Man V. Nature: Stories (9 page)

Ross said, “Hey, pal, get yourself back into this boat.”

Dan turned to Phil. “Don't you see?” he pleaded.

Phil shook his head.

Ross said again, “Get in here. You can't leave me. If you leave, I'll die of boredom.”

Phil winced.

Dan choked out a real sob. “But I'm so tired, Ross.” He said it like a secret he didn't want Phil to know.

Everything was still, and Phil thought maybe the moment had passed. Then quickly, easily, Dan slid his body over the side of the lifeboat. Phil managed to grab his foot, but the shoe slid off with a couple of kicks, and they watched Dan waggle and pull, like a kid diving for toys in a backyard pool, until the darkest water swallowed him.

“I've got to go in, get him,” Ross said.

“We've got to get him,” Phil corrected.

Neither man moved.

Air bubbles rose to the top for a few minutes and then the lake was calm.

“Fuck,” Phil said, holding Dan's shoe in the air. Ross snatched it and threw it overhand, the force pitching the boat wildly. It plunked like a stone into the water. The ripples went on forever
.

 

Phil thought Ross would make a play for the better seat, now that Dan was gone, but instead Ross slumped over, barely propped up by his own bones. Phil slid to the boat floor and stretched out. He stifled a groan of pleasure out of respect for Dan.

Ross didn't say anything all day. He just peered over the edge like he was looking for something important and kept almost seeing it.

When the sun began to set, Ross reached into a zippered pocket on the inside of his shorts.

“What's in there?” Phil craned his neck to see. Maybe it was food.

“It's nothing,” Ross said, taking out an index card and a stubby pencil, the kind used at golf courses.

“You had paper and pencil this whole time? And you didn't give it to Dan?”

Ross waved the card in the air. “Too small to fit a whole TV show on, don't you think? Besides, I didn't remember I had it. What kind of asshole do you think I am? I would never do that to him.” He bent over the card and began to scribble.

“What are you writing?”

“Nothing that concerns you. It's for my girls.”

“Are you going to signal a bird to pick it up and fly it to them?”

Ross singsonged, “Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh,” mocking Phil's comment, his whiny voice. He scooped water from the side of the lifeboat and flung it at Phil. Phil retaliated by filling his cupped hands and dousing Ross's lap and scorecard.

Ross leaped to his feet and the boat bottom folded, water rushing over the side. A cramp from sitting so long seized him and he lurched forward, bending deeply, so his face met Phil's. His sunburned eyeballs looked like the bottom of a dried lake bed. Tears burst from them and tracked through the grime on his face. “You expect me to believe you didn't do this on purpose?”

“Sit down! What are you talking about?”

“Strand us out here. You know,
run out of gas
.”

Phil laughed. “Calm down.”

“You just happened to forget to fill the tank? That's crap. We've been coming out here how many years?” Ross sat down with a thud, and more water poured in.

“That's baloney. You're crazy.” True, Phil hadn't filled the tank up all the way. Dan and Ross hadn't offered him any money. It was weird. They usually did, but this time they'd just pretended to look at the map when he backed the boat trailer up to the pump. Gas was so expensive now. He'd felt uneasy ever since he'd picked up Ross. He and Dan, they'd been fine, talked about girls Dan could fix him up with now that he was single. But then Ross had gotten in the car. Phil thought then that maybe Bren had finally told Ross about the blow job. He'd always thought Ross acted weird around him, ever since. For years he'd assumed Ross knew. He wanted Ross to know, to know and to go on these trips with Phil anyway. Because they were such good friends and nothing could ruin that. And Phil could feel he'd gotten away with it. And then maybe it could happen again, with Bren. It had been a fantastic blow job. He'd been drunk, yes, but he still remembered it. She acted drunk, but he knew she wasn't. She had wanted to do it. And the fact that Bren never came to the door to see Ross off on these trips was proof to Phil. She was harboring some serious feelings for him. God, Bren. They used to have a ball together back in the day. They'd all go out when Phil visited for the holidays, him and Dan and Ross and Bren. Ross and Dan always drank too much and were a mess. But in basic training Phil learned how to act sober even when he wasn't, so he always offered to drive Bren home and then would rejoin Ross and Dan later. They never suspected anything. Bren was so giggly and her mouth was so big, with her sleek white teeth and that thin slippery tongue. They made out the first couple of visits, and he felt her up frantically. And when she was pregnant, her tits were unreal. And then, that fantastic blow job. But then she stopped going out with them when he was visiting. “She's with the kids,” Ross would explain. And Phil always thought he saw a weird look on Ross's face.

