American Salvage

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Holroyd snorted. Jerry knew Holroyd didn’t think much of Jerry’s wife or anybody’s wife, his own included. Holroyd had been Jerry’s ma’s boyfriend for a while, though, and he’d treated Jerry nicer than any of the other men his mother dated.

  Holroyd had been the yard man for eighteen years, until he married his second wife. She lasted about six months in this place before moving out. Holroyd still seemed surprised at his own decision to follow her. That was five years ago. Now, when Jerry asked, “How’s the trailer park?”

  Holroyd would say something like, “Oh, it’s yapping dogs and too many kids and foul food cooking.” Or he’d complain, “Everybody’s garbage is all pressed up against you in that place, and you’ve got to hear everybody else’s business.”

  Jerry wouldn’t say it, but Holroyd didn’t look capable anymore of doing the yard man job, which was more than mowing and trimming and spraying the poison ivy; sometimes Jerry had to load up trailers full of metal to sell as scrap or broken concrete to recycle at Consumers. Last month Jerry had delivered piles of insulation to the hazardous-waste folks, and then there was the business of emptying and burning the old sheds one by one as they became unsafe. More than half of the buildings were gone now, and there were twenty or so concrete block foundations being reclaimed by the earth out there. Jerry was supposed to keep everything trimmed and clear around the sheds, but it was becoming more difficult, with plants and critters creeping in.

  “Red said there were a dozen of them snakes at least. Don’t know if you can believe what he says. I never saw one, but I didn’t go looking. Said the men who worked here sometimes found the snakes coiled up on their crane and dozer engines in the mornings.”

  “On their engines?” Jerry asked.

  “For warmth.”

  The next day when Jerry got home from working at the school, he found that Holroyd had stuck a dog-eared Michigan Field Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians inside his storm door. On the first page was written in a cramped cursive, “R. Hammermill.” Also stuck in the door was an envelope containing a check with the reference line, “June—Yard Man,” for his ten hours of labor last month.

  Jerry was sorry to have missed Holroyd, but not the old lady’s nephew. The nephew usually wore a suit when he came out with Jerry’s check, and the guy surveyed like an investor the thirty-some-odd acres fanning out behind the office building of the old Mid-American Construction Company. Jerry figured that when the old lady died, the nephew would sell this whole place to developers for a bundle, and they’d clear out the buildings and equipment in a few months and build a subdivision.

  Jerry doubted any big snake would survive.

  Instead of getting right to work on the bathroom or patching the holes in the clapboards outside the bedroom, he sat out on the tailgate of his own truck and enjoyed the hazy afternoon, took in a view of the sheds—all painted barn red, although on some the paint was peeling—and he thumbed through the pages with the color pictures of snakes. There were faded notes handwritten on the page showing rat snakes, and somebody had circled the phrase “wide color variation.” Jerry wasn’t sure about the head; that smiling potato head had looked a little different, but not too different. Six foot was the longest a rat snake got. Jerry flipped through the pages, hoping for the drawing Hammermill had given Holroyd, but it wasn’t there. He knew he ought to go inside and get going on that bathroom, or he ought to do some trimming outside, but he poked around the property instead, walked slowly around the sheds, searched the ground for snakes, saw a couple of nests in the grass where he’d let it grow too long. One nest had three speckled eggs in it.

  Jerry and his wife headed up north a week later to a resort they could not afford, saw tall pines shaped like palm trees, saw shore birds at the edge of the pond outside their hotel window.

  Jerry couldn’t get enough of seeing the birds come in for a landing with their legs dangling. Jerry and his wife rode the water slide, and he clamped his arms and legs tightly around her as they flew down.

  He missed the kids, especially his stepson, who would have loved the water slide, and he was glad when his wife said, “We should have brought the kids.” Both nights they drank too many sweet drinks, got too drunk to make love, and on Sunday morning, when his wife had a headache, he was glad they had an excuse to go home early.

