Refresh, Refresh: Stories (21 page)

He remembers what a friend of Linda’s once said to them: “You have a lovely home. Now all you need are some children to mess it up.” She had two boys, both of them red-faced, fat-legged toddlers who left their toys all over the yard and screamed when they didn’t get their way. At the time John had laughed good-naturedly at what she said, thinking she was jealous and he was lucky. Now, without the possibility of children, he feels like a man standing at the edge of an oceanic void, at the jumping-off place of his life, with nothing to tether him to this world.

Now he and Linda huddle into their seats and say nothing. The sun moves in and out of the clouds. The trees to either side of the road vanish as they drive out of the forest and into pasture where cattle lick salt blocks and barns huddle against the windbreak of hills, and then past vineyards, and then alfalfa fields for ten miles, twenty, with the alfalfa swelling into trees and the trees closing in once more—like fingers—allowing only a thin strip of sky overhead that soon becomes clotted with blue-black clouds. Thunder rumbles. The air takes on a twilight dimness and John leans forward in his seat and clicks on his lights. They cast a colorless glow. A big burst of lighting comes, followed by thunder that sounds like a great chair dragged across the floor of the sky.

“I’m sorry,” he says and she says, “I’m sorry too,” and he isn’t sure what she refers to, their bickering, their vacation, their marriage, all of it.

The wind swells, groaning against the windshield. Trees nod back and forth, leaning toward the road, some of them bent nearly in half. A branch snaps and crashes to the road before them and John revs the engine and swerves onto the shoulder and back into his lane to avoid it. “Shit,” he keeps saying under his breath.

A drizzle starts, dotting the windshield. The drizzle thickens into a rain, coming down in gray sheets the wipers can’t keep up with. And then the air blurs and thickens with swirling white as the hail begins. The world takes on a big rattle. In an instant everything grows as white as winter. He takes his foot off the gas and slows to forty, to thirty. The hailstones drum against the hood and the roof and the windshield, and he can feel the vibrations in his fingers—his fingers wrapped tightly around the wheel, fighting the wind and the uncertain surface of the road. Under the many-voiced roar of the hail he swears he can hear his heart beating—the deep-toned bu-bump of it like the notes drawn hurriedly from the center of a drum.

He is only dimly aware of his wife. When the words “Maybe we should pull over” finally register, too much time has passed to acknowledge them. All of his attention is crushed down into the thirty feet of road before him. Every time lightning flashes, every hailstone seems to pause in its descent, looking like a white beaded curtain that a moment later crashes to the ground. He tries to blink away the lightning—its afterimage sticks to his eyes—but every few seconds, there is a brighter flash, a louder rumble.

At first, between those hard blinks meant to bring his eyes back into focus, he isn’t sure what he sees in the near distance: red eyes, a black humpbacked silhouette that becomes not a monster, but taillights, the frame of a car. The Miata, he realizes, from earlier. It has slid off the road, into the ditch, coming to a rest against a tree.

At first—he can’t help it—he feels a burning delight. In a life that has not turned out the way he expected, something has finally, in one violent instant, turned out the way he expected. The driver was going too fast and now he has paid for it. The sight of the car, its hood crumpled, makes John feel—for the first time in a long time—as if there is a certain logic to the universe. A comforting thought.

There are branches littering the road and with tiny jerks of the wheel he dodges the minivan through them. His eyes rise again to study the Miata, now twenty yards ahead, and there, by the side of the road, he spots the driver. The man—in his late teens, early twenties—just a boy, really—watches their approach. Through the driving hail, John can see his hair is an unnatural shade of blond. He wears a black leather jacket and black baggy jeans. He has blood on his face, and the blood stands out brightly against all that white. He holds his hands above his head and scissors them back and forth. The minivan closes in on him steadily. There is a glittering intensity to his eyes that John recognizes: confidence. Even after wrecking his car, the boy stares at John with confidence, certain he will stop.

And maybe this has something to do with why John hesitates a second—his foot rising off the accelerator, hovering over the brake—before trying to stop the minivan and finding out he can’t.

“What are you doing?” Linda says.

