Shelter in Place (12 page)

I'm eating the same way, ignoring the fork, and shoveling the thing into my mouth by hand, by fist.

And why am I happy?

Because Tess is there.

Yes.

Mystery solved.

And Tess? Why is she happy? Why is she so full of appetite? So full of lightness and warmth? Why does she accept so easily my father's hand on the back of hers? Because she has been reunited with her love? Because she is touched by my father's eyes? His gentle warmth? His small kitchen, their knowing references to secret telephone conversations? Because she's missed me?

Well, whatever it is, we were happy. Chatting away, eating ourselves sick, the sky lightening outside and that good exhaustion slowly setting in.

We're leaning back from the table. The quiet has come now. The coffee is useless.

“Well,” Joey March says, “we should sleep.”

What he wants now is to slip into bed with Tess, to draw his knees behind hers, to take her breasts in his hands, to kiss her shoulder and fade away.

So he stands. He is lean and strong with thick curly hair messier and longer than he likes it, but just as Tess does. He stands without pain, with a fatigue that has nothing to do with age. He stands behind his father. He bends down and kisses him on the top of his head.

“Thank you, Dad,” he says and says it again. “Thank you.” All the while looking at Tess who rises now and follows him to bed.

The morning is coming faster. My father, who is as old then as I am now, will leave in a few hours for work. And our young heroes, in bed together for the first time in so long, will sleep deep into the afternoon.

And in that late afternoon, I whisper, “Good morning, Tess. My love, my love, my love.”

I whisper straight into her skin, which smells of sweat and coffee and sex. Of the lemon oil she uses as perfume.

And what is the first thing she says?

“Joseph, I want to meet her.”

Before she has opened her eyes.

And for no good reason I say, “Who? Who do you want to meet?”

She sighs. It's understood then. That's what we'll do.

Tess Wolff and Joey March. The two of us when we were young.

I
t couldn't have been the next day. You don't just show up at White Pine Penitentiary. The Pine, you learn to call it. You don't just show up there. You have to be on a list. There are rules.

So one day not long after Tess made her dramatic entrance, not stage right, not stage left, but there as the curtain opened, as the lights came up on a short-haired girl riding the hood of a Toyota truck, we went to see my mother.

Offstage, the wind whipped at the ocean and the waves crashed. Concussive sounds in the night. Unlit cigarette between her fingers.

Not too long after that we find this young woman in black combat boots, scuffed and unlaced. Torn jeans over long johns, waffled, color of cream, old-fashioned, five bucks at Army Navy. Tight Fruit of the Loom wifebeater. White, new, the term hers, not mine. And don't argue. She'll roll her eyes.

“Fuck
those
women,” she'll say. Or did once. “Feminists in language only. I'm a fucking
feminist
.” She laughs. “See? No bra.”

Over which a wool shirt. The Pendleton classic. Red and black checked. Insulated. Satin lining. And the watch cap. Let's say black today. Sometimes navy. Sometimes white. This is the uniform now. A little tougher than in Cannon Beach. But it's not
that
tough. If you're following the chronology, keeping an eye on the years, you'll know she's in style. All of us dressing like half-assed lumberjacks back then.

God, do I see her. Unbuttoning the Pendleton, her nipples through the thin white fabric. Doc Martens on the dash the day we started out. The two of us driving up away from the beach, turning onto the ridge road. To our left, to the west, the town of White Pine, and the ocean. To our right, the prison of White Pine, and the vast valley and all its farmland beyond. Tess has turned to me and is beginning to speak. She's raised her hand to the back of my neck and is running her fingers through my hair.

“How is it, Joe? Is it better?”

I'm watching the valley, waiting for that moment when the road breaks slightly to the east and the spaceship comes into view.

“Is what better?” I ask not knowing what she means this time. Not pretending. Not delaying.

“The bird,” she says.

“Ah,” I say.

“Is it?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because it's the beginning. Because it doesn't come in the beginning. It only comes in the middle. And now you're here and no way it would dare now.”

