Refresh Refresh

by Benjamin Percy

  He reaches for the radio, but her hand is already there, snapping the dial. She races through the channels—with pops of static between them—until she finds what she is looking for, the studied baritone of a broadcaster’s voice, telling them about the low-pressure system that has unpredictably settled over the region, drawing the storm farther south than anticipated, into Oregon. Gale-force winds are expected. Maybe funnel clouds. Certainly hail.

  “I think we should turn around.” She rakes a hand through her hair, drawing it back to fully reveal her face, pinched with worry. “John? Why can’t we turn around?”

  “Because we’re going on vacation.”

  “Can’t we go somewhere else? We can still make it to my mother’s by dinner. I could call—”

  “No. The reservation’s made.” He makes a karate motion with his hand. “It’s done. We’re going.”

  “Don’t make me say I told you so. I don’t want to say that.”

  He almost says, “Yes, you do,” but doesn’t. Once her mood sours toward him it can take hours, days, to win so much as a smile from her face.

  “It’ll blow over. I’m telling you, by the time we get there it’ll be all done and spoken for.”

  He snaps the radio off and lets his hand drop to the soft cooler that rests between the driver and passenger seat. He unzips it and rifles through it and pulls out a Diet Pepsi. He pops the tab and lets it run down his throat. Then he grabs a snack-size bag of Doritos. He tears it open with his teeth and pushes a handful of chips into his mouth and crunches them down to a paste, repeating the motion over and over until the bag is half empty.

  “Chip?” he says to Linda.

  When she answers him with a curt shake of her head, he continues to crunch his way through the bag. “Suit yourself.” A minute later, finished, he licks the orange dust off his fingertips and runs his tongue along his teeth, hoping to find one last crumb, just a taste, that might somehow minimize what he recognizes as dread rushing through him, that old familiar feeling he thought he left behind.

  Right then one of those Asian cars you could fit in your pocket—a black Mazda Miata—appears in his rearview mirror and a second later shoots past him, swerving in front of the minivan while going ninety at least. Its tailpipe is drilled to make a sound like growling. “Fucker.”

  “Excuse me?”

  The car disappears around a bend, hugging it so tightly the tires leave a thin black strip of rubber on the road, and John makes his hand into a gun to shoot a bullet after it. “I was talking to that guy.”

  “I should hope so.”

  He tries to think of something more to say to her.

  For the past thirty minutes—through Albany, Corvallis—Linda has leaned against the door, her head turned away, as if determined to maintain a separate space. He can see her reflection in the window. Her eyes are narrowed, focused on the storm gathering ahead of them. The sky hardens into blackness, as if slowly mineralized.

  “Hey,” he says. When she does not respond he says, “Hey,” again, this time reaching out his hand, hesitantly touching her thigh.

  Their eyes lock in the window.

  “Hey,” he says. “It’s going to be fine. Seriously. Don’t worry so much. It’s going to be a great weekend. I’m really looking forward to it.”

  She does not respond except by raising her eyebrows a little higher on her forehead, as if they don’t quite believe him.

  At that moment he veers into the left lane to pass a semi. It is hauling a livestock trailer filled with a hundred panicky hogs. Through the ventilation holes John can see their snouts and shadows. When he is almost past the semi, its horn blares. Linda makes a gasping sound and John looks up to find the trucker looking down at them.

  He has a cardboard sign duct-taped to his door. “Show Me Your Hooters,” it reads. Above the sign, in the window, a big bearded man looks down on them. He wears a cap and in the shadow thrown by the brim of it his eyes appear as black hollows. A hand rises up and gives John and his wife a little wave. They continue like this for a few hundred yards, side by side, glancing between each other and the road, before John lays his foot on the gas and the minivan growls forward.

  John remembers a story his grandfather told him—about a storm. It was the worst Peoria, Illinois, ever saw. Balls of lightning rolled down chimneys and exploded in living rooms. Hailstones the size of softballs crashed through windows. Pigs flew. Salamanders writhed. Straight-line winds sucked fence posts from the ground, daggering them into houses, barns. Funnel clouds came down from the sky and vacuumed up the earth.

