Girls (2 page)

At Mrs. Tanner’s funeral, they sang “Shall We Gather at the River,” and I sang, too. It was like that in the field. Everyone gathered, and it was something to see. Then we all came apart. Fanny went where she needed to, and Rosalie Piri did, and Archie Halpern. I did, too. Most of them, I think, remained within a few miles of the field.

The dog and I live where it doesn’t snow. I can’t look at snow and stay calm. Sometimes it gets so warm, I wear navy blue uniform shorts with a reinforced long pocket down the left hip for the radio.
I patrol on foot and sometimes on a white motor scooter, and it’s hard for me to believe, a cop on a scooter in shorts. But someone who enforces the law, laws, somebody’s laws, falls down like that. Whether it’s because he drinks or takes money or swallows amphetamines or has to be powerful, or he’s one of those people who is always scared, or because he’s me, that’s how he goes—state or federal agency or a big-city police force, down to working large towns or the dead little cities underneath the Great Lakes, say, then down to smaller towns, then maybe a campus, maybe a mall, or a hotel that used to be fine.

I’ve moved a few times, changing my job but trying to stay on a kind of level vocationally. I would like not to sink very much more. And she traces me, and she calls. The first time, I was surprised. I was south and west, looking at a map while lying on a bed in the Arroyo Motel, where they gave good residential rates and didn’t care what species your roommate was. The dog was in the bathroom, lying against the coolness of the tub and panting, and I was reading the map of New York State. At one time, I marked the areas with a felt-tip pen where girls had disappeared. Most of them were under the snow and ice up there, I figured, and I didn’t know why I had to look at months-old guesses about burial sites. I distrusted this kind of recreation.

It was my third week on the new job, and I continued not to know where to go or what to do for what might be thought of as pleasure. I was supposed to have fun or relax, the duty sergeant made clear, because I had been reported for menacing a citizen and obviously I needed some time to get right.

“Gritting your teeth isn’t menacing,” I told him.

“In
your
face,” he said, “it is.” Then he told me, “Jack, go and get unfucked.”

So I was off duty and getting unfucked with a daydream I often had about her. Facedown on my chest was a map marked with places where someone took people’s daughters and killed them.

I am talking here about being lost or found. You can be a small child and get lost, and maybe I will find you. God knows, I’ll try. Or
you can be a large and ordinary man and get lost in everything usual about your life. Maybe you will try to find yourself, and so might someone else. It ends up being about the ordinary days you are hidden inside of, whether or not you want to hide.

I didn’t flinch when the phone rang, and I didn’t run to pick it up. On the fifth ring, I said, “All right.” On the seventh or eighth, I answered it. The dog, I noticed, had moved from between the toilet and the tub to lie with his nose at the threshold of the bathroom door.

She said, “I knew I’d get you. There you are.”

All I could think to say was, “Aren’t you something.”

“Given my family connection to the finding-people profession, no. I wouldn’t expect any less of me. Neither should you.”

“No. I think I won’t.”

She said, “I prepared a list of remarks to fall back on in case I couldn’t think of anything to say that would keep you on the line.”

I could hear the hum and hiss of the open connection, but I couldn’t hear anything of her. Then she came back and I felt her on the line. A piece of paper rattled, and then she recited, the way you do when you read something out loud, “Are you eating well? Are you sleeping well? Are you, in general, looking after yourself?”

I said, “Are you all right?”

“No. Are you?”

“Sure.”

“Really?”

“No. I guess, really, no.”

“Good,” she said. “In a way. You come back here, Jack. Will you come back?” She gave me a little time to answer, and then she said, “Never mind. You wouldn’t. Maybe I can get there. Wherever in the world it really is. Jack, it’s so far away.”

“I believe that’s why I came here.”

“Yes. Except you had to leave me behind when you did that.”

“You couldn’t have come with me. The dog could barely stand it.
I
could barely stand it. I haven’t been really friendly, these days.”

