Corpus Christi

J. Dana Stuster

It was the crackling, the dry static tension, that held the air with a web of invisible threads and stifled her breathing, constricted her motion as she tried to roll over, out of the dim light. Is Sisyphus still rolling his stone? Some nights Jennifer felt eternity ended long ago. As she lay in bed, cold in spite of the heavy wool blanket she had bound tightly around her, cold with the consciousness that she was shivering, that her bed distinctly lacked the warmth she needed, she watched the thunderclouds push in from the horizon. They rose like dark pillars bracing the pendent sky and she thought she could hear them rolling in from the sea with a coarse, brittle sound, like a landslide, or a boulder, or the earth scraping round on its pin.
Most acute in her mind, though, was that she was cold. She held her arms tighter, curled her knees closer, until she was balled and fetal. She tried to remember something warm, but nothing came to mind. She couldn’t remember the womb, nearly twenty-four years ago, though she had heard once that some people could. She wished she could.
Her room was lit by the dusky glow from the window and the chilled blue LCD numbers on her alarm clock, which at nine-thirty was telling her she needed to rise and go work her night shift at the Agnes Diner, the dilapidated little coffee shop, sunbleached and weathered, two blocks away, next to Highway 44, with the tarnished stainless steel siding and the cracked, faded red vinyl booths. As she got out of bed, her joints frosted stiff, she hoped it would be a slow night. Outside, the wind was starting to whip the tops of the trees like flails against the gathering night. Jennifer shivered while she slipped into her faded yellow waitress’ dress that the diner’s owner had bought second hand, then found her heaviest coat and pulled it tight around her.
The bell on the door of the diner didn’t ring anymore; Jennifer couldn’t remember a time when it had. As long as she had worked there it had always sounded like more of a tinny rattle than the shattered-glass tinkling it intended. She didn’t mind. After ten o’clock, the customers seemed to suit the dull, metallic noise, something muted and unmoving. George was already at the counter, and as Jennifer walked in he turned the fixed grimace of his face and winked at her. She shuddered and pulled her jacket tighter, not realizing the way it accentuated the curve of her narrow hips. George squirmed on his stool and smiled.
Having stalled as long as she could in putting her jacket away, Jennifer finally walked out behind the counter. Big drops of rain were starting to fall, splashing the wide windows of the diner with a raw slapping sound.
“Shit,” she mumbled, already anticipating her walk home.
“Tha’s no kind a’ word fer a purty mouth li’ yours.”
“What do you want, George?”
George smiled again. Jennifer thought it looked more like a sneer.
“I tol’ you t’ call me ‘G,’” he said.
“I’m not going to call you that.”
“Bu’ I’m yer G, yer homeboy.”
“No, George, you’re not.”
“I was las’ time I came in here.”
“No, you weren’t.” She was standing in front of him now and seeing the gray barbs of stubble breaking through his olive skin so close again made her stomach clench. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “It was just once, George. You don’t mean anything to me.”
“Nothing?” He snatched her wrist and dragged her down close to his face until she could feel his breath on her cheek. It felt warm. He cinched his fingers tighter, like a garrote around her hand. “Eh? Nothing?”
Flashing blue lights caught on the tear-streaked windows of the diner. George let go quickly and melted back into his stool, sneering again, while Jennifer recoiled and nursed her wrist.
The door rattled as four men walked in and chose the end booth.
“Don’t look like no police,” said George.
“They’re stormchasers. We get them in here every now and then.” She raised her voice, “Where you boys from?”
“The Weather Network.” He was tall and blond, the one they would put in front of the camera. The other three were probably his crew.
“The Weather Network? I’ve never heard of them.” She walked casually down the aisle behind the counter until she could lean out over it towards them.
“We’re new,” the television face said. “Trying to compete with the Weather Channel.”
“Isn’t the weather just the weather?” She was goading him. He didn’t look like much of a meteorologist, but it was his job. She waited for him to respond.
“Facts are always facts.” He smiled and Jennifer observed how it was not a sneer. “It’s about how you present them. We figure if there’s room for a dozen news channels reporting the same facts, there’s room for two weather stations.”
“If it’s all about the facts, how come you weather men’s predictions are always wrong?”
One of the cameramen laughed.
“Always wrong? I don’t know, but looks to me like a storm’s coming. Does that suit you?”
Jennifer smiled. “You don’t say?” She stepped out from around the counter to take their orders.
