True North Page 13

  17

  Looking back it is easy to see that Riva saved my sorry ass and Fred’s too. The easily perceptible linear thread through our lives causes a basic misunderstanding when we tend to give the same weight to years, months, and days. The briefest moments can have an explosive power that overwhelms the time around them including what preceded them. We had arrived at Fred’s in the last of the twilight. Riva had fixed us ham hocks, butter beans, and turnip greens knowing that I loved her kind of country fare. When we were still a half hour out I stopped so Fred could buy a six-pack. He also bought a pint of whiskey and I dreaded the idea that the rest of the evening would become unpleasant when he chugged half the pint. I had a single beer, cautioned by the thought that this sort of power drinking occurred on both sides of my family.

  Riva was angry at Fred. He had a few bites of supper then went over to the corner, finished the pint, and went to bed. She looked at me balefully and explained that Fred had passed out in a near diabetic coma the month before and had promised his doctor he would keep his drinking to two beers a day. I simply threw up my hands at her interrogation. Fred had gone to Chicago to help me out but at least part of his motive was the freedom from Riva to get drunk.

  “I’ve had enough of this dumb motherfucker.” She got her empty suitcases from the whitewashed pump shed where I was going to sleep. “Did you manage to get your head out of your ass?” She rubbed my shoulders and laughed.

  I told her that I had noticed some signs of life in myself. I avoided my project and told her how my peripheral vision had widened when I got on Route 52 out of Cincinnati. She liked that and told me an appalling story of how when she was a senior in high school her basketball-star boyfriend had gotten drunk and “cornholed” her so that she had to have rectal stitches. She had spent a full month sleeping in a closet and three months after that had refused to go to school. “No one knew but I knew and the doctor and nurses knew.” The boyfriend went unpunished because of his basketball stardom. She was a senior in college before she could stand to be around a man again, “a short, fat, white boy,” she laughed.

  Riva got up and fumbled in a desk drawer finding a letter I had left behind when visiting on spring vacation of my senior year in high school. It was postmarked Key West and was a furious note from my father written after he had learned that I had turned down my acceptance at Yale and instead had chosen Michigan State. It was incomprehensible to him that I had broken a family tradition. The letter was a drunken and abusive scrawl. I was destined to be “worthless.” I suddenly found myself telling Riva the story of the night my father raped Vera which I hadn’t told Polly or anyone else. I didn’t leave anything out and included Jesse leaving with Vera the next morning, my father’s escape to Duluth, Cynthia taking off with Donald, and my mother’s departure to Chicago. I began weeping, stood up, and turned to the wall to try to control myself. On the wall Fred had arranged a number of prints of Walker Evans’s photos of the Great Depression in Alabama. My mind played a trick and imagined a photo of Vera so I turned back to Riva who was in a reverie over my story. She put in a Buddy Guy eight-track and like any bright but confused white man I envied his ability to turn terror into song. I struggled to get our conversation away from myself and asked if she was really going to leave Fred. She looked down at the suitcases on the floor and kicked one lightly. She said she had been with Fred for six years and it wasn’t getting any better. She had turned down a good job in Washington, D.C., the year before to stay with him and now regretted it. She felt obligated to finish their current summer project. Fred was good at getting grant money from government agencies. He’d brandish his elegant education and spiritual commitments. She turned back to me.

  “Fred told me your daddy done stole your money,” Riva’s grammar was normally impeccable unless she was speaking of emotional issues.

  “I don’t give a shit. His money’s rotten.”

  “You might care someday,” she teased.

  “I get a hundred dollars a week from my mother’s family.”

  “Baby, you’re poor.”

  “Not for what I’m doing. I can get by. If I go flat broke I can go to graduate school. That’s paid for.” This reminded me to count the money in my suitcase. “It doesn’t cost much to do what I intend to do.”

  We were still talking well past midnight. Riva told me that in regard to my project I shouldn’t follow a narrow route of inquiry. If I didn’t have a broad enough base the whole thing would suffocate me. Good social anthropologists poked around for years in societies before they drew conclusions. This sounded like good advice to me but then she made a suggestion that wrenched my gut.

  “You should go down to Mexico and try to make it right for that young woman. You should try to get her forgiveness not for your father but for yourself because I can tell you see yourself as somehow tied to it. If you can’t do it alone maybe you can get your sister to go along.”

  I felt like I was swelling up and constricted at the same time. I had to assume that Riva was correct but the idea of doing what she advised gave me the sense of being catapulted into space. I was too much a lightweight to risk my sanity. My brain began to jitter.

  Riva lit a joint, turned up the music, and asked me to dance with her. I was slow to get beyond a shuffle, then absorbed the idea that I had a woman in my arms again. We were the same height and I saw how her eyes faded into the music until she escaped her mind. It took me longer but I made it. She felt me becoming erect and laughed, pushing her hips into mine, then drew away shaking a finger at me and saying, “I’m going to find you a woman tomorrow.”

