by Anne Valente
“Since when do you care?” My voice sliced the stillness in the room. “Now that I’m two weeks from graduating, my future matters?”
She looked like I’d struck her. Her eyes slid away, back down toward the table, and her voice grew even softer than before. “You’ve got options, Mike. You’ve got SUNY, or any other college you want to go to. The deadlines roll through August.”
“I don’t have any other college.” I stared at her; she suddenly seemed so unaware. “I have the draft, Mom, and as long as that’s true, I may as well get far away from here, forget Albertson’s and this hellhole of an island and at least live my life until I’m shipped away to God knows where.”
She didn’t even look at me. She just sat there, the patterns scattered beneath her hands. The air in the house thickened, too heavy for my lungs, so I grabbed my coat from the foyer and slipped out the door toward Jim’s house, leaving my mother behind.
When I walked up to Jim’s, Breslin’s car was parked on the street. I crossed the grass to the backyard, where a sliding-glass door sidled up to Jim’s basement room, and when I knocked, Breslin pulled open the door.
“Well, look who it is.” He held a trigonometry textbook in his hands, a class he and Jim shared. “We’re nearly done studying for this bitch of a test.” Jim’s head peeked out from the background and he waved, and Breslin motioned me inside and shut the door.
I watched the last half of Bewitched while they finished up, took a Schlitz from the basement fridge. When they were finally done, Breslin pulled on his coat. I thought he was going outside for a cigarette, but Jim was wearing a coat too, and I knew he didn’t smoke.
“Come on.” Breslin flipped off the television before the predictable conclusion of the episode, the reveal that Darrin wasn’t actually having an affair. “We’re going for a ride.”
Outside the air thrashed cold through the car’s open windows, but the change was welcome and I inhaled the lack of stagnation, a shift from the fog that hovered above the kitchen at home. We picked up Stan, who was waiting at the end of his driveway like he knew we were coming, and then we sailed onto the expressway where the night air slicked a balm across the car, a space open enough to breathe.
“Where do you kids want to go?” Breslin shouted over the din of the radio, the rush of the highway.
We always went to the same places, every time we went out. The Burger Barn, the Rusty Nail. The Maple Leaf on Thursdays for cheap beer before the weekend brought crowds. I looked out across the highway, could see the far-off metallic flash of the Unisphere glinting from the heart of Flushing Meadows Park.
“Let’s go to the fair.”
Jim looked at me. “It’s closed, Mike. Let’s get a beer instead.”
“Let’s go anyway.” I was adamant. “Who gives a fuck if it’s closed.”
Breslin watched me in the rearview mirror, his mouth spreading toward a grin, and Stan shrugged in the passenger seat and rolled up his window. Only Jim looked like he didn’t want to, but he consented anyway with a slow nod of his head.
The fairgrounds were empty when we arrived, the crowds long gone, but two night porters paced the perimeter of the park as we drove up. Breslin circled around to the 7-Eleven on Radcliff instead, and we sat in the fair parking lot drinking PBRs until the porters finally left, sometime well after two. By then, I was drunk enough to scale a fence.
Stan made a step with his hands that I climbed onto, hoisting myself up toward the railing until I flopped over the edge. Breslin followed, pushing off Stan’s shoulders as he stepped into his palms, and then Jim helped Stan across the fence, remaining on the other side.
“Aren’t you coming over?” I stood eye to eye with Jim, chain links dividing our faces.
“How the fuck would I get across?” Jim squinted back toward the car. “I’ll stay here, keep an eye out for cops.”
I pinched his cheek through the fence and turned away toward the park.
The pavilions loomed like monsters in the night, deserted, their shadows hulking high over the park. Breslin ran down the main thoroughfare, the flags billowing like ghosts above him, while Stan stared at the posters for Johnson’s Great Society, the ride that took audiences through the annals of American history and on toward progress, the great strides we would forge into the future. I walked past the Disney exhibits, the tours of worldwide waters and prehistoric caves, until I arrived at the Ford pavilion once more and stood in front of the Mustang like Grandpa and I had done.
