her hands on the nights she must work. He must stay beyond the window.
12
Mike ran down Cornelia, beneath the Ravenswood Metro tracks, and watched blond men wind Christmas lights around their town house fences. They laced the cords with garlands. The night was also good for running, humid cool between the rains. The men weren’t smiling, and they strung the lights like soldiers did concertina wire while wives watched from windows, so he turned back toward the lake, relieved he could add three more miles without having to explain the extra time later. He started to look back, but stopped himself, knowing the men would remind him how he didn’t miss the riddle-life he and Susan led after the abortion.
But Mike never let himself think this very long. His pace would slow and he’d not sleep later because his body felt cheated and awake. He’d start missing her toes against his ankle, and soon he’d remember that he lay beside her many nights wishing her a random lover. In the beginning, he’d tell himself, he was sure neither one of them did that. Now, there were places he was learning not to go.
The wind quit off the lake and he was sweating in a long-sleeved T-shirt. He ran in the street, but stayed close to the parked cars. There were more men stringing Christmas lights and garlands, disgusted men, and they all worked like their neighbors. He cut down the first alley, hoping to keep his mind on the streetlit puddles, not the decorators, but it was too late. He’d already started remembering the last year of his marriage.
The medical examiner told Mike that Susan hadn’t felt a thing. The killer swung the baseball bat and she just died. It was painless for her, he said.
She was gone six months now. No cops asked Mike if he missed her. They looked at him in the precinct’s locker room like they would a guy at the YMCA. There was little to gain by knowing the wagon driver.
He kept quiet and spent his days driving domestic batterers and car thieves to bond court, letting the silence of her death drone with the arrestee’s heel knocks against the wagon walls. He’d sometimes forget by looking at blond women in Volvo wagons, and imagining himself feeling as convinced about things as them, but Susan always returned behind his eyes.
Mike hated knowing she died when they were straining to see love in each other, and his mother-in-law reminded him with a Christmas card. Thinking of Suzy, she wrote. He smelled her Benson and Hedges on the envelope and remembered how mother and daughter sat at the kitchen table and imagined the ways they’d die. Susan went in a motorcycle accident on a warm country night, but her mother saw herself all alone in a room. He also hated knowing his wife blinked her eyes in a rainy alley and never opened them. Her last sight may have been a car lot fence, he thought.
At University of Illinois, where Mike studied on the GI Bill, he first saw Susan walking through yellow leaves, Ophelia in a black skirt, her eyes brown like Illinois rivers. She sat on bar stools beside him and listened to his Fort Bragg stories, drinking Glenlivet, while he told her about how in 1988 a C-130 full of paratroopers exploded on a demonstration jump for their families, and how he and Dilger manned a drop zone water point and watched the bodies fall on fire with the wives and the little sisters. Later, Dilger and he never talked about it; they just got drunk off-post and found hookers in a tobacco field house trailer; and neither Dilger nor he could look at each other right forever after. They’d seen themselves on fire.
Mike wanted to make the rich pay. Somehow, their young never fall and burn.
Susan understood. Back in her Illinois town, her father, a short sheet-metal worker with a squirrel head, beat her when he was laid off longer than a week. He fought in Korea with the USMC, freezing in the Chosin Reservoir with Chesty Puller, and never got over having survived a forgotten war. He claimed nobody knew how
12
Mike ran down Cornelia, beneath the Ravenswood Metro tracks, and watched blond men wind Christmas lights around their town house fences. They laced the cords with garlands. The night was also good for running, humid cool between the rains. The men weren’t smiling, and they strung the lights like soldiers did concertina wire while wives watched from windows, so he turned back toward the lake, relieved he could add three more miles without having to explain the extra time later. He started to look back, but stopped himself, knowing the men would remind him how he didn’t miss the riddle-life he and Susan led after the abortion.
But Mike never let himself think this very long. His pace would slow and he’d not sleep later because his body felt cheated and awake. He’d start missing her toes against his ankle, and soon he’d remember that he lay beside her many nights wishing her a random lover. In the beginning, he’d tell himself, he was sure neither one of them did that. Now, there were places he was learning not to go.
The wind quit off the lake and he was sweating in a long-sleeved T-shirt. He ran in the street, but stayed close to the parked cars. There were more men stringing Christmas lights and garlands, disgusted men, and they all worked like their neighbors. He cut down the first alley, hoping to keep his mind on the streetlit puddles, not the decorators, but it was too late. He’d already started remembering the last year of his marriage.
The medical examiner told Mike that Susan hadn’t felt a thing. The killer swung the baseball bat and she just died. It was painless for her, he said.
She was gone six months now. No cops asked Mike if he missed her. They looked at him in the precinct’s locker room like they would a guy at the YMCA. There was little to gain by knowing the wagon driver.
He kept quiet and spent his days driving domestic batterers and car thieves to bond court, letting the silence of her death drone with the arrestee’s heel knocks against the wagon walls. He’d sometimes forget by looking at blond women in Volvo wagons, and imagining himself feeling as convinced about things as them, but Susan always returned behind his eyes.
Mike hated knowing she died when they were straining to see love in each other, and his mother-in-law reminded him with a Christmas card. Thinking of Suzy, she wrote. He smelled her Benson and Hedges on the envelope and remembered how mother and daughter sat at the kitchen table and imagined the ways they’d die. Susan went in a motorcycle accident on a warm country night, but her mother saw herself all alone in a room. He also hated knowing his wife blinked her eyes in a rainy alley and never opened them. Her last sight may have been a car lot fence, he thought.
At University of Illinois, where Mike studied on the GI Bill, he first saw Susan walking through yellow leaves, Ophelia in a black skirt, her eyes brown like Illinois rivers. She sat on bar stools beside him and listened to his Fort Bragg stories, drinking Glenlivet, while he told her about how in 1988 a C-130 full of paratroopers exploded on a demonstration jump for their families, and how he and Dilger manned a drop zone water point and watched the bodies fall on fire with the wives and the little sisters. Later, Dilger and he never talked about it; they just got drunk off-post and found hookers in a tobacco field house trailer; and neither Dilger nor he could look at each other right forever after. They’d seen themselves on fire.
Mike wanted to make the rich pay. Somehow, their young never fall and burn.
Susan understood. Back in her Illinois town, her father, a short sheet-metal worker with a squirrel head, beat her when he was laid off longer than a week. He fought in Korea with the USMC, freezing in the Chosin Reservoir with Chesty Puller, and never got over having survived a forgotten war. He claimed nobody knew how
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