COVINGTON, OHIO, 1948–1972
When a soul has been born almost ten thousand times, birth comes easier.
Milo recovered in good form from all the squeezing and the sudden brightness. Of course, he didn’t understand right away who or what he was, any more than any other infant did. But time passed, and he learned.
He learned emotions. Sometimes he was filled with huge, sunny goodness. Sometimes he was apprehensive or calm. Sometimes he raged. When he raged, he was fed. He noticed this.
Aside from a certain smartness and confidence, Milo was mostly like other babies all over the world. But something in his brain—that wonderful brain—was different. Something like an OFF switch. The switch, like the rest of his brain, wasn’t finished forming yet.
What was it an OFF switch for?
Unknown.
Milo lived with another person, called “Mommy.” They lived in a trailer on a farm. Mommy (whose name was Joyce) worked for the Smoker family, who owned the farm. She helped with the cows. There were a hundred cows, and Joyce was always busy.
One morning when he was three, Milo was left to wander in the barn during milking time, within sight of his mother. He heard something scratching in the corner, behind a rusted manure spreader, and discovered a giant, nasty-looking silverfish.
The insect stared up at him through glossy, awful eyes. In its last life, it had been a pimp.
Milo picked a rusty nail out of the dust. With a look of mild concentration, he stuck the nail through the silverfish and pinned it to the boards beneath.
The insect spasmed, like a dry leaf throwing a fit.
All kids do things like that. Then they feel bad. Milo’s OFF switch kicked in, preventing the bad feelings. (It did not prevent a hard-to-breathe feeling he often got when he was frightened or excited. His mother called it “asthma.”)
Five minutes later, the milking was done, and Mom was ready to move the cows out for the day. “Milo!” she called.
“Coming, Joyce!” he answered, and ran to meet her, to take her hand.
He left behind a systematically dismembered silverfish: Wingless, wings arranged in a row. Legless, legs arranged in a row. Headless, the head in his pocket.
In fifth grade, a girl named Jodi Putterbaugh moved to Covington. Her parents, like Joyce, worked on a farm. She got on the bus the first day, walked straight to Milo’s seat, and said, “You look like you might be in fifth grade.”
Milo nodded. He was busy reading a science-fiction book.
“Do you mind if I sit here, so I’ll know when to get off the bus? My mom says this bus stops at three different schools, and I’d hate to accidentally get off at the high school. My name’s Jodi Putterbaugh.”
“Milo Wood.”
She sat down next to him and left him alone with his book.
Milo couldn’t focus on his book, after that. He thought about Jodi Putterbaugh sitting next to him, with her long brown hair and cow eyes. New switches started opening all over his brain. The hard-to-breathe feeling raised its head, just a little.
The OFF switch stayed quiet, studying the situation.
On the playground later, after a long September rain, Milo was stomping on worms when he heard a sharp “Oh!” behind him.
Jodi Putterbaugh, looking stricken.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re killing worms. Why?”
Milo didn’t have an answer. He didn’t like the way Jodi was looking at him.
“Maybe I won’t do it anymore,” he said.
She nodded but kept walking away. Milo started having a tiny little heartbreak feeling, but the OFF switch shut it right down.
Jodi’s family started an organic farm on the north side of Covington, raising food that was chemical-free. They raised pigs for pork but were very nice to the pigs while they were alive. Jodi invited Milo and some other fifth-graders to her birthday party in June.
“That’s Henry,” Jodi’s dad told Milo, when a loose pig nuzzled his leg and began chewing on his jean cuffs. They were all sitting at a picnic table, eating yellow cake.
“You name your animals?” Milo asked. “But—”
“We’re going to kill them, yes. But that doesn’t mean you can’t show respect. Lookee here.” And he got down on his knees and took Henry’s head in his hands.
“Look in his eyes,” said Jodi’s dad. “There’s somebody in there. Henry’s alive in his head, just like you and me. He appreciates kindness.” (Mr. Putterbaugh was right. Just a year ago, Henry’s soul had been a retired painter in Buenos Aires. His kindness to his neighbors had been legendary. His short, happy pig life at the Putterbaugh farm was a reward, not a punishment.)
