Red Ant House

by Ann Cummins

  “You going to go with joes like that?” he’d say.

  “I might.”

  He’d look at her slyly out of the corner of his eye and give her hand a squeeze. “Well, just don’t start anything you can’t finish.” He laughed then because he knew she didn’t know a thing about it.

  This old joe was tailgating her. Her speedometer crept toward forty-five, too fast for some of these curves. She braked, gently, then again. The man was close enough for their cars to kiss. She slowed further, put her hand out the window, motioned for him to pass. She saw gold shine in his mouth as he pulled out. When he was even with her he held something out across the seat. A bottle. The man was drinking. She shook her head. He nodded. She shook her head again, stepped on the brake, forced him ahead.

  He pulled around, held the bottle up to his mirror, and she slowed to a crawl. He made a show of his bottle, waving it around, drinking from it, stepping on the brakes again and again and again, finally stopping and making her stop. He leaned his head out the window, held the bottle out and shouted something. She stuck her head out the window.

  “Vinegar?” he said.

  “Move it, you bugger.”

  The man opened his car door, started to get out, and Ginny hit him. Just a tap, but his car rolled forward, and the man leaped back in. He turned to look at her, incredulous. He shook his head, turned back around, hunched over the wheel.

  Now he was going again. He began speeding down the mountain, and Ginny breathed deeply. She got the weird feeling, watching him stalk off, that he was having himself a tantrum. She watched his car sashay at the curves and then disappear around a bend.

  She continued slowly, tapping her foot again and again on the brake. She saw him once, maybe a quarter-mile away, driving down the center of the road, taking his part of both lanes, and then she didn’t see him at all.

  She began to make out details in the field below, a tree, more a bush, there in the center of yellow weeds, weeds with tall, golden stalks. Angel fingers. That’s what Nan called them. “Those aren’t weeds, honey. Those are angel fingers.” Her stepmother had a name for everything. Nan had a name for Ginny’s little shrunken head. It was a grief bowl. “Do you know why the headhunter takes a head, Ginny? He is enraged. He needs a place to put his grief when he loses a loved one, so he takes an enemy’s head.” She had read that in one of her dream books. Nan had told Ginny she had not grieved properly for her mother when she died; Nan said Ginny would not be able to get on with her life until she faced her grief head-on. She told Ginny she must open the floodgates.

  Nan was her mother’s nurse just before she died, and afterward Nan would call on the phone to lend an ear to Ginny’s father, though she always did all the talking. She always called at suppertime. Ginny would watch him listen while Nan talked and his food got cold. She would see his jaw tighten. She would see the two points of color come into his cheeks. He would answer Nan’s questions with yeses and noes, and when he hung up he’d shake his head at Ginny and say, “Now there’s another country heard from.” They would laugh.

  After the calls, though, he didn’t want to eat anymore; he wanted to drink. But he never told her to stop calling, and a year after Ginny’s mother died, he married Nan. By then he was drinking pretty good.

  Once, late at night, after he remarried, Ginny’s father came into her room, woke her up, and asked her if she wanted to talk about her mom. She knew Nan had told him to ask.

  “No,” she said. He nodded. He sat there smoking his cigarette until it was done, then kissed her head and left.

  Ginny rounded a curve, and there was the man in the Fairlane directly in front of her, stopped dead in the road. She hit the brakes. He was leaning out the window, motioning with the bottle for her to pass. She would not. She would not let him get behind her again. She shook her head. He pulled back in, and his reverse lights came on. She jammed the gearshift into reverse, looked quickly behind her, began to back up. He backed up, too, closing the gap, hitting her, pushing her a few feet, and she thought she heard glass break, and she knew her front bumper had connected with his taillights. He stopped. They both stopped.

  Ginny was shaking violently. Her arms and legs had turned to rubber, and she could feel sweat running down her sides, from her throat, and under her breasts. The guy sat there, his elbow crooked on the door, his head in his hand, his fingers drumming his head, as if he were waiting for a traffic light to change. The guy was crazy. She could hear nothing but her own engine. His, she thought, had stopped. She looked again and again into her rearview. A car coming up on her around the bend might not be able to stop. “Move it, you old joe,” she said. They sat like that for a minute, two, and then she saw his door open again, and she saw his foot step out.

