American Rust

She looked confused and then the old man began calling out from his bedroom. Isaac ignored it.

  “Should we check on him?”

  “He does that in his sleep every night.”

  She nodded. Because nothing is required of her, he thought. Then he was angry again.

  “I swear this is all about to get fixed.”

  “You were a day too late,” he told her. Before he could hear her reply he was out the front door, making his way toward the road in the dark.

  1. Poe

  It took him, he didn't know, half an hour to walk home from Lee's house. Two miles, give or take. He passed through town, the long main drag, it was even darker than normal, no lights on anywhere except for Frank's Tavern. It seemed like forever since they'd been there but it had only been a few hours. It was long after closing time now, but the lights were still on. Everyone knew why that was. Poe was careful to not look in the windows as he passed, you didn't know who might be in there. The bar had nearly gone out of business for back taxes but somehow Frank Meltzer came up with a bunch of money, claimed it was some aunt that gave it to him but most people said he'd flown down to Florida and driven back in a minivan full of dope. Ten- thousand- dollar paycheck, if you had a clean record you just had to call the right people, but only if your record was clean. Being a mule, they called it. But it was just like the movie said: once you were in, they didn't just let you out. He wondered if Frank Meltzer was sorry he'd done it. There was another place like that, Little Poland, supposedly the Russian mob had bought it but meanwhile the food was still good, people would drive all the way down from the city to eat there, pierogies and kielbasa.

  He was making good time. He had long legs—a fast walker. He was thinking a lot. He thought you'll follow her. You'll follow her to Connecticut. Plenty of schools up there you'll get a scholarship. Except Christ what was wrong with him. She had moved in with her boyfriend, husband now. It was all a fantasy what he'd just had, it was not the last time they'd sleep together it didn't have that feel, it didn't have that tragic, sitting around crying feeling. But it was close. They would do it one more time and it would be horrible, sex followed by five or six hours of intense bawling and holding each other and complete and utter misery. And then he would never see her again. She would not come back to the Valley he could be sure of that. Four years gone, down the tubes. Only Christ it wasn't four years, it had never been four years, it had only been fun and games that had gone on four years, it was not the same as being together. They had never been together properly except the one Christmas break three years back when she came home the whole week. One week of walking down the street and holding hands and all, kissing games, all your standard boyfriend- girlfriend activities. The rest of the time it was just sex. That had seemed good at first, a pretty girl who just wanted sex and not much else. You did not think those girls really existed. But now it didn't seem good at all. She would go back permanently to her other life, because that's what it was, she had two lives and this one, the one here in her hometown, this was the life she was trying to get rid of. It was another world entirely she had out there, he had not seen it but from the way she talked he could imagine it, that new world, mansions, educated people, a butler involved. It was not even doctors and lawyers, it was another level entirely. It was the level of having butlers. Only maybe those were only from movies. Butlers were outmoded, probably. He guessed it was all robotics now.

  And look at him here now, walking down a dirt road, an actual dirt road, he imagined her new husband driving his BMW or whatever it was down the road, look honey, we are driving on an actual dirt road. How quaint. Well yes. He had seen a picture of the new husband once, back when he was still just a boyfriend. He looked queer. That boyfriend of hers looked like an actual homosexual. Wearing a pink oxford. Maybe that wasn't queer in Connecticut but still, that pink shirt, it had given Poe a good deal of satisfaction to see it in that picture. Though here he himself was on his dirt road, walking home as he had no functioning vehicle, his own home, not mansion but a doublewide trailer, just ahead of him. He could see the porch light just ahead. It was nearly five in the morning. Before going inside he took a leak in the bushes so as not to wake his mother with the bathroom noises. He was careful to be quiet—his mother she wasn't a good sleeper and if there was anyone who needed it, about three years of good sleep, it was her.

  He made it into the house quietly and into his bed. Falling asleep he had to remind himself that bad things were happening to him, but that wasn't how it felt. This will all blow over, he decided.

