The sun is over the White River, lighting up its icy crust, setting it on fire, and Debra Hansen races next to it in her car, not sure for a moment if the sun is coming up or going down, thinking, in either case, that the sun rising or falling looks more like a movie, like a spaceship landing in a movie, than it does an everyday, natural occurrence. She is wishing for a spaceship. She is wishing away the smell of hogs, their awful death squeal, and the two-lane, the tiredness so deep even the backs of her knees ache.
South Dakota in the winter is not a land for wishing. The wind whips the snow across the highway and rattles the old car’s windows. Debra shakes in time with their rattling, flexing her gloved fingers against the steering wheel. She has left the hog confinement factory where she is chief accountant and payroll officer, a job she took nine months ago when the factory opened outside her hometown of Talbot, population 1034. It is a good job, everyone says. She has been happy to have work.
Then the pigs started dying, and the men in masks came at night, and people in town started to use words like ecoterrorists and sabotage. Some of the people were saying environmentalists, instead. Some were saying it would be good if the plant went away, that it’s trouble, that it’s too close to the river, that it’s polluting the water source, stinking up the air. All of a sudden people were arguing over the local economy, over their quality of life. These were words Debra was surprised these people knew—these people who, before the plant, only talked about the weather, about who was having whose baby.
Debra’s boss, Harold, doesn’t believe in environmentalists or ecoterrorists. He believes in what he knows—Damn kids with nothing else to do. He goes around the office muttering this, rubbing his top shirt button like it might have answers. Debra has seen the men in masks—knows they are men, not kids, but she doesn’t say so. She is trying both to locate in time and to put away that night, how she forgot her purse in the office and went back for it, late. She is trying to locate the walls of her office, to put away how they looked smeared in pig’s blood. How she grabbed her purse and backed out, slow, then faster when she saw the men. She is trying to locate the rough weave of their ski masks, to put away the feel against skin, not her skin, one to the next and the next. She is in her car, rolling down the car windows, driving fast. She is trying to put away the smell, how she drove faster and faster but still couldn’t outrun it. How she reached inside her purse for her cigarettes. She is trying to locate her cigarettes. She is trying to put away what she found instead.
Each day after, she goes into work, and she thinks about telling Harold, but she can see that he is frightened enough, so she keeps her worries. Everyone can see Harold’s fear. He brings his own men who stand at the gate, who carry guns and ammunition belts, who wear masks for the cold, sure. Who scare Debra as much as the night men in masks, because which men? And when? Because which masks? So Debra is mostly scared all the time. But nothing scares Debra as much as much as her old purse, which she leaves at home, now, on the mantel, the zipper tight as her work-smile.
All the time, day and night; there’s no sleeping. Instead, Debra does a lot of staring. Her thoughts come in flashes: the senior prom, Delbert Hansen down on one knee, the gymnasium light slanting off the ring, and Debra shaking her head back and forth. How she thought a person ought to get a new name when she got married. How she knew Delbert would want to name their kids Delilah, Dirk, Doug, Doris. How she could see ahead twenty years—a small farm alongside the White River, the uncontrollable urge to throw herself into it. And then there was college, instead. But still she’s here, alongside the White, shaking her head back and forth, staring at the river. She’s staring and shaking when the whirling lights come up behind her, fast. She is trying not to look again into her purse, but this is the new purse, yes? Instead, she studies the speedometer, the 87 registering as a number that means trouble.
The officer is young and blond with blue eyes in a face much too round to be taken seriously. “Ma’am,” he says, “do you know how fast you were going?”
Debra thinks this is just like in the movies, and so she is trying to think of something clever, a clever-girl excuse from the movies, and the blonde man is leaning into the car window, tapping his pen against a clipboard. Debra is wondering about the clipboard, if this variety is regulation size, because it seems small to her, un-policelike in its smallness, but then the blonde man interrupts her thinking.
“Ma’am,” he says, “are you all right?”
Debra smiles. She flips her stringy, light brown hair behind one shoulder. She knows her eyes are ringed in darkness, are red where they should be white, and she wishes she’d slept and showered, but she pushes these thoughts from her mind. She tells herself she has slept, at home in her bed with her husband. She tells herself she did not spend the night huddled in the corner of some office—and was it last night or a month ago or fourth months, anyway? She tells herself she will not think of death squeals and curled tails. She tells herself to stop it right now, this thinking will come to no good, and there will be springtime and flowers and good if she can just stop thinking. There will be no more winter, no more ice, no more bad smells, no more blood.
“I’m sorry, officer,” Debra says. Her lips move, clever girl, clever girl.
The officer holds the clipboard up to his face to shield it from the sun, which is now mid-sky, and his skin glows reddish-pink.
“Why the hurry?” he says.
“I’m sorry,” she says again, “but I really have to get home.”
