Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  “They put down any animal that doesn’t get adopted in seventy-two hours,” he told her. “If it’s got so much as the sniffles, they’ll put it down even faster.”

  They adopted a new dog almost every month and then made phone calls and put ads in the paper to try to place each one. They only had enough room on their property to keep so many. Plus, the dogs would sometimes attack one another. She loved watching him with the animals. That night they sat in the vast, yawning expanse of backyard, which, compared to the wee double-wide, was the main event: grass and forest and those beautiful Ohio hills rising to the dawn and stars. They fed the dogs, threw tennis balls and sticks and toys, watched the pups sprint after them in an excitement that didn’t have a human parallel. Like they knew they’d been saved.

  That evening she found Symphony with burrs in her hair, and he grabbed a pair of scissors to cut them out.

  “You think she’d learn better by now.” He snipped into the dog’s coat and brought out yet another small barb tangled in fur. “Swear she runs into that patch every time we let her out back.”

  She watched from beside him, holding the scrawny mutt gently with two hands, rubbing the poor girl under the jaw. She was the newest of the strays, some timid mix of Australian shepherd and cattle dog, according to 56. Something bad had happened to her. She trembled every time a human got near her and had horrible scars on her snout.

  “Maybe she’s trying to run away,” she suggested.

  “Can see the fence right there.” He gestured to the back of their property where wood posts and welded-wire field fence enclosed three acres. He finished cutting the burrs out and fed Symphony a treat. The dog took it with deference. Let it drop to the ground and sniffed hesitantly before picking it up.

  “Good girl,” he whispered to her, scratching around her head and neck. “You’re such a beautiful girl.”

  It was cool outside. Fall trying to break through summer. The clouds huddled around a setting sun so that the sky looked like pink cupcake frosting. They talked about what life would be like in just a few years when he went pro. The things they could buy. The worries they could forget forever. The house he’d build his mom. The dogs that would bound across their enormous property. He’d use his money when he made it to the NFL to open a no-kill pet shelter in his hometown. And then open them everywhere and save all of these beautiful pups.

  * * *

  She waited in Cole’s Cobalt a long time. She’d brought nothing to do, no magazines or crossword puzzle to occupy her. That was fine. She stayed in the dark alone with her memories. She imagined the whole span of her life like it was a world of fireflies trapped in a jar.

  When the door banged open and 56 stumbled out, she almost didn’t recognize him. She’d seen him only from a distance in the last few years. She’d seen the weight he’d gained, especially in the belly and face. His jaw had gone round and fleshy. His stubble now covered a pouch beneath his chin. She knew that he still went to the cheapo gym out by Bluebaugh Auto Body where he benched and squatted, but all that muscle now had a heavy coating of fat. Tonight he wore a red Buckeyes hat that had dirtied and faded to a crimson rust. He moseyed on to his truck, excavating keys from his jeans pocket.

  She turned the key in the ignition. It revved and then sputtered out. Her skin went cold with dread. The battery was old and the engine cranked sluggish, but it always turned over. Not now. She looked back to 56. He tottered slightly. She expected him to get into the truck before he noticed, but as he sifted through his many keys, she saw him catch sight of the tire. His cuss rang out through the quiet. She tried the ignition again. It wheezed, struggled, and failed. Wait ten seconds. Don’t panic. But panic was all around. She found herself praying as she tried it a third time.

  Fifty-six bent down to examine the wheel, and just as he was pulling his cell phone from his pocket, maybe to call a buddy for a ride, the engine caught and turned over. She put the Cobalt in drive and her foot to the accelerator.

  Her heart thundered in her chest. Memories winking in and out in the jar.

  * * *

  She thought—she didn’t know, but she thought—it had something to do with the day in the black depths of a midwestern winter her sophomore year, his senior, when Mr. Clifton, the music teacher, stopped her after class. She could see 56 waiting for her down the hall as students scurried to the next period. He had his eyes on her when Mr. Clifton shut the door.

  “I just wanted to speak with you very quickly, Tina. Hope you have a minute.”

