“She was one of those people who could walk between raindrops, never a hair out of place, always the right thing to say. But when it came to happiness she was a zero-summer. If I was feeling good, then I’d somehow subtracted that precise measure of joy from her side of the ledger, and the only way for her to get it back was to exchange it for some of her misery. She was smart enough to know what sort of image she needed to keep up for company. She’d save it all for me. Nobody would have believed it if I’d told them with my hand on a Bible.”
He laughed in a way that didn’t sound rehearsed anymore. It sounded painful. “I remember how her body looked after she had the baby, how her cheeks stayed fat and her tits collapsed like the tents coming down after the circus—you’ll have to excuse me. I remember it because it made me so happy. Her body had been such a sight to see and it was a shame—but it meant she couldn’t hold her beauty on me like a knife anymore.”
He was really warming up now. I was even starting to enjoy listening to him. It had been months since I’d been in a conversation with anyone for this long.
“During the worst days I had myself convinced that she wasn’t human at all but an instrument of divine purpose dispatched by God to test me, to see whether I would fall, and when I fell so far the first time I was ever tested, she was transformed into the means of my punishment. Of course I don’t believe any of that now. I believe in sin and I believe in bad luck and I think that sometimes the second doesn’t have anything to do with the first.
“You can’t see me,” he went on, “but I’m not an attractive man, Bob. I’m fat. I’m the kind of man who can shave in the morning and have a five-o’clock shadow by the time I finish the toast. If you ran into me on the street, you wouldn’t ask me for directions to the church. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I’d taken a good look in the mirror a long time ago.”
I could smell that he had gotten into something to even himself out. He passed it over my shoulder, a little hip flask, maybe vodka. It tasted harsh and metallic, the way I imagined the truck would taste if it was rendered into a liquid.
“There are people like me—maybe like you, Bob—who drag the past behind them like a big plow that picks up more dirt every day. And there are people the past just seals up behind—zip!—without a trace as they move ahead. After Mickey died, I don’t think she ever thought about him again, except as an excuse to hate me.”
A cloud bank of smoke encircled my head. “I started to fall apart. I was as shaky as an old man. One morning I woke up thinking I was going to die right there. My heart was flopping around inside my chest like a winged animal. I remember getting down on my hands and knees on the living room floor and digging through my daughter’s toy box to find the little plastic stethoscope she had in there, hunching over on the carpet so I could get this tiny ridiculous thing into my ears and down onto my chest at the same time. Can you picture it, Bob? A grown man?”
I said I couldn’t, but I could.
“That morning she was out at the grocery and I made up my mind to leave her and set things right once and for all. I wrote a note telling her I was going to make a confession to the deacons and step down. I put it on the kitchen table, but then with all my things in the trunk I lost my nerve. I had Easter service to preach. I convinced myself I owed it to the church to wait until after that.
“Charlene came across the note the next morning in my pants pocket in the dryer. She put it on the ironing board and smoothed it out and drove down to the church and Scotch-taped it to the front door in broad daylight, like goddamned Martin Luther himself. On the bottom she wrote in her own hand: ‘Too much of a chickenshit to tell you himself. Now you know the truth about what you were whispering behind our backs. P.S. You can all go to hell.’
“I didn’t think she had it in her, in a small town like that, where they’re just waiting to judge you, but damned if she didn’t. She packed up the car and went back to her folks in Dallas and I haven’t seen her or my little girl since—she’ll be eight in April.”
He paused. I was afraid he might start to cry but he didn’t. He was the kind of guy who had practiced keeping it together telling stories like this, stories much worse.
“I bounced around for a while, until I put away enough money to finance a rig and this is where I’ve been since. I don’t even have a house anymore. I live back here and up there. It’s not a bad life.”
He left off, the first sustained silence of the night. The snow had let up outside and the parking lights shone into a stand of pines in front of the truck. Back in the deepest part I caught the flank of something flash, seem to come forward and then retreat—maybe a black bear, but probably just a doe eyeing the trash cans.
“Sometimes I struggle now even to bring her face and voice back to mind,” he said. “But I do, because I know what she really wants is to steal a whole part of my life—years!—by making me want to forget everything: about her, about Mickey, all those years before her and during. But I don’t let her. I remember her to save part of my own life. The more I do, the more kindly and loving she becomes in my memory. Then I think: Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she was a better person than I thought she was, and I start to miss her, and I get sad because I know it’s not really her I’m remembering anymore. But everything in our memory is half made up anyway, so what does it really matter, right?”
He yawned and let out a weary breath.
“Thus endeth the reading.”
He passed back the bottle, almost gone. I heard him shift heavily behind me, stretching out, as if he’d spent himself bringing his story across the finish line.
I was at a loss as to what to say. I liked him well enough not to say something cheap, especially not that I was sorry. So I just sat for a while, which felt like the most honest thing to do. After a few minutes I decided to ask him a question his story had brought to my mind, a question I’d wanted to ask of a preacher since I was a boy—realizing it was a little late for both of us.
