by Amy Hempel
” Kenny snaps his head around. As if he’s not watched Dell all the way up the drive, didn’t have him and Becky at the end of the guitar case when they stepped up onto the deck. Kenny stares at Dell a hard five seconds, working a little his mouth. His eyes ringed dark, his face caved so the bones stand in peaks, and his silver hair slicked, he reminds Dell of a chicken-coon cross. The eyes slide off Dell’s. Kenny pivots back to his vigil.
“Done got that side.” He swings his free hand to the left. “Done got that side.” Flings it past his face to the right. “Done got all that behind, and now they’re coming after the front side, too. Gonna burn me and her out and blast right up under the house.”
Behind Kenny’s back, Becky raises her eyebrows and nods, See? Dell ignores her. He saunters across the persimmon-colored carpet into the kitchen, where he takes a place at the table so he can watch Kenny across the living room. Everything Dell does, he does noisier than usual, including an exaggerated sigh of contentment when he settles into the chair. Kenny does not turn around.
“Can I get you a cup of coffee, Dell?” Becky asks, like she always does, her overloud too. At least she’s quick enough to remember her lines.
“Oh, yes, please.” Dell booms. “Don’t mind if I do.”
“Black, right?” Becky asks.
“Black’s right,” says Dell. “Like my pap always said, ‘Drink it black, or don’t drink it at all.’”
On the little TV next to the microwave, Rachael Ray’s whipping up some kind of Mexican dish. Dell thanks Becky for his coffee, and she sits across the table with her own, sugaring it heavy enough for a cake. Then they commence the pretending-to-watch the show, each sipping slow, now and again making a comment to each other for normalcy’s sake. Both with an ear, an eye, constant-cocked to Kenny.
Dell can remember when Kenny’s whole family had to live in this one room, the kids doing their homework on sawhorses. How Doria’d hung Christmas decorations on the insulation the December before they got the drywall up. Kenny built the house little by little, whenever he had the money, and Dell’d helped him off and on until he’d get sick of being bossed and take a break for a while. He always came back, usually after Kenny called and asked him to drive up and see some new tool or piece of equipment he’d got, which was as close as Kenny could come to an apology.
Dell sneaks a full-on look at Kenny. He can feel that it’s still too soon.
Becky refills his cup. He’d had to ask Jason many times to show him the houses that he built before Jason finally did, one time about a year ago. A subdivision, Jason explained, an old horse farm split up. He and Jason glided in Jason’s new Ford Explorer over fresh-paved streets through acre after acre of immaculate vacant homes, bulked up and bulging on undersized lots. The streets deliberately unstraight, snake-tailing into dead ends that made no sense, the area everywhere treeless, hill-less. Until Dell, despite how he’d looked forward to this, despite his pride in what his boy did—build things—started to get carsick for the first time in sixty years. He had to ask Jason to stop. By this time, they’d reached the outermost ring of the maze, where houses still under construction stood half-naked in their pressed woodchip skins, their Tyvek wraps. Dell stepped out and breathed deep: odor of raw lumber, fresh-poured concrete, and something chemical he could not name. He looked over his shoulder, expecting Jason behind him. Jason sat in the Explorer, fooling with his cellphone.
Dell hits the bottom of his second cup. Usually that signals that the wait’s been long enough. He glances at Becky. She opens her hands in an I-don’t-know. So Dell reaches toward Kenny, not with his body, not with his hands, but with the how-long-he’s-known-Kenny—that’s what he uses to catch where Kenny’s at. But still Dell can’t tell, and if he starts too early, Kenny won’t play. Dell goes on and risks it.
“Hey, Kenny,” he calls, forcing a casualness in his tone. “I hear you all been getting some real bad shakes up here.” Dell waits. Kenny does not move. Dell swallows. “I don’t see no cracks, though.”
He waits again. The poodle tumbles off the chair and disappears. Then Dell does feel it off Kenny—a stiff ripple up his back, a prickling above his ears. Without turning from the window, without the slightest stir of his head, Kenny sneers, “Ha. Look there. Above the refrigerator. See there?”
Dell lifts his face, squints, and frowns, even though the cracks are as visible as the grandchildren’s coloring book pages on the freezer door. “Huh. I can’t see nothing,” Dell says.
