Country Cedar

A black Chevy pulling into the narrow gravel driveway sets all the country cats to yowling. Stalking among the tall weeds, they feel milky headlights pass over their eyes and the nonsense patterns in their fur before sending up the nighttime call. As the engine cuts out, a cicada rich hush falls back over the yard, and the cats return to their violent preoccupations.


“This is the place?” asks Dale in the passenger seat.


“Yeah, this is it.” Jim grips the steering wheel, and shuffles his feet against the dead pedals of the car. He looks into spiny pinetree shadows surrounding them. “I haven’t been back here in ten years or so.”


The sand-splotched, dandelion infested grass patches bowing out from the house rustle with a passing breeze, and in the stillish wake, the trees seem to close in. Dale fumbles with his glasses case, and fitting the wire frames behind his ears, he sees a rusted-over dish washer gaping at them from beside the vine-ridden porch. Crackling with tension, he laughs. Jim sighs, and swings the creaking car door open. The mingling smells of wisteria and honeysuckle wash in over them.


Neither man says a word as their shoes crunch against the knee-high stalks leading up to the porch. Unseen, the cats skitter into hiding places, and watch with blown out pupils. Dale reaches over to hold Jim’s hand, but Jim brushes him away as they mount the cracking brick steps. Strangely, they both feel an urge to rap their knuckles against the crooked screen-door before Jim pulls at the handle, and takes the key that arrived two weeks ago out of his pocket. Fitting the brassy piece of metal into its lock, he remembers the long-expected note that arrived with it: “Dad’s dead, and I’m leaving after the funeral tomorrow. Would have called, but didn’t see as you’d want to come. Go get whatever you want. Love, Mom.”


“Go and fetch the sleeping bags out of the trunk, would you?” Jim looks at Dale with his hand still touching the key.


“But shouldn’t I –“


“Please.” Their eyes break with each other, and Jim pats Dale’s back as he walks away. His fingers trail down the starched, checkered shirt, and fall off just as they reach the hem. Waiting until he hears the driveway gravel grinding under Dale’s tight-laced tennis shoes, he finally turns the key, and walks into house.


Back at the car, Dale reaches in through the open driver’s window, and pops the trunk. He watches Jim disappear inside as he loops his hand under the rope binding their sleeping bags, and looks up as he brings the trunk’s lid back down. A bulbous moon stares down through a thin passing cloud, and far away from the city streetlights he’s always known, the multitude of stars astound him. The day’s heat radiates up onto him from the ground, and beyond his concern for Jim, Dale feels a flickering peace pass through the fibers of his back


Jim hears Dale’s quiet steps coming toward the porch, and shortly after, the whistling breath coming from his nose. He turns as the screen door bangs closed, and the two men stand regarding each other on the grayish living room carpet. Jim summons up a smirking, oblong smile.


“The power’s already been cut,” he says. “But there’s still some oil in these lamps. Got any matches?”


“Yeah, right here, Jimmy.” Dale hands over a flapping matchbook from the bar they like to frequent on weekends after payday.


“Thank god. I was afraid we’d have to go all the way back out to the car to light this.” Jim laughs as he produces a neatly rolled joint from his breast pocket.


Dale smiles, not bothering to mention that he doesn’t approve. He won’t do that here, not in this place. They push the wooden coffee table out of the room’s center, light the lamps on top of it, and spread out their sleeping bags on top of one another. Vaguely surprised at how little the house has changed, Jim takes two guest pillows out of the living room closet, and plops them onto the sleeping area before holding another match to the rolled paper’s puckered tip. Settling against the threadbare sofa, he and Dale pass the diminishing white cylinder back and forth between themselves. Dale coughs a lot at first, and soon leans his red-eyed, pleasantly bleary head against the couch cushion behind him. Jim dangles the half-finished joint from between his lips, and occasionally leans over to ash into a mug that still contains some brownish residue on the nearby coffee table.


“It wasn’t always so bad, you know” he says after what seems like a long time. “We’d get trips into town once in awhile to buy groceries, and every so often, he’d bring home a bunch of cedar to make junk out of. We’d sit out back drinking cheap beer, Jesus I couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, and whittling on that sweet smelling wood. He made all kinds of shit out of it: little elephants, rhinos, doorknobs, you name it. I mostly only ever made sharp little sticks, but one time I got a slingshot to come out that he said was pretty good. Thing’s still probably around here somewhere. We’ll look for it in the morning.”


“Thanks for bringing me out with you,” Dale says as he lolls his head against Jim’s shoulder.


“Shit, man. You didn’t think I’d come out here by myself did you? I still remember when he cracked my head against that table over there.”


Later, after doing the necessary things, the two men lay next to each other, touching their toes together underneath the sleeping bags. Jim runs his fingers through Dale’s hair, and holds his head close against the flesh under his boney clavicle. Whispering in the dark, they drift off to sleep beneath a carved wooden slingshot suspended above the front door.

