Two Rivers (29 page)

B
rooder drags the man across the ground by his arms, which are tied together with one of his own bootlaces. The man is barefoot now, his clothing and hair covered in wet leaves. Ray and I watch him from the car. After a while Brooder looks back at us and motions for us to follow.

Ray says, “Where is he taking him?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“We should get out,” Ray says. “We gotta make sure he doesn’t do anything crazy.”

I open the car door, am aware of the creaking of metal, the crush of leaves underfoot. Ray follows, and then we are running. When we get to the place where the two rivers meet, we find Brooder and the man.

He is awake now, and pleading. “Don’t kill me,” he says.

Brooder is silent. The man is on his knees, his hands tied together in front of him. In another circumstance, he might look as if he were only praying. Genuflecting to the harvest moon. But Brooder is standing behind him on a rock, his shotgun aimed toward the thick tangle of trees beyond the river.

“There are more of them out there,” Brooder says quietly. He gestures with his chin toward the deep woods. “Just because we’ve captured this one doesn’t mean we’re safe.”

“Come on,” Ray says. “Let him go.”

“Shh,” Brooder says. “Listen.”

I close my eyes. I listen. But beyond the buzzing in my brain, the chattering of my teeth, it is quiet here.

“I didn’t mean to hurt nobody….” the man says, his whole body is shivering in the cold. “It was an accident.”

Brooder turns toward the man, aims the gun at his head.

Ray grabs my arm. “Let’s go.”

Brooder frowns. “Already? The ride’s just about to start.”

“Please,” the man says, and looks at Ray and me. “Please, help me.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. On the back of my eyelids, I see Betsy, on a late summer afternoon, picking blackberries. She is bending over to examine a berry on a bush in the backyard. I had watched her that day; she didn’t know I was there. She pricked her thumb on a bramble, and wounded, she stuck her thumb in her mouth and sucked it before returning to her task. And I knew then that there was nothing more perfect than that moment, of Betsy with sun in her hair, plucking a ripe berry and putting it to her tongue.

When I open my eyes, the man is looking right at me.

“You coming or not?” Ray asks.

I stand still, cannot speak.

I hear Ray turning away, running back to where we left the car. I hear the car start. The slow rolling backward through the dark woods.

Brooder pulls the hammer back.

I move toward Brooder to stop him, but I know that it is already too late.

“You better back away,” Brooder says, turning the gun on me. I hold my hands up, starting to back up slowly. Brooder hisses, “This ain’t got nothing to do with you anymore.”

I stumble on a rock.

“You know how to swim?” Brooder asks the man.

He shakes his head. He is weeping now.

Without lowering the gun, Brooder kicks the man in the chest hard with his boot. The man falls backward into the river. He is struggling against the current. He looks at me again, reaches out his tethered hands for help.

“Please,” he pleads.

And for a moment, I begin to reach for him. I know that without my help, the river might carry him away. That Brooder might just squeeze the trigger. But just as I am about to grab hold, to save him, I think of Betsy again. And it’s too late. It’s too late; I can’t think of anything but blackberries in summertime.

“Go home,” Brooder says, turning the gun on me again.

So I leave Brooder standing on the rock, watching the man hanging onto a fallen tree branch that straddles the two rivers. I back away, back through the woods, backward through the night. And I imagine that if I walk far enough, I will arrive again at the moment Betsy asked me to turn out the headlights.

I
left Brenda’s apartment at dusk, sober and tired, my throat swollen with grief. My hands still smelled of her; I cupped them to my face and breathed her in. The whole world felt heavy. It was cold, and the clouds were thick. Blue. The streetlights were late coming on, evening an unanticipated visitor. As I walked past the barbershop, the jewelry store, the drugstore, downtown Two Rivers felt foreign to me now. I climbed the stairs to my apartment slowly, my feet no longer able to recollect the height of each riser. The smell of old wallpaper in the hallway was stronger than I remembered, the echo of my footsteps on the floor more hollow. Before I opened the door, I ran my hand across my new haircut. Felt the end-of-the-day beginnings of a beard on my face. I probably looked like hell.

Inside Shelly was sitting at the kitchen table with her books spread out before her. “Hi, Daddy,” she said, without looking up.

“Hi, honey,” I said. My throat constricted even tighter. I wanted to go to her, to hold on to her. I wanted to be able to pick her up in my arms and bury my face in the soft skin of her neck. I wanted to apologize, for everything that came before her and everything that was likely to happen now. I sat down next to her at the table and picked up one of her books. It was an English textbook. A grammar book filled with diagrammed sentences. A jumble of words. I absently thumbed through the pages.

