Driving across the country had been Jacob’s idea, but Sheila was the one who insisted they return along the Highline Highway. Throughout the trip she’d navigated and he’d done most of the driving, a compromise he’d insisted on to keep her from behind the wheel where she turned into someone else altogether: obscene, misanthropic, possibly homicidal. The route she plotted was circuitous—revenge, he suspected—always avoiding interstates, opting instead for old two-lane highways. The Highline fit right into that.
Jacob had suggested they just go south a bit, get on I–90, which would take them through Bozeman. He’d show them where he’d lived and the stadium where he’d played cornerback for the football team. But Sheila said no, they’d stay up where they were. They hadn’t come on this trip for a nostalgia tour.
Other than the miles that passed through Glacier National Park, there was nothing to look at except endless fields of low-cut barley, broken only by the syncopated thuds of telephone poles, and pathetically small towns named after lonely men. Sheila said, “I can see why you left this place.”
“I didn’t live here. Bozeman’s in the mountains.”
“I know, I know, so pretty, all that skiing, blah, blah. But this,” she rapped the window with a knuckle, “is what I always sort of imagined. This is what I thought you were running away from.” Her window was cracked open and dark hair blew around her face. She kept pushing it behind her ears, but in seconds it was free again.
“It sure is bleak,” he said, to get her to be quiet, though he wanted to say he hadn’t been running away from anything.
In the backseat, Janey had her headphones plugged into the iPhone they’d bought her as consolation for coming away all summer with her parents. For the past few thousand miles she’d poured her attention into the little screen as if it were her last link to a dying civilization. He’d known Janey wouldn’t want to come on the trip, but he hadn’t expected the almost imperturbable sheen of indifference she’d put on since the second day. She pretended not to hear them when they asked her questions, and remained bored and annoyed even as they’d visited the Grand Canyon, the La Brea tar pits, and through the hike in the Redwood Forest. She wanted to be home with her friends from fourth grade, lying around the public pool, watching the older kids flirt in their too-revealing suits. And though he’d been relentlessly upbeat all trip, even Jacob was ready to get home. The Accord, which he always kept immaculate, was littered with food wrappers, tourist flyers, ripped-up maps, and the seats were sticky from spilled soda and mashed crumbs.
“Did you ever come up here?” Sheila asked.
“No,” he said, too quickly.
“Never?” He didn’t look over, but could tell she was smiling at him.
“Maybe, I don’t know.”
She picked up the map and ran a finger along the page. “But isn’t Bozeman just down here? It’s not far at all. For you Westerners.”
“I said maybe.” He knew he sounded defensive, but he couldn’t help it. Twenty years had passed. Half his life. This place had nothing to do with him anymore.
“When? When did you come up here?” She always knew when he was hiding something, and could never let it alone.
“I don’t know. One time, I think.”
“For what?”
The lie surged up in a welcome rush. “With the football team. We played an exhibition in Saskatchewan. I think it was a recruitment thing. Up in Regina.”
She turned the map over to the yellow mass of Canada.
The memories came steadily: Jacob had answered the door in his boxers, mouth sweet from a night of beers, and blinked. Standing there was a man with a white beard who said they’d been watching him at practice. For a second he’d thought the man was a scout, but that didn’t fit with the coarse black suit, the beard with no mustache. In the old man’s hands was a large black hat with a wide brim. Behind him was a younger man with the same hat, only on his head. They had a proposition for him. Why didn’t he get dressed and they’d take him to lunch?
“It’s kind of mesmerizing,” Sheila said. “Just goes on and on and on. I think you’d go a little nuts, living here.”
“Sure would.”
“And there we go, one of the local crazies.” She pointed to a horse and buggy, standing in the breakdown lane. “What’re they, Amish?”
“I don’t know.” He sped up, but the cart lingered in the rearview.
“They live up here all winter? Without electricity? With wood stoves?”
“I guess.”
“That must be so cold. The poor kids.”
