Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Read online

  “Do you ever think”—the interviewer bent close, his breath almost touching Fat Boy’s shoe—“of what they took away from you?” Fat Boy blinked, looked up. The interviewer’s voice got softer. “What gave them the right to dismantle your whole life? Think about it: don’t you wonder how they dared?”

  “WHAT DID THE Gridians look like?” Kennedy asked.

  Average white people, Lila said. Except for Eduardo and a few Melanos in the dining hall, almost everyone was white. Old-fashioned. They dressed casually, really no differently than any other non-city Ohioan. Several of the adolescents had the pierced web between the thumb and first finger that was the latest style. They ate breakfast at long communal tables, but Lila and Allyssa sat apart, and the people who came up to speak to them (to Allyssa, really) had the look and sound of show people playing a part. “Did you taste those tomatoes from Village 6?” “We got almost two inches the other night; Leon in 28 said they measured two point six.” Only the young children had the tiniest interest in Lila. They peered around and through their mothers’ panted legs, and one boy asked her, in an accusatory tone, “Are you really from a metro?”

  “It was like eating with Amish people,” Lila told Kennedy.

  Lila used to sit in the backseat as her mother drove northeast of Columbus to Holmes County to visit the Amish. It wasn’t visiting, really; it was gawking. “Look, look, there’s a horse and buggy!” Lila’s mother would say. Or: “See how that little girl’s dress doesn’t have any buttons?” As exciting as spotting deer. The modern people who were the Amish’s neighbors (“the English,” the Amish called them) were less transfixed. But to Lila and her mother the Amish were more than people. You glimpsed them in gaggles, tipping their heads to one another, shy and glorious creatures you would never have the chance to know.

  “Am I going to get to talk to anyone?” Lila had asked Allyssa.

  “You’re talking to me!” Allyssa said.

  People drove around the countryside looking for Amish bake sales and fruit stands, and it wasn’t that their produce and cakes were especially tasty, it was that the purchase bought the presence of them. Maybe you could glimpse their lives, their hopes; maybe they’d follow you, talking, to your car. Useless. The Amish were never lured away. Within their own families and community there were surely arguments and love affairs, grudges and rebellions. These an outsider could only imagine. The Amish, like the Gridians, betrayed themselves only to each other.

  Kennedy said, “I always thought the Amish were boring. I hate the Amish.”

  Kennedy said, “Lila, all it is is a great big piece of farmland.”

  a dose of yearning with the mashed potatoes

  “TERLESKI MESSAGED US,” Sharis said. “There’s going to be a meeting about Cub Scouts.” It was late August. School was starting in a week.

  Chad sighed. “Cub Scouts?” Chad would be starting classes, too. Two people from his department had left—an assistant professor and an instructor—and virtually none of the East Coast students were returning. Chad would be teaching classrooms of Catholic Ohioans. Other than his Dayton course, always enjoyable, the year already sounded dull.

  “There aren’t going to be many boys,” Sharis pointed out. “Maybe six. Seven if they let in Bruce Hawthorne. He should be going on to Boy Scouts, but there is no Boy Scouts. So he wants to redo Webelo.”

  “How can there not be Boy Scouts? Didn’t they learn anything earning their survival badges?” Chad had never liked the Boy Scouts. From the moment they threw him in a pool and asked him to remove his jeans and blow them up as a flotation device, he was convinced the whole organization was loony.

  “They don’t have a leader. Terleski’s a leader!” Sharis was startled at the fervor in her voice. What did she care about Cub Scouts? But she admired, she realized, Terleski’s doggedness in keeping his den going. Everyone was giving up, hiding inside, talking about not sending their children to school. Terleski, like Sharis, like Chad, was holding out for normal life. President Baxter, in his daily messages, was endlessly reassuring. The Euros, rumor had it, didn’t think the U.S. was winnable; they might persuade the Suds and Afros to pull out from Cleveland as a first step to an Alliance-U.S. truce. “It’s only Bruce who’s switching from Boy Scouts,” Sharis pointed out. “And he’s not very tall.”

