Jorgen watched the corn. A few rows in, stalks were bending more than what the wind could do. “I wasn’t always this way.”
“Well, it’s a good way to be.”
The corn wavered, the stiff leaves rustling, sounding like rain on tin. Jorgen began to shiver. He reached his arm around Mary Ellen and pulled her so they had to walk slower.
“I ain’t getting cute,” he said. “I’m cold is all.”
“Thought you said you didn’t get cold?”
“Never had before.”
“You want your jacket back?” she said. “Maybe we can take turns? A minute for you, a minute for me?”
“I’m all right.”
Mary Ellen threw an arm around his waist and they walked easy. The air smelled of woodsmoke. He tried not to look at the corn, but it wouldn’t stop shifting in his periphery. Finally, he peered into the rows. “They’s dogs that run these fields,” he said. “Sometimes the stalks move and you think someone’s out there, but it’s just the dogs.”
Mary Ellen looked into the corn, too. “You trying to spook me?”
“Sometimes, when they cut the crop they find dogs, dead or froze up in a rut or something.”
“That’s awful.”
He shrugged.
“Jorgen,” she said. “I ever tell you about my big dream?”
Up ahead, the road came to a T. An abandoned farmhouse sat on a wooded hill above the road, the moonlight edging its chimney and tattered roof. Beside the house, the tops of trees swirled in the wind. “Marrying Tad?”
She smacked his shoulder. “Not that,” she said. “No, I want to go to school to work in an animal hospital. That’s what my mama does.” She chuckled. “We got eleven dogs, two snakes, and a potbellied pig, all what live in the house.”
“Must stink.”
“You get used to it after a while,” she said. “I miss it when I’m gone, if you can believe that.”
“I got a bird,” he said.
“A bird?”
“A little parakeet.”
“What’s she called?”
Jorgen felt uneasy. “Don’t know,” he said. “Never called it nothing.” Mary Ellen smacked his shoulder again, laughed like he’d told a joke. He watched her mouth, the white of her teeth, the gap in the front. “Tried to set it free today, but it wouldn’t go.”
“What you want to set it free for?”
“Just seemed right,” Jorgen said. “With me leaving and all. Anyway, it wouldn’t go.”
“Bet you treat it well.”
“It don’t say one way or the other.”
“It didn’t fly off,” she said. “That’s how it says.”
“I guess.”
“You might be too nice for my cousin,” Mary Ellen said. “She’d eat you alive.”
“I ain’t that nice.”
At the T in the road, Jorgen pointed to the right and they turned onto Old Saints Highway. He walked and watched the farmhouse. A flashlight blinked on and off behind a second-floor window. The right side of the road was a high wall of corn, the left was harvested hills. On a far knob in the middle of the bare field, a tiny light winked back.
“You’re shivering like a kitten,” Mary Ellen said, and stopped in the road and took off the jacket. “Here, take this awhile.”
Jorgen pushed it away. “I’m all right.”
“Take it,” she said.
“No.”
Mary Ellen defiantly stepped forward and wrapped the jacket around Jorgen and held the collar at his throat. “You wear it till I count to sixty,” she said, and began to count.
Jorgen breathed in her perfume. She grinned, mouthing the numbers. He could see how it happens. He wanted to throw his arms around her. Kiss her mouth. At the count of twenty, a knot of guilt welled high inside his chest, and he had to look away. Dark things moved out in the field. “There’s them dogs,” he said, quietly. Mary Ellen glanced over her shoulder, then looked back at him, nodding her head from side to side, whispering thirty-two, thirty-three.
“Mary Ellen,” he said. “You know that boy what fills the soda machines? Tim Eddy Jenkins?”
Mary Ellen’s head stilled. Her mouth stopped counting. “Why’s he coming up?”
Jorgen shrugged.
She let loose of his collar. “He’s always kind to me,” she said, but her eyes turned the shape someone else’s eyes might only take when crying. Her body brushed against his as she ran a finger along the skin above his ear. “You ought to let your hair grow out. The army’s got you looking like a little boy.” She gently slid the jacket off Jorgen’s shoulder. “That’s sixty.”
