by Jeff Ewing
“Probably.”
Behind him, jumbled voices, the presence of bodies.
“Hi!” Donna called over his shoulder.
He moved out of the way to let a tightly packed family pass: The father thin with a very thick mustache, the mother and oldest daughter smiling under hijabs.
“We love it,” the father said.
“Wait till you see the inside.”
They jostled one another to be the first through the door that then closed behind them.
Behind his own door, Ed looked down disapprovingly at the sunken seat of the chair. The leather had cracked and turned darker than the rest. It was unseemly.
He brought some old leg weights in from the garage and strapped them on while he watched Jeopardy and Antiques Roadshow. The insect scuttling deep in his leg tickled.
After an initial, understandable period of wariness, the Pourans settled in. They waved to him on the way to their car, or walking down the opposite sidewalk toward the park. They could see him through the front window. On his throne, as Soraya called it.
He heard the car speed off on a Tuesday night, but didn’t see who had thrown the eggs at their house.
“Don’t judge us all by that,” he said.
Their smiles weren’t quite as bright, but they were still there.
After a lawn job, a broken window, and two more egg-throwing incidents, the smiles went into full retreat.
He tried to reassure them, to tell them those people were not emblematic, but he wasn’t entirely convinced himself. He hardly knew his neighbors. They had always looked at him, too, with suspicion—hurrying past his house with their kids or dogs, shaking their heads faintly behind tinted SUV windows. Squinting through fireworks smoke at the block party he wasn’t invited to.
“This is America,” he said.
By way of reassurance.
Donna waved to him from her car across the street.
“Isn’t it awful?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Some people,” she said, shrugging.
“Some people what?”
Summer had returned overnight. Indian Summer, as they once called it, he didn’t know why. Sweat glistened on her skin—as he remembered it, as it had always been. The air along the recollected river cooled him, leaning against his fence.
“They don’t like change,” she said.
He nodded. That was probably true.
“I love it myself.”
And he meant it, which surprised him.
“Well, you’re a rare one.”
She turned the BMW’s A/C on full, he could hear the fan whirring cleanly. It blew her hair around her face as though she were standing at the edge of a canyon, wind rising from the depths to stir the hearts of those above.
She left a puddle of condensation behind on the pavement. If he tilted his head just right and didn’t stick too strictly to reality, it was shaped like a heart.
The floorboards creaked under the armchair. He changed position again, but couldn’t get comfortable. In his dreams now, he was running again. He’d wake up drenched in sweat, the sheets coiled tightly around him. In one dream, the track coach was making love to Donna Harris behind the backstop. He could see the coach’s fat jiggling, Donna’s breasts lifting and falling. When she threw her head back and screamed, Ed did the same.
The Pourans came and went silently now, never loitering for long in the open. They looked at him through the peephole when he knocked, but wouldn’t open the door.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The peephole cover slid back into place with a squeak.
He imagined them sitting inside silently, each in his or her own armchair.
He’d ruined the homecoming float, several people claimed, even though he’d only stepped on a corner, smashed a handful of paper flowers. He was half drunk, unable to commit fully even to that. He staggered more than necessary, playing it up.
MARCHING TO OUR FUTURES was spelled out in yellow and green, with the S a little splayed where he’d trod on it. It struck him as excessively militaristic for a dance.
Someone pushed him toward the open garage door. He tripped on a bucket of paint and took out half of the TO.
“Get out!” Donna screamed. Looming. Her eyes disdainful, a little spit in the corner of her perfect mouth.
“You’re beautiful.”
“Do something,” she said to someone behind him.
He was hoisted and heaved into the side yard beside the recycling bin. By his face was a stepping stone little Donna had inscribed years ago with a handprint and a smiley face.
“Asshole,” he thought he heard. But that couldn’t be. He kissed the childish scrawl.
