How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly

by Connie May Fowler

  Raul took the wallet, returned it to his back pocket, and said, “I am a very, very lucky man.”

  “Indeed.” Clarissa looked in the rearview, which reflected a long stretch of open road. “Sixteen thousand two hundred dollars?”

  Raul nodded, kept his sights straight ahead.

  Clarissa popped the car into drive, pulled onto the road in the direction from which they’d traveled, and gunned it. Empowerment, she mused, should not be so fleeting. Above the engine’s full-throated growl, she shouted, as if she were a woman with nothing to lose, “I’ll give you ten grand cash and finance five. Not one dime more.”

  Raul’s fingers resumed their dance. They were graceful fingers, tanned, and still bore the calluses of a man who used his hands to make a living.

  Clarissa wondered how long he had worked at the car lot and if he missed whatever it was he did that earned him those calluses. Maybe he understood the secrets of oak and pine, citrus and tomatoes, drywall and nails.

  He looked out the passenger-side window, watched the world go by, his handsome face crinkled in concentration.

  “Why you want this car?” he asked. He turned to her. “I mean”—he tapped his index finger on the dash—“this car.”

  “You’re supposed to be selling me. Not interrogating me.”

  “You a lady. This a man’s car.”

  “Then why did you show it to me?” Deep inside, Clarissa felt as if her imaginary fall from the Sears Tower were about to end on a positive note.

  He laughed. “That’s right. I show it to you. But you want it. I mean want it, the way a man wants. Why?”

  Clarissa looked at him—his face was open and beautiful—and then back at the road. Dead Oak lay just ahead in the scintillating distance. She knew the answer, and the knowledge made her light-headed; it was the same feeling she experienced in the old days when she was writing and writing well, when she knew the next word she typed would be not simply an okay word or a good word, but the only word in all the English language that would do.

  Still, she took her time, not answering immediately, allowing herself the luxury of experiencing the totality of the El Camino, feeling the engine’s power radiate up through the drive shaft, the steering column, the tiny bones of each finger, the hard orbs of her wrists. She listened to the truck’s pitch-perfect rumble the way a jazz aficionado listens to Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” She saw the yellow-and-black-striped hood gleaming, a few stray clouds reflected in its polished shine, and thought that there was nothing mundane about power and utility combined. In her mind, she sat at the keyboard and began typing, clicking the letters that would form the perfect word. Click, click, click: Everything—the alphabet and all its sounds—lined up as if they were charmed and she were their wizard.

  She knew Raul was watching her, and she liked that. She looked over at him. His brown eyes were patient, intent, hungry. Hunger for a woman, for air, for life—that was something she hadn’t seen in her own husband in years. Raul was the kind of man, she knew, who would impale himself with guilt and shame if he ever did cheat on his wife. He might even confess, and Clarissa hoped that if any of that actually happened, his wife would forgive him.

  “You want to know why, really why?” Clarissa asked.

  “Sí. Yes.”

  She caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview. She was sweaty. Dirty. Unafraid. Maybe, she ventured, even beautiful. “Freedom,” she said.

  Amaziah Archer stood on the front porch of the house he had built—nail by hand-forged nail—and played the fiddle while Olga Villada patted her leg in time to the whirling rhythm. Their son, Heart Archer, standing an arm’s length away from his mother, bounced up and down in that odd way children have of dancing. Amaziah had crafted the fiddle back in 1825. Hewn from the wood of trees he had felled on the western boundary of their property, in both appearance and tonal quality, it was an exquisite instrument. In deference to the surrounding swamp’s wildlife, he had forgone the scroll’s traditional circular motif in favor of a heron’s head. Each of the four tuning pegs was a hand-carved replica of the bird. Because of the nature-inspired scroll and pegs, it was easy to imagine that the fiddle’s neck—which was practical and necessary—also paid homage to the great bird.

  Later on during that long, hot solstice, Clarissa would turn again to the material from the archives and learn that Amaziah was in his time known as a craftsman of the highest order. His fiddles produced melodious sounds so sweet that slave-owning white men as far away as New York sent emissaries to purchase this free black man’s instruments. Clarissa presumed that in the early nineteenth century, commerce and politics—on both sides of the divide—were perhaps more pragmatic than in the early twenty-first century yet equally complicated and ethically anemic.

