Refresh, Refresh: Stories (10 page)

“I don’t know what to do,” she says. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do,” repeating this over and over until the words blur together, becoming only series of sounds.

Her boyfriend Dwayne has been drinking whiskey. There is something about whiskey, the way its brownness works through him and brings a wild blistering heat to his temper. A few minutes ago he worked his knuckles across her face until she bled from many places. Now he is outside with a bottle in one hand and a shotgun in the other. He is trying to blast the moon from its black place in the sky and the birdshot is hissing down on the trailer roof and Anne, for the life of her, doesn’t know what to do.

Jim tells her to call the police, and when she says she can’t—it will only make things worse—he tells her to leave, to come home, and when she says nothing he says it again—“Come home.”—and then again, until she begins to stuff her clothes into a duffel bag.

Then his daughter says, “Oh no.”

And Jim feels his heart clench when he realizes what he hears: a door slamming shut, footsteps clomping across linoleum, the quickened pace of his daughter’s breathing.

There is a rumbling sound—a voice—that sounds like a chair dragged harshly across hardwood, and in response to it his daughter screams, “You bastard, you asshole, you son of a bitch!”

And Jim continues to listen—to the screaming, the noise of furniture turning over, glass shattering—until the receiver is at last set harshly in its cradle and not for the first time Jim feels that she has gone someplace where he cannot follow.

After midnight, from the living room, with a mug of coffee steaming in his hand, Jim watches headlights appear at the end of his driveway. They grow brighter in their approach. This is his daughter. She is driving the same car she was driving when she left him at eighteen—a rusted-out Cavalier he found listed in the
Bend Bulletin
for two grand. Now she parks it before the garage and clicks on the dome light. He can see her, surrounded by a weak yellow light. She adjusts the rearview mirror and observes her reflection and takes out her compact and reapplies some foundation.

Even from here, even under all that makeup, her eyes are blackened hollows and her face appears sunken, rotten, as if there is already something dead about her.

She gets out of the car and climbs up the porch and Jim opens the door and they look at each other for a long minute. One of her eyes is swollen completely shut. An eggplant purple reaches up her nose. Her upper lip looks like someone took a syringe full of water to it. Looking at her, he feels something inside him stir and roll over, like a log with a rotted underside spotted with pale and squirming grubs. He feels the simultaneous urge to hug her and to yell at her for being such a fool, for getting herself into situation after situation.

Before he can act on either, she says more or less the same thing she said two weeks ago, and two weeks before that, her words as predictable as the creeping progress of autumn, the failing light, the changing shade of the leaves, the cold winds that come howling down from the mountains.

“He was in a rare mood,” she says, her voice dampened as if run through wet cotton. “But I talked to him—I just talked to him on my cell phone actually—and he’s better now. He’s sorry. He feels really terrible.” As if all that rage and drunkenness, burned away like mist under the sun, never existed at all.

Not for the first time Jim feels a vast distance from his daughter’s life. It is so unmistakably hers. She destroys it and shapes it as she wishes—her mind busy with decisions he cannot begin to understand—and what he says does not matter, not at all.

And so, when he welcomes his daughter inside, he can only give her a tight-mouthed smile that is like an accusation.

Jim cannot sleep, nor can he stay awake, so he lies in bed, lost somewhere in the black canyon of the night, a place where his daughter’s face emerges from the shadows to smile at him, and then to hiss. Muddled voices babble in his head and he more than once mistakes the sound of his own heart as a threat—as the ragged report of an assault rifle, as enemy troops stampeding toward him—and he is seized by a terrible panic where the air feels too warm and thick to breathe, like a sick green jungle fog that fills up his lungs and then his skull.

Near dawn he rolls to the edge of his bed and dangles his legs over the side. The stump of his left leg burns, as it always does in the morning, when he sits upright and the blood wants to go where it cannot. He pulls on the flesh-colored shaft that fits his prosthesis onto his leg. He knocks on it and it makes a hollow noise.

