by Josh Weil
“It was made in 1928.”
“Is that hot?”
“Do you know how old that is?”
“Can I have that?” The child is still pointing at the candle.
“No,” Stillman says. “Listen, it’s as old as me. We were made in the same year.”
“My birthday’s next week,” it says. “I’m going to be six years old.”
“That Deutz is seventy-six,” Stillman tells it.
“So?” it says.
Stillman looks away. He sets the candle in a bowl of water at his feet. He watches all the pieces of dark things from inside his head drift out. Some fall to the bottom, some float to the surface. Pieces of skin and chunks of wax and oils that swirl in tiny eddies of their own.
“What is all that?” the child says.
“All the crap from my head.”
The child comes forward and stands across the bowl from Stillman. The two of them look down for a while. The child is wearing oversize glasses pushed back onto the top of its head. They keep wanting to fall forward; it holds them in place with one hand.
“Where did the fat lady go?” the child asks.
“She’s my daughter.”
“I know that. I remember when she lived here.”
Stillman nods.
“Did she get married?”
Stillman starts to shake his head, then stops himself. “I don’t know.”
“Dad said I should invite you and her to the—” The child pauses, as if trying to remember a word. “Recycle?” it says. “The dance. Next week is my birthday and also it’s the dance recycle for the Festival of the Hills, both on the exact same day, and I’m in it, so you should come. It’s in town. If I see the fat lady I’ll tell her, too, okay? And if you see her—”
“You do that,” Stillman says.
“Where does she live?”
“Do you know what a commune is?” Stillman asks.
The child looks up fast from the bowl of ear leavings. “My dad says the cops are gonna shut them down.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” the child says.
“What do you mean?” Stillman demands, again.
“It’s something about the water. And the dead people. Dad says I’m not supposed to talk about police work.” Then, as if in apology, it reaches up and takes the glasses off its head and puts them on the cot next to Stillman. “I stole these for you,” it says. “They’re my dad’s.” And then it’s gone.
Stillman picks up the glasses and folds them and holds them in his hands, looking at them as if they’re an animal and he’s just broken its legs. The ringing is still there, but now he can hear something else, too: a distant drone. The engine of a car, maybe. Sometimes it seems to come closer. Then to fade away. And then it just runs alongside the coordinates of his home, as if it is not moving any more than he is, staying even with him on parallel treadmills of time.
Roy Booe’s glasses were too weak, but strong enough that, when Stillman held the paper up to his face, he could just make out the words. He had bought The Eagle days before, and had read the article in between putting the last touches on the Deutz, read it so many times between the remover and the primer, between masking the tires and the spraying and the sanding between the coats, that he had memorized most of the words. It was on the front page, beside a list of all the events on this last day of the Festival of the Hills: Cops Say Pond Ritual Kills. Beneath that, an aerial picture of the pond, and, deeper still, the image that had grown in his mind: all of them stripping down on the cold, muddy shore, their nakedness flashing beneath the moon, the priestess (as the paper called her) leading them by the hand, a chain of naked men and women moving together into the pond until they formed a floating mass gathered in the deep, leaning back, looking at the sky as the priestess called her chants and, from town, the first of the fireworks to end the fair lit up the sky, and amid it all, floating in that toxic pool, Caroline.
He had not slept. Nor was he fully awake. All night he had moved between body and parts, back and forth, uncoiling the air pump’s hose, dragging it until his legs gave out, and resting, and starting across the room in fresh air mask and latex gloves, and it was into day again—how many times had the earth rolled its hours beneath his shuffling feet?—before he was ready, finally, to bring the Deutz at last into the world. Now, the crowning grill, polished to such a silver it looked slick with gleam; now the radiator cradled in his shaking palms; now the gentle, tender straightening and untwisting of belt pulleys. He fit the hood on and tightened the instrument panel into place, attached the steering wheel and the seat, and by the time he was done, dark had again found the windows to the outside world. He pushed the black rubber respirator off his mouth. It hung at his neck, beneath his chin. He wiped his face. He checked his watch. Just after seven. In three hours they would begin their suicidal wade into the malignant waters of that carcass-strewn pond.
He made his way up the high steps to the front door, holding onto the rail, going as slowly and breathing as hard as she used to. Inside the house that had been their home he found the scrap of paper where he’d written down the commune’s number. His ribs squeezed; his breath struggled with his heart for room. Two years since he’d seen her. He had the receiver in his hand before he noticed the blinking light on the machine.
“Dad,” the message said. “The Booes’ kid called. Gonna be in the dance tonight. Said maybe you’d come. I’d like that. I’ve got news.” There was a pause so long he thought the machine had just forgotten to beep. “It’s a birthday gift,” she said and hung up. The house let go of the sound of her voice too quickly.
Through the windows he could see the grackles settling into the November trees. The house lights caught their small eyes. Glinting, they stared back at him through the glass. Outside, taking the steps down, he listened to the hushing ruffle of their thousand wings. Behind him, beneath the house’s belly, the stilts fenced off an emptiness black as a mine shaft.
