“Once, I fucked this girl. After we did it, we were laying there and she started to tell me about when she was a little girl visiting her grandfather’s farm. It wasn’t a big farm. He had a few cows, grew some corn. The usual. Out in the pasture there was a pond. Kidney bean shaped. That’s how she described it. Kidney bean shaped. She told me that one winter the pond froze over and a cow tried to walk out across it but the ice was thin and the cow fell through, or part way through. The hind and udders stuck up through the ice, but there wasn’t anything that her grandfather could do about it. They couldn’t go out on the ice and get it or they would fall through, so they had to wait until spring. When spring came the cows hind and udders began to grow green with moss and small white flowers. I don’t know why she told me that while we were flopped there. Her mouth smelled like cinnamon.”
The stars offered no solution.
One of the security guards at the hospital died. A young guy, just out of high school. He’d always wanted to be a police officer and he took criminal justice classes in the morning at the community college and worked the graveyard security shift, watching the halls through the night, making rounds of the rambling building on the hour. One morning, a custodian found the young man’s body sprawled on the tiles in the maternity ward.
Then, just as people were beginning to move on, one of the nurses went out on maternity leave and gave birth to a baby that everyone heard was ‘different’ though no further description was given. There was much hushed discussion of ‘the poor thing.’ All mentions of the baby’s name were followed by ‘bless its heart.’ In any case, the nurse never came back to work.
Soon after that, after the first of summer, the boy went missing and the newspaper was full and everyone had something to think about for a while.
The restaurant’s name taped to the window in sun-bleached, bubble letters. The wall behind the cash register encrusted by dusty family photos in tarnished tin frames. Card tables covered in butcher paper. Handwritten menu with Bible verses. The warm smell of frying wafted like cat hair on an updraft. Swirling tendrils of hot dog and chili and hamburger and french fries. Mouthwatering haints of unhealthy desire. The owner watched through the window, hoping the filthy woman walking toward the door, her face caked with colors, was not about to enter and ask for food like the men do sometimes, hats in hand, hairy faces downcast, playing a part. Luckily, the woman, striding in her filthy sweatpants, knees and seat stained with what the owner hoped was mud, battered backpack slung over slumping shoulder, just walked on past the window and the owner felt tension that she did not even realize she was feeling release. She turned and watched the men at the table in suits chewing and staring at the young woman waiting on another table.
“Listen, they drive by real slow. Listen, there are lights outside all night. Listen, there are wires under the ground they put. I know that: They try to take my land, they stand in my road. All twenty of them held me down. God just don’t do stuff like that. The Earth is just the Earth. Look me in the eye and tell me how them waggertails got in the bucket then?”
In that last moment, the brilliant catacombs of space, the gathering light. The girl in the purple dress is a parasol. She held out her hand, cupped, ready to catch rain. The streets were half clusters of disappearance. Half clusters of broken wives.
The girl took Leah by the hand and they crawled over the fence. Cheeks and shoulders dotted with drying salt-sweat. Flickering eyelid of a deer, the pink tongue of a toad, the mirror of sound. Beneath a pregnant galactic vista, an eternity of pauses, never more than a sheet drawn across the sun. Fallen trunks of trees, hollow and rotten and some boys that the girl met at the movie theater. Leah leaned forward and she breathed hot breath and saliva back and forth with a boy from another county while a few feet away the girl watched and laughed, having dared her. The air was in bloom with the splendid riot of the bright green cow shit that surrounded them. On the other side of the pasture, the slumping wall, dry stacks of stone and beyond that, the Old Country Club. Air licked the thin blades of dry grass. The boy hooted. Leah felt like weeping, but kept thinking of the girl watching. This or another Sunday of doing nothing but watching Hayley Mills movies in the living room while her mother slept on the couch. She never made it to the Old Country Club to read the graffiti. Never beyond even that, to the sunken stream, blocked from sight by a break of trees, crackling water full of garbage and shaded forever. Hayley Mills looked at her, but she could not hear.
The girl opened the door of an abandoned building and Leah followed. The girl had an empty water bottle of bourbon in her coat pocket. The hall was nearly completely dark. The only light came in from a window at the farthest end from the stairs. They didn’t hear anyone and there were no lights on in any of the rooms that they could see, but then, they could hear singing in the dark, but too faint to name. They realized someone was sitting in the dark. The thought, happened upon at the same moment by both, was too much and rather than sneak out, they bolted for the stairs, hit the door with a clatter, and tumbled down the steps like marbles. It was only when they were outside on the empty Crow Station streets that they laughed, a torrent of laughter that neither could suppress.
On her back, stretched on a fallen tree trunk, listening to the clatter of water over rocks, alone, Leah stared up into the now green canopy of trees in the woods where she’d wandered, across empty fields and past the ruins of old farmhouses and the Old Country Club. She matched her breath to the lapping and the crackle of decaying undergrowth and felt her eyes dry out. One of the still standing spires of the decaying clubhouse cluttered with sunlight in the distance. She had nothing planned for the rest of her life beyond this. A warm breeze passed through everything, through her. She could feel the rotting bark scraping her bare calves.
Her neat desk, the case files and the telephone and the cheap toy car that she kept by the computer monitor that looked just like her car.
The telephone rang, but she let it go to voicemail. On her wall hung a framed copy of the article about her from last week’s newspaper. The women in the office had given it to her as a gift. The telephone rang but the person left no message.
The wind blew and caused dry leaves to whisper and she was walking along the bank of the stream that ran through the trees by her apartment complex. A black snake hurried from her path, startled and running away like water.
She remembered: They were cutting through a pasture, slipping down between trees to the stream and there had been a snake, green mud and mossy rock. The girl laughed and they took after it. The snake, caught in a crotch of roots. They tossed rocks, laughing, until it was dead, and then something moved through the trees and they, without a word, ran home.
The summer days grew shorter.
They lay in the grass, the green blades rising above them like spires or green teeth in a blue mouth. Leah felt her legs sink into the soil and her friend told her incredibly strange and unbelievable things about Pennsylvania and about her family, most of which Leah had a hard time believing. All mired in the blue around her and smelling the salty smell of the clouds.