  Once they were on the road, his wife suggested they wait until the evening to pick up the kids from her parents’ house. Jerry recalled how when they were first together, when he first got his license, he’d driven her around in his old pickup truck with the bench seat. He’d felt easy pulling her over next to him, and his arm had gone around her long hair, which had felt cool against his skin on hot nights.

  They stopped at a tourist shop before getting on the highway for the last stretch, and he bought deer jerky, and she bought what turned out to be a gift for him, a chocolate in foil, and he wished he had bought her something special. He held out the plastic bag of jerky, forgetting she wouldn’t touch venison, and she shook her head no. She smiled, though. “It’s nice to get away,” she said. “The air seems fresher up here.”

  “How’s your headache?” he asked. She looked pretty with the forested hills behind her and the two big rigs dieseling nearby—fortunately the wind was blowing their exhaust in the other direction. He looked at her coppery hair and wanted to ask if she remembered anything particular about that snake, whether he had imagined the great length of the thing, the brilliance of its colors, but the snake was something that he and his wife would probably never talk about.

  “The Tylenol helped,” she said and smiled again, as though finally she were warming up after a long cold spell.

  “It’s nice to get away, and it’s nice to go home,” Jerry said. He was glad to be returning to the yard house, to the queen-sized bed in the room they had renovated before their wedding. His wife had painted the outside edges of the floor around the carpet remnant, and she had chosen all the colors and fabrics, while he had patched the walls and replaced ceiling tiles.

  “I’m sorry I get impatient with you, Jerry. It’s just that living at a salvage yard is not where I expected to be. It’s nice getting free rent, I know, but maybe we need to be thinking about the future.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe if there was at least a fence up so we didn’t have to look at the sheds or the piles of junk.”

  “I can ask the old lady about a fence.”

  The previous night at the hotel, he’d had a dream he couldn’t tell her about, a nightmare in which he’d cut the big snake in half. He’d thrust his shovel into the dirt and the snake had moved, slipped its curving body under the blade. He had watched its organs spill out, saw its innards glisten like egg yolks and Mandarin orange segments in a pudding of dark blood. He’d sliced through the snake so the tail-half was a severed dead thing, leaking guts, and the head-end was writhing in agony, its golden eyes mad with pain. In his dream, the snake’s body had become as thick as his son’s middle, then as thick as his wife’s waist. He had awakened in a sweat, despite the hotel’s air conditioning. He had not wanted to disturb his wife, so he’d gone out and paced in the parking lot, where he heard nighthawks diving and whistling. He knew about nighthawks from Holroyd, knew that dusk to dawn they flew over the yard house and fields hunting for bugs, screaming shrilly, although it wasn’t anything you’d hear over the sound of the TV if you had it on.

  As they pulled into the driveway, he searched for the orange snake. His wife was humming absentmindedly—he liked it when she hummed, changing from one old pop tune to another—and he recalled the way they had clung to each other on the water slide. They carried only the cooler and her purse to the front door, leaving everything else in the minivan. She rested her hip against the doorframe and gazed at him languidly while he fumbled with the key. Before they’d left home, his wife had insisted they make the bed, and so, in a few minutes, when they went upstairs, it would feel something like a motel bed. And his wife would go into the bed with her cool copper
y hair and soft thighs and smooth arms, and there would be no children there to disturb them. He would slide over her and inside her and the sunlight would play on them through the curtains, dappling her body. On this hot afternoon, the red squirrels would sleep and not scratch inside the walls as his wife’s hair coiled on the pillow. Let snakes sun themselves upon rocks, let spiders suck juices from the bodies of flies they had captured in the night and drop the crumpled corpses to the floor like the shells of tiny pistachios. Let dilapidated wooden sheds settle while weed roots nudged into cracks in their foundations. Let all of nature continue its parade while he made love with his wife, the great love of his life, whom he’d lost in high school and miraculously found again.

  The house smelled salty, or sweet, when they entered. different, anyhow. Jerry wondered if he had left food out. Natalie, too, wrinkled her nose. He decided the smell was both salty and sweet.