  “Goddamn you!” she yelled, and she threw the gearshift into first, rammed him hard. His car leapt and the door snapped on him. He fell back in, and she rammed him, saw him sit up in the seat, begin yanking the gearshift, rammed him again, then jammed her foot on the brake, put her hand over her mouth, and watched the Fairlane slip over the edge of the mountain.

  At the bottom of the hill she sat quietly in the truck, her hands hanging loosely on the steering wheel. Halfway across the field the underside of his car faced the road, and the wheels spun. The car was half buried by angel fingers.

  She opened the truck door and stepped out. The stench of hot tar rolled up to her, and the pavement burned through the soles of her sandals. She crossed the road and stood at the edge of the field. She could hear the engine running and something knocking. Did she smell gas? She could not see a wet slick running over the car’s innards, which were now exposed, nor could she see the details of the car’s underbelly. She could see the two tires spinning. When the engine began to chug noisily and then abruptly died, the tires did not immediately stop.

  She looked back up the mountain and then in the other direction along the flat stretch to where the pavement disappeared in a shining pool of light—the only sound the chattering of cicadas. She stepped from the pavement into the weeds. Grasshoppers shot out from under her, flying grasshoppers with armored backs, flashes of yellow and orange under the wings, hundreds of them that spread in waves, whispering past her bare arms and her ears, and she slapped at the air around her, then at her back when she felt the soft flutter of insect legs. She began to run, to bore through the weeds, which snagged at her hips and waist, crackled under her feet, but then she stopped. Yes. It was gas she smelled. Now she could see the blackened axle.

  A spot of red on the mountain caught her eye, and she looked up. A car, a red sports car, had just begun its descent. It swung out at one of the top curves, then disappeared into a switchback, reemerged. She watched it weaving along gracefully, bending with the road. It moved so fast, darting in and out, the engine whining, then revving. It sounded like an angry hornet disturbed from its hive, chasing down the mountain, busy and mean—she ducked. She laughed nervously. She crouched flat-footed and held her knees. She did not look at the place where the car would emerge. She pressed her fists to her heart, and she strained toward the road, listening for the engine. She clenched her arms to her sides and clamped her teeth, though her own air hissed through them because she was laughing and could not help it. It was a good hiding place. She stared at her toes, the cracks and toenails defined by thin lines of red dirt. The weeds around her had brown spots, moving, twirling brown spots. Bile lurched in her throat. They were not worms. Cockroaches, she thought. They looked like the shiny backs of red and brown cockroaches hanging from the weeds and twirling toward her, though when they twirled at a certain angle she saw there were no legs or bodies. They were empty shells, flaking red pods, and some had fallen—some she had crushed under her feet, and one was alive. Near her right eye a cicada ate at the pod. She hit it. She stood and began winding her arms like windmills and slapping at herself, stopping suddenly and listening to her own breath rasp in her throat. The red car was not in sight. She held her elbows in her hands and scann
ed the road as far as she could see. Nothing moved.

  She began walking. The weeds stank of gasoline. When she was little she had loved this smell. She would walk with her mother to the Conoco station to buy penny candy and to see her mother’s friend, Sam. “Hey, Ginny,” Sam would say. “How’s tricks?” And she would say, “Just fine, just fine,” and she would pull her hot pennies out of her pocket.

  “Girls don’t have to pay,” Sam told her.

  “Yes, they do,” her mother said, and Sam would give her mother a look.

  “Tell your mama to leave your daddy and run away with me,” Sam told Ginny. All the time he said this.

  “She won’t,” Ginny said.

  “Your mama drives me crazy,” Sam told her, and her mother would grin and lick her teeth. They would, she and her mother and Sam, sit by the pumps, eating red licorice and smelling the gasoline.

