11
I became aware of my wedding ring, silver and real on the hand holding the steering wheel, somewhere in Nevada. I could turn back now and still be able to explain, I thought. My suitcase contained no photographs, no mementos. I had brought only clothing, a toothbrush, and the meager contents of my wallet. The finer bureaucratic concerns—my birth certificate, past tax returns, account numbers—were left behind. Fuck them: they had brought me only grief. The silver pocket watch Greta had given me on our wedding day I had placed on the bureau we shared. I left no note. Carrying the suitcase, I had crept through our bedroom that morning, stepping toward my worn white car. Greta had been up early. I had come home the night before, had attempted an apology she was wise to ignore. When I left she was standing in the shower, eight to ten hours away from the moment, I imagine, that she began to worry—or, more probably, that she cursed my name, understanding what I had done.
But that time hadn’t come yet; she was still at work. Somewhere after Lovelock, but before Elko, I glanced at the glimmering point of afternoon sunlight that the ring shot onto the ceiling of the car and thought, If I go back now, I can still save the situation. I could say I had stayed late at school, that I had gone to a movie by myself. I could say anything, because anything was better than this.
Two days later, I had stopped only to piss and gas up and rest my sore eyes while parked in parking lots. I was indifferent to food. My hands and arms had grown pink and sweat-slick from the burning air through the open windows. I had driven east on I-80 from Vallejo, moving beyond the pocked asphalt of the Bay Area, through California’s mountainous edge, winding through cleared forest as the incline increased and receded. Directions were unnecessary. East was all I needed to know. I would keep going until the road ended. In Nevada, the ground beside the flattened spine of highway became an orangebrown sea, sunflowers sprouting beside the road, salamanders darting beneath my tires. In Utah, the dirt turned white. In Wyoming, the earth rose in ominous, pale green stalagmites, like the surface of a distant planet. And then, in Nebraska, the terrain morphed into quilt-squares of green, punctuated by oblong blue lakes.
The smoke began as formless wisps, escaping from the car like ghosts in fast-forward. When the smoke turned black, I pulled off the interstate. In Chappell, Nebraska, I lifted the hood beneath an abandoned station’s stories-high Texaco sign. A surprise tongue of flame licked my wrist before the fire retreated under the engine’s maze. I held the burn in confusion before running to the trunk to get a gallon jug, dousing the engine and the wound, spilling water everywhere. I pulled my suitcase from the rear of the car and stared at the manic hum of the highway, heaving, my pants soaked.
The wooden pole of the Texaco sign looked rotten, like a dead tree. Beside it, bizarrely close to the gas station, was an ancient white farmhouse. I saw through the windowpanes, the glass wobbly with age, that it was empty. There was a small wooden sign, handwritten: WWII BOMBER CRASH SITE, TWO MILES, with an arrow pointing to a deserted field.
The two miles took me a half hour to walk in the May heat. The dirt path ran up and down small hills, curving through fields of dead grass. Tan gravel flitted into my shoes. Touching the blistering burn on my wrist, I thought about the car. I wondered if, when I returned, it would be in flames again. I imagined the whole thing enveloped, the white paint bubbling, alighting in weightless curls.
The crash site emerged when I turned a corner: ten PVC-pipe crosses in a semicircle, lashed together with metallic twine. Power lines droned overhead. There was a plaque: DURING A THUNDERSTORM B-24J #44-40758 CAUGHT FIRE, DESCENDED TO 500 FEET, AND BEGAN CIRCLING THE TOWN OF CHAPPELL, NEBRASKA, WHEN IT EXPLODED. ALL PERSONNEL ABOARD WERE KILLED INSTANTLY.
The flight had originated in Lincoln, three hundred miles away. But I pictured the airmen in their small-town homes, waiting weeks to be deployed, suppressing fears of an enemy with ready guns. I imagined their legal wills being drawn in the sweaty office of the town’s only notary. And then, before their trepidation could fully mature: dying here, in an innocuous field like the ones in which they had played as children.
