Day Trip

Certain members of local government had been recently deposed and their bodies hanged up outside The Hitching Post, a dive the insurgent party members frequented. Sarah and I were hardly counterculture, though we were happy to see a change in leadership. As such we decided to walk down and take a look. We owed them that much for their effort.

“A nice little trip,” I had said that morning after breakfast, scraping spoiled government butter into the trash.

Plus, there wasn’t much better to do. Since the curfew had been put in place the week prior we’d both gotten a little stir crazy. We’d be out playing HORSE on the cracked driveway or salvaging what we could of the scrubby garden until the very last moment when the hills in the west drank up the sun. As it set the sky became crinkled crimson thanks to the junk miners on the outskirts burning their garbage. The scene itself was kind of romantic, if you didn’t think about it too much.

“Should we bring a bag?” Sarah stood in the doorjamb, her body parting the beaded curtain.

“What for?”

“I don’t know.” She’d recently acquired a little sunspot beneath her eye. In the light filtered by the lampshade it seemed more pronounced, like her face was a puzzle and it the only missing piece. “Where’s the bug spray?”

I told her it was beneath the sink, beside the clawhammer, and she went to the kitchen, leaving me to sit in bed with my sketchpad propped up by my knees.

I’d recently rediscovered illustration. I drew mostly faces, mostly eyes, open, closed, a freckle offset in the iris. Though I couldn’t make eyebrows. They looked so terribly amateur after I added them. Crowding the remaining sliver of bathroom mirror, I would stare at my face in an attempt at reference. My brows were wiry and dark, inherited from my father. In his middle age they had begun to grow out like the horns of a steer. Ďábelské rohy, my grandmother would say. Devil horns.

I erased what I had drawn and joined Sarah in the kitchen. Pots and chipped china were spread out across the floor, half-full with cloudy water from the leaking roof. It had rained over the last few days, but this morning the sky was clear, patches of blue cutting through the smog. I leaned on the countertop and we both looked out at our little eighth-acre.

“You about ready to go?” I asked.

“You look like Springsteen with that thing.”

Lately I’d been using a red bandana to keep the hair out of my eyes. It was a little paisley number from the back of the drawer. Perhaps there was some resemblance. My face had always been long, and I’d gotten a heavy tan from working outside. I pawed at myself in the weak reflection of the kitchen window, pulling at my skin, exposing the whites of my eyes.

“Just let me put shoes on, then let’s boogie.”

***

It was a three mile walk to the Hitching Post, longer if the bridge was up, and it was so often up. This despite the fact that no freight had come through in nearly a decade.

“Give me a glug of that.”

Sarah handed me the old army surplus canteen she’d bought after the first time the government collapsed. The water inside was warm and tasted like blood collecting in my mouth.

We were just getting out of the driveway when Paully, our neighbor, waved us down.

“Good day for it.” He was in his yard, whacking away at weeds with a five iron.

“How’s that now?” We weren’t friends, Paully and I. Sure, he sometimes brought us cheese made fresh from the goats he kept, but I also caught him leering at Sarah through the bedroom window every now and again.

“Little bit of wind,” he said, taking another swing at the flowered head of some plant. Yellow pollen exploded into the air. “Takes the seeds away.”

If there was any wind I couldn’t feel it, and I watched as the remnants of the obliterated flowers fell over the property line into our side yard. I looked over at Sarah for confirmation but she had her head turned, arms folded up.

Paully leaned on the five iron, a stretch of pale, paunchy belly peeking out from beneath his shirt. “Parsnip, all this. Nasty stuff full of toxic sap. Stains the skin something awful. Guy I knew out east of Ferrington, his fence fell over and his chickens got out and tangled up in it. He had to pluck every one. They were all scarred and blotchy to hell.”

I couldn’t figure out why he was telling us this.

“Yeah, sure, we’ll be careful then, around it I mean.” I reached back for Sarah, but she was gone, already walking down the road toward the main drag. I turned to follow.

“Where you off to?”

“Into town is all.” I craned my neck to respond.

“Not enough money in the world,” he yelled back, slicing into another stalk.

As I jogged to catch up the canteen slapped sharp against my breastbone.

“Why’d you run off?”

“I’m antsy. I want to get going.” She was flush.

“Well, we’re going. But you didn’t have to just abandon me.”

“Let’s not fight about this.”

“We’re not fighting.”

