In This Light (18 page)

The man who could suck his belly back to his spine didn’t have the cash for even one night at a motel, so Didi, in her kindness, in her mercy, brought him back to the trailer, and they made love right there with three-year-old Evan and five-year-old Meribeth wide awake, no doubt, and listening. He had a pretty name,
Aidan Cordeaux.
The last part meant fuse, and the first was the fire, so maybe the flickering man did spark inside her.

Strange as it was, she often hoped the starved prison guard was Holly’s father, that the night she’d conceived her youngest child, Evan and Meribeth had been there with her.
Little angels!
She felt them hovering all night, close and conscious, her darlings lying together in the narrow bunk above the bed where she and the Living Skeleton made love, where she touched the man’s sharp ribs and knotted vertebrae, where she prayed,
yes, prayed
, for God to give him flesh, to restore him.

She heard her two children breathing slowly afterward, asleep at last, and the man was asleep too, up in smoke, and so she was alone, yes, but safe unto herself, blessed by her children, and the sound of their quiet breath was so sweet and familiar that she felt them as breath in her own body, as wings of sparrows softly fluttering.
God
, she thought,
his messengers.

She was drunk enough to pretend, drunk enough to imagine. Later, the cries of feral cats in the woods sounded half-human, and she had to laugh at herself. What a hoot to think God might send angels to Didi Kinkaid in her trailer.
Just my own damn kids, but Christ, it was comforting.

Her cousin Harlan was probably Holly’s dad. It made the most sense: Holly and Harlan with that bright blond hair, those weird white eyelashes. Harlan’s wife lived in Winnipeg all that winter, following her senile mother out in the snow, lifting her crippled father onto the toilet. Harlan and Didi met four times at the Kozy Kabins: twice to make love, once to watch television, once to be sorry.

More than anything, Didi wanted to believe Holly’s father wasn’t the fat man in his truck who passed out on top of her. She’d escaped inch by inch, hoping his cold sweat wouldn’t freeze them together. She walked back to the Deerlick Saloon, to her own car, a yellow Dodge Dart that year, lemon yellow, a tin heap destined for the junkyard. She thought she should tell somebody he was out there alone at the edge of the river. She pictured him rolling off the seat to the floor, pants pulled down to his ankles, ripe body wedged underneath the dashboard. He could die tonight, numb despite all that flesh, and Didi Kinkaid would be his killer.

But the bar had been closed for hours, and her fingers were so stiff she could barely turn the key in the lock of her car door, arms so sore she could barely grip the wheel. Didi didn’t feel sorry for anybody but herself by then, so she didn’t stop at the all-night gas station, and she didn’t call the police when she got home—she didn’t even tell Rita LaCroix, her neighbor, the babysitter—she just dropped into bed, shivering, and the truth was she was so damn cold she forgot the man, his flesh and sweat, his terrible whinny of high laughter.

In the morning, she smelled his skin on her skin and she used every drop of hot water in the shower, all twelve minutes, and she drank bright green mouthwash straight from the bottle and she listened to the news on the radio. There was no report of a dead man gone blue as ice by the river. She figured he’d been spared and so had she, but when she thought of it now, she hoped to God she hadn’t been cruel or stupid enough to abandon the one who was Holly’s true father.

When Didi Kinkaid’s child splintered the window above my mother’s bed and entered our lives, her story became my story—her only son burst in my heart, her bad boy broke me open. My father was dead. Eleven months later, the second night of November, the night Didi’s pinkand-green trailer burned and melted, I knew my mother was dying.

Didi had been in prison since August. When I imagined her children—the desperate ones she’d borne and the wild ones she’d rescued, when I imagined all the sooty-faced, tossed-up runaways left to wander—I understood there are three hundred ways for a family to be shattered.

Soon, so soon, I too would be an orphan.

II.  FIRE

The fire was revenge, intimate and tribal. We came to witness, we people of the hills and hollows, lured up Didi’s road by smoke and sirens. Through the flames, I saw the glowing faces of Didi’s closest neighbors: Nellie Rydell and Doris Kelso, Lorna Coake and Ruby Whipple. I thought that one of them must have sparked this blaze—with her own two hands and the holy heat of her desire.

Who poured the stream of gasoline, who struck the match, who lit the torch of wood and paper?
Tell me now. I keep all secrets.
Was it one of you alone, or did all four conspire?

