The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards

by Robert Boswell

  A frightened bird, Monica thought, eyeing the girlfriend. “Chirp,” she said aloud but beneath her breath. “Thanks,” she yelled, her voice as vibrant and happy as she could make it. She lifted her daughter into the car, buckled her into the car seat Brian had given them. “What did you do today, sugar?”

  “Play,” she said, taking on her car personality, the sweetly quiet child who stared out the window and clapped for dogs and trucks.

  Brian would be upset about the car seat in the front—the instruction booklet recommended the rear—but Monica thought it only fair to Sally to let her ride beside her mom. What did Brian know about raising children, anyway? His own daughter was a mess. A fat, moody adolescent with pimples and an attitude. It occurred to Monica, as she pulled into traffic, that his daughter, when she’d been tiny, had probably seemed as sweet and perfect as Sally. It was not possible that Sally could turn out so badly. Monica had gotten high with Brian’s daughter a few times. All after Brian had left her. A way to keep in contact with him, even though he didn’t know about it, and his daughter didn’t know who Monica was. “I’m the love of your father’s life,” she imagined herself saying.

  From her car seat, Sally clapped at a passing truck, saying, “Big.”

  Her life is in my hands, Monica thought, steering them down the freeway, her hands resting at the bottom of the steering wheel. My hands, she thought, picturing a close-up of them: her fingers fill the screen, the delicate bones almost visible beneath the skin. Some actresses had stand-ins for their bodies, she’d read. It was never Nicole Kidman’s breasts you saw, but some perfect girl without a face. Did her lover know that her breasts were famous?

  Monica planned her evening as she drove. She would stop at Casa Azul briefly to see how huge Brian’s wife was, to see if his daughter wanted a ride somewhere. She would stop at Alpha Beta to get milk and Pampers. She would drive by Brian’s house without even glancing at it. She would get to the trailer in time for the last half hour of Sesame Street. She would read Mr. Chub’s letter again. She might begin the biography. Notes about his condominium, the way he walked, the way his beautiful breathless voice rode the air. He had wanted to know whether she’d bathed, which meant he had pictured her naked. She would mention the shiny vacuum, and the belts in his closet, the custom-made shoes that gave him balance. And his shirts, all those shirts, the way they faced the same direction, one after another, identical but for color, one spaced perfectly after the next, like promises kept, like a series of snapshots all the same, like the days of a life.

  A WALK IN WINTER

  Snow weighted the limbs of trees. Mounds of snow lined the shoulders of the county road and cloaked the adjacent fields. Snow lathered the air. Snow brought Conrad home.

  “You have to like the cold to live up here,” Sheriff Mallon said. He slipped a hand from the steering wheel to remove his hat and dust snow from his jacket, the finger of his glove erasing a dozen years from his eyebrows. The official vehicle, a huge Suburban, was forest green, inside and out.

  Conrad positioned his hands before the heater vents. He had left his gloves on the plane. The township of Chapman, North Dakota, had no airport. In this weather, the drive from Grand Forks could take four hours.

  “I never liked the cold,” Conrad said. “Not when I was a child, not now.”

  A pier of electronic apparatus separated him from the sheriff. A queue of red lights flashed on the slender face of a police radio. Saddled to the radio was a louvered microphone and cochleate cord. A second screen displayed digital numbers shifting from 00 to 05.

  “That’s the radar,” Sheriff Mallon said. “The trees are growing at five miles an hour.” He indicated with a nod the plastic trumpet on the dash. Without his hat, he looked like a boy. “It sounds slow, but if they really did grow that fast, a seedling in the a.m. would be taller than Everest by nightfall.”

  “You must spend a lot of time alone,” Conrad said. He tucked his hands inside his jacket, under his armpits. He was a chemist and spent a lot of time alone himself.

  The Suburban gyrated slightly on the ice.

  “I should have chained the tires,” Sheriff Mallon said. “You have to drive so slow with chains, I didn’t want to bother.”

