The Lost Father (50 page)

After mass, my grandmother’s car bobbed outside like a moored
boat, always there, running, never late. I was the last one out. I always looked up once more as if he might be on the ceiling.

“Man, you haven’t even seen me dance yet,” Stevie said, curling a hip shove in the bathroom, before the shower. With him it was hard to describe. I knew his small vanities, the way you do. “He’s a fixer-upper,” I told my college friends, apologizing. He lived on people’s couches. He’d just come back from the air force. He wasn’t going to be enrolled until the next semester and he was much older than all the freshmen. But that wasn’t really it. There was once we took a walk in a woods he knew. It was near dark and when we were inside the trees, a thunderstorm started and sheets of rain pounded with violence, echoing, and we had no clothes for it, nothing, we hugged our chests freezing, and he laughed softly, something mean to himself on the top of the voice, neck sloping down forward like a yoked animal, neither of us knew any way out and he was not surprised.

In the warm indoor pool of Cap Chief Motel at midnight in North Dakota, my arms and legs swam in the profound trust of being unseen.

I
WAS STOPPED BY A SIGN
, just a little green square on a weathered post by the side of the road saying,
HEBRON, INCORPORATED, POPULATION 1,109
. So it was here, it existed, this name I’d always known. I slowed the car and coasted in. My head turned back and forth, eyes greedy for the look of the place. It was ordinary, a flat blond brick elementary school with pipe-metal monkeybars in the playground. Oldish long cars stalled on the main street. Decent well-kept houses stood in a neat grid of tree-lined streets. It looked like a greatly distilled Racine.

I tried to imagine what it was for Mai linn arriving here, shipped through the agencies, papers all filled out. She might have pushed her cheek against the bus window, turned away from other passengers, she might have been crying. But, springing down, in her tennis shoes, she could have thought, this isn’t so bad. Better than the orphanage in Racine where the cemetery ends, near the coal heaps and sulphur piles for the paper mill.

The downtown here was two tree-lined blocks. Standing with her duffel on the pavement, she might have even had a moment thinking, I lucked out.

When she’d moved into my aunt’s house, she told me, she remembered the first time she woke up there alone. She was sick and everyone else had gone to church. She walked through the rooms and opened all the doors. She fisted the piano keys, just for noise in the empty house. She sat naked on the upholstered living room furniture eating a plum, letting the juice spill on her belly.

The Hebron family might have been standing in the parking lot where the bus halted, hands on their hips, waiting for her. They would have had her picture ahead of time, maybe the kids made a poster,
WELCOME MAI LINN TO HEBRON
.

In this flatness in winter, the sun fell a certain thin yellow on the sidewalk. These are not the things you say in letters, how you felt yourself alone stepping in your new Ladies-Auxiliary-of-Racine-bought white sneakers down the rubber-treaded bus steps onto the yellow blessed sidewalks under maples and elms, shoving your hands in your pockets, goofing a grin on your face, your new family watching, wanting them to like you but fighting the want at the same time because you feel dumb and bitter and far away. But you go with them down the main street and then you all pile in the station wagon, you in the front seat, the mother clambering big and awkward into the back for the first and last time ever, and then you see the house, a box-shaped brick house, pretty with a pointed roof and a big screened-in porch. You sit at the table that night and she serves coconut cake with lemon filling, a new one she cuts open in your honor. Mai linn wrote letters but you don’t write those things. Most slow every minute things you don’t ever say.

Then I saw the low rectangular ice cream store, Rudy’s, and the parking lot in back where the Greyhound buses stopped. One yellow school bus was parked in its long slot. I stopped and went in. I ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and asked to use the telephone book. The kids behind the counter were teenagers, this was their after-school job and their movements had a slow play luster. Klicka, Kenneth, was listed in the book, 3939 Grove Street. I wanted to at least drive by the house. I could do that, anyway. And these kids could tell me where the junior high was. Bell Junior, I remembered it was called, from Alexander Graham Bell. I wanted to do more, though. I wanted to knock at the door and ask to talk to the father alone and say something to him, land him blame. But I couldn’t do that without calling Mai linn.