He brews some coffee and eats a banana and goes to the living room and clicks on the television and watches CNN. When it begins to loop through the same footage of Iraqi insurgents firing a rocket launcher at a Marine convoy, he gets up and walks down the hall to the closed door behind which she and the boy sleep.

He opens the door and a wedge of light falls into the room, onto the bed. She is lying on her side, on top of the covers, her back to him, with one arm thrown over the boy. She must hear him because she rolls over. He can see her bad eye, the white gleam of it, surrounded by purple tissue, watching him.

“Can’t sleep?” he says.

“You know what it’s like when you’re totally exhausted,” she says, “but your mind keeps going around and around in circles?”

“I know what that’s like,” he says. “But you don’t need to think about any of that right now. Just rest.”

He stands on the porch and watches the horizon redden. The redness creeps higher into the black bowl of the sky, taking it over. And then the sun arrives and throws light and shadows across the meadow. With its arrival, the air instantly warms, though not enough to melt the coldness in his stomach.

A low cackling draws his attention skyward, where he spots a flock of geese passing overhead. Their spearhead formation, headed south, seems to suggest that change is possible and necessary.

So he clomps down the porch and moves along the right fork of the gravel path to where she parked her car. He lays his hand on the hood as if over a slain animal before popping it open. He removes a jackknife from his pocket and thumbs open the blade. It gleams, catching the light. He leans over and locates each spark-plug cable where it enters the engine block at the piston site—and then he slices through them with the same precision as when he slices through a band of cartilage, a knot of ligaments.

Her cell phone has been going off all morning. She has her ringer set to play some sad country song he recognizes from the radio. Sometimes she ignores it and sometimes she answers it, and when she answers it she usually ends the conversation by snapping shut the phone and looking around, as if hunting for a cradle to slam it down on.

They are sitting at the kitchen table, drinking mugs of coffee, his third, her second, while the boy plays in some far corner of the house. The heavy silence between them makes his mouth go dry, so he brings the mug to his lips and drinks. The heat of it, its bitter blackness, burns down his throat, a welcome distraction.

Anne has both hands around her mug, as if she is cold and trying to steal what heat from it she can. The cell phone sits between them, like a big bullet, squared at one end and rounded at the other, gleaming silver.

It comes to life. She is bringing the coffee to her mouth when the noise of the ringer startles her. Coffee spills and races down her wrist. She brings the mug to the table in a hurry and shakes the heat off her hand, hissing through her teeth. She looks at Jim and Jim looks at her. She closes her eyes when she snatches up the phone and brings it to her ear.

Dwayne does most of the talking. Jim cannot hear what he is saying, but he can hear the changes in pitch and volume, the whines that interrupt the growls.

“All right,” his daughter eventually says. A pause, and then: “I said
all right
, Dwayne, all right?” She snaps shut the phone and bangs it softly against her forehead a few times.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes.” With the back of her hand she roughs a tear from her eye. “No.”

“Maybe I should talk to him.”

“
No.
Not on your life.” She holds the phone away from him as if he planned to grab it from her. “I can take care of myself.”

“You and I both know that’s not true.”

Again her phone chirps to life. Before she can answer it Jim stands and walks to where his daughter sits and grabs her wrist and squeezes it until she releases the phone into his other hand.

“Don’t answer it,” she says. “Please, please, please don’t answer it.”

He walks from the kitchen, through the living room, the front door—in his slow clomping way—out onto the porch. The phone continues to ring and fill up the morning with its shrill song. He adjusts the weight of it in his hand and in a windmill motion pitches it across a good thirty yards of meadow to where it strikes a tree and shatters into many silvery pieces.

His daughter screams
no
and grabs at his arm and he turns and sets his gaze on her with such force that she lets him go and begins to cry freely. “I need to get out of here,” she says and brings her hands to her face. “I need to go home.”

He is surprised by the severity of his voice when he says, “This
is
home.” He points to the porch for emphasis. “
This
is home.”

Thirty minutes later Jim is sitting on the couch and the boy is sprawled out on the floor, coloring in his coloring book. The fire is going, a fresh log recently set over the flames hissing and shuddering as the water inside it boils out.

