“Screw off,” Mark said.
Behind him, over the sound of the bell above the exit, which jingled now as he pushed his way out the door, he thought he heard the man laughing. He didn’t turn around to check.
When Mark got back to the car, Gerome was in the backseat panting and Maggie was already in the driver’s seat. She’d recapped the gas tank and returned the hose to the filling station. Now she was monkeying with the center vents, adjusting the air stream so that it was aimed squarely at the dog’s face.
Mark put the coffees on the hood of the car and opened the door.
“What’s wrong?” Maggie said.
He handed in the first coffee, and she put it in the cup holder.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said.
Mark was sometimes startled by the way Maggie could read his face so quickly and effectively. It gave him the feeling that she was always aware of him, always aware of exactly where he was and what he was doing—whether she could see him or not.
He handed her the second coffee. “Nothing,” he said, “just ready to get where we’re going.”
“Pit stops,” she said. “No one’s favorite part of a road trip.” She secured the second cup firmly in its place. “Would-be cowboys are the worst.”
Mark followed Maggie’s gaze. In the distance, next to a large pickup truck with an after-market pair of plastic testicles hanging from the bumper, a man was looking their way.
Together they watched as he placed a large-brimmed hat on his head and tipped it in their direction.
“What made you say that?” Mark asked.
“Say what?”
“About cowboys.”
Maggie chewed at her lower lip. She was deciding whether or not to say something. Abruptly, she shrugged. “No reason,” she said. She buckled her seat belt, then glanced up at the rearview mirror and adjusted it slightly. “Just that people don’t seem to mind their business like they used to. You know?”
Out the window, just to the right of Maggie’s profile, a minivan trying to exit the station honked at a sedan taking too long to turn. There was a second honk, then a third, then an extended uninterrupted fourth that received stares from all around.
Mark scanned the parking lot. The truck and its driver were gone. “I know,” he said. He reached over and knocked on the steering wheel. “Let’s blow this joint.”
They pulled out into traffic. It was four-thirty. The sun was a magnificent orange.
Mark felt bad for not telling Maggie the truth about the stranger in the gas station and the crude joke that had been made at her expense. But, he reasoned, in many ways he was protecting her. He was sheltering her from the quiet horror that actually did exist in their world. This wasn’t the stuff of her news articles or crime procedurals. This was worse because it was real, because it potentially affected them.
Be more patient, he told himself. Be more patient.
7
They crossed into Ohio just after five. It was light out still, but the nature of the sky had changed. The ceilings were lower than when they’d passed the turbines in Indiana. The trees along the highway pushed back against an unseen current, and the leaves showed green, then silver, then green again. The car’s windows whistled like teakettles—high, plaintive, stiff. A few times Maggie drifted into the rumble strip because the wind was so strong. Gerome had whined each time, but Mark didn’t say a thing. He’d been silent since their pit stop.
Out of nowhere, the GPS system—which they used primarily to count down the miles, since they knew the drive inside and out, backwards and forwards—started beeping. Maggie had just taken exit 1 off I-70 in the direction of Eaton. Gerome shifted behind them but didn’t get up.
“It’s mad at me,” Maggie said, tapping the monitor. She said this more to hear a voice—any voice—than to be heard by her husband.
Mark punched a few buttons. “It wants us to stay on 70 until 75,” he said. “Then go through Dayton.”
“We never go through Dayton.” She watched the screen images change while Mark continued to push buttons. “What did that mean? That last message?”
Mark didn’t answer, just turned the system off altogether. “We can keep track of the miles on the odometer,” he said.
“But what did that mean?” said Maggie.
“What?”
“Restricted usage road—what did that mean?”
“It didn’t say that.”
“It did,” said Maggie. “Turn it back on.”
Her neck went hot. Mark was staring. She could feel his attention, though she refused to look his way. He’d caught the tenor of her voice, its unsteadiness. But if he thought she was imagining something awful, he was wrong. This time he was wrong. She simply didn’t see why they couldn’t consult the GPS every now and then. Wasn’t that why they had it? For instance, what if there was a required detour or a road that was freshly out of service? All she hoped to do was save them time, avoid preventable trouble.
