by Josh Weil
Osby chuckled quietly to himself, waving his hand a little as the bus slowed, remembering the three or four years after high school when he’d stand at the bottom of the driveway, just like now, and wait for Carl to come up the road in the souped-up silver-gray Dodge D-100 they’d fixed together. He’d gun the motor as Osby got in and they’d roar off, the sun not even up yet, and nothing in between them and the job site but an hour and a half of open road, the tunes blasting from Carl’s radio, the fresh coffee and fried apple fritters they’d pick up at the Harts Run store, good fritters Alva Linton made herself, good time to talk. They’d talk of the women in Carl’s life, the best buyer for their beef, where they’d try for turkey that weekend, smoking, shouting over the wind whipping in through the open windows, the Penthouse Pet air freshener twirling from the rearview. Those were some of the best times of Osby’s life—good money, too, working construction. He was feeling lucky all of a sudden; he could still come down here fifteen years later, wait at the driveway, and hop on with Carl to talk. Even if it was a school bus now.
When Carl stopped and he got on, Osby felt the whole bus go suddenly quiet, thirty pairs of kids’ eyes staring at him.
“Hey,” he said to Carl, climbing the steps.
“Hey.” Carl grinned at him. “You in the first or second grade?”
“I don’t know,” Osby fired right back, trying not to smile, “Momma just said to get on the bus!”
They both grinned. It was an old routine, same thing every time: built-in comfort. Whatever question Carl asked—“Did you remember your lunch? Has your daddy been whupin’ ya?”—Osby always answered, “I don’t know. Momma just said to get on the bus!” Some years ago, they had thought that was hilarious. Now they grinned because not to grin would have been admitting something neither one could bring himself to admit, just yet.
“You boys slide ’cross the aisle,” Carl said, though his sons were already moving.
Osby squeezed into the seat behind the driver’s.
The kid noise started filling the bus up again, moving from back to front.
The sun painted the windshield with glare. Carl leaned forward, as if that would let him see better, and, behind him, Osby leaned forward too, out of habit. They stopped and picked up kids and drove on and stopped and picked up more. Osby didn’t say anything, just watched the kids when they got on, nodded at them. They looked surprised when they saw him; they looked at him the way they looked at adults. That still felt odd to him.
The bus rounded the hilltop bend and started down the long drop toward Harts Run, a shuddering beneath the seats as Carl shifted to a lower gear. They passed the old schoolhouse half hidden behind scrub trees grown up in the yard where, long ago, Osby and Carl had played. It was where they’d first met. Five, six years old. Something about a tractor tire, Osby remembered, one of them sitting on it holding to the chains it hung from, calling out for the other to come give him a spin. He didn’t remember how they’d gone from that to inseparable. But he remembered the guilt he’d felt later, when his mother died, how he had skipped school to help with the burying, and all during the funeral he kept thinking of what Carl was up to, missing his friend instead of her. He tried to catch a glimpse of the place through the trees—some rusty poles, maybe, some dangling chain busted loose from what it had once held—but there was barely time to make out the brick beneath the knitting of brown vines, the high windows shot through with missing panes, before it was behind them and hidden near the hill.
“You want a bite?” Carl said. He held his greasy sandwich up near his head.
Osby thought there was a hint of annoyance in his voice, but he figured Carl just didn’t want to give up part of his breakfast. “No, you go ahead,” he said.
That was it for a while. Osby sat looking at Carl’s greasy hair and deep-creased neck in front of him. He could smell Carl—it was a familiar smell, kind of sour, but sweet, too, like spoiled milk heated up in a saucepan, and Osby tried to breathe it in without showing that he was. The whole bus smelled like people. It was steamy from them. Sitting there, Osby thought that he could forget for a while the feeling lodged in his guts, impassable, that seemed to grow leaden when he was alone in his house.
When they were off the last of the back roads and gaining speed on 33, Carl said, “What can I do you for, Chief?”
The question threw Osby. He couldn’t very well say, Let me sit here with you and smell the kids.
“Somethin’ on your mind?” Carl persisted. “Somethin’ I can help you with?” And then, reluctantly, as if out of duty, “You holdin’ up okay? You know, Dad Caudill an’ all.”
