M31

by Stephen Wright

  She stepped up to him then, the top of her head just level with his shoulders, and began to beat on his skinny corrugated chest, the pleasure was immediate, the blunt meaty sound, how the skin came up red under her fists, she was inside her body in a new way, the very force of it an enclosing spinning out of which she communicated by beating jungle messages on a gooseflesh drum, three months on the road, three days in this house, prune for a heart. She had never been so serious about hitting, despite the loose arms of the sweatshirt she couldn’t let go of flapping about in comical confusion, she wanted to make marks visible and sore enough to remember for a time and when she finished she whipped the shirt across his face in a last gesture of contempt and charged out of the bathroom, out of the church, out of his life. Zoe bounded up from nowhere, eager as a puppy, a fresh bruise the color of spoiled eggplant decorating one cheek, her dress (the same one as yesterday and the day before that) filthy and dragging kite tails of raggedy material. “No, no,” said Gwen. “You can’t come with me.” The girl stood just out of reach, head tilted at what appeared to be an especially uncomfortable angle, eyes averted. “Do you understand? You have to stay here with your mommy and daddy.” She stood like a robin listening to worms underground. Gwen started across the yard, the girl running about her in wild circles. “No,” she said. “Go. Go home.” As she mounted the bank the girl at last broke away, veering off toward the back of the house, a renegade missile, screeching like a monkey, a sound Gwen was only too glad to leave behind forever. It didn’t matter which direction she chose, road ran two ways, both of them leading straight out. Howl, you rotten kid, maybe someone’ll come out and knock your ratty teeth in.

  She walked rapidly, almost at a run, watching the gravel skip on ahead of her, scattering like thought, then suddenly to look up and around, the eyes into a dizzy roll, nothing to hold them out here in all this terrible flatness and space, like a palsied hand reaching out for support and sliding wheeee! across a sheet of oiled glass. She had to stop for a moment, bent over by the side of the road, arms braced against her knees, waiting for the buzzing to stop. When she turned for a curious last glimpse back, the house had become unexpectedly diminished in size, little more than a dunce-cap triangle of black roof and pointy steeple topped by that ridiculous dish revolving still, searching her out, the whole awful place already too distant to return to, and find the gun and shoot the maniac—she could see herself acting this out in fleshy clarity, how she would look marching back into the church, boots thumping loudly across the floor, right up to his startled pasty face, and raise her arm, carefully memorizing his expression for the rocking chair years, pull the thingamajig, watch his forehead go smash. But there wasn’t a gun because the idiot in the john had lost it on the road somewhere, lost the gun, lost the way, lost the keys, lost her.

  She wiped her eyes on her shirt and went on. The sun burned white and ruthless over silent fields of green haze. Stare too long into this light and you risk corn blindness. But there wasn’t much to look at along the road, either: the flaking orange shell of a battered muffler, the scaly S of a flattened snake, a shredded tire or two. No sign of a vehicle or any hope of one.

  She must have gone miles before happening on her first farmhouse, a strangely stunted two-story affair constructed of randomly alternating bare and painted boards that seemed to tilt slightly forward as if searching anxiously for overdue visitors. Rising out of a knee-high yard on uneven pedestals of gray cinder block was a bleached-blue Datsun truck, swaybacked and wheelless. Mechanical chickens strutted aimlessly along the driveway, pecking at pebbles with amazing persistence. Out back a crumbling barn sagged against the big bullet of a brightly domed silo. In the hot wind the black rooster of a weather vane pointed a black unwavering arrow straight westward, the blades of a windmill were motionless as the hands of a broken clock. In the daylight Gwen recognized nothing, the house hid its identity behind the reflections in its windows. She supposed this was the place where the woman had been in the bath. Where was she now? Where was her husband? Who fed the chickens? Who tended the crops? The country was a mystery she would never penetrate.

  She walked on. What would happen was this: the road would run on into another road and that one or the one after would run out to the ramp of an interstate where she would climb into the first car that stopped and ride until she was told to get out. She had a wad of bills stuffed in her pocket and when that was gone she would improvise.

