He put his head in his hands.
“You’ll find some way to explain it. You’ll call me a witch or a crazy person. Turn it into a dream. You’ll forget.” She stood and, searching Roy’s coat, found the check, folded it, and put it in her pocket. “You have to kill him and then you have to leave.”
Roy pulled his fingers through his hair, like a child having a tantrum. “But I don’t believe in magic.” He barely believed in God. He barely believed in chiropractors.
She kept her voice calm. “That’s like not believing in car accidents. Just because you don’t want them to happen doesn’t mean they don’t.” She clucked at him, scolding. “It’s not belief. It’s whether or not you’re going to let magic ruin your life. People pretend the world is ordinary every day.” She held her hips. “Because they have to.”
“Why don’t you kill him?”
“Come on,” she tsk-tsked. “You started this. You kissed me.”
“It wasn’t really a kiss,” Roy said. All he’d done was paint his walls yellow. “And I definitely didn’t raise your dog from the dead.”
“Yeah?” She was leaving the room with sarcasm, matter settled. “Then what did?”
“I don’t know,” he told her, but Susanne, having plugged the vacuum back in, was no longer listening.
* * *
From the dark behind her house, he saw the warm glow of her windows, her family returning. He leaned on the shovel.
“Out! Out!” she had said. Once for Roy, once for Curtains. “There’s a shovel in the shed.”
Roy stood in the night undetected, looking in. Her children and her husband gathered around her, relaying the very thin but fantastically absurd plots of the Hollywood movies they’d seen. A bank heist and a clean getaway. A love that conquers all. A dog that comes back to life. Her young son’s hands shook, his feet stomped, recalling the wonders. How true they’d been. Her daughter’s head spun. Each world had been real enough to betray her by ending neatly after an hour and a half.
Susanne retracted the vacuum’s cord. Tethered again. And in the dark Roy understood her family’s pact. Work and school, laundry, dinner, the things that happened in their lives were not part of the brightness that she and Roy had glimpsed. These things had nothing to do with birth and death but were, rather, dull, quite expected, and entirely unastonishing. Nothing strange ever really happened. No, it didn’t.
The weight of the shovel made Roy’s arms burn. He needed to sit down. He needed to get back in his car, start the engine, drive away from here with his finger on the radio’s scan button, looking for the right song, one that might erase Susanne, the dog, and the shovel she’d wanted him to use to brain and bury Curtains in her backyard.
The dog looked up at him, tilting its head a bit to one side, waiting for the blow of the shovel’s blade. “No,” Roy told him.
He would leave soon. He’d drive through the night listening as each song began, hot with promise. “I Feel for You.” “Don’t Stop Believin’.” “Time After Time.” Fine songs. He knew them well. He’d heard them all hundreds of times, as if he’d been driving the earth forever, killing any and all things that got in the way. None of the songs would ever make him forget and he told Curtains so. “Scram,” he yelled. “Get out of here!”
Curtains turned and wandered off to pee on some rhododendrons, not at all like an animal running for its life. The dog would be waiting on her doorstep tomorrow morning, gentle, stupid, still undead, still looking for something to eat. In front of her children she’d pretend to forget. She’d hold out her hand to pet the dog’s head, and in a while, perhaps a few days or a week, the head would begin to feel like the head of any dog. By the light of day, under the huge yellow, optimistic sun, Susanne would find it easy to convince herself of anything: marriage is easy, motherhood a snap, and death uncomplicated. But in the dark it was clear to Roy. Susanne sat on the couch, surrounded by her family, while out in the night, partner to the extraordinary, Roy held a shovel made for digging deeper in the dirt.
CORTÉS THE KILLER
It’s starting to get dark. Beatrice walks the highway’s shoulder from the bus depot to her family’s house. She stays just outside the guardrail on the dry grass strewn with trash, matted down by road salt and rain. There’s the bloated body of a dead raccoon. Beatrice is sure that every car and truck passing holds someone she knew in high school. Inside their cars they ask, “Is that Beatrice? What is she doing with a raccoon carcass?”
