But the Iowa Sarah Jane, the real one, has no beads of sweat forming on her forehead. Her jaw doesn’t tremble and her hands don’t shake. The several rings she wears on her fingers click a little against the steering wheel, keeping time with a melody only she can hear, but she is otherwise indistinguishable from anyone else driving down the same road. She’d gone in early because Lisa Sample had knocked in the middle of the night and told her it was time. Time for what? Time to take the tapes back. Take them back? Yes, they’re finished, they should go back out on the shelves, I can only hold on to them for so long. All right, but all at once? Yes, I think so: who’ll know, besides you and me? They’ll only get out a little at a time: this with that smile, that hybrid of kindness and hunger she’d never seen anywhere else.
You’d expect, in the presence of any inner struggle, to see it reflected here, in the privacy of the highway, where no one is watching. But that after-midnight conversation, and any news it brought about the nature of Lisa’s work, has gone away to hide in the place where all the other moments they share end up: in a secret chamber of Sarah Jane’s heart, where the person she’d hoped to be by now has set up shop and is making do with available materials.
So think instead of animals that shed skins. It’s a metaphor with limited uses: there aren’t any animals in play here. Everybody’s a free agent. Still, picture the noble snake, having molted, slithering away, newly glistening. There’s the skin, in a big disorganized pile behind it. Is the snake asking you to notice that a snake was here earlier? No; the snake doesn’t care one way or the other. It has moved on. No, indeed, you can’t call a snake sloppy or careless or fault it for leaving tracks in its wake. Besides, who are you? Snakes have been here for millions of years.
* * *
There was a small mountain of tapes on the other side of the door when Jeremy opened the store the next morning. The overnight return didn’t normally get a lot of use; there was an extra heft to the door as he pushed it open. He deactivated the alarm first and then started moving tapes from the floor to the counter. It took a while.
The unexpected stack of returns threw off his routine; he forgot to put a tape into the player for in-store play. Instead he sat at the counter, processing returns in silence, pronouncing titles in his head as he checked them all back in: Tango & Cash, Varsity Blues, Primal Fear, She’s All That, Mortal Thoughts, Bloodsport, Targets, Nightbreed, Reindeer Games, The Sweet Hereafter, Trading Mom, Universal Soldier, Shadowlands. He was running an internal inventory of which ones he had and hadn’t seen when Stephanie came in. “Hi, stranger,” she said.
“Hello stranger yourself,” said Jeremy. Their meeting at Gregory’s was comfortably tucked away behind the last long freeze that preceded the spring thaw; it was May now. He was happy to see her.
“Keeping busy?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m kind of the acting manager these days. How’re you?”
“I’m looking at a job in San Francisco,” she said, trying casually to slide “San Francisco” onto the end of the phrase like you might say “Clive” or “Colo” or “Marshalltown.” “You think they have a Video Hut there?”
“Management opportunities at Blockbuster,” said Jeremy. Their smiles sparked off each other in the same instant. Stephanie thought about how bored she’d been all winter.
She grabbed a movie from the racks without really looking at it and put it on the counter. “I’m going,” she said.
“I believe you.” He rang her up and handed her the tape. Excalibur.
“You should go someplace, too, Jeremy,” she said.
“Well, and I might someday.”
“Seriously. You have to get out of Iowa.”
He wrinkled his brow, alone there in the store with Stephanie, trying not to feel stung but thinking she could probably see it on him.
“No, I don’t,” he said.
“You’re right,” she said, their eyes meeting. Not too long. “I hope I see you before I leave, anyway.” Then she smiled the smile that few outside the region will ever master, a no-problems look that paves over rough road without making any big deal about it. But he felt the needle land where she’d aimed it, as he did sometimes when people who didn’t understand his family weighed in about his life, telling him how it looked from the outside. Another nagging little question lodged like a bit of grapeshot in his chest. It was nothing major, but the place where he stored them all was running out of room.
