Kevin P. Keating

Antiquing

-1-

They were lost, well, maybe not quite lost, how could they be, there were only so many roads out here, impossibly long ribbons of two-lane highway that cut across fallow fields, bisecting one another at ninety degree angles every two or three square miles, a thousand nameless lines plotted with monstrous logic on a grid in the middle of this gray, treeless, March desolation. Few things attracted their attention--power lines, the rusted hulk of a burned out car, here and there an old grain silo, a crumbling barn, a dozen rotting fence posts marking either the beginning or the end of a wilderness, it was difficult to tell which. On occasion the simple white gravestones of a forlorn cemetery dotted a distant hillside, the last inhabitants of an abandoned town returned at last to the anonymity of scattered dust. Some of the stones had been toppled over by drunk and listless teenagers, the inscriptions erased by a century of wind and rain.

“I bet the coffins slide down that hill,” Ed said. His coffee had gone stale and cold miles back but he drank it anyway because it gave him something to do. “Erosion, you know. The soil gets thin, the earth crumbles away. Imagine this place after a heavy rain. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a pile of bones right there in the gulch.”

Karen studied her nails. Except when their finances became the topic of conversation she rarely listened to anything he had to say. A thousand times he wanted to reassure her that they had nothing to worry about, that they could always make the minimum payments, everything was under control, but as the sedan screeched around sudden bends and struggled over abrupt hills, Ed recalled with the mounting panic that had come to define his life that the car payment was now two months overdue. Of course this fact hadn’t deterred them from embarking on yet another pointless excursion. How much money had they spent? No, he wouldn’t think about that just yet. They were having too much fun.

“Maybe,” he said, “I’d be better off buried up there.” Self-pity came naturally to him, and over the years he’d mastered its gratifying tone of despair. It gave him such pleasure that at times he felt like a hedonist, shamelessly wallowing in his own anguish and misery. “I’d be the first new resident in a hundred years, maybe more. Gotta be cheap for a plot. Save on funeral costs.”

Karen smirked. “Ed, darling, we couldn’t get credit for a pine box.”

Her voice had an omniscient quality, it never went away, not entirely. During the long afternoons when Ed dozed in his cubicle at work and late at night when he fell fast asleep and dreamed of forbidden delights the voice came to him, shrill and acrimonious, injecting him with a near fatal dose of spite, and even now, as he drove through this barren landscape, he heard it, a coiling phantasm that rattled and hissed in the claustrophobic confines of the car. Over the years he’d built up an immunity and found that it soothed him, calmed him, lulled him into passivity, made him think of warm water, blue skies, white sand; it was so hypnotic in fact that he didn’t hear Karen suddenly shriek beside him, didn’t see her turn away from the windshield and cover her eyes. By then of course it was much too late to hit the breaks.

He felt a sudden thud against the bumper, heard the snap and crunch of bones, the wet splatter of disembowelment, saw a shock of scarlet against the endless gray expanse and the great shaggy carcass tumbling end over end along the gravel road.

Karen folded her hands on her lap, breathed in and out, contorted herself with the stillness and austerity of a Buddhist sage. Maybe the yoga classes were at last paying off. “Just keep going,” she instructed him.

“But we can’t do that.”

“Why are you slowing down, Ed?”

Ed scratched the stubble on his chin. He hadn’t shaved since they’d left home. How long had it been now? The days were as dreary and formless as the sky. He tried to envision this place in the summer, lush and green with stalks of corn in the fields and Queen Anne’s lace on the side of the road, but he simply couldn’t do it. He suffered from a lack of imagination, that’s what Karen always told him anyway, even as he made love to her last night at the bed and breakfast. He stopped the car but wasn’t so foolish as to cut the engine.

“I’m sure we have some kind of, you know, legal obligation.”

“Lawyers, Ed? Keep driving, please.”

“There’s no need to worry. When the time comes I’ll explain everything.”

She pointed to the thing in the road. “How do you intend to explain that?”

“You don’t give me enough credit.”

Karen breathed deeply. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Ed dear, I really am, but I think you’re losing it. I think you’re fucking delusional.” She reached into her purse for her pills, huge pink tablets that he suspected were some kind of placebo. As far as he could tell they had no effect on her. “Besides, you didn’t do anything wrong. It was already dead when you hit it.”

Ed shifted in his seat. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, dead in the middle of the road. Flies buzzing all around it.”