“Oh, yeah,” Osby said, as if they were talking about a sprained ankle. “Sure. You know.”
He was conscious of Carl’s boys across the aisle, Brian staring moodily out the window, Luke sitting there watching Osby, hard. He didn’t mind the boy’s stare. It was nice to be looked at, to feel someone’s eyes on you once in a while.
“What’d you do with that ’fifty-nine Dodge?” Osby asked, with sudden eagerness, leaning a little over the back of Carl’s seat.
“That ol’ gray D-100?”
“Yeah. You remember how we fixed her up?”
Carl nodded, stared straight ahead.
“She was a beaut, huh? You still got her?”
“Yeah.”
“Back there with others? Up near them woods back there next to that spring box? I’d love to fix her up. What d’you think? How bad off is she, anyway?”
“Pretty bad.”
“You think we could fix her up?”
“Oz,” Carl said, “you know you could get me in trouble comin’ on the bus like this?”
Osby watched the back of Carl’s head. His neck was stiff, his shoulders tensed, both hands gripping the steering wheel.
“I mean,” Carl continued, “if you’ve got somethin’ to talk about, all right, you know, but if it’s just—I mean, I’m not supposed to pick anyone but kids up. You know that, right?” Carl’s eyes flicked up to the mirror, but when Osby saw them looking at him, they darted back to the road.
“Yeah,” Osby said, quietly. “I just thought I’d say hi.”
“Well,” Carl’s laugh was strained. “You got a telephone, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Osby tried to chuckle, too, but he couldn’t do it. “Boy,” he said. “I’ll tell you, I never realized what a big house that is.”
“You know what you need?” Carl’s voice was suddenly loud, as if he were trying to smother his previous words. “You need to rent that house out.” He looked at Osby in the mirror again and this time his eyes stuck. “Yeah. I’m serious. Get you a renter move in with you. Get some dough, fill up the place. Hell, Oz, I know how it is.”
“Yeah,” Osby said. “I don’t think—”
“You get a renter,” Carl cut in. “You take out an ad in the Eagle, put up a sign or two around town, get you a renter.”
“Well, no, I don’t—”
“Listen—” Carl said.
“Yeah, I just don’t think that’s it.”
“Listen, the best time of my life was before I got married. Don’t go lookin’ for a woman,” Carl bounced the seriousness in his eyes off the mirror and down to Osby. “You don’t need that.”
“Oh, I wasn’t—”
“You’re lucky. You’re in a lucky spot. When I went off and worked crew on that job down in Virginia Beach, lived down there for a year, you remember that? You stayed on with your dad. You remember? And I went down to Virginia Beach and me and four other boys from the crew rented a place down there. Four of us! Best time of my life.”
Osby watched his friend’s face in the mirror. It was beaming. He hadn’t seen it like that in a long time.
“You get you a renter,” Carl said. “Best time of your life.”
The idea crept up, unwanted, on Osby: is that how he looks around his other friends, when he’s not around me?
“Yeah,” Osby said. “All right.”
&nb
sp; He sat back in his seat. It seemed to him that if he reached out and tried to put his hand on Carl’s head, his arm wouldn’t reach even halfway. Osby looked across the aisle at Luke. The boy was still staring at him. They looked at each other, both their faces blank, as if they were separated by clear Plexiglas. Osby had the feeling that if he spoke to Luke the boy wouldn’t be able to hear him, and if the boy said something Osby would just see his mouth moving dumbly.
Osby turned in his seat and looked at the bus full of kids behind him. Every one of them has a daddy, he thought. Thirty fathers out there. He thought that maybe, if he had a kid, a child, his child, if he were responsible for a baby, a baby connected to him by his own blood, dependent on him … The idea was so strange his mind backed off from it, drifted aimlessly over the faces of the schoolkids. The whole bus full looked back at him. It was as if that Plexiglas wall had extended, curved, encircled him, so that now he was encased in it.
In front of him, Carl was talking about that year he’d lived in Virginia Beach with all those guys.
