by Kent Meyers
I found dozens of them stick pens all over the house. Empty, not a drop of ink in them. Scattered around. Husks of dreams ripened into letters. I can see it—Shane rolling in at two or three in the morning, no headlights, been up all night, rolling in by feel with some new-dressed deer or antelope in the back of his pickup, and pulling into that shed on his place that I can’t figure out how it manages to stand, and hoisting that animal out of that pickup with the come-along he had hooked to the rafters, and then walking out of that shed with those dead eyes swiveling behind him, groundward-facing, the come-along creaking in the beams. But Shane’s already gone, he’s been inventing his father for his invented mother the whole goddamn night, the whole thing has grown beyond his control, it was just a way to keep his mother away from the land and it turned into something bigger than he knows, and now he walks into the light leaking out of that shotthrough house, carpeted with snakes, stepping between them, his clothes all bloodstained from his work, sits down at that kitchen table, the varnish worn off for years, and picks up one of them stick pens and licks the end and grips that sonofabitch like it was a chisel and starts to dig words into a notebook, so hard in some a them letters I can see imprints of the previous one in the paper, and who knows, maybe the one previous to that. Maybe the last letter has the whole goddamn thing pressed into it, and you could get the entire story out of that one page if you took an impression with dust or ash and could decipher the words cutting across all the other words, the maze of the whole thing put together. Somewhere in there, maybe, you could even find the missing letters and figure out what was in them and fill in that gap, and maybe that’d help make sense of it or maybe it’d just make it more bizarre.
I don’t know. Could be I’m bullshitting myself and all that really happened is Shane was a paranoid sonofabitch and anyone shows up at his place, he blasts away without asking questions. I could be a bigger bullshitter than Shane. But I keep seeing him in that house, snakes sleeping around him or hunting in the walls where mice claws are clicking, and he’s inventing Rodney’s life. For her. For himself. Memory and bullshit and loneliness so mixed up that years back and years now are the same thing, and little things like time and dying just don’t matter.
Here’s the last one:
October 16, 2003
Dear Sarah,
It has been some remarkible events out here as you may know if you watch the TV I believe our son has written to you about our neighbor girl, name of Hay Lee Jo Zimmerman. She moved to Rapid City and got killed it was in the news. We dont hardly know what to do. You should have seen her ride the way shed tip her horse and stay so strait on it it was great just watching her. We know every time she won a race and kept track of it. She used to fish to. Theres a big stock pond on another neighbors place and shed go fishing there I think our son has told you about that how shed fish and all. It aint right having her gone like she is. Whod do a thing like that? I suppose maybe it shouldnt be such a big deal but we knew her from the moment she was born and its hard to say things right. Anyways the horses is whinnying and I have to get up now and take care of them so I hope your well.
Love,
Rodney.
Of all the people to be bothered by that murder, Shane Valen’s the last person anyone’d pick. Knew her from the moment she was born? Jesus Christ. So lost in his own world he don’t know up from down, but he’s feeling all peaceful because she’s fishing? Then she gets killed and the poor sonofabitch is heartbroken. And the only person he can tell is his mother. But he can’t tell his mother, for Christ’s sake. But Dad can. And she comes back, feeling his loneliness like a real thing coming through all the bullshit, I don’t know. Or maybe it was just she wanted to see her family again before it was too late. In any case, she was the only person ever Shane didn’t see coming. His letters were making too much light around him, he couldn’t see past them. She doesn’t call, she wants to surprise them maybe. She pulls into that driveway after a day of driving, and it sure ain’t no Arabian horse ranch where foreigners sit on the deck and drink bourbon. This is her real memory trying to get back inside her head. But she ain’t got room for it, her head’s so full of Shane’s imaginings.