“If only,” she says. “But those are lies.”

“I'm glad you're here,” I say, which is evidence of just how defunct language is.

She stops moving her fingers and instead cups the back of my head with a new firmness.

“What do you mean it's the beginning? What do you mean it only comes in the middle?”

“There,” I say. “There.” I point down into the valley. The prison slides out below us as if set in a slowly opening drawer.

I pull the truck off the road. It's about the same place where I stopped with my father. About the same place he comes to look over her as she sleeps. Or whatever she does in her eternally illuminated cell.

We have brought her earplugs. Balls of wax in a plastic box.

Tess will give them to her. Her first offering.

Tess doesn't run into the onion field to vomit. We lean against the grille.

“She's in there,” I say, pointing for no reason.

“I hate it.”

I nod.

“We should help her escape,” she says.

I wrap my arm around her shoulder. We wait a while before climbing back into the truck and slipping into the valley, to the prison parking lot. The doors closing and our four feet moving across the asphalt.

Those two in love. Joey March young and afraid. His blood full of adrenaline. His heart full of dread. And Tess? What was her heart full of? Love? Perhaps. Fear? Maybe. But above all, fire and rage. No question about that. She is half a step ahead pulling Joey March's wrist slightly on the offbeat.

They are walking in the sunlight across the shining wet asphalt until they have become VISITORS, until they are swallowed by the double doors.

We stand in line. Wait our turn. Sign our names. We are scanned and frisked. We are ushered by a stocky woman with her long hair drawn up beneath her cap. Long hair I know is there because I've seen her drinking at Lester's. Seen her with the heel of a boot on the bench of a wooden booth. Seen her bent over a pool table, eye on the break, hair back in a loose ponytail. This woman in her civilian life.

I've seen her both ways.

All of us broken in half. Half at least. Most of us in quarters, or sixteenths, or thirty-seconds, or sixty-fourths. The woman at work, the woman at play, the woman in love, the woman at war, the woman at home, the woman alone and all combinations in between.

We're following her down the long cinder-block corridor, along the green linoleum. We can't hear our own footsteps. Or I can't now. Just the sound of those guard boots leading us along. Her broad back like a swimmer's. Back and boots showing us the visit room, with the benches and tables riveted to the floor, and the fluorescent lights and the vending machines. Cans of Dr. Pepper, bags of Combos, Funyons, Snickers, always Snickers. The boots gone, the door closes. And there we are, the two of us. Waiting.

Others, sure. Other visitors. Other prisoners. But they are vague color. They are general noise, general motion. The clarity, the clarity is in Tess. Hands on the table. Narrow eyes fixed on the PRISONERS door. The texture of the table. The rotten-fruit candy chemical smell. Bleach. Humming lights and human noise. Visitors and prisoners coughing and sniffling and throat-clearing. Shifting their weight on the creaking benches. Murmuring interspersed with sobbing, a raised voice quieted by the death look of a guard built like a squat furnace. One of Seymour Strout's colleagues.

And above it all, above the smell and sound, above even the hope and dread and rot exists something else, some other thing.

And it is this thing that holds the true authority.

And it is this thing that kills.

Tess in contrast. Her very existence, a kind of protest against it all. Her intelligence. Her warmth. Her smell. Her skin. Her rage. Her youth. All of it at war with the prison. Do you see the way this woman, just by her very presence in a place, challenges it and its terrorizing government? Is a menace to that sinister thing impossible to describe.

W
e waited sitting side by side. Holding hands. Tess in my father's place. Me in mine. All the people around us, the door opening and closing, all those prisoners ushered into the room. Blue for peaceful. Green for suicide watch.

Until at last, my mother appears in orange.

“That's her,” Tess said, as if I might not recognize her. As if it had been Tess all that time coming to visit, and I'd just arrived in town. Right from the start it was that way. The instant my mother arrives in the room. Like that famous brand of love: an immediate and shattering thing.

