Now, driving through a dark Ohio night, remembering the collective moan of those cows, she thought of what she might say to Lisa. If she just bought a plane ticket. If she showed up at her door. Not with expectations but just to say thank you for what Lisa had given her. The girl who’d taught her to swear, to drink, to use a condom, to read weird, wild books, to explore this one irreducible, unquantifiable life. Without whom she never would have left home, never climbed down to the crater lake of Quilotoa, never tasted criolla in Argentina with a group of Israeli backpackers, never stayed up all night on the streets of Vilnius with a gorgeous artist who painted only sex zombies, never explored a foreign capital with a woman who could explain to her its opera house and what carbonic acid does to the ocean’s calcifying organisms, never thought to try to scrape her nails against the ceiling of her imagination and then claw past it.
Turning on to Stillwater, a shortcut to Highway 36 which would eventually lead her back to the interstate, she reached over and turned off her phone. She would wait until morning to write back to Lisa because the anxiety that had taken hold reminded her of that moment on the scarred edge of the Amazon, watching as that noxious cloud of dirt and shit and sun engulfed the world.
Coming over a hill, she was met with the harsh glare of headlights and slowed. The vehicle was still, pulled off to the side of the road so that its high beams angled right into her eyes, and this wrenched her from her brooding dream. As she applied her foot to the brake, she saw a figure standing beside this stranded car, arms above the head, waving, flagging her down. Her own headlights cut a hole in the dark, uncovering the pale ghost outline of a woman’s face. There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead above a look of dismay, of dread. Stacey hesitated, but her hands took the wheel, almost without her consent, and guided the Jeep to the left so that it brought her vehicle nose to nose with the small blue sedan. Now Stacey could see a dark smudge on the woman’s jaw that looked like a bruise or soil or soot. For the last time that night, the unnerving sense of a fated encounter descended upon Stacey Moore. Because she recognized the car. She recognized the woman. And she recognized the fear of stepping into a scene, a situation, a moment that in your heart you know is somehow utterly wrong.
DAN EATON AND THE MURDER THAT NEVER WAS
ON THE DRIVE BACK HOME to see Hailey Kowalczyk, the girl to whom Dan Eaton lost his virginity, probably his heart, and certainly countless games of driveway H-O-R-S-E, he got to thinking about Elias Wiman. Wiman was a nicotine/caffeine-addicted private who existed on a diet of dip, cigarettes, Red Bull, and Snickers, an emaciated, feral Kentuckian, who had a real chip on his shoulder about Ohioans, who he saw as effete snobs sticking their noses up at the real salt-of-the-earth south of the river. Despite this, he and Wiman became friends and had long, uninteresting arguments about what made their respective states superior. Take the night the two of them stayed up with Greg Coyle while Coyle waited to find out from his wife via Gchat if they were going to have a boy or a girl.
“You call your towns ‘hollers,’ ” Dan objected. “I mean what is that? Russellville? That place was more scarring than anything we’ll see at war.” They’d had Kentucky immersion while living at Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne. Wiman was from Russellville, an hour east. One visit was plenty for Dan.
“A holler,” said Wiman, “means like ‘down the road a ways.’ It’s a term of affection, you fucking snotty-ass bitch.”
“I’m sorry but I got Eaton’s back on this. Kentuckians all have sheep DNA.” Coyle was playing with his knife, leaning back in a cheap desk chair to the point of spill. He’d thunk the blade into the plywood, twist, withdraw. Thunk, twist, withdraw. “You know why they can’t teach driver’s ed and sex ed on the same day in Kentucky?” Coyle asked. “ ’Cuz that poor fucking horse gets too tired.”
This was in Hawija just as Iraq was spiraling into what some people called civil war. They’d agreed to stay up with Coyle because who could sleep anyway? After they lit up a bunch of insurgents that afternoon in a spectacular, invigorating firefight, the adrenaline was still there hours later. Dan half read a copy of Theodore Rex, trying to calm the thunder out of his blood while they waited for Greg’s news.
“Can’t wait till you got a hot little daughter. It’ll serve you right,” Wiman told Coyle. The new pastime was giving Coyle grief about a potential daughter. One of Dan’s best friends since he’d gotten his platoon assignment, Coyle was a butt-chinned, all-American blond, California tan, muscled, and as breezy a guy as he’d ever known. He was also a total cad until he married a woman he’d been dating for only three months right before they deployed.
