The Constant Heart (5 page)

 

MY FATHER STILL slept on the sofa, but sometimes in the morning, my mother read to him about automobile accidents,
in which she gave the make, model, injuries, and estimated damage. My father said, “Too bad. But I guess the insurance will cover it.” And my mother said, “Yes, honey, I guess that's right,” but my father didn't respond to that. He kept his mouth shut, which he often said was the best thing to do sometimes. He just put sugar on his oatmeal or drank his orange juice and looked at the papers, the studies of the pH of the water he looked after, and then got up and went out the door. Soon, though, on one occasion, he thanked my mother for breakfast. Still, they were trying to live with something, and I knew it was related to that prison, to what I felt for Sara, and how, I was afraid, she could be right. Just think of the things that had been done in the name of love. Almost as bad as religion.

I found some new books of photographs and Sara sat with me, as though she could feel what tugged on us more safely if we just touched while we looked at those glowing clouds, the stars piercing them so keenly as to feel it in your heart, but at the same time, as though to compensate, Sara whispered about what those women would do to me, her hair just touching my face, her hip against me, the vulgarity of what she said (“going to rub your thing raw, Jake, going to suck you dry”) serving as a kind of license, I guess, to feel, at least secretly (since she was advocating against it so fiercely), something tender and sweet and innocent, all of which things had been banished from the age and which she must have felt ashamed for having. I had these sweet desires for her, too, but now I just kept my mouth shut and watched her go to work on that inverse prison break.

“It's all set,” she said. “They are going to have the gate open at the back of the prison when the laundry goes out on
Saturday evening. But I told them I'd let them see you first. So come on.”

The traffic in the street had that sad commercial quality, vans and trucks that were driven by bored men and women, and then the odd car here or there that left a trail of smoke like a flag of desperation. Sara and I stood on the sidewalk, at the end of the prison, and behind the bars, one story up, women moved in the shadows, the weak light showing only the highlights in their hair, or what I thought were highlights, and the whites of their eyes.

This, of course, is where I failed, and I spent a lot time trying to make up for it. Or, at least, I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I should have put my lips against her ear and said, “I love you.” But she would have gone nuclear, just turned her back on me altogether, as though I weren't listening to her at all. She was already making this bet, but maybe she'd think it was better to clear out altogether. But that was a chance I should have taken. Or maybe she would have dismissed me by saying that I was just poisoned with testosterone. I may have felt desire, but it was never because of a poison. How could I have stopped her?

“They're going to confirm the time,” she said. “Tomorrow afternoon. They're going to throw me a note and I'm going to throw them a joint. Jake, you're never going to forget it.”

I held a heavy book in my hands, photos, of course, but I wasn't looking at it. The pile of books I had made to get a good view swayed a little as I leaned forward. Sara stood in the street, on the other side of the traffic, and she flicked a joint up to the window. At the end of the block, a generic four-door car pulled into the drive at the front of the prison,
and two men got out, one with short hair and one with a shaved head and a gold ring in his ear, as though that was going to fool anyone.

The books on the shelves seemed to pass in a blur, in a sort of streak of faded gilt and old cloth as I ran past them, by the table that looked so much like something from a jury room. On the stairs I took the steps three at a time, appearing, I'm sure, as if I were on an invisible skateboard. Then Mrs. Kilmer looked up, oozing a sort of black sourness at the noise and the speed, and as I said “Buzz me out, buzz me out,” she slowly put down her pen, just touched the button, and said, “Now, you know the rules . . . ,” but I had already vaulted the little fence with one hand, a move I had learned in gymnastics on the side horse. The glass door of the library seemed oddly green, like tinted glass, and when I reached the street, the two men, one with that gold earring, were already closing in on her like the cops they were. I said, “Sara, Sara, Sara, look out . . . ” She turned first to me, as though I had some special request to make to those women in the brick building, but by that time one of the cops had his badge out and the other had her by one arm. Then the one with the badge put it away and took out his handcuffs from the back of his pants, from under his jacket, and when he did that his gun was there, too, on his belt in a black holster. Sara kept her eyes on me, and in that moment when the cuffs clicked over one wrist, she went right on staring at me, and when they twisted her arm behind her she said, “Jake, Jake, for god's sake help me. Can't you help me?” And, at the same time, the women in the building howled and called names I had never heard before, when I thought I had heard all the swearing there was, the sound
from the building so loud as to make the bricks vibrate. The cops tightened the cuffs. The cop with the gold ring and the shaved head gave the finger to the women in the building, his beard so heavy that, although he had shaved just a few hours before, he looked like he was turning blue. “Jake,” said Sara. “For god's sake. Please.” Then they put her in a car, just like on TV, one of them with a hand on her head to guide her into the backseat. I didn't think they really did that, but they do. And as they guided her into the backseat, she turned her face to me, her eyes steady, everything about her suggesting that there was one person in the world she could depend on, only one, and we knew who that was. Then, when the car went by, she said, “Jake, Jake, Jake . . . ,” the words trailing away, like something I learned about later, a kind of Doppler effect. Then I leaned against the wall of the library. But just for a minute. Then I got on the bus with its plume of black exhaust, paid my fare, already hearing that buzz from those high-tension lines that came into the kitchen.

 

 

MY FATHER ANSWERED the phone at work, which was in a building that had been an asylum for the criminally insane years ago, but the state built a new place and turned the asylum into the headquarters of the Department of Fish and Game, and then into the headquarters of the Department of Environmental Protection. My father answered the phone from his office, which had once been a place where they had done electroshock therapy.

“How come you're home so early?”

