He had her try out for the copy desk. What she never told Jackie: she flunked her grammar test. Not that she cared back then. Who wants to line-edit punctuation in a corner desk? But it would have been something.
She started trying to get pregnant. And waiting tables at The Pad Rat. She decided her love for Kelly was big enough. Somehow, she did the math wrong. Never got the right parts of life to add up.
The woman reporter on the ten o’clock news is no more than twenty-five. Twenty-seven, tops. She’s got a great voice and she’s pretty, even with those bangs. Susan sinks deeper into Dad’s old floral couch. It smells of dog hair and must. The man did not buy one new thing his entire life.
“I’m going to bed,” Jackie says, leaning her head into the room. She looks so much like their mom—same dark eyes, same dark hair and tall, lean frame. Her shoulders round forward: a body made for work, for bending toward the future.
“Aren’t you going to bed?”
“No, I want to watch this.”
“Looks fascinating.” Jackie sets her notebook on the couch, picks up one of the pillows, and beats on it, dust floating into the room.
“No really, it is. Beetles are killing the pine trees in the Rockies. Tens of millions of beetles. They’re inside the bark, tunneling in there, having babies that hatch and mature. Mass tree death, it’s called. Pesticides don’t help. Nothing can stop it.”
“Did you call Kelly?” Jackie picks up another pillow and gets to work.
“The trees turn red when the beetles finally kill them. An entire forest of red. That’s a good story.”
Jackie sits down. Susan should say something else. Keep the train in the station.
“You promised you’d call him,” says Jackie.
“He was out on a rig.”
If she’d called, he would’ve been out, so this isn’t a lie, not really.
“Why don’t you call him now?”
“I’m watching this.”
“You should file. He owes you something.”
“Kelly doesn’t have any money.”
He used to say she was the kind of woman he’d want around in wartime. Darlin’, you can make ten dollars last a week.
“I’m sure he has enough money for drinks.”
“Yeah, well.”
Her hand taps the edge of the couch as if she were sending Morse code. He kicked the car door when she drove away. Three dots. Three dashes. Three dots.
“I bet you could settle out of court; it would make you feel better to just be done with it once and for all.”
“You don’t get it.”
“What’s there to get, honey? That guy sucks.”
“Forget it. I’m just tired.”
Susan lies down on the couch and closes her eyes. She can feel Jackie standing there staring at her.
When she hears Jackie’s footfalls down the hall, away, Susan opens Jackie’s notebook and flips to this week. Find come-along, Susie exercise, Mesa Bank 10 am. All of those plans in pen, like something that will keep her little sister safe, like proof that she’s in charge of her life.
That night, she lies in bed, under the quilt Granny made. Tired. Ready already. The sheep jump over the moon. Or is it over the hay? And really they leap, not jump. The sheep leap over the moon. The cow ran away with the spoon. She scowls in the dark. The cows need her. But Jackie thinks Susan can’t do anything. That guy sucks.
Kelly’s skin tasted like the ocean. The salt made her think she knew him. Dunbars go in for hard work, for sweat. The first month after they met, he fixed her truck and the hinge that never had worked in the bathroom, and he patched her bike tire. His job on the rig had taken him everywhere. She’d never met anyone who’d seen what he’d seen. He would sit back in his chair and grin, and then he’d launch his deep voice and tell her all about it—gators in Florida, caves in Alaska, markets in Saudi Arabia. She got hooked, on his stories and his deep voice. He knew something about everything. The sex was better than she’d figured possible. He was more handsome than Camila’s Ray. More worldly than Dad. More wild than a pack of Jackie’s boyfriends. He was meaner than all of them too, but she didn’t know that then.
She sits up in the dark and finds the Walkman on her bedside table, the tape Jackie brought her from the library already inside.
