Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  The rest is history.

  Night Flight

  After she moved back to her hometown in Kentucky, Wendy was careful not to get involved with a good old boy, or any guy with a single redneck tendency, or any who watched TV sports obsessively. Then she met Bob Jackson. He didn’t watch much TV. But he fished.

  On a Friday afternoon in June, Wendy drove to Bob’s weekend house in a small lakeside development with a marina. She wasn’t sure where the turnoff was, but then she recognized the sign, LITTLE BLUE HERON ESTATES, with a clumsily painted bird—royal blue. Several new building sites had been gashed out of the scrubby woods, and a dozen or so modest houses lined the gravel road, which branched along the inlet. A sign in the yard of an A-frame said DUNWORKIN. Nearby stood a bend-over—a painted plywood cutout of a fat woman bent over, her pantaloons showing beneath a polka-dotted dress. Bob’s house, a chalet-style prefab, sat near the airstrip being constructed to attract weekend residents from all over the five-state area.

  She found Bob at the marina, tying up his motorboat. When she kissed him, he tasted salty, as if he had been out on the ocean, not the lake. Corn chips, she realized.

  “They’re not biting,” he said. “It’s too calm. They get restful.”

  “It must be the drought.”

  He nodded and jerked his head toward the lake. “The crappie have gone out in the middle, in the deep drop-offs. Usually in early summer they hang around the banks.”

  Bob had sun-bleached blond hair with a reddish cast to it and a matching freckled complexion. His muscles were tan and hard. He was wearing a cinnamon tank-top and cutoff jeans, the raveled fringe hanging down unevenly and brushing his legs as he worked to secure the boat against the dock. He stuck his rod-and-reel and tackle in her hatchback, and they started down the short gravel stretch in her car. The minnow bucket sloshed at his feet. When her hand on the gear shift brushed his leg, he responded by caressing her bare leg up past the hem of her shorts. She pulled into his driveway, and he shot out of the car.

  “Last one in the sack is a rotten egg!” he cried.

  She had moved back to Kentucky from Florida only recently, and she was still tentative about returning to the place she had once been so eager to escape. But she had missed living in a place where life was slower and safer—the kind of place meant for raising families. In Florida, she had lived midway between the city and the beach. The motorcycle gangs arrived in February, followed by spring-break revelers. On her way to work every day, she drove past tomato fields. After the tomato plants began to turn yellow and the red fruit decorated the fields, the pickers arrived. One day they were suddenly there, early in the morning, stooping over with their baskets—living bend-overs. At the ends of the rows, they filled tubs with still-hard tomatoes and loaded them into a pickup truck. Wendy remembered the children snatching treats from the driver—candy or oranges. The oranges made her sad. In Florida oranges were hardly a treat.

  She still thought about the fields that ran to the horizon, the dying vines exposing the rotting fruit, the clutch of shacks at the border of the fields, the migrants playing cards on citrus crates by the roadside. Even now, when she bought vegetables, she found herself examining her hands and thinking of the workers’ hands, scabby from the pesticides.

  Her Florida boyfriend had been vituperative and paranoid, always seething about slime-balls and bastards everywhere. So now she was back, maybe romanticizing her memories of home, embracing what she had once rejected as provincial. She wondered if this was a case of reverse snobbery, or if it was another phase that would dissolve into something else. Bob Jackson, who managed a hardware store, was like a test case. He didn’t read much, except outdoor magazines. He had never heard of inverted yield curves or fractals. He had never listened to Pink Floyd until she showed him the video of the Pompeii concert. He seemed to like it. He was one of those guys who drove a pickup truck and wore a cap that was likely to say “Big Snapper” or “John Deere” on the front. She used to call good old boys GOBs, but now the acronym seemed as appalling as a racial slur. She thought she had long ago gotten away from men who got wrecked on beer every weekend. But Bob intrigued her. It was true that he drank a lot of beer, but he didn’t have a beer belly, and somewhere he had learned not to be boorish. One night recently they had been walking from a shopping strip across a street to where they had parked. A large sixties-vintage car crammed with guys holding their six-packs like lap dogs pulled out of a gas station. From an open window in the back, one of the men yelled at Wendy, “Hey, honey! Let’s get naked and spit!” She burst out laughing. She was surprised that Bob laughed too. He didn’t bristle. The car disappeared, and he was still laughing with her.