He hurriedly undid the ankle weights when he heard the car slow, followed by the thud and splat of eggs. He had to drive with one weight still attached as he chased them through the once-cherished streets of his neighborhood—ratty now around the edges, and possibly inside—into a new development with a counterfeit English name: Wolton Hills, never mind the lack of anything resembling a hill. The houses were tall and narrow, each trimmed and corniced in a bastardy of styles. The yards were neatly maintained with not a single visible garden.
The car pulled into one of the wide driveways, and two teenagers got out. Whooping and high-fiving. By the open front door, Donna Harris clapped and laughed. Ed noticed her smile wasn’t quite as fresh as it had been once, and saw the silk of her hair in the harsh blaze of security lights take on a metallic gleam like broken piano strings. She ushered the boys inside—for cookies and milk, maybe. A lecture on purity and maximizing commissions.
The little dog—he’d reappeared not long after the Pourans moved in—barked at Donna as she tried to hug Mrs. Pouran and Soraya. Their arms hung limp at their sides.
Donna kicked at the dog without breaking the embrace. The dog didn’t budge.
After she’d driven off, Ed fed the dog a can of cat food he had lying around.
“Good dog.”
He waved to the Pourans as they piled into the U-Haul, glancing sideways at the For Sale sign Donna had replanted in the lawn, but they ignored him. He couldn’t blame them. Was there any telling us apart?
That night in his dream, clumps of Donna’s hair streamed past him, uprooted like grass in a hurricane.
She called to him the next morning from the Pourans’ open front door.
“Airing it out!”
In what he hoped was a calm fashion, he pulled the For Sale sign out of the lawn and threw it into the street. Donna looked at him the way an oncology nurse might look at a flagging patient.
“I knew you were there,” she said. “At the river. Watching me.”
“It wasn’t planned.”
“I didn’t mind.”
“No, I guess not.”
She shrugged.
“It’s what I had.”
Ed heard a faint whistling sound, time slipping its gears on the grade.
“Me too,” he said.
Donna laughed, snorted once.
“Not quite,” she said. Then she turned smartly on her clean white sneakers and strode off into the dusk of the emptied house.
He hadn’t run in so long. He could feel the blood beginning to move, loosening up like cold syrup. He jogged past the little gate Bita Pouran had briefly swung from, pushing with one foot to set it going. The little dog barking, nipping at her feet. They had thought it belonged to him.
He cut through the park to the levee, over it and down to the stretch of river he’d run along way back when. The water was down, the bank littered with trash. Plastic bags hung in the trees like decorations from the last high water. As he wound along the trail, he resumed composing his obituary.
A man before and behind his time. A dedicated gardener bereft of his garden.
Somewhere around the bike bridge he moved on to the elegy. The church was nearly flooded with tears by the time he hit the horse trail. The smell was familiar: horse shit and dust, something de
ad off in the blackberries.
The river widened and turned shallow where Donna had appeared to him. A loose band of geese that hadn’t bothered to migrate back north floated lazily near shore. Cuthbertson’s Almanac in his back pocket, Ed shook off the bug moving inexorably up his vein.
Plant early, for the long season will undo all but the most resilient of seedlings.
Though Cuthbertson had died twenty years earlier, in a light plane crash over the desert, his almanac continued to be issued, with some revisions, year after year. Ed had relied on it in mapping out his own years. He wouldn’t abandon it now, of course, but he would pay a little closer attention. It was astonishing to him, for instance, that he could still mistake a weed for a flower.
He put his funeral on hold as he turned off the trail and plunged headlong into a stand of alders hung thick with wild grape.
HIDDENFOLK
THE VIEW IN EVERY DIRECTION was the same—sloping tables of wind-scraped land tilted this way and that as if they’d been dropped by a running child. There were no trees, just an incongruous carpet of bright green grass sown across volcanic rock. Low clouds scudded past overhead, the sky bearing down on Pete Harmon so that he seemed to be on the summit of a high peak rather than twenty feet above sea level. That’s how he would describe Iceland to Tower—a mountain breaking through the ocean.
