Reincarnation

Maple City Dispatch: stories from the former “Fence Capital of the World,” Adrian, MI

by Nathaniel Berry

My neighbor, Mark, corrected a rumor that he’d gotten a dog. No, but we used to have one out at the farm. A long-haired German Shepherd wandered over into his fields one day. Mark’s dad found her eating corncobs. Mark used to spend hours getting the burs out of her thick black fur. The dog lived around the barn and down by the stream. Sometimes she’d come up to the porch and lay on her back in the sun for belly-rubs. My dad had a big diesel truck, Mark went on, and that dog, I swear, could hear it from a mile away. She’d just perk her big ears up and smile, and we’d know my dad was coming down the road. She disappeared after my dad passed away. But, no—other than that, I’ve always had cats.

Mark’s farmland is out near Morenci and his house is next door, in Adrian. He’s got buddies over on Chandler Street, but he never seems to have guests at his house. He’s got an old Thunderbird collecting dust in his garage. He’s been to the Czech Republic and almost got married there. He inherited my dad’s grill. His old town cat, Trouble, lived to be twenty-two, and his new town cat, Alley, sleeps in the window box of our garage. When I die, Mark tells me, if there’s reincarnation, I want to come back as a well-fed house cat.

I can’t think of who I’d want to come back as. In that way of good neighbors, the conversation ends without either of us having to say anything.

⦿

Martin’s got the kind of bad news that can only be told in person. You drive out to his house late, on a night when the snow is melting into a fog so thick it plays your high-beams back at you. There is something up ahead: strange lights on the road, strange shadows.

A Ford Ranger in the ditch, capsized into tall grass. A Silverado parked behind it with the hazards on. There’s a man standing in the road. His face is red. He wears a hazard-orange vest over a Realtree hoodie. His eyes flutter like snowflakes in the wind. He could be a rough nineteen or a well-preserved forty. You can’t tell.

Everything alright? When you roll down the window to ask, you can taste the air steaming off the headlights.

Man, he says, bad couple months. Lost my grandad in November and wrecked my truck—this is my dad’s truck—I thought I saw a dog or something and I swerved and I just went into the ditch, you know, into the swamp.

A woman in a matching orange vest stands in the shadows at the edge of the road. She doesn’t move, says nothing. Her eyes bore holes into something you can’t see.

Need a ride or something?

The man shakes his head and goes over to help the Silverado attach a tow cable.

Do you need a ride somewhere? you try to ask the woman.

How do you know she’s scared of the man? You just do. He doesn’t look at her, and she doesn’t look at him, but there’s something there. Isn’t there? Sure—you tell yourself—they’re all in shock from going off the road. But you know better.

The Silverado pulls the Ranger from the ditch the way you or I would take a sweater from a drawer. Word to the wise, the Silverado-man says, don’t get on the road if you’ve been drinking. And stay off your phone when you’re driving. You’ll live a lot longer that way.

I wasn’t drinking, the man whines, in a voice that tells you, finally, that he is very young. And I wasn’t on my phone. I heard a noise under the truck and I went to pull over…

Ask the woman if she needs anything. Just one more time. Show her your eyes, if she’ll look at you. Show her your Samaritan eyes, eyes that say you can help, even if you don’t know with exactly what. Show her she can trust you, even though she doesn’t know you. She doesn’t need to get back into that truck, weeping marsh water from the bed and the engine bay. No. She will not look to you. Drive on, little voyager. Lead your car up that pitted, icy road, through the winter fields, to Martin’s house. Bad news cannot wait.

⦿

I’ve gone to Uncle Craig’s place to drink while Mom and Aunt Nancy have wine downtown. Craig heard Martin’s news from Nancy, who heard it from Mom, who heard it from me. There isn’t much to say, other than how it isn’t right that bad things happen. In that way of good, drinking relatives we move on, talk comfortably about nothing in particular.

We stare at a photo I took of Uncle Craig in Montana. He’s crossing a sea of parched wheatgrass, dressed in blaze orange with his Weatherby rifle balanced at his hip. I printed it for Christmas and he got it framed at Hobby Lobby. We’ve been staring at it so long we remember the feel of frost on our noses, taste the clean, empty air of the High Plains beneath the morning sun.

Do you ever think about reincarnation? Uncle Craig asks me, as my trip-home coffee brews in the corner of the kitchen. You know, sometimes you pull up to a car at the stop sign and there’s a woman in the car next to you and, you know, she was your wife or something when you were a knight, living back in olden times? In medieval Ireland or something? Do you ever think about stuff like that?

I nod. Craig pours coffee into two heavy mugs.

I thought, he said, man, I could write a short story about that. You know? Not that I will. You can have it, if you want. You should write it, if you want to.

⦿

See it, then. Your fur is matted and frozen. From the underbrush, you watch humans in the road as your cold teeth crush a frozen ear of corn. The rumbling of strangers’ engines shakes the earth. You are climbing from the cab of your foundered Ranger and stumble onto slick, icy pavement; the second truck you’ve wrecked in this year when wreckage became routine. You are standing at the roadside in a safety-orange vest and your socks are soaked, and for whatever reason your boyfriend driving you off the road—driving all night like he and death had signed some kind of pact—is so final and crucial an act of betrayal that your anger scares you. You are connecting the cable from your Silverado to the tail of the Ranger in the ditch, and you’re struggling to think of something sufficiently chastening to say to this red-faced boy who doesn’t seem to know that death is a thing you don’t come back from. Not as you. Not as anybody.