History of Wolves(15)

Paul whacked a stick against a rock. He wanted a swing set, a slide. He wanted a playground with sand in a box and public shovels and public pails, which people at the Department of Parks and Water cleaned and kept nice. He knew his business when it came to parks. He’d lived in a Chicago suburb for most of his life, with sidewalks and such. Golden retrievers fetching Frisbees. He wanted a tire swing, a baseball diamond, acres of mowed grass.

“Oh, brother. Another beaver,” he said.

“Oh, brother,” I mocked him. Then I felt bad.

The upshot being that on a drizzly day in mid-May, I arranged him in his green rain slicker in the bike seat and pedaled the six miles into town. I had to stand up on the pedals to do the hills, and when I came over a ridge, we careened down through oily puddles wide as the road itself. Within minutes, we were both soaked. At the elementary school we trudged through the piled pebbles on the playground, and I pushed Paul on one of two plastic swings.

“This what you want?” I asked.

“I guess,” he said. It clearly wasn’t at all what he wanted. Back and forth he went: I stood behind, watched his hood flap. Some sorrow shoved around in my chest, like a stick in wet sand, and so time passed.

Later, I could get that drizzle feeling just about any time I saw a kid on a swing. The hopelessness of it—the forward excitement, the midflight return. The futile belief that the next time around, the next flight forward, you wouldn’t get dragged back again. You wouldn’t have to start over, and over.

“Should I push harder?” I asked him.

After a moment: “I guess.”

School had been out for hours, so at first we were alone in these labors. My arms were getting tired, though the rain had begun to let up. At some point a young mother arrived with an umbrella, a baby in a plastic stroller, and a little girl. The girl looked older than Paul: she wore yellow rubber boots and a pink rain jacket. When Paul saw her, he lit up instantly. He dumped all the pebbles out of his leather glove and worked his hand in up to the elbow. He wanted the girl to push him, and when she took over from me, heaving him with her hands, he got this goofy look on his face, both concentrated and dazed, as if he were trying to watch her without turning his head. I walked to the park bench—not exactly jealous, though not quite generous either. Paul never said another word after he asked the girl to play with him. He sat still on his swing, let her fall all over him from behind.

I had, then, a very complete vision of him as a fifteen-yearold. I thought I knew the sort of guy Paul would be. He’d be the kind of boy who let himself be pushed on some little kiddie swing by a girl who adored him, who wrote his name in purple pen on her palm and waited for him after school. He’d be the reluctant but radiant star of Our Town, or vice president of the student council in an ironic yet good-natured way. He’d be a mediocre but heroic huddler for the track team. He’d have a mysterious Chinese character tattooed on his wrist, something only he could read and slightly smeared because he’d gone to a dingy parlor in Bearfin to do it. He’d be called Gardner, probably. He’d be the kind of boy known by just his last name.

“Higher,” he said to the girl, without any rancor or desire, as if he were doing her a favor by allowing himself to be pushed. Overhead, a floatplane skimmed the treetops. Across the parking lot, several trucks of senior boys were making screeching circles through puddles. They had their windows down. They were shouting, “Marco!”

“Teeth,” the young mother said to me, when I sat down next to her on the wet bench.

“Um, hmm,” I nodded in agreement, letting the word arrive like a cleaned fossil from another epoch of meaning. It suited my mood to believe that some words, such as “teeth” or “Marco,” needed no further explanation.

Then the young woman said, “This bugger’s going to bite my nipple off.” So “teeth” got its tag and was filed away with all the other mindless small talk, all the obvious things you say to strangers on a park bench in the rain. I sighed and she went on, “Your brother’s quite the lady-killer.”

“Your girl’s pretty easily killed.”

We watched them for a moment in silence. The little girl with the yellow boots was standing too close to the swing, and every time Paul swung back he barreled into her chest. She looked ready to topple over.

The woman snorted as the little girl stumbled. “That one’s not mine, thank God. Or not the way you mean. She’s my sister.”

I peeked over at the mother and saw that she had pimples on her chin and plucked eyebrows. She had spit-up on her letter jacket and a Pixy Stix straw in the corner of her mouth like some cartoon hick with his piece of hay. She could have been any one of the Karens in my class a few years down the line, and when I realized this I wanted to laugh but not because it was funny. The girls who stuck around Loose River after high school were always having babies and getting married at eighteen, then moving into their parents’ basements or backyard campers. That’s what happened if you were pretty enough to be a cheerleader, but not smart enough to go to college. And if you weren’t pretty enough, you got a job at the casino or a nursing home in Whitewood.

“How old’s your baby?” I asked her then, to be friendly.

“Fifteen weeks,” she said. “I’m halfway there. At thirty, I’m not doing this nursing thing anymore, you know? My boyfriend’s afraid of my tits! They gross him out he says.”