Chinese Handcuffs (4 page)

 

Now Grampa stands in the middle of a field. They live in Lawrence, Kansas, and springtime has created a rich greenness that stretches forever. Towering, white billowy clouds fill the deep blue sky, and the sun shines brightly on his silver hair. Jennifer stands watching him, edging closer as she glimpses the shadow that is her father on the horizon. It is a pathetic shadow, but also giant somehow, one that fills her from inside, chokes her. Grampa stands tall in the field with a beveled wooden object hanging from his hand. Jennifer recognizes from Grampa's exaggerated pomp that this is yet another of the toys that will be named after her, like J. Maddy Yo-Yo and J. Maddy Hula-Hoop (which Grampa can skid almost halfway across the lawn and make return on its own English). These are all toys that go away and come back.

“This is J. Maddy Boomerang,” Grampa says. “J. Maddy Boomerang, I want you to meet J. Maddy Lawless.”

J. Maddy Lawless says hi.

J. Maddy Boomerang hangs from Grampa's hand.

“J. Maddy Boomerang,” Grampa continues, “flies far and free. She flies up to the clouds,
past
the clouds to the other side of the moon, where princesses are monsters and monsters are friends. They tease her and terrify her and tickle her silly.”

Jennifer is mesmerized by Grampa's nonsensical tale, as she always is, staring at J. Maddy Boomerang hanging innocently at his side.

“And then she flies home, where it's safe and warm and there's plenty of Ho-Hos and Ding-Dongs and chocolate-covered grasshoppers.”

“Oooooh.” Jen wrinkles her nose. “Chocolate
grasshoppers?
She eats grasshoppers?”

“She surely do,” Grampa says, and with a flip of his elbow and wrist he sends the boomerang spinning forward, climbing, climbing toward the majestic clouds. Jennifer watches in amazement as it starts back toward them in a wide arc. Grampa moves close to protect her, and together they watch it dig into the dirt less than ten yards from where they stand. Jennifer cheers and runs to retrieve it. They repeat the story and the act, and Jennifer helps Grampa make up new creatures for the kingdom on the other side of the moon. She tries throwing the boomerang herself a few times but is quickly stymied.
The ghostly presence of her father sits on the horizon like a dull ache on the edges of her consciousness.

 

It's night—very late at night—when Jennifer's father creeps into her room. She can't remember when it started—can't remember the first time. Maybe he has always come, though now he stays longer. She lies awake, dreading the faint creak of the door, followed by the soundless sensation that someone is very near. She feels his pressure on the end of the bed and waits through the silence until he chooses to talk. This is why she tries to stay with Grampa most of the time. But there are always times when she can't work it out, can't get Gramma to let her stay there, or can't get Grampa to stay at her house. When she can, she keeps him up very late—until after her folks go to bed—playing and reading stories. Often then he falls asleep on her bed and she sleeps easy, sheltered. But Grampa isn't here tonight. Daddy is. And Daddy starts to talk. Jennifer doesn't really understand all his words, but he talks about her body, and he tells her he loves her a lot, but it doesn't feel like it does when Grampa says it. It feels good—kind of—in a strange sort of way, but it also feels icky. Daddy seems like a little boy now, really, and he puts his hands up inside Jennifer's nightgown and
touches her in places that her mother calls “privates” when she washes them in the bathtub. It feels awful to be touched there, but it feels good to make Daddy feel good; any other time he almost never does. And it's a secret. Jennifer is very good at keeping secrets. It's her very best thing, Daddy says. It's something we can never tell or Mommy will get very sick and people will come and take Jennifer away. She wants to tell. If she told someone, it would be Grampa, but this is really the only warm feeling she has with anyone in her family except him. It's the only time Daddy seems to love her.

 

“Jennifer. Jennifer.” The voice came from far away, and Jennifer struggled to bring it into focus. “I need to look in your eyes again, all right, Jennifer?” A dim light—probably a night-light—illuminated the room, and a woman in white stood over her with a small penlight. Jennifer remembered where she was and rested back against the pillow. She told the nurse to go ahead, following the instructions to the letter.

“Your eyes are dilating about the way they should be now,” the nurse said. “I probably won't be waking you again.”

Jennifer nodded and said that would be a relief. “If
they stay that way, can I get out of here tomorrow?” she asked.

“I'm sure you can,” the nurse answered. “We just wanted to be sure you weren't going to have any difficulty. You took a pretty hard hit, they tell me.”