“I’m going to change the way the world treats animals,” Jodi told Milo.
It’s funny, the things that cause people to fall in love. In Milo’s case, it was Jodi reaching over and squeezing his hand. Later, under an apple tree, at that perfect moment of dusk when the lightning bugs are coming out, they said, “One, two, three,” and kissed each other on the lips.
Milo heard a whispering deep inside his head just then, as if, say, there were ten thousand old souls trying to be heard and offer advice. The voices seemed to approve of the kissing.
It’s going to be all right, said the old souls.
The old souls were wrong. The dead switch knew how to wait.
Years passed. Fred Smoker, the owner of the farm, took Milo hunting with his own sons. For Milo’s first kill, Smoker marked his forehead with blood. When the blood touched his skin, Milo moaned a little. He couldn’t help it. And he didn’t tell Jodi.
The Putterbaugh family moved away, pushed out of business by a gigantic new Dinner Bell meatpacking factory over by Casstown. Milo’s heart split wide open, but the OFF switch came out of hiding to squelch the pain.
Something was wrong, his old soul sensed, in a sleepy, overconfident way, but didn’t know what.
Milo learned farm chores from his mom, and these developed into paid work as he grew and filled out. He lost his virginity to one of his mom’s friends, Debbie Fair, out in the woods one night.
Then, suddenly, he had a high school diploma and an apartment of his own—a room over the Lucky Mart Gas and Sundries, right on the edge of Covington. He was a person. He planned to save money and go to college before long. The plans made him feel good and made his soul feel good. His soul reminded him that you had to make money in order to save money, so he needed some kind of job.
Fair enough, agreed Milo. He got drunk with a meat-packer named Tom Littlejohn one night at Walt’s, and Tom got Milo a job at the Dinner Bell plant, killing cows. (Ah, shit, said his ancient soul.)
He carried a stunner, a kind of air hammer, and a hundred times a day he held the muzzle between a cow’s eyes and—
SsssssPOP!
—a steel slug punched through the cow’s skull and stunned its brain. Sometimes this killed the cow outright. Other times the cow might just tremble and roll its eyes at you. Milo’s dead switch engaged automatically during work hours; he could kill an animal no matter how it looked at him.
One time they had a three-hundred-fifty-pound Duroc hog named Orlando, to be specially butchered for a charity dinner at the Cincinnati Oktoberfest. Don Sweeney, the senior hand on the killing floor, tried to knock Orlando out with the air hammer, but Orlando bounced back up, squealing with rage. Sweeney came vaulting out of the pen, laughing, “That’s enough for me, boys!”
Milo grabbed the hammer from Sweeney and hoisted himself over the wall. Before Milo could even get balanced right, Orlando came grunting at him, pig feet flying, jaws agape (he had been a pig for six lives in a row and was really good at it).
Milo was focused, fearless.
SsssssPOP!
Pig and pig-slayer went down together.
Milo got up first and gave Orlando another slug (SsssssPOP!), right in the eye.
Gore jetted all over his smock.
Still the mighty pig whined and kicked and looked as if he might make it back to his feet. Milo leaped up as high as he could and came down on the pig’s ribs with both feet, driving his heels down.
Snap! Crack!
Orlando screamed and thrashed.
In one final, fluid motion, Milo reached behind him, picked up a nine-pound sledgehammer, and smashed the pig’s jaw.
Again, the hammer whirled and smashed. When Milo backed away, chest heaving, eyes dead, there was nothing left of the pig’s head. It looked like rags and Jell-O.
“Jesus, Milo,” said Sweeney, in a tiny little voice.
At home in his apartment later, Milo shook as if he’d been in an accident.
You should feel something, whispered his old soul.
Milo tried to cry. His breath shuddered. He sat there for an hour, shaking, trying to be normal.
He would go to college for engineering, he decided. After a month’s research, he found a program that would cost four thousand dollars a year. Five years at the slaughterhouse might give him what he needed to start, without having to bury himself in debt.
That’s good, said the wise voice. More!
Milo put his plans in writing, complete with a timetable. He contacted the college about financial aid, about meeting with an admissions officer. He felt more like a person than ever.
To celebrate, he spent his college savings on an air rifle.
