Refresh, Refresh: Stories (25 page)

When his father discovered what he had done, he nailed the coon to the wall of the high seat as a reminder. “That way maybe you’ll think twice before you pull the trigger.” Never firing off a round out of boredom—at a jaybird, a jackrabbit, a doe—hungry to kill something, anything, as boys often are.

“Jesus,” David says.

Stephen breaks the silence by kicking a folding chair. “Best seat in the house,” he says. The chair faces a window that opens up into the forest. “All yours. Just keep your eyes on that game trail.” He winks. “Fish in a barrel.”

They take their chairs and cradle their rifles in their laps. They don’t speak for a while, their silence deepening with the shadows in the woods. Then Stephen gets up to pull a beer from the cooler and offers one to David, who pops the tab and, after slurping at the foam that comes boiling out of it, says, “Hey, did you know a whale penis is nine feet long?”

Stephen gives him a blank look. “I’m the one who told you that, man.”

“Are you?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Sorry.” David feels his grip tighten around his beer, the metal giving way. “Things any better with Stacy?”

Stephen returns to his window and looks out it. “So-so.”

“Just so-so?”

“Let’s put it this way,” he says, keeping his voice at a low volume. “Are you still good on that offer? If I needed to, I could crash at your place?”

“Sure.” David tries hard to control his voice. If there is too much excitement in it, he can’t tell.

“Just in case,” Stephen says.

“You’re always welcome. Stay as long as you like. There’s plenty of room.”

Stephen twists the tab on his can until it snaps off. “Good to know.”

They fall silent again. David finds it difficult to concentrate on the woods and throws a glance over his shoulder every few minutes to check on Stephen. It feels different, sitting here with him and not moving, not listening to the engine hum, not watching the world slide by. It feels good—permanent.

Time passes and his vision blurs and the forest falls away as he imagines the two of them as young boys, dirt under their fingernails, carrying in their hands slingshots and BB guns, darting through the trees, headed toward where they heard a chipmunk chattering minutes ago. The false memory makes him feel so close to Stephen, his friend, he wants to reach out and touch him.

He glances over his shoulder then, just in time to see Stephen snap off the safety and bring the thirty-aught-six to his shoulder. He rises from his chair, slowly, the metal complaining only a little. David follows the line of Stephen’s rifle. There, at the edge of the meadow, less than thirty yards away, a buck untangles its antlers from the forest and moves cautiously toward the trough.

Halfway there it pauses. It swishes its tail. It raises a hoof and puts it down again. Maybe it smells them, or maybe it smells the blood in the grass. David holds his breath, anticipating the shot. When it doesn’t come, he says, “What are you waiting for?”

“I don’t know,” Stephen says.

David gently pushes him aside and nestles the stock against his cheek and sights the buck through the scope. Right then it raises its head and looks at him. The blood in his ears buzzes, like a wasp loose in his skull. The rifle kicks against his shoulder. The gunshot fills the world.

The buck jerks its head around in a half-circle, as if curious where the shot came from, and then it collapses and a flock of swallows swirls from the forest, over the meadow, dappling it with shadows.

A few minutes later, they stand over the body. When David nudges it with his boot, its hind leg quivers, then goes still. Since the gunshot, the air has gone quiet except for the rhythmic knocking of a woodpecker’s beak against some distant tree. The woods are softly colored with the gloom that comes with twilight. The hole David has blown in the deer’s side is big enough to put his hand in, and he does. Hot, moist. It reminds him, with a sick kind of pleasure, of a woman. When he withdraws his hand, gloved in blood, it steams a little. He smears its redness against his left cheek and says, “There. Now I match.”

Stephen laughs as if he is trying not to. “I’m glad you took the shot,” he says, his smile fading. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Nothing’s wrong with you.”

Some blood oozes into David’s mouth and he spits it back out. It occurs to him then—with blood on his lips and the woods darkening all around them—that he has never been happier.

The next Monday morning, David arrives at work fifteen minutes early and waits for Stephen on the loading dock, an elevated concrete platform with a steel ramp leading up it. Nearby, a poplar, stripped of its leaves, shakes against the wind that comes howling down from the Cascades. A rime of frost coats its branches. With the sun still low in a sky full of torn clouds, the air has a gray quality that carries little warmth. David paces back and forth and stamps his feet, trying to keep the cold out of them.

