by Dale Peck
The car, Shen.
A new expression crossed his face, something that wasn’t quite suspicion, and then Shen let go of the keys and picked up his glass and touched it to mine where it sat on the table. His eyes squinted shut as soon as the whiskey hit his throat and he slipped the thumb and index finger of his free hand under his glasses to wipe a tear from beneath tightly squeezed lids; on the table, his hand pawed the Formica, and I suddenly thought of a dog my father got me soon after I went to live with him. The dog had spent its life in a kennel, six or seven years, and when it was first set loose in the wide-open space of my father’s yard it refused to run, to walk around even. It took just a few steps, wobbling like a newborn fawn, then turned and retraced its path, and then, eventually, turned again. It was months before the animal seemed to realize it was no longer in a cage, and as soon as it did it ran away and we never saw it again.
I wondered if Shenandoah Waters would realize he was free. I wondered if—when—he’d run away from me, but when he spoke his voice was hoarse and dry.
Aw man.
That night I dreamed about Shenandoah Waters. I dreamed I measured every single part of his body with a tailor’s tape, chest and waist, wrists and ankles, fingers and toes even, and then I sewed him a new suit of skin, this one fresh and white, clean of tattoos and history. He grinned sheepishly when I asked about the tattoos. They used to steal his glasses, he said, wouldn’t give them back until he submitted one more time. Dumb asses could draw okay but they sure couldn’t spell. He held out his arm: Jezuz.
In the morning I knocked on the door to the maid’s room before pushing it open. Shen slept through my knock, facedown on the little twin I’d bought a few weeks before he was paroled. He’d managed to undress before falling atop the sheets, and on his uncovered skin I could see more tattoos: a vine-wrapped cross on his calf, a rattlesnake’s tail curled around his waist, and, on each shoulder blade, a little flightless wing. The rest of his skin was as pale and new as I’d dreamed it, save for a thin patch of hair above the label of his inside-out underwear (I could see him, glasses off, blurrily pulling them on at the sound of yesterday’s reveille bell). The wings on Shen’s shoulder blades flapped as he rubbed the hairs on the part of his back I was looking at, and then some prison sense must have told him he was being watched because his hand froze and his eyes sprang open. For a moment they were filled with fear and confusion, and even as he felt for his glasses on the floor I saw the two faded indentations high on his nose, and then his glasses were on his face and the confusion left his eyes, but not, immediately, the fear. He tried to smile but it came off as a grimace, the grimace of a teenaged boy who looked incapable of killing a fly, let alone a woman.
Aw, man. What’d you put in my drink?
You’re out of practice. You’ll get used to it.
Shen grimaced again. Maybe I should quit while I’m ahead.
I’m going to work. I thought you might like to go with me. I talked to my supervisor, he said he could probably get you something in the warehouse. You don’t have anything else lined up, do you?
Well, as a matter-a fact, no.
Good. You can drive me. Better get a move on, we’ll be late.
In the car he was a kid again, a cocky seventeen-year-old whose rap sheet was filled with nothing more serious than a string of B-and-E’s. He tilted the seat back, rolled up his sleeve before letting his tattooed arm hang out the open window; if he could have seen the front of the car without them, I’m sure he’d’ve taken off his glasses. Damn, he said. Wish I still smoked. Car like this deserves a cigarette. He gunned it, and the speedometer’s upward surge was matched by the gas gauge’s downward spiral. Fuck you, OPEC. He looked at me. Goddamn camel jockeys took the fun outta everything. Ten hours later we were back at the kitchen table. Empty plates were pushed to one side, drinks sat between us, just pop this time, cold cans perspiring in the warm air. The workday had lasted two decades: Shen’s five-o’clock shadow was tinged with gray, and the hand he ran over his lined forehead revealed a receding hairline. His prison burden weighed heavy on his back tonight, and he slouched in his chair, occasionally stealing glances at me from the corner of his eye.
Finally I said, Shoot.
Shen jumped. Huh?
What’s on your mind, Shen? You haven’t said two words since we left work.
Oh. It’s just you said—He pointed his finger at me, pulled the trigger, and then he looked a little shocked and he put his hand on his chair, under his leg. He was silent for another moment and then he said, It’s just—the house, the car, the job. It’s a little much, especially on my first full day out. Don’t get me wrong, man. It’s not that I ain’t grateful.
