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About the Author:
Robert McKean’s
The Catalog of Crooked Thoughts was first prize winner of the
Methodist University Longleaf Press Novel Contest and was published in
2017. The novel was also named a Finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer
Award. A recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant for his
fiction, McKean has been nominated three times for Pushcart Prizes and
once for Best of the Net. He has published extensively in journals such
as The Kenyon Review, The Chicago Review, Armchair/Shotgun, 34th
Parallel, Kestrel, Crack the Spine, and Border Crossing. |
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Excerpt from Book:
However Innocently, However
Unwittingly
Spring 2009
Heady things, humble things.
Her father’s pet phrase, something the old man would mutter as he went
about his housebound days in frayed slippers, whether he was parsing
Virgil or cleaning the trap beneath a bathroom sink. It was, in fact,
her father’s coming-apart-at-the-seams slippers that Maddy was thinking
about on her way to check in on him when, at the left-hand turn across
traffic onto Linden Street at the T&V Supermarket she always dreaded
making, she lost her nerve and caused the accident . . . well, the first
accident.
“That’s why I’m here,” the police inspector who turned up at her house
that evening explained. “The officers, you told them it was your fault?
No disrespect . . .”—he consulted a tablet he withdrew from a
pocket—“Mrs. Schoolcraft, but how do you figure you was to blame?”
The inspector, a tall, solemn black man, wore a light-colored suit as
stiff as cardboard. Since he was not in uniform, he’d shown her a badge
pinned to the inside of his wallet. Not that she could really see it.
Why do officials display their IDs so quickly you never have time to
read them?
“Ma’am?”
“I’m sorry.” To steady her thoughts Maddy focused on the damp spots on
his sleeve. “I was thinking of my father, I’ve been worried about him,
and as I was inching forward to make the left there—you know, at the
T&V?—I suddenly changed my mind. That’s when he bumped me. I couldn’t
see—because of the rain—and I just stopped. I’m sorry, I’m not a very
assertive driver.”
The loose skin of the inspector’s forehead drew up in pleats.
“Still don’t get it. We got all sorts of laws against driving
recklessly, but not against driving cautiously.” His voice took on a
lecturing tone. “It’s for the motorist behind, ma’am, to have control of
his vehicle. The boy did hit
you, that is correct, is it not? The woman behind him”—he consulted his
tablet again—“said he got out of his car, looked at
your car, then got back in his
and swung around you to your right? Now, that’s how it happened, am I
not correct on that?”
She was forty-one, divorced. She worked at the community
college as an administrator. People did not always regard her as a
serious person, and here she was taking up the valuable time of the
police. “I’m sorry,” Maddy recanted, “I shouldn’t have said that. Yes,
he hit me, I mean it was only a tap, I’m sure there wouldn’t have been
anything for him to see back there, but he did exactly as you say. Is he
going to be all right? He didn’t die, did he? What about the truck
driver?”
The vexing question of her guilt dispensed with, the inspector
permitted himself to relax; his shoulders lowered, the muscles of his
long face slackened. He stowed away his tablet. “The fellow in the
truck? Oh, plenty shook up and
he’s lost his livelihood—that was his rig, he’s a private contractor—but
at least he walked away from it. As for the boy, it’s pretty grim, but
I’ve been told he’s got a chance. And let me tell you, if he does pull
through, he’s going to be the luckiest kid in the world. By all rights
he should be laid out tonight on a slab in the basement of Butterworth’s
Mortuary. He was thrown out on the road and got his face slashed, so
that message he’ll carry with
him the rest of his life. But you, are
you going to be all right, ma’am?”
No, not really.
