Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing

by Lydia Peelle

  The rain starts at four. Slow, just a drizzle, and people duck under shelter to wait, not wanting to go home. After a while, they begin to venture back out, holding plastic bags over their heads. Umbrellas bloom in the pathways. The Mexicans come down from the midway and shake straw over the churned-up ground, kick at the power cords, giving each other dark, dubious looks. The Ferris wheel keeps turning in the grizzled air. Someone hits the jackpot up at B–52 Breakdown, the lights flash and the sirens wail, and everyone freezes for a minute, their faces full of alarm, as if the unthinkable has happened. They laugh nervously when they realize their mistake, take another bite of their hot dogs, keep making the rounds.

  All afternoon I’ve been slipping my hand into my back pocket, pressing my thumb against the point of the necklace’s heart. Just to feel the dull prick, just to be sure it is still there. I keep searching the revolving faces, hoping and dreading that she might streak by. Her tight jeans would be soaked now, her hair wet, the white satin sash flashing behind her. I wonder if she would stop again. I want her to stop again. I know exactly what I would say: You don’t want it.

  But after a while I start to get cold, my jeans heavy and wet, the rain feeling like it’s seeping through me. I unfold the tarp over the table and go to Dub’s to wait it out. It’s crowded in the tent, warm with bodies. I drop into the folding chair in the corner and watch the people jostle one another, grabbing for shirts. I lift one off the pile closest to me. THE HUNTER’S NIGHTMARE. What the boy under the bleachers was wearing. My stomach clenches.

  “Hey, Dub,” I shout across the chaos. “Where’d you get that necklace?”

  “What necklace?” he calls back, looking up from his cash register as he hands someone his change.

  “Come on,” I say, no patience for this.

  He ignores me, stuffing half a dozen shirts in a bag. The deer on the shirt looks at me with a near-human face. It strikes me as the most indecent thing I’ve ever seen. I hold it halfway up. “How can you sell this garbage?” I say, loud, trying to turn some heads.

  Dub, unfazed, looks over. “I don’t have to,” he shouts over the din. “It sells itself.” Several customers’ eyes widen when they see the shirt in my hand, and they elbow their way over to get a better look. I let it fall back down on the table and push my chair back. Dub comes over and grabs it. “Made in Malaysia, man. Only the finest.” He throws it to a fat ten-year-old, whose face jiggles when he catches it. “Come on, Cole, where’s your sense of humor?”

  “I think I lost it somewhere back in Ohio,” I say.

  “Under the bleachers,” he says. “But now I’m giving away all my secrets.”

  I hang around at my table another half hour, not knowing what else to do. The rain keeps coming, falling in big, heavy drops, and it must be apparent to even the most optimistic that it’s not going to stop. A distant clap of thunder sounds. The crowd is steadily thinning, and finally I give up on it. I pack up my table, wrapping things haphazardly in newspapers and rags, throw all of it in my crates. I see Dub shoo a pack of boys out of his tent, and they pull up the hoods of their sweatshirts and head doggedly back up to the midway, determined, like soldiers. He stands at the door with his palm stretched out and makes a face at me that says he’s quitting too. “I got a pocket full of dead presidents,” he shouts. “I ain’t complaining.”

  I shove my crates under the table and tie down the tarp. I’m ready for the warmth of Kathy’s bus, the sterile, off-the-lot smell of it, the huge leather couch that slides out from the wall at the press of a button. As I head up the paths, I see that the only people left on them are teenagers. The only ones willing to get soaked to the bone for one last go on the Tempest or Zipper, now that there are no lines. They’re still eating hot dogs and funnel cake off soggy paper plates. I reach into my pocket, touch the necklace, and wonder if she’s gone home. Home to the solid brick ranch beside the cornfield. A stillness inside, as her family sits together in the living room, listening to the storm. Grateful for their lightning rod and foundation. As I pass the wing stand, I hear Bob practicing his chord progressions. “Goddamn it all,” he says. “Damn it to hell.”