  The road wound through a broad valley. The river that dictated the road’s curves had vanished, turned to ice and laminated with snow, as solid now as any other piece of the frozen world. Beyond this rolling esplanade, on either side, lay forest. Conrad had learned of his mother’s disappearance in such a landscape. He had been ten years old. The farmhouse in which he had lived had a handmade ladder that led to the unfinished second story, the walls framed but only the exterior covered. Conrad had leapt over straw insulation from one joist to the next. Frost made the lumber slick. Twice he fell. The noise, he feared, would alert his father.

  Beginning with the south window, he searched for his mother’s path through the snow. No one could walk on snow without leaving a trail, he reasoned, not his mother, not even Christ. Beyond their farm stood the forest, as dense and dispiriting as a roar. The only clear footpath led to the chicken coop and had been made by his father’s boots. The tractor, their one functional vehicle, had a heap of snow on its black seat, the great tires buried. Conrad could not even see evidence of the road that led to their house. The only possible paths were two runnels in the snow that curled out to the forest. The wind might have softened their appearance, and new fall disguised them. Or they could have been made by animals, a funnel of wind, a trick of the underlying geography.

  If she did the smart thing, she cut through the woods to their nearest neighbor. Conrad ran to the next window, stumbling again, the straw slapping his cheek. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath, yet it fogged the window. There was no sign of a trail, but he resolved to hike to the neighboring farm to search for her.

  His father waited at the bottom of the ladder. He took hold of Conrad’s head to examine it. “Straw,” he said, pulling loose a twig. Gripping the waist of Conrad’s pants and the collar of Conrad’s shirt, he carried him down the hall and locked him in his room. The drift beyond the bedroom window reached almost to the top of the glass. Conrad threw himself on his bed and wept.

  “Snow has always been a civilizing factor in history,” Sheriff Mallon said. “Compare the north to the south, Scandinavia to the tropics.” He pointed a gloved finger at the landscape, but Conrad saw only the rumpled white blanket of winter. His window held a cornea of ice. “Deer,” the sheriff said.

  As he spoke, the deer materialized by the side of the road, a startled doe racing alongside the Suburban.

  The sheriff lifted his foot from the accelerator. “They do the damnedest things.”

  The deer cocked her head and the sheriff braked. The vehicle began to skate, turning to one side, sliding forward at an angle, the running deer suddenly framed by the windshield. As the front of the Suburban crossed the centrifugal line, the engine’s weight whipped the vehicle around. At the same moment, the doe made her crossing, darting in front of them, the swinging rear of the truck gliding magnetically alongside her body. But the trailer hitch caught the deer’s back leg and upended her, sent her skidding into the high white bank left by a state snowplow. She flew into the mound headfirst and snow collapsed over her. She vanished.

  The Suburban rolled backward to a stop, all four tires on the road.

  “Be careful with her,” the sheriff said.

  The outside air, brittle glass, splintered in Conrad’s lungs. He nudged his door shut, afraid to touch the metal with his bare hands. On the other side of the truck, the sheriff paused at his door to flip a switch. The flashing lights on the roof shone blue and white. Appropriate colors for the cold world, Conrad thought.

  He reached the snowbank first and shoved aside loose fall, cursing himself again for losing his gloves. A furred flank appeared. Conrad touched the leg hesitantly, then gripped it and pulled, his feet sliding. The animal was larger and heavier than she had looked. The sheriff uncover
ed another leg. Together they freed her.

  “She’s not breathing,” Sheriff Mallon said. “Watch her.”

  Conrad thought they might gut this deer and lash it to the metal rack on the truck’s long roof. His father had been a hunter. Conrad had eaten a lot of game as a boy.

  The sheriff retrieved a metal box from the vehicle. The open lid revealed columns of switches and dials. Sheriff Mallon lifted two disks from the box, each with a black cord and Velcro straps. Mallon slid the straps over his hands.

  “When I tell you, hit that green button.” He knelt over the deer and placed the disks on the doe’s chest. “Now!” he yelled, as if Conrad were far away.

