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Refresh, Refresh: Stories Page 15

by Benjamin Percy


  He has had enough of winter and enough of his job. He works in the Investment Products Department of Northwestern Mutual. Every day, alongside his coffee and bacon, he gulps down his Lipitor and Ramipril pills and drives to work in an egg-shaped Windstar minivan and settles into a windowless office that smells like carpet glue and doughnut glaze. On the wall hangs a diploma from OSU, and next to it, one of those motivational posters that across its bottom reads, DREAM. Above the word a dolphin leaps out of the sea, carving an arc through the sunset.

  Here, in his orthopedic leather chair, he drinks Diet Pepsi after Diet Pepsi while talking to clients, reviewing accounts, typing up contracts and refiguring investment units, taking conference calls with financial representatives, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the IRS. He keeps his Internet browser open to the New York Stock Exchange. His eyes track its numbers, so many numbers, their black shapes swarming through his head like a stirred ant pile. All day long he speaks of things looking bullish and bearish, of tax implications, late trading, market timing. He so often says, “Effective with the close of business this afternoon” or, “Effective at the close of the following business day” that in his mouth the words have taken on a rolling rhythm and become a sort of song.

  He needs to get away.

  Consider this. The other day his doorbell rang at 4:00 a.m. When he went to answer it, his boxer shorts hastily tugged on backwards, his bathrobe billowing open in the cold winter air, he found a policeman waiting for him.

  “Do you own a white minivan?” the policeman asked. His eyes were narrow and his shoulders were dirty with snow.

  After a foggy second, John told him yes, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Yes, he did. Why? Had it been stolen?

  No, the policeman said. It hadn’t been stolen. It had been left running. During the night he had driven through the neighborhood several times, each time noticing the cloud of smoke blasting from the tailpipe.

  The policeman moved aside, allowing John to brush by him and step onto the porch. And there, in the driveway, next to the police cruiser, sat his car. Its tank had burned through its fuel. Its headlights glowed weakly under a scrim of snow.

  John scratched the back of his head in the way of embarrassed men. “I’ll be,” he said. “I must have—when I came home from work, you see, I was going to jump back in the car—I left the engine running—I was going to go to the supermarket—and I must have—since I decided not to—forgot.”

  The policeman removed a flashlight from his belt and clicked it on and studied John a moment before saying, “Are you feeling all right, sir?” with “all right” seeming like a substitute for drunk.

  “Yes.” John raised a hand to shield his face from the light. “I’m fine. Everything is perfectly fine.”

  His doctor—a gaunt man with white wisps of hair combed carefully across his scalp—tells him a different story. “You’re fifty pounds overweight. Your blood sugar is all over the place. Your systolic pressure clocks in at 150 mm Hg.”

  His doctor sits in a chair with his legs crossed and a clipboard in his lap. Aside from his mouth moving he remains perfectly still, like a propped-up cadaver. “Do you know what that means, John?”

  John sits across from him, his legs hanging off the examination table. He doesn’t wear a shirt and his belly rests in his lap like a garbage bag full of warm milk. In response to the doctor’s question his shoulders rise and fall in a shrug.

  “To top it off.” The doctor consults the clipboard. “Your triglycerides are up to 260 and your LDL is up to 330.” He doesn’t say these numbers as most would—in quick bursts—as two-sixty, three-thirty. He instead draws them out, laying heavy emphasis on the hundred.

  There is a disapproving silence that John interrupts by shifting his weight, the sanitary paper beneath him crinkling. He tries to find something to concentrate on besides the doctor and settles on his hands, his wrists. He imagines a thin yellow gravy rushing through their pipe-work.

  The doctor continues: “I’m only half-joking when I say I have obese seventy-year-olds with numbers not much different than these.”

  John tries to sound cheerful but his voice comes out sounding like it has a bad back: “I don’t feel old. I don’t feel age.”

  This is a lie. His eyes are black-bagged with exhaustion. His joints feel like pockets of broken glass. The staircase to the second floor of his house leaves him out of breath. His penis, when erect, droops like a scythe.

  Because of his belly, the weight of it, his wife, Linda, prefers to be on top. Lately, inevitably, he slips out of her—and they either give up, if she can’t push his softness back inside her, or she makes him finish her with his mouth.

  “I don’t feel old,” he says and his doctor recognizes the lie by bringing together his white eyebrows and scraping his teeth across his lip. “I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. You must begin eating better, exercising more, working less.” For each of these things he taps his finger against the clipboard.

  “Or?”

  The doctor gives him a tight smile. “Or.” He slowly lifts his hand to his neck and makes a slitting motion.

  Mid-March his wife, a fifth-grade teacher, has spring break—and John has saved up his vacation days to correspond with hers. They will be staying in Depoe Bay, at the Inn at Otter Crest, a mossy-roofed gray-sided hotel that hangs over a cliff hanging over the ocean.

