The Kunkys didn’t even notice they’d cut her arms off, drove up the hill, shedding metal, and out of sight. She stood there, amazed, rooted, seeing the grain of the wood of the barn clapboards, paint jawed away by sleet and driven sand, the unconcerned swallows darting and reappearing with insects clasped in their beaks looking like mustaches, the wind-ripped sky, the blank windows of the house, the old glass casting blue swirled reflections at her, the fountains of blood leaping from her stumped arms, even, in the first moment, hearing the wet thuds of her forearms against the barn and the bright sound of the metal striking. But she couldn’t look at the ground, wouldn’t see her hands down there, still curled as if grasping the broom.
She bellowed.
From her filled-to-straining lungs poured a great pealing shout, the defiant roar at the end of life everyone wishes to give and few manage. It lifted her parents off the bed like a spear from the springs.
Party
Conrad formed the habit of eating breakfast at the Home Away in less than a week. The food had savor, the place was cheerful, full of news and bustle. It was a relief not to hear his wife fussing over Vela. He loved his daughter, but he couldn’t stand sick people, couldn’t stand seeing her scar-laddered arms and hear her whining and panting when the physical therapist, a brown-headed woman with a baby voice and a huge rump, put her through the exercises. How easily his daughter and his wife wept. The house was damp and miserable with weeping.
He enfolded a ketchup-shot egg in a slice of toast and bit into it, mashed the other egg into his corned beef hash and asked Mrs. Rudinger for two jelly doughnuts. Dick Cude came in lugging a plastic garbage bag.
“What you got, Dick—your lunch?”
“No, it’s for your girl. Seen your truck out front. You said she couldn’t get enough of those old tapes? There’s about fifty in there and I picked up a old accordion, found it at Ivar’s, y’know, thought she might get a kick out of looking at it while she plays the tapes, y’know; even if she can only look at it, least it’s something. It’s a miracle. She’s a tough little girl. Y’know, it was criminal, hauling sheet metal in that truck without any tarp or tie-downs. I don’t see how Ed Kunky can look you in the eye. Criminal. Isn’t his boy in school with Vela? I suppose you seen a lawyer about it.” He handed the black sack to Conrad who was belching and suffering from the first doughnut.
“You hear the one about the guy got in a plane crash and everybody’s killed but him? He’s in some wild place, Alaska, I don’t know. So he stumbles around for a week, not a sign of human beings, he’s half crazy. Then he comes to a tree and there’s a rope hanging down and on the end of it is a dead nigger. Guy says, ‘praise God, civilization.’ Get it?”
“Yeah. That’s a southern joke. I heard it about a Chippewa. But it couldn’t happen. There’s no place in North America farther than twenty miles from a road. Nobody can be lost for a week. It was in National Geographic.” He ate the second doughnut, swallowed the coffee in his cup and tossed his head to get the grey curl up. He quelled the bitter rising in his throat.
“Thanks,” he said and got up, a sensation of scalding itch spreading over his torso. “I’ll give them to her tonight. Time to go to work and make a dollar.” He was out the door and Dick Cude saw how he threw the bag into the truck cab, saw from the way he was bending over and scrabbling on the floor that the tapes must have fallen out. He’d slung in the sack hard enough to burst it. Those plastic tape cases had sharp corners. He noticed Conrad still didn’t fasten his seat belt and he was smoking as he drove out of the parking lot. The way he twitched the hair off his forehead like that, he was asking for a neck injury. Dick pursed his lips.
When Conrad pulled into his driveway that evening, every window in the house shot mango-yellow light into the dusk and there were three or four cars parked out front. Oh Jesus, don’t let something else have happened, he said aloud, letting the wind catch the truck door and strain the hinges, running up the steps and into the smell of oregano and yeast, from upstairs a tumult of music and feet and voices. His wife stooped over the sink whipping cream and the counter was arranged like a buffet, the blue and white plastic plates, a fan of teaspoons, celery and carrot sticks, squares of orange longhorn and two-tone olives in geometric formation, a wooden bowl bristling with potato shoestrings.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“Don’t tell me you forgot. I must of said it a hundred times: The fifth, Vela is having a party, her friends from school are coming over for a party. They’re all upstairs now. I made strawberry shortcake. I’ll never do it again; this damn dark old kitchen, it’s like threading a needle in a coal mine. They’re gonna eat up in her room, all the chairs are up there. We can eat in the living room. I got a card table set up in there for us. There’s a couple beers for you in the icebox. What’s in the bag?”
