by Josh Weil
“Well, it’s expensive,” he said. “But I could take out a—”
She was laughing so hard he couldn’t go on. She pinched her nostrils as if wine was going to shoot out.
“What?” he demanded. “At least I’m—”
“Those are for little old ladies,” she managed.
“So?”
“I was just picturing me getting on one of those things. I’d tear the banister right off. What I was thinking, Dad … I thought I could move down here.”
He held his fork perfectly still. “You mean the dining room?”
“Well, I’d rather that than the kitchen.”
“Well, hell,” he said, and had to go quiet to keep his voice calm. His mind swept through an image of the two of them thirty years from now, eating another birthday dinner, this time in the kitchen, and he was already pushing back his chair to stand, already picturing those far-off years when they would begin to grow old together.
When he flicks on the lights, the rain-dark world outside disappears. Just the reflections of the workshop in the window glass and, against the heavy vise at the far wall, the baseball bat lying where it rolled. In the center of the room, the sledge on the floor next to his gloves. The engine. Standing over it, he reaches down to touch the pistons, one by one by one by one, his fingers grazing their smooth metal tops. The last one he pauses over, lets his fingers float, then grips it. Tugs. It slides free. In his surprise, he almost drops it. Laying it gently on the wooden work table, he tries the one next it. It comes, too, and the next, and the last. It is as if they had been jammed in between his ribs: as he extracts each one, he can feel his lungs expand, his breastbone relax back into place. The damn tears are trying to rise up his throat again. Ridiculous, he tells himself, but the feeling is seeping in through his spinal cord, along his back to his skull, as if it has been dammed until then. He can feel all the muscles of his face smiling. He walks back to the engine block and checks the bearings and pulls out the old piston sleeves, and it’s when his hand is in the second cylinder, feeling the walls for cracks, that the tears come. He leans against it, muttering Get a hold, Charlie, and fool, and old man, and crying just the same.
Always, after his parents had been in the dance hall for an hour or two, his mother would come out to him. If it was summer, he would have stretched out on the Jenny’s bottom wing, the top wing blotting out the stars above, his face turned to stare at the hall’s back wall, its own giant faces painted there: bristly-bearded men in coon-tail hats, a bonneted woman with washboard and rifle, a black boy with hunted eyes bright as headlights. He made up stories about them to pass the time, loves and fistfights and all the ways they met their ends, until she came out: the hall’s back door yawning open beneath the hooves of a leaping rider’s horse, her shape in it, the glimpse of the rowdy crowd inside, the noise of their boot stomping and bellowing and bursts of laughter coming through the doorway and buffeting her dress like hot wind.
Always, there would be the tapping of her high heels on the wood steps, then the soft scuff on dirt, then her weight as she sat on the wing beside him. Hey, Huckleberry, she would say. Her wrist next to his face smelled like rose hips, her blouse sour with drying sweat; the combination made him dizzy with how much he wanted her to stay outside with him. She sat and smoked. Looking up at the stars, he watched the gray wisps of her breath drift across his sky.
Always, one of the tunes she liked would slip out of some crack in the dance hall walls and out to them. Then she would slide off the wing, pull him with her, and they would dance. “Begin the Beguine.” “Sweet Leilani.” “Don’t Be That Way.” Her neck and her hair. Rose hips and sweat. Tobacco on her breath and spilled whiskey on her clothes and how he shuffled around on that tire-marked back lot dirt, breathing her in. She taught him all the steps from Black Bottom to Varsity Drag. When she had finished her cigarette, she would inhale deep to make it crackle and, tossing the butt, plant a kiss on his cheek, a kiss that swam with the swirling smoke leaking out of her lips against his skin. And pull away. And smile. And go back inside.
To start the top end overhaul, he has to first remove the head. He stares at it, waiting for the energy to get to work. Mind-weary. He hasn’t dreamed in weeks; how can he dream when he can’t sleep? His mind seizes up at night, sweat prickling his skin. Cleaning the carbon from the valves, he leans in close to get his eyes focused, searching for any warps or cracks. He scrapes the head clean of carbon, too. Some nights, hunting for the cause of his sleeplessness keeps him up till dawn. There are nights when he walks out to the autumn orchard, and stands still in the windless air, and listens to the last hanging apples drop.
