American Salvage

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  AMERICAN SALVAGE

  MADE IN MICHIGAN WRITERS SERIES

  GENERAL EDITORS

  Michael Delp, Interlochen Center for the Arts

  M. L. Liebler, Wayne State University

  ADVISORY EDITORS

  Melba Joyce Boyd

  Wayne State University

  Stuart Dybek

  Western Michigan University

  Kathleen Glynn

  Jerry Herron

  Wayne State University

  Laura Kasischke

  University of Michigan

  Frank Rashid

  Marygrove College

  Doug Stanton

  Author of In Harm’s Way

  A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

  AMERICAN SALVAGE

  Stories by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS DETROIT

  © 2009 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the paperback edition as follows:

  Campbell, Bonnie Jo, 1962–

  American salvage: stories / by Bonnie Jo Campbell.

  p. cm.—

  (Made in Michigan writers series)

  ISBN: 978-0-8143-3412-6

  1. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3553.A43956A8 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2008051203

  This book is supported by the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs

  TO DARLING CHRISTOPHER

  Contents

  THE TRESPASSER

  THE YARD MAN

  WORLD OF GAS

  THE INVENTOR, 1972

  THE SOLUTIONS TO BRIAN’S PROBLEM

  THE BURN

  FAMILY REUNION

  WINTER LIFE

  BRINGING BELLE HOME

  FALLING

  KING COLE’S AMERICAN SALVAGE

  STORM WARNING

  FUEL FOR THE MILLENNIUM

  BOAR TAINT

  Acknowledgments

  AMERICAN SALVAGE

  The Trespasser

  The mother jiggles her key in the ancient lock, nudges open the heavy oak door with her shoulder, and then freezes on the threshold. The father steps around her, enters the kitchen of the family cottage—last summer he and his daughter painted these walls sunshine yellow—and drops one of his two bags of groceries onto the linoleum. The thirteen-year-old daughter’s mouth glitters with braces. She squeezes her gym bag to her chest and says, “Holy crap.”

  The stove is burned black, the ceiling tiles above it are scorched, and the adjacent side of the refrigerator is sooted. Bedsheets hang over the windows, one of which has been shattered, the broken glass removed. A faint ammonia smell lingers, and the kitchen garbage can is full of empty Sudafed packages and coffee filters and crumpled tinfoil.

  A curly-haired blonde departs unseen through the back door, descends the stairs, and heads for the river. A few days ago, she was one of four intruders in the cottage cooking methamphetamine, but when the three men left last Sunday to go home and get a night’s rest before work, the girl hid away in a closet in the daughter’s room. The men had not realized that the skinny girl with the ravaged face was only sixteen, and they did not know that she had snagged enough meth during cooking to keep herself going, shooting up, for more than a week.

  The family discovers that objects in every room of the cottage have been moved. On the kitchen counter, a configuration of condiment bottles—horseradish sauce balanced atop mustard, stacked atop mayonnaise, with two squeeze bottles of ketchup alongside—is encircled by pastel birthday candles arranged wick to end. Drawers are empty, their contents arranged as shrines on tables and dresser tops and in corners. In the bathroom, medicines and ointments and bottles of pills have been lined up on the sink. Tubes of lip balm cluster around an old glass bottle of Pepto-Bismol upon a green-and-white guest towel draped over the toilet tank. In the center of the master bed sits an ancient nest of twigs containing pale blue robins’ eggs (collected and blown by a great-grandmother), which forms a nativity scene with a pair of wooden dolls. A dozen old-fashioned clothespins are laid out side-by-side across the foot of the bed like children at a reunion lining up for the group photo.