“Something for her. Dick Cude got some tapes for her, or something. Christ I’m sick of hearing him go on about the accident. It’s like that’s all he can talk about in that drooly voice. He kept trying to edge the conversation around to Russell.”
“Russell who?”
“The nephew. Cude’s goddamn nephew that’s still out in the desert.” The music throbbed through the floor in a steady awful beat that made him clench his jaws.
“Who’s up there?”
“Audrey. Your boss’s daughter. Audrey Henry and a few other girls. I’ll bring it up unless you want to go up and tell them the food’s ready. You want to go up?”
“No, you handle it. Maybe they can turn down the bass while we eat.”
She laughed, not her normal laugh but a stagy ha-ha she had learned from television. “Oh I doubt it. It’s a party.”
Five girls sat on the edge of the bed or the wooden kitchen chairs. There was a line of soda cans on the windowsill. Audrey Henry held her tape player on her lap, her fingers tapping it lightly. Her silvery hair was cropped in a bowl cut, the back of her head shaved. She wore baggy army fatigues and a jewel-tone violet sweater that showed her midriff.
Nancy stood in the doorway smiling at the girls, speaking in her high party voice. “Audrey, that’s a cute sweater, what is it, mohair? Cashmere! Well, it’s beautiful. Anyway, the pizza and all is ready, so you gals go help yourself. And take a lot, there’s more in the oven, I got it set on low. Vela, Dick Cude sent some tapes over to you.”
Vela was propped against the expensive foam wedge pillow, a cola on her tray, the long glass straw protruding. Her complexion was a rash of pimples, her hair long and limp despite Nancy’s work with the curling iron. Her useless hands were hidden under the art quilt Nancy had sewed, a pattern of ivy leaves she saw as elegant.
“Tapes. All right, tapes, what are they? It’s heavy, there must be a hundred in here.” Audrey poured the plastic cases onto the bed. The stiff old accordion bumped out.
“God, what’s that thing!”
“It’s an accordion. What a wreck.” Kim, who had been playing piano accordion since the fifth grade but hated the instrument and longed to take guitar, picked it up. The stiffened bellows resisted and she quit after it panted a few thin, wailing notes like an asthmatic baby. “It doesn’t play. What’re the tapes? Myron Floren, who’s he? ‘Polka the Night Away,’ ‘Polka Is for Lovers’? Look at this one, look at this ugly guy.”
“Hey, play one. For kicks.”
“OK, here’s ‘Polka Maniacs.’ Put it on.”
They screamed with laughter, they killed themselves imitating dancers moving to the schlocky oompah, a beat that slugged with the verve of a pile driver.
Vela was mortified.
“Ma, I don’t want that junk. Take it out. Just throw it in the trash. And that thing too,” pointing her chin at the accordion. Audrey pressed a button on the player and the tape shot out. She dropped it in the plastic bag as if disposing of a reeking bone and slapped the booming, chanting tape in its place.
“What group is that?” said Nancy. “They sound cool.”
“Loop a troop, bazoo
ka, the scheme…,” came the hard male voices.
“Public Enemy. I love it. Mom, that’s what I want for my birthday, this tape.”
“Your father says it’s pretty loud.”
“It’s rap! It’s got to be loud.”
“Well, you gals better hit that buffet. There’s strawberry shortcake with whipped cream for dessert.”
“Can I squirt it out of the can, Mrs. Gasmann? I love that stuff.”
“I’m sorry, Audrey—it’s the kind you whip in a bowl, heavy cream.”
“I’ll pass. I hate that stuff. It’s not sweet. I’ll just eat the strawberries. You got any Tropicana?”
Nancy couldn’t understand why they all started to laugh. “Vela, did you tell your friends we’re going to Disney World in the spring?”