“But…”

“Don’t make me repeat myself, Ed. You weren’t paying attention. Obviously. Now please drive away. I’m getting nauseous.”

For a moment, maybe because he couldn’t quite accept the reality of it, he let out a sigh of relief, kissed his wife’s hand out of gratitude, smelled her lotion, oversweet and cloying, yet it was like a magical balm capable of absolving his innumerable transgressions, and he put the car in drive, but before pulling away he couldn’t help but look back one last time to study the thing at the edge of a muddy ditch, carrion for the great birds of prey that hovered always in the sky, huge creatures prehistoric in their visage that swooped low over the fields and perched on rusty wires to peck madly at the vermin burrowing in their black wings, and though he couldn’t be certain, he thought he saw the thing shudder and writhe with unimaginable suffering, doomed to take its last agonizing breaths beside a pasture reeking of cow shit.

“Keep your eyes on the road,” Karen snapped.

He brooded, gazed dreamily into the distance, and after driving a mile or two he once again imagined hundreds of exhumed townspeople, thousands of them, gleefully riding coffins rank and fetid down the steep hillside into oblivion.

-2-

They trolled the empty streets of a small town, searching for a cafe, a bakery, a trendy bistro but found only the usual boarded up storefronts and bars where men in denim coveralls smoked cigarettes and checked their lottery tickets and grumbled about the weather. A canal of sludge and stagnant water circled the town and its crumbling brick warehouses like a mote. Weeds sprouted from the cracked pavement. Crumpled cans of beer and busted bottles of whiskey littered the curbs. In the uppermost branches of the oaks and elms, blue plastic bags flapped in the wind and sounded like a thousand voices laughing deep inside a well. From the lopsided porch of a clapboard frame house a horde of dirty children stared blankly back at them and pointed.

At the edge of town a diner. They decided to go in. Ed lowered his head to avoid the scorn of the other customers who chewed their buttermilk biscuits sopping with gravy and regarded them with unmistakable loathing as if to say, There is something not right about you people, you are depraved and ruinous, now leave us be.

Karen ordered the fish, using the tongs of her fork to pick with surgical precision at its bones, and somehow knew that it had been scooped up out of the noxious waters of the canal with a net kept beside the diner’s back door and fried up in a greasy skillet. She tossed her fork down with a loud clatter.

Ed leaned forward. “Honey,” he whispered.

“Goddamn tourist trap.” She snapped her fingers three times. “Waitress, would you come here for just a moment, please?”

Ed kept his eyes focused on his plate because he knew that by looking up he would be implicated in this crime, an accessory to his wife’s brutal condemnation, but the waitress was young and pretty, no more than nineteen- or twenty-years old, and he needed to inspect, to study, to fantasize about her slim physique, her disproportionately ample bust, the caked muck around her eyes, he had to supply his dwindling libido with some kind of fuel however meager, he had no choice in the matter, the human soul yearns for variety. For three days now he’d been subjected to a gauntlet of morbidly obese ladies who sighed and grunted every time they trundled their hefty rolls along the cramped aisles of antique shops or tried to wedge themselves into narrow booths at ice cream parlors, women whose necks jiggled whenever they belted out that raucous laughter of theirs and whose noses were sometimes pitted from excessive drink.

“I can’t eat this fish,” Karen informed the waitress.

The waitress’s eyes instantly glazed over with boredom. “That’s your prerogative, ma’am.”

“Prerogative? My, my, someone’s been taking night classes at the community college.”

Karen was much too proud of her education, she’d earned a master’s degree at the University of Chicago in American Studies, and whenever she could she worked this tidbit of information into the conversation, “Chicago, oh, yes, I lived there for a time, Hyde Park. Hmmmm? Yes, I did attend the University of Chicago,” still bragged about the seminar she had with Saul Bellow who, she claimed, made a pass at her at the end of the semester. Ed didn’t believe this story, not for a minute, but then Karen got tipsy on scotch at a dinner party over the holidays and confessed to yielding to the great man’s advances (“The dirty old sonofabitch stank like garlic but he screwed like a champ”), Ed stormed over to the shelves, found her copy of The Adventures of Augie March, signed in bold black letters by the author himself, and tossed it onto the fireplace. The pages crackled with a sort of lilting musical quality and gave off the heat of a Chicago blast furnace. Karen screamed, called him a book-burning, goose-stepping Nazi, but Ed quietly insisted, even while their guests looked at their watches and started to make excuses, that no one should possess that kind of talent, it wasn’t natural, it was to be perfectly frank about it freakish, abnormal, and thus doomed to extinction, but it satisfied him that the ashes of the book looked no different than the ashes of the newspaper he used earlier that evening to kindle the fire.

