by Annie DeWitt
As the bus came to a halt in front of K’s house, the animal collapsed in the gutter to the side of the road. The engine stalled. We stared out the windshield. After a moment, the driver swung open the door and descended the stairs. Her hand caught on the stick that started the wipers. The thin plastic blades screeched across the glass. I watched as the driver stooped over the body. The cat’s flanks were still heaving. A good deal of blood was gushing from its skull. She threw her jacket over its head. Before she went inside the house to place a call, the driver reascended the stairs of the bus in her shirtsleeves. Her face had paled. A blotchiness had risen on her neck. She gripped the steering wheel for a moment and peered down the aisle motioning us away from the windows. “Stay put,” she said.
K stood still on the lawn. The driver climbed toward the house at a waddle, the thicks of her thighs descending toward her knees, which seemed hardly to part. A few moments after she disappeared into the house a middle aged man in an old hound’s-tooth flannel came out. He went around back to fetch a shovel and a tarp.
The driver stood outside the bus smoking a cigarette as the man cleared the dog’s body from road. The road was narrow. It was impossible to skirt the remains. It took both of them just to lift the carcass onto the tarp. Afterwards, the driver picked her jacket up from the road with the end of a branch and tossed it into the gully. She said a few words to the man, climbed the stairs, and started the engine. As the bus pulled away, I peered out the emergency exit. The man dragged the carcass up the hill toward K’s house. He’d folded the tarp around the body, pulling it behind him like a sling.
“The Black Hills,” Mother had said tracing the landmass with her finger on the old Atlas that afternoon at the butte with Birdie in her lap as the cars had swooshed by us below. The Long Walker’s body, the gold of its coat still slick with sweat, was the final remnant of Wilson’s leaving us. The cat had done our killing for us. All we needed was one damp strip of flesh to know that we were human. If our graces got the better of us, we could stand in that gully and someone would off us. In the meanwhile, we could start anew.
The following week Granny Olga was back to Schenectady. She was having trouble with her mechanic heart. I woke one night to find her in the kitchen making a cake for her husband, John-John. All that remained of John-John was that white Panama hat in the back of Granny Olga’s Buick and his headstone in the cemetery upstate. Even his pension wasn’t lively anymore. Granny Olga stood in the kitchen that night and said she couldn’t find her breath. She only had a thin slip on. Beneath it, her body sagged and folded. She looked at the microwave and told me, “I’m going skating all the wrong ways.”
Mother put her on the Vermonter. There was a doctor near the Canada border. “You can count on him,” Mother said to Granny Olga as she boarded the train. “He’s a specialist.” Someone would fetch her at the other end. Maybe an aunt. Maybe her sister. Maybe a service that fetched people who got dropped off.
Granny Olga wore her fur out our front door.
That night at dinner Mother was into her wine. A big bottle of utility white. Reds, she said, reminded her of youth and all those churches with their sepulchers and their sipping cups.
Father brought out his box of White Owls and his carton of drawing pencils after dinner. He smoked a big smoking blunt in the living room and whittled away at the tip of his charcoals. He planned to lay his small-boned wife out on the L-shaped settee under the windows and draw some mercy into each of her curves.
Together, he and Mother were deep into their stash of vinyls. We were sitting in the living room, my parents still rocketing on the fibers of their imbibing, Birdie and I gutted of sleep, when the first sparks shot off the roof of the pheasant farm that sat on the Doctor’s run.
It was Birdie who first noticed the flames. “Fire,” she said pointing out of Mother’s windows at the smoke rising over the cornfields.
“It must be a brushfire,” Father said. “What with the drought.”
“Should we go see?” Mother said. “Just to be sure?”
We drove over in the Honda. Birdie and I were allowed. There was no one home to watch us, Mother reasoned. What if the flame leapt? What if it found its way through the gap in the fence? We had our five acres. We had Father’s land. We had all those future fir trees to drag in over the deck.
“Wait in the car,” Father said to Birdie and me as we pulled off the road a short distance from the smoke.
Otto was standing in the clearing across from the fire, the lights of his Caddy trained on the pheasant coup. I hadn’t seen him since that afternoon in his kitchen with Callie. He looked old, thin, nearly transparent in the darkness. Just another piece of fabric on the line the wind could blow around.
Birdie and I rolled down the windows to try to hear what the adults were saying. The air stank from the pheasants burning. I pictured the entire roost—all of the doctor’s prize—flying up in one wild swoop unleashing their fetid stench. They’d escaped our Rogers and our Remingtons. “It’s a shame they’ll never be hunted,” Otto said. “So much breeding gone to waste.”
Father circled the coup once, dragging his toe behind him as though drawing an invisible line in the sand over which the fire dare not cross. Mother stood behind Otto watching the black plumes where they merged with the night. The air had a poison on it. It reminded me of the scent of ammonia after Granny Olga blanched the tub. “Amateur job,” Otto said. “They opened the windows first to make sure to let in enough air for a good flame.”
“That’s an old crime,” Father said. “Where’s your evidence?”
“Multiple points of ignition,” Otto said. “Next, they’ll search for traces of accelerant. Looks like the work of those young bucks with the dogs.”
