Population: 485

by Michael Perry

  What you hope for, I think, is to reconcile the dichotomies and negotiate a position of comfort. This is mostly a passive process. Which is not to infer limp acquiescence. In a town founded by a successful author who set up his own sawmill but didn’t write his own book, I make a living writing, but some of my credibility is maintained by the fact that my helmet is hanging on the wall over at the fire hall right now, and while no one on the department has any idea what goes on at these poetry readings, or what I could possibly get from watching an eighty-nine-year-old man dancing Ulysses and the Sirens in a headdress and gold lamé g-string, they do know that when there is smoke in the sky, I will pull hose and roll.

  Exclude issues of culinary excellence, and there is no question I am more comfortable attending the smelt feed at the Legion Hall than I am choosing from six forks on the five-star mezzanine. I love cycling through the line with my neighbors, loading my plastic foam plate with smelt and cole slaw and beans. There’s buttered bread, a cooler of Kool-Aid, and a couple coffee percolators. If you want a beer, you give your money to the lady at the card table. She makes change for your fiver with singles drawn from a tin box and you grab a can from the tub. We sit at folding tables under pictures of departed local veterans and a framed version of the Preamble to the Constitution. The smelt are flat and lightly breaded, about the size of a pocket comb. The tails are on. Some people strip the bones out. Me, I eat the bones. Calcium, I figure. If you like, the members of the Fish and Game Club put shrimp sauce out. Shrimp sauce being IGA ketchup and Silver Springs horseradish mixed in a bowl. You spear the smelt with a plastic fork, swab it through the sauce, and fork it in. Repeat until full, or a little beyond, which is the way around here. Whatever table you land at, you’re going to know someone. Conversation runs to weather and catch-up. Last year I sat next to the school shop teacher. He married a girl up the road from our farm. He wants to know what my brothers are up to. Making wood and hauling logs, I tell him. He says he’s going to build a house in town, might get my brother John to dig the basement with his big backhoe. We get back in line for seconds.

  Last time I was in the Legion Hall, it was to perform. A seed-corn representative hosting a customer-appreciation luncheon hired me to read some of my work for a group of local farmers. That was daunting. I stood there with my essays in my hands, looked at their red faces and thick fingers, and remembered the old “football builds character” speech my high school football coach used to deliver on parents’ night. I was always embarrassed for him, knowing half his audience had been up and grinding since five A.M., milking cows, bucking hay bales, lugging feed, wondering if the bank might cut them some slack. Football? Standing inside a manure spreader chipping frozen cow manure off the beater bars when it’s ten below, that builds character. So I led off my reading with the thing about learning to write by cleaning calf pens. That eased things quite a bit. Physical labor is not in and of itself virtuous, but when you can carry your work around on 8 1/2-by-11 sheets of paper, you stand before a group like this with your metaphorical hat in your pink-palmed hands.

  There are those who say he chokes up on it a little more than he should, but Ross Johnson’s hand is formed to grab a hammer handle. If you get up early, you can catch him at the Gas-N-Go most mornings, with his van and his crew, the coffee drinkers getting their fix before the ride to the latest project, a house, a pole shed, a cow barn. Ross has been building things for forty years now, and last summer he donated his time to help the fire department put up rain shelters down at the softball field. Most of the time, his head was three steps ahead of his troops. It’s an art, keeping a work crew busy. The overbearing ramrod triggers their resentment; an indecisive ramrod loses their respect. Ross kept us all busy, and was quick up the ladder with his own hammer when necessary.

  Like most of us around here, Ross takes off work for deer hunting, and last year he shot a legendary local buck. Twenty-six points. A monster. He made the television news and all the local papers. He was pretty low-key about the whole thing, but if you wanted to sum up our local ethos, you’d be hard pressed to do better than Ross, quoted in the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram. “I got a new pickup last week, shot that buck, and yesterday the Packers won…so it was a pretty good weekend.”

