Searching for Trilobites

As I stepped onto the brick side street, I looked at Company Hill again—all worn down and rounded off. A long time ago, it stood like a craggy island in the Teays River. It took over a million years to make that smooth little hill and I’ve scoured every inch of it for trilobites. A flock of starlings swam high above me, where the air was smoky with summertime. I was born in this country and I had never very much wanted to leave. I shut the door of my truck and headed for the café.

        In the street, there was a concrete patch with a shape that reminded me of Florida. And I recollected what I wrote in Ginny’s yearbook: “We will live on mangoes and love.” Two years she’d been down in Orlando without me. She sent me postcards with alligator wrestlers and flamingos on the front. She never asked me any questions.

        Ginny called last night. Her old man drove her down from the airport in Charleston. She was already bored.

        “Can we get together?”

        “Sure.”

        ”Maybe do some brew?” 

        “Sure.”

        “Same old Colly. Same old Ginny.”

        I wanted to tell her about Pop and how Mom was on the warpath to sell the farm, but Ginny was talking through her beak.

        I rested in the cooled air of the empty cafe. Tinker Reilly’s little sister poured my coffee. Her hips sloped nice curves to her legs—like Ginny’s. Hips and legs like that climbed steps into airplanes. She went to the counter end and scarfed down the rest of her sundae. I smiled at her, but she was jailbait. Jailbait and black snakes are two things I wouldn’t touch with a window pole. One time I used an old black snake for a bullwhip, snapped the sucker’s head off, and Pop beat the hell out of me with it. Pop could make me pretty mad sometimes.

        Greasy, dusty cups hung on pegs by the storefront. There were four of them, each with a decal name. The cleanest one was Jim’s because he still used it, but it hung there with the rest. Through the window, I could see him crossing the street, his joints cemented with arthritis. I thought of how long it’d be before I croaked, but Jim was old, and it gave me the creeps to see his cup hanging up there. I went to the door and helped him in.

        “Tell the truth, now,” he said. His wrinkled paw pinched my arm.

        “Can’t do her,” I said, helping him to his stool.

        I pulled a globby rock from my pocket and slapped it on the counter. He turned it with his drawn hand, examined it. “Gastropod,” he said. “Probably Permian. You buy again.” I couldn’t win with him.

        “I still can’t find a trilobite,” I said.

        “There are a few,” he said. “Not many. Most of the outcrops around here are too late for them.”

        The girl brought Jim coffee in his cup and she pumped back to the kitchen—good hips.

        “You see that?” He jerked his head toward her.

        “Moundsville Molasses,” I said.

        “Hell, girl’s age never stopped your dad and me in Michigan.”

        “Tell the truth.”

        “Sure. You got to time it so you nail the first freight out when your pants are up.”

        The windowsill was speckled with the crisp skeletons of flies. “Why’d you and Pop leave Michigan?”

        The crinkles around Jim’s eyes slackened. “The war,” he said and sipped his coffee.

        “He never made it back there.”

        “Me either—always wanted to—there or Germany—just to look around.”

        “Yeah, he promised to show me where you all buried that silverware and stuff during the war.”

        “On the Elbe,” he said. “Probably plowed up by now.”

        My eye sockets reflected in my coffee. Steam curled around my face. I looked up to ask Tinker’s sister for an aspirin, but she was giggling in the kitchen.

        “That’s where he got that wound,” said Jim. “Got it on the Elbe. He was out a long time. Cold, Jesus, it was cold. I had him for dead, but he came to. Says, ‘I been all over the world’; says, ‘China’s so pretty, Jim.'”

        “Dreaming?”

        “I don’t know. I quit worrying about that stuff years ago.”

        Tinker’s sister came up with her coffeepot to make us for a tip. I asked her for an aspirin and spotted a pimple on her collarbone. I didn’t remember seeing pictures of China. I watched the hips.

        “Trent still wanting your place for that housing project?”

