Pilgrims Upon the Earth Read online

  Terry put a hand on the armrest and pushed up, turned fast, and split the aisle, the front lobby, the red guard rope, the parking lot, blacktop studded loose flagstone. The high voice of the usher, run after him like skinny dogs set loose.

  END OF the next week the teacher stood one side of the desk and leered down on him. Terry stayed on the open math book and the teacher kept beside. He tapped the pencil at the spine, looked up, nodded quickly and put his face back down.

  Teacher, he said.

  A kid a few seats up spit a laugh he could not hold, put his head down at his arms on the desk. Terry turned his eyes down again. The teacher kicked her shoe at his knapsack. He turned the pencil over and erased a mark on the page, brushed the shavings. She went on the bag again. He looked up.

  I didn’t read last night if you’re wondering that, he said.

  Open your bag.

  What?

  I said open your bag.

  I’d rather not.

  Do it now.

  It’s personal please.

  He looked at the faces turned on him. The one at his left, Richard Jenkins, looked at him and huffed. Terry studied his face and he knew.

  You son of a bitch, he said.

  Stand up now, the teacher said. You get sick and us too carrying that around.

  Terry looked up at her.

  It’s not there anymore, he said.

  He nodded at the bag beside the desk.

  I took it out. Yesterday I did.

  She raised the knapsack chest level and did the zipper. She winced and turned her head and stretched her arms long into the bag, and then she dropped it, feathers sprung from the top. She went up toward the front.

  Bring it up here, she said. Now.

  He got the bag at a strap and took it up front.

  Take it out, she said.

  He put his hand inside and got the dead bird out. He unwrapped the newspaper. It did stink.

  Put it in the trash, she said.

  He looked at the bird, some of its feathers gone, eyes open old black, and he felt strange, and weak. A cry bloomed in his face. He put his eyes at hers, a plead.

  In the trash, she said.

  The bird crunched paper falling. He looked at it there a moment, head buried, splayed on balled white.

  The teacher pointed him back to his desk. He walked drop eyed, and sat down, and the cry a hard knot in his jaw. He pinched fists at the desk, looked over at Richard Jenkins, worked on some word problems like the other ones.

  The bell ran loud and didn’t stop. Some of the kids around him put hands on their ears. The teacher stood up front and yelled. She held a textbook above her head and squatted in front of her desk. Behind, there was a map of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was cold there. She told them the week before the Russians had a lake bigger than all the great ones up north combined and more nuclear missiles than anyone, ever, and if some important one over there just decided to, the world could end, all of them burned to cinder. They reached under the desks, to their knapsacks and got out their math books, and then they put them flat over their heads and necks and kneeled beneath the desk wood. The bell rang and kept. The teacher got from beneath her desk and stood up in front and then she pointed them to the door.

  They cleared double doors, and he got Richard Jenkins near the others huddled at the back of the yard. He jammed him on a tree, pushed him up by the neck and tried to break his jaw. Then he took him down and punched on the back of his head. Richard Jenkins covered his face and his legs jerked straight at the grass. Terry hit him at the forearms, then stopped and stood over him. He felt the cry come up in his chest again and it twisted his face up. He put a hand long at his brow and over his eyes.

  A trashcan, he said.

  He kicked him hard. Richard Jenkins whimpered.

  I was going to give it a burial, he said. A damn funeral.

  He saw her stood a ways off, watching, chewing the end of a finger; he forgot Richard Jenkins huffing on the ground, felt some quick and sudden calm. He smiled a way to hide his sick front tooth and waved.

  The principal got him around the chest, and another teacher came up and yanked his shirt at the front and they started to drag him. He yelled at them, hauled off, felt sad and talented, knew, from then on, he’d look for her, and that was all.