“Must be.”
Sheila turned and looked out the back window and when she straightened out said, “Hey, why don’t you stop.”
He looked in the rearview, thinking she meant to help the cart. An old man with a thick white beard had been kneeling beside the wheel. “Why?”
“Just stop,” she said.
“I can’t, we’re on the highway.”
“What? Just do it, Jacob. There’s no traffic.”
“Jesus, Sheila, it’s dangerous. And Janey’s watching her thing.”
“So what? Janey can pry herself away for five seconds.”
“What do you want to stop for?” He could no longer see the cart. It was probably miles back by now.
“I want a picture. Just stop.”
Easing into the breakdown lane he said this wasn’t a good idea, but she turned back to Janey and snapped her fingers in front of the girl’s glassy eyes. Wind slammed into the door when he opened it. As he made his way around the car a semi roared past, shaking the air.
“Here,” Sheila shouted over the wind, holding out the camera. “Get one of us.”
Janey held her mother’s hand, dazed and compliant. They climbed down the gravel slope so that when he looked at the camera they were framed entirely by the yellow fields. They were beautiful, his ladies: both with thick dark hair, pale skin, and translucent blue eyes. The backs of their legs, he’d seen as they walked down the slope, were red and impressed with the crisscross seat pattern, but through the camera lens they were perfect, the finished version and the smaller replica, both prettier than he felt he had any claim to hope for.
“Smile,” he shouted into the wind.
Sheila insisted on checking the image, wanted another, but he refused, imagined the buggy catching up to them, imagined Sheila striking up a conversation with the man. He walked around the car and got behind the wheel, started the engine, and because he was rushing he didn’t check the mirror and so didn’t see the truck, passing so close it seemed to hit him in the eyes, the horn blaring, the wheels within inches of the hood, then the second set of wheels, and he turned them back into the breakdown lane, wheels spinning in the loose gravel. Only at the last second did he manage to correct the turn and head back out onto the road, but too fast, so that they hit the ridge of asphalt with a crack.
The truck disappeared into the distance. They drove in silence.
“Oh my god,” Sheila said
“We almost died,” Janey shouted. “We almost had an accident!” She leaned forward, clutching Sheila’s headrest.
“Yes,” he said, pushing on the accelerator. Then, “Put your seat belt on, right now.”
“What happened?” Sheila said.
“That truck just came out of nowhere.”
“You almost killed us.”
“On purpose, Sheila. I did it on purpose.”
When he looked over she was crying. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That just scared the shit out of me.”
In the lull that followed he noticed a rattle coming from the back of the car. The noise got louder. Soon he could barely hear Sheila shout they should probably stop next time they found a place.
The mechanic wiped his hands on a rag and said there was a crack in the manifold. Could they drive? That was all they needed, just to get home. They could, the man said, but if they hit a bump the whole exhaust system might just fall out on the road.
“So how long to fix it?” Jacob said.
“Well,” the man said, looking back into the shop. “I’m pretty full.”
Jacob said he’d pay whatever it took. The man frowned, squeezing the oily rag. “For another five hundred, I could probably do that.”
“Good. Great, fine,” Jacob said. With the cost of the labor and parts that brought the total over two thousand, but what were they going to do, sit it out in this road-bump town for a week until the mechanic got around to them? Sheila would be pissed and blame him. But she was the one who’d insisted on the Highline Highway. If they’d gone his way they’d be in Bozeman, strolling through campus, or driving slowly around his old neighborhoods. Now they were in this nothing town, which he’d realized, as soon as they drove past the welcome sign, he had been through before.
Twenty years ago, he’d taken the bus up from Bozeman with the ticket the old man with the white beard, Elisha, had handed him across the diner table. The bus would be more comfortable, the old man assured him, than riding all the way up with him and his son, Adam, in the buggy. They’d pick him up in this town, where I–15 hit Route 2, and take him the rest of the way out to their community.
