What Burns Read online

  Sniffles now. Little bitty sobs. I did my best to think about Tina, then realized my hand was moving in time to the creaks in the next room. And the music: Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Who in the hell fucks to something that’s basically a war requiem? And then suddenly a drum roll, so loud I jumped and rolled away:

  Bah-dah bah-bah-bah, I’m lovin’ it!

  I realized I was facing Davis. In the dark, I couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed, only that they were wet. His hands were folded under his cheek in the universal symbol of sleep and prayer, I could feel his breath on my face, and all I could think was, how do you tell a five-year-old that he’s made it impossible for anyone to touch him? But then I thought, what do we do it all for, if not for the next generation?

  Aw, fuck it, Davis. C’mere.

  Reader, I made him so happy it nearly killed us both.

  —2010

  II.

  From my window I can hear the bells of the Orthodox church and see the rising glass curve of the building they finally managed to erect on Astor Place. Friday and Saturday nights there are the sounds and smells of McSorley’s, and once a year the Ukrainian festival wafts in: roasting sausage, sauerkraut tang, tinny PAs distorting a language fewer and fewer people understand on this street. The new building’s the future of the neighborhood. It looks down on sharp-chinned Irish drunks and round-cheeked Slavic congregants, but its oil-slick panes tilt upward, to reflect the sky. The window frames break the image, so that it looks less like a mirror than a bank of television monitors, and the clouds they reflect seem to come from inside the empty building. The building thinks: I will outlast you, but it doesn’t say if its you refers to me or the clouds. It’s not interesting enough to claim it will outlast me: the starlings hatching in the rusted cornice of the building across the street will live longer than I will. No, like all ’scrapers, this building hates the sky.

  Bliss

  My mother’s killer was named Waters. The morning he was released from prison was sharp and hazy, a spring day with a scattering of leftover clouds that dotted the sky like shredded bits of tissue paper floating in water. Everything seemed overdetermined that morning, all the details right out of that scene in the movie where The Killer Is Released. The shapeless clouds, the crisp diamond lattice of the fence through which I saw them, the fat gate guard, his uniform stretched so taut across the gelid curves of his body that it seemed to cry out for the pierce of bullet or knife. Black puddles reflected the limestone walls of the prison until a car traveling the length of the parking lot spat grit into them, causing the walls to disappear. Then the water stilled, revealing the image of Shenandoah Waters. He was dressed in stiff jeans and a chambray shirt faded nearly white, the sleeves rolled up over arms nearly as faded, and etched by pale blue veins and razor-blade-and-Bic-ink tattoos of Jesus, Mary, and a snarling Ford pickup. Over one shoulder hung the slack green lozenge of an Army-issue duffel bag, and this bag slapped audibly against Shenandoah Waters’s backside as he walked resolutely towards the open gate. Between the gate’s pillars he paused, as the freed do. He took a deep breath. He grinned nervously at the security guard, and then he squinted through the thick-lensed black-framed glasses that covered his eyes like a bandit’s mask—a new pair since the last time I’d seen him—then started forward again, the slap-a-dap slap of the duffel bag coming at a slightly faster rhythm. As he reached my car I pressed a button that rolled down the passenger side window with a loud squeal. Shenandoah Waters started; nineteen years in prison hadn’t made him any less jumpy. He leaned down and peered at me through his glasses, and the cut planes of his freshly shaved face filled the empty window. A thin line of stubble traced the subcutaneous arc of his right jawbone. It was so close to my eyes that had I wanted to I could have counted the individual hairs.

  I counted; there were sixteen, seven of which were gray. I smiled.

  Want a ride?

