Silent Retreats Page 4

  The afternoon he first learned about all this, Skidmore arrived as usual and shifted his shopping bag full of Stroh's to the other arm so he could hammer out the code on the door with his right hand, when he noticed the door was ajar. He cautiously pushed it open and from there could hear her in the kitchen. In there, he found her on the floor doing sit-ups.

  "Why's the door unlocked?"

  "Saw you coming up the sidewalk from the window—didn't want you to interrupt, so I opened it between sets. I'll be done in a minute." She was wearing nothing but the sweat bands on her arms and a pair of navy blue panties.

  "What's going on?" Skidmore asked, popping open a beer.

  "Check it out," she grunted, pointing toward the news magazine on the kitchen table. She was working out on a small black throw rug, a feeble cushion between her and the old linoleum. Her hair was glossy from exertion.

  "I thought you wrote in the afternoon."

  "What's it to you?" she said, smiling as her face came up. Her hands were behind her head, and her feet were locked down by tucking her toes under the kitchen cabinet. "Hang around," she said. "Push-ups are next."

  "Push-ups? Getting ready to enlist?"

  "Funny. Trying to make me lose count or what?"

  "How about a beer?"

  "Never touch it."

  "Oh yeah? Since when?"

  "Since this morning. Stop it, you're making me lose count."

  "Sandwich?"

  She stopped. "Will you please get out of here? You're embarrassing me. I'm toning up. Read the magazine. I'm twenty nine years old—I've got to get after it while the getting is good."

  "I'm thirty-five," Skidmore said, his arms up in the air to indicate that even at that age he was in good condition.

  "I didn't ask," she said. She rolled over and started a set of push-ups. Her face turned purple as she worked. Skidmore was looking at her pretty back and the backs of her legs, all imprinted by the ancient kitchen linoleum because the throw rug was too little.

  "Look, quit it," he said. "This behavior is extreme."

  She sat up. "See these?" she said. She seemed to be indicating her breasts. "These are your pecs," she said.

  "Boys only have one," Skidmore said, toasting her with his can of Stroh's.

  "Very funny." She rolled over and went back to sit-ups. After a while she paused again. "You get a lot of strength if you do a bunch of push-ups and a bunch of sit-ups every day. Arms like a meatpacker in six months."

  "Sounds lovely. You can join the circus."

  She laughed. "That's what you know, you ape!" She stood up and pulled the Time magazine off the kitchen shelf. "Read it, Jack. Women aren't going to take it anymore." She was smiling at him.

  "Take it from who?"

  "Men—what do you think?"

  "Take what?"

  "It," she said. "It."

  "Oh." Skidmore drank his beer. "Guess I better read the magazine."

  Fiona came to have the opinion that her writing was improved by these exercises. Besides hitchhiking—which was physical exercise, she would hasten to clarify—she had not taken much interest in sports or exertion and had had little appreciation for the psychological benefits such activities accorded the avid and consistent athlete. Now she found that she had double the energy she used to have, and late at night, instead of drifting off into a muddled sleep, she would still be able to read. She took up reading poetry, memorizing poems she really liked and lines from all the novels she was reading, and suddenly many things she read seemed directly relevant to her.

  By the end of the warm-weather time, the days had a definite pattern—the heat and bright sunlight building out of breezy, shaded mornings. Each day was scheduled around the mail watch, anticipation of a check from her ex-husband or a rejection notice from some magazine or a letter from her niece. After noon, the sun would come across her writing table, across Fiona, across the floor to her bed, and then up the glossy white wall to the picture of her and Yank at the farm house in Long Pine; then the sunlight would wane to a rose color on the white wall, and finally the light would die altogether. At some point in the afternoon, the odd, secretive Skidmore might appear, but not necessarily, and if he did, he would knock in code on the apartment door. Invariably he arrived harassed and pitiful.

  "I think it's the way you look," she told him one day.

