they dragged them through the streets

By hilary plum

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Hilary Plum
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-172-0

Contents

……

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A

A recruiting center? This was the first idea, an obviouschoice. It wouldn’t be enough, of course we all knew this, itwould be only a gesture. But we imagined the smoke and stink,the heat, we pictured keyboards popping apart—it would saysomething. We told each other.

Those nights in that room, all our words, mingling in thefluorescence where moths swooped and died: I found them,wings shuddering, on the table, on the floor in the morning. Inestled them in the compost to whisper among the onion skinsand lettuce hearts. The beginning.

A beginning. A. Yes, it was my house where we gathered,my living room with the road close on one side, on the otherthe hill descending into brambles, deer paths crisscrossing. I gotup, fetched the meal or the weed, finally sat on the stool by thetable. Our sense of ourselves as protagonists: Ford stretchedout on the couch, announcing his every idea; Vivienne in thechair in the corner, her quick replies; Sara arguing from thefloor where she sat like the martyr she insisted on being—no,that was unkind; she stroked the dog’s head and he loved her.And Zechariah on the wooden chair pulled close to Vivienne,when he was not on the phone pacing the kitchen, his crispspeech floating out to us.

The bowl making its rounds, what is flame is air is blood.We faced one another.

* * *

Those nights ended, Ford and I slept in the room with nodoor, only a curtain, I never felt I was rid of their voices. In themorning I walked the dog down the hill, where the stream bankwas mud and protruding roots, a violence of spring melt water.The dog hunted out an abandoned deer carcass, a femur withflesh clinging.

A beginning. Ford would say: A plane taking off, that’s howit always begins. Or a ship embarks, a city of soldiers.

Vivienne would summon up an opening line, stand to reciteit.

Look, Z would say, and unfold a newspaper.

V

Someone should tell Z’s story; I don’t disagree; but I won’t;how could I? There was no end, which is needed for stories; andI am no storyteller, I insist on this.

I am a woman of sentences.

Of semicolons.

A woman who stops before going on.

I shouldn’t be trusted with anything continuous: I am nosalmon leaping up a long river. I am a woman of puddles, ofnests. A perfect blue egg or a chaos of tadpoles.

I sat in my corner of A’s living room as everyone talked,and I waited for the gaps, the depressions I could flow into,brim over. How loosely their logic was looped together, Ithought. I would pull the knots tight at their most absurd.The ideas were enormous but the executions just wet explosions,a thump jarring the stomach, then nothing. This is whatI thought then, Z at my side, his laughter whenever I desiredit; I was victorious.

Z of course could defeat me, anytime. But he did it quitereasonably, a glance over the breakfast table. And then he died.

Who would have known—isn’t it fair to ask?—that this wasthe direction, how we would conclude? Who would aspire tosuch divination? This is why I won’t tell a story, insist a prophecyplay itself out. I will keep to my sentences; within the spaceof a sentence I can hold back. I can earn what I have alwayswanted: no more than Z’s checkmarks next to the best lines.The lines like small revolutions.

So that even now I await Z’s applause, sudden and lovely,birds taking flight off a pond.

In the space of my life I am algae and eutrophication. Thenshe was sick, as they say politely.

In bed insane weeks passed.

I recovered; Z waited for me; we went on. But there havebeen these pauses.

But—weren’t we like anyone, a past no one had the rightwords for, a future we would not wish to know? We armedourselves: A with her diligence and nostalgia. Ford—I think hechose to be handsome, swathed himself in good looks as I didin irony, then parried from behind, sharp quick jabs. Sara wantedto be merely useful, and after all she wasn’t wrong.

And Z?

Z. The times were violent. It’s true. If we tried to see this,which in our best moments we did, the mind opened intochasm, and reason slipped down, and love and hope followedafter, though they were the best of ourselves—

But that’s no story, end only, no beginning. This is what Imean, what I have been trying to say.

F

Start with the tree in the backyard. Where the swing waswhen we were kids in what weren’t quite the suburbs. Our yardbacked up to a swamp, the kind of land that’s preserved becausenobody wants it. But we weren’t far from town; if Jay went withme I was allowed to walk the fifteen minutes to the conveniencestore, in the summer went and got slushies. Purple tongue, bluetongue. When we were older Jay would buy beer for me therebut first make me sit in the passenger seat and listen to his big-brotherlecture. Years later he told us he’d hang himself fromthe tree, and he did. We were on the phone with the VA, all theclinics, everyone all the time. They said, we won’t take him, wecan’t help him until he stops drinking. He won’t stop drinkinguntil someone helps him, my dad said, reasonably. He was thereasonable one, my mom shouted or cried.

Then Jay was dead, ending this chicken-and-egg conversation.I don’t know how much he was even drinking by then; Ifound a half handle of vodka under his bed and a thirty-rackuntouched in his closet. I think he’d been drinking just enoughto go on, then stopped. That seems reasonable, I told the VAwhen we went to the appointment they’d made for him, whichwas two weeks after we found him hanging from the tree wherehe had said he would go. It was a reasonable reaction, I toldthem.