The car had dulled in the dark, without the sunlight to illumine its interiors or polish its wheels. The red leather had turned almost black, the body’s paint transformed from a blinding shaft of light to no more than a muted phantom.
Grandpa knew Anthony would have loved this car. He’d known that just as easily as he knew never to ask about my future, a future that maybe he anticipated would never come. I stared at the car, at its red interior gone black beneath the half moon. There were so many ways I wasn’t Anthony. Anthony would have taken my mother to the fair, bought her funnel cake and popcorn, paid her way through the Magic Skyway and let the light fill her eyes again like it must have back in 1939, when the weight of what would end was nothing more than an impossibility and the future rolled out plush ahead like a smooth, unbroken highway.
Past the Mustang, the dinosaurs loomed in the distance. I noticed how close they were to the road where Jim stood, where Breslin’s car sat waiting.
I yelled out to Breslin, who stopped sprinting down the thoroughfare. Stan was still staring at the Johnson posters, but when I stuck my fingers in my mouth and whistled, he looked up immediately. Within minutes, we were all standing in the center of Dinoland.
The triceratops, the brontosaurus, they all towered too tall above us to really be moved. But near the section of baby dinosaurs stood several bird-like creatures, two of which were small enough to dismantle.
“Jim,” I shouted across the parking lot, where he stood with hunched shoulders, his fists shoved deep into his pockets. “Pull the car around.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Mike.”
“Oh, don’t be such a crybaby.” Breslin launched his keys across the fence, which Jim fetched with reluctance from the gravel. “Pull the goddamn car around. I’ll drive from there, like you never even did anything.”
Jim stared at us for a moment then turned on his heels toward the car.
By the time the Falcon sat idling against the fence, we’d already unhinged a small pterodactyl from the ground and Stan had pulled some feathered reptile so hard that it separated, its feet staying bolted to the ground though the rest of it had come undone. Jim stood outside the car, looking away toward the expressway while Stan climbed back over the fence. We handed him the birds until they were both stowed in the Falcon’s trunk, until both Breslin and I had scaled the fence, until we were back in the car, pulling hard out of the fairgrounds.
“I can’t believe you guys did that,” Jim said, his head resting against the back window as we accelerated onto the highway. Breslin laughed and Stan lit another cigarette, and I watched the moon disappear behind the expressway’s con-crete barriers until we were shooting down the left lane and the centerline reflectors held the only light for miles.
It was well after four when Breslin dropped us all off. By then, my beer buzz had faded to a dim fatigue, and when Breslin took me home, last, I slipped from the car knowing he would hide the birds well, the only one of us with his own place, his own garage.
“Hey,” he yelled as I walked up the driveway. “That might be the stupidest thing we’ve ever done.” I could tell he was still drunk.
I nodded and turned away toward the house, but when his car disappeared down the road, the pitch black felt like the heart of some forest or jungle, so much worse and more real than all the stupid things we could’ve ever done.
When I awoke in the morning, a dull ache crowding my temples, my mother had already left for work. But on the table, she’d left the Daily New
s, which, when I flipped through it over coffee, contained a small story in the local section, the headline blaring TWO FAIR DINOS STOLEN; SINCLAIR PRETTY SORE. I drooled a few drops of coffee, wiped them away so my mother wouldn’t notice.
The car fell silent on the ride to work. Stan and I had seen the paper, and Breslin, he’d watched a brief news spot on the morning broadcast, the reporter announcing that the damages totaled twelve thousand dollars. Jim just stared out the window, his conscience apparently clear, though he shot me sidelong glares whenever we stopped at red lights.
On my smoke break that afternoon, I watched people line up outside pavilions, like they had every day since the fair opened. Crowds twisted through the thoroughfares, bunched heavily near snow cone stands and demonstrations, and even continued to wind through Dinoland, despite the missing birds. When Breslin climbed up onto the roof after me, I didn’t even have to ask.
“I’ll drop them in some field late tonight” was all he said, and I nodded and turned away, stubbed my cigarette out, and went inside.
When I came home that night, after hearing Stan’s dad talk all day about the dinosaurs, and after watching the crowds move endlessly through the fair from Albertson’s windows, a rush of people without end, I found my mother sitting in the living room, hunched over the coffee table while the six o’clock news blared on mute.
“Hi.” I sat down next to her.
“Hi.” She didn’t look up.
I noticed then that she was locked in concentration, examining an assortment of old photos scattered across our coffee table. I leaned forward on the couch and recognized what at first looked like a bunch of boring shots—armchairs, dressers, a bedroom set of a full-sized mattress and night-stand—as a series of inventory photos my father had taken a few years before he died, photos meant to preserve our family belongings in case anything perished or burned.
There was my father’s closet in one photo, all his ties and shoes and a stack of white undershirts I still remembered. There were my mother’s perfumes, lined up along a vanity table, and the contents of my nursery, a wooden crib and a basket full of stuffed rabbits and bears. But the photos my mother focused on were the ones of Anthony’s childhood bedroom, and I followed her gaze to everything there.
A nightstand, small enough to fit only one lamp. A bookshelf full of children’s picture books and tiny figurines and airplane models. A rocking horse in the corner, a pile of board games—Anthony’s favorite had been Candyland. An old alarm clock, a quilt fastened to the wall, a dresser topped with two stuffed bears. Their waving, still arms seized the intractable core of my chest, the way no hands or small palms would enclose them now, all that potential and the anticipation of what a child could bring, everything gone, every blinding white speck of the world that was ours.
“I can’t,” my mother said, just words without thoughts.
“You can’t what?”
She turned to me, her eyes full. “I can’t lose you, too.”
I looked away, toward the silent television where I could see them, troops lining up before planes. A newscaster spoke in front of the soldiers, turning and pointing every so often, before the broadcast switched abruptly to the fair. Dinoland rose up behind a different reporter, and though I couldn’t hear her, I knew she was describing the stolen birds. Beyond her stretched an obvious void, the space where the dinosaurs had been.
My mother gathered the photos into a pile, her hands sweeping across the coffee table, and my stomach rippled up inside me, a flicker of dizzy nausea. Maybe the beer still rolled through my body, or maybe something else, something I had no name for, a future too impossible to comprehend. I thought of Grandpa then, what he’d blathered about the Earth spinning and spinning, and how I’d ignored what was true, how senseless it was that our chairs had no seatbelts. My stomach flipped and bucked and I wished I was fastened to the couch, both my mother and me, with the world spinning as it was, as if the balance of gravity itself had shifted beyond progress or promise and our quick collapse had finally come, the air too heavy to hold us.
BY LIGHT WE KNEW OUR NAMES
Through summer, we waited.
We waited through June, through July, when the sun ripped a white fissure from tree line to sky, a sky that burned all day and all night, turning away from us for only moments, four hours, five, settled into its own sleep. The days were long then, stretched wide and full of light, but for us, full of only bruises. Full of slaps across sunburned cheeks when flowers weren’t watered, when dishes sat and scummed. Full of cuts from broken bottles held against our throats until we gasped yes, take my money, just take it and go. Full of scratches from the exposed metal of pick-up flatbeds, latticing the backs of thighs, hands held across our mouths to catch and crush the word no. They were long days full of spilling light, so much light it shadowed every hurt.
We waited through split lips, through whistles from car windows, through bribes brokered at the movie theater, free tickets for a hand job. We waited through failed lifeguard applications, through mocking glances at our muscles, through gazes that moved from arms to breasts, through allowances paid to our brothers, the extra change flipped our way, go buy yourself a Seventeen. We waited until Wren came late to the bluffs, one night in August, carrying a six-pack in one hand, the other covering her mouth where blood spilled between her fingers. She set her beer hard on our picnic table, removed her hand, slapped a wet, red handprint against the wood and said, Enough.
