Pickard County Atlas

by Chris Harding Thornton

  In the stairway, he switched on the flashlight. The railing had fallen off and lay diagonal across the steps. It was a fair indication nobody’d been up here, not in a while. He pushed the rail aside with his boot. Near the top of the steps, he nailed his head on something. He looked up and saw the spindles of the banister, fallen over like the bars of a cage. A coolness washed through him. A feeling like relief. It was another sign nobody’d been up here in a while.

  “Hold on,” he said and let go of her wrist. He pushed the banister upward and leaned it against the hallway wall. When he took another step, her hand held his forearm. She kept it there and followed.

  Upstairs were the two bedrooms and bathroom. The door to his folks’ room was closed. He passed it. He made his way down the hall, her trailing behind him, and checked the bathroom first. Plaster lay in chunks in the pedestal sink. The basin tilted from the wall like it was trying to work itself loose from the plumbing.

  Across the hall was the room he’d shared with his sister till she’d done the smartest thing she could’ve, got knocked up by Carl Shumway and moved to Oregon. The room was empty. What furniture there’d been was sold or given away. The hole under the loose slat of floorboard was empty, too. He knew without looking. He’d cleaned it out when he left. There’d been an old, clear marble with a white sulfide cow trapped in the center. There’d been an old cigarette card like nothing he’d seen before or since. A picture of a red fox on a table, paw on the chin of a skin-colored mask. He’d found it in the root cellar out back. He wondered what he’d ever done with those things.

  He stopped outside their room, his parents’ room. He turned the knob. Locked. He reached above the doorframe and pinched the skeleton key. He jostled the lock till it popped. He felt Pam’s presence at his back, the warmth of her breath behind him. He opened the door.

  The bed was still made. The spread was still in place, draped over the sags their bodies had worn in. The wardrobe, a chifforobe, she’d called it, stood between the bed and the window, closed. What few things she’d had were no doubt still there. On the bureau lay the thick-backed brush and hand mirror, the bowl of powder and the perfume bottle, doilies. All of it was there, caked in a silt of cobwebs and dust. He remembered what he’d heard about dust. This was the first place he’d considered it. That motes of her were there in a fine coat on the dresser top. Motes of her that weren’t her any more than the perfume had been. He’d snuck up once and sprayed it. He’d learned a perfume didn’t smell like the person unless it was layered in, dulled by what came from their own pores.

  He pulled the door to, locked it, and slid the key in his pocket. He felt its weight there. He pulled it out and put it above the door again.

  Pam had said nothing this whole time. He was grateful.

  He led her the short distance to the stairs. A third of the way down, he pulled the banister so it rested like a grate on a sewer. At the second-to-last step, he switched off the flashlight. He slipped his forearm from her hand and took hers again.

  In the kitchen, he let his eyes adjust to the grainy dimness and tried to keep from breathing. To keep from inhaling the air of the room.

  There was no table. No chairs. No stove between the mudroom entryway and the yawning dark of the open pantry. There was no sink, though the pipes still ran up the wall. He saw the sharp line of white space where it once attached. The old paint. They’d had to change it. They’d scoured the walls but still had to paint. They’d scrubbed the floorboards. Painted those, too. Dad had gotten a deal. A slate-blue color. Just a hint of gray, mostly blue. They’d painted the whole room with it, he and his sister and Dad. Walls and ceiling and floor. So the only way you could see where wall ended and ceiling began was by shadow.

  They’d had carbide gas lighting. The fixture had burned too bright against the slate-blue. It made the three of them paler, their eye whites larger. So they were all locked in an expression of shock. Not surprise. Shock. Like after a compound fracture or a car wreck. It got so none of them could stand the sight of each other because of that paint.

  His father had busted up and burned the chair. She’d sat in a chair. To push the trigger with her toe. Her chair, although it was no different from the others.

