Marvel and a Wonder (2 page)

The grandfather, on the other hand, favored amateur radio and was a serious CB enthusiast. In the front parlor, there was a gray Heathkit shortwave transceiver sitting on a small wooden desk; tacked above the desk was a map of the United States, with tiny colored pins placed at odd intervals throughout the continent, marking the old man’s acquaintances in places as distant as Florida and Wyoming. There was also the brand-new CB he bought every year, installed in the cab of his faded blue pickup truck. It was something he and his wife Deedee had liked to do, before she passed away three years before, the two of them driving downstate to sell a gross of eggs, killing time chatting with the truckers or lonely hearts or whoever frequented channel 17. At quiet moments during the day, after a meal or in the evening, the grandfather would sit at the tiny desk, his voice and the voices of other familiar strangers bouncing off the sun and moon and passing satellites and stars, whispering to each other into the narrow hours of night. The house was noiseless as the grandson, in the bedroom above, inhaled toxicants, staring vacantly at the abstract patterns on the ceiling, while the grandfather cleaned his radio in the room below.

Around one p.m., Deirdre appeared briefly, stealing a can of soda from the fridge. But before the grandfather could call out to her, she was gone once again to the isolation of her bedroom.

* * *

By evening, their chores had been done and their dinner eaten. In the dark, the boy wandered around outside, searching for insects to feed his reptiles. He found a pill bug and dropped it into a glass jar. He looked up and heard the sound of a cricket, then followed it into the henhouse. There, inside the brooder, the boy discovered the peep with mushy chick had died. It lay on its side in a pile of sawdust, its tiny abdomen crusted open and red. The boy called out for his grandfather, who came out, looking worried.

“What is it?” he asked, and the boy only pointed. The grandfather frowned and then cradled the creature in his palm, and after a moment made to toss it in the trash. But the boy insisted they bury it. The grandfather looked down at the animal, shook his head, and said no. The boy pleaded with his eyes until, finally, the grandfather went against his better judgment and said, “Get a shovel.”

In the dark, they held an informal service, burying the animal near the roots of a birch tree the boy seemed to favor. The boy said a prayer and then covered the animal with two shovelfuls of dirt.
It was despicable
, Jim thought, looking away from the face of his grandson. It occurred to him that this, this was what was wrong with the country, the world today: it was what happened when you stopped seeing things get born, and live, and then die. It was what happened when a person, when a town, when a whole country didn’t have a rudimentary understanding of how things ought to be.

After the peep’s funeral, they went back into the house and sat quietly in the living room. The grandfather did not watch television. Their entertainment was the mayflies that soon appeared on the windows, crowding out the dusk. After a few minutes of that, the boy drifted upstairs to his bedroom. In a moment, Jim could hear the sound of video games, of music.

Jim frowned and then sat down at the kitchen table, put on his cheaters, and went through the bills once again. Tally after tally, sheet after sheet, they all said the same thing: they owed more than they were taking in. The factory-farm boys had muscled him out and the land was all they had left. But the utilities, the upkeep on the place, was burying them. Another year, two at the most, and they’d have to sell. And then what? Jim squinted down at the bills, trying not to imagine the future.

* * *

The phone rang at eight o’clock. He heard his daughter stumble around upstairs to answer it. Almost immediately she began to shout. He sighed and walked over to the Heathkit and switched it on, preferring the distant voices of strangers, the far-off static.

At nine p.m., the grandfather got undressed and went to bed. Remembering it was Sunday, he made a halfhearted attempt to flip through his wife’s Bible but gave up after a single page. Then he laid back in the flat, wide dark and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling, imagining the shape of his wife somewhere above.

* * *

Two hours later, he awoke with a terrible urge to urinate. He did his business, patiently making water, and then passed the boy’s room on the way back down the hall. The boy was once again not in his bed. The grandfather sighed, tromped down the carpeted stairs, and pulled on his muck-covered boots.

Quentin was in the chicken coop again, asleep on a plank of hay, headphones blaring, glasses folded up, open rucksack near his feet. Once more, he had only made it this far. Jim nudged the boy awake, taking a seat beside him.

