Zwilich was listening now. He knew of this incident, which had been widely reported in the Trenton area: a random bullet fired into the air that had fallen and killed an elderly man in the Straube Street project back in April, and the shooter had never been identified. Zwilich tried to interrupt the chattering boy to ask who the shooter was—an Iraqi war veteran?—but César laughed, saying it wouldna happen if God din’t want it that way, nobody damn fault how the gun go off, how you blame it?
“César, did you tell your mother about this?”
César sniggered, vastly amused. Had to be Mr. Zwilich was a real asshole to ask that.
“An elderly man dies, nobody cares? What if this man was your grandfather, César?”
“Hey man, he not.”
Zwilich felt a throb of dislike for the boy. The mimicry of older boys, men, in his voice, his vocabulary, his mannerisms, the contortions of his small body. Zwilich would be meeting with César’s mother, not the next day, nor the next, but sometime on Monday, at which time César would appear before a Family Court judge, in the company of a court-appointed public defender. He saw in César’s file that Gladys Diaz, twenty-eight, had moved to Trenton four years before from Camden, New Jersey; she was a diabetic who received Mercer County welfare payments for her sons and for herself; in Camden she’d been arrested for trying to cash forged checks and had been sentenced to two years’ probation. At 3:30 P.M. on June 30, 2006, Mrs. Diaz had called 911 to report that her son César was “threatening” her with a fork—not an eating fork but a long, two-pronged fork like you use for turning meat—screaming he was going to kill her and his six-year-old brother. He’d been sniffing glue; Mrs. Diaz couldn’t control him. But when Trenton police officers arrived at the Straube Street apartment and César ran away, panicked, crawling to hide beneath a bed, Mrs. Diaz relented, saying maybe they shouldn’t take her son away, then she’d relented again, saying yes! they should! this time she wasn’t going to come with him to the precinct, César is on his own this time, though again changing her mind as the officers hauled the boy, shrieking and stumbling, to the street, to the waiting patrol car, wrists cuffed behind his back, and the officers would note on their reports a strong smell of red wine on Mrs. Diaz’s breath. César was speaking excitedly of Mama as if Zwilich must know her. César was furious with Mama but César was desperate for Mama. César was saying Mama been wantin’ to scarce him, now Mama sorry. Callin’ the damn police, Mama done that before, sayin’ she gonna call them to scare him, and his brother too, lots of times, to scare them. Mama afraid to beat him now, he too big, damn police come for him at school too but he’d never been “kept in” this place; he’d be let go now, Mama comin’ to take him home. Why this was funny, Zwilich didn’t know. The boy’s laughter was sharp like shattering glass and getting on his nerves. If the boy was made to spend a single night in the juvenile facility, he’d be punished for that shriek of a laugh. He’d be punished for his runny nose, and for his smell, and for being a runt, a loser.
César was demanding to know where’s Mama? was Mama here yet? and Zwilich said his mama wasn’t here, and César said, his voice rising, Where’s Mama? I want Mama to take me home, and he wasn’t laughing now, tears of indignation shone in his eyes, and Zwilich said, “César, your mama told us to take you and keep you here as long as we want to. Your mama said, ‘I don’t want César in the house anymore, I’m done with César, you keep him.’”
Zwilich was a perfect mimic of Mama’s furious voice. Fixing his somber counselor’s eyes on César’s face.
In fact Mrs. Diaz had said something like this. The mothers of kids brought into juvenile custody invariably said something like this, or more extravagant despairing things, but Mrs. Diaz had also said she hoped her son could come back home that night, she wanted to take him to stay with a relative in New Brunswick, get him out of the neighborhood for a while, and Zwilich, who’d spoken to the distraught woman on the phone, said yes, that sounded like a good idea.