Imagine yourself in a sun-dappled forest. The woman’s voice is slow, stoned-sounding. It is a cool spring evening. You feel very safe and secure as you stroll through this quiet wooded area. There are cracks in the ceiling. She waits for the plaster to break. To dust her with asbestos. Take a deep, cleansing breath. She wasn’t a good daughter. She did a bad job with Dad at the end. Relax your shoulders and jaw. She used to do so much: the book club with the other roughneck wives, blueberry pie for sick neighbors, tutoring kids at the elementary school. A feeling of calm fills you, as though nothing matters. People liked her for the things she did. The doing is what mattered, what matters. Let your thoughts go. Let your mind float among the leaves. She needs a plan. But what can she do? How do you do? Don’t. You feel yourself relaxing more and more with each gentle and easy breath. Kelly said: I don’t really see you as a magazine-style writer. Kelly said: don’t act like a nerd. Kelly said: Your face looks funny with glasses on. You’re not exactly Lois Lane. You aren’t saving anyone with that article. You need to get a real job. Don’t use those ten-dollar words around me. No one’s ever going to love you as much as I do. I can’t believe I wasted two minutes with you, let alone seven years. You will not allow any outside sounds to interfere with your relaxation. Only the sound of my voice is important now. This lady on the tape with the irritating slow voice: this is her career. People—other people, like Susan, but different enough—must find this helpful. Jackie says it should be helpful.
She flips the tape eleven times before dawn. She holds her dad’s old watch to her ear, listens to its ceaseless ticking. As the sky turns white, she slips out of bed and into the hall, her feet moving her forward as if they belonged to someone else, someone with something to do.
3
THE DOORBELL SOUNDS ITS two notes as Ray Stark walks into the diner. There’s a hot plate of cakes set down on a Formica table. On a wooden peg in the back is his mug, his name written in blue. Today will be different. Today Ray will get coffee, see people, start the day like he used to, start the day right.
He slides into a booth beside Dick Birk. On the wall above them is a stag head, its antlers a six-foot span, and beneath that a framed picture of President Bush, a hierarchy that strikes Ray as fitting. Across from him, Jim Boyce and Jon Amick—guys he’s known his whole life—nod at him, grunt hello, and never drop the thread of talk. The three of them hunch over coffee as if it were fire, all of them in wool shirts, their hands red and rough from ranch work.
“You see that storm blowing in from Utah?” Amick says, while Molly fills Ray’s mug. “That red dirt’ll cut that snowpack quicker than salt. Last thing we need.”
“Farm Service agent out of Parachute says he’s got a plan if there’s another drought year, but you know how that goes.” Boyce rolls his blue eyes and slaps the table in the same way his dad always did. “Another big government solution.”
“Shit. I ain’t ever known you to turn down cash on the dollar.”
“With the prices we’re getting on steers, my bank book’s in a coma.”
The conversation around him bends to stock prices and last night’s hockey game, and Ray tries to take comfort in it, to care about it. He waits for it to mean something, to touch him somehow. He stares at the badge on his uniform and at his hands, which haven’t seen a hard day’s work in months.
“You look like crap, Stark. You doing OK, bud?” Amick glances at the other guys, all of them awkward in their concern.
“Sure, sure I’m all right.” Ray thinks about the newspaper sitting in the driver’s seat of the patrol car, open, like it has been every day of the past five months he’s been home, to the page in the back where they list the casualties.
“How’s your family?”
“Oh, you know. The same.” Everyone laughs at that and Ray tries to join in but he can’t say he gets it, not really. Outside the wide glass windows, the clouds are thick enough to suffocate the sky. Maria Richardson, pastor’s kid, walks by smoking a cigarette, her red winter coat pulling at her belly. The surprise in him dies as quickly as it was born: another one pregnant and stuck here. His wife, Camila, looked like her once. Camila was her once.
Before he went away, before the war, Ray was like Amick and Boyce. He set his clock by contra dancing at the grange in the winter. Farm supply auctions in fall. Calving in spring. Rodeo in summer. Good enough whiskey for sale at the Skyline, every night but Sunday. Good enough coffee every morning at the diner.
Ray stares at the mug in his hands. Maria Richardson’s life is now set: a debt run up, and she hasn’t even spent a dollar. He tries and fails to not think about certain things. His hands tremble. He clenches a fist in his lap, trying to keep it steady, but it’s no good.
