Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “I’m coming down there, Nick. Tonight, after my evening class. I’ll be there by 11:30. Meet me at the bar, and you damn well better be there this time, I swear it. I have to talk to you. If you’re not there, I’ll come to your house and ring the bell and talk to you there.”

  She didn’t wait for Nick’s answer but she heard part of it anyway, while the receiver was on its way down: “Wait, tonight isn’t—” The words already sounded tinny with distance, ghostly with loss.

  She knew she was a better teacher when she was angry, was perhaps even at her best then. Even Freshman Composition sat up straight in its chairs, stopped doodling in its collective margins. During Romantic and Victorian Poetry, Jane sparkled with irony, grew passionate with the sort of literary scorn that impresses graduate students. Her notes strode across the board in a forceful hand she scarcely recognized as her own. The better students’ eyes took on that thoughtful look that was at once public reward and a kind of private, sly seduction.

  Not tonight, chickies. Sorry. Teacher has a headache.

  Jane let them go at 8:45, fifteen minutes early, knowing she would need the time to peel them both off Wordsworth and off her, and escape to the car. By 9:02 she was pulling away from the campus, the lights of the high-rise dorms shining in her rear-view mirror in erratic patterns like some indecipherable message from the sky itself. The October night was cold, desolately beautiful. She could feel her anger begin to slide away; she whipped it up again, afraid to feel what might take its place.

  Dear Nick,

  Don’t write me, not even about the fascinating progress in remodeling your garage. I’ll just have to live without finding out how much the insulation exceeds federal energy specifications. Don’t write me, don’t call me, don’t try to drive up and walk into one of my classes—

  Fat chance.

  She was crying again. Fuck it. She swiped at her eyes with a Kleenex, hunkered down over the wheel like a bad parody of a race car driver, and concentrated on the road. One hundred twenty miles south through the Allegheny foothills and over the border into Pennsylvania, the last section expressway but the rest New York State Route 19 south through decaying small towns and comatose cabbage farms. Two and a half hours, if it didn’t rain. In two and a half hours she would slide into a booth in a roadside bar across from Nick and say . . . what?

  Don’t call me, don’t write me . . .

  Fat chance.

  Not tonight, chickies. Teacher has a heartache.

  She lost Route 19 at Pike, without at first realizing it. Clouds had rolled in from the west, and there were no street lights except for the sole traffic light at the sole major crossroads of Pike itself. On campus, life went on twenty-four hours; this empty blackness, mile after mile of it broken only by an isolated farmhouse and her own headlights, was at first unsettling and then calming. Beyond the spectral sweep of her high beams lay sullen hills, sensed rather than seen even when the road rose and fell between them.

  Jane rolled down the window. The air smelled of late autumn bitterness, wet leaves and wetter earth, violated out of season for the planting of winter wheat. Plows behind yellow tractors biting the ground. There would be thick raw furrows, naked without snow.

  Twenty minutes past Pike, Jane knew she was lost. No more farmhouses, no more winter wheat, just dense woods crowding close to the road, which seemed to have shrunk. Jane scowled into blackness. Let there be a roadsign. And lo, there were roadsigns! It’s a miracle, she’s cured, she can . . . she can read again!

  There was no roadsign.

  A hundred feet, a quarter mile, a half mile more of nothing but sullen void. Even the trees had retreated back from the shoulder of the road. When she pulled over to consult a map, the quality of the silence startled her with its velvet indifference, its country blackness.

  My dear Nicholas,

  Am writing this from the depths of nature, where I have gone to experience the fullness of the land and my own inner self, a Wordsworthian sentiment your pretty and illiterate little wife is incapable of feeling. Please forgive the turds smeared on the back of this birchbark. They are not a personal message but rather a social statement as writing paper has come to seem a desecration of living timber which might provoke the ancient sleeping forces to retaliate—

  The map was only limited help. The last landmark she remembered was Pike, where she must have missed the way Route 19 abruptly twisted southeast and instead had taken some branching local road. But the map, a gift from Mobil Oil, showed only main routes, and Jane had no idea in which direction she had branched, or if she had done so more than once. It was so damn dark . . .