César stared at Zwilich now in stunned silence, his mouth quivering. César couldn’t be more respectful than if Zwilich had slapped him on both cheeks, hard. You didn’t tell an eleven-year-old that his mama didn’t want him, not in Zwilich’s profession you didn’t, but the impulse had come to him, not for the first time in circumstances like these, but for the first time with a child so young, an impulse as strong as sex, overpowering, irresistible, a wish to create something—even misery, even self-disgust—out of nothing. Zwilich felt a sick thrill. Zwilich smiled. Zwilich was overcome by shame. Luckily, the interview wasn’t being taped, no surveillance camera in this airless cubbyhole, and outside in the corridor the Mercer County guards, stupefied with their own boredom, hadn’t the slightest interest in what transpired in the room unless there’d been a call for help, an adult’s cry for intervention and restraint.
Zwilich relented. “César, hey.” Stood and approached the stricken boy. César’s eyes shone with tears, which gave him the look of a fierce little dog. When Zwilich touched him, to comfort him, the boy cringed. “César, your mama didn’t mean it. She called us—just a while ago she called and left a message for me. ‘I love my—’”
So swiftly it happened then, Zwilich would live and relive the assault and never quite comprehend how César grabbed his right hand and bit his forefinger before Zwilich could shove him away. Bit down hard, tendons taut in his grimy neck; in an instant he’d become a deranged animal. Zwilich struck him with his free hand, his fist, on the side of the head, knocked the boy from his chair and onto the floor, yet he wasn’t able to pry the boy’s jaws open to free his finger. Zwilich was shouting, screaming in pain, oh God the pain was terrible, the mad boy had bitten Zwilich’s forefinger to the bone, at the first joint. Only when the guards rushed at him did the boy release his pit-bull jaws and Zwilich stagger away. The guards cursed the boy trying to crawl beneath the table; he was lifted, thrown down, scramcrab-likentic and crablike on the floor, shrieking as if he were being murdered. Quickly now the guards subdued him, cursing him, laughing at the size of him, couldn’t weigh more than seventy-five pounds, they had him on his belly on the linoleum floor, on his face, wrists behind his back and cuffed and lifted for maximum pain, wouldn’t cease struggling so the guards cuffed his ankles too, marveling Jesus! The size of the little bastard! Zwilich showed the guards his wounded finger, which was bleeding thinly down his hand, down his arm to his elbow, and seemed somehow to have become smeared on the front of his white shirt. He hadn’t known he’d been shouting for help. Trying to laugh it off: the kid was quick as a snake, Zwilich hadn’t seen the attack coming. He was white-faced, dazed. In a state of shock and his heart pounding crazily. The panic rush, the adrenaline rush, had to be as powerful as any heroin rush Zwilich had had, years ago, when he and Sofia had experimented with injecting heroin into their veins, not seriously but just to see what it was like, and they’d backed off from it almost immediately, at least Zwilich had, and never tried it again. Zwilich was stammering at the guards, telling them to take César Diaz away, he couldn’t bear the sight of the boy any longer. The evaluation would note the abrupt termination: “assault on a Family Services counselor.”
In the skirmish Zwilich had nearly lost control of his bladder. Jesus! The guards would’ve been witnesses—he’d never have outlived such a professional humiliation.
Now you’re fucked, little cocksucker, for life.
Not for life, surely: only remanded to juvenile detention for thirty days.
Pitiless glaring lights in the medical center, where in a cubicle screened off from more serious traumas Zwilich’s wounded forefinger was given a thorough cleansing, disinfecting. The young Korean resident doctor examined the finger as if he’d never seen anything so curious. “You can see teeth marks all around. These are human teeth?”
Human teeth had the ring of a joke punch line. Zwilich laughed, a hot flush in his face. He was still shaky, edgy. But yes, he had to concede, human teeth.
“Small, though? A ch
ild? Child teeth?”
“Not so small—the child is eleven.”
Zwilich waited for the young doctor to inquire if the child was Zwilich’s own child—it seemed a natural question; Zwilich was a normal man yet might be the father of a crazed demon-child—but already the doctor was deftly bandaging the finger. Strangely, for all the pain, which still throbbed like flashing neon, the wounded finger hadn’t bled much.
In a staff lavatory at Family Services Zwilich had run cold water on the wound, washing away the blood and numbing the finger. He’d have improvised a clumsy gauze bandage for the finger out of a near-depleted first aid kit in the office, but his supervisor insisted that he go to the medical center immediately to get professional medical attention for the bite. For insurance reasons, Zwilich supposed: if such a wound became infected—if, for instance, the finger had to be amputated—Family Services would be liable for a large settlement.
