MATT McGOWAN - YEARS LATER, MORE INFORMATION ABOUT WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS

Matt McGowan grew up in southwest Missouri and attended the University of Missouri. He was a newspaper reporter, and for many years now he has worked as a science and research writer at the University of Arkansas. His stories have appeared in Adirondack Review, Deep South Magazine, Concho River Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Arkansas Review and others. He lives with his wife and children in Fayetteville, Arkansas. 

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YEARS LATER, MORE INFORMATION ABOUT WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS
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​Spooner’s aunt Claire came down from Kansas City in the bed of her boyfriend’s pickup. It was 1976, the summer of the Bicentennial, and Spooner’s mother, who had become my surrogate mom, was throwing us a party.
         They hadn’t seen Claire in almost four years, a long time in the life of an almost eleven-year-old boy. But Spooner remembered her clearly. She was his mother’s sister. He and Jennifer talked about her all the time.
We were shooting baskets in driveway when they arrived. Joan and Jennifer, Spooner’s older and younger sister, respectively, came from the pool. Their swimsuits were still dripping. Jennifer let go of Joan’s hand and ran to the tailgate. There, she found Claire, crying, her hand covering her mouth.
I was enthralled by their bra-less aunt, her skin as dark as the Bain de Soleil model. She embraced Jennifer and lifted her up off her feet. While they were hugging, I noticed Claire did not shave her armpits. Until then, I didn’t even know that women grew hair there.
Setting Jennifer down, Claire turned toward Spooner and me.
“What’s up, kid?” she said. Spooner rushed toward her. She hugged him and then pushed him back and held him at arm’s length. Her hands clutched his bony shoulders. “You’ve grown,” she said. “You all have.”
When she said this, her voice quivered. Tears again welled up in her eyes. She turned toward Joan, lifting the child into her arms and squeezing her tight, holding her for twenty seconds, maybe more.
Joan was beaming when Claire set her down. She happily accepted her aunt’s hand and held on to it while they walked toward the carport.
“Last time I saw you, you were in diapers,” said Claire.
Embarrassed, Joan grinned and buried her sunburned cheek into her shoulder as they made their way to the pool.
Mocking his aunt, Spooner teased Joan. “’…you were in diapers,’” he said.  
            “Stop it!” cried Joan.
“Stop what?” Spooner’s mother stood tall with a straight spine. Her broad, bare shoulders were covered with freckles. Though four years older than Claire, she was every bit as pretty, but her face bore evidence of the stress that naturally accompanies the rearing of three children. When she smiled or frowned, which was rare, the corners of her eyes revealed three lines in the pattern of a heron’s print in the sand. I had a crush on her, but I loved her for the way she treated me, which was no different than the way she treated her own children.
            “Spooner thinks I’m a baby,” complained Joan.
            Spooner’s mother was deft at managing multiple tasks simultaneously. In one fluid motion, she glared at Spooner, comforted Joan by caressing the child’s head, and leaned over to peck her sister on the cheek. When she did this, her hand touched Claire’s forearm, but that was the extent of their affection. They did not hug.
 
Spooner and me, our birthdays were a day apart, his July 21, mine July 22. That’s a pretty big thing for kids, coincidence and the superstitious power of numbers and dates. We discovered it the first day we met, less than a week after his parents moved into the sprawling ranch house at the top Crescent Drive. From that day on, Spooner and I were inseparable.
            I didn’t know how many people were at the party that night, but at one point, Spooner and I counted twenty-one kids in the pool. It was the kind of party that would cause the neighbors to complain, but that didn’t happen because they were there too. Of course, the pool was the main attraction, the kids climbing out of it only when Spooner’s mother asked everyone to come over to the table and sing Happy Birthday. When Spooner and I blew out the candles on a giant sheet cake, Claire was there, a drink in one hand and Spooner’s shoulder cupped in the other. It was a special moment, one of those blissful memories of childhood that you carry around long after you’ve had children of your own.
 
