Relative Distance

Memphis’ life story was this: once upon a time there was a boy who lived on a farm with his father and mother, who he loved beyond reason. In the summers he took his boots off at the paddock and walked through the weeds and side stepped the cow patties and lounged in the hay for hours until the smell was too obvious that he’d been lounging in hay for hours. In the winter he scraped frost from the windows of his father’s mustang. In the spring he duct taped the shutters on the windows closed to keep the storms from blowing the shutters indoors, and still the screen door banged against the outer wall of the house and the windows rattled and the gale howled. In the autumn wind-spiked rain shot holes in the mud and pasted the leaves to the floor of the woods. When he was fourteen he found his father beaten to death in front of his house, the door of his mustang wrenched open, the key in the ignition, and no sign of his mother. The next day he told the police he had no relatives, nowhere else to live. A week later his mother still hadn’t returned. Two weeks later he moved into the apartment above the church in Everwoods.

Everwoods was a town that never seemed to wake, if you came from outside the town. If you were born within it you knew that Everwoods was always awake, and awake it was so lethargic it bled solemnity and boredom onto the surrounding highways. It was a place like teeth, houses and municipal buildings slotted next to one another precisely and closely. It was comfort and asphalt, clean and efficient. No one worked on Sundays and Memphis didn’t notice. Memphis never drove his father’s mustang, which sat on the street outside the church where it was not legally allowed but also not in the way, back to his father’s farm. He didn’t tell anyone where he’d lived before, and no one asked. Because where Memphis had never been, he was now always there. Working nine to five every weekday and extra hours on Saturday, he fitted as neatly into Everwoods as though he’d been born there, never mind that he looked other, that it was clear he was from elsewhere. What else explained the wildness in him? The air of shade and green creepers and animal musk and wild plums? Memphis was polite; Memphis worked hard; Memphis didn’t have a family or a girlfriend or a boyfriend or anywhere to return to or anywhere to go. These were facts of life.

Memphis left Everwoods after his shift. Possibly the next day. He left his shift, anyway, and no one saw him return. No one saw him leave the church, but the mustang was gone, and the apartment above the church empty. Memphis drove twelve of the fifteen hours to Kila Glade, the radio in the mustang fading in and out of stations and static. He drove until he didn’t recognize the road signs, then kept driving. He paused to pee by the side of the road and to observe a fox going in the opposite direction who did not look up at his footsteps but did look up at the sound of his piss hitting the ferns. He drove another three hours to Kila Glade. In those hours the sky turned from silver blue to a colour like the dark caves under the ocean, threaded through with stars. He looked up at them outside the driver’s side window now and again, when he slowed and could be almost sure he would not hit anything that bounded out of the woods. He was looking at them again when he pulled into Les’ driveway. If he hadn’t managed to tear his eyes away from the silver-dusted sky he might have crashed into Les’ Camaro. It would have put some strain on the cousins’ reunion. But Memphis didn’t look worried at all, even when Les barrelled into him as he got out of the Mustang, or when he introduced me.

He told me later he didn’t know Les had a girlfriend. They hadn’t spoken for a while before his parents died.

I told him it was funny, because until Memphis and his mustang pulled into Les’ driveway, I hadn’t known Les had a cousin. Then I told him I was sorry for his loss. I wanted to tell him I was sorry he couldn’t look at the stars a little longer, but Les was already dragging Memphis inside.

If Memphis hadn’t paused so often, it would have been harder to deduce how everything about Kila Glade surprised him. The roads surprised him because they twisted and sloped, tripped and seemed to make an effort to steer vehicles into ditches. The floorboards that moaned beneath his feet made him pause, made him look down as though he might find he’d stepped on a person, then shuffle his feet thoughtfully over the warped wood. He was beguiled by the lack of a telephone system, by the emergency siren that we were to ring to alert the ranger of fire or accident. He was bewildered by the three generators in the basement that were enough to power every electronic in the house, should we need it. He could no comprehend the way we built fences and nets around our zucchinis to keep out the voles and hares.

What made him stop most often was the smell. When he stopped and breathed deeply, I tried to breathe deeply too. But I only smelled grass seed and hollyhocks and leaf mould.

