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How could she be sure? Anna opened her hands on the
steering wheel, palms flat against the gray leather. She breathed out. A flash of white. A child’s
head, hair still the color of milk but destined to fade, going under the
bumper. How could she know that it happened, that it didn’t happen? She was six hours into the trip,
driving out of a dark damp late summer morning, fog lying over the fields. Syrupy
dawn. Coffee and a biscuit in paper for breakfast, more coffee in the
squinting The drive-through was awkwardly
built, the turns too tight. She asked for a medium, something diet. We have
Diet Coke. Okay, fine. The speaker crackled as the girl asked if that was
large or medium, again. Medium. The car in front of her was at the service
window forever. Three bags handed over, opened, checked, the guy leaning out
the window of his pickup. A wait, another bag. Finally she was at the window. The
girl fumbled her change. Anna took the drink and peeled wet paper from the
straw, jabbed at the opening until it forced through. She looked in the
rearview for someone coming around the building behind her and goosed
forward, ahead of a pickup truck. She accelerated, looking out
toward the entrance and the noonhour traffic,
around the corner of the building. A whole family was straggled out
across the parking lot. A teenager, head bent, a
slash of hair across his eyes. Mom, Dad. Two kids of nearly the same age,
holding hands. Grampa. Grandma. A girl, or a woman,
maybe 16 but with her hips thrust forward as she walked and her breasts
carried like eggs. Anna leaned against the wheel, arms
folded, as they straggled. Finally the last one was across. She gunned it,
tires squealing momentarily as she cut the corner to the exit and out. But as she crossed the highway,
she looked back. Had there been another child? Could
there have been a small child running by himself,
fine hair lifting up on even that little wind? She had been looking at the
girl, at her knowing strut, at her cheekbones and round forehead. Perhaps a
child had been running after her. A child going under the car, his head just
at the level of the molded black bumper. Anna waited as the light cycled.
Surely she would have felt the impact. Someone would have shouted, or run
after her. Still, she couldn’t escape the
reality of the vision. There had been no child, no jolt, no scream, no
shocked faces, but she could see them all, the blond head and the bumper and
the child thrown away from the impact, sleeping on the concrete after sudden
violence, a trickle of blood from his ear. Anna settled into the rhythm of
the interstate. Already she had been six hours on the road, with 11 hours
ahead. She planned to drive until dark, stop for the night, arrive the next
day at the Linsbecks’. The college was familiar only
through Scott’s letters. This was his fourth faculty position, each one
taking him farther from their She might have followed the same
path, if Tony hadn’t lured her out of the Dickenson Library and into the
hectic delights of commercial publishing. English department friends had
joshed her for selling out, as they awaited word from chapbook competitions
and jockeyed for new jobs at MLA, but the barbs had a point. She wrote blurbs
and wooed authors, he did the deals, everything was fine. After a while, she only kept up
with Scott, a couple of others. When she became an agent, the word got around
and she received some half-brazen, half-abashed inquiries from former
classmates. Then Scott asked her to take part in the summer writers’
conference. “You can stay at our home. The
guest housing is in desperate need of renovation,” he’d written. The sun slid down in front of
her. Anna flipped the visor across the glare and the slicing light reflected
from other cars’ chrome like the blinding sweep of a flashlight into the
darkness. Fields stretched out and out, langorous with fertility and profit. She looked deeply into the small
towns as they went by, above or below the highway. Buildings with false
fronts eyeing each other across empty main streets. Stop-and-go lights. Tractor
dealers at each end of town, the arrays of red and green machines. A bus with
the name of the school district blocked out by blue paint along the sides. The
‘60s-era church it turned toward, buff brick with a suggestion of a steeple
in the upswept roof line, the suggestion of stained glass in the blocks of
color scattered across the windows. She remembered the Koncheskys, the backs of their necks exposed in the pew
in front of her. Their five-year-old had been killed when he darted into
traffic. There had been a party, visitors, kids
playing and yelling. A moment of inattention and the child ran toward someone
on the opposite sidewalk. The driver was not at fault. Maybe