“You running away?”

The boy nodded.

“Well, how come you don’t get any farther?”

The boy shrugged.

“What are you running away from?”

The boy sniffed.

“Is it me?”

The boy shook his head.

“Is it your mother?”

The boy hesitated, then slowly shook his head.

“Is it the peep? The one that died?”

The boy shook his head again.

“Well then, what is it?”

After a long pause, the boy finally muttered, “Everything.”

Jim let out a disgruntled snort and forced himself to clear his throat. He looked around the coop for some witness, for someone, anyone to see the boy’s cupidity, his off-putting weirdness, but found there were only the chickens asleep in their roosts. He felt for the boy a familiar sadness then but did not know what to say or do.

_________________

The blue light before dawn, breaking through a sunless sky, thinning clouds, a weary moon. Blood on a willow, a barn owl devouring its prey. The world asleep. A loose beam, the creak of the back porch steps, a shattered window in a neglected corner of the house, whistling its familiar tune.

* * *

Around four a.m. the grandfather awoke to the sound of broken glass. Jim did not know if it was a Wednesday or a Thursday. He fell out of bed and crept downstairs barefoot, finding the jam jar broken on the kitchen floor. Small change had rolled everywhere. His daughter Deirdre looked up from her knees, too desperate to be ashamed. She wore some man’s black bomber jacket and had the distant, unrepentant look of a criminal.

Jim switched on the light. The boy crept down the stairs behind him, wiping some sleep from his eyes. He had forgotten to put on his glasses.

“Go on back up,” Jim whispered. The boy nodded and, slowly peering around his grandfather’s shoulder, treaded upstairs. Jim turned back and searched his daughter’s face. She seemed to sink into the floor, head falling into her hands.

His daughter’s face was the town, the state, the country. With her broad forehead and big blue eyes, the feminine cheekbones and soft pink lips, it was hard not to look at her and imagine who she had been twenty, thirty years before. A girl much loved, though sometimes too much, sometimes ignored, sometimes whupped, sometimes overindulged with chocolate or sodas or candy, and then, at once, the face he was remembering was no longer the face he saw. What had been open, trustworthy, wide-eyed with all of the world’s possibilities, those eyes like a newborn colt’s, dark blue, the eyelashes dark and lengthy, the eyelashes being the only thing Jim felt had come from him, her hair once blond, soft and feathery as corn silk, cut in a simple schoolgirl fashion or tied up in pigtails, her skin once a bowl of pinkish cream, without mark or bruise or blemish, except a little crumb or two at the corner of her lip, the nose pert and rounded, the teeth small, delicate, always at the service of a mischievous smile, a single dimple then appearing on her left cheek, her neck long and splendid like her mother’s, well, all of it had become something else. What had once been a face you looked at and saw hope in, the future in, some different world in, a face that had once been named “Best Smile” and “Best Looking” two years in a row back in high school, a face he had said made him proud of who he was, able to endure all of his failings as a father, a face that had led a Fourth of July parade, not once, not twice, but three times as a girl, and had seemed downright beatific standing among the choir each Sunday, a face which had been fawned over as lovely, as one of a kind, as special, had become masked in secrecy and disappointment and guilt.

The face kneeling before him in the near-darkness was the face of the world out there, of the plains that extended in all directions from the back steps just beyond the door, the face of the failing little town, and the failing little state, and the failing little country. It was the face of a girl who had been spoiled, spoiled by comfort, spoiled by safety, spoiled by trinkets and gewgaws and love, a face that had sat before the television and muttered, pointing with tiny white fingers again and again, “I want! I want!” half in love with whatever advertisement was on. It was the face of a girl who had once believed in God but nothing more, not school, not hard work, not work of any kind, a faith as reckless as chance itself. It was the face of a girl who as a baby cried whenever she ate mushed apples—the sweetness being too sweet—the girl demanding more, more, more, her mother unable to spoon the mashed-up fruit into her daughter’s mouth quick enough. It was a face that had been told one too many times that it was pretty, only to discover that there was nothing there but the surface of the skin, the shape of the nose, the structure of the bones themselves, nothing more than the flesh, and all of it had begun to go bad, because it was made of nothing that was meant to last. All it was was flesh. There were waitresses at truck stops who were better looking, and thought much less of themselves. This face, the face of a girl who had been told she was more beautiful than she was, who at the age of twenty decided to leave home without a word, and three years later returned with the boy—already two years old—standing in her shadow, this face that brought more heartbreak than all the beauty it had possessed, this face was lurking in the dark there, eyes downturned, hiding from the glow of the shaded kitchen lamp.