  We were sweating heavily and had just sat down when Fred opened the bedroom door and walked quickly into the kitchen like a windup toy. He knelt down and drew a tequila bottle from under the sink and started sucking on it. He stopped to say “I can’t sleep” and then started again by which time Riva knelt next to him and tried to get the bottle away. He pushed her and she tipped over. I got there and reached for him and he hit me in the face with the bottle cracking my lip. Now I was angry and wrestled the bottle away from him and threw the tequila so hard that it went through a front window and smashed on the cement floor of the front porch. I turned around and swung at Fred but missed and was glad I did. He looked at me like I was unrecognizable and scurried back into the bedroom. I was dripping a lot of blood on my shirt from the cracked lip. Riva wrapped a paper towel around an ice cube and held it to my lip. It was clear that another member of my family was headed to a clinic.

  Riva started singing “Some Enchanted Evening” and I laughed, infatuated with her resilience. It was an unlikely time to think of it but I remembered my father’s sharp wit which seemed to have passed on to Cynthia but missed me though I obviously suppressed it. Before my religious period starting in my fifteenth year I thought of life as basically comic.

  Riva fetched herself a sheet from the bedroom and disrobed to her bra and panties. I turned away with that peculiar hollow feeling in my stomach while she did so. I spread the sheet more evenly on her body and rubbed her shoulder. “Sometimes a good thing would be a bad thing,” she said with her eyes closed, and then curled on the couch in a mockery of sleep.

  It was short of five A.M. and I had been asleep for an hour when Riva shook me awake. Fred had been moaning and flopping around but she couldn’t really revive him. She had called his doctor who was worried about a diabetic coma so rather than wait for an ambulance we put a mattress in the back of the pickup and loaded him like a very large sack of potatoes. Riva was worried he would become conscious and frantic so I duct-taped his wrists together and also his ankles.

  The sun was just rising when we reached the small hospital in Gallipolis on the Ohio side of the river. A doctor, nurse, and attendant were ready and Fred was wheeled off. The doctor told Riva to call him at midafternoon so we drove back home and went to bed. When I got up about ten Riva had her bags packed. She made me breakfast and said she was moving down the street until the program was done in Au
gust and then she was leaving town. Her dark face glittered with anger so I said nothing. She was wearing a light summer robe and I stared at her fanny when she leaned over to close a suitcase. She turned around and I’m sure my face reddened. She was suddenly amused and asked how long it had been since I made love. I said eight months since I had broken up with Polly in late October. She said her own body had been pretty lonely for too long. We were both still for a full minute before she closed the distance to where I sat on the chair. I nuzzled her chest and she put a breast in my mouth as if feeding me. Two hours later we were still on the sofa and she was rubbing aloe lotion on my sore penis. “Sometimes a good thing can be a good thing. We deserved it,” she said.

  I had that curious golden feeling I’d gotten when working behind a shovel in Iron Mountain. It may not be socially correct to say that black women are better than white women at making love but Riva was in my own modest experience. She heated up the leftover ham hocks and butter beans while I called my mother who suggested Hazelden up in Minnesota. She would cover her “little brother’s” recovery tab. I had learned from her that Fred had been more generous than necessary with his first wife and also that he gave away a great deal of his inherited money to needy people and charities.

  While lunch was getting warm Riva talked about how alcohol easily becomes a culture’s treat but then without effort in excessive quantities falls into becoming a culture’s hiding place. There’s no physical place for most of us to hide so booze is the next best thing. She naturally had sympathy for the dirt poor who drank too much but not for people like Fred. She had never been able to determine the true character of what she called his “heartache” or if it was merely a biochemical case where he drank because he started drinking. I told her how my father thought of himself as a northern gentleman to whom three martinis before dinner were nearly an obligation and how after dinner he might “brandy off,” as he called it. That amount might have worked but at least twice a month there were binges.

  Without thinking I doused my food with a vinegar hot sauce, then groaned when it hit my cracked lip and Riva applied another ice cube. I opened her robe for a look and then she sat on my sore dick until we broke the chair and ended up finishing on the linoleum floor. She said that since she was forty and I twenty-four we were a perfect match but this was the last time.

  When we arrived at the hospital the nurse told us that Fred had become conscious and after a long conversation with the doctor had decided that he wished to live. Fred had talked to my mother but had turned down Hazelden opting for a clinic connected to a hospital up in Columbus. He would be voluntarily locked in for a minimum of six weeks.

  When we entered Fred’s room he looked awful but was smiling. “I had a drug-induced dream that you two were fucking,” he said. “Of course we were,” Riva teased while I broke out with sweat. He had a tablet and was writing his good-bye to his first love drinking. He had started at ten years of age with sips in his parents’ pantry. “I guess I got out of hand,” he said. “I was supposed to help you,” he said, clutching at my arm.

