Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  A uniformed officer approached the driver’s side. Hailey, who’d not been wearing her seat belt, quickly pulled it across her lap and clicked it home. Bald and heavy, he leaned into the window. His name tag said OSTROWSKI, and Dan remembered him from long ago.

  “You’ll have to go back,” he said.

  “What happened?” Hailey asked, seemingly unconcerned about being seen this late at night with a man who was not her husband by someone who surely knew who she was.

  “Can’t help you. Gotta turn around.”

  The lights pulsed eerily, flickering on and off in the pitch-black hills, jerking and colliding in near silence, except the rattling of nearby sycamore leaves.

  “Is that Marty Brinklan?” Hailey asked. Rick’s father wore an improvised outfit of sweatpants and a pink polo shirt. He still had his mustache, though the hair there and on his scalp had lost any last hint of gray and was now white as a cumulus cloud.

  “Turn around, ma’am,” said Officer Ostrowski. There were huge beads of sweat on his upper lip and tracing paths down his pink scalp. Even from the passenger seat, Dan could smell him. He stank of something deeper than body odor. Dan would have called it fear. “Go back the other way. Take 229.”

  Ignoring him, Hailey called out to Marty Brinklan. He was talking to two other officers, and at the sound of his name, he shielded his eyes and looked their way.

  “Hey! I said turn around,” Ostrowski demanded. “I won’t warn you again.” But Marty was already there. He touched Ostrowski on the shoulder and motioned for him to step back. Ostrowski did so, reluctantly.

  “What’s going on?” Hailey asked again.

  Marty looked into the car, first at Dan, then at her. He still had the same cold, tranquilized expression Dan remembered. A stony face always held in leathery reserve.

  “Hey, Danny,” he said.

  “Hello, sir.”

  He thought he saw the look in Mr. Brinklan’s eyes. The one Dan had seen in Rudy’s mother and in Greg Coyle’s wife, Melody, when he met her briefly at the memorial in California. Maybe it was all in his head, but he saw it nevertheless: a look of selfish, guilty anguish. Why couldn’t it just have been you? Why him instead of you, you miserable stranger?

  “Wherever you’re headed, you need to find another route.”

  “Can you at least tell us what’s going on?” Hailey demanded.

  Marty Brinklan looked back at the scene—the vehicles and a dark puddle on the ground—running his fingers over his mustache, deciding.

  “I can’t have you driving through.” He took a long look back at the field, like he was trying to articulate something awful. “We’re just hoping we find this individual alive.”

  Hailey began to say something else, but Dan finally grew impatient with her. “Hailey,” he said. “We’ll just go back and take 229. Come on.”

  “Do that,” said Marty. He looked at the boy who’d come home from the war. “Good seeing you, Dan.”

  “You as well, sir.”

  He walked away, and Dan thought of standing over his son’s grave that night. As Hailey reversed and began to make a U-turn, he gazed back across the field. Two flashlights clashed like swords and then struck off in different directions. Particles of dust and wind filled their beams as they searched restlessly over this strange insomniac night.

  * * *

  In his driveway, beneath the basketball hoop where they’d first played H-O-R-S-E in seventh grade, kicked at the autumn leaves, and danced around their blossoming crush, Hailey kissed him. He ran his fingers around the skin of her eyes and wondered if she would truly be able to live within her own exile. The way he did. Then again, maybe this was right. Maybe her sins would fit like a key in the lock’s tumblers of his own. In the distance he heard murmurs of thunder. The horizon crackled with bursts of golden lightning behind clouds the size of mountains. Fat droplets of rain began exploding across the windshield, one at a time, their compatriots surely not far behind.

  Involuntarily, his lip curled in a smile. “Calvin hammering nails into the coffee table,” he said. “I loved how much you loved that one.”

  “Is that some kinda trick question or something?”

