Harmless (3 page)

“Sure. Some never find their way out.”

Another line of oily sweat coiled down Joseph’s back.

“Can’t you tell what direction you’re going by checking the tree moss? It only grows on the north side of the tree.”

“That’s a myth,” Alex said. “Moss grows on every side.”

Of course it did, and of course Alex knew that.

“People wander in circles for days, passing the same trees, driven half-crazy by the bugs. If you know how to walk north, south, or east, you’ll eventually come to a road.”

Joseph looked west toward the rolling pastures behind the farm. “What if you walk west?”

“You’ll find out who your real friends are.”

Once again Joseph waited for a punchline that didn’t come.

S
o this was the heart of Alex’s domain: a farmer’s shed about twenty feet long and ten wide, an old wood stove in one corner, a work table stacked with crates of his old film equipment, and shelves lined with tools, wood solvents,
DVDS
, and the overflow from the family book collection, which Jane had refused to pare down before the move. Joseph recognized a few of her history textbooks stacked on top of a row of kids’ books. She used to fantasize about owning a house with a library, about indulging in a rare burst of geekiness by arranging her book collection by subject on the future floor-to-ceiling shelves. He saw a crate on the table marked
Film Projects
and wondered if his script for Alex’s planned documentary on homelessness was in there, the script he’d abandoned without warning when things fell apart with Martha. There was a smaller tabletop covered in old farming implements and rocks, but he saw no evidence of the “new political project” Liz had alluded to with such scorn in the car.

Joseph and Alex and Mike had entered the shed to grab an axe but were interrupted by the opening synth chords of
“The Final Countdown,” Mike’s favourite good–bad rock anthem, signalling a call on his iPhone. As they waited for Mike to finish, Joseph scanned the book spines on a handmade bookcase big enough to entomb a family of four while Alex scowled at Mike’s persistent use of the word
dude
. He was too progressive to use the word, but when it came down to it, Alex thought Mike was a
pussy
, a man-boy forsaking proper adulthood for sleeve tattoos and Converse sneakers, a buddy to his kids instead of a father. Jane and Liz were no doubt playing caretakers to their husbands’ anger in the kitchen, their decades-old friendship the neutral site for negotiations. It was a nice enough set-up for the men, but their wives wouldn’t be happy travelling back in time to claim the fixed gender roles waiting there. Joseph could picture the women slicing carrots or some other hard root vegetable at the counter, but for all that he knew about them, all the times he’d seen them bingeing or drying out, infatuated or depressed, he had no idea how they spoke as one wife to another.

“How’s the store working out?” Joseph asked Alex, fighting off the shed’s closed-in atmosphere.

“Not bad. It took a while. The locals can buy a bookcase made in China for eighty bucks at the big-box store, and the tourists found my work too slick—they want rough wood grain,
authenticity
.” He spat out the word as if it were a fly he’d inhaled.

“I told him to grow one of those neck-only Mennonite beards,” Mike said, pocketing his iPhone.

Alex actually smiled. “It would go with my wool cap—my labourer of the Ellis Island period. The locals don’t
trust anyone whose great-grandparents weren’t born here, but they’re coming around. And I show the tourists my workshop behind the counter, let their kids plane a board.”

He’d be hard to resist, the wood and carving tools imbuing his strong body with an aura of self-reliance, the smell of solvents and sawdust satisfying yearnings for simpler times.

“You’re probably doing better than me,” Joseph said. “Arts features columnist, also doing the former website copyeditor’s job for free. There’s a hundred writers who’d do my column for a third of the pay, which has been frozen for years.”

It was Alex he’d gone to for advice when the editor of the city’s glossy monthly sent Joseph a gushing email about a blog post he’d written on the post-9/11 family car’s metamorphosis into a domestic army troop carrier, all wraparound bumpers and side windows narrowed to tinted slits. The editor called Joseph’s work “just the thing” for the magazine’s relaunched website and Joseph himself an edgy voice to anchor the content, establishing “edgy” as a marketable publishing niche and setting off several internal alarms. It was Alex, clinging to the Internet’s liberating potential, who urged him to take the gig—“Think of the
good
you can do writing for such a large readership,” he’d said, using that most unfashionable word. Joseph took the job, and by the time he’d adjusted to the magazine’s ad-friendly mandate, he and Alex were no longer speaking.

