by Sarah Vowell
“I ever see you again, I won’t stop. You hear me?”
Keith goggled at the inchoate blur talking to him.
“You hear me?”
“I can’t hear anything this ringing in my ear.”
Henry hit him again, hard in the knee. Keith scrambled into his car, turned it over, and went away forever.
Henry had, in fact, witnessed his grandson’s conception. Had occasioned it, one could say, hiring that boy loping into town. All of the trouble fell squarely in his lap.
What Henry did not see but imagined and could not stop imagining: Keith sniffing around the house, sidling up, ogling and charming and seducing his daughter. It was Henry’s whole setup that was to blame, then. Putting this kind of business on the same property as his house. His family. It seemed so inevitable now. Did he not know the sheer natural fact that since she was thirteen, his crew had thought and spoke crudities about her, sexual and violent animal things, snatches of which had wafted into her ears as she passed the outbuildings to fetch her grandmother or these very men for dinner, things they said involving parts of her body, and which pooled in her thoughts and made her picture herself as a mere constituency of thigh and neck and breast?
He did know. He could not unhear these things any more than she.
In fact, his silence was permission.
A man with a placard waited across the street, already at this hour of the morning. WHAT PART OF “THOU SHALT NOT KILL” DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND? read his sign. Leaning on the placard and sipping his coffee, the man watched them pull in and back out of a STAFF ONLY space right up front. His face untroubled, a little optimistic even. He stood on the street corner in front of a hotel. The hotel sign said Welcome Soroptimists.
Henry’s family hadn’t been down to Missoula in years and they would not be back for years more. He drove around and around the clinic in wider and wider circles. So early in the morning and with no one on the sidewalks, it was astonishing how many cars there were, the dearth of spaces. They entered an unpromising lot. Even the handicapped spaces were taken. Henry parked on the grass under a tree. They could just ticket him then.
He told Jill and Reba to wait in the pickup. The maple trees were grand and cool. Showing off. In Tenmile, no one had planted trees. Trees were for the mountains. But here. It was an initiative to have planted trees. Henry would plant trees in Tenmile when he was mayor. In the town, around the bald square. Take care of this business and plant trees.
Yes. He wanted to be mayor. If he was mayor, perhaps he would deserve his life.
The clinic was a brick house on a rise above street level. Henry mounted the steps that ran through a cinderblock wall. A guard picking up trash in the grass told Henry that the clinic wouldn’t open until the doctor arrived, but Henry was welcome to wait out front. Henry looked across the street at the man leaning on his sign and sipping his coffee. The man tugged up his sleeve to look at his watch, as if waiting for his shift to start.
“He don’t get holy rolling until he finishes his coffee,” the guard said. “But don’t worry. He can’t come within a hundred feet of here.”
A car pulled up in the staff spot. A nurse, from the look of her pink scrubs, parked her sedan in front of the cinderblock wall and asked did the guard want her to run for donuts.
“Oh come on now, you witch,” he said to her. “She’s undermining my willpower,” he said to Henry, tapping his gut. “Now lookit that. She went and got them already anyhow.”
The nurse set the donuts on the hood of her car, shrugged innocently.
Henry said he’d wait with his family in the yonder lot. He pointed in that direction, but the guard was telling the nurse to get them donuts up to him pronto. He went and sat on the bench by the front door and rubbed his hands together.
When Henry got to down to street level, the man with the placard nodded at him like a coach on the opposite sideline. Henry had a mind to go over there, but that was it. Just a mind to go over, no idea what he’d say to the fellow. And the wind was odd. From the windrows it gusted up last year’s old gray leaves. They spread like an opening palm and fell into a sudden stillness.
When the explosion happened, it rattled and blurred the visible world, it hurt his teeth, and he expected something collapsing, something falling from the sky. He pivoted around into a crouch between two cars, and when the guard’s body dropped into the street before him, he did not immediately recognize it as such and looked up wondering generally now what the fuck are they doing now the goddamn sonofabitches, hot debris pelting him and smoking the sonofabitches. Jesus. A white cloud of smoke in front of the clinic. Burning green leaves.
The taillights on the car were flashing, the noise—car alarm. He warily rose, scanning the street. The flashing lights of other vehicles in automatic hysterics. The smoke caught in one of those odd gusts shunted sideways down the street and halted just like a person might stop to take in this scene. He turned and could just make out Reba and Jill inside the pickup in the distant lot, what confused expressions they wore. He touched his chest to show them he was fine and gestured at them to stay put.
He warily approached the guard in the middle of the empty street. He’d been blown out of his shoes, his clothes, naked save his service belt. The exposed bones of his glistening face were flensed and obscene. He did not move or even bleed, just smoked and in places bubbled.
Screaming. From somewhere, screaming.
Henry made for the nurse next to her car. Burned donuts sweet in the air. A trace of aqua fortis. When Henry knelt, he cut his hand on the car. He sucked his hand and looked where an array of hot nails and screws spiked out of the fender, and told of a homemade bomb he would realize later. He bent over the nurse, her scrubs ripped open and bloody as the day she was born. From black holes the length of her seeped ribbons of blood. But she drew breaths and screamed again. Again and again like an infant. Henry felt for her jugular, femoral, auxiliary arteries. He tilted her to check underneath and her clothes and backside were pristine. He took her quivering hand.
