Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing

by Lydia Peelle

  Jeanne calls herself hoarse. Every so often Jack finds himself watching her heavy backside waggle as she strains out the window, then looks back quickly at the road, disturbed by it, vowing not to look again. At four o’clock they decide it’s time to quit, without having found hair or hide of Tiny. Jeanne is crumpled against the door of the car as if she doesn’t have the strength or the will to hold herself up. Jack feels utterly powerless.

  When he drops her off back at the house, he grabs her hand before she gets out of the car and meets her eye. “You gonna be all right tonight?”

  She bites her lip and nods.

  “You call me if you need anything. You just pick up the phone and call. I’ll put the phone right by the bed. All right?” He watches her go in and waits until she’s closed the door behind her before he puts the car in gear.

  Jack stops at the end of the drive, pops a pill, and eats a granola bar from the glove box. He is cramped up, exhausted, the small of his back aching and his glucose levels all out of whack. He feels hollow, nearly desolate. It can’t just be the damn dog, he thinks, driving home. It’s something else, something bigger.

  They’d driven down roads they hadn’t been on in years—past the old empty high school and the field where the drive-in used to be, now grown over with highbush honeysuckle and littered with junk cars, a few speakers still hanging off their posts like rotted teeth. It looked like a war field. Finished.

  He stops and buys a pack of cigarettes—to hell with it, he thinks, something else is going to quit long before my lungs do—aching for just some small physical pleasure to get him through the night. Before he leaves the gas station, though, feeling guilty, he shakes out three, leaving the rest of the pack on top of the trash can. Just as well, he thinks. Make some lucky sucker’s day.

  There is a place in Highland City that every generation thinks it is the first to discover. A gladelike swimming hole in the creek, set in a deep bowl of the hills. It’s easy enough to get to from the road that you can bring in coolers and lawn chairs and cases of beer, but secluded enough that you can do anything you want out there and nobody’s going to bother you. When Jack and Jeanne were kids everyone called it Valhalla, and spent their summer nights down there, when there wasn’t something playing at the drive-in. I wonder what the kids call it now, Jack thinks, pulling into the rutted clearing off the side of the road. Probably nothing. These kids today have everything fed to them. No imagination.

  Back in high school, Jeanne was always the first one in the water. Last one out, too. She was fearless then, even of the cottonmouths that scared everybody else off. She would stand in the creek, waist deep, splashing the water with her fingertips. “Jack! Jack!” she’d shout. “Get in here. Get your ass down here!”

  He’d sit up on the bank with a beer and look at his friends. “Already got him on a chain,” they would snicker to one another, and Jack would do his best to laugh along with them, crack another beer, and roll his eyes. He never went in, in order to prove something. Stupid reason not to go in, he thinks now. Should have.

  He parks and pushes the seat all the way back, lights a cigarette. He closes his eyes and lets the smoke filter into his nostrils along with Jeanne’s familiar smell, which lingers after their day in the car together. He tries to imagine that she is still sitting next to him, eighteen and in a wet bikini, smoking a cigarette and playing with the radio. In those days there was always something good on the radio.

  After a while, feeling stiff and caged-in, Jack heaves himself out of the car and makes his way slowly into the trees, leaning hard on his cane. He starts down the hill, drawn by the smell of the leaves and the warm air that the woods still hold, and suddenly he can see the creek. It startles him—he remembers it being much deeper in the woods. He makes his way down to it and sits with difficulty on an old stump to light his second cigarette. The banks of the creek are worn smooth from years of bare feet, littered with beer cans and busted sneakers, fast food bags and old condoms. Jack shakes his head sadly. On a beech tree on the opposite bank, someone has spray-painted FUCK GOD.

  He lets a drag linger in his lungs, feeling it creep in and fill all the corners. We had some days, he thinks. We did have some days. Back when we thought it was all ours for the taking. Back before everything got ruined. And it all got ruined at once. Funny how it happened that way. Just woke up one morning and there was no going back and fixing anything.

  A pair of crows take off from a tree near him, the branch shaking. There’s a feeling at the back of Jack’s neck like someone is behind him. He turns around twice, scanning the purple-lit trees. Something pops in his shoulder the second time, a painful little explosion of nerves.

