The Middle Ground

by Jeff Ewing

  “I mean, when it happened.”

  Wilton thought about that, unsure how to judge it. He wanted to say something helpful.

  “Like you said, things die easily.”

  The blow came quickly; he had no time to react. Kauffman stood over him, huffing. The look on his face held too many components to isolate. He was howling, a kind of wail like something caught; his teeth were grinding, his eyes pressed shut so that the thin, white lids were almost transparent. Wilton sat up where he’d fallen and watched the blood from his nose run in a stream into the snow. He didn’t resent the punch, or the wailing, or any of it. He himself had seen Flora nearly every day, counted on it, and he found it difficult now too reconciling himself to her absence.

  His original title for the book, A Pictorial Study of Ice Flowers, was changed by the publisher to Ice Crystals. Simple and straightforward, qualities Wilton would have admired at one time. He couldn’t put his finger on when that had changed. The truth was, the book didn’t interest him much once it was done. It became history, which he had little use for. He continued to collect and to catalog his findings in a kind of revolt against its finality. There would be subsequent editions, amendments and supplements presenting themselves, conceivably forever. He looked forward to the job’s futility, its Sisyphean labor. Besides, what else was he to do with his remaining time?

  He had discovered, on later visits, that the crystals around the hot spring were markedly different from those found elsewhere. There was an extravagance to them—intricate filigree between the arms, stunning prismatics, stars within stars. Late in the season he made one last trip out there, collecting close to the water’s edge along the demarcation between ice and snow. He carried a loupe with him to get a preliminary idea of the crystals’ form. They were some of the finest of his long, eccentric career. He knew that was how others viewed his coming and going, but it had never bothered hm. It was a life with a purpose, wasn’t it?

  The first hard flakes that overtook him on his way back from the spring were sharp and graceless, streaking nearly horizontal. They stung his neck, pelted against his legs. Deeper into the woods, though, the wind died and the snow grew thicker and softer. There was a kind of music to it he’d always been only half-conscious of—the tick of weighted branches, the sigh like waves washing between the trees, rising and falling with the muffled voice of a distant conversation. He sat down to listen with his back against a birch tree.

  DOUBLE HELIX

  HIS LITTLE GIRL FLAPPED HER vestigial arms and Ernie felt his love swell and swell like an overfed fuel line—what if it burst now, with Daisy so helpless and, except for him, alone?

  After dark, he carried her over the fence to the shuttered pool where they floated together in the reflected stars. She flicked her armlets and sped in circles around a satellite tracking slowly across the deep end. A car passed with its bass thumping, shock waves rippled in harmony across the pool, warping the night sky.

  Was it worth it, someone had asked—who, he couldn’t remember, no friend surely—the trips, the substitute existence, the fuck-all attention to reality? Wrong question, he’d said. How much love is too much?—that was the real question.

  No one could agree, anyway, on the damage. How much was lasting. Maybe it wasn’t his fault, maybe his chromosomes were just fine and not shredded, as hysterics claimed, by lysergic razors. Processed food, tainted water—the air itself might have conspired against them. What good was guilt, in any case. What comfort was that to Daisy?

  She waggled her web-strung feet and sped across the water.

  “How are you going to explain it to her?” Cynthia had asked, some time before the door slammed. “When she’s old enough.”

  “What’s old enough?”

  He hadn’t meant to be difficult, or a smartass. It was a legitimate question. How old did a child have to be to benefit from the knowledge that her parents had played so carelessly with the future?

  Every summer, as soon as school let out, they made the drive over the mountains to the ocean. Daisy would sit up and begin giggling as they crossed the last ridge and the first ragged wisps of coastal fog swept past the car. She held her fingerless hand on the window and watched as the condensation formed a mitten around it. Then the ocean, and the sun crashing down, caroming off the waves.

  She scooted across the sand on her belly toward the water. He couldn’t help her, she wouldn’t allow it. He walked beside her, his simian tracks unseemly alongside the sleek lines spooling out behind her.

  The world came to her, it was true. A sea otter first, then a pod of dolphins. They nudged her toward deeper water. He could hear her giggling, the fins circling her like the ribs of a playpen. A ray leapt over in a high arc. People watched, mouths open. He stood waist-deep in cold water, her laughter rising and falling, washing in to him on the onshore breeze.

  “The fuck is wrong with you?” Running past him, board slapping the water. Daisy protesting in trills. How could he explain, their worlds intersecting only tangentially? He was cited for child endangerment.

  Daisy watched the shoreline recede, the fog close over. All this is real, he promised her on their way back across the mountains. All of it. The land melting away behind them, the whistle of the gulls circling around inside the car like the echo of a judgment uttered so quietly and so long ago it could hardly have been true.

  COAST STARLIGHT

  CLIFFORD COULD HAVE BEEN ANYONE, though no one from around Corning. He was too easy in his skin, standing with his hands loose at his sides, the first person in years to pay any attention to the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign. He rocked a little on his feet, his thin legs bowing out at the knees. When he flipped up his clip-on sunglasses, his pupils floated like drops of ink in milky green irises, neglected looking things. If she’d been a little younger she might have blushed, but she’d long since stopped being embarrassed or flattered by men’s stares. Her beauty was something she’d had to acknowledge early on, even if she couldn’t appreciate it herself.

