Flight Behavior (18 page)

The forest went still under golden evening light that made everything look precious. Even the roar of the water seemed to quiet. “How big is your church?” Bonnie asked, after a bit.

“Over three hundred people,” she said, a figure that raised their eyebrows. She wondered what sort of church college students attended, if any. “And it’s not just our congregation. First it was just kind of locally famous, but people are starting to come from Cleary and places farther away. Now that it’s been in the paper twice.” The second time, when a reporter and photographer came, they’d claimed they were there to interview the science team, but it hadn’t gone that way.

“Hester keeps the touring pretty well organized. She doesn’t like the groups to be more than eight or ten at a time. And if people are, you know, old or something, disabled, or little children, she brings them on the ATV. She charges more for that.”

“So no senior discount,” Mako observed.

“Nope. My mother-in-law is not one for making allowances. If she were an undertaker, she’d tell her clients to quit whining and walk to the cemetery.”

They had a laugh at Hester’s expense, and Dellarobia felt a twinge, wondering where her loyalties ought to lie. Certainly she had not planned to fall into any alliance with these students. But she would miss their interesting energy when they were gone. They were all headed home for Christmas, wherever home was, the following week on the twenty-first. The shortest day of the year, according to Johnny Midgeon on the radio, her main educational source. Bonnie and Mako would not be coming back with Ovid after the break, because they were only second-year graduate students and had classes to attend. Ovid taught classes just for the first semester and the rest of the year did his research. He’d recently received something called a genius grant, Bonnie explained, implying this made him a VIP. Dellarobia had heard of stars with their own trailers, but not the type where the toilet and shower did double duty. Pete also might come back, Bonnie said, because he was a postdoc doing research full-time, but he wouldn’t stay long because he had to be on campus to run Ovid Byron’s lab. Dellarobia thought of mad-scientist labs in the movies, bottles of things boiling over, and despaired at the gulf between her brain and all there was to know. The words “butterfly lab” made no sense.

When they’d dropped back a little way behind the men on the trail, Bonnie also mentioned that Pete was a newlywed. His wife didn’t like him gone too long. Dellarobia pointed her chin at the well-muscled shoulders of Pete, and asked, “Would you?”

Bonnie laughed. “I guess not.” Dellarobia thought to ask Bonnie if she was also married. She said she wasn’t.

If Hester could look past her nose, she would see these kids were not stuck up. Worldly maybe, and heedless of their good fortune, to be sure. But in some ways they seemed young for their age. Dellarobia wished she could do something for them, other than zippers and laundry. And the dilly beans she’d brought them that once, which they’d gone crazy over, practically licking out the jar as if she’d put narcotics in there with the dill and vinegar. She could certainly bring over some more from Hester’s, as they’d canned about fifty quarts. How could a person never have heard of dilly beans?

A going-away party, she thought now. Just a little gathering in her living room, Christmas cookies and eggnog. She almost brought it up to Bonnie, but her nerve failed. They were near the end of the trail, the opportunity would pass; she formed the words but found she could not say them. She was embarrassed to invite these people into her house, that was the long and short of it. A man living in a motor vehicle, the others maybe rooming next to a meth lab, but still Dellarobia couldn’t bear how they would see her life. Like the country-music diner they called “vile.” If these kids didn’t know a zipper could be replaced, they had surely not seen the likes of her Corelle plates and stained carpet and pillow-strewn rooms. Her every possession was either unbreakable, or broken.

7

Global Exchange

E
very disaster proved useful for someone, it seemed, and flooding was good for the gravel business. Cub was called in to work double shifts through the weekend and into the following week, even missing church, which Hester felt was justifiable for those involved in emergency services. In Cub’s case that mostly meant delivering gravel to people whose driveways had relocated onto their downhill neighbors. But it also meant money, which brought no complaints. Dellarobia and Cub would catch up their house payments by year’s end, and everything else would go to the equipment loan, including Hester’s tour group proceeds. They’d been calling this her “butterfly money,” an apt name for such a lightweight source of funds. The impending loan payment was a balloon, and that name was not apt, for something that weighed enough to crush a family. Bear and the Money Tree men struck an agreement to wait a month for things to dry out, two months at the most, before they went ahead with the logging.

