River of Heaven Read online

  I can’t help myself. I laugh. I laugh over the silly joke and the boy’s joyful telling. I laugh with more gusto than I have in years, and the boy hears me. He looks toward the garage where he must see my face pressed close to the glass, and all I can think to do is to wave. He waves back. Then he turns and runs down the street, the tail of his sock hat trailing behind him.

  THIS MORNING, I LOOK OUT MY KITCHEN WINDOW AND SEE a girl—a teenager I’d guess—on the deck of Stump’s ship. It’s Saturday, a week until Christmas Eve, and I’m listening to Very Vera on the radio. She’s telling her listeners how to wrap Christmas packages like a pro.

  “You want clean, crisp lines when you fold and tape the edges of the wrapping paper,” she says. “So the trick is to use double-sided tape—you can pick some up at Wal-Mart in the crafts section. This tape is sticky on both sides so you can give gifts that look like they were wrapped at the stores. Clean lines with no ugly pieces of tape showing. Even you men can pull this one off, and it’s sure to impress that special someone.”

  Stump, never one to appreciate the fine points of gift wrapping, dozes on the braided rug, his chin on his paws.

  I turn off the radio and go to the back door to get a better look at the girl. She’s resting her back against the mast as she smokes a cigarette. Her shins are bare. That’s the first thought I have—not, Who is she? not, Please get off my dog’s house I built like a ship with my own hands—but instead, Her pants are too short. The day is cold, too cold for her to have her legs uncovered above her high-top black sneakers.

  I open the back door, but not the storm door, and I feel the cold on the glass. Stump wakes up and waddles over to nose around my leg, sniffing the winter air that carries with it this morning the damp smell of a gray sky. Clouds are banking in the west, knuckling up like fists. By afternoon, I figure, we’ll have snow. So there’s that smell of wet laundry in the air, and the tang of wood smoke from Arthur’s Franklin stove, and the tobacco, burning sharp and sweet, as the girl puffs on her cigarette. All of these scents delivered, so Stump believes, for his inspection and delight.

  He bumps his nose against the storm door, and the girl must hear that because she turns her head toward my house. She tosses her cigarette butt out into my yard, and she puts a hand on the deck of Stump’s ship as if she’s ready to press against it and push herself to her feet.

  But she doesn’t get up. She’s just there, ready. I can feel my own calf muscles tense, the way hers must, and I don’t mind saying it’s a pleasant feeling, this quiver of flesh, this pulse that tells me here’s something I hadn’t planned on, this girl on Stump’s ship, looking as if she’s just as surprised to see me as I am to see her.

  Who is she anyway, and why should I be moving now, stepping out into the cold without as much as a sweater, to say, Hello, hello, my name is Sam.

  Stump goes on ahead of me, barking once at this girl he didn’t intend to find on the deck of his ship. He enters below deck and sets out to investigate.

  The girl is on her knees now, her hands laid flat on the tops of her thighs.

  “It’s all right,” I tell her. “I’m just coming out to say hello.”

  Stump noses his way through the hatch and comes up on deck. He sniffs the soles of the girl’s black sneakers. He moves along her leg and sniffs her knee. He presses his nose into her sweater sleeve.

  “That tickles.” She giggles and tries to squirm away from Stump. “You old hound dog.” She takes his muzzle in her hands and backs him out of her sweater sleeve. She scratches around his ears, tips back his head, and pulls her face down close to his, inviting the inevitable. Stump licks her cheek. “Kissey-kiss,” she says. “You handsome boy, you. You old heartbreaker. Good boy. What a good boy.”

  “That’s Stump,” I tell her. “Looks plain to me that he likes you.”

  “At least someone does,” she says.

  The wind is up now—that west wind pushing those knuckled snow clouds closer. The flag atop Stump’s mast snaps and pops. The sharp air cuts through the thin gabardine of my trousers, and, again, I think of the girl’s bare shins. She doesn’t even have a coat on—I realize that now—just that cable-knit sweater.

  “Do you mind me asking what it is that causes you to be out here?” I rest my hand on the ship’s stern and lean toward the girl. “To come into my yard on a day like this—feel that snap in the air?—snow coming, and you with your legs bare and not even a coat.”

  “It’s him,” she says.

  “Him?”

  Next door, Arthur steps out into his yard. He holds a black electrical cord in his fist, a cord that’s been cut. The plug dangles from one end, and the other end, the one that should be connecting to something, is stripped back, frayed copper wiring showing.