He’d heard of these people before, some sort of Amish, or Mennonite, or Anabaptists, he wasn’t sure exactly. He’d seen them a few times while riding to football games in the bus.
How familiar was he with their community? the old man had asked over lunch, which it turned out only Jacob was eating. Not very, Jacob admitted, chewing a strip of bacon. They wouldn’t bore him with the details, but one thing about their life was that they were isolated, out in the plains above the Highline. The old man seemed to be winking at him—a tick, but it drew attention to the old man’s eyes, sunk into a thicket of wrinkles, the whites distinctly yellow and thatched with red veins.
“Must be tough,” Jacob had said, stupidly, as the man seemed to want a response.
“We manage. By working together. We are a very close community.”
And that was also the problem. Elisha had hired a researcher at the university to study their bloodlines and had been told that if they didn’t get an infusion of new genes, the community would begin to degrade. The truth was they’d already started to see this: stillbirths, defects. “Mental retardation,” the old man had said in his weird accent, as if he’d come over on a boat from Germany.
Jacob was about to say he didn’t have any interest in joining their community, but the old man held up a hand. “You would only need to come and live with us for one week, and we will pay you very well for this.”
“Pay me for what?”
“Three thousand dollars,” Elisha said, leaning forward, clearly awed by the number.
“For what? Three thousand dollars for what?” At the time, Jacob had twenty-seven dollars and nineteen cents in his checking account.
“I explained,” the old man said. “We need new blood. You will be the new blood.”
“For one week,” Jacob said. They wanted him to come up to their community and give some of his blood. No, his genes. Fuck that, his sperm. He almost laughed, but looked over at the old man’s son, Adam, who was glaring with just-contained hate. Jacob wondered if he’d be screwing this guy’s wife.
“That is all the money we have,” Elisha said, holding his calloused palms up, as if to prove it. “We cannot offer more.”
“Okay,” Jacob said, sipping his coffee. “That sounds like a deal to me.” Even that afternoon he’d wonder why he said yes. The money? The plain weirdness of the offer? But he didn’t think it was even as rational as that. He’d been hungover, which made him both euphoric and depressed, and it was this swirl of feeling that had made him say yes, a surge of hysteria. Then, as soon as he said yes, it seemed there was no way to back out, though of course he could’ve at any point.
There was no one he could tell about the proposition. His friends wouldn’t have believed him, and what if they had? That might be worse. So he was on his own to wonder, increasingly, why he’d said yes, and why they’d chosen him. How long had they been watching him? Just this weekend, or had they been watching him walk to class, watching him head in sweatpants and sweatshirt to the gym each morning for weight training, head out to the fields in the afternoon for practice? Had they followed him back to his apartment and watched him through the kitchen window, shoveling mac ’n’ cheese into his mouth? And what had they seen that had made them settle on him? Why not any of the other guys on the team? He knew he was good-looking, had always had an easy time with girls, could just wait for them to drape themselves across the hard slabs of his shoulders and soon they’d be moaning beneath him on whatever creaky bed or sofa was on hand. He was six foot three, two hundred twenty-five pounds, with a thick head of light-brown hair (which, in his mid-thirties, had started thinning, leaving him bald on top, a trait Elisha and Adam probably weren’t yet aware of), and he had a strong jaw. His mother had called it a movie-star jaw. “My little leading man,” she’d called him. They must have chosen him for his looks, since they propositioned him before meeting him. His personality, such as it was, didn’t matter in the slightest. He could’ve been anyone, a murderer, a sadist. The old man’s plan was stupid and even dangerous. For them, and for him. Out in their community he’d be surrounded. They could kill him and bury his body in some barren field. But still he’d packed a small duffel bag and, as soon as the semester ended and the cold had gripped all of Montana, he walked through the creaking snow to the bus station.
After the mechanic settled up with Jacob’s credit card—“I’m afraid in this case I’m going to have to get it all now,” he’d said—Jacob asked if there was a car he could use.