The waitress pointed. “No refunds, ma’am. Says so right there on the door. Sorry.”

Karen smiled. “Oh, I’m sure you are, sweetie. Well, could you please box up our food so that when we leave this filthy little establishment I can toss the box into the trashcan so your customers can see just what I thought of your ‘home cookin’?’”

“You want that in a Styrofoam box, ma’am?”

“Styrofoam would be lovely. It releases toxins, you know.”

As the waitress strode off to the kitchen, Ed followed her with his eyes, admiring how her thin cotton blouse, which was just a little too short for her tiny frame, so that crept up her back whenever she leaned over a table to pour a fresh cup of coffee, revealing the small butterfly tattooed only a few breathless centimeters from the glorious crack of her ass.

Karen, who had a sixth sense about these things, caught him staring.

“Let’s go, Ed.” She stood up.

“But the waitress hasn’t brought us our check.”

“She’s lucky I don’t talk to her manager. Come on.”

He considered tossing a few singles on the table, the spare change in his pockets; instead, he scurried obediently behind his wife and once again tried to avoid the scornful glares of the other customers who seemed relieved that the weird couple surrounded by the swirling haze of madness were at last decamping from their tranquil town.

-3-

They continued driving, still lost. Karen, who’d given up miles back on the whole adventure, thought they should keep going until they ran out of gas and were forced to walk to the next bed and breakfast where they’d at least be greeted by two aging hippies, but Ed no longer listened to what she had to say because that omniscient and needling voice had returned, a perpetual drone between his ears, the volume rising and falling, fading in and out at unexpected moments like a radio frequency, its unrelenting tone of scorn and bombast reminding him of those AM preachers, though whenever he closed his eyes the voice seemed almost to vanish and he was at long last able to indulge in his fantasies, saw the waitress from the restaurant, skinny little country girl bored out of her mind, nothing to do on a Saturday night but get drunk and fuck her good-for-nothing boyfriend, the bruises on her arms told him as much, rough fingers pressed into soft flesh, just the way she liked it, lots of dirty talk, vivid instruction, sheets sullied with sweat and stinking of cigarettes and hashish.

He opened his eyes. Off to the right another barn with a faded American flag painted across the rotting planks of wood.

“I gotta piss,” Ed announced.

He pulled over and marched across the field to the barn and stood behind the great decomposing door where he took his penis in his hand and masturbated ferociously. He moaned with pleasure and self-loathing. Something told him that the waitress probably had ugly tits. Large, with areolas like slices of baloney, asymmetrical and pink as the belly of a prize-winning pig. Such details aroused him. Razor burn on the inside of her thighs. Fingernails bitten and chewed. He imagined her bent over the table, the butterfly rocking back and forth as he thrust his hips with wild abandon, his wife watching impassively, saying between sips of coffee, “Big deal. I fucked Saul Bellow.”

He clutched himself more tightly, varied the rhythm, unwilling to give up on the project, some kind of catharsis was needed, but after a short time the voice turned into the drone of an old engine, the sputter and boom of a rusty machine barreling down the road at speeds much too dangerous, and this made it impossible for him to climax. Through the cracks in the barn he glimpsed a red pickup truck, and with a grunt of resignation he stuffed his disobedient prick back into his pants and watched the truck veer around their mud-splattered silver sedan and pull over to the shoulder.

The man who emerged from the cab didn’t look particularly menacing, he was elderly, stooped, trembling slightly with what might have been the onset of Parkinson’s, and in the mist small droplets of water formed on his forehead and trickled down the bridge of his nose. A gentleman farmer on his way home from church, a familiar hymn on his lips, a Bible opened beside him on the seat, the pages turned to Leviticus. The Jesus fish on his back bumper gave him away. So did his sober blue suit. But Ed did not move, did not to stir. Maybe because the man cradled a shotgun in his arms. This Ed took as a bad sign.

