Talty Fire Exit

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-916751-05-7
Verlag: And Other Stories
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

A lone white man lives beside the river on the edge of the Penobscot reservation in Maine. Charles spends his days doing odd jobs, looking after his depressive mother, and staring across the water to the house in which his half-Native daughter Elizabeth has grown up, unaware of his existence, her paternity hidden to protect her tribal status. Yet the cracks in the foundations of Elizabeth's life are beginning to show, and Charles can see Elizabeth is struggling, much like his own mother does. He firmly believes the truth will set them all free - but the price of it may be the destruction of them all. A deeply layered story of family and blood ties, full of quiet, beautiful, and dignified sentences, Fire Exit shows us kinship from all angles, and its capacity to break down, re-form, fade, or strengthen, while always remaining a part of us.

Morgan Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation, and the author of the critically acclaimed linked story collection Night of the Living Rez (Tin House Books 2022; And Other Stories 2025), winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Best First Book. He lives in Levant, Maine.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Talty, Morgan

Leseproben

2
It was 1996 when I started AA, and I made it a point to reconnect with my mother. Maybe I felt enough years had gone by for us to move past what had happened. I knew where she lived off reservation because I had helped her move in years before, not long after Fredrick died, but when I arrived, I found out from the landlord that she hadn’t lived there for more than three years. I felt something like betrayal, but not quite so, that my mother would move without letting me know. She called every so often and would leave these long voicemails telling me about her day or week, and so I wondered why she hadn’t told me she was moving or had moved. The place my mother now rented was, as the landlord said, three streets over and at the bottom of a steep hill. I’ll never forget it: I drove to the top of that high hill, and as I started descending, I saw something at the very bottom, right where the road leveled out. It looked like a hole—not a pothole—that stretched the width of the street, and it looked portal-like, and endless. The closer I got to it, the more frightened I became. But before it could swallow me and the truck, I splashed through it: a puddle. I buzzed the buzzer that went to my mother’s apartment, but my mother was not home. Her neighbor—a tall, skinny guy I learned Louise called “shovel man” because he was always outside shoveling snow or, when there wasn’t snow, dirt, which he used to keep his dirt driveway flat—was outside, sitting on the bottom step, smoking and inspecting a worn nightstand, its wood chipped and flaking. He seemed to have a lot of garbage in his driveway, right at the end near his house. I felt him watching as I kept buzzing the buzzer to my mother’s apartment next door, and when nobody answered I started for my truck, but thought maybe it was worth asking him about her. And so I did, and he said to me, “I ain’t selling anything right now.” “No, no,” I said, looking at the nightstand and other junk he had there. “Louise. The lady that lives here. Do you know her?” He set the nightstand aside and stood up. “Who are you looking for?” he said. Again, I told him who. I still stood by my truck. “Your mother?” he said. “What’s your name?” I told him that too. He laughed. “I thought she was making you up,” he said. “What do you mean?” He waved me over. “My throat’s sore and I’m not going to yell.” He told me Louise had told him to tell me that she was going away, that she’d be back in a few days, and that I shouldn’t worry. “She’s been telling me to tell you that for years, every time she left. I thought she was crazy. But you are real.” I asked him if he knew where she’d gone, and he said he didn’t know. “I told you all she told me.” “Do you have a phone I could use?” “I don’t,” he said. “You got a cigarette?” I gave him one, and he lit it. “Hey what’s that in your truck there?” he said, blowing smoke and pointing. “You throwing it out?” He was talking about my fuel tank for work. And I told him as much. “Fuel tank, huh?” he said. I didn’t find Louise that day and when she finally called I wasn’t at home—I was at work up north clearing land—and I called her back in the evening. This was a few days after I’d gone looking for her. We talked for a bit. She sounded tired, like she wasn’t up for talking, and so I didn’t tell her anything about having gone to her old house and then to her new apartment. I just said I’d come by on Sunday, and it was then that she told me she’d moved and it was my turn to act surprised by it. When that Sunday came, I almost didn’t go. Elizabeth was outside, in her backyard, with her father. She was playing ring toss. I didn’t know how big or small five-year-olds were, but she was so little and couldn’t throw the rings very far. What she did was toss one, then take a step forward, reaching, and toss another, and so on until she was right over the pole, and she’d drop the last ring from her hand, and it wobbled in place. I stayed watching until Roger looked at