Refresh, Refresh: Stories (7 page)

“What?”

“Look. It turned out to be a beautiful day, didn’t it?” And he was right—it was—the kind of bright blue day that bleached everything of its color. “How about let’s enjoy it?” He regarded the dead man and I noticed his cheek bulge, his tongue probing the side of his mouth. “Tomorrow we’ll drive to John Day and tell the police. But not today.”

Boo crept toward the dead man, his muscles tense, his body low, as if certain the blackened pile of bones and sinew would leap up at any moment and
attack
. When it didn’t, his movements loosened and he panted happily and waded into the spring to drink.

“Okay, Justin?”

I looked at my feet—something I do when gathering my thoughts—and there discovered a weather-beaten pack of Marlboros, the cigarettes that could not kill the dead man quick enough. “Okay,” I said in a voice I hardly recognized as my own. “Fine.”

From faraway came the sound of a diesel horn, a logging truck rocketing along a distant highway, reminding me that no matter how much this felt like the middle of nowhere, it wasn’t.

We made our camp twenty yards upstream from the dead man. While Boo splashed along the banks, chasing the silvery flashes of fish, I set to work digging a new firepit and my father unloaded from the Bronco our rifles and fishing poles and cooler and duffel bags and his old army-issue canvas tent. It leaked and smelled like mothballs and mildew and every night I had ever spent in it, I woke up swollen and sneezing.

That Christmas I had bought him a new tent from REI—one of those fancy waterproof, windproof four-man deals with a lifetime guarantee and a screened-in moonroof.

“Dad?” I said, and he said, “What?”

“What happened to the new tent I bought you?”

“This has been a good tent for us.” He patted it fondly. “I like
this
tent.” He did not look at me, but set to work unfolding the canvas and planting the stakes.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” My voice went high and I tried to control it. “That tent cost me nearly three hundred fucking dollars and you’re just going to let it rot in the attic?”

He finished hammering a stake into the ground and stood up and straightened his posture to accentuate his six-foot frame. Beneath his stare I felt as if I had shrunk a good five inches, as if my chest hair and muscles had receded—and I became seventeen all over again.

That was the year Mom and I bought him a bicycle for his birthday, an eighteen-speed Trek. “Boy,” he had said when he ran his hands along it. “Wow.” That night he stripped off every gear except the hardest and from then on rode it all up and down the country highways with a terrible grimace on his face.

A grimace similar to the one he wore now, eyeing me with a hand resting on his belly. “I didn’t ask for the thing,” he said, “and I didn’t want it.” He began to rub his belly as if to summon his anger from it like a genie. “And when are you going to learn that quality doesn’t always come with a price tag? Just listen to you. You’re as bad as a Californian.”

Just then Boo came trotting over to us, grinning around a femur bone with a strip of denim sticking to it. My father said, “Release,” and took the bone and stood there, holding it, staring at it, not knowing what to do. Boo wagged his whole body along with his tail and my father looked at me. What he was feeling then, I didn’t know. His emotion was masked from me, hidden behind his beard.

We plopped our lines in the South Fork and came away with five rainbow trout, each the size of my forearm. We gutted them and threw their heads in the river. We fried them in a pan with a few strips of bacon. We ate and drank and sat in silence. The only sound was the rushing of the river and the occasional
crack
of an opened Coors can. My father was like a still-life painting, his hand on Boo’s head, motionless and watching the fire with a detached expression.

I wanted to shake him and hit him and hug him at once. I wanted to get back in the Bronco and return the way we came. I considered sleeping on the bare ground, but the gathering clouds and the nearness of the dead man drove me inside the musty tent.

I woke to absolute darkness and the dull even noise of rainfall. The entire world seemed to hiss. I clicked on my flashlight, revealing a tent that drooped and breathed around me with many damp spots dripping and pattering my sleeping bag.

Have you ever noticed, when you lay your head to your pillow and listen—
really
listen—you can hear footsteps? This is your pulse, the veins in your ear swelling and constricting, slightly shifting against the cotton. I heard this now—a sort of
under
sound, beneath the rain—only my head was nowhere near my pillow. I had propped myself up on my elbow.