We waited until the fire trucks came. Once they arrived, they put up their yellow tape. The men rushed in with their helmets and their coats. A thick white powder shot out of their hoses.
“Don’t hustle any,” Otto said to them. “It’s not like there’s an emergency here.” He carried a cane. As he wandered around directing, he looked nearly crippled.
After they put down the flame, they turned off the sirens. The earth had a blackened hallow feel. Everything was wet. A light rain smoldered what was left of the ash.
Father took the roads slowly on the way home. We cranked down the windows and drove by all the people in their houses where the lights fell down at the end of the day. I let my arm out to catch the breeze. I thought about what it takes for a family to fall out of love with each other. Who knew how long this would keep? Our four bodies in this bucket of tin cruising the back roads of some town we only half recognized in the shadows. The rain was loud in the branches. Everyone had gone to bed except for the dogs.
On the bus home the day after the fire I found Fender, drunk and shitty. He looked tired, like some of the smut from his brother’s walls had rubbed off on him. I hadn’t seen him in some time. There was still that line between us. There was still the way he’d said, “Sing me something sweet. Sing me that one about San Francisco.” He’d said, “You’re that old man’s little darling.”
“Faker,” I said as I passed him. “You just wanted to show up this morning so that one of us could say we heard your voice chime in when the teacher called roll. ‘Fender Steelhead?’ she said. ‘Yes,’ you said. You just wanted us to hear her call your name.”
I wondered how long he’d spent washing the soot off his arms.
Perhaps he didn’t care. Perhaps he’d already stepped over that white line and didn’t plan on coming back. He was already sitting with K, or Kat or Katherine, when I boarded. As we neared K’s stop Fender began tossing packets of rubbers over the seat. The rubbers were small and red. K took one out and blew it up and the two volleyed it like a balloon.
I didn’t know what a rubber was. But I knew that there was something ugly between them. I knew K would’ve taken Fender’s hand in he
rs and invited him upstairs to Mother’s bed. Perhaps she already had.
When I arrived home Mother was in the yard. The horses were tethered to the crossties we’d strung between the electric poles where we parked the cars.
“What about Otto?” I said.
“What about Otto?” she said.
“Nothing,” I said.
“I don’t like how he looks at you,” she said.
“Where will we keep them?” I said.
“We’ll build our own barn,” she said. “In the meantime, we’ll board at the farm up street. I called this morning. They’ve got room.”
“They’ve always got room,” I said.
We led the horses up the road toward the new barn. I thought of the night Fender and I sat on the boulder in front of the drive to the Starlings’ house. I thought of the old blind guy in the golf hat and his fat wife. And too of Father walking down the road next to Otto dragging the Shetland’s blanket. “I haven’t stolen anything yet,” Father had said to Otto.
Mother and I walked in silence. The only thing between us was the sound of the horse’s hooves in the dirt of the road.
“They’re paving this fall,” Mother said glancing down at the places where the dust had gathered around her boots.
I looked up the long narrow expanse ahead of us.
Wilson’s dying wasn’t the last of our troubles. It turns out our doctor was a sham. As happens with the travel of news, the Ranger had misheard his story. The doctor wasn’t a medic at all but rather a painter who’d attended art school in Rhode Island in the 70’s. After New York had failed him, he’d witnessed the demise of his first marriage to a young prostitute and had spoiled on the city altogether. He’d met a waitress in a diner one night on his way home from scoring some hash in the park. The waitress had dropped off nursing school and was thinking of getting back to the theatre where she belonged. That night the painter convinced her she belonged to him and the countryside. He moved her out to Fay Mountain to a simpler pace of life, away from the critics and the customers, where they could stare down their disappointments in each other’s company. The doctor painted seascapes and farmhouses. He sold them to local banks and hospitals. Callie had seen one hanging in the hall of the emergency room on the evening she’d gone to visit Wilson before he died, an oil painting of a single sailboat in a bay. That’s all our doctor amounted to, a lousy sailboat in the death wing a second-rate hospital. This explained the pheasants and his wife’s pregnancies. He was an artist and a layabout. He spent all day fucking. When he wasn’t fucking he was out painting the birds.
The news of our doctor’s demise was the pinnacle of the town’s disappointment. We’d lain waste our hopes on his good name.
That’s not the half of it.
A young farmhand had commandeered Cash’s heart. The girl was also a painter and something of a talent. According to the local paper, she’d kept up in a small studio in the center of town. For several months Cash had been begging Ada for a divorce so that he could marry the girl and do right by her talent.
The girl kept a stand at the flea market next to the cabinetmaker. Hers, Margaret said, was the watercolor which hung in the post. I had first glimpsed the girl out of the corner of my eye the day Father and I went to the flea market to purchase Baby. I recognized her months later by her picture in the paper. The picture ran in the Police Records section a few days after Wilson’s death. The article was short. According to the report, the police had been called out to Cash’s farm stand on several occasions that summer. The neighbors had heard people rowing late into the night. When the police had arrived there were holes in the plaster from where Ada had chased Cash around with the broom. The last time they’d had been summoned, Cash had been on his hands and knees cleaning Ada’s preserves off the floorboards when the police arrived. Cash too had his picture in the paper. A long vertical shot of his body which made him look even lonelier than he was. His face was beaten. His hands were covered in flies.
