Molly Giles
She stood at the window of the small airport and watched him cross the tarmac. He was the last one off. He had dyed his hair for this visit but he was wearing the same faded jeans and brown windbreaker he wore to work. She tapped the glass and waved but he kept his head down. She knew his bunion ached, his shoulder hurt, his hip pinched, and he was probably fibrillating after the cross country flight. But still. He could look happier. It had been six weeks since they’d been together. She’d flown back to see him in San Francisco three times already. This was the first time he’d come to Arkansas to see her.
She joined the others waiting in the baggage area. Two Chinese pianists, brothers, were greeted by a claque of excited women from the town arts council. A young girl with a jagged haircut and a silver ball in her lower lip hopped up and down like a child as a soldier in uniform stepped forward to hug her. Local people with soft Southern voices embraced, helped each other with baggage, exchanged news of family and friends, laughed. He alone—her long-term, long-distance lover—lagged. Had he decided to stay on the tarmac? He did not emerge until the room was almost empty. Then, with his duffel bag slung over his shoulders, he slouched through the doorway. He might be an old foot soldier returning from some foreign war. Or heading toward one. She opened her arms.
His hug was preemptory, his kiss on her forehead brusque, and the first thing he said was, “Boy, those are little planes. I wonder how often they go down.”
“Every day. Yours is the first plane to get here in one piece in a year.”
“You joke but you should hear the engines on those things. Kaputputput.”
“Hi darling. Say hi darling.”
He kissed her again, again on the forehead. “Don’t want to give you my cold.” He blew his nose on a napkin with an airplane logo on it and tucked it back in his pocket.
“Although it may not be a cold,” he mused as they stepped out into the bright afternoon. “They say this is the allergy capital of North America.”
“Don’t tell the natives that. They think it’s the allergy capital of the world.”
She opened the trunk of her car for his bag, helped him push the passenger seat back so he could stretch his legs, and pulled out of the parking lot. “Getting used to the humidity, aren’t you,” he said, as he fiddled with the air conditioner. “You’ve been here long enough.”
She heard the hurt in his voice and didn’t answer. She knew he was angry at her for renewing her contract with the arts museum. She should have talked to him about it before she agreed, but she was in the middle of a huge project and had said yes right away. He should understand. He knew how important it was to have work you enjoyed. He’d been unhappy with his construction firm for as long as she’d known him. She watched as he popped open the glove compartment and peered inside.
“My gun’s behind the Bible in back,” she explained.
He looked at her, startled, then reached over and started to massage her shoulder with such authority she almost veered off the road. He gave the world’s best shoulder rubs. She had just begun to relax into his familiar touch when, ignoring the meadows, forests, and farmhouses outside his window he paused to put his ear to the dashboard. “Oh-oh,” he said. “Your alternator. Can you hear it?”
“That’s just the sound the engine makes.”
“You ought to take it in and get it checked.”
“I did. It’s fine.”
“Who’d you take it to? Some big ole boy or a real mechanic?”
“Please? Give it a rest.”
He didn’t care for her new car but at least he liked her new apartment. He walked around inspecting it and when she asked, he agreed that the southwest view from the picture windows offered a nice slice of sunset. He was glad she had been able to manage the move from the other, smaller, apartment in town on her own and he was sorry that he had been too busy to fly back and help with the packing. He tinkered with her dishwasher for ten minutes and fixed it; he helped her hang a heavy antique mirror she’d been unable to lift, and he adjusted the lock on her front door. He ate the cheese grits, okra and barbecued ribs she’d cooked half as a joke and half because she was beginning to love Southern food, and he did not complain. He talked about his health, mentioned mutual friends, reminisced about a backpacking trip she and he had once taken through Mexico. He did not ask about her recent promotion, her projects, or her colleagues at the museum. He slept beside her in her bed, but he did not touch her.
Over breakfast the next morning he marveled about all the fat people he’d seen on the plane and asked, as he asked every time he saw her, if she’d bought a Confederate flag yet. He’d be happy to hoist it for her. It would look mighty good on that hanging tree down by the holler, yee haw.
“Are you done?” she asked. “Can you stop now?”
But he couldn’t. She took him to the farmers’ market on the square and as they walked through the stalls of daffodils and spring onions he wondered how much of this was a front for the real commerce of marijuana farms and meth houses and he asked in a loud voice if she understood that eight out of ten people in this state were armed. She introduced him to her assistant and listened as he explained he could not shake hands because of his cold.
“It must be lonely for him here,” he murmured, after Peter left. Meeting her puzzled gaze, he added, “Being gay.”
She laughed. “Peter’s not…” she began, but he shushed her with a raise of his eyebrows. “Just because someone has good manners?” she pursued. He didn’t answer. He noted there were no blacks and few Asians in the market and he wanted to know where the Ku Klux Klan had their headquarters. Wasn’t it nearby? Wasn’t a town near here almost wiped out last winter from flashfloods? Snakes swim. Did she know that? Snakes survived floods by looping themselves over tree limbs. She should be very careful going anywhere near the river after a flood; she should always check the tree limbs.
