“Rachel, come eat!” As he waited, he considered that on any sort of day, even today, she might just disappear from his life. Having so much meant a fellow had all that to lose.
Rachel stood up from her garden and looked in his direction. She wore two braids this morning, making her face seemed even rounder than usual.
When he and Rachel got inside the kitchen, she looked down at the table and the two chipped Blue Willow plates and said, “Where the hell’s David?”
16
A HALF MILE WEST AS THE CROW FLIES, DAVID’S MOTHER, Sally, was still sitting behind her house in a lawn chair, her feet up on the picnic table. She had remained nearly motionless long enough that birds flying over probably assumed she was something inanimate or dead. Above her, five turkey vultures circled effortlessly, barely shifting their wings to execute turns. They spiraled downward and landed, one at a time, a hundred yards away, where a newly dead possum lay in alfalfa stubble. The birds milled about, their pink heads bald of plumage, their clumsy turkey-sized bodies shifting across the rows scraped clean by the mower, rake, and baler. Sally assumed the birds were just out and about, traveling aimlessly, picking up carrion where they could and digging into it with their hooked beaks. She might have respected the vultures more had she known they were readying to fly south. With the help of winds a thousand feet up, they would be migrating to Central America, fully intending to keep warm this winter. Sally took the last swig of her bourbon-laced coffee. She considered lighting another cigarette from the one in her hand, but instead snubbed it out on the picnic table. A few seconds later, though, when she saw a vulture yank a length of grayish gut from the possum, she fumbled in her robe pocket for the pink lighter. There were four more cigarettes in the pack.
A walnut fell out of a tree onto the barn roof with a clunk that sounded familiar to Sally. Though she had dutifully collected the nuts every autumn of her youth, she would no sooner have shelled one of those walnuts today than she would have peeled her own toe. Without anything else to drink and with only a few smokes left, Sally felt the weight of the gloomy sky. Harsher weather was on its way, as it usually was in Michigan, so unlike California, which would have blue skies, season after season. She mentally rummaged the farmhouse, imagining she might have more liquor. She knew she didn’t, and yet she envisioned herself opening closets and unlatching secret wall compartments, pulling out drawers to find false bottoms beneath which farm wives could have long ago hidden flat bottles of alcohol-rich cure-all. Really, those drawers and cupboards contained only mismatched silverware, dishes in all variety of cheap designs, a cereal box with a bit of oat dust in it. In the refrigerator was an old brown heart of a cabbage that Rachel had given David months ago, and some ketchup and mustard. There was no milk and no booze. Fortunately, she wasn’t broke—she had twenty-six dollars from the child support, and Mike had just sent her an insurance card for David, so she could get him a puffer, though she’d have to pick up the five-dollar copayment. She’d get another box of cereal and a bottle of milk for David. And bread and peanut butter if she had enough left.
Sally saw the turkey vultures take clumsy flight from the hay field, but from her position behind the house she didn’t notice the window salesman’s quiet Thunderbird pull into her driveway, and then she didn’t see the salesman press the doorbell at the front of the house.
Steve could see the house was badly in need of thermal windows and insulated doors, that it needed minor miracles of hammers, nails, caulk, and paint. He couldn’t help it that when he saw a rundown old house like this, he right away imagined the house restored to its full potential, with new windows, doors, and smooth-looking siding. The vision of restoration wasn’t a ghostly thing—it was a full-blown, full-color picture overlaying the real house, and he sometimes had difficulty calling back the actual state of things. He pressed the buzzer and waited, but heard no response, no footsteps, no voice shouting I’ll get it. Perhaps the occupants were sleeping late. When he pressed the buzzer again, he also pressed his ear against the door and realized the buzzer was broken. He knocked and peeked inside at Sally’s stairway, on which there was a pair of worn-out boy’s sneakers and a few crumpled towels. Steve stepped back on the porch and looked up. Sometimes a woman would be getting out of the shower, and she’d hear his knock and pull aside a curtain and look out a steamy window. He imagined a face showing through mist, but that vision quickly faded. The lower sash of a window to his left was cracked and held together with a length of duct tape. A car was parked on the overgrown lawn at the side of the house, but the front passenger-side wheel was missing and the axle rested on blocks.
