"I think with that tall metal rod sticking up in the middle. At least, I hope so."
Rico stood by his mailbox. "Maggie, what would Carl do?"
She looked directly at him, wiping sweat from her face, tears from her eyes. "I honestly don't know, Rico. I don't know if this is for him, or me, or God, or some combination of all that."
A old blue pick-up came to a thrumming stop behind the square. Eric, on his way to work, big bushy red beard. He swung down from the driver's door, portly and sneakered. Walked over. "Launch day?"
She grinned. "Yeah."
"Go for it, girl."
She looked around at the crowd. "Can you kids help me push this to where the road slopes down?"
Of course they could. They all got behind the back of the large wooden square, different-sized hands on the sharp edge, leaning their bodies forward, pushing.
The square actually moved pretty nimbly down the road. Thank you, God. As its front edge reached the top of the slope, Maggie raised a hand. "Okay, kids! Hold it!"
The adults, walking along both sides of the road, caught up.
Maggie clambered on top of the square, walking to its center, grasping the upright metal rod. From her vantage point she looked down the brown road as it sloped like a dirt slide to the Hollister's tree-surrounded farmhouse, smoke rising from its central chimney, a half mile away. This is crazy, she thought. They're not expecting visitors. "Let's go!"
She held onto the metal steering rod as the large square was pushed forward, tilting as it started down the slope.
Maggie grabbed the steering rod with both hands, terrified, sneakered feet shifting on the wood, hair lifting from her temples.
It was like surfing.
Although the square sailed downwards slower than she would in a car, she had a greater, visceral sense of speed. From behind her, she heard the cheers of the neighborhood kids fade in the distance.
Still clasping the rod, she raised her head to Heaven. Is this it, God? Is this what I'm supposed to do?
As the square rumbled towards the Hollister's home, kids running down the hill behind it, she twisted the upright rod to the left, to avoid the trees growing larger in front of her.
Except the square didn't roll left. Even as the trees got really large.
You know, she thought, as she shifted her feet around on the square, one thing I forgot about was whether this thing had brakes.
The front of the square crashed into the trunk of the old elm in front of the Hollister's farmhouse, wood ripping up.
Maggie held onto the upright steering rod as long as she could, legs in the air, rod bending out of shape.
She looked up, flat on her back on the Hollister's lawn, blue sky above.
Got up on her elbows.
The front of the square was crushed against the elm, splinters and styrofoam up in the branches.
The front door opened.
Mr. Hollister came out onto the gray front porch, blinking behind his glasses, TV remote, like a gun, in his right hand.
Rico stood above her. She looked up at him, dazed. He appeared exasperated. "Maggie? Is this over now?"
Eric, big and burly, bushy red beard, held his freckled hand down to her, helping her up. "We'll rebuild it. This is a little bit like the Wright Brothers."
Maggie left the square crashed against the Hollister's elm, because there was no way it could be moved today. The Hollisters, to their credit, were okay about that.
The kids went to school, Rico went to work, Eric, after making sure Maggie was okay, got back in his blue pick-up and continued on to his metal working garage.
Maggie went back inside her home, shut the door, locked it.
It was so quiet inside.
That was always her problem. She learned that soon after Carl's death. You could turn on the TV, crank up the radio, but all that was artificial noise. It didn't substitute for hearing someone in another room, hearing your lover's voice.
She stood in her bright kitchen, with all its horrible memories, wondering if she should bake more bread, but she had baked so many loafs of bread since Carl's death, nearly all of which she threw out, still warm, into the bullet trash can.
She placed her palms down on the counter by the sink. Started crying. "God, what was the point? Are you fucking with me?"
She wandered out into the living room, drunk by now on orange juice and vodka.
Grabbed up everything in the house that was personal. Paintings on the walls, clothes in the closet, yanking them off hangers, personal items in the medicine cabinet, favorite foods in the pantry. Dropped them all into boxes, carried the boxes and clanking pillowcases up the pulled-down stairs into the attic.
Now my home looks like a motel room, she thought, passing under the doorways. White and impersonal. Can I bear it?
Turns out she could.
The next morning, she was down at the Hollister's, sliding on her back under the front end of her rolling square, assessing the damage.
Actually, it wasn't that bad.
Another trip to Home Depot, to get replacement parts.
Kids, on their way home from school, stopped on the road to watch her working under the square, dropping her hammer on the wet grass to pick up a wrench, dropping the wrench to pick up a screwdriver.
By the third day, the square was operational again.
She spent the early morning packing for her trip, a suitcase filled with bread and bottled water, rolls of toilet paper, soap, a change of clothes.
She dressed in blue jeans and a yellow t-shirt, thirty-three dollars folded in the front pocket of her jeans.
The dew was still on the grass, birds chirping, when she pushed the large square away from the elm, trundling it up onto the road.
Fewer people were gathered around the road for this launch, some stragglers on their way to school, Mr. Hollister.
She got on top of the square, excited. I have to remember, God told me to do this. Surely, He wouldn't have gone to all this trouble for nothing.
The road ahead was flat for a quarter mile, after which it rose gently towards a field-flanked crest.
