When she is done explaining it all in such a rational, mapped-out way, Doug can’t help but ask, “So what do I do?” as if for a minute, he believed it was true.
They are bound to José as long as those grains of soil are here, and so they must be removed from the property. Then they can act generously or judiciously, however they want to act, but it won’t be out of spirit manipulation. “But I’ve already poured out the little bag!” Doug explains. “I can’t pick out those grains. I can’t even tell them apart.”
“We’ll shovel a great big circle into a bag and take it up to the mountains,” Yo says.
“Okay, okay,” he agrees. He is not going to tell her that he’s already plowed under the garden. Those grains of soil are everywhere casting their little spells, making Corey hysterical half the time, spooking Yo, and just plain driving him crazy.
It’s like they’re Bonnie and Clyde planning a getaway, how they’re going to dispose of this soil. It’d be easy enough if he could just take the garbage bag to the side of the road and dump it, but no, she wants it at a safe distance from the house. So, it’s settled, when they’re driving Corey to her mother’s next Saturday, they’ll take it along.
“You mean, dump it at her house?” Doug has this image of his ex-wife looking out the window and seeing him empty what she’ll assume is his trash in her backyard. He smiles in spite of himself.
And there is a naughty look in Yo’s eye, too. “I suppose we better not.” She laughs. On the mountain they will be crossing to get over to the interstate, there is a little park, a bench or two, a Robert Frost plaque. That’s where they’ll dump the soil.
“Before or after we drop off Corey?”
It’ll be dark on their way back. Not as easy to dispose of the bag. “Let’s wait and see,” Yo says. Doug can tell she is tempted to include Corey since the two of them, anyhow, have been having a good visit.
They will see, he supposes, how things go for the next three days. He knows very well the phone calls have not stopped, but Corey is now reporting them to Yo, not to Doug. She keeps aloof from him, treats him as if they are in a sitcom together, and she is acting the part of his child. Bright and polite, but if he tries to give her a hug, or put his arm around her, she dodges him. He stops trying. Yo accuses him of moping around and wasting this valuable time with Corey.
“It’s not my fault your friend put a spell on me,” Doug says, half joking.
Yo looks at him as if he is miles and miles away, and she is not sure she is hearing him correctly. “No one’s put a spell on you,” she says at last. She’s changed her mind about the soil. Poor José wouldn’t do such a thing. Corey has gotten the whole story in the last few phone calls. José lost his night watchman job. He is desperate and has gone on to the capital, hoping to find someone who will sponsor him to the States. Yo feels sorry for the guy. Maybe they can do something to help him out.
“You mean, marry him to Corey!”
“Oh, Doug, why are you so purposely thick-headed sometimes,” Yo says in a teary voice. Now she’s the one hurrying upstairs, wanting some quiet time, which is how some therapist taught her to say she is not talking to him. Instead of the human pretzel, he’s turned into the big oaf in everybody’s way.
Left downstairs by himself, Doug goes up to the window. It is a black slab, too dark now to look out at his garden—what he likes to do at moments like this. Somehow those straight brown furrows soothe him like the little farm plots seen from an airplane do. Instead, he sees his reflection, a much younger man, all dramatic shadows and planes. It is him years before anything has happened, Corey is a baby in his arms, his wife is making faces at her, he has planted their first garden. The moment is so perfect, it does seem madness or witchcraft to allow anything to threaten their happiness.
He hears the steps coming down the stairs, and then stopping at the door. He turns to find a surprised Corey frozen in mid-step. “I thought you’d gone to bed,” she accuses him.
“No, that was Yo,” he says, wanting to say so much else. But how does he ask his own child to forgive him for the unforgivable sin of falling out of love with her mother? He lingers a moment but seeing that she is waiting for him to leave so she can pour herself a soda—for even filling that small need in his presence is too much of a letting down her guard—he departs the room. “Buenas noches, Corey,” he calls out from the stairs. After a long silence, he gets a grumpy, “Night.” So much for The Waltons.
Saturday, while Yo and Corey are out shopping for the ingredients for a paella, which, it turns out, is eaten both in Spain and the D.R., the phone rings. There is a garbled, official, foreign-sounding voice on the other end. It is an operator asking Doug if he will accept charges.
At first, Doug is tempted to say, No! Tell this jerk to stop calling my house and causing trouble. But curiosity lures him on. “Sure,” he says, “I mean okay, sí.”
“Look here,” he starts, but all he hears at first is himself echoed back, look here. He stops and in that silence, a man is speaking, asking for Doña Yolanda or la señorita Corey.
“No está,” Doug says, and then he wants to say who he is, but he can’t think of the word for husband. He does remember the word for father, though. “Soy padre de Corey.”
The man says something rapid and grateful-sounding that Doug doesn’t understand. It’s time to lay down the law. “Corey no matrimonio.” And furthermore, he adds, these calls are “muy expensivo. No llamar, correcto?”
There is a long silence. And then, like the air being let out of a tire, Doug hears, “Sí, sí, sí, sí . . .”
