American Salvage

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  “No,” Jim said. It was black men who scared him, he realized, not black women. He had never known black women. Or black men for that matter. He said, “Please, come in.”

  “You’re hurt,” the first woman said. Jim could tell she was kindhearted.

  “I’m burning up.” He had to wipe his eyes.

  “We’d better go,” said the other woman. She pulled at the arm of the kindhearted woman.

  “The Lord will heal,” the kindhearted woman said. She stepped closer to Jim. Her heart-shaped face glowed, and Jim got the idea that if she would put her hands on his burn, it might heal.

  Along with the rest of the guys at work, he had sometimes used the word nigger. The tinge of regret he’d felt each time now turned to acid in his belly. Now these women were the only ones who could help him.

  “Can you forgive me?” Jim said. He looked into the woman’s eyes.

  “Ask God to forgive you.” The woman smiled and reached toward him, but the other

  woman tugged her by the wrist and pulled her away. Jim Lobretto grabbed at the kind woman’s other hand, but he managed to touch only her fingertips, and she slipped easily from his grasp. Her wedding ring told Jim that she loved some man, healed some man, but she would not heal him. The two women moved out of the doorway and along the sidewalk toward a four-door car sitting there with the motor running.

  “You bitch,” he mumbled. “She was going to help me. She could have.” Jim Lobretto stepped outside to watch the women go. The women glanced back only after they reached the safety of their car. Two black men sat in the front seat, wearing suits. Jim wondered if the men might get out and beat the hell out of him. His hand still tingled where he had touched the woman’s fingers.

  When he went back inside, hurt rose like flames out of every corner of his apartment, from the sink, from the dried-out plant Jim had never once watered. Every edge of every piece of furniture threatened him. The voices on the TV were sharp. The pain of that broken finger at the foundry had been nothing compared to this; he’d break all ten of his fingers to be released from this hell. The heat from the burn had reached his throat; the acid from inside his body had reached his eyes, which now felt hot and dry. He drank another pint of water standing over the sink, staring into the backyard. Even in the cold, the birdbath fountain didn’t freeze. At the top were some ceramic flowers and two birds sculpted in concrete.

  “Stupid dykes,” he whispered to himself and felt the acid of the word dyke burn his face. He didn’t want to use that word again, not even with the guys at work.

  The women were making the floor creak beside their bed, so he returned to the couch. He had never treated them badly, he told himself. He had helped the small woman with her car once when she needed a jump. And by not telling the guys at work about them, he had protected them.

  He heard the women fall together onto the bed. He didn’t turn up the TV volume to drown out their breathing as he might have, but leaned against the ductwork and listened as whispers gradually turned to quiet gasps, which grew louder to become drawn-out moans. He imagined their soft bodies, their bare feet, their cool, meaty lips. The big one had long, shiny hair, which must frame her face on the bed, must spread out from her face like rays of light. Jim thought of the girl from the bowling alley lying on a soft bed, inviting him in a whisper to lie at her side. If he could find the phone number, he could shave and put some of that oil on his hair to make it lie flat, and he’d drive to her house.

  “Oh, God,” moaned one of the women upstairs. As Jim listened, he let his forearm fall across his leg, and the pain of the burn erupted anew. How had he been so stupid as to move his body that way?

  “Oh, oh, oh, oh!” one of the women gasped. And then the voice broke free: “Sweet Jesus, yes! Oh, yes! Yes!”

  “Shut up!” Jim screamed into the heating duct. “Stop doing that!” His heart raced, and he stood too quickly, and the bandage pulled, and then he banged the leg against the arm of the couch and collapsed. He sat there feeling his whole existence reduced to hot throbbing. Silence ensued and then whispers and then silence again. Whatever he used to have with those women before yelling at them, it was gone, and he already missed it terribly. Now he really was alone, at the mercy of the burn that would continue to devour him, continue to sear through tendons and muscles; even his bones would disappear, become a little pile of ashes, as though he had never existed. He needed some sort of special water, blessed water. Mary Magdalene had mopped Christ’s brow with a cool, wet cloth, but Jim had never realized the importance of that gesture, had never known it was hydrotherapy for Christ’s burning soul. Christ had become small like a child in her arms as she soothed him.