 

Sitting beside Grampa on the big couch at his house, Jennifer attempts to put together a Dumbo the Elephant puzzle. The puzzle has more than fifty pieces and is, in fact, too complex for her, but the pieces seem to materialize very close to where they belong whenever she gets stuck. Grampa tells her she must be a born puzzle fixer. “We're here at ABC's Wide World of Puzzles,” he says in his best Howard Cosell voice, “and young J. Maddy Lawless is attempting to put together the never-before-assembled Dumbo Circles High Above the Big Top, a six-
quadrillion
-piece monster of a puzzle that has baffled experts in seven countries and fourteen tropical islands.”

“Grampa, you talk funny,” Jennifer says as an all-gray piece of Dumbo's ear appears magically by her finger, less than an inch from where it belongs. “You sound like that guy that talks on TV. The one at Monday football.”

“Yes, I do,” Grampa says, slipping into his W. C.
Fields, but then he stops, a little dazed, and looks at Jennifer, reaching across his body with his right hand to his left, massaging a bit, looking puzzled.

“Say some more, Grampa,” Jennifer says. “Say some more about what a great puzzle lady I am. Put me on television some more.”

Grampa looks bewildered now, feels his arm again, and shakes his head. He moves his hand tentatively back to the puzzle pieces but only fingers them absently. He hears a buzzing sound, then is smashed with a hammer to the chest. “J. Maddy . . .” he starts again in Cosellese, but it trails off. Then: “J. Maddy, you go get your mother, okay? Go get her and tell her Grampa needs to see her right away.”

“I think she went to the store. She said she'd be back in—”

“J. Maddy, you go get your momma now, you hear? You go get your momma and tell her to come right in here, okay, J. Maddy?”

Jennifer looks into Grampa's eyes, but he's not in there. He's not looking very far past his face, and he's rubbing one arm with the other hand, then clutching at his chest. He blinks twice, but Jennifer doesn't think he sees anything.

“She's at the store, Grampa,” Jennifer says, and
now she's getting scared. “Grampa, are you all right? Are you all right, Grampa?”

“J. Maddy,” he says; but Jennifer can see he's not really talking to her, and he grabs his chest and slumps to the side. She crawls quickly across the coffee table, knowing something is terribly wrong, and she'll never get this puzzle together without him, that she won't be safe. . . .

Jennifer stands on the couch and braces herself under Grampa's shoulder, trying to push him back up. She knows if she can sit him upright, like he was a minute ago, he'll be okay. But the weight . . .

He seems to fold over her when she pushes, engulfs her, so she crawls across his lap to the other side and tries to pull him up by his left shoulder. It doesn't work, but she's
sure
if she can just get him upright, get him sitting. Like he was . . .

It's fifteen or twenty minutes before Jennifer is able to get Grampa sitting up. Her tiny body is soaked with sweat from trying to perform this impossible task, but never once does she think to go for help. It doesn't occur to her that anyone in the family would want to help. Grampa has always been hers, like she is his. They are two people at far ends of the spectrum, and they don't matter in this house, unless, of course, you count when
Mommy wants her to show off how smart she is or that late-night time when her daddy sneaks into her room. That matters. . . .

For more than a half hour Jennifer remains wedged against Grampa's ribs, propping him up in his sitting position. She continues with the puzzle, at least the parts she can reach, and Grampa is long gone. Jennifer talks to him as if he were still there, magically guiding her hands to the right places with the right pieces; but the going is slower, and several pieces have been forced into the wrong spots. “Does this one go here?” she asks patiently, waiting about the right amount of time for an answer, then: “Guess not, maybe here.” Tears stream down her face, but she refuses to let what is real be real. When Grampa's gone, well, who knows what when Grampa's gone?

It all falls apart when Jennifer's mother walks into the room from the kitchen, where she has just set down two sacks of groceries on the counter. She is talking as she walks through the door, though Jen has no idea what she's saying. There is dead silence, then a muffled shriek as her mother sees Grampa's dead eyes staring somewhere off the arm of the couch, his face ashen.

“Jennifer! Jennifer!” her mother yells at her, but Jennifer stares valiantly at the puzzle, trying to figure
how the feather goes into Dumbo's trunk. “Jennifer, your granddad . . .”

Jen stares harder at the puzzle.

Her mother takes Jen by the waist and pulls her away from the couch, and Grampa slumps over. Jen automatically moves back to try to prop him up, but her mother snatches her again by the waist and points her toward the door. “You go outside, dear,” she says desperately. “I'll see to Grampa.”