On the Enneagram, there was a pair of statements that perfectly summed up the current situation, as well as their opposing takes: I’ve been careful and have tried to prepare for unforeseen problems (Maggie). I’ve been spontaneous and have preferred to improvise as problems come up (Mark). Or so Maggie imagined; Mark had never taken the test.
Fine, then. Forget the GPS. Hope, after all, was the confusion of desire with probability, or however the saying went. But if they ended up having to “improvise” by taking a detour or turning around, getting back on 70 and going through Dayton—well, if they ended up having to do that, she’d have a hard time not gloating. That’s for sure.
“Restricted road usage,” said Mark, “is a ploy to keep away through traffic from smaller towns. It’s just a way to funnel us to a toll.”
He was probably right, but she’d never seen such a notice before when they’d made the drive, and she knew he hadn’t either. No matter. Just then, she didn’t feel compelled to engage. She’d learned that winning was often about who could be quiet longest. This wasn’t a theory she had discussed with her therapist—in part because she suspected it might have been deemed morbid, perhaps even destructive—but in silence was power. In Maggie’s ability to ignore her husband was the added bonus of occasionally making him feel as though he’d been dismissed or, better, as though he’d been the one to overreact, not her. And so she focused on the road—on its double yellow lines, its faint bend to the east—and said nothing.
After a little while, Mark turned away from her. Maggie cracked the front window and the car howled. This got Gerome’s attention. He stood, stretched, then sniffed at the air, at all the midwestern smells filtering in. Chickens. Hay. Cows. Manure.
They were on US-35, headed southeast into Ohio. The sun was slanted low and bright to their right, in spite of the copper clouds ahead of them. The air itself was tea-toned, a pinkish brown, almost shiny. The angle of the light seemed funny, somehow off, as though the sun were being reflected back and forth by the darkening storm clouds and its position wasn’t exactly what it should have been. A magic trick. A sleight of hand. Prestidigitation in the sky.
This—US-35—was the ugliest leg of their trip, and they’d be on it for the next couple hundred miles or so, until it dumped them into West Virginia and onto Interstate 64. Maggie almost always drove this stretch. She didn’t mind the reduced speeds, and she wasn’t too bothered by all the stoplights. They were punctuations in an otherwise uneventful trip. Don’t misunderstand: she didn’t actively enjoy these 200-some miles—who could?—but she didn’t . . . Well, she didn’t take their ugliness personally, the way Mark sometimes seemed to.
To her, Ohio was just sad. Sad and neglected. A state that didn’t know it was already dead. Like animals at a kill shelter. They didn’t know that all that water and all that food didn’t mean anything about the possibility of a future. All it meant was that some good people were fighting a war they’d already lost. What the animals couldn’t know: they were already d
ead.
As a pre-vet, she’d been acutely aware of the rancor non-pre-vets felt for kill shelters. But Maggie and her peers never chimed in when the outsiders started up. They understood, and Maggie in particular—without any of them then having all the facts—that kill shelters existed in the same way no-kill shelters did. Nobody wanted to kill the animals—nobody who volunteered at a shelter, anyway: she’d read the article last week about those kids up in New York who poured lighter fluid on a three-legged dog and then set it on fire. But that was different. With kill shelters, the reasoning was straightforward: the money and space simply didn’t exist to maintain the animals while they might have waited to be adopted. The idea that volunteers at kill shelters were happy about all those soon-to-die kittens and puppies? A preposterous notion, which brought her back to Ohio: just because you were born there, just because you had been raised there and hadn’t had the sense or opportunity to get out, that didn’t mean it was your fault. In the game of geography, you and yours simply hadn’t lucked out.
