Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (5 page)

 

There is a pond in the back pasture where the horses go to drink, half hidden by willows and giant honeysuckle bushes that shade it from the noonday sun. On the hottest days we swim the ponies out to the middle, and when their hooves leave the silty bottom, it feels like we are flying. The water is brown and rafts of manure float past us as we swim, but we don't care. We pretend the ponies are Pegasus. And as
they swim, we grow quiet thinking about the same thing. We think about Curt—his arms, the curve of his hat brim, the way he smells when he gets off the tractor in the afternoon. You trail your hand in the water and say,
What are you thinking about?
And I say,
Nothing.
When we come out of the water the insides of our thighs are streaked with wet horsehair, as if we are turning into centaurs or wild beasts. The ponies shake themselves violently and we jump off as they drop to their knees to roll in the dust. Other days it is too hot to even swim, to move at all. We lie on the ponies' necks as they graze in the pasture, our arms hanging straight down. The heat drapes across our shoulders and thighs. School is as incomprehensible as snow.

Rodeo is our favorite game, because it is the fastest and most reckless, involving many feats of speed and bravery, quick turns, trick riding. One day late in July, out in the back field, we decide to elect a rodeo clown and a rodeo queen. The ponies stamp out their impatience while we argue over who will be what. Finally the games begin. There is barrel racing and bucking broncos and the rodeo parade. We discover that we can make the ponies rear on command by pushing them forward with our heels while we hold the reins in tight.
Yee haw!
we say, throwing one arm up in the air. The ponies chew the bit nervously as we do it over and over again. We must lean far forward on their necks, or we will slip off. Then the pinto pony goes up and you start to lose your balance. I am doubled over laughing until I see you grope for the reins as the pony goes high, and you grab them with too much effort, and yank
his head back too far. He hangs suspended for a moment before falling backward like a tree on his spine. You disappear as he rolls to his side, and reappear when he scrambles to his feet, the reins dangling from the bit. I jump off my pony and run to you. Your arm, from the looks of it, is broken.
Oh shit,
I say. You squint up at me through a veil of blood.
Doesn't hurt
.

 

Curt was the one who rescued you. He drove his pickup through the tall grass of the back pasture, lifted you onto the bench seat, made you a pillow with his shirt. And when he couldn't get ahold of your parents, he was the one who drove you to the emergency room. I rode in the truck bed, and watched through the window as you stretched your legs across his lap, your bare feet on his thighs. I could see his arms, your face, his tanned hand as he brushed the hair, or maybe tears, from your eyes. I sat across from him at the hospital, waiting while they stitched the gash on your forehead and put your left arm in a cast, and I came in with him to check on you. I hung back in the corner when he leaned over the table, and I heard you whisper to him in a high, helpless voice. I watched your hand grope out from under the blanket, reaching towards his. And I saw him hold it. He held it with both hands. Of course I was jealous, and still am. You must still have that scar to remind you of that summer. I have nothing I can point to, nothing I can touch.

It was early in August when the brown pony died. It happened overnight, and no one knew how: whether he colicked and twisted his gut, or had a heart attack, or caught a hind foot in his halter while tending an itch and broke his own neck. When we found the body, we didn't cry. I remember that we weren't even very sad. We went to find Curt, who lit a cigarette and told us not to tell the ladies. Then we went back and looked at the pony's still body, his velvety muzzle, his open eye, his lips pulled back from his big domino teeth. We touched his side, already cold. Later we rode the pinto pony double out to the pond, your arms around my waist, your cast knocking against my hipbone. Behind us the tractor coughed as Curt pulled the pony's body to the manure pile with heavy chains. We slipped off the pinto, letting him wander away, and sprawled out in the grass. You scratched inside your cast with a stick. Grasshoppers sprang around us. We lay there all afternoon and into the evening, your head on my stomach, our fingers in the clover, trying to think up games we could play with only one pony.

Weeks later we were alone in the barn. We were sweeping the long center aisle, pressing push brooms towards one another from opposite ends, the radio flickering on and off, like it always did. When it faded out completely, we heard the squabbling of dogs out back. We dropped our brooms and ran to see what they'd got. Through a cloud of dust in the paddock we could make out Curt's dog, his butt to us, bracing himself with his tail in the air and growling at one of the ladies' fierce little dogs, who was shaking his head
violently, his eyes squeezed shut. Between them, they had the brown pony's head. It took awhile to recognize it. It was mostly bone, yellow teeth and gaping eye sockets, except for a few bits of brown hair that hung on the forehead, some cheek muscle and stringy tendon clinging to the left side. And then we saw the little scrap of green against the white: the pony still had his halter on. This was what the dogs had got their teeth around. Curt had never bothered to take it off. With a final shake of his jaws, the little dog managed to snatch the pony's head away, and he dragged it around the corner of the barn, Curt's dog bounding after.