  He said good-bye to Hailey in his driveway, and it was the last time he ever saw her. In the moment she pulled away, he felt what lay deep behind his eye, like a television left on day and night. He watched through the vision of others: He saw himself grow into a man as if he was his mother. Through Hailey’s eyes, he saw his ancient, hopeless longing. He looked through Rudy and bore witness to the snowflakes of Korengal and later the way his skin bubbled on the bone. He looked into the desert sky through dirt and blood and tears and bile as Greg Coyle, and he saw his daughter in the falling murk. He stared into the shredding wind of paradise, hurtling forward even as he could only look back in this one fixed direction, pissing tears for all the vanishing debris.

  Names and faces went by like vapor. Ashes and bodies Dan Eaton would hold close until his last moment.

  TINA ROSS AND THE COOL AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS

  AFTER SHE SNAPPED HER FINGERS next to Cole’s ear and put her palm under his nose to make sure he was still breathing and she hadn’t overdone it with the G, Tina left him curled on the couch and drove back to her hometown. She spent most of the trip thinking about love.

  The highway from Van Wert to New Canaan was a pristine stretch of Ohio asphalt, wide and unpocked and always empty. A road she knew well. It was so familiar to her that the sights along the way—a billboard reminding in stark, towering black and white that JESUS IS REAL, a McDonald’s sign with the light in half the arch burnt out and never replaced—served as markers of distance. She’d made many trips on this highway, spent so much of her adult life crossing back and forth between these two places she knew. A few years back, Van Wert had gotten some of those wind turbines, and when she hit the road they were blinking in unison, blades slicing quietly in the night. Gary, her boss, lived near one of the farms where the turbines had gone up, and he swore the steady, almost-not-there hum of the blades gave him headaches and nosebleeds, but she liked them anyway. They were like something out of a movie about aliens or spaceships, each with one glowing red dot hundreds of feet in the sky, burning on and off in the dark.

  The stereo in Cole’s Chevy Cobalt had been broken forever, so she drove in silence, but that was okay. Normally she hated being alone, but now she had to be. She had to think about all of this very carefully. What she would say.

  Tina once had a theory about love, which was that you can only have—really, truly—one love of your life. You could be in love with more than one person. You could let multiple men have sex with you. You could even come to care about a certain person more than that one love, as she had with Cole. But in the end, you only had the one Love of Your Life. For most people, that love happened early.

  The summer before her freshman year at New Canaan High School, she and her friends got wind that the football team had made a list of the top twenty hottest freshman girls. According to her friend Stacey Moore, Tina had been number one (Stacey had been eleven). Hearing this had filled Tina with that adolescent heat that quickens the pulse. The boys looking impossibly giant and handsome. Unlike those in her class, they looked like men with real muscles, thick bristles of cheek-scraping facial hair, and halos of worldly confidence. New Canaan was a small town, so you kind of knew who was behind the list.

  That summer, she and Stacey rode their bikes out to the football field and watched from behind the fence while the team endured two-a-days. She knew who he was—everyone did—but that was the first time she really took him in. Number 56. She wondered if he remembered her from the handful of times their paths had crossed at Stacey’s house. They’d mostly hid in Stacey’s room, too embarrassed by youth to be anywhere near Matt Moore or any of the older guys. Now at the field, on the brink of beginning high school, she watched him. Those football pants made some of the heftier boys look comical, the flab of their butts slumping over t
hick thighs in little pooches. But 56 had the legs and thighs and butt of a statue. She watched the way he carried himself on the field. She knew nothing about football, but he looked like the leader, calling out to everyone around him, pointing, making signs with his hand, cocking his helmeted head and crying out like some ancient warrior leading men to battle. She didn’t take her eyes off him until Coach Bonheim himself came over to tell them to get lost, his Appalachian drawl thick as motor oil. “My boys can’t concentrate with a gaggle of girls giggling at ’em.”

  The rest of the summer she thought about almost nothing else. In church, during dinner, hanging out with her friends, Number 56 was never far from the front and center of her mind, ready to be rolled around and absently obsessed over like a hard candy on the tongue. And her place as number one on the list? He had to have voted for her. She could only speculate that the other guys followed his lead in this the way they did on the field.

