American Salvage

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  The mammal guide was a reference book, or he would have checked it out of the library.

  Instead he went to the nature center and bought it at the gift shop, although he should have been saving his money or paying on the credit cards. Once he got it home, he couldn’t stop turning the pages, studying the moles and voles, the different types of mice and weasels. The animal in question was an ermine, no doubt, the pure white winter phase of a short-tailed weasel. He liked that phrase winter phase, which suggested a creature could be different season to season.

  When Holroyd finally showed up again, it was an afternoon at the end of January. He looked pale, and he didn’t talk about missing hunting season, so Jerry didn’t bring it up. That morning, Jerry had burned shed number five to the ground, and now he was tending the embers. Holroyd backed his truck up through the snow so they could sit on the tailgate and stare into the fire and feel a little heat from it. Jerry told Holroyd about the ermine coming into the house.

  “That’s something, they’re coming back. I never saw one. Hammermill trapped them all, trapped everything around this place. Used to sell pelts. Ladies used to love that pure white ermine fur.”

  “I wish I’d’ve seen it.” Jerry thought maybe, if he’d been there, he could have helped his wife see it in a new way—a way she could have liked it. Seeing that ermine the right way could have been a nice surprise, like seeing a unicorn when you were hoping to see a deer.

  “You aren’t smoking?” Jerry said.

  “Naw, gave it up.” His fingers twitched. “Sons of bitches tell me I’ll be dead if I don’t.”

  “I been craving a cigarette, myself, lately,” Jerry said. “When I’m sitting alone.”

  “Don’t get yourself started on that smoking again, son,” Holroyd said. “Promise me.”

  “I won’t.” Jerry’s eyes stung for an instant at that word, son.

  “You ever see your snake again?” Holroyd asked.

  “No, not since I was putting up the siding. Hey, you’re shaking. You want to come inside?”

  “Naw.”

  “I guess a snake like that would be hibernating now,” Jerry said.

  “Sure it wasn’t just your imagination, playing tricks?”

  “I wouldn’t have something beautiful like that in my imagination. Did I tell you that up close the skin was like a prism? Showed even more colors, greens and blues.”

  “Shame about burning down this shed,” Holroyd said. “Now there’s only fifteen of ’em left.

  You scrapped out the wood stove, I guess.” Holroyd tossed his beer can onto the embers, and they watched it blacken against the orange coals.

  “My wife’s getting her prefab,” Jerry said. “Her parents are putting it on the lot behind their house. Nice for the kids to be near their grandparents.”

  “You thinking of moving in with her?”

  “She hasn’t asked me,” Jerry said.

  “Well, I’m not anyone to tell a person what to do and what not to do,” Holroyd said. He splashed beer on his mustache and put the can down without managing to take a drink.

  Jerry couldn’t think anything bad about his wife. He didn’t know why he’d started loving her in high school, why he kept on loving her, loved every move she made, every expression that showed up on her face—he just did. With her soft skin and long hair, she was a beautiful mystery, and even her fear of all the other beautiful creatures was something special about her. She had her way of living, and those kids of hers were such nice kids, and he missed them every day, but she was somebody who didn’t belong here, plain and simple. It was more relaxing now, not having to worry about fixing everything up, but it didn’t stop him from missing her. Jerry said, “My wife said I was always staring at her and it made her nervous. I thought it was a normal thing to look at your wife all the time.”

  The two men sat on the tailgate most of that Saturday afternoon. Jerry watched the old man’s shaking hands, his watering eyes, and, once, a tear that ran down the side of his nose into his overgrown mustache. Anything seemed possible now that Jerry’s wife was gone, any kind of sadness.

  “So the old lady owns this place is still alive,” Holroyd said, shaking his head in agreement with himself. “My wife watches the obits, keeps an eye out for her.”

  “I keep getting a paycheck. It’s not much, but it’s something, now that it’s just me here.”

  Jerry threw his empty can onto the fire, although it had a ten-cent deposit, and he watched it darken.

