Sourland

  20.

  Where the brothers had been playing their rough game earlier that day, there were patches of ice treacherous underfoot. A boy who might’ve been the Cheetah signaled to David from the far side of the open space, near the parking garage. He walked rapidly away, turned, and beckoned to David mysteriously. They’d entered the parking garage at the rear. This was level A, now mostly deserted. The Cheetah was smoking a cigarette and trailing smoke over his shoulder, exhaling through his teeth. He held out a pack of cigarettes and David was about to stammer, “Thanks, but—I don’t—” when he understood that he must accept the cigarette from his friend and learn to smoke it. He laughed, excited at the prospect. His hand reached out and the Cheetah’s hooded eyes flashed and in that instant David was grabbed from behind, and his arms yanked painfully back. Someone had been waiting behind one of the posts. A tall, strong boy, of course it was the Cheetah’s brother. David was too surprised to cry for help. He might have thought this was part of a game. He heard his cracked voice, “What?—what—” Already a flurry of hard blows like horses’ hooves struck his chest, his stomach, his thighs. He fell, or was pushed. Sprawled on the gritty pavement. The Hawk stooped over him, his breath in short steaming pants. He punched and kicked him and spat in his face and the Cheetah, making a high, whimpering sound like a malicious child, stooped over him too, striking him with his fists, not so hard or with so much fury as his brother.

  The beating was quick and cruel and could not have lasted more than two minutes. The Hawk kicked him in the groin, cursing, “Fucker! Little fag!” The Cheetah drew his foot back for another kick but changed his mind. He pulled his brother, “Hey, no more.” He called the older boy by a name David couldn’t recognize, a name whose syllables were foreign, but in fact David heard little, the terrible fiery pain in his groin, his eyes misted over in shock, there was a roaring like a waterfall in his ears. Yet he would always remember the Cheetah hesitating. He would see the Cheetah not-kick. That glisten of fierce happiness in the Hawk’s face David would never forget; it would be one of the great riddles of his life even as he would cherish the gift of the Cheetah’s withheld kick. For both brothers might have kicked and kicked, leaving him limp, broken, bleeding; they might have kicked him to death for that was within their power, yet they had not. The younger boy panted, “Hey, no more. C’mon.”

  The brothers walked swiftly away. David lay where he’d fallen. He was alone, dazed. Never such pain as the pain between his legs, yet he seemed to know it would pass, he wouldn’t die, wouldn’t even be crippled. Afterward he would realize that the brothers had deliberately spared his face. He wasn’t bleeding, he’d have no visible marks.

  Always, he’d be grateful for this.

  HONOR CODE

  1.

  Seems like forever I was in love with my cousin Sonny Brandt, who was incarcerated in the Chautauqua County Youth Facility outside Chautauqua Falls, New York, from the age of sixteen to the age of twenty-one on a charge of manslaughter. You could say that my life as a girl was before-Sonny and after-Sonny. Before-manslaughter and after-manslaughter.

  That word! One day it came into our lives.

  Like incarceration. Another word that, once it comes into your life, the life of your family, is permanent.

  No one says “incarcerate” except people who have to do with the prison system. “Manslaughter” is a word you hear more frequently, though most people, I think, don’t know what it means.

  “Manslaughter.”

  Those years I whispered this word aloud. Murmured this word like a precious obscenity. I loved the vibration in my jaws, my teeth clenched tight. “Man-slaughter.” I felt the thrill of what Sonny had done, or what people claimed Sonny had done, reverberating in those syllables not to be spoken aloud in the presence of any of the relatives.

  “Manslaughter” was more powerful than even “murder” for there was “man” and there was “slaughter” and the two jammed together were like music: the opening chord of an electric guitar, so deafening you feel it deep in the groin.

  What Sonny did to a man who’d hurt my mother happened in December 1981, when I was eleven. A few years later my mother’s older sister Agnes arranged for me to attend a private girls’ school in Amherst, New York, where one day in music class our teacher happened to mention the title of a composition for piano—Slaughter on Tenth Avenue—and in that instant my jaw must have dropped, for a girl pointed at me, and laughed.

  “Mickey is so weird isn’t she!”

