by Reed Karaim
The silence had grown too long between us.
“We really need the ad,” I said. “I could call him and say we’ll run a correction . . .” I stumbled to a halt trying to imagine what that correction would be. The corpse of Henry Abbott on display at Swanson Funeral Home last Friday was not dressed up?
“No, you’re the editor,” Louise said. “You’re not supposed to have to deal with ads. That’s the publisher’s job.” She stood by sliding her back up against the wall. It was an impressive sight, like watching a mountain rise out of the earth. “I’ll talk to the little faggot,” she said, her eye flaring back into a fierce, tumbling solar cauldron. “You’ll get the ad back.”
I walked across the street in the early evening silence.
“Art’s out of town,” I said when I got back to the office.
“I know,” Anna said. “I told you.”
“Louise is going to deal with it.”
“Okay . . .”
“Just hold the space for now. The ad will come back in.”
She nodded and returned to work.
“Art’s out of town with a friend,” I said.
“I know, Eric.”
I looked around for something to do and then gave up, leaning against the wheel of the old letterpress.
“Does everybody but me know that Art goes out of town with friends?”
Anna smiled ever so slightly. “I’m not so sure Sam knows,” she said, referring to her ten-year-old daughter.
I watched Anna use a ruler to sketch out the design of a page.
“I’m the editor,” I said. “I’m supposed to know stuff.”
“You know lots of stuff, Eric. It’s okay you didn’t know this. What does it really matter, anyway?”
I went over to the other light table, where I had a couple of half-finished layouts, and pretended to work. The radio was playing a Kris Kristofferson song, something about drinking too much. It didn’t matter, but then, nothing felt like it did.
“I just don’t like not noticing.”
“They’ve been here forever, you know,” Anna said. “They knew each other in grade school, high school. I think he was the best friend she ever had. They got married when she came back to town after getting fired at the Fargo Forum.”
I understood what she was trying to tell me, but I didn’t know what to say.
“I didn’t know she got fired.”
“She pissed off the biggest business in town, the sugar beet processing plant. The story won an award, but the Fargo Forum really wasn’t about challenging the business community.”
“What did she write?”
“A story about how much the plant stunk.”
I laughed.
“He took her in,” Anna said. “A job first, but they ended up together.”
“Okay.”
We worked quietly for a bit.
“Still . . .” I said.
She stopped working and turned, a mixture of impatience and sympathy on her face.
“Still, what?”
“Still, wouldn’t you want it to be, you know . . . I mean, why would you want to give up . . . sex, and, okay, not just that—and love, too. I mean wouldn’t you want everything? All the things you’re supposed to have when you’re together and . . .”
“I don’t know that they don’t love each other. And for that matter, I don’t know that they’ve given up sex.”
“Oh, Jesus—”
“It’s between them,” she said, with an edge I hadn’t heard before. I had disappointed her. “The choices they’ve made.”
I thought that was true, but part of me still wanted to protest. I had been thinking in a bewildered way about what love meant since Emily had crawled back into my bed, and I clung to a romantic ideal.
“But you don’t know that they really do, either. I mean, love each other.”
Anna shook her head and turned back to her table. “I suppose not.”
We worked in silence for a while, Anna pulling a full-sized page sheet out and beginning to fill it with waxed copy. I did the same.
“I just meant nobody really knows what anybody’s feeling.”
“I know what you meant, Eric.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe it’s enough,” Anna said. “Maybe it works for them. That’s all I was trying to say.”
• • •
TWO DAYS LATER we had a fire. It was set on purpose by the volunteer fire department so they could get in some practice, and no living thing was supposed to be at risk. The building the fire department decided to burn down was a small, abandoned grain elevator. Grain elevators are always a fire hazard because of the explosively flammable grain dust that ends up in every nook and cranny. Setting fire to an old grain elevator and putting it out seemed like good practice for what would be a serious danger should it occur.
The fire truck was parked nearby, hoses properly unrolled and positioned. The men in their heavy yellow-and-black fire-retardant suits circled the building. I joined them, notebook in hand. Anna climbed into a nearby barn to get a better angle for photos. The blaze was set and the flames were allowed to work their way up the sides of the elevator.
Except they didn’t work, they raced. In a few minutes the Shannon Volunteer Fire Department surrounded a towering Roman candle. Flames reached high into the clouded sky, blown sideways by a breeze that seemed slight on the ground, but was clearly stronger at the top of the elevator, where a fountain of floating cinders, burning shards, and a thick, swirling, lovely swarm of glowing grain dust like ten million fireflies drifted through the air and onto the barn, an adjoining shed, the fire truck, and all of us.
The heat must have been intense, because the firemen fell back, the water from their hoses reaching less than halfway up the elevator. I was standing farther away and still felt it like a summer sun that had mysteriously risen twice as close to the earth.
I was backing up slowly, when the roof of the shed burst into flames and I realized Anna was still in the barn hayloft.