The plaque listed the date they fell from the sky as June 7, 1944. My birthday, less thirty-eight years. I sat down on my suitcase. There was nothing else in that field, nothing else anywhere I could see—a fence in the dead grass along the highway, some hills, cows. I breathed so deeply it stung, and emptied my shoes of rocks.
I walked the two miles back, soaked with sweat. The white car sat silent and extinguished. I considered trying to start the engine, continuing on my way. But the air still possessed the caustic smell of dangerous heat. South of the abandoned station were only dirt roads; to the north, across the highway, was a small lake and the outer edges of a town: Chappell proper, I guessed. It was about a hundred yards away. I crossed the overpass beneath an enormous sky. On the shore of the moss-green lake was a brown-brick building with a mural of a cartoon family eating at a picnic table. The words LAKE CHAPPELL were painted across it in primarycolored bubble letters. The building housed bathroom stalls and a sink, like the cement structures at rest stops that, during this frenzied drive, I had learned to watch for. I held the angry burn under the tap, the sting diminishing. I washed my hands with the pink soap from the dispenser on the wall and splashed water over my neck. The stream ran cloudy as it fell into the sink.
Outside the bathrooms was a more formal memorial to the ten men—this one made of stone, surrounded by a log-fenced parking lot. It said their names and where they had been from. Peculiar, MO, Waynesboro, MS, Cranford, NJ. I read on: I had been wrong—they weren’t on their way to face the enemy in Germany or Japan. At least not yet. They were on their way to the West Coast. Maybe they weren’t ever supposed to go abroad. Maybe they were going to fix tanks and hammer in rivets. Mammoth Springs, AK, Camilla, GA, Stromsburg, NE. Maybe they were going to spend the rest of the war in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco. I touched the carved stone with a grimy fingertip. Anadarko, OK, Rochester, NY, Oneonta, NY. And the last: New York, NY.
I examined the contents of my wallet: $467, withdrawn from our checking account. I had left Greta with nothing but the tips in her purse. No car fire I ever heard of was remedied with $467. I was stranded. I felt a curious absence of panic.
I walked back to the Texaco station, but didn’t stop. I strode through the grove of elm trees that guarded the wraparound porch, right up to the steps of the grand white farmhouse. I leaned my suitcase against the screen door and walked around to the rear entrance.
I stopped, taking in the yellow tape with which someone had fashioned a wide X. CAUTION, it read. DO NOT ENTER. The tape, loose and faded, wafted in the occasional breeze, attached to the pillars of the back porch. The entire rear of the house had burned.
Behind the tape was a gaping hole in the wooden planks of the house—it looked as though the fire had exploded outward, ripping open the back wall, errant flames snaking up to the second story. The black exterior of the house hung in clumps, like hair pulled from a scalp. Long pieces of charred lumber, the wood grain split and corroded by flame, dangled from the level above. I ducked beneath the tape and leaned against the outer border of the flame’s reach, where the paint was still white. I sniffed the wood; the smell of scorch remained. I touched a blackened board, the tip of my index finger shining with a bitter smear of gray.
I stepped into the house through the open hole, my feet crunching over black silt, into what had been the kitchen. The fire hadn’t extended to the front of the house, where there was a dining area and a sun-soaked room with a faceted bay window. But the smoke had turned all the interior walls the uneven yellow of a textured al fresco. Where pictures had hung were rectangular white ghosts. The floors were littered with leaves and twigs. Birds flew just beneath the ceiling, bobbing like they were pulled on strings, bouncing up the staircase to the second story.
I figured the bedrooms were up there. I climbed the creaking stairs slowly, carefully. I knew they could crumble. I entered the room at the far end of the hall: the master bedroom. Because it sat above the kitchen—clearly the source of the blaze—it had sustained damage, including a blown-out window. The wooden window frame remained. I stepped into the room and heard the floorboards creak; I jumped back from the sound as though from a growling dog.
Beneath the singed windowsill was a scatter of papers. Before I could tell them not to, my legs moved forward on that gritty black floor and I knelt and scooped the papers up. The knees of my pants stained instantly in the soot. I held the wordless pages in my hands, their meanings obscured by smoke damage. In the stillness of the place was the remnant of frenetic terror: someone had lived here, someone had left here—quickly, and afraid.
