by Josh Weil
From a couple miles away, way off in town, his ears—sharper than that soon-born’s would ever be—caught the sounds of a nail gun perforating the air. Thwop, thwop, thwop. Distant and undeniable as the sudden pricks of first stars. They were putting together the stage. It was morning. In less than a week the Festival of the Hills would begin. Behind him, he could feel the fullness of the garage and the Deutz nested inside, asleep, waiting.
This next morning, this same hour, there is only Stillman and the tractor and the hinge-creak of him shutting the door on the November world outside his workshop. He thuds a heavy canvas thresherman’s kit onto a worktable, loosens the ties, working at the knot with his turkey-foot hands, fingers steady as a surgeon’s. The canvas roll falls open, spread on the table like an autopsied cadaver’s chest. He hunches over it, eyes traveling the long spine of tools: cope chisel, rat-tail file, tinner’s snips, punch. Lately, there have been times, moments, just hints of a second, really, when it feels to him as if his vertebrae are collapsing, one on top of the other, becoming crushed. He keeps it to himself. Pliers, nuts, split pin box … There is the wrench. Holding it, he lifts his arms high above his head, aligning his skeleton bone by bone, rising onto his toes and reaching as if to grasp the electrical wires strung across the ceiling, as if to push his fingers all the way through to the autumn sky above.
Outside the small window, beyond the cinder-block wall, he can see the last yellow leaves and a blot of grackle smudging the witch-broom branches of a hackberry tree. A fortnight ago the woods beside the Swain roiled with black birds feasting on the purple fruit. Thousands flown in for Thanksgiving as if to replace the leaves, then gone by December, leaving the branches even more bare. Now there is just the one, clacking its beak. Not a beautiful bird, but Stillman admires it—most birds its size die after a dozen years or less, but it is known to hang on long past twenty. So black. Such a black spot. Every time his eyes flick that way he can’t see anything else. Well, it will be gone tomorrow. Tomorrow he will remove the sheet metal.
But the Booe child is crying. It cries most mornings. And most nights. A wailing that rips the air: long, ragged rents that never quite close up before they are wrenched open again. Listen to it! He can almost see the red, wracked face. Peering through the window, out over the sprucelets, he sees Rog in his pajamas hurrying toward the minivan, arms around that wailing bundle. The man slides open the cargo door and shoves the thing in like it’s going to blow. He gets in with it. Stillman can’t imagine why. He has never been around a newborn. He does not like children—harbingers of a time he will not know—and he especially dislikes that Booe one with its sharp blue eyes always trained on him. Over there, the minivan spews its exhaust. Rog rocks inside. In the corner of his eye, Stillman can see the spot where the grackle used to sit. The hackberry’s thin, leafless branches wear a New Year’s coat of perfectly unmarked snow.
Back at the tractor’s side, he removes the hood, side panels, grille. The rain drums at the flat roof. Beneath its ceaseless rhythm time shakes loose of its track. The operator’s seat, the generator. It feels good to work with his hands, down on his knees on the newspapers stuck to the floor by dark pools of grease. Sometimes he plays this game: sits on his meditation mat in the living room, eyes closed, challenging himself to remember where the tachometer was in Pfersick’s garage, which cabinet held valve clearance tools for Fords, whether the January girl on the calendar above the office desk had dark hair or blonde. And February? And March? He ratchets loose the bolts that held the steering wheel, feeling the weight of them like pulled teeth in the palm of his hand, slipping them into the ziplock bag, scrawling black ink on the masking tape. He has not yet hit anything he can’t recall perfectly if he gives it enough effort and time.
But God his knees hurt on damp mornings like this, when spring means frost as much as redbuds and Stillman still has to worry about growing careless and letting the pipes freeze. Damn his finger joints. He works the spoke loose, removes the steering knuckles, pries off his kneecap, digs out his wrist bone, and soaks them all—bell housing to the back of the carburetor—in kerosene. He stuffs rags in the manifolds and mounting holds and degreases them, too.
