Kenny had never seen her cry; she never cried in front of him, but she cried now. She pressed her forehead into the brittle-cold ribs on the steering wheel and let the tears jerk out. What would she tell Kenny? Would she tell him? Did he have to know? Only a few minutes ago she had been standing in the warm post office looking forward to dinner. Before the letter, Kenneth Swanson was alive.
She knew she should stop crying—pull herself together—but she couldn’t move. She slumped in the car, staring out at the empty street, the pathetic Christmas decorations swinging from the lampposts, her tears blurring the white lights into long stars, the points on the stars stretching and receding. Her mind would not stop working, and pictures, like the pictures that come on a night of insomnia, followed, one after another. She saw Ken in his flight suit, treading water. Waiting for search planes that never came. Then she thought about Kenny, who seemed by some miracle unhurt by the things his father had done, who loved his dad.
“I hate you,” she said aloud, as if Ken Swanson were there, right in front of her. Hate curled her fingers into fists. “I hate you,” she said again, and thought, Even when I found out you had another woman in another town, I never hated you. Even when you took Kenny with you, and he saw your suitcase by her bed . . .
She started to sob silently. Deep inside, she’d always thought she would win a fight with Kenneth Swanson, she would make him see, and he would change. He would take care of Kenny. Even after he remarried, there had been time, she thought, for things to come out right.
Why hadn’t his wife had the decency to phone her? Lenna was not his next of kin, but Kenny was. There would be more letters. Official documents. But why hadn’t someone phoned?
As she sat in the car, not thinking to start the engine or the heater, her breath frosted the windows, and her fingers and toes were beginning to ache and grow numb from the cold. She had to start the car and drive home.
Instead, she got out and began to walk, shoving her hands deep in her pockets to warm them. If she could just walk up and down a few times, let the tears freeze on her cheeks, maybe the raw air would shock her back to normal.
Twice she passed the mirrored windows of the Ralston Hotel before she convinced herself that what she needed was a drink. She’d never been in the bar before; it was not a place where women went alone. But she couldn’t go home.
The café was empty. She passed down the hall and pushed open the padded door into the bar. She sat down at the first table she came to, set against the front wall of a wide, low-ceilinged room, darkened by smoke and stained paneling. The bar stools were crowded with men in dark shirts and grease-black work clothes, but Lenna was afraid to look at them beyond a quick glance. She stared down at the rings left by wet glasses on the table until an overweight young woman in tight jeans bent to take her order. She wanted something strong and quick, but she couldn’t think of the names of drinks. She ordered whiskey.
When the drink came she took a swallow and let it melt into her limbs before she looked around. A pool table stood in the center of the room, and two young men took turns leaning over their shots. At two or three tables, couples sat drinking and talking. She didn’t fit here, a single woman wrapped in her good office coat. Her eyes must be rimmed with red and smudged with dark mascara, but no one seemed to notice her. A man pushed a quarter into the jukebox, and he and his wife—she thought it was his wife—got up to dance, folded close into each other.
Lenna felt herself sink into the music, a sad country song with Hawaiian guitars. She had never cared for country music, not only because the twangy voices brought back the poverty of her own background, but because it lied. It made believe that things like divorce and drinking and being alone were romantic, and she knew it wasn’t true. But tonight, she wanted to hear lies.
She knew she should ask if they had a phone, go and call Kenny, but she ordered another drink instead and waited for the next song. Kenny would be doing his homework now. He would have gone ahead and eaten the meat loaf she’d mixed up last night and left for him to put in the oven. She sipped her second whiskey and began to watch the pool game—not paying attention to it, just watching. One of the young men moved around in an easy rhythm, clearing the table of pool balls one after the other. She looked at his dark hair, falling long against his cheek, and thought about Kenny. Would he ever look so strong and self-contained as that? Would she look at him someday—across a room like this—and see a stranger? Then she recognized the pool player, Roddy Moyers, because Kenny had pointed him out. When he glanced up from his game and saw her, she was embarrassed.
