Sourland (15 page)

Mr. Carmichael parked the Dodge station wagon close beside the house. In the backyard was a children's swing set among tall grasses. Cicadas were shrieking out of the trees. Close up the cobblestones were misshapen rocks that looked as if they'd been dredged up out of the earth with dirt still clinging to them. The back screen door was ajar as if someone in the house had rushed out without taking time to close it. One of the first-floor windows had been shoved open to the very top and a yellow-print muslin curtain had been sucked out by the wind, wanly fluttering now. The thought came to me
He is living alone here. There is no wife now.
With the cruelty of a fourteen-year-old female I felt a stab of satisfaction as if I'd known my math teacher's wife, a youngish blond woman glimpsed by me only at a distance, years ago; a figure of idly jealous speculation on the part of certain of Mr. Carmichael's girl students, in fact a total stranger to us. That Mr. Carmichael had young children was of absolutely no interest to us. “Won't stay long,” Mr. Carmichael repeated, nudging me between the shoulder blades, urging me into the house, “but damn we are thirsty.”

It was true. I'd been drinking from the quart bottle out of the glove compartment and I was very thirsty now, my throat on fire.

All going to die. Why's it matter exactly when.

This raw and unimpeachable logic emerges like granite outcroppings in a grassy field, at such moments. You will remember all your life.

“Welcome! ‘Ecce homo.'” Inside it looked as if a whirlwind had rushed through the downstairs rooms of Mr. Carmichael's house. In the kitchen the linoleum stuck to my feet like flypaper. In grayish water in the sink stacks of dirty dishes were soaking. Every square inch of coun
tertop was in use, even the top of the stove with filth-encrusted burners; in the hot stale air was a strong odor of something rancid. Flies buzzed and swooped. Mr. Carmichael seemed scarcely to notice, exuberantly opening the refrigerator door: “
Voilà
! cold beer! Not a moment to spare.” He grabbed a dark brown bottle, opened it, and drank thirstily and offered it to me but I could not force myself to take more than a cautious little sip. I hated the taste of beer, and the smell. I asked Mr. Carmichael if there was a Coke in the refrigerator and he said no, sorry, there was not: “Only just beer. Made from malted barley, hops—nutrients. Not chemical crap to corrode your pretty teen teeth.” I saw Mr. Carmichael's eyes on me, his smile that looked just slightly asymmetrical as if one side of his mouth was higher than the other. Impossible to gauge if this smile was on your side or not on your side, I remembered from seventh grade: yet how badly you yearned for that smile. “C'mere. Something to show you”—lightly Mr. Carmichael slipped his arm around my shoulders and led me into a dining room with a high ceiling of elaborate moldings and a crystal chandelier of surprising delicacy and beauty, covered in cobwebs. This was the room with the opened window through which the yellow-print curtain had been sucked and here too flies buzzed and swooped. Around a large mahogany dining table were numerous chairs pulled up close as if no one sat here any longer, except at one end; the table was covered with books, magazines, old newspapers, stacks of what appeared to be financial records, bills, and receipts. On sheets of paper were geometrical figures, some of them conjoined with humanoid figures (both female and male, with peanut heads and exaggerated genitals), which I pretended not to see. Idly I opened a massive book—
Asimov's Chronology of the World
. It came to me then: a memory of how Mr. Carmichael had puzzled our class one day “demonstrating infinity” on the blackboard. With surprising precision he'd drawn a circle, and halved it; this half circle, he'd halved; this quarter circle, he'd halved; this eighth of a circle, he'd halved; as he struck the blackboard with his stick of chalk, addressing us in a jocular voice, as if, though this was mathematics of a kind, it was also very funny, by
quick degrees the figure on the blackboard became too small to be seen even by those of us seated in the first row of desks; yet Mr. Carmichael continued, in a flurry of staccato chalk strikes, until the chalk shattered in his fingers and fell to the floor where in a playful gesture he kicked it. No one laughed.

“‘Infinity.'
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
”

It wasn't clear what Mr. Carmichael wanted to show me. He'd wandered into the living room, sprawled heavily on a badly worn corduroy sofa, tapping at the cushion beside him in a gesture you might make to encourage a child to join you, or a dog. Tentatively I sat on the sofa, but not quite where Mr. Carmichael wanted me to sit.

This room was not nearly so cluttered as the other rooms. You could see that Mr. Carmichael often sprawled here at his end of the sofa, which had settled beneath his weight. Close by was a small TV with rabbit ears on a portable stand and beside it a hi-fi record player, with long-playing records in a horizontal file, Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, a piano quintet by Mozart, a piano sonata by Schubert…. These were only names to me, we never heard classical music in our household; eagerly I asked Mr. Carmichael if he would play one of his records?—but Mr. Carmichael said, “Fuck ‘Mr. Carmichael.' You'd like to, eh?” Seeing the shock and hurt in my face quickly Mr. Carmichael laughed, and in a tender voice said: “Anyway, call me ‘Luther.' No ‘Mr. Carmichael' here.”

