American Salvage

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  “So you got yourself locked up in the psych ward,” I say when he’s standing there in front of me. Some women in the neighborhood are scared of Jonas, because he’s big and because they see him walking all the time. Some people assume he’s mental, but he’s not.

  He nods, takes a while to speak. “Everybody up there on One North is all cut-up wrists and shit.” He’s got a bottle in a bag under his arm. He’s always been a slow talker, but maybe he’s even a little slower now.

  Myself, I never could fathom the wrist cutting—so much room for error and for changing your mind, and so much blood. Jonas is sweating as bad as I am, although I’ve been out in the garden for an hour, trying to save the last beans from the woodchucks, and he’s only walked up from the bus stop. I wipe my face and neck with the bandana and tie it back over my hair. I consider slapping Jonas right across his face, but then I might keep on slapping and hitting him, and he might be weak enough that I’d kill him. Or if he took a mind to hit me back, he could probably knock me across this garden.

  “You make any friends up there?” I’m wondering if he’ll have anywhere new to go, so he won’t be coming up here all the time, trying to borrow money or trying to climb into my bed in the camper. I’m twenty years older than he is and getting fat; I’ve never been anything to look at, but he’s been lonely, and there was a time, not long ago, when I wasn’t turning him away.

  “There was this one big black guy who kept bumming cigarettes from me,” Jonas said. “He tried to OD on sleeping pills and some other drugs, but somebody found him like they did me.”

  Drugs. I have no use for them, not the illegal stuff Jonas and the kids used to cook up in my house without my knowing, not the drugs doctors might prescribe a woman like me, if I was fool enough to present my deteriorating form to one of them.

  “You tell that guy where I live?” I ask. I bend down to pick another handful of green beans.

  My daughter, who lives two thousand miles away, yells at me for bending at the waist; I’m too old to learn a new way to bend, I tell her. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, the way the hospital tosses all the suicides together in a ward, so they can concur about putting an end to this travail. The beans are freckled with rust spots. I drop them into the paper bag near my feet and wipe my hands on my jeans. Some women throw away beans freckled like these, but they taste fine to me. Last year I processed four-dozen pints in my pressure cooker, back when I had my old kitchen. I say to Jonas,

  “I don’t need anybody doing drugs out here. Not you or some guy trying to OD. I got enough to worry about with Robert.”

  “I didn’t tell the guy nothing.” Jonas says it tiredly, as though his not making friends in the psych ward is some new kind of failure piled on top of failing to kill himself and failing to want to live.

  When we hear the side door of the garage open, we both look over and see Robert. He hobbles out a few steps onto the brick path leading to the driveway and then rests with both hands on the cane. He won’t use the walker. He pulls shallow breaths through pursed lips. Robert’s been living in the garage since April. He’s got emphysema, he’s been crippled since the heart surgery, and he’s coming off a long treatment for one of those bad staph infections. It’s been two years since Robert applied for Social Security disability, and probably the government assumes he’s already dead. Last week he was standing the way he is now with his cane, and then he crumpled, almost hit his head on a brick. Luckily, I was right there and got him back inside and into his chair, and he was okay. If he ever looks over in this direction, Robert will be happy to see Jonas; Jonas might be the closest thing Robert’s had to a son, although he’d never say as much.

  He’ll pay me some rent, Robert keeps saying, as soon as he gets that settlement, but I’m not holding my breath. Robert used to have a cowboy mustache, and he moved so gracefully that when he walked into my kitchen, my legs went weak, but now he’s just a broken-up man I’m stuck with. I don’t know what he will do in the winter. I don’t need anyone with me in my tiny camping trailer, and I really don’t need anybody freezing to death on the driveway ice because he slips when he goes outside to piss.

  Robert had a room in my farmhouse until this spring, when Jonas and a few of the local kids burned it down cooking their drugs. I was letting a neighbor girl stay upstairs, because her dad kept beating the hell out of her, and so kids were in and out. I told the police I didn’t know what happened or who those kids were, and by then the girl had run off to Florida and taken Jonas with her. When he came back a month ago, he was skinny and strung out, his eyes all crazy, and I told him he wasn’t welcome on my property. The old farmhouse, the house I had grown up in, the house we had all lived in, had not been insured.

