You Only Get Letters from Jail (25 page)

Charlotte was seventeen and had been pretty, but not beautiful, but this was the summer she had discovered Fleetwood Mac and something about her had changed. My dad started making rules, more rules than ever before, asking things like “Where have you been?” and everything was a privilege and bedroom doors had to be left open and phone calls were monitored and, as Charlotte liked to say, “privacy was part of the old regime.” I did not really know what she meant by that, but I sensed there was a battle brewing, and my dad may have had more power than Charlotte, but Charlotte was smart and quiet as a sniper, and sneaking out had become her specialty.

“Find another ride,” she said on the phone. I was leaning forward, trying to cut the wind that had picked up the second I decided to leave Billy's house. It had been Lenny's invitation that I had ridden in on, and I should have figured that the first time Lenny ever found anything good to do, it would be at some place out of town, out the back roads, where the air felt fifteen degrees cooler, and it would finish up hours past the time when there would
be any real traffic passing by to get me back, and Lenny would ruin the whole thing halfway through for me anyways by pointing out that everything was probably fake. The other guys had stayed behind at the house, Lenny with them, and talk had been loud, and there had been a lot of clapping and shouts, and by the time I started walking down the driveway, the decision had been made by everyone else to watch the film again.

“I can't get a ride, Charlotte. Please,” I said, and I knew that begging wasn't the way to Charlotte's heart and if I stood a chance at getting picked up it was going to come on the back of George Washington, several of him, and probably a Lincoln, too.

“Dad's home,” she said. I thought about hanging up then, walking back to Billy's and joining the second viewing, or maybe by then it would be the third and I could just quit trying and get caught up in the mix. “But he's been talking with Johnnie,” she said, and I knew she meant “Walker,” but she didn't need to say it; it was our code for
drunk
.

I relaxed the phone into my ear and felt its warmth and could see my dad in his armchair, the footrest kicked up, the TV on, the glass empty. The wind took less than a minute to turn from gust to sustained and I felt the edge under it and knew the August night was false and the summer was packing to go. “I'll pay you,” I said.

“Stay where you are,” she said. “I'm coming.”

Billy lived out in what we called “the country,” out beyond the city-limit signs, signal lights, stores, and food joints. All we had passed was the one gas station, a skeleton building
that offered basic necessities at sky-high prices if what the window signs said was true. According to the cardboard square taped to the door, it kept limited hours, was closed on Sundays, and pumped only one kind of gas. Everything that qualified as civilization was in town, a trip by car, too far to walk from here, and if you didn't have a license you were trapped once you got from one place to the other. I couldn't imagine what Billy might do out here for fun, and then I thought about the film,
nothing but corn syrup and food coloring
Lenny Richter had said, and I felt nervous and pulled as tight as the fence wires that lined the two-lane blacktop and hummed in the wind.

The only other sound was the bugs beating themselves blind against the single overhead fluorescent that lit up the lot. It was a sickly sodium light, too bright and artificial, and the cloud of insects swarming made strange shadows on the cracked cement below. I could smell wet grass, irrigation, farmland, and creosote seeping from the railroad ties that served as the borders between asphalt, fields, and road. In the distance, a dog barked and barked, over and over again, a tired and monotonous sound, and there was no shout to
quiet down
, no hassled owner opening up a door and forcing it to come in, and I wondered what purpose a dog like that served if there was nobody to pay attention. There could have been a thousand things to bark at and nobody to teach it about real threats. In the movie, the girl had dark hair, and she was thin, and she was standing and bent forward onto the bed, and I could see her spine rising up, bony and knobbed, and her skin was pulled tight, her head away
from the camera, with just her shoulder blades looking out like hollow eyes. Above me, a bat circled, clumsy and big, and I watched it until its path took it out of the arc of light. I tied my shoelaces, retied them, sat on the curb and chucked rocks, counted moths, listened for a car to come from the distance, and finally it did, the first and only car to come down the road, my parents' Dodge Royal Monaco two-door hardtop that I recognized from the engine whine when my sister drove, the 400 Lean Burn V8 held in full restraint under the hood, and the left hideaway headlight door stuttering like the engine to open up.

Charlotte had the heater on and the music loud and I wondered how she had crept the car out of the driveway, but the very fact that she was there confirmed that she had gotten away with it, and I was happy to slide in and pull the door shut and fold myself toward the warm vents in the dash.

“Thanks,” I said.

There were no cars on the road, no headlights in either direction, just house lights, and they were scattered few and far between, set back in the distance, as sparse and dim as city stars absorbed by the night. Charlotte signaled as she left the parking lot, though there wasn't much reason to, and then we were swallowed by the fields on both sides of the road, the staggered fence posts, and even though I had been walking in the dark, I did not realize the immensity of it until it became a throat hold around us and even the broken yellow line was lost beyond the one good headlight.

After the accident, I would wonder if I saw it coming, the shift in shadows, the sudden definition of a shape, a
thickening in the air like a premonition, because when something goes terribly wrong there is always a before and always an after, but the moment itself is vague and hard to gather, and time jumps like a skip in a record and so I tried to remember the before, tried to trace what happened during, but in the end, it all came down to after and we were spun hood up into a dry drainage ditch, the broken headlight suddenly finding its too little too late and pointing straight and strong at nothing more than wide open sky, the windshield shattered and fracturing the night into a thousand webbed pieces, and Charlotte bleeding from her nose and me with my mouth open to say something but instead everything just hung quiet and still.

“What did we hit?” Charlotte asked, and she rubbed the back of her hand under her nose and the blood smeared across it, and in the weak light, the blood was more black than red, just like in the movie, and I thought about what Lenny Richter had said,
nothing but corn syrup and food coloring
, and that maybe he could have been wrong.

