Creatures of Habit (2 page)

As grown-ups, you have to stop and wonder what people are thinking, or not thinking. Do those boys, grown into the bodies of men, carry that death around in their pockets? Do they ever, at the height of sexual climax, see that boy there, his sad eyes pleading
Let me go
?

And the suicide-pact story, who knows if it was true? There was the note the son found, but how do we know the son didn't write it himself as a way to protect his dead parents? Or maybe the husband wrote it after he killed her. Maybe it was a murder of hatred, a murder of passion, and
then he left behind a legacy of mutual love and decision. We will never know.

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER
house in town, a beautiful Victorian with a little circular tower. It was surrounded by an ornate fence, each iron picket the shape of an arrow. I loved the house and its fence until I heard that there had once been a terrible car crash on the corner. A young passenger, a boy, was thrown through the windshield and onto those iron arrows. It had happened twenty years earlier when my parents were teenagers, back when the interstate didn't exist, back when people didn't know the danger of smoking the very tobacco that so many had helped to harvest. I tried to get the image of the speared boy out of my mind, but I was never able to pass that house without seeing him pinned there under the blue sky of a beautiful October afternoon.

That image, and the one of the middle-aged woman, violin in hand, son living elsewhere, begging for her life, hang on in my imagination. Sometimes the violinist's face gets confused with that of Mrs. Colette MacDonald. The stories of one person begging, another taking, run parallel.

It is said the MacDonald house remained vacant and untouched for years. The food in the freezer, the valentines out on display. I could not imagine my father in such a fit of rage,
but some of my friends said they could imagine theirs that way. Some kids had seen their parents drunk. All of us had overheard at least one really bad argument. Most of us had seen our parents cry, and even for those who glimpsed only the briefest losses of control, the memories remained vivid. Our parents were as vulnerable as we were. Anyone, grownups and children alike, could die at any minute. They could disappear as quickly as a car crashed into a tree, or a trigger was pulled, an overdose or undetected cancer cell flowed through the bloodstream; their hearts, livers, or lungs might shut down, some with warnings, others without.

We all had experienced the desire for breath, the burning ache of our lungs when we shot up from the deep end of the motel pool to the surface of light and gasped for air, when we tumbled from our bikes, dizzy and high, to roll in someone's front yard and spit out the taste of mosquito poison. The wonder of that first full breath. Jeffrey MacDonald claimed in his trial to have given mouth-to-mouth to his wife. He claimed that he could hear the breath exit through her chest as quickly as he delivered it. Too late.

T
HE LAST TIME
I ever saw Hank Carter he was directing traffic around an accident at an intersection near the high school. We all stopped to watch him there, cowboy hat
pulled low, beard long and unkempt, billy stick swinging from his belt. He wore some mirrored sunglasses and moved quickly, pushing bystanders over toward the curb as he tried to make the two men involved in the fender bender sit down and breathe into paper bags. When he was dismissed from his post by a policeman, he reluctantly returned to his motorbike, which a crowd of us stood around. It was old and rusty. Ropes, flashlights, and fast-food bags were crammed in the basket on the back along with the Bible, yellowed and swollen from exposure to the weather.

“What's doin' Hank?” one of the boys yelled in a slow mimic. “Shot anything lately?” Traffic was moving by then and we were ready to move on ourselves. We were in high school. We had afternoon jobs and study dates. We had a prom to plan and decorate.

“Nothin' but some old mean blue jays,” he called back, mounting his bike like it was a horse. “There weren't nothin' left but a few feathers and some bird gut.” He pulled a blue feather from his back pocket and waved it back and forth, laughing until he began to cough and wheeze, a cigarette burning to ash between two fingers of his waving hand.

