Lark and Termite

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  “You feel this,” he says, almost like he’s surprised. Then he steps away from me.

  I don’t let myself move after him. He stands across the little room from me, by the kitchen window, looking at me, and looking. This is how people get caught. Past his shoulder, I see that it’s dusk.

  “You shouldn’t stay here tonight,” he says.

  “Termite wants to.”

  He shakes his head. “Keep the doors locked. This part of town is deserted. I’ll check on you as I come home. I don’t know where Solly is, but I can send Zeke over to stay with you.”

  “It’s OK, Nick. We’re fine.” I open the kitchen door, and he walks past me, into the yard. All the dark, wet warmth spills out with him.

  He turns to me, halfway to his car, his eyes lit and full. “You’re my girl. I’m going to take care of you, both of you.” I watch him drive away. The wrapper, that thud. He would have left his car at the plant, to save it from the water. Nick is gone. He did that just right, I think, so that it could go either way. I feel warm with relief, almost faint, as though I could lie on the floor and sleep, but it’s getting late. There’s not much time.

  I hear Termite in the quiet, letting me know. We’re fine. We’re fine. We’re fine.

  You have to ride in this,” I say to him. “Again. You have to.”

  I fasten the strap snug across him and pull down the metal footrests for his feet. He didn’t want to move from his soft chair, and he doesn’t want to leave it. I’ll ask Charlie to send it to us somehow, bring it to us in a truck. The day has cooled off some. I pull on an old sweater of Nonie’s because Termite will miss her and like the smell of it, then I tie the wagon onto Stamble’s wheelchair by a length of rope. I pile in the duffel bag of clothes, the sleeping bags, jugs of water Solly filled, a laundry bag of food. If I stand just behind Termite’s chair, pushing and walking, the line of the rope pulls taut beside my hip and the wagon stays in line pretty well. It’s not downhill to the rail yard, it’s nearly uphill, a long gradual slant. Good thing you’re a strong girl, Nonie would say. Just at dark we get going. It’s hard through the alley, but the street moving out of the dank flood zone gets easier. The broken pavement that leads to the rail yard is a hard surface, and we don’t make much of a sound. His chair is near silent on those wheels and we’ve got Stamble to thank, in his nowhere, wherever he came from, wherever he went. The chair looks almost new, and I’ve got Termite’s blanket in the pack slung over the back, his pillow, the moon pitcher, the deed Charlie gave me, the money, and the keys. In the duffel, folded in with our clothes, I brought the flag and the gun, and my mother’s metal box.

  All the rest is gone, gone from us, the alley and the house, and the town and the stores and the flood. Flood Relief will buy the house and tear it down. Nonie should come south, see what’s left where it’s never winter. Charlie can open a diner where the ocean is a flood that stays in place. The river will follow us to it, branching and turning, visible awhile, dipping away beside the tracks, retreating into woods, crossing along and under us while the train roars over it. We have to get to the rail yard in time. Find a Chessie car. To make it happen I think of the cat’s face on the steel sides of the boxcars, that silhouette shape as big as we are, and I say to myself, I can manage, I can manage, in case no one is there, no one but us.

  I must have said it out loud, because Termite says it too. Low, careful tones. Manage, manage. “Shhh,” I tell him, then he’s quiet, and I am. It won’t do, talking to myself, it won’t do in job interviews or offices, in a town where there are flowers all winter.

  Closer to the yard, I can see the stray dogs loping between ruined houses, over the mud that’s dried on the drowned grass. A door lies twisted off its hinges, flat as a raft across a sodden shoe. All the Polish kids are gone, the houses empty. Flood Relief is maybe a chance to do better. But Nonie said most of them will move into subsidized housing on the other side of town, no more floods, no high water, just brick apartment buildings with concrete courtyards. She says Nick will keep his house, clean the mud off the porch and kitchen linoleum, renovate with Relief funding. Zeke and Solly carried nearly everything, even the rugs, upstairs. Finally, Nick told her, a reason for sons, and if Joey had been there he’d have held back the water itself.

