The Middle Ground

by Jeff Ewing

  May forces herself to look at the woman. She notices a small scar beside her left eye and wonders what made it. She touches her own face alongside her eye out of reflex and the woman straightens.

  “Cat got your tongue?” she says, and laughs. “Kitty-cat got your tonguey-wung?”

  She waits for the others to laugh too.

  “It’s a fixit,” May says at last.

  “Oh god,” Eve says.

  “A what?”

  “A fixit.”

  The woman blinks down at her.

  “What’s a fixit when it’s at home?”

  “Just what it says.”

  “What, like a doctor or a repairman or something?”

  May laughs. “No.”

  The woman points toward the station wagon with a finger girdled with yellow stains. “Can it fix that old piece of junk?”

  “It won’t help you,” May says, pulling the plate closer. “Go away.”

  The woman tenses. Her husband shuffles over and touches her arm lightly.

  “Lee,” he says, but she doesn’t seem to notice him.

  “Why not?” she snarls down at May. “There something wrong with me?”

  May holds the plate out toward her so she can see her reflection. The woman’s face fills with a sudden, bursting red.

  “You’re a rude old woman. You’re a crazy old bitch!”

  Matt steps between them and holds out his hand.

  “Thanks for coming up,” he says. “Sorry you couldn’t find anything.”

  The woman glares past him at May. Her husband reaches his hand carefully around and shakes Matt’s hesitantly.

  “Thanks for the look-see. There’s some interesting things.” His smile is tight and close to breaking. He touches his wife’s shoulder.

  “Come on, Lee.”

  “I want that,” she says, pointing to the plate. “We’ve got a dollar twenty-five, don’t we? We aren’t that broke.”

  “You don’t want that.”

  “Don’t tell me what I want.”

  May grips the plate tighter. Eve looks at her, then back at the woman.

  “We said it was for sale, so it’s for sale,” she says.

  The woman slaps her husband on the chest.

  “Give me the money.”

  “Can’t you forget it?”

  Her hand remains extended, unwavering. May looks closely at Eve. She’s tried to tell her before, but she doesn’t understand.

  “It’s got powers,” May says.

  “Stop it.”

  “It kept all this here. It kept us together.”

  “Are you kidding? Who, Mom? They’re all gone—James, Dad. It didn’t fix them.”

  “That’s not how it works, you know that.”

  Eve’s hand shoots out suddenly and snatches the plate away.

  “No, I don’t know. I never have known. As far as I can tell, it’s done just the opposite.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? Come on then, let’s see some magic. Bring James back, how about that?” She looks around theatrically, her free arm slashing the air. “Where is he? Why isn’t he here?”

  May looks involuntarily toward the railroad crossing out of sight beyond the trees. It was abandoned some time ago; the trains don’t use that track anymore.

  “He was too broken, Evie.”

  Eve’s teeth clench, the lines of her cheeks showing sharp as knife edges.

  “This is going to stop.”

  The man has the money out, his hand extended uncertainly. The bill is crumpled and dirty, the green ink almost black. The quarter, in contrast, gleams from frequent rubbing. Eve reaches for the money, but Matt steps forward and bats the man’s hand away. The bill flutters to the ground. The quarter sails high and spins against the sun, flashing on and off, off and on.

  “Let her keep it,” Matt says. “For god’s sake, what difference does it make?”

  The quarter whirls and flashes. It has broken free of the earth and won’t ever come down.

  May didn’t understand herself at first how it worked, when she gave it that silly name—but she was just a little girl. She thought it was like some kind of magic glue, that it could heal all things sundered. She tried it on broken toys, a gash on her leg, even on a dead magpie, but she saw it couldn’t put things back once they’d come apart. All it could do was hold them where they were for a little while, keep them from flying all the way apart. Maybe not forever, but for a little while. It was like the chemical she and her daddy used after a picture was developed in the little darkroom off the kitchen. That’s where she got the name, from a bottle in there. It fixed things like that, in time. Folded open—kept open—it slowed life just enough to catch up.

