Red Clocks(66)

The biographer’s sodden lungs fight to take a full breath.

She drives back to Newville, gasping.

On the beach the wind drives hair into her eyes. She hurls a sneaker at a low-flying gull. Curses her aim. Retrieves her shoe. Jumps on an old log. The beach is a good place for rage: the sky and sea can take it. Her screams are absorbed by the booming waves, the heaped fields of oyster cloud. Because this is Oregon in January, nobody human is around to hear.





Doctor reported his medicine chest stolen. It was found in the snow a few yards from the tents, missing its morphine and opium pills. An able seaman was blamed for the theft, and shot dead.





THE DAUGHTER


“The jury’s going to convict,” says Dad.

“Are you now a fortune-teller?” says the daughter.

“She completely lost it on the stand, I hear. Looks as if she’ll go to prison for a good little bit.”

“Why are you cheerful about it?” She is extra seasick tonight.

“It’s only fair she pay her debt.”

Sipping water to mute the queasiness: “What if she didn’t do what they said she did? What if—”

“More rice, Mattie?”

“It’s like you’re accepting whatever the news says. You weren’t even at the trial.”

“Your mother asked if you would like more rice.”

“No thank you.”

Mom, still holding the bowl: “You sure, pigeon?”

“Has Miss Stephens been telling you this woman is innocent? It’s not her place to bring politics into the classroom, and if she is, then—”

“I can think of my own ideas. Miss Stephens didn’t say shit.”

“Language?” says Mom.

“Tons of injustices happen in broad daylight,” adds the daughter, “when ordinary citizens are aware but do nothing.”

“For instance,” says Dad.

“The bystander effect. Nobody helping a crime victim when other people are around because everyone thinks someone else is going to do it.”

“Fair enough. What else?”

Her father has trained her to give more than one example in any debate; and that numbers not ending in zero are more convincing in a negotiation, because they sound less arbitrary.

“For instance,” she says, “the whole world knows about the pilot-whale slaughter in the Faroe Islands, but nobody’s been able to—”

“People have every right to practice their own cultural rituals.” He saws at his little pink pork chop. “The Faroese have been hunting whales that way for centuries.”

“Pilot whales are technically dolphins. Oceanic dolphins.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Well, Dad, I do, and they are.”

“Point is, they eat what they kill, and they only kill as much as they can eat. The haul is shared out fairly among the community.”

“Good for them,” mutters the daughter.

“Are you coming down with something?” says Mom. “You look—”

“I’m fine.”

“I don’t want you stressing out about the Math Academy,” she says. “If you get in, you get in. If not, you try again next year.”

“No reason she shouldn’t get in this year,” says Dad.

“May I be excused,” says the daughter.

She has to get her body clean. Stop being seasick. Stop the blue veins from branching across her tightening breasts. Don’t be the free milk.

Terribly she misses Yasmine.

Bolt River Youth Correctional Facility is a medium-security state prison for females twelve to twenty years old.

Number of letters, cards, and care packages the daughter mailed to Bolt River the first year Yasmine was inside: sixty-four.

Number of words she heard back from Yasmine: zero.

Whenever she phoned the front office, she was told, “The offender is refusing your call.”

Yasmine’s mother said, “I’ve got no idea, Matts. I simply don’t.”

After a year, the daughter stopped trying.





The frostbitten skin, which at first itched intolerably, has gone waxen and lifeless. Black-purple blisters seep rank-smelling pus. The doctor offered to cut the fingers off, but without morphine or opium, he said, it will be the worst pain I’ve ever known. I declined the offer.





THE WIFE


Puts away clean clothes while the girls play Amelia Earhart on Bex’s bed. Didier is at the pub with Pete, home by dinnertime. Dinner will be taco casserole, and Shell is going to ask whether the beans were home soaked or from a can.

“What’s that sound!”

“Oh no, the plane’s running out of gas!”

“My only choice is to fall into the sea!”

“I’m falling! Flump.”

“Flump.”

In a non-game voice Shell says, “Gross, why is there dust all over your floor?”

Bex looks at the floor, then up at the wife.

“My mom says,” adds Shell, “that a clean house is the only house worth living in.”

That’s enough, Perfect. That is enough.

“I guess your mom doesn’t know much about dust,” says the wife. “Because if she did, then she’d know that dust has pollen fibers, which are very good for you.”