American Salvage

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  He and his wife had been living apart for more than two weeks, but their separation didn’t feel permanent to Jerry. His wife spoke warmly to him each day when he called, and with each day he assured her that he was working hard. Putting up the siding gave him respite from the upstairs bathroom, which he hadn’t started on yet.

  The minivan pulled into the driveway while Jerry was installing siding on the west end of the building, and the kids tore out and ran into the house. A few minutes later, while his wife was standing below the ladder talking to him, he spied a big orange snake. It lay curved like a long easy tongue of flame around a railroad tie at the far edge of Holroyd’s wife’s garden, and Jerry wanted more than anything to climb down and make his way to the creature. He wanted to glimpse the belly, to see if it was a checkerboard black-and-white or mottled like Indian corn, or if it was blotchy like the top of the snake, but he didn’t dare look again in that direction for fear his wife’s gaze would follow his. His wife threw back little coils of coppery hair—curlier and shorter than the last time he’d seen her—and said she was sick of living with her parents, said how nice it was out here, with the view over the hayfield, asked Jerry if he’d seen deer out there (he had), asked if he would consider planting evergreens (sure, he would). Her parents had a hedge of yew bushes, and a hedge sure would look nice over there, she said. “It would help block the view of those sheds.”

  Jerry stole a glance at the garden, but saw only a line of color disappearing. Then he stared at his wife’s suntanned throat, her shoulders, her blue eyes and small ears, studied her as he wanted to study the snake. Back in high school, they used to go to Campbell Lake and lie on the sand, and when she closed her eyes to soak in the sunlight, Jerry had stared at her body, her belly, her breasts, her neck, and that glistening hair, streaked by the sun. Summer was not his season, but he’d loved it when she swam, when she threw herself into the water and flipped over on her back and waved at him. With her gold-and-copper hair she looked like a mermaid with a Michigan forest rising behind her.

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  “I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You seem worried, and you’re staring at me in that creepy way.”

  “I guess I’m just tired. I worked at the school this morning,” he said. “And the sun’s been pretty hot out here. Did you cut your hair?”

  “I got a trim and some layers. It’s too hot for long hair.”

  “It’s above your shoulders.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “No. I do.” If his wife would go to the store right now, or if she’d even go inside the house, he could search the weeds for the snake. Instead, she produced a lawn chair and a thermos from the van, parked herself nearby, and sipped a cool drink.

  “Today was the last day of Friday kids’ camp,” she said. “Thank God that’s over. Those kids have way too much energy. Six parents sent the kids in with cupcakes or cookies this morning, and everybody was bouncing off the walls. I mean bouncing off the trees, since we were out in the park.”

  He felt guilty for wishing her away. He said, “I’m so glad you and the kids are here.”

  “Do you want a drink?” she said. “You don’t look so good.”

  “I’m fine.” He could feel the snake moving farther away, perhaps in response to his wife’s voice.

  “You’re probably dehydrated. Here, take a drink.” His wife brought him her glass, held it up.

  She continued holding it toward him until he descended the ladder, accepted the glass and took a long draw. He was thirsty. Lemonade with artificial sweetener, not the kind of thing he’d go out of his way to drink, but not so bad. He’d drunk worse. He could use a beer, but probably that wouldn’t be a good idea, seeing how he was working on a ladder.

  She poured herself more from a Thermos, returned to her chair, and put on sunglasses. He climbed back up and looked in the direction of the snake, but didn’t see anything. The sun moved west as he worked, and finally, when he couldn’t lift his arms one more time, he put away his tools for the night. The kids seemed happy to have their own rooms again after their time cramped with the grandparents—they didn’t fight once all evening—and after they’d gone to bed, he and his wife made love for the first time in more than a month. Jerry had pushed the nightstand against the wall to hide the damage done by the beekeeper, but he couldn’t sleep for feeling aware of that hole.