“We didn't hit anything,” I said. “Did we?”

“I saw it,” she said. “I just couldn't stop.”

The engine was still on, the radio picking up the end of Kiss doing “Christine Sixteen,” and I turned around in my seat and looked out the back window at the rise of ditch behind us, tall grass and weeds pressed against the bumper, and I realized that the car was still in drive and Charlotte's foot was on the brake, because the slope of ground was lit bright and red.

“Turn off the car,” I said.

It took her a moment to cut the engine and then there was a different quiet with only the headlights telling us nothing except that we were off the road and looking at the stars. I opened my door and I could smell the grass torn up where the back end had swung around when we spun, and there was the sharp burn of fresh rubber on asphalt hanging in the air, but I could not remember Charlotte hitting the brakes at all, and the wind had died down, or we were far enough in the ditch to be out of the gust, and I could hear crickets, a million of them in all directions around us, and the sound of something on the road just over the soft shoulder above where I stood, something ticking out of sync with the noise of the engine cooling, something struggling to get its legs under it, something trying hard to get up and walk.

I heard Charlotte's door open and the angle of the ditch forced her to put her weight into it so she could swing it wide enough to get free, and then she was walking up the short incline toward the road, and I stood there watching her, listening to the crickets, and trying to make sense out of the sound.

“Son of a bitch,” she said. And there was a sadness in her voice that made me want to get back into the car and shut my door and slide onto the floor, let Charlotte deal with it and wait it out, because Charlotte was older and had always been the one to take the brunt, but I wouldn't do that this time. I couldn't do that anymore.

My eyes had adjusted to the dark, which had settled and thinned on the road, and even the smallest detail was
defined and clear—the broken asphalt where shoulder met road, the yellow centerline, the metal fence posts set back on both sides, leaning and loose with rusted wires marking acres. Behind me, the wide, shallow ditch ran along the roadside, full of nothing more than dense grass gone to seed, trash, and my parents' Dodge Royal Monaco, nose up and cooling quietly with both lights shining into the air. The bugs had already come, gnats and moths in greedy clusters, so that the beams held their movement like dust. The deer was lying in the center of the road, one back leg still kicking out for grip, and Charlotte was standing over it, hands squeezed tightly in front of her, watching the struggle, and from where I stood I saw its head rise up from the pavement, watched the panicked white of its eye roll around and see nothing, and then the deer dropped its head and the back leg tucked in, and all of it went still.

Charlotte crouched down and reached out and touched the deer, and part of me wanted to stop her, tell her not to, yank her back to her feet and down to the car, but I knew that if I had been closer, I would have done the same thing, reached out and touched it, too, and I watched her run her hand over it, ribs to thigh, and I watched the way her hand lifted over the slope of its side, the stomach distended and pulled tightly back from the ribs.

“I can feel it,” Charlotte said.

“Feel what?” I asked. Everything around us had gone quiet; even the crickets had slunk back into the thicker grass and the night was still and the air felt warmer than it had before, the breeze now barely strong enough to bend and
ripple the fields. I looked at the sky above us and there were a million stars, and all of them seemed as if they were arranged in patterns that I was supposed to understand, but I couldn't recognize anything except that they were brighter and closer than I had ever remembered them to be.

“There's a baby,” she said. “I can feel the baby inside.” I walked up next to her, careful to keep my footsteps quiet, and then I realized that the deer was maybe dead and there was nothing left to startle. I squatted down next to Charlotte and reached out my hand. I wanted to touch it, let myself feel the hair, stiff and coarse, and I knew I would be surprised by how warm the deer would feel, her skin radiating heat, and I would rest my hand against her rough side and hold it there, waiting for something to happen. But I could not touch the deer. I just stood there with my hand holding air.

“Is she dead?” I asked. I stood up and pushed at the deer with my foot, hooked the toe of my tennis shoe under her ribs and tipped her side up and off the asphalt. Charlotte grabbed my leg and pushed me backward, hard, so that I lost my balance and fell onto the warm road.

“What's wrong with you?” she said.

“I was seeing if she was dead.”

“She's dead,” Charlotte whispered. From where I sat, I could see around Charlotte to the deer's head resting on the ground, one eye open and fixed and staring up at nothing and her jaw slack, widened just enough that her tongue lolled out and over the darkness of her lips. There was something on the road underneath her, spreading around her shoulders and neck.

“The baby's still alive,” Charlotte said, and she started rubbing the deer's side in small, tight circles. “I think we can save it.”

The asphalt was comforting and warm, and I was surprised at the way that it held the heat from the day despite the wind and the dark. I could feel small rocks biting into the palms of my hands and I reached forward and rubbed them clean on my jeans and I looked over the deer and down the road, looked in the direction that we had been going before we found ourselves spun into the ditch, and I looked for a pair of lights that would signal the approach of a car, the intervention of someone else to help us pull the Dodge out, move the deer, and get us back on track toward town, someone to interrupt the things that my sister was saying and gently tell her that what she wanted was an impossibility that should not even be thought about, let alone said out loud. But there was nothing around us in any direction, not even the promise of lights, no cars, no more barking dog in the distance, no houses with porches cast in a soft yellow glow, no gravel driveways, no mailboxes marking homes.

“We have to go, Charlotte,” I said. “We have to tell Dad.”

At the mention of our father, Charlotte stood up and walked back to the edge of the road and down the incline to the driver's side of the car, and I thought for a minute that she might just get in, start it up, and leave me stretched out on the ground, but she pulled the keys from the ignition and kept walking and I could hear them rattling, knocking back and forth on the ring, and then the
trunk lid popped up and there was light from the small bulb inside and I could hear her moving things around.