Wading through the golden rod, studded with scrap metal, with shredded firecrackers, flossy crimps of insulation foam, there I was. The trailers all edged in rust like frills peaking from under a dress, but as you got closer, it wasn’t so dainty and there was a feel in the air of awfulness. All of it, it reminded me of places you’re not supposed to be, they’re just not for you, like when we went to that house, when we were in Girl Scouts, to deliver the Christmas presents to the family on Mt. Elliott, and everyone told us, Just watch, they’ll have a big TV and a VCR and they’ll be lying around collecting welfare with tons of kids running around, and that wasn’t what happened at all, and remember how the baby wouldn’t stop shaking and the look in the mother’s eyes like she’d long ago stopped being surprised at anything, and the plastic on the windows and the leaking refrigerator, we weren’t supposed to be there at all, now, were we?
This, it was like that, but different, because this had that lostness but then too in place of sad there was this hard current of nastiness and dirtiness and badness, sweaty, gun-oil, mattress-spring coil throbbing, stains spreading. My eyes skating over the abandoned trailers and thinking of the things happening behind the bulging screens, the pitted aluminum. The sky so black and the vague sound of music and the feeling of teetering into something and then it getting inside you, feeding off you, making you its own.
There was a laugh then and it struck me hard right through the swirling muzz in my head, but it was warm, rippling, and it broke up some of the nastiness for me, but not enough.
Coming from one of the trailers, a faded red one with a rolling top, like a curling tongue. There was something glowing inside and there was music.
I felt my ankle twist on a bottle curved deep into the earth. I could hear the music, a thud-thud, bass tickling me, promising things, and I walked closer, I just did.
I walked closer like I could, like I was allowed, even as this was no place for me. That tickling laugh kept rolling itself out, felt like long fingers uncoiling just shy of me, just shy of my body, hot and itchy under my coat, aching for the cold wind ripping off the water and instead this runny canal, a ditch swelling.
And then there it was.
Soft, high, sweet, Keri’s own laugh.
Like when we watched a funny movie or when we watched Joni make cross-eyes or when we danced in our bedrooms, singing, singing until we thought our lungs would burst.
But then turning, turning like a dial and the laugh got lower, throatier, and I could feel it prickling under my skin, then sinking through me, down my legs, along the twitching pain in my ankle, straight into the ground.
Reaching under my feet.
And in my head, I could see her face and she’s lying on a stripped mattress, hair spread out beneath, a windmill, and she’s laughing and twisting and squirming, her head tilting back, neck arching, and who knew what was happening, what was happening to draw that throaty laugh from her, pump that bursting flush into her cheeks, face, God, Keri, God, all kinds of dark hands on her, she at the center of some awful white-girl gangbang. All those hands touching her white white-girl skin. These are the things I thought, I won’t claim otherwise.
I was standing ten seconds, a minute, who knew, the cold snaking around me but not touching. I could’ve stood forever, twenty feet from that trailer, watching. But then. But then. The sound.
A hinge struck and I could hear and there it was, I could see they weren’t in the trailer but on the other side of it and there I was, back to the mangled sheet metal, sidling around, and that’s when I saw the bonfire that made the glow and I hid behind the tinsely branches of a half-fallen tree and I watched and I saw everything, or figured I did.
There were two black guys and a white guy and there was a tall black girl with a dark jacket on and I could see it had gold print struck in it and then I saw it was a letter jacket, Keri’s letter jacket from volleyball, and the girl was climbing on the picnic table and that was where Keri was and she was dancing. She was dancing to the music from the radio they’d brought and one of the black guys, Keri was saying something to him as she danced, and he was laughing and watching her and I could tell he was the one she was with, you could see it in his eyes and hers, it was vibrating between them.
She was there in the Homecoming Court, resplendent in her floral dress, smiling brightly, waving at everyone and standing ramrod straight, face perfect and still.
And the black girl joined Keri and the girl had a can of beer and so did Keri and the guys, they were shouting and they were lightly rocking the table, and the white guy was tipping a bottle of something into his mouth and singing about how some girl was his twilight zone, his Al Capone, and I could smell the pot and a lot was going on like at any party and it seemed like maybe more, but I was watching Keri and Keri’s face, it was lit from the fire and it was a crazy orange flaring up her cheeks and she was wearing her long cashmere muffler from Jacobson’s, coiled around her neck, flapping tight in the wind, and she was dancing and the fire lit her hair and I could see her face and it was like I’d never seen it before and never would again because things made sense even if they didn’t because there was something there that I felt twenty years too young to understand, no, not too young, because I couldn’t understand it because she was fathoms deep and I would be driving along Kercheval in fifteen minutes, driving to my family’s three-bedroom colonial and tucking myself in and hoping the boy would call and thinking about the next party and here was Keri and she was fathoms deep and I was…
I couldn’t have known, watching her there, watching her dancing and looking like that, feeling that way, that she would be gone by finals, by junior prom even. I never said a word about what I saw and I never told her to watch out either, even though, the way I was, I could only see it as she was going for broke and it could turn out any number of ways but most of them bad. But even if I had tried to warn her, to hold her back, it wouldn’t have mattered because I would’ve told her to watch out for the wrong things, the wrong places. I couldn’t have known, watching her there, that two weeks later she’d be driving a drunken Kirk Deegan home late after a postgame party, driving him in his Audi and coming into the Deegan garage too close to the wall and shearing off the side view mirror. I couldn’t have known Kirk Deegan would get so mad and push her so hard against the garage wall and her head hitting that pipe and then turning and hitting the edge of the shovel hanging and what must have been a sickening crack and her falling and her dying and her dying there on the floor of his garage. Her dying on the floor of his garage and him there, too dumbstruck to call the police, an ambulance, his parents, anyone, for a half hour while she was there, hair spread on the cement floor like a windmill and then gone forever. I couldn’t have known that. But one way or another I did.
Honesty above all else
by Dorene O’Brien
Corktown
I’ve never told anyone this story, and I’m only telling you now because Mrs. O’Leary is dead. You don’t need to know my name — what’s it matter? I grew up in Cork-town, live in the same Carpenter Gothic on Church that my great-grandparents lived in. Against all odds, Corktown has survived — bravery, gentrification, the luck of the Irish? But back in ’99 when it happened, everything was going to hell. You couldn’t count on things anymore the way the Carmodys and the McNallys could count on trains to plow into Michigan Grand Central to the south and scatter tourists onto the doorsteps of Limerick’s Pub and the Lager House, or Tiger Stadium to the north to draw crowds like ants to spilled sugar. The Tigers were a magnet for suburbanites, who’d line their Cadillacs and Cutlasses up and down Michigan Avenue, the money bursting the seams in their pockets. My family inherited a parking lot on Trumbull, but that well ran dry when after a century of major league ball in our neighborhood the Tigers just trotted off, leaving behind a sad and hulking mess that nobody wants. The stadium’s still there, eight years later, a painful reminder of a better life, though out of loyalty or homage it’s the only abandoned building on Michigan that isn’t carved up, burned out, or sprayed with State Boyz and Plato tags.