Maxwell nodded knowingly, his lips pursed in triumph, and pointed to his nearby book bag, which was clunky with his silver hammer and what was left of a pound of fourpenny nails.
Though I was shocked by the accident, I had to stifle a laugh when Coach went down like one of the fainting girls. I didn’t know what to do with my mixed emotions. I imagined the javelin holding my father to the ground during one of his drinking bouts when he swung his belt instead of a paddle at any part of my body he could reach.
Coach was finally taken off the critical list and Chuck became himself again, as though he had walked into and out of somebody else’s nightmare. Miraculously, Coach had only a nasty scar and that voice, high and sweet like Molly’s, to remind us of his brush with death, and Chuck received a great outpouring of sympathy. “He’s more human now, don’t you think?” I overheard Molly say. “Now I can see he needs love and compassion more than the rest of us.”
When I heard that, I wanted the son of a bitch dead like a doornail. I went looking for Maxwell, determined to ask him to conjure up more magic.
Even so, the day after A Streetcar Named Desire, I stood as ordered behind and slightly to Molly’s side as Chuck and his phalanx approached. He was still strutting like Stanley, still the spit and image of Brando in the movie all of us had been forced to watch in English class, and I knew my work was cut out for me. We had also read Julius Caesar in English, and looking at Chuck it was easy to imagine Caesar in Rome, desperate petitioners reaching out with their pleas. Crossing up Chuck on his exalted plane was as unthinkable as betraying Caesar. Like Chuck, Caesar no doubt consoled a few with a clap on the back, an intimate nod. He probably nudged others in a generous show of affection, deigning to treat a second-string senator as his peer. For the girls, Chuck had his patented vague smile, that sensuously full underlip slightly curled at the corners. His smile, sometimes aided by a hooded wink, was usually what did them in. First a sigh, then a rolling of the eyes, and finally a seasick swaying before the swoon. Chuck took them down like deadfall.
That day, when he seemed most like a deity, I revived Molly with the medical device from the philanthropist: a vial of smelling salts so strong it would make a dead horse kick. “Never rely on the kindness of a stranger,” I murmured, waving the salts like a wand before her upturned, neighing nostrils, cradling her gently and smelling her soapy aroma. “Take advantage of the one who loves you.”
Her eyes fluttered and her mouth opened in a bright smile. She laughed. “Gotcha,” she said. “I don’t faint, even over a dreamboat like him.” For a moment we were intimate and carefree, as if lying alone on a checkered blanket in a prairie field full of high grass with a picnic basket beside us. It was a moment of camaraderie, of joyous freedom, that I’ve seldom managed to find again. It was as if Chuck had magically transferred some of his charisma to me. Then she stared away to the cafeteria. “Did you see him in Streetcar?” she asked.
I stood and pulled her to her feet. I stared darkly at her. I didn’t say a word.
“Wasn’t it the loveliest thing you ever saw? He was wonderful, like one of those statues come to life. We get to live in the Time of Chuck. Are we lucky to have him here among us, or what?” She laughed again, this time so hard she had trouble catching her breath.
“Got me for the second time,” I said.
It was her valedictory. Before I could stammer out a reply, one of her girlfriends touched her on a wrist and she was gone, and so was Chuck.
A year later, I happened upon her wedding announcement in the local paper one Sunday. My mother had died and I lived alone. I worked in the oil fields as a roughneck, a job that didn’t suit me at all, and saved most of my pay so I could get to college. It was spring and flowers were brightly in blossom after a hard winter. Molly wore a wedding dress and looked about the same in the black-and-white snapshot as she had when she jogged in her khaki outfit to the gym, always running late and then stopping at the door to leap high like Chuck when he slam-dunked a basketball.
As my own valedictory, I drove to the high school on a day of deep clouds and found my way to the wooden bench where I had spent so much time for four years. It was summer. The campus was hot and deserted, the grass gone brown.
I ran my rough hands over the bench’s rotting wooden slats. I could see the bright glare of the water tower. Chuck was long gone, of course, playing football at the state university in Fargo—still a success but no longer making anybody faint—and I remembered that he had once declared the Rosetta Stone to be a ski slope in the Rocky Mountains.
Oddly enough, those memories, unlike Chuck’s fame or my crush on Molly, haven’t faded with time. And I’ve come to understand that my life’s vocation, one sentence following another, is to climb into the clouds as if they are mountains and rappel down their slopes, deciphering their whorls and hieroglyphics as if I hold between my fingers a key to some indecipherable understanding.
