Women and Other Animals Part 8

"Why can't you be happy without a stupid guy?"

"Reg, you're so young. You don't know how terrible it is to be alone."

"I'm alone all the time. I like being alone."

"Wait until you're grown up. Besides, this John Blain's not like the other men around here. I can tell." Mom lay on the couch, fitting herself into the imprint she'd made in the cus.h.i.+ons over the years. We'd brought it with us from the trailer.

"Well, I hope he doesn't come back."

"You're so mean." She sounded tired and sad. "You're every bit as mean as your daddy."

"Maybe Daddy had a reason to be mean. Some day I'm going to find him and ask him all about it."

Mom turned away from me and fell asleep.

When John Blain showed up the next evening with a pizza, Mom said he could stay the night, but he didn't end up sleeping on the couch like she'd suggested in front of me. That next morning, he got up early and drove out for a box of doughnuts from the highway stop, getting back just as I finished ch.o.r.es. I sat in the kitchen and ate a chocolate cake doughnut and a cruller without saying a word, even though John Blain kept going upstairs and returning and pacing. Finally, I overheard him in Mom's room saying her name louder and louder. I carried a frosted long john upstairs and watched from the hallway while he shook her. He turned, panicstricken, his forehead strained.

"Oh, G.o.d! What's the matter with her? Why won't she wake up?"

"She's got the sleeping sickness," I said.

Page 114 "Sleeping sickness? Encephalitis? She wasn't sick last night."

"She just sleeps a lot," I said. "Twelve hours a night. You can't wake her before eleven or even noon sometimes. And then she takes a nap in the afternoon."

John Blain collapsed in the chair by the bed. I noticed his blond hair was streaked with gray.

We'd only lived on the farm two years, ever since my grandpa J.T. had died. Mom had gotten pregnant at age sixteen, and J.T. had told her that if she ran off with my dad, he'd never speak to her again, and because he was a man of his word, I never met him. Maybe the only reason he left her the farm was because he knew she hated it. If it had been up to her, she would have gotten rid of Jessie and the chickens, but I argued until she let me keep them so long as I took care of them. For weeks, then, Mrs. VanderVeen from next door had to come over and help me milk the cow until I could do it myself. When Mom was drunk, she'd say the house was "a G.o.dd.a.m.n jail." Whenever something went wrong, like a roof needed fixing, she'd say that she ought to sell the place. A few days before John Blain came, I told her I'd fix the roof over the porch, and she'd said accusingly, "You'd do anything to keep me here, wouldn't you?" That night I dreamed that we still lived in the trailer and that Mom's exboyfriends were all with us, drinking canned beer and sucking the oxygen out of the air. I woke up twisted in my sheets, sweating.

By the middle of tomato season, John Blain was well entrenched. He got a seconds.h.i.+ft job, so I didn't see too much of him, except on the weekends, when I ignored him. One Sat.u.r.day evening, though, I finished milking the cow and carried the bucket up to the porch, where John Blain was always squatting, his elbows on his knees, as still as a plant putting out roots. He stood when he saw me coming and made to open the door for me.

"I can open the door myself," I told him.

He let go of the door, wrapped a hand around my skinny biceps and clamped tight. "Why are you such a brat, Regina?" he asked. His breath smelled like whiskey, a bottle of which I'd seen him hide Page 115 in the crotch of the apple tree next to the barn. ''Your ma is so nice, and you're so d.a.m.ned mean."

My arm was starting to hurt, but when I twisted to free myself he tightened his grip. When I kicked him a dozen times hard enough to bruise his s.h.i.+ns, he squeezed tighter still. I noticed white, dry salt around the edges of the sweat marks on the neck and armpits of his Ts.h.i.+rt. "What do you want?" I asked.

"A little respect. A kind word, maybe. For your ma's sake."

"I've got to strain the milk. Let me go."

"The milk'll wait. Life is too short to be so mean, Reg."

His grip exhausted me. He was only a halffoot taller than me, but I couldn't come near matching his strength. When tears threatened to drop over the edges of my eyes, I turned away and looked west, over my garden, toward the hot, dirty sun. I let out my breath in a tired sigh. John Blain leaned toward me and then kissed my mouth. His lips only just touched mine, then he pulled away with a look of surprise on his face. I sloshed milk onto the porch and on my shoes, and he followed me into the kitchen. "I'm sorry, Reg. I don't know what happened."

