Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  “She’s been a mess lately. Like more of a mess than ever before. I took her to a rehab clinic in Columbus a while back, but who knows if that’ll take. It’s not all I’ve done for her.”

  “Okay. So she didn’t keep the baby?” he guessed. Thinking Hailey’s big secret was that she’d driven Kaylyn to an abortion clinic. Hailey looked at him like he was an imbecile.

  “Everyone keeps it here. How do you think half our friends got to the world?” She pulled the nail all the way off and looked for another one. He could still feel her body on him, all the flab she’d added, from stress, pregnancy, age. It didn’t make her any less attractive, but more human, more herself. “Kay just keeps getting into trouble, just stupid, terrible trouble. So she cut deals with Amos Flood and Kirk Strothers and all those redneck nuts they hang out with.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, Fallen Farms. We called them the Flood brothers in high school.”

  “Right, okay.” He stammered, tried again. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  She looked at him, annoyed. I’m getting there. “She was buying them guns and other things their parole officers wouldn’t be happy about. I told her she was going to end up in prison over it, but they paid her. She’s never thought five minutes ahead.” She used a forearm to swipe at her cheeks, hot and bright with sex and pain. “She’s just always been my friend, and I’ve always done things for her or because of her. She’s always had this power over me, and I know you don’t want to hear this, but that’s part of the reason I ended up going out with Curtis and doing everything I did with him . . .”

  Dan shook his head. “You’re right, I don’t want to hear this.”

  “But you should.” She swallowed. “I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to . . . to do what I did when I did. And so Kaylyn did her part. At this party, she got me drunker than I’d ever been in my life and took me to the bathroom with him . . . I barely even remember it.”

  He had the urge to clamp a hand over her mouth or dig up Curtis Moretti’s bones and use a hammer to smash them to dust.

  “And I didn’t blame her,” Hailey went on. “Never occurred to me to blame her. I always did what she wanted. You think you had it bad? Girls, man—teenage girls can be so . . . fucked up. It’s like they suddenly understand that boys think they’re hot, and they just go insane with power. Kay used to call herself my older sister, and I believed her even though she was just a user. A manipulator. She was this agent of chaos I could never get away from. And still can’t.”

  “Why?” A bitter tear crept into his eye, and he blinked it away. “Why would you tell me this now? And you want to blame Kaylyn for—”

  He shut his mouth. With the anger, with the frustration, came a dark adrenaline.

  “It was more than that. Kaylyn—I felt responsible for her.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Before her parents lost their house and moved off Rainrock, there was . . . She got attacked. When she was eight and I was seven, she got attacked by her cousin. Her sixteen-year-old cousin.”

  “Attacked how?”

  “How do you think.”

  He chewed on the inside of his cheek, scraped away the flesh with little pinches of his incisors. Through the trees in the distant hills, homes glittered, practically as tiny and gone as the stars. He could hear the mournful low of a far-away cow. He dreamt of walking through the woods to that farm and then he could just keep walking. Over the fields and barbed wire fencing, over the county highways and the old bridges and creeks. Just keep walking until he didn’t remember or care about anything.

  “I didn’t understand what happened exactly, but I was the first person who went to see her after. My parents told me something really bad had happened to her, and it would cheer her up if I would be with her. And I remember so vividly . . .” She paused, eyes shimmering again. “I remember she asked for my Barbie’s dress. This sequined dress for my Barbie that she’d always really liked. She asked me for it while we were playing, and I gave it to her. And she kept it. And it didn’t seem like anything bad had happened to her at all. I remember thinking, she seems fine. She seems fine, and maybe she made the whole story up to get my Barbie’s dress. But obviously I got older, and I understood it better and . . . It made me love her. And it made me afraid of her.” She laughed happily. “And then one day, she really did go too far. And she got a person hurt.”

  She wiped her nose where the tears had collected. Dan waited, but she seemed incapable of saying more. For no reason, he suddenly felt like turning his head and checking the woods around them. His eyes had adjusted to the dark, yet the shadows seemed to have expanded.

