by Tom Kealey
“He went to a lot of trouble,” said Shelby, and the woman turned her eyes toward her. “You should be more thankful.”
“And you should wait for an invitation. This isn’t any business of yours.”
The woman’s eyes were direct, seemed hateful. Shelby looked away. In the silence between the three of them, they listened to the tables around them, the people. An argument, louder than theirs, had broken out in a corner, and the two guards circled toward the table, sized up the situation.
The woman lifted the binoculars, brought them to her eyes, looked up at the ceiling, the clock, then the guards. She turned the focus ring with her smallest finger, then pointed the lenses at Phillip. Shelby tried to see the woman’s eyes through the lenses. The woman’s teeth were yellow behind her lips.
“You’ve grown,” she said.
In the cold and dark they made their way to the bus station, past the walls of the prison, the wire and the fencing, past the market and the stoplight. They turned left on Hawkins Street, moved from glow to glow beneath the streetlamps. Cars passed slowly on the rain-slick road. They seemed to be the only people on foot. Shelby watched her white breath cloud from under her hood, watched their reflections in puddles under the lamp glow. She reached out, took Phillip’s arm, slowed him down. As they passed over each pool of water, she tried to bring herself and Phillip into focus, but they were moving too quickly, or Phillip would stamp his foot into the puddle. Circles spread from his boot step, blurred the reflections.
There was little left of the bus station, only a concrete shell and a pile of burned, broken furniture left against the side of a dumpster. The plot of land, what remained of the building, reminded Shelby of Bremerton. They seemed to be home again, but still far away. Out in the road, they could hear the rush of drain water in the gutters. Phillip pushed a cinder block over with his boot. They held hands and shivered in the dark.
Across the road was a car, parked facing the state road. Beyond it they could make the outline of the Olympics, could even smell the bay from where they stood. One of the backlights of the car flickered red, reflected against the water on the street.
They crossed the road, tried to see in through the fog. They hesitated, climbed into the backseat, shut the door behind them. It was eight o’clock.
Otis was leaning forward, against the wheel, flicking the back of the paper frog on the dash. The creature jumped at each flick, knocking against the windshield, falling on its side after. Otis set it back upright and flicked again. They listened to the tap against the glass.
Eventually, he turned, put his arm up on the seat next to him, held the frog between his fingertips. He looked at them with his two eyes, both big, one damaged.
“How’d it go?” he said.
They set their hands in their laps, looked there, listened to the rush of rainwater outside, felt a pain in their fingertips as their hands began to warm. The glow from the dashboard lit the car—the seats, the vinyl ceiling, the windows—in a dull green and white. Otis waited, looked at the frog, at the creases and folds.
“This guy didn’t want to sit still,” he said.
THE LOST BROTHER
I went down to the basement in late evening because of a strange, familiar shiver that frightened me. There was water down there, shin deep, and it was filled with silt and sand. My brother Albert and I had been trying to pump it out. I opened the gun cabinet and checked for his pistols, and sure enough there was one of them missing. I’d been worrying about him for a while. I’d felt something similar years before, and another feeling had set me to motion. Out from school and into home, and when I got there Ma was under the table, eating pills, talking on the phone to nobody. And another time, after a visit to my granddad—a good visit, he’d been feeling better—I woke and knew that he’d died. These were not visions to me, and not ghost whispers in my ear. I was an Atkins, and a good number of us had turned crazy over the years. But I was not yet crazy. I was fifteen and Albert’s only brother, and we were friends, he and I, back then.
It was dark outside, and the moon was half, and I could see up for as many stars as I’d like. I listened to the rustle of dead leaves across the yard, and there was some smell in the air, like a storm might be moving in, though there was no other sign. I had the chills down my spine. Albert had pulled himself up on the engine of the old jeep, and he was looking down into it, like maybe he’d lost something down there. I could see the night bugs pinging against the gas lamp, and Albert’s wheelchair was just outside the glow, leaned against the fender. There were other bugs—lightning—out near the river, as many as I could recall seeing that summer, and they flashed on quick and faded slow, and there was a gray mist creeping up into the yard from below. Across the water some kids were playing basketball in the dark. I couldn’t see the game, but I could hear the ball and the rattle of the chain, the shouts here and there. I went down and sat up on the engine with Albert. He was twelve years older than me and looked it that night. I cleared away some beer bottles to make a space. The oil in the pan made the air seem sweet and sharp, and I tipped the lantern in so he could see.
He was scrubbing something down there in the dark with an old toothbrush, and he was really going at it. Like he was almost there, whatever he was working on. He had two fuel pumps—one new, one old—set up on the alternator, and his black hair, pulled back and waist long, sheened in the light.
“Thought I’d surprise you,” he said.
“I don’t need any surprises.”
He looked up at me. He had eyes the same color as his hair, and they were not yet drunk, like they usually were, this time of night.
“You’re not sure what you need,” he said.
Maybe that was true. He’d sensed my mood, as he often did. I was believing I needed to hold on to whatever I still had, and I told him as much.