  “Madeline.” He shakes his fist, and the cord ends snake and jounce. “Damn it all to hell,” he says.

  “Him,” says the girl. “My gramps, or should I say, the Pope.” She points her thumb back over her shoulder, and, when she lowers her arm, a butcher knife slips from her sweater sleeve, landing with its blade point stuck into the deck, just a whisker from Stump’s paw. “Sorry,” she says. Then she yanks the knife from the deck. “Sorry,” she says again. Then she climbs down from Stump’s ship and lets herself out of my yard, forgetting to close the gate behind her.

  “The gate,” I say, but it’s too late. She’s tromping over the frozen ground to where Arthur waits. She storms past him into the house. She slams the door behind her. Arthur gives me a shrug of his shoulders as if to say, what’s a guy to do.

  “That’s my son’s kid,” he says. “Maddie. She’s going to be on board awhile.”

  He goes into his house, and I go to my gate and close it, trying my best not to pay attention to the voices I hear rising behind Arthur’s walls.

  “You can’t prove I did that,” Maddie says.

  IT WAS THE RADIO, ARTHUR TELLS ME, THAT OLD PHILCO Transitone he keeps on his breakfast table. He restored it himself: AM/FM, eight-tube receiver. “Maddie didn’t care for Very Vera,” he says after lunch when he asks me to accompany him to buy Maddie a Christmas gift. “You can help me, Sammy,” he says. “An old dog like me? I don’t know what kids want.”

  “You think I know anything different?”

  “You’re my first mate now. Maybe together we can figure something out.”

  His first mate. That’s what he used to call Bess. The thought that I’ve become that important to him warms me, and when he asks me if I’d like to ride out to Wal-Mart with him, I say I will.

  So, it was the radio; that’s how the argument started. Arthur tells me this as we drive down Route 130. The snow is coming down now, big wet flakes starting to stick to the grass at the city park where the Christmas light display has been up and running since Thanksgiving. It’s one of those pretty snows, the kind I generally like to watch from inside my house as it weighs down the branches of evergreen trees and piles up on roofs and sidewalks. But today I’m out in it with Arthur because he asked me, and as he tells me the story of Maddie, I keep my eye on the snow and the folks moving through it outside the Dairy Queen and Dave’s Party Pack Liquor Store and the strip mall where the Wal-Mart used to be before it became a Supercenter and had to have a bigger building a mile north. I’m listening to Arthur, but at the same time I’m thinking about the snow and how the first one of the year always makes me feel like a boy again with a day off from school.

  Then Arthur says, “I was just listening to Vera on the radio after I had my breakfast. She was giving some hints on gift-wrapping—hey, don’t let me forget to pick up some double-sided tape—when all of a sudden Maddie says, ‘I don’t like this woman. I don’t ever want to hear her again.’ Later I find the radio cord pulled out from the wall and hacked up with a knife. Now what would make Maddie go and do that way? Can you tell me that?”

  Of course, I can’t tell him. I don’t know anything about his granddaughter, only that she was nice to Stump and he seemed to take to her, and,
although it surprised me to find her in my side yard, it wasn’t at all an unsettling surprise; it was, if anything, a little wrinkle I didn’t mind. A little zest, Vera would say. A little shazam to give the blah-blah-blah a kick.

  The truth is I don’t know anything about teenage girls, and all I can say to Arthur is, “I’m sorry. No. I couldn’t begin to guess. I didn’t even know you had a granddaughter.”

  He slows for the stoplight on 130 where the road turns into the Wal-Mart parking lot. “She’s had some upset in her life of late. Sure, there’s that, but is that any call to hack up my radio cord? I’m trying to help her out. I know Bess would have wanted us to do that.”

  “Upset?”

  “Her mother.” The light turns from red to green, and Arthur turns his Chrysler into the parking lot. “Well, she’s another story.”

  Maddie’s mother, Arthur’s daughter-in-law, lives up I-57 in Champaign-Urbana. “If you can call it living,” he says. The leather of his bomber jacket squeaks a little against the Chrysler’s seat as he turns down an aisle of the parking lot. “She’s messed up with that junk, that methamphetamine. She can’t make a home for Maddie. Hell, she can barely remind herself to eat and sleep, and my boy Nelson…well, the truth is we don’t know where he is. He took off for Mexico a few years back and we haven’t heard from him since. There’s no one on the mother’s side, not the grandparents or any aunts or uncles, who want anything to do with Maddie. So, it’s up to me, savvy? I’m the only one she can count on.”

