13 

When my (then) editor read about Damon Ray living in his tent for the summer, he said, “Get real. People don’t live in tents.”

Has he been living under a rock in Manhattan?  Has he never skimmed a copy of Mother Earth News or Outside? Has he never heard of Camp Four in Yosemite Valley, where the dedicated rock climbers live in tents for six months at a stretch? Has he never heard of college students working in fish canneries in Homer, Alaska, in the slip and slide of sockeye guts, living in tents to save money for tuition? Has he never had a cousin or nephew who dropped out of high school in the 70’s and hitchhiked out west and set up temporary shop in a hippie commune, to learn how to grow his own food without pesticides? Has he never driven his Audi along the Columbia River in Washington and spied the apple pickers who return each night to their tipis, sleep under sheepskins, awaken each morning to frost on the winesaps, and build a fire and eat oatmeal, before picking the apples my (then) editor buys at 56 Spring Street Fruit & Veggies?

Be a believer: people take up shelter in tents. And yurts. And hogans. And one-room cabins. And tipis.  When I was twenty-two, I went to live at Tolstoy Farm in eastern Washington with husband #2. Where the women gardened bare-breasted and on Sundays the communards played nude volleyball.  Where lovers lay down in lambsquarter, caught in the bite of the mother moon’s tooth.  (Eventually I wrote some stories about Tolstoy Farm – Friday Night at Silver Star. I set the stories in Montana where I’d moved after teaching high school in Canada for two years.  There was so much moving around then, so far from home and Benny and our parents. The search was on; a scavenger hunt for personal peace. For a long time it seemed that the harder I sought it, the more elusive it became. Tom McGuane once told me that he hadn’t ever seen bare-breasted women gardening in Montana, but that he hoped to after reading my stories. He was on the lookout. He’s one of the faithful, willing to suspend disbelief.)

Two hundred acres of canyon-land south of the Spokane Indian Reservation – Sherman Alexie country – Tolstoy Anarchist Peace Farm was founded by people who had met at a civil rights demonstration in Washington, D.C., in 1964. One of the originals, Mort Meister, lives there still, and he is the prototype for Uncle Mort. Well-educated, a lean, brown-skinned green-man, with a bushy beard and uncombed hair, Mort is your counterculture renaissance man. He gardens, cans fruit, quilts, writes poetry and flamingly brilliant leftie editorials, replaces spark plugs, plays the zither, brews beer and makes tomato wine, conducts wedding ceremonies, mediates divorces, advises young people. His buckwheat pancakes are famous. We had them every day for lunch. Slathered in peanut butter and honey.  He is satisfied in his life. Living on two-thousand dollars a year.  Making do. He likes to say, “Happy is the man who has no car payment.”

Everything I needed to grow and change was there, but I could not give up wanting more. More money, more autonomy. A kind of surrender was required. It was as if I had to commit to the other thirty-three people living on the land at Tolstoy Farm. More arduous than marriage, wherein you are required to surrender your self to the beloved, to be a co-protagonist. Marriage is traveling light, an itsy-bitsy thirty-pound backpack on a more-or-less level groomed trail, compared to communal commitments, the pressure to reach consensus, the web of community, which, more often that not, took more than it gave. The ideals we went there with – untried longing for simplicity, purity, social cooperation – crumpled in the face of what we didn’t know about ourselves. Our selfishness and lust and greed. The human tendency to violence, to cruelty. 

I wanted to settle into that life, a stone in a streambed, but I lived there less than two years. My hands having learned the shape of tools, a hammer’s weight, how to milk a cow, I grew restless.  Not a day goes by that I don’t remember it fondly. We walked in the dark, down dusty farm roads or across snowy fields, to spend the evenings – shameless gossips – telling stories and drinking home-brew by the light of a kerosene lamp. Walking in the dark in the middle of nowhere, by starlight, you could forgive the night its threat. We had no television and sporadic radio reception. We depended on each other for diversion and entertainment. Some days I could believe that we were building paradise from scavenged lumber. Yarrow grew like a white lace fire and might be used for tea.  The sky was large and fringed with lupine. That farm had three seasons – dust, snow, and mud.  We did not have indoor plumbing or electricity.  Many were the mornings I went outdoors and rinsed my face in creek water.  We had no way to earn wages and I worked now and then in the apple orchards of the Okanogan Valley and in the Poets-in-the-Schools Program.  Whenever I drove back into the canyon after a stint of work – down through the mud or snow or dust, John Denver on the tape deck – I would weep at the beauty of the land.  It was the first place I wanted to make up stories about and although I don’t write about it anymore, its images inhabit me: the heron who lived near the creek, the sound of kids hooting outdoors near dark, the little makeshift dwellings – yes, some of them tents! – their eccentric domesticity, the smells of wood smoke and curry and marijuana, the lavender and chamomile in bundles hanging from the low rafters. 