She passed out or simply quit shrieking. He checked her breath and her pulse again, both faint and steady. People arrived, blanched, and departed. Someone touched his shoulder, uttered things, and left. There was a vibration in his pocket. He would realize later it was his phone, his wife calling and calling him from the pickup.
The police and paramedics arrived and pulled him from the woman’s side, and he heard his daughter yelling, “Daddy! DADDY!” He swagged heavily to the truck. Jill and Reba shouted at him for leaving them there and not answering his phone and slapped and clutched at him as he negotiated the key into the ignition, started the truck, and got them the hell gone. Saying, “Okay okay okay.”
Henry and his mother, wife, and daughter sat around the kitchen table, silent. Jill rubbed her belly as if her pregnancy were evident. The coffee had ceased steaming and the sun had gone up so far during their muted impasse that there was just a little quadrangle of light on the corner of the table. Like the last slice of cake. A housefly planed figure eights.
Jill had changed her mind.
Henry said that nothing had changed. They had decided before and what was settled was still settled. He set his palms on the table to indicate finality.
Kelly got up and rinsed her cup in the sink. Reba fingernailed a spot of cream on the table, ran rays from it. Jill jiggled in the chair like it was hot or vibrating under her, waiting for her mother or her grandmother to say something. She looked hard at her mother.
“You said we never should have gone, Mama. You said that.”
Henry passed his bandaged hand across his forehead as if to smooth the thoughts in there. What Jill said was true. On the way back Reba prayed. Begged forgiveness, thanked the Lord for sparing Henry. Said to God that they never should have gone to the clinic. Now she only nodded.
“He doesn’t even know,” Jill said. “Keith will come back when he knows he’s a daddy.”
“He’s a fuckwit,” Henry said.
“No, it’s not—”
“If you just loved it, Daddy.”
His words were like flintsparks, hot, quick, and seeking fuel: “I won’t ever love it, Jill.”
Her face rose white and ominous, and she stood, and a good majority of her love for him evaporated right then forever.
She went to her room, slammed her door, of course. The fly landed on her cup. Disappeared over the lip of it.
Reba leaned on an elbow toward him. “I’m gonna pretend,” she said, “that what happened, what awful things you saw, is why you just said that.”
“Wonderful,” Henry said. “You changed your mind, too.”
But she was already away from the table.
His mother was leaning against the sink, looking at him sadly. He’d never seen her cry. She didn’t now, but this was close to it.
“Christ, you too?” he asked.
“No. Not that.”
“Then what?”
“Henry. You’re my son. You could’ve been killed.”
He tasted his cold coffee, got up, and went out the side door.
That he could have been killed did not change how he felt. People die and people almost die all the time. Only the fortune in his life would ever astonish him. His ten water trucks, the nurse tankers, the 5,000-gallon water tenders. Four buildings. Mountains all around, and the acreage on three sides his too. That was a miracle. Death you could count on. His life he wasn’t so sure he deserved.
He walked out to the truck bay. A pair of his crew were grab-assing when he came up in the cavernous outbuilding, and they snapped to at the sight of him.
“Hey Mr. McGinnis. We about got this one lubed.”
“Good. Where’s the rest of you all?”
“Jeff and Church went for them parts you ordered. Ken and Ben are getting our lunch. Nick’s around.”
The two young men stood there greased to the elbows and waiting for him to say something. Warm oil in the air.
“You all can knock off early. Say, three?”
“Sure thing, Daddy.”
The heating sun made a corrugated panel boom into shape and sounded like someone had dropped a rubber hammer on it, and he flinched. The young men witnessed this without comment, glanced a couple times at his bandaged hand. Henry asked if they heard what had happened. They had.
“Was it gnarly?”
“Yes.”
“Man.”
“So it’s got around then?” Henry asked. “That we were down there? What we were down there for?”
They nodded. Henry put his hands on hips and affected an authority he didn’t feel.
“I want to be really clear,” Henry said. “I don’t want any of you talking to my family about what happened. Any of you breathe a goddamn word about it to Mrs. McGinnis or my daughter and you’re fucking fucked.”
“We wasn’t—”
“You hear?”
“Yessir.”
“In fact, don’t talk to her at all. Don’t so much as talk about her or look at her or nothing. I so much as get a whiff of you thinking about her, you’ll lose more than your goddamned job.”
Despite his efforts, Henry could not bury the incident and get them on with their lives. Two detectives from Missoula—nice enough, mustached and earnest and not even taking notes—had a hard time believing Henry or his family didn’t see anybody except the man with the placard. And the FBI agents in their black sedans and black sunglasses had a harder time. All those cars at the scene, and not one single person before the blast? The bomb had a remote detonator, not a timer. Someone had seen them—Henry and his family—and had decided to spare them. They should think about that, the FBI said.