There goes the Booe child making a fuss again. It has fallen. Arlene is bent over it in the grass, her shorts showing ribs of fat on the backs of her thighs. She is telling it It’s okay and Upsie-daisy and Rog has come out, dressed for work, drinking orange juice. “How far’d he get?” Rog calls. “Two whole steps,” Arlene sings back. And the child wailing and screaming in the grass.
Stillman watches it through the veil of mosquito netting that hangs around his head, warding off hot-weather insect disease. It seems to him that for a thing to wail like that, for so little reason, and all the time, it must be full of a pain so bad nature knows it has to put it in early enough that no one can carry the memory into their adult years. He figures it is what comes with growing bone, building muscles, jamming a mind with all new details of the world. He wishes the child was old enough to understand his words. He would sit it down and talk to it, try to glean from it a sense of the inverse he knows must one day come: Would his bone grinding away feel the same? His muscles rotting? Time ripping out bloody hunks of his memory? Think on that, pup, he would say. A mosquito hums its anger at his net. He lets it stew. Out there Rog is trying to calm the child by swinging it around his head, flipping it. Death-tempting acrobatics. Stillman tries to calculate the numbers: twenty years from now, he’d be ninety one. In thirty, just over a hundred. In forty he’d be celebrating his century and ten. Forty years? Plenty of kids die younger than that. Carelessness, risk taking, lack of precaution: he could outlive even a thing that young. Watch yourself, pup, he thinks, feeling better.
He uses the wire brush to get rid of the last gunk on the chassis, then the putty knife to scrape the metal to a shine, works until there isn’t any more he can do without a sandblaster. He will get one tomorrow. In the late summer heat, his sleeveless undershirt clings to his chest like an opaque second skin. He makes his way around the engine, a roll of duct tape in his hand, ripping off strips and pressing them on, covering any crack or crevice with the small silver bandages gleaming beneath the bulb. The sandblaster roars in his hands. If he could, he would stand in front of it and blast his own bone frame this way.
When he shuts the machine off the grackles drop back, returning from their scattered flight. The entire yard outside the windows is alive with them. They have come early this year, still October and already on their way north, descended upon the valley like some biblical plague. They fill every tree. The branches sag with them. Their clucks and high swelling screeches smother every other sound. The first beams of early morning sunlight come over the thinning trees and hit the horde, revealing, for a moment, the myriad colors of their feathers—as iridescent as spilled oil—that had, until then, appeared simply as black. Below them, on the lawn, the hackberry fruit—bone-colored pits in gnawed red pulp—is scattered like handfuls of rubies amid the fallen leaves. Bent over his Deutz, Stillman works on. They will pass, too.
He was in the ascending wing lift of “Rising Crane,” arms floating upward to tap the backs of his wrists above his head, when Caroline came home. On the TV screen beside the artificial waterfall the plump-cheeked middle-aged Oriental made his lissome moves. It was a new video—the second he’d bought—and Stillman didn’t like it as much as the first. The first had an old Oriental on the cover, Sifu Wu Dong, white haired with a pointy dragon-master beard and eyes that the advertising material divulged had seen a hundred and seventeen years. His hair stuck up like egret feathers and his whole body seemed to hum. The plump Oriental on this new video—he had an American name, but Stillman couldn’t stop thinking of him as Chow Young Fat—was half Stillman’s age, a third the dragon master’s, and didn’t do it for Stillman quite the same way. Even so, he mimicked the movements, trying to feel the weight at the end of the string tied to his tailbone, and then the string tied to the top of his head tuggin
g upward. Shut your eyes, Young Fat said. Feel the toxins drain out from your chest, through your shoulders, tingling in your fingers as you raise you hands, slow, slow, like wings, up, up, up … Scooping at the air, Stillman tried to gather between his palms what the instruction manual called chi, and life force, and soul energy, but what he thought of as whatever the hell kept that whitebeard dragon master alive into his hundred and teens.
Still, none of it soothed the muscles of his face, loosened his arms, like the sound of his daughter pulling into the drive. It was just after eight. She’d been gone all night, again.
It had become their routine: him doing his Chi Gong in the living room, sheathed from ankles to neck in midnight blue polypropylene long underwear, his feet kept from the cold by Smartwool socks with no-slip soles, his hair pulled into a knot and fixed with a chopstick saved from the last time they’d driven together to the mall in Coalsburg for a movie and Chinese. Two, three mornings a week she came home with some fucker she had found that night.