I thought Spooner’s mother was incapable of feeling anger; the innocuous, almost loving glare given to him earlier that day was the closest she’d come to any kind of physical demonstration of it. But later that night, after everyone but family and I had gone home, I heard her voice rise above an excited flurry of conversation among aunts and uncles and grandparents who were sitting at a wrought-iron table on the other side of the pool. As humans will do, especially curious children, Spooner and I gravitated toward the commotion.
            As we waded across the shallow end, I heard Spooner’s mother raise her voice again. It started as an urgent plea, barely audible over the din of conversation, but then it got louder, and shrill. Soon, we realized she was yelling at someone.
I couldn’t see her because she was sitting on the far side of the table, blocked by the people nearer us. As we reached the steps and came up out of the pool, Spooner’s grandmother met us at the edge of the raised patio. She went to Spooner and comforted him, drawing him to her with one hand and patting his wet head with the other. Beyond that, she didn’t seem to know what to do.
            We stood there, water dripping off our fingers, trying to understand the world of adults. From the raised patio, we could see that Spooner’s mother had accidentally kicked over her chair. She was standing now and leaning over the table. Her finger was pointing at Claire. She thrusted the finger and shouted words Spooner and I couldn’t understand. It was English, words we knew, but the ideas, or what we could make of them, were totally foreign.
            Two men, Spooner’s father and grandfather, each sitting next to his mother, pawed her arms and pleaded for her to sit down. One of them had picked up her chair. Only her father’s effort caught her attention, but the effect was not what he sought. She shook her arm loose, turned toward him and shouted, “No! Not you, of all people.”
            Claire, the target of Spooner’s mother, was sitting on the other side of the table. She was smiling, rocking back and forth, almost taunting her sister in an effort to show her that her words meant nothing. Claire’s boyfriend, slouching drunk in a chair next to her, appeared bored.
            After silencing her father, Spooner’s mother turned back to Claire, pointing and thrusting again, angrier now. Her thighs rammed against the side of the table. The words confused us. “’Which way the wind blows,’” she yelled. “Why do you keep saying that? All I know is that man had a wife and two children! How do reconcile that, Claire? Or is that what I should call you?”
Spooner was frowning. It was the anguished look of someone caught between two people he loved. He kept asking what was happening, but his grandmother said nothing and simply guided us away from the patio. By the time we reached the sliding glass-door to the family room, his mother had calmed down, but we could still hear them talking. They were trying to keep things hushed.
Spooner’s grandmother ushered us inside and closed the door. It was quiet inside the house, and I felt sorry for Spooner. He was shivering while listening to his grandmother, who was telling him everything was going to be okay. Claire and his mother were sisters and sometimes siblings had conflicts, she said, “just like you and your sisters.”
“But who was she talking about?” Spooner said. “Who had two kids?”
Spooner’s grandmother looked down at him and smiled. She helped him dry his hair, even though he didn’t need it. I didn’t believe her when she said she didn’t know who the man was.
 
The next day everything was fine, as if the fireworks of the previous night hadn’t even happened. If there was tension in the house, I didn’t feel it, although Spooner and I weren’t around much. As soon as we woke up, we went outside to play basketball.
Later that morning, while gathered for breakfast at the long table in the formal dining room, everyone was gay and chatty. I watched Claire and Spooner’s mom. They seemed comfortable – both were smiling and laughing – but they weren’t talking to or sitting near each other.
            After breakfast, Spooner and I played basketball some more and then went swimming. During both activities, various family members came and went, moving around us, and everything seemed completely normal. By that afternoon, I was convinced that the drama of last night was only imagined.
            At 4:30 that afternoon Spooner and I went for a bike ride. We took the Broadway hill, crossed the bridge at the bottom of the hill and then turned left onto Par Drive. We made it all the way over to Daugherty, the road leading up to our elementary school and the cemetery beyond the school. We turned left there and climbed the hill to Colonial, turning left again and heading back to Spooner’s house. We called this the big loop. It took thirty minutes to complete. We knew this because we had clocked it several times, slowly decreasing the time as we got older, which we explained to Spooner’s mother when she said there wasn’t enough time to do it before for dinner.
            When we got back to the house, Claire and her boyfriend were out on the driveway. They were in a hurry, rushing around the truck, throwing suitcases and a duffel bag into the bed. Before they saw us, I looked at Spooner. He was frowning again, the same sad face he’d made last night when we witnessed his mother yelling at Claire. I felt sorry for him again. In their haste, it was obvious Claire and her boyfriend would have left without saying goodbye.
            “Are you leaving?” Spooner asked.
            “Oh honey,” said Claire. “Yes, we have to get back.”
            “But I thought you were going to get pizza with us.”
            “Next time,” said Claire. “I promise.”
She leaned over and kissed Spooner on the forehead and then hopped in the cab of the truck. As they drove away, she turned and smiled at us and placed her hand against the window.
But there was no next time. For me, it was the only time. 
 
