Universal Harvester(46)
Emily felt vindicated. Back in West Covina he’d tried to convince the movers to haul the whole couch off to the Goodwill, but she’d caught wind of the arrangement in time. “Let’s at least keep the cushions,” she’d said: they were yellowish green, a little grotesque. For her, they brought back fond and now quite distant memories of her first pregnancy, when the couch, new and modern, had been the most comfortable seat in the house.
When, having rearranged them into a tidy stack, she turned around to view the room again, Ed saw the expression on her face: in the year they’d spent out on the road, they’d grown accustomed to the vagabond life, keeping possessions down to a minimum and making do with materials at hand. But now, all this old stuff, the chairs and the bookshelves and the cushions, were a line out to the time before they’d set off on their adventures: to the long gathering time that had made all their adventuring possible in the first place, over forty years of diligent, almost unconscious preparation.
“You were right, you were right,” he said, smiling.
*
It was the first weekend that June when James and Abby arrived; he flew from Albuquerque and she came from Portland, and both their connecting flights articulated in Dallas.
“How long are you gonna stay?” James asked his sister while they waited at the gate. The airport was crowded, busy, and loud, televisions and gate-change announcements competing unsuccessfully for attention over the sporadic beeping of utility shuttles.
“All summer?” said Abby. “I don’t know. My dorm doesn’t open back up until August. I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“How’s Reed?”
“Portland is the best,” she said. “I want to stay after I graduate.” James felt a pang of jealousy; he couldn’t wait to leave New Mexico behind.
“You’ve been there a year,” said James.
“But there’s so much going on in Portland,” she said. “It’s all right there, you just walk everywhere. Or take the bus. You don’t have to even have a car. I don’t know. I just fell in love with it all sometime during the winter. For two days we had snow.”
“Maybe you’ll fall in love with Collins,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. “Maybe you will,” she said, ducking out of the way before he could punch her on the shoulder.
*
“It’s just a gigantic dirt lot,” said James. Abby’d burst into tears upon seeing her mother in the driveway: parents get so old when you leave them to themselves for a few semesters. But the men lingered outside by the old corncrib. James wanted to see what he was in for, and Ed was eager to see his only son’s eyes taking the place in for the first time.
“No, it’s a field,” said Ed.
“Fields have grass on them.”
“Well, there’s actually some pretty tall grass to cut through once you get all the way out there to the trees,” Ed laughed. “We gave up before we got through it. But whoever was here last tilled under the crop at the end of the harvest, anyway. There’s actually some stuff coming up if you go out and look.”
James pointed toward the trees. “You guys planning on opening a junkyard?”
People have expectations of a field: what one ought to be like, how it ought to feel. But a field is what you make of it. The dilapidated bus and the gutted Oldsmobile in the tall grass out by the ancient black walnut trees at the far end of the property bequeathed a vague squalor to the otherwise empty field that abutted the Collins house, easy to miss if you scanned the lot quickly but hard to shake off once you’d registered them there, rusty and dry in the early summer sun.
James started out across the field, his father behind him.
*
I lived in Colo, Iowa, for a couple of years. It’s right up the road, really. I was in a holding pattern, waiting to know what to do with myself next. I worked one harvest on a grain elevator; it was punishing work, and everyone seemed a little surprised that I was up to the task. They never said so, of course. There isn’t a lot of unnecessary conversation on a grain elevator.
I manned the west site a time or two: it had a grate into which trucks could dump soybeans. It was my job to open the back of the truck and turn on the belt that carried the beans to the bin. There were two, maybe three small silos, as I remember: it’s been a long time.
In a small grass lot on the other side of the silos were several abandoned cars. I have always wondered how a thing as big as a car comes to be abandoned: Does somebody drive it to its destination, knowing this will be the end of the line? Does a driver one day say, that’s it, this car has broken down on the road one time too many, I can’t stand it any more, no one will ever want this car, I’m just going to leave it here? Do junkyards tow cars too stripped to be of value to distant fields and unhook them in the middle of the night?
There was a lot of junk in these cars, which I took the liberty of investigating more closely one cold November afternoon when the trucks were coming in slowly, no more than two or three an hour. There were admissions packets from DMACC and crumpled Marlboro 100 packs. There were clothes—a thin pink cardigan, some sweat socks—which seemed very sad to me. On the seat of one car there was a dildo with a plastic handle at its base; it looked to have been wrested from a display case somewhere.
I didn’t ask my coworkers at the grain elevator if they knew anything about whose cars these might have been or why they’d been left there. They would have found the question odd, and probably embarrassing, especially coming from me. Who cares about some junked cars in a grass lot over by the west site? My house, when I lived in Colo, stood directly across the street from the west site; when I finally moved out, in September of 1994, the cars behind the bins were still there. If, in all the years that have passed between then and now, anyone has thought of them, it was probably only to say that they meant to take care of them somehow, someday, and that the parts might be worth something, so they weren’t ready for the junkyard just yet.