"Go to h.e.l.l!" I screamed. He shook his head and went back out onto the porch, holding the door so it didn't slam. I set up my milk funnel and filter, but I could hardly see. I kept knocking the hall gallon bottle over, and finally I just left it all on the table. Ripley jumped up and started drinking right out of the bucket.

After that, John Blain kept a distance from me, as though we'd come to some kind of understanding. The next day he bought me the Detroit Sunday paper, and he continued to buy it every week, so I could spend Sunday afternoons reading and refolding each part. He wanted only the crossword puzzle. One Sunday, while I was reading at the kitchen table, Mom and John Blain were sitting in the living room where I could hear them.

"She's a beautiful girl, you know," he said, in just above a whisper.

"She's twelve," said Mom.

"But it happened just like that," he said and snapped his fingers. "All of a sudden, she's beautiful."

"I was beautiful, and where'd it get me?"

Page 116 "What do you mean 'was'? Any man would trade his soul for a chance to gaze into that freckled face of yours. I'll die happy, woman, so long as I die with your hair twisted around me."

Mom laughed with pleasure. When I dared look at them from the kitchen, John Blain was back at his crossword, and Mom had fallen asleep on the couch.

After dinner, I usually worked in the garden, pulling weeds and picking vegetables to sell the next day. Mom did the dinner dishes. John Blain, when he wasn't working, would go out on the porch and squat down, and smoke cigarettes like a cowboy at a camp or a soldier staying low to avoid enemy fire. Both he and Mom looked west, Mom's face blurry through the window screen over the sink, John Blain's out in the open in clear focus. By the time I finished in the garden, Mom and John Blain would have started drinking jug wine, either sitting at the picnic table on the porch, or else in the kitchen if the mosquitos got bad. They'd be reading or playing cards or John Blain would be doing the crossword, and then after a while, for no reason, they'd start arguing and accusing each other. Sometimes Mom would tell him to get the h.e.l.l out, but John Blain knew as well as I did that this was her way of testing whether or not he was going to stay. I took to going to bed even earlier so I wouldn't have to hear them. If they carried their argument up to the bedroom next to mine, I'd go out to the barn to sleep with Jessie. By the next day they always seemed to have forgotten whatever it was that had made them fight.

I didn't need an alarm clock to wake up each morning between fivethirty and six, and I'd do the ch.o.r.es first thing. Often I'd come across John Blain lying in a heap somewhere. Once I found him outside my room, and a few times he was on the kitchen floor, but more often I'd find him outside, as though he'd tried to leave us but collapsed from the effort. Most of the time he'd be north of the house, up the incline. The farthest he ever made it was into the pasture and to the row of white pines that made the property line. I'd say, "Get up, you," and if he didn't, I'd nudge him with my foot, then stand nearby until he slogged off.

The day he made it to the pine trees, I didn't find him until the afternoon. When I came in from the vegetable stand for lunch, Page 117 Mom was fidgeting, not drinking the coffee she'd poured. So I hunted around and found him lying awake on the moss, his hands locked across his belly. "I knew you'd find me if I waited," he said. "I'm glad you don't hate me anymore." We regarded each other, John Blain smiling, myself determined not to smile.

"Mom's worried. She thinks you left."

"She can see my car's still here," he said. "I'm not going to leave her, Reg, so you may as well get used to me." He supported himself on one elbow while he lit a cigarette. I probably looked skeptical, and maybe I rolled my eyes. "I swear, Reg, I'm not leaving your ma," he said, looking right at me. We walked back to the house, keeping a distance between us. Probably my dad had promised to stay too.

John Blain fixed the pasture fence during the last week of August. It'd been down in two places-one where a tree had fallen on it, the other where a corner post had rotted away. I'd tried propping it up using ropes and twobyfours, but none held. The VanderVeens were mad because Jessie and the calf had gotten into their garden twice. John Blain found tools in the barn and restrung the whole thing, replacing parts of it, making it strong and tight, even better than the VanderVeen's fences. When I acted surprised that he knew how to put up fence, he said, "I can do just about everything, kiddo. And I'm going to teach it all to you."

The last fence post we reset was at the far corner of the pasture, out of sight of the house. Mom was most likely sleeping on the couch, and John Blain lay on the ground with a small log under his head. We'd already put the post into the hole and I was tamping the dirt with an axe handle.

"You're a hard worker, Reg. And you're strong for your age."

I shrugged and didn't look at him.

"You're a lot tougher than either me or your ma, and you're a lot smarter. You're not going to end up like us, a couple of drunks."

