Neal Pollack

At night, they wrapped themselves in one blanket and sat watching the clouds blow down from the high range. The sky turned green and the lightning splayed like fingers. They tried to make love and it went badly so they held hands and talked about getting new cats and perhaps their own house in the cornfields south of Chicago. They talked like they believed the abortion was not the sad and humiliating thing it truly was. They were cautious with each other. They never talked about the bad dreams or the weak feeling that went to their knees. Sitting still under the blanket, they would make themselves laugh by naming the new cats after cartoon characters or friends they’d had. When the jokes went, they listened to the slackening rain, holding each other, both seeing him in the waiting room with People magazine while she lay dilated before the doctor. Then later, when the clouds blew through the canyon, they would decide the farmhouse they wanted must have white clapboards and a long front porch and stained glass in the eastern windows to color the sunrise. I'’ll build a fireplace from river rocks, he said. I'’ll cut the wood, good hackberry. She lay her head against his shoulder, her hair wet from the leaky awning. I'’ll sweep the porch and try not to wake the sleeping cats, she said.

All week they held hands and hiked trails of slate rock slick from the wet spring. They came upon elk herds sleeping in scrub meadows, ground squirrels running between holes like vaudeville comics, and one night watched a coyote nosing by the car. They stopped and studied waterfalls, shooting rapids, boulders dropped amongst birch trees like monoliths. She took pictures, holding the camera up and down to get in his height. We pick up from here, she said. One day after the next, he thought. Like walking.

They took Interstate 80 home through the stout hills of Nebraska, where cattle herds balded pastures and fat kids with sunburned legs waved from overpasses. The sunlight was low and even and white. Susan found new stations when the distance beat the signal. Outside Cheyenne, they heard Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” on college radio, and listened through the static. He wished they could sing it together, let go the way dogs howl.

“I can’t believe they'’re playing this song,” she said.

“Go with it,” he said.

“I didn'’t like it then.”

She turned down the volume and he heard the wind over the sad, growly singer. Ian Curtis was a put-on, she said. She’d talked about dancing in the aisles at Talking Heads concerts back in college, really throwing her arms above her head, and for twelve years he tried imagining it.

Mike first saw people scrubbing their windshields with greenpads at a truck stop near Kimball. The insect guts darkened the glass like window tint, but his remained clean enough to see Susan’s reflection without spots shadowed on her face. They must have hit an odd stretch of air, he thought. Smiling guys with RVs stood upon stepladders and worked their elbows, watching Susan walk for the rest room, her hand squeezing her purse strap. Look at the ass on her, their faces said.

“You can’t get the bugs all the way off with a squeegee,” a man in a cowboy hat told him. “Not out here. Go get you some green pads at the Wal-Mart in Brownson.”

Mike nodded that he’d make do and the man shrugged his shoulders. He went looking for Susan because that morning she’d cried on a Texaco toilet seat outside Cheyenne, sobbing so hard her eyes were still swollen at noon. He’d stood outside the door, his shadow broken on a propane tank, asking her what she wanted from him. My eyes are all puffy, she’d said.

“Remember,” the man called out, “it’s the bugs’ world in Nebraska and we just live in it.”

Mike drove off and set the cruise at eighty-five and read the mileage sign for North Platte, Kearny, Omaha. Sure, Tex, he thought of the man. It’s probably just like you say.

Ogalala was a hundred miles away when the bugs came out of the white sky like spilled coffee. They stitched the windshield. He looked hard through the smears and heard them hitting while Susan searched the radio for a stronger station. He couldn'’t see and the bug shadows spotted her cheeks. She scanned and listened for a half second, caring more about a clear signal than the music.