American Salvage

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Although Julie had been doing her best, she was a lousy nurse. A better girlfriend would cut him slack, understand that he was irritable from being off the morphine, slightly out of his mind from shock and stiffness, and fearful at the possibility of being permanently crippled. The intern had told him that there was danger of bone infection—and thus amputation—until every fracture healed completely. In other words, for a year at least. Another girlfriend would have swallowed her pride and sulked in the other room. No wonder Julie had been kicked off her college swim team—she had probably walked out in the middle of a meet, probably after telling the coach to screw himself. And no wonder this was the longest Julie had ever dated anyone. Of course it was almost the longest for Doug, too. With that realization, he felt a rush of warmth toward her, and he drank the entire glass of water she’d placed beside him. Just under the bed, where he could reach them, were plastic hospital bottles to piss into, but he dreaded having to use the bedpan. Julie shouldn’t have to deal with that.

  The phone rang half an hour later. “How are you?” Julie asked. At the sound of her relaxed voice, Doug felt himself treading water, imagined himself grasping at her, trying to climb onto her as though she were dry land.

  “Fine,” he said. “Where are my binoculars?”

  “I put them beside the bed.”

  Doug looked at his left hand. He was clutching the binoculars, had been since she left.

  “You shouldn’t be alone,” she said.

  “Bob and Sharon are on their way over,” Doug said. “They’re going to stay the night. Maybe we’ll have a ménage à trois.”

  Julie laughed, and he heard waves slapping the shore. Doug didn’t want her to return out of pity or a sense of obligation. When she came back, he’d say Bob and Sharon had just left.

  “Where are you?”

  “The Pub.”

  He recalled her jacket with no shirt under it, her beautiful collarbone, her navel. “Who’s hitting on you?”

  “Nobody’s hitting on me. I’m talking to Martin the bartender.”

  “Figures Marty’s hitting on you. So are you going to screw him?” Even as Doug said it, he wasn’t sure whether he was saying it aloud or whether it was merely an ugly thought flitting through his brain.

  “Fuck you, Doug,” Julie said.

  Doug considered apologizing—that’s what Julie was waiting for. He could blame the way he was acting on the painkillers, but his body became suddenly sweaty and shivery and he slammed the phone down. Instantly he longed for Julie. He couldn’t remember if he’d asked her to come back. In any case, she had to know he wanted her there.

  The next call was Bob asking if he needed company. “No, Julie’s here with me. She’s rubbing my dick right now.” Doug moved his foot, and the last of Bob’s magazines fell between the wall and the bed. “Give me a call tomorrow, Bob.”

  Doug must have dozed off, because when he woke to pain racing up and down his legs, the room was darkening. Wind blew over his bed, and rain poured onto the windowsill beside him. He leaned up as far as he could and managed to pull down the open window, wishing Julie were there to see he wasn’t a complete invalid. The action exhausted him. His surgeon had said there could be blood clots from the accident. Exertion could loosen one into his bloodstream, send it to his brain, and he would pass out and never wake up. He should call Bob back and ask him to come over, but he still held out hope for Julie. He could call the Pub, but he’d never before called a bar and asked for a woman. He whispered to himself, “Julie, I’m sorry,” but it sounded pathetic.

  When the clock said 9:07, he swallowed a Vicodin with saliva. A window across the room was still open about six inches, and a stream of cool air blew toward him. Trees thrashed above the house. Doug heard a crunch and watched a limb break loose from the trunk of his big burr oak and fall to the ground, flattening a burning bush. For years that branch had hung twenty feet above his lawn, but now it lay there like a dead body between him and the lake. If Julie came back, he would tell her he was sorry, however it might sound.

  The surface of Little Foot was chopped with tiny whitecaps, the wildest effect such a small lake could manage. As soon as he was allowed to get wet, he’d have Bob take him across Little Foot and back onto Big Foot, even if it was in the outboard with Doug strapped to a piece of plywood.

  Things were always easy between him and Bob. Doug couldn’t remember uttering a single apology to Bob in the twenty years they’d known each other. Bob just knew when he was sorry.

  Within twenty minutes of taking his Vicodin, by 9:27, the drug had taken the edge off the pain, but it couldn’t mute the stiffness of his legs. The drug made him sweat, too—he’d only been lying there in his living room six hours, but already he wished he could change the sheets.

  He clicked the TV remote control until he reached the cool blue of the weather channel, where a man with the authority of a doctor announced eighty-mile-per-hour winds to the west. The surgeon had told Doug a few days ago that some of the bones didn’t heal until you walked on them.

  Doug had assumed the opposite, that you didn’t walk on them until they healed. That’s why people didn’t heal in the past, the surgeon said. He spoke as though doctors understood everything about healing now.

  The meteorologist announced the approach of a powerful storm and said that twelve thousand people in southern Michigan and northern Indiana were already without power. Hardly

  “without power,” Doug thought. Even in the dark those folks could get out of bed and go to their refrigerators for some beer to choke down their pain pills. The Vicodin bottle beside him warned,

  “Alcohol will intensify the effect of this medication.” Excellent idea. At the very least, he needed another glass of water, but there was no way he could get himself into his wheelchair without help.

