The Current

by Tim Johnston

  She stood leaning on the sill and breathing in the spring and looking down on the backyard, yellow and green with the thaw. The old clothesline post and the brown patch of earth there. Her boys running around the yard and swinging from the clothesline until it had gone crooked and Grammy Olsen asking, What the heck happened to my clothesline post? and Rachel shrugging and saying, I don’t know, Grammy, maybe it was the wind.

  She heard something—kids, coming home from school. Their high voices as they spilled from the bus into their yards. And within those cries she heard her own sons’ voices, and Holly’s too, and she saw the girl once more in her purple Easter dress, running through Gordon’s woods, a bright spot of color searching for smaller spots of color, the poorly hidden eggs. Her squeals, her happiness!

  But there were no children out this way—or none close enough to hear, unless it was the McVeigh kids, who lived in the house on the other side of the rented field, and unless the wind was just right. Which maybe it was.

  She wiped her face with her fingertips and turned back to collect her tea from the desk, and it was then she saw it—the piece of metal on the desktop, next to his Big Dam Mug. It was a bolt. Placed upright on its hexagonal head. Heavy. Not old. Well cleaned but smelling of oil. She stood looking at it a while, her heart knocking dully in her chest, then returned it carefully to the desktop, exactly as she’d found it, so that it would be there when he came home.

  69

  She followed the county road out of town and it was the same road they’d been on that night and this time the station appeared on her right instead of her left and when she saw it in the early dusk, the bright square of window, the pumps standing in the garish light of the tin shelter, her heart broke freshly and she had to swallow down a sob, Oh, Caroline!

  It wasn’t the woman with the soft pink face in the window when she pulled in, but a skinny man who stood bent at the waist and leaning on his elbows, his head hung down below his shoulders like a man in sorrow, and he did not look up. She parked to the side, away from the pumps and next to the only other vehicle in the lot, a white and dented pickup with blisters of rust around the wheelwells. She cut the engine and sat there with the windows down, and she could smell the river, the icy yellow water, the taste of it even. As if it had been this car and not the RAV4 that had gone under the ice and filled with the river and had been fished out again and drained and put back on its wheels again, There you go, miss, good as new, and—

  Audrey?

  Yes?

  What are you doing?

  Nothing.

  Are you going buggy on me?

  No.

  Then get your ass in gear, girl. We haven’t got all night.

  The skinny man had not moved and as she passed by the window she watched to see would he move at all, and just before she stepped out of view he flipped the page of a magazine and the bill of his cap followed the page and he was still again.

  She stepped into the shadows where the shelter lights did not reach and she stood on the concrete as she’d stood that night, and she could smell the ladies’ room through the door to her back but she could not smell the boy. Could not smell the gas on his clothes or the beer and cigarettes on his breath or the grease on his hand when he put it over her mouth. Could not even smell the pepper spray. Beyond the concrete was a coarse terrain, barren but for yellow weeds and a solitary pine tree, and she took a few steps into that meaningless land, but it was hopeless; he could’ve thrown it any direction and he would’ve thrown it far, and would there be anything under its little wooden fingernails anyway, or would it be useless, like her memory?

  He’s gone, isn’t he.

  They’re both gone.

  It figures.

  Why?

  Because there wasn’t anything to them in the first place. Faceless, useless boys. They run all over the world like rats.

  I’m sorry.

  Why are you sorry?

  Because it isn’t fair.

  Caroline laughed. Fair? Oh, Audrey!

  She was out of the wind where she stood, but overhead the pine tree swayed and whispered, and she looked at it more closely and identified it as a white pine. She climbed it with her eyes—thirty, maybe forty feet tall—and remembered a young girl walking in the woods, looking for a tree just her height. A father going out to measure the tree year after year.

  Audrey.

  What?

  Time to go.

  She drove down the hill toward the trestle bridge and there was no ice or snow now, and the shoulder where they’d gone off the road into the ditch was a wet soft gravel and she pulled onto it and came to a stop short of the bridge and short of the edge of the riverbank where they’d gone over. She cut the engine again and got out and walked to the edge and stood looking down. There’d been the sound of her boots in the gravel and now that she’d stopped she heard the deep silence of the valley. If you could hear a silence. She stood listening and after a while she heard, or became aware she was hearing, a dry rattling and it was the sound of two old leaves in the treetops, brown and curled and hanging on and batting at each other in the wind.

  Caroline’s family had lived in Georgia for generations. One of her way-back grandfathers had fought in the Civil War. Her father was a professor of mathematics at Georgia State, and when Caroline did her impression of him she stuck her chin in the air and made her shoulders big and spoke from her Georgia chest and you could just see him, you could see the man himself: A moving vehicle is no place for luck, daughter. May this vehicle be safeguarded by intelligence, by great care and caution, and not the amputated paw of a rodent.

  Her papaw called her Sweetpea and was a mechanical genius who kept the same old pickup running for all of Caroline’s life. Her mother was a middle school teacher. Her older brother, James, was going to be a lawyer.

  And if you had never asked her for bus fare she would not have driven you.

  And if you had never been put in that dorm room together . . . and if she had not asked to borrow a pen from you . . .

  Hush now, Audrey, hush.