  THE PRINCIPAL had a tomahawk framed on the wall behind his desk and a ball musket mounted on another, and on another were his diplomas, three of them with gold stickers and cursive signatures on the bottom, and a painting of a man fighting a tall bear with a sharp long stick and mountains behind them. Terry laughed on the sight of it, but he couldn’t say why

  I never had a pet, Terry said.

  Get one.

  Where?

  Pet store. People got dogs for free all the time.

  I don’t want a dog.

  The principal sent him home for two days. Terry balled the pink suspension note and threw it to one of the trashcans in the courtyard.

  He smoked a short joint on the way home, laughed and couldn’t stop. His ribs hurt.

  He sat in his room and he looked at the backyard. The leaves turned some.

  THE NEXT day, a little past one-thirty, he waited at a piece of sidewalk downtown, the middle part of a path some kids took on the way to and from the school, old trees over the concrete, corners torn up with oak root and crabgrass. He got up behind her, and he went around to walk at her shoulder. She didn’t speak, but kept walking. After a minute she turned to him and spoke.

  You want something? she said.

  Terry stepped to the left of a woman scuffling someplace fast, brown leather handbag held tight, in front, at her belly. He got back beside Alice Washington.

  Can I walk around with you? he said.

  She kept her face downturned. He blew smoke, dropped the butt and stepped it without pause, then got another and lit it.

  No, she said.

  Why not?

  I don’t need company.

  He stopped on the sidewalk, cigarette in his right hand dropped close to his thigh, smoke running up along his arm, air broke, then, past his shoulder. She kept, but then she held her feet. She turned around and looked at him. She jostled her knapsack at the straps.

  You come back and meet me tomorrow, she said.

  Where? he said.

  Over there, beside that gate.

  He looked, nodded, and then she turned from him and started again on the walk. She turned while moving, spoke over her right shoulder.

  Bring me some cigarettes, she said. Alright, he said.

  He watched her cross fast through the signal on Cheves, then turn left at the crosswalk.

  That night Alice Washington knocked his window, and he raised the blinds, her chin at the bottom sill. She waved up at him and pointed at the latch. It didn’t make much sense to him, but what he thought was, what happens when you open a window? and then he said the same thing out loud. He went over and turned the brass lock, put a hand below the pane and pulled up; slight wind, outside a new cold, and the night deep black. Lights gray and yellow white in the east, one rig and then another hitched at a box trailer, went west loudly.

  They took you down the hall, he said.

  You too.

  That was yesterday?

  It was a week ago almost.

  She took off her glasses, held them an angle at the floodlight, and she put them back on. The lenses fogged some. She blinked a few times.

  They took my bird, he said.

  You want to go over and see his house? she said.

  I don’t know, he said.

  Come on. They put up white candles in the yard.

  She stood a few moments at the window and looked at him and then at a small white car on the highway behind. She took a pack of brand copy smokes from her knapsack and shook one to him.

  She started off and then she stopped and turned back. Terry stayed at the window. She waved him again. He went to the door and jangled the knob, put a shoulder on th
e flat wood, leaned it hard into the frame. He sat down, bent his legs at the knees and pulled his boots on. He pushed the window open some more, hooked a leg over the frame, and then they walked in the road. Headlamps rose up behind and they went to the shoulder and the tall grass.

  Basil’s yard was dark, the house unlit. He looked around, saw nothing, no candles in flame, and he bit his lip and lit a cigarette, looked around some more; nothing still. Alice dipped in and out of shadows put down by the quarter moon on the trees, turned at him and held out her hand. Her fingers warm on his palm she led him to the tree, sat at the base and faced it. He fell in beside. She took a candle from her jacket and put a match to it, and then she got another and held it to him. He took it.

  I got these from the church, she said. Like ten maybe. And some paper wax drip guards for your hands but those are at home. They look like the tops of umbrellas but with holes in the middle. And I lit some already And when I said they back at your house I meant us. Me and you are the they I meant.

  What are they for?

  Like different holidays they have at the church.

  Oh.

  Holy days.

  Yeah.