For some seconds, the only sound is Becky’s fist, a sushing against the denim of her thigh. Then Kenny blurts breath in disgust. He thrusts the wheelchair back and heaves himself to his feet, hobbles a step or two, unstiffening. Then he stomps across the living room without a limp.
“Right there, you blind ole sumbitch. Right there. See where I tried to patch it up, bought that stuff from Lowe’s? See what a sorry job I did, trying to patch it together?”
Becky vanishes like the poodle. Dell squints deeper. “Oh. Okay. Yeah.” He nods slowly. “I see it.” He gets to his feet, Kenny right up beside him now, wagging the guitar case back and forth from his waist, and Dell can smell the aftershave heavy on him. Dell reaches up on tiptoe, gritting his teeth against the old pain that lightnings down his right leg, and runs his fingers along the splits. “That is sorry.”
“You never seen such shaking, buddy, the night that ceiling busted open.” And now Kenny is going. “Here we was, just setting eating supper, had a big pitcher of ice tea there in the middle, and they set one off”—he leaps back, throws out his arms, the guitar case slamming into the door frame—“blew that pitcher clear up off the table. And she didn’t tip, boys, she didn’t tip, but tea sloshed out all over ever’thing. Spoilt our spaghetti.” He swings the guitar case at the back wall. “Got them windows, too, that time. But I done replaced those.”
“It’s terrible.” Dell shakes his head, freshly mournful and shocked, as though they’ve not already had this exchange eight times, ten. “It’s just terrible.” Then he cocks his head, studies the cracks more intently. He spreads his thumb and first finger to take the measure of one. “Huh. But I think I seen bigger cracks than these down at Charlie’s.” He nods thoughtfully. “Yeah. Believe I did. And over at Miz Reynolds’, too, come to think of it.”
Kenny starts working his mouth, his teeth rabbitting his bottom lip. The eyes seem to steam; Dell can see the wet glow. Finally Kenny snorts. “You did, huh? You did?” He reels away, the case grazing Dell’s arm, and marches into the hall. “Well, you follow me. You just follow me.”
Dell does. Kenny is heading for the fractures behind the photos in the hall, skipping both the living room and the garage. The tour is going so fast that Dell wonders, like he did last time—that tour shortened, too—how much Kenny is truly led on and how much he’s performing, exactly like Dell and Becky are. “See here? My sheetrock?” Kenny has unhooked the picture of his son Roger in his high school football uniform, and the one of him and Becky getting married, and he thumps the wall with his palm. “Here how I tried to paper it back over?” “Yeah,” Dell is commiserating, “I see what you mean, them ones are deeper than Charlie’s,” and as he says that, he’s cramming down the other, what he dares not think in words but what boils up anyway, forcing itself through the cracks: that maybe, just maybe, the tour will shorten and shorten, until . . .
Then Kenny speaks again, his voice dropping to a husk: “And I got something else to show you, buddy. Here in the bedroom.” He twitches his shoulder back toward the kitchen, and for the first time all morning, he grins. “Not even she don’t know yet,”
The half hope drops out of Dell like a trapdoor in his gut. His face heats, his fists curl—he did think it, did jinx—but still he follows. He tails Kenny into the room, the air close and slept-in, Dell cringing with the queasiness he always feels in other people’s rooms with beds unmade. Kenny is already in the closet, thrusting aside clothes on their hangers, and he calls, “Lookee there, Dell.”
Dell looks. A dim, cream-colored wall.
“I don’t see nothing, Kenny.” He says it in his normal voice. Not the pumped-up playacting one. Not the one that goes along.
Kenny drops the guitar case, whips his free arm up, and jerks a cord. A bare bulb in the ceiling snaps on. “See there?” Kenny’s voice is both soft and shrill. He is looking past Dell, to make sure, Dell knows, that Becky has not sneaked in. “Them scorch marks on the wall.”
The wall shines bare in the harsh light. Dell does not speak.