  She began to circle the car. The whole back end was crumpled, the metal folding into a sort of grimace, and the window, though intact, was segmented into thousands of green squares, each square frosted in white. The top had dimpled but had not collapsed. The front window was gone. She could not see the man. She stepped closer. She could smell the gasoline and the acrid scent of alcohol and cigarettes. The upholstery, a dark green weave, was horribly shredded and curled into the foam. She thought he must be dead, or so deeply unconscious that his breathing was shallow.

  She put her hand and then her head through the space where the glass would have been. “Yes?” she whispered. “Yes?” She was crying in her throat, but her eyes did not tear. She stared into the darkness below. Careful not to touch the jagged glass in the window frame, she lifted her leg and stepped on the ground where the driver’s window should have been, leaning her calf against the steering wheel. She arched her back to avoid the glass shards, pulled her other leg in, scratching her knee against a piece of glass, and stooped so that no part of her head touched the passenger’s window. She turned, stood flat-footed, looked over the seat into the back, and she tried to stop the sound in her throat.

  At first she thought the coat piled against the back door was him. At first she took the crumpled armrest for his ruined face. She stared at these things, barely breathing, then scanned the whole back floor. He was not there.

  She crossed her arms over her middle. It was, after all, just a little bit of a fall. She began to shake. She stared at the shattered glass in the back window. In the corner, tiny black beads swarmed a half-buried silver crucifix.

  She turned her head slowly, painfully, toward the opening. She could see only the narrow alley of weeds and blue sky framed by the windowsill, and she strained to hear past the soft whisper of grasshoppers. The back of her head felt as though it was being pierced with iced pins. Ridiculous little popping sounds came from the engine, and she tried to hear beyond them. She leaned against the seat back, her cheek resting against exposed foam. She began to laugh silently, and tears squeezed out the sides of her eyes—

  She slapped her right thigh, then her left, then dug both hands into her pockets. The keys were not there. She could see them, in her mind, dangling from the ignition. She began pushing her way out of the car, and glass tore the skin on her back and leg. Outside, she glared at the highway. Her truck was still there. She began to rim. She must get there before he did because if he took her truck, he took everything. Now she was flying face-first into the weeds and she pushed herself up, ran again, stopped. She looked back. Her ears were throbbing. She turned and walked back.

  He lay face-up, eyes closed. He was grinning that same wide-toothed, hubba-hubba grin he’d flashed when he offered the bottle. Vinegar? Her stomach lurched. His hips and legs were twisted horribly, his back flat on the ground. She could see no blood. She squatted. She stared at his chest, then at his mouth. She began to rock, gently, forward then backwards, stopped, reached over, and held her fingers above his mouth, then jerked her head around. She shuddered. He was not heading toward her truck anymore. He was not looking for her.

  She felt the air over his mouth again, then dropped her hand until her fingers brushed the dry surface of his teeth and she could not see the grin, pressed, then jerked her hand away when she felt the teeth give, stood, and began to run across the field away from the mountain and the man.

  She ran to the low hill opposite the mountain. She ran up the slope, her feet sliding in the sand. Not halfway up, she stopped and let the ground pull her back. She sat down and leaned back, settling into the earth, which burned her neck and shoulder blades, and she pushed into it until the burn faded and the ground below became indistinguishable from her own skin. She stared at the sky just over the mountain. She closed her eyes and saw him again, his face grinning back at her, the car rolling, never hesitating, disappearing.

  A breeze had come up, blowing from the north, and she listened to the rustling of dried grass. Fine grit hung from her lashes, sand that looked like tiny dots of glass. She turned her head, testing the heat with her cheek. At her feet, a stick. She watched it sideways. A black speck crawled over the sand toward it. She closed her eyes, making the speck disappear, opened them, and there it was. She sat up. A lone black ant had begun its journey around the end of the stick. She picked the stick up and put it in the ant’s way. The ant stopped. It backtracked. It began to detour. She blocked its way again, and it stopped again.

