Charles D'Ambrosio - The Dead Fish Museum

But this, Lance had said, this would allow them to turn their backs on that year, on everything they’d done for survival. A regular at the doughnut shop had set them up with their kit — the picture ID, the magazine subscriptions, the pamphlets. Although the deal worked like a pyramid scheme, it wasn’t entirely a scam; a thin layer of legality existed, and ten percent of the money collected actually went to the babies. Another ten percent was skimmed by collectors in the field and the remainder was mailed to a PO box in Key Biscayne. Of that, the recruiters took a percentage, and the recruiters of the recruiters took an even bigger cut. That’s the way it was supposed to work, but when Lance and Kirsten left Florida the tenuous sense of obligation weakened and finally vanished, and Lance was no longer sending any money to the PO box. They were renegade now; they kept everything.

Lance got out of the car. He tried to break the dragging tailpipe free, but it wouldn’t budge. He wiped his hands. Down the road the yellow lights of a farmhouse glowed like portals. A dog barked and the wind soughing through the corn called hoarsely.

“The worst they can do is say no,” Lance said.

“They won’t,” Kirsten said.

Lance grabbed his ledger and a sheaf of pamphlets and his ID. They left the car and walked down the road in the milky light of a gibbous moon that lit the feathery edges of a high, isolated cloud. The house was white, and seemed illuminated, as did the ghostly white fence and the silver silo. When they opened the gate, the dog barked wildly and charged them, quickly using up its length of chain; its neck snapped and the barking stopped, and when the dog regained its feet it followed them in a semicircle, as if tracing a path drawn by a compass.

Before they could knock, an old woman answered, holding a bowl of candy. Her hair was thin and white, more the memory or suggestion of hair than the thing itself. Her eyes were blue and the lines of her creased face held the image of the land around her, worn and furrowed. Her housedress drifted vaguely around her body like a fog.

“Evening, ma’am,” Lance said.

When he was done delivering his introduction on the evils of drugs, he turned to Kirsten for her part, but she said nothing, letting the silence become a burden. The whole of the night — the last crickets chirring in the cold, the brown moths beating against the yellow light, the moon shadows and the quiet that came, faintly humming, from the land itself — pressed in close, weighing on the woman.

Finally Kirsten said, “If you could give us a place to stay for the night, we’d be grateful.”

Lance said, “Now, honey, we can’t impose.”

“I’m tired and I’m cold,” Kirsten said.

Again the silence accumulated around them like a world filling with water.

“My husband’s gone up to bed,” the woman said at last. “I hate to wake Effie.”

“No need,” Kirsten said. “If we could just sleep tonight in your girl’s room, we’ll be gone in the morning.”

“My girl?”

“That’s a lovely picture she drew,” Kirsten said, “and it’s wonderful that you hang it in the living room. You must have loved her very much.”

A quelling hand went to the woman’s lips. She backed away from the door — not so much a welcome as a surrender, a ceding of the space — and Kirsten and Lance entered. Years of sunlight had slowly paled the wallpaper in the living room and drained the red from the plastic roses on the sill. A familiar path was padded into the carpet and a pair of suede slippers waited at their place by the sofa. The air in the house was warm and still and faintly stale like a held breath.

____

In the morning, Kirsten woke feeling queasy and sat up on the cramped child’s mattress. She pulled aside the curtain. The old couple were in the backyard. The wife was hanging a load of wash on a line, socks, a bra, underwear, linens that unfurled like flags in the wind. The husband hoed weeds from a thinning garden of gaunt cornstalks, black-stemmed tomato plants, and a few last, lopsided pumpkins that sat sad-faced on the ground, saved from rot by a bedding of straw. A cane swung from a belt loop in his dungarees.

“Any dreams?” Lance said. He reached for Kirsten, squeezing her thigh.

“Who needs dreams?” Kirsten said, letting the curtain fall back.

“Bitter, bitter,” Lance said. “Don’t be bitter.”

He picked his slacks off the floor and shook out the pockets, unfolding the crumpled bills and arranging the coins in separate stacks on his stomach.

“Let’s see where we’re at,” he said. Lance grabbed his notebook from the floor and thumbed the foxed, dirty pages in which he kept a meticulous tally of their finances.

“You don’t need a pencil and paper,” Kirsten said.

“Discipline is important,” he said. “When we strike it rich, we don’t want to be all stupid and clueless. Can you see them old folks out there?”

“They’re out there.”

“It must be something to live in a place like this,” Lance said. He put down the notebook and peered out the window. “Just go out and get yourself some corn when you’re hungry.” He pressed his hand flat against the glass. In the field to the east, the corn had been gathered, the ground laid bare. “It looks weird out there.”

Kirsten had noticed it also. “It looks too late,” she said.

“That’s the whole problem with the seventies.”

“It’s 1989, Lance.”

“Well, then, high time we do some something about it.” He pulled the curtain closed. “I’m sick and tired of washing my crotch in sinks.”

“I’ll go out and talk to them,” Kirsten said.

“Where’d you go last night?” Lance asked. “After the gas station.”

She didn’t want to say, and said, “Nowhere.”

“Get a look at yourself in that mirror there,” he said.

Kirsten sat in a child’s chair, looking at herself in the mirror of a vanity that had doubled as a desk at one time — beside the perfume bottles and a hairbrush and a box of costume jewelry were cups of crayons and pens and pencils and a yellowed writing tablet. Kirsten leaned her head to the side and began to brush her hair, combing the leaves and dirt out of it.

“Lance,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t take anything from these people.”

“You can’t hide anything from me,” he said, with an assured, tolerant smile.

Kirsten set down the brush and walked out into the yard, where the old woman was stretched on her toes, struggling to hang a last billowing sheet.

“Lend me a hand here,” she said. “The wind’s blowing so—”

Kirsten held an end and helped fasten the sheet. Dust clung to the wet cotton.

“I probably shouldn’t even bother hanging out the wash, this time of year,” the old woman said. She pronounced it “warsh.”

The swallowing mouth of a combine opened a path along the fence. The old woman shuddered and turned away.

“You have a beautiful place,” Kirsten said. “All this land yours?”

“We got two sections. Daddy’s too old to work it now, so we lease everything to a commercial outfit in Kalona.”

“You must eat a lot of corn.”

“Oh, hon, that’s not sweet corn. That corn’s for hogs. It’s feed.”

“Oh,” she said.

“That blue Rabbit up the road yours?” The old man walked with an injured stoop, punting himself forward with the cane. He introduced himself — Effie Bowen, Effie and his wife, Gen. He was short of breath and gritted his teeth as if biting the difficult air. A rime of salt stained the brim of his red cap.

“That’s us, I’m sorry to say.”

He tipped the hat back, bringing his eyes out of the shade.