Mister Gibson

The wall was glass and massive, perhaps forty feet tall and eighty feet long. During the day she had been able to see the jagged crags of the mountains rising from the flat and grassy plain and soaring to nearly nine thousand feet. But it was three a.m. and a moonless night, several hours after she had arrived, and the wall of glass had become a black mirror in which she could see her own reflection eerily illuminated under the harsh and unforgiving fluorescent lighting, as she sat alone on a hard plastic seat among a crowd of plastic seats in an otherwise empty airport lounge. She wore a yellow dress and pearls, and crossed her legs neatly, and looked fine for her age in spite of some small and barely noticeable wrinkles, and had in her lap an old but well cared for tote, made of a deep brown leather and purple paisley-patterned canvas.

She was on her bike on a long and narrow and exactingly straight road, which cut through the countryside until it vanished on the distant horizon. The road was bordered by deep ditches spiked with cattails, from which always angry red-winged blackbirds would spring, and launch aerial assaults on any who dared trespass on the vile winged-rat’s little fiefdoms. And she was indeed trespassing, for she had never ridden this far from home. Past the ditches were miles and miles of fields filled with a multitude of greens, of corn and wheat and soybeans and clover, broken by a patchwork of trees, oaks and maples and beeches, and an occasional pine. The sky was almost white with the smallest hint of blue, and very typical for early June.

Yesterday had been her high school graduation, and her mother had insisted she attend for the memories that would last a lifetime, but the girl knew it was because her mother was worried about the opinions of the neighbors. So she and twenty-seven others had trod across the temporary stage that had been hastily erected in the center of the football field at the high school that was within sight of the home she had lived in for all of her nearly eighteen years, and shook the moist and mushy hand of Principal Moore. Memories.

Today she was miles away. Physically. Stopped on her bike in the middle of the narrow gravel road. But as she watched the red-winged blackbirds as they swooped and swirled and screeched about her, she was reminded of the graduation caps after they were hurled into the sky and then tumbled back to earth.

“You gonna ride forever?”

A boy, really a young man, reclined in the tall grass on the other side of the ditch next to the soybean field, eating something and drinking water out of a large, clear, chipped jar. He was shirtless and sweaty and his jeans and boots were dirty. On the ground next to him, and equally relaxed, was a hoe. He had spent the morning walking the long rows of beans and had cleared most of the field of weeds, and the stray and lonely corn stalk, a remnant of last season’s crop.

“I might,” she said, and nodded in the direction she had been riding. “What’s out there?”

“More a the same. Sometimes a house or a dog.” He said.

“I guess I’ll stop, then.” She said.

“Don’t stop on account a me.” He said. “Could be ridin’s all what you need.”

It was summer and she spent much of her time hiding out in her usual spot under the bed. It was an antique, which in her teenage brain meant “uncomfortable.” She believed it to be beautiful, with its gnarled wood and ornate carvings and its history that one must have heard about to believe, but the mattress was lumpy and the bed was too short to lay in, even diagonally, and she had found that history was not the equivalent of a good night’s sleep. Its sole redeeming quality was the two and one-half feet of clearance from the floor to the slats. This was where she would sleep and this was where she would read and this was where she was when she heard her little brother scream. Now she was mostly asleep so it didn’t register outside of her dreaming, until he poked his head under the bed and howled, “Ted is dead, Ted is dead!” That woke her up. 

Ted was her stepfather, and he was on his back in the flower garden off the stone path. The flowers were in full bloom, and danced in the gentle breeze, bright reds and purples and yellows and oranges. Cicadas hummed and birds sang, and the afternoon sun softly painted the porcelain statue of St. Francis of Assisi. And there lay Ted. And he was not dead. Her mother knelt next to him and cradled his head and he watched her with clear blue eyes, and the girl could tell that Ted knew he would never walk into their house again.

Sirens wailed in the distance and soon an ambulance, fire truck, and police cars arrived and parked scattershot on the lush green lawn, and the paramedics rushed in, and stomped and scattered the flowers as they tried to save his life. He was given oxygen and nitroglycerin and lifted expertly onto a gurney, and rolled hurriedly to the waiting ambulance. She rode in the ambulance with her mother, who gently rubbed Ted’s hand in hers, and stroked his forehead. His eyes were closed by then. He was not dead yet, not officially, but as the medics fussed over him, she could see they were just going through the motions, until a doctor could make the call. She turned and looked out of the back window at the tall green fields of corn and the blue sky and listened to the muffled sound of the sirens and the steady drone of the tires on the road. 

Mr. Holdstedt, the funeral director, was tactfully sympathetic and antiseptic in his gray suit, though, she admitted to herself, he was pleasant enough. She was at the funeral home with her mother to view Ted’s body. He had wanted a closed casket and she wanted to see him one last time before the funeral the following day. Her mother needed her for support. This would be the first time the girl had seen a dead person. She needed her mother for support. Mr. Holdstedt led them through wood-paneled halls and tastefully decorated rooms filled with a lavender scent, to the back of the home.