        “Sure,” I said. “Mom’ll probably sell it, too. I can’t run the place like Pop did. Cane looks bad as hell.” I drained off my cup, exhausted by the subject. “Going out with Ginny tonight.”

        “Give her that for me,” he said, poking at my whang. I hated when he talked about her like that. He looked up at me and his grin slipped. “Found a lot of gas for her old man. One hell of a guy before his wife pulled out.”

        I wheeled on my stool and clapped his weak shoulder. “You stink so bad the undertaker’s following you.”

        He laughed. “You were the ugliest baby ever born, you know that?”

        I grinned and started out the door, hearing him shout to his sister. “Come on over here, honey, I got a joke for you.”

The heat of the filmy sky burned through the salt on my skin, drawing it tight. I drove the truck west along the highway built on the dry bed of the Teays. There were wide bottoms and the hills on either side had yellow billows the sun couldn’t burn off. 

        I passed an iron sign put up by the WPA: “Surveyed by George Washington, the Teays River Pike.” I saw fields and cattle where buildings stood and pictured them from some long-off time.

        I turned off the main road to our house. Clouds blinked the sunshine light and dark in the yard. I looked again at the spot of ground where Pop fell. He had lain spread-eagle in the thick grass after a sliver of metal from his old wound passed to his brain. I remembered thinking how beaten his face looked with prints from the grass. 

        I reached the high barn and started my tractor, then drove to the knob at the end of our land. I sat there, smoked, looked again at the cane. The rows curved tight, but around them was a sort of scar of clay and the leaves had a purplish blight. The cane was too far gone to worry about the blight. Far off, somebody was woodchopping and the ax-bites echoed to me. The baked hillsides shimmered with heat ghosts. Our cattle moved to the wind gap and birds hid in caps of trees where we never cut the timber for pasture. Pop had set the wrinkly old boundary post when the hobo and soldier days were over. A few dead morning glories clung to it.

        “I’m just not no good at it,” I said. “It just don’t do to work your ass off at something you’re not no good at.”

        The chopping stopped. I listened to the beat of grasshopper wings and strained to spot blight on the far side of the bottoms.

        “Yessir, Colly,” I said, “you couldn’t grow pole beans in a pile of horseshit.” 

        I squashed my cigarette against the floor plate. I pressed the starter and bumped around the fields, then down to the ford of the drying creek, and up the other side. Turkles fell from logs into stagnant pools. I stopped my machine, rubbed a sunburn into the back of my neck. The cane here was just as bad.

        “Shot to hell, Gin,” I said. “Can’t do nothing right.” 

        I leaned back, trying to forget the fields and flanking hills. A long time before me or these tools, the Teays flowed here. I could feel the cold waters and the tickling of crawling trilobites. All the water from the old mountains flowed west. But the land lifted. I had only the bottoms and stone animals I collected. I blinked and breathed. My father was a khaki cloud in the canebrakes and Ginny was no more to me than the bitter smell in the blackberry briers up on the ridge.

        I took up my sack and gaffed for a turkle. Some quick chubs flashed under the bank. In the moss-dapples, rings spread where a turkle ducked under. This sucker was mine. The pool smelled like rot beneath the hard brown sun.

        I waded in. He went for the roots of a log. I shoved around and felt my gaff twitch. He was a smart turkle but still a sucker. I bet he could pull liver off a hook for the rest of his days, but he was a sucker for the roots that held him while I worked my gaff. I pulled him up and saw he was a snapper. He’d got his stubby neck curved round, biting at the gaff.

        I laid him on the sand and took out Pop’s knife. I stepped on the shell, pressing hard. That fat neck got skinny quick and stuck way out. A little blood oozed from the gaff wound into the grit, but when I sliced, a puddle formed.

        “Get a dragon, Colly?”

        I shivered and looked up. It was only the loansman standing on the bank in his tan suit. His face was splotched pink and the sun turned his glasses black.

        “I crave them now and again,” I said. I went on slitting gristle, skinning back the shell. 

        “Aw, your daddy loved turtle meat,” the guy said.