  He finds a parking spot at the end of the aisle, and we get out of the car and hunch our shoulders against the cold and the wind.

  “Ready, sailor?” he says.

  “Aye,” I say, and we start the walk to the store.

  A Santa Claus is ringing a bell at the Salvation Army kettle by the front door, and I stop long enough to fish my coin purse out of my pocket and drop three quarters into the kettle.

  “How come you carry that old thing?” Arthur asks me.

  It’s one of those oval purses made from vinyl and slit down the middle, so all you have to do when you want change is squeeze it in your palm. My father brought it home from the tire plant where they were giving them away as a promotion. It’s black with white lettering that used to say KEX TIRE REPAIRS, but years of use have worn away some of the letters so now it says, EX PAIRS.

  “Sentimental, I guess.” I close my hand around the purse and shove it back in my pocket. “I got it when I was a kid.”

  Once we’re in the store, we get to work trying to figure out exactly what a butcher-knife-wielding, radio-cord-hacking, Very- Vera-hating, sixteen-year-old girl might want. We reject the gifts even has-beens like us know someone like Maddie would hate: the baby 14-karat-gold pink cubic zirconia earrings (“too girlie,” Arthur says), the Winnie-the-Pooh houseshoes (“too ‘I’ve forgotten how old you are,’” I suggest), the black silk bra and panty set (“too old for how old you are,” says Arthur).

  “Maybe a gift card,” I say. “Then Maddie could get what she wants.”

  “A gift card’s no good.” I know the voice belongs to Vera an instant before I feel her hand on my back, and smell her perfume—that scent that makes me see vases of peonies and crisp linen curtains lifting from windows on breezy spring days. Then she’s there, between Arthur and me, her jingle-bell earrings chiming as she shakes her head. “A gift card says, ‘I didn’t care enough to pick out something special for you.’ Please excuse me for overhearing. Now, boys, who’s the lucky girl you’re shopping for today?”

  “My granddaughter,” Arthur says.

  “Age?”

  “Sixteen.”

  Vera snaps her fingers. “Gents,” she says. “Follow me.”

  We leave electronics for girls’ fashions. Vera stops at a rack full of skirts and blouses. The sign above the rack has a picture of two girls, blonde and tan, each of them wearing the same clothes Vera is pointing out to us now. MARY KATE AND ASHLEY SPORTS WEAR, the sign says. REAL FASHIONS FOR REAL GIRLS.

  I’ve seen this Mary Kate and Ashley on television. They were on a sitcom when they were just itty-bitty girls, but now they’re all grown up.

  “For Maddie?” Arthur says. “Gee, Vera. I don’t know.”

  Vera whisks a hanger off the rack and holds up a skirt that to me looks no bigger than a dish towel. “Here’s a cute skirt.” With the other hand she takes another hanger from the rack. “Oh, and look at this halter top. Now what teenage girl wouldn’t like this outfit?”

  “It’s sort of skimpy, isn’t it?” Arthur says.

  “Oh, come on,” says Vera. “Get with it, sailor.”

  Arthur takes the clothes from her. He holds the hangers away from him as he gives the skirt and top a once-over. “Sammy?” he says to me.

  “Vera’s the expert,” I say.

  “Trust me, Arthur.” She lays her hand against his cheek. “Real fashions.”

  “For real girls,” he says.

  She pats his cheek. “Now you’ve got it.”

  WHEN ARTHUR AND I GET BACK FROM WAL-MART, WE PARK on the street because once the snow stops he’ll want to clear his driveway. We’re at the tail end of the storm, just a few specks slanting down, and here in the late afternoon, the light is blue with the coming dusk. By five o’clock, the last of the sun will slip below the horizon, and there we’ll be, in the dark. Arthur will get out his snowblower, and he’ll do his driveway and the sidewalk, and then he’ll come over, as he always does, and do mine. I’ve insisted it’s unnecessary, this favor. I have a snow shovel. I may be sixty-five, but I’m in good health. I’m capable. “Sammy,” he’s told me. “It takes so little.”

