Look At Me_ A Novel Part 26

"And right on the corner there was the Central Furniture Company, founded in eighteen seventy-seven-"

"Good!" Moose interjected with surprise.

"-by E. R. Herrick and L. D. Upson-"

"Very good!"

"-after Upson's other furniture plant burned down."

"Excellent!" Moose cried, and favored Charlotte with a look that was purely her own; fond, sweet, a look she began to pander for when she hadn't received it in a while.

It was easy. Her mind trapped information and held it-she had always been that way. She knew more about Rockford's history than she did about tropical fish; facts itched in her mind, looking for ways to be said. Their meaning was secondary, sometimes altogether absent; history was the idiom she and her uncle could speak. They joked and teased each other in history; they sparred, snapping it back and forth, or else let facts float between them desultorily, like sweet nothings. Moose challenged her, poking factual questions as if Charlotte's mind might have wandered (which often it had), and she rea.s.sured him with facts applied gently, soothingly. For Charlotte, it was like entering a state of hypnosis. At times she had trouble switching from the language of history to the language of everyone else.

"Let's backtrack," Moose said, and led the way onto Morgan Street. The Illinois Central tracks sliced through it at an angle, one of four lines that still bisected Rockford, stopping occasionally to pick up freight. "We can follow these right to the old depot," he declared, and charged between the rails.

Moose was thriving, kinetic, infused with a new vitality that made him seem in a state of constant great haste. Charlotte had trouble remembering the man who had flopped at his desk looking pained and half asleep as she read to him. Now he paced, he stalked, sometimes marching from his office and continuing his declamations from the bas.e.m.e.nt hallway at a shout. Or he and Charlotte went out, canva.s.sing the dregs of Rockford's past like detectives: the old Swedish neighborhood on the east side of the river around Kishwaukee Street; the Esterline Whitney factory, one of the last machine tool factories still active in Rockford. The Industrial Hall at Midway Village, where Moose had narrated for Charlotte a tour of Rockford's industrial products with such booming authority that the entire population of the hall (namely, four visitors from Des Moines and two from Cincinnati) politely asked if they, too, might join.

Each Friday, when she appeared on his doorstep (she'd been coming on a weekly basis since January), a kind of stunned happiness would float across her uncle's face, and Charlotte would feel a pulse of antic.i.p.ation that made her head ache. Eventually Moose would reveal something to her, she felt this keenly: the solution to the deepest mystery of all, which had nothing to do with Rockford. The mystery of himself.

Her uncle hounded the tracks onto Main Street, crossed the bridge over Kent Creek and hurried to the old railroad depot, abandoned now, surrounded by cyclone fencing, windows either boarded or broken, ringed with icicles of gla.s.s. "Northern Illinois Central Freight Station" was still faintly visible on its yellow brick.

"Trains changed the shape of ladies' skirts from hoops to bustles," Charlotte said, by way of conversation, "so they could get down the aisles more easily."

Moose murmured in reply, "At one point, twenty-three pa.s.senger trains stopped in Rockford every day."

He glanced at Charlotte in a knowing, particular way, as if alluding to a shared understanding between them so axiomatic that she couldn't bring herself to ask what exactly he thought she understood. Charlotte did her best to return the look. She hated disappointing him.

"Did you ever catch a train here?" she asked.

"Oh, yes," he said, and pointed through the cyclone fence at a more modern structure, also vacant, closer to the tracks. "That was the pa.s.senger depot."

His mind pitched into memory: rocking over the railroad bridge and Grape Island, spying into people's backyards at their flailing laundry; bolting through crossings where the same group of children seemed always to wait astride bicycles, waving. But Moose wasn't going to talk about this. He had to be careful-Charlotte would always try to make it personal. It was the reigning habit of mind in this land without history, this era when all relationships of time and s.p.a.ce, of cause and effect, had been obliterated by the touch of a key. And so people were adrift, lacking any context by which to orient themselves, seeking to fill the breach with personal history personal history, that diminutive, myopic subst.i.tute.