And then, like I said, before she can even get out of the car, who’s she see walking out of the house but Rodney. Hasn’t aged a bit. Walking out of the house with a shotgun in his hands, squinting through the glare off the windshield, trying to figure out what this car is doing in his yard. She’s not seeing the blades of grass moving all around him. Christ, it gives me the willies. Here he comes, she’s got her window open, she thinks she’s hearing wind.
Rodney? she says. You can just hear her saying it. She almost recognizes something’s wrong, but she can’t unlock it. Rodney? It’s me. Sarah.
She opens her door. Then she sees his eyes widen. But what her husband says doesn’t make any sense.
Mom? he says.
And even as the shotgun’s sweeping up, everything’s collapsing, all those lives, the real and the dreamed, falling around her, winds are blowing them over, and she’s a rusted weathervane that in spite a those winds ain’t never pointed anywhere but where she’s at right now. She’s knocked backwards by the blast, lifted clear off the seat and knocked into the passenger side. Time ain’t never passed, she’s right back in the moment she left, her baby swinging that gun up, the black hole of the barrel turned to her, and then stopped forever.
Shane turns back to the house and goes in and sits in that chair and pumps the action of the shotgun, and the spent shell goes somersaulting through the air and clucks onto the floor against the baseboard where I found it, and he knocks the pump forward and sticks the barrel against his eye and the stock on the floor and leans for the trigger. He’s been cut, cut bad. Far as he knows she finally saw through it all and had come back to claim the land. What could he do? Then there’s nothing in that house but rattle and alarm and hazard, the singing of a hundred snakes in a concert you’d never want to hear.
I looked all through that house for those letters but couldn’t find a thing. Just junk, a bed so grungy I didn’t want to touch it, and a freezer full of meat, and a kitchen table and that chair he shot himself in, and an old rocking chair in an upstairs room and a single fishing rod and reel, and his various rifles and shotguns. On the wall he had a bunch of dates written down, who knows what the hell they were. I wish to hell I had Sarah’s side of it, but he wasn’t near as careful as she was. Just thinking of those snakes out there in that house, the only company and family Shane had that wasn’t in his head, I’m tempted to go out and burn it down. Snakes sprawled on the floors at night, coiled by day waiting for mice to wander by or slithering out under the doors or through various cracks. He might’ve actually felt something for them, but I know goddamn well they didn’t feel a thing for him.
I’m tempted—go out and burn it down and throw that damn pack of letters in and walk away. But they got a grip on me. I can’t stop reading them. I’m afraid some night I’ll be looking into my headlights and the Valen women will parade in front of me, one cut and with children clinging, and the other with a hole in her chest and snakes twisting up and down her, and she looking at her empty hands, trying to read those letters, still all tangled up in them, but not knowing where they’ve gone.
Reflectors
WE LEFT THE CHURCH in a warm rain and processed out to the cemetery. It wasn’t many, and even fewer who got out of their cars to stand beside the grave—all men except for Sophie Lawrence and Audrey Damish. I’d forgotten rain gear, and Audrey caught up to me and brought me under her umbrella. She made the usual comments about it being good to see me, and funerals bringing people together, then asked me if I’d ever noticed anything that looked like unmarked graves up here. I had no idea how to take the question. When I said no, she replied: I thought maybe—you used to come here—you know—a lot. Before I could find out what she was after, we reached the grave, and the conversation ended. Beside us, Sophie Lawrence pushed her stepfather, Sid Erv
in, so close to the open hole I feared his caster wheels were going over the edge. The rain wetted his knees, and the knuckles of his good hand went white on the chair arm. I had this vision of the soaked ground collapsing and Sidney tumbling down, twisting sideways as that one hand gripped the chair. I touched Sophie on the shoulder to suggest she back him off, but she looked at me with that smile that could convince the prophet Jeremiah everything’s just fine, and I let it go. We stood—Richard Mattingly, Stanley Zimmerman, Brock Morrison, myself, and a few of Shane’s relatives—while the women watched through windshields, the wipers purring and clunking. Father Obermann pronounced the words as carefully as if it were a saint or loyal banker he was committing, and the day a sunny one.