  On the outskirts of Peoria there was an underwear factory. The storm peeled off its roof like the lid to a tuna can. When the funnel clouds finally shrank and the winds died down and the sky lightened, everyone emerged from their basements to find the town turned inside out and garnished with panties.

  There were panties everywhere—hanging from tree branches, telephone poles, car antennas—everywhere. And the survivors could only shake their heads and rest their hands on their hips, their mouths set in tight thin lines that expressed at once their shock and amusement.

  The semi grows smaller in his rearview mirror and the storm grows larger before him, muttering and grumbling with thunder, darkening the air beneath it with skirts of rain, not close, but closer than before. Its clouds seem to ­ripple blackly and powerfully, like ocean swells.

  Sometimes Linda got in these moods.

  He would come home from work and find the lights off, a single candle lit in the living room. The orange glow of it would reveal her lying on the sofa, the pillows propped up behind her, a glass of Merlot in her hand. He would stand over her and she would seem barely able to turn her head, to lift her eyes to look at him, as though there were some invisible net draped over her body, holding her down. The kind, amused expression she normally wore would have melted away, replaced by the face of someone he only vaguely recognized. On her cheeks tears would have left behind a salty rime. On her lips, the dried blood of wine.

  One time her vibrator was lying on the coffee table, another time a butcher knife.

  He never knew what to say in these situations. Usually nothing. Usually he just shrugged off his suit jacket, knelt next to the couch, and petted her hair until she asked if he wanted to order a pizza. But not long ago—when was it?—sometime after the holidays, when the loneliness of winter had set in—he said, “You okay?”

  In response she moved her shoulders in a sort of shrug, as if to ease away some pain.

  And he put a hand to her cheek and said he didn’t know if this was what was bothering her, but if it was, she should know that he thought it was a good thing they never had children. That was what he told her. It’s probably for the best, he said.

  He tried to make his voice buoyant, but the word probably weighed it down. “Reason number one,” he said. “I just read this article in the Wall Street Journal, and you know what it said? It said that in twenty years, at the rate of inflation, it’s going to cost 200 grand to send a kid to college. Can you believe that? Think of all the money we’ve saved.” He held out his hand then as if they were being introduced for the first time. She looked at it, but didn’t take it. “And there’s nothing holding us back. You know how it is with all our friends. They can’t go on vacation. They can’t go out to dinner. They can’t, they can’t. For us, the sky’s the limit. We can do whatever we want to do and we can go wherever we want to go.”

  On her face the patterns of the wrinkles and the shadows revealed her sadness. “What have we done?” she said. “Where have we gone?”

  He almost said, “Depoe Bay,” but caught himself, recognizing that it was time to stop talking. Each of his words he understood as a hollow canister containing only absence.

  If they had looked into fertility treatments—if he had drunk less alcohol and eaten more vegetables—if she had angled her pelvis upwards, after he filled her with semen, letting it stew inside of her—if they had only tried a little harder and a li
ttle earlier—and if her fallopian tube hadn’t clogged up with a carnival strangeness, the kind of thing you see preserved in formaldehyde—then maybe the architecture of his life would feel more substantial, less the product of a faulty builder whose craftsmanship had constructed around their marriage a windowless room where they invariably ate dinner on TV trays while watching Entertainment Tonight, where they drank whiskey sours on Fridays and got their oil changed every three thousand miles and carefully studied the Crate&Barrel catalogue and went to see the latest Tom Hanks movie and wore sombrero-looking hats when gardening.

  He remembers what a friend of Linda’s once said to them: “You have a lovely home. Now all you need are some children to mess it up.” She had two boys, both of them red-faced, fat-legged toddlers who left their toys all over the yard and screamed when they didn’t get their way. At the time John had laughed good-naturedly at what she said, thinking she was jealous and he was lucky. Now, without the possibility of children, he feels like a man standing at the edge of an oceanic void, at the jumping-off place of his life, with nothing to tether him to this world.