“I got to get back to it, guys.” He stands up too suddenly, his coffee spilling across the table. “Sorry about that.”
“Nothing to worry over.” Boyce smiles and mops up the mess with his sleeve. “You’re always rushing off these days. Stay awhile. This town ain’t got so many problems.”
“Not everyone is lucky as you.” He throws a wrinkled dollar and a few coins on the table.
As Ray walks outside into the slop snow, Shelly Stewart, her orange face hard, waves him over from across the street. “Hey Ray, come here and give me a hand.” Beside her, blocking the driveway into Guns Flowers & Tanning, is a shiny new Dodge Durango and an oil-and-gas guy with all the trimmings: wraparound sunglasses, new down coat, baseball cap with a corporate decal, cell phone glued to his ear. Shelly has her hands on her hips. “This joker is blocking things. Tell him how things work here, Ray.”
Ray stays on the opposite side of the street. He tells the guy to go ahead and move. The guy raises his finger as if to say, You here in this shitty two-block-main-street town aren’t worth my time. Ray nods. Nothing to be done. He shrugs at Shelly, at her confused expression, and gets in his car.
He drives two blocks, through the four-way stop in the middle of town, which is also the edge of town. Silt, named for its soil, wasn’t ever good for growing much besides clover. It never tried to be more than that. It took pride in its library and what it went without: stoplights, gangs, big-box stores. But it’s different now. A stupid stoplight sits at the end of Grand Avenue; a new restaurant with organic lettuce and something called artisan pizza has gone in. The rental market is too tight for anyone born here, the oil and gas people having snapped up anything decent. Domestic disputes are on the daily. There’s more DUIs and meth labs than he’s ever seen.
Ray crosses the overpass above the highway and parks at the empty lot behind the new Holiday Inn. Drill rigs rising seven stories into the sky dot the craggy edges of mesas and the wide valley to the west. Miles of new roads crisscross the land around him, connecting hundreds of dirt pads littered with tanks and wells and pipes, scars in the green sloping hillsides.
From here, the Colorado River, the only thing unchanged, shines the color of used nickels and dimes. A hawk circles above the cottonwoods in a long low dip. The willows on the bank are redding up. The ice has started to crack into thin sheets that couldn’t hold a man. When it rains, tomorrow or next week, the creek will swell and turn the color of shit. Up in the ranches, brown water will fill irrigation ditches and flood fields. This is the way of spring. It has always been something to count on.
He finds his cell phone, another thing he never wanted, and calls his wife.
“Hey, honey.”
“What’s going on? Lilly, don’t touch that.”
“I just thought I’d check in.”
“Lilly, I’m serious. Sorry, she’s making me crazy.”
“We eating at your mom’s tonight?” In the eleven years he’s been with Camila, he’s never found a foothold in her family. They all speak Spanish over each other, one word he can’t catch crashing into the next. They are good people. They help out all the time, especially when he was gone. They call him Raimundo and tell him they love him, but Camila’s mom doesn’t let down around him, like he’s still in trouble for knocking up her brilliant, going-places teenage daughter.
“I told you this morning, I have a PTA thing tonight so we’re eating early.” A slight Mexican accent laces Camila’s speech. “You know family dinner is important to me, Ray. I don’t know why it’s not important to you too. I know you want the girls to get used to you again.”
“Of course it’s important to me, Camila.”
Ray sighs. When Camila first came to Silt, just her and her little brother living above her uncle’s restaurant, she’d learned to speak English by watching The Cosby Show, Family Ties, and Andy Griffith reruns. Her idea of what makes an American family are better suited for a laugh track and a Hollywood screenwriter than for the rise and fall of actual life. No one ever wrote a television show about immigrants or teenage pregnancy.
“Did you know Maria Richardson is pregnant?”
“Of course. Everyone knows that. Lilly, stop it. You’re going to end up with gum in your hair.”
“Since when is she allowed to have gum?”
“Dinner is five thirty. Don’t be late again.”
“I better go, babe. It’s real busy today.”
