The Sheer Weight of the World
She was twelve that day in Wellsprings, West Virginia, a day she remembered so vividly she could feel the heat at noon in the one-car garage belonging to that man her daddy knew. She spent her days that summer slipping out of the house at the crack of dawn to avoid the list her mother had for her. Sifting flour for biscuits every morning, whether or not any of them wanted such a thing as breakfast at the crack of dawn. Hearth shoveled out, a thin layer of ash left for the next fire. It was no less a chore, the things her daddy and the men did that day. Remove the hood, disconnect the battery. Unbolt the transmission, the engine mounts. Disconnect hoses. Hook chain to engine. Hoist and swing aside. Replacing the engine took the best part of a day.
Ever since, she’d loved the feel of a good day’s work. The warm feel of oil when she changed a filter. How sharp kerosene smelled when you soaked a carburetor, or the way something like sugar could clean grease from her own two hands. She loved a phrase like thirty degrees of dwell. The burnt smell of dragging brakes. That was an ordinary sign in this world, a sign she could understand and fix. There were things about Russell she could never name, as hard as she tried, things inside him she could never reach, let alone repair, as hard as she loved him and as long. “What do you want from me, woman?” he’d say again and again as they moved, east to west, west back east. What she wanted was a world that made sense.
Before she met Russell, she ran her daddy’s gas station, a place she’d been left after both her parents passed. She was an only child, and odd-turned. When she was little her mother ironed the bows on her dresses of a Sunday, but by mid-afternoon she’d be out in the garage, helping her daddy strew sawdust across the floor to soak up oil from changing. “Remember,” he’d say, “never use sandpaper to clean a plug gap unless you’re in a pinch.” Her mother herded her back inside to knead dough and learn the ways and means of tiny stitches, but it was her daddy she learned to love. How he’d take her with him to test out the truck he was fixing up, show her how to turn the distributor and adjust the timing get to rid of a ping.
“Listen up, girl,” he’d say. “The biggest problem’s not over-greasing the cam and the spark.” And he’d show her the intricacies of advance plates, teach her more about how to listen to what an engine said.
Engines, she learned young, had a heart and a soul bigger than any person she’d ever meet. They were a thing you could count on, nothing like the Good Book or sermons about end times, or any old movie with moony-eyed girls who sang about love. Engines were a love story. A good light to set an ignition timing beat any boy she knew. Drive-in movie of a Saturday night or hair in pin curls and a high school dance. She liked the taste of tobacco in the mouth of some boy, but she liked it better when they let her roll her own cigarettes or when they realized that she could hold her head better than them any day after enough neat shots of whiskey as they sat looking out at the quarry by moonlight. It wasn’t that she didn’t like their lips, their hands, where those hands went, and how it made her feel inside. But it made her impatient, too, made her want them to get on with it, the unzipping and unbuttoning, the quick intake of breath, the pleasure that never seemed to be her own.
When she met Russell Wallen, she was twenty-three going on twenty-four, and most of her days were spent cleaning up, setting up, sweeping up. By then she’d owned the station for some time, and she’d expanded it too, opening up a little coffee and breakfast place in what had been a storehouse beside the garage, and she was working double time, serving up doughnuts and doing tune-ups near about in the dark. She hired helpers, one for the breakfast shift and another for bigger repairs in the garage, but she was running daylight to evenings, seeing to it all, and missed pleasures she couldn’t even name. She laid her hands against the warm hood of a car as she waited for a tank to fill up with gas and she felt that warmth travel up her arms, down her spine. She lay on her back under a car and the warm spill of oil from an engine ran over her hands, her wrists, the warmth making its way into her belly.
Russell Wallen was different. He seemed to get her right away, his black eyes moving along her body as she stood fiddling with his side mirror, cleaning the windshields more than they needed, taking time to admire the fanciness that was his car, a red Chevy with fins and whitewall tires. He needed new wiper blades, she said, though he didn’t and they both knew that.
“Don’t want to get caught out there in the rain,” she said as he stood too close behind her while she slid the old blades out.
“Some days are made for rain,” he said as he reached over to help her tighten the new blades on the arm. “Some days are for listening to it falling.”
She didn’t need, had never needed, help exactly. What she needed was his particular warmth, how it had already traveled from his body next to hers, but how it hesitated, just at the surface of the skin beneath her coveralls, waiting for her to invite it in. He took her riding that very next day, out to the quarry at night. She shouldn’t have gone, she told herself, but that shouldn’t dissolved like moonlight on water. Shouldn’t have reached for the hand that lay atop the steering wheel, tapping time to some radio song. She laid that hand on her chest, her fingers nearly spelling out the words for him, like it was Braille in the dark. Unbutton me.
They swam in the cool water, and they became for one night like the sleek silver scales of fish. They became the wings of night birds. They became all things that flew, raced along the wind, all things that picked up the two of them, guided them along a road, then many roads, roads neither of them especially wanted nor understood. It was simple enough. His body entered her body and her body answered. That was the way of it, and only as time passed did she realize neither of them should have called it love.
