“Yeah?” She was leaving the room with sarcasm, matter settled. “Then what did?”
“I don’t know,” he told her, but Susanne, having plugged the vacuum back in, was no longer listening.
*
From the dark behind her house, he saw the warm glow of her windows, her family returning. He leaned on the shovel.
“Out! Out!” she had said. Once for Roy, once for Curtains. “There’s a shovel in the shed.”
Roy stood in the night undetected, looking in. Her children and her husband gathered around her, relaying the very thin but fantastically absurd plots of the Hollywood movies they’d seen. A bank heist and a clean getaway. A love that conquers all. A dog that comes back to life. Her young son’s hands shook, his feet stomped, recalling the wonders. How true they’d been. Her daughter’s head spun. Each world had been real enough to betray her by ending neatly after an hour and a half.
Susanne retracted the vacuum’s cord. Tethered again. And in the dark Roy understood her family’s pact. Work and school, laundry, dinner, the things that happened in their lives were not part of the brightness that she and Roy had glimpsed. These things had nothing to do with birth and death but were, rather, dull, quite expected, and entirely unastonishing. Nothing strange ever really happened. No, it didn’t.
The weight of the shovel made Roy’s arms burn. He needed to sit down. He needed to get back in his car, start the engine, drive away from here with his finger on the radio’s scan button, looking for the right song, one that might erase Susanne, the dog, and the shovel she’d wanted him to use to brain and bury Curtains in her backyard.
The dog looked up at him, tilting its head a bit to one side, waiting for the blow of the shovel’s blade. “No,” Roy told him.
He would leave soon. He’d drive through the night listening as each song began, hot with promise. “I Feel for You.” “Don’t Stop Believin’.” “Time After Time.” Fine songs. He knew them well. He’d heard them all hundreds of times, as if he’d been driving the earth forever, killing any and all things that got in the way. None of the songs would ever make him forget and he told Curtains so. “Scram,” he yelled. “Get out of here!”
Curtains turned and wandered off to pee on some rhododendrons, not at all like an animal running for its life. The dog would be waiting on her doorstep tomorrow morning, gentle, stupid, still undead, still looking for something to eat. In front of her children she’d pretend to forget. She’d hold out her hand to pet the dog’s head, and in a while, perhaps a few days or a week, the head would begin to feel like the head of any dog. By the light of day, under the huge yellow, optimistic sun, Susanne would find it easy to convince herself of anything: marriage is easy, motherhood a snap, and death uncomplicated. But in the dark it was clear to Roy. Susanne sat on the couch, surrounded by her family, while out in the night, partner to the extraordinary, Roy held a shovel made for digging deeper in the dirt.
CORTéS THE KILLER
It’s starting to get dark. Beatrice walks the highway’s shoulder from the bus depot to her family’s house. She stays just outside the guardrail on the dry grass strewn with trash, matted down by road salt and rain. There’s the bloated body of a dead raccoon. Beatrice is sure that every car and truck passing holds someone she knew in high school. Inside their cars they ask, “Is that Beatrice? What is she doing with a raccoon carcass?”
She turns up the drive. She hasn’t seen the farm in more than a year. After her father died she moved away to the city—not for any good reason, but now she likes it there because the humiliations of entering her thirties as a single woman happen behind a closed apartment door, out of the view of her family and everyone she’s ever known.
There are some weathered plastic Easter decorations wired to the front porch, a hip-high bunny rabbit and a bright green egg purchased at the drugstore. It is Thanksgiving. In the time she’s been gone redneck clones of her brother and her mother have had their perverted redneck way with the house.
The farm is an island in a sea of big chain stores. While the surrounding farms were plowed under one by one and turned into shopping centers, her parents had stood by. They had waited rather than selling as the neighbors all had. They had waited with the thought, Maybe this will stop, maybe the farms will return. Now, along a ten-mile strip of parking lots, stores, gas stations, banks, and supermarkets, their farm is the only one left.
It isn’t even much of a farm. Beatrice’s parents gave up farming seven years before when, one morning, Beatrice’s mother told her father, “I don’t feel like getting out of bed.” He looked her over and, holding her jaw in his hands, he studied her face for a long while before saying, “Yeah. I can see it. Right there on your forehead,” as if there were a word written across her brow that excused her from farmwork for the rest of her life.
Within a few weeks Beatrice’s father had become an expert crossword puzzle solver. He’d even considered writing a novel before realizing that soon they would be broke. Beatrice’s parents had to start working or sell the farm. So they leased their land out to a conglomerate soybean operation and applied for jobs in the new industrial park. Her father found work as a loan adjuster, her mother a job in advertising, working in the satellite office of a company called Mythologic Development, where they turn myths and sometimes history into marketable packages used for making new products and ideas more digestible to the consumer public. Her father didn’t like having an office job. He used his sick days as soon as he got them, but Beatrice’s mother had always been very dramatic, someone who would swoon or leap without provocation; the sort of person who would sing while grocery shopping and then wonder why people were staring at her. She flourished during the brainstorming conference calls that were a regular feature of her new job. She’d dominate the conversations with her patched-together notions of Leda and the Swan, the void of Ginnungagap, the bubonic plague, and Hathor the Egyptian goddess, whom she reenvisioned as a nineteen-year-old Ukrainian supermodel spokesperson for a vodka company.
Beatrice’s parents hadn’t been born farmers. It was just one of many bright ideas they’d developed in their twenties, ideas like dropping out of college in their junior year, forgoing regular dentist visits, and having children they decided to name Beatrice and Clement.
*
“Right,” Clem says after Thanksgiving dinner, standing to leave the table. He shakes his head at his mother, at Beatrice. Clem works as a carpenter, though he’s mostly interested in small projects, cabinets and decks, hand-carving the names of rock bands into soft pieces of wood.