Volt: Stories (10 page)

FURLOUGH

Plywood covered where once had been glass, and Jorgen strained his eyes to find her in the dark bar. Yesterday, a deer charged its reflection and crashed through the Old Fox’s front window. Bucks acted crazy during their rut. Things like that happened. But Jorgen was weary of hearing about it, and didn’t bother saying hello to Mildred, who sat scratching a lottery ticket behind her bar, or to Pervis Hagen and Ed McDonaghey, who were playing their nightly game of cribbage, as he made his way back to Mary Ellen Landers.

Mary Ellen leaned against the busted jukebox, sipping soda through a straw. She wore a red sequined top, had curled her hair. “What you doing here?” she asked.

“Tad sent me,” he said.

“He ain’t coming?”

“He’ll be where I’m taking you.”

She smiled. “What’s all this?”

“Can’t say.”

“A surprise?”

Jorgen shrugged, then called over to Mildred that he needed a couple shots of whiskey. She waved a hand and told him to get it himself. Jorgen never sat down. He led Mary Ellen to the bar and poured the drinks and together they downed the shots.

“You got a coat?” he asked her.

“I need a coat?”

“You can have mine,” Jorgen said. “It ain’t that far to walk.”

Jorgen helped her on with his jacket. He was a small man and it fit her well. His hands lingered on her shoulders. He could smell her perfume, and pulled her hair out from the collar. She smiled as he zipped the coat high to her neck.

“You going to get cold?” she asked.

“I don’t get cold.”

The night hung a damp chill. Jorgen stuffed his hands in his pockets, nodded for Mary Ellen to follow. They passed the vacant savings and loan, then the First Baptist Church, set back off the road, its steeple glowing white in the darkness. They talked awhile about the freight yard, where Jorgen used to work and Mary Ellen still did, where since he’d been home on furlough, and had nowhere else to go, Jorgen spent his afternoons watching Tad and the boys unload the trains.

Hickory trees rustled overhead. Wet leaves papered the road. Jorgen had once been at the center of things, with everyone else, but then he went to serve overseas, in that desert land, and though he’d been back awhile he felt as gone here as he had over there.

They passed the Langstroms’ big Victorian, warm light gathered in its windows. Jorgen watched old lady Langstrom in a nightgown and curlers pull the shade on an upper window, and the light went dark inside.

“What’s my surprise?” Mary Ellen asked. “I know you know something about it.”

“I don’t,” he said.

“You know where we’re going.”

“Ain’t going to spoil it.”

“Come on, Genie,” she begged.

Jorgen kept walking.

“Is it big?” she asked. “At least tell me that.”

“Ain’t for me to say.”

“You know what?” she asked.

“What?”

“I don’t like calling you Genie,” she said. “I know the boys do, but it don’t fit you right. I’m going to call you Jorgen.”

Jorgen shrugged. “It’s my name.”

“I like it,” she said, and took his arm. “Jorgen,” she said, trying it out. “Jorgen, can I ask you something?”

“I guess.”

“You think Tad’ll ever marry me?”

The last house in the row sat dark. Three trucks parked bumper to bumper in its gravel drive. Jorgen glanced at Mary Ellen’s hand on his arm, her slender fingers, nails painted white at the tips. “That what you want?”

“I think so,” she said. “Don’t tell him I asked.”

Jorgen nodded. A figure stood beneath a willow tree at the corner of the house. Jorgen watched the figure slide out of the curtain of branches, scramble through the house’s shadows, then dash into the field they were approaching.

Mary Ellen bubbled, tugged at his wrist. “Hey, Jorgen?”

“Yeah?”

“How long till you got to go back?”

“Back?”

“Over there?”

“Oh,” he said. “Not long.”

“You know,” she said. “I got a cousin I should set you up with.

Crystal’s only seventeen, but she’s grown for her age, and so smart and pretty. I think you’d all do good together. Boy, she’s a wild one.” They walked beyond the row of houses and the road became a corridor between fields of corn. Mary Ellen told a story about her cousin sneaking off to the city, where at fifteen she lied about her age and got a job in a casino. “Served a senator once,” Mary Ellen said. “Had a Pabst Blue Ribbon.” She laughed. “We thought she was at choir practice, if you can believe that. Boy, my uncle tore into her. But when she told him how much she made, he said he knew where she’d work once she got old enough.”

