5. KELLEN

August–October 1977

I woulda gone the next day to see the girl in the meadow, but the bike wreck about turned me into hamburger. I ended up with a concussion, a dislocated shoulder, three busted ribs, a twisted ankle, and my arm broken in two places with the bone poking out. After I spent a week in the hospital, it was another two months before I could do any work for Liam. Two months cooling my heels at Cutcheon’s Small Engine. The old man was decent to me and I liked the work. You spend the day putting engines together, you go home feeling like you done something worthwhile.

Once I was healed up enough to be any use in a fight, I did a few runs for Liam. Me and Butch took this slicked up Monte Carlo to Des Moines, trunk full of meth. Good money.

The summer was near gone before I made it back up to the farmhouse. Nobody answered when I knocked, but the door was unlocked. Soon as I walked in, the stink of dirty dishes hit me. The kitchen sink was full of them, with flies buzzing on rotten food. All these bowls and glasses with mold growing in the bottoms.

“Hello? It’s Kellen, from down the hill. Anybody home?” I hollered.

Nobody answered, but in the bedroom off the front hall I heard somebody snoring, just a little louder than the fly-buzz. I poked my head around the door frame and whoever was in bed rolled over. This thin, white leg and a patch of dark hair poked out of the covers. Liam’s wife? I took a step back, so I couldn’t see her.

“Mrs. Quinn? I was looking for the little blond girl. Wavy?” It was fuzzy as hell in my head. More than a couple times in the hospital, I thought maybe I’d dreamed it.

“She took Donal somewhere.”

I didn’t know who Donal was, but at least the girl was probably real, since Liam’s wife didn’t say, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Do you need anything, Mrs. Quinn? You okay?”

“Who are you?” she said.

“Jesse Joe Kellen. Uh, I work for Liam.”

“Fucking asshole.”

“I’m gonna go. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

I beat it back down the hallway, hoping real hard the whole deal wouldn’t get back to Liam. Had my hand on the doorknob, on my way out, when the mess in the kitchen pulled me up short again. Was the little girl living there in that filth?

*   *   *

It was the end of October before I went by the house again. Every time my arm twinged, whenever I did any work on my bike, I thought about the way the girl laid her hand on my cheek and said my name. I spent years trying to get people to stop calling me Junior, but damned if that wasn’t the first time I really felt like Kellen was my name.

After I got the bike back in running order, the first place I took it was the road up to Liam’s house. The gas tank still being primer gray made me old-lady cautious, easy on the throttle going up the drive to the house. The kitchen door was unlocked again, and when I swung it open, the girl was there. She stood next to the table, her hair combed smooth, no leaves in it. There was a baby, too, clutching at her dress, and just like that I recollected the reason I’d been sent to the house the night I wrecked. A bag of groceries. Ricki had gone to the store, but she couldn’t take the food up to the house, what with her being Liam’s girlfriend and his wife probably not liking that. So Butch said, “Run it up there, Kellen, before the milk spoils.”

Now that I could see the girl was real, I didn’t know what to say. Maybe that was all I needed. She stood there, holding the little boy by his overall straps and not saying a word.

“Hey, Wavy,” I said. I thought that was her name and the way she looked at me, like she was surprised I remembered; it musta been.

She straightened up and let go of the baby. “I didn’t kill you?”

“Not even close. I’m as good as new. Wasn’t your fault anyway.” I said it real quick, not wanting her to feel bad, but she frowned. “Only I wasn’t expecting to see you out there. When I hit that gravel and the front tire skidded, I over-corrected. Spilled the bike like an idiot. Not your fault. Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks for helping me.”

That was what I wanted for as long as she was looking at me, but when she looked past me, what I wanted more than anything was for her to look at me again. Most people look at you like nothing, but the way she looked at me … it was like we were in the meadow again. Like I was important. People don’t usually look at me like that.

“Is that Donal? He your brother?”

She cocked her head and frowned. Out from the road, I heard this familiar rumble I couldn’t place. I’d been just looking at her face. Her hair and her eyes. Then I looked at all of her. She was wearing a coat, with a backpack over her shoulders.

“You going somewhere?” I said.

“School.”

As soon as she said it, I felt like a dope. That was the bus she’d been listening for and it was gone now.

“I can give you a ride, okay? Since I made you miss the bus.”

She looked at me real serious and nodded.

You wouldn’t think someone as small as her could pick up a baby that size, but Wavy heaved him up on her hip. She was stronger than she looked.