  During the night, he felt certain his wife, too, must be aware of it. Anything could move into that empty space and lurk there, a bat or a squirrel or bugs or some awful part of himself, maybe.

  The following day, while his wife was at the beach with the kids, he took some time off from siding the house and used his jigsaw to cut a piece of sheathing that more or less fit the hole—it took him almost two hours to get it right, and he had to add pieces of two-by-four to the studs to have something to nail into. He lamented that he hadn’t asked the beekeeper about getting the original piece of wood back. Unfortunately he didn’t have quarter-inch plywood, but used instead three-eighths-inch OSB, so it stuck out a little. After he nailed it in place, he regretted not painting the piece before installing it—now he couldn’t finish it without Natalie smelling the paint.

  Over the course of two weeks, he insulated and sided the west and south sides of the building, and replaced the windows and trimmed them out. One morning his wife got up early and made him scrambled eggs for breakfast. He’d heard rumors of more job cuts at the school, but he didn’t ask if she would still have her halftime office job, didn’t want to admit how much they would need the money.

  “I’m happy to be back with you, Jerry,” she said as she placed the eggs and toast already spread with grape jelly before him. “It feels more like a home with the siding on. The green looks better than I thought it would. Maybe things will just keep getting better from here on.”

  “I should be able to finish it before school starts.” He had lied, told Natalie the old woman had insisted on the green siding.

  Jerry’s stepson appeared in the doorway, rubbing his eyes.

  “I’m so glad you came home, honey,” Jerry said to his wife. He kissed her mouth and called his stepson over for a hug. He heard his stepdaughter walking around her bedroom upstairs. He closed his eyes so as not to stare at his wife’s face the way she hated.

  Things went fairly well throughout the first few months of the new school year, even though his wife had indeed lost her job to budget cuts, and they had to take out a loan from her parents to pay the credit card bills. Jerry’s stepson’s science project on spiders received an honorable mention for the top award, although he was only in third grade. A few people had done moths, but nobody had captured spiders and displayed their legs so well. The boy had been frustrated at first when he realized the spider legs sometimes came loose in the process. Jerry didn’t think he had overreached his parental authority by helping the boy reattach the legs with tweezers and rubber cement or in helping catch and asphyxiate the spiders.

  “Jerry, they liked the spiders,” his stepson whispered during the judges’ announcements.

  They were in the gymnasium of his elementary school. “I know Mom hates them, but the judges liked them.”

  “Your mom doesn’t like a lot of things, son,” Jerry whispered. He meant to add something nice. In truth, his wife had done a remarkable job of tolerating the spider project, which they worked on in shed number eighteen, the shed with fifty or so old toilets stored in it. The white porcelain seemed to attract spiders, or at least it made them more visible.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked Jerry. The judges were still announcing the special mention prizes. “That I don’t like a lot of things.”

  “We were talking about the spiders.”

  “Spiders are fine outside. As long as I don’t have to see them or come near them or have them touch me.”

  “Spiders catch lots of flies,” the boy said. “They help us.”
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br />   “I guess that’s what your stepfather would say. He loves all the creatures.”

  Her response seemed prickly, but her smile afterward was genuinely friendly, and when Jerry kissed her on the side of the head, she laughed a little.

  Next time Jerry saw Holroyd, the sycamore and sugar maple leaves shone orange and red and gold. Holroyd had trouble lifting himself onto the tailgate, and he was breathing heavily when he lit his first cigarette.

  “We going to bag a couple deer this year?” Holroyd asked.

  “Sure.” There was no shortage of deer on the property, but Jerry wondered if Holroyd could really aim a gun, the way he was shaking.

  “You know Hammermill died, right?” Holroyd said.

  “No.”

  “Died three weeks ago. My wife saw the notice in the paper, but I didn’t make it to the funeral. I planned to, but I didn’t make it.”

  “Aw, damn.” Jerry had enjoyed Red’s stories, whether or not they were true. Jerry thought Holroyd’s eyes were watering under that hank of white hair.

