Travis Dahlke
FICTION BY TRAVIS DAHLKE
Orchard Gold
1.
Sunday around two I quit ShopRite so me and Amanda Harper can fool around in the field behind First United Methodist. We take our time, tossing Macoun cores everywhere so when we return there'll be an orchard for us. I make my apron a picnic blanket. Smoothing Amanda’s baby hairs to her temple, I say the word marriage and close my eyes like a psychic.
Did you hear that? Amanda asks, terrified of wild dirtbikes. She shifts upon the apron. Plucks apple skin from her tooth gap and wipes it on the grass. She doesn’t know I’m looking.
I tell her she’s safe. Say, babe, don’t you know I’m planning our future? You know those crumbles you bake? We’re going to be living off those crumbles forever. Big smile. I don’t want to raise our children in this town, she says. Amanda is an heiress to the Greener Valley Landscaping empire. With her father’s money we’ll be able to live anywhere. I tilt my head and slowly pull in, like they do on Dawson’s Creek. I even hum the theme into Amanda’s mouth. You know that if we are to stay alive. A waxen smack of lip balm. A purr like distant chainsaws sputtering out.
I told you, she says, turning toward the forest.
I hold her face, rake the fuzz on her cheeks. I tell her they sound far off. Plus it’s the middle of the day. I pat my pocket for the shape of a folding knife, even though a folding knife won’t do anything to a dirtbike.
2.
Nobody knows how long the wild dirtbikes roamed our forests. Eric Grey, who’s responsible for keeping the taxidermied foxes and muskrats dust-free at the children’s museum, claims our town’s indigenous population painted engines with blackberry juice.
I remember lying awake at night listening for their barking, metallic, like something hard being shredded. Gathering our bravery, me and my friends would scale Paupack Ledge at sundown to try and catch glimpses of them tearing through the maples below. At dusk, the dirtbikes emerged from dens deep in the forest to ride beneath the power line alleys. Sometimes, you could see the little headlights dancing in the green like deer eyes.
As young men, we hunted the dirtbikes with the empty rifles of our fathers, trampling through the woods, talking about the girls we had. In great detail, Carl Khemensky would describe Maria Laufineur’s breasts plunking from each bra cup one at a time. We used Monster Energy as bait. We lassoed the dirtbikes and rode them to their deaths, like cowboys. We’d dismantle their aluminum corpses in our garages, Mötley Crüe Pandora ascending from Steven Janclark’s Milwaukee speaker. To create mustaches, we’d wipe transmission fluid across our upper lips.
Wikipedia details each fatal attack on humans:
In 1968, remains belonging to a man with dementia were believed to be the result of a dirtbike attack.
In 1998, a fly fisherman angling for stripers at dawn had his leg amputated after being attacked by a rabid dirtbike.
In 2008 a bank manager was killed while jogging–identified only by the self-help playlists on her iPod.
3.
We spend winters drinking at the Berkshire. Our belches fill the bar with raw sawdust. Carl Khemensky swears by a system of back roads for driving home drunk. One humid Thanksgiving Eve, Carl calls me and says he’s clipped a young dirtbike with his car. He blames the snow melt fog. Bring your gun, he says. When I get there, the dirtbike is sputtering oil, the rear tire bent at its spoke. The fawn emits this shrill roar like a beehive or an RC car running out of battery. It’s a sound that settles as sediment in the gut unless you quickly remind yourself of something else. I drag the mangled bike off the road and fire three rounds into its hull. Carl calms himself with endless Fireball nips.
4.