Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?

by Brock Clarke

  And then she tapped me on my shirt pocket, and I was reminded of those painkillers, of how she’d said I might yet need to take them, and then I took them. And then she shook two more out of her bottle and dropped them in my open palm, and then I took those pills, too.

  Twelve

  150.

  I woke to the grinding of brakes, the whooshing of air through open car windows.

  To my left was my aunt. She was gripping the steering wheel with her left hand. Not even gripping, and not even with the whole hand, just her index and middle fingers gently touching the bottom of the wheel. Her hair was blowing so wildly that I could barely see her face, and I wondered how she could see the road clearly enough to drive on it.

  “We’re in a car,” I said sleepily. Aunt Beatrice didn’t seem inclined to respond to that. The air coming through my open window was wet and heavy, and through the windshield I could see dark gray clouds against light gray sky. “We’re in a car,” I said again, somewhat more awake now, and when I sat up and leaned forward I became aware that I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. And then I went to strap mine on and became aware that there wasn’t a seatbelt.

  “I feel like I’ve been drugged,” I said.

  “In a sense, you have been drugged, Calvin,” my aunt said through her hair and the roar of traffic and the wind. “Penoxalian. Part of the barbiturate family. Five hundred milligrams is the recommended dosage for humans. You ingested something closer to the recommended dosage for horses.”

  Aunt Beatrice’s tone was full of authority. It sounded as though she were in a lab, or at least a drugstore, wrangling pills with her tiny knife. I could picture her behind a high counter wearing a white smock. I was about to ask her how she’d come to know so much about pharmacology when a man’s voice, a man’s very flat voice, came from the backseat, quoting John Calvin, “Knowledge of the sciences is so much smoke apart from the heavenly science of Christ.”

  I turned around. There was the Reverend John Lawrence, sitting in the middle of the backseat. He was holding his hat at chest level, as a mourner would at a funeral, although if I’d been the dearly departed, I doubted the Reverend John Lawrence would much mourn me.

  I noticed the Reverend John Lawrence wasn’t belted in either. Behind him was a cargo area and, at the end of that, a long window, and by that I understood that we were riding in a station wagon.

  I turned and faced my aunt again. “Is this what it’s like to be dead?” I asked. That wasn’t the question I wanted to ask: I wanted to ask how long had I been asleep, where were we, where was Caroline, what was the Reverend John Lawrence doing in the backseat of this station wagon, where had we gotten the station wagon. But the drugs were still in my system and wouldn’t let me. They seemed to have made my mind their mind. Or rather, their mind was between me and where I wanted my mind to go. But where did my mind want to go? It wanted to return to the moments before I woke up in the station wagon but after I took the drugs. But the drugs were sitting there between those moments and this one. And I wondered if this was what it was like to be dead: to remember that there were things to be remembered without being able to remember them.

  Or to only selectively remember them. Because a moment later I remembered that my house in Congress had been burned to the ground. And then I thought, why would anyone do such a thing? And then I thought: revenge. And then I thought: Dawn.

  “Dawn burned down my house!” I shouted.

  “That does make sense,” my aunt admitted, running her fingers along the bottom of the steering wheel like a piano.

  Meanwhile, from the backseat came a long, low groan. Such a sad sick sound. It made me wonder if the Reverend John Lawrence had known the house, how well he had known it, in what capacity, whether he’d been inside it with my mother when my father was alive, whether he’d dreamt of being inside it on a more permanent basis after my father had died.

  151.

  “I was in the process of stealing this station wagon from just outside the train station,” my aunt said, “when the Reverend came up from behind and introduced himself. He said that he knew that I knew where poor Nola was, and I couldn’t disagree. And then he said that I would take him to her or that he’d alert the Paris gendarmes to my grand theft, and I told him that I’d do my best.”

