Jeffery Allen - Holding Pattern - Stories

His eyes met hers, black, stunned. Wait, she said. You don’t understand. She shook her head. You don’t—

I hate you! he screamed. I hate you! Concrete shoved him to his feet. I hate you! Brutal wind pulled him into motion and led him as if he were leashed. Down the sidewalk, beyond the El’s steel pylons, through warped, unfamiliar streets.

Through a window fogged with his breath, Hatch can see the first and last cars at once as the train curls slowly around the mountain, a giant horseshoe, the other cars — he counts them — like a string of scattered islands, an archipelago. In the green valley below, grass ducks under bladed wind, and trees are naked for all to see, their skinny arms pointing in jumbled directions. The mountain curves up from the valley in a range of stony ridges like knuckles and joints, a peach fuzz of morning light growing from them. Up ahead, the engine disappears into a tunnel, followed by one car, then another. A steady rush of squeezing darkness.

Boy, take this here jar of applesauce to Mr. John Brown. Blunt held out a mason jar, in conventional use a container for storing fruit but in Hatch’s hands a glass zoo for displaying fireflies, holes punched in the lid, metal gills.

Yes’m. His grandmother often entrusted him with such errands.

Free of her, he unscrewed the lid and dipped his finger in for a taste. Moist sauce made from apples fresh from Blunt’s yard. He walked past John Brown’s old red pickup truck, parked on the gravel road, as still as his gray metal mailbox with its little red metal flag. He unlatched the chain-link gate and entered the tree-shadowed yard. He sensed tingling animal smell.

John Brown’s house was exactly like Blunt’s — except that hers was green and white, his blue and white — a long and wide cereal box knocked flat. Hatch banged on the door with practical knowledge. John Brown was hard of hearing. Almost immediately, the door wedged open, inner light spilling out, as if John Brown had been awaiting him in his heavy black shoes, dark brown slacks with sharp creases like raised tents, and crisp white shirt ringed with sweat under the armpits. John Brown poked out his head. A long narrow wasplike face. Hair cropped close, watermelon meat chewed down to the rind. Oil glistening on the scalp. Walnut-colored skin that brightened like a lightning bug in the sun. Hardly a trace of eyebrow, just two dirty smudges. Toothless mouth, puckered, drawstring tight. Razor-slit eyes. Expectant shine.

Blunt send you some applesauce. He screamed the words. She need to send two or three more jars. John Brown was starvation skinny, on the verge of disappearing.

He took the mason jar. Boy, tell Miss Pulliam I thank her kindly.

Yes, suh— But John Brown had already slammed the door shut, bringing a showering of dust down from the porch roof.

Miss Bee pulled a lump of snuff from her mouth and patted it on his cheek. He closed his eyes at the pain.

Hold it in place.

It hurt.

Hold it in place.

He did as instructed, felt his cheek rising under his fingers, swollen like an overstuffed nest.

Keep it on there two hours.

Yes’m.

Two hours.

Yes’m.

If it’s not better in the morning, I guess we’ll have to amputate.

His mouth went tight with concentration.

And keep away from them hedges.

Bent forward in his padded adult-sized seat, he feels light move like hands up and down his back, his face hot with friction against the window’s baked vibrating glass. For as far as he can see, sun covers the world, as thick as honey, a warm buttery yellow over candy-colored houses. Midgets slosh through the valley in rhythmic black duck boots. He is certain that they are singing. A hunting song. They aim their rifles at the sky — a bright shimmering pink — hammers cocked.

Light splinters against the glass and brings a sense of space into the cramped coach. He studies a line of mountains — he has seen many mountains today — and, beyond the mountains, pure distance, until a stiff breeze pushes against the window and breaks his concentration. It continues, a violent rhythm pounding for entry.

Topped with off-white shades and hanging fringes, antique lamps cast soft triangular glow, fine radiance suspended like spiderwebs in the corners. Miss Bee’s store was so dim you had to carry light in from outside, massage it into your eyes. The store proper was pushed back to the farthest room of the house, money hidden in a drawer. A cigar box and a pad and pencil served as Miss Bee’s cash register. An old display case as her counter. Rolls of belly fat pushed her inches from its edge. This woman, akin to no other. Hamster-fat cheeks stuffed with snuff under the constant violence of big greedy horse teeth. She watched you with big round-lidded frog eyes, her face framed by two long skinny snakelike braids. The smell inside the house-store the same as that outside: chicken shit and the stinking ghosts of unborn chicks. Miss Bee had a rooster to crow for day, and plenty of noisy chickens running about her yard, pecking secret codes into the dirt. Every now and then, some lone fowl would escape and wander out onto the gravel road, and you would chase it down.

Thank you, boy. Now, pick you out a sucka.

Thank you, ma’am. That one there.

You a good boy, ain’t you?

Yes’m.

Miss Bee released a space-filling laugh.

She would come to your grandmother’s house smelling like chicken and bearing gifts of food: turdlike yams, runny mashed potatoes, gummy pound cake, warmed-over greens, or a green egg — tree growing inside — from the green womb of one of her hens.

You would crack the eggs and pour the yolks into a big bowl of milk. Blunt would fork bread into the mixture, then fry the slices in a popping skillet. You ate six slices of green French toast and six strips of bacon in a puddle of thick syrup. Chewed slowly, seeking out words in the yeast and meat.

A rattle of rain, hard, slamming, glancing with wind, big crystal-like drops shattering against the window. Then bright light spoking through the clouds. A rainbow formed, a pot of gold at either end to weigh it down, keep it earthbound. Leprechauns leaped at the colored bands with open hands.

Seated inside the deep tub, he extended his arms winglike, grabbed the hard enamel sides, and tried to pilot the vessel forward. The claw-feet dug porcelain talons into the bathroom tiles.

Boy, soap yo rag real good. Blunt stood near the sink, a big washcloth folded over her palm and hanging down to her forearm like loose pizza dough.

Yes’m.

And soap that rag good over yo whole body.

Yes’m.

And be sure to wash yo elephant snout.

He set three quarters ringing on the counter. Miss Bee’s eyes wandered round in her head. Should he slap them still? He wanted to.

Blunt want some bread.

Miss Bee fetched the bread.

He slapped a nickel on the counter. And give me one of them suckas. Strawberry.

Miss Bee looked him full in the face. Boy, where yo manners?

Ma’am?

Give me.

Sorry, ma’am. May I have a sucka? Please.

Miss Bee dug inside her nose, pulled her finger free, and with the same booger finger shoveled a plastic-wrapped sucker out of the box.

Broccoli-like clumps of squat tightly leaved trees and lanky palms — or so he figures; flora not native to this part of the country, the world — prodigious fronds spilling down like dreadlocks, floppy dog ears. Then black ink-lined trees traced on a thin gray-and-pink-cloud sky. Other trees in the valley, heavy with birds — he discovers three or four rare finds, new species, never before recorded by man — photo-still cows, and white houses hemmed in by blue sky, shining, naked bulbs. He fidgets in his seat, hard to keep still. A big sleek silver bird with streamlined feathers and sparkling talons lifts off into sky against the wind’s resistant slap, light forming a bright badge of achievement on its breast. Earth cannot restrain it. It flies off to somewhere behind the sun.