“Seriously, though-,” the television face looked from behind his rimless eyeglasses at her plastic nametag that leaned forward eagerly on its pin, “Jenny, you’ve got a real shitstorm here.”
“That’s a technical term?”
“The storm part is.”
They ordered coffee and George got tired of waiting and left just as Jennifer hoped he would. She listened for the jangling on the door and sighed comfortably when she finally heard it. The storm was getting worse. The rain and wind were almost loud enough to drown the sound of the distant thunder that reverberated from the pale cast of lightning on the horizon.
“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Chris said. Chris, short for Christopher Weiss, age twenty-seven, from Jersey City, New Jersey, Jennifer learned when she checked his license against his credit card. Christopher Weiss with blond hair and green eyes, six-foot two-inches tall, one-hundred sixty-seven pounds, with corrective lenses required to drive, who would warm her bed that night. She read the license three times to commit it to memory.

“It’s pieces of a hurricane as it breaks up over the Yucatan,” he tried to explain to her that night as they went into her trailer. “Some of the storm has spun off, and because the jet stream dipped south last week, a cold front moved down from Canada and it’s colliding with the warm Caribbean storm. The hot air in the storm is trying to rise through the denser cold air, and that’s what’s making that storm out there.” The lights were off and he looked out the window of her trailer at the lightning illuminating the ocean, the low islands, and Highway 44. A lonely pair of headlights drove past, away from Corpus Christi, towards drier weather.
“Is that what you’re going to say on television?” Jennifer asked, though she hadn’t been paying attention. She took down her hair.
“Haven’t thought about it yet. Probably not. I’ll just say something about how it’ll be bad. Storm of the century, some shit like that.”
“Is it?”
“What?”
“The storm of the century?”
“It’s been a short century, so far.”
“But is it really the storm of the century?”
“No. It’s bad, but it’s not that bad. But that’s how we’re going to beat the Weather Channel. It’s all about hype. What do you think people want to hear about, a thunderstorm, some tropical depression on the edge of Texas, or the storm of the century? If you’re going to sell weather, you have to make it interesting.”
“Oh.” She walked up beside him at the window and they stood watching the tendrils of lightning writhe their way closer. She had asked for permission to go home early, to be home before the brunt of the storm hit, and when she had received it, she asked the weather crew for a ride home. Chris had volunteered, telling the others to take the van and find a motel and that he’d call when he left, knowing that he wouldn’t be calling until morning. He drove her home in the chase car and put on the blue light to make himself look more important than he felt. She didn’t have to invite him in, he just followed; she liked his initiative, it made things easy. Now, standing like this, she sized his silhouette against the pale, flickering glow.
“Could you help me with this?” she asked, twisting to fumble with the zipper of her waitress dress.
“Yeah.” He turned and undid the zipper, sliding it from her and guiding her toward the bed.
The storm drove down louder on the tin roof. Sharp sounds like snare drum shots and the scuttling of stones rioted above them.
“What’s that?” asked Jennifer. She pulled the blanket around herself.
“Hail.” Chris pulled the blanket from her and pushed her into the sagging crevice of her worn mattress.
The storm pounded the walls until they rattled with the hail like a landslide from floating gray mountains; until everything shook under the febrile choler of the buffeting; until the coiled spring of the earth seemed to groan under the force of it. Something had shifted and she heard it. The grinding swelled until it filled her and she throbbed with the sound of it, the discord of the disjointed spheres. The world spun savage and unaware until it threatened to break apart and dissolve; until the lightning seared the air in her lungs; until Jennifer was weak and trembled and asked for it to stop, and even then it continued.
She lay there afterwards, holding the blanket close and trying to ignore the weight on the other side of the mattress. She pulled a pillow to her face to muffle her sobs, as she did every time she did this. She held her breath and listened. She could hear her heart beating, faintly, the pulse of the rain on the roof, and the distant sound of the earth still scraping in endless circles, stone scouring stone, rolling uphill. She willed it to stop, for the earth to halt on its rusted pin, weary with the tension and the friction of all the accumulated ages. She wanted a realization of some vague eschatology. But the earth ground onwards.
She woke to the sound of Chris yelling outside. With the blanket wrapped around her, she tiptoed to the door and cocked it ajar. Chris was picking broken shards of the blue plastic siren out of chunks of dirty hail. A single crack veined across the passenger side of the windshield. He kicked the tire and threw a handful of hail at the side of her trailer.
“God damn it!” he bellowed. His shout caught and crystallized in the stagnant air. He swung at it.
