Linda makes it through the door first and doesn’t hold it open for him. He catches it when it swings back, and with a grunt pushes through, into the dim light of the store. He stomps the ice from his shoes and leans against the wall and takes deep breaths and puts a hand to his chest and feels his heart, stopped up with white pockets of fat and awkwardly somersaulting at the top of his rib cage, but still pumping, by God. Another moment and he collects himself enough to take in his surroundings, a rack of T-shirts with eagles and wolves silk-screened across them. A display case of lacquered logs with clocks built into them. Grocery aisles crowded with candy and potato chips. There are antlers hanging from the walls, white-tipped, as sleek and sharp as knives. Behind the register hangs the largest set, like a tangled rack of bones, made not of bone but of dried blood vessels. Beneath them stands Linda, trying the phone on the counter and hanging it up with such force that John startles at the sound, a shriek escaping his mouth.
He looks around, worried someone might have heard, but there is no one. The store is empty, the attendant gone, perhaps at home, hurrying to close up his windows against the storm that gathered so suddenly in the sky.
At the storefront, with a good six feet between them, John and his wife stare out the windows. For a second the storm seems to die down, and John feels hopeful, wondering if this is it, the end—and then the wind puffs and groans and stirs to life once more. In the sky the clouds whirlpool, as if sucked upward into some cosmic plug hole.
“Not the worst I’ve ever seen,” John says, “but right up there.”
“Please. When have you ever seen—” She says something else, but thunder follows lightning and takes away her voice.
In a rush the rain hardens into hail. It comes down heavily, seeming to erupt from every inch of the sky, filling the world and whitening it, pouring down in an endless curtain so that the air seems to contain more ice than air.
John listens to the drumming against the roof, the windows, the asphalt, a sound he can feel as much as hear, the sort of rattle that might rise up among a thousand snakes. The hail makes dents, like tiny mouths, on the hood of his van.
Beside him Linda wraps her arms against her chest, as if hugging herself, and stares intently into the storm. “Something’s coming,” she says.
Outside, through the rattle of hail, John can hear things crashing about, knocked against the side of the store by the terrible wind. And under this he can hear a humming that grows steadily louder, an engine. Through the ragged holes glimpsed between the falling hailstones, he sees a light flare, then disappear, then flare again. These are hazard lights, blinking a warning against any fast-moving cars. They belong to a semi. It crawls along at no more than ten miles per hour. Slush fans out from beneath its tires when it pulls off the highway and into the parking lot.
John can hear the semi moan as it downshifts, and its brakes shriek in complaint when it finally comes to a halt at the edge of the parking lot. And there it idles. The engine seems to growl, waiting for him.
The semi is carrying a load of hogs to slaughter. When the lightning flares John can see them through the ventilation holes—their pink snouts, their shifting bodies—and then the door swings open.
There is the driver—an enormous body, nearly as wide as it is tall, dressed entirely in denim—climbing out of the semi cabin. A beard curls around his jaw. His cap perches high on his head.
From behind him comes another. Dreamily—and then in a panic—John recognizes the peroxide hair, the black leather jacket, the boy. He can feel his muscles gathering around his spine like a fist around a knife. There is such tightness in his posture he thinks he might break. “Oh no.”
“Oh, thank God,” Linda says. And then, concern creeping into her voice: “What’s the matter with him? Something’s the matter.”
The boy, with a hand to his stomach, seems to fight a doubled-over posture. The truck driver loops an arm around his shoulder, helping to redistribute his weight, and together they limp toward the store, wading through the several inches of hail that has accumulated. Pain has replaced the confident look on the boy’s face. He gnashes his teeth and every other step he closes his eyes for a long second, moving slowly through the hail, the stones popping off his skin and leaving red marks.
When Linda opens the door for them, the wind lifts the hair from John’s scalp.
In the middle of the store, in the center of the aisle, they stand like this—John, Linda, and the truck driver—the three of them making a half-circle around the boy. The boy lies on the linoleum floor, his head propped up by a bag of rock salt. Linda hunches over, resting her hands on her knees, as if she wants to crouch next to him and comb her fingers through his hair, but can’t quite bring herself to do it. “We’ve got to help him,” she says. “Poor thing.”
John notices the trucker looking steadily at Linda. He is a sun-yellowed man. His beard has a pubic quality to it. The sight of him studying Linda makes John feel a little disgusted and jealous at once. When he clears his throat, both of them swivel their heads in his direction and wait for him to say something. This is what he comes up with: “I don’t suppose you have a cell, do you?”
The trucker reaches into his breast pocket and pulls from it not a phone but a pack of Marlboros. He shakes out a cigarette and brings it to his lips and smiles around it, the smile aimed at Linda. “Do I look like the type would own a cell phone?”
John recognizes the look she gives the trucker—a long quizzical look, as if feeling him over with an invisible antenna—trying to figure him out. “No?”
The cigarette bobs in his mouth when he says, “Sorry.”
The center aisle leads to a door bearing a sign that reads STAFF. The trucker goes to it and tries the knob. It opens and he moves through the doorway, disappearing into a rectangle of shadow, reappearing a moment later. “It’s safer back here.” His voice is like gravel. “You should come on back here. In case those windows go.”
