I DO NOT SLEEP. I WANDER the woods. Nobody comes looking for me.
I kneel beneath an elm and pray to a Presbyterian God of wrath and fire, my soul depraved, a predestined stain blooming dark. I cry and pray for that man’s safety. I actually wait for something to answer. Nothing does. Gnarled roots bite into my knees. I want to curl into a ball and sleep, transform in the forest’s vaporous breath and wake up sleek and forgiven. Find it was all a bad dream.
The lake is deep. Wirkner Lake, we call it. Now all the fish and frogs are dead. I found them in the summer, floating putrid and bloated. Around the shore, deer flee where they once thrived, plants wither to husks. The birds circle elsewhere; their tiny bodies litter the ground beneath dying trees where bark unpeels like rotten skin. This is where I throw the duffel bag: cell phone, rags, shells, my clothes. I load it with stones. After the splashes and ripples it all sinks, sealed up in a curdled film.
I walk the ancestral soil my father abandoned, the silent trees, the vast blackness where shadows move. His parents’ graves rest beneath an old oak looming tall. As a child I thought that tree pillared the sky, the heavens, because my father promised me it did. Their stone crosses tilt in the mud. I sit with them and wait. I wait a long time.
When the sun rises, the world expands with definite shapes, colors. But now that it’s here, I just want it to burn out like a dying coal. I don’t know what I expected it to solve. I thought I was so damn smart. I had a plan for how my life was supposed to start. But I failed myself. I was the only one who could.
I pick up fallen leaves and twirl the stems and marvel at the webbed veins, think of words like photosynthesis and xylem and vascular tissue. Massive birches and sycamores far older than me, a young dumb thing beneath them. The dawn spills through crooked branches, a glaucomic eye behind gray clouds squinting judgment.
I think of the word monster.
I leave the woods. It’s simple. My future is sinking away. To get it back I must overcome this storm. I’m not stupid anymore, no childish cursing of bad luck, unfairness, or fate. I cried all that bullshit out in the dark.
This storm was always coming. It was just waiting on me.
Horns arch up in the mist. Horace watches me. The rope around his neck is bloody, his skin frayed, peeled open. I touch the tender red flesh. He never makes a sound with me, and I never speak to him like so many do with animals. We can’t understand each other with language. His thoughts are his. My thoughts are mine. We are both unreachable. But I can sense his pain, can see he suffers. That’s all I need.
Dad slumps against the porch. His head sags as if his throat were slit. He nestles an empty Canadian Mist bottle. His lanky body appears broken, a gathering of crooked sticks. One lid twitches open, his mouth a dusty rasp.
“He’s bleeding again,” I say.
Dad’s corded hands squeeze the bottle.
“Why’d you choke Horace?”
“Shit,” he says. “I didn’t do anything to that goat.”
In the living room I stare at the black television. Whatever happened has already happened. But I have hope because I don’t know. The man is dead, or he isn’t.
I creep into the bathroom, look behind the mirror, avoid my face, thumb past Mom’s Zoloft until I find a tube of Neosporin. She snores beside Stonewall’s crib. I cover her with a blanket. Like always, she’ll sleep all day. I open a small medical kit, get some cotton swabs and plastic gloves. I pour clean water into a dish.
Horace rubs his face into my open palm as I set down the water. I snap on the gloves and search along his neck, apply ointment carefully as he drinks.
Dad watches me with soft admiration, raises a freshly opened beer, grins. “Nutrients.”
The cuts along Horace’s throat are deep and raw. The salve glistens red.
“He alright?”
I wipe my bloody fingers in the grass, kiss Horace between the eyes.
“You love that thing, girl.”
“He’s one of us.”
He checks his phone, reads texts. “Well, hello now.”
“What’s up?” I say.
He tells me what I already know, an explosion, a fire. I wait for more. “It’s Ray. Says the police are hunting a guard. Not sure if he skipped out on his shift or what, but he’s missing.”
