We’d been living together a few years. We were getting the hang of it. We shared common tastes. Then Rhonda developed a new habit: making me wonder. Guess who mounted a trophy biggy, guess how many calories in ice cream cones, guess who I heard’s preggo, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. “Guess who’s going to prison,” she said this time. “I’ll give you anything you want if you guess right.” Her voice was serious. Her hair was down. She wasn’t smiling.
What I wanted was a blow job. It had been a while. I wanted one. There wasn’t much else worth wanting just then, at least nothing she could give me. Things were fine, status quo. I believed that.
The only person I could imagine going to jail was Lane Greiner, a friend of ours from high school who stole car stereos. He worked with me at Metz-Indus; we were on the company softball team. We’d had lunch together that day and talked about a teenager—Mosey Shargool—who’d got his head busted open on I-91. I figured Rhonda had heard something about it.
She had jeans on and a tight T-shirt. It was gold and set off the gold flecks in her eyes. “Who’s the last person,” she asked, “who you’d think was going to jail?”
“You,” I said.
Rhonda blew her brains out with pistols made of her hands, which were small, pretty ones. The nails were glossy white wine. “Bull’s-eye.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “That’s crazy.”
She sat down. She still wasn’t smiling. “I’m the one who served that little fucking Shargool douche bag the alcohol. He gets his head smashed by a car and now they’re blaming me.”
“You were on that night?” I tried to recall the day of the accident: last Wednesday, the twenty-third. Rhonda had worked the last shift. I’d rolled one and played Nintendo and smoked. “You’re worried over nothing,” I said. I sat beside her. I pulled her against me. She smelled salty. Her body filled mine with a damp gravity. I touched her hair and waited for her to speak. I couldn’t help thinking of the blow job I’d won as a result of having guessed correctly. I was about to say, guess who has a stiff one. I couldn’t help it. Just being in the same room with her always gave me a hard-on. It was love. I loved her.
“All the waitresses there served him,” Rhonda said. “Now he’s dead and I’m getting busted for serving him, and what I think about it is, it’s not fair.”
Someone knocked. I kissed Rhonda on the cheek and got up, half expecting the police to be outside, ready to escort her coolly away. That’s how she would go: cool, calm, quiet.
It was our landlords, the Pellegrines. They lived on the first floor and leased us the upstairs. I asked them in.
Mrs. Pellegrine said, “It’s not raining too much.” She wore a purplish wig that was very shiny and curled under her ears. Her head was sandbagged by like a hundred bucks worth of jewelry and makeup.
Mr. Pellegrine shook my hand. He was a semiretired pharmacist. He wore thick glasses that amplified his eyes. Those huge eyes along with his raised prickly silver-and-black eyebrows made him look like a TV villain. “I hope you don’t mind if we try to do this tonight,” he said.
“Do what?” I asked.
He shook a tablet out of a bottle and handed it to his wife. She gobbled it down and sat with Rhonda on the sofa. A forked blade of lightning flared in the window glass. Mrs. Pellegrine started counting out loud, “one, two, three, four,” and stopped when the thunder started rumbling. “That puts the storm four miles off.”
“We want to see where we’ll end up lying,” Mr. Pellegrine said.
“Yes,” Mrs. Pellegrine said. “But I forgot my binoculars, without which, my gosh, it’s too far to see in any detail.” She had on a clinical-smelling lotion that trailed behind her like a musky cape in the humidity.
I looked out the window. The softball game I was supposed to play in would probably be cancelled. Rhonda shrugged and went to the kitchen to make some coffee. Mr. Pellegrine sat with his wife. “It’s getting too dark to see anything now anyway,” he said.
I sat in a chair opposite them. “See what?” I said.
“We bought our cemetery plots this morning,” Mr. Pellegrine said. The second-floor balcony had a view of I-91 and a cemetery; they wanted the second floor for the view. They’d been hinting around about it for a few months. “Rhonda said it would be okay, if you don’t mind.”
I nodded. What did I care. But it seemed weird for them to want to be on the second floor just so they could look at the one place they’d never look back from. Let them be weird. I didn’t care. Rhonda didn’t care either. We got along good that way. We let people do whatever usually. “Let’s do it this evening,” I said. “It’s not like we have much.”
