Test Site
April 11, 2008
How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail…’” Humming it, muttering it just loudly enough to interrupt the chickens in their mindless dirt-pecking and have them glance up at him inquisitively as he passed by with a bucket of fodder, Crawford went about tending to his tiny farm.
He’d finally decided in ‘43, while gazing from an unreachable distance at the cattle that surrounded him in his marketing meeting, that it was time to head back. London does have a charm that reaches unstoppably into your being, but Crawford could now feel, after so many forcibly oblivious years, that the earth below him was not his own.
“I’m done with this city, Ma, and don’t you want me to come back anyway?” he had hollered into the receiver that evening. “Dad? Yes, I am coming back…because I want to…I’ve made enough money…I won’t live at home with you…listen, can I just borrow your car?”
He’d spent 12 years fortifying himself in London — her distracting expanse and her rain, her bunkers, her identical, drab houses stretching street after street, and her antiquity. But now doubts, tremulous like the touch of cold fingers, crept through his brain: that she might be married to a New English brat; or that she’d forgotten him, that she did not want to see him again because it was too painful or perhaps, just a bother. And what of the ardent but unsaid belief that he was made for simple but special things, that convention was an ugly mould into which he was loath to fit; and his counter theory that “one man, all tasks” would outdo the productivity — but really, lucre — attempted by this “modern” world in a thousand ways? There had been a vengeance, 12 years strong, in these thoughts that drilled insistently through his walls.
But the fortress had stood.
It had taken much squabbling to get his parents to believe in his farm in the desert, and even more to convince them of his harmless intentions with their almost new Lincoln.
“The Bailey girl is lovely, you know, and she always asks about you,” his mother had attempted listlessly as he’d packed the car with the little he’d decided to take with him. He’d waved jovially to their somewhat sour faces as he’d pulled away.
“‘And pour the waters of the Nile on every golden scale.’” The high ridge that shaded his farm for most of the day eased up to the freckled sky while the simmering sand receded before him, offering its ancient and vast self to him as if his unabashed protégé. On the second of two trips that he’d made to stock up his farm-to-be, he’d brought, in a two-piece tow behind his car, ten chickens, two horses, three cows, two bulls and one brown lab.
“How much water you got up there?” the filthy mechanic had leered at Crawford in a shop he’d located in the “closest town,” the stench and sight of tobacco suffusing from his mouth. Crawford remembered now how stale the man’s breath had been, probably from not having to talk much. And with this reminiscence came the comforting relief that any civilization was over three hours away.
“Enough,” he’d replied. “It’s a pond, you could say, about six feet deep. Not very wide, but enough to keep the bush alive.”
“What’s with them animals in your truck?”
“I’m keeping a farm,” Crawford had said, quite ready for the cackle that followed.
“Well, mister, don’t let me keep yer.”
The old hick’s sarcastic suggestion of a few more hands had nagged intermittently during the seven weeks of his steady labor on the low, dim barn. At least the animals had kept close to the water, as he’d anticipated, so he’d rested for a month before setting up his even more basic shack.
As he tried to feed the three-month- old colt that still shied away behind its disgruntled mother, Crawford contentedly scrutinized the small barn that he’d finished over a year ago and that, impressively, still stood. The desert sun bore its relentless swelter through slits in the heavy roof, but was cooled in his barn, as if it dared not question his toil. He remembered how he’d had to sleep there for weeks so he could still smell the dull must of the chickens’ corner on his clothes.
And every night he’d dreamt of her startled eyes. Light gray, exactly as he remembered, maintaining an odd stillness that belied the alacrity with which she moved. Not to say she lacked grace…no, the slightest gesture riveted him entirely…and how uneasy she’d made him sometimes! His pride, strength and even self-gratifying mystery were penetrated, though hardly forcibly. He’d driven against all will, but for every desire, through Chicago — where it seemed she now lived — on his way to his envisioned farm, hardly letting himself think that perhaps, he might not make it to the desert.
And he had not been prepared to see her again. It was with an icy shock that he had beheld her through the off-white film of her curtains, looking out to the street quizzically. He hadn’t stopped the first time, but rather circled the block, breathing deeply all the while.
She had still been in the window, hand against the glass, when he stopped shudderingly outside the small but pleasant house. Startled eyes in a still face; she made it to the car in three seconds. He could not look at her for long, and had heard her hand come to rest on the wound-down window.
“Where did you go?” Her tone had been accusing, though, of course, deliberately so.
“I’ve been in London, lovely.” Crawford had managed to smile.
