Smudge Pot
Matthew Fiander
Like any other morning, Fossil was first to the site. The crew was carving out lots in a new development edging up to the intracoastal, pouring foundations for homes none of them could ever afford.
His name wasn't really Fossil, but because the crew was young and he was old, as in not old but old to them, it's what they called him. The time to remind them of his real name had passed, and anyway he thought about land and pressure and time and secretly approved, even if that's not quite what they meant.
Fossil staked out the dimensions, his measurements easy and perfect, and ran twine from stake to stake to give his calculations shape. He pulled lumber and cut it to fit the frame inside the twine. He scanned the site for debris, rocks, anything that might slow them down. His neck knotted and pained at the bending over, the squinting into the ground.
This would make the crew's work much easier. Fossil knew they wouldn't be able to measure with his close eye, the three of them still fogged up by the imprecisions of youth. That was why they saw the stakes, the twine, the cut boards as if they materialized out of nothing, as if there was no work before their work. They worked hard enough, Fossil knew, and kept going once they started, the kind of workers he liked. He could correct small mistakes along the way -- he'd take his trowel's blade to a rounded corner or run his tape down a footer's too-shallow depth -- and the young laborers picked up the slack on the heavier work. They dug well, they operated machinery, they kept things moving.
Fossil's real value to them was the smudge pot.
Without the smudge pot, they'd all be driven insane by mosquitos and gnats. They would scratch themselves bloody, spend their nights casted in a baking soda paste to ease the itch and sting. The laborers had been on other sites with smudge pots before, but Fossil's was the best. You could stand in its smoke for five minutes and it stuck with you an hour, the smoke bonding to sweat to form an oily second skin. Even after work, the smoke on their clothes held a sweetness, not the acrid smell of burnt rubber or trash or kerosene.
They all rolled into the site at seven, a convoy of rust-framed trucks, each wearing their own unique mask of exhaustion. For Marco, purplish circles swelled under his eyes in taut sandbags. Kurt's eyes were rimmed wet and pink, his head shifted forward on his neck, his posture curled like a dead leaf. Oakley held no pinch to her face, no slowness to her movement, but it was how her jaw hung open, slack and tilting, still trying to draw in the waking world with each breath.
Each nodded to Fossil as engines started, machines beeped and belched oily exhaust and shifted backwards into position.
"Let's build us another no-story home," Fossil said. They laughed, and he laughed too, though they weren't laughing at the same thing.
Blades sank damply into earth or with a dry snick into gravel. Rebar rattled inside the Bobcat bucket as they readied to grid it into place.
Fossil left them to it. He would check in at intervals, but they knew the steps. He paused at the pot only to look up and down the street, see the other homeless slabs they had already set, the concrete curing in the damp summer heat.
Other crews might not like Fossil worrying over that old coffee can, how he set it just so on its homemade stand, how he picked away rusted flecks from the puckered drill holes circling the bottom of the can and thought how you can nearly hear a whistle as the fire sucked air in, as the charcoal burned itself to embers. But Marco and Kurt and Oakley are opposite poles to Fossil, which was what kept them together. They did their work, he did his, and the world spun between them. All three claim here as home. They'll never leave, but they'll burn out of this crew, this company, this job. On to something else eventually. Not Fossil, even if he isn't from here, he's from so many miles and years ago he can't see it in his mind. His past a feeling. Home not far away but gone. One time, Kurt sat on his cooler at lunch break, and waved his hand across the lot they were clearing. "I'll own something like this one day," Kurt said. "It's what me and Tracyanne are saving for. Land of our own. The American Dream, right?"
That Dream was what Fossil's dad once called it. Kurt saw land as something to own. Fossil knew land for what it was: a measurement of distance.