I got so eager then I took the sandwich outside with me and held it in one hand in the phone booth on the corner. From in there, I could hear the slow drift of cars on the wide main street.

After two tries, I found her. The secretary of the music department went to get her from a practice room. “Guess where I am today?”

“Yesterday was Minnesota. You in Montana yet?”

“No. I’m in Hebron.”

“You are?”

“Yup. I wish I had a camera. Maybe I’ll go buy one.”

“I could tell you where. The Camera Corner. Right next to the Jandrain’s Music. There’s one camera store and one music store. But you better be careful. We’re never going to be able to pay your credit card bill. You know the total?”

“Unh-uh. But I’m only going to do this once. I don’t care if I have to pay it off forever. I’m going to start at the bottom and get my life totally organized after. This is it.”

I told her what I’d done in the last day and a half and I heard a small steady noise.

“I think you’re running about thirteen hundred.” She had a mathematical memory. It was all that was left of her genius for high school science.

“Listen, Mai linn, I called because I’m here and I kind of felt like going to their door and knocking.”

She didn’t say anything a minute. I could imagine her twirling the cord around her wrist. “What for?”

“Just to tell him it really happened. That he didn’t get away with it. That you survived and are doing fine. Doing great.”

“I don’t want them to know where I am though.”

“Listen, I probably shouldn’t do it. It’s just a whim. I’m sitting here at the ice cream parlor, outside, I mean, I’m eating a grilled cheese sandwich.”

“Rudy’s? You’re outside Rudy’s?”

“Yeah.”

“On the corner of Main and Sullivan?”

“I guess.”

“Hey, let me think about this.”

“You don’t have to. It’s probably a dumb idea.”

“Let me call you back in a few minutes. Give me your number.”

I gave her the pay-phone number and then I sat in the booth finishing my food, the wash of slow life all around. One old woman with
a scarf tied under her chin passed and looked at me sharply. A car slowed across the street and parked. A man got out and walked briskly into a store.

Then the phone rang. “I’m going to fly out and meet you. It’ll take me pretty long probably, but just go to Dickinson and check into the Airport Ramada and I’ll find you when I get there.”

“What? No, I’m sorry I started this, but don’t. You’ll end up in the same shape I’m in. You have to stay and practice.”

“But I want to. I’ll only be a day. I’d like him to know that he thought he was doing something absolutely in darkness and he thought he was completely unwatched and I was just a kid, a yellow kid and I had no power and no recourse. He did the greedy thing to do that’s always been done, he had more and he knew he could take what he wanted and not get punished. I know what he did. It’s in me. I’ll tell him I’m thinking of writing a letter to the superintendent of schools.”

“Are you really thinking of that?”

“No. I don’t want the hassle. But I’ll scare him a little. I want him to know that someone is always watching. I want him to live like that from now on, looking over his shoulder.”

And then I had the afternoon to wait. Dickinson was less than an hour’s drive. I thought I’d just go and wait at the airport. But I wanted to be clean.

On the main street there was one old black brick building that said Deacon Hotel, but I didn’t want to sleep in Hebron. I wound around until I found Bell Junior High, but it was locked, not a school anymore. I drove back to the elementary school I’d seen. The floors echoed and I found myself in a tiny bathroom, marked
girls
, with tiny toilets, sinks that hit my thighs and a long rectilinear mirror. There was a bubbler just over knee high. I washed and combed my hair and put on something better. My shirt had a dried reddish stain where I’d spilled catsup. Things weren’t lasting. I knelt down and drank from the little bubbler. The water was warm and nickel-tasting.

Outside of Dickinson, big handmade signs stood along the highway.
SPORTS SHOW, STARK COUNTY ARENA
.

And I passed the huge pale green domed building, the late-day sun glittering on the many cars quilting the tar lots. Then I thought, What the hell, and turned around. I parked, locked my six things in the trunk and walked across the long lot to the entry where I paid the five-dollar admission fee. I strolled up an improvised aisle where
International Harvester Tractors were displayed, gorgeously, next to power boats. I gave a dollar to the raffle for a catamaran. I stood in line with numerous children to catch trout in three huge tanks of water. The kids walked with the dead fish in plastic bags. I got almost to the front, and then I thought of the fish smell in my grandmother’s car and ducked under the yellow cord that kept the line.

