The Illumination_ A Novel - Kevin Brockmeier [64]
She pointed to the one-way street that ran past the cafeteria, where an apartment building was separated from the interstate by a spinney of pine trees. On either side of the walkway, rising from the grass, stood a pair of fluted concrete pillars, their lines meant to carry the eye to heaven, but the cement had fallen loose from them in chunks, exposing veins of black rebar that absorbed the sunlight and directed the eye inward rather than upward.
“That over there,” Felenthia said. “That’s us.”
Ryan watched her cross the road with her nephew, his great big steps and her tiny baby steps, until they reached the apartment building and disappeared behind a screen door. Then he returned to his satchel and his flyers.
That was the afternoon the pastor called him aside to tell him he was being transferred again. “Detroit. August first. Pack your bags, Brother Shifrin.” The first of August was only eight days away, and Ryan presumed he would not meet the girl again, but as it happened, he saw her once more before he left town.
He was riding with one of the other missionaries through Wheatley, a small agricultural community a few miles down the highway from their hotel, when they came to a stop sign across from a swimming pool. The sky was thick with tea-colored clouds, the kind that had a yellowing effect on the landscape. The trees and bushes stood motionless to the smallest leaf. Though it was barely noon, the insects were already intoning their night songs. The pool was not crowded, and Ryan was surprised to see Felenthia sitting at the end of the diving board, reading a magazine with her elbows on her knees. She looked wholly at ease, as if she had never suffered so much as a hangnail. The boy treading water beneath her had a glittering infection in his right eye. The other boy, who did a cannonball into the deep end while Ryan sat watching from the passenger seat, wore a fresh puncture mark, a luminous crater high on the shoulder plane of his back. Felenthia swatted at the air with her magazine. She might have been shooing mosquitoes. “Y’all fools quit splashing,” she said.
Ryan lost sight of her as his car pulled away. The next day, alone, he swung into the Superstop where she worked and found the gas pumps disconnected. Someone had nailed a sheet of plywood over the door, writing across it in big handpainted letters, CLOSED DUE TO VANDALISM, ROBBERY, AND THE “CROOKS!!” AT PATTERSON INSURANCE. He went over to the window and peered inside. The damage was considerable. Most of the shelves had been overturned. The microwave was missing its door. The cash register was lying busted in a pool of blank lottery tickets. The soda dispenser had been torn from its cords and hoses, staining the wall with plumes of dark brown syrup. The road maps and potato chips, Starlite mints and charcoal briquettes, had all been swept into a reef beneath the shattered glass of the freezers. Suddenly it seemed to Ryan that he had looked out over this same vista a million times before, as if he were a rich man and these broken machines every morning were the city that greeted him as he stood at his penthouse window. He found the feeling hard to shake.
Gradually he would forget nearly everything about Brinkley, Arkansas, just as he had forgotten nearly everything about the dozens of other small towns he had visited over the years, but for the rest of his life, every time he saw a skeleton chandeliering its way down a stand in a biology classroom, he would think of the girl whose bones fluoresced with pain. He never did find out what was wrong with her.
In the unseasonably warm October that followed Ryan’s fifty-sixth birthday, he received a letter from the Greater Council of Evangelical Churches thanking him for his fourteen years of service and asking him to give some thought to accepting a post in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, right in the middle of the 10/40 Window. He would be working in the literature ministry, the letter said, consulting with a team of African Christians who were translating the Bible into a local trading language