"Did you go with your mom and dad?" she asked. "On the train to Chicago?"

"Just my dad," Moose said.

Those long-antic.i.p.ated visits! The University Club, on Michigan Avenue-first a swim in the ancient pool, where chlorine fumes lazed like ether from the milky water, where yellowish old men swam their laps, mouths agape at each breath. And afterward, lunch with his father in the wood-paneled dining room, Moose's eyes foggy from the chlorine, the silver heavy and cold in his hands. Raspberries for dessert, raspberries served in a silver bowl over ice shaped like scrabble pieces.

But he wasn't going to talk about this. Or think about it. His mind was fuddled from lack of sleep. An old problem, resurgent in recent weeks: lying awake, counting Priscilla's breaths, or else pacing a living room blanched by moonlight. Some nights he left his apartment and walked along State Street for miles, trudging east through vast empty superstore parking lots toward the interstate (the older parts of town were dangerous at night); walking without sidewalks to walk on, his clothes and hair suctioned to him by the backdraft of pa.s.sing twenty-four-wheelers. Since January-nearly four months, now-Charlotte had teetered on the brink of sight. And as Moose waited for her to slip, tip, tumble irrevocably into the chasm of comprehension, the vision's maelstrom, his eagerness had come to eclipse nearly everything else.

Meanwhile he was talking, feeding his niece facts about this particular railroad line: "Illinois Northern and Central ... first reached Rock-ford August fifth, eighteen eighty-eight, after a series of skirmishes known as the Railway Wars ... first cargo was a load of yarn from Georgia headed for the Nelson Knitting Company ... watermelons from Texas ..."

The old tracks ramified into the distance with a thready shimmer that was not unlike the gleam of circuitry-odd how they looked the same. Moose's distrust of a world remade by circuitry brought a corollary nostalgia for trains; their noise; their visibility; their physical existence. Again and again he spoke to Charlotte of things things, watermelons and grain and cattle and string, reaper-mowers and harvester combines, chisel mortisers and scroll saws and flue stops and piston rings and grain elevators. Objects existing in time and s.p.a.ce. But things had lost their allure generations ago, shunted off to countries where people would make them for less. And information was the inversion of a thing; without shape or location or component parts. Without context. Not history but personal history. Charlotte hadn't seen this yet, Moose knew. She was too happy.

Flushed, smiling up at him in her bright yellow rain slicker. Kicking stones. And oh, the grind of impatience he felt-an old, dormant anger that had a shivery boil to it, like sinking his teeth into wood, or ice, or aluminum foil. He had reached a point in his life, he'd told Priscilla last night over chicken pot pies (his wife listening with a look of worry that annoyed him), when he no longer could wait. He'd been too pa.s.sive since the incident at Yale, too accepting of the limitations imposed on him! Yes, he'd imperiled the lives of twenty-four undergraduates plus himself: a methodological catastrophe, Moose was the first to admit. But his method had improved-witness Charlotte! So close, so very close! And so now the time had come to accelerate.

"Uncle Moose," Charlotte said.

"Yes!" She was shivering in the heavy rainfall. Not kicking the stone anymore, which was something. "Yes, let's keep moving."

They walked north along Main Street-once the prime artery of Rockford life, now an empty thoroughfare lined with parking garages and parking ramps. Cold rain had eked its way inside the neck of Charlotte's raincoat, her jeans were caked to her legs. Ahead she noticed a seedy-looking bar, a worn-out Old Style sign suspended above its door. She wished Moose would take her there.

But her uncle had veered into a vacant parking lot, sections of old brick grinning up from beneath its retracting asphalt. He was loping toward the river's edge. They were north of the dam; Charlotte heard the giddy plummeting crush of its waterfall. And suddenly she was tired, drained by her uncle's relentless stamina. Tired and a little defeated.

"Come on," he called to her through the rain. "From here we can look right over the dam ..." He was heading along a wispy trail into desiccated shrubbery, branches festooned with garbage, a child's soiled undershirt-the sort of place where you found people dead. And a wall of stubbornness came down in Charlotte.

