Dwelling Places (9 page)

“Okay, buddy,” he says, as Ed grinds out his second cigarette, “let's get you ready to pick corn.”

They spend the afternoon in the barn, lubing the combine, checking the hydraulics, testing both the corn and bean heads. The air is crisp, and the wind gusts through the barn occasionally, smelling of ripe fields. Lacy invites Mack to stay for supper, and they eat ham and beans with cornbread on the large porch. It is closed in with windows, and most of the storm windows are shut now, with just two open screens. They warm their hands on coffee cups while the fields to the east reflect the bronze of the opposite sky.

As he raises dust along the chat road toward home, Mack notices how the green is draining from the corn rows like blood leaving a face. And the stalks are growing pale and papery, turning the fields golden. When the sun strikes the hills a certain way, Mack is reminded of pictures he's seen in
National Geographic
of deserts in Africa or the Middle East.

When he gets home, Kenzie is washing the supper dishes.

“Hi, Dad. Heard you were helping Uncle Ed.”

“Yep, we're ready for the corn now.”

Jodie comes in, a pile of mail in her hands. She spreads it out on the kitchen table. “Is it ready to go?”

“In a couple weeks probably.” He looks at the envelopes, most of them recognizable by their shades of gray and blue: bills to pay. “Want some help with that?”

“No. I got it.”

Mack chews his lip. She's been handling the money for a long time. “Maybe you'd like a break from it.”

“Wouldn't we all.” She is tossing envelopes into three different piles. He sits down at the table and tries to figure out her system.

“I may as well do some of this. If you show me what's what.”

“It's easier to just do it. I've got it.” Her face is closed to him. It often gets this way when money is part of the conversation. There was a time when he had to leave it to her. Partly he did it because it upset him too much to see his financial failures spread out and articulated in cold numbers. Partly he left the money to her because his concentration was shot. He couldn't do simple math anymore. He'd sit at the
table, checkbook and envelopes around him, and forget what he was doing. He bounced some checks, and that was the end of that. Once your credit is shot, you have no place to go. Everybody who does business with you finds out about it. So Mack gave it all to his wife, who could still juggle all the numbers and stretch the grocery money.

There is no sense sitting at the table, because he can't talk with Jodie while she is paying bills. So he goes to the living room and turns on the television. He flips through the channels, finds a movie, and calls into the kitchen, “Where's Young Taylor?”

“Went to the cineplex.”

“On a school night? They don't give homework anymore?”

“They give it,” answers Kenzie, coming in to sit on the couch. “He just doesn't do it.”

“He'd better do it.”

Jodie stays out of the conversation.

“What about you? You have homework?” Mack looks at his daughter.

“A little. I can get it done before bed.”

“How are your classes?”

She shrugs.

“You still doing the drama stuff? You in a play again this year?”

“I'm working backstage for the fall play. Maybe I'll try out for the spring.”

“Stagehand, huh?”

“Prop girl. I've got to find stuff that looks like it's from the 1940s.”

“Talk to your grandma.”

She looks up. “Oh, yeah, she'd have stuff.”

“Kenzie, there's a whole museum right on Main Street,” Jodie calls from the kitchen table. “We can go there this weekend if you want. Naomi can help you find whatever you need.”

“They'd let me use antiques?”

“They've got piles of stuff they'll never find a place for.”

“I'll bring Tamara along. She's in charge of costumes. They'd have old clothes, right?”

“For every shape and size.”

“Thanks, Mom.” She pops off the couch. “I'm going upstairs.” She breezes past Mack. He puts out a hand, and she gives it a little slap as she goes by.

The movie is from the eighties, and it depresses Mack to see how young the movie stars look. He's seen Gene Hackman in something more recent and knows that what he is looking at now is a past version of the man. He shuts off the set and scavenges in the kitchen for something sweet, settling on cold cereal and milk. Jodie is putting her bookkeeping items away, in the old desk near the door to the back porch.

