Bright Before Us (24 page)

But that time hadn't come yet; she was still at work. Somewhere after Lovelock, but before Elko, I glanced at the glimmering point of afternoon sunlight that the ring shot onto the ceiling of the car and thought, If I go back now, I can still save the situation. I could say I had stayed late at school, that I had gone to a movie by myself. I could say anything, because anything was better than this.

 

Two days later, I had stopped only to piss and gas up and rest my sore eyes while parked in parking lots. I was indifferent to food. My hands and arms had grown pink and sweat-slick from the burning air through the open windows. I had driven east on I-80 from Vallejo, moving beyond the pocked asphalt of the Bay Area, through California's mountainous edge, winding through cleared forest as the incline increased and receded. Directions were unnecessary. East was all I needed to know. I would keep going until the road ended. In Nevada, the ground beside the flattened spine of highway became an orangebrown sea, sunflowers sprouting beside the road, salamanders darting beneath my tires. In Utah, the dirt turned white. In Wyoming, the earth rose in ominous, pale green stalagmites, like the surface of a distant planet. And then, in Nebraska, the terrain morphed into quilt-squares of green, punctuated by oblong blue lakes.

The smoke began as formless wisps, escaping from the car like ghosts in fast-forward. When the smoke turned black, I pulled off the interstate. In Chappell, Nebraska, I lifted the hood beneath an abandoned station's stories-high
Texaco sign. A surprise tongue of flame licked my wrist before the fire retreated under the engine's maze. I held the burn in confusion before running to the trunk to get a gallon jug, dousing the engine and the wound, spilling water everywhere. I pulled my suitcase from the rear of the car and stared at the manic hum of the highway, heaving, my pants soaked.

The wooden pole of the Texaco sign looked rotten, like a dead tree. Beside it, bizarrely close to the gas station, was an ancient white farmhouse. I saw through the windowpanes, the glass wobbly with age, that it was empty. There was a small wooden sign, handwritten: WWII BOMBER CRASH SITE, TWO MILES, with an arrow pointing to a deserted field.

The two miles took me a half hour to walk in the May heat. The dirt path ran up and down small hills, curving through fields of dead grass. Tan gravel flitted into my shoes. Touching the blistering burn on my wrist, I thought about the car. I wondered if, when I returned, it would be in flames again. I imagined the whole thing enveloped, the white paint bubbling, alighting in weightless curls.

The crash site emerged when I turned a corner: ten PVC-pipe crosses in a semicircle, lashed together with metallic twine. Power lines droned overhead. There was a plaque: DURING A THUNDERSTORM B-24J #44-40758 CAUGHT FIRE, DESCENDED TO 500 FEET, AND BEGAN CIRCLING THE TOWN OF CHAPPELL, NEBRASKA, WHEN IT EXPLODED. ALL PERSONNEL ABOARD WERE KILLED INSTANTLY.

The flight had originated in Lincoln, three hundred miles away. But I pictured the airmen in their small-town homes, waiting weeks to be deployed, suppressing fears
of an enemy with ready guns. I imagined their legal wills being drawn in the sweaty office of the town's only notary. And then, before their trepidation could fully mature: dying here, in an innocuous field like the ones in which they had played as children.

The plaque listed the date they fell from the sky as June 7, 1944. My birthday, less thirty-eight years. I sat down on my suitcase. There was nothing else in that field, nothing else anywhere I could see—a fence in the dead grass along the highway, some hills, cows. I breathed so deeply it stung, and emptied my shoes of rocks.

I walked the two miles back, soaked with sweat. The white car sat silent and extinguished. I considered trying to start the engine, continuing on my way. But the air still possessed the caustic smell of dangerous heat. South of the abandoned station were only dirt roads; to the north, across the highway, was a small lake and the outer edges of a town: Chappell proper, I guessed. It was about a hundred yards away. I crossed the overpass beneath an enormous sky. On the shore of the moss-green lake was a brown-brick building with a mural of a cartoon family eating at a picnic table. The words LAKE CHAPPELL were painted across it in primarycolored bubble letters. The building housed bathroom stalls and a sink, like the cement structures at rest stops that, during this frenzied drive, I had learned to watch for. I held the angry burn under the tap, the sting diminishing. I washed my hands with the pink soap from the dispenser on the wall and splashed water over my neck. The stream ran cloudy as it fell into the sink.