“Oh my god,” said Audrey. “Disney World.”
(The next year, in the darkness of early morning, Audrey flew to Boston, the first woman in her family to go to college. Below, orange-lighted towns spread across the prairie like a luminous paste, the highways traced out by long streams of headlights, workers moving down the darkness toward their jobs. The streets of cities seemed shining furrows. The sunrise broke blood-orange through sullen cloud in the east as they descended to the mass of scar tissue that was Chicago.)
Nancy and Conrad sat in the living room chairs and stared at the television, listening to the noise from upstairs.
“Who brought that jungle-bunny crap? Audrey?” He tossed back his grey curl.
“Who else? Wearing a cashmere sweater that must of cost two hundred bucks.” They stared at the television.
“There’s nothing on but the war,” said Nancy. “It’s nothing but smoke. You can’t see any guns or anything.”
“Yah. It’s the Rackis set all the oil wells on fire.”
“You want some strawberry shortcake?”
“Does a bear shit in the woods?” His pizza rinds lay on the chair arm like doughy smiles.
Trash
Old Glory and seven other towns in the county paid to send their trash to Mississippi when the state closed down the dumps and the regional landfills could hold no more. On a sun-fired March morning Whitey Kunky, working his Saturday job on the town trash truck, with red-bearded Martin H. Swan driving, heaved plastic bags and Lands’ End boxes into the ass end of the compactor, occasionally finding something good and tossing it into the cab. The week before, they’d rescued some half-full bottles of gin and bourbon from the Bunnbergers’ garbage and after scraping the coffee grounds and bacon grease off the bottles, drove around drinking it, and Martin made up a couple of blunts and they booted out. The job had a few perks.
“Old man Bunnberger must be going on the wagon,” said Martin H. Swan, combing his beard with his fingers.
“Or his wife done it when he wasn’t looking.”
But today the collection was poor, a deflated basketball that perhaps could be fixed and a cracked bike frame that couldn’t, a German toaster with burned English muffins protruding, and an old green accordion. He threw the toaster and the accordion into the cab.
At the end of the run they had to wait beside the loader for the semi that hauled it all away to Mississippi. Snakes, the driver, was a workout freak in a leather jacket. He wore a belt buckle stamped with a radiant cross, an award from the company for his three-year safe driving record. He leased the truck from a Christian trucking company, Covenant of God, that specialized in nationwide late-night transport of garbage, sludge and hazardous waste.
“The Snake is late.”
“Yeah.” Martin H. Swan chewed the nicotine gum that was supposed to ease him off cigarettes. He kept the truck running for heat against the late afternoon chill.
“He was late last week too.”
“It’s not him, it’s the guy that works with him, that fat black jigaboo. Tapper. There’s something nuts about that guy. You see the way he’s always talking to himself when Snake tells him to do something?” He spat the gum out the window and took a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket, lit it.
“Yeah. Hey, after, let’s get some beer.”
“After.”
“Too bad Mrs. Bunnberger didn’t clean out the liquor cabinet again. There he is, down making the turn.”
“It’s only him. See? He hasn’t got the other guy. Or else Tapper’s down there giving him a blow job. You’re gonna have to help him load.”
“Jesus Christ, why not you? I been picking up all day.”
“I got seniority. Anyway, it’s all automatic. All you got to do is work the levers, pick up the spill and help Snakes get the tarp on. What’s so bad about that?”
“Seniority? You can drink your fuckin beer by yourself.”
“I planned to anyway, you little shit.”
Getaway
Halfway through the job the hydraulic system jammed and it took twenty minutes to clear it out. It was a long, stinking job and Whitey slammed and shoveled and pitched the stuff that fell over the side. He swore aloud at Martin H. Swan who sat in the town truck reading his motorcycle magazine and every seven or eight minutes lifting his head to check on him. Snakes didn’t say anything but jumped around athletically, his belt buckle winking, connecting the hydraulics, snugging down the olive drab canvas tarp.
He scraped some gluey shit off his boot, looked at Whitey and said, “hey, how’d you like to make the run to Mississippi? Tapper quit on me. I got the authority to hire a helper. But we got to get on the road. I’m running late. You want to call home or pack a suitcase, I’ll give you fifteen minutes. That’s all anybody needs for anything. That’s my theory.”