The boy must have broken his nose against the air bag. It seems to hang on him crookedly. A fan of dried blood spreads across the bottom half of his face, the red shadow of a beard. He has his eyes closed and John and Linda hover over him another minute before following the trucker.
When they peer in the doorway they find a Coleman lantern burning in the center of a Formica table. On the walls, illuminated by the dim orange light, hang trophy fish and posters of women in thong bikinis. Cigarette butts lay everywhere, their ash smudged blackly into the floor. A pile of cracked car batteries. Newspapers. In the corner, a mop clotted with chewing gum and candy wrappers. The ancient smell of mold rises from it.
Linda brings her hand to her nose, giving her voice a hollow quality, when she asks, “What are we going to do?”
The trucker drags an aluminum chair from the table and sits and indicates that they should do the same. “Take a load off.”
“What about the boy,” Linda says. “Shouldn’t you do something?” A temporary truce, she looks to John for help, and he gives it, saying, “We really ought to do something.”
“What else is there for him to do but rest? I’m no doctor. You think of something to do, do it.”
She brings a thumb to her mouth and peels away a hangnail and seems to lose with it her apprehension. There is a cupboard in the corner and she fetches from it a bowl. She fills it with warm water and throws a washrag over her shoulder and returns to the center aisle, with John trailing behind her.
On her knees, next to the boy, she dampens the washrag and wrings it out and runs it across his forehead, his cheek, his chin, with such gentleness, wiping away the blood the way you would peel an orange, hoping not to break the skin. “There,” she says when she dabs the last bit of blood from his chin. “Better?”
The boy has his eyes open and he gives her a small smile that bends into a grimace. “My ribs hurt,” he says and clutches his chest with both hands.
John leans in and over her shoulder says, “He says his ribs hurt.”
She stiffens, but do
esn’t turn to look at him. “I know what he said. Don’t tell me what he said. I’m right here.” Her voice grows immediately kinder when she addresses the boy. “I’m going to lift up your shirt, okay? Just to see.” John recognizes the tone as the tone she uses when her fifth-graders occasionally call their home, confused by homework.
She parts his leather jacket and peels back his T-shirt and gives a gasp. The right side of his chest looks like an arthritic fist, the bones pressing in knuckley bulges against his skin with a brownish gray color in between them. The boy looks down at the damage, then up at them, his face broken up by pockets of shadow and light.
The trucker appears in the doorway, leaning against its frame. Smoke surrounds his words. “I seen this happen before,” the trucker says, shaking the red cherry of his cigarette at them. “The steering wheel punched him.” He takes the last drag off his cigarette, burning it down to the filter, then lifts his boot to stub out the ash out its sole. “This ain’t good,” he says and continues to say under his breath. “No. Not good.”
Linda says, “Will you please be quiet?”
The trucker takes off his hat and looks into the dark mouth of it before returning it to his head. “Bite my head off.”
The way John is standing apart from everyone with his legs shoulder-length apart and his arms hanging stiffly at his side, he must look like a metal swivel rack crowded with beef jerky, maybe a pyramid of soda, part of the store. His heart feels as if it is turning over in his chest, and right then, maybe the boy hears it because he raises his head and looks at him. His expression hardens.
“You’re the one drove by, left me standing there.”
John says nothing. There is a heavy silence broken by thunder.
Five minutes later, Linda is telling John in a hushed, pressing voice that they need to do something, they need to get the boy to the nearest hospital.
“What can I do?” His voice comes out as an almost stutter, a beat between each word. “We’re in the middle of nowhere—in the middle of a storm—and you want me to take him back out there? In that?” He gestures to the window. “We’ll both end up dead.”
She looks ill. “I should have known better than to even ask.”
He hates how she stares at him—the black patches under her eyes like runny mascara—how she thinks she knows him so well. He is older than her. He has done plenty of things she hasn’t been a part of, wild gutsy things. He used to run—he placed 515th in the Seattle marathon. When he was in high school he gutted a deer in the middle of a snowstorm. Another time, from the roof of his apartment building, he overturned a garbage can full of water on his landlord, five stories below. Or how about in college, when he and his friends took a road trip—down through California—into Mexico? There he lost his virginity to a whore with purple eye shadow. At the hotel, out on the balcony, he pushed her up against the railing and seized her wet crotch with his hand. They fucked right there, right in the open, where anybody could have seen them.
This was all before Linda knew him. What they had become together seemed separate from that, almost like an intrusion. Remembering how he was before makes him feel a little more alive, somehow.
He asks what she wants to do.
“I want to scream,” she says.
He says he knows the feeling.
John is standing at the front of the store, looking out the window. Now and then the glass seems to wobble against the force of the wind, shuddering like a thin sheath of ice beneath a mad current.
The trucker lights another cigarette. “Hey,” he says and blows a thin jet of smoke. “You better get back from there. That window is liable to go.”
John regards the trucker before returning his attention to the window, then holds up his hand, like a dare, and lays it on the glass.