  What we like, we like. We are happy when we are happy. We identify with some people, not others. That guy the Beagle and I wrassled out on the logging trail, I hope I never see him again, but I sure am glad we have history. We’re on the same team, he and I, even if we don’t play well together, and even if he’ll never remember me through the whiskey haze he wore that night. Ross Johnson found satisfaction in the Packers, a truck, and a deer. The things that bring you joy tell you a lot about who you are. The reading is not always definitive.

  I am in a motel. Running the basic cable. This video comes on. “Home,” by Sheryl Crow. Everything is shot in black and white, that lustrous black and white with the silvery spray-paint sheen. Sheryl is singing at a demolition derby. The possibilities of heaven expand. The derby cars are jouncy and sprung, tagged with ads for pressure washers and muffler shops. The drivers careen with earnest idiocy. Heads bobbling, radiators fuming, they smack each other tremendously, in stark contrast to the wistful adagio of the music. The camera cuts from the cars to the grandstand, dwelling on faces. Every face is different, but they share the patina of hard living. Wrinkles and wind scour. Pale brows and burnt napes. A woman’s skin, jerked and cured by a lifetime of cigarettes. A thin-nosed child with bad teeth. A stiff-backed man with guarded eyes. A girl, maybe out of high school, pregnant and beaming, the old lady she will become already evident in her uncomplicated face. The boyfriend’s hand, meaty and tan, cupping her belly. This is a powerful human study. Every countenance is proof of a common verity. Proof of how station, time, and circumstance shape our visage. Every day I see these faces.

  Sheryl, of course, is beautiful. She is exempt from our verity. She is standing amid the sheet metal and the dust and the hardscrabble rednecks and she is singing her soft, sad song, and—in a juxtaposition perhaps confirming the existence of God—she is wearing leather knee-boots and an abbreviated nightie. Between her hemline and her boot tops there is such an equine stretch of thigh as to imply a lifetime of mystery and wonder. The song is ending. Cut to Sheryl standing atop a hay bale—O ineffable image!—at the lip of the mud boggers’ racing pit. A beastly four-wheel-drive slams into the slurry. It screams through the frame, lifting a vast, chocolaty curtain of ooze, which obscures, then breaks (in delicious slow motion) over Sheryl, legs a tad astraddle, head tipped back, arms held wide.

  Awards should be arranged.

  Behind her, my people rise to their feet and cheer.

  Gawping at the TV, I make a noise. Sounds a little like a walrus.

  8

  DEATH

  I CAN TURN YOU INTO A CORPSE. I can look at you and know exactly what you would look like dead. It is a disquieting ability, one I must frequently suppress. I will be seated across a table from someone, they can be talking, eating, laughing, and I will see them stiff on the floor, skin drained, mouth gapped, teeth dry, eyes staring. For fourteen years now I’ve had occasion to observe the recently deceased in a variety of presentations, and as a result, I have developed the ability—similar, in a macabre way, to those computer programs used to create age progression in pictures of missing children—to look at the living and see them dead. Frankly, it is a talent I could do without.

  The dead and their faces have never haunted me. I can conjure them up, but they never come unbidden. There has been only one exception, from a call I made back in the early days. I recall a hot summer afternoon, and I remember Jacques and myself banging out the door even as the page was still transmitting, the dispatcher saying only that a state trooper had been struck by a vehicle on the interstate. We knew it wouldn’t be good. At interstate speeds, a car-versus-pedestrian strike is apocalyptic. Jacques drove, and I trembled in the passenger seat, all the while constructing a vision of some burly tr
ooper lying twisted and silent in the ditch weeds. When we rounded the sweeping curve, I saw a blanket-draped lump on the concrete. Someone waved me in, and I ran to the lump. As I bent to the blanket, the first thing I saw was a hand extended from beneath the cloth, the white fingers set in a curl, the palm cupped. I remember a fleeting impression, something about that hand being not quite right, and when I stripped back the blanket, there, like a rumpled child, was a tiny uniformed woman, her face framed in a thick splash of long blond hair. The hand…it was too small. I was ready for the violence, prepared to view a blunt, wide-shouldered busted-up man; I was unprepared for beauty, for the color and abundance of that hair, for those delicately drawn fingers. We tried, but there was nothing to be done. The damage was overwhelming. I recall listening overlong for a heartbeat, then looking at Jacques. We quietly replaced the blanket and stood down until we were cleared to transport the body.