His daughter, a late-thirties woman whose gargantuan hams of shoulders hunched higher than his; his daughter, whose mere breathing was an epic, painstaking, sweat-producing task; Caroline, whose short skirts showed knees like blue secrets beneath swollen flesh; his Blueberry, as he had called her since she was little, seemed to have no trouble finding men. He knew the places she went to get them—area bars, county fairs, stock-car races, roadside farm stands—and what they wanted; she had shouted at him once things he tried for a long time afterwards to scour from his mind. And still he had hoped that on this day, this one day, she might have come home to him alone.
Outside, a truck door banged. He heard her scold the slammer, ease her own door shut with a click. He smiled—good, considerate kid—then, focusing, eyes squeezed into a squint, he breathed louder to cover their footsteps, the whispering at the door behind his back. He could just make out her telling the man Stay quiet and Meditation and Don’t laugh, he’s my dad. He concentrated on the good, cold burn of the air in his nostrils. Behind him: footsteps up the outside stairs to the eight-foot-high landing at the door. The latch. A rush of cold air hit the back of his neck.
Stillman switched to “Wind in the Waist.” Twisting at the hips, he flung one arm all the way behind him, his gaze following the fingertips: she caught his look on her and he tried to make his eyes appear too deep in meditation to notice the bloodshot in her’s, her night-dried mascara, blue-black curls mussed by the fucker’s pawing. Then back around the front, switching arms, the right one swinging behind him followed by his eyes: buckskin jacket; cigarette ash flecked across her mammoth chest; shorts showing blue-veined, goose-pricked barrel thighs. And back again, more rapidly now (the man, the boy, looked no more than high school) the effort pushing at his breath (his crew-cut hair the color of Tang; his black mesh shirt showing cold-hardened nipples; pierced eyebrow; even from that distance it looked infected) and swung around, his breathing tight now and all the chi gone wherever chi went and …
“Morning,” the fucker said.
Stillman shut his eyes.
“Don’t talk to him, Ted,” Caroline said.
“Tad,” the fucker said.
“Whichever,” she said. “Give me your hand.”
With his eyes shut “Wind in the Waist” made Stillman dizzy. He opened them long enough to see the fucker looking back as she led him for the stairs, and stopped in mid-back-twist, one arm pointing straight at the fucker’s face. He tried to put in his look all he wanted to say: How long have you been doing this? and Do you keep it safe? and How do I know? and You give her something nasty, I’ll rip your throat out with my teeth.
The boy pulled his look away and whispered something to Caroline’s broad back. She looked over her shoulder at her dad. “Oh, shit, sugar,” she said. “Trust me, he’s fine.” Then she leaned in and said something into the fucker’s ear that purpled his neck and made him grin.
Stillman watched them head up the stairs. The boy was forced to take them at her slow speed. She grunted with each step, her breathing loud enough to fill the downstairs. The creak of her heading for her room. The tap of the bedroom door tugged shut. They were already thumping.
He was eating breakfast when she came down again. He paused in the crumbling of his dried seaweed over his oatmeal long enough to listen to her footfall on the stairs. Over all these years he had learned to tell her moods from the way she came down to him. When she was small—eight, nine, before she had gotten fat—the methodical thump, thump, thump of her sliding down the steps on the heels of her socks meant a tranquil mood; if she gave up after the first few and walked the rest, she was pensive; when she was depressed she came down so quietly the creaks seemed made less from her weight than a natural breathing of the stairs. And always there had been the rapid thudding drumroll of Caroline happy. Until she was a teen. Until she’d begun to heft up. Now, just shy of three hundred pounds, his Blueberry would have broken something—ankle or knee or just maple-wood step—if she didn’t make it down slow and careful every time. But he had adjusted with her, learned to hear the subtleties. She sounded done in.
Through the kitchen opening, he watched her finish the stairs. She’d wrapped a nappy, cream-colored blanket around her. Sunlight bloomed in its bottom edge of fuzz. She gazed around the living room.