One of the things they say in Group—
I stopped because he was rolling his eyes.
Hear me out, okay? One of the things they say in Group is that people spend their grief. They buy a bronze casket or silver urn, they arrange to have roses put on the grave every month, every week even, every day. Okay? But other people invest it. My dad’s one of those. He dropped the forty-five grand he made off my mom’s house into mutual funds. He made a couple good guesses along the way, got lucky a few times, and here we are.
Shen just shrugged. Whatever.
What I’m trying to say, Shen, is that I can afford it. I’m saying it’s worth it to me, whatever it costs.
But what’re you buying, man? Are you trying to buy me?
I tried to laugh his fears away, but what could I say? The truth was I recognized his questions: I’d asked the same questions when I first went to Group, until I realized there was no answer to them: you had to learn to stop asking. I tried to explain it to him, told him I’d been doubtful too. I told him how I’d sat there dumbfounded as Raylene Cummings recounted the night Raymond Church had driven a knife into the meat of her right shoulder and then, with the knife still lodged in place, had raped her. Now, I told Shen, Raylene Cummings paid visits out to the penitentiary once a week. She baked Raymond Church a cake on his birthday and he knitted her loose cardigans with big wooden buttons that were easier for her to fasten with just her left hand: nerve damage had left her right arm numb and useless, and it hung from her shoulder like a wet flag on a windless day. I told Shen how Karl Grable had come home and found his wife and son like that. Nearly twenty years afterward he still couldn’t say what like that meant, but every other Sunday he took services out to the penitentiary with Brian Dawes, the one who’d left Karl Grable’s wife and son like that, and he’d even bought Brian Dawes a white button-down shirt and tie so he wouldn’t have to sit in the Lord’s cinderblock chapel in his working clothes. And then I told Shen about Lucy Ames. Like me, Lucy Ames had lost a parent. Unlike me, nine-year-old Lucy had sat in a chair and watched as George Ferguson pistol-whipped her father in an attempt to beat the location of his wife’s jewelry box out of him. Seven times he popped him, until on the seventh time the gun went off as it struck Mr. Ames’ face and the back of his head sprayed across the living room wall in a wide arc like a rainbow where all the colors are red. Now Lucy Ames was married to George Ferguson and thanks to the grace of god and monthly nuptial visits out to the penitentiary she was expecting their second child.
And, I told Shen, it wasn’t like these stories convinced me of anything, but curiosity outweighed skepticism. At first I told myself I was going back because I wanted to hear more of these fascinating tales, but eventually I realized I was curious about him. I realized I wanted to meet him.
I wanted to meet the man who killed my mother.
At some point while I spoke I’d picked up my empty pop can and used my dinner knife to cut it in half, lengthwise. I didn’t really register the awful squeaking the dull blade made as it sawed through two inches of aluminum until the sound was gone, and then I looked up at Shen, who stared at the cut-open can in my hands with the look of a rabbit transfixed by a pair of oncoming headlights. I tried
to grin, but even as my lips curved I was bringing one half of the can to my mouth, my nostrils flared at the long-ago scent, and then I stuck my tongue against the can’s exposed inner surface. The taste was obscured by memory—rain, pearls, the fleeing genie of my mother’s last, forced breath—and the only way I could share that with Shen was by holding the other half out to him. I waited to see what he would do. At first he just stared at me. Then he took the can in his hands and pulled the twisted metal open like a halved fruit and raised it to his mouth. I watched his tongue flicker out and lick up the last few drops of pop. I think I was hoping he’d understand what I was trying to do because I needed him to explain it to me, but he was just as lost as I was, just as caught up. Neither of us knew what we were working towards, but in the thin clink of metal against the tabletop was the certainty that he would stick around until we’d done it.
