by Annie DeWitt
“Smokes,” he said.
It was early in the day. Inside, the farm stand lacked its usual commotion. The hum of the freezer kicked in every now and again from the back. Cash had once tried his hand at the cattle business, turned loose a few meat cows on the muddy acres where the hay wouldn’t grow. He’d marketed the choice cuts to a friend who distributed to the Steak House a few towns over. The leftovers he sold to the locals from the freezer out back of the farm stand. All that was left of the business was a yellowing sign, a hand-drawn image of a black and white cow with arrows pointing to the various cuts. The freezer now housed bars of ice cream and prepackaged cones, which Birdie and I bought with our quarters.
“Son,” Otto Houser said, nodding at Fender while taking a sheet of paper from his billfold and laying it next to the register.
Fender stared down at the paper as though it were a speck of dust which he might as soon have blown off the checkout and swept under the counter.
“Seems Wilson’s got a soft spot for that one,” Ada said.
“Nah,” Otto Houser smiled, nodding his head toward the patch of drive next to the bikes where Birdie was standing. “Wilson’s taken a shine to the little miss.”
“Poor thing,” Ada said. “Can’t help himself.”
“Who can, Ada,” Otto said.
A look passed between them. They both chuckled for a moment.
Outside, Birdie was eyeing Ada’s empty seat at the table across from Wilson and Callie.
“Here, baby,” Callie said laughing, holding up a checker, motioning Birdie over to the table.
“Well, what do you need then?” Ada said, turning back to Otto.
“My regular,” Otto said picking up the list he’d taken from his billfold and handing it to Ada. “Seeing as the hay’s early, I want to put an order in with Cash for a loft full of your finest.”
“Well, there’s nothin’ that man can do that I can’t handle,”
Ada said. “I’ll put you down in the books for a truck load. Come on out back.”
As Ada disappeared through the back door into the office, Fender plucked a honey stick out of the box next to the register and bit off the tip.
“I ain’t your son,” Fender said to Otto, spitting the tip in the dust and leaning back against the dusty pay phone behind the register.
Fender was the type of boy who grew up cat-spined and shady. Tall and fair and tow-headed, Fender could lean against almost anything and look like he was born to stand there, like he was made to do just that. I’d first seen him at school smoking cigarettes under the grove of birch trees that lined the fence. He wore a tight denim jacket and carried a brown paper satchel under his arm which I’d seen him pass around to the people he drifted with. Those days Fender came to school, he was suspended. At recess he was made to stand in the shade of the school building with his back against the brick. Watching him stand there, I remember thinking Fender could lean into the wind without falling over, propped up by reputation alone.
Lonesome for any visible parentage, it was well repeated that Fender was among the motherless, a legend which served to soften his fate. As the youngest Steelhead brother, Fender was viewed as the town’s last opportunity to stamp out misfortune. When he lifted several volumes of encyclopedias from the local library, the librarians considered the books a donation. God willing, they said, Fender would read them. In the eyes of the town Fender was still open to redemption. Before the week was out, the library was missing the whole set.
Ada and Cash had run the farm stand out of their garage for as long as anyone could remember. When it came to troubled boys, they had seen the worst of them. Rumor had it, Cash felt guilty about calling the cops on Fender one night after he looted a patch of their tomatoes. To make it up to him, Cash had given Fender a few paid hours of work every week.
As I looked out at my bike parked in the drive, I wondered how Fender would answer the phone if it rang.
The list in my pocket was always the same with slight variation: an armload of zucchini, two peppers, an ear apiece of corn for us girls and two for Father. Though I knew it by heart, that afternoon as I retreated into the cool shade of the garage, I pulled Mother’s list out of my pocket, walked over to the counter and placed it next to the register.
“Hey, Hotshot,” I said.
I was wearing my swimsuit with allure.
“Well, what do they call you?” Fender said, deepening his lean and stuffing his hands into his pockets.
“Billie,” I said. The name occurred to me on the spot. I’d recently taken to sifting through my parents’ vinyls when Mother was out with the Separatists and Father was in the basement pining away over his college easel. Most of my parents’ records were decrepit. They lacked the speed of the current moment. The one vinyl I listened to was the only one to which I could dance. It was electric and funky and sounded like it had come from some future generation. “Billie Jean” was the title track.
“Take one for the road, Billie,” Fender said, pulling the honey stick from between his teeth and handing me the open end. I put my mouth over the stick and licked at the tip.
Otto looped his arm around my shoulder and brushed the front of my chest as though marking some kind of territory. “Get one of your own,” he said to Fender before disappearing out back.
“Don’t plan on it,” Fender called after him.
5.
The hay wasn’t the only thing growing early into the summer. That June, Father ordered a riding mower to keep up with the lawn. He’d been working overtime at Data General, the software engineering plant on Route 9. The riding mower came straight off the truck, factory direct. Being that we lived so far out of town, most items Father ordered had to be picked up at the Post. The rider was so large that UPS made a special delivery. The truck labored up the mountain. From a distance, I thought, it looked like one of the ready-made houses I’d seen tractor-trailers haul on the highway, the house expanding on the horizon the closer it came.