#
By eight or so the bugs began their onslaught. Fossil was ready, feeding the pot with bright green leaves and stems -- nothing too woody, nothing made of paper or plastic. When the first tendrils of sweet smoke rose into the air, Kurt or Marco or Oakley said, Right on time, Fos. One or all of them must think it was the weight of years of labor that made the process slow, that kept Fossil working and reworking the pot. Fossil felt it sometimes, how they pitied his age, though he was not yet sixty. But he learned that some young people don't know how to read deliberate motion, chosen quiet. They see both as a slowing down. Fossil didn't take this personally. The same way he didn't mind how easy they assumed this pot was to make. They took the sweetness of its smoke, the way it lingered, for granted, didn't know he foraged the woods near his complex for just the right leaves, how he stored them in bags with damp folds of toilet paper to keep them from drying out and crumbling. Kurt and Marco and Oakley didn't realize the sweetness came from lavender grown in pots lining the rail of his fire escape. He mixed dolomite lime into the soil to get the pH right. Georgia soil can be too acidic for lavender, he found, but the lime balances it.
After a few feeds, the pot produced plumes of smoke far wider than its mouth, and it made its usual wall between the work site and Fossil. Later, he'd walk through it and check progress, see what work was left to do.
#
At the end of the month, when he could, Fossil walked to the bar nearest his complex, a squat brick building with a dim neon sign out front. He sat at the bar, held his beer bottle with two hands, and the other men who sat next to him held their beers, and they spoke to each other through the mirror behind the liquor bottles. They all labored, all worked with younger people, and they all -- even Fossil -- outlined these differences: their imprecision and impatience, their blindness to work done in their absence, their respectfulness that rendered each of them, to a person those bodies at the bar, more relics than men. Fossil always heard the edge of frustration in the other voices. They probably heard it in his; sometimes his voice did sharpen. He did wish that scales would fall from eyes, that these kids saw the cycle they were in, that hurrying up to get it over with or speeding blind through every day between paychecks, that all of it was steering them down a road called Never Enough that dead-ended in the old they feared.
But even if exasperation sometimes heated Fossil's words with the mirror men at the bar, he washed it away with that beer. Only the one. Never two. Which was not control, nor was it habit, since habit suggested choice in carving out a behavior. It still felt like necessity, even if he wasn't sure that's what it was, the single beer, the envelopes of money once mailed monthly and now, with no one to send them to, still filled out of habit and stored in the drop ceiling of his small apartment to guard against burglars that never came.
Fossil didn't go many other places besides the low-set bar. There was the library, his other quiet sanctuary, but mostly he went there and picked up magazines out of this old bin set outside the door. He took them into the library to read sometimes, but the endless stacks of books, the stories swelling inside, crowded him out. Scientific American was his favorite, laying out the world around him in all its strange and wonderful edges and corners.
Birds were his favorite topic. He spent so much time clawing into the ground, he liked the idea of another world above him, a world of air. When he found articles on birds, he re-read and marked them up with pen that could slice through the thin, glossy pages.
His favorite were nightjars. Ground nesting birds, dug into the dust like him but active at night, could rise up and escape. He read in one article that the Chuck-will's-widow was a common nightjar where he lived. Not a whip-poor-will like he hoped – too far south for them, though he longed to hear their sound – but he would stay up late or get up early and listen for the Chuck-will's-widow own distinct call.
When, after a few weeks, he hadn't heard one, or recognized it if he did, he went into the library and sat at the bank of computers, looking for local stories on nightjars.
Turns out all the construction, the new developments, the downtown lofts and apartment buildings, were too disruptive. The nightjars were leaving.
Fossil stared at the screen for a long time, until his eyes ached, until he felt somewhere in his periphery the librarian coming to check on him.
He'd tried it after that, the TV, because it was what people did after a long day of work, or on a quiet Friday night. Just more stories, though, 22 minutes of people goon-chuckling through mistakes, no law comes calling, no bill comes due. Laugh track rattles throughout like a can of nails. Minute 22 brings some fleeting forgiveness. "Try the news," one of the mirror men said once. He'd brought it up, the cold face of his television.
"Is that really any different," Fossil said.
"No laugh track," one other mirror man said into the mouth of his beer bottle.
"No forgiveness either," another said. The room laughed. Not a can of nails, more like the heater kicking on.
#
Oakley's face was the first to conjure itself over the pot. This was when they slowed down. Their morning respite from youthful propulsion. Oakley, a deep breath cut short by coughing. "Smoke only works on the skin," Fossil whispered. She smiled. Then, she lifted and dropped her shoulders. A breath without breath.
"Every day she calls," Oakley said. "Sometimes I let it go to voicemail and she fills it up with her words, but even when I answer I press the phone to my ear and she talks."