The Circle was small, usually just six or seven people, sometimes as many as a dozen, every once in a while just two or three. Even with my sporadic attendance it wasn’t long before I’d heard everyone’s story, the pain, the loss, the grief, the inevitable victory signified by their presence in Group. Participation was voluntary, but members were strongly encouraged to share, to relate their Incident and describe the aftermath. You might recognize some of the words from some of the recovery/survivor groups, but in Group we’re taught not to think of survivors or victims or perpetrators: everyone’s a Person, before and after the Incident, and the only thing Group does is remind us of that fact. I managed to worm my way out of testifying for a long time but finally no one would listen to my excuses anymore and so I took my place in the center of the Circle and told them what I knew, which wasn’t much. An apparent robbery, my mother’s return home, a push down the stairs, a broken neck. Rigor mortis and the can of pop and then my father. I left out the glasses and the pearls and the cloud of green gas I’d pushed out of my mother’s belly because that didn’t seem relevant to Group, and when I’d finished telling the story Lucy Ferguson, gently rocking on her knee the eldest son of the man who had killed her father, said, Well, what does he have to say? I thought she meant my father, but she meant Shenandoah Waters, and when I told her I had no idea she said, Well then I think it’s high time you found out, and Raylene Cummings said, High time is better than no time, and Janyne Watson led the chorus of Amens. The next day Lucy Ferguson picked me up when she went to visit her husband. Out to the penitentiary. I held George Jr. on my lap because Lucy Ferguson believed in god and she believed in Group but she didn’t believe in child safety seats. Trap my baby boy in a hunk of burning metal? she cooed. How could I even think of such a thing?
I don’t know what I expected to happen when I confronted my mother’s killer, but I certainly wasn’t prepared for the sense of disappointment I felt when he shuffled into the room. The shuffling wasn’t caused by leg irons or anything so dramatic: Shenandoah Waters was simply a man who shuffled, and stooped, and squinted behind Buddy Holly glasses held together at the bridge with a rolled-up Band-Aid. His skinny frame swam inside his orange jumpsuit. His hair was cut short, parted on the side, combed over neatly. He was thirty-two years old, but he looked and acted like a teenaged refugee from some fifties sitcom, and I remember thinking that this wasn’t the sort of man who should kill your mother. Shenandoah Waters’s shuffling feet were loud on the concrete floor, the metal balls of his chair squeaked something awful when he pulled it away from the table to sit down, but after he’d slumped into his seat there was a long moment of silence between us, during which I heard Lucy Ferguson say, Let’s show Daddy our new tooth! I considered opening lines: I wish you were dead; You’re a monster; I’ve dreamed of this day for years. But none of these statements was true, not even the last, and in the end all I could come up with was: You’re smaller than I expected. Shenandoah Waters blinked when I said that; I imagine he’d also expected something more dramatic. Behind his glasses his eyes flitted about, as if looking for something to say, and then he just said, I, um, I’m five-foot-seven. He paused. In my socks. Visiting sessions lasted an hour, and I had to wait another hour while Lucy Ferguson, after being thoroughly frisked, retired to a little tin trailer in the center of a chain-link cage in the prison yard. I held George Jr. in my lap and I silently repeated the words my mother’s killer is five-foot-seven until Lucy Ferguson finally pushed open the trailer door and blew a kiss to her husband inside. Five-foot-seven, I told George Jr. In his socks.
After the first night I offered him an upstairs bedroom but Shen said maybe he was better where he was. A pattern developed: morning coffee, work, dinner, then story time. We talked for hours every night, sometimes while drinking, sometimes cold sober. I told Shen about Group and he told me about prison. Neither of us was telling the truth, really, by which I mean that neither of us was telling the other what he really wanted to know. Every night I started from the beginning, from my first appearance at a meeting, and worked forward; and every night Shen started at the end, from his long walk out those open gates, and worked backwards, and both of our stories were bound by the same unmentioned endpoints: by my mother’s death, and by our current cohabitation, and in some way these two things became conflated in my head, and, I think, in Shen’s too, and our life together took on an inflection of punishment and penitence. Unbidden, he drove me to and from work, signed his paychecks over to me for rent and food, cooked and cleaned and mowed the lawn, and he did it all with the same meek acquiescence with which he’d licked the inside of the pop can I’d given him on our second evening together. Sometimes, when we’d been drinking, he’d slouch in his chair and stare at me through his glasses, and sometimes, when we’d had too much, he’d take his glasses off and his eyes would glaze over and I knew I was little more than a pale blur to him, but even though I wanted to I never reached over and put his glasses on my own nose, even though I knew he wouldn’t protest if I did. In fact the only thing that ever got a rise out of him was when I asked him to come to Group.
