The Middle Ground

by Jeff Ewing

  I finish off number six, hold my hand in front of my face, study it for changes—the broken knuckle straightened, the burn scar healed. Two streets over the familiar dog barks his pidgin, telling me to wait, be patient, all things come in time.

  I crumple the last can, flip the dog off, and feed a vision of Neil Armstrong into a wood chipper.

  Toward morning the fog begins to disintegrate, the bottom edge to fray. The window closes so slowly that I don’t notice all the things drifting out—hairpins, apricots, snowmelt, deer tracks, phone calls, gas tanks, words words words—I only sense their absence after they’re gone, the feeling each of them generated in me lost. I try to call them back, to relearn their hopeless alphabet, but it’s impossible. My head is full of broken furniture. There’s no more room.

  I limp as I walk out of the field, my leg gone to sleep. The sidewalk is a gray beach with the fog breaking against it. The road beside me is slick black and shimmering, the centerline glowing like a runway disappearing in promise a hundred yards off. To the east, the mountains are already haloed with the controlled explosions of a new day. I feel the heat gathering behind me and pick up the pace.

  Soon, I know, the fog will burn off and everything will be belittled by sunlight. The soft angles and fuzzed lines will harden in the glare. The girl and her cowboy will wake up in separate rooms under the gentle hum of A/C and mistake repetition for renewal. The moon will disappear, then reappear, over and over, and across the wide, featureless valley the last of the lost tribes of Kit Carson will lick their stamps and send their postcards out.

  But no one anywhere, not even the dead, will wish they were here.

  SILO

  OUT BEHIND MY DAD’S HOUSE, just past the edge of the pasture, the federal land begins. It reaches back from there up into the buttes, a cluster of shaved-off hills of volcanic rock covered with thick, brown grass that hover over the house. When the wind blows, which is most of the time, the grass lays over on its side and ripples like an ocean, and the buttes look like big brown breakers bearing down on us. I go over there most weekends and stay with him. He doesn’t always remember me, but we get along all right anyway. Sometimes better than when he knew who I was.

  “Government stole that land,” he says, pointing out the back window at the buttes. “During the war. Sons of bitches.”

  “Well it’s not much good, anyway,” I say. “Pretty, but not much use.”

  “What do you know?” he asks, and he’s got a point. I live in town, on a regular street, and there aren’t any horses, or cattle, or rice fields anywhere near me. My neighbors are salesmen and engineers and teachers. There’s not a farmer in the whole bunch. It’s too bad. Sometimes I wish it was all still farm country, that we’d all sit around on someone’s porch and watch a storm roll in as though it might make a difference. As it is, we just watch it come and sometimes don’t even get out of the way.

  One night I opened up my front door to look out at the rain and saw Scotty Browning standing on his lawn in nothing but his shorts. Scotty Browning. A little kid’s name, but he’s forty-one, same as me. We grew up together, went through school together. We were never close, though. I never really even liked him. Now he lives two doors down, and I don’t like him any better.

  He used to yell at his wife and his two kids all the time. I could hear him at night even with my doors closed and the TV on. He’s got a loud voice that’s a little hoarse from being mad for so long, and glass and screen, even the thick stucco of my walls seem to have no effect on it. It’s superhuman, like something alien invaders might use to brainwash us over to their side.

  I used to pull for Janel, his wife, to just once let loose and give him a little of it back. She never did, though. She just stood there and took it. But there’s only so much of that anybody will take, even Janel, and one day while he was at work she packed her things up, put the kids in the car, and left. That night it rained, a mad, driving rain that rattled the downspouts against the side of the house.

  It came out of the south, like it usually does, rolling across the buttes in gray ripples, matting the grass up there like dog hair. That’s when I looked out and saw him on his front lawn, soaked to the bone, just standing there. I called across to him, to make sure he hadn’t been hit by lightning and calcified to a belligerent statue. If that happened, I figured, I’d never be rid of him.