John continues past the boy and spies the tilted vision of him in the rearview mirror. The boy turns to follow them, his mouth a big black O, still waving his arms, now with a kind of frantic disbelief that John finds reassuring.

“John?” his wife says. “John, what the hell are you doing?” There is a high urgent tone to her voice. “Stop. We’ve got to stop.”

He says, “It’s not safe,” and it’s not, with the trees, blown by the wind, leaning dangerously close to the road, their limbs like thick arms swatting at them—but still, it would have only taken a second to stop, to throw open the door and allow the boy inside. “He’ll be fine.”

She throws up her hands and lets them fall to her thighs with a slap. “He’ll be fine, it’s not safe? John?” The way she breathes—roughly through her nose—is a conversation in itself.
I can’t believe you
, she’s saying. He doesn’t look at her, but he knows she is looking long and hard at him. He can
feel
her eyes, as if they carry heat in them.

“We’ve got to think of ourselves,” he says and hits the steering wheel to drive home his point or express his regret, he isn’t sure.

“
Your
self. That’s all you’ve ever thought about.”

“I’m happy thinking about myself.”

“Yeah, you’re happy.” She gives him a cold look that carries the weight of their marriage in it.

“Listen,” he says. “I might not be the best person in the world, but I think I know a thing or two about life and making it in this world and . . .”

Midsentence he turns to her and she meets his eyes easily, her stare ugly and penetrating. All of a sudden he cannot find any more words. In place of them he takes a deep breath that sends a cold wind whistling through the caves of his heart.

Outside, hail rakes at the windshield like an endless series of fingernails trying to claw their way in, and he begins to feel he is a part of it, the storm, separate from the minivan and from his wife, the blood icing up in his veins like a November river, his mind a white blur.

He tries to find distraction in the radio, clicking it on, and then, recognizing the song—“Sloop John B”—he turns it up. “Hey, this is from that record we used to play all the time. Remember?” Even as he white-knuckles his grip around the wheel and tries to negotiate a slick corner, he shakes his head back and forth and does a little dance in his seat.

The music fills the minivan and he finds himself momentarily lost in the sound, the syncopated three-beat, five-beat tapping of a drum, the high innocent voices of the Beach Boys. He hears in this music a certain vibration of meaning, of notes that seem to carry color in them—bright yellows, pale blues—like the starfish hugging the bottom of the ocean.

Then the radio cuts out. And the hail softens into freezing rain. Within a few minutes mittens of ice have formed around the wipers. He rolls down the window. Immediately a cold wind fills the minivan. His eyes water when he reaches outside and stretches his arm around the windshield and in a desperate grab lifts the blade off the glass so that when it snaps back the ice shatters.

When he seals shut the window, she says, “I can’t believe you did that. I can’t believe you just left him there.”

John says nothing, only gives his head a little shake as if he can’t believe it either.

“We need to stop,” she says. “Do you hear me? Or
we’re
going to be the ones on the side of the road.”

“I know that, okay?” His voice has the high-pitched whine to it that he always tries, and fails, to suppress when he gets angry. “Just please, please, please shut up.”

She touches her fingers to her neck, in that hollowed-out dip at the base of it, something she usually does before she cries. “We
need
to stop.”

“Where? You show me a place to stop, I’ll stop.”

As if on cue they turn a bend and in the distance spot an Amoco station. It is a long rectangular building with windows that run its length and reflect the brightness of the lighting in the sky. Before it there are four gas pumps, behind it a shed, and next to it an abandoned truck eaten up with rust and blanketed with a thick coat of moss, with hail clinging to the moss, like clotted cream.

“Stop,” she says. “Please.”

The slush in the road is calf deep. When he brings down his foot on the brake, the back tires kick sideways before finding traction. He hangs a slow right into the station and parks before its entrance and shuts off the engine and a second later the windshield ices over. They pull on their jackets and zip them to their necks and jump out of the minivan to race through the lashing rain. Every step is a sliding uncertainty. John holds his arms out for balance. He breathes heavily, not used to moving with any kind of speed, and his breath curls away from him in the wind.

