Electric God

Chapter One

1996

THE HEADLIGHT ZONE

Hayden Reese picked his way on foot in the dark, straight uphill into national forest territory, his Jenny dangling heavy on his right shoulder. Still supple she felt, and almost warm. His only little bit of comfort.

In his left hand, the shovel.

Here and there he'd take hold with his right, grasp the smooth, red, strangely burnished trunk or limb of a manzanita for balance, for pull, gently pressing the fistful of shovel handle to her smooth flank to keep her from tumbling. The sun would be coming all too soon.

He'd kept this trail clear by his own maintenance and concern, hiking by day with a sheathed trail saw hanging on one side of his belt, a strong hinged clipper for smaller branches on the other. He knew this trail the way he'd known his Jenny, could navigate it in the dark, knowing by memory when to grasp, when to duck his head.

What few things Hayden knew, he knew. The rest was a mystery, pure and simple.

As he grasped and ducked he cursed himself, and his burning chest, and promised himself he'd quit smoking again, this time for real, and touched his shirt pocket, wondering if he'd remembered to bring the pack along. It both comforted and disgusted him to feel it there. He'd lean on them now, because he needed to; then, in a day or a week, he'd reclaim his stolen wind.

He reached the saddle of the ridge, the clearing he'd created and maintained, and gently spread her on her side on the cool ground and sat for a moment before going to work. Sat by her side and fired up what he hoped would be one of the last, and set the shovel across his knees, hating the finality of the whole deal. And touchedone hand to her cooling side, wishing the sun was up so he could enjoy her smooth blue coat with his eyes and not just his hand. He drew hard on the cigarette tucked deep between his first fingers, watching the red tip glow, hating the way the hot smoke soothed him going down.

Maybe his eyes had adjusted to the dark, or maybe that odd moment of predawn had found them, because Hayden noticed he could nearly make out the silhouettes of buckbrush, the gnarled shapes and nature-sanded smoothness of the manzanita branches. He felt his thinking change about Jenny. He did not wish to see her, not now. Not like this. And the dawn would bring the heat of the day, the enemy, tormentor of men with shovels. No. It wasn't dawn. Couldn't be. Still long too early for that. But it would be, sometime. He had better get started.

For one brief moment he allowed himself to think about Laurel, let himself feel the need, a touch or a word from her to fill the ache of this moment. Hayden told no one, not even Laurel, when he ached, but he often ached for his ache to be seen, to be known by her. To be cooled and settled.

He put the urge away again but it left an echo, the blank, unfilled shock of a craving deferred.

He set about to dig in the hard ground.

Hayden stared down at his hands, at black dirt still packed underneath the nails, ground deep into the calluses of his palms. He didn't mind dirt, not as such. He minded the lack of sleep, the sandy eyes and dicey stomach from staying up the night, challenging the dry soil inch by inch. He minded that Laurel would come soon to start the cinnamon rolls in the half dark, in the barely-morning light, and what if she reached for him or allowed him to reach for her? What, then, would he do with all this dirt?

More even than this, he minded his Jenny in the ground, lost to him. Minded it so much he could not permit his mind to complete that revolution, to spin its gears around to the new, real, entirely changed day. He needed instead to stay mired a few more moments in that foggy no-man's-land, like the moment between sleep and waking when a vivid dream slides away, one unlikely image at a time.

He sat in the dawn in the cab of his old pickup and waited for her to unlock the diner's back door, thinking, Where will I wash my hands, in case I get to touch her? It was a good moment to cry, or would have been, anyway. Only for one thing, though. Hayden didn't cry. Never had, as long as he could remember. Didn't figure at this late date he ever would.

Even Hayden's mother, whom he hadn't seen since he was nineteen, had told him the story time and time again, along with anyone else who would listen. Maybe when you were in diapers, she would say. But after that, nothing. Not even if you hurt yourself bad. Which was usually. Not even when you broke both your legs that time. And it's a funny thing, she would add, because you were always the most deep-down oddly emotional boy anybody'd ever met. Just no tears.

