The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (11 page)

I had never been to the mountain. I had no idea what people did on the mountain. It is the only mountain in Wisconsin. Indeed, it is the only mountain within a one- or two-thousand-mile radius. Indeed, it's not a mountain at all. It's a bluff, and
because we see it as a bluff, a total fraud, we call it a mountain. Miners liked it years ago. But that didn't last, and I can see why. It has always seemed a particularly depressing mountain to me. It has always seemed like some ecological flaw, a misstep of creation, an eyesore that suppressed our property values and our perspectives—a painfully slow rising from the earth matched only by its salient and rather unpleasing drop back down again—a metaphor to kill the pleasure of all metaphors in and around and about this countryside.

I probably should have discouraged her from driving. She was fourteen. She passed cars on the right edge of the highway. She played extraordinarily loud music. The music seemed unbelievably unrelatable. I wondered at the calibration of their anger and what a world looked like in which people wore their anger so openly, or a world in which people paid money to hear people so fluent with their anger. I nearly bit my hand off as we rounded the tight switchbacks. I have never been more grateful to see a parking lot.

We left the car and crossed a wooden bridge leading to a prefabricated cabin built off the face of the mountain. I wanted to know how she'd
known this place was here, but she would not read my note. She said, “Let's go” like we were actors in some television crime drama. But I kept pace with her, and I remained silent. We paid fifteen dollars each (she paid for herself on a credit card I had not, to my knowledge, cosigned for her) for a flimsy tin lid. The broken-toothed and partially bearded man at the counter said, “He know what he doing?”

“No one knows what they're doing, Billy,” my daughter said.

He laughed. His mouth was a gothic cage. “You go like this,” he said to me. “Not like this. Got it?”

I nodded. I did not have it. I had no idea what he was talking about. I smelled whiskey, and I wanted a long drink. He pointed us out the back door, which he had propped open, and I could see through the back door another long bridge and a set of stairs that went down to the creek near the base of the mountain. He winked at me.

I followed my daughter. She didn't speak. I didn't speak. It was, by then, late afternoon. The light fell against the face of the mountain rock in a pleasant way, so that I could see the black flies swarming
against the pollen and motes. At the bottom of the stairs we went straight for the creek bed. I knelt down.

“Not here,” she said.

I stood back up.

She was looking around me, around us, and back up to the prefabricated cabin. Sensing, I suppose, that we were not being watched, she moved quickly up the creek, and I followed. We walked for another twenty minutes until we arrived at the entrance to a mine portal. The entrance was boarded over. The creek was spilling from beneath the boards. She stomped into the water, across the slick rocks, and went directly to the entrance to begin yanking boards away.

I am not great at transgressions, which makes me both a great and horrible father. She seemed to expect that I would not be able to assist her in her violation of mine property, as she did not turn around to ask for help. She grunted; noises I had never heard her make came up from her belly and her heart, and she pulled against a final plank with a yell I
had
actually heard her use before, somewhat frequently, with her mother. But she could not get that last plank away. She turned to me. “Someone used screws.”

I made a face. I came over.

Indeed, someone had screwed the planks to the wooden framing of the mine. The screws were new, shiny silver. I put my foot along the side and really yanked. It came off, and I fell heavily onto the rocks and creek behind me.

She ducked down and went in. I scrambled up out of the water and went with her. “Watch your” became the opening of her every sentence inside that mountain. “Watch your head” and “Watch your step” and “Watch your right.” I just stayed close to her, following her deeper into the dark. I tried to keep my hand on her back. I tried to thread my finger through the hole of her shorts belt loop, but she was so fast. It's a good thing I have such a nice body, I thought to myself, though I was hunched over and shuffling forward like a witch.

“Tell me your thoughts on dark, damp holes,” my therapist said. “You're clearly drawn to holes. You love to talk about them. You have some sort of obsession with them. I'm interested in the type of holes that most fascinate you, call to you, sometimes maybe come to you in your dreams. Because we all have holes, don't we, that we want others to
explore? And we know that, as we have holes, so too do others. And we like to look and explore holes to make sure theirs are like our own.”

Indeed the mine was dark, and it was wet. But it was cool bordering on cold. It became very dark very rapidly, swallowing any of the late-day's light that had earlier been chasing us. I turned around a few times and saw nothing—literally the portrait of nothing. My daughter used a small keychain flashlight to guide us through the passageways. Its power against this darkness was astonishing. I said nothing.

Then she stopped and shone her flashlight into a stretch of water that appeared clouded by lime and alluvial tailings where the mine had been flooded and simply pooled. She turned to me and put a hand on my chest. “This is where things get a little weird,” she said.

I nodded.

“Be ready. I just met her a few weeks ago. She's in some trouble,
O.K
.? So am I. I'm going to show her to you now. You'll get it when you see her.”

