Black Maps (17 page)

I started to say “I'm sorry,” but she took my arm suddenly.

“I want you to know,” she said, “that Chuck forgave you before he died. He didn't hate you anymore. He even talked about the two of us driving up to Montana to see you, to set things right between you.”

I couldn't believe what she was saying. “You're wrong,” I said, pulling my arm away. “You're terribly wrong.” I meant that Chuck had never hated me, that he'd always loved me in spite of everything, but Tammy didn't understand.

“No,” she insisted. “It's true. He did forgive you.” She took my arm again. “You have to believe that.”

I stood there looking at her earnest face. For a second, it crossed my mind that I'd like to slap her. But I just said, “Thank you. I appreciate you telling me that.”

“He really did love you,” Tammy went on. “You have to remember that.”

I was beginning to feel dizzy, almost sick. “I'm sure he did,” I said, and tried to smile. “He always said he did.”

Tammy looked down a second. When she looked back up, her face was working. “Oh, Mr. Falk,” she said, gulping back a sob, “I'm so sorry!” And then she gave me a quick hug and turned and hurried outside. I watched her run carefully down the slick sidewalk to a blue Oldsmobile waiting in the parking lot.

That was when the shaking started. It was almost as bad as that time at Intercept, when I couldn't lift my own fork or spoon and a nurse had to feed me like a baby. But it was a different kind of shaking, a scarier kind. I was shaking so much I thought I'd have to sit down right there on the floor. I put my hands in my pockets so no one could see them shake.

A minute later, Gale called across the vestibule to me. “It's time,” he said, and nodded toward the limousine idling behind the hearse. But I couldn't move. I was trembling so bad I just stood there. Gale came over and said again that it was time to go.

“That's all right,” I managed to say. “I'll catch a ride with someone else a little later.”

“What are you talking about?” Gale said. “You don't even know anybody else here.”

Barbara came over then. “What's wrong?” she asked. “Mr. Gilmer is waiting.”

“Nothing's wrong,” I said. “You two go on ahead. I'll catch up in a little while.”

Barbara looked at me. “Are you all right?”

I couldn't look at her. “I'll be okay in a few minutes,” I said. “I'll catch up with you then.”

Gale put his hand on my arm. “I know how you feel,” he said. “I'll ask Pastor Davis if he can take you with him.”

“Fine,” I nodded. My teeth were chattering and I could hardly talk.

“Maybe you should sit down for a while,” Barbara said.

“I'll do that,” I answered. But I couldn't move.

“We've got to go,” Gale said. “Are you sure you aren't coming with us?”

I nodded.

Gale took Barbara's arm then. “Come on, dear, everyone's waiting.”

Barbara looked at me. “You won't try to go back to Bozeman before we get home, will you? I don't think you ought to drive right now. Not the way you're—” She didn't finish.

“I won't,” I said.

Then she gave me her house key. “You can get a taxi to take you to the house,” she said. “Maybe you can get some sleep. Or at least rest.”

“You mean, maybe I can get a drink.”

She looked like I had struck her. “No,” she said, “I didn't mean that.”

“You're sure you'll be all right?” Gale asked. I nodded yes. “Then we'd better go, dear,” he said to Barbara.

The funeral director was standing beside the limousine under an umbrella, waiting to open the door for them. Barbara took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said, still looking at me, then turned and went out into the sleet with Gale.

After the procession wound its way out of the church parking lot, I went out into the storm and began walking back to Barbara and Gale's house. I didn't know, then, why I wanted to walk instead of taking a taxi; after I reached the house I understood, but then, I just felt I had to do it, that somehow it would be wrong not to.

The house was on the other end of town, near the oil camp and the black pumping units rising out of the snow like giant grasshoppers, but Rose Creek was just a hospital, a post office, a community hall, a school, and a couple dozen blocks of stores and houses, so I didn't have far to walk. But it was awfully cold, and I didn't have any overshoes or gloves. After a few minutes, my hands and feet were numb, and the wind was blowing the sleet into my face so hard it stung. I felt exhausted, like I'd been walking for hours, even days. My breaths came out short and fast, little clouds the wind blew into nothing.

