The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (171 page)

On the first day of September, Hoffman woke at dawn and began preparing his truck. Months later, during the court proceedings, the Wilsons’ attorney would attempt to show that Hoffman had stockpiled weapons in the bed of the truck, an allegation that Esther and Ace would contest heatedly. Certainly there were tools in the truck—a few shovels, a sledgehammer, and an ax—but if these were threatening, they were not so intentionally.

Hoffman had recently purchased several dozen rolls of black electrical duct tape, and at dawn he began winding the tape around the body of the truck. He wound the tape, and then more tape over the existing tape, and he did this again and again, as armor.

Esther had an early-morning flute class to teach, and she got up to eat her cereal. From the kitchen window, she saw her father taping his pickup. The headlights and taillights were already covered and the doors were sealed shut. She went outside.

“Dad?” she said.

And Hoffman said, almost apologetically, “I’m going over there.”

“Not to the Wilsons’?”

“I’m going in after Bonnie,” he said.

Esther walked back to the house, feeling somewhat shaky. She woke Ace Douglas, who looked from his bedroom window down at Hoffman in the driveway and called the police.

“Oh, not the police,” Esther said. “Not the police . . .”

Ace held her in a hug for some time.

“Are you crying?” he asked.

“No,” she lied.

“You’re not crying?”

“No. I’m just sad.”

When the duct tape ran out, Hoffman circled the truck and noticed that he had no way to enter it now. He took the sledgehammer from the flatbed and lightly tapped the passenger-side window with it, until the glass was evenly spider-webbed. He gently pushed the window in. The glass crystals landed silently on the seat. He climbed inside but noticed that he had no keys, so he climbed out of the broken window again and walked into the house, where he found his keys on the kitchen table. Esther wanted to go downstairs to try to talk to him, but Ace Douglas would not let her go. He went down himself and said, “I’m sorry, Richard. But I’ve called the police.”

“The police?” Hoffman repeated, wounded. “Not the police, Ace.”

“I’m sorry.”

Hoffman was silent for a long time. Staring at Ace. “But I’m going in there after Bonnie,” he said, finally.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

“But they have her,” Hoffman said, and he was weeping.

“I don’t believe that they do have her, Richard.”

“But they
stole
her!”

Hoffman snatched up his keys and climbed back into his taped-up truck, still weeping. He drove over to the Wilsons’ home, and he circled it several times. He drove through the corn in the garden. Ruth-Ann Wilson came running out, and she pulled up some bricks that were lining her footpath, and she chased after Hoffman, throwing the bricks at his truck and screaming.

Hoffman pulled the truck up to the slanting metal basement doors of the Wilsons’ house. He tried to drive right up on them, but his truck didn’t have the power, and the wheels sank into the wet lawn. He honked in long, forlorn foghorn blasts.

When the police arrived, Hoffman would not come out. He
would, however, put his hands on the steering wheel to show that he was not armed.

“He doesn’t have a gun,” Esther shouted from within Ace Douglas’s house.

Two officers circled the truck and examined it. The younger officer tapped on Hoffman’s window and asked him to roll it down, but he refused.

“Tell them to bring her outside!” he shouted. “Bring the rabbit and I will come out of the truck! Terrible people!”

The older officer cut through the duct tape on the passenger-side door with a utility knife. He was able, finally, to open the door, and when he did that, he reached in and dragged Hoffman out, cutting both of their arms on the sparkling glass of the broken window. Outside the truck, Hoffman lay on the grass in a limp sprawl, facedown. He was handcuffed and taken away in a squad car.

Ace and Esther followed the police to the station, where the officers took Hoffman’s belt and his fingerprints. Hoffman was wearing only an undershirt, and his cell was small, empty, and chilly.

Esther asked the older police officer, “May I go home and bring my father back a jacket? Or a blanket?”

“You may,” said the older police officer, and he patted her arm with a sort of sympathetic authority. “You may, indeed.”

Back home, Esther washed her face and took some aspirins. She called the mother of her flute student and canceled that morning’s class. The mother wanted to reschedule, but Esther could only promise to call later. She noticed the milk on the kitchen counter and returned it to the refrigerator. She brushed her teeth. She changed into warmer autumn boots, and she went to the living room closet and found a light wool blanket for her father. She heard a noise.

Esther followed the noise, which was that of a running auto-mobile
engine. She went to the window of the living room and parted the curtain. In the Wilsons’ driveway was a van with markings on the side indicating that it belonged to the ASPCA. There were grills on the windows of this vehicle. Esther said aloud, “Oh, my.”

A man in white coveralls came out of the Wilsons’ front door, carrying a large wire cage. Inside the cage was Bonnie.

Esther had never been inside the local ASPCA building, and she did not go inside it that day. She parked near the van, which she had followed, and watched as the man in the coveralls opened the back doors and pulled out a cage. This cage held three gray kittens, which he carried into the building, leaving the van doors open.

When the man was safely inside, Esther got out of her car and walked quickly to the back of the van. She found the cage with Bonnie, opened it easily, and pulled out the rabbit. Bonnie was much thinner than last time Esther had seen her, and the rabbit eyed her with an absolutely expressionless gaze of non-recognition. Esther carried Bonnie to her car and drove back to the police station.

Once in
that
parking lot, she tucked the rabbit under her left arm. She got out of the car and wrapped the light wool blanket she’d brought for her father completely around herself. Esther walked briskly into the police station. She passed the older police officer, who was talking to Ace Douglas and Ronald Wilson. She raised her right hand as she walked near the men and said solemnly, “How, palefaces.”

Ace smiled at her, and the older police officer waved her by.