So then, he was lost at sea.
He laughed and patted himself figuratively on the back for being able to laugh in such a situation, lost in a harsh country of ice and rock. He wished Tower were here to see it; it might have changed his opinion.
He didn’t try to tell himself it was fine out here on his own, that he didn’t miss Tower’s company. Their trips were a tradition, one of the few he had left, a yearly reprieve from the pressures of his practice. He was happiest during the months of preparations—poring over maps, researching patterns, caravanning down to the fly shop—and on the flight over, before they touched down. Watching the threads of water flash under the wing, the liquid shimmer of possibility. It wasn’t the same without him, and Pete knew this solo trip would be his first and last.
The core of the earth was close under his feet, contained by a thin skin of rock and gravelly soil. He bent beside a geothermal vent to let the steam warm him, though he suspected it probably chilled him even more in the long run. He heard rumblings in the distance, hungry belly growls like thunder rolling. This was newborn country, geologically speaking. He stomped his feet, clapped his hands against his sides. His lips were too cold to whistle properly, but he tried anyway. Squeaked out a pitiful, thin peep, and laughed again.
You could summon the hiddenfolk, Einar had told him, with a whistle.
“They run this place,” he’d explained, while they detoured a half-hour around a boulder in the road he claimed the hiddenfolk had put there. “Not the government, not the Prime Minister, not Bjork.” He snorted and bounced over a lip of calcified mud at the edge of the road. “She might be hiddenfolk, though, now I think about it. One of their bastards.”
They could change the landscape itself, Einar alleged, move mountains and rivers, even alter the sky. Their powers were vague and enormous, and they used them according to a code only they understood. Out of simple mischief sometimes, but at other times directed toward more serious ends—to protect the helpless, and to punish the deserving.
“‘Little gods brought to life,’” Einar said, spitting a dollop of snuss into a coffee cup. “Halldor Laxness said that. He was a smart man and a great writer, but a little too clever for Iceland.”
Pete squinted out into the empty landscape. How nice it would be to believe in such things, fairytale creatures behind every stroke of good and bad luck. At the core of every disease, nestled down in each corrupt cell. He could just whistle over Cicely, promise a favor in return for a favor.
He saw her thin and frail in her tidy room, the disease moving invisibly beneath her skin like termites burrowing, and saw Tower at the window looking out on the field behind the hospital, the muddy pool of rainwater. He thought out there was where life was lived, that the two worlds—inside/outside, sickness/health—were mutually exclusive. But Pete knew they existed on a single plane of possibility, that the wall between them was as soft and permeable as a cloud bank.
He stepped out into the hall and breathed in the vaguely ammoniac air, listened to the hospital’s soothing metronomic heart, and felt a contentment he felt nowhere else but on a river. It was a world that he understood, and admired. Sometimes as he made his rounds or took the long way down to the OR, he would stop in the middle of a hallway and listen to the whir of the ducts like water flowing, low voices rippling. He’d watch the carpet turn liquid, the silver backs of trout flick through doorways.
He crooked his finger under the cork of the rod handle, felt it balance perfectly. It was a beautiful creation, supple, hand-wrapped bamboo. It had been a gift from his father before their first big trip to the Yellowstone, passed on to him in an oddly ceremonious moment—his dad’s head down, offering it butt-first like a sword, eyes smooth and glassy as a junkie’s. It was an attempt at connection, Pete understood, however tardy. He decided he’d give it to Cicely when he got back.
The rod tip sawed between two clusters of stars showing through the half-twilight. Maybe he could dowse his way back to the car, let the rod point the way. He turned in a slow arc, panning across the sky where the unfamiliar stars jumbled together like spilled salt. Jesus Christ, he muttered, what stupid fucking—just before the rod picked out the low-slung cabin tucked into a cleft in the rock.
