Refresh, Refresh: Stories (20 page)

He turns off the heat. He rolls down the window and lets in a warm wind. Two hours and he feels as though he has fast-forwarded two months. It’s nice.

He can hear her voice, but barely, like an alarm heard through the mist of a dream. Then she hits him, a punch to the shoulder, and at this he jerks his head to look at her, his eyebrows shooting up as if to say, What was that, honey?

“I
said
I have to pee. I said so twenty minutes ago.” Tall and sinewy, she is forty-seven and looks it, her pale skin dotted with age spots and finely lined with wrinkles. Under each of her eyes there is a purple patch. Today she wears a green hooded sweater, blue jeans that taper at the bottom, white tennis shoes. She has a bony nose. Her hair is the color of dead leaves.

“So we’ll stop,” he says.

“That’s what I said. I said get in the right lane or you’ll miss the turn, is what I said.” She points emphatically at a roadside sign that reads, Rest Stop, 1 Mile Ahead. She rolls up her magazine, one of those women’s magazines, as if to strangle it. “Jesus, do you ever listen?”

He cannot recall the last time he felt in love with her. Not that he doesn’t love her now. It’s just a different sort of love. Not that
in-love
love, that falling-off-a-cliff feeling that used to exist between them. He remembers how, so long ago, before they fell into the rhythms of their careers, before middle age bowed their backs and thinned their hair, Saturday mornings, she would wake him up with her hand—and afterwards, they would shower together, not minding the coldness and awkwardness that came with shifting their bodies beneath the thin stream of water. The cup of her elbow, the hollowed-out dip behind her knee, he remembers those places, how he would run his tongue along them and how their salty flavor and their pearly color reminded him of the soft mantle of an oyster shell.

Then she would cook breakfast in the nude, a damp towel wrapped around her head like a turban. The bacon would hiss and sputter and occasionally she would shout when a bit of grease popped off the pan and left a red spot on her belly, her thigh. And he would sit on the couch, jogging his eyes between the newspaper and the ripe curves of her body.

He remembers her like this: with a window behind her, and beyond it, a birch tree with the light filtering through its leaves. The small pleasure of seeing her just so, framed like a photograph, made him smile then—and now.

And she maybe senses this because she looks at him and smiles briefly before returning her attention to her
magazine.

The rest area, a good quarter-mile off the interstate, consists of a dark-wooded building circled by an unkempt lawn speckled with fat dandelions. There are two rotten picnic tables, a garbage can, and mounds of freshly overturned dirt, the work of moles. The parking lot is edged by fifty-foot firs and oaks half their size, both covered with fluorescent green moss.

Theirs is the only car. He stands where the asphalt meets the grass, waiting for Linda, staring off into the woods. The sunlight that spills through the branches reveals the ragged mat last year’s leaves make on the forest floor.

He has the same feeling here as when he walks into a church. The air is at once static and loaded, as if there is some kind of
under
sound his ear can’t quite decipher. Like after a bell rings.

He has his head cocked. He is listening. His shadow falls across the lawn before him, drawing his eyes downward. In the grass something stirs, the blades shifting as if blown here and there by an absent wind. He bends his body in half to get a better look. There—the source of the small sounds—a moist black eye—a spade-shaped head—a leathery brown back spotted white—glimpsed not once but many times over. The entire lawn is alive with them—salamanders—dozens of them. The noise they make, barely discernable, is the noise of many tongues moving damply inside of many mouths.

He has heard about this kind of thing before. His grandfather grew up in Peoria, Illinois. There, before a tornado hit—the old man told him more than once—the birds went quiet, the sky turned dark as a bruise, and the salamanders and worms boiled out of their underground dens, drawn to the surface by the sudden shift in pressure.

Right then Linda appears beside him. “What on earth are you looking at?”

He isn’t sure how to respond, and before he can, a salamander darts out of the grass and onto the asphalt. It pauses before her shoe, actually reaching out with one webbed foot to touch her—before retreating to the cool slivers of shade offered by the grass.

Her eyes don’t actually grow bigger in her head, but they seem to, a small expression of horror he recognizes from the time, five years ago, when she visited the doctor complaining of chronic stomach pain, a stabbing sensation that had bothered her on and off for several years and had only recently become unbearable. X-rays revealed an ectopic pregnancy.