  Ghosts, he thinks, rubbing his neck. Ha. What ghosts would bother to haunt these woods? Our teenage selves. The long hunters. Not angry ghosts or vengeful. No, just…disappointed.

  He shifts his weight and looks around for a grave. They’re all over these woods. His father taught him how to spot them: the depression in the ground that would be roughly the dimensions of a coffin, where the soil had settled over the years. “Always watch out for them,” his father told him—walking across them disrespected the dead.

  The long hunters buried each other in hollowed-out tree trunks, no time to build a proper coffin, no women to linger and weep over a grave. Scores of them must have died in these woods. A dangerous place, back then. But give me that over a hospital room any day, Jack thinks. Go with some dignity. And then, to be laid to rest the way so many creatures go: curled up in a log somewhere, tail over nose, and by spring they’ve crumbled into the log, and the log, in a few years, is crumbled into the soil. It makes him feel cheated and lonesome, looking up into the leaves, the bare crowns lit with the last of the sun. There’s not a single tree left out here that would be big enough to hold him.

  Take better care of yourself, the doctor told him, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t live another thirty years. What the hell for? was Jack’s first reaction. What’s left? No grandbabies, no wife, no money to travel, and why did folks even bother to travel nowadays, when every place was just the same as the next?

  Jeanne had wanted a baby. But those years, their chances, had disappeared in his drinking. He has only begun to regret this recently. I’m it, he thinks. The last of the Wells line. My work is all I’ll leave the world. But some of the early work has already gone, popped at the seams, mice long since eaten the glue and made nests out of the stuffing. How long will the rest of it last? Longer. But not forever. For a while his mounts will hang in living rooms and hunting cabins and fathers will tell their sons, That’s a Jack Wells mount; he was the best, you know, but after a generation or so no one will remember his name. And a few more decades down the road, he thinks, at the rate we’re screwing it all up, what will it even matter? The water poisoned, the air ruined, too many damn people and more every day—what is it that we all want to hang around for, anyway?

  Even the long hunters, Jack thinks, even they weren’t smart enough. It only took a generation or two for them to foul it all up. The buffalo went first, then the birds. The fish, the deer, suddenly you couldn’t just reach out and find dinner anymore. But what did it stop them? They just cut down the trees, built their frame houses, planted gardens and orchards, bought a few head of cattle. Went back up to Kentucky, came back with their children and wives.

  The sun disappears. It gets cold. Jack shivers and suddenly wants to be home. He looks at the hill with great apprehension and lights his last cigarette, hands shaking, wondering if his brain will be able to send the proper messages to his muscles to get him back up. Hell. So what if I die out here? So I die out here. He tosses his butt into the creek and watches it float away, the water rippling over the smooth stones of the creek bed, resigning himself to the thought.

  But who is he kidding? He wouldn’t die out here. Instead he would spend a cold, painful, sleepless night huddled up under his jacket on the knobby roots and stones, and in the morning he’d have to piss on
a rock, hobble up to the car, drive to the shop, take a dozen aspirin, and explain himself to Jeanne, who’d have been up all night calling, worried sick.

  Jeanne.

  I’m going. Just as soon as I catch my breath.

  A car pulls in up at the clearing. The slam of doors. A radio. Kids. One of the voices breaks out from the crowd and carries down to the creek, a high manic laugh. Ronnie. Now I’m really going to have to explain myself, Jack thinks, but realizes it’s possible that in the dark they did not see his car parked on the other side of the clearing. Maybe he can get up to it without them seeing him—if he skirts them and comes up on the other side. “Little punks,” he says, heaves himself off the stump, and starts up the hill.

  But his body doesn’t want to cooperate. His muscles bicker and then wail and scream. His good knee seizes up. Every few steps he leans on his cane and tries to reason with his thighs. A low branch slices across his forehead, stinging his eyes.

  “All right now, Jack,” he tells himself, angry, gasping for breath. “This isn’t Everest, you know.”

