American Masculine (14 page)

With nightfall the landscape was harder to make out. She was struck by the conviction that she’d built a life but to what end, and this solitary thought broke her. She rose, walked from the garden out over the lawn, alongside the house to the front driveway, to her car. She got in, found her keys where she’d placed them under the floormat, and turned the ignition. From his bedroom John had seen her leave the garden. She looked brisk and stern. He stood in the bay window. They could see each other, and she shook her head, then backed the car down the drive into the street and drove away.

SHANNON MADE A quick excuse to John and Katherine, loaded Jessie into the car, and pushed the gas until he saw the brake lights of Tori’s car a half mile in front at a stoplight. He kept his distance and followed her as she curved along the on-ramp and drove east on I-90. At the Twenty-seventh Street exit he expected her to turn north toward work. She didn’t, and this threw him. Still he followed, his emotions at bay some, not so raw as when he thought he might have to do something drastic. He had planned to wait outside her work, let her and John get settled, then walk in and see what he would see. Now he had no plan. He slowed and let her car go out of sight.

Tori’s fists were small and white on the wheel. She took the off-ramp toward home.

In the house she mounted the stairs to the top floor, the master bedroom, the master bath, to the small office she’d carved out of the spare room up there. She sat at the desk and turned on her computer. She found the website for the Miles City Star and typed in her own name. The search was empty. She typed her name again, her full name. No results. In the search box on the browser, she typed Victoria Smith and Shannon Secrest, and found, “Secrest Wedding on Sunday Creek.” The article gave a few details, hardly anything at all, the day and location, their names.

She sat with her fingers on the keyboard. Then she heard Shannon as he entered the laundry room from the garage. The house was dark; she’d failed to turn on the lights.

“You there?” he called. “You there, Victoria?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m here.”

She shut down the computer and went to the open doorway. Shannon ascended the stairs with Jessica asleep in his arms. He entered the master bedroom, drew back the covers and put her in, enfolding her in the down coverlet. In the bathroom, he brushed his teeth, made himself ready, and went to bed, positioning himself beside the child. He didn’t know what to say. He thought of calling out to his wife, calling her to bed, but he believed if he said something he might also cry. He covered his eyes with the palms of his hands. The words wouldn’t come. He said nothing.

Tori went back to her desk and sat in the dark. He’s not what I want, she thought. She was seated with her hands in her lap. No one is, she whispered. When the house was still she rose. She readied herself for bed, staring in the mirror at the white of her face, the arch of bone above her eyes, the iris of the eye blue-green and streaked with gray, iridescent as the breast of a bird, her eyes so like her daughter’s, and faintly like Shannon’s. She touched her face and walked to the bed and got in on the side opposite her husband. She lifted Jessie and drew her in, matching Jessie’s small frame to the curve of her own body. She put her lips to Jessie’s neck and breathed.

“No work tonight?” Shannon’s voice was loud in the quiet.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t have the heart for it after all.”

“I don’t want to hold you back,” he said.

He reached past Jessie and moved his hand toward Tori’s hand and encircled her fingers. Tori lay there, feeling the weight of him, the largeness of his hand, the big bones. The moon’s light was silver in the room. She took her hand away and felt him pause. She touched her foot to his. She was tired. She breathed in, exhaled. The line of her body fell, then rose.

He placed his hand on her hip, and she slept.

—for my brother, Kral

“Which of you fathers, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?”
—Luke 11:11

SEVEN DAYS after Devin graduated with honors from Montana State University his father stood over him and broke his nose. That was seventeen years ago; Devin hadn’t been back to Montana since.

Then his father called from Bozeman.

“Why don’t you come up and stay awhile?” he said.

“No desire,” said Devin.

It was eight thirty where Devin was, nine thirty in Montana. From the chrome chair beside his bed Devin stared at the city again, out over the bank of lights and the blending they went through as the night took shape. He said what he said, then was quiet.

Devin had left in the off-white Vega on three semibald tires and one whitewall, two retreads in the trunk for spares. His mom’s side of the family gave him the car for a dollar and it took him three days and all six tires to make it as far south as he could, south and west to the city where he’d forgotten his father and commenced laddering the backbones of corporations.

“I’d like to pay for you to come up,” his father said.

“I’m a banker,” Devin replied.

Devin balanced ledgers and paid accounts, justified things from a desk on the eighth floor of the Bank of America building in Santa Monica. Two and a half years ago his wife had left with a friend of his named Beck. She’d taken Devin’s daughter with her, cross-country to shut his mouth. He had nothing to say. He never gave what she desired. He drank more, and since they’d gone he hadn’t slept much. My father knows nothing of me, he thought.

“I’d like to pay for the plane ticket,” his father said. Then the line went quiet again.

He’d been calling every Sunday for some months now, so Devin was used to the pauses, how he took his time saying things, then waited for Devin to respond. And Devin had warmed some to him. But saying he’d pay for the ticket, Devin told himself, it’s not how this thing would be done.

HIS FATHER met him at Gallatin Field near Belgrade, the Montana version of an airport: two gates, one baggage claim. When Devin deplaned, his father stood in a small ring of people at the west door up on the second floor, in among the glass and stone architecture. It was after dark. He moved toward Devin.

“Nice to see you,” he said, and grabbed at Devin’s hand with both of his and shook it firmly. “Glad you’re safe.”

“Yeah,” said Devin.

They descended a cement stairwell, squares of granite embedded in the banisters. A silence set in as they made their way down. Dad will try to find something to say, thought Devin.

“I think they let the bags in over here,” his father said, and led Devin to a small metal garage door, the rolltop kind, attached to a steel bin that slanted to the floor. A couple of men in light-blue workshirts hoisted bags. Devin lifted his two out. His father took the heavier one. “Thanks,” said Devin.