After the solicitous inspector left, Maddy made the ground beef and
macaroni casserole that her son, home soon from his track meet, would
wolf down in gulping mouthfuls. As she worked, she tried to erase from
her imagination the scene before the T&V. She had not gone on to her
father’s. So violently was she shaking that, after the police had taken
her puzzling statement and dismissed her, she could manage only to steer
her car up Sutton Post Road and home—shaking that had gone on in the
gray silence of her bedroom. The smeary windshield, her old Honda with
its all-but useless wipers, the relentless procession of oncoming
cars—how selfishly, how
unforgivingly, people drive nowadays—her lurch forward and panic,
jamming her brakes and then the slight jolt from behind. The young man
leapt from his car in the pouring rain. He was shouting, revolving his
arms. She heard his obscenities even before she rolled down her window
to apologize. An apology he had no intention of accepting. As she turned
to fetch her papers from the glove compartment, he screamed at
her—called her a cunt! a word
she hadn’t heard in thirty years—and stalked back to his car. To fetch
his papers? No, as Maddy watched in disbelief and went on re-watching in the
theater of her mind, his car inexplicably spurted past hers onto the
shoulder on her right, then swerved recklessly—and
yes, that word of the
inspector’s was the proper one—across her front: taking his left anyway,
the hell with her.
Without looking.
Her husband, former husband, an engineer for the power company, would no
doubt have dispassionately explained the dynamics of such an event, two
bodies traveling at great velocities attempting to occupy the same space
at the same time, one a low-slung red sports car with spoked rims that
flashed in the rain, the other a truck, one of those massive dump trucks
you’ve begun to see more and more often. But no mathematical formulation
of forces and counterforces on Dale’s whiteboard could mitigate the
shock of that impact, the enormous truck in a deafening shriek of
rending metal and exploding glass crumpling and sweeping away, now on
her left, the much dwarfed car.
The truck, it occurred to her, could have driven the boy’s car into
hers.
But it was her son who put a period to this disconcerting, jarring day.
Sliding his gangly body with its oversized clownish feet into his chair
at the dining room table, Ethan said, “There was an incredible wreck
today—Terry Boswell.”
“You know who it was? The boy?”
“Mom,” Ethan spoke in impatience with his mother, “Terry Boswell’s in my
class!”
~ ~ ~
One lesson Maddy had fully absorbed in life was never to doubt her
father. Now retired, but once beloved school teacher—Latin, French—Pop
Warner coach, community-garden founder, pancake-breakfast and
spaghetti-dinner organizer, chaperon for adults on tours to the Alhambra
and for hormonal teenagers on senior trips to the nation’s capital: Who
knew how many travelers cheerful, unrufflable Albert Victorine had
steered through the muddles that humans will inevitably make of things?
But with his failing eyesight and periods of distraction, Maddy had
begun to question her father’s grasp, and walking in on him this
afternoon brought her no reassurance.
What must have represented every scrap of clothing he owned, as well as
whatever stray pieces remained of her mother’s, was strewn across the
sofa, the table, the floor: shirts, sweaters, socks, dresses, coats,
scarves, hats, belts. It looked like the Mission after a two-for-one
sale. And for the first few seconds when from the center of that
disorder her poor wizened old papa blinked at her, perplexed, she feared
it was even worse than it looked.
“Dad, what’re you doing?”
“Simplifying?”
“You have everything everywhere?” She had taken the afternoon off to
drive him to his appointment with the retinal specialist. She stepped
over the tangle of clothes. “We’ll have to put everything back—and we
don’t have time now.”
“But I don’t need all this, Madeline, really, I don’t.”
He looked down, as she did, at his slippered feet, the slippers whose
tattered bindings had worried her yesterday. Nearby, a striped jersey
lay, the kind of shirt that referees wear in sporting events. At least
he was right about having too many things. Didn’t they all have too many
things? “Do you have a system?” she asked hopefully. “What you’re
keeping, what you’re discarding? You do, don’t you? You always have a
system.”
“I do.” Albert brightened. “Anything with three or more colors goes.”
“What do I smell? Something burning?”
The empty saucepot on the burner was glowing. It was nearly translucent;
you could smell the metal—preparing to melt? Maddy turned off the gas
and, using two potholders between her hands and the handle, doused the
quivering pot under the cold-water tap. Great clouds of vapor rose up,
fogging her glasses.
“Dad, we need to talk.”
“We used to have one that whistled, well, screeched.”
“Why don’t I,” she said, “make some tea for us? Then you need to get
ready. You do remember you have an appointment, don’t you?”
Her father
looked around the kitchen he’d spent sixty years in. What did he see,
what glimmered against those damaged retinas? Paths worn in the
linoleum, rounded cabinet corners, paint on handles rubbed to wood? When
her mother fell ill all too early in life, he had assumed household
duties, becoming, no surprise, an inventive chef. He gazed at her
thoughtfully. “Should I change it to two colors? Your mother had a
beautiful frock—of many colors. Stripes. You probably don’t remember it,
she wore it in the summer. She looked like a walking rainbow.”