He sat looking out across the long valley, smoking a cigarette, sighting along the endless line of electrical towers. They always looked like headless lattice giants to him. Long legs slightly spread, short arms extended, strands of wires dangling from their fingers and dipping slightly between towers, traveling off into infinity. Every year some fool kids tried to climb them. A combination of rural boredom and some strange rite of new manhood Hayden wished he didn't understand. This year some poor kid paid the price, which was going to happen sooner or later. Rumor had it his watch was still up there somewhere, half melted and fused forever to that unremorseful steel. Even the crystal melted. Hayden didn't know which tower, and he damn sure wasn't going up to look, but it was possible. He knew such a thing could happen.

He looked in his rearview mirror to see the sun just cresting the mountain ridge, the highway clear in that still air, and an animal worrying over something right on the centerline. An odd sight. And it felt good to be distracted, to wonder over somebody else's problem for a change.

A cat, he decided. Moving a kitten across the highway. Hurry, Hayden thought. It's a mean highway. It's a headlight zone. One of those flat two-lane stretches in the middle of nowhere on which motorists are instructed to run their headlights by day. Only way anybody can think to cut the fatalities. Nobody wants to just do nothing, but how much can you do? People die on highways. It's what happens.

Hayden stepped out of his old pickup and watched the lights of a big rig bear down from the east. Move, cat, he thought, but it wasn't a cat with a kitten, it was a possum. Mother and baby. Which was too bad. A cat he could pick up and move. But possums. Vicious little bastards when threatened. Razor-sharp little teeth.

The rig roared down, and Hayden watched, a bit detached. Somewhat confused. They would move. Of course they would move. Momma possum held her tiny one, eyes barely open, in her teeth, but it squirmed free. Hayden moved closer. Not squirmed, he saw. Convulsed. Something wrong with the baby. Maybe it had been hit already. It seemed to stiffen into little seizures that made it impossible to handle.

Momma possum seemed to know the truck was coming. Death, motherhood — Hayden knew it must be hard to decide. When the headlights fell full across her she abandoned her young and ran. It was late, nearly too late, really, but Hayden stepped into the road and picked it up. It weighed a few ounces at most; it was soft. He jumped back, not even thinking it might bite him. Thinking more about his near miss with the semi. The deep, shocking blare of the truck's air horn pressed into his ears; the wind of the passing monster flapped his big shirt about. The driver flipped Hayden the finger out the window as he blew by.

Hayden only smiled.

The baby possum did not try to bite him. It stiffened into another convulsion in his palm, tiny eyes closed, feeling soft and looking ratlike but innocent. He put it in his shirt pocket, where it seized against his chest. He wanted to return it to the mother but couldn't see where she had gone.

He wondered if it could feel his heart beat.

Old Dr. Meecham, the veterinarian, lived over his storefront office. Hayden leaned on his truck horn until Meecham came to the window to ask what the hell gives.

"Oh, you," he said. The lights came on upstairs and in time he shuffled down.

A hard glare of full morning assaulted Hayden's eyes from the east, over the flat valley landscape; the day's heat already more than threatened. They stood outside, boots in the dirt, two big men hovering over a few ounces of sudden trouble. Meecham wore a shock of pure white hair still tumbled from his pillow.

"Momma abandoned it, huh? That'll happen," the doc said. "Born wrong somehow. They know to let it go."

Hayden didn't bother to say this lady was loath to let go, like Hayden himself with his Jenny, Meecham being a logical sort of a fellow. Some of us, Hayden considered, aren't fortunate enough to possess that cool luxury.

"Some kind of seizures. Want me to put it out of its misery." Meecham told this as a fact, didn't ask it.

"No, I want you to fix it."

"Not everything's fixable, Hayden."

Don't I know it, he thought. "You're the veterinarian. You're the one supposed to know how."

"Well, leave it here. I'll see what can be done. Might cost."

Everything costs, Hayden told himself, money being the least of it. "I'm prepared to cover it."

"Don't get your hopes too high. Sure you want it saved? Just what we need around here, another possum."

"Do what you can, Doc."

