White Nights in Split Town City. Annie DeWitt
oats. Operation Desert Storm blasted in the background while stay-at-home mothers drove their Honda Accords around newly minted culde- sacs on the other side of town. Farmers sold off old Indian burial grounds while listening to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation.” Every night the man on the news said, “It’s ten o’clock, do you know where your children are?” and Father would laugh, “No. Do you?” For me, the image of Fender Steelhead sprawled out kitelike tethered to the rack of the Jeep was the beginning of some deeper treason. I had never wanted to rescue something in such earnest. I had the feeling this was the moment in life I’d heard Uncle talk about, the one in which fate comes to a halt in the middle of the road in front of you. In such a moment you were outside of your body watching yourself step over a thin white line that represented a wide unforgiving chasm, but in reality looked so small an inkling you almost mistook it for some fissure the wind had drawn in the sand.
I’d buried a hamster once in a box in the yard. It had cracked its leg on the little wheel in its cage and was only half-dead when I found it, hanging mid-flight on its circuit. Uncle put it out on the porch in a small yellow shoebox to finish dying. Every few hours, he went out and shook the box. It took the whole afternoon before there was no more shake in the body. We buried the box off the end of the cement stoop that lined the front of the house. I didn’t know how long it took for an animal to suffocate. Even as we covered the box with dirt, I wasn’t so sure it wasn’t still gasping a little at its own air.
“It’s not like you can just snap the neck,” Uncle had said.
There wasn’t a soul alive or dead that cared whether Fender Steelhead kept his heels on the ground or went flying. For Fender, to fit was the whole of it. He needed to find someway into his brothers’ breed. If it wasn’t the wrestling or the smut or the holes in the wall, it was the flying. The getting pissed and high. The letting go. From the moment I saw him barreling toward me, I knew it would be hard. It would be bitter. There would be that New England fence between us, our feet planted firmly on opposite sides.
The problem was, Fender had already usurped my own cutting loose.
“It’s a shame too,” Mother said of the boys as the Jeep turned the corner.
I stared at the back of Fender’s shirt as the Wrangler sped out of sight.
“You don’t look at people like that,” Mother laughed, cuffing me gently on the back of the head. It was a phrase she often repeated, though I didn’t yet know its importance.
“You don’t look at people like that,” Mother said later that summer.
I recognized the phrase but by then I had lost the memory of its earlier context and felt only the tender surge of familiarity that Mother’s advices sometimes lent.
“Like what?” I said.
“The way you were looking at him. It’s not done at your age. It’s unsightly.”
We were sitting at the table overlooking the window in Otto Houser’s kitchen. Otto had invited Mother, Birdie, and I over for lunch. Father was at work. Granny Olga was down for her nap. Otto wanted to extend his hand back toward Mother’s trust.
“Don’t touch anything,” Mother had said to Birdie and I on our way over to Otto’s. “I’m not saying it’s their fault. They’re old is all. All they have is their germs.”
“It doesn’t spread like that,” I said.
“What doesn’t spread like what,” Mother said.
“What she has,” I said.
“What who has,” Mother repeated.
“His Helene,” I said. “Otto says she been sick so long whatever she’s down with is too worn out to jump anywhere else.”
Birdie leapt a little then in the road. She liked to try out the tricks they were teaching all the gymnasts at the gym. Small and round and tow-headed, Mother said Birdie was the type of child who would show up well on television. The nickname had stuck despite Father’s better efforts. He thought perhaps Birdie would be blind to her own charm and good looks. He’d wanted to see his youngest fashioned with a name with history behind it. “Don’t turn her into a bore,” Mother had said. “She’s got such a thrust for life.”
“It’s my new tumble,” Birdie said that morning, cartwheeling in the road.
“Very good, darling,” Mother said. “That was very good.”
Even still, Mother insisted we wash Otto Houser’s clean silver before we set the table. She’d seen that boy Ryan White on the television. There was a cancer afoot in Otto’s house and she wasn’t going to catch it, worn out or not. Otto was at the other end of the counter whipping the mayo and mashing the tuna. Mother took the spoons out of the drawer right in front of the old man’s face and washed them again. She heard the whisk of his fork stop against the side of the bowl.
“You must have been quite lucky once,” Mother said.
“How do you figure?” Otto said, glancing at Mother from the corner of his eye as he went to cut another can of fish on the opener under the cabinet.
“Your wife kept quite a kitchen,” Mother said nodding toward the living room where His Helene was asleep on the couch. “Everything at arms length. You can tell it’s just how Helene left it.”
We started laughing then. Me and the old man. Me and Otto Houser. Me and the Otto that was still hanging on that banister somewhere waiting for his wife and his tap lesson.
“You two have been spending some time together in my absence,” Mother said. “You and my daughter have adopted the same laugh.”
This made Otto howl even harder. Wilson was in on it then. He wanted to prove that he spoke his old man’s language. Wilson was full-grown with graying hair that was balding in the back. People said he was slow. Mother said he’d been touched by something. When he spoke, flecks of spittle formed around his mouth so that, if you were made to stand too close to him, you’d feel a fine mist. He lived in the RV out back. The trailer was parked on the lawn close to the porch. When Otto propped open the door, he could sit on his crumbling veranda and keep watch over his aging son.
That summer Wilson had started gumming a toothpick. Whenever you talked to him, he often repeated whatever you’d said, like he’d gotten stuck on a word and couldn’t get past it. In his confusion, the toothpick dropped out of the corner of his mouth and into the dirt. Without pause, Wilson picked it up off the ground and righted it back between his lips.
“Beg your pardon,” Otto Houser said to Mother when he’d come down a little. “It’s just been so damn sad around here. You can’t imagine.”
“I can imagine a lot of things,” Mother said.
She turned then to Wilson.
“Your laugh is infectious,” she said. She looked at him, taking his chin in her hand and examining both sides of his face.
“Infectious,” Wilson said.
“It means you give people something,” Mother said. “You give them something happy.” She clasped Wilson’s cheeks momentarily and kissed him on the lips. The kiss appeared almost an accident, a way for Mother to direct her focus toward something other than Otto’s laughter.
Wilson’s body shot up from his chair from the excitement.
“Infectious,” he chanted under his breath, going over the word with his mouth until he could form it properly. After a while the chanting got louder until he was yelling. There was something garish about watching a big man flail about indoors. Despite his hunch, Wilson cut a good six-foot and a half. His head almost touched the ceiling fan. The house was old. The ceilings were low.
Wilson kept on until no one was laughing. Otto looked like he’d had the wind taken out of him. The lines in his face deepened. He curled his lips and ran them over the length of his teeth. Otto took great care