me, and then I walked to my truck. Louise was outside when I showed up. I don’t know what I expected when we saw each other. It had been at least three years since I’d seen her, but she acted as if she had just seen me the other day, as if I had just seen her. The only time she got close to acknowledging how long it had been since we’d seen each other came when she said, “You look good.” That was it. My mother didn’t care very much for discussing things in the past. I don’t think she liked talking about the future, either, and she always, when I was young, changed the subject when Fredrick talked about the what-ifs of the Settlement Act, particularly my having to leave the reservation when I turned eighteen. From that day I saw her on as many Sundays as possible, which was typically once a month. She gave me a key to her place—both the house door and her apartment door—and when I asked about the dead bolt, she said it didn’t work so I didn’t need to worry. She stopped telling shovel man to tell me she was leaving, and instead would call me and say, “I’ll be out and about on Sunday, so don’t come by.” Out and about. I learned where she went eventually when I saw the medical bills on her kitchen sideboard. She went to the wellness center, where they gave her a bed and fed her and monitored her for a few days. She never told me though, and I don’t know if she knew I knew. But when I heard her say “out and about,” I came to know where she was. When I began to visit her more often, I only ever asked her a few questions about her past. One was about my father, what his name was. “His name?” Louise repeated. “Brian. Isn’t that a boring fucking name? Brian.” She stopped talking for a bit, and then said, “I wonder where he is.” She never said what happened to him, but I took it he left. You’d think men would come up with a better story, or a different one. I came to realize, through my visits with her, that I didn’t really know my mother. I started to think that Fredrick had understood her in a way nobody else could. It explained how well they worked together. But what exactly made them so close I never found out. I guess the simple answer is: Just because. That’s how it happened. They fit together. Louise’s mother, my grandmother, who Louise and I lived with when my birth father left, eventually disowned my mother for seeing Fredrick. And apparently she tried—and was successful, only for a bit—to get me taken away by telling the state that Fredrick beat me. I was almost four, but not old enough to remember. “And when they saw you had no bruises,” Louise said, “no swelling, nothing at all, they let us take you back. We were all in court, even my mother, who thought she was going to leave that day with my child. That’s the last I saw or heard from her.” For days after hearing that story, I felt strange. There was this history I was a part of, a history my body had experienced and moved through, but I never knew it. It made me wonder how much I didn’t know. We had that in common, Elizabeth and I. And I felt she should know her body was special, and she should know its history, especially the one it would not tell her and the one she could not see. And I decided to tell what I knew, because she deserved to know it. For the first time in nearly two and a half decades, I spoke with Elizabeth’s mother. I wasn’t seeking her out—I just wanted to know about burial rights. After seeing my mother age, I’d started to think a great deal about how, like all mothers everywhere, mine would one day die, and I hadn’t given any thought to what would become of her body. She had never said what she wanted done at the end. Maybe she didn’t care, or maybe she was like me: afraid to talk about it. My guess was that she would like to be buried with Fredrick on the reservation and that was my business: to see if that was possible, since my mother was not Penobscot. I didn’t know who to speak with and so I went to the chief’s office at the community building next to the school. I looked for Elizabeth’s car, the green Elantra, the one Roger had kept alive over the years until Mary had passed it down, but didn’t see it. Nobody was at the community building. Nobody at all. And all the lights were off. It was when I was leaving that I saw the printed pink sign on the door that said all offices had been moved across the street to the building behind the health center. I wasn’t surprised the tribe was tearing down the community center; it had been there for so long that it must have needed to be taken down before it decided to do so on its own. I walked across the street and took the small path behind the health center to the building where the pink sign said everyone was. Every room in that building was occupied, some doors open, some shut, but each with a sign: “Finance,” “Department of Natural Resources,” “Tribal Clerk,” and so on, and I checked almost all the doors until I found the chief’s office. The door was partly open, and so I pushed it open to find not the chief but instead Elizabeth’s mother. Mary sat behind a large brown desk, a computer in front of her. She never wore glasses when I’d known her. At first, I did not recognize her. But when I did, I forgot what I wanted to know—about burying my mother—and I asked what she was doing there, and for a moment she stared at me, or maybe she wasn’t staring but thinking...