In the hush, Paul called the girl’s name softly. “Stay there, Anna,” he said. Harley looked up at him. Paul jerked his head, nudged Harley toward the pickup.
Harley passed where Rick lay and went to the passenger side of the F-250. Before he pulled open the door, he holstered the .38. Inside, the girl sat on the bench seat, features crumpled in a silent shriek. She caught her breath in hitches.
That aside, she looked fine. Not hurt, anyway.
Pam still gripped the wheel. She stared wide-eyed and pale at the woman on the porch.
“You all right?” Harley said quietly. She wasn’t. She pretty clearly wasn’t. But he couldn’t think what else to say.
She looked at him like he was a stranger. Then she blinked like she had from the parted trailer door as night fell. She looked like she was coming to, waking up. Harley wished, for a moment, she wouldn’t. It’d be easier if she didn’t.
She looked at him, first one eye, then the other. “Get Anna to my folks.”
“He got a shot off,” Harley told her. “You’re not going to jail. I saw what happened.”
“I know I’m not.”
The cold, dark thought that gripped Harley hours earlier held him again. There was no telling what Pam might do, Babe said, if she was in a tight enough spot. Harley had seen that now. He’d seen it, and the best he could do was stop the hemorrhaging. Stop her from doing anything else. “You’re not going to jail,” he said again. “Everybody saw what happened.”
“I know it.” By now her eyes were completely clear. She looked at him like he didn’t understand what she was saying. Maybe he didn’t. He looked back down at the girl, whose breaths hitched like hiccups. On the floor past her small feet was Pam’s handbag. And a pillowcase knotted shut. She was leaving.
“You can’t just take off. That’s the one thing you can’t do.”
Though he supposed she could. He’d seen what happened. And if it came down to his word versus Paul’s, Harley’s account would surely stand.
“You can’t leave,” he said again. This time it had nothing to do with stopping the hemorrhaging. It had nothing to do with keeping the peace.
She’d looked away, into the rearview. “Get her to my folks.”
What had he told her last night? Not sure what you think can happen here. Not much, reasonably speaking. Not now. She knew it. He was the one who needed reminding.
Harley nodded, though she didn’t see it.
He held out his arms to the girl. She scrutinized him in a familiar way, one that made him feel like a field mouse in a hawk’s sights. Then she scooted toward him. He took her up and held her to his side. He nodded again, though Pam didn’t see it that time, either. He shut the pickup door. He made himself step away.
The hum of the F-250’s engine picked up as it backed out onto the highway, shifted into drive, then roared and died away into silence.
Harley tried to shield the girl’s face from the scene around them. He kept her back to Virginia, whose eyes lit well past the yard, as if she saw clear into the darkness. He kept the girl’s back to her father, who was trying to catch his breath in the dirt. Rick had maneuvered enough to see the porch and lay transfixed. He looked like death. His skin was yellow-cast and his cheeks sunken, eyes wild but holding their focus. He tried to roll onto his side and winced. Likely broken ribs, no telling what else.
“Dell Junior’s here, Mom.” His voice was choked and windy.
Harley reached the cruiser’s backseat door. He set the girl inside, told her to lie down for a bit. It’d be best, he said, if she’d just lie down for a bit. Harley slid in the front. He grabbed the handset from where it clipped to the radio and told Carol he needed an ambulance. Out at the Jensen place.
“He’s right here,” Rick wheezed.
“She knows,” Paul said from the porch roof. He was sitting up, arms slung to drape over his knees. “She’s known a long time.”
Virginia walked back into the house.
“You call an ambulance?” Paul asked Harley.
Harley said they were on the way.
Paul scooted toward the porch roof’s edge. When Harley looked, Paul stopped and put up his hands to show they were empty. He rolled onto his belly, swung his legs to grip a porch column, and slid to the railing.
He came down from the porch and reached out an empty hand. He didn’t look at Harley, just asked for a light. Harley remembered the lighter was out of fluid. He walked to Paul and handed him the matchbook.
Paul climbed the steps and leaned back against the clapboard by the front door. He crossed his arms on his chest, squinted out at the sky, and took a long breath.