  She could either retrace her route north back to Pike, or forge on ahead. She had come maybe ten miles off 19—retracing would lose her another fifteen or twenty minutes. Since she had not twisted east when 19 did, she was probably still heading south, and if that were so she ought to be able to keep going until she rejoined 19, or else came directly to the Expressway at some point or other. The Expressway ran east and west; if she drove south long enough, she would have to come to it.

  On impulse, Jane twisted the door handle. Outside the car, the darkness seemed even more furry, soft in the way heaps of banked ashes are soft, with the underlying sense of something alive, mute but not extinguished. She could not remember the last time she had stood alone this deep in wooded countryside. Maybe she never had. There was no sound, not even insects. Was it too late in the year for insects, were they all dead? When in the fall did insects die? What if the car broke down out here?

  Inside, she rolled up the window as tight as it would go. Three miles down the twisting road, just when she was beginning to eye panic warily, as if it were a potentially dangerous student, she saw the glow of curious green lights through the trees. Green, surrounding a red and glowing blob.

  She had met Nick a year ago. As part of a Faculty Exchange Program that had started mostly because there was State Arts Council money to start it, the community college in Pennsylvania had requested a guest lecture on World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon, and Jane had lost the political tussle not to go deliver it. Why Siegfried Sassoon? She never found out.

  Nick had sat in the second row, a big glum man with gray in his dark beard and the serious tan of a man who worked outdoors. Throughout the lecture he scribbled dutifully in a notebook, asking no questions and showing no real interest in Sassoon’s sing-song and bitter pacificism. Nonetheless, Jane found herself aware of him throughout, and when he came up to her in the coffee hour afterward, she put on her best can-I- help-you-understand-some-point bullshit smile, slightly curious to hear what this aging undergraduate would ask. But she hadn’t been prepared for what he did say.

  “It’s gone, you know. All that Georgian anguish over war, and then all that sixties pacifism. The men I know who didn’t go to Nam wish they had.”

  Jane froze. Stupidly—later she would see it had been stupidly, had given him some early indefinable advantage she never regained—she said, “No, they don’t.”

  He smiled. “Afraid so. Me, too. We missed something.”

  “Missed?”

  He looked at her more closely, and his expression shifted.

  “Missed?” She heard her own voice, scaling slightly upward, the acceptable contempt not quite enough to cover the unacceptable panic. “I lost a brother in Vietnam. The men you know must be fools, or bastards, or both!”

  His glumness seemed to deepen, settle over him like a mist, out of which his eyes watched her with the first hint she had of his astonishing ability to turn an attack into an occasion for reassurance. “Oh yes, they are that. All of us. Both.”

  Jane had found herself grinning: coldly, reluctantly, her anger not completely gone. It was a strange sensation; the skin around her mouth tingled with it. She had raised her eyes to his, all glum compassion, and the dreary room had suddenly seemed too bright, full of glare and sunshine, hot with possibility.

  The greenish light turned out to be Christmas tree lights, hal
f of them broken into jagged ovals, circling a window with a red COCA-COLA sign. Even in the dark, Jane could see the wooden store was unpainted. Gutters sagged below the roof line. She parked her Chevette next to the biggest pick-up truck she had ever seen, a monstrousity painted screaming yellow, and took the keys out of her ignition. To grasp the doorknob she had to reach through the soft worn ribbons of a screen door.

  Inside, there were high half-empty shelves, one littered with the dusty yellow fallout from a bag of corn chips. Three people stood under a dim bulb, arguing fiercely. None of them looked at Jane.

  “—paid last week, the full damn amount—”

  “Like hell you did!”

  “Like hell I didn’t, Emma—”

  “Excuse me,” Jane said. The three looked up, annoyed. Uneasiness nibbled at Jane.

  The woman—Emma—was huge, middle-aged muscle gone to fat Stuffed into jeans and sweatshirt balanced over surprisingly small—even dainty—feet in Western boots. The boy, a gum-chewing ten or eleven, she would have passed a dozen times without noticing. But no one could not notice the man, if only because he matched the store too perfectly. In another setting Jane would have found him fascinating; in this one he seemed to her the creation of one of her second-rate students, a stale literary contrivance. Scrabbly-haired, wild-eyed, bearded, his knobby frame dressed in torn overalls and a dirty sheepskin-lined jacket.