“But you’re some kind of a
fugitive
, Jack. From
me
. Consider that.
You and your dog, in the middle of the night, you drive away in the world’s oldest station wagon to—”

“Daylight. I left in daylight. But I know what you mean. And the Torino did finally die. Get this: outside of Buffalo, New York. I never even got it out of the state.”

“I can’t imagine you driving anything else,” she said.

“I drive a Subaru DL, 1980. I had to pay extra for a rearview mirror you can tilt against the headlights behind you. You have to replace the struts every few miles, but the engine’s good and the body only shifts on the frame when you turn a corner or pull out to pass.”

She said, with a kind of a wobble, “Is there room for the dog?”

“He gets the backseat.”

“You and him.”

“Me and him,” I said. By then, I think, I was messed up, too, and my voice must have showed it, because the dog banged his tail on the floor. It was a trick he used to do with my wife. Now he was promiscuous, and he would slam his tail against the floor if anyone gave the slightest signal of distress. Apparently, I was signaling, and he was signaling back.

Thinking about the way we came apart, all of us, Fanny and Rosalie and Archie and me and the Tanners and their daughter and every man and woman who worked in the field between the houses and the river, was like watching something explode, but slowed down.

I saw it on the job, early in my rotation, when my work consisted of rousting disorderly American teenaged boys in uniform in Phu Lam when they overacted their role as savior. I was giving directions to a somewhat shit-faced marine just back from Operation Utah in I Corps. He was so chiseled down and locked tight, I would not have challenged him to a bet on a ball game. I was pointing, I remember, when a car bomb took down a hotel across the street. I kept seeing it afterward. Traumatic flashback, a doctor taught me to call it.

But that day, directly after the explosion, I didn’t know its name, and I sat on the curb and I kept watching the hotel go out and up. The marine, who got very sober very fast, squatted behind me where I sat. I was wondering out loud for him whether what we might be
thinking of as oil or gasoline that pooled beneath my legs in the street could actually be the blood of whores and janitors and cleaning ladies. He patted my shoulder over and over, and he kept saying, “Uh-huh,” and “That’s right,” and “You got it.” After a while, I didn’t see blood, but I did keep seeing the slow coming apart of the back end of the little gray Fiat, and then the stick-by-stick dismantling of the two-story hotel, slat by gallery banister, window mullion by floorboard, everything coming toward us from the inside out.

“Uh-huh,” the marine said, patting me, “you saying hello to Flash.”

She said, “Jack.”

“The chances weren’t terrific, you know,” I told her.

“For what?”

“Well, what you’re calling about.”

“You and me. That’s what I’m calling about.”

The dog was pounding away with his tail. He sounded like the drummer on an antique recording of a slow, surrendering song.

“But you were hoping they’d get better,” she said. “Weren’t you?”

I said, “Not at first.”

Y
OU CAN’T SAY ONCE
upon a time to tell the story of how we got to where we are. You have to say winter. Once, in winter, you say, because winter was our only season, and it felt like we would live in winter all our lives.

I was awake in the darkness and the sound of wind against the house when the dog began to retch at 5:25. I hustled ninety pounds of heaving chocolate Lab to the door and rolled him onto the snow that looked silver in the fading moonlight.

“Good boy,” I said, because he’d done his only trick.

Outside he vomited, and I went back up, passing the sofa Fanny lay on. I tiptoed with enough weight on my toes to let her know how considerate I was. She blinked her eyes. I know I heard her blink her eyes. Whenever I told her I could hear her blink her eyes, she said I was lying. But I could hear the damp slap of lash after I made her cry.

I got into bed to get warm again. I saw the red digital numbers, 5:29, and I knew I wouldn’t fall asleep. I didn’t. I read a book about men who kill one another for pay or for their honor. I forget which, and so did they. It was 5:45, the alarm would buzz at 6:00, and I would make a pot of coffee and start the woodstove. I would call
Fanny and pour her coffee into her mug. I would apologize because I always did. Then she would forgive me. We would stagger through the day, exhausted but pretty sure we were more or less all right. We would probably sleep that night. We would probably wake in the same bed to the alarm at 6:00, or to the dog, if he’d returned to the frozen deer carcass he’d been eating in the forest on our land. He loved what made him sick. The alarm went off, I got into jeans and woolen socks and a sweatshirt, and I went downstairs to let the dog in. He’d be hungry, of course.