His nose twitches for a moment as if he might sneeze, and Debra notices how it turns up at the end just slightly, and then it comes to her, how they can get back to the movie, what a clever girl might say. She gives him another smile, this time trying for sheepish. She slouches down in her seat, pushing out her stomach as far as it will go.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she says. “I’m five months pregnant, and this baby is really starting to push down on— ”
“Okay,” he says. “Okay, there.” His face is red, now, an escalation far past pink, and he and the clipboard are backing away from the car. His pen is writing out a warning, his hand stretching to place it in hers, and he is mumbling something about luck, maybe telling Debra good luck with the baby, but she isn’t really hearing him. She’s thinking she doesn’t need luck. She’s thinking that clever, pregnant girls don’t need luck or pigs or men like Delbert Hansen. She places one hand on the wheel and one hand on her belly. She presses down on the accelerator, and she swears she feels something rise.
The time goes by quickly, one month, one season to the next, with Debra feeling her belly rise and swell like the water in the White. It is spring, she is sure, and someone has planted tulips outside her office window, but there are days when they are mittens, left behind and colorful, but not cheerful, not exactly. Debra spends her time watching them open and close, imagining a marvelous scent, like roses and lilacs combined with the crispness of the night sky just before snowfall.
Her coworkers scurry about the building, smiling and laughing and working, and the blood stains on the walls have been painted over once, twice, three times. But Debra can see a few spots on the wall in the break room, over the coffee pot, near the American Bank calendar. She feels her coworkers talking about her, a buzzing like a roomful of flies, but she pays them no mind. They are jealous, she thinks, that I will have a baby, that they have only this place, cubicles and dead pigs and clocks that move slow.
She stares at the calendar—at the picture of golden puppies and pink-cheeked children playing in a field—and she wills it four inches to the left, but it never moves. She is working on this, on willing the calendar left, when she hears the water surge from her, breaking over her knees. It will stain the indoor-outdoor carpet under her desk, she thinks, but maybe no one will mind. Debra hurries from her office, hoping Harold won’t notice her leaving in the middle of the day, hoping they won’t have to have another conversation. He had come into her office—the week before, or was it last month? He had come into her office and shut the door behind him.
“Debra,” he said, “is everything all right?”
She was tired of people asking this—everything was better than all right—couldn’t they see? Harold mumbled on about the payroll being late, about complaints from the other employees and from those above him. Debra pictured a group of men with short-sleeved, button-down shirts like Harold’s, flying above with cherub-like wings and big, complaining mouths. They all fingered the top buttons on their shirts as they shouted, and soon their shouts turned to cries—babies’ cries—and their noses turned to snouts, and Debra had to look away.
She’d taken the afternoon off after the conversation. Once home, she’d slept deeply on the sofa as she did now most nights, awaking mid-morning, the movie long since over, the TV gone staticy and flickering.
In the car, the sound of the water breaking rushes over her. She races once more alongside the White and tells herself she’s done thinking of Harold. She’s done with the office, with all those people. She accelerates her car alongside the White, this time without being followed, without sirens whining their fly whine behind. It occurs to Debra, a mile from home, the sun over the river, the river beside the car—that she’s forgotten her purse again—but which purse? She knows there’s no going back.
She reaches home, the sofa, in time for one last spasm of pain, what she thinks of as a contraction, before she smells it coming out of her. There is crying, but she’s not sure whose voice it is she hears. Again, she is tired, so tired, and she’s forgotten to turn on the television, though she longs for a movie to start or end, for the flickering, staticky hum to soothe her. She leans into the familiar arms of the sofa, the familiar sounds of the river behind the house, behind her, and she curls herself fetal and sleeps.
When she wakes, her old purse sits on the mantle over the fireplace, keeping watch, its zipper teeth open, the smell inside so strong it has made the house its own. Debra wakes and stretches her sore back against the arm of the sofa. She shakes the pillow to remove its light blue case and walks with it to the mantle. The purse is in her hands, but she does not turn her head from the smell. She reaches her hand in and pulls from the sharp zipper teeth the part that remains—its boney edges smooth but for the cloven point—and she puts what remains into the cloth, swaddling it.
Debra fits the sharp bundle in the crook of her arm. She rocks and rocks, swaying in time with a rhythm it takes her a moment to recognize—not the TV hum or her own breath or the tick of the work clock, no—these sounds are finishing now. But when it comes to Debra, the recognition, her face breaks, such a clever, clever girl, and she moves to the back door, then beyond it, making her way through sunlight, moving in rhythm, not alongside the White this time, but down the hill, facing the river, swaying in rhythm to the water rush, carrying her bundle, down to the riverbank, and down.
______
Guest Editor: David James Poissant is the author of The Heaven of Animals: Stories (Simon & Schuster, 2014). His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Glimmer Train, The New York Times, One Story, Playboy, Ploughshares, and in the New Stories from the South and Best New American Voices anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with his wife and daughters. Visit him online at davidjamespoissant.com.
Photo credit: Andrew Birch Photography / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND