by Ron Rash
Toomey backed up the truck a few feet and turned around. The pickup’s taillights disappeared into the trees. Leonard stood outside a few minutes. He’d warned the boy not to go back and Travis hadn’t listened. Something had happened. But whatever that something was wasn’t his concern. The boy had stirred up all sorts of things deep inside Leonard that he’d thought safely locked in the past. He’d probably never see Travis again, and that was for the best.
When he went inside, Dena was on the couch watching TV, clothed only in panties and a halter top. She’d lain out in the sun that afternoon and her skin had a pink tinge.
“You need a air conditioner for this trailer,” she said, her voice slurred by the quaaludes.
He looked at her face. Carlton Toomey had been right. There was, despite all the pills and booze, the scars and two knocked-out teeth, some pretty left in her. High cheekbones, delicate nose, and sensuous lips. The morning after he’d brought her back from the Ponderosa, Leonard had awakened to the smell of coffee. He’d walked into the kitchen where Dena had set the table with two plates and a pair of mismatched forks, paper towels as napkins. On each plate was a single piece of buttered toast. It looked like something a child might have done, a child who’d witnessed such domesticity only in a movie or a book. When he’d asked if she was ready to go home, she’d said there was no home, just a back room she rented from a quarrelsome old woman. She’d lingered at the breakfast table, then tried to coax him back into bed. The morning and her hangover accentuated her dry jaundiced pallor as though the nicotine in the cigarettes she smoked had tinted her skin. The plastic and wire where two of her front teeth should have been was more evident as well in the morning’s unflinching light. Before leaving she’d taken a decade-old photograph from her billfold, one that showed a woman of undeniable beauty. Recognize me? she’d challenged, not putting the photo away until he’d nodded yes.
“You could buy us a couple of those window units, for God’s sake. I got you enough new business to afford it.” Dena slumped deeper into the couch, weary from the effort of speaking two whole sentences.
“I could afford a lot more things if you weren’t eating my pills like they were jellybeans,” Leonard responded. He couldn’t help but wish that they did have a window unit, because hot as it was he wouldn’t sleep well tonight.
“Anyway, you owe me a gift,” Dena said, her eyes still on the TV.
“How do you figure that?”
“It’s our anniversary, sweetheart. This time last July’s when we first met.”
Leonard retrieved another beer from the refrigerator and left her on the couch, knowing he’d find her there in the morning. He undressed and turned on the bedroom’s ceiling fan, noticing the watermark on the ceiling as he did so. He went to the closet and pushed aside the thick leather-bound ledgers one at a time to reach the picture album in the far back corner. Leonard briefly contemplated taking down the 1848 ledger as well. He lay in bed, the album propped on his stomach as he turned the pages slowly, counting the pictures. Fifty-seven, and only two in Illinois.
Kera had believed they had no choice but to go. Two highschool teachers finding jobs in one county was hard enough, much less at the same school. Every morning for four years, they’d each driven thirty minutes away from their apartment in Asheville to opposite sides of the county. In Illinois they would work at the same school. There would be more time to be with their child, with each other. Less stress as well, fewer arguments fueled by that stress. The problem was the long commutes, Kera argued, but Leonard believed the long commutes, like the sleep-deprived year when Emily’s ears and lungs had been welcoming harbors for infection, had not created but revealed fissures in their marriage, fissures that would be all the more apparent in a landscape where nothing remained hidden. He’d finally agreed to go, but Kera noted his sullenness. An English teacher, she’d accused him of living in the passive voice, letting others make choices so if things went wrong he didn’t have to bear the blame.
