Suspicious River (6 page)

My father has his hands pressed over his kneecaps as her voice rises above us all, an invisible bird—one perfect, earthshattering note. High and cold, it is a needle taking a piece of white thread up to the ceiling like a stitch.

Ave—half breath, half pure steel scream—Maria.

Helium, the simplest and lightest of the elements.

All the women in the church touch their throats at that moment, afraid the sound has come from them. The men look away, ashamed. But the children look up to the ceiling, believing we might even be able to see that last note as it pierces the thin blue skin of the sky like a woman’s wrist.

Then, it’s Sunday night, and my mother sits at the edge of my bed and describes Spanish moss to me before I go to sleep—how it hangs in wet ropes over the branches of trees in Louisiana, matted as fur.

You can smell it like old blankets in the air, everywhere, even in the house.

“I hated it,” she says—hated the whole damn state where she was born.

She wears a slippery nightgown, metallic baby blue shimmering sleek and dreamy in a crack of light that bleeds up white from the hall outside my bedroom door, and she’s drinking something thick and minty from a coffee cup.

I can imagine the Spanish moss of my mother’s childhood like corpse hair, or the dark ruined hair of my dead dolls—trees trapped under cloaks of it, bats and animals smothered and human in a turquoise veil of twilight in the state where she once lived.

And I imagine her being born into it—a baby sleeping in a cradle of clotted hair, a moon snagged in branches, like another mother’s face, filling her cradle with silver light.

“Bonnie,” my father calls, “Are you coming to bed?”

She kisses my cool forehead as she leaves.

I can hear them struggle through the thin wall between my room and theirs before I fall asleep.

“Jesus,” my father says, and she sobs.

“Goddammit,” my mother mumbles.

Then my father, “Bonnie, no.”

Something broken. He says, “We’ll clean it up tomorrow. Bonnie. Please. Come here. Come back here now.”

I fall asleep when they go silent, and every morning the sound of yelping from the neighbors’ back yard wakes me when the sun comes up, liquid and fast.

You might imagine Suspicious River as a small, friendly town if you’d never been there. One bowling alley. Seven churches. Ten motels. Fourteen bars. A 2,700-square-foot gift shop, its facade a cinderblock mural of Pocahontas emerging from a teepee, sprawling for a block along Main Street.

The sky was painted turquoise in that mural. Two whitetailed deer stood blinking at one another. An old Indian with red feathers in his headdress glared at his own empty hands while Pocahontas, dark skinned, with long black braids, smiled at a shirtless white man. Her breasts were enormous and barely covered with the deerskin she was wearing. Midriff exposed. Her thighs were fleshy and curved into a dark place hidden only by a half-inch of ripped skirt. The tourists liked it, took each other’s photos from across the street, waving under the Indian princess.

Her eyes were blue.

Local legend was that the artist’s Swedish mistress had posed for the painting, had stood half-naked every day for six weeks on Main Street even after the weather turned cold, while the artist painted her into Pocahontas.

But the mural was four decades old, and no one really remembered its genesis with any certainty at all. Still, it was a landmark in the town, perfectly preserved, something larger than life and twice as bright living right there beside us—though the Indians themselves, who’d found and named the town, who’d inspired the gift shop full of moccasins and plastic tom-toms, were gone now except for their graves mounding the river like three soft green bellies, inhaling and exhaling water.

Years earlier, a condominium developer had wanted to level those Indian mounds, had even started to, had taken a big yellow bulldozer to them like a huge and hungry bird. But he must’ve expected the dirt underneath the long, soft grass on the mounds to be solid, expected the mounds to just roll off the edge of the earth like guillotined heads. Instead, the earth under there turned out to be pitch and mud—half water—and in it, poking up here and there, floating in that dark soup, human bones—a length of spine, a skull, a shard of pottery with a stick figure buck painted on it in what looked like blood.

After that, the Indians came to Suspicious River from further north—looking exotic and poor in our town. They made a human chain in front of the bulldozer and stretched a white banner across themselves that said rest in peace in big black letters.

All day for days, carloads of families streamed past, craning their necks to get a look at the Indians and the massacred mounds hacked open like corpses. It puzzled the newspaper reporters, this attachment to the old bones of people the Indians had never known, who’d lived and died before their own grandparents were even born—not to mention the other garbage under there. The Indians didn’t want the bones, even to sell to a museum or a gift shop in Detroit. They just wanted it all buried back under mud and grass again.

Publicity, the paper speculated.

Pity, publicity, and cold hard cash.

Comparisons were made to try to convince us the Indians were sincere.
How would you feel if Sacred Heart Cemetery was dug up for condos and your grandma’s bones were sold to a professor in New York?
Still, no one in Suspicious River really believed we’d care. Briefly, maybe, but they’d just be bones, and we’d be over it by August.

But the Supreme Court ordered the mounds to be remounded, and then that was over, too. Just now and again an arrowhead was found in the forest, which was no surprise. Anything could wait in that thick woods for a few hundred years to be found. That forest, surrounding the town, seemed to whisper all day and night to the condominium developers,
Surely there’s plenty of room for condominiums and Indian mounds on this empty planet
. But the Indians couldn’t hear it over the din of bulldozers and garbage trucks.

As I’ve said, you might imagine this was a small and friendly town. Like the swans, you might think it was a good place to build a little wet nest at the river’s edge, hidden behind a wall of cattails and whistling reeds. Every March I’d watch them through the window in the office. Always in pairs. One of the big white birds would bring a beakful of uprooted river weeds to the other, who would stuff the weeds mechanically into the mud.

22. I knocked. The door was the usual half-inch open. The curtains had been closed.

He said, “Come in.”

The room was cold. His maroon suitcase was open on the floor. Black socks and gray underwear spilled out of it. I said, “You could turn the heat on.”