  The house next to them had been abandoned. “Hi, dollface!” its elderly owner, Mr. Hofmeister, used to call to Sharis. “How are my little devils?” He had talked to Sharis on a Thursday, and the next day he and Mrs. Hofmeister waved as they backed out of their driveway. That was the end of them, so far as Chad or Sharis knew. Chad kept mowing the Hofmeister lawn, and Sharis cut their flowers for her own house. She couldn’t help feeling resentful that the Hofmeisters, for all their purported realism in leaving, hadn’t planted vegetables instead of flowers.

  “You think Leon doing Cub Scouts is a good idea?” Chad said now to Sharis. Because how could he dispute her opinion, she who had a life experience doctorate in survival?

  “Of course,” Sharis said. “Keep him busy.”

  In the summer, Sharis missed her little brother’s dirty fingernails. She could forgive her parents everything but him. At night she pressed her ear into Chad’s chest to hear his heartbeat. His arms wrapped around her felt like a warm stockade.

  “WHAT DO YOU think,” Chad would ask in his class this year (and he hoped he got a Dayton class, without a Dayton class he didn’t think he could keep going), “are typically midwestern virtues?” There was always silence after this question, and then a few tentatively raised hands. The answers were predictable: perseverance, diligence, politeness (suggested politely), modesty (“people aren’t too full of themselves here? they don’t think they’re too char and all?”), orderliness, thrift. One thing, politely, was never mentioned: ambition. And this omission gave Chad his opening.

  The glider designers of the Wrights’ time had been concentrating on building a machine that was “inherently stable,” that would steer through the air like a car rolling down a road. But Wilbur and Orville were bicycle builders, and what makes a bicycle stable? Not the machine itself, but its rider. Orville, the little brother, thought the key to a successful heavier-than-air machine would be to give the human flying it more control. “I like Orville,” Wilbur said. “He likes a good scrap.”

  The buzzards, Wilbur noticed, when buffeted by a gust of wind, “regain their lateral balance … by the torsion of the tips of their wings.” He was standing in his bicycle shop talking with a customer, idly twisting a long thin box in his hands, when he noticed how the ends of the box could be angled while the center of it stayed steady. He pictured the broad sides of the box as the upper and lower wings of a biplane. He discussed his idea with Orville, and they built a model, a biplane kite with a five-foot wingspan and double sets of strings secured to the tips of each wing. They kept the kite level in the air by adjusting, with the strings, the relationship between the wings. They called this “wing warping.”

  It should be possible, Wilbur and Orville both believed, to build a machine to make man fly. At first their goal was to build a pilot-controlled glider, so a human could steadily ride the currents of the air. Later—in 1903—they decided to add an engine and propellers, aiming for a machine that could get into the air and stay aloft by its own power. Accomplishing their goals required an orderly approach, the sequential solving of various problems—many of which they could anticipate—and the completion of certain tasks. Their family thought they could do it. They thought they could do it.

  You don’t think that was ambitious? You don’t think that was audacious?

  This is where Chad raised his hand and shook his finger. “They were as ambitious as Napoleon,” he said. “As ambitious as Adolf Hitler, as Bin Laden, as Nenonene now. Even more ambitious! More audacious! They didn’t care about conquering land. They wanted the sky.”

  HOW HAD THIS happened? Lila had gone up to the Grid out of simple curiosity, her first impression was shock
at the burial mounds of towns, she’d spent a night in a farmhouse calculated to be Essence of Farmhouse, and now she wanted to live there, she dreamed about cornfields, their mice and rustling invading every crevice in her mind. But how could she stand living there, realistically? Where were the trees? Where were the theaters, the plazas, the restaurants? She wasn’t a farmer. She couldn’t tell a soybean from a lima bean. And those Gridian families, those luminous children—would they tolerate a lonely lesbo like herself?

  She didn’t care. The practicalities weren’t the issue. It was as if Allyssa had fed her a dose of yearning with the mashed potatoes. Home, the Grid seemed like home. A real home, with creaky stairs and drawers with missing knobs, a place where she would always feel safe. Her own condo seemed suddenly foreign to her. Her snobbish sofa looked like it had never been sat on. The children of the Grid could be her children, she could be their auntie, the one they ran to with small injuries and treasures.

  A small house on the edge of one of the villages, a bouillon cube of a house with its own cool basement.

