Suddenly, with both her parents gone she felt like an orphan and missed her grandparents in London. When she had called her grandmother about her mother’s death Catherine kept sobbing and whispering, “It’s not fair.” Of course it wasn’t. It had been more than a decade since she had turned to her parents for anything. So many people she knew carried their parents around in emotional backpacks. Her own story was largely unknown to anyone but herself and Robert in prison whose sentence had recently been lengthened for beating up a guard. This was plainly the curse of the father. She herself felt no curse and had often thought that her early trip to England to see her grandparents had successfully detoxified her life. She would fly over this summer so they could see their great-grandson and she would also visit Tim’s family. They were getting very old and had just lost their only child. She planned to take Lola with her to help with the baby.
Thoughts of Robert reminded Catherine of another childhood experience that had started as a truly horrid summer evening. Her father had been drunk and raged about stock market losses which he blamed on the “Jews.” Catherine and her mother didn’t believe anything he said and ignored him so he fixed his anger on Robert. They had been eating at the picnic table in the backyard and her father had fallen down twice trying to chase Robert. Robert was much faster which further enraged him. He demanded Robert stop so he could beat him but Robert cut through the hedge and was headed downtown. After dark he came home and thought it was safe because peeking through the window he saw his father was asleep on the den couch. Robert came up to Catherine’s room and said that he was running away at dawn. She said she wanted to go along. She got up and made several peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to take. Robert filled his Boy Scout canteen, packed a day pack with warm clothes, and rolled up his summer sleeping bag. After midnight Father awoke, went to Robert’s room, and beat him. Catherine’s mother tried to stop him and he pushed her to the floor. Robert’s lip was cut from a punch and there was blood. Catherine went into the room and screamed, “Daddy, stop that!” The scream was so penetrating that he stopped and walked out the door. That cinched their departure.
They left in the first scant light of dawn walking north to a big woods to conceal themselves if they were being followed. By midday they were lost despite Robert’s Scout compass. They were headed toward Martinsdale where Robert had a friend. Their feet hurt and they spread the sleeping bag and slept a couple of hours in the heat of the afternoon. They hogged their sandwiches but were still hungry. Robert judged that they were too high in the foothills of the Crazy Mountains. They continued to walk, refilling their canteen in a safe-looking creek. They both knew the danger of giardia from animal waste in the water. Late in the afternoon she was sure she recognized parts of the landscape. She mentioned this to Robert who became angry realizing that like many lost people they had walked in a big circle and they were now about two miles behind Grandpa’s farm. They had circled all the way back to the southeast.
When they reached the pond Robert built a small fire and they heated a can of baked beans, all that was left of their food supplies. She ordinarily didn’t like them but on this evening they were delicious. They snuggled up in the sleeping bag near the fire where Grandpa found them at dawn.
Catherine remembered this fondly twenty-five years after the fact. Mother drove out to pick them up. She had a black eye. Dad had pounded on her until she called the deputy who hauled Dad off to the jail in Livingston where he would be spending a second night. He never forgave her for the public shame of this.
Catherine tilted the urn to the side and dumped out the rest of the ashes into the water. Her finger touched what was obviously a piece of vertebra and she felt a chill. She felt oddly serene sitting there until she thought that she must go back to the house and feed Tim his lunch. Hud was asleep, tired from his night of wandering. She would have Clyde build a pen to contain him at night when he wasn’t sleeping inside because of bad weather. He was having a pretty good life with her and little Tim and now Lola who was obsessed with sweeping the floors. Hud already fawned over Lola and Catherine remembered the man’s joke about interspecies love as she passed the chicken yard. There she had sat in the second grade, making notes outside the henhouse while sitting on the milk stool.
The Case of the Howling Buddhas
From his upstairs bedroom at 6:00 a.m. Sunderson could dimly hear his cell phone in his jacket pocket down in his study. It was more irritating then getting up to pee on a cold night. He was proud of the way his prostate was holding up at his age, also of his ears and their acute hearing in an era when many had destroyed their hearing with loud rock music.
The phone calls had been nearly continuous since 5:00 a.m. and he wanted to jerk the caller’s teeth out with his Griplock pliers. He normally arose shortly before 7:00 a.m., flipped the coffee machine on, and went to his study, pulled out a book from the shelf that blocked the window, and gazed at his neighbor Delphine doing her nude yoga. She knew he was watching and was enthused because it helped what she called “sexual repression.” Last Thursday she had masturbated in plain view, then called to say that her husband had gone to East Lansing and they could enjoy themselves. He hustled over to the back door in his old terry-cloth robe and she met him in her bare skin smelling of Camay soap.
Sunderson was ready early with his coffee and had pulled a study titled The Jongleurs for his view. She was flat on her tummy in a position called Snake’s Pose, one of his favorites as it showed her sumptuous ass and the concealed goodies. In the year or so they had been playing the game her husband had showed up only once to make love to her. Sunderson had quickly replaced the book. He didn’t want to start the day seeing a nude man, always a laughable sight. Her husband was a stiff who taught American literature at the local university. She taught anthropology and was tremendously popular with students while these same students ignored a course of her husband’s devising called “Faulkner vs. Hemingway,” as if the two writers had been in a foot- race. He had told Sunderson that he had hoped to become the department chairman and perhaps a dean someday. He was without apparent personality and she had told Sunderson that he had some money on the side which afforded them the opportunity to spend their summers in Europe. That was why she married him. The money enabled her to visit archaeological digs in southern France and Spain. Her academic career was limited because she had never finished her Ph.D. dissertation despite working on it for fourteen years. Her excuse was that her mentor professor at Cornell had died and no one else was capable of dealing with her complicated writing.
Sunderson had noted that his voyeurism lacked the punch it had when he was watching his young ex-neighbor Mona, whom his ex-wife had later adopted, in her nude calisthenics. His neighbor shifted into the Royal Flux with her legs flopped up and over her head. He actually yawned rather than feeling his worm turn. He was not prone to fully accepting aging though he knew very well that it was what caused his sexuality to be less than rampant.
The other day on a warm afternoon he was sitting on the front porch reading the paper, the Mining Gazette, when Barbara, a lovely girl from down the street, broke her bicycle chain in front of his house. He fetched his pliers and small hammer from the kitchen and fixed it, removing a link. It was too loose anyway. Meanwhile she squatted in front of him with her weight on her haunches. It was simply electrifying with her bare lovely legs under the blue skirt leading upward to the white undies with a slight indication of pubic hair. He was naturally engrossed and tarried at the simple job. She had done well in the state high school gymnastics championships but was lithe rather than short and muscular like most female gymnasts.