by Josh Weil
“What are those?” she said.
He looked at the tablets as if, to his surprise, some small creature had squatted in his palm and crapped them.
“Dad,” she said. “I thought we agreed.”
“Oh, just take them.”
“I don’t want them, Dad.”
“For your daddy who loves you,” he said, and dumped the pills onto her oatmeal.
He sat back on the toilet lid, cleared his throat. Her arm sloshed over the tub side, her hand searching the floor like a blind water creature scouring a lake bottom for food. Each time she found a bottle, she picked it up, read the label, and hunted for the next one. When she’d read all six, she lined them up on the tub sill with their warning labels facing him. Every one bore bright red cautions directed specifically at women in the pregnant state. The look on her face dared him to look back at her.
“What?” he said.
“If these things could keep me from getting pregnant, you think they’d sell a bottle of them for”—she checked the sticker—“four ninety-nine?”
“You worried about getting pregnant?”
She loosed a breath of disbelieving laugher. “You think I’d let Ted up there—”
“You don’t even know his name.”
“You think I’d get juiced in just to—”
“Caroline.”
“—give you a grandkid?”
“I don’t want one. I’ve got a daughter. If you don’t mind, I’d rather keep this one around, rather keep—”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“A,” he said, holding up a thumb. “Each year over thirty-five a woman’s chances of complications, serious complications, life-threatening …”
She had taken the spoon from her bowl and now she clanked its edge against the tub sill. A bird dropping of flaxseed and grayish Cool Whip sat where she’d tapped it.
“B,” he said, “the breast cancer thing’s only good if you have a kid before you’re thirty five. D—”
“You’re on C,” she said, and tapped out another turd.
“D, pregnancy’s tough on any woman, but there’s complications when you’re a big—”
“Fat,” she said.
“When you’re a big woman it can seriously … It can kill you. And E, I don’t know, maybe you’ve forgot about diabetes and—”
“I don’t have diabetes.”
“Not yet.” He felt the strain behind his eyes that hit him whenever he thought of her with anything worse than the burden her weight already gave her, and he went quiet to keep his voice from giving him away.
“Dad?” she said, with a brightness that let him know he’d better look at her and be sharp.
In an attempt to head her off, he pointed at her porridge bowl, told her it was going to get cold.
Covering her chest with one arm, she rose a little in the tub and showed him her other shoulder. “What do you think that is?”
Above the tattoo of the license number of the car she’d driven to victory in the ’94 demolition derby were five welts, straight two-inch lines fanned out like the footprint of some strange bird.
“There are diseases,” he said, “that they don’t have immunizations for.”
“It’s birth control, Dad. Ninety-nine percent effective.”
His mind worked through her numbers; at one in a hundred he figured she’d be pregnant within two years.
“It’s more effective than a rubber,” she went on.
He looked from the bird print to her face.
“It’s like the pill, but it’s time released. This’ll last me—what?”
“You don’t use a condom?”
In the silence he left, he listened for the sounds of the fucker upstairs, waited for him to creak or snore, as if that would prove a point he had not yet made. There was just the lapping of the tub water and the roar and honk of a truck going by outside. Finally, he pointed at her bird print and, in his I’m-your-father-and-I’m-older-and-I-know voice, said, “Caroline, you don’t know what they might have.”
“Not again,” she said.
“Him,” his eyes flicked upward. “Any of them.”
“What do you want, Dad?”
“You don’t know.”
“You want me to take samples? You want me to save it in baggies and send it off to a lab?”
“What I want is for you to stop taking risks with your life every other night.”
She had let her arm fall from her chest and now she covered herself again. “Risks?” she said. “What would you know about risks, Dad? You’ve never took a risk in your life.”
Either she wasn’t truly looking at him, or she was too mad to see the hurt that caused him, because otherwise he could not account for how she could go on saying, “If I lived my life like you …” and “Thirty-nine years …”; how his daughter, who could almost read his mind, could not know how deeply that had cut. Well, he told himself, she didn’t know what was buried that far down. And never would.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I swear I’m gonna move the fuck out.”
