fiction

by Gary Fincke

Because the snow had melted back to the fences and no sign of more was in the ten-day forecast, the nets were up in late April on the courts in Traverse City. But even though it was nearly seventy degrees, Alan Moyer’s overhead kicked sideways off a fence pole and rolled deep into a puddle spreading from the shadowed corner of slush. In the sky above the soaking ball, Alan could see odd, last-Sunday-in-April flickers of lightning. Within minutes, busy with anxiety about lightning, he stood under the enormous oak that shaded, from the other side of the park road, the courts in the late afternoon. His car was at the parking lot’s far end. From a set of cars parked nearby, teams of softball players emerged, looking at the sky and then crossing to the field behind the oak. Serious cabin fever, Alan thought. By the time he left Traverse City behind, a fresh bank of black clouds swept overhead.

The six o'clock news opened with a shot of a newscaster standing near that oak tree, fallen branches behind him. The camera swept the park, showing the tennis courts and the softball field and the split oak while the broadcaster related how lightning had struck, the names of the two softball players who had died, huddled together beneath the oak shortly after, according to the time given, Alan arrived home. At once, he thought about timing. As if God had forgotten about daylight savings time, and his intention, all along, had been to have that tree struck an hour earlier when Alan had stood underneath it.

One night, while he was in college, Alan had listened to a girl tell him she'd seen a statue of the Virgin Mary cry in the chapel of her church. She hadn't told anybody. She'd returned each day for a month and seen nothing. "It’s called jealous phenomena,” she’d said. “Things choose to reveal themselves to just one person," she'd said.

“The Ancient Mariner,” he’d said, and she’d given him a look that signaled she didn’t expect to see him again after death.

He thought of that girl now, wishing he had her phone number, but instead he called his wife. "Those poor guys arrived just in time for the lightning because it was an hour late."

“How about aliens?” Sue said, taking on the tone he remembered her having every day for the last two months she’d lived with him.

“Jimmy Carter has seen UFOs,” Alan said. “So has Muhammad Ali."

"One of them said his fishing boat was attacked by a crazed, swimming rabbit; the other slurs his speech from taking so many punches to his head." A burst of static jammed her answer. A fresh set of black clouds scudded over Lake Huron. It was enough to make him think of snow, a whiteout blowing in after this line of thunderstorms. Unlikely, but possible. Matt, his younger son, had been born in mid-April, and by the following morning, six inches of wet snow had settled into slush and precarious highways.

Both sons, at Sue’s direction, had grown into boys who carefully managed their rooms. He’d seen the evidence in how Patrick and Matt arranged things, alphabetizing their books while their mother applauded. When they were asleep, Sue would go back and correct the errors, reverse Seuss and Sevard.

"How do you do it?" she'd say. "You arrange money all day, yet you don't keep track of anything at home."

"Other people arrange the money. I judge their arrangements."

He'd done nothing, Alan thought, but become disinterested in what he did all day, but Sue started counting his beers after work, saying all the numbers after three with a shriller voice. “Why not have the boys write the numbers down and paste them on the refrigerator?” he’d said.

The last month with her he’d taken to having a few before he reached home, keeping his numbers in the house modest and flat. But one late afternoon, she’d smelled the beer on him. “You’re drunk and had your sons in the car,” she said.

“I was drinking. They’re not the same.”

“Don’t talk to me like that. Don’t make me out a fool.”

When she’d rented an apartment close to the city, taking the boys to where things would be orderly, she’d said, "You don't come near them unless I tell you it's ok. You don't come looking until we settle everything."

"Of course not," he'd blurted, believing she was signaling like a diplomat.     

#

Four Sundays after the lightning strike, Alan started to skim leaves and insects from the above ground pool in the backyard, but after ten minutes it seemed to him that if he filled the pool, a child from the neighborhood would climb the fence and drown in it. He sat down, opened his cooler, and fished out his second beer, his shoes dangling three feet above the leaf-strewn water, the same position he was in fifteen minutes later when Sue climbed the ladder and said, "Getting an early start?"

"Maybe. Maybe not," he said.

“Put the empty in the cooler and don’t open another one,” Sue said. “The boys are right there in the yard. Keep that cooler shut.” She lapsed into the face she made when she swallowed grapefruit juice, the look of a psychiatrist caught off guard. Alan began watching his sons run the perimeter of the pool, passing him twice before they climbed the ladder and stared at him as if they were trying to remember his name.

"What's up?" he said, smiling, and when Matt said, "Hi, Dad," without approaching him and Patrick said nothing, Alan wanted to tumble into the leftover water from the summer before.

“Go find your old friends,” Sue said. “I’ll be at the Andersons’ in a few minutes,” and they climbed back down.