“We’re going to the river this afternoon,” she reminded him.
“That’s different,” he said. “I’ll be with you.”
On the drive to the river he talked about microbes capable of killing the entire human population. He talked about the depletion of natural resources, the hole in the ozone, polar melt, acid rain, school shootings, terrorist attacks, toxins in meat and insect-borne diseases. He asked if she owned a tick extractor and when she said she did not he went into a convenience store to buy her one and picked one up for himself as well. He read every word from an insert in the box called The Life Cycle of a Tick as she drove. Nothing kills them, he announced. They swim even faster than snakes. They can survive freezing temperatures and scalding water, they live through entire washing machine cycles, they crawl out of fireplaces, nest in frozen pipes. They cause Anaplasmosis, Babesiosis, and Ehrlichiosis as well as Lymes. He closed his eyes with a deep sigh, and when she looked over she saw he had fallen asleep. She thought of her desk at the museum, overflowing with work she longed to get back to, and wondered why she’d ever thought he’d like it here.
It was a long drive to the river town. The canoe they rented for their float sprang a leak almost at once and he banged his knuckles on a submerged rock as he helped her bail.
“Sure can hurt yourself having a good time,” he said as they rowed back to the take-out. The guide at the rental place gave them a map of hiking trails nearby and showed them where to find Indian caves and the meadow where elk grazed. “I hear elk can get pretty mean,” her lover offered, and the guide obliged by saying, “Yeah, but what you really got to watch out for are the mountain lions.”
“And the poison ivy,” she added as they set out on the widest trail. “And slipping off a sheer limestone bluff into a rattlesnake cave filled with nettles only to be attacked by fire ants and eaten alive by a bear that you manage to beat off with an armadillo which ends up giving you leprosy.”
“Funny,” he said, when she finished.
Their motel room reeked of bug spray and the fan ran noisily all night. Once again, citing his cold, he lay beside her like a brother, without touching. But in the morning, over chicken and waffles in a sunny cafe, he agreed she had brought him to a sweet place and though he knew the surrounding hills harbored nothing but killer dog packs, crazed Christian cults, and armed drug lords, he was willing to walk around the town and admire the stone post office and hand-built houses. He paused before the courtyard of an old hotel.
“There’s your bear,” he said. She laughed, but looked where he pointed. At first she saw nothing but a tire swinging back and forth. But then she saw the enormous bear squatting in its cage.
“Third generation in captivity,” she read out loud. “Kisses children. Plays the guitar.”
“Rips your head off,” he added.
She stared at the bear. Melon-colored nose, dark reddish fur, satisfied bright eyes that did not meet hers. Despite herself, she shivered.
It was too cold to try the river again so they drove up the mountain instead and stopped at a view point. A telescope was planted near the cliff edge, but it was surrounded by thigh-high grasses that looked, he said, “seriously dangerous.” Copper-heads, he elaborated. Brown recluses. Ticks, of course, everywhere. And chiggers. She was tired and didn’t protest. They unrolled their windows, breathed in the fresh air, looked out at the mauve hills and masses of trees leafing out below, and listened to the birds. She had been taking long solitary walks on the weekends, she told him, trying to identify native birds by their songs. The red cardinals had a commanding whistle and the cedar waxwings had a lispy trill but, “Look!” she cried. “An eagle!” She pointed to the swift shadow passing over the valley below and threw open her door to stand outside and get a better look. “We have bald eagles here!” she exulted, turning to see her lover, arms crossed, still sitting inside the car.
“We?” he repeated.
She stared. “What is the matter with you?”
“Just didn’t reckon you’d go native so fast.”
“I haven’t gone na…”
“Sure coulda fooled me.”
“Coulda? Look, if you didn’t want me to move here you could have said so.”
“And you would have listened?”
“You could have asked me to stay. You never once asked me to stay.”
“Why? You were only going to ‘try’ this job. Remember? Try it for a while and then come back. You can’t be happy here.”
“Why not?” she snapped. “It’s a great job and it’s better than…” She stopped, took a deep breath. “You were going to ‘try’ to retire and join me here, remember?”
“Looks like we both need to try a little harder.”
We? she thought, but did not say.
They drove farther up the twisting road and stopped to look at willow baskets and corncob pipes in a souvenir shop. The owner wanted to tell them about the winter before. It had been so icy cows slipped and fell and the ice was so hard the cows’ bones pierced right through them and they died by the dozen. Her lover turned to her. “Did you hear that?” Worst December ever, the owner nodded. Doing his genealogy, the owner continued, he’d recently learned his wife was related to a Davis and he checked and sure enough it was Jefferson. “Did you hear that?” her lover asked, his voice dark and sly. She shrugged, bought pralines made by the man’s wife: Brown sugar, pecans, butter—no preservatives, no chemicals—and ate half a pound by herself in the car, while her lover took photos of the owner and his three-legged hound dog to show, he said, his friends back home.
