A Map of the World (17 page)

It was in his fervor, when he started clutching at me, that I suddenly couldn’t bear it, not any of it. He was coming down and down on me, over and over, crushing me as he thrust. I had to get out, couldn’t stand the heat, couldn’t endure his damp body, and still I hardly knew that I was heaving up, gasping for breath, knocking him over, leaping from the bed. I stood at the dresser, panting.

In the dark I could see him thrashing like he’d been shot and then curling up into himself. “Why are you doing this?” he said quietly.

I used to get pleasure from being the parents, making love with the door closed, getting up afterward and making sure the girls hadn’t woken during the naughty interlude. Howard swabbed his stomach with a T-shirt, and then gathered his coveralls and his underwear and left the room with the things in his hands. He had never taken his boots off. I was still trying to breathe, having an idea finally what it might have felt like for Lizzy when the world overhead wavered and was gone.

The next morning Howard didn’t come into the house until nine o’clock. I watched him walk across the lawn, and then stand outside the kitchen door as if he was uncertain about who lived at his address. His coveralls were flecked with hay. He looked as if he had taken the skin off of his face and not put it back on properly. I had no idea where he had slept. He was trying to get something from his pocket and after a moment he produced a washer, a screwdriver, and a piece of plastic tubing.

I went out onto the porch and crouched on the orange and red rag rug that he, in his color-blind pride, had bought for me at a church bazaar. The night before had been peculiar, certainly for many reasons,
but not least because somehow in my mind Lizzy, Howard, Mrs. Mackessy, and Robbie had become joined, as tenuously but surely as a short string of paper people holding hands.

“In case you haven’t noticed,” Howard said, coming around the corner, “we need food. The list is on the table.”

I could feel my eyes going wider and wider, staring like a heifer will. “And congratulations,” he added, “for getting up.” The bad heifers never got over being skittish. I was tilting my head back and licking my lips.

“I can’t stop to talk now and you can’t either—” He nodded in the direction of Claire, through the door. She had taken a paring knife off the counter in the kitchen and was starting to spear a peach.

“Alice, will you look at Claire? I’m going now. Keep in motion, do you hear?” He moved to me, reaching for my shoulders, to shake me. I shuddered and backed off into the screen.

“What do you expect me to do?” It was a reasonable question. There was disease in the barn. The fence in the back pasture had come down, and the cows had been heading up to Vermont Acres. Lottie, the rebel cow, had stumbled into the backyard of a Mrs. Klinke, who had been hanging up her wash. Mrs. Klinke had responded as if it was King Kong who had peeked his face over her dish towels. The university team was coming again soon to do their research in spite of the fact that all of the crops were withering. I flew past Howard in a way that he would surely find dramatic and went up the stairs, back to our room, a place that I had always thought of as safe. He had suggested I use the words, “Keep in motion,” as a sort of mantra. He was so very capable when it came to motion. He could smother me with his pillow and then make love to me somewhat against my will, drag me to a therapist, shove grocery lists in my hand, but he had no hold over my inner life. He couldn’t stop me from standing on the vinyl tabletop at the school cafeteria and commanding everyone to applaud Mother Nature. I had tried to follow his directions because I trusted his instincts. I should have explained to him that I felt as if I had fallen from space into a well and that it would take more than a proffered human hand to get me out. The tub of melted, rancid butter had spilled on the dresser, onto the filthy runner. Emma was pummeling Claire in the living room. Howard shouted over the racket, “I’m leaving.”

From the bedroom window I watched him walk past the barn to the machine shed where the tractor was parked. He stopped and looked up to the subdivision. He was listening for the neighborhood boys on their all-terrain vehicles. They rode back and forth over his alfalfa, mashing it down. When he caught them they denied that they owned bikes, although they were stashed in plain view in the woods. Howard stood cocking his head, listening for the bikes. His posture was terrible. His chest was sunk in; he was nothing like a rooster claiming his dusty yard.

