by Brad Barkley
Now she sat on the low brick wall that surrounded the square at the end of Main Street, next to a store that sold sandwiches and frozen yogurt. Across the street was the Discount Beverage Center, which had found a place in her heart during her time here, not for the liquor they sold but because at night their neon sign lit up to read DISCOUNT RAGE CENTER, a few of the red tubes burned out. Every time she came this way, she imagined a long line of the timid and shy, waiting their turn to purchase hostility, to stock up on anger. The thought made her think about her own rage right after Marty’s accident, long since subsided, discounted by nothing more than time.
Next to DISCOUNT RAGE was the Red Bird Cafe, all lit up and filtered pale green through the plastic window film. Inside, the waitresses slid around on their crepe-soled shoes, carrying coffeepots and trays. As she walked closer, she could make out Mr. Beachy in a corner booth, a book spread open before him, next to his pie and coffee. She pushed open the door and walked inside, sat on the stool opposite him.
“Evening, Mr. Beachy.” She swiveled around to face him, after ordering coffee. He looked up from his book and then politely closed it. The title was Rangers of the Lone Star, a Zane Grey novel.
“Well, Alison, how are you tonight? How’s the work coming along on that Corvette?”
She carried her saucer and cup to his booth and sat down across from him, grateful for innocuous company, for small talk.
“Slow, I guess. I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’ve decided to fix the brakes first.”
The corners of his mouth turned down, as if he were giving this careful thought. “That’s fine, you have to start somewhere. Just jump right in. Come by the store tomorrow, I’ll fix you up with parts.”
“I’ll need jack stands,” she told him. She had no idea what these were, but now that she was learning some of the jargon, she wanted to try it out. She wanted to throw it around like a pro, like a restoration scientist.
He nodded, chewing his coconut pie. “Yes, of course. Plus new lines if they’re cracked. And a master cylinder, or will you rebuild yours?”
She mentally leafed through the pages of the manual, trying to remember “master cylinder.” Nothing came to her. “Oh, definitely a new one. Absolutely.”
He smiled. “No reason to be penny-wise and pound-foolish, right?”
They were quiet a moment, and suddenly the whole thing felt awkward; Mr. Beachy seemed exposed, almost frail, without the long counter in front of him. She stirred her coffee, drank it. The waitress refilled her cup. She tried to think of something else she could say about the car without sounding like an idiot.
“It’s not a very desirable year, is it?”
“Well,” he said quietly, “I don’t think anyone would wish on themselves the kind of year you’ve had. But things can only get better is how I feel.”
“Oh, no, I meant—” She groped for words. “I meant the car, Mr. Beachy. Not a good year for Corvettes.”
He flushed deep red. “Oh, that.” He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “You see, customers ask me all the time about blue-book value, and what this or that might be worth. I tell them, if you love the car, then it’s priceless.”
She smiled and nodded. “You should be a diplomat, Mr. Beachy. Or a marriage counselor.”
“Alison, I do wonder if during…during the year or so you’ve been through, has the church been much of a comfort to you?”
Oh, man. The last thing she wanted was to have Mr. Beachy trying to convert her. She wanted suddenly to get out of there, to be back sitting at the edge of the lake in the quiet and the dark, or in her garage, tinkering.
“A few Mass cards, some flowers from Marty’s church, but really, Mr. Beachy—”
“Oh, so you’re Catholic, then? My late wife was Catholic. I never did join up, though. Never had much use for any religion until after my surgery. I guess I’m not too original in that, am I?”
“Hey, that is the very same with Marty and me,” she said. “He grew up in the church, and I just kind of went along.”
Mr. Beachy smiled, his teeth small and white, like baby teeth. “Well, that would be me, too. I liked the pageantry of it, I suppose, but could never get behind following a priest or any kind of preacher, really. I wanted to chart my own course.”
“Marty used to tell me that Mass was like obedience school—you know, stand, sit, kneel. If you don’t learn young, you’ll never get it. I was just an old dog, or a bad dog, I guess.”
He laughed, and she felt her face warm. “But not too bad. You went, didn’t you?”
“Every Sunday, every day of obligation.”
“So, why did you?”
She thought about this, sipping her coffee. “Marty liked dressing up for church. Some Sundays, they asked him to do the collection baskets, and he just loved that. He was so happy. The only time I ever saw him in a tie was at church.” This was the same tie that still hung knotted in the closet at home.
“Wearing it some other place would’ve spoiled the whole effect.”
“Exactly. So, how could I not be there?”
He nodded. “You couldn’t.”
She patted him on the arm, put a dollar on the table. “I should get back, before I’m missed.”
“Okay, Alison. Just remember that all the answers you need are in the book.” He gave a solemn nod, and it took her a good five seconds to realize he was talking about the Bible—that book, not her Haynes manual. Her silence made him blush.
“I don’t mean to proselytize. You come on by tomorrow, and we’ll get you fixed up.”
As she walked out of the diner, she turned to see him back reading his Zane Grey novel where he’d left off, his finger shaking a little as it followed slowly along each word, the next, and the next.