  Discovering that Amaziah Archer was a first-rate fiddle maker led Clarissa to fantasize that she would discover, in a forgotten corner of the attic, both fiddle and bow and that she would display them in her own shadow box by the front door of the old, lovely house. She would even allow herself to imagine that her husband’s rifle displayed in a case of sacred pink ivory would end up in his office, out of sight. And because it suited her daydream, she would decide that she was not hearing the wind whip through the eaves but that it was actual remnant scraps of music, still alive in the atmosphere, played by Amaziah nearly two hundred years ago. The truth—that she was under a spell of her own casting (sometimes soul-gnawing need reprises itself as practical magic) as she trundled down the path of possibly becoming a writer again and, as part of this process, was privy to the sounds and sensitivities of the resident ghosts—was too logical for her to entertain.

  Amaziah stopped playing as he caught sight of Clarissa rolling up to the house in a long beast of a yellow car. He lowered the fiddle. “What do we have here?”

  Olga Villada’s face lit up. “Isn’t it beautiful!” she said. “Look, Heart, at the big crazy horse.” Amaziah and Olga Villada referred to all cars and trucks as crazy horses, and they often mused about what their lives might have been like—how different their fates—had such contraptions existed when they were living.

  Heart ran into the yard before Clarissa had come to a full stop.

  “Let her at least get out of it first,” Olga Villada called, feeling a tinge of pride, wondering if her presence—however spectral—was actually having a positive influence on Clarissa.

  Unaware of the three spirits, Clarissa slammed the heavy door and headed toward the back entrance of the house, her head spinning with trepidation. What would Iggy do? How would she explain? She paused before rounding the corner and looked at the truck, which, according to the owner’s manual, was what it was. Not a car, not an open-air station wagon, not some strange retro hybrid: simply and quite extraordinarily a truck.

  Olga Villada, hurrying toward her son, spied fear in the tense angle of Clarissa’s jaw and fledgling independence in the flickering light of her eyes. She wished she could sit with Clarissa, have a cup of tea, tell her about her life (how wonderful a life it had been right up until those awful, final moments), share with her things about the house she would never come to on her own, warn her to tread wisely when it came to defiance. She had watched the way Clarissa’s husband interacted with the naked women (oh, how she wished that would stop; poor Heart, always being sent to his room so that he wouldn’t see the goings-on in that yard). And, perhaps more important, she had seen the way he treated Clarissa, with indifference and disdain. The woman needed to know what it felt like to be loved by a confident, generous man. Oh, what she would give for the chance of just one conversation, one breach in the living-and-dead divide.

  Amaziah stepped off the porch, watching his wife. “Olga,” he said.

  “What?”

  He put his arm around her. “I know what you’re thinking. But you can’t.”

  “I know, I know! But look at her. She needs my help.”

  “She needs,” Amaziah said, squeezing her shoulders, “to live her life wit
hout us meddling in it.”

  “Mama! Come play!” Heart called, running his tiny hand over the shining door latch. “Daddy, can we get inside it?”

  Amaziah and his wife exchanged glances.

  “It’s up to you,” Olga Villada said.

  Amaziah looked at the gleaming mechanical beast and felt deep down, in a place that he would not share with even his wife, that he had been cheated. The twenty-first century should have been his time, his day. He’d seen Clarissa’s computer—how images and words flew across the screen like a rush of wings—and had heard the people who lived in that thing called a television talk about satellites and rocket ships. Just think of the fiddles I could have crafted, he mused, if I’d had power tools.

  “Daddy!” Heart tugged on his father’s hand.

  Amaziah looked at his son and then the El Camino. “Oh, why not!”

  During the most profound heat of the day, the three of them—bemused, excited, and riddled with longing—wafted through the steel body of the yellow crazy horse, Heart in the middle, Olga Villada in the passenger seat, and Amaziah behind the wheel. The Civic had only mildly interested them, and the pickup, once it began to reek, was off-limits. But this gleaming yellow Minotaur of a vehicle with its long black racing stripes and chrome flourishes was a seduction even a man like Amaziah could not resist.

  “It seems dangerous to me,” Olga Villada said, pressing her face close to the windshield, trying to hide her fascination with the idea of mortals moving faster than the wind.