  “I’m lost,” Jane said. “I’m trying to get back on Route 19, and I think I turned off it at Pike. What’s the fastest way to pick it up south of here?”

  The three stared blankly.

  “Route 19,” Jane repeated, more loudly. Were they all feeble? Rural inbreeding, exhausted chromosomes.

  They went on staring. Then the woman stepped forward, a half-step in her delicate leather boots.

  “Can’t get there from here.”

  Exasperation flooded Jane, washing out her momentary uneasiness. “Of course you can get there from here—I just was there. I left Route 19 at Pike and now I could just drive back the way I came, but I thought there might be a faster way to rejoin 19 farther south. I’m heading for Pennsylvania.”

  “Can’t get there from here,” the woman said. Her voice had changed, gone curiously gentle.

  The wild man said, “She can go by down behind Cuba Lake.”

  The boy stopped chewing gum. The woman whipped around her huge body to turn on the man. “Down behind Cuba Lake! I’d like to see her try to go down behind Cuba Lake, you big fool! She’d get lost on them back roads before she knew it!”

  “Huh,” the man said, and there the discussion stopped. Man and woman glared at each other, Jane apparently forgotten. Their fury was inexplicable to her, but obviously unconnected to getting back to Route 19. She scanned the Mobil map. There were numerous tiny splotches of blue, most of them unlabeled.

  “Which one is Cuba Lake?”

  Everyone ignored her.

  “Look,” Jane said, “I’ll just retrace the route I came. Thanks anyway.” She turned to the door.

  “Wait,” the man said. He stepped closer; she smelled fetid whiskey on his breath. “There’s a faster way. You just follow, me half a mile. Then the road splits in three, I’ll pull over and get out and: show you which way to go. It goes on a ways, put you back on a main road that hooks into 19 south of Oramel.”

  Jane looked at him. At the edge of his flannel collar, a roll of gray flesh worked up and down.

  “No, thanks. It’ll probably be simpler to just drive back to Pike.”

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  “Hold still a minute,” the woman said sharply. She took the map, not asking first, from Jane’s hand and studied it. “Lose you half an hour. Maybe more. Yeah—more.”

  More. And she had already lost time—she wouldn’t get to Nick before 1:00 a.m. The bar would be deserted if it were open at all, the lights long since out behind Nick’s Austrian pines.

  “She can’t even get down behind Cuba Lake,” the woman said, still studying Jane’s map. Her voice held a curious mixture of triumph and pique. Pique—that was reassuring, wasn’t it? Pique wasn’t an emotion that went with condoning a set-up for crime. “Not on that split.”

  “Huh,” the man repeated. He raised one scrawny leg and stood balanced on the other like some extinct waterfowl, yellowed teeth chewing on his bottom lip and eyes gone inward. He looked so bizarre that Jane was suddenly sick of both of them, suddenly longed for the slick normality of a Safe-way. Clean plastic, college kids buying chips and beer, house—wives with whining kids. An hour and a half.

  “Look,” she said with sudden decision, “when the road splits in three, which one do I take? Left, right, or middle?” She watched not the man but the woman, searching for some sign of complicity, some shifting of eyes or muscles that would map the woman as knowing him capable of . . . whatever. She didn’t find it.

  “Left,” the man said. “But you could miss it, the middle curves a trick left too. I’ll stop, get out, show you.”

  “Just honk,” Jane said. “Honk at the split and I’ll find it.” She was still watching the woman, who showed only annoyance at having her opinion ignored. At the edge of her vision the man, still on one foot, nodded.

  “Okay. I honk, you bear far left. Come on, boy.”

  Outside, the boy climbed into the cab of the huge yellow pick-up. Jane felt further reassured. It didn’t seem likely a man bent on rape or robbery would bring along a child, did it? She locked her car doors and started the engine.