  He needed that girl’s phone number badly enough that he stepped out his front door into the cold and made his way to his car, which was parked out from the curb, almost far enough out to disrupt traffic. Stephie, who was studying to be a nurse, whose voice on the phone could soothe him. The matches were nowhere in the front or back seats. He opened the trunk and found the gas can and his father’s shotgun lying on top of an army blanket. Jim would clean the gun for his father before he returned it. He would call his old man and ask if he could stay at his house while he healed. He lifted the shotgun out and held it to his chest, and when he looked up at the second-story front window, he saw the women watching him from between lavender-patterned curtains. Their faces seemed longer and thinner than he remembered, and their mouths formed o’s. He gripped the shotgun more tightly and shook his head no, meaning, no, this wasn’t his gun, and he wasn’t going to do anything with it except clean it, but the women’s faces receded from the window.

  When he returned to his front door, he discovered it had locked behind him. He grasped at his pockets for a key, but he was wearing only boxer shorts. He limped around to the back of the house, to the fountain. Somehow the birdbath fountain resembled the girl from the bowling alley.

  There was no end to the life inside the birdbath or inside the girl, for her blood and fluids kept flowing and flowing. Above him, at the top of the back stairs, the two women stood wrapped in their winter coats. The smaller woman had her hand on the doorknob, as though unsure whether to stay or go back inside.

  “Bastards,” he said aloud to the guys at work, the ones who would call him nigger-lover and dyke-lover. They all had their wives and their girlfriends at home, so they had nothing to say about him. No matter how they talked at work, Jim knew they got down on their hands and knees for those women every night. Those guys he worked with got saved every night when they went home.

  The smaller woman opened the door to go back inside, but froze when Jim spoke.

  “I need this water,” Jim shouted. His bandages were soaked through with fluid the color of piss, and he realized that all the water and whiskey he’d been drinking must have flowed through him, must have wept right out of that wounded eye in his leg. He dipped his hands in the fountain and sloshed water over the side. He dropped the shotgun and tore off his bandage, revealed the raw meat of his leg to the cold air, to the holy water, to the women. He shouted to them, “I’m burning.

  The doctors couldn’t put out the fire.”

  “I think he really needs help,” said the smaller woman. A fluffy white cat slipped out the open door and stood beside the two women, its tail defying gravity.

  “You can douse the flame,” Jim said.

  The big woman’s shiny hair gleamed in the cold sunlight. She stood silent, her hooded parka almost the same color as the sky, her arms crossed over her chest, studying him. She was nearly as big as his father’s wife, but she seemed as light as bird feathers up there.

  The small woman said, “Should we call an ambulance? And what the hell’s up with that gun?”

  When he realized he was once again holding the shotgun to his chest, he tossed it away with enough force that he fell onto his ass in the snow.

  The big woman said nothing, but uncrossed her arms. When she began to descend the stairs, Jim closed his eye
s and prayed.

  Family Reunion

  “No more hunting,” Marylou’s daddy rumbles. Mr. Strong is a small man, hardly bigger than Marylou herself, but he’s got a big voice, and some people call him just Strong, without the Mister.

  “We got more than enough meat. You understand what I’m saying, child?” He stands up from the stump where he’s been sitting, sharpening the butcher knife, and glances around, looking for her, and Marylou fears he will also spot the yellow paper stapled to the beech tree. Marylou has just noticed the paper herself, and she is sneaking around the side of the house, intending to jump up and yank it down before he sees it, but she is not quick enough. He puts down the butcher knife and whetstone and moves to the tree.

