PLOWING THE STARS

From Fugue

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HIS PENCHANT for passing on the shoulder was, by then, uncorrectable. In his defense, there’s general trouble out here with deceleration, with the slowing down, I’m saying. Folks simply don’t have to—they expect not to have to—and a staggering amount of road kill attests to a troubling ambivalence about when they should. We’re rural. Rural rural. The urbanites’ gridlock is of no concern to us, nor are we afflicted by the so-called stop and go, of which, on clear days, during drive time, the St. Louis station apprises us on the tens. Such maladies we cite as reasons not to go to the city.

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What hazard we’ve got, instead, is this treacherous network of two-lanes gridding the farmland, fairly straight lines of asphalt, coded with stripes and hemmed by ditches. Given a single lane within which to operate, the simple act of passing becomes improbable at best, often outright illegal, and pity him at harvest whose tractor drags a wide rake, whose overladen seed truck, say, slouches toward the Equity silos. To be trapped for interminable miles behind such machinery many find a fate worse than waiting on a train, and as vehicles stack up behind these lumbering implements of husbandry, there’s no end to the swearing and the light-flashing, the horn-blowing and the bird-flipping, as the would-be passersby jockey to overtake the impediments in question.

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Comes with the territory, I say, and have marked such agony as penance for our original sin of being born on America’s fruited plain, we that sparse but taxpaying populace who have no multi-lane highways in our foreseeable future. Bitterness grows, though, and an angry religion of impatience has cropped up as surely as those white crosses in the weeds off the shoulder. I’ve even witnessed a van with CV plates engage in Pass-or-Perish without second thought, this bevy of gray-haired sodality women nearly meeting their demise head-on in the form of a blue septic truck. Releasing cruise to let the van by, I wondered, as I can’t help but when being overtaken, for what they might have been late, and, then, as they narrowly escaped in the cry of an air horn, what churchgoers of their dwindling generation might whisper when taking such risks. Altogether new prayers, I supposed. Our Lady of Lead Feet and Blind Faith.

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Surely I’m no saint, though, either. Shortly after closing time last December 19th, I met my own fate, as it were, at a darkened crossroads just before the overpass on my way home. Rolled one stop sign too many, as the arresting officer kindly put it. My feet couldn’t find a straight line. The consequences of my transgression: a revoked license and some rather expensive remedial coursework supervised by the State. Rightfully. I make no bones.

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But even in daylight and sobriety, my confrere, Dmitri Pasolini, had acute problems. He was particularly fond of using a curve’s inner lane to increase the efficiency of travel from corntown to corntown (our steady gig was the safe transport of auctioned vehicles to Mr. Tucker's car dealership; there were four or five of us drivers, part-time). The mathematics of Pasolini's vice were simple, he explained: tangents. The shortest path between the ditches. The practice, though, was terrifying: high-speed chicken matches with semis and minivans on those rare bends between Stewardson and Strasburg, Cowden and Herrick. Blame the conflation of a B+ in geometry and a Protestant work ethic, I say. A strong ambition and a low self-esteem, perhaps. Pasolini was an odd duck. At the Christmas party, Mr. Tucker pointed him out in our awkward circle and called him a real go-getter. Several drinks later, when the lines of professional demarcation had grown fuzzy and it seemed an all-for-one/one-for-all camaraderie was fermenting there in the Knights of Columbus Hall, Mr. Tucker slurringly referred to me as the goat sent in to calm the stud. Even Leslie laughed.  I shrugged pleasantly and scratched the holly leaves printed on the plastic tablecloth. Whiskey don’t make liars, my grandmother always said.

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Good to have work, though, and Pasolini and I were boon companions. In my probationary period, until I had my license back, Tucker kept me on washing cars and sweeping the garage. I still rode with Pasolini now and then. At night, we took classes at the community college: mathematics for him, mythology for me, which, I confess, I told Leslie was accounting. Okay, okay, okay.

 

                                                                   

SHE SAYS TO ME, “Your only problem, Seth, is that you’re not assertive. You’re absolutely not.  And, actually,” she says, “that’s just one of your problems.”

 

"I am willing to address the others categorically,” I tell her, “but first let me say—”

 

“Not in the least bit. End of story.”

