Audiobook 14 – KELTON, an anti-war novel

Chapter One: Floyd.

The truck starts on the second try, which is better than it deserves in this cold.

Floyd Bates lets the engine idle while he scrapes the windshield with a plastic scraper that has a crack down the middle and a Ford dealership logo from a dealership that closed in two thousand nine.

The ice comes off in sheets.

Underneath it, the glass is clouded with the particular gray of a January morning on the Fox River, a color that is not quite silver, the color of a sky that has forgotten it has other options.

He does not plug in the block heater anymore.

He knows he should.

He knows that twenty degrees is the line below which a two thousand eleven F-150 with a hundred and sixty thousand miles on it would benefit from a warm engine block.

He knows this the way he knows everything about the truck, which is the way he knows everything worth knowing, through years of sustained physical attention.

But the outlet on the side of the garage has been unreliable since October, when a windstorm took down a branch that nicked the conduit, and Floyd has not gotten around to fixing it because fixing it means lying on his back on cold concrete, and at seventy years old in February, there are mornings when that matters.

The truck warms up.

The heater begins to push air that starts cold and tastes like dust and then slowly becomes warm air that still tastes like dust.

Floyd puts it in reverse and backs out of the driveway, which is cracked concrete that he poured himself in nineteen eighty-nine with help from his brother-in-law, Eddie, who is now dead, and from a rented mixer that leaked hydraulic fluid onto the lawn in a stain that took three years to grow over.

Every time Floyd backs out of the driveway, he drives over the work of his own hands and the memory of a dead man and a rented mixer, and he does not think about any of this because it is just his driveway.

But it is all in there, in the concrete, the way everything is in everything if you have been in one place long enough.

Kelton at eight in the morning in late January is a town performing its absolute minimum.

The streetlights are still on because the timer has not caught up with the lengthening days.

The school buses are running, their lights flashing yellow and red against the gray.

A few cars idle in the bank parking lot, their exhaust rising straight in the windless cold.

The Dollar General on Route thirty-one has its lights on but no cars in front of it, which means the morning clerk is in there alone, doing whatever morning clerks do in an empty store, which Floyd imagines is similar to what he does in an empty house, which is move from room to room with a coffee cup checking on things that do not need checking.

He drives south on Main, and the town arranges itself around him the way it has for decades.

The courthouse with its limestone facade and its Civil War monument that no one has read since the last time a teacher brought a class to read it, which was probably nineteen ninety-four.

The Recall Cafe, which has been the Recall Cafe for forty years, and before that was Junie’s, and before that was something else that Floyd’s father would have known, and Floyd does not.

Three pickup trucks already in front of it.

A Buick that belongs to Herb Paulson, who is eighty-four and drives it to the Recall every morning and will continue driving it until someone takes his keys away or God does, whichever comes first, and Floyd respects this because the alternative is waiting for someone to come get you, which is the beginning of the end of everything.