The Summer He Didn't Die

  Sammy had had them place a half dozen big vases of cut flowers in the suite, also a big bucket with two bottles of champagne which we never got around to opening. The flowers reminded me poignantly of the death of one of my young caseworkers in an auto accident a few months before. The funeral had been in a fundamentalist church out in a poorer suburb. The casket was open and surrounded by flowers but I didn’t file by the casket with the rest of the congregation. She was a living memory and I didn’t want to see her dead. Her parents had moved up from Alabama in the fifties and she had spoken in a southern accent. She was white but was an expert in the most difficult black cases. It was a warm morning and the air in the church was sodden with sweet flower smell. The choir sang “The Old Rugged Cross” and everyone there but me seemed sure that they would see Marjorie in heaven. I’ve never figured out the connection between death and flowers. Flowers are so intricately beautiful and death is always my crumpled dog Fritz.

  Our room-service dinner was sleepy but good. Sammy’s personal secretary who is a whiz had selected five special wines but William prevented the room-service waiter from opening more than two. Our appointment with the prosecutor was now at eight the next morning. The only passing note was when Paquin joked about certain legal issues being resolved only when a check is written and Frances said that she thought that she should contribute to the kitty. William said almost harshly that any settlement was a family matter. I could see tears forming in Martha’s eyes but then Paquin skillfully changed the subject to his poor youth on Grosse Ile, an island in the Detroit River, and all of the wonderful ways you could cook muskrat. William got in the mood and reminded Paquin of the wonderful lunches they used to have at the London Chop House in downtown Detroit which closed with the flight to the suburbs. I could see how calming these two older gentlemen were to Frances and Martha. I include myself. Our husbands seemed tentative and unfinished by comparison.

  We went to bed a bit too early, at nine in fact, so that I was awake by four A.M. which is not at all what I wanted. There are points in life when unconsciousness seems to be your truest friend. I again recalled dozing in the haymow while Daryl bellowed in the barnyard below me. Earlier in my professional life I went to a psychoanalyst thinking I might be depressed but he said that I wasn’t depressed, just a little too conscious and that the grimness of what I saw daily in my job would give any intelligent human pause unless they were also a sociopath.

  I read for a half hour about how Buddhism spread from India to China. There was a painting of the Bodhidharma who had sat nine years in front of a wall before coming to his conclusions. I imagined him riding on an elephant across the mountains to spread the word. I also imagined I was back in Mérida in the Yucatán but then I realized soft Mexican music was traveling muffled through my bedroom door. I got up and opened the door a crack and peeked out. Frances and Martha were drifting, flowing, dancing independently around the big room to a CD Frances had bought in Mérida. They were lost to the world and I thought if I joined them it would be like having one’s mother walking into the room in the middle of an ever-so-slightly-questionable activity.

  I did manage to go back to sleep but it was definitely not worth it when I woke up crying and bound up in my sheet having dreamt that both my parents had faces resembling shucked pecans and were talking to me but I had no sense of being there. The morning was colored with Monday and we ate a hasty breakfast while Paquin and William tapped their toes in impatience.

  Security was high at the court building with metal-detecting machines making porpoise squeaks, something that began I supposed after the Oklahoma explosion preceding 9/11 but then some people were always prone to settling courtroom issues with pistols. We sat in the foyer of a conference room while Paquin and Daryl’s lawyer and the Mexican-American prosecutor chatted in the corner. I could see how William, Frances, and Martha were oppressed by the ugliness, the pale soiled institutional green of the windowless room. I was accustomed to such places and barely noticed them anymore but now I saw it through their eyes and my stomach fluttered. I began to wonder if Daryl was going to be typically late but then in he walked supported by an ornate cane as if he were convalescing from a disease no one else was worthy of having. Always a bit of a hypochondriac Daryl had told me that he’d once asked a doctor, “But what if I have a disease that hasn’t been discovered yet?”