He began going for walks in the woods at night, sitting for hours in the trees along Route 41.
It seemed as if the only time he could ever get his mind to spin down and be still was when he crouched among the insect noises of the night woods with his rifle to his shoulder, lazily tracking cars as they passed.
Breathe in. Breathe out. The rest was silence.
For his birthday, he bought himself a telescopic scope and an insulated set of winter camos.
In midsummer, he did something that surprised him.
Hidden fifty yards from the road, he fired a shot that cracked the windshield of a passing Toyota 4Runner. The truck swerved, then sped up and vanished toward Springfield.
Aw, shit! That was dumb. That was serious. It was the kind of thing that drew attention.
Milo checked the papers the next day. Nothing.
Was he disappointed? Relieved? He didn’t know.
That same day, Milo went down to Zwiebel’s Market for baloney and horseradish sauce and ran into Jodi Putterbaugh.
He stared at her over a pyramid of Miller beer twelve-packs. He knew she was familiar, but couldn’t quite…
“Do I know you?” asked Jodi.
She was cute, in an off sort of way. Dressed in sweats.
“Not sure. I’m Milo Wood.”
“Oh, my God, Milo! Milo, I’m Jodi Putterbaugh. From fifth grade!”
Sometimes our memories make us do strange things, especially if we are strange people. Milo said, “Hey, Jodi,” marched around the beer pyramid, grasped her by the arms, and planted a huge kiss on her lips. Not just a friendly kiss, either.
Obviously that long-ago dusk, with the kiss and the fireflies, had been lurking around in his head.
Woo-hoo! crowed the ancient souls.
“Okay,” said Jodi. And they put their arms around each other and stood there by the beer for a time.
Where had she gone?
Iowa. Then she was in the hospital for years, having hallucinations and, finally, brain surgery. She was dumber now; did it show?
Her parents?
Dead.
“Shit, Jodi. I’m sorry.”
He was sorry. It got past the switch.
Jodi said, “Thanks. I’m going to be driving a school bus, when school starts up in the fall.”
Meeting Jodi Putterbaugh at the store and then having grilled cheese and Cokes with her at K’s made Milo have to get his thoughts in order. For that, he needed quiet.
Night found him in the shadows by the highway. Thinking. Breathing.
Waiting. Pulling the trigger and—crack!—starring the driver’s-side window on a little blue Mercury Lynx. The driver kept his nerve, didn’t swerve, but sped up.
That shooting made the paper. The cops also mentioned a previous report, a Toyota. Someone called him “the Route 41 BB Sniper.”
Why’d they have to go and put “BB” in there? Made him sound like a little kid.
He went and got a real rifle and real rifle bullets. He threw all the bullets but one out the car window. That one bullet, he kept in his pocket.
They had dinner at the Brewery, looking out over the Miami River.
Man, she looked nice. Not just cute, like that first day at Zwiebel’s. Now she’d had time to grow in his mind, and he’d made room for her there. She made it hard for him to breathe, that’s how beautiful she looked, wearing a blue dress and an enormous mum in her hair. The mum looked like a second head.
He had gone out and bought a tie.
“Do you miss living on a farm?” he asked her, over salads.
Jodi nodded. “Yeah,” she said, “except for the work. I miss the animals, but you have to work really hard to live on a farm. Does that make me lazy?”
“Nah,” Milo answered. “There’s different kinds of work, is all. Different kinds of energy.”
She gave him a nice kind of look then. He’d said the right thing. For a minute, spearing the last of his lettuce off his plate, he felt the rightness of his life like a boat sailing on clear water. But it made him nervous, too, because he had to tell her sooner or later where he worked.
They talked about college. They were both saving up.
“Maybe we could take a class together over at Edison,” Jodi suggested. “To try it out. A class about poems. I know you probably don’t want to take a class about poems, especially, but it can be interesting sometimes if you look at the way we put words together in regular life. Like last week I made a grocery list. It said—you want to hear what it said?”
“Yes.”
“ ‘Red lettuce and shoestrings.’ ”
“So that’s like a poem?” asked Milo.
“No. It’s just some things that wouldn’t come together anywhere else but on a list.”