They had long given up on having a baby. And now this, a fertilized egg in one of her fallopian tubes had grown into a child the size of a salamander. When the doctor removed it—it had a black thatch of hair and a scrunched-up face, teeth—he determined that it had been inside of her for many years—dead—curled up in the dark muddy pocket of her belly.

Sometimes, when John burrowed his head between her thighs and darted his tongue in and out of her, he imagined he could taste the child. It was a sour pasty taste. Horrible enough to make him pull his head away, fighting the urge to gag. He always tried to hide the gagging with his hand or a quick wipe of the washcloth they kept on the nightstand, but one time she caught him, and he saw the look in her eyes, and it was heavy with a pain he had never seen in her before.

A sudden wind picks up, ice in its breath, chasing them back to the minivan. Once inside they watch the treetops nod and the branches sway as if something big is about to disentangle itself from the woods. An empty potato-chip bag swirls through the parking lot.

When John keys the ignition and pulls out of the rest area and onto the highway, he can see, in the far distance, clouds, a thick black tide of them churning up over the green coastal mountains.

“I don’t like the looks of this,” Linda says.

As if on cue lightning flashes, a white zigzagging vein that lingers on his eyes.

He reaches for the radio, but her hand is already there, snapping the dial. She races through the channels—with pops of static between them—until she finds what she is looking for, the studied baritone of a broadcaster’s voice, telling them about the low-pressure system that has unpredictably settled over the region, drawing the storm farther south than anticipated, into Oregon. Gale-force winds are expected. Maybe funnel clouds. Certainly hail.

“I think we should turn around.” She rakes a hand through her hair, drawing it back to fully reveal her face, pinched with worry. “John? Why can’t we turn around?”

“Because we’re going on vacation.”

“Can’t we go somewhere else? We can still make it to my mother’s by dinner. I could call—”

“No. The reservation’s made.” He makes a karate motion with his hand. “It’s done. We’re going.”

“Don’t make me say I told you so. I don’t want to say that.”

He almost says, “Yes, you do,” but doesn’t. Once her mood sours toward him it can take hours, days, to win so much as a smile from her face.

“It’ll blow over. I’m telling you, by the time we get there it’ll be all done and spoken for.”

He snaps the radio off and lets his hand drop to the soft cooler that rests between the driver and passenger seat. He unzips it and rifles through it and pulls out a Diet Pepsi. He pops the tab and lets it run down his throat. Then he grabs a snack-size bag of Doritos. He tears it open with his teeth and pushes a handful of chips into his mouth and crunches them down to a paste, repeating the motion over and over until the bag is half empty.

“Chip?” he says to Linda.

When she answers him with a curt shake of her head, he continues to crunch his way through the bag. “Suit yourself.” A minute later, finished, he licks the orange dust off his fingertips and runs his tongue along his teeth, hoping to find one last crumb, just a taste, that might somehow minimize what he recognizes as dread rushing through him, that old familiar feeling he thought he left behind.

Right then one of those Asian cars you could fit in your pocket—a black Mazda Miata—appears in his rearview mirror and a second later shoots past him, swerving in front of the minivan while going ninety at least. Its tailpipe is drilled to make a sound like growling. “Fucker.”

“Excuse me?”

The car disappears around a bend, hugging it so tightly the tires leave a thin black strip of rubber on the road, and John makes his hand into a gun to shoot a bullet after it. “I was talking to that guy.”

“I should hope so.”

He tries to think of something more to say to her.

For the past thirty minutes—through Albany, Corvallis—Linda has leaned against the door, her head turned away, as if determined to maintain a separate space. He can see her reflection in the window. Her eyes are narrowed, focused on the storm gathering ahead of them. The sky hardens into blackness, as if slowly mineralized.

“Hey,” he says. When she does not respond he says, “Hey,” again, this time reaching out his hand, hesitantly touching her thigh.

Their eyes lock in the window.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s going to be fine. Seriously. Don’t worry so much. It’s going to be a great weekend. I’m really looking forward to it.”

She does not respond except by raising her eyebrows a little higher on her forehead, as if they don’t quite believe him.

At that moment he veers into the left lane to pass a semi. It is hauling a livestock trailer filled with a hundred panicky hogs. Through the ventilation holes John can see their snouts and shadows. When he is almost past the semi, its horn blares. Linda makes a gasping sound and John looks up to find the trucker looking down at them.