  The water’s nearly gone now, but the mark and smell of it are everywhere. The rail yard is higher than the alley houses or the river, and the steel of the tracks glows ahead of us in faint lines. No one sees us but the dogs, and they gather a house lot away, six or seven of them, furtive for now, separate from one another, like they’re seeing us off. They’ve got to be hungry. Nothing here anymore, no trash cans to turn over, no scraps. By the time we get to the yard, they’ve come together behind us. They’re pretty far back and they’ve slowed, catching some instinct drift, sizing us up. I move a little faster, but not too fast. I could back them off with a few well-aimed stones if I turned around and yelled, but I can’t yell. It seems there’s no one but there’s always someone, and no one can hear or see or find a sign of us. I’ll have to find an open car, lift everything up quickly.

  The yard looks almost normal except that the ditch along the edge is full of floodwater and wider, like a little canal. The chute from the tipple’s been gone for years. The double ramp up to it, the platforms they loaded from, are still there, running alongside the tracks like a roller-coaster structure no one ever finished. Tracks for the coal carts still gleam along the slant on top. They ran up a few carts at a time, emptied them into the tipple so they could load the long flatbed cars that ran north to Cleveland, east to Pittsburgh, south to Memphis, and everywhere. The lower platform’s for freight, with a broad dock behind. They moved boxcars opposite to unload. Once a wide steel ramp slid across right into the cars. There was noise and motion. Men walked back and forth, heaving, hauling, but there’s no freight now, and the boxcars sided here are empty. Some go by with their big doors flung open. The engines that push and pull them don’t even have engineers. They run on switches, shunted and slammed from empty yard to yard until they’re run down south and loaded. Winfield is just a siding, not even that, now the tracks from the northeast are torn up. No reason to fix them. The trains will stop altogether. These cars will move on schedule to be switched off down south, all the way south. We’ve got fifteen minutes.

  There are three Chessie cars and I stop at the one with open doors. It looks clean, where I can see. Moonlight slants in at the back, like it’s falling through a window. There must be slats on one side, ventilation for moving livestock. In the days we’ll have to be careful, but there’ll be air and a way to see out. “This one’s ours, Termite.”

  He looks up, head back, like he’s thinking it over. I start to lift him out and realize he’s listening hard. The dogs. He’s heard them, creeping up, and I grab a handful of gravel, throw it hard behind us in a steady arc. They back off. The floor of the boxcar is about as high off the ground as my chest. I throw in the capped water jugs and hear them roll along the floor, then I lift in the duffel bag, the laundry sack with the food. I push them in as far as I can reach, then lift Termite in beside. He tilts over onto them like a rajah on his pillows, hands up, fingers still. Speechless. Soft bars of moonlight fall across his face and his pale hair. His eyes move. He’s in a darkened, shattered marble with its colors held tight, waiting inside a roar he must know is coming. He can’t see me, but he hears me throw in the backpack, the sleeping bags. Boxcar camping, I’ll tell him, three days and nights, maybe four.

  Solly’s nowhere. I don’t see him, don’t hear him. I’ll manage. I’ve got to get the wagon and the wheelchair in. I can’t leave anything to say we were here, where we’re going, how we got there. The floor of the car is smooth, not slatted; I put in a couple of big stones, to stop the wagon wheels, keep it from rolling once I get it in. The wheelchair isn’t as heavy as the wagon. I fold it, push it up sideways, and I’ve got it just inside when I feel the dog come up. I’ve got the rock in my hand when it pounces, sl
ams into me snarling, hard and lean, turning with me against the side of the car. Nonie’s thick sweater rips in its teeth as we swing round and I slam the rock into its head, slam its head so hard against the steel car I think the world thuds. But it’s the train, slamming into motion. Somewhere far down the line, a shudder starts and builds. The dog drops away from me, silent in the noise, wobbling like a broken toy. I can hear its brains click, stunned or smashed, and I want it to creep away, crawl if it has to, away from here. In case it doesn’t, I throw the bloody rock into the dark of the car. There’s an almost human, overwhelmed groan as the train lurches sharply backward. The wagon is heaviest so I lift it at an angle, front wheels in the car, lean hard, and push. The boxcar shudders and helps take it in, pulls it up, moving. There’s an instant when I realize the click I heard was time ruined, thrown off just long enough. Running, I think about my mother’s little gun folded into the bottom of the duffel, about Termite, how I would have shot us both if I’d thought we could be separated. Lunging for the edge of the boxcar, I feel the hard metal edge in my hands and vault up, swing my legs up and over, scramble to fall forward rather than back.

