American English, Italian Chocolate Read online

  “So you’ve ridden, haven’t you?” she asked.

  I had not yet learned the virtue of lying. Many times, I could have said. I was thrown recently by a stallion, I could have said, was in recovery, and might never ride again.

  I told her I hadn’t.

  “It’s easy,” she said. “You’ll love it.”

  I didn’t know what her fantasies were. Along with kissing in Frank Johnson’s garage, she may have dreamed of riding a horse bareback on a moonlit beach. Perhaps I figured in that tableau. All well and good. The problem was the horse.

  Wasn’t it enough to ride to the beach in a car?

  On the appointed day I drove us in my VW to a horse barn fifty-some miles away. There we met a few more couples who, unlike me, were very pro-horse. They were relaxed, enthusiastic, even jubilant. I don’t remember signing a release or taking out insurance. I do remember muttering “none” when asked about my level of experience and feeling terrified when we left the office and headed for the corral. I was hoping for a nag, a horse so spent, so totally consumed, it would have a comfortable bow in its back, sort of like an inverted camel. While my girlfriend and her pals scrambled up into the saddle, I was led to my mount, whose name was Tango. Tango was big and brown; I’m pretty sure it was female. The horse rental man handed me the reins, gave me a few tips on stopping and steering, and heaved me into the saddle. Away we went.

  Or rather, away my friends went. Tango walked a hundred yards out of the parking lot and then pulled over to the edge of the trail and stopped.

  I was sort of okay with this. I preferred not moving and would have been happy to dismount and give us both a rest, however undeserved. At Tango’s walking speed, the saddle creaked and swayed. The situation felt unstable. And I was very high up there in the saddle, higher than it looked from the ground.

  We sat there, checking each other out.

  “Let’s go,” I finally said to Tango. I pulled the reins gently in the direction of the road. That was steering, right? We didn’t go. The horse must have sensed I was afraid. It must have felt that I was totally beneath her sitting up there, not even worth the effort.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go catch up with the other horses.”

  On TV, riders said, “He-YAH.” Or some variant of that locution. That seemed extreme to me, and risky, and—in a word—foolish. I needed a command that said: Let’s just walk over there. No need to run. There’s no rush.

  I remembered my feet, down there in the stirrups, and gave Tango a tentative nudge in the go zone with my left foot. That did it. Tango dropped into low gear and returned to the trail. We walked for a minute. Then something terrible happened.

  Tango began to trot.

  Trotting is an unhappy middle zone between walking and galloping. I had no training. No one had told me what to do in the event of a trot, so I did what any ninny would do on a trotting horse: I clamped my hands around the saddle horn and hung on for dear life. And I bounced. I bounced up and down in the saddle, which must have given Tango perverse pleasure. We bounced along until we caught up with my girlfriend, who was riding back to find me. She smiled big and waved. She looked great on a horse. She looked at home.

  “How’s it going?” she yelled.

  “Oh, fine,” I said.

  I pulled back on the reins, thinking we’d stop, but Tango, ever spiteful, kept right on going. We trotted past her.

  “You’re bouncing,” she yelled after me. “You look really funny.”

  A whole afternoon stretched ahead of us. The experience never got any better.

  On the way home I nursed my crushed kidneys and wounded pride. I also listened to some fanciful talk about the horse as a mystical animal. I knew I shouldn’t let a horse come between us. I just had the feeling that sometime in the future, I was destined to revisit the indignity and terror of my first equestrian experience.

  Since then, I’ve read my D. H. Lawrence; I’ve read my Equus and contemplated horse mystery at a comfortable distance. I get it. In a comfortable chair, I even like it. Lawrence’s thwarted, unhappy protagonist Lou sees something elemental and sublime in St. Mawr: “His naked ears stood up like daggers from the naked lines of his inhuman head, and his great body glowed red with power. Almost like a god looking at her terribly out of the everlasting dark.”

  Exactly. And great. But who wants a god like that? And who needs everlasting dark?

  I don’t.

