Dog Run Moon (9 page)

“Night,” August said, getting up to go inside.

His father yawned and stretched. “Night,” he said.

Later, his parents' arguing had kept him awake, and the next morning his father hadn't rousted him for the morning milking—and soon after that Lisa was always around, and not long after that his mother had started spending time at the old house. At first, just a few nights a week, and then one morning she didn't come back to make breakfast and his father burned the toast and slammed the door on his way to the barn.

August tied his boots. He climbed up to the haymow and surprised two cats that had been intently pawing at a dead sparrow on the hay-littered floor. He broke one's back with a quick chop of the wrench, and stunned the other one with a jab to the head. The cats were indistinct as they writhed, blurred in the gloom. August silenced their yowling, each with a sharp blow from the wrench, and then gave chase to a few more slinking forms that eluded him by leaping to join their wailing, spitting clan in the rafters.

August didn't curse much. His father always said that no one took a man seriously who cursed too much, and it was better to be the type of man who, when he
did
curse, made everyone else sit up and take notice.

Now, however, in the dark barn with the hay dander swirling around his face, and the cats twitching and seething out of reach above him, he cursed.

“Motherfucker,” he said. “Motherfucking, cocksucking, shitfaced, goddamn fucking cats.”

It was the most curse words he'd ever strung together, and he hoped the cats were sitting up to take notice, trembling at the rain of fire that was about to be visited down upon their mangy heads.

At the old house his mother had the blinds drawn. She had cut a ragged hole in a quilt, pulled it over her head, and belted it around her waist, poncho style. Her arms stuck out, bare, and the quilt ends dragged over the floor when she got up to let him in. With the shades drawn, it was dark. She had lit an old kerosene lamp and the flame guttered, sending up tendrils of black smoke. She had been playing solitaire. There was a fried pork chop steaming in a pan on the table.

“You want some lunch?” she said after she had settled herself down in her chair, smoothing the quilt down under her and over her bare legs. “I'm finished. You can have the rest.”

She slid the pork chop over to August. It hadn't been touched. He took a bite. It was seared crispy on the outside and juicy and tender on the inside, quick fried in butter and finished in the oven. That's how she always made pork chops. Lisa wouldn't know how to do this, he thought. His father would get so fed up with dried-out tough pork chops that he might send her away, and his mother might come back to the new house and he'd start helping his dad with the barn chores again.

“Are you still not eating?” He picked up the pork chop to gnaw at the bone where the best tasting meat always lived.

“Augie, that's a common misconception about us breatharians. I eat. Good lord, I eat all the time. Here, actually, let me have one more bite of that.” She leaned over and wafted her hand around his pork chop, bringing the smell toward herself, and then took a quick, hiccupping little breath and smiled and leaned back in her seat. “Meat from an animal you know always has the best flavor,” she said, lighting one of her little cigars. “That's something city people probably don't understand. You remember taking kitchen scraps out to that hog every night after dinner? You fed that animal and now it feeds you. That lends a certain something to the savor—I'm sure there's a word for it in another language.”

She pulled her quilt tighter around her shoulders. “Did you know that, Augie? That there are all sorts of words for things in other languages that we don't have in English? It's like your soul is tongue-tied when that happens, when you have a feeling or experience that you can't explain because there isn't a specific word for it. If you knew all the languages in the world, you could express yourself perfectly and all experiences would be understandable to you because you would have a word, a perfect word, to attach to any possible occasion. See what I mean?”

August wiped his greasy hands on his jeans. He was fairly certain his mother was naked under her quilt. He wondered if there was a word for that in another language. A word to classify the feeling you get sitting across from your mother, eating a pork chop, with your mother naked under a quilt.

“I don't know,” he said. “Just because you have a word to put on something doesn't mean you understand it any better. Does it?”

“Oh, I think so. Definitely. I don't think things really exist until we can name them. Without names for every living thing, the world is populated by spooks and monsters.”

“Just because you give something a name doesn't mean you change what it is. It's still the same thing.”

“You couldn't be more wrong, Augie dear. How about death?”

“What about it?”

