Suicide's Girlfriend (6 page)

“So.” In as pleasant a voice as he could muster, Dale asked, “So where'd Decker's wife come from, anyway?”

“Oh, who knows!” said Gwen, though the answer was Freiburg, a city she had looked up in the atlas and held on the map of her heart ever after. What anguish she had felt the night Thom Muller came by to take her dancing, and glibly announced, “I guess Randall Decker got engaged to some girl he met stationed over there”!

That night, Gwen had wrenched Thom Muller's ring from her finger and thrown it on the dance floor. The dance came to a stop as Rhonda Hansen set her foot down on the big ring and stumbled forward into a neighboring couple, who had turned to watch Thom Muller stalk from the gymnasium. Gwen prayed that word of the spectacle would reach Randall at his base in Germany. Randall would come. Randall and Gwen would escape, take new names in a new land.

Her fingers on the drinking fountain handle, Lily looked up at the photo of the Class of 1951. When her father arrived at eleven, she would say, nonchalantly, “I guess I forgot my bag on the breezeway. I guess we'll have to stop by the farm.”

The boys in the Class of 1951 looked
old
, didn't they, as if being of another era aged them in their frames? They seemed men, despite the silly knobs of hair so many of them wore on top of their heads. A classmate of Lily's had one of those old-fashioned oily knobs and, once, after he made a smart remark about her dad, she said, “What's with your hair, Glen? You let your mom use it to wipe out the bacon pan?”

Could she really have said something so awful? She really could have.

In his photo, Lily's father looked handsome, but also like someone from whom you shouldn't take a ride. He still looked like that, she
supposed, only thinner. Since the stabbing, the bones of his cheeks seemed chipped from stone, like the flaked arrowheads he'd collected on the farm as a boy.

Last month, he had visited Lily for the first time since the stabbing. He wore a new orange sweater decorated with diamonds of brown and gray vinyl. In order to avoid meeting him when he came by, Lily's grandparents and mother had driven the family Ford up the road and parked under a clump of cottonwoods. Lily's Aunt Cara had stayed at the house with Lily. Cara cried in the kitchen. Lily sat quietly in the front room. Her father took her hand in his own. “I want you to know,” he said, “I'd never let anyone hurt you.”

An odd thing to say. He, after all, was the one who'd been hurt. Still, Lily had to let him say what he wanted to say, and then nod, as if she believed him.

The newspaper had run a photograph of his girlfriend, Mrs. Kramer. W
OMAN
S
TABS
L
OVKR
. A lumpy, weary woman—
old
—who seemed to be staring at a pop bottle someone had set on top of the waiting squad car.

After the stabbing, once Lily knew her father would live, Lily had believed the worst was over, he'd come home. Well, he hadn't. And, last night, on the telephone, he'd talked on and on about Mrs. Kramer. He wanted Lily to meet her. “You mustn't hate her, Lily,” he said. “She's been in the hospital ever since, and I . . . provoked her, you see.”

Lily had felt ashamed. And in pain, too. His words were a bullet that contained the secret of him, a bullet lodged in her heart in such a way that only dangerous surgery could remove it, present it for understanding.

“Hey, Lily.”

The girl turned. Beside her stood Christine De Vries. “That's my Uncle Leland in the picture next to your dad. They were friends in high school.”

Lily bent to drink from the fountain. The day she and the others had come back from the disastrous Christmas vacation, Lily had spied the children studying the photograph of the Class of 1951. Christine
De Vries stood among them, smiling, talking, just the way she talked to Lily when Mrs. De Buhi had “buddied” them for the field trip to Sioux Bee Honey.

Lily lifted her mouth from the fountain, wiped her hand across her wet mouth. “My father hated this school,” she said as she hurried around Christine. One lie, and then another: “He couldn't stand this dinky town.”

Morrow Consolidated had a problem for which no solution had been devised: Elementary's classrooms groaned with the pressure of all those well-fed, postwar babies. Ancient desks with inkwells in their upper-right-hand corners had been retrieved from the hay loft over the bus barn. Lily had to pick her way through the narrow aisles in order to give Mrs. De Buhr the note from her mother. Mrs. De Buhr—formerly an excellent teacher, now beleaguered—snapped, “You'll excuse yourself
quietly!
”

While Lily made her way to her desk, Mrs. De Buhr turned on the classroom TV and Clark Hinshaw, the TV instructor of
Your Iowa
, was soon opening the tailgate of his station wagon and taking out his easel. Clark Hinshaw wore a coat and hat, but no muffler or gloves. Behind him, the trees appeared bare as the trees in Morrow. Christine De Vries had once told Lily that Clark Hinshaw worked in a TV studio and what you saw behind him was just a photograph. Unlike Christine, Lily hadn't been disappointed, but thrilled at the lengths to which the program went to provide the audience with the illusion that Clark Hinshaw stood at the various Iowa sites.