“Truck’s out here,” his father said, and he walked into the mostly empty parking lot, off toward his beat-up Ford. The pickup was parked far out on the edge of the square, just outside a cone of amber light cast by a high steel lightpost.

“Not too clean,” he said as he tipped the passenger seat forward to put the bags in. Behind the seat the space was full of blankets and old coats, overlaid by a .243 and a .22. The cab smelled of deer blood.

Devin remembered the guns. He noted the .243 had a new scope on it and thought the stock on the .22 was even darker than it had been, smoothed out by the placement of shoulder and cheekbone. Devin’s father put the bag down, carefully lifted out the .243, and handed it to Devin. “Hold this, please,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Devin as he took it in his right hand. The cold feel of the wood and the sheen of the gun barrel were foreign to him now, but still strangely familiar. The gun was heavy. He set his bag down and held the stock and the wood beneath the barrel, and he liked how it brought a good feeling of things that had been gone from his mind for years: early mornings, day trips with his father.

His father removed the .22 and positioned Devin’s gear flatly in among the mess, then placed the rifles over the bags and pushed the guns down so they wouldn’t slide or bump each other. The way he handled the guns reminded Devin of his father’s third or fourth call, a few months back. Devin could hear how delicate things were for his father then, how near he was to something he both desired and feared.

“I’ve been thinking a whole lot,” his father had said, “about the man I was to your mother. About the kind of father I’ve been to you.”

“Uh-huh,” Devin had said.

“Ugly,” his father said. “Gave your mother hate. Hated myself.

Didn’t have much guts. No good to you either. I guess I get what I deserve.”

“I guess you do,” Devin had said.

“I’d like to make it up to you,” his father replied.

Devin had gone quiet, his bitterness still charged with his father’s image. Add to it the void he felt over his wife, over the dying they’d gone through and the fortress she’d made of herself and the child.

“I was wrong to you,” Devin’s father had said. “No kind of man.”

Devin let the silence be. Then they’d said their good-byes.

But past 2:00 a.m. he was wide awake in his bed. He lay on his back with his arms straight as he stared at a span of wall about three feet in length between the upper steel molding of the window and the black crease of the ceiling. Finally, he slept, and he dreamed.

When he awoke it was still dark. He felt very cold, especially around his wrists, ankles, and neck. He remembered three things: a set of false teeth on a nightstand; the color red; and an image of his child, Bethen, two years old, lying near his dead father. Her cheek was pressed to his father’s cheek and her nose was near his mouth. She inhaled a white vapor, seeming to draw it from his father’s mouth in a long, slow breath. His father’s hand was on her back. Devin couldn’t place himself in the room. But she searched him with her eyes. Her cheek still touched his father’s face. Her small, tender arms were around his father’s neck. She stared quietly at Devin. Watching her, Devin felt she knew his desperate motivations, his frailties. The dream troubled him immensely and he told himself then he would return to Montana.

THEY ENTERED Bozeman from the west. Devin’s father lived a few blocks south of I-90 in a set of old two-story buildings that lined the edge of an industrial zone. The apartment was on the ground floor, a narrow box with a bathroom just left of the door, then a hallway that opened to a kitchen and living room/bedroom area. “This okay?” he asked and he set Devin’s bag down where the edge-eaten linoleum ended against the dull green carpet of the living space.

“Okay,” Devin said.

At the kitchen table, a metal and fiberboard rectangle barely big enough for two, they sat over the potatoes and fried deer meat his father had kept warm for him.

“I bet it’s been awhile,” Devin’s father said.

“Yeah,” said Devin.

“Nice fat doe,” his father said. “Standing right next to a four-by-five over near Big Timber at the foot of the Crazies.”

His father had taken him there when he was a boy. Devin pictured a big whitetail, the brown-gold rack of horns, four points on one side, five on the other.

“Bright, sunny day,” the older man recollected. He looked into Devin’s face and placed his hand on Devin’s forearm. Devin wanted to draw back when he did this, but he was struck by his own weariness and by a remembrance of all the late-night walking he’d been doing, down hallways and stairwells, or out wandering Pico, or Wilshire, along the unlit places on Third Street, where he shuffled with his head turned down over his coat beneath the crisscrossed maze of fat electric whir. It was a numbing he went through to get some sleep.

“Good to have you here,” Devin’s father said.

Devin noticed his father’s face, the lines and the skin beneath his eyes, the lack of tension in his jaw, the full head of hair, silver and smooth, turned up and back by the way he pushed his hands through it. The bones of his cheeks were hard beneath the loose skin. He was a tall man, awkwardly folded into the short-armed kitchen chair, broad shouldered as he faced Devin, more a man of mountain and stream than the linear structure of the small apartment space. Devin remembered a weekend his father was hunting bighorns on a tag he’d drawn in the Bridgers. A whiteout had swept in from the northern Rockies, down the gap from Glacier through a north-south corridor that lent force and snap to the cold. In little more than a pair of garage-sale wool pants and a hunting jacket, he had spent the night shouldering the slant of a granite outcropping, shielded some from the wind. When he came in late the next afternoon, Devin and his mom had watched him unload his vehicle. He described the night as uneventful. Devin had had to heat the oilpan on his mom’s car that morning. She’d had it plugged in too. “What was it like out there?” Devin asked him.

“Windy,” his father answered.

“Where did you sleep?” Devin asked.

“On that rocky bend near Leland’s pass,” his father had said.

DEVIN’S FATHER moved about the kitchen, attending to him. Devin noticed his eyes. They had an open quality, no longer the brooding or the sharp anger that consumed and concealed. Just a sense of sorrow now, Devin thought, and the tiredness of how he carries himself. It’s hard to find the violence in him anymore or the fear in me.