“Yeah,” Osby said, quieting Carl in the middle of a sentence. “That Dodge was a beaut, though, wasn’t she?”
By the time Carl dropped Osby off back at his driveway, thick clouds had rolled over the mountains. At home, Osby threw two Pop Tarts in the toaster, and then put two more in while he ate the first ones. He made himself a thermos of instant coffee, shook sugar into it for about three seconds, shook some dried creamer in for two, screwed the lid tight, shook the thermos, and drove in no-radio quiet over to the Geller place on 236.
Tom Geller, who lived an hour away past Coalsburg, was having his mother’s forty acres of woodland logged and he’d hired Osby to bulldoze the road up through the pastures to the edge of the woods. He’d just started when his father had died. The muck-yellow Caterpillar was still halfway up the hill, right where he had left it when Tom’s mother, Eula, had come huffing up behind him with the news that Osby’s father was on the phone. By the time he’d gotten down to her house, Cortland had hung up. He’d never known his father to call him on a job, not once, so he’d driven back home and then over to the Old House, where he found him.
Now, Osby got the truck up the pasture, driving alongside the unfinished, muddy road, and parked it by the bulldozer. The clouds had blanketed the sky by then, and he watched them suck the round sun up out of the last clear strip of blue. The treads were gunked up with mud and grass and cow shit. He wiped dried spatter off the sign on the side—New Ground Excavating, Caudill & Son, Harts Run, VA, 544–7293— grabbed the cold metal handle and climbed up, sheeting the water and thin skin of ice off the vinyl seat with his bare hand before sitting down. By a combination of timing, skill, and luck, he managed to get the knob on the dash, the lever to his left, and the pedals at his feet to all work the way they were meant to: the old machine roared to life, blowing the quiet out of the field and halfway up the mountain.
Sometime in the afternoon—he had forgotten his watch and the sky had stayed the same shade of gray all day—he caught a movement in the corner of his eye. Eula Geller made her way up the hill toward him, her bright blue windbreaker billowing in the cold wind, something aluminum glinting in an arm tucked against her chest. He raised the shovel, brought the lumbering thing to a stop, and walked down the hill toward the old woman. It was strange seeing someone else after working alone all day. Just before he reached her, he had the troubling sensation that he’d have to consciously remember how to speak.
“Looks good,” she called to him over the noise of the wind and the huffing bulldozer in the distance.
“Thanks.” He scanned the ripped-up, reddish, muddy gouge in the hillside. “It looks frozen, but once you tear it up it’s just wet as can be.”
The old woman nodded, but he could tell she wasn’t really listening. Her look touched his face all over.
“Here,” she said, thrusting the aluminum-covered package at him. “It’s blueberry.”
The heat of the pie came right through the bottom of the pan and warmed his hands. “Thank you, Mrs. Geller,” he said. “That’s real nice of you.”
Her eyes were so full of sympathy, he couldn’t look at her.
“You know,” she said, “Your grandma used to babysit me when she was a girl. I ever tell you that?”
“No, ma’am.” She had told him at least twice before. And that, later, she herself had babysat his father.
“Right in that house.” She pointed down the hill. “And I used to babysit your daddy.”
He nodded, glanced back up toward the bulldozer, which was coughing gray smoke at the gray sky. When he looked back, she was watching his face with that heavy sympathy again.
“Uh-huh,” he said, just to fill the quiet.
“Here.” She held out a fork.
He took it from her. “I can’t eat the whole thing.”
She nodded, but it was about something else. “Our daddy,” she said, “went the same way.”
Her eyes were still on him, but he could tell she was seeing her whole family again. The wind rippled her jacket and she pulled her knit hat further over her ears. Somehow, the motion made her look smaller.
“You help me eat this, okay?” Osby said.
“Terrible,” she said. “To do that. Isn’t it?”
He held the fork out to her, but she didn’t even look at it.
“Shame on them!” She spat the words so vehemently that Osby jerked the fork back.
“Shame on them,” she said again, quietly. Then, after a few seconds, “That thing sure makes a racket.”
“It’s noisy,” he said, and took the chance to turn away from her and look up the hill at the bulldozer.
