Rachel crawls out from under the bed. She is naked and she takes her robe from the hook on the closet door. She had awakened in the middle of the night and heard the voices outside the house, then heard the back door forced open, and she slipped out of bed and onto the floor, scurrying under like an insect. She listened as they ransacked the kitchen and living room, their movements loud and uninhibited as they believed they were alone. After half an hour they left but she hadn’t moved, lying motionless, afraid to blink, her nose inches from the box spring. She eventually unclenched her jaw and relaxed, then she slept, her body straight and still as if in a coffin. Now she moves towards the bedroom door in the gray morning light, wary of what she’ll see on the other side.
In the kitchen, the drawers are out and emptied onto the tile floor, the cabinet doors ripped off the hinges, the kitchen table and chairs overturned. The refrigerator door is open and its few contents splattered onto the wreckage—ketchup, salad dressing, leftover spaghetti. In the living room, a knife has ripped the cushions of the sofa and the recliner and small chunks of foam litter the room like dirty snow. Picture frames and lamps are broken and the television and VCR are gone. And on the walls of both rooms she finds creations in black spray paint—four letter words and cartoonish tits and cocks.
Rachel tiptoes carefully through the fragments of broken glass to the telephone on the kitchen wall, somehow still on the hook. She dials the sheriff’s office and asks for her brother Steven.
“Kinda early, ain’t it?” he answers.
“I need you to come out here. Somebody broke in and trashed the place.”
“Jesus, not again. That’s the third one this month. How bad is it?”
“Pretty bad.”
“And you?”
“I’m all right.”
They say goodbye and Rachel picks up a kitchen chair and sits down. It will take fifteen minutes for Steven to arrive, the sheriff’s department on the other side of the county with many bends in many narrow roads between them. Outside, the sun creeps higher and the gray light becomes yellow, the light growing through the kitchen window above the sink and shining on Rachel’s bare leg. It’s warm and she opens her robe and slides her other leg into the light, and she sits still, closes her eyes, can almost feel the sunshine penetrating her skin. She keeps her eyes closed and imagines this warmth finding her somewhere else—at a hotel pool, on a long walk—and her mind wanders until Steven pulls into the driveway.
***
“Were you here?” Steven asks. He stands in the middle of the mess with his hands on his hips. He shakes his head, bites his lip. “Little shits.” Rachel stands in the living room, leaning against the paneled wall.
“I hadn’t been here long. Worked late last night.”
“Let me guess—Dale wasn’t here.”
She shakes her head.
“How long’s he been gone this time?”
“A day or two.”
“I see the car’s not here. He got it?”
“Mary picks me up for work.”
“That ain’t the point.”
Steven kneels and looks more closely at the covered floor. He picks up a coupon that drips with Italian dressing. Then he stands and walks to the back door and examines where the deadbolt splintered the frame.
“How many did it sound like?” he asks.
“At least three, I think. Any ideas?”
“I figure it’s some bored high school kids. They don’t usually take anything, just do it for the hell of doing it. If your car would’ve been here they’d have probably kept going.”
“They took the TV and VCR.”
Steven takes a notepad from his shirt pocket and makes some notes.
Wearing sneakers now with her robe, she walks across the living room, past Steven, and out the back door. He follows her. She sits down on a blue ice chest under the carport and asks for a cigarette. They smoke together, Steven with his back to her, looking out across the overgrown acreage surrounding the small brick house. No one lives within sight and he is relieved they didn’t know she was there, that she stayed put and didn’t play hero. From here you could scream and scream but it would be the same as a whimper.
He flicks the cigarette into the yard, then he turns and says, “I’ll give you the money to get up there, Rachel. Just pack your shit and go. Mom has told you a hundred times you could stay with her for a while.”
“I know.”
“Then go. This afternoon. Take the bus. When Dale gets back I’ll come out here and take the car from him and me and the kids will clean up.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Goddam, Rachel,” he says.
“Don’t goddam me, Steven. I said I’d think about it. Let me have another cigarette. Mine are lost in there.”
