WHAT LUCK, THIS LIFE
Copyright © 2018
Kathryn Schwille
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schwille, Kathryn.
What luck, this life / Kathryn Schwille.
Spartanburg : Hub City Press, 2018.
LCCN 2018006016 (print) | LCCN 2017061677 (ebook)
ISBN 9781938235429 (hardback) | ISBN 9781938235436 (e-book)
LCSH: Family life—Fiction. | Social problems—Fiction.
Small cities—Texas—Fiction. Columbia (Spacecraft)—Accidents—Fiction.
LCC PS3619.C496 (print) | LCC PS3619.C496 W53 2018 (ebook)
DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006016
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
186 W. Main Street
Spartanburg, SC 29306
864.327-8515
for Tom, who believed.
“...we enquired of the destiny of the universe, and the oracles of thermodynamics answered us; every existing form will break up in a blaze of heat; there is no entity can escape the irretrievable disorder of the corpuscles; time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.”
from ITALO CALVINO, “IMPLOSION”
CONTENTS
PASTURE, STUBBLE, SHOULDER OF THE HIGHWAY
Coyotes, weasels, green flies, crows. The animals heard it first. Along the weedy edge of Route 20, a turkey buzzard quit the possum she’d lucked into and took cover in a stand of pines. The wild pig under Cecil Dawson’s oak trees snorted twice and froze. To us, it came from out of nowhere: two blasts and the roar of a crashing train that rumbled far too long. Our windows rattled, our floorboards quivered, our breakfasts trembled on their tables. We thought terror, we thought bombs, we thought of our loved ones. A few of us thought to scream. Those of us who ran outside, the ground beneath us shaking still, saw wobbling plumes of smoke in a Texas postcard sky. Some saw three trails, some claim one. No one saw the fire balls, since they streaked west of here. Jimmy Hubble counted the seconds, like the time between lightning and thunder. One thousand one, one thousand ten, one thousand thirty. Over the trees of his south pasture, pieces of something fell from the sky. Grover Sharkey heard a whizzing sound, like a bullet flying past. Carter Bostic heard a thud on her roof, then another, then two more. We turned on our televisions. Columbia’s lost, the anchor said. Not lost, we said, it’s here. Cable on a hay bale, computer in a tree, space suit in a briar patch, toilet by a school. Beside Junior Pierce’s mail box lay a shoeless foot, missing one big toe. Didn’t anything burn up? On the shoulder of Farm-to-Market 104, Lila MacFarland reached for a square of silver metal, big as a turkey platter, charred on just one side. The heat it gave off reddened her palm. She made a hot pad out of two old towels and laid it in her trunk. Don’t touch anything, the anchor said. Chemicals, danger, NASA doesn’t know. Arthur Kenny smelled something in the air, but he could not describe it. Not fuel, not smoke, nor burning flesh. Not the East Texas perfumes he knew: creosote, fertilizer, pulpwood, pines. His dog held something in her mouth; Arthur’s legs went weak. Here, Dingo, bring it here. She circled, teased and dropped it on his shoe. A black piece of pipe, narrow as a woman’s finger. Good girl, he said, and chained her to a tree. What could we do? The stuff was everywhere, light as paper, heavy as brick. We set up roadblocks where it littered our highways. Our children played at searching. For what? A nose cone? A fuel cell? An instrument panel? Coyotes, weasels, green flies, crows. For weeks we walked with our heads down. Watching, watching, where we walked.
Bostic’s was a corner store on a two-lane highway, a location that should have made for good commerce. The traffic on 91 was never heavy—deep East Texas was too lightly populated for that—but the highway ran out to Minden Lake, where the bass were lunkers and the campgrounds rarely empty. From Bostic’s gravel parking lot where the fussy gas pumps stood, it was just a mile to the road that led to Kiser.
In the rising light of a cool October morning, Carter Bostic struggled at the store’s back door, fuming over the lock she’d begged Roy weeks ago to fix. Maybe today was the day she’d call up to Eno for the locksmith to come, and with that money wasted when Roy could so easily do it himself, his attention might settle on the things that cried out for doing. He had held her up after breakfast, talking about what money they didn’t have and apparently never would, until finally she had to leave him there in the dirt path that passed for a driveway at their place. She’d sped off in the Silverado he’d picked up from the dealer the morning of 9/11—two years old and the light of Roy’s life. While the Twin Towers were collapsing, Roy had tooled around Kiser showing off their big purchase. Now they could barely make the payments.
Carter pushed in on the key, pulled back, turned slowly. Nothing. Roy had insisted on the deadbolt, though she’d told him it would never keep out trouble