“I just don’t like the way he sings and all,” he said. “Coming in with that old squeeze box, putting on a big show for you. Somebody might think something of it.”
Mary Ellen put on the jacket. “You’re just jealous he can sing,” she said, and began to walk ahead of him.
Jorgen lagged behind. “I can sing.”
“Then sing something,” she said curtly, back over her shoulder.
The wind blew and Jorgen rubbed his arms. “I don’t sing to people,” he said. “I only ever sang to my bird.”
“Right,” she said. “Well, if I hop around and flap my arms, will you sing to me?”
He shook his head.
“All talk,” she said. “Just like Tad and all them others.”
Jorgen stopped walking. “I ain’t like them.”
Then Mary Ellen stopped, too, and reached back and snatched his hand the way a big sister might that of her baby brother. They walked holding hands, past a knob littered with shorn stalks. The land dropped away from the road. Deep in the swale stood a lone sycamore. Beneath it sat the silhouette of a four-wheeler. If Jorgen hadn’t known to look for it, he wouldn’t have seen it out there in the shadows. The corn to the south rattled in the wind, and he could barely hear the motor as the ATV, small and black as a beetle, drove up and over a ridge. Mary Ellen’s hand was warm in his. Across the field and atop the hill sat the aluminum garage, windowless, dark.
They’d come too far, were too close now to turn back. Just ahead lay the gravel drive leading up to the garage. Jorgen sensed the others up there, hiding, watching. It was wrong, what they were doing, and Jorgen felt sick, his neck stiff, his throat raw. “I write songs, you know?”
“Songs?” she said, with a wry smile. “For your bird?”
“Ain’t really songs, I guess. Just things I write.”
“What kind of things?”
“Just things on my mind.”
“Your mind?” She chuckled. “Well, I’d surely like to see that.”
“Ain’t never showed nobody.”
“Not even your bird?” She squeezed his hand.
“No,” he said. “I mean, ain’t nobody ever know it came from me. I sent one in the mail, but it ain’t got my name on it.”
“You mailed it?”
“Didn’t put my name on it, though.”
“What?” Mary Ellen asked. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Things I write.”
“No,” she said. “I mean, why not put your name on it?”
He pulled his hand from hers, was afraid she’d feel him tremble.
“Don’t know.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Guess so it’s just about what it says, and not who sent it.”
“What?” she said. “Aw, you’re kidding me.”
“Know what I wrote?”
“What?”
“It said, I think you ought to know that I’m fucking your girl.”
She chuckled once, glanced away. “Lord, you got a screw loose.”
He shrugged.
“Still,” she said. “It’s kind of funny. Can you imagine?”
Jorgen studied her face in the moonlight, her wilted lips, her downcast eyes. In his mind, he saw that sheer curtain, the blue flickering light from a television. “One night,” he said, “I was walking the
se old roads, you know, and I seen something through a window I wasn’t supposed to, and that got me thinking how you could hurt someone more without guns or bombs or none of that shit.”
She looked off at the low moon. “You’re crazy.”
He watched his own boots, the cracked pavement passing. “Anyway,” he said, “I only sent one letter.”
“Yeah,” she said, and kicked a hunk of asphalt. “To who, the Easter Bunny?”
Jorgen could feel himself coming untethered, like he often had over there, where kids slept in the dust and nothing got buried and everything felt like it wasn’t quite real. He grabbed Mary Ellen’s hand and pulled it to his lips, pressed the back of her hand to his cheek. He felt her pull away, or maybe it was him. She said his name, and then he was crying, and he let go of her hand and ran across the road and jumped down into the ditch. She followed, and then they were in the field, treading over the nubs of corn.
“Hey, big dummy,” she called. “Where you going?”
He shook his head.
“Come on, Genie.” She hooked her arm around his elbow and turned him back toward the road.
“I’m trying to tell you something,” he said, but he couldn’t think how to explain himself. His mind was a mess. All he could see were figures on a couch, a dead deer on a barroom floor.
“Will you take care of my bird?” he finally said.
“That what this is all about?”
“Tad and them others ain’t worth a shit.”
“All right,” she said. “Sure.”
He nodded. “Don’t know who else to ask.”
“Poor thing.”