Claire was shrieking now. I walked downstairs, and I walked through the pantry and the kitchen and the mud room and into the bathroom. I slammed the door as hard as I could and then I pounded at it, and then kicked it open, and slammed it again, so that the paint chips went flying off like sparks, and the spice rack hanging above the stove fell off its hooks. The bottles tumbled down the cold air return. When I was done slamming I stormed into the living room, grabbed Emma in front by the cloth of her sleeveless shirt, and shook her. When both girls were wailing I matched their noise—“I’M GOING TO THE GODDAMN STORE, DO YOU HEAR?”

I kicked the toys on the walkway, opened the car door, sat myself in the driver’s seat, and started the engine. Music, at top volume, came from the tape deck, as if Howard’s cassette had been poised to narrate my situation:
“Oh, hang down your head, Tom Dooley, Oh, hang down your head and cry. You killed poor Laura Foster
—” I pushed at button after button on the console until I hit Eject. It was almost funny, coming upon that particular song, under the circumstances. There were a dozen songs on Side A including “Charlie Is My Darling,” “Loch Lomand,” and “The Ash Grove,” and yet “Tom Dooley” was the one, the words filling the car as if to taunt me.
“You killed poor Laura Foster, And now you are bound to die.”

I draped myself over the steering wheel, to rest. If only I could survive until the girls were through high school. It was Claire who would save me, who would take me by the hand and lead me through the difficult years ahead. She was beautiful and easygoing, diplomatic and tolerant. She would be crowned Homecoming Queen and for the first time the people of Prairie Center would turn to us, her parents, and wonder how it was we had produced such a graceful, congenial, amazing child. Having
her by our sides would grant us free admission into the very life of Prairie Center, chairs set out for us every morning at Del’s for breakfast, and a standing invitation to Dr. Larson’s annual Memorial Day picnic. “Oh, hang down your head, Tom Dooley,” rang on in my ears. “Oh, hang down your head and cry.”

Emma came tripping out of the house, her bony knees knocking against each other. Claire was waddling behind, short and plump and dark. Emma’s bangs had grown halfway down her nose and her shirt was slipping off one shoulder. She looked so forlorn I had to turn away. I would get everything Howard wanted. We had Nellie’s carefully labeled casseroles, but no paper products or bananas or mayonnaise. I stared at the tattered list while the girls climbed into their seats. We were going off to the store, just as we should. If we could go to the Piggly Wiggly today, then there was no telling what might happen tomorrow. It might be that everything would fall into place and we would keep in motion so continuously, like the planet itself, that we wouldn’t even feel our effort, working to put one foot in front of the next.

My children were sitting in the back seat, each studying a picture book on her lap from the car book bag. They were waiting for me to take them to the store. They didn’t seem scarred, didn’t act like bumpkins. They were wearing name-brand clothes and had somehow managed to come through looking very like their thoroughly modern Prairie Center sisters. I was considering whether or not I should remind them of my bad behavior by apologizing, when the squad car turned up the drive.

Howard came from the milk house and went to the officer. I was already out and to the gate, to the stretch of grass by the garden. I lay down on the parched ground and looked as hard as I could at the blue sky. I wanted to feel the sheerness of space, to somehow reach what was empty and quiet, to hold what was right beyond my grasp.

Howard

——

Chapter Nine

——

L
AST SUMMER WE USED
to strike out and drive up and down country roads. Even with the sun blazing away I wasn’t sure which way was east, which was west. The girls would gradually close their eyes and slump over. Or else the corn rows, passing by with machinelike precision, would hypnotize them. They’d sit in a stupor. I tried to brace myself against thought. There was no good in thinking. I concentrated on the asphalt straight in front of the car. We were in a capsule, the girls and I. We were suspended in time and space, while the folk music drifted from the tape deck like smoke.
“So be easy and free, when you’re drinkin’ with me. I’m a man you don’t meet every day.”
The slightest thing would jolt me back to our present life. A fence, a gate, a cow, wash on the line, the moon in the sky. For weeks just about everything brought me back to Alice. After last summer Emma and Claire also stopped looking at a thing for what it is. They also began to ask, in their own way, What’s here that doesn’t meet the eye? They don’t look at a river without wondering if it’s dirty and if the fish are sick.