  This was definitely a threat: my mother was dead, my aunt was saying, and if the Reverend John Lawrence wanted to go where she was, well, then my aunt was happy to take him there. I wondered if the Reverend John Lawrence had heard the same thing I’d heard. I doubted it; it seemed likely that he’d heard something hopeful instead. Aunt Beatrice pulled the curtain of her hair aside and grinned at me. Sometimes her missing tooth made her look comical, but now it made her look cruel, and then she allowed her hair to hide her face from me again.

  “What about Caroline?” I said.

  “Oh, there wasn’t time to say goodbye, Calvin,” Aunt Beatrice said through her hair.

  “All right,” I said. It was ridiculous, I had only just met Caroline, we had had sex only once, but I almost cried again and would have if not for the drugs still in my system and the Reverend John Lawrence in the backseat.

  “Caroline,” my aunt said, glancing at the Reverend John Lawrence in the rearview, “was Calvin’s lovely friend from the train. She hails, I believe she said, from Sheboygan, Wisconsin.”

  I felt that this reference to Caroline’s supposed place of origin was a taunt, directed at me. This was the thing about my aunt’s cruelty: it was indiscriminate. This isn’t to say that she couldn’t control it but that she chose not to.

  “Odd,” the Reverend John Lawrence said. “Several of my most troubled parishioners have claimed to be from Sheboygan.” He paused, and I could feel the old station wagon buck and shudder as my aunt pushed it to an unsafe high speed. “But that has always turned out to be a lie,” the Reverend John Lawrence said. I felt like he, too, was trying to be cruel, although he probably felt like he was just being truthful. As though the truth couldn’t be just as cruel as a lie.

  “You know you weren’t her only lover,” I said to the Reverend John Lawrence. I didn’t even bother to turn to address him. I simply faced forward as I talked, as though he weren’t important enough for me to bother using my neck. “You weren’t even the only one from Iowa.” And then I began to list my mother’s imaginary lovers. The ministers, they were from all over: Iowa, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas, Rhode Island, Washington State, Washington, DC. I was always alerted to their presence by their rental cars, parked outside the church. After they left, I’d ask her where they were from, and she told me.” I paused to see if any of this was sticking, and sure enough, I heard angry, tortured breathing coming from the backseat. “She was very forthcoming,” I told the Reverend John Lawrence. “She told me that she liked to have sex with her ministers in the church: sometimes in a pew, sometimes behind the altar, sometimes up in the choir loft, up against the organ. I once asked her if this didn’t seem blasphemous to her, and she said no, because when she had sex with a minister in her church, she imagined she was having sex with John Calvin instead.” I paused again, then added, “But she’d basically have sex with anyone. It didn’t have to be minister; it didn’t have to be one of her acolytes. My father’s colleagues. Other coaches. Even assistant coaches. Men on the county road crew. Once, a plumber. Once, an electrician.” I paused for a third time, because I was running out of people and professions. But then I remembered how the Reverend John Lawrence had said the volunteer firemen who’d found my mother’s burning car were good, honest men, and also that I’d seen a picture of Leland Otis in the newspaper, holding his ax and facing away from my burning house. “Several volunteer firemen,” I said. “Once, I walked into our house and my mother was kissing one of them, our ancient grizzled neighbor, Leland Otis, right there in the entryway. Leland Otis: the man always has a toothpick in his mouth. Even when he was kissing my mother, I could see the pick in the corner of his mouth, bobbing, as they went at each other. My m
other and I laughed about it afterward.” Here I paused, for a fourth time, glanced over at my aunt, who was grinning, and bouncing her head up and down, like she was listening to some really good music. I said earlier that my aunt’s cruelty was indiscriminate. But it was also contagious, and inspiring. She was so good at it, and I wanted to prove that I could be good at it, too. And I could! I was! I then returned my eyes to the windshield. The wind and the road blasted in from the open windows, but still I could hear the Reverend John Lawrence breathing fiercely from the backseat. I kept waiting for him to put his hands around my neck from behind, but it’s to his credit, I suppose, that he didn’t. “Yes, my mother told me about all of them, every single man,” I said, still facing forward but saying it extra loud and extra slow to make the Reverend John Lawrence could hear every word. “Funny, though, that she never mentioned you.”