  “I guess that means you and me are the only yard men left,” Holroyd said. “The only people who know this old place. My wife can’t figure out why I’ve got to come out here all the time. She’s happy with her lawn the size of a postage stamp and her trailer full of knick-knacks and air freshener crap. I can’t hardly breathe in that place.”

  “There’s the old woman’s nephew.” Jerry felt a lump in his throat. “He comes around.”

  “Aw, that fool-in-a-suit doesn’t know shit.” Holroyd shrugged. “You know, I always wanted to try and get maple sap out of them sugar maples. Maybe next year we ought to do that, you and me. Collect the sap, boil up some maple syrup in shed number five. There still that old wood stove in there?”

  Jerry nodded. He didn’t have the heart to tell Holroyd that the old woman sent instructions to sell the wood stove for scrap in preparation for burning the structure. Instead Jerry asked, “Why does the woman keep this place? She could sell it for a lot of money.”

  “You know how women are, holding onto strange ideas and strange trinkets.” Holroyd had to rest his beer on the tailgate when he spoke.

  “Can’t think of seventeen buildings and thirty acres as a trinket, can you?” Jerry hoped his wife wouldn’t get back right away. If she pulled in the driveway, Holroyd would make quick work of leaving.

  “Hammermill had a theory,” Holroyd said. “He said the old lady worked in her grandpa’s company as a girl, fell in love with some job superintendent who was killed in an accident.

  Hammermill used to claim the woman came to visit him sometimes. Visit him, if you know what I mean.”

  “Was she married? The old lady?”

  “Far as I know, she never got married. Far as I know, Hammermill made the whole thing up.”

  “When I didn’t see you for a month there I got worried,” Jerry said.

  “Yeah, they dragged me up to that goddamned hospital, lousy sons of bitches.”

  “I wonder if I ought to get your phone number.”

  “Don’t bother. The phones are ringing off the hook all through that trailer park. I don’t want to add to the noise.”

  “I suppose when the old lady dies or when these sheds are all burned down and all the piles of materials are gone, they won’t need me,” Jerry said.

  “Only seventeen sheds left?”

  “Sixteen plus the house. I don’t know if I could do what you did, move into a trailer park.”

  “We all do what we’ve got to do.”

  “We looked at a prefab in Indiana,” Jerry said. “We walked through it on the sales lot.”

  “Whose idea was that?” Holroyd asked and laughed.

  Jerry understood why his wife wanted to live in a prefab. The yard house wasn’t carpeted, and the walls here were old wood paneling full of nail holes instead of smooth drywall. Good enough for him, of course; in fact, he preferred a beat-up house to a nice one where he had to worry about wiping his shoes before he came inside or taking them off like at his in-laws’. Jerry said, “The prefabs have low energy costs, and they’re easy to keep clean.”

  Holroyd blew out air in a snort.

  Sitting there on the tailgate, Jerry looked around, wished he could see something like white-tailed deer grazing, a mother and a spotted fawn. Life was always out there, he knew, but he’d have to sit still and listen awhile before he’d hear critters munching or rustling or hissing, before he’d see flies being devoured by spiders or see one of them big orange snakes. He wondered, if he listened hard enough, would he hear the dinosaur-like bones of old construction equipment rusting, wooden sheds rotting, sheets of insulation dissolving, piles of old toilets sinking into the ground?

  Jerry said, “You think maybe them orange snakes live up top? Maybe they eat birds’ eggs up there.”

  “We can watch for ’em when we’re hunting. There’s lots of deer tracks this year. Maybe you’ll get a deer, too. You get your license yet?”

  Jerry nodded, cracked open a second beer from Holroyd’s cooler. Usually Holroyd shot two, one for each of them. The sun was setting in a pretty way. If only they could all remain together forever like this, he being the yard man, with his wife and the kids, and Holroyd stopping by to visit.

  And snakes and bees and deer and ground birds and nighthawks could all stay here with them, and those snakes would stay out of his wife’s line of sight, and she would relax and start to love this place the way he did.

