Pilgrims Upon the Earth Page 9

  Did you think I wouldn’t know you were here? she said.

  He thought a moment. No words came. He pushed the spread back and sat up. She moved easy through the room, got a small wood chair at one corner, drug it over and sat down. She tapped ashes at her hand again and closed a fist. She wore the silver hoop earrings Alice used to pierce her ear. He thought to pull one out, and laid one hand over the other in his lap. She put the cigarette in her mouth, and leaned toward him, took his hands and turned them over and put her thumbs on the cuts. He studied her eyes, pinched in the smoke, took his hands from her and jammed them beneath his arms. He got up off the bed and straightened the pillow and then the spread. He turned back to her; if he didn’t ask, he never would, the question in his head a gleaming bone. They burned her to ash, but past that fact he didn’t know what, and it confused him, thought and blood and heart turned to that.

  What did you do with her? he said.

  Her mother was quiet.

  Is there a jar? he said.

  She stood up, went over to one wall and opened the window. She took long, quick pulls. He put his eyes to the floor, then lifted his face. She kept hers at the window. She finished the smoke, thumped it to the backyard and then she lit another.

  Is she on the mantel? he said.

  She kept her face at the backyard and pulled on the smoke and blew from her nose.

  Is she in a jar? he said.

  She turned quickly, and glared at him.

  In a trunk with a combination?

  She didn’t speak, kept her face at his.

  What?

  She shook her head.

  Is something wrong with you? she said.

  I need you to tell me.

  She looked away

  No one talks like that, she said.

  She kept at the window and her cigarette, a quick hard drag and then another, ash tapped to the sill.

  He went on a run and did not think to stop. The trees rushed past were dead or sleeping.

  TERRY WENT back to Alice’s house, three hours before first light. He parked his car in the same place and carried a shovel and a sack of potatoes into her backyard. He started digging at the edge of the rose garden, worked a deep rut beneath the grass and roots. He knifed the sack in the middle and held it to the mouth of the hole and shook it empty. He covered the scar neatly with loose dirt and pine straw from the flowerbed. He dropped the empty potato sack in the field on the way back to the car. He put the shovel in the back and drove off. In two weeks, the rose garden would be dead. Alice’s parents would have many potatoes.

  BENJAMIN WEBBER came outside wearing army boots with black laces undone, tongues loose and flapped at blue church socks pulled close to his knees, legs bare above the bands. They were old shoes, from Korea when he carried a gun there and shot communists from the northern part. Once Benjamin Webber said he used a flamethrower there, and burned a whole forest, and some people inside. The flamethrower took two people to carry, he said, him at the barrel and trigger, metal harness bracing both shoulders to keep the gun still, another at the back, toting the fire tank, both of them zipped burnproof coats and pants and hoods, like a spacesuit he said, or one for scuba diving. He had on flannel sleep pants cut short with scissors, bottoms frayed loose red and black string. The silver hair left on the sides of his head stuck wild from his night face against the pillow. He smoothed it some, but it stayed.

  Terry was leaned at one knee beside a fire; leaves and sticks from the yard, low wet plume of smoke wound a bed spring. He pulled up hunks of grass and threw them in. He stood up when he saw his father, and thumbed the cigarette into the dark past. He spit, wiped one corner of his mouth on the back of his green jacket sleeve. He looked for the cigarette after, to see if the cherry still burnt, but nothing, only his father’s chest and face streaked with fire line the closer he got; all of him clear when he stood beside Terry and crossed his arms tight on his chest. The end of his nose, the bridge, flushed apple red, broken veins at the nostrils and cheeks, skin beneath his eyes puffed so much Terry couldn’t see the bottom lids. Benjamin Webber took a red bandanna from a pocket and put it to his nose and blew hard and high and then he did it again. He folded the cloth and went to put it back but he stopped and held it out. Terry put a hand out and shook his head.

  I’m alright, he said. You can keep it.

  Benjamin Webber nodded, did not speak, put the kerchief to the pocket on his sleep pants.