When we were little, we twisted the swing around andaround so it got higher and higher then Jay would shove it inthe other direction and I’d spin like crazy, feet out, screaming.All the neighborhood kids came over for our swing ride. Oneday a kid threw up and we had to stop giving them. One day theswing broke and the branch was ready for Jay.

You could say this is what radicalized me. Everyone likesverbs like that, –ize verbs, which show what regular words cando to people. The brother’s suicide. But I don’t know what itmeant, to see his shadow on the patch of dirt our feet hadkicked bare as children. And I was against the war already beforehe came home. Before he threw up in the car because wewent over a pothole, and he said, Over there, the bumps werepeople. Kids even. He said we couldn’t stop for them, we wereordered not to stop, not even for kids, because it might be anambush, so—front tires, back. He wiped the vomit off his faceand apologized.

You can’t say what something like that would make anyonedo, you can only say afterward—well, this was because of that,because you can’t think of another reason, because you can’tbelieve how in one moment everything looks like a cause, inanother moment an effect. It’s true that it did something, but Idon’t know what and neither does anyone. When I’m dead theymight say something convincing and reasonable and wrong. ButI saw his shadow, I saw what his eyes had become.

When I moved into A’s house and she helped pack mythings, later I found that same plastic bottle half full of vodkaunder her bed, she’d put it there for me, pushed it to the wall. Idon’t know what she meant by this.

S

I’m the only one who works at the shelter who doesn’twonder why some of the homeless won’t come in, why theyprefer the streets—wandering, troops losing strength. Manyhave in fact fought in wars, and even those who haven’t tell thestories. They’re such accomplished scavengers they can’t helpit, I think. They collect stories as they collect everything discarded,cans, clothes, boxes—coins tossed at them out of guilt,not hope. I wonder, though, at the ones who say things I knowcan’t be true, I wonder where these fictions come from. I thinkthey may be telling stories on behalf of the dead, that there area handful of stories they preserve among them.

Often they die in the streets; we’re called, the corpse described.

They tell me about deserts and jungles. You wouldn’t believeit, they tell me. One man will say something specific aboutthe shine of this bug’s wings or how a plant prickled his ankles,and I’ll know this must have been his life.

You’re a good person, a few men have said to me.

What do you know? I want to say. I give them their retrovirals,I change the gauze over last week’s fight. A good person issomeone who helps you, but that’s a narrow definition. I havebeen many things. I don’t say to anyone that they’re all good. Itake temperatures, give out clean needles. I talk to the men aboutcarbohydrates, help them care for the feet’s wasted skin. Whenthe virus finally takes one of them I am in the crowd around thebed, keeping the tubes from bag to blood from kinking. I cry,too, quietly, at their deaths; I cry for the body that remains. Thetarn of shadow above the collarbone, the long-fingered handsthat played cards, grasped my arm. The teeth.

I make them all donate their organs, I make them sign thecards. Don’t waste, I say, and I joke, this is your chance at immortality.But many of them still believe in heaven. And mostof their organs can’t be used.

I live my life forward. I don’t regret. I won’t haunt the past’slandscapes: A’s house in the woods, I sat on the floor of the livingroom though everyone always offered me a chair. I sat andrubbed the dog’s head. It is another life.

If I try to look back into that room, I can’t see it wholly.This is my place now, here, with these men. Not in that room,the five of us in a home made of smoke and words, the placewe returned to even the night Z died. I’m not there anymore.

After all, the blood has its own business. Our vessels nevermeet. The miles of capillaries, breathing in waste and breathingout what they have gathered: they are only ours. This is thefact of our separation. Even in the moments we are closest tounion, what we feel is the skin’s friction, the soft nerve-filledwalls.

A

A recruiting center?

The four of them looked at me. It was the obvious suggestion.

When I said it I wondered if everyone had just beenwaiting, not wanting to be the one.

How? Z said.

All right, F said. Ask me next week.

Z was looking at him, eyebrows raised.

It’s not that hard, F said.

F

The night after Z died we sat in A’s living room.

I’d done this kind of sitting before and A was looking to mefor something. There’s no skill to it really, I wanted to say, but bythen she was crying again. Straightening the magazines on the table,cleaning pointlessly. Vivienne and Sara should have been therehours before. I rolled a joint and went outside to smoke it. A shookher head at me, she started to fight: if the police come, she meant.I walked out to the yard, to where skunks lingered, raccoons eyeingthe compost. She stayed inside, watching for headlights.

For months afterward we thought Vivienne would have oneof her breakdowns, but she didn’t. I’ve never understood this.It would be easier, I thought—just disappear into whatever it is,stay in bed, check in to some place, go. She didn’t.

