Fake Rubber

Fake Rubber

a short story by Jeff Minton

         

         Two days before the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, a white woman with black hands in Ohio finished plucking the loose bits of synthetic rubber from a newly made B.F. Goodrich Silvertown radial tire.  As she did, the man who would buy this tire landed at North Field Air Force Base on the small Pacific island of Tinian, where he was summoned to chart strategic maps for Truman’s massive Japanese invasion proposal, Operation Downfall.

         The man’s name was Aaron Brodsky.  He spent eight long days drawing maps at North Field, and then the Japanese surrendered.  They confiscated Aaron’s work and sent him home to his wife, whose face he remembered only by photograph, and his daughter, Marianne, whom he had not met.

         Aaron bought the tire on special in a set of five a week after he arrived home to his father’s house in the open land south of Springfield, Missouri, where his wife and daughter had taken up.  The beginnings of his father’s long cancerous death and the cold eyes of his wife kept Aaron in search of things to do outside the house.  That afternoon he spent replacing the tires of the old black Studebaker he had bought before the war.

Afterward, he found the tiny girl that was his daughter flipping through books she couldn’t read on the floor of the hallway, tracing the lines on the page like art.  Bushy brown hair unlike the curls and flips and pompadours of the times fell down around her squatting body.  She looked up at him strangely with pale skin and two big front teeth and bright gray eyes like searchlights in a morning mist.  Aaron took the girl outside, far from the house, and he hung that fifth tire from the lowest arm of a lonely walnut tree in the light air of the open yard.

         Here, out of earshot of his wife’s parties and his father’s moans for cold rags and water, he pushed Marianne high in the air, and ran under the swing while she screamed laughter and held onto the thick braided rope for dear life.  In the weeks and months and years to come, Aaron pushed his daughter on the swing and climbed the rope up to the tree branch where he’d hang upside down from his legs, and the ivory cross he wore under his shirt would dangle out, and he’d drop green walnuts on his daughter, which sometimes made him think of bombs and aerial maps.

         Marianne sat alone out on the tire after school, spinning in place and dangling her legs.  She waited for her father to come home from building highways and find her out there.  On rainy days, he took Marianne into the detached garage that still smelled like freshly cut wood, and they drew maps together of the back yard, the town, the world.

         Once Marianne asked what he did in the war.

         “This, mostly,” Aaron said, looking up from the long table and smiling at her.

         “Did you ever have to fight?”

         “I had one of the good jobs.  Very far from the fighting.  And I had about a thousand men with tanks and planes and really big guns all there to keep me safe.”

         “Were you a boss guy?”

         “No.  Well.  Kind of.”

         As Marianne grew older, the swing hung longer and longer without use.  Aaron’s father passed.

In the burnt colors of autumn the year Marianne turned sixteen, she and the young man from the wood-fenced farm across the gravel road loitered around the tire.  They smoked and talked about their parents and school and what was next.  Before the trees lost their leaves completely, the two were kissing down by the swing.  They rolled around on the ground under the weeping willow at the edge of the yard, where no one could see.

         “Have you ever done it?” the young man asked her under the willow between kisses.

         She was wearing a dress because it was unusually warm that day in late fall, and she thought it would be a last chance to dress light until next spring.  The young man’s finger grazed her long leg from the soft skin at the back of her knee up her skirt to the waistband of her panties.  Marianne laughed into his neck.  He had her underwear pulled down around the low line of her buttocks when she broke away, still laughing, and ran from the draping willow to her father’s swing.  The young man chased her and they kissed some more against the walnut tree.  Again she slipped away.  She dove into the tire with the inner ring against her belly.  She swung out into the free air and then back to the young man.  She kicked off the ground and laughed to catch her breath.

         “Push me,” she said.

         The young man caught her where she thought he would push, and with her body held by the tire, standing at a forward lean, his hands found her panties again.  He was behind her slippery and hard and inside her so quick she was still laughing when she felt the rip of her hymen.  For three minutes that would last her lifetime the swing kept her from going forward, and he kept her from going back.