  Now he and Linda huddle into their seats and say nothing. The sun moves in and out of the clouds. The trees to either side of the road vanish as they drive out of the forest and into pasture where cattle lick salt blocks and barns ­huddle against the windbreak of hills, and then past vineyards, and then alfalfa fields for ten miles, twenty, with the alfalfa swelling into trees and the trees closing in once more—like fingers—allowing only a thin strip of sky overhead that soon becomes clotted with blue-black clouds. Thunder rumbles. The air takes on a twilight dimness and John leans forward in his seat and clicks on his lights. They cast a colorless glow. A big burst of lighting comes, followed by thunder that sounds like a great chair dragged across the floor of the sky.

  “I’m sorry,” he says and she says, “I’m sorry too,” and he isn’t sure what she refers to, their bickering, their vacation, their marriage, all of it.

  The wind swells, groaning against the windshield. Trees nod back and forth, leaning toward the road, some of them bent nearly in half. A branch snaps and crashes to the road before them and John revs the engine and swerves onto the shoulder and back into his lane to avoid it. “Shit,” he keeps saying under his breath.

  A drizzle starts, dotting the windshield. The drizzle thickens into a rain, coming down in gray sheets the wipers can’t keep up with. And then the air blurs and thickens with swirling white as the hail begins. The world takes on a big rattle. In an instant everything grows as white as winter. He takes his foot off the gas and slows to forty, to thirty. The hailstones drum against the hood and the roof and the windshield, and he can feel the vibrations in his fingers—his fingers wrapped tightly around the wheel, fighting the wind and the uncertain surface of the road. Under the many-voiced roar of the hail he swears he can hear his heart beating—the deep-toned bu-bump of it like the notes drawn hurriedly from the center of a drum.

  He is only dimly aware of his wife. When the words “Maybe we should pull over” finally register, too much time has passed to acknowledge them. All of his attention is crushed down into the thirty feet of road before him. Every time lightning flashes, every hailstone seems to pause in its descent, looking like a white beaded curtain that a moment later crashes to the ground. He tries to blink away the lightning—its afterimage sticks to his eyes—but every few seconds, there is a brighter flash, a louder rumble.

  At first, between those hard blinks meant to bring his eyes back into focus, he isn’t sure what he sees in the near distance: red eyes, a black humpbacked silhouette that becomes not a monster, but taillights, the frame of a car. The Miata, he realizes, from earlier. It has slid off the road, into the ditch, coming to a rest against a tree.

  At first—he can’t help it—he feels a burning delight. In a life that has not turned out the way he expected, something has finally, in one violent instant, turned out the way he expected. The driver was going too fast and now he has paid for it. The sight of the car, its hood crumpled, makes John feel—for the first time in a long time—as if there is a certain logic to the universe. A comforting thought.

  There are branches littering the road and with tiny jerks of the wheel he dodges the minivan through them. His eyes rise again to study the Miata, now twenty yards ahead, and there, by the side of the road, he spots the driver. The man—in his late teens, early twenties—just a boy, really—watches their approach. Through the driving hail, John can see his hair is an unnatural shade of blond. He wears a black leather jacket and black baggy jeans. He has blood on his face, and the blood stands out brightly against all that white. He holds his hands above his head and scissors them back and forth. The minivan closes in on him steadily. There is a glittering intensity to his eyes that John recognizes: confidence. Even after wrecking his car, the boy stares at John with confidence, certain he will stop.

  And maybe this has something to do with why John hesitates a second—his foot rising off the accelerator, hovering over the brake—before trying to stop the minivan and finding out he can’t.

  “What are you doing?” Linda says.

  John continues past the boy and spies the tilted vision of him in the rearview mirror. The boy turns to follow them, his mouth a big black O, still waving his arms, now with a kind of frantic disbelief that John finds reassuring.

