Annie DeWitt - White Nights in Split Town City

“Scout’s honor,” I said.

Father emerged from the house. He fumbled with his keys in the lock before hustling down the walk toward the truck. He’d slung the old army backpack that he and Sterling used to take hiking over his shoulder. Father was always naming off the mountains they had peaked together. “As boys,” he’d say.

“Jeanie,” Ray said chuckling. “Be a lady and jump into the back to make room for your old man.”

I moved down the bench toward the center of the cab in order to swing my body over the rise of the seat, upsetting a loose stack of newspapers next to Ray.

“What are you hiding under there?” I said, brushing aside the papers. Ray’s Colt sat on top of a cheap low-gloss circular advertising the week’s specials. Home goods and electronics.

“You never know when you’ll find a sand shark trailing you in the water,” Ray said, taking the gun and focusing it through the windowsill in front of him. “Don’t want any predators sneaking up on our big game.” He narrowed one eye as though picking off a fish as it leapt from the water.

I looked through the windshield in front of us. Father started to run toward the truck.

“Jesus, Ray,” Father yelled through the window. “Put your gun away. That’s my kid you’ve got in here.” Father’s voice was making that jagged pant it did after he’d galloped Rebel.

“No harm done,” Ray said. He opened the door to the glove compartment and tucked the Colt under a pile of napkins. “I wouldn’t be caught dead on the open water without some form of protection.” Father slid into the cab.

“She’ll be safe in there,” Ray laughed slapping Father’s thigh before starting the engine.

The back of the cab was narrow and dirty. The floor was littered with work shirts, random utility tools, and empty cassette cases. I sat on a pile of newspapers stacked behind Father. The seats in back were short and squat. They flipped down from the walls. The rocks and dust kicked up around us as Ray sped off. The road had that type of lonely exhilaration.

As we passed the Starlings’ home, there was a light on in the kitchen. A creature of habit, Ruth kept her husband’s hours. She’d gotten up to put a pot of coffee on before Ray’d left for the fish. I imagined her sitting around their kitchen table in a thin pink bathrobe fingering a pile of cards, savoring one of the lone Parliaments she kept in the back of the junk drawer behind her make-up and the piles of bills.

The road followed the curve of a short steep hill. At the bottom sat the Young residence. Ginny was a nurse in the children’s ward at the local hospital. Dan kept house, an arrangement which was widely suspected but rarely spoken of. The renegade son of the local construction company, Dan had abandoned his share of the business. He’d thrown off his Father’s shadow in favor of Vietnam. He’d returned from the war with a back injury that kept him from steady work. Dan kept a motorcycle and a small fishing boat, which he financed by working odd hours at the auto body. Occasionally you’d see him working in the driveway, fixing somebody’s carburetor.

Something in this arrangement would’ve irked people had it not been for Dan’s service and the beauty of his wife. Petite and naturally trim with a perky bosom that she showed off while gardening in her two-piece, Ginny had a doll like quality which made men like Father clam up when they spoke to her. People respected Dan for having the courage to keep her around. Such a task required that a man of his means be around on the constant. Dan and Ginny had produced two children. Lissie, Danny Jr. and I rode the bus. The town was not required to fetch us. We offspring of an unpaved road which dead-ended at the town’s border walked each morning to the little bridge near the farm stand where the dirt met the pavement. We waited for the bus on the stump next to the stop sign at the corner. If we were early, we raced sticks under the bridge, a habit Mother had warned me against as the bridge was preceded by a blind turn around which the occasional car came speeding.

My experience of the Young’s house was based on a single exposure. I’d been invited to dinner once when Mother had class at the feed store and Father was working late. Lissie had prepared a casserole while her father slept on the couch in front of the game. Danny struggled with a load of colors in the basement. A chart of chores on the refrigerator was evidence of their father’s regiment. Despite the abundance of foil stars, bright red and blue assigned to Lissie and Danny respectively, the refrigerator gave the kitchen the effect of Christmas in the barracks of an underground war unit, the iridescent stickers glinting in the light of the overhead halogens every time anyone opened the door. When Ginny returned home from work, her lips were still glossy. Her eyes were the only thing that betrayed her. The brilliant blue replaced by tired blinders of gray.

At the table, Dan Sr. had said grace. It seemed we’d barely stopped eating when the children were up clearing and scraping.

A bungalow built in the style of the frontier with a large triangular atrium and a sleep loft that overlooked the kitchen and living area, the house itself boasted the slick and sleaze of a seventies ski cabin where people from the city went to drink bourbon and turn down the sheets on one another’s’ wives for a weekend before stumbling back into their Rolls, the fridge still stocked with dark winter brews and the carcasses of half eaten chickens. Here were the glass windows Mother dreamed of. I imagined Ginny luxuriating in front of them each evening after a long day of making the rounds, slowly undressing herself in front of the wall of glass that looked out onto the street while Dan watched from the couch, her thin chemise slipping down around her ankles to reveal her gentle curvature, which she pressed to the window, bending over so that through the part of her legs Dan could watch for the flash of headlights as they came up the street as Ginny made love to whomever might come to pass.

Meanwhile, the kids were tucked into their dormers at the rear of the house at an early hour. Lissie laid on her back and breathed heavily through her nose. Danny engrossed in a monster truck magazine illuminated by the small screw-top flashlight he kept under his sheets where he would eventually keep a switchblade and later his first gun.

The bungalow’s distinguishing feature was the flag Dan Sr. had erected on a tall metal pole on the front lawn. The girth of the pole intimated the seriousness with which Dan took this project. Erected in a small round bed of concrete around which the grass was mown, the flagpole was treated with the reverence of a monument. Each morning Dan walked out onto the lawn, barefoot and winded, with his eyes lifted toward the sky. Not a man to be rushed, he fixed any fold or snag in the flag’s fabric before raising the stripes to their full altitude where they billowed for the road to revere.

That morning, we’d caught Dan securing the line when we drove by. Recognizing Ray’s truck as it lumbered down the hill, Dan waved, eyeing the hitch and the boat in back with envy. “Good man,” Ray said as we barreled by, saluting the flag through the window. A fellow man of the uniform, Dan came to attention. Ray chuckled. “Crazy bugger,” he said under his breath. “Now there’s a man who knows how to keep his luck around.”

Beyond the Young’s house, down the road a stretch, was the stop sign where Lissie, Danny Jr. and I waited mornings, the little bridge in all its earnestness, and then the beginnings of Ada and Cash’s fields, their gray shingled house, and beside it the farm stand.

The streets skirting the radius of town were decorated by the types of homes with driveways that ran in a horseshoe and were lined in a reception of old town cars. Pillared porches and tall white fences enclosed trellises of wild roses and pots of imported tomatoes. Here decadence shifted in perennial storm. In winter, when the flowers and the tomatoes were under snow, images of horses in gingham blankets speckled the landscape. The lawns of these homes were turned into pastures where horses were kept close to the houses. Occasionally, the animals would run to the front of the yards and cast their necks over the fences, whinnying at the cars as they passed.