by Josh Weil
In their pallid light the entire hillside behind her truck was grayed over and still, as if in wait for the downpour, and the gravel lot was bluely waiting, and while he stood there waiting the sky let loose and the rain came down in one solid sheet.
She came walking through it. She had pulled on a poncho, yellow plastic down past her knees. Beneath it he could just make out her shape.
He pried his eyes away—pulled the respirator over his mouth and flicked the pump switch and began laying on a thin coat of spray—and when she came in his eyes were on her again. She shoved off her hood and stood there dripping rain on the rubber mat: low tocking drops that beaded blackly around her black rain-beaded boots.
Sliding his mask off, he said a hello. She said something back. But he was looking at her face, a face so pale her skin almost looked blue with the blood beneath her cheeks. Until he looked at her eyes and knew what blue was.
“You brought the rain,” he said.
“Do I look like I like rain?” she said.
“No, I guess not.”
“Alright then.”
The spray pump hummed between them.
He told her, “If you’re looking for the manager, Mr. Rundgren’s—”
“I’m looking to stay away from the manager.”
“There stands a wise woman,” he said.
She smiled at him. She was missing a tooth at the side of her mouth and it did a black thing that was the opposite of wink. After a moment she said, “You gonna spray the whole van?”
“Shit.” He jerked his look back to the nozzle, already thumbing the spray gun off: it had drifted from the glass and was pointed at the van he’d unloaded earlier that night. A murky slick of In-Solar window coating spread across the open cargo door. “Fuck,” he said and wiping at the smear with his coverall sleeve, thinking of how much the spray was worth, how little he made, what a hardass Mr. Rundgren was, said a few things worse.
In one move, she reached over, lifted the respirator mask from around his neck, and pressed it over his mouth. She stood there grinning. Then let go. The mask dropped. He could feel the cool air hit the sweat around his lips.
“I take it back,” he said.
“What?”
“All that about the wisdom bottled up in those blue, blue eyes.”
“Don’t even try,” she said.
“I just did.”
“Don’t try again.”
“About the wisdom bottled up in those blue, blue, blue eyes.”
She tried not to laugh and then he could see her think screw it and she laughed.
She said, “You can call my eyes purple and I’m still not gonna fuck you.”
He leaned back against the van, his shoulder blades pushing the coverall against the wet patch, let the spray do what damage it would. “Yes ma’am,” he said. “I guess that saves me asking.”
She laughed again. “What can I do for you,” she prompted.
“What can I do for you?” he said.
“That.” She was pointing at him.
He stuck his own gloved finger at his chest but she shook her head and he cranked his face to look behind him at the drying smear of spray. “On what?”
“My truck.”
“You put that on the windshield and you’re not gonna be able to—”
“No. My truck.”
“The whole truck?”
“Think like a paint job,” she said.
“You have any idea how much that would cost?”
“Why do you think I’m talking to you instead of the manager?”
“You could be rich,” he said.
“You could be handsome.”
He grinned. He had not trimmed his beard in a long time and he could feel the whiskers tickle the corners of his mouth and wished he had. “I’d lose my job,” he said.
She stood looking at him. Between the tops of her lumberjack boots and the bottom of the yellow slicker there was a stretch of shinflesh, white. Beneath the plastic there was a dress whose color he couldn’t tell other than that it was dark, cut in a shape he didn’t know how to describe except that it came nary lower than her upper thigh and was loose around everywhere and then suddenly tighter just below her breasts and cut low, too, and it didn’t matter because she was looking at him in a way that made him unable to keep his eyes from hers.
“Can I say something?” he asked her.
“If you’ve got a tongue,” she said.
And he leaned against the van, letting the wet glaze soak into his back and wondering if she was working him in a way that he would find out later was just the way she worked men, or if she felt, too, their pulses passing back and forth like jump lightning making its cauterizing leap from vein to vein.
She drove the Ram into the garage while he stood inside and waved her forwards, his gloved hands motioning her a little more, a little more. He spread his palm for her to stop. She pushed the clutch and revved the gas and waited for him to scurry. But he just stood there, giving her a hard eye, and she felt it again, something in the way he looked at her that made her sure he had survived something worse than anything she’d have to up ahead. It eased her nerves. She thought on how it would feel to have that beside her where she was going. She shut the engine off. He already had a slab of cardboard pressed to the long window of the camper shell that humped the truckbed behind her, and in the sideview she watched a boxcutter appear in his hand, trace the line of her window, something in his quick ease with the blade, its sudden appearance and disappearance when he was done, that cranked her nerves back up again. She watched him through the windows of the cab while one by one he blacked them out. His hair was a tangled self-cut mess as greasy looking as his mechanic suit and his beard was so long it was tangled up with it and when he was done with all but the driver’s side, he leaned in.
