The Fall of Alice K. (32 page)

“I was too ashamed of you to tell him. Things are tough enough for him already.”

“Mother? Is this our secret?”

“It's our secret, and I have no intention of hurting him with it. But secrets have their own way of unwrapping themselves. You can smother it now before it finds its own life. Smother it. Just stop. Don't honor that young man's destructive hunger.”

“Mother, don't blame Nickson.”

“You and that young man are in the process of bringing shame to both of your families.”

Her father returned from the bathroom and looked at them with a puzzled look on his face. “We'll be all right,” he said. “I don't want either one of you worrying. Now, Agnes, I hope you come to bed soon. You look awfully tired.”

“I'll be there in a minute.”

In a few minutes Alice could hear her father's deep breathing as he fell back to sleep. Alice and her mother seated themselves across the living room from each other and sat in silence. The electric clock on the wall looked tired of passing the time. Steers coughed in the feedlot—that rough cough, like a smoker's cough. The hog-feeder metal lids clanked down when hogs pulled their heads back. Her mother kept staring at her, and it occurred to Alice that Valium might not be enough to keep her mother under control. She might be mentally ill and dangerous. Alice stood up and started toward the stairway to her room. Her mother didn't stop her, but Alice heard her go into the kitchen and sit down. She was guarding the front door to keep Alice from leaving the house.

Alice took her medication, went to her room, and lay in bed planning her escape. There had to be ways to continue seeing Nickson at night, even with her mother on vigilant duty like a prison guard.

The next day she told Nickson about her mother's behavior.

“She's mad and she had to blame somebody,” he said. “Give her some time to cool off.”

“My mother's not normal,” said Alice. “She doesn't cool off. She just stews inside her sick head until the lid blows.”

“We still have to respect her,” said Nickson. “She's still your mother.”

The barriers that her mother had set up to prevent her from ever
seeing Nickson again were no more than a harmless little whirlpool to Nickson. The way he saw things, Alice's mother had to be who she was, they couldn't stop that—but that didn't mean that she should stop what they were. Alice agreed with him in her head, but her feelings were tied to a stake while her mother turned loose the hyenas. Her mother was doing more than turning loose the hyenas, she
was
the hyena.

“We can find a way without hurting her,” said Nickson, and when he said that Alice knew he was right. Of course, they could get around her: even hyenas had to sleep.

Dealing with her mother and her new attack-dog vigilance was just a game, and it was a game Alice knew she and Nickson could win. If prisoners could break out of Alcatraz, she could find a way through the walls her mother was trying to build around her. She brainstormed playfully in her mind: dig a tunnel out through the basement, crawl out of the chimney, buy an “invisibility dress” on the Internet, put padding on her feet and jump out of the upstairs window.

Her mother was now on a schedule of staying up until after the ten o'clock news. Alice knew what she was thinking: if she stayed up that late, Alice wouldn't have time to sneak away and see Nickson and be back before 11:30 when her father got up to go to work. She essentially had Alice under house arrest. Alice got rational. Every would-be escapee had to start by studying the guard, learn her habits and weaknesses, find her vulnerabilities.

The vulnerability in her mother's prison was a short timeslot between 10:15 when her mother went to bed and 11:30 when her father got up for work. Her mother must have calculated that an hour and fifteen minutes was not enough time for Alice to rendezvous with Nickson. Alice accepted the challenge. They had a window of just over an hour when they would have to get out of their houses and meet and then get back to their houses. The problem to solve was how to steal that little satchel of time and fill it with sweet loving without anyone noticing.

Alice presented the problem to Nickson.

“I know,” he said without hesitation, “I could run to your house and we could meet in a field somewhere.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” said Alice. “We live seven miles from your house.”

“I can run eight-minute miles forever,” he said. “I could be there in less than an hour, and my mom isn't watching the clock on my side. We'd have to meet close to your house somewhere, someplace where you could get to real quick without starting a car.”

“You're serious?”

“Try me,” he said.

Alice studied Nickson's hands, watching them for any sign of the nervousness her mother thought was the reason Nickson rolled up the seat belts in the Taurus and 150. Again, it was clear just how wrong her mother could be: Nickson's hands were as calm as the praying hands on their kitchen wall.

The evenings were getting cold, but Alice knew a bridge on the gravel road south of their farm that had a big open space beneath it. She told Nickson exactly how to get there—even recommending that he jog down the railroad track for a few miles so he wouldn't attract any attention. Then he could easily cut across fields and meet her under the bridge. They'd be a quarter mile from the farmhouse. She'd put a blanket under the bridge, tuck it up next to the pigeon nests. This would be simple. If they met at 10:25, they could have at least a half hour together and she could be back home in bed before 11:30 when her father got up to go to work. Since she could easily run the short distance from their farm to the bridge in a few minutes, she wouldn't have to start a car with the chance of waking her mother. No one would know she was out of the house. Nickson said no one at his house would notice that he was gone either, or he could say he was walking to the Redemption Library on well-lit streets where nobody would mug him.

They arranged for a 10:20 rendezvous. When she thought about it, Alice loved the possibility that their bodies would be warm by the time they reached each other.

Alice stopped on the bridge on her way home from school and planted the haymow blanket for them to use. Once again she was filled with the joy of anticipation. She chatted with the pigs. She sang hymns to the steers as she fed them.

She tried not to act too happy when she came into the house after chores. She ate dinner quietly and then got out her books. She made sure she did not wear the kind of grin that would tell the guard that her prisoner was planning an escape. Before Alice went to sleep, she did not try to pray, but she did take her medication. If there were blemishes in her life, they would not be on her face.

