Report from a Place of Burning Page 2
The image of the deer in the moment it came out with the glass all around it glittering stays with me.
• • •
When I was a girl, my brother used to tease me something awful. More than once, he’d get me trapped in a corner and tickle me till I was heaving. Once, he kept me huddled in the bathroom while he hit me over and over with a Nerf ball. Every time it hit me in my side or in my leg I’d laugh and cry at the same time. If I could have, I’d have leapt through the bathroom window and sparkled in the glass like that deer.
Or like the stained glass window my brother shattered.
My brother was always getting into trouble. He was caught streaking at school, for instance. He and three other boys streaked through the gym during a basketball game, with all the parents in the stands. They ran naked, except for shoes and socks, onto the court, and two of them, my brother being one, grabbed a startled cheerleader and carried her out with them. She ran back in a minute later, laughing. Later I heard how they’d made it all the way to the classroom where their clothes were and were getting dressed when the vice-principal and a couple of teachers found them. They were suspended for two weeks, not that they cared. They were legends.
The stained glass window fiasco resulted from the fact that one of the places my brother and his friends would drink was the woods just behind the Episcopal church in town. My brother would heist beer while he was supposed to be mopping the floors at the IGA and stash it outside when he took the empty cola bottles out to the alley where they were kept till they were picked up by the bottler. Then he’d drive to the church parking lot and take the beer into the woods where his friends would join him and they’d get drunk and then head downtown to the Dairy Queen where they’d pretend to fight and harass any girls who came for ice cream.
One night someone left the lights on in the church. I heard about this from one of my brother’s friends. My brother’s always denied he had anything to do with what happened. What his friend said was that when they came out of the woods and my brother saw the stained glass figure of Christ Healing the Lepers all lit up, he started shouting.
Your brother, his friend told me, just went off. He was cursing at the figure in the window, and, his friend said, I swear he started crying in the midst of the curses. It was like he was so angry he could barely be bothered to form actual words. It got to the point that, whether it was the beer or his crazy anger, his words were so slurred together it was like he was, as they say, speaking in tongues. At one point, he ripped his shirt off and flung it in the air in the direction of the window. I tried to calm him down, his friend said, and he knocked me to the ground and was going to kick me when he stopped and turned and ran off, ranting, toward the church.
Just outside the door to the church he bent down and picked something up, his friend told me. None of us followed him, so we don’t know for sure what it was. It must have been a rock. There were always some pretty big rocks there under the evergreen bushes near the steps up to the door of the church. It must have been one of them.
Whatever it was, he took it into the church with him. We could hear him still yelling inside the church, but we couldn’t make out what he was yelling. We could tell he was angry though. Then we heard the crash and saw the shards of the stained glass figure of Christ leap out into the night air, gleaming, reflecting the light from inside the church.
We’d been drinking, but we all knew this was something none of us would ever be able to explain. The way that figure of Christ shattered into what almost seemed fireworks. It was awful, and it was beautiful. We knew he’d broken something he ought not to have broken, but it was almost as though he’d broken that stained glass window to give us that moment of glittering beauty.
It was something, he said. Really something to see.
• • •
Ray, when he was alive, could break just about anything. God love him, he tried to be handy, to fix little things around the house. Every now and then he did. We celebrated those small salvations like they were national holidays. We’d take off and stop and buy some beer and head for the drive-in, or we’d go to some ridiculously expensive restaurant and have steaks and champagne.
More often than not, though, we’d have nothing to celebrate. I remember once a crazed blue jay broke its bright body against the living room window and it cracked. After burying the blue jay, Ray visited the local hardware store. They sold glass, sheets of it to fit into the frames of windows as large as our living room window and larger. Ray walked a sheet of glass home from the store.
People didn’t know what to make of it, Ray said. A man carrying a sheet of glass through town.
I peeled potatoes in the kitchen for dinner while Ray took a hammer to the cracked window, taking it out with one good swing. After that, now and then I could hear tiny scraping noises and some tiny sounds of glass shards falling to the hardwood floor under the window. The potatoes were peeled and already soaking when Ray called me to come into the living room. I barely heard him as he was standing outside when he yelled for me. When I got to the living room, I could see that Ray had gotten that sheet of glass into the frame and there was fresh putty around the edges of the glass.
How’s she look? Ray yelled from outside. He was standing there grinning, his hands crossed in front of his chest, looking so satisfied with himself. I could see a little blood on the sleeves of his shirt. It hadn’t gone in without a struggle, I knew.
I was just about to tell him it was like looking through air, when there was a strange sound and I watched as a crack started down from the left corner of the glass and moved diagonally, jaggedly, across and down. It was like watching the earth come apart in those cartoons where there’s supposed to be an earthquake and the split in the earth separates, say, the coyote from the road runner. You’ve seen it, haven’t you? How after the crack passes all the way across the drawn-in landscape, the part the coyote’s standing on falls and we watch it fall and get smaller and smaller until it’s just a dot and then there’s always that puff of dust.
