When Leah Shepherd got the car, which had been cheap and was old and every year cost more to maintain than it was worth, she showed her parents, expecting that they would see and understand and turn and look at her and see her and that they would all get in it and drive to the beach together, like they used to do, or even just around town and they would reminisce, and she drove up and leapt out of the car and ran inside and said, “You have to come see my new car,” and her mother and father looked at it in the drive and smiled distractedly and shrugged. She wanted them to understand without her having to tell them.
Everyone told her that she needed to get rid of the thing and get something more reliable and with better gas mileage and less blue, but she didn’t listen.
Lightning cracks and the world is static. Night, the night yard, the faraway street light.
Scrambled eggs, sausage links, glistening carafes of milk. A gleam of grease in the faint light. Silver platters of food clanging loudly on the hardwood floor. Laughter. Great links of meat.
Mirrors made them soldiers in a chaotic but clockwork army — writhing on lances, crawling along the ground. The smell of cooling sausage patties and warming shrimp cocktails waft in intermittent waves on the whims of the air conditioner that groans loudly over the pulsing mechanical beats. He drove the next morning from Graham, North Carolina, to Crow Station, Kentucky. When he closed his eyes, he could still see the waves of women dancing and the light on their dimpled skin and smell of the wet dumpster he’d parked beside to spend the night.
The man in the door of the motel room by the train tracks raises the half-exhausted cigarette to his lips, the tip of which contains a bright carbuncle that flashes as he breathes in, and looks at the variegated pools on the wet surface of the road where it has just rained.
The men digging the grave for Saturday’s service talked quietly as the sun began to set.
“Remember that boy went missing back, I don’t know, thirty-some years ago. In the eighties?”
“No.”
“I wonder if they ever found out what happened to him.”
A shrug.
“I’ll tell you, it’s like I say, it’s got so that you can’t trust no one no more. I mean, used to be, children could go outside alone, go all over, you know. But not now. My momma used to send me clear across town to my uncle’s house and there weren’t nothing to be afraid of.”
Dogs marked gates. Starlings clouded. The sound of metal on earth.
“You don’t remember that? I still think about that family some. I mean, my boy, he’s had his troubles, but at least I can go visit him on weekends.”
The other man thought for a moment, shrugged, and told a story about a girl he knew who liked to do it and have people watch. The man recounted the story and they stood, leaning on their shovels.
“A prayer for a husband to get more hours of work. A prayer for a granddaughter who has to have knee and feet surgery. A prayer for a husband to be convicted of using profanity. A prayer for a daughter struggling with depression and mental illness. A prayer for a son addicted to pornography and cartoons. A prayer for a wife to learn to enjoy the work she has been blessed with. A prayer for a daughter to not feel resentment about having to leave her job and help her mother care for her disabled sister. A prayer for a baby to be born. A prayer for an ex-son-in-law to concede on how to raise a child. A prayer for a mother-in-law to see the good in her daughter-in-law. A prayer for a child to stop sassing.” And then a swell of strings and commercial break.
In the motel room, he tried to remember what he was going to say. He tried to remember what it was like to be a little boy. What could he say? In the mirror, he watched his lips move, but made no sound. There was someone next door he never saw.
“So after that, he wanted to go over to Western Steer. So we went and an hour became five, can you believe that, five hours and we had these Jell-O shots, or maybe we’d already had those and we just had beer, but lord, lord, lord five hours. It should have been over and she was with us the whole time, pregnant, you know, just big, just about to burst and all I could think about were the Jell-O shots and how I shouldn’t have, you know, just shouldn’t have. And then I don’t even know whose house it was we ended up at, but, you know, it didn’t matter at that point and she was just on him, riding, all night, her mouth going so fast, and I seriously thought about sleeping in a ditch or something just because at that point, when we were in the house, whoever’s house it was, I was just like, you know, ready to be done with everything, baby or no baby or whatever.”
The young couple in their first home marveled at the two raccoons in the moonlight of the backyard. The young couple could not conceive that there would ever be a time when they would not be in their house watching raccoons through the kitchen window. There had been one raccoon on the deck, eating the cat’s food, and when it registered some motion from inside the house, the young man putting his arm around his young wife, it ran down into the yard, pausing for a moment to make a sound and the second raccoon ran out of the darkness and together they trundled off. To the young couple, this moment felt as though it would exist forever, this life they had, and even when he sat by her bedside in the hospital, slipping in and out of herself, looking much changed without her teeth, he felt as though all he had to do was to rise from the chair and look out of the hospital window, steadying himself on the sill so he wouldn’t slip again, to see those two dark creatures who had long since returned to the generalized life of the Earth.
“You have to see it.”
“Wait, wait. Tell me again what you saw.”
“Listen. Okay, so I was walking through that one field behind Indian Hills, you know?”
“Yeah, where the Old Country Club is.”
“Yes, but I was past that, I cut through the field, passed the old pool, through the trees, down the hill to Clark’s Run, and I followed it for a while. I was just killing my day, right. I had on my Walkman.”
“What were you listening to?”
“DJ Screw. But wait, listen: so I walk along and I come to this one part where it gets wide and calm. It is totally quiet. Then I come around this bend and it was real quiet and that is when I saw it.” He tried to explain what he saw, but the incomprehension on his friend’s face silenced him. So they went, cutting across the same fields in the same place, but there was nothing there.
“I don’t know. Maybe I was wrong or something.”
“This is like that time you tried to get me to go into some cave you found because you said there were some clothes or something.”
“Now that, my friend, was true. I totally did. I found this cave and inside there was a little shirt and pair of pants and saddle oxfords placed on top of it like they were placed out by a mother. There were other things, too, like—”
They walked on, trudging through mud and muck. They turned a bend and saw a bull upside-down in the branches of a tree. A perfect, pristine bull, legs like columns in the air.