Rampage - Rilegato

Susan Taylor Chehak is the author of four previous novels, including Smithereens and The Story of Annie D. She was born and raised in Iowa, and she received her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has taught fiction writing at the University of Southern California and the UCLA Extension, and now divides her time between Los Angeles and Colorado, where she recently opened a bookstore called Inxpot.

To get from the airport in Linwood to the Riverhouse in Rampage, you have  to skirt the larger city, drive past the car lots and the strip malls on  the northeast side of town, into the black fields along Highway 16, east  toward Chicago, until you hit the four-way stop signs at Highway 10. There  you turn north and keep on going, up and down the small hills and across  the rolling creeks until you come to the unmarked county road near the  little gated Rampage cemetery, where you take a right, heading east again  now, and at the fork just past the sign that points to a sandy area of the  river known as Sugar Bottom, you hold to the left. In a while you will be  crossing over the old iron bridge at the Rampage River, and by then the  town of Rampage itself will begin to be in sight.

Madlen knew the way without having to think about it--along that winding  asphalt road toward what she still, in spite of how many years she'd lived  elsewhere, called and thought of as home.

"The river, the river, the roaring Rampage River. If you can't sing a  rhyme and sing it on time, we'll throw you in the river."

It was hard to tune in to any good radio stations so far outside of  Linwood, and in the silence of the rented car the old half-forgotten  chorus that she and Haven and Rafe used to sing was rattling insistently  in her head.

"Old King Cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was he. He  called for his pipe and he called for his bowl and he threw them in the  river."

Glen, in the front seat next to his mother, looked at her, startled, when  she began to sing the song out loud, softly. Claire, in the back, frowned  and squeezed her eyes shut as if the sound of Madlen's voice pained her,  then turned and gazed out the window, with the book that she'd been  reading closed in her lap, one gnawed finger tucked in to keep her place,  her gaze distant, attention lost, her chin cupped in her hand.

"Do you remember the song, Claire?" Madlen asked, catching her daughter's  eye in the rearview mirror. In places the highway ran right up alongside  the river, but it flowed the other way, so they were traveling against the  current, and it seemed to Madlen that she was having to struggle and fight  to make her way back.

Claire turned and raised one eyebrow in her Pence-appropriated way. "I  don't think so, Mom," she answered, her face infuriatingly placid,  covering up the roil of her fear and expressing her disdain by way of her  indifference, without either a smile or a sneer. And then she turned back  to gazing out her window again, as if the passing flat fields and bowed  fences and sun-splashed farmhouses and silos and barns might be together  the most absorbing scenery she'd ever encountered in the world and she  didn't want to miss a bit of it. Her sigh fogged the window glass for a  moment, then it was gone.

"The river, the roaring Rampage River. If you can't sing a rhyme and sing  it on time, we'll throw you in the river." Madlen was picturing Haven's  hands grasping her legs at the ankles and Rafe with a hold on her wrists  as together they swung her back and forth between them over the grass,  while she laughed and screamed for them to stop.
She'd been driving so fast that the scenery was a blur, and when Glen  shut his eyes it felt as if they'd maybe left the ground. With the radio  off there was hardly any sound, only the engine's steady hum and a whistle  of the wind that was blowing through the cracked-open window as they  skimmed along the rolling road, over the flat black-topped surface on its  long straight infinite-seeming line, sailing between the blurred  fields--grass and hay and neatly rowed plantings of soybeans and corn.

Madlen slowed to bump up over the rugged hump of the railroad tracks, and  then they were crossing the river on a black steel webwork bridge that  arched up high between two stone-strewn banks. It was Glen who saw the  sign first, white letters on black: RAMPAGE. POP.  1498.

Claire didn't think she'd ever been in anyplace so small.

