A Flatland

(Excerpted from a longer piece of fiction)

Out by the thin metal bones of the cellphone towers, the dilapidated railroad depot only barely held its rotting wood roof supports in place and sweated green down lichen-covered stone. There was a group of boys that hung out around there. They didn’t play football and weren’t the class clowns and didn’t even graffiti the shops on Main Street. They just sat in a line on the railroad platform as trains — ones that hadn’t stopped in Wilmington for as long as anyone could remember — pitched down the thin strip of track; long strings of boxcars carrying grain and meat and auto parts towards Braidwood and then onto Pontiac. The boys were hefty with bodies that slid solidly into tractor seats and bodies that were meant for the grain elevator or for hog tying. They wore camo purchased from the Bass Pro Shops in Joliet and had wheat colored hair cut flat and straight across greasy foreheads. Some of them had already thought about the army; some of them already helped their father out at the three pump gas station or handed out shoes at Riverfront Lanes or were frying up potatoes at PT’s on 66 or at Nelly’s.

They didn’t talk too much but would hit each other’s caps down over their eyes, passing around a Lucky Strike or a Marlboro Red, peering over the soft porno magazines of girls with long hair wearing cowboy boots and wet Wrangler T-shirts. They knew a lot about hunting and a lot about guns and would compare a Remington M870 Shotgun to a Savage M220 Stainless Rifle to a American Safari Magnum or flip through photos with stubby fingers swiping on cracked screens: turkeys with crumpled tawny feathers and speckled deer strapped down onto the beds of rusty pickups and geese limp and thin held up by wind cracked hands. No one would call them nice boys, but the town felt a great deal of gratitude towards them anyway.

Maureen had been scared of them for a long time. The boys from her school were small and wore khaki pants fitted to thin legs. They wore round glasses that were sometimes tortoiseshell and combed their hair back with pomade. But Maureen was alone with very little to lose, and she thought she could come up to them on the railroad platform and be sullen and they would respect her and maybe think she was hot.

“Wouldn’t it be so fun if you brought a Wilmington boy to prom?” Maureen’s father asked from behind the printed newspaper he had to read because there was no wifi at home. The family had been in Wilmington for over four months and Aaron had adjusted to his new lifestyle with an ease that miffed Peggy. “All those boys from school would be literally terrified. You should do it my dearest daughter.” Aaron had started ordering the Chicago Jewish Star so that it could be thrown on the grass next to the mailbox and get a rise out of the local churchgoers. He left that newspaper there for days before picking it up and then intentionally read it sitting on the porch. There weren’t many exciting controversial things happening in small town Illinois. Besides the Confederate flags that were hooked onto the back of trucks and waved from second stories and were taped inside windows facing busy streets, Aaron didn’t have much to complain about. Sometimes he wished that just one person would say something antisemitic to him so he could tell his friends all about it.

“Yeah maybe I will dad,” Maureen muttered to herself, pulling her car up to the railroad depot, parking in-between the rusting snouts of the chevy wagons and the big white pickup with the eight shovels stored in the back. She smoothed out the wrinkles in her Chicago Cub’s T-shirt — her most down to earth piece of clothing — under her thick red flannel, under her down winter jacket. She bent down to check her ‘real girl’ ponytail in her side mirror, then straightening up and strided towards the train tracks.

When Maureen returned to the octagon house she felt seen. The boys at the platform had tolerated her presence just long enough for her to feel impressive before they all rambled away without explanations. Next week she was expected at the prairie reclamation to see the bison up close, they told her it would be fun for her. There was this one boy, who was even wider than the others and had set up a home gym in his family’s shed out back and now had thick cables of muscle roping from his wrists to his concrete shoulders. He was no Leonardo DiCaprio, but had said something about going to Church with his grandmother and Maureen’s heart warmed in a certain way towards him. He had gruffly said that they should “hang out,” before he got in his truck.