That crack spread down the glass from one corner to the other, and then the top of the glass, the part above the crack, slipped out of the fresh putty in the frame and slid past the lower portion and fell into the grass under the window, taking more than one reflected image of Ray with it as it fell. And taking Ray’s grin along for the ride.
Yep, Ray could break just about anything, bless his heart.
• • •
Kids are playing some kind of game in the ruins of the Heinz plant. From the porch I can’t make out their yells enough to know what game it is, or its rules. Even though it’s hours before the sun will go down and it’ll start to get dark, I don’t think they should be playing over there. A few weeks ago, men in overalls and hard hats starting tearing down the plant. They came with bulldozers and other big, awkward-looking yellow machines and starting gutting the buildings. They haven’t gotten very far yet. The buildings just across the street from me haven’t been touched. Still, I’ve never liked the way the kids in the neighborhood used the abandoned buildings for fortresses and who knows what. I’ve worried for years a child was bound to go through a floor somewhere, or a building would collapse on a whole group of kids. I’ve told my concerns to my neighbors.
Kids will be kids, one said once, as if that somehow was a chant that could protect them. Kids will be kids, she repeated, going back to her garden.
Now it’s got to be even more dangerous, what with the way things are being ripped up and torn down every day by the men in overalls and hard hats. But I can’t do anything about it. Yesterday, I yelled at some kids from the porch, told them how dangerous it was over there. They laughed and ran further back into the plant, closer to where the machines were working. Someone’s bound to get hurt.
• • •
Last night there was a heavy fog. From my bedroom window, upstairs, the Heinz plant, draped in the fog, looked lik
e one of those old paintings of Hell. There were even some small fires burning here and there in the fog.
Teenagers. They’ve been coming to the plant for years, to drink and make out. I know that’s what the fires were, but last night they seemed to be something else. Something terrible. Usually, thinking about what the teenagers are doing over there at night just makes me smile. Not last night. Maybe it was the fog. Maybe it was something else.
The strangest thing, though, was not what I saw but what I thought I saw. I was about to go to bed, the light was already out in the room, and I looked out the window as I started to get into bed. What I thought I saw was the figure of a deer, running, on fire, through the fog. Then it was gone.
This morning, the fog hadn’t lifted yet. All morning, there were the cries of redwing blackbirds echoing in the fog, all the fires out.
The Adulterer Is Trapped by Dreams
Talk of dreams started it all. From the office, where I figure the day’s sales, I can hear the cooks, the two teenage boys I got stuck with for closing, breaking down the breading table in the kitchen. I know the sounds. I made them thousands of times myself before I moved up into management. Angela’s alone up front, restocking the styrofoam mashed potato cups. Even doing something so mundane, there’s a grace to Angela I’ve never seen in anyone else.
Angela’s the reason I’m stuck with the two in the back. Managers have to make concessions to get the people they want to work with. In order to get Angela, I had to settle for those two. One of them’s just turned the radio up. Lynard Skynard’s “Freebird” is firing up back there, making it all the way out here. Angela smiles and her hips move almost imperceptible to the music. God, the way she moves. No dream could convince me more that there are angels in this world.
Like I said, it was talk of dreams that started things almost two years ago now. Angela had just recently started working here. She was different from the other girls. Older, for one. And married. Most of the girls that work here at Famous Recipe are still in high school, this their first job. So training new girls can be a pain. Most wouldn’t even be able to spell discipline.
But Angela wasn’t just older, she wasn’t local. Angela was from Kentucky originally. She’d grown up there and had come north to go to college. Though you couldn’t tell it to listen to her. She’d lost whatever accent she might have had by the time she came to work here, after she finished college. Which is where she met her husband. She was working because he was still a student, going to graduate school in Education. So money was tight.
We hit it off pretty much right off the bat. She was the only girl at Famous Recipe who got my jokes. And we could talk for hours without once slipping into the kind of vapid, polite gargling with liquid licorice that passes for conversation around here. She’d tell me stories of growing up in Kentucky, like the time on a dare she walked, like a tightrope artist, along the slim edge of a bridge hundreds of feet above the Barren River. Of course, she’d been drinking. Drinking seemed to be involved in most of her stories.
Drinking became a part of our story, too. But not in the beginning.
At first it was all completely innocent. I know, everyone says that, but it really was with us. We just talked, about our lives, about the world, about everything. I started to pick up on certain comments Angela would make that suggested things weren’t great at home, and slowly I came to realize I wanted to do more than talk with Angela. But back then I thought of myself as a moral person, not someone to get involved with another man’s wife.
Even as I was falling in love with Angela, I told myself nothing would ever happen between us. That I’d enjoy her company at work and that would be that.