The barn roof must have been damp or covered with moss, because it was only smoking when I arrived, tongues of flame like the blessing of the holy spirit drifting through the smoke to land and flare briefly on the wooden shingles. Anna stood in the open door of the hayloft, camera to her eye, shooting both the elevator and the burning sky.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Time to go!”
She took another shot and lowered the camera slowly from her eye, her expression strangely serene.
“Hey, get down!”
Anna stood in the frame of the hayloft, and a curl of smoke bent out of the sky and wrapped itself around her waist. She returned the camera slowly to her eye and took another carefully framed photograph, and I suddenly felt like I didn’t know her at all.
“Get down!”
She hesitated, clearly hearing me, and I thought she was about to say something. The sound of the fire behind me and the damp pop as the hot cinders landed on the roof filled the air with a low tumult of noise.
“Come on, quit fooling around.”
A small flame had sprung to life on the edge of the roof, bending toward the shingles like an eager gnome. Anna’s attention had returned to the river of debris and ash floating so clearly against the gray slate of the sky.
“Anna, get out of there! That’s an order from your boss.”
That made her smile with an odd sort of affection. She raised the camera and took another shot of the sky.
The firemen were focused on the elevator and the shed. I needed to call them over, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, the way she was still leaning against the side of the hayloft opening. Smoke was curling out around her feet.
“Anna! Jesus! If you don’t get down this second, I’m coming up there.”
She looked down at me then, regretfully, and stepped back into the darkness of the hayloft. I waited a heartbeat and then I was running into the ground floor of the barn, where the darkness blinded me and I felt the smoke like a s
nake constricting slowly around my chest and I bumped into her as she jumped from the last step on the ladder.
We emerged into the gray light and a torrential downpour as hoses were turned on the barn, extinguishing the smoldering flames. Anna bent over double to shield the camera and we staggered out into the grass, where I sat down hard and she knelt beside me.
Paul Strand appeared in front of us, pulling his fireman’s hat back in panic.
“You’re both okay?”
“We’re fine,” Anna said. “I just waited a little too long. Sorry.”
He shook his head in disbelief and returned his attention to his crew.
“Fire and ice,” Anna said, coughing quietly.
“What? What the—”
“Robert Frost. ‘Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice.’”
“Anna . . .”
“‘From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire.’”
It didn’t seem she had heard me. There was a kind of euphoria in her voice.
“Awesome. Listen—”
“‘I think I know enough to say that for destruction ice is also great—”
“Listen—”
“—and would suffice.’ One of my favorite poems.”
“Listen. That was stupid. That was so stupid. What the hell were you thinking?”
I will always remember the way she looked at me then, as if she had thought I would understand and was saddened that I didn’t.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
We were both soaked. I was trying to regain my composure.
“Really. What were—”
Behind me the grain elevator collapsed in on itself, the sound like a cascade of garbage tumbling down stairs. I felt a flare of heat against my back and a flock of sparks and glowing embers sailed through the air. Anna raised the camera and took a shot.
“It was just beautiful. The fire. The sky. I forgot where I was.”
I was about to protest, but she had the camera back at her eye, a shield, taking pictures of the firemen now closing in to hose down the tumbled remains of the elevator. She stood and drifted closer for a final shot.
I looked up the poem in my Norton Anthology that night. Sitting in my apartment above the bank, I reread it several times, picturing Anna memorizing the lines as a young girl out there in the badlands, where the country itself can catch fire. As I read it seemed an odder and odder choice as anyone’s favorite poem. No road not taken. No woods lovely dark and deep. No promises to keep. No hope. Fire or ice. The end, either way.
She hadn’t quoted it perfectly. There had been a single omission. The actual line is, “I have known enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great.”
I didn’t know what to make of that, thought it was a curious mistake, and the whole event still bugged me enough that I brought it up with her at the end of the next day. We were both working late, finishing our copy. She handed me the cutlines for her photos of the fire, which were excellent, and I said:
“You misquoted Robert Frost.”
“I don’t quote him at all,” Anna said. “I quote the fire chief.”
“I mean last night.” And I explained.
I could tell it annoyed and confused her. She reached absently for the cutlines still in my hand, as if they now needed a rewrite.
“I like my version better,” she said.
I moved the page just out of her reach. “You’re thinking of misquoting the fire chief, too?”
She realized what she was doing and pulled her hand back. “No, I think he expresses himself perfectly: ‘The success of our initial efforts to ignite a conflagration exceeded our expectations.’”
“There you are,” I said. “Let’s see Robert Frost beat that.”
We were alone in the front office, although I could hear Todd knocking around in the back shop. Anna turned to her desk, and an unexpected sense of sadness, of uncertainty, swept over me, not just at her, but everything—Emily reappearing, my father’s funeral, still so recent.
“No hate,” I said.
“Not always,” Anna said, her typewriter rattling in a long and furious salvo.
