I drove. I drove really fast.

Ol’ Blue sailed over a hill of simmering pavement and lurched around a blind tree bend. Corn stalks bowed and snapped upright and bent again into the tailwind . Raindrops sizzled on eraser burns left in the road. The open road. Far from my pink slip on the coffee table. Far from her high-pitched “What are we going to do, Mick?” Just the sound of speed and wind on the back roads to Mel’s Pub.

Va-room. Before the curve, a black-ringed tail flicked through the golden husks, the odometer tipped ninety, the oil light flickered, my eyes stared back from the rearview mirror and smack. Ol’ Blue kicked left. I pulled her hard back to the tarred gravel, but she bucked and careened down the slope. In front of the windshield, smoke spun in wild circles through tangled weeds. There was a huge raccoon, splayed between two tread-cut lanes of grass. It rolled and fluttered like when you touch a moth’s wing. Its fingers opened and closed, opened and then curled into a tight fist when the heart finally stopped.

“God. Damn. Car.”

Two hours later, a tow driver plucked Ol’ Blue from the ditch and placed her next to the carcass.

“That’s a big son of a bitch right there” he chuckled. “No wonder.” The driver withdrew a folded wad of grease-stained paper from the back pocket of his overalls, the pen like a toothpick between his blackened fingers, and handed me the bill. Damn raccoon.

“Snap, crackle, pop!” I gestured to Wendy that evening. Her brow crunched together. She snatched my dinner plate, wiping a free hand across her eyelids.

“You killed the poor animal,” she mumbled. “If you drove like a normal human being it would still be alive.”

And then bloop. The TV screen goes dark and it’s the two of us framed in the dim-lit flicker of black and white static. I’m twenty-nine. She’s twenty-six. I’m Irish and German. Stocky-necked. She’s Italian and tired. I wonder if this is how the lot of us looked, five-thousand plus staring at locked gates and smokeless stacks.

Ka-boom.

A dozen green soldiers dodge sweeping helicopter blades in a South Korean minefield. Then another commercial. She hated eating in front of the TV and sold our Xacto-Fold TV trays in a garage sale while I was at Mel’s.

“Don’t think you’re going to sit in front of M*A*S*H while I’m in the kitchen fetching your dinner. I’m not your mother,” she’d said, and so for a dollar and a half she loaded the trays into the back of some hippie’s Vega.

The next week I zipped past the rectangle imprint where a few stalks of corn lay broken on the ground. A cloud of flies buzzed around the open mouth of the animal, its pelt parted by the soft pull of maggots and rot. From the rearview mirror, I could see that the eyes had been pecked loose. Somewhere within the tall grass, they stared back at my fleeing car.

Wendy made pea soup that night. I shifted from leg to leg and dried the dinner bowls after she placed them in the strainer. It was 6:56 pm. Four more minutes until M*A*S*H. She gave me a funny look. I hadn’t shaved in four days and I needed a haircut. I checked the TV set: Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. Oh, what a relief it is. The China dish, the one with the ugly rose petals, the one from her grandmother’s cabinet, slipped from my drying towel, splitting like a MK-77 on the linoleum.

“What the hell, Mick?” Tears welled up in the red corners of her eyes. “You always ruin the best that I’ve got!”

Before the baby died, before the quiet ceremony in my Mom’s backyard, Wendy loved me something fierce in high school. Her blond hair bobbing in pigtails, jelly gloss on her lips, as my knotted football jersey set green against her creamy waist.

I sang, They say our love won’t pay the rent. Before it’s earned, our money’s all been spent… Babe, I’ve got you babe. She fixed me with those steel-gray eyes and a little red smirk that whispered: remember this.

On the drive to Mel’s a weak rain chh’d against the cracked windshield and siphoned down the protruding belly of the raccoon. It looked as if someone had filled it with air. The damp smell of decay drifted through the vents, twitching at my nostrils.

Fucking animal.

Wendy began sleeping in the baby’s room, between the arms of her Granddaddy’s rocking chair.

The rocking, she said, soothed her migraines. The living room glowed all funny-blue from the light of the tube. Bob’s Auto Lotto was having a massive inventory reduction sale and then Radar, piece by piece, mailed his Jeep from South Korea back home. Hawkeye said that once Radar’s mailman found out he’d have a retroactive hernia. Canned laughter.

A few weeks later long strings of red gut from the deflated body littered the pavement. Two crows planted their feet into the corpse. I swerved left, ruffling their feathers.

Wendy grabbed my TV dinner and sighed. “What happened to us, Mick?” Behind my Pabst bottle, the television warped images of men and silent steel yards. Three days after Youngstown Sheet and Tube announced layoffs in Youngstown, Ohio, Congressmen form a caucus in hopes of meeting with President Carter next week…. Wendy took the bottle and lowered it from my lips. The last sip sloshed and glittered at the bottom. I stood and reached across the coffee table while she took a step forward. A tear fell onto my sleeve. I leaned towards her, put the bottle on the table, and cradled her with one arm. With the other arm I reached behind her back and twisted the knob up on the TV set. Her silhouette blocked the newscaster and her hands fumbled with the light switch. Darkness.

Later, within the blue glow, Hawkeye announced that they came as boys and went home as men.

That night, she’d packed her carpetbag. When I woke up, her thin gold band was on top of the TV set, right next to our wedding picture.

Ol’ Blue turned right on County Line Road and crawled to that scarred place just beside the still cornfield. A brown rib stuck out from a patch of sticky hair. It glinted in the moonlight, broken, like an old stone direction marker with a letter N for North, saying here it lies.

Amber Pence is a freelance writer and student finishing her B.A. in English and Creative Writing at Youngstown State University. She is currently the vice president of Jenny and a member of the Artists of the Rust Belt. When she is not designing jewelry or teaching poetry to the children at SMARTS (Students Motivated by the Arts), she can be found scribbling another short story inspired by husks of prosperity here in Ohio.