  “What’s that you’re drinking? Soda pop?” I ask when Jonas unwraps his bottle. Used to be Jonas showed up with a forty-ouncer and poured me a cup off the top, and to be honest, I could use a cup of beer right now. He holds out the bottle of grape pop unsteadily, and I shake my head.

  “Social worker says I shouldn’t drink alcohol.” He unscrews the cap with some difficulty, takes a sip, swallows (also with difficulty), and nods. That bend in his neck is probably from nodding agreeably, because he’s had to be agreeable to all those doctors and social workers. He nodded at me that way when I told him, before the fire, that there would be no more cooking drugs in my house, so I’m not sure it means very much.

  “Why’d you want to do it with antifreeze?” I say. “Couldn’t you get a gun?”

  “I thought a gun would hurt too much.”

  “Wouldn’t’ve hurt as much as what you did, wouldn’t’ve cost folks so much money taking care of you.” He nodded.

  For myself, I already have a plan. A .22 bullet penetrates the skull, but can’t get out, so it spins around inside your head and scrambles your brains like eggs. Maybe Jonas doesn’t know about the brain, how all the pain in the whole world gets sent there, but the brain itself doesn’t feel anything—hell, doctors do brain surgery while you’re awake, squeeze the brain in their hands, cut parts of it away. Maybe there’d be pain when the bullet hit the skin, but after that, it would just be lights flicking out, one after another, making one sad fact after the next disappear forever.

  “What was it like?” I ask him quietly. “I mean, before they took you to the hospital.”

  “I won’t do that again,” he says. “That stuff was nasty. Sweet and nasty. Every time I think about it, it makes me sick.”

  “But how did it feel when you were sure you were going to die?” It’s something nobody else I know can tell me.

  “It just hurt. I was throwing up and then trying to throw up more. My dad said I should call him if I ever think about doing something like that again,” Jonas says, backing away from me, into my tomato patch.

  He steps on a perfectly formed (although still green) Brandywine tomato, and the anger swells up in me again, until I realize I’ve actually scared him. I’ve been absentmindedly poking my finger into the place between my temple and the top of my ear, the place where I’ve rested the tip of my own pistol hundreds of times, pretty much every night these last few months, sitting at my little fold-down Formica table, before putting the gun away and laying out another hand of solitaire, deciding to wait a little longer, just to see what else might happen. My farmhouse kitchen had pine cupboards all around it, full of stewed tomatoes and beans and bread-and-butter pickles. I used to sit with my feet up on the end of my big kitchen table, read Mother Earth News and murder mysteries, and drink pots of tea with the sun coming through the window over the sink.

  Robert has made it halfway to the driveway, and now he’s standing under the branches of the apple tree. Be careful, I wish across the distance. I study him for swaying or other signs of impending collapse. The doctors seem amazed he’s still alive. When Robert was a boy in the army, he accidentally killed a fellow soldier, a kid from Texas, and spent a few years in jail on a manslaughter charge. He told me the story years ago at my kitchen tabl
e, where I’d been feeding him glass after glass of elderberry wine. The sad grace of his confession, with his cheek pressed against my hand, loosened some screw in me that I haven’t been able to tighten back up. Some mornings I think there’s no reason to get out of bed, but then I see Robert’s light come on in the garage.

  “You go ahead and call your dad,” I tell Jonas. Robert takes another several steps. When I realize I’m holding my breath, I let it out and say, “That’s a good idea, Jonas, calling your dad.”

  Truth is, though, his dad is a useless piece of shit, and a mean drunk besides. I know it, and Jonas knows it. To avoid watching Robert’s every agonizing step, I turn to the raspberry bushes, ever-bearing, and pick a few red fruits. Automatically, forgetting how mad I am, I hold them out to Jonas. He takes two, with trembling fingers, and leaves me two. Only one berry makes it to Jonas’s mouth. We both study the raspberry that falls like a big drop of blood in the dirt.

  “The social worker got me a room downtown. Two guys already come to my door trying to sell me meth.” He talks toward my feet. “I told ’em I didn’t do that shit anymore. I’m finished with all that.”