The hottest day of the year, the radio announcer had predicted as they’d started the all-day drive to Illinois. He and Kera had been up past midnight loading the U-Haul, already exhausted come daybreak as they buckled Emily in her car seat and headed north. An hour out of Asheville Leonard and Kera were already bickering, about when to stop and feed Emily, which radio station to listen to. The Ford Fairlane struggled in the higher mountains. As they approached the eastern continental divide, the orange and white trailer swayed and dragged behind them like an anchor someone forgot to raise. The temperature gauge rose, and it seemed the mountains and summer day had collaborated to keep them from getting out of North Carolina. Leonard cut off the air conditioner. They rolled windows down but Emily still whined she was hot. Kera told him to turn the air-conditioning back on, but Leonard was afraid the car would overheat. When Emily began to cry, Kera reached over and punched the ON button herself.
They had almost made it. EASTERN CONTINENTAL DIVIDE, ½ MILE, a blue-and-white sign proclaimed. The temperature indicator wavered like a compass needle in the red part of the gauge but the car kept moving, and their continued ascent seemed a small miracle that might harbinger the possibility of even greater ones. For a few moments Leonard believed luck might stroll into their lives and announce itself, that he would be wrong about the car overheating, maybe wrong about some other things as well. He was about to reach for Kera’s hand when the radiator hose burst.
He’d managed to pull the car onto the shoulder, then hitch-hiked across the mountain, leaving Kera and Emily by the roadside. He returned two hours later in a tow truck. Kera and Emily waited where he’d left them, both dehydrated and sunburned. The driver chained the car and trailer to his truck, and the four of them had crammed into the front seat, crossing the divide like a family fleeing a fire or flood.
They’d waited inside the hot, grimy service station for the radiator hose to be replaced. Emily hunched in Kera’s lap, whimpering from her sunburn. No door dimmed the racket between office and garage. When a rivet gun battered their ears Emily pressed her bent forearms to the sides of her head and shrieked.
You’re glad this happened, Kera said, then carried Emily across the street to a café. On the cinder-block wall opposite where Leonard sat, a nail crookedly hung a photograph of a father and son fishing from a wooden bridge. Under this bucolic scene the coming days of August were numbered and lined up like rows of boxcars, headed for a future he told himself had been derailed by a five-dollar piece of black rubber.
Leonard opened his eyes and stared at the watermark last week’s downpour had formed on the trailer’s ceiling. The stain had reminded him of something for days but only now did he recognize that what he saw above him evoked the rhinoceros-head outline of Australia.
September 12, 1856
A.M.
Joe Woods, age 58.
Complaint: Sore back.
Diagnosis: Lumbago.
Treatment: Heated poultice applied to afflicted area first thing
in morning and before bed. Sassafras tea three times daily.
Refused to cup afflicted region despite patient’s insistence.
Fee: One dollar. Paid in cash.
Ruth McKinney, age 6.
Complaint: Earache.
Diagnosis: Inflammation of inner passage of right ear.
Treatment: Rabbit tobacco vapors blown in afflicted ear. Two
drops castor oil in afflicted ear. Repeat both treatments three
times daily for three days. Have child sleep with right ear on
warmed pillow.
Fee: One dollar. Paid with half sack of salt.
Summoned to Revis Farm.
Billy Revis, age 28.
Complaint: Left arm mangled by threshing machine. Violent
bleeding.
Diagnosis: Severed artery. Ineffectual tourniquet. In Articule
Mortis.
Treatment: Cauterized artery. Sealed with hot tar. Lead acetate
to arrest further discharge.
One P.M.
Some recovery but pulse dismal. Chalky pallor.
Four P.M.
Pallor improved. Pulse full. Left family with sanguine
assurances of recovery.
Treatment: Fomentations to balm pain. No exertions for three
days. Rare beef every meal for next week.
Fee: Four dollars. Paid with one dollar cash. Fifteen pounds
tobacco at harvest.
THREE
It was the second afternoon when Lori Triplett came to Travis’s room, dressed not in white like the nurses but in a pink and white striped skirt and blouse. Girls at the high school who wore these outfits called themselves Candy Stripers. Travis knew they did something at the hospital but wasn’t sure exactly what. Shank called them candy strippers.