She came to us moving in her new way. I'd noticed it the last few visits. A kind of imperious gliding. A dancer's affect—hands loose at her sides, chin high, a look of bemusement, the slightest smile. A joke she's still thinking about. A sweet story she's just recalled. The look she gave you:
Relent. I know all
. Her face so relaxed. Nothing tight, no lines, no furrows. She seemed to have become younger in prison, not older.

So, she came to us, moving through the room as if it were a stage, a ballroom. And this new quality about her grew more pronounced when she saw Tess. Her eyes lightened. The smile grew into something beyond what she reserved for her son and husband. It was something closer to an expression of pleasure.

“Joey,” she said, kissing my cheek. “And you are Tess.”

We have all seen some version of this. Two people meet and something is changed. In the air, in the room. Something is acknowledged. Around them we exchange knowing looks. Did you see that? Did you see? Often, it is someone's husband, someone's wife who catches it. That flicker. The terror it can cause. The implications. So often a signal that a marriage will shortly suffer great damage.

“You are Tess,” my mother said again, but this time her tone meaning,
at long last
. The one I've been hearing about, the one who has captured my son's heart. The motherly mode, so different from the first.

“I am,” Tess said with her fullest smile. No restraint. No caution.

My mother asked all the questions our time would allow. And in her new style consistent with the smile, the gliding, the hands at peace.

“Who are you, Tess? Where do you come from? What do you want from your life? Where will you go next? What are your intentions with my son?” This last with a laugh. “What are you doing
here
? A gorgeous young woman in a prison town? In a
prison
? Young lady, I don't approve.”

She went on like that, Tess hypnotized. Enchanted, in the most literal sense. A spell had been cast. The straight-spined queen of The Pine has magical powers. Tess Wolff, our knight errant, is beguiled. The dutiful son sits silent and waits.

When our time ends, when our audience with her is nearly over, Tess slides her small rectangular box across the table. Six balls of wax rolled in white cotton.

“Thank you,” she says. “The noise is awful. Thank you.”

She presses her lips to the back of Tess's hand, leaving a red stain.

The queen has found lipstick in prison.

T
his morning I dragged the ladder from the garage and pulled the satellite dish off the roof. I'd always hated the thing. That little billboard. Paying those people to advertise for them. Those white letters pronouncing to the world: We watch television!

I never liked the dish, and I didn't like drilling a hole into our house, and I didn't like their black wire worming in.

We'd lived with it for a long time, of course. Like most people do. We liked watching the Mariners. The news. Staying up late. Smoking a joint. Nowhere to go in the morning. Some college football too. Mostly, though, we watched a lot of movies. That was something we both loved. Good and bad. It didn't much matter.

But now that Tess is gone, I don't have the heart for them. And the news makes me want to kill someone. All that noise. All those chattering fools. And that kind of anger is no good for me.

Both my grandfathers died of heart attacks.

So did my father, as it happens.

I'm in the sludge today. There is no wide crystalline sky. No sharp edges, no florid poetry.

The fire does not appear cut from glass.

Today my eyes are smeared with Vaseline and I am thinking of my father's .45.

Anyway, the television. I couldn't stand to watch it. I wanted it out. That grey dish collecting all the trash of the universe and funneling it in through its insidious black wire. Something we'd paid for willingly. Eagerly. We'd invited the most hideous people into this house. All that cultivated outrage. All that ugliness. I should have put a bullet through our expensive screen, but instead I just wrapped it in an old blanket and propped it against the back wall of the garage.

Since then, I've started listening to more music. I don't know a thing about it, just that I like some of it a lot. And I mean with an upsetting intensity. It could be anything, too. No particular genre. I treat music like paintings. I walk through a museum until I'm hit in the chest. I guess that doesn't make me very sophisticated, but it suits me well. What do you expect from a guy with a subpar education?

Anyway, it's the way I like to live when I like to live.

Y
ou should have seen her. The expression. The eyes. Walking to the truck you'd have thought we'd been to see the pope.