I drove. I drove really fast.

 My blue Toyota sailed over a hill of simmering pavement and lurched around a blind tree bend. Yellow corn stalks bowed and snapped upright only to bend again into the tailwind. Hiss. Raindrops sizzled on black eraser burns left in the road. The open road. Far from my pink slip on the coffee table. Far from her high-pitched “What are we going to do Mick?” Just the sound of speed and wind on the back roads to Mel’s Pub.

Va-room. Before the curve, a black ringed tail flicked through the golden husks, the odometer tipped ninety, the oil light flickered, my brown eyes stared back from the rearview mirror and SMACK. Ol’ Blue kicked left. I pulled her hard back to the tarred gravel, but she bucked and careened down the slope. In front of the windshield, smoke spun in wild circles through tangled weeds. A huge raccoon splayed between two tread cut lanes of grass. It rolled and fluttered like when you touch a moth’s wing and watch it spiral into a zapping blue darkness. Its fingers gripped the air, opening and closing, opening and then curling into a tight fist when the heart finally stopped.

” God. Damn. Car. “

Two hours later, a tow driver plucked Ol’ Blue from the ditch and placed her next to the carcass.

“That’s a big son of a bitch right there” he chuckled. “No wonder…” The driver, withdrew a folded wad of grease-stained paper from the back pocket of his overalls, the pen like a toothpick between his blackened fingers, and handed me the bill. Damn Raccoon.

#

“Snap, crackle, pop!” I gestured to my Wife that evening. Her brow crunched together. She snatched my dinner plate, wiping a free hand across her eyelids.

“You killed the poor animal,” she mumbled. “If you drove like a normal human being it would still be alive.”

And then bloop. The TV screen irises inward and it’s the two of us framed in the dim-lit flicker of black and white static. I’m twenty-nine. She’s twenty-six. I’m Irish and German. Stocky-necked. She’s Italian and tired. I wonder if this is how the lot of us looked, five-thousand plus staring at locked gates and smokeless stacks.

Ka-boom.

A dozen green soldiers dodge sweeping helicopter blades in a South Korean mine field. Then another commercial. She hated eating in front of the TV and sold our Xacto-Fold TV trays in a garage sale while I was clinking glasses with the boys at Mel’s.

“Don’t think you’re going to sit in front of M*A*S*H while I’m in the kitchen fetching your dinner. I’m not your mother.”

So, for a dollar and a half she loaded the trays into the back of some hippy’s Vega.

#

The next week I zipped past the rectangle imprint where a few stalks of corn kneeled. A cloud of flies buzzed around the open mouth of the animal, its pelt parted by the soft pull of maggots and rot. From the rearview mirror, the eyes were pecked loose and somewhere within the tall grass, they stared back at my fleeing car.

#

Wendy made pea soup that night. I shifted from leg to leg and dried the supper bowls after she placed them in the strainer. It was 6:56 pm. Four more minutes until M*A*S*H. She scanned my profile from between furrowed brows. My four-day-old stubble blended into a red, overdue crew cut. I checked the TV set; “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. Oh, what a relief it is.” The China dish, the one with the garish rose petals from her grandmother’s cabinet slipped from my drying towel, splitting like a Mk-77 on the worn linoleum floor.

“What the hell Mick?” Tears welled up in the red corners of her eyes. “You always ruin the best that I’ve got!”

Before the baby died, before the quiet ceremony in my Mom’s backyard, Wendy loved me something fierce in high school. Her blond hair bobbing in pigtails, jelly gloss on her lips, as my knotted football jersey set green against her creamy waist.

I sang, “They say our love won’t pay the rent. Before it’s earned, our money’s all been spent… Babe, I’ve got you babe.” She fixed me with those steel-gray eyes and a little red smirk that whispered: remember this.

#

On the drive to Mel’s a weak rain chh’d against the cracked windshield and siphoned down the protruding belly of the raccoon. Its pillow shape looked as if someone filled it with air but stopped at the four sprawling legs where red rubber stoppers should be. The damp smell of decay drifted through the vents twitching at my nostrils.

 Fucking animal.

#

Wendy began sleeping in the vacant baby’s room between the arms of her Granddaddy’s rocking chair. The rocking, she said, soothed her pounding migraines. The living room glows all funny-blue from the light of the tube. Bob’s Auto Lotto is having a massive inventory reduction sale and then Radar, piece by piece, mails parts from his jeep from South Korea back home. Hawkeye sputtered that once Radar’s mailman found out he’d have a retroactive hernia. Canned laughter.

#

A few weeks later long strings of red gut from the deflated body littered the pavement. Two crows planted their feet into the melted corpse. I swerved left, shifting their feathers.

#

Wendy grabbed my TV dinner and sighed, “What happened to us Mick?” Behind my Pabst bottle, the television warped images of eyeless men and silent steel yards. “3 days after Youngstown Sheet and Tube announced layoffs in Youngstown, Ohio, congressmen form a caucus in hopes of meeting with President Carter next week…” A hand darkened the glass and it lowered from my lips. The last sip sloshed and glittered at the bottom. I stood and reached across the coffee table while she took a step forward, splashing tears onto my sleeve. I leaned towards her, removing the clutched bottle and cradled her with one arm. The other reached behind her back twisting the knob up on the TV set. Her silhouette blocked the newscaster and her hands fumbled with the light switch. Darkness.

Later, within the blue glow, Hawkeye announced they “came as boys and went home as men.”

#

That night, after she’d packed her carpetbag, her thin gold band winked next to our wedding Polaroid poised on top of the TV set. Ol’ Blue turned right on County Line road and crawled to that scarred place just beside the still cornfield. A brown rib jutted from a patch of sticky hair. It glinted in the moonlight, broken, like an old stone direction marker with a letter N for North saying, “Here it lies.” The blacktop shimmered and somewhere between this place and the pre-dawn horizon, it rested in a strange unsettling peace.