That’s when I started arranging to have Angela’s schedule mimic mine. The excuse I told myself, and the other manager, was that I liked having Angela on my crew because she was more responsible than most of the other girls. Which was true. That’s why I often ended up with slackers back in the kitchen. Compromise. You’ve got to give something to get something. But having Angela around was worth it. Though I began to find it impossible to deny it wasn’t just for conversation that I wanted her around. Still, it was innocent and I believed it would stay that way. Like I said, I was convinced I was a moral person.
• • •
One night one of the girls was talking about a book she’d had to read for some class. It was a slow night. I’d already sent one of the cooks home. The one cook left had started to break things down in the kitchen, preparing to get out quickly after we closed. I could hear him banging out the beat of some Allman Brothers’ tune with a spatula while the water ran in the sink. He wasn’t a half-bad drummer.
The book was about dreams, and what she was saying was something about how the book said we need to dream in order to stay sane. Something about how dreams are the brain’s way of sorting out all the images it’s accumulated—not that she used that word for it, stored up, is the way I think she put it—over the course of a day. She said that our dreams are really just the residue—the stuff left over, as she put it—of the sorting process. From what I could gather from the snippets I heard, the idea was that dreams are a kind of toxic waste dump and without them all that waste would build up in our brains and poison us, drive us crazy.
Like I said, it was a slow night, and I’d already done most of the day’s paperwork, so I came out of the office and helped the girls clean, joining in on their conversation about dreams being toxic waste dumps.
I don’t dream, I told them.
Angela jumped on that right off. That explains a lot, she said, smiling. Clara, the other girl, laughed.
You don’t know the half of it, I said, and laughed, maniacally, rubbing my hands together.
Angela and Clara both pretended to cringe in fear and held one another. Eek, Clara said, giggling.
Hey, Clara, the cook yelled from the back. You got a phone call. And when Clara went in the back to take her call, Angela stopped playing around, though she still wanted to talk about dreams.
You have to dream, she said. Just because you don’t remember doesn’t mean you don’t dream. It just means there’s some reason you don’t want to remember.
I suppose you remember your dreams, I said.
Not only do I remember them, I can control what I dream about, she said.
That’s impossible, I said in a way that made it clear I wasn’t calling her a liar.
I can, she said. If I spend some time before I go to bed thinking about something or someone, I end up dreaming about what, or who, I focused on. But I have to really concentrate for it to work, she said.
I wish I could do that, I said, not seeing where this was about to go. To this day I don’t understand why I didn’t.
Why? Angela said. Is there someone you’d want to dream about, if you could?
I’d been thinking, of course, that if I could control my dreams, and remember them, I’d dream about Angela. About being with her and doing a lot more than talking. The thing was, it seemed Angela knew what I’d been thinking. In fact, it seemed she had known I was thinking it before I’d realized it. That she’d led the conversation to this point.
I was feeling a lot of guilt. Not that I’d done anything wrong, though I suppose it could be argued that falling in love with another man’s wife is, in itself, a wrong thing to do. What the Catholics would call a sin. Don’t some Catholics believe that to imagine committing a sin is a sin? Which means every sin is actually two sins you need to confess.
God knows I’d thought of doing a lot of things with Angela, but I never intended to do any of them. How did she know? And she did know, I’ve learned. She’s admitted she knew what I was thinking about long before this talk of dreams. She’s said she doesn’t think she was deliberately leading the conversation that night, but, she’s said, she’s really not sure. Maybe she was, she’s said.
I tried to get out of it with my usual hu
mor. I made jokes about different actresses and political figures, and she let me off the hook until the next night.
After closing, she was stocking the front counter while I finished balancing the day’s sheets.
So, who’d you dream about last night? she said, smiling.
The cooks were in the back singing along with Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind,” badly. I think they hit one note out of every six. And one of them couldn’t even get the words right.
I don’t dream, I said. Remember?
You dream, all right, she said. Come on, you can tell me. Who is it you want to dream about?
I was sure she knew. She was waiting for me to admit I wanted to dream about her, since I couldn’t do anything but dream about her. Since she was married and all. She’s told me she was pretty sure she knew I wanted to dream about her, but wasn’t sure. She’s told me she was confused by what I seemed to be thinking because she couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to dream about her. It’s amazing, the image some people have of themselves.
Who do you think I want to dream about? I said. Obviously you have some idea, so you tell me, who do I want to dream about?
But she refused to say anything. You’re the one who wants to dream about someone, she said. I just don’t know why you can’t say who it is.
We’d recently starting taking walks sometimes together after work. Every night she walked her dog, Lena, a mix of Husky and something else, who looks for all the world like a wolf, but has the gentlest personality of any dog I’ve ever known, and sometimes I’d meet her somewhere and we’d walk several miles together, talking.
If we walk later, I told her, maybe I’ll tell you.