American Salvage

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  A car door slams. A broad-chested man in camouflage approaches, drops to one knee. His hunting license is pinned to his jacket, but the plastic sleeve is scratched and fogged, and the girl’s pain has become so great so quickly, she can no longer read. On the hunter’s cheek is beard stubble.

  Her heart pounds as he leans close, pounds harder when she sees the other side of his face, the scar, chin to temple, edged in white, a swath of flesh so raw-looking it seems as though it might melt and drip on her. She cannot back away, so she wishes momentarily to die, or at least to faint. The hunter rests a shaking hand on his knee, and she sees the flesh is similarly mottled on the back of that hand, as though the skin has liquefied and frozen.

  “I didn’t see you,” he says in a harsh whisper. She sees a gap where a canine tooth is missing and smells sour breath. She cannot see that his throat and the alveoli of his lungs have also been seared by iron oxide and explosions of steam, but she hears his labored breathing.

  A tattoo on the back of the hunter’s other hand glows blood-blue. She recognizes Comstock ’

  56 not as letters and numbers, but as a logo, as though it is her own tattoo. She moves her lips, tries and fails to say, Uncle Ricky, although this man’s thick outline is nothing like Uncle Ricky’s. At home, on the pond-side wall of the girl’s boy-blue room, Comstock ’ 56 is pressed in gold ink on the corner of Uncle Ricky’s senior portrait. Handsome, dark-eyed, narrow-chested Uncle Ricky drowned in the pond before she was born, the month before his graduation, died in the black muck in his own homemade scuba gear. Everyone says she resembles Ricky, and this year she is parting her hair (dark like Ricky’s) on the side, the way he did, rather than in the middle like the other kids at school. He has always been, for her, proof that the good die young, and this horrible man, who should have died instead of Ricky, is more proof.

  “Can you talk?” The hunter spits as he speaks. The girl’s stomach heaves.

  She closes her eyes, presses them closed, swallows acid (notes her throat is not crushed). The pain in her leg is breathtaking; she cannot imagine uttering words, but if she had something like a walkie-talkie, she might be able to press the transmit button. Her parents should be here, saying, Help is on the way, honey, and Everything will be okay. She turns her head to one side (neck not broken) and, without opening her eyes, vomits this morning’s toast and peanut butter down the side of her face.

  “I’m going for help,” the hunter rasps.

  When he is gone, she looks down and sees blood soaking her new jeans. Her hand is bare, minus its glove. The other hand feels numb underneath her back. The girl has sometimes imagined how it would be if she died, how her family would miss her, how the two boys she likes from school, Curtis and Mark, would long for her, how beautiful she would look in her coffin. But that was yesterday or five minutes ago, before this riot of pain in her leg. Now the vision of herself in a coffin makes acid rise in her throat again. She does not want to die young. She does not want to be good like that. She presses together her thumb and middle finger, slowly—feels muscles connect, a hundred tiny levers turning, clicking into the on-position, all the way from her brain, down her arm, to her hand—and she snaps. Snaps again, because her thumb and finger still work, because her spinal cord is not severed. Snaps a third time, to snap away death. She moves her stinging hand to her face (arm bones not shattered) and wipes the vomit from her cheek.

  Beside her, a slender tree trunk rises out of the snow and into the fog like a single leg. There are no songs about one-legged girls, and at school, everybody avoids the two girls in wheelchairs.

  Nonetheless, she realizes, one-legged would be better than dead. Her heart deflates. She has long imagined her future spreading out before her, gloriously full of love and discovery; she has been waiting for the future to arrive like a plate full of fancy appetizers in a restaurant, like a lush bunch of roses placed in her arms, like the biggest birthday cake with the brightest candles, baked and lit by people who love her.

  But the snow beneath her now is not fluffy sled snow, is not pond-side drifts sculpted by wind, through which she can fly on her wooden sled out onto the ice. The snow here is metallic, sharp-edged, conductive of the pain that pulses all through her leg, radiates to her belly, her shoulder. The pain at first seemed like her enemy, but she knows now that it must not end. She clings to the pain as it blossoms, as it opens like a flower, as it grows too elaborate to be contained in this moment, so that it must swell into the future, the way a freight train blows its whistle forward to warn of its approach.