A new song came on the jukebox, another slow, mournful song. It made her want to cry again. She had to admit that having an ex-husband had been a comfort. It had allowed her to feel less helpless, less alone. She hadn’t been crying for Kenny, who had no father. Or for Ken Swanson. Only his new wife was allowed to cry for him.
She was crying for herself. Because she was alone—and shut out, even from his dying. She turned her face to the wall and felt the tears well up over her bottom eyelids again. She was ashamed. She saw her own self-pity, but she couldn’t stop. She cried with her eyes open, seeing nothing.
She was startled by a tap on her shoulder. She turned and looked up at Roddy Moyers, who stood above her, unsmiling.
“A dance?” he said.
“No, no, thank you,” Lenna began to say, and then she stopped herself.
“Yes,” she said, and stood up. Roddy Moyers led the way past the pool table, into the darkness at the back of the room. He placed a broad, warm hand low on her back, and slowly began to move in small, close circles. She leaned her face against his shoulder and let him guide her to the music, but she didn’t listen to the verses of the song.
15
As Kenny started down the metal steps of the plane, the stewardess said something. He stopped, blocking the people behind him.
“What?”
“Watch your step,” she said, and turned mechanically to repeat it to the next passenger.
Kenny watched his step, angling down the stairs slowly, his duffel bag turned sideways and banging hard against his knee.
The flight had seemed so unreal to him, so quiet and outside of time that his ears felt stuffed with cotton, as if he had a cold. When he stepped on the runway, a ragged wind cut across his cheek, and his boots crunched on broken ice.
His mother waved at him from behind the glass wall of the terminal. When they met, she hesitated, kissing him on the side of the head, as if she’d aimed for his cheek and missed. The two of them strode down the cool linoleum corridor and out the doors.
Though they were out below, in the broad river plains and at the lower elevation, it was very cold. He and his mom sat in the car for a minute, waiting for the engine to heat up, the heater to come on.
When they left the airport, the streets in Bonneville Falls were glistening black with melted snow, and he could hear the cars pushing through the slush. His mom drove under a brick railway arch and turned onto the highway toward home.
“Well?” his mother said. She smiled at him, but there was worry in her voice.
“Well,” he said, “I made it.”
“How was it?”
“Not too bad,” he said, “for a funeral.” He laughed, despite himself. He was so glad to be going home, where he could laugh.
His mother laughed, too.
“It was okay,” Kenny said. “Just a service at the chapel on the base. Sort of bare, you know.” His mother nodded. He had the sense she did know. “That was the hardest part. Dad wasn’t there. It’s hard to believe somebody’s dead. I didn’t want to see him. But I sort of wanted to.”
His mother nodded again.
Snow gleamed blue in the fields beside the road. Florida had been hot. In Louise’s house, everything smelled stale; the air-conditioning was always on, and the cool air smelled like heat, rotting things, and old cigarette smoke.
Even the airport, when he landed, had that smell. Louise was
there to meet him, and when they finally stepped outside, the air itself was thick with heat and smells. Everything he saw struck him as too white and too small. His father and Louise had lived in a low, concrete blockhouse enclosed by a jungle of vines and banana trees. He remembered walking under a green plastic carport and into the dark, cool house.
The first thing Louise did was take him out and show him tangerines and grapefruit growing on the trees. Real bananas. But the bananas weren’t ripe, and she couldn’t believe Kenny had never eaten a grapefruit.
At the service he was hot. The wool collar of his suit scratched him right through his shirt, and sweat ran down the sides of his face.
They had driven a long time without talking, but his mother seemed to be there, inside his thoughts.
“What’s she like, Louise?”
“I don’t know. She was nice.”
“But what was she like in general?”
“Ordinary.”
“Ordinary how?”
“What’s that mean, ‘ordinary how’?”