  Some years later my wife and I were walking across Greenfield Village with a niece and nephew. That place, now called The Henry Ford, is named for a man who couldn’t quite decide whether he preferred the nineteenth or twentieth century. While vintage motorized vehicles and horse-drawn wagons crisscrossed the tree-full lanes of the Village, we stopped next to a corral where a workhorse hung its head over the wood fence. Quite naturally, I offered my nephew a chance to meet a horse. You’d think at Greenfield Village you would find a kid-friendly animal.

  The season was late fall. Joey was wearing mittens. When he reached up and stroked the horse’s long muzzle, the horse must have smelled something appealing in the mitten. It opened its mouth and clamped onto Joey’s right hand. They stood there a few seconds, motionless, boy and horse joined together. Then old Ned took another bite. Joey’s hand was now halfway into the horse’s mouth. This was not a mythological connection.

  “Hey,” Joey said, turning to look at me. Like, Do something.

  “Hey!” I yelled. I began swatting at the horse’s head with my gloves. It peered out at me from everlasting dark, and I whacked it a few more times, and harder, until at last it let Joey’s hand go. Then it turned, presented its backside, and ambled across the paddock.

  Looking back, I think I was more traumatized than Joey. All he wanted was to pet the animal. All I wanted was a little respect, just once, from a horse.

  “Come on,” I said, patting the boy on the shoulder. “Let’s go pet a Model T.”

  6

  Sick Wild

  Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction got me thinking about frogs—the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, in particular, when frogs rain from the sky. First one goes splat against a car windshield, then a few more—thunk, thunk, thunk—fall from the night sky onto the roof and hood of the car. Then more of them bounce with a fleshy thwap off the sidewalk. There’s nothing to prepare you for it. You watch, thinking, My God, is it—frogs? Then the all-out frog deluge comes, terrifying, apocalyptic, a plague visited upon a cast of miserable fakes, manipulators, and degenerates. You feel surprise mingled with horror: Terrible humans. Poor frogs.

  Remember frogs?

  I cut into one in tenth-grade science. Mr. Perry presided over the class. He was jocular and mean, usually on the same day, his hairline receding, leaving an arrowhead of short brown hair on top of his head. His signature move was to come up behind you during lab and tighten his grip on your neck and shoulders. It was not a massage. It was a warning. On frog day he invited us to follow him into the storeroom, where we reached into great jars—like the ones you would use to brew sun tea—full of frogs marinating in formaldehyde, their eyes wide open and staring at you.

  My lab partner was Debbie Monroe. Perhaps not accidentally we also sat beside each other in typing class. I can still hear her and Kathy Jo Waite talking over the determined clacking of thirty typewriters. Every other sentence ended, Sickening.

  I brought our frog back to our lab table, laid it on its back in a special dish, and stuck pins through its feet, its arms raised in alleluia, legs splayed.

  “You do it,” Debbie Monroe said.

  We were supposed to find the heart. The procedure called for a scalpel, pressing it against the frog’s chest and making a clean incision. I tickled the frog under its chin (no gloves) and then went to work, pressing our dull scalpel hard, then harder, and then much harder against its leathery skin, until the whole frog seemed to pop under the pressure, sending jets of formaldehyde into my face and eyes (no glasses) and all over Debbie
Monroe’s sweater.

  I instinctively looked behind me for Mr. Perry’s judgmental smile, half-expecting to feel his vise grip on the back of my neck.

  “Oops,” he said.

  I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and pointed with the scalpel. “There,” I said. “The heart.”

  Sickening.

  I grew up playing on the Tittabawassee River’s dioxin floodplain. One hundred feet behind our house, a hill fell to the flats. Standing under a canopy of cottonwood trees down there, you saw nothing but wilderness. We were kids. This was our wild. It was a sick wild, I now know. No one then had heard of dioxin, except for maybe Dow, eight miles upriver, and if they knew about it, they had decided to keep it a secret. When the brown current slowed to a crawl in the summer, we stooped at the edge of the river and looked for life. Early in the summer if you stirred the water, pollywogs fluttered and swam beneath the surface. Later we saw frogs sunning themselves on stones, resting on the dry black muck. You could barely take a step down there without disturbing a frog. We took them prisoner.