“No puedo salvar mundo,” Doug adds, feeling guilty even as he says so. His whole childhood was full of Lone Ranger dreams of saving the world. Now he doesn’t even want to accept the charges on an SOS call.
“Por favor,” he says, and then, thinking he’s sounding like he’s waffling, he adds, “Policía,” to put a punch into what he is saying. As he expected, José hangs up.
Back out in the garden where he is fertilizing, and pruning, and potting, and getting things ready for the first frosts, he hears a terrible sound, a cross between a human cry and the trumpets of those angels that are going to descend on the last day to sort out the good and bad souls like laundry. Looking up, he sees the sloppy V of geese headed south for the winter. And to them, since there is no else around, he finds himself apologizing.
A wonderful but punishing peace has descended on the house. Corey is back to being the daughter who used to sit on his knee and ask him why stars didn’t fall off the sky like raindrops or snow. Yo is on a high. Corey is looking so pretty. Corey makes her feel better about not having her own child. Corey has really grown up so much. Far be it from Doug to suggest Corey still has some growing up to do.
“She’s coming along. Like you said,” Yo says, smiling fondly at him.
There are no more phone calls. The soft underbelly seems to have gone hard as nails—not a word about José. Just as there hasn’t been another word about that island baby. Sometimes Doug has a feeling that these enthusiasms Yo picks up are momentary inspirations she eventually deletes from the rough draft of her life.
“I wonder why he hasn’t called?” Doug dares to introduce the subject during their last dinner together. His guilt is making him talk like that guy with the albatross around his neck. “Maybe he got to stay on his farm, you think?”
Corey shrugs. She has gone on to new concerns; her school starts Monday, the day after she gets to her mother’s. Her friends have found out she’s back, and they’ve all been calling her. Perhaps, Doug thinks, José has tried to call but hasn’t been able to get through.
“I bet Mundín gave him his job back.” Yo called her cousin, explaining José’s predicament. “Anyhow, there’s nothing else we can do for him from so far away.”
“What do you want to do about the soil?” he asks Yo that night. The problem of bad energy in the house seems to have been solved all by itself. Normally, he would take this occasion to point o
ut to her that this business of spells and spirits is all a bunch of Dominican malarkey. See, things resolve themselves in their own good time. But he doesn’t feel so righteous anymore. What does he know of the magic that connects people and tears them apart. It might as well be spirits.
Yo says she’d just as soon leave the soil here.
But he has already packed it up like she said. Is she sure she isn’t going to want him to dig it all up again when the next disagreeable thing happens?
“Sounds like you want that soil out of here,” she teases.
To tell the truth he does want that soil out of here—even though he knows damn well José’s soil is plowed throughout the garden. But this dark plastic bag has come to represent all his troubles here these last two weeks, all the fury pent up in his child, all the loneliness of missing Yo for two months, all his anger at the country that keeps claiming her and taking her away from him, which is why, he knows it now and without the help of a therapist, thank you, why he was so angry at the intrusions of José’s calls.
He says, no, if it’s okay with her, it’s okay with him to leave the soil here. . . . But the next morning, he packs the bag in the trunk and hurls it into the dumpster behind the hospital. There, a few years ago, a newborn baby was found, bawling, wrapped in those brown paper towels of public restrooms. It was traced to a young girl who was so terrified her parents would find out she wasn’t a virgin, she opted for murderer instead.
But that baby survived, Doug is thinking as he stands by the dumpster. Sometimes the grandparents bring him into Doug’s office, and the little boy is a sunrise of smiles and cooperation. There isn’t a mark that Doug can see with the naked eye or with any of his instruments—not a mark on him of his horrible arrival on this planet.
And that is what Doug is hoping as he stands by the dumpster—for the deposit seems to draw something from him, a prayer, a wish, a goodbye. Maybe Corey will be all right after all. Por favor, Corey, felicidad.
On the ride down they make plans with Corey. She will come to visit them during her fall break. She’ll spend Thanksgiving with her mom, since over Christmas she and Doug and Yo are already planning this wonderful trip to the Dominican Republic.
“It’d be so awesome after being in Spain!” Corey has pulled herself up so her arms rest on the back of the front seat. It is the way Doug remembers her during car trips as a child. She’d stand on the back seat and lean forward into the front seat, wanting to be a part of everything going on.
“You’ll meet my whole crazy family,” Yo is saying. “Maybe Mundín will let me borrow his mountain house again.”
“I’ll get to meet José,” Corey offers. They are telling this story together, the story of the Christmas trip to the island.
“I’d like to meet José,” Doug says, and both women look at him as if not sure he is being facetious.
“Really, Dad?” Corey has thrust her head even further into the front. If he turns to her now, he could probably plant a kiss on her cheek.
“Sure, I’ve been thinking maybe we should buy some land there. Maybe José would like to farm it for us. For a salary,” he adds, “a good salary.”
The soft underbelly is happy. They like the ending he has given their story.