(Tapper Champagne was in Oklahoma for the funeral of his sixteen-year-old brother, Li’l Duke Champagne, sent to a Youth Leadership Academy for six months to get straightened out, learn how to eat peas, do sit-ups, mop floors and shine shoes, say yes sir and stay out of trouble. One morning he didn’t get up, strangled by an asthma attack diagnosed the night before by the counselor as malingering.)
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll come. I’m ready now.” He grabbed his jacket, the toaster and the accordion from the seat next to Martin H. Swan and climbed up into the high semi cab, into the comfortable seat, saw the rack of CDs, Dwight Yoakam and Vince Gill, and the decals from every state stuck on the headliner along with sparkly crosses and religious mottoes, and he thought, I’m getting out, it’s that easy and I’m getting out. I’ll never wake up here again. He called down, “hey, Martin, I wanta do this, you know? Can you call my old man?”
“Yeah,” said Martin. He was chewing four pieces of nicotine gum.
It was a three-day run and they slept in the truck. The rig was one of the new computerized models that shut down after ten hours of operation forcing the driver to stop, though Snakes said he knew a way to bypass it but it wasn’t worth it, and the back of the oversized cab was like a little apartment with a glass-topped stove and a counter and a TV and a fold-up sink and fancy imitation-wood paneling, but Snakes got up two hours before the computer, waiting for it to tick over, he wanted to make time, and sat eating bee pollen and drinking espresso coffee. He showed Whitey how to brew the thick stuff in a little machine on the counter, told him he’d get used to the black stuff, said Tapper put four teaspoons of sugar in his, making a thick, sweet sludge. Snakes was a good guy and he liked a laugh so Whitey mugged and did imitations and even sat on the damned accordion making it groan and loosening it up enough to squeeze some roars and farts out of it. He enjoyed Snakes’s easygoing pleasantries, and on the third day, when they were coming into Mississippi, black people slouching around, Snakes said that where they were going, where the huge landfill was, was right next to some nigger houses, it shouldn’t be there but it was, their wells were filled with poison.
Whitey had never thought about being a truckdriver, it had sounded like a lousy, low-down job to him in the past, but now that he was in the truck he’d changed his mind; he was out of Old Glory and seeing the rest of the world, listening to music, cracking jokes. The t
ruck smelled good because Snakes didn’t smoke and had a pine tree air freshener hanging off the rearview. Once, the talk got serious and Snakes told Whitey about his bad divorce ten years ago and beating up his ex-wife and doing some jail time because of it and getting religion, and Whitey told about the scrap metal that flew off his father’s truck and cut off this girl’s arms and how they never knew a thing until the girl’s father came to their house and started wrestling with his father and crying and nobody could understand what he was saying until the phone rang and his mother answered it, hearing a neighbor say, you all right? I see Conrad’s truck at your place and it kind of worried me considering the situation, and his mother answering, better come over quick. And he cried when he told it and was furious at this sign of childish weakness and to get back to normal again he put down the window and pitched the accordion into a wasteland of shacks and weeds.
“Yeah,” said Snakes. “You know what I do now? I climb. I’m a rock climber whenever I get a break. You drive a truck, you get out of shape, you eat junk road food, you get a pear ass, you smoke, your wind is shot, you lose your strength. I started climbing a few years ago, after I found God, and it’s like I was born again twice. I quit smoking, got my body back, hard as a rock, I can wear my old navy uniform now I couldn’t get into since I was twenty-two. And you see some unreal places; it sets you up. You’re closer to God, or something. You ought to try it, young kid like you. You’d be a natural.”
“Yeah,” said Whitey. “I might try it. Martin H. Swan is trying to give up smoking. He chews that nicotine gum and smokes just the same.”
“That don’t work. You got to do it cold turkey. You got to have faith in yourself.”
(Some year or two later, Snakes, using a climbing rope with a single core in a color pattern of purple, neon pink, teal and fluorescent yellow, hung himself in the cab of his truck. A note on the seat read: “I’m not going to wear glasses.”)