Universal Harvester(42)
“Oh,” she said.
Jeremy felt himself getting ready to do something he wasn’t comfortable doing.
“She’s a nice person. I can’t figure it out. I have to talk to somebody about this,” he said.
He couldn’t see her smiling in the dark, and she calibrated her tone so he wouldn’t be able to hear it, either. “Do you want to come over?” she said.
At one thirty a.m. in Nevada at the very end of spring, his was the only car driving evenly down the side streets, turning cautiously, not even attracting imaginary attention. Jeremy reflected upon the moment as best he could, situated as he was, there at its center. It felt quietly dramatic, inward-turning: an unfamiliar feeling. He settled into it. There was no telling how long it would last.
*
“I still have the charts,” she said. She was at the closet door, in her bedroom, still in her nightclothes: Cyclone Red sweatpants and an oversized Lake Okoboji T-shirt. In a previous lifetime, last winter, this would have made Jeremy feel profoundly uncomfortable, but the events of the day had left him open to unfamiliar positions.
Stephanie’s apartment was just off downtown, on the second floor of a three-story building that predated the Second World War. Steve and Jeremy lived in a ranch home that had gone up at the same time as the rest of the ones surrounding it; at Stephanie’s, he felt acutely conscious of how little he actually knew about other people’s lives, and of several assumptions he’d always carried but never named. You could see the whole of the place as soon as you came in through the front door; there was a fern on a single bookcase, and another hanging from a hook in the window frame, and not much else. Her bed was right in the middle of the room with a collapsible table next to it, like the ones in hospitals. The window looked out onto Sixth Street; he kept stealing glances at the sidewalk below.
Her charts consisted of two notebooks and a large sheet of paper from an artist’s sketch pad with an actual map drawn on it: cut sections from laser printouts were affixed to its edges by paper clips. It was big enough to hang on the wall; its four corners bore faded tape marks.
“I was really mad at you,” she said, not looking up from her work.
“I know,” he said, also keeping his gaze downward, following her hands as they smoothed out rumpled papers and tried to settle on a definitive arrangement, keen to keep up as much of his guard as he could readily access without being obvious about it.
*
In the future, would he spend as much time in the car every day as he had today? Once you get outside of town after dark you can’t see much through the windows: the night’s still dark and big off the shoulders of the Iowa highways. He was riding out to Collins, too tired to drive his own car, thoughts pleasantly sloshing around inside his head like slurry in a cement mixer. Stephanie drove a 1981 Thunderbird she’d been given by her grandmother; it got eleven miles to the gallon and sailed across the asphalt like a ship.
“What if they’re still awake?” she said without looking over at him.
“It’s three in the morning,” he said, and then, looking at the clock in the dashboard and correcting himself: “It’s three thirty. Farmers might get up pretty soon but Sarah Jane’s no farmer.”
“I thought you said they had pigs.”
“No,” he said, a little dreamily, picturing what the place would look and smell like if there were even a couple of hogs on the plot. Imagining the different feel as he ascended the porch steps earlier that day, his shirt wet with Ezra’s blood.
“Don’t know where I got that, then,” she said, smiling.
Jeremy leaned back against the window, stretching his left leg out a little on the bench seat.
“Thanks for doing this,” he said. “I feel all backwards.”
“I think you kind of like the excitement,” she said. “Can you at least admit you kind of like it?”
“We’ll see if I do,” he said, gently closing his eyes, completely adrift for possibly the first time in his life, hoping that the jolts of fear that kept flashing up through his fatigue weren’t visible on his face.
*
What were they expecting: floodlights? High-wattage motion-sensitive lamps that come on with a pop when the car gets within range of the beam? There’s no light at all. The waning moon is visible, but weak; the stars are dazzling, but strictly decorative, useful only for calculating calendar time. Once she’s killed the headlights, midway through her left turn into the driveway, at Jeremy’s urging—he was nearly whispering: “Now, now. Before they hit the living room windows”—everything goes dark.
The voice came from the porch before they were even fully out of the car.
“What are you doing here?” said Lisa Sample, still not visible from where Jeremy and Stephanie stood.
He quickly put on his disguise, the one he’d been born with, that made him look and sound like a man on the other side of middle age who didn’t have any use for conversation. “Worried about Ezra,” he said.
Behind Lisa, the blue glow of a television throbbed and ebbed against the living room window from the inside.
“Watch your step,” she said, pointing at the stairs leading up to the porch.
4
“Can you go out to Grimes and show Lyle how to operate the Super Boom?” Bill was saying. Jeremy was at the table saw crosscutting wood. It was busywork; most clients who needed wood in bulk could do the cutting themselves. But he’d learned in his first winter at Veatch & Son that he liked to keep his hands busy when it got quiet around the yard. There was always at least one person on a weekend coming in wanting odd lengths of wood for some project or another, so it wasn’t an entirely idle effort. It beat just standing around.