  It was late in the morning when he woke up, clearheaded, the best he'd felt in weeks, he checked the clock and knew his mother had already gone to work. He was thinking about Lee again, lying there in his bed in his room with the sun shining on him. The south- facing window, he hated it, you didn't get good sleep once the sun came up. He needed to fix the curtain rod, it'd been broken for weeks now. And the tape was coming off his old posters, Kiss, why had he ever liked them anyway, plus Rage Against the Machine, someone said they were communists. The good thing was that with no curtain over the window he could see a long way, almost to the river, and on account of the sun it was already hot in the room. It felt good though he hadn't slept well. The warmth.

  He would go to the library and fill out the applications for schools, April 10th now, another day advancing, it would not stop until he died. Only even then it would not stop, the day he died would be like any other day. He hoped that was a long way off. He got up and went outside in his boxer shorts, it was another beautiful day the kind that reminds you how good it is to just be breathing, no matter if nothing else is going right. You are breathing, he thought, more than many can say. He looked at his car, his 1973 Camaro, last of the small- bumper models, before the government came in with its five- mile- per- hour bumpers that ruined the lines of the car. He would never own one newer than 1973. You would have to be an idiot. The Camaro was sitting where the tow truck had left it a month earlier, off to the side of the driveway. Leaves and dirt on top of the new paintjob he'd paid for. He'd dropped the transmission racing Dustin McGreevy in his new WRX Subaru, Dustin going on and on about pop- off valves and turbos and then Poe had smoked him the first time but the second time Poe'd dropped the tranny, the original Turbo-matic, torn the inside of it all to pieces and they'd had to leave the Ca-maro in the ditch and Dustin had given him a ride home. So much for American steel, said Dustin. Least it isn't my mom's car, Poe told him, flicking the Jesus air freshener.

  That was a lesson, he decided, McGreevy's Japanese car, it had only won because it hadn't destroyed itself. They knew what they were doing, the Japanese—plenty of steel still got made there. Special alloys. You wanted to believe in America, but anyone could tell you that the Germans and Japs made the same amount of steel America did these days, and both those countries were about the size of Pennsylvania. He wasn't sure about that last fact, but he guessed it was true. Pennsylvania was a big state. Not to mention all the expensive cars were made there—overseas—Lexus, Mercedes, the list went on. Happening to the whole country, he thought, glory days are over.

  Anyway he'd put almost eight grand into the Camaro, punched- out 350, Weld rims, new paint, much of it on a credit card he'd stopped making payments on. He'd probably get three or four grand all told. Maybe thirty- five hundred. Speaking realistically. It had rust. It was not a good investment. It was not like putting your money with Charles Schwab. Get something cheap, good on gas. Toyota or something. He tried to think but no, the car, that old Camaro, it hadn't gotten him any pussy he wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Pussy magnet is what the guys at the hotrod shop called that car of his, but that was a bunch of bullshit. You could not trust people who told you things like that. The car was a loser, through and through. As his mother had said it would be.

  He would put an ad up on the Internet to sell it, do it at the library when he went to do his college applications. Some stupid kid would buy it same as he had. He'd pick up an old Civic
or Tercel, good on gas. Listen to yourself, he thought. Buying an actual little car like that. Unthinkable even a month ago, you are changing. You are changing in front of your own eyes. He got a hose and bucket and sprayed the leaves and dirt off and got his special car soap from the house and sudsed the Camaro so it wouldn't look so bad for a buyer. He was still wearing his boxer shorts. It felt good being out there in the sun like that, practically naked, he could feel the heat all over him.

  Then he heard someone coming up the road. It sounded like his mother's Plymouth. He didn't think his mother would be back that early, but maybe so—her hands were getting worse every day. That was another thing he hadn't considered—that soon his mother would not be able to work, at least not much. Winters were hell on her. She pulled in next to the trailer and there she was, his mother, dressed for church and him standing in his underpants in the driveway, nearly one o'clock in the afternoon. She shook her head, but not in a friendly way. She was not happy to see it.

  “I'm selling it,” he said, by way of making up for being caught like that.

  She just looked at him.

  “The car. I'm getting something that runs. I'm going to college. In September, if I can.”

  She didn't say anything.

  “I'm gonna call that coach at Colgate College,” he continued. “He said I could check in with him anytime. And there'll be other places. Either way I'll be in school by this September. And not any California University of Pennsylvania, either.”

  “Okay,” she said. She went up onto the porch. She didn't believe him.

