I’ve always watched people on my walks. People in their houses, working in their yards, people driving by in cars. It always struck me that with their windows rolled up, people in cars often have a tint to them that almost makes them look the way ghosts are often made to look in movies. But now, sometimes the cars that go by while I’m walking don’t just have drivers who look like ghosts, they have riders in them who are dead.
Just last week a car went by, slowing down to make a turn just a little further up the road. The woman who was driving had that tint to her that almost made her seem like a ghost, and her baby in the back seat, strapped in his carrier, could have been a ghost child. But that was just the trick of the light through the windows of the car, some kind of Pontiac, I think. Playing with the child in the back seat, though, was Richard Nixon. The child was laughing as Nixon tickled him under his chin. As the car slowed down to make the turn, Nixon looked at me and gave me the victory sign. He smiled at me, his jowls sagging like they had in life, and waved his hand with two fingers raised in a vee. He was laughing, his jowls going to town. As the car turned, Nixon went back to tickling the child in the back seat.
It’s not the Alzheimer’s. It’s no damage to brain cells that’s bringing the dead to me. And I’m not crazy. I just think that, since Sarah’s death, I’ve been lingering between living and the idea of the dead so much that the dead have been drawn to me as a kind of distraction. I mean, being dead is something it’s hard to ignore, hard to get away from. And so they come to me to visit and stop thinking about being dead for a little while.
The dead aren’t scary. They’re more bored than anything.
Last night my best friend from my time in Korea came by. I hadn’t seen Greg since that day in Korea when the mine went off and the lower half of his body turned into a red mist he looked down at, surprised. We spent hours drinking and talking about the war, about the pranks we pulled on some of the others in our outfit. He was laughing about the dead snake we put in one of the men’s bunks when suddenly he went silent.
What’s the matter? I asked him. Need another beer?
For a few seconds, he just looked at me. It was as if his eyes had gone suddenly blind.
Picture a room, Greg said, with shelves built in to all the walls. His eyes were closed now, and it was as if he were dreaming, his lids dancing with that rapid movement of the eyes behind them.
Now, picture the shelves are full of hearts, human hearts. But the hearts aren’t quiet, Greg said, or still. They’re beating, there on the shelves. Picture being surrounded by thousands of hearts beating on shelves. Imagine the music of thousands of beating hearts.
Greg, what are you talking about? I asked him.
Listen to the hearts, Greg said. I watched his eyelids jerking, and there was a faint music coming from somewhere far off. At first it was too faint to make out what song it was.
Listen, Greg said. Listen. You know this song.
The music was getting louder, more distinct. It could have been coming from the radio in the kitchen. And it did seem familiar. It got louder still, and then I knew what it was. “Moondance” by Van Morrison. One of Sarah’s favorite songs. When I looked over at Greg, his eyes had stopped dancing.
In that room, Greg said, there are too many hearts. Then he got up and left.
Later, I put the CD of Moondance in and programmed the title track to repeat and fell asleep listening to that song. Knowing that I’d wake to the same music made it easier to fall asleep.
• • •
Tonight, on the news, there’s a story about another baby being found burned. No one seems to know what’s going on. The police are said to have no suspects, and according to the anchor it’s been suggested there’s not someone going around setting fire to babies in their cribs, that it’s some kind of natural phenomenon. He says the fact there’s been no evidence in any of the cases of anyone breaking in, that none of the parents have heard anything strange before they woke to find their babies dead in their cribs, and the fact that smoke detectors have not gone off, that all these things keep it from being clear just what is going on.
Can you imagine the kind of person who could do that? my mother asked. She had walked in while a reporter was interviewing the parents, who could barely talk between sobs.
Do you mean the reporter? I asked her, thinking she was disgusted, as she had often been alive, by the way reporters interview people at times that should be private, turning people’s sorrow or shame or fear into a public spectacle.
No, she said, though that’s despicable too. I mean a person who could set fire to a baby.
On the television, the reporter was now pointing to the house where the latest victim had been found.
I’ve walked by that house, I said. It was a house I’d walked past many times, just about five blocks away. I’d seen the parents out in the yard. Seen the stroller sitting nearby where they were pulling up weeds. Just a couple of nights ago, I said, the father was out watering the lawn when I went by. We said hello.
And last night, my mother said, someone walked in to that house and set fire to a baby.
Are you sure? I asked her. It’s hard for me to believe, I said, that anyone could actually do that. Maybe it is some kind of natural phenomenon, like they said on the news.
There’s nothing natural about it at all, my mother said, and went into the kitchen and was gone.
• • •
There’s yellow police tape draped around some trees blocking off the yard. They won’t let anyone get close to the house. It’s still light out, but the sky has that look to it that says it’s given up, that it’s just going to get darker from here on out. Some neighbors are out working in their yards. A woman whose husband is trimming the bushes at the side of their house waves to me from where she’s watering a flowerbed in the front yard. She’s seen me out walking many times, and doesn’t think of an old man walking by as any kind of threat, as anything dark at all.
