Universal Harvester

by John Darnielle

  James pointed toward the trees. “You guys planning on opening a junkyard?”

  People have expectations of a field: what one ought to be like, how it ought to feel. But a field is what you make of it. The dilapidated bus and the gutted Oldsmobile in the tall grass out by the ancient black walnut trees at the far end of the property bequeathed a vague squalor to the otherwise empty field that abutted the Collins house, easy to miss if you scanned the lot quickly but hard to shake off once you’d registered them there, rusty and dry in the early summer sun.

  James started out across the field, his father behind him.

  * * *

  I lived in Colo, Iowa, for a couple of years. It’s right up the road, really. I was in a holding pattern, waiting to know what to do with myself next. I worked one harvest on a grain elevator; it was punishing work, and everyone seemed a little surprised that I was up to the task. They never said so, of course. There isn’t a lot of unnecessary conversation on a grain elevator.

  I manned the west site a time or two: it had a grate into which trucks could dump soybeans. It was my job to open the back of the truck and turn on the belt that carried the beans to the bin. There were two, maybe three small silos, as I remember: it’s been a long time.

  In a small grass lot on the other side of the silos were several abandoned cars. I have always wondered how a thing as big as a car comes to be abandoned: Does somebody drive it to its destination, knowing this will be the end of the line? Does a driver one day say, that’s it, this car has broken down on the road one time too many, I can’t stand it any more, no one will ever want this car, I’m just going to leave it here? Do junkyards tow cars too stripped to be of value to distant fields and unhook them in the middle of the night?

  There was a lot of junk in these cars, which I took the liberty of investigating more closely one cold November afternoon when the trucks were coming in slowly, no more than two or three an hour. There were admissions packets from DMACC and crumpled Marlboro 100 packs. There were clothes—a thin pink cardigan, some sweat socks—which seemed very sad to me. On the seat of one car there was a dildo with a plastic handle at its base; it looked to have been wrested from a display case somewhere.

  I didn’t ask my coworkers at the grain elevator if they knew anything about whose cars these might have been or why they’d been left there. They would have found the question odd, and probably embarrassing, especially coming from me. Who cares about some junked cars in a grass lot over by the west site? My house, when I lived in Colo, stood directly across the street from the west site; when I finally moved out, in September of 1994, the cars behind the bins were still there. If, in all the years that have passed between then and now, anyone has thought of them, it was probably only to say that they meant to take care of them somehow, someday, and that the parts might be worth something, so they weren’t ready for the junkyard just yet.

  “Holy shit, the keys are in the ignition,” James said when he and his father had reached the rusting body of the Oldsmobile.

  Ed smiled, out exploring in the great wide world with James, his once-small companion. Just like old times. “Be pretty surprised if the engine turns over,” he said, so pleased to find himself here, now, a grown man talking with his son about this gutted husk of a car. You have to guard moments like these ones, and you do it by keeping them quiet. You never know how many more you’re going to get.

  “I’m going to open the trunk,” said James.

  3

  The first tape was just street scenes: no commentary, no known locations, no titles. The locales varied—there were park benches, and bus stops, and grassy hills by freeway off-ramps. In all these places two constants remained: people, and garbage. There were men and women in dirty clothes, digging through trash cans, sometimes scrounging in the nearby grass, eating with their hands, casting furtive glances around as they ate; often, when they’d left the scene, the camera would remain trained on the spot, as if waiting for something new to develop. Nothing did. Five minutes would pass with no action in the frame, then seven. There was no news to report after the garbage eaters had gone, but the camera, possibly mounted and left unmanned, kept at its work until someone remembered to turn it off. The scene would end then, cutting out abruptly, and just as suddenly the next scene would begin: static, familiar, identical save for the particulars.

  “It’s somebody’s college project,” James offered. The army-green plastic garbage bag full of videotapes from the trunk of the Oldsmobile bulged on the cellar floor nearby.