  Are you related to the ones that invented the grills? I mean us, are we?

  I’ve used one before. They’re nice.

  Maybe it was your great grandfather.

  Nah.

  A second cousin.

  Nope.

  I wish it was.

  Benjamin Webber did a quick nod.

  I do, too, he said.

  I bet they get free charcoal. Hot dogs. Marshmallows and all that.

  I had a grill one time.

  Did you fight Russians?

  No. Koreans.

  Why does that president always talk about wars with Russians?

  He’s got a small pecker.

  Oh.

  Did you really have a blowtorch?

  Yeah.

  Why?

  I burnt things. Houses. People. Trees.

  Was your blowtorch cool to use?

  No. Nothing like that is cool to use, boy

  His father was convinced he should be on the soccer team. He stood there, scratched skin at his bare thighs flicked orange light, and asked Terry questions; how he felt, good or bad, sad or angry or whatever.

  The night after he made a phone call, promised the coach in Echota a box of new school-colored sweatshirts, hooded or straight collared, if Terry could be on the team. The coach said, sure, fine; the team needed sweatshirts, sometimes they got cold.

  BENJAMIN WEBBER rented a silver family van, boomerang antennae on top, wood panel at the sides. At the rental office, he pulled the two seats shaped like small pews from the back and left them there, cleared box space, and then at the house he stacked their things inside, cardboard flaps sealed with clear postal tape, and labeled with red pen marker. There wasn’t room for Terry inside the van. Benjamin Webber gave him five dollars for gas, to drive himself and a few other boxes he couldn’t fit into the van. He left a gift on the kitchen block table, a plastic radio with an antenna and a tape player on the front. He took it from the break room at Hardwick after it sat for two weeks with no claim. His own father, July Webber, brought things home from the landfill where he worked; a Belgian made sixteen gauge pump action shotgun, shell pin pulled so the chamber carried five shots instead of three; headboard from a dark finished poster frame bed; phonograph missing needle arm; box kite made from dowel rods, yellow wind cloth the outside skin; brass latched specimen box, shaped like a small briefcase, grasshopper and locust needle pinned to the wood inside, genus and phyla writ card labels beneath; iron woodstove, hole torn at the creosote resined flu pipe; garden spade; gray stone cast of the Buddha; mannequin torso; dark union field coat from the states’ war, thick navy wool, gold buttons big as light bulbs, crossed rifles graved at them; iron fireplace grate; pine box nailed shut, tulip bulbs laid to wood shavings inside; none of these remained.

  Come on when you get ready, Benjamin Webber said.

  Terry nodded, put the bill to his shirt pocket. The radio had a handle on top, like a lunch pail. Terry picked it up from the table and held it in front and studied it.

  He sat in the driveway for an hour and played a tape in the radio. Sometimes he looked at the house.

  Terry got on the interstate near dark, after five miles there unhitched the knife and thought of the policeman holding it to him, and then he felt hungry, put a hand flat against his belly and held it there. Curtis Rigby said his cousins, ones on his mother’s side, they killed wild forest pigs with knives like that, cornered them a circle in the row pine, the sawbrier and bracken, deepstuck the blade to a big artery in the right shoulder flank; with this the boar fell
down, and died; then the tick dogs lapped blood. These pigs had mohawks on their heads and on their backs, Curtis Rigby said, tusks, white as piano keys, from the sides of their mouths that diced calves and shins and knees to ribbon shred; they weighed five hundred pounds, sometimes more; they were not scared of people, guns or dogs. Terry never thought of a pig that way; there was a pink one in a book that talked with a spider webbed to a barn rafter; later the pig became the father of its babies after the spider was dead; afterward the pig cried often. Terry thought about a woman’s stomach with a baby inside it stretched a drum skin, and then he thought of breakfast, cereal and red jelly sandwiches; he touched his belly, again, remembered, in the park downtown Issaqueena, watching a young, steep-haired woman sitting at a lawn chair, coarse green leaves from the box elders shingled near her feet; Terry heard a baby cry, then another; wet spots formed at her shirt front. She looked down, covered flat palms at her breasts, pulled her jacket tight over her chest and held it closed; when he told Curtis Rigby the next day, standing toe curbed, waiting after last bell for a ride, he got hungry, again, and then he wondered if he always would when the woman from the park reared in his head; Curtis Rigby pulled a book from his knapsack, the one they used in biology, turned it to the index and scrolled his index finger at a column; here, he said; he stopped near the front, past the appendices and periodic table, past the color pictures of rock and mineral, leaned over close at a diagram; the insides of a man and woman, line drawn, organs labeled at the white margin space. He mumbled the words while he read the paragraph beneath, told Terry a woman, like many other mammals, could lactate, spontaneously, upon hearing a baby cry; says it right here, he said; Terry told him he didn’t understand, and Curtis Rigby said, Look, it’s simple, you know how you smell, like, something that smells like weed, or somebody else smoking weed, and then you want to smoke it? Terry nodded. Same thing, Curtis Rigby said.