Eventually Stephen pulls up in a Chevy Cavalier with an Army National Guard sticker on its bumper. Rather than park along the chain-link fence, next to David’s truck, he kills the engine at the bottom of the ramp and hops out.

“Hey, Stephen,” David says, and Stephen says, “Hey.” He steps onto the ramp and pauses there with David hanging over him, obscuring him with his shadow and a big breath of mist.

“Something wrong?” David says.

Stephen brings his hand to his mouth and chews hungrily on it. “Maybe.” He sighs deeply, and in a halting voice that seems bothered—by nervousness or excitement—explains that he has been asked to be part of a task force. He and fifteen other soldiers will work as an embedded training team to mentor the Iraqi Army.

“What do you mean?” David says.

“I mean I’m not working here anymore,” Stephen says. “I’m going back.” He examines his palm. Blood and saliva dampen it. He wipes it on the handrail. “Next week, I’m on active duty. I just came to say my good-byes and pick up my paycheck.” He studies David a moment and irritation creeps into his voice. “Well, aren’t you going to say anything?”

David doesn’t know what to say, so he says, “What about Stacy?”

“What about her?”

“You can’t just leave her again, can you?”

“What do you care?”

“I don’t know.” His voice has a fine crack in it. There is a pain in his forehead. It makes him think of insects eating away at the space between his eyes. He squeezes the bridge of his nose.

“I better go talk to Joe,” Stephen says. He moves up the ramp another two steps, and from here David can see the redness in his teeth, the blood from his chewing.

“I’m in your way, aren’t I?” David says and steps aside and makes a motion with his hands, ushering Stephen onto the dock. “Sorry.”

Stephen doesn’t say anything else, but just before he pushes through the double doors, David yells after him to wait a minute. Stephen pauses, half inside, half out, as David takes a few lumbering steps toward him and offers his hand. It hangs there a second, then Stephen shows off the blood on his hand like an apology before disappearing inside.

Without Stephen, driving feels different, the roads as routine as an old network of veins that has pumped the same blood along the same path too long. David yearns for conversation, but there is only the grumble of the engine, the hiss of the tires spinning over the blacktop, the voice of Hank Williams yodeling through the radio.

He swings by Stephen’s house once, and then again, looking for a car in the driveway, a light in the window. The third time, when he passes the house at a crawl, he catches sight of his reflection in the living-room window—the Astro van and his dark shape inside it. Without really thinking about it he raises his hand, and it is as if his hand and the hand in the window are trying to reach across those many feet of space to touch.

At the end of the block, he doesn’t turn around to drive through the neighborhood again, but instead continues through town until he merges onto Route 20 and drives toward Sisters, then past it, to the plot of land where they went hunting.

He parks the van on a logging road and hikes through the forest to the meadow. His hands are shoved deep in his pockets, the smell of pine drifting all around him. The low rays of sunlight pick out a little red in the soil, the place where they gutted the deer. He kneels there, and though the ground is hard with frost he manages to finger his way into it and pull away a handful of dirt, still the reddish color of blood. He puts it in his pocket, and later in a Ziploc bag, to keep.

Crash

The doctor tells me a car crash at 60 mph threw Karen forward at 120 times her body weight. She remembered to buckle her seat belt so that means 1/10th of a second later she came to a stop. But her internal organs did not. They collided with her bones and broke open. Most people die right off the bat, the doctor says, but not Karen. Karen died minutes later.

I ask how many minutes later.

“Beats me,” he says. “No clue.”

He says probably she looked okay—probably she even stepped away from the wreck and said, “Thank God,”—but underneath her skin things bled.

The endorphins soon faded, the pain set in, a dull soreness that made her lift up the black blouse I bought her from JCPenney to discover a purplish stain spreading across her distended belly, the scar from her cesarean looking so white against it.

The doctor says there was nothing he could do.

“DOA,” he says.

“I’m very sorry,” he says, “but these things happen.

This is why I take out my gun sometimes, and look at it.