The back of the house faced the fields beyond the back porch—toward the ten crosses in the distance, hidden behind that small hill. I looked out the window, sure that in an instant the floor would give way, and saw hundreds of shards of glass, blown as far as a dozen feet away by the blast. The sun illuminated their random constellations, hidden among the golden weeds. The house groaned again, and I clutched the gray papers to my chest as I ran down the stairs and out the front door. I gasped for breath on the porch. My suitcase was where I had left it, next to the door—as though someone had come home, so excited to arrive he had tossed the suitcase aside, running toward the open arms he had missed.
I sat on the porch steps. My burned wrist screamed. I looked down: the papers in my hands had disintegrated. I was nowhere, and it was nowhere I had ever been.
I stayed. I fashioned a bed out of my own clothing in a corner of the sunlit front room, the longest distance possible from the burned-out kitchen, figuring this area was more structurally sound. The first two days, I woke each morning to walk across the overpass, the interstate assured and purposeful beneath my feet. I sat by the lake or walked around town. There was a bar, a bank, a red-brick post office, a barbershop, a small Mexican restaurant, a mechanic, a hobby shop, a scattering of homes, a high school, and a tiny general store that sold no produce. I guessed that people had to leave town to buy fruits and vegetables, or grow their own. At the edge of Chappell, a row of enormous silos kept watch over large and mysterious machinery. Beyond the silos were fields and fields of green and yellow.
On the first Sunday, I sat in the Methodist church on Babcock Street, closing my eyes to listen to the rhythm of the speech. And then it was time to stand and sing, and I picked up the hymnal in front of me to sing five verses of a song everyone there seemed to know. Reveal thyself before my closing eyes. Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies. The organist finished, the congregation closed the books and dispersed onto the lawn for punch. I walked back to the farmhouse, the hymn stuck in my head—In life and death, O Lord, abide with me.
I walked. I visited the crash site often, to sit in silence or sing songs aloud. Fish and chips and vinegar, vinegar, vinegar. I walked parallel to the interstate for ten miles, where not much was different, and walked back. I walked to town and from the bleachers watched the high school’s baseball team defeat the nearby town’s. Shut him down, the crowd would yell to the pitcher. Put him back in that dugout! The first few days, I ate at the bar: salted nuts, fried shrimp. The bathroom there was bizarre—two toilets side by side, no partition. On the wall above the sink was a novelty Halloween postcard featuring a gargantuan naked ass; on it was painted a jack-o’-lantern. I locked the door and washed my underarms and crotch in the sink. I walked to the edge of town, watched men manipulate the strange equipment by the silos. At night, in the burned house, I would count my money and try not to think. On the fourth day I used the payphone outside the post office to call Greta. She picked up, said nothing. We listened to each other breathe a moment, and then I hung up. I walked to the bus stop and waited. No bus ever came. I walked around the neighborhoods, waving at the old women tending to their tomatoes and begonias. Some of them waved back. At the general store I purchased a notebook and a small pack of plastic pens. I took them wherever I went—always armed, ready to document something, anything. I never wrote a word. Every time I spent money, I felt my bowels quiver. The cash was going to run out. This couldn’t go on forever. I could feel the desperation creeping toward me like an advancing enemy.
On the fifth day I called Greta again. I wanted to hear her voice. I let it ring and ring, the answering machine evidently turned off. Until finally, three or five or I don’t know how many minutes into the call, she answered.
Hello? Hello?
I looked over my shoulder at the deserted main street. A young woman stared back, before pushing her stroller onward.
I’m sorry, Greta.
You’ve lost your job.
I assumed, I said. They called you?
I’m surprised you’re calling here.
I closed my eyes and saw the firm contour of Greta’s naked hip, the way her mouth opened as she put on lipstick. I heard her lilting laugh. I thought of her fingers, years earlier, touching the welt on my neck.
I think about you all the time, I said. It was almost true—it was true with one degree of separation: I often thought about how hard it was to think of her.
Well, I said. Okay then. And I hung up.
