Pilgrims Upon the Earth Read online

  Could you be still with me? she said. When everything else is so loud I fall down?

  He nodded.

  Will you run if I show you mine?

  I won’t, he said.

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT he came back and stood in front of the fireplace. He held a section of wood knocked from a reindeer in someone’s yard. It was the red nose, part of an eye. He thought whether or not to put it on the fire. His father pushed the front door, went past him to the kitchen, came back after a moment and sat the couch. He pointed to the torn wood.

  Where’s that from?

  Terry held it up and looked down at it.

  I found it, he said.

  Yeah?

  In the road.

  He squatted on his heels in front of the fire and laid it in. It caught after a few minutes. The paint burned off red and chemical and glowed the flame. He stayed a crouch and watched it go, and then his father spoke behind him, and Terry stood up, and turned around. His father rubbed his hands, and went slow on telling him; he got a new job, at a plant in a town called Echota, three and some hours east. He didn’t know when they had to leave. He waited on word from the new manager.

  Sometime past new year, he said. I’ll let you know when I do and then we’ll have a couple of days to get things together.

  Terry nodded.

  It doesn’t matter, Terry said.

  He remembered four times. They moved so much, passed people and towns like a rumor most of the time he couldn’t tell the difference between staying or going.

  What’s wrong with the job you got now? he said. It’s not there anymore.

  THIRD FULL week the town hung lit ornaments at the end of bridge lamps; blue and red, white and green fat colored bulbs, shaped candy canes, snowmen, reindeer. He stopped at the crest, and looked over the side to the black water steel and cold. He spit, wiped his mouth with the back of a sleeve. The stoplight at the foot of the bridge blinked; the downtown behind dark then drawn red in the throb.

  Dusk he left the station where Deaccus and King crossed at a yellow light and thumped a pack of cigarettes topside against a palm. He stopped at the curb and spit, sat down and let his feet on the road. He studied an old house on the northwest corner, pink at the front, white on the rest, clapboard shutters at the windows green and open, front door mismatched wood and small for the frame. The yard was dirt, one side of the front porch stacked with tires. Guinea hens pecked and kicked around the steps and at the yard and the walk. An old pig white at the jaw nosed the yard and wore a Christmas wreath at the neck, bells sewn into the green, rang dull when it waddled. An old woman lived in the house. On the east side of the place an empty firework stand built for holiday shouldered more tires and the shells of cars and a spring bed frame, a stove, a septic tank, stacks of cinder block and brick and old pipe. The old woman poked the yard, leaves in her hair and on her clothes. She tossed seed to a cloud of hens, put a hand to the old pig’s mouth. The pig licked her hand, and she patted its back, and scratched at the ears. Her mailbox was labeled

  KEHOE.

  He watched his father step from the car and walk toward the filling station with keys and folded bills in one hand. He limped at his back heel. A few minutes passed. He came back out and got into the car and shut the door. Terry made across the lot, stood next to the car and knocked the window with a fist. There were boxes stacked in the backseat, a pile of clothes on hangers laid long on top. He saw his shoulders and his head stretched long in the glare from halogen on glass. He looked hard, then turned down to his lap. He cranked the car, and looked up. The window fell. Terry looked at him for a moment, and then he cocked his head at the backseat.

  It’s late boy, his father said.

  He looked over the roof of the car, turned his eyes over the lot.

  We going to leave soon?

  A few weeks. A month. Something.

  Terry shifted weight from one hip to the other.

  Come back to the house when you get tired of walking around, Benjamin Webber said.

  Alright.

  You know how things are so nasty and pretty you want to fall over sometimes? I know about that. I do.

  He drove off, and Terry stood there and smoked. A man who worked inside held the door and yelled at him.

  Get the fuck away from the pumps.

  Terry didn’t understand. He spit.

  You’re going to start a goddamn fire boy.

  He took a pull, and looked at the cigarette.

  Yeah, alright, alright. Fuck alright.

  He stepped what felt a safe distance. The attendant went back inside the station and let the door shut.

  A crash of feather and teeth then in the yard of the old house. One pack dog came up in the yard and took two birds, and then more of them gathered and snarled and held twitching guineas in their mouths. They moved jagged circles and worked on the last hens, pink mawed, full of feather and tiny bone. One went for the pig, snapped at its hind legs and chased it around the yard. The bells rang on its neck wreath. Its cries were desperate, clueless.

  Terry picked up a handful of gravel beside a dumpster, heavy in the palms, and he ran to the dogs, the birds, and the wailing pig. He threw the rocks hard and straight, worked on the dogs one at a time. Some turned and jostled away A few moaned.

  The pig stuck its nose about the ground and jawed the scraps of birds after the pack left. His heart beat fast. One of the dogs circled and came back. It bore teeth, and studied the pig nudging the ground, stayed half in shadow at one side of the firework stand and moved in and out of the dark. The boy got a piece of scrap metal at the ground. He held it at a sharp end and pushed the tip on the dog.

  You want a fight? That it?

  Things got confused in his head; he saw his father, and the dogs, the pig and the old woman all singing, his father holding a shovel, the old woman’s house crumbled and then raised.