  Heat hung on her like an ill-fitting suit. Dust clung to the moist skin of her face. Her scissoring legs made a steady rhythm over the ground. Beale and Dash, Dash and Beale, Beale and Dash. She looked up and a point of light clear as one of last night’s stars fallen accidentally out of the darkness streaked at impossible speed across the empty sky exactly parallel to the trembling line of bare horizon. Her mouth began to work as all sorts of possibilities opened up in her head, not least the realization cold and precise: this is not a hallucination. Without the slightest reduction in speed the light executed a crisp ninety-degree turn and headed directly at her. She dropped to her knees, flooded by revelation. The experiment was over, the maze run, here came the extraction. She prayed there would be no pain. Then, almost on her, the light pivoted again and, gracefully banking away, extended a pair of sleek flashing wings on which she read without comprehension the word USA and actually wondered to herself, USA, pronouncing it Oosa, what planet was that? She got up slowly out of the dirt, angry, foolish, relieved. So. The experiment was not over. She wished they’d toss her a few crumbs of cheese now and then, these shocks were getting harder and harder to take.

  She went on. Beale and Dash, Dash and Beale, Deale and Bash.

  She heard a car approaching from behind and turned, already offering a hopeful thumb. It was the blue Bug. She bolted off the shoulder, skidded down a steep grassy bank, hopped a stagnant ditch, and threw herself into a six-foot-high wall of solid corn. She came out on the other side in a tropical nightmare of green humidity, thrashing her way down a dense endless aisle of sharp leaves that slapped and cut her hands and face, stumbling on hard dry clods of dirt until the momentum that had carried her deep into the stifling heart of the land burned to vapor and she lost her balance and went sprawling down into the baked earth, one raw ear pressed up against a crack in the sod. She listened. It whispered, just as Maryse had promised. It whispered. “Gweeeeeen,” it called in an old raspy woman’s voice, “Gweeeeeen.” She lay still, face flushed and wet, panting like a dog, and transfixed by her first close-up view of the bizarre stiltlike structure of a corn root, it looked like it could break loose and walk away. “Gweeeeeen.” There was only one voice, and it kept moving around. A drop of sweat slid off the tip of her nose and disappeared into the dry ground. The voice called and called, quite serious apparently about receiving an answer. Under her for the first time she felt the earth, a solid thing, a big thing, a thing of being. This was you dead. “Gweeeeeen, Gweeeeeen.” Her name squeaked through her like the sound of a mausoleum door. But as she listened she became gradually aware that this voice that would not stop was a voice she knew. She struggled to her feet. “What?” she cried. “Where are you?” answered the voice. “I’m coming,” shouted Gwen, pushing her body between the flapping stalks. When she emerged at last into open sunlight she saw Trinity far away down the road, peering off into the dense field. There was a moment of hesitation when she could have taken one short step backward and disappeared into the landscape, but there was something in Trinity’s attitude and look that held her until it was too late.

  “Oh, there you are,” she cried, smiling easily at her mistake. “God, I was sure you were down here somewhere.” She approached Gwen, the soles of her boots crunching along the gravel shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” A wary smile flitted across Gwen’s features. “I think so.”

  Trinity laughed. “You don’t look all right.”

  Gwen turned her head aside. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Why don�
��t we get into the car?”

  “I’m not going back, so don’t think you can get me back because I’m not going.”

  “Okay with me, I’m no cop. Why don’t we just get in the car, cruise around, and we’ll go wherever you want to go, all right?”

  “Take me to the interstate.”

  “Fine.”

  The inside of the car was as hot as an attic. Gwen angled the window vent toward her, aiming the wind right into her face. It felt so cleansing, as if dirty pieces of her were being blasted off.

  “I’m supposed to tell you how concerned everyone is, especially Beale.”

  “Then why didn’t he come with you?”

  “He wanted to, of course, but Dash has got him involved in some sort of intense discussion. You know how Dash is.”

  Yes. Gwen stared out on the passing scene. For her it was always passing, no matter what it might be. Suddenly the night in the parking lot opened up before her, unfolding out of the blazing center of the day, and for one long nearly unendurable instant the asphalt was cold and hard against her frantic shrinking from the light, a huge bright shower of light and she gripped the handle on the dashboard so she would not fall. She looked at Trinity and the door of the glove compartment popped magically open, spilling pretty maps of the states across her lap.

  “Are you all right?”

  The story came out in a rush, the confusions of the night, awareness rising up and sinking down, dream pictures of actual events outside her head, the loss of motor function, the weight on her chest, the flight of the moon.