  “There were rumors about this videotape of Tina. Tina Ross. You remember that?”

  He shook his head. He’d heard rumors of Tina—most of the school had. But never anything about a videotape.

  “Doesn’t matter. Only point is that Todd Beaufort really didn’t want people to get ahold of this tape. And Kaylyn, she came strolling back into town after she dropped out of college and decides—I don’t know what she decides. She decides life’s not interesting enough, I guess. So she told Todd that she knows someone who’s got a copy of this tape. She told him they were going to use it to ruin him.”

  “I don’t get it. What does she care about Todd?”

  “Her and Todd.” She laughed again, the sound so high and bright. “They’re old, old fuck buddies. She was his first in middle school.”

  Dan thought of the rumor he and the guys had argued over in the bar that night. He recalled the hoary, threadbare quality of Todd Beaufort’s face, its coat of fleshy skin.

  “Was it going on while she was with Rick?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. All I do know is that Todd did something that she didn’t expect. Or she claims she didn’t expect it. I’m not sure what she wanted to happen or thought would happen. One night she comes to me and tells me . . .” Hailey was quiet for a beat. She sucked back her tears, and what she said next was as hard as winter stone. “She claimed she found out who had a copy of this tape, and she told Todd, and Todd stabbed some poor kid to death over it. And I believe her. She was there, and she said she tried to stop him, but she couldn’t. And then she helped him. She helped him get away with it.”

  The moment was like a tumor, surgically cut out of time. If, while one day helping Rudy to the bathroom, he hopped up and started tap dancing, Dan couldn’t have been more shocked. If Wiman or Wunderlich or Coyle showed up at his door in their dress blues with their eyes rotted out and grimly told him, Psych. Gotcha good, Eaton, his skin couldn’t have crawled colder.

  “Hailey.” He took a breath of the fecund soil-sweet air. “Are you joking with me right now?”

  She hocked snot back into her throat. Her head vibrated from side to side in a trembling affirmation that no, she was not joking.

  “I never told anyone. I know I should have, but I couldn’t. I’ve never said anything. By the time she told me . . .”

  “Who?” he whispered. The river, in motion, the color and texture of hardened lava.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Just . . . Someone who got a copy somehow. Kaylyn swore she didn’t know what he would do.”

  He felt like he’d stumbled into a blizzard. And when he found the words again, it was like the wind had blown them back in his face.

  “You need to tell this to someone. You need to tell this to . . . I don’t know, Rick’s dad.”

  “No, I don’t.” Her breath quivered. “And not just because it might make me an accessory after the fact or something like that. But it’s settled now, Danny. No one knows any better. And if it came out . . . Everyone’s better off if this—if this stays buried.”

  “Tell yourself that,” he said. “But I can’t.”

  “Yeah, you can.”

  “How do you know?”

  She smiled like she’d smiled at him not long after he heard she’d hooked up with Curt Moretti. Like he was some stupid little k
id who would never know better. She put a hand on his cheek.

  “Because you still love me.”

  The wind picked up. Rumors, it turned out, were purposefully indistinct, shifting, shimmering. Maybe they were more about erasure than they were about revelation. Muddying a great sin so that no one knew what to believe.

  “See? You lovely, beautiful, crazy boy, you see, right? It’s not just you who’s had to live with shame and pain and disappointment and the certainty—and I mean the fucking absolute certainty—that you’re going to wake up one day in Hell.”

  She lowered her head to his chest, and more by instinct than by cognition, his arm wrapped around her shoulder. How could Eric and Emma go their whole lives without sensing this in her? For that matter, how had he? Yet carrying a secret like this, Dan understood, was like having something alien siphoned into the blood. One learns to live with it in the pulse. Compared to what he’d done, whatever meager bit of violence she’d accomplished felt less than meaningless. She knew he wouldn’t tell because he knew what it was to carry a piece of fixed doom. She knew he’d walk until the earth burnt away for the last moment of her escaping smile. The history had already been written. What is history but an adjudication of memory. And what is memory but a faithless rendering of all sex, death, justice, murder, prayer, greed, hope, mercy, and love. Memory was as molten as the soul.