  Terry held the knife blade up the whole way, fingers tight on the wood-grained handle, butt end resting on the dash. He looked for wild pigs on the side of the road, heads poked from the trees, mean black hair, grinning bull horn.

  TERRY STARTED school in Echota the day after. It rained full on the way, trees bent to cold water. The green river beneath a small concrete bridge ran high at the pilings and foamed a sheet over the road. His tires gave some, wobbled through the slick. The radio shook in the seat, and the bridge ended, the ground looked up and the tires bit the road hard, town behind a smear of railroad and tin.

  He listened to a record called Combat Rock by a group named the Clash. He’d taped it to a cassette, played it then in the plastic radio he’d set on the passenger seat. The radio was metal gray, the size of a bread-box, a fold-out handle on top. He faced the black web speakers at the windshield, believed the slant of glass pushed the music from the speakers over his head, against the ceiling and to the back of the car and the rear glass, and there it bent down, over the backseat, along the floor, under the front seat to his shoes and the pedals, kept that way, moved the way heat filled a room. Alice Washington told him all about Joe Strummer. He thought of him, then, his job cleaning toilets at the English National Opera before the Clash got started, climbing rafters sixty feet with a wire cutter longway in his mouth like a horse bit to steal a microphone. Terry wanted to love something that way. All the headlights he passed in the wet morning were suns burning out. An early joint put everything to a moan; he knew later, at soccer practice, he’d get pummeled.

  The Echota school was square and dark brick on the outside. Exhaust fans shaped like globes turned on the flat roof, and steam came out and fissured just above the metal. The main yard edged short trees and a concrete walk. The cars of teachers nudged the curb. Two sides were shallow fields, the ruin of pine between the school and highway. He put the asthma inhaler to his mouth and pulled hard and held it in. He’d gotten it from the school nurse. She gave it to him after he went in and said his throat was tight and he couldn’t breathe so good. She’d listened to his chest with a stethoscope.

  Inside he was led by color; the white and black check of the cafeteria floor just past the front glass, the pale yellow and blue walls, the wood brown railing of staircase rising to the second floor. He blazed the halls for a smoking section, and found none, and then he went to the front office where the principal and all those other bastards lived. It was quiet inside, no one behind the counter. Terry leaned to it, put his knees against the flat panel below the counter, fished out his pack of cigarettes and held them. He waited a few minutes, knuckled the veneer with a four-count tap, he rang a tin bell; one like a hotel must have, he thought, a chime for a bellman.

  A teacher came from the back offices and faced him. Terry showed him the cigarettes, held the new pack out over the counter. The teacher wore a wine rouge blazer, pale carnation pinned to the lapel. He looked down, bone white hair long at the neck, then swept thin wisps over the crown, and lingered at Terry’s hand, the smokes gripped there, amber tint bifocals low on the bridge of his nose. Terry looked at the pack, too, then back up, quickly; the teacher’s wet yellow boutonniere and his staring confused him.

  What? Terry said. Stop looking at my hand.

