deeplyshallow // eleanor no. 37

eleanor no. 37

Through the windshield the moon is a splintered eggshell. Jack leans forward and squints upward through the fine web of cracks in the glass, trying to reassemble the pieces of sky so that the moon makes sense again, but it’s wasted effort. He slumps back into the seat with a sigh. It has been a long drive home, and now that he’s here, he wishes he was still out under that sky.

Hard to drive with a windshield kicked in by an owl, though. At least that’s what he thinks the shadow was. Couldn’t have been much else. An eagle, maybe. A hawk. Have to be a big son of a bitch, wingspan like the one he sheared into.

Inside Eleanor is still awake. A warm orange glow cups the spare bedroom, and he can see her there, through the filmy curtain, bent over the desk she keeps in the corner. Making something. He doesn’t know this, but in the time since he has been gone — gone this time — she has begun to paint again. She sits awake at the desk at three in the morning, washing a flat small canvas in indigo watercolor. It is the third canvas she has brushed; the previous two are disasters of weak color, flung across the floor beside her.

Jack watches her silhouette. He can’t quite figure out what she’s doing. She looks as if she’s hunched over something, but he can’t tell what. His eyes fail to focus, distracted by the movement of downy feathers gummed up in the scree of blood on the windshield. He sits silently in the driveway, engine still, lights extinguished, waiting to be caught, debating escape.

He remembers the house he grew up in, and the garage apartment that was his, and the windowsill that Eleanor would carefully negotiate to slip into his room on late nights like these. He remembers the blue fabric of her nightgown, the way it caught moonlight and etched out her naked body beneath. Remembers the way the cotton felt against his skin when she would settle into his bed. Remembers the first time, on a still, pitch-black night, she slid between his sheets, her bare skin matching his.

For a very long time he anticipated the night she would come to him, take him into her. He moved through years of days patiently, accepting that such a night would occur eventually, and that he could wait. But now, in shadow in the driveway of his own house, the same house Eleanor shares with him, Jack has been waiting for nine years. Eleanor seems in no hurry. Every night he is home, they sleep together as they always have; he holds her close, and she sleeps. He knows that she uses him: when she is with him, she dreams less; when the dream comes, Jack is her parachute.

And so he leaves, now and then, and does not return until his impatience has burned itself out. Sometimes he is gone for an hour or two, but tonight he is returning from six days away. He isn’t quite ready to be back, he realizes.

Eleanor still hasn’t noticed the pickup in the driveway. Jack shifts into neutral and the truck rolls backward, slowly at first. The brakelights would paint the windows red, so as the truck gains speed he spins the wheel left, then straightens up. The truck coasts away from the house, rolling backward down the street, and when he has put enough distance between Eleanor and himself, he keys the engine and makes a one-eighty turn from a neighbor’s driveway.

The bar is called Taft’s, and a fat man in a sport coat is awkwardly dismounting his Harley in the gravel lot when Jack parks alongside. The man nods curtly at Jack, then shifts his eyes to the pickup’s windshield. “Hell of a mess you got there,” he says. “Looks like you plowed into a vulture. Maybe a turkey. Goddamn.” He looks at Jack. “Yep, maybe a turkey.”

“I think it was an owl,” Jack says.

“Coulda been an owl. Coulda been a falcon, coulda been a damn dodo.”

“But probably an owl.”

“Probably.”

Inside Jack hangs back from the bar, staking out a booth in a darker corner with a slab of oak for a table. The place is hazy with smoke turned yellow-green by the neon signs. The green felt on the pool table is decorated with chalky white handprints and cigarette burns. Eventually a woman wearing jeans with an elastic waistband comes by and doesn’t ask Jack what he wants. He answers bourbon, and she goes away just as quietly, and he doesn’t see her again for nearly ten minutes, when she returns with two glasses. She mutters something that sounds like, “Busy fuckin night,” and he nods, and she takes his twenty and never returns.

He is finishing the second glass when a second girl comes along. She puts a fresh glass in front of him, and he reaches for his wallet and she says, “Naw, that’s mine,” and he raises the glass as thanks, and she smiles and raises her beer. In the swamp-green light her makeup is a zombie carnival mask. She would probably pass for pretty in daylight, but he can’t be sure. She asks his name and he says it and she says hers is Jolene. Like the song, he asks her, his repertoire on autopilot, and she laughs and says she loves Dolly Parton.

His heart isn’t in it, but he knew it wouldn’t be. It’s back there in that house, watching Eleanor paint, soaking her in so that the weight of her will draw him home again. He goes along with Jolene, listening to her stories, but he’s done drinking, and she’s still going and hasn’t noticed yet that she’s going it alone. She goes far enough that when she says she lives just a few blocks away he knows he will walk her there, and that chances are when she fumbles in her purse for the keys she’ll go down like a lead top. He’s almost right; she has the keys in her pocket and tells him to get them out while she leans against the aluminum siding and begins to slide away from him. Jack opens the door, leads her inside. Her apartment is carpeted in 1972, and her furniture isn’t much better off.

“Bedroom?” he asks, and she points and he drapes her over the bed. She smiles sleepily and he thanks her again for the drinks, and she says, “Don’t mention it,” and gets his name wrong. He draws the blinds for her and leaves, but not before raiding her refrigerator and coming up with a strawberry soda. He drinks it while he walks back to the truck.

When he parks crookedly in the driveway he is ready to be home. Eleanor opens the door. His boots are heavy on the porch, and hard to miss. He smiles tiredly, and she takes him to bed, and tonight, worried at the smell of liquor on his breath, Eleanor folds herself around him, pulling him against her. HIs back rises as he draws a long, embattled breath. He lets it out. He says, “I hit an owl. I think.” Eleanor kisses his back and draws him closer, and he is asleep. She lies awake until the sun is rising, and then in the slow daylight she sleeps as well.