I return over and over to that in my writing, love of what the philosopher David Abram calls the more-than-human world. Biophilia. What we’ve lost. What Joe and Damon Ray want to regain. What threads its way into Liz’s heart when she swims in Lake Michigan.

 

14             

Back in Pilsen, Sophie visits Joe in the shop. Joe shrugs when Emma says, “What does she do down there?” He can’t explain how close he feels to Sophie, how he wants to protect her. Tears brim from his eyes if he tries to talk about it. He makes work for her, sorting photos. Once Sophie says, “We did our homework in the bay window.” He pictures his girls there, flushed from their daily triumphs. He and his brother had done their homework in the same window, when the shop had been a ma-and-pa grocery, before his father retired from Schwinn, before his mother had her stroke.  

“Tell me what you remember,” Sophie says, “about the shop when you were a boy.”

“Oh, Soph, not much.”  Disappointment falls like a scarf over Sophie’s face. “Here,” he says, reaching into his front pocket, “here’s a twenty. How about getting take-out from Dos Tias? Would you?”

One afternoon Sophie says, “How will we live with not knowing?” Her question gapes unanswered like a wound they won’t be able to staunch. 

That night he goes out for a walk after dinner. He stops at Wendy’s and peers in the window to see if Tony’s on shift. He walks around the building and up to the drive-through. Tony leans out the open window on one elbow, his blue T-shirt bagged out around the neck, his face a mask of indifference. Sullen mouth. Lidded eyes.  His hair falls in a mink-like wave over his brow. Joe waits until a rusted-out black Corolla pulls away and he goes up close and taps on the grimy window.

Tony pushes it open. “Que tal?” 

“I want to talk to you.”

Tony grunts.

Joe steels himself. “When are you off?”

His eyes skipping peripherally, as if someone or something might rescue him, Tony finally says, “Eight.”

“Meet me at Dos Tias.”

“Man,” Tony whimpers, “I can’t go there in this outfit.”

“Change. I’ll wait.”

Tony sighs, the wind of teenage exasperation. A cream-colored Cadillac inches close to the window; the woman driving glares at Joe.

“You owe me,” Joe says.

A look of recognition crosses over Tony’s face. This much he understands: Joe has done him favors. He owes him.

“Yeah. All right.”

All they know, Joe tells himself on the way to Dos Tias, is that someone came by on foot or on a bicycle one cool convivial night in May, Cinco de Mayo, and fired a weapon at fairly close range. The wounds lacerating the skin, aorta, and spleen. There are plenty of guns like his father’s. He doesn’t know why he kept it. He kept it the same way he kept the shop. It was there. Why didn’t he get rid of it? Like Mort’s things? 

At Dos Tias, he waits. He drinks café con leche, made with whole milk, what his doctor wouldn’t approve. He needs it to bolster his resolve. He’s turned into an old man whose indulgence is animal fat. A patina of self-loathing feels like sweat on his skin. Jukebox music wends around the restaurant, bittersweet or barroom raucous. He waits and watches; the street goes dark and the miniature sombrero lights blink randomly off and on and shine on the plate-glass window. At last, near nine, Tony ducks in the restaurant, sheepishly. He’s changed into a white shirt, a gold bracelet loose on one wrist. Joe waves him over.

Tony slides into the booth. “So?”

“Coffee?” Joe says.

“Hombre, I don’t have time for this.”

Joe catches the waitress’s eye and merely points at Tony’s side of the table to let her know he wants a coffee. Tony slouches against the booth back. He lights a cigarette.

He rips open two sugar packets at once and dumps the sugar into his coffee.

Joe leans across the table. “You took my father’s gun.”

“That’s crazy.”

“You cousin is dead. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“My family don’t mean nothing.”

“I don’t believe that.”

Tony drinks his coffee and stares away. The miniature sombrero lights cast rosy and jaundiced and blue patches on his cheek.

