Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  “Everyone can tell you like her,” Lisa told him as they walked home together. “Just some advice: Don’t be so all over her.”

  He knew Lisa didn’t say that to be cruel. He’d been eating her mom’s cookies, drinking their Capri Suns, and wondering about her beautiful friend for as long as he could remember. Lisa was both his buffer and his conduit to the popular kids; she looked out for him. Nevertheless, Dan protested: he wasn’t “all over” Hailey. They were just friends. They liked hanging out. But he knew that wasn’t true. Hailey didn’t like him that way, and now she had to put in her distance.

  That night he went home and read about “Mad” Anthony Wayne. The encounter took place in a portion of northern Ohio near present-day Toledo, an eerie slice of forest called The Wilderness. A recent storm had felled hundreds of trees, and Wayne’s army charged under, over, and through the timbers. The retreating Indians fell back to Fort Miamis, but the British spurned them (some might say “betrayed”) and they had to keep running. They had no choice but to sue for peace. The Wyandot, Delaware, Ottawa, Miami, Potawatomi, Chippewa, and all the other mighty tribes of the Ohio territory ceded nearly all their land in exchange for goods. Beginning with the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, war would become mostly bribery. Whites would always view their boundaries with the Indians as a temporary arrangement until the moment they needed more land. In this fashion, the borders of Ohio were born, but the battle would continue over the course of the coming century. All the way to the glory of the Pacific.

  * * *

  From the exit, he followed State Route 229 past the endless bisecting county roads, the small towns cluttered into plots of two-story buildings, gas stations, volunteer fire departments, Jean’s Ice Cream, Buddy’s Tavern, Gary’s Grocery, long spans of telephone wire, pickup trucks of every make and model carrying their loads. From the east, he passed the sweeping gloss of Jericho Lake with its ink-smudge homes on the other side. The sun drew down over the straggler clouds, vestiges of some long-dissipated low-pressure system now drifting lazily in a sea of dark cream. The rest of the drive was as familiar as finding his way through his childhood home in the dark, the way you know every corner, every doorway, how to angle your body around the dining room table.

  And then there was what had changed. Zanesville Road, once nothing but fields, had vanished under pavement and parking lot. Gas stations, pet stores, tanning salons, Pizza Hut, AutoZone, Ruby Tuesday, Staples, Dairy Queen, Discount Tire, and finally a new crop of prefab homes, each one a clone of some original vinyl-sided patient zero. This was the strip that scotched away New Canaan’s downtown, relocating all business, all jobs, to this stretch of off-the-rack strip mall, even as year by year the same gutted quality befell Zanesville Road.

  Turning down Rainrock, he passed the old bus stop, the Klines’ dark house, and pulled into his uneven slab of driveway beneath the basketball hoop, rusted and genuflecting over the concrete, where he and Hailey had waged countless H-O-R-S-E wars. He crawled from the stale odor of his car, stretched his limbs, felt them crackle. Dusk had settled to a purple velvet over the top of the nearby woods. His home sat almost completely unchanged: one story of white linoleum siding, rust-red shutters, and a basement level that grew out of the hill like a corn-fed rear end. The hoop looked worse than ever with pieces of the backboard chewed away, the rim bleeding rust all over the top of the net. The scars of Dan and his sisters could be seen on the scuffed and dented garage door, the quaint driveway lamp that had not one pane of glass left and the jagged root of a broken bulb still protruding from the socket.

  Of course their neighbor Mr. Clifton was in his yard, flapping a hose around his flower beds. When he saw Dan pull in, he hastily shut the water off and crossed the lawn to greet him.

  “Dan-Dan-Dan-Dan.” He pulled Dan into a bear hug. “Dan, you’re back.”

  “I’m back.” He couldn’t help but return a bashful grin at the enormity of Mr. Clifton’s smile.

  “Oh man, your parents didn’t tell me you were coming home.”

  “Sorta didn’t know myself until a few days ago.”

  “You look great!” Hearty slaps on the shoulder. Dan noticed Mr. Clifton studying his right eye. He was too polite to say anything awkward about how good it looked.