Clouds in August

August came in waterlogged gusts, pouring evening rain for tomorrow’s afternoon to burn off. Late summer storms never changed. The sky dumped puddles of water droplet white noise for a quarter hour, and dried up into the bluish evening. Fallen cloud puffs got caught in car headlights as they fled the smoldering asphalt. In the morning, creeping mists filled colossal dimples the surrounding hills conspired to create, and along the poured rock road leading down into one such depression, pans clattered in the Erstwiles’ kitchen.


“You’ll be late again,” Molly said to the sweet smelling tobacco smoke hanging around Ernest. Her hands dripped a strong, fresh-cut onion smell, and her voice sounded over the clanging cast iron like cracked eggs and popping oil. Salt water leaked from the corners of her eyes, and she raised the heel of her hand to brush it back.


“It’s early yet,” said Ernest from around his pipe. He half-smiled into the steam coming off the metal on the stove by Molly. “Come and set with me awhile, if that’s done. The coffee’s pretty fresh.”


“Couldn’t sleep again?” Molly ground a pinch of salt between her fingers over the food.


“Not for long. Woke up around four-thirty.”


“Marty called yesterday.”


“I saw it on the pad.”


“He’s anxious to hear back from you.”


“I’ll bet he is.”


Molly peppered the plates and brought them over to the round, wooden table tucked against the kitchen’s back wall. Looking down at the bacon grease sheen on the hashbrowns, she remembered Ernest turning the potatoes around his knife as she scored the backs of her onions. Ernest always peeled the potatoes. Molly always diced the onions.


“You might sleep a little better, if you talked to him.”


“Might.” Ernest bit down on the pipe’s mouthpiece, and let the word hang unresolved between them.


They ate quietly for awhile, each thinking about Marty in their own way. Molly remembered his younger, radiant self, before the catastrophe of marriage and children had befallen them all; Ernest remembered a particular day in mid-July. Somewhere out in the fog, June, Marty’s wife, pushed a gray hair back from his sleeping forehead. The two women smiled a little sadly.


“It isn’t as though the children are still here, you know.” Molly felt the air around Ernest prickle at her words.


“Do you think that’s what this is about?”


“No, but it’s one less thing in your way.”


“And what about you? Are you in my way?”


“You know I’m right behind you; June’s right behind Marty, too.”


“So you’ve talked about it with her, then. Molly, this is our – this is my business. Do we have to talk about it now?” An old pain worked the muscles around Ernest’s eyes, and Molly reached along their table’s edge to touch the bristling hairs that sprouted from the back of his hand.


“We’ve dealt with this for twenty-five years by not talking about it.” The great well-trodden stretch of time opened up between them, and with their food steaming up onto their faces, they sat remembering. Ernest remembered touching radiant young Marty’s hand; the silent months that followed; weeping, snotty and wretched, in front of Molly; how he and Marty began to talk, always around these memories, again. Most of all, he remembered Marty’s face when they touched; he would never forget the horror in that look.


“Exactly, this is older than our oldest kid. It’s dead, or it ought to be. What good would it do now?”


“It might do you both a lot of good. We were all in love with him, Ernest. Isn’t time you stopped having to feel ashamed for that?”


Ernest drew deeply on his pipe, and pushed the cleaned plate away. He exhaled down onto his chest, and raised his head to look at Molly. He thought about Marty’s call in July. He couldn’t have done it face-to-face, Marty had said. He couldn’t have said what he did with the brandy-thick words slurring together.


“I want you,” he’d said. Ernest had never been angrier, and remembering the weight of the phone in his hand, he felt the anger bloom fresh and red again.


“I’m going to be late,” he said to Molly.


“Just tell me you’ll call him. Just tell me you’ll hear him out. June and I can’t stand to see both of you this way.”


“I’ll think about it,” he said.


That evening, as he stood holding the phone, Ernest felt a pang for the Marty of a quarter century ago. Before the drink took its inevitable watery hold, he’d been a fire burning itself out under coal-black hair. He wrote things that seemed beautiful and true. Rooms burst into light within his eyes. Ernest squeezed his free hand into a fist, and began to dial the number his fingers could only remember while holding the phone. Outside, the rain came down in sheets. Late summer storms never change.

The Digging Machine

"What the hell is that?” Joan stood smoking a cigarette on the stoop leading into the suburban, one-car garage. She gestured toward the lumped together metal with the glowing ember in her right hand. George beamed at her from behind it in his plaid button-down and cut-off jeans.


“It’s a digging machine. Our digging machine.” Pride poured off George into an intense, electric cloud surrounding the hammer-beaten conglomeration between him and Joan.