Leaning his weight on the mop handle, he made his way again to the workshop. The Deutz waited on its fresh-blacked tires. He set the stick against its flank, and rested his hands on the thing. Both palms. Not steadying it and not leaning on it, just touching it the way he could remember his father had once touched the plow horse—warm withers muscles—in the years after they’d replaced it with the tractor. He stood in the murmuring of the birds’ wings, the sound like wind caged, unable to move on, passing over and over again.
He filled all the fluids. Then he climbed up. It took him time. The Deutz waited silently beneath his shaking. He eased down into the seat. His joints rattled from the effort, then calmed. He took hold of the starter and cranked the Deutz to life. Its roar ran his spine.
He rode it out onto 364 and turned it toward town. The Deutz rumbled beneath him, its tires crumbling their gravel through the dark. All along the road, the grackles woke to its sound, lifting in wild wing clatter through the trees. They rose and settled in his wake and rose further down and settled behind, a black rolling wave of them following the Deutz, rippling along the banks of the road. His head lamp shot its blue beam ahead of the tractor’s grille. No other light at all, not even the moon. Occasionally, he passed a farmhouse up high off the road, a herd of cattle staring and silent behind their wire. On 42, headlights slapped his back. The blare of a horn. They veered around. Hunched over the steering wheel, shaking with the rumble of the Deutz, he rolled on.
Till there below him was the town. Its four streetlamps made a line straight as a landing strip laid through the undulating darkness of the hills. On the road the cars were thick, taillights like blood drops beaded along a wire, all heading into Narrows. It was more traffic than the town saw on any other night of the year. The church barbecue would be over, but there was still to come the dance recital, and the fiddle action, and the fireworks—their booms ricocheting from ridge to ridge—that would bring the Festival of the Hills to its close.
In the rear lot behind the
old dive joint, he shut off the Deutz’s rumbling. Crowd applause came through the building’s back wall, and he wondered if it was over, if she’d come already, seen he was not there, and left. But the clapping died and trickled into the new sound of music starting up. The foot thuds of the dancers echoed from the second floor. On the brick, the mural seemed almost to shake. Something about it seemed wrong, and he sat, unsettled, trying to see what it was. The rifle-clenching woman, the black-faced boy, the Confederate rider in midleap: for one long moment he stared at them like he had not since he’d been a child.
When he finally climbed down and walked around to the front, the street was empty; everyone had already gone in for the show. Over the door, the bulb showed the flyers town people had thumbtacked to the corkboard. Inside, the shelves were all bare. The bar was a lonely plank. After the dive joint died, it had been a dry goods store, and after that went under it was a meeting spot for the VFW and Elks, and, as they had passed away, it dropped into emptiness and unuse. The only part that ever saw people anymore was the old dance hall on the second floor: town meetings, and the grade school pageant, and closing night of the Festival of the Hills.
At the top of the stairs, he eased open the double doors. The hall held most of the town. They sat on folding chairs, hill folk and valley folk and new arrivers and those who’d come back, and even a few hashheads in their eyeglasses and beards. Up there on the stage, the children’s feet battered the wood; he didn’t even throw them a glance. She was sitting right at the aisle. A pink bandana on her head. Her hair hanging down her back in one thick python braid. The mop handle thumped along the aisle. People turned to look. He didn’t care—his focus nailed to her—till she turned, too.
Her eyes showed no surprise, just worry and sadness creeping in. For a moment, he wondered what caused that. Then he remembered his cane: her dad was an old man thumping on a stick. He mustered his breath, whispered, “It’s just till my knee gets better.” Someone told him to hush. He leaned down to her to speak, but she tilted her face away as if he reeked.
“You better sit,” she said.
When he did, her thickness pressed at his shoulder, his arm, all along his thigh; he could sit right there forever.
But the dance went on only another couple minutes. On the stage, the children did ballet, or modern moving, or whatever kind of foolishness they’d been trained to do. They were dressed as butterflies, boys and girls both, in tights and leotards and small bright papier-mâché wings that rattled till they nearly drowned the music out. The thudding of their feet finished the job. Over on one side, two butterflies from the edge, the Booe child did its part. Aside from stomping a little harder, it did no worse or better than the rest. Even if it had, Stillman wouldn’t have noticed. Oh, he was looking at the stage. But his attention was on the stink of whatever his daughter had smeared on and his determination to sniff through it to the scent of her that he had known ever since she came into his life. Listening to the rhythm of her breath, he focused hard on matching it with his own.
The audience clapped. The children ran to get out of sight. Stillman’s throat closed up. Around them, people rose. He stayed seated. She stayed seated. They looked at the empty stage.
“I’m sorry I missed it,” he said.
“It’s intermission,” she said, and nodded at a table in a corner: squashed brownies and Rice Krispies treats and cookies smothered in plastic wrap. “You want something?”
“Sure.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s true.” They both gave up smiles as if their faces, at least, remembered how it was.
“Don’t ask me to move back,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
She looked at him again, let her eyes hang on him a little longer. “Nice glasses.”
“They’re not mine.”
She reached over and picked something out of his hair. “When was the last time you washed yourself?”