“I’m not getting radio work either,” Joseph said. “I wasn’t delivering the quota of tips on awakening listeners’ Inner Parisian or the best beach reads of 2010.” He wanted to laugh but his mouth was dry. “You’d think they’d want
to build an audience through the cultivation of reliable”—he had to be modest here—“
informed
opinion.”

“Maybe they’re just going young,” Alex said.

You fucking cunt
—Joseph almost said it out loud.

“My students are the same,” Mike said, tossing his half-ironically feathered bangs from his forehead, his hands forming a triangle, gestures likely honed in the human communications course he taught at the local community college. “They can’t follow an abstract argument or complex text. They need conflict, resolution, characters they can identify with. Forget reflection and analysis—the inner life is dead.”

Mike’s cultural doomsdaying was an easy dig at Alex, whose stern face was framed by the rows of art-house
DVDS
, literary novels, and biographies lined up like a panel of judges from a more thoughtful age.

“Maybe you should write my column,” Joseph said to Mike. His editor had emailed him a reminder that morning, in a lower-case blurt, that he was expected to present three months of column topics at Tuesday’s “content” meeting. He had five so far, two of which would be deemed “too political.” Not that it mattered—his bosses wanted him gone. He was too cerebral, too expensive.

“I’ll be your ideas man,” Mike said. “Alex, show our urban friend your gun.” He pointed at a shelf running above the windows, where a rifle was rested on piles of old phone books. “Have you ever held a rifle?”

“I’ve never even stood beside a man holding a gun.”

“City Boy has seen a thousand movies about men with guns, and yet,
ironically enough
, he’s never fired one.
What’s it like to actually hold a gun, to fire it? There’s your column.”

It was a good idea. He should write it down. His memory was shaky at best, a condition his last girlfriend put down to gluten intolerance.

“You could do a series,” Mike said. “
Postcards from the Country
: wry Lake Wobegon-style sketches of rural life, with Alex and I appearing as recurring characters. I want to be called ‘Jerod’—Jerod the well dowser. Alex can be the local quack veterinarian. Hashtag josephintheboonies.”

Alex took down the rifle and examined the barrel. It was amazing how quickly the gun gathered significance to itself, as if it were the single splash of colour in a black-and-white photograph. He cocked open the rifle and closed it, snapping the stock to his shoulder and sighting in the barrel using what had to be the minimum number of movements it would take to shoot a man. How many would that be? Four? Five? Alex would know—he’d spent two years in the army, one of the many institutions that failed to meet his standards. He aimed the gun at the window, fixing on a target in the pasture behind the farm, then he handed the rifle to Joseph and stood back to watch. It was a pumpaction rifle, heavy but finely balanced, the weight falling mainly in the middle section. As Joseph nestled the stock in a convenient hollow between his shoulder and chest he hadn’t known existed, he was startled by a sense of impending climax. He stared down the barrel at a pile of boulders outside. Imagine if a man was standing in front of them. Who did he want it to be? Everyone had a list of worthy targets these days—bankers,
CEOS
, hedge-fund managers,
career politicians, religious fundamentalists, climate-change deniers. He squeezed the trigger, wanting the room to fill with sound, smoke, and broken glass. He handed the rifle back to Alex, disoriented by a sudden feeling of weightlessness. It had felt good to hold the gun in his hands.

This was more like what Joseph had in mind—hard, useful work in the sun, honest sweat, the smell of cut logs. The first guy did the chopping, the second set up a fresh log and stacked the cut pieces, while the third cooled off in the shade of Alex’s shed, assessing the other men’s work. Mike soon wedged the axe into a knot-riddled log and tried to pull the handle free by working it up and down like a water-pump handle, an ineffective method Alex would correct if asked. Mike swore and pounded the fused axe and log into the earth a few times before stepping away.

It was Joseph’s turn. He lifted the axe and tried to pound the log free, hoping that Franny could see her father bent to outdoor labour. He hadn’t seen her for at least an hour, but why should that matter? He went days without speaking to her, putting off calling her until he was less tired, less distracted, wanting only to talk to her when he was at his best. Not that his absences seemed to bother her anymore.