On an ordinary morning in the hottest, driest summer on record, two officers got out of their car and went around the house to find my wife lying on her back in the dead grass. She was holding her arms straight up,
flexing her fingers. She kneeled while the hefty one handcuffed her and recited her rights in a stream. It is a familiar-enough scene, but startling in one’s own yard. The cop sounded like a kid who’s saying grace, mumbling the whole paragraph as if it was one long, meaningless word. I am as guilty as the next person, thinking that hardship comes to others. Last summer on that Tuesday morning I would have been less surprised, and also filled with reverence, if a space alien had landed in the wheat field and dragged Alice to Mercury for an examination.

When I questioned the policemen they made no answer. When I insisted I was coming along, Alice turned and said, “Stay here, I’ll call you.” The short officer with glasses smacked a piece of paper in my hand. “What is this?” I demanded. I didn’t have time to sit and read. I was walking sideways, together, apart, together, apart, asking Alice to explain the problem. Under no circumstances, I said, was I going to sit at home while she was driven off by two men who were younger than both of us.

The cop said, “Do you want anything from the house, Ma’am?”

They weren’t listening.

To the officer Alice said, “Can I bring some books? What am I allowed?”

“Books are okay. Extra socks, white only, that’s about it.”

She stopped on the sidewalk. She said so calmly, as if she had expected to be hauled away, “I’m in trouble, Howard. Read the piece of paper. Robbie Mackessy says I—awful things. I don’t know how this could have happened but I have to go along. What you need to do is take care of the girls.”

Alice gave me a painting for my thirtieth birthday, from the Go Back in Time Company. An artist in Pittsburgh produced an oil portrait of myself as a Napoleonic soldier. Alice went and hung it in the bathroom over the toilet. The painting was a good likeness. I couldn’t take a piss without feeling disoriented. Last summer on that Tuesday morning at nine-thirty she stood handcuffed on the sidewalk looking at me. It was only the first of many occasions during those months that seemed to take place out of time, or in a historical moment I had yet to identify. “It’s no use coming after me,” she said. She turned then and went into the house.

They must have realized she was harmless because they undid her handcuffs while she filled a grocery bag with books, paper, envelopes.
They had let her go, I thought, because they knew she was innocent. But if they had shackled her in the first place it wasn’t right to spring her loose. I wondered how good they were, if they allowed their captives to rummage around for their Lugers. “No,” she shook her head mournfully, “I don’t have plain white socks. Let me look at this warrant thing,” she said, taking the paper from my grip with her free hand.

“Alice—”

“Here,” she said, holding out her wrists to the policeman. “I’ll call you when I sort this out, Howard. I’ll need a lawyer—maybe you could get a hold of Rafferty.”

The girls were hiding in the Ford, springing up and peeking every few minutes and then ducking down. When Alice came from the house she went to the car and in a flash she grasped Emma’s head through the open window. She did so with her hands in manacles. She held Emma’s face. She moved to the front window and did the same with Claire. She had cast some kind of spell on them and they knew they shouldn’t say a word. They opened and closed their mouths. “I’ll call you,” she said to me, just before the officer shut the door after her. As they pulled away, Emma and Claire emerged from the back seat and came to my side. We stood in the dust of the driveway. When the car rounded the bend and disappeared we continued to wait. I guess—and why not?—we thought the road might straighten out to reveal her destination.

After a minute we blinked, shook ourselves. I said we’d go inside and make some Marshmallow Fluff sandwiches. Claire started to whimper. Emma kept it up longest, looking down the road. She probably would have felt about the same if she’d woken to find that a tornado had touched down while she’d slept, a whirlwind that had taken the one thing she valued most. Claire began climbing all over me, suddenly feverish with anxiety. I told her that Alice would be back soon, probably before we were finished with our sandwiches. Inside I turned on the TV to the “Today” show. I left it going, without sound. The girls crouched at the window, expecting Alice to be delivered at our doorstep at every next instant. “She’ll be the next car,” Emma kept saying. “I know this next one will be hers.”

I slathered the Fluff like Spackle over the bread and put a piece at each girls’ place. Without stopping to consider I went to the phone to call
Dan and Theresa’s lawyer friend, Paul Rafferty. “No, I’m sorry, sir,” the secretary said, “he won’t be in until Thursday.”