She turns up the drive. She hasn’t seen the farm in more than a year. After her father died she moved away to the city—not for any good reason, but now she likes it there because the humiliations of entering her thirties as a single woman happen behind a closed apartment door, out of the view of her family and everyone she’s ever known.
There are some weathered plastic Easter decorations wired to the front porch, a hip-high bunny rabbit and a bright green egg purchased at the drugstore. It is Thanksgiving. In the time she’s been gone redneck clones of her brother and her mother have had their perverted redneck way with the house.
The farm is an island in a sea of big chain stores. While the surrounding farms were plowed under one by one and turned into shopping centers, her parents had stood by. They had waited rather than selling as the neighbors all had. They had waited with the thought, Maybe this will stop, maybe the farms will return. Now, along a ten-mile strip of parking lots, stores, gas stations, banks, and supermarkets, their farm is the only one left.
It isn’t even much of a farm. Beatrice’s parents gave up farming seven years before when, one morning, Beatrice’s mother told her father, “I don’t feel like getting out of bed.” He looked her over and, holding her jaw in his hands, he studied her face for a long while before saying, “Yeah. I can see it. Right there on your forehead,” as if there were a word written across her brow that excused her from farmwork for the rest of her life.
Within a few weeks Beatrice’s father had become an expert crossword puzzle solver. He’d even considered writing a novel before realizing that soon they would be broke. Beatrice’s parents had to start working or sell the farm. So they leased their land out to a conglomerate soybean operation and applied for jobs in the new industrial park. Her father found work as a loan adjuster, her mother a job in advertising, working in the satellite office of a company called Mythologic Development, where they turn myths and sometimes history into marketable packages used for making new products and ideas more digestible to the consumer public. Her father didn’t like having an office job. He used his sick days as soon as he got them, but Beatrice’s mother had always been very dramatic, someone who would swoon or leap without provocation; the sort of person who would sing while grocery shopping and then wonder why people were staring at her. She flourished during the brainstorming conference calls that were a regular feature of her new job. She’d dominate the conversations with her patched-together notions of Leda and the Swan, the void of Ginnungagap, the bubonic plague, and Hathor the Egyptian goddess, whom she reenvisioned as a nineteen-year-old Ukrainian supermodel spokesperson for a vodka company.
Beatrice’s parents hadn’t been born farmers. It was just one of many bright ideas they’d developed in their twenties, ideas like dropping out of college in their junior year, forgoing regular dentist visits, and having children they decided to name Beatrice and Clement.
* * *
“Right,” Clem says after Thanksgiving dinner, standing to leave the table. He shakes his head at his mother, at Beatrice. Clem works as a carpenter, though he’s mostly interested in small projects, cabinets and decks, hand-carving the names of rock bands into soft pieces of wood.
“Going to toke up?” Beatrice’s mother asks him. He pops his head back inside the kitchen. He is stocky and solid like a bolted zucchini that has grown too long. He holds a finger and thumb up to his lips and inhales, pinching together a vacancy in between them.
Their mother has put a feather in her hair for the holiday, her “Indian
headdress.” She can’t stand it that her youngest child is a pothead and sometimes she’ll get a look, as if she’s trying not to cry just thinking about it. She’s a very good actress. She stares at Clem. He looks just like her, dark hair, red skin, and papery lips. Beatrice’s mother can make her bottom jaw tremble so slightly that the movement is barely perceptible. She stares at him with her mouth wide open, waiting for him to feel guilty. Beatrice looks away. It is difficult for Beatrice to think of her mother as someone with thoughts and desires, as someone who keeps a vibrator in her bedside drawer the way Beatrice does, as someone who might dream about a tremendous ice cube, the size of a sofa, melting in the middle of a hot desert, and wake up having absolutely no idea what the dream means.
“Dude, I’m so stoned.” Clem laughs once, faking a stumble before disappearing. As he opens the front door the flat sound of road traffic sneaks inside. Beatrice clears the table. She holds the turkey over the garbage by its breastbone, dangling it there while her mother splits what is left in the last wine bottle between their two glasses.