  There is something about the ocean. All that blue-green water stretching off into the horizon, uncluttered by flashing lights and concrete buildings and ringing phones. The way you can bring binoculars to your eyes and find, without looking very hard at all, a humpback or a gray whale breaking the surface of the water—a long black U sliding in and out of sight. And the waves roll over with a boom and sizzle their foamy white tongues along the sand. And the spume lifts off the water—and the wind smells of salt and algae—and he could spend all day crouching beside tide pools filled with bright-colored anemones, crabs, urchins.

  It’s always been that way for him. Nights, when he plops down on the couch and cracks open a can of Coors and sips from it, he often watches the Discovery Channel. He likes to see the sharks darting through schools of tuna, the squids blackening the water with their ink, the whales calling to one another. He likes to imagine himself floating someplace deep underwater, an underworld where fish would slither over his back and brush by his belly, where hunger would be his only concern.

  Next to his bed he keeps a sound machine. It has all sorts of different settings. Birds chirping. Frogs drumming. Thunder booming. Waves crashing. And he keeps it tuned in to this, the ocean setting. It’s on a timer so that for fifteen minutes every night waves turn over next to his head, easing him into sleep. His wife complains that the waves don’t sound like waves at all—they sound like paper torn slowly, she says—but to him they sound like the most beautiful thing in the world.

  He doesn’t know why he feels this way, just as he doesn’t know why he used to eat dirt as a toddler. Certain people just feel drawn to certain things. And for him the ocean represents a kind of afterlife. The mere thought of it—the days he ticks off the calendar as his vacation time approaches—helps get him through his workweek. His dreams are there. Lost hopes and romantic possibilities and forgotten memories are there. Peace is there. Everything missing, everything he can’t explain about his life, is there, washed up on the sand.

  Which is why, the day before they leave for Depoe Bay, when Linda calls him into the living room and bumps up the volume on the television and points to the screen where the Portland weatherman talks about a major storm system moving toward Puget Sound, the slight possibility of it sliding south and coming to a head against the Oregon coast, he says, “So?” with some hatefulness in his voice.

  “I think we should cancel,” she says. “I don’t think we should go.”

  “We’re going.”

  “There’s a 24-hour cancellation fee. That means we’ve only got—” she glances at her watch for emphasis
“—another couple hours.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “What if it isn’t? Some vacation that will be. Sitting inside some moldy motel room all day. We could go to my mother’s instead. I’d really like to see her. She’s so lonely these days.”

  “Linda.” Here he holds up his hand as if to block the words coming from her mouth. “I said it’ll be fine and it’ll be fine.”

  The next day they drive toward the wall of the Cascades. John can barely make out the mountains from the sky, the mountains covered in snow and the sky full of slow-moving clouds. Sagebrush lines Highway 20. Their white huddled shapes remind him of the ghosts of dwarves. He is happy to see them go, when near Sisters the trees thicken and the road steepens and the Windstar begins its slow crawl up the Cascades, toward the saddle-shaped dip between the North Sister and Mt. Jefferson that will mark the beginning of their descent into the Willamette Valley, where spring has already started.

  Snow falls. Old-growth firs—sixty-, seventy-feet tall—loom close to the road and the snow weighs down their branches so heavily that blobs of white fall and splat against the minivan’s windshield, swept away a moment later by the wipers. The wind blows, pushing the minivan toward the centerline. Ice crystals rise in whorls off the drifts and the sun catches them and makes them glitter.

  Every now and then a blue sign will appear—advertising the Metolious River Recreation Area, the Hoodoo Ski Bowl—and a road will branch off the highway, a quick glimpse down it revealing cross-country skiers, snowshoers, snowmobilers, people dressed in bright-colored parkas from REI, people who spend so much time in ski goggles they have raccoon-like tans, people who enjoy winter. John doesn’t understand them.

  Semis park along the shoulder to put on chains. Enormous plows, like prehistoric beetles, scrape the snow from the road with their broad steel shovels and drop cinders behind them, making the road appear dusted with paprika, helping tires find purchase on the slick asphalt.

  Linda yells at him, tells him he’s going too fast. And he is. He can’t seem to help it, his foot weighed down by the desire to leave all this behind.

  Eventually they rise over the hump of the Cascades and follow the long winding highway down and down and down—and then something happens, the changes begin. The water begins to run off the icicles and the ice in the river breaks apart and glimpses of green emerge from the snowdrifts and eventually take over. He notices leaves unfurling from the branches of the oaks and ash and maple, and among them, clusters of trillium and bloodroot and white wild onions. Songbirds flutter between the trees.

  He turns off the heat. He rolls down the window and lets in a warm wind. Two hours and he feels as though he has fast-forwarded two months. It’s nice.

  He can hear her voice, but barely, like an alarm heard through the mist of a dream. Then she hits him, a punch to the shoulder, and at this he jerks his head to look at her, his eyebrows shooting up as if to say, What was that, honey?

  “I said I have to pee. I said so twenty minutes ago.” Tall and sinewy, she is forty-seven and looks it, her pale skin dotted with age spots and finely lined with wrinkles. Under each of her eyes there is a purple patch. Today she wears a green hooded sweater, blue jeans that taper at the bottom, white tennis shoes. She has a bony nose. Her hair is the color of dead leaves.

  “So we’ll stop,” he says.

