MORGAN TURNS DOWN THE HEAT | Fiction by Kurt Engstrom

Morgan stops to look out the kitchen window at the farmyard. The wind-scoured hardpan rimes a week-old skiff of snow with blow dirt that eddies across the ground like a nest of mice swarming a bad dream.

The sun is bright, and the sky is an awful blue. The thermometer on the windowsill outside the kitchen reads an even zero, and Morgan thinks back over the past few months of notices from the lender—default, foreclosure sale, eviction—all landing in the mailbox at the end of the lane like scavenger birds with sharp beaks and gnarled talons that can’t be pried loose. He’s been through at least a dozen auctions—neighbors and people he knew, even if only in passing—but, regardless, it is always the same. Strangers tramping through someone else’s house with their boots on, the Ladies’ Legion Auxiliary set up in the kitchen to sell coffee and sandwiches and pie, always pie.

There will be no ceremony marking the end. They won’t put a frame around the title to Morgan’s land and hang it on the wall. There will be a procedure and an execution. A secretary will slip the documents into a file and make a mark on a column of numbers. What do all those numbers add up to? The sum of larceny and failure, most likely, though which in greater measure, Morgan has quit trying to puzzle out, figuring that once the world of toil and dreams becomes nothing but a number, he would no longer care to know.

He tears off two sheets of paper from the tablet, sits at the kitchen table and writes:

DeRoy
The steers in the corral ain’t branded. Come and get them and the mare. They’re yours. You been a good neighbor.

Morgan

On the second sheet of paper he writes:

Dear Sam
I am sorry about everything.

Your Dad Morgan

The address of the correctional facility is in the back of the phone book where he wrote it, and he reads this aloud to himself as he addresses the second envelope to his son.

The insulated overalls hang in deflated effigy on a hook in the mudroom. Morgan twists himself into them. The off-kilter teeth of the zipper chew at the fabric. The harder he works at it, the worse it gets until the zipper moves neither up nor down. Of course, if it isn’t one thing, then, by god, it’s another.

He bunches up the half-on overalls, like a lady lifting her skirt out of the mud, and makes his way to the junk drawer in the kitchen for a pair of needle-nose pliers. As he shuffles back to the mud room, he grabs the hole in the zipper puller with the pliers and tugs, breaking the puller immediately. He tries instead to get at the zipper from the inside of the overalls, pulling on the remaining metal until the pliers lose purchase, slipping out of his hand and dropping down his pant leg into his boot.

When he stoops to retrieve them, he feels a spasm in his back. He stands up cautiously and breathes slowly, willing his back to cooperate, to not seize up on him. For now, the pliers in his boot will have to stay put.

As he passes the mirror on the wall on the way back to the kitchen, he stops and sees the hollow look of panic in his own eyes, a look he’s observed in the eyes of others trailing around a tank of oxygen. The inevitable stare of bewilderment that comes from fluid accumulating in your lungs. A look of drowning. After a lifetime of hard living, he too is now one of them, a man with a couple of nubs in his nostrils, his paper skin sprouted with eyebrows and whiskers of wire.

He digs around in the junk drawer again and finds a standard screwdriver, with which he works at the seized zipper, poking the herniated material back through each space between the coiled brass teeth until they can properly interdigitate the length of the tape. The kitchen clock keeps time with a steady ticking judgment of his progress. Once he frees the zipper—a small measure of relief— he gets back into his overalls the way old people approach sex—accepting of the gingerly pace and imbued with feelings of gratitude and sorrow in equal measure.

He pulls on a sweatshirt and a down vest, puts on a cap with earflaps, and slips a pair of yellow cotton gloves onto his onion-skin hands. Before leaving to make the slow walk across the farmyard to the barn, his oxygen tank in a bag looped across his shoulder, he goes to the thermostat and turns down the heat. The cylinder on the storm door wheezes in the cold before hitting the catch and snapping shut behind him.

A yellow extension cord runs from the barn to the pickup. He raises the hood and unplugs the block heater, retrieves the can of starter fluid stored behind the seat of the pickup, turns the wing nut off the stud, and lifts the air cleaner cover to get at the carburetor. Then he rests.

He takes off his right glove, lays it on the radiator, and holds on to the pickup frame with his left hand. He jitters his arm with the can of starter fluid out over the carburetor and presses the spray button. A stream of cold fluid coats his hand.

Goddammit.