"You're not drunks," I said. I finished tamping and lay down beside him on the ground and propped my head up. "You're not a drunk." I was close enough that I could smell his cigarette breath and his sweat. I'd never noticed before that he had a tattoo on his forearm, a tiny eagle with wings folded, the size of a thumbprint.

Page 118 Though I'd never before touched him on purpose, I pressed the tattoo through the hair on his arm. The pasture would be perfect now, after John Blain stretched this last corner. I opened my eyes and he was looking right at me, and for no reason I could fathom, I wanted him to wrap his fencestretching arms around me and pull me to his chest and hold me there next to his heart. His chest expanded and deflated as he breathed, and my own breathing seemed loud. How could I live, I wondered, if he didn't put his arms around me? I moved closer, and he snubbed his cigarette in the dirt. He reached an arm around my shoulder, grabbed my bra strap through my Ts.h.i.+rt, pulled it out, and let it snap back.

"You creep!" I yelled.

He laughed and coughed, and reached for another cigarette. I stood and brushed myself off. "Why don't you just fix your stupid car and go back to the U.P.?" I picked up the mattock and lugged it down the incline, lifting and swinging it at every burdock plant.

That evening, I walked by the door to my mother's room and saw her sitting on the edge of her bed, looking into the adjoining bathroom, listening to John Blain. Her hair shone like a fresh penny in the light from the setting sun, and she wore a nylon slip that she used as a nightgown. She rested her bare feet on the wooden bed frame and wrapped her arms around her knees. John Blain was shaving with no s.h.i.+rt on, telling her about a Russian he knew in Copper Harbor. The humidity seemed to have softened the edges and the corners on everything in the room-the pictures in their frames, the furniture, and the steamy bathroom mirror all looked soft. Once I looked at John Blain, I couldn't look away. His nipples were like a girl's, like mine, his arms bronze below his s.h.i.+rtsleeve line but as pale as Mom's above, and the tattoo like a bruise. As he shaved, I became afraid that he would cut himself with his razor, and I watched, concerned, until he caught my eye in the mirror. He smiled at me and winked.

"Jerk," I said to myself and returned to my room, but I couldn't clear my head. No longer did I want John Blain to hug me, but somehow I had tasted my mother's desperation, and I couldn't go back to not knowing it. When I found myself unable to sleep that night, I took out my photo alb.u.m. On the first page was a picture of Page 119 my father. His was a face I couldn't remember without reference, the hair as dark and curly as mine, the bloodshot eyes which looked angry. It was a handsome and peculiar face, but it wouldn't stick in my mind. Mom once said he was half Indian, but another time she said that was one of his lies. Daddy had always been full of jittery energy when we lived in the trailer, and about my only memory of him was wis.h.i.+ng he'd be still so I could sit beside him. Now the vision in my head was just as restless, moving in and out of my memory even as I looked at his picture.

I flipped forward, then, to the pictures of our farm: the rustcolored barn, Jessie and newborn brownandwhite calf, the chickens, the bridal bushes. Mom had taken a photo of me standing in the soft muck outside the cow barn wearing rubber boots, holding my stainless steel milk bucket. I rubbed my cheek against the plastic which covered the picture of our rabbit Snoopy. I'd taken the picture right before he escaped from his cage and got killed by Ripley.

With my pillow and blanket under my arm, I slipped past Mom's room and outside. The barnyard was quiet at this time of night, chickens asleep on their perches, cows resting and ruminating. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the blue earth became brown, and the strange landscape became familiar. Fireflies sparkled in the bushes and around the apple tree outside the barn. I shook out some fresh straw in the cow stall and lay with my head on Jessie and my feet on her calf. Ripley stretched and yawned atop a bale of hay nearby. Crickets chirped intermittently. Jessie's giant belly moved rhythmically, and I fell asleep to the sweet smells of alfalfa and manure. But I was immediately jarred awake by what felt like sadness in the air around me. We'd sell the calf in a few months, and Jessie would be alone until she had another baby. My mother said she had no idea where my dad was-he could be lost and alone, maybe without a home. And now that John Blain was going to stay, he couldn't come back to us even if he wanted to. It occurred to me for the first time that my father must be sad when he thought of me.

In September, my vegetable stand was covered with tomatoes, squash, and melons. Since John Blain had started paying the bills, I Page 120 kept my vegetable profits in coffee cans in my closet-so far I had about $550. I was at school until three o'clock, so I left an empty metal box on the stand, and, as far as I could tell, most people were honest and put money in when they took something.