  Better to let it all lie; let it continue Never Was-ing. Sitting there in the night with his arm around her, smelling the coconut in her shampoo, he retreated to thinking of the angel looking backward upon the ruins. Rudy had once said that killing people was funny. Not because murdering another human was funny, he assured Dan. No, killing was an act of bottomless cruelty. “What’s hilarious is how people are killed over such dick-trifling matters,” he cracked. “And then we go and call that civilization.”

  After Dan woke up in the hospital at Bagram with his right eye gone, the first thing he managed to read was an essay. Someone had brought his personal items, including his Kindle. He couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t eat, and he didn’t want to talk to anyone because every time his doctor came by, the man insisted on repeating, like an incantation, that none of what happened was Dan’s fault. Dan wanted to say to him, Imagine. Imagine it had been your call to take Highway 1, the Kabul–Kandahar Highway, the ISAF money hole in the south of the country, which you knew had been nothing but a graveyard for American soldiers. So you thunder over brown countryside, past the village of Najuy, and you don’t even recall the sound of the EFP going off. One second you’re casting about for the enemy, checking the second Humvee in your rearview, the next your vision is dark, your ears are bleeding, and the world has gone airborne. The explosion turns the vehicle in incomprehensible spatial directions, and it feels like you’re in a Black Hawk falling out of the sky. You come to trapped inside this burning box, and you hear screaming all around. You feel absolutely no pain—only heat, and that sensation of time slowing, each second stretched to a dazed minute. Your door is lying against the asphalt of the highway. The screaming’s coming from behind you, and you understand that your vehicle is on fire. You can see a bit of sky the color of cool milk. You struggle out of your harness but people are in the way. Everyone’s in the way and it’s getting hotter and you can feel the fire blistering all around you and the smoke is thick as drapes. You’ve got your eye on that slice of sky, and all the panic you’ve felt since you started this journey, practically all the panic you’ve felt your whole life, it descends upon you. There’s a body in your way. You feel your M4, and then maybe accidentally, maybe not, you pull the trigger, and warm gore splashes over your face, but now there’s a path. Nobody in the way. You scramble toward the milky light. The screaming is no longer your problem. So you push aside remnants of a shredded man, step on a screaming other who can’t get out of his harness, and crawl out through the gunner’s hatch into the sun and the sweetest air you’ve ever breathed. You’re not on fire, but you’re sizzling, smelling burning ACU cloth and blood. The agony in your skull begins to dawn on you. One eye is nothing but a gray-red fog, yet with the other you see bits of flesh and bone clinging to you, and in that second-by-second way you understand these are parts of what once was Daniel Imana. The men from the tail vehicle fan out, scanning the ground for another bomb, but what you focus on—in all this smoke and fire and chaos and crying—is children from a nearby village gathered, watching, twisting sandals in the dust. They’re standing there laughing at you and your friends burning alive in the box. Your unit, your guys are all about to be dead and you can hear shrieking and, you think, the snap of bullets, and these little bastard orphans of Najuy are laughing about it. Even in your haste to escape, you held on to your M4. And you think you see a triggerman through the thin trees, about forty meters off the road, clutching something rectangular in his hand, maybe a phone, certainly grinning in the pale dust. The grin of the man, years ago, in the VBIED that killed Coyle. You raise your weapon at the threat, at the laughing, and sort them all out with about twenty rounds, which hack bits of bone and hair skyward. You make sure this group of kids falls in your line of fire, and they go down so easily, so serenely, and now there are all these little bodies, maybe five, maybe more, and a lot of very clean-looking blood. Very red, very wet. Now you realize maybe you were premature. The vehicle’s on fire, but it’s not, like, ablaze. Sep Marshall managed to get Brody’s body off him and push his way out despite a gristly wound in his abdomen. Jody Picarn approaches from the tail vehicle, screaming at you. He’s trying to get Kerlix to your face, your eye, but you brush him off. Steve Otterman wields a fire extinguisher. And there’s Rudy, on fire a little, shot in the head of course, but Otterman manages to put him out, and the others, they manage to get inside, to slice through his harness with a combat knife, get under his shoulders, and haul him out while you, the numb idiot that you are, stand watching. Sep Marshall, wound and all, drags him away from the wreck. Everyone is looking at the kids and the dead guy with the phone—who turns out to just be a teenager. You call in the CAT Alphas. Then you get tired and lie down and wait for the medevac. A part of you is sickly impressed with how the enemy orchestrated all this. They got you good this time. You figure your life is over, but the investigation will clear you easily. You saw a threat in the cell phone boy and removed it from your section. The bullet Rudy took to the head—a 5.56mm piece of U.S. hardware—it turns out that came from extra ammo carelessly left in the rear cooking off in the heat. And lying there in the dust, head buzzing from the burning fuel, the wind smoldering with black smoke and ash trailing to a seared pink twilight sky, you understand that something’s gone out of you, the habit of your lifetime. Any notion of the sacredness of life or the impossibility of destroying it. You go over to what’s left of your friend, sit down, bleed from your face, and wait for some rescue.