Kenny felt the car slowing down.
“You’re slowing down,” he said.
His mother glanced at the speedometer and pressed on the gas. “Was she ordinary big, ordinary small, ordinary young . . . ? Give me a clue.”
Kenny didn’t know. He tried to think why. “I guess,” he said, “I was kind of afraid to look at her. Her other husband crashed, too. Did you know that?”
“Yes,” his mother said. She was slowing down again.
“Mom”—Kenny felt a laugh coming up in his voice—“I’d like to get home sometime this week.”
She laughed and sped up. Somehow he knew his mother didn’t want to know what Louise was like. She was small, hardly taller than Kenny, and had short, curly hair and green eyes. Her little girl, Corey, had those eyes, too. And Louise smelled good. She had been nice to him at the funeral, but too polite.
His mother didn’t ask him any more questions. He switched on the radio. The moon came up in the east and lighted the rolling hills of snow. The yellow-green gauges on the dash made the car seem very private and safe. He liked the smell of dust blowing in with the warm air from the heater.
An hour later, they pulled in behind the house, where the snowplow had carved out a narrow parking space. Kenny hoisted his duffel bag and they high-stepped through the deep snow to the back door. Inside, his mother turned the stove dial and opened the oven. “Just leave your coat on for a minute,” she said. “I’ve got a fire built. I just need to light it.”
Kenny sat down in the kitchen and worked his wet shoes off. Tomorrow he would shovel a path to the car for his mom. He pulled his coat tight around his chest and rested his elbows on the table. He was shivering.
“I’ll make us something hot to drink.” His mother poured milk in a saucepan and set it on the burner. Slowly, heat radiated from the woodstove, and they carried their chairs up close to the fire. In the corner, a fir tree, full at the bottom but twisted and bare at the top, was hung with colored lights and Christmas balls. He was shocked that his mom would decorate the tree without him.
“It’s almost Christmas,” she said. “Did you know that?”
“Yeah.”
“You aren’t excited?”
Kenny didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t excited. Inside him, a pool of something had gathered, something sharp and alive, almost like excitement. But it wasn’t excitement.
“I feel sad, you know,” he said. “There won’t be anything from Dad. He never sent me anything much. But I always thought, someday, he would.”
His dad had sent him something, in a way. Louise had given him his dad’s pilot’s wings and his medals from the war. Just before he left, she’d handed them to him, not in a case or anything, but in a paper bag.
She acted like it was something special. But Kenny wondered about the goat’s head and the hide. His dad’s guns and saddle. He hadn’t seen them at Louise’s, and the time never felt right to ask.
He woke up early in the morning, loaded the woodstove, and made coffee. Then he went out and shoveled a clean path to the car. The snow clung, wet and heavy, to the shovel, and the sky was overcast. But it was warm, the clouds holding in the heat of the sun. By the time he finished, he was sweating hard. His mom had told him that he didn’t have to go to school until he was ready since it was so close to Christmas vacation. He had looked ahead to that vacation for so long, but now he couldn’t think what to do with even one day alone. He wanted to go downtown and buy a present for his mother, but he didn’t have much money.
In the kitchen, his mother was dressed for work, finishing her coffee. Kenny fixed a bowl of cereal and sat down at the table. She went in the bathroom to put on her lipstick and came back out, looking for her purse.
“You be okay?” she said.
“Sure.” He looked up and smiled to give her the idea.
“I might be a little late,” she said.
“Okay,” Kenny said. His mom looked so worried about him, as if a funeral changed someone. But he couldn’t think of anything to say to calm her. “I wish you could have gone with me, on the plane,” he said.
“Me, too,” she said. Then she was gone.