  Kathy is waiting for me in the bus. She’s got the news on the big wall-mounted TV, sound down low, and has a strained look on her face. When I duck inside, the weatherman is pointing to a red pixilated mass that is moving in fits and starts across a map of the state. She looks up at me and rearranges her face into a smile. “Just a summer storm,” she says, reaching up to touch her earrings. “Nothing to worry about.” She sounds as if she’s trying to convince herself. Clicking off the TV, she pats the space beside her on the couch. “Look at you,” she says, her voice changing when I don’t sit. “Rough.”

  I walk back to the bedroom and lie down on the water bed without taking off my muddy boots. I hear her get up and start to make coffee. The rain comes in waves on the roof. It sounds like a hell of a lot more than a summer storm. It sounds like a wrathful sea.

  “You’re not sleeping in that truck tonight, Cole, baby,” she calls back, running the water, opening the cupboards, banging around. It all sounds so forcedly cheerful that my mood goes dark like a burnt-out bulb.

  “Got any other ideas?” I say to the wall. “Think Bob will mind if I shack up here?”

  She’s quiet, then says, “You could get a hotel.”

  The thought of driving into Thunderbird in the rain, past all those lighted houses, navigating the inevitable strip, finding the chain motel with its Shriners candy machines in the lobby and brochure rack of local attractions—it leaves me with a black hole of loneliness deep in my center.

  “Cap’s tight,” I say, probably too quiet for her to hear. “There’s worse things.”

  She comes in with two mugs of coffee, her rings clinking against them, squeezing sideways through the narrow door. She sits on the edge of the bed, sending a little wake rolling under me. A water bed in a bus, of all the things. She says she likes it, sleeping while Bob is driving, the little currents comforting, like the womb.

  I know there’s a part of Kathy that believes this bus will keep her young. That if she and Bob only keep moving, the odometer will spin on it, not her. As little kids, Clay and I thought that if you could just manage to keep your feet off the ground long enough, the world would revolve underneath you, and you’d come down in a different place than you left. We would take turns with a ruler, jumping as high as we could. Later we were fascinated with our grade school textbook’s explanation of the speed of light. A story of twin brothers. One travels in a spaceship to distant galaxies and returns to find that while he has not aged at all, his brother is an old, old man. There was a cartoon illustration of the two of them face to face, an exclamation point in the air between them, the one who stayed behind with a beard like Rip Van Winkle. Clay and I discussed these things often, up past our bedtime, whispering in the darkness of his room. Atomic forces, galactic maps, the theory of relativity. His voice electric with excitement, my mind tripping over itself, trying to keep up with his.

  I reach into my back pocket. “Present,” I say.

  Kathy gingerly takes the necklace from me and holds it between her fingertips. She turns it over and over, her lips tight. “Where’d you get this?” she finally says.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I say, and cross my arms behind my head, feeling suddenly expansive. “It’s for you.”

  She looks at me, one thin eyebrow raised, then slides a painted fingernail along the edge of the heart. It springs open like a door. Inside, there’s a tiny picture of a baby, a red-faced newborn in a blue cap with a pinched, wrinkled face. We both look down at it, silent. The picture is small, no bigger than my pinky nail, but it suddenly feels as if there are three of us on the bus.

  Snapping it shut, she hands it silently back. I take it, avoiding her eyes, and shove it deep in my pocket, as deep as it will go, wishing that it would disappear. I close my eyes and see the girl’s grip on the bleachers, imagine the necklace swinging with each of his
thrusts until it fell to the ground. A baby. It could be anyone, of course. A nephew, a cousin, an old picture of her brother, the one gone off to war. There is something tragic about it, the picture. But maybe it’s just that look that newborns have, when it’s hard to tell if they’re alive or dead. I can feel Kathy watching me, waiting.

  “You know that’s someone’s treasure,” she finally says.

  I keep my eyes shut and nod. Or the baby might be hers. No hope, then, of escape. Parked him with her mother the weekend of the fair so she can pretend for a day or two that she’s free.

  “I don’t get you, Cole. What are you doing here? You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. You should make a home for yourself. Settle down.”

  “I like the road,” I say, opening my eyes. Looking up at the close ceiling, the faux-marble panels and light fixtures, the words ring as hollow in the bus as they do inside my head.

  She sighs. “But don’t you ever think about the future?”

  “I don’t think about next week.”