The baby set to wailing when she carried him away, and he was still going at it from somewhere in the house when she came back to the kitchen. I waited for her to say something, but she walked right out the door. I was making her late to school.

I hadn’t thought at all about how her riding on the bike was gonna work, but I went at it the only way I could see. I put my hands around her waist and hoisted her up to the seat. Her back went all stiff and her eyes got wide, so I could tell I’d messed up. I let go of her like a hot potato, and she settled herself on the back of the bike.

“Hold on tight, okay?” I said, after I fired up the engine. She didn’t answer and she didn’t touch me. I felt like a clod, like I’d missed something important. “You ever rode on a bike before?”

I looked at her in the side view mirror. She frowned and shook her head. Figure that. Liam’s kid and she’d never been on a motorcycle. Most guys as crazy for bikes as him, they take their kids riding.

“We’re gonna go pretty fast, so you need to hold onto me. I don’t want you to fall off,” I said.

Wasn’t like she could put her arms all the way around me, but she got a grip on one side of my jacket, and held onto my belt with her other hand. Out on the highway, her skirt fluttered around us, so I reached back and tucked it between us. Doing it, my hand brushed against her knee on accident, and she pulled back from me. Her being so light made me nervous. Like having nothing on the back of the bike. I tapped the front brake to slide her closer to me, just to reassure myself she was there. Soon as I did, her hand loosened up where she was holding my jacket. For those couple seconds she wasn’t touching me, my heart stopped.

“Hold on tight. Don’t let go!” I yelled. She got a grip back on my belt and my jacket.

At the stoplight into town, we caught up to the bus and followed it to the school. I pulled the bike up on the front sidewalk and, as soon as I came to a stop, Wavy slid off the back. For a second, she teetered back and forth, trying to get her skirt untangled. I was worried she was about to tip over, but as I went to grab her, she rested her hand on my thigh to steady herself. Then she pushed off and ran up the sidewalk ahead of the kids coming off the bus. They all stared at me on my bike in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Hey, Wavy! What time?” I yelled.

She turned back and squinted at me.

“What time do I need to come pick you up?”

She held up three fingers. The pack of kids off the bus caught up to her. One of them knocked shoulders with her, looked to me like on purpose. Then she dropped her hand and shoved her way into the building. I rode away feeling like I’d delivered her up to the gates of Hell.

I never liked school, was always looking for excuses to stay away, but when I thought about the mess out at the farmhouse, I could see why Wavy wanted to go. All I was thinking as I rode back out there, was that I could make things a little better for her. In a stranger’s house, it was easy to see what needed doing. I went in there figuring I’d just wash the dishes, but then I couldn’t leave the baby crying in dirty pants. It’s not my favorite thing, but I can change a diaper. I got the kid cleaned up and then I boiled a pot of oatmeal, skimming off the bugs as they floated to the top. When it cooled, I stirred in some crystallized honey and fed the kid that. He seemed to like it fine. Liked me okay, too. Patting me and smiling big while I talked to him.

Until Old Man Cutcheon took me on at the garage, I was a dishwasher at the truck stop. It’s not hard, kinda nice even. Mindless. Scrubbing and rinsing. A couple things were too far gone—a burned and rusted skillet, a bowl of milk so rancid I about gagged over it. I took those out to the trash barrel behind the barn.

It tore me up a little, seeing where Wavy had been trying to make things decent. There were clean baby bottles, and she musta been the one who scrubbed the bathtub to gray. I went over it with bleach and borax, got it damn near white. Took a good hour, down on my hands and knees, scrubbing until my arm got to hurting where they put the screws in.

For lunch, I scared up a can of tomato soup with some stale saltines. One bite for Donal, one bite for me. No worse than what I ate as a baby. Didn’t stunt my growth none.

By that point I’d been there almost four hours, and I hadn’t heard a peep out of Mrs. Quinn. It spooked me, so I went to her bedroom door and called her name.

“Leave me alone,” she said. The sheets on her bed were so dirty they’d turned yellow. I guess she musta got up at some point and took Wavy to enroll in school. Unless Liam or one of his girlfriends did it.

“Mrs. Quinn, are you hungry?” I said.

“Go away.”

