History of Wolves(5)
The Grierson scandal broke a few months after I started high school the next fall. I overheard the gossip while I was pouring someone’s coffee, working as a part-time waitress at the diner in town. He had been accused of pedophilia and sex crimes at his previous school and was promptly fired at ours—a stack of dirty pictures had been confiscated from some former apartment of his in California. That day after work, I took my tips to the bar down the street and bought my first full pack of cigarettes from the machine in the vestibule. I knew from the few I’d stolen at home not to inhale fully when lighting up. But as I ducked into the wet bushes behind the parking lot, my eyes started watering and I coughed, an ugly fury thumping at my heart. More than anything else I felt deceived. I felt I’d perceived some seed in Mr. Grierson’s nature, and that he’d lied to me, profoundly, by ignoring what I did to him in his car, pretending to be better than he was. A regular teacher. I thought about Mr. Grierson zipping his wide, warm neck back inside his jacket collar. I thought of his rank scent when I got close, as if he’d sweated through his clothes and dried out in the winter air. I thought about all that, and what I felt for him, finally, was an uncomfortable rush of pity. It seemed unfair to me that people couldn’t be something else just by working at it hard, by saying it over and over.
When I was six or seven, my mom sat me down in the bath basin in my underwear. It was midmorning, midsummer. A shaft of light caught her face. She dribbled water on my head from a measuring cup. “I wish I believed in this shit,” she told me.
“What’s supposed to happen?” I shivered.
“Good question,” she said. “You’re a new pot of rice, baby. I’m starting you all over from scratch.”
I didn’t want to go home the night Mr. Grierson dropped me off. I thought—with pleasure, feeling a necklace of hooks in my throat as I swallowed—how I might break through the brittle lake ice and just go down. My parents wouldn’t worry for a long time, maybe not till morning. My mother nodded off each night sewing quilts for prison inmates. My dad spent his evenings scavenging wood from the cleared property that was for sale across the lake. I never even knew for sure if they were my real parents, or if they were simply the people who stayed around after everyone else went back to college or office jobs in the Twin Cities. They were more like stepsiblings than parents, though they were good to me, always—which was worse than anything in a way. Worse than buying cereal with dimes and quarters, worse than accepting hand-me-downs from neighbors, worse than being called Commie, Freak. My dad hung a swing when I was ten from a giant cottonwood; my mom cut cockleburs from my hair. Even so, the night Mr. Grierson dropped me off, I kept thinking, viciously, waiting for my body to plunge through ice: There goes the rice, Mom. There goes the whole pot.
After I went to community college and dropped out, after I had been temping in the Cities for some time, I found a national database online into which you could type any sex offender’s name and track them around the country. You can watch someone’s little red trail on a map of each state as they go from city to city, as they go from Arkansas to Montana, as they search for bad apartments, as they enter prison and come out again. You can watch them try to give new names and get called out, a flurry of angry posts erupting online every time this happens. You can watch the moral indignation. You can watch them try again. You can follow them to southern Florida, to the marshes, where, among the mangroves, they set up a little out-of-the-way antique shop, selling whatever, selling junk. Hawking rusty lanterns and stuffed ducks, fake shark teeth, cheap gold earrings. You can see everything they sell because people update their posts and give all the details. There are so many people watching. People are updating all the time. “Should I buy a map from a convicted sex offender?” people write, and it seems an ethically ambiguous question. “Don’t I have a constitutional right to tell him I don’t want him here, selling his postcards at half price?” People write, “Don’t I have a right to tell him to his fucking face?” People write, “Who does he think he is?”
2
PAPERS PASSED ALONG IN A PILE. That’s what high school was. They went down one aisle between desks, came back around the next, looped slowly to the back of the classroom. The gifted and talented kids—transformed now into the Latin Club, the Forensics Team—licked their fingers to extract their portion. They always set to work like the swim team doing laps, breathing from the sides of their mouths, biting down on their pencils. The hockey players had to be prodded awake when the stack came down their aisle, had to be treated with great deference—or else we would lose the District Championship. Again. They woke from their naps long enough to take one paper and pass the rest on, long enough to dump open bags of chips into their mouths, wipe the salt from their lips, and return to their dreams of Empire. What else would hockey players dream about? It was their world we lived in. When I was fifteen, I figured this out. They dreamed it into fact. They got teachers to forgive their blank worksheets, they got cheerleaders to scream out their names at pep rallies, they got Zambonis to stripe the world as far as you could see—ceaselessly—in perfect swaths of freezing water. We were in a new building that year, a bigger classroom with pale brick walls, but outside it was the same thing it had been since we were children. Winter boomeranged back.
Outside: four feet of snow sealed in a shiny crust.