The Annie Year. Stephanie Wilbur Ash

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      It hit him square between the eyes.

      Everyone gasped, including me.

      Hope bent over into a big belly laugh as all the lights went out.

      Then he was laughing too, the only other one in the auditorium. The two of them were laughing while the rest of us sat in the dark. I will never forget that.

      Behind me Mueller kicked my chair. Next to me, the Vo-Ag teacher’s hot breath was in my ear, saying, “Who is that?” He grabbed my arm and put his forehead on my shoulder. His ponytail swished around and grazed my neck. He laughed and laughed, and whispered into my ear, “What kind of a place is this?” while the rest of them, all of them, said, “Who’s that laughing? Who’s that laughing?” with Huff, loudest of all, shouting: “I SEE TANDY CAIDE HAS A NEW FRIEND.”

       3

      Later that night I lay down on the white eyelet comforter that had been on my bed since I was in the fourth grade. I listened to Gerald snoring in his bedroom across the hall. His bedroom is the one that used to belong to my father and mother. This whole cottage, the one on the go-around at the top of the hill on the north side of town, the one right next to Huff’s, used to belong to my father and mother. My father bought it in the fourth year of his business, the year I was born. I have been told by Doc and Huff that he painted the shingles shit brown to match the color of his soul. I have also been told by Doc and Huff that the three of them stalked this cottage like a pack of coyotes, and when old Edie Meier’s husband, Elmer, died, they convinced her kids that she was better off in the nursing home over in Fayette, where she could play bridge and eat meat every day and not have to shovel snow off the cottage’s driveway. Whether this story is true, and whether this was in Edie’s best interest, and whether my father’s soul was the color of shit, was always dependent on the drunkenness of Huff or the tenderheartedness of Doc. If the topic came up when Huff was drunk and Doc was simultaneously tenderhearted, I invented urgent work to do and left to do it. I would not wish that disagreement on anyone.

      So nothing in this little cottage on the go-around has ever truly belonged to Gerald. It belongs to me only on the technicality of my birthright. But still that other bedroom—the one with wallpaper printed with tiny roses and those cherub babies you see on Valentine’s Day—is Gerald’s. He had been sleeping alone there since the second year of our marriage, when he decided to no longer wear underwear to bed because it crawled up his butt cheeks when he slept. Also, his snoring sounded like drowning.

      I got up and opened the small window that faces out toward Doc and Huff’s place across the go-around, shingled in the same shit brown. Out there was that sagy smell again, just underneath the catpee smell of newly applied anhydrous ammonia. I thought about the Vo-Ag teacher with his colorful belt and the man clogs that would not survive winter. He seemed too good to be in a place like this.

      I went back to my bed, and to stop myself from thinking about him I went over the order of the stripes on the wallpaper, timed to Gerald’s snoring—thick, thick, thin, thick, thick, thin, thick, thin—which had always worked for me in the past. It didn’t work anymore. The smell of sage and cat pee and my sweat mixed up together. It seemed like the smell of something about to happen.

      The Vo-Ag teacher reminded me of Bruce Willis, when Bruce Willis was on that big wraparound farmhouse porch in that Seagram’s Golden Wine Cooler commercial in the 1980s. In that commercial, the screen door of a farmhouse bursts open and Bruce Willis comes out of the house with a Seagram’s Golden Wine Cooler in his hand. He’s got tight faded jeans on and a black T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. There’s a band playing on the porch. He puts this bottle of Seagram’s Golden Wine Cooler up to his mouth and uses it as a microphone, singing, Seagram’s Golden Wine Coolers. It’s wet and it’s dry. My, my, my, my. And everyone has a wonderful time.

      My father hated that commercial. Every time it came on he would throw up his hands and yell, “Jesus Christ! What the hell does Bruce Willis know about farmhouse blues?!”

      But I always thought, even then, before I had breasts or my full height or a driver’s license: How does my father possibly know the heart and mind of Bruce Willis?

      Finally I went to Gerald’s bedroom and I woke him by touching his penis, and eventually we satisfied each other as best as we could, given Gerald’s size. I think it had been about seven months since we had done anything resembling that. Afterward, he pressed himself against my back while I stared at the chubby cherub babies on the wallpaper. He was so fat he couldn’t reach his arms around me. His top arm could get to only my left breast, so he held that.

      But still he was mine, at least by marriage. People like you may or may not understand this, but when it has been hammered into you your whole life that very little of that life is actually yours, a small technicality like marriage can sometimes mean something.

      I said, “What if we got a foreign exchange student?”

      He said, “From where?”

      I said, “Benin, in Africa?” and as soon as I said it I heard how ridiculous I sounded. Maybe even suspect. “I don’t know. Anywhere I guess.”

      Gerald didn’t move. Finally he said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

      “Why not?”

      “Well,” he said, “what if this African foreign exchange student walked out to the backyard one night and saw us making love in our hot tub?”

      We didn’t have a hot tub.

      “You tricked me,” I said.

      He laughed at me like I was a kid throwing a tantrum. “Oh, come on, Candy Cane,” he said. He squeezed my breast. He whispered, “It would be easier, with the water, more buoyant.”

      “It’s too expensive,” I said.

      “Maybe you should look for one on eBay,” he said.

      Maybe you should disappear, I thought. But I said nothing.

      Gerald rolled to his back and fell asleep. I got up and went to my own bed and did the same.

       4

      That night, a house blew up. It was on the other end of town from the cottage on the go-around, down by the closed Hardee’s, across from the closed A&W, and on an entire city block of houses owned by a holding company in Mankato. It was that area of town where railroad employees had once lived, but most of the houses had been carved up into apartments for Section 8 housing now, or abandoned entirely. I had little to do with that part of town anymore, as few people living there had property or businesses or even enough income to necessitate a CPA. While I was walking to my office that morning, Cindy from Prairie Lanes passed me on her way to open the bowling alley and told me the occupants of the house had not been living here for more than a few months. She heard they were nephews of Arnie Utzke, a former client of mine who had once worked for the railroad and now worked in Forest City at the Winnebago factory. But she wasn’t entirely sure, and Arnie had moved to Forest City, so no one could ask him. She did say for sure that one of the men who lived there had his face blown off in the explosion. She knew this because Dave Oppegaard, the head volunteer fireman, had told her earlier that morning when she saw him at the Kum & Go. Oppegaard had gone into the burning house and saw him. “His skin was basically СКАЧАТЬ