I thought Vivienne’s grief would make her even more ofa queen but it didn’t. She shrank. At A’s house she washed thedishes, and not in the old way, where you’d find one dirty glasshead-down among the clean, like a sign.

Without Z, two bottles of wine was just enough. This wasa new fact.

I grew tired of watching A watch Vivienne. I got drunker.

Come on a walk, I said to A, putting a beer in my pocketand thinking of that stone by the stream in the dark.

Come to this meeting, she said. She was writing a pamphlet.

Pointless, I said.

I’ll see you in an hour, she said, that’s how long the walktook if you smoked slowly.

Just for that reason I’d come back another way, starting onwhat looked like a deer path but wasn’t, took its toll in jacket,skin. One long welt across my eyebrow that A laughed at thencleaned. I would have avoided the nettles, I said, but it was dark.And it’s not true, I wouldn’t have avoided them.

Down along the power lines was the thickest stretch. Backbehind the church, the community center. You could find a tentor two here in the summer, a good spot for the homeless. Oldfire rings here and there as if the men sat and drank together.Under the hemlocks nearby, the shrubs had been flattened bydeer bedding down. As if they too had come for the fire, thecompany.

I came out by the church, I went home.

A would have finished whatever piece she was writing andleft a draft for me on the table. She’d rig the house like this, sothat you’d go to pet the dog and start reading again about thelatest development, that gold-domed mosque.

No point, I said, when she brought up the meeting again.But as she cleaned the nettle stings I told her about a boy: in thehospital after an explosion he was in the same room as his parents,but they left without claiming him, still showing everyonethe pictures, he no longer looked enough like himself.

You could have been a doctor, she said to me, plenty oftimes.

I could have. But I had my reasons.

* * *

I had my reasons, I think this now: I go to the lab, I comehome. I had my reasons, I want to say to the protesters. Everyfew months they gather outside the lab again, spend a few daysshouting, waving posters of rabbits and monkeys. But every daythere’s fresh food and water, I want to tell them, the whole placesmells like fresh cedar. It’s someone’s job just to come in andchange the bedding cage by cage. The mice caged together—Iwant to say this to them—never fight, and they sleep piled upwarmly, you have to lift them away from the softness of eachother. I don’t know what they know of the loss of each other.

I don’t mind the scratching, their claws in my palm. I thinkit’s something the body knows, that feel of feet and whiskersarriving just before death, I think it could be a comfort.

When I stole from the lab in those days I felt the animalswatching me: watching me doctor the supply logs, sidestep thesecurity cameras. This wasn’t any kind of belief: they’re nocturnal,their eyes were all open in that dark room.

The four of us in a room—just that there had been five.

A

The first place I chose was the woods where I was youngand my brother used to chase after me and my friends, setoff small firecrackers he’d gotten somewhere illegally. Theground snapped and dead leaves flew. There was smoke and wescreamed. He laughed and laughed. The woods were endless.Toads among the leaves, snakeskins. Deer and trees the bucksrubbed raw in fall. A hawk screaming, five-toed print of a fisherfresh in the mud, I could picture him hooking the fish in thatstream, near the rock slide, near the crayfish, my childhood.

Sara thought I was being sentimental, telling these stories.Or worse, that I said all this just to impress F, leaned my headagainst the wall and talked about the wet rustle of that forest,the moss thick and slippery on the rocks we hopped over, hidingfrom the hunters and their spoor of Bud Light cans. Weleft the woods holding armfuls of beer cans to our chests, freshand still smelling or old and slug-covered. But I spent everyafternoon there—if you can’t feel something for that, can’t bebothered to care for where your life was lived, its freshest hours,what hope is there? I asked Sara this. She had her stern look.

F and I planned everything. I was surprised by his willingness.This is where we’d go, all the neighborhood kids, I said.I thought he’d laugh; it seemed laughable. But on the map thegreen of the park stretched—only chopped into by the town’sthrusting spur—all the way to the mountains. A wildlife corridor,a kingdom. They were draining the swamp outside my oldtown to build a development. Hacking at my woods and eventhe woods more distant, which we only ventured into that timethat girl was lost and all the kids in town went to look for her,though we could have gotten lost too, we were barely older, andabove us a helicopter throbbed, and we were in parts of thewoods we’d never seen, and the crickets sang thickly and thebullfrogs and the sounds pressed in on us and the air. We werescared and we sweated. We raced each other back out. Theyfound her after ten hours and she was fine.

So one night we went there, F and I, drove through theold town and into the development. I hadn’t been for years andmy old neighborhood was more ramshackle than I’d realized.It had looked different against the tangle of trees on the outskirtsof town than when the new houses went up, their poolsand basketball-court driveways. I couldn’t see the rocks and wildgrapes of my childhood. We could just smell the grapevinesnear the field they’d cleared for the development, where deadwood bowed.

(Continues…)
(Continues…)Excerpted from they dragged them through the streets by hilary plum. Copyright © 2013 by Hilary Plum. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS.
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