In-Solar or refracted glaze, he asked her. She told him whatever would change the color most. He told her he had no clue. On glass In-Solar let the daylight in and kept out the glow sent down from the sky all night. Refracted did the opposite. But neither was meant for metal. She told him whatever and take a chance and rolled her window up.
He taped it over. “Get out,” he told her.
She pressed the lock down. Sitting in the darkness inside the cab, listening to the thunder of the spray on the metal around her, she could imagine his face rippled with the shadows of the rain, and the wan light seeping through the clear glass roof and above that the clouds with the reflected light leaking through and above them the mirrors. There were a thousand of them, or more. The government kept sending new ones up. They drifted ceaselessly across the sky in their ceaseless drifting orbit, their giant reflectors spread like parachutes meant to catch the sun instead of wind. They took its brightness and refracted it and sent it down upon the land, and for years now they had taken night away from the world and replaced it with their constant gloaming. Even in the first days of her life, even in the moment when she must have opened her eyes for the first time and gazed upwards, that was all she had ever known of night.
He was still at work when she shoved open the door and burst out, gasping. She grabbed at the cardboard on a window of the camper shell and wrenched it off. He quit spraying. In the sudden quiet beneath the rain there was just the sound of her ripping tape loose and the cardboard skittering across the floor and then she was yanking the airgun from his hands and had let loose all over the shell, plastic and glass and all of it.
When she handed him the nozzle back, he took it without looking at it, his eyes never leaving her. “You know you won’t be able to see out the back in the day.”
“I’m not driving in the day,” she said.
Then she tore off the rest of the cardboard, left it scattered around the garage floor like something dropped from a great height and exploded, and got back in the truck. He stood behind it. In the passenger side mirror he could see her hand reach over and unlock the passenger door.
They drove to the place that was the closest t
hing he could claim as his, a trailer on Catawba Creek that belonged to a friend who had one day disappeared to no one knew where. On the road, she pulled over and got out and squatted above the mud at the edge of the wet scrub while in the cab he rifled through the dross of her life that she’d left on the seat, his eyes glancing out the window at her eyes staring back. The whole walk around the front of the truck her stare didn’t quit. It stilled his searching. She climbed in and before she had even shut the door they started at it. She drove—barely—and told him where and how, and they barely made it across the yard of sogged grass and wetter mud to the pine steps that rose before the door, and they didn’t make it past the door. It was a backroad off a backroad but at least two vehicles passed while they were at it on the mud-slick steps and she didn’t care and he didn’t either. The rain came down on the tin roof. Lower, heavier, in the pooling yard. He ran around naked and tanned except where he was white as a peeled frog, looking behind each cinder block piling for the key while she laughed at him. When he found it and got the door open, she grabbed him by the flesh at his waist and dug in her nails and she was stronger than he would have guessed but should have known.
Inside, they lay into each other like mountain cats tied tail to tail. That was how his grandfather used to say the hill people did it and when they were done he told it to her. She laughed.
“Tails tied nothing,” she said.
The ceiling above them was made of laminate strips painted to look like wood. Some had come loose and bowed down. He couldn’t remember if they had hung like that before. It wouldn’t have surprised him if they’d been tight and flush an hour ago, two, whatever. In the living room a busted couch arm hung by its upholstery. In the bathroom the ceramic toothbrush holder once attached to the wall lay scattered in its many ceramic parts. In the bedroom: the bamboo blinds in a heap below the window, the mattress shucked of sheets, pillows strewn. In the kitchen: pieces of plates littered beneath the table and the ones that had survived lying there dumbfounded and whitefaced as if traumatized at how they had been used. And mud simply everywhere.
They lay there smoking. The rain drummed on the roof and then quit and there was just the rush of the creek roiling by. A breath of air blew in through the still-open door and drew a shiver across them.
He said, “I know it’s what you’re supposed to say, but—”
“Then don’t say it.”
“But you know what.”
“Yeah. Me never either.”
“You said it,” he said.
She nodded. “How come we didn’t go to your place?”
“Look around you,” he said.
Her smile did something to him, already, that made him want to see it again as if it was something he needed or would get the shakes, and he hadn’t known her half a day.
“You didn’t know how it would be,” she said.
“I knew. But also there’s that I don’t so much really have a place.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“Rundgren’s,” he said. “In the cargo vans.”
She looked at him.
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “I have my pick of the seats.”
“They don’t pay you enough to get yourself a room?”
He took one last drag and blew three smoke rings and rubbed the butt out between his fingers and flicked it against the wall and it bounced back and almost landed on her. One of the things he’d done made her smile again. He wished he knew which it was. He was old enough to have learned there was a kind of woman that did it for him and knew it was the allure of something dark in them they hid or tried to hide, and knew too that learning what it was always made it leave. But watching her so close he could see the dark grains of makeup below her eyes he thought she was not just his kind of woman, but the woman the idea of his kind was based on, and if the feeling was going to leave he wanted it gone.