Linda makes it through the door first and doesn’t hold it open for him. He catches it when it swings back, and with a grunt pushes through, into the dim light of the store. He stomps the ice from his shoes and leans against the wall and takes deep breaths and puts a hand to his chest and feels his heart, stopped up with white pockets of fat and awkwardly somersaulting at the top of his rib cage, but still pumping, by God. Another moment and he collects himself enough to take in his surroundings, a rack of T-shirts with eagles and wolves silk-screened across them. A display case of lacquered logs with clocks built into them. Grocery aisles crowded with candy and potato chips. There are antlers hanging from the walls, white-tipped, as sleek and sharp as knives. Behind the register hangs the largest set, like a tangled rack of bones, made not of bone but of dried blood vessels. Beneath them stands Linda, trying the phone on the counter and hanging it up with such force that John startles at the sound, a shriek escaping his mouth.

He looks around, worried someone might have heard, but there is no one. The store is empty, the attendant gone, perhaps at home, hurrying to close up his windows against the storm that gathered so suddenly in the sky.

At the storefront, with a good six feet between them, John and his wife stare out the windows. For a second the storm seems to die down, and John feels hopeful, wondering if this is it, the end—and then the wind puffs and groans and stirs to life once more. In the sky the clouds whirlpool, as if sucked upward into some cosmic plug hole.

“Not the worst I’ve ever seen,” John says, “but right up there.”

“Please. When have you ever seen—” She says something else, but thunder follows lightning and takes away her voice.

In a rush the rain hardens into hail. It comes down heavily, seeming to erupt from every inch of the sky, filling the world and whitening it, pouring down in an endless curtain so that the air seems to contain more ice than air.

John listens to the drumming against the roof, the windows, the asphalt, a sound he can feel as much as hear, the sort of rattle that might rise up among a thousand snakes. The hail makes dents, like tiny mouths, on the hood of his van.

Beside him Linda wraps her arms against her chest, as if hugging herself, and stares intently into the storm. “Something’s coming,” she says.

Outside, through the rattle of hail, John can hear things crashing about, knocked against the side of the store by the terrible wind. And under this he can hear a humming that grows steadily louder, an engine. Through the ragged holes glimpsed between the falling hailstones, he sees a light flare, then disappear, then flare again. These are hazard lights, blinking a warning against any fast-moving cars. They belong to a semi. It crawls along at no more than ten miles per hour. Slush fans out from beneath its tires when it pulls off the highway and into the parking lot.

John can hear the semi moan as it downshifts, and its brakes shriek in complaint when it finally comes to a halt at the edge of the parking lot. And there it idles. The engine seems to growl, waiting for him.

The semi is carrying a load of hogs to slaughter. When the lightning flares John can see them through the ventilation holes—their pink snouts, their shifting bodies—and then the door swings open.

There is the driver—an enormous body, nearly as wide as it is tall, dressed entirely in denim—climbing out of the semi cabin. A beard curls around his jaw. His cap perches high on his head.

From behind him comes another. Dreamily—and then in a panic—John recognizes the peroxide hair, the black leather jacket, the boy. He can feel his muscles gathering around his spine like a fist around a knife. There is such tightness in his posture he thinks he might break. “Oh no.”

“Oh, thank God,” Linda says. And then, concern creeping into her voice: “What’s the matter with him? Something’s the matter.”

The boy, with a hand to his stomach, seems to fight a doubled-over posture. The truck driver loops an arm around his shoulder, helping to redistribute his weight, and together they limp toward the store, wading through the several inches of hail that has accumulated. Pain has replaced the confident look on the boy’s face. He gnashes his teeth and every other step he closes his eyes for a long second, moving slowly through the hail, the stones popping off his skin and leaving red marks.

When Linda opens the door for them, the wind lifts the hair from John’s scalp.

In the middle of the store, in the center of the aisle, they stand like this—John, Linda, and the truck driver—the three of them making a half-circle around the boy. The boy lies on the linoleum floor, his head propped up by a bag of rock salt. Linda hunches over, resting her hands on her knees, as if she wants to crouch next to him and comb her fingers through his hair, but can’t quite bring herself to do it. “We’ve got to help him,” she says. “Poor thing.”