  We linger in his car, neither of us, it seems, anxious to step out into the cold. Lights are on in his house, and we can see Maddie at the picture window. She parts the sheers with the back of her hand—a motion so elegant I can almost believe that the skirt and top Vera talked Arthur into buying will be exactly what Maddie wants. She looks so ladylike, half-hidden behind the sheers, and I wonder if, like me, Arthur is thinking about Bess and how many times she may have stood in exactly this way, made exactly this sweep of her hand to part the sheers so she could look for his car coming down the street. Maddie waits at the window—I’m not sure whether she’s spotted us—and I think she must feel alone in Arthur’s house. All the rooms blaze with light. Here she is, far from her own home, which, as he’s explained, hasn’t been much of a home at all, and now she seems anxious for another voice in the house, even if that voice belongs to her grandfather whose radio cord she cut with a butcher knife.

  She must see us, then, and she must be embarrassed to be found watching because she lets the sheers fall closed and she moves away from the window.

  “It’s not easy,” Arthur says. “This time with Maddie.”

  Then he tells me about the night her mother locked her out of her house.

  “It was snowing,” he says, “and the kid was barefoot. Barefoot, Sammy. Jesus.” He curls his fingers around the steering wheel, and I can feel the rage in his grip. “Her mother, Treasure—honest to God, Sammy, I’m not making this up. Treasure—I guess you’d say she never grew to fit her name—she throws Maddie out because she won’t go to Wal-Mart and buy Sudafed. That cold medicine. That’s what they use to make that junk, that crystal meth. I tell you, Sammy, when they’re messed up with that junk, they don’t care about anything else. Her own kid, barefoot and the snow coming down and her mother not giving a rat’s ass that she’s out like that. Maddie had to spend the night in the shed just to get out of the cold. She tied rags around her feet. Jesus, it breaks my heart.”

  As it does mine. “It’s good she’s with you now,” I say to Arthur.

  He relaxes his grip on the steering wheel. “Here’s hoping I can convince her that’s true,” he says. Then he opens his door, and the cold comes in around my legs, and I can’t move, seized as I am with the image of Maddie barefoot in the snow.

  “You’ll freeze in there,” Arthur says, ling
ering, his hand on the open door.

  “I’m thinking about that story you just told me.” I shake my head. “Maddie and her mother.”

  “You can’t reason what makes people do the things they do. I figure we’re all lucky if we’ve got at least one person to stick by us.” He turns and stares at the lighted windows of his house. “That’s what I aim to do for Maddie. Love her. Whether she wants me to or not.”

  5

  THIS MORNING, MONDAY, I’M WATCHING TELEVISION BY MYSELF. Arthur is home with Maddie, and now it’s just Stump and me, and I have to admit I miss Arthur’s company. I think about giving him a call, just to gab, but I don’t. He has his own life to live, this new life with Maddie, and who am I to try to butt into that?

  Stump dozes on the rug by my chair, and I’m about to nod off, too. I’ve got the television on CNN, the volume down low, and the voices of the newscasters are lulling me to sleep. Then I hear one of them say a name, “Calvin Brady,” and suddenly I’m wide awake.

  I punch up the volume and scramble to catch up with the story, a hostage situation at a feed supply and grain elevator in Edon, Ohio. A gunman holding three employees hostage. One of them is seventy-year-old Calvin Brady. I watch the footage of the scene, most of it shot from a helicopter hovering above the site. I see the flat-roofed sheds and the office building where a red and white checkerboard Purina sign is tacked to the wall. I see railroad tracks, the rail bed dusted with snow, and the cement silos of the grain elevator reaching up into the gray sky. The camera from the helicopter looks down on the police barricades, the officers in SWAT gear, rifles drawn. Fields stretch out behind the elevator. Canada geese feed on shelled corn left in the stubble. Specks of snow stir in the wind.

  Then the photographs go up on the screen: the hostages being held by the yet unidentified gunman. One of them is a woman, forty-three-year-old Mora Grove. She’s a gaunt-faced woman, and in her picture, her hair is back in a ponytail, and her lips are pressed together as if she knows this day is coming and she can’t stop it to save her life. The owner of the grain elevator is fifty-one-year-old Herbert Zwilling, a beefy man with a flattop haircut and a big, toothy grin. Then there’s my brother—I’m certain as soon as I see him—my brother, Cal. I can hardly begin to say what comes over me as soon I look at his face, slack now with age, a face so much like my own. My chest fills with the knowledge that he’s alive, but held hostage now by some lunatic with a gun.