Lark and Termite

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  Lark says the island draws lightning like a steel pole, standing bare in the water between two shores. It’s why they stay in the tunnel in summer thunderstorms, hearing the double blur of the river and the rain. He can feel the air go tight before thunder cracks, he can smell the burn. He smells it now above the clouds. They’re piled one on another, bruised and bunched. Lark smells of her dark hair and the lemony close scent of her mouth. She touches her fingers to her lips and rubs at his skin, near his mouth and nose, and he smells the taste of a kiss. A kiss is small on his forehead or his face, but the island stands up in the water like a dense, pushed kiss the river could swallow. The river shifts in silted layers, stirring the dark and dropping it. Wind cuts the water in white pieces. Solly’s on his knees beside the wagon, holding Lark in the cool of the tunnel, his face against her legs. Lark says to let go.

  You’re bleeding, aren’t you, Lark. I can tell when. Does it hurt?

  The river is clattering, running fast and rushing.

  Solly says he knows. The elastic belt with the metal clasps and thick napkins. Two on heavy days. Joey’s girlfriend keeps all that stuff at the house.

  Lark, I can make the pain stop. Let me.

  Termite wants the roar and blur. He says until they turn the wagon to where the water flashes white. Lark puts her skirt on him like a blanket. Wool, to keep you warmer Termite. Blanket head, Solly says. Now you can see the river. Lark wears her sweater and jacket and knee socks. Her long pale legs, her shoes.

  We’re here at the river, Lark. Lie on my coat. Let me touch you.

  Your hand will be bloody.

  Fill my hand. There. Shhh. You see? Lie back.

  The river is rattling loud and wind stirs the trees one way. Naked slivers of the smallest branches move, far up in the tops of the trees. Lark is breathing and Solly says inside her sounds. Give me your hands. See how warm and wet you are. Touch me, like that. The river is flat and turns, sparkling before it smashes the stones of the railroad bridge and rushes against the island. Clouds move and the light goes bright and soft and bright.

  Solly, it’s the last time, last time, last time.

  Solly stands in the water to his hips, looking at her and looking. The river moves fast around him.

  You never let me, Lark. Don’t let anyone else.

  Wind edges the water. Lights in the water turn and dive, little fish that bend. The lights go down, sliding and stabbing deep. Termite wants to be inside the river. He wants to stay but Lark goes. Lark sits close beside him and the river holds the island, pressing on every side. The island is round and the river makes the shape. He turns his head to listen. Deer stand up from the flattened weeds of the island and walk into the open. He feels them move, three forms lit dark against the sun, slashing dandelion with their teeth and tearing the ruffled grass, raising and lowering their heads. Then they’re still, smelling the air.

  They’re waiting for the roar. He closes his eyes and the river opens inside him. The river and the tunnel darken around him and he feels the river roll, deep and thick, folding like drenched fabric. The deer dips its antlered head and plunges, ripping the water, tearing it in sheets, moving toward them in a shape that churns, huffing like wind in a box. The roiling water is thick and dense and the deer’s chest heaves. He feels the animal thrash in the deepening pull, froth in its teeth, and he tells the deer no, tries to tell, and he breathes. He wants to go, ride the stab and thrust of the deer’s legs, the thrash of animal limbs against the weight. The roar of the water is a train pouring through the dark and the picture inside him opens wide. He sees inside the roar to where the bodies are sleeping and waiting to move. So many bodies, tangled in one another, barely stirred. They want to move, lifted, turning, but they can’t speak or see. One shape stands and opens its shining hands and the roaring light goes white. The pounding starts, pounding and pounding until the picture blurs and stops.

  It’s all right, Termite, a deer was in the river.

  You’re tired, Lark says. We’ll go now.

  The field is tall as Lark’s shoulders when she turns and moves. He sits quiet in the wagon and the grass is all around him. She tells him the locusts are still because rain is coming, but he wants to hear their rapid clatter. Not today, Lark says, they’ve moved to the woods, to the big trees with cracks and holes deep enough to hide them. The ragged orange cat hides too, nosing the beetle and biting small, deep in its stone cleft, high in the wall of the railroad tunnel. The wagon crushes a path and the grass parts sharp around him. He hears the field growing, surging like an engine, flung erect in the heat, and he opens his hands to touch the slow hot buzz that runs to every root. But Lark walks fast against the push of the grass. The field ends and the grass stops. The white stones in the alley make their rolling whisper.