Milo shrugged. “Who says that’s not a poem?” he said. “Just because it came together at random?”
Jodi’s face brightened. She leaned forward.
“You actually get it,” she said, reaching out, touching his forearm. “I thought you might get it, and you do.”
“I work at the Dinner Bell plant,” he told her.
Their entrées came.
“Jeez, Milo.”
“Gotta put food on the table,” he murmured. It was just like when she caught him squishing the worms.
“You know what they do with baby pigs they can’t use?” she asked. “I read about this slaughterhouse in Pittsburgh. They just pick them up by their hind legs and bash their heads on the floor. They have contests to see who can get the brains to splatter the farthest.”
A single table candle burned between them. It was too tall, and unless he peered around the side, it left a bright halo in the middle of her head, and all he could see was the mum sticking out.
It bothered him, the tone in her voice. The dead switch armed itself. So, she wanted to tell horror stories?
“They had a contest once,” he said, leaning forward into the candlelight, “at Dinner Bell, with the steers. The air hammer went on the blink, and the night shift had to process two hundred beeves before they clocked out. So they went ahead and hooked the steers onto the overhead trolley without using the stunner. Which basically means they’re hanging upside down, totally alive and scared to death, instead of brain-dead like they’re supposed to be. And they had a contest to see how far they could process a beef before it died. They had one steer come down the line that had been skinned and had its, you know, its organs gutted and had gone through one steam-spray, and when it got to the guy who was supposed to cut off the flank steaks, it twisted and went, ‘Moooo!’ right in his face. I mean, it wasn’t even a cow anymore, it was just a meat thing, and it goes ‘moo’ like that. The guy quit.”
He peeked around the candle to see if Jodi was shocked. She was staring into her lap.
The dead switch snapped off. Better judgment flooded in. Aw, man…
“Listen,” he said, “it wasn’t really a contest. The floor works like an assembly line—”
Jodi winced at the sound of his voice. He shut up.
They ate their dinner.
Milo found himself making lists in his head.
Things to talk about: Craziest things you ever did. Shoot cars on the highway.
No! cried his old souls. He kept silence.
Dinner forks. A picture on the wall. Picture that might be an eye or some water going down a drain. Hard to tell.
Milo drove out to his tree on Route 41.
Why had he told Jodi that awful story?
People sabotaged themselves all the time, Milo thought. For example, why was he driving out to the same tree, the same spot where he’d already shot at two cars? Wouldn’t they start watching this area? If the Route 41 BB Sniper were smart, he wouldn’t snipe on Route 41 anymore.
He hiked back to his car.
He drove to the edge of Troy, out past the old covered bridge and past Experiment Farm Road, until he found a hill overlooking I-75 itself.
He left his truck parked on a gravel turnout, a mile or so from the interstate. Carrying both guns—the air rifle and the rifle rifle—he picked his way over a barbed-wire fence and sat down beside a tree, four hundred yards away. Out of headlight range.
The highway roared and whined. The headlights approached like starships, transforming into streaks, then taillights. It would be a challenge to try to hit them just as they passed. He’d have to lead them by…twenty feet? Part of it would depend on whether he used the air rifle or the real thing.
He went with the air rifle, although it grated at him. BB Sniper, my ass. The rifle bullet in his pocket seemed to announce itself, to clear its throat, to grow hot against his leg. He ignored it and screwed the scope on. Took his time calibrating, firing four shots into a pop can down in the ditch.
Patience, the dead switch whispered at him.
He was patient. Couldn’t have said what form of Perfection he was waiting for. Didn’t the headlights all look the same? And the longer he sat there, the more chance some cop would get curious about his truck, parked for no reason back there, with the empty gun rack in the rear window.
He wound up choosing a truck. A Peterbilt tanker that got his attention by pulling its Jake brake a mile upstream.
Milo let the Peterbilt fill his scope. Let the reticle hover off-center. He wasn’t trying to hit the driver. Moved his shoulders and arms and hands together, swiveling just slightly, letting the reticle pull out ahead of the truck, like a sprinter making his move.
Timing his breath, exhaling.
His lungs emptied. The oxygen in his blood hit maximum, leaving his eyes at their sharpest. He squeezed the trigger between breaths, when his body and mind were at their most still.