It concerned a passage in the Bible I had never been able to get past, somewhere in the Old Testament near the beginning, maybe Leviticus or Deuteronomy. This was one of those stories about the Israelites hauling the Ark of the Covenant—they always seemed to be having to haul it somewhere—and an ox pulling the wagon loses its footing. A poor drover named Uzzah reaches out to steady the Ark to keep it from falling into the dirt. And maybe because he wasn’t one of the Levites who were specially appointed to take care of the Ark or because nobody was supposed to actually touch it, I can’t remember, God strikes him dead on the spot.
“Ever since I first read it,” I said, “I’ve kept trying to make sense of it. Once I thought maybe the real reason God killed Uzzah was because Uzzah didn’t trust God, that God would never allow the Ark to fall in the first place. Or maybe Uzzah did trust God but it occurred to him: Hey, I’m right here, God put me here! I’m the one he’s chosen to save the Ark from falling. But of course he realized his mistake pretty quickly as he hit the ground dying. God put him there within reach of the thing, all right, but not to save it. He put him there so Uzzah would presume in all his human pride to know what God was thinking, which would give God the great instructive opportunity of making Uzzah an example of what happens when human beings start thinking they know what God is thinking. And I thought: Maybe in the seconds before he died Uzzah figured this out and he said to himself: Okay, so that’s what God decided to do with me! He decided to accord me this highest honor of sacrificing my life in such a manner to teach my people this important lesson!
“But you know what I think’s a lot more likely? Uzzah lying there, drawing in the last breaths of his life, thinking: All I tried to do was the right thing, the right thing—which is so hard, the hardest thing in this world—and now God has made me the asshole of history for it.”
It shocked me to hear myself talking like this. What was my question supposed to be, anyway? I trailed off but then I realized there was no reason to be embarrassed: From behind me came th
e heavy measured rhythms of sleep breathing and I knew that whatever was in the flask had done its job.
I pulled off my jacket and balled it up against the window but I couldn’t sleep. By sunup, the snow had stopped. For the first time I looked back into the sleeper through the curtains but I could see only the top of the man’s graying head facing away from me beneath a gray blanket. His large body all but consumed his tiny quarters. I put on the jacket and climbed out of the truck to find a place to piss, walking into the thicker pines where the snow wasn’t as deep and a little ice-choked stream trickled through, looking as if it had found its way into the woods to die.
When I came back, I saw that the trucker had woken up and driven on, leaving a rectangle of snowless asphalt—a negative image of the truck, black on white—with tire tracks leading from it to the road.
Thinking about it now, I’m pretty sure I never actually asked him about the story from the Bible. But it was something I’d wanted to talk to somebody about for a long time and still do.
*
Martha had long since lost track of direction. She had no idea how far they would drive with her before they decided to stop long enough for her to get away. She told herself to keep calm, to push down the waves of panic that kept mounting, the feeling that she wouldn’t be able to prevent herself from hurdling over the seat to grab for the door. Over the noise of the engine she tried again to listen to their talk, but it was lower and calmer now than before, so that she could catch only fragments, words and half words that sounded like Spanish or Plautdietsch, though she knew they couldn’t be. The more she tried to clear her mind to extract language from the air the more her mind wandered. She thought about her aunt Johanna, whom she had never liked, though she knew her dislike didn’t really have anything to do with Johanna herself and Martha felt bad about that. She thought about what Johanna’s pretty, round, made-up face must look like now as she sat in the police station or on a pew in her husband’s church, her pale Mennonite cheeks red and puffy from so much crying, blaming herself for leaving Martha and the boys and the keys in the car, even though everyone in America left their children and their keys alone together in their cars. She wondered how hard it could possibly be—in a place with such long empty roads, with so few automobiles and most of those pickups, with what seemed like a ratio of police all out of proportion to actual criminals—to track down a huge blue station wagon with fake wood paneling and two men up front. She wondered mostly why anyone would want to steal a car like this, so ridiculously big that even people with herds of children seemed to own one only under duress, an embarrassment forced on them by the immense piles of crap that came along with baby making in the United States.
Martha was one of the rare children from a religious background who took literally the admonition to count one’s blessings, though it often seemed to her that the only purpose of the exercise—in a hard and unforgiving life like hers—was to scrounge up the one or maybe two good things that could qualify so unhappiness didn’t go completely unchecked. As she lay there, feeling the road knock beneath her, she considered it a blessing akin to a miracle that her bladder wasn’t pressing on her, at least not yet. The second blessing was that the two men had somehow failed to discover her when they made a rapid stop about an hour before, down a dirt road. She had known from snatches of their conversation that the stop was coming. Then the ride became rougher and she could smell raised dust. They slowed and the one who was driving told the other one that he kept clean license plates hidden across the countryside for emergency situations and this was their lucky day because he had just buried a pair outside the town of Seagraves. After the car had turned off onto the dirt, Martha snaked her hand slowly across the carpet of the station wagon to a corner near the tailgate and grabbed hold of a bunched-up canvas hunting coat belonging to Brother Ted, Johanna’s husband, and drew it slowly across her body and tried to tuck her legs and feet under it. The car pulled over and came to a hard stop on the caliche, jamming her up against the seatback. She heard both men get out and she turned her head into the darkness of the carpet beneath the coat and shut her eyes. The silence that had fallen with the engine off made her feel as if as a floodlight had been turned on her. Every shallow breath sounded like a shriek.
