White Nights in Split Town City. Annie DeWitt
falling over, propped up by reputation alone.
Lonesome for any visible parentage, it was well repeated that Fender was among the motherless, a legend which served to soften his fate. As the youngest Steelhead brother, Fender was viewed as the town’s last opportunity to stamp out misfortune. When he lifted several volumes of encyclopedias from the local library, the librarians considered the books a donation. God willing, they said, Fender would read them. In the eyes of the town Fender was still open to redemption. Before the week was out, the library was missing the whole set.
Ada and Cash had run the farm stand out of their garage for as long as anyone could remember. When it came to troubled boys, they had seen the worst of them. Rumor had it, Cash felt guilty about calling the cops on Fender one night after he looted a patch of their tomatoes. To make it up to him, Cash had given Fender a few paid hours of work every week.
As I looked out at my bike parked in the drive, I wondered how Fender would answer the phone if it rang.
The list in my pocket was always the same with slight variation: an armload of zucchini, two peppers, an ear apiece of corn for us girls and two for Father. Though I knew it by heart, that afternoon as I retreated into the cool shade of the garage, I pulled Mother’s list out of my pocket, walked over to the counter and placed it next to the register.
“Hey, Hotshot,” I said.
I was wearing my swimsuit with allure.
“Well, what do they call you?” Fender said, deepening his lean and stuffing his hands into his pockets.
“Billie,” I said. The name occurred to me on the spot. I’d recently taken to sifting through my parents’ vinyls when Mother was out with the Separatists and Father was in the basement pining away over his college easel. Most of my parents’ records were decrepit. They lacked the speed of the current moment. The one vinyl I listened to was the only one to which I could dance. It was electric and funky and sounded like it had come from some future generation. “Billie Jean” was the title track.
“Take one for the road, Billie,” Fender said, pulling the honey stick from between his teeth and handing me the open end. I put my mouth over the stick and licked at the tip.
Otto looped his arm around my shoulder and brushed the front of my chest as though marking some kind of territory. “Get one of your own,” he said to Fender before disappearing out back.
“Don’t plan on it,” Fender called after him.
5.
The hay wasn’t the only thing growing early into the summer. That June, Father ordered a riding mower to keep up with the lawn. He’d been working overtime at Data General, the software engineering plant on Route 9. The riding mower came straight off the truck, factory direct. Being that we lived so far out of town, most items Father ordered had to be picked up at the Post. The rider was so large that UPS made a special delivery. The truck labored up the mountain. From a distance, I thought, it looked like one of the ready-made houses I’d seen tractor-trailers haul on the highway, the house expanding on the horizon the closer it came.
Father’s rider came in a large cardboard box lined with a thin plywood plank. He kept the box in the garage until Mother threatened to return the mower along with it if Father didn’t break down the packaging and take the refuse to the dump. The flower show was the following weekend, she said. The Separatists had ordered mums which they planned on storing in our garage.
The day after the flowers arrived, Mother went to church. The Separatists had organized a car wash after the service. The women, Father joked, planned on stashing the leftover cash for a trip to Palm Beach the local circular had been advertising.
The box was large enough that, side-by-side, Birdie and I could lie down in it. While Father was out mowing, Birdie and I snuck into the garage and made off with the box, carrying it on our shoulders along the riverbed to the far side of the marsh.
When we arrived, the green bottle was exactly as I had left it. Birdie and I dragged the box under the tree and cut a door out of the cardboard. I scored along three sides of the rectangular opening with Mother’s gardening scissors and bent the box back so the crease served as a hinge. The rest of the afternoon Birdie and I gathered stones to mark off the perimeter. As we worked, the white branches of the birch crept into shadow. By the time we made our way up hill from the marsh, dusk was heavy along the horizon. Floodlights overlooked the back porch.
As we approached the Bottom Feeder, Father was playing the piano. In the background I could hear high-pitched laughter and the clinking of cans. I ditched the gardening scissors in the crawlspace beneath the garage and washed under the spigot, running my hands over Birdie’s legs to scrub away the mud. Several welts were forming where the bugs had broken skin.
Together we stood on the back deck to survey our progress. If you leaned over the railing and trained your eyes along the riverbank, beyond the outer reaches of the floodlights, you could just make out the faint gleam of the rocks we had gathered, the white patches of mineral glinting in the dusk.
As we entered the kitchen, Callie was standing in the portico leaning over the piano. One hand on Father’s shoulder. The other hovered over the songbook. Otto sat in the recliner in back of them. He kept time with his knuckles. A row of beer cans lined the cedar chest where Father kept his music. Father was singing a song about the things people needed.
“Join us, baby,” Callie called to me in the doorway. “Your old man was just playing us some of his standards.” Faded jeans rode halfway up her stomach. Her undershirt was pulled tight over her bra and tucked into the front of her pants.
“We’ve been out at the barn all day loading the loft,” Otto said. “Your father invited us over to blow off some steam.”
“Otto says he’s heard you practice,” Father said.
Otto smiled. “Play us something,” he said.
I played the last piece in the book just as I’d heard it. Father stood behind me. Otto sat in the chair with Birdie in his lap. After the first several bars, Callie lost track and gave up on the pages. She sat next to me on the piano bench and hummed along. The piece didn’t come with any words, just several repeating passages, which I played best I could remember.
“Wouldn’t want anything to happen to an ear like that,” Otto laughed when I finished.
6.
Otto called the next morning to say the Shetland was dead. Father set out across the road before sunup to help dispose of the body. Otto wanted to get the carcass in the ground before word made its way around the stable. “Found that pony lining its own stall when I opened the barn to put the feed out,” he said. “Its nose still warm from breath.”
When Father got home, Mother made him strip down and clean up outside under the spigot. They’d wrapped the Shetland’s body in feedbags and buried it in Otto’s south pasture, Father said. The old ceramic tub that had once served as a water trough marked the grave.
The image of the pony in the ground did not sit well with Mother. Lately, on nights when Father was sleepless and incapable of stepping away from the world, he slipped out the slider door onto the little deck that abutted their bedroom. Mother said she often awoke to Father’s absence. In those moments, a strange stillness gripped her. The air was too light for her lungs. She could see the image of her husband’s back on the porch in the blackness. Father took a pillow with him. The mornings after these nights, his voice was hoarse and scratchy.
“You sound faded,” Mother said one morning at breakfast.
Screaming, Father said, released a chemical in his body that allowed his mind to find the emptiness in the world. Mother had mentioned Father’s habit once, in passing, to Margaret and then regretted it.
“Dumping,” Margaret said. “It’s a psychological device like blowing up a bag and then popping it. The pressure deflates.”
Mother wasn’t sure what pressures existed in the country to be deflated.
“Don’t