"Be under somebody's wheels on the highway tomorrow. Born roadkill they are. Just the way of the world, Hayden."

"You do what you can," Hayden said, one carefully formed word after another, trying to keep the reasonableness from draining out of his voice.

He walked back to his truck, scuffing his boot toes in the dirt, thinking he must've missed Laurel's arrival at the shop by now, that quiet, untouched moment before life wakes up and shuffles around, disturbing their chances. He said inside himself, That little mass of fur will never grasp the sacrifice.

"How's that good-looking bluetick hound of yours?" Meecham called to his back.

Hayden drove away and did not answer.

When he arrived back at the diner her station wagon was there, along with the car that belonged to the morning waitress.

He stuck his head in the back door and just stood that way a minute, watching Laurel roll the big flat sheet of dough for this morning's cinnamon rolls.

He was that late.

He wondered what might be about to transpire, and whether or not it would hurt. It seemed more or less an even draw, like flipping a coin. Or so the past had taught him.

She addressed him, never once looking up. "Not like you to sleep in."

"I haven't slept yet."

She looked up, as if to confirm or deny that information with her own two eyes; she seemed convinced once she saw his face. He wanted to tell her about Jenny, but it seemed like the morning had already set off in the wrong direction, almost before he'd opened his mouth. So he just stepped inside and watched her work. Watched the place where her apron tied snug at the belt line of her jeans, a pleasingly narrow waist, and the way her hair, kind of brown but red, a dark brown with deep red highlights, had already begun to come apart from the simple way she'd pinned it up this morning. It was better, anyway, apart, mussed looking. It reminded him of other mussed moments, and made his stomach hurt.

He wished she would say something, or that he would.

He moved closer, around her side of the wood table, and slid one arm around her waist, heavy to breaking with his need to do that, but just then the swinging door to the front flew open and the waitress came through. Laurel ducked away from him, he wasn't entirely sure why. He was never entirely sure if they were a secret or not. If they were anything or not.

They waited for the waitress to bustle around and take what she needed and go again. Hayden stood close enough to Laurel to smell her, not perfume exactly but something like it, that blend of soap and shampoo and Laurel that wouldn't come out the same on any other woman, or in his head on a lonely night. It just could not be reproduced.

"This is not a great time," she said when the girl had gone. "Jack'll be in any minute. Anyway, we need to talk."

The words collected in his stomach, gained weight, and settled hard. And then he saw it. Looked down at her hands gone back to slicing cinnamon rolls from the coil of dough, and there it was, half covered with flour, but there all the same. He grabbed her left hand hard and held it close under his face, in case it was only an illusion, and proximity might break it apart, make it go away. But it was still her wedding band. It wouldn't leave him alone all that easy. He felt dizzy, like he might pass out, but in the end was not nearly so fortunate.

"You couldn't have told me about this?"

"I'm trying to tell you about it right now. Could you let go my hand, please? You're hurting me."

"Oh. Sorry." He dropped her hand and dropped his own hands to his sides, and looked up to see Jack standing in the doorway, watching them. "I was just leaving," Hayden said.

At the doorway Jack did not step out of his way. They stood like that a moment, nearly nose to nose, maintaining eye contact in the manner that any animal will know to do in such a bind. Jack was good looking, which didn't help, with that shiny kind of pretty-boy looks. He had a fifteen-year age advantage on Hayden, but Hayden had a couple of inches and maybe fifty pounds of bulk on Jack. Just for that moment Hayden wouldn't have minded throwing all that into the fray, just to see what would prove more important than what. Wouldn't have minded a bit.

"Guys," Laurel said, which broke up those thoughts and knocked Hayden onto a different train of action.

"You're in my way, Jack," he said, and Jack took one step to the side to let him pass. Just as he did, Jack bumped Hayden's shoulder hard with his own, but Hayden just kept walking, at least until it was time to drive.

It was too soon to go back to Meecham's, Hayden knew. Yet he went back there all the same. Where else would he go? Home, to an empty cabin? To no Laurel, no Jenny, no buffer for this roiling disarray spilling around inside him, where it could do harm to himself or others? Better to use himself in some way. If only this had been a working day. If only this had not fallen on his day off from the hardware store, but so it did.