  She’d pulled it back from the table, which was set. Steam drifted up from the boat of tan gravy. Like a window sheer, he’d thought. A sheer he’d wished were thicker. The gravy had already formed a puckered skin against the ladle. He’d been the first inside. He smelled the powder, the spent shell, and a scent like iron. A scent so thick he tasted it on his tongue. Her chair had a high, slatted back. A woven cane seat. Not comfortable. It’d blown over. He saw the gray dirt on the soles of her feet. That, of it all, was what he remembered clearest. That gray dirt, the soles of her feet.

  She was just a thing. Not only then but all along. They all were. Things. He hadn’t known till then.

  It’d struck him in that moment, a sharp, simple thought that’d always been in him but shadowy and dull. A sharp, simple thought that would never leave him, not when he was with others and not when he was alone: What she’d done was something a person could do. There had been, always, and would always be that.

  He breathed.

  23

  PAM DIDN’T KNOW WHAT HE WAS SEEING and didn’t want to. What she wanted was air. What she wanted was to not be here, standing in this room she shouldn’t have known about but did, a room she’d pictured in her head because she couldn’t help herself, any more than she could keep herself from picturing the pickup tire on Pooley’s neck and how she imagined the pressure of it blew up his head, like a balloon, till it popped. Worst of all, she’d pictured this place different. A place airy and sunny yellow with white curtains billowing and everything past them blinding green and a blue sky with those flat-bottomed and cottony clouds that looked fake, that looked painted on. Not a room so dark and closed in she couldn’t breathe.

  When she could, she moved. She touched the cool wall behind her and felt for the edge of the other room, the space where he held her hip the other night. She shrank in that direction, but he had her wrist. She shrank that way but kept her arm still so he couldn’t feel her inching. When she couldn’t reach any farther, she tried one more inch. He moved then, fluidly. He turned to follow her as if he’d seen nothing. As if he hadn’t been standing there frozen in place and seeing whatever it was she didn’t want to know.

  “You all right?” he asked her, as if she were the one with a goddamn problem. As if she were the one with all the misery and craziness and heaviness that filled the air like that thick, oily dust in the Oldsmobile. Was she all right. She was the only one who was partway all right. Out of everyone she knew, she was it.

  She pulled him toward the heavy wood front door, which was still cracked, leading out to air that would be thick but not half this thick, when it shut. Right in front of her it shut, sucking its thin gap of light and air from the room, and she thought for half a second, pins and needles all through her, that it shut itself. Then she saw his arm above her head, palm flat against the wood. His armpit was level with her temple, and that warm Old Spice smell filled her head with a sharpness. She felt his hand hot on her waist and he turned her body to face him. The belt buckle, hard and curved, grazed her belly.

  “Let me go out first,” he said.

  She didn’t move and she didn’t speak.

  “You all right?” he asked again.

  Words came, words like, I need some goddamn air, but they stuck in her throat and she didn’t say them. Instead she did what made no sense. Instead she did the least sensible thing she could. She pressed herself to him, length and breadth. He took a breath, expanded. His arm slipped down her shoulder and arm, but not to touch her. He grasped for the doorknob at her back. She reached up then and pulled his neck, pulled his face down toward hers. He was stone when her cheekbone found the edge of his jaw. He wouldn’t bend any more, so she stretched on bent toes up to find his mouth a taut line. She brushed her lower lip against hi
s and he tried to pull the door open behind her. But there was no space. Not with her there. Then she felt, finally, the pad of his thumb. It made a single stroke down the inside curve of her hip bone. He was trying to move her aside. But like a lever pushed or a string pulled, she ran her bare leg up the coarse fabric and held him.

  He was motionless so long her thigh cramped from holding it at the angle. But she didn’t let go. His palm left the doorknob and touched the small of her back.

  Then there was only breath. She held him with her legs when the two of them slid and crumpled down, and she didn’t jump at the clunk and patter, the cartoon boing of the flashlight’s fall to the floor.

  What followed was slow, the sliding of fabric, then warm palms and fingertips clutched on the ledges of collarbones. It was all the weight of him, pressing, and the thickness of his shoulders. The dip in his back where her calves wrapped and rested. Inside her was all warm silence.

