At the End of the Road

by Grant Jerkins

  Up ahead, he saw the Chevelle SS, resting on its side, the undercarriage exposed, the top two wheels spinning. He heard glass breaking and cascading down the side of the car. The woman had somehow popped out the passenger side window (which would have been above her head from inside the car). Kyle watched her mount the steering column and crawl out of the window, emerging bloody and disheveled like a violent birth. She slid down over the hood and dropped to her feet. They stood facing each other, neither of them able to move. The woman broke her inertia and lurched toward Kyle. Kyle took a step forward.

  The driveway leading back to the safety of Kyle’s home lay between him and the woman. She was much closer to it than Kyle, but she was moving slow, stumbling, dazed. Their eyes were locked as they moved toward each other.

  “Help me turn my car over. Help me turn my car over. Help me turn my car over.”

  She said it like a record stuck in a groove. No emotion, just quiet, flawed logic. But Kyle knew there was no way that even together they could budge the automobile. A grown man might could rock it back over to its wheels, but not a boy and an injured woman. And even if they could, this bleeding shambling woman was not going to be able to get in and drive away as if nothing had happened. He instinctively knew that more than just her body had been damaged, that something was wrong with her mind.

  He beat her to the driveway and started walking down it backward, rolling his bicycle and keeping the reticulated woman in his vision. He did not know what she was going to do, but she was still asking him to help her turn over the car. And Kyle wished he could. He wished that they could flip it back onto its wheels and the bleeding woman could just drive away and that this truly terrible thing had not ever happened.

  THE GRAVEL DRIVEWAY FROM THE ROAD

  to the house was a good eighth of a mile long. Houses in this pocket of the barely rural South were built with little concern of land usage, because land was plentiful and mostly cheap. The Edwards house was built amongst a dying breed—the local small farmer. Instead of a yard, the house had actively growing fields all around it. Facing the house, on the left side of the driveway, was dense corn that held the driveway like a painted green retaining wall, and to the right was a field of low-growing sweet potatoes edged with sickly looking peanut plants. In the late summer, Daddy-Bob, the farmer who owned most all the land on Eden Road, would pay Kyle and his brothers a quarter per bushel basket to harvest the peanuts, and the same again in the fall to harvest the sweet potatoes. Often, his mama and daddy would join in the work as well, and Kyle liked it when they did. There was just something that satisfied him when the whole family worked as a single unit. It was at those times that they seemed closest. And he somehow understood that his parents joined in not for the money, but because they too enjoyed the work.

  This was food planted not in quantities to fill cargo trucks and be shipped to grocery stores, but for Daddy-Bob’s produce stand that stood at the top of the dirt road—with the excess going to the local farmer’s market.

  Kyle much preferred working the potatoes and peanuts to picking the corn. The corn was planted in staggered fashion, and started coming in during midsummer when it was still hot as fire, the air wet and adhesive like syrup. The thick frond-like leaves of the corn plants would roughly grab hold of Kyle’s exposed skin, rubbing it raw, sometimes cutting. And the plants seemed to hold on to their treasured ears of corn, giving them up only grudgingly, making him fight for each one, so that he was covered in sweat and sap, forearms already raw, before he could fill even a single bushel. And the corn seemed to emit a kind of sticky secretion that slowly covered you and attracted dirt and insects. It was hard, sweaty, sometimes ugly work.

  But the sweet potatoes and the peanuts were a joy. It was usually cooler when they were ready to be harvested. And the fashion of the harvesting was a constant delight to Kyle’s senses. He was given a pitchfork that was easily a foot longer than he was. The tines of the instrument were wickedly long, clotted with red dirt and orange rust from the long years of their useful life. The wood handles were blanched gray from weathering, and worn smooth as river stone from generations of workers’ hands. The handles were also worn skinny about six inches from the top where a callused hand would naturally hold it during work.

  Just like Daddy-Bob had taught him, Kyle would pick a spot about a foot-and-a-half beyond the farthest reach of the plant’s leaves. The fork had to be angled so that once it penetrated the earth, the tines would extend under the plant, about center. Kyle, who was small for his age, and pale even in summertime, would stand up on the pitchfork, both feet resting atop, behind the tines, and once stable, he would grab hold of the handle and jump up, both feet coming back down squarely, setting the tines in the earth. It took three or four good jumps. And once the fork was buried, Kyle would throw his entire body weight against the handle, to loosen the sun-hardened earth. Then he would get behind and pull back on the pitchfork.

  At that time of year, the outer showing of the potato plant was puny, even dead looking, so it was always a wonder for Kyle to watch the fork lift the plant out of the ground from the bottom up, and see the unimaginable profundity of sweet potatoes cradled in the fork. The dirt would fall away through the wide tines, leaving the fat bulbous potatoes resting pretty. A single plant could sometimes fill half a bushel basket. Some of the potatoes would be as big and long as a loaf of bread, some as small as marbles. At first, Kyle would often drive a tine of the pitchfork through a potato, splitting it or scarring it, but soon he developed a sense for how they lay and never even nicked one.