  Where is the man who survived 1956, the scarred man who threw her into the air and left her in agony? Where is the man who has ruined her? The man who must get her into the future alive?

  The hunter has not run in years, but he runs into the road in front of a two-tone Chevy pickup, which screeches to a halt inches from him. The hunter holds up his hand, motions for the driver to unroll his window, notices blood on his own knuckles—he has trapped and gutted three rabbits to cook for his father today. The hunter approaches the driver along the fender, clears his throat, but the driver’s eyes widen and the window freezes halfway down. The driver is small-headed, with a face that resembles a rabbit’s face; his knuckles, perched high on the steering wheel, have gone white. The hunter wants to explain to the driver that he has been burned at the foundry and that a girl needs help, but the driver must have seen him emerge from the fog at a certain angle that made his face look like a scary mask, because the driver guns his engine, squeals his tires, and fishtails away, without ever seeing the girl on the other side of the El Camino. His pickup spits oily carbon exhaust into the morning fog. The hunter has scared himself a few times when he’s encountered unexpected mirrors. Because he has run out of his prescription ointment, the scar is burning more and tightening, tugging down the skin around his eye, making him feel as monstrous as he must look to a stranger.

  He leaves his car there, thinking it will protect the girl, and runs a hundred yards around the side of the pond to the nearest house, little more than a shack. He is panting as he knocks. He knows this house, and despite the urgent situation, his heart sparks. He and Ricky Hendrickson used to smoke in the old stone garage behind this house, halfway between their own two houses; the hunter wore himself out carving his name into one stone and the word fuck into another, while Ricky created tiny gunpowder explosions that bit into the walls. Ricky gave him the Comstock ’ 56 tattoo in that garage, with India ink he’d swiped from the school’s art cupboard. Ricky was the art teacher’s favorite, although he drew mostly schematic diagrams of machines he planned to build someday.

  After half a minute, the hunter pounds on the door of the house again with his good hand, the tattooed hand. A cold light shines from inside, but nobody answers. When he sees a plasticky curtain move, he pounds with both fists until the motion of the curtain settles. He tries the handle of the windowless door, with its thick white paint, but it is locked. He does not kick the door open, does not swing his cracked and muddy steel-toed boot into the door, but instead jogs to a house farther around the pond.

  Only after much pleading does the old lady in the second house unlock the door and allow the hunter in. She wears big plastic glasses that extend above her eyebrows, the frames the blood-blue color of a tattoo, and she trains a shotgun on him the whole time, follows him with the business end from the door to the kitchen wall phone. The hunter admires her squat steadiness—

  the shotgun does not quaver in her hands, does not for a second relinquish its target. He fumbles, fails twice to drag his shaking finger, stuck in the zero hole, all the way around for the telephone operator.

  “Please, ma’am,” he rasps into the phone and tries to explain.

  “I can’t understand you, sir.” The voice on the phone is patient, soft, a little nasal.

  “Please listen,” he says and closes his eyes, envisions the girl’s body, the dark hair tangled around the freckled face. That face looks so familiar to him, although h
e knows no schoolgirls. He struggles to control his voice between breaths.

  “I hit a girl on the road by the junior high. She’s lying beside my car. Please send an ambulance. I didn’t see her with the fog.”

  “Just a moment, sir,” she replies. Of course, she’s a telephone operator with no ambulance to command, but she promises to connect him to the ambulance dispatcher. Long seconds pass. He stares out the woman’s window onto the pond, where evaporating snow rises as fog. He sees the outline of the Hendrickson house across the way and remembers the early May afternoon some kids found Ricky’s body in the mud, tangled in water-lily stems. While the hunter chokes his story into the phone, the old woman does not lower her gun or offer advice that might assist him. She aims patiently as he, by himself, through careful selection and repetition of the facts, makes clear to the man on the other end what school, what road, what pond.