We stood in the slanting September light and watched this. We listened to the dogs' whines and rumblings, the scrape of the skull against the ground. Then we picked up our brooms, and when we were done sweeping we went and got the pinto pony and rode double down the hill and didn't think much about it again. Death was familiar that summer. It was in the road, in the woods, in the holes of the foundation of the barn; it was the raccoon rotting in the ditch, and the crows that settled there to pick at it until they, too, were flattened by cars, and their bodies swelled and stank in the heat; it was the half-decayed doe we found in the woods with maggots stitching in and out of its flesh, the stillborn foal wrapped in a rotting amniotic sac in the pasture where the vultures perched. We caught a whiff of it, sniffed it out, didn't flinch, touched it with our bare hands, ate lunch immediately afterwards. We weren't frightened of death.

And a few summers later, spinning out of control on a loose
gravel road in a car full of boys and beer, we weren't scared of it then, either, and we laughed and said to the boy at the wheel,
Do it again
. We only learned to fear it later, much later, when we realized it knew our names and, worse, the name of everyone we loved. At the height of the summer, in the very dog days, I would have said that we loved the ponies, but I realize now we never did. They were only everything we asked them to be, and that summer, that was enough. I don't know. Lately I've been thinking someone should write an elegy for those ponies. But not me.

I
n Thunderbird, Illinois, I get to thinking the world is going to end. During the day it's cotton candy and caramel apples, the Howler and the Zipper, the looping soundtrack of the carousel. But at night, when I'm stretched out in the back of the truck on the outskirts of Camper City, trying to sleep in the bowl of quiet left by five hundred people gone home sunburned and broke to their beds, the feeling sneaks in and sits down square on my chest: these are the last days. It's all going to break up. It's as if I'm eavesdropping on the secret that history has been whispering to itself all along: the punch line, the trick ending, the big joke. I curl up alongside the wheel well, wondering why I'm the only one who hears it. But morning always comes, daylight burning through the windows, the truck hot as a greenhouse, and I slide out barefoot onto the grass for another slow drag around the sun.

Across the aisle, Dub leans out the door of his camper, shading his eyes and squinting in my direction. “Hurry it up, man, hurry your ass up,” he shouts. “They're calling for rain today.”

He steps out of his camper as if he's lowering himself into a pool, gripping the doorframe and easing himself down on one leg, then the other. It takes a while for him to wade his way over. I pull off my T-shirt and crack my neck. The morning is hot and damp as the inside of a dog's mouth. All around us, Camper City wakes up slow. Generators hum, people light their first smokes of the day, piss out the door. The Haunted House woman puts on the radio and steps out to do her exercises under the awning of her RV, bouncing in a tank top, touching her toes. Everyone struggles to maintain something of a routine. Me, every morning, I remind myself where we are. Now: Illinois. I say it out loud, to make it official.

By the time Dub makes it over he's sweating and puffing, his mouth a deflated O. He presses a hand to my back window to steady himself. “Get a move on,” he wheezes. “We'll get an early crowd. Rain in the afternoon. They're all at home right now, glued to the Weather Channel, changing their plans. I guarantee.”

Dub is always guaranteeing the unguaranteeable: the weather, the whims of people, the quality of questionably constructed merchandise. A born hustler. Me, I couldn't sell a drowning man a life jacket. We could get no business at all, for what I care. I'd just as soon sit at my table and watch the crows tear around above me, wondering what the hell set
down in the center of their field. But still, I'm pulling on a shirt, lacing up my boots. Illinois. Really it's just another sky, another field, another morning, another sea of faces to come, blank-eyed, slack-jawed, hands on wallets, not as much to see the spectacle as to take something away from it to put up on the shelf.

“Coffee?” Dub jerks his thumb back at the camper, jowls swaying. I nod and slam the tailgate shut. Five months, four thousand miles, Dub's coffee has been slowly hollowing out my gut. He is a friend, or at least constant as one.

“Christ, it better hold,” he shouts on his way back to the camper, shaking his finger at the sky. “I sure as hell can't afford a slow day.”

 

Twenty minutes later, the coffee cranking through me, I head up to the port-a-johns on the midway. Up here, things are slow to creak into gear: the carnies fold tarps, run patchy safety checks on rides, shout to one another in English, Spanish, Portuguese. Sodas are plunged into ice at the concessions stands, hot dogs are eaten for breakfast, no buns. The old man in the cotton candy stand wearily starts his centrifuge spinning and shakes his cartons of pink sugar. Ed the Giant Steer, led out of his tent so that it can be flea-bombed for the second time in two weeks, sways on his stilt legs and groans, yanking his lead in his handler's palms, diving for the grass. A heavy roll of
ADMIT ONE
tickets is dropped in the dust and rolls to a stop at my feet. No one looks up when I
pass. I might as well be just another faceless customer, passing through. The outfit is watertight. Us hucksters, relegated to the side strips, we're nothing but gulls following a fishing boat, swooping in to snatch the leavings.