  “Sure. I have chemistry, though.”

  “I can write you a note.”

  He motioned for her to have a seat in a front-row desk. He sat beside her, folding his hands. Mr. Clifton was probably the most adored teacher in the school. He was funny and warm, and he took a direct interest in every student, knew everyone by name, knew their sports and extracurriculars. His voice reminded her of a middle school vocab word she’d never forgotten: mellifluous. When it flipped from a rich baritone to a high peeling laugh, it was a sound of extraordinary pleasure to the ear. The tone of this kind voice troubled her now, though. She had no idea what he might want.

  “You date Todd Beaufort on the football team, right?”

  She nodded. “For a year now.”

  “And that’s going well?”

  “Of course. It’ll be hard when he goes away to school, but it’s only two years, and I’ll probably visit every other weekend.”

  He nodded, stared at her.

  “I heard some . . .” he began and then stopped. His teeth worried his lower lip. “I heard some pretty outlandish stuff from a student. In regards to you and Todd. I won’t go into the details, except that my position almost requires me to inform the higher-ups of . . . of what I heard if it’s true.”

  She frowned. “What did you hear?”

  Mr. Clifton looked extremely uncomfortable. Beads of sweat had popped out on the high part of his brow where the hair had receded. He swiped at his mustache.

  “Does Todd treat you the way he should?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  Mr. Clifton nodded. He opened his mouth, but was cut off by the snick-snack sound of the classroom door unlatching. Fifty-six stepped into the doorway, still holding the knob. His eyes assessed them the way they would an offensive line: quickly, expertly.

  “Everything good in here, Tina?”

  “Excuse me,” said Mr. Clifton. “We’re having a conversation. Please shut the door.”

  “What all about?”

  “It’s okay,” Tina said, but neither of the men seemed to hear her.

  “A private one,” said Mr. Clifton. For the first time since she’d known him, she heard anger in his voice. “Shut the door, Mr. Beaufort.”

  Fifty-six kept his eyes cool, indifferent.

  “Another day not that long ago, Mr. Clifton,” he said, “and you wouldn’t dare talk to me like that.”

  Mr. Clifton bolted from the student desk. “Excuse me?” He took two steps and put his face inches from her boyfriend’s. “What did you say?”

  He was a great deal taller than Mr. Clifton, but he turned his gaze to the side anyway. “Nothing.”

  “No, why don’t you repeat that, Mr. Beaufort? Repeat that to me right now.”

  Number 56 shook his head back and forth lazily. “Can’t even remember what I said.”

  The two of them stood like that, nose to chin, for a moment. Tina pictured him in his pads on the cold sideline and could nearly see the steam wafting from his skull. Finally, Mr. Clifton said, “If you want to play Friday, get out of my sight right now.” He slammed the classroom door in her boyfriend’s face.

  When he sat back down, she smiled apologetically. “I’m really sorry. He’s just protective. He cares about me, so he gets worried.”

  Mr. Clifton nodded but appeared not to be listening. Instead, he stared at the surface of the desk. He looked up at her.

  “Tina, I’m going to tell you this one thing, and then you can go.
I heard something distressing, but perhaps it was not from a source that would prove very reliable. All I will say is that when you’re dating anyone—but especially with Todd—you need to make sure he’s respecting you. Understand?”

  “Of course. I do. And he does.” She smiled to show that she meant it. “He’s just protective.”

  Mr. Clifton grilled her awhile longer, increasingly desperate to hear her disparage 56, but he finally let her leave. A few weeks later, with the awful year of 2001 having flipped forward, 56 told her, “We’re done.” One day they were fine—she ate dinner at his house, they played with a dog named Winnow in his backyard, he drove her home—and then the weekend passed and he never called her. When she finally got him on the phone, he only had those two evil words to say. After her stunned silence, tears, and protestations, he realized her secret fear. He said it right out loud: “It’s like, how can I marry you after all that shit I’ve seen you do?”

