Fitting Ends (19 page)

“You know what Georgia said to me once?” Mary A. said, quiet now, musing. “She was like, ‘I can't stay with someone who isn't afraid to die.' And I thought it was pretty funny at the time. You know, I was indulging in certain . . . behaviors then, but now I think back, and she was probably right. She falls in love with fools, I think. I don't mean that in a cruel way, either, but if you want to know about Georgia, that's the real secret.”

“Yes,” he said. “Well.” He thought again of the letter, on Georgia's desk, unsent. He had seen it still there, earlier that day, and had considered before dropping it in the wastebasket.

“It would be really terrible for her if you self-destructed, you know,” Mary A. continued in a bright voice. She listened, as if to hear something on the line—to be sure he was still there, still breathing, still pressing his ear against her voice. He exhaled softly.

“But you won't,” Mary A. said.

“No,” he said.

“You'll forge onward, despite everything.”

“Yes,” he said.

He looked at Georgia as he held Erik in his arms. She was thinking something, knowing something, and he could not guess what. Erik nuzzled against Rich's shoulder, breathing him in, and Rich ran his finger lightly over the peachlike hairs on Erik's ears.

What could he do? There was a numb ache in his chest, a dull hopefulness, a kind of shadow that Rich recognized as a symptom of love. How ridiculous, he sometimes thought. My God! He loved this boy, his son, this vacant little person, with an intensity that had never made much sense to him. He knew that there was not, and perhaps would never be, any reciprocation, but it didn't matter. He had no choice, and it often occurred to him that all the things people said about love were wrong. He ought to tell Georgia, he thought. Love didn't have anything to do with the outside world: it just happened. Some mysterious brain chemistry set in, and you couldn't avoid it. Human beings could fall in love with an idiot, with a drug, with a rock; they could fall in love with the smell of their own breath. It was a biological function, Rich thought, some long-forgotten instinct that could kick in at any moment. He could actually feel it activating, the way a drug might, tracing through his body from the center to the extremities, and he could feel it in the pads of his fingertips as he sat there.

“Can I hold him for a while, please?” Georgia said politely.

And now afterwards: What would it be? They were driving in silence again, another visit without a miracle, without any change. In the quiet, his eyes resting on the road, he could imagine them growing old with each trip, their faces sagging as Erik's legs grew long and coltish, their hands becoming dry and shrinking as their child grew hairs and an Adam's apple. How long, how many years could they stand it?

He didn't know. It had stopped raining, and the late afternoon sun, low in the sky, caught Georgia's profile, caught the strands of hair around her head and made them clear and delicate as a spider's web, but her expression was shadowed. The dark stumps of telephone poles slid by, orange-lit, beyond her silhouette—and the horizon, the dull yellow-gray prairie that rose up just beyond Denver's city limits. Up ahead, a sugar-beet factory was sending a long, white plume of steam across the interstate, a solid-looking cloud of murk. He could imagine a figure emerging out of it, lurching steadily and almost gracefully, like a knight on a horse out of the fog, but there was nothing. They passed under it, and the road didn't even grow misty. It just darkened, and they felt the shadow of the steam fly over them.

What? he thought.

FITTING ENDS

T
here is a story about my brother Del that appears in a book called More True Tales of the Weird and Supernatural. The piece on Del is about three pages long, full of exclamation points and supposedly eerie descriptions. It is based on what the writer calls “true facts.”

The writer spends much of the first few paragraphs setting the scene, trying to make it sound spooky. “The tiny, isolated village of Pyramid, Nebraska,” is what the author calls the place where I grew up. I had never thought of it as a village. It wasn't much of anything, really—it wasn't even on the map, and hadn't been since my father was a boy, when it was a stop on the Union Pacific railroad line. Back then, there was a shantytown for the railroad workers, a dance hall, a general store, a post office. By the time I was growing up, all that was left was a cluster of mostly boarded-up, run-down houses. My family—my parents and grandparents and my brother and me—lived in the only occupied buildings. There was a grain elevator, which my grandfather had run until he retired and my father took over. PYRAMID was painted in peeling block letters on one of the silos.

The man who wrote the story got fixated on that elevator. He talks of it as “a menacing, hulking structure,” and says it is like “Childe Roland's ancient dark tower, presiding over the barren fields and empty, sentient houses.” He even goes so far as to mention “the soundless flutter of bats flying in and out of the single, eyelike window at the top of the elevator,” and “the distant, melancholy calls of coyotes from the hills beyond,” which are then drowned out by “the strange echoing moan of a freight train as it passes in the night.”

There really are bats, of course; you find them in every country place. Personally, I never heard coyotes, though it is true they were around. I saw one once when I was about twelve. I was staring from my bedroom window late one night, and there he was. He had come down from the hills and was crouched in our yard, licking drops of water off the propeller of the sprinkler. As for the trains, they passed through about every half hour, day and night. If you lived there, you didn't even hear them—or maybe only half heard them, the way, now that I live in a town, I might vaguely notice the bells of the nearby Catholic church at noon.