33

Alice first saw him when he was a half mile away, an apostrophe on the shining line of railroad tracks. He came angling down the embankment, a slither of dark movement. He disappeared briefly, the way night-moving animals do, following the path that raccoons and foxes made through the drying grass, then reappearing briefly, his dark clothes reflecting moonlight, a glint of shadow, only to disappear again at the fence where he crawled under to emerge onto the moonlit field of mulched corn stubble. He stayed close to the fence and hardly looked human, his pace more a lope than a walk or jog, but moving evenly and steadily, a dark fluid figure rippling across the moonlit field. The world came alive with a vivid intensity, the sharp clarity of the cradle-shaped moon and the myriad stars making the dark harvested fields look like a calm, dark sea, and the faint hint of straight rows where the corn had been shorn looking like deliberate paths through the night that led him toward her.

And then the muted rhythmic sound of his feet coming down as he got closer, a sound disguised, as if it were not human, as if it were a creature whose presence the earth had never received before.

“I'm here, over here,” she whispered. She followed the sound of his breath as he made his way more noisily through the weeds, which she parted for him, spreading her arms like wings to open the space into which he moved to receive her embrace. They had done it. They were together again.

“I was watching,” she said. “You looked so sure of yourself, as if you had come this way many times.”

“I didn't feel that way,” he said. “I didn't like it when I got off the railroad tracks and had to go down through that brush. I kept thinking of wild animals.”

Already his breath was coming more slowly. She put her hand on his chest and felt it rise and fall against her palm. “We don't have tigers out here,” she said. “Nothing that will bite you except the barbed wire—and I saw how you slipped right under that.”

“In my head I knew there weren't any mean critters out there, but my grandfather's stories about tigers kept popping into my head, you know. Every noise was like something pouncing at me.”

“There are some pretty mean tigers in your mother's pictures too.”

“I know it.”

She led him under the bridge and unfolded the blanket. They were practiced lovers, following and knowing each other's moves, undressing as they embraced. The chilly air washed over their perspiring bodies. Beneath them, the creek bed breathed its long-stored summer warmth. It was soft, sandy earth, the nearest thing to a mattress that they'd ever had. They did not say but knew how short this moment would be. Intense. Beautiful. Brief.

After they dressed, Alice looked up at the pigeons and saw their dark forms lined up like rocks. Some were on nests, but most had settled on bridge pilings for the night. A waking signal passed among them, and, one after another, their heads rose from under their wings to watch. The birds' heads swiveled like turrets and their beaks pecked in Alice and Nickson's direction like fingers repeatedly pointing at them. One pigeon ruffled, and another, and then they started flapping off into the night. The first dived in their direction to get clearance from the underside of the bridge. Nickson reached for the blanket and tried to pull it over his head as if he really were under attack. The startled pigeon veered away from the movement but left a white dollop on Nickson's shoulder.

“No, not bird crap!”

Alice grabbed a handful of dry grass and swiped it away.

“At least it didn't land on my head. That would have been really bad.”

“Hair can be washed,” she said.

“You don't understand,” said Nickson.

Alice did not know that bird droppings falling on a person was a bad omen. If there were other bad omens in the air that night, she was not seeing them either.

Nickson picked up the blanket for her, shook the sand out of it,
and then his hands did look nervous, pulling the corners of the blanket together and then pulling and putting them together again so that the edges were perfectly even, then folding and refolding, all of his attention focused on the exactness of the edges, and finally he had folded it as evenly as she had seen an American flag folded in a ceremony. He handed the neatly folded rectangle to her. Folding the blanket had taken as long as their lovemaking, but she took it and placed it where they could reach it if and when they used it again.

She watched him jog easily away from the bridge, worried briefly about his safety, and then turned and sprinted for home, slowing down as she got close, then walking slowly to catch her breath. There were no signs that the guard had awakened in her absence. She imitated Nickson's easy and stealthy movements, and then assured herself that even if her mother did catch her coming back into the house, she would never guess that she had been off with Nickson. Unless it was written on her face. Unless she looked so happy that her mother would regard her suspiciously. As she moved through the house, she heard only her own movements.

The door to Aldah's bedroom was closed. Alice opened it slowly and turned on the light. Her normally slovenly mother had cleaned the room up. She had removed the bedsheets and pillowcases to leave the sad spectacle of a bare, striped mattress. She had even polished the floor to leave its tan speckled surface glowing in the light. Even Aldah's bureau had been cleared and its pine finish polished. The tiny room did not have the look of a motel room that was being readied for the next guest; it looked more like someone preparing for a home sale. The room smelled like bleach and wax, not like Aldah. Her mother had sanitized Aldah out of the house; she had erased her.

As the pain of Aldah's absence dug into Alice, she countered the pain with an even greater resolution to see Nickson again. As often as possible.

When Alice got to her room, the clock told her that it had been exactly an hour. More rendezvous with Nickson would be easy—at least until the snows came and made it impossible for Nickson to run across the field to meet her as he had done on that most beautiful November night. Not every night, but maybe three nights a week. When snow and
freezing cold came, they would find another way. Love like theirs knew no barriers that they couldn't get past.

As she went through the motions of the next few days at school, Alice's heart and mind were elsewhere. She sealed them in a vacuum of bliss. As she went through the routines of her day, the universe gave her an abundance of happiness. Even some of her old teammates from basketball were friendly to her again. She must have had a welcoming aura around her, and every daily task was easier. Doing chores at night was easier. The hogs and steers were friendlier. When she fed them, the hogs looked up at her as if they knew something good was happening in her life. She kept singing and talking to them, and they responded with sounds that could have been the sweetest of human words. She could see the pork chops growing on them the day she sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” The whole world smiled at her. Everything that needed doing passed through her life without encumbrance.