Bright Shards of Someplace Else (6 page)

“That thing you're doing, that …
massage
is never going to work. Why not just push it down with the backhoe?”

A panicked calculus went on behind her eyes. Her mouth opened and shut, and the low sun bounced off her gold crowns so her mouth winked shut a small sun each time she thought better of speaking. The thumb on her right hand tapped the other four fingers over and over as if she was counting in groups of fours. That,
that
, was his mother's definitive tic, and it so invoked her that he could not make sense of
the image. It was like flipping on a favorite sitcom and seeing another actor in the key role, speaking and doing everything like the original but with a different body, a different voice, the rest of the cast behaving as if nothing had changed. Fran was not his mother, not at all, but the motion of her hand was; it was a small part of his mother evoked through a tiny gesture, it was a piece of her settled on Fran, stunning proof she had blown apart and scattered wide.

Finally, she spoke. “Marie would want me to try her way before … resorting to force.” In Fran's halting tone there was nothing of her businesslike bravado. She was afraid of trying the backhoe. Afraid it wouldn't work—because if the full force of the machine bore down on the carcass and nothing happened, the floating horse would have moved into a more certain plane of paranormal. Afraid it would work—and his mother and her massage would have been bypassed, overthrown, disregarded, unneeded, unheeded—it would be, for Fran, a death of a god. No, the backhoe would not do. The dead horse was no doubt a mystery, no doubt a problem, but there were many mysteries and many problems, and if you had to forsake something to solve each one you'd have nothing left for your trouble. “Nothing left to do but finish the massage.” Fran summed up, her voice stronger now.

Bill did not agree. He would give anything to see the damn thing drop, to feel the ground shake as it took on its weight, to hear the hooves crumple and hit the ground with the reflective, dangerous sound of two like weights striking—hoof and ice equally matched, hitting like the heads of two hammers. The dead horse was a mystery, to be sure, but it was a mystery that had overstayed its welcome. There had been mysteries and inexplicable things throughout his life—strange forms in the trees on summer camp nights, flashes of light in the dark, lost things, such as keys, turning up after years of hiding, things lost (things you
just saw
) and never found, his mother's late love for horses, his mother now. One could learn to live with these mysteries, but a floating dead horse, in all its corporeal fact, could not
be endured. Once the horse fell, he was sure he could find an explanation, some liberal reading of science or physics that would diffuse the mystery just enough so the edges blurred and the dead horse, like the other mysteries, would recede into a kind of fog, a harmless atmospheric, which, strange as it was, he could still walk through.

Fran had begun to whistle as she worked, and it was this ludicrous sound that finally drove him to it. He sprinted toward the backhoe and jumped up into the cab and tried to put the thing in gear. He had never used any heavy machinery, and the dashboard, if it could be called that, confused him. He moved a lever up and down, the machine ran roughly, and the bucket, which had frozen to the ground, rose up with a high, shattering crackle, like a prehistoric mastodon waking from a fossilized slumber, shaking its tusks free first. The response of the machine frightened him; he had no idea how to control or direct what was happening, but he was beyond turning back. The backhoe began to rumble and swerve forward, the wheels jerking right and left, Bill hunched over the controls as if he'd just taken a sudden blow to the gut. The tires spun and threw up snow and ice; out of the corner of his eye he saw Fran approaching with her hand in front of her face, trying to block the spray. He gave it more gas, tried to move the bucket down toward the horse, but it raised to its fullest height, like a hand lifted in heavenly praise or wound up to strike. He heard Fran's shouts, saw her leaping at the cab like some desperate mutt, and the bucket came partly down but he could see it would not reach the horse, not yet. He accelerated yet again, and this time the machine found purchase and lurched forward and before he could react it was over the edge.