he was going 30 instead of 25. The kid came from between the parked cars, out
of nowhere, and the street was steep. Maybe the driver’s glance had slipped
away, following a bird, or he had leaned over to change the station on the
radio. It made no difference. The child was dragged under the wheels. No one
could put guilt onto the parents, not when Bob Konchesky
sat with his white shirt scouring the shaved back of his neck. He and his
wife, both bent, ready for the sword. A flash of white. That’s all
there ever was. A moment when the sun shifted. The face appearing at a
window, then nothing. A moment. She saw the blond head, the
bumper, the body. It was crazy. Nothing had
happened. Anna thought about the
mockingbird. It had flown low across the highway, and she’d braked, not too hard, the bird flashing across, its wing
patches semaphoring. She was in a hurry. Maybe there was a sound. She looked
in the rearview mirror but there was nothing on the highway, no sign of the
bird. When she pulled into the parking
lot, and went around to put money in the meter, she
found the mockingbird splayed across the grille. One gray wing was thrust deep
into the bars, the other spread like a hand. The bird was dead,
its body real in a way that smashed things on the road are not. Anna looked at it for a long
time. Finally she leaned down and took three of the spread primaries between
her fingers, pulled. The feathers slipped, soft vanes parting, the shafts
firm but pliable as a stem. The body came away, but the other wing was still
caught in the grille. She’d pulled harder, a tiny
crunch, and the mockingbird had fallen to the pavement. It was not that he didn’t want
her to go. It was that he had accepted the long trip as if it were just the
morning drive to work. Tony was not threatened by her visit to a college
friend, not concerned. He helped her pack, tucking panty hose into the side
compartment. He set the two alarm clocks—she always woke with the first, but
worried that it might someday fail—but didn’t get up as she showered and
dressed. Anna didn’t want him to hold her
back, but in a perverse way she would have appreciated it if he had tried. She expected to miss him more. They
had worked together for a long time, then she had
begun her new career by working at home. She was there for him every evening.
They had dinner together, without authors or editors. They were closer and
closer. Alone on the road, she saw the
marriage getting smaller in retrospect, not larger. Tony moving back and back.
People driving by saw a woman alone. Single. Maybe always single. A white
Jeep with suitcases, no sign of children. No car seat or toys, or bumper
stickers about honor students. The family at the drive-through
had gotten out of a van. Could they all had fit in
there? She tried to think how many seats. A big family. She hit the gas,
caught the slow turning of Grampa’s head at the
noise. Maybe his faded eyes widened as her bumper caught the running child,
almost safe, his fingers reaching for the young woman’s lowered hand. The child was too small for her
to see below the nose of the Jeep. Just the brief gleam of his hair. Then the
sickening crunch of bones, the three-corner tilt as the front wheel went up
and over. Like the thud and snap when she’d hit a squirrel or gone over
someone else’s unavoidable roadkill. Then the body on the pavement,
the long eyelashes on the cheek, perfect in death. She had seen Tony’s face at the
window. Just for a moment, the white round of his face, a bag pulled tight
with a string. Then he turned away. What made him wait until she was
backing out of the driveway? She had said goodbye to him in the bedroom. As
usual, he was rucked up in the sheets, only a
corner of his face showing between comforter and pillow. Tony was awake, she
said goodbye, he said to drive careful and call. She carried her own
suitcases out to the garage. It wasn’t even the apparition of
his face, illuminated by the streetlight as he stood close to the glass, but
the way that he turned his face and body back to the darkness as her eyes met
his. The habit of marriage had become
merely habit, clinging because the alternative was black and threatening. Who
was at fault? She couldn’t see where she had let down in anything, any caring.
In fact, she had become less and less demanding, her self fading, not doing
things and truly not missing them, wanting him to be comfortable and secure
and happy. As an agent, she could pass as a
housewife. She stayed home. The radio played. She went to the store in the
afternoon to get fresh vegetables for dinner. Surely she had done something,
to make him look and turn away. Somehow she had slipped. The sun burned directly in front
of her, like a lighthouse her small craft was intent on meeting. Anna saw his
face. She saw the child’s head. The child had blue eyes, not brown like Tony’s.