We didn’t have much. The three years we’d been shacking up seemed more like one. A collapsible card-table, an under-stuffed red chair, a love seat with mismatched cushions, a pair of dressers whose drawers were wobbly, a queen-size mattress we had on the floor. Some rugs. One of them with a pineapple print. And things we had never paid attention to until now. A collection of attachments that didn’t fit our vacuum. A few Zippos with no flints. Magazines we read only on the toilet. We put this stuff in boxes. It was like some miserable rainy evening yard sale.
Rhonda and I were dragging a rolled-up rug down the stairs. “I am going to jail, you know,” she said.
“You might get a fine,” I said, “or the Nestegg might lose its license, but not jail. Don’t be so melodramatic. And don’t let this thing drop on me.”
Rhonda rehearsed a smile and bobbed her head left and right. We got down the stairs and dropped the rug on the concrete under the balcony, where it wouldn’t get wet. Maybe she was convinced. I had a way of speaking that put her at ease. I was twenty-three. I had a year of wisdom on her. It was a year that she overestimated. I was already losing faith in what I’d said. I knew nothing about the law. For a second I thought of what it would be like making conjugal visits. In a movie I’d seen they did it in trailers. Inmates watched from high windows and cheered. I thought about the blow job I might have waiting for me later.
I couldn’t help thinking about the blow job. The damp air had brought a sheen to Rhonda’s forehead. Her T-shirt clung to her tits. Getting head was better than fucking because I didn’t have to wear a rubber. Rhonda wouldn’t take the pill. It was okay. I wouldn’t have either. It fucks things up, it’s unnatural. I hugged her. She said, thanks, sweetie.
We got most of our things downstairs into the front yard, and then starting putting stuff inside. The Pellegrines had gotten a lot of their smaller things up to the second floor. But they had pieces of furniture that they couldn’t move, plus an upright piano. My softball game was in thirty minutes. Even if it got called I planned to be there. Rhonda could help with the chairs. The Pellegrines said they’d call their grandsons to help them with the piano. They covered it with a yellow tarp and walked up to look out over the balcony.
I got my glove and spikes and kissed Rhonda on the mouth. The Pellegrines watched us. I put my hands around her waist and pulled her pelvis into me. “Drive slow,” Rhonda said.
“I’ll love you even if you’re a convict,” I said.
“Say hi to Lane for me,” Rhonda said.
I waved good-bye to everyone.
Interstate 91 had been here for ten years. I was thirteen when it approached Windfall from the north. Everyone called it the “new road.” They said it would help our economy and put Windfall on the map. But Grandpap disagreed. The state had bought all the land along Second Avenue except his—he wouldn’t sell. His neighbors were afraid he would wreck the deal. One day he found his dog, Snickers, dead in the driveway. He thought it was a warning. “Imagine what they’d of did to your grandma if she was still alive,” he said to me once. Imagine what they might do to you, I thought. But I didn’t want him thinking I was the one who shot Snickers, even though I would have. Later that summer Pap sued the government and lost. After the verdict my dad cut Pap down from a rope in the basement of his home. Dad brought a few things home from Pap’s place—some lamps, photographs, tools. And the chair Pap had jumped from. I sat in it once.
By the time I got to the field it had started raining again, and the base paths were muddy and smelled like guts. Even if it had stopped raining, we wouldn’t have been able to play. Lane showed up late and he and I split a six-pack in his truck and drove out onto the new road again.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“I want to show you where I saw that bear.”
An old guy named Gimler who worked as a radio evangelist on WPAW was walking against traffic along the highway. Lane eased his truck into a puddle on the shoulder. Water splashed up on Gimler and he shriveled inside his jacket. “He should have jumped over the guardrail,” Lane said. “It’s like he enjoys punishment. Somebody told me that he killed a little girl in Altoona.”
“They don’t call them guardrails anymore,” I said. “They call them guide rails.”
“Whatever you say,” Lane said. “Anything else I should know?”
“Sundry Gimler didn’t kill anybody,” I said.
“That’s good news.”
“But Rhonda’s in deep shit.”
