“Yesterday,” he said as he rubbed his dirty hands over his face. “Yesterday they come.” He wasn’t looking at me as he spoke. Somehow his dirty hands hadn’t made his face dirty.
“Who come?” I said.
“Oh, no,” he said. He put his black palms up in defense. “I don’t ask question.”
“Who come?” I demanded.
He looked at me with trepidation. Slowly, stumblingly, full of error, he told me that yesterday they come for Roberto, yesterday, middle of day, four car, four car, no warning, all pull up same time, right outside, happen fast, take him way, take him. What I can do? I can do nothing. I am one man. They have law. Hurt me as much as hurt him.
He hunched his shoulders and he looked aggrieved. He was sorry, he said. “I pray for him now.”
I believed him.
“He was nice boy,” he said. “Hard worker. Hurt me too. Oh, boy.” He ran his dirty fingers through his thick hair.
Then some people came in with their shoes, and he stood up to help them. His pack of cigarettes was on the counter, and I took one and stuck it in my mouth and lit it. He didn’t notice. He didn’t care. My boldness surprised me.
I took the long way home. I walked fast and hard. I smoked the cigarette, and the second I exhaled, the cold wind took the smoke. People drove past honking. I came down the hill and over the bridge. At the train tracks I stopped and tried to get my breath. I was wheezing. A small dot appeared way down the line. After a while it became a train. I could hear the rumble. When it drew closer, I could see that it was loaded with long tubular objects, missiles no doubt, twenty feet long, thirty feet, covered with canvas and strapped down with canvas belts. As the train approached, I saw the engineer hanging his head and arm out the window, and I motioned for him to pull the horn as I would have back when I was a kid. A moment later I heard the blast, braaaaaammmmm; it was louder than I had remembered, longer too, and then the train passed under the bridge as it headed out west or down south.
SLATLAND by Rebecca Lee
I went to Professor Pine for help twice in my life, once as a child and once as an adult. The first time, I was eleven and had fallen into an inexplicable depression. This happened in the spring of 1967, seemingly overnight, and for no reason. Any happiness in me just flew away, like birds up and out of a tree.
Until then I had been a normal, healthy child. My parents had never damaged me in any way. They had given me a dusty, simple childhood on the flatlands of Saskatchewan. I had two best friends — large, unselfish girls who were already gearing up for adolescence, sometimes laughing until they collapsed. I had a dog named Chest, who late at night brought me half-alive things in his teeth — bats with human faces, fluttering birds, speckled, choking mice.
My parents couldn’t help noticing my sadness. They looked at me as if they were afraid of me. Sometimes at the dinner table the silence would be so deep that I felt compelled to reassure them. But when I tried to say that I was all right, my voice would crack and I would feel my face distorting, caving in. I would close my eyes then, and cry.
One night my parents came into my bedroom and sat down on my bed. “Honey,” my father said, “your mother and I have been thinking about you a lot lately. We were thinking that maybe you would consider talking to somebody — you know, a therapist — about what is the matter.” My father was an earnest, cheerful man, a geologist with a brush cut and a big heart. I couldn’t imagine that a therapist would solve my problems, but my father looked hopeful, his large hand tracing a ruffle around my bedspread.
Three days later we were standing outside an office on the fourth floor of the Humanities Building. My appointment was not with a true therapist but rather with a professor of child psychology at the university where my father taught.
We knocked, and a voice called from behind the door in a bit of a singsong, “Come in, you, come in, you.” Of course he was expecting us, but this still seemed odd, as if he knew us very well or as if my father and I were both little children — or elves. The man sitting behind the desk when we entered was wearing a denim shirt, his blond hair slicked back like a rodent’s. He looked surprised — a look that turned out to be permanent. He didn’t stand up, just waved at us. From a cage in the corner three birds squawked. My father approached the desk and stuck out his hand. “Peter Bergen,” my father said.
“Professor Roland Boland Pine,” the man said, and then looked at me. “Hello, girlie.”
Despite this, my father left me alone with him. Perhaps he just thought, as I did, that Professor Pine talked like this, in occasional baby words, because he wanted children to respond as if to other children. I sat in a black leather chair. The professor and I just stared at each other for a while. I didn’t know what to say, and he wasn’t speaking either. It was easy to stare at him. As if I were staring at an animal, I felt no embarrassment.
“Well,” he said at last, “your name is Margit?”
I nodded.
“How are you today, Margit?”
“I’m okay.”
“Do you feel okay?”
“Yes. I feel okay.”
“Do you go to school, Margit?”
“Yes.”
“Do you like your teacher?”
“Not really.”
“Do you hate him?”
“It’s a her.”
“Do you hate her?”
“No.”
“Why are you here, Margit?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is everything okay at home?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love your father?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love your mother?” A long tic broke on his face, from the outer corner of his left eye all the way down to his neck.
“Yes.”
“Is she a lumpy mother?”
“Pardon me?”
“Pardon me, Margit. I meant does your mother love you?”
“Yes.”
“Does she love your father?”
I paused. “Yes.”
“And does he love her?”
“I guess so.”
“Margit, what is the matter?”
“Nothing. I just don’t see why we’re talking about my parents so much.”
“Why don’t they love each other?”
“They do — I said they do.”
“Why can’t you talk about this?”
“Because there’s nothing to talk about.”
“You can tell me the truth. Do they hurt each other? Lots of girls’ parents hurt each other.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Is one of them having an affair, maybe?”
I didn’t say anything. “Maybe?” he repeated.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Which one, Margit? Which one of the babyfaces?”
I stared at him. Another tic passed over his face. “Pardon me, Margit. I meant which one of your parents is having the affair?”
“My dad. But I don’t think he’s actually having it. I just heard him tell my mom a few months ago that he was considering it.”
“And do you think he is?”
“I don’t know. A few weeks ago I picked up the phone and a woman was talking to my dad. She told him that she had to have her breasts removed and asked if that would make a difference.”
“How difficult for you. How sad for the girlie-whirl.” Another tic, like a fault line shifting. “Margit, may I tell you something from my own childhood?”
This worried me, but I said yes.
“When I was young, I loved my mother. She was a real lumper. Then one day, kerpow, she was dead.” He held his forefinger to his head as if it were the barrel of a gun and stared at me for a few seconds without speaking. “It wasn’t actually her, you see, but a woman of about her age who happened to be walking toward me on the sidewalk. A man came running and shot her. I was so devastated that I fell right on top of her. I didn’t care if he shot me, too. I was only ten at the time, and my mother’s death could have scarred me for life. But it didn’t. And do you know how I got from that moment to this one — how I got from there to here, to sitting behind this desk now, talking to you?”