— — -

Maureen fucked the large boy who was kind to his Grandma. They had watched half of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and when enough was enough Maureen had let the health class condom fall out of her pocket, and then picked it up as suggestively as possible. Things moved from there. Maureen insisted that the act would take place on the caned balloon settee across from the suit wearing portrait of Martha Cox. It was satisfactory and cursory, it got the job done. She asked him if he watched internet porn and he said no that shit was for losers. She asked him what he thought about the view over Bay Island. Losing your virginity was supposed to be goddamn monumental and it hadn’t been.

Peggy had been out selling her dream catchers and Aaron was with his data consulting buddies, and it was approaching Thanksgiving and there was a leafy wreath hanging over the fireplace with three gourds lumpily tilting on their sides by the back door. The box elders and the maples and the buckeye were bare, with sharp branches shifting uneasily in the wind, their leaves in piles of crumpling brown debris in the center of yards, mulchy at the bottom and dry at the top.

By IL-53 N the prairie was a hazy mass of golds and taupes, the prescribed burns leaving a gauze of smoke over the grasses, pluming up into the crisp air. The bison loped through the smoke with their heads to the ground in their groups of calfs and cows. The bulls wandered alone, one right up against the highway, pawing at the hardened earth, dried bluestem caught in the hair hanging shaggily from his front legs. The bull was pathetic, standing there with the smoke behind him, covered with plant debris, hunched and worn out.

— —

When Peggy and Aaron finally had sex again, for real, after an unmentionably long hiatus, Maureen was with the train depot boys, squeezed into the warm cab of a truck, next to a girl with three streaks of pink in her mousy brown hair. They were 30 in all, the boys and their girlfriends wearing boot cuts jeans with embroidered flowers on the pockets and their sisters with plastic blue glasses from the nearby Walmart and skinny uncles with spots of dark blood on their face from old razors. Nicole drove her open top Suzuki jeep, her two boys in the back bundled up under wool blankets.

Aaron started speaking in a southern twang midway through this trial run, his nerves simmering up to the surface as he began to cry hot nervous tears. Peggy, who has described herself as tender, couldn’t muster up any amount of sympathy and went to watch Jimmy Fallon videos on her hidden iPad locked in the downstairs bathroom until her husband calmed down. And then it turned out to be a lovely night.

The bison at night huddle together for warmth in a slight dip as the prairie nears the marsh wetlands at the preserve’s northwest corner. It had rained recently, a pelting and unrelenting flurry of stinging rock hard droplets and now the mud flecked up in oblong chunks onto the the truck beds.

“They used to do this all the time back before Brodie’s woods were bulldozed,” the boy driving yelled into Maureen’s ear. “Mud bogging, mudding, whatever you want to call it.” he laughed, “You take your ATV or your truck or whatever you’ve got and the mud splatters everywhere, and you see how fast you can fucking go.”

And suddenly the vehicles were stopping and everyone was getting out wearing thick leather boots and canvas jackets over hoodies tied tight around the neck, and the people lumbered out across the prairie, the brackish grasses coming up to their waists. Nicole tottered unsteadily over, her pregnant torso extended and her hands clasped over her stomach. Her boys ran into the darkness and she didn’t try to stop them.

“It’s like cow tipping, but way more dangerous,” one boy shouted to the other. They held wooden stakes and crowbars and baseball bats, and some had shotguns slung over the shoulders. Maureen wasn’t an animal lover, but she asked the boy who went to church with grandma if they were going to hurt the bison, and he had said no, definitively. These were tools for personal protection, obviously.

White flashlight beams shone harsh over the stiff side-oats grama and cord grass, angled with broken stalks cracked by late November winds. Maureen was comforted knowing Martha didn’t have a chance to see the bison before she died.

They were hers. She saw them every day.

There were 30 bison, dark massed shapes in front of the orange of the half moon, the grass springing up around them.

“We’re just going to wake them up, and then they’ll run, and then we’ll run.”