  Clouds are blowing apart. Soon they’ll fall. Lark pulls the wagon to Nonie’s low front porch. They never go this way, on the sidewalk to the street. Someone stands there, blowing like a flag.

  Termite, Lark says. Mr. Stamble is here from Social Services.

  A cool pale light has found him. The light bends over him.

  You remember me, Termite. That’s your name? My name’s Robert.

  Voices rush and tumble behind Stamble’s voice, flying and gathering. The voices are in the stones of the alley and in the street by Nonie’s house, moving along the slanted broken walk by the front stoop. Voices gather in the rusted pleats of the metal awning over the front door. All the spaces are thick with sounds.

  Stamble puts flowers in the wagon. He piles their smells on a pour of grasses so thick and sharp Lark says no one can pull them up. Don’t pull at them Termite, they’ll cut you. A round stem breaks but blades have threads like cloth. The grasses and their white roots lie quiet under the flowers. Colors too deep to see, thick with dust and nectar.

  Stamble moves above him, unfolds a ticking of wheels Lark says she’s never seen. The rain begins, pouring, spitting hard. Blowing away and stammering back.

  You see would you like to try.

  Termite feels Stamble’s white hair blow and hears the wind whip his clothes. Stamble knows about the roar and the field. He knows the river turns and slides and tunnels deep and he knows about the trains. He comes close, his face by Termite’s face. He’s a blur of pale hair and rippling white sleeves, lit with the light inside the roar. He opens like a moon, round and soft with voices that could push and move, but Stamble holds them still. He stands with the wind behind him and he opens his hands. He touches Termite’s head and his hands leave a shine where they touch.

  The wind is going to get stronger, he says.

  Smithereens. All this heavy air.

  Stamble knows the blue can pour and break. Termite hears it burst in Nonie’s kitchen, a tiny shattering and drip of blue. The lowering sky is too full to move. Banks of cloud high up are rolling, darkening. Stamble speaks without talking. You’ll be safe here, he says. I’m going now. I’ll be back for you. Then he’s gone. The rain begins, thundering in sheets, swallowing voices and sounds. Lark pulls Termite inside. The rain is drumming, pounding and pounding. He knows his pictures hang in the dim light of the basement, curling their paper edges. Deep inside his pictures, the man and the animal stand up and hear the shapes.

  North Chungchong Province, South Korea

  JULY 27, 1950

  Corporal Robert Leavitt

  24th Infantry Division

  He’s conscious, alert, as though no time has passed. He covers vast distances and then he’s here. He can’t feel his legs or hips or loins, yet there’s intense physical sensation in his thoughts, his delusions, a sense of movement in space and time. He knows the girl won’t take him to the entrance of the tunnel. She doesn’t believe the Americans would come for him. They’re shooting at any sound or movement, and she won’t risk being injured or killed, leaving the boy alone.

  She’s left him alone though, left him with Leavitt. It must be after midnight. Leavitt sees the boy sitting near him, hunched in his odd postu
re as though keeping watch, listening. Leavitt is left in the care of a blind child, left to care for the child if she doesn’t come back. He sees the boy’s hands hovering over him, his fingers open and parted, faintly moving. Leavitt tries to speak to him, but he only makes a sound, an exhalation. The boy turns his head as though to hear more intently, moves to touch his wrist to Leavitt’s face. It’s as though he reads sound with touch, as though his fingers are too sensitive to bear contact and he discerns sensation with the underside of his wrist. He holds himself carefully, expressionless but for the careful tilt of his head. His face is smoothly flawless and distinctly heart shaped, his forehead unusually high and broad. His straight black hair is chopped short in so many lengths it looks feathered, wispy. He sits, insectlike, his thin legs drawn up. He seems to stare at Leavitt with eyes that never move or waver, and the startling pale blue splash in his black irises is the last image Leavitt sees as his vision quietly fades, a light turned down to nothing.