“That’s where they got it set. They test-runned her the other night, just to see how it worked. Left them marks there.” Kenny lowers his arm, the hangers clashing back into place, picks up the case, and shuts the closet door, gently. He leans forward from his hips toward Dell’s ear. Dell’s arms pimple. “They got a three-mile-long fuse, Dell. End of it laid right under my bedroom.”
Dell feels himself falling away. Kenny shrinking before him, although neither of them has moved, the distance widening, a rushing noise come in. Kenny seen across a featureless gray field. For twenty years, they strip-mined together—contour jobs, peeling the sides off hills. They’d both worked underground first. And after years in tunnels, what it meant to get up on top, nothing about to fall on you, the machines doing all the heavy work, no more black dust. To be up out of the dark. And they’d been proud of what they did, they made America’s electricity, they kept on the lights. The money they earned raised their kids comfortable, like they deserved—way beyond how him and Kenny’d come up—refurbished Dell’s old company house to modern, built Kenny’s from the foundation up.
But to blow the top off a mountain. It wasn’t like this here. Still, by now Dell understands the little hole inside him, boring down, down, farther than he knew he went, yearning always to be plugged. And all Dell can do is pull a screen across it.
Then the distance dissolves, and Kenny is regular-sized before him again. Dell hears himself speak.
“How’s your bathroom holding up, buddy?”
Dell closes the door at the end of the hall behind them. He squeezes past Kenny and sags down onto the lip of the tub, twists on the spigots and lets the water run hard, his hand in the gush. Kenny’s clapped the commode shut and dropped his guitar case again, which skitters against the metal trash can and drives it into Dell’s leg. The temperature right, Dell stops the drain and sits studying the vinyl tile on the wall. He can feel Kenny behind him almost as certain as a touch, sitting on the toilet unlacing his boots—thinking what, Dell never knows. Only when the tub’s full and Dell cuts off the water does Kenny stand and start to fumble with his clothes. The soft plomp on the floor, the clank of the belt buckle. Like he always does, he comes to the tub edge with his boxers still on.
Dell rises and takes Kenny’s upper arm, a little rough. A helping hand, not a petting hand, not a comforting one. Kenny gets his leg over the rim, and Dell eases him down until he sits slumped in the water, his arms around his knees. All the muscle in his back has fled to a pile of sags at his waist. His skin is colored like a speckled cold grease.
That time Dell’d visited Jason a year ago, the time they’d gone out to the construction site, Kenny hadn’t stopped him before he left, but Dell’d had to cut a five-day stay two days short. Becky’d called at eleven at night, swearing she’d spent since noon trying to get Kenny to himself, oh, she was terribly sorry, but where else could she turn? Dell had to sleep first. He was way too old to make an eight-hour drive in the middle of the night after playing with his grandbabies all day. He had set his alarm for four.
When he woke, he feared at first he’d overslept, light as it was outside, until he understood it was the condo complex’s security lights. He’d never driven in northern Virginia before dawn, and as he loaded the Metro under floodlights, there stirred in him an uneasiness mingled with awe. Then he was passing under the streetlights that canopied the suburb’s four-lane main drag; the gas stations, office buildings, stores, sidewalks, and the street itself were completely peopleless, him the single car, and all of it, every-where, lit bright as an emergency room.
Dell’s shoulders were hunched, the wheel was dampening under his hand—when, suddenly, the light turned to sound. The strip malls first—they burst into roar, a crowd in his head—and then the box stores, Target and Home Depot and Sam’s, them louder yet, squalling and hollering bald blares of light. Among them the fast-food places, Wendy’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, Sonic, each shrieking light, and then the quaint and quietful places—coffee shops, boutiques. Dell heard them, too, hissing their squander of light.
He was speeding now, his eyes cramped to just enough pavement to let him safely drive, his body braced, his heart held. And then he was out and onto the highway, hurtling south and west, toward home, his body easing, his breath coming catch-up in his chest—when he heard, from the near distance in what used to be fields, the wailing flare of subdivisions, each one, he knew, either uninhabited or asleep. Yet each one haloed in a great conflagration of light.