  “I'm serious,” he said.

  She went inside.

  He followed her in. He looked around for a pair of pants to put on, as if it would make him seem more serious.

  “Are you really going,” she said. “Or are you just saying that so I don't start charging you rent.”

  “I'm going,” he said. “I'm going to the library to get the applications. Get them in the mail soon as possible.”

  “What about letters from your teachers and copies of your transcript?”

  “Right,” he said. “I'll do that, too.” He had forgotten that part.

  “Billy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You're a good boy.” She hugged him but still, he could tell, she didn't believe him. Who could blame her? He was hungry and he went to the fridge, there was nothing he wanted. He checked the chest freezer on the porch, but it was nearly empty as well. Some venison wouldn't hurt anything. He would go and get a deer—poaching—it ran in the family. There were too many deer now, they kept on extending the hunting season but never enough to catch up with the deer population, a little poaching it was no big deal. Fifty pounds of venison, it was free money. Though his mother wouldn't touch it.

  After getting dressed he took his .30-30 off its rack, his Winchester 94 from before Winchester went to shit, the gun was fifty years old. Top-eject the way God wanted and no scope—that was for people who couldn't shoot. An original Lyman peep. Someone might have guessed it was his father's or grandfather's rifle but neither one of them knew or cared to take care of anything this nice. He'd saved and bought it himself, passing up the clunky newer models, mostly plastic, that cost half as much.

  He dropped a few cartridges in his pocket, three was the right number, then walked down into the field, it was definitely spring now, that rich green smell was everywhere, he wondered where it came from. After slipping into the small blind he'd built, he drew in the air, even the damp soil in the blind smelled rich, it was just the smell of things growing. Smell of life, really. He pushed a pair of blunt- nosed rounds into the magazine. It was all a cycle. It would continue long after he was gone. It was turning out to be a good day. Though already he'd nearly pissed it away, he wouldn't get to the library before it closed. It's Sunday, he thought. Probably closed anyway. He would get it done tonight and still mail the apps tomorrow. But for now it was a nice day and you did not piss away days like this in the library.

  The field had not been mowed in a year and the grass was high and the goldenrod was taking over. He would have to mow it soon. He would do that tomorrow as well, a field unmowed did not stay a field very long. He would stop being the kind of punk that put everything off till tomorrow. No excuses it was time to grow up. In his way he was still a momma's boy. He admitted that now. He was good at some things but not at others. He looked out over the land, rolling off in all different directions as far as the eye could see, it was all ridges and hollows, deep wrinkles in the earth as if God had taken a great armful and squeezed it in on itself. Like when you play with the skin on a dog's face, it all wrinkles up. He had not even bothered to get another dog, he thought about that. He was still mourning Bear. But Bear had been dead two years. Was that mourning or being lazy? He went back to the rolling terrain. Of course God was not the explanation. Isaac would know why it did that. Underground plates, probably.

  The field descended gradually to a stream and then the land went uphill again, a hundred different types of green, the pale new grass and new buds on the oaks and darkness of the pine tree needles, the hemlocks. Spring—Christ even the animals loved springtime. You called it all green but that was not correct, there should have been different words, hundreds of them. One day he would invent his own. The air was cool and the sky was very blue. Christ it was a nice day. It could have been back in Indian times, a day like this, with the land all greening up and beautiful. He did not see why people would ever want to leave here. It was a beautiful place and it was no exaggeration to say it. It was because of the job situation. But that was changing as well. The Valley was recovering. Only it would never be what it had been and that was the trouble. People couldn't adjust to that—it had been a wealthy place once, or not wealthy but doing well, all those steelworkers making thirty dollars an hour there had been plenty of money. It would never be like that again. It had fallen a long ways. No one blinked at taking a minimum- wage job now. He had not been old enough to see it fall is why it didn't bother him. He just saw the good parts of it. That is a gift, he decided, to only see the good parts. Because we're the first ones to grow up with it like this. The new generation. All we know. But things are improving in different ways. Right now, right from where he was sitting, there were patches of woods that he remembered being overgrown fields when he was younger. Oak, cherry, birch, the land going back to its natural state.