  Footsteps like heartbeats! Someone is coming through the fog! The girl touches her thumb and middle finger together and presses. A man approaches, breathes as though he has returned from drowning, comes close, closer, leans over her the way she has wanted certain boys from school to lean close, the way girlfriends lean in to tell secrets, the way she has dreamed of Uncle Ricky coming to her in her bed. In her room, she has opened her arms and thighs to his ghost, to receive his perfect body with her perfect body, but now she smells sweat, blood, infection.

  The hunter’s terrible face seems the cause of her physical pain, that unbearable assurance that she is still alive, and so she will not look away. She considers another future, one without flowers or prizes or birthday cakes. What if the future were camouflage and gray and sour, phlegm and dirty snow, wounds and scars and boys killing helpless pond creatures? (She has always thought Uncle Ricky would have stopped the other boys from killing turtles and frogs.) The pink at the horizon is no longer a flower, but a ghoulish hand, with its fingers grasping upward.

  “Help is on the way,” the hunter says when he finally reaches her. She cannot make out his words, but his strained underwater breathing tells her something about Uncle Ricky’s last breaths.

  At home, in her blue room, the girl hides incense in the hole in the plaster wall where she found an ancient pack of Lucky Strikes, where she would hide love letters if she had any, where she has recently hidden her friend’s copy of Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker. The girl has been afraid to read beyond the first page because of the word pubic. If she lives, she will read the book.

  She will paint her room. White or yellow or pink. She now tries to hum the Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby,” but it sticks in her throat—why, she wonders, would a face be in a jar by the door? She thinks waterlogged—Ricky was waterlogged. If she lives, she will move the picture of Ricky out of her room, to the stairway with the other family photos.

  “The ambulance is on the way,” the hunter says. “Everything will be okay.”

  One of his eyes seems bigger than the other, the lower lid pulled inside out to reveal red flesh like a leech’s. The girl thinks the whites of his eyes are oily, ready to ignite. Any time before now, she would have turned away from this man, but this morning she has willed him to come to her.

  Her freckled cheeks would be cold to the touch, the man thinks. He could press his cheek to hers, let his wound be soothed against her young skin. Some instinct tells him this girl’s flesh would heal him, some ancient voice whispers that this was how men healed before doctors, before the promise of painkillers and surgeries. Surely this girl will get what surgeries she needs, but men, hunters, now as back then, must tap other sources. He could lower his face to hers, but instead he breathes deeply, knows he could not live with himself if he forced himself on her. He imagines how she would squirm to escape his burned hand pressing against her smooth naked belly. He takes off his camouflage jacket and spreads it over her legs, feels momentarily the thrill of doing the right thing, lets himself forget what he might have done. Then he hates himself for not covering her before now.

  He looks into her eyes to establish how much she hates him. She meets his gaze, fixes him in her sights, but he does not see hatred. Without moving a muscle, the girl reaches out for him, grabs hold of him with her eyes. Grabs, holds, boards him like a lifeboat and clutches his gunwales. What she is doing to him with her eyes makes it even harder for him to catch his breath. He tries to look away when he hears the ambulance siren in the distance, but when he does so, her eyes seem to grip him even more securely. He has no women or girls in his life, no daughter, no little sister. He has had a few girlfriends over the years, none lately, none since burning his face. After his parents’

  divorce, his mother moved to Indiana, where his older sister lives.

  As the girl holds him there, he silently promises her that he will not use her body and that he will save her life. But he can tell from the way she looks at him that his promise is not enough. He will dedicate himself to her, he wants to explain, although he can’t give her much. He’s living in his car right now, and earlier this week, to his shame, he ate half a sandwich somebody left on a table in a sub shop. He lost his tooth four months ago, yanked it himself with pliers after a year of pressure and pain, and since then two more have become infected—the blood flow is compromised on his burned side, the doctor said—so his mouth aches and tastes of metallic rot. As a result of the burns on his hand, it has been years since he shot a deer. And he’s only thirty-five—other men seem so young at thirty-five.

