Silent Pancakes

She woke at dawn to make silent pancakes. With a plastic funnel she filled an empty half-gallon orange juice carton with Bisquick, milk and an egg. Then she went to the garage with the carton, and standing in her sockfeet on the cool cement, she shook the carton wildly above her shoulder, like some maniacal and muliebral quarterback. She went back inside and made coffee in a press, for the drip or hiss of any machine would work against her purpose. Then she heated the griddle. And finally, after half an hour of silent effort, that he might have that much time to sleep, she called him in to eat.

Eat a few more, she told him. You're skinniern ever. He watched her stack the last three pancakes on his plate. Now let's make them pretty, she said, working the butter and syrup in amber orbits over the cakes.

I'm full, he said. It was the first he had spoken.

She put down her knife and took his left hand and drew its warmth. Then she bent to kiss his wedding ring, a tactile query to a question she would never allow herself to ask out loud, if he was seeing another woman.

I love you, Ronnie, she said.

He sat there quietly and made himself eat all three, ruminating on it all. Love, he thought. If he would not let the word leave his mouth, then forcing into his mouth the product of hers might suffice. He could eat that he might love. Though he doubted the logic to this idea, he did not doubt his love for his wife. He only wished she would not insist he say a word that at the end of the day was to him just a word.

He rose from the table, showered and dressed. Then he kissed her and walked through the garage and toward the side of the house where he parked his rig when he was not driving somewhere. It seemed to him that he was always driving somewhere. Yet this was the working life of Ronald "Big Dog" Epting.

The air outside made him feel more awake, but the starch and syrup from breakfast and the soft morning sun nagged at his eyelids. I shouldn't have eaten them extra pancakes, he thought, climbing into his truck. Tomorrow I'll tell her to hold back a little. And so Big Dog rubbed his eyes and pressed on down the road.

***

It was a highway of death. She would sit there in the skeleton trees and wait here against the shadow of a morning sun and cyan sky. Big Dog did not see the redtail until the last moment, when the hawk aborted her dive and flared up in front of the truck. He cannonballed and swerved, and then his tires slid in the dry clay as he ran his rig into the ditch, the bullbar cutting a fresh corniche into the bank. His limp body flew out of the side window and the rig jackknifed and plowed through the shadow of a tulip poplar and from inside the rig two tons of dunnage and raw almonds spouted on top of him. Underneath it all Big Dog wondered if he would make it out alive.

Some 20 minutes later a blue Ford pickup passed the rig and then doubled back in the direction it had come and parked on the side of the highway. A boy got out and scuttled across the road. He saw Big Dog lying prostrate on a heap of cardboard and almonds, drooling, and breathing still. Hey mister, the boy said. You dead? Say something. No response.

When the boy crept closer to the edge of the pile of almonds, he saw something glint in the sunlight. Well look at that, the boy said, sucking at the back of one of his knuckles and eyeing on the body's left hand two gold rings, which flashed like some manikin fay dancing in a black night rain.

When the boy reached to remove the rings, Big Dog moaned softly. The boy started and caught his breath but then relaxed and again tried to remove the rings. They were stuck so the boy reached to his mouth and surrendered a glob of saliva to his thumb and forefinger and using the mucus as a lubricant he slid both rings off, pocketed them, and wiped his fingers.

Oh Lord, the boy said. You are one sweaty almost dead son of a b-----. But I'm gonna get you some help now, OK? The boy walked back across the road, got in his truck, and drove until he came to a filling station and from a pay phone he called the police and reported the wreck. They asked for his name, and he hung up the phone.

Big Dog did not move, but in the half-hour or so that had passed from when he flew out of his rig he heard everything that had happened around him. Howl of brakes. Dull smash through safety glass and almonds. Crunch of jaw as he connected at last with the ground. The gulp of each dry bolus driving downward and within. Boy walked up on him and robbed his high school and wedding ring, engine idling, for all he knew that same thieving boy by now halfway to Georgia. He imagined thieves lie about as well as they steal, so the boy's promise to call for help was about as good as Big Dog's chances of waking up for breakfast. And these thoughts of food turned his mind to the varied and myriad contents of his stomach.

Presently Big Dog felt bilious and acrid warmth bubbling up from inside his stomach as though some torrid creature wanted to cook its way out of him. He remembered that morning's breakfast and wondered if he could eat that he might love, could eat that he might live.

When the ambulance arrived the sun was already nigh onto its zenith. Two paramedics, a man and a woman, made a makeshift skid with pieces of dunnage and cardboard and eased him down off the hill of nuts onto a gurney and then carried him to the ambulance.

Inside the ambulance, the man and woman connected Big Dog to several machines. Hold tight, shouted the driver. I got to merge onto the interstate. The man in the back held fast to his jump seat and the woman tethered herself between a rail on the gurney and Big Dog's hand.

He looks fine, the man said, relaxing his grip. Just some scrapes.

Fine as fine, she said. That sure is one good-looking man. There's at least one pretty girl in this town'll be crying tonight.

Probably more than one. He ain't married.

What?

I said he ain't married. He ain't wearing a ring, so he ain't married. He's got girlfriends out the wazoo I bet.

Nah. Well I'd take him if that's the case anyway. He is too good looking.

You assume he'd take you. There you go, always putting words in the mouth of the dead.

Don't say that! You'll jinx him, she said. You can't just say that in here.