This was not the first time. Each pot brings them here. Oakley and Kurt and Marco. Their words a second, uncontrollable plume. The world outside dropped away and Fossil made the sound he always made through the smoke, a fluttering whistle – the Chuck-will's-widow's call -- a wind on which Oakley could float her tale.
"She says they're stealing her money, the nurses. Says they're poisoning the orange juice. That the humming vents pour a toxin into her room to put her to sleep."
Only his whistle in response, nothing more.
"She says she sees Dad. That he sits next to her and pats her knee and pushes a stray hair from her eyes and says The room is a rectangle but not a square. He says the Dow is up 300 points. He says the cheetah is the fastest land animal."
She paused. Fossil waited.
"The nurses told me she's just grabbing little bits of what's on the TV. What she's imagining, it's not even hers."
"Fossil," she said. Oakley did this whenever she wanted him to open his eyes, to really see her. He opened his eyes. He saw her.
"She had me late and now she's leaving early, and I can't enter that room. Because she's not there. Because I can't face not-her. All I can do is breathe into the phone."
Oakley cupped her hands and held them over the rising smoke. What she trapped there she turned over and rubbed onto her face. It left no color on her cheeks.
Fossil ran his flattened hand through the smoke like a lone wing, whistled one last time.
She nodded in quiet benediction and left.
#
Fossil fed greens and shoots into the can and poked them down. He waited for Kurt and then he was there.
"You ever been to McTierney's?"
Kurt always started with a question.
"I guess I'd've seen you there. Anyway, a couple nights ago I'm there. It's what you'd expect, all dark wood and hard felt on the floor. Irish name but nothing Irish about it."
Start a conversation, set the scene. Fossil heard all this before. Kurt was warming up.
"This woman, let's call her Juliana, was on the other side of the bar. She leaned on it this way, real easy like. She wasn't smiling at me, just looking, flat, like I said, easy, sizing me up."
Fossil closed his eyes, offered his skittering call.
"We barely spoke, just drank next to each other. She never even gave me a name, Fos."
Not the whole call now, just the first percussive whip.
"It was so quiet, the whole night. We silently settled up and I followed her to her car and then we were over the bridge and onto the island and parked and walking up to a house and inside and she's kissing me, or -- I know, I know -- she's kissing me back."
No call now, just the scuffle of new leaves added to the pot.
"She went to freshen up -- freshen up, that's what she said, like some movie scene -- and that's when I saw it. The picture on the sideboard by the door. Her and a man. Dress and tuxedo. Rings. Smiles. The silver frame around it spun a little and I was drunk and my feet were heavy and it was like I was looking in a mirror.
"Point is," Kurt said. "I left. Honest mistake to this point. I could tell Tracyanne and maybe she'd understand. Tell her how my dad ran out on us. How I never would. A mistake, that's all."
Kurt cleared his throat.
"But I took the picture, tucked it under my arm and carried it back to the main road. I set it on the concrete and ducked down in the roadside brush and waited for a car to come by. When one did the frame broke too quietly, no settling the matter in it. I walked for a long time then, over the bridge, until I got to the pale light of the Kroger lot and called a cab.
It's that last part of me that stole that picture, that destroyed it, to what, Fossil? I can't figure it."
Fossil kept his eyes closed and breathed in the smoke that did not make him cough and he knew after some time that Kurt's story had ended, that he had left.
#
There was always a good pause before Marco appeared. Marco entered the smoke differently. Hands in his back pockets, head tilted forward just so. As if waiting for an invitation.
Fossil obliged. "Marco," he said.
"What do you know about taillights?" Marco said. A question but not a question, like a breath but not a breath.
"Back left went out on my truck. So, I get a bulb, drop the gate, pull out the bolt, and swap the dead bulb for new one."
A shorter chirp in response this time, one Fossil imagined you'd hear early morning.
"That was last week. Two days ago, it's out again. Same thing. Swap out the bulb. Then guess what I found this morning."
Another not-question. "Out," Fossil said.
"I can't get pulled over, Marco said. "They'll ask for papers. They'll want my papers."
"Can't get forced out," Fossil said, because it felt like the only thing he knew.