Before Zwilich left the clinic holding his thick-bandaged finger at chest level to minimize the throbbing, the young Korean doctor insisted that he have a tetanus shot.
Zwilich laughed irritably. He was fine; he didn’t need a tetanus shot, he was sure. Or rabies.
The doctor said somberly, “Yes, but the inside of a human mouth can be as dangerous as an animal’s mouth. Teeth caries contain infectious microorganisms. You’d be surprised.”
Zwilich thought, Would I! In his dazed state, nothing could surprise him.
The needle bearing the transparent tetanus vaccine entered Zwilich’s left bicep cleanly, with little pain, but shortly afterward, as he left the clinic, his arm began to throb. And the clumsy bandaged forefinger throbbed with pain. A jeering sort of pain, it seemed to Zwilich, recalling the demon-child’s look of feral hatred. If he’d been able, César Diaz would have torn out Zwilich’s throat with his teeth. Zwilich shuddered, stumbling as if he’d been drinking. He badly needed a drink and so stopped by the Dorsey Hotel, the romantic seedy bar—like the interior of a cave, Sofia had said, and that cave undersea and muted—where frequently he’d met up with her after work. For a while Sofia had been a therapist at the hospital a half-block away; her specialty was pediatric oncology. Wistfully she’d said, If we’re going to start a family . . . , and her voice had trailed off and he’d said quickly, We can. Soon. We will. When things are more in control. He’d meant to say (hadn’t he?) under control. When things are more under control. His father had often used the expression, to placate Zwilich’s mother. When things are more under control.
In this way months pass. Years.
At the bar, in perpetual twilight, a ghost figure barely visible in the mirror behind rows of glittering bottles, Zwilich drank a beer, and a second beer with a shot glass of whiskey, drinking with calculated slowness, telling himself that he was early, Sofia wasn’t late, he was waiting for her to appear, this pleasant interim of merely waiting, Sofia would be breathless from having hurried, a smell of rain in her loose hair. Sofia’s hand on his shoulder, a light claiming touch: “Hey.” And the pressure of her wide, warm mouth against his, which quickened his heart, which was shriveled to the size of a peach pit, with hope. “Hey. Where’ve you been?” Already he’d forgotten the interview, the assault, the evaluation, abhorrent to him, he would not remember, an aberration in Zwilich’s life not to be shared with Sofia, not ever. Half consciously counting four men at the bar beside himself and there was the bartender, and it’s a law enforcement officer’s habit, you see that their hands are in sight, and you see where the entrance, exits are, where you might need to take cover in an emergency. For such things can happen; you can’t foresee. One of the older drinkers at the bar had the large gravely heraldic head of Zwilich’s father, who’d been a rich Hartford, Connecticut, stockbroker who’d died not when Zwilich had been six but when he’d been twenty-six and so long estranged from his father and in so undefined a phase of his life, geographically as well as otherwise, that Zwilich hadn’t known that his father had had a massive stroke and had died pleading to see his son until several days after the death, when Zwilich’s distraught mother had finally been able to locate him in an outlying district of Brooklyn where he’d been, temporarily, “living with friends.” Zwilich must have been staring at this man, unlike Zwilich’s late father unkempt, unshaven, for at last the man squinted over at Zwilich with a faint frowning smile, as if trying to determine who Zwilich was, and a sensation of cold terror washed over Zwilich: I am not one of you, I don’t belong here. Hurriedly Zwilich paid the bartender what he owed him and fled.