The front tires hung over and spun. The bucket rested on the horse, which had rotated under the pressure so now its back legs hung down straight like a cat twisting in midair to land on its feet. He threw the machine in reverse, and every time he laid off the gas even for a moment, the backhoe rocked forward and threatened to tip. The back wheels dug deeper into the icy sub-layer of the winter pasture and began
to lose ground. He rose up off the seat, turned backward as if the machine might follow, and stood on the accelerator with both feet. He could see his mother's house and stable in the distance, could see the clear empty sky and the slight winter breeze shaking up a few frozen branches so they rattled like wet bone. Nothing he saw admitted of the chaos of which he was part. Even the rev of the engine and tires was a thick insulating lull, nothing sharp or panicked, except for a higher whine, a building screech. He spun back around—was the engine burning up? Then he saw Fran standing immediately below him, her head wrap popped off her wide-strung ears. She was yelling at him. He saw her mouth move. At first he did not hear her, but the repeated rhythm of her cry finally got through:
Turn it off, turn it off!
He couldn't run the thing hard in reverse forever, so he turned it off and readied himself to leap off as it fell. But the backhoe simply swayed a bit as it quieted, and the rush of adrenalin abandoned him so he sat, stunned and stupid, while Fran called his name.

He finally climbed off the machine. Fran was quiet as she watched him descend. Her brown-gray hair was dotted with dry felled snow, as if her head was sprouting small white blooms down the length of dropping stems. Her mouth, so thin-lipped that it seemed a fissure in her face, blossomed outward, quivering and wet. She put a fist, clad in a thick winter glove, up to her mouth and sank to the ground, her back against the machine, the snow piling on her bare, bent neck. Her sobs were so quiet they could have been the tiny pings of snowy sleet on the backhoe, could have been a laugh three properties away carried in and altered by the winter wind.

His mother's house and stables, the fence line, Fran, the driveway—these images seemed to bulge with an aggressive particularity, it was as if the dead horse was an accent mark, changing the emphasis and making everything foreign. He looked up at the falling snow, so hushed and composed, and felt a sudden vertigo, as if the snowflakes were actually still and he was slowly levitating upward, giving the illusion of their fall. He sat down. A red drop from his reactivated
bloody nose hit the snow like a burst of fireworks on a horizontal sky. After a moment, he pulled himself along the icy ground so that he was sitting next to Fran. Her profile was slack, her face collapsing into her chin, which receded into her neck, as if her whole head had originally been nothing more than a feat of complex origami, a series of flat folds popped out to resemble a face.

Fran was unmoored, and he was afraid. He thought of something that had happened with his mother. Right after his father moved out, while his mother sifted through her hobbies for some distraction, an orange tabby cat appeared, wormy and starved. His mother had been convinced it was their long-missing cat Sorbet, and she took the cat's return as a reversal in her fortunes.
See, you lose one thing and something else comes back
, she'd say, doting on the cat with a pleasure he had not seen since the split. But the cat was obviously not Sorbet, who had left eight years prior and was two shades darker, and he laid out the evidence to his mother. She replied
I knew it
and sunk down and in as if being drawn through a straw at her feet. What had troubled him most, he recalled, was not the impression that his mom had indeed known and permitted herself to believe otherwise. What most disturbed him was how easily she gave in, and the haunting tone of self-reproach as she shooed the cat away.

He stood up in front of Fran and lifted his hands in the air several times in front of her as if trying to whip up the wind to pull her to her feet. She rolled her head toward him with a heavy looseness; regarding him and the icy pasture beyond with the sardonic gaze of someone who had been awoken from a deep sleep by the tail end of a bad joke. There was a lethargy in that look, a somnolent dark wisdom that seemed to echo the dead horse in that it was both disturbed and irrevocably in repose. He did not let himself be stalled. “
Fran
,” he said, bouncing a bit on the balls of his freezing feet, “I think the massage might work. It probably was working before I interrupted.” He swung his head back toward the hole where the curve of the horse's hindquarter
still peeked above the edge, a half-moon of hide arched like a doubting brow.

“I bet you just didn't do it long enough. Or maybe you forgot a step. Didn't my mother have another step in the massage?” He gestured frenetically over her; he mimed a more perfect massage. His face flushed with impatience and a building panic; restoring Fran seemed the key-stone to getting free of this bizarre business. He thought again of his mother making that trek from the car to the house, nurse and daughter guiding her every step, and it seemed essential that Fran, at least, still saw a powerful sage, a spellbinder. “Maybe you missed a pressure point, or maybe you started at the wrong place.” Fran's hooded flinty eye rolled either in dismissal or in a circular assessment of the scene: snowy ground, house and stable, his stricken face, the backhoe bucket-edge, the horse just out of sight.