"What do I know about wiring? And what money do I have to take it to a mechanic? And what if that doesn't work?" Marco waving his hands, not to clear the smoke but to feed the pot, to grow the plumes. "The problem," he said, shaking his head. "Always further back than we think, always hidden. Same ol' story and it never ends."
"No story," Fossil said. "Just days." Marco whistled like he knew and maybe he did. He wiped his hands on his thighs and left the smoke.
#
"What's your story?" Kurt asked him once.
No story is what Fossil thought, but also how Home is a story, and then parents fall ill, bills stack and compress like layers of earth and the story that you own land becomes the story that land owns you, narrated by stiff voices calling from far-off buildings to take it back. So then Away becomes your story. I'll be back. The late-night cry. I'll be back. The early morning trill. I'll be back. That Dream, as Dad put it, the light they all moth-swarm to, becomes a story. And then it's all lost and it's not a story anymore, just a string of years, which sounds like tragedy, which is ringed in its own stain of sadness, but also combusts, converts an exhausted yesterday into some unknown freedom.
"Like, what are you?" Kurt said to the silence around his first question.
Fossil smiled wanly, "I'm a nightjar."
"Nightjar? The hell is that?"
Fossil considered the way Kurt's face twisted, closed itself off.
"I contain all the dark that reminds you what light is."
Kurt laughed like he was joking, shook his head. "Where do you come up with this shit?"
Fossil slipped his wallet out of his back pocket. He took his library card out.
"The hell is this?" Kurt said, reaching for it.
"They're free, you know," Fossil said.
Kurt shook his head, handed the card back, shifted to pull a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
"Who's got time?"
"Not a single soul," Fossil said. "Turns out time has us."
But Kurt was on to something else, biting at the safety band on his lighter, trying fix it, to scuff spark into flame, to smoke one more before it was back to work.
#
Fossil says nothing of the years of land, the years and land. The envelopes sent back so often for food and medicine, then more for medicine than food, a number in mind he could reach and then return, another endless story since no amount fit that feeling, then one funeral and then another. He attended but then left again because he only had his one heart now and it went with him everywhere.
He never spoke these things into the smoke. They never asked. If they did, he would speak on the mirror men at the bar and the first, coldest sip of beer. The smooth feel of the magazine pages on his chapped fingertips. The silence of the public library, stories muzzled behind closed covers, inside tight bindings, how that quiet could be perforated by the slightest, sweetest creaking of a chair. His weekly meal at the Church for All God's People. Five dollars and he had fried chicken and greens and macaroni and cornbread, so much of it all the plate folded under the weight. His seat at a long table in the church basement, speaking quietly with strangers, everyone's lips slick, their greasy fingers pinching at napkins in front of their faces. Fossil never set foot in the church above them, though every new envelope in the apartment's drop ceiling read its name, its address. Why he didn't just send them he didn't know, though he took it for a kind of prayer.
He had wished so long for one thing, then the years and land, and now he couldn't figure a new wish. So, this quiet life, this steady work, the sweetest smoke to keep the bugs away, to make the day tolerable. If he said any of this it might sound sad instead of what it was: enough.
#
Sometime in the afternoon he let the pot die and the smoke fade out. They finished pouring the foundation and left it to cure in between the foundations they'd already done and the untouched lots yet to be dug.
"Tomorrow," Fossil said, and the others nodded. Before they drove off, in the cabs of their trucks, each one adjusted their rearview mirror, peered back over the empty mouths of their truck beds, out of habit and nothing more.
Then a series of groans as each trucks shifted into gear and the road opened in front of them like once upon a time. Behind them, Fossil cleaned up debris, paused once to take in the impossible sky, as they headed to places closed off from the world enough to call home, to tell themselves, to whisper in the quiet of familiar rooms, that the day was over.
Matthew Fiander was born in Massachusetts, but has spend the past two decades in North Carolina. His debut novel, RINGING IN YOUR EARS, was released this year via Main Street Rag. His writing is interested in work, in the things we do to get by or to find ourselves, and music, the sounds we surround ourselves with and the ones we make. His stories have appeared in many literary journals including Zone 3, Story Magazine, Massachusetts Review, and others. He lives and works in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.