“Because of that Shargool jackass?”
“Rhonda served him that night.”
“That little fucking turd,” Lane said. He looked in the rearview mirror for a second and put his eyes back on the road. His hair was hanging in wet spikes down to his nose. “Guess who hit him,” he said.
“You?”
“Bull’s-eye,” he said. “But don’t tell no fucking body. I ran right over his head. Not a mark on the truck, and no I wasn’t drinking, but there you have it. Here’s the Billings exit.”
He took the exit too late and we slid a little in the flooded gravel shoulder. I was surprised. I had figured it was someone passing through Windfall who had hit Shargool. That’s what the highway was for, not for people from Windfall, but for people who wanted to pass through it quick.
“He was just sleeping there?” I asked.
“On the exit ramp,” Lane said. “I was coming back from where we’re going to now. What a douche bag. Do you know how it feels?”
“How what feels?”
“Everything.”
The storm had followed us from Windfall and the rain dropped in thick balls and made the windows yolky.
I cracked another beer. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m not going to let some drunk kid ruin my life is what I’m going to do. I don’t care. I’ll leave. I’ll take the highway like we used to. Only this time I won’t turn back.”
When Lane and I were in school we’d cruise backroads to link up with the new road and take trips as far as the highway would take us. Sometimes Rhonda would come with us. Lane would drive. Me and Rhonda would mess around in the backseat. One day Lane wanted to sit in the back with her. I’d said absofuckinglutely not, and that was the last drive we three took.
Lane parked in an empty lot and turned his windshield wipers off. We both had another beer and cranked the windows down a space. I rarely went to Billings. It was a small town about half the size of Windfall. All the houses here were built so close to the road it seemed something was shoving them from behind. They had a decent high school basketball team that beat Windfall almost every time. And now trips back and forth for the players would take only ten minutes on the highway; it used to take thirty. I didn’t know if that was a change for the better.
“That’s a quick ride up the mountain,” I said. “I guess that’s what you call progress.”
“There’s no progress,” Lane said. “Just change, is all. Things don’t get better, but appearances change on you. Now I’m sounding like my probation officer.”
We drank.
“Did you and Rhonda ever talk about marriage and kids and shit?” Lane asked.
“Just once,” I said.
“Kids would be cool. I can see it. Steering them clear of all the bullshit.”
“Like what?”
Lane shook a Camel out of a crumpled soft-pack. He lit it. He smoked a quarter of it. “The propaganda,” he said. “You know, the promises.”
The rain got faster and no more beer. And the rain was thick. The drops exploded and made a frying noise on the pavement. We went to a bar in Billings called the Long Run. The only empty table in the place had a tin bucket sitting on top to collect water dripping from the ceiling. It made a songish regular ping when drops of water fell in. It could start somebody reflecting if he wasn’t already.
“My friend here suffers from nostalgia,” Lane said to the waitress. She had short black hair and something about her said emergency, plus a mouth like the crack in a split-shot sinker. We ordered a pitcher and drank it fast. “My mom just got a check from Conrail for a thousand dollars,” Lane said. “We sued because my Grandpap got cancer from working in the shops. Cancer’s what everybody gets if you read the obituaries. Asbestos, or else, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. Didn’t your pap work for the railroad?”
“He upholstered sleepers and did some painting. He did himself in.”
“Trains are a thing of the past,” Lane answered. “New railroad was built a million years ago, now a new highway. Next thing they’ll be putting in an airport, and somebody’ll pay and somebody will get paid. Then a landing pad for UFOs. Remember Whip Delmar? Do you believe that story?”
There was a popular story that Whip had been swiped by aliens. More likely he just left on a bus. It wasn’t all that hard. The new road put ideas like that in people’s heads.
“What comes after UFOs?” Lane asked.
“Time machines,” I said. “So we can go back.”
Lane smiled. It wasn’t a reassuring thing but more like devilish. His teeth were a roasted brown color. “To the good old days,” he said, and we drank to that. Then we got another pitcher and drank to the future.