The man led him out to a back lot, through a chain link fence to a battered old Datsun with South Dakota plates. The car barely ran, the engine dry and raspy, and the seats smelled like body odor and mold. Jacob honked for his wife from the lot of the diner and had to step out of the car to wave when she didn’t recognize him.
As they drove to the motel, a low-slung building like a supersized trailer, bound on all sides by a field of weeds and small, wind-shaken trees, he explained the situation.
“We have to stay here?” Janey said, glaring out the window at two boys standing up on the pedals of their bikes.
“Just for tonight. It’ll be fine.”
“How much is it going to be?” Sheila said, face already hardened with blame.
“Enough, honey, okay? It’s going to be enough.” Thankfully, she let it go.
In their room, which cost eighty dollars a night, he asked what they wanted to do.
“What exactly is there to do?” Sheila said. “Did I miss something? All I saw was a Dollar Store and that disgusting diner.”
“There was that movie theater. Or we could just drive around.”
“To look at cornfields?” Sheila said, sitting on the creaking bed and turning on the television. “I think we’ve done that.”
“Barley,” Jacob said.
“Whatever. The answer is no. I’m staying right here in our lovely room.”
“Well, I’m going to go drive,” Jacob said. “If that’s okay.”
“Whatever,” Sheila said, waving him away.
“Janey?” he said. She shook her head vigorously, as if otherwise he might scoop her up and subject her to some arcane torture.
“I’ll be back,” he said, hurrying out.
As he backed out of his spot the Datsun coughed and clattered, exactly like a car he’d driven back in college, a clunker he’d bought from a graduating senior for four hundred dollars, a car you could drive drunk and not worry about, because what was the worst that could happen? You’d crash the thing, but that was no big deal. They were nineteen, twenty, invulnerable. He felt for a moment that sense of his old self, his old confidence, was returning, as if the fabric between the man as he was now and the man he’d been was lifted by a strong wind. But then he caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview as he backed out: his wrinkled face, the tanned top of his head, dusted with the remains of his hair, grown too long on the trip, and the curtain fell heavily back in place and he was once more a thirty-nine-year-old high school teacher and football coach in rural Pennsylvania.
He passed the garage where he saw his car parked in the lot, the windows all rolled down, two other cars up on the jacks. The town dwindled away to nothing after that.
When he’d come up on the bus twenty years ago, Elisha had been waiting for him at the station. Elisha explained he wasn’t allowed to park the buggy in the lot, but it wasn’t far. Jacob noticed people eyeing them as they walked out onto the main street. Maybe Elisha had come here first, made the offer to a few of the locals, before heading farther down to Bozeman and the gullible college students who had nothing at stake. All he’d had to do was call his parents back in Pennsylvania and tell them he had to stay after the end of the semester, but only a few days, for a football thing. Anything having to do with football had always been good enough for them. Throughout high school, when he’d been a varsity starter from sophomore year on, they’d prepared him for his time as a star, but by mid-junior year it was clear he wasn’t good enough for Penn State, or any Big Ten school, so he started looking through the letters sent him from schools he’d never heard of, including Montana State University. On the cover of the brochure there’d been a red brick building and high, snow-capped mountains in the background, students walking through pristine air. He’d known no one in Montana and though he’d always made friends easily and did on campus, he’d felt completely alone the entire four years he was out west. Maybe Elisha had seen something of this. Maybe the old man’s spartan, religious life had allowed him some insight into the person Jacob was. Maybe he’d be able to let Jacob in on what he’d seen.