  Daryl sat down and nodded with the thinnest smile possible and it occurred to me abruptly that this was the first time that Daryl, Frances, Martha, and I had been in the same room since our university days. Martha examined her shoes and Frances grasped my hand tightly and exhaled. William without effort acted as if Daryl didn’t exist. I glanced over and Paquin and Daryl’s lawyer, a rather frowsy big man, vaguely feminine, shook hands and shrugged. The Mexican-American prosecutor in his Haspel drip-dry suit waved into the conference room with a trace of a bow. Though strategically impassive he was clearly what young women call a “hunk.” His eyes widened a trace at Martha’s beaming smile which resembled that of someone entering a rock concert.

  “My name is Juan Murrietta but around here my name is Johnny the Jaguar, a rather difficult animal in the place of my parents’ birth. My profession is to discourage criminal acts by effectively prosecuting them. In short, if you don’t behave in agreement with the social contract you get locked up. Within an hour I will be dealing with a group of young men who, wired on crystal meth, gang-banged a thirteen-year-old girl until she was dead. This afternoon I hope to finish a trial of a man who while drunk threw his eight-year-old stepson through a picture window for taking the batteries out of the TV clicker. The kid needed the batteries for a toy but unfortunately a shard of glass cut his carotid artery and he bled to death in a flower bed.”

  Juan paused to let the nature of his job sink in. The color drained from our collective faces except for Paquin and Daryl’s lawyer. Daryl himself glanced around unsuccessfully for a window to look out of.

  “Before I can make my final decision on the nature of my prosecution I have to get a clear idea of what you people had in mind which, given human nature, might not be possible. This case has already prompted the phone interest of a United States representative and the governor of Texas which is more attention from politicians than almost anyone can expect.”

  He said this without apparent irony but the message was there. He studied the folder before him and named us accurately except for mixing up Frances and myself. He fixed his cold eyes on Daryl.

  “So you’re the photographer?”

  “He’s a major American poet,” Daryl’s lawyer interrupted.

  “O.K., a poet-photographer. You seem to be working on a series of naked sleeping wives, perhaps an interesting series but then why send the photos to the husbands? Lucky for you this didn’t take place down in Sonora.”

  Daryl stood mute and his lawyer wrote diligently in a notebook. Juan stared first at Martha who, of course, smiled, and William who returned his stare with unblinking honor.

  “My first impulse was to charge Martha Dillingham with attempted murder but then on learning certain details I lessened this to attempted manslaughter, and then on learning yet more I decided to step down to attempted negligent homicide which can still draw three to five years in a penitentiary. However, the victim has not yet signed a complaint. My conclusions seem directed to the idea that their case is devolving into a civil court case. Mind you, I don’t need a signed complaint from the victim. I’ve prosecuted men who’ve nearly beaten their wives or girlfriends to death and still the women won’t sign a complaint but I don’t need one to prosecute. Here, though, I would need to prove the defendant’s intent and her law yer Mr. Paquin has maintained that by crushing Elavils and doping the coffee she was merely trying to escape Daryl Howe’s company and, further, the defendant Martha Dillingham has had five hundred and seventeen appointments with mental-health professionals over the past twenty years, an average of once every two weeks. This does not necessarily indicate an unsound mind but it
’s my conclusion that a jury, once all of the evidence is divulged, would likely be in sympathy with the defendant. They might think that eleven Elavils is a bit lame if you really intend to kill someone. If she had shot Daryl in the arm I’d have a good case.”

  He sighed deeply as if in boredom with all of us, looking at Frances who had begun to sniffle without sympathy. Daryl was fiddling with his cane head and William held Martha’s hand.

  “In short it’s my belief that it does not serve the citizens of Texas, the public good, or the taxpayer’s wallet to prosecute this case and enter a long expensive trial period. The two counsels involved have indicated that a settlement has been agreed upon but that is beyond my interest. I leave you all to your own devices which I trust will be pleasant.”

  Juan got up and started to leave, then turned abruptly and shook hands with William ignoring the rest of us. I had the feeling that William was the only one in the room that he could take seriously.

  Back at the hotel Frances disappeared into William’s room for a half hour while I sat with Martha on the sofa with all of our energy having fled from us. Martha told me the settlement figures which made me mildly nauseous. Daryl was to receive fifty grand a year for three years, his lawyer twenty-five in all, and nearly twenty-five for two days of hospital intensive-care efforts. If Daryl attempted to contact any of us payments would cease. As he was always a clotheshorse of a dowdy sort I imagine Daryl walking the streets of New York buying items for the image he hoped to make in France.