  Strong is freshly shaven for work—the new job makes him go in on Saturdays—and

  Marylou can see his jaw muscles grinding as he reads. Under his green wool cap, his forehead veins are probably starting to bulge. She didn’t notice anybody putting up the invitation, but maybe one of her cousins snuck over here after dark last night. Uncle Cal couldn’t have posted it himself, because of his tether and the restraining order, in place on account of the trouble at last year’s Thanksgiving reunion party. Ever since Grandpa Murray died, though, Cal has been the head of the Murray family (not to mention president of Murray Metal Fabricators, the only shop in town paying a decent wage), and so in Strong’s eyes, the photocopied invitation has come straight from Cal.

  Marylou and Strong have just finished stringing up a six-point buck, Marylou’s third kill of the season and two more than the legal limit. When Strong found her dragging the body toward the house an hour ago, he reminded her that being only fourteen didn’t make her exempt from the law.

  Some day she would like to try hunting with the new Marlin rifle she won in the 4-H competition, but they live below Michigan’s shotgun line, and, anyway, she knows a .22 bullet can travel a mile and a half, far enough that you might hit somebody you never even saw. Not that Marylou has ever missed what she was aiming for. She took this third buck in the woods at dawn, and the single shotgun blast echoed along the river and awakened Strong. He used to get out of bed early, but nowadays he usually stays up late and sleeps until there’s barely enough time to shave and get to work.

  But Strong seems to have forgotten about getting to work now. He shakes his head and says,

  “Son of a bitch.” All he needs to see are the words Thanksgiving Pig Roast, and he knows the rest, that it’s the famous yearly family gathering of the Murrays, when uncles and aunts and truckloads of cousins come in from out of town, and even outside of Michigan, to play horseshoes and drink beer and eat pork. Worst of all, the paper is stapled too high for Strong to reach up and tear it down.

  He storms off and returns a few minutes later with his chainsaw and yanks the starter until the motor roars. He jabs the tip of the saw into the beech, knee-high. Sawdust flies, and with one clean, angry slice, the adolescent tree is free of its roots.

  As the beech falls, Marylou notices the few marks where she and Strong carved dates and lines for her height in the smooth bark. The tree is taller than she has realized, and the top hangs up on a big swamp oak before breaking free by taking down one oak arm with it. When the beech lands between Strong’s truck and the venison-processing table, it smashes a honeysuckle bush. Strong puts his foot on the downed trunk and cuts some stove-length pieces. When he reaches the invitation, he shreds it with the chain.

  “Nerve of that bastard.” His white breath mingles with the oily blue smoke.

  When he notices Marylou staring at his face he says, “You got something to say, child, say it.”

  Marylou looks away from him, across the river, toward the Murray farm, toward the white house and the two red barns. The big wooden barn would be full of hay this time of year, and she knows how the cold morning sun streams through the cracks inside, the shafts of sunlight full of hay dust. Behind that barn is the hill where she used to shoot targets with Uncle Cal and her cousins, before all the trouble.

  She decided to stop talking last year because she discovered that she could focus more clearly without words, and by concentrating hard with her breathing, she has gradually learned to slow time by lengthening seconds, one after another. In target or skeet shooting, she sometimes used to fire without thinking, but on opening day this year, she took her first careful, deliberate aim at a living thing. As she set her sights on that buck, she found she had all the time in the world to aim—up from the hooves and legs or else down from the head and neck, smack in the chest, touch the trigger, and bang.

  On the way to his truck, Strong is shaking his head in exasperation, and once he’s inside, he slams the door hard. When he pulls away, the truck’s back wheels dig into the ice crust of the two-track. Marylou hears him throw up gravel on the road, and she hears the truck’s noisy exhaust as it crosses the bridge downstream. No, she doesn’t have anything to say, yet. And it was not just out of loyalty to the Murrays that she wouldn’t open her mouth for a trial last year—her daddy is wrong there. At the time she didn’t have things figured out, and even now she is still puzzling through what really happened.

  This morning she puzzles about the invitation on the tree. It certainly wasn’t meant for her mother, Cal’s sister—she ran off to Florida with a truck driver and only calls home a few times a year. And it definitely wasn’t meant for Strong—although he worked for the Murrays for years, they’ve never liked him. The man broods, Uncle Cal has always complained. Even Anna Murray used to say, Loulou, don’t brood like your father. Marylou tried to defend him, but the Murrays could not understand that a person sometimes needed quiet in order to think about things.

