The New Valley

by Josh Weil

  He turned off the car. Without the engine noise, the rain seemed twice as loud. Next to the track a low chain-link fence surrounded a square of lawn as green and wet as pondweed. On it stood the stones. There were maybe a half hundred graves, maybe more, but the two he’d come for were planted smack next to the track, just on the other side of the fence. The car windows were fogging up. All he could see was the shapes of the slabs, cut the same day out of the same chunk of stone. He reached over and wiped at the inside of the passenger window, squinted at the graves; he couldn’t make the engraved letters go sharp. All that streaking rain. Rubbing his face, he sat back. He didn’t need to read them, anyway. On one was cut the words: Lyle Clemens Wing, husband of Lynelle Opal Wing, father to Stillman Hershel Wing, b. June 3, 1905, d. April 22, 1938. The other read Lynelle Opal Wing, wife of Lyle Clemens Wing, mother to Stillman Hershel Wing, b. October 12, 1908, d. April 22, 1938.

  He reached over again, rolled down the window, and squinted hard at the stones until his eyes ached from the effort. He sure wasn’t going to get out into the goddamn rain to read them. He didn’t know why the hell he had come. He didn’t care anymore. Had not cared for a long time.

  Even years ago, when Caroline was old enough to hear it, he’d told it to her with his eyes dry as they were now. She’d been six. He’d had her two and a half years. A Saturday. Supper time. He was home, in the kitchen, trimming fat off pork chops. He looked up from the knife blade—just a whisper in his lungs that something was wrong—and through the window caught a movement in the orchard across the road. There stood his daughter among the trees. She was just near enough that he could see her uncombed head tilted back on her twig of a neck. One arm jerked upward as if throwing something at the sky. Then, quick, her whole body moved, lurched to a stop; she bent to the ground; her head tilted back; her arm jerked; she repeated the whole thing. He watched for nearly a minute before he realized what she was throwing: hard, unripe apples. She hurled them at the sky between the branches, high up as she could, and stood still, and then, at the last minute, dodged…. No, she was trying to move into them. She was trying to line up her face so they would hit her. His six-year-old fool daughter was trying to catch them in her mouth. By the time he got to the road, she was running through the trees to meet him, wailing, her open mouth a well of blood.

  Inside, he made her swish some rubbing alcohol around, made sure she spat it back out. Then he sat her down and told it to her as a lesson:

  “Blueberry, you ever thought why you don’t have no Grandpa Wing? No Grandma Wing?”

  “They dead.”

  “All right. But you ever thought why?”

  “They old.”

  “No.”

  “They got sick.”

  “No.”

  “Somebody killed them?”

  “No.”

  She whispered through the ball of Kleenex at her mouth: “They done a sudicide?”

  “Might as well’ve,” Stillman told her. “They were gamblers. They were fools. You know what barnstormers are?”

  “Germans,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Yes,” she told him. “In big boots.”

  He squinted at her. Sometimes her child mind confounded him in a way her mother’s grown one once had, too. “No,” he said. “Barnstormers were pilots, them who fly airplanes.”

  “I know what pilots is.”

  “But they were a special kind of pilots. A stupid kind. Daredevils. Hothead fools. They should’ve never been parents. Listen, your Grandma Wing and Grandpa Wing had a airplane. They owned it, understand? Old Curtis JN4. Was called a Jenny. Couldn’t be bothered—”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why was the airplane called Jenny?”

  “Just was,” he said. “Like you name your dolls, okay? What I’m getting at is—”

  “I wouldn’t pick Jenny.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’d call it Virginia.”

  He looked at her hard. Over the years since she’d arrived, he’d bought her dolls of every variety and she’d named them all Virginia, every one. He wondered what her child’s brain remembered from its infant years. He had always known her mother as Ginny, but he didn’t know her in the years his daughter had.