  * * *

  It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive to New Canaan, and through the dark summer night, the headlights of the Cobalt showed the way. She kept her eyes peeled for deer. She’d hit a deer a year ago, and the Cobalt still bore the crumpled scar on the fender. She’d smashed the brake when she saw the glossy reflection of its eyes on the roadside, but instead of hightailing into the woods, the terrified doe leapt back into the road, and she clipped it. Coming home from a long shift at work—and after Gary had screamed at her for knocking over a row of pickles, the jars shattering into a mess of glass and reeking brine—she’d been picking at the spot in her hair, digging out the roots with the blade of her fingernail, when the doe bolted. She got out of the car to assess the damage, saw the smear of blood on the headlight, the damage she’d done to Cole’s car, and then the deer scampering into the woods with its hindquarters pulped and broken in some grotesque way she only glimpsed briefly. She sat on the cold ground and wept for a while.

  She absolutely could not afford to hit a deer tonight.

  Glancing in the rearview mirror to check on a car overtaking her, she met herself now, almost ten years removed from high school. There weren’t many lists she’d top these days. She tried going to the gym on her day off, but it cost ten dollars, and she’d get on an elliptical for a little while, get discouraged, leave, and feel guilty for a week. It didn’t help that Cole kept sweets around the apartment (he had frequent cravings for Cool Ranch Doritos and Little Debbie Swiss Rolls), yet she was the one who gained the weight. He never added a pound to his stork frame no matter what he ate. They didn’t have a scale, but the last time she’d weighed herself at the gym, she’d been a dismaying 154 pounds. She’d never weighed that much before.

  Cole had bought her a bike for her birthday the month before. It had sleek red and yellow colors and intimidating gear knobs.

  “So you can ride to work in the summer.” Cole was great at that: understanding whatever was making her anxious or sad and finding a way to encourage her. She had yet to actually take it out, but she promised herself when she got back home she’d start.

  Cole was an example of how you could grow love like a weak flower. If you gave it enough care and attention, you could create happiness from the most sickly of bulbs. They met not long after she started at Walmart. After her dad lost his job when Dave Kruger’s medical supply store went out of business, her parents moved out to Van Wert. She went with them. That was right after graduation, when she really needed a change of scenery anyway, what with her eating troubles and the pricks she had given herself. Her dad’s cousin Bishop worked at F & S Floor Covering and helped get him a job as a floor salesman, showing off carpet, tile, stone, laminate, hardwood, and the rest. Her mom got on part time with the YWCA janitorial staff, and Tina, without much of an idea of what she should do, had walked into the Walmart and asked for an application.

  She’d been working for a month as an associate and only noticed Cole because he seemed to always need something from her register. He’d come through wearing the uniform of the Tire & Lube Express technicians to buy a pack of Little Debbies, a Snickers, a fishing magazine and ask her how her day was going.

  “Fine.” She tried to keep it to one-word replies.

  “We’re really backed up. Looks like you guys are too.”

  “It’s always like this.”

  One thing she learned quickly was that Walmart wasn’t a slacker’s job. She never had fewer than five people waiting in line when she worked the register, and Gary always assigned some additional stocking when the line finally went down. But complaining about the grueling pace was how she made friends. It felt like they were all in the trenches together. Her best friend at work was Beauty, who usually worked the same shift. They traded trashy true crime books and, on particularly stressful days, shared a cigarette out by the loading bay.

  “He likes you, you know,” Beauty told her. Beauty was black and lived up to her name. She had rich dark skin and elegant movie-star features. She also had a jealousy-inducing figure, a black girl’s round butt that all the guys at work stared at without trying to hide it. Tina once saw Gary throw an elbow into the ribs of a young associate and nod at Beauty’s behind as she passed. Beauty never reacted or let on like she was aware of this. She had a boyfriend in Afghanistan—a sturdy, handsome farmer’s boy she’d gone to high school with—and they were getting married when he got back.