“When Atlantis was sinking there was an awful period of…” and Beatrice’s mother stops to think of the proper word but can’t. “Of sinking,” she says and places her open hands on either side of her face, like the sunshine. Beatrice cringes at the gesture. Her mother is going to try to tell her something she doesn’t want to hear. Her mother still works for Mythologic and believes all concepts are better communicated through specious retellings of ancient myths. Most of the time, Beatrice can’t see the connections.
“Imagine,” her mother says, her hands still in place. “People went to sleep inland and woke up with the ocean at their doors. When they stepped outside in the morning to pee or to feed their goats the neighbors were gone and the only sound was waves lapping.”
Her mother slowly drags one finger across their kitchen table and then does it again. Beatrice remains entirely still, frozen like a field rabbit, hoping her mother will decide not to tell her whatever it is she wants to say. She can already imagine its perimeters: “Honey, I wish you would think about a job that offers insurance,” or “I know a real nice young man you might like to meet, Bea.” But he wouldn’t be a nice young man. He would be another forty-five-year-old divorced actor her mother had met through community theater projects, a man who also holds his hands up around either side of his face like the sunshine when he wants to make a point.
Or maybe she wants to tell Beatrice that she is finally going to sell the farm.
But Beatrice is wrong.
“When your dad was in the hospital the doctor gave me a choice, Bea.” She rubs her palms across her skinny thighs, exhaling. “The doctor asked, ‘Do you want to stop his pain?’ And at first I said, yeah, of course, but then the doctor asked again, ‘No. Do you really, really want to stop his pain?’ And, Bea, I knew what he meant and I said yes. I killed your dad.”
She is drunk.
“Oh. So you killed him?”
“Well, not me, but the doctor. I told the doctor to go ahead and get it over with.”
“What does that have to do with Atlantis?” Beatrice asks.
Her mother has to think for a moment. She looks up at the ceiling. “We all have to die sometime?”
Beatrice stares straight ahead like a TV stuck on static, the remote control gone dead. She blinks a series of gray and black squiggled lines. No reception. Nothing. Her mother’s words are not getting through; they are stones dropped into a bottomless hole, the hollow known as Beatrice. They fall and fall until they are too far away to be heard.
There’s an unwound egg timer beside the stove. “You want to watch a movie, hon?” Static clears, program resumes. It’s a story about a mother and her kids on a farm in Pennsylvania, a dull after-school special broadcast for the Thanksgiving holiday.
If Beatrice sits in the living room with her mother watching a movie, she’ll explode—a dark green syrup of boredom her mother will have to sponge off the floor with Fantastik and a towel. “I’m going to go see what Clem’s up to.” Beatrice is still holding the turkey by its breastbone. It has started to sway. Beatrice drops the bird. It makes a swoosh, a rush of flight as it falls into the garbage bag.
* * *
When Beatrice was a girl, Clement still a baby, and the farm was in okay shape, Bea and her father walked the fields once a day. The furrows were dry and bulging and Beatrice liked how it felt when the dirt broke underneath her muck boots. Corn plants made a canopy over her head. She’d lose sight of everything except her father’s legs marching ahead of her. She’d put her hand inside his and he’d hold it roughly as if her hand was a mouse he’d captured. She’d pretend he was not her father at all but a boyfriend, someone from TV.
He said: “Don’t tell your mom, but I’m the king of the farmers.” They walked on a bit farther and came across an irrigation hose that had cracked its rubber tubing. Her father fingered the leak and stared out at the land with every intention of coming back and patching up the cracked hose. He’d never come back. He just liked to look that way from time to time.
“Farming,” he’d say, “takes ten percent perspiration and ninety percent inspiration.” Beatrice had heard this the other way around, but didn’t let on. Maybe he was the king. He wasn’t a bad farmer. He just didn’t do things the way they had always been done. For instance, pruning trees—he had no time for it, or thinning plants. He hated to yank up seedlings that had been eager enough to sprout. He’d let the vegetables grow on top of one another. He’d let the carrots and beets twist around each other, deformed by proximity. “They still taste as sweet,” he’d say, but no one wanted to buy the bent oddities that came from such close growing quarters.
