JULIP

Julip got her name, a mixture of a flower and a drink, by her parents' design in the first flower of a somewhat alcoholic marriage. Her father bred, raised, and trained bird dogs of various breeds. Her mother was from one of the leading families of Ashland, Wisconsin. Lest anyone mock the fact, every community owns its leading families, which exist mostly as a result of hard work (if only in the distant past), at least modest prosperity, and being either Congregationalist or Episcopalian. It was, and is still, considered to have been a bad marriage for Julip's mother, Margaret, whose father, a dry-goods merchant, had sent her off to Lawrence College (a Germanic suckhole) at no moderate expense in hopes that she would marry well. It was a sad day for her father when Margaret threw over her porkish fiancé from Milwaukee in favor of a quick romance with a young man of few prospects from Duluth, with no possessions other than an old Ford convertible full of English setters. Margaret's father gave them a used car for their wedding because the convertible had no top.

It was a little startling to the dry-goods merchant to see his family business dissolve in the face of the usual shopping mall onslaught, while his daughter and her dog-trainer husband had their photos in society pages of Chicago and Milwaukee papers. It is a cultural oddity that dog trainers, golf and tennis pros, horse trainers, fishing guides, much like writers and artists, are socially acceptable in a way that wealthy parvenus never are. The tycoons of the Midwest who continue their boyhood passion for bird hunting can scarcely train their own dogs for reasons of time and specific skills. These men develop an unbalanced affection for dog trainers for the simple reason that the outdoorsmen appear to be less abstract and venal (untrue), and are leading a more manly life than can be led in a law office or brokerage house.

So Julip's father and mother had a foreshortened heyday until her birth and her dad's drinking reached levels of true impropriety. The year was divided between South and North. From November and the beginning of quail season to its end in March, they lived in various locations of Alabama, southern Georgia, northern Florida, settling by the time she was ten at a large plantation near Moncrief owned by Philadelphia people. By the end of March they headed back to the Ashland area, to a small farm of a hundred acres surrounded by cedar swamp, then broken again by fallow fields dense with dogwood and aspen, ideal cover for grouse and woodcock and the training of dogs.

They lived well enough, especially after her mother began cooking for rich folks, which doubled a modest income. Margaret was totally without talent or instinct for motherhood due to a panoply of neuroses that would never be unraveled, but was a genius in the kitchen. There were never less than a dozen dinner guests at the quail plantation and she was preoccupied with cooking to the point that she neglected her children, Julip and Bobby, and her husband, which made them feel lucky. It's an old word but Margaret was a virago, and even her silences were tortuous.

Julip liked to say she was raised in a trailer, but the quarters offered the dog trainer were a pleasant bungalow. She and Bobby had fled in her fourteenth year to a nearby trailer on the estate to escape their mother. Dad would frequently come over with a bottle of whiskey and they'd play a tearful game of gin rummy. Often he'd fall asleep on the trailer couch, waking at daylight to look after the dogs which at this estate numbered forty-eight English pointers and a few retrievers.

It was a schizophrenic upbringing, and if it were not for an interested teacher in each place she would not have been saved. She was not unlike the legion of dislocated armed-services brats to whom a true home has been, and will always be, an attractive fiction. But to the degree Julip was saved Bobby was shattered, both by the reality of their situation and by an imagination so errant it boggled the clinical psychologist after the shooting.

* * *

"Remember when," she said to Bobby, who was behind a pane of glass almost permanently, the glass soiled by breath, tears, fingers — the longing between prisoner and imprisoned. "Remember when we cut the hole in the trailer floor?"

His face was dissected by what appeared to be fine chicken wire embedded in the glass. She had lost him. His Adam's apple bobbed and his bad eye framed by the wire drifted off, ignoring her question.

"I like it here. I have a black friend named Ralph. I'm teaching him how to read and write because he doesn't know how. Ralph's gay."

"Is that what you have in mind for yourself?" she asked, trying to prolong his attention.

"No. You know that I'm nothing. Mom and you and Marcia saw to that. At least that's what they told me."

"So it's our fault," Julip said. "I don't doubt that. Everybody on earth fucks up everybody else. That's not exactly new, is it?" She only added the question to keep him going. Until now he had refused to see her, nor had he answered any of her letters the past three months.

"I doubt that. I believe in free will, not predestination. I told them what I did so I could stay in the Forensic Center. Another prisoner told me: Keep bullshitting, it's a lot better here than Raiford. There was a pond and birds out the window. So I said everything I could think of to keep them interested and stay there longer."

She glanced over at the clock and then behind her at a guard, who seemed to be studying her fanny on the chair with an intensity she had grown accustomed to over the years. She turned back to her brother with the whisper of an ache beneath her breastbone.

"I saw a new lawyer," she said. "He told me you would've got off if you admitted you were crazy. You would have spent a couple of years in the nut hatch, then got out. You still might be supposing that I can get your victims, judge, and prosecutor to agree to a change of plea on your part."

"No way. I'm not crazy. I shot those fuckheads out of free will and that's that. I admit that Dad told me it was okay."

"Bobby, you know Dad is dead." Tears flowed upward into her throat and his features blurred.

"Maybe he's dead to you, but not to me. He told me to go right ahead and shoot those who defiled my sister." Bobby became rigid for a moment at her tears which she hastily wiped away.

"I never once heard him use the word 'defile,' but maybe you did." She added the last to humor him. "How come you agreed to see me after all this time?"

"I need my little bait box. You know, under the old trailer floor where we cut the hole. I need my arrowheads, stones, and marbles. Jim Crabb lives there now but he'll let you in. The key's under the doormat if he's gone."

Now he stood and stretched with the awkward muscularity of one who burns up his rage by pumping iron in the prison weight room. He affected, she thought, the wry smile of the doomed, but maybe that's how he felt, doomed, but having done what he set out to do. Her voice became thin, plaintive.

"I pray no one hurts you in here." She broke down again at the thought of how her life had twisted his own.

"They don't fuck with a crazy who shot three men. I love you, Julip."

"I love you, Bobby."

"I'll tell Dad I saw you."

He waved before she...