Jen turns on her mother then, eyes blazing, defiant. “You won't see to Grampa,” she says between gritted teeth, her hands locked onto her hips, upper body protruding over her legs so far as to defy gravity. “You won't see to Grampa. Grampa's dead. He's dead. Nobody ever sees to Grampa.” Her mother's hand flashes out and slaps her hard across the face. The tears and the snot begin to run then, but Jen holds her ground. “And nobody ever sees to me!” she yells, and runs out of the room.

Her mother stands stunned, as usual, totally ineffectual at dealing with either crisis. She turns to her father's corpse. . . .

Jennifer feels the steel casing start to form around her heart from her perch in the tree just outside the back porch. First her father comes home, sees her there but
makes no acknowledgment and disappears into the house. After her father come the fire department and a policeman. Grampa is taken away on a long bed with wheels, and his whole body is covered with a blanket. Jennifer can't see him, but she knows it's him. Then other people start to arrive; some she knows are aunts and uncles and cousins and some are just neighbors. Some she doesn't know at all. Several folks look at her up in the tree, and a few make feeble attempts at coaxing her down; but Jennifer will not budge. She will sit there well into the night.

If I could have sat him all the way up
. . . she thinks.
If I could have sat him all the way up, I could have saved him.
She hates her mother for making her leave the room before they got the puzzle fixed. She was the only one in the world who really cared about Grampa. And the people who care about you are the only ones who can save you.

Dear Preston,

Been thinking a
lot
since I wrote last. Funny, most of it's been about Stacy. My thoughts about her keep me in a constant state of confusion. I said before I hated that she loved you and not me, and that's not exactly true. I didn't hate that she loved you. I just hated that she didn't love me. I fell into the trap of believing that strong feelings about a person are exclusive of feelings about any others. That's what
they tell
us, but it's a lie. The part of Stacy that liked me and talked with me and was intimate in all those ways that aren't
man-woman
ways didn't have anything to do with you. And her love for you, her attraction and her sexual draw toward you, didn't have anything to do with me. I got them confused, I think; thought I couldn't have my part without your part. I'm sorry I was such a smartass all those times I said things like
“Why go for the Plymouth Duster when you can have the 'Vette?” I think that probably hurt you a lot because you believed the analogy. And truth be known, I probably did, too. I have some things to learn about unwarranted arrogance. I keep going back to this time I ran into her at the carnival. You might remember, it was the time I lost Christy and ended up spending three life sentences grounded to my room. I play it over like it happened yesterday—don't have a clue why it's important except that it tells me something about my roots with her and why she seems so important in my life.

 

She hollers, “Wait up!” from around the corner, just back from the bottle throw. I hear her, recognize her voice, but I can't see her through the crowd. “Wait!” she yells again, so I stand fast, holding Christy by the back of her coat collar, letting Stacy find me.

“Look!” she yells, and finally I see her, sidestepping all the folks pressed up to the dart throw, dancing through the steady stream of people moving toward the big green canvas tent for the next performance of EPHRAIM,
THE ASTOUNDING DOG BOY, THE ONE AND ONLY OF HIS KIND IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE.

I wonder if they have an abundance of astounding dog boys in the
Eastern
Hemisphere.

“Dillon,” she hollers again, waving with one hand,
pointing at me with the other, this funny-looking, colored straw extension protruding from her index finger, aimed directly at my heart.

I say, “Hi,” as Christy reaches for the sky like a saloon bartender robbed by the Daltons, and drops to her knees, sliding out of her coat and my grasp. I dive and catch her belt loop an instant before she could have scrambled into the crowd, only to surface at Lost and Found a half hour later stuffed with ice cream and cotton candy to silence her wailing until Mom or I got there. Part of me wants to let her go because though I'm only nine years old, I'm totally, hopelessly, irrevocably in love with Stacy Ryder and I know I could negotiate those mysterious waters better without my pain-in-the-butt sister in the boat. But I am what Mom calls a “trustworthy caretaker,” and besides, Stacy likes
you,
so I don't let Christy go. “Nice try, peckerbrains,” I say, lifting her to her feet by the belt and handing her jacket back. “Put this back on. Don't make me use the leash.”

Christy's eyes narrow defiantly, and that impish smile crosses her lips, letting me know that wasn't her last, or even her best, escape attempt. I don't know how we were able to keep her in the family, Pres. Seems like she spent her first ten years trying to get away. Maybe she knew something we didn't.

“Stick your finger in here,” Stacy says, and I stare at the long orange-and-brown woven straw barrel extending from the end of her finger like a silencer on a handgun.

“What is it?”

“Just stick your finger in.”

I hesitate, squinting. “Is this a trick?”

