The Used World

by Haven Kimmel

  In the wide upstairs hallway there were no longer any eyes to open and close, tell her if she’d gone right or left. That rug had been one of the first things she’d carried out; she’d rolled it up and driven it to the space she’d rented for almost nothing, an empty building that had once been a tractor tire store. The first few trips she drove her car, taking the lightest, smallest pieces of furniture. Then she realized that Jim Hank’s truck was still right there, parked right where he’d left it, and he wouldn’t be needing it anytime soon. Things went more quickly after that.

  She took her flashlight out of her belt, shone it in the bathroom. Yep. A bad leak around the window. She’d get the boys to come out, shore that up. Edie’s room was the worst, for some reason. The teenagers and hunters who’d briefly taken over the place, before Hazel had realized she’d need to board up the village to save the village, had gravitated toward Edie’s room so naturally it may as well have been Stonehenge on the summer solstice. They’d torn down the wallpaper, dragged in an old mattress, written on the walls. She always assumed Edie herself, Edie and Charlie and their bumbling militia, had been among the vandals, but she’d never caught them. All she knew is that when the boards and the steel door went up, Edie and Charlie somehow found Cobb Creek, and the break-ins had stopped. “I’m homeless!” Edie had yelled at her, how many times over the years? “And that’s my home, too, and it’s empty—I should call the law.” Hazel laughed at Edie, pitied her. And Edie never pushed, not really. She knew instinctively that whatever lay on the other side of pushing Hazel too far was bad for all God’s children, and she must have known that it wasn’t hers, too. At the end of the day—and they weren’t there yet, but dusk was surely falling—it was all Hazel’s. The whole disaster.

  The key to the lock on the nursery door slipped in and turned easily; she’d been wise to buy a good one. She opened the door, stepped inside without turning on the light. It wears off, it wears off after a while, that’s what Caroline told her. Your mother or your father dies and the first time you walk past his favorite chair or pick up her hairbrush, you think the planet has spun off its axis. And it hurts every time you walk past the chair, if you leave it there, every time until one day you don’t notice it at all and you’re sitting in it talking on the phone. The gray walls, the elephants marching, the braided rug. I don’t care what you do with it, Caroline had said, I will not live in a crypt. Practical, her mother. Hazel stepped into a cobweb, brushed it off her face. And she had been obedient, yes. Sold everything in the clinic to a new GP just opening his practice (except for a couple things that she kept in the storage place and would not sell). There was so much money, savings accounts and insurance policies, money to burn if handled right, and Caroline and Hazel knew how. Even here, her own room, she’d carried down to the truck the toys and rocking horses Nanny used to arrange for a different sort of little girl; the bookcase with her favorite books; her desk, her rocking chair, her clothes. Caroline didn’t know—didn’t need to know—this: the iron bed, still turned to face the window, made up in its white coverlet.

  The light in the room was silver, it flickered as rain poured down the casement window. Hazel took a step toward the bed, jarred by the sound of her own breathing. For the first fifteen, twenty? years she’d come out every few months and wash the linens on this bed. Once a year for the coverlet, even though nature itself seemed to avoid the room; the windows stayed true, no wildlife had found a way through the ceiling or up through the closet floors. But it had begun to seem, even to Hazel, strange to care. No one was hurt if she did it or didn’t do it, and one fall afternoon, during the time of year she usually tended to the house, she looked at herself in the mirror, gave a shrug, skipped it.

  Now, approaching the bed, she wondered if she’d been wrong. It wasn’t…the coverlet wasn’t as she’d left it, it seemed dingy and mussed, as if someone had sat down on it. The rain fell so hard on the slate roof above her it sounded like marbles being dropped on the house. Hazel sat down. The bed groaned beneath her in its usual way. She felt dizzy—closed her eyes—this bed, she thought, stayed right here, just like this, with no purpose since the last night I slept in it, not knowing it would be the last. It just waits.