He opened a door to stainless steel brightness. It appeared to be a doctor’s office. It wasn’t, of course. It was filled with gauze and wraps and shiny instruments, and the smell of rubbing alcohol and something else, something sweeter with more depth, she would find out much later to have been formaldehyde. In the center of the room was Ted, on a metal table covered with a sheet to his navel. The Y-incision from the autopsy was sewn shut with thick, black, angry sutures, but Ted looked peaceful. She and her mother and Mr. Holdstedt stood there for what seemed to her a lifetime. Ironic, she thought, since Ted was dead, but accurate nonetheless. There was no sound apart from a whispering air-conditioner and a ticking clock. 

The day of the funeral, she woke to sunshine and went downstairs for a breakfast of cinnamon toast and oatmeal and a cold glass of orange juice. Her little brother had his usual bowl of Cheerios and her mother sat across the table with a cup of coffee, and read the newspaper. The girl looked out the kitchen window toward the flower garden, but her view was obscured by an evergreen. After a steaming, hot shower, she put on a new dress, black, purchased the day before, following the viewing. She had outgrown her dress from the previous year’s wedding of her cousin. But that dress had been yellow and even if it had been her size, her mother said the color would be inappropriate for a funeral. Still, it was summer, she thought, and the day felt to her more colorful than not. Downstairs, her mother and little brother waited, she in a dark blue, almost black dress, and he in his Sunday best. Both looked nice in spite of the occasion. 

Ted’s casket was long and metal and gray, surrounded by flowers. Always flowers, she thought. On top was a gold-framed picture of him smiling in his Army uniform. The girl stood with her mother and little brother and Uncle Ray as people filed past. After the brief ceremony a group of elderly pallbearers in Army garb and white gloves marched in to carry Ted. On the steps outside, the small old man in the middle stumbled and the men almost dropped the casket, and she smiled discretely. Once the withered pallbearers had their cargo safely inside the hearse, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. The family climbed into the funeral limousine for the ride to the cemetery several miles out of town. She watched as Uncle Ray removed a flask from his jacket and took a sip. He glanced at her mother and they burst into laughter, so contagious was the laughter that the girl and her little brother were soon infected. Tears streamed down their faces, and the driver smiled. The girl admitted to herself that she had not laughed so hard in a long time. It felt good. Her mother watched her laugh and in the quiet that followed, her mother said to her, “Ted is dead. It’s all over now.” But that was a lie, and they both knew it.

They came to a small cemetery enveloped by soybean fields. Most of the headstones were old and worn, from the eighteen hundreds. She imagined that nowadays most people must get buried somewhere else. A tall grain silo, possibly fifty feet high, with a red and white checkerboard pattern painted on the top third, rose just off the eastern edge of the grounds, like a tombstone for a giant. The weather was so beautiful that on any other day, when not hidden under her bed, she would have been off wandering the countryside. She thought of that as the preacher rambled on. Eventually it was over, and Ted was slowly lowered into the ground. They threw in handfuls of dirt and returned to the cars and rode quietly back to town. The girl leaned her head against the window and stared at the blurred landscape. 

In the garden, the flowers were no more. What the paramedics didn’t destroy that day had succumbed to the frost. She stood at the spot where Ted had fallen and gazed out across the lawn and the empty fields to the woods, mostly barren of leaves. The birds were gone and the cicadas were gone and the sky was gray. There was a chill in the air and she could smell snow. Winter was coming. She took a deep breath and walked inside, and went to lie under her bed.

She laid her bike in the tall grass next to his hoe and cracked glass jar, and he led her several rows into the hip-high soybeans and she noticed that they were a deep, deep green and that the soil was a rich coffee, and as they lay between the plants on the damp and musty soil, and she watched his blue eyes as he smiled up at her, she realized this wasn’t making love, of which she had read so intensely in Vogue and Cosmo and Seventeen. It bore no resemblance to her stepfather, sweet Ted, and his grubby little dirty finger-nailed assaults, which began when she was six, began shortly after he had married her mother and moved into their house, and ended when she was thirteen, on the morning when he died so peacefully among the bright reds and purples and yellows and oranges of the flowers in the garden, when he fucked her in his spider-infested and dusty workshop next to the house, under her bedroom window.

No. This was the rutting of animals. This was National Geographic. This was nature. It was wild and animalistic, and she and the young man ravaged the remainder of the summer.