The wide innocent acceptance of the bumper, the pain, the unconscious thwack
against the pavement, already gone. Her eyes burned. Anna pulled off
at a rest stop, braking hard once she was out of the flow of traffic, the
tires shimmying a bit on the frost-heaved asphalt. She pulled into a spot under a
tree, shifted to park. She flexed her hands, aching from holding the steering
wheel, and the knucklebones cracked and settled. Anna got out. She had to use the
restroom. First, she walked around the front of the car, already expecting
the heart-stopping moment when something lifted gently in the heat coming off
the radiator. Her hand came up, touched her
lips; she thought how the unconscious movement was mimicked over and over
again in fiction and film, but it was absolutely true. She took a step, looked instead
of glancing, and saw that the movement was from the wings of a butterfly. Maybe it was still alive, just
caught. Anna bent closer. It was one of the big butterflies, yellow striped
with black. The wings fanned with the heat, and the ticking of the cooling
engine was insect-like, a call or signal. She saw that it was dead. The
wings rose and fell, ragged with impact or the abrasion of the wind. Another sign loomed overhead,
passed. She went by exit after exit, the road names and numbers meaningless,
only the steadily decreasing exit numbers that told how many miles to the
other end of the state. Each exit was preceded by
official blue signs with the logos of restaurants, gas stations and motels. She
had planned to stop for the night, by mid-state at the latest. Anna counted the miles and the hours. Maybe
six hours ahead of her, if she didn’t pull off to eat. Her stomach was still
full with the heat of the day, expanding. She felt the road hum. She
watched the gauges, the oil, the temperature. The
radio station bickered with another, country with classical, and she pushed
it off. It would be early morning. She
imagined Scott and Jae coming to the door, their
faces moonlike with sleep. Frightened at the knock, they would peek out
around the curtains, debating this stranger at the door. She wasn’t expected.
People stopped and called, people kept schedules, didn’t turn into the drive
with a sweep of headlights like a police cruiser arriving with bad news. She should stop. Why not stop? But
the light pulled her forward, the sun that had glared in her face all
afternoon now sunk below the horizon, and the banded
clouds fading from orange to rose to purple. She felt the dark rushing up
behind her with the earth’s rotation; she fled toward the last light. A major highway intersected here.
Restaurants glowed in parallel strips. Yellow and red and orange, sunset
colors, also the colors that psychologists said made people want to eat. The
windows of the restaurants were yellow, and inside their frames, people sat
at tables and talked, drank, ate. Anna felt a moment of
wistfulness. It would be good to stop. To cradle a warm cup of coffee between
her hands. The cup would be round and heavy, white stoneware, and when she
turned it over the bottom would be marked with the outline of a buffalo. Then she recognized how easily
this came, this suspect emotion, a gesture. A false sense of home. The white moment of a face at
the window. Anna looked at Tony. She saw his face, but there was no
recognition, no emotion. It was a face like that of a woman being left
behind, passive, empty. A waiting face. The child wore plaid shorts and
some kind of pastel top, knotted at the waist. It might have been pink but
the Kodachrome had faded. Her hair was white, cut short
like a boy’s because it was easier to take care of, under the circumstances. Her
face was white with sickness. She remembered having blonde
curls. Her mother has told her that she liked red shoes. But in this picture,
the one that has come floating up, she was standing alone in a summer yard,
cut off at the knees. Anna tried to place the year. The
spruce tree over her right shoulder was dying, its branches turned to brown. She
was going back into the hospital. It might have been 1962, or 1963. She was holding the new stuffed
bear that had been given to her by an aunt. Something to be of comfort in the
stark bare hospital room. The plush body was clenched between her thin arm
and her bony torso, the bear’s eyes cheerfully askew. She was looking straight into
the camera. It was the kind of picture a parent takes, half in fear. If the
child dies, at least there will be this last photograph. Mom or Dad pressing
the button, angry with guilt and with the admission of that possibility, as
though taking the picture could doom everything. Something about her was
reckless, now, driving on into the darkness. The world shrank to the white
hood of the Jeep and the twin cones of light reaching ahead but never gaining
any ground. Anything might be waiting, beyond the gape of those lights. The highway was empty, a
two-lane now, funneling her toward the small town and the red brick college
and Scott and Jae, startled awake. Anna watched the road, watching
for eyes. The berms flashed with beer cans and
broken glass. Animals show pairs of reflections, two eyes, although she
remembered maimed cats and a hound born with one eye. She didn’t trust her vision. Everything
glittered. Even the road surface scintillated. How could you know? A few weeks ago, the paper had
printed that story about the man on the hilltop. Why he was out walking along
the highway at that late hour, no one could say. He was struck by a car at the
very crest of the hill. The first driver surely knew it
was a man, but drove on. Maybe the next two or three realized, but panicked
at the thought they might be blamed for his death. They kept going. After a
while, his body became like a deer’s, the intestines dragged pink along the
asphalt, the hide rolled blackly into a ball, the limbs shattered. He was a carcass, something red
and bone-white, smeared across the pavement in the sudden glare of the lights
as drivers hit the gas for that weightless moment as they topped the sharp
hill. Who could have seen the denim
jacket, in the dark? It was a body, the lump of a body, and streaked blood,
the white of bone without species or identity. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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GC&SU is a member of |
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