  Loft didn’t believe any of it, of course, he thought it was a kind of blasphemy even. He waved it in her face one day, the air singing off it and the light bending.

  “See there,” he said, “right there? That says Mexico. You think God’s gonna put Mexico on one of his creations?”

  “He did on Mexico.”

  “Damn it, May.”

  “I never said it was God.”

  “Well who then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And she didn’t. But it wasn’t any harder to believe for that. Maybe it worked off her dreams, or the light running through the farm and the woods, she didn’t know. And she didn’t care. It gave back to her the same as she gave to it.

  She heard Loft flip the clasps before she could stop him, turned to see him clapping the halves together.

  “Look,” he said, holding it up. “A silver taco.”

  He laughed, while May stood there—her heart broken—watching her husband and their life together hurtle away.

  At the barn, the man has to turn around. He carves a clumsy Y, and at the leg of the Y he backs the station wagon hard into the corner. A length of siding hangs in the bumper. He lays on the gas until the board finally snaps, a ragged piece still wedged against the taillight.

  He steps out of the car, stares down at the deep V in his bumper, at the splintered red board jutting out, pointing like a finger. With some effort, he finally frees the board, holds it up helplessly. He starts toward Matt, holding the board like a dead pet, but Matt waves him off. He hesitates, then leans the board against the side of the barn. He shrugs an apology and gets back in his car. In the passenger seat, his wife glares at the barn, then at Matt, then at May. They have all conspired, she knows.

  When the car’s dust trail finally dissipates, Eve goes into the house. She comes out a moment later with a suitcase and sets it down by the car. She goes back in and comes out with another one. Matt has given the plate back to May. She holds onto it tightly, rocking slowly in the lawn chair.

  “Are you going to help?” Eve calls.

  Matt looks briefly at May, then turns away and goes into the house.

  When May and Loft first moved back into her daddy’s house, she’d take the fixit out sometimes and study its shifting surface while Loft listened to his television preachers scolding him like a child. Downstairs James and Evie played their music and laughed at jokes she didn’t understand, their quick lives a secret from her already. Later, at dinner, they would be briefly a family before the kids dumped their dishes in the sink and darted off. When they made it back every night from wherever it was they went, it was another little miracle she credited to the fixit.

  It drove Loft crazy. At least until later, when he started to lose track and began believing in even wilder things. When he heard the voice of God coming from the television, and May would find him staring rapt at the screen while Vanna White turned the letters over, holding his breath, thinking the answers to his deepest questions were about to be spelled out for him. Puzzling over the words and phrases for hours afterward, repeating them out loud until they were just sounds, getting angrier as meaning drifted farther and farther away.

  When the shows were all over and the sun was long gone he’d kneel by the bed and sa
y his prayers like a little boy. Once in a while he’d try to coax May down there with him.

  “It troubles me that you don’t believe,” he’d say. “I worry about you.”

  She never understood what he meant. How he could think she didn’t believe.

  “Time to go, Mom,” Eve says.

  May can tell without looking at her that she’s been crying. She suspects it’s her job to comfort her, but she doesn’t feel inclined at the moment.

  “I know you’ll like it,” Eve says. “You’ll make friends.”

  “I had friends already,” May says. She can’t bring herself to look at her daughter, at the blunt woman’s face that swallowed the child.

  After a moment, Eve draws her hand away.

  May is alone then, and she doesn’t mind it so much. She sits in the chair and listens to the grasshoppers clicking in the grass, the faint wind up in the walnut rattling the leaves and making the branches creak like rusty machinery. There are possibly the voices of people mixed in, too, people she’d known, but she can’t be sure. She thinks she hears her mother and Loft arguing—which is impossible, since her mother died long before Loft came along. A squirrel starts up in the tree and James enters quietly, as he always did. She tries to push him out, but he won’t go. He’s the troublemaker again, standing in the doorway at the far end of her room snapping the fixit open and closed. Mocking her. He winks at her and she slams her eyes shut. When she opens them again, he’s gone and there’s just a faint impression where he was, like a wind matting down the grass.