Had they talked on that buggy ride out to the community? It’d taken hours, but he didn’t remember saying a word. What he remembered was feeling, as they rumbled along, that he was doing the right thing. Elisha’s people needed one of the most basic things in life, and he could provide it. But what the hell was going to happen, exactly? Since that breakfast in the diner Jacob had masturbated many times to fantasies of sleeping with young women, virgins, but also older women, widows, or maybe even married women. But as they pulled out of town and started along the breakdown lane of the highway, he started worrying about the details. Would there be specific rules? Was someone going to be watching, to make sure he didn’t do anything forbidden? As they turned onto a narrow road marked by two white mailboxes—which were still there when Jacob drove in with the Datsun; he braked hard, just making the turn—he started to get afraid. What if this was actually some sort of death cult, some sort of ritual sacrifice? He’d thought about getting a gun before leaving Bozeman, of hiding it in his duffel, just in case. In the buggy, as they were enveloped by the endless fields, he wished he had.
There was another turn off the state road to get to the community, but he couldn’t remember where. He’d have missed it if not for the family walking along with their cows, the mother leading the way, two young girls beside her, all three women with black bonnets on their heads, long black skirts brushing around their ankles. Behind the cows were a father and son, the boy no older than five or six, the father probably not much older than Jacob had been when he’d been brought out here, which was how old his child, the child he’d been brought to make, would be now. He’d been twenty and that was nineteen years ago. His kid would be eighteen. Father and son wore straw cowboy hats and stiff black pants rode up above boxy black shoes and held long switches they brought gently down on the swaying rumps of the cows. Jacob backed up and turned onto the narrow dirt road. As he passed, the father looked up and touched the brim of his hat.
When they’d arrived in the buggy, Elisha had taken him directly to the house where he’d be staying. The building was behind Elisha’s house, in the center of the community, a tidy cluster of white houses. To Jacob it looked more like a glorified shed, a single room with a bed, a wooden dresser, a single wooden chair. There was one window without shutters or a curtain. On the wall beside the bed was a potbellied stove, a funnel running up to the ceiling, and beside it, a pile of chopped kindling. An outhouse was just down the path, and a bedpan was under the bed, Elisha said.
“Does this look acceptable? We thought you might like this better than staying in the house. We thought you might want privacy.”
“Of course, it’s fine,” Jacob said, tossing his duffel bag onto the bed, which creaked under the weight. When he looked back at Elisha the old man was frowning, as if he’d expected something more from Jacob. Thanks? Excitement?
“Everyone is at a meeting. They are waiting for me. Do you need anything?”
Without giving Jacob a chance to respond, Elisha walked out. Jacob thought he heard a lock turning, but when he tried the knob a few minutes later it opened and he looked out. He found what he thought was the church—there was no cross, but it was the biggest building in town—and studied the windows, trying to see in, but from that distance all he could see was the hint, now and then, of a dark shape, and though he strained to hear complaints, shouts, protests, rage in the voices of the men who’d come and find him in this shed and bludgeon him with the sharp edge of a shovel, he heard nothing but wind.
There was a single gas lamp beside his bed, but he wasn’t sure how to light it, so he used the flashlight he’d brought when dark came early. He was looking at the white spot on the ceiling when Elisha came in, stepping aside to make room for a woman, his wife. She set a plate, covered with a towel, on the dresser. They’d brought him some dinner. They hoped he was comfortable. Again, without waiting for an answer they left and this time he distinctly heard the turning of a key, and when he tried the door he found it locked. Maybe for his safety. After eating the entire plate of potatoes, green beans, and chicken, he turned off the flashlight and was plunged into solid, depthless black.
Jacob recognized the church, and farther on he saw Elisha’s house. Behind it the gray shed looked even smaller than he’d remembered. After that first night he’d thought maybe he was going to be locked up in the shed all week, but the next morning Elisha took him around the community and introduced him to the men. They greeted him kindly, though once or twice the men seemed to squeeze his hand harder than necessary. He wasn’t introduced to the women, but they were there, walking past on the roads between the homes, nodding to him, or maybe it was to Elisha. The same was true of the children, especially the little boys, tiny, creepy versions of their fathers with the same hats in smaller sizes.