All fall Doug jumps a little whenever the phone rings. Often it is Corey calling to find out how you guys are doing, reporting that she has already gotten a two-piece on sale and a pretty terrific sundress that makes her look skinny. Yo’s spirit waters have gone to seed, if that is a proper term for them, who knows. The saucers sit empty at their windows and one day when Doug looks for them, they are gone. “The house is pretty well protected now,” Yo explains when he asks after them. It’s odd how he finds himself missing them.
When the frost hits, the garden wears a silver coat, which by midday the sunshine melts. The leaves fall every which way, a beautiful mess, leaving the hillsides bare and skeletal and scary. The soil hardens, and the land braces itself for winter, all browns and grays, a clenched look. Doug misses the garden most these months, before he can begin to plan the next garden in February, sorting his seeds, paging through a stack of catalogues. Fall is when he starts watching TV and cooking and wondering where his life is going. This year, he daydreams, a kind of mind travel, as if he has another simultaneous life going on long distance.
He is on the island on a mountain farm in an upper field by a roaring river. They are planting the yucca in long even rows. He is helping another man whose face he does not see, or maybe the other man is helping him. When Yo hands him his soup dish at dinner, they have almost gotten the whole southwest corner finished. “Where are you?” she wants to know.
He is not one to think of fanciful ways to say things so he surprises himself when he answers her, “Everywhere you are.”
The stalker
tone
All I have to do is look into your bookjacket eyes and I can see all the way back
to that roadside quickstop in western mass where you are wearing a pea green uniform and hairnet and grilling burgers and dogs and dipping fries in their wire basket and I am touching myself as I can see through the pea green fabric to the dark panties
and afterwards walking out and looking up I see the stars shift into a connect-the-dots spelling of your name which I do not even know is your name yet—yolanda garcía—the whole name down to the little accent over the i
which tell me was not a sign which is why I was not surprised in the reading room when your face stared back at me from today’s SUN TIMES with the announcement that you are going to be at a bookstore on michigan avenue at eight tonight reading from a new book which I have not seen though all others are already in my possession
I call the bookstore. I say, I want to go to the reading tonight, do I need a ticket, how early should I come and how long will it last and is there parking nearby—all these busywork questions before I slip in the one I want an answer to
is there any way I can get a hold of ms. garcía as I am an old friend of hers whom she would like to hear from I am sure
—there is a hesitancy on the other end
— a catch of the breath with which I am familiar as I seem to incite this kind of reaction in females
of a certain age and intelligence and looks which in this instance I cannot verify as I cannot see this clerk but I would guess she is a petite brunette with a turned-up nose and a cute look she is trying to fight with eyeliner and all-black loose-fitting clothes
so I am not surprised to hear her recite the expected I’m sorry but we are not allowed to give out this kind of information but there will be an opportunity after the reading to talk to the author
so I say, of course, how can you give out this kind of information as you don’t know me from auden and for all you know I could be an ex or an axe murderer or an ex axe murderer (hahaha) but she does not laugh just listens real hard like she might be trying to make out some telltale background sound that she can later tell the police about so they can trace where I might be calling from
Let them come down michigan and on down the long avenue of the years over the need the fear the loneliness the pain on the train out to elgin to the brick two-story, THE BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS, says the sign, flashing their badges at mark who leads them upstairs
to my room where they knock and the nicer-looking one says, excuse me but we are trying to find a certain walt whitman, without blinking an eye, without thinking but this name has already been taken up by a famous poet of the nineteenth century
saying instead, yep, walt whitman—at least that’s the name he has been going by for the last five years and before that it was billy yeats, and before that george herbert, gerry hopkins, wally stevens
(as if you might listen if I were one of your resurrected heroes)
and I say, come in, and they step into the life of the boy with the pouring problem who at five is rushed to mass general unconscious from a rubber-hose beating
because, she says, this boy is out
of control I give him the box of frosted flakes and the bowl and he keeps pouring until the whole box is empty and there are flakes all over the floor the same thing with the carton of milk until it is running off the sides of the table the half-gallon wasted the talcum powder, too, the entire ammens container sprinkled over himself and everything else
and he knows better but does it to get at me and that is why I have to take my hand to him for you have to understand he is not right in the head since the day he was born the spitting image of his father who has never seen his son’s face unless maybe by some weird coincidence he spots a dark pretty boy on the street in a bus riding up an escalator and thinks that little guy sure looks like me
she says all this to the doctors and they put it down in their records and put me where she can’t get at me for a few years
until I am a boy without a pouring problem on my first weekend with my mother
doing unto her cat her miniskirts her panties her makeup as she has done unto me
which sin I repent me of which sin I have confessed time and time again to the state employed and underemployed the counselors the therapists the social workers the officers the chaplain the advocate the psychiatrists and even to mark—all of them paid ears and not the one person I want to hear me out
and say, it wears a human face
yes, it wears a human face
I leave the house, telling mark, I’m off to my shelving job at chicago u. and, yes sir, I’ll be back by the nine o’clock curfew maybe even before
my shopping bag filled with your books which I have dismembered and reassembled so that not one page is the way you wrote it, sentences spliced into different stories and the list of your thank you’s in back mixed in with your iambic pentameters and your eyes popping up in the white margins, every word tampered with until