Meecham's assistant was nowhere to be seen. Meecham himself came out from the back examination room, wiping his hands on his lab smock and shaking his head.

"Gone, Hayden. Sorry." He didn't say it so much like he felt deeply sorry, more like he was sorry to have to tell Hayden something Hayden didn't care to know.

"Seizures killed it?"

"Well, I — "

"What exactly killed it?"

"Can't save everything, Hayden."

Now it began to rise in him, that hard disdain for being gently tutored in something he knew better than anybody. Meecham stood close up on the other side of the front counter now, and Hayden wanted him to stand farther back. Much farther. To where nobody could get hurt.

"In other words, Doc, you decided not to save it, so you just put it down."

Meecham seemed to see, or read, or smell the anger in Hayden, packed into and driven in front of those words, and he peered into Hayden's face with a frightened curiosity. He did not stand back. He should've stood back.

"It died, Hayden."

"You put it down."

"It died."

"Fine. Give its body over to me, I'll drive it to the vet in the city, we'll see what it died from."

"Can't do that. Against county law. Animal dies in this county, remains gotta go in for rabies testing."

"It wasn't even alive long enough to have late-stage rabies convulsions. You damn well know that. You said yourself it was just born wrong."

"County law."

"Okay. Keep what you need to test, give me what's left over."

Meecham's look had become more frightened, then leveled off, now turned stony with indignation and enough stubbornness, he seemed to feel, to match Hayden's. "Won't be nothing left over. They got to take a bunch of cross sections of that brain. Look. Hayden. We've known each other for a while now — "

"You killed it."

"All right, goddamnit. Yes. I put it down. For Christ's sake, Hayden. It was born wrong. It wasn't a hound dog. It wasn't your momma. It was a possum. A goddamn fucking possum. Get a grip, man."

While Hayden's fist arced, he felt it like a lung full of hot smoke or a private touch from Laurel, soothing deep in his belly, the delivery of something sweet and sorely needed. He threw his upper body half over the counter and caught the doc square on the jaw, fist to face, knucklebones to jawbone, and the jaw gave, and so did the fist.

It was not the first jaw Hayden had ever broken, and he knew the feel of it well, the sickening feel of give, and the sound. Not a clean crack like what one might expect, but an unsettling crunch, the sound of boots on icy crusts of snow on a school day morning in Hayden's long-lost youth.

It was also not Hayden's first boxer's fracture, and he knew the feel of that as well, the bowing of the outer bone of his hand, then that sudden point of bright pain where it decides to let go.

The vet tumbled to his own linoleum floor.

Hayden came around to the doc's side of the counter, and the old man rolled onto his belly to protect himself, but it was for no purpose. Hayden had finished being angry.

He picked up the doc's phone and called the local ambulance service. Could've called 911 to dispatch them, but it seemed like a lot of histrionics for a simple case of two broken bones.

While he waited on a ringing line he spoke to Meecham. "Okay down there, Doc? I'm gonna call somebody to come by, take you to the hospital. You just hold steady where you are, okay?"

No intelligible sounds came back to him, just a muffled grumble.

"Morning, Della," he said into the phone. "Hayden Reese...Good, how're you? I'm over at Doc Meecham's, and I think he'd like it fine if the ambulance came and scooped him up and took him into the city...

"Just a broken jaw, I think, but he's in some pain."

He glanced down at his right hand, noted the early stages of swelling and blackening.

"Me, no, I'm fine, Della. I'm just going to swing by the doctor here in town. You could do me a good favor, though. Once you got that ambulance on its way, could you give Scott a call for me? Tell him to meet me by the doctor's office?...

"Yeah, I'll wait for him...

"Thanks, Della."

Hayden sat on the curb and waited. Lit a cigarette with his left hand, held it tightly in his lips, eyes squinted against the smoke, and tapped on the light fiberglass cast. Wiggled the fingers of his right hand around.