We went outside. The rain had stopped but everything was still wet. Behind the bar was a trail that led to a stretch of abandoned railroad tracks. Distilled evening sunlight gave some damp stones a shimmer and the tracks were rusted with waterlogged cross-ties. “It’s where I saw that bear, remember? I was right here, and blam blam, I missed. I wanted to show you.” We walked along the tracks and came to a plaque posted on a wooden stake. Kids with spray paint and knives had covered some of the words, but still we could make out what it said—eighty railroad workers had died of something, pneumonia I guessed, laying track to get over Loyal Knob and then to Windfall to meet the deadline for finishing the Muleshoe Bridge in 1893. “It’s going to rain again. It is raining again,” Lane said. “At this rate it could rain all summer and we’d never accomplish anything.”
It was about eight-thirty. We went back to the truck. Lane turned out of the parking lot onto a road called Mill Run. It snaked around behind Loyal Knob. Then you took a one-lane extension of Old Station Street right into Windfall.
“Take the new road again,” I told Lane.
Lane U-turned and we pulled onto the six-lane highway. We drove along the bottom of the valley. The front doors of houses on the ridge all faced us. At exit 43 we passed over the place where my grandfather’s house had been. You’d never have known it was there. At our exit some new businesses—franchised gas stations, restaurants, and a hotel—had gone up to serve people driving through Windfall on their way to Pittsburgh or Lake Erie or Orlando, Florida. They could pull off here, fuel up, sleep, and have a meal without having to see any of us locals—except the ones who worked in the gas station, the restaurant, and the hotel.
“Here’s where I hit that unbelievable douche bag,” Lane said as we curved in a loop from the exit ramp into old Windfall.
I imagined being the one who had run over Shargool’s head. “What was it like?” I asked.
“Like a watermelon,” Lane answered. “Or maybe a pumpkin. No. I don’t remember. I remember, but the thing is it wasn’t like something you can compare to something else. This I know. That’s memory.”
“Whatever,” I said.
“Maybe a watermelon,” he said. “A small one. If it makes you happy.”
“You’re drunk,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said. “Getting drunk makes me forgetful.”
He dropped me off at the ballpark. “Tell Rhonda I said hi,” he said.
I drove home. Mrs. Pellegrine was sitting on a bench at the piano, which was covered with a bright yellow tarp in the front yard. She had her hands stuck under the tarp and was playing blind. Her husband was sitting on the steps fiddling with a calculator. I waved hello to them. “We’re having a little barbecue tomorrow,” he said. “As long as the weather’s nice. Why don’t you and Rhonda come, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
Mrs. Pellegrine started playing a classical piece. I don’t know anything about music but she had picked something nice. The sound of the notes reminded me of a kid I used to know, a time when he was looking at a paper boat that just sunk in a roadside ditch and behind the kid there’s his dad mowing the lawn in the rain.
Rhonda hadn’t put any curtains up downstairs and I could see her inside reading a soup can label. She was beautiful from all sides but especially in profile; in profile she looked confused and dazzled, she looked like a child.
I went in the door. The first floor was the same as the second floor except this place stunk like a chemistry lab. “Can you still smell that?” I asked Rhonda.
“The smell of old age is what it is,” she said, and kissed me.
“Guess what,” she said.
“You’re not in trouble?”
“You realize that we moved but now people are still calling us upstairs. In fact, Mrs. Pellegrine answered when Maurice called. And guess what he said. You’re not listening, Clint.”
“So they’re getting our calls upstairs?” I realized what a dumbass idea the whole thing had been. The refrigerator was probably still filled with their prunes and old-people stuff. “This is all pretty screwy,” I said.
“We’ll just call everybody and tell them the new number. Anyways. Guess what Maurice said. He talked to a lawyer. Probably—just probably—no charges.”
I kissed her and smelled her neck. But I didn’t like that word, probably. I thought again of what might happen. I thought of the road. The open road. I had a hard-on again from smelling her.
“What are you thinking?” Rhonda asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just about food, I guess. I’m hungry.”
“You smell like beer,” she said. “I guess the game was cancelled.”
“Lane and me drove up to Billings. Just to kill time.”
We ate some soup that Rhonda made. We listened to Mrs. Pellegrine at the piano and played a board game. “Were you with Lane before?” Rhonda asked.
