Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

“This here’s my wife, Kirsten,” Lance said.

Kirsten smiled.

“Pleased,” the kid said. He crawled under the chassis of the car and inspected the tailpipe.

“Your whole underside’s rusted to hell,” he said, standing up, wiping his hands clean of red dust. “I’m surprised you haven’t fallen through.”

“I don’t know much about cars,” Lance said.

“Well,” the kid said, his face bright with expertise, “you should replace everything, right up to the manifold. It’s a big job. It’ll take a day, and it’ll cost you.”

“You can do it?” Kirsten asked.

“Sure,” the kid said. “No problem.”

Lance squinted at the oval patch above the boy’s shirt pocket. “Randy,” he said, “what’s the least we can do?”

“My name’s Bill,”the kid said “Randy’s a guy used to work here.”

“So, Bill, what’s the least we can get away with?”

“Strap it up, I suppose. It’ll probably hold until you get where you’re going. Loud as hell, though.”

The kid looked at Kirsten. His clear blue eyes lingered on her chest.

“We represent a charity.” Lance handed the kid one of the printed pamphlets, watching his eyes skim back and forth as he took in the information. “Outside of immediate and necessary expenses, we don’t have much money.”

“Things are sure going to hell,” the kid said. He shook his head, returning the pamphlet to Lance.

“Seems that way,” Lance said.

The kid hurried into the station and brought back a coil of pipe strap. While he was under the car, Lance sat on the warm hood, listening to the wind rustle in the corn. Brown clouds of soil rose from the fields and gave the air a sepia tint. Harvest dust settled over the leaves of a few dying elms, over the windows of a cinder-block building, over the trailers in the courtyard across the street. One of the trailer doors swung open. Two Indians and a cowgirl climbed down the wooden steps. It was Halloween.

“You got a phone?” Lance asked.

“Inside,” the kid said.

Lance looked down and saw the soles of the kid’s work boots beneath the car, a patch of dirty sock visible through the hole widening in one of them. He walked away, into the station.

____

The kid hadn’t charged them a cent, and they now sat at an intersection, trying to decide on a direction. The idle was rough. The car detonated like a bomb.

“Here’s your gum,” Lance said.

He emptied his front and back pockets and pulled the cuff of his pants up his leg and reached under the elastic band of his gym socks. Pink and green and blue and red packages of gum piled up in Kirsten’s lap. He pulled a candy bar from his shirt pocket and began sucking away at the chocolate coating.

“One pack would’ve been fine,” Kirsten said. “A gumball would have been fine.”

“Land of plenty, sweetheart,” he said.

Kirsten softened up a piece of pink gum and blew a large round bubble until it burst and the gum hung like flesh from her nose.

“Without money, we’re just trying to open a can of beans with a cucumber,” Lance said. “It doesn’t matter how hungry we are, how desirous of those beans we are — without the right tools, those beans might as well be on the moon.” Lance laughed to himself. “Moon beans,” he said.

Kirsten got out of the car. The day was turning cold, turning to night. She leaned through the open window, smelling the warm air that was wafting unpleasantly with the mixed scent of chocolate and diesel.

“What’s your gut feel?” Lance asked.

“I don’t know, Lance.”

She walked toward the intersection. Ghosts and witches crossed from house to house, holding paper sacks and pillowcases. The street lights sputtered nervously in the fading twilight. With the cold wind cutting through her T-shirt, Kirsten felt her nipples harden. She was small-breasted and sensitive and the clasp on her only bra had broken. She untucked the shirt and hunched her shoulders forward so that the nipples wouldn’t show, but still the dark circles pressed against the white cotton. The casual clothes that Lance had bought her in Key Biscayne, Florida, had come to seem like a costume and were now especially flimsy and ridiculous here in Tiffin, Iowa.

A young girl crossed the road, and Kirsten followed her. She thought she might befriend the girl and take her home, a gambit, playing on the gratitude of the worried parents that Kirsten always imagined when she saw a child alone. The pavement gave way to gravel and the gravel to dirt, and finally a narrow path in the weeds dipped through a dragline ditch and vanished into a cornfield. The girl was gone. Kirsten waited at the edge of the field, listening to the wind, until she caught a glimpse of the little girl again, far down one of the rows, sitting and secretly eating candy from her sack.

“You’ll spoil your dinner,” Kirsten said.

The girl clutched the neck of her sack and shook her head. Entering the field felt to Kirsten like wading from shore and finding herself, with one fatal step, out to sea. She sat in the dirt, facing the girl. The corn rose over their heads and blew in waves, bending with the wind.

“Aren’t you cold?” Kirsten said. “I’m cold.”

“Are you a stranger?” the girl asked.

“What’s a stranger?”

“Somebody that kills you.”

“No, then, I’m not a stranger.”

Kirsten picked a strand of silk that hung in the little girl’s hair.

“I’m your friend,” she said. “Why are you hiding?”

“I’m not hiding. I’m going home.”

“Through this field?” Kirsten said.

“I know my way,” the little girl said. The girl was dressed in a calico frock and dirty pink pumps, but Kirsten wasn’t quite sure it was a costume. A rim of red lipstick distorted the girl’s mouth grotesquely, and blue moons of eyeshadow gave her face an unseeing vagueness.

“What are you supposed to be?” Kirsten asked.

The girl squeezed a caramel from its cellophane wrapper, and said, “A grown-up.”

“It’s getting dark,” Kirsten said.” You aren’t scared?”

The little girl shrugged and chewed the caramel slowly. Juice dribbled down her chin.

“Let me take you back home.”

“No,” the girl said.

“You can’t stay out here all by yourself.”

The girl recoiled when Kirsten grabbed her hand. “Let me go,” she screamed, her thin body jolting away. “Let me go!” The fury in her voice shocked Kirsten, and she felt the small fingers slip like feathers from her hand. When the girl ran off through the rows of corn, it was as if the wind had taken her away. Instantly, she was nowhere and everywhere. In every direction, the stalks swayed and the dry leaves turned as if the little girl, passing by, had just brushed against them.

When Kirsten finally found her way out of the field, she was in another part of town. She walked the length of the street, looking for signs, deciding at last on a two-story house in the middle of the block. A trike lay tipped over in the rutted grass, and a plastic pool of water held a scum of leaves. Clay pots with dead marigolds — woolly brown swabs on bent, withered stalks — lined the steps. A family of carved pumpkins sat on the porch rail, smiling toothy candle-lit grins that flickered to black, guttering in laughter with every gust of wind. On the porch, newspapers curled beside a milk crate. Warm yellow light lit the downstairs and a woman’s shadow flitted across a steam-clouded kitchen window.

Kirsten heard a radio playing. She knocked on the door.

The woman answered. Her hair was knotted up on her head with a blue rubber band, a few fugitive strands dangling down over her ears, one graying wisp curling around her eye. A smudge of flour dusted her cheek.