  And maybe that would have happened. That was one way it could have gone.

  It was a snowy night a week before Christmas when his wife called him at the school. He was working the evening shift, cleaning lockers over break to get ready for the new semester. This was going to be the best money he made all year, getting him some rare overtime.

  “Jerry, there’s a white thing like a cat in here.” His wife sounded distressed.

  “What is it, honey?”

  “I mean, there’s something white in here.”

  “Snow? It has snow on it?”

  “No, like a cat, only not a cat. Short-legged.”

  “A dog?” Thank god it wasn’t a white snake, woken up from a winter sleep. A white snake would have been a terrifying thing for his wife to see. Not that there was any kind of white snake in the reptile book. He hoped it wasn’t a dog either—he’d still been trying to convince his wife to agree to a new dog, and a strange dog showing up in the house would nix that idea.

  His wife continued, breathless: “A wild thing, Jerry. Something from outside. It was in the kitchen. I slammed the door and left. Now I hear it tearing something up.”

  “A possum.”

  “Nothing like a possum. Please, Jerry, come home now.”

  “I’ll be right there, honey.” He left the mop bucket in the hallway, ran out. He almost forgot to lock the school’s front door, but he returned and locked it, and then jumped in the old truck and zoomed home. When he got there, the front door was open. A winter wind blew through the house as though his wife were long gone, but she was not yet gone—she was outside loading up the minivan.

  “I don’t want to wake up the kids,” she said when she came down the stairs. “But I can’t stay here.”

  “Where is it?”

  “What?”

  “The white creature? The cat.”

  “I told you it wasn’t a cat. A cat wouldn’t have scared me. The body was long. Short legs.”

  “But at first you said it was like a cat.”

  “Forget about it being a cat.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Outside now. I locked it in the kitchen and went around outside and opened the kitchen door and it ran out.”

  “What could it be?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t want to live with it. I don’t want to live here.”

  “But white? What’s white?”

  “You’re not listening to me.”

  “I’m listening. Of course you were scared. White and not a cat.
Not snow on its fur.”

  “It wasn’t snow. And its neck was long.”

  “What else is white?” Jerry said.

  “It was something that wasn’t supposed to be in here, Jerry. It wasn’t supposed to be in a house. A house should keep something like that out. I thought with the new siding…”

  Jerry wondered. Could something have come up under the siding? He wasn’t a professional, after all—maybe he had made a terrible mistake installing the siding. If a white cat could get in, then there were places where that snake could enter. He hadn’t secured the place at all.

  He stepped into the kitchen and saw that the window above the sink was open two inches, and the new fiberglass screen was slashed roughly. Sometimes when his wife burned food, she opened the window. There was a trellis right outside; he’d installed it for roses after he’d finished with the dry well. He’d considered the flimsiness of the screens on the new windows when he’d bought them, but the window guy had assured him that nobody used metal screen anymore, that everybody used vinyl.

  “It must have been a cat,” Jerry said. “If it wasn’t a possum, what else could it be?”

  “It wasn’t a cat,” his wife said, tears now pouring down her face. “Smell. Does it smell like a cat? Stop saying it was a cat.”

  “Or maybe something albino, like an albino rabbit,” he said. “Did it have red eyes?”

  “It wasn’t a damn rabbit.”

  God, she was beautiful, her skin as smooth as the skin of the girl who had broken up with him in her parents’ driveway ten years ago and then jumped out of his truck and married another man. Her hair just as shiny, although she had cut it even shorter in the last few weeks, so there was no longer anything serpentine about it. Only then did Jerry realize the smell, the full smell of the thing that had been in the kitchen, rich and musky. A smell that would wake a person up once and for all.

  His wife packed a bag that night and left. She came back for the kids and another load of her things the next day. That musk scent faded, but Jerry could smell it in the kitchen for weeks, and even after that he didn’t forget it. And finally, he longed for the smell.