  The dog growled. Terry kicked the ground. It looked to be mostly wolf, but its tongue was fat and purple, almost black. He was set in his mind to gut it. He took a step, and the dog clenched, pulled back some in the dark. A streetlamp stuttered yellow on the corner.

  I’ll cut your ears off.

  He waved the shank. The tip caught the dog’s eyes. He did it a few times, and then he took his arm down slow and put it on the ground between them. He put his hands up, showed the dog his bare palms. The dog’s face went still. They pondered each other this way for a few moments. He leaned some more, turned his hand over and moved it slow beneath the dog’s nose, mouth blotted red, breath warm at his skin.

  Be quiet now.

  He let the dog breathe at his hand and smell it, and then he moved it behind the ears and kneaded the skin.

  Get to it then.

  He stood up and pointed at the trees behind.

  Go on.

  For a moment the dog looked at him, and then it turned and made to the woods.

  THE NEXT day, early, he went back to the sporting goods to get some I shoes for his father. In their cardboard box the running shoes bulged his jacket a hump when he tucked them at his belly, sucked back toward his spine and up, into his ribs, fastened the plastic quarter buttons at the front flap. He took the box from his jacket, and then he set it down against the floor. He thought for a moment on what made the best course; he checked the aisle again. He bent down and scooped the shoebox, straightened up then and raised his left arm high at the shoulder, lodged the box long against his ribs, held it there tight when he dropped his arm down to keep it steady and wrapped the coat over.

  Terry left the box on the kitchen table. Then he thought to wrap it, but he couldn’t find any paper in the house like that, so he got newspaper from the bin, unfolded the big front section and put the box to it, and then he wrapped it over the top, got clear plastic tape and fastened the seams, and then he left it there again, on the small kitchen table, where his father would sit.

  The running shoes looked more like socks than shoes, off white with a red stripe on the sides and a red h
eel tab. That runner on television, the one whose heart worked different than most people, got more air and beat steady when he ran far and fast, he wore shoes like that.

  Later Benjamin Webber came home and studied the box and then he took the shoes out and held them at the knot where the laces were tied together. They dangled beneath, a tree ornament, and he looked them over. He undid the laces, sat down and pulled his boots off at the heel. He put one foot, then the other in the running shoes, and then he tied them, stood up and worked his heels and forefeet around inside them. He rocked back and forth some, toe to heel. He walked a lap in the kitchen, and then he stopped beside the small table, looked down at the shoes and rocked some more.

  Benjamin Webber said, I want to sleep in them. Terry said, I think they will make you very fast.

  SHE GOT him between classes, yanked his knapsack down from behind, pulled his shoulders back. He stopped then, and looked at her, and she didn’t speak, but tugged at his sleeve, led him beneath the doorway to a classroom the school used to store desks. They stood shoulder to shoulder, watched kids pass in front of them, moving through the hall before fourth period bell. When they thinned, she leaned out and looked both ways.

  Come on, she said.

  She looked again, and then she stepped from beneath the arch, held his fingers with hers, led him onto a quiet walk to the hall exit leading behind the school.

  They kept their heads down, over to the teachers’ lot, pulled hood ornaments from hold slots on three of them, left them cocked, dislodged, drooped one side or the other, and then they crossed the practice field, got close to the trees on the east side. She pointed.

  What I wanted you to see, she said.

  He looked; an owl, bigger than any he’d seen, even in pictures, knee high if standing it looked to him, laid to its back, eyes long and dark, like a person’s, one wing splayed a little, the other tucked behind, wide, fat feet, like a labrador. One foot clutched a headless crow, like a banded newspaper wrapped in plastic, thrown to door stoop. He looked some more, couldn’t figure how it was dead, no wounds, no bullet holes or tire marks on the great owl, just dropped there, left to rot beneath long pine. He wanted to touch it, but would not. He figured lightning, but the feathers were untouched. He looked at Alice, scrunched his face a question. She shrugged.

  I don’t know, she said. Just fell I guess.

  Just fell? he said. Don’t make sense.

  She shrugged again.

  Maybe it was just old, she said. Maybe it was just tired.

  THEY DROVE early, no cars on the road, got an hour south and passed a I lake, and then the capitol, a white dome. Only a few cars, even then. Another thirty miles they stopped for gas, and she showed him the rest of the way; she drew a finger line on the map west, across green and pink and orange states, mountains and rivers and state parks and towns, her hands red from the cold; she blew at them. Floodlights at the station pumps behind them turned off, and the new light sprung. They swore hunched over the flat country unfolded on the hood, the lot of those fuckers, the whole town, even, were forgotten already, so early, its face blurred a drunk fingerprint.

  They got back on beneath long clouds, steel gray, and they passed cars gone north on the other side and sometimes they came up on cars in the south lane. Someone had yanked out the back hitch and left a hole in the panel. The metal around it rusted back to a lip. She had covered it with a square patch of cardboard, edges layered shut with duct tape. He watched the metal back door stutter, and then he watched her head through the glass nod. He worked at a joint and passed a long ditch filled up with rainwater. He smoked half and pinched it out and got an empty cigarette box from the floorboard, put the stub in the box and tossed it on the passenger side.