Until I saw her again, nine years later.
I was watching television in the lounge of my college dormitory. Spooner and I had planned on going to the same university, but he didn’t have the grades, which is ironic, because he eventually finished college, and today he makes twice as much money as I do.
It was busy and noisy in the lounge. Near the big window that looked out over the quad, two couples were playing Ping Pong. I was annoyed with them already because they were too loud and not taking the game seriously. They were just goofing off, acting silly, whacking the ball all over the room. The incessant giggling of one of the girls grated like a dog that won’t stop barking. On the other side of the couch, two philosophy majors were arguing about Hegel and Kant. One of them mispronounced “Nietzsche” (two syllables, the second a long “E”), which irritated me almost as much as the giggling Ping Pong player. Behind me, facing a different monitor, two dudes were grunting and shouting at each other while playing a video game.
The noise in the room and the low volume on the TV ensured that I would not hear the programming, which didn’t matter because I was only channel-surfing, procrastinating from all the homework waiting for me upstairs.
That’s when I saw her. I had landed to CNN. Her hair was different – straight and mid-length rather than long and curly – and she was wearing those big, round glasses that were in style in the eighties. But there was no doubt – it was the same face.
Two men in gray suits ushered Claire through a narrow doorway into a small, crowded room. People were shouting, camera bulbs flashing. The men nudged reporters and photographers out of the way as they escorted Claire across the room.
At that moment, when they were a little more than halfway through the room, the camera zoomed in and showed a close-up of Claire’s face. Her lips were pressed into a straight line, and her eyes were far away. She appeared indifferent, unconcerned about what was happening around her.
I couldn’t see her hands – they were just below the stock market ticker – but I could tell, from the odd positioning of her arms, that her wrists were cuffed. One of the men was holding her upper arm as they turned and headed for another door. Right before she faded from view, her eyes came to life, and I thought I saw the beginning of a smile. Then she was gone.
The program cut to the news anchor, a tanned, white-haired man who touched his left ear when he spoke. I grabbed the remote and cranked the volume.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Be quiet.”
The gamers and pseudo-philosophers obliged. A few of them laughed inexplicably, but most of them drifted toward the couch and watched with me.
“I know her!” I said.
As the anchor talked, the program cut to a black and white photograph of a burned-out, smoking building. On the street in front of the building, firemen were dragging hoses. Because we’d tuned in late, and I struggled to make sense of the story. Then, this text scrolled across the bottom of the screen: “Housewife radical arrested in California.”
They cut back to the anchor.
“… Wilkes was a rank-and-file member of the Weather Underground,” he said, “a subversive political organization that bombed public buildings in the United States from the early to mid ‘70s. Wanted by the FBI for her participation in these activities, Wilkes disappeared in 1972. Early in her ‘underground’ life, Wilkes used many aliases, but for nearly two decades, she lived as Kathy Davis, a La Jolla, California, homemaker and mother of two. Police there said she walked into the station early Thursday afternoon, identified herself as Claire Eloise Wilkes and turned herself in.”
The last time I talked to Spooner, he told me his grandmother was sick. Maybe Claire wanted to see her, I thought.
I was right.
I called him and left a message. When he called me back, he didn’t even say hello. “I know,” he said. “I saw it.”
“Did you know?”
            “Mom told me a few days ago.”
            “Wow,” I said. “You didn’t know you had two more cousins?”
            “Nope.”
“Kathy Davis,” I said. “Was that what they said?”
            “Yep,” said Spooner.
We talked a while longer, but I could tell he wasn’t excited about it. He seemed distracted, maybe even embarrassed. Afterwards, I regretted calling.
Before we hung up, he told me his grandparents had flown out to California to see Claire. He said his mother had chosen not to go.