Alan opened the cooler. “Did you read about the guy who crashed his homemade helicopter?” he said. “Both legs broken, his back shattered, his kidneys and liver damaged, yet he survived.”

“What’s the point?”

“The inventor's wife had the wreckage loaded on a flatbed truck and taken to their garage. In a year or two, when her husband is up and around, she plans on helping him launch himself again.”

When Sue turned and stared across the fenced-in yard as if their sons had never played there, Alan thought how maybe it wasn't a heartless thing at all to abandon someone who welcomed daily drinking. "I knew it was going to strike that tree," he said, lying to turn her back toward him. "I reached up and put my hand on the spot where the limb would shear off, and I started shuddering."

When Sue pivoted, she stepped back, one heel over the edge of the pool deck. Alan watched her face to see if she knew where her foot was, whether, if she tumbled, it would be by accident or design. He'd started his made-up story without knowing how to end it, but now he knew exactly what he'd meant to say. "When I saw those softball players getting out of their cars, I wanted to warn them, and then I drove off and left them instead."

For a few seconds, her heel back on the deck, she looked at him, and Alan thought it was like those moments between his old 45s, when the next record drops from the changer but the tone arm hasn't returned for the jolt of pop and crackle just before the music begins.

“That’s why what you want is called Never Never Land,” Sue said. “And no, I can’t come back.” Her tone had the perfect pitch of someone who would be living with another man before the coming summer.

#

Alan’s Wednesday indoor league ended when May began. The last night, Alan and Rick Robertson, who lived only six blocks away, were matched against the weakest team in the league, one a teacher, the other a school superintendent. A boring win, but the teacher said, “The wife dumped me here, and my car’s in the shop, but the refrigerator works.”

It was only a couple of miles into the country. The beer, as promised, was cold. The teacher’s wife poured herself a glass of wine and joined them. But after two cans, Rick Robertson said he had things to do. “The family calls,” he said. “You know how it is.”

“Used to,” Alan said, and he muffled Rick’s apology by pulling on his jacket.

A mile from the teacher’s house, the radio shut off and the headlights began to dim. "What the hell?" Rick said, but Alan knew, from years of experience, it was the alternator fan belt, that he had maybe five minutes of charge left before the battery was drained.

"Christ," Rick said, suddenly understanding. Alan closed up on the car ahead of them, the headlights so dim the driver didn't seem to notice the tailgating. A half mile and they were in darkness except for the lights of the car ahead of them sweeping the narrow country road.

"Come on," Alan coaxed, but then the car quit altogether, and they were coasting in a cave, the other car disappearing like empty-handed rescuers turning for home.

"We’re almost to the main road. Then only a mile or so, maybe," Rick said. "We can tough it out. There won't be any place open this late."

They pushed the car onto the mowed strip that ran along a chest-high fence. "Look here," Rick said, and when Alan turned he saw a dozen cows slog out of the darkness toward them.

Alan peered past them, checking the pasture. There were junked cars scattered through the field. “See all that?” he said.

“Seems careless,” Rick said.

“It’s a one-of-a-kind place,” Alan said. “A farmer hoards junked cars. He knows the cows won’t tell.”

The cows positioned themselves in a row along the fence as if the herd was expecting something. "Murdered cars or not, the cows don't belong out here now," Rick said.

"Maybe they think we're the ones sent to bring them home."

"Outside the fence?"

"Even better."

The cows jostled their heads over the fence. Clouds of steam curled up from their nostrils and vanished. The world was filled with snuffling and pawing.

“It’s like the car knew to stop right here,” Alan said. “Like it had a sixth sense.”

Rick raised one hand, and the closest cows backed off. "This business with Sue," he said. "I thought you would work it out."

"I'm disappointed too," Alan said. When Rick looked puzzled, he added, "and embarrassed. It’s on me.”     

Two months before Sue had left, she'd said, “It’s on you.” Before he left for the bank, she’d handed him a note that asked him to stock up on essentials over his lunch hour and drop them off because the forecaster had claimed a monster was possible, high winds and heavy snow.

"Sure," he said at once, but she didn't even clear her throat.

By noon, though, the grocery list in her handwriting was enough to bring the world back to ordinary. He bought milk and bread and orange juice; he dropped three six packs of beer into his cart and stood cheerily in the long line of impatient, panicked neighbors.

The blizzard veered north, only an inch of fitful snow swirling for a few hours in the otherwise dry streets. Without an emergency, he worked his way through eight of the beers while Sue stayed quiet through the early evening and his sons watched a rented movie. When the boys were in bed, their door closed, she said, “I want you to sleep in the living room.”