Many years later this woman, Anna, sits on the edge of a motel bed, a bottle of bleach in her hands, and I can say, yes, of course, it’s obvious; it was always there. But she also came down from that burning barn, and who is to say one moment is truer than the other? We are taught to believe the ending is the part that matters, but it’s just the point where we lift our hands, or they are taken, from the keys. She was back at her desk that next afternoon, and I can still see her proud, unbent posture. I watch her hands come down. I hear the staccato of Anna filling another page.
Chapter 18
THE FIRST TIME HE HIT HER it was raining hard, the sound like a machine gun against the tin roof of the trailer. The baby was crying. Nobody could sleep. He had come home late, fishtailing the Pontiac down the switchback dirt road until he lost it on a corner and left the car nose-down in the ditch. He was soaked when he came through the door. Sitting at the kitchen table, he asked for a glass of water, and her arms felt strangely numb and it slipped from her hand as she was bringing it to him. The glass shattered and shards bounced across the yellow linoleum floor, and when he stood he stepped on one, cutting his foot badly, and it was only then that she noticed he was barefoot, that somewhere in the night he had lost both his boots and his socks.
He shouted in pain and swung wildly with a half-closed fist, which flashed an odd blue in the corner of her vision, and then she was sitting on the floor, staring at pieces of glass between her legs, each with a small halo of light, like gems of some incalculable value.
Before he stumbled through the door she had been lying in bed with the baby beside her, hoping that would stop the crying, listening to the mad pummel of the rain, and it had felt to her she could feel the drops falling all the way from the farthest stars to her roof, that she could apprehend the depth of the universe in the silver line of their descent. And as she rode the distance toward the small square box of her home, visible like a metal bull’s-eye amid the wild country, she could trace the path of her marriage in their plummet.
The sound they made as they annihilated themselves against the corrugated tin was a shot and a hollow echo, as if the metal were snapping back into place; after a while it transformed itself into two words repeated a thousand times a minute, too young too young too young too young too young. Her husband was too young to be asked to come home every night and sit in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but stare at a video or listen to the wind sneak past the cheap window frames with the squeak of nervous mice. He would try, sometimes for three or four nights in a row, but the other men were all single and they were all going into town and why shouldn’t he join them for a quick drink? What could be wrong with joining them for a couple of drinks or maybe one more after that? He worked hard. He was working hard to support her and the baby and hadn’t he earned a drink or two? Could she say he hadn’t earned a drink or two, and if he was still the boy who had first leaned forward in the light of the dash to reveal a smile so perfect it flashed a semaphore of longing directly into her heart, and if he still had the same tangle of dirty blond hair and the same thin hard body that stretched his T-shirt and her erotic imagination, how could she blame him if these things still worked with other girls, not that much older than her, in the bars? She slid down this long straight line of reasoning through the darkness until she hit the unyielding end and felt herself dissolved in the cacophony of the rain.
Now, sitting on the floor with pieces of glass glowing like half-born angels and the air ringing like a bell, she said, “I’m sorry.” And that was the wrong thing to say. She saw something change in his eyes, some shift from defeat and shame to contempt. She had made herself the one to blame and she could feel his confused heart seizing at this. She wanted to say, I know you are not bad, I know you are not a bad man, but maybe that was no longer true, because he grabbe
d her by her hair and pulled her to her feet. Bring another glass into the bedroom, he said.
And she stood there unsteadily with the world glowing and somewhere very far away the baby was still crying. How do I know this? She told me most of it later that year, and the rest I have taken a lifetime to learn. Call it fiction, if you wish, a writer filling in the blanks. But time explains things, and this is the girl who still lived in the woman I knew.
• • •
EMILY CAME AND WENT at odd times. I never knew when she would be waiting inside my apartment, ready to stay the night or for a few days, and she would only tell me she was leaving an hour at most before she was back out the door. Twice I returned at the end of the day to find a note taped to the window and a hollowness in the air where she had so recently been.
Taping the note to the glass baffled me. Why not the counter, the bedside table? It was as if she thought the first thing I did upon returning home was march to the window to stare out at the town. I wondered how many hours a day she spent there while I was working. I knew she went out into the countryside sometimes for long drives. She would tell me about some abandoned barn or perfect country church she had discovered amid the ripening wheat fields and browning prairie grass. I asked her a few times if she wanted to go to the Buffalo Bar or have dinner at the café, but she made awkward excuses. The window was all the view of Shannon she wanted. She didn’t want to meet anyone. She didn’t want to have to make conversation. She didn’t want to talk about the past year. She didn’t want to explain. She just wanted to be there in my apartment, my living room, my bed, with nothing said, her skinny arms with their knobby elbows wrapped too tightly around my chest, her skinny leg draped over me, all with a confused fierceness that led to dreams of being entangled in hammocks, collapsed sails, or force fields cast by spectral blue-skinned aliens watching from the shadows.