“What if instead of death everyone called it being born and looked forward to it as the great reward at the end of seventy or so years of slow rot on earth?”

“That doesn't make any sense. Why would anyone look forward to death?”

“Maybe you're too young for this conversation,” she said, coughing into the back of her hand. “That's an interesting thought. I bet in some language there is a word for the state you exist in now—the state of being incapable of formulating concepts of, or discussing abstractly, death in all its various forms, due to a lack of experience. You need to have someone you love die, and then you get it. All the understanding of the world comes rushing in on you like a vacuum seal was broken somewhere. I'm not saying you'll ever understand why the world works the way it does, but you'll surely come to the conclusion that it does work, and that, as a result, it will absolutely someday come to a grinding halt, as nothing can work forever. See what I mean?”

“No.”

“Huh. Well, in time you will. I'm sure.”

She picked up her solitaire game and shuffled the cards, splitting the deck, riffling the ends together with a brisk splat, and then condensing the deck back together by making the cards bow and bridge and shush into one. August sat listening, enjoying the sound of her shuffling, thinking, knowing she was wrong. He
had
loved someone who had died.

“How's the job coming?”

“Not great.”

“Motivational issues?”

“No. They're just fast. I've been thinking about a change of tactics.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I don't know if it will work. Can I borrow some bowls?”

Lisa stayed for dinner again. August sensed that his life was now split in two distinct pieces. There was the part when Skyler was alive, when his father and mother and he had all lived in the new house, and now, this new part, where things were foggy and indistinct. August twirled Lisa's spaghetti around on his fork and realized, for the very first time, that the whole of his life up until this very point existed in the past, which meant it didn't exist at all, not really. It might as well have been buried right there in the pasture next to Skyler.

It was dark and cool in the barn and he switched on the radio for company. August hadn't been able to sleep, and he'd risen early—before Lisa, even—and he hadn't had breakfast and his stomach rumbled as he climbed the wooden ladder up to the haymow. In the darkness he could see the faint pinpricks of stars through the knotholes and chinks of the barn planks, and then his groping fingers found the pull chain and the haymow was flooded with fluorescent light.

The floor was carpeted with twisted feline forms, tabbies, calicos, some night black, some pure white, intermingled and lumpy and irrevocably dead. They lay like pieces of dirty laundry where they'd fallen from their perches after the tainted milk had taken its hold on their guts. August coughed and spit, slightly awed, thinking about last night, and the way the antifreeze had turned the bluish white milk a sickly rotten green. He nudged a few of the still forms with his boot and looked to the rafters and found them empty except for one, where he spotted a calico, its dead claws stuck in the joist so it dangled there, like a shabby, moth-eaten piñata.

He pulled his shirt cuffs into his gloves against the fleas jumping everywhere, and began pitching the cats down the hay chute. As he worked the voice of Paul Harvey found its way up from the radio on the ground floor.

There's going to be unrest. There's always going to be unrest but things always get better. Tomorrow will always be better. Just think about it, is there any time in history in which you'd rather live than now? I'll leave you with that thought. I'm Paul Harvey, and now you know the rest of the story.

August climbed down the ladder and stepped shin deep into a pile of cats. He got out his jackknife and stropped it a few times against the side of his boot and set to work separating the cats from their tails. He pushed the cats into the conveyor trough as he worked and when he was done he flipped the wall switch to set the belt moving. August watched the cats ride the conveyor until all of them went out of sight under the back wall of the barn. Outside, they were falling from the track to the cart on the back of the manure spreader. He didn't go out to look but he imagined them piling up, covering the dirty straw and cow slop, a stack of forms as lifeless and soft as old fruit, furred with mold. Tomorrow or the next day his father would hook the cart up to the tractor and drive it to the back pasture to spread its strange load across the cow-pocked grass.

It took him a long time to nail the tails to the board and as he pounded the last one they were already stiffening. The sky was just starting to take on the milky light of predawn when August carried the board up to the new house. In the mudroom he stopped and listened. There was no sound of his father and Lisa in the kitchen but he knew they'd be up soon. He leaned his board against the coatrack, directly over his father's barn boots, and regarded his work as it was, totem and trophy, altogether alien against a backdrop of lilac-patterned wallpaper.