* * *
He called Bill Veatch from work, muting the in-store TV before he did it. It’d been a slow day in the store; it seemed like it was all slow days now. Bill himself answered, but only to say he wasn’t much good at talking on the phone: could Jeremy come in tomorrow? Sure, he had tomorrow off, tomorrow morning would be fine.
The Veatch & Son offices in Des Moines took up a full city block just off I-35. Thom Veatch, with a government loan, had founded Veatch Basement & Foundation after coming home from the Second World War, where he’d served in the Pacific theater; over the next ten years industrial growth around town slowed to a trickle, but he’d already been able to open offices in Sioux City and Council Bluffs by then. His main line of work was waterproofing; one of his salesmen, a real carny barker type, had a line about how you needed to waterproof your basement on both sides of the boom-and-bust cycle. It was true. Applying sealant to baseboards and cinder blocks wasn’t the kind of work people aspired to, but there’d always be the work to do, and if on top of that you were the man who sold the cinder blocks, so much the better.
By the time Thom Veatch died in 1987, he had five locations throughout the state, and had expanded his home office’s operations to include building materials—wood, concrete—and machine rental. He left the whole business to his son William, who’d graduated from the College of Business and Public Administration at Drake. There were actually two Veatch sons, but Bill’s brother, Gary, had driven a VW van out to Oregon immediately after high school and didn’t want anything to do with construction. So it was just Veatch & Son.
Bill was in his late forties now; it seemed like there was a new Home Depot going up somewhere in Polk County every week. Young men ran into the Home Depot recruiter at the job fair and ended up replacing PVC under residential sinks all day, but Bill wasn’t going down without a fight. He liked the Iowa he’d grown up in and wanted to leave something of it to his own kids if he could.
It was the third job interview Jeremy’d ever done; he’d gotten a harvest help job at the co-op when he was sixteen without even filling out an application first. With Sarah Jane it’d been more of a conversation than an interview; she talked about starting Video Hut after her divorce, figuring out the mechanics of the business all by herself, learning how to stand on her own two feet. But Bill Veatch spoke in broad terms, and his outlook grew more appealing as he went, taking on softly cinematic properties in Jeremy’s imagination. A reliable day’s work; a few bills in his pocket; money in the bank. Making the drive out daily from Nevada until maybe he met someone. A family? Move closer to work, then, probably. Or possibly not; there was nothing wrong with commuting to work. All kinds of people did it. He’d seen a bunch of them behind the wheels of their cars on the highway just this morning, cups of coffee in one hand and the other on the wheel. It was something of a perk, according to Bill: “House fills up with kids, you love ’em, but half an hour on the highway, it’s like a little vacation,” he said when they’d reached the far fence, from which you could see the cars up on I-35. “Sometimes I listen to those Books on Tape. Y’ever read Raise the Titanic?”
“Saw the movie,” offered Jeremy.
Back at the office, which was a mobile home past the end of the lumberyard, Bill said: “This is a growing company.” He gestured at a little window above and behind Jeremy’s head, which looked out on the lot. “This isn’t that seasonal position I was telling your dad about a few months back. There’s guys been here ten, twenty years. I try to hire people who can see themselves retiring from Veatch
& Son.”
You can kind of see it coming, the life you begin assembling in these awkward moments when somebody’s getting ready to offer you a job. In Hollywood, these moments sometimes present themselves as a crossroads in a cautionary tale, where the hero comes to think of himself as having been rescued, in that one moment, from the grinding boredom of an unvarying daily regimen of unglamorous tasks. Fate steps in, or chance, or providence, and reveals his purpose, his calling, the shining vistas and curious byroads of his destiny. When the spectre of the monotony he’s escaped sometimes rises in memory, it’s like childhood: another time entirely, a planet to which you can never return after leaving, a womb that nourished you until you were ready to breathe on your own.
