FIRST STANZA:
ITALICS MINE
1.
Liv heard the town-hall bell gong seven times. Everyone knew it was ten minutes slow, which meant twenty minutes until school started. Plenty of time. She stepped off Hamilton Avenue, out of the shadow of the old J. C. Penney building and into the sun-splash of Washington Street. She was joined by ten or fifteen other morning plodders, students bearing packs of schoolwork and adults feeding meters before keying open Dittman’s Pharmacy, Bob’s Shoe Barn, or First American Bank.
A flagpole stood at the northeast corner of the square. By habit, Liv knocked on it as she passed. She heard the flag snap like wet laundry, but for once did not look up at it, for she was a freshman and had been walking this route for weeks now, and sensed right off something awry at the southern edge of the town square. Everyone else had stopped to look as well. That Liv could only see the backs of heads—no faces—was itself unsettling.
A person had entered the square from the center of Jackson Street, a trajectory that only made sense if you’d emerged from the alley between Wilson Hardware and McAllister’s Insurance, and why would you do that? Also strange: The person was pink. You didn’t wear pink that early on a Tuesday—not in Bloughton, Iowa, population seven thousand, you didn’t.
The person was pink because the person was naked.
He was a man, evident from how his genitals jounced with each lurching step. Walkers stopped walking. Schedules were forgotten. No one ran away, but neither did anyone run toward. The naked man’s presence was so jarring amid the sweet birdsong and swishing trees that it was difficult to accept. Only Liv headed for him. Already she could feel in her veins the thrush of urgency.
By the time Liv had trampled through flowers and skidded to a stop in the dewy lawn ten feet from the man, one onlooker had screamed, as if hoping the noise might assure the lot of them they hadn’t all gone mad. It worked: People moved. They were Iowans, luckless farmers, withstanders of bankruptcies, witnesses of machine accidents. They knew how to absorb shocks. A mustached guy approached the naked man. A woman stammered to a 911 dispatcher on her phone. An older gent limped up with a cane, coat outstretched, offering to cover the man’s nudity.
The old gent succeeded on his third try, the first two times the coat sliding from the man’s convulsing shoulders. It gave time for all present to memorize details that, over the next three years, would become local legend.
There was no indication why the man was naked. His chest was dirty. His calves were crisscrossed with underbrush scratches. His feet should have been bleeding, from rocks if not alleyway glass, except that he wore black dress socks—his only item of clothing. A fantastic detail for sure, though itself not enough to guarantee infamy; a few years back, a football play in neighboring Monroeville had been whistled dead when a young man, drunk and dared, had streaked the length of the field, and a week later it was old news.
What held everyone breathless was the man’s behavior. His eyes were fish-wide, defenseless against both sun and cottonwood fluff. He jerked about as if being encircled by a threatening mob. Strands of spit swayed from his bottom lip. His upper lip curled back to reveal clenched teeth. Whines escaped, broken by tongue-tangled babbles. Finally, there was his knee-juddering stagger, as if the planet were fracturing beneath his socked feet. Liv felt it too, the loss of footing. There was no stabilizing flagpole within her reach.
“It’s Mr. Fleming,” someone said.
Had it come from a schoolgirl? The old guy with the coat? Bob of Bob’s Shoe Barn? Or was it all of them, a choir of condemnation, shaming Liv for not making the identification herself? Whatever had led Lee Fleming to this state of degradation, she should have known about it, because Lee Fleming, in addition to being Bloughton High’s senior English teacher for twenty-five years, and the director of every school play, speech competition, and community theater production for the past three decades, was also Liv’s dad.
Her intestines knotted. She dropped to her knees and felt the dew soak through her leggings. The person closest to her in the world had been turned inside out. The flagpole was clanging again. No, it was her heart, transformed into a hammer, driving her into the ground.
Liv was, in fact, mortified she hadn’t recognized him first, though, in her defense, he was barely recognizable, stripped of his usual cardigan sweater, ironed slacks, and wire-frame glasses. Naked, he looked underdeveloped, even fetal. As the old man’s coat closed around him and Liv heard sirens from the direction of the hospital, her dad’s stabbing jabbers shifted to moist inhales and explosive, snotty sobs, noises louder and cruder than any she’d ever heard him make.
The actual event did not exceed five minutes. The hospital, like everything else in Bloughton, enjoyed a direct route to the town center, and an ambulance was the second thing to violate the square that day, rollicking over the curb and bouncing up the sidewalk, chewing up pretty green grass and ejecting two EMTs. They were all over Lee Fleming before Liv, still on her knees and struggling to breathe, could find the courage to reach him. They hoisted his forty-eight-year-old body of soft, but clenched, muscles onto a stretcher.
Certainly they would have beckoned Liv, the man’s only child, into the ambulance if they’d known she was there. The medics began administering to her dad before he was even strapped down, and the last thing Liv saw was his limbs thrashing, spittle geysering, all ten fingers pointing at his wet, matted chest hair.
“Biologic evidence!”
They were the first words he’d managed.
The doors slammed, and the ambulance hopped the curb, surging the wrong way down Hamilton, its siren no match for the happy birds, its swirling red lights gulped up by the cheerful sun. Liv pivoted in the grass, knees muddying, and watched, thinking there was other biologic evidence here, the provable kind, that tied the raving, naked lunatic to the gasping, kneeling girl.
At least her dad was home, after four days missing.
Eight months and six days later, he would vanish forever.
2.
Bone cracked against glass. Liv sucked air, wobbly, sick. She’d chased the ambulance and fought her way through the back doors, only for it to overturn when it took a corner too fast, and the sound was her bones, or her dad’s bones, shattering hypodermics. No—she was lying down, and it was wet. The dewy grass? No, the wet was sweat. Was she in bed? Yes. In bed. The dream again. That terrible memory, ending this time with a fictitious crash. The memory was never going to leave her alone.
The knock again, steady as a woodpecker’s. Right: It was Sunday. And not just any Sunday—the last Sunday before senior year began. She’d been waiting for this week for so long. Liv opened her eyes to the fiberglass ceiling panels her dad had installed eight years ago, once upon a time cloud white but now tawny with water damage. Orange was the closest color, given the quality of sun at that hour, which was, of course, seven in the morning. Her father’s hour—seven would always be her father’s hour.
For the third time, a hard knuckle against her window. The visitor’s shadow was cast across the same ceiling at which she stared, not that she needed the shadow to recognize Doug. All week, her excitement to begin her last year at Bloughton High had allowed her, deliciously, to forget the pains of the past. But Sunday always came; so did Doug; so did the memories.