As he drove past, the doors of the meeting hall opened and children poured out, little boys leading the way, leaping off the four white steps and landing clumsily in the yard, then racing toward the playground equipment, an elaborate dark wooden structure with swings and a bouncy bridge. Back when he’d been here before, there’d been no playground, and from what he’d been able to tell the kids hadn’t spent much time playing, but now even the girls were climbing onto the swings, which the boys had left empty, and soon they were rising high, their hair trailing out beneath their bonnets, the thick pleats of their skirts lifting up and falling down. The oldest looked like they were not quite teenagers. Twelve, maybe.
His second night in the community he’d been led back to his shed after dinner with Elisha, his wife, and their unmarried son, Matthew, who was mildly retarded. Dinner began with a long, elaborate prayer, and then followed in near total silence. Matthew kept looking up quickly, as if continually surprised to find Jacob there, opening his mouth, then snapping his thick lips shut again and staring down at his plate. Back at the shed Elisha held open the door for him and looked at his shoes.
“She will be here soon. I will leave you to prepare.”
“I’ll be waiting,” Jacob said, but knew that that sounded strange, maybe too eager, so he smiled and tried hard to think of something else to say. Then he saw the lamp and said, “Can you help me with that thing?”
The knock that came a few minutes after Elisha left was barely audible. “Come in,” he said, not sure if he should go to the door.
Her hand appeared first, gripping the edge of the door, then her arm, covered in black, then her face. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen, and perhaps not even that, he thought, as she came all the way into the room and closed the door. She was at most seventeen. Maybe sixteen. Jesus fucking Christ, she might be fifteen.
“Hi,” he said, standing up. The room was too hot: he’d stoked the fire until it was raging, pushing in most of his wood, so he’d probably be freezing later.
She folded her hands over her stomach and looked like she wanted to run, but instead she stepped quickly over to him and put her hand on his chest. She was more than a foot shorter than Jacob, her hair in a thick brown braid down her back. In all his fantasies he’d imagined some demurely beautiful woman, but this girl was plain, almost dowdy, with a wide nose and a gap between her front teeth. Standing in front of him, she was breathing hard, panting, almost, and her cheeks were flushed.
“I’m Jacob,” he said.
Rising up on tiptoes, she tried to kiss his mouth, but he pulled away.
“I don’t think,” he started, but saw her face harden.
“Here,” she said, stepping out of her shoes and climbing onto the bed. She hoisted her skirt, lifting her butt to get it all the way up. She had on nothing underneath. Her pubic hair was a light brown, tinged with red.
“Look, I think,” he started.
That’s when he heard something just outside the door. A man, coughing.
The girl on the bed just stared at him and lifted her hips. He unbuckled his belt, pushed down his pants, and climbed on top of her. He was as gentle as possible, fumbling for a while trying to get himself positioned, almost losing his erection, but then he’d looked at her face and she’d turned to him, and he slid in, watched her gasp, then roll her face away as he began to move.
As soon as he’d finished she slipped out from under him, pulled on her shoes, and left the shed. He thought he heard her talking, but Jacob just rolled his face into his pillow. Tomorrow he’d go home.
But he stayed. The next day he walked toward the more distant farms whose land pushed up against the sand hills. Beyond town he could see men working, leading horse-drawn wagons, repairing the roof of a shed, doing something to a silo. Back at the shed he had nothing to do, so he chopped the logs of wood stacked beside his barn, then moved on to those beside the house. Elisha’s wife brought him a bucket of warm water and a greasy bar of soap and shivering behind the shed he washed as best he could.
That night, his third, the knock came at the door after dinner. It took him a minute to realize that the woman standing before him was the same as the night before.
“Wait, I thought,” he started, but stopped himself. But what had he thought? Of course it had to be the same girl.
She lay down and pulled up her dress, just like the night before.
“I was wondering,” he said, as he unbuckled his pants and pushed them down over his erection. “Maybe you could tell me your name.”
She blinked as if the idea had never occurred to her. Then she said, “Rebecca.”
“Hi, Rebecca. I’m Jacob.”