My burn peeled, oozed, and settled into a borderless hillock of scar tissue. My car grew a brown hide of dust. At night, I watched raccoons and skunks through the window—scurrying about the porch, leaving with nothing. I anticipated them coming through the hole in the back wall someday, but if they did I never knew about it. Maybe they smelled me and left. They had probably explored the house long before. Too scared to spend more money on food, I ate what I found in the burned kitchen—cans of peas with seared black labels, cans of other things without labels at all. I opened them, laboriously, with a butter knife I found in a drawer. In the pantry was a box of Saltines; the fire had fused the plastic wrapping to the crackers. Plastic utensils were melted into the counter, and a deep red stain in the floor had me spooked until I noticed the broken, scorched ketchup bottle nearby. Every time I scavenged food, I ran from the kitchen as if at any moment the ceiling would come down on top of me—as though the rest of the house were safe. I realize now the whole thing could have collapsed at any moment.
A few days after I arrived, I walked into the barbershop. Inside was a man whose own hair had long since departed. Can I work here? I said to him, my words sudden, barely planned—after so many days of silence my own voice was unfamiliar.
He wagged a straight razor through some kind of solvent in a mason jar. Can you, or may you? he said, winking.
It was an unexpected relief, being spoken to like a child.
May I work here?
He looked at my clothing, his smile faltering. I shifted my feet, holding the burned place on my wrist.
I could use some help, he said.
His name was Martin. He asked me to sweep the cut hair into piles and then empty the metal dustpan into a burlap sack in a shed out back. What he did with the hair I never knew. Each day I walked from the burned house to the barbershop, rising early to cover the few miles before the sun fully awoke. The May breeze was more forgiving in the hours before noon, and sometimes I closed my eyes and listened to the distant whir of the tractors in the fields. Martin opened up shop seven days a week at nine o’clock exactly, a bell trembling in the doorjamb. When no customers came for a haircut or a shave, I swept anyway. You’ll run a broom-shaped groove into my floor, son, Martin said, chuckling. Other times I sat in his back office and organized his desk, which was already tidy and probably had never been used anyway. My fifth day working for Martin, without looking me in the eye, he passed me a razor and a baby food jar filled with shaving cream. That night, small clumps of my beard fell into the bar’s bathroom sink like miniature rodents. Sometimes I washed the shop’s windows, or wiped down the vinyl barber chairs. In the evenings, staring up the staircase of the burned house, I would think of ways to keep busy at Martin’s; I refused to stand idle. Every day, Martin gave me a five-dollar bill at six o’clock and said, Here you are, son. He never called me anything but son. I would thank him and, calling good night over my shoulder, step into the orange dusk. Some days I would head to the pay phone beside the post office, ready to call home. And then I would change my mind, the receiver still in my hand, the moment gone.
I always brought a change of clothes with me to the barbershop. When I left, I would stop at the lake to bathe. I hid behind the willow branches that dangled above the thick skin of the water, closing my eyes and floating naked on my back. I washed my sweat-soaked clothes in the water and changed into the fresh garments, sitting on the same damp rock at the water’s edge. My clothes had a green cast from the algae of the lake. I smelled faintly of mold.
Three weeks passed this way—and they passed so quickly I marvel thinking of it now. I marvel to think of that time at all, really. Every morning, I awoke in groggy misery: the familiar pain, the default terror. The existence I had grown so accustomed to. Resentments and regrets and the certainty that I wasn’t good enough. And then my eyes would adjust to the light, and I would watch a small bird dart overhead, and I would snap back into the present—remembering where and who I was, remembering that I had left all of that behind. And the pain would lift. It was the most peaceful time of my life.
On the first day of June, I showed up to the lake one day and found it surrounded. What’s all this? I asked somebody. Fishing derby, the man said, adjusting his ball cap. So that night I bathed beside the burned house, in the stream of a garden hose; the metallic taste of its water was like a portal to childhood.
At the barbershop, an old man named Dale was a regular. He came in almost every day, to sit in one of the boosted chairs—there were two, though Martin was the only barber—and speak slowly and carefully about the high school football team, bird watching at Lake McConaughy, the thirty miles he drove each week to the Wal-Mart in Sidney. He rocked as he spoke, nodding in time like a bobbing oil derrick. He brought his grandson each Wednesday—a small, sullen boy named Peter, no older than seven. When Martin and Dale got to talking, Peter would slink to the shed behind the shop; there, a child going off without disclosing a destination went unnoticed by adults.