“You used to smell like this,” Les said to Memphis once. He was looking at Memphis’ car as though blaming it for the way Memphis smelled when he came to us, the way he still smelled to me. I didn’t hate the mustang as Les did. Memphis and leaned against it sometimes when Memphis felt like looking up and I didn’t think I could finish an entire bag of crisps by myself. Memphis didn’t look bothered by Les’ words, but I think he must have been. Maybe his father’s farm smelled of hollyhocks and mould. I wasn’t surprised he smelled of cleaner and tarmac then; time had probably washed his father’s farm from him.

“Everwoods doesn’t actually have any woods in it,” Memphis said. He looked at the mustang too, then leaned against it for a moment. It seemed to want to hold him up, like a large dog or a horse. “Nothing there except libraries and houses.”

“Isn’t it in the middle of the woods?” I asked.

“It actually takes a long time to get to the woods though.” He sounded tired, like he’d already tried it and hadn’t the energy to do it again. “All that walking.”

Les spread his arms wide and grinned. “Walking is all we do here. Unless you want to get somewhere, then you drive. That’s the same everywhere you go.”

Memphis replied, “Not in Everwoods. You have to drive there, to get anywhere.”

I scratched the back of my calf. Mosquitoes another thing that baffled Memphis when he first came to us. His elbows were angry with bites. “That sounds awful.”

Memphis turned. He’d been wearing Les’ clothing since he’d arrived, and if Les didn’t have so many plaid shirts and wool jumpers he might have cared, but he was probably caught in the improbable way Memphis looked in his clothing. The way his browned skin and darker hair didn’t manage to blend into the dark woods at all. He looked flattened in a cubic space. He had. Now, with his leaner arms and broader shoulders, redder cheeks and forehead, he lost his dubiousness. “Only if you’re trying to go somewhere,” Memphis said. He rubbed the mustang’s hood like he would the head of a fond dog and went to shake out the rug.

Les took Memphis into the base camp of Kila Glade for supplies every two weeks. Memphis wasn’t good at boundaries, Les said, not ones that came with signs. He knew how not to spook a calf or a beaten pup, but a restricted access sign on a metal fence was as good as non-existent in his eyes. When Memphis was gone to base camp too long, Les loaned me the Camaro to follow him. Almost half a year after arriving at Kila Glade, Memphis didn’t realize the fenced off field behind the general store had been staked by the general store owner’s son Abram.

The afternoon was hot and long, stretched like taffy, green and black with moss and gnats. There was so much dark golden light that the fence behind the general store looked like a fishing net in the dusky underwater light of the sea. When I climbed out Abram already had a fist buried in Memphis’ face. Memphis might have fallen if Abram didn’t grab his shoulder and hold him against the fence next. The agitated bull calves were retreating to the far side of the fence, trampling the grass as they went. Abram didn’t seem to notice. “Do you not understand?” He jerked a hand at the fence.

Then Restricted Access sign was hard to miss. If you weren’t Memphis. The anger in Abram’s face was hard to misunderstand. If you weren’t Memphis. Les had once said that he worried Memphis wouldn’t understand the world: what he meant was that he thought Memphis would fumble with the world and cut himself. “I didn’t see it. It’s just a fence,” Memphis said.

Abram looked happy to cut him. He didn’t waste his time on words. When he swung his fist it looked as though someone else had planned it, as though the universe had calculated the swing, had drawn Abram’s hand back and let it loose, guided it to Memphis’ jaw. Memphis looked as though he’d accepted it, as though he’d already accepted the consequences for what he’d said then and everything he would ever say. Memphis did fall, into the grass and the gravel that collected at the edge of the fence. There was a dust in his eyelashes, chalk on his cheek. Gravel rolled out of the creases in his t-shirt. He stood up and Abram took the opportunity to kick him below the ribs.

“Abram,” I said when Memphis sucked in a breath, opening his mouth to a spike of grass.

Abram rested the toe of his boot against Memphis’ working throat. “What are you doing here?”

“Picking him up.” I was already backing away from the fence. There was a door a few feet away that no one had unlocked. I didn’t have a hard time imagining Memphis climbing the chain links to hurl himself over the side. But why, Memphis? “Come on. He won’t do it again. Les won’t let him back on his.” Les also wouldn’t be happy that Memphis had pissed off Abram, or that Abram had winded Memphis.