  “For Chrissakes, Jonas. You told me you were finished with drugs before you burned down my house.”

  “I’m so sorry about your house, man,” Jonas says, and he looks me in the eye for the first time since getting here. “If you ever want to build another house,” he says, slowly, “remember, I worked for that construction guy. I know how to do framing, and how to put on a shingle roof. I was good at doing roofs.”

  Whenever I’ve seen guys putting shingles on a roof, I’ve thought of laying down cards on a table, and I’ve felt something soothing in the way they place one shingle after another in a row and then move to the next row, all in straight lines. But the slow way Jonas talks makes me think any house of ours would take an eternity to erect.

  “Do you ever think about killing yourself?” Jonas asks so quietly I hardly hear him. “I mean, not with antifreeze.”

  “Sometimes,” I say, after a pause. No reason to lie. But all these nights sitting at my fold-down table, maybe I’ve just needed to finger the bullets, slide them into the chambers, measure the weight of the loaded pistol in my hand; maybe I’ve just needed to feel the cool barrel against my head. Maybe that’s all.

  Jonas nods. He’s slept beside me. There’s no telling how much he knows.

  This was not my plan, but I can’t see any way around it. I sigh. “You can stay here if you want, for a while, anyway. Help me take care of Robert. We’ll pitch you a tent here somewhere.”

  Robert finally catches sight of us in the garden, against the backdrop of raspberry spears as tall as we are and some lush pokeweed I’ve neglected to yank. Robert stands a little straighter when he sees Jonas; maybe he smiles. He lifts a hand off his cane and gestures to us with two bent fingers, but I wish he hadn’t. His hips waver, his legs seem unable to support him, his cane slips a little in the dirt. Jonas is watching, too, his trembling jaw setting up, his big body clenching beside mine, until Robert regains his balance. We wave back, as though waving to any old friend, and when Jonas lets his hand fall, I catch it and hold it steady in both of mine.

  King Cole’s American Salvage

  On a windy evening in February, William Slocum Jr., eleven months out of prison, pulled into King Cole’s driveway in a Jeep he’d stolen from an apartment complex near his girlfriend’s house. He’d cut through the Jeep’s canvas top with a utility knife, popped the ignition with a screwdriver, and hot-wired the engine, a trick William Slocum Sr. had taught him not long before passing out drunk on the railroad tracks.

  Slocum’s car had broken down two days ago, and King Cole, of King Cole’s American Salvage, had given him seventy dollars for it, minimum scrap price. That old Mitsubishi Montero hadn’t been registered or insured, so if he’d left it broken down on the road, the city of Kalamazoo would have impounded it, but still Slocum felt Cole had ripped him off, had not given him what the car was worth. Slocum and his girlfriend Wanda were now without any car, since hers had been repossessed two months ago. She also hadn’t managed to pay her mortgage or get enough methamphetamine to keep herself going since she lost her job, and Slocum hadn’t been getting any work either, so things were tight. He’d tried to make love with Wanda last night, but without the meth, it wasn’t working, and he knew tonight he needed to hit a lick. If he didn’t, Wanda was bound to lose faith in him.

  Slocum got out of the Jeep, carrying with him a length of galvanized pipe he’d swiped from Parker’s Auto Repair, where he bought meth sometimes and where he’d met Johnny Cole, King Cole’s nephew. They’d known each other less than two weeks, but right off, Slocum knew Johnny was a solid guy. Although he was five years younger than Slocum and still pocked with acne, Johnny was generous with the homegrown and seemed like the kind of person you could trust—a rare quality. Slocum had liked the way the kid had asked his advice, had seemed to look up to him.

  Slocum knocked hard on King Cole’s ornate wood and wrought-iron front door, and in about a minute, King swung open an upstairs casement window and turned on the security light, which lit up the crusted snow. Slocum could see by the tire tracks that the tow truck was the only vehicle that had been there recently. According to Johnny, the man’s wife had died years ago, and according to the sticker on the window, Cole had an alarm system.