  Her thoughts aren’t as clear as they once were, she knows that, and it troubles her. The edges of things have lost some of their distinction, and she’s not as sure of herself. She wonders if her ideas about the fixit and its powers have always been there, or if it’s something new, a drift into foolishness like Loft seeing God on the Wheel of Fortune. Time does seem sometimes to be loosing its grip on her.

  Matt leans against the loaded van, raises his hand in a tired wave. May waves back, then takes the plate in one hand and with the other pushes herself up from the chair. She rocks a little on her feet; the massive spread of the walnut dwarfs her, makes her lose herself for a moment. She takes three short steps, four, lets her meager weight gather, lifts her feet higher and starts to run. Her knees pump, the tendons and ligaments creaking inside her like an old harness. She can feel time tugging against her like a fish ticking the drag as she runs through the open barn door, past the workbench and the tack room, and on into the black body of the barn.

  The darkness closes in around her, brushes up against her. She stands still and listens for sounds of pursuit, but there’s only her own strained breathing and the hiss of blood in her ears. Maybe they won’t follow her. They’re afraid, she knows, of so many things. Then the car door slams and they begin calling, like children at the end of a game.

  She clutches the fixit to her chest, rubbing it in quick circles. She feels heat rising from it, hears its hum like far-off starlings. The barn begins to groan around her. Old cans filled with bolts and washers rattle on the shelves. A cloud of hay chaff descends to her, glittering like gold dust.

  Far back in the barn, a hinge squeaks, and a line of light stretches out beside her. She follows it back through old shadows and bits of chewed leather to the muck-out chute she’d forgotten all about, a low door in the back wall that Loft had nailed shut years ago. She has to crawl to get through it, like she did when she was little. The ground is soft with dried manure that’s been ground to dust, the smell familiar and purposeful.

  As she starts up the little hill behind the house, the barn collapses on itself like a paper foldout. The walls fall away, the roof hangs in the air for a moment, then splits in two and flutters to the ground. It all happens in silence, the noise only coming after, rushing into the vacuum left by the barn’s absence. She is halfway up the hill by then and feels the wind from it, but she doesn’t turn around to look. Loft’s wife, she thinks, and laughs. Gone to salt.

  Down below, Matt and Eve rush to the wreckage of the barn and begin throwing boards aside, calling her name. She should wave or yell back, she knows, let them know she’s all right, but she doesn’t. She brushes a film of dust from the plate and buffs the pale metal with the sleeve of her dress. Her face is multiplied many times across its surface—her tiny, wrinkled mouth, her eyes like olive pits. She takes a stray bundle of hair between her fingers and tucks it behind her ear, then climbs the rest of the way to the top of the hill. She undoes the two clasps and gently folds the plate closed. There is a sound like a string breaking, quiet and very far off.

  She sets the plate at the base of the burnt oak and takes a step back, laces her fingers the way she’d seen Loft do and whispers a little prayer in his honor:

  “I’d like to buy a vowel.”

  Then she continues on down the other side of the hill toward the creek and the last remaining pasture. There’s no rush. It’s a lovely day—the end of summer, not unbearably hot. It’s the kind of day that, in her time, they would have sooner died than waste.

  MASTERPIECE

  DAN DISLIKED DOGS, HE ALWAYS had, but that wasn’t why Nora went out and got one. She bought the dog because she wanted to reconstruct some part of their old world, the one they’d lived in when they were kids. The current one wasn’t working, it was a blown experiment. They hardly talked anymore, and when they did it was Dan criticizing her, berating her for nothing. It was frustrating. So she bought the puppy—the puppy would be Dan, down even to the red hair, an obedient little thing following her around without question or objection, content in believing that each word and gesture of hers was an act of god. It was a good plan. But as it turned out, Paramus was as big a letdown as Dan.