  18

  I drove north at dawn feeling liberated enough in body and soul to begin my life in earnest. I knew this feeling would become tenuous occasionally but for the time being I was going to ride it. I had exiled myself in a marriage that was punishing for Polly, and further betrayed myself with a return to religion in the form of a thin and abstract devotion. How soiled and tawdry poor Jesus was compared to the theological school where the self-interest of the human intelligence smothered prayer, and the abstractions in the history of theology were a virtual fire extinguisher on the Gospels. I had envied my fellow students whose faith was profound but whose minds were evidently orderly enough to make formal studies remote from this faith.

  There was a temptation to close my eyes while driving and thank God for the gift of a skinny black woman who was far wiser than all but one professor in my life, but then it had often occurred to me that the possible wisdom of my teachers had always been strangled by the institution. Being at the university through the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. ending with the more recent Kent State butchery had often made academic studies seem problematical and remote. How upsetting to see your professor break down in tears in your Chaucer class the day after King was murdered. My return to religion was a defense against the insanity of the time, a way to avoid standing there simply screaming like the girl in the famous Kent State photograph. I recalled the day when I was a junior at Michigan State and Cynthia had called to say that she had heard our ex–paper boy had died in Vietnam. He was a poor kid and never seemed dressed warmly enough in winter when below-zero winds blew in off Lake Superior. His name was Larry and Cynthia slipped him extra change and also food. He was none too bright but did well as a distance runner in high school track. I remembered seeing him standing in front of the pool hall when he came home from his marine basic training. He put a face on an insane war. I knew that Cynthia had had a goofy girlhood crush on this boy thinking it heroic the way he lugged his big canvas bag of newspapers up the snowy hill.

  I was absurdly happy when I entered Michigan just north of Toledo though I was already lonely for Riva. She was going to stay the two more days Fred needed at the hospital then drive him up for his hoped for cure in Columbus. He had friends in the area who would visit him, especially a Zen adept named Claude who had quit drinking after taking a particular vow the name of which I’ve forgotten. I’d witnessed Claude and Fred in mild arguments over whether any religion could properly be removed and adapted away from its homeground, whether it was any of the forms of Buddhism or Christianity. The Germans tended to make Christ Germanic, the Americans made him a kindly glad-hander, and so on throughout the world. It wasn’t a pretty picture when the Spanish killed everyone who wouldn’t become Christians in the conquest of Mexico. Fred would counter with the question of what a solo Zen student was doing in Columbus, Ohio. Claude defended himself by saying that his practice was an “attitude” not a religion. Both his father and his brother had committed suicide and he wished to avoid this family trait. Claude and Fred gave themselves headaches when they arrived at the obvious point that we were colonialists in America with a religion of Judaic source. We couldn’t very well adopt a religion from any of the more than five hundred American Indian tribes. Was religion without faith possible? It was a relief when they lapsed into their love lives in the manner of long-term cronies. This was years ago but Fred had always said it was Riva who glued his life together more than his religion and I wondered what he would do now that she was leaving. I knew I had to evolve my own private religion or I’d be in danger of falling off the edge of the world. Fred and I both had been startled that afternoon in the Chicago tavern when Vernice said that as a poet she had discovered it was her own story that was true.

  I felt exhilarated in the early evening when I crossed the vast Mackinac Bridge into the Upper Peninsula. I made it to the Soo just before dark but missed the last Sugar Island ferry. I went to a tavern for a hamburger and beer then parked near the ferry dock and slept in the truck. It was a cool night and my sleeping bag was tucked safely away in Marquette so I awoke several times to start the truck and heater. I was bothered by the idea that I had committed adultery with Riva but finally let any guilt slide off into the night when I watched a huge ocean-bound freighter with a Duluth name heading down the lakes then east toward the St. Lawrence Seaway. The guilt couldn’t amount to much if it could be dispersed by a freighter.

  19

  I meant to stay a single night with Donald and Cynthia but it extended into a fine week when I helped Donald dig up and retile their septic tank field. We’d fish for lake trout, whitefish, and perch early in the morning and then be behind the shovel all day long. We also dug footings and hand-mixed cement to build new porch steps. It was tough going but the exhaustion was wonderful. It was also fascinating to be around my nephew and niece. The boy was as gentle as Donald and the girl impulsive and headstrong
as her mother. I felt some regret that I had decided never to father children. Cynthia also had three dogs, mixed-breed mutts, to make up for their absence in our childhood. There was also a seven-week-old female pup left from a litter, a Labrador and sled dog mix, that slept with me on the living room sofa. The little girl had named the pup Carla and on my last day with them it was decided that I should own the pup. Naturally I refused. This was at dinner and the pup had a gift ribbon around its neck.