Marilou Is Everywhere Page 18

  I would know all about that later, but just then I had gone beyond weariness. Suddenly I found myself bad at pretending to be surprised. I couldn’t make myself feel what anyone was feeling, and I had the crazy thought that they would see in me how I’d known all along and toss me into the fire, too, whole thing. Chill fell on me like a cold coat once I had walked away from where they were all watching. I couldn’t go back in the house. It had gathered itself up against me like glass. Maybe I would have walked into the dark until I died. I considered it. It was romantic. But our truck, Virgil’s truck, stuck out at the end of the straggling line of cars laid along the road, and the handle gave. I curled myself back in the pony seat. I must have slept.

  XXI

  Richard Klink had abducted Jude from a Uniontown bar where she was waiting for Gebe & Skocik to dump her fuel filter. He was a ticket taker at the Regal Valley Mall movie theater, and had been cut from his coast guard deployment as the result of a routine mental health screening. He was no relation of the boys who had put the sugar in her gas tank or the Burchinals who owned the general store where she broke down. He had business in Uniontown over a purebred poodle he was buying for his mother’s seventieth birthday. The poodle’s name was Racy, and Jude had sat with him at the bar because the dog was so friendly.

  In the 60 Minutes interview, Jude said: “He said he was going to drop me back at the mechanics. It was raining hard. I thought a little before I said yes. I actually thought, ‘This is the kind of thing where you do it and they never see you again.’ The dog was wagging its tail. It was like, how bad can it be? I don’t know. That decided it for me. The worst part was when I noticed he was driving toward the highway. When he merged onto the highway, he was talking about baseball, like I wouldn’t notice what he was doing. And the worst part was, I talked about baseball, too. I wanted to keep him calm. I thought if I was nice enough, I could get out of it. I hate baseball.”

  Other details would come later, as Richard Klink proved to be a highly voluble and engaging speaker on the matter of his own mind. He had to take her, he said, because she had a thousand-point star on her shoulders in place of a head and he had never seen anything so beautiful. He believed that the light in a person usually died away by the time they could drive a car. This was why he had divorced his wife: The starlight all fled from her mind. He had tried to prevent this decay in his own daughters to zero effect. Determined to manifest a perfect girlfriend for himself, when he saw Jude in the late-day dazzle of the dark bar, he had no doubt she was for him.

  The police had no trouble finding the place. It was just as Jude had described. Richard Klink was a volunteer firefighter and first responder, which explained why she hadn’t called 911. He’d told the local dispatchers that he was taking care of an elderly aunt who was a bit paranoid and easily confused, and so they should disregard any emergency calls made from his home address. Who knows if that could be true, but Jude believed it, which was enough. He had been keeping her in an upstairs room with the windows blacked out with roofing felt. The open door taunted her. It made it seem like she could just walk out if she wasn’t afraid. Only at night, or when he left, he locked the room again.

  During the day, they did what he called boyfriend-girlfriend activities, all oddly chaste: He liked to order complicated IKEA cabinets for them to assemble as a team. He had an artificial Christmas tree which they trimmed each day, and which he denuded each night. He never touched her, except to prop an arm around her shoulders when they watched reruns after supper. But he only fed her if she said “I love you,” “You make me feel so safe,” or any of the other desired phrases he had helpfully inscribed on index cards. People said she was lucky, how he didn’t do the things you’d think a man would do. But I wasn’t so sure.

  Jude had managed just the once to get to the phone. There had been a fire in town, and Richard Klink forgot to lock her up as he rushed off to fight it. Everything about that time rang strange to her. Time itself had changed. She had a clear memory, a perfectly clear memory, of calling her mother, but later couldn’t say when it had even happened. She didn’t trust her own mind anymore. She said time had been just the one moment that she could see the beginning and end of. Over and over. She said it was like getting up on a balance beam over and over.