Another Trenton bar, on lower State Street, Zwilich looked into: but Sofia wasn’t there. Nor was Sofia at the Bridge House, where the bar was crowded, the air dense and combative, and Zwilich called the bartender: “Has Sofia been in here tonight?” And the bartender cupped his hand to his ear amid the din, and Zwilich raised his voice: “I’m looking for my wife, has my wife been in here tonight?” and there was a momentary hush. The Bridge House is a tavern in which there is a moment of respect when a man in a blood-spattered white shirt and with a bandaged finger announces in a raw uplifted voice that he’s looking for his wife. Yet still the bartender said no, hadn’t seen Sofia that night, in fact hadn’t seen Sofia for some time. Zwilich thanked him and departed, and now at sunset, crossing the Delaware River to Morrisville, Pennsylvania, hot rain splashing against the windshield of his car, Zwilich is possessed by the thought that he will drive to Philadelphia; he’s convinced that he knows where Sofia might be staying, and with whom. Driving across the familiar bridge, he’s made to notice the strangeness of the fading sky; below the bridge there is mostly darkness, but much of the sky remains in patches of light, the sun melting into the horizon like a broken egg yolk. The effect has to be the result of chemical pollution, yet it’s luridly beautiful. Below are the old shuttered mills, warehouses, the decaying Trenton waterfront, but at the Pennsylvania shore a string, as far as Zwilich can see upriver, of glittering house lights. His heart beats with a forlorn eager hope: sun spilling its light onto the bridge, onto the river, like a slow-motion detonation in which, though many thousands are destroyed in a fiery holocaust, no one feels any pain.
The Spill
1.
Once, a farm family named Braam lived on fifty acres of land abutting the Black River in a steeply hilly, densely forested part of Herkimer County, New York, known as the Rapids. This was in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, when my mother was very young.
Walter Braam was a part-time farmer whose primary income came from working as foreman at the enormous stone quarry at Sparta, a small city twelve miles to the south. Walter’s sons Calvin and Daniel also worked at the quarry. When Walter’s first wife, Esther, died of a rapid and unspeakable (ovarian?) cancer, Walter grieved wildly for a year and then abruptly remarried, with no warning to his family. His second wife was a young woman named Lizabeta who’d worked in a Sparta rooming house as a cleaning girl; Lizabeta was fourteen years younger than Walter, brought to the Rapids at the age of twenty-four to be a stepmother to eighteen-year-old Calvin and twenty-year-old Daniel, who still lived at home, and to care for, tirelessly, without complaint, Walter’s elderly, arthritic mother and his yet more elderly and more arthritic aunt. Lizabeta had three children with Walter: Agnes, who was six in October 1951; Melinda, who was three; and thirteen-month-old Alistair. Also in the Braam household was Walter’s twenty-three-year-old nephew, John Henry, whom Walter had taken in because John Henry’s mother, Walter’s oldest sister, Dorothy, claimed she “couldn’t keep him”—she’d “given up on him.”
So many Braams! Lizabeta woke sweating and shivering in the night, having dreamed of a great mouth, always hungry, that had to be fed. She, Lizabeta, was the one to feed this mouth.
It was like a fairy tale, one of the cruel ones. A giant had to be fed each night or he would devour the servant girl whose task it was to feed him; unless maybe—Lizabeta wasn’t certain—the giant did finally devour the girl. Lizabeta would read to her children only those fairy tales
that ended And they lived happily ever after, and before beginning any story she checked the end to see how it turned out.
When Walter first brought Lizabeta to the Rapids, shortly before he married her, Lizabeta expressed astonishment that the narrow gravel road leading past the Braams’ property was called Braam Road. “A road named for you!” she’d exclaimed naively. Walter explained: the road had been named for his grandfather Wilhelm, who’d been one of the first settlers in this part of Herkimer County, in the 1890s. At the time Walter told Lizabeta this they were driving in Walter’s pickup truck and Walter’s hard, scarred hand was on Lizabeta’s fleshy thigh, squeezing as you might squeeze a child who has said something charming but foolish. A gentle reprimand, but unmistakable.
In the Rapids, Lizabeta would learn to say little. In her former life in Sparta, she hadn’t been encouraged to say much either.
On the narrow Braam Road, the Braams had no near neighbors. The Rapids was a remote region, sparsely settled. The farms Lizabeta glimpsed were small and the farmhouses modest, but the Braam house had a weatherworn stone facade that gave it a look of austere dignity. It was two stories high, and on each floor tall narrow windows without shutters seemed to hint at mysterious lives within. The roof was shingled, steep. At the highest peak was a copper weathervane in the shape of a cock.