But now as the camera zooms in closer, you see that the green is crisscrossed by linked electric towers leading to a set of old gray buildings of assorted sizes—including Quonset huts and prefab mobile units. They are unprepossessing except for the largest two, which appear ample enough to house a fleet of C-5 transport aircraft. These two buildings, in chorus, emit a low roar, like the sound of a waterfall.
Now, the close-ups. The row of gleaming scrap heaps. The gate with the DANGER signs. The small building brightly decorated with yellow signs and festooned with yellow tape. One rusty pile of smashed barrels and girders and coils staggering to the height of a two-story building. From this mountain of metal, a ditch threads into a lagoon, where the still water is green and shiny. Other small lagoons are outlined with yellow ribbon.
A parking lot is filled with large metal canisters painted a pretty aqua color. They resemble gargantuan Prozac capsules. Thousands of them line the pavement. They are parked in geometric rows, like patient pupae waiting to become worms. Beyond the six-pack of cooling towers and the twin smokestacks, two tall construction cranes rise from a clearing on the edge of the wilderness, where a scrim of temporary fencing conceals a new act in an ongoing drama.
Reed’s motorcycle plugs along a gravel road, skirting the security perimeter, passing the tall scrap heap, then leaving the gray, humming village and easing into the solace of the woods, where campers and hunters, with their dogs and deer rifles and picnic coolers, have pursued the natural life for years. Boy Scouts have their roundups and jamborees here. Coon-dog clubs hold their field trials.
The wilderness sprawls toward the river. The road leads into the heart of this sanctuary, away from the string of high-voltage towers and the dancing plumes. Even the crash and gurgle of the invisible waterfall grows distant. But the luminescence of the place remains, brightening with the growing dusk.
Reed Futrell wound through a labyrinth of gravel roads, stirring up a dusting of memories. He had been coming to this place all his life. His uncle Ed taught him to fish here in the large ponds, long before the water began to turn strange colors. He killed his first—and only—buck here. He hunted squirrels with his cousins. He went on church picnics, although he belonged to no church. He probably had camped in this woods three hundred times.
He decided to camp near the levee, where he could hear the blasts from the tugboats towing barges of iron ore and coal. Leaving his bike near a clearing, he lit out through a stand of river birches. He followed his glimpses of the immense metal bridge that spanned the river. At the top of the levee, he squatted and let the last of the sunset happen, imagining it was coming out of him, that he had the power to make the sun go down. If the sun, flaming orange, was like the inferno inside him, the burning blaze of fear and desire, then perhaps he could drop it over the horizon as casually as a basketball. He rose to attention as the sun’s top rim sank. A haze of thin clouds spread above the horizon. A cool tinge in the air brushed his skin. A coal barge was gliding along, and he could see the tugboat captain on his perch. Reed had considered that way of life for himself at one time, a means of living without moorings.
At the levee, he was always aware of his maternal grandfather, who had worked with the Army Corps of Engineers building the levees and preparing the way for the marching towers of electricity that fed the gaseousdiffusion plant. Somewhere along the levee, Boyce Reed had been working on an erosion project, laying willow matting along the banks, when he fell ill with pneumonia. Whenever Reed came here, he was gripped by the vision of his grandfather suffering from fever and congestion while lying in his tent by the riverbank. He had been in the tent for three days before anyone realized how sick he was. He died in 1951, before Reed was born. Reed knew little about him, a pale man in a portrait on his mother’s mantel, so coming here was like a ritual connection. Reed did not have a line of men he was close to. His father, Robert Futrell, had died young, in 1964, when Reed was only six, in an accident at the plant. It was up to his uncles to teach him how to be a man. “This is the way your daddy always baited his hook,” they would say. Or, “He was the champion when it came to muzzle loading.” And “The Almighty broke the mold after he made Robert Futrell.” Reed felt he couldn’t live up to his father’s reputation, and it took years for him to realize that his uncles meant nothing personal.