  "What is?" They were eating potato chips and drinking beer—she was back to beer by then. They were sitting on the black exercise rug, in the best approximation of the lotus position either of them could muster. Skidmore was playing his Fleetwood Mac tapes on a portable cassette dictaphone the government had bought him for depositions. The beer was cold.

  "You lose because you don't look like the judge used to look before he was a judge. You don't seem to aspire to the same things he aspires to—you don't appear to aspire to his station. So what possible use for you could he have? You, in your Brooks running shoes and jeans. He looks at you and says, 'What in the hell is THIS, anyway?'"

  "Because of how I look, the judge runs Indian brave and redneck alike off to the state farm and the county jail—because of how I look?"

  "You got it, Rondo," she said, grinning at him.

  "How about how you look?"

  "Here it comes." Fiona's long, graceful arms waved big in the air. "There will now be five solid minutes of male retaliation." She looked over at him and grinned.

  "Okay, let's have it," she said, throwing a potato chip at him. "Let's have some good old male retaliation!" She stood up and stepped back, crouching low, then lobbing more potato chips. "C'mon, tell me, how do I look?"

  Laughing, he chucked a potato chip back at her. In the second volley, she took cover behind the closet door in the kitchen area and he under the kitchen table. "Your eyes—that screwy mascara effect. Did you ever think you might have spent time in the Dawes County jail this summer because of the hooker eye makeup?" She made a run for the refrigerator and from that advantage lofted ice cubes across the room.

  "I spent time in jail because I was being defended by a distracted, uninspired public defender." One ice cube grazed his shoulder, another slid across the table, then gently dropped off the edge onto his head. "Bingo!" Fiona shouted, ringing up the score.

  "That did it!" Skidmore said, and, both of them laughing, he stood up as if to inspire a whole brigade of reinforcements, then stormed the walls, deflecting ice cubes and potato chips. When he caught her, a short wrestling match ensued which bent, veered, curved, swooped, came finally in even turns of its own accord to the sun-filled bed.

  When they had made love and were basking on the white sheets, Skidmore finally popped the question: "Why can't we make a deal? I'll let you do push-ups all day and not laugh about it. And you, someday soon, please, take down that god damned picture of you and whatshisname." Skidmore was staring at it.

  "I like that picture,” she said to him.

  All through the summer it went on, with Skidmore at the trailer in the night most nights, or hurrying at least to be there by the time Peg arrived in the morning, and three times each week he walked up the hill from the trailer court, ten blocks to the courthouse, where he shouted, wailed, and mis-motioned poor people straight into the custody of the state. He daydreamed constantly of his regrettable involvement on the reservation, and in night dreams he saw Jolinda buried under rocks in the Black Hills, down with the bones of Crazy Horse in a secret place, or he heard her voice coming from the dismal shadows of the concrete-block house out on the Ridge. Sometimes, in peaceful dreams, Jolinda would suddenly intrude, sad or angry, her presence terrible and real. A process had begun in which Skidmore was recasting remembered events with himself as victim.

  "I'm a terrible lawyer,” he once mumbled to Fiona as they sat on the bed in the sun. "Something else, too. I hate these goddamned drunken Indians."

  "If you hate them so much, why are you here?"

  "My question precisely." He got up and walked over to her writing table, sat down. "Do you write about
the Indians any?"

  "Nope."

  "I don't seem to be able to defend them. They kill each other, they drive their cars at high speed into poles and cattle. What do they think they're doing?"

  "Why are you here, then?"

  "They don't seem to be able to organize. They jump each other and each other's wives. They play pool fifteen hours a day."

  "Then how come you're here?"

  "I'm running from all my friends and acquaintances back in Illinois. They think I'm mean."

  "And why do they think that?" Fiona asked, but by then he was paging through a book of poems that was on her desk. Perhaps he hadn't heard the question.