  And there, too: the sweater tossed casually across the bed. The first time she’d done it, Hazel had to pretend she’d just taken it off, that she was changing for dinner or to go out with Finney and Jim Hank. She pretended to take it off and toss it on the bed, pretended to turn to her closet, which was, of course, completely empty. The next time she did it, it was easier; she skipped the fantasy of dinner and went straight to the tossing and the closet. Then no fantasy, and finally no closet. Not her sweater. Finney’s. Well, not even Finney’s—it had begun life as Malcolm’s cardigan, but Finney had worn it for so long it had become hers, just the same way Jumpin’ Bean became Claudia’s dog, or Oliver belonged to all of them. No one knew as well as Hazel the shifting boundaries of ownership, how little it mattered in the scheme of things. A wiser woman—a much wiser woman—would have let the bed go, too, and the sweater, and the house, the land. Caroline did.

  Hazel picked up the sweater, which was damp, lifeless, and buried her face in it. Nothing. She had so long ago emptied that sweater of every part of Finney, she might as well have eaten it. One day there had been the last trace, elusive and faint, and Hazel had hunted it down and devoured it, not knowing it was the last. But that was okay, she thought, dropping the sweater beside her. If she’d known, she would have done it anyway.

  A tap-tap at her bedroom window: Hazel looked up, but it was just a tree branch. She waved her hand at the window, dismissing it. Thirty years. Thirty years since her world had collapsed, and in that time? Nothing. No owls in Jonah. No owls on campus. The windows at her new house? Aluminum, double-paned, diddly for predator birds.

  She straightened the coverlet, locked the bedroom door behind her. Two, three, four steps down the hallway, a third key. Hazel unlocked the attic door, turned on the light in the stairwell that was no color, just the remnants of what someone long before her had to spare. She climbed the stairs.

  Claudia leaned over the steering wheel, ground her teeth. The radio had bothered her so much she’d slammed her palm against the on/off knob and knocked it to the floor. She needed new windshield wipers and wasn’t it always the case that you need new windshield wipers and you don’t think of it or notice it until monsoon season? Every mile or so she passed a car off the road, someone who’d tried to drive through standing water and only succeeded in flooding his engine. “Idiots,” Claudia muttered, turning the wipers up on high, which streaked the windshield and lowered her visibility. She also turned the defroster on high, in a vain attempt to turn the rain to steam.

  The rain was so hard and constant, Claudia could barely see road signs; she missed one turn and had to double back. Her palms were sweating, her fingers icy with fear. She thought of something Amos had said last Sunday morning, about how evil was less a preestablished fact than a failure to respond to God’s tug upon our souls toward goodness and harmony. Imagine the distance collapsed, the one between God and your every decision; it would be like walking down a dirt road in perfectly bright sun, followed by a hawk, or some bees. That is our Messianic dream, no division between God, the light, the road, the Man or Woman.

  Claudia couldn’t pray, so she drove.

  Rebekah was six years old and had scarlet fever and her mouth was so dry, her skin covered with red bumps. Sometimes she was too tired to cry out for her mother, and at those times Ruth just appeared, it was like magic, and she held a cold washcloth over Rebekah’s mouth and let the water drip inside. Her throat hurt too much to swallow, but this was nice, the water on her tongue. A jack-o’-lantern, a pumpkin caving in upon itself late in the season, that’s what she had become, although she wasn’t allowed to say so because she wasn’t allowed to know. She wasn’t allowed to know anything about Satan’s various holidays, and she wasn’t allowed to speak of the way worldly parents all
owed him to work through their children. It was as good as inviting him in. Ruth was gone again and Rebekah looked through the haze of fever around her childhood bedroom. She was stunned, even though she was just a child, by Ruth’s fastidious care, the straight, tight stitches on the hem of the gingham curtains, the polish of her dresser top. Her mother’s love was like a…the fever kicked at her, it squeezed her body in a tightening vise, and she felt the water, hot beneath her and flowing from her, and knew then that something was over, and she was at sea.

  Claudia didn’t recognize the truck following her, and the rain was much too hard for her to see the driver. She tried speeding up and slowing down, thinking she might be in someone’s way, but the truck stayed close to her. She turned onto Rebekah’s road and crept toward the cabin, knowing the driveway would be difficult to spot. There, finally, was the mailbox.

