= COMING OUT OF NOTHING
  By Ray Nayler


This country's barren
The fields lie fallow,
The highway cuts 
From throat to knees.

And I have strayed dear
Far from the meadow,
Into the deep
Beneath the trees.

The Green above me,
The Dark below me,
Oh Love where is 
Your lantern, please.

When will you wander?
Far from the meadow,
And scrape for me
Beneath the leaves?

(Traditional old-time ballad)


Steven lay in the dark of the room. Often after the mad rush of making love, he would fall instantly asleep. Yet at this moment, he felt absolutely alert and alive. His mind wandered to the furthest points of the town, imagining Shane Demsey, eyes also open to the dark, wondering where Polly was. Shane knew where she was, of course, but he would push that knowing away with possibilities. Steven imagined the violence building in Shane at that moment, the blind rage as he knotted his knuckles in the dark. And somewhere else, across a black-spiked cornfield, Polly's father David would be fighting a twin knowing, and nursing a twin rage.

Laying in the dark, mind clear as it had never been, he knew that those two men would kill him if they could. They would kill and bury him in the black earth.

Polly shifted beside him, her curves opening soft against him as she leaned to the nightstand. Clatter of cigarettes, sulfur hiss of a cheap liquor store match, purr of melting tobacco.

Steven loved her. He had been unprepared, yesterday, for the cold shock of it as they came together in the gloom of her secret place, the rotting springs of the couch exhaling a dust that clung to them.  He could still taste the dust on her skin when they were finished, cut with sweat. Then, he had thought the shock was momentary, physical, like the taste she left on his fingers.

Now he knew it was fact.

Her hand skated carefully down his arm, traced and returned. He dreaded the break in stillness, the loss of clarity, that would come with the singsong of her voice, questioning him about the blurred tattoo her fingers had just outlined. He thought of something to tell her.

The question never came. She twisted her cigarette out in the ashtray, shifted her warm cleft curves against him, and was still.

* * *

Driving into Iowa was like coming out of nothing. Suddenly, the world was alive with color-blue sky, red barn, yellow-thatch field. The landscape had an immaculate sameness to it, a repetition of natural and manmade features. Glinting silver water towers announced towns in the distance. Mica sparkled in the hot black road.

He drove until the sun settled red over the fields, finally stopping in Hadley. It was a town like many others he had passed through that day-brick box downtown with theater, hardware store, tavern, a gas station, two banks and a cafe . At the far edge of the town, where the fields chipped away at it, was the Swallow Motel, with a neon bird and red capital VACANCY riding its sign. He took a room for $14.95 a night, impulsively paying for three nights in advance. This got him an odd look from the bird-faced girl behind the counter.

"Business in Hadley?"

He smiled. "Photography. This is beautiful countryside."

The chin-tucking expression of surprise that she gave him told him she'd never thought of it that way. People never love where they are from, he thought. He liked Iowa, with its sense of order and the bright newness of its cultivated landscape. Everything seemed orderly, everything clean.

They seemed to know that he was coming to the cafe . It was as if the girl at the counter had phoned ahead-and Hadley seemed almost small enough to make the idea reasonable.  He carried his camera with him like a shield or a badge, although he knew he would shoot nothing in the grease-spotted interior of the cafe . Every eye was on him as he sat down in one of the booths.The eyes were curious and craggily friendly.

The waitress's name tag read Pauline, but when he thanked her by that name she corrected him.

"Nobody calls me that. It's Polly."

She couldn't have been over twenty, but her voice had a purring husk to it that seemed much older. She had the beauty of a scrubbed, pink-nailed movie star, reminding him of a publicity shot he had once seen of Ava Gardner standing against a haystack.

Polly lay steak and potatoes smothered in gravy in front of him. 

"If here's anything else I can do for you ..."

"Actually there is."

Polly paused on the upswing. 

"Yes?"

"I need someone to show me around the county. Guide me to the best spots. Do you know of anyone?"

She wiped her hands on her apron. He saw her scan the room quickly. A John Deere hat or two cocked in their direction.

"It's easy enough to find your way out here. I doubt you'll need a guide."

Laying in his motel room, he thought of Ava Gardner and tried to shape the picture in his mind. He had lost details of it, could not make her black-and-white face come alive anymore, could not remember her exact expression. The bright sun and the haystack he remembered clearly. 
A double tap at the door put a stop to his efforts.