“Get up on the bumper and keep your eyes down the road—if you see anything, a pickup, a trail of dust, a goddamn cottontail, you whistle at me and take the wheel and I’ll jump in. Can you do that?”
“What’re you gonna dig with?”
“My own two hands. I don’t put ’em deep. Nobody else is going to be out here in a cow pasture looking for buried license plates.”
The car dipped in the back as the second man—the one she knew to be named Harlan—climbed on the bumper to be the lookout. She heard the footfalls of the other one, the driver, Troy or possibly Roy, recede in a trot on the packed dirt. She turned her head as slowly, as imperceptibly, as she could manage and peered with one eye through a buttonhole of the canvas coat and saw the wide thighs and crotch of the second man, his belted khaki trousers pressed against the back window, his chest and head out of sight above the top of the car.
She considered lifting herself to see how far the first man was from the car but she was unable to will her body to make the movement. Martha had not prayed in more than two years but she prayed now; she struggled desperately to remember something, anything, that she had once committed to memory from the Ernsthafte Christenpflicht, the old Palatine primer whose dagger-pointed medieval letters, blackening the page with text, had always caused her to think not of God, as she was supposed to, but of hellsmoke and Beelzebub.
The only passage she could summon whole from the book was completely wrong, she knew, but she recited it in her mind anyway, as devoutly as she could, trying to release any power that might be latent in the words despite their meaning:
O heavenly Father, be merciful to me and protect me from the gross sins of adultery, fornication, impurity, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, malice, quarreling, jealousy, anger, strife, dissension, reveling, drunkenness, and such like, which would separate me from Thy great love.
She heard the first man’s trotting footsteps approaching the car and waited to feel the bounce of the suspension as the big one stepped off the bumper, but he seemed to remain motionless, dutiful at his post. In the shrouded light in which she lay she anticipated the shadow of the second man, who was probably standing no more than a foot from her now, with only the back window of the car between them. He was the more alert one, more suspicious, the one she was sure had stolen the car—he would look through the window and see her so easily. But his shadow didn’t fall and Martha heard nothing, no voices or movement, until faint metallic scraping sounds began to register from the back, echoing through the chassis.
She heard the wind start to pick up, slapping raggedly at the side of the car.
“Nothing out there . . . nobody.”
“Just a minute,” came the reply from below.
“You keep a screwdriver on you for things like this?”
Nothing except the metal noises, now tapering off.
“Bury it with the plates. You never have tools when you need them.” Then footsteps again and the metal sounds, fainter, this time from the front of the car.
Gusts of wind landing harder. Snort. Guffaw.
“It’s no wonder they haven’t caught you yet.”
The noises stopped.
“Okay, let’s haul ass.”
She felt the bounce of the second man climbing down from the bumper and she clamped her eyes and her fists tight and thought: Now. Now. Now. And now. And now. And now. How will they come in? She thought about her teeth, the only part of her body that felt remotely like a weapon, though she knew if she were close enough to get teeth into either one of them it would already be all over, except for whatever blood she could draw.
A door slammed shut and then another, compressing the air inside the station wagon like a thunderclap. The engine jumped
back to life and they were moving again. It occurred to her that it was possible they were going to wait until they were off the main road a little farther into the combine-emptied cotton fields and the second one would climb quietly back for her while the first one kept driving. Martha pulled the coat aside slowly and peered up the carpeted seatback as if up the side of a battlement, waiting with her body tensed against the breach, but it didn’t come and she felt the tires swim up off the dirt and back onto smooth asphalt.
It seemed like hours had passed since then, but she knew it was unlikely even one had gone by. The car slowed and turned and she held her breath. A little later it turned again and then twice more, back in the direction they seemed to have been going in the first place, and she guessed they must be trying to stay clear of towns or maybe they were moving in circles because the troopers would expect a straight line. She had listened for cars passing against them and had counted only three since they came back up on the paved road. The men barely talked now. She heard the one driving say that they needed to get off the road again.
“The law’s on the hunt right now. Their blood is pumping the way it does when you think you have a bird in your sights. But let a day pass and it’ll be a different story, they’ll start to lose interest.”
Lying up against the seat, Martha thought: Except that neither one of you have any idea what kind of bird you really are. The only person in this car who knows is me. And we’re the kind of bird they’re never going to stop looking for, high and low, night and day. For a minute the thought made her feel slightly less desperate, as if she shared a small measure of power over her fate with this pair of American Texas dumbasses who didn’t know they were kidnapping a Mennonite girl on top of stealing a pastor’s wife’s station wagon.
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