My shaking was getting worse. I had to have a drink, I couldn't wait any longer, so I walked as fast as I could. I walked past the silent houses with smoke rising from their chimneys, past the schoolyard where some children in snowmobile suits were playing King of the Hill on a mound of snow, past the turnoff that led to the highway where Chuck had died. I walked faster and faster until I was almost running. My face and hands burned from the cold, and I could tell without looking that they were white with frostbite.

When I finally reached the house, I stood on the front steps, the sleet pelting my back, and tried to open the door, but my hand was shaking so bad I couldn't get the key into the lock. I stood there a moment, trying to get ahold of myself. But it was no use. I couldn't even breathe right—I had to strain for every breath, as if the air was too thin—and I felt so empty and dizzy I had to hold onto the doorframe to keep from falling.

And then I saw myself climbing Rainier, inching my way up the sheer cliff, a terrible weight on my back, and it wasn't a lie anymore, I had really done it. And I hung onto Barbara's door, bracing myself against the rising wind.

I remember sitting in Gale's easy chair, drinking his bourbon and staring out his window at the ice-laden trees, but I don't remember going to Chuck's room. I don't even remember thinking about going there. I just remember finding myself swaying drunk in front of his door. And I remember deciding, as soon as I realized where I was and what I was about to do, that it'd been a mistake to come, that I should never have left Bozeman. Standing there, I saw myself driving across that empty state under the huge black sky, driving away from Barbara and Gale and what was left of my son, heading home, toward Betty and lovemaking and sleep. And I turned to leave.

But I turned back. I couldn't leave, not yet. I stood there a second, then took a deep breath and opened the door.

I'm not sure what exactly I expected—maybe I thought his room would give him back to me, if only for a moment, let me be with him for that last minute before he drove off to the accident that waited for him—but whatever it was, I didn't get what I wanted. The room was just a room. The bed was just a bed, the desk just a desk. Even the shirts that hung in his closet were just shirts. I stood there awhile, looking at everything, then opened the top drawer of the desk: blank paper, some pens, a ruler, and a calculator. In one corner there were some pencil shavings. I picked them up and they fell apart in my hands.

I sat down at the desk then and put my hot face against the cool wood. It felt good against my cheek, and it made me think of when I was in grade school and the teacher wanted to find out who had done something wrong. She'd tell everyone to put their heads down on their desks and close their eyes, then raise their hands if they were the one. Closing my eyes, I remembered how I felt those times when I hadn't done anything, how I liked sitting there, innocent, imagining someone else's guilty hand rising into the air.

At first I thought the storm had woken me. Sleet was striking the window, sounding like flung pellets of rice. But then I heard Barbara, her voice wavering. “What are you doing in here?” I lifted my head from the desk and tried to see through the darkness. But I saw only a shadow, haloed by the hall light, and I heard it say, “Why did you have to come in
here
?” Then she flicked on the overhead light. I shielded my eyes. Through the bright blur, I saw Gale standing behind her in the hall, his coat still in his hand.

“I knew we shouldn't have stayed so long at Muriel's,” he was saying. “I knew something would happen.”

Barbara came toward me. “I asked you not to come in here,” she said. She looked around and bit her quivering lip. “Why did you have to—” she started, but couldn't finish.

I realized then that I'd taken away her last comfort, that from now on when she came into this room I'd be here with him. “I'm sorry,” I said, and stood up. My forehead swelled and throbbed, and I almost lost my balance.

“You're drunk,” Barbara said then, and she stepped toward me, her hands clenched at her sides.

I wasn't drunk, not anymore, but it didn't matter. And it didn't matter that Barbara and Gale were angry at me. Nothing mattered now. It was all over. And suddenly I felt numb, almost peaceful, even though I knew it couldn't last, that any minute now all the pain and sorrow would come back, maybe even worse than before.

Barbara said something to me then, but I didn't hear. I just looked at her. Then I reached out and put my arms around her. She stayed stiff in my arms and kept her hands at her sides, but she didn't back away from me. I held her tight. “Chuck is dead,” I told her. I said it like I'd only just found out about it and thought she ought to know.