  Days later, Dan Eaton lay in the hospital, head wrapped tight, wondering about swallowing a bullet and how soon he’d be allowed near a weapon. So he tried to read with the one eye the doctors were letting him keep, and for whatever reason, instead of a book he opened this essay he’d downloaded to his Kindle months earlier. The author wrote it in France in 1940, just as the Vichy government was handing over Jews to the Gestapo. He finished writing just before he escaped the collaborationist government, only to commit suicide in Spain a month later. With his newly acquired monocular vision, Dan struggled, word by word, through the unsettling conclusion that one cannot look at the treasures of his society without feeling horror. Because when we look at history we only empathize with the victor, an empathy that benefits the current ruler. This ruler comes from a long line of those who’ve stepped over the stricken body of the one who came before, each an heir to a long line of violence and power. So the spoils of resources and culture get carried along in a direct procession, and it becomes difficult to contemplate any document of civilization as anything but a document of barbarism. The inevitability of progress being such a hopeless fantasy. Progress, the author warned, is
ephemeral. The notion of progress lies in each successive generation’s “weak Messianic power.” How each one considers itself the conclusion of history: all who came before were fated to live and die so that it might triumph. Dan smiled through bandages and tears because he remembered a Calvin and Hobbes strip about that very idea. The author had a different vision: he owned a painting by an artist named Paul Klee called Angelus Novus, in which an angel seems to hurtle backward, wings spread, eyes fixed, mouth agape, and his description of the Klee painting was something Dan had never been able to get out of his head, his memorization hopelessly accidental: “This is how one pictures the angel of history,” the author wrote. “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

  * * *

  Hailey Kowalczyk took them the long way home. To get from the Brew back to Rainrock Road, you can either take Stillwater or 229. It was a night to drive with the windows down, and they were still a mile away when they began seeing red and blue hues, like extraterrestrial spacecraft reflecting off the night sky. They said nothing as they drew closer, and the lights pulsed with greater and greater urgency. Cresting a hill, Hailey slowed the car. A lunch-box ambulance and three patrol vehicles, sturdy SUVs with New Canaan Police Department spelled out in yellow italics along the sides, blocked the road. A cop was taking yellow police tape from the fence on one side of the road to a stake on the other.

  “Wreck?” said Hailey.

  It wasn’t, though. They pulled to within twenty feet, headlights illuminating the scene. There were two cars outside a gate: an old, battered Jeep and a small blue sedan with both its driver-side door and trunk open. Spray-painted on the gate were the words THE LORD HAS HIV. Beyond that there was a long field followed by miles of woods, and he could see more blue and red strobing from the depths of those woods, along with what looked like dozens of flashlights crawling over the black skin of the field.