Pilgrims Upon the Earth Read online

  I’m not, he said.

  Come on, man.

  His father turned his face down some and shook it again slow.

  Just sit down or something, he said. Be quiet a little while, dammit.

  I’ll walk then.

  Fuck you will.

  Watch, then.

  His father turned, looked at him square and serious.

  Be fucking quiet, he said. You hear me?

  I don’t hear you.

  He put a finger hard on Terry’s chest.

  You can’t talk at me like that, he said. You can’t.

  I still don’t hear you.

  He got up close to Terry’s face, squeezed one of his arms hard and put a finger to his chest again and shook him at the same time.

  Listen, goddammit, he said.

  He held Terry at the bicep and turned a few times at the others standing near and watching. Terry felt something lost in his grip, punched his chest with a closed fist, hard as he knew.

  Let fucking go, he said.

  For a moment his father was shaken, and then he backed him against a tree a few feet behind, put his forearm at Terry’s collarbone. He pushed him against the trunk and raised him on his toes, breathed hard, eyes set. Terry turned to one side.

  Just stop, his father said.

  He panted.

  Just stop.

  He held Terry there another moment, and then his breath slowed, and his face dropped. He let him down. Some of the ones nearby kept watching. Terry swatted at them.

  Yeah, yeah, he said.

  He pinched his eyes and dropped his brow and put his chest out, walked stilted from all of them. He balled the orange sweatshirt he carried tightly, and threw it down a few feet ahead. He met the bundle and kicked. It caught on his toe and stuck, rose in the arc of his foot and then dropped, all the force gone at nothing, like trying to kick a birthday He gathered it up and threw it down again, jumped on top, stomping.

  He walked the edge of the place and found a graveyard through a stand of tall pine, headstones worn and broken, knee high granite. He crouched and lit a joint. The grave at his right was shaped a crib, plain baby face carved at the head. Grass filled the crib below the face. He put a hand against it flat, let it stay until the joint smoldered. He put his shoulders back against the stone, lit a cigarette, listened to the far muffled voices and shook his head at them through the trees. He dropped his eyes, circled thumbs at his temples. Seated he turned back at the crib, made scuffed dates at the head; four days, late October.

  That night he slept walked, and woke chewing, taste of old ice at his tongue, refrigerator light bulb yellow on his bare feet and the wood floor. He gripped a frozen drumstick on the muscle at the fat end, ankle bone between his front teeth like a pacifier, a teething ring. He undid his fingers and turned the chicken leg the other way around and looked at it, held it up to the light come through the door, sweating in his tight grip. The skin was dimpled, colored white yellow. He had not meant to chew it, hadn’t meant anything other than sleep. He did not understand what his body had set out to do without him knowing. He looked some more at the drumstick, and then he dropped it quickly to the floor, bone thud like a fallen paperweight.

  IT WAS a holiday. She wanted to go down by the water to a fountain she liked at one side of the park, a large marble circle like a manhole cover cut ground level, with eight spouts on the edge, water shooting clockwise arcs. She told him after the flood dropped in some houses there was a stain of waterline five feet up on the walls. She said the paper ran a detailed list of things people found in their houses; dead fish, tires, a washing machine, trees, a blue bicycle, fence posts, license plates from Indiana and Tennessee, a human jawbone with six teeth, bloated deer, mailboxes, barbed wire, a headlight, a dropped telephone pole through a first floor window, a small black bear, the hair still damp, laid on its side. One of the cemeteries, even, turned mud, and the black water raised coffins, hung them ornaments in the trees.

  They timed it, moved between bursts gone overhead like the paths of electrons and stood on the wet marble, the water a gray mirror skin beneath their shoes. She kept her eyes up. The light bent through the water, and the water and the light beaded her face. She said she never saw anything like it even though she came there before.

  A helicopter beat slow in the blue overhead, and carried, at its belly, hung from cord attached to the legs, a gray bridge piling. Flags limped near the water and then puffed in the wind. The silver poles waxed in the bright light, the rope joints banged against the metal.