In the growing darkness, he hiked briskly through the woods back to the spot where he had left his bike. He made his camp methodically, laying out one of his tarps on the ground and stringing the other among some tree branches for an overhead shelter. Then he smoothed off a place for his tent. Slamming the pegs with satisfaction, he anchored the base corners, then wormed the aluminum tubes through their little fabric tunnels. His pup tent sprang open like a flower unfolding on high-speed film.
He constructed a small fire and heated some beans, then unwrapped a chicken focaccia sandwich and snapped open a can of beer. He ate, watching the fire swell and turn colors. The warmth was pleasant. The air still held the mellow spring daytime smells of bloom and decay. The light from the plant blotted out much of the night, but he could see a faint smattering of the Milky Way and a few of the brighter stars. He thought he could make out Sirius. He liked to imagine dying stars, their enormous fires imploding or exploding. He tried, as he often did, to grasp the idea that the present moment did not exist in some star a million light-years off. It was not now there. Not even on Mars was it now. If that was true, it could be reversed, he thought. He and his fire and his tent did not exist from the vantage point of the star, or on Mars, at this moment—whenever that might be.
Viewing the stars, he always felt privileged to witness ultimate mystery, to be in it. The universe tantalized and affronted him, ripping him out of his own petty corner. As he ate, hypnotized by the fire, he listed in his mind all the things in his life that were good. His kids had jobs and weren’t in trouble, his ex-wife was satisfied, his mother was nestled in a senior citizens’ home. His dog didn’t have fleas.
But he had not seen Julia in six weeks. She came out here with him a couple of times, most recently on a freakishly fair day on the last of February. They picnicked in a meadow beside the ruins of Fort Wolf, the old munitions factory that had operated during World War II. It was one of his favorite places. The hulks of the ragged concrete walls were like the forlorn remnants of a castle. Two water towers, their brick and mortar crumbling, stood like bookends without books to hold. He cavorted with her, halfnaked, shouting, “It can’t get any better than this!” In the sunny afternoon they wallowed around lazily on a flannel blanket. At night they snuggled in the pup tent (his double-pup tent, he told her when she questioned its size) and shook up the wilderness with riotous sex.
Still gazing at the fire, his sandwich now gone, he wandered into a reverie about Julia, trying to create a Top Ten list of sex-dates with her. But none of them could be relived in his mind. He couldn’t remember what she was wearing the last time he saw her. She said, “I can’t loiter. I’ve got an immunogenetics seminar to go to.” And after that, she did not answer the telephone messages he left.
Julia, who worked at a cytopathology lab, planned to save the world from sinister infectious diseases like Ebola and anthrax. Early in their relationship, not realizing how ambitious she was, he had suggested she go to nursing school. She good-humoredly dismissed his idea.
“I can stick people,” she said. “But I’d rather be in charge of a mental hospital than have to do a Foley or a rectal.”
“You’d rather hear about their cracked minds than look at their cracks,” he said.
She thought for a moment. “A cracked mind—I like that.”
Julia was from Chicago. He loved to hear her talk. Her sweet Scandinavian-Irish-Polish twang. Her sharp, precise sounds, her back-slanted A’s and rounded O’s. He missed her vowels. He missed her lip gloss. She used flavored lip gloss habitually and sometimes smeared it straight across, instead of following the natural lines, so that her mouth was a wide, glistening swath
.
He would get his blood tested if she could be the one to stick him. He hadn’t had a complete physical in five years. He was a notorious procrastinator—with tinnitus and a thrumming lust that ran like a refrigerator, kicking on and off automatically.
The tree frogs were peeping a cacophony, in which he heard raucous machines and anxious melodies. He draped a blanket around him and fed the fire little twigs. He picked a tick from his scalp and dropped it into the flame. The sky was gathering clouds, and the stars were fading. The clouds moved swiftly. He couldn’t even see the Dippers. He had been to the Smoky Mountains one August during the Perseid meteor shower; it was dazzling, like fireworks, like the Big Bang. He tried to remember it now, but it was like trying to remember sex; you had to be there then. If there was no now there now, then there would be no then there now either.
Inside his tent, he sidled in and out of sleep, dreaming that Julia was with him. He dreamed that she telephoned a pizza parlor, and a machine voice told her, “Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line.”
