VII
My brother and I are watching television in the living room. The faint ammonia stink of cat piss still hangs in the air. Though my father claims he can’t smell it, I know he’s lying. It’s everywhere. My brother adjusts the rabbit-ear antenna on the television and the picture of sand-colored tanks rolling over the desert snaps into focus. The news broadcaster announces that the war in the desert has begun.
My father comes into the room and tells my brother to turn up the volume. He stands beside the couch and nods his head as missiles fire from the long guns of tanks.
“What does this mean?” I ask my father.
He clears his throat. “It means I won’t lose my job,” he says. “We won a contract to build those tanks. Although there’ve been problems—”
On the screen another tank fires and a distant mud-colored building erupts in a violent explosion.
“Won’t a lot of people die?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says, “but the war is to protect us.”
I want to ask why it’s okay for some people to blow up other people when Father Brian calls Jesus the Prince of Peace, but the phone rings. My mother is sleeping down the hall, so my father rushes to answer the call after the first ring.
The television flashes images of fiery explosions erupting in the night sky. The newscaster says names that sound foreign to me.
My father hangs up the phone in the kitchen and tells us to shut off the television and get in the car. Before I twist the knob to cut the feed, rubble falls from a bombed-out clay building.
* * *
My brother and I don’t speak in the backseat of the car as we drive. My mother sits in the passenger seat with her head leaned back against the headrest, her eyes closed. Our mother has been sleeping most of the day and throwing up at night. When she tried to tell us to stop fighting a few days ago, she vomited on the kitchen floor, splattering my socks. My brother and I have become so frightened that we will kill her, our fighting has gone underground.
My father rubs my mother’s shoulder as we drive. “Father Brian said twenty people will be there. It was all organized this morning. He said people feel called to pray for you. They’ve forgiven us for the protests,” he says. “It’s a sign from God.”
My father’s voice sounds hopeful. My mother forces a smile. The car hits a pothole and the car jerks. My mother rolls down her window and turns her face toward the breeze.
“See,” my father says to us in the backseat. “When the Spirit moves you, you listen.”
We nod, but I want to ask my father more questions about the war and how it can be good if we believe in Jesus. In the front seat my mother holds her stomach and I brace myself for her to vomit, but she only breathes deeply, keeping her face toward the open window with her eyes closed.
When we walk into the church there’s a circle of adults waiting in the entranceway. They are the same adults who stood on the streets with us holding signs against abortion. These adults—of which my parents are aligned with—are a small faction of our church. Later in life, it’s easy to look back and see signs that not everyone in the church liked this group: the subtle eye rolls at the mention of the Second Coming’s imminence, the tight smiles as Halloween and trick-or-treating are demonized. These people are, however, in their own esteem, the true believers in the Word. Hard-liners even for Catholics. A group bred in the rural pockets of this country.
My father is especially drawn to their strict tenets. There is no casual moment in life that cannot be straightened out by the Word, be it the music one listens to, the books one reads or even the ideas one thinks in the quiet moments alone.
Now, in the church entranceway, each adult offers the same somber look, mouths down-turned, when they see my father leading my mother through the church doors. Father Brian, who was released after two nights in jail, places an arm around my brother and me. I study him to see if he’s changed at all, but he looks the same. I heard my father say that he’s been seen leaving the rectory late at night. People are talking.
We walk to the small chapel at the back of the church where Father Brian says weekday masses. A bronze crucifix depicting the gruesome death of Christ hangs over the altar. The chairs have been arranged in a circle. One chair sits in the middle.
An older woman from church who used to babysit my brother and me when we were little while chain-smoking Marlboro Lights says to my mother, “Please,” and leads her by the hand to the chair in the center of the circle. My mother sits in the chair, and the adults all take a seat around her. My brother and I sit in two open chairs.