He has a cardboard sign duct-taped to his door. “Show Me Your Hooters,” it reads. Above the sign, in the window, a big bearded man looks down on them. He wears a cap and in the shadow thrown by the brim of it his eyes appear as black hollows. A hand rises up and gives John and his wife a little wave. They continue like this for a few hundred yards, side by side, glancing between each other and the road, before John lays his foot on the gas and the minivan growls forward.

John remembers a story his grandfather told him—about a storm. It was the worst Peoria, Illinois, ever saw. Balls of lightning rolled down chimneys and exploded in living rooms. Hailstones the size of softballs crashed through windows. Pigs flew. Salamanders writhed. Straight-line winds sucked fence posts from the ground, daggering them into houses, barns. Funnel clouds came down from the sky and vacuumed up the earth.

On the outskirts of Peoria there was an underwear factory. The storm peeled off its roof like the lid to a tuna can. When the funnel clouds finally shrank and the winds died down and the sky lightened, everyone emerged from their basements to find the town turned inside out and garnished with panties.

There were panties everywhere—hanging from tree branches, telephone poles, car antennas—everywhere. And the survivors could only shake their heads and rest their hands on their hips, their mouths set in tight thin lines that expressed at once their shock and amusement.

The semi grows smaller in his rearview mirror and the storm grows larger before him, muttering and grumbling with thunder, darkening the air beneath it with skirts of rain, not close, but closer than before. Its clouds seem to ripple blackly and powerfully, like ocean swells.

Sometimes Linda got in these moods.

He would come home from work and find the lights off, a single candle lit in the living room. The orange glow of it would reveal her lying on the sofa, the pillows propped up behind her, a glass of Merlot in her hand. He would stand over her and she would seem barely able to turn her head, to lift her eyes to look at him, as though there were some invisible net draped over her body, holding her down. The kind, amused expression she normally wore would have melted away, replaced by the face of someone he only vaguely recognized. On her cheeks tears would have left behind a salty rime. On her lips, the dried blood of wine.

One time her vibrator was lying on the coffee table, another time a butcher knife.

He never knew what to say in these situations. Usually nothing. Usually he just shrugged off his suit jacket, knelt next to the couch, and petted her hair until she asked if he wanted to order a pizza. But not long ago—when was it?—sometime after the holidays, when the loneliness of winter had set in—he said, “You okay?”

In response she moved her shoulders in a sort of shrug, as if to ease away some pain.

And he put a hand to her cheek and said he didn’t know if this was what was bothering her, but if it was, she should know that he thought it was a good thing they never had children. That was what he told her. It’s probably for the best, he said.

He tried to make his voice buoyant, but the word
probably
weighed it down. “Reason number one,” he said. “I just read this article in the
Wall Street Journal
, and you know what it said? It said that in twenty years, at the rate of inflation, it’s going to cost 200 grand to send a kid to college. Can you believe that? Think of all the money we’ve saved.” He held out his hand then as if they were being introduced for the first time. She looked at it, but didn’t take it. “And there’s nothing holding us back. You know how it is with all our friends. They can’t go on vacation. They can’t go out to dinner. They can’t, they can’t. For us, the sky’s the limit. We can do whatever we want to do and we can go wherever we want to go.”

On her face the patterns of the wrinkles and the shadows revealed her sadness. “What have we done?” she said. “Where have we gone?”

He almost said, “Depoe Bay,” but caught himself, recognizing that it was time to stop talking. Each of his words he understood as a hollow canister containing only absence.

If they had looked into fertility treatments—if he had drunk less alcohol and eaten more vegetables—if she had angled her pelvis upwards, after he filled her with semen, letting it stew inside of her—if they had only tried a little harder and a little earlier—and if her fallopian tube hadn’t clogged up with a carnival strangeness, the kind of thing you see preserved in formaldehyde—then maybe the architecture of his life would feel more substantial, less the product of a faulty builder whose craftsmanship had constructed around their marriage a windowless room where they invariably ate dinner on TV trays while watching
Entertainment Tonight,
where they drank whiskey sours on Fridays and got their oil changed every three thousand miles and carefully studied the Crate&Barrel catalogue and went to see the latest Tom Hanks movie and wore sombrero-looking hats when gardening.