August tried to whistle as he walked across the lawn and down the hill to the old house. He'd never gotten the hang of whistling. The best he could muster was a spit-laced warble. On the porch he wiped at his lips with the back of his sleeve and looked in the window. His mother was at the kitchen table. She held a card in her hand, raised, as if she were deciding her next move but August could see that the cards in front of her were scattered across the table in disarray, a jumbled mess, as if they'd been thrown there.

O
n the last day of class before summer vacation, his students—all fifteen of them, ranging in age from eight to sixteen—filed out the door saying their goodbyes. Before leaving, one of his sixth graders, Molly Hanchet, stopped at his desk. She had red hair and freckles and, in five years, would likely be Park County's Fourth of July rodeo queen. After that, she would go on to premed at Stanford. She had her thumbs hooked in the straps of her backpack and she said, “Have a good summer, Mr. Colson. I hope next year you feel better.”

She left, and James was forced to ponder the implications. It had to be bad if a sixth-grade girl could see that he was fucked.

Carina lived in a small rental cabin on the river, set back in a grove of old cottonwoods. Once, in a windstorm, he'd lain awake, envisioning whole trees shearing off at rotten points in their trunks, branches punching through the roof, flattening him and Carina in the bed. He imagined them being found out that way.

Carina wasn't home and he sat on her front step. He was preparing to leave when her car pulled in behind him. She got out and groaned at the sight of him. “I've had a bad day,” she said, “I don't know if I can handle you right now.”

“Maybe I've come here to profess my undying love.”

She snorted.

They did it with her bent over the small two-burner stove, her skirt up around her waist. In their frantic movements, one of them nudged a burner switch and soon the cabin was full of a strange odor. James thought for a moment that he was having some sort of olfactory response to imminent ejaculation. And then Carina was slapping him and swearing. A section of her hair had begun to curl and smoke.

He sat at the foot of the bed facing her. She was on her back inspecting the ends of her hair.

“God,” she said, “what a day.”

“She's moving her stuff out right now. That's partly why I'm here. I can't really go home for a while. I drove by the house, and she was loading boxes.”

Carina didn't say anything. She wet her fingertips in her mouth and rubbed at a burnt end.

“Boxes. Moving, dying, breaking up. All life's great tragedies are marked by the appearance of those goddamn square cardboard units. Such an ominous shade of brown.” He'd thought of this earlier today, and now it pleased him to say it. He wished she'd come to his side of the bed and put her hand on his leg. He didn't think that was asking too much.

“Fuck,” Carina said. “I may have to get a haircut to fix this.”

“Part of me didn't actually believe that she was going to leave. We had some serious work-it-out talks. We went camping up on the Stillwater last weekend. We sat side by side next to the campfire. She said the stars above were like a
million diamonds
. She said that. I almost asked her to marry me.”

Carina was pressing her hands to her face. Her fingernails, as always, were immaculate, painted a brilliant red. Each nail was like a little cherry hard candy that James wanted to crush between his teeth.

“I'm serious,” he said. “I was going to propose. And you know what? Why
can't
the stars above be like a million diamonds? And why, when she said that, did I want to tell you about it immediately?” James stopped. There was some sort of noise emerging from behind Carina's hands, both of which were now clamped over her mouth. Her fingernails were digging into her cheeks and her eyes were screwed shut. And then she rose from the bed and he could hear her retching in the bathroom.

When she emerged, her dark hair was in beautiful disarray. She was brushing her teeth, one arm crossed over her bare breasts.

Carina had come from San Francisco on a grant to teach creative writing to at-risk girls on the Crow Reservation. She was writing a book about her experiences. For someone who could be so sarcastic, downright caustic, it surprised James to see the level of earnestness with which she approached her job. She loved it. She loved the at-risk girls—a classification that, on the reservation, seemed synonymous with the general population. She approached each class day with happy anticipation. If he happened to entertain the idea of staying over on a school night, she would kick him out so she could prepare. She was a teacher and he was a teacher, but what she did was something completely different. He fully acknowledged that. She had a passion. He enjoyed the really nice sense of calm that came from having good health benefits.