At the garage she was known for being able to put her hands on the hood of a running car and know what was wrong. Laying on of hands, her daddy called it, and he was good at knowing just like she was what was wrong with an engine by sitting quiet and listening, fiddling around in the mess of wires and caps and belts. She’d even seen him dip his finger in an oil pan and put the finger to his mouth, swearing he could diagnose what ailed a car from the taste. At night she lay beside Russell, taking in his scent, a salty sweat. She put her hand against her mouth and memorized, again and again, the musk of his taste. She put her hand atop Russell’s chest and held it there as lightly as she could, feeling the least beat and skip. There’s a miss when it’s running, a customer would say, and she’d be able to diagnose pistons or rods, valves, head gaskets. She was more and more sure that with Russell’s heart there was a missing beat, but she had no notion what caused it.
He was a strange one, the way he talked in his sleep. The way he’d say a name or two of other women he’d known, and God-words too. Women were the way of it for some men, those who loved running the roads to get a wildness out of their systems. God was another thing, and one she’d never questioned like he did. Dominion, he’d say when she asked him about speaking the Lord’s name in his sleep—ain’t nobody got that. She curled herself next to him, her knees to the backs of his, and she’d hold on for the ride that was a night spent through and through with him, his tossing and turning, his fits of waking and pushing her away. She held on and rolled with it, the waves and waves of his sleep with dreams she would never know. Hush now, she said, as if she were soothing a child. She put her hand against his chest and knew there was a miss there, a secret, an enormous misfire that might someday cause this thing that was them to crash and burn, but she had no exact remedies. Surely, she told herself, the weight of the world would be enough.
In Florida they dreamed big. They hooked up with a fisherman who showed them crabbing. They traded in the Chevy for a truck, that time, and she went along with it, telling herself she knew the ins and outs of some Dodge pickup good as you please. It would be easy, he said, to slap a camper on the back of the truck, load it up with chests of ice, how they’d make time back north, fresh seafood for folks who knew nothing about it and, why, that breakfast place would be packed to the nines with customers ready to kill for a blue plate special. She kept good memories of that time, how he took her out on the beach late at night and showed her the rough barnacles and shells on the backs of turtles and deadwood, how you could trail your fingers to make a shine in the dark like pale green neon. She rolled her pants legs up and waded far out, feeling the live things shift and scuttle between her toes.
She’d begun to build a clientele at the garage and at the little breakfast place beside it, and she kept a room for herself upstairs. She sat by the window smoking cigarette after cigarette and keeping watch at night, for what she wasn’t exactly sure. Russell was away for weeks at a time, working for a company that bought up land to clear-cut and make way, he told her, for the booming business that would be coal. Radiance was the name of that place, and she imagined it as a world that smoldered, ready to explode with the way of it, the big trees pulled down, the trucks loaded and heading out. No one loves us here, Russell said in the postcards he sent, and yet at night when she sat by the window she knew better.
She’d hear the stamp of feet on the road outside, voices, the rev and tearing off of cars into the dark. She lit matches and smoked until a cigarette burned down to the quick of her fingers. She’d raise the screenless windows and touch the cool air, bringing her hand back to her mouth to taste it. Her daddy had said you could diagnose trouble in an engine like that. The distance between herself and Russell Wallen was like that. The night tasted of a body not her own. It tasted of his sweat and heat, of nights she’d held him so tight she could feel the sharp bones of his shoulders and back next to her breasts. Another woman was holding him now, she knew, but her only proof was the taste of all the long nights he was gone. Like that, she followed him and his dreams of heading west.
In the deserts of New Mexico, he told her, he would make their fortunes clean and clear. They’d make money aplenty—enough to make their own way in this world, own the world even, enough for sure to make that world shine with their own two names. She counted herself lucky as they broke down here, needed a patched radiator there, in the miles of heat and distance. Deserts. She had never seen the like, how nothing led to nothing and on from there, to motel after motel and finally to Willette, where the factories that processed uranium and copper gleamed.
She took a job in Willette her own self, one that pleased her enough, factory work at an auto parts assembly line. She needed the work, the dullness of it, and she lulled herself at night by counting down the screws and bolts she’d gathered, hour after hour. He sat up laying out cards for solitaire and only came to bed to wake and sleep and wake. Where were you? She whispered in his ear, hummed anger to him until his breathing grew deep and smooth. Where are you now? More and more it set her teeth on edge, the way she put her hands next to his heart, waiting for the signs she already had. He was gone, then back again, half of him at most.
She saw the two of them, Russell and a woman, as she walked back from work of a late afternoon. After that, she looked for the woman everywhere. She noted the way a wisp of black hair blurred around a corner in the waves of heat off the streets. A particular shadow behind the plate glass window of a store. She followed her a few times, the pale-skinned woman. One day she walked behind the woman to an office building, waited outside a movie theater for her for two long hours as she sat in a slice of shade, mouth dry and breath coming hard. The glimpse she had that day was of the woman’s fingers, her red nails in the white-hot heat.
The red settled inside Della’s body over time. Russell was gone more and more, the sheet tossed back, the bed empty. Surely, she told herself, she should have sensed it. Should have known, all those nights she lay beside him, holding on to him, turning with him like they were one self. Should have known as he came home smelling of that black-haired woman’s sweat, his mouth tasting of her most secret spots, but that wasn’t the thing either. Should have known, should have known, should have known. What difference did knowing make? Other women were other women, and she had lived with them, one by one. Why don’t you love me? Della said this aloud, testing the air. The question tasted stale, used up, and it was. Russell wanted a place, a woman, a lover, work, a tract of land, some deep heart of the earth he could never, never find.