He gives her another and takes one for himself. The morning is cool and clear and quiet. They had grown up with mornings like these. Their mother helped them make sandwiches and they walked across the damp fields to the woods and down to the stream. Steven took a hatchet and they built forts and later skipped rocks as they waited for the day to warm up and then they stepped into the spring fed water, wading downstream to where their feet came out from under them and they dove for the bottom, grabbed a clump of mud and hurried up with it dripping between their fingers to prove they’d made it all the way down. Now the fields are overgrown and on a Sunday afternoon Rachel had gone into the woods and looked for the path to the stream but it was also gone. And so is their mother, living with a man neither of them have ever seen somewhere in Ohio.
“What’s Dale up to this time?” Steven asks.
Rachel shrugs, the robe falling from her shoulder. She gives it a tug and says, “He’s been talking with this guy over in Hattiesburg about buying and selling buffalo. It’s supposed to be the new hamburger.”
“A buffalo farm, huh? Will this be like the llama farm he had out here in the backyard?”
“At least he’s trying.”
“Trying is working. Not running all over the goddam place digging for gold.”
Rachel stands from the cooler, sighs, doesn’t know what to say about Dale. Or about the mess inside. Or about anything.
“I need to clean up,” she says instead.
“I get off at four and me the boys will come out and help. You got to work today?”
“Tonight.”
She moves to go inside and Steven says, “Think we should call mom and let her know?”
Rachel runs her hand across her forehead, then answers flatly, “No.” She goes in and Steven walks to his car, looks back at the house, then the radio calls out a wreck on the highway and he drives away.
***
The windows are down and the music up and a beer sits between Dale’s legs as he drives along Highway 98. Hattiesburg had been what he expected and both the cooler and gas tank are full. A buffalo farm is on its way to southeast Mississippi. He met the man with the money, who had friends down from Birmingham with more money. They piled into a pickup and drove into the Forest County countryside and saw the acreage, met the men who would tend the herd, walked around with their hands on their hips. Dale couldn’t afford what they were asking but he talked like he could. So the men with the money bought his dinner and drinks and later he danced with a redhead and then a brunette and shook hands firmly and almost believed he was the big shot he pretended to be. When they left the last bar at two in the morning, he lifted the twenty dollar bill that was left for the tip and that gave him money for gas and beer for the ride home. He slept in the backseat of the small Nissan at the city park and awakened with a terrible catch in his neck, but four beers and a clear highway later, the day seems to open its arms and going home empty-handed is an afterthought.
He finishes a beer and tosses the can out of the window. The Styrofoam cooler sits on the passenger’s seat and he takes another from it. He looks around at the inside of the car and thinks he might stop and give it a vacuum, maybe even wash it. Give Rachel something to smile about.
Along the side of the highway, old men sell watermelons, peanuts, sweet potatoes out of the back of their trucks. He waves to them as he passes, wonders what kind of money they make. Wonders if any of them need a partner.
He hasn’t held a job since the textile plant laid him off. But Dale, unlike the others who set small fires and tossed rocks through windows on their last day of work, wasn’t upset by it. He figured the severance pay was good enough and it would give him time to think. To figure out how to work less, make more. All he needed was a catchy phrase on a t-shirt or a gadget that no housewife could live without.
He’d been thinking now for almost three years and the best he’d done was a booth each year at the county fair selling giant pandas. Which he didn’t like because he didn’t make enough to hire someone to do the actual work.
He was smart enough to know Rachel never complained as much as she wanted. They live in her mother’s house, square and small and free. The Nissan is Rachel’s, passed down from Steven. Dale keeps the grass mowed, the dishes washed. Her uncle bush hogs the twenty acres twice a year. Every once in a while he cooks dinner. If she wants more out of him, she hasn’t said it. Or at least she hasn’t said it loud enough. He anticipates the day when he can tell her to quit her waitress job at the truck stop, that we’re moving up in the world. How about a weekend in Gulf Shores to celebrate?
He tosses another empty can out of the window.
The men from Birmingham said he needed $20,000 to get a piece of the herd. Said he could turn around and make twice that once the buffalo matured and went on the market. And then you were set. Turn it over and turn it over and watch the money grow. You have to spend money to make money, they told him. Hell, everybody knows that, Dale said and laughed big. But they might as well have asked for a million as the twenty bucks Dale swiped at the bar was it. Anywhere.
A few miles down the road he passes another old man with another pickup truck and in the back of it sit giant Winnie the Poohs. Dale slows to get a closer look at the huge yellow heads, as big or bigger than his white-faced pandas. The old man waves and Dale shakes his finger at him, then yells out of the window, “Don’t even think about bringing your ass to the fair!”