  152.

  After that, a sort of peace or truce settled over the station wagon. The landscape changed, became less industrial, more pastoral: I saw sheep, men tending them on horses and tractors and on foot. On our left, lakes—at first isolated and distant and mist shrouded, but then soon the landscape was thick with them, one after the other. Gradually the weather cleared; the gray clouds disappeared and then there was nothing but baby blue sky. And as the bad weather burned off, so did the effect of the pills. My mind came back to me. Or at least it started doing what I wanted it to do. For instance, wondering why this station wagon didn’t have any seatbelts.

  “You might also wonder,” Aunt Beatrice said, “why it doesn’t have working heat or brake lights, or why it refuses to shift into reverse.”

  I remembered the truck my aunt had stolen, how beat up it was, how its speedometer didn’t even work, and I asked her why she stole such terrible old cars.

  “An old car is a burden,” Aunt Beatrice said. “The owners rarely report them stolen. They want them stolen.” Before I could remind her that the last vehicle she’d stolen had come with a dog and had the dog’s owner wanted the dog to be stolen, too, my aunt added, “There are obviously exceptions, Calvin.”

  My phone then buzzed in my right pants pocket. I took it out and saw a text from Caroline. Hey, where’d you go?

  I wanted to text her back, of course, but didn’t feel like I could do so without my aunt catching me at it. So I returned my phone to my pants pocket. I thought all this had been done slyly enough, but Aunt Beatrice asked, “Who was that on the phone, Calvin?”

  “Dawn,” I said. Why this was better than saying “Caroline,” I don’t know, except that my aunt seemed to know everything and I seemed to know nothing, but at least now I knew that it had been Caroline who’d texted me, whereas my aunt had thought it was Dawn. It was a pointless lie, in other words. Although as I knew by now, there is no such thing as a pointless lie. A lie is always born with a point.

  “What’d she want?” Her tone was as chipper as usual. I couldn’t hear any suspicion in it.

  “She wanted to know where I was.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her?”

  “Because she burned down my house,” I said, and then added, “and because I don’t know where we are.”

  My aunt didn’t respond for a long time. Her silence now seemed sullen to me, and I wondered if she knew, after all, that I’d lied to her. But no, she was waiting for the moment, an hour into her silence, when she could simply point out the windshield and at the large sign that welcomed us to Geneva, Switzerland.

  153.

  “Imagine,” my mother wrote in her famous book. “Imagine the moment when John Calvin first entered the city of Geneva, Switzerland, in 1536. He’d had no intention of going to Geneva; he’d been traveling from Paris to his home in Strasbourg. But war in France forced him to seek haven in Geneva. John Calvin was twenty-seven years old. That is difficult to imagine in our contemporary culture; in our contemporary culture many twenty-seven-year-old men and women still live at home with their parents; in our contemporary culture many men and women are essentially seen as and treated like and indeed act like children. I would want these twenty-seven-year-old children to imagine themselves otherwise. I would want them to imagine themselves as young John Calvin. Imagine being forced to flee to a city that doesn’t know you, or you it. Imagine feeling not as though this were a tragedy but an opportunity. Imagine coming to a place that needs you even more than you need it.”

  154.

  Once I heard where we were going—or rather, where we already were—I turned around in my seat to get a look at the Reverend John Lawrence. Surely, as a student of my mother’s, and of John Calvin’s, he knew the significance of Geneva; surely he knew that John Calvin had preached in that city’s St. Peter’s church and would see something—hope, probably—in our going there. He was sitting in the middle of the bench seat and had put his hat back on his head, as though expecting imminent departure. And he was grinning crazily. The grin looked all wrong on his gaunt face: it made him look less like a minister and more like a child. But then, he was riding in the backseat, and people who ride in the backseat always look like children.

  155.