In my six years in Group only one member had ever brought in his Person. That’s what we called them in Group: People. Not murderers or rapists or muggers or thugs. By calling them People we reminded ourselves that they were as human as we were. Clay Adams had run a pawnshop downtown for forty-six years, until the day Blake Moore came in and, in Blake’s own words, went a little crazy in the head I guess. He hadn’t brought a gun, he said, cause I was the kind of sonofabitch who’d’ve used it, but relied instead on a cattle prod, which in an attempt to torture the existence of a safe out of Clay Adams he’d applied to the soles of the old man’s feet again and again till what they looked like, Blake Moore said, was Neapolitan ice cream, melted. As it turned out there was no safe, and all Blake Moore got for his troubles was $5.47 from the till, a ceramic statue of two intertwined black panthers, and eight years in jail. Clay Adams had recovered the statue, and the money too, but, old and diabetic, he’d lost first his feet and eventually both legs up to the knee, all told it took about a year and half before they stopped cutting. He was seventy-eight years old when Blake Moore pushed him in his wheelchair into the center of the Circle and, eyes brimming with tears, presented Blake Moore with the statue he’d so coveted. He said, I just want to thank you, Blake Moore, before god and Group, for allowing me to forgive you and forgive myself for what happened. Blake Moore had lost the tips of the fingers on his right hand beneath a metal press—yes ma’am, license plates—and with the smooth soft stumps he stroked the sleek black cats on his lap. After Blake Moore’s trial the police had returned the statue to Clay Adams and he’d dashed the damned thing to the ground, but six years in Group and a lot of super glue had all but done the trick. One of the cats was missing an ear, but an ear ain’t much, Clay Adams said, or a foot. Or fingers, Blake Moore added, not when you get right down to it. Not compared to bliss. Not so long after that, Clay Adams died of a stroke brought on by his diabetes, and about a year later Blake Moore went back to jail, this time for stealing cars, but the general consensu
s was that he’d been helped by his visit to us: at least he’d chosen a line of thievery that jeopardized no one’s safety but his own.
But none of this impressed Shen. He just shook his head and said:
I don’t like crowds.
But that’s the beauty of it. It’s like the other people aren’t there at all, and you can say the kinds of things you’d never say one on one, like this. I didn’t look at Shen when I said that, because even though I knew what I was saying was true, I also knew that it was the problem with Group. That feeling of superhuman isolation became all of you, obscuring everything else. Shen seemed to sense this instinctively. In the end I struck a bargain with him: he could skip Group if he’d tell me something.
Like what?
My mouth watered, and I blushed and swallowed, then said, Why our house?
Shen squirmed in his chair.
I said, It was a small house, this is a prosperous neighborhood. Why ours?
Your mom, Shen said, and stopped. Your mom was on a date with this guy I knew. That’s how I knew she wouldn’t be home.
My mother was on a date?
Shen shrugged and refused to meet my gaze. She was twenty-six years old. Just because she had a kid didn’t mean she was—He shrugged again.
We left it at that, and I went to the meeting on my own. Every week I’d ask him to join me, and every week he refused. Sometimes I demanded a piece of information in exchange for letting him off the hook, but eventually I gave up that practice because I didn’t like the things he told me. I didn’t like the fact that my mother had gone on a date with a man who was friendly with a house breaker, and I didn’t like the fact that my mother had been humming “Afternoon Delight” when she entered her house at one in the morning, and I didn’t like the fact that Shenandoah Waters called our house a slim haul—no silver, no cash, just a couple of rings and bracelets and shit, a pair of dinner-table candlesticks that were probably tin but just in case—and I especially didn’t like the fact that it was the candlesticks my mother had tripped over. When he heard my mother come in—humming “Afternoon Delight”—Shenandoah Waters had tried hiding in the linen closet at the top of the stairs, but my mother had apparently decided to take a shower, or maybe she just wanted to dry her hair. At any rate she went straight to the closet for a towel without even bothering to unzip her raincoat, and when she’d pulled open the door he’d screamed; she’d screamed; he’d dropped his near-empty bag of booty and run and she’d run after him, only to trip on the candlesticks and send them both sprawling down the stairs. Somewhere in the fall he’d lost his glasses and she’d lost her life, and when he’d figured out the latter fact he’d stumbled half blind out into the night.