#

The Ford dealer towed the car in the morning. Alan read the newspaper on a vinyl couch beside a door labeled SERVICE, taking the morning off from the bank. "Move up a couple of models when you ditch this thing,” the shop manager said. “A couple of thousand dollars on the front end goes a long way toward peace of mind."

“Maybe,” Alan said.

Alan opened to the regional section and discovered a story about a tractor that had sunk into an onion field, wallowing so deep it had completely disappeared. There was a picture of the farmer standing by a partially plowed, empty field, its furrows running parallel to the untouched muck. There was a photo of the tractor heaving up out of the earth, slime dripping from all parts of it, a crowd applauding.

"You try to get out early, but this is a chance you take," the tractor owner said. "All this trouble for onions."

On the first page of Science and Technology was a story about funding for people who had opened ten million channels into space, giving the aliens as many choices as possible on which to broadcast. The scientists had been listening for more than ten years, and because none of them had been singled out for audio contact, the government was considering cutting off their subsidy. The news saddened him so much he decided to give up drinking for May, then beg Sue to return and offer that diet as proof of self-discipline.

#

Memorial Day morning, just before noon, Alan walked into town for the parade that ended each year at the Veterans' Remembrance Site. Maybe, he thought, Sue would bring the boys, but he knew he was too late for that when he saw people gathering chairs from the parade route, most already in their cars or, far down at the other end of town, bunching at the Veterans’ Site.

Sawhorses were still up at either end of Main Street. He stepped off the curb and crossed without looking for traffic, turning for home instead of walking to the memorial ceremony. He grabbed the single six pack he’d left in the refrigerator as a symbol for self-discipline and drove to the junked car pasture.

One by one, he finished three beers, crushing each can under a shoe and sailing it into the field. Maybe, he thought, the farmer believed the wreckage helped the cows produce more milk, that he'd taken one car into this field, left it, and discovered gallons of extra milk the following day. He stowed the other three in the trunk as if that number canceled the others.

Fifteen minutes later, he parked on the grass across from the Traverse City tennis courts. He positioned himself so he was looking, as he had nearly two months before, at the surface of the three tennis courts, gauging when they'd begin to puddle from the rain that had just begun.

When the courts looked unplayable and there hadn't been any lightning, he turned and saw where the limbs had sheared off, the scar running down nearly to the base of the trunk. He raised his arms, imagining the distance to where those limbs had jutted out, and he was frightened by how skinny his wrists were, his forearms suddenly so spindly he thought his three months alone, despite his terrible diet, had initiated some unexplainable weight loss.

He had only five minutes of driving to finish a breath mint and conjure the perfect, redemptive words—starting, in the hallway outside her door, by apologizing for breaking his promise not to visit. “Come inside,” Sue said. “But make this quick.” Close to her for the first time in weeks, Alan took in the scent of her hair. She seemed fit-looking in a way that made it difficult not to touch her. “You look good,” he said, and kept his hands at his sides.

“I’ve been running,” she said, “with RaeAnne from down the street.”

“You never ran.”

“I had to get shoes,” she said, and when she smiled he formed a sentence full of begging and repeated it to himself before he blurted a flurry of apologies.

“Sometimes,” Sue said, “I wish you were just straight out unfaithful, something easy to deal with.”

“That’s so much worse,” he started, but she waved him off with a headshake.

“Exactly. You’d be this asshole I’d be well rid of. But this, whatever it is, it’s like you’re Moses wishing for a burning bush and drinking because all the bushes just sit there. Jesus, I can smell it through the mint right now, and you drove all the way out here like that.”

“Moses needed wonder.”

“Kids do, Alan. Christmas, Halloween, and then you grow up,” her tone dropping into resignation. For a moment, she looked at him as if he reminded her of those child cancer patients on a telethon, a boy chosen for his optimism, but he didn’t have cancer, he had something contagious, and when she spoke again, she said she was afraid he would turn her sons into dreamers who would end up permanent children, lovable and helpless as puppies, in a world that was cruel.

“I never raised my voice,” he said. “I never acted like some asshole whenever.”

“But every night I waited for it to happen.”

“That’s crazy.”                                  
“Yes, it was,” she said. “Nobody should have to live like that.”

Alan looked out the window to where his sons were riding swings in a small playground with two other boys, and because they were three stories up, he imagined he could see Lake Huron in better light.

"I stayed as long as I did because I love you," she added. Alan didn't know where to look in the room to keep her talking. "It was restlessness instead of despair," she said. "I thought people were kept together by love, and here I was finding out that was wrong."

"And the boys?"

"The boys are fine."

Alan nodded and walked down the hall, looking through the open doors. Sue had been living in this place for three months, and Alan couldn't find a sign of recent moving. Even what looked like a spare room had no cardboard boxes, no stacks of redundant pictures or groups of excessive vases. It was as if she'd packed exactly what would fit in the apartment, like somebody who could guess when 1000 gallons of water was in a swimming pool. "I wouldn't even know the boys lived here," he said.

