10000 napkins

4
$3.95
EDITORS
FRONT COVER
JOE PETERSON
& MIKE BREHM
IAN HUNTLEY WALLACE
SPECIAL THANKS
WHITNEY LINDER
INSIDE FRONT COVER
KEVIN RIORDAN
JOHN BROWN
SUSAN PHILLIPS
Published Quarterly by StoryHead 1340 W.
GENIE
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JOE MCDONNELL
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FRANK GAARD
10000 NAPKINS
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I L L U S T R AT E D B Y M I K E B R E H M
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EVERY DAY I’M THERE
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ISSN:1071-3336
WILDERNESS
JOE PETERSON
TOWER OF BABEL
D AV I D G R E E N B E R G E R
I L L U S T R AT E D B Y J O E M C D O N N E L L
WOMAN’S FACE
K AT H R Y N S T E M W E D E L
THE VOICE
JOE PETERSON
I L L U S T R AT E D B Y M I K E B R E H M
DRAWING
FRANK GAARD
INSIDE BACK COVER AND BACK COVER
IAN HUNTLEY WALLACE
B Y N ATA L I E S . WA I N W R I G H T
W I T H D R AW I N G S B Y C H R I S W O O D WA R D
A woman met another woman
on the street. The second
woman seemed to be in pain.
She held a small bottle, which
had a stopper. When she
staggered, and nearly fell before
a car, the first woman, unthinking, rushed to help her.
“Are you all right?” she
asked.
“Take this,” the other
breathed.
“What?” asked the first
woman, startled and unsure of
what she had heard.
“Take this. Be careful. It is a
very literal genie. Wish
carefully.”
Finally, the woman came to herself. She remembered she had an appointment. No wonder she had
forgotten. A doctor’s appointment. But the woman
already knew what the doctor would tell her. The
pain had been information enough, and she
knew enough about the disease to understand:
by the time you knew, there was not much
hope. It would be cancer. Her mother had
had it, her great aunt. Probably others. She
went to the appointment anyway.
And it was cancer. Fourth stage.
The woman’s husband was there to pick
her up. The bottle was in her shoulder
bag, but he would not have noticed it
in any case. He knew from his wife’s
face the diagnosis, and he could not
help the tears that sneaked into his
eyes and forced their way out down his
face. He felt he should be strong, for
her.
They were not an old couple. In
their early forties, they had two young
children, seven and ten.What would the
children do, motherless? What would
the husband do without his wife of
The second woman went limp in the arms of the
other. The bottle dropped to the ground and rolled
a short distance. The first woman called to the bystanders, who had by now gathered around. “Call
an ambulance!” She laid the woman down gently,
knowing she was dead.
That bottle? She could not resist the mystery.
As if the mystery were necessarily hers, a young
boy picked up the bottle and gave it to the woman.
“Thank you,” she said absently, and oddly, began
to wander away. She dimly heard the sounds of the
ambulance as she walked.
twenty years? Neither spoke. They would try
surgery, chemotherapy. They might be lucky.
That night, the woman could not sleep. Pain, sadness, a thought that she was forgetting something.
The bottle. She quietly went to the living room
and found her bag.
She opened it. There was the bottle as it had
been. Quiet, inert. There could be no
magic. Still, it was a mystery.
She held the bottle for a moment, then
gripped the stopper and pulled. She waited
without much expectation. But then,
something seemed to change before
the woman’s eyes. Around the open
bottle the air seemed to thicken, to
coalesce and become opaque.
Another woman stood before her.
There was something familiar about
her, although perhaps it was only
that she looked very much like the
woman who had died on the street.
The woman from the bottle spoke.
“What do you want?”
A miracle. Complete remission!
Everyone was astonished and happy.
The husband, the children.
Time passed. There were moments
when the woman was tempted to make
the last wish, but for a feeling that
wishes could not be so inexpensive.That
and the dead woman’s warning.
Once when the family was in severe
trouble for money—the husband had
lost his job, the woman was not working, the children were expensive, and
“I believe I need to know the rules,”
said the first woman, remembering the
warning she had been given.
“Ah. Two wishes. Only.”
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
The woman was unsure what to do.
She was a deeply religious woman, in
her own way. Her commitments and
her actions had always held a profound
significance for her. What should she
do? Should she consult her husband?
Yet, given her present circumstances,
she did not feel that she could resist
the wishes themselves. How would it
be phrased? A literal genie. Very dangerous, no doubt. Perhaps simplicity
and humility would be the best. If she
were not greedy, who could fault her?
“I wish to be healthy,” she said
“Done,” said the other woman, and
vanished.
The woman went back to bed with
the illness, and when she woke, she did
not have it.
how could they owe so much in taxes? She
opened the bottle.
“What do you want?” said the genie-woman,
who looked more familiar than she had before.
“If I were to wish for wealth?”
“You would have it.”
The woman stoppered the bottle. She did not
trust it.Their financial troubles passed, not without leaving scars.
changed, grew older—except the
woman. She remained healthy. She
discovered, finally, how she was to
pay for her wish. Health precluded
aging, apparently.The woman’s husband grew older and older, the children became adults, she remained
the same.
When her husband’s love took on
bitterness and resentment, the
woman was tempted to tell him of
the genie and the bottle, and perhaps to wish for youth and health for
him, too. But she was afraid. The
genie was not kind, would not reward humility or lack of avarice.
The children, too, grew suspicious, and then resentful.
Another time, her daughter was
very, very ill. It was uncertain
whether the teenager would recover
from a drug overdose. The woman
unstoppered the bottle.The genie appeared. The woman understood now
the sense of familiarity. The woman
from the bottle now looked much like
her, not the woman from the street.
“What do you want?” the woman
who looked so much like her asked.
“If I asked for my daughter’s recovery?”
“You would have it.”
“And no more wishes?”
“Yes.”
The woman stoppered the bottle,
deciding to wait. Her daughter recovered, a changed girl.
The years passed, the family
Finally,
the
woman
realized
she could
not live
like this.
She
would
have
either to
run away
and live a
different
life
among
strangers,
or soothe
the bitterness of
those she
had
always
loved.
She could
not leave.
One night
she
unstoppered the
bottle.
The
woman
appeared,
now identical to the
other
woman in
the room.
“What do
you want?”
The
woman
thought
for a time.
How to
phrase
this?
Allow for
the least
damage?
“Please restore to me
the normal
aging processes.”
“Done.”
The
woman’s
double
disappeared. The bot-
She went back to her
of their life could be
tle was gone, too.
bed, stroking her
restored.
The woman went to
the mirror in the bathroom and stared at her
own face. Was that a
wrinkle already? She
hoped so.
sleeping husband as
she climbed in. He
was far on the other
side of their bed. Perhaps the better things
Just before she fell
asleep, the woman was
struck by a thought.