  Peter’s car was gone, but Rebekah’s was there, covered with fallen leaves and a small branch from the tree it was parked under. Claudia reminded herself to breathe, to stay alert, to take mental note as if at a crime scene. She pulled up the hood of her raincoat and stepped out into the rain just as the truck pulled into the driveway and stopped behind the Jeep.

  She stood, letting the rain pound against her, as Vernon Shook stepped out of his truck and walked toward her, his back and shoulders squared in defiance of the elements. He wore a jacket but nothing on his head, and in the strange light of the storm, the green of his eyes reached her first.

  “You get on back in your car now,” he said to Claudia, almost gently, like a man trying to spare a child something unfortunate.

  “I don’t think—”

  “I said get on. You aren’t getting near my daughter or the baby.”

  Even in the rain Claudia could see what she was up against: Vernon was the force that ran everything. She and Rebekah and all women everywhere lived and died according to the whim of men like him. She swallowed against her fear of him and tried to say something, but before she could, he opened the left side of his jacket and showed her the gun he had tucked into the waistband of his work pants. It looked like a .22 to her, the kind of weapon a lot of people kept in a bedside drawer.

  “You have till I count to three,” he said, lowering his chin and watching her, unblinking.

  He just gave me three seconds, Claudia thought, incredulous, as if I were his child or his battered wife. Even though I’ve got six inches on him and twice the gun. And she pulled the .44 out of the wide pocket of her raincoat. She didn’t show it to him, she didn’t wave it around, she extended her right arm and put the barrel against his forehead. A bullet in the first chamber. With her left hand she reached into his jacket and took the .22, dropping it into her pocket.

  “You wouldn’t,” Vernon said, and Claudia wondered if he was right. There was, after all, something so familiar about him, something she felt inclined to hold on to. Then the corner of his mouth rose up in a sneer and twitched, a nervous tic, and Claudia realized, oh, I certainly would.

  Vernon seemed to feel it too, that he had given himself away. His shoulders slumped and he let his eyes blink slowly, once, twice. He covered his face with his hands and pushed his hair back, then turned and headed for his truck. Even his walk was defeated. Just before he opened the driver’s side door he looked at Claudia and said, “I’d like to have that gun back at some point.”

  She nodded, said, “You just worry about getting home safely.” He started the truck and backed out slowly, and Claudia stood still, waiting until the sound of his truck faded, disappeared.

  The screen door was rusted, the mesh pulled away slightly from the frame all around the bottom. She turned the old brass handle and it opened. Now there was the heavy door with a single diamond pane; she raised her hand to knock, let it fall. No one was going to answer. She palmed the doorknob and there was the feeling again, that the weight of an object, or its purpose, offered more resistance than she could overcome. She leaned her head against the door, afraid she would hyperventilate. Now she was falling apart. She’d been fine pulling a loaded gun on a man, but now she thought she might faint. A part of her wanted to storm the gate, and another wanted to turn around and go home. What was beyond was not hers, it had nothing to do with her. She saw, again, Hazel’s face, her dry lips, the lines around her eyes; saw Rebekah carrying Oliver into the kitchen on a gray morning in December, and Claudia opened the door.

  The room was dim, the air was close, and it took a few moments for her eyes to adjust. Here, just as in the kitchen at Cobb Creek, were layers of smells, most of them very bad. There was garbage in the kitchen, dead fish floating in a gray-green aquarium, a smell of sickness, fever, urine.

  She took a step into the living room, sweat breaking out on her forehead, her neck. The cabin was so horrible and silent she was afraid to call out. She was about to turn and look for the bedroom when she saw, under an old quilt, Rebekah’s hand floating in the air, her skin so white it looked blue.

  “No no no no,” Claudia whispered, trying to find Rebekah’s face in the swirl of hair and quilt. The smell was overwhelming, and when she finally turned Rebekah’s face toward her it was swollen, pale. Her bottom lip was cracked and bleeding from what must have been a fever; she was so hot, her skin was burning.

  Claudia stood up, panting, and began clawing through the debris on the floor for the phone. She traced the wire running around the floorboard and found it on the desk, but when she lifted the receiver, it was dead, of course, it had been disconnected. She kept up a steady stream of verbal panic, beginning with where’s the phone where’s the phone, and moving on to oh my God oh my God, then Rebekah I’m here I’m here, hold on.