Dellarobia had hardly seen Cub since Hester’s surprising visit. She intended to mention it, but that afternoon he’d taken the monthly run to the landfill with their trash, and early the next morning she’d hiked up the mountain with Ovid and the students. When she came back, Cub was called in to work to drive gravel to a road washout, the first of many. Now she basically handed him his coffee as he went out the door. This morning she’d wondered where all their mugs had gotten to, and realized they must be rolling around empty on the floor of his truck. His shift ended at four today, and she’d asked Dovey to babysit so Cub could come with her to do some shopping for the kids. Dovey thought they should drive over to Cleary, which had fifty times more stores, at least to window-shop, but Dellarobia couldn’t afford to walk into most of those places, and recreational envy was not her idea of fun. Maybe the Walmart on this end of Cleary’s outskirts. But they ended up getting a late start, so they would just have to scavenge the subpar storefronts of Feathertown. Cub wasted a full hour putting up a whine. He was tired. A Virginia Tech game was on. Amazing, how men who had no use for college could summon such enthusiasm for college ball. “Why don’t you just go with the kids?” he’d asked. “You always do that, put Cordie in the shopping cart and go.”

“
Christmas
shopping? As in, Surprise, kids, Santa came?”

She hadn’t yet bought one present. A resentment of the Christmas season was fair game, she felt, for people who’ve lost their parents, have no expendable income, or both. The cedar still stood naked in their living room exuding its prickly scent, as barren of Christmas spirit as the muddy outdoor landscape. She’d asked Cub to mention to Hester they were doing Christmas morning at home this year. And maybe suggest she donate some set decoration for the affair. But she didn’t know how that was going, as she hadn’t really conversed with her husband in days.

Naturally, given an opportunity at last, she jumped in with both feet and they fell to arguing immediately. It was a rule of marriage: the more desperately you needed alone time with your spouse, the quicker you’d spoil it with a blowout. When they went out to a restaurant without kids for their anniversary a while back, they’d ended up yelling in the car, actually cracking the rear window with a pair of channel locks (hurled in anger but not actually
at
anyone), over why he’d left his greasy channel locks in the car, among other topics. Today’s acrimony was less athletic; they were too worn-out now for the major leagues. It was more of an endurance event, dragged through several errands across the four-block span of Feathertown: first the gas station, where she only let him fill the tank halfway so she could buy a carton of cigarettes for a price that nearly brought her to tears, swearing she’d make them last out the month, knowing she would not. Next, the discount hardware where they exchanged the fixture he’d picked up to replace their leaky kitchen faucet, because he’d gotten the wrong kind, as any idiot could plainly see. Now they hauled their dysfunctional date into the dollar store, where they hoped to provision their kids with a memorable holiday for something in the neighborhood of fifty dollars.

“I can’t go against my dad on that logging,” he said, for the twentieth time.

“You
can
, but you
won’t
,” she said. Ditto.

“Because I’m not
perfect
like you want me to be.” Ditto, ditto. They walked through the glass door and dropped it a few decibels, for decency’s sake. “Show me where else you can get that kind of money from,” Cub hissed, “and I’ll take it to Dad.”

The idea of that mountain dragged down, and a certain world with it, was becoming unthinkable to Dellarobia. Her life was unfolding into something larger by the day, like one of those rectangular gas-station maps that open out to the size of a windshield. She was involved in a way, with those scientists. And strangely, also, with Hester. She craved to tell Cub his mother wanted him to stand up against Bear, but she also longed for Cub to be his own man in this fight. A husband who was not just his mother’s pawn but also the head of his household: was that too much to ask?