  He looked at the area he was hunting, the strip of woods at the edge of their property, a long thin funnel of trees that ran along the edge of the field down to the creek. There were creeks everywhere, that was the other thing about this land. It was rich with life only most people went by it without noticing, as he often did himself. The deer would break from the end of the treeline into the small opening before the creek. He would take the smallest one. He sat and let his mind empty out.

  Time passed, he was just watching, he was in his trance, his body was all numbed out he couldn't even feel it, he hadn't even twitched in an hour at least, just his eyes. That was the trick, disconnect your mind from your body. It felt very natural, his father had taught him, you watch any nature show and you know all animals do it, it was not possible to sit still for any length of time otherwise, to just completely blend in. You put every part of you to sleep except your eyes. But people didn't have to do that anymore. You did not have to be a part of your surroundings. You just went to the drive- through. He decided there was something wrong with that. He himself couldn't eat a McDonald's hamburger, he could taste the chemicals in it, he had a delicate stomach. He could eat a pile of vension, or rabbit or quail or anything that lived in the woods, just anything where he knew where it came from. Any wild meat you could tell, it gave something back to you. But Christ, McDonald's. Not to single them out. It was not that their product was inferior. Burger King, Wendy's they were all just as bad. They gave him diarrhea. It was most likely the chemicals. He checked his watch again and only a minute had passed. That's what you get for thinking, he thought. Time wo
n't move if you think. He let himself focus again. He thought about the deer. Taking a nap under those trees where you'll hear anyone coming in after you. But soon you'll want to eat and maybe take a sip from that cool stream and you'll have to cross that little opening. He sniffed and turned his head slowly and sniffed again to check the wind. It was still favorable, coming from the direction of the treeline, blowing toward him. The deer couldn't smell him.

  Wait for them to come get a nice cool drink from this stream. He thought about Lee. That will be fine, he thought. Even if she's married she still loves me. He wondered if he would see her that night. It didn't have to be so tragic, their ending. They loved each other but the stars were not in favor of it, so to speak. She was doing what was best. He thought about Isaac then, and the dead man in the factory. He shivered, it was not a good thought and he put it out of his mind. Harris had taken care of it anyway. It was a big fuckup and he'd caused it but Harris had taken care of it.

  He heard another car come up the road and then pull into their driveway. One of Mom's friends. He wondered if he should go check. And waste all your two hours sitting and letting the woods forget you're here. All the squirrels and birds are feeding again like you don't even exist. Little Mrs. Whitetail's guard will be down. Sit like an Indian, wait them out. They're probably bedded down a hundred yards from here.

  Twenty or so minutes later there was movement at the top of the field. He moved his body slowly in that direction but didn't raise his rifle. Then he saw it was not a deer. A person—Harris—appeared at the top of the hill next to the trailer. Poe could see the sunlight on his bald head. Harris was looking all around the field. Christ he'd get busted for poaching. First he catches me yesterday and now again today. He felt sweat run down his armpits all of a sudden, he could see Harris scanning the field, he could practically watch the man's mind working; Harris saw where the treeline funneled to the stream and then spotted the small thicket and the brush pile that gave good vantage on the opening. It was the best place to hunt that funnel and Harris began walking down the hill toward it, right toward him. Poe knew he couldn't see into the thicket, the sun was in Harris's face but still Harris was coming right for him. It was not for poaching. He would not have come all this way for poaching. He couldn't have known besides. It was that Isaac had been right—Harris was only biding his time and Christ he didn't know, he'd barely slept he couldn't think straight. Harris knew, you were not going to pull the wool over on Harris. Lee she would never talk to him again, getting her brother in trouble like that, the last one who needed trouble was Isaac English, tried to kill himself in the river like his mother did. He felt the weight of the rifle. It was two hundred yards to Harris, maybe one eighty, it was all he could think about, there were plenty of places to brace it was maybe a six- inch holdover at that distance. Only chance you'll ever have. You or anyone else Harris he was a fucking machine everyone knew it. He looked at Harris and thought that way for a long time. He had a strange feeling in his bowels, it was fear, he thought let this be over quickly. By the time he set down the .30-30, Harris was only seventy paces away. Christ. Christ you're a fucking lunatic an actual insane lunatic thinking about shooting a law enforcement officer you've known since you were a kid. As if that will make your problems go away.