  After what seems like hours he gets far enough up the hill that he can see the clearing, the light of a fire they’ve built. Six or seven figures huddled in a ring around it. He sees Ronnie, then Tanya. She’s sitting off to the side, her hands pulled up into her sleeves, drinking a can of beer. The beer makes her look young, just a little girl. The group seems to be discussing something. As he gets closer, there’s a shift. They fall silent, slowly put down their beers.

  “Shhh,” he hears someone say.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “Listen. It’s coming up from the creek.”

  Tanya stands up. Jack’s heart swells a little, watching her up there, trying to see into the dark. Her face, lit by the fire, is filled with anticipation. Lips parted, her eyes dark in her pale face. Just pure and young and like anything might happen. She tucks her hair behind her ear and cocks her head.

  Kids, Jack thinks again, fondly now. Suddenly he wants to speak to them, if they would only listen: I wish it was all going to turn out the way you think it will. I really do.

  He looks down at the ground, then back up at them, wiping his eyes. You want a scare? He lets a branch snap under his good foot. That one’s for you, Tanya. A gift. He sees her raise her hand, tentatively, as if to steady something. She puts her finger to her lips.

  Jack smiles.

  “It’s…right…over…there,” someone hisses. Ronnie stands up, poised, ready to run.

  Jack gives the leaves a little rustle with his cane, forgetting the pain, starting to enjoy himself. And that’s for you, Ronnie, you little S.O.B.

  “That’s it,” Ronnie says. “I’m getting my gun.” He turns and jogs towards the truck.

  Jack feels a chill of fear. All right, all right! No guns, Ronnie, no guns—Jack takes a lurching step forward, about to shout, Don’t shoot! But then he freezes. He holds his breath. Jack hears it—whatever it is—good Lord, he hears it, too.

  Sweethearts of the Rodeo

  Lately I’ve been thinking about that summer. We barely ever got off those ponies’ backs. We painted war paint across their foreheads and pinned wild turkey feathers in our hair, whooped and raced across the back field, hanging on their necks. Some days they were a pair of bucking broncos, or unicorns, or circus horses, or burros on a narrow mountain pass. Other days they were regal as the ladies’ horses, and we were two queens, veiled sultanas crossing the Sahara under a burning sky. We were the kidnapped maidens or the masked heroes. We braided flowers in their matted tails, dandelions and oxeye daisies that got lost in the snarls, wilted, and turned brown. We tore across the back field, our heels dug into their sides. We pulled them up short and did somersaults off their backs. We did handstands in the saddle. We turned on a dime. We jumped the triple oxer, the coop, the wall, the ditch. We were fearless. It was the summer we smoked our first cigarettes, the summer you broke your arm. It was the last summer, the last one before boys.

  Our mothers drop us off every morning at seven. We grab two pitchforks and fly through our chores. For four dollars an hour we shovel loads of manure and wet shavings out of the stalls, scrub the water buckets, and fill the hayracks, the hay sticking to our wet Tshirts, falling into our shoes, our pockets, our hair. We race to see who can finish first. When we are thirsty, we run to the hose and drink. Late in the morning Curt comes out to the barn and leans against the massive sliding door. He wears sandals and baggy shorts, and under his thick, dark eyelashes, his eyes are rimmed with red. He tells us what other jobs there are to be done, that we must pick stones out of the riding ring, or refill the water troughs in the pasture with the long, heavy hose. We whine and stamp our feet. He is the caretaker, after all, and supposed to do these things himself.

  We were just about to go riding, we say.

  Girls, he says, winking. Come on now.

  He looks over his shoulder and whistles for his dog. You stick your tongue out at his back. Some mornings he stays in his little house and doesn’t come out until much later, when the ladies’ expensive cars start pulling in the long driveway. They get out and lean against their shiny hoods, smoking cigarettes and talking to Curt in low voices. Sometimes only one or two of them show up, and other times they all come at once, a half-dozen of them with identical beige breeches and high boots that we dream of at night. They never once get a streak of manure across their foreheads or a water bucket sloshed across their shirts. We turn down the volume of the paint-splattered barn radio to hear what they’re saying, but we can’t make it out. In the afternoon we eat the sandwiches our mothers packed for us and throw our apple cores over the fence to the ponies. They chew carefully and sigh in the hot midday sun. Their eyes close and they let their pink-and-gray mottled penises dangle. We go to them with soapy water and a sponge in a bucket and clean the built-up crust from their sheaths, reaching our arms far up inside. The ladies see us doing this and pay us five dollars to do their geldings, then stand by and watch us, wrinkling their perfect noses.