“How do you know I'm home?” I said.

“The buzzing. What's going on?”

“Please, please,” I said. “Come home.”

He waited as someone said, “Here's the result of the fish population study, done by electroshock, on the lower part of Furnace Creek . . . Looks good, don't you think . . . ”

“Yes,” my father said. “I'll look at them when I get home.”

I sat in the kitchen and imagined him getting into the car and starting it, the engine coming alive, and then how he would go up to the main drive and turn, leaving that black building, which still looked like a place where they locked people up for axe murder or aggravated rape, and turn toward home. Maybe he listened to the news. That would be typical of him, I guess, to see if what I was worried about was bigger than just a problem of my own.

My mother came in, too, with some bags from the supermarket, bright celery, like a pet, sticking out of the top. She had the mail, too, and one of those brochures from the ashram. The same long-bearded guru on the front and the same odor on the paper, like incense and dope.

My father sat opposite me now. My mother stood behind him.

“So,” my father said. “She's been arrested? Is that what you are telling me?”

“Yes,” I said.

My father opened the drawer of the kitchen table where we kept the phone book and ran his finger down to the C tab and flipped it open. Crandall was the name of his lawyer.

“Oh, no,” said my mother. “We don't have to get involved.”

“I think we are involved,” said my father.

“Who's going to pay for the lawyer?”

“Us,” said my father.

“But I had planned to make a contribution to the ashram this month,” said my mother.

“It'll have to wait,” said my father.

“I'm not in the mood to wait,” said my mother. Then she turned to me and said, “Why don't you get a haircut and stop hanging around with these cheap sluts?”

My father took the phone from its hook by the icebox and began to dial, and while he did, he gave me the look, which said, just as loud as though he were speaking, “This is a time to be quiet, Jake. I'm telling you.”

“If you feel that way,” I said to my mother. “Why don't you go down to the bowling alley for a few games.”

“Oh,” said my mother. “Oh. And that's just the kind of thing that little bitch was always hanging around to hear about.”

My father put the phone down.

“Jake,” he said. “Two things are going to happen. And they are going to happen right now. First, I'm going to call Crandall. The second is that you are going to apologize to your mother. And you are going to do it as though you mean it. You better mean it.”

That buzzing came into the kitchen. I tried to imagine what the field had been like when it didn't have any houses and the sheep on it looked like small clouds on a green sky.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I really am.”

My mother sat down in the living room with her brochure and looked at the quote of the month, a line that was always included with each month's promotion. “The infinite mystery is consciousness . . . ”

 

 

SARA WASN'T EIGHTEEN yet, and Crandall represented her in juvenile court. That meant my father and I could only look in the little square windows of the door to the courtroom, since the juvenile court proceedings were confidential. So we looked in those little windows, although Sara turned around once and looked at my father and then me and then bit her lip. Crandall spoke, and through the buzz-mumble made by the door I could make out all of it. According to Crandall, it was just a schoolgirl prank. The other lawyer, a man who looked like he had body odor, read Sara's record, and then Crandall came back with more buzz-mumble.

“What can they do to her?” I said.

“A lot of things,” said my father. “They could try her as an adult.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“We'll have to wait,” my father said. “Too bad we can't go in.” The hall had the same scent as the polish they used in the library. “But, Jake, I want to ask you something.”

“What's that?”

“If Sara had been able to get you in there, into that prison, would you have gone?”

More buzz-mumble through the door. It was the other lawyer's turn.

“Jake?” my father said.

“I don't know,” I said. “Probably.”

“To take advantage of those women?”

“No,” I said. “No.”

“Why then?” he said.

“You know,” I said.

“To prove something?”

“Yes,” I said. Sara's hair had grown out now and it was half red and half black.

“Well, Jake,” he said. “Let's face it. Sometimes you have to make hard decisions. No one is going to escape that.”

“No,” I said. “I'm beginning to see that.”

“Well, all of this is a secret between us,” said my father. “OK? I mean about what you would have done or not done. It's our business. So we'll just keep our mouths shut.”

“No lectures?” I said.

“Not from me,” said my father.

The judge didn't try Sara as an adult, but sent her to a home, a sort of mild prison for young offenders, until she'd turn eighteen. Then, depending on her behavior, they'd decide what to do from there.

“Well,” said my father. “The first thing is for you to go visit her. I'll find out what we can give her. I guess Tampax and maybe some pajamas and slippers and a bathrobe. Or maybe just some money. For the dispensary.”

So she was arrested and then put in a detention center for troubled girls.

Mrs. Kilmer was ready to buzz me right up the next day. It wasn't so much that she was cheerful but more like someone who had had a mathematic proof accepted by the
Journal of Theoretical Mathematics
.

“You see,” she said to me. “What did I say? That little slut got what she had coming to her. They say she was trying to get into the prison or something like that. What the hell was she doing?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Why, I bet she was trying to sell them dope. The little slut.”

“Don't call her that,” I said.

“Un-huh,” she said. “She had you wrapped around her finger, didn't she? Why, what was she doing with you up there in the stacks?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“A gentleman,” she said. “My god, we have a gentleman here. Why, you have some standard? Is that it?”

She said this as though another person, a sort of ghost of the library, stood next to her.

“He's sticking up for the little slut,” she said.

It wasn't only that Mrs. Kilmer hated Sara, although she did that for sure. She was one of a number of women who don't hate men so much as they hate life. And what were Sara and I, at that age, seventeen, but life and promise personified? Mrs. Kilmer buzzed me through and I sat with the picture of the Horsehead Nebula that Sara had always liked.