“I hope death is
included.
10000
NAPKINS
A N T H O N Y
B E R K L E Y
SHE CLUTCHES AN ODDLY
SHAPED PURSE WITH
BOTH HANDS
MEN DON’T BECOME AFRAID
THE WAY WOMEN DO. Jim was
standing on the top rung of a step
ladder fixing a light bulb in his
garage when his back gave out on
him. He felt a sharp pain in his
spine and then couldn’t move any
of his limbs. This lasted for minutes. After 30 years working for
the county, 45 years of marriage,
and 1 year of retirement, Jim
found himself frozen at an odd
angel six feet above a cement
floor, unable even to flinch. Immediately he thought about her,
not calling for help, not the ce-
ment floor, not accidental death,
only her. She flooded his mind, a
girl glimpsed from a moving train
forty years ago. See, he told Eddie
later, you don’t even have to go
anywhere. The great abyss is in
your own garage.
When a man’s back goes out it
is a lot like a bridge collapsing.
Not only do you have to clean up
the structural damage but you also
need to figure out how all that traffic is going to continue getting
from point A to point B. The doctor persuaded him to shorten his
golf swing, give up softball all together, and leave the heavy work
to younger men. Jim responded by
developing a new hobby: model
trains. If Virginia thought he
would be moping around the
house snacking all the time then
she was dead wrong. He rearranged the garage, put up four
sheets of plywood on two saw
horses, climbed back up the step
ladder to put in a clean bulb with
twice the wattage and on Mondays
and Thursdays began frequenting
Hunter’s Train & Hobby.
Jim models a fall day in 1945,
late afternoon with the sun still
strong in the sky, a cold wind
blowing off the lake and leaves
gathering in piles around the base
of the trees. There are a few people on the train platform, newly
arrived. Two boys lug sports
equipment. A grandmother holds
tears in her eyes. A man with a
briefcase and a blue suit points at
a girl, standing alone, waiting for a
train going the other direction.
Jim’s first and last impression was
that he had never seen a girl so
beautiful before, or so alone.
Everyone he knew and had ever
known, everyone he would ever
know, belonged to something, a
family, a school or a town, an
army. Not even in Europe had he
seen a girl with such strange clothing, a haircut that short.
She clutches an oddly shaped
purse with both hands, her feet
sort of planted there, not moving.
The train approaches without
slowing down. Jim can see her
clearly now, the arc of her face, the
pattern in her coat, matching
shoes, all so completely and perfectly out of place like a flower
brought back from the future.
Then she turns toward him. Their
eyes meet almost without seeing
each other and in that instant he
knew he needed to get off that
train. It was only an instant but he
knew he was making a lifetime of
THE SHOCK JERKED HIM OUT OF HIS SEAT
AND ONTO HIS FEET.
mistakes if he didn’t get
off, that no matter how
fast he got there he was
going in the wrong direction.
The shock jerked him
out of his seat and onto
his feet. He struggled to
maintain his balance
while the train shuddered
and clacked. Looking
around none of the other
passengers seemed to
have noticed. No conductor was in the car. They
were moving at least forty
miles an hour. And so the
train hurtles past her, past
the sledding hill covered
with orangey pine bushes,
past the centimeters of
plastic topsoil, past the
velvet baseball diamond,
past the painted toothpicks and molded tin foil.
The train shuttles past
Lake Michigan, an orgy of
details where ridges of
blue velvet lap like waves
along the rocky shoreline
and a shimmering image
of the afternoon sun contrasts with the water’s
greeny blue. The exposed
bulb hangs just above eye
level. Recently he lowered
it a foot by letting the
socket hang directly from
HE FELT HOW ALL THIS
COULD HAVE A SYMBOLIC
VALUE IN RELATIONSHIP TO
HIS LIFE, LIKE A CRECHE
HE HAD BUILT AND
DEVOTED TO HIMSELF. . .
SHE STILL FINDS IT HARD TO BELIEVE HOW QUICKLY HE
MADE THE TRANSITION FROM THE REAL WORLD TO THE
MINIATURE WORLD AND HOW MUCH JUNK IT REQUIRED.
the power chord, the extra light
becoming necessary for the detail
work as his eyes got worse. He is
perched on a high-backed chair
reading the local newspaper, The
Lake Towns’ Free Press. He
squints as he reads. SCIENTISTS
PREDICT. TIGERS LOSE. CHINESE GIRL RAISED BY PIGS.
The bang of the screen door interrupts him.
The screen door bangs again
and Virginia, wearing a house coat
over a pair of slacks and a blouse,
sets down a tray of dry sandwiches
on a strategically stationed stool,
placed carefully amid the work
benches, the boxes of unused or
already-used material for constructing miniatures, the quickand slow-setting glues, razor
blades, tiny watch tools, as well as
the implements required for direct
action in this life, a life-sized rake,
heavy and solid tackle box, sleds
leaning against the wall, equipment for the boat, an empty car
berth. She hates these scenes with
him in the garage over the newspaper.
“Did you hear they found this
naked Chinese girl raised by pigs
in some remote valley in China?
Her name is Fang Wang Chen.
Scientists at the linguistic institute
there want to teach her to speak
Chinese.”
She drops the tray and moves
back toward the door, stopping in
the door well and propping open
the spring-loaded screen with one
foot.
Not putting down the paper or
lifting up his eyes he says, “Sounds
like the name of one of those
restaurants in the mall. Probably
means something too. You know
how the Chinese are.”
“I need you to pick up something for me at The Store, Jim,
napkins, a big box of napkins.”
He folds and refolds the newspaper, shoulders hunched over,
searching and searching for another article, his exertions out of
place with the physical effort required to read. Watching him
perched over the train set she still
finds it hard to believe how
quickly he made the transition
from the real world to the miniature world, and how much junk it
required. With her foot wedged
against the banging screen door,
the aggressive kind, made out of
aluminum with a rattling screen
and a spring-loaded drum prepared to fling the whole contraption against the frame at the slightest hesitation or lapse, she rummages on the work desk for a pencil and a slip of paper.
“Why do you need napkins?
Eddie and Mary aren’t coming tomorrow, we’ll have to wait for next
Sunday. They’ve gone to Reemy,
France to seek a cure from those
nuns they got there. Didn’t Mary
tell you?”
“She just called me from the
airport in Chicago,” she begins to
say. A weight was being lifted off
Jim’s chest He put the paper
down. He had already decided
what attitude it might be best to
take in the face of such an adventure, but always keeping in mind
Eddie’s advanced state of lung
cancer.