He sat there as if his spine was a part of the commode, a pipe rising up out of the porcelain to attach at the back of his skull. There had been five times that she called moving out and he called running away: when she was seventeen, for two days; when she was twenty, for a month; then not again until twenty-nine, for three weeks in the summer; thirty-one, for most of January; and for two weeks last year. And, by whatever name, each time drove him ill with worry and grief.
Slowly, he stood, taking more time than he normally allowed his legs, didn’t even block his face from wincing at the stab in his knee he still wouldn’t admit had persisted long enough it might be permanent. She shut the curtain. The Marlboro Man, forehead deformed by a curtain fold, stared back with one hard eye. Outside, another truck honked. He opened the bathroom door and was about to step out when she said something.
“What?” he asked from the doorway.
Her hand jutted out from behind the curtain, holding the bowl. Except for what she’d done to the seeds, it was untouched. He took it.
“Dad,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s not I don’t appreciate it. It’s just the seaweed kinda stinks.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but I hear it’s good for the mood, helps improve the disposition.”
Her eyes appeared at the curtain’s edge. “You better have mine, too, then.”
He tried to make his smile look like it couldn’t come from a man who harbored hurt, and failed. He set the bowl on the tile, lowered himself to sit at the foot of the tub, and reached a hand under the curtain.
“Give me your foot,” he said.
She had a normal-size foot. Looking at it sticking out from under the curtain, off the edge of the tub, you wouldn’t have known she was anything special. He held it in his hands and rubbed at the arch, thinking This is for her liver and slid his thumbs along the inside ridges of each foot thinking This is for her back pain, and then This is for her blood pressure, and This is for her heart. Outside, a convoy of trucks passed, lobbing their horn blares into his yard the way someone did Michelob cans every Saturday night. It was the day before the Festival of the Hills. They’d be getting to Narrows early to stake out overnight spots in the high school field. He had read up on reflexology long enough to know his stuff and her voice was sleepy and soothed when she spoke again.
“You’d think,” she said, “that you’d be happy I got laid as much as I do. It’s supposed to prolong health, isn’t it?”
“Other foot,” he said.
“Well, I know I heard somewhere it’s supposed to make you live longer.”
“No,” he said. “It’s the feeling of closeness,” and he worked his fingers gently over the soft, warm arch of her foot.
He enters that fall morning after breakfast through the small side door, like he has done all the past year, unlocking it and stepping in quickly, and relocking it behind. The Deutz sits where he left it last
. There are days when the world outside his shop seems spinning too quickly for him to get his hands on it, and he comes in, and the Deutz is there like a bolt right through the axis of it all. Sometimes, gripping the chassis to help pull himself up from a crouch, or resting against a high wheel rim, he can feel it shake, just a little, as if everything spinning around has finally begun to rattle it loose. But when he comes again, it is always there, solid as ever.
He has split the chassis, the front wheels off in a corner, its bones tagged and shelved, the engine block resting alone in the center of the room like a heart on ice waiting for transplant. The thing is seized up. He’s freed a hundred stuck engines, but always using the hydraulics at Pfersick’s to press the pistons out. Pfersick’s: if he cups his hands over his face and sucks in he can smell the years at that place in the creases of his skin. He crosses the room and plugs in the electric heater. The outside has darkened with soothsayer light, a morning storm coming. It will strip the trees of all the last leaves. In the window glass, he looks at himself: his hairline all wrong, the forehead too high, as if the top of some other man’s head has screwed itself onto his skull. His breath clouds and disappears, clouds and disappears. He’s heard Pfersick’s son hired a woman to come in and look after the old man. He’s heard Les can’t go to the bathroom by himself anymore. He looks away from his reflection, from how it looked thinking about that.