  “Who does?” Tina asked.

  “Cole.”

  “Who’s Cole?”

  “Cole, in the Tire and Lube Express.”

  She had to describe him in detail before Tina put it together. The boy who kept coming by her register. Rail-thin with slumping shoulders, no chin, an Adam’s apple like a turkey, and several overlapping teeth.

  “I’m not into it.” She’d been admiring Travis, who worked in the electronics section. He had a wedding ring but also the bulging shoulders of a former athlete.

  “Cole’s sweet,” said Beauty. “Girl like you needs to recognize sweet more.”

  “Would you recognize sweet if that was the guy who was sweet on you?”

  After she went with Travis to the dark side of a strip mall parking lot, and then he never looked at her again, she started to see Cole differently. She could tell from the way her coworkers shut up when she walked by that Travis had told at least a few of the guys, and Cole stopped coming by her register. She ran into him in the break room and expected him to avoid her. Instead, he licked at his weak, embarrassed smile, and said, “I really like that new way you do your makeup on the eyes. Like how the lines come off and make your eyes look a little Chinese.”

  This was so awkward, so dopey, and so genuine that at first she thought he was making fun of her. When his smile faltered and he forced it to beam again, she understood that he’d heard about Travis. That this comment was his marble-mouthed way of telling her that he was okay with whatever had happened, and he didn’t blame her; he just couldn’t come by her register anymore in case she had an obsession with a married man. At least this is what she inferred.

  She went to the Tire & Lube Express the next day.

  “Would you want to come to church with my parents and me this Sunday?” she asked. After stumbling through an explanation of how he worked Sunday but not until the later shift, his neck suddenly bright red and splotchy, he said yes.

  So they met at her church (her mom and dad giving Cole their intrigued handshakes; Cole in full tie and jacket, dressed for a wedding instead of the Sunday sermon, his rigorous explanation to her father of what he did as a Tire & Lube Express technician, “That means anything, sir, from tire changes, oil service, battery service, but I’ll also stock shelves, or run the cash register. Oftentimes people will want to buy their groceries at the same register if they’re getting an oil service.”). The sermon had been about personal responsibility and community responsibility, how Jesus had instructed us to be kind and compassionate to our fellow man. Taking care of one another was the responsibility of the church, that’s what it was there for.

 
Her dad’s head bobbed along to this, as did many others’. He was going on about it a lot at the dinner table: “Governments should protect their people, not try to balance everyone’s wealth so that it’s perfectly equal.” Tina remembered this well because all the talk at work then had been about how they’d have to lay people off or cut their hours if this healthcare thing went through.

  Cole sat beside her, hands in his lap, staring straight forward. His nervousness radiated off him like heat. She and her parents went for brunch at Bob Evans afterward. Her mom invited Cole, but he had to work. “Thank you for having me,” he said. “I had really a good time.” He gave Tina a hug, the sweat on his hands dampening her bare arms.

  * * *

  She passed the turnoff for Lima and worried about what time it was. The clock in the car hadn’t worked for years, but she knew all the new phones tracked their own locations, so she had to leave it behind. She calmed herself. As long as she got to New Canaan before the bars closed she would be on time to catch him.

  She hadn’t known how to go about it back then. Just seeing him in the hallways was nerve tingling, flustering, crazy making. His eyes took a beat in her direction, as if he’d been aware of her the entire time and decided at the last moment to turn them to her. She quickly adjusted her gaze down, and it was all she thought about the rest of the day. Her biology, English, and health classes might as well have been taught in the Spanish she didn’t pay attention to either. She never would have approached him. That’s not how high school worked. Fifty-six was at the top of the hierarchy in a universally recognized way. He was being recruited by Division I colleges. He had a way of speaking—a baritone ripe with earned authority—that made everyone understand he was to be paid attention to. He carried his books in this particular nonchalant way, palmed from above rather than with his hand curled beneath them like everyone else.