“They haven’t left yet—couldn’t get a flight out at the last
minute as easily as they thought.
They are still waiting there in one
of the hotels for cancellations.
Marilyn tells me that Eddie is
scared, really scared, and acting
sort of crazy, enough to finally quit
smoking.”
Eddie, Eddie Manning. A
painter, best friend in the world,
scared enough to seek a miracle, a
man who has never been to
church once in his life so long as
Jim has known him.
“They sure are going to make
Eddie pay for this adventure,
aren’t they? Last minute flights,
looking for something somewhere
and he doesn’t speak the language. What is he thinking, they
are going to remember him? What,
it’s only been 45 years since his
last visit.”
Eddie just finished a commission last month: painting all the
federal bridges blue along Route
38. That is good work and it only
took his crew two years to do it.
Who knows why the government
wanted the bridges blue rather
than their original gray? It was
good work and Eddie was happy,
a top wage, lots of holidays, good
insurance, which came in handy
after all didn’t it? He didn’t have
to get up too early, an important
point for a night bird—wasn’t he
always saying how easy it was to
get a day or two off when he
needed them?—because it isn’t
pressure work when you are painting them like it is building the
damn things, with cars honking, a
single supervisor running three
crews and screaming at everyone
when he wasn’t trying to catch an
odd hours sleep in the back of the
car, dreaming during his catnaps
of looking over his shoulder at the
Chambers of Commerce and the
newspaper editors at his back and
screaming.
She has found the piece of
paper with a pencil, blunt and apparently recently used to scrape
wax and begins to write instructions using the door frame as a
hard surface. Finished scribbling
she brings the note to him, a news
item which consists of the words,
10000 Napkins. He reads it with
all the seriousness of a late-breaking story crossing his desk.
“Maybe you should just lay off
the finger food and the cards tomorrow. It doesn’t feel right with
Eddie gone off like that, it being
Sunday and all.”
What particularly rankled him
was having to go to The Store.The
place wasn’t natural. Buy a snow
shovel in April and they already
have the Halloween decorations
up. That, and as he turned the
note over and found part of one of
his old sketches on the back, the
number 10000. All those zeros in
a row like that resembling nothing
but bubbles floating off the page.
Bubbles of nothingness. One
coming right after the other. Identical bits of nothingness.
But she was adamant, proving
what he had long suspected of his
wife: she wasn’t as fond of Mary as
he was of Eddie. She bangs the
door on her way out and he folds
the slip of paper once and slips it
into his pants pocket. He wonders
what he will do when he gets
home carrying that big bag of napkins in his hand, wondering just
how big a bag of 10000 napkins
actually is, how heavy it is if it
weighs anything at all. Will he go
right up to the house or take the
fork in the path and stop by the
garage? A sandwich gets wrapped
and placed in his shirt pocket. He
grabs the car key off its hook and
locks the side door from the inside, exiting out the car berth
where the car sits waiting outside,
leaves wedging themselves beneath the front grill and beginning
to gather in a mulch pile under the
bumper.
Another fall day. Almost the
holiday season. One season just
slipping into another. He looks
back at the house—he almost
wanted to say for the last time—at
the lawn, at the white stone path
he laid 20 years ago with its gentle
curve and fork in the road, at the
boat. How long has it been since
he called his kids and invited them
over? He felt how all this could
have a symbolic value in relationship to his life, like a crèche he had
built and devoted to himself, a
miniature replica of the key events
of his existence with a spiritual
significance difficult to state
clearly.
A turn of the key and the engine drowns out the rhythmic
clacking of the train. A light rain
begins to fall sealing him into the
comfortable interior of the car.
His foot on the gas and a hand
HE NOSES THE CAR INTO THE ALLEY BEHIND THE CATHOLIC
CHURCH TO AVOID THE LONG RED LIGHT ON TELEGRAPH AVE.
manipulating the radio it feels like
being just back from the army
when he still had a bachelor’s
blood flowing in him. Why didn’t
he get out more in those days
when the world was different, hit
the streets? Not that he’s done
badly for himself, 2 boys raised
well, a home paid off and a summer cottage on the lake.
He noses the car into the alley
behind the Catholic church to
avoid the long red light on Telegraph Avenue. He and Eddie built
this damn community. There was
nothing but farms and dirt roads
when they returned home like
they promised they would and
started spending their GI checks.
He laid some of the cement himself. Two decades later he was still
here to supervise the extension
and enlargement of what by then
everyone was calling the old
county road system.
The rain falls harder now producing a steady drumming sound,
both relaxing and distracting.
Passing behind the church brings
to mind boyhood wisdom concerning Catholic girls and he begins flipping the radio looking for
the Mexican station. Songs in a
foreign language make it easier to
appreciate the sadness of the
melody. More than anything else it
is that moment when you can feel
the meat of her hanging in your
hands, when the woman throws
open the doors to her body and
just lets you in. He settles instead
on rock-n-roll. It is a song by one
of his son’s favorite groups, the
singer screaming again and again,
“If rain keeps on falling, love is
going away.”
He pulls out the sandwich and
begins chewing into the softness.
He finds himself slowing down,
watching the roadside and looking
for anything that might detain
him, taking a wider angle than
necessary on the curves, letting
the car sway a little back and forth,
the soft rain sounds with the darkening sky creating an effect of near
bedtime. The ride already feels
like it is taking longer than usual
and he decides on the indirect
route out past the loading dock
and along the lake, back up along
the other side of the old dairy,
under the overpass where he and
his crew turned two lanes into four
and then Eddie painted it blue.
He knew the way he wanted to
remember Eddie. The way he was
the night the Tigers won The
World Series. Eddie getting his
Irish up, screaming “Lou” as
Whitaker stepped up to the plate
so loud it sounded like he was
booing him. After the game, riots
broke out right in front of the stadium. Eddie brought out a box of
phonograph recordings made on
little 45s of the triumphant CBS
Radio broadcast given the day the
war ended. The TV camera
seemed to just sort of swivel in
slow motion following the arc of a
long ball down into the violence of
the streets. Eddie dropping the
needle down on those little 45’s
one right after another like he was
on a mission—that was true Eddie
in his element. He imagines Eddie
and Marilyn standing in line beneath the bright lights of O’Hare.
How much is a trip like that going
to cost? Eddie, Eddie, he sings
along with the sad melody. Eddie
painted the bridges blue.
Wheeling into the parking lot a
drowsy feeling of sadness flows
into the car and it is not without
effort that he avoids laying his
head down on the steering wheel
and closing his eyes in the relative
darkness. He finds himself just
wheeling around the immense
parking lot, making a slow circle
around the glowing building. In
front super-heated lights shine out
through the huge glass windows,
bathing the parking lot with long
shadows. Around back in the dark
trucks off load an endless number
of boxes. The Store occupies its
own tract of land, as large as a
shopping mall, like an amusement
park or a small village where anything can be bought, repaired or
eaten. In a vacant section of the lot
next to a light post he stops the
car.