She sometimes read him sections of stories or poems, written by her girls. James had to admit that some of the stuff was pretty remarkable. There was one he always remembered, the words themselves and the way Carina had read it, in bed, naked, on her stomach with her feet up in the air, her heels knocking together in time with the words.
I look at him, the boy that doesn't love me, and it's like a badger has climbed into my chest. The badger tramples my stomach while it chews on my heart.

Carina got in bed. She continued to brush her teeth. She also started to cry.

“I'm sorry,” James said. “I shouldn't have been talking about all that stuff. It's been tough for me lately and I'm—”

Carina was shaking her head, pointing at the kitchen. “Can you get me a glass to spit in?” she said, her voice garbled by toothpaste.

When he returned with the glass she spit, handed it to him, and then rolled in bed to face the wall.

“Today Ellen Yellowtail went to the bathroom and sawed through her wrists with an obsidian spearpoint from the early Clovis era. She asked to be excused and was gone for twenty minutes, and I had a weird feeling and I went into the bathroom and there was blood under one of the stall doors and she was in there. James, she was still kind of moving around, slowly, in a pool of her own blood. She was making, like, fish movements or something. Trying to swim through the floor. That will never go away. I will have that forever. And then, on the way home today, I literally caught myself thinking, for a split second,
Damn you, Ellen, you little bitch. Do you have any idea what kind of thing you have just lodged in my brain?
Can you believe that? What kind of person thinks that in response to something like this?

James was still holding the glass with Carina's toothpaste spit in it. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “An obsidian spearpoint? The Clovis era?”

“In science class, they were having a prehistoric unit. Apparently, there was a guest speaker from Montana State who brought visual aids. Ellen pocketed it at some point when no one was looking. Last week I asked them to write me a paragraph about some of their writing goals for the summer. She wrote that she had gotten a job at the Dairy Queen and that she was going to carry a little notebook in her waitress apron so she could just jot down observations about all the interesting people she would see. That's how she put it. She was going to observe and
jot things down
. No one who
jots things down
kills themselves.”

James got in bed and put his arms around her. He'd come to tell her that he was leaving. It seemed rather impossible now—the telling, not the leaving.

In the morning, Carina still sleeping, he pointed the car south. It was green-up, the best time to be driving through the great swaths of western grassland. Crossing Wyoming was like riding a fresh swell of chlorophyll. He pushed his way into Colorado until he hit the front range traffic on I-25 and then he got a room and ate a bad meal and watched sports highlights before surrendering to the pull of stiff hotel sheets.

He was up early, an egg sandwich and coffee to go. Past Denver, the traffic eased and the land flattened. It was still Colorado, but it could have been anywhere. Eventually he broke out and covered the skinny Oklahoma panhandle in about the time it took to listen to a full Townes Van Zandt album. And then—just as the sun cracked itself down on the vast, oil pump–studded plain that stretched around as far as he could see—James crossed over into Texas.

His brother lived in a maze of culs-de-sac and identical two-story homes with two-car garages. The streets were named after trees or Ivy League colleges. James imagined that if you lined up all the kids and golden retrievers of the neighborhood on the sidewalk, they, too, would prove indistinguishable.

Casey's wife, Linda, met him at the door. She was big and brassy and blond. James had seen her in a bikini once, and she had the Lone Star of Texas tattooed on the small of her back. She pressed a beer into his hand and led him into the study, where, predictably, Casey had deigned to remain instead of coming out to meet James. Like Don Corleone, he had always enjoyed
receiving
visitors, especially family members, as opposed to just greeting them, like a normal person.

Casey was sitting at his desk, shuffling some papers. He looked up, surprised, as if he hadn't known James was there, as if he hadn't heard him talking to his wife in the kitchen. He stood, they shook hands, and then Casey pulled him into an awkward hug, both of them leaning over the expanse of desktop between them.

