Annie DeWitt - White Nights in Split Town City

I thought of Otto on the porch that night. How he’d taken my head in his hands and stared at my face. How he’d kept wanting to kiss like a sister those afternoons Birdie and I took to the outdoors. One evening shortly after Mother’s return, before supper Birdie and I had made our way to the marsh. The box from the mower was just tall enough that, if we laid down side by side inside of it, Mother couldn’t see us from the porch.

As Mother called out to us over the deck, Birdie crawled on top of me.

“Show me,” she said.

Where she’d seen it I never knew, or perhaps I didn’t care to remember. Perhaps she’d caught Fender and I that afternoon in the box.

What I remembered was the shortness of it, the smallness of her head in my hands, the way she’d tilted slightly to the side as we locked lips.

She’d called it the marriage kiss.

That same evening at dinner Birdie had wanted to show our parents what we’d learned.

“Show them,” she’d said. “How to do it.” Her hair parted across her forehead as she leaned across the table.

I thought, too, of Otto and Callie and their greed. “It’s perfectly quiet here,” said the correspondent on the television. In his golf jacket, he looked as though he were going on vacation, somewhere warm. “No activity whatsoever,” he reported. “Looking out from the hotel where most of the foreign journalists are kept, the lights of the city are still on. You can see to the horizon. Taxi drivers are asking passengers nearly $200 to drive to the Turkish border.”

“A sign of the times,” Jennings said.

I pictured reams of taxis crossing a long drawn-out desert. Their thick yellow paint brocading the dry wastes of air like a fleet of canaries flown south for the winter.

The war began. Large green flares that looked not unlike the fireworks on the Fourth of July set off from the town green. “Lit up like Christmas trees,” the correspondent on the ground described it.

The screen went dark. I switched to another station. “You have no idea how good it is to hear your voice on this remarkable night,” I heard a young news correspondent say. “I’m going to go to the window so that our viewers can stay as much in touch with the scene as possible. I’ve just seen a blue flashing light down on the streets below. You can hear what I can hear, I imagine. More of that eerie silence from before the attack began.”

“Is everything OK with you and the crew?” the man in the suit on the screen said.

“We’re a little excited,” the disembodied voice of the reporter in the Baghdad hotel laughed.

“You’ve had a lot of experience being under attack in Vietnam and other places,” the anchor said.

I couldn’t believe Mother wasn’t there. I stood in the darkness of the living room and stretched toward the ceiling, trying to occupy as much of the house as I could. “Where are you?” I said aloud. “Where is anyone?”

Margaret came back with Mother and Father from the funeral. I watched the headlights turn down the drive. I heard their keys jiggle the front lock. I pictured Mother in the foyer hanging their coats. I imagined Otto sitting in the dark across the street in the armchair in the corner of his bedroom. Bent at the knee with his feet firmly planted, his legs would look like they were waiting for a kid to crawl up into his lap.

“White nights,” he’d say as Callie made her way across the room towards the bed.

An old transistor would be playing in the background. He still kept the game on. Soft enough that you can’t hear the calls, just the occasional roar of the crowd.

Alone in the quiet, he waits for the swing, the steady crack of the bat.

All Callie cares about is the win.

In the bed Otto’s got his wait on, still shirt-tied and clammy. His hands hover, like he’s searching for something bigger than what she is.

When she offers him a seat in the saddle, he says, “These days I’m more of a walking man.”

She thinks what he means is, company: some beers in a dimly lit pool hall.

She thinks what he means is: I’ll stick.

Backlit by the moon, she lets the evening work her body. She takes her time gearing him up. Stands at the window. Smokes a cigarette. Lets him wrap his greed around her.

“This,” she says as he unzippers her dress. “Is the whole of our glory.”

As I walked into the foyer, Margaret and Mother were reclined among the pillows. I wondered if Mother knew yet. I wondered if any of them did.

“I always wanted a boy for my second,” I overheard Mother say from where she and Margaret sat in front of the window. The old blind man drove by in his yellow Volvo on his way home from the funeral.

“Really?” Margaret said. “What would you have done with a boy?”

“I’d have named him Samson,” Mother said.

“Everything is big,” Margaret said.

“My big bruiser,” said Mother. “He was going to pull us out of this mess.”

“Go Samson,” Margaret said.

“Go Uncle Sam,” Mother said.

They chuckled nervously then. That was a good one. I chuckled a little too from my place in the doorway where I had stopped to watch them.

“If you’re going to eavesdrop, why don’t you just join?” Mother said.

I took my place on the cushion where they’d made room.

Margaret’s withered breath was thick on my shoulder.

“What do you see?” Mother said nodding out the window at Otto’s place across the street.

A flock of small black birds flew over Otto’s barn. The wind upset the electric wire where they’d been roosting. I wanted to tell her how their bodies cut through the sky like the mouth of a scissor when it got wide, peeling back the clouds and letting loose the flap. I wanted to tell her about getting the infection out. How the bottom of a hoof turns up everything. “Sometimes it comes out natural,” the vet had said. I wanted to tell her about the hole in His Helene’s stomach, how her kidneys let loose their blood. “What she has doesn’t jump,” Otto had said. “Smell her.”

I wanted to tell her about K or Kat or Katherine. All the boys she’d fucked in her bed. How I’d looked at the napkin in the basket next to the toilet that night where she’d showed it to me, where she’d pointed it out, and wondered how the blood would well up if you wrung it. Was there that much of the kill in our bleeder? I’d had dreams where I put my finger on someone’s arm and pressed down a little and their skin broke open into some fetid wound. The skin wouldn’t heal. The sun wouldn’t let off. Even the flies were sick. They flew through the air waiting to welt you. To deliver their happiness. “It means you give someone something happy,” Mother had said. She’d said, “Here’s my thrill. It might be instructive.”

My parents once said you could change your personality. Mother and Father were sitting at the kitchen table. They were leaning towards me in their chairs. They were trying to get their teeth into something.

It was right after Mother returned from Schenectady and her almost perfect man in the diner who made his one film.

“You don’t have to end up that way,” they’d said. They were talking about Sterling and the factory. And then they were talking about talking and how little of it I had done lately.

“Blank face,” they’d said.

They’d said, “Act your age. Let loose. Go crazy. There’s enough time.”

Father’d said, “Don’t end up like me.”

I thought he’d ended up fine. I thought he’d ended up a little silent. I thought so what if I end up a little silent too. So what if sometimes when people were talking I let my eyes wander. What if sometimes Mother wished Father’s heart would leap a little more out of his chest? So what if the rest of the world came in and drowned them out. There were so many words to know. I sat there watching their lips. I wondered if they had night-lights in the back of their throats. Was there enough light in the hall at night to get up to pee? Had I turned off the faucet in the paddock where I’d let the water into the trough? If I prayed enough maybe Granny Olga’s mechanic heart would give her enough kick to go skating on the reservoir again. “Untouchable combination,” the neighbor had said. He’d said there was a possibility of a fourth cut that fall. Mother’d said, “No one cares whether he keeps his heels on the ground or goes flying.”