He takes a long pull on the flask. The hawk arcs above the river, where water pools and stills behind a large boulder. He turns up the volume on Straight Outta Compton and tries to feel as brave as the music Wilson had loved. The liquor does what it is made for. He keeps drinking until there’s nothing left. He starts up the car and drives the half-mile onto the freeway, the single exit for Silt a blur quickly becoming lost in the rearview.
A doll with one eye missing named Jenny Fox, a teddy bear, a rubber duck, three books, and a water bottle sit on the bed that night between Lilly and Ray. Across the room, under a Cinderella poster, Monica stares at a book while wearing headphones. If a tornado hit, he isn’t sure he’d have time to pull them both into the closet. If there was a fire, he could throw the lamp through the window and Monica could pass Lilly down to him. He stares at Monica’s arm, wondering if she’s strong enough to lift herself onto the windowsill.
“Read this one, Daddy.” Lilly, her dark curls falling into his face, puts a book in his lap. He touches her hair to remind himself that everything is fine. For now.
“We just did that one, honey.”
“Again.” In the time he was away, she grew to be just like her mama.
“OK, sweetheart.”
They have been at this going-to-bed business for more than a half an hour. All the nights he missed bedtime don’t suddenly come back if he lets her stay up; Camila keeps telling him that. She would say that he’s spoiling them. But with his kids, and only with his kids, does he have moments of peace. There is heartbreaking joy or boredom, usually both at once.
“Daddy.” She points to the corner of the small room. “There’s a spider over there. I think I better sleep in your bed.”
On his knees, he checks under the bed, a toy graveyard, and behind her small chair. He gets back into bed and checks behind Lilly’s ear.
“That tickles.”
“No spider anywhere.” He kisses her on both cheeks. “You’re safe, Lil.”
“When are you going away?”
His own dad had been an outfitter and had been gone a lot: fly fishing in the summer, elk in the fall, big game in Alaska in the spring. Until the season he never came back, sending only the random postcard, until even those stopped. When Monica was born, that first night she’d slept on his chest, he’d promised himself it’d be different. He’d be different.
“I’m not going away, honey. Not ever again.”
“Someday I’m going to go to Africa and marry a zebra named Tootsie. You can come too.”
“I cou
ldn’t miss that.”
Cold air seeps through the window near Monica’s bed, the window he put in. He piles another blanket on top of her. “Squeeze squash love.” He hands her a flashlight from the shelf and winks. “Our secret, OK? But don’t read all night. You got school tomorrow.”
He stands outside the shut door and listens to their breathing. It gives him the same feeling he used to get watching the cows feed at his gramps’s place. Like he can let down for a minute. Like everything’s OK in the world.
He goes to the kitchen and pours himself some JD and he stands there, alone in the small dining room he has been buying from the bank every month for seven years. A car passes outside on the county road. Someone’s dog barks. Wind in the poplars. The clanking chain from the swing set he hauled home from Shorty’s yard sale. Then there is nothing again. He takes a long sip.
He looks out the sliding glass window and sees himself, a man of average build and average height who wears clothes his wife bought for him at Walmart, who looks older than he used to, whose scars are all on the inside.
“Fuck.” He’s not sure if he says it out loud.
4
IN THE AFTERNOON JACKIE walks down the ditch road from the stack yard through snow and mud. The water runs thick as creamed coffee and the sun cuts a slant of light that burns off the cold. Bits of hay cling to her wool sweater and jeans. She is trying to remember the terminology for efferent and afferent neurons—which ones exit the brain and spinal cord, which approach, and not that it matters today or any day soon, but it bothers her, this forgetting of something she once knew solid. Grief, the great mind slayer.
As she approaches the house, she sees a man at the gate and as the features of his smiling face become familiar, she stops in surprise. When he waves, she raises her hand. She sees that there is no way to get out of this and walks toward him. His dark hair, long in high school, is cut short, clean cut. Gone is any trace of the guy with the penchant for tie-dyes and Mexican ponchos. He’s wearing a blue button-down, open at the collar, tucked into jeans, sunglasses on a sports leash around his neck. These are not clothes meant for hard work, which is a sign that perhaps little has changed.
Kickdown Page 2