  Conrad punched the button. The disks sent a shock through the doe’s body. Her four legs kicked. She raised her head and peered about, back from the dead. She stared at Conrad, her face inches from his. For an absurd moment, Conrad thought she might speak. Then she got to her feet and began running.

  Conrad’s laughter caused him to teeter and drop onto the ice. He rose quickly to one knee to follow the doe’s prance through the high snow. He was speechless with delight until he saw blood on the sheriff’s face.

  “She kicked me,” Mallon said.

  The right side of his face was split open.

  Conrad drove the Suburban in the direction from which they had come. Sheriff Mallon lay moaning in the back. The snowfall grew heavy. Conrad kept his eyes on the yellow line dividing the road or on the slope of snow that marked the shoulder. He’d had an accident behind the wheel, five years earlier. No one had been hurt, but it had changed his life. He had been driving his girlfriend’s son to day care. The boy was buckled into his safety seat in the back of the Taurus. They were talking, as they did daily. The boy said, “Remember that dream we had about those guys and those animals?”

  It should have made Conrad smile. He recalled looking for the boy in the rearview mirror. He meant to ask the boy to describe the dream, but he could not complete the gesture. His stomach cramped and his hands trembled. This is fear, Conrad thought. He had to name it to understand what was happening.

  Fear made Conrad double over. He threw his arms around the steering wheel and leaned against it. Tilting his body, he directed the car off the road, onto the shoulder. He failed to find the brake in time and ran into a chain-link fence. The poles of the fence remained upright, but the wires holding the links snapped, and the fence recoiled as if it were a living creature.

  Conrad cut the engine and pushed open his door. He tumbled from the car while the boy called for him.

  “I’m all right,” Conrad shouted, but he did not sound all right, even to himself. The child cried and flailed in his safety seat. Conrad climbed to his feet. “I just have a tummy ache,” he told the boy, a small part of the truth. He leaned against the car and walked hand over hand to the open door. The cramping eased. Lifting his knees to dust them, he expected to find snow, but he lived in Arizona and it was September.

  It was not that he had recalled something he had forgotten. He would never forget the walk he took with his father. He did not like to think about it, but he had not forgotten it. He had suffered a moment of terror from that walk. Something had brought it back. He lifted the boy from his restraints and carried him to a parts store across the street. Conrad called his girlfriend. A breakdown, she labeled it. She spoke as if the problem were merely vehicular.

  Conrad checked the gauges on the Suburban. He did not believe he would have another breakdown. He had managed his life more carefully since the accident. Ahead, he saw white and blue flashes. He couldn’t see the car until he was almost even with it. Sheriff Mallon had radioed ahead. The window on the cruiser lowered.

  “Follow me,” said a young man in a ski mask. His siren sounded.

  Conrad felt a funny thrill, driving the Suburban, following the police car, the few vehicles on the plowed city streets pulling off to let them by—all the moving things in the world scurrying to get out of their way.

  The first decade of his life Conrad spent on a small farm outside Chapman. By the time he was old enough to have memories of the place, his father had quit raising cash crops. They had a vegetable garden each summer, and his father hunted game in the neighboring woods. They had no money, except the monthly envelope his aunt sent. She lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she cleaned houses. Eventually, Conrad would go to live with her. One of her clients, a professor at Macalester College, took an interest in Conrad. When Conrad graduated from high school, the professor came to their house with a present—a tuition waiver to the college. The life that Conrad lived he owed to that professor and to his aunt, but not to them alone. He owed his mother, who had protected him from his father. And he owed his father, who had saved his life.

  His aunt liked to say his parents had not been well suited for each other. To others, she said horrible things about his father. Conrad’s mother had a few slight deformities—her nose was asymmetrical and one of her eyelids drooped. In profile, her right side showed a disfigured woman, while her left side revealed a beauty. Her teeth were a mess, the bottom row listing like a stand of trees maligned by prevailing winds.