  The Cliftons had been their neighbors for Dan’s whole life. Their daughter, Kimberly, had been friends with the younger of his two sisters, Heather, and Dan’s occasional babysitter. The hair had retreated to a ring around Mr. Clifton’s skull with one kinky black patch struggling to hold territory on the crown. He’d shaved off his mustache. He’d never known him without it, and his lip looked bald. The wrinkles of his face seemed deeper, his smile still pure white in a pale brown face. Having Mr. Clifton for music class was almost like having one of his own parents. Dan got a C on a quiz once, and he wrote, Dan! I’m sorry! Study!

  “How’s Kim and J.D.?” he asked.

  Mr. Clifton gave Dan the short version of his kids’ various successes. “Feels like only yesterday your parents were paying Kim six dollars an hour because they thought Heather might push you off the roof. What about you, though? How’s work? How’s life?”

  He tried to wrap everything up as concisely as possible: Good job in a civil engineer’s office in Titusville. Basically glorified secretarial work, but still interesting enough. His boss was in charge of developing drilling projects across northern Pennsylvania, poking holes in the Marcellus Shale wherever feasible. Mostly Dan was in the office, but sometimes he followed him to job sites. He was learning a lot about drilling rigs and other gas infrastructure.

  “Never thought it’s where I’d wind up, and—you know—I still have thoughts about going back to school, but that won’t pay the bills, and this does. Never thought I’d know so much about feasibility analysis, site layout, gas pipeline routing, grading, drainage, storm water management . . .”

  “So you like it?” Like a salute, he put a hand above his eyes to block the setting sun.

  “I do. Plus it gives me time to read. At this point, my apartment’s just a bed and books stacked to the ceiling, you know?”

  With a shudder and a rattle, the screen door of the house thwacked open, the storm door closing mechanism no match for the arm that threw it wide.

  “Kid! Get away from that man. What’d I tell you about stranger danger.”

  Mr. Clifton guffawed, and Dan went to hug his father.

  When his dad hugged his sisters he held them by the shoulders first, looked them in the eye as if deciding about how they turned out, and then wrapped them up like he wanted to kill their husbands for taking them away. With Dan, he always took his hand in a crushing shake. Then the other arm looped around the back for three hard slaps. Each pat vibrated his lungs.

  “Cam!” Dan’s father called. “The worst of the kids is home!”

  As his dad shook hands with Mr. Clifton, because he literally could not converse with another man without a firm handshake first (even if it was a neighbor and friend of nearly thirty years), Dan could hear his mom racing out of the house, throwing the storm door almost as hard.

  “You little stinker, come here.” A fierce hug and about twenty face-peppering kisses later (“My little man, my little man!”), she pulled away. “You come home and go see Clift first? Before the woman who pushed your damn watermelon head out?”

  “Cam, get off the kid. You’re giving him an O-dee-pol complex.”

  The older Dad got, the more he looked like himself, handsome somehow, improbably, despite pits of old acne scars and a rough Scots-Irish face leathering further and further. He needed to put more sunscreen on his scalp where the white fuzz had thinned down to the sunspots. Maybe his gut had swelled, but there hadn’t exactly been a washboard there in living memory. His gold tooth, tucked in place of an incisor he claimed to have lost in a bar fight in Saigon, threw a dull shine over an otherwise browning row of teeth.

  Mom had colored her hair a lighter, summer shade, and her aging
was still a graceful retreat. In school, all his friends had given Dan never-ending hell about how hot his mom was. Above her blue top was an expanse of pink skin and one hard mole. They must have been up to see Heather in Cleveland. Mom loved to get sunburned on Lake Erie. She held his cheek, studied him, tears pushing at her eyes, and Dan felt guilty about not coming home more often.

  Arms crossed, Mr. Clifton beamed at them. “How long are you planning to stay?”

  “Just a couple days.”

  “Unless I kidnap him,” said Mom.

  “Here’s the thing you gotta understand about Daniel,” said Dad, putting a finger in the air. “And I tell this to Cam all the time: the point of having kids is to get them the fuck outta your house. Now I hear all these stories about kids coming back home to live with their parents. Back in my day, that’s called panhandling. Bums do it.”

