the spouse, self for the boss, self for our friends at the pub. And we don’t always get to choose which one to be at a given moment. At least I don’t. Sometimes life seems to assign me a self and there’s not a lot I can do about it. Other times, more than one self shows up.
Like when Uncle Lester caught me and a neighbor boy playing with a ouija board a year or two after Judy and I had moved in with him. Lester ran the kid out of the house and then turned on me, his head full of Leviticus. He unbuckled his belt as he walked toward me, saying something about me being cut off for consulting with mediums and spirits. He liked that phrase, “cut off.” He used it a lot. And it was always him doing the cutting and me on the receiving end.
This time he was madder than usual.
“You have contaminated my house. You have brought powers and principalities into my very home. You have turned a godly house into a place for demons. You are possessed of evil spirits. You will be cut off.”
I was petrified. I knew it was true. I knew what it felt like to have something else sharing my mind. I was unclean and deserved to be cut off. I even determined to take the whipping without flinching. But when I saw the horrible look on his face as he reached for me, I ran.
He caught me by the back of my shirt. I let my legs go limp so as to fall onto the floor and shrink into the smallest possible target, but he lifted me by the shirt and started whipping me with his belt. Usually I could get away after three or four licks, but this time he had a good hold. He just kept hitting me, over and over. I thought that he might kill me this time. Part of me was attracted to the idea.
Then, suddenly, there were no more licks, and he dropped me to the floor. I slid away and looked back. Judy had grabbed his right arm and wouldn’t let it go. He was yelling and cursing at her.
“Don’t think I won’t whip you too, you little idiot. Let go of my arm, goddamn you.”
But Judy wouldn’t let go. She had her eyes closed tight and her lips were moving silently. I didn’t stay to see what happened next. I ran out the front door and didn’t come back until late in the night.
thats right run run wee cowrin timrous beastie let your sister take the heat save your own sorry ass
Living with Uncle Lester was like living in a Kafka novel. Not that I’d heard of Kafka, of course. But when I discovered him later, I knew how his characters felt. The world is full of rules, but it’s never clear exactly what they are or how to keep them. Some of Uncle Lester’s rules were easy enough: “Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t chew—and don’t go with girls who do.” But others were amorphous and hazy, like “have the mind of Christ,” “be godly,” and “show thyself approved.” And then there were the rules that couldn’t be found in the Bible, but that were all the more powerful for being unstated.
I had the distinct feeling I was playing (and losing) a game in which only the umpires know all the rules. Sometimes you learned about a rule only after you’d broken it. Uncle Lester was the umpire in his house—an official representative of the Big Umpire Upstairs—and forgiveness came at the end of a belt, if it came at all.
NINE
I need some time to pull things together, but time is something I don’t have. I am out of money, for one, and in America to be out of money is literally to be worthless. No money, no worth, no reason to be. Even with money I am short on reasons to be. Add empty pockets to an empty heart and pretty soon you’re staring down the barrel of a not-so-empty gun.
The only way to get money, at present, is to keep looking for whoever killed Richard Pratt. I am billing by the hour but dissolving by the minute, and so I get up one Wednesday vowing to get back on the productivity treadmill.
The tread that day leads to Verity Jackson, a woman who made a scene at Pratt’s presentation the night he was murdered, thereby making herself a suspect. She had stood up and yelled at Pratt as he wrapped up his talk, and was escorted noisily out of the ballroom. The police, according to Detective Wilson, have interviewed her twice, but haven’t filed any charges and are unlikely to now. I’m sure she doesn’t have anything to do with killing Pratt, but I don’t know of anyone else to talk to and I need the hours.
I call Ms. Jackson at Metro State, where she teaches remedial English, mostly to adults. I expect her to say, “Who are you and why should I talk to you about anything?” Instead, when I mention Mrs. Pratt, she says she’ll meet me in Loring Park by the fiddler that afternoon at four. She speaks quietly and politely and briefly. I hang up, first pleased that it had been so easy, then disconcerted when I realize I don’t know what I’m going to say to her.
I bring Judy along for protection. We park near the Walker and cut through the sculpture garden. Judy spots the big spoon with the cherry.
“Looks like Mr. ... Mr. Paul Bunyan has been here.”
The connection escapes me, like most connections.
We cross over Hennepin Avenue into the park on a pedestrian bridge that tries to be artsy while getting you safely over six lanes of traffic. It sports various phrases from a cryptic poem all the way across. I feel like I’m walking in a Buddhist koan: “What is the sound of one bridge clapping?” My whole life is a koan—long on paradox and brain busters.
The fall is everywhere present. Many of the leaves have already leapt from the trees. Those that remain are mostly yellow and brown, with just a few orange and red dazzlers here and there. The colors are past their peak by a week or two, the remaining leaves holding on now by sheer bravado. I know the feeling. Winter is so inevitable it can afford to dawdle, to allow a few more jacketless walks in the park.
“This is very pretty, Jon. It reminds me of … of my very own calendar in my bedroom.”
Which calendar and which bedroom are anyone’s guess. She doesn’t have a calendar in her bedroom now. Maybe in her former room at Good Shepherd. Maybe when she was three. Who could tell? She investigates the past like a fly buzzing through the air from point to point, all instant right angles, abrupt changes in elevation, unexpected landings and takeoffs. Hers is a random access memory—Judy is the Intel of recall.
We walk around the small lake and past the fountain that looks like a giant wet dandelion. I am thinking of Verity Jackson’s name. Who names their kid after a virtue anymore? What’s in a name, anyway? Is it just a label, an arbitrary collection of letters and sounds that say “you“? Or is it rooted in something? I mean, does it matter if a kid is named “Candy” or “Brandy” because the parents think it’s cute, as opposed to being named, say, “Lydia,” after your great aunt Lydia, who was the first woman in the state to get a medical degree and was herself named after the deacon in the New Testament? People used to think your name was your destiny. What’s the destiny implied in “Brandy”?
Some tribes used to delay naming newborns for a time so evil spirits couldn’t learn their names and get power over them. I like that. I would gladly be nameless even now.
I spot Verity Jackson waiting for us, sitting on a bench near the statue of a large brown fiddler. I had caught a glimpse of her when she was led out at Pratt’s talk, but she looks smaller sitting there on the bench than she looked that night.
Ms. Jackson is a black woman of indeterminate age, as many black women are—for me, anyway. She’s at least fifty but might be a lot older. She is lean. Her skin is smooth and unwrinkled, but she has just a few strands of gray. Her hair is relatively short and curled under, a sort of old-fashioned look. The main impression she gives is of quiet dignity.