In October, I saved John Blain's life. Or that's what he told me. He finally got around to taking the engine out of his car and putting it in our station wagon. In the process, he cut the end of his thumb on the oil pan and had to explain to me how to pressurebandage with gauze and duct tape while he bled all over the ground in front of the barn. He refused to go to the doctor, and, after that, he couldn't do much with his thumb.

In November, we sold the heifer to Mr. VanderVeen, which meant I had to milk twice a day, and Jessie gave way more milk than we could drink even though I convinced John Blain to drink his coffee halffull of hot milk.

Two nights before Christmas Eve, I woke to shouting in the next room. A wine bottle crashed to the floor but didn't break. "What's the matter with you?" yelled my mother. I got out of bed, put a coat over my pajamas, slipped into snowmobile boots, hat and gloves, and went outside. My garden was dead from frost, and my stand was shut down except for bottles of milkforcats that froze solid after a few hours. The air was crisp, and the sky was clear, with a zillion stars in sharp focus.

Jessie was alone now, and each tree seemed alone without its leaves, and any creature who braved the winter night had to do so alone. There was no society of crickets or fireflies this time of year. I reached into the rotted crotch of the tree where John Blain kept his badtasting alcohol-whiskey or ginger brandy usually-and found instead a halffull pintbottle of peppermint schnapps. With each sip, a warm s.h.i.+ver traveled into my legs. I leaned against the tree and looked back at the house.

The light from their bedroom was on, a tiny bedside glow, reflecting the pinp.r.i.c.ks up there in the heavens. My window was dark as I'd left it. Gradually the peppermint schnapps softened my vision. Though the roof sagged and the paint had all peeled off, our house looked beautiful surrounded by the leafless sticks of bridal bushes.

Because I couldn't hear them, I imagined that Mom and John Blain had stopped arguing once and for all, that they had settled their dis Page 121 agreements and would live happily ever after. The stars changed from p.r.i.c.ks to tiny blurs. I placed the empty bottle in the crotch of the tree and stumbled back to the house where it was warm.

The next morning I woke to a sky so bright it burned my eyes and to the sound of Jessie mooing crazily. The clock said quarter 'til nine. I hadn't slept this late in all the time we'd been on the farm. My mouth was dry and my head hurt, but I bundled up, grabbed my bucket, and ran out to the barn. On the way I saw John Blain crumpled up, sleeping on the ground near the apple tree, and I yelled, "Wake up, you!" and was surprised at the way my own voice hurt my head. Maybe he'd needed his schnapps last night and would be mad that I'd drunk it.

Jessie's bag was swollen as though it would burst, and a halfhour later, when I finished milking, John Blain was still lying there with his legs curled toward his chest and his hands between his knees. He wore a flannel s.h.i.+rt, wool socks, and jeans, but no boots and no jacket. "Come on, get up," I yelled. When I nudged him with my foot, his head fell back and he faced me. His lips were waxy white, and his unblinking eyelids opened onto dull, frostedover marbles. When I screamed and dropped my milk bucket, Ripley came bounding across the frozen ground to lick up what milk he could.

I leaned against the wooden fence, unable to focus. A crow flew up out of the frozen garden with a startling "Caw! Caw! Caw!" Ripley, when his appet.i.te was sated, padded over and rubbed himself from nose to tail against my leg. Cars rolled past on the road, somewhere far off a train whistle blew, and the sun rose a little higher in the sky. John Blain's hands remained locked between his knees. I knelt beside him and felt his neck for a pulse, but the skin was cold and silent. I pulled back his sleeve and touched the little eagle on his arm. I pushed his hair away from his forehead. The skin around his eyes was puffy as though he'd gone to sleep crying. I said, "I'm sorry, John Blain."

For a long time I stood beside Mom's bed. Her skin was creaseless. She reeked of wine, but her breathing was deep and regular, and she looked cozy under her blankets. I called to her over and over, raising my voice until I was screaming. I shook her violently. "John Blain's Page 122 dead!" I yelled. "Dead! Dead!" She opened her eyes groggily, then closed them again. Never in my life had I felt so tired. I worked open the window beside her bed and propped it up with the lamp, and let icy air pour into the room. Then I tore the covers off and threw them on the floor. She s.h.i.+vered, curling smaller and smaller, into the same position as John Blain. I dragged her to the side of the bed, made her sit up, and turned her face toward the open window. "John Blain's dead, Mommy!

Look!" Finally, she moaned in realization and leaned out the window toward the figure on the snow, knocking the lamp out so it hung by its cord, still burning, six feet down the side of the house. I pulled her back inside, reeled in the lamp, and closed the window.