He has parked in section C,
row 38 and after finding a pen in
the glove box, writes “C 38” beneath the number 10000. On AM
the host talks with a scientist at the
university about a recent discovery: the world’s largest living organism right here in Lake County.
It is a mushroom that has been
growing for thousands of years
several inches below the topsoil
and stretches over 37 acres. Someone calls in and wants to know
how many elephants could be
folded up into it like a taco. A
woman complains hysterically
about the tragedy of this sponge
sucking up the water and poisoning the air for her children. Another caller wants to know what is
being done to commercialize this
mushroom in the way of a tourist
attraction. The giant sponge, the
DJ declares in a rising voice, is beneath our feet right now and it is
growing larger every day.
Jim clicks off the radio. He puts
the half-eaten sandwich down on
the car seat and looks out of the
side window at the rain. It is a fine
drizzle which doesn’t fall so much
as move sideways like a spell
changing the nature of things. It
was in drizzles like this that he
spent a lifetime half expecting to
see her again. Velvet. He would
step off that train and on to the
platform and be offered some-
thing, a strange haircut, silent
conversation, an invisible gift. He
felt sure it would be something he
had never seen or heard before.
If someone called his name,
called him by his name in this rain
and he heard it, heard his name in
someone else’s voice and turned
to see who it was and saw her
standing there then no matter
what, tears would come rolling
down his face. He would be incapable of explaining himself. She
would just be standing there
watching him while he choked.
Everything would be different
then. Velvet, he would say and she
would come to him.
inside her just like you and me. Today, though, standing on the edge of the
the pigeons and squirrels her eyes turned back at the storm breaking within.
I don't know who she is who needs to, she has wilderness
park she made a decision to listen to it throwing corn to
?
?
?
?
OF
BY
DAVID GREENBERGER
drawings by JOE McDONNELL
Tower of Babel originally published in The Duplex Planet, #107
WILLIAM “FERGIE”
FERGUSON: The Tower
of Babel is supposed
to be in, in Italy.
DAVID B.
GREENBERGER: What’s
the purpose of it?
FERGIE: That’s what
I’d like to know.
Christ, I was lucky
enough to get here. I,
I came through Italy,
but, there’s a tower
there, it’s an
immense tower—it
goes a-way up in the
air. And, it’s solid
concrete—not
cement, but
concrete. And it goes
a-way up, it goes
about sixty to
seventy feet up in the
air. And whether
there’s anyone in it I
don’t know. I don’t
know, I don’t know if
you know either.
DBG: I don’t. I was
hoping you knew.
FERGIE: There’s no windows in
the darn thing that I know of,
that I ever saw.
DBG: Why’d they build it so
high?
FERGIE: That’s what I can’t
figure. If it’s some kind of a, a
fortress, I don’t know. It looks as
though it’s solid concrete. Or
solid cement. I don’t see any entrance to it.
DBG: I’ve seen pictures of it bigger than that.
DBG: What’s it for then? What’s
its use?
FERGIE: I mean, from the
FERGIE: That’s what I imagine
DBG: It’s written up in the Bible.
many are wondering, what it’s
for. It’s, it’s a round tower—I’ll
bet you it’s about ten feet in diameter, isn’t it?
bottom.
FERGIE: It IS?
DBG: Yeah.
FERGIE: It’s in the psalms, huh?
P-s-a-l-m-s.
curious and they wanted to find
out what was in it. And if they
found out somethin’, they sure
as hell, Christ didn’t tell me.
DBG: How’d you find out they
even went there?
FERGIE: Well I was goin’ through
there when Amos and Andy
came along. And they knew me
for a long time, many years.
And Amos says, “Hello Fergie!”
Amos and Andy, they’re only
about my own age. I was born
in nineteen-five, so what does
that make me now?
DBG: Ah, seventy-eight.
FERGIE: Seventy-eight. Well
DBG: Why’s it in the Bible?
FERGIE: Why?
DBG: Yeah.
FERGIE: I suppose that’s where
Amos could answer that
question, ‘cause Amos was over
there in Italy, that’s where he
came from. Amos and Andy.
to do with the Bible though, did
they?
DBG: And what’d they have to
do with the Bible?
FERGIE: Not that I know of.
FERGIE: Huh?
DBG: What did they have to do
with the tower then?
DBG: They didn’t have anything
FERGIE: I s’pose that they were
they’re, ah, just about my age,
seventy-eight.
DBG: When does the tower date
back to, or the legend about it?
FERGIE: Huh?
DBG: What are some of the stories about it?
FERGIE: That’s what I’d like to
FERGIE: There’s a legend?
know.
DBG: The story of the Tower of
Babel.
DBG: You said there’s quite a few,
right?
FERGIE: Babylon. B-a-b-a-l-o-n.
FERGIE: Huh?
DBG: And what’s the story of it?
DBG: You said there’s quite a few
stories about it?
FERGIE: There’s many that
entered that tower and they ascended up into that tower and
how far they went I don’t know.
There’s not a, a darn—a window
or nothin’ in it, that I know of.
DBG: What are some of the stories about it?
FERGIE: There may be many sto-
ries about it, of who ah, who ascended it, our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ, who was a a
power—a powerhouse over all
of us.
DBG: It’s where people spoke different languages, the tower.
FERGIE: Well our Lord and Savior
could speak any language. He
was no bigger than I am, fivefoot-eight, but power he had.
Where he got it, I don’t know.
DBG: What’s he got to do with
the tower?
FERGIE: Who? Jesus Christ?
DBG: Yeah.
FERGIE: I don’t know, all I know
is that he’s been up into that
power—into that tower. He goes
up to the top and he goes and
looks all over. And he can tell
you anything you want to
know, if you’re lucky enough to
get his attention. But there’s
very few that I ever knew that
ever got his attention a’tall. Our
Lord and Savious. Capital J e-su-s-, capital C h-r-i-s-t. He isn’t
any taller than I am, five-footeight.
DBG: Do you know the story of
the Tower of Babel, that he
made everybody speak different
languages?
FERGIE: Well they all speak
Lithuanian and, and German
and French and Italian—
”Capeesh Italian.” I can’t speak
any language, I mean I’m lucky
to speak the English language,
that’s all I can speak. I’m lucky
to speak that.
DBG: Well at the tower they were
FRANCIS: Oui oui.
FERGIE: What did he say?
DBG: He’s speaking French over
there in the corner.
DANA: Where did they come
from?