“We weren't even going to come this year. Me and Dan,” Ross said. “We talked. Yeah, we talked about stopping with this stupid week. We hate it. And Bren hates it when I go. Not because I leave her, but because of you. She says you're a creep. And she makes this face when she says it.” Ross pruned his. “Me and Dan have our own week. In June. We go rock climbing. It's awesome. And we were planning even more weeks. Dan was seeing a girl. We were going to have them to the cabin. She's great. I bet you didn't even know about her. I bet you never even asked what was new with Dan. Like, ‘Hey Dan, what's new with
you
?' ” Ross looked like he might spit at Phil, head-butt him, but instead his face drooped pitifully. “But then you got divorced, and god, you were so fucked up. We felt bad because we're nice people. So we came, and now look. Dan is living with mermaids and it's World War Three, and we're never going to get out of this shitty, shitty rubber boat.” He hung his head. “My girls.” He wept.

Phil slumped against the hot, squeaky wall. He couldn't believe it. They felt sorry for him? Was that why they didn't give him any gas money? Because they didn't really want to be here? And Bren said he's a creep? He didn't believe it for a second. Did they really go rock climbing? Did they really have their own week?

As boys, when Phil asked to sleep over, Ross and Dan had told him their moms had said no. He'd had no reason to doubt it was true. Phil had done everything to make sure they were friends. He gave them candy, money, comic books. When they got older, he let them drink his parents' liquor and took the blame. He'd bribed his sister Maggie to have sex with Ross, who was still a virgin by the time he left for college. He didn't know she was a virgin too, but Ross told him. Ross said Maggie was a crybaby. Then Ross went off to college and met Bren. And Phil went into the army, developed a gambling habit, had a series of failed relationships, pined for Bren, finally settled for Patricia, quit gambling, thought his life would turn around. It had. He believed it had. Until a year ago, he believed that. And even though Ross and Dan hadn't wanted to come, in the end they came. That meant something, right?

“I'm sorry, boss. Please, I'll do anything,” Phil said. He got goose bumps from the familiarity of wanting something he realized he couldn't have.

Ross's eyes were swollen and red, but hard. His mouth tightened into a smirk. “If you want to be my friend, you'll never talk to me again.” He turned his head away and bent over his knees to sleep.

 

In the morning, Ross was gone. His water-warped golf scorecard was tucked into Phil's clenched hand. On it was written:
Got rescued! You looked so peaceful I decided not to wake you!

All around Phil was the same still, gray water that had surrounded their boat for days. Weeks? Months? No land peeked out from behind the morning fog. No wake from a passing ship spread itself into thin ripples. Did Ross really get rescued?

Phil groaned an alone kind of groan: deep and howling, a major pitch-shifter. How many more signs did he need? Adrift on a lake for countless days without another soul in sight? No search parties? Friends who got rescued and left him behind, or who'd rather drown than stay in a boat with him? He'd rather drown than stay in a boat with himself. Life was over. He was tired of life. Life sucked. I want to live, he thought. Really live. Let go of the world. Wasn't there a way to get to the ocean from here? Everything is connected to an ocean somehow. Yeah, he could float up that seaway Dan mentioned, to the Arctic, where no lawyer could get to him. He could find a way to catch fish and just drift through icebergs and shower in whale spouts. Now, that was a life. Not like his. Divorced and forty. No kids. He should have taken that as a sign. She didn't want to have kids. What woman doesn't want to have kids? He kept waiting for her to say she wanted them. It's the guy who's supposed to not want kids; the wife is supposed to be like, “We're having kids, you asshole,” until the guy feels pushed into it and resentful. But when they pop out he's supposed to realize that his kids are the reason life makes sense, and then he's supposed to love his wife even more, want to get a better job, discover his new life purpose as protector of his family. That's how it's supposed to go. Except she didn't want kids. Didn't even want to talk about it.

Phil wept. The crust around his eyes melted back to goo. He wept for all the kids he never had. He'd always wanted kids, ever since he was a kid. Since going fishing with his dad down at Pickerel Lake, standing on the shore, casting off. The silence. The stillness. The heat penetrating their baseball caps. Here comes his sister, fast, yelling down the path, and here's his dad hushing her and then, seeing her little shamed face, picking her up and swinging her upside down over the water until she wails, then cradling her in his arms until she laughs. It made so much sense even back then. That's what you do. You have a bunch of them and they're your friends. They look like you. You give them your feelings. It's animal. It's basic. What kind of cunt doesn't want kids? “Stretch marks,” she had said once, laughing it off. His whole life. Wasted.