But anyway, this is how the writer sets things up. Then he begins to tell about some of the train engineers, how they dreaded passing through this particular stretch. He quotes one man as saying he got goose bumps every time he started to come up on Pyramid. “There was just something about that place,” says this man. There were a few bad accidents at the crossing—a carload of drunken teenagers who tried to beat the train, an old guy who had a heart attack as his pickup bumped across the tracks. That sort of thing. Actually, this happens anywhere that has a railroad crossing.

Then came the sightings. An engineer would see “a figure” walking along the tracks in front of the train, just beyond the Pyramid elevator. The engineer would blow his horn, but the person, “the figure” would seem not to notice. The engineer blasted the horn several more times, more and more insistent. But the person kept walking; pretty soon the train's headlights glared onto a tall, muscular boy with shaggy dark hair and a green fatigue jacket. The engineer tried to brake the train, but it was too late. The boy suddenly fell to his knees, and the engineer was certain he'd hit him. But of course, when the train was stopped, they could find nothing. “Not a trace,” says our author. This happened to three different engineers; three different incidents in a two-year period.

You can imagine the ending, of course: that was how my brother died, a few years after these supposed sightings began. His car had run out of gas a few miles from home, and he was walking back. He was drunk. Who knows why he was walking along the tracks. Who knows why he suddenly kneeled down. Maybe he stumbled, or had to throw up. Maybe he did it on purpose. He was killed instantly.

The whole ghost stuff came out afterwards. One of the engineers who'd seen the “ghost” recognized Del's picture in the paper and came forward or something. I always believed it was made up. It was stupid, I always thought, like a million campfire stories you'd heard or some cheesy program on TV. But the author of
True Tales of the Weird and Supernatural
found it “spine-tingling.” “The strange story of the boy whose ghost appeared—two years before he died!” says a line on the back cover.

This happened when I was fourteen. My early brush with tragedy, I guess you could call it, though by the time I was twenty-one I felt I had recovered. I didn't think the incident had shaped my life in any particular way, and in fact I'd sometimes find myself telling the story, ghost and all, to girls I met at fraternity parties. I'd take a girl up to my room, show her the
True Tales
book. We'd smoke some marijuana and talk about it, my voice taking on an intensity and heaviness that surprised both of us. From time to time, we'd end up in bed. I remember this one girl, Lindsey, telling me how moved she was by the whole thing. It gave me, she said, a Heathcliff quality; I had turned brooding and mysterious; the wheatfields had turned to moors. “I'm not mysterious,” I said, embarrassed, and later, after we'd parted ways, she agreed. “I thought you were different,” she said, “deeper.” She cornered me one evening when I was talking to another girl and wanted to know if I wasn't a little ashamed, using my dead brother to get laid. She said that she had come to realize that I, like Heathcliff, was just another jerk.

After that, I stopped telling the story for a while. There would be months when I wouldn't speak of my brother at all, and even when I was home in Pyramid, I could spend my whole vacation without once mentioning Del's name. My parents never spoke of him, at least not with me.

Of course, this only made him more present than ever. He hovered there as I spoke of college, my future, my life, my father barely listening. When we would argue, my father would stiffen sullenly, and I knew he was thinking of arguments he'd had with Del. I could shout at him, and nothing would happen. He'd stare as I tossed some obscene word casually toward him, and I'd feel it rattle and spin like a coin I'd flipped on the table in front of him. But he wouldn't say anything.

I actually wondered, back then, why they put up with this sort of thing. It was surprising, even a little unnerving, especially given my father's temper when I was growing up, the old violence-promising glares that once made my bones feel like wax, the ability he formerly had to make me flinch with a gesture or a well-chosen phrase.

Now, I was their only surviving child, and I was gone—more thoroughly gone than Del was, in a way. I'd driven off to college in New York, and it was clear I wasn't ever coming back. Even my visits became shorter and shorter—summer trimmed down from three months to less than two weeks over the course of my years at college; at Christmas, I'd stay on campus after finals, wandering the emptying passageways of my residence hall, loitering in the student center, my hands clasped behind my back, staring at the ragged bulletin boards as if they were paintings in a museum. I found excuses to keep from going back. And then, when I got there, finally, I was just another ghost.

About a year before he died, Del saved my life. It was no big deal, I thought. It was summer, trucks were coming to the grain elevator, and my brother and I had gone up to the roof to fix a hole. The elevator was flat on top, and when I was little, I used to imagine that being up there was like being in the turret of a lighthouse. I used to stare out over the expanse of prairie, across the fields and their flotsam of machinery, cattle, men, over the rooftops of houses, along the highways and railroad tracks that trailed off into the horizon. When I was small, this would fill me with wonder. My father would stand there with me, holding my hand, and the wind would ripple our clothes.

