Keeping Me Warm
At first I thought he was a serial killer, but reversed my decision and settled on registered sex offender. In the dark of the movie theater I also concluded the man to my left was born old. Old is among the more subjective of terms, but you know what I mean and, besides. I teach English and literature, and am fat and a dyke. I know about subjective. Or something.
Drifting above grease slicks of chemical popcorn his sweat smelled like it had been frozen and was thawing. He wore an oily windbreaker reeking of unrepentance and sorrow, and spent long minutes peeling layers of Saran Wrap from snacks he’d smuggled in, peeling it off, biting slices of something I hoped was cheese. He kept knocking his right elbow into the human tissue-stuffed cloud of my midriff, into flannel shirt, sweatshirt and the loft of my parka.
I might have told you this before, but I have a history. My parents were drug dealers in the Bay Area. They were caught, imprisoned and through a contrivance of fate and a variable deity’s unending knack for amusement, died two years in, my mother in a fire in the kitchen of the Northern California Women’s Facility; my father in a classic shanking by a jailed member of Nuestra Familia. The murderer needed recognition although how much he received for fatally slicing my conniving though generally dazed and kind father, well, I have to wonder.
Now I live in the great Pacific Northwest, in the city of Seattle where I teach in a private high school. For the record, I didn’t leave California because of my parents. I left because of a woman, a fat woman, like me. I am a fat woman who loves fat women.
Merlye was not a fat woman but it was she who was seated on my non-serial killer side in the theater. I exuded hostility when the serial killer, registered sex offender or whatever he was kept intruding on my space. Fortunately, Merlye was alert as he positioned his elbow for another gratuitous jab. Around the time the movie star in the Utah desert was deliriously hosting an imaginary morning talk show, she whispered we should switch seats. Mr. Grandma Smell proved disinterested in Merlye, who is thin and not vulnerable, at least not openly like I am. The movie ended without incident, unless you want to count the character played by the movie star sawing off his arm.
It was kind of unusual that Merlye and I were at the theater or even doing something together at all, but there we were. On Thursday after school, she had asked if I wanted to drive her to the reservation the next day. We’d been getting to know each other. I’d asked for Native American fiction suggestions for my class. Two afternoons a week she taught history of Native art to a select crew of our students. She’d appreciated my interest and, I suspect, understood, just looking at my very large, pale and serious face, I was, as they say, a breed apart, certainly apart from our principal and board. Of course everyone wants to be a breed apart,, wants their breakdancing inner-city child to manifest so the world knows how cool they really are. Lots of people just might be cool. You don’t know.
Merlye’s car was in the shop, and the loaner wasn’t reliable enough for a round-trip into the countryside. She is a little skittish, but not skinny-woman skittish which is like kitten-on-crack skittish. More like smoker-skittish. She is in her early forties, with a son out of rehab, living at his girlfriend’s apartment and selling his canvases to galleries. Her husband is living or dead, I have yet to figure that one out, though they weren’t talking, which would be more relevant if he were alive.
So when she asked if I wanted to see to the reservation—she said, “If my car is still busted.”—I responded, “Yeah, sure.” I am a sucker for being included in pretty much anything and as a northern Californian, adore field trips. My parents thrilled to high deserts such as the area around Mount Shasta, and one time we drove the Oregon Coast highway, curvy, dramatic, moody. I would be happy if I were asked to be driver for a bank robbery, something my father suggested but my mother talked him out of. I think he was kidding.
“See the reservation? Yeah, I’d like that.”
Her job was a curator at United Indians of All Tribes Daybreak Star Cultural Center’s art gallery in Seattle’s Discovery Park, in the Magnolia neighborhood, where I picked her up Friday afternoon, a little later than we’d agreed, but then she hadn’t finished whatever she was working on. We had to stop by her apartment for bags of groceries and whatever else. About the time we packed the car a storm broke, half a day before Channel 5 predicted it would.
The ground was getting muddy and muddier, the downpour was violent compared to the generally misty sort of rain we know here. Backpacks and bags were safe in the back seat, but our outer gear, a term I’d learned since leaving the Bay Area, was challenged to withstand the wet. Even before I shifted into first it was clear the windshield wipers were organizing a protest against water and gravity. They screeched like rubber banshees.
“Hey,” Merlye said. “Wanna see a movie?” She suggested things might clear up in spite of weather forecasts. Caesar’s death may have been accurately predicted (or not—maybe there were monthly warnings, Beware the Ides of April, Beware the Ides of May, Beware the Ides of December, oh, and March, too) but overall, auguries even of a scientific nature are a guess. If we could see into the future we would be able to see into the future. Right?
So there we were, next to a child molester-type and wondering what it would feel like to saw off your own arm.
It was after nine when we left the cineplex.
She climbed into the passenger seat, and soon as I put my key in, messed with the radio which, like the Bible, can be used to tell you whatever you want to believe. We were told the worst of the storm had moved east and she asked if I wouldn’t want to head for the reservation now. “Sounds like the roads are safe.”