  Trinity kept her eyes on the road, saying nothing.

  This time Gwen heard herself telling the story, and sometimes what she heard sounded odd. She doesn’t believe me, either, she thought, and began to cry.

  Trinity looked over at her. “We’ve got to get you two out of here,” she said. She sounded worried.

  Up ahead black shapes started lifting up out of the fields, familiar angles and planes. Gwen’s head began to shake back and forth. “No,” she said firmly. “No.”

  “I think there’s some Kleenex in the glove compartment,” said Trinity. “Listen, it’s all right, no one’s going to touch you, okay? Trust me.”

  “You’ve already lied once,” said Gwen, sniffling into a ball of wet tissue.

  “Yes.” She smiled. “But I didn’t know it at the time.”

  They came bumping into the backyard and stopped, the bug-splattered windshield filled with the sight of a grimacing Dallas down on one knee, arm locked around Beale’s struggling neck, seeming to squeeze the blood out of his mangled mouth. Dash stood to one side, observing, the indulgent parent, faintly amused.

  Gwen leaped from the car, screaming, “What’s this?!” her face a violent red, veins swelling into plastic tubes, buzzsaw voice louder even than Zoe’s. “What’s this, huh? What’s this?!”

  She ran up, arms flailing as if herding pigs out of the pen. Everyone, including Beale, looked over in surprise. When no one moved or spoke she spun around and bolted for the house.

  “What’s the matter with her?” asked Dash.

  Trinity followed without replying. Gwen was already in the john behind the locked door. Maryse’s head poked from the top of The Object. “What’s wrong with her?”

  There were loud shouts from outside. “She thinks Dash raped her last night.”

  “Oh God.”

  Wreathed in a tangle of uncombed curls, Dot’s sleep-pressed face thrust itself around the doorjamb. “This slamming?” she barked gruffly.

  “Gwen,” replied Trinity. “She went to the john. She’s upset.”

  “Might have known. Girl lives in the toilet.” Dot disappeared. Then her door slammed, too.

  Trinity and Maryse looked at one another in resigned silence. Trinity spoke. “What’s with the wrestling?”

  “Oh, that.” The lines of Maryse’s mouth lengthened and thinned. “Some kind of loud and ridiculous boy scene. One said one thing, another said another, then they yelled and ran outside. I think it was something about the beer.”

  For a moment Trinity felt herself drastically reduced in size, an injection molded figurine in a cardboard house whose giant owner might be glimpsed at one of the paneless windows, straw hair tied in stiff paintbrush braids, eyes enormous, round, noon blue, and glassy as ice. She looked at Maryse. “I think it’s time to go on a trip.”

  “Oh goody, I’m going, too.”

  Inside the bathroom Gwen stood, too cranked up to sit, holding on to a towel rack, forehead against the wall, trying to recall something useful she had read in a book once, a couple lines of Zen nonsense resting at the bottom of a page under a bowl of inky plums, you are not you, you have no face, bad thoughts come and go like clouds across the mirror, keep the mirror polished bright, or something like that. Yes. Better than a towel rack. Certainly she could imagine a mirror, she could imagine clouds, drifting thick and deeply shadowed, blue and gray and black, billowing, bunching, speaking to one another across strokes of fire. It began to rain. The night, the light, the moon, the dish ran away with the spoon.

  She jumped at the furious rattle of the doorknob.

  “Who’s in there?” Beale demanded angrily.

  She pulled back the bolt.

  “So,” he said, forcing himself in past her, “you came back.”

  “Yeah, I did. What happened to you?”

  “What does it look like?” He leaned his bloody face in toward the mirror, inspecting the damage. “I got cut.”

  “Let me see.” She turned his sweaty head into the light. He yelped and pulled away. She wet a stiff musty-smelling cloth and dabbed it gently under his nose. “What were you two fighting about?”

  “I don’t know.” He pushed her hand away and touched the lip himself. He winced. “I think he’s crazy.”

  “They’re all crazy.” She caught an unexpected glimpse of herself in the dark glass. She looked like someone she wouldn’t want to know.

  “He’s been after me since we got here. Jesus, look at this, do you think I need stitches?”