Kenny put the milk away and set his bowl in the sink. He climbed the stairs and fished the paper bag out of his duffel. He arranged the medals in two rows on his bed, fingering the metal and the ribbons. The striped ribbons felt substantial, almost greasy. Some, he knew, were given to every flyer, but others, the ones from Vietnam, were special. He scooped them back in the bag, crumpled it into a ball, and carried it downstairs. He tucked the bag in his jacket, and all the way to town he could feel it there, the warm heat of the medals against his chest. They felt to him like the residue of a dream, a dream he didn’t want to wake from. He could never recall the dream, but all day he’d feel the pull, the warmth of it.
At the pawn and gun store, he stood for a long time looking in the windows. The glass was grimy with steam and dirt, the greenish-yellow of crankcase oil. Behind the glass, the window was filled with dull, dusty items. Gold rings and watches. A statue of a bulldog with a rag in its mouth, a mangy stuffed coyote, and a snaking row of red pipe wrenches, ranged in order from giant-size to very small.
He pushed through the door. A fat woman with dull gray hair flattened close to her head sat behind the counter, so low he could just see her chest and head. She looked up at him and went on counting to herself, writing on something he couldn’t see. He waited for her to look up again and walked to the counter, his hand on the soft paper of the bag.
“I wondered —”
“What you got?” He shook the contents of the bag onto a felt pad in front of her, but it seemed to him she never glanced over.
“Quarter,” she said.
“Each?”
“Yeah, each.”
Kenny looked at the medals. There were ten. $2.50. He picked them up one at a time and put them back in the bag. He folded it over and placed it back inside his jacket. “Thanks,” he said. His hand was shaking.
He walked out onto the covered boardwalk and looked to see if anyone had noticed him, but the street was empty. In the shade of the overhang, he was cold. He walked along toward the café. At the door, he worked his hand into the pocket of his jeans and counted his change. He didn’t have enough to buy lunch, but he could get a donut.
The café was warm. He asked for a cinnamon twist to go, and carried it back outside. At the end of the boardwalk, he crouched down on the steps.
Across the street, he saw his mother stride out the door of the courthouse. Good, he thought, we can get some lunch. He stood and threw his arm up in a wave. “Mom!” he hollered.
Just then, he saw Roddy Moyers climb out of a pickup by the curb. He walked around the hood and opened the passenger door. Kenny crouched back down. His mother carried a roll of maps in one hand and her white snow boots in the other. She climbed into the truck and tugged her coat hem after her. The last thing Kenny saw before Ro
ddy shut the door was the way his mother leaned toward him, then bowed her head, laughing at something Moyers must have said.
16
Roddy flipped the heater fan to high and turned the radio up higher. Christmas music. He switched it off and went on pounding the heel of his hand against the wheel to a rhythm he couldn’t hear.
To the west, a cloud bank had lowered and rolled over the mountains in a dark mass, but to the east and overhead the clouds thinned to reveal high patches of blue. The road was bare of ice and slush. It was enough for him to feel it was a clear day. He let up a little on the gas and shifted in the seat.
Lenna sat upright, looking out the windshield. She wore the same blue coat she’d worn that first night, in the bar, and stockings and high heels. She was the only woman he could think of, other than his mother, who seemed to belong in high heels.
He thought about the first night, watching Lenna come into the hotel bar. She seemed out of place. She was beautiful, that much was true. But she came in with the expression of someone who’d just seen an accident. Later, when he looked over, she still seemed beautiful, but bruised. Like a girl whose lip is soft and swollen from too much kissing.
He watched her for almost an hour, through one pool game, then another. He finished a beer and switched to whiskey, and his pool game improved. Shots he normally took time to set up he knocked in hard without thinking. She couldn’t even see the table—but he had to be good. He kept telling himself to go over, talk to her, but each time he racked up another game.
When he finally quit and approached her table, he had no idea what he was going to say. He thought she’d think he was coming on, just tell him to get lost. But she stood up and took his hand. He couldn’t believe how it felt, how easy it was. She closed her eyes and leaned her cheek on his shoulder as if she’d known him all her life.
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