Into the Sun

by Deni Ellis Béchard

  Clay had positioned himself to watch arriving cars. He instantly knew which one it was: a jade-green station wagon with no sign of make or model, riding low on its shocks like an alligator on a river of asphalt. The fenders were rusted above the wheel wells, the ragged edges resembling bloody teeth. The body had been repainted so often that scrapes and weathering revealed the multicolored striations of a sucked candy cane.

  While the flea market regulars plodded among the heaped junk, the man who got out of the station wagon stalked between tables, swiveling at the hips with the poise of a boxer. He was taller than everyone else, slightly bowlegged, in a black T-shirt and new jeans. His forearms and biceps were veiny, his chest hollowed like that of a man trying to puff up his back, and his shoulders made Clay wince: their fronts dug in, eroded, his strength worked beyond its limits.

  Clay walked toward him. His father kept lifting his head, squinting around, maybe losing his sight or no longer accustomed to seeing into the distance. Gray flecked his cropped black hair, but he had the same carved goatee and mustache.

  Dad, Clay said.

  His father stood before a booth of Elvis statues and clocks, and he turned, his arms raised as if to hug or make fists, but the hands stayed open.

  Clay? His bloodshot eyes rolled down and back up. Goddamn, son. You’ve grown into a man. I was thinking about you all the way.

  Clay couldn’t speak, his throat tight, a line of pain at his sternum. His father took his shoulders in hands big enough to cover them and squeezed the way Clay, as a child, had imagined giants accidentally crushed humans — the grip that of someone who hadn’t touched another person tenderly in over a decade.

  Son, I’m sorry about that time.

  It’s okay. I wish we’d gotten away.

  His father bit his bottom lip, his two front teeth yellower than the rest.

  We were so close, he said.

  You did a good job. I wanted to go with you.

  Well, his father said, I have some work in Maine. I got permission to leave Boston and head up there. I was thinking maybe you’d want to come.

  That could be okay, Clay said, needing to think this through. He stood at the table of Elvis paraphernalia. Its owner had lowered his head, showing only a puff of gray hair as he unscrewed the back of an Elvis clock on his knees.

  If you want one of these, his father said, I’ll work out a deal. I got a little money.

  Nah. It’s okay. I already have a clock.

  Well, you’re a man now. You can come with me if you want. I’d like to know you.

  I got to think about it.

  His father said nothing. The raised muscles and veins in his neck gave the impression he hadn’t slept in years. He cleared his throat.

  How’s Elle? he asked hoarsely.

  Same as always.

  Always will be. That’s what I loved about her. She was just this thing on her own. They all said I forced her. You could never force that woman to do nothing.

  His father’s gaze was distracted, aimed at the Elvis vendor, who glanced up nervously.

  Anyway, he said, and seemed to come to. I have three days before I have to check in with parole up in Maine. I shouldn’t be here.

  He scanned the crowd with the look of someone expecting a problem, a setup maybe. No — this was in their blood: an almost predatory scrutiny of their surroundings.

  You’ve never met my folks, he said. They’re good people. They had some hard times when I was a kid, and I didn’t live with them, but they’ve gotten clean and figured it out. We have a lot of history up there. That’s something you should want to know about.

  I do, Clay said.

  Okay. You just give Demetrie the message.

  They shook hands, palms meeting with the jarring of bones. His father walked off, checking out the tables of the flea market as if he’d come here to buy something. Or maybe everything was worth looking at after so many years in a cage.

  Clay barely slept, and in the morning he walked through the drifting leaves along the quiet weekend streets, breathing the cool vestiges of the night.

  Elle was asleep on the couch, in her faded jeans and black tank top, a book on her stomach. She woke as he came inside. She never startled. Even as a child, when he’d hidden behind doors to surprise her, she’d just smiled.

  What are you reading?

  A book about picking a future. I’m supposed to write who I want to become.

  Oh. Why don’t we sit outside? he said. Her place felt confining, humiliating, like having to go to school in too-short jeans or a T-shirt that showed his belly.

  Sure. She stood and followed him out.

  Here? she asked on the porch.

  No. Over there.

  At the concrete well cover, he sat, his knees to his chest, and she did the same.

  Do I look old? she asked.

  Of course not.

  He scanned the yard and out the driveway beyond the hedges. The one time he’d joined Justin at church, the minister had said the pain of life could be washed away — Sloughed off like the skin of a snake. We must shed our pleasure-craving skin and show our true selves.

  She sighed. Where do I connect my dreams to my life? Everything I read points to another way of living, but there’s no place to change tracks.

  She’d never said so much about herself. Maybe if he left, she’d have the freedom to become who she wanted to be.

  Silently, they scratched their ankles where bugs bit them or the grass tickled their skin. They began picking up the closest pecans. They crumbled the piney husks and broke the shells with their heels against the concrete cover. The flesh inside was soft and faintly sweet.

  When Clay said goodbye, it was as if they’d concluded a long deliberation. He walked off, past the hedges. In the heat radiating from the street, the pillared porches of the neighborhood loomed like a reflection in water.

  I’ll meet him tonight, he told Demetrie, who’d just come home, grease-stained bags of takeout on the table. Clay loaded his backpack. There wasn’t much to put in it.

