You Can Go Anywhere From Here

He didn’t ask if she remembered him because he knew of course she didn’t, it had only been one moment.

 
It was his mother who told him about Jay. This was after they’d moved to an apartment in town, a house divided into four parts and next to the supermarket parking lot. It was after his father had left for Florida and after one brother followed him south, and after the other joined the Army, and after his mother laced into winter boots to start at the meat processing plant, and it was just the two of them. Aaron and his mother were stopped at a train crossing and the train was so fast and so long he couldn’t count the cars, only see that they were mostly tankers. When his mother drove on the flat and straight Midwestern roads she named every person she knew who’d died there in a car wreck. A neighbor who ran a stop sign. A friend of Aaron’s father, drunk in a ditch. A teenager who’d gunned into a railroad bridge support, which most people thought was a suicide. Some of his brothers’ high school friends. Her old school bus driver, T-boned turning across a county route into her driveway. An aunt who lost control on the ice with blowing snow going to visit the cemetery, Jesus, don’t I always tell you not to take north-south roads in weather like that?

“That boy who lived out in the ratty farmhouse when we lived out on the state road, maybe he was in your grade? Remember how they had that pig roast? Crowded up the road with all those parked cars. Some kind of party. Traffic hazard was what it was. I’m surprised nobody called the police. Had to shut up the windows from the smell of it, even though your father said it smelled like the kind of good food that wasn’t cooking at our house.”

Aaron said how it wasn’t a pig roast.

“Well, what was it, then?”

“They’d killed a bull. Killed and gutted and skinned and quartered it and sent it to the butcher. Don’t know what they were eating though. Bratwurst, maybe.”

“Well, that boy and his cousin, a girl his same age, they died right here.” She gripped the steering wheel with both hands even though the car was in park as they waited. It was December, brown fields with corn stalks poking up out of the snow on either side of them, and the car was never warm enough. “Train-car collision, and you know who always wins that. Not sure they were even old enough to drive. Both 15, maybe. That’s why there’s a gate here now.” The end of the train finally rattled past them, and the arm of that very gate slowly lifted. “Course,” his mother said as they bumped over the tracks, “maybe the cousin didn’t die. Don’t remember the details. Maybe she lost a leg? Or has burns? Paper don’t get personal like that, unless it’s supposed to be inspirational or there’s a fundraiser. Can’t remember their names. Girl had one of those saint names, but a fancy one.”

“Cecilia.”

“Oh, so you know your saints now, do you?”

That summer Aaron thought he saw her outside the slaughterhouse.

He worked on the overnight clean-up shift and he never saw any live animal, just their entrails and their shit. His shift started at six o’clock and, dressed in knee-high rubber boots, a hard hat, and a long white coat, he hosed down the ramps, steam and shit rising. The pigs were the worst, for their excrement, a smell like ammonia that burned through his sinuses, and for the hair that made a disgusting gray slurry left behind in the settling tank. If he aimed the hose wrong, the water kicked it all back up and into his face.

It was the summer between his sophomore and junior years of college at the large state school built right up against a Great Lake that he never got to see, only feel the fierce wind that swept across it. He’d wanted to stay on campus that summer and find an internship, but there wasn’t any money for any of it, and his mother had gotten Aaron this job.

By the time Aaron arrived for his shift, most of the workers had gone home and it was only the cleanup crew, the supervisor, and sometimes an inspector. The girl loitering in the parking lot was always going to be noticeable since so few women worked in the slaughterhouse. If a woman worked in this town, she worked in the meat processing plant, where they all carried knives, sharpened all day as they worked until the blade wore down to the size of a paring knife, and then the women took them home and filled their kitchen drawers with big-handled and small-bladed knives. Aaron didn’t know how many they had at home now, since his mother had started working—it had been years—but his mother was now wicked with a knife in a way that matched the rest of her. On his good days he could see it all for what it was: a survival skill.

The girl hung out in the parking lot, sometimes leaning against a tree, sometimes lying down in the scraggily grass with her feet up along the trunk, and once when he walked by she said, by way of explanation, “My dogs are barking.” Maybe she was waiting for a ride home after her shift. Maybe she was waiting for someone inside. Maybe the parking lot was a nice spot. She usually had her hair pulled up and covered, usually with a ballcap or a kerchief. It wasn’t until he’d been working a week or so that she’d had her hair uncovered, the swing of it as fine and pale as corn silk, that he thought he recognized her.

She leaned up against a spindly tree, smoking. She was thin and stood curved in on herself. When Aaron walked by her she nodded, and he lifted his hand in a partial wave, but he didn’t say hello. He didn’t stop dead in his tracks and ask who she was, if she was who he thought she was. He didn’t ask, “Cecilia?” He didn’t ask if she remembered him because he knew of course she didn’t, it had only been one moment when they were all three children, and maybe she never knew his name anyway. He didn’t say, “I’d heard you were dead.” She had two legs, and any scars were covered by her blue jeans and boots and a long-sleeved shirt. It was hot outside but inside the slaughterhouse it was as cold as January and even colder in the chiller. He didn’t say how he’d never forget Jay, though he had, in fact, forgotten for a long while, but it was the kind of forgetting where a person didn’t think specifically on it, it was just a part of him. It was all too much to say to a person in a parking lot at the start of a shift, and so he just lifted his hand to wave, and went on into the slaughterhouse.