The heater coils have filled with red. He extends his hands. His knee pads hang around his boots. He has to suppress an urge to rip them off and hurl them at the wall. Just for a month, he promises himself, till the first of the new year, to let the joints get back their strength, and then the goddamn old-lady pads go in the first-aid bin with the rest of the unnecessaries. But damn, the heat feels good on the bone. He has tracked in snow-sogged leaves and he squats down now and, plucking one from the floor, holds it to the red coils, smiling, until it is dried out and can keep its own shape again. He sets it down carefully, and stands. Tries to stand. Breathes once, sharp, and stands up right through the spike that pierces his femur to his hip. When he pulls the knee pads up they press his heated pants against his skin so it burns and he pounds on them, rapid fist hammerings, pounding.
He will have to soak the engine free, dissolve the rust until the thing unseizes. A long time—months maybe, maybe a year. He mixes the brake fluid with the penetrating oil, fills the cylinders through the spark plug holes till they brim, then screws the plugs back in. Long leaked rivulets dripping on the newspapered floor. Outside the windows, the snow is eye-hurt white.
He shuts his lids for a while, lets them soothe the dryness of his eyes. He is so tired of not sleeping. All night Caroline was up flushing the john, the thuds of her walking the hall back to her room, a few hours of quiet, and back to the john again. He is sure she has diabetes. He’d tried to explain to her, sat her down to lay out how his parents had both had the disease.
Well, that’s not what killed them, was it? she’d said.
That’s not the point.
Yes, it is.
It’s a hereditary—
Dad, it’s my point.
With the first warm hint of spring the carpenter wasps come out. They crawl the windows and buzz at the screens. When he was a boy he knew another boy who got stung and swelled up till his eyes closed and his throat shut off. What was her point anyway? Occasionally, he tries the hand crank on the engine to see if anything has penetrated deep enough into the rust. Nothing.
And why the hell does that pup have to sit beneath the spruce hedge and sing? For half the summer it seemed the Booe child wouldn’t ever learn to speak, but then it just started singing. “Mary’s Lamb” and “Twinkle Stars.” Words and all. He opens the side door and peers out to see where it is. It’s lying on its back in the pine needles, its mother’s shape barely visible on the other side of the hedge. The boughs hang so low over the child’s head they seem to squeeze it against the ground. Maybe it’s trying to hide; maybe it’s looking for a way out of the heat. Regardless, it’s learned a new one. One he doesn’t recognize, tune nor lyrics. Maybe it just made them up. “Hey,” he says, sharp and throaty, the way you do to shoo a dog. It stops singing. It looks at him. He slips back inside, shuts the door before it can see in. And there’s the damn tune again, right through the screens. It’s too hot to shut the windows. He takes the plastic mallet and the brass rod and goes at the pistons through the spark plug holes—bang! bang!—as if to drown the child out.
It was the rain that eventually did it, either sent the Booe child hauling for inside, or smothered its noise in the tumult that poured down. There was no other sound left in the valley. Just the hammering on the roof, the roaring through the last autumn leaves, the drops drilling at the surface of the Swain. He stood back from the engine block and wondered if Caroline would worry about him. They had fought that morning. He’d sat her down to talk about her drinking—bowel cancer and throat cancer and mouth cancer and liver collapse—and this time she’d gone so far as to snap the Eads Eagle open to rentals and start calling numbers. That was when he left, told her he was going to cool off with a long walk on the road. But once he was outside, the Deutz drew him again.
Now, the clock above the extinguisher read a sliver to noon, but it was almost like dusk inside. He’d left the lights off so she wouldn’t know he was in there, so she’d think he was still walking in the downpour, so she’d feel the guilt. Through the window, the streaking rain, he could see her up above the flood stilts in the kitchen making the cake. Ever since she was a little girl, his Blueberry had felt guilty after their fights. He felt that old barb of shame and turned from the window, back to the Deutz. The engine block hunched in the rain roar, black and grease-smeared, like a prehistoric animal excavated from a swamp. He had been waiting to try the last thing; if it didn’t work, there’d be nothing left he could do to unseize that tractor heart.
