People tell stories about video stores and the clerks who spend multiple summers at their counters, marking time, or about the owners, the ranch houses they live in, the Nissans in their driveways. People also tell stories about houses out in the country, old farmhouses, sitting unprepossessingly on large lots parceled out a century ago, soaking up darkness from depths in the earth past those where you’d till. They tell you the history of the house, who built it, what the town was like when it went up, how things seemed after everybody’d moved on to the bigger cities or set out for new land.
If you sift through the stories a narrative begins to emerge that’s hard to convey in general terms, but I am reminded of it when I watch the third scene on the tape marked Shed #4. There are several people in this scene, at least three, though it’s hard to be sure because of the hoods, which can’t really properly be called “hoods”: they’re just some old sheets with a little binding below the jaw end. The people wearing them mill about, or try to, their hands in front of them—looking for a door? Trying not to bump into each other? But they do bump into each other; they always draw back politely when it happens. Their movement slows. It’s clear that the most they can see through their masks is a faint hint of shadow. They begin again.
No one seems to be minding the camera; after a while, one of the guests runs into the tripod, and the two fall together to the dirt floor. The camera is then trained by chance on the hooded face, which has a floral pattern. It’s a pillowcase, I think. I can’t remember. The others run into the fallen figure, but hold themselves upright, recalculating their rough parabolas, trying to make sense of the new data.
Shed #4 was not made available for commercial release, though a few seconds from it ended up on either Tango & Cash or Mortal Thoughts. The master tape is quite long, and makes for tiresome viewing, but it’s not without its moments of pathos. Eventually everybody is on the floor. That is really the only possible outcome of Shed #4, whose title might refer to four sheds, in which case new assumptions have to be made about the property in Collins, or to the tape itself being the fourth in a series, which seems more likely, though this shed does seem a little smaller than the one we’re used to. Could be a function of population, though. When there’s more people in a room it just looks smaller to the eye. Fill it up with a whole bunch of people and you’d hardly be able to make out the details of the shed at all.
11
“Your dad’s told me a lot about you,” Shauna Kinzer said at the dinner table the following night. It was true. Steve Heldt talked about Jeremy every chance he got—about how he hoped things would work out with Bill Veatch; about how he was glad to still have his son in the house, even though it sometimes seemed like the time for a change was coming; about the movies they watched together. There was quiet power in the way she listened to him—patiently, not waiting to break in, hearing his story coalesce around a profusion of small details. He felt at ease telling her about himself. When he spoke, she’d watch his face, and when he did go quiet, she’d ask questions, good ones. He tended to smooth over dense growth with a high gloss of facts and figures—place names, lineages, simple chronologies. She kept bringing him back into the picture. “So where are you in all this?” she’d asked at one lunch when he’d started down some line of dates and places; later, back at work, he supposed it was time she met his son.
Jeremy smiled and gave a very small nod. His father was orchestrating something tonight that didn’t really compare with anything he’d tried before; Jeremy could sense it. It was just dinner, but there was more to it than that. Preparing for it—inviting Shauna, readying Jeremy, accepting it as a natural next step—had involved instinct and intuition: there weren’t any domestic suppliers for these. You had to import them from someplace.
So he felt proud of his dad. He picked up the dish of scalloped potatoes Steve had asked him to get ready that afternoon.
“Potatoes?” he said.
“Thank you,” said Shauna, helping herself.
“Dad says you’re from Nebraska,” offered Jeremy.
“Yes, Lincoln.”
“Cornhuskers,” said Jeremy.
“‘Go Big Red,’” She nodded. “I used to play a little softball, actually.”
Steve reached for the pot roast. “She’s being modest. Her team went to the tournament in ’84.”
“No kidding,” said Jeremy.
“Down in Omaha,” said Shauna. “We came in second.”
“No kidding,” said Jeremy again, comfortably, easily.
“They call it the World Series but it’s really a bracket. We beat Fresno State but we drew Texas A&M in the next round.”
“They play a lot of baseball in Texas,” Steve offered.
“Softball, too,” said Shauna.
“Softball, too,” said Steve. Jeremy looked up from his plate to see his father exchanging a smile with Shauna. Some in-joke, maybe. From the way they looked at each other, you’d have thought they were old friends.
*
“Where did you meet her?” she asked while they were all bringing their plates into the kitchen; she was looking at a family portrait on the wall above the microwave. In it, a younger Jeremy held an oversized wooden alphabet block on his lap, its big blue H facing the camera. His parents were standing on either side of him; Mom, in a sleeveless beige summer dress with yellow trim, had her hand on his shoulder.