Free Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

Jesse’s father’s face, making him squint.
    They turn onto the Moran Creek Road and now they are nearly home. Things move toward them quickly and silently. A wilderness of trees, unrestrained shapes, and then a sudden opening, a break in the thicket, and there is pastureland around a sharply meandering creek, where in better weather cows graze, stupid as the horses. The creek has meandered so that it resembles a series of S’s, one fixed onto another, a child’s scrawling. Logs protrude through its ice. Jesse has fished and waded in this creek for the past several years, but today it seems distant, snaking away into the dusk while he is being carried home in the opposite direction.
    His father sniffs suddenly. A snorting, angry noise as he tries to clear his head.
    And now they are nearly home. Over one of the bridges … the clapping of the boards beneath the car … the Snyder farm, with its gaunt, ugly, exposed house on a hill … and now the gas station is suddenly in sight, and it is really boarded up. Closed. And the field of junked cars and motorcycles is really behind it, as always. Jesse is being brought home. What is the secret of this scene? The look of the gas pumps and their hoses thick as arms, thickly looped? Behind everything is the gauzy late afternoon sky, wintry and evil, and there is nothing in that sky to give a form to the day, nothing permanent, nothing to be outlined with the eye. It is all a blur, shapeless, a dimension of fog and space, like the future itself. Jesse stares at it and as he stares he is being driven into it relentlessly.
    Dear God
, Jesse thinks.…
    His father turns up the driveway joltingly. He shuts off the ignition.
    “Go in the house,” he says.
    Jesse thinks this is strange—of course he will go in the house. Why not?
    “Aren’t you coming in?” he says.
    “In a minute.”
    Jesse gets out, goes to the porch. He hears his father get out of the car behind him. But his father goes to the trunk of the car. Jesse half-sees that he has opened the trunk … maybe there is something inside, a small Christmas tree, a present, a secret …? And he turns away before his father sees him watching.
    When he opens the door, he is grateful for the warm air. His face burns with it. And a smell of something sweet: some kind of food. The house is quiet except for a noise like arguing, almost inaudible. Jesse stands in the kitchen and his fingers instinctively grope for the zipper of his jacket. Then he sees a smear of blood on the floor.
    A faint smear. It seems to lead into the front room.
    Jesse’s face comes open with the warmth of the house. His mouth opens into a question. He comes forward on legs that are suddenly elastic and springy.
    Someone is lying there—in the doorway to the front room. It is a joke, Jesse thinks. His brother is hiding from him. It is Bobby lying there on his stomach. His face is turned to one side, far to one side, the eyes open, a pool of blood beneath him. Jesse stares down at him. “Bobby,” he says. The boy’s eyes are open. It is strange to see that they are open, that he is lying right in the doorway, not hidden at all.
    “Bobby …?”
    Jesse looks up, his head springing up, and now he sees them all: he has been seeing them without knowing it. There is a jumble of bodies, arms and blood, drifts of hair like field grass, stiff with blood. His sister Jean lies with something shattered beside her—a lamp, maybe—and there is white glass mixed with the blood. A lampshade is splattered with blood. Jean’s face is turned away; no, it had bled away, half of it is soaked in the rug, half of it is gone … and at the very tips of her fingers, as if straining to get away from her touch, is Shirley, doubled over, lying doubled over with her arms shielding her stomach. Jesse steps forward into the blood. He has begun to hear a whimpering sound. It is the dog, Duke, locked up somewhere …? Jesse sees blood on the rug. It is glistening, it is