We stopped to let a parade of bicycles pass before us, the members of which were singing folk songs with half-remembered words, choruses off-key but in bluster. They sang about the old times, though none of them looked old enough to have lived in the old times that drew themselves in my mind: an era with thick green grass and sunbathing and skate parks not yet repurposed as water treatment pools.

“Fine then,” she yelled over the singing and the ticking of bicycle tires, “let’s keep not fighting.”

We’d been getting along real good as of late, Sarah and I. Better than before, when we were arguing nightly about the baby. Or, rather, the lack of a baby. At one point we both shared the dream of a little goblin running around the house, bumping into everything and spreading a film of snotty fingerprints on all the windows. But as the societal tide of good feelings ebbed something inside both of us eroded away. Though now things were different. I was working down at the re-tread center and we had a little money saved up. Plus we were both at that age where we could still be a little optimistic about something like that. So I broached the subject again. And again. And every night until we were so tired from arguing that we fell asleep on opposite ends of the couch. We’d wake up in the morning to the clattering of Paully’s lathe vibrating his tool shed to death.

We were now back at the “we’ll see” phase, which I took as a step forward. If nothing else it meant we might start having sex again, and since I still had the parts for that I was buoyed further.

The bicycle parade disappeared behind a corner, their song now just a tangle of noise.

“You wanna follow them?” Sarah asked.

“What for?”

“They could be going somewhere heavy.”

I screwed up face and she softened.

“Okay, okay. C’mon then, shake a leg.”

We’d gone to a few rallies when the weather was nicer, sat in when the bottling plant was shut down, marched with the masses in wake of military brutality. Though we never stayed long. I found I didn’t have the stomach for protest—I also didn’t want to get tear-gassed again—and would ask to leave early.

“Now? But the music’s about to start.”

We’d walk home along the near-empty streets, the only people around being old folks with bad backs and government sympathy. I feared that one day I would see myself beside them. This was in direct opposition to the fantasies that played out in my head of myself as an aware, active person. Perhaps that was a younger version of myself. Perhaps that version only existed in the part of my brain that placated me as I spent the whole day sitting on the couch eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells out the window.

We’d been going along for thirty minutes on Sumner Ave when we came upon a looted grocery store. Upturned shopping carts dotted the parking lot, wheels spinning on worn out bearings. The windows had all been broken out. The large plastic letters that had announced the name—TETRA-MART—had fallen, or been stolen, or disintegrated. We stood to look at it a moment and I took another long pull from the canteen. My lungs were burning.

Sarah raised her eyebrows and gestured toward the doors. “Let’s go inside.”

“What for?” Water dribbled down my chin and onto my chest.

“I need razors.”

After the revolutionaries overtook the government the city erupted in violence. Living in the suburbs we were spared, but we heard about the unrest from friends. The further we got from the house the more we saw pebbled garbage cans upturned, the valuables—glass and aluminum—plucked out.

Though in recent days the resistance police forces had emerged; posses of men and women in cobbled together riot gear—motorcycle helmets, football shoulder pads, masonry knee pads all painted black. People were generally behaving themselves. Staying at home during the evening was for our own good, we were told.

Used to be that I would go out on my moped—when it still worked—and ride around at night. I would go into abandoned stores and sneak around. It felt sexy and dangerous. Though I’d stopped going out when, in the self-help aisle of a bookstore, I saw two men beating up on the shopkeeper. There was a desk fan, I recall, behind one of the men, and his long hair blew around his face. I left in a hurry, the book I had been scanning through, Think and Grow Rich, splayed open on the shelf. When I got home I vomited. Seems I wasn’t even seasoned enough for minor trespassing.

“Let’s go?” Sarah asked.

I sighed and rubbed the crust from my eye. “Yeah, let’s go.”

***

The inside of the grocery store was dark, light coming only from the broken-out windows and a few jittery fluorescents flashing high on the ceiling. The aisles were patchy: canned vegetables cleared out, dry pasta all gone, the waist high platforms where fruit had been stacked—when there weren’t high tariffs from neighboring counties—were empty save for a few withered oranges. Though there was plenty of Oat Bran left. Dust floated in the air and it looked a little like snow.

“Vincent?”

A woman walked towards us from the empty magazine racks, a rotisserie chicken dangling from one hand. I recognized her. We’d used to date back, way back, before I had met Sarah, before I decided that I didn’t want to date anymore. I can’t remember much from that time. I used to drink a lot. I used to get high a lot. But who didn’t.