  THE SCREENED porch at the back of the house overlooked a runoff ditch, still water and leaves, and branches fallen and split, hunks of scrap concrete and bush grown at each lip; spring green leaves on the row, wide blossoms popped like sudden fog. He sat and pondered at the ditch, the cluster oak, late yellow leaves big as sheet maps thick in the air and splayed in the yard.

  Curtis Rigby came up the steps and sat down on the porch. He wore gray pants that looked something from a space suit, four zipper pockets the length of each leg, and he was short, blue eyed, hair white blond and combed a stiff part. It looked wet, dry the same time. Terry touched a finger at the top.

  What’s in there?

  Curtis put a hand up and patted his hair.

  Leave it man. I just did this.

  It’s frozen or something.

  Hair spray man. My sister told me about it.

  What?

  It’s in this metal can, you shoot it all over.

  He moved his hand circles at his hair.

  Keeps it in place. It looks like rain or something. Mist?

  What’s it smell like?

  I don’t know, flowers or something.

  You just spray it on?

  Yeah.

  And then your hair doesn’t move? Yeah. For like a whole day Maybe more I’ve heard. A whole day? You’re making this up. Don’t bullshit me. No man. Some scientists invented it. Just recently. I’m sure there was an article in the paper. It’s an important development. I need to get some. You can buy it at the drugstore. Terry nodded and thumped a cigarette at the steps.

  Curtis went off and he stayed on the porch and watched the dark. An air unit hummed on and kept, tires spun loud on the road when they passed the house and the floodlights put the shape of bobbed tree limbs against the wire screen. He heard children yelling on the baseball field. The lights above the backstop stayed all night.

  AFTERNOON THEY stumbled the brick streets downtown stoned i and stared at the bridge wire and steel humped over the black water. He took her hand.

  Are you my boyfriend? she said.

  She kept her face at the wire ties and pulled twice on the pin joint and gave it to him.

  I don’t know.

  She blew out. The wind came hard off the river, smelled tree bark and rot.

  Me neither.

  You want me to?

  You could. I don’t like no one else.

  Alright.

  They found a place where Alice Washington said the old man who kept bar, greased with cataract, couldn’t see who he poured to. During the daylight he never asked, because he figured the ones taking their beers before noon were old enough, by a long time, had been at nursing themselves because of children or mortgages, dead hounds and grandmothers, and wouldn’t have a license, anyway, with all the wrecked cars, judges and jail cots. They put the drinking age up to twenty-one a few years before; the old man didn’t know this, or he didn’t much care, but either way, she said, they’d get some drinks. He followed her up to the stools, tin leg, vinyl drum skinned at the seattops, and sat down, put his feet to the low rung. He notched the soles of his boots at the angle where block heel met the arch, squashed the toes down, at the plank floor, like he pressed a gas pedal. Cigarette burns on the wood, like stress marks the reading teacher at school put above syllables on words he wrote to the blackboard. The old man got two glasses with his left hand, thumb, index and middle finger ringed at the fat handles, held them atilt beneath the
beer spigot and swatted the tap with the other hand, long white hair pulled a tail in back, double knotted with a blue rubber band, the top of his hands, starting where the knuckles pressed, white, liver spots and grill burns. Terry looked at his white callused eyes, skeined wet cotton, blinking. Alice Washington handed the old man a dollar, and he nodded, rang the register door open and put the bill to the drawer.

  They drank the first ones fast, then got two more and sipped at those. He felt slow, filled up a damp bog in his face and hands. Their cigarettes slumped to the black plastic ashtray, his no filters, Alice Washington’s menthols, the old man bartender’s skinny baby sweet cigars. Alice Washington bought two rounds for the bartender, all of them laughed there, like some family at holiday dinner.