Mark, though—and Maggie knew the diatribe by heart because she’d heard it dozens of times before—he believed that Ohio deserved itself. Those first few times during the early years of their marriage when they’d made the mistake of stopping at major travel plazas and witnessing firsthand the overweight families in their over-large T-shirts eating their oversized meals in their over-tall cars—the sight had filled Mark, every time, with a noiseless sort of rage that could last all the way to Virginia, to his parents’ farm. And Maggie knew this for a fact because she’d felt the noiselessness in those early years; she’d been the recipient of its meanness. She, not Ohio, was the one who handled that odium, and so, very quickly, she established a new route—one that favored the smaller, slower roads they were taking now—and she volunteered to drive the segment so that Mark might sleep his way through.
Ahead, in the far, far distance, there was a crack of lightning.
“Did you see that?” said Mark.
Maggie rolled up the window. They car sealed itself with a whump. A sign on the side of the road indicated that the speed limit would reduce in the next mile.
Mark messed with the radio. “We should try to get Gerome to do something sometime soon,” he said. He stopped at a weather station. Local schools were already being canceled on Monday. It was only Saturday.
Maggie nodded. “I agree,” she said. “You were right. We’ll need a hotel.”
“I should have let you find us one online,” he said. “You’d have gotten us a deal.”
“A smoking deal,” she said. It was a phrase Mark’s parents used indiscriminately, on anything from a Parisian hotel room to a bundle of asparagus purchased at the local farmer’s market.
Maggie put a hand on Mark’s knee, and he, without a moment’s hesitation, reached down and squeezed her fingers.
See? That was just the thing. The thing that kept them together. He understood her. He, too, recognized that though they might approach their opinions—say, of Ohio or even the GPS for that matter—from different directions, ultimately those directions landed them in the same place, with the same result. Each knew that the other was theirs. Two brains thinking one thought. Two brains following one final wave of logic. She felt a nearly animalistic sense of intimacy at that moment.
It was true, regrettably so, that in the last few weeks Maggie’s brain had been going out of its way to seek out extra tangents, to explore other prospects—darker, more disturbing possibilities—but that was her brain. That wasn’t her. And her brain was beyond her control. You can do what you will, but you can’t will what you will, another aphorism she’d been taught by her therapist.
But therapists and aphorisms aside, the takeaway was this: Mark was hers and she was his, and everything, ultimately, in one way or another, would always work out between them.
The radio went silent. There was another crack of lightning in the distance. Then there was static. Then, with no formality or warning, the radio issued several long low beeps. A tornado watch was underway in southeast Ohio.
In 1840 the Great Natchez tornado killed 317 people in Natchez, Mississippi. In 1925 the Tri-State tornado ran a path of 219 miles for nearly four hours, from Missouri to Illinois to Indiana. More than 600 people died. In 1989 roughly 1,300 people were killed by the Daulatpur-Saturia tornado in Bangladesh. Twelve thousand people were injured. Eighty thousand were left homeless.
The tornado—that funnel-shaped weapon capable of moving at nearly 70 miles an hour with internal rotational winds of sometimes 250—is no laughing matter.
8
Maggie pulled the car into a small Shell station. They were somewhere in New Lebanon—population 4,000—a place where US-35 felt more like a side street than a highway. Squat ranchers, secondhand shops, the occasional empty bank.
Next to the station, thankfully, there was an overgrown field of grass. Maggie had only just turned on the windshield wipers. The rain wasn’t too bad yet.
“I’ll walk him,” said Mark. “Unless you want to and then I’ll top up the tank instead.”
“Your choice,” she said.
Gerome was standing with his front paws on the center console. He was whining, asking a question—whu, whu, whu—whose end he couldn’t achieve. Gerome hated to get rained on probably as much if not more than Mark. They had that in common. Smart boy, thought Mark.
“Smart boy,” said Mark, massaging the dog’s chin. “You think this is shit, too, eh?” He turned in his seat, dug around in the floorboard behind him, and found Gerome’s leash. The dog continued his plea.
To Maggie, he said, “I’ll do it.” Mark’s knees were cramping; a short walk would do him good.
