Two Rivers (28 page)

“Oh shit,” Betsy said, pulling away from me. Before I had a chance to stop her, she was moving back through the crowd toward Brooder.

Beyond the grandstand, cars revved their engines, and the loudspeaker boomed and reverberated.

“I’ll tell you what happened to my fucking face!” Brooder hollered, throwing his shoulders back. Puffing up his chest.

Betsy had reached him and was tugging on his arm. I started to push my way through the crowd to get to her. By the time I got to her, Brooder had climbed up on the milk crate and was ripping off his jacket. And then he yanked his T-shirt over his head. The floodlight from the grandstand illuminated him like a spotlight. His torso was riddled with a series of red welts, skin rippled and twisted and scarred.

“Fucking Charlie! That’s what happened to my fucking face! You asshole. I
fought
your fucking war.”

“Please,” Betsy said, reaching for him; she was crying now.

“Jesus,” I said.

But then Brooder was charging into the crowd, which parted for him like water. He suddenly had the guy by his shirt collar. The crowd circled around them, spectators at a cock fight. I braced myself for the first blow, and then there it was: the awful crack of bone against bone. Brooder’s hair was flying madly; spit and blood splattered everywhere. I’d seen Brooder get into fights before, but never like this. He was like an animal. A wild, rabid animal.

I watched in horror and disbelief as Betsy pulled away from me and went to him, screaming, “Stop it!”

Brooder seemed oblivious to what was happening, oblivious even to her. He was dancing around the circle with his fists raised, like a boxer. Like he was in for the fight of his life. Betsy grabbed at his shirt, as if she could simply pull him away.

“Betsy!” I said, pushing my way through the crowd. I knew I had to get her out of there before something terrible happened. I reached for her hand, and I half-expected she would pull away from me, intent as she was on stopping the fight. But when I touched her, she looked at me, stunned as if I’d woken her from sleep. Then she looked down at her stomach, cradled it with one hand, and closed her eyes. I put my arm around her, enveloping her, and steered her, the best I could, out of the mess. Once we were away from the crowd, she collapsed into my arms, crying big, awful sobs.

Brooder threw one more punch, and the guy went from staggering to falling. Brooder spit a mouthful of blood onto the guy’s shirt and shook his hair out of his eyes. “I fought your fucking war,” he hissed again, and then he disappeared into the crowd.

“Let’s just leave,” Betsy said, defeated, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

The first few drops of rain were cold, unexpected.

“Oh, Jesus, I thought this was
over
,” Betsy said. When thunder rumbled, she grabbed my hand. We ran, as quickly as we could with Betsy’s awkward gait, to the exit and into the parking lot. It took a few minutes before we found the DeSoto among the hundreds and hundreds of cars, and lightning streaked across the sky just as I was opening the passenger door. Inside the car, rain pelted at the glass, and Betsy wept.

“We’ll be home in a few minutes,” I said. The fairgrounds were only a few miles away from our house.

“No.” She shook her head. “Not until the storm is over.”

I made my way through the rain, climbing into that unrelenting sky until we got to the top of the Heights. The heater blew warm air into the car, but Betsy shivered.

“You want a blanket? I’ve got one in the back,” I said.

Betsy shook her head. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She was quiet for a long time.

“We did the right thing,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“The baby. This is the right thing. I truly, truly believe that.” Betsy put her face in her hands. Her shoulders trembled. I could hear her trying not to cry. Everything inside me ached.

And then I remembered. In all the commotion, I had completely forgotten about the job. I had to tell her about the university, about Maine.

“You know, after the baby comes…” I started.

Thunder cracked.

“I’m scared,” Betsy said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m here.”

Betsy looked at me, desperate and sad. “Turn the headlights out? Let’s just watch the storm.”

“Y
ou okay dere?” Rene asked, leaning out of the window as I stood on the street below my apartment. “Maybe you best go lie down.”

I nodded.

“Dat Demerol, it knock you right out.”

I nodded again, still unable to speak.

