Lark and Termite

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  Nonie clears our lunch plates and pours the last of Termite’s milkshake into a paper cup. Charlie has taken Termite to the rest-room. He says Termite is old enough to use the Men’s, and when he’s at Charlie’s that’s what he’ll do. I don’t think Termite cares, but he likes it when Charlie picks him up and carries him off with such matter-of-fact certainty. I see Termite in Charlie’s arms and think of Nick Tucci last night, reaching to take the tray from me with the evening and the alley soft behind him.

  “Charlie and Nick Tucci remind me of each other sometimes,” I tell Nonie. “Both dark haired and brawny, with furry arms.”

  Nonie laughs. “You make them sound like bears.”

  “They could be brothers,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “They’re totally different. One’s a hotheaded Italian, tough as nails and built like a fireplug, and the other is a six-foot, fifty-plus Irishman, afraid of his mother and balding. All they’ve got in common is that they grew up Catholic, they work dawn to dusk, longer in Charlie’s case, and they love you kids.”

  “And they love you,” I say.

  “I suppose,” she says, like it’s just dawned on her. Then she adds, “For all the good it does me.”

  I don’t know what good it does, but they really do love her, more, I think, than men love their wives. “They love us because they love you so much,” I tell her. It’s true. Nick looks up to Nonie, like she’s an older sister he adores, and Charlie depends on her for half of everything, even putting up with Gladdy “It’s like Nick and Charlie are family who don’t talk to one another. You make them family.”

  Nonie smiles. “Don’t let’s tell them.”

  Termite’s exiting the Men’s, slung in Charlie’s arms, crooning sounds. Tell them tell them tell them. He hears words, even soft ones, through walls. I don’t know how. It isn’t possible.

  Charlie puts Termite in the wagon. “The man’s in his cockpit,” Charlie says, like Termite’s piloting a Spitfire, wedged in tight in his cushioned seat, the sides of the wagon shoulder high. “You get on home now,” Charlie tells me.

  “Charlie, it’s not going to rain for hours. We’ll pick some wild-flowers, go by the rail yard.”

  Rail yard rail yard rail yard. I’m pulling the wagon out the door and Termite makes his sounds, like we’re bidding everyone a civilized good-bye.

  “I’ll be home by dark,” Nonie says. “You be there too.”

  “Absolutely,” I say. “You know how he feels about the river in the dark.”

  I’m joking, because Termite loves the river anytime, but I don’t hear Nonie’s answer. Main Street receives us with its usual afternoon sounds. Cars going by, the traffic light’s whir as it changes. I wave at Elise in the window of the Coffee-Stop and give Termite the rest of his milkshake in its paper cup. “Better drink it before it melts,” I tell him, and fix the straw so he’s got the end in his mouth. People who don’t know Termite get nervous around him. They look away, but everyone who does know him wants to give him something. The fact is, once they know he’s not the emergency he might appear to be, they find an excuse to be near him. He doesn’t demand anything or communicate in the usual ways, but he somehow includes them in the way he pays attention, in his stillness. It’s how people feel when they look at water big enough to calm them, a pond or a lake or a river. Or the ocean, of course. The first time I put my ear to a conch shell, it was as though I could finally hear the sound Termite lives in.

  He’s one reason I think about Florida. Taking Termite to the ocean has always seemed to me like taking one full space to another. The ocean is the biggest sound I could ever show him, bigger than rivers or trains. The other reason is the address on my mother’s boxes. Taking him to Florida would be like taking him to her. Even if she isn’t there, she must have been there once. Maybe with him, or even with me. And Florida is warm. In winter, Termite hardly gets out. He loves the feel and sound of snow, but I can’t leave him in it long. Nonie says we have to be careful of his lungs, of his breathing. She worries about pneumonia, even though Termite’s never had it. When he has a cold, you can hear him from across the room, a ragged purring sound. Nonie gets worried. She coats his chest and throat with Vicks VapoRub and fits a paper bag onto the spout of a boiling teakettle, and makes him sit with his head in the steam. She’ll stand right with him and rub his back in slow circles, tell him to breathe, breathe, as though that’s not exactly what he’s doing.