Steve retreated from the creaking wooden porch and glanced out over the field of stubble beside the house, imagined it greening and springing forth with a fresh crop, in a scene overlaying the brownish expanse. Such fields just thrust their fertility up at a man, begging him, Plow me, sow me, reap me. Steve had gone to school with a few farm kids and had always thought he’d make a good farmer, but his father had been a foreman at a paper mill, and his grandfather had worked for the railroad, as some of his uncles still did. The last farmer in his family, as far as he knew, was his great-grandfather Enkstra, who’d worked on another man’s farm until he got his railroad job, but he had died long before Steve was born. Steve headed toward his car, but then he sensed another presence. He detoured to look behind the house, and halfway between himself and the busted silo, he saw a woman with a coffee cup and a cigarette, her naked, slender legs propped up on the picnic table so that her robe barely concealed her torso. As he approached, he anticipated the smell of her. Steve thought cigarette smoke fit certain women the way fresh-baked cookies fit other women, the way nail polish and potpourri or vanilla-scented candles fit still others. His wife wore perfume that smelled of flowers and babies. Cigarettes and coffee and the sweetness of alcohol were merely the opposite end of the spectrum of womanly smells.
“Morning, ma’am,” Steve said to the woman, who did not adjust her robe to cover herself but sat as though her little body were an artifact dropped from the sky to be found and appreciated by a lucky scavenger. She looked up at him through calm, wide-set eyes, raised her eyebrows slightly, but said nothing. He held out a hand to shake hers, and with the other offered a business card. “Steve Hoekstra, ma’am. Harmony Windows. Beautiful October morning, isn’t it?”
She moved her head so slightly that Steve couldn’t tell if it was a positive or negative gesture. She gave him an uninterested though not limp hand, and she accepted the card but then laid it on the table without a glance, as though inviting the wind to rise up and blow it into the field. Steve took a seat on the bench across from her and looked out over her slender legs, to the north, across the bristle of cornstalks sticking straight up, row after row, acre after acre. He leaned toward her and inhaled her boozy smell. “Have you considered new windows?”
“This isn’t my house. Go talk to George Harland.”
“George Harland?”
“He’s a farmer on Queer Road. Q Road. This house is his.”
“I live across the street from him. I didn’t realize he owned more than one house.”
She looked at him and smiled. “And if you’re going that way, maybe you can give me a ride.”
“Sure, I can give you a ride, no problem.” Steve thought the day was making sense already—he would indeed meet his neighbor Rachel.
“Let me get dressed. It’ll just take a minute.” She started out walking toward the house, then broke into a jog.
Steve wished he were waiting inside the house, waiting for the woman’s breathy arrival, watching the robe slip from her shoulders to reveal the small of her back where he would place his hand. Steve would inhale the light boozy sweat on her skin, taste her neck, lift her little body right off the ground and set her on a dresser and ask her to wrap her legs around him. Steve picked up the business card she’d left on the table and stuck it into the crack between two planks so it wouldn’t blow away.