His ears, hyperalert, heard the crack of the shot and the distant crack of the pellet on the windshield. An adrenaline bomb went off inside him. He had a moment of Perfection that even his ancient soul enjoyed.
Then a universe of noise and confusion as the truck locked up its brakes and skidded to a stop—incredible!—less than a hundred yards down the shoulder. The stink of scorched rubber filled the night. Cars swerved and scrambled to give the truck room. A horn blared.
Milo’s body tightened up, and he almost bolted. Then the dead switch kicked in.
He exhaled. He sat like a stone.
The driver appeared, walking fast. Not your usual trucker type but a skinny guy in nice pants, with his shirt tucked in.
Flashlight.
The beam played up and down the ditch. Then up the hill, way to Milo’s right.
Milo reasoned with himself. He felt as if he stood out like a bonfire in the night, but that was just mind panic. He imagined what it looked like to the trucker, down there on the shoulder. He made a list of things the trucker saw.
Shapes. Shadows. One big rock and some fast-food trash.
Needle. Haystack.
The beam jabbed in his direction. Milo covered his scope with his hand, so the lens wouldn’t reflect.
The light passed over him without pausing.
In the dark that followed, he raised the rifle to his shoulder and focused in on the driver. The guy started walking again, back toward his cab. Milo zeroed the reticle on the back of his head. Followed.
Breathe, whispered the dead switch. Squeeze.
He didn’t. The adrenaline bomb in his chest fizzed and subsided.
The driver had hopped back up in his cab, but the truck didn’t go anywhere. He’s radioing the highway patrol, Milo thought. He won’t leave until they come.
He backed away through the weeds, uphill, crouching. Down the fenceline the way he’d come.
Dead grass. Duck under branches. Racing heart. Grunt. Gasp. Dodge a gopher hole.
Sirens. Fuck! If they had any brains, they’d send somebody down Experiment Farm Road, too. Goddammit. Even if he got to his truck and got on the road, a cop might pull him over, if he passed one.
Shit. He unslung the air rifle, wiped it down with his sleeve as he ran. When he judged it was print-free, he cast it aside, to the left, into a strip of woods.
Jogged through the tall roadside grass until he drew even with his truck, and thirty seconds later was on the road, fiddling with the radio. Rifle in its place, up on the gun rack.
He drove casually into Troy and out of danger, and the main thing on his mind was that he still wished he hadn’t told Jodi that slaughterhouse story.
Let a little time pass, he thought. Be patient, just like with firing the rifle. Make it perfect, and she’d let him in again.
Radio. Washer-and-dryer sale. Slow song. Static.
One day when school had been going about three weeks, Jodi stopped the school bus at the Kosmal driveway, out on Tick Ridge Road, to pick up little Rachel and Skye, and there was Milo Wood, in a brand-new Cincinnati Reds ball cap. There was his truck, parked just down the road.
“Milo!” gasped Jodi as he climbed aboard the bus.
“Hey,” he said, smiling a warm smile. “Can I sit up here in front?”
A week ago, he had sent her flowers. Five yellow roses, two red roses. A low-pressure bouquet.
Three days ago, a note on stationery paper, saying he was sorry. Saying he had a surprise for her.
At home, he built a little Jodi shrine. A plastic toy pig. A grocery-store receipt. A candle. A picture of some mums. A picture of a school bus.
Now here he was, half on, half off the actual bus.
Ten little kids and two young teens sat perfectly still, observing.
“I’m not supposed to have riders,” said Jodi, keeping it quiet. “Extra grown-ups, like friends or whatever you are.”
“Not supposed to” didn’t mean “no.” Milo started climbing the rest of the way onto the bus, but Jodi reached for the lever, slowly closing the door.
“You can follow me back to the garage,” she said. “Now, get down; you’re going to get me in trouble.”
All right. He stepped down. The door closed in his face.
He followed the bus to fourteen more driveways and three schools, with kids piling up in the backseats, staring. One of them made a face at him. He made a face back. The kids laughed. He could see them turn around to tell Jodi.
Schoolkids, he thought. Thumbs-up.
“I quit the slaughterhouse,” he told Jodi after she parked the bus at the district garage.