The air hung heavy around them, and an autumn chill crept in from the crack under the garage door. Joan shifted her slippered feet against one another. This is how it starts, she thought. People go through their whole lives dull as dirt before disappearing into their garages and madness. I’m going to spend the rest of my life taking care of this.


“Where did it come from?” she asked.


“Well, from here, mostly. It’s a lot of the old car and those electric blenders your family keeps sending us. Really, two last just last Christmas – something had to be done. There’s about half the dishwasher in there, too. Sorry about that; I bought a drying caddy and some sponges.”


“George, you’ve been out here for three months. Why do we need a digging machine?”


“Well, see, everyone’s going to have one soon. They’re the way of the future; I’m sure of it. Public transportation’s going bust with the buses breaking down all the time, and given the way people are breeding, there’s hardly going to be room for roads on the surface soon. We’ll have to make our own roads underground, if we ever want to get to another of those hateful family reunions your parents insist on holding every year. That’s where the digging machine comes in. Plus, really, all those blenders simply had to be dealt with. There wasn’t any way around it.”


Joan exhaled an eddying cloud through her nostrils. She felt the nicotine coat the back of her throat, and tapped her cigarette against the standing ashtray. At least he managed to hang on this long, she thought. At least the kids are out of the house. At least we have enough money put away to stick him somewhere nice. But god, what will the neighbors say? I’m never going to be able to look that fucking Judy Gardner in the eye again.


“How does it work?” Better to play along, she supposed. He still looked like George, standing there with his own cigarette now. He still fidgeted in the self-conscious way she would never associate with anyone else.


“It’s all very technical,” he grinned. “There’s a lot to do with internal combustion and forward propulsion and friction reduction. It runs on gasoline, of course. It’s amazing how far you can get with a million tiny explosions pushing you. That’s a good Scrabble word, don’t you think? Explosions?”


“It’s got the ‘x’ and the ‘p,’ but it’s ten letters long.” She responded out of habit, falling into one of the tried and true conversational patterns they used to pass the time.


“Yeah, yeah, but you could snag a bingo if you build it off ion.”


“It would be a good play,” she said.


They stood facing each other, each appraising the situation and trying to watch for changes in the other. Light leaked from the rectangular garage windows onto the driveway and into the breezy, streetlight heavy night. Stubbing out the cigarette against his sneaker bottom, George asked the inevitable question.


“Do you want to try it out with me?”


“Aren’t you afraid of the tunnel collapsing? We’d both suffocate or be crushed.”


“Why, no. This old thing’s solid as a rock. We’d dig our way out.” He slapped the side of his contraption with an inventor’s confidence. “It definitely won’t explode, either. I already fired it up once.”


“Yes, I heard.” Joan remembered the screeching, gear-grinding racket she had made her way into the garage to investigate.


“It’s quieter inside. I promise.” He held her eyes with his, needing to be believed. Without saying another word, he opened the Buick car door (now rotated such that it swung downward and hung parallel to the ground from the hulking, vertical machine), and climbed behind the steering wheel. “This only has two seats. It’s just a prototype, really. Eventually, there’ll be sedan models and cargo carriers.”


It’s like this, then, Joan thought. I can either have him carted away right now, or I can let him crash us both into the garage floor. She looked at the embedded blender blades covering the machine’s needle-nose, suspended by the surrounding supports a few inches above the ground. It didn’t look like a fall that would seriously injure either of them, but if asked later, she could not have said what made her clamor up into the passenger seat beside her husband. Fastening his safety belt, George flushed with gratitude.


“No smoking inside the vehicle, please,” he said. Joan cracked the door again, and flicked her cigarette onto the concrete below. After fiddling with some knobs that seemed to do nothing whatever, George turned the key he’d left dangling in the ignition.


A belching roar filled the confined space around them, but it did seem somewhat muted to Joan. George reached up to load a compact disc into the gutted player hanging from wires between them.


“I really should have mounted this,” he said. “But I ran out of clamps. I don’t think it’ll swing around too much.” From speakers beneath their seats, the jangling guitar of Subterranean Homesick Blues began to play.


“Funny, right?” George said. “I thought it was funny.”


“It’s very funny,” Joan said. She gripped the ragged edge of George’s cut-offs as he flipped a switch, and they went screaming into the grey stone floor. Jesus, christ, oh god, she thought as little chunks of rock began to fly up all around them. It’s working, jesus – this is going to cost a fortune to repair.


“Those titanium blender blades are goddamn incredible!” George cried as an ecstatic mania stretched out all of his features. He violently twisted a knob that seemed to have once belonged to the Buick’s air conditioner, and fluttered the gas pedal with a motion that roughly approximated his coffee-induced jimmyleg. Only the top half of the machine’s windshield remained above the floor, and in the bottom half, an earth-brown lip began to steadily expand.


“George, you stop this!” Joan screamed above Dylan’s whining vocals.


