Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (17 page)

The moments of my impotence increase. I am not alarmed by this fact but clinically engaged. I sense that I am walling off everything, all appetites, and have room for nothing but this torrent of pain and squalor that pours through me from the daily and weekly harvest of rapes and killings and molestations. I remember once reading a statement allegedly made by Sophocles in his old age, when sexual desire had left his loins; he said he was glad to be free of the mad master. So I am becoming classic and care not at all. I repeatedly try to leave the work, but the city desk always wins because a part of me feels bound to the crimes. So I protest, and then return. I tell myself it is a duty, but what I feel is the desire to run out my string, to see how much I can stomach and learn. And yet then, and now, I cannot really say what this knowing entails. I can just feel its burden as I lie with caring women in countless cheap motels, the movies rolling on the screen.

The end begins in the bright light of afternoon on a quiet street lined with safe houses. One moment an eight-year-old girl is riding her bicycle on the sidewalk near her home; the next moment the bicycle is lying on the ground and the girl is gone with no one the wiser.

This one is my torch song. The rudiments are simple. The alleged perpetrator is a man in his twenties from a very good home in another city, a man whose life has been a torment of drugs, molestation of himself by others and of others by himself, a man who has slipped from his station in life into dissipation and wound up roaming the skid rows of our nation. None of this concerns me, and I leave ruin in my wake. I fly to that distant city, talk my way through a stout door, and gut his mother like a fish. When I leave she is a wreck, and later that night her husband goes to the hospital for perturbations of his heart. I get into files — legal, psychiatric — that I should not have had access to, and I print them fulsomely. The child favored a certain doll, and I buy one and prowl the city with it on the truck seat beside me, a touchstone. I am standing in the backyard as the mother of the missing girl makes a plea to whoever took her daughter to bring her home safe and sound. The woman’s face is grief made flesh, and I note its every tic and sag. It turns out that the alleged perpetrator stayed for a time with a couple in a trailer court. I visit; the man is facing child-molestation charges himself, the woman is a hooker with a coke habit. “Do I have to tell you that?” she whines. I remember leaving them, driving to a saloon, setting my small computer on the bar, and begging a phone for the modem. I sip my drink and write in one quick take. The story flits through the wires and descends into the next edition. The following night a local PTA meeting takes a recess, walks over to the trailer, and then it goes up in flames.

My temper is short, my blood cold. A young mother who works in the newsroom comes over to my desk and asks me what I think the chances are of the girl being alive. I snap, “Fucked, strangled, and rotting out there.” And keep typing. The sheriff leaps into the public wound and starts leading marches of citizens holding candles and decrying violence and the rape of children. It is much like the time so long ago when things began for me with a seven-year-old eviscerated while people marched to take back the night. I pay no notice to these marches: they are for others. The reporters on the story all speculate about the girl — even when the arrest comes and still the girl is missing. I do not. I know. Bones bleach out there. It is months and months before her remains turn up, but this hardly matters to me. I know. This is my country.

It ends several times, but at last it finally ends. The city desk asks my help to find a woman whose son, a famous local rapist, has just escaped. I leave, chat up some neighbors, and within an hour I am in a state office, a bullpen of women toiling over desks and processing forms. She has done everything she can — changed her name, told no one of her son, gone on and tried to fashion a life. I approach her desk and tell her my errand. She pleads with me. Don’t do this to me. She leans forward and whispers that no one typing away at the other desks, none of them knows anything about this. Leave me in peace, she says. I look into her careworn eyes and I say yes. I tell her I will now leave and she will never read a word of my visit in the newspaper. Nor will I tell anyone of her identity.

When I enter the newsroom, the editor comes over and asks, “Did you find her?”

I say, “Yes.”

“When can I have the story?”

“I’m never writing the story.”

He looks at me, says nothing, then turns and walks away.

That is when one part of me is finished. I know I must quit. I cannot take the money and decide what goes into the newspaper. I do not believe in myself as censor and gatekeeper. And yet I know I will never write this story, because I have hit some kind of limit in pain. The phone rings. It is a woman’s voice. She says, “Thanks to you she has had to go to the hospital. I hope you are happy.”

I tell her I am not writing the story. I tell her I told the mother I would not write the story. She does not believe me. This does not matter to me. My hands are cold, and I know from past experience this means I can take no more. I am righteously empty.

The other ending is more important, because it does not involve the work, the little credos and dos and don’ts of journalism. It involves myself. It happens the night the arrests come down for the missing eight-year-old snatched off her bicycle on that safe side street. Around three in the morning, I wrap the story and reach into my desk drawer, where I stashed a fifth of Jack Daniel’s bought earlier in the day. I do not drink hard liquor, and I bought the bottle without questioning myself and without conscious intent. So I finish the story, open the drawer, take the bottle, and go home. I sit in my backyard in the dark of the night, those absolutely lonely hours before dawn. I drink, the bite of the whiskey snapping against my tongue, and drink in the blackness.

After a while I feel a wetness and realize that I am weeping, weeping silently and unconsciously, weeping for reasons I do not understand. I know this is a sign that I am breaking down, this weeping without a moan or a sound. I feel the tears trickle, and step outside myself and watch myself clinically in a whiskey-soaked out-of-body experience. That is the other ending.

I quit the paper, never again set foot in a newsroom, and go into the mountains off and on for months and write a book about them. That helps but not enough. I sit down and in twenty-one days write another book about the land, the people, and the city. That helps, but although I barely touch on the world of sex and crimes in this book, it broods beneath the sentences about Indians and antelope and bats and city streets. Nothing really helps.