“What happened to your arm?” she asked, looking up from her work.

I shook my head, swallowed hard. “I made a mistake.”

“Is it broken?” she asked.

“I’m fine.” I smiled, looking at her hand holding her pencil. The eraser was gone, the wood was riddled with tiny teeth marks.

“You shouldn’t do that,” I said, pointing to the pencil. “It’s got lead in it.”

“Can I sign your cast?”

“Sure,” I said, and she reached for a highlighter. I gently set my arm on the table, and she pulled the cap off with her teeth. She signed her name in pink, and then reached for the yellow to make a flower. She squinted, concentrating hard on her work. She held the pen in her fist, like a child still.

I noticed then that she had curled her hair, two angels’ wings on either side of her face. “I like your hair,” I said.

“Thanks.” She smiled and kept drawing. “I like yours too.”

I could have stayed like this forever. I willed the moment to last. Wished for a garden to grow in this plaster. But then Shelly snapped the cap back on the pen and sat back to check her work. “You like?”

I looked at her name there, surrounded by yellow flowers, and nodded. “Where’s Maggie?” I asked, her name catching in my throat like a burr.

“She’s in the bathtub. She’ll probably be a while; she brought in a book.”

I nodded. “Get back to work,” I said. “I’ve got to go find something.”

I went to my bedroom, feeling like I was trespassing. Once inside, I closed and locked the door. The bed was neatly made, and the whole room smelled of fresh linens. Maggie’s suitcase was tucked neatly under the bed, and her few things were still arranged on top of my dresser. I picked up the sand dollar and held it in my hand. I rubbed my finger against the gritty striker on the pack of matches. I picked up the photo of Maggie and her girlfriends, peered into the distance, looking for him.

Like Ray, I saw him everywhere. He lived in the corners of my eyes, hiding just out of sight. In the periphery of things. I was ready now. Ready for him to come out from behind the trees, the buildings. He’d been watching me through the spaces between the cars in passing trains for too long. “Come out,” I whispered. But the harder I looked at the picture, the more absent he became.

In the other room, I could hear Maggie in the bathtub. The sloshing of water.

The little wooden box was sitting in the center of the bureau still. The flimsy gold clasp broke easily when I pinched the soft metal between my fingers, and I slipped off the tiny padlock. As I opened the lid, a ballerina sprung up and began to pirouette to music box music. It startled me, and I looked quickly at the door. The mechanism finally wound down, and the ballerina stopped dancing. I heard the water start to drain from the tub, the sound of Maggie’s wet feet on the bathroom tile.

Inside the box were trinkets: a ladybug stickpin with green-jeweled eyes, a rusty barrette, a tiger’s-eye marble. There were broken necklaces, a cigarette, three wads of Bazooka. And in the little drawer in the bottom was a photo and what looked like a worn piece of glass. As Maggie’s wet hand struggled to open the locked door, I pulled out the photo with trembling fingers.

It was a color photo with scalloped edges. The date stamped along the side said “May 1965.” The photo was of a woman sitting on a sofa, holding an infant. To the right was a man sitting on the arm of the sofa, peering down at the baby. I stared at the man’s face for a long time, at his dark skin, at his black eyes. I was trying so hard to see him, but it was like trying to examine the sun. And blinded, I didn’t notice the woman and the child. I didn’t even see the pale-skinned woman, her hair piled on top of her head in two frizzy braids. I didn’t see my mother’s face, looking down at the newborn child who even then had one blue, and one black eye.

A
fter Betsy died, I kept in touch with my father mostly be cause of Shelly. Over the years, we’d take the train to visit him in Boston a couple of times a year. The last time we visited, she was nine years old, and he had just been diagnosed with bone cancer. She adored him—and he her. But after that visit, I knew we wouldn’t ever go back.

Shelly had a loose tooth. Usually, Shelly couldn’t sit still the whole way. I’d give her a dollar, and while I slept or read, she’d go to the snack car for barbeque chips and chocolate milk. This time she sat in her seat the whole time, peering at the tooth in a pocket mirror.