  She looked at the ground and then to both sides. She smiled, most of it eye and cheek on one side of her face.

  Groundhogs day, she said. Feast of all saints which is called Halloween but that’s just so stores can sell costumes and candy to small children and rot their teeth out. Valentine’s too, except that’s a saint I think.

  He did not understand other than she meant him to laugh softly. He did.

  That’s a good one, he said.

  I dressed like a pumpkin this one time. I made this orange suit and stuffed it with old newspapers. I sewed green vines at the neckline.

  Alright.

  She leaned the flame over. He tilted his and let the wick catch. The leaves overhead stirred, some pale light scattered through.

  ON WEDNESDAY Alice Washington said he looked like a younger version of a Cherokee she saw in a library book, and then she kissed him on the neck, in the stairwell closest to the vocational center, feet come down loud on the steps above them after the bell, her fingers bent on the black lacquer rail, nails bit to the quick.

  TERRY DIDN’T turn all the way until she was already moving past I him quickly against breezeway traffic let from fifth period classes. She gripped the chest strap at her green canvas knapsack halfway up, with two hands, fingers clenched tight, as if it were heavy rope, and she drug something behind. Sudden as highway brakes, things got mashed up, flattened, jackknifed. She ticked her shoulder and hitched the book pouch to even weight on her shoulders, flung her neck, hair tossed from the face, back over her skull. He watched Alice Washington push the right side of the double doors at the back entrance to the science building. There was a moment before the herd closed on him, a moment before he went elbow first to the walk, a space between steps. Looking at her, his body felt like wind, like the nodding broomgrass cuffed on highway shoulders; he put a hand out, and wished it to graze hers, just the fingertips, white thimbles, were enough, or the thread frayed wrist cuff on her red wool sweater. He’d give his car, all that was his, to do that, but by then Alice Washington was inside, the door closed behind her, and he watched the feet moving above him, near his face a stilt to the furrowed overhang, tall as bridge piling, hollow as rain gutter. He clutched a hand there, to raise himself up.

  After class he waited, in the same spot where he fell, in the open air walkway between the vocational center and the science building, pressed a hip to one of the thin metal columns holding the roof. A cold wind sped through the wide space opened by the breezeway. He felt it through the back tail of his shirt come loose at the waist, a flap of cloth, like a bird comb, cinched above a belt loop, and crossed his arms tight over his ribs, hunched over a bit to get warm. He lifted one foot, then the other, like a horse stamping the ground when stop reined. He waited past the cars idling a bowed line on the front curb, past when the teachers left, some lighting cigarettes once out the building, even past when the custodian, a man named Smith who neared seven feet, clocked out past five, and still, he did not see Alice Washington. He went to the door she moved through, looked close at the brushed metal push handle; smudged prints the whole length of the bar. He remembered her hand at the middle, and moved his right index finger slow there, held it close for a moment, hovered just above the metal like he meant to touch coils heated on a stove, and then he put his right thumb out flat and touched the handle. It was cold, he pulled his thumb back and looked, expected some mark, a sheep brand, but there was nothing, just the same callus and dry peel, the print lines like those on a topographical map where a mountain stood. He put his thumb back to the prints; hers was there, he knew, somewhere in all the tapped hands, and then he felt it, where she passed, where her hand lingered. The bar warm, then, he put his palm open and flat against it, like one put hands to wet cement to mark the year, same as when he touched his ribs, while at rest, and felt his heart counting even time. He rubbed at it with his thumb again, but longer this time, and when he stopped, made a fist with the thumb out, put it to his mouth and suckled on it.

