Suspicious River by Laura Kasischke Read Free Book Online Page A

house.
    “I hated it,” she says—hated the whole damn state where she was born.
    She wears a slippery nightgown, metallic baby blue shimmering sleek and dreamy in a crack of light that bleeds up white from the hall outside my bedroom door, and she’s drinking something thick and minty from a coffee cup.
    I can imagine the Spanish moss of my mother’s childhood like corpse hair, or the dark ruined hair of my dead dolls—trees trapped under cloaks of it, bats and animals smothered and human in a turquoise veil of twilight in the state where she once lived.
    And I imagine her being born into it—a baby sleeping in a cradle of clotted hair, a moon snagged in branches, like another mother’s face, filling her cradle with silver light.
    “Bonnie,” my father calls, “Are you coming to bed?”
    She kisses my cool forehead as she leaves.
    I can hear them struggle through the thin wall between my room and theirs before I fall asleep.
    “Jesus,” my father says, and she sobs.
    “Goddammit,” my mother mumbles.
    Then my father, “Bonnie, no.”
    Something broken. He says, “We’ll clean it up tomorrow. Bonnie. Please. Come here. Come back here now.”
    I fall asleep when they go silent, and every morning the sound of yelping from the neighbors’ back yard wakes me when the sun comes up, liquid and fast.
     
    You might imagine Suspicious River as a small, friendly town if you’d never been there. One bowling alley. Seven churches. Ten motels. Fourteen bars. A 2,700-square-foot gift shop, its facade a cinderblock mural of Pocahontas emerging from a teepee, sprawling for a block along Main Street.
    The sky was painted turquoise in that mural. Two whitetailed deer stood blinking at one another. An old Indian with red feathers in his headdress glared at his own empty hands while Pocahontas, dark skinned, with long black braids, smiled at a shirtless white man. Her breasts were enormous and barely covered with the deerskin she was wearing. Midriff exposed. Her thighs were fleshy and curved into a dark place hidden only by a half-inch of ripped skirt. The tourists liked it, took each other’s photos from across the street, waving under the Indian princess.
    Her eyes were blue.
    Local legend was that the artist’s Swedish mistress had posed for the painting, had stood half-naked every day for six weeks on Main Street even after the weather turned cold, while the artist painted her into Pocahontas.
    But the mural was four decades old, and no one really remembered its genesis with any certainty at all. Still, it was a landmark in the town, perfectly preserved, something larger than life and twice as bright living right there beside us—though the Indians themselves, who’d found and named the town, who’d inspired the gift shop full of moccasins and plastic tom-toms, were gone now except for their graves mounding the river like three soft green bellies, inhaling and exhaling water.
    Years earlier, a condominium developer had wanted to level those Indian mounds, had even started to, had taken a big yellow bulldozer to them like a huge and hungry bird. But he must’ve expected the dirt underneath the long, soft grass on the mounds to be solid, expected the mounds to just roll off the edge of the earth like guillotined heads. Instead, the earth under there turned out to be pitch and mud—half water—and in it, poking up here and there, floating in that dark soup, human bones—a length of spine, a skull, a shard of pottery with a stick figure buck painted on it in what looked like blood.
    After that, the Indians came to Suspicious River from further north—looking exotic and poor in our town. They made a human chain in front of the bulldozer and stretched a white banner across themselves that said rest in peace in big black letters.
    All day for days, carloads of families streamed past, craning their necks to get a look at the Indians and the massacred mounds hacked open like corpses. It puzzled the newspaper reporters,