He lets go of the pickup and reaches to wipe the starter fluid off his hand, losing his balance, pressing down on the aerosol can to keep from falling over, spraying a fine mist up into the air and over his face and the reading glasses he forgot to leave in the house. He lurches forward across the front of the engine compartment with the radiator cap gouging his breastbone. He reaches for the blue paisley handkerchief he keeps in the back pocket of his overalls and wipes his face until he can see nothing but a blur through the glasses.

He’s too winded to stand so he feels around the carburetor until he can finger the choke plate open. Again, he pushes down on the button and sprays the volatile hydrocarbon mixture into the carburetor. Face down, reaching across the engine block, he finds he can’t let up and sprays way too much before finally letting go and allowing the can of starter fluid to pinball somewhere into the engine compartment. He slides the air cleaner lid over the threaded post, failing to notice the handkerchief stuck in the open carburetor. He gives up on the wing nut, which has disappeared.

He closes his eyes against the pain and futility and gropes his way along the side of the pickup and into the cab. He lays his head on the steering wheel for a moment. It is his intention to drive down the road, put the letters in the mailbox, lift the red flag for the mailman’s notice. When he twists the key and the engine turns over, the truck backfires and settles into a rough idle with gunmetal blue smoke rolling out from under the hood. If he lets it warm up, he might change his mind. If he doesn’t let it warm up, he’s afraid he’ll find himself halfway down the road with a flooded engine.

He realizes there’s an option other than those two, either of which could go wrong in so many ways. He could just get this over with. He takes down the carbine from the gun rack behind him and slides the bolt closed and locks it into place, removes the safety, and slips it between his legs until the butt is resting on the floorboard of the pickup. He leans forward and rests his forehead on the muzzle. He feels the earth turning. All the margins are now at the level of science. The oxygen content in his bloodstream is tied to the force of the barometric pressure against his lungs. The number of steps he could take involves the speed and direction of the wind. His remaining heartbeats are like the needle on the fuel gage, approaching empty. He feels down the wooden stock of the rifle to the trigger guard and opens his eyes one last time to make sure everything is right. But he can’t see a damn thing.

He straightens in the seat, and when he removes the smeared glasses from his face, he sees the bay mare and the two steers looking his direction. They stand on opposite sides of a corral fence dividing the shared stock tank in two, a round slab of ice covering the surface of the water where they would otherwise be able to drink. Just once, couldn’t things go as planned? He eases the firearm out from between his legs and stands it, muzzle up, on the other side of the hump, against the seat on the passenger side of the cab.

Morgan lifts the lid of the tank heater and peers in at the darkness at the bottom. The pilot light is out. He sets his gloves on the white pill-shaped propane tank. He is careful of his back as he kneels, stretching his arm down to feel for the matchbook he stashed at the bottom of the heater box. He had lit the heater when the weather had first turned, the day after Thanksgiving. Now, in mid-January, the weight of the holidays is past and nothing but a bleak stretch of days until a cold Easter lay ahead.

As he feels for the matches at the bottom of the heater box, the needle-nose pliers in his boot digs into his shin bone. The matches aren’t where they should be, and then he remembers using them last fall to light one of the last cigarettes he’d been able to smoke.

He withdraws his arm, his fingers numb with cold as he grips the rolled edge of the galvanized steel tank. His arms wobble like a colt on new legs, and as he struggles to stand up, the oxygen canister he’d slung across his back, out of the way, swings as a pendulum in a smooth downward arc from his shoulder, cracking the valve against the solid metal of the frozen tank. The falling weight yanks the tubing from his face as the whole apparatus falls to the ground, hissing.

The cold pains his exposed skin. He puts his hat back on his head, gathers up the oxygen lines and reinserts the nubs, which are now adorned with frozen nose hairs, roots and all. He fiddles with the valve on the oxygen canister, but his numb and clumsy fingers neither have the dexterity nor strength to silence the escaping gas. He stuffs his hands into the pockets of his down vest to warm them and discovers the familiar shape of a full book of matches. He reaches into the pants pocket of his overalls and finds another book of matches; he finds two more in the breast pocket. He is a man teeming with matches and leaking gas.

He unspools the loops of tubing attaching himself to the damaged bottle of oxygen and sets the bottle as far away from the tank heater as he can. He pulls a matchbook from Bohannon’s Cowboy Bar out of his pocket, tears off a match, tries to light it. The fine motor skills required to draw it across the strike strip, though, have gone the way of his other diminished capacities—proprioception, endurance, continence, endothermy, and the rest of the doctor’s list—all weighing on him until the sum of his deficits forces him to give up. He retrieves the leaking oxygen bottle and slings it over his shoulder.