  When his wife went into the bathroom, Jerry pushed open the kitchen door, and the scent became stronger. He looked into the enameled designer sink that his wife’s parents had paid for—

  the old woman who owned the house offered to pay for only the cheapest replacement sink—and found the basin three inches deep in dead bees, thousands of dead bees. What on earth?

  Jerry knew his wife should not see the bees. She wouldn’t understand—not that Jerry understood. He began to scoop the yellow-and-black bodies into a paper bag with a cup.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she asked from the kitchen doorway, her voice alarmed.

  She was right to blame him, he thought. These were his bees somehow, his wasted little bodies. Without realizing it, he had probably killed the bees, just as he could easily have killed the orange snake in the garden by misjudging the winding and unwinding of its body.

  He picked up a dead bee and studied it in his palm, studied its yellow and black stripes and slightly furry body.

  “Let’s call an exterminator,” she said.

  “It’s Sunday. And Natalie, honey, they’re already dead.”

  They both looked up and saw live bees buzzing around the light fixture where the ceiling was cracked.

  “They look like wasps,” she said.

  “I’m pretty sure these are honeybees,” he said. “I don’t think you’re supposed to kill them.”

  “I can’t live with bees in my house.”

  She looked desperate, and he began to understand that this time he had to give in. He had not killed the snake for her, but he would have to sacrifice something. In order to save his marriage, he might have to poison the living bees.

  “I wonder if they made honey in our house somewhere,” Jerry said. “Wouldn’t that be something?” He wanted to plunge his fingers into the sink and take up a handful of dead bees to show her, but instead he held out the single bee in his palm and stepped toward her. He wanted to share this mysterious tragedy with her, but she stepped away from him.

  “With all those god-forsaken sheds out there, why do bees have to come in here? I’m calling the exterminator.”

  “No, honey. Give me one day.” He realized the strangeness of calling his wife honey just then.

  His wife joined the kids at her parents’ house. It was summer, after all, and nobody had to be up in the morning except Jerry, to prepare the football field for August practice. His wife was working only a few hours a week this summer, assisting with the school’s Friday-afternoon parks program—during the school year, she worked half-days as an administrative assistant in the school office. Jerry drank four beers that night, but resisted smoking, although he got the urge bad. The following morning, he visited the high school biology teacher at home. The teacher confirmed the bees were honeybees, and they contacted a beekeeper. Things started to make sense after that. Jerry called his wife once a day, and after three days, he’d almost convinced her to come and meet the beekeeper who would collect the bees. “Honey, these are something special,” he said to her on the phone the fourth day, forgetting again not to call her honey. “The beekeeper needs them.” He didn’t mention that he was going to have to pay fifty dollars to get the beekeeper to come out.

  “I won’t live in a house with bees,” she said again, but she was sounding more lighthearted, and she complained about the way her mother was fussing over what the kids ate. Right before hanging up, she said, “I love you, Jerry, but I do want to have a nice house someday, one I can keep clean, and a nice yard.”

  “I’ll get back to work on the bathroom,” Jerry said. He understood her tone to mean she would give him another chance.

  The day before the beekeeper came, Jerry went to lunch at the in-laws’. Jerry liked having a father-in-law, although the man seemed to disapprove of Jerry’s job, more so since the school had cut him to part time. (Natalie’s first husband worked in computers, and, luckily, the kids were still covered by his insurance.) Her parents seemed happy to have their only daughter and their grandchildren near them, but Jerry could tell his wife was getting restless staying there. His wife had been indulged by her parents, had had an upbringing very different from his own, but it wasn’t something anybody decided for themselves, how they’d be raised, no more than a hive of bees or a snake decided how it would be raised.

  Jerry watched the kids playing in the lush grass of the fenced-in backyard, and the smallness of that green space made him uneasy. His in-laws owned another lot behind this one, which would have doubled the size of their place, but they didn’t extend their fence-line to include it.

  Jerry shook hands with the beekeeper, who wore a beard, a feed cap, and overalls, and invited him into the house. His words were largely a variety of grunts, and right away Jerry felt at ease with him, the way he’d always felt at ease with old men like Holroyd or Red Hammermill—

  talking to Red always made him wish he’d had a grandfather.