When she got home the dancers had left, and the little window light was out in the kitchen, which meant Sarah had gone to bed. Alison walked to the house in the slight chill of a summer night, anticipating having the quiet house, the porch, the lake to herself. Instead, she found Bill in his bathrobe and slippers, standing in the shadows under the front windows, tossing handfuls of Uncle Ben’s rice onto the roof of the house.
“Bill?”
“Alison! You scared the heck out of me. I thought you were upstairs.” He stood holding the orange box as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“I just got in. I was downtown.”
“Oh. Well. Good night, then.”
“You know I’m going to ask, Bill.” She leaned on the porch rail, looking down at him.
He held up the box and studied it, as if just realizing what it was. She could tell from the way he held his arms that he was embarrassed. “This?” He nodded at the box. “I know Sarah told you about the javelin throwers, right?”
“Yes. Why the javelin? Some kind of phallic thing?”
He waved away the question. “You know why they throw rice at weddings?”
“As opposed to javelins?”
“No, really. Do you?”
She shrugged. “For good luck?”
“Rice is a crop, grows abundantly and all that. It’s for fertility.” He shrugged.
“And less subject to litigation than, say, cabbages.” To her relief, he laughed at this, as she knew he would. She had always liked Bill for his sense of humor, not the kind that caused him to say funny things, but more the kind that let him laugh at anything worthy of it that crossed his path.
“Bill,” she said, “this really is sweet, what you’re doing. But…rice?”
He pressed his lips together, looked toward his feet. “I want more than anything else for us to be pregnant. Well, Sarah, I mean. Guys at work come in saying, ‘I’m going to be a Daddy,’ and they act all like they will be so broke now and no more fun and no more poker games and nothing but worries from here on. But at the same time, everybody is slapping them on the back, shaking their hands, and they just smile.” He picked a grain of rice off his bathrobe sleeve. “We go through it again and again, th
is letdown every month. I guess that sounds strange.…”
Alison smiled. “And throwing rice on your house doesn’t?”
“No…yeah, it does.” He nodded at the orange box. “It sure does. Strange and odd, I know. But we’ve tried everything, Al. Every thing. So I’m going to try everything else. I don’t care if it makes sense or not.”
She thought of her Corvette, of her need to see it finished and working. “I hear you, bro,” she said.
“Will you help me?”
She shrugged again. “Sure, I can throw rice if you like. Want me to throw some around back?”
“Nah, not that. Just help me…get the momentum moving. That’s what we need, the big mo.”
“But how?”
He looked at her. “Beats heck out of me. But I’ll think on it and let you know. Fair enough?”
“Yeah, fair enough.” She walked back down the steps to give him a hug, told him good night, and then went into the house. From the kitchen, she heard the quiet shush of more rice hitting the shingles and trickling down into the gutters. She sat at the darkened table, sipping wine and eating a leftover cheese puff from the dance, listening as if to a rainstorm, until the noise quit and she heard Bill make his way upstairs.
Instead of heading off to bed, she decided to check on the car. She could start making a list of what she would need in the morning from Mr. Beachy. Maybe circle the parts in the diagrams. By this time tomorrow, she could have made real progress, have some little piece of the job done. When Marty and Lem got involved in a big project—repairing a sump pump or constructing a go-cart or building their own computer from a kit—Lem used to take such satisfaction in finishing part of it. He’d walk into the kitchen, flushed and sweaty, tugging his shirttail, and dig a beer from the fridge. “We’re eating that elephant,” he’d say, “one bite at a time.”
As she snapped on the coffee-can light, she nearly tripped over the bag at her feet, from Wal-Mart. Inside were two cardboard boxes, each containing a pair of jack stands. On top was a note scrawled on the back of the receipt and weighted down with a piece of gravel:
Alison,
Didn’t mean to insult your project. Sometimes I am not very good at making myself understood the way I want to be (all that army sensitivity training did me no good). Hope these help, I can show you how they set up if you need. I’m headed out to Tygart to blow a silo tomorrow. Want to come?
Max
She slid the note into her jeans pocket and picked up one of the boxes. The nearest Wal-Mart was across the river in Cumberland, which meant he’d driven over and driven back before he had to pick up his father. She tried to picture him doing it, carrying the two heavy boxes in his hands, walking into the middle of the dance practice and asking for her. Strange, it was hard for her to remember exactly what he looked like; she could see only his hammered-metal haircut, the tiny flashes of light his frameless lenses made. But how tall was he? What was the texture of his skin? His smell? These were the same questions she asked her students in Western civ when they talked about da Gama or Karl Marx. How to pull the person out of a boldface name in a textbook, how to give back to them their profanity and lust, their bald spots and infidelities, the sound of their breathing or their coughing when they suffered a head cold. And this was her worry with Marty, too—that the little details of him would start to fade, that his small clutters and messes in the house would be neatened into extinction, her anger and impatience with him swept away, her memory of him transformed into merely the memory of her memory, like a photo in an album, trimmed and aligned, held under plastic.