My father had retired not long after my mother was killed, and he had converted her office/printing press into a workshop. Whenever we visited, he and Shelly would almost always spend the entire time working on some invention or another. Over time, the inventions had become less and less practical, and the ones he created with Shelly were pure whimsy. Once they made a clock that played “The Star-Spangled Banner” every hour on the hour. She assisted him installing a doorbell that asked, “Who is it?” and helped him make a device that simultaneously watered the flowers in his window box and cleaned the windows above it. Shelly appreciated his passion for innovation like neither my mother nor I ever did.

When we got off the train, I was surprised to see my father standing on the platform, waiting for us. Though he’d just found out he was sick, I had prepared myself for the worst. He looked the same as he had the last time I saw him, the only difference being the cane he was carrying. “It’s also a litter stick,” he said, pulling a lever on the handle, which released a sharp rod at the bottom of the cane. “Try it!” he said, and Shelly dropped the bloody napkin she’d been using to work on her tooth. He aimed the stick over the napkin and speared it.

Shelly squealed with delight.

“I’ve got a loose tooth,” she said. “Wanna touch it?”

“Sure,” he said, smiling and bending down to examine her mouth. He reached his finger in and gently wiggled. “We may need to come up with a little something to help that tooth on its way,” he said.

Shelly’s eyes opened wide.

“An extractor,” he said with a nod.

“Will it hurt?”

“Of course not, it will be very gentle. An exactor extractor of the most delicate kind.”

At the house, I watched my father pretend that nothing was wrong, that he wasn’t in any pain. If I hadn’t spoken to the doctor myself, I would have thought it was all a big mistake. He had asked me to come to get his finances in order before he had the final draft of his will drawn up. He said it was only a precaution, just in case. He set me up with all of his papers at the kitchen table, where I struggled to make sense of his wretched bookkeeping and filing.

He and Shelly disappeared into the workshop, my father coming out only to make lunch. He made tuna sandwiches and picked two apples as big as grapefruits from the tree in his backyard before disappearing inside the workshop again.

As I struggled to make sense of the mess, I came across a file of bank statements. The account was in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I assumed, at first, that it was something my mother had established while she was living there. However, as I went over the figures, I realized that no money had ever been withdrawn from the account. It was a savings account with exactly one deposit made every month starting in 1965, with the most recent deposit made just that month. Both of my parents’ names were on the account, but so was a Reverend Lawrence Jones’s.

When my father emerged from the workshop, his face looked pained. “I need some water,” he said. Hunched over at the sink, he held his back, rubbing his fingers into his spine. “It’s not so bad in the mornings,” he said. “It’s the afternoons that get me. Later in the day.”

“Who is Lawrence Jones?” I asked.

My father set his glass of water down and looked out the window over the sink. “He’s the oldest son of the couple your mother stayed with in Mississippi. The preacher?”

I remembered my mother mentioning him in some of her postcards. He had built a library for the school. She taught him how to play the piano, and, in exchange, he taught her how to cook. “Why do you have an account with his name on it?” I asked. “An account with over thirteen thousand dollars in it?”

“We send money to help out the family. Just seventy-five a month. It’s nothing really.” His hands trembled as he drank some more water. “Your mother, she felt
indebted
. They took care of her. This is her way of taking care of them.”

“But they’ve never taken a dime out of it,” I said. “They must not need it that much.”

My father turned to face me, smiled sadly. “There’s a little girl. She’s twelve. Maybe they’re saving it for her to go to college.”

“Or,”
I said, “maybe they don’t feel right accepting charity from somebody who’s dead.”

My father massaged his temples with his thumb and middle finger. “Let it go, Harper.”

“Dad, that’s a lot of money. And I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but it doesn’t appear that you’ve set up any sort of trust fund for
Shelly
.”

“I said let it rest,” my father said.

“Christ, Dad. Mom just gave and gave and gave. She gave two years of her life to them, to their
cause
. And for what, Dad?”

“You don’t understand,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s complicated.”

“What’s complicated? She was
killed
,” I said. I couldn’t stop. Every inch of my body was aching. “
Murdered
. By the people she loved more than her own fucking family.”

I felt the slap, but it took several seconds before it registered that my father had struck me. I caught my breath.

“Harper, “he said, his face twisted.

Shelly opened the workshop door and stood, triumphant, in the doorway, holding out her apple, the bloody tooth sticking out of its flesh. “I didn’t need the exactor extractor!”

Later, as we got on the train to go home, my father kissed the top of Shelly’s head, and wiped at his eyes. He hugged me, and whispered in my ear, “This was important to your mother. Can you understand
that
?”

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”