I just ambled up and down the aisles of equipment. Fishing poles, water skis, a fleet of nineteen orange-and-white snowmobiles. None of this would I ever use. I took a light interest in the colored flies, the oversized crop machinery. It was no more or less than most of the days of my life had become. I had veered off, out of the procession, and all of time had this quality of precarious lightness, subject to tilting over into another life altogether.

The airport told me that the first flight in would be at midnight and so I did what Mai linn had told me. I checked into the Ramada and left a key at the desk for her.

I slept dimly, rising up into the strange air, then sighing and slipping under again. Finally, I heard her key in the door.

“Should I get up?”

“No, I’ll come to bed for a while.”

I heard her unfastenings and droppings and the strange room felt more curved and round and I fell asleep with her weight so I could touch it with my right hand.

We got up late and took showers and dressed. I sat on the bed combing out the tangles in my hair. It was so nice to have a friend with me here.

She pulled up her jeans and tied on suede shoes. She always dressed like that but she stood staring down at herself with a crossed brow.

“You look fine.”

“I was wondering if I should’ve brought a dress or something. I’d kind of like to prove I’ve gone up in the world.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t say why, but I knew that wasn’t right.

We dallied in the hotel. We swam in the pool. We didn’t want to get to the house before he was home from work.

Mai linn, all those years later, gave me directions to Hebron on a back road.

“Now I’m nervous,” she said. We were still two blocks away but
they were straight blocks and we could see ahead through the filtering chestnuts.

“God, I’m almost as scared about this as I would be meeting my father.”

“He’s not my father.”

“I know.”

“My father wouldn’t have made you nervous. My father was sweet. A gentle guy.”

Then when we parked the car and sat there a moment, I asked her if there was one thing she wanted from him that he could give her that would help her in her life. People had asked me that. And I didn’t know.

She sat in the car, miserable, and said, “Tickling.”

I just looked at her. She had to know I wouldn’t get what that meant.

“When I came there I was ticklish and when I left, I wasn’t anymore. That and a few other things. Little kinds of pain. Like you know, you’ve seen how I can touch my hands with matches.”

I had seen Mai linn do that. It was a kind of trick. But that trick did not seem something he could take away and the tickling not something he had in him to give back.

Mai linn didn’t want to come up to the door with me. She didn’t want to see the mother or the sons. One was just a baby when she’d left. So she was going to wait in the trees behind the old junior high, a block and a half away. I had to get him there.

I didn’t feel really odd until my heels creaked the wooden steps up to the door. The car glittered across the street. I stood there a minute smelling the fine edge of rot in the air, from melting snow. Then I knocked. A woman opened the door, wearing an apron, saying, “Hullo, what can I do for you?”

I told her my name and that I was a friend of Mai linn.

Her face endured two acrobat flips before she said, “Oh,” and stuck out a slick wet hand for me to shake.

“Daddy, there’s a friend here of that little Mai linn,” she called into a room I couldn’t see. I heard the mumbling underwater sounds of a television. “He’ll be right out. I’m just frosting a cake,” she told me. “Come follow me into the kitchen.” I stood there while she emptied the contents of a box mix into a bowl, measured water and then stirred. She shook in a few drops of food coloring that came out a
deep orange but then mixed to a thin pale yellow. So she used mix. The empty batter box still stood right on the table. And frosting is so easy, I was thinking. It’s just powdered sugar and a little butter and milk. That was all.

“So where did you say you were from?” She wasn’t old, only about fifty, and competent, making a routine social conversation the same way she armed the spoon in the bowl. Now she was spreading the pale yellow frosting on the cake. She did it nicely, swelled apostrophes of swirl, so by the end the whole cake would look even and professional.

“I’m from, uh, Boston, and I’m driving to Oregon. To see my dad.” I didn’t want them to know anything true. Not that she seemed so interested.