Harley watched him. Paul’s expression wasn’t hardened. The look wasn’t soft, but it wasn’t hostile or indifferent. He looked tired. The door beside him gaped where Virginia had left it open.
Harley mounted the steps, not bothering to skip the third. When he reached the porch planks, he let them groan as he crossed.
Inside, beneath the unreasonably tall ceiling, Virginia knelt where the cruiser’s headlamps cast Harley’s shadow. Night’s meager light from the front room windows and kitchen entryway glinted off her body. When he caught the sharp metallic scent, Harley understood what he was seeing. From the neck down, she was soaked in gasoline. She knelt where hip bones had risen from the dusty floorboards, not twenty feet from where the cane-seated chair had blown back. A nearly drained bottle of Cutty Sark sat next to her, beside a half-empty tumbler. Her nakedness, the fact she was soaked in gasoline, didn’t strike Harley so odd as her bothering with the tumbler.
A cigarette dangled unlit from her lips. Her hand resting on her thigh held a ruined pack of matches. They were soaked, too, either by the gas or the scotch. Harley took a step toward the door. A porch board sighed. She looked at him. She held up the ruined matchbook, one side of her mouth and an eyebrow raised. Like that ruined matchbook was some joke.
In a half circle in front of her she’d spread the clothes. The ones from the chifforobe, from the dresser topped with the brush and comb and dust. Harley recognized a dressing gown with buttons down the front, fabric yellowed with age. Next to it were stockings and slips. They were piled beside a simple dress of cream-colored satin. It was a dress his mother wore once and kept just to keep. Till she’d stopped keeping anything.
The fumes were thick. Harley was light-headed. “Let’s get you a blanket. Let’s get you covered and out of here,” he said. But he had no blanket. He’d used it on the fire in the burn barrel days before.
She dropped the ruined matches and took the cigarette from her lips. She raised the tumbler and sipped. “I don’t need covering.” She smiled, not happily, more a show of courtesy. Virginia looked tired, too. Her eyes weren’t the lit flames they’d been on the porch. “Goddamn, they make you wear it, don’t they?”
The fumes ached in Harley’s head. They made you wear it. He didn’t know what it meant. Maybe grief or the past. Your own skin. Or maybe just clothes. Harley took a step back from the threshold to get his bearings and a clear breath. One not thick with fumes.
When his shadow receded, he saw the far corner of the room. Gas cans were stacked and toppled. His eyes stung so they filled. Like looking through a drinking glass, he saw what lay behind her. A jumble of brown and yellow fragments piled on the scorched army-green blanket. There were hundreds. She must’ve collected each bone from the cellar. They were clean. Not sun-bleached like a discarded cattle skull. Picked clean by time.
She must’ve seen him studying the pile. She glanced back, then looked at him again. “Tell him,” she said. “Tell him now he can get the hell on with it.”
“Dell Senior,” Paul said from where he leaned against the clapboard. His voice was still worn out and quiet, but the sound rattled Harley like waking from a dream. “He’ll know what it means.”
Harley understood. It was what people wanted. To know after a thing like that you’d either overcome or succumbed. You’d moved on or were more broken than t
hey’d ever be. If you didn’t persevere, you could be evil or crazy, either or both worked fine, so long as you were something outside what they knew. Like Paul said, outside their frames of reference. Dell Senior wanted her to get the hell on with it. No doubt because Dell Senior wanted, more than anything, to get the hell on with it.
Harley reached absently to his pocket. To finger the foil of his smokes.
Paul looked at Harley’s hand, then at Harley. He gripped Harley’s shoulder once, brief, like a reassurance. Harley didn’t twitch. He didn’t tremor.
Paul stepped through the open door. He squatted to his mother’s kneeling height. He handed her the matches.
Harley stepped in. “You don’t want this,” he said. It was instinct, to say it. In truth, he didn’t know. In truth, he didn’t know if want even applied here.