“In here,” Stillman whispered. If the fucker was sleeping, let him sleep on. “Blueberry, I’m in here.”
She turned to him, her hair groped into a wilderness of curls, makeup still on. He wished she wouldn’t wear that stuff. No telling what chemicals seeped in through the pores, and, besides, she was plenty pretty without it.
“I’m gonna take a bath,” she said, and he could hear she was lost in that after-sex dreamy fog, hormones leaving depression trails in the brain.
“You eat yet?” he said.
“At the bar.”
“That’s not eating.” He lifted the bowl at her. “Here, I just made it.”
To his surprise, and pleasure, she came.
“Watch your hands,” he said.
She blew a noise at the heat, and put the bowl down on the counter, shaking out her fingers.
“Hot,” he said, patting her fingers with his. On her hands, or the blanket, or from inside the blanket, he could smell something that he didn’t like to think about. Each time it filed a corner of his heart a little more raw.
He gave his attention to preparing a second bowl for himself. Shaking glops of oatmeal off the wood spoon, he listened to the floor-groans of her crossing the room, then the suction pop and squeal of the fridge door. He turned. Her blanket-shrouded back was like a mattress stood on end and around it glowed the inside of the fridge, her shelves gaudy with plastic packages of processed foods, his all browns and greens and cardboard. The rustle and grunts of her stooping to take things out. Fake maple syrup. A stick of butter. Cool Whip. He watched her load the first two into the bowl, shove it into the microwave, and nuke it. Stillman gave her a good hard look. She knew he didn’t like her to use that cancer box while he was in the room, but she stayed where she stood, right smack in front of it, as if she wanted her breasts zapped with tumors. He opened a cabinet door to shield his brain from the leaked rays. When the thing beeped, he shut the cabinet door and saw her loading in a scoop of Cool Whip. He tried not to stare as she added a second. He poured flaxseed onto his oatmeal, paused, then walked over to her and carefully shook the small, dark specks onto her pile of fake cream.
“Helps the heart disease,” he said. “High blood pressure. Plus, it’ll uncork your bowels better’n grease.”
To avoid meeting her eyes he opened another cabinet, dug at pill bottles. Her bowl sat untouched on the counter. By the time he’d picked out six bottles, turning them around to read the labels, the dark seeds had sunk into her cream like road sand spread on ice. He peered around the cabinet door. She was almost out of the kitchen, hands empty, heading away from him towards her bathroom down the hall.
The six pill bottles
in the palm of one hand and her bowl of oatmeal in the other, he stood outside her bathroom door, listening to her fill the tub. “Blueberry?”
“Shouldn’t you be in the shop by now?” she said. “Diddling ’round with your secret?”
He could hear she thought that was funny, could picture her smile. It sprung a smile on him. “I don’t diddle,” he said. “Saps the body.” Then, “I’ve got your bowl,” and went in.
The metal rings scraped at the rod as she yanked the shower curtain closed. Ever since she was a little girl, her own cleverness had tickled her in a way that was, at least to him, more endearing than smug. Ginny had been like that. Sometimes it seemed the pleasure his daughter brought him was soft fruit grown around a pain so old it had lithified into a stone waiting to crack his teeth. Caroline was like her mother in so many ways. Except for size. And style. He’d rebuilt this bathroom for her—extra-wide tub, metal grip bars on the wall to help her get out, the raised toilet seat with personal cleansing cutouts, a pull cord attached to an alarm—but the ambience was all Caroline: a round black bathmat stamped with Dale Earnhardt’s racing number, 3; gaudy, clashing beach towels bought solely for square footage; and the shower curtain with its western mountainscape and foot-long cigarette and oversize Marlboro Man squinting out at Stillman from beneath his hat.
“Hello, Dad,” she chirped from behind the curtain in a voice he knew meant she was rolling her eyes.
He set her bowl on the corner of the bathtub.
She shut the faucet off and her hand pushed aside the curtain just enough that he could see her face, her head reclined against the wall. She looked sideways at him. He handed her the spoon. She took it in her wet fingers, but her eyes stayed on him and the pill bottles in his hand. Under her gaze, he popped off their tops, spilled one of each into his palm.