by Lydia Peelle
“Think the weather will hold?” she says. Her bracelets jangle as she waves towards the sky. I squint up at the clouds, making out like I’m studying something she can’t see.
“Yes,” I say. “Guaranteed.”
She laughs, too loud. “You getting into anything tonight?” Next to the deep fryer, turkey drumsticks and wings are lined up, ruddy and stoic-looking, as if they’re steeling themselves for the hot oil. Dinosaur Wings, they call them. There’s a pterodactyl on the sign in the window: BOB AND KATHLEEN DENNIS. PROUDLY SERVING YOU.
“What’s today?” I say, though we both know it makes no difference. Every day is the same. Every night, the same clamor to erase it.
She thinks for a minute, her lips moving, counting back. “Saturday,” she finally says, flipping a braid over her shoulder, triumphant.
“One more day. Tomorrow we go.”
“Where?” she says with a sigh. “I don’t ask anymore.”
“West. Over the river.” For weeks I’ve been looking forward to it, crossing the Mississippi, thinking things will be different on the other side. But as soon as I say it, all my anticipation fades, the way a trout loses color when it is yanked out of the water.
“Come by the bus this afternoon and see me,” she says and winks, then swipes at the counter with a rag and turns to the crackling fryer. “Bob takes over at four.”
When I get down to my table, Dub’s already in his tent across the way, refolding and restacking Tshirts. The tent is packed with them, most XL or larger, stiff with silk-screened designs: women in Confederate flag thongs leaning across the hoods of Ford and Chevy trucks, bloody-fanged pit bulls in studded collars, Uncle Sam with his middle finger extended above an American flag and the message THESE COLORS DON’T RUN. A ’Nam buddy left him a warehouse full in his will. Dub’s been on the road two years now, says he’ll quit when he sells them all. But I don’t know. There’s a point of no return, I’m beginning to think, and Dub may have passed it several thousand miles back.
I’ve been traveling since spring. Already the highway has become the one true thing, towns only stopovers, names on signs. Certain smells, clouds, movements of trees will once in a while feel exactly like home. Shadows will fall on the road in such a familiar way that I get disoriented and think I’m back in Virginia, headed down to the farm, where everything is still as it once was, and a certain sort of peace will come over me. Then the light shifts and it all shatters.
I pull out my boxes, roll up my tarp, and set up my table: blue glass medicine jars, tin toys, old coins, moldy magazines and tools. Wherever I go, I’m always knocking on farmhouse doors, offering to clean out old couples’ sheds and barns. All I need is some bleach and a wire brush, and people will pay fifty bucks for an old milk pail, a Red Flyer with a broken axle. ANTIQUES, my sign says. Dub is always pointing it out to people, laughing. “Antiques? He sells junk. I sell trash.” Business is generally slow. I’m lucky enough to get Dub’s runoff, wives who wander over while their husbands are clawing through piles of Tshirts, debating if the woman astride the John Deere tractor is better in blonde or brunette.
I hear Dub shout my name and look up, annoyed. What now? “Looky here!” he’s saying. He’s standing in the door of his tent, waving me over. In his hand I see something hanging from a chain, glinting. When I get over there he holds it out against his palm for me to see: a girl’s necklace, a tiny gold heart, nearly swallowed up in his beefy hand.
“Where’d you get it?” I say, suspicious.
He taps the side of his nose. “Found it on my way over here. Sniffed it out.” His eyes are glassy from the heat, his forehead glistening. He’s got half a pound of shrapnel in his left calf and thigh. Walking, standing, everything takes its toll. He pulls out a folding chair and sits down heavily, grunting. “Hell,” he says, grinning like a dog. “I think it’s worth something, too.” He grabs my hand and pours the chain into it. “Go on, man. Take it. Sell it.”
I look down at the little heart. Why not? Everything else on my table is borrowed, begged, stolen from the dead. When I go back and lay it down among the old campaign buttons and souvenir pen knives, it might as well be a relic of someone long gone from this world.