  “Mickey is so funny.”

  “Mickey is funny-weird.”

  At the Amherst Academy for Girls I’d learned to laugh with my tormentors who were also my friends. Somehow I was special to them, like a handicapped dancer or athlete, you had to laugh at me yet with a look of tender exasperation. When I couldn’t come up with a witty rejoinder, I made a face like a TV comedian. Any laughter generated by Mickey Stecke was going to be intentional.

  “Hurry! No time to dawdle! This is an emergency.”

  It was Hurricane Charley in September 1980 that broke up our household in Herkimer, New York, and caused us to flee like wartime refugees. So Momma would say. That terrible time when within twenty-four hours every river, creek, and ditch in Herkimer County overflowed its banks and Bob Gleason’s little shingleboard house on Half Moon Creek where we’d been living got flooded out: “Near-about swept away and all of us drowned.”

  Momma’s voice quavered when she spoke of Hurricane Charley and all she’d had to leave behind but in fact she’d made her decision to leave Herkimer and Bob Gleason before the storm hit. Must’ve made up her mind watching TV weather news. This confused time in our lives when we’d been living with a man who was my brother Lyle’s father, who was spending time away from the house after he and Momma had quarreled, and every time the phone rang it was Bob Gleason wanting to speak with Momma, and Momma was anxious about Bob Gleason returning, so one night she ran into Lyle’s and my room excited saying there were “hurricane warnings” on TV for Herkimer County, we’d have to “evacuate” to save our lives. Already Momma was dragging a suitcase down from the attic. “You two! Help me with these damn bags.” Momma had a way of keeping fear out of her voice by sounding as if she was scolding or teasing. It became a game to see how quickly we could pack Momma’s old Chevy Impala in the driveway. Momma had just the one suitcase that was large, bulky, sand-colored, with not only buckles to snap shut but cord belts to fasten. She had cardboard boxes, bags from the grocery store, armloads of loose clothes carried to the car on hangers and dumped into the back. Already it was raining, hard.

  Our destination was my aunt Georgia’s house in Ransomville, three hundred miles to the west in the foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains, we’d last visited two summers ago.

  I asked Momma if Aunt Georgia knew we were coming. Momma said sharply of course she knew. “Who you think I been on the phone with, all hours of the night? Him?”

  Momma spoke contemptuously. I was to know who him was without her needing to explain.

  When a man was over with, in Momma’s life, immediately he became him. Whatever name he’d had, she’d once uttered in a soft-sliding voice, would not be spoken ever again.

  “Pray to God, He will spare us.”

  It was a frantic drive on mostly country roads littered with fallen tree limbs. From time to time we encountered other vehicles, moving slowly, headlights shimmering in rain. Ditches were overflowing with mud-water and at every narrow bridge Momma had to slow our car to a crawl, whispering to herself. Where it was light enough we could see the terrifying sight of water rushing just a few inches below the bridge yet each time we were spared, the bridge wasn’t washed away and all of us drowned. To drown out the noise of the wind, Momma played Johnny Cash tapes, loud. Johnny Cash was Momma’s favorite singer, like her own daddy, she claimed, lost to her since she was twelve years old. In the backseat in a bed of wet, rumpled clothes Lyle fell asleep whimpering but I kept Momma company every mile of the way. Ev
ery hour of that night. I was Aimée then, not Mickey. I wasn’t sorry to leave the shingleboard house on Half Moon Creek that was run-down and smelled of kerosene because Lyle’s daddy was not my daddy and in Bob Gleason’s eyes I could see no warmth for me, only for Lyle. Where my own daddy was, I had no idea. If my own daddy was alive, I had no idea. I had learned not to ask Momma who would say in disdain, “Him? Gone.” From Momma I knew that a man could not be trusted except for a certain period of time and when that time was ending you had to act quickly before it was too late.

  Through the night, the rain continued. In the morning there was no sunrise only a gradual lightening so you could begin to see the shapes of things along the road: mostly trees. Then I saw a shivery ray of light above the sawtooth mountains we were headed for, the sun flattened out sideways like a broken egg yolk, a smear of red-orange. “Momma, look!” And a while later Momma drove across the suspension bridge above the Chautauqua River at Ransomville and when at midpoint on the bridge we passed the sign CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY she began crying suddenly.