They hadn't seen each other in almost a year, and they launched into all the usual topics—last year's presidential election, weather as of late, the state of the MSU men's basketball program, their respective health, their mother's continued descent into Jesus-tinctured battiness.

Linda brought them sandwiches and more beer. When she put the plates down in front of them they each got a smile, a “there ya go” and a personalized heartwarming southern term of endearment. He got “honey” and Casey got “darlin'.”

“Damn it, Casey,” James said while Linda was still within earshot, “why is your wife such a horrible nag?”

“Oh, you stop,” she said. “Ya'll are too bad. Ya'll holler if you need anything.” And then she went back to the living room to watch TV.

James had read somewhere that a study done of three thousand American couples found that those engaged in traditional gender roles—male breadwinner, female homemaker—were 50 percent happier than couples who comported themselves less conventionally. He thought about mentioning this to Casey, but decided against it. In general his brother was not a man who needed validation that his ways were correct.

Casey got up and closed the door to his study. He poured two glasses of whiskey from a decanter on the sideboard and gave one to James gravely before settling back into his chair. James knew he was loving this. Casey leaned back and sipped his whiskey.

“Well,” he said. “What's the deal? You having a bit of trouble?”

Casey was a lawyer. One of the most unsatisfying parts of his life, as far as James could tell, was how infrequently his family members needed legal counsel. It was endearing how ready he was to spring into action, to roll up his sleeves and get litigious to preserve the family honor. “Going to Billings to get a new muffler put on your car, you say? Well if you get in any trouble over there you call me, understand?” At some point, James realized he might have to get himself incarcerated, just to make Casey feel needed.

“It's not really a legal matter,” he said. “Affairs of the heart and all that.” Casey shrugged, disappointed. Somehow, most of his whiskey was already gone. “Hell, I don't know, Casey. I just needed a change of scenery. Do you mind if I loaf around for a little bit?”

“My
casa es tu casa,
brother, you know that.”

“
Gracias, amigo.
Let's drink more of your fancy whiskey.” James watched Casey pour them both more bourbon, man-sized slugs this time, and he thought that Casey seemed more at home here in his den, with his wrinkle-resistant khakis and his big-haired wife in the next room, than any man had a right to be. If it were anyone other than his brother, he might have hated him for it.

They reached across the desk and touched glasses. “Nice to see you, brother,” Casey said.

“It is,” James said.

Casey leaned back and kicked his feet up on the desk. He wore fleece-lined moccasins.

“Nice slippers.”

“They aren't slippers. They're house shoes.”

“What's the difference?”

“The sole on these is slightly more rugged, I believe. One could feasibly spend a short amount of time out of doors with them. Linda got them for me for Christmas. She's been making baby noises.”

“What do those sound like?”

“ ‘Casey, honey, my ovaries are speaking to you right now. They're parched. They're starting to wither. Are you going to fertilize this garden or what, boy?' ”

“She says that?”

“And worse. Much worse. That's the version generally fit for public consumption.”

“You might as well just do it. What's there to wait for? You're rich. You could support a small tribe.”

“A boy wouldn't be too bad. I'd like that, actually. But a girl, I don't know if I could take it. And this isn't something I can talk to Linda about very well.”

“What's wrong with having a girl? Girls love their daddies. You wouldn't have to fight with her like you would a boy. Linda would get to have all the awkward talks.”

Casey took a drink of his whiskey and swished it audibly around in his mouth. He swallowed and grimaced. “One time I was involved with a gal that liked me to put my hand around her throat and squeeze. I mean, she liked me to choke her, James. Now, can you tell me what happens to make a little girl grow up to become a woman who wants something like that?”

James laughed and then he saw that Casey was serious. “I'm not sure,” he said. “But, how'd you handle that situation? I mean, did you, you know?” James made a gripping motion with his hand.

Casey shook his head. He drank the rest of his whiskey and set the glass down carefully on a coaster shaped like a bass.

“Shit, man, I did more than that. I married her.”

It was mid-June, and North Texas was a smoking hot plate. In the cotton fields outside of town, farmers were doing something to raise the dust. There was nothing to see and you couldn't see it if there was.