“It’s good to see you.” She set the chicken down on a tipped-over soup can display and we embraced.

I was more than a little embarrassed. Not because I was meeting and old flame in front of Sarah—though perhaps later, lying in bed, submerged in that somnolent state where memory and regret pick at you like vultures, I would be—but because Ora, her name emerging in my brain, had her face pressed up against my disgusting jacket. It was part of my “rummaging” clothes, the kind I wore to work or when Sarah and I would go out and dig up stones for the wall we were slowly building between our’s and Paully’s property.

We detached and Ora introduced herself to Sarah as an “old friend.”

“Pretty nice find.” Sarah gestured to the chicken, it’s domed plastic case cloudy with moisture.

“Last one, pretty sure. You two going to Central?”

“What’s at Central?”

“First meeting of the new city council. Then a little street festival, supposedly.”

I began to tense the muscles in my legs, alternating one, then the other. All those people in such a small space. There’d probably be alcohol, inevitable yelling, a lot of bumping and jostling.

“We already made plans, but,” Sarah looked over at me, “maybe. We’ll see.”

Ora took the chicken back into her hands. “Well, if you go keep a look out for me. Come say hi.” She waved and walked through the broken automatic doors, twin dings falling in pitch like a burbling drain.

For a moment we stood between the abandoned registers, watching as other people pawed through the remains of the inventory.

“She’s nice.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. I just said she seems nice, is all.”

She was chewing the inside of her cheek. A tell. She was frustrated and I was getting red in the face, heat moving up into the space around my eyes.

“Well, what do you think?” She folded her arms and leaned her butt against an empty checkstand.

“Hmm?”

“About going to the meeting?”

I could feel an unpleasantness spreading across my face, my lips knit together tight, eyes narrowing. I looked like I had just smelled something awful.

“It could be important, you know.”

“Well, I don’t want to go.”

“So we were just going to go to the Hitching Post then head home?”

“I figured maybe a beer or two first.”

And then we fought in those heated whispers you hear from people arguing in public. We got looks from the store’s few shoppers: an elderly couple, arms full with paper towels, children looking for sweets. We covered all the old familiar ground, swapping out names and places. I tried to diffuse the tension with humor. That didn’t work. It was hopeless in the way that all arguments feel hopeless in the middle, that point where the conversation is on it’s third or fourth loop.

“What’s this about?” I asked.

“We both know what’s it’s about.”

Though I didn’t. Maybe I thought I did, but I was so often wrong about this sort of thing.

Eventually we both decided we’d had enough of each other.

“I’m going to go look around. Let’s meet back up in thirty minutes.”

She walked into the growing darkness away from the front windows. Then, as she rounded the corner into meat and fish, I couldn’t see her anymore.

I kicked around pet care for a bit, wrote my name in dust where the condoms used to hang, and then fell asleep in a chair by the empty pharmacist’s window, my head resting upon the vinyl shelf where there was once a mounted plastic blood pressure cuff. I dreamed I was at home, folding laundry, wet bras hanged by their straps on doorknobs. Everything was polygonal, triangles and other faceted shapes. Then I was outside, at night. I couldn’t feel the rain, but I knew it was raining. I could see it in the streetlight. I was alone. There was a voice that sounded as though it came from inside my own mouth, but it wasn't mine, and I couldn’t understand it.

When I woke my bandanna was pushed back and my forehead was imprinted with the cracks in the vinyl. I stared at my reflection for the second time that day in the pharmacist’s window. I looked older than I had this morning, more tired. I tried desperately to rub the imprints out with my fingers but failed. Blood rushed to the irritated skin and the marks only worsened, looking frighteningly red like veins.

I found Sarah sitting at the customer service counter leafing through an old issue of Glamour. There was a smudge of dirt beneath her eye mirroring the sunspot. I thought about pointing it out but I kind of liked the way it looked. I kicked a can of condensed milk and it rolled beneath a shelf. She looked up at me and smiled and without thinking I smiled back, automatic and light.

“Find anything good?” She set the magazine down on the scratched glass counter. The cover had been ripped off and the sickly smell of a perfume sample was wafting from the pages.

“Nothing.”

“Well, lucky for you I was eagle-eyed.” She stood up and slid across the counter, her legs leaving a trail in the dust. “Close your eyes and hold out your hands.”