  “Well, you live your life like that, Cole, baby, and one morning you’ll wake up and it will have passed you by. Like that,” she says, and snaps her fingers. “Believe me.” I shift and look up at her hovering above me, her eyes sad and heavy. A sudden rush of rain pounds the roof, and a worried look passes over her face. No matter how far or how fast she travels, Kathy will grow old. She is old. I can see the wrinkles breaking through her thick makeup, the gray hair in her braids. The sagging flesh under her arms, gravity’s toll.

  She leans over as if to kiss me, but instead tries to fluff the pillow behind my head. In the penumbra of her smell, warm and soapy, I’m pushed down through fathomless depths, weighted with lead. The bed sloshes underneath me. The narrow walls of the bus are close and final as a casket. I jerk my head away from her and swing my feet onto the floor. The rain falls with the sound of tearing pages. In the lulls I can hear Bob’s uncertain chords, his curses and false starts. I stand up on shaky legs, sick to death of other people’s tragedies. To be carried away by a giant bird. There could be worse things. Everything and everyone on earth growing smaller and smaller, as all of it fell away.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” I say.

  Kathy sits up and slides her hands between her knees, trying to smile, to smooth it over. “Baby,” she says, reaching out, and I step away, knocking into the flimsy closet door and sending a cascade of clothes out onto the floor. The rain roars on the roof. “Where on earth do you think you’re going?”

  The wind rips the door of the bus out of my hand as I dive out into the pounding rain. Pulling the collar of my shirt up around my neck, I duck my head and run down the empty path. Shouts and the beeps of backing trucks on the midway pierce the thick sound of the torrent. But none of it has been broken down yet—the rides are still up, the Ferris wheel looming above the crouching booths and trailers. Along the strips, figures in raincoats load pickups and tires spin in the mud. I run away from it all, out towards the dark field. The wet grass grabs at my legs, slowing me down, but I keep running until I’m at the tree line, and then I turn and look at the carnival, a somber city in the distance. When I pull the necklace from my pocket and let go, I expect it to be carried away on the wind. Instead it drops to the ground like an anchor, and I have to grind it into the mud with my boot to be rid of it. I want it never to be found again. Buried. Lost for good.

  I’m the one who stayed. The brother with the beard. Clay reached escape velocity fifteen years ago, when he crashed his car that night, out on the dark road. I’m starting to think he was the lucky one. I stop and lean down on my knees, try to catch my breath, let the rain hammer me. The rain-swept field is desolate as the open sea. Virginia. Even if I was to turn around, drive east a thousand miles, pull onto the old road and down our driveway, I’d walk up a front path that leads to nothing, the house torn down months ago to make room for the new neighborhood that is rising up in the pasture where we spent our afternoons. Just Clay, me, and the old oak trees. And now the trees are gone, too.

  “This is Illinois,” I say, to steady myself. “My feet are on the ground.” I crouch there, repeating it, until the rain stops. It stops abruptly, as if I have somehow willed it to, and in its place comes a thick, strange stillness, as if the palm of a giant hand has flattened over the field. Everything stands still—the grass, the leaves, the sky. I stand and look up, the towering dark clouds frozen. Clay had another favorite theory. If you could go up in a plane and travel around the equator at one thousand miles an hour, the speed of the earth’s rotation there, the sun would appear to hang still in the sky. No past, no future. As long as you could keep up your speed.

  “But,” he’d say, frowning. “But there’s a rub.” It would be an illusion. Down on earth, the sun would be rising and setting, the clocks ticking away. Life would carry on without you.

  Headlights come at me across the field. It’s a cop car, bumping and straining over the uneven ground. The window rolls down as it pulls alongside me. Without stopping, a bull-faced sheriff leans out into the still air and jerks his thumb up towards the road, mistaking me for a straggling reveler. “Son,” he says. “We’ve got a tornado warning in effect. We’ve sent everybody home.”