  In the stillness after, she felt the grit of his stomach’s trail of hair against her belly. Her knees straddled his sides and she felt the hard floor beneath her back, beneath her heels and toes. She felt the air again, a heat not from bodies.

  She waited. For the other weight. The sinking weight of what she’d done. Or the punch to the chest. Or the drain of sand through her throat and into her stomach. Or the itching nerves of a lightning strike. But there was only warmth. Not numbness but a soft, constant buzzing.

  He slipped out of her and stood, pulling up his pants. The glow behind him cut him clean as a flat paper figure she traced for detail. The thin, curled hairs beneath his arms as he pulled on his undershirt. The edges of his holster. By the slight downward tilt of his head, she could tell he buttoned his uniform shirt by feel. He watched her body. Her skin rose in bumps.

  He bent down, picked up her underwear and cutoffs, then stopped.

  “What?” She pushed herself up on her elbows as he reached to crack the door open. Starlight cut across the floor in a narrow line.

  Static. A voice called out tinny, from a can. His CB. He handed her the clothes and disappeared around the door. His boots whispered across the grass. He spoke, but she couldn’t make out what he said. She slipped on her underwear and cutoffs and covered her chest with her T-shirt before she peered out.

  At the base of the steps, he called up, quiet and stern. “There’s a fire,” he said. “Get home. Now.”

  She pulled on the T-shirt as the cruiser roared to life. She’d put the shirt on inside out. She pulled it off, righted it, and pulled it on again. He was at the end of the drive by the time she shut the door behind her. She stood on the porch and watched him turn left, in the direction of Madson.

  She didn’t want to go. She could still feel him, still feel the floorboards at her back. She wanted to curl up in the Nova and stay here. Never leave. Or at least never go back.

  But from behind the house came a sound like wind. Past the clapboard corners of the house, a cloud of brightness filled the air, a glow like a distant town’s streetlamps lighting the sky. The sound neared. Light seeped and sharpened around the edges so the yard was black with the house’s shadow.

  She sprinted down the steps to the car. She got in, turned the key, and slammed the Nova into reverse. The tires skidded back across the grass. She weaved out onto the highway.

  24

  IN THE DARKNESS TWENTY MILES FROM HOME, Rick saw streaks of light in the corners of his eyes. They were what he’d mistaken for legs alongside the highway. He’d seen them again and again till he figured out they weren’t legs. He knew he just needed some sleep. He hadn’t slept since Wednesday night, and it had to be Saturday morning by now. All the same, he half wondered if the streaks had always been there and he’d never noticed them. Now that he had, they sure didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

  He made the turn into Park Meadows and coasted to the end of their road. The Nova was gone. Where it should’ve been was an empty space of crabgrass patches and dirt under the streetlamp fog.

  He idled. She’d been skittish last time, when she came back and saw the van. If she came back and saw Paul’s pickup, he didn’t know how skittish she’d be. Rick played it safe. He pulled back a block and parked behind Evelyn Mueller’s place.

  The road closer to the highway ran along an embankment. From where he parked, Rick had a clear view of the trailer. Anna was inside, he knew. Sleeping. No idea she was even alone. Not alone, he supposed, now that he was here to watch over her. But if she cried out in her sleep, if she woke scared from a dream about werewolves—he never should’ve let her watch that show about werewolves—nobody could hear. And she was still in the crib she’d outgrown. She might try to get out. Climb up over the bars. One of her pajama footies could skid and she’d fall, crush her windpipe on the rail.

  The thought made him jump from the truck and scurry down the embankment. The high grass, tan and sand-colored, streaked past and blended together. He squeezed the rubber Snoopy soap holder in his fist as he jogged across the road and up the trailer steps. He turned the knob. Unlocked. Pam had left the door unlocked again. He went through the living room and down the hall to where Anna slept. He set the Snoopy down beside her, on its back, like it’d float in a tub of water.

  He threaded his arms beneath his girl, beneath her heavy head and limp knees, and lifted her to him. He cradled her like a baby. She didn’t wake. That unsettled him, that he could come in here and pick her up and not wake her. She must’ve known it was him. She must’ve known it was Daddy. He told himself that was it. He carried her to their room. He laid Anna where she would have fit between them if Pam were here.