  When I called he looked over, but it was as if he was looking at something on the other side of me. Something in the long distance that was maybe promised to him when he was little. His head pivoted as if it wasn’t part of him, like a bobble-head doll’s. After a minute his eyes settled on me, and he raised his middle finger lazily. Then he turned back toward the buttes and took a drink from a can of beer hanging at his side. It was raining so hard that every once in a while a sheet of it would fall between us and he’d disappear. But when it let up a little, he’d be right there again, staring off at the hills.

  “Goddamn Russians,” my dad says, sitting up in his La-Z-Boy. “They’re the ones put us up to it.”

  “What?”

  “The goddamn missiles. What do you think?”

  “There aren’t any missiles,” I say.

  “Bullshit. It’s like Swiss cheese up there. They got those silos dug in everywhere, goddamn missiles still in ‘em. You think I don’t remember?”

  His eyes squint up when he talks about it, his pissedoffedness focused for a moment. “Never even bothered to take the shitting things out. Leave us down here with all that radiation leaking down onto us, using us for goddamn guinea pigs. See if our hair’ll fall out. Or our nuts’ll rot off.”

  “There’s nothing up there,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me.

  I wonder if he has some kind of Tourette’s. A mild version. He never takes off on a full-blown swearing jag the way they’re supposed to; it’s just kind of a constant, vaguely obscene drone. I don’t mind it, really, it’s just that he never used to do it. When I was a kid he hardly ever swore. He washed my mouth out once for saying “damn.”

  “You don’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” he said.

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I just said ‘damn.’”

  “You’re asking for round two.”

  My sister Carol was watching from the doorway.

  “It’s only going to give him diarrhea,” she said.

  Dad turned on her. “You hungry too?” he asked, waving the bar of Dial.

  “No thanks. I’m stuffed.”

  I could feel his arm tense where he held me by the collar.

  “You must have got that mouth from the mailman.”

  I was older than she was, but she was smarter. I wouldn’t get the joke, or its meanness, for a couple of years yet. Carol disappeared from the doorway, and a minute later the front door closed.

  “That’s that,” my dad said, letting go of my shirt. “Rinse out.”

  Carol was in love with Scotty Browning’s little brother, Bobby. They didn’t have any friends of their own, just each other. It was embarrassing for me and Scotty, but they didn’t care. They were already talking about getting married. When they were only twelve. When they should have been throwing things at each other. When they should have had nothing in common.

  Sometimes they followed me into the hills. They’d walk along behind me when I took my horse up there, holding hands like it wasn’t going against nature. Like I said, they should have been natural enemies. They shouldn’t have known what they did already, they shouldn’t have known about love.

  Once in a while Scotty would tag along too. I’d try to get away whenever I saw him coming, but he usually knew where to wait for me so I wouldn’t have a chance to turn off. Like an ambush. All of a sudden he’d be standing against a fence post by the trail tossing a rock in the air and smiling crossways at me.

  “You and that horse,” he’d say, shaking his head. Then he’d fall in beside me.

  After a while he’d pick up a stick and beat the grass with it, hoping to scare up som
e snakes and spook Sonny out from under me. He carried a slingshot, too. For defense, he said. There were wild pigs in the buttes that would sometimes break out on the trail and stare you down for a second before turning and running off into the brush. They’d snarl at you, and you could see their teeth poking up on either side of their mouths. Their eyes were dead like lizards’ or snakes’ eyes. There were rumors that they’d killed two hunters once, but nobody knew who the hunters were or exactly where it had happened.

  There were a lot of stories like that. Like the missile silos. You still hear that one, even now. About how the government laid out this whole string of missile silos in the buttes during the early fifties, during the scare. Deep down, in the bedrock. About how they worked by night, up in the steepest parts, and the flash from their welding torches sparked along the contours. Worked like moles to lay out their vision, a concrete-lined warren hidden beneath the brown grass and the oaks.