         “Oh, Jesus hell,” the young man said.  “Holy hell, Marianne.”

         Aaron’s wife left when Marianne went away to college, appearing, unusually made-up, in the doorway of Aaron’s garage to tell him she was leaving.  She wore beige slacks, a navy jacket, pearl earrings and a matching necklace, and her hair tightly spiraled up in a bun.  She was a beautiful image of a woman.

         Aaron said nothing at first.  Then he said, “I’ve had it in my mind we might start over.  Now that it’s just us.”

“I don’t want to.  I don’t love you.  You don’t love me.  I don’t want to love you.”

“Why have you stayed all this time?”

         “I couldn’t leave.  I tried once.  Did you know that?”

         “Yeah.  I did.”

         “I went my Mom’s, and I wrote you and Marianne a letter saying I was going away for a long time, and I imagined myself being Marianne and getting that letter.  I—I couldn’t send it.  I just came home.”

         “I didn’t expect you come back then.  I didn’t want you to.  It was a relief you were gone.  But when you did come back I thought that maybe marriage was something more than I understood at first.  I thought that’s what you were thinking, too.”

         “I wasn’t thinking about marriage.  I was thinking about being a mother.”

         Aaron walked across his garage, and he looked out the window at hills and trees rolling out to the curvilineal horizon.  The swing rocked a little in the wind under the weight of the ghost of his now grown child.

         “I wonder how hard you thought about that.”

         “I have so much want in this life, Aaron.  Maybe if when you were at war if I hadn’t had Marianne, and I could’ve done things.  I could’ve grown up, and maybe when you came back it would’ve been different.  But I never had that chance.  You were gone.  It’s not your fault.  But you weren’t there.  It was hard.  So hard.  And your dad got sick.  I feel like I lost my life.”

         “You should’ve left.  We didn’t need you.”

“You never tried to need me.  But I was here.  I was always here.”

The grass grew often to touch the swing in the years Aaron spent alone in his father’s house, while Marianne studied abroad, married an English actor named Charles, had two kids, and struggled to live in London.

A letter from Marianne with drawings from the kids and family pictures and brochures of her husband’s performances came every month.  Aaron returned the letters with colorful maps drawn of London that the kids could navigate.  He sometimes saw the swing blowing in the wind or in a brief flash of lightning from the window of the detached garage where he spent most of his nights mapping things.

He drew maps for work, cutting new highways through the hills of Branson to ease the stream of tourism.  He drew maps of Europe.  He drew maps of Middle Earth and Maycomb, Alabama and of Heaven and Hell.  He drew maps of places he wished could exist.

         While searching for a rifle in his father’s closet, Aaron found an old baseball bat that he used to take to the yard when he was thirteen and point to the bordering tree-line like a fence.

He took the bat out into the yard, and he swung it three times in the air each time harder than the last.  The stout wooden handle educed something unknowable from his bloodless palms.  And he took the bat to the tire swing over and over and over, lifting bits of fabric from its layers.

         In the early spring of 1972, when her husband’s stage career could no longer support their life in London, Marianne returned home with Charles and their kids, Raven and Misa, who were four and seven.  Marianne, on sunny summer mornings, sat on the porch and read books about places and watched through her indefensible periphery her husband push her children on the swing.

         Aaron taught the kids as they grew how to draw with rulers and compasses, and he taught them the importance of scale and proportion.  He showed them on a globe a point in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

         “See this speck here?”

         “I don’t see it,” Raven said.  “That’s just water.”

         “Misa, can you see it?”

         “I see some writing?”

         “There’s an island here called Tinian.  And when you’re there it seems pretty big.  But from really far back, when you compare it to the ocean and the countries around it, it’s so small you can’t even tell it’s there.  That’s the first rule to map-making.  You gotta keep things in proportion even if means you can’t draw an entire island because it’s too small to fit on your map.”