There it was. Or was I only imagining it? The rasping thud a foot makes in wet grass—one moment behind the tent, the next moment before it, circling.

Before I went to bed, as a sort of afterthought, I had tied shut the front flaps. Now they billowed open with the breeze, the breeze bearing the keen wet odor of rabbitbrush, a smell I will always associate with barbed-wire fences, with dying, with fear.

Perhaps the knot had come undone with the wind or perhaps my father had risen to pee. Outside, thousands of raindrops caught my flashlight’s beam and brightened with it. I imagined something out there, rushing in—how easy it would be—its shape taking form as it moved from darkness into light.

My father released a violent snore. I spotlit him with the flashlight, wanting to tell him
shh
. His fingers twitched like the legs of the dreaming dog he draped his arm over. His mouth formed silent words, his eyeballs shuddered beneath his eyelids, and I wondered what was going on in there, inside of him.

Morning, a sneezing fit woke me. And after I wiped the gunk from my eyes and pulled on my jeans, I discovered outside the dewy grass trampled down, and before the tent, a boot. Its leather was badly torn and discolored, as if it had passed through the digestive tract of a large animal. I stepped around it, keeping an eye on it, on my way to the firepit. We had stored some wood in the tent with us and I kindled it now with newspaper and boiled water for coffee.

The smell of the grounds woke my father. He emerged from the tent in his white T-shirt and his once-white BVDs. He stretched and yawned dramatically and the noise brought Boo from the tent. Boo promptly picked up the boot with his teeth and presented it to my father as a cat would a dead mouse. “Goddamnit, Boo,” my father said and picked up the boot and shook it at him. “Bad dog.
Bad
dog.” Boo yipped once and cocked his head in confusion and my father examined the boot before hurling it into the river, saying, “Thing looks like a hay baler got it.”

About last night, I mentioned nothing, asking instead if he wanted bacon.

We set off with our rifles strapped to our backs. The rain had left the world dewy with its after-breath, and in the shady spots, a light mist clung to the ground, coiling around our feet, soon to be burned away by the sun. We followed the South Fork until we found a game trail bearing many hoofprints, rain-blurred but recent, and we pursued them up and up and up until we gained the rim of the canyon.

We paused here to get our breath. A small fire—no doubt triggered by lightning—had not long ago burned through this plateau, making the trees sharp and black at their tops like diseased fangs. When I leaned against a pine, its shadow stuck to me.

A basalt cornice jutted from the canyon wall and my father climbed out on it. Far below him, in the spots the sunlight had not yet warmed, vapors floated up and fingered the air. He coughed something from his lungs and spit it over the edge and followed its fall and laughed softly. He was so natural and fearless, standing casually at the edge of a hundred-foot drop, eating his trail mix and peering through his binoculars and cursing the big stags for hiding from him, the goddamned chickens.

Whereas I—with my freshly deodorized armpits and my $100 safari jacket with Velcro compartments and all sorts of zippers and buttons and hooks for hanging knives and compasses—did not feel nearly so comfortable. Add to this the dead man wandering through my mind like a tumor, distracting me, and you have a hunter who hardly knew which end of the rifle to point away from his body.

The trail we followed, after crossing through a dense pine forest, dropped halfway down the canyon and ran into a willow and cottonwood thicket. Springwater made the ground marshy here. This, combined with the forty-degree angle, made me place every footstep carefully—though my father marched along at a fast pace, unaware or unafraid of any danger. Birds called from an unseen place ahead of us and their music had something dark in it. They grew louder, croaking and cawing, and in a small bear-grass meadow we finally came upon them, nearly two dozen crows and magpies and buzzards.

Boo sight-pointed them and my father said, “At ease,” and then,
“Sick.”

With one fluid motion Boo shot forward, barking fiercely. The small birds cawed their surprise and flapped up into the high branches, complaining down on us with their rusty voices. The buzzards remained—hissing, opening their wings—until the last moment, when Boo lunged at them, and then they rose above the treetops, where they wheeled in a tornado formation, but did not depart. Something fell from one of their claws, a rag of gray flannel, and it fluttered between my father and me like a piece of ash.