The wind blew in the corn and Mary Ellen clung to his arm. “She sounds all right,” Jorgen said.

“My uncle was only kidding, though. He wouldn’t really want her working there. He’s a religious man.”

“Oh.”

“I used to be more religious than I am now,” Mary Ellen said. “I don’t know. All that talk on how to live.”

Jorgen nodded.

“You’re kind of quiet tonight.”

“I guess.”

“That’s what I like about you,” Mary Ellen said. “Was just telling Tad about how you sit on that bench by the office, in all that noise, trains going every which way, and it’s like you’re out fishing on a pond or something. Whenever things’re getting tight on me, I just look out at you, you know.”

Jorgen watched the corn. A few rows in, stalks were bending more than what the wind could do. “I wasn’t always this way.”

“Well, it’s a good way to be.”

The corn wavered, the stiff leaves rustling, sounding like rain on tin. Jorgen began to shiver. He reached his arm around Mary Ellen and pulled her so they had to walk slower.

“I ain’t getting cute,” he said. “I’m cold is all.”

“Thought you said you didn’t get cold?”

“Never had before.”

“You want your jacket back?” she said. “Maybe we can take turns? A minute for you, a minute for me?”

“I’m all right.”

Mary Ellen threw an arm around his waist and they walked easy. The air smelled of woodsmoke. He tried not to look at the corn, but it wouldn’t stop shifting in his periphery. Finally, he peered into the rows. “They’s dogs that run these fields,” he said. “Sometimes the stalks move and you think someone’s out there, but it’s just the dogs.”

Mary Ellen looked into the corn, too. “You trying to spook me?”

“Sometimes, when they cut the crop they find dogs, dead or froze up in a rut or something.”

“That’s awful.”

He shrugged.

“Jorgen,” she said. “I ever tell you about my big dream?”

Up ahead, the road came to a T. An abandoned farmhouse sat on a wooded hill above the road, the moonlight edging its chimney and tattered roof. Beside the house, the tops of trees swirled in the wind. “Marrying Tad?”

She smacked his shoulder. “Not that,” she said. “No, I want to go to school to work in an animal hospital. That’s what my mama does.” She chuckled. “We got eleven dogs, two snakes, and a potbellied pig, all what live in the house.”

“Must stink.”

“You get used to it after a while,” she said. “I miss it when I’m gone, if you can believe that.”

“I got a bird,” he said.

“A bird?”

“A little parakeet.”

“What’s she called?”

Jorgen felt uneasy. “Don’t know,” he said. “Never called it nothing.” Mary Ellen smacked his shoulder again, laughed like he’d told a joke. He watched her mouth, the white of her teeth, the gap in the front. “Tried to set it free today, but it wouldn’t go.”

“What you want to set it free for?”

“Just seemed right,” Jorgen said. “With me leaving and all. Anyway, it wouldn’t go.”

“Bet you treat it well.”

“It don’t say one way or the other.”

“It didn’t fly off,” she said. “That’s how it says.”

“I guess.”

“You might be too nice for my cousin,” Mary Ellen said. “She’d eat you alive.”

“I ain’t that nice.”

At the T in the road, Jorgen pointed to the right and they turned onto Old Saints Highway. He walked and watched the farmhouse. A flashlight blinked on and off behind a second-floor window. The right side of the road was a high wall of corn, the left was harvested hills. On a far knob in the middle of the bare field, a tiny light winked back.

“You’re shivering like a kitten,” Mary Ellen said, and stopped in the road and took off the jacket. “Here, take this awhile.”

Jorgen pushed it away. “I’m all right.”

“Take it,” she said.

“No.”

Mary Ellen defiantly stepped forward and wrapped the jacket around Jorgen and held the collar at his throat. “You wear it till I count to sixty,” she said, and began to count.