I wave back and keep walking. This is the same block where Sarah and I stood in front of a dark house and listened to the faint sounds of lovers drifting down over us. It’s just a few houses up from the house with the yellow tape running from tree to tree surrounding it. It’s never the things you want to forget the Alzheimer’s takes.
Like you’d want to forget anything, someone says beside me. It’s my first father-in-law, Darrel. The truth of it is you’d remember everything if you could, and you know it.
Darrel and I had gotten along better than his daughter and I ever had. He had worked at the Heinz plant, too. Fact is, I met his daughter, my first wife, at a company picnic shortly after I started working at the plant. Darrel and I had fished together, even after the divorce. Fact is, I was there in the hospital room the night his bad heart finally gave out on him, after three operations. One of the last things he saw was his daughter crying in my arms.
Not everything, I say. There are some nights with your daughter I’d just as soon forget.
Yeah, Darrel says, laughing a little, but there are more you’d remember.
I have to admit he’s right. But this, I say, to have to imagine someone doing this. I’d rather be able to forget it happened.
Then why are you here? Darrel asks. Why are you walking by this house tonight?
I don’t know. Maybe I needed to see people still going on with their lives. Maybe I needed to see men and women who live even closer than I do to where such a thing could happen out mowing their lawns and watering flowers and cleaning windows. Maybe it’s not the house where it happened I needed to see at all, but the house where Sarah and I heard two people making love. Maybe I needed to know that house is still here. Even after this.
That’s a good story, Darrel says. But we both know it’s not true. Gotta go, he says. Good fishing, he says, and then he’s gone, and I keep walking.
The Widow as Ventriloquist for the Past
Ray loved to talk in voices. Sometimes I would rub his throat with my hands, like it was an ancient Persian vase I’d found on some beach and I was determined to let loose whatever genie had been locked away in it for centuries. I would rub his scruffy throat with my hands and call him my little macho mockingbird and coo at him as if I were some bird myself till he let one of the voices out. It was his talent.
Sometimes I would rub his throat with both hands in bed. He knew what was expected of him when I did that. He was to start talking in some famous voice and not slip out of it until we were both finished and sweaty, lying calm on top of the damp sheets. It wasn’t only living voices Ray did. Sometimes the dead made love to me in the almost dark of our bedroom, the only light whatever managed to make it through the drapes of what moon there was, and the streetlamps. Jack Kennedy was my lover more than once in the seventies.
Ray couldn’t say no to me, God bless his guilty heart. Ray always worried I didn’t enjoy it as much as he did. Sex, I mean, not the voices. He’d do anything I asked to please me. Especially after the way things turned out with my only pregnancy, I think Ray took it upon himself, almost as a sort of burden, to do whatever it took to be sure I enjoyed sex. Pleasure being the only reason for it, after that.
Sometimes Ray would let a voice out at a party. But never just for entertainment, Ray liked to say, like he was bragging. Ray said he used the voices only when to do so would teach someone a lesson they needed to learn. Ray said the voices needed to educate as well as entertain. To be used for good, Ray liked to joke, never for evil.
Like the time he did Nixon at Sam and Gloria’s Independence Day backyard cook out. This was some years after the resignation but before his death and the subsequent resurrecting of his reputation. So Nixon was still just about universally an object of scorn and ridicule. Some grudges last longer than others. Ray didn’t hold grudges, though, and certainly not against ousted Presidents or any other figure he knew only through the news. I can’t even hold a grudge against people I love, Ray would say.
Sam and Gloria’s oldest, Pamela, was thirteen at the time. The kind of thirteen which can pass, from a distance, for eighteen. With all the attendant attitude, the resentment toward any restriction placed on her, whether by her parents or by the nudges of decorum, of what people call polite society, what Ray used to laugh and, in his best Rock Hudson, call the caste of snobs. She was scowling at one end of a picnic table covered with various Tupperware containers of egg and potato salad, Jell-O with marshmallows embedded in it, deviled eggs and bags of chips of various sorts, large horseflies stirring the air just above the table and occasionally alighting on one container or another. Pamela was swatting at the flies whenever they landed. She had already had what can only be labeled a hissy fit.
I did feel for her some. I mean, she was thirteen going on grown-up and forced, on the Fourth of July, to hang out in her own backyard with a bunch of couples, her parents’ friends. True, some had kids close to her age they had brought with them, but they weren’t kids she hung out with. The fit was over the fact she’d been invited by some of her friends to a party out at the quarry a few miles south of town. The quarry was full of water and, unlike the quarry near the interstate, it was kept clean enough it was used as a local swimming hole. People even took scuba-diving classes there, though what they might have seen down there in that wound ripped out of the earth for some local mineral or other, I can’t imagine.
That Fourth of July, like most, there were local bands playing there throughout the day and into the evening, and the promise of the biggest and best fireworks display in the county starting at dusk. Pamela took it as a personal affront that she had to wait the day out in her own back yard, surrounded by old fogies and nerds. That she had to be satisfied with the town’s pathetic fireworks and a few bottle-rockets her parents wouldn’t even let her shoot off.