Travis had been feigning sleep, because until now no one who came through the door had brought anything good. The doctor had dismissed his waterfall story, saying he’d heard more convincing lies from first-graders and if he had the time he’d get the sheriff and find out what really happened. His daddy was no better. He’d driven Travis’s truck back from the bridge and found the six-pack stowed in the cab. The old man spent his first visit lecturing about the beer and Travis’s climbing the waterfall. His mother sat in the corner while his daddy went at him for half an hour. The next time his parents came all the old man talked about was how much the hospital bill would be. You’re seventeen years old, boy, his father had said. When I was your age I was making my way alone in the world. If you don’t straighten out real quick you’ll be on your own too.
So when he heard footsteps approaching Travis closed his eyes, hoping whoever it was would think him asleep and leave. But this time it was Lori Triplett, a blue plastic watering can in her hand. She was from Antioch, the far upper part of the county, so they’d been in school together only since ninth grade. Travis didn’t know much about her. The girls and boys from Antioch tended to keep to themselves. They ate at the same lunch tables and sat together at assemblies and ball games.
He’d paid some notice to her though. Hard not to with her red hair and green eyes, skin white and smooth as porcelain. Tall as well, five-eight probably. Travis thought her pretty and had once told Shank as much, though Shank said she didn’t have enough up top to suit him. Shank had added that Antioch girls were a hard lot. His older brother had dated one and come in one night scratched up like he’d lost a ten-round fight with a bobcat. After she got through with him she’d took to his car seats with a butcher knife, Shank had said. All that just because he was fifteen minutes late.
But Lori had never seemed that kind of girl, even less so now as he watched her water the plants. Besides homeroom, she’d been in two of Travis’s classes. She always sat in the back, head down like she might not be paying attention, yet she always knew the answer when called upon, knew it quick without a stammer. Smart, he knew that, but not in a show-offy way like the snobby town kids.
Lori turned from the window. Sunlight slanting through the glass burnished her hair, making it shine like a new penny. Her eyes met his for a moment and then stared at the watering can as if to remind herself why she was there.
“We’ve been in homeroom together,” Travis said.
Lori raised her eyes. Maybe it was because he had never looked at them so carefully, but now he saw how distinctive their color was, the soft cool green of a luna moth. Travis looked away first this time. Those eyes made his whole body feel light. Like swinging out on a muscadine vine and letting go, he thought. That moment you hung above the river, waiting to fall.
“I know that,” she said.
“My name’s Travis, Travis Shelton.”
“I know that too.”
Something almost a smile softened her face.
“Anything I can get you before I go?”
“You ain’t got a cigarette, do you?”
“I don’t smoke, and you shouldn’t either,” Lori said.
The feistiness of her reply surprised him. He’d never much cared for other folks’ advice, but before it had come from his parents and teachers and Preacher Caldwell, not someone his own age and as pretty as Lori Triplett.
Travis searched for something else to say as Lori walked toward the door.
“Do you get paid for doing this?” he asked.
She paused in the doorway.
“No.”
“Then why do it?”
“I’m going to A-B Tech next year to become a nursing assistant,” Lori said. “I wanted to know what it was like first.”
Travis didn’t want her to go. Except for Shank she was the only person he’d been glad to see since waking from the operation. But words fled out of reach. He made a solemn vow that next time he’d have a whole peck of questions for her.
She lingered by his doorway a few moments.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.
After Lori left he thought of the high school library’s big unabridged dictionary and how it was filled with thousands and thousands of words but he couldn’t find half a dozen to make a sentence, had just sat there in the bed like there’d been a C-clamp on his tongue. Unlike Shank, he never seemed to know what to say to girls. The one time he’d acted like he had, at Leonard’s trailer, he’d made a jackass of himself. What he knew about was fishing and engines and farming tobacco, some other things he’d read. None of these things seemed of much interest to girls.