Father’s rider came in a large cardboard box lined with a thin plywood plank. He kept the box in the garage until Mother threatened to return the mower along with it if Father didn’t break down the packaging and take the refuse to the dump. The flower show was the following weekend, she said. The Separatists had ordered mums which they planned on storing in our garage.
The day after the flowers arrived, Mother went to church. The Separatists had organized a car wash after the service. The women, Father joked, planned on stashing the leftover cash for a trip to Palm Beach the local circular had been advertising.
The box was large enough that, side-by-side, Birdie and I could lie down in it. While Father was out mowing, Birdie and I snuck into the garage and made off with the box, carrying it on our shoulders along the riverbed to the far side of the marsh.
When we arrived, the green bottle was exactly as I had left it. Birdie and I dragged the box under the tree and cut a door out of the cardboard. I scored along three sides of the rectangular opening with Mother’s gardening scissors and bent the box back so the crease served as a hinge. The rest of the afternoon Birdie and I gathered stones to mark off the perimeter. As we worked, the white branches of the birch crept into shadow. By the time we made our way up hill from the marsh, dusk was heavy along the horizon. Floodlights overlooked the back porch.
As we approached the Bottom Feeder, Father was playing the piano. In the background I could hear high-pitched laughter and the clinking of cans. I ditched the gardening scissors in the crawlspace beneath the garage and washed under the spigot, running my hands over Birdie’s legs to scrub away the mud. Several welts were forming where the bugs had broken skin.
Together we stood on the back deck to survey our progress. If you leaned over the railing and trained your eyes along the riverbank, beyond the outer reaches of the floodlights, you could just make out the faint gleam of the rocks we had gathered, the w
hite patches of mineral glinting in the dusk.
As we entered the kitchen, Callie was standing in the portico leaning over the piano. One hand on Father’s shoulder. The other hovered over the songbook. Otto sat in the recliner in back of them. He kept time with his knuckles. A row of beer cans lined the cedar chest where Father kept his music. Father was singing a song about the things people needed.
“Join us, baby,” Callie called to me in the doorway. “Your old man was just playing us some of his standards.” Faded jeans rode halfway up her stomach. Her undershirt was pulled tight over her bra and tucked into the front of her pants.
“We’ve been out at the barn all day loading the loft,” Otto said. “Your father invited us over to blow off some steam.”
“Otto says he’s heard you practice,” Father said.
Otto smiled. “Play us something,” he said.
I played the last piece in the book just as I’d heard it. Father stood behind me. Otto sat in the chair with Birdie in his lap. After the first several bars, Callie lost track and gave up on the pages. She sat next to me on the piano bench and hummed along. The piece didn’t come with any words, just several repeating passages, which I played best I could remember.
“Wouldn’t want anything to happen to an ear like that,” Otto laughed when I finished.
6.
Otto called the next morning to say the Shetland was dead. Father set out across the road before sunup to help dispose of the body. Otto wanted to get the carcass in the ground before word made its way around the stable. “Found that pony lining its own stall when I opened the barn to put the feed out,” he said. “Its nose still warm from breath.”
When Father got home, Mother made him strip down and clean up outside under the spigot. They’d wrapped the Shetland’s body in feedbags and buried it in Otto’s south pasture, Father said. The old ceramic tub that had once served as a water trough marked the grave.
The image of the pony in the ground did not sit well with Mother. Lately, on nights when Father was sleepless and incapable of stepping away from the world, he slipped out the slider door onto the little deck that abutted their bedroom. Mother said she often awoke to Father’s absence. In those moments, a strange stillness gripped her. The air was too light for her lungs. She could see the image of her husband’s back on the porch in the blackness. Father took a pillow with him. The mornings after these nights, his voice was hoarse and scratchy.
“You sound faded,” Mother said one morning at breakfast.
Screaming, Father said, released a chemical in his body that allowed his mind to find the emptiness in the world. Mother had mentioned Father’s habit once, in passing, to Margaret and then regretted it.
“Dumping,” Margaret said. “It’s a psychological device like blowing up a bag and then popping it. The pressure deflates.”
Mother wasn’t sure what pressures existed in the country to be deflated.
“Don’t look so alarmed, dear,” Margaret promised. “To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
“Where’s that from?” Mother had said.
“Wilde,” Margaret said. “‘The Ideal Husband.’”
“What else,” Mother laughed.
As the summer wore on, animals of all kinds disappeared from the fields. Livestock were kept indoors to suffer the humidity away from the threat of airborne illness. During the daylight hours, the only forms dotting the landscape were the farmers in their flatbeds, the backs of their tires shooting up mud as they barreled around the fields to gather the bales of hay. The town grew quiet as people settled into an unspoken curfew. Even Ada took to wearing a straw hat over which she draped a piece of cheesecloth to protect her face from the bugs during those lulls in the game when she settled into sleep as Wilson fingered the checkers, mulling over his next move.