The boys liked to keep Hank talking. They liked to get him riled up over some topic far removed from the moment. They wanted his ranting and raving but not directed
at them. It was a fine line they walked; a minefield of topics guaranteed to set him off. He hated dogs that barked when he rode past them. He'd like to see their vocal chords tied up into knots. That would leave them silent. “I hate a damn barking dog,” he said. “I hate 'em like I hate a Communist. I'd shoot me some dog if the law would allow it. They should've let me loose in Vietnam.” He didn't believe that men had gone to the moon. He said all that stuff was filmed right down near the coast. “Down where you girls strip naked and grease your bodies to get that tan. The Lord would not like that.” He laughed and shook his head. “The Lord would not like that one damn bit.” He thought that women should not be allowed to drive cars, especially the really young women and the really old women and the foreign women. “A woman is good for one thing,” he said, and the boys egged him on. “Not for
cooking,
” he said, and adjusted his mirrored sunglasses that made it hard to know what he was staring at. “Though I'd not turn myself down a meal of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Don't need one for cleaning, neither,” he said. “I can operate me a Hoover as good as any old woman. Got me a Hoover so goddamned powerful I can use it to rake up yards if I take a notion.”

“So, you got yourself a woman, Hank?” one of the boys
asked. Asking this kind of question was like playing Russian roulette. He might laugh but he was just as likely to fire his pistol into the air and command some
goddamn
respect for the weaker sex. He often preached about Adam and Eve, which was exactly what the boys were hoping for. He could go on for hours about how that naked harlot was put there in the garden for one thing and one thing only until she took up with that devil snake and got it in her evil mind that she wanted herself some knowledge other than making some babies to populate the earth. “She was nothing but a rib,” he said, “and Adam had every right to kick her ass.” He said, “The great and almighty plan was not supposed to take such a turn.”

Everyone knew that as a high school student he had dated Emma Mosby, a girl who grew up to marry another town boy, one who went off to school and then to the Korean War and then back to school and became a surgeon and then chief of staff at the hospital. They lived in an old house in the center of town, a block Hank circled endlessly. He was dating Emma Mosby when he began to cross over. One day he was telling her how much he loved her and explaining how suspension bridges are built and the very next week he arrived at her house suited up like someone going to a rodeo and complained of all the racket
the dogs were making, those cussing belligerent damned dogs. Emma Mosby's time in love with Hank Carter was something that everyone knew about but no one discussed. “Emma doesn't deserve to have that dredged up,” the grownups would say.

But the day at the accident was the last time I ever saw him. The boys hoped for an angry answer but Hank just shook his head and laughed. “For me to know and you to find out,” he said. “You find out and I'm likely to reward you with a dollar bill or two.” He mounted his bike and the group cleared a path for him.

“Hey there, girl,” he drawled when he saw me standing there. “Do I know you?” He lifted his sunglasses to reveal clear blue, much-younger-looking eyes than I would ever have expected. “Are you the one been calling up to my house and hanging up? Or asking is my Frigidaire running or have I got Prince Albert in the can?” I shook my head, my face hot. I wanted to look away from him but I was afraid of making him mad.

“Not me,” I said, while a chorus of boys behind me sang out things like
Yeah right. Sure. You want us to believe that?

“If that's what she says then that's what she means, you bunch of stupid boys.” He turned on them then, patted the big gun strapped to his hip. “You all look like a pack of mean
old junkyard dogs to me. Damn Nazi mongrels.” Everyone froze while he twirled his gun and then eased it back into the holster on his belt, alongside his big silver flashlight and the billy stick. “The good Lord hates the Nazis and the Commies and the ignoramuses, and I've been put here to keep a watch. Ain't nobody gettin' by me.” He laughed his loud laugh and then turned back to me. “I've known you forever, girl,” he said. “I know your whole life like a book. I always have and I always will.” He shook his head and dropped his glasses back in place. “Don't you ever forget that.” He made a clicking sound from the corner of his mouth, the kind of sound that someone might use to accompany a wink, though now his pale blue young eyes were hidden again. I nodded. No one spoke until he cranked his bike and rode well past the intersection as he headed out toward the service road.