  November came, cloudy. Nebraska began to bone up for hard winter and the late afternoons were dim and uncertain. Skidmore tried again to get Fiona to move in, and again she said no. Reagan's budget cuts were a low waving axe over his program and his job, and Skidmore was beginning to feel temporary. He wanted Fiona to go with him. He was haunted by the Indian woman, and wanted to put many miles between himself and her. He kept expecting her to knock on his door. On the street, he would think he saw her and he would wince inside himself and his heart would jump. It wouldn't be her. The wind on many nights would come down from the Black Hills, pick up a howl in the long draws and narrow passes, would roll along the piney bluffs whistling, then flat and quick would whip down the long valley and slam into the trailer court. Skidmore would shiver in his bed. Sometimes he would stand in the dark at his bedroom window and watch the gravel dust sweep up into the yard light and then run downwind like a ghost.

  Or sometimes a windless cold would stand on Fort Robinson, and Skidmore would become jumpy from the sounds outside, the yakking of dogs and the howling of kids, the loud shouting of cowboys and Indians getting things straight with their wives. In the rare times when Fiona would let him stay at her place the whole night, he would hurry back to the trailer right at dawn, cold to the core. Most of the time Fiona preferred to have him gone so she could read and exercise before bed. She slept soundly, the bedroom snug from the steamy radiator. The windows would fog up with the steam and her breathing.

  One morning she found something odd in her mail. There was a note in scrawly handwriting:

  I'm watching.

  Fiona said nothing to Skidmore about this message. She assumed the drunk she'd threatened in the summer was back for more. Or that Yank had returned. When she went to the laundry or the grocery, she found herself looking for Yank along the street or standing in the shadows between the buildings. She hoped he was back—she'd missed him and wondered how he was. She assumed he'd seen Skidmore's comings and goings, and was reacting possessively. There was an edge of menace in the method, which Fiona kept trying to ignore. Yet she knew Yank was capable of menace and more.

  One morning the veil of condensation dripped down her windows as she was typing and she looked out over the alley behind the bar, out half a block to the next street, and there, in front of the old wood-frame building that was once the trading post, she saw an old blue pickup truck idling in the cold, a weathered camper on the back. Inside, looking her way, Fiona could see a woman, bundled up. In the mailbox that day, a second note arrived:

  I remain to be watching.

  Many times in the following days, Fiona and the woman would watch each other from their separate places. One afternoon when Skidmore drifted over to Fiona's, she didn't answer the coded knock. He didn't have a key, but the rickety door was easily finessed with his old plastic law school ID card. It was the middle of the afternoon and he assumed Fiona was late getting back from the laundromat. Inside, he looked around the place. He had never been in the rooms when Fiona wasn't there too. This apartment was a great comfort to him—clean, smelling of Fiona and her toil and her blind, senseless, somehow pitiful but lovely optimism. The warmth of the rooms went deep inside Skidmore, giving him a sense of well-being. He decided he would go in and read something she was working on. He was always hesitant to ask if he could do that. He set his beer down on the kitchen table and pulled off his coat. As he did so, Fiona suddenly appeared in the door of the bedroom.

  "How did you get in?" She seemed upset. She was wearing a long terry-cloth bathrobe.

  "Didn't you hear me knock?" Skidmore asked, defensive.

  "You knocked your way in?"

  "There wasn't an answer, so I picked the lock."

  "Is that what you always do when there's no answer at a person's house?"

  "Sorry. There wasn't an answer, so I let myself in—to drop off the beer. What's the matter anyway?"

  "There wasn't an answer so you picked the lock?"

  "Look, what's the matter?"

  She stared at him until he began to wonder if she'd even heard the question.

  "The truth comes in blows," she said.

  "Huh?" Skidmore was getting ready to fix a sandwich. There was something disturbing in the air. He tried ignoring it.

  "The truth comes in blows. Henderson the Rain King, 1959."

  "That did it. I've got to confiscate your library card." He was smiling, keeping it light. "What's going on?" he asked.

  "I've been looking out the window. Someone's out there."

