Jeremy climbed down. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Well, it’s a lot more sensitive than the older machines, that’s for sure.”
Lyle squinted in the afternoon sun. “You really think this is worth what they wanted for it?”
Jeremy paused, and took a breath to keep himself from smiling; Lyle had been farming at least twice as long as Jeremy’d been alive. He hadn’t called the store for a demonstration. He’d called because he wanted to talk to somebody about his new toy.
“Lot of guys around here swear by it,” said Jeremy. “We had a couple guys order Case four-fifties but those were construction firms, big projects. Pretty popular with the guys that have ’em. Anyway, most everybody loves the joystick once they get used to it.”
“Well, I guess I’ll get used to it,” Lyle said; in the light, his tanned, wrinkled face looked like a bronze sculpture.
* * *
On the walk back to the barn where Jeremy’d parked his car Lyle detailed his plans: they seemed overambitious for a man of his age. He was going to clear enough space to have a pond put in and stocked with fish, and then he’d be able to fish without having to stay out overnight or drive home after it got dark. “I’m not supposed to drive at night anymore,” he said, tapping his thick lenses.
“Seems like a whole lot of work,” Jeremy volunteered.
“Yes,” said Lyle. He nodded his head over toward the other side of the highway, still distant but visible from the path they were walking. “But I had a crew come in to build that place a few years ago and they could probably handle it.”
Jeremy looked at the house across the highway, all beige vinyl siding and pristine rain gutters: it was hard to feel like it’d ever really look like it belonged, but that was only because he’d seen a little of how things had been around here once upon a time. In truth it was places like Lyle’s that weren’t going to fit in pretty soon: white paint on wood, tall rusty windmills out front. They looked like movie props, even to some of the locals.
As they walked, they passed an old shed, boards visibly loosening from the frame—it was an antique, the real thing, something whose nails had earned the right to rust. “Don’t make ’em like that anymore,” Jeremy said: it was more reflex than remark.
Lyle grinned. “Well, now, that’s true, but how would you know anything about that?” he said. He was only teasing, the way a grandfather might.
“I’ve spent a little time in the country here and there,” he said, smiling, and he heard the way it sounded: like they were just a couple of guys talking about the things guys talk about when they run out of business to attend to. But his mind was racing privately backward, as through a dark tunnel, to the interior of the Collins shed, sixteen months ago now: the mounted camera, and the silver fuzz of the boom mic, and the built-up lighting rigs with their bright bulbs screwed into old flash housings probably salvaged from the junk heap; Stephanie standing quietly in the corner, bearing witness, declining Sarah Jane’s offer to go wait in the car: “It might be easier”; and then the questions, smooth staccato under a slur riding the hairpin to a foreseeably blunt climax, losing their rising intonations as their numbers gathered, one after another, calm at first and then emerging in their true forms, all the shades of hurt and outrage and buzzing currents of hot anger trying to make contact with the ground, Jeremy ready for it, open to it, as if his gently meandering path had been leading him gradually over the years to a night like this: to find himself alone among the nameless vanished in seeing Lisa as she was, wanting to help her even if it meant getting hurt. It rushed in on him quickly, but he had learned young how to consign hard thoughts to hidden corners, and he sent it all back to its permanent home: a space that resembled, in one part, the place where people in the movies said they stored memories of their weekends in Las Vegas, and which resembled, in its greater part, nothing like those weekends at all.
“Well, that’s good,” said Lyle; at the sound of his voice Jeremy’s thoughts scattered like light mist from the surface of water. “There’ll be less and less of it to see after a while, I guess.”
“I guess that’s right,” said Jeremy, trying without success to stop his mind’s eye from conjuring up an unattended Super Boom, and, failing that, trying not to watch as it plowed directly into an old wooden shed: the teeth of the bucket shiny and sharp, the CPU gone berserk, everything over in less than a minute—the shock of impact, the satisfying crunch of boards cracking under hard steel, the muffled sounds of everything inside being quickly crumpled into unrecognizable pulp.
PART FOUR
1
They were carrying the film equipment down to the cellar: dusty, unwieldy old machines, enlargers and old rollers and cases of emulsion and fixer. There was nowhere else in the house to put it all. This place was going to fill right up as soon as the rest of the moving trucks got here, you could see it. There was about a week left to squirrel away all the stuff they’d asked Abby to send ahead first, and then the flood would come.
Moving didn’t seem to strain their marriage the way it did other people’s. They had plenty of friends who’d moved once and talked about it like they’d survived wartime: how they’d eaten on the floor for several weeks, how they’d had to buy new towels they didn’t even need, how they’d gotten so tired of all the takeout places in their new town that even now, years later, they’d shudder driving past the Long John Silver’s.
It wasn’t like that at all for Ed and Emily. Credit the late start. They’d stayed put until James and Abby were both old enough to go to college, then told them on Abby’s first Christmas back from school—James’s third—that they were going to sell the house and move someplace where they could see the seasons change.