  He slid into the middle booth and ordered scrambled eggs, then smothered them in Tabasco. Sweat broke out across his face as he ate. He went through almost half a canister of napkins, which she’d have to refill after he was gone. She watched the sweat drip onto the table and bead up on the film of oil that never scrubbed all the way off.

  Afterward, at the register, he pushed a card across the counter.

  “I know this sounds like a line,” he said. “But I’d like to put you in the movies.”

  It did sound like a line, as a matter of fact.

  “What kind of movies are these?”

  “The real kind,” he said. “Not what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m not thinking anything.”

  “Even better.”

  She finished her shift and the sun went down while he sat out in the parking lot in his Lincoln with the radio on. Her boss asked if she wanted him to walk her out to her car, but she said no, it was okay. He wasn’t dangerous. She could tell.

  In a way, she was right.

  It was the implication in her daughter’s question, the way she asked it as she herself might have asked her own mother, that made her start thinking about Clifford again: “Don’t you wish something exciting would happen to you, just once?”

  Her life, in other words, was a pitiful thing, hardly worth keeping track of. And yet something had happened—or nearly happened—something that could have been put down to a little girl’s fantasy, sitting in her room on the blunt edge of nowhere cutting pictures out of magazines, if she’d been that kind of little girl. But she’d always been able to see the eventual disappointment hidden in fantasies, just as she could see the inevitable fading of her own looks when she stood in front of the mirror.

  She’d been going out with Matias for a couple of months by then. In his mind it was serious, if not necessarily in hers. It was possible she’d love him some day, she didn’t know. For now he was a wall, and that’s what she needed. Solid and unmoving, wi
th a fine scar running along the edge of his chin where he’d cut himself with a grape knife when he was a kid. No one bothered her when she was with him, even the older men steered clear. He wasn’t mean like the other boys—calling girls putas and bitches—he had a soft streak in him. It would likely get ground down eventually, but there might be a livable spell until then. They might have ten good years, maybe more.

  He was afraid of her beauty, as many people seemed to be. He touched her like he was defusing a bomb. She could feel him shaking against her that night, this big man with thick, work-scarred fingers. When he tried to put his hand under her bra, she let him. It was a small concession that didn’t cost her much. He almost cried at her generosity. She stroked his hair like a child and watched an owl at the end of the orchard row dive in a sudden burst to snatch up a mouse. She thought about Clifford, imagined the owl was him, his skinny frame swooping among the trees. Matias bit her nipple and she let out a little chirp, then shifted in the bucket seat in a futile effort to get comfortable.

  The next day Clifford was back, this time ignoring the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign like everyone else. He looked a little healthier, his eyes less muddy. Every now and then he tapped something into an electronic organizer. It was an exotic thing in those days—more for effect than practical use, Elena thought—separating him from the common people the way a cravat or a cane might have twenty years earlier.

  “You didn’t call,” he said.

  “Of course not.”

  “I’m serious about this. You can check me out with the trades, I’m legit.”

  She had no idea what the trades were, but didn’t say so. It was another part of his show, a private language to impress her.

  “Do you know where you are?” she said.

  “More or less.”

  “We raise olives here, and dust. That’s it.”

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that, please.”

  He ordered French toast this time, and wolfed it down. He didn’t linger as long in the booth, but he left another identical card under the edge of his plate. On the back he’d written: You put them all to shame.

  She still had the card. The edges had started to separate, one corner bent like a pig’s ear. She laughed at the fact that she lived in such a place and in such a way that a pig’s ear was the first comparison to present itself. That was part of the problem: she couldn’t see herself anywhere but where she was. She never imagined other towns, a different life. When she looked out the window she saw olive trees, rice fields, and the stumpy tanks of the cement plant. The world did not curve out beyond the edge of her vision into rain forests and deserts and kingdoms, it butted up against the dry hills and stopped there.

  It was unusual, then, when that night she dreamed of just that, another life, a life in which she felt eyes lingering on her without wanting to hide. She teased and laughed and knew that later on she would be with a man she’d just met, looking out through plate glass windows onto waves and gulls, wrapped in sheets so soft they whispered against her skin like crickets. They would talk in the cryptically mutual way that people in love, real love, talked, understanding everything with a minimum of effort. Wine would follow dinner followed by wine.

  She woke in a near panic and showered hurriedly, afraid to touch herself. She drove straight to work, no detours past the park and the duck ponds, no singing to herself under the radio. She was afraid the memory of the dream would persist in those favorable surroundings, rather than dissolving in the sun slanting through the windshield. Still the thought kept creeping back: What if she was beautiful not just here, but everywhere? What if she left this place and people still watched her; what if they saw something in her—like Clifford did—something that could be shared without giving herself away?