 

“—that what I think you see as a lack of assertiveness in me actually stems from your highly aggressive nature. You operate differently. More than aggressive, in fact, I’d call it vigilant. You’re a vigilant person.”

 

“What do you mean vigilant?”

 

“You seek out things that might possibly upset you. And then you pound them into the ground—”

 

“Oh please.”

 

“—before they can realize their potential.”

 

“Their potential?”

 

A summer breeze riffles the linen curtains, smoke wafting in from our patio grill.

 

“To upset you, I’m saying. Let me have that.”

 

She brandishes the hammer but won’t deliver it. “To upset me. It’s what those of us with jobs call proactive. You’re thirty years old, Seth.”

 

“Proactive, right. Just, I don’t see it that way. I think it’s—”

 

“Because you don’t have a job.”

 

“I think this proactive vigilance on your part breeds bad things like…”

 

“Like what?”

 

“Like mistrust. Undue suspicion. The stuff of fascism, on a grander scale. You need to relax—”

 

“Relax. And let things walk all over me like they do you, you mean.” She waves the hammer.  “What are your intentions, anyway?”

 

This is often how it starts. She may keep us up all night, developing new insults here in the kitchen, or she may follow me from room to room, reciting the litany of old ones. The neighbors may knock on the door again. The police, this time, just might be called. Something almost certainly will be broken, and I don’t want it to be my nose. We stare each other down, amid the drone of lawnmowers and the smell of charcoal, and wait for all of our wild words to catch up with us.

 

“I do too have a job,” I say.

 

“Real job,” she clarifies. “How much are you in for? With me? Seth?”

 

“For whatever comes.”

 

“Like someone else, maybe?”

 

“Maybe. Maybe there’s someone better. For you, I mean,” I say hopefully.

 

“No one doubts that. Did you ask the dealership about Payroll? I taught you spreadsheets, and they were begging for you to show one ounce of… Christ. I could use a little help with the mortgage and groceries if you’re staying here. Okay? What do you plan to do about that?”

 

“It’s just staying I’m doing here? Les?”

 

The hammer strikes the counter, rattling the silverware in the drying rack.

 

“Goddammit,” she says.

 

I shake my head and put the paintbrush back beneath the sink. I’ll fix Pasolini's boards together later. There’s no sense doing it now. These crosses are tawdry and maudlin, I know, and we had our share of gallows jokes about them, but in spite of it, perhaps because of it, I feel compelled to make him one.

 

“Seth?”

 

I raise my voice to match hers. “The résumés are out, Les. That phone will ring.”

 

“Not for nothing,” she says, “but that phone dials out, too.”

 

                                           

BY SUMMER, Pasolini had rationalized shoulder use to recoup lost minutes and increase his bottom line.  Riding shotgun on the homestretch of a one-for-one swap in Dieterich, I was afraid to take my eyes from the road to use the tobacco cup we’d wedged between the bucket seats. The car lurched from side to side as he challenged a crawling seedwagon.

 

“No, it’s a bad idea,” I said. “Meech…”

 

The keel evened. The speedometer needle dropped like a red timber, and he pointed his travel mug past my nose. “Come on. How wide you think it is, Seether?”

 

Oncoming traffic huffed by us on the left, the sun glaring off the windshields.

 

“Who cares how wide?”

 

He lowered his nose and slurped coffee.

 

Spilled corn kernels bounced in front of us like golden gnats. They pinged against our undercarriage as we crept up on the seedwagon once more, its bright, cautionary triangle looming before us, oranger and oranger. I braced myself. The front wheel drummed the rumblestrips. “Meech,” I said on drawn breath, sucking the words into me, “it’s not a car width.”

 

“This boat gets to Ewington by noon, Seether, I clear fifteen bucks an hour.” He pressed the pedal. “Do the math, bro.”

 

He wasn’t so aggressive off the clock. Tuesday and Thursday nights, after class, we’d drive the so-called scenic route home from Mattoon, trying to pick up any rumor of rock stations from the cities. Central Illinois is vast and flat, especially when the crops are low, and I fancied these roadtrips searching for airwaves something like sailing for treasure or new passage. I was glad to be away from home.  We would set a course for wayside taverns, where we could buy package liquor, and Pasolini would glide his Nova back into the pitch. Beyond the stunted luminescence of our headlights, visibility was near zero, and more than once I felt I’d slipped the bonds of earth entirely to hurtle through space, a three-subject notebook full of gods in my lap, Pasolini howling Zeppelin at the wheel. Our tack we configured by the flashes of radio towers, the vaporlights of distant cow barns, that pink glow of commerce at Ewington’s interstate exit—this penumbra, this almost placental bloom in the Midwestern night—which would invariably reel us out of orbit around twelve, the last cigarette spraying sparks in the rearview, the last Miller bottle bouncing in the ditch.  Deflated, I’d dangle an arm over starboard and let my fingers plow the stars.