  “No one can hurt us now.”

  These words that came to be confused in my memory with Johnny Cash’s manly voice. No one can hurt us now the words to a song of surpassing beauty and hope that was interrupted by applause and whistles from a vast anonymous audience. No one can hurt us now soothing as a lullaby, you drift into sleep believing it must be true.

  My aunt Georgia Brandt lived in a ramshackle farmhouse at the edge of Ransomville. Of the original one hundred acres, only two or three remained in the family. Georgia was not a farm woman but a cafeteria worker at the local hospital. She was a soft-fleshed fattish woman in her late thirties, six years older than my mother, a widow who’d lost her trucker husband in a disastrous accident on the New York Thruway when her oldest child was in high school and her youngest, Sonny, was five months old. Aunt Georgia had a way of hugging so vehemently it took the breath out of you. Her kisses were like swipes with a coarse damp sponge. She smelled of baking powder biscuits and cigarette smoke. To keep from crying when she was in an emotional state Aunt Georgia blurted out clumsy remarks meant to amuse, that had the sting of insults. First thing she said to Momma when we came into her house after our all-night drive was: “Jesus, Dev’a! Don’t you and those kids look like something the cat dragged out of the rain!”

  If Sonny happened to overhear one of his mother’s awkward attempts at humor he was apt to call out, “Don’t listen to Ma’s bullshit, she’s drunk.”

  Aunt Georgia was a hive of fretful energy, humming and singing to herself like a radio left on in an empty room. She watched late-night TV, smoking while she knitted, did needlepoint, sewed quilts—“crazy quilts” were her specialty. Some of these she sold through a women’s crafts co-op at a local mall, others she gave away. After her husband’s fiery death she’d converted to evangelical Christianity and sang in a nasal, wavering voice in the choir of the Ransomville Church of the Apostles. She was brimming with prayer like a cup filled to the top, threatening to spill. Even Sonny, at mealtimes, bowed his lips over his plate, clasped his restless hands and mumbled Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive through Christ-our-Lord AMEN. My aunt Georgia was the second-oldest of the McClaren girls who’d grown up in Ransomville and had always been the heaviest. Devra was the youngest, prettiest, and thinnest—“Look at you,” Georgia protested, “one of those ‘an-rex-icks’ you see on TV.” In an upscale suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, lived the oldest McClaren sister, my aunt Agnes who was famous among the relatives for being “rich” and “stingy”—“snooty”—“cold-hearted.” Agnes was the sole McClaren in any generation to have gone to college, acquiring a master’s degree from the State University at Buffalo in something called developmental psychology; she’d married a well-to-do businessman whom few in the family had ever met. Agnes disapproved of her sisters’ lives for being “messy”—“out of control”—and never returned to the Chautauqua Valley to visit. Nor did she encourage visits to Cleveland though she’d taken an interest, Momma reported, in me: “Aggie thinks you might take after her, you like books better than people.”

  I did not like books better than people. I was nothing like my aunt Agnes.

  I hated Momma’s brash way of talking, that my cousin Sonny Brandt might overhear.

  First glimpse I had of Sonny that morning, he came outside in the rain to help us unload the car, insisted on carrying most of the things himself—“Y’all get inside, I can handle it.” Sonny was just fifteen but looked and behaved years older. Next, Sonny gave up his room for Lyle and me: “It’s nice’n cozy, see. Right over the furnace.” The Brandts’ house was so large, uninsulated, most of the second floor had to be shut up from November to April; the furnace was coal-burning, in a dank, earthen-floored cellar, and gave off wan gusts of heat through vents clogged with dust. Sonny was always doing some kindness like that, helping you with something you hadn’t realized you needed help with. He was a tall, lanky-lean boy with pale ghost-blue eyes, said to resemble his dead father’s. His eyebrows ran together over the bridge of his nose. Already at fifteen he’d begun to wear out his forehead with frowning: one of those old-young people, could be male or female, Momma said, who take on too much worry early in life because others who are older don’t take on enough.

