A sign goes by saying, Dangerous Curves Ahead.
A sign goes by saying, Slippery When Wet.
Outside the window, Nebraska is getting closer by the minute.
The whole world is a disaster waiting to happen.
'I want you to know I won't always be here,' Fertility says, 'but I'll always find you.'
A sign goes by the window saying, Oklahoma
'No matter what happens,' Fertility says, 'no matter what you do or your brother does, it's the right thing.'
She says, 'You have to trust me.'
I ask, Can I just have some Chap Stick? For my lips. They're chapped.
A sign goes by saying, Yield.
'Okay,' she says. 'I've forgiven your sins. If it helps you relax a little, I guess I can get you some Chap Stick.'
Of course, we lose Fertility at a truck stop outside Denver, Colorado. Even I could see that coming. She sneaks off to get me some Chap Stick while the truck driver is out taking a leak. Adam and me are both asleep until we hear her screaming.
And of course she planned it this way.
In the dark, in the moonlight through the windows, I stumble through the furniture to where Adam has thrown open the two front doors.
We're pulling away from the truck stop, gaining speed as the driver upshifts with Fertility running after us. Her one hand outstretched with the little tube of Chap Stick. Her red hair is flagging out behind her. Her shoes slap the pavement.
Adam is stretching his one hand out to save her. His other hand is gripping the doorframe.
With the shaking of the house, a marble-topped little occasional table falls over and rolls past Adam out the doors. Fertility dodges as the table smashes in the street.
Adam is saying, 'Take my hand. You can reach it.'
A dining-room chair shakes out of the house and smashes, almost hitting Fertility, and she says, 'No.'
Her words almost lost in the roar of the truck engine, she says, 'Take the Chap Stick.'
Adam says, 'No. If I can't reach you, we'll jump. We have to stay together.'
'No,' Fertility says. 'Take the Chap Stick, he needs it.'
Adam says, 'He needs you more.'
The windows we left open suck air inside, and the easy-living open floor plan channels this airstream out through the front doors. Embroidered throw pillows blow off the sofa and bounce out the front doors around Adam. They fly at Fertility, hitting her in the face and almost tripping her. Framed decorative art, botanical print reproductions mostly and tasteful racehorse prints, flap off the walls and sail out to explode into shards of glass and wood slivers and art.
The way I feel, I want to help, but I'm weak. I've lost too much attention in the last few days. I can hardly stand. My blood sugar levels are all over the map. I can only watch as Fertility falls behind and Adam risks leaning out farther and farther.
The silk flower arrangements topple and red silk roses, red silk geraniums, and blue iris sail out the door and flutter around Fertility. The symbols of forgetfulness, poppies, land in the road, and she sprints over them. The wind throws mock orange and sweet peas, white and pink, baby's breath and orchids, white and purple, at Fertility's feet.
'Don't jump,' Fertility is saying.
She's saying, 'I'll find you. I know where you're going.'
For one instant, she almost makes it. Fertility almost reaches Adam's hand, but when he makes his grab to pull her inside, their hands miss.
Almost miss. Adam opens his hand, and inside is the tube of Chap Stick.
And Fertility has fallen back into the dark and the past behind us.
Fertility is gone. We must be going sixty miles an hour by now, and Adam turns and throws the tube at me so hard it ricochets off two walls. Adam snarls, 'I hope you're happy now. I hope your lips recover.'
The dining-room china cabinet comes open and dishes, salad plates, soup tureens, dinner plates, stemware, and cups bounce and roll out the front doors. All this smashes in the street. All this leaves a wide trail behind us sparkling in the moonlight.
Nobody is running behind us, and Adam wrestles a console color television with surround sound and near- digital picture quality toward the door. With a shout he shoves it off the front porch. Then he shoves a velvet love seat off the porch. Then the spinet piano. Everything explodes when it hits the road.
Then he looks at me.
Stupid, weak, desperate me, I'm groveling on the floor trying to find the Chap Stick.
His teeth bared, his hair hanging in his face, Adam says, 'I should throw you out that door.'
Then a sign goes by saying, Nebraska 98 miles.
And a smile, slow and creepy, cuts across Adam's face. He staggers to the open front doors, and with the night wind howling around him he shouts.
'Fertility Hollis!' he shouts.
'Thank you!' he shouts.
Into the darkness behind us, all the darkness and scraps and glass and wreckage behind us, Adam shouts, 'I won't forget everything you told me must happen!'
The night before we get home, I tell my big brother everything I can remember about the Creedish church district.
In the church district, we raised everything we ate. The wheat and eggs and the sheep and cattle. I remember we tended perfect orchards and caught sparkling rainbow trout in the river.
We're on the back porch of a Casa Castile going sixty miles an hour through the Nebraska night down Interstate 80. A Casa Castile has cut-glass sconces on every wall and gold-plated fixtures in the bathroom, but no power or water. Everything is beautiful but none of it works.
'No electricity and no running water,' Adam says. 'It's just like when we were kids.'
We're sitting on the back porch with our legs hanging over the edge and the pavement rushing under. The stinking diesel exhaust from the truck eddies around us.
In the Creedish church district, I tell Adam, people lived simple, fulfilling lives. We were a steadfast and proud people. Our air and water were clean. Our days were useful. Our nights were absolute. That's what I remember.
That's why I don't want to go back.
Nothing will be there except the Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill. How it will look, the stored-up years of pornography from all over the country sent here to rot, I don't want to see firsthand. The agent showed me the receipts. Tons of smut, dump trucks and hoppers full, garbage trucks and boxcars full of smut, were arriving there every month, where bulldozers spread it three feet deep across all twenty thousand acres.
I don't want to see that. I don't want Adam to see that, but Adam still has his gun, and I don't have Fertility here to tell me if it's loaded or not. Besides, I'm pretty used to getting told what to do. Where to go. How to act.
My new job is to follow Adam.
So we're going back to the church district. In Grand Island, we'll steal a car, Adam says. We'll get to the valley just around sunrise, Adam predicts. It's just a matter of hours. We'll be getting home on a Sunday morning.
Both of us looking out into the dark behind us and everything we've lost so far, Adam says, 'What else do you remember?'
Everything in the church district was always clean. The roads were always in good repair. The summers were long and mild with rain every ten days. I remember the winters were peaceful and serene. I remember sorting seed we picked from marigolds and sunflowers. I remember splitting wood.
Adam asks, 'Do you remember my wife?'
Not really.