        Cane leaves scratched together in the late sun. I dumped the tripes into the pool, bagged the rest, and headed up the ford. I said, “What can I do for you?”

        This guy started up. “I saw you from the road—just came down to see about my offer.”

        “I told you yesterday, Mr. Trent. It ain’t mine to sell.” I toned it down. “You got to talk to Mom.”

        Blood dripped from the pokeweed to the dust, making a dark paste. Trent pocketed his hands, looked over the cane. A cloud blocked the sun and my crop glowed greenish in the shade.

        “This is about the last real farm left around here,” said Trent.

        “Blight’ll get what the dry left,” I said, shifting the sack to my free hand.

        “How’s your mother getting along?” he said. I saw no eyes behind his smoky glasses. 

        “Pretty good,” I said. “She’s wanting to move to Akron.” I swung the sack a little toward Ohio and sprayed some blood on Trent’s pants. “Sorry.”

        “It’ll come out,” he said. But I hoped not. I grinned and watched the turkle’s mouth gape on the sand. “Well, why Akron?” he said. “Family there?”

        I nodded. “Hers,” I said. “She’ll take you up on the offer.” A hot shadow sapped me and my voice whispered. I threw the sack to the floor plate and climbed up to grind the starter. The metal seat burned through my jeans.

        “Saw Ginny at the post office,” this guy shouted. “She sure is a pretty.” 

        I waved, almost smiled, as I lumbered up the dirt road. I passed Trent’s dusty Lincoln, moved away from my bitten cane. It could go now—the stale seed, the drought, the blight—when she signed the papers. I knew I would always be to blame, but it couldn’t just be my fault. “What about you?” I said. “Your side hurt all that morning, but you wouldn’t see no doctor. No, sir, you had to see that your dumb boy got the crop put proper in the ground.” I shut my trap to keep from talking like a fool.

I stopped my tractor on the terraced road to the barn and looked back to the creekbed. Yesterday, Trent said the bottoms would be filled with dirt. That would put the houses above flood, but it’d raise the flood line. Under all those houses, my turkles would turn to stone. Our Herefords made rusty patches on the hill. I wondered if the new high waters would get over Pop’s grave.

        I watched the cattle play. A rain is always coming when cattle play. Sometimes they play for snow, but mostly it’s rain. After Pop whipped the daylights out of me with that snake, he hung it on a fence. But it didn’t rain. The cattle weren’t playing and it didn’t rain, but I kept my mouth shut. The snake was bad enough. I didn’t want the belt too.

        My first time with Ginny was on the tree-cap of that hill. I thought of how close we could’ve been then and maybe even now. I’d like to go with Ginny, fluff her hair in any other field. But I could see her in the post office, sending postcards to some guy in Florida.

        I drove on to the barn, stopped under the shed. I wiped my face with my sleeve, noticed the seams had slipped from my shoulders. The turkle was moving in the sack and its shell clinked against the gaff. I took the poke to the spigot to clean the game. Pop always liked turkle in mulligan stew. He talked a lot about mulligan and the hobo jungles just an hour before I found him.

        Maybe Ginny’d take me to her house this time. If her momma had been anybody but Pop’s cousin, her old man would let me go to her house. Screw him. But I could talk to Ginny. I wondered if she remembered our plans. We wanted kids. She always nagged about a peacock. I would get her one.

        I smiled as I dumped the sack into the rusty sink, but the barn smell—the hay, the cattle, the gasoline—reminded me. Me and Pop built this barn. Every nail stirred up the same dull pain. 

I cleaned the meat and laid it out on cloth torn from an old bed sheet. I folded the corners and walked to the house.

        The hot air churned, rattling the screens in the kitchen window. Mom and Trent were talking on the front porch and I left the window up. It was the same come-on he gave me yesterday and I knew Mom was eating it up. She was probably thinking about tea parties with her cousins in Akron. She never listened to what anybody said. She just said all right to anything anybody but me or Pop ever said. She even voted for Hoover before they got married. I threw the turkle meat into a skillet and grabbed a beer. Trent softened her up with me. I pricked my ears.