  —We’re having problems with the irrigation system down by 33. Low pressure and what’s coming out looks cloudy.

  —Go talk to Lila. She knows everything about water.

  Like falling in love, when every cavern of your mind is suffused with one person. And it had hit her just as love often did, unexpectedly, as if a doorbell rang in the middle of a dull afternoon and on her porch sat a huge gift. What is this? It’s … my God! It’s everything I’ve always wanted. It’s perfect. I didn’t realize how incomplete I was.

  A meaning to her life.

  CHAD WAS PICKING tomatoes in his garden when the impulse first came over him. His neck was hot, the tomatoes were hot to the touch, and suddenly he wondered if this was the last time he’d be picking hot tomatoes in his yard in Dayton. So many variables. If they’d have a garden next year, if they’d have a home next year. If Dayton would exist, if Chad would still exist.

  He laid his bowl of tomatoes on the porch and headed out to memorize his yard.

  The drainage ditch, incompletely mowed. The peculiar patch where grass had never thrived. The tiny rise where the boys, as toddlers, sledded. The flat and sunny area Sharis had turned into her amazing garden. The ivy vining up the gray trunk of the maple.

  There were things he was missing. He looked more. A white squirrel bounding through the grass, alleged a descendant of some odd variety imported by John Patterson. A woodpecker rattling the tulip poplar. What kind of woodpecker? He didn’t know. Was this a sin, to not know his own fauna? In the patch of pachysandra beside the house, any shovelful of dirt would turn up worms. Happy worms. Harmless worms.

  My yard, Chad thought. Mine.

  “MOMMY?” LEON SAID. “Can we go to the troll bridge?” Leon lately was much less intrepid. Two months before he would have gone off to the troll bridge without her. His front teeth had grown in, and there was a gap between them; Sharis wondered if this notch would make him look boyish all his life.

  The troll bridge was in the woods beside an abandoned elementary school about a mile from Sharis and Chad’s house. The boys and Sharis used to play a game there, Sharis hiding under the bridge like a troll (the creek was almost always dry) and grabbing at the boys’ ankles as they ran across.

  “Why not?” Sharis said. They hadn’t been to the troll bridge for ages. Chad had gone to UD to do some planning for his courses, and the boys’ school didn’t start for two more days.

  They walked a fairly straight line south, down streets without sidewalks past brick and frame one-story houses. Another hot, sunny morning. No one was out, but some windows were open, and Sharis heard an occasional child’s whine, and at the corner of Grantland and Jenny a man’s loud voice came from a corner window: “I’m not a machine, you know?” Sharis hurried the boys past.

  We’ve been too cooped up, Sharis thought. The uncertainty of the summer had kept them in their own yard. But the south suburbs were perfectly safe. You heard about wild dogs in Dayton proper, and that little boy had been murdered in the city back in June, but even the people who’d left admitted the south suburbs were secure. It was their fear of the future that drove people away.

  Some of the yards they passed were filled with not just grass and weeds but garbage and debris. Sharis glanced at Leon and wondered if he’d wandered this far before. Now he was walking ahead with his chest stuck out and his arms swinging. I allow that, Sharis thought, and she worried that Leon needed her behind him to display his bravado.

  One pale brick ranch looked as if the house’s entire contents had been dumped on its front lawn. “Looks like the house just vomited,” Howard observed.

  “Hey, look at the owl!” Leon said, turning, pointing at a figurine in the grass. “Can we keep it, Mommy?”

  “I don’t think anyone lives here now,” Sharis said to Howard. “Leon, you can keep it if you carry it.” She moved herself across the road to stand under the shade of a tree as her sons inspected the pile.

  “Why would anyone throw all their stuff on their front yard?” Howard said, heading her way empty-handed. “Do you think their neighbors got mad and threw all their stuff out?”

  Sharis felt nauseated from the sun and heat. “I have no idea, Howie.” Between her eyebrows she felt the twinge of an incipient headache. Howie was her brother’s name.

  “Hey,” Leon said, running up to her, “this owl has a broken foot. Can you fix it when we get home, Mommy?”

  “I don’t have extra owl feet at home, I’m sorry.”