Maggie got out and started the pump. After a second, she ducked her head back inside the car where Mark was still fidgeting with the leash. “You want anything? The card reader’s not working. I have to go in to pay.”
“Coffee?” Mark said. “If it’s hot?”
“You got it.” She trotted off across the parking lot toward the store, the wind pushing her ponytail, her shirt, the hem of her shorts to the side. It seemed her clothes, the pieces of her, were aligned with the earth and not Maggie.
Mark pulled down his baseball cap and coaxed Gerome from the backseat.
“Come on, guy,” Mark said. “We’re in this together.”
Gerome put his tail between his legs and emitted a bleat of objection, but he hopped down from the car without a struggle.
The little field to the side of the station was already soggy. Mark walked Gerome the length of it so that he, Mark, could stay on the concrete and Gerome could walk on the grass. But Gerome wasn’t having it. Instead, he balanced his paws along the concrete perimeter, looking up at Mark every now and then as if to say, “If you don’t have to, I don’t have to.”
Meanwhile Maggie was taking her time in the store. The parking lot was empty except for a beat-up pickup, which probably belonged to whatever sad sack was working inside. There couldn’t have been other customers. Mark imagined Maggie in the women’s restroom, pulling little pieces of toilet paper from the roll and arranging them daintily around the seat. Then, out of nowhere, he thought of Elizabeth, her severe short hair, her lithe little body. She’d played volleyball as an undergrad at some small liberal arts school in the Northeast, something she’d mentioned as a throwaway as they outlined his upcoming chapters. She hadn’t yet told him she was dropping out of the program. “It’s not merely about the body,” she’d said. “It’s about discipline. It’s about pushing the brain.” She spoke with authority about everything, with an air of privilege and a sense of too much self-importance. He’d liked it. Her entitlement was a bulletproof jacket, and she’d clearly been making her way through life as if nothing would ever thwart her.
Now he imagined Elizabeth in the stall next to Maggie. He gave her a skirt, which was hiked unceremoniously to her waist, and panties pushed just to the knee. Above the toilet, she maintained a perfect athletic squat, never once
letting the skin of her thighs touch the porcelain.
Mark’s glutes flexed instinctively. There was a tingling in his hamstrings from his knees to his pelvis. Gerome pulled at the leash. That afternoon when Elizabeth had told him about volleyball was more than a year ago. Now she was elsewhere, in some West Coast town probably dating some West Coast asshole. In their correspondence, Mark never wrote explicitly about desire, and normally she didn’t either. But in an e-mail she’d sent just that week—in fact, on the very day Mark had discovered the switchblade and then decided without discussion that they would leave Chicago ahead of schedule—Elizabeth had broached the subject point-blank.
Hiya—
So I’ve been thinking about sex.
Mark had gotten up from his chair and closed his office door before continuing. The muscles in his buttocks tightened as he sat back down, and he was reminded of a day from childhood when Gwen had explained why horses so often relieved themselves before fleeing. “They’re lightening their load,” she’d told him. His father had said, “In other words, they’ve had the crap scared out of them.”
Hiya—
So I’ve been thinking about sex. And I’ve been thinking about your book. It would be incomplete, you know, if you didn’t also address what’s happening in the world of sex vis-à-vis anonymity. Like, did you know there’s a whole section on Craigslist about conference meet-ups? You name it; they have it. Think about it: the world’s most intimate act becomes anonymous by way of the Internet. Brilliant! These are real-life hookups, real-life liaisons. But when they’re over, they’re over, and nobody knows anyone else’s name. Husbands, wives, the people back home—they never find out. You just get on a plane and get out of Dodge. So my question is this—
The e-mail had gone on, but he couldn’t think about that right now. Gerome still hadn’t peed and the rain was picking up, and Mark was determined not to get back in the car until the dog had done something. He didn’t want a repeat of the morning. The two times Gerome squatted—he almost never lifted his leg—a car drove by and the rainwater splashing up under its tires distracted him.
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