True North

  I wasn’t homesick for my home but for the north with its vast forests and cold rivers and trout. In the first month I drove Lila all the way to Athens three times to see movies. We watched Alfie, Blowup, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I liked the first two and loathed the third because it reminded me of my parents’ cold-hearted quarrling. Fred thought Lila was leading me around by the nose and I was too much the young gentleman to say that she was passionate about giving blow jobs. I’m not sure what it meant, if anything. She was also explicit in her teaching me how to go down on her, a practice in which each woman seems to have her peculiarities.

  Fred was irked that I had brought along a carton of books and monographs on logging and mining. One hot evening we sat at the kitchen table and he and Riva traded blows on my intellectual shortcomings. Riva was less likely to see evil in Fred’s economic terms. She was a graduate student in sociology and when I had blithely told her about my project she began to make a book list that included Marcuse, Paul Goodman, and Oscar Handlin. Fred insisted that I read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and a whole string of theologians including Niebuhr whom I had already tried but found too dry. They both agreed that my approach toward evil and socioeconomic ills was too narrow and that I would devour myself before I really got started. Riva was merciless about Fred’s theological background. She saw religion as a wonderfully primitive impulse. Riva didn’t drink but was an expert at rolling big joints. She would sing fundamentalist hymns like “Washed in the Blood of the Lamb” or “Power in the Blood” (“wonder working power”) to piss off Fred. I could understand the idea that if I started with too narrow a base I would simply topple over. Riva teased me by saying that I was included in her definition of the human species, “males and females, usually between one hundred and two hundred pounds, mostly fueled by resentments that burst out in wars, divorces, lynchings, wife beatings, motiveless murders, and the stomping of the poor because they are the easiest to stomp.” She was that unique human who could remain lucid and energized while smoking marijuana. One night she delivered a perhaps hourlong lecture on what happened to the Indians of Oklahoma since Andrew Jackson that left Fred and me in tears. The story continued right up to the year before when some white teenagers on a lark shot her family’s only milk cow. At the time I was pleased with the help Fred and Riva gave me but also disappointed because I wanted to write a short, excoriating family history and be done with it, freeing me to go on with a less obsessive life though I had no idea what shape that might take.

  Curiously, it was my students who helped me to stop thinking about myself for the time being. Riva had quickly figured out that nearly all of the students arrived hungry but that our budget would cover only lunch. Ed was particularly upset about this and called his parents who shipped from Pittsburgh large cartons of this Jewish bread called challah that had eggs in it. The kids loved it and since I needed my ample pay like a hole in the head I went to a supermarket and bought local hams and blocks of cheese so that each morning when the kids arrived there was a big platter of bread, ham, and cheese. Ed joked that he wouldn’t tell his Orthodox parents about the ham.

  My class was comprised of a terribly thin mulatto girl, two Latino boys whose parents were farm workers, two white boys and a white girl from across the river in West Virginia whom I had difficulty in understanding, and a very short girl whose legs had been bowed by the disease of rickets. Her name was Marli and I still keep in touch with her more than thirty years later. She runs a public radio station in Kansas. I admit that teaching was the first sense I’d ever had of what they call “community.” There was something wrong with every one of my students whether hearing impairments, obvious malnutrition which made them small for their age, various other maladies caused by this malnutrition, one of the West Virginia boys stuttered, and the West Virginia girl was sexually precocious. I called in Riva to deal with the latter. I overheard Riva saying, “You can’t be showing your ass to boys for a nickel.” I was amazed at the general lack of complaint or whining though I later figured out that they didn’t complain because there was generally no one to listen. You either kept your chin up and you would fall apart. They were shy and friendly stoics. Marli who was barely four feet at the age of twelve joked that she would never have to deal with boys bothering her, and when I couldn’t laugh she patted my hand as if I were the one who needed sympathy.

  11

  I always date the beginning of the end of my family to the morning of the Fourth of July when I slid into second base. We were playing softball in the public park during a picnic for all of the kids. Anyway, I had beaten out a cheap single, there was an error, so I took off for second and made a slide I probably wouldn’t have tried if I hadn’t had a few beers. Second base had no give but was spiked there firmly to prevent theft. My bad ankle simply crumpled with flesh tearing from bone, and bone splitting from bone. Within a minute I fainted from pain.

  My mother arrived by late afternoon and I was flown in a small hospital plane to Meigs Field in Chicago, then taken to a hospital for orthopedic surgery early the next morning. I was being injected with Demerol and don’t recall much of anything until I woke up in a recovery room. My mother was standing there with the doctor who supposedly treated her phantom pain. He bore a resemblance to my father though his face was relatively unlined and in the times I saw him in the next few days he was always witty and smiling. Barely soon enough for my taste I was flown up to Marquette with my mother and ensconced on a bed in my father’s den so I wouldn’t have to get to my room upstairs. Cynthia, Clarence, and my father welcomed me. Jesse was still on vacation in Veracruz and I had pretty much convinced my mother that she and Father should return to the Club. I wanted only to read in privacy and have Mrs. Plunkett take care of me. My mother babbled on how she and Cynthia had redecorated a guest bedroom for the coming visit of Jesse’s daughter because the garage apartment was too small and a young lady shouldn’t have to sleep in the same bedroom as her father. Cynthia rolled her eyes at that one.