But this isn’t Hollywood. It’s Des Moines. Jeremy didn’t feel fear when he thought about life at Veatch & Son. He felt—what was the word?—inspired. “I’ll be honest, I haven’t thought about retirement much,” he said. Both men smiled. “But this is the kind of job I feel like I’d retire from. When I was retiring. Down the road. You know, when it gets to that point.”
“When it gets to that point,” Veatch agreed. “Listen, let me show you the warehouse. There’s a whole picking system you’ll want to learn.”
* * *
On the way home to Nevada his thoughts began to organize themselves very quickly; there were only two open courses of action. He could take the job with Bill and quit Video Hut, or he could turn down the job and stay where he was. Beyond these lay only variations. None of the variations had any meat on their bones.
He overshot his turn at sixty-five miles an hour. At first he put it down to distraction, but as he made his way back along old Highway 30 from Colo, he realized where he was going: to Sarah Jane’s, to talk. He didn’t have the specific shape of their talk outlined clearly; in earlier days, this would have stayed his hand. He didn’t like to start talking before he knew what he meant to say. But there was a need to act in this moment before it passed. The defining characteristic of moments, he knew, is that they pass. The whole detour took him a solid hour, all told; there was an accident backing up traffic in the no-man’s-land between towns, two fire engines and an ambulance and an officer in the middle of the highway directing traffic. Jeremy always felt wrong just driving past a pileup; he felt like men of an earlier age would have gotten out to help. But the flashing lights and the burning flares seemed to send the specific message stay out of the way.
Sarah Jane wasn’t home, of course. She was in Collins affixing lengths of masking tape to empty canning jars that would be filled with jam as the year progressed. She sat in a wooden chair next to a tall shelf in the basement, a crate full of jars at her feet and a red Sharpie in one hand. Her lettering hand repeated one of four movements with each pass, and that movement told the shelving hand what to do next. S for strawberry. B for the blueberries that would come in summer. P for autumn pears and PP for pumpkin butter. The reduplicated P didn’t offend her eye like PB did; she’d made an executive decision.
Once a jar’d been labeled, she slid it back as far on a shelf as it would go: nimbly, then, her hand would dart back into the crate. The whole process took less than a minute. It was quiet work and it went quickly. All lined up, label sides facing out, the empty jars waited for someone to come along and give meaning to their name tags. Prior to the actual canning their red letters might have meant anything, who knows what. Of course, no one who didn’t already know what they stood for was ever going to see them, so it didn’t really matter, but it gets easy to let your mind wander, doing simple busywork in a basement. The gentle scraping sound of the jar bottom on the wooden shelf. The simple solitude.
People tell stories about video stores and the clerks who spend multiple summers at their counters, marking time, or about the owners, the ranch houses they live in, the Nissans in their driveways. People also tell stories about houses out in the country, old farmhouses, sitting unprepossessingly on large lots parceled out a century ago, soaking up darkness from depths in the earth past those where you’d till. They tell you the history of the house, who built it, what the town was like when it went up, how things seemed after everybody’d moved on to the bigger cities or set out for new land.
If you sift through the stories a narrative begins to emerge that’s hard to convey in general terms, but I am reminded of it when I watch the third scene on the tape marked Shed #4. There are several people in this scene, at least three, though it’s hard to be sure because of the hoods, which can’t really properly be called “hoods”: they’re just some old sheets with a little binding below the jaw end. The people wearing them mill about, or try to, their hands in front of them—looking for a door? Trying not to bump into each other? But they do bump into each other; they always draw back politely when it happens. Their movement slows. It’s clear that the most they can see through their masks is a faint hint of shadow. They begin again.
No one seems to be minding the camera; after a while, one of the guests runs into the tripod, and the two fall together to the dirt floor. The camera is then trained by chance on the hooded face, which has a floral pattern. It’s a pillowcase, I think. I can’t remember. The others run into the fallen figure, but hold themselves upright, recalculating their rough parabolas, trying to make sense of the new data.