DBG: No, this other fellow in the
corner there.
FERGIE: They come from
about the tower —
DANA MOSER: Do you know how
FERGIE: You’ll have to ask some
come there are different
languages in the world? Do you
know why that is, why
everybody’s not speaking the
same language?
of those historians. And there’s
many of them around over
there. And they look at you and
they ask you questions, Motherof Christ, that Mother of Christ
couldn’t answer. Maybe she can
speak to them and we can’t.
DBG: But one more thing now,
FERGIE: Why they can’t speak
FERGIE: They couldn’t what?
DBG: They couldn’t get any work
done because everybody was
speaking a different language.
JACK MUDURIAN: My mother
speaks French.
FERGIE: His mother speaks
French?
DBG: Yeah.
there everybody spoke a
DIFFERENT language—no two
people spoke the same language.
FERGIE: Well parlez-vous
JACK: Yep.
Francais? —I can’t speak much
French.
FERGIE: Could she go and answer
FRANCIS McELROY: In France you
any of it?
say, “Parlez-vous Francaise?”
DBG: I don’t know. At the tower
FERGIE: Huh?
everywhere.
DBG: But why is it that different
countries ended up with different languages, instead of everybody having the same language?
French. J’ne sais pas, tres bien.
DBG: His mother speaks French.
DBG: Why does everybody speak
different languages?
FERGIE: I was?
FERGIE: Oh—I can’t speak
all speaking different languages
and they couldn’t get any work
done.
the same language? I don’t
know.
DBG: But you know how big Europe is—it’s not that big, and
there’s different languages in
every country. Don’t you wonder about that?
FERGIE: Huh?
DBG: Don’t you wonder why
there’s all those different
languages in Europe?
FERGIE: Well, they converse with
one another.
DBG: But they speak in different
languages from one country to
the next.
FERGIE: Like, just like you’d say,
“Parlez-vous Francaise?”—Can
you speak French? I’ll say, “No, I
can’t.”
DBG: Why is that, why do differ-
ent people speak different
languages in different countries?
FERGIE: Well I s’pose they are
taking care of their own, their
own families. But how they take
care of them I don’t know, anymore than I know how we take
care of ourselves. We ah, we
have bread, and butter. And
once in a while we get ahold of
a jar of jam, and how we get it, I
don’t know. . . The children of
Israel don’t tell you anything.
any more than how this is our
property, I don’t know either.
This is Huntington Avenue, isn’t
it?
DBG: Why not?
DBG: Harris.
FERGIE: I s’pose they ah, don’t
FERGIE: Huh?
want to infringe on their, their
property. How it’s their property
DBG: Harris.
FERGIE: K—
DBG: S.
FERGIE: Harris.
DBG: Harris.
FERGIE: F!
DBG: Finally.
FERGIE: Harrette.
DBG: S!
FERGIE: What they are doing
DBG: Harris.
FERGIE: Like my name, F?
FERGIE: Herron?
DBG: No, S, like Sally.
DBG: HarrIS.
FERGIE: Oh, Sally—S!
FERGIE: H-e-r?
DBG: Yeah!
DBG: H-a-r.
FERGIE: H-i-s?
FERGIE: H-a-r
DBG: H-a-r
DBG: R-i-s.
FERGIE: H-a-r, i-s.
FERGIE: R-i-F?
DBG: H-a-r-R-i-s.
DBG: S.
FERGIE: (slowly:) H-a-r, r-i-s.
FERGIE: S?
DBG: Right!
there I don’t know. If it’s their
home, it’s their home. H-o-m-e.
How they made it their home,
our Lord and Savior could only
answer that. Jesus Christ. And
he is a power that, ah, if he
wants to talk to you, he will
talk to you.
by
JOE PETERSON
drawings by Mike Brehm
W
hen the voice first came to Ben in the night he sort of
laughed to himself as if it were a joke because if it wasn’t a joke it was a voice, and if it was a
voice, then he had every reason to be terrified. The voice told Ben strange things that he half
knew to be true, secret things that he was afraid to admit to himself much less dwell on.
Things about himself that were new to him, revelations of character, foreshadows of
his own destiny, he saw it all laid out for him like the road map he scrutinized beneath the dashboard light of his car. He saw the thin red vein as if it were his other history coming into and out of focus as the car careened into darkness, around bends, skidding on and off the shoulder of the road. And the voice, speaking in the night,
was making things clear to Ben in a way that things were never made clear
before. Making, for instance, the
exact nature of his relationship to
his wife Trisha known to him.
Telling him how bad the relationship really was, how far gone he was
from any type of possible reconciliation with her. The voice told him
crazy things like the fact that his
son Kevin was bitterly inconsolable
until the day he jumped from the
third story window of his math
classroom, committing suicide.The
young kid was inconsolable because his father Ben, searching for
comfort, struggling for consolation,
in fact never found comfort or consolation. He didn’t let himself be
consoled, and the boy, following his
father’s example, refused as well to
be consoled, a refusal that cost him
his young life. Ben was behind the
wheel tonight trying to get a grip on
things, and the voice, an incantation in the night, spilled those
things all over the world.
There was the time, for instance,
when people used to tell Ben that
his time was going to come. He was
famous in a way. He carried a knife
with a ten inch blade, a veritable
butcher knife. He was a big man, a
strong man, unpredictable when he
was sober, downright dangerous
when he was drunk. He had many
friends who loved him, but one by
one the friends disappeared as he
threatened to wreck havoc with
their physical well being. Those
who didn’t believe him, who didn’t
take his threats seriously because
they thought they knew him better,
well then, he’d get them too—sending some to the hospital. Others
he’d send away bruised and bloody,
vowing to get revenge. “Your time
is gonna come Ben,” they would
say. “Your day will be here soon.
You better be looking over your
shoulder when it happens because
these things are gonna come back
to you. And when they do, you’ve
got hell to pay.” But to Ben, a man
who has no inner voice, no conscience, who already has it figured
out that it’s him against the world,
and who is perennially frightened
by the solitude he thinks he faces—
to that man, to Ben, these threats
are nothing. He’s encountered
them in bar fights from one end of
town to the other. In fact they’re
just more opportunities for him to
prove that not only is his principle
of action correct, i.e., him against
the world, but that he is a survivor
in such a world. “Your time is
gonna come Ben, just you wait!”
And that’s what Ben did, wait.
Those people who threatened, disappeared one by one leaving him
far behind like a violent spot in the
distance of their memory. They
never did find out whether Ben’s
time came, whether or not he had
hell to pay, or even if he’d lived long
enough to pay it.