  The furniture in Bob’s chalet was Early American, all matching and new. He said he had ordered everything in one phone call, including some wall plaques of brass ducks in flight. Wendy examined Bob’s trophy and listened to fish stories. In mid-April, when the crappie ran to the shallows to spawn, he had spent several days at the lake, fishing in the annual crappiethon. His freezer was full of fish, and now he fried some crappie and microwaved frozen store-bought hush puppies and french fries. After supper he showed her some snapshots he’d taken at the lake during the spring.

  “Back in April, something happened out here that spooked me,” he said, pausing over a shot of a sunset. “I woke up and thought I heard somebody crying—like a kitten stranded up in a tree. I looked up through the skylight. The trees had budded but hadn’t leaved out yet. There was a bunch of bats out there, jumping around through the trees. Maybe this little noise was bats, but I thought bats squeaked at some high range humans can’t pick up. I was half asleep and I’d been dreaming about being in a boat race—I guess I was excited and tense about the crappie run. I kept hearing it. It was an animal I’d never heard before. It was like a bird but sort of like a baby. I’ve been outdoors all my life, hunting and fishing, and I’ve never heard anything like that.”

  “At night your imagination seems to take over, doesn’t it?”

  He shook his head. “It was weird—like that Pink Floyd of yours,” he said, pulling at the raveling on the edge of his cutoffs.

  “But you like Pink Floyd,” she said with a laugh. “So they’re yours too!”

  Her eyes hit on the fish mounted on the wall. It was a twenty-pound catfish, in a pose of struggle. Beneath it, on a table, was a picture of Bob’s son, a blond boy in a baseball cap reaching up eagerly to something out of camera range, like a dog about to jump up for a stick. Once, at a produce stand in Florida, near the migrants’ shacks, Wendy had seen a little boy taunting a rooster, having a mock fight with it over a crust of bread. The rooster suddenly pecked a scab off the child’s knee. The boy didn’t cry. He just gazed in surprise at the blood trickling down his leg.

  That night Wendy slept fitfully, and when she found herself fully awake, she realized she had been listening, in her sleep, for the unusual animal Bob had heard. An echo of a dream drifted around in her mind. She saw a bat cross the skylight. Bob had said he saw the bats jumping around, and she wondered if the word “bat” derived from “acrobat.” It seemed odd that she had never thought of that before. Bob was snuffling a polite little snore. She could feel his body radiating heat. She eased out of bed and went to sit by the living room window. It was a moonlit night, and the landscape was washed silver with a dark backdrop of trees. The window had reflective glass; nothing could see in, but she could see out. That was true for daytime, but she wasn’t sure about night. She imagined peeking in at their lives here in a few years—if they ended up together. He was vague about his ex-wife and the little boy, Todd, and Wendy suspected he wasn’t over the marriage. Love frightened her. It seemed so arbitrary—a temporary madness, a blurring of perception.

  She saw her eight years in Florida as a peculiar interlude, as if she had been wafting through the future like one of those parasailors she had seen riding through the sky on a parachute behind a motorboat. Sometimes in Florida she had suddenly
asked herself, “Who do you think you are?” It struck her as unnatural and wrong that she—a small-town girl whose earliest ambition was to be a veterinarian—should be working on the twentieth floor of an icy air-conditioned building in one-hundred-degree weather. Now she looked back at her time in the corporate world as an aberration—like her schooling, an adolescent stage. Reading Marx or Camus was something you might do in college, when you’re trying out possibilities, but not later, as an adult.