“What are you running from?” he said.
“I’d like to see you try and shrink my head.”
“I meant it literal.”
“I’m not,” she said.
“You keep a Chief’s Special .45 just to the terrorize the squirrels?”
She looked at him and she wasn’t smiling and in her eyes was what he’d thought he’d glimpsed while they went at it but it was rarified and stripped clean now and in all truth it scared him.
He said, “Well, if you didn’t want me to find it, you shoulda hid it a better place than the glove box.”
“Who says all the other hiding places aren’t already full?”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” he said. “I’ve never seen hollow tips for anything but a rifle shell before, at least not in a box in the truck of a woman who claimed not to be running from someone.”
“What if I’m hunting someone instead.”
“Then I’d pity them. But you’re not.”
“Okay,” she said, “I guess you want to tell me why you’re living in the back of a van and covered up in that fucking beard and have got right there what I’m guessing was once a tattoo of a butterfly or a little bird or something, which I mean whatever, but why the fuck’d you try to hide it with that nasty hand pricked shit that looks just fucking nasty and, while you’re at it, how about touching on why you took the boxcutter with you and how come you have spare blades sewn into pockets on the inside of your belt?”
“You don’t like the beard?” he said.
“I didn’t say that. And you wouldn’t show me your driver’s license picture.”
“I told you I don’t have one.”
“My point,” she said. “And won’t even tell me your fucking name.”
“You didn’t tell me yours,” he said.
“There you go.” She said it like he’d won her argument for her.
He got up and walked to the open door and stood there, naked, leaning against the doorjamb, looking out at the empty dirt road.
“I’m guessing you’re gonna move on soon,” he said. When she didn’t say anything he looked back at her and she was lying there sprawled out still in her boots and nothing else and she rose onto her elbows and looked at him and he saw the way her breasts remade themselves into a new and equally perfect and still unexpected shape and knew that would be in his mind for a long, long time and he looked back at the road and said, “Shit.”
He heard her come up behind him. She didn’t bring a towel or a sheet or anything but the pack of smokes, bright green in her hand, just stood there naked beside him naked in the door.
“You’re gonna attract attention to yourself,” he said.
She smacked the pack and drew one out and realized she had forgotten to bring the lighter. She stood there holding the long white useless thing. The rain had quit and the clouds had piled onto the horizon and the rest of the sky was clear. The whole valley was lit up like a work site, the pale trunks of the beech trees and the needles of the pines bright in the floodlit forest, the dirt road clear of darkness as a city street, the flat roofs of the trailers in the trailer park around them gleaming, and on them the pooled rainwater and in the water the reflections of the sky: all the mirrors, like a thousand full moons swarming, shining down their reflected shards of day.
Across the road there was a dog house in the full blast, in front of it a metal bowl turned over and on fire with gleam. There was a dog standing on its roof. There was no owner’s house to go with it, or trailer, or anything. Just woods and a dirt patch and the dog house and then more woods. In the woods, he knew, there were still some animals left, but he had not seen a dog since what seemed forever. As a boy he’d had one, but after the mirrors were launched they had to put it down. It had gone mad at the constant light. All the animals did. They seemed to have lost all sense of what was natural to them. Some had stopped mating and died off. Some had migrated south, confused and desperate, and had not been able to outrun the light that always followed and had turned violent in a way that people talked of with a sense of shame. It was as if they no longer knew what they themsel
ves were and they tried to get into the houses and garages and anywhere that was sometimes blessed with a manmade dark, and once there they did things to each other that people didn’t want to look at it, so most of them were killed off, too. Others had gone north and it was rumored they had found the line where true night began again. People talked of the possibility of pets up there.
“I wonder whose dog that is,” he said.
She reached over and wedged the unused cigarette behind his ear and left it there. She looked at him. “Cute,” she said.
“It’s not even guarding anything,” he said.
“Maybe it’s guarding this trailer. Maybe it’s your friend’s.”
“It’d be nothing but the bones of a dog.”
“You should come with me,” she said.
A car sent its noise around the bend and came after it and the dog leapt off the roof of its house and hit the ground running and ran for no more than a second before it was jerked into a backflip and landed in the dirt. The car passed through the barking of the dog, its small yellow dusklights glowing and the rainwater spraying from its tires and in the thin spatter of its wake the dog did the same thing again.
“Would you look at that,” he said.
“You heard me,” she said.
The road puddles returned to rocking the reflections of the mirrors above and the dog stood there barking at the dwindling sound of the tires and stopped and then slowly climbed back onto its roof again. He knew it was just the end of the chain but he liked to think it was some invisible something that the dog had come up against and could not pass, he liked to think that, and he thought she would like to think it too and he told it to her.
She reached across to his head exactly as she had done with the cigarette and found with her fingers a grease-and-sweat-bound curl and played with it.
“Do I get to ask where you’re going?” he said.