; Sally ran up the stairs to her room. She figured George would take her to get cigarettes and a bottle of something. And of course David’s puffer and food. This guy’s giving her a ride would save her the time walking over there. He seemed helpful, seemed like the kind of guy who would fix things and not get angry and make demands, although you really never knew with men. She’d mention that she had a twelve-year-old son, and she wouldn’t mind if he thought her younger than she was. In her bedroom, the dresser drawers hung open and a layer of clothes, some dirty, some less dirty, lay draped over the edges of those drawers and on the floor as though she had surprised them during the execution of a slow crawling escape. There was an old wringer washer in the dirt-floored Michigan basement of the house, but there was no dryer, because the farm women over the years had tirelessly hung their clothes outside to dry. George still hung clothes on lines in winter, said he liked “freeze-drying” them. And that man owned half the township, for crying out loud. Sally selected a pair of jeans from the floor, and she let her robe drop, though the salesman was leaning against his car out front and looking up at her window. She picked a long-sleeved T-shirt off the floor, smelled it, tossed it back down, and found a dark turtleneck instead. Over that, she pulled on a musty but clean-looking wool sweater she found in the bottom drawer. Sally couldn’t believe that just this spring she’d had the energy to hand-wash, or maybe Milton had given her this black ribbed sweater from the church box. She looked in the dusty, full-length mirror and decided she looked good enough that this guy might offer to take her to the store if George was out in a field. She’d try to avoid Rachel; talking to that girl was like rubbing up against poison ivy.
17
DAVID RETAKKER DID NOT STEAL AND SMOKE HIS MOTHER’S cigarettes as a result of peer pressure or because he thought smoking was cool; he stole and smoked them in order to scratch and burn his lungs, to toughen his inside skin until, like his hands, it would become leathery brown and strong enough to tolerate any sort of air. And if smoking made his breathing worse now, then it would surely make him stronger later, he told himself, strong enough to conquer his asthma. David envisioned a time when he would be toughened all over, inside and outside, as callused as Rachel’s feet and George’s hands, so tough he wouldn’t even feel hunger or cold. By the time he was grown up, he would be able to walk across a frozen pond barefoot, inhale pure oat dust, and run his hands through flames without flinching. David also hoped to grow tall like George, but he knew that he might not, seeing how neither his father nor his mother was tall, and in that case, he was prepared to be extra strong to make up for it.
From the zippered bag strapped beneath his bicycle seat, David took a green-and-white cigarette pack containing three menthol 100s. He never stole a whole pack, but just took one or two out of his ma’s now and again while she was passed out. David moved just outside the doorway of the barn, away from the hay and straw. At precisely the same moment that his mother pulled a sweater over her head and George and Rachel got up from their kitchen chairs, David struck a match and lifted it to the cigarette, with both hands shaking. He needed to figure out a way to steel himself against the shaking caused by his asthma medicine, and of course eventually he wouldn’t need the medicine at all. The cigarette tip sizzled and caught, and bits of loose tobacco squirmed like tiny glowworm fireworks, like caterpillar embers inching their way up a small white dead-end road. David inhaled the smoke, stifled his choking, and blew out the match. David had overheard George warning Todd more than once about smoking in the barn, so David knew he had to be careful. He licked the pads of his finger and thumb and pressed them against the match head to extinguish it with a hiss.
Along Queer Road came a police car, white and blue with red lights on top, but rather than drive on by, as David assumed it would, the car slowed. When it turned in to the driveway before him, David jumped inside the barn and peered out between two boards, hoping the cop hadn’t seen him. Officer Parks drove up, opened his cruiser door, and planted his wide feet on the dirt drive. David reminded himself that he had a right to be in the barn. He should just sit tight and tell the cop he was helping George, but his instinct was to disappear like a ghost—except of course that ghosts didn’t leave their bicycles lying in doorways. He only thought of his bicycle after it was too late to pull it inside without looking suspicious. David moved farther inside and climbed up the bales to the top of the stack, where he lay panting, flat on his stomach, peering down over the edge. He could see from his position that he’d forgotten to zip the vinyl seat bag containing his cigarettes. He then noticed his own hand beside him, as though it was somebody else’s, holding a cigarette between two fingers. He could have dropped the cigarette into the straw, he told himself. He could easily have let it slip from his hand while he’d climbed. Thank God he hadn’t. He extended his arm and held the cigarette away from himself. Had anyone asked him whether he’d ever bring a cigarette into the barn, he’d have sworn he would not.