I was thinking of this, remembering, when I suddenly started to do a little dance. I didn't know why I did such things: my father said that ever since I started junior high school I'd been like a “-holic” of some sort, addicted to making an ass out of myself. Maybe this was true, because I started to caper around, and Del said, “I'd laugh if you fell, you idiot,” stern and condescending, as if I were the juvenile delinquent. I ignored him. With my back turned to him, I began to sing “Ain't No Mountain High Enough” in a deep corny voice, like my father's. I'd never been afraid of heights, and I suppose I was careless. Too close to the edge, I slipped, and my brother caught my arm.

I was never able to recall exactly what happened in that instant. I remember being surprised by the sound that came from my throat, a high scream like a rabbit's that seemed to ricochet downward, a stone rattling through a long drainpipe. I looked up, and my brother's mouth was wide open, as if he'd made the sound. The tendons on his neck stood out.

I told myself that if I'd been alone, nothing would have happened. I would've just teetered a little and then gained my balance again. But when my brother grabbed me, I lost my equilibrium, and over the edge I went. There were a dozen trucks lined up to have their loads weighed, and all the men down there heard that screech, looked up, startled, to see me dangling there with two hundred feet between me and the ground. They all watched Del yank me back up to safety.

I was on the ground before it hit me. Harvesters were getting out of their trucks and ambling toward us, and I could see my father pushing his way through the crowd. It was then that my body took heed of what had happened. The solid earth kept opening up underneath me, and Del put his arm around me as I wobbled. Then my father loomed. He got hold of me, clenching my shoulders, shaking me. “My sore neck!” I cried out. “Dad, my neck!” The harvester's faces jittered, pressing closer; I could see a man in sunglasses with his black, glittering eyes fixed on me.

“Del pushed me,” I cried out as my father's gritted teeth came toward my face. Tears slipped suddenly out of my eyes. “Del pushed me, Dad! It wasn't my fault.”

My father had good reason to believe this lie, even though he and some twelve or more others had been witness to my singing and careless prancing up there. The possibility still existed that Del might have given me a shove from behind. My father didn't want to believe Del was capable of such a thing. But he knew he was.

Del had been back home for only about three weeks. Prior to that, he'd spent several months in a special program for juvenile delinquents. The main reason for this was that he'd become so belligerent, so violent, that my parents didn't feel they could control him. He'd also, over the course of things, stolen a car.

For much of the time that my brother was in this program, I wore a neck brace. He'd tried to strangle me the night before he was sent away. He claimed he'd seen me smirking at him, though actually I was only thinking of something funny I'd seen on TV. Del was the furthest thing from my thoughts until he jumped on me. If my father hadn't separated us, Del probably would have choked me to death.

This was one of the things that my father must have thought of. He must have remembered the other times that Del might have killed me: the time when I was twelve and he threw a can of motor oil at my head when my back was turned; the time when I was seven and he pushed me off the tailgate of a moving pickup, where my father had let us sit when he was driving slowly down a dirt road. My father was as used to hearing these horror stories as I was to telling them.

Though he was only three and a half years older than I, Del was much larger. He was much bigger than I'll ever be, and I was just starting to realize that. Six foot three, 220-pound defensive back, my father used to tell people when he spoke of Del. My father used to believe that Del would get a football scholarship to the state university. Never mind that once he started high school he wouldn't even play on the team. Never mind that all he seemed to want to do was vandalize people's property and drink beer and cause problems at home. My father still talked about it like there was some hope.

When my brother got out of his program, he told us that things would be different from now on. He had changed, he said, and he swore that he would make up for the things that he'd done. I gave him a hug. He stood there before us, with his hands clasped behind his back, posed like the famous orator whose picture was in the library of our school. We all smiled, the visions of the horrible family fights wavering behind our friendly expressions.

So here was another one, on the night of my almost-death.

Before very long, my brother had started crying. I hadn't seen him actually shed tears in a very long time; he hadn't even cried on the day he was sent away.

“He's a liar,” my brother shouted. We had all been fighting and carrying on for almost an hour. I had told my version of the story five or six times, getting better at it with each repetition. I could have almost believed it myself. “You fucking liar,” my brother screamed at me. “I wish I had pushed you. I'd never save your ass now.” He stared at me suddenly, wild-eyed, like I was a dark shadow that was bending over his bed when he woke at night. Then he sat down at the kitchen table. He put his face in his hands, and his shoulders began to shudder.

Watching him—this giant, broad-shouldered boy, my brother, weeping—I could almost have taken it back. The whole lie, I thought, the words I spoke at first came out of nowhere, sprang to my lips as a shield against my father's red face and bared teeth, his fingernails cutting my shoulder as everyone watched. It was really my father's fault. I could have started crying myself.

But looking back on it, I have to admit that there was something else, too—a heat at the core of my stomach, spreading through my body like a stain. It made my skin throb, my face a mask of innocence and defiance. I sat there looking at him, and put my hand to my throat. After years of being on the receiving end, it wasn't in my nature to see Del as someone who could be wronged, as someone to feel pity for. This was something Del could have done, I thought. It was not so unlikely.