After Rene pulled away, I stood staring down Depot Street. When I looked up at one of the windows of my apartment that faced the street, I could see Maggie’s silhouette moving behind the kitchen curtains. I blinked hard and started walking in the opposite direction. I stopped when I got to the Laundromat, stood for several minutes just breathing the clean smell of detergent and bleach before I went in.

In the hallway outside Brenda’s apartment, the hum of the washers and dryers below was almost pacifying.

“Come in,” she said. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Once inside, I didn’t know what to say. Why I was there. What to do. Brenda motioned for me to sit at the kitchen table. “Let me get you something to drink.” She handed me a bottle of beer and furrowed her brow as she sat down across from me.

“What?” I asked, suddenly self-conscious.

“You need a haircut. It’s the
eighties
, you know. You and Tony, both of you, caught in some sort of time warp.”

Before I knew it, she had me leaning over her sink as she used the spray nozzle to wash my hair. The warm water felt good on my neck. I watched the soap swirl down the rusty drain. Her fingers pressed into my scalp, making my skin tingle. Come alive. She threw a towel over my head, and left me to dry it myself.

“Sit down here. You mind if your shirt gets some hair on it?” she asked.

I looked down at my shirt and shook my head. She draped the towel I’d used to dry my hair over my shoulders and disappeared into the living room. She came back out with a velvet-lined case, a shining pair of sheers lying inside as if it were a casket.

“Where’s Roger?” I asked.

“He’s with his nonna,” she said. “Tony’s aunt. I usually work at Bobbi’s shop in the mornings and then pick him up after I’ve had a chance to run some errands.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Am I keeping you from something?”

“Nah. I was just gonna run to the post office. Mail some bills.”

“I haven’t had a haircut in over a year…. I can wait another day or so….”

“Shh.”

The hair fell all around me, curling dark and wet on the floor. Her fingers kept touching the sides of my face, my neck.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“Did somebody’s face get in the way?”

I smiled, but it felt like something inside me was fragmenting. Fracturing.

“There,” she said, holding up a plastic-handled mirror to my face. I barely recognized myself. “You like?”

“How much do I owe you?”

“Forget about it,” she said and smiled. “I don’t charge my friends.”

I smiled back at her; the thought of us being friends seemed like a strange idea. I wondered what Brooder would think of me sitting in his kitchen now. I reached for the beer, which had grown a little warm, and took a deep pull. We were quiet for a while, just sitting and drinking.

“Tell me about your wife,” she said softly. “About Betsy.”

Brooder had obviously told her more about me than she’d let on before.

I shrugged. “There’s not much to tell. She died twelve years ago. We have a little girl.”

“Do you still miss her?” she asked.

I wanted to be able to tell her
no
, to tell her that the gash Betsy’s death made grew narrower and narrower with each passing year, but I couldn’t. The wound was in a spot that couldn’t heal, aggravated by even the simplest things, torn open again and again. Brenda wanted me to tell her that she wouldn’t always feel the sharp sting of Brooder’s death, but, as far as I knew, it would always hurt.

“I’m afraid that I won’t be able to raise Roger on my own,” she said. “Thank God for Tony’s aunt. I don’t know what I’d do without her.” She was playing with the wedding band on her finger, spinning it around and around with her thumb.

“Betsy’s family helped me out,
helps
me out too,” I said. “But you’d be amazed how capable you are. How much you can do by yourself.”

“Sounds to me like we’ve got a lot in common,” she said. “You and me.”

I smiled and swallowed another swig. She kept opening bottles of beer, and I kept drinking them. Every one of them made everything that was happening seem further and further away. Remote. Just a story I heard once. And Brenda’s edges softened with each drink. She was so pretty. Her hair was loose today, and hanging down over her shoulders. She looked like summertime.

“It’s nice to talk to someone who knew Brooder.
Before
. When I met him, when he came to Florida looking for his mom, he was like that. Normal, you know. Even with the mess the war had made of his face, he was still sort of charming. He wrote me songs, on his guitar. It was, I don’t know, sort of romantic. And he was so generous. He’d give you the shirt off his back, the
skin
off his back if you asked.” She chuckled, and then her smile faded into a sort of grimace. “But almost as soon as I got back here with him, he started to…change.” She looked out the window.