  It wasn’t until her eyes had adjusted that she noticed Matias in the booth where Clifford would have been, his arms tucked in at his sides and his head ducked down the way he did to make himself smaller. He always worried he’d frighten her away. But she wasn’t a bird or a squirrel or some other tender thing. When he got down on a knee and a gray puff of cement dust lifted from his jeans, the restaurant tunneled toward her, the sounds of the freeway and the clatter of dishes rose to an aching pitch as if someone had thrown the volume knob all the way over. She fell back into herself with a crash.

  In a way, it was a relief, though she had a headache later and had to spend her break in the bathroom with a Coke and a couple of Ibuprofens. Her eyes ached with a pressure like the heel of a hand pushing down. From the fall, was how she put it to herself. As if it was something physical that had happened to her, a wrong step on the ice, or a ladder going out from under her.

  When Clifford showed up the next time, Elena and Matias were married and Carla was almost a year old. Matias had done well; he was good to her and she didn’t have any regrets. Very few. She could have done without the cement dust he carried everywhere with him—in the creases of his shirts, on the soles of his shoes, in the gaps in his thinning hair. After the rare rains that came like drunk rages out of the north, she’d find clots of hardened cement cast off around the house and through the yard. Sometimes there were full boot prints, big and ungainly, strung around the fence line where he paced on his sleepless nights like a guard.

  “I’m afraid you won’t be here when I wake up,” he’d said once to explain it.

  “Where would I go?”

  He should have smiled then, it would have been enough. But instead his face went cloudy and tight thinking about all the places she could go if she wanted to. A map of the world scrolled across his vision, each road perfectly capable of taking her away from him.

  Clifford stood with his hands on his hips, sporting a scraggly beard now and wide, black-rimmed glasses riding halfway down his nose. Even before his car came flying across the overpass, something had made her look up, something like a sound but not quite. It reached her ahead of the Lincoln, preceding the car as though it had created the car rather than the other way around.

  He’d developed a faint limp that she only noticed as he made his way down the aisle to his booth. More acting, she thought, but then decided—no, something had shifted in him. He moved more deliberately, more seriously somehow, not the cocky careless way he had before. It embarrassed her that she was happy to see him. He made her feel wanted in a way she wasn’t used to.

  “Welcome back,” she said. “Eggs?”

  “Just toast and coffee.”

  As she poured, he held up a sheaf of thumbed pages held together with brads, red lines and notations in the margins.

  “Your movie,” he said.

  Sure enough, there was her name centered on the page in capital letters: ELENA.

  “Is it a tragedy?” She tried to laugh, but it came out too loud and a little crooked.

  “Is your life a tragedy?”

  “No. A comedy, more like.”

  “Same thing, different scenery.”

  She only had one other table, a couple of pressers from the olive oil plant, their fingers and palms stained black. They hid them under the table when she took their order. Then they took turns in the bathroom trying to scrub them clean, but it didn’t make much difference. Shelly, who cleaned the bathrooms after closing, complained constantly about the stains in the sinks she couldn’t get out, the oil slicks on the counters. Elena passed by Clifford’s table again after bringing their orders out.

  “Why is it my movie?” she said.

  “I had it written for you. I described you to this writer friend of mine, I painted a picture in his head. I’m pretty good at that.”

  “I see.”

  “Not just the way you look, though, your—” outlining with his hands the shape of her, “but the way you carry yourself. Like there’s another you hidden inside, the same way you’re holed away in this little town here. No offense.”

  “Is that what the movie’s about?”

  “It’s an allegory. An action allegor
y.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It’s a story that tells another story.”

  “With shooting, etcetera.”

  “Yes. Some shooting, etcetera.”

  He had a new card. She pulled it out from under the saucer as she watched him get in his car and drive back across the overpass. Dark letters slanting across the top of the card announcing what she guessed was the movie’s title: Out From The Shadows.

  The late sun through the kitchen window lit up the ever-present dust, shivering and dancing like a swarm of insects. The chicken mole crunched faintly as she chewed. Everything—not just in her house, but throughout the town—was coated with it, cement dust and field dust, dust stirred by tires and feet and the wind. The houses and stores and the two churches huddled inside a perpetual cloud.

  “How far have you ever been?” she asked Matias, slumped like a question mark over his plate, half asleep. He was working twelve hour shifts now. Advancement had its drawbacks as well as its perks.

  “How far what? What do you mean?”

  “I mean away from here.”

  He thought and chewed. She could see the gray coating on his nose hairs as he breathed in and out.

  “Fresno, I guess. When I was a kid, for 4H.”

  “I haven’t been out of Corning once. Did you know that?”

  “Well Fresno wasn’t much. You’re not missing anything.”

  “I’d hate to think that. If I thought there wasn’t anything worth seeing outside of here, I’d drown myself in the bathtub.”

  Carla made a noise like a lawnmower refusing to start, and Elena laid her hand softly on top of her head. Her hair was so thin and fine, not like Elena’s. She could feel the heat rising up into her hand, skin on skin transferring.

  “I’d like to see some of it. Someplace else.”

  Matias winced as a grain of cement wedged into a crack in his back tooth. He took a long drink of water and waited for the pain to subside.