Read Online Another Perfect Catastrophe by Brad Barkley - Free Book Online Page B

to be harmless. We asked her one night in early spring and she went with us, riding. Her T-shirt had a cartoon of a hen with a fishing pole, reeling in a big catfish. She wore black shorts. Gave her my denim coat to wear in the Pinto with its bad heat, Sugar leaning up between the seats like our eight-year-old and we are on our way to Six Flags. We bought little pony bottles of beer along with handfuls of Ding Dongs and Slim Jims, and rode out to the golf course, across the parking lot, and right up onto the cart path beside the first tee, clicked the Pinto down to parking lights. “I don’t know about this, guys,” she kept saying, and I drove slowly to reassure her, the cinders crunching beneath us, careful to stay on the path and not dig any tire ruts on the fairways. We handed our empties to Sugar and he placed them back in the carton. After a bit, Lyndsey settled into it, saying we were the most cautious vandals she’d ever seen. I liked the sound of her voice in the dark, the way her hair smelled like hush puppies.
    Near dawn, the sky just edging toward light, we parked atop a hill beside the fourteenth green. Below us was the dark gape of a pond, the surface puckered by fish going after mosquitoes. Dew settled over the Pinto so that every few minutes I had to run the wipers. It was not yet sunrise, though there was a little rag of gray in the corner of the night, and the trees and yellow flags began to shape themselves. We got out of the car, walked to the edge of the hill in the wet grass, and below us the town lay spread out in darkness, the arc lamps strung like pearls through the streets. Light in the sky shifted again and all in one moment the streetlights blinked out, as if the town were giving in to daylight. “Wait till you see this,” I told Lyndsey, and I watched her watching the town. “One more minute,” Sugar said, and we were quiet.
    Right below, a few hundred yards under our shoes, was the John Deere plant, and when the light in the sky notched up again, the green and yellow of those tractors bloomed into being like a sudden field of dandelions, and I took Lyndsey’s chin and angled it down for her to see, the way Sugar did me the first time up there. Seventy-seven of them—tractors, harvesters, combines, backhoes, excavators—parked in rows on a wide gravel lot. Always seventy-seven, we had noticed through the years, so much so that we had stopped counting and went by faith. Dew glistened on the shiny green paint, the shadows of the machinery angled left in their own neat gray rows.
    â€œOh my God,” Lyndsey whispered. She took my hand, then Sugar’s.
    I squeezed. “Like it?”
    She nodded. “So beautiful. Like a Zen rock garden.”
    â€œWith internal combustion,” Sugar said. We stood silent and watching, as if we might see the little shift as the sun lifted over the hills and the shadows darkened and narrowed beneath the rows of machinery, as the town began to ripple with cars and noise. Then the sprinklers spread out over the fairways rose out of the ground and began spewing water in tapered arcs, and somewhere we heard a lawnmower start up.
    â€œWe’d better get moving,” I said.
    As we drove along the cinder paths, Lyndsey unpinned her nametag from her Hen House shirt and stuck it into my dash, left it there.
    â€œI want to come back,” she said. “I want to see that again.”
why she stays
    I don’t know.
logging leg
    It was something to do, road trip up to Oregon for a summer, escape the worst of North Carolina heat and no money. We were twenty-three, same age Lyndsey is now. We signed on with Hennesy Forestry Management Inc. for six bucks an hour, plus free lunch off the back of the silver truck at the foot of the logging road. We spent our nights in bars, chalking games of dominoes on the tables, trading money for half a buzz and a few jukebox dances with the local women, pretending that a pair