  “Well,” he said, “They called it a Jenny. It was just what it was called. And they couldn’t be bothered to pay off the farm, but they owned that Jenny as if crop dusting or folks who paid for joyrides excused it, which it didn’t. It was a toy. They put their lives into a toy. Saturday nights, just like tonight, they’d pack me in it with them, sit me on my—”

  “Can I have one?”

  “One what?”

  “A toy airplane?”

  “No. It wasn’t a … It was a real airplane, Blueberry. Listen, your grandma’d put me on her lap—no seat belt or nothing, just hold me to her, like I was nothing but a purse—and your grandpa’d sit up front and we’d take off from the landing strip beside our house—which, by the way, if they were responsible adults they’d have put that land in crops instead—and we’d fly into Narrows and they’d come in low and buzz Main Street so the wheels almost hit the tops of the cars and everyone screaming—”

  She screamed, like it was her job to do sound effects.

  “Right,” he said. “And Ma and Daddy was laughing it up—”

  She did a Santa Claus laugh.

  “This is serious,” he said.

  She made her face serious.

  “Now, listen. They come whooping into town that way Saturday nights, pulled the plane around, landed it on Ripple-mead Road and taxied all the way down, waving at people on the sidewalk, letting people jump on for a ride, till they got to the dance hall and parked it in the big lot behind back.”

  “Where there’s the painted people,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he told her. “It’s called a mural.”

  “The heros of the valley.” She grinned like the phrase was a trinket she’d filched from school.

  “Behind that mural,” he said, “in that back lot was where they’d leave me to watch over the plane. Like a dog. I know now that’s ’cause they were keeping me from all the drinking and gambling and fights and stupidness inside, ’cause they were a big part of it—the fightingest, drunkest, stupidest of the bunch —but back then all I knew was they were some long hours waiting outside, sitting on the wing, hanging off the propeller, nothing for company but all the painted stares of those giant painted people, having to hear all the time the sounds of so much fun going on in there.”

  “Why didn’t you go inside?” she asked.

  “I had to watch the plane.”

  “I would’ve gone inside.”

  “Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Dancing around? Sound like fun? All them men and women and that music making everyone crazy? Hm? Sound like a good time? Getting drunk sound like a fun idea to you? I ever catch you drunk, Caroline, I’ll—”

  “Daddy—”

  “What?” He was close to yelling. “You think you’re gonna grow up and be a gambler? Big Gambler Caroline? Hm?”

  “I don’t know what a gambler is,” she said, quiet.

  “Your Grandpa and Grandma Wing, that’s what it is. Thrill seekers. The kind of person who gets a kick out of taking stupid risks. Like throwing a damn apple up in the air and seeing where it might land on your damn face. Let me tell you what happens to people like that. One Saturday night—this is when I was ten, just a few years older than you are now—they wrapped up their stupidness sometime around two or three in the morning, came out the back door of the dance hall. I’d gone to sleep in the backseat hole, but they woke me up with their hooting and laughing and pawing at each other. Well, I just stayed curled up down there on the seat, waited for them to wrap up so we could go home. But that Saturday night they got it in their heads they wanted to do something else, try some new thrill—”

  “What was they wrapping?” she said.

  He looked at her.
“All you got to know,” he told her, “is it wasn’t exciting enough for them on the ground, they wanted to … I’m talking about … Listen, all you got to know is they were up there for the plain and foolish fun of it. They’d left me in the dance hall lot. They were flying up there, without any lights, circling around and around. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear their engine going. Not more than a few hundred feet up above my head. And then it sounded like they were gonna land back down. And then it sounded …”

  He blinked beneath her stare. She was holding the Kleenex to her mouth with both hands and blood had dried on her fingers.

  “They crashed in a tobacco field,” he said. “They died right away.” He cleared his throat. “Now what the hell did you think was gonna happen when you finally managed to catch one of them apples in your mouth? Hm?”

  “That’s how Grandma and Grandpa died?” she said.

  “It is.”

  “What happened then?”

  “That’s how the story ends, Blueberry. Let me see your mouth.”

