Rock Island Line. David Rhodes
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he asked, easing out of the driveway, smiling inwardly at the sound of his mellow-toned muffler.
“Just sitting,” said Sarah, putting her feet up on the glove compartment and accepting her whole self back. They almost never rode in the old Ford and when they did it was a pleasant novelty. It was a convertible with running boards, mechanical brakes and red paint. It made her feel important to ride in it, and waving at people from it was especially nice.
Still, she couldn’t bring herself to wave at Ronny McClean, who stood in the ditch in front of his parents’ house at the edge of Sharon. John would. She looked into her faded denim knees and put her feet down.
“I wonder what it’s like to be like that,” asked John.
“Don’t talk about it. I’ll get upset.”
“One day he rode his bicycle over to Frytown and they finally found him in Lloyd Brenneman’s fruit cellar, eating a little banquet he had spread out on the floor. That’s the farthest he’s been from home in forty years. That was . . . let’s see . . . thirty or thirty-two years ago.”
“Don’t talk about it, John. It’s awful.”
“No it isn’t. At least, if you grew up with him. He’s never been any different.”
“That makes it worse.”
“It doesn’t. I kind of like him. He’s all right.”
“ You don’t like him. You just say that because you think that’d be good to feel that way—I’m sure you have a secret ambition to be a saint.”
“Sarah, that’s unfair. I only—”
“I know,” she said, and moved over closer to him. “It’s just, you know, how you are. Being bad isn’t so serious.”
“Yes it is.”
“You worry too much.”
“Besides, I do like him.”
“Why can’t you just accept that a madman gives you the creeps? You never learned to accept things and forget them.”
John’s voice rose to nearly an argumentative level. “It’d make more sense for you to learn to accept that there’re people like Ronny, and accept that it’s not so bad if there are. It’s possible to like someone for—”
“John, let’s don’t talk about it.”
“Not talking about it doesn’t solve anything.”
“There isn’t anything to be solved.” Both sat in a gloomy silence. John felt the beginning of what could materialize into a roaring headache. The air seemed too wet, too hot, and his most cherished car seemed made of wood and corrugated fasteners. He drove faster. They turned off the blacktop onto gravel, and the dust flew.
Two hundred feet in the air a large bird looked down on them. At that height the wind covered all the noise from the ground, and he could not hear the muffler or the popping of the gravel against the tires. Only the motion, and the dust stretching out behind the red car like so many giant balloons. He was too high to be hunting, cruising in long circles. He veered slightly to intersect with a lesser angel, the sensation passing through him in all its colors, and quite out of his own control he let out a joyful krreeeee. Below, the car slowed down and stopped, the dust catching up with it and blowing on ahead. Lights flashing: two tiny glass reflections. He swung off toward the west, the hayfields and long-grass pasture.
“It’s a broad-wing! I’m sure of it. Look at him—just look at him! Oh man, can you imagine him up there, the wind and—There he goes. Just look at him.”
Sarah was turned, unhurriedly going through the basket, looking for her own pair of field glasses, wondering if she hadn’t forgotten them.
“Here, take these, quick, look at him!”
Sarah adjusted the left eyepiece one half a digit to the plus side.
“Hurry up!”
She put them to her eyes, couldn’t find the bird, took them down, relocated it and brought the glasses back up.
“That’s nice,” she said.
“He’s too far gone now,” said John.
“I saw him,” she complained.
John put the car in gear and they were off again. Sarah waved at the Brogans sitting in their yard on steel-rung chairs. It seemed the motor was running smoother and he drove more slowly; soon he didn’t think about the rattles, and by the time they arrived at McDuffs pasture both of them were enjoying themselves immensely. They left the convertible in the road and crossed the woven-wire fence at the place it was nailed to a maple tree which not only supported the old wire but had engulfed it and held it toward its center with a hand’s breadth of wood. They walked back into the timber.
“Look,” said John. “There’s a kinglet. Look.”
“Don’t stop walking,” said Sarah.
“No, wait. Look. Right over there.”
Sarah stopped, and was immediately bitten by a vicious mosquito.
“Over there,” said John. Then, “This place is full of mosquitoes!”
“I told you.”
They continued on to the picnic table Marion McDuff’s father had built. The pasture had been his wife’s joy, and as a symbol of devotion he had built a table and a fireplace recessed against a sharply inclined bluff, in a partial opening of elms (the cursed tree), her name written in the fireplace cement. John and Sarah loved the little wild park. They fought off the bugs by cupping their hands and swinging them by the sides of their heads, and built a fire with the paper Sarah had brought. The gnats tenaciously hung on through the smoke, but retreated with the rising heat.
Then they sat on the picnic table and drank iced tea with lemon and honey. Out of the basket they took the warm turtle meat and ate it with salt, brown bread and butter. They talked about what animals it would be preferable to be, if you had to be born one.
“I wouldn’t want to be domestic,” said Sarah. “I’d rather be wild.”
“It’d be nice not to have to be afraid of people, though.”
“Domestic animals are afraid of people too.”
“I’d like to be a dog,” said John, “if I could be one of my father’s.”
“I wouldn’t. I’d be a wild horse—a mustang!”
“Anything wild has to spend all its time scrounging for food, or being afraid of bears.”
“Bears wouldn’t bother a mustang,” said Sarah.
“Of course they would. A horse wouldn’t have a chance against a bear.”
“It’d trample it to death with its sharp hooves. Jab! Jab!” Sarah made pummeling gestures, her fists representing hooves.
“That wouldn’t be much of a threat. Bears have claws, you know, and have enough strength in their arms to whing a horse, especially a mustang—a very small horse—several feet in the air.”
“Bears aren’t that strong. Nothing’s that strong. A fierce fighting mustang stallion could smash the biggest bear in the face.” And her fist came down on the table.
“Many times bullets don’t even penetrate a bear’s head. It’d just pounce on a horse’s back and it’d be all over.”
“A mustang stallion,” said Sarah, “would grab him off and fling him up into the air.” And with her clenched teeth she imitated the action.
“I’d rather be a fish,” said John. “A mud cat.”
“And get caught on a hook,” said Sarah, pouring out only one third a glass more of the iced tea, so