  “She must be eighty, ninety years old.”

  “I hope she goes on awhile.” Jerry wasn’t thinking about the old lady, though. He was thinking about Holroyd, who was at least a decade younger than Red Hammermill, but looked almost as old, or at least today he did.

  “You cut up your credit cards like you said you was going to?” Holroyd asked.

  “Yup. And I got one of them payment plans like you said.”

  “Those cards’ll drag a man down.”

  “I wish I could see the snake one more time,” Jerry said. “Just to know it’s okay.”

  “Maybe you ought to get yourself that dog you were talking about, now that your wife isn’t stopping you. It’s not good to spend too much time alone.”

  “I’ve been thinking, though. If I get a dog, I probably won’t see the snake again. Not with the barking and chasing. Maybe I’ll wait until I see that snake one more time in the spring.”

  “A lab or a retriever would make you a nice companion, better than any snake.”

  “I just wonder, what if he’s the last of his kind?”

  Holroyd handed Jerry another beer and when he popped it open, Holroyd said, “Hell, here’s to the last of its kind.”

  Jerry supposed the last of the big orange snakes would be hiding the way any snake hid in winter, curling under the ground in his old skin. In spring, he’d poke his head up, stick out his tongue, sniff, and know he was where he belonged. Then he could get to the business of shedding and eating and seeking warmth.

  World of Gas

  Propane tanks reclined like rows of swollen white bellies behind the chain link, each tank emblazoned with the Pur-Gas smiling cat logo, one of the boss’s idiotic conceptions—he’d apparently forgotten that the “p-u-r” was meant to be pronounced “pure.” At the tire-repair shop next door, the compressors rattled and droned, and if the noise didn’t actually kill brain cells, then it certainly prevented anyone in the vicinity from thinking clearly. As the Pur-Gas office manager, Susan, talked on the workroom phone, she noticed that she was wadding up her lunch bag so tightly that her knuckles were white. According to the vice principal on the other end of the phone, her oldest son, Josh, was being kicked out of school for fighting.

  “Give him some kind of in-school suspension,” Susan said. “Otherwise he’s going to sit home watching TV all day. He should be learning something.”

  The vice principal said, “We don’t have the personnel to monitor problem students all day.”

  “Well, I’m at work all day. I can’t watch him.”

  “What about his father?” “What about his father?”

  “Somebody’s asking for you,” whispered Darcy, Susan’s assistant. Darcy crossed her eyes and signaled “nutcase” by tracing a little circle in the air.

  “We’ll see what we can do,” said the vice principal, sounding annoyed.

  “Yeah, thanks a lot.” Susan hung up the phone, tossed her lunch bag into the garbage can and returned to the front counter, where she found her brother-in-law Mack, dressed as usual in a camouflage jacket and army cap. For the benefit of her sister Holly and their two kids, Susan always gave Mack her employee’s discount. Susan retrieved his paperwork from a file under Holly’s name.

  “You’re sure that’s the biggest one I can get?” Mack asked.

  “This is a three-thousand-cubic-foot tank, Mack. It’s half as big as your trailer. Try not to let any of your drunk buddies drive a truck into it.” Propane was apparently the fuel of choice
this month for the Y2K crowd, whose members all thought that the flow of natural gas would be compromised at the stroke of midnight December 31, 1999, along with civilization as they knew it.

  Mack and his militia pals were by no means the only pain-in-the-ass alarmists in town these days. Susan had ordered survival appliances for fidgeting paper-company executives, two city council members, and, last week, the very vice principal with whom she’d just been speaking—maybe she should call him back and threaten to lose his order for the super-efficient, lightweight propane heat source if he didn’t keep Josh at school. All these men thought that the big collapse was coming, and they were cocksure enough to think that through clever planning and by purchasing the right machines they would survive, huddling in their basements or manning their guard towers.

  “Them delivery trucks run on propane or gasoline?” asked Mack, who was not a bad-looking guy when he wasn’t done up like an idiot commando. “Propane.”

  “Good. That means the trucks’ll have fuel to make deliveries.”