A four-foot-tall Santa figure near the store entrance began to grind his hips and emit a thin electronic rendition of “Joy to the World.” It must have had some sensor inside that set the affair in motion when they walked near it. “Okay,” she said, “let’s focus. Christmas ornaments. Did you ask Hester about letting us have some of her stuff?”

“Here’s your Christmas stuff,” Cub said, waving at the aisles. Nobody could argue that one. The store contained enough plastic baubles to cover a hayfield.

“Great,” she said. “Family heirlooms made by slave children in China.” Her mother used to spit that one out like a curse: slave-children-in-China. Dellarobia was startled by the words she’d channeled, and that drab army of orphans she could still see in her mind’s eye. She used to picture them in poorly made caps and jackets, resentful of happy homes everywhere, undercutting her father’s handmade furniture business and her mother’s work as a seamstress. Eventually those brats even shut down the knitwear factory where her mother had stooped from business suits to underwear, in the last decade of her employable life. In hindsight, Dellarobia could fathom her mother’s drinking.

Cub was brewing a bad mood of his own design. He yanked out a shopping cart and began to toss things in: roach and ant killer, Krazy Glue, Clorox, antifreeze, shopping by the same rules he applied to watching TV. Channel-surfing his way through the dollar store. A quest that made her think of the skinny old man they always saw at the landfill, eternally churning the heap with his hoe, seeking some fortune in the dump where fortunes didn’t grow. Some called that living.

“Nice Christmas gifts, honey. If everybody on our list is planning suicide.”

He rolled his eyes, shook his head. A wife was to be endured. Men learned that from television, she thought.

“Well, why do I always have to be the police? You’re over ten dollars already.”

“Oka-ay,” he said, too loudly. “Since you already blew forty on your tar and nicotine.” He trudged off to put the items back, and shortly returned with two T-shirts, Fire Department and Little Pony, in the correct sizes. Six and ten dollars respectively. She took them to consider, rubbing the pathetically thin fabric between her fingers. The side seams of the Little Pony shirt ran right off the edges, already raveling apart.

“Why is girls’ stuff more expensive? Look at this. Half the amount of fabric, half the quality, and almost double the price.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, because boys wear their clothes out faster?”

“Oh, please. You think anybody’s on
our
side?” She tossed the T-shirts onto a shelf, entirely in the wrong place, and she didn’t care. Let them hire extra help; people needed the jobs. They turned the cart into the seasonal aisle. “Just ask Hester about the ornaments, okay? She’s got dump-truck loads. You could go up in her attic and steal some, she’d never know.” Dellarobia thought of the wooden ornaments her father made years ago, which must still exist somewhere. What a complicated life cycle those must have passed through: attic boxes, funeral upheavals, yard sales. Like an insect going through its stages, all aimed in the end toward flying away.

Cub picked up a brassy-looking plastic bell with the year on it, labeled “Keepsake,” and turned it over. “Two dollars,” he said. “That’s not bad.”

“Here’s the thing, genius, do the math. You need more than one. You need twenty or something, or the tree looks pathetic.”

He put the ornament back. Like a child, she thought. His consumer skills were somewhat more advanced than his daughter’s, but not by much. She looked over the bins of tinselly junk and felt despair, trying to find one single thing that wouldn’t fall apart before you got it home. Maybe her father was lucky to die young with his pride of craftsmanship intact. What would he make of this world? Realistically, it probably wasn’t slave children, but there had to be armies of factory workers making this slapdash stuff, underpaid people cranking out things for underpaid people to buy and use up, living their lives mostly to cancel each other out. A worldwide entrapment of bottom feeders.

“What about all those things you made when you were little, Cub?” she asked. “Those Popsicle-stick stars and stuff she’s kept all this time. Wouldn’t Hester at least give you those for our tree?”

“Talk about tacky,” he said.

“But it’s
our
tacky. Isn’t that the Christmas deal, pass on the love and all that?”

“The true meaning of Christmas is, Turn it over and look at the price tag.”

