People have expectations of a field: what one ought to be like, how it ought to feel. But a field is what you make of it. The dilapidated bus and the gutted Oldsmobile in the tall grass out by the ancient black walnut trees at the far end of the property bequeathed a vague squalor to the otherwise empty field that abutted the Collins house, easy to miss if you scanned the lot quickly but hard to shake off once you’d registered them there, rusty and dry in the early summer sun.
James started out across the field, his father behind him.
*
I lived in Colo, Iowa, for a couple of years. It’s right up the road, really. I was in a holding pattern, waiting to know what to do with myself next. I worked one harvest on a grain elevator; it was punishing work, and everyone seemed a little surprised that I was up to the task. They never said so, of course. There isn’t a lot of unnecessary conversation on a grain elevator.
I manned the west site a time or two: it had a grate into which trucks could dump soybeans. It was my job to open the back of the truck and turn on the belt that carried the beans to the bin. There were two, maybe three small silos, as I remember: it’s been a long time.
In a small grass lot on the other side of the silos were several abandoned cars. I have always wondered how a thing as big as a car comes to be abandoned: Does somebody drive it to its destination, knowing this will be the end of the line? Does a driver one day say, that’s it, this car has broken down on the road one time too many, I can’t stand it any more, no one will ever want this car, I’m just going to leave it here? Do junkyards tow cars too stripped to be of value to distant fields and unhook them in the middle of the night?
There was a lot of junk in these cars, which I took the liberty of investigating more closely one cold November afternoon when the trucks were coming in slowly, no more than two or three an hour. There were admissions packets from DMACC and crumpled Marlboro 100 packs. There were clothes—a thin pink cardigan, some sweat socks—which seemed very sad to me. On the seat of one car there was a dildo with a plastic handle at its base; it looked to have been wrested from a display case somewhere.
I didn’t ask my coworkers at the grain elevator if they knew anything about whose cars these might have been or why they’d been left there. They would have found the question odd, and probably embarrassing, especially coming from me. Who cares about some junked cars in a grass lot over by the west site? My house, when I lived in Colo, stood directly across the street from the west site; when I finally moved out, in September of 1994, the cars behind the bins were still there. If, in all the years that have passed between then and now, anyone has thought of them, it was probably only to say that they meant to take care of them somehow, someday, and that the parts might be worth something, so they weren’t ready for the junkyard just yet.
“Holy shit, the keys are in the ignition,” James said when he and his father had reached the rusting body of the Oldsmobile.
Ed smiled, out exploring in the great wide world with James, his once-small companion. Just like old times. “Be pretty surprised if the engine turns over,” he said, so pleased to find himself here, now, a grown man talking with his son about this gutted husk of a car. You have to guard moments like these ones, and you do it by keeping them quiet. You never know how many more you’re going to get.
“I’m going to open the trunk,” said James.
3
The first tape was just street scenes: no commentary, no known locations, no titles. The locales varied—there were park benches, and bus stops, and grassy hills by freeway off-ramps. In all these places two constants remained: people, and garbage. There were men and women in dirty clothes, digging through trash cans, sometimes scrounging in the nearby grass, eating with their hands, casting furtive glances around as they ate; often, when they’d left the scene, the camera would remain trained on the spot, as if waiting for something new to develop. Nothing did. Five minutes would pass with no action in the frame, then seven. There was no news to report after the garbage eaters had gone, but the camera, possibly mounted and left unmanned, kept at its work until someone remembered to turn it off. The scene would end then, cutting out abruptly, and just as suddenly the next scene would begin: static, familiar, identical save for the particulars.
“It’s somebody’s college project,” James offered. The army-green plastic garbage bag full of videotapes from the trunk of the Oldsmobile bulged on the cellar floor nearby.
“No way,” said Abby. “This took years.”
“Big expert,” said James.
She pointed at a teenage girl on the screen. “Those are acid-washed,” she said. “Eighties.” She picked up the remote, hit PAUSE for a second, then REWIND. The footage scrolled backwards for a minute, then two.
“There,” she said, hitting PLAY again. A woman in jeans, a halter top, and oversized brown sunglasses was stopped mid-stride. “Those are Dittos. Mid-seventies.”
“You ever heard of this amazing invention called the thrift store?” said James, more out of habit than conviction.
“There’s no way,” she said. She froze the screen again and pointed in sequence at several spots. “Macramé purse. Birkenstocks.”
She let it play for another minute.