I had seen Cash’s girl working in the fields several times while biking to the farm stand to collect vegetables for dinner. She wore a large wicker bonnet such as the ones the itinerant works wore to shade their face. Father said he thought he’d seen her once sitting in the little office in back of the farm stand strumming on an old cigar-box guitar. “I’d recognize a good White Owl anywhere,” Father had said.
After a while it seemed everyone in the town had once known her. Ray had seen her taking numbers from the circulars he posted outside the barbershop. She’d sold Ruth a bag of peaches for her pie. Even the old half-blind couple who lived next door claimed to have seen the girl pushing a cart at the market. Margaret swore she’d caught her in the stacks at the library taking out books. The boys in town said she’d stop by the diamond in back of the schoolyard to watch the neighborhood kids toss the baseball around.
“Where you from, girl?” they’d say.
“Kansas,” she’d say.
Eventually she just said, “I’ve been around.”
It seemed odd that no one had found her out. Cash was a quiet man, Margaret reasoned with Mother. “He provided a blank slate,” she said. “It’s only habit to draw when there’s so much not knowing hanging around.”
Afternoons alone in the box that had once housed Father’s mower where Fender and I had spent so many afternoons, I used to imagine Fender and K and how we’d all once been. Fender no longer visited. The box was damp now and sagged in places from the changing of the seasons. Liden’s smut had blown off the walls.
The evening of Wilson’s funeral, the wind was so strong I could stand in the yard and smell the last of the season’s fruits where they sat rotting down the road in their crates. Otto had waited two seasons before spreading his son out over the earth. He’d let the fall go by and with the ground now frozen, the best he could do was toss Wilson around the field and let the wind take him where it thought he should settle. Wilson never was much of a walking man. This was as far as he’d travel, I supposed.
I wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral. Otto would be there and there was Mother’s suspicions and the idea, too, that children should not be exposed to death. Birdie needed a sitter.
Otto’s was the first car to return after the service. I was surprised to see his headlights turn the corner. After the sun set and I was sure Wilson was in the wind, I sat out on the portico watching the road waiting for my parents to return. As Otto’s headlights pulled into his drive I was struck by his burden. His Helene was still hanging on, her presence both absent and livid. Every night as he climbed the stairs toward his bed, leaving her alone on the pullout in the living room, I was sure Otto prayed he’d descend to find she’d relieved him.
Callie was first out of Otto’s car. She crossed in front of the headlights where he paused in front of the gate at the far end of his drive. She was wearing a suit. Something about the density of the fabric, the way it clung to her body, made her look thick around the middle. There was a bit more age on her. She was wearing a pillbox hat with a small white bird. It reminded me of something Granny Olga would’ve worn on the train from Schenectady. I recognized it as His Helene’s. The headlights cast a radius around Calli’s body illuminating the old tub in the south pasture, shining, boat-like in the yard.
It was only after Callie and Otto entered the house and the lights were down in their windows that I sat on the piano and flicked on the lamp. The piece was called “Confidence.” It opened as Sterling had once described it to me, with the image of a woman on a proscenium. A long operatic flute of sighs and runs. A few measures in, there was a rest. After the rest, Sterling’d said, the piece began in earnest with a brigade of troops marching. The thing he’d said about this piece is that it contains every emotion in a single page.
Afterward, I stood at the window. For a moment I wondered if Otto was watching, and then I remembered Callie and her pillbox hat.
Th
e TV was nothing but news. I stared absently at the images. The men were at it again in the desert. Oil drums burned in the background. I wanted to understand how far the desert was from the hole in the earth where the Starlings had installed their pool. Where was it in relation? “The Gulf” felt too abstract. Outside, the patches of grass were thick. Long and downy, as though you could sink your fist into them and your pulse would disappear.
The moon was full. In the wind, when the light caught the reeds, the field beyond the marsh looked like a river. The sheen was so thick I thought it might hold me if I stepped out the window and put my weight on it.
The screen flashed to pictures of troops in faded fatigues.
“Captain Miller says anyone who isn’t scared there is a fool. Is everybody scared?” Jennings said to the correspondent. I felt as though he was asking me directly.
I thought of Otto on the porch that night. How he’d taken my head in his hands and stared at my face. How he’d kept wanting to kiss like a sister those afternoons Birdie and I took to the outdoors. One evening shortly after Mother’s return, before supper Birdie and I had made our way to the marsh. The box from the mower was just tall enough that, if we laid down side by side inside of it, Mother couldn’t see us from the porch.
As Mother called out to us over the deck, Birdie crawled on top of me.
“Show me,” she said.
Where she’d seen it I never knew, or perhaps I didn’t care to remember. Perhaps she’d caught Fender and I that afternoon in the box.
What I remembered was the shortness of it, the smallness of her head in my hands, the way she’d tilted slightly to the side as we locked lips.
She’d called it the marriage kiss.
That same evening at dinner Birdie had wanted to show our parents what we’d learned.