  Let it come, I think, running back up to the midway. Let it rip through. Let it wipe the field clean. Let it carry all this away. Up on my strip, my table stands alone, the tarp blown off my boxes, everything soaked. Dub’s tent is gone, the only thing left an overturned folding chair. I can see a steady line of rigs leaving Camper City, pulling out onto the road, headed for God-knows-where. The rain starts again, all at once, pounding, and then the wind, picking it up and slashing it around. What I said to Kathy, about liking the road. That was a lie. The road—what it really is—eight lanes of grinding semis barreling west with spent uranium, east with old-growth timber, hauling shit-caked cows and microwave dinners, feeding the mad frenzy of this country—it all moves too fast. I’ve been thinking we’ll just spin off our axis and out into the center of space. Hell, Thunderbird, Illinois, might be the first to go.

  I run up the deserted paths of the midway, where rides and booths have been forsaken, left to the mercy of the wind. Flat-beds sit parked at abrupt angles next to the rides, some of which are partly dismantled, some still standing, the wind whistling through scaffolding. Paper plates, cups, and gnawed drumsticks spill out of overturned trash cans. A balloon caught on the side of the Haunted House beats itself against the wall, as if trying to break free. A loosed tarp swoops towards me on furious wings. I duck and it flings itself on down the path. I run past the Ferris wheel, where the plywood clown that kids must be as tall as to ride has toppled over and lies sideways, grinning, in the grass. The wheel shudders and groans. The carriages rock and glow in a flash of lightning. The wind shoves me along from behind. My heart takes over, pounding, shouting from my chest. Get out of here, it shouts when I look up at the swaying wheel. Get out of here, it shouts, and the moaning steel struts of the Gravitron and Tilt-a-Whirl and Zipper all shout it too. Stumbling, I run through the rain towards the remains of Camper City, no idea what I’ll do when I get there. Pull out on the road and try to outrun it, or lock the doors and watch it come. Either way, I’ve got nowhere to go.

  But then I round the back loop, and see them. A ragged pack of boys, weaving through the abandoned booths. They’re passing beer cans, trying to light cigarettes in the whipping wind. They must have hid when the cops came through, first brave, then reckless, defying the lightning. Now they’re swaggering through the rain, invincible. And ahead of me, up on the carousel, girls in wet Tshirts sit astride the still horses, passing a bottle in a wet paper bag. The horses’ nostrils flare, eyes and manes wild, legs flung out, suspended in mid-flight. Behind them, all of the sky is gathering itself up at the horizon, bloodred, feathered. The wind seems to hover above us. “Look!” I yell, pointing, but my voice is snatched away by the wind. The Ferris wheel groans, lamenting. “Get out of here! Go on!” But none of t
hem even notice me. The girls cackle, their hair plastered to their faces, their eyes black with smudged makeup. The boys strut over, swing themselves up onto the horses, and shake the rain from their hair. They’re all laughing, shouting, singing, celebrating as if they know something no one else knows. As if on the other side of that terrible horizon there’s a new world coming when this one goes, a world where everything lost will be restored, and everything made whole. One of the girls, dark-eyed and wasted, sees me and reaches out, saying something I can’t hear over the din, and I strain to make out her lips.

  “Come on,” she’s saying, “come quickly, come, come—”

  Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing

  Shell

  I meet the herpetologist on the bus. Rush hour is in its deepest throes, a snowstorm has clamped down on the city, and the bus is packed with people in bulky coats, impatient and aggressive at the end of the day. Trapped at the center of the crush, I am starting to doubt that I will be able to hold it together all the way to my stop. Then a surge from behind sends me sliding into the man in front of me, and the flaps of a cardboard box he is holding pop open. I find myself looking down at a turtle, its shell mapped with orange and yellow and green. A turtle! I say as he gently folds the flaps back down. Then, shocked to hear myself unlock a door to conversation, Do you mind if I see it again? He opens the box just enough for me to see inside. Are you particularly interested in reptiles? he says kindly. Absolutely, I say, though it isn’t true. I just want to keep looking at the turtle, which has drawn its head inside its shell, so utterly still and complacent in the midst of the chaos of the bus. It’s rare to meet young people with an interest, he says. Oh, yes, I say quickly, thrilled to be considered young. Then I look up at his face and realize how old he must be himself—gray beard, eyes big and watery behind thick glasses. I’m a professor, he says, at the university. I’ve written a book you might find interesting. He pulls a card from his pocket and points to the address with a shaky finger. Drop by any time.