She looked down and slid her right hand under Big Dog's head and with her left hand she held his. It was hot. Like damp dough. His temperature climbed, his breathing quickened, and then he started to seize and arrest. Let loose his hand so they could try to bring him back. Each time they shocked him to no effect she saw his hand clamp and release around where her hand would have been, she holding fast until his hand lay there limp and cooling in her own.

Coming into downtown, hold on, the driver said.

No need, the woman said. I lost him.

All right, the driver said, as he swung the car hard to the right onto an adjacent street.

Geez! Take it easy up there.

Sorry, sorry. Gotta hurry so we can put this guy in and miss five o'clock traffic.

A head's up will do next time.

Righto, sweetheart, the driver said, just before slamming the brakes.

Hey, what's up man! the man in the back seat yelled.

Not my fault guys. Trying. Some fool politicians are running toy cars around in the intersection. I think I hit one, he said. Of the cars, I mean. She saw him grinning in the rearview mirror.

Sometimes I think you are a pity, she said. You're lucky you've got at least a momma that loves you.

I'd like to hear her say it, he said.

* * *

Shortly after four o'clock they arrived at the coroner with Big Dog's body. At seven they called his wife, and she did not cry but sat in her thin gown for a long time with the phone in her hand.

Ma'am, said a baritone voice on the other end.

Yes? Oh, yes, she said.

Ma'am, I'm truly very sorry, I really am, if there's anything I can do.

Tell me again how it happened.

He ate himself to death. He was buried under all them almonds with only one way out. Man eats that many almonds, and he gets a kind of cyanide poisoning.

I understand I guess, she said.

You can come up here tonight and have a look if you want. We'd like you to do that. We're closing things up in a hour.

I'll run on over, she said. Just let me throw on something real quick.

The sun was pressing down on the horizon when she pulled out of the driveway wearing Levi's and a sweatshirt that still smelled of him. She drove with the radio off and cursed the honking cars and screaming sirens and wailing campaigners, all-who made their way through the downtown streets like ants mindless and maniacal.

The coroner's was a low-flung brick ranch house converted to an office space. She walked past two potted geraniums on the front porch and then inside where she saw a meaty woman sitting behind a glass window. The secretary wore a powder blue shirt covered with flowers in shades of red and pink and besides smearing chapstick on her face, she was testing the structural integrity of its floral warp and weft. The secretary pursed her lips and pointed her toward a sterile back room.

The sight of his dead body did not bother her. He was not so different now than as he lay before. Colder, but quiet just the same.

She took his left hand and held it coolly. Then she bent to kiss the alabaster band of skin where he had worn his wedding ring. I love you, she whispered to the silent corpse.

Two men approached her and both nodded and one discussed some paperwork with her while the other asked which of Big Dog's personal items she wanted to keep.

I'll just take his jeans and his shirt and don't worry about nothing else. Just do what you will with it. And get his rings wherever they are. I'll want those for sure.

The men left her to finish the papers. In her hand, the pen was like a thin and heavy stone. One of the men returned and told her he had not found the rings. She puzzled at this fact and asked him if he was sure and he said yes, but he would call the police station in the morning and see if they had collected them for evidence, but that this was unlikely in such a clear, though bizarre, case. She thanked him and he left the room.

She charged herself for doubting her husband, but then the rings seemed to answer the question she would never allow herself to ask. Two truant rings and one truant Ronnie. There's but two reasons a man in this county takes off his wedding ring, she thought. To play golf, or to sleep around. And Ronnie never played golf a day in his life. And now he never would. It was her loneliness, this cold and gentle incubus, which punished her. She thumbed the pen closed and looked to the woman behind the glass.

Excuse me, ma'am, she said.

Yes ma'am?

If that was not my husband's beautiful face lying in that room in there, I would say that this was all a big mistake and that another Ronnie Epting had passed and you'd called the wrong woman and everything was just plumb wrong, but there he sits right in there and quiet as ever, hell forever, and everything is just wrong.

The woman again pursed her lips, as if conjuring sympathy were some chore she did by rote. I'm really sorry ma'am, she said. I don't know what you're saying.

I guess I don't either, she said.

She drove home and lost the road in her tears, and so in looking through this glaucous cloud of grief she did not see the formless object until it exploded in front of her in an icy web of feathers and glass. Damn bird, she said. I hope you were worth my windshield.

Where he would have sat at the kitchen table she put a plate of leftover cubed steak and potatoes and set her own plate, which she herself ate. Then she scrubbed her dish in the sink and packed his away in the refrigerator for the next day.

When he would have asked her if she wanted to go outside and sit, she went to the back of the house and sat in a plastic chair beside its empty twin, waiting on the night to blacken. It did and she spotted Aquila and for him she found Cassiopeia. She buried her face in the warmth of salted palms and remembered times when they had gone barefoot and held each other close in her parents' driveway and felt the season's sun emanating from the sloping concrete slab while they rocked to a faint radio humming from the house down the street and taught each other the summer stars and how to dance the shag to slow beach music. This routine they had begun before they had left high school and had by now, six years later, learned almost the entire southern sky and every Drifters song.

Sitting in her back yard beneath a gaunt dogwood, she passed in and out of tears and sleep until the wet day broke slowly behind her and the shadows began to flee. And so she came to yet one more day of silent pancakes.

Presently she rose and turned to walk inside. The blood in her body fell and she wobbled beautifully in the dawn light, like some graceful and balletic sot. At the edge of the wood a deer started at the sight of this strange lamia dancing beside the dogwood. The deer stood motionless and watched and when her blood settled and she found her balance, the deer lost interest and lighted for the woods of the western hills.