  A faint hum entered her thoughts, growing until she realized she was hearing an airplane. A dog howled, far away. The plane was coming closer, and a light appeared, but in a moment the light blinked out. The engine seemed to quit. And then she heard—not a crash, but the plane’s wheels whooshing fast on asphalt. Then the engine roared again. The plane had landed on the airstrip beyond the A-frame just ahead, and just as suddenly it was taking off. It passed so near the house she could see the outline of the wings, like some shadowy prehistoric bird. She followed the sound, and soon the red winking light appeared again. It faded out beyond the trees, and in a moment she heard a vehicle crunching on the gravel road down by the marina.

  She darted up the stairs to the bedroom. “Something’s happening,” she said, shaking Bob.

  He woke up easily. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “A plane landed but didn’t stop. It cut its engines and its lights and just glided in and then took off. Then I heard a truck or something.”

  He staggered out of bed to look out the window. “There’s nothing there now,” she said, as they stood in front of the window, both nearly naked.

  “Crazy fool,” he said, shaking the sleep from his eyes. “This happened once before, back in April.”

  “The airstrip’s not even finished, is it?”

  “No. And it wasn’t nothing but dirt back then.”

  “Remember how kids used to drag-race at the old airport late at night?”

  “Yeah. I used to do that.” They stood there for a moment, touching each other. He said, “A buddy of mine was driving to Atlanta once, and he passed some airport—Charlotte, North Carolina, I think. All of a sudden there was this plane landing right beside him. The runway was parallel to the road. He looked over and, by God, it was Air Force One—landing! But the funny thing was, it just touched down and took off again, like that plane just now.” He spoke enthusiastically, running his hand through his hair like a cat suddenly licking its shoulder.

  Wendy woke up at first light, made coffee, and took a mug out to the patio, sliding the glass door quietly. The air felt like rain, but she knew it was only the early-morning haze. The birds were singing—a loud, earnest congregation. She had forgotten to bring her bird book.

  “Did you get back to sleep O.K.?” Bob called down from the balcony.

  “Mmmm.”

  “Not too jangled?”

  “No. It was just odd.”

  “I’d say it was probably somebody picking up a load of marijuana, but it’s too early in the season.”

  With a mug of coffee, he joined her on the patio. There were wrinkled-sheet prints etched on his cheek. He said, “I dreamed I was taking flying lessons, and now that I’m awake I realize that’s exactly what I want to do.”

  “What? Fly?”

  “I guess so. The dream must have brought it out in me.” He laughed at himself for some reason. He scooted his chair backwards, scraping the bricks. A nearby robin hopped across the grass. “When they started building that airstrip I started thinking about how nice it would be to taxi right up to the front door. And now I’m thinking—by God, why not? I can afford it.” He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “Come on, coffee,” he said. “Do your job.”

  “Won’t it bother you, having all those planes buzzing over your house when the airstrip is finished?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “It’s just one of those things. Progress. I don’t think I’d ever get bored watching airplanes.”

  “I meant the noise.”

  He laughed and tweaked her knee. “Airplanes make noise, Wendy. What do you expect?”

  Late in the afternoon Bob’s friends Jerry and Kim arrived in a junky Silverado. They were drinking cans of Coors.

  “I’m afraid my mother’s having some kind of breakdown,” Kim said as she set her can on a patio table. “She called me from St. Louis this morning in tears. It just didn’t sound like Mother.”

  “Kim always has to have something to worry about,” Jerry said, belching.

  “I’m Wendy,” said Wendy.

  “Nice to meet you,” Kim and Jerry said simultaneously.

  “Has Bob been talking you to death with his fish stories?” Jerry teased.

  “No, but he’s been feeding me plenty of those crappie he caught this spring,” said Wendy with a forced smile. She instantly disliked Jerry’s loud personality and his beer gut, which was like a pregnancy with the baby carried high. Wendy wondered if people got louder as they gained weight.

  Jerry guffawed. “He’s feeding you plenty of crap, not crappie!”

  Bob said, “Come on, Jerry, I need some help here. Don’t go giving Wendy the wrong ideas about me.”