Mom bolted and then appeared outside, leaning over the body, touching John Blain's face and then laying her head on his chest so her hair fell around him. I remembered him saying that was how he wanted to die, but Mom was a little late in getting to him. I went downstairs and met her as she stormed back into the house.

She threw on her winter coat and boots over her slip, got a shovel from the utility room, and marched off past the body, into the pasture and up the incline. I was fastening my ch.o.r.e coat as I chased after her. She went near the spot where I had found John Blain lying the time he said he wouldn't leave us. "You son of a b.i.t.c.h!"

she yelled. She was trying to dig, but the cold had made the ground hard.

"Mom, I think we'd better tell the police."

"The police don't give a d.a.m.n about him."

"You can't just bury somebody. What if the police think we killed him?"

"Did I kill him, Reg? Did I kill the son of a b.i.t.c.h?"

"He didn't mean to die, Mom!" I yelled.

She dug furiously, her shovel making only tiny dents in the frozen ground, her hair flaming around her head. "I need the mattock, Reg. Go get it for me." And when I hesitated, she screamed, "Go get it!" Against my better judgment, I ran down the hill to the barn and returned dragging the mattock. By now Mom was on her knees, beating the ground with her fists, calling John Blain names and demanding, "How could you?" She grabbed the mattock and started chopping at the ground, her knuckles whitening as though Page 123 fusing to the handle. With each stroke I worried she'd chop off her own foot, but she only went on like that for a minute or so before falling onto her knees again and dropping her face in her hands. She said, "Reg, it doesn't do any G.o.dd.a.m.ned good to love a person."

If only I had not drunk his liquor, I would've woken at my regular time to milk Jessie, and John Blain would've lived. He depended on me to wake him up. He thought we had an understanding. Maybe he'd been out looking around for a bottle that wasn't empty. I could imagine him on the moss right here, sitting up to light a cigarette, asking why I drank his booze. I looked to the sky for a clue, but there wasn't even a cloud. Of course John Blain knew a lot, so maybe he'd known we lived in a world where all it took to kill a person was sleeping late.

"Mom, we're going down to the house now." I grabbed her cold hand and held it, though it didn't hold mine in return. She had become weak enough that I could boss her. I left the tools where they lay and led her down the frozen pasture, shutting the gate behind us so Jessie couldn't get out. I took her into the kitchen and started some coffee in the drip pot before calling the Alexander police. When they arrived, Mom was sitting as stiff as a fence post with a cup of coffee growing cold in front of her, her snow boots and parka still on. While we waited for the medical examiner, I told the two men that Mom wanted to bury John Blain on the hill, and they looked at each other as though we were crazy, and then Mom agreed to have the body taken to Peas Brothers Mortuary.

In February, because the mortuary hadn't heard from any of John Blain's relations, they gave Mom the ashes in a metal box. That night she tried to drive his car drunk, but she crashed it into a tree before even getting out of the driveway. She didn't hurt herself, but the car wouldn't run anymore. One Sat.u.r.day, after we'd had a week of thaws, Mom spent all day digging near the pines. She became a tiny silhouette of a woman, very far away. I didn't dare take my eyes off her, for fear she'd become smaller still and then disappear. She took the box of ashes up to where she had been digging, dumped them loose into the hole, and covered them with dirt, as though she expected him to grow again next year.

Page 124 That night Mom cried and cried in the room next to mine, and since there was nothing I could do for her, I dressed warmly and dragged my quilt out to the barn. The moon was silent and half full beneath the blanket of sky. I curled beside Jessie and pulled the cover over both of us. Hopefully Mom was wrong about loving people, but I had never thought about John Blain in terms of love anyway. I just knew for sure that he didn't mean to leave us-he'd stayed as long as any of my tomato or squash plants, and in a way he was still there, if you counted his ashes. I was grateful his car was busted so Mom couldn't try to drive to the U.P. or the Alexander Bar & Grill. The smells of hay and manure mingled, and I held Jessie around the neck with both arms and breathed in the warmth from her body. Gazing out the barn window, I thought I could see the burning red tip of one of John Blain's cigarettes, a comforting little glow, but really it was only a star, or maybe Mars. As Jessie chewed beside me, rhythmically, peacefully, I thought about the garden I'd plant in May. Lush rows of beans and tomatoes curved through the barnyard and up the incline in my mind, and in my muscles I felt the pull of the young, strong plants toward the sun.