  A combine turned a dead cornfield and a wire fence posted shoulder high for two miles, and then a water tower, and then he kept his eyes too long on a tree shaking with cowbirds gone purple and red in the early light and didn’t know he let the front end drift until the fender caught the guardrail and kicked sparks; they rained a tail past his window open to trees in the median, and he watched it pass fired and orange, and then the sparks cleared and he righted the car and put his face back to the road. The rust he colored blue flaked at the wind, rushed over the hood. Once more quickly he turned over his shoulder to the tree, the birds become leaves.

  He drank some of the gas station coffee and it burned the roof of his mouth and his tongue. He lipped the cup and tuned the radio through fuzz and then he clicked it off. When it was quiet he thought for a while about space, and everything contained in it, planets and chairs and dogs and weather, and he was glad to be awake, and stoned, quickly moving through cold sharp air, and he was glad of the girl he followed, and of the new year, and he was glad of the morning, the blue light plain on the road. The tree and the birds and the sparks from the fender that soon were portents, and for good, signs the world had an energy, just there, like the pitch of fast water, or burning leaves.

  Her car started to wobble, but he did not worry. It was old, a gray station wagon with mismatched and balding wheels, wood panel at the sides and back hitch; he figured the alignment was bad. He watched it shake. Four exits passed.

  He tried the radio again, and found nothing. He got the box from the passenger seat and went back at the joint and when it burned his lips he rolled down the window and held an arm over the frame and dropped the end. He left the window and screamed at the trees gone by for some miles and his feet wanted to dance like mad, and they swiped the pedals and lurched the car, and the cold air rushed the window and smelled like burnt wood, and he held his mouth closed and pushed air from both nostrils, and it fogged inside the car with the window down, and it fogged inside with the window up and the heat off. He pressed an asthma inhaler and held his breath. He stared long at a billboard. It read WISE MEN SEEK HIM.

  Her car turned sideways and rolled onto its head and slid into the median, which was mostly small pine, and long dry grass. He watched this all as if it were a dance.

  He slowed his car and pulled onto the shoulder and got out.

  Her car rested still upside down and left a path mashed brown back to the interstate. The wheels were still turning. The front right was torn, and it clapped against the metal going around, and the top of the car was pressed flat.

  The window glass was smashed out, and the seatbelt was still across her chest and over her lap. Her head touched the roof. Her eyes were closed and her neck bent forward sharply so her chin went down into the collarbone. There was some blood but not so much.

  One of the side mirrors was snapped off and laid at his feet and he picked it up. He turned and threw the mirror at the road.

  He leaned at the driver’s side and put his hands flat on some of her hair run over the frame.

  A truck pulled in behind him. Then an old man stood beside in the gray light and asked about the turned car. Terry pressed on her hair, turned his head to the old man. He opened his mouth to speak and then he stopped. The words slipped, weren’t there to begin with. He went back to his hands and looked.

  There was a police car and an ambulance. The policeman made him take his hands off her hair. There was some glass beneath but he didn’t feel it. The policeman said his hands were bleeding.

  One of the ambulance drivers quickly taped his hands, and then two of them zipped her up and lifted her into the back. One of them shut the doors. One said she was busted something unnatural. One touched his right shoulder and kept a hand there.

  He sat in the grass on the shoulder and watched her move away in white and orange lights. He was not yet a man. He wanted a bomb to go off and light the gray sky The police car waited on him to stand. He didn’t pull the glass out of his hands, not for a long time.

  HE ASKED to drive. The policeman wore a gray uniform and a wide

  I round hat with dents in the top and he shook his head and told him it wouldn’t work because of his hands cut to shit and then he called a tow on the radio and they left the car on t
he interstate and the keys in the front seat.

  He picked one edge of the tape at his hands until the gauze peeled back. The skin was gummed. He balled the tape with the gauze and dabbed the cuts for a few minutes and then he dropped the ball to the floorboard. Some of the cuts went to bleeding again, and he poked at them with a finger to see if there was glass still, and then he pressed his hands against his thighs for a few minutes until they stopped.

  Soon they passed the crest of the bridge, and the old downtown surfaced below them; behind and in front of the car, lamps raised on joints in the bridge dropped in measured white. He knocked the safety plastic between the front and back and put his head close and the plastic was scratched and cloudy. The policeman kept his head straight and reached behind and slid open a small door in the center of the guard panel.

  I don’t have any money, Terry said.

  The policeman put a forearm on the seat ledge. He turned over his shoulder and then back to the road, but kept an ear to the door. He had a faded tattoo on his forearm, dark blue line, a navy anchor, and a pinup with bobbed hair standing on top, hips cocked, the word Enola above that.

  Say again, he said.

  For the tow. I can’t pay.

  It’s nothing. It’s a friend of mine pulling it.

  He thought to tell the policeman to leave it for the rust and the weather but he’d taped a paper bag with some strong dope wrapped up in plastic beneath the passenger seat. He leaned back against the blue vinyl, wanted to ask about the tattoo and where that word came from. The policeman turned again, and Terry poked at the cuts on one hand and then he poked at the other ones.