Jorgen swallowed hard, took a breath. “I’m just tired is all.”
She grinned. “I was talking about the bird.”
He was exhausted, was sure if he fell he’d never get back up again.
“Don’t sleep much no more. I just walk around, you know,” he said.
“All night I just walk around.”
She rubbed his arm. “I appreciate you taking me out here.”
He tried to focus. “The cold don’t bother me.”
“We going to the garage?”
Jorgen nodded.
“So much for romance,” Mary Ellen said, and laughed a sigh. Then she tugged his hand, stopped them both. “You all right?”
He forced a smile, shrugged.
She smirked, too. “I’ll call my mama. Get you some pills that’d put a mule to sleep.”
Jorgen’s smile faded. They climbed the hill in silence. Jorgen thought about stopping, but he took one step and then the next. Low clouds drifted overhead. In a gap of open sky, tiny red lights from an airplane blinked, then slid behind the clouds. Jorgen watched the lights appear again, for but a moment, before they were gone.
They stood in the gravel drive in front of the garage. The ATV sat in the tall grass beside the door. Dogs lay atop a rusted-out car. A German shepherd, face matted over with mud, hobbled out of the grass with one gimpy leg.
“Tad said to knock three times,” Jorgen told Mary Ellen.
She hurried toward the garage. Jorgen trailed her, the old dog at his heels. He’d just wanted to be part of something. His whole life, that’s all he’d ever wanted. That’s why he’d enlisted, had gone overseas.
More dogs trotted around the building, bounding about Jorgen, sniffing low at the garage. Mary Ellen stopped at the door. She took off his jacket and tried to hand it to him.
“I don’t want it,” he said. He helped her back on with the jacket, zipped it up. He peered into her eyes, hoping a kind of understanding had passed between them.
She grinned, kissed his cheek.
Then he looked off at the fields. He heard the three rattling knocks on the aluminum door. The dogs barked. The door clacked as it raised, and light burst over them as the gang inside hollered like a surprise party.
The buck deer was strung up with chains from the rafters, was draped in a red gown. They’d painted its hooves red and tied a bouquet to one, stapled a blond wig and a big white hat to its skull. Beside it sat Tim Eddy Jenkins, bound to a chair with silver tape. His nostrils trailed blood, the old squeeze box between his hands. Tad, in a powder-blue suit, hair slicked back, struck Tim Eddy’s legs with a switch and Tim Eddy pulled apart the bellows and sound, not quite music, screeched out. The boys whooped. Tad took the buck by the forelegs and pretended to dance.
Mary Ellen backed into Jorgen. She stared as if to recognize him. Jorgen shoved her into the road, and she was enough of a local to know to run. Dogs ran along with her, barking, and the boys piled out howling as they gave chase down the hill. Tad ran the hill, too, far behind the others.
Mary Ellen didn’t stay on the road. Jorgen watched her descend the berm and break headlong into the corn. The boys followed her in.
Their shouts fell muffled. Halfway down, Tad sat on the gravel road, then lay back and covered his face with an arm.
Jorgen shuffled slowly down, his hands in his pockets. He stood beside Tad, who sat upright and wiped tears with his sleeve. “I just loved her so much,” he said. Jorgen nodded, watched the flats far below. A couple of boys came out of the rows, Mary Ellen nowhere to be seen. Tad smacked Jorgen’s leg. “Hey,” he said, and reached up a hand. “It’s good to have ol’ Genie back.”
Jorgen stared at the hand. He pulled his hands from his pockets, hugged himself against the cold. The others were emerging from the corn and climbing the ditch bank, shouting, laughing. Jorgen walked down. He passed through them all. One of them asked where he was going, but he didn’t answer. He crossed the highway and sidestepped down the ditch and pushed into the corn.
Jorgen wandered a long while, pressing deeper into the field, corn leaves raking his neck and face, his boots heavy with mud. Then he stopped. The wind had stilled, the world hushed.
Jorgen stomped a mat of stalks on which to lie. Moonlight seeped over him. He gazed into the muzzy stars, thought of the freight yard, of watching the boys load lumber and pallets of feed and steel forms from the Leighton foundry.
