Where It Comes From Desmond Everest Fuller

Where It Comes From

Desmond Everest Fuller

Wade had never hitchhiked before. I knew those white shoes of his wouldn’t last the day unscathed if he came along. But when our thumbs snagged a ride, he matched me, lean and long legged; for a moment, clapping down the blacktop, we were horses, racing to the tailgate of Corey Foss’s Chevy pulling over in a mess of white exhaust and break lights.

We hopped up in the truck-bed and benched ourselves on the toolbox. Corey was a sheep farmer, and his truck carried the residual stink of lanolin. Wade looked around as if this new vantage showed him things about fallow pastures that he couldn’t have seen before. I’d been working the fields and watching my dad and the other men like him sweat into their dirt for almost half of my fourteen years. I’d never seen anything to suggest that anything changes.

I had told Wade that he’d have to find his own way home. There were chores to get done before Dad started passing around blame by the fistful.

Mr. and Mrs. Wellhouse had moved their boys, Walt and Wade into the new residential community Mr. Wellhouse developed on land where we used to find arrowheads and catch frogs. Now, it lay stripped and veined with isolate pockets of caul-du-sacs surrounded by farmland. I’d been sitting in the Wellhouse’s living room, admiring Wade’s new Adidas. Johnny Quest wore them in all the new episodes. I felt too old for Hana-Barbera shows; cartoons

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didn’t dirty white shoes working hogs, bucking hay, or kicking rocks waiting on a ride to come along.

I had gotten up to hit the road when Wade had asked if he could thumb the way with me. His eyes were doing their camera-shutter blink, and he sat down, as he sometimes had to, hugging the arm of the couch. When the spell passed, it took all the sound out of the room with it. Wade curled and uncurled his fingers and said he wished he could be more like me. It was a strange and earnest thing to say. I couldn’t sit with it in his house that smelled of paper and lemon oil, where you didn’t get smacked if you left a light on, or the wind turned wrong and moved the rain off a crop.

The truck shivered beneath us as Corey gave two blasts of the horn and pulled off the shoulder in a lurch of tires spitting gravel. Too fast. Over a year after the Wellhouses had moved here, us locals still wanted to show off or somehow ruffle their middleclass sensibilities; it was a scarlet thing we couldn’t help but chase As the truck tilted to take the road, the toolbox shifted beneath us. Metal scaping metal. The edge slammed against the back of the cab, crushing Wade’s fingers in-between.

He didn’t scream or curse. I’d never heard Wade swear. The sound that pealed from him was high and mournful; the sudden absence, how far we are from our mothers’ arms, that a wound clarifies with painful certainty. It was the first time I had seen human bone, his skin peeled back off the grey and red mash of knuckle. Wade’s eyelids quickened like hummingbird wings, and I imagined the storms in his head raging in waves of lightning glass.

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I grabbed his arm to stop him from tumbling over the side and pounded the roof of the truck until Corey pulled off. He took Wade up in the cab and wrapped his hand in an oil rag. Blood stringed in a cherry drizzle over Wade’s Adidas.

It was fifteen minutes speeding to the county clinic. I rode along in the back and tried not to look the garnet droplets beaded on the toolbox. Redundant fields rolled by. I knew Dad would hit me for all the work left undone. We rushed by a windbreak, and a murder of crows lifted from the quaking aspens and floated like fire-blackened newspapers across the sky.

At the clinic, they took Wade somewhere behind those heavy swinging doors, his hand pinned under white lights. I bothered a nurse in reception until she gave me a dime for the payphone. It was Wade’s older brother, Walt, who answered.

As I told him what happened, I thought about Wade’s lungs panting next to mine, his toothy grin and long legs, passing me as we had raced to Corey’s Chevy. It made me sorry in a way I’d never been sorry before, but I couldn’t find the words to say as much. I stopped talking then, and when Walt spoke, there was a calm quality in his voice that I imagined as a shadow thrown in lamplight, lips moving in silhouettes played out on a wall.