One afternoon, he was in the shed when I went to empty my dustpan. Outside, the air was stiff with pollen and dust. I knocked at the shed door, and Peter’s tiny voice came back muffled: Come in.
I entered. Light came in through the burl holes in the wood planks and a small window. The shed was about ten by six, and though I brought discarded hair there each day, I had never stopped to look around closely: two lawn chairs sat unfolded in the center, and tin Coca Cola signs were nailed to the unfinished walls. Beneath the usual gardening implements, hung on hooks, were plastic tubs, their lids open, full of cheap baseball cards, jacks, Ping-Pong balls—a sea of little boy curios, clearly forgotten: astride one ballplayer’s face were hairy black corpuscles of mold.
Are you hiding? I said.
Peter shook his head no.
It’s pretty dark in here. You’re not scared of the dark?
No, he said.
He looked up at me expectantly, waiting to be commended for his bravery.
I wanted to commend him. But instead I emptied the hair into the sack and said nothing, keeping the door slightly ajar behind me when I left.
About a week into June, Martin turned on the radio. Thought I’d listen for the weather report, he said.
I glanced outside. It’s sunny every day here.
They’ll announce visibility, Martin said. Tomorrow’s gun day.
What’s gun day?
In June of ’44, Dale began, a plane on its way out west caught on fire in the sky ...
I set the broom against the sink. I know the story, I said. I’ve seen the crosses.
Martin adjusted the radio dial. My second cousin was on that plane.
Martin’s from Stromsburg, Dale said. About three hundred miles out.
Vance C. Johnson, I said. Stromsburg, Nebraska. I’ve seen the marker a dozen times.
Martin looked up from the radio. He was my second cousin. A few years older than me, only eighteen when he died.
Stromsburg’s off of I-80 too, out toward York, Dale said.
Can you do without the five dollars tomorrow, if I pack you a lunch? Martin said to me.
Dale looked at his hands.
I can, I said.
Every year on the anniversary of the crash, Martin shot the twenty-one gun salute in the fields south of the burned house. I’d do it at the crash site, but Miller’s got his livestock out there, he said. He had asked me where I lived, and when I didn’t answer fast enough he offered to pick me up the next morning outside the barbershop. I don’t know what he thought, exactly, but I could guess. The nearest town was miles away, even smaller than Chappell. They were the only two towns in the county. Maybe he thought I was a hitchhiker. I’m sure whatever he thought, he knew I had come in from the highway. To get to the field we passed the abandoned Texaco station, and I cursed silently as I saw my car parked in the lot—its California license plate, its grimy exterior. But if Martin noticed it, or believed it to be mine, he said nothing.
Do you bring someone with you every year? I asked him as we parked. He had four guns secured in the truck—two handguns, a thick shotgun, a spindly rifle.
No, he said amiably. I fire all twenty-one rounds alone.
Also in the back of the truck was a big wooden crate full of junk—orange plastic detergent bottles, a semi-deflated basketball, a half-dozen gallon jugs of water.
Dale doesn’t come with you?
Martin pulled out a triangular-folded American flag, nestled in a wooden case, from the cab of the pickup. He’s got arthur-itis. The kickback hurts the joints. He unfolded the flag. On the starred end were two metal eyelets, and he fitted them over two nails he had hammered into the wooden cage attached to the truck bed. We’ll start with the Luger.
I stared at the small arsenal. Which?
He peered at me. Your daddy didn’t teach you how to shoot?
No, sir, I said.
He waited a moment for an explanation. When he saw that none was coming, he pointed at a thin-nosed pistol. That one there’s the Luger.
I picked up the gun like any second it would turn on me. I held it out to him, anxious.
Good boy, he said. Every firearm ought to be treated with respect.
Okay, I said.
Say it—every gun’s a loaded gun, Martin said, loading it. He handed it back to me.
I took it, the textured grip rough against my palm. Every gun’s a loaded gun.