  People think Termite is delicate, but none of us kids ever thought so. I do what he needs, but I don’t worry about him. People could tease or neglect him, but I don’t let them. I don’t worry about germs or accidents or about him getting worse. The worst happened before he was even born, and he’s still here. In my book, he’s strong, strong as me or Nonie.

  Your book is a strange book, Nonie would say.

  The rail yard is quiet today. Something is different. There are almost no cars on the sidings. Just one engine sitting on the main track, with four boxcars linked behind it. Engines don’t usually stop in Winfield at all. They only idle and back up and slam forward to link onto cars stored here for pickup and transfer. This engine is dead stopped, like it’s been sitting here awhile. Then I see the engineer, standing to the side, and another man in the cab.

  “Termite,” I say softly. “There’s an engine on the track, and an engineer.”

  The engineer doesn’t see us. He’s looking at a pocket watch on a chain, just like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, but his uniform is dark, with piping down his jacket and cuffs and across his hat. The dark bill of the hat shades his face. He purses his lips as though the watch face is a serious matter.

  I walk right up to him, pulling the wagon. Termite knows tramps ride the trains, but not that men drive them. I want him to hear this engineer talk, hear him climb into the engine, drive it away. “Excuse me,” I say, “why is the yard so empty?”

  He looks at me, distracted. “Got some weather coming through, apparently. Everything’s shuttled south, out of the way. Not much stored at this siding now anyway.”

  “I’ve never seen it this empty,” I say.

  “Oh, this siding is slated for termination,” he says. “Not worth it to the railroad to repair the lines, especially on that bridge.” He nods in the direction of the river and the stone railroad bridge we glimpse through the trees. “Inside of three months, there won’t be a thing through here anymore, weather or no weather.”

  “My brother won’t like that,” I say, but Termite is silent. The engineer is facing away from us and doesn’t seem to notice Termite in the wagon. “When do you expect to pull out today?” It’s a sensible question, but the engineer doesn’t answer. I start to wonder if he’s a mirage, if it’s not true this train is stopped here, not true there won’t be any more trains. I make my voice a little more insistent. “Where do these cars go?” I ask. “I mean, where’s the end of the line?”

  Line, line, line, Termite says, each tone slow and pure and clear. The engineer registers mild surprise and looks behind me at Termite. He nods acknowledgment, man to man, like there’s nothing unusual about a boy in a deep wagon, eyes hard to the side and head tilted, fingers up and moving. He touches the watch in his pocket and turns toward the boxcars beside us. “These cars? The Long Islands switch off at Beckley and run east. The Chessies, now, they move straight south to Augusta, Georgia, and on to Jacksonville.”

  “You mean Florida?”

  “Surely. They’re loaded out of Fort Lauderdale and Miami. Cheaper to run them straight down there empty. Three, four days, depending.” He looks over at Termite. “To answer your question, Miami’s end of the line for the Chessies.”

  The other engineer calls down to him then, from the cab. Our business is concluded. I nod and step away as he touches his cap to me and climbs up into the cab. I feel foolish, asking about Florida; if you’re in Georgia going south you’d hardly change direction to go to any other Jacksonville. I’m walking away and Termite doesn’t protest. I�
��ve changed my mind. I don’t want him to feel this train pull away.

  It’s not far to the tunnel under the railroad bridge. We cover the distance fast, out of the rail yard into the cover of the woods, onto the broad dirt path through the trees. The path was a road once. Before the rail line, Nonie says, when freight moved by boat on the river. They widened an Indian trail that was already here, and horses hauled flatbeds of supplies and trade to a town we wouldn’t recognize now. A settlement, not a town, small and rough and new. There was someone like me in that place, and someone like Termite. There have always been people like us. And the river has been here too, for hundreds of years, for a thousand or tens of thousands. If I stood just here, I wonder how far back I would have to look to see the lines of the river change. The island is different. It’s temporary, a little hill in the river. Some say it’s earth layered year after year over a shelf on the river bottom. Others say it started as coal slag, mine refuse dumped illegally off the bridge at night. Companies skirting regulations before the deep mines shut down. Either way, the island is beautiful now. It gets green, then barren and snowy, like any other landscape, and buds out in the spring, though it’s no bigger than a city block. Sumac seedlings rooted by the water turn bright red in the autumn. The top of the island is naked grass, a green cone the scrub trees and bigger brush haven’t colonized.