“You sure?” I was having trouble seeing her expression. Her hood had a drawstring. It was pulled tight. She reminded me she had been making the drive forever and offered to take the wheel. She could navigate, I told her.
Before getting on the highway we stopped for cigarettes but once inside the convenience store decided not to buy any and left carrying hot coffees and Twizzlers. However, sort of like the Bible or a radio station, you can find what you want in a many a purse. Merlye found half a pack of generic cigarettes in hers. As she lit up, she said, “They’re cheaper home,” and handed over a lit smoke. She snarled that Big Tobacco was attempting to do what the treaty breakers of the U.S. government failed at—”Killing us off.”
Some events, car trips among them, call for tobacco—in other words, some events demand a sacrifice. Life isn’t a Shirley Jackson story, as I tell my students, but there’s a reason everyone reads “The Lottery” and it isn’t just that educators who write curriculum are lazy (they might be but that’s another story). It’s because the village wants its scapegoat. Gotta train the young ones.
It was a dark drive under the black wool night of the great Pacific Northwest, brooding, a change from San Francisco’s dark and smoky civilized terror. Civilization is a scary sucker trying to run interference on the existence of evil.
We arrived well after midnight. Her sister Gail was up watching a talk show and doing some kind of needlework. She was kind to me, rubbing my shoulder, maybe because we shared something. Like me, she was big.
They laid out some quilts and settled me on the couch. The next morning I woke up when a four-year old ran a red metal car on my legs. Hot wheels. He had big black eyes in a big round face and unleashed, big joy. Gail called out from the kitchen there was coffee; Merlye told me to hang out because they were going to get the place ready. I didn’t know what they meant, but they took Harold with them, leaving me with eggs and a loaf of bread, margarine, a toaster, one side of which worked. I pulled on my sneakers to walk outside with my buttered toast. I chewed and studied small houses and some trailers set up on wheels. The trees, oh the tress, were tall and so present, thriving among people’s lives, their needles making patterns on the ground like a child’s craft or a landed kaleidoscope. A crow in Goth black flew here and there, narrating events with authoritative caws. I had been thinking of sitting outside but everything was wet from the storm, of course, so I wandered back, buttered another slice of toast, and felt the quiet.
Then Gail and Merlye returned, and Harold, who was crying because his hot wheels were missing one wheel. I found another car under a cushion on the couch. He imbued me with magic powers until I winced because he’d run a car over a bandaid on my ankle. My yelp made him sad so we spent some time with reparations, another car on my other leg, the couch’s armrest, the rug. Gail made lunch. Around three, Merlye asked if I was ready. I was thinking maybe she meant for a ceremony or sweat lodge, but she meant to drive back to Seattle, directly from the event, whatever it was. We’d never established an itinerary and after the movie and wet drive, a night on the couch, I was satisfied with stopping off at the playground where Harold ran ahead of Gail. Things had dried up enough he had fun on the slide. Gail asked if I wanted to stay another night. Merlye gave no clue as to whether or not she did. I said we should go to the event they’d chattered about, and leave from there.
It was a birthday party for her cousin Mack who was turning nine. He got T-shirts with logos of a local team and the Seahawks, plus those electronic things kids get now, Gameboys or similar. Her uncle Phil asked me what I thought about Columbus Day, though I could tell he anticipated my response of rage and irony. He complimented me by saying I thought like an Indian. I don’t know that I do, what that means or that Phil really believed his compliment but we got along. He said all the religions worth a damn were pro-kindness and that you never knew who you might need if you fell into a crevice in the Utah desert. He knew which movie Merlye and I’d seen, and asked what I thought of it, but before I could answer, observed anyone could get into trouble in the wilderness, even a native.
“But one of our team, we would’ve changed shape and flied out of that canyon.”
Was I included in his team? I was pretty sure he was gay so I might have been. Following up on the movie he commented on the things people have to do under duress. “When I was a young man in love, I was out of control when my person said no. I don’t even want to tell you things I did.” I’m used to hearing confessions from people, and was grateful this one wasn’t specific, though it brought to mind last night’s serial killer/child molester.
Gail and some others started putting away paper plates and gathering soda cans. I loaded a few big plastic bags into the trunk, which Merlye unloaded back at her apartment. Blankets for the gift shop at Daybreak Star.
“Thanks,” I said, and she said the same. It was a comfortable exchange, a comfortable night and day, and I counted myself lucky as I have known field trips to turn sour. When I got home I returned a phone call from my friend Eudie, short for Eudora, though I always teased her it was a Swedish way of saying Judy. We filled each other in on recent events; she thought Merlye had used me, but I didn’t agree. I got out of town, which is always good, and was served lunch and breakfast—and cake, plus saw beautiful trees, which alone compensate for many of life’s trials.
I upended my backpack, threw some stuff into the hamper and some other stuff I neatly folded and returned to the dresser. I can be pretty organized at times, which is the way to be if you are a high school teacher with papers to grade. But I wasn’t ready to do any work, yet. Eudie had invited me over. We left it open. In the meantime I figured I’d walk to the market a block away, on 45th, for a few staples.