  “Can we cut a hole in your floor or wall,” the beekeeper asked, “if we need to?”

  “Sure,” Jerry said, although, as he climbed the stairs, he felt less than sure. He was glad his wife hadn’t shown up. He should have poisoned the bees, no doubt. What had he been thinking?

  That the bees could be lured out one by one and their hive and queen, too, without destroying anything?

  “You got a beer?” the beekeeper asked.

  “For catching the bees?”

  “For drinking. I don’t drink at home, so I like to have a beer when I go out.”

  Jerry went back downstairs and retrieved two from the refrigerator, although it was only eleven in the morning.

  “I need to watch and see where they go,” the beekeeper said. They sat on Jerry’s unmade bed. Good thing his wife wasn’t there. She’d have hated having this man with the greasy Carhartt overalls sitting on the edge of her sheets. The bees followed one another under the bedside stand.

  Without speaking, the two men moved the bed and nightstand and sat there in silence, drinking their beers, watching until they were sure where the line of bees was entering, through a gap under the baseboard.

  “Right around here,” the beekeeper said. He moved his hand over the wall. “You can feel the heat in this spot.”

  “I just boarded up some holes in the siding a few days ago. A bat got in here, upset my wife.” Jerry placed his hand on the wall and was impressed by the warmth.

  “You must’ve trapped the bees in the wall.”

  “Damn. I never considered that.”

  Jerry volunteered his own reciprocating saw when the beekeeper’s keyhole saw seemed slow, but the beekeeper said a power saw would drive the bees crazy. The beekeeper cut a rough rectangle from the quarter-inch painted plywood; when he pulled the swath from the wall, it was piled with wax and honey. All the bees that had been hovering inches away flew toward the honey and stuck themselves there.

  “See how they cling?” the beekeeper said. He gripped the hunk of wood. “That means we have the queen. Your job is to take my little dust vac and suck up any of those fellows that haven’t stuck themselves to the hi
ve.” Most of the bees followed the man making his way slowly down the stairs (honey dripping on the steps), but Jerry traveled around the bedroom, and the whole house, gathering up every wayward bee. The vacuum had been modified to suck gently, and the work was satisfying. Jerry retrieved hundreds of bees from the bedroom, dozens from the kitchen, a few from the bathroom.

  “You want another beer?” Jerry asked.

  “I’d better not,” he said. “I’d better get these bees home. Say, what you got in those sheds?”

  “All sorts of construction salvage,” Jerry said. “Old building materials mostly.”

  “When I was a boy, this was a going concern. Mid-American Company, wasn’t it?”

  Jerry nodded and felt inexplicably proud. As the man was getting into his old truck with the utility cap on it, Jerry asked, “Hey, have you ever heard of a big orange snake in these parts? Orange and red and gold? As long as a man is tall?” Jerry found he didn’t want to let the beekeeper go. He wondered about Holroyd, hoped Holroyd would stop by sometime soon so he could tell him about the bees. He wondered if maybe something had happened to Holroyd, for he hadn’t seen the man in a couple weeks. Would Holroyd’s wife know to call and tell Jerry if something did happen? He’d known Holroyd since he was a kid, since Holroyd used to take his ma to the Pub and sometimes sleep over. It would’ve sounded odd to say it out loud, but Holroyd was the closest thing he had to a father.

  The beekeeper said, “No, nothing like that. I’ve got your hognose snake over by my place, and I once seen a king snake, but nothing like what you’re describing.”

  “They used to be around this place,” Jerry said. “A long time ago, and they meant something to people here.”

  A few days after the beekeeper’s visit, to Jerry’s surprise, the nephew came by with the report that the old woman would pay for new siding and windows. Jerry visited his in-laws again with a page of samples and invited his wife to choose the siding, and he hid his disappointment when she picked an off-white color called “Desert Rose.” (He’d been hoping for dark green.) Even that snake, with its orange and red and gold, somehow fit in with the natural colors, the way a beautiful woman like his wife could still look like a member of her otherwise ordinary family, but the pinkish hue seemed off to Jerry.