The Lost Father

  “No. I don’t want the hassle. But I’ll scare him a little. I want him to know that someone is always watching. I want him to live like that from now on, looking over his shoulder.”

  And then I had the afternoon to wait. Dickinson was less than an hour’s drive. I thought I’d just go and wait at the airport. But I wanted to be clean.

  On the main street there was one old black brick building that said Deacon Hotel, but I didn’t want to sleep in Hebron. I wound around until I found Bell Junior High, but it was locked, not a school anymore. I drove back to the elementary school I’d seen. The floors echoed and I found myself in a tiny bathroom, marked girls, with tiny toilets, sinks that hit my thighs and a long rectilinear mirror. There was a bubbler just over knee high. I washed and combed my hair and put on something better. My shirt had a dried reddish stain where I’d spilled catsup. Things weren’t lasting. I knelt down and drank from the little bubbler. The water was warm and nickel-tasting.

  Outside of Dickinson, big handmade signs stood along the highway. SPORTS SHOW, STARK COUNTY ARENA.

  And I passed the huge pale green domed building, the late-day sun glittering on the many cars quilting the tar lots. Then I thought, What the hell, and turned around. I parked, locked my six things in the trunk and walked across the long lot to the entry where I paid the five-dollar admission fee. I strolled up an improvised aisle where International Harvester Tractors were displayed, gorgeously, next to power boats. I gave a dollar to the raffle for a catamaran. I stood in line with numerous children to catch trout in three huge tanks of water. The kids walked with the dead fish in plastic bags. I got almost to the front, and then I thought of the fish smell in my grandmother’s car and ducked under the yellow cord that kept the line.

  I just ambled up and down the aisles of equipment. Fishing poles, water skis, a fleet of nineteen orange-and-white snowmobiles. None of this would I ever use. I took a light interest in the colored flies, the oversized crop machinery. It was no more or less than most of the days of my life had become. I had veered off, out of the procession, and all of time had this quality of precarious lightness, subject to tilting over into another life altogether.

  The airport told me that the first flight in would be at midnight and so I did what Mai linn had told me. I checked into the Ramada and left a key at the desk for her.

  I slept dimly, rising up into the strange air, then sighing and slipping under again. Finally, I heard her key in the door.

  “Should I get up?”

  “No, I’ll come to bed for a while.”

  I heard her unfastenings and droppings and the strange room felt more curved and round and I fell asleep with her weight so I could touch it with my right hand.

  We got up late and took showers and dressed. I sat on the bed combing out the tangles in my hair. It was so nice to have a friend with me here.

  She pulled up her jeans and tied on suede shoes. She always dressed like that but she stood staring down at herself with a crossed brow.

  “You look fine.”

  “I was wondering if I should’ve brought a dress or something. I’d kind of like to prove I’ve gone up in the world.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t say why, but I knew that wasn’t right.

  We dallied in the hotel. We swam in the pool. We didn’t want to get to the house before he was home from work.

  Mai linn, all those years later, gave me directions to Hebron on a back road.

  “Now I’m nervous,” she said. We were still two blocks away but they were straight blocks and we could see ahead through the filtering chestnuts.

  “God, I’m almost as scared about this as I would be meeting my father.”

  “He’s not my father.”

  “I know.”

  “My father wouldn’t have made you nervous. My father was sweet. A gentle guy.”

  Then when we parked the car and sat there a moment, I asked her if there was one thing she wanted from him that he could give her that would help her in her life. People had asked me that. And I didn’t know.

  She sat in the car, miserable, and said, “Tickling.”

  I just looked at her. She had to know I wouldn’t get what that meant.

  “When I came there I was ticklish and when I left, I wasn’t anymore. That and a few other things. Little kinds of pain. Like you know, you’ve seen how I can touch my hands with matches.”

  I had seen Mai linn do that. It was a kind of trick. But that trick did not seem something he could take away and the tickling not something he had in him to give back.