Abby cried; her first semester at Reed had been lonely and cold. The last few weeks of waiting to come home were torture. She’d had to spend Thanksgiving in Portland; her aunt Doris was a widow who lived up on the northeast side, and they’d had chicken cordon bleu at an old card table together in the living room, which was sweet and cozy. But it made going back to the dorm later even worse. Her expanding horizons made it impossible to think about how much she missed West Covina without feeling weirdly provincial, for a Californian, but she was honest with herself about it. She missed the freeways, the clustering strip malls. She missed all of it, and now her parents were taking it away.
They’d been understanding but firm: they were sympathetic, but they had their own dreams now. New Mexico. The Rockies. Wherever the road took them. “It was how we lived when we were young,” Ed Pratt said, sizing up both kids, now grown so big. He and Emily had agreed, before setting out on the path of parenthood, that it was important to be honest with your children; they had made good on that promise. For the children, this had always been a mixed blessing.
“Come on, Ab,” James said, reaching for another slice of pizza. “You knew they were outta here as soon as they got rid of us.” He smiled; he was teasing his father, who cared too much about things.
“They’re going to sell the house!” she said.
“We’re going to sell it,” Emily Pratt said to her daughter, gently but conclusively. “Not right away, but before you graduate, Ab. And then we’re going to take half the money with us, and put the other half into an interest-bearing account in your names.”
James and Abby exchanged a glance, weighing their losses against the promise of new gains.
“We’ve had it all planned out for a while, now.”
“We’re buying an RV,” offered Ed.
“Good Lord,” said James, but Abby knew then that he was right: they’d been looking forward to this, and it was final.
She picked a few olives off her own slice of pizza with her fingernails, scooting them as far to the side as they’d go without falling off the plate.
“Well, I know you guys will be happy to be out having adventures,” she said, visibly trying so hard to be the good grown-up her parents had hoped to raise that her mother burst into tears right there in the middle of Ro
und Table Pizza.
* * *
Emily’d picked up the camera equipment at a going-out-of-business sale the following October: Colima Film and Foto had been a neighborhood fixture for years, but nobody could fight the digital tide. Fotomats with their windows boarded over had briefly been a common sight in grocery store parking lots; the ones that didn’t convert to cappuccino stands got knocked down and bulldozed so quickly the eye forgot they’d ever been there in no time at all.
It all seemed to happen nearly overnight. She brought in a roll of film she’d shot in Santa Fe during the second semester of James’s sophomore year at college, where the grievances he continually aired against St. John’s had become almost comically transparent affectations. (“Too many hippies,” he said dismissively while looking out his dorm window, but Mom was young enough to recognize the music he’d turned down when she arrived: it was Meddle.) “You’ll have to pick these up by next Friday,” Kurt said: he owned the place and was usually the only person in the store. “Friday’s the last day.”
She looked around the store, her eyes suddenly registering yellow tags on everything. “What? Why?”
He reached into his pocket and brought out his iPhone, holding it up lens side out. “We’re not really needed any more,” he said. He was old enough that the suggestion of retirement fit naturally over his general appearance—the patches on his corduroy coat, the thick bifocals. But his choice of words suggested several feelings mixed together, and she wondered what would replace the little store next to the Teleflora.
She picked up a Nikon F from a crowded table in front of the counter: it was in terrific condition, sharp and clean. “Oh, Kurt, for pity’s sake,” she said when she saw the bright “50% Off!” tag hanging from the rewind knob: a vision of Kurt’s garage, swollen with equipment he’d never use or need, had begun rapidly establishing a foothold in her imagination. Dusty tripods and frames were huddled together there in the shadows, conspiring to make her feel sad.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m ready for some kind of new adventure. Hauling all the big stuff in back out to the dumpster’s going to be the worst part.”
She insisted, over his protests, on paying him (“Seriously, you’re doing me a favor,” he said); he made sure she allowed him to arrange the transport. It all sat in a pile next to mops and buckets for a month or so, but that first autumn with both kids gone she registered for night classes at Mount San Antonio College and enrolled in two the following spring: Basic Digital and Film Photography, and Laboratory Studies: Black and White. Older students are often the best students. They know they may not have another chance to learn.
By May she’d built a little darkroom in the garage. It was a good way to spend her mornings dabbling, waiting for Ed to come home from work. He had another year to go before he retired from Charter Oak. He was working half days now and they’d cut his caseload in half. He enjoyed these unspooling days; his clients got more of him, because he had more to give. One day there’d be no more clients at all; he’d see his last one, say goodbye to everyone, and then set out for the great unknowable beyond. It wouldn’t be long at all.
* * *
By the time they got to Iowa they’d been on the road for over a year, Ed at the wheel of the RV he’d christened the Greener Pastures. They spent their first summer in Ashland, Oregon, in a bungalow Ed’s old classmate George Plummer planned to put on the market in the fall. He, too, was retiring; he’d traipse all over Europe one last time and then move into a condo smack dab in the middle of Portland. “I had a good run here but I still feel kinda cramped,” he told Ed, who smiled all night listening to George spin stories about his practice in southern Oregon: he ran a rehab that also had outposts in Medford and Eugene. He was selling those, too. Condos in Portland were fetching enormous prices.
