No One Will Miss Her(13)

Dwayne would let out this idiot’s chortle every time one of them incinerated itself, this duh-huh-hurr sound from deep in his throat, and eventually he’d drain his beer and pitch the can away into the yard and say, “These bugs are so fucking dumb.”

That was my man: half-drunk on a Tuesday, reveling in his superiority to something that doesn’t even have a central nervous system. Picking on someone his own size would have taken a kind of integrity he just didn’t have.

But the men in Copper Falls were like that. Not all of them, maybe even not most of them, but enough. Enough to make it a trend. Enough so that if you were one of them, you could look around and assume that the way you were was the right way to be. Your own father was probably the same; he would be the one who first taught you that there was a sense of power to be had in stamping on spiders, zapping flies, snuffing out a life so much smaller than yours that it hardly meant anything at all. You’d learn early, while you were still a boy.

Then you’d spend the rest of your life finding little things to crush.



It happened the summer that I was eleven, still young enough to feel that the place we lived had a kind of magic to it. Our trailer sat at the end of the lot nearest the road, the heaps rising up behind it like an ancient, ruined city. It felt like the edge of another world, and I liked to pretend that it was, and we were its keepers, my father and I—sentries at the borderland, charged with guarding ancient secrets from trespassers and plunderers. Snaking corridors of hard-packed dirt wound back between the piles of scrap metal, splintered furniture, broken and discarded toys. There was a line of busted-up cars marking the property line to the west, stacked like oblong building blocks, so old that they had been there not just since before I was born but since before Pop took the place over. Pop hated them; he worried out loud that they would topple one day, and warned me away from ever climbing them, but there was nothing to be done. The machine that had been used to lift and stack them had been long since sold off to pay some debt, and so the cars stayed, slowly rusting. I would weave my way back to the place where that line ended, where the heaps stopped and the woods began, a narrow path of yellowed grass winding into the trees just beyond the bumper of a crushed Camaro. This was the oldest part of the property, from some long-ago time before it became a repository for unwanted things. A hundred yards into the trees was my favorite spot: a clearing where the rusted-out husks of three ancient trucks sat facing each other, sunk into the earth up to the wheel wells. Nobody knew who they’d belonged to or how they’d come to be left there, nose to nose like they were paused in the middle of a conversation, but I loved the shape of them: the curvy hoods, the heavy chrome fenders, the big, black, bug-eyed holes where the headlights used to be. They were part of the landscape now. Animals had nested in the seats over the years; vines had threaded themselves through the chassis. One of them had an oak tree growing straight through it, rising out of the driver’s seat and through the roof, blooming into a lush green canopy overhead.

It seemed beautiful to me. And even the ugly parts, that line of stacked cars or the piles of busted junk, seemed like something exciting, dangerous, a little mysterious. I hadn’t figured out yet that I was supposed to be ashamed—of the trailer or the heaps behind it, of our cheap furniture, of the way Pop would pluck toys or books out of the boxes of crap people left at the junkyard, clean them up, and present them to me at Christmas or birthdays all wrapped up with a bow on top. I didn’t know they were trash.

I didn’t know we were trash.

I have Pop to thank for that. For that, if nothing else. I was able to imagine for a long time that we were the blessed guardians of a strange and magical place, and I realize now that it was because of him, that he took it upon himself to keep the world’s meanness at bay so that it wouldn’t interrupt my dreams. Even when things were tough, when the winter had lasted a month longer than usual, and the car broke down, and he had to spend our grocery money for a new transmission, he never let on that we were desperate. I still remember how he would walk into the woods at dawn and come back with three fat squirrels strung over his shoulder, the way he’d grin when he said, “I know a lucky gal who’s getting my nana’s special limb-chicken stew tonight.” He was so convincing with his “special” and “lucky” that I clapped my hands with joy. One day, I would realize that we weren’t lucky but broke, and that our choices were squirrel meat or no meat at all. But in those early days, neatly clipping the feet off my dinner with a pair of bloodstained tin snips, undressing them out of their skins the way Pop had taught me and his daddy taught him, it all felt like an adventure. He shielded me from the truth about who we were for as long as he could.

But he couldn’t do it forever.



I was alone a lot that summer, just me and the heaps and the junkyard cats. We’d always had a few skulking around, raggedy feral things that I rarely saw except out of the corner of my eye, a lightning-quick flash of gray slinking low from between the heaps and into the woods. But there had been a litter of kittens that winter; I could hear them mewing from somewhere near the trailer, and one day I saw a lean tabby cat disappear down a passageway into the trash with a freshly killed mouse dangling from her jaws. By June, the tabby had left for parts unknown, but the kittens were still there, grown into three curious, leggy adolescents who would sit on the heaps and watch me every time I walked through the yard. Pop gave me a long look the day I told him I wanted cat food from the grocery store.