My left arm hurts. My left hand tingles, delicate bites along my fingers. I have to pretend to be the person I used to be. In my room I swipe on deodorant and brush my teeth and ready my backpack. The usual routine must remain. I am the same Amy.
Power was restored in the night. All our digital clocks are wrong. Dad sits in the living room watching television now, the exploded remains, a collapsed cylinder of scorched metal. The news crew came from St. Clairsville, a town thirty minutes east. A dollish woman talks about “an awful accident that shook the small town of Barnesville last night.” She tiptoes along a slope and culvert and discusses the toxic spill. “It is unclear what caused the explosion, but locals suspect negligence and a gas leak are to blame.”
“Look at this mess,” Dad says. “Assholes can’t even tend their own tanks.”
I adjust my backpack. I have to take one step after the other, to the truck, and then into town, and then into school. The mechanics of life are just one measured task after another, an ordered restraint to maintain control. “Maybe the guard did it.”
“Maybe, baby.” He pecks at his phone. “Maybe it was the CIA, or aliens. And maybe Demont just doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing.”
“Just keep those Barnesville gossip chains going.”
“It’s a well-oiled machine, Amy.”
I drive familiar paths that now look warped along the edges.
I could turn left at the fork and take Route 800 all the way to the highway and then anywhere far from here. But my gas light is on. The needle perpetually hovers over the E. I fill up in $5 increments twice a week. If I ran, I wouldn’t get far.
Men sit on benches along Main Street, watch cars pass. They smoke cigarettes and drink Mountain Dew. I recognize a few, roofers like my dad, and, I suspect, Klansmen like my grandpa. We all wave to one another. They don’t have anything to do at 7:30 in the morning, but they are up and dressed in jeans, flannel jackets, and work boots, hoping. The steel mills were outsourced to China years ago. Now there are legions of dispossessed men who hunt work wherever they can find it. They mow grass, haul trash, wash windows, paint homes. But mostly they loiter, drunk, or hide in their mothers’ basements watching war films, grown men with failed marriages and kids they rarely see. Or they’re young and childless and never had a chance to grow.
The lucky ones work in the coal mines, like Paul’s dad. They crawl out of the earth like some blackened subspecies, drive home in expensive trucks, and hack up inky phlegm at the kitchen table while their wives hold their perpetually dark hands, strong men with charcoal wrinkles and wet eyes luminescent as frost.
This is Paul’s fate, and he knows it. But it was never mine. Many of those men are rooting for me. They congratulate Dad when they see my name in the newspaper. I’ve never missed an honor roll. I could be the first in my family to go to college. And now, their vicarious dreams could die with mine.
The high school resembles a prison, drab cinder-block walls, small square windows. A few shrubs brighten the concrete sidewalk. My dad says it was built by the same contractors who did the state penitentiary. Uncle Tom claims this is intentional.
“It’s the conditioning for life in a police state. It starts with period bells, eight hours in a classroom, and then you’re a corporate slave doing nine to five at some soulless desk, paying your taxes diligently to the military industrial complex, sending your children off to war, voting for who the television tells you to. All while exercising the same reasonable thinking skills you were educated to trust. They get you early, during the most formative years of your life, the nation’s biggest brainwashing machine.”
Even so, I’ve always enjoyed school. It’s the one thing I’m good at it.
Someone pasted a sign inside the gymnasium windows, green paperboard and Magic Marker: At Barnesville High, we say the pledge, we pray, and we love our Country. It’s been there for weeks. Nobody’s complained, and even if they did, it’d still be there.
In the parking lot are pickup trucks with gun racks, beat-up sedans, and Jeeps. Before Grandpa gave me this truck, I rode with Paul or took the school bus. My truck is at 223,000 miles. I wonder now, for the first time, what Grandpa used this truck for in the past, if it ever carried someone against their will, if the bed ever held corpses.