“Did you bring me anything?”
With agonizing frequency he’d awoken in the unfinished barn to torrents of tears and shame, the somnolent suburban air still upon him, shielding them from all eyes as he held her face but did not kiss her as he’d known he should have.
“‘How cheerfully he seems to grin, how neatly — ‘” A crack down two crossed beams behind the bulls’ stall caught his eye. With a grunt he left the colt to explore the bucket on his own, and gently patted a bull aside to examine his chore for the morning. It was not a difficult fix — especially since he’d gotten better at them over the past year and knew exactly how to smooth any particular part of the wall in with the rest of his construct. With his palm flattened against the cracked beams, he looked around the barn one last time.
His dog ran out before him into the soft, spreading orange, as if to fetch his tools, and Crawford laughed when it turned around suddenly, tail wagging off, hoping for an energetic break in their routines.
“All right, chase the chickens if you must, but mind that you don’t kill them…that’ll be a thrashing.”
The cows grunted their disapproval as he hammered the third of four nails required into the beams, but Crawford paid no attention. He thought instead how he didn’t mind that any damage to his farm was only ever inflicted by a rather active nightmare of one of the animals. All this was a reprieve to him from the grind that society had churned itself into under the pretext of post-“Depression” convalescence. He’d escaped it successfully, as he had the draft, by sailing away from his parents’ — and his own — scorn. It’d be three years before they spoke again.
“Did you get the money?” Crawford had asked his father cautiously.
“Yes, and we’ve saved it all…we don’t need it,” had been the clipped reply. But Crawford had pressed on, determined to change at least their minds.
“I know how hard it’s been there — “
“You don’t know anything, son.”
“Well, it’s been rough here too…for me. But I’d rather this than Ma’s whispering friends. I know how you felt, but it’s better here. The money is in support only of my decision.”
“I did well, though the accounts all left for a while. Some came back eventually, so we were better off than some.” His father had sounded too casual.
“Where’s Ma? I can’t talk much longer…Ma — no, I’m not married. Listen, use the money; I’ll keep sending it anyway…thanks Ma.”
He had enjoyed London more since that conversation. And he’d managed increasingly to mostly ignore the other cause of his flight. Now the desert conjured her daily; the moments he’d tried pathetically to stay, when she’d really played a game with him, her newfound perspective was a bit too fancy for his simple mind, wasn’t it? His belonging to her — and he had — was given an embarrassed sidelong glance.
“I have hardly seen you this month because of the job. You’re busy too, no doubt. But come downtown once you’re done with classes. It would work, you just have to try it…” He’d written her from across town but her responses had gotten steadily rarer.
The night he’d visited her at the dorm, she was not home. Sitting at the college café, he’d noticed her walk by the window and called her name. Only the second time did she stop, but had looked at him through the glass, saying nothing, blinking, and Crawford had been strangely aware of his hands. There remained one around the cup, the other in his lap, but in his mind they held her face.
“Not us, Julianne?” he’d thought as she’d walked on, head down in the cold, thinning rain.
He fell back into his mutterings — “Not us, love…’how neatly spreads his claws, and welcomes little fishies’” — as he surveyed his patch-up. Remembering with some annoyance that it was time again to visit civilization to stock up, Crawford dropped his tools and wondered if he could possibly put the trip off any longer. He could do without ink and toothpaste for a while yet; and what did those people and their televisions, papers, and money hold for him anyway? He couldn’t recall the last time he’d ventured into the town five hours from his farm, but it had hardly been a breath of fresh anything. He didn’t easily forget the disgust that had erupted in his mind for the futility of their lives and their world — a newspaper declaiming the “American supremacy in nuclear realm” fed the fools with an enumeration of “Allied lives lost” in an adjacent column. Crawford had dropped the paper back into its stand, refrained from looking at the woman behind the counter, and hurried back into his desert with sparse supplies.
A wild squawking from roughly the direction of the water trough brought him lazily out to rebuke his euphoric dog. He checked his pockets for something he could offer to the perpetually hungry chickens, and found several peanut shells. Dropping them in the flurry of feathers, Crawford dipped his face and hair into the water. Two paws appeared beside his head and he withdrew, laughing, from the trough.
“Back to the barn, you crazy dog!”
Crawford followed the dog, and was at the barn door when he saw the flash, though it was almost behind him. The dog whined and Crawford looked curiously at the tremulous ground. “‘And welcomes little fishies in with gently smiling jaws,’” he thought, before his incinerated skin mixed with his crystal marrow and was blown to a shadow on the door, reaching for its handle.