Wade never hitchhiked again. But later, I would lose years in places that were strange and stirred with hostility in their shadows and suns. Unreckonable miles swirled in the dust on the side of any road where you’re thumbing and there are no

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lights in the distance, and home is a foreign thing that feels like it happened to someone else.

It was a few months after Wade had smashed his hand. He and Frank Padges and I were riding in the back of Walt’s new ’65 Cortina. The three of us packed into the backseat with our duck-hunting gear.

“Walt’s giving us a ride out there,” Wade had said the night before on the telephone, “No hitchhiking required.”

Now I know he was trying to make light of his bad day, joking like that. But I didn’t understand then, and a snarl of bad feeling caught me in the quiet humming over the phoneline. It sure as hell wasn’t my fault he’d been so green, no matter how much it felt that way.

The pullout before the green gate to the game preserve was a bare spate of mud crosshatched in tire-tread. We tumbled out of the car into the cool redolent morning. It was November, and the sky was cracked and gray.

Walt called after Wade as we headed for the gate, “What’d we say, Bud?”

Walt had graduated that spring. He still lived at home but wore a neat beard and had started in sales for a fertilizer business in Pullman. Both brothers wore crewcuts the color of straw and were taller than me.

Wade called back, “We say, ‘we’re a-okay.’”

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The exchange felt like something between brothers that, as an only son, I couldn’t understand. I jogged ahead and didn’t look back as Walt pulled onto the road, shouting after us.

“Happy hunting, boys. See you back here by four.”

Frank and I had come along at Wade’s invitation for a daylight chance at some duck. That morning, Mr. Wellhouse had added our names to the permit in pencil below Wade’s and Walt’s. The wave of planned communities and golf courses that men like Mr. Wellhouse were ushering through county approval had corralled the wetlands, where Frank and I had often hunted with our fathers, into this narrow reserve with gates and postings and permits we couldn’t afford.

We climbed with our shotguns and backpacks over the gate and followed the fence line that marked the reserve’s edge. Most of the important things – binoculars, waders, decoys – belonged to our fathers; we carried their smell on us over the wet brown grass. Dad had handed me his galoshes and a box of shells. A bitter pull at the corners of his mouth. He didn’t mention us riding Mr. Wellhouse’s permit. But he warned me not to make him regret the loan of his boots. I wasn’t keen on catching the wallop of his hand. I had known it to bark, hot and sudden.

When I was twelve, our barn burned down in the reek and squeal of immolating hogs. My left eye had swollen shut before Mom could get him to stop. Turned out, the pole light I left on had shorted and sparked. His own shoddy wiring on the cheap. Dad never regarded me straight on after that, always looking beyond me or out his side-

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eye. Mom would say, “Y’know he’s in knots with how sorry he is.” But I watched how he stared out over our acreage with dull resentment. Days kept sliding across the windows without his say-so. Each morning, a hurtful familiar surprise.

Frank had a crumpled pack of Winstons he’d swiped from his uncle’s glovebox. We smoked and felt more like men for it. Wade’s cigarette kept falling from a quaver in his left hand. His right was still bound in a leather brace. It would be after Christmas before he could use it again. After a couple fumbles, the cherry went out, the paper damp and ruined.

Frank shook his head. “Those were my last three.”

He asked Wade if Mr. Wellhouse would dress our birds. “My mom said I’m not bringing a wet duck in the house.” Wade nodded. “He’ll make jerky if you ask him.”

“Maybe, if I get two birds at least. Mom makes a mean roast.”

“Well, I hope you get two birds, Frank.”

Frank’s father inseminated cows for a living and took odd jobs when he had to, same as my dad did in the bad seasons. We had met when we were little, helping our folks shell walnuts to sell. We battled to see who could shell the most and argued over who had won. He threw a good fastball and was a cocky sonofabitch. We were what passed as friends.

