It was late afternoon when I flew through Fairview Heights and into East St. Louis. East St. Louis happens slowly. Cut fences. Buildings spray-painted with numbers and names. Bags of garbage left even on road islands. Pretty soon you see that the little stores are boarded up and things—everything—looks like they were burned up. Or at least touched by a lot of heat.
There’s a scorched feel about the wide sidewalks and metal-clamped stores. It was September 17. I had been riding for twenty-one days, and even though the sky had a soft sun going into blue and the weather was very comfortable, I was feeling discouraged for the first time. For the stretch of a mile past the vacant stores, I didn’t see anyone. A dog chased me for about a hundred yards or so—that’s it. At the next intersection, I found a self-serve gas station and stopped to use the phone. The attendant sat in a concrete bunker with eye slots made of thick Plexiglas. There was a drop for money for the gas machines, which he could operate from inside. One sign read EXACT CHANGE REQUIRED. Another sign read ANYONE MESSING WITH PUMPS WILL BE SHOT BY ATTENDANT. I spoke into the little voice box.
“Hi,” I said.
The attendant’s eyes stared out at me.
“Listen, I’m trying to find a pay phone.”
The eyes kept staring at me. They seemed more concrete than the little square building he was in.
“Pay phone,” I said, mimicking dialing.
After a few more seconds, I walked to my bike and pedaled on. About ten minutes later, I found a small variety store in the middle of an abandoned block. Its signs were in both English and some Asian language. There were some young black kids, boys and girls, standing around on the sidewalk. I asked them if there was a pay phone around, and a girl pointed to the store.
An elderly Oriental man sat on a rocking chair in front of a display of Campbell’s Soup, and a young woman, also Oriental, stood waiting behind the counter.
“Pay phone?” I asked.
“There.” She pointed.
“I’m going to buy something, too. I’m just gonna use the pay phone first.”
A woman picked up on the second ring.
“Uh-huh.”
“Yes. Yes. I’m trying to reach Bill Butler. I guess William Butler.”
“You tryin’ for Bill Butler?”
“Yes. I’m Smithy Ide.”
“You Ide?”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence, and it wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. It was a nothing kind of silence.
“Is this the Bill Butler that was in Vietnam?”
“He was in Vietnam. Uh-huh. Who this?”
“This is Smithy Ide. Ide. Bill saved my life.”
“He never said nothin’ ’bout savin’ anything.”
“Is he there?”
She laughed.
“Will he be around later? I’m in East St. Louis, and—”
“Where?”
“Where am I?” I yelled over to the standing woman.
“You are in Great-Full Sunrise Food store.”
“Great-Full Sunrise Food store,” I said into the phone.
“Chink store?”
“Uhhh . . . okay.”
“Go two blocks more into the city, and on the corner they be a bunch of brick buildings. Each building got a number. Butler number be eleven. We be apartment 417.”
“Number eleven. Number 417. Okay.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, and hung up.
I bought some chewing gum at Great-Full Sunrise Food store. I probably should have bought more, because I promised and everything, but I wasn’t hungry at all, having eaten four bananas for lunch.
I found number eleven, and then I stood outside door 417. I thought about my sister. I thought hard about her, because, besides being the most filthy, dirty place I had ever stood, even in-country, the halls smelled like Bethany’s hippie commune, where they used their own fertilizer. It was that awful. How could people live here? What could they do to make it all right? It’s true, then—people can take anything.
“You Ide?”
“Yes.”
She was an enormous human being with straightened hair dyed a sort of yellow-orange. The skin was brown and smooth, but there was clearly a lot more of it than a person should have.
“I’m Theresa. Where you parked?”
“I’m on a bike. It’s downstairs by the elevator.”
“Don’t use the elevator. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“No.”
“Get your bike and bring it up here.”
I went back down by the stairs and got my bike. I didn’t want to take it back up the stairs because it smelled actually worse than the rest of the building. She held the door open so I could wheel my bike in.