“Well,” he said, shrugging, “I couldn’t figure out how.”

“Here,” I said, going to the radiator under the window, turning the dial to ON. Twisting the knob in the direction of the red arrow pointing to WARM.

He looked over my shoulder as I did this. “Wow,” he said, “great. Is that all? Hmm.”

Then he handed me a twenty and a ten, which he’d already had in his hand. I leaned down to slip it in my shoe, and I could smell him. Old Spice and Listerine. He was standing close to me in his undershirt and blue polyester pants. I could see black hairs on his chest sprouting out of his T-shirt. His belly was soft behind his belt, and he was breathing hard.

I could hear country music drone above us. Someone singing 0-0-0 over and over. Twang and thump. Gary Jensen stomping in his cowboy boots over our heads while I undid the buckle of this man’s belt, unsnapped his pants and pulled them down.

He was trembling, practically screaming, “Oh my god. Oh. Oh my god.”

When it was over, he wanted more. I told him I had to go, but he held onto the sleeve of my blouse. “Please,” he said, “just let me see your titties.”

“No,” I said.

When I got back to the office, Gary W. Jensen was leaning on one elbow with his back toward the counter, smoking a cigarette. He wasn’t wearing the leather jacket, and he looked lean. His brown hair was combed now. The thin beard looked darker. He looked like someone vaguely familiar from a TV show—maybe the deputy on
Gunsmoke
, but sexy, clever.

I didn’t look at him, just walked around the counter, took the money out of my shoe and reached under the cash drawer to put it in my purse, checking first to make sure the rest of my money was still where I’d left it. Then I stood back up and said, “Can I help you, Mr. Jensen?”

“You sure are a busy little beaver, ain’t you?”

“Yes.” I looked straight at him. “So what can I help you with now?” Not a hint of anything in it—sex, fear, anger, nothing.

“Well.” He cleared his throat, which led to a long cough, and then he said, “To be honest, I wanted to apologize. I know I’m really a bastard. I should never’ve hit you.”

“It didn’t hurt,” I said. It hadn’t.

He looked surprised. “I’m glad of that, at least, but I still feel so damn bad about it.” The Texas accent made him sound sincere, and his eyebrows were knitted together. His eyes were dark and sad. He dragged on his cigarette and looked hard at me, though he didn’t look for long. My fingers felt cold and thin to each other.

“Forget about it,” I said, and meant it. I’d gotten the money, he’d hit me, so what? It was just my body, and it was over.

“Thank you,” he said. “You’re real sweet, you know that? You shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing. I know it’s none of my damn business, but you’re real pretty and nice, and it’s just wrong. It could be dangerous, too, with fools like me running around loose.”

I felt my throat tighten, near the spot he’d held me down against the floor.

Here he was, someone else again, and what role was left for me to play?

I swallowed and said, quieter than I’d meant to, “Why’d you hit me then?”

He leaned across the counter and whispered, as if it were the most astonishing fact I’d ever hear, “Sweetheart, I have no idea.” He shook his head and looked at his thumbnails lined up next to each other on the counter, then he looked up at me again with damp eyes. “That’s the truth,” he said. “I don’t have the slightest damn idea. Just something sick in me, I guess.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said, and my own eyes went stupidly damp. I felt myself step back a bit then, away from my body or out of it, and I could see myself as if in a mirror. Embarrassed, sentimental, blurred.

Gary Jensen began to fish for another cigarette in his shirt pocket and handed one to me, too. The flame was warm near my face when he lit it, and I didn’t look up again.

Outside now it was deep blue, though the October sky had begun to clear with just a bruise of old light, the sun already sunk like a shipwreck to the west, where Lake Michigan sloshed sloppy with dead fish and weeds.

The office felt too small and hot, a dull fan scrambling the heat, blasting dust into the air, and I imagined the dry mummies of mice stuck in the electric furnace duct, crumbling and blowing mouse ash into the air. Us sucking it into our lungs. The cigarette smoke filled my mouth with soot.

“You saw that woman then, the one who came looking for me?” he asked.

“I guess so.”

“She’s got a good heart, too, and I’ve broke it to pieces. She’s the mother of my child, for chrissakes, and I’ve treated her worse than dirt. Worse than dirt.” He shook his head, seeming baffled by himself. “Who knows why a guy like me does the kind of stuff he does. Who knows?”

I shrugged and said, “I don’t,” exhaling a banner of gray hair over his shoulder.

He grinned. “No, hon, I suppose you don’t. But I just want to tell you I have never been sorrier in my life for anything I’ve done than I am for hitting you. There’s just no excuse for hitting a pretty little girl like you. A total stranger. And I just had to have you know that. Especially since, you know, you were being real nice to me, and we were doing something—intimate. You know? The way I behaved was just plain wrong. I am one evil guy. My mama would just roll over in her coffin if she knew what kind of man I have become.”

“O.K.,” I said, putting the cigarette out in the ashtray near his elbow, “but I need to get back to work.” I felt annoyed, familiar, myself again.

He straightened up then, as if I’d caught him in a lie. “I understand. I understand.” He cleared his throat. “Listen, I hope this isn’t going to make matters even worse. But money is not a problem for me right now, though I suspect it is for you. Here.” He handed me a wad of drab green. “I want you to have this as a gift from me.”

I took it without looking at it and slipped it into the front pocket of my skirt.

“Thanks,” I said, looking at the wall behind Gary W. Jensen’s head as he turned to go. His boots squealed over the linoleum and, before he stepped out of the office into the damp curtain of dusk, he turned at the door to its K-Mart Christmas jingling: “Bye.”

I tried to smile.

I didn’t know why.

The clock said twenty-five past eight, and the river sounded sloppy and fast outside, like someone running away with a bucket of cold black water.