The Uninnocent (12 page)

I never understood this marrying business, and I can't imagine what it must be like to raise children. The dog I own here in the city reminds me of old Bob Coconut. He's far too lively and large for this apartment, but he is an amiable companion. When he curls up by the fireplace—the landlord won't let me burn a fire in the hearth, so I make do with a gouache painting of flames I made on cardboard—I think of those times, of the complexities and strangeness of a child's world. We were isolated. We didn't know what we were doing; we didn't realize how splendidly we were able to do what we wanted. All that is gone now. Is it schizophrenic of me to say that I regret the loss and couldn't care less?

Here is Christmas night again. Christmas Eve I spent with my friends. We ate dinner down in Chinatown. It was a noisy evening there, the streets teeming with revelers. Tonight, it is silent. I've thought about phoning Mother, even considered giving Angela a call. Not fond of Mother's new husband, and knowing Angela to be a chore, I have decided against communication. Were Bob Coconut here, I might light a candle for old times' sake. There is a cathedral around the corner, where I could snag one. I miss my ghost; he'd have made a decent brother, despite how our mother would have raised him, smothering him with a flood of feeling, drinking his love like a vampire. Yes, I miss my Christmas brother. He would have been a felicity in my olding life. He'd have been able to tell me why I'm all alone.

Outside the window, snow is making a feeble attempt to fall. The streetlights that form halos of its transient passage are cheery. A whole world tries its best to rise to the dignity and joy of the occasion. I wish the world happiness, and everyone in it peace. I do. I'll always regret what happened to Butter. We were uninnocent, but the very isolation that in some ways damned us has also acted as our benefactor and protector. I suppose I'm grateful no one has ever found out how it happened, or will.

TSUNAMI

E
SCAPISM, AS
L
OVELL PUT IT,
Lovell my husband with the most butt-backward name ever a good mother gave a bad son. “You're just looking for some kind of false peace by going groggy on me, girl,” he said. “Just hoping that in some lame dream of yours, love is gonna get returned to you from a place none of us can ever return love from.” As if Lovell ever knew a single thing about peace, false or otherwise. Not to mention love, or as he liked to call it,
lovelling
.

This was the year when the Soviets crossed over into somewhere, and there was bloodshed also in Haiti, as well as many deaths in Beirut, I don't remember which year but do remember that mine was not the only life in chaos. Selby was born before things began to go straight downhill, a shining star in an otherwise totally black sky. Just how many people, you might wonder, can one soul lose in a season? Well, nearly everybody that mattered, at least in my measly world. And what does a person do after all the funerals, the burials, the cremations, the memorial services, the condolence cards and caskets, the sad recreations we living must engage in when Daddy Death comes knocking? The answer was, for me, to watch the news and sleep.

One afternoon, that year of the mass graves of innocents uncovered in Croatia, I did what I always warned him I might do. I moved in with my best—well, my only friend, Joanna. Her husband, Kurt, and the posse (baby Ralphie, pretty Wilma Jean, and Nelly, who is stone deaf and dumb and yet bright as a new dime) took me and Selby and my other boy, Guy, into their home, without so much as asking why or wherefore. They expected it, must have. Lovell wasn't popular with them, though they were stoical about my decision when I asked Lovell to marry me on account of Guy. I didn't know exactly what I was doing that afternoon (raining hard and cold and gray) when I packed my bags and left the man, but grateful is nowhere near strong enough a word for how I felt that night at Joanna's, despite her cats, who stopped me up, and the scare of Lovell calling Kurt again and again demanding to know what was going on. He didn't understand my note, wanted to speak with me in person for clarification. Was coming over right now to get his wife and kids back.

Kurt told Lovell to chill, which just made the man more angry. The only reason my husband didn't make good on his threat was he got too toasted to drag himself the three blocks to Joanna's house. She and I stayed up late watching the news that night, Kurt and the kids all having gone to bed finally, and I remember there was something about an arson fire in a mosque, or a temple. Hate crime. Some worshippers died.