Page 125 Celery Fields The police called as Georgina was swallowing her last bite of plain Cheerios with skim milk. ''Ma'am, do you own a white Ford pickup?" Georgina didn't think of herself as a ma'am. "That's my husband's truck," she said. That's the truck that cost half as much as this house, she thought, the truck he'd bought without consulting her. Georgina stared into her empty bowl and clicked the clearpolished nails of her free hand on the polyurethane tabletop. As a kid she'd eaten at a varnished pine table that softened when anything wet spilled on it. "My husband's not here."

Andy was supposed to be out with his brother cutting firewood for their dad. On Sat.u.r.days, if he wasn't pouring cement, Andy usually did something with his brother.

In late November they'd clip on their licenses and go deer hunting, which meant they hunkered in a dark field with a hundred other orangeclad men until the sun rose, and then they went to a chain restaurant near the game preserve and ate a lot of fried meat. At other times they'd go fis.h.i.+ng or attend outdoors shows or gun shows at Wings Stadium. Georgina spread her fingers out on the table for a moment she was surprised that her nails were clean.

"The truck's bogged down on some private property," said the Page 126 cop, "and the owner called to complain. Your husband might want to tow it himself right away, save everybody else the trouble."

Andy had left some kind of caramel pastry here. Georgina pulled the box toward herself across the table until she could see through the plastic window. She didn't care what Andy ate during the day. Let him eat his deepfried doughnuts and vending machine cashews. Let him pour mapleflavored corn syrup over his f.u.c.king Greek restaurant breakfast sausages. But he didn't have to bring this s.h.i.+t into the house to tempt her.

"Thank you, sir. I appreciate it," she said. According to the cop's directions, Andy's truck probably wasn't more than a halfmile from the house where Georgina had lived until she was fifteen. The old neighborhood had been run down, and the road along the river had always been littered with trash despite "No Dumping" signs.

Kids there, including Georgina, had earned nickels from the bait shop by digging nightcrawlers out of the soft muck.

Georgina hung up the phone and resisted an urge to take out her file and further clean and smooth her nails. She had been planning to get her hair trimmed today, to buy a red blazer, and to visit her sisterinlaw who wanted her to host a party to sell candles or lingerie or some s.h.i.+t. She thought about pretending she'd never gotten that call about the truck, but she'd become curious about the old neighborhood, and besides she'd like to see just how stuck Andy had gotten himself. Andy had eaten a corner piece out of the pastry, a rectangle no bigger than a foldedup paycheck. Why would a person who was going to eat only that much buy a whole G.o.dd.a.m.n box?

Georgina hadn't eaten pastry in years. Dieting had changed her body into an efficient machine, one which needed surprisingly few calories to sustain itself. When she had originally cut her rations, her stomach radioed her primitive brain-the oldest, grayest part, at the base of her skull-and sent the message that she was a woman lost from her tribe, banished from her native lands, scavenging on hillsides in years of drought, scratching for the sustenance of wildflower seeds, berries, and weed roots.

With the handle of her cereal spoon, she cut a piece of pastry about the same size as the missing piece. She held it between two fingers and moved it toward her mouth and almost bit down, but instead she Page 127 returned it to the box and wiped her hands on her jeans. Stop it, she told herself. But she wondered if biting into that sweet stuff would open up an alternative universe, one she'd entirely forgotten. Maybe it would be a universe of surrender. Vegetables and rice cakes never surrendered. Cheerios always stood up to her in the white china bowl, which sat before her now looking very empty, as though it had never contained cereal or anything. She rinsed the bowl and the spoon and put them both in the drainer. Eat me, the pastry cried from the table, bite me, as boys used to say in the neighborhood.

She could probably eat more if she exercised, but she couldn't imagine herself bouncing around the way women did. Maybe martial arts. Gardening would have worked, but Andy didn't want her tearing up any part of the lawn. He claimed it would interfere with his underground sprinkler system. She went into the attached garage and started up her Volkswagen Golf. Georgina had thought she, not Andy, would be the first to get a new vehicle, since hers was ten years old with some rust on the rear body panels, and yet, something stopped her from giving up a car that still ran well. In another year or two, her car would look at home in the old neighborhood, parked in a dirt driveway, next to a sagging front porch on which an unshaven man in a sleeveless unders.h.i.+rt lounged on a torn and disheveled couch.

As she backed into the street, away from her vinylsided, whitetrimmed white house, the perfect blackness of tarred and curbed driveway poured out in front of her.