Before she left for college, he smiled as she opened the gift he had so inexpertly wrapped. It was a tote and it smelled like a new pair of very expensive shoes from Neiman-Marcus, made of a shiny, deep brown leather and purple paisley-patterned canvas. He loved paisley, particularly purple paisley, and said it would compliment the yellow she was so fond of wearing. She surprised him the following day with a pair of silk paisley boxer shorts. Purple. She laughed as he strutted around in them in his bedroom, like he was a New York City model.

She sat on a high stool in a boisterous bar of clinking glass and the hum of conversation, and of a bad local band butchering cover songs. The place smelled of stale beer and sweat and vomit and urine, which wafted from the bathrooms that never were cleaned. It was a small and dimly lit college dive bar, five blocks from her apartment. She watched a boy she hadn’t seen before, who reminded her of the young man of summer, her man of paisley. She stood and walked to him, and left her drink on the bar. He turned as she approached him, alerted by his friends, and jabbed out his hand and had begun to introduce himself, when she swiftly interrupted him.

“Stop.” She said.

Her apartment was dark and cold, it was winter, and her bed was piled with quilts, and the faint light from the street cast her bedroom in a sickly orange glow, which made them appear as zombies, as walking corpses. She didn’t mind. It was better than the honesty of a well-lighted place. He pulled his clothes off with more rapidity than if he had been on fire, then proceeded with hers, but his fumbling fingers seemed to have forgotten how to operate buttons and zippers, and seemed to have had no knowledge of intricacies of the delicate removal of a bra. She assisted. Once naked she opened the top drawer of a dresser, partially hidden in the shadows of a corner, then turned to the boy.

“Wear this.” She said.

She walked to the bed and climbed in under the thick warmth of her quilts onto her soft mattress, while he paced in the orange darkness, and she reached toward a spot on the wall, darker than its surroundings, and suddenly the room blazed with the searing light from bare bulb in the ceiling, and he smiled under the harsh brightness of interrogation, and he wore a pair of fine silk paisley boxer shorts. Purple. She told him to pace and spin and pose, then she snapped off the light and the room was black and they had sex and it was over and she lay quietly staring at the ceiling and he remained still.

“I had a boyfriend. Last summer.” She said. “He killed himself. Committed suicide.”

She listened to his footsteps as they crunched in the cold snow and watched his breath as it frosted the air under the street light, as he made his way hurriedly from her apartment, and he rounded the corner and was lost from sight.

She had been in college for nearly a month when his mother had called. She had been in a hot shower and the small apartment was full of steam and it smelled of scented soap and shampoo, and as she raced to phone she was eager to hear his voice. They hadn’t spoken in seventeen days. He had been busy. But it was his mother’s voice she heard, and she could tell immediately that something was wrong.

He had taken his .22 caliber rifle, his rabbit gun, and stood in the living room of his parent’s house, where he had still lived. He was next to the jagged, hand-carved stone fireplace, when he placed the barrel of the small rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger and a bullet ripped into his brain. He did not say why, now could not say why, and had not left a note.

She went with his mother to the Holdstedt Funeral Home to see his body. He was in the back room of stainless steel brightness and glass and gauze, and it smelled the same as she remembered, of rubbing alcohol and something else, something sweeter with more depth, she would later learn from Mr. Holdstedt to have been formaldehyde.

Her boyfriend was naked and dead on the metal autopsy table. He looked as if he had been beaten severely by something heavy and jagged, which had smashed his nose and shattered his teeth, and gouged deep gashes in his scalp and face, arms and body, peppering his body with monstrous wounds. He had been cleaned but no attempts at repair had been made, and none would be made. His parents were ashamed, his father could not even utter the boy’s name, and his would be a closed casket and a small funeral, at a cemetery several miles outside of town, in the midst of fields and flanked by a tall grain silo with a red and white checkerboard pattern on its top third, lonely and abandoned.

In spring, under the warm amber light of a late afternoon sun, farm boys would cruise slowly down the narrow roads in an old, beat-up pickup with a giant “CHEVROLET” stamped into the sheet metal tailgate, laughing and drinking beer with their rabbit guns hanging out the windows. Some would ride in the back of the truck, and with all the rifles it looked like an angry and hairy mole on an old and bitter woman’s chin. They would patrol the fields of young corn and wheat and soybeans and clover, hunting rabbits, which multiplied furiously to dine on the vastly increased supply of food. The boys would shoot the rabbits in the head, and often, not always, but often, the rabbits would jump as if jolted by electricity, as if the main spring of their life had sprung, and their bodies would bounce and flop madly, until the shredded synapses in their brains quieted, and the boys would whoop in complete satisfaction.

She helped his mother clean the living room the next day, and she noticed that the spiral blood stains on the walls reminded her of paisley, and she thought that he would like that. They scrubbed and scrubbed and emptied buckets of dirty pink water, but were not able to completely rid the room of its stains of guilt. In the end the carpet was replaced and the walls repainted, and the living room was able to mask the death and appeared normal.