  Reporters loved talking with Richard Klink because he said the most terrifying things in sensible tones more often used to give interstate directions or describe what had been had for breakfast.

  “Some people, they think everything is about race these days. Not me. I look beyond. I thought her light could be made a little better with my help is all,” he would say. “Some women need just the right environment to flower.”

  “Mr. Klink, you restrained her against her will for the better part of a year,” the interviewer would say.

  “I do not argue with God’s will, sir. I do not always understand it, but I do not argue. I surrender myself in full degree. Anything else, you’re talking cream and living skim milk. Surrender is worth any discomfort you’d care to witness.”

  “Discomfort?”

  “Oh, yes. Oh yes. To shed this life. It is a difficult task. Most aren’t up to it. Most don’t have the grit. That little girl is better than you and me. I require us all to believe it.”

  I came to with lines of heat leaping off me and a block of ice in my throat. It felt like someone had replaced my knees with rubber balls. I vibrated at a frequency that might have made me disappear. The sky flooded down white and aching over everything. I was in my bed, my childhood bed, still in my farm clothes. My jeans tented around me and rubbed the hairs on my leg like a shimmer. I was holding close to me my doll with the broken neck.

  I dragged up to the bathroom to put my mouth against the water but couldn’t reach it on my stiff neck, and brought my hands full up and up to my face until the water in my stomach hurt.

  Something, I guess, must have happened to me those days. I thought I would die of what had killed the goats. The fever washed over me, and I cried in the dark of my bedroom. I woke up to drink water. I burned a rut in my blankets. Something in the dark was seeing me, it was an eye on the wall which nobody else saw and I felt it burn what it knew about me all over. That I was myself, myself. Virgil sat with me. He said I was almost gone and I was lucky it was not all the way. I part wondered if he was real. He put his hand on my forehead and held me onto the earth, like I would float away if he didn’t. For long silent hours and I wished he would leave, but when he did leave I cried. It was hopeless. He opened oranges by my bed and watched my eyes shine in the dark. Bunny, I missed you, he said. I missed you so much.

  When I woke up again, it was spring. Blond You and Black You were choking against chains someone had strung up on a run between the porch beam and the rusted metal pole that held up the wash line. I had never seen them tied up before and it shocked me. It had made them meaner. The way they jumped at me I couldn’t tell whether they even knew to be friendly, but after a moment I could see it was just that they were so excited to see me that it made them horrible.

  Neither was I ready for what was inside the house. It was a sea of silver, waist height. At first it seemed like someone had left a lot of new furniture crammed in between the old things, but then I saw that it was cases of pop stacked everywhere so there was only a slight path between rooms. Hundreds of cases. It was really crazy that I had not noticed when I was sick. Shayna and Clinton threaded through them to the kitchen without thinking but I stood there trying to put a thought together so hard it kept me from walking. My mother had arranged some of the cases in a cube like an armchair, and was watching a show about shark hunting. The baby was sat on her lap, pulling at the air. She looked like she could be a supermarket display. “And here’s Sleeping Beauty,” she said when she saw me there.

  Shayna realized I was up and leaned back through the doorway. “We’re doing fajita night,” she said. “You gonna eat?”

  “What’s wit
h all the pop?” I asked.

  “Clinton buys from people who buy them with EBT. Pays cash, but half what they’re worth.”

  “What? Why?”

  “He sells them to the Grapplerettes, and they sell them at wrestling matches. Oh, don’t look like that.”

  “It’s better money than you think,” Clinton said. He was cutting up tomatoes and putting them in a little bowl to eat with dinner. I had never seen him do a helping thing. He was trying not to look up at me, but he did a little, and smiled small back into his hands.