She rolled her face away from him, toward the wall.
“Well, it was nice talking with you,” he said, kneeling between her ankles, but he paused. “How old are you?”
“Shhh,” she whispered, reaching down and grabbing his dick.
The next morning, after breakfast, which Elisha’s wife left outside the door, Jacob followed a narrow dirt track to the rising slope of the hills where the fences ended. At some point he expected the ground to turn to sand, like at the beach, but instead the crumbly dirt got grittier, looser, the low, yellow grass sparser. Why hadn’t he brought water? When he looked up, panting, he saw nothing in every direction but the billowing swells of the hills, the shuddering yellow grass. The sun was straight up overhead, so he couldn’t tell which way was east and after wandering a little, he sat down and waited for the sun to drop. By the time he was able to start back his shadow stretched, long and thin in front of him and the wind had turned sharp out of the north. He ended up too far south and had to trudge along the edge of the hills until he found the cow trail. By the time he reached his shed his lips were cracked, his face red and burned, his ears throbbed from the cold wind, and his hands were numb. He drank the ceramic pitcher of water and lay down in the dark.
The knocking didn’t wake him that night, and he only drifted out of sleep when Rebecca poked his shoulder. “Wake up,” she said. She lit the lamp beside the bed and he covered his eyes with his forearm.
“What?” Jacob said, forcing himself up on an elbow. “What are you doing?”
“I’m here,” Rebecca said, folding her arms across her chest.
“No,” Jacob said, collapsing back against his pillow. “Not tonight.”
“I,” she started, then after a pause, “no, you—”
“Get out,” he shouted. He could tell she was standing above him still. “Get the fuck out of here,” he shouted, louder, and this time he heard her hurried steps, the door slam. There might have been voices outside and the door might have cracked open, a head peering in at him, then the door closed with a click.
Rebecca was surely still here, in the community, he realized now as he drove out to the edge of the town, and then did a five point to turn to start back out toward the road. She’d be in her thirties now, but with the cold and wind and working the fields she’d look older, older by far than Sheila with her faint wrinkles and pale skin. Rebecca probably already looked like an old woman. Presumably she’d been married off and raised the child. His child. Except he didn’t really think that. He knew that having a kid wasn’t just a matter of shooting your wad.
He slowed until he was barely moving, hoping to see something in the women’s faces that would spark a memory of Rebecca, or maybe something of himself in a young man, taller than the rest, with dusty blond hair, a strong jaw, big shoulders. The young man would be pushing a wheelbarrow in front of one of the white houses and he’d glance up as the battered car rolled past. Through the dusty windshield, they’d see each other.
He’d turned Rebecca away the fifth night as well, and the next morning Elisha had came to talk to him. Was there anything wrong? Was he uncomfortable?
Jacob was lying on his bed, his arms behind his head. Of course not. He was fine.
Elisha considered him carefully, rubbing his white beard. Then he said that it was important to remember that Jacob had been brought here for a job. This was a job they had hired him to do. They had agreed to pay him good money for his services.
“My services? That’s what you call it?” He sat up and took pleasure in seeing the old man flinch.
“Please,” Elisha said, holding his hands out, “cooperate with us.”
“Right, fine,” Jacob said. “No problem. I’ll cooperate.”
That night Rebecca came at the regular time and he was standing naked just inside the door so the wind made his skin prickle.
“Are you ready?” he said. “Because I’m all set to cooperate. How about you?”