He hated the claustrophobic feel of being unable to move most of his right hand. It seemed unreasonable, not enough cause for full-on claustrophobia; still, he knew that in the moments just prior to sleep he would bolt awake, sweaty and panicky, as if his entire body were locked into this forced, armored inertia, mummified.

He took the cigarette in his left hand, where it felt unnatural, and held it between his thumb and index finger, and drew on it, and tried to be calm.

In a minute or two a black-and-white sheriff's unit pulled up, parked a few feet away from Hayden's legs at the curb, and the sheriff stepped out and stood in the empty road in front of him. Hayden looked up into his face, but the sun was full up behind him, and Hayden mostly saw glare.

"Morning, Scott."

"Hayden, Hayden, Hayden. You were doing so good for a while there. What the hell happened to you?"

"Anybody can have a bad day, Scott."

The sheriff stood with his arms akimbo, hands at his belt line, face still mostly obscured in the glare, which was okay by Hayden. "Yeah, I reason that's true," he said. "Come on."

Scott opened the front passenger door of the black-and-white; Hayden thanked him and climbed in. Planted his feet on the familiar corrugated plastic mats, sat staring at the familiar blue dash with the wood-grained strip across it, the Crown Victoria decal.

They pulled away in silence, rode side by side along the flat grid of town, turned left onto the highway at the stop sign. Hayden watched the well-memorized progression of fields. Short brownish cotton fields and almond orchards and tank farms, and wide acres of evenly tilled gray-black dirt. Here and there oil drillers spun their gears around and around, their grasshopper heads pecking slow and regular at the soil. Wide dirt roads named after letters of the alphabet flashed by.

They listened to scratchy transmissions over the radio. Code 6 Mary on a routine traffic stop miles away, which meant he'd have to share the holding cell. An assistance call Hayden translated to mean old Mrs. Shuck fell out of her wheelchair again. Every three minutes an alert tone in Morse code, the equipment talking to itself.

"Think he'll press charges?" Hayden asked after a while.

"What do you think?"

"I figure he will. Think I'll get ninety days this time?"

"Depends on the mood the judge is in. Which depends on the mood his wife was in last night. Bottom line, Hayden, our fate'll be determined by the whims of a woman."

Hayden only grunted.

He sat quiet for a while, noticing the imposing volume at which Laurel's name was not being said. In his peripheral vision he watched Scott's hands tight on the wheel, the short, brushy cut of his thick dark hair. He was young, which Hayden never would be again.

Scott broke the stillness in a voice too serious, a voice reserved for something needing deeply to be said. Something inevitable. "You knew she would, Hayden. He's her husband. She's got to try at least."

"How'd you know about that?"

"How'd you not know about it? That'd be more to the point."

"Can we talk about something else?"

"Fine. Whatever. Pick your topic."

"They won't hold my job for me. Not this time."

"There's other jobs."

"Around here?"

"Doesn't have to be around here. There's other places to be."

"You should be so lucky. You know I can't go from here."

"Might need to, if you can't get work."

Breathe, Hayden told himself. Inhale, exhale. Big, full breaths. He did not complicate his breathing by attempting to answer.

"I'll go on by and feed Jenny, you know that."

Hayden shook his head, slowly, carefully, as though he might dislodge it by not being cautious enough. "Thanks anyway. No need."

He felt the sheriff's stare on the left side of his face. Felt it burn there like a brand, like noonday sun.

"When did that happen?"

"Yesterday evening. In her sleep."

"I'm sorry, Hayden."

"I know. Thanks."

"She was old."

"I know it."

"Better off this way."

"Her, maybe."

"I'm sorry."

"I know."

"Tell the judge that."

"No. No chance."

"Might go easier on you. Moment of grief. Everybody knows how much you loved that old hound dog. Everybody figured you'd come apart some when you finally lost 'er."

"I'm not going to make excuses for myself."

"Whatever. Your funeral. Lord, you're a stubborn man."

"I know it."

"Yeah. By now I reason you do."

Copyright © 2000 by Catherine Ryan Hyde