It wouldn’t be easy to hide in here, but if the man was hell bent on senseless slaughter, Ed could always scramble into the rafters and remain absolutely still until he’d finished his business with Karen and disappeared again into the gloom, but the longer Ed lingered in the barn the longer he would have to endure Karen’s taunts and insults (“You were hoping he would kill me, weren’t you, that would make you so happy”) so with his chin held high and his shoulder thrust back he emerged from the barn and, waving one hand above his head, called, “Howdy!” but the moment the word left his lips he cringed. Nobody used that word around here, wrong part of the country, probably wrong decade as well. He struggled up the muddy embankment, choking on the blue fumes spewing from the truck’s tailpipe.

At first the man said nothing, only nodded, looked into the sky as if wondering when the real rain would come or when the hand of god would stamp them all out like scuttling black bugs. When he spoke his voice was high-pitched and plaintive.

“I believe you’re the folks that ran over my dog.”

Ed stuffed his hands deep in his pockets, stared at the tips of his shoes.

The old man pointed to the bed of the truck. “You wanna take a look, see if you know him?”

Ed stepped forward, peered in. “Godalmighty,” he gasped.

The thing was still alive. It seemed impossible.

Karen rolled down her window. “Excuse me! We’re in a hurry here!”

The farmer leaned over the tailgate and stroked the dog’s head. “Ain’t right, you know, to let an animal suffer like that. Maybe you folks never had a family pet.”

“I’m allergic to cats and dogs,” Karen said. “Tell him, Ed.”

“It’s true. We never kept any animals in our house. We used to have a bird feeder but the robins and blue jays kept shitting on our cars so we poisoned them. Poisoned the rabbits, too. They kept eating our hostas. We don’t have children. My wife is barren, you see.”

Karen laughed. “Funny, Ed. Your boys don’t swim!”

The old man looked baffled, and for a moment Ed hoped he might get back in his truck and drive off. “Well, I don’t know anything about none of that,” he said. “What I come here to say is that since it was you who run down my dog I figured you should put him out of his misery. It’d be the decent thing to do.”

“Sir, my husband didn’t hit your dog. Ed, admit nothing. Isn’t there a vet around here? A quick shot in the hind leg and it’s all over. Rover will be playing fetch with Saint Peter.”

Ed gestured to the gun. “I’ve never handled one of those things. But if you show me, I’ll be the one to pull the trigger.”

“Ain’t nothin to it. Just point and squeeze. It’s already loaded. Buckshot.”

The gun felt heavier than he expected, smelled vaguely of powder and oil, the black barrel glimmering faintly in the light muted and dulled by the heavy clouds inflexible and motionless as sheets of steel. Inside the bed of the truck the dog lifted a paw toward him, its reeking innards bubbling and foaming. He couldn’t tell the breed, but guessed it was some kind of sheep dog, black, large, in need of grooming. He stepped forward, paused a moment, waiting maybe for some message imparted on the wind, but this seemed a silly thing to do, the silence was stunningly banal, though he did catch a small whimper, whether from the man, the dog or his wife he did not know. His eyes were shut tight at that point, and when he finally squeezed the trigger he counted the echoes from the blast--three, four, five--each one ricocheting off the ugly little hillocks of clay on the far horizon, a sound gradually swallowed up by the land and its dumb immensity.

The old man quietly wept, his head bowed.

Ed handed the gun back and felt compelled to say something. “I don’t believe in god, haven’t been in a church since my wedding, but I said a prayer for your dog anyway.”

The man plodded over to the cab of the truck, tossed the gun through the window, and leaned heavily against the door, his hands spread out across the rusting surface, fingers picking absently at the flakes of red paint. Then with a small grunt of discomfort he climbed inside where he sat for a time behind the wheel, staring at the road. He wiped rain from his forehead, the tears from his cheeks, and with a smile as intractable and harsh as the desolation all around turned slowly to Ed and said to him, “Don’t believe in god. Then, my friend, you will burn, you will burn.”

Had it been a dry day, the kind of day in July when the sun scorches the fields and blisters the backs and arms of the indigent workers who came each summer to pick the soybeans, Ed would have felt the sharp sting of gravel against his face as the man sped away, but it was March and the road was pliant and the tires of the truck didn’t spin with the ferocity the old man would have liked and so Ed felt only the soft splatter of mud against the cuffs of his pants, and he watched the truck rise and fall on the ribbons of road like a boat carried high and low by the swells of a sea, and he kept watching for what must have been miles and miles because there were no other roads out there in that mindless waste, nowhere to turn off, and even though his wife urged him to get back in the car because they were in a hurry, the antique shops closed early today, he stood very still and breathed very quietly and waited to see if the old man would pull over to bury his dog high atop one of the distant hills.