Staring at his daughter, he now saw her face had gone yellow and gray. Yellow in the tone of the skin and eyelids and teeth, gray beneath the eyes and around the mouth. There were wrinkles at the corner of those eyes, the flesh like the flesh of an old chicken, pocked, bumpy, irregular. The eyes themselves had gone from blue to a bruised violet, milky, clouded over in a hazy film, the recurring expression in them of plain confusion, as if she was forever staring off into the near distance at something she did not comprehend—her past, her present, her future maybe. The forehead was perpetually furrowed, a permanent notch having formed between her eyes, the eyebrows themselves having been shaved off, their suggestion now made in sooty pencil. Her hair, once a pride to Jim, the tresses of it like something from a fairy tale, had been bleached and colored so many times that it looked like the hair of a doll that had been left in the weather, or abandoned in a musty attic, the color now being close to copper, like old wires torn from the walls of a vacant house.

“Please,” she said, not looking up at him.

“Empty out your pockets,” he said.

“Please.”

“Go on.”

She nodded and dropped a fistful of dimes and quarters to the tile.

“Now clean this up,” he said, stepping past her. He went and took a seat in his armchair in the parlor, hands still shaking. When she finished, she banged open the kitchen door and disappeared. Her car made that terrible sound again—the alternator or ignition now shot—before she tore away, down the gravel road. Jim sat in the dark and worried about if and when she’d come back.

* * *

When the sun began to rise an hour later, the grandfather was still sitting in the chair. He heard the first cocks begin to crow and stood slowly. He walked over to the kitchen table, started a pot of coffee, and saw the feed store calendar with a red
X
marking the date. It was the boy’s birthday. The grandfather stared at the
X
solemnly, went upstairs, got dressed, opened the boy’s bedroom door and saw him snoring facedown on the pillow, then decided to let him sleep. He closed the door, trod out to the henhouse, fed the birds, and began candling the eggs. Rodrigo—a Mexican illegal who helped during the summers—was already at work. With his well-trimmed black mustache and his half-buttoned vaquero shirt, he was hunched over the pen, counting chicks.

The boy was still asleep at seven. The grandfather came indoors, buttered some toast, ate, then puttered off into the field to check on the corn. It was just past his knees now, the leaves a keen, rich green. He squatted there among the rows, poking his fingers deep into the soil, cupping some of it in his palm, taking in the pleasant corruptness of the dirt.

Next he and Rodrigo cleaned out the roosts. All the dust clouded his vision and caused him to cough. At nine a.m., he got a little winded and came indoors to make another pot of coffee. While it percolated, he stood at the counter and stared out the rectangular kitchen window. The sun was poking a hole in the sky and he leaned there, taking in its rays. Then the phone rang. The old man’s heart sank; he had every right to assume it was his daughter. He stared at the yellow plastic device for a moment and then answered on the third ring; it was the electric company.

“Mr. Falls, sir, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but you’ve got until the end of the month.”

They had been telling him the same thing for the past three months. He took a seat at the kitchen table, yellow phone cord stretched across the room, and studied the bill before him.

“The end of the month?”

“That’s right, sir, or we’re going to have to switch off your power.”

“Well, I can get you some of it by then. How’s five dollars?”

“Sir, your bill is for $139.”

“If I had the $139, don’t you think I would have sent it to you?”

There was an awkward pause. “Sir, I’ve just been asked to call as a courtesy . . .”

“What about bartering? Do you ever take in trades?”