Jennifer shut the door, locked it, and crawled back into bed. It was raining again, and the soft spattering lulled her as the dawn, muted by clouds, spread in from the sea.

The rain continued for four more days, and when Jennifer would come home after her graveyard shift with the sky transmuting from coal to slate, she would cry into her sheets until they were cold and clammy. She would crave the warmness of a body next to her, then cry again, always careful to dab the salt off her cheeks before going to work. By the fifth day, it was more of a mist than a rain, and that night Jennifer took the time to drink the moist air in deep drafts as she walked to her shift at the Agnes Diner. For the first time in a week she could see the moon, its cuticle crescent piercing the vagrant clouds.
She didn’t think about why she brought men home with her, about the connate abandon with which she threw herself on them and the inadequacy she felt when it was over, theirs and hers. There was no reason to think about the why. There was no intervention here, no one left to force her, confront her; no one left who wouldn’t leave at dawn and not look back. It is a reckless abandonment that cuts both ways, and it is abandonment, every time someone walks out her door. Call it liberation, call it vindication, she didn’t think about it, and when she felt the thoughts welling towards the surface she swallowed hard and pushed them to her eyes and cried, cold, pale, but in thoughtless solace.
When her manager stared suspiciously at the stains on her cheeks as she walked into the diner, she said it drizzled on her way over. The manager glanced at the windows, waterstained but dry, and nodded.
Usually she picked them as they walked in the door, but Jim took her by surprise. She had closed her eyes, leaning back against the warm dividing wall that separated her from the kitchen and he startled her when she saw him sitting there at the counter. The bell on the door hadn’t rattled. His teeth flickered at white heat, set into his cast iron skin. Jennifer followed his eyes as they flitted nervously along the counter, to the door, along the counter, back. Despite his imposing frame and anxious eyes, he didn’t scare her. It was him who seemed scared. His eyes put her at ease. They were big and brown, but more than that, they seemed somehow malleable, soft even, like they gave way under the weight of the things they saw. His eyes kept hers off the gray scar that arced from his eyebrow down his cheek and slid back across his neck, driven deep like a wedge.
“Evenin,’ Miss.” She felt he could rattle the tin walls with his voice if he felt like it, but his voice rose barely above a whisper. “I hope I didn’ startle you.”
“Oh,” she drew one hand across her eyes to wipe the sleep away, but she savored the moment of darkness as it blindfolded her, “no. What can I get you?”
“Jus’ some coffee would be nice. And cream.”
Jim Seagraves, age twenty-five, from Atlanta, Georgia. Jim Seagraves, wrought into five-foot seven-inches, one-hundred forty pounds, who stared at her with big brown eyes. She read his license three times to memorize it when she checked it against his credit card.
“You have a morbid name,” she told him.
“I never did think ‘bout it much.” The cream rose in his coffee in plumes, building like thunderheads. He stirred it in until it was a pale and feeble brown and then dashed it with sugar.
“It’s morbid,” Jennifer concluded.
“Tha’s fine. I don’ mind.” He sipped the coffee slowly. Jennifer leaned back against the wall. In her mind she was sliding down the yellowed tiles, tracing the molded grout until she was a heap on the floor. “Tha’s some dents in the side of your buildin,’” he said, opening Jennifer’s eyes again. “I don’ know that you care at all, but I can fix tha,’ if’n you like.” He stirred his coffee again. “Tha’s what I do.”
“What is?”
“I fix dents.” He fished a dog-eared card out of his pocket and handed it to Jennifer. The edges were stained with dried epoxy and an oil grease thumbmark. AFTER THE RAIN DENT REMOVAL, it said, then, smaller and in italics, Repairman. He pointed to it. “We go around after bad storms and fix things.”
“Well, I don’t think our walls need fixing.”
“Tha’s fine.” He watched his coffee swirl in the mug cupped in both his hands. “Can you tell me what the weather’s goin’ to be li’ tomorrow?”
“Like this, I suppose.”
He took a deep sip, swilled it a bit, and sighed.
“Damn.”
Jennifer wondered if he could see his eyes reflected or if they were lost in the diluted coffee. She stepped closer and tried to peer into the cup. She bent her head and sunk lower until she was hunched over the counter next to him.
“I haven’ seen a storm in three years, and I think it’s been half a year since I seen the sun.” He spoke quietly into his mug. “We go place to place after the wors’ of it. Always ge’ caught in between.”
“Where were you before this?” she asked.
“Spain. Austria before that. Two weeks ago was in Michigan. Ever been to Michigan?”