        “I would wager on Colly’s agreement,” he said, a hill twang still in his voice.

        “I told him Sam’d put him on at Goodrich,” she said. “They’d teach him a trade.”

        “And there are a good many young people in Akron. You know he’d be happier.” His voice sounded like a damn TV. 

        “Well, he’s awful good to keep me company. Don’t go out none since Ginny took off to that college.”

        I leaned against the sink and rubbed my face. The smell of turkle soaked between my fingers.

        Through the living room door, I saw the rock case Pop built for me. The white labels showed up behind the dark gloss of the glass. Ginny helped me find over half of those. If I did study in college, I could have come back and taken Jim’s place at the gas wells. I liked to hold little stones that lived so long ago. But geology didn’t mean lick to me. I couldn’t even find a trilobite.

        I stirred the meat and listened, but the porch was silent. A lightning flash peeled shadows from the yard, leaving a dark strip under the eave of the barn. Feeling scum on my skin in the still air, I took my supper to the porch.

        Down the valley, bison used to graze before the first rails were put down. Now those rails were covered with a highway where cars rushed back and forth in the wind. Trent’s car backed out, heading east into town. I was afraid to ask right off if he got what he wanted.

        I stuck my plate under Mom’s nose, but she waved it off. I sat in Pop’s old rocker, watching the storm come.

        Dust devils puffed around the berm. Maple sprigs landed in the yard with their white bellies up.

        Across the road, our windbreak bent. Rows of cedars furled every which way at once.

        “Coming a big one?” I said.

        Mom said nothing and cooled herself with the funeral home fan. The wind layered her hair, but she kept that cardboard picture of Jesus bobbing like crazy. Her face changed. I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking how she wasn’t the girl in the picture on the mantel. She wasn’t standing with Pop’s garrison cap cocked on her head.

        “I wish you’d of come out while he’s here,” she said, staring at the windbreak.

        “I heard him yesterday,” I said.

        “It ain’t that at all,” she said. Her brow came down a little. “It’s like when Jim called us askin’ if we wanted some beans, an’ I had to tell him to leave ’em in the truck at church. I swan how folks talk when men come ’round a widow.”

        I knew Jim talked like a dumb old fart, but it wasn’t like he’d rape her or anything. I didn’t want to argue with her. “Well,” I said, “who owns this place?”

        “We still do. Don’t have to sign nothin’ till tomorrow.”

        She quit bobbing Jesus to look at me. “You’ll like Akron. Law, I bet Marcy’s youngest girl’d love to meet you. She’s a regular rock hound too. ‘Sides, your father always said we’d move there when you got big enough to run the farm.”

        I just kept my mouth shut. Raindrops rang the roof tin. High wind snapped branches. Pale splinters of light shot down behind the far hills. We were just brushed by the storm.

        Ginny’s sports car hissed east on the road, honking as it passed. But I knew she would be back.

        “Just like her momma,” said Mom, “racin’ the devil for the beer joints.”

        “She never knew her momma,” I said, setting my plate on the floor. I was glad Ginny thought to honk.

        “What if I’s to run off with some foreman from the wells?”

        “You wouldn’t do that, Mom.”

        “That’s right,” she said, watching the cars roll by. “Shot her in Chicago. Shot hisself too.”

        I looked beyond the hills and time. Red hair clouded the pillow, blood splattered by the slug. Another body lay rumpled and warm at the bed foot.

        “Folks said he done it cause she wouldn’t marry him. Found two weddin’ bands in his pocket. Feisty little I-taliun.”

        I saw police and reporters cramped in the tiny room. Mumbles spilled into the hallway. Nobody looked at the dead woman’s face.

        “Well,” said Mom, “at least they was still wearin’ their clothes.”

        The rain slowed and, for a long time, I sat watching the blue chicory swaying beside the road. I thought of all the people I knew who’d left these hills. Only Jim and Pop came back to the land, worked it.