  “Don’t worry, the trucks’ll be running.”

  It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic—love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy. Men wanted to focus on just one big thing, leaving the thousands of smaller messes for the women around them to clean up.

  “You’re too negative, too cynical,” Susan’s husband (now ex-husband) had told her. “And you don’t love me the way you used to. That’s why I had to find somebody else.”

  “Tell it to your kids,” Susan had said. “Tell it to Josh and Andy and Tommy.”

  Men didn’t understand that you couldn’t let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was so much work to do. Men didn’t understand that there was nothing big enough to exempt you from your obligations, which began as soon as the sun rose over the paper company and ended only after you’d finished the day’s chores and fell exhausted into sleep against the background noise of I-94.

  This millennium business was just another distraction to keep men from being of any goddamned use whatsoever. Instead of going to all this fuss and expense, Mack ought to hire a babysitter once a week and take Holly out for dinner or maybe clean up the yard around their trailer, which, last time Susan saw it, was littered with motor-oil bottles, rotting lumber, and automobile engines covered with tarps. And now that he was preparing for Y2K, Mack had gotten hold of a 550-gallon diesel tank that lay like a big yellow turd under Holly’s clotheslines. Apparently Mack was going to fill the tank with fuel for his truck.

  “You’ve got to have a four-inch concrete pad for this propane tank,” Susan said. “We’re going to have to come out to inspect it before you pour, and after.”

  “I’m pouring the slab tomorrow.” From his pocket, Mack produced some papers. With great seriousness, he said, “Susan, I know we haven’t always gotten along, but you ought to have a copy of this,” and he unfolded a four-page stapled packet of instructions for Y2K preparation. Susan stopped writing and read to herself randomly from the back page: “Fill your bathtub with water,”

  and “Have a minimum of a thousand rounds of ammunition for every gun you own.” The noise of the compressors next door seemed to intensify, and the men shouted and dropped tools onto the concrete floor. As usual, the radio out back was turned to the Rush Limbaugh station.

  Susan looked into Mack’s squinting face, wadded the pages into a ball, and tossed it over the counter, missing the can behind him by three feet. “None of you sons a bitches get it, do you?”

  Susan’s voice grew loud. “If the power goes out, we’ll all just have to live without power for a while.

  Whatever happens, happens. You can’t control the world, and you especially can’t control this propane!” Susan’s voice rose to a crescendo, and Darcy looked in from around the corner, a cheese and meat sandwich falling open in her hand. Susan resumed at a whisper, “You know, if I tell the driver not to fill your tank, he won’t fill it. So you’d better be good to Holly.”

  Mack moved away from the counter and studied his black army boots. Susan marked three places on the form where Mack had to sign and held out a pen. In a businesslike voice she said, “If you don’t use a hundred dollars a month worth of this gas, you’ll have to pay double rent on the tank.”

  That afternoon, Susan skipped swimming at the Y and went right home. Before even going into the kitchen, she followed the stairs down to the basement into which Josh, two months ago, had moved his bedroom. That had allowed Andy and Tommy to have their own rooms.

  “Josh?” She tapped on the door to what used to be her husband’s office, but there was no answer. She pushed the door open into a room lit only by the bluish glow of the television.

  “You’re home early, Mom!” Josh shouted in an accusatory tone.

  “Josh, I got a call—” Susan stopped talking as soon as she realized there were two bodies in Josh’s bed. “Nicole?” Josh’s latest curly-haired girlfriend was with him, the sheet pulled up to her neck. As Susan’s eyes adjusted, she realized Josh was naked. For Christ’s sake, they were fifteen years old! Susan was struck dumb, listening, despite herself, to the intonations of surprise and anger emanating from what appeared to be The Jerry Springer Show. Finally, Susan yelled, “Get up!”

  “I don’t just come into your room,” Josh said.

  “Get up!” Susan stepped outside the door, crossed her arms over her chest, and tried to think of what to say. The girl came out first, with mascara smeared around her eyes. She looked at Susan defiantly before heading to the stairs; the girl’s face was so pale and thin that Susan wondered if she could be one of those girls who threw up her food.