We knew what it had come from. We did not want to know, but we knew.

This dead man was fresher than the other, no more than a few days old. He lay splayed out in a sort of bloody X. I cannot tell you if he was blond or brown-haired, if he was fat or skinny, because I could not focus on the body for more than a second. I did not cry, nor did I run—but I closed my eyes and pressed my hands to them until fireworks played across my retinal screen.

I think my father said it best when he said, “All right. I’m officially creeped.”

I took him by the sleeve and said, “Can we please, please,
please
go home now?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think we better.”

We were a few hundred yards upstream from our camp when it happened. Somewhere across the South Fork there was a sound—a deep groan—and all three of us went still.

“Quiet!” my father said when I opened my mouth to speak. He had one hand cupped around his ear, while the other held his rifle. When after a moment, we had heard nothing else, I said, “Do you think it’s a bear?”

He did not have an answer because right then Boo broke away from us and leapt into the river. It was fast-moving and foaming and pulled the dog a good thirty feet downstream before he made it across. Once there he shook off quickly and rushed the sandy bank and entered the woods, and then a moment later appeared again on the bank, barking terribly at something in the trees. “Boo,” my father yelled. “Boo, goddamnit, get over here.”

The dog did not acknowledge him but continued barking as he ran in a wide circle and then vanished into another section of underbrush. For a long time, over the noise of the river, we could hear the branches snapping, the bushes rustling, Boo barking. Then a silence set in that in this deep shadowed canyon seemed too silent.

Dust clung to the air and drifted across the river. Some of it stuck to my skin. My father could not stop shaking his head. He could not believe it. “I’ve never seen a dog act like that,” he said. “I’ve seen salmon act like that, when the hook first surprised them, but never a dog.”

My father wanted to immediately ford the river and search for Boo, but I suggested to him, since we were so close already, that we might make our lunch at camp, and who knows, the smell of fried fish might bring the dog from the forest.

“Or something else,” my father said, and when I said, “What?” he put two fingers to his mouth and whistled a special ear-zinging whistle I have always wished to master. When Boo did not respond he muttered, “Damn, damn, damn,” and began marching toward camp with his rifle held before him.

An hour passed and clouds piled up above us. They moved and met each other, closing the blue gulfs between them, like hands slowly weaving a spell of grayness over the day. The sun filtered through the thinner clouds and shapeless sections of light roamed across the canyon floor and walls.

We returned to find our camp not as we left it. The cooler was open, the lawn chairs were tipped over, and my sleeping bag had been dragged halfway from the tent like a stuck-out tongue.

“
What
the hell,” I said as adrenaline-soaked panic hummed like Muzak in the background of my brain. “I mean, what the hell, Dad?
What
did this?” I knew this sounded like a line from a bad movie, and I wanted a line from a good movie, but there was nothing else to say. “Dad?”

My father picked up the sleeping bag and smelled it, clearly lost in thought. “Mmm.”

“Mmm what?”

“Mmm I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Let’s go now,” I said. “Can we just go? Now?”

My father pushed the sleeping bag back into the tent and went to the firepit and squatted next to it and began to arrange fresh kindling. “Not without Boo, we won’t.”

“Look,” I said. “We’ll go to John Day and—”

“Not without Boo, we won’t!” This was said at a scream. A freakish look came into his eyes that I didn’t want to argue with, so I lifted my hands and let them fall, seeking an explanation and giving up on one all in the same motion. “We’ll eat something,” my father said, his voice calm now, “and then we’re going to find him. We’re going to track him. And if we run into anything else along the way, we’ll kill it.”

Soon flames crackled and trout filets sizzled in butter and my brain felt as if the clouds had dropped down and seized it.

We waded the South Fork with our rifles held above our heads. Once across, our boots squished and our pants clung to us uncomfortably and we entered the woods and the light fell away as if in a sudden dusk. Birds sailed around us, squawking and inspecting us, but otherwise we saw no living thing when we followed the rain-gutted game trail bearing Boo’s prints.