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Pasolini turned the radio down. “And, so, okay, that’s what she says. What about you?”

 

“Well.” I directed the vent louvers away from my face. “I will cross that bridge when I come to it.”

 

“Ah, I see, Billy Goat.  Cross that bridge. Sounds like a no. You’re saying you’re not actively looking for the bridge. The bridge’s function, to you, is secondary. If the bridge happens before the Seether, if it, like, rises out of the mist, he will cross—”

 

“I would probably cross.”

 

“But it’s not the crossing, of the river or the canyon or whatever, that is important.”

 

“We’re talking about a family, Meech. You’re clear on what we’re talking about?”

 

“Rock and roll.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“It’s rather that here, now, the bridge would happen to be in front of you…”

 

“Maybe let’s drop the bridge metaphor.”

 

“The journey more than the destination, you’re saying.” He nodded at this, comprehending himself.

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Following a major blow-out over the family issue, Leslie had stopped picking me up from work. The sidewalks didn’t make it all the way out to her place, and it was an arduous three-mile trek over culverts and under road signs. When I reached the narrow drive, each time, I would stop and stand there like a stone in the dusk, look at the light coming from the living room window, and wonder why on earth I was going to go inside. I always did, though.

 

“Meech, I don’t want to go home. Don’t take me home.”

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If he said something then, I couldn’t hear it. He untwisted a bottle cap, kissed the crescent-riding cowgirl on the neck, and tipped the bottle back. I thought I felt the car slow just a tad.

 

                                                       

SHE WAITS FOR me in the driver’s seat, parked on the shoulder. There are no skid marks to be seen, but there are some severe-looking ruts which cross the ditch at an angle, and beyond this, the soybeans are down and the ground is torn up where the pickup Pasolini was driving flipped to a stop and was subsequently hauled away. The whole empty scene bears testament to violence and tragedy. He died alone out here.

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I’m in the gray suit I wore to the service, the sleeves too short. My black tie is flapping in the wind, and my truck stop sunglasses keep falling from my nose because the hinges are weak and the arms have splayed. “Where should I put it?” I yell.

       

She won’t lean to the window.

       

“I can’t put it out here,” I tell her. “It’ll get, like, harvested.  It’ll have to go in the ditch somewhere.”

       

“Then put it in the ditch, Seth. That’s what most people do with them.”

       

I sink the cross into the soft slope and tap its top with the hammer.

       

“Hurry up,” she says. “I don’t want to be behind this guy.”

       

A mammoth combine is grinding up the highway, going our direction. Instinctively I look the other way to see if someone’s coming and step back. “It’s a little crooked, isn’t it?” Indeed, the gibbet is loose.

       

“No one ever mistook you for a craftsman,” she says. “Come on.”

 

But I feel the need to be stubborn, to assert myself, and so stand there waiting, waving to the combine as it passes, the farmer’s capped silhouette high in the cab waving back, knowing what’s happened here, a sympathetic salute. He’s damming a long stream of cars. I count all seventeen.

 

“Thanks for the hurry,” Leslie says.

 

I take my jacket off, my tie, and toss them through the window onto her seat and start walking down the shoulder. She’s out of the car in a fury, coming around the hood in heels. “What are you doing?” Her wristwatch glints in the sun. “What are you doing?” The buttons on her navy suit are fiery, golden nailheads.

 

                               

AND, FINALLY, forty days after his death, the phone does ring.  I’m expecting to hear from the business supply company on Jefferson Street. Every night I have been preparing, scripting dialogue on the back of my incisors with my tongue as I watch the ceiling fan churn the air above the bed. I’ve built a series of ready answers around positive words like delighted, yes, and immediately. I am looking forward to the opportunity and certainly hope to be activated into your workforce. In my talking notes, I have drawn lightning bolts around the word activated.