I threw the dice and rolled double sixes. “I win,” I said. “Sure I was, why?”
“You were cheating,” Rhonda said.
“What the fuck?” I said. “I was with Lane.”
Rhonda threw the dice at me. “I was talking about the game, retard,” she said. She started putting the game pieces away. She folded the board and poked me hard in the thigh with one corner of it. She stood up and walked back to the bedroom.
I stayed up a while, talking to myself, imagining conversations with her. The thing is that I was cheating at the game, and while we were playing I looked down Rhonda’s T-shirt as she leaned over to move her pawn, and thought of somebody else. Not somebody specific, but an imaginary woman.
In bed I told her I was sorry, and she turned away from me and said, “Whatever.”
I woke up about an hour later with my dick in her mouth. She stopped and said, “you guessed right, and I knew this would be what you wanted, so enjoy it.”
I didn’t enjoy it. Not as much as other ones. But it was nice enough. She told me not to do it in her mouth but I almost did. I couldn’t help myself. I pulled out instead and let it go on her shoulder and the pillow. Afterward I said thank you and she told me to shut up and do her now. So I did. Then she fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. I stayed awake a while, looking at her. I could smell her pussy on my fingers.
The next day Rhonda called me at work. The cops, she said, started asking more questions at the Nestegg Lounge. All the waitresses stuck with the story that Mosey Shargool had presented a valid-looking ID on more than one occasion, and so when he came back they never asked to see it again. When Lane came back from lunch he told me that somebody had passed by his house and taken pictures of the front end of his truck. Things were being taken very seriously. I started to worry as well.
When I got back from work, Rhonda was already in the backyard, helping Mr. Pellegrine shuck ears of corn. His wife was removing the tarp from the piano. “She’s preggo,” she said to me—loud enough for all to hear—when I walked by. I looked at Rhonda.
Later that evening we ate chicken and corn on the cob and we met friends of the Pellegrines from all over town. Windfall’s big enough that you can’t know everybody, but small enough that you can be sure to see everyone more than once. Now that we had all these acquaintances we’d say hi to them at garage sales, at the bank, at parades. A neighborhood guy came around with a wheelbarrow of illegal fireworks. It was late June. Mr. Pellegrine bought two dozen bottle rockets and lit them one by one. “To the new road, and in memory of Mosey Shargool,” he said, lighting a match for another bottle rocket. The dedication was mixed and the response was mixed too. Some of the people at the party, years before, had gotten checks from the government for moving out of their homes. Others had seen a slight increase in business if they had any stake in a place that faced the highway. But they didn’t know Rhonda’s connection to the story. Mr. Pellegrine lit another bottle rocket. It whistled into the sky and made a meek explosion. Rhonda put a drink in my hand. “I am,” she said. “I mean I don’t know about any doctors, but I’m two weeks late, plus I peed on the thingy and it said yes.”
“Congratulations,” I said, not knowing what else to say. I guess I was in an ironic celebratory mood. We used condoms, the most expensive ones, the ones with the spermicide crap. I’d never seen one break and I followed the directions. But maybe they got little holes in them. Maybe little pores like in Mrs. Pellegrine’s nose.
“Congratulations yourself,” Rhonda said. Her hair was lit up from behind by moonlight reflected off the hood of a car.
I drank a lot and Rhonda watched me get drunk. It was a nice night. Stars and satellites. The air was fragrant with leaves and leftovers. I reminded Rhonda that my Grandpap had been so mulish on dying at home that he hanged himself.
“Everybody knows he hanged himself, Clint, and besides which, you’re about to fall out of the chair,” Rhonda said. “Let’s go up to bed.”
“I’m never driving on the new road again,” I said. “It changed things.”
“Things change,” Rhonda said. “It’s called the future.”
“Guess what,” I said.
“Bull’s-eye.”
Lane came over to the loading dock at Metz-Indus. I was stacking pallets. I took my time at it. There was nothing else to do.
“How was your barbecue?” he asked.
“Got drunk, don’t remember the rest.”
He told me the cops had caught up with him and asked him a few questions. Lane wasn’t a good liar. He knew this. “There’s something else, though,” he said.
“You going to make me guess?”