  Why did I hate the Reverend John Lawrence? It wasn’t because he was in love with my mother, or even that he’d had sex with her, if he had had sex with her. It was that crazy grin. When I saw it on his face, I could also picture it on mine. When he was imagining the moment he would reunite with my mother who in his mind was not really dead, I was imagining the moment when my aunt would reveal to me that she was really my mother. He was a fool. But I couldn’t think that without thinking that I was probably a fool, too. I saw myself in him, and him in me, and that’s why I hated him, and that’s why I wanted him gone.

  156.

  “You left behind a copy of my mother’s famous book in my hotel room in Stockholm,” I said. It was a theory, but I said it as a fact, hoping that would make it one.

  But it wasn’t. The Reverend John Lawrence stopped smiling, cocked his head to one side, scowled. He clearly didn’t know what I was talking about. Which infuriated me. Because that meant I was wrong about him leaving that book in my Stockholm hotel room. Which meant I was riding in the backseat, too, still. And I was tired of that. You could not grow up while riding in the backseat. Which was why I persisted.

  “And,” I added, “you’ve been telling Dawn where I am.”

  “Dawn?” he asked, scowling. Again, clearly, he hadn’t done any of the things I’d accused him of doing. “Your scowling ex-wife?”

  I turned to my aunt. She nodded and said, “Yes, Calvin, I understand what you understand. The Reverend didn’t do either of those things. And we still don’t know who did.” She said this in her normal, chipper voice, but something in it made me think that she did know, and I was right about that.

  157.

  Not long afterward, the car slowed in traffic as it passed over a bridge. There were hundreds of sailboats in their slips although none out on Lake Geneva itself. The mountains in the distance were still flecked with white, and the sky was blue and the lake bluer yet. Off to the right there was a fountain shooting and arcing out of the lake, looking not like water out of a lake but like water out of a hose, and of course I thought of the volunteer firemen and of my house in Congress.

  After we’d crossed the bridge my aunt pulled out her own phone and said into it, “St. Peter’s Cathedral, Geneva, Switzerland.” The phone whirred. And as it did, the Reverend John Lawrence said flatly from the backseat, “I find that technology dehumanizes us.”

  “I hope so,” my aunt said. The phone stopped whirring and my aunt placed it on the dashboard, and an automated man’s voice told her to take a left in sixty meters. “Because most people I know could stand to be less human.”

  158.

  There was no legal parking in front of St. Peter’s, but nonetheless my aunt parked in front of St. Peter’s, pulled right up over the curb and onto the cobblestone plaza in front of the church. Aunt Beatrice got out of the station wagon and began walking toward the chur
ch. The Reverend John Lawrence and I did the same. I noticed my aunt was limping, leaning to her right, like a woman in need of a cane. But then, we’d been in the station wagon for several hours, and the drive had made me feel stiff, too. “Are you allowed to park there?” I asked when I caught up with her.

  “No.”

  “Won’t you get a ticket or towed?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you park in a place you’re so obviously not permitted to park in,” my aunt said, “then people assume you have some special permission to park there.”

  159.

  St. Peter’s was much bigger than my mother’s church: you could have comfortably fit ten of my mother’s church inside. And it was made of stone and not wood. As in my mother’s church, there was nothing on the walls, no icons or murals or tale-telling stained glass. I knew from my mother’s famous book that St. Peter’s had once been Roman Catholic and that John Calvin had attempted to strip the building of anything that smacked of ornamentation and idolatry. But it hadn’t worked. The walls were bare, but they looked wrong; their bareness just served to remind you that they hadn’t always been bare. It had been over four hundred years since John Calvin had remodeled, but still, his church looked like a man who has just shaved off his mustache.

  160.

  I felt a presence. It wasn’t John Calvin. It was my mother. There, in front of me, was a pulpit. And I could picture her behind it. I could hear her voice, in all its authority, in all its certainty. Ridiculous to think that a voice like that could ever be silenced, even by a train. The Conductor, I thought. And for a moment, I wondered if the Reverend John Lawrence wasn’t deluded after all.