“He didn’t…”

“What?” she asked, her eyes wide.

“He didn’t ever hurt you?” I stopped. It was none of my business.

She shook her head, turned back to me. “No. He wasn’t right, in the head. But it wasn’t like that. And it wasn’t all bad. I would have turned around and gone back home if it had been
all
bad. He was a good father. And a mostly good husband. Plus, he needed me. He had so much shame inside. So much anger and shame.”

“About Vietnam?” I asked.

She looked at me, hard.

I lowered my head.

She reached across the table and grabbed my hand before I could reach for my bottle. “He adored her, you know. Your Betsy. She was his best friend.”

I lifted my head up, willed myself to focus on her eyes. On her face. Everything was collapsing now. She squeezed my good hand.

“I know,” she said. “About that night. I know what happened.
Why
it happened.”

I felt my insides growing hot. The warm beer buzz became molten sobriety. And before I could speak, I was crying. As if all that heat inside me had run out of room and was coming out in hot tears.

She got up and came to me. She kneeled next to my chair and leaned into me, resting her head in my lap. I could feel the warmth of her face through my jeans. I stroked her hair, traced the outline of her face. I touched her lips with my finger, felt the soft, wet place where they parted. I pressed my palm against her cheek then, and she lifted her head, looked at me with sad eyes. And then she was kissing me: my hair, my forehead, my throat. I closed my eyes. When she reached my mouth, I kissed her back softly. Quietly. Both of our lips were salty with tears.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pulling away. Embarrassed.

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s okay.” And it was okay, because for the first time in twelve years I felt like someone was inside
with
me, staring out from the same hollow place. And so I told her what I’d never told a soul before.

“I thought Brooder was just going to scare him,” I said. “I really thought he was just going to teach him a lesson. He said that if we didn’t do it then nobody would, that by the time the cops got to him he’d already be gone. But I let him do it. I didn’t stop him. It’s my fault.”

She wrapped her arms around my waist, leaned her head against my chest, and whispered, “It
wasn’t
your fault. It was a terrible thing, but you didn’t do anything wrong. He told me that. He did.”

I
t sounded like a tremendous crack of thunder, but then I felt my face hitting the steering wheel, my neck snapping forward and back. Something had hit us from behind. But as I turned around to see what had happened, the DeSoto pitched forward, and we began to fall. Everything went black and starry for a moment. For hours? Another crack, crack, and when I came to again, I was staring at a thousand shards of broken glass.

Here is Betsy in repose: she was lying on her back, halfway in the car, her long legs stretched, golden and thin still. Her back was arched, her belly rising up, a small mountain, her arms over her head, which was thrown back, her neck exposed. Her hair hung to the ground, the edges dipping in the dewy grass. I touched her leg first—grabbing tightly onto the delicate bones of her knee, cradling the kneecap in my palm. As my head began to throb and my vision became blurred with what must have been my own blood, I felt something like a fire starting to catch—a heat in my legs, my calves burning. I looked away from Betsy only long enough to verify that I wasn’t actually on fire. I watched my hand moving toward the swell of her stomach, my fingers trembling (like the first time I touched her, like every time I touched her), crawling across the exposed skin of her stomach. I rose to my knees and was crawling across her body, shielding her.
Too late, too late
. I grabbed handfuls of her hair and tried to pull her back into the car, grasping onto her hair, pulling. I enclosed her, enveloped her. Made a fortress out of my own body, but it was too late.

I could feel the baby moving under her skin, the rolling and jabbing, an insistent reminder:
I am here. I am here
. I pressed my cheek to her throat, listening for the sound of blood rushing, imagining it like the river. I buried my face in her neck, buried my hands in her hair.

There was a pair of bright lights glaring in through the back window from above. Confused, I opened the driver’s side door and crawled out of the car. I was looking up at the lookout where we had been parked. The DeSoto was about thirty feet down the embankment, stopped in its descent by a large plateau of rock and grass.

I stood and shielded my eyes from the bright glare of the headlights, and when I did I saw the man standing there, staring down at us. At first he looked only like the shadow of a man, like a paper cutout. A silhouette. But when he stepped away from the car, peering down at us through the crumpled guardrails, the headlights illuminated everything. I saw his face.