Jorgen breathed in her perfume. She grinned, mouthing the numbers. He could see how it happens. He wanted to throw his arms around her. Kiss her mouth. At the count of twenty, a knot of guilt welled high inside his chest, and he had to look away. Dark things moved out in the field. “There’s them dogs,” he said, quietly. Mary Ellen glanced over her shoulder, then looked back at him, nodding her head from side to side, whispering
thirty-two, thirty-three.

“Mary Ellen,” he said. “You know that boy what fills the soda machines? Tim Eddy Jenkins?”

Mary Ellen’s head stilled. Her mouth stopped counting. “Why’s he coming up?”

Jorgen shrugged.

She let loose of his collar. “He’s always kind to me,” she said, but her eyes turned the shape someone else’s eyes might only take when crying. Her body brushed against his as she ran a finger along the skin above his ear. “You ought to let your hair grow out. The army’s got you looking like a little boy.” She gently slid the jacket off Jorgen’s shoulder. “That’s sixty.”

“I just don’t like the way he sings and all,” he said. “Coming in with that old squeeze box, putting on a big show for you. Somebody might think something of it.”

Mary Ellen put on the jacket. “You’re just jealous he
can
sing,” she said, and began to walk ahead of him.

Jorgen lagged behind. “I can sing.”

“Then sing something,” she said curtly, back over her shoulder.

The wind blew and Jorgen rubbed his arms. “I don’t sing to people,” he said. “I only ever sang to my bird.”

“Right,” she said. “Well, if I hop around and flap my arms, will you sing to me?”

He shook his head.

“All talk,” she said. “Just like Tad and all them others.”

Jorgen stopped walking. “I ain’t like them.”

Then Mary Ellen stopped, too, and reached back and snatched his hand the way a big sister might that of her baby brother. They walked holding hands, past a knob littered with shorn stalks. The land dropped away from the road. Deep in the swale stood a lone sycamore. Beneath it sat the silhouette of a four-wheeler. If Jorgen hadn’t known to look for it, he wouldn’t have seen it out there in the shadows. The corn to the south rattled in the wind, and he could barely hear the motor as the ATV, small and black as a beetle, drove up and over a ridge. Mary Ellen’s hand was warm in his. Across the field and atop the hill sat the aluminum garage, windowless, dark.

They’d come too far, were too close now to turn back. Just ahead lay the gravel drive leading up to the garage. Jorgen sensed the others up there, hiding, watching. It was wrong, what they were doing, and Jorgen felt sick, his neck stiff, his throat raw. “I write songs, you know?”

“Songs?” she said, with a wry smile. “For your bird?”

“Ain’t really songs, I guess. Just things I write.”

“What kind of things?”

“Just things on my mind.”

“Your mind?” She chuckled. “Well, I’d surely like to see that.”

“Ain’t never showed nobody.”

“Not even your bird?” She squeezed his hand.

“No,” he said. “I mean, ain’t nobody ever know it came from me. I sent one in the mail, but it ain’t got my name on it.”

“You
mailed
it?”

“Didn’t put my name on it, though.”

“What?” Mary Ellen asked. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Things I write.”

“No,” she said. “I mean, why not put your name on it?”

He pulled his hand from hers, was afraid she’d feel him tremble.

“Don’t know.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Guess so it’s just about what it says, and not who sent it.”

“What?” she said. “Aw, you’re kidding me.”

“Know what I wrote?”

“What?”

“It said, I think you ought to know that I’m fucking your girl.”

She chuckled once, glanced away. “Lord, you got a screw loose.”

He shrugged.

“Still,” she said. “It’s kind of funny. Can you imagine?”

Jorgen studied her face in the moonlight, her wilted lips, her downcast eyes. In his mind, he saw that sheer curtain, the blue flickering light from a television. “One night,” he said, “I was walking these old roads, you know, and I seen something through a window I wasn’t supposed to, and that got me thinking how you could hurt someone more without guns or bombs or none of that shit.”

She looked off at the low moon. “You’re crazy.”

He watched his own boots, the cracked pavement passing. “Anyway,” he said, “I only sent one letter.”