  Now and then I have occasion to run that section of interstate. When I pass the white cross planted in the grass and hung with the dark blue Smokey the Bear hat favored by the Wisconsin State Patrol, I feel the stillness of the cross. I usually think about the guy who hit her. He claimed he was digging under the passenger seat for some jewelry, didn’t see her, despite the long, flat curve, the flashing lights, the stationary vehicles. The day he was acquitted of manslaughter charges, the local television station ran footage from the courtroom. When the jury announced its verdict, he made this little move that seemed celebratory. Jacques and I had lifted her so gently from the concrete—when I saw his reaction, I felt a flare of rage. Still do. Knowing that such a thing might happen, that a fellow can be pleased to have things go his way in the wake of such mortal carelessness, I want to know how one attains the peace implied by that quiet roadside cross.

  Time passed, and one night, in a dream, I was climbing, burrowing through dead weeds, and I pulled myself up to a high spot, and there, down below, nesting in dead grass, was the hand. Even in the dream, I recognized it immediately. It happened again, off and on over time. I have never seen her face, or her hair, or her body—just the hand. It is always the same; palm up and cupped, fingers curled. It would be overdramatic to say the image haunts me. I have gone for long stretches without seeing it. But every once in a while, I’ll be flowing through a dream, and there it will be. And despite all the years, I recognize it immediately. When I awaken, my gut is laced with ice.

  It is a given in the fire and rescue business: Sooner or later, you will handle a corpse. Unprettied and unposed, the bodies allow death no romance. Heeding Dylan Thomas, we generally do not go gentle into that good night. We go hacking and drooling, lurching and puking, darkening and purpling. Someone who has flown through the windshield of a Pontiac at seventy-five miles per hour to ricochet off a white pine and land in the brush like a bag of wet gravel does not look as if he is sleeping. People who shoot themselves, people who hang themselves—even people who quietly overdose or suffocate themselves—may find peace beyond the vale, but they leave a blotchy, seeping mess back on this side. At best, a corpse looks worn out.

  Worn out, and yet, powerful. I once bought a used book called Celebrations of Death, in which authors Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf wrote, “The vitality of a culture or ideology depends upon its ability to channel the power of such mordant symbols as the corpse.” We honor the dead, but we are speaking to ourselves.

  Tracy Rimes was seventeen years old when she rolled her car on Jabowski’s Corner. A little less than a year later, her classmates graduated. A folding chair on the front row of the dais was left empty, save for a white rose placed across the seat. The next morning, in the local café, a group of women were discussing the girl’s death, describing in turn how upset they had been, laying out their ties to the girl and her family. One remembered her as a child. One had just spoken with her parents. One said, “Those kids shouldn’t have put that rose out…. I was fine until I saw that rose…then I just lostit.” There was a certain tension to the conversation. While the women waited to speak, they nodded, but they nodded as if they were marking time, waiting for their own opportunity to stake claim to a piece of the grief. Given the slightest space between syllables, they interrupted—often by agreeing: “Yeah, I…”—and pinched the end of the previous speaker’s sentence, gently pirating the conversation, steering it back to their own waters. The subject was always the girl, but the object shifted from person to person. Celebrations of Death includes the following passage regarding the French sociologist Emile Durkheim:

  What Durkheim finds important…is the way that other members of society feel moral pressure to put their behavior in harmony with the feelings of the truly bereaved. Those who feel no direct sorrow themselves will nonetheless weep and inflict suffering and inconvenience upon themselves. How can it be other than a positive affirmation of their commitment to an abstract value of neighborliness, of society?

  So on the one hand, we’re a little selfish. On the other hand, it’s nice to suppose that the conversation in the café was driven at least in part by an innate desire to find common ground, to knit individual experiences into a cloak of mourning wide enough to drape across our neighbor’s shoulders.