Paul took his mother’s face in both hands. He pressed his lips to her forehead. The wrinkles there flattened and vanished when she shut her eyes. She said something to him. Something soft. When he went to stand, he wobbled a touch and caught the floor with the tips of his fingers for balance. Then he willed himself up. Harley stepped back to let him pass.
Light filtered from the next room, where the walls and ceiling and floor were painted slate-blue, where under the carbide lamp, the whites of eyes once shone like shock from a compound fracture. Shock, Harley knew, was a mind’s mercy. Shock was the switching off of pain when a body could take no more. He wished for that shock as the thick knot ached in his throat. He couldn’t swallow it away. He couldn’t clear it.
He couldn’t say the word any more than he could unstop it from where it lodged: Why?
Maybe it wasn’t the right question. After all, Paul had already told him. Paul had given all the answers there were to be had. Answers about revenge, compassion, about rage and mourning and making a point. The fact she picked this place, identical to the one where her boy was killed, a place where another person had once opted out of everything—it all linked together well enough. The strands all threaded together like those kinds of answers do. Like loose-knit gauze. Transparent. Easily torn. Enough to make sense for a blink. Enough to leave you asking again and empty, trying to pack the bleeding hole that’s left with other, different reasons. All of it so much gauze.
Still. It’d felt natural to ask, even if no one heard it. As natural as the hollow Harley now felt in his chest.
She bent a match down around the edge of its book. Between the strike and the shot of flame, Harley pulled the door shut.
36
SHE’S STOPPED TWICE ALREADY, once to let the ambulance pass, another to leave Paul’s pickup at the trailer. The Nova had more gas and her name on the title.
Because the sun rises in the east, she went west, not ready to face daylight. For a long distance, she sped, rising and sinking through the dunes, till she no longer heard or felt the roar of her pulse, till the thick, crackling static in her head ebbed to silence.
Now, pulled off the road on the sand, she breathes. Under the dome of starlight, she feels the air press against her skin. She listens for what there is to hear. Some toads and crickets skittering in the nearby grass. Mainly air.
When she gets back in the Nova, she’ll drive to Thedford. There’ll be enough in the Butter-Nut can to fill the tank and buy a few things to eat. Passing through Seneca, the clock will turn back an hour. She’ll gain time through distance.
When she’s out farther, she’ll drive down to Chimney Rock, a needle of soft Brule clay cutting jagged and sharp against the lightening sky. It’s a place she’s seen only in pictures. She once learned it was a signpost, a landmark that told people they were headed the right direction, or at least let them know where they were. She’s heard the spire is smaller than it once was, sand and wind having worn at it, year after year.
She’ll pull into Alliance when the morning is bright, pale blue. The town, the small city, will be just big enough for her to be a stranger for a while, big enough to stop a bit and still be a passer-through.
There, she’ll sleep in the Nova a few nights, maybe more. She’ll use a gas station’s bathroom sink as a shower, and she’ll find work as a dishwasher or fry cook. Hopefully a dishwasher. Some places, waitstaff tip out dishwashers at the end of the night, and the oily, sweet film of fryers is tough to scrape from the skin. Either will mean a free meal per shift, though, and either will help her stay or leave, maybe drive farther west, to Wyoming, eventually Utah. She doesn’t care about getting as far as the ocean but she’s always wanted to see the Green River.
She knows, in less time than she thinks, she will miss Anna. The missing will come and go like the rise and sink of the hills, a clenching, burning absence in her sternum when she hears the banter of Ernie and Bert on a lobby or waiting room TV. Then the feeling will pass as quickly as it sets in, gone until it comes again.
She will miss Rick more. She’ll miss him whenever a new weariness replaces the old, when the thick callus keeping her from being wrung out turns pliable again. She’ll miss his shape and warmth against hers and the tremor when he first falls asleep. She’ll miss small, stupid things. The childlike giggle the time he used his toes to slingshot his underwear onto the bedroom lamp. She’ll miss the stinging stink of burnt trailer paneling and tar in his T-shirts. She’ll miss his dopey, Smokey the Bear insistence that they’ll get by when they never had the slimmest chance. She will wish she could’ve loved him, not more but in the way he needed. She’ll wish she could’ve loved away the need in him.