  On the morning after Shenandoah Waters killed my mother the sky was suitably gray, the clouds thick and portentous as a roll of toilet paper knocked in the bowl. They were just squeezing out their first drops as my father let me off at the edge of our yard, and I ran up the sidewalk and ducked into the house and even as I lifted my head to call her name I saw her on the floor at the foot of the stairs. The only blood on her body was a tiny spot below her left nostril. It was the size of the eraser on a new pencil, and it had bubbled up like yeasted bread before hardening into a brown scab. In the six or so hours since her death the rest of her body had stiffened too—not the skin, which had a Play-Dohy pliability, nor the bones, which seemed if anything to have softened, but something between the two. The first thing I tried to do was raise her head but her neck wouldn’t bend. Then I tried to pull her hand to mine but it wouldn’t come away from her body. It was only after I saw a strange pair of black glasses lying a few feet away that I ran outside to see if my father was still there, but he’d already driven off. The rain seemed to have solidified in the air, and fell without making any noise on the lawn.

  Twenty years ago, Kansas: five-year-old boys weren’t taught 911. Five-year-olds were taught their names and addresses and phone numbers, they were taught If I’m not here turn the TV on and wait for me to come home and only one pop before supper. I went inside and shut the door. I didn’t turn the television on but I did drink a can of pop even though it was only seven in the morning, and by the time the can was empty my mother’s arm had softened up enough for me to pull her still-stiff fingers into my lap. The sleeve of her black plastic raincoat rustled when I moved her arm, and I didn’t like the feel of it in my hands. I thought of taking it off but I only got as far as unzipping it. Underneath my mother wore her favorite pale pink dress, still belted at the waist with a thin gold buckle but ripped open at the throat where two buttons had popped off during her fall down the stairs, and atop her breastbone, twisted into a lazy figure eight, was a thin string of pearls. It was the pearls that stopped me. Their double loop—one curled around her neck, the other framing a patch of fading summer tan—seemed too delicate to disturb, and I forgot about removing the raincoat and reached instead for my pop. It was empty save for a single syrupy drop, and when it fell on my tongue I nearly gasped, and I held it there for a long time before swallowing. Held it until I could shake the idea that it was one of my mother’s pearls I was swallowing.

  The only thing that seemed to explain what I did after that was wait for me to come home, and I did, and it wasn’t until late in the afternoon, when the school had called my father’s house after calling my mother’s several times, and whatever you do don’t pick up the phone, that he came over and found us, her hand in mine, the empty can of pop, the eraserhead of dried blood—and the black glasses, which I still don’t remember putting on, dangling off the end of my nose. It may seem horrific and who knows, maybe it was, but fifteen years of passive recollection and another five of active retelling at Group have changed these memories into little more than scenic details, stock phrases I choose whether or not to voice. That’s what they teach us in Group: we can choose to tell or not tell our stories, we can impose our own meanings on them rather than letting them have power over us. In Group they teach us to love what we hate. They teach us that the only way to stop hating is to turn it into love, blame has nothing to do with it they teach us, and, like you, the first time I heard such absurdities I laughed. I couldn’t help myself, and I tried to hide it behind my hand, but still: I laughed.

  The woman before me had been talking about her husband, whom she’d found in a pool of his own blood. She didn’t call it a pool: she called it a gel. She’d told this story so often she’d had time to replace the word pool with gel and blood with essence, and the knife that she called a dagger was stuck in the nineteenth of thirty-three stab wounds that left her husband’s skin no more solid than the walls of Jericho come tumbling down. Walter had told her that. Walter had told her it wasn’t until the thirty-third thrust that he realized what
he was doing, at which point he began reinserting the knife into each of the prior wounds as if blood-hot metal could sear what had been so violently rendered, and he was on what he thinks was the nineteenth hole when the police arrived. Nineteenth hole, someone said. Sounds like a golf course, and everyone laughed, Janyne Watson included, everyone laughed easily at Janyne Watson and what she had to say about Walter, the man who had killed Janyne Watson’s husband by stabbing him thirty-three—no, forty-eight times. Janyne Watson said Walter told her this story during their most recent visit, three years of weekly trips out to the penitentiary and finally! and then Janyne Watson said Amen and a host of Amens came back at her. At the time I thought it strange that someone could laugh in the middle of a story like that and then wind it up with a word that means so be it, but even then I saw that the thing to do in Group is what everyone else does, so I said it too, or almost said it. I moved my lips but no sound passed them: Amen.