Outside the bathrooms was a more formal memorial to the ten men—this one made of stone, surrounded by a
log-fenced parking lot. It said their names and where they had been from. Peculiar, MO, Waynesboro, MS, Cranford, NJ. I read on: I had been wrong—they weren't on their way to face the enemy in Germany or Japan. At least not yet. They were on their way to the West Coast. Maybe they weren't ever supposed to go abroad. Maybe they were going to fix tanks and hammer in rivets. Mammoth Springs, AK, Camilla, GA, Stromsburg, NE. Maybe they were going to spend the rest of the war in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco. I touched the carved stone with a grimy fingertip. Anadarko, OK, Rochester, NY, Oneonta, NY. And the last: New York, NY.

 

I examined the contents of my wallet: $467, withdrawn from our checking account. I had left Greta with nothing but the tips in her purse. No car fire I ever heard of was remedied with $467. I was stranded. I felt a curious absence of panic.

I walked back to the Texaco station, but didn't stop. I strode through the grove of elm trees that guarded the wraparound porch, right up to the steps of the grand white farmhouse. I leaned my suitcase against the screen door and walked around to the rear entrance.

I stopped, taking in the yellow tape with which someone had fashioned a wide X. CAUTION, it read. DO NOT ENTER. The tape, loose and faded, wafted in the occasional breeze, attached to the pillars of the back porch. The entire rear of the house had burned.

Behind the tape was a gaping hole in the wooden planks of the house—it looked as though the fire had exploded outward, ripping open the back wall, errant flames
snaking up to the second story. The black exterior of the house hung in clumps, like hair pulled from a scalp. Long pieces of charred lumber, the wood grain split and corroded by flame, dangled from the level above. I ducked beneath the tape and leaned against the outer border of the flame's reach, where the paint was still white. I sniffed the wood; the smell of scorch remained. I touched a blackened board, the tip of my index finger shining with a bitter smear of gray.

I stepped into the house through the open hole, my feet crunching over black silt, into what had been the kitchen. The fire hadn't extended to the front of the house, where there was a dining area and a sun-soaked room with a faceted bay window. But the smoke had turned all the interior walls the uneven yellow of a textured al fresco. Where pictures had hung were rectangular white ghosts. The floors were littered with leaves and twigs. Birds flew just beneath the ceiling, bobbing like they were pulled on strings, bouncing up the staircase to the second story.

I figured the bedrooms were up there. I climbed the creaking stairs slowly, carefully. I knew they could crumble. I entered the room at the far end of the hall: the master bedroom. Because it sat above the kitchen—clearly the source of the blaze—it had sustained damage, including a blown-out window. The wooden window frame remained. I stepped into the room and heard the floorboards creak; I jumped back from the sound as though from a growling dog.

Beneath the singed windowsill was a scatter of papers. Before I could tell them not to, my legs moved forward on that gritty black floor and I knelt and scooped the papers
up. The knees of my pants stained instantly in the soot. I held the wordless pages in my hands, their meanings obscured by smoke damage. In the stillness of the place was the remnant of frenetic terror: someone had lived here, someone had left here—quickly, and afraid.

The back of the house faced the fields beyond the back porch—toward the ten crosses in the distance, hidden behind that small hill. I looked out the window, sure that in an instant the floor would give way, and saw hundreds of shards of glass, blown as far as a dozen feet away by the blast. The sun illuminated their random constellations, hidden among the golden weeds. The house groaned again, and I clutched the gray papers to my chest as I ran down the stairs and out the front door. I gasped for breath on the porch. My suitcase was where I had left it, next to the door—as though someone had come home, so excited to arrive he had tossed the suitcase aside, running toward the open arms he had missed.

I sat on the porch steps. My burned wrist screamed. I looked down: the papers in my hands had disintegrated. I was nowhere, and it was nowhere I had ever been.