  Not for pets. No one I knew kept a pet frog.

  If we had a single qualm among us, none of us wanton boys admitted to it.

  Years later, when I read about Mr. Kurtz’s “fascination with abomination” in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, I felt a creepy sense of recognition and shame. We were capable of terrible things.

  One year Roger Kipfmiller and I rode our bikes out west of town to Wagner’s Pond after school. We took BB guns and a bucket. In ninety minutes we worked the south edge of the pond, shooting and killing frogs, until we had fifty or sixty of them in the bucket. Then we rode back into town. Roger’s dad knew how to cook frog legs. We separated their legs from their bodies, peeled their green skins off their bony thighs and down over their webbed feet, and tossed the wishbones of meat into a bowl of salt water, at which point, to our surprise, the legs began to twitch and kick, one last muscle memory of trying to get away from us.

  By the time we finished, I had to go home. I sort of wanted to go home. The truth is, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to eat frog legs.

  “I’ll bring you some tonight,” Roger said.

  That night was a JV football game. I was going, but not to watch football. That summer I had smelled Valery Frost’s lilac perfume at the Freeland Frontier Days. She had fluttered her eyes in my direction. We were going to meet in the bleachers, which we did, some moments after I saw Roger waiting by the concession stand. He had pulled a napkin from his pocket, unfolded it, and revealed a few remaining frog legs. They were brown; his father had breaded and deep-fried them.

  Roger pushed the legs at me. “They’re good,” he said. “Like this.” He picked one up by the foot, pushed one leg, then the other into his open mouth, and clamped his teeth down on the bones, dragging the meat off them. “Try one.”

  I ate one. He was right. They were good. But I regretted eating them because I knew I was going up in the bleachers looking for Valery Frost, eager to smell her lilac perfume again, eager for her to drop something from the bleachers, which would require our going down there, together, to get it, under the bleachers. Will she kiss a boy, I wondered, with frog on his breath?

  All those frogs back then: they seemed capable of spontaneous generation. Frogs in the house, in laundry tubs (my mother would shriek), in the basement, under the kitchen sink. Hearty, persistent, ubiquitous creatures, now dying off.

  Kolbert reports that we are on the threshold of a sixth extinction. The last one happened some sixty-six million years ago. Probably an asteroid smashed into the earth. The coming die-off—actually it’s already well under way—will be a gradual cataclysm. Honeybees are dropping in their tracks. The acidification of the oceans is causing a die-off of the coral reefs. Who knows what these extinctions will mean to the food chain? Salon reports, “By the end of this century, scientists believe, up to 20 to 50 percent of the plant and animal species on Earth could be gone forever.”

  Extinction, I was surprised to learn, is a relatively new idea. Jefferson thought that when he sent Lewis and Clark on their journey, they would see mastodons.

  We’re used to the idea of extinction. We’re in it. We’re the asteroid and the frogs. Don’t look up. Look around.

  7

  The Man from Glad, Car Crash, Amnesia

  This really happened.

  One Saturday night the spring of my junior year in high school, I was working until closing time at my father’s gas station. At 9:30 we would raise the hoist, wet the floor, and sprinkle a pungent, yellow granular cleanser all over it to cut grease and oil that had accumulated throughout the day. Then we mopped the bathrooms and office, brought in tires that were outside on display, and emptied garbage cans on the drive. Ron Fritz was closing with me that night.

  I was about to empty the can on the front island of pumps when I noticed a car stopped at our town’s one stoplight. It was a pale-green Studebaker Lark. I remember its rusted door panels. I also remember the left rear of the car sagged so much I wondered if the tire were flat or the springs were broken. Just sitting there, the car began to rock, first gently, then violently, like there was a wrestling match going on inside. I was about to turn away when the light changed to green. The driver revved the engine two or three times, and the Lark wheezed through the intersection, trying to accelerate, until the car’s brake lights flickered on and off, then on again. The driver slowed and swerved toward the right shoulder, the right rear door swung open, and a person spilled out of the moving car and tumbled across the pavement. The flailing arms and legs made me think at first it was a dummy.