The hissing tank jeers him as he wheezes his way across the corral to where the hungry livestock watch his approach, jeers him as he struggles to carry only half of a five-gallon bucket of cracked corn to the yearling steers. Purple light wavers at the edge of the darkness that rings his telescoping vision. The pain in his chest is like that of having to hold one’s breath for a long time. Dismay, spreading like a vine, will choke the life out of him if he gives into it.

There was a time when Morgan would have lashed out to the recurring tides of indignation, frustration, and anger that formed his understanding of the world for so long. The impulses remain, but his condition tempers their expression. The doctor says he has attenuating bronchioles, a complicated name for the simple outcome of his disregard for his own health, the folly of believing he would be the exception, that his actions wouldn’t someday come home to roost. So, on the morning he received the notice of default from the bank, he felt something give out—the fight, the rage—he felt it buckle like a branch heavy with the ice and snow of a Spring blizzard.  They would come for him, and when they got him, he would be done.

The corral on the other side of the frozen stock tank holds a five-year-old bay quarter horse. Spirited, smart, not mean in the slightest. Now that was something he knew how to do right. She took to the bit and saddle easier than any horse he had worked with before. Within a week she was following him during chores, and if he didn’t act like he was going to ride, she’d nicker and nudge his back with her head until he saddled her. He answered her questions with calm and reasonable replies. It occurred to Morgan that he might have tried that with family— his son, his wife, and the daughter they’d lost at two—but the wisdom of that thought came along well after they were gone, each in their own way but for reasons that always came back to him.

With the hatchet that hangs outside the tack room, he splits the wires around a bale of alfalfa in the feed trough. He brings the horse a small can of oats and puts the grain in the feed bunk. He lays his head against the mare, absorbing her warmth and patting her neck as she eats.

When he looks up from the mare’s shoulder, he sees what at first appears to be the heat coming off the animal, rippling the air between himself and the truck parked the length of a football field away. He then leans against the mare with his eyes closed, listening to the hissing oxygen, until a jolt, like an impulse commanding the conscious mind to halt the plummet into slumber, strikes him. His eyes snap open. The ripple in the air is more vigorous and now includes smoke rising from pickup in the distance. The first tongue of flame slips out from beneath the hood and licks at the frozen air. Morgan jerks. The hissing oxygen bottle, swings on the strap looped across his shoulder.

He taught the mare to follow leg and heel commands. The pressure of Morgan leaning against her side and the poke of the oxygen canister in her ribs is in perfect placement. The mare spins and flattens him onto the hard ground. She stops and watches him struggle to get back up. When he regains his feet, he stumbles forward, leans to rest against a post, and then opens the corral gate. The mare whinnies her disapproval and gently nudges him in the back with her head, knocking him onto the frozen ground once again. The gate swings open.

As the flames consume his truck, he senses having missed something. He listens to an odd silence that is as specific and as instructive as the sound of, say, a guard dog barking or a siren blaring. It takes a while to identify this particular brand of quiet that has replaced the steady hissing of the oxygen bottle. It is a torpedo-shaped quiet, pointed and portentous yet somehow also diminished and disappearing like a pinpoint into the abyss.

From his vantage under the bottom rail of the corral fence, the flames are beautiful. He feels no alarm in the paradoxically hot and hard cold of zero degrees. He removes his hat and gloves and feels a desire to squeeze himself into the space between the bottom rail and the frozen ground. When he tries to get out of his overalls, the zipper sticks, but he is happy in his delirium to lie there, feeling warm as toast with his truck merrily burning in the distance.

A rifle round goes off inside the cab, spurring a host of sparrows to scatter from the ridge cap of the barn The mare’s ears and tail go up, and she turns her head, excited and alert to what may come next. Plumes of vapor billow from the steers’ nostrils, and the icicles dangling from the hairs of their frozen chins clink together as they raise their mouths from the feed bunk and turn in unison at the sound. Three more of the thirty-caliber cartridges discharge inside the burning truck. The bay mare flies away through the open gate and runs in a wide circle across an open field of winter wheat, her mane and tail whipping across Morgan’s final thoughts like a black flame burning away the last of the bright and blissful day.

---