It was Polly. She would be happy to show him around. She would meet him at the motel, in the morning. She didn't have to wait tables until three. She told all of this to him in a breathless whisper, as if even the circling, darting bats overhead were listening. Then she was gone, like a girl who had crept through her bedroom window for a kiss in the night. In the tiny bathroom, he spent ten minutes cleaning minutely under his nails. He picked through several long-sleeved plaid shirts, lay one out for the next morning. He placed his glasses on the night-stand, avoiding looking at himself in the mirror after removing them. He did not like his face without the glasses. He felt it did not suit a quiet photographer. It was a violent face, planed to break the knuckles of a fist.

They lay together on the ancient, dusty couch, sweat and dirt-streaked, breathless, a cloud of bluecurling from her mouth, the red dot of cigarette floating in the cave-like room.

"This is where I always come when I want to be alone. It's my secret place."

He noticed the fish-white stripe of flesh around the ring finger of her left hand.

"You're married."

She was moving around the darkened room, finding her clothes.

"Yes. And no. We're getting divorced. Not that it matters."

"I was married once," he offered. All that he could remember of Lola now was a slender ankle and her small, perfectly even teeth.

"My husband, Shane-he and my father are more married than Shane and I ever were. They hunt together, farm together-they're like one person. One very jealous person," she said. "If they knew I was here with you, they would die."

He thought of the samelike men at the cafe , listening to every word he spoke to Polly. Thick-shouldered Iowans with heat-creased necks. They didn't seem the type to die for love.

"Why didn't your marriage work," Polly asked.

"I was away so much ... it was part of the job." He realized that she might want something more substantial, felt the guilt of omission. But she just made an affirmative sound in her throat, filling in the blanks herself. The next question she'll ask, he thought, is how long I'll stay. She shifted her shirt over her head, hiding her face for a moment, pulling it down over her bare breasts.

She grabbed his wrist.

"Maybe this won't mean anything to you-but my father touched me when I was little. So if I act weird or anything, that's why. It's not an excuse, it's just true. It makes me act funny sometimes."

They had known each other, really talked, for less than an hour.

"Why tell me?"

"I guess I had to tell someone. And you're leaving."

He watched Polly's secret place shrink in the rear view mirror-a faded, paint-chipped Victorian mansion, eyeless with broken windows, its sawn-wood pickets turning gray with years.

He kept thinking of the confession she had made. It was such an odd thing to do-to trust someone suddenly and completely. He could think of nothing to say that would have the same effect. He wanted to tell her about seeing one hour of summer a day from a prison courtyard, but that would only frighten her. So instead, he said nothing. Outside the town, the cornfields had the immensity of a yellow-gold ocean, dotted with the red islands of barns. They were on a gravel road, and awake of dust followed them.

A truck came up fast, passed, blinding them with dust and hammering rock against the windshield. He fought to make out the road through the debris. The truck slammed on its brakes in front of them, fishtailed, then tore away with a paint-chipping spray of gravel. He felt angers well in him, behind his cheeks and eyes. Polly lay a hand on his wrist.

"That's Shane's truck. It's best to just ignore them. They make a lot of noise, but it's just noise.They'll drink it off down at Lee's tavern tonight."

He left her at her house-a prefab brick just outside of the town, with a sunbeat Duster in its dirt-and-rust driveway.

"You'll wait up for me, won't you?"

The door slammed before his answer.

When he pulled into the Swallow Motel, the sheriff's car was waiting. It sat in the slot before his room, black and tan and gleaming. A laptop computer on the passenger seat blipped green in theheat.

The door to Steven's room was open, the air-conditioner running full blast, beating the heat back three feet outside.

In the cool dark of the room was the sheriff, relaxed in a straight-backed chair, thumbing his way through a paperback. He set the book down on the bed and stood up as Stephen came in,extending a hand.

The sheriff  was not a large man, or small, or young, or old. He looked to be just shy of thirty-five,with designer framed glasses, clean nails, indifferently short hair and smile.

Steven let the extended hand close over his, and they exchanged greetings. Steven was sweat-slicked from the hot outside air. The sheriff sat again in the chair, and Steven found a place on the bed, planing the spread with his palms. The sheriff gave him the short smile again.

"Name's Arthur Hollenbeck."