A sound penetrated his sleep. In his semiwakefulness he thought he heard himself fart—a muffled, explosive blat that projected over toward the levee, as if his bowels were practicing ventriloquism. But he hadn’t heard himself fart that loudly in years. As a gentle rain began to fall, he sank back into sleep, with the soothing and hypnotic shush of the raindrops on the leaves.
In his dream, a car pulls up nearby and the engine shuts off. The headlights go off, but an interior light stays lit. The car seems to huddle between the shadows of the ancient water towers. The moon climbs high, but the driver of the car does not emerge. With spring peepers screaming out their courtship messages, the night seems welcoming. Hours pass. Then, near midnight, the car door opens once briefly, and a woman—indistinct in the dim light—slips out of the seat, shuts the door, and squats on the ground for a few minutes. Then she reenters the car, starts the engine and lets it run. Radio music blares. The car does not move from its spot in the shadows. The engine keeps running, with the dome light shining and the music playing until the car runs low on gas and begins to sputter. The engine dies. The light goes out. And the blast of the gun splinters the night calm. In a while, rain begins to fall softly.
Reed tries to awaken, but he feels paralyzed. He struggles fitfully, and then eases deeper into dream as his muscles release and he floats toward the car. He glimpses the ice-blue metal, burning like candles, between the water towers. He approaches cautiously, noticing that it is a luxury sedan, a nice city car, not the kind of vehicle a camper or hiker would be driving. Slopping his way through puddles, he reaches the car.
He stares through the broken window at the shattered face. She has fallen toward the wheel, but he can see half her face is ripped away, leaving a reddish-brown spaghetti sauce. She must have hit her temple at a slant. He does not need to open the door. He can see the revolver on the floorboard, a .38 special, its handle decorated with floral decals.
On the dashboard, fastened with tape, are pictures of children. Two boys and two girls. All of them little, smiling, in Halloween costumes, the least one in a bunny outfit, with long, erect ears.
Moaning, Reed reels away. He streaks through the woods—crazed, stupid with disgust and horror. He calls out. He runs and runs, but he feels he is traveling at the speed of a shrimp trawler, which he imagines as a slow boat to Ethiopia. But then the shrimp trawler zooms across the Gulf of Mexico, where he awakens, in a sea of sweat.
His mind had given him a private screening of a horror film. Who was the woman? Why would she come out here to kill herself? He could not fathom a woman killing herself when she had four small children to care for. He turned and stretched in his musty, oversized sleeping bag. Was it so simple to go mad and kill yourself? He didn’t believe it. What if she wanted to spare her children from something? An illness. Maybe the woman believed herself inadequate to the task of raising them. He wondered if her husband would ask the same questions he was asking. Over and over he heard the shot muffled by the rain, saw the faceless woman, someone he would never be able to recognize. The Halloween costumes raced ahead of him as he relaxed again into sleep.
Rain awoke him at the brink of dawn. The dripping rain made a sound like someone pounding in a fence post. Leaving his camp undisturbed, he pulled on his slicker and zipped up his tent. Guided by his flashlight, he began slogging his way through overgrown brambles and wet vines toward the shimmering light of the plant, until he spotted a certain metal scrap heap some two hundred yards away. He didn’t go closer. He could see eerie blue flames licking the metal junk, with tongues of fire nearly a foot high. In a gentle rain like this one, mysterious blue flames often erupted, flickering delicately like a gas fire on artificial logs. The flames were lovely yet terrible, another of those elusive phenomena—like a solar storm, a starburst—that you strive to grasp but can’t. They made him think about quasars, those distant blue lights in the firmament.
The rain was slacking up. He tramped a different route back to his camp, following dirt-bike paths and small lanes, avoiding the briar patches. The ruins of the munitions factory lay ahead. He reached the clearing where in his dream he had found the dead woman. In the dream the setting was visually more of a museum than a wilderness, but his mind had placed it in this space. It was the exact spot where he had romped with Julia among the slag heaps and ruined buildings. They had played hide-and-go-seek in the bunkers, chasing each other around the towers. That was before she accused him of betrayal.