  I don’t know at first. Then I feel the roll of motion under me, and how lightning fast things can go right or wrong. In just a mile or two we’ll pick up speed, ride along the road before we cross the highway. Cars stop there at the crossing, the train moving just beside them. When we were kids, we used to watch each car pass to get that weird tickly feeling of moving backward. The car has got to look empty to anyone seeing it pass. After the crossing, we’ll roll out of town, across the rail bridge and the river. I thought about throwing the gun into the water, but I’ll take it to the ocean, let the waves float it far away. I move the wagon back into the corner, slam the rocks under the rear wheels. Later I’ll find the other rock, the one I’ll keep, flecked with a stain I decide is sacred. I’ll wedge it under the right front wheel in the beam of the flashlight, but for now I hope the wagon will stay put. I pull Termite to the other side of the car, into the corner with the duffel and rolled-up sleeping bags soft and secure against him. He can see out from here, but he’s far from the doors and no one can see him. “You can talk now,” I tell him, “we’re on the train. No one can hear us.” But he’s silent. He’s scared, or maybe not. He has to hear my ragged breath. He knows what almost happened. Or he doesn’t. Please, he doesn’t.

  I may not be able to shut the doors by myself. They’re going to be heavy, rusted even, except these cars have come in here from somewhere else—nothing smells wet or damp. I’m standing to the side of the open doors. Now that we’re inside, the train has slowed, like in a dream. Like we’re holding still and everything is moving past us in blue and gray. We’re still in the rail yard.

  Then I see Solly. He’s on the Harley keeping pace with us. He nods at me, like hey, from across a street.

  He’s too late. I see him across a million miles.

  He rides along beside us and I don’t know what he’s doing, looking over at us and back, back and forth, calculating, then he roars on ahead, up alongside the adjacent track to the freight dock as the train starts up the slant to the tipple, slow and steady. Through the wide-open doors of the car I see him pull up hard at the edge of the platform and stop, the bright light of the headlight a stark white beam. He revs and revs the cycle, waiting. We come up on him and he guns it, sails over space into us. The machine hits the floor of the car and there’s a bellow and whine as he pulls the keys and jumps, falling against me. We both go down as a boom of impact shakes the car like a cannon shot. The cycle bounces off the back of the car and falls over smoking, confused, spinning and roaring on its side. Then Solly’s up and off me, straddling the cycle as smoke blurs around him inside the quickening rumble of the train. He looks at us over the Harley with its big wheels still turning, and he smiles.

  Nonie

  There we all sat in a room at the courthouse. Elise nodded her head at the men around the table and the stenographer taking down the interview. We’d known them all for thirty years. Some of them worked with Civil Defense, still were, cleaning up the flood. Now they wore suits and looked tired. We all did, except Elise. She wore her white pillbox hat and pearl earrings, and her black raincoat that she didn’t bother taking off, as though she hadn’t time.

  Gladdy was a hardworking woman, Elise told them, but demanding. They’d all remember. Was the stenographer getting this down? The stenographer was, and Elise went on. Gladdy demanded the watch as soon as I stopped the car, Elise said, and grabbed it so hard she broke the band. Noreen helped her anyway, carried those heavy bags up the steps. I wouldn’t have, Elise said, but Noreen did. She set them just inside before Gladdy slammed the door in her face. Sent her back into the storm, hard as it was blowing. Elise said she thanked her stars Gladdy was satisfied to have the watch. If I’d driven off alone, Elise said, I wouldn’t be here. Then she was silent, and sat up erect in her chair, as though she wasn’t only speaking to them. God as my witness, she said, it was me that hurt Noreen. I sprained her wrist when she pulled me out of that car against the flow of the flood. I’ve a lifelong fear of water, Elise said, and I lost my head. I scratched and fought Noreen something awful. I was in a panic, the water came in so fast. Well, the men driving the truck saw how quick the car swamped, how Noreen got me out, and I clung to her even after, until we all saw she was injured. Hold Noreen if you like, Elise told them, though she saved my life and didn’t hurt anyone. She went on to say, as though they didn’t know, that Charlie Fitz-gibbon was Gladdy’s son who cared for her every whim. If he was satisfied Gladdy’s fall was an accident, why wouldn’t they let him get on with mourning his mother? She looked at them outraged and her tears were real.