  She unwrapped the rest of Rebekah’s body and saw that her nightgown was soaked and streaked with pink, as was the futon beneath her. Claudia ran out the door, leapt from the porch to the ground, and opened the passenger door of the Jeep with such force she felt a jolt go through her shoulder. She reclined the seat as far as it would go, then flew—it seemed she was flying—back into the house.

  Rebekah was breathing, and her right hand was twitching against her chest, as if she were still running the adding machine at the Used World Emporium. Claudia ran into the bedroom, grabbed a blanket off the bed, and spread it over Rebekah, even her head. Claudia centered her feet just under her shoulders, squatted at the edge of the couch, and slipped her right arm under Rebekah’s knees, her left under Rebekah’s shoulders, all the while whispering Okay okay bear with me, I’m not very graceful. But when she actually lifted Rebekah up, she felt a hum, deep as electricity, in her thighs. It traveled up her back, through her shoulders, and into her arms, and Rebekah felt like nothing, she weighed less than Oliver, less than the groceries Claudia had carried thirty minutes earlier. Fluid ran down Claudia’s arm and soaked into her shirt, into the waistband of her pants. She held Rebekah as close to her as she could and took one long step and was over the threshold, another, and was across the porch. Each step brought a moan from Rebekah, a terrifying exhalation, and Claudia spoke constantly, we’re almost there, we’re almost to the car, I know you can hear me.

  Rebekah was telling Claudia that the Mission had been right, the battle was lost and the world was going to end. They’d had this conversation before, and Claudia was impatient. She was impatient but she smiled nonetheless and told Rebekah, as it seemed she had done before, that the world has no end; that it was a trick of Pastor Lowell’s, just a shadow flung off his black wing, to suggest that it did. She said Who are you going to believe? And Rebekah sighed and lay back in bed. There were things Claudia might never understand. She had never really known Jesus, after all, she had never slept in a house that was, in essence, His tomb. She thought religion was the honeyed light of Ludie’s Christianity, songs about suppertime, jars of bright fruits and vegetables, lined up in a cellar. But that was all fine, Rebekah loved her. You, she said. It’s you I believe.

  They were still three miles from the hospital when Rebekah began making a strange noise
, a concentrated, open-throated hum that was close to a growl. “No no no, Rebekah, wait wait,” Claudia said, approaching a low place on the highway where the water was deep. Three cars were already pulled over, either because they’d attempted it and lost, or because they didn’t dare. The water rose and rose; she saw now that it was spilling out of an irrigation system in one of Nathan Leander’s fields; she was two-thirds of the way through it, almost there. She might make it through the water but she wouldn’t make it to the hospital. Three cars at the side of the road: one of them would have a phone.

  Claudia coasted to the side of the road, slammed the car into park, left it on with the heater running. She sprinted back to the first car she came to, a green Neon, and knocked, maybe a little too hard. The window came down two inches or so. It was a teenaged girl, dressed in the god-awful fashion of the moment, wherein all of her clothes were made for someone Oliver’s size, and they all appeared to have been washed in lye.

  “Do you have a cell phone?” Claudia asked, scaring the girl further.

  She nodded, and reached into the seat beside her. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt, leaving the message on her T-shirt unimpeded: I SUCKED HEAD AT JOE’S CRAWFISH SHACK.

  “No, you call. I need an ambulance. Do you know where we are?”

  The girl looked around, shook her head.

  “We’re on Highway 27, eastbound, between exits twelve and thirteen. Can you remember that?” Without waiting for an answer, Claudia ran back to the Jeep and opened the passenger door. Something was definitely happening; Rebekah’s body pulled in on itself, and she moaned as if her chest were being crushed. An enormous energy seemed to be gathered just over the baby, and as Claudia began to rub Rebekah’s limp hand and say again that everything was fine, she realized Rebekah was pushing. Claudia grabbed the blanket she’d had over Rebekah and threw it over the roof of the Jeep and the open door, making a tent she could stand in without water getting inside.