For the small crime of arson, no respectable woman ever stood trial. The trailer was a temptation and an eyesore, a refuge for feral cats, a sanctuary for wayward children. Now Didi’s home could be hauled away, a heap of melted rubble.
An accident
, Ruby said.
A blessing
, Lorna whispered.

Who can know for sure? Maybe the small boy called Rooster lit a pile of sticks to warm the fingers of his twelveyear-old girlfriend, Simone, so that it wouldn’t hurt where she touched him. Maybe cross-eyed Georgia squirted loops of lighter fluid into the blaze just to see what would happen, and all the children danced in the dark, hot at last, giddy as the fire spread, too joyful now to try to smother it.

But I will always believe those four women in their righteous rage burned Didi out forever.

Didi Kinkaid trespassed against us: She harbored fugitives; she tempted boys; she tempted husbands. She slept with strangers and her own cousin—and despite all this generous love, Didi Kinkaid still failed to marry the father of even one of her children.

Compared with these transgressions, the crimes named by County Prosecutor Marvin Beloit—the violations for which Didi Kinkaid was shackled, chained, and dumped in prison—seemed almost trivial: receiving and selling stolen goods, felony offenses, theft of property far exceeding $1,000. To be precise: forty-one bicycles snatched by children and fenced by Didi over a thirteen-month period.

Forty-one, including the three treasures in her last load: a black-and-yellow 1947 Schwinn Hornet Deluxe with its original headlight, worth an astonishing $3,700; the 1959 Radiant Red Phantom, a three-speed wonder with lavish chrome, almost a motorcycle—and radiant, yes—worth $59.95 new, and now, lovingly restored by Merle Tremble’s huge but delicate hands, worth $3,250; finally, the lovely 1951 Starlet painted in its original Summer Cloud White with Holiday Rose trim and pink streamers, worth only $1,900, but polished inch by inch for the daughter Merle never had. To him, priceless.

In court, Merle Tremble confessed: The jeweled reflector for the Phantom cost him $107.
A perfect prism of light, worth every penny.
He found a seat for the Hornet, smooth leather with a patina like an antique baseball glove, worn shiny by one particular boy’s bones and muscles.
No man can buy such joy with money.

For six years, Merle Tremble had haunted thrift stores and junkyards, digging through steaming heaps of trash to recover donor bikes with any precious piece that might be salvageable. Under oath, Merle Tremble swore to God he loved his bikes like children.

No wonder Didi laughed out loud, a snort that filled the courtroom. A man who believes he loves twisted chrome as much as he might love a human child deserves to lose everything he has, deserves fire and flood and swarms of locusts. But Didi’s lack of remorse, her justifiable scorn, didn’t help her.

For crimes named and trespasses unspoken, Didi Kinkaid received ten years, the maximum sentence.

Ten years.
More than any man gets for beating his wife or stabbing his brother. More years than a man with drunken rage as his excuse might serve for barroom brawl and murder.

Didi’s transgressions wounded our spirits. She fed the children no mother could tame. She loved them for a night or for an hour, just as she loved the men who shared all her beds in all those motel rooms, and this terrifying, transient love, this passion without faith that tomorrow will be the same or ever come, this endless offering of the body and the soul and the self was dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.

If she was good, then we were guilty. Exile wasn’t enough. We had to burn her.

When Didi heard about the fire, she knew.
Busybody dogooders
, she said,
always coming to my door with their greasy casseroles and stale muffins, acting all high and holy when all they really wanted was to get a peek inside, see if I had some tattooed cowboy sprawled on my bed, find out how many kids were crashing at my place and if my own three were running naked. Kindhearted ladies benevolent as that did the same damn thing to my mother. Ran her out of Riverton in the end. Killed her with their mercy.

The bikes were just an excuse.
It could have been anything
, she said,
but in the end, I made it easy.

III.  BICYCLE BANDITS

Didi never asked the stray children for anything. Rooster and Simone brought the first bike to her doorstep, a silver mountain bike with gloriously fat tires, tires nubbed and tough enough to ride through snow and slush and mud and rivers, a bike sturdy enough to carry two riders down ditches and up the rocky road to Didi’s trailer. A small gift, for all the times she’d fed them. Rooster said,
I’ve got a number and a name, a guy willing to travel for a truckload.