He dug out the wood baseball bat he’d bought for Caroline thirty years ago, hauled over the sledgehammer, lay them beside the engine, opened the thresher kit, took out the socket wrench, and stood there, breathing loud. He did not want to touch it. He tried to shake himself out of it, but the rain beat directly on his mind and his fingers squeezed the wrench so hard they felt like they’d snap apart at the knuckles. He tore his eyes from the engine block—What the hell’s wrong with you, Charlie?— and, breathing his short, sharp, calming breaths, crouched by the engine and began to drain the petrol mix. He took off the head, hauled away the pan, disconnected the rods. There the pistons were. Bare as carcass bones picked clean. Carefully, he set the wood side of the bat on top of the first one. In his other hand he took up the sledge. And brought it down, gently, one light tap. Walking around the engine block, he did the same to the next, then the third, the fourth, and he was moving counterclockwise now, hammer on wood on each irreplaceable piston crown, the hits coming harder and harder until they were slams that shook the bones of his arms.
As he circled the engine, he could see Caroline in the kitchen through one window. And through the opposite window: the old orchard. In the sky above the autumn trees, the blinking light of an airplane bled through the rain. He was around another engine circle before it struck him: What the hell was an airplane doing in this kind of weather, flying that kind of low? And had gone around another when What the hell was it still doing framed in his window? It blinked on and off, on and off, a distant red spot in the shredded gray. Something in him iced over. He could feel it spread like frost dusting his bones. What kind of airplane hovered in this weather, or circled, or whatever it was goddamn doing, and why over him, and then he was slamming at the engine, over and over, the sledge on the bat on the pistons until he knew he was going to ruin it, going to kill it beyond repair, and his throat was tight and his eyes felt as if thumbs were pushing at their raw backs from inside his head, and the sledge clanged to the floor. The bat slipped from his fingers. For a long time there was just the sound of the wood rolling slowly along the concrete.
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nbsp; In the car, rain pummeled the windshield, streamed down so thick the old wipers couldn’t clear it beyond a blur. But he had always felt safe in this car, from the day he’d bought all five thousand pounds of the low-set cruiser a quarter century ago; it was the first car with an air bag, and first with auxiliary brake lights, too, but he would have felt safe in it even without all that. Ever since he was a baby, cars had calmed him. Or maybe it was these back roads. His mother would pack him squalling in the car and drive them. They used to roam the swales and curves at rolling speed, the hills rising and falling beneath their wheels like a resting giant’s chest, until, one morning, the undulations did too good a job on them both. She woke up at the bottom of a cattle pasture, the front wheels stuck in a creek, the road high above at the top of a hill they had apparently rolled down. The way she told it, she woke with a bloody forehead and a broken nose and saw him lying there on the dash where he’d been thrown, drooling out of his smile, still asleep. How she laughed at that. And how his daddy laughed with her. It had never seemed funny to him. But that was them. That was the way they were.
He drove on through the downpour, the road lined with hay bales hunkered together like horses trying to keep warm; stands of wild asparagus in roadside ditches, their brittle autumn seed sprays broken by the storm. He passed through Narrows with its banner stretched across Route 42 reminding all to come back next week for the Festival of the Hills, and he went on through Ripplemead out towards the far end of the valley until he passed the Breedloves’ dairy farm, its big gray-board house and windows lit like night, milling with all the water-brained souls of that Breedlove woman’s massive brood.
Or almost passed it. He found himself idling at the two-track dirt path that cut between the silos and the rows of white crates, their doorways dark with the movements of veal calves, warm breath steaming through the bars into the rain. He told himself he didn’t know why he was there. And then he told himself that was a lie. And then he took the track. The car tires splashed a wake. Behind the Breedlove home, halfway up the hill, the fields of cut cornstalks gave way to a clearing.