Conscious of the kids watching her, none of whom had volunteered to help push her this time, she stood at the metal steering rod, decided to experiment shoving it like a clutch into different positions.
Straight forward. Nothing. Straight right. Straight left. These positions must have a purpose, or else why would the grooves have been built, but nothing.
Straight back.
The wide square rolled forward, like a hovercraft. She stepped quickly in her sneakers, left, right, back, so she didn't lose her balance.
She was moving!
There were hundreds of metal springs under the square, she knew. She had put them there. Had they stored energy, tightening when she went downhill, uncoiling, propelling the square forward, as the backwards position of the steering rod put them in an 'uncoil' mode?
In any event, the momentum carried her down the level stretch of road, still had enough energy to slide her up the road's rise to the top, where she saw, in the lowered distance before her, like at the crest of a roller coaster ride, geometric fields of green and yellow corn.
By dusk, she had traveled twenty miles, staying on farm routes.
Feeling lonely, a little scared, the stars appearing overhead, she sat on her square, by the metal steering rod, unzipped her suitcase. Pulled out a hunk of bread, ate it, washing it down with bottled water.
Stretched out on the square, looking up at the stars. I should have brought a blanket. Not for warmth, since it was still Summer, but for psychological reasons, to have something to pull up to my shoulders, cover me.
She fell asleep.
"Are you gonna preach?"
Her eyebrows flexed.
Men and women were gathered around her square, having stopped on their way to the fields, curious about this woman sleeping out in the open, on a large wooden square.
She raised herself up on one elbow, blinkin
g. "What?"
One of the farmers, long beard, holding a pitchfork, nodded at the square, looked back at her. "I asked if you were gonna preach."
Maggie stood, still half-asleep. Used her hands to try to get her hair in order. Slapped at the wrinkles in her jeans.
"Why do you think I would be preaching?"
The farmer snorted, lifting and lowering his pitchfork. "Guess because you're on a stage."
On a stage?
She stopped slapping at the fronts of her jeans, looked around at the square. Well, I suppose it was a stage. Was that God's purpose? For her to preach? Was the square a moveable stage?
But what could she preach about?
"God told me to build this stage. To go out into the country."
A stocky woman, sunburned face, raised her chin. "Praise God."
The farmer with the pitchfork gave a lopsided smile. "And talk about what?"
Maggie scrunched her eyebrows. "I don't know. Do you want me to tell you the specifications about how I constructed this stage?"
The twenty farm folk gathered around the edge of her stage glanced sideways at each other.
"Well, maybe you wouldn't want to hear that. I guess it's kind of boring, even though it did come from God."
A sheet of paper blew up on her stage, curling against her left shin.
She bent over, picked it up.
Not sure what she was doing, she held up the paper, showing it to her audience.
"Look how flat this piece of paper is. Pure, pristine." She rotated around, so all could see. She crumpled it into a ball. The crowd reacted. Unfolded it, aware of all their eyes on her effort to restore it from a globe to a flat rectangle. She couldn't.
"I can try to flatten this piece of paper until the end of my days, but it's never going to be pristine again. It will always bear the scars of what's been done to it."
Her eyes felt hot. She looked out over the crowd, forty strong.
"When my husband died, he died a suicide. He left a suicide note. I started reading it, but it was too painful." Tears streamed down her pretty, black-eyebrowed face, a face so tired and worn, the face of the wife of a suicide, and all the guilt that carries. "I crumpled the note and threw it away. I never read all the words he meant for me to read. I never learned how he ended his suicide note." She looked out over the hundreds of faces. "Did he end it coldly? Did he end it with the hardest, fucking word in the world to say sincerely, ‘Love'? He was a good man, sometimes. That's gotta be all you need. Not ‘always', just ‘sometimes'. You forget about ‘always' in the long, dark days and nights. You just live, you just fucking swoon for those ‘sometimes'.
"Sometimes he was bad. Sometimes, like lovers do, he'd try to be as cruel as he could. And I'd pretend to be strong, pretend his hurtful words had no effect on me, I'd just ignore them, rolling my eyes or wiping the counter, but then a word or a phrase would get through, a particularly cruel word or phrase, carefully calculated to hurt me, because being my lover, knowing me that well, all those long talks over the years, some of them while both of us were drunk, he knew exactly what to say to get to my fears, my insecurities, and I'd no longer be this brave, tired woman trying to act bored, I'd be this frightened little child who had been smacked, who had had her stubborn belief in ‘us' smacked, smacked hard, and I'd collapse, it would be too much, on my knees on the kitchen floor, rotating my terrified face up, seeing this look of triumph and shame on his face. And I did the same thing to him. I did the exact same thing to him. It wasn't love, it wasn't hate. It was almost like chess. It's what lovers do."
She picked up another piece of paper. Held its flatness out to the thousands who had heard about her, brought their picnic lunches to listen to her at her latest stop. Crumpled the paper. The crowd gasped. Made a point of trying to straighten it out, couldn't. "That's our lives. We crumple it, or someone else crumples it, and that flatness, that smoothness, can never be restored."