  She took the wad away and tried to speak while he looked in at her teeth.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Weren’t you sad?” she said, again.

  “Yes, I was. Now you hold on to these two teeth. Put them—”

  “Why aren’t you sad now?”

  “Put them under your pillow, Blueberry. See if some little fairy I know doesn’t—”

  “Why aren’t you sad now, Daddy?”

  “Who said I’m not sad?”

  “You don’t look sad.”

  “Well, it was a long time ago.”

  “You look angry.”

  “Tilt your head back,” he told her. “Try not to swallow too much blood.”

  He took the tissue wad and balled it in his hand and went to the bathroom with the bloody thing. He dropped it in the toilet. The water went pink almost immediately. She was watching him from the living room, her head tilted back just like he’d said. He pulled tissue after tissue from the box and balled them in his hand and then took the box with him back to her. “Here,” he said, handing her the mashed ball of fresh Kleenex. “Spit into this.” When she was done he said, “Now, what if one of those teeth had got stuck in your throat? Or that apple had come down and squished one of your eyes?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “That was kind of stupid, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

  He hugged her to him. “That’s all right,” he said. “I don’t want you to be sorry. I just want you to be smart. Smart and careful, okay?”

  “What were they doing up there in the air?”

  He spoke into the apple scent of her warm hair. “Just being careless,” he said. “Careless and stupid.”

  The rain was coming in through the open car window. It stained the empty passenger seat with dark spots the size of children’s fingerprints. He rolled the glass back up. The car had become cold and damp. His knees ached. In the places where his hair had died off, his scalp felt icy. He’d forgotten to take his knit hat. He hadn’t even taken a coat. It had been stupid to come out here, stupid to take the drive, stupid to still be angry.

  Unbuckling his seat belt, he reached around to dig at the junk in the backseat. The black plastic basin he used for changing oil was full of things he’d salvaged from the side of the road: bolts, washers, a plastic funnel, a hammer’s head with the handle broken in jagged shards at the neck. He dumped it all out on the seat.

  Turning the basin upside down, he held it over his head and got out. The rain beat above him. It was cold on his fingers. He splashed around the car, crouched beside the fence, scrunched his eyes at the chiseled stones. He tried to summon some kind of sadness. He thought how it had been to stand there listening to their engine circling above, to hear that sound change, how he had backed to the side of the lot to give them room to land. Thought about how it had been in the moment he’d known it was not sounding like he’d ever heard it before. Tried to recall the way his heart had shifted into something else, too, as if, in synchronicity with the Jenny’s engine, it was struggling to pull the falling plane back up. Oh, he could remember it just fine. But he couldn’t feel it. Didn’t cloud his eyes. Didn’t do anything, really.

  Even the run through the woods behind the dance hall lot, the breaking out into the wide open field, the moon shining down on all the long rows, the wide-leafed plants. Soft-looking, the shadows in the lower reaches dark as anything in the deepest part of the sky. And all over their tops the nicotiana flowers glowing, white, luminous. In the middle of them all jutted one of the wings. The tobacco plants slapped at him, and there between two rows was part of the propeller; there was the tail; and, further on, the entire massive engine block mashed through the center of a row. He was a dozen yards away when he saw it, and a few steps closer when he heard it sizzling, and closer still when he saw them: they must have been sitting together. Now his mother was smashed atop his father, the engine block smashed atop them both, pinning them together, driving them into the ground.

  Stillman stood up from the wet grass. Wallowing, he thought. Keep your eyes on the road, Charlie, he told himself, not on the rearview.

  But, running towards them across the tobacco rows, he had seen one of them raise a head. When he was five rows away, he came upon legs. He could see, then, that one of them had been squeezed apart at the waist. The other—it was his mother—was looking at him. Three rows away, he saw her hand move. She was trying to wipe the blood from her eyes. And he was two rows away when the engine flamed, a sudden flare of heat that crackled at his skin, light so bright it burned him blind. He jerked back. Covered his face. Still he could hear her.