“So much for putting food on the table.”
“It’s okay. I know somebody who knows somebody over at SynthaGro. They might put me on.”
SynthaGro was a company in Troy that would come and spray little pellets on your lawn and keep bugs and weeds from doing what they did. If he got hired, Milo would be wearing a green uniform with his name on it and pushing a little green spreader—kind of like a lawnmower—around people’s yards. It didn’t pay as well as Dinner Bell, but hey.
“Dinner Bell is like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” said Jodi. “Anything but that.”
And she kissed him on the cheek.
For some reason, this made the dead switch perk up. In the space of his own head, Milo whipped around with a savage grin, teeth exposed, and made the switch disappear.
I’m going to have this, he thought, lashing out. I’m going to have this one good thing. And then another good thing after that. And another.
His old souls peed themselves, spiritually, in amazement.
He kissed her back.
Roses. Letter. School bus.
“What are you thinking?” Jodi asked.
“I’m doing poems in my head,” he answered.
She wouldn’t sleep with him unless they were living together.
“So move in,” he said, shrugging. “Your apartment’s the same as mine. What difference does it make?”
She squinched up her eyes.
“That’s romantic,” she said.
“It’s practical,” he said, but then he wheeled around and grabbed her and kissed her and took her hand. She shook his hand off and put her arm around him. They walked out of K’s with their arms around each other.
“The kids are asking when you’re going to follow the bus around again.”
“I thought you were going to get in trouble?”
“I did. Someone called the school. I’m lucky I didn’t get written up.”
It might be fun to be a teacher, he sometimes thought. Once he got to college, anything could happen, really.
She moved in that same evening.
Jodi paused in total silence when she saw the Jodi shrine he’d built. He didn’t explain. Just stood worrying, making silent finger-snapping motions.
She didn’t say anything. Just moved on, kept moving in. The second all her things were inside and she’d cleaned the bathroom, she pulled him into the bedroom and said, “You may take off your clothes.”
He saw that she had arranged some things beside the Jodi shrine. A simple Milo shrine: the word “Milo” on a piece of paper, and a candle.
Bright skin. The lamp. Twisted sheets. Breeze. Open window.
And then the list stopped. The poem stopped, if that’s what it was, and there was just her and him, one thing, breathing perfectly.
After, she lay half on top of him, stroking his chest. She said, “I love you. You know that, right?”
“I do,” he said. He loved her, too. He wanted to, anyhow. Wasn’t it the same thing?
So he said “I love you” back to her, and the dead switch screamed as if he’d poured acid on it.
It was a lazy afternoon and evening. They unpacked some things and arranged some things. Argued in good humor over whether to use his couch or hers (hers), which TV to use (hers), which plates to use (hers). Three times, they stopped to make love.
The dead switch calmed down and took a softer tack.
What are you doing? it whispered. This could be good or bad. You had to have something bright and human and normal going on, right? Otherwise the beautiful things you did might come to light.
After the second time, they didn’t bother getting dressed again. They sat on the living-room floor, sorting records, naked. Jodi had a tattoo of a dolphin on her shoulder.
“See my dolphin?” she asked, leaning forward, almost into his lap.
“It’s nice,” he said. It was blue.
“I like your armband,” she said.
Milo’s forearm said “Jodi” around it, in a ring.
“It’s not a real tat,” he said. “I drew it on with a marker.”
“Wow.”
“We should both get real ones. Real armband tats with our names.”
She shook her head.
“What?” he said. She wasn’t excited about the idea. He had thought she’d be excited. Why wasn’t she?
“Don’t make a big deal out of it,” she said.
Yeah, said his thousand voices. Don’t.
They were right. Milo nodded, looking away. He sat quietly, tracing her dolphin tattoo with his finger, pulling her close.
Okay, he thought. Breathe out. Be still. It’ll all be so good if you’ll just be still and let it.
After she fell asleep, he went for a drive.
Parked his truck off-road and hiked to a bluff overlooking Tick Ridge. Part of Jodi’s bus route.
He needed someplace totally new, after all, if he was going to shoot again. No doubt they had their eye on I-75 now.
Full moon.