She stood in the center of the huge tent, the overflow crowd outside estimated at ten thousand, watching her on monitors. "I can never smooth the sheet! I can never go back. The sheet can never go back!"
The thousands all held up their passed-out sheets of paper, lifting them up, crumpling them, crying.
When she reached the banks of the Mississippi, one of the people who came out to hear her, a laborer by the name of Pedro, waited in line to talk to her afterwards.
His face and hands were dirty from his work.
The two of them walked along the river's bank, families behind them posing for photographs in front of her rolling stage.
He said nothing for a while, brown face lowered, in obvious thought. He had, she thought, an ugly face. Wild black hair, oversized nose, ears.
Finally, he cleared his throat. "Your husband? Did you truly love him?"
The bluntness of his question surprised her. "Yes. Yes, I did. I do." She blinked, rapidly. "What makes you think I didn't?"
"All the arguings. When was the last time you and he were…husband and wife?"
"When did he die?"
"No, no." Pedro gave a polite smile. "When did you and he… perform as husband and wife. You know?"
Maggie let out a surprised huff. "When did we last make love?"
"Yes!"
"And you think this is your business because…"
"But you talk about it in your sermon, yes?"
"Our relationship. Of course, that does include our sexual relationship, I guess." She let out a lonely sigh. "About a year before he died, I guess. I didn't put an X on the calendar."
Pedro's face brightened. "We are here."
She looked around. They had reached a row of outdoor showers, painted bright green, no dividers between the showers.
"I didn't realize this was where you were walking me."
He gestured down at his body with his big hands. "I have to wash from working all day."
As she watched, averting her eyes, looking back, he raised his arms over his head, lifted one knee, then the other, getting out of his clothes.
Walked unselfconsciously over to the nearest showerhead, turned on the water.
His bare shoulders jumped. He grinned his big teeth at her. "The water is cold."
She watched him soap up the front of his body, ugly face bent as if she weren't there.
Saw him pay careful attention to washing between his brown legs, limp cock and balls flopping side to side. His mother or father must have told him as a little boy to always keep that area clean.
He turned his back to her. Looked at her over his shoulder. "Could you, please?" He held his foamy washcloth out to her.
Maggie blinked. "You want me to wash your back?"
"You do it, please?"
She looked around the quiet, darkening park. "Who washes your back the other times you shower?"
"One of the other men. We wash each other's backs. The men are not here tonight, they have washed already, while I was by the shore, listening to your sermon." He lifted the hand holding his washcloth. "Please? So that I am clean?"
She tried to think of why she shouldn't accept the washcloth, couldn't come up with a good reason. Took it from him. It was heavier in her hand than she thought it would be. Feeling the wet warmth across her fingers she realized, this washcloth was between his legs.
She accepted the bar of soap in her other hand. Rubbed the soap vigorously across the nubble of the cloth, working up a foam.
He bent forward, away from her, shoulder blades growing larger.
His back was more muscular than Carl's. She moved the washcloth across the broad ripples, foam dripping down his spine.
When she worked her way down to his narrow waist she hesitated, then, lifting her chin, matter-of-factly, like a nurse, rubbed the wet cloth over both cheeks of his buttocks, feeling, in her palm, beneath the nubble, the lima bean roundness.
Finished, she returned the soapy cloth to his big hand, stepped back.
He slowly rotated under the shower, head tilted back, s
pray landing on his wide nose, Adam's apple sticking up, letting the soap drain off his body.
As he turned within the cone of silver water, eyes shut, she looked down at his cock. It had grown, but was still pointing down.
He walked her back to her rolling stage.
By now the sun was setting. Everyone had left.
He put a big hand on one wooden corner of the stage, dark eyes glancing at the other three corners. "It's a raft, no?"
Maggie reared her head back. A raft? That was a new idea for her. She had thought it was a road vehicle, then a stage. Was it also a raft? Wouldn't that explain why God had told her in his specifications to stuff so much styrofoam into the joists?
"I don't know."
"Let's try it, for an experiment."
She hesitated. If it weren't a raft, pushing it into the river might cause it to get stuck in the mud, to where she could no longer use it. How would she get home? But home had already, over her weeks on the road, turned into something so distant, a small, shingled roof far away, past green hills and valleys, at the bottom of a tall blue sky, she decided it was worth the risk, to see if this might be the next step in God's plan.
She and Pedro got down by the front of her stage, pushing forward, wobbling the stage closer to the bank of the Mississippi, closer still, until the large wooden square tilted down, their hands lifting away, falling into the river, bobbing, righting.
It was a raft.
Maggie waded out into the water, pulling herself up onto the square.
Walked across the wood, wet from the waist down, grasped the steering stick, experimented with it, discovered she could steer the raft on the water.
Pedro, standing on the shore, twenty feet away, asked if he could travel with her.
Maggie got nervous. After all, she knew nothing about him. She shook her head at his shrinking image. "No, thanks, but I think I have to do this on my own."
Pedro stood on the dimming shore, watching her drift further away, then splashed his feet into the water, tilted forward, fingertips of both hands touching above his head, dived in.
Maggie faced forward, working the stick to get out into deeper water as quickly as possible.
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