Once I had the kitchen and the bathroom cleaned, and Donal was napping, I looked around the rest of the house. Wavy’s bedroom was up in the attic, squeezed into the roofline, with a long window at each end. The window over the front porch had a trellis under it. Just bare dead vines in the winter, but might could be honeysuckle come spring. Wavy hadn’t made her bed up, but the sheets looked clean and she had a homemade quilt on top. There was a set of shelves with some books and the kind of junk I used to collect when I was a kid. An old purple glass bottle, a cat skull, a rock with a hole in it, a hood ornament, a mannequin’s hand. Just stuff that calls out to you. Up in the joists, a couple nails had dresses hanging on them. I lifted one up, and under it was an undershirt and a pair of panties.

I lit out of there, feeling like a spy.

I got back to the school just as the empty school buses pulled into the drive. That’s why Wavy gave me a funny look when I asked her what time school let out. She’d missed the bus in, but she coulda took the bus home. Except I’d said I was coming back for her. I didn’t like to say that and not follow through. Too many folks do you that way.

When Wavy came out, she had a pack of kids following her. She came down the sidewalk toward me, not looking right or left. I figured them kids must be hassling her, the way she looked. Little assholes.

“Hey, Wavy,” I said when she got to me. She climbed right up on the bike without any help, ready to get out of there. I put the bike in gear and roared away from them staring kids. I didn’t have to tell her to hang on, either. She grabbed my jacket tight and didn’t let go.

There wasn’t much food at the farmhouse, so I took us through the old Biplane Drive-Thru to pick up some burgers and fries. They’d be cold from riding in the saddlebags on the trip back, but they’d still be good to eat.

When we got to the house, Wavy looked downright scared as she pushed the door open and saw the kitchen. She let go of the doorknob and stepped back far enough to bump into me.

“Mama cleaned?” she whispered.

“No, I did it. I didn’t have anything else to do today and I figured you were busy at school. You know that used to be my job, doing dishes. It’s good work. Kinda lets you turn your brain off. My favorite thing is plates and bowls, just making circles in them.”

There I’d wanted to do something nice, and she looked like she was gonna cry. I put my hand on her shoulder, meaning to hug her, I guess, but she put her hands against my belly and shoved me away.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

She shivered hard, all the way down her back, before she stepped inside. I wasn’t sure if she was mad, but she looked back at me, so I followed her.

“Silverware you have to take more time washing,” I said. “Because of how food gets stuck in the forks. Eggs especially are a pain in the ass once they get dried onto something.”

It was easy to talk to Wavy that way. She didn’t seem to care what I said, but her shoulders relaxed.

“Man, I’m hungry. I hope these burgers aren’t too cold.”

I made us up plates, a burger and fries on each one. She watched me do it and, when I put the plates down on the table, she got up in the chair across from me. I tucked in, wrestling with those little plastic packets of ketchup. She opened one, I figured for herself, but she squeezed it out on my plate. Then another one. The whole time I ate, she watched me, but didn’t so much as touch her food. After I finished, she picked up the plate in front of her and carried it down the hall to Mrs. Quinn’s room.

I fixed Wavy another plate, but when she came back she was toting Donal.

“Here, why don’t I hold him, while you eat your dinner?” I said.

She put the baby up on my lap, but she didn’t sit down. Instead, she went around the kitchen, one little hand running along the edge of the sink, the range, the front of the icebox, like she was testing how clean they were. When she came to the end of the countertop, she stepped behind me. I went to turn around, but then I realized she was checking me out, making sure she could trust me. My neck prickled up from her watching me.

“It hurts?” she said.

I rubbed down my hackles with the flat of my palm. Once my hair grew back out, you wouldn’t even be able to see the scar running up the back of my head. “Nah. I told you, I’m about as good as new. It wasn’t so bad, really.”

Besides the road rash going up my arm, I ended up with this scar like a centipede, the marks from the stitches coming off it like legs. She took another step to my left and looked at it.

“That one hurts a little. They had to operate on me.” I reached around Donal to hike my sleeve up and show her how long the scar was, just that urge to show off a good scar. The way she frowned, I wished I hadn’t.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “I know better than to come up that road so fast. It’s lucky for me you were there. If I’d wrecked with nobody around, I mighta died.”

She shook her head. She wasn’t buying that.

6. MISS DEGRASSI

September–November 1977

Her first year teaching, Lisa DeGrassi had Wavonna Quinn in her third grade class. One of fourteen names on the roster. Lisa saw them all as possibilities.

Most of the kids’ parents came on the first day to meet the teacher, but Wavonna arrived alone and slipped into the desk nearest the door.

