Annie DeWitt - White Nights in Split Town City

“Just lie back,” I said.

Or, maybe he said, “Just look out the window.”

Have you ever seen Skeeter Davis sing “The End Of the World”? Really seen it? “Hey, listen. Why don’t we have Skeeter Davis do another song right now,” the host of the night show says. And this angelic platinum haired woman who looks not unlike Birdie stands in front of the microphone in a dress buttoned up to her chin and sings, “Why does the sun keep on shining? Why does the sea rush to shore? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world cause you don’t love me anymore?”

This is what I pictured as Otto pulled my dress over my head that night. Birdie as Skeeter Davis performing at a carnival on television, her blonde hair aglow and the world watching. I imagined the scout who had stopped Mother in the mall and looked at Birdie and said, “Hey, that kid would show up well on television.” And I thought of my ugly little chin and the dentist’s stale breath in my face as he’d whispered, “Just a little insert.” And the way Father wanted to keep his girls a little ugly, the better to protect our brains.

The old man began to kiss my neck and reach for his belt beneath me. I stopped him. “Let me do it,” I said. I undressed him the way Mother had done for Father, the way Birdie and I had practiced. His body was boxy and not unathletic. The way his skin hung loose over the bones you could tell he’d left something of himself behind. He’d let something get away from him, love or lust or maybe just time. In the process, he’d gotten smaller.

He held my head into his neck. He didn’t want me to see him. I remember the pain pushing up into me little by little and then more forcefully until he could no longer manage. The pain, the shock of it, provided an opening, into which I could recede. I came to understand what to do, there was a steady rhythm to it.

“You can look at me and say, ‘You’re a criminal,’” Kevorkian said on the television.

It was Wilson who interrupted us. He was standing at the window. His breath fogged a halo around his face in the glass. When I looked up, he waved.

“Don’t encourage him,” Otto said without turning his head.

“Who’s encouraging who?” I said.

“He’s better off outside,” Otto said.

“I’ll check on him,” I said.

“Let him watch,” he said. “That yard’s not big enough for an old hound dog to scare up a squirrel. I should worry. It’s not often I get a woman like you in my lap.”

I straightened my spine. Every now and again Wilson moved his palm against the glass to clear the fog. I had all the attention he’d ever wanted.

How it ended I don’t remember. The room had taken on a slant by the time the dog started barking.

“Do me a favor, Jeanie,” Otto said, my clothes strewn across the floor. “Let that mutt out to do his business.”

I stood and walked across the living room carpet and onto the cool slip of kitchen linoleum in my bare feet with my flat chest shining. The minute I opened the back door, I smelled Wilson’s stench. A pool of urine had gathered at his feet where he’d been watching. As the old Setter ran outside, he leapt over the standing liquid. Wilson looked down at the dark trail that stained the front of his pants and laughed. Tears were coming down his cheeks.

“Pretty girl, Jeanie,” he said. “Daddy says I like the pretty girls.”

Otto was on him before I heard the crash of the chair in the kitchen behind me from where Otto’d overturned it. I felt the rush of the old man’s body and the stale whiff of Scotch as he sailed through the doorway. His hand landed solidly against Wilson’s face. The crack of skin against skin was sharp and high. At the last minute Otto released his fist. At least his palm was open. The way the shadows caught Wilson’s features, all I saw was the slack skin of his jaw and the long wrinkled gullet under his chin flap sideways from the impact.

In that moment, I knew Otto Houser was a spy. He was trading for some old team where he’d once had a bit part as a pitch hitter. All that slapping and shouting. When he looked at me he saw a way back into those days when he’d spun his wife around the old inn in Cheshire where they were married among the silver and the paintings of hunting dogs and cavalry that hung on the porch. After the war and the bum kid and the thing cleaved inside of His Helene’s lungs, he’d dragged himself back to that place on his belly. He’d righted himself on the portico of that old inn with a bottle of whiskey and an envelope of lists. Everyone on Fay Mountain could see the way he clung there to the banister. His cheeks had sallowed. Only the liquor brought back the rush of light to his eyes. He had his felt derby hat and his long tan cigarettes that left the yellow around his gums and under his nails. People still envied him for his head of hair. Everything else he had was built on nostalgia. That brown and white Spaniel at his chair under the table could just as soon have been the reincarnation of some old porcelain figurine cutting up a rust on top of the piano had it not been for the way he licked his master’s feet.

I grabbed my dress from the floor and took off across the yard before I saw the look in Wilson’s eyes. I was afraid they would still be laughing.

As I crossed the road that separated our houses, I heard a long deep wailing followed by the yapping of a dog. I stopped in the shadows beneath the two trees of knowledge, and slid my underwear from around my waist. A stain had gathered on the moist strip of white cotton where it had clung between my legs. I held it up to the moon to examine it. In the crotch there was thin streak of blood. I buried the underwear between two rocks in the stone wall. The lights in Otto Houser’s house were off by the time I entered the Bottom Feeder and locked the door behind me.

Father was asleep in the recliner in front of the television. The war was still going on.

The next morning the rain came. One of those warm summer downpours that follows the opening up of the sky and a great movement of air.

There was a note from Father in the kitchen. “Went riding with Otto.” K was sitting at the table with a mug of coffee. Even her skin looked pale and gray in this light. “He didn’t want to wake you,” she said. As I reached for the door of the refrigerator, I felt a presence occupy my body, as though I were outside myself watching the morning break over us. K, or the semblance of K, returned to thumbing one of the women’s magazines Mother had delivered to the house.

It wasn’t unlike Father to set out at that hour. He was often at his best in the morning when the sun had released him from the confinement of his bed.

I poured two tall glasses of juice. K and I stumbled into the living room and the drone of the television. K was lax to settle on any one program. The images on the screen barely registered. I just needed some buzzing between us.

The phone was ringing after a while too.

It was a woman. It was Mother. Or it sounded like Mother would sound if she was shouting across some long field.

“Is that you, Jeanie?” she said. “Do you still have that same twang in your voice? Is that how you sound?”

“It’s still me, Mom,” I said, unsure of the answer myself as I was saying it.

“Oh,” she said.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m just a little nervous.”

“Why?” I said.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m always a little nervous in the afternoons.”

“Oh,” I said, pausing for a moment to scan the mist in the field visible through the window over the sink. The world outside looked not unlike one of Father’s Bob Ross imitations, faint and hazy around the edges. The tree line barely etched in with his chisel. “It’s still morning here.”