  They were secret installations, supposedly, a battery of weapons guaranteed to wipe out Russia even if they killed all of us first. They had no defensive purpose, they were designed for pure punishment. The last line of punishment, sneaking up behind the Russians from some nothing hills out on the edge of nowhere just when they thought they were safe—like a Doberman does, not barking, not interested in show, only in effect.

  When the government abandoned them, the story goes, they left the missiles in and just covered up the mouths of the silos. The problem was, somebody had lost the map that showed all the locations, and no one could quite remember how many there’d been or where exactly they were. So some were missed and were never sealed up. Until eventually the live oaks and manzanita drew their own cover in over them.

  Scotty believed every word of it. He was gullible, but it was more than that. Sometimes he wanted to believe things so badly it was scary. It was like his life depended on this whole string of lies and stories he’d piled together into a ladder of air, and he held onto it like a drowning man.

  Bobby laughed at him about it. Carol, though, always tried to explain to him logically how the things he believed couldn’t possibly be true. I think he liked being laughed at better. Sometimes Carol would be talking along sensibly and he’d just turn away, glare up the trail toward the high ridge and its lightning-scarred trees as if none of us were there.

  “Do you know there are goddamn Russians living right here, right in goddamn town?” my dad asks.

  “Sure,” I say. “It’s different now. They can get out if they want to. Remember they tore the wall down?”

  “That was Germany,” he says.

  “I know. But it was all part of the same thing. They couldn’t get out of anywhere. They were all stuck.”

  “Why do they have to come here?”

  “Where else are they gonna go?”

  He doesn’t answer. He needs these things. They’re simple and perfect.

  One time I was riding Sonny up in the buttes and Scotty fell in beside me out of nowhere.

  “What the hell’s wrong with them?” he asked, jerking his head toward the trail below us. Carol and Bobby were down there, following a little way behind. They were holding hands and swinging their arms. There was a little grass in my sister’s hair from lying beside the trail next to Bobby and looking up at the empty sky. I’d come across them like that once, lying in the grass like they were dead. When I saw them I couldn’t help looking up too, to see what it was that held them there so fixed. But there wasn’t anything I could see.

  “Who knows?” I said.

  “Pisses me off.”

  I climbed off Sonny and let him graze in the long, dry grass beside the trail. Scotty sat in the shade of a live oak and looked down at Carol and Bobby moving toward us.

  “Why do they have to come up here?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Why do you?”

  He picked a rock up from beside the trail and tossed it in the air.

  “I belong here,” he said.

  It was probably just bad timing that Bobby and Carol laughed at something right then. Scotty jumped to his feet. He loaded the rock into his slingshot and fired it, hard. It ricocheted off a boulder beside Bobby. He and Carol stopped and gawked up at us, their eyes big and stupid with surprise.

  “Hey!” Bobby yelled.

  The next one hit him in the foot and he hopped around on the other one for a minute, leaning on Carol’s shoulder.

  “Cut it out,” I said. “Leave ‘em alone.”

  “Fuck you,” Scotty said.

  The next rock whizzed by Bobby’s head. He was almost crying; you could see it even from where we were. Scotty loaded another one in, but they were already turning back so he shot it into the brush off to the side of them.

  “Good riddance,” he said as we started up the trail again. I looked back once more when we were near the top. They were almost out of sight. They were holding hands again, but their arms weren’t swinging and Bobby was limping a little. They looked very small, like toys. Like memories when you catch your mind wandering.

  “Where’s your horse?” my dad says.

  “He’s gone,” I say.

  “Good.”

  When they didn’t come back that night, no one was worried. Everyone figured they’d probably fallen asleep in each other’s arms up in the buttes. That’s how they were, and it was the natural explanation. It satisfied everyone. It wasn’t until late the next day that people started talking about a search party.