“Hi! I’m Miss DeGrassi. Are you in my class?”

The girl unzipped her backpack and handed Lisa a copy of her enrollment form. Wavonna Quinn, age eight, parents Valerie and Liam Quinn, a rural route address. The handwriting was hardly legible, and at the bottom of the form, where there was a place for parents to write comments—allergies, health restrictions—someone had scrawled two short lines. The first was “She won’t talk.” The second looked like “Don’t try to teach her.”

It unsettled Lisa. Were the Quinns backwoods antigovernment types? Opposed to the public school system, but legally required to send their child? Whatever her parents’ politics, Wavonna didn’t protest when Lisa moved her to a more central desk, and she eagerly filled out the math worksheet Lisa distributed after lunch.

The problem came when it was time to pass the worksheets forward, and the boy behind Wavonna tapped her shoulder. She turned in her desk and punched him in the arm, sending the worksheets flying.

“Wavonna!” Lisa stood at her desk, scrambling for something to say. “We are not allowed to hit.”

In the time-out desk at the back of the room, Wavonna seemed indifferent to punishment. With nothing to do, she didn’t fidget or lay her head on the desk. Given worksheets, she did them without complaint. During the planning period, while the kids were at PE, Lisa reevaluated the scrawled note on Wavonna’s registration form: Don’t try to touch her.

At the end of the day, after the kids left, Stacy, the other third grade teacher, came by to chat. She was a few years older than Lisa and the closest thing to a friend Lisa had found in Powell.

“You got the Quinn girl in your class,” Stacy said.

“Do you know her?”

“Not her. She transferred here from out of state. Her mother, though. I was in the office when she came to register the little girl for school.”

It was a story Lisa would hear several times in the next few weeks.

Valerie had been drunk or stoned. She slurred her words and could barely hold the pen to fill out the registration paperwork. She paid with a hundred dollar bill—registration costs were only twelve dollars for the year—and walked off without her change.

Her hair was a crazed rat’s nest of knots and she’d been wearing what one person described as a nighty. With black peek-a-boo stiletto pumps.

And she stank. The assistant principal added that detail: “I mean, really stank. Like she hadn’t bathed in weeks.”

Wavonna did not stink. Her homework occasionally came back smelling of cigarettes, but there were other kids in the class with less care at home. Children who came in the same clothes three days in a row with sleep gummed in their eyes and their teeth unbrushed.

Then there was Wavonna’s refusal to eat lunch. The fourth day of school, she wasn’t with the rest of the class when Lisa went to escort them from the cafeteria. Wavonna sat at the teacher’s table with a tray in front of her and Mrs. Norton watching her.

“Is there a problem?” Lisa said.

“I have one rule for lunch. Everyone has to try a bite of everything. She won’t.”

Lisa disagreed with rules like that, but in her first week of teaching, there was no way to disagree with a thirty-year veteran like Mrs. Norton.

“When will you send her back to class?” Lisa said.

“After she tries a bite of everything.”

At 2:55 p.m., just before the release bell, Wavonna returned to class with a note from Mrs. Norton. Rather than try a bite of each item, she preferred to sit in the echoey cafeteria while the janitor cleaned.

PE was also a dead-end. While the other kids ran around, screaming and laughing, Wavonna sat on the bleachers and read. Take away her book and she would sit on the bleachers staring at nothing.

She was stubborn, but at least she was smart. Her reading was above grade level and she rarely scored less than 100 percent on her math worksheets. She was a problematic student, but she was less trouble than most.

Then the first cold of the season went through school, and Wavonna stayed out sick. Three days later, she returned to school with a severe-looking woman, who marched into the classroom and said, “Who’s the teacher here?”

“I’m Miss DeGrassi.”

“I am Valerie Quinn.” The woman was tall and slender, with brown hair, but this Mrs. Quinn didn’t stink or slur her words. She was dressed in a white turtleneck, white slacks, red pumps, and she wore her hair pulled back from her bare face.

“How often do you disinfect the desks?” Mrs. Quinn said.

“I’m sure the janitor does it regularly.”

“You’re sure? How are you sure? Do you see the janitor do it? Or do you just assume that he does it?”

Lisa started to say, “I trust that the janitor is doing his job,” but she never got to finish.

Later, when she told the story, she found there was no way to exaggerate it for more laughs.