An orderly brought supper, and two hours later the night nurse gave Travis a red pill to help him sleep. Then she’d asked if he needed to go to the bathroom. This nurse was older than the one who’d come the previous night. Her gray hair was balled on the back of her head tight as a fist, and it seemed to tug her mouth into a tight-lipped frown.
“I guess you’ll need me to help,” she said irritably, as if she couldn’t see his lower right leg looked like it belonged to a mummy. Instead of getting a male orderly or a bedpan like the other nurse, she’d helped him to the bathroom herself and hadn’t even looked away, just watched Travis make water like she didn’t trust him to hit the bowl. Travis swore to piss in his water glass before he ever asked her help again.
THE NEXT MORNING PASSED EVEN SLOWER THAN THE PREVIOUS two. There was nothing on TV but game shows and the only thing to read was a Bible. He asked the nurse if she could get him some magazines and she brought back some year-old copies of National Geographic. One had an article on Civil War battlefields and Travis remembered what Leonard had said about Sheltons siding with the Union. He wondered if there were books about what happened in Madison County during the Civil War.
Late morning the doctor read the chart and checked Travis’s foot, not seeming to care much when he turned the ankle and Travis winced. You’ll be going home tomorrow morning, he told Travis, but that was nothing to get excited about. It just meant being stuck in his own bed instead of the hospital’s. Besides, at home the old man wouldn’t have to wait for visiting hours to light into him. Probably lay a pallet on my floor just so he can bad-mouth me last thing at night and first thing come morning, Travis figured.
The clock hands moved as if coated with tobacco resin. But it wasn’t just boredom that made time crawl. He was waiting for Lori. To help pass the time, he rummaged through his mind as he might a woodshed, searching for something long ago put away. Travis remembered one thing, something that happened in homeroom their sophomore year. It had been the Friday before Christmas break. During the last period students went to their homerooms for a “party,” though it was nothing but soft drinks and stale cookies. Slick Abernathy, the principal, had shown up at the door and handed Lori a full grocery bag. Soon as it was in her hands she’d sat back down while everyone else milled around the room. There was one detail more though, just at the edge of memory. Then it came to him. Lori had used only her right hand to eat and drink. The left gripped the grocery bag so no one could look inside.
He ate his lunch and had two more thermometers shoved in his mouth before Lori appe
ared. She brought not just her watering can but also a backpack.
“I went to the library to get you something to read, but I wasn’t certain what you’d like.”
She lifted three books from the backpack, let him see the titles: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, Call of the Wild by Jack London, and The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. He’d read the first two, so he took The Last of the Mohicans, though he had serious doubts if someone with the middle name Fenimore could write anything he’d much care for.
“The doctor says I’ll be going home in the morning,” Travis said. “How will I get it back to you?”
“Give the book to the nurse and I’ll get it from her.”
This time he made sure Lori stayed awhile, filling silences with questions he’d stacked in his mind like square bales in a barn loft. He learned more about her plans to get a CNA and found out she worked mornings and evenings at Carter’s Café. She had an older sister and a younger brother, and her mother worked at the yarn mill in Marshall. When he asked about her father, she said he’d left three years ago. She didn’t offer the where to and why.
“What are you going to do when you get out of high school?” she asked when he struggled for more words to keep her in the room.
Travis wanted to sidle around the question, but Lori wouldn’t allow it.
“I’m not sure,” he finally said, not mentioning he’d quit school three weeks before last year’s term ended.
“You could probably do a lot of different things,” Lori said. She picked up the backpack. “I guess I better get to the other rooms.”
“Too bad you won’t be here in the morning. I like talking to you.”
“I’ll see you at school in a few weeks,” Lori said. “Maybe we’ll be in homeroom again, like in tenth grade.”
“Maybe we could do something before then.” Travis spoke the words quickly, afraid if he didn’t they would hang on his tongue and he’d swallow them.
“I’d like that,” Lori said.