Phil's grief pulled him to the bottom of the lifeboat and he curled up. The water there, trapped and warm, pruned him.

The golf pencil wavered by his head. He plucked it and drew a stick figure on the other side of the scorecard, in a small corner that hadn't already been written on and scratched over by Ross. He made out
I love you
but could read no more of Ross's words.

From the figure, Phil drew a thought bubble.
Hello
, he wrote within its girlish borders.

At first the stick figure was Patricia, but he was silenced by the desire to say the perfect thing to either hurt her or to fix things. Then it was Ross, but he could only think of apologies, and for what, he couldn't say. He missed his friend. Was the figure a child? He couldn't see it; it was unfamiliar. A stick figure. It didn't look like him at all. He stared at his companion mutely. Eventually the paper fell from his fingertips and disintegrated in the rank stew where he lay, fetal.

He roused himself in time for a puke over the side, and in the bile-soured water he saw his own reflection. Who will miss me? he asked himself. No one had. It was real, a fact. The proof—his solitude. He stared, seemed to wait days for the answer. He laid his head down, smelled the hot rubber.

At the next daybreak Phil took notice of, he lifted his head to a new smell. Pine. The morning fog rolled away like a stage curtain to reveal rocky cliffs, evergreened at the top, on either side of him, as the large lake funneled into an ever-narrowing channel. He saw the current quicken around his boat, swirling, tugging, caressing.

He thought of Canada. Of the war. Of beluga whales, their pinked heads breaking through the black surface to breathe, misting everything into a watercolor.

“Don't shoot,” he yelled to all the hiding rebels. He held up his hands in mock horror, his voice echoing off the bluffs surrounding him, and it sounded as though the hills were full of men begging for the same mercy as he was. He doubled over and laughed until he wheezed like the aged.

The water flattened, and Phil saw the hull of a ship maneuver a bend, miles in the distance.

The current carried him toward the enormous vessel, a tanker of some sort. When finally next to it, he rapped his knuckles on the side. It was metal, and the rumble it threw back was like dungeon doors closing. Water had worn away the blue paint, which now only covered the higher-up walls. He sliced his palm against the large white barnacles stuck to the hull, and blood the color of cartoon apples flowed out.

A real boat.

Just then a rope ladder unfurled down the side, and Phil grabbed hold.

MARRYING UP

Just before the world got bad, I married for love, a man who was funny and brilliant, but small. He could not pick me up the way I'd watched the men do to women on television. I'd never been twirled as I laughed, my head back, my leg in a kick, all to some lighthearted song. But no matter. I loved him. I rested my chin on the top of his head when I was tired, and when he was, I wrapped my stronger arms around his small body. We were happy.

Then one day I became feverish and was unable to leave our bed, and so he ventured out to find medicine at the pharmacy. He said, “Be right back, my love,” grabbed an umbrella, and left. I'm told that even though he swung the umbrella wildly, he was set upon before he'd even left the front stoop of the building.

My next lover was funny but not as bright. He was much taller, however, and with a little more muscle that showed beneath his flesh, though sometimes it just made him seem hungry rather than strong. I'd seen him in the building; he fixed things. I asked him to fix my leaky faucet, and then I asked him to stay.

He could twirl me, but once when I kicked my leg his back gave and we tumbled to the floor. I brought hot pads to place under him and made a bed for us where he had fallen so he wouldn't have to move. He told me jokes as we lay there, and he laughed, then grimaced, each time forgetting that it hurt him to laugh. But I liked that about him. We planned to marry.

One night, very late, the door buzzer woke us. He sat up and stepped into his slippers.

I said, “Don't go out there.”

He said, “But someone's at the door.”

The buzzer rang again. It's the kind of shrill buzzer found in old cities full of angry people. The kind that always catches you off guard.

I said, “Don't go,” and I grabbed his arm.

He shook me free. “What if someone needs help?” Did I mention he was also a very good-hearted man? He was.

“No one needs help,” I said, feeling like an awful person. “It's a trap.”