“It has to be every day. Every day. Say it with me: the desks have to be disinfected every day. Children are germy. They are covered in germs. These, these, these sweet little angels—” At that point in the story, Lisa swept her arm around her audience, one finger pointed accusingly at them, always aware that she would never master Valerie Quinn’s contemptuous gesture. “—are disgusting disease factories. These little angels are going to the bathroom and not washing their hands. They are bringing their germs back to this classroom and smearing them over every surface.”

The diatribe lasted until the cafeteria lady sent Mr. Bunder, the PE teacher, to see why Lisa’s students were late to lunch. He found them in the thrall of Mrs. Quinn’s unrelenting account of their hygiene failures.

Mr. Bunder was able to convince her to come down to the front office, where she unloaded on the principal and the janitor and the school nurse, too. When it was over, Mr. Bunder sacrificed his planning hour to keep Lisa’s students in the gym, while Lisa went back to her room to recover. Alone, she sat at her desk and cried. When she lifted her head, she found Wavonna sitting on the bench under the coat rack, reading a book. She had been there all along, while her mother rampaged.

“Are you okay, sweetie?” Lisa said. Without looking up, Wavonna nodded. It made Lisa wish there were something worth calling Child Protective Services over. A suspicious bruise, an appearance of malnutrition, anything to get that little girl away from her crazy mother.

Mr. Bunder’s take on the situation was slightly different. After having Wavy in his PE classes for two months, he suggested having a kid like that would make you bonkers. “Which came first? The crazy chicken or the crazy egg?” he said.

In November, things got better. Maybe it was the influence of Wavonna’s father, who started dropping her off and picking her up most days. That was the same time she started writing Wavy on her papers instead of Wavonna.

When the crazy mother and the Hell’s Angels father failed to show up for parent-teacher conferences, Lisa mailed a letter to the house. Then she called, but no one answered.

Finally, she did what she’d been too cowardly to do in the first place. At the end of the day, she walked Wavy out to where Mr. Quinn waited on his motorcycle, his hands resting on ape hanger handlebars. With his leather jacket hanging open, Lisa could see sweat stains under the arms of his greasy T-shirt. He was huge and meaty, and if Wavy hadn’t been there, Lisa might have backed down from her intention to confront him.

“Hi! I’m Miss DeGrassi. I’m Wavy’s teacher.”

He nodded.

“I was sorry we didn’t see you and Mrs. Quinn at open house, but I’d like to meet with you to talk about how Wavy’s doing. I sent a letter about conferences. Maybe you didn’t get it?”

“Uh, sorry,” he said.

“Maybe you could come in right now? It would only take a few minutes.”

He looked at Wavy, and Lisa had the weirdest feeling he was waiting for instructions. All the lights were on but nobody was home?

Wavy nodded.

“Okay,” he said.

In her classroom, Lisa kept two adult chairs for parent conferences, but even they seemed too small for him. As big as he was, he hardly seemed old enough to have an eight-year-old daughter, but Lisa had learned her lesson on that subject. Grandfathers who turned out to be fathers. A mother so young, Lisa mistook her for a student’s older sister. Mr. Quinn looked young, sitting across from her like a kid who’d been called to the principal’s office.

    “Wavonna—Wavy is already over the big hurdles in third grade: multiplication and learning to write longhand.”

Lisa had kept back a sample of Wavy’s penmanship to show him, a little essay she’d written about the Voyager 1 and 2 launches. He looked at it long enough to read it, but didn’t say anything.

“But she’s still not participating in PE class. I was wondering if we could find a way to encourage her.”

Mr. Quinn shifted in his chair and said, “What’s PE?”

“Gym class. They call it Physical Education now. PE for short.”

“Oh.”

“The other thing that concerns me is Wavy’s speech. You don’t have to decide today, but I want you to think about having Wavy meet with the school’s speech therapist. It won’t cost anything. It’s part of the district’s services that are provided to all students and I really think—”

“I don’t need a speech therapist,” Wavy said.

Until then Lisa had heard Wavy say exactly three things: “Don’t,” “No,” and “Asshole,” which earned her a trip to the office, where the principal butted his head against her indifference to punishment.

“Oh,” Lisa said.

At a look from Wavy, Mr. Quinn stood up, his wallet chain rattling against his leg.

“That it?” he said.

“Um, thank you for coming in.”

After that, Lisa gave up. No wonder Wavy didn’t talk. Her role models were a crazy woman who wouldn’t shut up and a man who barely spoke. What could you do with a child who had that at home?