  The only happiness he has felt lately is something he can never tell anyone: the jolt of adrenalin he felt when the girl’s body hit his bumper. Joy at the notion he’d hit a deer, joy that he’d have something more than rabbits to take to his father’s house, joy that his father would be glad to see him. He would have carried the body out to the garage, hooked the chain around its neck and dragged the chain over a couple of rafters. He would have skinned the deer and dressed it out the way his dad had taught him.

  “I didn’t see you,” he whispers to the girl. “I was going to visit my father.” He doesn’t say that he was looking through the fog toward the Hendricksons’ house, as he does every time he passes, wondering who lives there now, wondering if they know what happened to Ricky.

  The man and the girl share the thought that the sirens are too far away, that the ambulance technicians will never arrive. The girl sighs again, sighs like a grown-up woman who has chosen badly in marriage. The hunter sighs, too. He thinks his body was once a vessel filled with hope for the future, ideas for inventions—as a teenager, he ordered the inventor’s guide out of the back of a comic book—but he long ago became a sack of broken glass. Now he has broken this girl, too, and she will never be her whole young self again.

  He has always been able to clearly picture Ricky Hendrickson in his coffin, silent and pale, his freckles covered with makeup, and he has a photographic vision of Ricky building homemade bottle rockets beside the pond, with charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter, but when he sees Ricky’s face in the girl’s face, he fears he is losing his mind.

  “Please, don’t die,” he whispers.

  He wonders what could be taking the ambulance so long. And he wonders why life has not delivered what it promised when he was a kid. By now cars (and ambulances!) should fly at the speed of sound as they did in the comic books. By now, he thinks, by 1972, roadside sensors should warn a driver of humans approaching the pavement, even in dark or fog, should warn an entire neighborhood of bodies submerged in ponds, of arrested breathing, of spilled blood. When a girl lies on the pavement, when a boy is drowning, everyone should run to help.

  If the foundry, where he worked above vats of molten steel for sixteen years, has become obsolete, then shouldn’t the world outside the foundry be noticeably more advanced? He had intended to work at the foundry forever (his burns were a pact the foundry made with him), but they disassembled and dissected the equipment with torches and sold it as scrap iron in a world unprepared to reshape those materials into advanced medical machinery. The hu
nter imagines not only helicopters that can rush patients to hospitals, but high-tech stainless-steel flying crafts, orbs positioned strategically throughout every community to provide relief to those in pain. He can imagine a silver globe flying toward them at bottle-rocket speed, at spacecraft speed, pausing to release a sedating gas or painkilling radio waves or calming infrared radiation. He has hurt this girl—

  he won’t deny it—but the whole world is guilty, too, because of the achingly slow progress of technology, because of the world’s refusal to soothe burns and infected teeth, to heal drowned and broken bodies. What point is there in a world like this one, he wonders, where working machinery must be melted down, where the cleverest scientists drown, where he and this girl must wait in the dirty slush alongside the road and stare into the face of pain?

  The girl’s freckles seem like holes through which her life might pour out—she may already be dissolving. Each of the three dead rabbits in the back of his El Camino, each flea-ridden pelt, contains about a pound of meat. After seeing the girl’s wounds, he will not be able to skin the rabbits, knows, too, that they are not enough to bring his old man, who thinks his son should have more to show for his life. The siren grows louder, and the girl is still alive. He is alive with her. Tears are falling out the sides of the girl’s eyes, and he feels grateful; his own tear ducts have been damaged by his not wearing goggles at the foundry.

  His eyes remain locked with hers until the technicians (Modern uniformed miracles, they have arrived!) push him aside. “I didn’t see her,” he says in his nonsense syllables. He wonders if they sense his hunger for venison, if his hunger shows on his face. The girl sees it; he feels her watching him until they place her in the ambulance, until he hears the swoosh-swoosh-click of doors closing and latching, as securely as those on a space ship. The police ask him to get into the back of the cruiser.