  The old man at the service station blinked at him a few times when Terry stood at the front counter and nodded to a row of generic menthol cigarettes on the rack behind him. The old man let his feet from the bottom rung, toed the floor and stayed sat to the bar stool, four plain legs like handles from a work shovel, maroon vinyl at the padded head, two holes there patched with silver electric tape. He swiveled a half turn and reached for the cigarettes stacked deep rows, like shelved books in the library. He heard something from the radio, bayed at the sill behind him, and raised the volume, middle finger cocked to thumb. He flicked the short antennae a light three count, nail tapped against the flimsy metal. Terry kept his thumb to his mouth, took the smokes with his free hand when the old man quit the radio, got the pack and fingered the small change pocket on his jeans for two quarters.

  He nodded to the penny jar beside the register when the old man held the change to him, and took a step to leave; past the door glass the night, even colder by then, and the town light, over the treeline, a yellow smudge in half moon, the glow around a gas lantern.

  You got something on the end of your finger? the old man said.

  Terry shook his head, but didn’t speak, kept going on his thumb.

  What you sucking on it like that for?

  Terry shrugged, shoulders pulled up toward his ears, free hand out beside him turned open and flat to the ceiling, but still, he said nothing.

  You must of put some syrup on the end or somewhat.

  Terry shook his head.

  Nothing?

  Terry shook his head.

  What you gone do when you light one of them menthols? You gone smoke through your eyeholes?

  Terry shook his head. The old man lit a smoke from an open pack laid beside the register, took a pull, then leaned it to the black plastic ashtray in front of him and let it sit there, line of smoke crooked yarn between them.

  It’s okay You just do what you want. I chewed on a blue blanket for twenty some years.

  Terry held his left arm chest level, made a fist and stuck the thumb up, wished the sign he made to the old man to say, alright, thank you, good job, good job.

  He lit a smoke, kept the thumb to his mouth and smoked at one corner, felt the smoke on his cheek, at his teeth and gumline, then run chemical through his sinus, below his eyes. He held his lips shut, and exhaled through his nose, smoke from his nostrils like church columns. What he thought was, I’m a dragon, goddammit. He pictured himself breathing fire, then his father carting a flamethrower, shoulder strapped, both of them burning towns to cinder, melted window glass sagging in the frames. He pushed his thumb back farther, until he lipped the bottom knuckle and his nose butted the backside of his hand. He kept that way; Alice Washington between his tongue and the roof of his mouth.

  Later he dreamt of Alice Washington moving past
him in the breezeway again and then again; he reached to touch her going past, but each time, his hand was gone, not torn, or shot off, just gone, never there to begin with, and when he woke up, three hours to first light, he’d pissed himself, and when he understood this, hands at his groin and then the sheets, he didn’t care, because already, he was settled to the welt at the center of the mattress, and gone back to dream.

  THE WHEELS bounced at the dirt road leading up to the white house. His father parked, the two of them walked in the grass lot, and Terry lagged at his back. Hardwick employees and their family members nicked footlines in the grass, gathered on the big front lawn, scattered paper napkins and chicken bones, voices gone loud at the trees. His father drew up with the others. The air was bright, and warm. They all wore identical orange sweatshirts made for the day, fifty-eight years since dirt broke, at their chests a black outline of the plant, as seen from the highway, a block with a smokestack, and after a while he went and stood near him. Benjamin Webber’s knee popped loud like broken wood when he shifted weight. In Korea he tore some part of it, a ligament, a tendon, while carrying a flamethrower strapped to his back. The doctors sutured it ramshackle. Terry kept at two boys sitting a few feet apart in the grass, their brown hair cut to bowl lines. The elder went to the ground and picked with two hands, stuck his fingers down hard and broke grass. He raised up, moved a clod around in his hands, threw it against the other one’s head, and the dirt busted, dry cloud bloomed at his face.

  Going on an hour Terry stood beside him cross armed. Benjamin Webber breathed hard through his nose. His shoulders were wide and bowed. Still he was thick in the arms, and his hands were beat rough. The hair grew wiry and unkempt at the base of his neck, dark, mostly, but taken some by gray and white. Some of them talked to one another, but none came where they stood. Terry told him he was ready to go. His father shook his head.