Mr. Carmichael passed the icy-cold beer bottle to me, and I managed to swallow a mouthful without choking. Hesitantly I tried the name: “‘Luther.'” Biting my lower lip to keep from laughing, for wasn't “Luther” a comic-strip name?—then I did begin to cough, and a trickle of beer ran down inside my left nostril that I wiped away on my hand, hoping Mr. Carmichael wouldn't notice.

Another time I wanted to ask Mr. Carmichael who he'd been visiting at the hospital, and where his family was, but didn't dare. Against a wall was an upright piano with stacks of books and sheet music on its top. I could image a girl of my age sitting there, dutifully playing her scales. The living room looked out upon the vast front yard now
overgrown with tall grasses and yellow and white wildflowers. The walls were covered in faded once-elegant wallpaper and in this room too was sculpted molding in the ceiling. On the coffee table near the sofa were ashtrays heaped with butts and ashes. I resolved, if Mr. Carmichael lit another cigarette, I would ask if I could have a “drag” from it as girls were always doing with older boys they hoped to impress. Mr. Carmichael took back the beer bottle from me and drank again thirstily and asked me which year of high school I would be in, in the fall, and I told him that I was just starting high school: I would be in tenth grade. “That sounds young,” Mr. Carmichael said, frowning. “I thought you were older.”

To this I had no ready reply. I wondered if I should apologize.

“You were my student years ago, not recently. How's it happen you're just going into tenth grade?”

Our math teacher's displeasure showed itself in a quick furrow of Mr. Carmichael's forehead and a crinkling of his nose as if he were smelling something bad—and who was to blame? He asked if I had a boyfriend and when I said no, the bad-smell look deepened. Stammering, I said, “People say—I have an ‘old' soul. Like maybe—I've lived many times before.”

This desperate nonsense came to me out of nowhere: it was something my grandmother had told me when I'd been a little girl, to make me feel important, I suppose, or to make herself feel important.

Still frowning, Mr. Carmichael said suddenly, “The Stoics had the right goddamn idea. If I was born a long time ago, that's what I was—‘Stoic.' Y'know who the Stoics were? No? Philosophers who lived a long time ago. Marcus Aurelius—name ring a bell? ‘In all that you say or do recall that the power of exiting this life is yours at any time.'”

“You mean—kill yourself?” I laughed uncertainly. This didn't sound so good.

Mr. Carmichael was in a brooding mood so I asked him if he thought there might be memory pools that collected in certain places like the hospital, the way puddles collect after rain; in places where peo
ple have had to wait, and have been worried, and frightened; if there were places where you left your trace, without knowing it. Mr. Carmichael seemed to consider this. At least, he did not snort in derision. He said, “‘Memory pools.' Why not. Like ghosts. Everywhere, the air is charged with ghosts. Hospitals have got to be the worst, teeming with ghosts like germs. Can't hardly draw a deep breath, you suck in a ghost.” Mr. Carmichael made a sneezing-comical noise that set us both laughing. “Could be, I am a ghost. You're a sweet trusting girl, coming here with a ghost. Or maybe you're a ghost yourself—joke's on me. Some future time like the next century there'll be explorers looking back to now, to 1959—what's called ‘lookback time'—y'know what ‘lookback time' is? No?” Mr. Carmichael's teacherly manner emerged, though as he spoke he tapped my wrist with his forefinger. “‘Lookback time' is what you'd call an astronomical figure of speech. It means, if you gaze up into the night sky—and you have the look of a girl eager to learn the constellations—what you see isn't what is there. What you see is only just light—‘starlight.' The actual star has moved on, or is extinct. What you are looking into is ‘lookback time'—the distant past. It's only an ignorant—innocent—eye that thinks it is looking at an actual star. If our sun exploded, and disappeared, here on earth we wouldn't know the grim news for eight minutes.” Now Mr. Carmichael was circling my wrist with his thumb and forefinger, gently tugging at me to come closer to him on the sofa. “Eight minutes is a hell of a long time, to not know that you are dead.”

I shuddered. Then I laughed, this was meant to be funny.