  “What do you want?” King said through the screen. The small man stood with one hand on his potbelly. His long beard and shoulder-length hair were black—Johnny had told him the old man dyed it because he thought it made him attractive to the ladies.

  “I need a jump start. Or maybe a tow,” Slocum said.

  “I don’t work at night. Call somebody else.” Cole started to close the window.

  “I’m a friend of Johnny’s,” Slocum said quickly and backed up so King could see him better.

  “Your nephew Johnny. You scrapped my old car the other day, the blue Mitsubishi.”

  Cole opened the window again. “That Jap crap isn’t worth a shit.”

  “That’s what you said.”

  Slocum had stayed up late smoking and drinking beer with Johnny a few nights ago, and when Johnny was stoned, he told Slocum what a cheap bastard King Cole was, how Johnny worked his ass off for his uncle, but the man wouldn’t lend Johnny enough money to buy some old diesel truck he wanted. King Cole didn’t like banks, Johnny had said, and he carried a shitload of money on him, thousands of dollars in hidden pockets in his jacket. “I should go out to his house late some night and negotiate my own loan,” Johnny had said, and they’d both laughed.

  “Your car went to the shredder,” King said. “What do you want?”

  “Johnny’s down at the gravel pit. He told me to see if you’d come help him.”

  “He’s got his Nova? Or that damned VW diesel piece of shit he’s been driving around this week?”

  “Yeah, it’s Johnny’s Nova needs a jump.”

  “I suppose if I don’t go out and jump him he won’t show up for work in the morning,”

  King mumbled. He took a phone out of his pocket. “Kid acts like he’s stoned half the time.”

  Slocum kicked at the ice and rust behind the back wheel of the Jeep, which was idling in the drive. The jump-starting method his daddy had taught him only worked on Jeeps made before 1982, so he’d lucked out finding this old one, and with a half a tank of gas. If King Cole reached Johnny on the phone, Slocum would jump in the Jeep, shift into reverse, and back out of the driveway.

  “That numb-nuts forgets to charge his phone,” King said. He closed the window and disappeared inside. A few minutes later he came out the front door wearing an insulated leather bomber jacket with “K C’s American Salvage” sewn on the back. He wore no hat, so his black hair was blowing around his skull in long dark strands. Looking at him, Slocum realized that King Cole was an old man. Slocum wasn’t sure he could do this—he hoped the guy would piss him off and make it easier.

&n
bsp; “I think we need a jump,” Slocum said. “That’ll probably do it.”

  “Why can’t you jump him off what you’re driving?” King Cole asked.

  “We tried, but it didn’t work. Battery’s weak. Got alternator trouble. That’s why I’m leaving it running now.”

  “Sounds all right to me.” Cole opened the door to his tow truck. Before he stepped up, he leaned out and said, “So you giving up driving Jap cars?”

  Slocum moved in. He swung the pipe and hit Cole above the ear, resulting in a dull cracking sound. Cole had a delayed reaction to the news about his skull, and he turned slowly and looked at Slocum. Slocum thought the old man was gathering up some crazy zombie strength to come after him, and he closed his eyes and hit Cole again. The impact made a duller and wetter sound this time, and it knocked Cole down onto the truck’s running board. It wasn’t anything Slocum had done before, hitting a guy with a pipe, but he kept focused on how he and Wanda needed the money and how the bastard had ripped him off.

  “Stay down. Just stay down and give me your money and I won’t hit you again.” Slocum wiped his hands on his jeans, one at a time, still holding the pipe.

  “Where’s Johnny?” King Cole whispered, as he pulled himself up to a kneeling position and clung to the truck seat. He got his arm hooked in the removable cloth seat cover.

  “Just stay down,” Slocum said, but the old man grabbed for the bottom of the steering wheel. Slocum thought about Wanda’s green eyes and her milky skin and the way her arms and legs wrapped around him, how she always had something smart and funny to say, and he hit King Cole a third time, a fourth time, and a fifth time. King fell into the snow and lay still. Blood covered his face, soaked into his beard and into the snow around him. Slocum had never killed a man, and he hadn’t wanted to kill this man, so he thought about buying carts full of groceries for Wanda’s kids and getting them medicine for their ear infections.