Right then the wind rises up as it never has before, with a moan. The hail swirls in hypnotic designs and all around them the trees dance. A soft violet light surrounds anything metal—the minivan, the semi, the gas pumps, even John’s wedding band—and his hair rises on end. Little balls of electricity dance between the branches of the trees and the air has a sparkling quality to it, like what sunlight does to river water. The sparkles focus into a whip of lightning that uncurls from the sky and takes hold of a nearby tree.
Instant daylight.
A white vein runs down the tree’s middle and turns into yellow fire and the thunder explodes, louder than the force of ten cannons fired at once, the noise bottoming out into a rumble that gets hushed away by a blast of wind.
There is a far-off sound—a wet snap—like a broken bone—and a branch from the tree missiles through the air, striking the parking lot, skipping once before settling into the slush and skating toward the store, the front door. With a crash the glass there opens up into a knee-high hole with a broken branch jutting through it, already oozing sap.
John takes his hand off the window and looks at it in disbelief, like a pistol accidentally fired. It’s just an ordinary hand, with soft pink palms, a dark stripe of hair along the knuckles, certainly not capable of anything remarkable. He puts it in his pocket and looks at the trucker, who still leans in the doorway and calls out in a teasing voice, “Told you so.”
He is so certain of himself. How can he be, with his frayed jeans and his fingernails carrying crescents of dirt beneath them? Even at this distance, ten yards away, beneath his beard a smile is evident. His lips are unnaturally red, the red of a poisoned apple. John imagines being bitten by him. His throat constricting, his heart seizing up with poison, and after his last breath stills, maybe his face will be transfixed with a final look of peace unavailable to him now.
The boy is coughing—big damp coughs that rattle around in his lungs and make him draw his knees against his chest. John can hear them and he can hear the wind rushing through the trees and crying through the hole in the door and rustling the magazines in the magazine rack.
The boy is coughing and John has his back to him, his hands jammed in his pockets. He watches, curiously, as the dark round shape of a raccoon emerges from the nearby woods, waddles across the parking lot, and squeezes through the hole in the door, lured to the warmth like people lured to whatever they’re lured to. It shakes the dampness from its fur and stands on its hind legs and sniffs the air before scurrying down the candy aisle, disappearing into some dark corner of the store. No one seeks it out with a broom, not with the storm as their common enemy.
The boy is coughing and finally John turns to look, and when he does, he observes his reflection in the glass doors of the soda cooler. It never fails to surprise him. In his head he still looks as he looked in college: flat-bellied, square-jawed, his muscles tight and surging beneath his skin, all the arrogance in the world suggested in his expression, the way his mouth always hiked up on one side. Not anymore. That John is buried beneath a mask of fat that he wouldn’t mind carving off with a penknife. He looks back and forth between the boy and his reflection, momentarily unbalanced, realizing some resemblance between them.
The boy coughs and some blood dribbles down his chin and his tongue darts out to taste it and when he coughs again John feels the blood rattling in his own chest. He takes off his jacket and goes over to the boy and lays it over him. After all these minutes of feeling powerlessness, it feels good to find something he can do to help.
He tries to think of what to say. “We’re going to get you help,” he decides on.
The boy has the gray kind of blue eyes that seem forever weighed down with sadness. He turns his head to the window, with the hail streaking down it, and says, “Now he wants to help.”
John flips through magazines without really reading them while the hail outside softens into rain, then hardens to hail once more. Everything turns bright—followed by a darkness that eases into dimness once again—and thirty seconds later sounds a thunderclap that makes him duck his head a little.
In the silence that follows the rattling boom, he looks around self-consciously to see if anyone sa
w him flinch. From the end of the aisle, as still as a statue, stands the trucker. He is looking at Linda. Linda is hunched over the boy. Her back is arched and her bottom is provocatively raised. John knows what is going on inside the trucker’s head, as if a window revealed it: Linda unclothed, his thumbs hooked inside her buttocks, parting them so that he might slide inside of her easily.
John can see this clearly—can hear the moan escaping both their mouths—as if it were happening in front of him. And, as strange as it seems, the possibility of it thrills him: someone might want what is his.
A kind of caffeinated excitement works through his veins. He can feel an erection pressing against his pants. And then something else, a jolt. He grabs his arm, pained by what feels like the lingering effects of lightning: small twinges of electricity running up and down his veins. This isn’t the first time this has happened, so he doesn’t feel particularly alarmed. He walks around the store until he locates the shelf crowded with aspirin and pops open a bottle of Bayer. He punches through the foil seal and rattles the pills out in his palm and dry-chews them down to a bitter paste and listens to the murmur of the hail, rising and falling in gusts, like the murmur of surf, and he tries to let the sound take him away from here.
But there is a torn-open feeling in the place just above his stomach. It makes him grab desperately for a nearby shelf. He grips its metal as tightly as the pain that clutches his torso. He shuts his eyes with such force that fireworks seem to explode across the inside of his eyelids, and when he opens them again, the white and red lights linger in his vision and play across the faces of his wife and the trucker and the boy, all of them a few paces away, watching him.
“What’s your problem?” his wife asks. There is wariness in her eyes and then concern. She takes a few hesitant steps toward him. “Are you okay?”
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