Without speaking, the adults lay hands on my mother’s shoulders, back, arms, neck and knees. Rosary beads are intertwined between bony fingers. In unison, they bow their heads and begin to whisper their own prayers. Their words melt into one another’s until there’s a steady hum of Jesus and cancer and Father and Savior and please. My hand rests on my mother’s wrist. I mumble my own prayer and watch the way the early-evening sun comes in through the window and lights up my mother’s face. Her skin is pale. I imagine the black cancer inside her melting away from our prayer. And when that happens, she’ll open her eyes and laugh and we’ll all cheer and the four of us will get back in the car and head home and brag about the power of the Spirit. But she stays hunched over with her eyes closed.
My brother’s hand rests on her forearm. His lips move, but no sound comes out. Lately he’s been talking to a girl from school on the phone until late into the night. He doesn’t want to ride bikes through the woods or sneak into the junkyard to smash windshields like we always have in the summer.
The collective prayer grows louder and louder. My mother’s cracked lips move silently. My father keeps repeating, “Lord-Jesus-Lord-Jesus-Lord-Jesus.” Father Brian begins singing the words to “Amazing Grace,” low at first, then louder. One by one the other adults join in until everyone is singing.
I start singing too, though I never sing in church unless my father makes me. Our voices echo against the high ceilings of the old chapel. The church accountant, a heavyset woman who snaps at my brother and me when we help our mother at the food bank, begins to cry as she sings. Tears trickle down her olive cheeks. The room vibrates with sound. As the song moves through me, I start to understand the original impulse to make music—pain, terror, love. Soon more adults are crying. I look at my father, whose eyes are shut. I can’t tell if he’s crying.
The song begins to fade though some of the adults start another half-hearted chorus. Soon everyone hushes and the silence that’s left is as profound as the song. No one prays now. They open their eyes and look at my mother bent in her chair, as if waiting for the miracle to arrive. We lift our hands from my mother’s body. She raises her head and looks at the adults; she smiles weakly. The other adults smile back.
“These things take time,” Father Brian says.
In the parking lot my father helps my mother into the car. In the backseat next to my brother the sound of “Amazing Grace” reverberates in my ears. The tall man who sings bass in the choir and works at the same factory as my father stands next to our car. He smiles at my brother and me in the backseat. My father latches my mother’s door, careful not to let it slam.
“Did you see the news?” the man says. “The war has started.”
“I heard,” my father says.
“Mr. Whittaker might give us overtime.”
“I hope so,” my father says. He begins speaking in the low voice he uses when he doesn’t want my brother or me to overhear him. “But we’re having trouble with the tanks,” he whispers. “Have you seen my reports? The guns, some are defective. No one will talk to me about the reports. I’m afraid they’re going to ship these tanks.”
“Be careful with that kind of talk,” the man says in his own hushed voice. “What can you do if they are shipped? It’s best to not question things. Just do your job and let Mr. Whittaker worry about that.”
My father frowns and shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he mutters.
The sun is dipping behind the church. Father Brian’s small blue car lurches out of the church parking lot. The man bends to look at my mother in the passenger seat. Through her open window he says, “I think you’ll start feeling better. Everyone in there really believes.”
“Thank you,” my mother whispers.
* * *
Later that night, my brother and I are eating frozen pizza our father heated in the microwave. A bluebird is perched on the limb of a maple tree at the edge of our backyard. My father steps to the railing of our back porch; he holds a hand over his eyes and squints. The bird is small, just a smudge of blue and orange on the gray bough. My father gives a soft laugh and smiles. I’m afraid he will try to get closer to the bluebird and find our cigarette butts piled beneath the skirt of a nearby evergreen.
“I haven’t seen a bluebird since we lived in the trailer park,” my father says.
I don’t understand why he cares about this bird.
Without speaking, my father walks into the house. A few moments later, he leads my mother through the back door. She rubs her eyes. She’s been sleeping since we came home from the church.
“What is it?” my mother asks.
My father moves her to the edge of the porch and points at the bluebird singing in a rapid voice on the maple branch.