  By morning they were all gone, my parents to the Club in their crisply expensive summer clothes, and after they left Donald picked up Cynthia to visit relatives on Sugar Island near Sault Sainte Marie. Mrs. Mueller from the library visited after I called for some fresh material. She admonished me about some “radical” books I had asked for but she was joking. She held my hand for a few minutes and I, absurdly enough, got an erection which she noticed by the rising sheet and let go of my hand. “I’m flattered,” she said, getting up to go. I was a bit dazed by my pain pills but at the moment Mrs. Mueller evoked all the errant mystery of sexuality. How I longed to embrace her big chest and plump butt so that my heart beat faster in its confusion. Years before Cynthia and 1 would laugh when my father’s bulldog would hurl himself drooling against the fence when a certain female mutt would walk by. Sometimes she would back up to the fence to receive an eager lap or two. My year of devout Bible study had called sins names but had certainly failed to explain them. Meanwhile we young Christians yearned, wheezed, ached, and throbbed just like the heathen.

  Fred sent me a mournful and comic letter. He had asked Riva to marry him and she had replied, “Are you fucking kidding?” He also told me to read Christopher Smart, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Henry Miller, and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” to “broaden” myself and I duly added them to my book list. Fred included a page of condolence from students that contained “you shouldn’t have slided into base” and “if you send me a bus ticket I’m a good nurse, love Marli.”

  After two weeks in the den I was surprised that I still wasn’t inclined to feel sorry for myself. At first I ascribed it to the pain pills that I was taking in diminishing numbers. I imagined the consequences of the metal screws in my ankle and wasn’t particularly disturbed. I doubted if they’d keep me from fishing. I finally, though, attributed my lack of self-pity to my previous summer’s labor in Iron Mountain but more so the teaching job in Ohio. You leave home and it dawns on you that the world bears little similarit
y to home. I remembered in Iron Mountain one late Friday afternoon when Herbert was handing out our pay and Clyde, a simpleminded older laborer, was talking how he was taking his wife and family camping and fishing on Lake Gogebic. His wife and four kids showed up in a junky old DeSoto and a little boy brought Clyde a cold beer and Clyde yelled “we’re going to have a party.” Glenn had said contemptuously that he had seen Clyde, his wife, and all four kids in a rental boat all at once fishing bluegills with dollar cane poles. Herbert had told him to shut up. And the kids in my class were so bravely woebegone that nothing short of my death could equal their misery. I returned to listening to Mozart and Beethoven because you couldn’t very well listen to Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, or Ray Charles when you were unable to move.

  One morning in late July I was dreading the arrival of my parents that afternoon. They were returning from the Club to welcome Jesse and his daughter Vera who were coming the next day. I was fond of my privacy and had persuaded Mrs. Plunkett to move the television into the kitchen so I wouldn’t have to hear the game-show shrieks. I was in a mild codeine haze when Laurie suddenly showed up at the den door. She was home on a three-day break from her tennis camp and looking for Cynthia. I found the Au Train number of Donald’s aunt and give it to her. She leaned over the desk in a short summer dress talking to Cynthia and I was heartlessly aroused. She turned to look at me while she talked and raised her dress up to her waist with her other hand. I reached for my crutches but then she hung up the phone and asked if I had a rubber and I told her they were upstairs in my desk drawer. I lowered the single hospital bed from its sitting position. I could hear Laurie chatting with Mrs. Plunkett in the kitchen and then her footsteps going up the stairs. I thought my dick would break. When she came back down she said she had found a bunch of fifty-dollar bills in the drawer and was charging me one. She closed the sliding den doors and took off everything except her bra and sneakers. Her legs and arms were very tan but her bottom and tummy and chest were white from her tennis dresses. She was careful of my cast which went up to my knee and straddled me. It was over in moments but she managed to get me up in fifteen minutes or so, a biological feat reserved for young men. Her body was as hard as a muscular boy and I wondered about the long-term effects of eight hours of tennis a day. Afterward we both fell asleep and were finally wakened by Cynthia opening the door and shrieking “sluts!”

  Jesse and Vera arrived the next morning quite tired from taking the Mexico City to Chicago red-eye and the early connecting flight up to Marquette. My father, mother, and Cynthia stood there in the living room welcoming Jesse and Vera while I sat on the sofa crutches in hand. She was only a little over five feet, not as dark as Jesse, and had lovely though irregular features, a high forehead, and a slightly Roman rose. She wore a pale green dress, white anklets, and shiny patent-leather black shoes. She curtsied and bowed during the introduction. She looked down at me slumped on the sofa and offered her hand calling me “señor.” She was twelve years old and smelled slightly of vanilla and cinnamon. She was obviously very tired and my mother and Cynthia took her up to her room. My father and Jesse went out to the back porch to talk out of my earshot. I had been distracted when Cynthia and my father were standing next to each other. She had become taller in the past year, perhaps five-foot-ten, and though her features were much finer than his she bore a strong resemblance to him. She’s his flipside, I thought, smelling the cinnamon odor left on my hand by Vera who I couldn’t help hoping would be good for our family.