I expected a dead child. I don't know why. It might have made more sense, in retrospect, to have imagined an animal or underworld science-fiction
creature. But that's what I pictured. I thought of a dead child. “Are you going to kill me?” I said.

She shushed me. “Just think about what we're going to do with this information. Don't worry about what it means.
O.K
.? And don't talk.”

She then turned the flashlight farther up the pool of water, deeper into the mine. I had to squint, but I could see, in the dim and pasty light, a woman looking back at me.

“Hi, Hannah,” my daughter said. “It's me.”

The woman I could see in the pool, in a bikini, was at once familiar and yet very, very strange to me. She was smoking a cigarette, though I could not smell the smoke. She was sitting on the far edge of the pool of water, her legs submerged to her knees. Her bikini looked to be red and floral. She wore her blond hair long and back, in a bun, and she looked ruddy, with high rosy cheeks, but there was no mistaking that this woman was my daughter, older. I was seeing the specter of my daughter as an adult. She was waving. “Hannah doesn't speak to me either,” my daughter said to me, loud enough that it seemed she wanted the woman to hear her.

“How do you know her name is Hannah?”

“Shhh,” she said.

“It's you,” I said.

She shushed me again, this time with some force. “I know who it is,
Dad
.”

Then we stood there in silence. I really didn't know what to say. The woman remained on the other side of the water. We would have to get into the water to go toward her. I presumed that was where this was headed. Or I imagined this woman, this specter of my daughter, would lower herself into the water and swim over to us. But nothing occurred; no person of the three of us moved. My daughter kept the flashlight on this woman and the woman continued smoking.

She had stopped waving, but she looked back at us as though we were in meaningful conversation. She nodded nicely. She shifted every now and then, and I could hear the harsh scratch of the loose mine surface beneath her when she did. Except when she would wince while moving her weight, she remained largely placid in her expression, entirely matter-of-fact.

“Just wait,” my daughter whispered to me. “You
O.K
., Hannah?” she called. “Can I get you anything?”

The woman shook her head and shifted once more. She pulled a leg from the water and the light from my daughter's flashlight caught a surprising angle in her profile. I had not been able to see it before, but it was clear in an instant that this woman was pregnant. Her belly was enormous! She plopped her near hand on her womb. She tipped her head back and looked up to the roof of the mine. She opened her mouth and groaned.

And then the light went out and I stood there stone silent in the dark.

I didn't move. I could see nothing. My eyes failed to adjust to the new light, because the new light was an utter absence of light, something I had never seen before, and something I have never seen since. The image of my pregnant daughter burned and glowed in my head, but if there are degrees of darkness there are surely degrees of silence, and I tell you I left a lifetime of relevant verbal matter stuffed inside that hole no one knows how to mine any longer.

THE COOK AT SWEDISH CASTLE

T
he cook was no cook. He had only role-played one at his grandmother's house in Chicago as a boy. Yet flying back for his grandmother's funeral, he found himself entirely preoccupied with playing the cook again. The prospect made his feet throb. Maybe, in the end, there was nothing larger than the cook. Even sitting in the pew, silent and solemn before the service, Able could not shake the trembling.

And then his mother's sister roped her arms around his neck and asked him if he would say a few words. “You are always our best speaker.” The cook nodded. The liquor on her breath was rum. “So warmhearted.” She paused, pinching her lips shut, suppressing something that had come up from her belly. “You're just the most warm.”

Leaning against the baptismal font at the front of the church in a tuxedo was the cook's cousin, Erik Pederson. He spoke with a dark, plump woman and periodically batted her on her heavy, bare shoulder. When he had done this several times, the woman reached back and whacked him in the chest with the flat of her hand. The sound of the impact was loud. The two of them chortled and tried to conceal their mirth with their hands. It appeared to the cook that his cousin had coerced a woman to marry him; the woman's ring was a salient and gaudy flash in the spare hull of the sanctuary.

The cook lowered his eyes. He would not be caught gazing at the cousin and the wife. However, he was really shocked to see his cousin married. Really shocked.

The cook's cousin was an educated man, a scholar of obscure philosophies, an adjunct at some desperate midwestern state university. The man had always been a real bastard. He was about as physically grotesque a person as the cook had ever known. Right below the rim of his belt, for example, the cook's cousin expanded enormously. It had been
this way since they were kids. The chest, the shoulders, the back, the stomach—all seemed to have dropped into an expansive bubble of body flesh orbiting the waistline; something, it seemed, had always been herniated. The man's arms were clubby with bloated, hair-thronged fingers that curled into half fists. He suffered from a cleft palate, his lip lifting to his nose and exposing his teeth in a placid grin. Also, an unseemly hunch of the spine.