This struck her as the most insightful thing Cub had said in years, although maybe he just meant it literally. They began picking through a shelf of shrink-wrapped DVDs labeled “Previously Viewed.” She felt degraded, as if shopping for previously chewed meals. Cub held up one labeled “Monster Machines,” but she shook her head.

“That’s not really what Preston is into now. He likes nature stuff.”

Cub smirked and held up another, showing a gigantic python curled around a frantic girl who was showing a lot of leg.

“Read my lips,” she said, and then mouthed, “Asshole.”

Cub was aware of Preston’s new interest, and she suspected he didn’t care for it. He wanted his son to be good at sports. Preston’s stature, she knew for a fact, was a matter that Cub addressed in his prayers. Heaven forbid he should grow up to be a smart, nearsighted pipsqueak like his mother. There was a TV show Cub liked about geeky young men in an apartment, all geniuses supposedly, always reduced to stammering fools by the hot blond girl next door. Cub laughed and laughed at these boy scientists in their ill-fitting pants and dim social wits. Dellarobia noticed they had a dishwasher, and a pricey-looking leather sofa the size of an Angus steer.

She squinted to read the small print on what seemed to be a documentary about lions. It was hard to tell what you were really getting. And it was $12.50. For a previously viewed video, that was outrageous. Their cart remained empty as they rounded the corner into the toy aisle. Cub picked up a boxing robot game, registered the $20 sticker, and put it back. Then he picked out a large $5 affair that looked to be some combination of automatic weapon and chain saw.

“Every redneck child’s dream!” she carped, eliciting a tight, warning look she rarely saw from Cub. She should rein herself in, she knew that. The eruption of loathing came out of nowhere. It scared her. Who was she, anyway? A girl who got knocked up in high school and scurried under the first roof that looked like it might shed water. Now attempting to hang out with a higher-class crowd, getting above her station.

“Ho-ho-ho, you two! Santa’s little helpers?”

They looked up to see Blanchie Bise from church. Dellarobia gestured at their empty cart. “Not much help, are we?”

“I saw you were in the papers again, Dellarobia,” Blanchie said, tugging at her tightly belted raincoat. Everything she ever wore was sized for a previous Blanchie, before creeping weight gain took its toll. Dellarobia thought of it as the Wardrobe of Denial. Blanchie glanced anxiously from wife to husband, when neither of them responded about the newspaper article. “Well!” she piped. “What do you think of this weather? Should we start building an ark?”

Their argument hung suspended, like a movie on pause. Blanchie got the message and scurried along.

“I’m sorry if we’re raising redneck children on a redneck paycheck,” Cub said, in almost a growl. “At least I’m working.”

“Oh, and I’m not.”

He didn’t answer.

“You try running after those kids for a day, then. You’d be flat on your back.”

“I babysat them Friday. While you went running after those fancy-pants kids.”

“For one day, Cub. Not even a whole day. And you
were
flat on your back.”

“I watched them, didn’t I?”

“Is that what you call it? They’d emptied out the whole refrigerator onto the kitchen floor when I got back. Preston was trying to put a peanut butter jar in the microwave and Cordie was walking around with a ten-pound load in her pants. You were on the couch watching
1000 Ways to Die
, as I recall.”

“When are you going to potty-train her, anyway?”

When am I going to potty-train her
, mouthed Dellarobia, to the imaginary audience of her soap opera. Maybe not entirely imaginary. One of the yellow-aproned checkout ladies was pretty much following their every move. “She’s not even two yet,” Dellarobia hissed. “And what’s this about fancy-pants kids? Those students are living at the Wayside.”

“Slumming it for a vacation. They’ll go home at Christmas and tell their friends all about it.”

“I don’t know,” she said. She was aware that could be true. She felt herself looking at things through their eyes sometimes. A lot of times, in fact. Their days here were like channel-surfing the Hillbilly Network: the potholed roads, the Wayside, the sketchy diner, her tacky house. She herself was a fixture in their reality show,
Redneck Survivor
. It had altered her sense of things, even in this familiar store where she was examining her purchases with some new regard. As if she could go elsewhere.