Stealing bikes was a good job, one the children could keep, without bosses or customers, time clocks or hairnets. They loved mountain bikes best—so many gears to grind, so many colors: black as a black hole black, metallic blue, fool’s gold, one green so bright it looked radioactive. Rooster had to ride that bike alone: his Kootenai girlfriend was afraid to touch it.

There was a dump in the ravine behind Didi’s trailer,
The Child Dump
, she called it, because sometimes it seemed the children just kept crawling out of it. They glued themselves together from broken sleds and headless dolls and bits of fur and scraps of plastic. Their bones were splintered wood. Their hearts were chicken hearts. Their little hands were rubber.

She expected them to stop one day—she thought there might be nine or ten or even forty—but they just kept rising out of the pit. In court, the day three testified against her, County Prosecutor Marvin Beloit said he had reason to believe more than three hundred homeless children roamed the woods surrounding Kalispell.

They slept in abandoned cars and culverts. Busted the locks of sheds. Shattered the windows of cabins. Desperate in a blizzard last winter, two cousins with sharp knives stabbed Leo Henry’s cow in the throat, split her gut with a hatchet and pulled her entrails out so that they could sleep curled up safe in the cave of her body.

Three hundred homeless children.

Sleep was good, was God, their only comfort.

Nobody in court wanted to believe Marvin Beloit.
Not in our little town.
Didi pitied him—her brother, her prosecutor—a man alone, besieged by visions. She knew the truth, but couldn’t help him.

Ferris, Cate, Luke, Scarla—Hansel, Heidi, Micah, LaFlora—Dawn, Daisy, Duncan, Mirinda.
These children offered themselves to Didi in humility and gratitude. Joyfully and by design, they became thieves. They’d found their purpose.

Sometimes when a child stole a bike, he stole a whole family, and they lived in his mind, a vision of the life he couldn’t have: they pestered, they poked him. Nuke was sorry after he took the candy-striped tandem with a baby seat and a rack to carry tent and camp stove. That night he dreamed he was the smiling infant who had no words, who knew only the bliss of pure sensation. Wind in his face carried the scent of his mother: sweet milk and clean cotton, white powder patted soft on his own bare bottom. Daddy pedaled hard in front, and the sun seemed so close and hot the baby believed he could touch it.

But Nuke woke on the hard dirt to the spit of his real name,
Peter Petrosky
, his mother’s curse:
not in my house, you little fucker.
Then he was an only child caught smoking weed laced with crack in his mother’s house, in his father’s shower. Doctor Petrosky was a genius, an artist with a scalpel who could scoop a pacemaker from a dead man and set it humming inside the chest of a black Labrador. Peter didn’t wait to receive his clever father’s pity or redemption. Sick with sound and light, the boy lay under his bed for an hour then climbed out the window. Now he was Nuke the nuke, a walking holocaust, sending up mushroom clouds with every footstep.

Wendy, Wanda, Bix, Griffin.

Tianna found a smoked chrome BMx with a gusseted frame and scrambler tires. She could fly on this bike, airborne off every mogul. Indestructible.
Tianna!
Thirteen years old and four fingers gone to frostbite last winter.
No more piano lessons
, she said,
no flute, no cello.
Tianna imagined sitting at the polished mahogany piano in her parents’ cedar house, high on a hill, overlooking the valley. Oh! How strange and lovely the music would sound, true at last, with so many of the notes missing.

She might lie down,
just for a moment
, and fall asleep on her mother’s creamy white leather sofa. Sleeping outside was torture. Tianna sucked and bit her stumps. The fingers she’d lost itched in the heat and stung in the cold.
They’re still there
, she said,
but I can’t see them.

Naomi, Rose, Garth, Devon.

Angel Donner bashed into his own basement and stole his own bike, a black and orange Diablo Dynamo that any kid could see was just a pitiful imitation of a Stingray, worth less than fifty dollars new and now worth nothing. He remembered it under the Christmas tree, his father’s grin, his mother’s joy, his pit of disappointment.

Laurel, Grace, Logan, Nikos.

There was the one who called herself Trace because she’d vanished without one.
Idaho, Craters of the Moon, family vacation.
Cleo Kruse climbed out the bathroom window while Daddy and his new wife and Cleo’s two baby stepsisters lay sweetly sleeping.
Knew I was gone before it was light, but didn’t start looking till sunset. I read about me in the paper. Daddy thought it was just my way—doing all I could to cause him trouble.