  The peanuts were harvested the same way, with the pitchfork lifting them from the earth, hard shells clotted with dirt, later to be washed and sold boiled at Daddy-Bob’s stand.

  SHE WAS STILL COMING AT HIM, ARMS OUT-

  stretched, her pace as slow as Boris Karloff. In his line of sight, as though staged for a photograph that would capture the essential details of the scene, Kyle could see the woman’s blue car, on its side in the ditch, the wheels no longer spinning, the windshield white and opaque like a caterpillar’s cocoon, and as still as death. It was with the potatoes and peanuts to his right, and the vastness of the corn to his left, that Kyle finally found the courage to hop on his bicycle and turn his back on the broken woman.

  His bike kicked up a modest dust trail (white, from the crushed gravel surface) as he pedaled at high speed back to his house. He propped his bike against the brick wall in the shadowy carport, and walked into the house. The door from the carport opened into the laundry room, and both the washer and dryer were humming and the good scents of detergent and fabric softener hung humidly in the air. The laundry room led directly into the kitchen, and in the kitchen Kyle found his mother standing over the counter making pineapple sandwiches. His little sister, Grace, sat at the redwood picnic bench that served as the family’s dining table. Grace held her Wonder Woman doll in one hand and sucked the thumb of the other while she watched their mother work.

  “Hungry?” his mother asked.

  Kyle watched her slather mayonnaise over a row of Sunbeam bread slices laid out on the counter like a hand of solitaire. She dipped a single extended finger into an open can of cored pineapple, bringing out the entire contents, her index finger and knuckles supporting the pineapple slices at their hollow core. She shook off the juice and placed a round wedge on each piece of bread.

  Kyle nodded and sat down across from his sister at the picnic table.

  “You okay?”

  Kyle looked away from his mother and said, “It’s hot is all.”

  His mother nodded, told Grace to stop sucking her thumb before it fell off, and reached to one of the high cabinets and brought down a can of Charles Chips. They were potato chips that were delivered twice a month. They came in a tin the size of a hatbox, and the Charles Chips deliveryman would always stop and talk to Kyle in a way that made Kyle feel good.

  Right now Kyle just didn’t know what to do or say. How could he tell his mother what h
ad happened? It had been his fault. The whole thing had been his fault. He’d been riding in the middle of the road, on a blind curve. And now a broken bleeding woman was on her way to the front door, to lay the blame squarely at Kyle’s feet. Kyle couldn’t imagine what words existed to be able to tell his mother this. This was the most real thing that had ever happened to him.

  He had heard of awful things happening in this world, but they did not happen in his little part of the world. And he certainly had never been the cause of a Bad Thing. One Bad Thing that happened in the world was caught in his mind as a constant reminder of just how bad the world could actually be. He had been riding in the car with his father, and the news was on the radio, and the newsman was talking about people being beat up for their money in a laundrymat. And that one of the bad guys had taken a ballpoint pen and punctured the eardrum of one of the people. And Kyle had never realized until that time that truly horrible things could happen to a person. Having a ballpoint pen driven into your ear and puncturing something inside you was a violation he had never imagined possible. Or that one person would do something like that to another person. Why?

  He was familiar with laundrymats. Before his family had their own washer and dryer, his mother used to take him and Grace to a coin-operated laundrymat once a week. It had always seemed like a safe place to Kyle, warm with good smells and lots of women. But now, he realized that if that thing with the ballpoint pen had happened in a laundrymat, then that thing could have potentially happened to him. Truly horrible, violent things could happen to him.

  And now it had. And he was the one who had caused it.

  He ate his pineapple sandwich, surprised that it still tasted good and that he still had an appetite. The glass of milk was cold and it tasted good too. He even asked for more Charles Chips, but his mother said no because they were so expensive. He had decided that since he did not have the words to tell his mother what had happened, he would just let it happen. That was the best way. The woman should be here any second, scratching at the door with her nailless fingers, the dried spiderweb of blood on her face branding her. So he finished his lunch and went to the living room and waited.

  But the woman never came. Kyle spent the rest of the day in the bedroom playing Operation with Grace, and that night the whole family watched Hee Haw (which he really didn’t like) and then The Brady Bunch on TV. He loved to sing along to the Brady Bunch theme song, and he did so that night. He had learned that it was possible to be scared and carry a burden of fear and worry and guilt, and still behave normally.

  His daddy never did say anything, and he would have driven right past the wreck on his way home after his Saturday shift at the mail sorting plant.

  What had happened to the woman?

  BEFORE CHURCH THE NEXT DAY, AND BEING

  careful not to dirty his Sunday clothes, Kyle took his bicycle out to the end of the driveway, stopped, and peered up and down the dirt road. There was no evidence of what had happened yesterday. It was like it had not happened at all. Kyle did not understand how this was possible, but he was just a boy. And while he did realize that probably God had intervened to save him, he gave no more thought to what had happened until the police lady came to the door later that day.

  WITH THE PERSPECTIVE OF ADULTHOOD,

  the man who the boy became would realize that there was a dividing line in his life, a border that, once crossed, would tinge everything that happened after, and dim all events prior. That border was a swatch of time, the space of a single summer. He was ten years old, and his sister, his partner in that strange borderland, was three years younger. The year was 1976.