The back kitchen door opened to the westward sun and it was like a lightning flash, the kind that flares in the night, and that’s when he saw her.

He’d known Jay in the fifth grade when Aaron was ten years old and Jay, who’d been held back a year, was likely older. As far as Aaron could tell Jay wasn’t stupid, just not all that interested in sitting at a desk for very long. One day when the dismissal bell rang and the kids pushed out to the busses, Jay came up alongside Aaron, a walker, and said, “Come on, man, I’ve got a fight on the playground. Wait till the busses leave.”

When Aaron asked, “What about?” Jay laughed and said only, “Are you with me?” and Aaron said yes, and then they waited at the edge of the playground near one of the slides until a crowd showed up.

It was spring but the weather was still cold and the big winds always had teeth. The sky was low and gray. The land was flat farming country and the air filled with the smell of animal shit and fertilizer (the same) and the stagnant sludge of undrained fields. It was a thick and alive sort of smell, even with the stink.

Jay was hyped up and ready, bouncing on his toes like a boxer, as if he knew what he was doing, at least that was how it seemed to Aaron, the playground gravel almost musical beneath his feet. Jay’s opponent was a smaller boy but with a meaner look, greasy hair, and mismatched camo pants and shirt. He stood with feet rooted to the ground, socking his right fist into his left hand again and again in the universal language of Let’s get this show on the road.

One of the boys started the chant, Fight, Fight, Fight, and then they all took it up. “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Jay started it with a punch to the boy’s gut, and the punched boy looked stupidly surprised. When he recovered and socked Jay, also in the gut, Jay laughed out loud.

 A few other boys leapt into the center of the group and started swinging, and Aaron ended up face-down, the stones sharp on his palms. He spit gravel out of his mouth like broken teeth.

At the end of the fight—“Teacher!”—they sprinted off—and Jay and Aaron headed out to the road, a wide state route. Jay, his face bright pink and wet with sweat, gave Aaron a gentle punch on the shoulder. “Thanks, man,” he said. “Thanks.”

The road was loud with trucks passing by at 55 miles per hour and they didn’t say anything else. Jay’s house was past Aaron’s own and Aaron kept his eyes straight ahead on the white line of the road so he wouldn’t see if his mother was watching from behind the curtains. Aaron’s house was an old farmhouse, divided in half, with another family on the other side. Next door was a mother, a father, and one baby girl. “All that house!” his mother liked to say. “Three people in all that house, and here we are, five,” and Aaron’s father would say how that wasn’t the neighbors’ fault, and his mother responded, nearly always, “That baby has pierced ears, if you can imagine.” His father would laugh and say how he didn’t have to imagine, he’d already seen, but what he really meant was shut up, woman, and Aaron was sure the family on the other side could hear through uninsulated walls when he did say it. Shut up, woman, Shut up, woman, Shut up, woman.

Jay’s house, though faded and sagging, was one whole house, and the fields behind it were farm fields that belonged to Jay’s family, and not just weeds and tall grasses, like what grew out behind Aaron’s. Broken-down cars and tractors and farm equipment crowded the front yard, and the long dirt driveway lead to a barn, red going pink. There was a chicken coop on one side and a pig pen on the other, the pigs hardly visible as they lay concealed in mud.

Inside the house was dark with window shades pulled down and curtains drawn closed. The boys went quietly in the front door. In one room, the television in the corner was on, an afternoon game show the room’s only light. Three little kids, round babies each a little bigger than the other, played with plastic blocks, while across the doorway between rooms a woman slept on the floor, her body blocking the only way out.

Jay pulled Aaron to the kitchen at the back of the house. The old linoleum of patterned windmills peeled up, and the white countertops were flecked with blue, like an egg. Jay lumbered in ahead of him, and though Aaron didn’t know Jay’s father, he knew Jay moved just like him, the way he hiked up his beltless blue jeans, how he huffed and stuck out his chest, how he stood next to the old tan refrigerator and said, “Take a look at this here.”

At that moment the back kitchen door opened to the westward sun and it was like a lightning flash, the kind that flares in the night, and that’s when he saw her. She had hair that wasn’t even quite yellow but was more the color of white-kernelled sweet corn, and its fineness made it seem more transparent than anything else. Her eyebrows and eyelashes seemed almost invisible. It was as though of course that was the color she’d turned when she’d walked through the sun.

Jay said, “That’s my cousin Cecilia. That’s what the fight was about.”

“Not me,” Cecilia said, “He doesn’t mean me. Besides, Joey already got one of the horns.”

Aaron figured Joey was the name of the smaller boy who’d been surprised by the hit in the gut and even more surprised that when he punched back Jay laughed.

Cecilia and Jay bent their heads together, like litter mates, which was how his mother would put it, even though Jay’s hair was darker, and it seemed as though Jay needed Cecilia’s permission to show Aaron whatever it was Jay was telling him about. “You won’t believe it,” Jay said when he opened the refrigerator door. He handed Cecilia a yellow margarine tub and Cecilia handed it to Aaron. He noticed she didn’t even have freckles, and how could anyone so pale not have freckles? She and Jay beamed at each other and Aaron had no idea what he held, but these two, these two knew it was amazing.