        Mom pointed to the hills. “Lookee at the willow wisps.”

        The rain trickled, seeping in to cool the ground. The fog curled little ghosts into the branches and gullies. The sun tried to sift through this mist but was only a tarnished brown splotch in the pinkish sky. Wherever the fog was, the light was a burnished orange.

        “Can’t recall the name Pop gave it,” I said.

        The colors shifted, trading tones.

        “He had some funny names all right. Called a tomcat a ‘pussy scat.'”

        “Cornflakes were ‘pone-rakes’ and a chicken was a ‘sick-un.'”

        ‘Well,” she said, “he’ll always be a part of us.”

        The gloomy paint on the chair arm packed under my fingernails. She could foul up a free lunch.

        I stood up to go in, but I held the screen, searching for something to say.

        “I ain’t going to live in Akron,” I said.

        “An’ just where you gonna live, Mister?”

        “I don’t know.”

        She started up with her fan again.

        “Me and Ginny’s going low-riding,” I said.

        She didn’t look at me. “Get in early. Mr. Trent don’t keep no late hours for no beer drinkers.”

In the quiet house, I could hear sniffling out there. I hurried to wash the smell of turkle from my hands. I shook all over while the water flowed down. I talked back. I’d never talked back. I was scared, but I stopped shaking. I walked out to the road without looking back to the porch.

        I climbed in the car, let Ginny kiss my cheek. I’d never seen those clothes and she was wearing too much jewelry.

        “You look great,” she said. “Haven’t changed a bit.”

        We drove west along the Pike.

        “Where we going?”

        She said, “Let’s park for old times’ sake. How’s the depot?”

        “Sure.” I said, reaching back for a can of Falls City. “You let your hair grow.”

        “You like?”

        “Um, yeah.”

        As we drove, the colors of the tinged fog changed hue.

        She said, “Sort of an eerie evening, huh?” It all came from her beak.

        “Pop always called it a fool’s fire or something.”

        We pulled in beside the old, boarded-up depot. We drank, watching the colors of the sky slip to gray dusk.

        “You ever look in your yearbook?” I said and gulped down the rest of my City.

        She went crazy laughing. “You know,” she said, “I don’t even know where I put that thing.”

        Across the railroad, there was a field sown in timothy with pumps to suck the ancient gasses. The gas burned blue, and I wondered if the ancient sun was blue. The tracks ran on ‘til they were a dot in the brown haze, gave off clicks from their switches. Some tankers waited on the spur, their wheels rusted to the tracks. What the hell did I ever want with trilobites?

        “Big night in Rock Camp,” I said, watching Ginny drink. Her skin glowed yellowishly and the last light made sparks in her red hair.

        She said, “Daddy would raise hell. Me this close to the wells.”

        “You’re a big girl now. C’mon, let’s walk.”

        When we got out, she grabbed my arm. Her fingers felt like ribbons on the veins of my hand.

        “How long you in for?” I said.

        “Just a week here, then a week with Daddy in New York. I can’t wait to get back. It’s great.”

        “You got a guy?”

        She looked at me with this funny smile of hers. “Yeah, I got a guy. He’s doing plankton research.”

        Ever since I talked back, I’d been afraid, but now I hurt again. We came to the tankers, and she took hold of a ladder, stepped up.

        “This right?” She was all crouched in like she’d just nailed a drag on the fly. I laughed.

        “Nail the end nearest the engine. If you slip, you get throwed clear. Way you are, a drag on the fly’d suck you under. ‘Sides, nobody’d ride a tanker.”

        She stepped down but didn’t take my hand. “He taught you everything. What killed him?”

        “Little shell fragment. Been in him since the war. Got in his blood...” I snapped my fingers. I wanted to talk, but the picture wouldn’t become words. I felt scattered, every cell miles from the others. I pulled them back and kneeled in the dark grass. I rolled the body face up and stared into the eyes a long time before I shut them. “You never talk about your momma.”

        “I don’t want to,” she said and ran to a broken window in the depot. She peeked in, turned to me. “Can we go in?”