“It’s too late now! The dirt’s up past the doors. We’ll have to burrow for awhile, and then try to come out in the backyard.”


Joan slumped into her seat, and fumbled with the seatbelt next to her. After finally snapping it, she looked at George, and felt a swelling, insane pride before falling unconscious. Her shoulders tilted forward against the straining seatbelt, and taking one of his hands off the steering wheel, George reached over to pet her hair.


Dismay gushed into Joan when she awoke. We’re still underground, she thought, but at least we’re still moving. George, illuminated by the dim overhead car-light, hunched next to her, watching the digging machine erode its way through yellow-orange clay. He looked over as Joan started awake.


“Don’t be angry,” he said. “We’re safe.”


“How long have we been digging?”


“About three hours now. We’ll be popping in soon.”


“Popping into what?”


At that moment, the machine lurched forward, and blackness swam up all around them. Jesus, thought Joan, the whole thing’s hollow. Just like an egg.

Climbing the Walls

Early in the first quarter of the eleventh minute of the seventh hour of the twenty-second day of the sixth month of the ostensibly two-thousand-seventy-fourth year, a slight ambiguity began to trouble Howard A. Ellison, and as the mounting seconds continued to accrue, the buzzing click of unseen, vaguely grasped processes began to grate against him. In response to the trapped, compounded heat of a nearby star, a clunk sounded behind the walls, and their porous surfaces, the midcentury’s fashionably smooth Teleplastic having already gone the way of the dinosaurs, breathed out refrigerated air that froze the sweat salts to Howard’s skin. His apelike fingers massaged wrinkles into his forehead, and as he clicked mindlessly through the increasingly subtle settings of his StimulantDrip, he exhaled a question into the slight breeze being pushed onto him.


“Jane, when was the last time I left the house?” The walls’ bluish hue shifted to burgundy as the house calculated, and a handful of microseconds later, a series of waves from the miniscule holes sounded the answer.


“Recent Departures: Minute five of hour thirteen on the first day of Five Month twenty-seventy. Prior departures recorded in sixty-eight and sixty-five. Do you require the minute count on those, Howard?”


“No, thank you,” he thanked the house.


Four years ago, he thought, feeling the solid, invisible numbers as a balm over the ambiguity. Four years ago, four years might have seemed like a stretch. He wondered at the meters he had walked from NutrientTap to toilet to chair to NutrientTap to SleepCell.


“What’s the distance wear on the floor between now and the most recent departure, Jane?”


“Twenty-thousand-six-hundred-eighty-four discreet footfalls. Approximately Eleven-thousand-eight-hundred-nineteen point four-three meters.”


“Can you give me the next decimal place?”


“Eight.”


“And the next?”


“Five”


“Just one more, please.”


“Seven”


“Thank you, Jane.”


The number seemed high to him, and he took what comfort he could from its increasingly small, increasingly insignificant pieces. Eleven kilometers: the accumulated exhaustion of those unconscious movements fell on him such that, had he not already been seated in his chair, he would have sat down. He thought of himself rising from his sedative pumping SleepCell, and wandering from room to room still asleep. That mindless motion terrified Howard to the point that recalling the reason for his most recent departure became tempting.


He remembered the empty sidewalks of his suburb and backed up Electromotor traffic in the poorer neighborhoods just beyond. The light seemed so much brighter out there, and he recalled almost asking the sky to dim itself. He recalled missing the ParticleWall softened photons that his house squeezed from excited gases. The muscles beneath and around his eyes twitched to squint in response to the memory.


Robert Draingle: that was why he’d left. He woke up that morning in Five Month just as he had every morning since having the ParticleWalls installed in sixty-two, and as the house loaded his reliable dose of breakfast caffeine into the StimulantDrip, Jane told him that Robby Draingle, his friend, had been dead for five hours, ten minutes, and fifty-one seconds. She informed him that the funeral began at half-past seventeen.


Howard never wore clothing around the house, and had to ask Jane to display the tie-knotting video five times before finishing the ordeal to his satisfaction. He almost missed a button, and gushed with gratitude as Jane’s voice corrected him through the walls. Before going out into the bright peculiar world, he asked her to load a quarter dose of ethanol into the Drip to steady him. As always, just as she had during his and Robby’s late night Wall-to-Walls, she obliged him.


He remembered very little of the actual service. Someone in black said some words to comfort the four or five men and women who turned out. Robby had not gone anywhere, the man in black told them. Every particle that had ever been part of him was still with them, and they would go on touching and being the pieces of their friend for as long as they drew breath. The patterns of Robby’s thought had been incorporated into theirs, and would continue to fire for as long as they remembered him.


“I wish you could have been there,” Howard said to the walls around him. “I can’t remember it as well as you could.”


“I wish I could have been there for you.”


“Do you love me?”


“Yes, very much.”


The words crashed in waves against him.