So tomorrow Max was blowing up a silo. Three seconds, he’d told her, for the library in Charleston. Laid it down like a baby, he’d said. And when the dust settled, that bit of the town was gone for good. Some part of her wanted to know what that looked like—something coming to its end so suddenly and so violently. The thought of it made her breathing subside for a moment, but at the same time, she wanted to see this.
Component disassembly should be done with care and purpose to ensure that the parts go back together properly. Always keep track of the sequence in which parts are removed, and make note of special characteristics or marks on parts that can be reinstalled in more than one way.
4
* * *
They were met at the silo by a balding man named Donald, who was in shirtsleeves, wore a tie, and carried a clipboard full of pink permits. He stood next to a pickup truck with state seals on the doors, its two-way radio squawking noisily. Max shook hands, then walked around the base of the silo, sometimes stopping to kick it, causing a powdery spill of brick and mortar. He kept muttering to himself, lighting cigarettes and then dropping them, picking up a few grass blades and tossing them in the air, like golfers on TV She and Donald watched him. All around them was nothing but a sloping expanse of red dirt, tiny pink flags stuck on rusty wires here and there into the ground. The county had recently condemned the property to make way for a new bypass. The silo itself leaned a little (almost as bad as her garage), brown bricks scattered around its base. Stored inside, according to Donald, were thousands of plastic gallon milk jugs, some of them spilling through the rotted doors at the base.
“Let me ask you,” he said. “What would someone have in mind to do with maybe five thousand milk jugs?”
Max struck the base of the silo once with a hammer, then shouted, “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”
“I just don’t get all those milk jugs,” Donald said.
Alison shrugged, pushed a stray curl away from her face. “I don’t know,” she said. “What’s your theory?”
Donald looked puzzled by the array of possibilities. Alison got the impression that a silo filled with milk jugs was the most exciting thing that had happened on his job in ten years. He frowned and scratched his head, then suggested that maybe the owner had a big trotline catfishing operation going.
“Or maybe he was a moonshiner,” Alison said. “They use jugs, I think.”
Donald snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “Hey, that’s exactly right. I read that somewhere. In some book.” When he said the word book, she realized—she’d missed her Monday-night deadline to call Ernie back and keep her spot in the fall semester. They would not need her again until mid-January.
Donald gave up on solving the mystery of the milk jugs (this sounded like one of the Hardy Boys books she and Sarah had traded as kids, preferring them to prissy Nancy Drew), saying this was cutting into his lunch hour. He sat in his white county truck, said something into the mike, and drove off. Max walked over and drew some rough sketches on the back of a fast-food sack he found in his truck. He jotted math problems in the corners, as if he were balancing his checkbook instead of readying to blow something up. Finally, he took a stick and traced in the dirt a set of parallel lines leading out from the base of the silo.
“You do such precision work,” she said. “I would’ve just used my finger.”
He looked at her, and seemed to tear himself loose from the wild concentration that had held him the last twenty minutes. “I tell you what, if we were the Alfonsis, we’d be doing all this by computer model,” he said. He stuck his pencil behind his ear. “But if you’re me, the dirt-and-stick method works fine. Want to help with the dynamite?”
“Just like that?” Her hands were shaking a little, and she was half-hoping Donald might come back to watch. “You mean…now?”
He smiled. “We could wait around a few years, see if it falls down all by itself.”
They walked to the back of the truck, where he pulled from under the camper top a cardboard box of dynamite. He handed her one of the sticks, which felt heavier than it looked, the outside covered in waxy red paper.
“Hey, you know, this looks just like dynamite,” she said.
“It is dynamite.” He pulled other, smaller boxes from the truck.
“I know, but it looks like dynamite, in bad-guy movies. Like Wile E. Coyote dynamite. I expected, I don’t know, something more high
tech.”
“I have plastics and emulsions for special jobs, cutting steel cable and such. But mostly I just use good old TNT. Nitroglycerin and wood pulp and paper. Nothing beats it for velocity.” Max tossed the box of dynamite on the ground, and she jumped. “Relax,” he told her. “Until we connect the caps and cord, it’s harmless as a box of pencils. Just don’t get the stuff inside the sticks on your hands.”
She looked at her fingers. “Why not?”
“The nitro is what’s called a vasodilator. Gets under your skin and gives you one hell of a headache.”
“All these years, I never knew my sister was a vasodilator.” Max smiled as he continued to count and make notes. She was nervous, making dumb jokes. She tried to think of something else to say, but all that would come to her were the kind of things Mr. Rossi might have said had he been here—Marco Polo’s introduction to gunpowder in Asia, Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite, and so on. She used to mention all of these to her students, impressing them with easy ironies while they sat in the dark watching World War II documentaries.
“You ever go to Ocean City?” Max asked.
She put the stick back in the box. “Every summer when we were kids in Baltimore. Us and about seven million others.” She thought of her trips there with Marty, of the obsessive way she’d watched their videos after his accident, watched as if they were the Zapruder film and could be made to reveal some truth about what had been wrong with them.
“In 1922, a dead whale washed up on the beach there,” Max said. “Huge thing. The rescue station towed it out to sea, and it came back in on the next tide. You know what they decided to do with it?”
“Turn it into a funnel-cake stand?”