In the Middle of All This

In the Middle of All This

Fred G. Leebron

 

 

 

Dzanc Books

Contents

In the Bone

Fall

Anthropology

Further Questions

Out of Control

Evening

Acknowledgments

 

 

For Kathryn, Cade, and Jacob
and
Kathryn Smyth

 

 

What if I did not mention death to get started
Or how love fails in our well-meaning hands

—R
OBERT
H
ASS,
“T
HIN
A
IR
”

IN THE BONE

 

The ride from the Super Giant cut through one of the most blood-soaked stretches of land in the country's history, and in the backseat Martin Kreutzel's seven-year-old daughter and two-year-old son pointed and wondered at the long rows of obelisks, vaults, and statues.
THEY
DIED
LIKE
MEN
, a billboard said,
EVEN
THE
TWELVE-YEAR-OLDS
. On the battlefield tourists paced the steps they imagined others had taken, or followed the pull of frantic metal detectors. “How many there?” Sarah asked as they passed a wide gray slab dedicated to Alabama's volunteers. “How many there?” Martin warily eyed the totals of killed, wounded, and missing. “One hundred and seventy,” she said. Sarah was a great reader. “That's killed,” she told Max. “Daddy, you're driving too fast for me to catch it all.”

“Okay, okay.” He made himself slow down despite the ice cream and milk in the trunk, a line of cars snarling ahead anyway, the air-conditioning in his old Honda vibrating and waning. Red clapboard barn houses hid in the swells of the valley, and on a hillock a dozen black-and-white milk cows drowsily grazed. An oncoming car from Tennessee—Martin couldn't resist noting all the license plates—inexplicably flashed its lights at him, and the driver pointed. Then a station wagon from Texas honked at him—Martin flinched, thinking it was yet another redneck who wanted directions to where Great Grandpappy had taken his last breath—and the guy rolled down his window.

“You got a flat,” the Texan called.

Martin shrugged. He couldn't feel a thing. But he pulled over, alongside a raised sundial honoring the men of South Carolina. “Stay put,” he told the kids. He got out: the driver's side was clear. He walked around back. No problem there. But the right front tire sagged as if shot.

“What the hell?” he said. He had had the tires changed last year, and he couldn't see a nail or a long shard of glass or a gaping hole or the leftover shred of a blowout. The tire was just flat. He peeked through the sunshade at the children. They were quiet.

Martin clicked open the hatchback and began to pull out all the grocery bags.

“I have to change a tire,” he said. “It'll only take a minute.”

“Can't we get out?” Sarah asked. “We're burning hot in here.”

“Yeah,” Max said.

There wasn't a useful tree within a hundred yards. But if he could make it to Wyatt's Charge, there was a shaded pullover. He dumped the groceries back in and slammed the hatchback.

“One second,” he told them.

He waited for a space between cars and then limped the Honda onward. At least it was a fine day. At least they weren't more than a mile from home. At least he had done this before. At the pullover he rushed the $140 of wilting groceries from the car and dug out the jack and the donut. Miraculously the children remained still. His hands on the jack trembled mildly. Most people in the Anthropology Department had the shakes, but they were older. He told himself he was too young for the shakes and started cranking.

He and Lauren and the kids had moved here only a year ago, but it had been a year of inch after inch of rainwater in the basement of their new home, a year of a witch in their department gunning for them in the usual insidious ways, a year when his dad suffered through prostate cancer and his sister in London learned that she had forty tumors on her spine.
Forty tumors on her spine
, his new colleagues said.
How could that be?
And he'd had to explain the tiny calcifications in her breasts that had gone unremarked, the months of general back pain and visits to physical therapists and chiropractors and charlatans, and finally the bone scan that had lit her up. And then it had become a year when he woke every morning feeling oppressed and paranoid only to discover that his presentiments were justified. It had become a year that he and Lauren bandied about words like
grace
and
mercy
—words he had never used—and debated just what the fuck they meant. It had been a year of death, he decided—this first year they had lived here—a lot of imminent death, and a lot of rain that had nothing to do with growth and everything to do with being buried.

“All right,” he muttered, “all right.”

When he was finished—not with this particular thought, he wasn't finished with that—the donut, compared to the adult-sized chassis, looked like something from a toy, but the whole enterprise had taken only fifteen minutes, and the groceries when he resituated them appeared to cling to a last level of freshness. The day was still blue and bold, autumnal save for the slight heat. His head was in a mild sweat. He'd get the kids home, set them in front of the TV for their one show, shove the groceries into the fridge, and have almost an hour to make himself concentrate and complete the last of the syllabi for his three courses. Then he'd treat himself to a Bloody Mary or a beer.

“Here we go,” he said.

It was odd how silent they were. Maybe it was on account of all the men who had died here, maybe it was because of the heat, maybe it was the car—or the ice cream—that worried them.

“Cheer up,” he told them, “we're right on schedule.”

“Okay,” Max said. But Sarah kept her eyes shut as if she were trying to sleep. Had he said something mean? He couldn't remember.

At Union Street, Martin stopped as a double-decker tour bus groaned past, the folks grouped on the open top, listening to a guide with a megaphone.
Carnage
and
slaughter
were the only words he caught.

“Double-decker!” Max said.

When Martin started the car across Union, it rolled forward several feet and then seemed to fall on its face, as if he'd lost a tire, and it ground to a halt in the middle of the intersection. In the distance vehicles approached.