  The teacher reached over and took the pack; Terry lurched to get them back.

  Hey, he said.

  The teacher yanked the cigarettes past his reach, held them up and broke the pack in the middle. He took a few steps and dropped them past one end of the counter to a trash bin on the floor below.

  Hey, man. Hey. You owe me a dollar for those.

  I don’t.

  Can I have the busted ones back? What do you say?

  No.

  I was looking for the smoking section.

  You can’t smoke here.

  What?

  The school board says it.

  What does that mean?

  They don’t allow it.

  They did at my old school.

  This isn’t your old school. Be quiet.

  Can I have that dollar?

  Two times you get caught, the teacher told him, it’s school on Saturday, eight hours bagging trash, painting classroom trailer walls. Then he dropped his eyes to the counter and opened a thick ring binder and flipped through. He stopped past the middle pages and kept his face there a moment, and then he closed the book, and set it back. He got a pen and wrote on an index card, and then he came back and stood at the counter and faced him. Terry shifted his weight, pad to heel.

  Please can I have those cigarettes, man?

  The teacher put the white card on the counter and tapped it with his left index finger.

  Your schedule, he said.

  He raised an arm and pointed over Terry’s right shoulder, through the glass-laced break wire.

  End of this hall is your class, he said.

  Terry stopped at a tan cinder block bathroom. He pushed the metal slide lock in the stall, and put his back against the door. He dug at the big zip pocket on front of his knapsack and found an old pack with three left. He put it to his mouth and blew, rounded the soft pack with his breath and shook one out. He struck a match, pulled through his mouth and blew smoke from his nose. He waved his hands to break the cloud. The cherry burned long, orange and pointed. The filter turned in on itself. The speed and volume of things grew sudden then, and the world moved quick, jagged, sped then slowed by a hand he could not figure; he saw dot-nosed warheads, butted through doors in the great plains, Alice Washington held seatbelt to her chest, upside down in her crushed car; he heard wedding music. The sound outside grew, and thumped, so loud he let go of the rail and put his hands to his ears; whetstone, a hungry ghost, music never listened to, stuck past his hands beneath the hair and bone. His eyes rolled, back pressed hard on the door; bells rang high on the hall brick, heels from the classrooms grew loud on the tile, he went to dream.

  A fist against the locked door at his back and his head shook straight. His lips tasted singed plastic. He took his hands from his ears and let the smoke drop from his mouth
to the toilet water. The fist knocked again.

  I heard goddammit, he said.

  He pushed through the door and shouldered a tall kid with stringy black hair, said what he thought was, I’m a visitor.

  During classes he sat in back of the room and kept his eyes down. The teachers called his name.

  In the hall shoulders knocked him down twice. Both times he stood quiet and kept walking.

  At the last bell he went fast to the front doors and lit a smoke in the yard. He threw it down next to his car, opened the door and got inside, pressed a button on top of the radio to play the tape.

  He turned left and drove the long cracked highway run in front of the school. The houses shrank, split to field, air warm and red at the window, a lull, like first light. He pulled a joint stub from the ashtray He parked in the concrete lot beside the practice field, and leaned to the backseat. He sifted trash in the floorboard for shin guards and socks zipped in a blue and red duffel bag from his father’s closet.

  The sport was new in the state. They played it in Russia, Terry thought, and Europe, Germany, east and west, and Mexico, and the country vampires came from, Transylvania. In Issaqueena there were two teams for Pickens County, green and blue, and Terry played green, for Stay Loaded Dump Trucks of West Issaqueena. Blue was sponsored by Issaqueena

  Pawn and Gun. Dixon Brown’s father was the coach. He stood them in two rows. They lost all five games in the season; end of the last one he made everyone charge the other goal. Dixon Brown flattened a kid to a sheet of water. It was November. They stood over him, and breathed smoke. The kid clutched one hand at the busted leg, and the other flailed on the ground, the bone through the shin a sharp white key The kid screamed. Terry thought of fireworks, and red popsicles.