Good boy, he said again.
Wielding a deadly power wasn’t something I thought I could get used to. And then I did. Because after a moment, shooting that gun just felt good. Everything I had ever felt about the idea—the associations most city kids carry—melted away. I had no idea how many bullets the thing held and didn’t keep track as I fired, so I would just keep going until Martin stopped me to reload. I slipped into an unmediated state, one without running commentary, pulling the trigger again and again. It wasn’t bloodlust; it wasn’t Freudian. It was just something I had never done before. And I was doing it in a place I had never been, with a person I didn’t know. I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger, thinking, What would I be doing right now, in my other life?
Let’s count off the twenty-one, Martin said.
Taking turns, we fired ten shots each in succession, aiming toward a lanky cottonwood tree. I had the Luger and Martin shot the air rifle; sound-wise, mine made a blast and his made a crack.
How’s it feel? he said. Accurate, that one is.
I wasn’t aiming at anything, I said.
Well, he said. The Luger is a fine gun. He began reloading the rifle: sliding the ammunition inside it, the gun bent in half. He straightened it with a resounding snap and looked through the sight. One more shot left, he said. That’ll make twenty-one. He paused, changing his mind, and stepped toward the truck bed. He set the rifle down and returned with another weapon, nearly as thick as my arm. He held it up to me. This is a Remington 870 Wingmaster twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun, he said, like he was introducing a friend at a party.
Holy shit, I said.
Martin squinted into the distance. We ought to watch our language. He held up a shell the width of my thumb. In honor of the day.
Something inside me ached. I’m sorry.
He shook his head. You didn’t mean anything by it.
I took the shotgun in my hands. It weighs a ton.
Go on, he said. You take the last shot.
Martin, you should be the one to—
You go ahead, he said, smiling faintly. Finish the salute.
I lifted the shotgun, wedging the stock in the groove of my armpit, the vinyl flag flapping sluggishly against the truck’s cab. I listened to myself breathe. Every second I didn’t shoot I grew more apprehensive. I knew what kind of power I was holding. The sound, the force it was going to send through my body. I was scared.
You’ve got this, son, Martin whispered. You’ve been shootin’ like a pro all—
But I cut off that last word, pulling the trigger the second I felt able. The birdshot went who knows where—we weren’t close enough to any target to note a result—but what stayed behind was the cracking recoil. Martin took the gun, and I clutched at my bruised flesh.
Jumped back and bit you, did it?
I lifted my shirt over my head and looked down: blood vessels had broken in red, pointillistic bursts beneath the skin. It looked as though I had been misted in the armpit with a paint sprayer.
Martin lifted the shotgun, resting it on his shoulder so the barrel pointed skyward. He turned to the flag hanging from the truck, raised his arm, and held a hand to his temple in salute.
My shirt was on the yellowed ground, but I stood straight and saluted too. That was when I finally made the connection. It’s the seventh? I asked him, our hands still poised at our heads. Today’s the anniversary of the crash?
He nodded.
It’s my birthday. I’m twenty-four years old today.
He lowered his arm after a moment and went into the truck, returning with three peanut butter sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. Happy birthday, he said, holding two of them out to me.
Then we pulled that junk out of the wood crate in the truck and shot at it. The other handgun was a gleaming .357 Magnum revolver, and I stuck with that for the rest of the day. When Martin hit the basketball it jumped an inch into the air, and then he lay down on his belly to shoot at a gigantic empty bottle of Tide. He set out those five jugs full of water with a big grin. And sure enough, when I finally did hit one—my last shot of the day, the first with any measure of accuracy—the water gushed forth in a translucent stream of victory.
Not bad at all, Martin said, patting me on the back. You’ll be sore tomorrow—he motioned toward my arm—in the wrist and such. Take the day off. He held out a ten-dollar bill.
I wanted to tell him, There’s no need, you’ve done enough. Please, Martin, you’ve already been so kind. But I said nothing. I reached out and took the money, folding it into my pocket.
I retrieved the massacred detergent bottles and plastic jugs, and when I turned to walk back I saw the brass peppering the dirt—our spent shells. Martin came out from the cab with a big plastic bucket. He set it down and began bending to pick them up, bracing himself with a hand on his knee. Martin, I said. Let me do that.