  "There's a whole little town out there," he said. Yet already he was starting to know.

  "Come and see."

  He followed her into the bedroom. Her robe was long and pink. Skidmore had never seen it before. She pointed out the window, toward the wood storefront on the other street. He was stunned. The blood surged into his head, swelling the arteries in his neck. Even at this distance, he recognized her. She looked old, bundled in black and gray wool, a ragged black scarf.

  "She's been sending me notes."

  "Notes?"

  "Handwritten things, saying she's spying on me."

  "It's not spying if she tells you."

  "Do you know her?"

  Skidmore tried to think. What might Jolinda have said in those notes? "How do you think I'd know her?"

  "Maybe one of your Indian families, one of your clients, something?"

  "I don't know who she is, with her goddamned crazy notes."

  "Better tell me," Fiona said. She was getting dressed.

  Skidmore watched out across the way, avoiding Fiona's eyes. If he looked at her, he knew what she would look like. She would look just a little afraid, but there would be an edge of determination there also, and that was the part of the look that would mean trouble. She was not going to let this pass. And neither would Jolinda. The radiator pipes rattled and knocked with the rushing of steam. Out on the street, Jolinda gave Skidmore a big, ominous Indian wave.

  "Well," Fiona said. She pulled on her jeans, the long familiar legs disappearing behind the light blue. "I'm gonna talk to her and find out what in hell's going on around here." Fast, she pulled on a blue and white flannel shirt, disappearing into clothes. She sat on the bed and strapped her sheathed knife to the outside of her leg, slid on her boots. "Looks like an Indian woman to me," she said, and went out the door.

  Skidmore heard her clomp down the slanting stairway. Quickly, he gathered up his beer and his tapes and his tape recorder, and put all the stuff in a shopping bag. Then he too left, latching behind him the door to the apartment, scurrying off down the hill toward his trailer. All the way home, he kept an eye out.

  Arcola Girls

  On Saturday night, Arcola girls would come north on the two lane for the dance. The road, Route 45, was flat, and the grass grew right up to the edge, crowding in on them, narrowing the alley of their headlight beam. With their windows open they could smell the warm, damp night air and the cornfields as they came. They could hear everywhere the swarms of crickets. Sometimes grasshoppers would land right on the windshield or thump onto the hood. Crows would sweep from the wires, stay on the road until the last moment, picking at run-over barn cats and field mice. The car tires would thump on the seams of the concrete road. It was a seven-mile drive.

  By eight in the evening their white Chevys and green
Mustangs and burgundy Corvairs would be cruising through the drive-in and making the Webster Park loop. They would glide through the downtown, past the community building where the dance was just getting started. Sometimes you'd hear their tires screech as they stopped, or they'd peel out at the intersection, showing off. You could hear them laughing.

  One of them, named Kelly, had beautiful blond hair, long like that of Mary Travers. There was one named Karen who was famous for singing like Connie Francis, and sometimes at the dance she'd join the band and sing "Where the Boys Are,” just for fun. Another, Sandra, was very tall, and her hair was ratted in a bubble after the fashion. She had odd eye-habits, always seeming to observe. Sometimes, playing in the park, she'd be running—her strides were long and confident like a boy's.

  They all wore shorts and colorful sweatshirts, white tennis shoes. At the dance they would huddle together in a corner, doing committee work on the latest rumor, the latest dirty joke. Sandra, alert in the corners of her eyes, would look over her shoulder in case anyone was coming.

  "I think you love those girls," my girlfriend said to me on the phone one night, "the way you watch them."

  There were two bad S curves in the road from Arcola. They were where the highway was rerouted fifty yards west of itself for a certain short stretch because it would always flood in a heavy rain and people would get killed. So, instead, people got killed in the curves. Late one night in that particular summer, early June, Karen, with another Arcola girl named Marie, ran off the road at high speed on their way home. They went over the ditch and deep into the weeds, through a fence, flipped into a field. They weren't found until morning.