The Countryside

Marcello against that backdrop of yellow grass. Dry, dirt-riddled air. He’s talking about being born from the elements. Forget my parents, he says. Pints of warm wine. His arms are spread, we both reek. It’s better than Francesco. No car, but we don’t mind the walk.

At his cousin’s house, more wine. They sit at a round table, smoking, a bottle of Chianti in the middle of the table next to an empty vase. No light but the square above the stovetop. On the wall, guns are hung, cloth slings draped over long nails. Drunk, I’m dancing. I move to the table. A Holy Bible props up an uneven table leg. There’s no music but Marcello’s clapping. I’m on the table, breasts bouncing, skirt fluttering, my feet stomping. The cousin’s wife is saying something so I giggle, nervous and flushed, like I always do when she speaks.

“Get down,” the uncle growls.

Marcello claps around his uncle’s head, claps in circles, up and around the red face. I dance in front of his fat head, his nose and chin crumpled in disgust but I move closer, my breasts in his face.

“Down,” he says and he points at the ground.

Marcello howls like a wolf, like a dog. Like a wolf-dog.

We smile, a forbidden smile, one we hadn’t shared before.

Hell, I don’t even know where Francesco is.

The uncle pinches under my armpits, picks me up, sets me down on the ground, wags a finger in front of my face. He’s speaking too fast, trying to spank me with his meaningless words. I lean away from him to see Marcello, to show him I’m still smiling. Sitting on the ground, I hold uncle’s leg and peer to the side, around his knee.

Marcello whispers to the woman, his cousin’s wife. His cousin’s gone. I try to howl but it’s more of a whimper.

“We should’ve gone dancing,” I say from the ground, but Marcello’s left the room.

The uncle’s lecture is endless, endless like the hot night. It’s a heat like a cat in heat. Painful hunger.

I reach for the wine; he skids it back on the table. I reach for his head and he roars back. The tap dance of rain against tin outside. When the uncle retreats, a pipe and untied tie at his neck, I crawl outside. My head feels soggy-heavy. The sun’s coming up. The yellow grass is still yellow. The earth crunches under my bare feet, gray gravel and glass. My bra on the flagless post in the driveway, half-singed, the wire jutting out. A tin pail next to the house is full of rainwater.

They’re building a house next door. Hadn’t I seen? Maybe it was built at night. The roof’s missing, but there’s plaster on one wall, fake wood, and a strip of white plastic quivers on the side, smacking against the plaster, whack-whack, whack, like a transparent flag.

Francesco shakes me awake. He’s blacked out by the throbbing sun at his back, but I smell his sweat. He drags me up and away, one arm at my waist, and my feet stammer, making a dirt cloud. Dust coats his brown eyebrows. Our lips pinched tight.

The pick-up barrels down the road. Francesco’s breathing through flared nostrils, a hand in his hair, eyes on the countryside. “And Marcello?” he asks. The seats, his breath, it all smells like stale sweat, which implies sex – real or imagined – but who am I to judge? I shrug.

A paper cup of watered-down lemonade in the holder between us. In the backseat, a string of condoms, a lime, ciabatta, cassettes. I find his knife in the glove compartment and wipe it against my shirt but the rust stays so I cut the lime, half, then half again. My nails black, palms caked in soil. I’m careful, but the shell’s slippery as I squeeze. The lime squirts from my fingertips, the dirty rind in the cup floating pulp-side up, but I drink anyway.

Marcello and Francesco used to practice the English alphabet on the broken rail tracks in Taormina. Many things had been abandoned there, but the trains found a way down eventually. I’m eyeing myself in the side mirror, lips red-wine-dyed and bloated. These brothers took me in, and I’m safe, oh-so safe. I lean against the cool window, hearing that plastic trying to slash someone’s soon-to-be home.

When I wake, I’m alone in the truck. The windows are cracked. If I squint, the country doesn’t look so different, and I’m eight, hopping upstream in our backyard creek, calling to the crayfish to run before my father comes out with his bucket and shovels. “The key is, pumpkin, don’t get greedy. Scoop up a few crayfish, but not every one you see. Your Grandpa Sulley, he was land-hungry. So hungry he ate a mound of insects. An anthill. That’s right. Red ants! A whole mound of ‘em. Ate it all, licking the ground smooth, and the shepherd next door came and stole the keys to his gate and barn from his back pocket, right there, while he was on all fours so he had no choice but to leave the country, the country that was once his.” I waded in the creek next to him, shovel sifting the rock bottom. In those years, I waited until night fell and I was the only one awake. I ran next to the creek, crossing the marsh, racing through the tall corn. I would yell my dreams up to the somersaulting fireflies.

The lemonade’s still at my side. The paper sinks around my hand and the bottom of the cup sags. I drink it down, fish out the lime rind. The crayfish used to shuffle away, not scurry. “They surrendered,” my father would say, and my mother swatted at him, said they didn’t know the meaning of captivity in the first place. Marcello, Francesco, they don’t know about that place. Familiar chatter like a hum. They walk toward me now, calm, as I suck at the leftover guts of the lime and make my eyes smile.