  Like his mother, Sonny was always busy. You could hear him humming and singing to himself, anywhere in the house. He slept now in a drafty room under the eaves, at the top of the stairs, and his footsteps on the stairs were thunderous. He had a way of flying down the stairs taking steps three or four at a time, slapping the wall with his left hand to keep his balance. He could run upstairs, too, in almost the same way. It was a sight to behold like an acrobat on TV but Aunt Georgia wasn’t amused calling to him he was going to break his damn neck or worse yet the damn stairs. Sonny laughed, “Hey Ma: chill out.”

  Sonny was in tenth grade at Ransomville High but frequently out of school working part-time or pickup jobs (grocery bagger, snow removal, farmhand) or helping around the house where things were forever breaking down. The previous summer, Sonny had painted the front of the house and most of what you could see of the sides from the road but the color Georgia selected was an impractical cream-ivory that looked thin as whitewash on the rough boards and would have required a second coat. Sonny gave up, overwhelmed. If he’d had any brains, he said, he would’ve worked those weeks for a painting contractor, at least he’d have been paid.

  Momma teased Sonny for being a “natural-born Good Samaritan” and Sonny said, scowling: “Natural-born asshole, you mean.”

  Lyle and I were crazy for our cousin like puppies yearning for attention, any kind of attention: teasing, swift hard tickles beneath the arms, attacks from behind. Sonny never hurt us, or rarely. He was sometimes clumsy, but never cruel. He was just under six feet, built like a whippet with shoulders and arms hard-muscled from outdoor work. His hair was the color of damp wheat and sprang straight from his head. By fifteen he had to shave every other day. His skin was often blemished and he wore grungy old jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts yet girls called him on the phone after school, giggling and shameless. If Georgia happened to answer she spoke sharply, “No. My son is not available.” Sonny basked in the attention but couldn’t be troubled to call any girls back. Still Georgia complained, “All that boy has got to do is get some silly girl pregnant. Wind up married, a daddy at sixteen.”

  A flush rose in Sonny’s face if he happened to overhear. He hated to be teased about girls, or sex. Anything to do with sex.

  “Chill out, Mom. Or I’m out of here.”

  One day, Sonny changed my name: he’d had enough of “Aimée,” he said. Especially the way my mother wanted it pronounced: “Aim-ée.”

  “‘Mickey’ kicks ass, see? ‘Aimée’ gets her ass kicked.”

  It was so! Clear as a column of numbers added up.

  Sonny called Lyle “Big Boy.” (Which was a sweet kind of teasing, since Lyle was small for his age at six.) Sometime
s, Sonny called my brother “Lyle-y” if the mood between them was more serious.

  Sonny had a formal way of addressing adults, you couldn’t judge was respectful or mocking. He could provoke my aunt Georgia by referring to her as “ma’am” in the politest voice. In town, adults were “ma’am”—“sir”—“mister”—“missus.” (Behind their backs, Sonny might have other, funnier names for them.) But he took care to call Momma “Aunt Devra” both to her face and to others. To Lyle and me he’d say, “Your Momma,” in a serious voice. The way his eyes shrank from Momma, even when she was trying to joke with him, which was often, you could see he didn’t know how to speak to her. Much of the time, he didn’t speak. Though he did favors for Momma, constantly. Climbing up onto the roof to repair a drip in Momma’s bedroom, changing a flat tire on Momma’s car, taking a day off from school to drive Momma to Chautauqua Falls seventy miles away. (Sonny had a driver’s permit which allowed him to drive any vehicle so long as a licensed driver was with him. What Momma was doing in Chautauqua Falls wasn’t for us to know. She would claim she “had business” which might mean she was interviewing for a job, looking for a new place to live or contacting a friend. So much of Momma’s life was secret, her own children wouldn’t know what she’d been planning until she sprang the surprise on us like something on daytime TV.) When Momma tried to thank Sonny for some kindness of his he’d squirm with embarrassment and scowl, mumbling O.K., Aunt Devra or Well, hell and make his escape, fast. Momma hid her exasperation beneath praise, telling Georgia her son was the shyest boy—“For somebody growing up to look like Sonny is going to look.”