When he reached his camp, he quickly collapsed his tent, rolled up his wet tarps, and crammed his gear into the carrier. Then he kicked the motor to life.
Women were always after him to get a cell phone. If Reed had really needed to call the police about the dead woman, it would have taken him half an hour to find a telephone. The dream had been so real that as he swerved through the back roads, he seemed to be dreaming still. He imagined going to the police station to report what he had seen. He harbored a slight worrisome thread of paranoia. What about his footprints at the site? And did he touch the window? No. He knew nothing. She was a stranger.
The scene had been so desolate. No one had heard the woman’s last utterances; she was like a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear. His own ears were nearly dead from the decibels at work.
Reed was normally a confident guy, given to bursts of pleasure and celebratory blasts of energy. He wasn’t afraid of much, he knew how to protect himself, he could deal with almost anything. Being neighborly, he once rushed into a burning house to save a ninety-seven-year-old invalid. “Slow down,” his former wife, Glenda, had often said to him. “You’ll burn yourself out.” Now in his forties, he still aimed to charge through life with youthful zeal. But for the last couple of years, a deep pain welled inside him occasionally and confused him. He supposed it was simply chemical—if chemistry was ever simple. But as bitter as his moods had sometimes been, he had never entertained a suicidal thought. The dead woman couldn’t have represented Glenda. She was too much of a schemer, a master of coupon organization. And the dead woman was definitely not his mother. Although she had high cholesterol and arthritis, her life force had the strength of the Saturn V.
And she wasn’t Julia. In no way was she Julia.
He skirted the construction site east of the plant. It seemed forsaken without the row of blue portable toilets, which were removed the day construction was halted. The cranes posed for still lifes.
Reed rode all day, through several counties, following no particular route. The dream wouldn’t fade out. If he had really found a dead woman, people at work would approach him, curious and agog. They would want to hear his story over and over. It would be like receiving congratulations for something extraordinary he had done. Over and over he thought of her last hours. The way she lined up the photos on the dashboard—how long did she stare at those pitiful pictures? Did she talk to them? Did she put off her act until she had said everything she wanted to say?<
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He let the wind fly through his hair as he swirled around the narrow roads, the sun winking through the leaves like a strobe light. He loved the patterns of sun and shade in the woods on either side of him. Wildlife fled from his mighty engine. Reed Futrell did not know where he was going. He rode along a precipice. He was a mechanized Road Runner, rushing along, but watching himself too, knowing that if he leaned too far in one direction or the other he would pancake down a canyon. His fatalism annoyed Julia.
“I’ve been living with that stuff so long my insides would be neon green if you opened me up,” he had told her. “If I’ve got it, I’ve got it.”
“But if you don’t, wouldn’t it be a relief to know?”
“Can’t you do the blood test for me?”
“No, it’s against the rules. The paperwork would screw you up.”
“Won’t you stick me, honey?” he said, running his hand down her back.
“Can’t do.”
“I’d like to stick you,” he said.
Julia could not know his work history. He hadn’t told her. He wouldn’t.
His mind always meandered while on the road, or lying on the tarp in the woods, or inside the patched pup tent he’d hauled around for years. But now he observed that he was surveying his whole life as though it had a pattern, passions and frailties that connected together.
Reed had grown up reading the Encyclopedia Americana and listening to big bands. He always had dogs. He loved shooting targets. He loved women. He loved being married for the first fifteen years, before he and Glenda began fighting. He realized that when they married, they didn’t understand each other, that they were too young to understand their own natures, or their differences. Glenda had always been picky, and then she sometimes demeaned him by calling him boorish and overly macho. Their counselor began harping on passive aggression, which Reed understood to mean that Glenda blamed him for her own bad behavior. She said she had to go away so she could grow as a person; Reed said that was ironic for a person always on a diet. The divorce was simple, and she finished raising the kids, Dalton and Dana. Now his children were young adults whom he saw only once in a while. They treated him decently. They seemed normal. He was lucky.
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