Covering the land between house and driveway was Andy's sacred green, uninterrupted by bush, flower, or weed. The garage door rolled toward the ground. From somewhere out of sight Georgina heard the buzz of chain saws and diesel motors she smelled the burning oil of twostroke engines, of men clearing the way for another house like hers, of bulldozers shoving felled trees to the back of one hundredbytwo hundred foot building lots. There was so much development around here everybody wanted to live in these gently curving rows of tidy and respectable prefabricated homes.

In a field near the river, Mexicans with machetes trudged north along the rows, the muck closing around their feet with each step so Page 128 their rubber boots became as weighted as b.a.l.l.s and chains. The men hacked with knives as long as their forearms and tossed heads of celery, half as thick as they were high, into the wagon that rolled beside them. The sweet peppery fragrance of celery leaves and seeds poured into Georgina's car through open windows and became so strong that she had to stop and park. Her granny used to grow a patch of celery behind the barn and she'd told Georgina about the old days, when the farmers grew acres and acres of the best celery in the world right here. Georgina wished Granny could see this. Along with the other old neighbor ladies, her granny had worked most of her springs planting seeds, and her summers placing bleachboards against each plant to block the sun and make the celery grow anemic pale, the way people liked it in New York and Chicago. The blackhaired men in boots, jeans, and straw cowboy hats moved steadily away, abreast one another, shouting in Spanish, slas.h.i.+ng and tossing, synchronized in a harvest line dance.

When Georgina no longer could hear the men's voices or make out their hands and necks, she s.h.i.+fted into first. For half a mile, celery heads grew on either side of the road, green columns which, after all these years, had somehow thrust upward from their roots with enough force to displace the heavy soil. After her granny died, Georgina, who was ten, had asked her mother why n.o.body grew celery anymore. Georgina's mother told her that the soil was finally used up, once and for all, and that was why the fields lay weedy and uncultivated, including the little garden plot behind their barn.

The houses beyond the fields were exactly as Georgina remembered-simple, small, peelingpaint houses built on concrete block foundations or on slabs poured atop mounds of slag landfill, above yards low enough to flood after a big rain. Georgina slowed to pa.s.s a driveway where four children with dirtsmeared legs played a game of running and handslapping. Even with Andy's sprinkler system and fertilizer, her new west side lawn didn't stay lush like these yards, fed by a watertable not more than a foot below the surface. That watertable explained everything about this place, why the celery grew, why the earth used to heave behind her old house, where one month there might be a valley a foot deep and the next month there'd be a little hill, and why Andy's truck, when she Page 129 reached it, was mired nearly to its axles. If he couldn't live without the new truck as he'd insisted, then why had he risked the thing by coming to the river, of all places, to get firewood? Andy's truck was as white as a wedding cake, a pure color that seemed wrong here. She'd expect greenwhites like the celery her granny once protected from the sun, and she'd expect redwhites like the crazy eyes of that pony that had been trapped in the mud a decade ago.

G.o.d, she hadn't thought of that pony in ages. As a kid, Georgina had seen cars stuck when older kids unfamiliar with the area would park and make out, and then they'd have to call their parents or a tow truck to winch them. The girl who lived up on the ridge must have known she was pus.h.i.+ng her luck riding her pony into that part of the woods after spring rains. When Georgina and other kids on the street heard the commotion, they came tearing through their patched screen doors and out of their weedy backyards. The pony, purplybrown and sweating, had sunk past its knees. It screamed and tossed its neck in the air as if trying to throw off its head.

Its eyes rolled back in its sockets and gra.s.scolored foam poured out of its mouth and coated the leather bridle and reins which whipped around like swamp snakes.

Though visions of the pony used to keep her awake nights, she had managed not to think of the animal since she'd moved with her mom out of the neighborhood. If they'd given Georgina a chance, she might have been able to free that pony, but back then she hadn't done anything but watch it thrash and listen to its screams, halfanimal, halfmachine. The girl had run up the ridge in her cowboy boots and leather fringe and returned with her father who dangled a shotgun. He made the girl stand back as he raised the gun to his shoulder. "No, Daddy! No!" screamed the girl. Georgina woke into the nightmare that the man wasn't even trying to save the creature, and that people up the ridge were cruel and stupid. The girl in fringe covered her eyes, and Georgina watched the ashfaced hill farmer buck at the force with which the shot left the gun. Later he and some other men shoveled a mound of dirt over the pony. A year later the ground was level again.