She’d stayed by the door. He told her to come closer. Closer. When she was nearly up against him he started to unbutton her shirt. She grabbed at the flaps of her shirt, trying to fit them back together, but he stopped her hands and told her to behave. He slid the shirt off, then unlatched her skirt and pushed it over her hips. Trembling in her heavy bra that looked more like a bandage and her wide, sagging underpants, she started to cry. He turned her around and eventually figured out how to undo the bra, so that her small, high breasts were free. He ran his thumbs over her pink nipples, watching her face, but she only looked afraid. Then he pushed down her underwear and pulled her to the bed. She lay down on her back, eyes clenched shut. He knelt above her, looking down at her pale, trembling body, then he grabbed her hips. She let out a cry as he turned her over, lifted her ass up, her face in his pillow. Unlike the other nights he didn’t finish quickly, held himself back, drawing it out. At first he was angry, but the longer it went on, the more he wanted her to let go of herself for just a second, to moan, to rock her hips back into him, but she didn’t make a sound, even when he reached around and rubbed her clitoris. When he finally came she climbed quickly out of bed and dressed. She left the door hanging open behind her so he had to get up to close it against the cold.
Behind a house, framed by a large red barn, a woman was hanging laundry. It wasn’t Rebecca. He hoped she never thought of him, but he doubted that was true. Or maybe not. Maybe this kind of life purified her mind, sloughed away all the nostalgia and grasping after youth that was so much a part of his own life.
The last night, his seventh, she came to the shed as usual. All day he’d been trying to think what to say when she arrived, because even after what he’d done the night before, he knew she’d come. What choice did she have? And he had to say something, but all he could come up with was, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you, worry you, frighten you. Those were bullshit, but there was no way he could get at the truth, because he didn’t have any idea what it might be. Still, he had to say something. He couldn’t leave her with the idea that the father of her child, her baby, was a bastard.
When she came into the room she stared down at her hands.
“Come here,” he said, patting the mattress. “Come sit next to me for a minute.”
She wouldn’t look at him, and he could tell form the tenseness of her posture, and the way she leaned away when she sat down, that she hated him. With good reason.
“I want,” he started, but then couldn’t think of anything to say. He just stared at her profile, at the slight puffiness of her lips, the perfectly straight line of her nose, her thick eyebrows, which were probably not thicker than other women, but she didn’t pluck them.
“I wanted to talk to you,” he said.
“All right,” she said. “Talk.”
“I mean,” he said, forcing out a fake laugh. “I mean, I barely know your name, you know? And you don’t know anything about me.”
She looked at him for the first time, a brief glance.
“I mean, considering all this,” he gestured at her stomach, “don’t you want to know anything? I mean, anything about me.”
She shook her head, then said, “What should I know?”
“I don’t know. What do you want to know? Anything. You can ask me anything.”
She pursed her lips, frowned and said, “All right. What do you want to do? What kind of work do you want to do?”
Like anyone else, this was almost all he’d thought about during college, but like almost everyone else he knew, he didn’t have an answer.
“I guess I’d like to be a teacher,” he said.
She looked at him. “A teacher?”
“Yes. High school, I think. Or little kids. Either one.”
“What would you teach?”
“History,” he said. This was the first time he’d even considered this, but as soon as he said it, he knew it was true. This was what he would do. He was already majoring in history. So why not?
“What history?”
He laughed and said, “Any kind. American. American history.”
She seemed to be considering this, then shrugged. “Okay.”
“See, isn’t that better?” he said. “Now you know something about me. Come on. Ask me something else. Anything else.”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on. Anything,” he said, and he wanted to touch her, to take her hand, to hug her, but instead he just bounced on the bed, making the springs squeal. She shook with the bounce, and he did it again, then again, and her smile widened.
Still bouncing he leaned over and whispered, “Come on, help me out.” At first she didn’t move, just sat there, shaken by his movements, and then she lifted her butt and brought it down and they went on like that, bouncing the bed, the springs wailing. A few strands of her hair, which had been tied up in a bun, drifted loose around her face, catching in her half-open mouth. She left just as she always did, not looking back at him, and he lay down on the bed that seemed to still be vibrating and he closed his eyes, trying to hold on to that feeling.
He drove back through the community as quickly as he could. Sheila and Janey were probably wondering where he’d gone. They’d drive back to that diner, sit in a booth, play music from the little jukebox on the wall, and tomorrow the car would be ready, and they could finally get out of there and head back home.