It’s afternoon and almost winter. All the cottages have padlocks on the doors and the rides are closed and some of the places that sell cotton candy and pizza and fried dough have boards where open windows and busy people used to cook.
Paul wants to show me something. I’m six, and he’s eighteen. It’s cold. The sun is out, but it’s cold. He has on a new Army jacket. It’s green and too big for him and he thinks he looks like a soldier but he looks to me like my uncle who just wants to be a soldier because he likes to kill fake soldiers in the arcade.
“C’mere, I want to show you something.”
He’s smiling at me. I don’t like his smile. It always brings a pinch or a slap or a kick and mean laughing. I turn to start running, but he grabs my arm and pulls me onto the sand. It’s hard to walk. I’m yelling at him to let me go. We’re between two big buildings, and the ocean is behind him, the waves small and quiet. Then he pulls me under the building where loud music plays in the summer. There are thick wet posts and a wooden floor way above us, and it’s dark under here and smells like wet seaweed and I want to leave but I want to know what he wants to show me too.
“See?” He’s pointing to something on a gray brick. It’s rusty and a little sandy. He picks it up. It’s a gun.
“Is it real?”
“Yeah. I found it, and I’m gonna kill your father with it.”
“My daddy’s dead.”
Killyourfatherwithit
It’s just a remembered sound in her head. Like Grandpa Gerry’s laugh in front of the TV, like a scratch on a record to a song she’d forgotten—killyourfatherwithit, killyourfatherwithit, killyourfatherwithit.
Then Paul points the gun at me, and I run back out into the light and he’s laughing like he’ll never stop.
Her fat uncle Paul who hated his air-freight job and who over the years had become a brooding collector of nearly thirty handguns and rifles and even an AK-47. Three or four summers ago, standing in his backyard while hot dogs and hamburgers flamed on the grill, he’d held it out to her, and she was surprised at how light it was.
“But why do you need this, Paul?”
His face was sweating and flushed, his thinning hair short above his ears. He was squinting at her as if she were an absolute moron. “Why wouldn’t I need it, you mean.”
He’d taken it back from her and then shook his head. “Just turn over the burgers, all right?”
He disappeared into the house with his new gun, and there was that familiar dance between them. Her uncle-brother who—so much like his mother Lois—would invite her in then push her away.
The phone was ringing. Had been ringing.
Killyourfatherwithit
She stood and walked down the dark hallway to Lois’s even darker room. It was too cold, the air conditioner on high. She picked up the phone. “Yeah?” Strange how she felt, like she was still six and rising up through year after year to her forty-three-year-old self hearing the voice of her husband. “Sound good?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Take a break. I’ll buy you lunch.” He asked if she wanted to meet him downtown or should he come pick her up?
“And I do have some important mail for you, Susan.”
“Then why’d you say you left it at home?”
“I’ll explain over lunch. Should I come get you?”
She said yes and hung up, though just the word lunch made her want to stay right where she was. And what did he mean by important mail? Would there be no course offerings for her in the spring? It was a little early to hear about this, but adjuncts were always the first to go, especially if they hadn’t worked for a semester. That had to be it. And Bobby was being careful with her. He loved her, and so he was being careful.
Lois’s room was like a crypt. The shades were halfway up, but the windows were covered all the way with lace curtains and lined with heavy drapes. Noni’s comforter was pulled back just enough to have allowed her out of bed early this morning, and her bedside table was coated with dust. On a stack of toy catalogues and People magazines there was her digital alarm clock, an empty reading glasses case, three prescription bottles. Susan read the labels: warfarin, Lipitor, Cymbalta. She knew the first two were to control her high blood pressure and cholesterol, but what was Cymbalta? She’d seen TV commercials for this. A middle-aged woman looking worried in her kitchen, then thirty seconds later smiling in the sunshine. Anxiety? Still?
Susan walked down the hall to the bathroom, where she was going to shower and cleanse herself of where she’d been all morning, this little girl running away from her family on the beach, this little girl running away from her brother-uncle and his rusty gun and his mean laughing. This little girl running and running and running. You use people. You use. And she was going to prepare herself for where she was headed next, to yet one more reminder that her life was probably more than halfway over and she was being set adrift yet again, her husband the only steady thing she had and now she was pregnant too and all she really wanted to tell him was: C’mere, get lost.
29
IT’S PAST noon, the sun high over fields of cotton and corn and maybe soybeans, Daniel isn’t sure, but on both sides of the highway are acres and acres of it, this part of North Carolina flat, something he does not recall from his bus trip south so long ago. Soon comes a bridge over the Roanoke River, and he glances down over the zipping steel railing to the muddy water and the sun glinting back at him. There’s a narrow island there too, just a spit of maples and pines and a bare patch strewn with white rocks and a tractor tire lying on its side.
At his last stop he pulled into the lot of a Big Boy’s 66, and it was a slow walk from his Tacoma past all the eighteen-wheelers to the men’s room door. His back was stiff and there was an ache that seemed to come from beyond muscle and bone and is still with him no matter how he shifts in his seat. Before leaving the truck stop, he topped off the tank and bought a cold Coke and a bag of potato chips, though he has not opened them, nor has he eaten anything since that steak last night, but his body seems to be going along all right without it. He can’t say he feels strong, but there’s some kind of fire lit inside him and he’s being pulled toward whatever’s feeding it.