  Figurines and portraits long invisible to the family on the hallway bookshelf in their old juxtapositions have suddenly reappeared: the rocks painted to look like trolls mingle with the miniature bronze pigs, goats, and dinosaurs. These creatures now gaze upon a framed photo of the daughter with her gymnastics trophy. (The daughter switched from gymnastics to swimming two years ago when she shot up four inches in height, right after this portrait was taken.) All the objects and framed pictures have been polished with soft cloths, which the trespasser then deposited in the hallway hamper. Piled on top of the hamper are a dozen pretty boxes of facial tissue in gray, blue, and yellow, each box opened, with a few tissues extracted.

  The trespasser pretended to be visiting her own family’s cottage, pretended that the bones in the faces in the photographs were her inherited bones and that she inhabited this place as naturally as the furniture and relics. Although she was alone during the week, the trespasser rearranged the living room so the old leather and wicker chairs are now turned toward each other, forming a conversation nook instead of facing the TV. She vacuumed the living room and then changed the bag and vacuumed again, sucking up all the cobwebs and even the ash from the fireplace.

  At first there seem to be a few objects missing from the daughter’s room, but the daughter discovers them in her closet, where the trespasser slept five nights in a nest created from all the pillows in the house. She curled there with two stuffed ponies and a unicorn, the pink flannel pajamas that say Daddy’s Girl, and the secret purple spiral notebook that is identical to the one the daughter keeps in the city. The trespasser read and reread the notebook in which the daughter has detailed frustration about a poor swim performance and about boys, and at other times has written that she is overwhelmed by pain that feels larger than herself, pain that connects her to girls she never talks to, but only sees from a distance, tough girls she is afraid of, with their heavy eyeliner and the way they glare back at her if she looks too long.

  The daughter has made it more than thirteen years without having spent a night with her dresser pushed up against her bedroom door to keep her mother’s friends out. Nobody has ever burned her face with a cigarette, and she has never burned her own arms with cigarettes just to remember how terrible it feels. The swimming daughter has never tried to shoot up with a broken needle, never spent time in the juvenile home or in the filthy bathroom of an abandoned basement apartment, has never shaken uncontrollably in the back seat of a car all night long. The daughter has never broken a window to crawl into somebody else’s place, has never needed something so badly that she would do anything for three men, strangers, to get it.

  The trespasser has been moving along the riverbank, crouching low, and now she comes upon a wooden rowboat belonging to a neighbor. She unties the rope, climbs in, and pushes off before she realizes she has no oars. The current catches the boat, and over the next several hours, she floats downstream. Sometimes the wind catches the boat and it spins.

  It is the teenaged daughter, the swimmer, the honor student, who discovers her own missing mattress on the river-side porch, screams “Mommy!” a term she hasn’t used in years. The trespasser had dragged the mattress out onto the porch as soon as the men had gone. The daughter studies the sheet, torn off, tangled at one end, the quilted fabric of the mattress crusted with jism, more jism than the daughter’s mother has
ever seen. The mother takes the daughter’s hand, tries to tug her away, but the daughter sees there’s blood, too, smeared across the fabric, dried and darkened.

  “Don’t look,” her mother says, but the daughter keeps looking. The daughter inhales the scent of the crime, knows she has walked through the ghost of this crime and felt its chill—in the hallways of her school, in the aisles of the convenience store, and in the gazes of men and women at the Lake Michigan beach where she and her friends swim.

  That night, after the trespasser’s boat runs aground near a liquor store in a strange town, the daughter goes to sleep in the small bedroom off the kitchen, the room her father jokingly calls the maid’s room. The dream that scares her awake over and over is the dream of entering a stranger’s bedroom—only it is her room—and encountering there her own body, waiting.

  The Yard Man

  He was standing in mud, leaning on his round-end shovel, when he saw the big orange snake folded on the rocks beside the driveway, its body as thick as his stepson’s arm. Jerry dragged himself out of the waist-deep hole where he’d been digging around the dry well and moved along the side of the building, approached the rocks heel-toe in his mud-caked work boots, trying to move silently in the overgrown grass. The snake was orange with red and gold, but close up, its skin reflected green and blue as well—strangely, the blue of his wife’s eyes—and the shiny coils of the snake suggested his wife’s coppery hair.

