Driftless. David Rhodes

feed onto his pickup and the box sank another coil spring groan lower, three o’clock had become a pillar of the past. His children, Seth and Grace, were out of school, pressing papers and books against their jacketed bodies, looking for him. He was seven miles from home and ten miles from the school. “Put this on account,” he told the mill hand.

      “Can’t do that,” said the young man, climbing back onto the loading dock and taking off his dusty hat in a gesture of apology. “Talk to them in the office. I don’t make the rules.”

      Grahm hurried around to the front of the building and into the office. The owner and the owner’s cousin, Mildred, sat behind a long counter layered with papers. Both looked up, Justin from the telephone cradled beneath his jaw and Mildred from an adding machine with a scroll of white tape arching up and onto the floor like a paper fountain. “I guess I need to talk about my bill,” said Grahm.

      Mildred lowered her head to signal that talking about bills did not fall under her department. Still, her eyes darted up from time to time from beneath her reading glasses. Justin rustled among the papers before him and in a darting movement seized a small pink sheet as though it was attempting to escape. “You’re getting a little behind, Grahm,” he said, pointing at the bottom line on the paper. “You haven’t made a payment in a couple months.”

      “I’ve always paid.”

      “I guess you have, Grahm, but I don’t remember you ever being this far behind.”

      The two men looked at each other. Grahm broke the silence: “I haven’t got the checkbook with me. I’ll stop in tomorrow morning and settle up half. Pay it all after corn’s in.”

      “See you in the morning,” said Justin, lowering his head and resuming his telephone conversation. Mildred punched a number into the adding machine and the paper fountain jumped a notch.

      Grahm glanced at the clock on the wall as he went out.

      Inside the pickup he was confronted by the edge of his checkbook sticking out from the sun visor. He didn’t remember putting it up there, pulled it out, and turned toward the office. Then he stopped, consulted his watch, took off his hat, adjusted the sizing band, and climbed back into the pickup.

      On the highway, Grahm pushed the accelerator to the floor. The pickup gained speed, noisily, until the speedometer hovered between fifteen and twenty miles per hour above the posted limit, a full thirty miles per hour faster than he usually drove with a load of feed.

      He considered the likelihood that driving this fast was reckless. The ton of additional weight seriously lengthened the distance he needed to stop. If anyone pulled in front of him, turning quickly to either side would be impossible without rolling over. But he was late, and if nothing bad happened it would mean something good.

      Late had recently become a habitual companion in a more general condition of dread. He felt unable to remain completely sane. He drove himself so hard it seemed he was being driven by outside forces. His inner life felt like a theatrical production in which the major players did not even bother to show up and the minor players attempted to continue without them. Everything he touched stole from his center, until nothing remained except an exhausted emptiness, a perpetual perishing. The nightmare that waits for young people to grow old before visiting them with visions of permanent inadequacy visited Grahm on an hourly basis. He had contracted the penultimate social disease—falling behind—and had joined the infamous ranks of people predetermined to fail.