  Colder down here by the bridge and darker but the river was visible in the dusk like a great snake slipping along with no sound, dark and glistening. She was standing at the place above the bank where the car had gone over and where it must have come back up, but there was no sign of those events either, only the grassy fall of the bank, the old yellow reeds twitching in the wind. As if the car had never gone over but instead had kept its hold on the shoulder, the two girls inside it so much luckier than they knew—their hearts racing, the world still spinning as they watched the headlights in the mirrors: the two lights coming slowly down the hill like two little suns descending, the lights growing large in the rear window of the RAV4 as the car or truck or whatever it was pulled up behind them and the driver braked carefully, skillfully in the snow, and stopped—absolutely stopped, well short of the rear bumper. A silence then. A waiting. The girls looking into each other’s eyes in the bright light, their hearts beating, until at last a dome light came on in the cab of the truck—it was a truck, they could now see—and there was a brief snapshot of a man in a billcap, just one man, before this man stepped from the cab and shut the door and the dome light went out again, and he was coming toward them, cautiously, a jacketed man in his billcap, the dark shape of him in the headlights, faceless as a shadow, his boots so loud on the icy pavement and then in the deep snow, laboring his way alongside the car toward the driver’s-side window, gaining it finally and stooping to look inside, and to give them a look: a face lit now by his own headlights and by the escaping green light of the RAV4’s dashlights, the worried face of an old man, taking them in through large wire-frame lenses—one girl, then the other—before saying through the window and fogging the glass with his breath, You girls all right?

  Caroline powering down the glass then, revealing him clearly in the frame of the window—bony, leathery old face with a gray stubble and a rim of creamy dentures showing and deep, watery bl
ue eyes behind the lenses—We’re fine, sir, thank you so much, Caroline saying, and the old man cocking a large ear at her so that they both see the pink bit of plastic fitted into the inner whorl and Caroline saying again louder, and with such happiness in her voice, Thank you, sir, thank you so much for stopping!

  It would take a while, the old man being old and the girls not knowing how to help, but he would have a tow rope in the back of his truck, and the good old truck would have four-wheel drive, as does the RAV4, and soon enough they’d be back on the road and he would tell them in his gruff old way—a father himself, you could hear in his voice, a grandfather, maybe great-grandfather—to drive more slowly in this weather, that the bridge would be icy too, and when they’d try to pay him he would not even look at the money but would wave them off and climb back into his truck, and he would follow them across the bridge and for a few miles beyond, until at last they’d see his turn signal, see the headlights swerving off into some dark Iowa woods . . . and only miles later, both of them thinking what might have been had he not come along—not allowing themselves to think what might have been had he been those boys—would they realize they’d never asked his name, nor he theirs. In his memory they would be the two girls he pulled out of the snow by the bridge that time, and in theirs he would be the old man, the kind old feller, who pulled them out of the snow that one winter they drove to Minnesota—who did not bump them, sending them down the riverbank, but instead had saved them—and that’s how it would be until the end of their lives.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It’s one thing to write a story—to bang out a kind of beginning, middle and ending—it’s quite another to bring a finished, cohesive, ready-to-read novel to readers, and for that I have two superb professional families to thank: At Writers House I thank Amy Berkower, agent, guardian angel and voice of clarity every step of the way, and Genevieve Gagne-Hawes—too essential to call an early editor, more like my secret weapon. My everlasting thanks also to Maja Nikolic and Kathryn Stuart, and all the outstanding staff on every floor of that house.

  At Algonquin Books and Workman Publishing Co.—simply the greatest publisher any author could hope for—I thank Elisabeth Scharlatt, Elizabeth Johnson, Betsy Gleick, Brunson Hoole, Michael McKenzie, Anne Winslow, Pete Garceau, Craig Popelars, Lauren Moseley, Debra Linn, Frazer Dobson and everyone else who has worked so hard on behalf of my books and made such a difference in the course of my life—none more so than Chuck Adams, my editor through two novels now and, if my luck holds out, my editor for the next two, and the next two after that.

  My thanks to Robert L. Giron and Gival Press, who once upon a time honored a short story called “Water” and gave its author a friendly shove into deeper waters. Also, the University of Memphis, my superb colleagues in the English department there, and all my students everywhere, who have given me so much more than I’ve given them.

  Closer to home: Tyler Johnston, whose influence extended far beyond legal expertise and into essential matters of storytelling; and Chris Kelley, who put his keen eye to earliest details and design, and all for the better. For all manner of friendship and inspiration and belief and support, I thank Mark Wisniewski, PD Mallamo, Randy Larson, Don Foster, Erin Quigley, Mark Carroll and Carmela Rappazzo. And of course Carolyn Blais, whose natural gifts of love and laughter made this book, and its author, better.

  Finally, to the person holding this book, whoever you are: Thank you for being a reader of books and for reading this one in particular. You make it all matter.

  Also by Tim Johnston

  Never So Green

  Irish Girl

  Descent

  About the Author

  Tim Johnston

  TIM JOHNSTON is the author of the debut adult novel Descent, the story collection Irish Girl, and the young adult novel Never So Green. Published in 2009, the stories in Irish Girl won an O. Henry Prize, the New Letters Award for Writers, and the Gival Press Short Story Award, while the collection itself won the 2009 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. In 2005 the title story, “Irish Girl,” was included in the David Sedaris anthology of favorites Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules. Johnston’s stories have also appeared in New England Review, New Letters, the Iowa Review, the Missouri Review, DoubleTake, Best Life Magazine, and Narrative Magazine, among others. He holds degrees from the University of Iowa and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He currently teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Memphis.

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2019 by Tim Johnston.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020534

  eISBN: 978-1-61620-889-9