  So be it.

  Wha—?

  Shenandoah Waters jumped when I spoke, and I turned to him but didn’t say anything. Behind his glasses his eyes were wide with confusion, but then he relaxed and chuckled and said, Guess I’m a little jumpy, I guess, and I nodded but still didn’t speak. My mouth was filled with an ancient flavor, that last drop of pop gone viscid and metallic after hours lingering at the bottom of an open can, and even as Shenandoah Waters’s window rolled down with a protesting squeal I remembered that one of the windows in the living room had been open that morning—the window that from the outside was shadowed by a boxwood hedge—and the rain had come in steadily all day and rendered a patch of white carpet a slushy gray the same color as the pearls on my mother’s chest. Ahead of us a heat mirage wavered over the highway’s arc of gray asphalt, next to me Shenandoah Waters exchanged a lungful of prison air for the wind-blown dust of his new condition, and then I remembered something else. I remembered touching my mother’s belly. I’d just put my hand on it at first, but when nothing happened I pushed so hard a sigh was forced from her open mouth, and though what came out was, I do believe, invisible, still, I saw it, a cloud thick and pale green as a spring onion. It was nothing more than a blur, of course—everything seen through those glasses was no more frightening than a blur—but for a moment I caught a glimpse of that same cloud on the seat between me and Shenandoah Waters. When I turned I saw it was just his duffel bag. Nineteen years ago the mirage had also lasted only a moment: I’d reached a hand out to it and then, like my mother, like the apparition of water in the distance and like the hatred I’d once felt for Shenandoah Waters, it disappeared as soon as I got close.

  Some men carry jail on their backs. They hunker down, hunched over under the weight of it, their shoulders drooping, their heads dropping into their chests. Shenandoah Waters talked a lot at first, but as we got closer to town his words slacked off, his back bowed even more, eventually he fell silent, he stared at his hands, which rested a handcuff’s width apart on the creases ironed into his jeans. The drive took nearly two hours, and during the ride his head sank lower and lower as his spine curved under his invisible burden. He didn’t look up until we were a few blocks from my house, and then his head jerked up, he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and looked out the windows, and then, with an almost audible gulp, he pushed his chin back into his chest. I thought about putting my hand on his knee then, telling him that I carried the same weight on my back: we all did. One of the things we learn in Group, one of the few things I have no trouble believing, is that no one’s innocent after a crime. No one’s free. And then I did put my hand on his knee, and Shenandoah Waters gulped again, and the muscles of his thigh were so taut it seemed I could feel his constricting throat under my fingers.

  My parents never got married, I said. My grandma says my dad was a deadbeat, and she had plans. My mom had plans. She was working as a broker even before she got pregnant with me, and by the time—by that time she had a pretty good business, and she owned two houses in this neighborhood.

  Only then did I pat his knee, remove my hand.

  So no.

  Shenandoah Waters rubbed his knee as if checking for an injury. No?

  No, it’s not the same house. My dad sold that one.

  Shenandoah Waters looked again at the silvered wood of shingled roofs, at Bermuda grass and purple impatiens and the open-fan leaves of the spindly ginkgoes that had replaced the elms that succumbed to blight a few years after he’d been convicted of murder, and then he said, It was a nice house?

  I guess. Kind of small I guess. A cottage really. My mom turned the attic into a second story, so we could have separate bedrooms. I tried to dam it, but the word poured out of me anyway. Ironic, huh?

  Ironic?

  I mean, if she’d never put in the second story, there never would’ve been a staircase for her to fall down.

  Oh, Shenandoah Waters said. Ironic.

