, the little stone room in the rocks along the lake. If their friends don’t show for the morning meeting, they’ll try calling again.
26
We Enter History
These days “hippie” means tree hugger. Privileged pot smokers from “back in the day,” who had anxiety-free sex and didn’t bother their idealistic little heads about employment. But to many of us in 1968, hippies meant a new hierarchy, an inversion of values, a fairer distribution, among other things, of popularity. What was down, meaning young people and black people and weird people, was up, and vice versa. And on the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, there woul
d be people our age, or just a little older, who might love us for exactly what thwarted us in Lourdes. So on Pledge Day minus one, in the middle of that night of terror and hopefulness, CJ and I looked for a place to park in downtown Chicago.
We found a legal spot on Lower Wacker, a belowground run of streets lit by creepy green light, then made our way to the surface. Not a soul was in sight. Our green shadows would vanish only to reappear in front of us, stretched to infinity. On the open street, the night remained surreal, sidewalks empty, the sky the same purple-red that had hung over Wells Street when there were four of us. We didn’t talk about that, though. CJ walked barefoot, carrying his high-heeled shoes. It was three A.M. CJ had a dim sense of where things were from a Fourth of July weekend his family had spent at the downtown Hilton. His father had opened the drapes of their hotel room and shown them the bejeweled nighttime city as if he’d invented it himself, a glittering web spreading north and south, cut off to the east by Grant Park and then the darkness of Lake Michigan.
When we hit Michigan Avenue, CJ put his shoes back on. The surrounding streets had been still and silent, but in the early hours of Wednesday, August 28, 1968, Grant Park was rocking. People lay in sleeping bags, under tarps, clustered for protection at the base of trees, while others slept out in the open like the world was their bedroom. It was warm enough. Most were awake, in groups large and small, talking, arguing, singing, or listening to people playing musical instruments. Their clothes weren’t that different from ours in Lourdes, jeans more rumpled, shirts more flamboyant, hair a little longer, a few beards. But in his mother’s dress and shoes, CJ looked like no one else. It was an experiment. Real hippies wouldn’t see the clothes, just the person underneath. Surprisingly steady on his feet, he crossed the street.
Once, in Lourdes Page 25