collision damage to a Mitsubishi SUV that had crashed into the back end of a trailered yacht at a closing speed of 75 mph. Stored in a field behind a gas station, the Mitsubishi was filled with rainwater, its contents were rotted, and a family of rats were living in the dashboard. Boggs cursed spectacularly while they worked, and Ellis held his breath until he nearly passed out.
Boggs bought two mini-bottles of Scotch from the flight attendant and drank the first neat from a transparent plastic cup, a dainty object in his large hand. They flew above a smooth white cloud surface like a perfected landscape.
‘Christopher was your half-brother on which side?’ Boggs asked. The question startled Ellis; it was the first time Boggs had ever asked about his brother. But, of course, Heather must have told him about Christopher.
‘My father’s,’ Ellis said.
‘What was his mother like?’
‘Skinny, tight pants, too much make-up. Smoker. I never saw much of her. Whenever I heard about her, it seemed she was moving into a new place with a new guy in a new town. I couldn’t figure out the understanding she had with my dad. But every so often he told Christopher to get ready to leave. Then she turned up and took Christopher away for a night, or a week, or whole summers. The longest was nearly two years. When Christopher came back from that one, he was fifteen. He had become much more withdrawn. He couldn’t bear to look at us, to speak with us. It was as if our family made him physically ill. He literally refused to speak to me.’
The plane banked. The clouds had broken, and in the window lay the miniature streets and buildings of an industrial city absent industry – houses lay gutted with constituent elements strewn into overgrown lawns, factories crouched amid empty parking lots. ‘I was excited when Dad said Christopher was coming back. But then it might as well have been a stranger who moved into the house –’ Ellis lifted his hands. ‘It was confusing.’
‘Sounds like adolescence.’
‘Actually, I think, fundamentally, he was just a jerk.’
Boggs looked over. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the dynamics of a family are pretty much the most inexplicable, anti-analytic thing on earth.’
As they descended, the city’s empty apartment towers presented faces of glassless window openings, black voids repeated in ranks. Few cars moved on the street grid; traffic surged in large numbers only on the interstate, en route to other places.
7.
ELLIS DID LATER observe that
the big streets
– Mill Street and Main Street – were really not very big. But they were the only through streets in Coil, a town stuck out among corn and sugar-beet fields, a town with a one-block brick-fronted downtown, several bars and churches, and one supermarket, one movie theatre, one pharmacy, one bowling alley, and more or less one of everything else people really needed. It served as a bedroom community for men and women who worked in automotive factories twenty miles away.
Although Ellis’s father rarely held a job for long, he had for a few years managed to keep a position in sales for a concrete contractor. When business was slow, he drove around looking for gravel driveways and cold-calling at front doors, hoping to talk a homeowner into a beautiful, solid, maintenance-free concrete drive. Eventually he was fired, but at their own house the job had already been immortalised – the summer that Ellis turned eleven, the entire lawn had been laid with concrete. For the rest of his childhood, the house stood on a small hard plain of grey, graded for run-off, gridded by expansion joints, the driveway marked by two shallow gutters on either side. Sometimes his mother put a few flowerpots along there for colour.
To Ellis, the main consequence of the concrete was that in the summer the lawn grew so hot that he could hardly bear to be outside. The house itself was built sometime in the seventies and looked much like all the neighbouring
Boggs bought two mini-bottles of Scotch from the flight attendant and drank the first neat from a transparent plastic cup, a dainty object in his large hand. They flew above a smooth white cloud surface like a perfected landscape.
‘Christopher was your half-brother on which side?’ Boggs asked. The question startled Ellis; it was the first time Boggs had ever asked about his brother. But, of course, Heather must have told him about Christopher.
‘My father’s,’ Ellis said.
‘What was his mother like?’
‘Skinny, tight pants, too much make-up. Smoker. I never saw much of her. Whenever I heard about her, it seemed she was moving into a new place with a new guy in a new town. I couldn’t figure out the understanding she had with my dad. But every so often he told Christopher to get ready to leave. Then she turned up and took Christopher away for a night, or a week, or whole summers. The longest was nearly two years. When Christopher came back from that one, he was fifteen. He had become much more withdrawn. He couldn’t bear to look at us, to speak with us. It was as if our family made him physically ill. He literally refused to speak to me.’
The plane banked. The clouds had broken, and in the window lay the miniature streets and buildings of an industrial city absent industry – houses lay gutted with constituent elements strewn into overgrown lawns, factories crouched amid empty parking lots. ‘I was excited when Dad said Christopher was coming back. But then it might as well have been a stranger who moved into the house –’ Ellis lifted his hands. ‘It was confusing.’
‘Sounds like adolescence.’
‘Actually, I think, fundamentally, he was just a jerk.’
Boggs looked over. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the dynamics of a family are pretty much the most inexplicable, anti-analytic thing on earth.’
As they descended, the city’s empty apartment towers presented faces of glassless window openings, black voids repeated in ranks. Few cars moved on the street grid; traffic surged in large numbers only on the interstate, en route to other places.
7.
ELLIS DID LATER observe that
the big streets
– Mill Street and Main Street – were really not very big. But they were the only through streets in Coil, a town stuck out among corn and sugar-beet fields, a town with a one-block brick-fronted downtown, several bars and churches, and one supermarket, one movie theatre, one pharmacy, one bowling alley, and more or less one of everything else people really needed. It served as a bedroom community for men and women who worked in automotive factories twenty miles away.
Although Ellis’s father rarely held a job for long, he had for a few years managed to keep a position in sales for a concrete contractor. When business was slow, he drove around looking for gravel driveways and cold-calling at front doors, hoping to talk a homeowner into a beautiful, solid, maintenance-free concrete drive. Eventually he was fired, but at their own house the job had already been immortalised – the summer that Ellis turned eleven, the entire lawn had been laid with concrete. For the rest of his childhood, the house stood on a small hard plain of grey, graded for run-off, gridded by expansion joints, the driveway marked by two shallow gutters on either side. Sometimes his mother put a few flowerpots along there for colour.
To Ellis, the main consequence of the concrete was that in the summer the lawn grew so hot that he could hardly bear to be outside. The house itself was built sometime in the seventies and looked much like all the neighbouring
Similar Books