Reba wouldn’t even listen to Henry about another clinic, the one in Spokane. At supper, Jill and Reba closed ranks—sitting close and stubborn and binary in some new and powerfully thwarting way—and left him puncturing the air with his fork when he tried to change their minds. And the sun went down, him at the dining room table, through the picture window there. An explosion of light from under the clouds and above the trees as the sun gloried in the last of the day. The murmuring behind Jill’s closed door was unbearable.
He went to his mother’s. She sat on the porch swing that his father had made and that to this day didn’t so much as creak. A filigree of roses on the armrests. The sheer skill and love in it. He sat next to her on it.
“She’s fifteen,” he said.
“Pshaw. In my day, you got pregnant, you got married. I’s fourteen, you recall.”
“I know.”
“Like I used to say, if you don’t like me, blame your father. He raised me.”
“I hate when you say that.”
Her cackling had startled a starling from the eaves.
“There ain’t a lick of him in my face, you know that? It’s all your side of the family,” he said.
“That’s too bad. He was a handsome devil.” She pushed the swing with her feet. “How’s your hand?”
“It’s fine.” He touched it. “I’m okay. I was really lucky.”
She nodded. “You want something to drink?”
He turned to her.
“Why you all like him so much?” he asked. “That kid, I mean.”
“Keith? I don’t know that we like him so much. Some people just have charisma, and you believe in them.” She touched a rose on the armrest. “I got some sun tea in there.”
“I’m all right. I just feel so helpless.”
“You’re far from helpless, Henry. You’re wonderful. You’re more successful than I ever imagined. But you’re just Jill’s daddy. And my boy.”
He felt hot shame like he hadn’t felt since he’d been a child, and she brought him sun tea but the glass sweated in his bandaged hand and he wanted something stronger, so he left.
He drank often. Afternoons alone in his office with a bottle or in his pickup by the river. An evening he spent a few hours at pinball in the Ten High with glasses of cold beer. The air conditioner cooled and then goosebumped his arms and neck. He felt considerably better. Burt and some of the old boys came in with wadded currency for dollar poker and bags of fried chicken that bloomed dark with grease. The belled pinball music gave him away in the corner, and Burt waved him over. His beer was empty so he went up to the bar and ordered another. The old men smoothing out their dollars looked up under hooded crow-footed eyes with something like sorrow in them, and Henry knew.
“A little walk, Burt?”
They took their beers outside with them. They squinted against the sunset until their pupils pinned, and then walked away from the sun boring into the mountains.
“How you all doing?” Burt asked.
“Fine.”
“Anything we can do. Just let me know.”
“Sure.”
“They find out who—”
“They don’t know shit.”
“Some kind of world we got going on.”
They didn’t stop at the end of the square but instead walked along the road out of town and to the bridge where they leaned over the rail. Henry spat into a pool just below them and fish the color of the stones, brown and green, flicked and dashed away.
“All because of our business down in Missoula. Our private business,” he said.
“Come again?”
“Why you’re gonna drop me,” Henry said.
He looked at Burt, and Burt watched the water dishing the two of them faintly in the pool
“Well now, there was that flood up at the fire camp. That’s a black eye right there. Now, I know that isn’t your fault. But there it is anyhow.”
Henry drank. Burt set his large pink hand on Henry’s shoulder.
“The boys asked if I’d throw my hat in. We’d like to have you aboard, Daddy.”
Henry removed the hand. Told Burt what he could do with his h
at.
On the Fourth of July, a roman candle caught the brush behind the old auto shop. Henry got a single truck out there at the same time the rural fire department arrived. The kids who were responsible for the fire scattered like tomcats when Henry spotted them peeking out from a pile of tires. The department fighters headed for the timber that was starting to catch, while Henry and a couple of his boys drove right into the thigh-high flames in the field with the back sprinklers blasting. The fire uncovered old Fords and Studebakers that stood out stark and abstract, their smoking frames hissing where the water hit them.
Henry and his crew fetched shovels from behind the cab and went to putting out hot spots by turning sod. The wet and black earth steamed where they worked. The fire department guys looked like they had a handle on the flames on the mountainside, but it was hard to tell what was going on in the smoke and the thick of the timber. For a while they watched a red city fire truck spray the wilderness. Large hawks sat nearly motionless and cruciate in thermal updrafts, looking for rabbits and mice flushed out by the flames.
“Let’s go look for spot fires,” Henry said to his boys, “before they have a chance to make more trouble.”
They spread out and went to work. Just beyond the smoldering area in front of him, a large hawk swooped down, snatched something from the wet unburned grasses, gliding low near the smoking earth, before it pumped itself skyward. Henry went to where this hawk had found prey. He moved his boot in the bearded darnel and wild columbine there, turning up clutch of wet eggshelled pheasants on folded wings not yet for flying. Moving like bats on their elbows and just as blind. Henry gripped the shovel and stood guard over the hatchlings, certain that they all had another thing coming.
MEAGAN DAY
■
Excerpt from Maximum Sunlight
FROM Wolfman Books
The following is an excerpt from Meagan Day’s debut book, Maximum Sunlight, which delves into life in a former mining town in Nevada’s Great Basin. It was published by Wolfman Books, a small press in Oakland, California, dedicated to experimental nonfiction, poetry, and artist books.