Beatrice’s father rarely wore proper farmer clothing. Instead he dressed in chinos, button-down oxford shirts, and canvas sneakers. “They’re cheap” is all he ever had to say. He looked like James Dean in the movie East of Eden. James Dean on a John Deere. He’d hay the fields, and Beatrice would follow behind in the trail of the tractor’s exhaust, so it would be hard for her to know what was an act and what was real.
* * *
Sodium vapor lamps from the mall parking lots wash away any definition for miles around. Everything on the farm glows the same yellow gray at night. Beatrice trips on a pig trough her mother’s been using as a planter for impatiens.
“What’s up, dude?” her brother asks when she yelps. Clem has converted half of the barn into an apartment. She stumbles in. There are no locks on his apartment because his door is an old cellar hatch taken off a house demolished to make way for a Dunkin’ Donuts. His kitchen countertops are built from plywood the Home Depot used as concrete molds and then tossed. Most of his apartment is built from stuff he lifted off construction sites. It’s a common practice among Clem’s friends because they can’t yet not own the land they’ve always owned. “Matthew Campbell’s milking pavilion used to be here, so I guess we can just help ourselves.”
“Let’s go downtown,” Beatrice says. “See if the stores are open on Thanksgiving.”
“I guess.” Clem’s uncertain about going out in the cold, but still enough under the sway of his older sister that he’ll do what she wants to do. He detaches himself from his video game.
“Can I try that first?” she asks.
“This?” He holds the controller up. “Yeah, yeah sure.” He restarts the game. “Do you know how to play?”
“No.”
“I’ll start you off slowly.” He slips her hand into a glove that is rigged with controls. It is filled with tiny nodes like suction cups, the dead raccoon’s puckered skin. “Sit down,” he says, and she does.
At first nothing happens. The screen turns blue and the nodes tickle her hand. Clem fusses with the machinery.
The apartment is tiny and the walls are mostly covered with shelves and cabinets. Clem moved out of the main house when he fell in love with Anna. They moved into the barn together after high school and lived here for almost five years. But Anna moved
away to the city a year ago. She hasn’t picked up all her stuff yet. Clothes, some textbooks that she and Clem kept from school, and a nice set of silver that Anna’s grandparents gave her. Everything is covered with bits of old hay from the barn. Sometimes Anna and Beatrice meet up for coffee in the city. They never talk about the farm or Clem. They act like survivors from a low-budget, straight-to-DVD apocalypse.
The video game starts up. A woman walks through a Zen Buddhist garden, wearing a tight silver outfit, carrying a long sword.
“That’s you. Use the glove to go forward.”
Beatrice walks slowly through the garden, because someone is going to tiptoe up behind her with a horrible machete, and she’s had a number of glasses of red wine. She’s not sure she can fight back. Beatrice feels the girl walk, inside the girl’s digital skin.
Clem lights a joint and hums the video game’s theme, a soundtrack. The girl on the screen creeps forward, flashes the blade of her sword. Beatrice accepts the joint with her ungloved hand, jerking the controls. The girl on-screen stands still, doing nothing, flicking her sword, walks backward, looks toward the couch. Beatrice holds the smoke in her lungs long enough for both of them.
There are pathways to the left and the right in the garden. Beatrice can’t turn yet. Clem hums the tune. Beatrice exhales, imagining a man with a deep radio voice speaking over the music, whispering into Beatrice’s ear, reading her the fine print. It fills her with longing just the same.
A pack of ninja warriors surprises her from above, and after a very short fight Beatrice is dead.
* * *
It is colder than most Thanksgivings. The ruts in the driveway have solidified, forming seals of creaky ice. Beatrice and Clem walk to his truck in silence. She still feels as if she’s on-screen with the video game’s sharpened abilities. She controls the world with her hand, senses sounds with her skin, hears her brother’s fingers jangle the keys in his pocket. She hears her mother sigh as the mid-movie commercial break starts. Beatrice hasn’t smoked pot in a long time. She feels every person who has ever stepped on the driveway. Oil deliverymen. Tractor repairmen. Lenape Indians. She feels the outline of these people precisely, solid bodies beneath her feet. She squishes faces with her boots.
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