Breathe in…let it go…
Crack! The sound of a real rifle, the kick of a real rifle against his shoulder.
The punch! of a real car window disintegrating.
Squealing tires. Headlights going all sideways. The car slid backward into the ditch on the far side of the road.
Warmth bloomed in Milo’s gut and spread through his chest. His groin tingled.
Had he…?
He waited.
Faint car radio.
Scraping noise.
The driver’s-side door opened, and a woman got out. Walked to the middle of the road and stood there with her head down. One hand on her hip, the other rubbing the back of her neck.
Okay.
That was good, right? She wasn’t hurt. Right?
The old voices and the dead switch locked grips and wrestled.
When he got home, Milo was momentarily startled to find Jodi sitting on her couch in his living room, wrapped in one of his blankets, watching her TV.
When people move all their things in together, it takes a while for their minds to follow.
“Where were you?” she asked.
He leaned over and kissed her.
“I drive around when I can’t sleep,” he said.
“Well, watch out,” she said. “There’s those asshole kids that shoot BBs at people.”
Two days later, he had his first day wearing the SynthaGro uniform.
There wasn’t even any training.
“It’s just like a lawnmower,” the foreman told him. “When you’re done, put up three or four of these tags.” He handed Milo a bundle of wire stakes with little yellow flags on them, warning people that the lawn had been treated and to stay off the grass for a couple of days.
“Good to go?” he asked.
“Very good,” said Milo. And he climbed into his SynthaGro truck, which smelled like poison. It burned a little, just the smell going through his nostrils.
But it was the smell of having a job, too. It was the smell of having a real life and of someone at home, someone he liked being with. It was the smell of love.
He sprayed three lawns and then stopped at the pay phone outside the Stop-N-Go in Troy.
Jodi answered the phone.
“Hey, precious,” she said. “Whatcha doing?”
Want to meet for lunch?”
“Maybe.”
“Pizza Hut.”
“Healthy choice. Okay. Now?”
“I’ll wait for you. I’ll get a table; I’m like a mile away.”
Jodi made a kissy noise as he hung up.
Four minutes later, Milo died on his way to Pizza Hut.
He was going down Main Street thinking how Velma from Scooby-Doo was actually hotter than Daphne, although you were obviously meant to think the other way around. Now, why is that? his brain had just begun thinking, when the thing that happened happened.
It was fast and bad.
A Camaro came screaming down Main Street, decided Milo was going too slow in his SynthaGro truck, and screeched by in the oncoming lane. (Jackass.)
The Camaro went slightly airborne over the railroad tracks by the Sunoco station.
On the other side, a church bus full of kids, on a road trip from the Liberty Baptist Church in Columbus, swerved to avoid the Camaro. Swerved into Milo’s lane, just as Milo came over the tracks. Milo had about a tenth of a second to quit thinking about Velma from Scooby-Doo and process whether to hit the bus or take his chances in the ditch.
Fast fast fast: Milo yanked the wheel and rolled the truck into the ditch. Fell through the driver’s door when it flapped open. The door scissored back on him, chopping him in two and trapping both halves under the truck, with lawn chemicals pouring all over. His dead switch didn’t have time to arm.
It took him three seconds to die, but it was a long, terrible, slo-mo three seconds.
Jodi passed the wreck on her way to Pizza Hut, and by then there was a collection of vehicles on-site: the bus, the Camaro, five cop cars with lights flashing, an ambulance, and two fire trucks.
She stopped. She knew. She started shaking.
The same instant, the chemical smell washed over her.
“That might be my boyfriend,” she told one of the cops, gagging as she spoke, covering her face with her hand.
The cop nodded. He looked sympathetic but raised his hands, saying, “You need to back up, ma’am. Please. There’s some nasty stuff spilled here.”
Jodi backed off.
She stared into the ditch.
Truck. Chemicals. Crashed and smashed. Part of Milo. Red lights blue lights.
She thought of all the different things that could have happened or not happened, and how different things were going to be now from the way they would have been.
Looking down, Jodi noticed that she had forgotten to put on shoes.
Barefoot. Asphalt. A faded Pepsi can. They wouldn’t have let me in Pizza Hut, anyway, she thought.