  If nothing else, bless that girl for bringing us a little more together.

  Names sand-blasted into the polished Bangalore marble of the Vietnam Memorial, notes left at Ground Zero in New York, the white rose on the folding chair, these are commemorations, but they are also attempts by the living to draw conclusions from the dead. A lot of it, I’m sure, comes from years of being steeped in Christianity, of being told Christ died for our sins. For something. Surely, we tell ourselves, we can’t die just because we hit a patch of pebbles on a curve. Surely there is preordination in the pea gravel. We are creatures of myth, hungry for metaphor and allegory, but most of all, hungry for sense. Death—a stillness within the chaos, after all—serves these cravings. Death provides us the pretext and the context within which we may arrange and participate in our own symbolic mythology, to establish significance and import, to reassure ourselves that it all means something. Death is the ultimate passion play, and we want to be on the bill, if only as a member of the chorus.

  A man drove up to the café while the women were talking. He parked his pickup across the street, crossed over, and took a seat at the counter, and ordered the pork chop special. He wore a seed-corn cap at a tilt, and left it in place as he ate, elbows splayed over the counter to either side of his meal. His face was weathered and creased. One of the women wondered aloud how the girl’s parents would get over her death. The man turned to look at her, a spoonful of corn niblets hovering halfway between his plate and his mouth.

  “You talkin’ about somebody losin’ a child?”

  “Yes,” said the woman.

  The man’s gaze drifted down and away from the woman, to a space just above the floor in front of him. Then he rolled out the words flat and cold as a length of strap iron:

  “You never get over it.”

  He pronounced never as quietly as the rest of the sentence, but both syllables were laced with a poisonous certainty. He returned to his food, and didn’t speak again. After a few looks, the locals went back to talking. When the man paid his bill and left, no one seemed to notice. But I watched him, and halfway across the street, he stopped, and right there on the centerline, with first one and then the other sleeve of his rough coat, he wiped his eyes. Then he was in his truck, and gone.

  I think of that guy whenever a celebrity dies and I hear some talking head in the media say we have lost a part of ourselves. You have to figure that’s a little tough for him to swallow, when he knows what it is to grieve a child, all alone in the middle of a highway. This is a grief neither assuaged nor exalted by the attention of a nation. This is a grief that refuses to arrange itself around prime time.

  “Get out of bed!” my high school science teacher used to say. “People die in bed!” Truth be told, ambulance calls have taught me otherwise. People tend to die in t
he bathroom. They tip over while groping in the medicine cabinet for Maalox, or straining on the pot just enough to blow a leaking abdominal aneurysm. Rare is the EMT who hasn’t performed CPR between the tub and the toilet. I have found people dead in bed, but I have found more of them in the bathroom. I have also found them in the brush, in snowbanks, in cars, on the road, sitting upright in chairs, draped over the kitchen table. My brother once drove his ambulance to a corn field and got stuck with an abiding vision of the pulverized remains of a farmer still spinning on a power shaft. I had a partner who once found a man hanging from the ceiling with alligator clips on his nipples. Another partner, responding to a call on an empty stomach, relished the smell of turkey when he entered the house until he walked into the living room and found an old man, dead for days, his forearm slow-roasting at the foot of a space heater. Last winter, a fisherman collapsed and died on Lake Tres Verde. He must have been catching fish pretty regular, because when the ambulance crew arrived, another fisherman was standing over the body, with his line down the hole previously manned by the deceased. We enter this world in generally uniform fashion; the means of egress, on the other hand, are infinite.

  On a cold night in early autumn, a universe of stars pinpricked across the black sky, we round a sweeping bend of the interstate and the usual burst of state trooper lights directs us to an accident scene. I am still in training, back in the Silver Star days, riding with Leif and Todd. Leif pulls the rig past the farthest patrol car and parks on the rumble strip beside the guardrail. Looking over the edge of a sloping embankment, I can see the sweep and wink of flashlights forty feet below.