In the corner of the tub sits a tall plastic Go-Mart cup Becky keeps there for the purpose. Dell reaches for it, sinks it into the bath, and lifts it full, water dribbling into his pushed-up sleeve. He looks at Kenny’s back, and for a second, Dell knows the chill of Kenny’s bare skin, and for that second, a tenderness spears him. Dell banks it down. He tips the cup. Water sluices over Kenny’s spine. Dell dips again, lifts, and pours. Again. And again. Sloshed water dabbling his knees, an old hurt wrenching his shoulder. Until Kenny starts to come back to himself.
Ann Pancake is a native of West Virginia. Her books include the short story collection Given Ground and the novel Strange as This Weather Has Been.
Arsonists” was inspired by the mysterious burning in the late 1990s of a town below a mountaintop removal mine in Logan County, West Virginia, and an interview an activist from North Carolina and I did with a retired coal miner. This man’s home was surrounded on three sides by a mountaintop removal mine, and although his intestines had been ruined by his runoff-poisoned well, his mind was sound. I sat there on his couch drinking black coffee with a chihuahua named Cupcake huddled behind my back and marvelled at the blast cracks on his ceilings and walls. He looked at me and said, “It’s like living with a gun to your head and you never know when the man’s gonna pull the trigger.” I thought about what it’d do to your brain if you lived like that too long.
Aaron Gwyn
DRIVE
(from The Gettysburg Review)
They were driving back from Wewoka Lake on the narrow stretch of blacktop east of town. They’d been fighting all morning, and she’d been drinking all morning, and now she was drunk. He didn’t think she was pretty when she was drunk. Her face turned red and rigid. She was sitting in the passenger seat of the Charger, staring out her window, and he’d turned the radio off so he could think. All his thoughts were mean and desperate. He couldn’t get them to stop circling. They hit the straightaway right after the curve by the brick plant, trees on both sides, the black oaks leaning so that the road seemed like a tunnel, and the light inside it a strobe of shadow and sun.
His hands were twitching. He was sober. He didn’t think he’d been more sober, and looking at things, clear headed as he was, he felt like it was finished. They’d never have kids, get married. They’d never have a lot of things, and when he thought about starting over with another one, something inside him seemed to fall. He didn’t know what it was. His sternum felt frozen. There was a cool ache in his throat. He tried to clear it, but he couldn’t.
The sun seemed to dim.
A van met them and slipped past. Then a pickup and trailer. He could see the sun reflect off the glass of another about half a mile away, coming their direction, and when the glint of it hit his eyes, he went cold and numb. He couldn’t feel his fingers or face. It was like his hands belonged to someone else. They gripped the wheel at ten and two, and he watched them tighten and the knuckles go white, and then he watched, as if on a monit
or, them steer the car into the oncoming lane. Jill didn’t seem to notice. She probably thought he was trying to pass. But then he started accelerating, up from sixty to seventy to eighty-five, and right before the truck coming toward them began flashing its lights, she glanced up, and then over.
She said, “Jesus Christ, Jimmy! What in the fuck?”
He looked at her. He felt very calm.
When he looked back to the road, the truck coming toward them had begun to brake, and they were about a hundred yards away. He bore down on the pedal and clenched his jaw. He could feel his back teeth grinding. He didn’t know what he wanted. He felt like he was floating or coasting. He felt like his mind was stripped bare, low to the ground and gliding fast. Right as Jill began to scream, the approaching pickup swerved into the opposite lane and went past in a blur of paint and chrome and a Dopplering of horn blasts and squealing tires.
She was saying, “My God.” She was saying it over and over. She wouldn’t look at him, and when he glanced at her, her face was completely drained of blood, and she was shaking.
He pulled into the right-hand lane, and when he turned into the driveway ten minutes later, feeling had returned to his hands and face, and he could sense his body. Jill was motionless, mute. She was staring at the console in front of her, the glove compartment. In it was a signature series Dan Wesson .357, five of the chambers loaded with Black Talons. She knew he kept it there. He leaned over and hit the compartment release, took out the gun and holster, and then got out and went up the walk to the house. He fumbled with the lock a moment and then he was inside and through the living room and up the hallway to the bedroom. He walked over to the dresser on his side of the bed, opened the drawer, and buried the pistol under a pile of socks. He sat there and tried to think. His skin was tingling. He decided he’d put the gun back before work in the morning. He decided he needed something to drink.