  Amaziah ran his hands over the steering wheel. Heart kicked his legs and tried to make a rumbling sound, imitating the engine. “If we’d had one of these,” Amaziah said, his eyes wandering over the instrument panel, his feet testing the accelerator, “we would have been able to escape.”

  Olga Villada looked at him and made the “Hush, you’re scaring the baby” face, but Amaziah let it roll right off him.

  As for Heart, he followed his father’s lead. “Yeah! And we would have shot them dead! Bang! Bang! Bang!”

  Olga Villada ran her hand over her son’s head. “Now, sweetie, we don’t talk that way. Okay?”

  Heart studied his mother’s face and nodded his agreement, even though he had no idea why he should not express his hatred for those men. After all, he remembered in perfect detail what had happened: the men and the beatings and the smell and the pain and the scorch of the ropes. He knew the terror he felt if he ventured too near the sentinel oak. But mostly, he thought as he reached up and patted his mother’s cheek, he remembered how much he was loved.

  Larry Dibble sauntered down the road, satisfied with himself. He had waited until the mail lady had misdelivered most of Hope’s mail before nailing her in the back of her SUV. She would not remember it, of course. He wasn’t that much of an asshole. He had ethics, even if the big shots didn’t think so. He knew the gal would have felt guilty over having sex with a tree cutter in the middle of the day, a man she’d just met, a compromised angel. So he’d pleasured her but stole the memory, leaving her to wake up alone amid U.S. mailboxes and third-class junk mail, parked behind an abandoned single-wide on Bread of Life Way, a vague sensation of happiness overtaking—for a few moments—her perpetual confusion.

  He headed down Mosquito Swamp Trail and thought he might stop by that snotty bitch’s house again. He was strangely drawn to the place and not because of the sick trees (he really was a tree cutter; it was a skill he’d picked up to kill the boredom of eternity) or that big fucker’s slew of naked babes (although what a delightful and unexpected perk, especially since the big boys had banished him to Nowheresville). As he nodded to a black guy who passed by on a blue bike (pity his mother wouldn’t make it to the next full moon), Larry Dibble considered the wonderful possibility that the powers-that-be had given up on him falling in line and, thus, stuck him in a place where he could do no harm. Ha!

  Up ahead, on the right, some fella was cracking open an egg on the road. “Hey there, mister. What are you doing?”

  Chet Lewis tossed the broken shell in the grass and pointed at the sizzling egg. “Hungry?”

  Larry Dibble laughed.

  “That there,” Chet Lewis said, “is proof of global warming. Yes siree. Damn, it’s hot.”

  Larry Dibble wiggled his nose. He hated the smell of fried eggs. It reminded him of burning flesh, and that was the one stench he could not abide. “You got some tree work for me?”

  Chet Lewis stood and smoothed his yellow-and-pink plaid shirt. “Maybe. You reasonable?”

  Larry Dibble bit down on a little clump of ants he’d tucked into his mouth after leaving the mail lady all spread-legged and satiated. Chet Lewis assumed it was chaw.

  “Oh, you have no idea.”

  “All right. I got stuff I gotta do today. Come back tomorrow. We’ll talk.”

  Larry Dibble gave him a sloppy salute. “You bet.” He walked across the road, toward the snotty bitch’s house, and thought that if he were in a good mood tomorrow, he’d do something about that man’s gout, which had been misdiagnosed as a pulled shoulder muscle. A little tree trimming, a little gout curing; that wouldn’t be a bad day’s work.

  He stepped up to the gate, spied a fine-looking automobile that had not been parked there that morning. And then he saw them, the three of them in the front seat, chattering away. It was the black guy he’d seen earlier who’d been out there by the swamp, wounding the tree with an old ax Larry Dibble wanted nothing to do with. But the boy? And the woman? Who the fuck were they? Why did the very sight of them make him want to rip this suit of skin right off his hollow bones? Something was wrong. He’d been tricked. Why the hell did he feel as if his wings were on fire? He hit the gate with his open hand. “Son of a bitch!”

  Larry Dibble ran down the road, flapped his burning wings, tried to take flight but couldn’t. The bastards had grounded him.