Somehow, we began arm wrestling. Before I knew it, with a gleeful chortle, Mr. Carmichael had kicked off his moccasins, worn without socks, slouched down on the sofa, and lifted me above him, to straddle his stomach. “Giddyup, li'l horsie! Giddyup.” My khaki shorts rode up my thighs, Mr. Carmichael's belt buckle chafed my skin. Beneath the Rangers T-shirt he ran his hard quick hands, where my skin was clammy-damp; he took hold of my small, bare breasts, squeezing and kneading, running his thumbs across the nipples, and I slapped at him,
shrieking in protest. Suddenly then Mr. Carmichael rolled me over onto the sofa, pinned me with his forearms, and gripped my thighs, between my legs he brought his hot, rock-hard face, his sucking mouth, against the damp crotch of my shorts and my panties inside my shorts, an act so astonishing to me, I could not believe that it was happening. Like a big dog Mr. Carmichael was growling, sucking, and nipping at me. “Lie still. Be still. You'll like this. L'il bitch god
damn
.” Wildly I'd begun to laugh, I kicked frantically at him, scrambled out of his grasp on my hands and knees—on the floor now, on a carpet littered with pizza crusts, dumped ashtrays, and empty beer bottles. Cursing me now, Mr. Carmichael grabbed hold of my ankle and pinned me again, mashing his mouth against mine, his mouth and angry teeth tearing at my lips as if to pry them open. By this time I'd become panicked, terrified. No boy or man had ever kissed me like this, or touched me like this, so roughly—“Why'd you come here with me? What did you think this was—seventh grade? You're a hell of a lot older than you let on. Hot li'l bitch.” With each syllable of
hot l'il bitch
Mr. Carmichael struck the back of my head against the carpet, his fingers closed around my throat. Fumbling, he tried to insert his knee between my thighs, he pressed the palm of his hand hard against my mouth to quiet me, I struggled, desperate to free myself like a fish impaled on a hook desperate to free itself at any cost, I would have torn open my flesh to be free of Mr. Carmichael's weight on me. Now he lurched above me, grunted and fumbled, unzipped his trousers, I had a glimpse of his thick engorged penis being rammed against my thighs, another time Mr. Carmichael grunted, and shuddered, and fell heavily on me; for a long stunned moment we lay unmoving; then he allowed me to extricate myself from him, to crawl away whimpering.

Somehow next I was in a bathroom, and I was vomiting into a sink.

Must've been, Mr. Carmichael had led me here. In this sweltering-hot little room, which was very dirty—shower stall, toilet, linoleum floor—I ran water from both faucets to wash away my vomit, desperate to wash all evidence away. I could not bring myself to look into the mirror above
the sink, I knew my mouth was swollen, my face burned and throbbed. On the front of my T-shirt were coin-sized splotches of blood. (Was my nose bleeding? Always in school I'd been in terror of my nose suddenly beginning to bleed, and the stares of my classmates.) With shaking hands I washed away the sticky semen on my thighs, which was colorless and odorless. Outside the bathroom Mr. Carmichael was saying, in an encouraging voice: “You'll be fine, Maddie. We'll take you back. We should leave soon.” Yet the thought came to me
He could kill me now. He is thinking this. When I come out of here. No one will know.
But when I opened the bathroom door Mr. Carmichael was nowhere in sight. I heard him in the kitchen, he was speaking on the phone, pleading, and then silence, the harsh laughter, and the slamming down of a telephone receiver. A man's raw aggrieved voice—“Fuck it. What's the difference….”

When Mr. Carmichael came for me, his mood had shifted yet again. In the kitchen he too had been washing up: his flushed face was made to appear affable, his disheveled hair had been dampened. His badly soiled sport shirt was tucked into his trousers, and his trousers were zipped up. The moccasins were back on his feet. It was with a genial-teacher smile that Mr. Carmichael greeted me: “Madelyn! Time to head back, I said we wouldn't stay long.”

 

In the Dodge station wagon, in late-afternoon traffic on Route 31 East, Mr. Carmichael lapsed into silence. He'd forgotten about driving me home, there was no question but that we were returning to Sparta Memorial Hospital. From time to time Mr. Carmichael glanced anxiously at me as I huddled far from him in the passenger's seat, trying to stop my nose from bleeding by pinching the nostrils and tilting my head back. So distracted and disoriented was Mr. Carmichael, as we passed beneath the railroad trestle bridge, he nearly sideswiped a pickup truck in the left-hand lane of the highway; behind the wheel of the pickup was a contractor friend of my father's. He saw me, and he saw Mr. Carmichael at the wheel beside me, not knowing who Mr. Carmichael was but knowing that it was very wrong for a fourteen-year-old girl to be with
him, this flush-faced adult man in his mid-or late thirties. I thought,
He sees us, he knows.
With the inexorable logic of a dream it would happen then: my father's friend would telephone my mother that evening, that very night Luther Carmichael would be arrested in the cobblestone house on Old Mill Road. Mr. Carmichael would be dismissed from his teaching position because of me, of what he'd done to me; because of this—having been seen with me, in the Dodge station wagon this afternoon. And now, telling this story, I remember: Mr. Carmichael hadn't yet been dismissed from his teaching job, as I'd said. All that lay ahead of him. The remainder of his foreshortened life lay ahead of him. He would be arrested, he would be charged with sexual assault of a minor, providing alcohol to a minor; he would be charged with the forcible abduction of a minor, and with kidnapping. He would be charged with keeping me in his house against my will. Some of these charges would be dropped but still Luther Carmichael would kill himself in the ugly cobblestone house on Old Mill Road, hanging from a makeshift noose slung over a rafter in the smelly earthen-floored cellar.