Dirt Clods

He was crawling across the field. Mostly big dirt clods—his son had plowed it clean about a week ago—made up the half section, a hundred and sixty acres. He figured he tripped a football field in. Back on the road, his son sat in the front seat of the truck, staring at his screen because why should he bother himself to check the moisture content when dear old Dad could get some exercise? Only dear old Dad, being angry at him for his laziness, had spun around after his inspection and caught his foot on whatever, lost his balance, and whoof! hit the ground hard.

No way could he pull himself up. Something hurt bad. Crawling, he grabbed at the cellphone that had flipped out of his hand, but lo and behold, it was out of juice. He had spent too long staring at it, his son having dared him to try to figure out some new way to measure moisture.

He did have elbows at least—and a shirt that covered them. It only hurt when he didn’t try to pull himself forward. The dirt smelled chemical. After spending the day spraying the fields about a decade ago, he’d sat up in bed at midnight and shouted “I’ll kill you.” Stunned awake, his wife had cowered, sure she was the victim-to-be—until he added, “You broadleaf plants,” and flopped back onto his pillow, still sound asleep. He should’ve died then, spraying all that poison around.

Broadleaf plants—a tall row of them, far off in the distance. He elbowed forward. Was he even going the right way? He couldn’t raise himself far enough to see.

He rolled over on his back and stared up at the blue sky and panted.

He had plenty of reasons to kill his wife. She spent money, she often mentioned old boyfriends, she burnt the roast. Kill? She didn’t know what kill meant, she could only bring home dead meat, aged, from the butcher’s, put out roach traps, and watch mice roll around on the floor from poison she’d left in the corners. The dog that had followed him everywhere, the one with all the burrs in its hide, the one that liked pizza crust, was dead in a minute after it ran through the broadleaf plant spray.

He hauled himself forward again. By inches. Up close, the dirt looked good: black and crumbly. And cold. It was still spring, but at least not muddy—no rain for a week. That was why he had wanted to know what the moisture was, deep down, and made his little trip out to the middle of the field. He had to know when to plant.

Must be his hip. He couldn’t make that part work.

He crawled past a lot of viny things he didn’t know the name of—what was it doing here after all that poison?—which, in the delirium of trying to avoid thinking about the pain, made him think about vines and that hotel with all of them dangling from balcony to balcony, a sort of Babylonia from the Bible. One of his wife’s ideas was to spend the weekend there. He would watch a ball game and she would find something to wear. She needed to look good to stand in the atrium that all the balconies faced.

He stopped crawling, he couldn’t stop.

He had Latin in high school: atria, atrium. More than one. There were definitely three old biddies sitting under the garden part of the atrium, giggling at him while he banged on the room door two flights up, accidentally locked outside in his shorts, hoping his wife would hear him over her loud TV. One of the biddies called up: You can always come down here and join us.

He should have.

He crawled on. His neck was killing him, his shoulders, his whatever he’d broken, and that hurt worse. A big, black bird settled in the dirt off to his right, giving him the eye like he ought to have wings—what was his problem?

Two-four-D, that was the name of the broadleaf poison. A form of DDT, he was sure of it; nobody could use it anymore. Very cleverly killed only select plants. He’d forgotten the Latin that the two-four-D stood for. The nuns had given him a good education in Latin; he should never have had to drag a plow around. Why, with his lawyering degree he could’ve been a Supreme Court judge, being so good at the baloney, except that he really liked the soil.

He was using his hands now, digging his fingers into it, moving a little faster that way, but it was way more painful now; a really loud pain was running down the side that was the goner. Loud like the music his son preferred to blast whenever he had a chance. Their agreement was that he could play it loud if he took the wheel. Sleep wasn’t in the cards when his son drove; sleep was nowhere. Between the music, the speed of his driving, and the careening around, sleep was just a dream.

He yelled and yelled. Of course, the kid had his music up.

He crawled on. He was cold, getting colder. A slip of drool wet his face—or was it tears? Think of something else—what? The sheriff, the week before. He said he’d left his badge at home to investigate a rape, and was that a crime? The sheriff was having a little conscientiae animi, thinking maybe she would sue. He didn’t want to call the sheriff back. He’d stopped his practice long ago, not enough of the right kind of dirt in town. His wife would’ve known, with all her Right to Life troublemaking, but she’d died a couple of years ago.