My mother holds her hand over her mouth. “I can’t believe it,” she says. She shares a look with my father. They both smile.
“It’s just a bird?” my brother says. He rolls his slice of pizza in the center and takes a bite.
My parents stare at the bird calling from the tree.
“When your father and I married we didn’t have any money for a honeymoon,” my mother says, still watching the bird. “Instead of going somewhere fancy like Hawaii, we went camping at a state park for a weekend. Your father had just been hired at the plant, so he couldn’t take any time off.
“In a tree on our campsite there was a bird’s nest. Your father spotted it halfway up an aspen. It was a bluebird nest full of hatchlings. All weekend we watched the two adult birds fly off and gather insects and worms to feed the babies. Each morning we’d check on the bluebirds, and each morning they’d be there. At night we could hear the hatchlings’ faint calls from the nest like chimes ringing in the night air.”
VIII
Shane Donaldson pulls back the lower half of the rusted sheet metal fence and gives a wide-lipped grin before saying, “Don’t worry, there are no dogs—if there were, they’d already be ripping out our larynxes.” His father had been a doctor, and his father’s words have seeped into Shane’s language. Between bitches and motherfuckers he flashes shiny words like thyroid and malignant and refractory. I know him from the gifted program at school. He’s weird, but I’d been lonely at home—my father at work, my brother at his girlfriend’s house and my mother sleeping.
“You go first,” I say. “I’ll follow.”
“You’re a pussy. What are you going to do when your mom dies?” Shane vanishes under the fence. The metal flap closes and I’m alone with his words.
Shane forces open the break in the fence and his head appears. “Come on.”
I duck under the fence. My shirt catches on the metal and tears at the shoulder. The fabric flaps open, and I put my finger through the hole. I don’t know how I’ll explain this to my parents. We’re not supposed to be in the junkyard. And I’m not supposed to ruin my clothes. With the medical expenses, there isn’t money to replace this shirt and despite the war in the desert my father still talks of layoffs at the plant.
There’s a loud metal moan from a backhoe. Getting caught in the junkyard would be worse than explaining a hole in my T-shirt, no matter how little money we have.
Shane slaps my shoulder and points up in the air. The yellow bucket of a backhoe looms over the pile of flattened cars beside us. The hydraulics squeal as the bucket is lowered and disappears behind the stack of cars. There’s the sound of breaking glass. The bucket rises above the cars again. Sunlight blinks off its shiny metal teeth. Shane nods and takes off running. When the bucket lowers with a loud cry, I run, too.
We sidestep disembodied fenders and rearview mirrors and car doors and plastic hubcaps strewn along the fence line. At a stack of tire rims brown with rust, Shane stops and peers out at a clearing. Men’s voices are smothered by the piles of severed car parts around us. The smell of burning engine oil is punctuated by cigarette smoke. Shane remains frozen. A crane comes down on a car. One of the men yells on the other side of the tire rims.
“Goddamnit,” the voice says. “Goddamnit,” it says again.
Shane sprints along the fence line, exposed for a dangerous moment in the clearing. I hold my breath and dart after him. The men don’t see us. There are four of them. They examine the shattered body of a red Pontiac Trans Am. A man in a mesh hat and oil-stained jeans calls the backhoe operator dick-brained.
We manage our way over a crumbling Chevy parked against the sheet metal fence and slide behind endless rows of tires stacked higher than the backhoe can reach. I’m breathing heavily. I’ve never been this deep into the junkyard. My brother and I usually only go far enough in to find a windshield to smash before running back through the fence. Shane moves with purpose; he’s been here before.
The men stop yelling. The beeping of a backhoe moving in reverse sounds over the scrap metal.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
Shane whispers, “I want to show you your future.” He adds, “I’m clairvoyant.” It’s comments like this that inspire my brother and his friends to call Shane a freak. I know he’s fucking weird, but he was one of the only kids in the gifted program who talked to me when I lived in the trailer park.