  Jerry had seen garter snakes and blue racers and rat snakes here. He had saved the dozen papery skins he’d found and tacked them to the wall inside shed number five, which had recently developed a roof leak and would have to be cleaned out and burned down. But this snake was like no animal he’d seen, as brilliant as the orange butterfly weed that had shot up like flames along the property line a few weeks ago. The snake had a smooth head the size of a Yukon Gold potato, and the look on the snake’s face made it seem as if he were smiling in the sunshine. When Jerry was close enough, he reached slowly toward the nearest coil, to touch it.

  The shriek caused the snake to uncoil and set out over the rocks, and it made Jerry stand up and knock his shovel into the side of the house, where it chipped a clapboard. His wife, Natalie, stood frozen on the concrete step a few yards away, jaw loose, eyes bulging a little. Her keys jangled as they hit the ground.

  The snake moved across the overgrown grass toward the flower garden old Holroyd’s wife had planted. It was Holroyd who’d told Jerry the dry well was probably nothing more than a rusted fifty-five-gallon drum of rocks buried outside the makeshift kitchen of the old construction office building where Jerry lived. As usual, Holroyd was right. Maybe Holroyd had been the one to bury it there twenty years ago.

  “Jerry!” his wife screamed. “Do something!”

  Jerry watched the snake’s middle part disappear under the garden phlox, then the hollyhocks.

  The snake was at least as long as Jerry was tall.

  “Kill it!” she shouted. “Jerry, please!”

  His stepson and stepdaughter appeared in the window, looking scared, although probably more by their mother’s screaming than by a snake they couldn’t see.

  Jerry picked up his shovel. As his wife of a year and a half had grown more unhappy with him, he’d tried to do whatever she wanted. Had she told him to do the dishes, he would have wiped his hands on his jeans and gone inside to run soapy water, dry well or no dry well. He pursued the snake into the hollyhocks, raised the shovel high enough to slice its body clean through. He didn’t know exactly what went on inside a snake’s body, but he could imagine a man or a boy chopped in half, how the organs and intestines would fall out. Jerry hesitated, lost sight of the snake in some ground cover, and then saw orange and gold bunching up between flowering bushes. He lifted his shovel again. He could feel his eight-year-old stepson staring at his back.

  “For the love of God, Jerry!” his wife screamed, as though the whole ground around them were writhing with snakes. He couldn’t blame her—what she felt was as natural as the snake’s enjoyment of the sunshine on rocks, as natural as the snake’s slipping away from the sound of screaming.

  Jerry lifted his shovel and jammed the blade deep into the soil eighteen inches from the snake, which kept sliding away, unaware it had come near death. Jerry studied the line of Indian-corn colors as the snake moved over a railroad tie at the far edge of the garden, into tall, dense grass.

  “Did you get it?” she shouted. Her empty hand was grasping at the air.

  “Listen, Natalie, honey.”

  “Jerry, please, at least step on it.”

  He left his shovel standing upright and returned to her empty-handed, watched her eyes as they changed from terrified to desperate and then to disappointed.

  “Oh, honey,” he said. “It was too big to step on.”

  “Why can’t you do anything for me?”

  “Maybe it’s something rare, honey. It’s not like any snake I’ve seen.” He wanted to say more, but talking about the beauty of a snake didn’t seem right with her being so scared of it.

  “Oh, Jerry,” his wife said. She turned away from him and spoke toward the hayfield next door. “I’m sorry I can’t love every living thing the way you do. I’m never going to love a snake. Or a bat.” She laughed a little. “To be honest, I can’t even stand that old guy Holroyd you like so much.”

  Her bra strap pressed into her flesh beneath her tight, thin T-shirt in a way that made Jerry wonder if it might be painful, but he liked watching her muscles flex and relax. He liked the way the snakes of hair in her ponytail curled away from one another as though trying to break free. At another time, he might have defended Holroyd.

