Annie DeWitt - White Nights in Split Town City

“Red hots,” I said as I removed the bedpan and wiped her down, looking for signs of sores or sudden bouts of perspiration.

“Kidneys,” she called them.

“That’s my girl,” Otto Houser said as he spread her legs and arranged her body.

The salve he used was thick and oily. He showed me how to thin it with the friction of his palms.

“Easy does it,” Otto said when the grease was the right consistency.

He lifted His Helen’s legs exposing her bottom. I spread a layer of ointment over the patches of red.

When I had a good coat on her, Otto handed me a small white pellet.

“Let me show you,” he said taking my hand in his and gliding the pellet up into his wife’s crack.

As he withdrew my hand from the warmth of her body, he ran the length of his finger under his nose.

“Smell her,” he said.

Mother wasn’t the only one holding her tail high that summer. What I noted most about her absence was the pheasant farm. The doctor had erected a coop on the corner of his property where it met ours. His birds strut around the fields in back of our house, noiseless, stubborn, brimming with pride. I watched them out the windows Mother had installed which looked out over the deck. Nightwalkers. Daywalkers. His birds were both. They had no respect for the hour of the day or the confines of their dwellings. There was an arrogance to their beauty that I found both attractive and abstinent. The way they hefted their legs and cocked their bright heads towards the sky, they were always stepping over something as though the very ground beneath them were rotten.

We bordered the doctor’s run on the north east corner of a thickly wooded pine forest. Our scrub and shade was stopped short by a stone wall and a tangle of barbwire. On the other side of the wall lay the doctor’s plot, acres of pristinely plowed land on which he housed fields of corn or wheat or alfalfa depending on the season. How these fields were kept up or by whom, no one could fathom. The doctor remained more myth than reality. Every now and again word went around that he’d taken a new vehicle, a signal of distant prosperity. People would’ve blamed such a man if it weren’t for his offspring. His wife housed pregnancies like ritual. No one could turn their nose up at a man with such seed.

The doctor’s fields provided a straightaway where Father galloped headlong into an empty expanse of green and wind. In Mother’s place, Father purchased a seventeen hand Morgan named Rebel who used to pull carriage and wasn’t yet used to the weight of a man. In the barn, Rebel was all pussy, nosing your crotch for scent or your pockets for grain. As long as you were under foot, he let you blow your scent in his nose. Under the saddle, Rebel was all riot. He’d try to throw it the minute you tightened the girth. The way he hung his head reminded me of those big broad shouldered men who’d never harnessed their athleticism and rather stooped around always looking for a woman’s back to glide up on and adhere to.

The Sheik and I were often at Father’s heels as he spurred Rebel across the doctor’s acres, squaring off with what pieces of the world he had left behind. Father rode in an old red and white bicycle helmet. The thin red chinstrap flapped wildly around his face in the breeze.

Evenings after Mother left, Father turned to his creative habits. For Father there was nothing alluring in the newness of progress. An engineer, he felt betrayed by the achievements of his profession. Data General may have been the wave of the future, but for Father, computers merely allowed one to operate in a language outside the banalities of human circumstance.

“I’ve still got my girls,” Father often said to Birdie and me after dinner, pushing aside the furniture in the living room where the three of us could lounge. Our nightly games were played this way, soldiers in the field.

The bald spot on the back of Father’s head glowed in the track lighting as he bent over the piles of Pick Up Stix, contemplating his next move. Father believed that when it came to strategy, one could win if you just understood the physics.

Birdie often grew bored of waiting for Father to take his turn.

“Try that one,” she’d say into his ear, climbing on his back and pointing over his shoulder at the stick buried deepest in the pile.

“Just a minute, kiddo,” Father would say. “We’ve got to consider this problem from all angles.”

Afterward I retired to the Atari while Birdie ran jumping courses over stacks of pillows she’d piled in the doorways of the Bottom Feeder. Birdie’d adopted an old hobbyhorse as her mount that summer, thrusting the wooden handle between her legs and galloping off into the foyer while peering ahead at the jump in earnest. Whenever she knocked a pillow down, a look of discernment came over her face; she’d slap her thighs and cluck her teeth to egg the horse onward.

Father surrendered to his sketchbook or an episode of The Joy of Painting . When forced, he would catch up on work in front of the cathode ray monitor on the desk in the corner of the living room. The monitor weighed a ton, and could only display sixteen colors. The next year, with the birth of the World Wide Web, Internet access would be as slow as boiling water. The modem would beep and hiss until it made a connection. For now, the three of us lost ourselves in a session of King’s Quest unawares of the greater world around us. You were constantly having to save the game, as it often forgot your progress. Even the most useless items encountered on the quest — a dead fish, a rotten tomato, or an old board — could have an unexpected and creative purpose in the right situation. “When a situation looks completely impassable,” Father said. “A good idea is to leave it and come back later.”

Above the computer hung a painting of Father’s. A modernist construction. Four multicolored sticks set on a deep blue background. The canvas itself was long and vertical — taller than Birdie or I — and it took up most of the backdrop to the computer. The four rectangles overlapped one another at various heights, as though magnetically attracted. I often stared at the rectangles wondering which I would remove first.

“What do you make of it, kiddo?” Father would say to me, wrapping his arm around my shoulder in front of his masterwork.

“It’s got symmetry, Pop.”

Before bed we snacked on Cheese Nips and Slice ‘n’ Bake. Birdie ate the cookie dough straight out of the wrapper. Those nights we ordered Chinese food, Father made us virgin Scorpion Bowls out of Kool-Aid and cans of fruit salad.

Dr. Who was the only program on which we could agree. We enjoyed the blue police box which became his space ship and tumbled into the galaxy. There was something about this arrangement that seemed plausible that summer. We watched the show in solidarity.

Father, Birdie, and I sat cross-legged with our backs against the couch, which Birdie had stripped of its cushions. “What’s your name?” Dr. Who says to the girl as they run to evacuate ship. “Cas,” she says. “You’re young to be crewing a gunship, Cas,” Dr. Who says. “I wanted to see the universe. Is it always like this?” she says. The two stand on either side of the door and yell passionately at each other as they part. “I’m not leaving this ship without you,” Dr. Who calls out to her. “Get out of here,” Cas says. “While some of the universe is still standing.”

During the day while Father worked, we were watched by a train of women.

Our first girl was a bleeder. The daughter of a psychologist and one of the women who worked line at the cafeteria. She lived in a small Cape close to the center of town. Those mornings I’d seen her standing at the foot of her drive as the bus rounded the corner, she looked like the sort of star who’d wasted the fetch of her youth trying to settle down with some country boy who’d loved her and left her. In his wake, she’d taken to hitching her way across America to understand just what it was the rest of us were doing. I expected her to stick out her thumb when she saw the bus round the corner.