  Demetrie walked him to the door, a small black bundle in his hands.

  I want to give this to you. He handed him a T-shirt. Unlike those Demetrie liked, it had nothing printed on it. The material had been worn thin and felt as soft as silk.

  I remember just where the words were. This is my first concert T-shirt.

  Halfway through the jungle, Clay looked back. Demetrie lifted a fist, devil’s horns. A few minutes later, Clay had to stop on the street, briefly doubled over, until he could dispel the feeling and keep on toward the school.

  The whole city, it seemed, had arrived for the football game. He and Melody sat in the bleachers, hip to hip, her head against his shoulder as he traced his fingertips through her hair.

  The player with the ball sprinted, dodged, and then dove to claim territory as an opponent caught his legs. Clay felt the motion in his body, a synaptic twitching in his limbs. He would never play football here, even though the school revolved around it, with pep rallies and the earnest encouragement of the principal for a good season.

  The ball flew up, spinning beneath the field lights, the runners small and mechanical. Against the green, the player about to catch the soaring football called to mind an ancient Christian painting he’d seen in a book — a tiny figure with bent knees and lifted palms, its face to the sky.

  At halftime, Clay pulled Melody close and kissed her.

  I’ll be back. I just have to do something.

  His last words would become part of the story, making everyone believe his departure hadn’t been his choice.

  North into the scattered forests of the moon-rinsed land, the interstate ran wide and straight — a technological wonder, a skyscraper on the horizon or a spaceship blazing into ascent. Clay had always lived close to a highway without giving it much thou
ght.

  His father steered with his right hand, his left arm out the window, and Clay rolled up his own to hear him against the battering air: life in jail, how it became regular — confrontations and fights and rising in status — and then the move to low security and his mechanic’s certificate.

  When Clay woke at dawn, his father asked him to take the wheel. With his head back, his mouth open, he snored so loudly Clay could barely focus.

  At a gas station, his father shouted at the cashier, accusing him of shortchanging. Their hollering grew in pitch until his father threatened to call the cops and the man handed him ten dollars, saying, Git the hell out. The next evening, at a remote one-pump station in rural Pennsylvania, his father did it again.

  Everybody’s afraid of the law, he said afterward. Everybody’s guilty of something.

  They reached their destination at sunrise: a stony hilltop in Aroostook County on the Canadian border; a one-room cabin without electricity or running water, surrounded by weeds and saplings. His father had been given use of the place so he could rebuild an old Dodge Power Wagon, a classic that had belonged to the grandfather of a rich man who’d moved out from Boston, back to where he’d grown up.

  We’re going to make it into a show car. A friend of mine from the pen lined this up for me. The guy’s running his own garage now. You’ll see, son. I have a gift.

  His father pulled behind the cabin, next to the rusted, hulking vehicle, and told Clay about it: a 1958 WM-300 Carryall, the first with an extended cab for military and civilian use. It dwarfed any SUV Clay had seen.

  The cabin held two folding metal cots and a wood-burning cookstove that they loaded with wood from a stack out front and fired up.

  They slept through the day without eating and the next morning drove to the supermarket for bread, bacon, and eggs. They fried breakfast on the stove and then unloaded tarps, aluminum poles, a space heater, and a generator from the back of the Power Wagon. They rigged a hoop garage over it and inspected the engine.

  Fucking rich people, his father said. First thing we’re going to do is take this thing apart. Then we’ll start from scratch.

  Into the winter, through cold snaps and heavy snows, they worked, ratcheting apart the Dodge. The rich man — chubby with a celebrity haircut — had loaded it with tools. He visited every few days, appearing too young to be retired.

  Shouldn’t you be in school? he asked Clay.

  I’m eighteen. I already graduated.

  I bet you did.

  Clay hated him, the work, and the cabin. He was so lonely that on grocery runs he gawped at the pimpled cashier, wanting to pull her into his arms. He refused to let himself think of Melody or her pregnancy.

  His father never entertained conversations, just worked and spoke about people in prison and from his past: crooked cops he’d known on the street and met again behind bars, inmates who suffered as they followed lives on the outside, betrayals and remarriages and children who forgot them. A furrow sank between his eyebrows, flecks of spit on his lips, and with his face to the antique engine, he talked about the life he’d deserved, the money he should have earned with his gift for engineering — that’s what he called it.

  After a blizzard, he began to cough, and blaming his cold on insufficient nutrients, he bought a shotgun. Clay used it to hunt out of season, bringing back a turkey and doe that they butchered and cooked on the stove. When their clothes were falling apart, they raided the donation bin behind a thrift shop. Clay found a heavy pleather jacket. He never wore the black T-shirt Demetrie had given him but kept it in a plastic bag.

  Helping his father for months, Clay said little, studying him. His father told him there’d never been a fair shake for those who weren’t Irish. He blamed his arrest on them. Clay’s grandfather had hated them too. The Irish had made life in New England hard for the French, calling them scabs for working during strikes, even though the French came from terrible poverty up north.

  Clay finally understood the trace of foreignness in his family. He’d known they were French but hadn’t thought of them as immigrants.