Ray and I had been among the witnesses to her fit, during which she called Sam and Gloria things I would never have dared to call my parents. I might have thought them but I would never have said them. We all got to hear, too, how they treated her like a baby and how she was fed up with it. The fit came to an abrupt end when she yelled at her mother that she wished she had just died at birth. At least then, she yelled, I wouldn’t have had to live long enough to be forced to spend the Fourth of July with a bunch of dweebs and losers. Gloria looked over at me with a frightened look on her face and slapped her thirteen-year-old daughter. Pamela shut up with the slap and started to cry as she turned and ran off to the picnic table farthest from her parents to pout and seethe and swat at flies and not look at her mother, no matter what.
Gloria wasn’t looking at Pamela, though, or running after her. Gloria, her face still contorted as if by some fear, was looking over at me. When it hit me why she was looking at me and ignoring her daughter, looking at me with her eyes so wide, like they were pleading with me somehow, begging for forgiveness for some sort of unmentionable crime, I gave her a little smile and a nod. I could see her entire body relax from the tensing that had started up when her daughter had yelled that about wishing she’d just died at birth.
And then Ray did Nixon. From the resignation speech, the one to his staff the day before he stepped up into that helicopter, stopping to wave and give his famous victory sign just before lowering his head and being swallowed by the interior darkness for the last time. What a performance, Ray had said when we watched that on TV. Ray hunched up his shoulders and loosened his jaw and cheeks so they shook a little. Not real jowls, but as close as Ray could come. Wringing his shaking hands out in front of his chest, he came out with My mother? My mother was a saint. I smiled and put my arms around him. All the adults, and some of the kids, broke out laughing. Gloria looked like she finally understood what it was to be truly saved. Pamela just scowled.
• • •
I don’t know anymore what’s wrong with this world, but I’ve come to expect and even to accept the worst from people. We’re mad as hatters, almost every one of us. But I guess I like to believe the rest of this world, what we think of as nature, as if we were not, or are not, anymore, natural, I like to think that nature is somehow immune to our kinds of madnesses. And for a long time I was able to hold to that belief, as a kind of comfort, actually. A comfort I needed more after Ray died.
Even before that, I understood how far off some people let themselves be taken.
In his last years, Ray had taken to wanting to walk after dinner. We’d lock up the house with all the lights on and head off into the beginning of dusk. We’d vary our walks so as not to get so bored one of us couldn’t make some story out of something we saw on the walk. Ray and I were good at telling stories to one another, making things mean more than they probably did.
Most of the time we’d stay in the neighborhood and wave to men and women out working on their yards, mowing the grass or trimming bushes or planting flowers. Often we would stop and talk with these men and women. The stories we told them were not the stories we told one another, but they were good stories and just as often made up as true. Depending on the weather, they might be watering their lawns, trying to save them from the heat. Depending on the season, we might hold onto one another waiting for a man or a teenage boy to finish shoveling the walk so we could pass on through. If no one was out, our stories started off with some figure glimpsed through a window.
Sometimes we would head downtown, which was only a matter of ten minutes or so, on foot, from our house. Even back then, walking together, we both felt, downtown, some tension around us. The poor and the desperate lived downtown. Once I heard a woman’s voice asking Where is it? I heard this question several times before I figured out where the voice was coming from. As we passed by an old yellow brick building, one with architecture and a facing that told a story of a better past, I looked up, hearing the question again, and on the second floor a window was wide open despite the almost freezing temperature and the howli
ng wind. This was in December. The window was open and I could see the bare, flabby arms of a woman who was old but not elderly. It was hard to tell her age for sure, but it was clear from the look on her face and her voice that this woman had seen plenty in her time. I looked around for who she was asking where it was, thinking if I saw who she was asking the meaning of the question would become clear. There was no one around, and the woman had not given any indication of seeing either of us. She kept asking where it, whatever it was, was. Ray put his hand on my arm and gave me a little push, hurrying us past the building. Ray didn’t want anything to do with the woman or her question. I let him hurry me, not wanting to have to imagine the story to explain her.
On another walk, this one in warmer weather, May I think it was, Ray and I were on Main Street and in the middle of a story about a man who kept his wife and two children blindfolded. We had earlier passed the junior high and seen pairs of kids, one in each pair blindfolded and being led around the school’s front lawn by the other.
The wife, blindfolded, Ray said, had learned to cook without being able to see, to set the table and wash the dishes all without being able to see what it was she was doing. His two sons had learned to throw a baseball back and forth without dropping it for hours at a time, and their games of tag were a graceful dance through the front and back yards. No one was allowed to remove the blindfolds and no one did. The man watched his blindfolded family eat and play and sleep blindfolded for many years. Since the others were blindfolded he took to leaving the lights in the house on all the time. One night he woke up in the bright light of his bedroom and knew something was wrong. There was a pain he had never felt before all through his body, Ray said.
The man who had blindfolded his family clutched at his chest and gasped a couple of times, though his wife, blindfolded and sound asleep next to him in the bed, didn’t wake to the sounds of those twin scratchy gulps for air. The man who had blindfolded his family was dead, his exposed eyes rigid and staring at the light that would not go out for days yet, when the bulb, which had been on a long time and had outlived its expected life, finally gave a last short burst of almost blue light and went dark.
Report from a Place of Burning Page 7