"Uncle Moose," she called to him, folding her arms. "I'm cold."

Moose turned, saw that his niece was not behind him and backtracked through rotting foliage. She peered at him, gla.s.ses fogged, arms crossed. Resisting him. And Moose was disconcerted by a paroxysm of impatience with his niece that was very nearly rage, a ruthless, bodily urge to crush her innocence. Sweep it away. The feeling stunned him. No, he thought, no. He wanted to save her-save her from the blindness of the world. And now he was beset by the obverse of his rage, an urge to sweep Charlotte into his arms and cleave to her, fend off those who might wish her harm.

"You're cold, you're cold. Of course," he said, returning to her side. "Let's go somewhere warm, let's find a place ..." Shaken, half dizzy from the force of what had just transpired within him.

Charlotte pointed at the bar.

Her uncle's disappointment made a weight between them as they walked, and she was sorry; she hated not to please him. "Gas lights came to Rockford in eighteen fifty-seven," she offered, but he was too distracted to reply. "Telephones in eighteen-eighty. And the first electric streetcar company in eighteen-eighty also."

Finally he turned to her. "Telegraphs?"

"Eighteen forty-eight. And the phonograph in eighteen seventy-seven."

"Standard Time?" She sensed him beginning to relent.

"Eighteen eighty-three," Charlotte said, with pa.s.sionate relief, "because of the railroads. Because before, if you went from the East Coast to the West Coast, you had to change your watch two hundred times."

"So you did," Moose murmured, still unnerved by that seizure of rage. It wasn't his; he disowned it. "You did indeed."

Compared with the emptiness of the streets, the room was thick with life. Perhaps two dozen workmen in blue jumpsuits milled at a broad humid bar, heads tipped at a White Sox game unfolding someplace sunny on an overhead TV. Charlotte's entrance with Moose made a ripple of awareness. Her uncle stood inside the door, squeezing rain from his hair and rolling his poncho into a s...o...b..ring orange ball.

"Moose," the bartender said. He was a stringy man with thinning hair, a blond mustache, and a slight concavity to his face-a suggestion of missing teeth. "Long time."

For several perilous moments, Moose looked at the speaker without recognition. Then he said, "Teeter" (to Charlotte's relief), and smiled uncertainly. "How odd to see you here."

"Odd?" Teeter ejected the word like a seed. "Been here fourteen years come June. I'm part-owner now."

Moose made the introductions. Jim Teeter. My niece. "We went to high school together," he told Charlotte in an ironic, quizzical tone that came across as obnoxious, but in fact meant her uncle was uneasy.

"Your niece," Teeter said. "She better be older than she looks."

Her uncle frowned; Charlotte sensed the comment landing in his mind with an unpleasant weight. "I just wanted a c.o.ke," she rushed to a.s.sure the barman. "We just came in to get out of the rain."

"One c.o.ke," Teeter said. "How about you, Moo-man?"

Moose winced at the epithet. "Beer," he said. "Whatever you've got."

"Old Style do you?" Teeter was already pulling the tap. "So where you been all this time?"

"I teach history over at the college," Moose said, with great effort. "I'm married for the second time."

"How many kids?"

"None, actually."

Teeter glanced at Moose, then slid the beer and c.o.ke across the thickly varnished bar. Moose lifted the gla.s.s to his mouth with trembling hands. Charlotte had forgotten how ill at ease he was with other people. "Do you have kids?" she asked Teeter, anxious to lift the burden of conversation from her uncle.

"Three," he told Moose, sounding downcast. "Wife's looking out for number four. Guess I'm supposed to plant a money tree out back." Moose said nothing, just rested his eyes on the ballgame. "Economy's gang-busters, right?" Teeter went on. "Every day you got a new millionaire. Guess I forgot to pick a number."

"Tell me about it," Moose said suddenly. "I'm driving a 'seventy-eight station wagon."