  We had a fine evening with only one sour note and in the morning Jesse drove Mother and Father back up to the Club. We had a good dinner with my father expertly grilling steaks. Vera had slept all afternoon and then become quite vivacious around dinner, speaking a limited pidgin English with Cynthia helping out because she had had high school Spanish. I showed Vera a textbook Mrs. Mueller had gotten me that was especially directed at teaching Mexicans the American language. It was slangy and up-to-date rather than formal and it seemed a good idea to start her on a level common with the culture. I felt nervous when flipping the pages of the book because Vera leaned into my shoulder but supposed that she was only trying to be friendly.

  The unpleasant moment had come later in the evening. Cynthia had pushed aside some throw rugs and she and Vera were teaching each other dance steps on the bare maple floor of the dining room, both of them in shorts and sleeveless shirts. I was reading in my bed in the den and my father was reading and watching television in the living room. He was having the usual number of nightcaps and I finally noted he hadn’t turned a page in his book. I came out of the den on my crutches to get a glass of cold water and ice in the kitchen and noticed that my father had lined up the television on its wheeled table so that he could watch the girls dancing. There was Veracruz music on the stereo and Cynthia was closely following Vera’s intricate samba steps. I paused to watch Vera’s sensual grace and the way her body moved fluidly as if she had fewer bones in it than we had in the great north. My father laughed and said to me, “What a sweet little butt,” which seemed in bad taste. I was relieved when he and Mother left in the morning.

  12

  Later I figured out that we had exactly twenty-one beautiful days together that August. Cynthia and I would trade off teaching duties, an hour apiece each morning, Mrs. Plunkett would cook us lunch, and then the girls would go to the beach and I would return to the den. One day my reading of one of Sprague’s journals enraged me and I moved back up to my room. I also was craving exercise and went up and down the stairs on my crutches until I was sweating hard and no longer pissed off. One morning after three or four days of this routine Vera insisted that I come along to the beach. We were in the middle of our once-in-a-summer heat wave so that Donald’s preseason football practice had been moved to early in the morning. I agreed and Donald carried me from the car to the water’s edge where the girls spread a blanket and towels. It’s very hard to walk in loose sand on crutches but it was still embarrassing to be carried. I weighed about one-seventy-five but it was no problem for Donald. Vera’s brief bikini was a little unnerving but the fact that she was only twelve offered enough cold water to prevent any conscious lust beyond the occasional moment. Her tummy was still rounded and her breast slightly conical but other than that she had a woman’s body. When other boys on the beach would stare or walk too closely Donald would merely give them a baleful look and they’d scatter. Once when Donald and Cynthia were off walking Vera got out of the water and stood over my dozing head dripping water on me and then sat down on my chest uncomfortably close to my face. I resolved then that I would wait at least four years and then travel to Veracruz to see what could be done.

  In our culture certain sexual moves are forbidden though less so in the cities in recent years. In Marquette at the time a senior boy could go out with a sophomore girl but a freshman girl was pushing the envelope. A man beyond high school years was gambling on legal problems if he fooled with high school girls though it was admissible for some of my female senior classmates to date college boys. A Lolita episode in Marquette would mean prison but in the further reaches of the countryside it wasn’t unheard of.

  By the end of the first week I was uncomfortably and stupidly in love with Vera but felt cool and collected about keeping it on a high level, say in the arena of what I had read about Dante and Beatrice. I was a teacher and she was the sacred vessel of my learning. That sort of thing. She was a quick learner and began to mimic Cynthia’s lilting, playful patterns of speech. I struggled for a framework to put her in that was biblical in its isolation from so-called lower desires. A little sister came closest to working though flat on her blanket on the beach with her knees drawn up and a few hairs peeking out from a plump pubis shielded by her bathing suit exhausted the soul’s finagling on the subject.

  One late afternoon while Vera was dozing sprawled on the sofa Cynthia motioned to me to follow her out to the back porch. She said that it was easy to tell that Vera was becoming infatuated with me an
d I should try to be a little cool toward her. I readily agreed and stopped going to the beach. I became more distant and acted perplexed with the difficulty of my project. In the evening except for a gin rummy game with Mrs. Plunkett I’d go into the den and close the door to baffle the music. One late afternoon when I was about to enter my room I heard a fire truck and went to the hall window. Vera came out of her room wrapped in a towel and stood beside me. When the fire truck passed she turned and walked away with the towel not covering her bare bottom, turning at her door to smile. That night she and her father demonstrated some old-fashioned dances of Veracruz. Jesse was skillful and austere showing us something he called “danzon,” a type of close dance performed a couple nights a week in the square of the city of Veracruz. Later when we were cooling off on the screened back porch and Jesse had gone to bed in the garage apartment Cynthia and Donald went off for a walk. I didn’t want to be alone with Vera so I started to get off the porch swing with the help of my crutches. Vera kissed me goodnight and put her tongue as far as possible in my mouth. I paused a moment too long before pushing her away. I made my way upstairs with my head ringing. Within minutes she knocked on my door and I locked it.