"Steven Hunt."

Arthur nodded. "I saw you at the cafe  last night."

"I didn't see you."

"No, I suppose not. And I suppose you're wondering what I'm doing here visiting."

"Yes, sir."

The sheriff nodded, to himself, as if making a note.

"How long were you in for, Steven?"

"In?"

"In prison."

Steven's eyes flicked toward the cheap motel curtains, to the pattern of flowered sun they dropped on the indoor-outdoor, back to the blank, passive face in the chair.

"I did five years."

"All at one time?"

"Yes, sir. I made a big mistake, and I made it young. That's all. I guess you checked my record, so you can see ..."

Arthur put out a stopping palm. "No, I didn't check any records. I could see it in the way you ate at the cafe , with one arm wrapped around the plate like someone was looking to take it from you."

Steven nodded, wiped his palms across the spread again.

"You were a boxer, too. When was that?"

"In the Navy, sir. And I kept up on it afterwards-inside-just shadowboxing for the most part."

"Were you any good?"

"I was all right."

"You have the good, careful steps of a boxer. That's good training."

"I won a few." He did not like to think of those days, of the ropes around him and the terrible anger, his and another man's.

"And now you take pictures."

"Yes, sir."

"Any in print?"

"I'm just starting. I had a few in a small journal, in California."

There was a long pause, and he saw in the sheriff's face that he was working up to something, about to say something or deciding not to.

"Where will you go when you leave Hadley?"

"East. Maybe to the rust belt. I have no real plans."

Arthur stood up. "Well, that's all. I just like to square people away a little, find out where their heads are at."

After Arthur Hollenbeck left, Steven sat for a long time in the same place, thinking. There was nothing in the bare room that he could safely hit or kick. He felt like a child that had been scolded and sent off to a corner. The sheriff had said nothing unkind, had not told him to leave town, had not insulted him. The sheriff had only reminded him of mistakes that he had made, of mistakes so distant they were like a dream. He remembered seeing Jimmy run from the store, screaming something. He remembered the feel of the ignition key in his hand, the look of Jimmy sprawled on the ground, the pop pop pop of the guns like fireworks, his hands on the wheel and the blurred road beyond his knuckles. He remembered the policemen with their guns. However, with equal clarity he recalled a recurring dream he'd had as a child, of swimming away from a sinking ferryboat, the screams of the dying too stupid to jump off, the dream-sun reflected on gold water as he swam away, across lakes, up rivers dropped with autumn leaves, up roads that were rivers.

Who was to say which was more important? He'd had the dream a dozen times. The other thing had happened to him only once.

He decided to go to the tavern for a drink.

* * *

"And if I ever see you so much as look at her again, it'll be worse for you. That's my goddamned wife you're messing with."

The ringing in his ears nearly drowned out the voice. He lifted his eyes from the splatter of bright blood, his blood, on the pavement. Shane stood over him, in the K-mart plaid overshirt he hadn't even bothered taking off.

"You hear me?"

Off to the side was Polly's father, leaning against the tavern's outside wall in brown Carrhart coveralls, looking happy.

"I guess," said  Steven, "I'll see whomever I want. No farmer from pigshit Iowa is going to tell me any different." He spat a redwashed glob across the toe of Shane's work boot.

"Say that again," Shane said.

"Pigshit, Iowa."

Polly found him sitting on the floor of the motel's tiny bathroom, working at a loosened tooth. It would probably stay in, he decided. He had not let them hurt him as bad as they had wanted to, had ducked Shane's hardest punches or taken them on his hard forearms, had turned and rolled with them as he had been trained to. He had let Shane do all the hitting.

Polly clung all night to his burning ribs like a bandage, her cool skin against the heat of his wounds. He shifted sleepless and ache-mouthed until morning. One of his eyes was swollen shut. 

"You should rest today." 

"I'm well enough to take pictures."

He shot a roll of her, lying cream white and sprawled in the green weeds, the secret place a peeling Victorian square in the distance, like a murderer loitering at the crime scene.

He stood by her body a long time, looking down at her.

Finally, she opened her eyes.

"The sheriff came by last night and told me you were in prison. What was it for?"

"Armed robbery."

A dust cloud appeared on the horizon, drawing nearer to them as Polly climbed into her clothes. A windshield glinted in the sun, became Shane's truck. It shot past them, a hundred yards out on the road. There was an echoing crack, and he felt something whir past him. A deadly fast lead bee, inches from his ear. Polly screamed, but the truck was already past them. And then gone.