Inside, Theresa’s house was perfect. A nice smell of sudsy ammonia came from the kitchen floor. Yellow curtains hung gracefully, covering the window bars. A rug of great beauty, light brown, with a ring of woven blackbirds, lay under a blond dining-room table. A piano was in the living room, an old upright that shined under a coat of blue lacquer. The living room had a maroon wall-to-wall carpet, a curved green corduroy couch, a recliner with a side stick control, and a black John F. Kennedy rocking chair with green cushions. A large TV was turned on, and a little boy, maybe four, watched a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
“I never seen a white man here. Never. Thirty-two years. My mama’s place, now mine. Never seen one. Even send the black police. You police?”
“No, ma’am. I’m Smithy Ide. Bill saved my life.”
She threw her head back and laughed again. A high and complete laugh.
“That Bill, oh, yes, that Bill. He save lives. He don’t say nothin’.”
I saw Bill’s picture. He was in his uniform, and he smiled out of the glass set on the piano. Next to him was an arrangement of different black people in different periods of an American time.
“This Bill,” she said, pointing and smiling, so that her beautiful teeth shined out of her mouth.
“And this Bill’s father, Bill, and this Bill’s boy Bill.”
“Your boy?”
“Uh-huh,” she said seriously.
“And Moona, that’s what we all called him. Our gramps.”
A man with close-cropped hair, comfortable in a World War I uniform, sergeant stripes on his sleeve, stared into the room importantly.
“And this Bill’s boy Alvin.”
“Yours, too,” I said happily.
“Uh-uh,” she said, shaking her head. “And my mama, and Bill’s mama, who died a young girl, and my girl, Lorraine, who not Bill’s, and Grandma Butler, who wrote a history book and was a dentist. I’m not foolin’. She go out of St. Louis in 1921, and she come home from Boston, and we got the papers. She had her office on Brookmayer, and Bill’s gramps and his grams lived by the mayor’s. That’s true.”
“I believe you.”
“Sit.”
I did.
“Bill saved your life?”
I told her. Theresa was silent for a little bit. Tom and Jerry music played in the background, but her difficult breathing pretty much drowned it out. She straightened some things on the upright and sat down on the piano bench. She wasn’t old. She couldn’t have been much more than forty, but she was as tired as anyone I had ever seen, and it made her seem old. Very old.
“Bill, he just fill up a place with Bill. He so happy and so . . . filling, you understand. He always, never ever not, happy. He think he win with that smile and that laugh and the way he touch people, and I mean even the ladies, which sometime make me cry, but it nice to see how he get everybody laughing and such. That big smile. His big face. And he good. That thing that good about folks, so big in Bill. Big. Dancin’ and singin’ and laughin’. Too bad, too bad. That Bill’s thing. That what Bill does. He pick up people. He get people up. I’m not surprised he save you. You understand? He savin’ them all with that laugh and that smile, but nobody miss it till they push him away. And till he have to make Bill laugh himself. Bill dance for himself.
Wine do that. More and more of that dancin’ for himself.”
Theresa looked into the room at the little boy. “You put that lower, hear!” she shouted.
“Bill sometime come, but not for a long time. He out there. You seen them. He a wine man now. Bill a wine man.”
Theresa stopped talking. She looked at me passively, a matter-of-fact look, but something happened in that big body and that flat face. She began to cry. I reached over to touch her hand, but she pulled away as if I were something hot.
“That it. Nothin’ more. If I ever see him again, I say the man who you save be here. If I see him.”
Theresa didn’t have to tell me that she didn’t feel very good about having me in her house, her apartment. I said thank you and went over to my bike. I had turned it facing the door, when it opened and a young man, nineteen or twenty, walked in. I never say things like this, but I promise you he looked more like Bill than Bill did. We stared at each other.
“I’m Smithy Ide,” I said.
“He know Bill. He know your father,” Theresa said, almost apologetically.
“Your father saved my life.”
“He Bill’s boy Bill,” Theresa said wearily.