  Conrad’s father was no taller than his mother and almost as slight, but he was dark while she was light, and handsome while she was ugly. He had gone to St. Paul looking for a wife. His parents had died the winter before. He needed help on the farm. He was marginally educated and nervous among people, but he was healthy and good-looking, and Conrad’s mother, who had been a cashier at a grocery, had been happy to give him directions about town and flattered to find him waiting in the parking lot when she finished her shift. He owned land and the farmhouse. At that time, he’d had a few cows and pigs. He likely told her about the animals and especially the house, how it looked complete from the outside, but the rooms upstairs were skeletal.

  Conrad had no memory of animals on the farm, except for the ragged hens in their stinking coop and the creatures his father would kill and drag home—rabbits, quail, deer, a neighbor’s dog or goat, prairie dogs, ducks, fox, house cats. He presented the gutted creatures to his wife with a kind of magisterial silence. He spoke little and expected to be obeyed. He hadn’t always been a harsh man. A bad crop of corn the summer Conrad was three had changed him. The pigs and cattle didn’t survive the winter. They needed grain he couldn’t provide. Conrad’s mother spoke often of the winter their lives turned grim, as well as the time before, when she had held out some hope. Conrad was returning to Chapman to identify his mother’s frozen remains.

  “We got a room for you at the Motel 6,” the policewoman said. She had a boxy head, a square smile. OFFICER PATTY, her tag read. Her police cap had flattened a recent perm, making it stick out on the sides. She looked deranged. She had bought him gloves and handed them over, along with the receipt and his change.

  Conrad thanked her. They stood in the hospital cafeteria, drinking coffee. The room smelled powerfully of gravy. Everyone had taken a table near a window to watch the blizzard grow near. The snow had let up, as if in anticipation of the storm, while the sky turned solid, a thick metallic lid the color of pewter. Conrad asked about the sheriff.

  “He’ll live,” Officer Patty said and finger-waved to someone seated nearby.

  One of the nurses had flirted with Conrad, a young blond with straight white teeth and a full chest. She somehow thought of him as heroic, although she had heard the details of the afternoon. Nonetheless, he had driven up under the flicker of constabulary lights and delivered an injured officer to people who could care for him. She had hinted about dinner. Conrad had politely ignored her.

  “I know your aunt,” Officer Patty said. “Most of the people in law enforcement hereabouts know her. Quite a determined lady.”

  “She’s a force of nature,” Conrad said.

  “You’d think, after twenty years, she’d give up. Finally we have something on our plate. I hope this’ll put an end to her grief.” She touched her hair. “Oh, flatty Patty.”

  “Can y
ou give me a lift to the motel?” Conrad asked her.

  “In the job description,” she said, fluffing her hair. “Protect and serve. Around here, it’s mostly serve.”

  She, too, drove a Suburban, a hula dancer wiggling on the dash. Wind lifted fresh fall from the drifts, but the impending storm still lingered outside the city. A peculiar light resulted, a solemn gray illumination that lent the drab buildings a dignity they did not deserve.

  Officer Patty said, “Your aunt thinks maybe you spoke with your father back five or so years ago.”

  “She never said that to me,” Conrad replied. His aunt wanted to find her little sister. She wanted justice when there could be none.

  “Something in your behavior tipped her off.”

  “My aunt is a peculiar kind of conspiracy nut,” he said. “She believes every detail of my behavior has its roots in a single bed. But the world is full of unpleasant catalysts.”

  “She’s always putting two and two together,” Officer Patty acknowledged, “and sometimes gets five. Or seven. Still, she says you went into a shell.”

  “I had an accident in a car. I haven’t seen my father since I left the farm.”

  “Seen is a tricky word,” Officer Patty said. “Contact might be the better word. Any contact whatsoever?”

  “None,” Conrad said.

  “It may seem like ancient history, but if this turns out how we expect,” she continued, “talking with him and not telling us, that could be interpreted as accessory after the fact.”

  Conrad said nothing in response to this, but shook his head contemptuously.

  “I’d just hate to see that happen to you,” she said.

  At Motel 6 he said, “I appreciate the gloves.”

  Sheriff Mallon appeared at Conrad’s motel room the following morning. A white square of gauze covered one side of his face. White tape held it in place.

  “You’re gonna have to drive,” he said. “I’m taking Percodan.”