He’d been her
best friend, perhaps her only friend. She had wanted to talk with him
about yesterday. The accident continued to distress her, the shattering,
convulsive violence of that impact, the image which she blessedly hadn’t
seen, but imagined, of a human face being flung against a pavement. From
talking with Ethan, she gathered that Terry Boswell ran in a different
crowd than the nerdy and jock crowds that Ethan bounced between, a fast,
loose crowd. But still: It
could have been Ethan. Not that Ethan was likely to burst from a car and
begin hurling profanities at a stranger, but seventeen-year-olds were
creatures of impulse. Editor of the school newspaper, basketball and
track star, cycling enthusiast, Ethan would graduate in a month and
intern again this summer for the Citizen Chronicle, the town newspaper. Her son’s sports worried her,
his cycling tours through the mountains, his nights out with his chums,
even the long-legged girls he’d begun to date. Were girls any more
responsible than boys? And come fall he would be off to college.
“Is this Terry Boswell some sort of spoiled rich boy?” she had asked.
“Is that what you mean?”
“You hear stories. He got suspended for something last semester, I don’t
know.”
He did know. She let it pass. “Did your father come to your meet?”
And this, Ethan
could not dissemble. His eyes lingered vulnerably on hers, the soft eyes
of a boy not yet a man, then fell away in sorrow and confusion. “Didn’t
see him, Mom.”
Would it be
embarrassing for Ethan if someone in school identified his mother as the
person who had provoked Terry Boswell? But now, this afternoon, was not
the moment to burden her father with her troubles. The piles of clothes
would have to wait until tomorrow, Saturday, but since she had
fortuitously taken the entire afternoon off there was time to get him
made presentable for his appointment. The doctor’s office was nearby, in
the assemblage of medical suites in a wing of the hospital. Reaching the
suites required taking the elevator in the lobby and crossing a glass
bridge. Albert had macular degeneration, the wet kind, and the
consultations every six weeks were lengthy affairs. Before they could
meet with the specialist, Albert had to be led away for dilation and
returned to wait for the solution to take effect, then fetched again for
a scan and returned, then finally summoned to an examination room. Most
of the patients Dr. Giannetta saw were aged, the delicate machinery of
the eye succumbing to time’s ravages in advance of the sturdier body.
The doctor, a bulky, perspiring man with a florid face framed by white
hair, would rush, harried, from one room to another. With a few stock
pleasantries, he’d raise her father’s seat, swing a piece of equipment
like a mask before his face and peer into his diseased eyes. Barking out
his conclusions in acronyms to an assistant who typed his comments into
a computer, the doctor would strap on a helmet with a light
attached—much like, Maddy would think, what a spelunker might don before
descending into a cave—and gaze through a scope into his patients’ eyes.
With the four of them crammed in the small room, the atmosphere seemed
pressurized, claustrophobic. On visits when Dr. Giannetta determined
that her father’s condition had worsened, the afternoons would be even
more prolonged by his needing to receive a shot directly in the affected
eye.
“It’s all
right, I don’t mind the needle.” Albert patted, in anticipation perhaps,
his eyes in which the pupils had begun to grow as large as the pupils of
cartoon characters. “One has to be stoical. If I have to get a shot,
then I shall. I’ll think of Homer.”
She looped her arm around him and whispered in his ear. “I don’t expect
anyone else here is thinking of Homer.”
Sometimes he would have a different kind of scan that resulted in his
urine turning bright tangerine. When that occurred, even a proper,
circumspect man as Albert Victorine could hardly let such a remarkable
occurrence pass without comment. He squeezed her hand on his shoulder.
“Vive memor leti; fugit hōra.”
“That’s Homer?”
“Persius.”
“And means . .
.”
“Shame on you,
Maddy. Live mindful of death, the
hour flees.” Albert glanced around the waiting room at the old men
and women, more women than men, the remnants of his generation either
stupefied by age or become garrulous, squawking at their adult children.
“Except here.”
She hugged him
again. “I remember Mama’s striped dress. It shimmered in the sunlight.”