  When we got to my house Shenandoah Waters opened his car door well enough; he stood up, even managed to hoist his pack onto his shoulders. Then he just stood there in the afternoon sunlight, blinking, watching me through his glasses, and I was caught for a moment by the sight of the man who had killed my mother standing on a mowed green square of suburban lawn. With his right hand, he fingered the spot over his heart where for nineteen years an ID number had been sewn into his shirts, but finding nothing there his fingers dug through the fabric into his skin. His foot scraped the dirt a little; other than that he didn’t move except to blink repeatedly, whether at me or the unbarred sun I couldn’t tell.

  I shook my head, straightened my spine.

  C’mon. You’re a free man. Act like one.

  For the first time his smile didn’t seem forced. Your front door locked?

  Yeah. Why?

  Well, seeing as my house-breaking days are behind me, there’s not much for me to do till you open it.

  He laughed a little, and I looked at him while he laughed, and when he was done I said,

  Touché.

  Inside, I said: As you can see, it’s way too big for one person. Too big for two really, that’s why my mom rented this one out. There are four bedrooms upstairs, two bathrooms, down here there’s a den, a screened-in porch, even a little maid’s room off the kitchen.

  You sound like you a got a bit of the broker in you too.

  Must run in the family.

  We walked from room to room. So, um, you got a girlfriend or anything?

  I’m single.

  Oh. Shenandoah Waters said, and then he cleared his throat. Look, I don’t want to be a imposition.

  Shen, I said. Can I call you Shen? Shen, this is the opposite of an imposition. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  That sounds like something you heard in Group.

  If it wasn’t for Group we wouldn’t know each other. You’d be sleeping on some cold sidewalk right now.

  It’s noon, Shen said. It’s June.

  Things change. Especially the weather.

  I don’t understand—Shen began, but I spoke over him.

  I don’t understand either, Shen, but I know that this is something we need. Both of us need this, if we’re ever going to move on.

  But he just blinked his eyes. I don’t understand, he said again. What do we need?

  We were in the kitchen when he said that. Shen had carried his bag from room to room, and now I said, You wanna put that down? It looks heavy.

  He laughed a little. Disjointed words dribbled from his lips, one at a time. Oh . . . yeah . . . sure . . . I . . . He caught sight of the maid’s room through an open door, and he pantomimed the fact that he was going to put his bag in there before he actually put his bag in there. When he came back I had a bottle of whiskey in my hand, the glasses already on the table. Shen looked at the bottle and then at me, and then his face broke into a grin.

  Welcome home, I said. Welcome back.

 
I poured us each a shot and we touched glasses, but neither of us drank. Shen’s hand fell to the table like a man losing an arm-wrestling match. He exchanged his drink for the car keys, which I’d tossed on the table when we came in.

  Seventy-six?

  I nodded.

  For the first time he perked up.

  No shit. I knew it, man. She’s cherry. Then his smile faded again. I went to jail in ’76.

  That seemed to me to be beside the point, but all I said was, Last of the big Monte Carlos. Last, biggest, and best, and even before I finished Shen was shaking his head.

  Naw, man. Best was ’72. Half Caddy, half tank, half wolverine. Climbing into that car was about as good as climbing into pussy.

  Now I put my glass down. Behind his glasses, Shen’s eyes closed.

  Aw man. Nineteen years. Aw man. When you’re locked up the thought of pussy is like god, man. There was times I’d reach up outta my bunk and touch that shit like it was right there, pussy like the size of a grizzly bear waiting to eat me up. My cellie used to say, Hey everybody, Shen’s having the pussy dream again. I like to kill that nigger when he do that. I mean, I don’t give a shit what nobody thinks about me, but he woke me up, you know what I’m saying, and when that pussy was gone there was no getting it back until it came back. Nineteen years I been having that dream, and I swear to Christ that pussy got bigger every year. Big enough to open wide and swallow me whole, big enough to take me right back where I started from. Nineteen years. Aw man.

  When he was done I said, She’s yours if you want her.

  She?