  When she kissed him, beneath the Indian head penny sign over the back door, beside a rusted grease vat, her mouth tasted sweet, his teeth slick and hard against hers, and after a minute she pulled back and studied him. She wiped her bottom lip with a back sleeve, then touched it lightly, and then she looked at the tip of her finger. She laughed, touched her bottom lip again, put the finger out to him in a point, got close to him and held it near his mouth. He let his bottom jaw sag open, her finger salty over his lips, against his tongue when she pushed it through.

  It was early, dark on her street. They leaned to cars parked and squinted at the windows. Some were unlocked. They opened one and sat inside, used an ashtray in the dash. The light slipped, window glass gone frost. Her blond hair was long and wrapped on her head with a thick blue rubber band. Her glasses were too big, bent one arm from sleeping in them some nights, skin and hair streaked from never wiping them. She pushed them up on her nose. She told him she liked two rock and roll bands, Big Star and T Rex, much more than any others. She told him she couldn’t match her clothes.

  She led him on the stairs, and they went to her room. He sat down on the pink shag carpet beside the bed and she went into the bathroom. She rested a hand on the sink. In the mirror at the medicine cabinet he watched her brush her teeth. She met the gums on a down stroke, used a red toothbrush with a fat head and arm. It looked something for a child. She spat loud and looked in the mirror and pulled her lips up high. She held them, clinked her teeth, spat again. The water stopped. She came back into the room and raised the lid for the record player on the low bedside table and put the arm down. The music scratched at the grooves, something he didn’t know, the man’s voice high, like a bird. He felt it at his hips, some wire there cut loose. He pushed up on his hands and went over and stood in front of the television. He pressed buttons at the black box on top. The channels turned. He stared at the picture. The company didn’t have the means and only put wire to the edge of town, but some kids at school talked about the box with red numbers on it and all the channels and no rabbit ears. He was yet to see such a thing as cable television. She unplugged the thick wire from the back and the picture blanked. She messed with the antennae.

  No one else has it, he said. Come on.

  It’s better you have to look for something.

  I heard there’s a channel that plays music, all the time, with like little movies of the songs and the bands. That’s just goddamn incredible.

  She put the ears wide. The picture caught, then broke up. She moved the metal around some more, turned the channel knobs. The picture stayed gray black, fast snow.

  It’s dumb, that television, she said.

  She took an earring from her bureau, and laid it beside the antennae, and the static jumped, and popped longway at black bars run down the screen. The earring was a hoop she took from her mother, a silver crane curled on itself and biting its own feet, and she dropped it to a short white paper cup filled halfway with water and hydrogen peroxide, and she shook it around. After a few minutes she took it out, and held it over the cup. The earring dripped and bubbled.

  I’ve seen snakes this way, she said. Feet in the mouths like that.

  She pressed the tip against her right earlobe and worked it around some and pushed it through.

  Not cranes though. It means something I bet.

  She dipped a cotton ball to the cup, and then she dabbed her ear.

  Have you done that before or something? he said.

  No, she said.

  Does it hurt?

  Not much.

  She got a picture from a dresser drawer and held it to him. He took it. A girl looked like her but older stood on a bright field, and the sky was big and deep behind her.

  That’s my sister Nora, she said.

  He turned it over. On the back she wrote in red pen, how little we really need? and come if you want, and beneath the words a numbered state road and a box number.

  She lives there, she said.

  Where?

  She tapped the picture.

  Alice said her sister went to college nearby, dropped after three semesters, and never came back, and now she lived with some other people in houses made of wood, among evergreen and snow on ten acres somewhere north of Boulder, Colorado.

  They take care of each other, she said. They grow vegetables and marijuana.

  He liked vegetables and marijuana.

  You can do anything you want. There’s no such thing as parents.