  “No way,” said Abby. “This took years.”

  “Big expert,” said James.

  She pointed at a teenage girl on the screen. “Those are acid-washed,” she said. “Eighties.” She picked up the remote, hit PAUSE for a second, then REWIND. The footage scrolled backwards for a minute, then two.

  “There,” she said, hitting PLAY again. A woman in jeans, a halter top, and oversized brown sunglasses was stopped mid-stride. “Those are Dittos. Mid-seventies.”

  “You ever heard of this amazing invention called the thrift store?” said James, more out of habit than conviction.

  “There’s no way,” she said. She froze the screen again and pointed in sequence at several spots. “Macramé purse. Birkenstocks.”

  She let it play for another minute.

  “Orange polyester pants,” she said triumphantly.

  “Are you spending Mom and Dad’s retirement studying fashion design?”

  “It’s weird, at Reed we have these courses in this subject they’re tentatively calling ‘history.’ Deeply experimental.”

  James watched, again, the woman with the macramé purse, who paused to talk to the people scavenging in the garbage: the camera’s station, no nearer than across the street, was too far off to pick up any dialogue. Traffic obscured the view from time to time.

  “You’re right,” he said after a minute. A green car rolled slowly into the frame from the right, accelerating suddenly. “Jesus, that’s a Gremlin. Those things are legendary.” More cars passed: big Fords like boats, several Honda hatchbacks in quick succession.

  “They’re all scenes of basically the same stuff happening over a long period of time,” Abby said when they’d been sitting in silence for a while.

  James didn’t know what to say. He was curious. Curiosity had always felt, to him, like something you ought to be ashamed of, an accusing finger pointing out that there’s something you don’t know yet.

  “There’s no label on the tape?” he said finally, cross-legged on the floor in front of the television down in the cellar.

  “It just says Street Number Five on the container,” said Abby, sliding the TDK-branded cardboard shell from the top of the VCR and handing it over even though she’d already told him all there was to know about it.

  * * *

  “Half of this is going to be porn,” said James; Abby was arranging the tapes into tidy stacks on the floor. Some were missing; all nine of the Street series were present and accounted for in all their excruciating tedium, but others, judging from their titles, were from the middle of a sequence. Driveway 5–7. Church Services 3.

  “You hope,” said Abby.

  “I hope I get to watch porn with you, Abs?” he said, eyebrows up. “Am I hearing this right? I just want to make sure I understand what it is you imagine I’m thinking.”

  She emulated the universally recognizable voice of the stupid older brother, laying it on thick: “‘I just watched ninety minutes of people at a bus stop. I bet the next tape’s porn.’”

  James laughed; she was right. “It’d be better than if it’s all bus stops,” he said.

  She tallied her win on a scorecard in her head and let him off the hook. “These nine are Street,” she said. “There’s also Field, three of those but they’re numbered one, three, and four. Then two with a bunch of two-letter combos in a row but no numbers, MN IA NE SD on the one and then MO IA SD on the other.”

  “Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, South
Dakota.”

  “Wow, they’re really working you hard out there at St. John’s,” she said.

  “We get to write our own majors, I picked State Abbreviations. Very forward-looking place,” said James.

  “You’re really funny now!” she said without insult: he’d always tried, but now he talked like a grown-up instead of a teenager who hopes people laugh at his jokes.

  “Thanks,” he said, looking around to change the subject. She’d finished stacking the contents of the first box, fifteen tapes: the nine Streets, the three Fields, the two with the state abbreviations, and one marked Shed #4.

  “Just the one Shed,” said Abby, picking it up, turning it over in case there was something else written on it somewhere: some initials in ballpoint, a date. Nothing.

  “Maybe the others are in that other box,” James suggested.

  She fed it to the VCR, whose gears turned loudly as the tape slid in. It worked fine, but it was an old machine.

  The action began immediately.