***
Rachel rests on the shredded sofa, still in the robe, her forehead moist with sweat. She salvaged little from the kitchen floor and emptied what was left in the refrigerator into a garbage bag. The cabinet doors were ruined and they lay in a pile by the side of the road. The tile floor is mopped, the living room vacuumed. She tried to scrub a three-foot penis off the kitchen wall but the black paint only smeared and formed a circle of gray clouds, hollow in the center. She will need paint for the kitchen, she doesn’t know what for the wood panels of the living room. There won’t be money to replace an entire wall.
She’s happy the television is gone and she wonders what Dale will do now.
The place still stinks so she gets up and opens windows. It smells like piss but she checked the carpet for damp spots and found nothing. She hopes Dale will show up before she has to go to work and help move the furniture out to the road.
She found her cigarettes and she lights one as she gazes out of the kitchen window, the grass high and healthy across the fields though the summer has been dry. She leans on the counter, wonders where that damn smell is coming from.
She envies the people who did this, the young, careless voices that scared her underneath the bed while they raged with careless intentions. She tried to remember what it was like to not give a shit. She wanted to not give a shit right now. Like Dale. She knew that he would walk in the door, shrug his shoulders, say it ain’t so bad. Say why don’t we cook out tonight. Say we need to go to the pawn shop and get another TV. And she’d go along with it. She figures it will be weeks before the f-words and swollen tits are painted over. Weeks before the smell disappears. Weeks before she gives up on him doing anything to help. Those little fuckers. She imagines them sleeping late, comfortable in black and white dreams of apathy.
Dale hasn’t always been this way and she can’t think of anything from before they were married that warned he was a rabbit chaser. The year’s worth of severance pay they spent in a few months, taking weekends in Memphis and Jackson, drinking without asking prices, dancing until the lights came on. Then seeing the end of the road, she began picking up double shifts at the truck stop again. But instead of looking for work, Dale started talking schemes, quick fixes, early retirement—talk that she listened to, smiled at, figured it would wear off.
It began with Dale sitting up all hours of the night, watching infomercials, making notes, writing descriptions of typical people with typical needs that weren’t being met to the fullest with their typical household products. He would draw sketches of new inventions—rough, childlike sketches that were often as simple as triangles on top of squares or circles inside of triangles. Sketches only Dale could understand. Then he began naming the sketches—red light radar detector, solar-powered can opener, shandals (shoes that transform into sandals in two easy steps), movie in a box. He’d stand in the kitchen for hours, staring at the appliances, going through the motions of cooking dinner for six, imagining cleaning corners that had never been cleaned. He bought stamps and envelopes and wrote elaborate letters to invention companies. They didn’t answer. He called the 800-numbers from the infomercials hoping to speak to the man in charge but the operator only processed orders. He asked Rachel about her domestic needs, about how her feet felt after ten hours of filling coffee cups and busing tables. But she was too tired to help.
So he turned his attention outside the house. They had twenty acres, plenty of space to turn plenty of profit. He fenced off three acres and bought llamas, though he never understood what he was supposed to do with them. The llamas bayed all hours of the night, ate without ceasing, several of them hopped the fence and were found as far as ten miles away. He finally gave away the few that hadn’t escaped to a petting zoo in Hammond, Louisiana.
To cheer him up after the llama fiasco, Rachel took him to the county fair. They rode the Ferris wheel, ate cotton candy, threw darts at balloons. But all Dale could say during the evening was, “Why couldn’t I have been the guy who thought up fairs?” The next year he set up the giant panda booth. And he discovered people love giant pandas. But the fair is only a month out of the year. Which returned him quickly to nowhere.
“Buffalo. Buffalo,” Rachel says and laughs. She doesn’t understand why Dale needs the big score. He never says what he might do if he hits. She figures they will live right where they live, know the people they already know. Maybe eat better, build a pool, drive faster. Steven has been after her for the last year to leave him, sell the house, go to Ohio and stay with mom. Do your own thinking. Get away from this sorry son of a bitch.
But she doesn’t want to think or leave and something inside her can’t help but smile when a new idea pops into Dale’s head, like a child entertained by a burning match.