But before I can ask what he means by this cryptic comment, he’s off again and so am I.
The backhoe sounds in the distance like a grieving whale.
At the end of the stacks of tires the junkyard opens, revealing row after row of cars parked in perfect symmetry.
“Astonishing, right?” Shane says.
I nod in agreement. There’s a poetry to the tidy arrangement of decaying vehicles. They’ve been here for God knows how long—years, decades maybe. People, once alive, perhaps still alive, lived their lives in these cars now sitting in this junkyard in this shitty town. Steel waiting to be fossilized.
Shane crouches behind a car. He pulls me down. His eyes widen and he motions with his head. A few rows down, a man with unnerving bushy brown eyebrows and a dirty mesh hat peers into vehicles as if looking for something he’s lost.
“The junkyard men call him Chuckie,” Shane whispers. “I think he’s slow, you know?”
Chuckie opens the door of a red pickup from the ’70s and yanks a wire loose from the floor panel. He holds the wire in his swollen fingers and examines it before shoving it in the front pocket of his overalls. He starts down an aisle of cars, moving away from us.
Shane and I crouch our way along the cars. Every so often Shane pokes his head up to look for Chuckie. I do the same. Each time, Chuckie’s head bobs along the tops of cars farther away.
We finally work our way toward a section of cars along the far side of the fence. As we move, the makes and models of cars become more modern. The paint jobs less faded. Some of the cars look almost new, with no dents or scratches. At the end of a row we come to a black station wagon. Shane runs his finger along the hood of the car. The sun reflects off the paint; I have to squint to look at it. The front end of the car is smashed in a V.
“Is this it?” I ask. “My future?” Shane doesn’t respond, just keeps running his finger along the metal body.
I look around for Chuckie. His head appears over an old sedan. He raises a steel bumper and seems to sniff the shiny metal.
“Get in,” Shane says.
/> “Why?”
“Get in,” he says. “You want to know how your story ends, don’t you?”
I don’t like the way Shane’s talking. I decide that when we leave the junkyard, I won’t talk to him anymore, unless I have to at church or at school when the summer’s over. I don’t care how lonely I get at home. He’s always been weird, but he’s gotten stranger since his father died last winter. He had cancer but looked healthy until the last few weeks. My parents would take me to Shane’s house to play with him while they sat with Shane’s parents and played cribbage. The last time we visited, it looked like Shane’s father had aged twenty years: he was thin and walked with a cane, his eyebrows and mustache had fallen out from the chemo.
Shane opens the passenger door and closes it without making a sound. I open the driver’s door, but Shane leans over and says, “Not that seat.”
I think about sprinting back to the hole in the fence, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to find my way out without his help. I close the front door and get in the backseat. Shane moves the rearview mirror until I can see his eyes. Inside, the air is stifling. I crank my window down a few inches. In the front seat, Shane stares at me in the mirror, then he reclines his seat and closes his eyes. He takes a deep breath, holds it in for a few moments before exhaling.
A wooden rosary with only ten beads hangs from the rearview mirror. There is the faint palm print of a man’s hand in the dust on the dashboard. I’ve been in this car before. I’ve sat in this seat on the way home from catechism class and once after a D.A.R.E. program for the gifted students at school. It’s Shane’s father’s car, the one he got into an accident with that put him in a coma right before he died.
“You wanted to show me your father’s car?” I ask.
“I found it a few weeks ago when I was roaming the junkyard.”
He continues to breathe slowly. His eyes remain shut. I close my eyes.
“Before he died,” Shane begins, “my father snuck out of the house. He wasn’t supposed to drive. The chemo and the cancer were close to doing what they were going to do all along, and he could barely walk. But he slipped out of the house for a pleasure cruise. That’s what he’d call it when he was well. He’d say, ‘I need to go for a pleasure cruise to clear my head.’ One morning before my mother and I woke up, he hopped in the car and started driving.”
Soon the Light Will Be Perfect Page 5