  To begin with, the name. She’d thought it was something classical, a Greek god or a philosopher. She couldn’t remember where she’d heard it, maybe PBS. Of course it was Dan who pointed out—smirking as he seemed to always be doing these days—that Paramus was a town in New Jersey. By then it was too late; the name was in the vet’s book beside the chip code and the heartworm prescription. Set in stone. If he got lost and someone found him, took him in and had him scanned, they would see the name and they’d laugh too. At her. Her ridiculous attempt at erudition. Where, she wondered sometimes, did it end?

  At the moment, Paramus was digging in the garden. She thumbed the hose and sprayed him with water that was sure to be freezing. She felt a twinge of sympathy. Then she saw his muddy muzzle and the uprooted eggplant, and it passed. The garden was struggling. Her one boastable talent and it was failing her.

  “You planted too late,” Dan had said.

  “What do you know about it?”

  “I know a screw-up when I see one.”

  She lifted her foam kneeler, scooted up along the row of eggplants. They’d be eating a lot of eggplant. She dug at the nutgrass, pulling each clump up carefully to make sure she got all the roots. She imagined each one screaming a little as she slowly extracted it, and drew the process out, smiling to herself. There was nothing disturbing about that, she assured herself. She was the garden’s guardian, it was her duty. Things were always horning their way in; she had to be vigilant.

  She smushed a pill bug under her trowel and thought about the episode coming up this Sunday on PBS, a new show, a new female detective. One of those British ladies with their better-tended gardens. She loved those shows. They were the reason she still kept a TV. It had been a nuisance to change over to digital—the little box and antenna, the terminology like a foreign language—but it had been worth it for those little old ladies. The Pembrokes and Duchesses and Marples.

  Paramus barked in the side yard and clawed at the gate. Nora straightened up with difficulty and leaned out to see what the commotion was. Too early for the mailman—the lazy mailman with the lazy eye—but there was definitely someone there. She could see his shoes in the gap beneath the gate.

  A rapist? Not in broad daylight, surely. That would be too much. But th
en again, who knew these days? Everyone was so bold and pushy. The Keller boys down the street sold pot right out in the open. They flipped her the bird once when she watched their transaction for too long. She just wanted to let them know that she knew, she didn’t care about the pot. She’d had a joint or two herself in her day—did they still call them that, joints? They must have new words by now, a fresh vocabulary to separate them from their parents with their tie-dyed shirts and Grateful Dead stickers on their SUVs. Really, a time came when—

  The rapist or Mormon or whatever was peering over the gate, a tall man with thick blond hair and dark eyebrows.

  “I’m looking for Dan,” he said.

  She struggled to her feet—first to one haunch, then up onto a heel, wobbling like a poorly made toy. Then one last push and … up. She brushed the nutgrass and dirt from her apron and crossed the yard at a calm, even pace so as not to appear either too anxious or too apprehensive. The man had been standing on his toes, apparently. He lowered himself now so that all she could see was a little bit of a blond cowlick. How cute, she thought, wanting to lick her palm and mat it down.

  The gate always hung up on the concrete cauliflowered around the base of the post. She’d asked Dan to fix it several times, she wasn’t sure why—he wouldn’t have had any idea how to go about it. It was her kind of chore, as most things were. She pulled on the gate, and at the same time the visitor pushed from his side. When the ends of the boards cleared the concrete, the gate flew open; it would have knocked her down if she wasn’t ready for it. The visitor meanwhile hurtled through, and just managed to catch himself before plowing into her. He came to a stop with his chest touching lightly against hers, their knees bumping. None of it painful, not at all. Just a bit awkward.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “My fault.”

  His clothes were tidy and pressed-looking. He was almost certainly a new boyfriend of Dan’s, or whatever they were meant to be called. Dan had corrected her terminology a number of times, but not with enough consistency that she could be sure of herself. In any case, they came and went so quickly that she never had time to offend them.