Most of the vendors down on the back side are already at their booths, counting out money, listening to radios. Yawning, sleep still burning off, looking only half-ready for the droves. I nod to the few I know: Indian Jim, who sells five-dollar sunglasses and isn't Indian in the least, Danny, the kid, sizzling on pills even at this hour, with his dream catchers and blown-glass beads on cords. They nod back, eyes hard.

I stop at the wing stand to say hello to Kathy. She leans out on the counter with her hands clasped in front of her and smiles big and blank, like she's waiting to take my order.

“Cole, baby,” she says.

“Good goddamn morning,” I say.

Kathy's hair, as always, is done in two braids, a hairstyle she must have outgrown forty years ago. No makeup yet, which makes a big difference. She's wearing a low-necked T-shirt covered with sequins that catch the light and send it sparking all over the place. I can see the tops of her breasts, brown and cooked-looking. Whenever I see them in the light of day, I can't imagine how I ever find comfort there.

“Think the weather will hold?” she says. Her bracelets jangle as she waves towards the sky. I squint up at the clouds, making out like I'm studying something she can't see.

“Yes,” I say. “Guaranteed.”

She laughs, too loud. “You getting into anything tonight?” Next to the deep fryer, turkey drumsticks and wings are lined up, ruddy and stoic-looking, as if they're steeling themselves for the hot oil. Dinosaur Wings, they call them. There's a pterodactyl on the sign in the window:
BOB AND KATHLEEN DENNIS
.
PROUDLY SERVING YOU
.

“What's today?” I say, though we both know it makes no difference. Every day is the same. Every night, the same clamor to erase it.

She thinks for a minute, her lips moving, counting back. “Saturday,” she finally says, flipping a braid over her shoulder, triumphant.

“One more day. Tomorrow we go.”

“Where?” she says with a sigh. “I don't ask anymore.”

“West. Over the river.” For weeks I've been looking forward to it, crossing the Mississippi, thinking things will be different on the other side. But as soon as I say it, all my anticipation fades, the way a trout loses color when it is yanked out of the water.

“Come by the bus this afternoon and see me,” she says and winks, then swipes at the counter with a rag and turns to the crackling fryer. “Bob takes over at four.”

 

When I get down to my table, Dub's already in his tent across the way, refolding and restacking T-shirts. The tent is packed with them, most XL or larger, stiff with silk-screened designs: women in Confederate flag thongs leaning across the hoods
of Ford and Chevy trucks, bloody-fanged pit bulls in studded collars, Uncle Sam with his middle finger extended above an American flag and the message
THESE COLORS DON'T RUN
. A 'Nam buddy left him a warehouse full in his will. Dub's been on the road two years now, says he'll quit when he sells them all. But I don't know. There's a point of no return, I'm beginning to think, and Dub may have passed it several thousand miles back.

I've been traveling since spring. Already the highway has become the one true thing, towns only stopovers, names on signs. Certain smells, clouds, movements of trees will once in a while feel exactly like home. Shadows will fall on the road in such a familiar way that I get disoriented and think I'm back in Virginia, headed down to the farm, where everything is still as it once was, and a certain sort of peace will come over me. Then the light shifts and it all shatters.

I pull out my boxes, roll up my tarp, and set up my table: blue glass medicine jars, tin toys, old coins, moldy magazines and tools. Wherever I go, I'm always knocking on farmhouse doors, offering to clean out old couples' sheds and barns. All I need is some bleach and a wire brush, and people will pay fifty bucks for an old milk pail, a Red Flyer with a broken axle.
ANTIQUES
, my sign says. Dub is always pointing it out to people, laughing. “Antiques? He sells junk. I sell trash.” Business is generally slow. I'm lucky enough to get Dub's runoff, wives who wander over while their husbands are clawing through piles of T-shirts, debating if the woman astride the John Deere tractor is better in blonde or brunette.

I hear Dub shout my name and look up, annoyed. What now? “Looky here!” he's saying. He's standing in the door of his tent, waving me over. In his hand I see something hanging from a chain, glinting. When I get over there he holds it out against his palm for me to see: a girl's necklace, a tiny gold heart, nearly swallowed up in his beefy hand.

“Where'd you get it?” I say, suspicious.