The bluffs were where we met then, past dusk, the sun finally glutted of its own glare, when the men of Willow at last left us alone, crept into corner taverns or living room couches, the bluffs our hidden shade, wooded shelter from others who still prowled. Willow, north of Anchorage, abandoned by miners seeking gold, leaving lines of sons behind, only occasional daughters, only us. And in winter, left by tourists too, once the sun discarded all adventure after September dimmed each day. We met among tall pines, separate blood, divided by arms and hands and hearts and lungs that all held the same wounds—mine were Kestrel’s and hers were Tee’s, Wren’s were mine. We met to drink, to smoke, to scream every word ignored until they ricocheted from the rocks, until Wren came late, smacked a bloodied palm against the table, until she said low and steady, we need a plan.
We would wait, she said, quiet through summer, and through the weakening glow of early autumn. We would wait until the equinox brought new lights, northern streaks against black, burning bands into the sky after the men crawled home, after they’d forgotten the shape of our hips, our breasts, long stretches of night that we could climb inside, a cloak, some shroud of darkness where, beneath the pale glow of atoms, we could see our own hands to practice. We would wait, so quiet they’d never notice us gone, until we could learn to fight, for self-defense, for release, until Wren’s father never knocked her teeth into her gums again for something as simple as not taking out the trash.
I am angry, she said, bloodstained palms curling into fists. I am so fucking angry.
But why wait? Tee took a beer, popped the tab. Why the fuck should we wait? Why not start now, for Christ’s sake?
Because the nights are too short. Wren stared at her, eyes red. The nights are too short, and the light we need, it’s not here. Flashlights are too obvious.
Tee climbed on top of the picnic table. I’m ready now. She held her skinny arms above her head, the left baring dark bruises where her boyfriend Brett had held her down. We all knew he played rough, though she denied it, said some girls liked being handcuffed, slapped around.
Wren stared over the bluffs, toward Willow’s blinking lights.
You know damn well that’s foolish. My dad knows we come here. Your little playmate does too.
Tee lowered her arms, stepped off the table. I looked away as she tugged her shirtsleeves down.
Every one of us, they know we’re here, Wren said. Let the girls have their time. But winter, it’s better. Nights that long, no one goes out. No flashlights, no headlights.
Just the
n, a blue Chevy crept past. Headlights dimmed, closer to road than bluff, but Kestrel recognized the car, we all did, her brother, his carload of derelicts. Kestrel wouldn’t say but Tee had seen it, behind the bleachers after school, her brother pinning her back by the elbows, taking dollar bills from his friends after they’d slid a hand beneath her shirt.
Kestrel stared at the car, watched the taillights fade beyond the pines.
Wren wiped her mouth, a streak of red staining the cracks of her hands cut by talc and detergent, long hours worked at the car wash, the paychecks her father kept, no wife, no guard over Wren to tell him no.
We will wait, she said, just a matter of months now. And though her voice held a lilt of hope, the word month—not weeks, days, not even the beating pulse of seconds—rolled away from us, prostrate, as long and terrible as the dull drone of flatlines.
Wren lived across the street from me, ever since memory allowed either of us to know one another, and through the open windows of my bedroom I heard her screaming sometimes, through the fixed stillness of summer air when every window shuttered open to let in what stale breeze flowed, our town too far north for air conditioning. I heard her screaming at her father, his roaring voice consuming hers, a match of aggression that splintered through my windows while I tried to sleep, punctuated at times by the sound of broken glass, dishes thrown, the piercing thud of fists.
She had it worse than me, I knew—no monstrous fathers in my home after mothers finally left, no brothers selling me to their friends, and no boyfriends holding me beneath the weight of them, not even lovingly, no tender hands against skin. There was only me and my mother, what felt like the only home without a man in all of Willow, and yet beyond our four walls I knew the insults and catcalls and touches meant to harm, the intent for me sometimes so much worse than for Tee or Wren. Every man in town knew I had no father. Bastard whore, they sometimes shouted, snickered bush child from mocking huddles—knew I had no daddy to go home to, no one to tell on them. My mother stayed away, never diverted from her well-worn path between the chemical plant and home, never told me who my father was, never mentioned what couldn’t matter now.