“I’ve just fucked so much nasty pussy in my life, it would be God’s worst kind of justice if Melody’s having a girl,” he explained.
Without looking up from his book Dan told him, “I’m not sure that’s how God operates.”
“That is how God operates,” said Wiman. His accent dripped. He wasn’t so much playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City as he was gunning down civilians and shooting rockets at the police vehicles that then pursued him. “Doling out justice, vengeance, retribution to pretty boys.”
“Christ, where is she?” grumbled Coyle. He set the knife down, ran a hand over his buzz. He picked the knife back up, stabbed it into the plywood. Two weeks before he met Melody at the Cat West bar, Coyle claimed to have slept with a Tennessee Titans cheerleader. Dan tended to believe him because months after he fell in love with Melody, this cheerleader was still sending him graphic, close-up pictures of her vagina.
“Get. Some. Sleep.” Sergeant Wunderlich emerged from the kitchen area with a spoonful of cereal crunching between his jaws, his T-shirt tucked into his sweatpants.
“Can’t, Sergeant,” Dan said. “We’ve got to find out if God will punish Greg for his loose ways.”
“You ever stop reading, Eaton?” Wunderlich took Theodore Rex from Dan’s hands to examine the cover. “Wasn’t this a Whoopi Goldberg movie with a tee-ranasaurus?”
“Sergeant, I been meaning to tell you—and no offense,” said Wiman. “But if you make us be in another video for your wife, I’m filing, like, a sexual harassment complaint.”
Earlier that week during some downtime, Wunderlich had cajoled nearly a dozen guys from their undermanned platoon to be in the music video he was sending to his wife. This was like a thing in the war: soldiers choreographing and lip-synching. To our horror, Dan wrote to Hailey, the song was Alanis Morissette “Hand in My Pocket.” Part of the dance actually involved putting one hand in the pocket of their ACUs while giving a peace sign with the other, hips swishing.
“That’s what you fucking kids don’t understand about love,” said Wunderlich.
“You’re like ten months older than me,” said Coyle.
“You go trudging off to war every couple of years, puts stress on your marriage. You gotta find ways to be inventive, be surprising, so your wife don’t suck off the mailman.”
“Please, Sergeant. Your wife ain’t got shit to do with it. You chose that song for you,” said Wiman.
“ ‘Hand in My Pocket’s’ a fucking jam, Private.” He slurped milk from the bowl, lapped the stubble that seemed to grow right onto his lip flesh, and shook his head defiantly. “I have no shame.”
Greg coughed, “Understatement.”
Sergeant Wunderlich was an interesting dude. Lumberjack strong, he looked like a total badass, had civilian pictures of himself with a beard like roadkill strapped to his chin, had the tattoo of a skull on each shoulder (one with a knife jutting from the eye socket and the other with a rose clamped in its teeth). Yet he listened to music like a teenage lesbian. He had CDs from Lilith Fair. No one in the entire battalion could have told you what Lilith Fair was until meeting Wunderlich.
Wiman whistled air through his sandstone teeth. “Again, I don’t mean to be combative, Sergeant. Just mean to point out that love be like some highly dubious bullshit Hollywood made up to sell us movies and diamond rings and shampo
o and boner pills.”
“Wow, what a fine philosophical rumination from a nineteen-year-old who smokes cigarettes while he’s dipping,” said the sergeant.
Dan laughed as Wunderlich returned his book. Seeing that this conversation was not ebbing, he marked his place with the photograph he used as a bookmark: him and Hailey in seventh grade.
“What it all boils down to, Private, is that no one’s really got it figured out just yet.” And for some reason, Wunderlich made a little lasso motion over his head and pretended to rope in Elias Wiman. Somewhere a few klicks away, a mortar exploded. No one even moved.
Coyle’s wife never messaged him that night. After patrol the next day he learned about his daughter in an e-mail. Two weeks later, Wiman would be killed in a traffic accident. His driver saw a dead dog in the middle of Route Omaha and decided to go a different way. They’d all heard of insurgents hiding the bang in those rotting carcasses that flecked the Iraqi roads like spittle, but in this case, the driver ended up flipping their Humvee off an embankment.