I was the oldest college student in America, I sometimes said. But of course I wasn’t. There were always ancient women with parchment skin who graduated at seventy-nine from places like Barnard and the University of Alabama. I was only forty-four, and I hardly qualified as a student. I patrolled the college at night in a Jeep with a leaky exhaust system, and I went from room to room in the classroom buildings, kicking out students who were studying or humping in chairs—they do it
anywhere
—and answering emergency calls, with my little blue light winking on top of the roof. I didn’t carry a gun or a billy, but I had a heavy black flashlight that took three batteries, and I’d used it twice on some of my overprivileged northeastern-playboy part-time classmates. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would waken at 6:00 with my wife, and I’d do my homework, and then patrol at school and go to class at 11:30, to sit there for an hour and a half while thirty-five stomachs growled and this guy gave instruction about books. Because I was on the staff, the college let me take a course for nothing every term. I was getting educated, in a kind of slow-motion way. It was going to take me something like fifteen or sixteen years to graduate. I predicted to Fanny I would no doubt get an F in gym in my last semester and have to repeat. There were times when I respected myself for going to school. Fanny often did, and that had served as fair incentive.

I am not unintelligent. “You are not an unintelligent writer,” my professor wrote on my paper about Nathaniel Hawthorne. We had to read short stories, I and the other students, and then we had to write little essays about them. I told how I saw Kafka and Hawthorne in a
similar light, and I was not unintelligent, he said. He ran into me at dusk one time, when I answered a call about a dead battery and found out it was him. I jumped his Buick from the Jeep’s battery, and he was looking me over, I could tell, while I clamped onto the terminals and cranked it up. He was tall and handsome, like someone in a clothing catalog. He never wore a suit. He wore khakis and sweaters, loafers or sneakers, and he was always talking to the female students with the brightest hair and best builds. But he couldn’t get a Buick going on an ice-cold night, and he didn’t know enough to look for cells going bad. I told him he was going to need a new battery, and he looked me over the way men sometimes do with other men who fix their cars for them.

“Vietnam?”

I said, “No way.”

“You have that look sometimes. Were you one of the Phoenix Project fellas?”

I was wearing a watch cap made of navy wool and an old fatigue jacket. Slick characters like my professor enjoy it if you’re a killer or at least a onetime middleweight fighter. I smiled as if I knew something. “Take it easy,” I said, and I went back to the Jeep to swing around the cemetery at the top of the campus. They’d been known to screw in down-filled sleeping bags on horizontal stones up there, and the dean of students didn’t want anybody dying of frostbite while joined at the hip to a matriculating fellow resident of our northeastern camp for the overindulged.

He blinked his high beams at me as I went. “You are not an unintelligent driver,” I said.

Fanny had left me a bowl of something made with sausages and sauerkraut and potatoes, and the dog hadn’t eaten too much more than his fair share. He watched me eat his leftovers and then make myself a king-size drink composed of sour mash and ice. In our back room, which is on the northern end of the house, and cold for sitting
in that close to dawn, I sat and I watched the texture of the sky change. It was going to snow, and I wanted to see the storm come up the valley. I woke up that way, sitting in the rocker with its loose right arm, holding a watery drink, and thinking right away of the girl I’d convinced to go back inside. She’d been standing outside her dormitory, looking up at a window that was dark in the midst of all those lighted panes. They never turned a light off; they would let the faucets run half the night. She was crying onto her bathrobe. She was sockless in rubber-bottomed boots, the brown ones so many of them wore unlaced, and for all I know, she might have been naked under the robe. She was beautiful, I thought, and she was somebody’s redheaded daughter, standing in a quadrangle how many miles from home and weeping.