She raises her eyebrows, a move I have long been convinced was designed solely to bring me to my knees. “Of course, it's a trick,” she says. “This is a carnival.”

I stick my finger in. “Gotcha,” she says. “You can't get away.”

This is Stacy Ryder. I don't
want
away, but I pull my hand back anyway. The straw tightens around my knuckle. I pull harder.

“Pull as hard as you want,” she says. “It won't come off.”

I do pull harder, yank it, but my finger is caught fast. “What is this thing?” I ask, bringing it, along with Stacy's hand, closer to my face.

She says, “Chinese handcuffs. Neat, huh?”

“Yeah, neat. Do the Chinese use these?”

“I guess. They're Chinese handcuffs.”

“How do I get them off?”

She shrugs. “You don't. Once you're in 'em, you're in 'em for good. Unless you know the secret.”

“So what's the secret?” I ask, at the same moment Christy drops out of the bottom of her jacket again. I reach; but Stacy and the Chinese handcuffs hold me back, and Christy stands just out of reach, hands on her buttocks, eyes squinted, chin stuck out a mile, a pose I'm sure you were as familiar with as I.

“You're in trouble now,” she says, and vanishes in a forest of legs.

I say, “Shit. Lemme out of this, Stace. I gotta get her. God, my mom will kill me if she hears her name over the loudspeaker.”

Stacy raises her eyebrows again and shrugs. “Sorry. You have to know the secret. The gypsy lady over by the Ferris wheel said it's a secret of life.”

“My sister pay you?” I ask. Stacy does know the secret, and I know she knows the secret; but I'm aware there are worse things in life than being connected to Stacy Ryder for the rest of it, and
you're
not around to turn her head. And what the hell, Christy is long gone now anyway.

We wander around together for more than a half hour before Stacy finally shows me the secret, gently holding my hand in place at the wrist while she releases the pressure and slides her finger out; you've seen those things, right? Then she just looks at me innocently and shrugs, and I want instantly to lay down my life for her in some heroic
and totally selfless way. But Christy has already been bailed out of Lost and Found by Mom, and my name is the one blaring over the loudspeaker every five minutes. Mom is searching furiously for me, intent on grounding me until my thirty-seventh birthday for turning a helpless five-year-old loose in such a dangerous place as the traveling carnival. I paid a lot of dues in my time for that little shit. I'm sure you did, too.

Anyway, to celebrate my liberation from the ridiculous handcuffs, which can't have cost more than three cents to make and whose secret of life is lost on me at the time, and to get in as much pleasure as I can before my impending incarceration, I take Stacy for two rides on the octopus and one on the hammer, leaving us nearly too sick to blow the rest of my money on hot dogs and cotton candy. No sense having cash during lifelong confinement. They have to feed you anyway.

 

I'm sure I have earlier memories of Stacy, Pres, but that's the one that always comes first. Being hooked to her and getting free of the handcuffs by releasing, instead of pulling hard. God, if I ever get
her
straight in my head, well, let's just say my life could take a turn for the simple. It was easier when you were still here because there was never any doubt who she was with. I grew up. I got bigger, I got stronger,
I may have even gotten smarter, but not smart enough to understand the effect she's always had on me. She may very well have been put on this planet by a sadistic, malevolent God to run my hormones wild and right into a brick wall and to make me feel truckloads of guilt for coveting the one thing my brother had that I wanted.

Boy, she was in love with you, Pres. She may have liked me better, but she loved you. I hated it.
I
saw her first. She was in
my
class at school. She copied off
my
homework. But she loved you. I tried to reason with her. By the time I was a sophomore and you were a senior, I had about an inch and fifteen pounds on you. That's when I started giving her the line about the Duster and the Corvette. That was cheap, Pres. I know it was.

She teased me back by asking why she should buy more car than she could use, but more or less wasn't really what it was all about. I don't want to be unfair or devalue what you guys had, but I think Stacy thought she could save you. I think that was a big part of her love. And I hate to say it, but I'm beginning to see that's a trick; it happens a lot, I think. Things get misnamed. Look what Mom and Dad called love.

It's hard for me to say these things, Preston, with you dead and all because it seems inequitable to pass judgment on your relationship with Stacy when you're not here to tell me I'm full of shit. But you left, and I'm stuck
here to make sense of it, so I'm giving myself some leeway.

And speaking of your suicide, I haven't come completely clean to the rest of the world about it. And I don't know if I will. I even feel strange about writing it down. I've read too many stories about little sisters or moms, or whoever, finding diaries hidden in the dresser drawers underneath the underwear or back in the closet behind the shoes, but since there's no one alive to tell about it, I have to tell it to you just so I can look at it myself. Besides, when Mom hit the road, Christy went with her, and Dad wouldn't be caught dead in my room.

