Kim rose up on her hip and looked at Franklin, and he made a slow appraisal of the length of her. She could feel the blood moving in her feet. All the buttons of his polo shirt were undone now — she hadn’t seen him do that — and she could glimpse the top portion of his lean, soft-lined chest as it rose and fell. Kim could smell Franklin’s sweat and she could smell pollen and she could smell the air itself, the oxygen and ozone.
“What do you want?” she said. “Tell me right now.”
Franklin cleared his throat, sitting up a little and unclasping his hands.
“With this day. What are you after?”
At long last, he seemed nervous. “I think I just wanted to be around you while I have the chance. I didn’t want us to miss our window and never connect.” He rubbed his eyes and looked off, as if into a vast and varied landscape. There was nothing around but Illinois. “My mom always used to say to be nice to you. Before you’d visit, she’d sit me down and say how important it was to be nice to you. Which of course I never paid much attention to. I don’t know what she was talking about — I guess that you’re not married or rich or whatever, and you live in Galesburg. I don’t know. But now I want to be nice to you, for my own reasons. I just think it would’ve been a travesty if we never knew each other.” He frowned then, in a tranquil way, contenting himself with his answer. His eyes were gazing out wisely from under those brushy lashes.
Kim could feel a wind in her mind, blowing things away that she didn’t need. She closed in on Franklin and took hold of the scruff of his neck. She wasn’t going to say another word and wasn’t going to allow him to either. She’d talked herself into wanting so many things, and here was this pure, unbidden craving. The juice on her fingertips was leaving dark smudges on Franklin’s collar. She was reaching for his hair now, limp-looking but coarse, and he was moving toward her, meeting her. She felt the sensation of falling, but she was down on the ground already.
THE MIDNIGHT GALES
There’s a guy from New Mexico who arrived recently. He stays at a one-story motel over next to the power substation, and he makes no secret that he’s obsessed with aliens and that’s why he’s here. One of his T-shirts proclaims as much: OBSESSED. He’s got another shirt that says SITTING DUCK, and another that says MIDDLE SISTER. He spends a lot of time sitting next to the weed-cracked motel pool with his feet in the sun, a jug of iced tea underneath his chair. He wears colorful hats and a beard and his jug of tea has halved lemons floating in it. My father says that if this guy were any kind of respectable crazy he’d read library books all day, books that smelled like piss and hadn’t been checked out in ages, not glossy magazines full of cologne samples.
We have no downtown, no police station or city hall of our own. There’s a concentration of dwellings near the highway, but it’s hard to say why. The highway is convenient to nothing. If you want to drive eight or nine miles down country roads, you have your pick of towns — franchise restaurants and car dealerships and jails. My parents rent a post office box in one of those towns, and hope not to get much mail. Occasionally my mom drives over for an out-of-the-way recipe ingredient or to see a movie in a theater.
My parents have a system for me. Every other year I go with the rest of the kids to a school in Larsboro — that’s one of the nearby towns — and in the odd years I’m homeschooled. My mom says the state discourages this by making the paperwork daunting, but what they don’t know, she says, is that she likes paperwork. She enjoys filling out forms and composing statements. She likes being put on hold. Resubmitting information she’s already submitted blows her dress up, she says. Driving twenty minutes to get a document notarized makes her all tingly. And then if the notary’s at lunch when my mom gets there, forget it.
She’s got a sense of humor, unlike my father. They moved here to get away from red tape, among many other things, but for my education, she says, she can weather the red tape. She administers book learning on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays she encourages me to wander. She sets me loose with a pack of oatmeal bars. I’m supposed to observe and reflect and interact and get some exercise. Huck Finning, she calls it.
My father says no one believes in miracles anymore, or in the impossible. He says the Catholics want to wax their cars and burn incense and the Baptists want guns and frozen yogurt. The corporate churches, in their newsletters, say we’re perpetrating a hoax. Newspapers from tourist-trap towns down on the coast have suggested we’re running a scam, trying to drum up tourism in tough times. What tourism? Besides the guy at the motel, what tourism? At first, people came off the highway and slowed their cars as they passed the sites, but there’s not much to see, really, unless you appreciate that unearthly violence leaves profane scars. We’ve come to suspect that time spent here is stolen time, and precious.
We are an area of unnamed, interchangeable churches. We decide things in church. Votes are taken and the losers are gracious. We decline to deem people ignorant. We don’t mind not knowing, don’t ask questions and then get angry at the answers. We don’t gather around anything that moves and beat it with sticks until money falls out. Our services aren’t an excuse to figure out who you hate and who you’re supposed to vote for and what you’re supposed to wear. We took all the fun out of religion, is what my mom says. She says it’s better than razor wire for keeping out bad elements.
A kid who was in my class at school last year and his family were chosen. The kid was special at baseball. His arm was as skinny as anyone’s, but he could throw runners out from deep in centerfield. He was a switch-hitter. Eleven years old, switch-hitting doubles off the fence. I wonder sometimes if, wherever he is now, they have baseball.
A family that ran a custom ball cap company was chosen. You still see people wearing the caps, each a one-of-a-kind.
A woman who lived alone.
A guy with a limp who ran a used-furniture shop.
An old-timer who was an assistant coach for FSU before Bobby Bowden came along and cleaned house.
The homes get tarped over right away by the church deacons. Since most everyone in the area has moved here from some other state, it takes the relations a couple days to arrive. They come and go without talking to anyone, carrying off the random remaining possessions. They are ashamed. They feel tricked. In the cold, crowded places these people come from, there is nothing more regrettable than being tricked.
The college-age kids leave, and the old people when their health fails and they need to be near hospitals. The parents and the children, we stay. This was decided in the churches, and the votes were not close. We will all stay until we all leave. Common sense has been propounded — all places have their dangers, their earthquakes or tornadoes or robberies at knifepoint or government-sanctioned poisonings or avalanches or wildfires or schizophrenics with machine guns. And then there are some who believe that when fate calls you, it won’t matter where you are.
People do ask why the little baseball star and his dimpled sister and his strict but patient parents were chosen, why before them it was the old lady who kept sweet-temperedly to herself, who spent hours and hours tending the citrus trees in her backyard. You can hear the unspoken complaint: Why not me?