“Right back to the cars ok.”

“Yeah, obviously, ok.”

And then they were all yelling, and Maureen was yelling and she charged at the bison and wanted them to be scared of her. And the bison all stood up, at once, shaking and rolling and snorting. Their breath sounded hot and musty. Their horns glinted streaked white hovering above massive heads over bodies that weighed 2,000 pounds. And they were running, quickly, the group splintering in all directions. The flashlight beams were bouncing now, from animal to animal, from the ground to illuminating the gray of the sky, a bat was flung across the field and struck an animal which emitted a low disgruntled bellow.

“Run — just fucking run!” A woman screamed, her voice high and shrill, terrified. And they were all laughing in some kind of way, as the animals charged behind them, people tripping and falling and then pulling themselves up and continuing to move. Maureen’s arm was tugged at, and it was Nicole kneeling in the grass, her jeans unbuttoned and covered in a clear liquid.

“This is where my baby is going to be born,” Nicole pulled the other woman closer to her, her teeth gritted tightly together. “Right here in this field, with these bison here, right fucking here.”

“Are you kidding?” Maureen shouted, but she was trapped again as she knelt in the bison wallow, the rainwater soaking through her socks and her shoes. She felt the skim of the brackish water’s surface against her hands as she reached to pull off Nicole’s jeans and her underwear and extended her arm to stroke the woman’s sweat drenched hair, the pale sheen of her face. The ground was physically shaking, hooves and heavy legs pounding across the ground. The engines of the trucks were gunned, the sick sloshing of tires over wet mud fading away from the wallow until Maureen could hear the smooth slither of the rubber as the trucks heaved themselves up over the flooded ditch beyond the shoulder of the highway.

Maureen was leaning over Nicole, low, pressed to the ground as the bison charged towards them. They were still coming, their hooves still pounding the ground, the bulls who had looked so forlorn now in control of the prairie. And Maureen thought that maybe she was going to die.

And then the prairie rippled into a deep orange blaze around them as the underbrush beneath the sedges finally caught onto the controlled burn. The smoke rolled into the air, obscuring the bison and their confused brays, consumed by the dense carpet of low flame and heavy smoke. And the bison turned around, loping back towards the dip where they had been sleeping to muffle around until morning. Nicole grasped the mud beneath her, squelching it out between dirty knuckles, her other hand grabbing onto Maureen’s hand as she said the only thing she knew how to say in this scenario. “Push!” She bellowed, like a coach or an overbearing parent at a sports game. And two hours later the baby girl squealed as its head and then its limbs and torso emerged into the cold November air.

Maureen returned to the octagon house, her jacket had been burned and cut open, her knees were bloody, her sweater was coated in afterbirth. She took off her soiled clothes, her underwear, her bra, and left them in a pile by the yard. John had come for Nicole and put out the nearest section of prairie burn with a fire extinguisher, and then drove Maureen home in a solid silence, because this was real life and a grown woman’s baby did not have to be put in the hands of a high school senior.

Maureen sat on the icy slats of the porch swing, the bitter air slicing at her, the neighbors across the street finally looking, peering around flowered blinds and exclaiming that there was a girl sitting outside. Naked, when it was almost winter. She breathed in firmly, and then she stood up, stretching her arms out towards the sky full of stars. She padded down the porch steps, knelt down in the flowerbeds and groped under the porch until she felt the rounded corner of the iPhone 3, with the sticker on the back in yellow that said “Aaron Resnick” with the family’s old Chicago address listed below it. She unzipped the plastic bag, wet from the rainwater collecting under the porch. She unlocked the phone, the sickly screen lighting up her pinched face from below in blues and greens. And she decided that now, probably, was the best time, right after she had witnessed the miracle of goddamn birth, to connect with her own family. And so she pulled open safari and then dragged her finger to open browsing history and flipped through Xvideos and RedTube and YouJizz, because that was what it was all about in the end, anyway.