“You let it, a body’ll keep itself oiled pretty good.” He waited until she had finished her small laugh, then said, “I’m not gonna ask you to come home.”
Her smile slipped. “You say that one more time—”
“I just don’t want you to stay up there.”
“At Whistler’s Meadow?”
“At the commune.”
“Well, that’s where I am, Dad.
“There’s people dying up there.”
“It’s a hospice. People come there to—”
“Other people.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Babies.”
“This is about the cops.”
“It’s the pond,” he said. “It’s the water in the pond.”
“You mean on the commune?”
“I mean the water,” he said. “It’s probably in the groundwater. It’s probably got in the well. The whole thing’s a graveyard.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I saw it. A hundred head out there. In that hollow. Years ago. The Demastuses shot them and planted them under.”
“No, no, Dad,” she said. “It’s where the spring comes out. There was a big sink spot there when the first brothers and sisters bought it. We just lined it to make it hold—”
“Promise me you won’t go swimming there.”
“We do it every year.”
“Promise me.”
“Dad,” she said, “why do you think I moved out?”
“It was that River fucker.”
“No.”
“It was the way he—”
“It was you.”
He could feel himself staring at her, but he couldn’t seem to look away. He took off his glasses. Her face went soft. He didn’t put them back on. The cookie eaters were throwing away their napkins and finding their way back to their seats. The lights dimmed.
He said, “Whatever I did, I did ’cause I love you.”
“Oh, Dad,” she said. “You think I don’t know that?”
“You don’t know how much,” he said.
“You think Mom didn’t know that?”
There was a long while of the crowd’s noise sinking toward quiet.
Finally, he said, “I want to show you—”
She cut him off. “I was the one that asked you to come here, remember?”
There was a coldness running under her words. “Please,” he said, and it sounded strange on his lips in this room crowded with people who could hear. “I just want to ask you to come outside with me.”
“It’s about to start,” she said.
“Then after.”
“Don’t you even want to know why I—”
“I want you to go for a ride with me.”
“No.”
The lights dropped.
“We don’t even have to ride, then,” he said. The curtain opened. “I just want to show you what I’ve been working on all this time. I want to give—”
“Don’t you even want to know what my news is?”
Then the clapping started and she joined in and he sat there, his glasses still off, waiting for them to be done.
When it died down, he told her, “I don’t care if you’re married.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“I mean it’s okay.” Someone called to him to hush. “You’re still my Blueberry.” The piano banged out its music. “They can call you that all they want. That River fucker can call you—”
“I’m not married,” she whispered.
“You’ll still be my little girl.”
“I’m pregnant.”
The children came on. They were doing some kind of dance that just looked like running to Stillman. He watched their blurred shapes go around in a circle with their arms spread like birds. The blurry movement made him dizzy. He put the glasses back on. But the clarity brought a sharpness with it that made his bowels hurt. He could feel them curling on themselves, his stomach rising up against his lungs
. He tried to remember what year it was, and then from there to how old she was, and the answer cut off his breath.
“Are you okay?” she whispered.
“Fine,” he said. Then, “I have to use the bathroom.”
“Now?”
He rose noisily to his feet. Someone nearby took hold of his elbow and said, “Wing,” and tried to pull him down, but Stillman said, again, louder, “I have to use the bathroom,” and then he was pushing at his daughter, trying to get past her. Up on the stage he could see the Booe child in the center now, leaping and crouching, leaping and crouching, staring straight at Stillman and forgetting to shake its wings.
Outside the stage hall the double doors shut behind him. He leaned for a moment against the banister. His legs felt as if they were filling slowly, from the toes up, with sand. Behind him, he heard his daughter’s heavy foot thuds coming up the aisle toward the doors and he forced himself down the stairs, moving his body as much with his hands on the rail as with his leaden feet. On the first floor, the old abandoned dive joint was quiet and empty as before. He stumbled his way through the space where tables had once been, into the bathroom in the back; shut the door; locked it. In one wall a broken window sucked at the cold night air. The sink and the toilet had been ripped out long ago; there was just the empty stall with its shut door and the torn gap in the tile where the urinal had been. The pipes to all the long-gone fixtures stuck out of walls like arteries missing their heart. The only time he’d ever been drunk had been in this bathroom, in this dive joint with Ginny and her friends, and after that he never drank again. He could still hear, now, Ginny’s worried voice outside the door. No, that was his daughter, breathing hard as he was.
“Jesus, Dad,” she said. “I go down those stairs any faster … Look, I know what you’re gonna say. I’m forty-three. I got diabetes. I’m really fucking fat. Maybe that’s the worst risk of them all. You’re going to say risk, and risk, and risk, and I know it, Dad. You think we don’t know there’s bones down there in that pond? That’s why we do it there. That’s the whole reason for the ceremony. They say it’s an old Indian burial site, and what the bones release makes you stronger, and I know that sounds crazy, but I don’t care. And that I don’t care is what makes it worth it. If I knew it was safe what the fuck would be the point? I don’t know I can say it any clearer, Dad. And if you didn’t want a daughter who likes the idea that it takes really wanting a baby enough to face some fucking risk, then you shouldn’t’ve had me.”