“Daddy!” Sarah shouted.
“Daddy!”

He crushed the accelerator, grating the car across as its metal scraped against asphalt and its rear fishtailed. He pulled over onto the battlefield.

Sarah's arm was flung over her eyes and she was silently crying.

“What happened?” Max said, pulling against the straps of his car seat. “What happened?”

“That wasn't so bad,” Martin said, trying to smile. “Was it?”

“We almost got hit,” Sarah mourned.

“All right now. Take it easy.”

Again he tore out for a look. Under the heavy axle the donut seemed as thin as a crepe.

“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck!”

Now what?

In the Honda the children squirmed. Out-of-state cars sailed up and down Union. The line of monuments curved east and west around the town. At least he wasn't out on the interstate. This wasn't in the middle of nowhere.

He got in and made the car drag itself over as far as it could. He got out and stared at it. Unbelievable, just fucking unbelievable. Of all the—goddamn it. Goddamn. Man. He drew in as much air as he could, held it, let it out, drew air in again. Again. Okay. Again. He went around and softly pulled Max from his car seat, carried him back to Sarah's side, and let her out.

“Daddy, I'm hot,” she said.

“I know. I know.” He nudged Max. “Can you walk?”

Max shook his head. His hair fell down between his eyes and his cheek bulged, and he sank into a patch of his own drool on Martin's shoulder. “Tired,” he said.

“Carry
me
,” Sarah said.

He gave her his hand. “You know I can't.”

He said his good-bye to the groceries, and they labored down the cannon-lined road around Cemetery Hill, the sun on their necks, the boy snoring. The late summer air was full of the green smell of cut grass and crisped cornstalks and bundled straw, and soon Martin felt his breathing slow, his pulse dip almost to normal. There was so much worse, he told himself, than two flat tires and a lost week of groceries. So much worse that it was all practically unspeakable. He kept hold of Sarah's hand.

“Please, Daddy,” she said, but she seemed resigned.

Later they walked past the railed Alms House Cemetery, a white stone planted at the heart of each abbreviated plot, and it suddenly struck him that there had been dead under the fields before they fought the great battle of the Civil War, and then there were thousands and thousands more dead when they finished, and he marveled at the enormous number of dead there must be in the world. Maybe there was some solace in that.

“Marty?”

Perhaps he was just imagining it. He kept walking, Max's warm face against his, Sarah's mushy hand still holding on.

“Marty!”

They turned. The co-chair of Anthropology had pulled alongside in his car. Martin nodded at the boy to indicate he was asleep and at the girl to show she was burning hot.

“Very sweet,” Ruben said, stopping the car. “Look, you got a minute?”

“I really should—”

“My wife's just been fired.” Ruben threw up his hands and dragged himself from the car. His face was dark and unshaven, his hair was in his eyes, and his lips were trembling.

Martin stopped.

“Daddy,” Sarah murmured.

“Julia goes into work today,” Ruben said, his voice shrill, “at eight A.
M
., an hour ahead of everybody, just as usual, and she can't open the door. She tries one key, then another, then a third. She thinks she's losing her mind.” He stopped himself, breathing hard, and stared past the wriggling boy at Martin. “Does any of this make any sense to
you?
”

“No way,” Martin said, although it sounded a little like what had happened to his father years ago, when he came home early from work wearing a papier-mâché life preserver that said SS Titanic.

“Exactly. So she tries all the keys again. She's practically a damn partner in the place, and she can't even get into her own fucking office. At a pay phone she calls the CEO. And the CEO says, ‘We've changed all the locks. Yesterday was your last day.'”

“Can they do that?” Martin asked as Max whimpered and Sarah tugged at him. “I mean, wasn't there notice or a warning?”

“Nothing. The damn CEO was sleeping with the damn director of human resources, and they've engineered this thing from a long way off. Total subterfuge. Julia's been there twenty-two years, twenty-two fucking years, built the business from the ground up. Worked double the hours of anybody else. And they've gone and fired her.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

“Jesus,” Martin said.

“Daddy, please,” Sarah muttered.

“I'm on my way to our lawyer. What a numb nut that guy is. ‘That's just the way it is,' he tells me on the phone.” He pushed back the hair from his eyes. “So who's your lawyer?”

“Same as David Lazlo's,” Martin said. “He did great at our closing, and I think he's going to do our will. But really I've got to—”

“What's a boy like you need a will for?” Ruben said. “But he's good, right? Only the best for David. I came in with that jerk, and now he's better off than I am.”

“He's a force of nature,” Martin said, beginning to move off again with the kids.

Ruben shook his head, climbing back in the car. “Or something,” he said. “Sorry I kept you guys.” He started the car and leaned across to the open window. “This all kind of reminds me of your sister. Not that it's really like it, you know, but just how you can get the crap permanently whacked out of you any minute of the week. I hope your sister's all right. What are you doing hauling around your kids this far out anyway?”

“Two flat tires,” Martin said.

Ruben looked away and then looked back at Martin. “You see. That's exactly what I mean. You need a ride?”

The children were sweating and the sun was branding the back of his neck, and he could just imagine their conversation if he climbed into the car.

“Absolutely,” he said.

By the time they were dropped at home, Max had again fallen asleep, and Martin laid him on the sofa and with quivering hands untied and took off his shoes while Sarah commandeered the television. In the kitchen he called Triple A and arranged a tow job, then he hurriedly dialed his sister's number in London. The double pulse began to ring in his ear.