His eyes hurt from the strain of trying to make the lines of the world get sharp. He leans back, inhales. On sunny winter days like this, he keeps the windows open, despite the cold, so he can smell the sweet scent of the downed and rotting apples on the gusts. Squeezing the springs, he takes out the keepers, removes the washers and rotators, puts them aside. He refaces the valves. When he’s done, he lies down on the concrete floor in his gray mechanic’s suit and thinks of all the worries he has. He breathes them out into the world. And breathes in all the love he has for Caroline, holds that seven seconds in his lungs, and searching the cavities of his mind for tension, breathes out again. On his next breath he searches out his love for his onetime nearly wife. Seven seconds of holding that memory in his lungs. The anger, and fear, and regret boil to the surface like pot scum. He breathes them out into the world. Outside, the snow covers everything in quiet. He will sleep. He will rejuvenate and heal and sleep.
“… cee, dee, ee, eff, gee …”
He forces his eyes open. Outside, the Booe child is learning his alphabet. He finishes up to p and then starts again. Over and over. Stillman thinks, I’m gonna go tell that pup to shut up. He thinks, I’m just gonna sit up and… But he can’t. Every time he begins to lift his chest off the floor, the muscles of his back feel like they will drop clean away from his bones.
“… el, em, en, oh …”
By the time he rolls onto his shoulder and elbow-jacks himself onto his knees, the kid is doing the whole thing straight through and back, through and back. Did they let it just stay out in the cold all day? Didn’t it go to school?
After a while, Stillman is hearing the letters so much they jumble in his brain; sometimes, saying them to himself, he isn’t sure if s comes after t or before r. He coats all the parts with clean engine oil and puts them back in the exact reverse order that he’d removed them. Tapping the end of the valve stem with his mallet to be sure the keepers stay in place, he thinks through the birthdays of his mother and father and Caroline and Ginny. He does all the phone numbers he’s ever known, even Ginny’s out in California, though he never called it and she never called him from it. He does the exact color of his first girlfriend’s eyes, and moves on to old Les Pfersick’s, and Caroline’s, and Ginny’s—which he is startled to remember could look purple in the right light; could look deep, deep blue in another kind of right light; they had thin silver flecks in them in the light that came through her bedroom window in the mornings when he would wake before her and lie there, patient, watching the golden strip find the window, slip in it, crawl the sheets gathered at her shins, and rise up her thighs to her waist, her shoulder, her neck, her lips, and finally her eyes; her lids lifted: those dark pupils looking at him, those wondrous silver flecks in the blue. Reassembling the bottom end, he forgets to replace the crankshaft oil seals and has to start all over again. During the disassembly, he’d made careful marks on masking tape strips stuck to each rod bearing-cap; he can hardly read them, now.
He lifts his eyes to give them a rest. Outside the window, snow is streaking past the glass. Snow? he thinks, in May? and, for a moment, feeling his body slip loose from time, he nearly panics. His hands fumbling at his head, he flips the macro loupe off his eye and swings down the telephoto one. Not glasses—he doesn’t need glasses—just headgear made of stiff plastic straps that ci
rcle his skull like a hatband. He’d ordered it from a catalog along with the two loupes, one for close-up work, the other for distance, both attached to the headgear at his forehead; he can swing the macro down to his left eye, the telephoto to his right, or leave them both up like a second set of eyes mounted on his brow. Squinting his left eye shut, he swings down the telephoto. It isn’t snow at all. Framed in the window across the room, the white apple blossoms swirl on gusts. The sight lifts his heart. He hauls himself to his feet, walks stiff-kneed to the window. The orchard stretches away up the hill. Late blossoms alive with the wind. He stands perfectly still, watching them, so big and close in the telephoto, like a million white moths fluttering on the dark branches of the old trees.
By the time he gets the plunger unstuck, his hands are sweaty from the July heat and shaking too much for him to finish the job. He tries to pick up the copper gasket but his fingers flutter uselessly at it, devoid of muscle and bone as feathers on a wing. He washes the grease off his hands, the cold water already easing the throb in his knuckles, then puts on first one Air Massage Glove, Velcroing the strap around his wrist, then the other. Giant blue mittens with power packs that sit on the backs of his hands, they fill with air around his fingers, compress again, loosen, squeeze. Their air pumps whisper. He sets them to level two and sits on a stool in the open doorway trying to get what breeze the hot air will allow. The log house stands on its thin stick legs, high above the lawn, in all its emptiness.