  The dark is low and painless, and Leavitt peers into it, fighting a low flutter of panic. He feels the boy with him, deeply near him. It’s as though he’s waiting for Leavitt to hear, just as before when the planes were approaching, but now he doesn’t seem alarmed. Leavitt can’t move, he’s only here, drifting behind his eyes. He tries to listen intently, sense fragments of information as the boy might sense or apprehend them. He thinks of the old woman, the mudang priestess wrapped in her cloth. Shamanism was country superstition, a practice of the rural poor. He wonders if the boy was shunned in the village, or if the old woman’s status protected him. He’s calm, intensely present. What was their word for a male witch. Paksu. Male shaman. Called by the spirits through heredity, or after hardship, deathly wounds, illness. Survival was transformation. Not so strange, when survival itself was miraculous. They communed with the other world in trance states, delivered messages, directions.

  Leavitt listens for the boy, senses him move closer. He hears, then, the flow of cool air high above them, moving along the pocked ceiling of the tunnel, thirty or forty feet up. The air they breathe is dense with smell and fear, but the air along the curved stones above them is clear and buoyant and fast. Leavitt hears it moving as though windblown, scudding along like water. He closes his eyes, opens them, discerns no visual difference, but feels the boy shift his crouching stance. He touches Leavitt’s face and moves away, stays near, waiting. Leavitt can’t see, but he feels the displaced air move and separate, thick and viscous as honey disturbed with a spoon. He hears patterns of sound, dappled and distinct. It’s the sound of the stream, murmuring in the ground under them, to the other side of the dense wall. The water sighs and rattles and crosses the road at the far end of the tunnel. The boy is no paksu, but he has a blind, hyperalert focus and awareness. The boy only waits, as though Leavitt will know what he knows, hear what he hears, inside the inability to move or do. To be nothing that way, Leavitt thinks, this way, to be held and carried, placed or taken, a bright awareness moved here or there like a fire in a cup. Or had the boy moved and walked in his hamlet, dependent on familiarity, never far from the girl, until the flight and confusion of the war. The bombing, the sounds of approach and skirmish, of invasion, the smell of smoke. Leavitt and his men striding through, gesturing with their rifles, shouting.

  Leavitt tries to slow his breathing. He closes his eyes to let the dark go black, and listens. Slowly, sounds deepen and layer. They’re dimensional, spatial. He begins to hear what the boy hears, the sound the boy wants him to hear. He hears the girl, her quiet breathing, her effort and silence, as though he’s in her head. He hears her pulling herself forward with her arms, low and careful, toward the stream at the rear of the tunnel. Smells the dirt of the tunnel, the damp of the moss near her face. He’s behind her eyes, moving with her, creeping forward flush with the wall. The soldiers answer any skitter of stones, any involuntary cry or motion, with artillery rounds, one group shooting in response to the other. The girl waits, moves, waits, crawling, flat to the ground, Leavitt’s empty canteen strapped to her back. Her torn clothes are stained with blood, brackish dark red patterns pressed into her as she lay against Leavitt, moved him, moved the old woman and wrapped her body. The girl pauses, listens. Even her undergarment is stained black orange. There’s a smell to the water when she reaches it, and patterns of tree limbs, leaves, eddying movement. The arch of the tunnel opening above her is reflected in the moonlit surface, and the inverted image shimmers, a black curve, anonymous but specific. He doesn’t know why the image is so familiar, why he knows this shape of curves and shadows. It’s as though he was on his way here, or it’s the same curving image everyone sees as the brain shuts down, the same apprehension of space curving into the unseen. Yet he’s awake, aware.

  He hears, in the dark, the sound of the girl pulling off her bunched shirt, feels her throw it into the water by one long sleeve. It’s as though he’s beside her with the stream in sight. Quietly, she lies prone, one pale arm extended beyond the mouth of the tunnel. The white she wore when he first saw her would have attracted attention, but the stained cloth is dark now, filthy and discolored. She drags the shirt back over the ground. He hears her bury her face in the wet cloth, drink the squeezed water. She throws the shirt back repeatedly to soak it, draws it toward her soundlessly, wrings the water into the canteen. Finally she holds the wet cloth in her arms and turns to come back to them, moving against such resistance, such terrible drag, close to the tunnel wall.