  The air of the food was a beautiful thing. I don’t know how but it took over the whole house. It took over their faces, Clinton and Shayna, who were slapping at each other’s knees between arguing over the best hot sauce: Crystal versus Cholula. No contest, no contest, Clinton said. He was jigging her in the ribs, she was laughing. And he looked happy. My mother was made small in the house. Something had changed places. Shayna was running things, and my mother seemed old. She held the baby with one arm and dabbed some sour cream on its mouth to eat. She held the baby like it was a basketball or something, very casual. Mom didn’t eat much. “I’m doing a low-carb thing” was all she said about that, though nobody asked. There was a little late sun going golden in the windowpanes, and a blare of it creeping across the wall like a tremendous and large slow moth. Then Virgil kicked the back door open and dropped himself into a chair.

  “Sit up,” Mom said. She jogged her heel against his chair some.

  “Um not hungry,” he said. For a strange second, the way he crossed his arms, he looked just like I remembered when we were kids. I had never seen him drunk before. “Um not.”

  “I didn’t ask was you hungry. I said sit straight.”

  “Ma, lay off. You know he’s not gonna remember it,” Shayna said. It was all news to me, her momming our mom.

  “Virge, it’d be good to eat something, huh?” Clinton was getting up to fix him a plate. “Let’s get you some of these good tacos.” This was news to me, too. I had never heard Clinton fuss like an auntie.

  “Um not fucking, fucking hungry! Fuck.” Then Virgil stood up, kind of liquidy, and, with severe concentration, turned his chair upside down on the floor so the legs spiked up. “Nobody sits in this chair. Ever again.” Somewhere outside, his truck started up with a rip and pulled out whining around the turns until the sound all died away.

  And I let that moment pass like the coward I basically am.

  There was nowhere to sit after dinner but the porch, so we sat on the porch and let the dogs off their chains and told them they were good dogs, good dogs, with our hands on their backs. And when it got dark, we went to bed.

  I guess you’d say I was depressed. A funny thing happened to my time around then. I won’t say it was my thinking. Now that Jude was home, I couldn’t stop seeing what I imagined she saw while she was trapped. All that time, looking at the ticking white panels of a strange ceiling, and hearing the horses run outside. What a deadly silence it would have been. It had been such a long time, half a year. I tried to imagine Richard Klink suffering me into holding his hand and calling him sweetie, but I couldn’t feel it. And sometimes I hit myself in the head or pinched my arms to try to feel it. I held my hand in the kettle steam until I couldn’t. What I had done to Jude was not so terribly real when I was eating the figs and dabbling rosewater on my eyelids and Nessun Dorma and no one leaves a star. I had forgotten, I really had forgotten, for days at a time, where she was and what was happening to her.

  But now I had no peace from it. My days had a hot fuse in the middle and burned up without fanfare. I made pots of tea, swept out the angles of every room, washed everything, and let the radio talk, anything to stop imagining it. Anything to stop imagining the moment the dial tone broke in when Bernadette hung up on Jude and her world shrank back down to its terrible true form. I lived inside a fever. It was wanting all hot and awful to have not done what I had done. The very world met me where I was, and it was shadow and horrible light with not a great deal of the between. I have never again been so old as I was that spring.

  My mother and I moved around each other very carefully. If we stayed in the same room for too long, it felt like that part of the house would get heavy and fall down into the valley. I can’t explain it.

  “I’m making fried chicken tonight,” she would say. “Wanna help me?” And when I didn’t say anything, she edged away like a shamed dog. Shayna and Clinton started looking for an apartment in town. The baby tracked me the way I would follow the weather: watching each moment shift and tremble and mean nothing personal. I did not interact with him as he seemed maybe a little too smart. His eyes were too shining. I believed if I held him, he’d tell the truth of what went on in my mind.