  Mai linn didn’t want to come up to the door with me. She didn’t want to see the mother or the sons. One was just a baby when she’d left. So she was going to wait in the trees behind the old junior high, a block and a half away. I had to get him there.

  I didn’t feel really odd until my heels creaked the wooden steps up to the door. The car glittered across the street. I stood there a minute smelling the fine edge of rot in the air, from melting snow. Then I knocked. A woman opened the door, wearing an apron, saying, “Hullo, what can I do for you?”

  I told her my name and that I was a friend of Mai linn.

  Her face endured two acrobat flips before she said, “Oh,” and stuck out a slick wet hand for me to shake.

  “Daddy, there’s a friend here of that little Mai linn,” she called into a room I couldn’t see. I heard the mumbling underwater sounds of a television. “He’ll be right out. I’m just frosting a cake,” she told me. “Come follow me into the kitchen.” I stood there while she emptied the contents of a box mix into a bowl, measured water and then stirred. She shook in a few drops of food coloring that came out a deep orange but then mixed to a thin pale yellow. So she used mix. The empty batter box still stood right on the table. And frosting is so easy, I was thinking. It’s just powdered sugar and a little butter and milk. That was all.

  “So where did you say you were from?” She wasn’t old, only about fifty, and competent, making a routine social conversation the same way she armed the spoon in the bowl. Now she was spreading the pale yellow frosting on the cake. She did it nicely, swelled apostrophes of swirl, so by the end the whole cake would look even and professional.

  “I’m from, uh, Boston, and I’m driving to Oregon. To see my dad.” I didn’t want them to know anything true. Not that she seemed so interested.

  “That’s nice.”

  Her cake finished now, she lowered a glass cover over it and immediately pulled open a drawer and counted out silverware. Then she began to set the table. “Well, you know, we haven’t seen Mai linn for quite a while now. I’m surprised she even gave out our address because I don’t get a thing from her, never a card on my birthday or the kids’, or even a call on Christmas. Never a word.”

  There was nothing I could say to that.

  She took a hot pan from the oven, her hand in a quilted glove. She cooked the way she no doubt did other things: with the proper equipment, updated regularly, and in perfect order. The pan held scalloped potatoes she set on a hot plate. From the refrigerator she took out parsley and chopped it, then sprinkled it over the dish. She was a woman unlikely to fault herself. Crouching down on the balls of her feet, she opened the broiler. Pork chops. They smelled good. She poked them with a fork, checking. Then she went into the other room, her hands on her hips, and called, “Daddy, come talk to that little Mai linn’s friend because then we’re going to eat in a few minutes. Scottie,” she called up the stairs, one arm bracing the banister, her back arching, “supper! Get your hands washed now.” A blast from a stereo jolted up in volume.

  I bit my nail while she turned away. This wasn’t working out right. They were going to eat and she’d set three places.

  Then he came out from wherever he was. I tried so hard to look at him that everything went fast. He was not a large man. He wore narrow, stiff-looking slacks and a button-down shirt under a vest. The vest was mostly wool with two suede panels. His face seemed multi-faceted like a cut stone, more
than octagonal. “I haven’t taken him out yet,” he said.

  “Oh, you better hurry. That’s our dog, Moxie,” she said. “Here Moxie. Here Moxie Moxie.” She coaxed the dog from under a low table with her hands, squatting down on her heels.

  He lifted the leash from a peg by the door and fastened it onto the collar. He seemed a man of small movements. I walked out with him, down the porch, then left on the sidewalk under bare, high elms. Good, this was the right way. At the end of the road we could see the playground, gold and empty in the still late-afternoon light. I couldn’t see Mai linn but I knew she was there, in the small stand of trees. They were pine trees, not very tall. Beyond them you could see an old and peeling playground merry-go-round, the kind made of wood and piping that you ran to make it go on its own and then you jumped aboard and held on and rode round and round that centripetal whirl.

  “So you know Mai linn,” he said. He tapped a cigarette out of a pack from his vest pocket and lit it carefully. “She ran away from here,” he said. “We never saw her again.”