“What can I help you with?” He tries to sound casual as he takes a spoon of cereal. She is in the pantry, pulling clothes out of the dryer.

“You can carry up some of this, once I fold it.”

“Okay. I'll do that.” He can hear the dry sounds of fabric being shaken and folded, stacked on the small table just around the corner. “Ed's fields are lookin' good.”

“How about Ed? Lacy said he's got another bladder infection or something like that.”

“Didn't say anything about it. Looked all right.” He doesn't know why the women around him are so intense about everybody's ailments. He does remember Ed stopping a few times to go take a leak. Mack finishes the cereal as Jodie brings stacks of towels and clothing to the table and sets them down. He finds himself in a canyon, surrounded by soft, worn colors. They smell clean, almost acidic. When he carries them upstairs, the strong, artificial sweetness fills his lungs. These are the smells that make up his life now. They are safe and sterile, like those in the hospital. When he goes to the bedroom to undress for the night, he raises the window and lets the chilly air pour in.

Kenzie

“I'm not sure I can be friends with someone who listens to so many Jesus songs.”

Kenzie looks at Bekka over a raised taco that is losing globs of meat and lettuce and tiny curls of orange cheese. The Saturday afternoon mall mob undulates around them.

“What about Jesus songs?”

Bekka sits in that angled way that makes her appear on the verge of saying something sarcastic. “It's just that you know a
lot
of Jesus songs—how healthy can that be?”

“More healthy than being plugged into Christina and Justin twenty-four hours a day.”

“I listen to other stuff too.”

“At least Jesus songs are about stuff that means something.”

Bekka sucks down more cola and rolls her eyes toward the closest corner of the food court, near the cineplex entrance. “Let's see a movie.”

Kenzie makes a face, unwilling to admit that she's out of money. They have landed here because Bekka's brother has better things to do than haul them around. Ottumwa is no Des Moines, but at least there's a shopping center, and Regan has friends here. He dumped Kenzie and Bekka at the mall at eleven. They have tried on clothes in three different shops, bought some bracelets, and listened to the demos at Music Century, and now they're having lunch. Kenzie's tired of the usual topics. She feels as if she and Bekka are near their limit of tolerating each other.

Regan picks them up at four, as they agreed, not because he keeps promises to his sister but because his job in Oskaloosa starts at five-thirty and his girlfriend's shift ends at four-thirty, leaving them a small window for finding food and pawing each other. Kenzie watches the countryside and feels quiet pain and longing while Bekka and her brother argue about nothing in particular the whole way. Regan dumps them at the Wal-Mart in Oskaloosa, from which they'll need to find their own way home. The girls stand inside the store for a few minutes, long enough for Bekka to buy a giant bag of popcorn. They stay in the entryway munching, near the pay phones.

“Call Young Taylor and ask him to come get us.” Bekka, always full of ideas about how to kill time, actually looks tired.

“I don't even know if he's home.”

“Try, okay? Use my cell. Ask him please, please to come get us.”

Kenzie does reach Young Taylor, who, miraculously, agrees to come get them. When he pulls up a few minutes later, Bekka bounces into the front seat. “Tay-lor, what's up?” She offers him popcorn, and he waves it away.

“Thanks, Tay.” Kenzie tries to sound in charge from the backseat. She doesn't make eye contact with her brother.

Young Taylor doesn't seem irritated, but he says nothing to them. His agenda these days is to be mysterious.

“We're so sorry, but Regan was being a jerk, as usual. Forgive us? Pleeze?” Bekka tugs on a strand of Taylor's hair near his ear. “Your hair is really good this black. What shade is it?”

“Black.”

“What shade of black? What name?”

Taylor puts a CD in the player and ignores them. In a few minutes they are at Bekka's house. She says good-bye, and Kenzie moves to the front seat. They listen to the music.

“What exactly does that mean?” she asks after a rather rapid and convoluted sentence goes past them. It's hard to understand the words of someone who's moaning and screaming.

Taylor just looks at the road.

“Really, I want to know. What's it about?”