  Without pulling off his boots, Rick lay down, too. He still wouldn’t sleep. For one, he needed to be awake when Pam got home. He needed to be awake to tell her she couldn’t leave the damn door unlocked. And she couldn’t up and leave Anna alone in the trailer. That was when things happened you couldn’t undo. When nobody was there to see.

  For another, Rick apparently didn’t need to sleep anymore. He hadn’t popped any speed since yesterday, but he hadn’t needed to. It was like he’d caught some twelfth wind that never stopped blowing.

  He’d close his eyes, though. They felt dried like the paper skin of onions.

  He bent his head toward Anna and smelled the top of her hair. She had a clean sweat smell. But another scent crept around the edges. It was sweat, too, but something else. A smell that stung like charred trailer paneling. The smell rang in his ears. Not warm soap but just as familiar.

  It was aftershave. Brut. There on his own pillow.

  The swarm of beetles scattered against the walls of Rick’s stomach. The nothing that was something was here on the sheets. It was why Paul brushed off seeing Pam yesterday morning. It was why Pam wouldn’t say Paul had been here. It was why Pam had snuck out in the middle of the night and come back looking guilty, an indent where her wedding band should’ve been. The same night Paul had a hot date with a blond number. It was why, back at Dad’s place, when Rick said Pam needed him home, Paul had looked at Rick like he was a hit deer hurled in a ditch, knocked on its side, still trying to run.

  Rick had a gift, Paul said. A gift for seeing only what he wanted to see.

  Rick stood and scooped up Anna like the bed was hot charcoal. This time she opened her eyes and looked cross at being woken. She settled when she saw him. Her arms circled his neck. He was tempted to spray her down in the sink. Wash away any trace of the sheets. He wanted her out of this room. He wanted her out of this trailer.

  Clutching her close, he half sprinted down the hall, through the door, and across the road. The gravel bled past the corners of his vision in streaks of white light. She woke enough to ask where they were going as he climbed the embankment. His boot slipped. His knee hit the dirt but he kept Anna up, kept Anna off the ground. Grandma’s, he told her. But she needed to nap first. Up here in Uncle Paul’s pickup. The name left a tinge of bile at the back of his throat. When he got her in, she tucked into her little egg shape on the
seat.

  He went to start the pickup and checked the gas gauge. Bottomed out. It’d taken the full tank to get here. He might not even make it to Mom’s before running out. He’d need gas. He’d need to feed Anna.

  Anna. Where was Anna when Pam was fucking his brother on Rick’s own sheets? The thought rose through him and swelled his skin tight. Could Anna hear what they talked about after, slick with each other?

  He shut the pickup door and saw the gun in the rack. He couldn’t leave Anna with the gun in the rack. He grabbed it, ran back across the road, and propped it inside the front door. Pam kept the money in the kitchen, but he didn’t know where. He dug through the drawers first. He pulled loose folded towels. He dumped the junk drawer in the sink.

  The cupboards. He thumbed through rims of plates and bowls. Nothing.

  The Tupperware. He pulled down containers, popped them open. He pushed his fingers through the sugar, sifted the grains. Inside its plastic bin, the sugar was still in the bag. Maybe she’d hid the money underneath. He upended the canister and dumped it in the sink. Nothing. Just sugar.

  The flour was still in a bag, too. He dumped it.

  The bills fluttered out. Plenty of them, it looked like. Plenty enough, for all the pissing and moaning she did about money. He snatched them up and shoved them in his pockets, trying not to crush what was left of the pills, just in case. He smeared and patted the flour dust, the white handprints it made on his jeans.

  Jeans. Clothes. He went to Anna’s room. He grabbed her blanket and Mr. Turtle from the crib, then opened drawers. He’d made built-in drawers for Anna’s room. Real nice built-ins. He grabbed fistfuls of clothes and wadded them in the middle of her blanket. He cinched it all into a bundle.