Lane squinted, as if to make sure I was who he thought I was. “What do you mean?”
“So what’s the other thing you want to tell me?”
“I’ll tell you after work,” Lane said. “We’ll go over to the lake.”
The boss let most of the full-time workers go, including me and Lane, at four o’clock that afternoon. It dawned on me as we clocked out that we were about to get our hours permanently cut back. Or we might even get laid off.
We got a cup of night crawlers and went to the lake. There was a breeze and you could see the way the breeze turned by watching the columns of peaks tremble on the water like dancers in line. Lane opened his tackle box. “I’m quitting,” he said. “I’m leaving.”
“Are you still worried about the cops?”
He laid a night crawler on a picnic table near the shore and opened his knife. “It’s not just a question of escaping,” he said. He split the worm into inch-long sections. He handed me one. We baited our hooks. There was something else he wanted to tell me. We cast our lines into the water and then stood there staring at our bobbers. This was easy fishing, pussy fishing, the best we could do. We were quiet. We listened to the water. I couldn’t even hear Lane breathing. Dragonflies nipped at our rod tips. Some time passed, the day cooled. We caught a couple of rock bass and threw them back.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Lane getting ready. “Guess what,” he said.
“You’re not taking Rhonda with you,” I said. “Absofuckinglutely not.”
He took a deep breath. He kept looking at the water. “You’re just too old-fashioned, that’s all. Things change.”
I looked at him. He wouldn’t look back. His eyes were on his bobber but he wasn’t really looking anywhere.
“Is she in any trouble?” I asked.
“Cops don’t have anything substantial,” Lane said. “I’m thinking that, what it is is, the law’s not our only problem, but the Shargool kid’s parents, who, they’re bringing a civil suit up or something. I’m scared shitless and pretty much broke except for a little my mom gave me from the settlement. Rhonda’s scared too, if you’d ever listen. Whether she’s really in any trouble is beside the point.”
“Are you trying to tell me that you two are in love?”
He started biting his thumbnail. He spit and looked me square in the eye. He wasn’t plain ugly, he just looked out of order—small teeth, hair poking out of his nostrils, and no ear lobes. “Ask anyone who’s seen me and Rhonda together and they will tell you that we are in love.”
“I’ve seen you together,” I said, which wasn’t exactly true. I had never seen them together when they weren’t with me. I wondered what they were like, just the two of them, and what other people thought when they saw them together.
“How long has this been going on?”
Lane shook his head. He reeled in. His worm was gone. He baited the hook again and cast the line back out. “It’s none of your business anymore. She’s getting her stuff out of your place right now. I’m going to pick her up at my brother’s and we’re going out of state. Got something,” he said. He set the hook and drew the line in and pulled up some bicycle handlebars. He unhooked them and tossed them aside, just missing my foot.
Lane leaned back toward the picnic table and slid another worm piece into his hook. “Wherever the new road takes us is where we’ll go,” he said. He was getting bolder. He thought he was on a roll. “But we won’t stop there. We want to see things. No offense, but it’s a little romantic, isn’t it? More far than y’ins ever went. The thing is, Clint, is that she’s pregnant.”
“She can’t be,” I said. “The test said she was pregnant, but we use rubbers.”
“You use them,” Lane said. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
He cast his line a good twenty yards into the wind. He stood there fishing. The sun needled the wave crests and my eyes. Things change. Everybody says so. I changed.
With my line still in the water I swung my rod around to hit Lane with the reel end but the rod bowed and the reel just tapped his arm. He grabbed my reel and threw it and the rod into the lake. Then I picked up the bicycle handlebars and hit him in the mouth. I was standing over him, my shadow darkening his face.
He spit blood into his hand and I said sorry, and I said good luck, and fuck you and all your bullshit. I walked away and then turned around to see what he was doing. He was fishing.
I went straight home. I parked the car on the opposite side of the street. I sneaked up to the house. I looked inside. I opened the door. The knob was cold. The house was chilly and dark. Rhonda wasn’t there. I didn’t know what to do. I could feel my heart beat inside my eardrums.
I went back to the car. I tried to concentrate on the fact that I was twenty-three.