It gives me hope in dark times.
Ava’s Demon
He comes home and beats me, like my father once did. “How many do you want?” He uses a thick leather belt, black like obsidian, one he keeps under the sink with the whiskey and the fix. He’s like Hemingway: a quart a day.
“As many as you think.” I find the will to submit. It’s come to that. My voices have deserted me; my ears ring.
He smiles afterward, takes me to the mattress, does the nasty, fixes me good, puts me asleep, the sleep of the dead. He paints. In the morning when I wake, he covers the easel with cloth. After breakfast he leaves, canvas still covered. With his paints and brushes and sketchpad and a dark hooded jacket, he’s gone all day. He returns at dusk, the wind sweeping the shore, the canvas shrouded.
“Why can’t I see? Wasn’t that the vow we made?”
“Keep off my back.” Mud’s caked on his shoes. “You’re always on my back.” He takes off his shoes. As I buff the leather, losing myself in the creases, odd creatures hover around me and he paces, comes close, leans over and grunts, then stalks to the wood-burning stove. He stares into the grate. “You’re getting lost,” he says. “There’s only the strap. Nothing else can do.”
***
“My name’s Pablo,” he said the first time we met. “Painting’s my game. Want to see my etchings?”
“Do you really have etchings?” He was a rugged man with grayish crusty hair, blue eyes that strayed to my cleavage, dark, radioactive skin that glowed.
“They’re very good,” he said, taking a slug from his flask. He moved close. I could see corrugations of thought under the brim of his sailor’s cap, tilted at a rakish angle. “Everyone says so.”
“Everyone?”
He grinned. “My former wives, at least. You can’t get more critical than that.”
His rage started in one of the wars. On the boat his comrades celebrated respite. “The waves,” he shouted. “The way they move. Make them stop!” He ran the upper deck, whipping his mates with his belt, sailor’s knife lashed to his leg. He broke a jaw, ruptured a spleen. They cracked him upside the skull, left a forehead indentation, put him in restraints, gagged him, tossed him in the brig. “Let me out!” he screamed. “I did it for your good; it’s not over. None of it’s over. Let me out!” They let him scream. Exhausted, he made promises. “Adrenal exhaustion,” he told me. “My whole endocrine system got fucked up. My lizard brain took over.” They threatened court-martial, discharged him. “Back-in-the-world deserves you,” they said. He grew a beard, lived in a garret in Fargo, of all places, alternated between orgies and solitude. “Like a priest,” he said. “I lived in the place where Bob Dylan once lived, though at the time he called himself Elston Gunn.”
One night he screamed out such bile that neighbors called the cops. When they arrived, he pulled off his belt. “Back off,” he said. “I’m no man to tangle.”
***
On the island in the Boundary Waters, I cook eggs. He likes them over easy. “Isn’t this better than that city hustle, all that crap? Aren’t we better here?” He likes his coffee hot, oily, black.
I stare across the water at the skyline of the broken city, an illusion made by clouds and landscape and the shit in my veins. It’s where I come to myself. Abuse on the farm before Mama left with me for good, but I’d been ruined by then—rude, graceless, high on anything, child-waitress and sometimes prossie at the café, where I learned everything I need to know about men. Back with Mama, running from my brutal father. “You don’t yet have wings,” she said, “and yet already want to fly.” She did what she could. It didn’t help. I couldn’t make it through. The only thing that made any sense was Poe: “Over the mountains of the moon/ Down the valley of the shadow/ Ride, boldly ride, the shade replied/ If you seek for Eldorado.” I had a child, poor thing. Named Serena, the most beautiful name in the world. She’s with Mama, who I hope does better by her than I did. It breaks me to think of her.
I tried, though, I like to think; I did try.
He gulps coffee like a drunk, cup after cup. “Listen. You’re mine; I’m yours. Repeat it.” He walks to the sink, pausing twice to stare at my legs, then bends over, rises, stretches, shakes his head. “Sometimes my hands do more.”
“What am I learning?” My head turns gauzy; voices haunt me like the hazy landscape. “What’s the point?”
“Pleasure,” he says. “Nothing’s like anything.” He pauses when the horn bleeps across the island. “Listen. You hear? The monster!”
The words are so stupid, I laugh. He glares, thinks twice, and laughs too.
His eyes wide like pennies, he reaches for a pair of shades. “Put on your dark glasses. This could be the end. Let’s go stand on the beach and watch for the cloud. You hear that siren?”
***