He taps the side of his nose. “Found it on my way over here. Sniffed it out.” His eyes are glassy from the heat, his forehead glistening. He's got half a pound of shrapnel in his left calf and thigh. Walking, standing, everything takes its toll. He pulls out a folding chair and sits down heavily, grunting. “Hell,” he says, grinning like a dog. “I think it's worth something, too.” He grabs my hand and pours the chain into it. “Go on, man. Take it. Sell it.”

I look down at the little heart. Why not? Everything else on my table is borrowed, begged, stolen from the dead. When I go back and lay it down among the old campaign buttons and souvenir pen knives, it might as well be a relic of someone long gone from this world.

 

Six months ago, my twin brother Clay's comic books were the first things I sold. Our house and pastures went to a development company after two days on the market, every penny paying for my mother's new apartment in the center with round-the-clock care. Her mind, by then, was as twisted and looped as a tattered curtain in a dark window. It was up to
me to clear out the house. Clay's room, fifteen years after his death, was exactly as he'd left it, untouched for nearly as many years as he'd been alive. Opening his door stirred up the dust that had settled in his absence, made it gleaming, glaring, new again. It was another day before I could bring myself to go in, and even then, I moved around like a trespasser, as if any minute he might appear in the doorway. I found the comic books boxed up carefully, chronologically, under his bed. A brittle piece of notebook paper, left over from the days when we fought over everything, fluttered to the floor when I lay on my stomach to pull them out:
Hands off, Cole!
But that money kept me going for months, bought me the truck, got me miraculously, against all odds, out of Virginia—
Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, Green Lantern, Atomic Man.

 

The people come, as they always do. In spite of the heat, the humidity, the exhaust-colored sky, they come dropping coins and car keys, yanking kids along by the wrists, eating funnel cake with their eyes on the Ferris wheel, their dogs locked in hot cars. I sit behind the table and watch them, the same faces making the rounds, hell-bent like they're searching for something. It's always the same, everywhere. I watch boys and men clamor in Dub's tent, T-shirts in their fists, throwing their money at him. I hear the clang of the bell at the Test Your Strength booth, the shouts of the barkers, hollers from the rickety Tempest, screams from the Gravitron every time the floor drops. The bleeps and buzzes and techno bass beats
of the games. Eyes pass over my table and move on, looking for something bright and new. A hot air balloon rises on the horizon, hovers red and stark against the steel-gray sky. People stop to point it out to one another, causing traffic jams on the paths. Something about it makes me uneasy. It looks like it has come to judge us.

No one has stopped at my table by the time the smells of lunch start to waft over: corn dogs, sausage and onions, Dinosaur Wings. At night, the smell is deep in Kathy's braids. Bob doesn't want her anymore, or at least that's what she told me. He spends hours in the wing stand after closing, trying to teach himself guitar. Kathy sits in the bus and waits for me. I come because there's nowhere else to go. She has an easy laugh, the optimism of youth. Bob's missing two fingers. He curses the stubs when he plays, the chords muted and muddy. The bus is parked so close behind the stand that sometimes, in bed with her, I can hear him. I pull the blanket over our heads and try not to listen. When I listen, I start to sink through the dark depths towards the pointlessness of it all. Why does he bother? At his age, what's the use?

 

Last night, I left the bus late and ended up at the grandstand, where most of the crowd had gathered for a beauty pageant. It was part of some festival going on in conjunction with the fair: the Corn Festival, the Harvest Festival, the Illinois Pride Festival, I don't know what. The girls, in their elaborate dresses, all looked incredibly earnest and downright scared,
as if this was the most important event of their lives. The winner cried as the judges crowned her, touching her frothy pink dress and piled-up hair. The sash they looped over her shoulders read
MISS HOPEWELL COUNTY
. She twisted it in her fingers as she stepped to the microphone to give a speech about her brother in the army. “We never know when the enemy might strike,” she said, feedback crackling. “It could happen right here in Thunderbird. That's why I'd like to take a moment of silence for our boys over there. They remind us all to follow our dreams and never give up.” The heads in the grandstand all nodded, and after a round of applause there was a minute or two of an almost sacred quiet. Out there on the edge of the crowd, I tried to direct my own silence towards the common cause, but all those grave unmoving faces only made me feel more invisible and alone.

Afterwards she posed for pictures, biting her lip between smiles. As she turned and waved to the crowd, she moved like so many country girls I know: trying to fold in on herself, trying to tuck away her broad muscular shoulders like wings. I thought about the girls Clay and I ran with in Virginia, girls who seemed to hold the answer to a question we hadn't yet learned to ask. Clay was the one they liked, though we were as near identical as two people could be. The only difference was that he had half an inch on me, a birthmark on his right shoulder, and a heart so big all the girls thought he was in love with them. He'd take them all out driving, that nightmare summer he was killed in the accident, the summer we turned sixteen. The age this girl must be, the age I last felt whole.