The
Today Show
is on and the camera is trained on an anthropologist with a peppery beard who wears his glasses perched at the end of his nose. His new book has just come out and he is talking about it, about men and the fine line that separates them from beasts. One of his chapters is about New York in the late 1980s. He refers to this time as “The Wilding” and he tells Katie in a solemn voice about the mobs of men who haunted Central Park, their dark shapes scarcely glimpsed between the trees like wolves ranging for food. He talks about the female jogger who was attacked and raped, whose skull was crushed in.

Jim lowers the volume when his daughter emerges from her bedroom, her duffel bag in hand. She crouches next to the boy and pets his head before kissing the top of it. “Mommy is going to go now,” she says. “She’ll miss you.”

The boy does not stop coloring. If anything his crayon moves faster, disregarding the lines on the page, making red everywhere.

Anne stands then and runs her hand through her hair, pulling it back to study Jim with her bruised face fully revealed. The swelling has gone down and the bruises at first glance appear black, but have actually taken on the deeper, greener color of a horsefly. “If things aren’t okay, I’ll come back. Okay?”

Jim doesn’t nod or say okay, as she might read that as some kind of approval. He only lets his eyebrows rise a little on his forehead to acknowledge he heard her.

And so she leaves them—only to return a few minutes later, her footsteps pounding roughly on the porch before the door swings open. She rushes through it. “My goddamn car won’t start.” She throws down her duffel with a thump and holds out her hands, palms up. “It won’t even make a goddamn noise.”

“Huh,” Jim says.

“It’s like it’s completely dead. It won’t even make a sound.”

“Weird.”

“Well. Are you just going to sit there? Or are you going to give me a jump?”

He holds out his hand and says, “Help an old man up.”

Outside the sky is a wash of pale blue with a few cirrus clouds interrupting it, the clouds so thin and white, like fish bones.

His truck is parked beside her car, each of their hoods propped open with cables running between them and clipped onto their batteries. He has put on a good show for her, cranking the key, staring with concentration at the engine.

He is leaning under the hood when she creeps up next to him and tucks her hair behind her ears so she can see what he sees. “Any ideas?”

With his thumbnail he scrapes some black crud off the carburetor. “Far as I can tell everything looks all right.”

She makes a fist and brings it down on the battery. “I wonder what’s wrong with the stupid thing.”

“It’s an old car. It was an old car when you bought it.”

“I guess.” She blows a sigh out of her nose. “This is the last thing I need.”

“We’ll take it into the shop tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?
Today.
”

He unclips the cables from the battery. “Today I’m going to take you fishing.”

She retreats from him. “Dad. No. I need to get back to Dwayne.”

“The hell you do. You’re staying right here. And we’re all going fishing. You and me and the boy.”

“His name is Cody.”

“I know what his name is.”

Every week Jim excises the bones from animals and tosses them into a twenty-gallon garbage can. And every week he drags the garbage can from its corner of the taxidermy studio and straps it to his Gator—a glorified golf cart with six wheels and a diesel engine—and drives the hundred yards into the woods to the bone pile.

There are thirty years of bones in the bone pile. Skulls of all sizes, of elk and deer and bear and dogs and cats and birds, all of them with shadowy eye sockets and hairline fissures zigzagging along them. Crows have picked apart the spines into individual vertebrae, hollow white cups the rain runs through. Chipmunks scurry among the slatted rib cages. And there are pelvises, broken antlers, thighbones gnawed in half by coyotes hungry for the marrow. The pile reaches ten feet high in its center and stretches thirty feet wide.

This is what they drive by, when they huddle together in the Gator, on their way to the river, the Deschutes River, which rushes and purls through the eastern edge of his property. His daughter sits beside him and the boy sits behind them, in the bed of the Gator, among the poles, the cooler and thermos and tackle box. They follow a dirt road, rutted and washed out from so many years of snowmelt. They rattle across dry creek bottoms where the hoarfrost remains in the shadows and hollows. Pines loom all around them, and every now and then they duck their heads to dodge a low-hanging branch, as they twist deeper and deeper into the forest and finally arrive at the river.