There was no lock on the thick slab of a door, which swung open surprisingly easily. A cast iron stove sat in the corner, hunched on bowed iron legs, its paunch stuffed already with wood. He got it going with one match and flopped down on the floor like a dog worn out from chasing its tail. Cicely returned as he descended into a sleep like a fall, as she often did, without ceremony or demands. Accompanied by the song he played when he was in the OR—“Lost Cause”—and that he’d found himself unknowingly singing at her bedside. He’d thought at one time there was something funny about it in the context of the OR, but he’d almost buckled with shame when Cicely looked up at him from the bed with that little crease across her forehead, and Tower clenched his hands into fists at the window.
He woke to words he couldn’t understand, grunts and trills like animal sounds. There wasn’t much light in the room, but in the face hanging over him he could clearly discern the distinctive features of Down syndrome.
“I couldn’t find my car,” he said.
The girl said more that he couldn’t understand, then opened his creel where two fat char sat on a bed of grass. She lifted them and turned their heads so that they faced her. She said something to them softly before gutting them on the counter.
They ate both the fish, along with some shriveled potatoes fried in butter. The girl laid the fish bones carefully and neatly on her plate as she ate, studying their pattern and every now and then tsking or nodding. She turned the plate expectantly to Pete at one point, to show him some divined meaning, but he saw only a scatter of bones tied loosely by strips of skin.
After they’d eaten, she lifted his rod and pack and held them out.
“Nordura,” she said.
Pete recognized the name, one of the rivers on his list.
“Lead the way,” he said.
She smiled her wide smile again, her face as smooth as the flank of their breakfast char.
They followed a long incline up out of the valley, along the spine of a glacial moraine that could have been set down a week ago. The girl reached the crest well before him, and immediately began jumping up and down and pointing at something. At the river, Pete thought, until he reached the top and saw billows of smoke curling from a wide mountain in the distance. Drifting toward them in a flat-bottomed plume.
“Eyjafjöll! Eyjafjöll!” she cried.
The smoke puffed and swirled like a time-lapse film, black cauliflo
wer blooms spilling upward from the volcano, then curling back on themselves. Swollen lobes merging like cells, splitting and mutating.
Pete sometimes imagined that Cicely was his own daughter—he saw them watching movies together, playing Scrabble, cooking not very good meals and laughing at the results. And he saw them at other times too, when he could hear himself scolding.
It was probably too late for him to have kids of his own. Fifty next year. He’d have to marry a girl the same age as most of his friends’ kids. Cicely’s age. It was too lecherous to contemplate.
He tried not to think about what he was missing, the closeness that he saw between Cicely and Tower, their tangled nerves and hearts. He sidestepped the question of posterity, who’d be left after him to remember, to carry on. Because what was there to carry on, really? He was an easily replaced face on a medical group’s website, a cog in a machine. Traveling? Fishing? Did that qualify as a legacy? It was something, anyway, something you could turn to when you turned away from other things.
They reached the river to find black ash flakes falling on the water and dissolving in bursts. The girl stuck her tongue out to catch one of the flakes, spat and tried to scrape the taste away.
He rigged up his rod, hoping the reel wouldn’t foul. The falling ash flicked past like scratches on an old film. He thought about collecting some to take back, to show Tower, maybe give some to Cicely. To provide evidence of the world still being born. To demonstrate that, despite recent reports, they weren’t at the end of everything.
He cast a wooly bugger out to the eddy line, closed his eyes and pictured the contours of the river beneath the surface. Watching the fly drift through, anticipating the hit. It was a habit he’d developed when he was a kid, fishing along murky ditches and dry fields. He would watch the hook floating, feel the water washing over him in a continuous, unbreakable sheet. Later, when he moved on to sleeker, cleaner rivers, he would see the refracted images of peaks and rimrock, the speckled stones at the waterline. It was all so beautiful, and it left him with a craving—the only frustrating part—wanting badly to somehow take it in, to taste it, to make it a part of him.