  Nearly a dozen years later, it still made her breath catch in her throat. His cruelty. He barely looked at her in the halls when they got back from break.

  A year of her life cut off like a guillotine came down and severed her neck.

  He began seeing that awful skank Jess Bealey, who, every time Tina laid eyes on her, made her want to scream. Tina spent weeks holed up in her bedroom struck dumb with grief, a constant panic coiled in her chest, unable to comprehend how he could drop her so casually and instantaneously. Had Mr. Clifton told Principal MacMillan or Coach Bonheim something? Had he threatened 56? Had 56 seen Mr. Clifton prying into their love life and decided she was more trouble than she was worth? She asked these questions endlessly and in circles, obsessed with finding an answer but afraid to leave her room, to talk to anyone at school, to accept her mother’s reassurances that this too shall pass, to approach the love of her life and ask for an explanation, though in her dreams they still sat together in his truck and looked out over the Cattawa, the water like scrolls of gold in the autumn sun.

  * * *

  Pulling alongside him, the window rolled down, she tried to call out. Her breath caught and hitched in the back of her throat. The residual terror due to the Cobalt’s faulty engine still rippled through her nerves, and the words became a choked cough. Fifty-six turned around on his own when he heard the car stop at his back. He still held his phone, index finger poised to dial. He’d crouched to examine the tire, and he turned to her with one knee on the ground, his boot scraping at the grit. He wore a short-sleeve plaid shirt, the top three or four buttons open over a white tank top, and when headlights washed over them, she could see a meat-yellow sweat tint at the collar.

  “Hey,” she said, pushing her voice to as bright and jaunty a note as she could manage. “I thought that was you, Five-Six. Whatcha doing?”

  It was hard to read his face because the eyes were a bit bleary and his expression was so neutral. Still, there was none of the joy or surprise she’d hoped for.

  “Hey, you.” He snorted a laugh. “Of all people. Fucking tire’s flat,” he muttered, looking back at it. “Think some grab-ass prankster let the air out.”

  “That sucks.” She glanced around the street, still empty in all directions. “Need a ride somewhere? Thought I’d do a nightcap.”

  “You got booze?”

  “Course.”

  He laughed softly and shook his head. Then she caught him glancing at her chest. Just a flit of his eyes, an assessment. One thing about her weight gain was that a portion of it had gone to her breasts. She’d worn a tight black shirt and a bra that pushed them to his eye.

  “Yeesh. Why the hell not.” He pocketed his phone and reached for the passenger door. He crashed into the seat, which protested his girth. He grabbed hold of the handle above the door and skipped his seat belt. She pulled into the street, amazed at how easy that had been, thinking ahead to what she would say now, how this might possibly go. When she checked the rearview, she saw a tall woman in a pretty summer dress come slinking from the alley to the street. She wore high black boots and had a cute purse slung over her shoulder. Her gait looked familiar, the way she carried herself. To Tina’s dismay, the woman watched them drive away.

  * * *

  She let the air out of his tire only because she saw no other way to be alone with him. He wouldn’t have gone with her if she just walked up to him and said she wanted to talk. He didn’t work like that. She’d tried many, many times in high school. Grow up, he’d hissed by his locker. Mine ain’t the last dick you’re ever gonna have in you. Words that made her panicked and ill.

  At some point crying wasn’t quite enough. That’s when her eating troubles began. When she looked in the mirror she saw a fat, ugly, slutty little child that a man bound for the NFL could never be attracted to, let alone love. “Shorter women have trouble keeping the weight off their hips,” her mother explained, herself a squat, rotund woman, once pretty in old pictures but now suited in middle-age flab. She could already see the advent of her mother’s figure in her shape. This got better only when she mostly stopped eating.

  It wasn’t until 56 graduated, though, and it became very real that he was going away and would not be coming back to her, that she really started with the pricks. “Pricking herself” was how she thought of it, but her instrument was not a needle. A box cutter from her dad’s tool kit, rather. A few months after it disappeared her dad finally noticed and ransacked the house looking for it.

