As we continued down the lane, we passed the Delmar house, where the daughter stood in the front yard, leaning against a large oak. She had a pen and Alice in Wonderland in her hands. She raised her eyes to the boy as we passed.
“She’s got a fake leg,” I whispered to him. “The left one.”
The mannequin-stiff leg was paler than her own skin. Attached to it was a black flat. Not real, just part of the plastic. I always wondered if she hated not being able to change her shoe. Always being the girl in the black flat.
Because she wore long dresses to hide the leg, she was immediately taken out of the catalog culture. No miniskirts for her. Her body was not clung to by neon lights. She was never without a buttoned sweater, while her loose and wispy dresses dated her in old-fashioned florals and muted colors. Seeing her in those dresses made me think of lace and lavender and radio theater.
She wasn’t thought to be the prettiest of girls. Her hazel eyes were a little too aslant. Her wrists were a little too bony. Her freckles were a little too much. She had a sedateness about her that most girls her age didn’t have. You’d never find her reciting the lyrics to Van Halen or hanging a poster of the latest crush on her wall. You looked at her and knew when she went to bed, she’d rather be blowing out a candle than flicking a light switch. Modernity was lost on her and died in cobwebs in the background to her old-fashioned grace.
“What’s her name?” The boy looked as if he could’ve taken her hand right then and there.
“Dresden Delmar.”
His wave came slow. His hand starting first on his stomach, then sliding up to his chest, his neck, until his fingers rolled out from under his chin and his hand was finally held up to her. Because there was no actual waving motion, it looked as if he were showing her something on his palm.
She quickly ducked behind the book, doing her best to tuck her red, frizzy hair behind her ear.
“Is she shy?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I’ve seen her ’round school. I think I might’ve had English class with her. I know she doesn’t talk much. Sits in the back, things like that.”
She quickly disappeared around the tree until he could no longer see her. Then he said how her hair reminded him of the color of leaves in the autumn.
“Red and burnt by an October oven.”
And then he smiled for the first time, and she peeked around to see it.
4
… I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 3:98–99
MY KNEES KNOW I’m a praying man. The broken dishes, the empty beer bottles, the hole in the wall the size of my fist, all know I am an unanswered man. Why is no one answering me?
It’s been seventy years since I’ve stepped foot onto Ohio soil. The closest I’ve ever been back was fifteen years ago, when one night I stood on the West Virginia side of the West Virginia and Ohio border. I cupped my hands around my mouth to distance my voice over the Ohio River that formed the border as I yelled for everyone I used to know. Hell, I even yelled my own name.
I frightened some birds, heard the river flowing down below, but the biggest reply of all was silence. No one yelled back to me. No one said, Hey, we’re here in Breathed. Come back now. It’s all okay. You can come back. It is just fine. I waited for all the familiar voices to say just this, but I am the unanswered man. I am the inside of silence.
What is it they say about home? You can’t go back again, right? So find a new one, Fielding. I’ve tried. I’ve lived all over. In apartments, in houses, in an abandoned gas station for a short time because I liked the way the sun hit its pumps, but I’ve never had a home again. They’ve all just been places. The place I’m at now? It’s a trailer park called King Cactus.
There are no kings, there are no queens, there is just the unraveled, trying to live. When I first saw the place, I winced and remembered the blood of the beetles. They would swarm Ohio, especially in the autumn, when they would cluster on our window screens, squeezing into our homes, where they would collect in the warm lampshades or crowd around the ceiling fixtures like a pilgrimage. When frightened or smashed, the beetles secreted a pungent odor with their blood. It is that bitter, yellow blood that the trailer park reminds me of and why I knew I would spend the remainder of my life here.