If Dan let his mind idle for any amount of time, even mid-conversation, he’d see them again. Coyle. Wunderlich. Wiman. Rudy doing a pencil sketch of the small sliver of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush that made up their whole horizon. When they pulled Elias Wiman out, there was no solidity left to his pulverized bones. He flopped onto the stretcher like a sack of sawdust.
Dan tried letting Wiman lay as he drove over the dips and rises of the Allegheny hills. Finally the oblate plane of Northeast Ohio came into repose. Down through the Mahoning Valley and a tinderbox summer, he passed his father’s hometown, the city shimmering in the hazy sun as if it might vanish. Once over the hump of Youngstown, it was nothing but the rippling green spears of cornstalks, the trembling soy leaves awaiting the sweatless industrial harvest. The mile markers fell and the telephone poles bled tar. The sky went from a deep orange to a bruise of purple and blue, the clouds carved by shafts of biblical sunlight—here lighting a patch of cud-stuffed cows, there illuminating a fallen barn with Ohio’s bicentennial logo flaking paint.
He avoided driving long distances as often as possible. His peripheral vision compromised and still, a year after the enucleation, having to focus extremely hard when judging depth, heavy highway traffic made Dan uncomfortable. And yet this excuse for why he so rarely went home sounded thin even to him. Now he had to at least cop to the beauty of it. The sky over the place you were born has a familiarity beyond how the clouds roll in or how the stars wink at you at night. The sky over your home behaves like that moment when, as a parachutist, you pull the rip cord and the heavens snatch you back. Even if you’ve traveled the world and seen better sunsets, better dawns, better storms—when you get that remembered glimpse of the fields and forests and rises and rivers of your home meeting the horizon, your jaw will tighten. The rip cord will yank you back from the descent.
The radio shuffled between talk and song and ad. To avoid thinking of Wiman and the others, he instead termited the details of his seventh-grade Ohio history class with Mrs. Bingham—this being where he first got to know Hailey. Seventh-grade boys have an insolent, smarm-soaked attitude about everything, but they all shut up for Bingham, the oldest teacher in the middle school. She had the physique of a snowman, capped with hair just as white, as grandma as it comes. She was utterly shameless in using Ohio’s savage frontier history to hold their attention.
The first day she didn’t even take roll. She just launched into a story of a Shawnee council of women called the Miseekwaaweekwakee, who, when they captured prisoners, might touch a certain white man, “To reserve him.” The Miseekwaaweekwakee women would strip the prisoner naked and bind him to a pyre.
“And they’d roast him alive and cannibalize him,” said Mrs. Bingham. She had a mellifluous voice, almost singsong in its lilt. Later she told them how women of her day had gone to elocution school, and her voice was particular in the way of that word: el-o-cue-shun.
Dan felt that hot panic of enjoying that class, of loving its lucid, gory stories yet wanting to remain totally anonymous and unremarkable to his peers. He was always conscious of Hailey, a simmering presence to his right, embedded in his awareness like a pleasant splinter. He hadn’t known her at Elmwood because she’d been in a different class, with his buddy Lisa Han. Now sitting near her once a day every day, well, he chewed pencils into gnawed, pocked kindling.
“You should take it easy,” was the first thing Hailey ever said to him. “You’ll give yourself lead poisoning.” He spent days puzzling out if this was disgust, teasing, or an overture. Assessing himself in the bathroom mirror, he decided—despite his hatred of touching his own eyeballs—to begin wearing contacts as often as he could stand.
Mrs. Bingham assigned them each a character from Ohio history that they had to live with for the whole year, leading to a grade-defining presentation. It had the aura of being the popular class, and it was where a short, shy kid, who couldn’t help but raise his hand, learned to fit in. Dan got a reputation for knowing everything about history even though he was just reading the textbook like everyone else. He found it a page-turner. Because of this reputation, Hailey asked for his help with her historical figure; to Dan, it felt like some combination of winning the lottery and being punched in the gut. Tina Ross was widely regarded by the boys as the hottest girl in their class, but his crush on Hailey was a brushfire gone wild. On the bus she usually sat in the very last seat in the back with Lisa and Kaylyn Lynn where they hunched into one another and shared whatever peculiar secrets girls always traded. He lived for the days he ended up across from her so he could hoard stolen glances. When Hailey asked him for help on her presentation, he ended up reading every book with even the scantest mention of Simon Girty, this gritty, larger-than-life product of the Ohio frontier. His mom was driving him to the New Canaan Public Library every other day.