Over in the war, to lull himself to sleep, he’d play in his mind the trains coming and going. Jorgen wondered if once he got back over there he’d have the same patrol. He recalled a spot on his loop, a crater burned into a hillside, where each night he’d sit and glass the valley of stone, the land as bright as milk in the moonlight, until the others caught up and he’d have to return to the road.
FORT APACHE
The electric sign for the Krafton Bowl and Lounge was a vibrant white square atop a tall post. Set back from the road, the lounge’s roof and all but one wall had collapsed. Smoldering lumber jutted from charred brick. Bowling lanes lay exposed to the night, and in the lane oil lapped tiny spectral flames like a riot of hummingbirds. Firemen shoveled dirt over the lanes. Others held blankets at the building’s corners. A tuft of sparks rose from a joist and drifted down onto the dry prairie, where a man smothered it beneath a stretch of wool.
Walt trailed his brother Lonnie and little nephew, Calvin. His eyes stung. His nostrils burned. Today was his birthday, and he fanned away smoke with the gray fedora he’d bought hoping to look a bit like Bogie or Cagney, even Ladd, any of the picture-show toughies. Smoke hazed the road. Under the sign’s electric glow, a bare-chested man leaned against the post, breathing hard into a paper sack.
“Anyone harmed?” Lonnie called to the man.
The fireman crumpled the sack, stared down at Calvin. Lonnie let the boy smoke to keep him quiet and a cigarette dangled from his lips. “Say,” the man said, “you got more of that tobacco?”
Lonnie pulled a cigarette from his pocket. The fireman took it in his blackened fingers, stooped to light it off the end of Calvin’s. Smoke seeped from his lips as he rose. His eyes narrowed on the sky. High overhead tumbled a wing of burning ash. The fireman backed under it, turned on his heels, raced across the road.
“Hey,” Lonnie shouted, “how’d it start?”
“Small fires make big fires,” t
he fireman called back, wading into the prairie, tripping circles beneath the drifting embers, staggering through the high grabbing grass.
In the sign’s pale light, Walt studied his brother’s eyes, bright and blue and tracking the ash’s flight. Then they drew onto Walt.
“Small fires make big fires,” Lonnie said, with lilting reverence. “I surely hope so.”
They descended the hill into town. Sharpton’s Hardware was dark, with red, white, and blue streamers draping its windows. Mounds of produce lay in front of the general store, and amid them a goat asleep with its beard between its hooves. Up the road stood the tall brownstone that housed the picture show. Over the sidewalk, over the golden stars stenciled onto the concrete, hung the marquee.
DOUBLE FEATURE:
FAR FRONTIER
&
FORT APACHE
Lonnie cut into the side alley. Walt followed, Calvin clutching his hand. They passed rancid Dumpsters and crates shimmering white with sleeping pigeons. The back side of the building opened onto listless prairie, the sedge undotted but for an old telegraph depot gone to ruin.
They stopped at a metal door, and Lonnie yanked it open. A frail boy in a red usher’s jacket and bow tie stood guard inside—Lester Muncie, a former schoolmate who’d been two grades ahead of Walt. Lester grabbed for the door, but in one fluid movement Lonnie shoved Lester and wedged a hip in the jamb.
Lester didn’t fight. He turned back into the flickering darkness, his eyes on the screen, and pretended not to see them hurrying past.
The first movie was ending. Orchestra horns blared as Roy Rogers rode Trigger through a shadow-cut arroyo. Walt climbed the stairs into the balcony and the music faded and the houselights bloomed. Up in the top row, Frances, Lonnie’s girl and Calvin’s mother, sat beside her sister Georgette. Hep James, Lonnie’s best friend, sat two rows down. Lonnie settled into the aisle seat beside Frances, and Calvin hopped onto his mother’s lap.
“Hey, Walt,” Frances said. “That’s a swell hat you got.”
“Ain’t you the movie star,” Georgette said.
Walt sat beside Hep, who’d have been handsome if not for a scar across his left eye and cheek. Just after Hep returned from the war, some boy slashed him with a switchblade in an alley behind a bar up in the city. Hep had lived for a time in the city, but after that he came home.
Volt: Stories Page 9