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Freshman year, Wade had no friends. We’d all tried to grind him down after he showed up on his first day with side-mirror ears off a face as open as an August sky; his clothes were nicer than our parents’ Sunday best. A couple of the real hayseeds roughed him up bad, tore his blazer. One guy knocked his tooth out and kicked it down the hall outside the woodshop. I couldn’t find fault with how Wade handled it. Didn’t snitch to the principal, or cave to Mr. Wellhouse wanting to press charges.

We all laughed at Wade’s stutter and incessant blinking. The way he’d stoop to gather his notebooks he was always dropping. A low chorus of “Ooohs,” rippled around his routine visits to the nurse’s office – cheap jokes and pranks were all we thought we could afford. Once, a couple boys snuck up behind him with cymbals, stolen from the band room, and crashed them behind his ear. He folded, convulsing on the ground. “I’d appreciate you didn’t do that again, fellas,” was all he said once he could speak again.

Far as I knew, he never said a bad word to anyone about anyone. And never cursed.

I know we’re taught to follow that lead, but I couldn’t find it in me. It wasn’t in our day-to-day that tarnished, slow and sure as rust. We were a bunch of old batteries leaking at the back of a shed; you could measure the rub between any two of us in the corrosive air.

The Wellhouses moving here made us all embarrassed for our coffee cans full of loose change that could make or break Christmas, our hand-me-down clothes, and the poached meat in our freezers. Mr.

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Wellhouse’s shiny Lincoln, that carried them in their fine clothes and milk-skin, reflected us back to ourselves as warped and stunted creatures like carnival mirrors. Our folks kept it in a quiet way. But us kids fussed and itched, scratching ourselves red.

We lost our resolve to hate Wade once the weather turned up in May and the drought-heat baked the leaves right off the sycamores. Mr. Wellhouse had a pool put in behind their house.

Wade welcomed everyone, as if none of us had ever done him wrong. We all wanted to snatch up a moment of cool blue luxury. I think I spent every summer afternoon I could get away from helping Dad with the farm, swimming till the chlorine fried my hair and made my eyes feel coarse. Sometimes, Walt would join Wade and us younger boys in the pool.

We’d become anxious for our own faces to bristle with whiskers like his. We all tried to dunk Walt, climbing his arms and back; he fended us off with a laugh that was joyful and sounded like nothing could hurt him while we got water up our noses and wondered what we’d look like in a couple years’ time, waiting for some impervious feeling to settle over us.

I lapped the pool that churned with shouting boys. At the far end, I pulled myself up and out and stood dripping on the cement patio. In the backyard, the sunlight beneath the three apricot trees was beautiful and green with shade. Next to me, an Adirondack chair held a watery figment like an inkblot. The streaked outline on the wood of where someone’s shoulders had rested.

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I heard Walt’s voice rise above the others, assured, relaxed. Suddenly, my skin felt too tight, and I could scarcely hold my breath from leaving me. I dove beneath the sky’s cerulean reflection and lashed out at the water. Something I couldn’t name was burning up all the patience in my lungs.

Another time, I’d just turned fifteen. I’d worn jeans instead of shorts, and the sun was too bright. Shards of it glanced off the rollicking crowded waters of the Wellhouse’s pool. The boys I had known since before we could talk splashed and cursed. Wade grinned and stayed in the shallow end. His condition had worsened and fits could lay him low at any time.

I changed into swim-trunks in the Wellhouse bathroom that was white and lilac and cleaner than anything in my house ever could be. Catching myself in the mirror, I stopped: I was just as I had been - the mole on my sternum, the scar below my left nipple - but with an entirely different person rippling just beneath my skin. I sensed his teeth grimacing back at me as I lingered in the in my own mirrored proximity, waiting to be pulled into razor sunshine.

After walking for a half-hour into the reserve, we crested a rise where the air stank of peat. Cattails in a slough. The pond before us bent in a teardrop. The water’s edge souped with dead reed stalks. In the mud of the banks, frogs lay buried for winter with their frozen blood.