 

Leslie sits at the table with the phone, the red cord stretching taut across the messy kitchen.  A pot shifts with a clank in the loaded sink. “Uh-huh,” she says, nodding and opening my notebook on the table.  She shakes her head briefly at a doodle of the Gorgon, then scratches down some notes of her own on the first blank page. When she looks at me—looks at me, who has risen eagerly from the couch and is gung-ho in the doorway, all bright eyes and firm handshake—I sense at once it isn’t prospective employment. It’s the clinic confirming our at-home test.

 

The mist disperses. The bridge reveals its long, rickety arch.

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In the next weeks, I make use of my positive words.  Absolutely.  We spend more time at her mother’s, who has assigned herself the planning of a simple ceremony for us, coinciding with the completion of her patio deck, upon which we will stand before Reverend Fusco, apparently sometime in September, she swears, though maybe early October, depending on the carpenter.

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We buy two rollers and a foam brush from Lowe’s and set to painting the spare bedroom yellow.  Leslie seems agreeable—sedated, even. She’s barely raised her voice in days.  She tapes the nebulous ultrasound photo to the pane while I’m dabbing around the window, and I stop to study it a moment. There’s the certain curve of a skull, the suggestion of an elbow, the possibility, I tease, of a horn.  She sighs as she begins to move my things from this closet to the one in the hall.

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The day of Pasolini's funeral, she waited in the Handy Dan’s parking lot, the first one she came upon, up the road a piece from where I drove his cross into the ground.  I was a sweating mess.  My feet were sore from being pinched in wingtips a half-size too small, and when I dropped sheepishly into the seat beside her, I began to unlace them, hoping the air conditioning would restore me before she let me have it.  In the summer heat we sat perfectly still and silent for a spell, like we’d never done before.  “Seether,” she said.  Softly, she flicked my knee.

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“What?”

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In another mind, I would have relished her placidity—her recent rages had been more than I could answer—but I was still blinded by the image of her red car stitching through that queue of seventeen, arcing wildly around the combine before disappearing in the shimmer off the asphalt, speeding off to leave me walking along the highway with my dumb conviction and a prayer card folded in my pocket. To teach me, as she often said, a lesson.

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The ride home was a tense one.  I left my clothes piled in the hallway.  She went to the grocery while I showered, and as I was toweling off, positively beat and too tired for more sorrow, certainly too tired to fight, she stepped into the foggy bathroom and handed me an ice cream sandwich, the paper folded back like a banana peel.

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“I didn’t ask for this.”

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“It’s ice cream, Seth. Just eat it.”

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I stuck it in my mouth, remembering how I had seen her, through the drapes, carry my birthday cards from the mailbox to the tall trash bin beside the drive. “Thanks,” I said.

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Now, preparing the nursery, she’s struggling with something in the closet.  She curses violently and kicks it hard.

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“Here,” I say. “Don’t. I’ll get it.” 

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She marches out of the room. “Yeah, get it. Do something.”

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I wipe yellow paint on my jeans and drag my box of papers out of the closet. Last spring’s graded term paper is on top.

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Your analysis of The House of Atreus is generally solid, although I question your assertion that a “defiant apathy,” as you put it, will forestall vengeance or wrath.  What makes you so sure?  Have you read Hamlet?  Grammar good.  Awesome job.  B+

                                                       

IN OCTOBER, SHE comes into the soft yellow room with a sample book of wallpaper borders and slowly lowers herself to sit cross-legged on the floor, in the morning sun, beside my sleeping bag.  My eyes are open, but I have nothing more to say. We hate each other and are afraid. I can smell coffee brewing. She opens the book and says, calmly, that she doesn’t favor the ducks (she likes the picket fence). She shakes a little, but doesn’t apologize. Loose pages fall from the book, and she gathers them and holds them out to me, until I sit up. Adhesive glow-in-the-dark stars fill the square sheets, their rays neatly interlocking, a teeming mass wanting design. I wait to see if she’ll say more. She can’t. She leans and, sniffling, switches off the paint-spattered clock radio, which I hadn’t noticed was buzzing. 

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“Wake to static,” I say.

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Slowly she kisses last night’s cut, a small stinger she left above my eye. Her remorse doesn’t linger. “You can reach, can’t you?” She points to the ceiling. “I want one there. And there. And there…”