He squatted down in front of her and began to rattle off all the ways she might have mishandled the massage in a ragged low whisper. Though she remained silent, he kept repeating himself, like a refrain, but soon even that disintegrated into a wandering monologue about how his mother must always be trusted in these cases, though this case had never, should never, and possibly was not occurring. The idea that a dead horse floated a mere ten feet away made everything he said seem, at turns, superfluous or courageous—what could he say in the face of such a cosmic aberration, and listen to how boldly he spoke despite the aberration. Fran's eyes had the buffed sheen of faraway thoughts, and she gave him a pitying look, as if he was the one operating under a harmless, but poignant, delusion. That look—though perhaps he had misread it—frightened him more than the dead horse itself. It seemed to indicate this grand shake-up in the world's logic was just another disappointing fact of reality to be faced, another test of one's maturity, one's grace.

“Think about it—you must have missed a step.”

He walked back to the hole, kneeled, and saw what they had
missed. Under the dead horse, an ice shelf zigzagged, leaving parts to dangle down, a photo-negative of a darting ice crack, a rent in the loose open air expressed as substance. The horse's tail fanned upon it. He was sure it had not been there before, he could not be sure it was there now.

“You just tell me what to do,” he said, his hands already on the horse.

I had to fire Mol. Today was the day. The regional director had called me and told me, apologetically, that they had received enough complaints about Mol over the last six months to necessitate it, and that the previous person in my position had issued her several warnings, none of which had made any difference. “I'm sorry you have to be the one to do it so early in your employment,” he had said, “but at least you don't know her too well yet. That should make it easier.” He was right; I did not know Mol at all. She was simply an unkempt and increasingly occasional presence in the office next door.

I'd been working for Journey's End Memorials for only two months when I heard from the director. Our company made videos of deceased loved ones to play at funerals or wakes, but I was assured, during my interview, that the workplace was nonetheless “youthful and upbeat.” To demonstrate, I was invited to a family fun picnic by the upper management the first weekend after I started. I'd been to enough company fun days in my working life to know this could be a cheerful drunken group-vent or a snake pit of office politics, where every ketchup pass represented a subversive uprising or an affirmation of an inexorable power dynamic. But the picnic was, instead, a desperate counterbalance to what I would discover was as morose a workplace as it sounded. The paper plates were cut to resemble gravestones, and different managers roasted each other by delivering mock eulogies; the speaker with a beer in hand and the roastee standing on a picnic table, a bedraggled funeral wreath about his neck.

During this display of forced gallows humor and impenetrable inside jokes (“Paint the dove, Georgie. Paint it!”), a youngish woman, laughing and splotched-faced, stopped to say hello. “Isn't this a riot,” she said, as she unwound a piece of corn silk from her teeth with her pinky nail. In truth I found the proceedings disheartening—I was hoping Journey's End might feel different from my old job, more real and involving. I had just left a job managing a team of secret shoppers, a group of six men and women who practiced being invisible, the kind of customers a business would mistreat with impunity, since their personhood seemed in question. As I coached them on how to be ever more unobtrusive (while still making enough demands to put the supermarket or whatever through its paces), they would move down the scale of presence—from coworkers, to strangers, to movie extras milling in the frame, to flat images, to simply thoughts. Even when I had their attention, I found myself tapping shoulders and grazing forearms to confirm all of us were there. I hoped to get away from that.

The woman began glossing the jokes and references. “You see, George once dumped a live dove in a bucket of food dye, since he needed a clip of a cardinal flying …” She asked me where I was from (downstate), if my family liked it here (I lived alone), and then she asked how that was working out, and it was here that I began heeding the training from my former job. I let my eyes focus on a middle distance, past her face but short of the snorting, bald manager wearing the wreath like a puffed-up Cesar. I hunched my shoulders slightly, and pulled my arms inward, compressing my physical presence. When I told her living alone was fine, my preference really, I flattened my slightly eastern dialect into that of a bland midwestern, midcentury broadcaster.