  His father told the story of a long-dead relative — a great-great-uncle — who’d been killed by an Irish stone during a mill strike. He’d been hit in the temple, and his wife and eight children had to be sent back to relatives in Quebec.

  Whenever he ranted, his father worked faster and harder, and then he’d do something strenuous — adjust the chassis or loosen a rusted rivet — and he’d stop to hold his chest.

  Got in a bad fight one time, he said. Was hit hard in the heart. It’s never felt the same, like I have this bruise or something, right here, right under my ribs.

  He was peaceful only when he smoked, once an hour, for five minutes, a cigarette puffing dead center in his lips, sticking straight out and nearly touching the tip of his nose.

  All that keeps me going these days, he said, is the feeling that a real life is just in reach, and if I don’t give up, I’ll get to achieve one meaningful thing.

  Clay wanted him to explain what he meant, but his father started talking about prison again.

  By June, with the trees blossoming, Clay often thought about Melody. Standing at the edge of the forest, he pulled open the collar of his shirt and, briefly, the warm wind against his throat was her breath.

  Welding and rebuilding every part of the Dodge had taken months. The reassembly was so painstaking that they weren’t quite finished, and the rich man came by too often now, just to admire the gleaming engine in the giant domed vehicle.

  By the time the work was done and summer had bloomed, his father was the spitting image of a Wanted poster. He coughed constantly.

  I don’t want to be a grease monkey forever, he said. It’s a hard life, you hear me?

  He lowered his head and placed his hand against his chest as if in mourning.

  Their earnings dwindled through the summer and took a dive when their station wagon died and his father bought an old Ford pickup. One night in September, he pulled away from the cabin, the sound of the motor waking Clay. Two hours later, as dawn lit the windows, his father came home and upended a garbage bag of pharmaceutical packets and containers across the floor.

  Help me sort this, he said. I love pharmacies. One quick hit and we can sell for months. I’ll drop you off at the closest college and you can unload it. I also know a guy who works the old folks crowd. A lot of people can’t afford this stuff. We’re helping them out.

  We shouldn’t have to do this, Clay told him. I had a real job in Lake Charles. I was paid well.

  You think that because you don’t know how the system works. I break my back for twelve hours a day and get a hundred bucks, while some other guy is making a thousand off my sweat.

  Do you remember what you told me when I was a boy? Clay asked.

  What’s that?

  About the islands off the coast of Georgia.

  His father threw his head back and laughed, a short constricted burst of air that became a fit of coughing.

  Yeah. I was crazy as hell back then, huh?

  Two days later, Clay and his father learned about 9/11 getting groceries. The cashier’s TV showed a replay of the airliners striking the Twin Towers. A woman’s voice described bin Laden’s intention to cripple the American economy and take down a symbol of its global power.

  I’ll be damned, his father said softly.

  The fluorescents buzzed in the aisles as they bought potatoes and the cheapest meats. Clay felt disconnected — what they’d seen impossible here: a disaster from another country.

  He couldn’t keep living on the edge of America. Maybe all his life people had seen him the way he saw his father. Justin once said the military made men equal; merit and not money carried them through the ranks. Clay pictured himself as a soldier, undeniably American.

  As his father steered the narrow forest roads back, he r
anted. Those fucking animals. They should be thanking us for civilizing them. This is going to be war, son. It’s going to be a hundred years of war.

  That afternoon, an acquaintance dropped by and told his father there was a video feed outside the pharmacy and the police were searching for his truck. Clay’s father moved it into the now-empty hoop garage and took off its rusty panels and license plates, the corroded skeleton like a muscled carcass stripped of skin. He popped pills as he worked.

  The next day, when Clay came back from the forest with a turkey, he found his father sitting in the garage, his elbows on his knees.

  You okay? Clay asked and sat across from him.

  His father’s expression had become gentle, confused and grandfatherly.

  I was remembering when I first saw Elle, he said, a dreamy lag between his words. Me and my friends, we’d fixed up a car and were driving, and there she was in these short shorts on a picnic table reading. She had her knees together. She was the prettiest thing. I don’t remember who made the bet. We were drunk on her beauty. You couldn’t blame us.

  I won. That’s how come you’re here. Her parents were older and not around much on account of work. She was always outside reading. She was French like me. I could see it in her. I brought her a box of books from a yard sale and a bag of candy. We talked. Then I asked if she wanted to go inside. It was beautiful, undressing her like that. She just watched as I did it.

  He lifted his hands and looked into his palms as if they might glow.

  I bragged to the other guys. I wasn’t above that. I was nineteen. We were kids. It was a game. Edgar said he’d get her too, and I punched him out right there in the yard where we were rebuilding his Jeep. Then I went and picked her up and took her to Boston.

  She agreed to that? Clay asked, with the feeling of having walked onto a frozen lake without realizing it, sensing the depth beneath him, the dizzying awareness of space and danger.

  She didn’t not agree. She was pregnant. She cried a lot, but I took good care of her. The police were after me, so we went underground. I got us new identities.

  His father dropped his chin and then jerked his head up. The muggy air of the hoop garage smelled of grease and the dead turkey’s thickening musk.