He looked at me like he didn't know who I had become. I was so ashamed I couldn't look back, even though I knew I was right. I'd heard the stories. I knew better than to answer the door.

“Someone needs help,” he said resolutely, shrugging on his robe. I'm told he fought hard, scrappily, but was dragged to his knees, then dragged down the street. For days afterward bits of his torn pajamas blew around, up in the air, into the naked trees. I watched them through my window.

Soon a new man moved into the apartment above me. His footsteps rattled my lamps and china, shook plaster dust down onto my dinner. I knew the kind of power behind footsteps like that. And eventually I married him.

He terrified me. He was more than twice my size. Making love felt like getting run over. I was pancaked like in cartoons. My ribs crunched if he was on top, and my hips were belted with bruises if he was behind. He twirled me until I puked.

He wasn't particularly bright, but he wasn't stupid. He wasn't funny. When I cracked a joke, he just stared. He was violent.

But he took me to the park. It seemed like forever since I'd been outside, but we could go to the pond and feed the remaining ducks, the ones too diseased to consume, and my husband felled all those who set upon us like they were tiny saplings. It felt like a small miracle to be able to go outside.

 

Each day, my husband left the house swinging a baseball bat. When it splintered, he used his fists. By the end of the day, our street was littered with bodies. At night I dressed his knuckles with ointment, wrapped them in bandages, and did it again the following night, and the night after. Each morning, the tenuous scabs ripped open; the wounds had no time to heal.

When I went into labor, he carried me outside, and we were set upon. My hair was pulled. Someone punched my round belly. But this was a momentary scourge. My husband drove through the wall of them like we were all on a football field and I was the odd-shaped ball in his arms. All around us were moans, hands grabbing as we ran. I thought, How can I bring a child into this world? Then I thought, At least our child will have half my husband's genes. Whatever the world brings, surely the child of a man like this can meet it.

I almost didn't make it through the delivery, the child was so large. Its aggressive squirming tore things in me. I was put under.

 

I was weak from the delivery, and now my boy took every last nutrient; he sucked me dry. I was too exhausted after nursing to move. He grew to an enormous size, a size that scared me, but also delighted me. I was desperate for him to be so big and strong that nothing could ever harm him.

By the time he was six months old, he was too big for me to lift. But he was hungry all the time. To nurse, my husband placed the child on my chest while I lay still beneath. He had to stay home to lay and lift the child off me all day. Eventually he lost his job.

“I think you should stop nursing,” he said one night.

I lay beneath our boy, flattened, barely breathing from the weight of him.

“But how will he grow?”

“Look at you.” He squeezed my flaccid bicep. I tried to make a muscle, but the arm just trembled. “I doubt you're giving him the kind of nutrition he needs.”

We switched to nutrient packs that he bought from the corner market.

We were a sight. I was all bones; my husband was bruised and bloodied from his nutrient pack outings. Our boy, though, was magnificent; he stomped around the house, able to reach things on the highest shelf for me. His shoulders were broad like a draft animal's, and he carried me around on them like I weighed zero. He teetered on his trunkish legs like a toddler because he was one. It was scary and thrilling to wobble up so high. I traced the filigree patterns on the ceiling of our once fine home.

 

My husband insisted we all eat the nutrient packs for strength. We needed it. A man on a lower floor had been attacked in his apartment. We couldn't count on staying home to keep us safe. But the nutrient packs had the opposite effect on me. I grew heavy but not strong; my muscles quivered under the extra weight.

My husband insisted we run sprints across our living room. Three times a day we did circuits. After lunch, we bench-pressed. He spotted me on the bench, but mostly he lifted the bar for me, and shamed me while I blubbered. Our son watched us with curiosity.

By twenty months he could bench almost as much as his father. He no longer wore clothes; nothing fit. We wrapped him in bath towels instead of diapers. He stomped around and soaked through them onto all the furniture. I did load upon load of laundry. Nothing smelled right in our house any longer.

For money and goods, my husband ran errands for the other apartment owners in our building. He went to the market for them. He acted as a guard when they had to go outside. He escorted them if they had to go to work. Our apartment became stocked with supplies and strange luxuries, all bartered for my husband's services. Fine sheets, china cups, silver trays. I hammered those silver trays onto one wall so my boy could watch himself do push-ups and bicep curls across their reflective surfaces.

 

One night, my husband came home with his shirt torn, his abdomen gashed with thick bloody lines like from the tines of a garden fork.