When George got back home in September, he put up the FOR SALE sign (“You have to see Romania before you die,” he told them), and they headed east: they hit campgrounds in Montana and North Dakota, but it was the Black Hills in late autumn where they began to first feel vaguely called toward something. It wasn’t the adventure that they’d needed after all: it was the light, and the quiet, and the space. Emily’s cameras glutted themselves on streams and shadows, but the film had to hibernate in canisters in her backpack.
They found the Collins place listed in an Advertiser at a diner the following spring—they were in Missouri, but the real estate listings were from all over the region.
Quaint family farm in quiet location, it said. Farming! The places life takes you if you’ll only let it. It took a few months to get all the particulars ironed out, but in the end it felt easy, natural. When they called, Abby arranged for her parents’ things to be sent to them from a U-Stor off the 60 in Diamond Bar; they’d be here soon. But this week there was only the first truck: a table, a bed, the sofa, books and bookcases, and the film equipment from the garage, finally finding its way to a home in a cellar underneath the most darling little farmhouse in central Iowa.
2
The cellar seemed immense, given the modesty of the house above it: without doors and walls and separate rooms to break up the space, it felt like a huge, empty arena. The dirt floor, leveled and smoothed down many years ago, was cool and dry, and the bare-beamed walls were sturdy; with work, it might all have been remade into a proper basement, had Emily not been just delighted with it exactly as it was. “Oh, Ed,” she’d said, squeezing his elbow when they first stood at the light switch at the foot of the stairs, seeing the whole of the room at one glance. “It’s like some great secret chamber.”
It was a big operation, hauling all her equipment down the narrow wooden stairs. Initially she’d reckoned the outbuilding off the driveway as an ideal darkroom: from the outside it looked modest and self-contained, a perfect working space. But inside it was full of equipment, she wasn’t sure what for: aluminum tripods and grubby canvas bags, a folding chair and several hundred feet of coiled yellow vinyl-coated polypropylene rope. It’d be shot through with daylight during waking hours, at any rate; its roof sat loosely atop the frame. The cellar was much better.
When all the equipment had been reassembled and rearranged to resemble an easier, more spacious version of the setup she’d fashioned for herself in their West Covina garage, she went back to the shed aboveground: those lights might be useful for something. Her darkroom, curtains and all, only took up one corner of the cellar, the far one, safe from any stray light from the door at the top of the stairs. A lifetime’s accumulation of books and keepsakes were in boxes stacked three high against the near wall. The remaining space to the right of the boxes they’d set up as a TV nook; neither Ed nor Emily had any interest in the television, but the kids might, if they visited. They plugged the old Magnavox into a power outlet in the basement’s northeast corner, and Ed heaped some old couch cushions in a pile against the wall next to it.
Emily felt vindicated. Back in West Covina he’d tried to convince the movers to haul the whole couch off to the Goodwill, but she’d caught wind of the arrangement in time. “Let’s at least keep the cushions,” she’d said: they were yellowish green, a little grotesque. For her, they brought back fond and now quite distant memories of her first pregnancy, when the couch, new and modern, had been the most comfortable seat in the house.
When, having rearranged them into a tidy stack, she turned around to view the room again, Ed saw the expression on her face: in the year they’d spent out on the road, they’d grown accustomed to the vagabond life, keeping possessions down to a minimum and making do with materials at hand. But now, all this old stuff, the chairs and the bookshelves and the cushions, were a line out to the time before they’d set off on their adventures: to the long gathering time that had made all their adventuring possible in the first place, over forty years of diligent, almost unconscious preparation.
“You were right, you were right,” he said, smiling.
* * *
It was the first weekend that June whe
n James and Abby arrived; he flew from Albuquerque and she came from Portland, and both their connecting flights articulated in Dallas.
“How long are you gonna stay?” James asked his sister while they waited at the gate. The airport was crowded, busy, and loud, televisions and gate-change announcements competing unsuccessfully for attention over the sporadic beeping of utility shuttles.
“All summer?” said Abby. “I don’t know. My dorm doesn’t open back up until August. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“How’s Reed?”
“Portland is the best,” she said. “I want to stay after I graduate.” James felt a pang of jealousy; he couldn’t wait to leave New Mexico behind.
“You’ve been there a year,” said James.
“But there’s so much going on in Portland,” she said. “It’s all right there, you just walk everywhere. Or take the bus. You don’t have to even have a car. I don’t know. I just fell in love with it all sometime during the winter. For two days we had snow.”
“Maybe you’ll fall in love with Collins,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. “Maybe you will,” she said, ducking out of the way before he could punch her on the shoulder.
* * *
“It’s just a gigantic dirt lot,” said James. Abby’d burst into tears upon seeing her mother in the driveway: parents get so old when you leave them to themselves for a few semesters. But the men lingered outside by the old corncrib. James wanted to see what he was in for, and Ed was eager to see his only son’s eyes taking the place in for the first time.
“No, it’s a field,” said Ed.
“Fields have grass on them.”
“Well, there’s actually some pretty tall grass to cut through once you get all the way out there to the trees,” Ed laughed. “We gave up before we got through it. But whoever was here last tilled under the crop at the end of the harvest, anyway. There’s actually some stuff coming up if you go out and look.”
Universal Harvester Page 14