This story doesn't get better, so if you wanted to stop here I certainly wouldn't blame you. I can even tell you what happens so you won't have to bother. When Lovell got himself undrunk and did show up a couple days later, I killed him with the loaded handgun I found in Kurt's bedside table. It was easy, firing the gun. I'd never held one in my hand before. Had a light heft to it and the kick wasn't as bad as they make it out to be on television. I was probably as surprised as Lovell that I actually pulled the trigger, but there it was to pull, and so I did. Neither Joanna nor Kurt was at home when this happened. The infants were napping, and the other kids were either out back playing or at school. Except Nelly, who wandered into the kitchen, where Lovell was lying in a growing red pond on the linoleum. She even helped me clean up the mess. Since I shot him first in the throat, and only afterward in the heart to be sure he was out of here, Lovell didn't make much noise, not that Nelly would have known either way. Selby slept through it all and so did infant Ralph, bless them.

Let me go back, if you are still with me here. Give some background framework, as Lovell, who was a paralegal (half a lawyer, just like he was half a man), might have put it. My parents and their parents before them, and I, were all born and raised in Tarr Creek. Population few, due northwest some hundred foothill miles of Cheyenne here in Wyoming. Grandfather was a doctor, Grandma Eileen was a nurse, and though their marriage was beneficial to the community at large (he was an awfully good physician, and she was an accomplished nurse), it was clear to anyone who ever encountered them that they were one very unhappy couple. My father played slide trombone in the Tarr Creek marching band and was some kind of hotshot back in his heyday, because his father, besides being the town sawbones, was also mayor, school superintendent, and on the board of directors of the First National Bank of Tarr Creek, which had branches in Laramie and Rawlins. Like me, my folks were brought up right, strict, clean, Methodist. My dad was a little spoiled, and sure of himself when he courted and married my mother, whose aspirations were lofty, as she wanted to be a grand opera singer on the stages of New York. To this day, and until all eternity because she died first in that year of the many deaths, she never managed to get even a quarter mile east of Kansas City, though she did have a beautiful singing voice. Like a meadowlark. Her ashes are in an attractive cloisonné yard-sale urn on the living room mantel.

I was a lonely only. Lorraine is my name. My parents tried to have other kids, but it wasn't to be. Other than when my father had his heart attack and died on my seventh birthday, I don't think it would have been possible for anybody to have had a duller childhood than I did. Sunday school, Brownie Scouts, 4-H, Homemakers of America. Sometimes we went to the rodeo in Casper, or attended the Cheyenne Days festivities. Beyond that, there was just a lot of walking around in fields or under big cottonwoods or along the canal full of brown, muddy, laggard water, waiting more or less in vain for something to happen. I don't know why, but I barely remember a thing about my youth, at least on a day-to-day basis. It was that deadly dull. I did have a best friend, Cecily, who was almost my opposite, lovely as could be with a sunny attitude toward life, but after her family moved to Sedona, Arizona, I didn't bother making friends with anybody else at the time. Didn't seem much point in it if all they were going to do was move away. I was your average student, maybe a whisker above average, but all in all an ordinary person. The one thing that set me apart from other girls back then was that I sometimes had, for want of a better word, spells. My grandpa Hubert diagnosed them as fugues, which my mother said was a kind of music and so got into a row with him about it, but whatever they were, they made a noise in my head that sounded like a swarm of riled hornets. One minute I'd be walking the horse path along the canal and the next thing I knew I'd be downtown at the dime store, not having a clue as to how I got from one place to the other. Time fell out underneath me somehow. As often as not I couldn't do anything more than go to bed until things got back to normal. Some neighbor accused me of killing their yappy dog during one of these fugues, but that was in fact a filthy lie. They were just taking advantage of my malady to cover up the sins of others a bit closer to home. Their own boy did the butchering and they were trying to foist the blame elsewhere.

What Lovell saw in me was anybody's guess. People commented on it. How could such a handsome buck waste his time with that plain-Jane dullard Lorraine? She must be putting out, they whispered, where the nice Tarr Creek girls would not. Another theory circulated. Maybe my grandfather's money had something to do with his initial attraction. The one time I brought it up, he convinced me that wasn't the case, and besides, he knew I was never going to see a penny (another pretty story). Not that I'm ugly, just that I'm no prom queen. Dirty-blonde hair, celery-green eyes, hipless-slim, narrow shoulders. My hands were so thin I could fit them into a tall water glass.

