by Josh Weil
When he went back to the workshop, he was filled with a sudden, overpowering need to show her the tractor. It sat there on its iron hoops of wheels, nearly ready, but not for hardtop road, not without the tires Les had stored in the belly of his plane. In his mind, Stillman could see how it would be: him driving up to her on those new tires on the new hardtop they’d put down through town, the rumbling Deutz agleam with new paint, her eyes opening wide. He would say to her, I am so proud of you. And she would say, Is that what you’ve been working on all these years? He would beam. It’s beautiful, she would say in the breathy way she did when she was shocked beyond the sarcasm she usually held in reserve. It’s yours, he would tell her. He could almost feel the expansiveness of her arms.
Through the early dusk the Toronado rolled the gravel road, wending alongside the Swain, trailer rattling on its single axle behind, and Stillman at the wheel. Both loupes were shoved up on his brow and he was leaning forward, chest almost hitting the steering wheel, squinting to make out the blur of road just before it rushed under the nose of the heavy old car. Its headlights swept the roil of river below, then showed the spilled dirt spread out on the asphalt: the Jefferson Forest Road.
He took it alongside the old Damastus land up toward the dark ridgetop woods, the pines peering down from their looming granite slabs. Halfway up, he stopped. The empty trailer sat in the quiet wake of its rattle. His taillights painted it blood red in the rearview, and behind that, the cattle guard, its wide ribs red, the gaps between them dark as grave holes after a rain. In front, the headlights showed briar snarls and black bodies of red cedars grown big as steers a month from slaughter.
He got out. Left the engine running. The growth was thicker than it had been years before, but he pushed his way through to the chestnut fence until he could see the swale below. Only a few pieces of the fence line still stood in place, a lone unrotted post leaning towards collapse, a cross plank hanging on with rusted nails, its other end slanting down to dirt. In the tangle of ground briars and grass, the old hill-people-hewn boards lay scattered like the skeleton of a creature long forgotten by the world, the chestnut still solid, the wood black as wet nut husks, enduring as bones, undone by the irresolution of nails, the cravenness of dirt.
He stood over where the fence had once stood, looking down at where the Demastus farm used to be. A wide distance of blurred dusk. He swung down the telephoto loupe and peered at the scene below. The lens exaggerated every movement of his head, the world shivering and shaking, but he could make out dim shapes in the dim fields: the old two-story, double-porched Damastus home had been engulfed in what the commune people had done. They had attached structures to it, all kinds from plywood shacks to double-story brick. The additions crept outward from all sides, wending their way along the land wherever they found it flattest. Strings of colored flags ran roof to roof, flapping frantically at the wind like birds snagged in a tangle of net. Down by the road there were tepees. The dark rectangles of cultivated fields, the metallic glints of two dozen trucks, cars, vans, even a bus. Three tractors stood too far away and dimly seen for him to guess their make.
The sounds of all those people drifted up to him from the lit windows, homey sounds that conjured scents of soup pots and fresh bread, and he realized how little he’d seen people the past year. A nod in a grocery store. Someone pushing conversation at him as he filled up with gas. Still, it seemed more natural than this. These were a strange people who lived down there, a people not of this land, not of this valley. This valley was a place of homes scattered far from homes, and meant to be that way, of lives built around cattle more than conversation, timed to rhythms of the crops, not the need to keep pace with other people’s heartbeats. This was a place where people knew how to keep apart. No wonder, Stillman thought, these commune kinds could call a place both hospice and home and go on living there with all those incurables shuttled in to die. They must just be used to it, the way they were used to knowing a half hundred people’s smells, to hearing night sounds of neighbors through the walls.
He’d read the Eads Eagle, knew how the entire county was whispering its concern. Not just about the old folks dying there —though three had died in the last year—but about the kids. Two infants had passed away. A toddler had been hospitalized and might go, too. Even the adults suffered sicknesses in waves of plague. And his daughter was among them. It made his insides squirm. But he could see how she’d gotten there. All her life it had seemed she was trying to do the worst to herself that she could. Now she probably had. He wondered if she had ever peered in the windows of his workshop, ever seen the Deutz sitting there—how cared for it was, how nursed over—wondered if when he brought it to her now it would be enough.
Overhead, geese were coming in. He listened to their calls. It was a sound he loved: another year keeping the pulse of the ones that had passed before, promising the same for the next year to come. He liked to think they were the exact same geese—they could live for almost thirty years—liked to think maybe they knew him, too. Scanning with his telephoto loupe, he watched them land. One by one they broke the stillness of the pond, shook it to noisy life. Strange, though: he didn’t remember a pond there. The commune people must have excavated it, but it showed no sign of recent digging. The saplings at the water edge looked older than the commune itself, four or five years at least. Some part of his memory sent the roar of a backhoe echoing in his skull. The thunder of rifle fire. The screams of the cows. It had been right there, where the water was now. Did they know about it, the communal people? Had he ever told Caroline? He watched the gray geese draw their glinting wakes across the gray canvas of the pond. Beneath the soles of his shoes he could feel one of the last old chestnut boards crumbling.