  Again, Mr. Clifton cracked up. There was a little kid element to the two of them, Dad always trying to get his friend to shoot milk out of his nose at the lunch table. Mom had once told Dan and his sisters, “Your dad gets his jollies pretending to be the toughest mother-effer in the world, but that’s all it is: pretend.”

  Dad was a door gunner on a helicopter in Vietnam. He came home and married a girl fifteen years his junior (she was sixteen when they started dating). He’d always been a bit of a schizophrenic character, which Mom attributed to his inability to make up his mind politically. He still swore that the U.S. could’ve beaten back the Viet Cong and won that war had it not been for the media and the flower children. According to Mom, Dad voted Nixon in ’72, skipped ’76, went hard-core for Reagan in both of his races, then voted Dukakis over Bush in ’88. He then proceeded to vote twice for Bill Clinton and twice for George W. Bush. He maintained that Clinton was “the greatest president of my lifetime” and was furious when Obama kept Hillary from the White House, casting outraged votes for McCain and then “Pattycake” (which was his inexplicable nickname for Mitt Romney). First and foremost he was an old-school union guy. Retired now, for Dan’s entire childhood he commuted up to Ohio Metal Working Products in Canton. His truck was still wallpapered with bumper stickers for the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers.

  Dan spent his childhood wishing to be his father’s son but by disposition channeled his mother: bookish, too nice for his own good, hearing from the other St. Vincent de Paul parishioners how sweet he was. It didn’t seem possible he could ever be his father—a man who regaled even his daughters with stories of how he once fought a guy with a chain and a trash can lid in an alley (Mom called these his “tall Paul tales”). It took him a long time to understand what Mom meant about Dad being pretend. He was too young to see it when Mr. Clifton’s wife, Rosa, passed away from cancer. To a young boy, the wonderful woman next door who stuffs you full of baked goods and comments on how handsome you’re becoming every time she sees you is an invincible figure. Dan was very young, and she went very fast. He vaguely recalled the duality that fell over their little corner of Rainrock Road: utter sorrow and utter rally. Mom and Rosa had been young mothers together, and he remembered her trying to explain the death of her friend at the dining room table. Dan, Betty, and Heather sat there while Mom’s pretty face crumpled—the first time he ever saw her cry.

  “Do you get what’s happening?” Heather asked him afterward.

  “Course,” he sputtered, but he thought maybe he didn’t.

  At the wake, he spent most of his time with Kimberly and J.D.’s younger cousins, all of them chasing one another in backyard tag, not understanding that dividing their teams based on skin color was inappropriate until J.D. came out and integrated them. When he went inside, Mr. Clifton was telling a story about Rosa and had everyone laughing through their Kleenex. Dan asked his mom if Dad was pretending not to be sad. She said that, no, he was sad: “He just has a durable heart.” And he saw how Dad took care of almost everything: coordinated with the caterers, the funeral home, directed family from Cincinnati who weren’t familiar with the screwy rural roads. He helped set up and tear down, cleaned the whole house afterward, and was at Mr. Clifton’s, Kim’s, or J.D.’s side every spare moment. Later that week, Dan watched from his bedroom window—Dad and Mr. Clifton sitting on the porch, passing what he thought at the time was a cigarette. Dad put his arm around Mr. Clifton’s shoulder, and he could see his babysitter’s father shaking. They ate many dinners with the Clifton family that year. Dad cracked jokes, and Mr. Clifton could still laugh like life had never cheated him.

  Night edged over the heat of the day. The sweat clinging to the small of his back finally began to evaporate. Mom returned from the house with beers. She carried them out, two in each hand. Rolling Rocks, of course.

  They stood in the driveway by the hoop, sipping from the emerald glass.

  “You keep missing the ruckus, Dan. DEA raided that little shitbox motel by the square,” said Mom.

  “The Cactus Motel,” Mr. Clifton offered.

  “Folks running heroin out of it! Unbelievable.” Dad slugged back the Rolling Rock. He used to only drink Budweiser until those commercials with the frogs came out. He’d said, “Welp. Can’t drink moron beer,” finished the rest of his Budweiser that night and, as far as Dan knew, had yet to touch another.

  “I’ll tell you, they need to clean that shit up. The last two years the DEA’s been up here ’bout five times,” he said.