  They started out around sunset with dogs and flashlights. I went along on Sonny and scouted off to the sides, through the thick brush where you couldn’t go on foot. We stayed out the next day too, when most of the others went back and replacements came up to relieve them. It was a big area, with a million places to hide if you wanted to. There were thickets of brush so dense that Sonny just bounced off them, and stands of manzanita that you had to crawl on your belly to get into. The branches twined over you and paths branched off in every direction. You could have taken any one of them and ended up somewhere you’d never been before. Somewhere strange and foreign, where you’d just hear voices, very far away.

  No one ever really got used to them being gone, it was just that at some point you had to give up. All of us did eventually, turned around and went back down to the flats, went home. We’d searched for three straight weeks. I don’t know what more we could have done.

  A couple of nights after the search was called off, my dad set Sonny loose. I was sitting on the couch and I heard his shoes clicking on the blacktop. The hoof beats started off slow, kind of unsure, but by the time he passed our front door he was moving. There wasn’t any moon. I couldn’t see him as he tore past toward the buttes. All I saw were sparks shooting out from under him, trailing off like little meteorites, until he hit the end of the road and the ground turned to dirt again.

  Before long people started saying they’d fallen into one of the silos. Stumbled onto one that had been missed, and the blanket of brush over the mouth had given way beneath them. They fell, down and down, through a darkness thicker than night. But it was soft where they landed—in a stockpile of army overcoats—and they just got up and brushed themselves off. There were C-Rations and water drums down there. That’s how they could survive, in an underground city built out of fear and rashness. It was an inevitable explanation for those parts. After a while, with nothing else to go on, it became the truth.

  Scotty kept looking. Once, much later, I was up in the buttes and I met him coming down the trail. His clothes were torn from brush snags and there were branches in his hair. I watched him for a minute before he saw me. He was working the trail, walking down it a few steps, then peering off into the brush and calling, quietly, for both of them.

  When he looked up and saw me, he puffed out in embarrassment.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Good answer.”

  It was still summer up in the buttes. I offered him a drink of water.

  “I bet they’
re watching us right now,” he said, wiping the mouth of the bottle on his dirty shirt.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Probably laughing too.”

  He squinted off into the brush. Then he snorted and shook his head.

  “This world’s full of idiots,” he said.

  He had a .22 with him, and he turned and shot into the scrub. I heard the bullet flick through leaves, then thump into the hillside.

  “What are you shooting at?” I said.

  “Whatever’s in there.”

  He cocked another round into the rifle, and moved past me down the trail.

  There’s a breeze coming through the screen door. I go to close the slider.

  “Leave it,” my dad says.

  “It’s gonna rain,” I say.

  “So what?” he says, leaning back in his chair. “So goddamn what.”

  I go into the kitchen and get a beer from the refrigerator. It’s already starting to rain when I come back into the living room. I stop and stand in the doorway looking out, past my dad in his purple leather chair, at the buttes disappearing under the clouds.

  By now it’s already been raining for a few minutes over at my house. Down the street, puddles will be forming in the two permanent holes Scotty’s feet left in his lawn the time he stood out there all night in the rain. He’s probably out there again tonight, glaring off at the buttes. He’s like my dad, his anger so focused you wouldn’t be surprised to see some kind of killer beam shooting out of his eyes. They’re two of a kind. They build their own little worlds, then they don’t like what they’ve made and they want to start over.

  My dad doesn’t say anything as I wrestle the La-Z-Boy through the slider. Even when I bump the footrest hard against the jamb, he’s silent. He doesn’t look at me. Why should he? I’m of no interest. I’m here.

  I wheel him out past the porch, through the yard. The chair’s wheels crunch over the fallen fence wires. Out in the pasture, it’s raining hard. The mud grabs at my shoes. There’s an old snubbing post in the middle where I used to mount up on Sonny. It’s rotting out, and acorn woodpeckers have riddled it with holes. In some of them you can see the points of acorns sticking out. When it’s windy, like it is now, the wind whistles through the empty holes. I spin the chair around to face the buttes, and lean the back of it against the post.