  The car kept going, disappearing into darkness around the bend in the road north of town. The person lay there on the shoulder. I thought he must be injured, maybe even dead. But after a few seconds, he stood up. I saw now it was a man. He dusted himself off, checked his moving parts, and limped off in the direction of the parking lot behind the bank on that corner.

  Inside the gas station, Ron was hosing down the floor. I told him what I saw.

  “No way,” he said.

  Not much happened in our town. We’d had a murder and a plane crash, but too long ago for us to feel the impact.

  “Wish I’d seen it,” he said.

  We closed the gas station that night, watching for the man, both thrilled and worried that he might come back, that we might have witnessed some skullduggery and were now involved in its sinister aftermath. Before we turned the key in the door, one of us had to walk a locked bag containing the money and the day’s receipts across the street to the night deposit box at the bank, an action always fraught with minor drama. After some discussion, I decided to make the drop. I crossed the street, avoiding the spot where the man had rolled out of the car. At the deposit box the keys jingled nervously in my hand while I opened it. I stuffed the bag inside and then closed and locked the box in one fluid motion. I couldn’t help but turn and look behind me as I crossed the street.

  Nothing further happened. At 10:00 p.m. we killed the lights and locked the doors.

  It was Ron’s turn to drive. We climbed into his ’55 Chevy and rode into Saginaw listening to the Amboy Dukes on 8-track, arguing about UFOs. I had seen one; he had not.

  Memory is capricious, frequently a liar.

  Recently my brother reminded me of an event from our childhood. It was the summer of 1957. The Mackinac Bridge was under construction, an engineering feat that must have appealed to our father’s imagination. We took a family trip four hours north, boarded a ferry, and motored a few miles out into the Straits. The two giant bridge towers had been erected on footings poured in 120 feet of water. They rose 550 feet in the air. The piers, cables, and catwalk were all in place. That summer, trusses were being lifted and positioned to provide the framework for the roadway. It would have been cold on the water, probably windy and rough. The bridge project must have been an awesome sight. I have no recollection of it.

  I was four years old at the time, a timid child, so I’m sure this who
le adventure was terrifying. Maybe that’s why I don’t remember it. But I remember other events from childhood that also must have been terrifying. My earliest recollection is standing up in a hospital crib and bouncing up and down while holding my groin, which was bandaged from hernia surgery. I was probably around two years old. At that time parents walked off and left their children in hospitals. Sleepover, in order to comfort the child, was not an option the way it is today. I think I was given a stuffed animal and told to buck up. I must have been traumatized being left alone like that. Around this age, I also remember sitting alone in the sandbox in the backyard of our house in town. While I played, a big black dog trotted up to me. Its head was the size of a large ham. It thrust its giant muzzle into my face, sniffed me, and then ran off. It was an archetypal visitation, an encounter with a strange black beast, and I remember it as if it happened yesterday. Why do I remember these moments and not hundreds of others, among them being on the water of the Straits of Mackinac?

  Another childhood memory: waking up in my father’s arms as he carried me into a strange house at night. I’m pretty sure it was the home of a relative, probably his Aunt Clarice, but as I’ve replayed the memory over the decades, it has shifted. I now wake up in my father’s arms in the home of Danny Leman, my neighbor and childhood friend. It is a place I got to know some years after the event in question. In this finished memory, I see the sofa I knew, the front door and stairway. It even smells like Danny Leman’s house. Memory has mixed things up, providing me with the wrong setting for the visit, but the recollection feels true nonetheless.

  Sometime after the man fell—or was pushed—out of that car, I began to notice a figure skulking around town. He was old enough to be someone’s father. He wore khakis, a light-blue Oxford shirt, and a navy blue jacket he kept zipped up. He had a thin, serious face, pointed features, and wavy gray hair. I saw him in front of Rodeitcher’s Chinese Restaurant. I saw him on the sidewalk across from the coffee shop, walking with a determined gait past Al Roberts’s market and Howard Schaffer’s barbershop. He would pause, look behind him, and then resume his jerky, agitated walk.