Six months ago, my twin brother Clay’s comic books were the first things I sold. Our house and pastures went to a development company after two days on the market, every penny paying for my mother’s new apartment in the center with round-the-clock care. Her mind, by then, was as twisted and looped as a tattered curtain in a dark window. It was up to me to clear out the house. Clay’s room, fifteen years after his death, was exactly as he’d left it, untouched for nearly as many years as he’d been alive. Opening his door stirred up the dust that had settled in his absence, made it gleaming, glaring, new again. It was another day before I could bring myself to go in, and even then, I moved around like a trespasser, as if any minute he might appear in the doorway. I found the comic books boxed up carefully, chronologically, under his bed. A brittle piece of notebook paper, left over from the days when we fought over everything, fluttered to the floor when I lay on my stomach to pull them out: Hands off, Cole! But that money kept me going for months, bought me the truck, got me miraculously, against all odds, out of Virginia—Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, Green Lantern, Atomic Man.
The people come, as they always do. In spite of the heat, the humidity, the exhaust-colored sky, they come dropping coins and car keys, yanking kids along by the wrists, eating funnel cake with their eyes on the Ferris wheel, their dogs locked in hot cars. I sit behind the table and watch them, the same faces making the rounds, hellbent like they’re searching for something. It’s always the same, everywhere. I watch boys and men clamor in Dub’s tent, Tshirts in their fists, throwing their money at him. I hear the clang of the bell at the Test Your Strength booth, the shouts of the barkers, hollers from the rickety Tempest, screams from the Gravitron every time the floor drops. The bleeps and buzzes and techno bass beats of the games. Eyes pass over my table and move on, looking for something bright and new. A hot air balloon rises on the horizon, hovers red and stark against the steel-gray sky. People stop to point it out to one another, causing traffic jams on the paths. Something about it makes me uneasy. It looks like it has come to judge us.
No one has stopped at my table by the time the smells of lunch start to waft over: corn dogs, sausage and onions, Dinosaur Wings. At night, the smell is deep in Kathy’s braids. Bob doesn’t want her anymore, or at least that’s what she told me. He spends hours in the wing stand after closing, trying to teach himself guitar. Kathy sits in the bus and waits for me. I come because there’s nowhere else to go. She has an easy laugh, the optimism of youth. Bob’s missing two fingers. He curses the stubs when he plays, the chords muted and muddy. The bus is parked so close behind the stand that sometimes, in bed with her, I can hear him. I pull the blanket over our heads and try not to listen. When I listen, I start to sink through the dark depths towards the pointlessness of it all. Why does he bother? At his age, what’s the use?
Last night, I left the bus late and ended up at the grandstand, where most of the crowd had gathered for a beauty pageant. It was part of some festival going on in conjunction with the fair: the Corn Festival, the Harvest Festival, the Illinois Pride Festival, I don’t know what. The girls, in their elaborate dresses, all looked incredibly earnest and downright scared, as if this was the most important event of their lives. The winner cried as the judges crowned her, touching her frothy pink dress and piled-up hair. The sash they looped over her shoulders read MISS HOPEWELL COUNTY. She twisted it in her fingers as she stepped to the microphone to give a speech about her brother in the army. “We never know when the enemy might strike,” she said, feedback crackling. “It could happen right here in Thunderbird. That’s why I’d like to take a moment of silence for our boys over there. They remind us all to follow our dreams and never give up.” The heads in the grandstand all nodded, and after a round of applause there was a minute or two of an almost
sacred quiet. Out there on the edge of the crowd, I tried to direct my own silence towards the common cause, but all those grave unmoving faces only made me feel more invisible and alone.
Afterwards she posed for pictures, biting her lip between smiles. As she turned and waved to the crowd, she moved like so many country girls I know: trying to fold in on herself, trying to tuck away her broad muscular shoulders like wings. I thought about the girls Clay and I ran with in Virginia, girls who seemed to hold the answer to a question we hadn’t yet learned to ask. Clay was the one they liked, though we were as near identical as two people could be. The only difference was that he had half an inch on me, a birthmark on his right shoulder, and a heart so big all the girls thought he was in love with them. He’d take them all out driving, that nightmare summer he was killed in the accident, the summer we turned sixteen. The age this girl must be, the age I last felt whole.