  “Maybe we need to go on a vacation, you and me,” Jerry said to his wife’s shoulder. Her neck looked long and pretty with her hair pulled back.

  “We can’t afford a vacation.”

  “We couldn’t afford one this spring, but we took the kids to Cedar Point.” Jerry knew she was right, though. The school had cut Jerry from full-time custodial to part-time this year; the pay cut was devastating, but he’d worked there for ten years, since graduating from the place, and he hadn’t yet been able to fathom getting another job.

  “Do snakes live in those sheds?” she asked, turning farther away from him and nodding toward the first row of old wooden buildings a hundred yards to the north. “Maybe in those piles of junk?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jerry said. “I think snakes live in the ground.”

  “I’ve never lived in a place with snakes, Jerry,” she said. “The thought of a snake coming into the house scares the hell out of me. And that bat did get in our bedroom somehow.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m going to patch the holes in the clapboards. I asked the old lady if she’d pay for new vinyl siding, and she hasn’t said no yet.”

  His wife went inside, let the screen door scrape shut behind her. That metal-on-metal sound was a reminder to Jerry that he needed to screw down the doorframe more securely. He’d installed it last year, but hadn’t gotten around to finishing the job. The old lady who owned this place was often willing to pay for materials for home improvements so long as Jerry provided the labor. She seemed to have more faith in Jerry’s abilities than he had. When Jerry had lived here alone, he hadn’t seen any need to fuss about such improvements. Now he was discovering that every project took longer than expected, and he always wished he’d gotten started earlier. He returned to digging out the dry well.

  Four days later, while Jerry’s wife was at Campbell Lake with the kids, Holroyd stopped by.

  As usual, he drove to the top of the property, beyond the white pines, to check for deer tracks—as hunting season approached, he did so with increasing frequency—and then returned and parked and dropped the tailgate of his Ford truck and sat on it. Jerry had gotten the water turned off to the bathroom upstairs, and for two hours he had been staring at the pipes and fixtures, trying to decide how to proceed. He’d never done any serious plumbing, and he
was nervous about tearing out the wall. When he saw Holroyd, he called it quits and came down and sat on the other side of the cooler Holroyd had dragged out onto the tailgate. Holroyd handed him a beer; the man’s outstretched arm shook as though it had developed a palsy.

  “How you doing with them credit cards?”

  “Trying not to put anything new on them,” Jerry said.

  “Good boy. Now get ’em paid off. They’ll drag you down, those credit cards.”

  Jerry didn’t want to think about credit cards now, seeing how he and his wife were about to go on a weekend vacation. Instead he looked out over the scrubby field scattered with locusts and maples, and dotted with the storage sheds, rusted hulks of defunct cranes, and piles of deteriorating I-beams and concrete blocks. Way up beyond the white pines, out of sight, was the open, hilly land full of bristly mosses, ground birds, deer, and wild turkeys, even. Jerry didn’t bring up the issue of hunting when he talked with the nephew of the old lady who owned the place. He knew she gave him free rent here for insurance purposes; Holroyd had told him if nobody was here to keep an eye on the place, they wouldn’t be able to get liability insurance at all.

  Jerry said, “I saw a snake the other day, six foot long, at least. Red and orange and gold.

  Never saw anything like it.”

  Holroyd nodded, seemed to gasp for air before taking another draw on his cigarette. Jerry had quit smoking before getting married, although he’d had a brief relapse when his old dog, Blue, died a month after the wedding.

  Jerry said, “Maybe it was somebody’s pet snake got loose.”

  Holroyd exhaled. “I didn’t figure they’d be here anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know Red Hammermill. Well, when he moves out and I move in, he tells me about this kind of snake, he draws a picture, tells me keep an eye out for ’em. Of course, you can’t believe half of what Red says.”

  Jerry said, “It was coiled up on the rocks there. Scared the hell out of my poor wife.”