  The invitation on the tree has to mean that, despite all the trouble, the Murrays want to keep Marylou in the family, and Marylou feels glad to be wanted by them, by Anna who taught her to cook, and by Cal who taught her to shoot. And having boy cousins has been as good as having brothers.

  Marylou kicks at the lengths of wood Strong has cut. The beech is too green to burn or even split this year. She retrieves the sharpened knife from the stump and returns to her strung-up buck.

  She wants to hurry and get the first long cut behind her. She will be fine after that, once the guts slosh into the galvanized trough, but she hates that first slice that turns the deer from a creature into meat. Strong would do it if she asked, but Grandpa Murray always told her, from the time she was little, how important it was to do a thing herself. She reaches up and inserts the knife about a half inch, just below the sternum. Pulling down hard and steady on the back of the blade with her free hand, she unzips the buck from chest to balls, tears through skin and flesh, and then closes her eyes for a moment to recover.

  A gunshot yips from the Murray farm across the river, and Marylou drops her knife into the tub of steaming entrails. A second shot follows. Uncle Cal’s black Lab begins to bark. Marylou has known this day would come, that Strong would one day kill her uncle with the pistol he carries behind the seat of his truck. And now Strong will go to jail, and she will have to move to Florida to live with her mother. Two more shots echo over the water.

  Marylou considers the hole she has dug for the deer guts, and she knows she has to act fast to cover up her daddy’s crime. She will bury Cal. Except she’ll have to get the tether off somehow, so the police won’t locate his body. She grabs the shovel and the bone saw from her venison table, carries them to her rowboat, tosses them in, and rows a hundred fifty feet across the current to the other side. She ties up to a fallen willow near Uncle Cal’s hunting shed, where the trouble occurred.

  This is the first time she’s been on the Murray property in almost a year. She climbs the bank, ignoring a sick feeling as she passes the shed, and makes her way across toward the Murray farmhouse. There she sees how Cal’s new white Chevy Suburban is sunk down on flattened tires.

  Cal stands alongside the vehicle, yelling at the banged-up back end of Strong’s departing Ford.

  “Str
ong, you son of a bitch! Those were brand new tires!”

  Cal’s wife stands beside him, wearing a dress with pockets, holding an apple in one raw-looking hand and a peeler in the other. Marylou feels bad she didn’t consider Anna when she was thinking about burying Cal. Marylou wonders if Anna is making pies for the party.

  Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving, Strong comes home from work to find Marylou dragging the warm, soft body of an eight-point buck by the antlers across frozen leaves, toward the venison table. She has to stop and rest every few feet.

  “Marylou, what the hell are we supposed to do with all this meat? We’ve got no room in the freezer.” He shakes his head. “Even if you aren’t going to talk, child, you’ve got to listen.”

  Strong would be even madder if he knew she shot the deer across the river, because he doesn’t want her to set foot on that bank for any reason. But Marylou was on her side of the river, watching the shed, puzzling through a few things, when the buck came high-stepping down the trail to the river’s edge. Marylou aimed the shotgun and calmly fired. She wasn’t sure she could hit at that distance, but the buck collapsed to his knees on the sand, then to his chest. She carried the knife across with her, dreading the prospect of finishing him off, but by the time she got there, he was dead. Dragging the buck into the wooden rowboat was difficult, and she was lucky nobody saw her.

  He was bigger than she realized, and the weight across the prow made it hard to fight the river current.

  “Listen,” Strong says. “The Murrays could make one phone call, and if those DNR sons of bitches open our freezer, we’re in big trouble.”

  Marylou isn’t worried. The Murrays always avoid the law, always figure they can take care of their own problems—apparently they haven’t reported Strong for shooting out Cal’s tires the other day.

  Strong helps her string up the buck and then stands back. “You are one hell of a hunter, though. You always hit what you’re shooting at, child of mine.”