Callie was the only woman I saw disrobe that summer. Mornings Callie lay out on Otto’s front lawn in her bikini before the day reached noon. The curve of her thighs and the flat of her stomach shone with oil. I passed the afternoons awaiting the sound of the occasional wood-paneled station wagon rumbling over the gravel, come to park at the base of the trail for a hike or a picnic over the butte. Even the milkman dropped our road from his circuit. If Mother wanted eggs, she had to send word via a form the postman delivered to the dairy. From a bird’s-eye view, our town might’ve resembled Ada and Wilson’s checkerboard; those people that moved did so with a worn-out deliberation.
Mother regarded the road with suspicion. She and Father sat in bed at night leafing through the local paper. To Mother, even the front page stories read like fiction. They reminded her, she said, of Birdie’s first trip to the train station. We’d made the voyage to visit Granny Olga in the city. Mother had wanted to see her daughter baptized in the old church. In the elevator on the way to the platform, Birdie had pointed to a man standing next to her. “Mommy,” she’d said. “Why is that man’s skin brown?” The elevator had been packed. There was no way the man had not overheard it. He shifted his weight, tugging on the edge of his suit jacket. “Country folk,” I’d heard him say to his companion as they exited the elevator. “Haven’t seen a shadow of the world bigger than their own two feet.”
I spied on Mother in bed nights flipping to the last page of the paper to read the police blotter, looking for some texture of life that had survived the summer’s suffocation. One evening she came across a headline about The Long Walker. She read the report aloud to Father: “Young ‘ambassador cougar.’ Seen by Nebraska Sowbelly. 23 Merriam Road. 6:30 pm. Attacked no humans or horses. Droppings consistent with Native Black Hills predator. Residents advised to keep pets indoors.”
“The Long Walker,” Mother said.
“What’s that?” Father said, flicking the edge of his page so the paper collapsed in the middle, enough for him to see over it and into his wife’s face.
“Nothing,” Mother said. She paused for a moment looking at Father’s eyes over the rims of his glasses.
“Have you heard of the Black Hills?” she said, tracing his beard with the back of her wrist as he nestled his hand between her thighs.
“Sure,” Father said, “Some 2,000 miles west of here. Highest peaks east of the Rockies.”
“That’s quite a distance,” Mother said.
“I’m more interested in these black hills,” Father said, digging his hand deeper into Mother’s lap.
The next day Mother drove Birdie and I out to the butte overlooking the highway while Father was at work. She parked on the edge of the cliff. Below the steep drop, cars sped by. The air had an industrial tinge to it, which Mother seemed to find comforting. She pushed the driver’s seat into recline so that she could rest her feet out the open window and feel the breeze whenever a truck passed. As we listened to the sound of the trucks cresting the hill before the way station, Mother took out the old Atlas that she kept crammed in the glove compartment of the car for emergency. The Black Hills, she told Birdie and me while taking Birdie on her lap in the driver’s seat, were an isolated mountain range that traversed from South Dakota to Wyoming. The trek east had taken the young ambassador nearly a year. As I looked out the window at the highway below, I pictured the body of the cougar as it emerged into the floodlights of Nebraska Sowbelly’s chicken coop. Father often surrendered after work to nature documentaries on PBS. His favorites were about large birds of prey. Beyond the scenery, I wasn’t much taken with these nostalgic glimpses of the hunt. What impressed me more were the strange feats of travel animals engaged in primarily for breeding. Birds flew south to the equator, migrating long distances called flyways, signaled by the length of the day. Salmon swum headlong upstream. Animals possessed honing devices that sounded at disparate intervals. This was something to which I sensed Mother could relate.
7.
Not long after the Long Walker was first sighted, Mother blew the house out. An awkward tri-level struct
ure set at the bottom of a hill, the face of the house was blocked from view of the road by two trees of knowledge, trees which, by the time we purchased the property had abandoned their vertical thrust and grown into rooty, gnarled affairs—save for in spring when they vomited garlands of nauseating white blossoms.
The exterior of the house was made to resemble an English style country house, really a New Englander’s version of an English style country house, a stately old salt box set amid sprawling beds of rugged wild flowers, thrifty crossbreeds that renewed themselves each year after the frost—both house and beds impermeable to any amount of cold or moist weather. Along with the apple trees, Mother called the house the Bottom Feeder.
“It opens up possibilities,” Mother said of the blow-out plan, “In a glass home you are so much closer to the reality of the world.” Modern living made life richer and deeper. She’d read it once in college in her roommate’s copy of Western Living with its barefoot architects and 1970s California contemporaries.
Unlike the temples of glass and steel of which Mother dreamt, the Bottom Feeder had been built with the goal of providing maximum insulation and cover from direct light. The previous owners, the stencilers, had been elderly. On our first visit to the property, the man of the house sat in a rocker in the living room, smoking his pipe in front of the wood stove. The living room was lined on the inside with reams of cedar paneling. The heat of the fire and the humidity of the man’s smoke fogged up the windows. For several months after we’d first moved in, the room smelled of wet wood and tobacco whenever it rained.
The exterior of the house was covered in a thick white stucco, a paint which, like the attitude of the house itself, retained a grainy, salt-and-pepper consistency. Occasionally, when you ran your hand over it, you discovered an unusually large blemish, a fly or two that had dried into the mix.