  Before Clarissa had steered the big yellow car-truck into her yard, before she heard the heavy door slam shut with a no-nonsense and deeply satisfying thud, before the three ghosts had slipped unnoticed into its passenger compartment, before Larry Dibble had run down the road with his wings on fire, Clarissa had journeyed homeward, ebullient about her new purchase and terrified regarding her husband’s reaction.

  When she pulled into the crossroads called Hope, the radio blaring squeeze-box-laced Tejano ballads courtesy of the Latin station Raul had tuned to, she checked old Mrs. Hickok’s thermometer. The mercury hovered a hair below 107 degrees. At that moment, above all the things she loved about the El Camino, Clarissa was grateful for its air-conditioning. Close behind was the fact that everything worked. The car had, in working order, all its knobs, mirrors, gadgets, gauges, blinkers, tires. Everything was big, solid, and the vehicle went really fast. How could her husband not be happy for her? How could he not be even slightly amused that his wife had brought home a big American muscle car? Surely his heart would ease toward her. She’d even taken on the job of trash hauler. What more could he ask?

  Still, her hands shook, her pulse tripped and raced, as she turned onto Mosquito Swamp. She had to get her story straight before facing him. And she had to be calm, because he could read her; if she let her nerves show, he’d go for the kill. Buying the El Camino was all about safety. That’s what she would tell him. The mail lady approached in her SUV that was belching smoke. She flagged Clarissa down.

  Clarissa flipped off the radio and lowered her window. See, more evidence that she’d done the right thing. She’d tell Iggy about the poor mail lady and her broken-down car and her all alone on a country road. He was surly, but not stupid. Of course he wanted her in a reliable vehicle. “Car problems?”

  “What do you mean?” The mail lady’s face was plastered with a ridiculous grin, and her brown hair was all undone.

  “Your car. It’s smoking.”

  “Oh, that!” She laughed hysterically. Her pupils were dilated. Clarissa wondered if she was on drugs. “It’s nothing. I just wanted to say hello.”

&nb
sp; The engine was about to blow up and she stopped to exchange pleasantries? Was she nuts? Clarissa felt a need to warn her about that Dibble fellow, but she really didn’t have anything solid on him. What was she going to say? “There’s something not right about that one-armed tree cutter.” She sure hoped the mail lady, whose husband had passed three years prior, to hear her tell it, wasn’t taking up with him.

  “You know”—the mail lady tossed her hair and fluttered her lashes; this was not the mail lady Clarissa knew—“I’ve been wanting to say something to you, and I just haven’t had the nerve.” An awful ping sounded in her engine.

  Clarissa noticed that the woman’s blouse was unfastened to just below her bra line. Her right breast cupped in pink lace was clearly visible.

  “I just wanted to say,” the mail lady started up again, tapping her gas in an attempt to keep her car idling, “I think you are the nicest lady, but that husband of yours is the rudest man I’ve ever dealt with. Why, he doesn’t even say hello.”

  Clarissa could not believe her ears. She was astounded by the mail lady’s unabashed gall. But her urge to take up for Iggy was trumped by the relief at having affirmation, no matter the source, that he was truly a jerk.

  “He’s South African,” she said. “They aren’t always the friendliest folks on earth.” Clarissa knew this was untrue, but it was all she could come up with in a pinch.

  “Mmmm,” the mail lady said, a polite, closemouthed grin revealing that she did not buy Clarissa’s explanation. “Well, gotta go before this old car blows up on me.” She blew Clarissa a kiss as if she were some country club debutante and drove away.

  Clarissa watched her turn onto Tremble and Shout in a cloud of noxious smoke and hoped the woman would make it home. Perhaps she has sons, Clarissa thought, pressing the accelerator, who know how to work on cars.

  Up ahead, in the vicinity of the fire tower, someone stood in the road, waving a red caution flag; from this distance it appeared to be a child. Perhaps there had been an accident. Perhaps Iggy had been drinking all afternoon with his little models and, bombed out of his mind on sickeningly sweet piña coladas, flipped his Civic just a few blocks from the house. Would he be sprawled on the pavement—bloody and dead—or would the Jaws of Life have to wrench his decapitated body from the wreckage? Would Clarissa, like the dutiful and devoted wife she was, be pressed once more into saving his life? What would she wear to the funeral? Something Jackie-O-ish.