“Hey, please help us!” I said. “My wife is pregnant! She’s hurt!”

The man looked down into the darkness, as if trying to place where the voice was coming from. In the bright headlights I could see him. That boyish face, the wide deer eyes and the dimple like a comma in his cheek.

“Please!” I screamed. “She’s dying!”

But instead of scrambling down the cliff to help me, the man froze. He held up his hands, his palms pink, his long fingers spread open wide in a strange gesture of surrender, and then he was running. I could hear his feet on the damp grass, see his shadow body running away through the bushes and rocks. I could see the handkerchief in his back pocket, a flash of terrible white receding in the distance.

And then I was back inside the car, lifting Betsy up in my arms. Cradling her, I climbed the slippery embankment, mud and rocks making every step difficult. The man’s car was still at the top of the lookout, the lights still on. But the man was gone.

I looked into the car to see if he’d left the keys in the ignition, but they were also gone. I kicked the tire, the bumper, and buried my face in Betsy’s hair, weeping. And then I made my way to the middle of the road, still holding Betsy in my arms, where I stood in the rain until we were both drenched. Finally, a car came. I don’t remember much after that except that when the woman driving the car asked me if she was breathing, I couldn’t speak.

I stood next to the hospital bed where she lay; my pants weighed down with water, the cuffs making muddy puddles around my feet on the clean white floor, and wished only for the quick blink of her eyelashes, the minute movement that would make all of this untrue. But she was gone. She’d been gone since they pulled the baby out of her.

The rain had soaked my hair, my clothes, my shoes. Even my chest was heavy with it. It took so much effort to move down the corridor where I knew Paul and Hanna were waiting. It was like one of those terrible dreams where your legs won’t work. Paralysis. Quicksand. Fighting a powerful current. Because waiting at the end of the hall was this: Hanna, standing, weeping, and Paul, sitting on the bench, hunched over, his head in his hands.

Later that night, the nurse took the baby from the incubator. “At least we were able to save the baby,” she said, handing her to me like some sort of consolation prize. But I only wanted Betsy. At that moment, if I could have traded one for the other, I would have.

“Sit down,” the nurse said, motioning to the rocking chair. “I’ll leave you two alone.”

I sat down, and peered into the baby’s tiny face, and knew then that no matter how hard I tried I would always fail her.

The car that hit us, that killed Betsy, was a 1968 Thunderbird. Cherry red. It belonged to Jimmy Burke, Howie Burke’s father. Howie was on his way home from Vietnam, and the Thunderbird was going to be his coming-home gift. Mr. Burke had taken it out for opening night at the fairgrounds. He and his wife took their younger son to the fair that night, parked the car in the fairgrounds parking lot. But when the boy threw up after too much cotton candy and a few too many spins on the Tilt-o-Whirl, and they decided to go home, they couldn’t find the car anywhere. The police figured it had to have been someone from out of town, someone with the midway, who decided to take it out for a joy ride. Nobody in Two Rivers would have stolen a car from Jimmy Burke.

At the hospital, I told the police I wasn’t sure if I had seen the person driving Howie’s car: that he was only a silhouette, running away. I mentioned something about his handkerchief. Something about the midway, the lights. I knew they’d want to talk to me again. I was delirious when we spoke; my head thick with grief and glass. Shattered.

The baby couldn’t come home with me yet. She was jaundiced, her skin the color of an unripe peach. And so the next morning in the half-light of dawn, I returned to our house by the river alone, and found Brooder sitting on my front steps.

“Who did it?” he asked.

I looked down at my feet.

“Who?”
he asked.

I looked at him, saw that he too was fragmenting. I almost reached out to touch him, but I knew it would have been like touching the edge of a broken glass.

“I think it was the guy running the Himalaya,” I said.

“That dirty nigger?” Brooder asked, standing up, his face red. Angry.

My chest heaved. I knew that what I said next would change my life. But the rage was already inside me; it was born when my mother was killed, its roots growing deep and sinuous. Now it had broken through the surface and was growing into something I no longer understood.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was him. I saw his face.”