Wade stumbled at the shore, sucked down air, and shook off whatever cyclone had whispered through him. I stopped and looked down at him. He threw me a resigned smile. “This son-of-agun’s always calling audibles on me.”

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“Come on now, Wade,” Frank said. “Don’t get twitchy on us.”

He tossed his father’s decoys in a pile; the clatter spooked a flock of starlings up from a hazelnut bush. Kneeling, Frank shucked his gloves and scooped up handfuls of mud. “What you need is some fortitude.”

In his palm lay a torpid frog the size of a fig. “Swallow it, Wade. It’ll make your spells go away. My granddad done it when he got scarlet fever.”

When Wade said no, Frank shoved him. I looked at Wade’s ruined hand cupped in leather at his side. His face had been so eager as he had followed me out to try hitchhiking.

I said to lay off. Frank glared at me – wasn’t this to be expected? Wasn’t it our right? He pushed the frog-bearing spade of his hand into Wade’s sternum. “He’s not eating that,” I said.

“Alright, then you gotta.” Frank shoved his hand under my nose. The frog smelled of mold and piss. “It ain’t going back in the ground now.”

We chickened at each other until Wade proffered his hand between us. He’d do it. And he would have. But I couldn’t accept him wanting to take on smoothing things over: the way it would say, this was who he was, and this was who we were. Wade stood tall enough to pluck the frog from Frank’s palm. Before he could reach, I grabbed Frank’s wrist and tilted it up towards my face. The frog slid cold and wet and sleeping down my throat, and that settled things.

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Frank was ruffled and started pointing and ordering: we’d set up a blind across from the bulrushes where a clearing opened above the pond. I sipped from my canteen and didn’t waste breath arguing; Frank would jaw me down until he could claim he was right about something. And I didn’t disagree when he volunteered me to set the decoys while he and Wade built the blind. Dad’s galoshes were the tallest; the tops brushed my thighs.

Wade lingered with me as Frank made for the hazelnut thicket. Our breath clouded above us, and he told me that Mr. Wellhouse planned to move the family down to California in a year or two, after he sold the rest of the lots he’d developed.

“They don’t have winter down there.” As he turned to follow Frank around the pond, he said, “Sometimes I can’t tell if you wanna bite my head off or put me in a jar.”

The pond was the color of milky tea. I hadn’t dragged the decoys more than a couple yards into the shallows when silt-covered layers of twigs, leaves, and decomposing reeds collapsed beneath me. Water rose from the false bottom, spilling over the lips of Dad’s galoshes with a burp of displaced air. I thought my teeth would burst as the cold leapt up my spine.

“Christ,” Frank said when I joined them in the blind, “You went right in.”

I kicked off the boots to drain down the slope while my wool socks steamed.

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We waited beneath the hazelnut bush draped with an old army blanket. Wade puckered his lips against the stem of his father’s expensive new duck-call and issued a strangled honk.

“You’ve gotta use your hand, Wade, like this.” I showed him how to cup his fingers over the spout to warble the call. But with his brace, Wade couldn’t bend his wrist.

“You know a greeting, feed call, lonesome hen?” Frank said. Wade honked off what sounded like choked impersonations of the dead. “Put your tongue on the roof of your mouth, Wade.”

“He ain’t calling down no ducks,” Frank said.

We watched the wind lick the water in sparse gusts. Time passed with granular slowness.

Cold puckered my groin, and I felt damp in my marrow. On each breath, I willed a raft of mallards or canvasbacks to flourish on the pond, and for us to shoot with accuracy, for everything to fastforward until we were back in Walt’s Cortina with the heater on full blast. I waited in my socks with sensations of ice chips pushing under my toenails until I’d lost feeling below my knees.

The galoshes lay next to me, their canvas interiors soaked through.

The pond remained still and opaque, creasing the granite light moving west.

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We ate salted peanuts and talked in low voices while Wade practiced calls. Frank reminded us that he knew things we didn’t. His brother, Dustin, had deployed in October. Snooping through his room, Frank had discovered Dustin’s stash of Playboys. He had never imagined all the differences of nipples.