  The road seemed even darker, more desolate than before. Jane’s high beams glared off the rear of the pick-up. Despite herself, she peered at the window: no gun rack.

  Dear Nick,

  Literary models, like Newtonian physics, cause equal and opposite reactions. Put it in your course notes. I start to love you because you say something so outrageous that you can’t possibly mean it. I follow a hillbilly derelict because he looks so much like a crazed killer that he can’t possibly be one. The world is not that anthropomorphic, except in bad novels, which I’ve been reading a lot of lately in a stupid effort to not think about you—

  The pick-up honked, slowed, and veered right. Jane caught her breath, unexpectedly panicked that it had after all been some sort of trap, that the man would shoot out her tires or follow her down what would turn out to be a deserted dead end. “Dead end” . . . who the hell coined these metaphors?

  The yellow truck honked a second time and picked up speed, disappearing around a bend. Jane pushed her foot to the floor. Pebbles clattered against the underside of the Chevette. She slowed down, angry at herself: even if there were some sort of cut-off and the yellow truck suddenly bore down on her, it wouldn’t help to be piled up against the dark woods.

  Crouched over the wheel, she strained to see the twists and turns of the dirt road. Her high beams were unaccountably focused too high; they showed clearly the undersides of leaves clawing at each other from opposite sides of the road.

  A few miles after the fork, the road ended.

  First it climbed an abrupt rise, which descended even more abruptly. Jane’s headlights, now pointed down, shimmered over a flat blackness. She slammed on the brakes and skidded, stopping inches from the water’s edge.

  Panic gripped her. Mud—the bank could be soft mud, cars sank in mud and then the pressure kept the doors from being opened from the inside—

  Flinging open the door, Jane hurled herself out of the car and clambered back up the rise. Her heart slammed in her chest as she stood looking down on the smooth top of the Chevette, still shining its lights out over the lake.

  Minutes passed. The top did not move. When Jane finally crept back down the slope, she tested the ground with each step. It held firm. Cautiously she reached into the car for her purse and pulled out a penlight. Hard ground, covered with tough weeds, extended clear to the water’s edge. Beyond, the lake sighed softly. A breeze sprang up; the surface rippled like black muscle.

  Cuba Lake?

&
nbsp; In her haste at the triple fork, she must not have veered far enough left, and so had ended up on the middle road. The man had said . . . the man . . .

  Jane scrambled back into the car, slammed the door, and switched off both headlights and flashlight. But after a moment anger began to bum away fear. She yanked the key to the right and began to back up the rise. Her beams again pointed down onto the lake, and for a moment it seemed something moved over the surface, far from shore. Jane turned her head back over her shoulder and tried to stay out of the underbrush.

  At the top of the rise she did a three-point turn in seven points, then barreled back under the leaves that were like dark hands.

  Nick—

  I do not believe in ancient terrors stirring to life in the menacing countryside, shaping the lives of men as in some modern horror novel, any more than I believe in ancient benevolence stirring to life in the pastoral countryside as in the sentimental Romantic poets you unaccountably love so much—

  Poets. What was she doing in possibly mortal danger, thinking about poets? Nick, Nick, you corrupted me, my dissertation was on Zola—stay on the road, Jane you idiot, it turns here—

  Beyond the turn, the yellow pick-up blocked the road.

  It was positioned with hood touching the dense trees on one side of the road, rear bumper on the other. There was no way around. Jane peered at the truck, one hand frozen halfway in the act of hitting the lights. The yellow cab seemed empty.

  Then where was he, where were they . . . the boy, too—

  Nick—

  Carefully, fingers trembling on the wheel, she backed the car through the overhanging trees. A hundred yards before the turn, there had been a gap in the woods, something that might have been the remnant of another dirt track. If it angled upward, it might bypass the occupants of the pick-up, wherever they were.

  She found the track, choked with weeds at its beginning but becoming surprisingly clear as she pushed along it. At one point Jane had the eerie sensation that she was driving on fresh asphalt, not dirt. The road seemed to neither curve back towards the lake not to angle upwards—until it precipitately descended and Jane was again staring at the dark water of the lake.