There were other times as well,
unpredictable times that touched
closer to home. There was that
time, for instance, when he and Trisha packed their car and drove off
early one morning for their first vacation. They were still living on the
top floor of the two-flat Trisha’s
mother owned. That morning,
when Ben couldn’t get the door to
their apartment locked, when the
key failed, and a half hour of his efforts were spent securing the lock
he threw a fit. Trisha leaned against
the car in the early morning light
and watched as Ben walked down
the stairs to the first floor flat where
her mother lived. He rattled the
door until the wood frame splintered loose. Bursting through the
living room to the bedroom where
Trisha’s mother was hastily pulling
herself out of bed and putting on
her robe, he grabbed her and threw
her to the floor.Then, standing over
Trisha’s screaming mother, he
kicked her in the kidney as if she
deserved more than a kick for the
lousy condition she kept the twoflat in. Afterward, he grabbed Trisha, threw her in the car, and drove
off.
Ben wasn’t always violent
though. In fact, when they first met,
Trisha told him what most men
hate to hear—she told him he was a
nice guy. Truth be told, he was a
nice guy. Back then he was even
witty. With brown hair, a sort of
rough but dimpled smile, and clear
blue eyes he was often irresistible.
He could be tender too. For years
Trisha would tell her friend Natalie: “He knows how to touch me just
right. Holding me
in his arms, he
makes me feel wonderful, like I’m his
baby, like he needs
me.” Ben dated Trisha
for
three
months and then
asked her to marry
him.
Trisha was still young, not yet old
enough to know a nice guy from a
dangerous one. “Alright,” she said,
“that would be great.” She often recalls that moment, and now so does
Ben as he pulls away in the night.
The voice continues, there were
times, Ben, when I tried to speak to
you, when I tried to get around your
meanness, hanging in wait for a moment when I might reveal myself to
you. There was your wedding for instance.You were alone in the wings of
the church waiting for your bride Trisha to be brought up the aisle by her
father.There were people in the pews of
the church, people you invited to the
wedding, friends of yours, every last
one of them could be called a friend, in
fact you did call them friends, you had
more friends gathered together there in
that church that afternoon than you
ever had before or since.The best man
Charley Watson had taken his place
before the alter, and the bride was being brought up the aisle. It was a long
aisle, and all your friends Michael,
Allen, Rodney, Albert, were facing it,
watching the train of her wedding
gown spill out behind her like the wake
a ship leaves. She was escorted by her
father.You called him Dick, his name
was Richard, everyone thought you
should be calling him dad. He was a
tall private man with his gray hair
slicked back, as graceful as a summer
weed in his black tux. He was proud
that afternoon holding his beautiful
daughter on his arm; proud, because
other than the people you and Trisha
invited to the wedding, there were his
people, men he’d worked with for twenty, thirty years, friends of his all the
way back to his childhood, brother’s
and sisters—Trisha’s uncles and
aunts, and her grandparents. Music
was playing as well, filling the church.
A woman was singing, the organ was
making slow
happy noises
and the priest
stood at the
head of the alter with the
Bible in his
hands. All at
once it
occurred to
you, standing
alone in the
wings of
the
Church,
just how
isolated
you
were.You were separated from all these people and yet you
were also about to converge with them
any minute; converge with them for a
lifetime. At that moment you were on
the brink of happiness, for a moment
you felt a bit of satisfaction, a bit of
what people experience when they are
in touch with themselves, when they
are in touch with the world around
them. You were almost satisfied, but
suddenly you felt the absence of your
parents.Your mother and father hadn’t
cause you never told her, because this single incident
was the keystone of all other
incidents in your life, the one
you tried to bury at all cost;
the one you finally did bury,
at the expense of all other
memories, at the expense,
most of all, of intimate human contact. But what was
it that you in fact buried,
only this: that you heard
about their death from a
neighbor who approached
you on the driveway as you
came home late that night
from school. When he pronounced the word: dead, you
asked him three times over,
Both of them? Each time he
shook his head a bit more
sadly, Yes both of
them, and then you
rolled your eyes
and said:Well
I guess I’m
old enough to
made it
because they had
both died.Trisha
had asked you about
them several times.What
happened to them? she’d
ask. How was your life changed without them? How would OUR life
change without them? But you never
wanted to talk to about it, and she never knew, nor for that matter did anybody else know that your parents had
died when you were only fifteen years
old. They had died, or so it went, violently, in a car crash; died two miles
from home; died just a half hour before
you came home from school. Trisha
never knew these things about you be-
be on my
own, and
turning
away
you disappeared
down the
street,
you
disappeared
away from the catastrophe, away from yourself
and you’ve been trying to
disappear ever since, but it
was that afternoon—the afternoon of your wedding
four years later as you stood
alone in the wings of the
Church remembering this—
when I wanted to come and
speak to you. I wanted to
whisper all
the possibilities
the future
might
hold for
you and
Trisha. I
wanted to
expose
worlds
that
didn’t exist but might
exist for you and her, but
you only saw the aisle that
she was walking up get narrower and narrower and you
felt the presence of her father,
of her family trying to push
these secrets out of you, secrets that you tried to bury,
and would bury at any cost.
When you took Trisha in
your arms that afternoon,
you vowed never to return
her to family and you didn’t. When her father
died, not
long after the wedding, you
only turned away from the
news, in abnegation to it all,
to Trisha’s pain, to your
pain, and so it went. . . .
Trisha could have lived
with Ben a thousand
years and she would have
never once heard him
mention the fact that
there were people out to
kill him. He had a quality
of fearlessness about him,
a sense of being above
mortality. Yet Ben wasn’t
without his share of suspicions no matter how
tough he may have
seemed. So when Trisha
told him, after taking a
particularly severe beating, that she
hoped he
would die
soon: when she said “I hope I see
the day when you die in hell,” Ben
took it as a hex thrown on his head,
something that would be tough to
outlive, he turned and beat her. It
was an incident she swore she’d
never forgive him for. But when he
later apologized, when she looked
into his eyes and saw a truly repentant human being, when he said, “I
promise honey, I can change,” she
forgave him and for three whole
weeks there was peace between
them, and then he beat her, again.
The voice goes, there were times
Ben, there was that time, for instance, after you and Trisha
had an argument, when, unexpectedly, you stepped outside of
the trailer and walking around
towards the hitch, you caught
your son Kevin smoking a
cigarette.When you
looked down at
him and saw
the fear in his
eyes, you simply said—unhook your bitch
Tooley from the
post and throw
her up in the
back of the
truck—you and
I are goin’ for a walk—
whereupon Kevin dashed out his
cigarette, unhooked his dog, and
the two of you, jumping into the
cab, drove off across town to a
place called, Reservoir Park. As
you drove through town, you
didn’t say anything about
the fighting, or the cigarette,
you only asked whether he
thought Tooley was
pregnant or not. But
Kevin, still too frightened
to answer you, didn’t say
anything. He only
looked out the window at the passing
shops on Dundee Road and watched
how the light from the setting sun reflected off the hoods of cars on the road.