Sunlight glared on the white concrete streets; heat was a shimmer on the  surface of the road. Glen rolled his window down and leaned his head out  into the hot wind, felt it ruffle his lank black hair. Shop windows along  a brief block of stores reflected the sun's white light in the squares of  their wavery glass. Outside one house a couple of old men were sitting  heat-dazed in a pair of chairs, gazing at the road, and they turned their  heads together to watch and consider as the Cramers' car crawled by.

When they drove past what looked like it might be a castle--blocks long,  with high stone windowless walls, machicolated parapets, rounded turrets,  and wind-furled flags--Glen craned to see.

"What is it?" Claire asked her mother.

"The reformatory," Madlen answered. Then shook her head and added, "Never  mind."

The streets of the town were shady, quiet, lined with houses and  sidewalks, tall trees, straight cement driveways split by rectangles of  wild grass. Some bare-bottomed small children played in the high bright  rainbow-sparked fan of a sprinkler's glittery spray, squealing, legs  churning, hands waved up over their heads high. A man out mowing his lawn  looked up and shaded his eyes to watch as the car cruised slowly by,  through the town and out of it, and then they were on blacktop again.

There was Mrs. Frye's small white house, set up like a cake on a plate at  the top of its rise of grassy lawn and shaded on one side by a huge,  shaggy willow whose switches swept the ground. And there was Mrs. Frye,  standing in her yard. The sheets were flapping on the line behind her. A  jet plane arced across the sky.

Mrs. Frye lived alone, and she'd kept mostly to herself after her husband  passed away--dead of a heart attack at forty-five--many years earlier.  Unlike his wife, Mr. Frye went peacefully, in his sleep, sometime in the  middle of the night, without a struggle, without even a cry, with the  result that Mrs. Frye slept right through it. Later she spent some time  trying to remember what her dreams had been that night. As well as  wondering why she hadn't known what was happening to him until hours after  it was over, when she woke, disoriented because it was already light  outside the windows, full daylight, long into the morning, and he was  still there in the bed beside her, he hadn't moved. In the twenty-five  years of their marriage to each other, this would have been the first time  that such a thing had happened; not even on the morning after their  wedding night had Mr. Frye slept in past dawn. Because there was always  work to be done and he'd be up and dressed and on his way outside to do  it. It wasn't until she tried to rouse him, pulled on his shoulder and  rolled him over onto his back, that she realized her husband was dead. He  lay there next to her unmoving, his eyes open, jaw hanging, as if he'd  looked at his own death coming for him in the dark and been amazed by what  he'd seen. But the doctor explained to Mrs. Frye later that it was only a  reflex she was seeing, a tightening of the man's stiffened muscles--Mr.  Frye's eyes had opened and his jaw had dropped sometime after he was  already dead and not at the instant before.

It had taken a moment for the understanding of what was wrong with her  husband to sink in, and when it did Mrs. Frye panicked, reared away from  him, struggled to free herself from the twisted sheets. She gasped for  breath, horrified not only by the fact that he was dead but even more by  the knowledge that he'd been dead for a while, while she was asleep,  oblivious, beside him.

She was left childless and without much else to call her own either, only  what little was left over of their meager savings after the funeral  expenses, some personal possessions, clothes and furnishings, along with  the seven hundred acres of farmland that had been the sole source of their  modest livelihood. She wasn't able to work the land by herself, and so  over the years she sold all of it off, parcel by parcel, until the only  thing that she owned outright was her house, not even the land that it  stood upon. After Mrs. Frye's death the place would go unclaimed--it would  stay abandoned and neglected, sagging steadily groundward over time until  one winter it would collapse altogether and have to be bulldozed away in  the spring.

Right now the awnings on the upstairs windows made them look to Glen like  a pair of hooded eyes, watching him. Their glass panes glared back the  sunshine at him, flashing light at the moment that Madlen's rental car  swept past.

The woods on both sides of the road thickened, dark with leaves and  undergrowth closing in. Madlen turned off at the limestone pillar with its  brass plaque that read THE RIVERHOUSE and stopped. She looked through the  windshield down the long driveway at the house--its broad brick...