I reached out my hand. In one fluid motion, as fast as I imagined the old gunfighters were, Bill slapped my hand away and brought a small blue metal handgun up to my face. Theresa let out a scream and fell onto her knees praying to God. The little boy ran in and stood next to his enormous mother. My mouth went dry. I felt dizzy.
“He gonna be shot, Bill?” the little boy asked.
Bill took a deep breath and seemed to suck all the energy from the room. His torso expanded out as if challenging the world.
“Sure I’m gonna shoot him. Shit. The white man know the drunk. He know the drunk.”
Theresa’s prayers and exhortations for mercy for me had dropped to a soft, sobbing mumble.
“He know the drunk piss himself. He know the down drunk. He know the clown drunk. The clown drunk save his white ass.”
“Baby, no, baby, baby,” sobbed Theresa, crawling, really crawling on her hands and knees, to her son.
“Mama, stop! Mama, get up! Charles, get your mama out of here.”
“I can’t get Mama anywhere, Bill. Mama too big.”
“Baby, no. Baby boy, no.”
“Stop!”
Bill’s eyes were wet at the sight of his mother prone in front of him. What had happened between him and my Bill, or white people or anything for that matter, didn’t seem important. I could feel the barrel now pushed into my left eye. Theresa was grasping at his pants.
“Please. Oh, God of the righteous, please save my boy. Render his heart . . . oh, baby. Oh God, please.”
Bill turned from his mother and glared at me. Tears were now pouring down his black face. The wet lines of rage shone, and his terrible hand shook. Slowly he lowered the gun.
“White man,” he groaned at me. “White, white man.”
He looked down at his mother. I could feel some blood flowing into my legs. I pushed my Moto out of the apartment and ran down the stairs. There were lots of young black men in the dirt front yard. No one seemed older than thirty. There were no women either. I walked my bike past them. The sun was sinking red.
“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,” I said stupidly, stupidly, stupidly.
I couldn’t take a full breath. I got onto the bike, and for the first time since my pop ran around behind me while I tried to balance without training wheels, I had to concentrate on the act of pedaling. I turned onto the first street I came to, then took another turn, convinced that young Bill just might change his mind.
INTERLUDE
Dear Smithy,
This is my own letter to you, only I won’t send it. I’m writing this by a window in my room, and the window is open. Outside, the maple in your yard is fluttering, and I’m just going to let that breeze carry this to you, because it can and because I truly believe that words can float.
I have done everything, or started everything, right here. My things comfort me, my work sustains me, my reading informs me, the music I’ve gone in and around with colors me and adds texture to it all. So it was not only good to savor or learn to savor what’s mine but somehow right to arrange things so I wouldn’t be broken by my experience. Do you understand that? Not can you, but do you? I know you can understand everything because I see you still bringing her back again and again, whispering to her, books in your back pocket. You.
And I know you stopped understanding, because it was easier, only you can’t anymore. You’re needed, and you have to arrive. And I have to arrive, too. Because I’m needed. You tell me over and over that you don’t know, but you do. As much as anybody can know. It’s all pretend, Smithy Ide. It’s all how we construct the world. I refuse to believe that you don’t see that. We have to get through, and if we’re really lucky, we can find somebody to get through with. To share the map. To make the good choices and the bad choices.
Maybe I have been a fool. I don’t think so, but I don’t care if I was. The sky and my dreams all mix together. For so long I couldn’t get back to me. I couldn’t sense if it was warm or cold or snowy or anything. And it wasn’t my body, which in so many ways hasn’t failed me. Has been there in its incompleteness and at the same time made me complete. Yes, I know you can understand that, too. Maybe you shake your head and say you don’t know, but that just won’t work anymore. You need more, and people need more than a head shake.