  “What is she doing with my father for God’s sake?” Martha wondered.

  “Getting advice.” I didn’t feel nervous about this.

  “I don’t want to go home but I have to, at least for a while.” Martha wasn’t smiling. “Jack will be a martyr about that money which would have eventually come to me and I’ll say something stupid like Shut up, it’s not yours. Money is exhausting isn’t it?”

  I had no answer but kept thinking about the question on the way to the airport. We dropped Frances at the international terminal. She was headed for Mexico City to visit art museums and think things over. The rest of us would fly to Detroit. I’d spend the night with Mother and we’d talk about what to do about Dad who was well past thinking about us. By not so divine coincidence we drove past Daryl getting out of his cab looking like he had won the world.

  Tracking

  Part I

  What the Boy Saw

  WHAT IS WATER? WAS THE FIRST REMEMBERED QUESTION. H2O, they said, which is to put a Cub Scout beanie on a bear. Two small creeks entered the lake through narrow swamps on the west end. An even smaller creek left the lake through a large swamp on the east end where fly-eating plants grew below a tall white pine where a great blue heron nested each spring. Beneath the surface of the lake schools of bluegills hid under upraised logs. Underneath dense floats of lily pads there were schools of fish and frogs’ eggs hanging in mucus-enshrouded clumps from the lily pad.

  Sitting beneath the dock in chest-deep water and looking up at his aunt’s body cut in sections by the dock boards with the smell of a wet bathing suit against warm wood. Peeking through the window of a cabin down the shore where a woman’s big butt seemed to fall out when she stripped down her bathing suit. He thought of the baby muskrat he had found drowned in the green reed bed. It was raining that day and the woman’s log cabin smelled like rain, as did the woods and his wet clothes. His father was an agriculturalist so rain was thought to be glorious. Rain dimpling the lake and sometimes covering it in windblown sheets, the sky split with lightning and hollow thunder filling the bowl of the lake. He fished in rain, walked in rain, drank from rain-swollen creeks that smelled like drowned worms, slept in a World War II-surplus wool army blanket in the woods in the rain peeking out at a forest of fern stalks, a small garter snake passing slowly from left to right, once hearing the womanly shriek of a bobcat.

  When they swam the big girl down the lake would try to strangle him with her legs. He helped to dry her with a towel and she always smelled like licorice. She peed in the woods and rowed a boat very fast. She slapped him for no reason and showed him her breasts which were flat like his own, if not flatter. In a hot damp surplus pup tent she had him lie facedown on her back. There were crows in the air. In the tent near the front flap he arranged three deer skulls, rare because porcupines in the area ate all the bones of dead creatures. Sliding your hand through the muck at the lake’s bottom you found surprisingly few fish bones but he had been told that the turtles in the lake fed on dead fish. His dad said that when something dies something else is always there to eat it.

  He kept running into things on his left because he had been blinded in his left eye, especially trees in the close-knit forest that ran a dozen miles north behind the cabin. About three miles back the forest broke here and there into huge gulleys of white pine stumps, bracken, and wild berry bushes. At the bottom on one of the gulleys there was a small spring surrounded by sedges and watercress. He thought of it as his spring because there were no footprints other than those of deer. The water was crys talline and he would stick his head in it to take away the ache of his blinded eye. Down from the spring there was an algae-laden pond where lived the largest water snake he’d ever seen. It was aggressive and would come at him. He snuck up on the gulleys and shot long arcing arrows at deer but never hit anything. He carried a canteen and a can of beans and an opener in a small canvas bag for lunch. Finally he shot a ruffed grouse with the bow and arrow and cooked it over a fire but not long enough. He ate it anyway.

  They lived on his grandparents’ farm when he was little and his dad was out of work. The language of the cows, horses, pigs, chickens, and dogs was as hard to understand as the Swedish preacher at the Swedish Lutheran Church on Sunday. He tried to be in the dining room when his aunt bathed herself in the big tin tub. There was no indoor plumbing. The privy was out near the pigpen and the granary full of corn and wheat. His grandfather who came from Sweden and his father took turns plowing with the horses, men and horses soaked with sweat. On Sundays they played pinochle, sipped whiskey and coffee with sugar. He read on the floor so he could see up the skirt of his young aunt whenever possible; this love would go on forever.