It has been exactly two weeks since Caroline left.
At least she is not there to see him like this: his fingers thin as bones inside the clear blue plastic flesh. Here is the breeze. He shuts his eyes to feel it better, turns the air massage up as high as it will go. With his eyes shut, his other senses seem to sharpen. He can smell the deer in the woods, their feral stink. It comes to him on gusts. He can hear some vehicle coming in the distance: its engine murmur rises from a distant hum to a rumble to an oncoming rush of sound. Any moment it will show itself, burst around the corner of his road. He tears off the mitts and hurries outside, where he stands at the edge of his workshop, trying to peer as far as he can around the curve.
Surely, that was her truck, Caroline coming home. Surely she’d come home at least for this day. The chill window glass bit at his cheek above the cold-weather mask. She had been gone almost three months. Ever since the fall had come again, his lungs didn’t seem able to get enough air down, or keep it in long enough to do its job, and, finally, he’d bought the mask—a flesh-colored thermal exchange module that covered his mouth and nose and prewarmed the air for his lungs. He listened to the sounds of the truck until he lost it in another gust of wind. Through the pane, he could see the driveway, a rich glow of late afternoon light trying to give life back to the scattered brown leaves. And the sound was gone. No big black Power Ram rolling around the corner, scattering road leaves. He flipped the telephoto lens back up. In the middle of the room, the Deutz sat in its blur, its engine back in the chassis, the wheels reunited, but its governor disassembled; the thing wasn’t correcting for changes in the load. He left it that way, unlocked the door, stepped out, locked it behind him again.
Months ago, way back in spring, the Swain had burst its banks, come boiling out of the wild woods of higher hills with flotsam on its back. And then receded, leaving its litter on the lawn: broken canning jars, pale piano keys, a hog-slaughtering post studded with handmade nails. Strange artifacts of a hill people he had never till then believed in. He had let their things lie. Now they were buried in leaves like land mines.
He slid his hands into the hip pockets of his winter-padded mechanic’s suit and walked carefully across the yard towards the drive, eyes on the treacherous ground, feet shuffling carefully around the things the world had laid out to trip him. Inside the mailbox, a few white letters nested like eggs. He slid them out, slipped the macro loupe over his left eye: propane bill, coupon pack, some politician’s pamphlet asking him to vote. A photocopied flyer listing all the times of all the events that weekend at the Festival of the Hills. He scanned it, skipping over the two-man saw contest, the antique tractor pull, until he found the demolition derby. Friday night at seven. Two days away. He’d find her there.
Something rattled the branches in the orchard. He looked up: an indistinguishable blur of rust color and sky, branches shaking in the second row of trees. Leaves fell. Apples dropped, drumming at the dirt. What the hell’s in there? he thought, and switched to the telephoto loupe. The leaves shot into focus. Blue jeans. A tiny, dirty sneaker shoe. The Booe child. It rattled the branches again.
“I see you,” he called at it. Either the kid didn’t hear him through his face mask, or didn’t care. The shaking went on. Another apple dropped. He shouted, a second time, “I see you!”
The branches quit shaking. The sneaker shot up into the camouflage of leaves. Through his distance loupe, Stillman could make out a hand, maybe a face. “You oughtn’t shake down those apples!” he shouted. The child tried to scrunch itself further behind the leaves. Stillman moved along the roadside till he had the child in clear sight. It stared back at him, its face stiff with fright. He wondered what the hell was wrong with it. “Those apples are all rot,” he called at it. “They aren’t gonna do you no good. Why’re you knocking them down? You let them fall in their own time. You—”
The pup jerked, a movement so fast and unexpected that Stillman jerked, too. Something tore through the leaves, hit the grass beside the mailbox, smacked his shin. Apples. The kid was throwing apples at him. Another hit the road and rolled. He flipped the lens back up to his forehead and, hunting the blurred brown balls, found two, grabbed them up, and hurled them back—one, two—hard. No apples came in return. The kid was a still blue blur. Stillman started to thumb the lens down to see again.