See, I might have known. I mean, when we got the guns and headed for the old cemetery, maybe I really knew you were going to do it. And if I did know, well, if I
did
know, then I'm the one who put the gun in your hands. Literally. Even as messed up as I'd seen you in your life, as broken down and scared and depressed and confused as you were when you first tried to kick the drugs, I'd
never
seen you like you were the day you shot yourself in the head. If a part of me knew, then another part wanted to let you go ahead. I mean, I wouldn't have wanted to live your life. The one crazy thing about being your brother and having you look so much like me—or vice versa, I guess you looked this way first—was that sometimes it was like seeing myself with everything off. You may well have been what I'd
be were I stripped bare of my sense of humor and my willingness to fight; of my tenacity; even of my legs.

If my memory's right, it was the end of your junior year when you bought the Harley. God, I think you still had the first dollar you ever earned hauling groceries for that old woman down the block from us when you were seven. You could have had any bike you wanted with the bundle you had put away. I remember Mom and Dad almost crapped their drawers in parental crisis when you said you were going to get it, but you stood on the family rule that whatever money we kids earned was ours to do with as we pleased. I'll bet they'd change
that
one if they had it to do over again. I think it was meant for allowances, not ten-thousand-dollar savings accounts. I remember once he was resigned to the fact that his firstborn son and odds-on favorite to provide him grandchildren before fifty was going to be a biker, Dad tried to talk you into a Honda or Suzuki, because he saw the glaze in your eye every time you said the words
Harley-Davidson,
but you were dead set on that Sportster. God, and what a monster it was. I never did know much about motorcycles, as hard as you tried to educate me, but I didn't have to know much to know you were in front of me one second and a
long ways
down the road the next. And it sounded like you were strafing an airfield when you went by. This was one big, loud bike, my man.

I think Mom and Dad's anxiety went down a little after you'd been driving six months or so and your skin was still there to hold your body parts in, instead of laid out like a hairless bear rug on the freeway, but what they didn't know was you were busy connecting with the Warlocks. And as you well know now, no matter how sharp a bike you've got, there's only one way to hook up with the Warlocks if you're eighteen years old and 135 pounds, and that is to sell their wares.

At least they drummed out the jerk who steered you between those two semis. Your “initiation” move, right? God, Pres, you were smarter than that. You were. How bad did you want in with those creeps? You get to be a full member if you pulled off that move? Man, you must have been sky-high. Wolf himself told me you were crazy out of your gourd to follow Indian Red. Bikers may be a few bricks shy of a load sometimes, but they have more respect than that for hard pavement and fast trucks.

I've been thinking about the day you did it, Preston, and I gotta tell you, it rips up my insides, even now, but it also pisses me off so bad that if you hadn't succeeded, I'd probably have killed you. At least the way I feel today. I remember it like it was yesterday.

 

It was a day like few seen in Three Forks in February. At six-thirty in the morning the sky was clear
as a bell with the temperature standing at forty degrees Fahrenheit. It would rise to sixty-one, a near record, before the afternoon sun slipped behind Boulder Peak. Winter had been mild, and there was little, if any, snow remaining on the ground. Outside, the light of dawn splashed a single streak of red in the eastern sky, the final evidence of the cloud cover passing over through the night, insulating the earth from the normal late-winter cold.

Dillon didn't normally get out of bed at six-thirty on a Saturday morning—in fact, he usually claimed ignorance of the fact that there
was
a six-thirty on Saturday morning—but on this day his eyes popped open as if by a secret alarm inside his head. He padded over to his bedroom window, pulling on his pajama bottoms, peering at the vague silhouette of Preston's van parked next to the garage, blocked by the shadow of the house from the early dawnlight. Initially Dillon thought Preston was leaving; but he heard the familiar sound of his wheelchair hitting the concrete, followed by the slam of the van door, and he knew Preston was just coming home. That could only mean trouble. He watched in silence as Preston wheeled himself slowly around the van, touching the hood ornament lightly, running his hand along the pinstriping and the dragon airbrushed
onto the side door. Preston performed a couple of figure eights on the concrete driveway, shooting an imaginary ball at the hoop mounted on the backboard above the garage door, then wheeled over to the side of the house, just out of Dillon's sight. Dillon didn't know whether to leave him alone or go down and talk—Preston looked really peaceful from that distance—but he opted for the latter, because it all seemed so unusual, and because Preston's being out that late made him wonder if he'd been somewhere using again.