  Although he would be willing to apologize to Julie when she came back, he couldn’t bring himself to call the bar yet. For six months, he’d struggled to keep even with her, to keep her from realizing she was too good for him. Now that she’d saved his life, the scales were tipped hopelessly in her favor.

  He stared out the window at the oak branch. How long would that big limb lie in his yard? How long before Julie left him for good?

  It was going to be difficult showing his appreciation throughout what the doctors said would be a long ordeal. Thanking people was easy in situations where it meant nothing—when the grocery clerk gave him change, for instance—but desperately needing help complicated everything. He would constantly be thanking people for getting him into his wheelchair and back into his bed, for changing his sheets, for preparing food, for emptying the bed pan, for cutting up that big branch and hauling it away. He stared at the surface of the lake until it became a massive dark organism whose watery shape could be outlined by connecting the dots of light fixed at the bases of docks.

  Julie needed to try and understand what he was going through. Why was she being so damned difficult?

  When the radar-weather voice announced the sighting of a tornado in Kalamazoo County, each light at the water’s edge, his own included, seemed like a personal call for help. The calls were all the more desperate for having glowed steadily and unnoticed during the four years he’d lived on the lake. Other than the neighbors next door, he didn’t really know any of these people. Everyone on this lake may well be trapped in his own house tonight, Doug thought, at the mercy of the forces of the universe: weather and women and pain. He reached for the phone to call Julie. First he’d try her at home, and then he’d try the Pub. But when he put the phone to his ear, the line was dead.

  He looked across the water through his binoculars, into a living room window, and focused on a gray-haired woman with glasses sewing. She did not seem alarmed. He moved laterally to the window of the next house, where a shriveled man with no hair reclined in a bed with white sheets.

  The old man looked toward the lake or perhaps toward the weather channel on a television placed beneath the window. Or may
be he stared at nothing. Or maybe with every worn thread of his pajama shirt and every cell of his old, withered body, the man was trying to call out for help.

  Doug didn’t usually mind storms, but that big limb lying between him and his dock changed everything. He panned the shoreline with his binoculars and saw geese as dim as ghosts standing on somebody’s lawn, three big ones and a bunch of what looked like half-grown goslings. He wondered where other animals went at times like this. Woodchucks must hide underground until their dens flooded. Songbirds were probably already hunkered down on their nests, the mamas spreading their wings out over their babies. The smallest tornado would pick up those geese and spray their feathers across the sky. Get to safety, he wanted to shout, a storm is coming! Doug didn’t remember whether he was supposed to open or close his windows for a tornado—he hadn’t paid attention during the tornado drills in school. Would glass soon be flying toward him at eighty miles per hour? Where was Julie now? Was she someplace safe?

  As the porch light next door sputtered out, so did Doug’s television. The leftover blue glow of the screen lit the room for another second and then faded. The lights across the way were still on, but Doug couldn’t bear to look at the old man again. The screaming of the wind and the rattling of branches grew in intensity. No way could Doug get himself into the basement for protection—even lowering himself to the floor could loosen blood clots and bone slivers, loosen the screws holding his legs together. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he began to make out his own body, his muscled arms leading to big hands. He lifted himself onto his elbows, tore loose the Velcro, and unwrapped the scabbed and stitched legs that had already begun to shrivel and grow pale. He knew he wasn’t supposed to take off the braces, but these were his own legs, goddamn it. Doug heard wood groan above his house. Perhaps the big tree stretching up beside the living room would crash through the roof.

  “Julie, I’m sorry!” he shouted, in what sounded to him like a little boy’s voice. He didn’t dare yell again, for fear of shaking loose the branches above him, for fear of further upsetting the universe.

  He looked down to where the magazines had fallen, between the wall and the bed. Although it was too dark to read, he wanted to hold the pages and try to make out the shape of a woman. He grabbed the rod that opened and closed the blinds and tugged on it, but it wouldn’t disconnect. He remembered the way he had lain so passively in the water in Julie’s arms, and he yanked the rod with so much force that the plastic blinds clattered to the bed and then to the floor, taking a long time to settle. He clutched the rod and lay immobile, waiting for his heart to slow, waiting for any stray clots to travel to his brain and kill him. Hail began to rattle on the roof and deck, and crash against the screen of the open window across the room. Doug stretched, but managed only to push the magazines farther away. He felt the rod drag on something soft. He stretched again and retrieved Julie’s lost sleeveless shirt. He held it to his face and breathed through it. The lights died in the houses of the old man and the sewing woman across the way. Lights around the edge of the water went off one after another, like a dress unzipping at the speed of electricity along the curve of the lake. Doug’s breath warmed the fabric of Julie’s shirt, which smelled not only of carnations, but also of honey and sweat and maybe something like milk.

  The universe seemed darker than he’d realized, and larger, which made each thing in it, including him, smaller. Years ago, smartaleck schoolboys like him and Bob should have learned more than their grammar and arithmetic. Why hadn’t they learned the way bodies could break and how slow and difficult it was to heal? Heat lightning flashed everywhere at once, and Doug decided he would invent a hundred apologies and thank-yous and recite them until the words flowed as easily as the names of states and the multiplication tables. In a few days, his friend Bob would lug a chainsaw from the bed of his Dodge Ram and walk on legs as thick and sturdy as tree trunks down into Doug’s backyard, and Doug would sit in his wheelchair with his legs straight out in front of him and watch Bob cut that branch. Doug could only hope he wouldn’t weep out of gratitude.