“No.” The kid’s voice was high and frightened and hit Stillman as unexpected as the apples. He lowered the lens the rest of the way but, before he could get it settled over his eyes, the kid was shouting. “No,” it shouted, and, “No, please,” and, “No.”
Slowly, Stillman pushed the mask off his mouth. It hung at his neck. The kid went silent. Stillman reached up to the plastic band around his skull and slid the headgear off. “It’s okay,” he told it. He struggled to remember the kid’s name. “It’s just me. Mr. Wing. Your neighbor.”
After a moment, the kid said, “The old man.”
Without the loupe, Stillman couldn’t make out the kid’s face. “My name’s Stillman,” he said, squinting hard. “Stillman Wing. You know my daughter Caroline. She works at the Wades in—”
But the kid was already scrambling down from the tree. Stillman listened to it rushing through the underbrush at the side of the road. Then—there!—a blur of movement as the child darted across to the Booes’ yard. He called after it, “I’ve been a mechanic for more than fifty years,” but it had already disappeared.
Inside the house, he took off his shoes, pushed them against the hallway wall. The paint was scuffed in a gray line at toe level from all the years of his and Caroline’s shoes side by side. He unzipped his mechanic’s suit, put the headgear back on. Now that she was gone, he just wore it around the house: flip down the telephoto loupe if he wanted to see who was in a passing truck, flip down the macro to read the numbers on the phone or knobs on the stove. Whatever of hers she hadn’t taken he’d left exactly the same. In the kitchen, her mermaid mug on the table, coffee dregs coagulating at the bottom, brown drips dried over the ceramic breasts and curve of green-tail handle. Her fast food coupons magneted to the fridge. Inside, all of his food still kept on the bottom racks. The top ones held only a used-up bottle of her hot sauce, an open can of Vienna sausage, and half a shriveled lime. The only thing he’d changed was her slippers. She had left them in the bathroom, but last night, in one of his sleepless hours, he had carried them out to the kitchen and arranged them under the table in front of the chair she sat at when they ate together. They were there now: giant, red, fuzzy racing ca
rs with the Dale Earnhardt #3 on the sides and Eat My Dust written across the toes.
Forty-one years ago, when Ginny left for California, he’d cleaned house as if that would help him to forget. It was only afterwards, when everything she had owned was in the dump, and the trailer they had lived in together smelled of glass cleaner and Murphy’s oil instead of that vanilla lotion, hash smoke, sundried laundry smell of her, that he realized he didn’t want to.
He shook that from his thoughts; it was only a matter of time before Caroline was back. So what if this time she’d moved in with a fucker instead of on her own? He didn’t see why that should sit in the pit of his belly as leaden as it did. He opened the freezer, took out a catfish fillet, and was thawing it under a stream of warm water in the sink when he suddenly shut the faucet off. Leaving the fish over the drain, he got a pot of water boiling, measured out some brown rice. He took out a brick of tofu, filled a pan with olive oil. He didn’t have any baby carrots, but he cut the carrots he had to just the right size. He had the entire meal prepared and was sitting across from her slippers when he remembered that she had put something on the rice. He got up, opened the cupboard, and went through the spices one by one, opening the tops and setting them on the counter, until the cupboard was bare. Whatever it was, she must have taken it with her.
He had refused to help her move. So she had asked the fucker from the commune to come over and help her. And the fucker had. She called him her lover. She said, Dad, this is my lover, River. The man held out his hand. River, huh? Stillman had said, pretending not to see the fucker’s paw, thinking, Lover my ass, you River fucker. The River fucker had lent her a hay trailer. He didn’t even have his own car. They hooked the trailer to the back of her Ram. She had known him for a month. For a week, they’d been staying together—trying it out, she’d said—at the commune on the onetime Demastus land. It was as bad as he could imagine. Not just the River fucker—the River fucker didn’t even warrant describing. But the idea of that place with all its shared germs and spread diseases and communal pots of food and probably orgies going on every night—he’d heard, like everyone else, about the naked swimming parties—and shower stalls crawling with toe fungus and toilet seats still warm from the last whoever’s freewheeling ass. They loaded up the hay cart and the bed of her truck and drove away. He had not talked to her since. Once, there had been a message on his answering machine that sounded like her breath and swallow, but that was it. When he sat back down to the table, the tofu was cold and the olive oil had rethickened to a gel. He ate the plain rice.