Parks, down below, picked up David’s bicycle and leaned it against the door frame. He took off his hat and swept his hand over his balding head in a way that made him look tired. The cigarettes were balanced half inside the zippered bag, poised to fall out. Then Parks looked up, pretty much toward where David was hiding.
“I know you’re in here. You shouldn’t be messing around in this barn.”
David held his breath as he shifted and wiggled backward about six feet so that he was even more hidden in the straw. By trying to sneak up on Rachel all those nights, he’d learned to move silently.
“I’ll go get George Harland. We’ll drag you out of here together.” Parks touched the bicycle handlebars and out fell David’s cigarette pack. Parks shook his head in disappointment as he bent to pick it up. “Whoever you are, you’d better not be smoking in here,” he said.
By a miracle of shadows, Parks wasn’t seeing him. David fought a need to cough—he gulped air and stifled himself until his eyes watered—and somehow Parks didn’t hear him. When David thought he couldn’t hold back his cough another moment, Parks put the cigarettes in his own top pocket, placed his hat back onto his tired-looking head, and walked out. As soon as Officer Parks was out of sight, David coughed onto the shiny bales until he finally stopped from exhaustion. After a few minutes of lying curled, catching up on his breathing, David looked at his hand and saw he was no longer holding the cigarette.
His breathing became fast again. He stood and tried to think clearly, tried to figure out where the cigarette could have tumbled, but it became difficult to concentrate. He might have lost it before or after he slid backward on the straw. He pulled away the bale on which he’d been lying, and he looked into the empty space and saw that something as small as a cigarette might have dropped way down between the bales, especially the loose-packed ones George’s nephew Todd had stacked. David jumped down a level and tore some bales away, letting them drop to the barn floor. Some bales from higher above tumbled onto him, sending him crashing down onto the plywood bed of the hay wagon. He twisted as he fell and banged his shin on the metal edge. David lay still, willing the pain to subside, and then three more bales fell around him in a kind of delayed action. After several stunned minutes, he extricated himself and climbed up top again and pulled away more bales. He pushed several down toward the front of the barn and still he saw no smoke. He rubbed his swollen shin and looked around; lying beside a bale of hay beneath him was the cigarette. In the process of jumping down, he turned his ankle slightly. Only after he held that cigarette safely in his hand did he pause to catch his breath. He felt immensely grateful. He would let himself rest before he restacked the bales. Close call. “Thank God,” he said aloud, and even just those two words winded him. Through the gap at the back of the barn—where George had stood alone just a few hours before—David could see a white-faced Hereford chewing its cud, gazing off into the corn without any sense of alarm, without an inkling that David could have burned down its home. To calm himself, David focused on that cow’s wide, pal
e face. After his breathing settled, he noticed that two of the fallen bales had snapped their strings and busted open; such bales were impossible to recover and George wouldn’t be able to sell them. David drew on his breather, tried to expand his clenched-up chest, and held as much air as he could in his lungs.
Some afternoons when David lay in this barn, cylinders of dusty light shot through the cracks in the wall and landed on the floor like a slow-moving laser show, making the barn feel like a spaceship ready to take off. In today’s dull haze, though, the barn was just an old wooden building. David exhaled his medicine. He studied the cigarette in his hand, which showed no evidence of having burned, and he noticed a clump of tobacco was missing from the end. Surely this was the cigarette he’d dropped, but the ash must have separated from the shaft, and he’d foolishly wasted all this time holding the harmless part of the cigarette, when the burning ash had fallen God knew where. And he didn’t know when the ash had separated or how far away it could have fallen or bounced. It was possible that the cigarette tip went safely out, just as it was possible that his father would come back from Indiana, and that his mother would decide to stay in Michigan and get a job and stop drinking. It was possible that George would invite David to dinner tomorrow and tell him, “You are always welcome here, no matter what,” and Rachel would say, “Hell yes!” and David would grow to six feet tall and become George’s hired hand.
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