  They took a path through the woods. Seth Merritt lived in a duplex, white and plank sided, and everyone there seemed bigger than them, taller, eaters of meat and lard. Mostly they passed at shoulders, square, block jaws like the Vikings he saw on television and in the encyclopedias, flush cheeked ax wielders, beards so long and orange they twisted them to braids. He felt his face while they walked, in front of his ears where sideburns should be but were not. He rubbed his chin; something sharp, maybe, starting there. He was not sure but he felt hopeful. They went through the fireplace and cigarette smoke to the laundry room in back, and she pulled the door shut behind, and they stood quiet in the dark and listened to voices rattle the thin walls, kids from the school in the rooms past, kids who went to school there once, their sisters and people they worked with, a few bare ribbed cats. They shared a cigarette and started at a joint, and she put her face down, wiped her nose fast with the back of a hand and sniffed, spoke to him low.

  Just below us now, beneath us it’s concrete, and then it’s dirt, and things living in the dirt, and there’s rocks, and bones, and animal bones, and human bones, and past that it’s more rocks, and some water, there’s caves, and even farther it’s the center, and it’s turning all the time, and not even solid.

  Terry looked at her. She kept her eyes to the floor.

  Or bridges, she said. I think about those, like part will just break or crack, and cars falling off, and people in them. Or just a half bridge, and no one knows, and they keep driving. Sometimes I think I’ll leave here. I was born in a car. My sister’s the only one that knows that. And you now. In the backseat of a Mustang. I’m sure it was raining. I’m sure it was cold.

  BUT ON Monday she was not there. He backed to one side of the brick arch, black iron gate swung open to the courtyard, halves pushed back like unfolded box lids. When people passed on the root split sidewalk, in the new turned daylight, he dropped his chin, put his hand to the bill of his hat and nodded it to them, like he saw old men do, like cowboys on television. Some of them nodded back at him, a few smiled. He scooped one of the menthol stubs he knew she dropped, not halfway burnt, straightened the paper and filter, put it to his mouth. After he finished that one, he got another, and then he gathered up all he could find, put them to one of his empty cigarette boxes and shut the lid.

  OCTOBER THEY rode forty miles southeast and shook cold in a grove of bone and poplar during the rain, and the wind tossed branches, and cemetery leaves hung wet in the air red and orange at the grave, and his father, somber, watched them lower his grandfather.

  The way back they passed the lot she was buried, and he stayed at the car window and watched the headstones blur, and his father kept his eyes straight, yellow line past the hood.

  I don’t remember what s
he was like, he said.

  You were eight months, his father said.

  What was the last thing you said to her?

  Goodnight.

  HIS MOTHER, a tall woman, long legs skinny as dowel rods, waded into the still part of the river before the fifteen-minute break they got at nine-thirty She was twenty, named Devin, after a great grandmother, five times back on her mother’s side. She left two other women smoking at the picnic tables set in back of the plant, gave one the rest of her smokes. She took off her shoes and her clothes, folded the blue work shirt and trousers to a neat pile beside her black, ankle high work boots. The water was peat black, tinted green where light came through the high trees, littered with yellow and red leaves, and old white pollen strewn like shudders of paint. She got waist deep, kept her hands near her chest. Against her stomach the water felt rock cold, older than mountains. Then she lay back and floated that way, head up. The water moved faster a little ways down. She picked up speed, swept quick with the water like a branch dropped, fluttered hands at her sides, legs straight and long, feet up, soles at the rocks, and then she was at the smaller of the two falls, bouncing through. She went over the big drop, before the boat lock, before the dam, and went under for good.

  Of his mother, Terry remembered waking slowly, as if there was no dark, only slow lumbering through morning half light; he remembered morning smelled of pine resin. He remembered the red divots on her temples and cheeks from the tight band on the work goggles she wore most day hours. Nothing else.

  HE SAW a blue one at the hardware priced three quarters, knit, like the red hat he wore to think. He didn’t have words for that sort of blue. Blue like the monster on television that ate cookies, eyes on top of its head, blue like the world close to first light, globe ocean blue. He stuffed it to the front of his dark jeans. The store was owned by an old man who was often kind to him, and on the way out he waved at him and the old man waved back. Terry kept his hands in the deep pockets and pushed them forward against the cloth and held the jacket shut at the front metal zipper and the buttonholes over his chest and waist.