“You know where the gun is, you have to tell me. If you don’t, I’ll have to tell the police that you took it.”

“Fuck. I didn’t do nothing.”

“I’m waiting.”

Tony gets up, goes to the restroom down the long hall, past the kitchen. Joe finishes his coffee. Fairly certain Tony won’t come back. He hasn’t found the right words to get what he wants. He blew it. And he begins to imagine calling Franny Ryan, starting down that ugly avenue. But two minutes later Tony does emerge from the men’s room – cocky, adjusting the wrinkled collar of his white shirt.

 He sits and takes a sip of coffee. He fiddles with the cellophane on his pack of cigarettes. “When my mother came here she learned English. She liked English phrases, what you call it – idioms. She would say, You’re barking up the wrong tree. That’s you, hombre. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“Yeah?”

Tony shakes his head, purses his lips so that they seem rubbery. “That gun’s long gone.”

“So you did take it?”

“That gun’s out-of-state.”

“Are you sure?”

“I can’t fucking trust you.”

“You fucking have to. Don’t you?”

“You know what’ll happen to me if you tell? I’m begging you.”

Joe says nothing. He wiggles the fingers of both hands: gimmee gesture.

“I owed someone.”

“Who?”

“He’s gone. Long-time gone. When I worked for you. That was before Christmas. Christmas this guy puts the screws to me, I give him the gun. He was on his way to Nebraska. Or Kansas. One of those states.”

“That was my father’s.”

Tony’s father is in prison. Did his father let him ride on his shoulders when he was small? What does Tony know of fathers? Joe can hear the nervous tap-tap-tap-tap of Tony’s shoes under the table.

Tony says, “I’m trying to stay out of trouble.”

Joe has what he wants. He rises abruptly and says, “So, stay out of it.”

He pays the check and slips the waitress a folded dollar, reluctant to leave it on the table with Tony still slumped there. The street is humid, summer-warm, and music from a car stereo disturbs the night: rap diatribe. Joe heads home, head down. Nebraska. He settles on Nebraska: a Diamondback revolver in transit. Exhausted, he clings to that hardscrabble perch of emotional safety.

 

15           

What was it Sophie said, after the funeral? “People keep saying I’m sorry this is happening to you, but Dad,” she said fiercely, “it’s happening to all of us. We should consider dying every day.” She hissed, “Study it.”

In June she goes back to work at Iris, waiting tables. Joe misses her in the shop, but it is a relief, too. Sophie pressing him for family stories makes him squirm. “I want to know where I fit,” she said.

At the Rudy Lozano branch of the Chicago Public Library, on the bulletin board, the police staple up Community Alert flyers: cars of murderers. But Chanti’s killer rode a bicycle or walked. Too young to drive. Like those child soldiers in articles about Africa. Joe says, “What has happened in the heart of a child who kills?”

 “It’s what hasn’t happened,” Uncle Leo says.

 

 

“Here’s how,” Joe says one night. “Here’s how we can work it out.” 

He turns on the lamp beside the bed. It’s one in the morning. He puts his glasses on. He reaches for Peggy Lee who lies near his calf. The steamy whoosh of a street cleaner is the only sound out on the street; then a car alarm pulses like a foghorn on the next block. He gently places his hand on Emma’s bare shoulder; she turns to him, sheets rustling; she was not asleep. 

He whispers, “I’m going to stay here with Sophie.”

Emma sits up in bed; she turns completely around to face him, her unbound hair falling around her shoulders. The fabric of her nightgown is thin; she squares her shoulders; her breasts rise with every breath she takes. “I will, too.”

“I think you should go, Ems.”

“I shouldn’t.” She flings the covers back and gets up and switches across the room, her nightgown flaring. “Don’t tempt me.” She plucks her cigarettes out of a lingerie drawer and holds them to her chest. “Do you mind,” she says.

Joe flings one hand toward the window: Be my guest. Emma lights up. A draft sends the smoke in a pearly tendril out the window. The curtains ripple. Emma looks worn out, bruised pouches under her eyes. Her travel folders lay in a stack on the bookcase beside the window. She brushes the top folder with her fingertips.

“Ems?”

“Yes?”

“Go on and go. I can take care of Sophie. It’s what I’d rather do.”

“What about us?”

“You go. People are expecting you. Ada Richman. She’ll be so glad to see you. She might not last much longer. And Zubin. And your student – what’s his name?”

Reluctantly it seems, Emma says, “Danny.”