  “That’s what I said. I said get in the right lane or you’ll miss the turn, is what I said.” She points emphatically at a roadside sign that reads, Rest Stop, 1 Mile Ahead. She rolls up her magazine, one of those women’s magazines, as if to strangle it. “Jesus, do you ever listen?”

  He cannot recall the last time he felt in love with her. Not that he doesn’t love her now. It’s just a different sort of love. Not that in-love love, that falling-off-a-cliff feeling that used to exist between them. He remembers how, so long ago, before they fell into the rhythms of their careers, before middle age bowed their backs and thinned their hair, Saturday mornings, she would wake him up with her hand—and afterwards, they would shower together, not minding the coldness and awkwardness that came with shifting their bodies beneath the thin stream of water. The cup of her elbow, the hollowed-out dip behind her knee, he remembers those places, how he would run his tongue along them and how their salty flavor and their pearly color reminded him of the soft mantle of an oyster shell.

  Then she would cook breakfast in the nude, a damp towel wrapped around her head like a turban. The bacon would hiss and sputter and occasionally she would shout when a bit of grease popped off the pan and left a red spot on her belly, her thigh. And he would sit on the couch, jogging his eyes between the newspaper and the ripe curves of her body.

  He remembers her like this: with a window behind her, and beyond it, a birch tree with the light filtering through its leaves. The small pleasure of seeing her just so, framed like a photograph, made him smile then—and now.

  And she maybe senses this because she looks at him and smiles briefly before returning her attention to her magazine.

  The rest area, a good quarter-mile off the interstate, consists of a dark-wooded building circled by an unkempt lawn speckled with fat dandelions. There are two rotten picnic tables, a garbage can, and mounds of freshly overturned dirt, the work of moles. The parking lot is edged by fifty-foot firs and oaks half their size, both covered with fluorescent green moss.

  Theirs is the only car. He stands where the asphalt meets the grass, waiting for Linda, staring off into the woods. The sunlight that spills through the branches reveals the ragged mat last year’s leaves make on the forest floor.

  He has the same feeling here as when he walks into a church. The air is at once static and loaded, as if there is some kind of undersound his ear can’t quite decipher. Like after a bell rings.

  He has his head cocked. He is listening. His shadow falls across the lawn before him, drawing his eyes downward. In the grass something stirs, the blades shifting as if blown here and there by an absent wind. He bends his body in half to get a better look. There—the source of the small sounds—a moist black eye—a spade-shaped head—a leathery brown back spotted white—glimpsed not once but many times over. The entire lawn is alive with them—salamanders—dozens of them. The noise they make, barely discernable, is the noise of many tongues moving damply inside of many mouths.

  He has heard about this kind of thing before. His grandfather grew up in Peoria, Illinois. There, before a tornado hit—the old man told him more than once—the birds went quiet, the sky turned dark as a bruise, and the salamanders and worms boiled out of their underground dens, drawn to the surface by the sudden shift in pressure.

  Right then Linda appears beside him. “What on earth are you looking at?”

  He isn’t sure how to respond, and before he can, a salamander darts out of the grass and onto the asphalt. It pauses before her shoe, actually reaching out with one webbed foot to touch her—before retreating to the cool slivers of shade offered by the grass.

  Her eyes don’t actually grow bigger in her head, but they seem to, a small expression of horror he recognizes from the time, five years ago, when she visited the doctor complaining of chronic stomach pain, a stabbing sensation that had bothered her on and off for several years and had only recently become unbearable. X-rays revealed an ectopic pregnancy.

  They had long given up on having a baby. And now this, a fertilized egg in one of her fallopian tubes had grown into a child the size of a salamander. When the doctor removed it—it had a black thatch of hair and a scrunched-up face, teeth—he determined that it had been inside of her for many years—dead—curled up in the dark muddy pocket of her belly.

  Sometimes, when John burrowed his head between her thighs and darted his tongue in and out of her, he imagined he could taste the child. It was a sour pasty taste. Horrible enough to make him pull his head away, fighting the urge to gag. He always tried to hide the gagging with his hand or a quick wipe of the washcloth they kept on the nightstand, but one time she
caught him, and he saw the look in her eyes, and it was heavy with a pain he had never seen in her before.

  A sudden wind picks up, ice in its breath, chasing them back to the minivan. Once inside they watch the treetops nod and the branches sway as if something big is about to disentangle itself from the woods. An empty potato-chip bag swirls through the parking lot.

  When John keys the ignition and pulls out of the rest area and onto the highway, he can see, in the far distance, clouds, a thick black tide of them churning up over the green coastal mountains.

  “I don’t like the looks of this,” Linda says.

  As if on cue lightning flashes, a white zigzagging vein that lingers on his eyes.

  He reaches for the radio, but her hand is already there, snapping the dial. She races through the channels—with pops of static between them—until she finds what she is looking for, the studied baritone of a broadcaster’s voice, telling them about the low-pressure system that has unpredictably settled over the region, drawing the storm farther south than anticipated, into Oregon. Gale-force winds are expected. Maybe funnel clouds. Certainly hail.

 

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