  “Termite? We’ll just stay a little while, before the storm.”

  He hums at me in response, a quiet, tonal code that stops and starts. We move out of the cool of the tunnel onto the dark earth by the river. I pull the wagon up next to me and sit. I’m just beside Termite, our shoulders even. I don’t have to tell him we’re facing the water. He tilts his head to the side, and his eyes, like he’s sensing the river twice.

  The light is changing fast. The sky has gone mauve, and the colors on the island look bathed in yellow. The grass top of the little hill glows like a lit stage. That’s when I see the deer. They walk straight up into the light from the other side, three dark forms that move higher until they gain the summit and turn to scent the air. I see the shapes of their legs and long necks, their flanks. The top of the island is no bigger round than an exercise circle where you might walk horses, and the deer move across it, raising and lowering their heads as though to smell or hear what’s wrong. One, a young buck, has two-point antlers. They’re lit from behind, black as silhouettes. The sky has lowered and gone greener, and the air stirs as though charged. Suddenly one of the deer, the male, plunges down the side of the island as though pursued and leaps into the water. It swims powerfully toward us, legs pumping under the surface, head straining forward. Termite is silent, completely still, his eyes closed as though to listen harder. I don’t move or breathe. The deer is gaining, gaining, more than halfway across, when it suddenly turns and begins swimming just as forcefully back. I stand up then, cold to the tips of my fingers, as though an icy core of me has blinked awake. The deer moves away from us, pumping hard to gain the island again, as though sensing there’s no point coming here, to this shore, to the shelter of the tunnel or the high cover of the field. It won’t help.

  “A deer was swimming the river,” I tell Termite. “It must have smelled us. They smell people from a long way off.” I don’t know how though. There’s not a breath of air to carry a scent.

  Termite has clenched his fingers. I realize I’m holding the handle of the wagon just as tight. Now he opens his hands as though to stop my voice, blows with his breath, a long sigh, but there’s no plastic ribbon, no blue to move.

  I see the swimming deer clamber out of the water and crash frantically up the slope. There are three shapes again, but they stop moving. They’re still, looking downriver at what’s coming. The sky pulses dark blue behind them, veiled with cloud like a swaddled fist. One long jag of lightning opens through it and disappears. I don’t hear the train at first, then it blares its whistle, halfway across the bridge. The engineer can’t have seen us; maybe he’s signaling someone, somewhere. Such a short train ends before it starts. It disappears before I’ve even turned around and hauled the wagon up the slope. Then I bend down to Termite and put my eyes near his, our foreheads touching, where I know he can see me. “Everything is fine, Termite. We’ll go now, before the storm.”

  The storm. He says it once, and I pull him away through the tunnel, under the railroad bridge. The tunnel is dark as dusk inside, and humming. I didn’t use to hear it but I’ve learned to. It’s more a vibration than a sound, like a remnant the trains leave in the stones. The tunnel used to seem so vast to me, like a cave all us kids could live in, big because of the weight and fit of the stones, and the volume of space it seemed to hold above our heads. Now I see how fast a woman pulling a wagon moves through it toward home, into the vacant lot between the tracks and Polish Town.

  The lot is choked with weeds and flowers in summer, flowing waist high to the cracked pavement of Lumber Street and the leaning second-story porches of Polish Town. Nonie says Polish Town field was full of victory gardens during the war, neat and cultivated and fertilized, but the whole town was different then. The town has gone down, emptied out, but the soil of the field is still black and rich and dense. The weeds and wildflowers mix with lavender and dill and come back every year, tangled and fragrant. The field gets so high that the city mows the lot every August, to keep things from happening in the tall grass. Boys fight or drink here at night, fireflies blinking all around them in the dark, and lovers lie down where they can’t be seen. Mothers in Polish Town won’t let their girls near the field, but every summer there are some girls who don’t listen. Boys from all over Winfield come here to find them. The churchgoing Polish girls sit on their porches. Sometimes a boy from Dago Hill or even Country Club Road will court them and speak with their mothers and take them out of Polish Town. They’re mostly blond girls and their mothers are heavy, and they look at the field together and wait. The Queen Anne’s lace is shoulder high, white among purple joe-pye weed and bright pink echinacea.