  When she didn’t answer he turned around. She was watching the water drip into the rusty sink, one, two, three. She looked up. “What?”

  He went back to studying himself. “This is great. You’ve been raped and I’ve been beat up. What a pair.” He laughed at their reflected images. “And Etherians were supposed to be such gentle peace-loving folk.”

  Water gathered in the ring of the faucet tip, a clear trembling bubble that bulged and broke, releasing the drops in measured succession pop, pop, pop, into the stained enamel sink, logical, inevitable, musical. Her voice was soft and even. “Why don’t you kill them?”

  “Hah, hah, yeah, well, the gun, there’s a problem with the gun, problem being there seems not to be one anymore, like it’s plumb disappeared or sprouted legs and walked off or maybe someone found it accidentally and accidentally put it in his pocket. You know he jumped me from behind when I went outside looking for you. Think I got him a good one in the eye, though. Hope I did, anyway.”

  “Why?” she asked in a near whisper. Down the dark drain dropped the lonely drips.

  “Why? ’Cause he was choking the hell out of my throat, that’s why.”

  There was a long silence. Then she said, “No. Why’d he jump you?”

  “He’s nuts. Look at the sister. Who can figure any of these people? He and Dash are in the kitchen eating waffles and I go in to find out if anybody knows where you went and we talk, everyone real friendly, and I go out and suddenly he’s on top of me, biting my ear. So then Dash comes out and just stands there gaping like a fool. Christ, look at my face.”

  His upper lip had swollen into an ugly pink larval thing, beard hairs bristling in every direction like poisoned barbs.

  “Listen, here’s what we’ll do. You stay right here, don’t go out, don’t let anyone in. I’m gonna go talk to the little fucker and then we’ll leave, okay? Once we get out we’ll stop in town and send the cops back. But first I
gotta find out what happened to my gun. Don’t let anyone in, okay?”

  She nodded her head. Whatever. Securing the door behind him, she perched on the edge of the toilet seat and thought again about being a mirror. The best she could manage was a ghostly replica of an aluminum plate. Suddenly she leaned forward, staring at the wall. There was a small hole she had never noticed before bored through the side of the house. When she looked into it, she could see part of the yard, the road, the bracketing corn. She imagined Dash standing out there, hands in his pockets, eyeball twisting around in the wall like a separate creature. A bile-colored cloud settled heavily onto her aluminum plate. The night, the light, the moon, memory shuffling, reshuffling the same old greasy deck in which all the suits had been replaced by murky rectangles depicting not just the previous night but all her famous nights, the one in the parking lot, the one on the beach, the one in Mechanicsville, the one in etcetera, etcetera, and all the face cards reduced to two: grinning Men in the Moon and glossy left-profile mug shots of her.

  A quick tap on the door. “It’s me.” She got up and let Beale in. “They’re gone,” he announced excitedly. “Dash took off in the car somewhere, Dallas just left to go visit some stupid friend of his down the road, one of those houses you looked at last night. So here’s the plan. You stay here, get all our gear ready to go, and I’m gonna try to catch up with him.” He moved in close to the mirror. “God, I look like hell.” He pressed his fingers gingerly to his lip. “Ow. I’m not even gonna be able to chew for a couple of days. Shit, I can’t believe he did this to me.”

  Gwen was looking at herself in the glass and didn’t realize he was finished. “Oh,” she said, glancing up at him. “Yes, I’ll do that.”

  He frowned and winced and was gone. She stepped out blinking into the big sunny room, bright dust falling like snow through great diagonal planes of lemon light. The sun broke across the curving metallic surface of The Object into a hundred twinkling stars that whispered urgently to one another in human voices. There were people inside. She picked up Beale’s dirty clothes off the floor, stuffed them in his pack, and got down on her knees and began rolling up his large unwieldy sleeping bag. The cat, licking whiskers tough as fishing line, ambled out of the kitchen to rub its soft hairy flanks against her leg. The telephone rang with a shattering abruptness. Trinity climbed out of The Object. “Oh hi, you feeling any better?” She picked up the phone, listened for a moment, then carefully placed the receiver down on the splintered windowsill. She smiled pleasantly at Gwen and climbed back inside The Object. The cat purred. The black receiver lay on its side as if stricken in a pool of liquid sun, emitting the muffled squawks of a parrot in a curtained cage.