Jagged with Love

Last April

LaST APrIL Tonight your father tells you one of his fIfth graders is a rapist. The boy took his cousin out to the garage last April, but since they're family, since nobody in Indiana wants to read about a boy raping a boy, nothing has ever been done: no police file, no juvey hall. It's a punishment of its own in Indiana: secrets aren't secrets for long. But what, we forget to ask, could we fmd under the linoleum of our hearts? Nothing of grammar, logic, or rhetoric, a triple way, as it were, to eloquence. Each dayyour father encounters the small bodies of children, their broken toys like their minds and their eager choices: which and who and how many. Each day our small bodies grow longer and thicker and muddier. They institutionalized Jared, the raped second grader, up in White River. At E. O. Muncie Elementary, a teacher's assistant has been assigned to watch his cousin Tyler at breakfast, at recess, on his way to the school bus. He still trips the fat kids, my dad says. He told everyone todlDl he had beer in his backpack. We sit in the noiseless room, our chins ruefully tucked, the game ofTrivial Pursuit now abstruse, a mile from our fingers. Tonight it began with the phone call, you excusingyourself from the volley of gaudy factoids to talk to the Tallahassee Police Department. ~'d like to askyou a few questions about the previous owner ofyour house, a gruffwoman started. ~'d like to know ifyou've spoken recentJy withJohn Trent. No, you tell her, and you peek your head into the living room, working to catch your mother's question: Which U.S. President died with 317 slaves and 150 acres? You're thinking, George Washington!-You're thinking, and he freed them all in his will! You are happy about this, the first abolitionist. The woman is saying, Soyou haven't spoken with him, not concerning 3~ the house, not at all? No, you say again, baffled by the inquiry, scanning your mind for details ofthe manyou'd met only once, John Trent, sweating in the September heat, his prosthetic leg squeaking, his two-year-old calm as a potted plant on the carpet that smelled of canines and tired cigarettes. I didn't interact with him, realJy, you say, my realtor did, and, ifI m~ ask, what's this in regards to ?You are suddenly solemn and fatigued, seconds away from defensive, having arrived yesterday in Indiana to visit your family, to leave all of Florida behind for at least a week, and here's this sergeant, wanting to askyou some questions like a forkful of slowly wound noodles. Ma'am, she says,John Trent is a sex offender. She pauses. we'vegot a warrantfor his arrest and we're lookingfor leads to his whereabouts. Another, longer pause, almost a silence. Ma'am? Ma'am, please, a date, a dialogue, aT!Jthing. Finally you fumble, Oh, sure, sure, but you are having trouble recalling his face, only his sweat-curled bangs will come into focus and a flashlight you found in the closet next to a box ofunused checks. What you can barely register as thinking is I wasn't expecting this. Two minutes ago you'd been answering questions with Yogi Berra and Robert KennetJy. Then again, who is ever expecting the bulk of a man's body, his elbows or his eyes, bothvariously thrown, to re-enter the house of the mind. AndI sleep in his room. AndI shower in his shower. It's not thinking so much as an imagining, those shadows you cannot help. That's right: the mind cannot help, the mind cannot take the words apart. It begs which, who, how many. Those carpets are gone, the walls painted, the counters resurfaced. You cannot know what sex offender means. Back at the board game, your brother has rolled a four, he counts out the spaces with his pinkie finger and your sister pulls out a card to ask himgreen: What popular vegetable was originally cultivated from the bitter stalk of sleepage?Your mother leans toward your dad, making their guesses behind cupped hands and even thoughyou are vegetarianyou cannot think straight: stalk, root, herb; chives, radish, sage. There are other ways, ways the heart has to tear itself out. You had forgotten you actually own a home, that place with doors and eaves, rooms and bulbs. Nothing skulked. Nothing shimmied...