  “John?” his wife says. “John, what the hell are you doing?” There is a high urgent tone to her voice. “Stop. We’ve got to stop.”

  He says, “It’s not safe,” and it’s not, with the trees, blown by the wind, leaning dangerously close to the road, their limbs like thick arms swatting at them—but still, it would have only taken a second to stop, to throw open the door and allow the boy inside. “He’ll be fine.”

  She throws up her hands and lets them fall to her thighs with a slap. “He’ll be fine, it’s not safe? John?” The way she breathes—roughly through her nose—is a conversation in itself. I can’t believe you, she’s saying. He doesn’t look at her, but he knows she is looking long and hard at him. He can feel her eyes, as if they carry heat in them.

  “We’ve got to think of ourselves,” he says and hits the steering wheel to drive home his point or express his regret, he isn’t sure.

  “Yourself. That’s all you’ve ever thought about.”

  “I’m happy thinking about myself.”

  “Yeah, you’re happy.” She gives him a cold look that carries the weight of their marriage in it.

  “Listen,” he says. “I might not be the best person in the world, but I think I know a thing or two about life and making it in this world and . . .”

  Midsentence he turns to her and she meets his eyes ­easily, her stare ugly and penetrating. All of a sudden he cannot find any more words. In place of them he takes a deep breath that sends a cold wind whistling through the caves of his heart.

  Outside, hail rakes at the windshield like an endless series of fingernails trying to claw their way in, and he begins to feel he is a part of it, the storm, separate from the minivan and from his wife, the blood icing up in his veins like a November river, his mind a white blur.

  He tries to find distraction in the radio, clicking it on, and then, recognizing the song—“Sloop John B”—he turns it up. “Hey, this is from that record we used to play all the time. Remember?” Even as he white-knuckles his grip around the wheel and tries to negotiate a slick corner, he shakes his head back and forth and does a little dance in his seat.

  The music fills the minivan and he finds himself momentarily lost in the sound, the syncopated three-beat, five-beat tapping of a drum, the high innocent voices of the Beach Boys. He hears in this music a certain vibration of meaning, of notes that seem to carry color in them—bright yellows, pale blues—like the starfish hugging the bottom of the ocean.

  Then the radio cuts out. And the hail softens into freezing rain. Within a few minutes mittens of ice have formed around the wipers. He rolls down the window. Immediat
ely a cold wind fills the minivan. His eyes water when he reaches outside and stretches his arm around the windshield and in a desperate grab lifts the blade off the glass so that when it snaps back the ice shatters.

  When he seals shut the window, she says, “I can’t believe you did that. I can’t believe you just left him there.”

  John says nothing, only gives his head a little shake as if he can’t believe it either.

  “We need to stop,” she says. “Do you hear me? Or we’re going to be the ones on the side of the road.”

  “I know that, okay?” His voice has the high-pitched whine to it that he always tries, and fails, to suppress when he gets angry. “Just please, please, please shut up.”

  She touches her fingers to her neck, in that hollowed-out dip at the base of it, something she usually does before she cries. “We need to stop.”

  “Where? You show me a place to stop, I’ll stop.”

  As if on cue they turn a bend and in the distance spot an Amoco station. It is a long rectangular building with windows that run its length and reflect the brightness of the lighting in the sky. Before it there are four gas pumps, behind it a shed, and next to it an abandoned truck eaten up with rust and blanketed with a thick coat of moss, with hail clinging to the moss, like clotted cream.

  “Stop,” she says. “Please.”

  The slush in the road is calf deep. When he brings down his foot on the brake, the back tires kick sideways before finding traction. He hangs a slow right into the station and parks before its entrance and shuts off the engine and a second later the windshield ices over. They pull on their jackets and zip them to their necks and jump out of the minivan to race through the lashing rain. Every step is a sliding uncertainty. John holds his arms out for balance. He breathes heavily, not used to moving with any kind of speed, and his breath curls away from him in the wind.