I
WAS A SENIOR
in college when I got word that Hank Carter had died. I was two hours and light-years away; I was in a place where my memories were something I could bend and shape into a suitable representation of who I was. I hung out at an old house at the edge of campus where there was always a gathering of students listening to music and
drinking beer, discussing philosophy and religion and the fate of the world. My hometown paper said Hank died of a heart attack. Those among the huge outpouring of viewers said he looked small lying in his coffin without his hat and boots, his face shaved smooth. They said he looked like a normal person. Receding hairline. Wrinkles around his eyes and on his pale white throat that had always been protected by a red bandanna and the scraggly beard. They said he died at twelve noon, and for several months after that, when the bell of the Methodist church chimed the hour, people would pause over their lunches to comment how they missed seeing Hank riding through town. Until he died, they hadn't taken into account how many times a week they saw him— helping at accidents or collecting litter along the highway or just riding his motorbike through town.

A
S A CHILD
, I had a contest with myself to see how many times I could call the time service before the minute lapsed. It was a reassuring thing to do. And now other numbers I called often crowd my mind like secret codes: 3642 and 5756. If I could be in a
Twilight Zone
episode, it would be the one where the phone line has fallen down onto a grave so that calls are placed from beyond. If I could write my own
episode, it would involve a phone line that could connect us back to those old places. Just dial and you get your grandfather in his wheelchair, his tired old collie curled beside him; your grandmother in her kitchen with Mason jars sterilized and ready to receive tomatoes and pear preserves; the neighbor saving her mail so when you got home from kindergarten you could use her jewel-handled letter opener —razor sharp—to slit the white envelopes of her bills and the pale ones of letters; the old aunt who kept a jar of peppermints for children and who always spoke with her hand covering poor dental work, her head tilted just slightly; fathers walking up from the eighteenth hole on late Sunday afternoons while mothers bundled their children into big warm towels as they stepped from the pool, eyes red and stinging from the chlorine; the freckle-faced boy, waiting on his bike, ready to race through the summer night with the sound of an ambulance on the highway.
Won't one of you please, please, please go with me?

I
WOULD CALL
the people I knew growing up who have since died. I would ask how life had taken them there. Did they beg or did they pass in silence? Did they embrace life or reject it? Were there memories that at the very last
minute filled their minds and swaddled their fears? And like a director, I would call for lights to come on in every house in town and for every person who had ever lived there to step outside and take a long deep breath on this average summer night.

C
AROLINE AND HER
brother stood in the darkness of the woods. They held a big burlap sack between them and watched their father disappear down the path back to the house. Though the lights from the house were hidden by the slope of the hill and the thick dark pine branches, Caroline knew that she was still within yelling distance, and now she had that impulse. “Daddy!” she called, her high-pitched voice interrupting the incessant drone of crickets. She ignored Danny's elbow digging into her hip to silence her. “Daddy, where are you?”

“Hush up,” Danny said and she knew his teeth were gritted though she could barely make out the profile of his thin face. “We ain't gonna catch nothing if you act like this.”

Caroline quieted with Danny's words as she usually did. After all, he was older; he was going to be in the fourth grade come fall and she would be starting school for the very first time. The thought of first grade and the stories about how the principal carried a big paddle through the halls burned through her body like comets, causing her to wake up at night all that summer to either a wet bed or a dizzy feeling as if she had been spun around and around like a June bug on a string.

“The principal is a wonderful man,” her mother would say, but Danny—at the table, in a doorway, beside her in the backseat of the old blue Rambler—would glance down with raised eyebrows, shake his head, sigh, and her mother's soothing words would fly past like Roman candles shot into the sky.

“I'll watch out for you at school if you do whatever I say,” Danny had told her with such forceful authority that she was able to go for thirty-minute stretches without worrying about it all. “You know, like if I hear you've disappeared from first grade, I'll go down to that dungeon where he puts the bad children, and I'll spring you.”