  Kim and Jerry were sunburned and oily, after a day out water-skiing with a borrowed motorboat. On the patio, where they gathered with some more beers, Jerry rubbed sunburn cream on Kim’s back. Her swimsuit straps dangled down, revealing white stripes. She had one of those boyish haircuts that had been in style several years before. It was less than half an inch long all over and moussed to look bristly. Wendy thought it looked good on Kim.

  When Bob told Kim and Jerry about the airplane landing in the night, Jerry said, “I imagine it was a drug drop-off from Colombia.”

  “Really?” Wendy was startled.

  “We’re not as out of touch here as people think,” he said. “We’re big-time.”

  “There’s still a lot of cocaine coming up here,” said Kim. “Bob, have you got any scissors? I’m going to whack that raveling off your shorts. It’s driving me crazy.”

  Kim snipped the threads off Bob’s shorts, and when she pulled some of the hairs on his leg he joked that he couldn’t afford her haircut prices. It would not have occurred to Wendy to cut off those threads. She plunged a chip into a bowl of salsa Bob had set on a stool next to his boom box, which was going full-blast.

  “I thought moving back here would be like moving back in time,” Wendy said. She moved a wad of wet towels from a plastic chair.

  “There’s a lot of meanness around nowadays,” Kim said. “I don’t mean just children murdering each other at school.”

  “All that, and the law’s still worried about potheads,” Jerry said. “The sheriff’s office is full of pictures of marijuana plants he’s pulled out of people’s cornfields.”

  “And probably took home to cure for himself!” said Kim.

  Jerry and Kim were like a cross-talk act, jabbering at Wendy in a way that was hard for her to follow. Each seemed to be trying to outdo the other as they proceeded to report the details of their water-skiing adventures that afternoon. Wendy stepped over a pack of curl-tail plastic worms and Bob’s crappie rig, a special pole with hooks spaced two feet apart. She could imagine fish lined up to feed on the pole like piglets at a sow. She followed Bob through the bright reflections on the sliding glass door, into the kitchen. He had told her he couldn’t have survived the trauma of his divorce if it hadn’t been for Jerry’s friendship. Wendy couldn’t imagine how that went.

  The salad bowl contained screws and nails and flashlight batteries. Bob emptied it into a paper sack and began washing the bowl.

  “Is it true? I mean about the cocaine?” Wendy asked.

  “Who knows?” He rinsed the bowl and shook the water from it. “Remember the bananas? All the bananas used to come up here from New Orleans on the train and they’d get unloaded in Fulton, and then get shipped in all directions, all over the country. I think it’s like that—a central location.”

  “The heartland,” she suggested.


  “Whatever that means.”

  “Do they still have the banana festival every year?”

  “Yeah. The world’s biggest banana pudding gets bigger every year. But it’s like everything else nowadays, just something that’s supposed to remind you of how things used to be.”

  She dried the bowl. “I wish I had some banana pudding like my grandmother used to make.”

  “You’ve been away too long, Wendy.”

  “I guess,” she said idly.

  Bob backed her up against a broom in the corner between the refrigerator and the open hall door. He said with a grin, “Do you think it could be any easier with us than it is with most people?”

  “I don’t know,” she murmured. “It looks easy. But I’m afraid it’s not.”

  “I’m scared too,” he said abruptly.

  Kim walked in on their embrace but didn’t seem to notice. She disappeared into the bathroom. Wendy could see Jerry out on the patio fooling with a fishing rod, casting out across the grass and reeling in a large wad of plastic trash.

  The day’s heat had accumulated in a stuffy gauze over the sky, and the light was washing out. Wendy and Kim followed a trail through the marsh, where a green heron was poking about in the shallows. Lily pads—double-deckers the size of serving trays, with colossal blossoms—carpeted the edge of the water. A woodcock flew overhead. Shafts of dusty light blazed through the dim woods. Wendy peered ahead, trying to spot the nineteenth-century iron furnace she knew was beyond the marsh.