She drops her cigarette into the sink and walks into the bedroom, kicks off her sneakers and drops her robe. She looks into the closet and doesn’t like anything. She looks around the room and doesn’t like anything. Her naked body looks back at her in the mirror. It doesn’t like anything either.
She puts her robe back on, and from the nightstand drawer she takes out the house insurance policy, two credit cards she keeps hidden from Dale, and a small photo album. She picks her purse up from the floor, then she walks back into the kitchen and lights another cigarette. She stands in the house she has known as a child, as a teenager, as an adult, but she is like a ghost in a ghost town.
And it surprises her how easy it is to walk over to the shredded sofa and drop the lit cigarette.
***
Rachel sits on the ground by the road, leaning against the mailbox post. She watches the fire through the windows as it spreads from the sofa to the carpet and begins to crawl up the walls of the living room. Smoke seeps from underneath the closed windows in a slow exhale. It isn’t long before the flames spread to the other rooms of the house—the kitchen to her left, the bedroom and bathroom to her right. More smoke drifts out and up and she watches it trail away into the clear morning sky. She stretches her legs out and unties the robe and lets it fall open. She hopes the road will remain quiet, that the distant neighbors are all at work, so that she can watch it burn to the ground.
In a few minutes the roof of the living room caves in and a gust of black smoke shoots up through the burning hole. That’ll do it, she thinks. Somebody will see that and know this isn’t trash burning. The flames grow and a breeze brings its warmth to her bare skin and she closes her eyes and again imagines lying next to a hotel pool. Kids flapping in the shallow end, mothers reading, a tan stranger asking if he she wants a beer from his cooler.
She hears a car coming and she closes the robe and stands. She sticks her purse in the mailbox, then prepares herself to appear frantic. But there is no need as the car is her own, Dale making his way home. He stops next to the road, hurries out of the car and over to Rachel and says, “Are you all right?” She nods. “What happened? Have you called the fire department?”
“It’s okay, Dale. How’d it go in Hattiesburg?”
He looks at the house, then back at her and he grabs her firmly by the shoulders. “Honey, you’re in shock. Sit down.”
She brushes him off and says, “I’m not in shock, Dale. I lit the damn thing myself.”
He sits down, his mouth open as he watches the blaze. Chunks of roof are caving in from side to side and the heat makes waves high into the blue sky. She sits beside him and says, “It’s kinda pretty in a way, isn’t it?”
Dale looks at her, his mouth still open, and back at the fire.
“Say something, Dale. You always have something to say, some sales pitch. Something. Describe what you feel in twenty words or less and I’ll open my robe.”
He hasn’t noticed until now that she is in her robe, barefooted. “What are you doing?” he asks.
She grits her teeth, suddenly impatient with him. “What are you doing? Huh? Tell me that, Dale. What are youdoing?”
A large section of the roof caves, glass shatters, something pops like a pistol. The growing heat pushes towards them and Dale says, “Let’s move back.” But when he tries to stand, she grabs his arm and says, “Sit down.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“Sit down and tell me what you’re doing. What happened in Hattiesburg? Tell me and you can get up.”
He gives in and leans back on his elbows. “Nothing happened. Nothing ever happens. You should know that by now.”
“No buffalo?”
“There’s plenty of buffalo. But they want a twenty grand investment. Minimum.” He sits up and huffs. “One thing’s for sure, there ain’t no gimmicks. Money makes money, not some bullshit 19.99 gadget thought up in the middle of the night.”
She takes his hand and puts it inside her robe on her breast. He keeps his eyes on the ground in front of him, unaffected by her softness. She moves his hand away and feels the heat on her face. She will call Steven and ask him to keep quiet about the break-in. She will give Dale the money once the insurance pays for the house. Then she will sell the land and they will move close to the buffalo so they can keep an eye on their investment. Maybe even help with the herd, whatever that means. They will buy a house of their own, with an alarm system, and she will get a job and he will get a job in case there is a buffalo plague. This will be part of the deal. This is her plan and it comes to her simply as if someone has handed it to her on a note card. If nothing else, she thinks, it will be something different. She will tell him about it but not now.
She stands and takes his hand and leads him around the snapping fire, behind the house and into the tall grass in the shade of a cluster of pine trees. She takes off her robe and lays it on the ground, then she brings him down with her and the wind blows smoke around them. Dale raises his head and says, “I think I hear a siren.” And then she puts her hand over his mouth and tells him to stop talking.