  An anthill just to her left swarmed with the little ant’s kin. She tossed the stick onto the hill but it rolled off. She scooted over, picked the thing up, and stuck it directly in the hole. Ants stormed up, climbing the stem as a unit, climbing onto each other as if there were somewhere to go. She pulled the stick out. She stared at the conglomeration on the end of the stick. “Now here’s another country heard from,” she said.

  She thought of Sam, the Conoco man, her mother’s old friend. “That one’s a country unto himself,” her father used to say about Sam. Once, Sam got moony-drunk and came to the door, stood with his arms open and said, “Anything you want,” to her mother. Right there in front of her father. Her mother thought it was funny, but her father picked Sam up and threw him into the street. Her father had taken her mother’s face in his hand then. He held her face for a long time, his eyes spooked and furious, and she stared back at him. Then he let go. A few days later, Ginny could see little blue prints on her mother’s white cheek. They never mentioned it, but Ginny and her mother stopped going to the Conoco.

  They had not known her mother was sick until a month before she died, and during that month, the phone rang every morning. Ginny would pick up the receiver and listen to dead space on the other end of the line. It was Sam. He wasn’t saying anything, but he was there.

  Nan said Ginny’s mother wouldn’t have died if she’d just opened her mouth and told somebody about the pain. That month her mother’s hair turned thin as web, and the tip of her tongue began to split. She could not stand the touch of food or drink or medicine on her tongue. She used to ask Ginny to hold the mirror for her. “I’m watching myself disappear,” she said, and when Ginny cried, she said, “It’s nothing to cry about.”

  Ginny stood. She shook her legs, first one, then the other, dislodging the ants that had begun to crawl on her. She wondered when this all started. Now the sun was going down. The field shone, and ants sprinkled off the stick, catching and clinging to the golden stalks.

  Though there was no noticeable indenture where his body was, she knew and walked straight to it. He had lost his shoes. His socks were dirty white. She thought of what Nan always said to her, first thing, before she even said hello: “Did you have any adventures on the drive? Did you meet anybody?” This time, she could say yes. Ginny laughed, and then she started to shake.

  She walked to the man’s head, kicked at the flies circling his face, dropped to her knees, and beat the air over his face, her fingers fluttering, then held her hands over his face until the flies began to light on them. She yelled at them and beat the air.

  Had she done this?

 
The man’s cheek under the cheekbone held a shadow. It curved beautifully so that a touch of blue defined cheekbone and jaw. She put her fingers there. His cheek was warm, though she felt the chill just under it. His skin was warm from the sun, not himself.

  She wanted to go. She just wanted to be back on the road.

  She stood. Two cars were passing each other near her pickup. She knew many had gone by. But she was invisible in the weeds, she and this man at her feet.

  This would be a good hiding place. She could just go. She thought of her own country where she had grown up, on the western side of the Cascades. In the forest behind her house, each bush held an animal, and she knew they were there before she saw them; she went there so often that she could feel them before she saw them, even the gray squirrel hidden in the ash tree, and the green lizard camouflaged in ivy. Once she had come on the carcass of a deer. She did not smell it. It had long since ceased to smell. But she felt the chill in her bones just before she saw it. It was half hidden under a bush, and she would have missed it if she had not sensed where to look.

  She looked at the body once more, stooped to wave the flies from the mouth. She could actually see where the teeth had loosened. The impact must’ve shaken them loose. One was missing completely, the roots half exposed in the others. The only one intact was the artificial one. The gold tooth shone in his gum like a fine jewel. She touched it with her index finger. It was dry. It did not seem to be loose. She laughed, folded her arms around her, looked at the empty field. Nobody was looking for her. She poked the tooth again. Why wasn’t anybody looking for her? She took hold of it. She was shivering, suddenly, every part of her, shivering. She held the tooth near the gum, wedged her fingernails into the gum line, yanked, felt it give. “Jesus!” she said, standing and stepping back. The tooth dipped into the mouth. The tongue, she saw, was black, and the gold hung above it, dangling over the dark cavern, then turned black itself when a fly lit on it—