  * * *

  The unedited Shed #4 is hard to watch. It’s long; shot with a Samsung SCF34 onto a Fuji 120 Super VHS Pro tape, it is a single continuous take. From the opening shot of the unoccupied outbuilding, its chair ready to receive, right down to the lingering view of the field at night after the fleeing woman hits the vanishing point, there’s no break in the play: everything happens in real time. They bring her in; they attach her to the chair; they begin asking her questions, footage that was never transferred to copies of Against All Odds or Pale Rider or Fresh Horses and so remained unseen until James and Abby retrieved the tape from the trunk of the Oldsmobile. She rises to her feet, as we’ve seen, standing on one leg as though bidden; and then, as Steve and Jeremy and Shauna can attest, she breaks for the driveway. She’s pursued by a two-man skeleton crew: whoever’s holding the camera, and Lisa Sample, whose familiar body we see briefly in the frame when the action goes off-script.

  “Sorry,” says the cameraman, whose name has not been preserved.

  “God damn it,” says Lisa, knocking the camera from his hands.

  * * *

  When the tape ran out the machine began rewinding automatically. The blue screen showed frost-white chunky numbers scrolling backwards, too fast for the eye to follow.

  “What the fuck,” said James, watching the counter: it was comforting. “What the fuck.”

  “Can you stop saying ‘what the fuck’?” said Abby; she was standing over her stacks of tapes, regarding them as a farmer might consider a nest of snakes.

  “Go tell Mom and Dad about this,” James said.

  “Leave Mom and Dad alone.”

  “It was on their property, they should know about it.”

  “It’s somebody’s AV project from the stupid state university,” she said. She was angry; it had been impossible to look away from the television the whole time, but she’d come away feeling dirty. The sensation registered in her shoulders and upper arms, an unwelcome burden beginning to establish its weight.

  “It’s a fucking home movie,” James said, snatching up a tape from the as-yet unsorted box: Interviews #3. “The worst AV student in the world knows better than to shoot trash like that. There’s no titles, no edits, no nothing. There’s just—”

  The tape finished rewinding and auto-ejected, and James deftly made the switch; he hit PLAY, and the screen blurred into focus, a young man’s face in close-up, head lowered as if in expectation of some reprimand, waiting for something.

  “Just nothing.”

  Abby looked at her brother, down there doing his best to put on an air of authority, and then she looked back over to the tapes, adding up the numbers. A hundred and twenty minutes, two hundred and forty minutes, four hundred. Six hours in three tapes, twelve hours in six, twenty-four hours in twelve.

  “Years,” she said. “It would take years.”

  The door from the kitchen creaked open and light flooded down the steps. The kids had been in the basement for what seemed like forever.

  “Whatcha watchin’?” Emily Pratt asked with a big smile when she got to the bottom of the stairs. It was great to have the kids around after being without them for so long out there on the road. It’s hard to describe, this feeling of seeing your kids spending time together like adults, meeting up again after being out there in the world like free agents: there’s something giddy and unreal about it. I knew that boy when he was afraid of strangers. I knew them both before they knew how to talk.

  4

  “I don’t see anything,” Stephanie says, scrutinizing the city scene before her.

  “Just there,” Lisa says. “By the garbage.”

  The woman near the trash bin seems oblivious to the other people at the bus stop. She leans over the hole and plunges her arm in, fishing around down there, her forehead pressing into the rim. She retrieves half of something wrapped in butcher paper, maybe a sandwich or some cheese, and drops it into a tote bag that hangs from her left shoulder. You can see her breath in the air: it’s winter somewhere.

  “Oh,” says Stephanie.

  “There’s more,” says Lisa, holding down the VOLUME button on the remote, the green bars on the screen increasing their numbers in response. City sounds from the speaker on the cabinet: trucks, sirens, horns.

  “I want to go home,” Stephanie says.

  “A lot of people want to go home,” says Lisa, her anger like a musket flashing in the dark.

  “What are you doing?” demands Jeremy from his chair. Lisa cocks her head to one side, regarding him with what looks like pity or scorn.