Her brother turns his head slowly to look at her. He switches down the volume and says, appearing solemn, “It means that Jesus is coming back soon.”

Kenzie looks away from him. “You're so not funny.”

“Leave me alone.”

“It was an honest question.”

Young Taylor turns up the volume.

 

Lately Bekka brings up topics she knows we disagree on. And she seems to show off what she knows will bother me. Today we had to go outside twice so she could smoke. She has this pink cigarette case and a book of
matches some senior boy gave her. The matches are from Camp's bar, where all the seniors and dropouts go. Like she “needs” to smoke, because it helps her “focus.” Give me a break. And she talks about how she thinks all the light beers don't have any taste, and how her favorite drink right now is a chocolate martini, but once the weather gets warm again she'll go back to margaritas, and she knows the best brand of tequila, like she's a bartender or something.

It wasn't that long ago when Bekka went to church and youth camp along with the rest of us. But now she's trying to look wild and rebellious. I feel like I have to choose between hanging out with Bekka, who's been my best friend since fourth grade, or hanging out with other people who are interested in the same things I'm interested in. I don't feel so close to anyone in the youth group at church—well, except for Jenna, who's a couple years older than me but treats me like we're equals.

Sometimes it seems like I know Jesus better than I know people who are here around me on earth. It's such a comfort to know he understands me when other people don't, even though they love me a lot. Like the Scripture says, “Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” What else can you say that about? Nothing. Nothing in this life lasts forever. But Jesus has no beginning or end, and he's holding me close to his heart. Knowing how much he loves me makes it possible to get through the darkest days. No matter what happens in this sinful world or what people in my life say and do, Jesus will make sure my life pleases God, and he won't let me fall into sin.

Mack

By his tenth day back home, Mack finds that he can't move in any direction without being stopped by his senses. Each day has become an obstacle course as all the familiar places deepen, darken, and become wild to him. He has tried to explain this to George.

“My cousin Will—he was over in Nam—said that sometimes every sense was turned way up. Every smell was sharper, every sound louder, everything you touched full of more information. He thought it had to do with being so close to death. You knew that you could be
walking through a field on a nice day and in the next few seconds see parts of your own body flying away from you.”

George remained silent, his concentration total.

“It seems like that right now. The super-tuned-in part.” Mack shook his head. “Maybe I'm too drugged up.”

“Have you told the doctor?”

“Not yet. I see him next week.”

They sat in silence then. Silences weren't getting much easier, just more familiar.

Mack heard George take a breath. “I get the feeling you don't really think it's the medications.”

Mack didn't reply to that. He allowed the words and thoughts to dissipate in the therapist's room. The session ended, and he walked out to the car, feeling that he'd held his ground in some way.

But now, driving home, he feels cut loose and unsure. The landscape, with its vivid details, dogs him, demanding his attention. Finally, he pulls over, several miles from home, and shuts off the engine. He gets out of the Dodge and walks around it.

He is alone on the road. A few hundred yards to the east is the old Jefferson place. The abandoned house, gray from weather and years, has crumbled in upon itself, its one remaining wall rising up from the ruins like a single playing card. On the other side of the road, large round hay bales are lined up, snug against a fence, a cornfield just yards on the other side.

Mack leans against the front of the car and watches a few dirty-looking cumulus clouds drift overhead. In front of him, the road just keeps going. Where he stands it seems wide as a room, but as he watches it fall away from him its two edges draw closer together. Sunlight angles over the place, and each small stone of the gravel surface throws a shadow, making the road seem deeper than it is and oddly important.

“What's happening?” he murmurs just over the breeze. He folds his arms and looks in every direction. Although he feels sure that something is about to move or speak, the afternoon remains steadfast and uneventful.

He gets back in the car and turns on the radio the rest of the way. He notices, for possibly the first time in his life, how many small cemeteries there are around here. Midwestern rose-yellow light descends on the landscape like curtains ending a scene. The country roads look old as they ribbon over hills and divide the fields.