I saw her again, late, past midnight. The rides shut down, the games closing up, most people gone home, I walked out into the field, far out to where I could turn and see the midway lights from a distance. Already thinking about packing up the truck, slamming the tailgate shut on everything I own. At night I like to do this, imagine the field once we’ve left it: the deer coming out of the woods, noses working over crumpled napkins, the foxes creeping out onto the trampled paths, sawdust scattering in the wind. It’s usually a comfort, knowing the field will recover without a trace of us, just days after we’re gone. But there’s a danger to picturing a place without you in it. After a while you can start to feel like nothing at all.
When I walked back up towards Camper City, I went past the grandstand again, empty now. By the bleachers, I happened to notice a teddy bear. It was bright orange, a prize off a game, glowing a little in the dirt. It reminded me of something, and I almost bent to pick it up, but then I heard them. A scuffling like animals, a hollow sound as she banged against the bleachers. When I peered into the darkness it took a few seconds to make sense of it. She had changed out of her pink dress and into a pair of jean shorts, which were down around her knees. But she was still wearing her sash, crooked now, flapping like she was unraveling. He was behind her, hands in her hair, yanking her head back a little with each thrust, his big white T-shirt billowing. I stood there and watched the whole thing, nothing but a pair of eyes. It was over fast. When he let go she didn’t move, just stayed there hanging on the support strut of the bleachers, then slowly bent down and picked up the bear and tenderly brushed off the dirt.
I stepped into the shadow of a ticket booth as he turned and zipped his fly. I couldn’t see his face, but I recognized the shirt immediately. It was one of Dub’s—THE HUNTER’S NIGHTMARE—a deer riding an ATV with a rifle strapped across its shoulders, a dead man in camo tied to the back.
Five months on the road and already I’ve seen too much. Too much to feel any shred of hope for the long-gone world. I feel the burden of it all clattering behind me, slowing me down, like cans tied on for a honeymoon. Sometimes I wonder why it hasn’t all burned up or broken down already. Sometimes it makes me want to lie down right where I am and just let the grass grow over me.
The sky, by two, is yellow and angry. A wash of worried murmurs moves through the crowd. Mothers peer up at the bloated clouds, clutching raincoats, old men mutter and tell their wives they’re ready to go home. Little kids run shrieking down the path, oblivious. I sell a chipped butter crock to a blue-haired, heavy-faced woman with white plastic shopping bags strung along her arms like buoys. “What’ll you all do if it rains?” she asks, swinging her head towards the midway, bags rustling. She widens her eyes in concern, as if she can think of no more terrible a fate.
I look up, ready to be done with these people, put Thunderbird in the rearview as I tear off down the road. “Same thing as you,” I say, snapping the money box closed. “Get wet.”
It is only a legend, the Thunderbird. A myth the settlers stole from the Indians to scare little boys out of venturing too far from home. But they told the story enough times that they started to believe it themselves. Started whispering the terrible what if s , started to keep an eye on the sky. Always watching for the dark shape in the trees that might be waiting to swoop down and carry their children away. A hundred years ago, two traveling men pulled into town proclaiming they had captured the beast, that they had it alive and caged in a tent, to be viewed for two bits admission. When the crowd gathered, one of them went around collecting money, working the people up, describing the creature’s great ferocity, the size and crushing strength of its talons and beak. And then just at the moment before the unveiling, the other one came running out from behind the tent, screaming, “It’s escaped! Run for your lives!” And in the pandemonium that followed, they packed it all up quick and took off for the next town. Dub told me the story, doubled up with laughter. “You’d think that would have put an end to it,” he said. But every year, even now, there are one or two more sightings. I can imagine it, looking out at the mute woods: how you might think you have glimpsed a wing or a passing shadow, the shuddering near-miss of catastrophe.
I know how they felt, those travelers: telling the same story town after town, the faces and the story must have eventually blurred, so they no longer knew what was hoax and what was truth.
I’m ready to take a break, clear my head, walk away for a while, when a group of teenagers comes careening down the path and slides to a stop in front of Dub’s tent. Three boys in low-slung jeans jab a pink cloud of cotton candy in one another’s faces, laughing and bumping into people. With them, in tight jeans and a tank top but still in her sash and crown, is Miss Hopewell County, giggling and slapping at their arms, trying to get in the middle of it all. She looks over and catches my eye, flashes a smile. I look down and grind my fist into my thigh. Sixty-six thousand miles an hour, the earth whips around the sun, while girls like this brush their hair, paint their nails, call their friends, believe that it all revolves around them. Suddenly she’s in front of me, shimmering in the heat, still with that center-of-the-universe smile.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hello,” I say through my teeth. I can see the top of her bra as she leans over the table—lacy, white, expectant.