"Mine's an 'eighty-two," Teeter cackled. "Green, looks for absolute s.h.i.t."

"Mine's blue," Moose said, and grinned. "With paneling paneling."

"No way, aw s.h.i.t! You got me on that," Teeter cried, and they laughed together with a kind of relief. Then Teeter said, "Look at us, right? Thirty years later and so what."

Moose seemed taken aback; Charlotte felt him straining to grasp Teeter's meaning. Finally, with deliberation, he said, "If you're talking about high school, we graduated twenty-three years ago."

"Twenty, thirty."

Moose downed the last of his beer and planted the heavy gla.s.s against the bar. "Right," he said in a tight voice. "So what."

"You oughta order up some soup. It's cats and dogs out there."

"Let's sit," Charlotte suggested. She wanted to get her uncle away from Teeter and farther into the bar. She was the only female in the room excepting the waitress, a middle-aged lady in skirt and sneakers, pink lipstick bleeding into a barbed wire of creases around her mouth. The density of men roused in Charlotte an unfamiliar sensation of girlishness; she felt like girls in the lunchroom at East, their b.r.e.a.s.t.s and bracelets and feathery hair folded around them like the leaves of a tree. She felt this now about her gla.s.ses, the wet tips of her hair. The amber bead, which she fished from inside her sweater and let dangle between the lapels of her raincoat. As she led the way to an empty table, her gaze locked with that of a young black man seated across the room, and she smiled at him.

The waitress arrived with battered menus and a second beer for Moose. Charlotte wiped her gla.s.ses and left them off, letting the room cave in around her. "So, you and Teeter were at East together?" she ventured.

"Yes," Moose said dully. The encounter had drained him. "We played football, both of us."

"Did you win a lot?"

There was a pause. "We won the state championship. My junior year." And now he smiled, unexpectedly.

"Wow," Charlotte breathed, imagining it-those long halls at East, everyone cheering him. "That must've been like being G.o.d."

"I guess it was," Moose said, and he smiled again. "G.o.d of a fishpond. G.o.d of a lily pad. Of course," he added, "you think it's the universe."

The waitress brought his beer and Moose ordered another on the spot. "And then what happened?" Charlotte asked.

He took a long sip. "I opened my eyes," he said. "I opened my eyes and it disappeared. Pop."

He'd never said anything like this before. "It sounds scary," Charlotte said.

"Terrifying." He was looking right at her. "Terrifying, but beautiful, too. Because my head was clear."

"How old were you?"

"Twenty-three. I was sitting by the interstate, looking down. For no reason. I pulled over for no reason."

He was watching her with eyes so bright and distinct that Charlotte saw them clearly even without gla.s.ses. Moose took her hand in his. Hot. She had never touched her uncle's hand before, or any part of him. "Charlotte," he said, softly but with great urgency, "I need you to concentrate. I need you to think very, very carefully. Will you do that for me? There's so little time!"

What do you mean? she wanted to ask. So little time for what? But the part of her that monitored her behavior with Moose, eliding all evidence of incomprehension, censored the query.

"But Uncle Moose," she said, leaning close, glancing in Teeter's direction, "how did you change from being like that that, to now?"

It was the question she had always wanted to ask, the question everyone wanted to ask-her mother most of all. What had happened? Moose clutched her hand. Charlotte felt the tension in her uncle as he struggled to make an answer.

The table joggled slightly, startling Moose so he flinched, nearly upsetting their drinks. Instantly he released Charlotte's hand. She looked up and saw the black man she had noticed before squeezing past their table toward the exit. He smiled at her in recognition. Disoriented, Moose fixed a resentful and suspicious eye on the man as he moved past. Meanwhile, the man's friend, a freckled redhead who was following behind, planted himself in front of their table and waited for Moose to meet his gaze. "You got a problem with Pete?" he said.

"No, I don't have a problem," problem," Moose said, in his mocking, nervous voice. "What kind of Moose said, in his mocking, nervous voice. "What kind of problem problem would I have?" would I have?"