I’m cold now. My arms are getting goose bumps, and my breath is fogging. I’d better close the window. I’d better finish the draft of the yacht and move on to the new Fleet Banking Center I’m doing the drawing of. But before I close it, I have to throw one more thing into the wind. When I was twenty-two, I cut my foot somehow and, of course, couldn’t feel it. Didn’t notice it until it started to swell, and I had to get it drained at the hospital. They almost took it off. Yes, they almost did. I cried and cried, and they didn’t understand that. They said my feet were just in the way. They honest-to-God said that. Because of the infection and the medication and really because I hadn’t yet started to work out and take responsibility for myself, I sort of went into a five-day, hospital-room dream. And in that dream I walked with a boy all around East Providence. Everywhere I remembered. We walked holding hands, and we both wore our hair long, and it kept bouncing onto our shoulders. And then we were walking in other places. Past rivers with mountains in the distance and flowers in high meadows. Indian paintbrushes and mountain lupine and asters and columbines. And he said, “I hope you will think of me.” I dreamed that. But I believe it happened. And I believe that boy was true and very beautiful.
I’m closing the window,
Norma
40
I sat in my pop’s den looking at the phone. I wanted to call Bethany’s new doctor, Georgina Glass. If I called, I could say, “I’d like to come over, maybe discuss Bethany’s progress, maybe take a walk while we talk, maybe you could tell me about those blow jobs.” I know. I look at things, always look at things, wrong. I’d just like a date. I could say something like, “Hi, I’m not sure you remember me, but I’m Smithson Ide, war hero, scars all over the place, and not yet all turned to shit, and I was wondering if maybe you’d like to go out with a young guy.” But there was the coach, and there was the doctor, and I’m fresh from the SEAL Sam assembly line. Why couldn’t she just call me? Hello? Is this Mr. Ide? May I call you Smithson? Do you think my breasts are too large or just about right? Could you come right over so we could discuss it? I wish things would happen like that.
Calls not made. Opportunities missed. I don’t want to dwell on that right now.
Bethany.
I picked Bethany up at the Thrift Center at Grace Church. She came out still wearing her apron. She was now seeing Dr. Glass, Georgina, every Tuesday and Thursday. We were all still pretty psychiatrist-shy at the Ide house, but we had to admit that Dr. Glass was a definite step up from “the golfer,”
as my pop had taken to calling Glenn Golden, who still refused to even consider the reality of Bethany’s voice and insisted instead that she was just sort of a nutty girl.
I had bought a 1968 VW Beetle. It was gray and ran good. I don’t think I could squeeze into one of them now, but then it was easy. My sister got into the passenger side.
“Drive slow,” she said.
“I always drive slow,” I said. “How was work?”
“It’s not work. It’s not really work. Don’t be a fuckoff.”
I was quiet. I guess work was not good. I watched the road. She watched me.
“Fucking asshole,” she said.
“Stop, jeez.”
“Stop, jeez,” she said, mimicking me.
I didn’t say anything. I took the fastest route to the east side of Providence. We took the Red Bridge.
“I jumped off this bridge. I almost died. I ruined everything. Thanks a fucking lot. Thanks for reminding me. Maybe I ought to do it again. Maybe then you’ll be happy. I hate you.”
I didn’t look at her. The Red Bridge. I took it without thinking. Maybe I deserved this.
“Maybe you ought to die. Maybe you ought to jump off the bridge. Maybe I ought to grab the steering wheel and put us both out of our misery.”
Bethany punched me in the arm.
“I’m not kidding,” she said.
“Stop.”
“Stop,” she mimicked.
I turned onto Waterman Avenue, then onto Blackstone Boulevard, and parked near the Brown Stadium. Bethany didn’t speak at all as we walked down the sidewalk to Dr. Glass. She met us at the door. She had on a blue skirt—pleated and hanging just an inch or two below her knees—a silky white blouse, and a string of large pearls that rested happily on her chest.
“Hey, sweetie,” Dr. Glass said, giving Bethany a kiss on the cheek.
“Hi,” bubbled my sister.
I would have felt a lot more comfortable if the name-caller had shown up for Dr. Glass, but I had the feeling Mr. Voice was too smart for that and was getting smarter.