When he turned back, she was already a few yards away, bent against the wind, hurrying downhill to her house.
That evening, Osby brought new salt to the pasture by the government land, hauling the pink mineral block out of the truck bed and into its housing box. The cattle converged on the salt lick, letting off bellows loud as foghorns in the quiet. He checked them over as they crowded each other, looking for signs of pinkeye or wooden tongue, the struggled breathing that might be a first step toward the pus-filled bulge of bone and lumpy jaw. He didn’t see anything wrong, no tears draining out of yellowing eyes, no tongues hanging out of drooling mouths. At the fringe of the herd, a white-faced Hereford-Lemosine cow had a swollen belly, and he thought—almost hoped—that she might be compacted. But it was too early to tell.
The only thing he could find to worry about was a cow gone missing: a young Angus that had gotten hip locked on a calf last fall. He drove slowly around the perimeter of the pasture, peering out the open window, his eyes straining to clear the thickening dusk out of briar snarls, patches of cedar, the scrub-filled gully. He hoped he’d find her in trouble.
The longer he drove without seeing the cow, the more excited he got. Maybe she’s hip locked again, he thought. Maybe she’s about passed out from it. He pictured himself arriving just as the cow was about to lose consciousness, scooping the calving chain off the seat, leaping into the truck bed, grabbing the jack, and flinging the halter over his shoulder. He’d hurtle over the side of the truck, already running as he hit the ground. Up ahead, the cow’s eyes would roll at him. Maybe the calf was half out, hips jammed, or turned around with a rear hoof sticking out. He’d harness her to the trailer hitch, strip off his jacket, roll up his sleeves, douse his hands in alcohol, and reach in, shoving his right hand past the calf, stuffing the hoof back in with his left, straining to get the thing turned around.
Rattling over the lumpy pasture, he hoped this time the calf would be too jammed, hoped he wouldn’t be able to get it facing the right way. He’d chain the calf’s leg to the jack, lock that jack up against the cow’s hips, and start pumping. The calf would probably smother. But maybe he’d do it fast enough and it would slide out with a shhlluck, splattering him with blood and amniotic fluid. He’d kneel down, wipe the placenta off its nose and mouth, the calf’s body shaking as
it sucked at the air.
Even alone in the truck, his giddiness embarrassed him. He’d helped birth hundreds of calves. It was just part of raising beef. He tried to laugh at himself, but even the puff of air that came out was thin with excitement. No matter how many times he helped a cow give birth, there was always that quick shot of elation at the end, the feeling that somehow, despite his gunked, slick arms and chest, he’d been cleansed. And, more, too: the irrefutable fact that a living thing would not exist if it weren’t for him.
The cow bolted in front of the truck. He was so caught up in his thoughts that he almost didn’t see her rush out from behind the thicket, and he slammed the brakes on too hard, smacking his forehead against the steering wheel. He sat there for a second, dazed. She crossed through his headlight beams into the bluing dusk again, lumbering back toward the herd. Still pregnant. Just fine. Osby pressed his palm to his forehead. It came away blotted with a small smear of blood. He swung the door open and went around to the back, where, shoving the jack out of the way, he grabbed a milk jug full of water and poured some of the half-iced stuff over his forehead. It felt like it froze the backs of his eyes. He shook his head a few times and stood there, catching his breath.
It was then that he glanced across the fence line to the government land and saw the hay bales. They were stacked in a row, maybe twenty of them, tucked up against the fence at the edge of the woods. Once, they had been large and round, but they’d sat there for almost three years now and had sunk in on themselves, decomposing, just mounds of rotten grass.
Standing there, his thick-fingered hands stuffed in his pockets against the growing cold, Osby stared at the line of forgotten hay bales, remembering how mad his father had been when the government took the land from him. His dad had almost gone to court over it, but had backed down rather than face a slew of strangers staring at him. Osby hadn’t wanted to face them, either, but he had thought he and his dad ought to at least retrieve the hay they’d cut and baled off that field over the summer. His father wouldn’t let him. “Neither you nor I’s settin’ one foot on that land again,” he’d said. “Them hikers can watch that hay rot.” Osby doubted they even noticed.