  “Meth,” Mom said knowingly. “That’s the one that makes getting your coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts suspect.”

  “The skin and dental issues alone,” said Mr. Clifton.

  The three of them went on like that for a while as the first fireflies arrived from whatever netherworld they inhabited while the sun was up. In the year since he’d been out of the army, Dan had learned to stand by and let others do the talking, but with these three it was actually enjoyable. When you come back from deployment and you hear people blathering about stuff that doesn’t quite have the life-and-death immediacy of running your fingers around your friend’s body to check for unseen blood, you drift off quickly. You learn to turn the volume down on people’s frequencies. He’d had a friend, Everton Cleary, who’d blown out both eardrums. Occasionally, Dan wished that had been his Purple Heart instead of the eye.

  “Clift, come for dinner?” Mom asked, brightening. “We’re doing pot roast.”

  “Already ate, Camille, I’m sorry.”

  Dad rolled his eyes. “Well then just come and drink my fucking beer—Jesus Christ.”

  Mr. Clifton looked at Dan. “I get the dinner invite near every night.”

  “Yeah, but Danny’s home,” Mom whined. “We need to catch up.”

  “And hear if he’s getting his knob polished by anyone special,” said Dad. Mom slapped his gut. He chortled.

  “That’s disgusting, and I do not want to hear about that.” She winked at Dan. “Unless she’s smart and pretty and I’d want her to give me grandbabies to smell.”

  He couldn’t help but laugh. He was always surprised he didn’t grow up to be funnier—maybe the gene skips the youngest.

  “I can only eat a little something,” he said. “First off, I’m picking up Hailey after work and we’re getting dinner. Then for seconds—and I keep telling you guys this—I’m a vegetarian.”

  Dad reeled. “Jesus have mercy, what did I do wrong.”

  “No pot roast?” said Mom.

  “What about brawts? They got those little flecks of peppers and jalapenos in ’em.”

  “Not sure you understand what vegetarian means, Dad.”

  “I’ll give you some money. You can run to the market and pick something up.” Before he could object, Mom ran inside and returned with a twenty from her purse. He continued to protest that this wasn’t necessary, but he was preaching to nonbelievers. Ruth’s Market was a small operation, but it was walking distance. As he set off down the street, Mom called him back.

  “Wait wait wait! Just one more hug.” She held him even tighter and longer this time. “My little m
an. Good to have you home.” And over her shoulder he rolled his eye and the matching prosthetic for the men’s benefit. Dad rolled his back at him. Mr. Clifton beamed. “It’s good you’re seeing Hailey,” she said.

  When he rounded the driveway he took a final glance over his shoulder and saw Mr. Clifton following his parents inside, hands tucked in his pockets. Mom and Dad slipped into the house, bantering. Mr. Clifton stopped to stare at the glowing blue evening, the smile on his face like the lonesome North Star.

  * * *

  Dan watched the last streaks of ashen light winnow away to the west. Walking down Rainrock, he passed Lisa Han’s house again. Everyone else on the block had a paved driveway except the Klines. The delta of gravel still spilled into the road. It had been that way since he and Lisa were at Elmwood, and they’d skid out on their bikes.

  The house sat at the end of the street, forlorn, the lawn browning, a testament to how the world never works out the way you think it will, let alone the way you want it to. He and Lisa exchanged a few e-mails in which she excitedly described her travel plans, and then she stopped responding. She had been his best friend for a time, like him a compulsive reader, and simply an easier companion than the guys who made up the punishing social web of adolescent boyhood. She left books she thought he’d like in their mailbox. Even though she was bound for higher social strata, bound to date the star basketball player, Lisa never dropped him. She made it her mission to yoke Dan into the network of New Canaan’s popular kids. Even when Lisa and Hailey had their falling out, her loyalty never faltered. She also never made him feel bad when he forgave Hailey for Curtis Moretti.

  He turned up the side of SR 229, heading past the woods where he and Lisa used to climb trees and come home with poison ivy. His tennis shoes felt too soft, each piece of gravel transmitting through the sole. He missed his rough-cut, full-grain tan leather boots, army-issued, where you could step on a piece of razor-sharp rebar without feeling it.