A rooster wandered over to the woodpile, scraping his miniature dinosaur feet through the dust, his polished black eyes fixed on the men. One good swipe would take the little fucker’s head off. Joseph wiped the booze sweat from his face.
Why drink so much when you need to be your best self the next day?
His answer came in the form
of several mental snapshots from last night’s summer arts gala—the society matrons’ faces frozen into Botoxed kabuki masks, their husbands tanned the colour of two-hundred-dollar-a-pound cured meat. Then the taxi ride home, the screen embedded into the back of the passenger seat playing clips of Caribbean family vacations he couldn’t afford.

“You could do a column on the bluegrass band I formed with some local guys,” Mike said.

“That didn’t take long,” Alex said.

“I’m trying to be helpful. We’ve recreated a pure thirties sound, right down to the microphones. There’s a real resurgence.”

Joseph was too tired to resist the bait. “Mike, your last band camped up the hillbilly stuff. You even did a bluegrass version of ‘Ace of Spades.’ Now you’re aiming for neo-authentic. What gives?”

Mike shrugged, as if maintaining both musical positions was as easy as holding a cup of hot coffee in one hand and a glass of ice cubes in the other. “Our singer is Derek Hermann.”

That was interesting. “Derek Hermann, aka
Dee Herr
,” Joseph said, reciting the future band profile as he set down the axe and log. “Former front man of Hardwar, a late-eighties, alt-rockabilly band that almost hit it big before their guitarist, obeying the dictates of rock cliché, overdosed on his honeymoon. Derek briefly rebranded himself as a character actor in a few indie thrillers.”

“The intervening years have been less column-worthy.” Alex continued the riff in a more sarcastic key. “After a marriage to a two-decades-younger woman and relocation to the country funded by Hardwar’s one hit single, he now plies his
trade as mechanic and drug dealer.” He stepped forward and pressed his foot on the log, pulling the axe free.

“Derek doesn’t fit Alex’s definition of a local businessman,” Mike said.

Alex’s face twisted as though a noxious gas cloud was drifting past, and his knuckles went white as he tightened his grip on the axe handle. “Some of these logs are still damp,” he said, as if it was Mike’s fault. He stood the log back in place, planted his feet apart, and raised the axe so that the double-sided blade hovered two feet above his head like a hawk riding the thermals. With a subtle shift of his stance, Alex transferred his body’s force to his back and arms, and he split the log with a loud crack, exposing wood as stringy as chicken meat. Even Mike was impressed. Alex wiped his hands on his loose tan pants—“
EU
pants” Mike had dubbed them when he still cared enough to test Alex’s capacity for teasing—and he watched the rooster peck at the exposed wood. The house’s glass back doors slid open, loosing Liam and Liz and Mike’s boys—little Sam and the older brother whose name Joseph kept forgetting—into the yard, chasing a soccer ball.

“They must have seen kids on
TV
playing,” Alex said, his dig aimed at the extended
TV
session Mike had okayed after lunch.

“I’m catching Sean up on sitcoms,” Mike told Joseph. “We’ve made our way through the American classics—
The Odd Couple, All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show
—and now we’re moving on to the Brits. How can the children understand their father if they don’t know his favourite shows?”

Joseph couldn’t tell if Mike’s deadpan delivery was deliberate or the side effect of decades of ironic detachment and pot smoking. Maybe he had the right idea. Bereft of ancestral lore, national myths, holy books, and rituals to bind the generations, Mike was initiating his sons into the world of the Cool Geek, where aggressions and aspirations were channelled into superheroes, video games, movies,
TV
shows, and the right pop music.

“Franny and I watch a few of the oldies together,” Joseph said. “She likes how the audience laughs at the funny bits and goes
aaaaah
during the reconciliations, and how the serious conflicts are overcome in a single ratings-week ‘issue’ episode.”

“So how’s that working for you?” Alex said. “Spending your time with Franny watching
TV.”

Alex’s tone of personal disapproval confirmed what should have been obvious: he was completely up to date with Franny’s recent struggles and with Joseph’s dismal parenting record, having heard about every missed dance recital, school play, and alimony payment during Martha and Franny’s regular visits to the farm. What did he want, a fucking medal for his virtuous treatment of Joseph’s splintered family? The men faced each other across the quartered logs, Mike watching with a boy’s expectation of a good fight. A pickup truck pulled into the driveway, seemingly igniting detonation caps under several chickens and calling the dogs in from the field. Mike dropped the log he’d picked up and jogged toward the truck, and as the log rolled away Joseph imagined future archaeologists speculating on the domestic drama that had sent a single log three feet from the pile.