  It was a dividing time for America as well. The year Kyle Edwards turned ten, America celebrated its two-hundredth birthday, and everything that happened that year was somehow informed by the genocide, the slavery, the savage wars, and the casual cruelties that had gotten them, as a nation, to that point in time.

  Of course, Kyle was mostly unaware of any of this. He was not precocious or insightful or strikingly bright. He was just a boy. He was only aware that it was a special year, that during that year, everybody was a patriot. As far as the world at large went, Kyle had accumulated only a handful of basic facts: He knew that the news stories about Watergate that his daddy took such interest in had finally sputtered to an end (although he still did not understand what a Watergate was), Patty Hearst had been found guilty (of what he didn’t know), and Vietnam was finally really over. The searing image of a naked Vietnamese girl running from a black bloom of napalm was replaced in his mind by the ubiquitous “Bicentennial Minute”—those patriotic commercials that came on every night right before nine o’clock, Kyle’s bedtime.

  That year, everybody felt good about America.

  But in the summer of 1976, Kyle Edwards was ten years old, and his world was an insular one. His world was a red dirt road in rural Georgia. A rural Georgia that was fast becoming suburban. County workers would lay down asphalt on Eden Road before the year was over, and backhoes and graders would break the earth all along it to build massive subdivisions.

  In Kyle’s world, his family’s personal Vietnam was only just beginning. His parents, the warring factions, were in an arms race, each side amassing weapons for the divorce that was to come. And like Americans who watched the bloody conflict unfold on their television screens, Kyle and his sister Grace, and their two older brothers, Jason and Wade, watched the war develop. A cold war, really. Resentments and suspicions building beneath the surface. They were fascinated and horrified, unable to look away, unable to alter its course.

  The oldest brother, Jason, was six years older than Kyle, so he would have been sixteen that year. Wade was next at thirteen, then Kyle, and Grace was seven. They were all three years apart. Kyle was supposed to have been a girl. Their mother had already bore two sons and very much wanted a baby girl, but got Kyle instead. She tried a final time and succeeded with Grace.

  AND ACROSS THE ROAD, WATCHING THEM

  that summer from his wheeled metal perch, was the paralyzed man. He grew into a mythical figure that haunted Kyle. He had been there on Eden Road for Kyle’s entire life, and before he became the paralyzed man, he was just a cipher to Kyle, just “that man who lives across the road,” or “that man from church who passes the collection plate.” He was aware of him, but he was no more important to Kyle than a pine tree, a vague point of reference in his world. Then just a few days after Kyle caused the woman to wreck her car, Mama said Mr. Ahearn from across the road had a stroke and that they had to put him in the hospital. And then the workmen had been at his house a week or so later, building a ramp that sloped down from his front porch. When Mr. Ahearn got back from the hospital, Kyle’s mother took over some peach preserves with the special yellow ribbon tied around it. His mama had said to his daddy that Mr. Ahearn was paralyzed. She whispered the word when she said it. And then Kyle started to see him sitting out there on his porch, day after day, just sitting there, sunning himself like a salamander. Day after day sitting in that big metal chair with wheels on it.

  TO KYLE AND GRACE, HE BECAME LESS A

  point of reference, and more a landmark. He was The Paralyzed Man, and they shunned him.

  GRACE AND KYLE WERE PLAYING HIDE-

  and-seek in the cornfield that bordered their property and stretched up to Eden Road. The corn was getting full and heavy with fat ears. Floppy golden tassels of corn silk cascaded from the crowns. The leaves were thick, abrasive, and sharp. They poked out from the stalks at odd angles and would cut them quick if they weren’t careful. Already, the field smelled of humid decay. And entering the dense rows was like stepping into an alien world. Inside, it was dark, dense, and tight when only moments before they had been in the open, in the sunshine.

  Grace carried her little plastic Wonder Woman doll with her at all times. No exceptions. And so Wonder Woman accompanied them as well. Kyle didn’t think Grace trusted him to protect her, but she trusted Wonder Woman. The cornfield could be a scary pl
ace. When you’re seven like Grace was that year, the whole world can be a scary place.

  IT’S RIDICULOUSLY EASY TO HIDE IN A

  cornfield. And just as easy to get lost. It’s impossible to see from one row of corn to the next. Like a maze with but a single repeated turn, but still deceptively complex. Hide-and-seek in those circumstances was less about finding someone with your eyes, but more with your other senses. And Kyle cheated. Whenever Kyle heard Grace getting close, he would position himself a few yards up from her, listen to time it just right, and then step backward out of the row just as she stepped into it—so that he ended up behind her. At that point, he would invert the game and begin to follow her. He would track silently behind her, match her step for step, and smirk at her growing frustration. At times he could literally be inches away from her, hidden in a row that she’d already searched and wouldn’t think of searching again. He’d watch, delighted, as her frustration escalated to agitation, which eventually gave way to fear. Then panic.

  She would shout his name, “Kyle! Kyle!”