         A month before an American shot John Lennon in the back, and Charles insisted on moving again to England where the starving artist at least had his respect, Marianne found in her father’s garage several maps of Japan with red lines and arrows pointing into the country from offset islands.  On the top map, penciled-in naval fleets, flocks of planes, and green dots labeled 40th inf. and 158th reg. decorated the black pen on white paper that defined the land.  Mushroom clouds and dates covered others.

         “Can you believe I’ve never been there?” her father answered when she asked him about the maps.

         “I know that, Dad.  Are these old maps from the war?”

         “I feel like . . . I’m supposed to be there.  Like I should be helping them in some way.  Isn’t that something backwards?  It’s the dumbest thing I can think of, Mary’n.”

         “Dad, come on.  That’s just old stuff messing with your brain.  I thought you told me they confiscated all those maps you drew overseas?”

         “Of course they did.”

         “Then what are these?  Did you draw them recently?”

         “Just a hobby, honey.  Just something to do.”

         “Is this really what they had planned?  If Japan never surrendered?”

         “Best I can remember.”

         “Well I’m glad it stopped when it did.  Can you imagine how you’d feel if they would gone through with all this?”

         “No, doll.  I haven’t the faintest idea how I would feel.”

         Children came periodically over the next three years to swing on the elderly tire while their parents talked to realtors and admired Marianne’s weeping willow tree.  Aaron, huddled late one night in the basement with tornado sirens faint in the distance, promised Marianne the bulk of the house money to take back to England once it sold.

         “Then come with us,” she said over wind howling outside the little basement windows.  “We can buy a house with enough room for all of us.”

         “Don’t mind yourself over me.  I got plenty of places to go.  There’s a lot of this world I’d like to see with my own eyes.”

         Midsummer 1985, Aaron, Marianne, Charles, and the kids who were grown, came home from the movie theatre to find a retired couple rambling their lawn.  These two, Cheryl and Leroy Weston, bought the Brodsky house with the two acres of open yard and the tire swing.

In the weeks following Aaron’s and Marianne’s family’s departure, the sons and daughters and grandchildren of Cheryl and Leroy came to exfoliate the property.  New paint the tan color of sunlit wheat in the late morning covered the smothered white of the old house.  Truckloads of brush and dead leaves burned up clouds of white smoke along the gravel road.

         Cheryl brought her grandchildren lemonade and laughter and praise at how well they worked as she had them prune the trees and dig a pond and till a garden.  The youngest son came with his toddler, Peter, who ran from the car to the swing as if by some force.

         “Vincent!” Cheryl called to her son.  “Get Peter.  I don’t think that old swing is safe.”

         “Oh, let up,” Leroy said.  “That tire’s hung there forever.  I don’t think Petey can do it any harm.”

         “Peter! Come see Grammy!” she called, and then said to Leroy, “It’s dirty and ripped up and I don’t trust it.  I want it taken down.”

         When after a laborious effort Leroy at last cut through the knots that were hardened to stone from uncountable jolts of tension and decades of tumultuous Missouri weather, he picked up the tire, licked his thumb, and wiped dirt from some small raised print.

         “Hey, Cher.  Look at this.”

         “It’s an old tire, Leroy.  Throw it in the truck.  Joey’s hauling a load to the dump tomorrow.”

         “You know what this is?  This is one of those fake rubber tires that they made in the rubber shortage.”

         “To the dump, Leroy.”

         “We can’t just throw this away.”

         “Oh yes we can.”

         “I’ll put it in the garden.  You can plant flowers in it.”

         “I don’t want that thing poisoning my soil.”

         “Chrissakes.  It’s not gonna seep into the soil.  Rubber takes about a million years to break down.  And this ain’t even rubber.  This is special-made to last.  It just seems right to leave it out here.  Don’t you think?”

         “If you can make it look good have it your way.”

         In the last days of summer that year in 1985, Leroy rolled the tire to the garden.  He dug a small place for it and set it in with dirt up around the base and he filled the center of the tire with dirt as well.  The following spring, Cheryl planted marigolds and morning glories and daylilies and lilacs inside and all around the tire, and when they grew she watched them against the flowers across the garden of the normal soil.









Word Count: Aprox. 2,500