Hoffman’s jail cell was at the end of a hallway, and it was poorly lit. Hoffman had not been sleeping well for several weeks, and he was cold and cut. The frame of his glasses was cracked, and he had been weeping since that morning. He saw Esther approaching, wrapped in the light gray wool blanket,
and he saw in her the figure of his mother, who had worn cloaks against the Budapest winters and had also walked with a particular dignity.

Esther approached the cell, and she reached her hand between the bars toward her father, who rose with a limp to meet that hand. In a half-mad moment, he half-imagined her to be a warm apparition of his mother, and, as he reached for her, she smiled.

Her smile directed his gaze from her hand to her face, and in that instant, Esther pulled her arm back out of the cell, reached into the folds of the blanket around her, and gracefully produced the rabbit. She slid Bonnie—slimmer now, of course—through the iron bars and held the rabbit aloft in the cell, exactly where her empty hand had been only a moment before. Such that Hoffman, when he glanced down from Esther’s smile, saw a rabbit where before there had been no rabbit at all. Like a true enchantment, something appeared from the common air.

“Behold,” suggested Esther.

Richard Hoffman beheld the silken rabbit and recognized her as his Bonnie. He collected her into his square hands. And then, after that, he did behold his own daughter Esther.

A most gifted young woman.

W
HEN ROSE
was sixteen years old and five months pregnant, she won a beauty pageant in South Texas, based on her fine walk up a runway in a sweet navy-blue bathing suit. This was shortly before the war. She had been a skinny, knee-scratching kid only the summer earlier, but her pregnancy had just delivered her this sudden prize of a body. It was as though life was gestating in her thighs and ass and breasts, not in her belly. It might have seemed that she was carrying all the soft weights of motherhood spread evenly and perfect across her whole frame. Those parts of herself that she could not quite pack into the blue bathing suit spilled over it exactly enough to emotionally disturb several of the judges and spectators. She was an uncontested champion beauty.

Rose’s father, too, saw the pin-up shape that his daughter had taken, and, five months too late, he started worrying about the maintenance of her graces. Soon after the pageant, her condition became obvious. Her father sent her to a facility in Oklahoma, where she stayed until she experienced four days of labor and the delivery of a stillborn son. Rose could not actually have any more children after that, but the lovely figure was hers to
keep, and she ended up eventually married, once again on the basis of a fine walk in a sweet bathing suit.

But she didn’t meet her husband until the war was over. In the meantime, she stayed in Oklahoma. She had developed a bit of a taste for certain types of tall, smiling local men in dark hats. Also, she had developed a taste for certain types of churchgoing men and also for left-handed men, and for servicemen, fishermen, postmen, assemblymen, firemen, highwaymen, elevator repairmen, and the Mexican busboys at the restaurant where she worked (who reverently called her La Rubia—the Blond—as if she were a notorious bandit or a cardsharp).

She married her husband because she loved him best. He was kind to waitresses and dogs, and was not in any way curious about her famous tastes. He was a big man himself, with a rump like the rump of a huge animal—muscled and hairy. He dialed telephones with pencil stubs because his fingers didn’t fit the rotary holes. He smoked cigarettes that looked like shreds of toothpicks against the size of his mouth. He couldn’t fall asleep without feeling Rose’s bottom pressed up warm against his belly. He held her as if she were a puppy. In the years after they got a television, they would watch evening game shows together on the couch, and he would genuinely applaud the contestants who had won cars and boats. He was happy for them. He would clap for them with his big arms stretched out stiffly, the way a trained seal claps.

They moved to Minnesota, eventually. Rose’s husband bought a musky flock of sheep and a small, tight house. She was married to him for forty-three years, and then he died of a heart attack. He was quite a bit older than she was, and he had lived a long time. Rose thought that he had passed the kind of life after which you should say, “Yes! That was a good one!” Her mourning was appreciative and fond.

When he was gone, the sheep became too much work, and she sold them off, a few at a time. And when the sheep were all
gone—spread across several states as pets, yarn, dog food, and mint-jellied chops—Rose became the driver of the local kindergarten school bus. She was damn near seventy years old.

Rose was no longer easy with names, but her eyes were good, and she was a careful driver, as she always had been. They gave her an excellent route of kindergartners. First, she would pick up the bus itself, at the station behind the gravel pits, over the double paths of train tracks. Then she would pick up the neighbor boy, who lived by the gas station near Rose’s own house. Then she’d pick up the crying boy. Then she’d pick up the girl whose mother always dressed her in corduroy vests, then the boy who looked like Orson Welles, then the disgusted girl, then the humming boy, then the girl with all the Band-Aids. At the bridge by the Band-Aid girl’s house, she would cross the river to the hill road. There, she’d pick up the black girl, the grateful-looking boy, the shoving boy, the other black girl, and the out-of-breath girl. Last stop was the absent boy.

Thirteen passengers. Twelve, if you didn’t count the absent boy, as Rose tended not to.

But on the particular morning that makes this story, the neighbor boy, the crying boy, and the corduroy vest girl were all absent. Rose thought,
Flu?
She kept on driving and found the Orson Welles boy and the disgusted girl and the humming boy absent also, and she wondered,
Chicken pox?
After the bridge passed with no girl on it, and the whole hill road passed with no children near it, she thought, with some humiliation,
Could today be Sunday?
She recalled, then, having seen no other bus drivers at the gravel pit station, nor any other school bus crossing the double paths of railroad tracks. She had not, in fact, noticed any other cars on the roads at all. Not that these were fast highways, but they were certainly driven roads. They were always used roads. And Rose thought lightly,
Armageddon?

But she rode her route out to the end. It was a fine choice that
she did, too, because there was someone at the bottom of the absent boy’s driveway, after all. Two people, in fact, waiting for her. She stopped the bus, demonstrated the proper and legal flashing lights, cranked the door open, and let them in. They were two very old men, one short, one tall. It took them some trouble to get up the stairs.