  To her astonishment Leon started sobbing. “I want my whole owl! I don’t want my owl broken!”

  “Leon.” Sharis knelt and pulled him to her, wrapping her arms around his shoulders, wishing that he weren’t too big to carry.

  She saw, over Leon’s shoulder, a shadow crossing Howard’s face. “Do you think maybe the people died and a ghost tossed out their stuff?”

  Leon stiffened in her hug. “No,” Sharis said. “Absolutely not. That I don’t think.”

  “Mommy,” said Howard, “are you and Daddy going to die?”

  Sharis hesitated.

  “Uncle Howie died,” Howard said.

  Sharis had an idea that raising children was like weeding. The big weeds you needed to pull right out. The little weeds you could take your time with. Worrying about death was a Big Weed.

  “I’m going to stand up now,” Sharis said to Leon. “You okay if I stand up?” Leon nodded, Sharis stood, and they continued on their walk. “Listen, boys, everybody dies. That’s just what people do. Every person we see or know is going to die. But you guys and Daddy and I won’t die for a long, long time. And what happened to Uncle Howie will never, ever happen to either of you. I promise that.”

  “How did Uncle Howie die?”

  “It was an accident. He drank poison. He didn’t know.”

  “How would I know if something was poison?”

  “You need to ask Daddy or me first.”

  The stoplight at the corner of Waterloo and Whipp wasn’t working. The patch of grass at the corner was a foot high and seeding. Leon was still fretting about his owl, stroking the chipped leg with his thumb. “Shut up about that stupid owl!” Howard yelled. “It’s not even yours. It’s a dead person’s.”

  “Howard, stop being mean to your brother. Leon, we will work on fixing it when we get home.” A twig and some glue might help mend the owl, she thought. “In the meantime you need to be strong, Leon. If you can’t stop sniveling we will not go to the troll bridge. Do you understand?”

  Leon wiped his nose on his hand and quieted himself. They crossed the street.

  “See?” Sharis said. “It’s not the end of the world.”

  The old school looked as decrepit and creepy as ever, but the woods beside it were deep and cool and appealing. The trees here—as on Custard Lane—truly towered. It was possible in this place to imagine a Dayton before people. Well. Before white people.

  They entered the woods and fo
llowed the trail down the small hill to the streambed, across a log, and along the other bank to the troll bridge. As they walked Sharis had to push back honeysuckle branches. She had never noticed rubbish here before, but now the stream was littered with cans and rags and even a bicycle frame.

  “I go first!” Leon cried, handing Sharis the owl before he took off. Howard followed, yelling for Leon to slow down.

  Then: “Mommy,” Howard’s voice, odd and flat, came from the path in front of her. For once Sharis, running toward him, didn’t wonder why at age ten he still said “Mommy” and not “Mom.” “It’s Abba.”

  Abba was Chad’s impossible great-aunt who lived in Cleveland. It couldn’t be Abba. And, no, it wasn’t Abba, but it was a woman, surrounded by trash, sitting ahead of them on a rock beside the troll bridge. She had wispy hair and wore a ragged T-shirt and shorts, and Sharis thought she must be crazy, someone who’d run out of her medicine or a gene therapy failure, but the woman looked up and said “Hello,” in a tired but resolute way, like any woman sorting through a mess. She was probably not much older than Sharis.

  “It’s not Abba,” Sharis whispered to Howard. “It’s someone else.”

  Sharis walked onto the footbridge, the boys following her slowly. “There’s a house on Jenny with all kinds of stuff in front,” she said to the woman.

  “Oh, I’ve been there. Crap.” The woman nodded at a bundle behind her in the dry bed of the creek; Sharis was startled to see that this was a sleeping baby, wrapped in a thin blanket and wedged on a corduroy pillow between two rocks. “What I really need is food. I’m nursing. Sometimes you can find wood chairs at those houses,” the woman said, picking up a cereal box and peering into it. “I keep those for fuel. But the chairs at that Jenny dump were plastic.” She glanced up. “I live just south of here, on Siena.”

  Sharis knew Siena. The houses and lots there were closer in size to Custard Lane’s, where the minimum lot size was an acre, than the area they’d just walked through. My God: a woman in this state lived on Siena?