“Cool,” she says, reaching to touch an old pillbox hat. Up close, her face has a blank innocence, like a field ready for the plow. She probably still thinks that one of those boys is going to sweep her off her feet, carry her away from here.
She gasps. “My necklace,” she says, her hand flying to her throat. She looks up at me with big blinking eyes. “Where’d you find it?”
I look over her shoulder at the boys, who seem to have tired of their game, and are standing around like cows, gazing dumbly at the horizon. I wonder which one wrapped his fingers in her hair last night, leaned her up against the bleachers. Which one might do it tonight. A meanness takes hold of me.
“What are you talking about?” I say, still looking at the boys.
“That’s my locket. I lost it last night. I’ve been looking for it all day.” All day. She says it with a suffering sigh, as if a day was an interminable amount of time, as if we lived on a giant planet that turned infinitely slowly around the sun. Under my clothes, all the humidity of the air collects, heating up.
“What a coincidence,” I say, “that I’ve got one just like it. I’ve had this one for months.” My face burns. Sweat breaks. I squeeze my hands together behind my back, fighting the urge to pull off my shirt.
“But it’s mine,” she says, trying to laugh. I can see she has decided I must be teasing her. She’s a little drunk, lining her words up carefully, like she’s placing them on a tightrope. “Here,” she says, reaching for it. “I can prove it.” I find myself grabbing her hand and pushing it back from the table. Startled, she jerks it away.
“It’s forty-five bucks,” I say. Willing her, just willing her, to go away.
“But it’s mine. If you look—”
“Forty. I can go as low as forty.” I wipe swea
t from my face with the back of my hand. I’m wet all over now, my clothes clinging to me, sweat running down my face. “Afraid I can’t go any lower than that.”
“It’s mine,” she says again, but quietly, dazed, with the voice of a little girl. Suddenly I can see her bedroom, in a brick ranch on the edge of her daddy’s cornfield. Her mother closing the drapes and turning on the lamps every afternoon at five, though the sun is still throwing wild light across the corn. I feel a wave of sympathy. She must think it will never change.
She turns and looks back at the boys. “Who are you, anyway?” she says with her head turned, her voice filling with tears. But it’s clear I’ve won. Without looking back, she goes over to the boys and disappears into the pack as they slouch up towards the midway.
The inside of my mouth, fingertips, toes, everything’s buzzing, ringing, like I’ve just come crashing back down through the atmosphere. As soon as they’re out of sight, I lay my hand flat over the necklace, close my fingers around it, and slip it in my back pocket.
On the drive in two days ago, I stopped at a historical marker, just to break up the numbness of the unbroken fields along the road. It was a plaque about the Hopewell people, who thousands of years ago lived on this land and built ceremonial earthworks, great burial mounds where they laid their dead to rest along with pottery, crude figurines, and stone tools. And there it was across the field, the mound, nothing spectacular about it at all. I got out of the truck and walked over, thinking it might be more impressive up close. There were daffodils growing along the sides of it, and a beer can had rolled down from the top. I picked it up and stood there and tried to feel some sense of the sacred, of the permanence. But I felt nothing, just the late blankness of an August afternoon, a plane droning overhead. Then, as I stood there flexing the can under my thumb, the loneliness of the ages suddenly grazed past—the shards of clay pots and bits of stone blades, the bottles and cans of countless teenage parties, the boxes of silverware and reading glasses and overcoats that I am always hauling out of other people’s attics—all the things people leave behind, and how they really can tell us nothing, nothing about a life lived, nothing about an entire civilization that has disappeared from the face of the earth. I pictured some future race, trying to make sense of what will be left of us, all of our precious treasures sad and useless in the rubble and ruin. It flashed past with a ringing in my ears, left me staggering with irrelevance. Then I let the beer can fall and walked back to the truck, the miles ahead stretching out before me like a staircase that leads nowhere.