Hadn’t we just been fighting? How long had I slept? I looked for a clock but the only one I saw was high on the wall and broken, its hands missing. I tried to call up our argument from earlier but nothing seemed tangible. Perhaps it didn’t matter. Every time I tried to remember the context, the geography of the words, I found I wasn’t angry anymore. I was just happy to see her again. So I closed my eyes, and beneath my lids colors lighted in my vision: purple and red and yellow, lines and shapes moving and morphing in the blackness. Something fell of a shelf. Something outside was burning. Something was placed in my hands that was so light I wasn’t sure anything was there at all.

I was pretty happy.

“Open up.”

Two scratch lotto cards lay in my hands, their edges curling slightly. In one corner cartoon coins fell like water from a slot machine.

“How great is that?” She was beaming.

“Where did you find these?”

“There’s a whole roll in the back.”

“What do we do with them?”

“Play them, of course.”

“But we can’t win.”

“No, but it’ll still be fun.”

Beneath the silvery plastic there could be anything, but once it was scratched off I couldn’t ever cover it back up, make it mysterious again. I thought about the phone call I got from my brother all those years ago, telling me that a group of people had burned down the bank building, how there were riots, violence, martial law. For a long time I had thought that if I hadn’t picked up the phone, never heard the news, that I could have just kept living life as I knew it. Nothing would have changed. I wouldn’t have become some scavenger working in a warehouse in the shitty part of town. Which was saying something because things were shitty all over. Though as I looked at Sarah I realized that there were still good things in my life.

“You wanna scratch them now?”

“No, let’s wait until we’re home.”

“Did you find razors?”

She shook her head no.

“Oh well, next abandoned grocery store.” I stuffed the cards into my back pocket and we walked back out into the street, goose-stepping over a fallen stack of empty egg crates.

***

Folks out in Hitchings had been living without a government for nearly two months, and things for them seemed to be going all right from what we could hear in between the static on the long reach stations. Not that we could hear much. Some nights you’d turn and turn the dial to a rather melancholy silence. Used to be you could catch the fragments of college ball from Lawrence. I would sit in front of the radio like a child, my legs crossed, Sarah beside me reading a book. Hadn’t been that way in a while. It was rumored that a few months back a family had taken up residence in the dish field up north, each of many children nestled in the cup of one of the antennas, sliding around against the curvature and gradually absorbing untold radiation. By the time they had been cleared out the basketball season was over and all we got were weather reports for places that didn’t much matter to us.

As the Hitching Post rose on the horizon I began to fantasize about being back at home, sitting on the mottled carpet and staring at the radio’s illuminated face. Recently a pirate station popped up in the high 1400s that played nothing but whale song. Often I scanned over to it and passed out, waking up some unknowable time later in the dark with my face enmeshed within the shag.

“Oh shit.”

Sarah barred her arm across my chest. I’d been distracted by the song of birds I couldn’t see. We stood before the Hitching Post, it’s big illuminated sign blinking a slow, steady rhythm. The large door swung open and hit the swaying feet of the man who, until just a few days ago, had enforced the tax code. Beside him was the county assayer. Both had torn suits and black cloth bags over their heads.

It was a lot heavier than I thought it would be.

“Well, yeah. There’s that.”

Of course it was sad to see those two people dead in front of us, but it was a muted, flat sadness. For so long it was hard to separate them and men like them from the ideas they peddled: the ownership of property, of harsh stewardship of the earth and its many extractable virtues. Now, standing in front of a run-down bar in the industrial district, I felt neither guilt nor shame for having played whatever small part I did in their deaths, but rather an emptiness in the space behind my sternum, hollow and full of cold wind. I think I’d been searching a long time, without being aware of it, for something to fill that vacancy. I had figured it would be some huge thing that would take up that void, but perhaps that wasn’t right. Perhaps it was the accumulation of many small, meaningful things.

The night before Sarah and I had started a crossword puzzle. I could see it in my mind’s-eye, half-filled in on the bedside table. I imagined the two of us with that puzzle, propped up against the headboard, comforter dusted with eraser dirt. We could finish it, and then move on to whatever thing needed doing next. That thing didn’t matter. It was, after all, just a thing.

In thinking this I took Sarah’s hand in mine, which I think was the right thing to do.

Benjamin Kessler's work has appeared, or is forthcoming in, Hobart, DIAGRAM, Jet Fuel Review, Entropy, Storyscape, The Oakland Review, Epigraph, Superstition Review, Aperçus, X-R-A-Y, Boudin, and Peatsmoke Journal, among others. He lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.