Alright, he said, settling on the tailgate.
The bucket was soon full. How many years have you shot the salute?
A while now. Forty or more.
Don’t you have a son, a grandson, anybody to come along?
Robert lives in Lincoln, he said. He pulled his eyeglasses from his face, polishing them with a handkerchief. And Vance lives in Des Moines.
Do you see them often?
Christmas, he said.
Do you miss them?
Sure, he said pleasantly. When did you see your family last?
I looked out at the fields. You barely know me. You don’t know me from Adam and you took me out in the fields and handed me a gun.
He waved his hand. I can tell about people, he said. And you seem like a fine boy to me.
The next morning, I woke to a creaking on the burned house’s pine floor. A small boy stood over me, his figure blotting the hexagonal window’s streaming sunlight. It was Peter, Dale’s grandson.
You live here? he said.
I sat straight up. Peter?
I’m seven. How old are you?
I looked out the window, my heart in my throat.
Where’s your granddad? I said, half shouting.
Ain’t here. I rode my bike.
I looked out the screen door behind Peter. Scuffed handlebars leaned against the steps like plastic antlers. I used to have a bike like that, I told him, my pulse slowing.
His expression shifted abruptly, narrowing in sudden suspicion. Don’t you have your own house? His face was a sunburned knot. Don’t you got a wife and kids?
Outside, the sugary contents of a spilled drink lay in a vivid red puddle near the porch steps.
Yes, I said. I leaned back on my palms, the grit on the wood floor piercing my hands.
Where’s your kids at?
At home, I said, hesitating. I pictured Greta’s soft and indelible face. With their mom.
How old are they?
I shook my head.
They could come here and play with me, he said. Sometimes I play store.
What kind of store?
Groceries, he said. You use leaves as money. He pointed toward the highway. Your kids ever swim in the lake?
I glanced out the window. No, I said.
I thought of the bay. The wet air; the ringed white salt stains on the boulders just beyond the shore. I remembered digging for hours there as a kid, compiling whole indexes of green, smooth rocks, and pulling the legs off the ghostly white crabs, and listening to the bass thud of the roiling surf.
He smiled nervously, suddenly shy, and took a step backward. I ain’t supposed to talk to strangers, he said, his face twisting. You a stranger? I only seen you once or twice.
A summer wind pelted the side of the house with dirt. I thought about how to answer. Would I let one of my students talk to me? Some homeless drifter? And yet—I knew Dale, didn’t I?
No, Peter, I said finally. I’m not a stranger.
He brightened. Good, he said. Could we go into town so you could buy me a candy bar?
As we walked along the overpass, crossing the highway, Peter slowed his bike to match my pace.
Where does your dad work? I asked him.
I don’t know, he said.
What about your mom?
She’s a nurse.
Do you have any brothers and sisters?
Yeah, he said. That was the end of his sentence. I smiled.
At the general store, Peter clattered his bike to the ground—no lock necessary—and made a beeline for the candy display.
What’s your favorite one? I asked him.
Look! he said.
Oh, I hate those, I said.
They hurt your teeth, Peter said, giddy.
I’m a Kit Kat man, I said.
Can I get two? he said, bracing for me to disapprove.
Sure thing, I said.
He grabbed two Look! bars.
Don’t you want two different ones? I said.
He looked up, his brow knitted. What for? he said.
We were walking toward the checkout line when Dale came up from behind.
Pete, he barked. Goddammit, Peter, get over here.
What? Peter said, genuinely shocked.
What the hell is this? Dale said, looking at me.
I was out for a walk, I said, and I ran into Peter.
Peter looked up at me. No you wasn’t. He turned to Dale. He was sleeping in that burnt-up house by the gas place.
Dale’s eyes went wide.
I asked him for a candy and he said I could have two. I can have two, right?
Dale took Peter’s hand, gripping it with both of his. You don’t even know his name, he growled at the boy. I don’t even know it.
The checkout girl stared up at us.
Look, Dale, I said. It’s not like I’ve never met the kid.