It was fully dusk when he pulled in behind the giant gray shapes of the Pfersick garages. Everything was the same. The tractors and the backhoes and the bulldozers. The hill behind rising black as ever. And against the darkening sky: the shapes of those old war machines.
He drove the rutted track through the field and up the rise, the grass scraping the car’s belly, drove past the howitzer, the earthmover, until he was beside the rusted hulk of the B-26. He shut the engine off, exchanged his loupes for his head lamp, and got out. It was cold and nearly dark. The wind moaned around the fuselage of the plane. Beneath it, Stillman could just make out the crying of that wolfish dog. It must be twelve, thirteen years old, he thought. And yet listen to it! A howl to turn his marrow cold.
Gingerly, he walked towards the bomber’s high flank. A huge wing sliced overhead. He ducked beneath the dark mass on an engine and, to steady his balance, took hold of a propeller blade. It was thick as the edge of his palm and wider than his thigh. He had forgotten how huge these machines were. Room inside for a group of men and all that cargo and the bombs. The tires came up to his waist. He gripped their cold rubber to take some weight off his thighs, forced his back to bend, got under the plane’s belly. His legs were shaking by the time he stood up into the blackness of the hatch. He took hold of the metal and, with a grunt, hauled himself up.
Inside, it was so black the dusk behind cockpit glass seemed to glow blue from outside light. He switched on the head lamp. The beam was as unsteady as his breath. His lungs made a noise like he had torn something loose in them. It echoed. In the beam, he could just make out blurred shapes and he moved among them, remembering them by touch more than sight: the upholstery on the seats, crumbled to dust; the drooping wires that once carried the voices of the men; fire extinguisher; door to the bombing bay. He opened it. Inside, a world of old tractor parts: PTO shafts, radiators, fenders, and there, towards the back, the tires. For a half hour, he worked to free them. When he opened the cargo door, the metal fell away, his headlight beam showing a sudden swirl of wind-whipped grass. He rolled a tire out. It fell with a thud, smashed the grass flat. He had rolled out the second and was about to lower himself after them when a sound stopped him.
At first he thought it was the dog. But it
was too high-pitched and steady for a howl. The longer he listened, the closer it sounded. He stood straight up: it was coming from the plane. The stored parts glinted in his head lamp light. It came from further forward. From the cockpit.
He made his way back through the bay, the transport room, and stooping into the cockpit stood beneath the arced ceiling of glass, his hands on the backs of the empty pilots’ seats, listening. He couldn’t hear anything but that ringing now. Maybe, he thought, it was whistling through the glass above his head. He crouched to get away from it. But it was only louder down there. Directly in front of him gaped the crawl space to the nose gun, dim blue glow leaking in through the half sphere of gunner’s glass. There—it was coming from there. He got down and crawled. The dome opened up around him: a translucent bubble suspended in the air. On his knees, he swept his lamp beam over the ground below. The grass swirled, slapping at the barrel of the machine gun, almost reaching to the glass beneath his pressed flat palms, his knees. He imagined, for a moment, that this must be what it would look like if you could freeze the second before a plane touched down, if you could stop time right at the moment of the fastest rush before the wheels hit the ground. In his shaking beam, a crack in the dome caught the light and glared its streak across the world outside the glass. Through a missing pane Stillman could feel the wind; it stirred a strand of his hair; he could hear it moan. And on that moan was the dog’s distant howl, still. And beneath that howl: the ringing of the bell. Ring ring. Ring ring. Over and over, from way down there in the dark brick block of Les Pfersick’s old home. Listening to it, he suddenly felt watched. From outside the plane, his head lamp would make the half globe of glass at the nose glow like a firefly atop the hill, and show him in it, scrunched up like a child in a womb. He shut the head lamp off. But still, he could feel dead Pfersick out there in the night, watching him, knowing his fear. Crouched there in the tight glass bowl at the nose of the plane, steeping in the acrid smell of his own body, he hated them, then. Not for their reckless, wild ways, not for leaving him when he was so young, not for any of the simple things that were a part of who they had been. But for how all of it had shaped him—for how he had let it shape him—his shape that had driven the course of his life that had shaped his Caroline, too, he knew, in just as hurtful a way.
The Booe child found him. The Toronado, stopped in the middle of the bridge. The Swain gurgling below. It was night.
The kid seemed to come out of nowhere. One moment, Stillman was sitting behind the wheel, staring at the rain shredding the headlights. The next, the child was there in the brights. It was wearing a green plastic trash bag that reached all the way to its feet and yellow dishwashing gloves that came up to its elbows. In one glove it held a flashlight. In the other, a long black pipe. Its head, jutting from a hole in the top of the bag, was covered by a red plastic fireman’s hat. The number on the front gleamed in the headlights.
The child stood there as if it was as surprised to see Stillman as Stillman was to see it. Then it walked around to the passenger door, opened it up, and got in. It slung a backpack onto the middle of the seat, put the long black pole between them. They sat in silence.