Anyway, he saw something he liked, because he asked me out the same day we met. Lovell had a motorcycle, which gave him an edge over other Tarr Creek guys in those days, and he loved picking me up and cruising over to Iron Mountain or Horse Willow. I must fess up, in all fairness, I loved it too. The back of his head smelled like heaven in the wild, rushing warm wind, like pure baby scent. He was all swagger and braggart, and until I got pregnant with Guy, and Lovell was forced to marry me (shanghaied to the justice of peace, as he kindly put it), he seemed like one of those type people who would stay forever fresh and young. Life went out of his eyes when he sold the chopper and got the job, and the rest is history. The Lovell I once loved became the Lovell I learned was better to hate. Or at least fear. Love'll set you free, he said once, early on. What a poet. A regular Robert Frost.

There was a monsoon hit Thailand or Burma the year it happened, several thousand in the lowlands drowned, and I remember something about the poison-gas slaughter of Kurds in Iraq or Syria over there. After Selby was born a few years along in our model marriage, and I experienced similar hormone problems with my body that my mother did when she bore me, I did put on some weight, just like Lovell accused me of doing. And yes, I passed a good deal of time sleeping and watching the late-night news. So sue me, I told him when his complaining became too much. This was when my fugues, which I'd thought were long since cured, came back visiting and the hornets nested in my head from time to time. I figured it was stress, except for those few moments when the trapdoor fell out from under me and I'd find myself not doing the laundry or preparing meatloaf as I had been doing just a moment before, but instead walking home from the park after having had a perfectly pleasant conversation about sunflowers, say, with some man at the bus stop I'd never met before and wouldn't meet again. Sometimes I'd be in front of the set and then in a pew in church. Now I'd be making the bed then I would be sitting in somebody's parked car a quarter mile away from home. Like that. Nothing violent or terribly scary. Just confusing.

I never mentioned any of this to Lovell. He would only use it against me whenever we were having a disagreement. I could just imagine him stating that I didn't deserve an opinion about anything since I'm mental. Unable to completely keep it to myself, I did share with Joanna, who suggested that maybe I was having some kind of postpartum blues, which I thought about but it doesn't explain why this had been happening to me long before I had kids. I don't know. Grandfather Hubert had retired by then and I never liked the doctor who replaced him down at the clinic (my sons were midwifed), so I didn't bother with getting, as they say, help.

Help. All of us, each and every one, could use a little help, especially in a year they shipped so many starving refugees out of Mogadishu, or out of somewhere, to some fly-infested borderland between one country run by a tyrant and another by a dictator. If we didn't need help, there would be no need for God, even though he was the one responsible for getting us all into this jam in the first place.

You have to wonder what kind of vacation the Guy in the Sky was taking on the morning Lovell's mother, Dolores, died, just for instance. All of us who bothered to pay attention to her habits knew that Dolores's fate was to perish as the result of lung, or throat, or mouth cancer. She was a four-packs-a-day woman, and we warned her about this. “Honey, please stop, please at least cut down.” No one could ever have guessed that my widowed mother-in-law, with whom, by the way, I had a friendship that included playing pinochle together, baking pies (she was a coconut cream addict, while my vice was rhubarb), and even once driving all the way down to Denver to go to a real classical music concert, would breathe her last after having been bludgeoned with a tire iron, according to the police. Lovell, who I had always thought had a distant relationship with his mom, surprisingly went to pieces. He wept in my lap and on my shoulder. He sobbed through the night. Bawled, actually. Bawled like a gumming baby. He was beside himself in a way I never thought he could be capable of. Lovell, who had been such a cool acre before he sold his Harley and had to enter the real world, was reduced to a fountain of warm tears. We made love that night. I believe that was the last time. No, definitely the last time. I didn't come and I believe he faked his. Either way, both of us were motherless now, I recall thinking.