"Precisely,” she said. “And you know as well as I do that it wasn’t just the Peter Pan thing. It was the other.”

“The other? Is that what you say to the boys? It’s like you’re talking about vaginas with them.”

“There you go. Just like always, changing the subject.”

“So far, the subject is nameless.”

“Drinking every night and drunk driving with your children unbuckled in the car.” She paused. “There,” she said, “names.”

He wanted to tell her he'd spent the long weekend making the house exactly the way she left it, that everything here could be set back in its original place because those spaces were blank. He wanted to ask her if she knew about the field of cows and cars, whether she'd wanted to hold the hands of their sons while they looked between the fence rails. And then he wanted to leave before he looked over his shoulder and saw a police car outside.

“Don’t talk to the boys,” she said. “They don’t know you’re here. Keep it that way.”

“Of course,” he said, and he meant it until, walking toward the repaired car, he noticed the sky was changing, a thunderstorm likely in an hour or less, the weather full of promise.

He looped around the corner of the apartment and waved his sons toward the car. “Boys,” he said, “hop in. I have something special to show you.” Sue would have watched him. She would be running down the stairs. He hustled them into his car, slamming the door just as he heard her shout.

“We should tell Mom,” Patrick said.

“It’s ok. We’ll be right back,” Alan said. “Wait till you see this. Just the other day a farmer and his tractor sank into the mud right up the road here. All the way.”

“No way,” Patrick said, but they started looking out the window, and both jumped out after he parked where there was still a tangle of tire marks stretching alongside a field.

The tractor was gone, nothing to be seen except promises of green, but he took their hands and started across the field. “The farmer got off in time,” Alan said. “He didn’t drown in the mud.”

“In the movies they always thrash around,” Matt said, “and then their hands stick up out of the quicksand for a second.”

“That’s the movies,” Alan said. “In the movies, it would be a car, and it would end up, for a little while, looking like a spaceship that had submerged past its wings, leaving something that looked like an observation deck, or better yet, a real spaceship and it would be the last you’d see of the aliens before the entire spaceship disappeared into the quivering quagmire.”

“Wow,” Matt said, but the boys’ excitement about the underground tractor deflated as soon as they felt the mud sucking at their shoes. “This is yucky,” Patrick said. “I don’t see anything. Where’s the tractor?”

“Down in the mud, right, Dad?” Matt said, but he was tiptoeing now, eyes on his feet.

Underfoot, the muck bore their weight, firm enough, at least, to let them walk fifty steps into the field where Alan hesitated, not because of the sucking at his shoes, but because of the lightning to their north. “Ok,” he said, “I guess that’s far enough. It looks like we missed seeing it.” He felt enormous this far from anything higher than his ankles and near the miracle of that tractor being saved and then returning again, its success visible in the sprouting onions.

“This was really stupid,” Patrick said. “How do we know we’re even in the right spot?” but Matt was staring at the sky.

“We’re the tallest things out here, Dad,” he said, sounding like he paid attention at his Cub Scout meetings.

“It’s a mile away yet,” Alan said, starting them back toward the road. “We’ll be in the car before it hits.”

Rain began to fall. The ground slurped and gurgled as they hurried. The next bolt made Alan flinch, both boys ducking. The thunder arrived in two seconds. “We should lay down, Dad,” Matt said.

Alan gripped their hands tightly, afraid they were about to throw themselves to the ground. The bolt that hit just before they reached the car was followed so quickly by thunder Alan thought it had hit the field. The boys flopped into the back seat, and he scrambled into the front.

The storm seemed directly over them, the rain heavy, the lightning looking thick and soft through the windshield. “We’re safe now,” Alan said. “We’re grounded.”

If he were being chosen by anything right at this moment, Alan thought, it would have to find another way to touch him. “The lightning rises,” he said. “We say it strikes down, but that’s not how it works.”

“That’s wrong, Dad,” Patrick said.

“It’s fantastic is what it is. Our eyes can’t take it in.”

There was a flash so close the thunder was simultaneous. “Whoa,” he said.

“That would have killed us a minute ago,” Patrick said. “Let’s go.”

“You’re safe here. You have a story to tell,” Alan said, but Matt began to cry. Alan wanted to say something to calm them, but when the next flash occurred, a bit farther away, Matt screamed and Patrick said, “Right now, Dad” in a tone that made him turn the ignition.

When the motor failed to catch, Patrick said, “Of course,” but then it caught, and neither boy made another sound, even when he pulled up close to the door of the apartment house so they could run inside without being soaked.