  “I’m trying to find my mother,” she says, locating her inner balance again, the center from which she tries hard not to stray.

  * * *

  “Jeremy Heldt,” he says. The light is hot on his face.

  “Your full name.”

  “Jeremy James Heldt.”

  “Ever ‘JJ’?”

  “No, just Jeremy.”

  “Simple Jeremy.”

  “That’s right,” he says.

  “Why are you here?”

  “Like I told you. After I saw the place earlier—”

  “You were here earlier.”

  “Well, you know I was, you were here too.”

  “Please tell the camera that you came here earlier today.”

  If you rented one of the two copies of A Civil Action that stood, for several years, on the shelves of Movies & More in Tama, you may already have seen and heard Jeremy’s response. It was edited into one of the scenes toward the end of the movie, after the class action suit gets dismissed. Unlike Lisa’s earlier work, this edit feels natural; there’s no way to make real sense of it in the context of the movie, but you might imagine some mix-up further up the line—something gone wrong in mastering, maybe, a documentary scene cut in by accident. Removed from the greater context of the interview within which they were made, Jeremy’s remarks seem cryptic, and it’s hard to account for the severity of his tone.

  “I was here earlier today,” he says. There’s a silence, and a possible edit. “I came out here earlier to say I’m starting a new job and it’s full-time. On the way here I saw Ezra in the road and I pulled over. I didn’t know he was coming out here. I helped clean up the road and I drank a glass of water and then I went home, and I called Stephanie after I woke up because when I saw the driveway of your house, I recognized it.”

  Lisa’s voice, offscreen, sounds suddenly warm now; it’s hard to account for it. “How did you recognize my driveway?” she says.

  “From the movies,” says Jeremy.

  * * *

  “I’m calling the cops right now,” Stephanie said in the car. Out on these country highways late at night the stars ripple like great sparkling banners overhead. Jeremy headed steadily for the brighter lights: Ames in the distance.

  He reached over from the driver’s seat, putting his hand over Stephanie’s cell phone. “Don’t,” he said.

  “I am calling the police!” she said. “You
can’t be OK with this!”

  “We’re not hurt,” he said. “Don’t.”

  “You are so weird!” She was yelling, frustrated by how he kept his eye on the road while he argued. “You’ve always been weird! You’re sick like her!”

  “I’m not sick. We’re not hurt,” he said again. “There’s something wrong with her. She can’t help it. Don’t.”

  Stephanie stared at Jeremy, trying to understand his apparent calm. It would be morning soon. They’d been kept there all night. How could he stand it?

  “How can you stand it!” she said.

  “Put yourself in her shoes,” Jeremy said evenly, and it felt like a knife pushing through his chest from the inside, because he knew Stephanie would not be able to understand—Stephanie, whose mother and father lived together in a house less than a mile from the apartment she rented, whose parents would grow old together and someday be buried next to each other in a plot in the Nevada City Cemetery, their children and grandchildren gathering to honor two lives well lived.

  “Try to put yourself in her shoes,” he repeated when she gave no response, leaving it out there in the opening silence, the spring night air.

  * * *

  Lisa in mid-frame; a voice offscreen: Sarah Jane Shepherd, sounding steady and confident, sure of her purpose. She has never considered herself a religious person, but this morning—as they prepare, on short notice, to leave the house in Collins, each to their own errands: Sarah Jane back to Nevada, Lisa to parts unknown—she feels a vague sense of kinship with former coworkers from back when she worked retail; people who used to tell her, on their lunch breaks together around a tiny table in a supply room, that God had a plan for everybody.

  “Are you ready?” she says.

  “I think so,” says Lisa.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” says Sarah Jane.

  “It helps if you ask questions.”

  “OK.” There’s a beat; birds chirping nearby somewhere, greeting the day. “Where did you grow up?”

  “A couple of places.”

  “Where were you born?”