  I kept looking at this man, a high school teacher. Band leader.

  “Well, she’s doing real well now. She’s a musician. Getting her Ph.D.”

  “Is she really? Well, that I’m surprised by. She played that horn here too, but I thought she’d end up in trouble. She was kind of a troubled kid when she was here, always playing her horn all hours of the night, you couldn’t stop her, my wife had to send away for special ear plugs.”

  The dog was rooting out a hole under a hickory tree, straining at his leash, then squatted in the compromised position every animal on the earth assumes, relieving himself, glancing back over his shoulder at us curiously.

  “ ’At’s okay, Moxie, uza good dog,” he said. When the dog finished and came trotting proudly back to our ankles, he turned again on the sidewalk, my heel hitting an old hickory nut, half eaten out by squirrels, its fibers and planes like the inside of a tiny skull. Oh no, not this way, I was thinking, but we were moving on, the park and its trees glittering in the last gilt light across the shallow street. We didn’t say anything for a while and the corner where we’d turn again to go back to the house came closer and closer until finally I knew there was a chance nothing would happen. The house would come into vision and loom bigger and bigger and Mai linn would stay hidden in the trees and he would escape inside again without me having done anything.

  “Well, give us her address and I’ll drop her a card sometime. I’m glad she pulled herself up and made something of her life.” He shook his head, dropping the cigarette and stamping it out with his shoe. “Like I said, I’m surprised.” He shook his head again as if he still couldn’t believe it.

  “I know what you did,” I said.

  He didn’t answer. His profile stayed forward as if I hadn’t said anything. But then the dog saved the day, turning and straining towards the abandoned playground. We crossed the road and I wondered for a second if I really had said the words out loud, everything was so much like before. We still didn’t say anything and the air was very quiet and the trees came closer and closer and my throat was closing and then we were there and nothing happened and I thought he would look at me and see through my skin to everything and I would be wrong.

  He tapped another cigarette out of his pack and now cupped his hand around it, flicked the match away. He shook his wrist then and profiled the cloudy, darkening sky just the red tip alive, brighting the dusk. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he finally said.

  “Yeah you do.” My voice was more level than I’d thought it would be, saying it, and behind him I saw a tire hanging on an old rope from a large oak tree and the strip of worn-away grass below it.

  He looked at me sharp like it was easy not to believe me because I was a crazy person. I knew that gaze; I’d been caught in it with people aiming at my mother. And my mother had done it to me.

  “Don’t believe everything she tells you,” he said. “She’s a liar. I can’t say we were sorry when she left.”

  I blushed. Mai linn did lie, I knew that, I could tell just when she did. She lied when she was bored and wanted to make something a little better, or when she was trying to get out of something. Or when she was really scared.

  “But she didn’t lie about this, though,” I said.

  Then Mai linn stepped out from behind the broad trunk of a tree and started walking towards us, her hands in her pockets. Her eyes were dark and her chin squared. She looked straight at him, without wavering.

  The dog whimpered against his owner’s leg. The man yanked the dog’s leash up and looked down at it, deliberately, he patted the dog’s head so we had to wait for him to finish and look up again.

  Mai linn stopped a few feet away from him.

  He raised himself up and looked at her and pulled at the dog’s leash again. “Come a Moxie,” and turned the dog away from the trees. He dropped his used cigarette, ground it down with his heel. Then, he looked sideways, as if it were nothing, and said, “What are you doing? Why didn’t you tell me she was here?”

  “I wanted to see you myself.”

  He shrugged, tapped out a cigarette from his breast pocket again, lit it, scut the match down. “Now you seen me.”

  They were at angles. He still wasn’t facing her straight. She knew when to be silent.

  “Listen, I don’t know your friend, but talk to me after you’ve raised children and taken in foster kids who are messed up to begin with. I felt sorry for you. It wasn’t your fault you were sneaky. You did what you had to do.”

  “But you could have been different. Instead of what you were.”

  The dog was rooting in the grass and then he snaked free of the man’s hand and sniffed further, belly almost flat on the dirt.