  The rain-battered basin tremored atop his head. God, he was angry. God, God, it was stupid to be so angry. Thinking it, he was angrier. It made no sense, no sense at all: Ginny should have been the one to heat his blood; she had earned his fury. And yet, there he was, trying to dip into memory and bring back cupped hands of it dripping with sadness for his parents, and he couldn’t do it, and couldn’t do it, and then there was Ginny and it was simple.

  The house smelled like warm cake. He thought Caroline would be in the kitchen, but she wasn’t. Just a disastrous mess of cookware and slopped batter thrown about. The oven door gaped. He stood in its remaining heat, pried off his wet shoes, dropped his soggy support socks on top of them, peeled away his slacks and turtleneck. He found a damp dish towel and stood in his underwear, drying his hair.

  She came in from the dining room, a butter knife in one hand, a cigarette lighter in the other.

  “Smells good,” he said.

  “Eu de cake la choc-o-lat,” she said. “You’ll bitch about it, but you’ll like it.”

  They worked at their respective kitchen tasks in easy silence, Caroline getting the last of the lunch together and Stillman making his tea, four bags draped into a saucepan: ginger, chamomile, ginseng, and, finally, to shore up the health of his prostate, a homemade bag of dried hydrangea, sarsaparilla, and nettle. By the time his tea was steeped, she was done with all the rest. He brought the saucepan into the dining room with a hot pad and a mug. He had given up trying to get her to drink tea after he’d paid over fifty bucks one year for a pound of premixed burdock and chickweed and cleavers the mail-order company swore would help with weightloss; she had thanked him for it, drove down 684, and fed it all that very day to Don Demastus’s Lemosine bull.

  The dining room was reserved for special occasions, which meant they only used it two or three times a year. It had always seemed a waste to him, but Caroline said it was the only thing that fooled people into thinking a lady lived in the house. Clear plastic covered the six chairs and an oval of more plastic, padded and white, did it for the table. On the table pad she had laid out a spread: two place settings, one at each far end, replete with their own chopsticks, take-out salt and pepper packets, and beer steins —his filled halfway with wine, hers to the top. The cake sat in the center of the
table, large enough for a dozen guests. She’d sprinkled his granola on the white icing to spell out DAD and the number 74. The dried strawberries leaked a border of pink. A tall incense stick stood stabbed in the middle, trickling smoke.

  He sat down. “Cake looks real good.”

  “Well, I sure hope it’s better than dinner.”

  She had tried her best to cook his kind of food. On the plates were bricks of tofu deep fried and smelling powerfully of olive oil. She had doused them in soy sauce and shriveled scal-lions. Brown rice sat in a wet heap next to a few soggy baby carrots. She’d tried to jazz it all up with a splattering of Mrs. Dash and a limp strand of parsley sagging off the side of the plate.

  She said, “You want to skip it and just go for the cake, I’m game.”

  “It all looks real good,” he said, unfolding the paper napkin. “Makes it feel like a restaurant.”

  “I stole them from the Bread Basket.”

  “It’s all real sweet.”

  “Happy birthday, Dad.”

  They had moved on to the cake when the phone rang. She said she’d get it and he waved—a motion they both understood meant “answering machine.” When it clicked on in the kitchen, a woman’s voice intruded into the room. It said things like Yes, it is still available and I could show it tonight and deposit and rent and then it clicked off. They ate in silence. She refilled her stein. He couldn’t look at her. He was trying to form the words moving out on his lips but he seemed less capable of making a sound than the machine.

  Finally she said, “The thing is, I’m sick of having to get up those stairs.”

  He nodded at his forkful of cake.

  “I take a bath and I’m all sweaty again by the time I get up to bed.”

  “I could …” he swallowed the cake in his throat. “I’ve seen these things you can get that’ll hook on the rail, kind of like a chair, it’s got a motor, just takes you up.”

  She started laughing.