Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

Frank B. Auberon, Sr.

Pomeroy

HENRY AND BRENDAN DROVE EAST ALONG THE FINGER LAKES, past brick buildings with flat roofs, white churches, stone Masonic Halls, gas stations, red lights, convenience stores. Brendan drank the sights in eagerly. The towns looked much as they had in 1954, when he’d traveled by bus from Rhode Island to Coreopsis, but the spaces in between the towns had changed. Low-roofed shopping centers and garden stores dotted what had once been stretches of field.

They passed an old woman in Waterloo scattering bread to some pigeons, and a row of swallows perched on the telephone wires in Cayuga. The sun caused complex patterns of shadow on a yard in La Fayette. In Cazenovia, a dog with brown eyes caught sight of Bongo and chased the van wildly for a while. Henry was silent, his face hidden in the shadow of his Red Wings cap. Look, Brendan wanted to say. Here. Look at all this. But instead he let Henry drive unmolested.

The van broke down south of Herkimer, within sight of another small town. There was a noise, first, which pulled Brendan’s eyes from the window; then there was smoke. Then Henry said, “Damn — the fan belt,” and then, “Hell. The power steering just went.” While Brendan watched, helpless but interested, Henry wrestled the van to the side of the road and then coaxed it into the parking lot of a service station next to a church.

Brendan let out his breath, aware only then that he’d been holding it. “Lucky for us,” he said.

“Lucky?”

“That it happened here.”

Henry shook his head, and when he hopped out of the van, it appeared that they were not so lucky after all. Quarter past six on a Saturday night — the station had just closed and there was no one around except for a boy with a lazy eye and a gap between his front teeth. Brendan opened his window as Henry approached the boy.

“Nope,” Brendan heard the boy say. “Can’t help you. All the mechanics are gone.”

“Is there someone I can call?” Henry asked.

“The other stations are all closed. Everyone’s gone home. I guess you’ll have to wait until Monday.”

“Monday? What are we supposed to do until then?” Henry laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder and eased him toward the van. “Look at this,” he said as he opened the side door. Brendan smiled down at the boy and said hello.

“This is my uncle,” Henry told the boy. “He’s eighty. He’s sick. Can’t you just look under the hood?”

Brendan did what he could to help. He let his hands curl into claws and his head loll forward against his brace. He wiped his smile away and let his mouth fall open, trying to look eighty, ninety, on his last legs. The boy was visibly impressed. Behind him, Henry shook his head and smiled.

“Wouldn’t do any good for me to look.” The boy stepped back and almost bumped into Henry. “I just pump gas. But there’s this guy my brother knows — he has a tow truck of his own. Maybe we could give him a call.”

“Let’s do that,” Henry said.

The two of them vanished inside a darkened building, and when they returned Henry looked relieved. “Just wait here,” Brendan heard the boy say. “Jackson’ll be along — he’ll take care of you. I gotta go.”

He ran his hand through his long blond hair, and his eyes disappeared as the strands rose and separated and then fell back against his face. He snapped his neck with a gesture Brendan hadn’t been able to make in years, which parted the curtain of hair and revealed his eyes again. Then he drove off in a low red car with enormous tires.

“Strange kid,” Henry said, and Brendan turned to him.

“What’s going on?”

Henry climbed back into the van. “We wait, I guess. This guy said he’d come tow us to his shop — he’s got a garage of his own, way out in the woods somewhere.”

Twenty minutes later Jackson appeared. His hands were grimy and his teeth were bad; he poked under the hood and said, “I can’t fix this here. Have to bring you back to my place. That all right?”

“Fine,” Henry said wearily.

Henry rode in the truck with Jackson, but Brendan and Bongo stayed in the van, which was tilted up and suspended by a tow bar. Jackson blocked the wheels of Brendan’s chair with the box Henry had taken from Kitty’s house, and he promised to drive slowly. For miles, out of town and along a quiet road that ran beside a river and then rose up into wooded hills and turned to dirt, Brendan watched the world pass by on a mysterious slant. Bongo barked beside him, excited and confused.

It might feel like this when I die, Brendan thought. His soul might float above the earth, dipping and tilting so that things were skewed from their natural positions. He’d felt like a ghost for months already, parts of his body shutting down one by one until, as the pie he’d tried to eat earlier had reminded him, nothing was working but his head. The tumors inside him had grown until his throat closed like a door when he tried to swallow. He couldn’t feel his legs at all; his hands and arms were his only intermittently. His lungs felt as solid as cheese — when he breathed, the air seemed to stop somewhere in his throat. He was solidifying, turning to stone, the organs and tubes that had once been hollow silting up. Sometimes it hurt, but mostly it didn’t; he often felt better, in an odd way, than he had in years. His joints, which had once stabbed him with shooting pains, felt as if they’d been packed in sand. His stomach, once a sack of fire, was calm. He was only his head, only his eyes and ears — the wedge of sky that flew by his window was as soft and gold as the skin of an apricot. Letting go wouldn’t be hard at all, he thought. The deadness would creep from his chest to his head and then his soul would slip out of his mouth. His brother’s soul might have slipped away just that easily.

The inside of the old gray Plymouth rings with Frank junior’s laughter. Margaret has just finished telling him a joke she heard at the dance, and Frankie says, “Olsen told you that?” and then reaches down to clasp the hand she has rested on his thigh. The rain pounds down on the roof of the car but inside they are warm and safe: finally, after all this time, almost at peace with their new lives. “We’ll go for a picnic tomorrow,” Frankie says. “Take the kids someplace nice.” And they are busy planning what they’ll bring when they come to the last curve on Boughten Hill. Frank turns the wheel easily, casually, but nothing happens; something in the steering mechanism has chosen this minute to break. They sail off the road without a pause and the wedges of night sky fly past their windows in the seconds before they meet the ground. Margaret is wearing a white dress and Frankie still has hold of her hand.

“Frankie,” Brendan said out loud. The van made a broad circle and then stopped.

Henry let Bongo out and tied him to a tree, and Jackson lowered Brendan’s chair. They were in a clearing, Brendan saw, a rough oval of dirt and grass surrounded by tangled trees. In the clearing sat a crumbling garage made of whitewashed bricks, an assortment of broken cars and trucks, a huge stack of wood, and a mound of trash. Off to one side, some tattered lawn chairs surrounded a ring of stones capped with a metal grill.

“You all right, old man?” asked Jackson.

“I’m fine,” Brendan said. “I enjoyed the ride.”

They never felt it, he told himself. They were flying, and then it was over. He focused his eyes on Jackson’s left hand and noticed a circle of white on his fourth finger, where a ring had once been. Dusk was closing in on the clearing and the trees were full of birds. An owl shrieked in the distance and then was still.