  And then all of a sudden they were alone. He didn’t follow the dog, but moved an increment nearer her. Her head bent down like a flower too heavy for its stem. I was a third. Don’t, I felt like saying, but they started walking away towards the old school. They stood almost like lovers, both their shoulders square and even. I didn’t follow them, I thought I shouldn’t, but I didn’t want to let them out of sight either. I went a little ways and sat down next to the curb. The dog made a disagreeable snuffling sound near my knees.

  They walked around the playground lot and then they started down the street towards the house. When he turned and called, the dog ran back, dragging its leash, grateful to be wanted. For a moment I felt an absurd jealousy.

  Near the house they stood and waited for me. He was still smoking.

  He shook his head, bent down and rubbed the dog. Then the wife appeared on the porch, another mixing bowl in her arm. “There you are. Your supper’s ready. Scotty’s sitting at the table.”

  “We’re writing letters to people,” I said in a plain voice.

  He was already walking in, mumbling to the dog. He didn’t even say good-bye.

  The wife closed the door sealing him inside. She clearly saw Mai linn and closed the door anyway. It was easy to hate her the most of anyone.

  We walked back to the car, like a home in the dark. Mai linn shook her head. “Let’s get out of here.”

  SHE DROVE WITH ME as far as Williston.

  We stopped at roadside stands and ate things we knew from childhood: French fries, wrinkled at their ends and translucent with dark grease, root beer floats, biscuits and roast beef sandwiches, even though Mai linn was most of the time a vegetarian.

  “Mai linn, you know her homemade cakes are just mixes. Pillsbury. The cheapest kind of mix even,” I said.

  “Oh, I know, she always did that. I told you she used powdered milk.”

  After a while, Mai linn said, “You know, sex is the thing, though. I can never go through with it without some bad idea.” She jabbed that out, eyes straight ahead, chin fair.

  “What do you mean, bad?”

  And she said, “No, really bad like one person having power over another or one of them a little kid.” She snorted. “Wonder whe
re that comes from.”

  I believed her absolutely and I knew what she meant because her first time with the artist in San Francisco, she’d told me she kept her eyes closed and it flickered back and forth between two ways, the one where she was a girl on an altar, sacrificed, laid on a clean white cloth, and the other, some ancient queen and him a servant, a boy just being used, meaningless, a pure mechanic instrument of pleasure.

  “Remember your infection?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  When Mai linn and the asshole artist started having regular sex, she got allergic. A rash spread all over, her nipples cracked with infection, oozing a yellow liquid, her eyes closed to slits, dry and red. She was going to Berkeley and the doctor at the student health center kept making Kevin June take away one thing at a time: his shaving cream, soap, deodorant, shampoo.

  “He doesn’t use shampoo,” she’d told the doctor. “He just washes his hair with Ivory soap. He grew up kind of poor. He’s proud of it. It’s one of his things.”

  She bled for nine weeks. The doctor never found what it was. That was around the same time my periods pretty much stopped.

  “You think we’ll ever get normal with this?” She opened a window and was dragging her hand outside. The air was cold but the sky was wide and blue with dreamy wisps of cloud.

  For me, what I imagined most of the nights, was a first time. A nice good way for it to have been. “I’m not even sure how unusual what we do is.”

  “It’s not good.”

  “No.”

  “I mean it’s not what you’d wish for for your kids.”

  “No. I’ve thought of that with Jane, like when she’s old enough. I can imagine her with a guy, like that blond boy who lives next door to them now, and I can imagine them so she’s not more and he’s not more.” They hated each other now and didn’t even know how much they were friends.

  “Yeah, but she’s little. Who knows what’ll happen to her.”

  “Hope nothing. At least it wasn’t your parents. Your parents would have taken care of you if they’d lived.”

  “I know.”

  The day seemed to billow out into eternity. We went on like that in our consoling fugue. I thought of her ticklishness but I was afraid to say anything. I couldn’t see how it would be any different.