There is a sturdy tree, a willow, whose leafy branches tremble at my living room window. My apartment is the second floor of a house. I have a private entrance, up a wooden stairway in back. The stairs were once painted green, though it was hard to tell anymore. They blended in. Anyway, I walked down the back stairway, my stairs, and over to my willow, to ground me. It’s a touchstone.
And there was the serial killer or registered sex offender, standing under my willow’s weeping foliage. I saw a neighbor across the street picking up stray branches from his yard, probably from the storm, and waved, although I had never talked to him. It was a way of indicating, Hey, Registered Sex Offender, I see you and so does my entire neighborhood. The neighbor fastened a lid on one of his plastic receptacles and went inside his house. I started to walk away because ignoring something or someone is a decent enough way of handling a scary situation, but the wrinkled man—I could see his face was a map of something like grief—called out to me.
“How are you?” he asked.
I can’t even begin to tell you how eerie that felt, to be asked by the old man in an oily windbreaker how I was doing. It was zone-of-twilight-like that he’d somehow tracked me down, maybe followed Merlye and me to my car on Friday night, copied my plates and traced them, or saw my parking sticker from school and conducted a little online research.
My next thought was to be direct with him, to say, “Not interested” or “I’m a dyke” but I couldn’t make myself engage in any way. He spoke again.
“Don’t be scared,” he said.
I flashed on his Saran Wrapped-snacks, unfolding.
“Or worried.” He took a step toward me. A squirrel raced up the willow to the branches behind him—and another scampered in pursuit. Their tails quivered fur and whim. “I followed you to the theater.” That was an explanation?
“How long have you—”
He held out his arm for me to stop talking.
“Your father,” he said. And, “I just got out last month.”
From the penitentiary. If no one was monitoring him, if he was free to travel to Seattle from the Bay Area, he wasn’t a registered sex offender. I tried to feel good about that though I worried a serial killer could be released on a legal technicality.
“I meant, retired.” He expression was crushed by yet another mistake. “I didn’t get out like a prisoner does. I was a correctional officer. I tried to save your father, but there was so much blood, I mean a lot of blood, whew, and I’ve seen my share of blood. I got it all over my arms and the front of my uniform, my union saw to it I didn’t have to pay for a new uniform. Well, I didn't have to pay full price.”
I didn’t flinch but if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered. He was not sensitive to my kind of body language, the movements of a large, mistrustful, soft woman. He was sensitive, if you even want to call it that, to quick moves and rage, to revenge and agony in their various manifestations, clearly stated and acted out.
“Working there was like being in lock up, except I left every night, but I brought it home with me. I bring it everywhere. I brought it to Seattle. Hello, Seattle.” His arms hung limply. His windbreaker was the kind with a flannel lining so old it was turning to dust. “The ugliness of the human race greets you.”
I asked if he had something to tell me about my father, but all he could say was my father wasn’t a bad man. “He was one of the better ones. I think he might of felt bad about your mom.”
My father might have felt bad about my mother’s death in California’s most dire women’s penitentiary? I should hope so and about the daughter they left behind. I would hope my father felt bad about a lot of things. He just might have.
“Is that all,” I asked. I’d forgotten to grab my woolen cap, and sensed an evacuation of my body’s heat. It was ascending.
Apparently, that was all. He dragged himself over to his Honda, which was new and really dirty. It might have been me romanticizing, the literary me, trained by Dickens and Victor Hugo to see past the circumstantial evidence, and me molded by the largeness of my soul to see beyond life’s ephemera, but I felt comfortable he didn’t want to hang around and wasn’t going to be a bother. He said he liked sunshine and had settled in Shasta of all locales, a chaparral of shrubs and trees and fragrant earth, not the stark monastic Utah backdrop for a sawed-off arm. His wasn’t a pilgrimage of many stops. My father was the only man who had died bloody in his arms, and now he’d fulfilled some mission.
I went inside and called Eudie, but she was out, so I dialed Merlye. “Man, did something weird just happen here.”
And I told her.
“I didn’t feel anything when I sat next to him,” she said. “I thought he was just another creep who likes a certain kind of women. Some weirdos like natives and some like black women and fat women and, you know.”
“Well I hope he meets up with a nice half-Black, half-native fat woman.” We didn’t laugh and I didn’t see him again. When I told Eudie, I said he was like a ghost in uniform, and later, when I phoned my ex in San Francisco, I embellished and said he had the feel of being a prophet looking for a few decent people so God didn’t blow the whole thing up.
My ex decided this was a good thing.
“The whole thing isn’t blown up, we’re all here. Maybe he bargained God down to finding one person—one decent person—so God would spare the planet.”
My conclusion wasn’t that I was the one decent person around but that I was, in fact, a decent person. That understanding made me glow, as if a shaft of light was shining on me through branches or a window, keeping me warm.
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