That is what I am trying to say. Theories don’t help, therapies don’t help, knowing doesn’t help. The experts say they have therapies that are cutting recidivism, and maybe they do, but I doubt it. I live with what I am and what I saw and what I felt — a residue that will linger to the end of my days in the cells of my body. I have never been in an adult bookstore. Two years ago I was at a bachelor party in a lap-dancing place and lasted fifteen minutes before I hailed a cab and fled. This is not a virtue or a position. I have no desire to outlaw pornography, strip joints, blue movies, or much of anything my fellow citizens find entertaining. Nor have I led an orderly life since my time in sex crimes. I write for men’s magazines and pass over without comment their leering tone and arch expressions about the flesh. I am not a reformer. So what am I?

A man who has visited a country where impulses we all feel become horrible things. A man who can bury such knowledge but not disown it, and a man who can no longer so glibly talk of perverts or rapists or cretins or scum. A man who knows there is a line within each of us that we cannot accurately define, that shifts with the hour and the mood but is still real. And if we cross that line we betray ourselves and everyone else and become outcasts from our own souls. A man who can be an animal but can no longer be a voyeur. A man weeping silently in the backyard with a bottle of whiskey who knows he must leave and go to another country and yet never forget what he has seen and felt. Just keep under control. And try not to lie too much.

Just before I quit, I am in a bar in a distant city with a district attorney. He shouts to the barkeep, “Hey, give this guy a drink. One of our perverts whacked a kid in his town.”

The bartender pours and says, “Way to go.”

And I drink without a word. Nobody wants to hear these things.

Janet Burroway

 

JANET BURROWAY
is the author of eight novels, including
The Buzzards
,
Raw Silk
(runner-up for the National Book Award),
Opening Nights
,
Cutting Stone
, and the forthcoming
Devil’s Play
. Her most recent plays are
Medea with Child
,
Sweepstakes
, and
Parts of Speech
. Her book
Writing Fiction
, now in its seventh edition, is the most widely used creative writing text in the United States, and a further text,
Imaginative Writing
, has recently appeared in its second edition. She is the author of a collection of essays,
Embalming Mom
, and the editor of the lectures of Robert Olen Butler,
From Where You Dream
. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

 

“I want to put you in a story,” I say. “Apparently it’s a matter of some importance.”

She is ironing and her back is to me. She says nothing and does not turn around, but she licks her finger to test the iron. Her spit sizzles like bacon and I can see her hand. Long strong fingers, violet veins, amber freckles. Under the taut freckled flesh of her forearms her narrow bones roll with the maneuvering of the iron.

“I don’t mean professional importance,” I say, “but psychological. Spiritual, if you like.” She rolls the iron along the board.

Things have not been going too well with me lately — a number of breakages, and not all of them for the first time. The compressor on the air conditioner broke down again. The left earpiece of my reading glasses split at the hinge and I can’t see to tape it together without my glasses on. Both of my teenaged sons had their hair cut again, for opposing reasons. I got divorced again, and moved again, or at least, I must not have moved, since I live in the same house in Florida, but it seems to feel as if I have moved again.

She rolls the iron along the board, wide end to narrow end in a serpentine path from her belly toward the window sill. It occurs to me that nobody ever sees her own bones, and that she has therefore never seen these bones that twist and roll under her skin, the forearm bones of a bony woman, their mineral and marrow.

“Well,” I say, “important to my soul, if you want to put it that way.”

“Hmmph,” she says. Does she say, “Hmmph?” It seems unlikely. Perhaps what she says is, “Hah!” I think she sighs. Once my brother Bud pointed out to me that when things fall apart you always run home to Mom. He pointed this out because I was fleeing a threatening lover (again) and he thought I wasn’t very well hidden in the breakfast bay. But I told him safety is not the point; the point is feeling safe.

She is ironing the skirt of the pima cotton dress with the white and purple pansies, the pin-tucked yoke, the puffed sleeves edged in eyelet. The pansies part at the point of the iron, swirl left and right under the heel of her hand and wheel down the board behind the butt of the iron. I do not, however, say “butt” in her presence. That much is clear.

I cross my legs, sitting at the breakfast bay, which is covered in some orange substance, a precursor of Naugahyde. I am wearing the trouser suit made out of handwoven amber tweed that I bought off the bolt in Galway at an Incredible Bargain. The trouser suit was stolen out of a parked station wagon in New York in 1972, but it is apparently important that I should be wearing it now, partly because it was such a bargain and partly because I designed and made it myself. I feel good in it: cordial, cool. I think of something I can pass on to her. I laugh.

“Do you know what a friend of mine said the other day?” Cordially rhetorical. “He said: Hell is the place where you have to work out all the relationships you couldn’t work out in life.”

It’s all right to say “hell” in this context, not as a swear word but as an acknowledgment of a possible place. My mother’s not narrow-minded about the nature of hell. I laugh again, and so although she laughs I don’t know if she laughs with me; I miss the tone of her laugh. “Haw, haw!”? I hope it’s that one, the swashbuckling one.

“I’d rather work this one out here,” I say, but am conscious that I mumble and am not surprised that there is no response. I am sitting on the orange plastic of the nook in the bay window, which my father designed and made, watching my mother at the ironing board that folds up into the wall behind an aluminum door. This also was designed and made by my father, who is not here because he is living in the mountains with his second wife although he was true to my mother right up to the end. And beyond. Outside the desert sun slants through the oleanders, illuminating minute veins in the fuchsia petals. The pansies on the ironing board I remember wearing in the sandbox under the oleanders before I started school, which means that my mother is about thirty-five. I am forty-five and three months by the calendar on the window sill to the left of my typewriter.

“What friend was that?” she asks, eventually, with a palpable absence of malice and a clear implication that any friend who goes under the designation “he” is suspect. It was all right to say “hell” but not “he.”