I stayed. I fashioned a bed out of my own clothing in a corner of the sunlit front room, the longest distance possible from the burned-out kitchen, figuring this area was more structurally sound. The first two days, I woke each morning to walk across the overpass, the interstate assured and purposeful beneath my feet. I sat by the lake or walked around town. There was a bar, a bank, a red-brick post office,
a barbershop, a small Mexican restaurant, a mechanic, a hobby shop, a scattering of homes, a high school, and a tiny general store that sold no produce. I guessed that people had to leave town to buy fruits and vegetables, or grow their own. At the edge of Chappell, a row of enormous silos kept watch over large and mysterious machinery. Beyond the silos were fields and fields of green and yellow.

On the first Sunday, I sat in the Methodist church on Babcock Street, closing my eyes to listen to the rhythm of the speech. And then it was time to stand and sing, and I picked up the hymnal in front of me to sing five verses of a song everyone there seemed to know.
Reveal thyself before my closing eyes. Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies.
The organist finished, the congregation closed the books and dispersed onto the lawn for punch. I walked back to the farmhouse, the hymn stuck in my head—
In life and death, O Lord, abide with me.

I walked. I visited the crash site often, to sit in silence or sing songs aloud.
Fish and chips and vinegar, vinegar, vinegar.
I walked parallel to the interstate for ten miles, where not much was different, and walked back. I walked to town and from the bleachers watched the high school's baseball team defeat the nearby town's.
Shut him down,
the crowd would yell to the pitcher.
Put him back in that dugout!
The first few days, I ate at the bar: salted nuts, fried shrimp. The bathroom there was bizarre—two toilets side by side, no partition. On the wall above the sink was a novelty Halloween postcard featuring a gargantuan naked ass; on it was painted a jack-o'-lantern. I locked the door and washed my underarms and crotch in the sink. I walked to the edge of town, watched men
manipulate the strange equipment by the silos. At night, in the burned house, I would count my money and try not to think. On the fourth day I used the payphone outside the post office to call Greta. She picked up, said nothing. We listened to each other breathe a moment, and then I hung up. I walked to the bus stop and waited. No bus ever came. I walked around the neighborhoods, waving at the old women tending to their tomatoes and begonias. Some of them waved back. At the general store I purchased a notebook and a small pack of plastic pens. I took them wherever I went—always armed, ready to document something, anything. I never wrote a word. Every time I spent money, I felt my bowels quiver. The cash was going to run out. This couldn't go on forever. I could feel the desperation creeping toward me like an advancing enemy.

On the fifth day I called Greta again. I wanted to hear her voice. I let it ring and ring, the answering machine evidently turned off. Until finally, three or five or I don't know how many minutes into the call, she answered.

I looked over my shoulder at the deserted main street. A young woman stared back, before pushing her stroller onward.

I assumed,
I said.
They called you?

I closed my eyes and saw the firm contour of Greta's naked hip, the way her mouth opened as she put on lipstick. I heard her lilting laugh. I thought of her fingers, years earlier, touching the welt on my neck.

I think about you all the time,
I said. It was almost true—it was true with one degree of separation: I often thought about how hard it was to think of her.

Well,
I said.
Okay then.
And I hung up.

 

My burn peeled, oozed, and settled into a borderless hillock of scar tissue. My car grew a brown hide of dust. At night, I watched raccoons and skunks through the window—scurrying about the porch, leaving with nothing. I anticipated them coming through the hole in the back wall someday, but if they did I never knew about it. Maybe they smelled me and left. They had probably explored the house long before. Too scared to spend more money on food, I ate what I found in the burned kitchen—cans of peas with seared black labels, cans of other things without labels at all. I opened them, laboriously, with a butter knife I found in a drawer. In the pantry was a box of Saltines; the fire had fused the plastic wrapping to the crackers. Plastic utensils were melted into the counter, and a deep red stain in the floor had me spooked until I noticed the broken, scorched ketchup bottle nearby. Every time I scavenged food, I ran from the kitchen as if at any moment the ceiling would come down on top of me—as though the rest of the house were safe. I realize now the whole thing could have collapsed at any moment.