Most of the broadleaf plants died first.

He had called his daughter instead, the one who reminded him of his wife, the way she pronounced her words and tilted her head and sorted laundry. Do you think the sheriff did something? he asked her, and she was huffy, she said, Why are you asking me this? Is this some sort of incestuous shit you’re pulling, wanting to talk about sex like this with me, your own daughter?

She hung up.

He laid his head down in the dirt beside the top of an old turnip that had missed being plowed under. He breathed, and his breathing hurt. He raised up a hand, the dirt on it fell off, and he saw that the palm was bright red, nearly raw, and his elbows stuck out of his shirt cloth.

Was that music?

It was music—it was that loud so-called music. He sure never wanted to hear it so much before. He crawled toward it, grateful he had a direction to head for. But if he did manage to get to the truck, what if his son couldn’t get him up into it? Maybe he wouldn’t be strong enough. He’d barely been able to move the hay bales last year—or had he just been lazy?

Dead grasshoppers, probably killed by the pesticide he’d put on this year, maybe twenty of them, lying legs-up, curled in a sandy patch that soon hurt his palms. All those damaged legs.

The room where he stored his land deals and grain contracts and pencil stubs and old legal forms, where his few clients sat with their kleenex, had a lithograph of a woman in gingham with bad legs. Not a real painting, no, this image was too famous to own outright—the one with the woman dragging herself over the field to the farmhouse. He’d read somewhere that she was a polio victim and couldn’t have walked if she wanted to, but to him, she looked like somebody who had recently been beat up and was crawling back to get more of what she left the place for. He was more sympathetic now: she probably had callouses on her palms. He wished he did.

Had he crawled a whole mile? You couldn’t tell by the music. Had the sun even moved a whit? Meadowlarks were acting as if it had, noisy even over the music, a little mechanical sounding. Music made the cows fatter, his son said. But so much music he couldn’t hear his own panting, yet he moved to the music, not so fast, in slow motion.

I’ll kill you, he’d said to his wife. He was pretty sure he could’ve done it.

A tire, the gargantuan truck tire that he touched with his hand as if it was the Queen Mary, didn’t give him purchase. He headed, as best he could, for the door, feeling his way, elbow-by-elbow. There he laid, panting again, trying to figure out how to make his son notice him over the noise. He picked up a dirt clod and threw it against the door, but its thud was dull, and it smashed into a million pieces. He would have to raise himself and throw another and triple the pain.

He would have to.

Before he could find another clod at hand, the boy turned on the motor. To get the heat going again? To back out?

He couldn’t get out of the way of the wheels fast enough on his elbows, but he did—he cleared the back two. But the boy didn’t actually put the truck in gear.

He was resting when the door popped open on the opposite side, feet appeared, then piss. The music was now way too loud for anybody shouting to be heard. The boy got right back in and slammed the door shut.

He would have to take the chance that he wouldn’t move the truck again, and he shoved his body under the chassis and slammed his arm against it, over and over.

Dad? said his son, his head upside down out the door.

Call an ambulance, he said.

He heard the boy telephone and touched his raw, bleeding elbows, his wet cheeks, and felt humiliated. Can’t move you, shouted his son. That’s what they told me.

But I’ve been moving all along, he said.

Apparently, his son didn’t know whether to get out and stand next to him or to just stare out the cab window in the direction of where an ambulance might come—if they could get the volunteers off their fannies. That was what he guessed was the reason why he didn’t get out of the truck again. Anyway, after a while, the son did get out and offer to put the truck manual under his head and asked if he wanted a swig of Gatorade.

He said there was a flask of Jim Beam pushed into the seat in the back and to get that.

While the boy fumbled at the seat, he thought of that crippled woman crossing the field in her gingham dress. He couldn’t say gingham—it was his mother’s word. His mother would have knelt beside him, she would have known a broadleaf plant when she saw one, she would never have stayed at a place with an atrium, nor would she have walked into the middle of the field in a tiff. You dumkopf, she would have said. He was sure now that the woman crawling the field was his wife, yelling at him to come home in time for the ambulance, and it was him singing the lyrics of the loud music his son had turned on again—that hot music the sheriff had hinted at when he said he took off his badge.

He would spray them all. And then, a second before he passed out, he saw a great big billboard-sized sign in his brain that said You’re Alive, and he laughed.

Are you all right? asked his son.