Pam will miss, and Pam will doubt.
Right now, though, she stands, as small here as she’s always known herself to be. Small and unneeded and here for a minute. She breathes deep.
Acknowledgments
Thanks first to my spouse, whose name is either Will or Bill. Whoever you are, closest person to me in the world, thank you. I could have neither written this nor coped with the losses of Rowland S. Howard and George Jones without you.
I am deeply grateful for my family, none of whom are featured in this book because this is fiction, Mom. I love and thank (in no hierarchical order, expressed or implied): Mom, Dad, Greg, Bill, Joy, Brack, Peg. The same goes for my aunts, uncles, cousins, stepsiblings, and in-laws. Thank you to the eleven grandparents I was lucky enough to be born with and know, and especially to those two who helped raise me.
I’m indebted to the family of friends who support me for no good reason: Brittany Dabestani (née Madson), for whom I named a town; Jackie Sterba, who walked across half of Nebraska with me; Jennifer Bryan, my rock, who listened and vented and reread this book twenty times; and Devin Murphy, who championed this novel and showed me I’d written the same sentence for three hundred pages. Thank you to Tracy Johnson and Steve Carmichael, just because. Thank you to every writer and friend who read drafts or spent hours commiserating: Jeff Alessandrelli, Megan Gannon, Kathleen Massara, Heather Akerberg, Jeremy Schnitker, Richard Stock, Jonathan Tvrdik, Nate Sindelar, Rebecca Rotert, Erinn Tighe, Justin O’Connor, Ethan Jones, Gabe Houck, Julie Cymbalista, Rudy Ciavarro, Chris Fischer, Mike Tulis, Jan and Doc Mahoney, Tracy Tucker, Erich Christiansen, and everyone I’m not forgetting—there’s just a page limit.
Thank you to my agent, Emily Forland, whose kindness, confidence, and ability to diagnose what I’m doing wrong with a scalpel’s accuracy led me to work with my editor at MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux: the funny, frank, and charismatic force who is Daphne Durham. Thank you, Lydia Zoells, for your boundless patience and smarts. And to Dave Cole, who copyedited this book: you, friend, are a saint.
Thanks to Richard Duggin, who gave me the swift kick that circuitously led me here, and thanks to everyone else with whom I’ve studied. I’m awestruck that I even sat in a room with Charles Johnson, much less was allowed to call him my thesis adviser. The great Jonis Agee reread this thing more times than either of us want to count and gave feedback I took way too long in implementing. I’m also indebted to Ted Kooser, whose input on my earlier work helped shape the world
of this one. Boundless thanks go to my workshop friends, a list including but not limited to: Lowell Brower, Zachary Watterson, Kirsten Rue, Jordan Farmer, DeMisty D. Bellinger, Casey Pycior, Adrian Koesters, Tom Coakley, Kate Kostelnik, and Karen Babine.
I also thank the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where, for the first time, I timidly asked strangers if I could eat with them and wound up chatting late into the night with the likes of Dino Enrique Piacientini and Richard Bausch. I’m eternally grateful for the opportunity to study with two literary giants, Steve Yarbrough and Bobbie Ann Mason. I’m grateful to have bawled, laughed, and been stunned at readings by Venita Blackburn, Tony Earley, and Randall Kenan. And, of course, I’m thankful for having had the honor of workshopping with incredible writers I’m now honored to call my friends. Among them are Rob Roensch, Emily Chiles, David Bumke, Sheila Lamb, Mickey Hawley, Sharon Bandy, Yang Huang, Jenni Moody, Lynn Schmeidler, and Colin Orr.
I’m thankful for everyone, basically. Thank you.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Harding Thornton, a seventh-generation Nebraskan, holds an MFA from the University of Washington and a PhD from the University of Nebraska, where she has taught courses in literature and writing. Her other professions have included quality assurance overseer at a condom factory, jar-lid screwer at a plastics plant, closer at Burger King, record store clerk, all-ages club manager, and PR writer. Pickard County Atlas is her first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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