What began with her coming over after school so he could feed her details from his Simon Girty reading continued even after her presentation. They’d shoot baskets at the hoop above his garage or watch Total Request Live and root for their preferred videos to top the list (Hailey had a passion for Korn’s “Freak on a Leash”). They’d sit at opposite armrests, as far as his living room couch would allow, but he could still feel her like a source of heat. One time his mom came in and snapped a picture of them (“I’ve got to finish out this roll—smile, guys!”), and that picture explained everything about the distance of memory. He remembered thinking Hailey extremely chic, hip, always dressed like a tomboy model, usually in her favorite Sheryl Swoopes USA jersey. But in that photo, she was just a dorky seventh grader with a ponytail, red-faced, a missing baby tooth in her embarrassed smile, jeans, and a black tank top a size too big. Gripping the armrest like he’s afraid of this girl was a pale, scrawny kid with his dad’s ginger hair, freckles like a bomb of cinnamon went off on his nose, and a big zit on his lip. Before he deployed, Dan took that photo from his desk and stuck it in the book he was reading at the time.
One day Hailey found his Calvin and Hobbes comic books, and he kicked himself for leaving them out. He still felt so much like a little kid, clinging to all the things he loved about childhood, while his peers, especially Kruger, Jarecki, and Hansen, were growing facial and armpit hair, stretching ever taller, their voices dropping through the basement. When Hailey picked up the comic, he wanted to snatch it out of her hands and run.
“I’ve heard of this,” she said. “Is it funny?”
His shrug took his shoulders nearly to the top of his head. “No, not really. I mean, I got them for Christmas a while back.”
“Can I borrow one?”
She did, and she ended up borrowing them all. They’d sit on the bus and pore over their favorite strips, cackling at Calvin’s limitless imagination and capacity for trouble. In Hailey’s favorite, Calvin was hammering nails into the coffee table when his mom comes running in screaming, “Calvin! What are you doing to the coffee table?!?” He quizzically looks at his work and asks, �
�Is this some sort of trick question, or what?”
Dan could still see Hailey, knees propped on the back of the bus seat, clutching her gut, her plump cheeks pink with laughter.
“You’re totally Calvin,” she said.
“How do you figure? I never get into trouble ever.”
“Not like that. I mean, you’re like wise beyond your years or something.”
And he had the very not-wise-beyond-his-years reaction of: I think I’ll probably marry Hailey when I grow up.
His own character in Mrs. Bingham’s Ohio history class was General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, the man President Washington tasked with avenging a debacle, in which the U.S. Army lost 623 soldiers trying to capture Ohio from the Indian tribes. It was the worst loss the United States would suffer against any Indian force in its history and also a worse loss of life than any battle during the entire Revolutionary War, which he always thought said a lot about how nations go about remembering themselves. Wayne led an army of 3,500 back into Ohio.
“Little Turtle was the only war chief who saw the writing on the wall,” Mrs. Bingham told them on the day she recounted the Battle of Fallen Timbers. She picked up a book from her desk. She took her eyeglasses, which hung from a beaded strap around her neck, and rather than hooking them around her ears, held them in front of the page the way you would a magnifying glass. “Little Turtle told the other war chiefs, ‘The trail has been long and bloody; it has no end. The pale faces come from where the sun rises, and they are many. They are like the leaves of the trees. When the frost comes they fall and are blown away. But when the sunshine comes again they come back more plentiful than ever before.’ ” She snapped the book shut and let the eyeglasses dangle.
He tried to make a goofy face at Hailey, but she didn’t return it. She hadn’t come to his house that week or sat by him on the bus. A few days later, he saw pen-knifed into the rubbery green plastic of the bus seat in front of him DE + HK inside an angular heart. Scratched there by some enterprising wit.
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