  “Just go buy a new one,” her mother suggested.

  “Why? I have a perfectly good one. It didn’t damn well dematerialize. It’s around. Unless you put it somewhere.”

  “That’s right, I hid your box cutter to gaslight you.”

  It had a bright orange grip. The blade was about an inch wide and could extend four inches from the handle. You pushed the black button with your thumb to pop it out, and then the button pulled apart to lock the blade into place at your preferred length. It was the only weapon the men had used to take over those planes and fly them into the towers, and this seemed to lend it a certain power it otherwise could never have possessed. This was a tool that changed history overnight. A little blade like this had toppled those two incredible buildings with perfect Hollywood symmetry, rained ash and fire and gray dust across the capital of the world. She liked holding it in her hand and marveling at this. Eventually, her dad bought a replacement and forgot about it.

  She began on the back of her thigh. First, she’d clean the blade with cotton balls soaked in isopropyl alcohol and stand naked with her back to the mirror in her room. Watching over her shoulder she’d press gently at first, then more firmly, and draw the blade over the back of her thigh until blood trickled down. She liked doing it there because in class the next day she’d have to sit on the hot, secret filaments.

  Then the backs of her thighs began to get too messy and she moved to the inside, cutting right up to the V near her groin. This was okay for a while. Then she needed more and moved the pricks to her torso. Drawing the blade along her rib cage, she explored the contours of the bone. Her body became a map, a serpentine sketch of scars in different stages of healing. Old pricks faded to thin pink and white lines while newer flesh, raw and red, could still bleed through the bandages she applied. She collected the used ones in a plastic bag in her closet and only threw them away at school.

  They made her promise to stop after one of the pricks went too far.

  * * *

  “I was thinking of going to the Lincoln to get in a drink before it closed, and there you were,” she told him. “Small world, huh?” Fifty-six hadn’t said anything since he got in the car. She had to begin the conversation somewhere. “I was in town tonight picking some stuff up from my parents’ storage locker and figured I’d see if anyone was out. How ’bout you?”

  “Just getting on after work.” He sounded tired, so worn out. She wondered how much he’d had to drink. “You still over by the Indiana line?”

  “Yep. Van Wert.”

  “Huh.”

&n
bsp; She waited for him to say more, but he only nodded. He seemed very far away, which rubbed her wrong. Her left heel jackhammered the car’s carpet. “I’m thinking I might want to get into trouble tonight.” He looked over at her, and she flashed a bright grin. “I mean, the kind of trouble we used to get into.”

  A shy smile finally lit into his face, the one she recognized from high school: half a lip curling up—only gone was the confidence, the daring. She saw the stainless steel ball-chain necklace, but he now wore the dog tags tucked into his shirt.

  “Yeah?”

  She shrugged. “If you don’t mind.”

  Approaching a red light, she braked and reached into the small compartment in the driver’s side door. She pulled out two airplane bottles. One Jack and one Jim. “Start with a little whiskey? You want?”

  He slapped his thighs and lurched forward. “Not at all how I saw this night going.”

  She unscrewed the cap on the Jack, his preferred brand, handed it to him. “Cheers.”

  The glass necks made a small tink, and they both tipped the bottles back. The whiskey struggled down the thin neck. Air bubbles replaced the liquid, gurgling up. She wasn’t much of a whiskey drinker and couldn’t help but cough at the burn. He swallowed in three bobs of his throat and dropped the bottle to the floor.

  “Where we going?” he asked. The light turned green and she eased forward.

  “I don’t know. Figured we could just drive out to Stillwater. We used to hang out there sometimes, remember?”

  He rubbed the red-blond stubble of his cheek and directed his gaze out the window. “Of course. Had us some fun for a while, didn’t we.”

  She forced a smile to prove it had been fun.

  “Who were you at the Lincoln with?” she asked to change the subject.

  “Just a buddy from Cattawa. Him, me, and Strow were at Honey Buckets earlier, but Strow had to go on duty for the late shift. He’s a deputy now, you know.”