“That’s a road to ruin,” he said. He was smiling. There was always something about me that he found funny.
“I could use one of those,” I said.
“I’ve been working on a joke,” he said.
“All right,” I said. “I’m ready.”
He handed me the new pump and turned the lantern up, traded the toothbrush for a wrench. I squinted in the brightness.
“So the farmer comes back in from the barn,” he said. “And he sees all these empty bottles on the table, and one of the cowboys looks up and says to him: ‘You got anything else? Seems like we’re even more thirsty now.’”
I shook my head, but I laughed a little. I was nervous, I guess. “What was in the bottles?”
“I’m working on that,” he said, and he caught what he was looking for with the wrench. I could hear it click into place. “You used to be the joke teller,” he said.
“Those were kid’s jokes.”
He tensed up, trying to get the bolt loose. “Okay, old man,” he said.
We got that fuel pump in there eventually. We filled the oil back up, and then I caught him under the arms and eased him down into the chair. He wheeled around in the mud and helped himself into the driver’s seat. He’d done it plenty times before. The jeep was a convertible, though we didn’t have the top. Most important, it had hand controls. Ma had found it somewhere in Virginia, and it had gotten Albert around enough to hold a job delivering the paper. But that hadn’t lasted. There was always something breaking down.
When he turned the key it started right up. A plume of blue-white smoke blew out from the back. I took his tools down from the engine and closed the hood. It was almost ten o’clock. The headlights switched on and lit up the stretch of dead grass, and a cat who’d been watching us from the driveway flattened itself against the gravel, then just as quick disappeared into the trees.
So Albert was happy there behind the wheel, listening to the engine. Happy as I’d seen him in a while. He turned on the radio, set the seat back. The engine sounded like it was deciding between quitting and staying. I got the broom and set to sweeping out the seats. They were all full o
f leaves. I wondered if there might be a bird back there. I swept over and around my brother, and he was looking up at the stars.
“Why you trembling?” he said.
I looked down at him. “It’s cold.”
“It’s not cold,” he said.
In the house I got myself a jacket and packed up some food: a bag of snap beans and what was left of a pizza. I took out a half-case of beer, which seemed to me both dumb and right. I got the quilt from the couch. Then I put it all in the backseat of the jeep. I folded up Albert’s chair, put that in there, and climbed in next to him.
“Where we going?” I said.
“To see my girl.”
I’d tricked her name out of him the previous weekend. He’d been all secretive about her. Merrill.
“Hope she lives close,” I said. “We’re not going to get ten miles in this piece of shit.”
He looked at me for a while, like he was maybe waiting on something else. I thought maybe I shouldn’t call his jeep that. It had meant something to him. We listened to the engine idle, and I was thinking of something to say. But he reached back into the seat behind and brought up the quilt. He folded it out and set it over me.
“Hold tight of that, old man.”
We went out from the city, on the state highway. There was nobody much out that night. We passed the paper mill and its ammonia smell and the stretch of farms beyond that, the bales of hay marching in rows up over the hills. In the blue they looked like a line of long, strange caterpillars to me, and the barns with their doors open like giant heads, their mouths toothless and hungry. I remembered then a broad sky, daylight, and me and Albert and Granddad stretched out in a sunflower field. We’d been in Indiana. It warmed me up a little, thinking about that, though I’d lowered my sights since then. I closed my eyes, listened to the wind, and I could picture Albert’s face in that field and Granddad next to him. But I couldn’t see myself. It was like it was me, but with somebody else’s body, my name but somebody in my place.
“Sit up on the seat,” said Albert.
I looked at him, his hair tossed every way with the wind. He looked wild and ancient to me. I had this feeling then, that there was something in the jeep that shouldn’t be there. I don’t know why. I got up, tossed the quilt back, sat on the back of the seat. I could see some horses behind a fence line, shadows milling about. We were going fast down the road, probably seventy-five or more, and I held on tight to the seat, bouncing a bit with the jeep. I let the wind blow my hair around, though I didn’t have the length of Albert’s—when I’d grown it out Ma was always yanking at it.
“Put your hands up,” he said.
I did. I held them up like I was on a rollercoaster. The wind was thrumming in my ears. I looked at what I could see of the road stretched out before us, flat and straight. I couldn’t make out much in the distance.
“Scream or something,” said Albert. He was looking up at me, looking back at the road. He punched my leg. “You’re a crazy Atkins. Act like one.”
I didn’t scream. I brought my hands down. We were moving fast. There was a long line of electric towers past the farms, and I watched the red lights flashing on and off. I watched and watched them till they were long past. Then I took hold of the windshield and stepped up on the dash. I set one leg over onto the hood.
Albert grabbed hold of my other leg. “What the hell are you doing?”
The wind was all in my face. “Let go,” I said.
“Get back in here.”
“I’m going to fall,” I said.
“Daniel,” he said. He was shouting at me.
“I’m going to fall if you slow down.”
He couldn’t do that though. He had one hand on my leg, one on the steering wheel.
“I’m falling Albert,” I said.