  They lived in a small town of fifteen hundred souls in a big house that cost thirty-five hundred dollars. He peed the bed and his left leg ached because it was slightly malformed. His father was an agricultural agent who traveled throughout the county advising farmers. Now there were five: John, James, Judith, Mary, and David with the last two coming within ten months of each other. He absorbed the lifelong fear that the furnace would quit when it was below zero in the winter. He went to the movies and the town library once a week. He got the idea from the library and movies that everyone, in fact, was a story. For instance he knew that Great-uncle Nelse who lived in a shack back in the forest was disappointed in love forty years before. Tobacco juice ran down his chin through whisker stubble. He had a tin can full of Swedish coins and a crank-up Victrola on which he played Fritz Kreisler violin music. Nelse served them such rarities as beaver tail and fried muskrat. He loved whiskey and bathed rarely.

  He knew his own story was short: boy blinded in left eye by girl in woodlot behind town hospital near clinker pile. Weapon was broken beaker. Generally happy except for the fact that his dog Penny was taken after she became too aggressive in his protection. Loved fishing, cows, and pigs. It wasn’t a long story for which you needed a suit, job, hat, and quick banter like Cary Grant in New York City, learn to dance on chairs like Al Jolson, discover ancient temples of the Maya in the manner of Richard Halliburton, fight in the Pacific like his dad’s brothers Walter and Artie but then World War II was just over and he had missed the fighting.

  His father had dug on the pipeline for two years living in a tent even in winter to help pay his way through Michigan Agricultural College. His mother went to County Normal a year and taught school before she married. To finish high school she had worked as a servant girl in Big Rapids as did her s
isters Grace, Inez, and Evelyn. These stories weren’t as interesting as Grandpa John who came from Sweden with his brothers and took the train in the 1880s to Wyoming to become a cowboy. Grandpa Arthur on the other side of the family had been a lumberjack and floated down huge rivers on giant logs. His wife, Mandy, was related to Mennonites from Switzerland who were now farmers downstate near Ithaca. When his family visited people there he sometimes sat in the car and listened to the Detroit Tigers on the radio. The Mennonites weren’t allowed radios and their kids would stand around the car’s open windows listening. Sometimes he would switch to a music station and they would step back nervously.

  In the haymow of the barn he had his pages torn from an old Montgomery Ward catalog of girdle ads which weren’t totally satisfying because the pictures were only from the waist down and the women were maybe not real women but mannequins. A better picture was torn from Good Housekeeping of a woman in underpants who used a particular powder for a particular itch.

  Church and Sunday school were troubling. He loved a girl he had met at the fair. She limped because her heifer had stepped on her foot. The heifer won fifth place in the 4-H (head, heart, hands, health) show. She had an overbite and they held sticky hands. She laughed when he wiped cotton candy off her nose. After the fair was over he fantasized that they were swimming across a big turbulent river in the nude. She began to drown and wrapped her body around his. He was a good swimmer and saved her life. He saw her once on the street for a moment when he rode to Evart with his dad in late August before school started. Her name was Emily and she had on a green dress. Her legs were brown and she smelled like Ivory soap. Her glasses had tape around the nose bridge. In September he read in the Osceola County Herald that she was riding in the back of a pickup with her brothers and sisters when her dad swerved to avoid a deer. She was thrown out, her head hit a tree, and she died. There was the feeling from church that maybe his dirty swimming fantasies were at fault, he thought, sitting on the rusty seat of a hayrake out by the pond where in the mulberry bushes there was the unmistakable evidence of cow’s bones. He was a Christian boy and glanced at the sky for answers. In November at butchering time he kept thinking of Emily, how quickly the future leaves us when the pig’s throat is cut, downcast at the circular splotch of blood on his foot. He had known the pig well, calling him Harry after President Truman. A kid in his class had died right when school let out in June. His heart was bad, and his face was purplish, and he had trouble walking up the stairs. He thought of this dead boy while picking potato bugs for a quarter a morning’s work, dropping the bugs mercilessly in a can with a little kerosene in the bottom where they would perish.