He keeps glancing down at Susan’s photo taped to the dash. For a moment, in the dull glare of the sun, it looks like a mug shot, and again comes the knowing that whatever is beautiful and good about her can only come from her mother. So why would she want to see him?
The river and the bridge are behind him now. The fields give way to asphalt parking lots and cars and trucks glinting under the sun. There’s a Walmart Supercenter, an auto body joint, a white Baptist church. Daniel’s book on tape has been playing a while, but the narrator’s voice is a rainfall of one word after another and only a few drops have gotten in—women, Plains Indians, holy people advice.
Daniel leans forward and turns it up.
When bands lost their male leaders, women would become chieftains. Women learned to shoot small bows, and they carried knives, because among the Sioux a woman was supposed to be able to defend herself against attack. The puberty ceremony of the Sioux was such as to give pride to a young Sioux maiden:
Walk the good road, my daughter, and the buffalo herds wide and dark as cloud shadows moving over the prairie will follow you . . . Be dutiful, respectful, gentle and modest, my daughter. And proud walking. If the pride and the virtue of the women are lost, the spring will come but the buffalo trails will turn to grass. Be strong, with the warm, strong heart of the earth. No people goes down until their women are weak and dishonored . . .
The blare of a car horn behind him, then a white flash in his rearview, a new pickup accelerating past him on his left. He glances over in time to see a young man behind the wheel flipping him off. Then it’s just North Carolina plates and a white tailgate growing smaller and smaller. He’s driving just under fifty miles an hour. For a long while now cars and pickups and eighteen-wheelers have been passing him one after another, but until tha
t kid took Daniel’s pace personally, he hadn’t noticed it at all. It felt familiar too. People barreling past him to go do important things. But now there’s someone waiting for him, or at least she knows he’s coming, and he has always driven slow, but today he knows he’s driving even slower.
The narrator has moved on to other things. He’s talking about 1756 and a girl named Elizabeth Sprigs writing to her father about her servitude. Daniel wants to hear this, but those words about a woman defending herself are snagged inside the current of his head and he presses the button to make the story go backward.
Another horn. He steps on the gas.
In the Zuni tribes to the southwest, for instance, extended families—large clans—were based on the woman, whose husband came to live with her family.
That morning a few weeks after Labor Day, the Midway was empty of cars and strolling people and Danny was doing touch-up with Liam on the Broadway Flying Horses. Liam had a leather case of fine brushes, and he wouldn’t let Danny do any of the brushwork himself, but Liam needed every horse cleaned and prepped before he got to it, and that’s what Danny was doing when Linda walked up to the carousel and said, “Hey.”
It was a warm morning, the sun out, and she wore a halter top. Her thin gold chain was bright against her brown skin. She wasn’t smiling, but she wasn’t not smiling. She looked scared or pissed off or like she didn’t understand something or all three. Back then, Danny would start to get hard just seeing her, and he glanced back to where Liam was painting on his knees on the other side of the carousel, and said, “Hey.”
“C’mere.”
She didn’t have to ask. He dropped his rag and bucket and got close enough to kiss her lips. But she turned her head and pushed three fingers into his shoulder and said, “I’m gonna have a baby.”
Almost like it had nothing to do with him. Like it was something she had to do by herself. Other guys would have run from that kind of news. Other guys would have seen it as some big heavy chain around their necks and now they had to walk alone into icy water. But Danny didn’t. For Danny it was the world locking him into the first real luck he’d ever had so only more good luck could keep coming.
Whatever horrors can be imagined in the transport of black slaves to America must be multiplied for black women, who were often one-third of the cargo. Slave traders reported:
“I saw pregnant women give birth to babies while chained to corpses which our drunken overseers had not removed . . . packed spoon-fashion they often gave birth to children in the scalding perspiration from the human cargo . . . On board the ship was a young negro woman chained to the deck, who had lost her senses soon after she was purchased and taken on board.”
Daniel lets it play, though he does not listen. He keeps thinking of those young Indian women carrying knives to defend themselves. And he sees Linda getting to him first. He sees her eyes widen as he and Captain Suspicion make their sick little move, and he sees her beat him to it, pulling her blade from her belt or whatever a Sioux girl would wear and then driving it into his chest and stopping his snake-filled heart cold.
This is something he has never considered before. Ten thousand times he has pictured anything but what happened, but it always ends with him not doing what he did. There were dreams of Linda running past him and out the kitchen door. There were plenty of those wishful pictures, but never her turning on him first.
A camp bus passes him on the left. Each window is filled with teenage boys and girls in red T-shirts, and they’re a hive of talk and laughter and clowning around. If Danny had been on that bus, he’d have been the quiet kid keeping to himself and staring out the window. And if Will Price had never heard his voice on the ladder that morning, Danny would still be that kid. But if Will Price hadn’t heard his voice, Linda Dubie would never have looked up and seen him behind fake cloudy glass in his red blazer with that mic to his lips. She never would’ve waited for him under the orange lights of Joe’s Playland, and she never would’ve told him he was the best one, and he never would’ve walked her home, and who knows if anything bad would have ever happened at all?