He stared at me coldly.
It’s not like I would ever hurt—
I choked on the words midsentence. It’s not like I would ever hurt a child, I had almost said.
I set the candy bars on the counter. Dale looked down at them, confused. I walked toward the door, then paused and turned around.
I’m sorry, I said. I didn’t mean to cause any harm. I left the store and began walking toward the burned house—toward what had become my home, toward the place where I could no longer stay.
My life in Chappell had pressed a reset button. My most basic assurances—that I was a man with a wife, with bills to pay, with a job and a requisite middle-class trajectory—had ruptured. Who was I, anymore, but the owner of a small white car, with so many of Martin’s dollars in his wallet? I started to run, my ankles aching with each step, each shock of pavement. The noise had quieted. The situation was reframed. The answers were in the questions I hadn’t asked—and I had asked so few; my God, how long I had gone without asking anything of my days, emptily performing them as though they were inexhaustible. I bit my lip, losing my breath, thinking the thoughts I had tried to push down—You ignore everything you don’t want to see—since I had left California: my wife, coming home to an empty house each night. The girl I had loved, so completely and utterly gone. Edmund—wherever he was, whoever he was with—robbed of a vital chunk of his trust.
I was, it had suddenly become clear, a career asker of the wrong questions. A man with limited foresight. A man with infinite hindsight. A man whose fingers fingered two quarters in his pocket.
I slowed my pace as I reached the pay phone outside the brick post office.
As Buckingham’s extension rang, I spun the grimy phone book on the end of its chain tether. The air smelled like heat.
How long, I asked myself, did I want to run?
Besides the notebook, pens, a deeply discounted haircut from Martin, and those early, misguided meals, some money had gone to toothpaste and soap, a muffin, a deck of cards, a lone can of beer. Nothing that wasn’t disposable, nothing I would keep. But with the money I had brought with me and the money I had earned—how I hesitate to phrase it that way—I walked to Chappell’s lone mechanic’s shop. He drove us in silence to the old Texaco station, lifted the hood of my car, and began to tinker. I knew the effort was useless: I would have nowhere near enough money to make whatever repair he suggested.
I saw him eye the car’s stratified filth. You say she just broke down today?
Yeah, I said.
I’d tow her, he said, but the tow truck’s in the shop. You believe that! He reached out to slap me on the shoulder for emphasis, but I didn’t respond. No matter, he said, unnerved. He did some maneuvering near the engine—I couldn’t tell you what he touched, where he looked, if I tried. You say it caught fire when you were drivin’?
Right, I said.
Well there’s six flammable liquids under the hood, he said. Did it smell real bad?
It didn’t smell good.
Was the smoke real thick and black, or was it more gray and thin?
I don’t know, really. Black. Can’t you tell where it was on fire?
Well, yes I can, sir ... it ain’t near any of the fluid lines. He ducked under, grimacing. I’ll tell you what happened. You got some grass or some dirt up in there, and it heated up on the engine, looks like. You say you put it out with water?
That’s right.
Well, that took care of it, looks like.
Are you fucking kidding me?
He grimaced: a response to my profanity. Yes sir, he said, though he was roughly thirty years older than me.
It’s been fine this entire time?
Well, I don’t see any other problem here, except this dent. Somebody T-bone you?
He jump-started the battery, charged me eighteen dollars for his time, writing up a small invoice on a pad of carbon paper, and then clattered away in the pickup. I put the brown leather suitcase into the backseat. The engine turned over without incident, as though I had imagined it all—the smoke, the fire—as though four minutes had passed instead of four weeks. I had almost three quarters of a tank left. I scraped the wipers over the windshield’s layer of dust. I didn’t revisit the lake, the barbershop, the hatched crosses. I rolled down my windows, turned on the radio, and made my way to I-80’s on-ramp.
Hours later, I let myself think of Martin. I imagined him opening the door at nine o’clock to find me absent. I imagined him looking up and down the street for me. And I hoped he had just put the broom back in its closet, going about his business without further thought. I hoped that he forgot me that very second, that he never thought of me again. I hoped—for his sake, and for the sake of a few others—that I was easy to forget.
