Habeas Corpus, Installment 7
Posted on January 4, 2008
Filed Under marriage, Habeas corpus |
Another installment for your New Year’s perusal. I’m working on it, really I am…
So it went on like that, me and James, well into the chill days of October. Right up until my car was vandalized. At first Chad was fiercely protective, admirably concerned when he discovered the car covered in graffiti.
“Who would do this? We should call the police,” he said. And I confessed, told him about James to save him the embarrassment. I had expected the confession would feel like a great unburdening but instead I scrambled and begged, trying to explain something I myself didn’t understand. The car was the least of it, just the inevitable response of a scorned wife - Bridgette, in her Citizens for Humanity jeans, toting a can of spray paint and a temper.
Chad said very little after my admission. His silence was freakish and unbearable. Say something, anything, I felt like shrieking but it seemed too cinematic. So I tried to stay out of his way, sat hugging my knees, fading into my side of the futon as he attempted to pace the cramped confines of our tiny space. I watched him hopefully, convinced that he might climb into his VW bus and barrel down North Hollow Road to go knocking at James’ door.
I had imagined the confrontation many times. Chad pounding the wall behind James’ head, his fist going clean through the cabin’s wood paneling.
Instead, Chad carefully lifted his framed collection of rock icons from the wall, climbed into his VW bus, wedged a fire extinguisher between his thighs to douse periodic engine fires and began the long drive West.
Somehow that ending seems aptly scripted, just a drop in the proverbial bucket when I think about the other stuff that went down those five months I stayed in Grafton. Chad’s leaving was really just a side-show considering there was one night in particular, one night when Grafton went from being a smallish, stubbornly same village nestled in among the Green mountains, a town that few had ever heard of, to being a place where a young girl’s death changed everything everyone had ever felt about one another. A place where chronic optimism and small observations about the weather gave way to distrust, suspicion and a palpable uneasiness.
I’d like to say that I had nothing to do with the events of that July night but I’d be lying. And it started when my father pulled up in his Holiday Rambler needing gas, his pockets bare empty.
“Well if it isn’t Claire Bear and her big dog Goliath,” he had shouted stepping down from the motor home he had bought for his and my mother’s 20th wedding anniversary. No flowers or a necklace, no weekend at the beach. He’d spent every dime of Mom’s savings, small change and dollar bills squirreled away, cash she’d had been scraping together for two and half decades, parental grudge money, the pitiful wages she earned answering phones and filing and performing menial tasks for which she was over qualified.
With its three burner stove, queen sized island bed, oak cabinetry and decorative valances, that Rambler was my father’s prize.
“Isn’t she a beauty,” he declared coming up the front steps quick and slamming through the door of the double wide to get clear of Goliath who had a good read on people and was hell bent on tearing the ass out of his khaki’s. “I’ve got to piss like a race horse, Claire Bear. Where’s the john?”
As far as I know, my mother has never stepped foot in that Rambler.
My father spent a few hours telling me about his latest fishing spot on the Connecticut River. He said he spent days hauling in White Perch the size of house cats.
“You should’ve seen them all. Fat fish just waiting to jump on the hook,” he said, leaning back in the plastic patio chair until the back legs flexed with the weight and bluster of him. I suspected that he had watched a few skilled fishermen do the hauling while he attended to the forty of Evan Williams he had brought along.
“Where’s Chad? Leaving my Claire Bear alone all summer,” he asked and I explained the nature of Chad’s position as a wilderness guide while silently marveling that he found Chad’s absences reprehensible while his own chronic failures as a companion, his own leaving without pause or consideration, went un-dissected.
Of course I didn’t mention James. There are certain things a girl doesn’t discuss with her father and, well, when it comes to my father, those things are just about everything beyond the Red Sox, game fishing and that Rambler.
After he finished the six pack of Miller Genuine Draft that was in the fridge, carrying each can out to the concrete pad that served as patio and entertainment space behind the double wide, absorbing the sweet smell of cow pasture at dusk and pitching the empties into a garbage bag I had hung on an old hanger meant to hold a pot of petunias or trailing vinca just to the left of the backdoor, he heaved his large frame, all height and no girth, still handsome but for the pronounced ravages of living hard with the bottle, and went down street to Tyler’s to finish telling his fishing tales to someone else for the rest of the night. I’ve wondered everyday since then if maybe that someone was Lacy Robinson before she walked home along Rte. 100 and wound up dead.
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