It is a.357, a revolver, something Dad got me when I turned sixteen. Back then I wanted to be a spy—
not
a dairy farmer—someone who traveled to exotic places and wore tuxedos and drank his martinis shaken. And so the.357 seemed like a step in the right direction, somehow. On my birthday Dad and I went through a whole box of bullets—blasting pop cans, tree knots, the pigeons roosting in the hayloft—so that our hands and ears hurt the next morning.

But that was a long time ago.

Now I take the gun out and look at it and it reminds me how different things were before the crash.

Before the crash we lived in a double-wide trailer twenty steps from the white two-story farmhouse where I grew up. It wasn’t the life I wanted. I wanted to go to college—to major in international politics, in political science,
some
thing—but instead stayed on the farm because Dad and Ma asked me to in a collective voice that was more command than question.

This happened at dinner, and I held my knife, but didn’t cut with it.

“Don’t get stirred up,” Ma said. “We need you. Plain and simple.”

“I’m going to go,” I said. “It’s my money.”

Dad scooped some mash potatoes and tasted them and studied his plate. “Well then,” he said. “I guess you got to do what you got to do.”

“I’m going,” I said and meant it. I enrolled at UO for the fall, but that summer met a girl named Karen through 4-H. She had long blond hair that was always getting in her way. I liked how she blew it from her face and swept it over her shoulder and chewed on it when watching television. In the bed of my pickup she got pregnant and a month later we were married at the United Methodist. Afterwards there was a reception where people shook our hands and ate cantaloupe wrapped in bacon.

We honeymooned two nights at the Eugene Holiday Inn where she told me to “Take it easy” because I couldn’t keep my hands off her. She bit her lower lip a lot and I asked what was her deal? She touched her stomach. It was starting to poke out.

“Oh,” I said.

“It’s starting to get real,” she said.

It
was an it—not a baby—like “It moved” or, “It’s making me nauseous.” We spent no time guessing its gender or cruising the aisles of Wal-Mart for breast pumps or blue or pink jumpers. Maybe
it
would go away if we pretended it didn’t exist?

In the hotel Jacuzzi we played a game where we wished for everything under the sun. We wished for yachts, mansions, winters in Tahiti, millions and billions of dollars. What we didn’t wish for was a life gone to pot, stuck on the family farm and pregnant at the ripe old age of eighteen.

Then the honeymoon ended, and when we got back home, the brand-new double-wide was waiting for us.

“Now that was a job,” Dad said and rubbed his hands as if he hadn’t yet cleaned the work off them. “Poured the foundation myself. Townsend’s son ran the plumbing and electricity over. Quite a job. Nothing fancy. But she’ll do the trick.”

Karen liked it. I didn’t, but pretended to for her sake. Later on I told Dad, “Even though I’m sticking around, I don’t have to like it.”

“Might try to,” he said.

I stayed angry for a time, but then Hannah was born and I caught myself hugging Dad in the hospital waiting room, partly because I was happy, mostly because I was afraid. Everything smelled like ammonia when we thumped each other on the back and he said, “I’m glad this happened.”

I said, “I’m glad, too.” Which sounded right at the time.

The first time Karen got on a plane—she was fifteen and visiting a cousin in Salt Lake—the electricity went out at 30,000 feet. All of sudden, no lights, no engines, no recycled air funneling through the vents. For about ten seconds nobody said a word. She said she had never been more aware how loud quiet could get. Then the screaming started. She thought she was a goner. Bar none, the scariest thing in world history, she said. Then everything kicked back into gear and the pilot got on the intercom and said a prayer of thanksgiving.

It was just one of those things.

The man sitting next to Karen was laughing and crying at the same time. She lent him a tissue, and he said, “Are we in Heaven?” pointing out the window where the clouds were white and puffy. “I bet that’s what it looks like.”

So whenever we went on vacation, it would be to a place within driving distance: Crater Lake, Yosemite, Newport. She said to hell with the statistics, it was a matter of control. In a plane, who knows if the pilot’s been drinking, if the mechanic tightened the five-cent lug nut holding the wing in place, if someone stuck a bomb in their shoe?