  I want to pick flowers for Termite, a huge bunch to pile in the wagon, but I move fast through the tall grass. The blades part like a crowd. Termite moves his hands to feel them like a sharp sea across his fingers, and the wagon cuts a narrow swath. Most days the field is full of sounds. Bees and insects on the tall stalks buzz and click. The dragonflies and jumping hoppers do a kamikaze zing and flirl through our hair, past our ears. Not today. There’s silence. Everything alive is huddled at the roots of the plants, or burrowed into the earth a few protective inches.

  Thunder sounds high up as we walk into the alley beside the Tuccis’ house. It’s continual thunder, rumbling like muffled barrage, and a wind has picked up out of nowhere. Right away I see Stamble on Nonie’s front porch, waiting. He doesn’t see me. He probably can’t, if his eyes are as weak as Nonie says. He stands still in his dark suit, looking out at the street. He’s taken off his suit coat and hat and stands there in his shirtsleeves, cuffs buttoned tight and proper. He’s thin, so thin. His white shirt hangs off the sharp bones of his shoulders, and his sleeves blow back tight around his skinny arms. There’s no sun, I guess that’s why he doesn’t need the hat. His pale white hair is long, almost like a woman’s, long enough to blow and swirl back from his face and the steel frames of his glasses.

  I tell Termite someone is here from Social Services. I see that Stamble glows a little in the strange light, and I do, and Termite does. My white blouse, Termite’s T-shirt. The afternoon has closed down, gone purple, coaxed and sucked dark by the storm. Pale things look bright. Even the pale gray insulbrick shingles on Nonie’s house look bright, like the house is floating on a patch of black grass. Rain has started, but it’s a strange rain, blows of needling spray that stop and start.

  “Ah, there you are,” Stamble says, as though expecting us. “I’ve brought you something.”

  Then I see the wheelchair beside him. It’s smaller, child-sized, the wheels thinner and higher than the ones on the chair we keep in the closet. The seat is
a square cushion, like on a chair you might take to a beach. On the seat there’s a sheaf of wildflowers, long stemmed, bushy with grass blades, fresh enough they haven’t wilted. They seem to be the flowers I didn’t pick, and I feel so strange seeing them that I don’t say anything about the chair.

  He leans down near Termite. “You remember me, Termite. That’s your name? My name is Robert, Robert Stamble.”

  He puts the flowers in the wagon with Termite, like a gift, then touches the metal handles that come up behind the back of the chair, pushes a lever underneath with his foot. The chair folds up, the seat collapsed, and he pushes it with those handles to show it still rolls on its wheels, all skinny and compact.

  “It’s different from any wheelchair I’ve seen,” I tell him.

  He looks pleased. He’s different too. I wonder about him at Social Services, working in that warren of eight or nine desks in the main room. The gaggle of women I know by sight must disburse when he approaches a klatch of them at the water fountain. They consider Nonie uncooperative and difficult, Termite a terrible shame, and me a poor unfortunate. Maybe Stamble was assigned our case because no one else wanted it; he was new and had to take what they gave him. Stamble is strange, with his pale pink look and pressed suit and air of having appeared out of nowhere. Maybe he makes them uncomfortable, and they assigned him to us so they’d have an excuse to fire him or transfer him when he failed. Then again, maybe he’s not so incompetent. He’s brought us this wheelchair without Nonie signing a form or a voucher or writing up a request. We didn’t even make a request.

  Rain is whipping down fast, then hesitating. We can see it stop and start just beyond the metal awning of Nonie’s narrow front porch, and the wind gusts harder, moving the flowers in Termite’s lap.