“Of course, you students know Indians once inhabited Iowa,” said Clark Hinshaw. “Think of Sioux City, named after the Sioux.” Mrs. De Buhr's students grinned at one another. A few hollered, “Yea! Sioux City!”

“Maquoketa,” said Mr. Hinshaw. “Cherokee. The very name of our state comes from the Indians. Do you know the meaning of Iowa, girls and boys?”

Mrs. De Buhr, at work at her desk, lifted her head and looked out at the class. Dutifully, the students responded, “Beautiful Land!”

“Beautiful Land,” said Clark Hinshaw. With a piece of charcoal, he drew a large question mark on his easel pad. “Today we're going to visit the Effigy Mounds and explore the questions surrounding them. Most important: Were these very sophisticated mounds, with their evidence of advanced culture, built by some lost mysterious tribe? Or”—Clark Hinshaw turned his pad upside down, used the question mark's curve as the foundation for the enormous nose of a frowning Indian—“or could the mounds have been built by Iowa's Indians themselves?”

According to Clark Hinshaw, the Mound Builders showed great sophistication: buried their dead with beads, pipes, tools, and ceramic vessels. Seashells among the artifacts suggested the tribe participated in trade. They experimented with corn, squash, sunflowers, and beans—

Lily looked out the window to the highway beyond. Empty. She had seen Indians once, just after she and her mother and father moved to Iowa. The family had gone to Sioux City to buy Randall coveralls. They were parking the car when they saw a man in the street, his pants not pulled up properly. The woman who was his companion cried while the man crawled in the road. “Drunk,” said Lily's father, then put money into the parking meter and started off down the sidewalk. Lily's mother stopped, though, and helped the woman guide the man onto the grass. She gave the woman the money meant for the coveralls. There was a small boy, too. Somehow the woman had attached his snow pants to a lilac bush so he wouldn't run after her into the street.

Clark Hinshaw seemed to believe that the Indians of Iowa
had
been the Mound Builders. Lily didn't want to believe it, but she supposed it was true. “Thousands of mounds!” said Clark Hinshaw. “And to have built just
one
would have required one thousand men working for one hundred years!”

One thousand men. One hundred years. And where did they go?
What happened to their world? When white settlers reached Iowa, Clark Hinshaw said, the Indians who remained appeared little more than savages.

Out on the highway, a tractor-trailer rig made a clownish noise as it slowed for the Morrow patrol car. Mayflower, read the truck. A silhouette of a ship in yellow and green.

Lily owned a book about a trucker. In the clearest of watercolor washes—greens and blues and Easter egg yellows—the book's trucker takes his small son and daughter on a haul. The three drink cold milk from a thermos and eat bologna sandwiches. The boy and girl take turns napping in the sleeper while the responsible dad guides them through the wonder of a night filled with all of the stars the children have never before been up late enough to see. All in all, the book suggested the children's world contained more good things than they'd ever realized, and that more lay ahead.

Lily remembered little of her father's trucking except the dank, clammy way he smelled when he came home, and how he spent his free days in the cellar, smoking cigarettes. There was an accident with his rig. Then another. Over supper, one evening, he told Lily's mother, “I can't keep the truck on the road anymore.” Almost like a complaint. As if he believed Lily's mother ought to solve the problem; it was no more serious than a tear in his pants, or a broken zipper.

While they talked, Lily went down into the cellar. She had never spent time there—a dark, damp place—and it seemed to her she needed to be someplace unfamiliar, maybe she would find something that helped. Near the base of the cellar stairs lay a salamander: black, its back covered with stars like the stars in the story about the truck ride, but when she reached out to touch the salamander, it skittered under the stairs.

Her father had robbed them, hadn't he? Taken away their happiness before she could even learn what it might be.

At five to eleven she put on her coat and gloves and went to stand by Elementary's front entrance. Between glances out the door, she studied the mosaic on the wall beside her. It was made of nothing but corn. Indian corn, field corn, popcorn fitted together to form warped buffalos and barns and fractured tractors. Something meant to resemble the state's wild rose had been done up out of popcorn enameled with a pink polish meant for fingernails. “Iowa,” read the mosaic's legend. “Beautiful Land.”

At 11:10, Lily unsnapped the pocket on her glove, taking out the porcelain chip. Her mother had told Lily that if she were to see an entire plate of the porcelain pattern—Blue Willow—she would see the legend of two lovers taking flight over a bridge from the cruel father who wished to prevent their marriage. In the legend, the gods took pity on the lovers and turned them into doves.