Universal Harvester(19)
“When it gets to that point,” Veatch agreed. “Listen, let me show you the warehouse. There’s a whole picking system you’ll want to learn.”
*
On the way home to Nevada his thoughts began to organize themselves very quickly; there were only two open courses of action. He could take the job with Bill and quit Video Hut, or he could turn down the job and stay where he was. Beyond these lay only variations. None of the variations had any meat on their bones.
He overshot his turn at sixty-five miles an hour. At first he put it down to distraction, but as he made his way back along old Highway 30 from Colo, he realized where he was going: to Sarah Jane’s, to talk. He didn’t have the specific shape of their talk outlined clearly; in earlier days, this would have stayed his hand. He didn’t like to start talking before he knew what he meant to say. But there was a need to act in this moment before it passed. The defining characteristic of moments, he knew, is that they pass. The whole detour took him a solid hour, all told; there was an accident backing up traffic in the no-man’s-land between towns, two fire engines and an ambulance and an officer in the middle of the highway directing traffic. Jeremy always felt wrong just driving past a pileup; he felt like men of an earlier age would have gotten out to help. But the flashing lights and the burning flares seemed to send the specific message stay out of the way.
Sarah Jane wasn’t home, of course. She was in Collins affixing lengths of masking tape to empty canning jars that would be filled with jam as the year progressed. She sat in a wooden chair next to a tall shelf in the basement, a crate full of jars at her feet and a red Sharpie in one hand. Her lettering hand repeated one of four movements with each pass, and that movement told the shelving hand what to do next. S for strawberry. B for the blueberries that would come in summer. P for autumn pears and PP for pumpkin butter. The reduplicated P didn’t offend her eye like PB did; she’d made an executive decision.
Once a jar’d been labeled, she slid it back as far on a shelf as it would go: nimbly, then, her hand would dart back into the crate. The whole process took less than a minute. It was quiet work and it went quickly. All lined up, label sides facing out, the empty jars waited for someone to come along and give meaning to their name tags. Prior to the actual canning their red letters might have meant anything, who knows what. Of course, no one who didn’t already know what they stood for was ever going to see them, so it didn’t really matter, but it gets easy to let your mind wander, doing simple busywork in a basement. The gentle scraping sound of the jar bottom on the wooden shelf. The simple solitude.
People tell stories about video stores and the clerks who spend multiple summers at their counters, marking time, or about the owners, the ranch houses they live in, the Nissans in their driveways. People also tell stories about houses out in the country, old farmhouses, sitting unprepossessingly on large lots parceled out a century ago, soaking up darkness from depths in the earth past those where you’d till. They tell you the history of the house, who built it, what the town was like when it went up, how things seemed after everybody’d moved on to the bigger cities or set out for new land.
If you sift through the stories a narrative begins to emerge that’s hard to convey in general terms, but I am reminded of it when I watch the third scene on the tape marked Shed #4. There are several people in this scene, at least three, though it’s hard to be sure because of the hoods, which can’t really properly be called “hoods”: they’re just some old sheets with a little binding below the jaw end. The people wearing them mill about, or try to, their hands in front of them—looking for a door? Trying not to bump into each other? But they do bump into each other; they always draw back politely when it happens. Their movement slows. It’s clear that the most they can see through their masks is a faint hint of shadow. They begin again.
No one seems to be minding the camera; after a while, one of the guests runs into the tripod, and the two fall together to the dirt floor. The camera is then trained by chance on the hooded face, which has a floral pattern. It’s a pillowcase, I think. I can’t remember. The others run into the fallen figure, but hold themselves upright, recalculating their rough parabolas, trying to make sense of the new data.
Shed #4 was not made available for commercial release, though a few seconds from it ended up on either Tango & Cash or Mortal Thoughts. The master tape is quite long, and makes for tiresome viewing, but it’s not without its moments of pathos. Eventually everybody is on the floor. That is really the only possible outcome of Shed #4, whose title might refer to four sheds, in which case new assumptions have to be made about the property in Collins, or to the tape itself being the fourth in a series, which seems more likely, though this shed does seem a little smaller than the one we’re used to. Could be a function of population, though. When there’s more people in a room it just looks smaller to the eye. Fill it up with a whole bunch of people and you’d hardly be able to make out the details of the shed at all.
11
“Your dad’s told me a lot about you,” Shauna Kinzer said at the dinner table the following night. It was true. Steve Heldt talked about Jeremy every chance he got—about how he hoped things would work out with Bill Veatch; about how he was glad to still have his son in the house, even though it sometimes seemed like the time for a change was coming; about the movies they watched together. There was quiet power in the way she listened to him—patiently, not waiting to break in, hearing his story coalesce around a profusion of small details. He felt at ease telling her about himself. When he spoke, she’d watch his face, and when he did go quiet, she’d ask questions, good ones. He tended to smooth over dense growth with a high gloss of facts and figures—place names, lineages, simple chronologies. She kept bringing him back into the picture. “So where are you in all this?” she’d asked at one lunch when he’d started down some line of dates and places; later, back at work, he supposed it was time she met his son.