  Virgil stayed drunk, with little variation. Apparently his cell mate had been the artisan pruno brewer of SCI Greene, and that was how he found his first drunk, how he found his first real magic. And since then you couldn’t say a thing about shouldn’t he slow down or eat something or shut the fuck up. He had been wrongfully imprisoned and had honed the edge of that bad luck so you couldn’t say a word without him cutting you back down. One day, I talked him into going to Heaven Lake, just for a memory. But he couldn’t get up over the fence, and cut his hand open on a loose wire, and so much blood swam out of him that I thought he would die before we got back to the house. The bottle in his back pocket busted when he hit the ground, and he was furious with me (you bitch, you bitch) for the whole miserable idea. A lake! What is a lake going to do? Is a lake going to live my life for me, Cindy? Get this bullshit off of me.

  I thought I was living in a bag of air and what was real was in the bag with me, and there was nothing in the bag. We sat on the porch and watched the wind stir the trees. Winter hardly had any teeth left in it, just the early dark and the pink flags of the sky.

  XXII

  Just when the night was beginning to lose its full dark, just when the gray edges of things began to surface in my room, I heard the truck idling in the road, luffing and settling like a grouse.

  The farmer had a brown coat and a T-shirt underneath it and suspenders held his jeans up over his hard, round stomach. His tits sloped off him in triangles where they met his belly, and he wore thick bifocals attached to his head with an elastic band. In the dark, they winked at me. I had gone through the waist-high sea of silver pop cans to answer the door.

  “Virgil in?”

  “Of course,” I said. The clipboard man from the school had been coming around, getting me enrolled to repeat the ninth grade, so I was completely relieved this man had nothing to do with all that. “What is this about?”

  “He’s driving. Got to take this grip out to Milwaukee.”

  “What!” I had no idea what a grip was, but I figured it out immediately.

  “I’ll wait here.” He stayed outside, stepping from shoe to shoe as if it were cold. A young boy, but pale, sat up in the passenger side of the truck and looked at me hard with the hating way you do when you’re sleepy. He was kindergarten age. His hair was cut by hand, I could tell. The edge was jagged like teeth and some of it stuck up in the back, like a splinter of wood was coming out of his head.

  In Virgil’s room, I couldn’t see because the alarm clock was too bright. It threw the rest of the space into a harder darkness. I shook him, then pinched his nose. He was fully passed out drunk still. My brother’s eyes were like white glass, with some blue threaded in them. He looked for a second as if he had gone blind. He was trying to realize who I was.

  “Cindy,” he said. “You got to go back to bed.”

  “There’s a man here with some, I think, drugs for you? You probably better get up.”

  “Hup, hup, no,” he said. “He’s supposed to not come around until later.”

  “He’s here now, I promise for real,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Fine, I’ll talk to him.”


  I went to the kitchen and made coffee. The farmer had turned off his truck. He had the boy on the porch with him. They sat side by side on the swing, barely moving to keep the chains from squeaking.

  “This is Grady,” he said, laying his heavy hand down on the boy’s head. “He got himself a little bit of a fever.”

  “You should come in. There’s coffee inside.”

  “Whyn’t you sit up out here with Grady.”

  I didn’t want to, but he pulled me down and sat me. He went into the house, where Virgil had turned on a light in the kitchen. I saw a wedge of it coming from down the hall.

  The boy leaned against me and put his arm around my waist.

  “Ew, no,” I said.

  The skin on his arms was hot. He smelled like a swimming pool, like bleach and sunscreen and zinc. He almost glowed. But then of course I realized the light was coming up all around us. And then he was blue, and he looked like he was sitting there in the light of a dark planet.

  I had gotten the idea from somewhere that you were supposed to sing to a child with a fever. So I sang a song for Grady. My voice was harsh because I was trying to keep it quiet. I made up something about a boat at the bottom of the ocean, where the fish were just bones and the moon never saw. It was silly and poetic. I hated it but I felt the swish of it burning up my arms and my eyes and the place where my tongue rooted into my mouth. Our feet whisked over the bare dust of the porch and the talking inside got tenser. I imagined it like a tight string, a string pulled tight between my brother and the farmer. They both held the string in their teeth. And took turns plucking it, one or the other of them.