He let go of my leg and put his hand on the brake switch, though he didn’t pull on it. I climbed out onto the hood and held onto the windshield, my back toward the road. We were flying down the road. My jacket was filled up with air, like it might lift me away, and what hair I had was in my eyes. I looked at Albert through the glass.
“I’m crazier than hell,” I said. I had to yell it above the wind.
“Don’t let go,” he said.
“I won’t. You want me to scream?”
We hit a dip in the road, and I lost my footing for a second. When I looked down I was crushing one of the windshield wipers with my shoe.
“Don’t let go,” he said.
“You want me to scream?”
“Whatever you want. Don’t let go.”
I screamed. I screamed as loud as I could. I took my foot off the wiper and set it on the hood again. I could feel the metal popping under my weight and the cold of the wind all down my spine. The farmland was flying past us. I screamed some more and looked back on the road. There was a car back there, way back. The headlights seemed like one headlight. I held one of my fists in the air.
“Don’t slow down,” I shouted at Albert.
“I won’t,” he said. “Get your hand back down.”
So I did that. I wasn’t scared at all. I wanted to dance up there on the hood.
“How crazy are you?” said Albert.
“Crazier than hell.”
“Everybody knows that.”
“Damn straight they know.”
“Tell them,” he said.
“I’m crazy,” I yelled out. “I’m crazier than hell.”
“Nobody crazier,” he said. “Now get back in here.”
I looked behind me, into the wind. It about lifted me off of there. I watched the tobacco fields coming toward us in the dark.
“I can’t ever fall,” I shouted at Albert.
“That’s right, don’t do that.”
I looked at him through the glass again. “I’m not ever going to.”
“Okay,” he said. “I hear you.”
I looked as clear at him through that glass as I could manage. We hit another dip in the road, and my feet came off the hood for just a second. I grabbed onto the busted wiper.
“You can slow down then,” I said.
And when he did, I climbed back over the windshield and into the seat. The car behind us passed us on the left side and we watched it go, an old drunk farmer it looked like. I took up the quilt again. I hadn’t lost the shivers.
“Where’s she live?” I said.
“Farther on.”
“Near Jake?”
“No.”
And he didn’t say anything more. He’d been in the Gulf War, Albert, and I thought maybe we might see one of his friends tonight. They were scattered all about these parts. I came up every weekend from Raleigh on the bus, spent Friday and Saturday nights with him. With his veteran’s check we bought groceries for the week, worked on the car. Whatever there was to do. We had a canoe, and we’d take that out in the river when we felt like it, if the water was still enough to get back upstream. We read the newspaper to each other. We watched TV. We drank. In the spring and summers we had a vegetable garden, though we didn’t have much success with that. We went bowling sometimes. Albert had been a combat engineer in the war. They found and disabled landmines. They called themselves a name that I’d always liked. Sappers. He’d had a friend who missed a wire. The man’s helmet snapped Albert’s spine. I’d heard this story only a few times. There was a pop and then the other pop and then silence. Stateside, I’d lived with him for a while in the hospital, sneaking around, after Ma went under the table.
“How about some beers?” said Albert.
I reached back, pulled two from the twelve. I opened them, passed one over.
He took a long swig and then another. He looked out on the road for a while and we didn’t say anything. We watched the farmhouses spaced every few miles, some standing, some fallen, some looking to. I drank my beer. I didn’t want the cold of the drink, but I kept sipping at it. About the time it was empty Albert turned to look at me.
“That was fun as hell,” he said.
“You’re not that crazy,” he said.
“No,” I said. “That was above me.”
“No need to do that again.”
“No,” I said. “That’s it for now.”
We took a turnoff from the highway and drove along next to a long gully filled with dark water. The moon had reached its height and was beginning to dip, and I watched it, the strange patches of gray and blue. I tried to see a face in the moon, but I couldn’t quite make it out. That storm smell was in the air again, and there were clouds off toward the north, not dark but white-gray, and I watched them, waiting for lightning. The road turned to gravel and we slowed down. We could hear the rocks and pebbles kick up from the tires, clattering in the wheel wells and popping against the chassis. I took out the beans as we rode along and snapped a few in half, chewed them down. I handed a couple to Albert, and he studied them, set them on the dashboard. I watched them rattle with the movement of the jeep till they became lodged against the windshield. I pulled my hands from beneath the quilt. Unsteady. I was still trembling. They looked like mad hands to me.
We pulled into a trailer park, and a couple dogs came out and chased along beside us. We passed empty clotheslines and a yard full of tires and bicycles. An old metal barrel filled with wood, burn marks down the side. Lights inside the trailers were blue and shifting, televisions likely, but maybe ghosts, said Albert, and he made some creepy voice and I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t sure how, but he was making fun of me. There were chairs tossed here and there, sideways, like no one would be sitting out soon, and the dogs gave up as we pulled past a small lake in which I could see the moon, and at the near end I could make out a school bus, half sunk in the dark water. I curled my hands into fists, thought that might help some. We pulled up next to a yellow trailer with Christmas lights—white, red, and green—though it was the wrong season. They were strung all along the roof and around the windows.