  She’s speaking to him, whispering. She wants him to drink. Her long black hair smells of the stream and falls across his throat. Somewhere, Leavitt thinks, no matter the confusion, command is deciding on a plan of action. Squeezed by the speed of the invasion, endangered by their own lack of troops, the need to support the retreat, the Americans will move at daybreak. Only some massive reversal, a melee in which the Koreans in the tunnel are overlooked, can stop what is coming. Leavitt feels it approach, a weight and dense opacity, a pressure in the air, a storm of vibration coming closer. The girl wets her hand and touches his throat, his mouth. It’s a cloudless night. He can’t see the moonlight but he can feel it, shining off the pale wall of the tunnel.

  July 28

  Winfield, West Virginia

  JULY 28, 1959

  Lark

  Rain falling across the alley and the backyards looks green as grass against washed brush and soaked trees. You see through it like it might rain forever, and you forget how hard it’s pouring until you stand out in it. Nonie said the rain drummed all night, and she went to work early in case they have any water to mop up at the restaurant. The backyard looks thick and spongy. Dimpled water stands in the tracks of the alley, and I’m staring out the screen door, feeling the rush of breath falling water makes. Termite likes the sound and he likes it if I shut the back door, open it, shut it again, like I’m changing the weather in the room. I shut the door and think about the water coming up, how it’s moving up the slant in the basement floor. I butter the toast, and when I turn to open the door again Solly is there, up close in a dull black slicker, water running off his face in the billed hood.

  “Lark, you OK?” He’s nearly shouting in the sluice of the water. “My dad said to drop off these water jugs. He said to fill them while the tap still works, in case the power goes off.”

  I move to let him in and the hood falls back off his wet hair. I realize I haven’t seen him close since before I left school, since I’d pass him in the halls and he’d look at me, some girl or other trailing after him. It got around that we were cousins, to explain the looks between us and the growing up together, our houses like two shambling arms of the same building, except Solly’s is bigger. Cousins because people think of Nonie and Nick Tucci as weirdly related, both alone with kids living off the alley, like we’re all a tribe down here, not quite across the tracks but almost. And we’ve got these missing persons, like old mysteries.

  “You want some toast?” I ask Solly.

  He looks at the hot bread in my hands, an
d then he’s at the sink with the plastic jugs. “No thanks,” he says.

  He steps out of his boots and I see the shine of blond whiskers along his jaw, on his cheeks that look hollowed out. He’s got such long bones, Solly does, and a bruisy mouth, like his lips are a little swollen. Most people wouldn’t say he’s handsome. His face is too mismatched, the square chin and straight nose, the deep-set eyes. He stands there dripping on the linoleum by the shelves of cans and bottles, filling the plastic jugs and capping them, and a steam nearly rises off him. The rain is cool and warm at once. “Seems strange to put water by with so much of it pouring down,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, well, if you end up on the roof you could catch it in your hands and drink it. May not come to that, but the river is rising fast. They don’t expect the crest until tonight. Lumber Street will flood for sure and they’ve closed the bridge. Nonie go to work today?”

  “Sure. She and Charlie? You kidding? They’d go to work unless the town closed down.”

  “It just might. Lark, the Armory is open. They’ve got food, cots, a generator. I could take you and Termite there now, just in case. No need for boats.”

  “He’d like a boat ride.” I smile, but Solly doesn’t. I fold Termite’s toast in a four-square and put it in his hand. That way he can hold it himself. “Solly, you know the Armory will scare him, all those people, all that noise. We need to stay here unless we really have to leave. Even if Nonie can’t get home tonight, I can manage.”

  “How will you manage?”

  “We have a bed in the attic, and room for groceries and blankets and water. I’ve stacked up some of the furniture down here. Maybe you can help me get some things upstairs. The rest will have to fend for itself.” I’m standing behind Termite’s chair, and I look over at Solly. It feels hard to walk over near him, cross a few squares of linoleum flooring, but I do. We stand at the kitchen window, inches apart, nearest the pour of the rain. “If it gets bad enough, you’ll come and get us.”