  As the sound of groaning wood above the house grew louder, hail fell larger and harder, and the air pressure thinned. Doug breathed deeply through Julie’s shirt and watched over the lake for a tornado with a slender waist and broad shoulders. The kitchen door blew open. Then it closed against the wind. Even without electric lights, he could see that Julie’s hair was wet.

  Fuel for the Millennium

  The banks were doomed. Hal Little knew it beyond the shadow of a doubt. And without the banks, everything else would fail—the stock markets, of course, but also the government and then the power company, the water and sewer, law and order, and most importantly, the gas stations.

  People said that stored gasoline soured after a few months, but sour gas was better than none, and Hal already had a half dozen fifty-five-gallon blue-plastic drums of gas stored behind his pole barn.

  A few months ago, in the heat of summer, Hal had loaded the first of the blue barrels onto his homemade trailer and had pulled into the Total station, but before he’d pumped even a gallon, the attendant had run out of the building yelling that the barrel was not “an approved container.”

  Ever since then, Hal had been filling the gas tank of his Country Squire and siphoning the gas into the barrels, which he concealed under an old army canvas, upon which autumn leaves were now falling. He was starting to wonder, though, if he should dig a pit and bury any further barrels so nobody else could stumble across them. One barrel had begun to bulge, so Hal had clamped a metal strap around it, and he planned to take fuel out of that one first. No amount of gasoline would be enough, of course, but he figured that if he didn’t drive much—and after the collapse, he wouldn’t be going around fixing people’s washing machines—he’d need only a few gallons per day to power his generator.

  Hal Little liked the tall, smiling man whose washing machine belt he’d just replaced, and that was why he decided to make a suggestion. “You ought to get yourself some gasoline stored away now,” Hal said as he stood in the man’s yard. “It’s going to be impossible to get gasoline after the new year.”

  “We’re not worried about the Y2K thing,” the man replied.

  Hal figured the man was about half his age, which might explain why he was naive about the situation—young people went along thinking that nothing bad could happen, thinking that their parents couldn’t be killed in a car crash so bloody that blood would stain the asphalt at that intersection for months. They didn’t think Satan could move among ordinary people in the form of a building inspector or a frisky squirrel. It never occurred to young people that the world could descend into darkness and chaos, leaving every man to fend for himself.

  “Well, you should prepare just in case,” Hal said. “I’ve got some gas put away, and I’m ordering live chickens from the Farm N Garden so I’ll have eggs.” Actually, Hal Little was not looking forward to raising chickens in his new pole barn. He didn’t like the idea of having to feed and water critters every day, not to mention figuring out what to do if they got sick. But, as he was trying to make this tall, smiling man realize, a person had to prepare. The millennium problem was like religion. Hal’s father the minister used to say that even though you couldn’t force anyone to believe in Our Lord, you were duty bound to suggest a fellow ought to love Jesus, just in case he had overlooked the importance of everything the Bible said. Hal hoped further that accepting both Jesus and the millennium problem would help Americans recognize the way that banks and Jews and the government were plotting together to deny the impending Y2K disaster.

  “We think it’s a lot of fuss about nothing,” said the tall, smiling man.

  “Do you trust in Jesus?” Hal asked. “Jesus helps those who help themselves.”

  “We’re not religious.”

  Hal stood there in the man’s yard listening to a bird singing. Hal suffered from the same degenerative eye disease that had afflicted his father, and it had
progressed in the last several years so that Hal had to wear telescopic glasses for driving. Without those glasses he saw birds as only shadowy, fluttering movement. It occurred to Hal that birds must really like people, because you didn’t hear birds out in the country near as much as you heard them in town. Here in Comstock Township, before he’d sold the house he’d inherited from his parents, may they rest in peace, Hal had heard chirping and singing from morning till night, all year round. His old next door neighbor, Em Garrity, had gone outside every day in pink slippers and a quilted bathrobe to put sunflower seed in a feeder shaped like a hay barn with a silo. She’d expressed shock that Hal wanted to sell the house where he’d lived his whole life, and he’d explained that he didn’t like selling, but that he had to prepare for Y2K, as she ought to be doing, too. Em said, “You’re a fool, Hal” and dismissed him with a wave. At Hal’s new ten-acre property twenty-two miles outside of town, there were no neighbors, and Hal rarely heard any birds.

  The tall, smiling man’s wife came out of the house with their baby strapped onto her back, and she walked past Hal, close enough that, even without his glasses, he could make out the expression on the baby’s face. The baby looked at Hal and laughed and put his fingers into his mouth before disappearing into blurriness. Hal felt bad that the parents were not taking precautions, if only for the sake of that child.

  “You ought to withdraw your money from the bank,” Hal said. “Did you know that the bank’s only got a dollar seventeen cents for every hundred dollars on deposit?”