I’m not sure how it fell to him. Most of us couldn’t imagine Shane Valen in church even in a casket. I suppose the relatives felt they owed some ceremony to the man whose death had opened an inheritance. They made the most of their time: funeral on Wednesday, land auction on Thursday, back to their lives on Friday. I’d like to think the town’s ministers got together at the Coyote Café and threw dice, the loser taking on the sermon, but Shane must have been baptized Catholic, though I have no memory of a Valen ever darkening the doors. Maybe Bea Conway produced a record, and Father Obermann interpreted it in the broadest possible way, as I would have myself. He was wise enough to keep the sermon short and not invent Shane’s goodness but to simply speak of loneliness and how we can’t completely know another human being.
With the graveside service over, I walked under Audrey’s umbrella back toward our cars. Stanley Zimmerman intercepted us. Haven’t seen you in a while, Caleb, he said.
I’ve been scarce, I replied. Been a busy season.
Audrey shifted the umbrella. I thought she wanted to leave.
Thanks for the dry, I told her. I’m OK now. I’ve got a hat.
She hesitated, then started off.
Good seeing you, Audrey, Stanley said.
She turned with some alacrity, as if she was pleased he’d noticed her.
You, too, Stanley, she said warmly. How are you?
I’m good, he said, then turned back to me: Come for supper. We’ll catch up.
It wasn’t really rude, just quick—yet past Stanley’s shoulder I saw Audrey bow her head, and the umbrella wavered, and rain pearled her white hair. She was disappointed. I almost told him so. But Audrey’s a bit odd, and I decided whatever business she had with Stanley, she’d get around to it eventually.
It was a disquieting meal. Stanley talked of nothing but his buffalo. On the face of it, that’s fine, but his talk, for all its effusiveness, ran down a dissonant rail, as if he feared stopping would let something else—and it was obvious what—emerge. Kris asked me polite, innocuous questions with an indifference palpable enough to be disturbing. They used to get along so well, and here I felt like I’d been invited to fill for an evening a dead zone between them.
It used to be I would have come right out and asked how they were holding up together. It would have been my job. But when you do such things professionally and then stop, you get uncertain. I noticed at their front door a pair of running shoes, with dried mud on the soles. How long had they been there? I let Stanley talk. I’ve seen it before: fervency can be a fence to hide inside or to hold the world away. After a while Kris got up and left the room. The stairs creaked as she ascended them.
It was dark when I left, and the rain had started up again. I’d taken my boots off at the door and when I put them on found myself staring at those running shoes, and so drove from their place remembering how I used to sometimes come upon Hayley Jo and Laura running together at night, the reflectors on their shoes moving elliptically and disconnected, an alien movement like some dance of UFOs on the horizon—not quite real, a spinning, as their heels struck down and rounded back up, circling outward from their knees in the way of girls. Next, my lights would reflect back from Laura’s hair, a hazy glowing, and then the two girls themselves took shape, nylon-suited, moving side by side along the shoulder of the road, in a world of their own making. I wanted to turn and stare back at them, to see in Laura’s face her mother’s, but I restrained myself, and by the time I could pick them up in the mirror they were invisible again. It was maybe four or five times I saw them, when I was on those roads after dark, and then they weren’t there anymore. Laura had quit running, and Hayley Jo took it to the track in town, doing loop after loop, in a dogged, relentless circling. I missed them—or missed the pang of seeing them: that brief excitement of those strange, circling lights, as if the universe were occupied by beings more wonderful than we knew. And then to see that indeed it was, and they were running through the darkness.