And the Ursula Andress centerfold – forget the Dr. No bikini, this was the real deal - it was hard to describe to us boys who, Frank was sure, didn’t know. He nudged Wade with his elbow. Did Wade prefer girls with tight little tips or big pancake nipples? Did he know or had he ever even seen any?

“Why don’t you shut up, Frank?” I said.

“What’s your problem?”

“I’m freezing, and you’re annoying the shit outta me.”

“The cold’s shriveled your pecker.”

“Bite me. Where are these goddamn ducks?”

The honk of Wade’s duck-call broke over us, and we shut up for a moment. After a spell of quiet, Frank brought up Starla Gills, a sophomore that went to Wade’s church. What did Wade think her tits were like under those presbyterian sweaters? If I could’ve felt my feet, I might’ve stood up then just to blow our cover and piss Frank off. But then Wade laughed, a full-throated swell that sounded bigger than his body and took us aback.

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“What’s the gas, Wade?” Frank said.

But Wade just laughed and shook his head. He wouldn’t say what it was. For a second, he was much older than both of us.

The sky was full of ice crystals floating in the clouds. Looking up between the hazelnut branches, I let my eyes get lost in the brooding. In my winter dreams, I smelled apricots where I felt my way through strange darkness, hearing the chide of water flowing and the brush of skin like pages turning. Sometimes thoughts like these would linger with me, and I couldn’t shake them. But whenever I got the notion to get them down on paper, it was no easier fitting them into words than giving shape to the rain. I guessed some people had an easier time of it than I did. As we sat in the blind, I wondered about that. It felt unfair to me then. How a moment passed you by without a hint or a word while the heft of the hurt could strike you dumb as a post. Now, it seems all I do is corral memories into words. Moments that I had no real sense of from within their shimmer as I was passing through them, as they were passing through me.

We waited. Our decoys bobbed dumbly on the pond. My jaw ached, and my back was wracked with muscle cramps. Wade’s lips had swollen from working the duck-call. He dropped and scooped it up again. Then, Frank hissed and pointed. We saw them, fleet and speckled against the mineral sky. Wade honked a greeting call that almost passed muster, and we watched their wings lock and tilt towards us.

“Alright, that’s fine, Wade. Don’t scare em off.”

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They were above us then and we saw the emerald caps of the males. They circled the pond once, well out of range, then shifted east, rising again.

“Comeback-call, use your hand, Wade, call em’ back. Keep it going, don’t stop, damnit.”

Wade’s comeback petered after their formation as the mallards lifted back into the gray emptiness until they disappeared, and our hands felt clammy against our shotgun stocks.

“I’m sorry fellas,” Wade said. He looked down at the plastic call in his one good hand.

“A whole Saturday, blown,” Frank muttered.

“Next time,” Wade said. “My dad does make great jerky.”

We made our way back over the fields with our packs and our shotguns that felt heavy and foolish. I registered little feeling in my legs, stumbling through the grass, in Dad’s galoshes that were still wet and stinking. I worried they’d be ruined and what that would mean. Our progress towards the gate, towards Walt’s Cortina and warmth, metered out in succedent posts sagging against lines of barbed wire.

Across the fence to our left, sat a 56’ Cadillac Sedan that hadn’t been there that morning. It had taken a beating over the decade: paneling flaked off the fenders, the chrome

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pockmarked with dents. It rested, obtuse to the fence line, at the end of a pair of veering ruts.

“There must be an access road on the far side,” Frank said as we stopped. I wanted to keep moving. The car had no business in the middle of a field, and my guts churned with snowmelt. But Frank was already making for it. We lay our guns down safely, like we learned in scouts, before crossing over.

A burnt taste clung to the air. Steel-wool light reflected off the windows, and we saw nothing inside until we were very close.

“There’s a guy,” Frank whispered as he came alongside the car. The drivers-side-door clicked and swung open.