"I got no idea. Maybe you're racial."

"Come on, Allen," Pete called back through the crowd. "Say we rock and roll here."

Moose and Allen eyed each other with lush, expectant hostility.

"He can't seem to tear himself away from our table," Moose said loudly, though whether he was speaking to Charlotte, to Pete, or to Allen, his new enemy, was not clear.

"Take your eyes and put 'em someplace else," Allen instructed Moose.

"You want a ride, Al? 'Cause I'm outta here."

"What choice do I have, with you looming over my table like some weird dirigible?" Moose asked.

A silence was falling over the room in gentle phases, as if a speech were about to begin. Charlotte didn't know what "dirigible" meant, but the longer the word hung there, the worse it sounded. "Uncle Moose," she said, and touched his sleeve. He didn't notice.

Moose rose from his chair, a terrible energy coming off him like heat. He was bigger than Allen, but Allen looked stronger, white freckled arms dangling like wrenches from the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt.

Suddenly Teeter was fluttering in their midst. "Whoa, hey, come on kids," he said cheerfully. "You gotta play nice in here, that's the rules. I don't want no trouble." When no one responded, he slung a collegial arm around Moose's shoulders. "C'mon, Moo-man. Aren't you getting kinda old for this s.h.i.t?"

Moose sloughed Teeter off with a single shudder of impatience. "I'm getting extremely tired," he told him, in a quiet, menacing voice, "of having you tell me how old I am."

Teeter went red, and Allen turned to him. "You know him?" Indicating Moose.

"Sure do," Teeter said sourly. "Stolt my girlfriend in high school. Then he cracked up, if I heard right. Set off a bomb or some such hoo-ha."

Moose punched Teeter in the face so abruptly, with such unequivocal force that the bartender somersaulted backward over a table and clattered to the floor without having uttered a sound.

"No!" Charlotte screamed as several men jerked toward her uncle, a band of anger contracting around him. "Stop!" And then she was plucked from their midst-Pete yanked her out of the way and seized her shoulders to keep her from running back in. "Nothing you can do ..." he murmured, "... gotta play itself ..."

Moose lunged heedlessly, longingly into the violence, lobbing punches at Allen's face and stomach so the redhead fell, holding his eye, then flinging blows at two or three other men, cuffing them away almost playfully, filling the air with the rusty stench of their blood. He was riotous, free, joyful as Charlotte had ever seen him-as if the excitement she'd felt building in her uncle these past weeks had at last found its perfect expression.

By now, Teeter had heaved himself to his feet. He swiped dirt from his legs and arms with studied indignation, then came at Moose, fast and mean, kneeing him in the gut and dislodging a groan. Moose doubled over. And now the others set upon him ravenously, too many to one, some holding his arms, others a.s.sailing his bulk with fists and feet so that each time Moose tried to stand, another blow crumpled him. Charlotte flailed in Pete's grasp, but he clamped her shoulders down as she watched her uncle slide to the floor, screaming, "No! No!" certain he would die, until finally she did twist free, writhed like a newt from Pete's hands and thrust her skinny way into the fighters' midst. She draped herself over the p.r.o.ne heap of her uncle, begging, "Stop! Please! Leave him alone," but she couldn't cover all of Moose, he was far too big and they were still kicking him, getting in where Charlotte couldn't stop them, until Allen went for Moose's head and Charlotte blocked his boot with her wrist.

The pain made her shriek, knocking tears from her eyes. And that stopped it. The men stood back. Charlotte heard Pete, "... it's done, just let it go ..." talking to the others the way she'd heard people whisper into horses' ears to calm them. The pain in her wrist nauseated her, and she held very still, trying not to be sick.

Her uncle felt dead beneath her, mountainous, insensate. Charlotte's uninjured hand was still cupping his head, the chaotic tangle of his hair, his blue-white cheeks. "Oh, G.o.d," she kept saying. She was afraid to get up, to leave him exposed. "Oh, my G.o.d."