        “Why? Nothing in there but old freight scales.”

        “Because it’s spooky and neat and I want to.” She ran back, kissed me on the cheek. “I’m bored with this glum look. Smile!”’

        I dragged a rotten bench under the window and climbed in. I took Ginny’s hand to help her. A blade of glass sliced her forearm. The cut path was shallow, but I took off my T-shirt. The blood blotted purple on the cloth.

        “Hurt?”

        “Not really.”

        A mud dauber landed on the glass blade. Its steel-blue wings flicked as it walked the edge. It sucked what the glass had scraped from her skin. I could hear them working in the walls.

        Ginny was at the other window, peering through a knothole in the plywood.

        I said, “See that light green spot on the second hill?”

        “Yeah.”

        “That’s the copper on your-all’s roof.”

        She turned to me.

        “I come here lots,” I said, breathing the musty air. I looked out the window, but I could feel her stare. Company Hill looked bigger in the dusk, and I thought of all the hills I’d never set foot on. Ginny came up behind me, glass crunching with her steps. The hurt arm went around me, the tiny spot cold against my back.

        “What is it, Colly? Why can’t we have any fun?”

        “When I was a young punk, I tried to run away from home. I was walking through this meadow on the other side of the Hill, and this shadow passed over me. I honest to God thought it was a pterodactyl. It was a damned airplane. I was so damn mad, I came home.” I peeled chips of paint from the window frame while I waited for her to talk. She leaned against me and I kissed her real deep. Her waist bunched in my hands. The skin of her neck was almost too white in the faded evening.

        I slid her to the floor. Her scent rose to me, and I shoved crates aside to make room. I didn’t wait. She wasn’t making love. She was getting laid. I pulled her pants around her ankles, rutted her. In my mind, Ginny wasn’t here, just good hips. A wash of blue light passed over me. I opened my eyes to the floor, smelled the tang of rain-wet wood. Black snakes. It was the only time he had to whip me.

        “Let me go with you,” I said. I wanted to be sorry, but I couldn’t.

        “Colly, please. . .” She shoved me back. Her head rolled in splinters of paint and glass.

        For a long time, hollow shadows hid her eyes. She was somebody I met a long time ago. I couldn’t remember her name for a minute, then it came back to me. I sat against the wall and my spine ached. I listened to the mud daubers building nests and traced a finger along her throat.

        “I want to go. My arm hurts.” Her voice came from someplace deep in her chest.

        We climbed out. A yellow light burned on the crossties and the switches clicked. Far away, I could hear a train. She gave me my shirt and got in her car. I stood there looking at the dark spots on the cloth. I felt old as hell. When I looked up, her taillights were reddish blurs in the fog.

        I walked around to the platform, slumped on the bench. The evening cooled my eyelids. I thought of how that one time was the only airplane that ever passed over me.

        I pictured my father as a young hobo with the Michigan sunset making him squint, the lake behind him. His face was hard from all the days and places he fought to live in, and all of a sudden, I knew his mistake was coming back here to set that locust-tree post on the knob.

        “Ever notice how only blue lightning bugs come out after a rain? Green ones almost never do.”

        The train was coming. She was highballing all right—no stiffs in that blind baggage.

        “Well, you know the Teays must of been a big river. Just stand on Company Hill and look across the bottoms. You’ll see.”

        My skin was heavy with her noise. Her light cut a wide slice in the fog. No stiff in his right mind could try this one on the fly. She was hell-bent for election.

        “Jim said it flowed west by northwest—all the way up to the old St. Lawrence Drain. Had garfish—ten, maybe twenty foot long. Said they’re still in there.”

Good old Jim’d probably croak on a lie like that. I watched her beat by. A worn-out tie belched mud with her weight. She was just too fast to jump—plain and simple.

        I would spend tonight at home. I’d got eyes to shut in Michigan—maybe even Germany or China, I didn’t know yet. I walked, but I wasn’t scared. My fear moved away in rings through time for a million years.