THAT NIGHT HE GOT HURT for the first time in the three years he’d worked there. It happened as they were changing the die in the press. He was thinking about the black oval of earth in the woods and holding the wrench positioned on the die for Reuben to hit with the sledgehammer. Something he’d done a thousand times before. The wrench weighed fifty or sixty pounds and had always reminded Pettijohn of something lost from the toolbox of a giant.
He must have been standing off-balance, for when the clang of steel on steel came and the wrench slipped, he fell headfirst into the press, the wrench ringing again when it struck the concrete floor. He felt no pain when his head struck the press, just a dull, sick concussion and a wave of red behind his eyelids and the sensation that his knees had turned to water. A hand stabbed at the floor to break his fall, index finger splayed out beneath his boneless weight. He felt that. A rush of nausea washed over him and he could taste sour bile at the back of his mouth.
When he came to himself, he had arisen to his knees and Reuben was stooped peering down at him. Reuben leaned forward with his enormous hands cupping his knees and his face was very close to Pettijohn’s. Behind the thick twin layers of safety glass, his eyes were rabbitlike and benign. His entire face was rabbitlike, Pettijohn suddenly saw — the soft twitching nose, the magnified eyes pinked-rimmed and myopic. Behind Reuben other workers had gathered, but Pettijohn saw no face he could put a name to and they might have been strangers staring down at some mishap in the street.
Goddamn, Bobby. Are you all right?
I think I hurt my finger, he said.
Finger, hell. You may be hurt bad. You knocked the shit out of your head and you’re bleedin like a stuck hog. Stayrook, help me get him to the nurse’s station.
I believe he’s busted that press, Stayrook said.
In the infirmary a middle-aged woman with a beehive of purple hair and an air of professional detachment cleaned and bandaged his cut. You’re going to need a few stitches in the corner of that eye, she said. I’m afraid you’re going to have a scar there, too. I’m sending you out to the hospital.
No. I’m not going to any hospital.
You don’t have a choice. It’s company policy. You have to go.
I don’t have to do anything. It’s my head. He felt dull and angry. He should not have fallen. He’d never done anything this foolish before.
Very well, then. Suit yourself. But your medical insurance won’t pay any expenses you might incur later. And you’ll have to sign a release.
Get it.
Coming out of the infirmary, he saw Reuben still awaiting him, cap in hand, out of place in this antiseptic world of steel and spotless tile.
They sendin you out to the hospital? he asked solicitously.
No. I’m taking the rest of the day off. Maybe a day or two.
Oh, Reuben said, crestfallen. Pettijohn knew that Reuben had been counting on driving him out to the hospital and waiting on him, thirty minutes or more of idle time that he’d be paid for and that he could easily stretch to an hour.
Ain’t you in no pain?
She gave me a bunch of pain pills. Anyway, my head’s all right. It’s my damn finger that’s giving me a fit.
You ought to have it X-rayed, Reuben said, trying one last time.
No. They’re liable to just sew me up and slap me into the hospital overnight. I’m going home.
That’s the ticket. Go home and soak it inside her; that’s the best thing for it.
In cider?
Yeah, inside her, Reuben said. That’ll draw the soreness out of it. A leering eye closed in a lewd wink.
Halfway to the parking lot and for no good reason, the remark angered him. Reuben hadn’t meant anything by it; that was just the way people talked. Still, it made an assumption he wasn’t comfortable with. It assumed an intimacy that he wasn’t sure existed anymore.
HIS HEAD HURT TOO MUCH for sleep and he sat beside the bed where she lay, his feet propped on the hearth of the dead fireplace.
Can you not sleep, Bobby?
Not right now.
Do you want me to get you a pain pill?
No, I’m all right. The one pill he’d taken had eased the pain but had made him lightheaded and drunk. He felt curiously off balance, out of sync, as if something somewhere needed to be adjusted half a turn. Everything looked and felt skewed; the level and plumb of the world seemed subtly off He wasn’t sure though how much of it was caused by the accident. He’d been feeling eerie and disassociated ever since he’d stood peering down at the dark oval in the woods.
They said Waters was a meter reader. Do you remember ever seeing him up here?
Who?
Waters. The man they found in the woods. Did you ever see him?
I don’t know. I may have. They all wear those yellow hardhats and they all look alike to me. Why?
Well, everybody has been talking about him.
They certainly have around here, she said. Why don’t we just let it be.
He fell silent. He studied her where she lay. He’d never thought about her leaving, the rest of his life without her. Her still somewhere in the world getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, living her life and yet no part of his. He’d always felt that she had saved him from something. Who knew what, perhaps she’d saved him from himself. Yet she’d always been a person of silences, of dark places you couldn’t see into. He would have liked to see the world through the eyes she saw it with, but her vision of it seemed posted off-limits, no trespassing. It seemed as best he could judge a serene world of chrome and ice and you went through it unscathed. Nothing touched you, nothing hurt you, nothing branded you with its mark to show you’d even been there.
I wonder what he was thinking while he was smoking nearly a pack of cigarettes, he said aloud. She didn’t answer. He knew she was awake. He could tell by the pitch of her breathing. She was lying naked in the warm dark. Her breathing changed when she slept. He used to lie awake and listen to it, a sort of reassurance that she was there.
He hadn’t been talking to her anyway. He had just thought of Waters, sitting on the dead beech, perhaps the gun in his lap. Was it dark? Was the sun in his eyes? Staring at nothing, then at the drifted leaves between his boots that had shifted to reveal a chasm of unreckonable depth.
Suddenly, she turned to face him and reached her arms to enfold him. She raised on one elbow and kissed his throat. Bobby, she said, just let it alone. It’s nothing to us. We didn’t even know him. It’s nobody’s fault. Can’t you see that none of it even matters? We’ve got our own lives to go on with. She took his hand and placed it on her naked breast. Marvelously, his hand passed through it into nothing, past the brown nipple and the soft flesh and the almost imperceptible resistance of the rib cage and into a vast gulf of space where winds blew in perpetuity and the heart at its center was seized in bloody ice. Rolling against him and sliding her hand up his thigh, she was a ghost, less than that, like nothing at all.
THE HIGH SHERIFF’S CAR sat idling noiselessly in Pettijohn’s front yard. With his cup of morning coffee, Pettijohn crossed the lawn toward it. A flicker of annoyance crossed his face, then there was no look there at all.
Mornin, son. I get you up?
I’ve been up.
What happened to your face?
I got hurt at work.
What do you work at, sortin wildcats?
Pettijohn didn’t reply.
I thought you might want to know how it all came out.
How did it all come out?
They decided there’s no question he shot himself. The angle of the shot and all.
Roller was sitting with his hands clasping the steering wheel and he was peering through the windshield toward the distant woods as intently as if they touched him with the same vague sense of unease Pettijohn had been feeling.