  “I love her, Mom,” Josh said. “You wouldn’t understand that.” Susan noticed that Josh’s face was sprouting not just peach fuzz, but also a few wiry, dark hairs.

  “Well, if you love her, then why in the hell would you take a chance on getting her pregnant?” asked Susan. “Why take a chance on screwing up both your lives?” Susan was also thinking: if this girl means so much to you, then why don’t you turn off the damned TV when you’re in bed with her?

  Dishwashing was Susan’s last chore before going to bed that night. The hot water was making her sleepy, and she let herself forget about Josh and think about Y2K. She’d been so busy scoffing at the alarmists that she hadn’t let herself really think about the year 2000. She understood the principle involved with the zero-zero date and that it could cause problems with computer systems controlling traffic lights and ATM machines. Maybe she’d allow extra time to get to work on Monday, January 3. Maybe she ought to have a couple hundred dollars on hand in case her first paycheck was screwed up. She could easily fill her bathtub with water, but probably she wouldn’t bother. Although her bastard of an ex-husband called her negative and cynical, she truly believed that regular people doing their jobs could fix whatever problems resulted from the glitch.

  Susan opened the window to allow a stream of cold night air into the room, and she listened to the hum of traffic from the highway, the buzz of an airplane flying over, the muted din of third-shift work at the paper factory, and the sound of the TV blathering in the basement. Josh would be lying in his bed, passed out with his mouth open when she went down to turn it off. When Susan pressed the power button, he’d complain, half-asleep, “I was watching that, Mom.” She knew she hadn’t said the right things to him about Nicole earlier, and she was still too pissed off to know what she should say.

  Susan submerged her hands in the warm water again. She could see some advantages to a real millennium breakdown. Life would be quieter without power. She imagined the hands of her kitchen clock spinning faster and faster, racing toward New Year’s Eve, and then stopping. At the critical moment, she’d be standing at the sink like this, maybe burning a balsam-scented Christmas-tree candle on th
e windowsill. She’d be exhausted from her father’s visit; he always came December 24th and stayed until New Year’s Eve, which meant she had to keep the house clean all week and get up early to cook hot breakfasts for him—the man thought the world would end if they didn’t all sit down to a cooked breakfast. Suddenly smoke would cease to flow from the paper-company stacks.

  The lights would all go out, and the factory’s whirring, rattling, clanking machines would fall silent.

  Susan would dry her hands and put on some hand lotion and exhale deeply. In Susan’s millennium moment, even the headlights of the delivery trucks would dim and die as wheels stopped turning.

  On all lanes of the highway, four-wheel-drive vehicles and ordinary cars would grind to a halt, along with their drivers. Overhead, the stars would shine as brightly as they did in the desert sky. Men revving motorcycles, chain saws, and lawn tractors in garages would wind down, too, their machines becoming dead, oiled metal in their hands. The voices of vice principals, men who ordered Pur-Gas, and guys jabbering on TV and radio would slow and then stop, if only for a moment. Men of all ages everywhere—men talking about football, auto engines, politics, hydraulic pumps, and the mechanics of love—would finally just shut up.

  The Inventor, 1972

  A rusted El Camino clips the leg of the thirteen-year-old girl, sends her flying through the predawn fog. She lands on the side of the road and lies twisted and alive in the dirty snow. Before the pain gathers its strength, the girl sees how her leg looks wrong against the asphalt. In slow time, she notices a hole in her new jeans, a puncture made when the jagged end of her broken fibula stabbed through and retracted. The El Camino backs up and parks beside her, blocking her view of the road. Beyond its low-slung bed and rusted rear bumper, she can see the pink light at the eastern horizon. Pink sky in the morning, sailors take warning, her father says, but this morning, the first morning she has worn her new hip-hugger bell-bottoms, she was seeing the blush of pink beyond the fog as a flower getting ready to blossom in the sky.