Dylan Nice - Other Kinds

His own sense of death escaped him. His books sat unread.

A year passed. Friends moved. His rent went up and the university would still not surrender his degree. He withdrew from school owing to debt and took up with a nice girl who enjoyed her work. They lived together in a well-insulated apartment for young professionals.

There was a bar far into the cornfields where he sat away from the comfort of her and tried to remember himself. Moths circled the floodlight at the door. The men there spoke roughly when the women walked by in their long way. That night, this was years ago, everyone was silent while the men on the television news told them that the threat was no longer vague but was still far away. Explosions had been recorded. The war was there, they said, it was certain, and their best people were out looking for it. The man drank fast and then he left. He drove. He kept his foot clamped hard on the pedal while sweat stung from his pores. Oaks lined the road, grown thick from the size of the sky. Heat lightning flashed from the horizon. It must be true: he felt himself free with the possibility of capture.

The river was high when he crossed it, and he watched the force of it against the concrete pillars, how the river didn’t stop and the pillars didn’t move and it kept doing that all that day and through that night. The night before, Tom had wanted a girl to come over who wouldn’t. She talked about stability.

Most people who lived here didn’t really live here — this was a town people went to for a time, so they could get something else they wanted, a job, a wife. Tom, too, was indebting himself to the institution before he could move on to further debts.

He thought about what he’d said to the girl last night, the girl with the careful eyes who wouldn’t come.

“It could be nice,” he said.

“Not tonight,” she said. “It’s late.”

He was thinking about the fabric she wore and the smell of the candles she burned. She looked like something he didn’t belong to. He’d tried once to look that way, too.

“It’s not too late for it to be nice for a little while,” he’d said.

“It’s never a little while,” she said, her voice losing its give. “It hasn’t been a little while.”

He tried sounding like this was simply a thing girls said and it pleased him. She was a small girl who wore short brown hair and seemed happy but then closed her eyes when she wasn’t talking. Before she came here, she had worked at one of those chain stores that distributed surf culture in places with no beach.

No one was out on the street because of the rain. The tops of buildings were blurred by the fog, and Tom was wet, but he knew where he was going now. He had decided. The river was already behind him, and he had already looked at where the water had come over the banks and would turn the grass black. He was in front of a bar with red lights in the window where he drank at night and rolled cigarettes in his booth and then stood in front of the glass watching himself exhale. His face was in the window, just the shape and enough of his eyes so he could see who he was.

She was in his booth with him one night. The bar was loud and had plywood floors and smelled like a garage, a place that lets the winter in; Tom kept smelling and drinking his beer and liking it but wanting to leave, too. The girl wore something white with silver earrings that touched her shoulders.

“What I’m going to do,” he said, “is finish this beer and then walk home.”

She knew this was an invitation to go with him and she did. After they walked past the empty front porches and gravel alleys to his building, Tom did the things he liked to do, move her hair over her eye and behind her ear, run his fingers where the edge of her jeans met her stomach. The clothes got tugged and some came off, but then this fear Tom had set in. There was just someone against him.

He stopped wanting her but kept trying to want her.

“It’s all right,” she said.

“Let’s just lie down awhile,” he said.

She did lie down and still used the easy voice you use in somebody’s bed. He had wanted her earlier that day and even when she was near him in the booth, but not now. He smelled her warmth through the smell of wood and dust and felt her thigh against his.

She talked about her family.

Tom told her a story about his grandfather, a man who only came out of the woods for seeds and tobacco. The autumn before Tom moved away, his grandfather came to their house and sat on the back porch in a grease-stained sweater and jeans, his curly white hair standing up. He drank a few beers and talked about a tractor he got running again, then he said he’d dug a hole out behind his house and they’d need to put him in it soon. Three mornings later, his heart gave out at the kitchen table.

“We don’t have anything like that,” she said.

“People decide they’re going to be like that,” Tom said.

Tom told her the story because he thought she liked him enough not to care if it was a lie. He sat up and put on his shirt and handed the girl hers. Light shined in that spot. The girl was totally illuminated — what she wanted was so visible her skin seemed to suggest that what she wanted would never go away.

Lily looked at you hard when she laughed. She came to the plains from an eastern city to see the size of the weather, the long breaths of wind, the way you could see the rain well before you rode into it. The place I was from was just as empty but not as flat. It took me years to get used to having nothing on the horizon, nothing farther in the distance to mark time. When I first got off the highway, there was a tin-roofed gas station at the end of the long exit ramp, then a town you couldn’t see until you were inside it. There were dusty brick streets and storefront bars, a lot of places to find someone who looked a lot like Lily. I met her late one summer night when she caught me about to kill a wasp beneath a streetlight.

“Don’t,” she said.

She wore her hair long and her jeans high in a way I liked. We stood and smoked, talking about the warmth of the air. I bought beers served in jars with handles and we sat in a booth along a row of windows, like we were in a train about to leave. We went for slow walks under big dark oaks and I found out about her father, recently gone from cancer, the money he left, the three-story federal she rented and lived in alone. There had been a failed engagement, she said, whole years lost. Lily looked young but almost a decade separated us. She said she worked during the days but didn’t say at what. Her house was hardwood and stacked with books so I imagined someone paid her to think about things I couldn’t yet understand. I had been alone a long time and figured there was a lot I didn’t know.

That spring the rain was heavy and I took her to the overflow — a ten-foot pipe at the base of a river dam. We stood at the chain-link fence where brown floodwater poured. A foul-smelling mist sprayed up from the constant, violent waves. We watched the waters swell for too long, so long the ground seemed to move and made us dizzy.

“What’s it mean?” she wanted to know.

“Nothing,” I said. “You said this was the kind of stuff you wanted to see.”

We watched a little while longer, not saying anything. The clouds broke around the sun and made the day hot. A few men were fishing where the water calmed.

“Do you know how to get to the corn from here?” she asked.

There were some apartment complexes, an inexpensive university between us and the cornfields. “The corn’s pretty much straight in every direction,” I said. She laughed the way I hoped she would.