“You’ll have company. You’ll meet people to pal around with. You’ll meet walkers.”

“I wanted you to be there.”

There it is: she wanted. She’s changing her mind. And that’s all right with him. His weakness is the need to stay at home; Emma’s the desire to flee.

Desire seems like a searchlight we shine hither and yon. You have yours, I have mine; sometimes our lights intersect in the dark, but mostly, they don’t.

Or desire is a solid thing. A chain. Yes, chain of desire. Doesn’t it feel like you’re dragging this constant chain of desire wherever you go? Philosopher William Irvine writes that when a link is broken in our chain of desires we will go to great rational effort to circumvent that broken link; we dream up other ways to get what we want.

Joe wants his fingers in the warm dirt, a pile of just-picked zucchinis on the kitchen counter. He wants to lose himself in a crowd at Wrigley Field. He wants to make everyone feel safe. He wants his funk to blow away like dust.

Sophie wants to paint to forget. She wants obsession. To be in the zone.

Liz wants to feel loved, the relief of that; she wants those little rodents scurrying in her mind to be still.  

Emma wants to feel young or to have the choices the young have. Once Joe made her feel that way; now he’s the broken link on Emma’s chain.  She wants to be a traveler. She wants to peer over the precipice of the unfamiliar. Her desires shine on safaris, train excursions, museums, walking tours, boat rides, hiking trails, a rental house in Key West not far from the Sunset Celebration, an apartment near a train station in Locarno, an adobe house built in the twenties north of Santa Fe, a houseboat on the Columbia River, a fog-shrouded cottage on the Oregon coast.

It is Emma I always return to, in my heart of hearts. Our family has the novelty-seeking gene. Some do, some don’t. You know whether you’re a homebody or a novelty-seeker. Marriages wreck everyday on the shoals of such distinctions. #1 fooled me; because we were married young in Mexico and ate that peyote in Playa Azul, I thought that we would always run wild, live out of backpacks, and defy the norms. But he meekly went back to school, finished his business degree, and went to work for his father who owns several small galleries in towns along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. The day we went to court to be divorced, after three years of wedded bad weather, he said, “I have always preferred walking on sidewalks.” #2 and I hitchhiked all over; we moved twelve times in eight years; he spoke enough of three languages to get by. #2 had been to Afghanistan, to Ireland, to Argentina. He had what you might call swarthy good looks, blackish eyes glinting with gold, and he could pass for Latin American or Italian. Like Dicken of The Secret Garden, my fictional blueprint for manhood, he knew bird calls and could tell the difference between loblolly pines and fir, ash and elm – he could translate the very bark of trees. He could tie knots that might save your life; camping out, he could stone a grouse for dinner from ten yards; he could dress up for the opera; he could be happy on a nude beach in Honduras. Whereas #1 tried to snuff out my novelty-seeking gene, #2 babied it like an embryo in a Petri dish. If I came home from the library with guide books to Tanzania, he said, “Go for it.”  For several years, before Friday Night at Sliver Star, before I took the teaching job in Dowdyville, #2 and I would work, work, work at jobs that were quittable, save our money like misers, and when the time was right, we’d go, giddily trashing what household goods we couldn’t fit in a storage unit. For a long time I believed that I might someday give up travel. That such a way of life might be a youthful digression. I would say, as Emma has, “Just one more trip and I’ll settle down.” Plant a garden that needs tending every summer; have dogs and cats; a house I love like a living being; volunteer in town; allow myself to nestle in the seductive web of community. Grow up.

So far, that hasn’t happened. I like to be near Benny; I like my job. But at certain times of the year – right before winter, when the fall color has faded and there’s a terrible epitaphic bite to the wind; and in the dark of late December; and in the muddy, snow-spitting spring – I feel restless. I cruise around the internet, searching for deals. I imagine myself teaching in an open-air wattle-and-stick schoolhouse in some distant land. Like Emma, desire for who I am traveling, for the bliss of shedding myself – that desire is stronger than love. 

Emma says, “Are you going to stay here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Will you stay here or will you be out in Michigan?”

“How’s this? When I leave town, I’ll get Uncle Leo to spell me. He’ll watch over Soph.”

“Doesn’t he have to go court soon?”

“End of summer. It’s not a problem.” Peggy Lee has climbed onto Joe’s chest. Joe strokes her face with the knuckle of one forefinger. “It’s the least of our problems.”