When you came to the reservoir you
brought your truck to a stop and got
out, slamming the doors behind you.
Tooley, Kevin’s dog, leaped out of the
pick up, and as if she were already
moving too fast to touch ground, took
off flying towards a group of ducks, her
sable coat gleaming in the same soft
evening light that reflected off the calm
surface of the reservoir. That’s when
you first heard your son Kevin
laugh—a sort of nervous laugh, that
grew more expansive the closer Tooley
got to the ducks—Get ‘em girl! Kevin
hollered. If that bitch is pregnant,
you hollered above Kevin’s
laughter, she sure don’t show
it! You and Kevin watched
as Tooley contracted into a ball, then
sprang open, then back into a ball,
leaping forward towards the ducks, her
hind legs kicking the wet mud high into the air. But the ducks, as if they didn’t realize that Tooley was on to them,
didn’t fly away like you thought they
would. They just floated quietly in the
shallows of the reservoir. That’s when
you realized that the reason why the
ducks didn’t take off flying, was because, stumbling out of the weeds and
onto the mud in a straight line, were a
half dozen ducklings. They were
scrambling for safety in the water.You
and Kevin stood transfixed, ankle deep
in the mud, your voices suddenly silenced as Tooley tore into the little
ducklings.You watched Tooley grab the
first one, shake it once, then toss it with
a broken neck onto the bank where it
lie. Meanwhile the mother ducks were
squawking frantically. Tooley grabbed
another duckling and did the same,
head shake, once twice, and then another, until finally she came to the last
duckling, who, in a state of terror darted back towards the tall grass. That’s
when you, finding not only your voice,
but a sort of mercy, hollered after Tooley, bringing everything menacing and
authoritative that was in you, into the
tone of your command, and called her
back. Tooley knowing not only your
voice, but the kick that would most certainly follow it, was called off.
“He doesn’t want to work things
out. His way of making things work
out is by exploding or leaving or
both.” Trisha whispers this litany
over the phone to her friend Natalie, a woman Ben doesn’t even know
exists. Natalie is Trisha’s only confidant; has been for years. Ben
doesn’t know about Natalie because he never made it his business
to know about her. And tonight, as
he disappears fast around the cor-
ner into the darkness, Natalie tries
to console her. “If he don’t come
back, he don’t come back, then
you’re free of him. Sell the house.
Move in with me.” Natalie tells Trisha this because Trisha has just
been abused by him again. Curled
up on the kitchen floor, barely able
to talk, she tries to collect herself.
“I don’t even know why I put up
with this. It’s not like it’s the first
time he’s run out. It’s not like I’m
suprised or shocked—I’d be a fool,
but I’m tired. I want to know when
it’ll stop happening to me. When
will it end?”
“Do you love him?” That
was Natalie again. She’s
on the other end of the
phone, and this
question is her way of
checking the internal pressures and
temperatures
of
Trisha’s soul. “Do you love him?”
and as Natalie asks this she’s prepared to receive one of several possible responses: “Yes—but...”, and
always it’s a ‘yes’ with qualifications. “I love him despite what he
does to me. In fact, he doesn’t even
know he’s doing those things to me,
and that’s part of the reason I love
him. Isn’t that the strangest thing
you ever heard?”Trisha reasons out
loud as she goes: “The reason why I
love him is because he doesn’t even
know what he’s doing to me, he
can’t sense when he’s being cruel.”
“Do you love him?” Natalie
asks, and then repeats herself, quietly, “Do you love him?”
Tonight for the first time in
many years, Trisha tries to answer
that question. She feels the importance of the occasion. She’s at her
breaking point. Now that Ben has
left, Trisha’s not altogether convinced she’ll take him back, even if
he wants to come back, even if he
apologizes like only he can apologize. “Do you know,”
Trisha says,
speaking in
the dark of her
kitchen, “at this point I
don’t know who or what I love
if I even love anything at all.” Suddenly Trisha feels alone, even
though she isn’t alone, even though
Natalie is on the other end listening, trying to understand. She feels
scared too, because it’s dark, but
she presses on. I’m alone, it’s dark,
do I love? And it occurs to Trisha
that after thirty-eight years of socalled loving she has arrived at a
spot where she can’t even say conclusively if she loves anyone or anything. Maybe she misunderstood
what love was supposed to be in the
first place. Maybe she’s had it
wrong from the beginning, and was
only now beginning to understand
something important: that solitude
and darkness are not the worst
things in the world, perhaps no
worse after all, than being in love.
“Natalie,” she goes on
saying, “It’s shitty being a woman. Don’t you
know that? It’s shitty being a wife
too, and it’s even shitty being a
mom!” Trisha thought about that
last statement for a moment, and
was surprised by it. Is it possible
she didn’t even love her son, Kevin?
She thinks she might have loved
him, in spite of everything. In spite
of all the troubles she had raising
him; his constant bouts of depression, his suicide. She thinks she
may have loved him and his infuriating moodiness, but his death was
still too close to make a final judgment on that one. It was too fresh
ting a sense of things by
going a one two three, a
one two three, and then
jumping in to see how
long she could last. She
truly loved jumping rope
with her girlfriends out
there in the sun light.
Each year she would get
better, get the rhythm
deeper into her soul so
that the one two three became an instinct, and she
became the best jump
roper in school . “Perhaps
I loved that Natalie. I
loved laughing as I did it.
It was laughter more than
anything that I loved, because I loved laughing
and nothing could make
me laugh faster than
jumping rope. He doesn’t
know this. Like he doesn’t
know a lot of things. How
can you say you love a
person who doesn’t even
care to know the simplest
things about you?”
“Do you love him?”
The question forces
Trisha to move
back
in her
mind.
She
kept flip-flopping
on what he meant to her.
She could go either way, any
time of day. So when she thinks
about love separating Kevin out of
the formula the first thing her mind
wanders to is jumping rope when
she was a little girl. Jumping Double Dutch, ducking her head, getting the feel of both the ropes going
round in different directions, get-
through a
landscape of
barren days
that she now
calls her past.
It makes her
remember. To
begin with,
there was the
trailer park
where they
owned their
own trailer
home. To the
north of the
park was a
junkyard, and
to the south
was a strip
tease club
called, The
Cheetah II,
that Ben liked
to visit on payday. The
summer brought all the
traffic noise from Milwaukee Avenue, and the
stench from the Desplaines River. In the winter there were large windy
draughts of cold that
came through the windows and every crack in
their trailer. The pipes
were always frozen, and
the roof sagged with the
weight of the snow.