“Go on,” Jay said, “Open it.”

Inside was a dark ball, bigger than a marble, smaller than a baseball. It was edged with white. He had no idea what it was. He didn’t think it was food, so perfect and round. He had no idea why it was in a leftover margarine tub in the refrigerator. He had no idea why Jay and this girl thought it was so special and why they let him see it.

He knew what it wasn’t; it wasn’t a marble from the fiberglass insulation factory in town. Every kid had picked up one of those faintly greenish marbles in the parking lot. Those were about the same size as this brown object, but nobody ever found a perfectly round one. They were all always misshapen. They arrived by the truckful to be ground down. Aaron’s father had worked there briefly, and once he brought one home for Aaron, said it was about as perfect a one he’d ever seen, even flat as it was on one side, which was something, his father had said, because they weren’t made to be perfect, they were made to be destroyed. Aaron had held it up and squinted, wondering if it could be like a crystal ball or a kaleidoscope, but it was too thick to see through. That was a long time ago. Before the lay-offs and before they moved to the half-house (what his mother called it, though his father said that was stupid way to put it, it wasn’t half a house, what was it missing?).

Aaron gazed down into the brown sphere. He was mystified, but he understood it was amazing, it was beautiful, it was wonder, and he could look into it forever.

That smooth darkness was like night, or outer space, as though someone had reached out into the night sky and rolled the stolen piece into a ball and placed it into a leftover container and gave it to Cecilia and Jay to store in the refrigerator.

Jay reached over and picked it up. They watched, silent, as Jay set it in the palm of his hand and then held it up to the light where they could see its perfect smoothness. Aaron felt a fragile and childish wonder he hadn’t felt in a long time.

When the principal spoke, he spoke of outer space. He spoke of the moon.

They were paddled for it.

The day after the fight, the principal called all students involved into his office, lined them up against the wall, and did not ask questions. His suit jacket hung over the back of his desk chair, and he’d rolled up his shirtsleeves. He was a tall man with hunched shoulders that made him look like a hawk, and when he swung the paddle he looked like a one-winged bird struggling to take flight. He moved from the least involved to the most, with Aaron somewhere in the middle, as though the stone he’d spit out like teeth and Jay’s camaraderie really had meant something. They all cried, and all cried the same: a ragged attempt at swallowing it, leaking tears, breath held, until the next whack forced it out. All of them cried but Jay, paddled last, who’d get a laugh knocked out of him with a punch but never even a whimper from the paddle, even as the principal tried again and again, and it stayed with Aaron, after.

The principal turned his back and rolled down his sleeves and bent into his brown suit jacket, and all the boys but Jay sucked snot against the wall. When the principal spoke, he spoke of outer space. He spoke of the moon. He opened the window blinds that looked out to the playground and that big open sky, uninterrupted by trees or buildings.

“Look out the window,” the principal ordered over their sniveling. “Do you know how many astronauts have come from fields like this? From this same state—this very same county, even? They looked at that very same sky that you look at. They saw their future. They saw outer space. Don’t you know that you could go anywhere from here?”

It was both a promise and a threat.

One day a month or so after the students took a long state test and filled in green answer sheets, the guidance counselor came to the classroom and told Aaron to collect his things and moved him directly up a grade. He didn’t see much of Jay again, not even at recess or out at the road, and then they moved again and he was at a different school entirely.

The night he thought he saw Cecilia in the parking lot he found a leftover cow hide that had literally fallen through the cracks— gaps in the grated floor—to the level below. He kicked it and discovered that it was hard and heavy, and he thought so that’s why cattle are so slow, and then went off to find his supervisor and then to wait. The supervisor brought in some other white-coated workers to salt it to preserve it for tomorrow’s hide truck, and told Aaron to take his break so Aaron stepped outside into the summer night. He squinted out into the dark distance, past the bright lights on the building that seemed alive with mosquitoes and moths. He looked for the tree in the parking lot. He looked to see Cecilia, waiting. He looked to see Cecilia in the darkness.

For the longest while that bright afternoon in Jay’s west-facing kitchen, Aaron didn’t even think to ask what it was. What could it even be? Did he even want to know if it was something ordinary?

When he’d finally asked, Jay told him. “It’s a bull’s eye.”

Aaron nodded. It still didn’t make sense. Jay and Cecilia were quiet, waiting for something. It wasn’t cruelty that filled them, or even the long wait for the punchline. They were amazed by it too. They loved it too. They had shown him. They were waiting for him to understand. “A bullseye of what?”

Jay shook his head. “No, man, it’s a bull’s eye. It’s the eye of a bull.”

Stepping outside the ring of the slaughterhouse’s lights, he fell into darkness and he closed his eyes, waiting for them to adjust. Maybe she was as gone as a ghost, but he looked again at the tree and if he saw her he’d say, “Cecilia? Do you remember me? Do you remember when we were kids? Cecilia? Cecilia?”