  I had no tears and that was fortunate. I’d already agreed it was all as Elise described. I told them I didn’t mind staying at the county facility until the coroner’s report was final. The women’s quarters were more comfortable than my house, with nowhere to sleep but the attic. I suppose I was making a point. I knew Elise and Charlie would look after things, and Lark was perfectly capable. Charlie leaned forward and took my hand. He knew I didn’t push his mother, but no one could prove I did or didn’t, and Elise’s story had to be the only one. She’d put herself at risk. I wouldn’t have let her, except that I was certain Gladdy wasn’t breathing when I pulled that string over her dark basement stairs and the light fell over her. I’ve let Lola go too, finally, into whatever she’s claimed for herself, and now Lark knows the truth. She’ll find out what else she needs to know and Charlie will finally be her father.

  I told Charlie to bury Gladdy with that broken watch. We didn’t need it anymore. If Gladdy had needed help, I would have found it, but she didn’t need us, or anything. The flood took its time and floated her free while her kitchen stayed pristine above her, dishes in the drainer and the table set. The fact that Gladdy lived in that big house, blocks and blocks from the flood plain, while Elise and I were driving into it, was simple geography. She fell because she insisted so hard on what she wanted.

  The wash of the old stories is gone. We’re all going somewhere else now, somewhere different from where we’ve been.

  Termite

  He hears the ragged orange cat crouch small on the beam of the tipple. The cat stays and waits and sees, watching the train pull away in shadow, leaving the mud smell of the town. The staggering dog lies down to slide into the ditch. Termite feels the water move, a ripple in the rumble of the train, in the shaking of the boxcar that throbs in every board. The boxcar clacks its iron wheels, ticking every seam, spinning steel and waiting for the roar. Solly moves the roar and the sound races, hovers, races. The train slows and climbs and Solly rides the roar, pulsing, cutting through. The roar shines a light and leaps into them before it smashes, sparking and crashing and cutting up the dark. The light comes on white and Termite sees inside it when the pounding starts, pounding and pounding while the bodies are slashed and spilled. The bodies fall still and stay and a blu
e air slips up from between them, from this one and that one, air that is thin and veiled and curls, smooth silvery ribbons turning to find a way out. The man who stands alone and hears the shape lies still, but a shape stands up in his shape. He opens his hands in the pale ribbon of himself and Termite can see his fingers moving, opening. He turns toward Termite and his face comes clear in the moving blue. His face blurs and clears and blurs again like a face underwater. He picks up a shape that clings to him and another shape moves beside him, crawling and then standing, a slight feminine shape that turns and moves next to him. The man looks back before he turns to walk away with them in the ribboned air of the tunnel. He looks at Termite. The ribbons all around them are veiled as smoke and move like the river moves, rippling and curling, pulled in the air. No eyes, no ears, the ribbons only move and flow. Thin silvery ribbons, moving in the tunnel. So many of them, more and more, moving toward the opening, to where the light gets big and bright. He sees his father clear against the light and his father turns and walks. His father has a boy like him and a girl like Lark, and he takes them with him, out of the tunnel. He sees his father walking between the ribbons and the ribbons make everything blue.

  Louisville, Kentucky

  JULY 31, 1951

  Lola Leavitt

  he sits by the open window, looking out. It’s the same third-floor room she shared with Bobby, first night to last. Nearly empty now. She’d taken the furniture when she moved to Coral Gables with the baby. There’s only the chair she sits in, their valise, a double mattress on the floor, like those last weeks when Bobby moved her mattress off the bed frame so the only sounds were theirs. Lola hears the club downstairs, prep and start-up for On-slow’s Sunday night crowd. Sunday nights were slow except at Onslow’s and a few other bars. Soldiers from the base poured in. Onslow would introduce her, especially those months she was obviously pregnant, as a religious experience. The church service they’d missed earlier that morning. She hears him at the piano now, through the open windows. Lola’s the cat, he told soldiers, she can purr, she can scratch. You boys behave and she’ll arch her back when she sings to you. Onslow is playing her songs, her repertoire, as though it makes a difference.