I was five miles toward home when I came over a hill and saw police car lights ticking on and off, scattered by a million drops. I pulled my foot off the accelerator and let the pickup coast against the engine drag. The lights puddled in the water on the windshield, and the wipers swept them away, and they gathered again. As I descended, the black crest of the hill in front of me rose over them, and then it was just my own lights on the road. I considered stopping, turning around, and sneaking away. I could go back two miles and pick up the Red Medicine Creek Road, past where I’d just come from, and take gravel home. But that would take me past the Morrisons’, and in spite of the years, I was still avoiding memory. More practically, in this rain those gumbo clay roads would ball up on my tires, and with a two-wheel-drive pickup I might as well take my hands off the steering wheel for all the good they’d do.
I watched the double yellow lines thread under the pickup’s grille. I’m just a rancher, I told myself. Whatever’s going on down there, it doesn’t have a thing to do with me. I put my foot back on the accelerator, and the engine grunted, and the headlights swept into the rain up the hill. I topped it and as suddenly as if they’d been clicked on, the distant lights were stabbing into the cab again. I thought I might avert my eyes and go by. But would anyone do that? People want to know what’s happening. They stop just to know the story even if they can’t do anything to change it. At least that’s the way it seemed to me. Even after all these years I find myself wondering how ordinary people would ordinarily behave.
It did occur to me that it wasn’t just an accident but another young girl’s body found. The man had been caught, but things like that haunt. We expect bodies to turn up yet: the residue of acts done and finished still surfacing, gruesome discoveries on routine days. My foot hovered over the accelerator. I considered letting it all diminish in my mirrors while I went on alone. But I touched the brake and pulled onto the shoulder and shut the engine off. The lights cut slow swaths through the air, but when they hit the cab they were hard as a punch and all-at-once, then lazy out there again in the wet vegetation, barely lighting the sage. I opened the door. I expected noise and confusion, but silence sat out there like a waiting dog.
In the ditch across the road three men squatted under a low tarp with someone lying between them. A car lay upside down inside a ruined barbwire fence that was going to need fixing or there’d be cattle on the road. The car was twisted toward me. It looked like a giant, helpless turtle on its back—wheels like stout legs, big headlight eyes. It had no windshield, just a dark, compressed oblong where the windshield’d been, and a pile of shattered glass beneath. I pulled the seat of my pickup forward to get rain gear, then remembered I hadn’t stowed it.
I let the pickup seat bang back. I won’t be here long, I thought. I stood at the edge of the pavement, feeling the rain against my neck. Beyond the ditch a small hill appeared and disappeared, grayly blue and red in the circling lights. One of the men turned his face to me, smooth with rain, a repository of changing light.
Greggy, I said. What’s going on?
He shielded his eyes with his hands.
Caleb? That you? Stand in the lights, I can’t see your face. You bid Shane farewell?
Yeah. Stayed a while. Heading home.
Some strange deal there. Tell you wha
t I found in that car sometime. Anyway, the antelope are celebrating. Lot a people there?
Some. What’s going on here?
Accident.
Anything I—?
I stopped myself. But Greggy shook his head.
We got her stabilized. Ambulance’s coming from Lone Tree. Nothing to do but wait.
I couldn’t see who it was. Just some cloth, an old white coat not moving. Greggy’s shoulder hid the face. If it was someone I knew, he’d say. One of the patrolmen with him turned to me, a young face looking awed. A drop of water sparked bright blue and fell from his chin.
I’ll be going then, I said.
They all looked up, like I’d said something significant. It was like a bunch of statues’d turned to stare at me, three faces shining, and behind them the hill going on and off, amber and red and blue and nothing. I shivered, stuck my hands in my pockets.
Sure, Greggy said. We don’t need help waiting. We got that practiced.
The older patrolman chuckled, a strange, dry sound in all that murmur of water.
Although, Greggy went on, this one looks like the type upon a time you coulda done some good for.
I stopped in mid-turnaround and shut my eyes. The lights filtered through my lids, reddening the darkness. When I turned back to the ditch, Greggy was grinning at me like an obscene shepherd from a perverted Christmas crèche, and the patrolmen looked as puzzled as any wise men ever.