“You want to see what I got?” the child said.
“Where did you come from?” Stillman asked.
The child pointed at the river. “You want to see what I got in my bag?”
“How long have I been sitting here?” Stillman said.
The child shrugged.
Stillman peered at it. It was mostly blur. “What are you doing out? This late, in the rain.”
The child unzipped its backpack and held it up to Stillman. The backpack smelled like river mud and giblets dug out of the cavities of chickens. Something in there let out a feeble, horrible croak. Peering close, lowering the loupe, Stillman could just make out the glint of frog eyes before he jerked back at the smell.
“Most of them are dead,” the child said. It jiggled the long black pipe. “I got them with this. It’s my dad’s. He taught me how to use it.” It slid something out of the pipe: a long silver dart. “I bet there’s a hundred in there. If you take me home, I’ll give you some.”
They sat in silence.
“I don’t know how,” Stillman said. He could feel the child looking at him.
“You don’t know how to drive?”
“Oh, come on,” Stillman said. “This is my car. I bought it in 1976.”
They sat in silence again. In the child’s backpack, one of the speared frogs let out a noise like air being squeezed from a bag.
After a long while, Stillman asked, “Is it upriver or downriver?” After a while longer, he said, “Well?” And then he said, “Where. My … your home. I can’t remember where it is.”
The child pointed up the road. Stillman eased the car that way. For a minute, he rolled it forward. Then he stopped. He leaned close to the windshield, rolled the car forward again till he lost sight of the edges of the road and had to stop once more. The child was staring at him.
“You can get out and walk if you want,” Stillman said.
“Are you blind?” the child asked.
“It’s dark,” Stillman said. “And it’s raining.”
“My dad wears glasses when he—”
“Your daddy’s half my age.”
Stillman crept the car forward again and the child said, “We’re going in the ditch!” and Stillman slammed the breaks.
“Gotcha,” the child said.
Stillman glared at it.
“Hey,” it said, and then was pushing Stillman’s arms aside, climbing on top of his thighs. The wet plastic bag smeared his chest and cheek. The brim of the fireman’s hat cracked him across the forehead.
“Okay,” the kid said. “Let’s go.”
“Can you see?” Stillman asked.
“I’m five,” it said.
Slowly, watching the back of the child’s head, Stillman gave the car a little gas. They rolled forward. It was a strange feeling to move all those tons and shut his eyes. “You know what you smell like?” the child said.
Stillman’s teeth were clenched too hard to let him answer, even if he’d wanted to.
“My grandpa,” the child told him. “Only older.”
“No older than you,” Stillman tells it.
The Deutz doesn’t answer back.
While he was crossing the yard, returning from a bathroom trip, the wet breath in his beard froze; now, he feels it dripping down his neck. He has already sandblasted the cast iron. The Deutz’s skeleton looks back at him like it wants its flesh retuned. He has all the sheet metal lined up and he puts on the breathing mask and goggles and loupes and heavy gloves and gets out the Mar-Hyde Tal-Strip II. It’s a thing so strong they use it on aircraft metal and when he slathers it on he can almost hear the paint squeal.
No—he smiles at himself—that’s the sound of the geese. He pauses in his scraping. Their calls come from the south, then are directly overhead, and he listens for long minutes until they have passed on north. Then he scrapes off all the paint, wipes it with lacquer thinner, searching for putty someone might have used years ago in an attempt to cover up the faults.
Outside, the small bright chirps of the peepers do to the summer night what the fireflies in the orchard do to the air. He can hardly hear them through the high constant tone that seems forever humming in his skull. He shakes his head, as if he could shake the tinnitus out; it would fall like a fly to the floor, buzzing on its back, legs paddling.
But all he can do is lay himself down on the cot, turn on his side. He slides the collecting plate above his ear. Slipping the linen and beeswax cone into the hole that leads to his ear canal, he lights the candlewick and—aroma of jojoba and honey —waits for the vacuum to drain his ear of pressure and pain, to sharpen his sense of smell, give him back his balance, clear his eyes, purify his blood, open the spiritual centers of the auric bodies, and all the other things the package claims to do along with get rid of the damn ringing in his ears.
>
He is lying there with his eyes shut when he hears a knock at the door. By the time he has opened them, the Booe child has come in.
“Go out,” he commands.
“You forgot to lock,” it says.
He flicks his eyes to the blurry Deutz. “Get out right now. And shut the door.”
“What’s in your ear?”
“You didn’t see anything.”
“What’s that?” the Booe child says. It is looking at the Deutz.
He pulls the candle away and elbows himself up to a sit. There’s nothing to do now but answer. Sitting there, the warm candle in his hands, he realizes that he doesn’t know how. “What do you think it is?”
“A tractor.”
Coming out of this small child who had not even been alive when he had brought the tractor here, the word seems like a slur.
“It’s a Deutz,” Stillman says.
“Oh,” the child says. It points at the candle in Stillman’s hands. “What’s that?”