“He’s yours.” Abram pulled his foot from Memphis’ throat. He wiped his mouth as a breeze blew chalky dust up from the gravel, and the smell of warm loam from the woods. He nudged Memphis in the leg with his boot to get him moving. “You’re lucky you got a girl to look after your ass.”

Memphis pushed himself up on his palms, then climbed to his feet. He waited until Abram opened the gate and then came outside. The bull calves were watching, shifting uneasily, caught between wanting a view and wanting to avoid the commotion. I walked past Memphis’ mustang and opened the door of the Camaro for Memphis to get inside. Memphis paused at his mustang and looked between the two of them as though he could not comprehend how they cold occupy the same world.

I tapped the top of Les’ car and jingled his keys. “Can you drive or no?”

Memphis’ chest was heaving. He had both hands by his sides, though I could tell he wanted to hold his stomach. He licked his lip. “No.” He blinked. There was dust in one of his eyes, I thought. Or I’d missed another punch Abram had thrown. One eyelid was swelling, the white of the eye beneath it was rosy. “It’s all hazy.”

There was a haze- twilight was fading fast. The sun was dipping over the trees and brushing them with murky gold light. But I leaned against the closed driver’s side door and tapped the top of the Camaro again. “Then come on. We’re going back. We’ll pick up the mustang tomorrow.” Les wouldn’t let it be if we came home without groceries and the Camaro.   

Memphis looked for a moment as though breathing had become negotiable. I hadn’t noticed how much he’d been moving until his shoulders went still. He looked frozen by the suggestion. When he looked at the mustang he put a hand on the side view mirror.

I said, “We’ll come back for it tomorrow morning.” I opened my door but didn’t get in. After a moment Memphis came round the side and slipped into the passenger seat. While I wrestled with the Camaro’s capricious gearshift he shifted and played with the seat adjuster.

“I think I miss Everwoods,” he said. It wasn’t what he meant, but I don’t think I could have helped him with what he did mean.

We paused halfway back to Les’ place and pulled over. The road was small anyway. If anyone wanted to pass us they would still have to be careful about it, but it was easier to pretend we had holes ourselves up somewhere private. With the windows almost all the way up I could smell his detergent and his sweat and the dirt crusted on the toes of his shoes. I left the windows that way when I reached across the gearshift to kiss him. This close his collar smelled like grass seed, and he tasted like zucchini flowers and blood, so he made a little more sense after all.

A little later, when the sun really was gone and the trees had become black veins and pillars and claws I pulled away and watched Memphis do up the buttons of his over shirt. He had the keys of the mustang in one hand. He wouldn’t let anyone touch it, even to go back for it. They were probably the only things he’d carried all the way from his father’s farm.

“Are you going back to Everwoods?” I asked, because Les wouldn’t, and Memphis wouldn’t volunteer an answer unless I asked first. He still might not. He was in a quiet mood.

Memphis looked down at the button on his shirt. He wasn’t frowning but I knew he didn’t want to. He wanted something Kila Glade didn’t have either, for all its smell of grass seeds and hollyhocks and leaf mould. He wanted something impossible, something that he’d dreamed up inside him and might begin to resent the world for not making real. Left alone, Memphis had dreamed up beautiful woods and beautiful pastures and gales and mud and plums. If he could turn inward and live there, he would.

“Not Everwoods,” he said finally. “Is there some place on the other side of Kila Glade? I could keep driving.”

He was already gone. He hadn’t left and already he was going. He had probably been leaving since he’d arrived. Bits of him were shifting at a time. “You could,” I said. “You want some place else?”

“Somewhere between Everwoods and Kila Glade. Some place like that.”

“Some place like you.”

Memphis went quiet again. He would stay quiet the rest of the night. He would explain the incident with Abram to Les with as few words as possible and let Les rage on his own. He wouldn’t talk about the kiss of his mustang or where he was going next. He surprised me by saying, “Maybe I’ll go somewhere you can walk into.”

I don’t know if I believed it. Memphis would never go anywhere the mustang couldn’t go as well. I didn’t tell him he wanted to go somewhere impossible. That places like that weren’t found, but made. He’d already made it.

But the next morning the mud had fossilized his footsteps away from Les’ and the mustang sat keyless in the general store’s parking lot.

Art by Frederico Infante

Text by Lucie MacAulay