They sat in the car in front of Polly's house.

"They must have been trying to miss."

"No. It's just very hard to hit a man at that distance, from a moving car. Still, they managed to come very close."

He thought of the thirty-aught-six sleeping in the trunk of his car, the gun his father had trained him to shoot well enough to hit a snow-hid rabbit at that distance. Even with that rifle's pinpoint accuracy, he would not have attempted the shot they had.

* * *

In the morning, Polly was gone. She left pink traces of herself on the cigarette butts stabbed in the ashtray, blond traces circling the drain in the shower. Steven scrubbed himself clean, rubbed crew-comb through his hair, watched the change in his face that the glasses made. They were a mild prescription, but they lent an intelligence to what was otherwise a hard, brown face, all jaw and brow. It was a face to batter things in with. The glasses did their best to soften it, but the dark bruise across his jaw and nose, the black vertical cleft in his lip, showed that the glasses lied. 
He smiled across the counter at the little bird-like girl.

"I'll be checking out today. A few more pictures of that old house should do it for me."

"The old Parker place?"

"I guess that's the one."

She thanked him. From the car he could see her picking up the phone.

It seemed the few remaining people in Hadley could feel the county like their own skin, could feel the movements of a stranger through their cornfields like the light pressure of an ant across a hairy ankle. He had just found a window in the top floor of the secret place, opened the thirty-aught-six across his knees and filled it with death, when he saw the diamond-hard glint of windshield far out on the road. Dust rose in the hot air. The secret place had the close smell of shadowed heat, of old wood and wallpaper and the skin of the people who had lived there.

They had to be macho, to make a show of it and come skidding off the main road in a spray of gravel. The rifle bucked in his hand and dropped its fast, fat slug in the front passenger-side tire. The front grill bit into the earth and the truck turned over with a scream of metal, landing on its cab, its wheels spinning in the air.

The dust washed across the truck's body, obscuring it for a moment. As it thinned, he saw a blur of movement, a thickness in the dust that made itself a man. He let it hobble a few dozen feet from the truck, watching through the sight. Shane was favoring one leg. Steven pulled the trigger of the thirty, taking him in the meat of his calf and dropping him screaming in the weeds.

He  realized he was talking to himself in a low, gravelly voice, naming his movements, growling commands. He stopped.

Polly's father was pulling himself from the broken Ford, the long black arm of his hunting rifle in his hands. Steven put a bullet through his big brown hand and watched him circle, holding the horror close to his chest, then sit down hard in the dirt. The rifle lay on the ground like a stick.

He was still sitting, holding his hand, his face picket-white, when Steven clipped him almost gently with the stock of the thirty. He flung the hunting rifle they had wanted to end him with into the ditch. 

He found  Shane at the end of thirty yards of blood-tracked grass, a square-shouldered ghost fighting to keep his eyes open. Steven leveled the thirty at his head.

"You put the sheriff on me?"

But Shane just covered his face and cried. Steven clipped him with the stock and  he fell unconscious back on the grass. With torn strips from Shane's shirt, he field-dressed the ugly hole in Shane's leg and stopped the bleeding with a sharp tourniquet. He did the same for her father's arm, then dragged the limp and moaning man and sprawled him out like a bride next to his son-in-law.

The thirty-aught-six nestled back in its black metal case. The camera he set on the passenger seat.

He had left a letter in Polly's mailbox in the cold early of the morning. He had wanted to say something about laying in the dark and loving her. Instead, what had come out was the dream-the rivers and the roads like rivers. 

That seemed somehow right.


RAY NAYLER was born in Quebec and raised in California. He has had short stories published in many magazines, from The Berkeley Fiction Review to The Edge. Ray Nayler resides in Toronto, Canada and Santa Cruz, California. He has stories upcoming in Ellery Queen's Mystery magazine and Hardboiled, as well as Crimewave in the UK. He recently completed a suspense novel set in Toronto. In addition to writing, he paints and plays the double bass. "Coming Out of Nothing" was inspired by a view of Iowa from the train, and a particularly haunting song on the banjo.  Ray may be contacted at like_the_rabbit@hotmail.com.

Copyright (c) 2000 Ray Nayler