~ ~ ~
Today’s
appointment did end with an injection of Lucentis. As her father
explored with his fingertips the black pirate’s patch on his right eye,
Maddy guided him across the glass bridge in the falling sunlight. She
kept her hand on his arm. Stoical or not, a needle directly in one’s eye
would give pause to even the most stalwart of individuals. As the
elevator doors began to close, two nurses came bundling in, chattering
excitedly, their heads pressed together.
“What?
When? I only came on.”
“Now,
now—I just heard it!”
“I thought he
was out of the woods? What happened?”
“I don’t know,
organ failure, blood clot, I don’t know! I’m going to find out. They
called in practically the whole attending staff, but they couldn’t do
it, couldn’t bring him back.”
“God, I know them—her,
his mother. The father doesn’t live with them. She was all in a dither
because she didn’t think he was going to graduate, but then he pulled it
off somehow, got the school’s approval. He probably sweet-talked his
teachers. He was quite a little operator apparently, a real heartbreaker
with the girls. God, this is so
awful!”
Driving to her
father’s today, Maddy had avoided the left-hand turn at the T&V. Had
gone out of her way to wend a zigzag through Ganaego’s old brick
streets, and now, driving them home, her father dozing beside her, she
did the same, plunging the car down one road after another, doing
anything to bypass that turn. When she bumped the car at last up into
his drive, Albert started awake.
“Here,
already?”
“Dad?” She
pictured the clothes strewn every which way, the glowing saucepot, an
old man with diminishing sight scuffling through the rooms in ragged
slippers. “I’m going to go in and pack a bag for you. I want you to stay
with us for a night or two.”
“Maddy, don’t
be such a—”
She put a hand
on his sleeve. “You can make your famous buttermilk pancakes—Ethan’ll
love them. Please, for me?”
He folded his
arms across his chest. “Oh, all right, if it makes you happy. I’ll come
in—I know what I want.”
“Tell me, I’ll
get it for you. You know, I think it’s coming time you’re going to have
to let me start doing more things for you?”
“Heady things,
humble things?”
“Heady things,
humble things, yes, Dad.”
“One night.”
“Two.”
He was sound
asleep when she slipped back into the car, an old pirate whose ship was
entering troubled waters, and she was suddenly furious—this out of
nowhere—with Dale, her ex-husband, who had missed unconscionable amounts
of his son’s childhood for his troubleshooting trips to far-flung
regions of the country. Dale’s circuits always took precedence over his
family—until one day he came home to discover he no longer had a family.
Now, he was missing Ethan’s final days with them, these glorious,
valedictory days of youth: a boy grown tall, who wore the most
outlandish Lycra biking costumes and pedaled in dense, fast,
synchronized packs of his fellow cyclists for hundred-mile stretches,
who sprinted four-hundred meters in school-record time, whose name
appeared above stories in the
Chronicle—missing all that for a bunch of damn transistors.
A boy had just
died.
A boy not all
that different from their son, and she, however innocently, however
unwittingly, had had a hand in it. Irritable—not only with Dale, but
with herself, with the world—Maddy did not take a circuitous route home,
but determinedly headed up Linden Street. If at rush hour the left into
Linden was a trial, the left out of it onto Sutton Post Road was nearly
impossible. She joined the string of left-turning automobiles and
pickups creeping forward. Ahead, against the ruddy sky loomed the
shoulder of the T&V. As the building drew nearer, its blocky shadow
crept closer and closer until darkness fell across the car. What friends
did Terry Boswell leave behind? Had he had brothers and sisters, aunts
and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers? Did he have a sweetheart?
That abandoned mother, who longed to see her child graduate, where was
she when his life ended? In the hospital, one prayed, and what was she
doing right now? Actually, Maddy knew what Terry Boswell’s mother was
doing: You go home after the death. She knew that. It was what she and
her father did after her mother died. Home to your familiar rooms, which
no longer look familiar, and you call Butterworth’s or Flipovitch’s or
Hoover’s, or any of the score of mortuaries in Ganaego, and you sit in
the gray silence of your bedroom and pretend that whoever you have loved
and lost is in heaven and that your life will go on safely and
securely—and, of course, neither of those things is true.
Her father
groaned in his sleep, sighed.
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