Jennifer had been to New Mexico twice, but that had been years ago.
“No,” she told him.
“Yeah, weather’s shit in Michigan.”
Jennifer smiled and Jim coughed once and broke into a laugh.
“Yeah,” he said. “I wouldn’ mind a storm, jus’ somethin.’”
“Don’t you get time off? There’s sun in Atlanta.”
“It’s nine months on, three off, and I don’ go to Atlanta anymore. I don’ even take my three months, mos’ of the time.”
“You just travel from place to place, all around the world, fixing dents?”
“Yeah, something li’ that.”
“Don’t you ever get tired?”
“I don’ sleep.”
Jennifer tried to remember the last time she slept. A week ago, maybe. It began to make sense to her that they would meet like this, hunched over the same cup of coffee at three in the morning in the diner off Highway 44. She liked Jim. She liked the way his teeth glinted in his reflection on the coffee and the way his last syllables were lost in the weak timbre of his voice. She wanted to know him, to trace the line of his scar, and already she was thinking of it in terms of a lifeline, only that it creased his face and not his palm.
“Oh.” It was all she could manage while trying to think of how to put the words together tactfully. “Jim, where are you staying?”
“Here, if you don’ mind. Tha’s what I usually do. The other boys will get a room and I’ll ta’ the rental and drive ou’ as far as I feel li,’ fin’ myself an all-nigh’ place li’ this. Bide time till morning.”
Jennifer drew her teeth along her lower lip, chewing her words like a cud, and she was thankful that Jim was looking at her only indirectly, at her reflection in the coffee mug between them.
“I go home at four. Drive me home?” She didn’t expect it to sound so much like a plea. He turned to her, and with their heads askew, inches apart, they could have been lovers suspended before a kiss. He looked into her eyes and saw that they were the same as his, as if their eyes had drank the mellow-brown, impotent coffee now chilled between them.
“I can do that.”

They lay awake together in her bed in the dark hours of the morning. The moon had set against the impending dawn and the clouds were rolling overhead again. Jennifer had asked him in and he followed dutifully, but when she asked him to help her with her dress, reaching awkwardly around for the zipper, he had told her no.
“I don’ wan’ to rush into anything.”
“This isn’t anything,” she lied.
“Still,” he said.
Jennifer had already undone the zipper then, and the back of the old dress looked defenseless the way it splayed open and chilled her bare shoulders.
“Then, at least, will you hold me, please?”
He nodded, then he took off his shirt and sat down on the bed. She shook the dress down to the floor and curled up beside him. She settled into the unmade sheets, put her head on his shoulder and wrapped his arm around her, and like that, they stared out the window at the clouds piling in the light of the city.
After an hour she felt bold enough to trace the line of his scar with her finger, from where it split the end of his eyebrow, down his cheek, along his neck. He winced at first, but then leaned into her hand, into its soft pressure.
“How did it happen?” she asked.
“Cultural misunderstanding. In Athens.” He left unsaid that it had been Athens, Georgia.
“Oh,” she said, and thought what it would be like to wear a scar like that, a scar that wouldn’t wash away when she dabbed her eyes in the morning.
“I’m sorry tomorrow’s going to be overcast,” she told him. “I was hoping I could give you a break.”
“It’s today,” he corrected her, “and today is always more bleak than tomorrow.” He felt the weight of her head on him as he breathed. “Le’s not talk ‘bout today.”
A pair of taillights like hot coals burned the night as they rushed silently down the 44, toward the glow of civilization. Jim watched them disappear into the distance.
“I like you,” he told her, whispering as if he was afraid he might startle her. Jennifer rolled her face into the iron motion of his breathing and kissed his shoulder. “I li’ the way your hair feels, an’ your Corpus Christi tan skin. I li’ the way you talk.” He felt her head wobble as he sighed. “I li’ the way this can be enough.”
Jennifer didn’t hear him, but she still saw him lying next to her in her dreams.
He was gone when she woke, late in the day, but there was a note, written quickly on a paper towel. It told her that tomorrow could be better and that he would have a break in six months and he would find the diner on Highway 44 then. She brought it to her face and brushed it gently against her cheeks, but it caught her tears and the black ink bled until the words were hazy and gray. She kept it anyway, and it sits tucked away in a drawer. Then she curled up in bed to watch the clouds rise like dark, lifeless loaves of bread and listen for the sound of the earth purring round effortlessly on its pin. Lying there, listening for the sound of method, of reason, of order, she prayed for rain.