These things
never got
fixed because she couldn’t ask Ben to fix them.
She couldn’t ask him, because the mere asking
would be so provocative
and potentially dangerous
that it wasn’t worth it.
“Other men, normal men
can be expected to fix
things,” she once told Natalie. “But my man can’t
be counted on to do anything. You can’t even
count on him to bring
home the check at the end
of the week.”
Besides all the bars
Ben frequented, there
was that strip tease
club he was fond
of. He knew the
girls there. He
spent money on
them, that
should have
gone to fixing
the pipes at
home; money that
should have been
saved so that they
could leave this
wretched trailer
and find a real
home. Trisha was
convinced that part
of the reason Ben
had become so violent was because he
couldn’t stand the
place they lived in.
He couldn’t stand
the stench from the
river in the
summer. He couldn’t stand living between a junkyard
and a strip tease
club. At first it
made him feel
worthless, and then
he became consumed by
it. Even now, as Trisha
sits on the phone in the
dark listening to the faint
presence of Natalie coming across the wire in the
form of her quiet breaths,
she curses the day they
packed their bags from
the apartment above her
mother’s house to move
out here. She curses the
memory of Eddy Pinella,
an old friend of Ben’s. He
was the man that set Ben
up with the trailer in the
first place, and convinced
him to move out here
from her mother’s apartment building in the city.
“Come to Wheeling,” Eddy Pinella told them. “In
the next ten years Wheeling will be where it’s all at.
Schools are being built.
Businesses are moving in.
Buildings are going up to
house the new population.” She remembers
that night now, and lowers the phone a little bit.
“But nothing ever came
of it,” she told Natalie.
“Just this rotten place
that has made us so unhappy.” Trisha pauses,
still curled up on the
linoleum floor, then
brings the phone back to
her ear. “Not long after
we moved in, he whacked
me for no reason. It was
the first time he ever did
that. I should’a left then.
But I didn’t.”
There was a silence
then Natalie spoke up.
“Trish, I’m right here, I
ain’t going nowhere
babe, so you can let it all
out’a you now.”
“Alright,” Trisha said,
“I’ll try.” And she did try.
But Trisha had held her
sorrow in for so many
years, never expressing it to Ben, nor her
mother, nor even the
priest at Church
who had such kind
eyes, that suddenly
she wasn’t so sure
she could just give it
up. This kind of sadness had come upon her
before, and when it did
she tried to let it out. At
night, when he’d leave
after one of his outbursts,
she’d stand over the sink
cleaning
the
dishes,
and
she’d try
to make tears
come to her eyes. But for
some reason they never
did. Sometimes when she
felt this kind of sadness
she’d walk out back
behind the trailer
park where the
Desplaines
River flowed.
There she’d
hold her
h e a d ,
watching
the slow
moving
muddy water that
even on good days
smelled like sewage.
She’d watch the current
move, carrying sticks and
fallen trees, plastic bags
and beer cans, downstream. Now and then a
dead animal, a dog or a
crow, would float by,
bloated, belly up and
ragged, bouncing along
the bank. She’d squat
down for a long time on
the river bank, her hair
falling down across her
face and stare despondently into
the water until her legs were stiff, or
her back hurt from leaning over.
She’d feel old then, older than the
river, and her face was sad, but she
could never release a tear.The river
was continually flushing it’s system, the muddy water flooded by,
but it couldn’t take her sadness
away. She’d leave the river and go
back to the trailer and get into
their bed where she’d sleep on her
side like a stone, all curled up and
silent.
“Trish you with me honey?” Natalie whispered. “Are you ok?”
Trisha gripped the phone tighter
in her hand. “Yeah, Nat, I’m ok.
Just hold a minute, everything’ll be
fine.”
Trisha lay there in the dark of
her kitchen and didn’t, couldn’t say
a word. Deep inside, however, she
was wishing she could let it all out,
just once. She thought of her boy
Kevin. She tried to visualize him
the morning of his accident as he
stood waiting for the bus at the side
of the road. He was wearing his yellow school jacket. He was carrying
a chemistry book in one hand, a
brown bag lunch in the other. She
remembers seeing him wait all
alone on the roadside gravel for
the bus. She remembers feeling
proud of him that morning,
proud despite his sulleness. As
much as she wanted to be a good
mother to him—a thing she felt she
was capable of—she could never
get him to open up. She regretted
this more than anything. She also
knew that he sustained all kinds of
abuse on her behalf. For that reason, probably more than any other,
he could never say a word, never tell
her what was on his mind. Not him,
a fifteen year old boy with big feet
that slipped a little when climbing
up on the school bus, where he sat,
his head falling against the window,
with despair. He wasn’t capable of
saying: Hey ma, I’m ok, don’t worry. He couldn’t tell her why, later
that same day, he’d do the unthinkable and jump out the third story
window of his math classroom,
landing head first on the empty
concrete fountain below. He couldn’t
tell her,
because, she, his mother, couldn’t
tell him the very same words. She
couldn’t say: Hey son, I’m ok, don’t
worry. She couldn’t, because she
wasn’t ok. Trisha held her breath
and tried to forget all that. She
wanted to feel proud of her son—
his hair neatly combed, the lunch
that she’d made for him, held secure in his hand. As she sat there
trying to picture him in her mind,
she couldn’t help but wonder how
things would have been different if
they had never left her mother’s flat
in the city, if they’d never come to
this—the poorest section of town
where the unsanitary river flowed
behind them, and trouble was all
around. She wondered why she
ever left, why she agreed to pack her
bags and move out here with Ben.
But in the end, she understood: Because
he vowed to kill me if I didn’t, and
I believed him.
Soon the map was no good to
Ben. It was too dark to see and he
was too drunk to see it. The car
just kept moving, carrying Ben and
the voice northward, up into the
flat cold desolation of the continent, and into the reckless awareness of his deeds. He hears it speak
to him, there were times Ben, when
you would stare into Kevin’s eyes trying to discover the clues not just to
your son, but to yourself, and as you
looked into his eyes, when you saw
first his eyes, and then his sadness,
you’d begin to hope that you could forget his sadness, and see only your son.
But the harder you tried to look beyond his sadness, the more you saw
not only his sadness but what it reflected. You saw yourself in Kevin’s
eyes.And when you saw that you too
were inconsolable as a child, I wanted
to come to you, like you wanted to
come to your son Kevin. But you didn’t go to him, just like you didn’t let
me come to you. . . .
The voice keeps speaking. It
keeps Ben company in the middle
of the night, and Ben, crashing on
in darkness, is trying hard not to
listen.
ISSN: 1071-3336