But he wouldn’t have his daughter, would he?
Daniel glances at Susan’s photo taped to the dash. She has her mother’s looks and that same almost reckless light in her dark eyes. Like she’ll do anything she damn well pleases when she pleases and there’s nothing you can do about it. How much better it would’ve been for this woman to have grown up with her mother who would’ve gone on to marry someone good.
Daniel reaches for his can of Coke, cracks it open, and takes a long sweet drink of it. It’s no longer cold, but it’s going down well and maybe he’ll be able to eat something soon too. He’s deep in farm country again. On both sides of the highway are thin stands of pine, the fields beyond them thick with low green plants in brown furrows under the sun. Maybe Linda wouldn’t’ve married anyone good. Maybe she would’ve just found another boy to wave in Gerry’s and Lois’s faces. It did feel that way sometimes. Like she’d chosen the one kid neither of them, especially Lois, was ever going to like, and that was another reason, maybe the main reason, why she never even brought up ending that baby growing inside her.
“You gonna raise it with me, or not?”
These may not be her words, but Daniel can still see the way her chin was raised up like she was going to do it with or without him, and maybe that’s when he began to know too that she did not love him all the way yet, and so everything he did after that moment he did like a man trying to catch and keep a dove flying through his house.
Even free white women, not brought as students or slaves but as wives of the early settlers, faced special hardships. Eighteen married women came over on the Mayflower. Three were pregnant, and one of them gave birth to a dead child before they landed. Childbirth and sickness plagued the women; by the spring, only four of those eighteen women were still alive.
Daniel switches it off. He’s had it with this book. It seems like the only thing we all have in common is that we fight our way to life only to suffer deeply once we get here. But what about the good things?
Like the smells of the ocean and wet paint.
Like lying naked on his side up against his naked wife, the way the sea air blew into their room and lifted their white curtains and she said, “That’s so pretty.”
Eating a slice of pizza under the sun.
Suzie pressing her small ear to his chest, her high sweet voice. “It’s so loud, Daddy.”
Pee Wee Jones and him quietly playing checkers.
A light rain on the flat roof of his trailer.
Sipping instant coffee alone on his bunk, the blue light of dawn opening up in his cell.
Walking through Port City one spring afternoon, his hands in his jacket pockets, his thin hair combed back, and a passing woman smiling at him.
The way this late summer sun lies on that green highway sign a hundred yards up ahead, the newness of the towns written there: Smithfield, Benson, Dunn.
Dunn. Forty-one miles. Daniel can only see this coincidence of names as a good thing. A tiny thing, but good, and that’s where he will stop and find another toilet. That’s where he’ll stop and make himself eat something before he hits the road once more, heading south.
30
THE SAWGRASS was dimly lit and air-conditioned cool, ceiling fan blades revolving slowly from oak trusses high above. At the bar a heavy couple in their sixties or seventies drank beer and picked from a basket of french fries, and a few feet away a shaded lamp hung low over the center of a pool table covered with blue felt. A rack of only three cue sticks was screwed to the wall, which was made of vertical planks of tongue-and-groove pine, and it was patchy with old posters of bands that had played on the black plywood stage in the corner, this place a night joint for ranchers and ranch hands and local businesspeople, and it struck Susan as funny that she had never once stepped into this place on a Friday or Saturday night, that she’d fled for Gainesville and then she’d just kept fleeing.
The bartender seemed to be the waitress, and Bobby stood at the bar ordering them iced teas and fish tacos even though Susan had told him she wasn’t hungry. He’d just smiled at her and said, “You should eat, babe.” As if he knew something when he did not. Though he had a right to, didn’t he? Susan wasn’t so sure. Nor could she remember the last time she’d ever written so deeply for so long, and she was thinking about getting back to work later this afternoon too. This wasn’t because she thought she was writing anything special, either. It was because of where it had pulled her. To Saul and Gary. To Paul and his rusty gun.
Bobby was smiling at her as he walked back to the table holding their iced teas in two big beer mugs. He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn last night—his faded Hawaiian shirt and loose shorts and sandals—and she’d almost forgotten how thin and hairy his calves were. Hooked over the back of his chair was the leather satchel he carried all his schoolwork in. It was wide and deep enough to also carry full-sized albums, and he had one in there now he said he’d found in a shop off Oak Street that he was going to show her once he got their drinks.
“This place is a trip.” He set her iced tea down in front of her. It had no lemon, and its straw was too short, and on another day she might’ve sent it back, but not today. On the ride into town, her hair wet, her makeup minimal, she’d felt both emptied out yet filled and she was sweetly tired but ready to work some more, and for the first time in a long while there was the nearly virtuous sense that she was earning her keep somehow. And even the knowledge of what she was carrying didn’t take away from this, for there was still the sense that there was time stretched out ahead and she didn’t have to say or do anything just yet, that unpaid bill pushed into the back of a closed drawer.
“You look good, Susan. Your work must be going well.”
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