“Angus?” From behind me. “Angus?” She must’ve called four or five times before I caught on.
“Jamey’s dead,” I told her.
Rachel sat in bed, blinking. “What, again?”
“No, I … I think it’s the real thing this time.”
She drew herself up in the sheets and the sweatshirt that she wore to bed, letting the news sink in, and when she asked how, I didn’t know what to tell her, because Andre hadn’t elaborated and I’d not thought to ask, and I couldn’t very well lie because she’d be seeing for herself in an hour or so.
I really hate looking like I don’t know the score.
*
I grew up with an answer for everything, or so my mother told me, plenty of times, and one of the last things she said to me the last time I visited was, “How on earth did you get so jaded this early in your life?” As if, one, I could summarize, and two, she actually wanted the truth. Her question, I think, her terminology itself, sounded suspiciously like a line from a Soul Asylum song she must’ve overheard my stepbrother playing and probably assumed I related to because everybody her age knows that everybody our age likes all the same things. Homogeneity is very important to her and my stepfather.
When she asked that I remember feeling sorry for her, because unlike now it wasn’t that we never talked, it’s just that we never said anything. If you grew up in our house you could often find yourself in the conversational equivalent of wandering through a museum that had been closed down, all the exhibits gone, so that the only things left to see were the blank walls of empty rooms, and dust. You knew something had been there once, long ago — there had to have been, you could sometimes see outlines where something had stood, where the dust wasn’t as thick — but whatever it was, you could only guess.
So there it hung in the air, her first stab in years at engaging me with something that made me ponder:
“How on earth did you get so jaded this early in your life?”
While I didn’t even think that the label applied, personally, the fact of her using it at all seemed more an admission of defeat than anything, so I felt obligated to reinforce it.
“What you should be asking instead,” I told her, “is why it took me as long as it did.”
I’d been neutral as far as who or what I was referring to, but my mother decided to take it as a personal affront.
“You can’t hurt me,” she said. “So if that’s what you think you’re doing here, you’re very sadly mistaken. You can’t hurt me at all.”
And when she said this, all I could think of was how true it was, and how that might’ve been the problem, because it was the only thing about her that I’d ever really envied.
*
We drove out of Chicago in the frosty autumn chill that grips hardest in those last few hours before dawn, dropping down to the Eisenhower Expressway and heading for the western ‘burbs. Soon the eastbound lanes would begin filling with morning commuters, like plaque in a hardened artery, while the trains that clattered down the center exchanged their seedy and exotic nocturnal cargo for the indistinguishable hordes who belonged to the sun.
Chicago’s western hinterlands are a patchwork quilt. There are stretches where you think you’ve finally seen the last strip mall, and drive over creeks and rivers, past woodlands that have withstood advance since the days of Marquette and Joliet, but then you’ll find yourself coming to the next tacky outpost of doughnut shops and rent-to-owns, and it seems you can never quite put all that polyurethaned civilization behind you. When I was very young I thought the entire country went on this way, the next McDonald’s never more than a reassuring five minutes ahead.
Those suburban woodlands, as you drive past, seem thick and mysterious, like overlooked tracts of ancient soil where the fleet descendants of pre-Columbian fathers might yet be watching with painted eyes. From the air, though, surrounded by ragged webs of asphalt, they mostly look besieged.
Still, it was in one of those brambled thickets where the old slaughterhouse sat enduring its years of obsolescence and neglect.
We found the convenience store where Andre had said he would wait, out of the chill. Rachel and I collected him to the relief of the cashier whose unfamiliarity with shampoo must’ve consigned her to the graveyard shift. But then she scurried to the sandwich island and plucked one of their wretched hot dogs off the weenie-go-round and slapped it in a bun, shyly giving it to him with a fistful of condiments, then backing away before he could attempt to pay for it.
Ever since we were kids, Andre has had that effect on some people. You just want to throw a blanket around his shoulders and give him soup. Everything about Andre is too near the surface, including his cheekbones.
Rachel and I followed behind his car, although certainly we knew the way to the slaughterhouse. The neighborhood houses all sat where they had for years, maybe with skimpy cosmetic changes, but still the same behind them. It’s only when you return to your old neighborhood that you feel the way houses have lives apart from the people who reside in them.
“The human body’s supposed to replace almost every cell in it every seven years,” I said, because it felt too quiet. “You’ve heard of that, right?”
“Yeah. But not all at once,” Rachel said.
“So I can mean it literally, saying I’m not the same person who grew up here.”
Fingers busy, Rachel made a show of subtracting from seven. “Guess that means I still have four to go.”
In the light from a streetlamp she frowned. Rachel’s was one of those rare faces that are enhanced by a tiny frown, her brown eyes filling with concentration or disdain and over them the thick eyebrows nudging toward each other in a way that made her wise and sensual and imperial.
“There’s something about all at once that’d seem better,” she said. “Like shedding a skin? You call in sick to work one day, and lock yourself in the bathroom, and keep flushing for hours, and when you come back out it’s a whole new you.”
“Imagine the plumbing hazards,” I said, which made us laugh because we needed to, because we’d gotten out of bed to go look at the corpse of a friend and decide, I guess, that it really was him, and he really was dead.
It meant two extra blocks’ walk, but we parked in the lot of a church — Lutheran, I think — so some suburban early riser wouldn’t see us disembarking directly in front of his castle and go making xenophobic calls to the police and the N.R.A.
“So you had to first come out here, when, like three o’clock this morning?” I asked.
“Uh huh,” Andre said, “about then.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, I just … just woke up with this awful hunch.” He wasn’t crying anymore. Had gotten out of his car with a smear of mustard on his cheek from the hot dog, for Rachel to wipe away. “I just had this dream that Jamey was…”
We moved down the street, then over a block, following the new one until the street ended in a cul-de-sac and dissolved into several dozen feet of weedy lot. Behind us, lights were beginning to wink on, off, in bathrooms and kitchens, while ahead of us the woods lay cold and dark, unaffected by that workaday world.
We threaded our way through trees, none of which were very big because none were terribly old by tree standards. Our feet tramped over frosty ground untouched by tires for two decades, although time still hadn’t erased every suggestion of the path where the meat trucks used to roll.
It couldn’t have been more than 600 feet back in, but seemed farther, because the woods had slowly closed in as though keeping a secret. Whatever died back here now would die randomly, not systematically, but if it’s true that places soak in memories of the things that happen there, then it’d never been entirely our imagination that around the old slaughterhouse we could sense some wordless animal panic, some imprint left by countless dumb beasts who buckled to their knees as their skulls were crushed by sledgehammers swung with brute factory precision.