Undoubtedly the animal had gone a little mad-but what greater madness drove that man to bring his gun down the hill? Was it the Page 130 same thing that made Andy drive his thirtyfive thousand dollar truck into the mud? Nights after the hill farmer shot the pony, Georgina had devised plans for pulling it out alive, using ropes and winches, blockandtackles, devices which could lift that pony straight into the air, maybe in a hammock made of her bed sheets. The muck would have released the pony if they'd worked it. Why had the man been so anxious to sacrifice the creature that he didn't even ask the river people for help?

Georgina pulled off the road alongside a drainage ditch and the car tilted sideways. She wished she had brought Andy's pastry and given it to the dirty children back there-if they were like her, they'd have torn it apart with their hands and chewed it with their mouths open as they shouted to one another. When she got out of the car, she saw that if she'd pulled a few inches farther off the road, the car might have fallen into the ditch. She crossed the road toward the woods and the truck. If this were March instead of September, the rigid, spiked cradles of skunk cabbage flowers would be poking up from the mud. Were this May, the leaves of the skunk cabbage would have unfurled as fresh and green as that celery. Georgina used to bend down and smell the skunk cabbage each spring, and now she remembered it like the stink of her own sweat before she'd ever used deodorant. In the summer she had roamed the cool woods, gnawing wild onion and the roots of wild ginger.

Andy's double rear tires had crushed a stand of jewel weed blossoming at the edge of the road. If this were late September instead of late August, she would touch the orange pods of the jewel weed, and they would explode against her fingers. In addition to celery, Georgina's granny used to grow tomatoes, cuc.u.mbers, and muskmelons in the black dirt behind their old house.

Fourwheel drive had apparently done Andy no good with all four wheels buried. Maybe that's why the cops called the house-if the truck had been easy to tow, somebody would have towed it already. Andy deserved to be stuck if he was here trying to steal from somebody else's land he deserved to be stuck for thinking these people wouldn't stop him from taking their wood. And yet Georgina couldn't help but think she should at least try to free the truck, to make up for not rescuing the pony.

Page 131 On the other side of the truck, three men stood in the driveway of an asbestoss.h.i.+ngled house painted the color of lime sherbet. One was old and bald and smallheaded and two were about Georgina's age and wore baseball caps. Their property was built up unevenly, several feet higher at one side of the concrete block foundation. A fulllength crack in the front picture window was held steady with duct tape. Beside the driveway sat a trailer made out of the back end of a pickup, rusted and filled with split wood, one of its tires flat. Andy's truck with its clean white panels and black wheels looked like a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p in contrast. It had sunk low enough that Georgina hardly had to step up to get inside.

Everybody Georgina remembered from this neighborhood had been a mutant of some kind, malformed or marked, as if nature loved each so much she couldn't let him look like anybody else. Look at that old man standing in the driveway with the tiny head, hardly enough room in that head for a regular brain. Georgina's mother, a palehaired mammoth of a woman, used to have a mole on the side of her neck, a great protuberance that looked as though it might grow into a second illegitimate child, a sister for Georgina. When they'd moved away, the first thing Georgina's mother had done was get that mole removed. Delbert, a boy with whom Georgina waited for the school bus, had a raspberrycolored birthmark covering half his face. The woman next door was confined to a wheelchair a long, unpainted ramp led to the front door, its boards coming loose, regularly stranding the woman partway so she had to holier for help from her six children. After her granny died, Georgina's whole body had become a mutation, round and soft as a tumor from eating any food she could get hold of. Without Granny's yellow cakes and date cakes cooked with coffee, Georgina spent all her nightcrawler money on creamfilled cookies and honey buns and ate them right outside the store, standing next to the electric meters. In the morning she filled her cereal bowl again and again, with sugarflavored cereal, then milk, then more cereal.

Out of habit, Georgina pulled the seat belt around her. Andy's truck, which cost more than the houses in this neighborhood, started easily with a turn of her own key, vrooming at first, then slowing and idling into a low growl. Maybe Georgina could drive to Page 132 her old house by cutting a new trail through the woods, swerving through trees along the river, then turning back south. She felt an inclination toward the old place, a pull verging on homesickness for the solid feel of its carpeted concrete floors, the lumpy and changing landscape of its backyard, her granny's garden, sodden and weedy after a night of rains-some weeds grew a foot a day in this soil, Granny had complained, mud smeared to her elbows. Some previous owner had cut away a curved doorway between their kitchen and the living room but had never smoothed it out or plastered its edges. Spiders had built webs there in the s.p.a.ces between the pieces of sheetrock. Granny said spiders helped control the flies, but after her granny became too sick to argue, her mother used to spray insecticide into the cracks.