  The ladies’ horses all have brass name plates on their stall doors, etched in fancy script, with the names of their sires and dams in parentheses underneath. They are called Curator, Excelsior, Hadrian. The ponies’ names change daily, depending on the game. The ponies don’t even have stalls. They live out in the field where they eat all day under a cloud of flies. Nobody remembers who they belong to. For the summer, they are ours. They are round and close to the ground, wheezy and spoiled with bad habits. One is brown and dulled by dust. The other is a pinto, bay with white splashes, white on half his face, one eye blue, the other eye brown. The blue eye is blind. We sneak up on this side when we go out to the pasture to catch them, a green halter hidden behind your back, a red one behind mine. The ponies let us get just close enough, then toss their heads and trot away. Peppermints and buckets of grain don’t fool them. After a while, we learn to leave their halters on.

  The grass in the pasture is knee-high, full of ticks and chiggers, mouse tunnels, quicksilver snakes that scare the ladies’ horses into a frenzy. But not the ponies. They are unspookable. Bombproof. When we cinch up their girths they twist their necks to bite our arms. They leave bruises like sunset-colored moons. As the summer gets hotter, we stop bothering with saddles altogether. We clip two lead lines to their halters, grab a hank of mane, and vault on.

  We trot through the field and down the hill to the pine woods. We scramble up steep ridges. The ponies are barn sour, much faster coming home than going. We get as far away as we can and then give them their heads to race home through the woods, spruce limbs and vines whipping our faces. We know we are close when we can smell the manure pile. When we come up the hill it is looming like a dark mountain beside the barn. You make a telescope with your thumb and forefinger. Your fingernails are black to the quick. Land ho! you say. Crows land on the peak of the pile and send avalanches of dirty shavings down its sides. The ladies’ little dogs jump out of the open windows of their cars and come running
to us, tags jingling.

  The ladies hardly ever ride. All day their horses stand out in the sun, their muscles like silk-covered stone. Sometimes they bring them in to the barn and tie them up in the crossties, then wander into Curt’s house and don’t come out again. The horses wait patiently for an hour or so and then begin to paw and weave their heads. They can’t reach the flies settling on their withers, the itches on their faces they want to rub against their front legs. They dance and swivel in the aisle, and still the ladies won’t come out. Finally we unhook them from the ties and turn them back out in the pasture, where they spin and kick out a leg before galloping back to the herd. When the ladies come out of the little house, late in the afternoon, they squint in the light like they are coming out of a cave and don’t ever seem to notice that their horses are not where they left them.

  We do everything we can think of to torture Curt. Before he goes out to work on the electric fence, he switches off the fuse in the big breaker box in the barn. We sneak around and flip it back on, then hide and wait to hear his curses when he touches the wire. You slap me five. He comes back into the barn and flicks a lunge whip at us, and we giggle and jump. When he turns away we whisper, I hate him. With pitchforks we fling hard turds of manure in his direction, and he hooks his big arms around our waists and dumps us headfirst into the sawdust pile. We squeal and throw handfuls at him when he walks away. Oh, how we hate him! We pretend we’ve forgotten his name.

  In the afternoon we ride our ponies close to the little house to spy on him. Their hooves make marks in the lawn like fingerprints in fresh bread. We ride as close as we dare and see things we don’t see in our parents’ houses: dirty laundry heaped in the hall, a cluster of dark bottles on top of the refrigerator, ashtrays and half-filled glasses crowding the kitchen table, which is just a piece of plywood on two sawhorses. Your pony eats roses from the bushes under the windows. He wears a halo of mosquitoes. From the bedroom we hear voices, Curt’s and a lady’s, but it is the only room in which the blinds have been pulled. We try to peer through the cracks, but the ponies yank at their bits and dance in the rosebushes, and we don’t really want to see, anyway. Come on, you say, and we head out to the back field to play circus acrobats, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, whatever mood happens to strike us this day.