She had made a reservation at a touristy lakeside lodge for them that night, but she had neglected to make a reservation for dinner, and when they arrived that afternoon they were told they would have to eat elsewhere. They unpacked in their cottage under the redbuds and then set out again. “Lookit all dem churches,” he marveled. “Guess y’all need ‘em here with all yer shotgun weddin’s and family feud funerals ‘n all.” He leaned out the window and started to hawk.
“Don’t spit,” she warned, her voice sharp enough to surprise them both.
He pulled the airplane napkin out of his shirt pocket and coughed into it showily for the rest of the drive. At the diner he mocked the menu, reading the items out loud in a redneck sing-song, but then ordered deep fried catfish, hush puppies, biscuits with gravy, and blackberry cobbler with cinnamon ice cream. He ate every bite and winked at her as he finished, lips slicked with grease. “Purty good eatin’,” he said as he rose to find a “two-holer” in back.
Had he always been so awful? She watched him walk away, a tall man, getting old but still good looking, with the wary grace that had always thrilled her. She had met him at an outdoor concert thirteen years ago. He had been raising three teenage boys at the time and she had been caring for her elderly mother, but the idea of living together someday had always been there. If he loved her—did he love her?—he’d be living with her now. Why wasn’t he? He’d do well here. He could follow his old dream of just doing woodwork. Coward, she thought, and then, No, it’s me. I’m the coward. I’m the one who ran away. She flicked her glass of iced tea with her finger, remembering the night she and Peter and Peter’s wife had christened her new apartment with a jar of moonshine. When Peter’s wife, a little tipsy, had asked why she’d left California, she’d lied, babbled on about the career opportunities at the new museum, the higher pay, the lower cost of living, never once admitting how badly she had wanted a change, any change, how frightened she’d been of staying stuck in the same place in her old life forever.
“How’s your cold?” she asked, forcing a smile when he returned.
“Better.” He smiled back at her for the first time.
That night they made love and although her lover didn’t come, he was tender. She nuzzled into his chest as she always had, and when she asked he said yes he had missed her and yes he was glad to be here; he just wished she’d come back to the West Coast, where she belonged. They fell asleep entwined in each other’s arms and woke hours later to a huge bang of thunder. Lightning flared, followed by rain in swift hard sweeps, then hail.
“Tornado,” he decided, excited. He got up to see if they could both fit in the bathtub, if it came to that, because bathtubs were the safest place to be in tornadoes, and then he stood by the window, his silhouette like a petrograph of a caveman, round head on a triangle back, stick arms lifted. When the storm stilled, he pulled on his clothes and stepped outside, where he was joined by other men, from other cottages, all talking in the same excited voices. A tree had fallen, she heard, right through the roof of the lodge’s restaurant, the place where they had been lucky enough not to eat last night. Some cars had been damaged by blowing debris. A pet dog had run off and disappeared but a ranger had found it and brought it back.
She reached for the pillow that smelled of him, of musk and cough drops, and hugged it close, wishing it could make her feel whole; she had not felt whole in a long time. She must have fallen asleep again, for in her dream she was alone in a stalled plane and the word on her lips when she awoke was the word he’d said when he’d first arrived: kaput.
She shook her head to clear it, had a shower and was dressed by the time her lover came back in, rosy, full of news about the storm and about the men he had met down at the emergency café set up by the lodge. She smiled to see him—that handsome face she had missed so much—but her smile faded when she saw he was holding a single cardboard cup of coffee. He had not brought anything for her?
“All you think about is yourself,” she said calmly. “You never think about us, as a couple. I would never buy a coffee without buying you one too.”
“We can share.”
“How? I take my coffee black, remember.”
“I didn’t come all this way to fight with you.”
“What did you ‘come all this way’ for?”
“Right.” He reached for his duffle bag and yelped as a large striped scorpion dropped out, scurried across the floor, skipped beneath his boot heel and disappeared under the bed. He turned, his face dark with triumph. “See?” he crowed, and for a second she hated him. If only she could keep on hating him. If only things were that easy. She bent, pushed the flimsy bed aside with both hands and stomped on the scorpion twice with her sandal.
“C’mon,” she said, furious, slinging her own bag over her shoulder. “We’re going to be late.”
“Late for what?”
“Didn’t the boys down at the lodge tell you? There’s going to be a lynching at noon. Tickets only, but I got us front seats.”
“Ha ha,” he said, weary. But he followed her out to the car and they drove in silence for twenty minutes before she pulled off to the side of the road by a strip mall and crept into his lap and sobbed while he rocked her back and forth in his strong, impatient arms.
Molly Giles is a short story writer, novelist, and professor at the University of Arkansas. She formerly taught at San Francisco State University. She is the author of Creek Walk and Other Stories and the novel Iron Shoes. Her story collection Rough Translations won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She also appears in Sudden Fiction (Continued) (60 New Short-Short Stories).