Shed #4 was not made available for commercial release, though a few seconds from it ended up on either Tango & Cash or Mortal Thoughts. The master tape is quite long, and makes for tiresome viewing, but it’s not without its moments of pathos. Eventually everybody is on the floor. That is really the only possible outcome of Shed #4, whose title might refer to four sheds, in which case new assumptions have to be made about the property in Collins, or to the tape itself being the fourth in a series, which seems more likely, though this shed does seem a little smaller than the one we’re used to. Could be a function of population, though. When there’s more people in a room it just looks smaller to the eye. Fill it up with a whole bunch of people and you’d hardly be able to make out the details of the shed at all.
11
“Your dad’s told me a lot about you,” Shauna Kinzer said at the dinner table the following night. It was true. Steve Heldt talked about Jeremy every chance he got—about how he hoped things would work out with Bill Veatch; about how he was glad to still have his son in the house, even though it sometimes seemed like the time for a change was coming; about the movies they watched together. There was quiet power in the way she listened to him—patiently, not waiting to break in, hearing his story coalesce around a profusion of small details. He felt at ease telling her about himself. When he spoke, she’d watch his face, and when he did go quiet, she’d ask questions, good ones. He tended to smooth over dense growth with a high gloss of facts and figures—place names, lineages, simple chronologies. She kept bringing him back into the picture. “So where are you in all this?” she’d asked at one lunch when he’d started down some line of dates and places; later, back at work, he supposed it was time she met his son.
Jeremy smiled and gave a very small nod. His father was orchestrating something tonight that didn’t really compare with anything he’d tried before; Jeremy could sense it. It was just dinner, but there was more to it than that. Preparing for it—inviting Shauna, readying Jeremy, accepting it as a natural next step—had involved instinct and intuition: there weren’t any domestic suppliers for these. You had to import them from someplace.
So he felt proud of his dad. He picked up the dish of scalloped potatoes Steve had asked him to get ready that afternoon.
“Potatoes?” he said.
“Thank you,” said Shauna, helping herself.
“Dad says you’re from Nebraska,” offered Jeremy.
“Yes, Lincoln.”
“Cornhuskers,” said Jeremy.
“‘Go Big Red,’” She nodded. “I used to play a little softball, actually.”
Steve reached for the pot roast. “She’s being modest. Her team went to the tournament in ’84.”
>
“No kidding,” said Jeremy.
“Down in Omaha,” said Shauna. “We came in second.”
“No kidding,” said Jeremy again, comfortably, easily.
“They call it the World Series but it’s really a bracket. We beat Fresno State but we drew Texas A&M in the next round.”
“They play a lot of baseball in Texas,” Steve offered.
“Softball, too,” said Shauna.
“Softball, too,” said Steve. Jeremy looked up from his plate to see his father exchanging a smile with Shauna. Some in-joke, maybe. From the way they looked at each other, you’d have thought they were old friends.
* * *
“Where did you meet her?” she asked while they were all bringing their plates into the kitchen; she was looking at a family portrait on the wall above the microwave. In it, a younger Jeremy held an oversized wooden alphabet block on his lap, its big blue H facing the camera. His parents were standing on either side of him; Mom, in a sleeveless beige summer dress with yellow trim, had her hand on his shoulder.
“Just growing up, just from around,” Steve said.
“That’s nice,” said Shauna. She meant it; you grow up and it gets harder to meet people, but there are shrinking places in the world where the people you meet growing up are the people you know later on. These places seem less nice when you feel trapped in them, but once you get free they seem sweet. “You all look so happy.”
Jeremy didn’t mean to hold his breath for a half second: it just happened, there at the top of the inhale. “Mom was excited for the pictures,” he said, letting it go. “They were doing Christmas scenes too if you wanted to get your Christmas cards made there, so we did those. We were giving her a little bit of a hard time about it.”
“About Christmas?”
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