The man who pulled himself out of the car was as old as our fathers. None of us knew him, a rarity there in those days. He scowled with sleep-brined eyes screwed nearly shut. I thought he might collapse if not for the door propping him up. “Need help, mister?” Wade said.

The man recovered a pair of linty pills from the breast-pocket his rumbled blazer and washed them down with a long swig from a flask.

“Y’all know Thurston?” Consonants lisped off the swollen wedge of his tongue. “Thurston’s a no-good-sonofabitch.”

Without looking at us, the man slouched into the driver-seat and turned over the engine.

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“Y’all push now.”

The three of us shared glances of mutual doubt. But nothing was said. And we were boys and did as the man told us. We squatted, shouldering against the back bumper. My body felt thick, flopping, as I pushed. It was as though I was made of rubber and couldn’t muster the blood to my limbs. Our boots slid back from the unyielding Sedan, and we coughed in the gouts of exhaust flooding out the tailpipe.

“He’s drunk as a skunk,” Frank whispered.

“Mister,” Wade called out, “These wheels aren’t moving.”

“Well, push, damnit.”

“Sounds like you’ve stripped your clutch.”

We heard him slamming his hands against the steering wheel, making little grunts. He shut off the engine and emerged again. Folds of skin around his eyes wrinkled up tight.

“Y’all did this to me.” His voice was cracked and lowing.

“Like hell,” Frank said. “Probably burned it up tooling around out here.”

The man fumbled with his coat until he found his cigarettes.

“Boys these days’s all no account pussies.”

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He smoked and stared down at the mud on his wingtips as if we weren’t there. Everyone was quiet. Nobody seemed to understand how to extract ourselves from the moment, so we stood waiting for whatever was going to happen to play out. When the man lit a second smoke, Frank rubbed his fingers together. The man grunted and tossed a cigarette towards us.

Wade reached and lost it between his fingers. It lay at his feet, paper split around a brown rupture of tobacco.

“Nice going, Wade,” Frank said.

The man scowled at Wade. “You smoke that, boy.”

Frank scoffed. “He’s not smoking it all broken. Give us a fresh one.”

“You don’t waste my smokes.”

Wade shook his head and blinked fiercely as if grit were flying in his eyes. The man’s face turned near-purple.

“What a bunch of pussies.”

Then the man moved with a swiftness that I wouldn’t have believed. From the car he retrieved a large pistol of a make and model that would become ubiquitous with Clint Eastwood a few years later. It looked absurd, a gleaming parody of a gun.

He aimed the heavy revolver into Wade’s face. “Smoke it, boy.”

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All the breath flew out of me.

And I knew Wade would fall before he hit the ground. His eyes flew back to whites, and he thrashed and arced as if the earth were electrified, his insides turned mutinous.

I felt suspended between what I saw happening and who I was, failing to form the question of what I should do or to even wonder if I could move if I tried. It was a terrible feeling.

The man stared with those eyes buried in skin at Wade writhing on the ground. All three of us stood, just watching for what felt like a long time. We might have stayed like that until Wade flailed in two, but then the man shoved the pistol into his waistband and knelt beside him. With shaky hands, he touched Wade’s shoulder as if his bones were made of sugar. Bile dribbled between Wade’s lips as the man turned him on his side.

Frank took off his jacket and draped it over Wade, crouching across from the man who was talking low, muttering something, but I couldn’t make out the words.

The sight of the three of them clumped together turned something in me; it seemed we had become primitive and hopeless creatures huddled without the warmth of a fire. The man’s voice droned on like moronic psalms. A wave of nausea crashed and whipped through me. Suddenly I could move again. I needed the man’s voice to stop. I knew where my gun lay and the distance from my hand to the trigger.

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My body moved out of time with my thoughts and carried me over the fence. I gathered my shotgun and felt the cold metal against my cheek as I trained it on the man.

Maybe I told him to back away, because he stood and turned to look at me. In that moment, the urge to pull the trigger and pepper his face with birdshot was a visceral thing pecking at my fingertips and whispering, you can, you can.