“It's getting much worse,” he huffed. He made me do extra sets of jumping jacks and squats and then squeezed all my major muscle groups while I tensed. I wanted this to lead him to make his violent kind of love to me, but he just went to the table and put his head down.

I checked the door and turned all the extra bolts. Sometimes my husband locked just two, like it was some test of fate. Could he ward off the intruders with brute strength if they got through a measly two locks? Three? We all knew he could, but I liked eight, a nice curvy number that had a lot in common with infinity. At least in looks. I bolted eight.

Our boy carried me to his room, and I read him a book while he tried to do crunches like his dad.

“You want to feel it deep in your belly,” I instructed. I knelt beside him as he struggled and failed and placed my palm right below his navel. I pressed down, and his breath pushed out and I felt the contraction while his head and shoulders lifted like they were tethered to the ceiling.

 

My husband made plans to move us to another city, one that was reportedly safer. He said, “We can't raise our son here. I thought we could, but we can't.”

“Going elsewhere is much more difficult than staying put,” I argued.

“It's one thing for us to be cooped up here. But he needs to be able to go outside. To grow.”

He looked at our boy and nodded, and our boy nodded back, but he was only mimicking his father; he didn't understand what was happening. He lay on the crashed-down couch, broken long ago by his weight and his father's, and sucked down a nutrient pack. He appeared to grow in chest circumference right before my eyes.

“He's fine,” I said.

But my husband had made up his mind. He sighed and looked me up and down. “I'll protect you as much as I can,” he said. “We both will.” Then he looked at his hands, swallowing the inherent
but.

I went to the window. Of course I knew what he meant, and I was angry. I had been strong once. I had made it this far. Now, because I'd given him a child, a son, I was weak and would be left behind.

I thought about how I might fare here alone. I looked through the lattice of the window gate at the smoke from the many fires that licked the sky. As the sun fell for the night, it glowed a sickly purple, like it had an awful flu and was giving up.

I could maybe last a week or two. If they noticed that my husband no longer patrolled the street, they might investigate the apartment, find me here, and have a field day. I looked at my son. I wondered if he would fuss at having to say good-bye. How would he remember me? I'd be that funny woman who used to ride on his shoulders. He might remember the feel of me there, almost weightless in light of his strength. But what more could he remember? That I taught him crunches? Gave him all my fortitude? Even though he looked like a man at times, he was just a baby still. It was strange to know, looking at them, that they would make it and be fine. And stranger to know that they looked at me and knew I would not. And that we would go anyway.

My husband unfolded maps at the table. He traced routes with his giant fingertip.

“We have to cross the mountains. The people there are wild,” he warned, his tone defeated.

But I felt buoyed by the idea. Mountains are beautiful. It must be springtime, I thought, and maybe there would be flowers. Maybe we would dip in a mountain lake, blue like my boy's eyes, cold enough to pucker my skin. We might hear birds calling rather than people hollering. If we went for a hike, were we as likely to be set upon as we were when we left this building? I found it hard to believe that anything could be as brutal as our neighbors.

I remembered seeing pictures of people living in the bottoms of large trees. They were old pictures, even back in my childhood, but surely it was still done. I'd seen whole cars being driven through big hollowed trunks as a stunt. “Maybe we could live in a tree,” I dreamed.

My husband said angrily, “Don't be a fool. The mountains are dangerous. They're not like the cities. The city is still civilized.”

I laughed, even though he'd said it straight-faced.

I took his damaged hands in mine. With his arms slack and heavy, I could barely lift them to my lips. In another time, I thought, I wouldn't have given him a second glance walking down the street. He's outlandish, his body triangular. But maybe he was a good man, and I wondered, under different circumstances or given more time, if he might surprise me. We might surprise each other. And isn't that really what makes for a nice life with someone?

“You told a joke,” I said proudly.

He said sadly, “Ha.”

We made love that night, and it was almost tender. Like he felt bad and wanted to remember me in some soft-lit way. So I pulled at his hair and I scratched away the bandages on his hands, bit open the scabs until they bled. His eyes watered, but he took it. I was trying to show him. Don't give up on me yet.

Finally, he batted me away like a pest. My eye swelled shut, a tinny ring expanded in my ear. He turned from me and sulked.

With my good eye I looked toward my son's room, where he slept, peaceful and trusting. I had made it this far. I slipped quietly from the bed. I could be brutal too, even in the safety of our once fine home.