I drove around like me and Lane and Rhonda used to do. But I was alone. It wasn’t bad. I rolled the windows down. I could hear individual birds as I lumbered along among thick trees. I headed out to the Muleshoe Bridge and got out of the car.
Dusk had settled on Windfall like the shadow of someone huge and badassed. The landscape stirred with unseen creatures come awake. Crickets and their ricochets. Damp silver grass. I crept down the slope to get under the bridge. It gapped Turnsey Ridge and Loyal Knob. Windfall was born of all this stone and steel, and men like my grandfathers had worked for the railroad earlier in the century. Stoned kids wasted hours hanging out under the bridge now. They got drunk and fucked each other and broke bottles and tossed things into railcars—spray-paint cans, flip-flops, batteries, lighters, clothes, porno magazines. A long time before I had spray-painted my own name on the bridge’s stonework and I wanted to find it.
Someone had attached the l and the i at the bottom to make Clint Frankhauser look like CUnt Frankhauser.
When I got back home it was around nine. The house was dark. I couldn’t go in yet. I wanted to wait. Maybe Rhonda was inside sleeping. It was possible. I wasn’t ready to find out. Maybe sleeping; it was a possibility. Maybe gone. Anyone’s guess. My guess. The piano was still in the grass.
I sat on the porch edge. Mr. Pellegrine came down and sat beside me.
“My wife fell down the steps,” he said. “I just got back from the hospital.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t like his wife. But I liked him. “Is she okay?”
“She broke just about everything,” he said. “A hip, a tibia, and an ankle, all in the same leg. Then, God bless her, she had a darned stroke. She’s stable I guess. That’s the word they gave. Stable. What good is stable? They’ve got her all wired up and they told me to come home and rest some.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Have you seen Rhonda?” I asked. He took off his glasses. His eyes were small, blue, the lashes white.
“No,” he said.
I got that weird feeling in my chest again, like the feeling I’d had when I hit Lane. It was my heart.
“I’ll be right back,” I said. I went to the front door of our place, then slowly inside. On the kitchen table was a white envelope with my name on it and two cheap rings I had given her. I stood there for a long time looking. The rings were side by side in an infinity symbol in the exact middle of the envelope. Cool, calm, and quiet. That’s how she had gone. I imagined her taking the rings off and setting them there and sighing, thinking about the future, which is easy, it’s too easy.
Or maybe she was smiling, or crying, or both. We never said good-bye.
The Shargool kid. I didn’t even know his first name. His death had caused this. I could only think I hated him for crossing the new road.
Mr. Pellegrine came to the door. “Come on up to the balcony,” he said. “We’ll have a drink.”
We sat outside in plastic chairs. He poured me a scotch and water in a coffee cup. “Can’t see them in the dark,” he said, gesturing toward the cemetery on Loyal Knob, “but our eternal place of rest is just across the new road. Not far at all.” Maybe he was thinking that his wife would be there soon. He’d have to live the rest of his life looking over at her stone, and his stone, still undated.
“You’re not that old,” I said.
He laughed and said, “Neither are you.” He was right.
“My wife and I knew about this business, Clint,” he continued. “That guy Lane called over here a few times when you were at work. He didn’t understand about the phone numbers. Then Mrs. Pellegrine kept wanting to blurt things out, especially when her medication wasn’t yet kicked in. I have to keep her pretty far down or she cries all the time.”
“Cries over what?” I asked.
“I had a little thing going there with somebody else. Old fart like me. Can you imagine? It didn’t last long,” Mr. Pellegrine said.
“Nothing lasts forever,” I said.
“Thank God for that, too.”
We watched cars go up and down the highway. I kept waiting for one of them to take the Windfall exit.
“Who was the other woman?”
“Nobody. Some fat bitch.”
We drank. Headlights turtled across ridges, the moon dangled like a bleached charm. A train whistle sounded. I believed in the possibility that everything would be fine, I’d clear up, clear out. The new road and its guide rails were there for us all. I’d renew myself and I’d find Rhonda. “To the future,” I said, waking Mr. Pellegrine from some sad reverie. We raised our drinks. But when we clinked them together it made a hollow sound; my cup was empty, and so was his.