His eyes widened, and I truly saw them. Lightless stones sunken in bruise-colored pockets. Something profane and true lurked there and reflected back in me.

I’d see it again in places where I’d try over the years to lose myself, plummeting along the curvature of greater and greater distances: In the burnt cinnamon night over Kenya; in a truckbed, among the goats I named after US presidents, rolling up the spine of South America; in finding myself broke again, loitering around gas stations in Florida and Nevada and Kansas - all the worst states I’ve passed through - where a ponytail could earn you a cracked skull; in the peyote I ate that turned Arizona into a glistening field of blood vessels.

I felt it getting closer all the time until it was staring out of my bathroom mirror in the morning after my first wife left me for another man. I was most alone. Nights became a vacuous cycle of my breath swirling in the dark. And I felt as cold and numb as I did on that day in November when I was fourteen, staring into the eyes of a stranger where I saw, but couldn’t grasp, all that

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rusted-out hardness could deny a person. Sometimes, thinking on all that my life became or failed to be, I still wish I’d shot the man. As if that would have changed any goddamned thing.

I stayed drawn on the man as Wade’s spasms gradually stilled, and Frank helped him back through the fence. I stayed with him as they shuffled away until I thought they were well out of range of that enormous pistol.

We regarded each other across the fence. Blackbirds were calling. The man leaned against his car and smoked.

“What’s wrong with him,” he said.

“He gets seizures. You gave him a bad one.”

He stared straight into the barrels and said without quarter, “Nobody’s had a harder time than me. No one’s even come close.”

When I caught up to Frank and Wade, the man was becoming a shape against the shape of his car flattening into the horizon. Wade was puking up what looked like dishwater. There was a metallic smell on him.

“Christ,” Frank said.

We could see Walt’s Cortina idling in the pull-off. Walt ran up to help us lift Wade over the gate. In the backseat, Frank and I rode with the windows down. The heater fan whirled loudly in the dash. Wade rode up front, leaning against Walt’s shoulder.

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“What’d we say, Bud?” Walt’s voice was quiet. “What’d we say?”

Wade trembled and gulped air in loud sips, snot and tears messing his brother’s sleeve. Walt steered and rested his ear against Wade’s head like he was listening for something within.

“I’m busted up,” Wade mumbled. Walt shushed him and drove faster towards the clinic.

“I’m all bust to shit. It’s all shit.”

Through all the picking and bull we’d dragged him through, I’d never heard Wade swear before that. His broken hand, capped in leather, brushed, grippless, against Walt’s arm. And once, he’d said he wanted to be like me.

On the radio, Buck Owens and his Buckaroos filled the car with tinplated melodies. Walt turned it up and began singing along softly.

“Oh, the sun’s gonna shine, in my life once more. Love’s gonna live here again. Things are gonna be the way they were before. Love’s gonna live here again.”

In a lancing second, I hated Walt for his steady hand on the steering-wheel and the love that sang for his brother dirty and crying beside him. Like he knew where something was hidden, and could get to it anytime, and I couldn’t.

“No more loneliness, only happiness. Love’s gonna live here again.”

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What gave him the right, or the will to sing?

The mildew never leeched out of Dad’s galoshes, their canvas linings reeked of spoiled cheese and turned ashen, flecked in black mold. They quivered like fish mouths next to me on the car-seat as we bucked over country roads, into the distance that promised to be the same as everything falling away behind us.

I leaned my head against the car-door, my breath spooling out the window. The air whipping by us pulled me up into a dream where every invisible door was opening, showing me where I’d find all the hidden love in my heart until I wouldn’t have recognized me coming along anywhere in the whole damn world.

Riding with my eyes closed, I tried to hold onto that feeling. I heard Wade’s shallow breathing; I heard the tides of his tremors and fits; I heard the muted efforts of his heart. The warmth in Walt’s Cortina was rendering sensation through my naked feet and hands in currents of hot glass. The squirm of my own blood hurt so bad I thought I was going to cry.

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