That winter, like every winter before it, my father woke early each day and turned up the thermostat so the house would be warm by the time my mother and I got out of bed. Sometimes I'd hear the furnace kick in and the shower come on down the hall and I'd wake just long enough to be angry that he'd woken me. But usually I slept until my mother had finished making our breakfast. By then, my father was already at Goodyear, opening the service bay for the customers who had to drop their cars off before going to work themselves. Sitting in the sunny kitchen, warmed by the heat from the register and the smell of my mother's coffee, I never thought about him dressing in the cold dark or shoveling out the driveway by porch light. If I thought of him at all, it was only to feel glad he was not there. In those days my father and I fought a lot, though probably not much more than most fathers and sons. I was sixteen then, a tough age. And he was forty, an age I've since learned is even tougher.

But that winter I was too concerned with my own problems to think about my father's. I was a skinny, unathletic, sorrowful boy who had few friends, and I was in love with Molly Rasmussen, one of the prettiest girls in Glencoe and the daughter of a man who had stopped my father on Main Street that fall, cursed him, and threatened to break his face. My father had bought a used Ford Galaxie from Mr. Rasmussen's lot, but he hadn't been able to make the payments and eventually Mr. Rasmussen repossessed it. Without a second car my mother couldn't get to her job at the school lunchroom, so we drove our aging Chevy to Minneapolis, where no one knew my father, and bought a rust-pitted yellow Studebaker. A few days later Molly Rasmussen passed me in the hall at school and said, “I see you've got a new car,” then laughed. I was so mortified I hurried into a restroom, locked myself in a stall, and stood there for several minutes, breathing hard. Even after the bell rang for the next class, I didn't move. I was furious at my father. I blamed him for the fact that Molly despised me, just as I had for some time blamed him for everything else that was wrong with my life—my gawky looks, my discount store clothes, my lack of friends.

That night, and others like it, I lay in bed and imagined who I'd be if my mother had married someone handsome and popular like Dick Moore, the PE teacher, or Smiley Swenson, who drove stock cars at the county fair, or even Mr. Rasmussen. Years before, my mother had told me how she met my father. A girl who worked with her at Woolworth's had asked her if she wanted to go out with a friend of her boyfriend's, an army man just back from the war. My mother had never agreed to a blind date before, or dated an older man, but for some reason this time she said yes. Lying there, I thought about that fateful moment. It seemed so fragile—she could as easily have said no and changed everything—and I wished, then, that she had said no, I wished she'd said she didn't date strangers or she already had a date or she was going out of town—anything to alter the chance conjunction that would eventually produce me.

I know now that there was something suicidal about my desire to undo my parentage, but then I knew only that I wanted to be someone else. And I blamed my father for that wish. If I'd had a different father, I reasoned, I would be better looking, happier, more popular. When I looked in the mirror and saw my father's thin face, his rust-red hair, downturned mouth, and bulging Adam's apple, I didn't know who I hated more, him or me. That winter I began parting my hair on the right instead of the left, as my father did, and whenever the house was empty I worked on changing my voice, practicing the inflections and accents of my classmates' fathers as if they were clues to a new life. I did not think, then, that my father knew how I felt about him, but now that I have a son of my own, a son almost as old as I was then, I know different.

If I had known what my father was going through that winter, maybe I wouldn't have treated him so badly. But I didn't know anything until the January morning of his breakdown. I woke that morning to the sound of voices downstairs in the kitchen. At first I thought the sound was the wind rasping in the bare branches of the cottonwood outside my window, then I thought it was the radio. But after I lay there a moment I recognized my parents' voices. I couldn't tell what they were saying, but I knew they were arguing. They'd been arguing more than usual lately, and I hated it—not so much because I wanted them to be happy, though I did, but because I knew they'd take their anger out on me, snapping at me, telling me to chew with my mouth closed, asking me who gave me permission to put my feet up on the coffee table, ordering me to clean my room. I buried one ear in my pillow and covered the other with my blankets, but I could still hear them. They sounded distant, yet somehow close, like the sea crashing in a shell held to the ear. But after a while I couldn't hear even the muffled sound of their voices, and I sat up in the bars of gray light slanting through the blinds and listened to the quiet. I didn't know what was worse: their arguments or their silences. I sat there, barely breathing, waiting for some noise.