Refresh, Refresh: Stories (6 page)

This continues for a few minutes, with her always eluding him. He can hear her voice and her footsteps and by the time he races to where she was, he knows she is already gone, but not where, not exactly.

All this time the roots startle him, coming out of the dark to lick his face. More than once he screams. And this is how she finds him. He can feel her hand at his elbow. It squeezes him and rises to his chest and pauses there. “Hey,” he says and she says, “Got you.”

Both of them click on their flashlights at once. They blink painfully, seeing a yellow light with a few filaments of red running through it. The black liquid of the cave oozes at the edges of their vision as the world takes form and they stare hard at each other for a long time. Then, as if something has been decided between them, she grabs a fistful of his shirt and pulls him down to the sandy floor where she brings her mouth against his. And this time she doesn’t stop him when he peels off her pants and explores the slickness between her legs with his hands before climbing on top of her.

Together they move slowly, with the rhythm of a sleeping chest, until they are finished—and this takes a long time—so long that their flashlights begin to dim and eventually black out. And they are alone in the dark, huddling together with the cold creeping into their bare skin.

When they finally untangle themselves and rise from the cave floor he takes off his belt and runs it through his back belt loop only, so that it serves as a sort of leash. She grabs hold of it and follows him as they continue back the way they came. They can hear dripping sounds of water and the hushing sound of wind and the booming sounds of rocks falling somewhere deep in the cave. But they aren’t afraid so much as they are resigned to making it home. Kevin reaches his hands before him and moves them in a slow scissoring motion as if clearing the cobwebs from the air. And he lifts his feet high and brings them down carefully and when necessary warns Becca: “There’s a big rock here, about knee-high, so don’t bang into it.”

Every time the cave walls fall away he follows the left passage, groping through the dark, and eventually they find the staircase. They climb it and close the steel door behind them. The air is warmer up here. It feels soft. A patch of dawn sky is visible through the living-room window.

Becca goes to the kitchen and pulls out a gallon of milk and before pouring it into a glass stands there, backlit by the fridge, her face in shadow, looking at Kevin as if wondering, in mystery, how they found their way back.

The Woods

My father wanted to show me something, but he wouldn’t say what. He only said I should get my gun, my thirty-aught-six, and follow him. This happened just outside Bend, Oregon, where we lived in a ranch house surrounded by ten acres of woods. I was twelve at the time: old enough to shoot a gun, young enough to fear the dark.

The moment we stepped off the porch, as if on cue, a sound rose from the forest, as slow as smoke. It sounded like a woman crying. I felt my veins constrict and a needle-jab of dread in my chest. “What’s that?” I said. “What the hell
is
that?”

“Don’t be a pantywaist,” my father said over his shoulder. By now he was several steps ahead of me and moving across the lawn. “And don’t say hell.”

When he reached the place where the grass met the trees, he perceived I was not following him, and turned. “Come on,” he said.

In silence, he motioned me forward with his hand and I clutched my rifle a little closer to my chest. Then the noise began again, sharper and louder now than before, reminding me of metal rasping across a file. Even my father cringed.

Once we entered the forest the pines put a black color on things, and through their branches dropped a wet wind that carried with it the smell of the nearby mountains. It was that in-between time of day, not quite afternoon and not quite night, when the air begins to purple and thicken.

We walked for some time along a well-worn path, one of many that coiled through our property like snakes without end. Sometimes loud and sometimes soft, the screaming sound continued, like a siren signaling the end of the world. It overwhelmed my every thought and sensation so that I felt as if I were stuck in a box with only this horrible noise to keep me company. Everything seemed to tremble as it dragged its way through the air.

We hurried along as fast as we could, less out of wonder or sympathy, I began to suspect, than the urgent need to silence it. I hated the noise—its mournful mixed-up music—as much as I feared it.

Then, between the trees, I saw the inky gleam of its eyes, and its huge ears drawn flat against its skull, and then I saw its body. Blood trails oozed along its cinnamon color.

“Man alive,” my father said.

It was a four-prong mule deer and it was tangled in our barbed-wire fence, the barbed wire crisscrossing its body like fast handwriting. I remember the blood so clearly. It was
the
perfect shade of red. To this day I want a car—an old-time car—say a Mustang or one of those James Bond Aston Martins—the color of it.

The deer, bewildered, let its head droop and took short nervous breaths before letting loose another wail, a high-pitched sound that lowered into a baritone moan, like pulling in a trombone. A purple tongue hung from its mouth. Its muscles jerked beneath its hide.

I stood behind a clump of rabbitbrush as if to guard myself from the animal. The bush smelled great. It smelled sugary. It smelled like the color yellow ought to smell. By concentrating on it so deeply, I removed myself from the forest and was thereby able to contain the tears crowding my eyes.

Then my father said, “I want you to kill it.”

Just like that. Like killing was throwing a knuckleball or fixing a carburetor or tying a necktie.

To this day, some fifteen years later, when I lie in bed in a half-dream, the deer sometimes emerges from the shadows, snapping its teeth, retreating back into shadow as quickly as it appeared. To this day, I dislike the woods, I dislike hunting, I dislike my father.

Which is why, when he called and invited me to join him camping and hunting in the Ochoco National Forest, I surprised myself by saying yes.

I wasn’t the only one surprised. “You’re sure?” he said.

“Sure I’m sure.”

“Your mother just thinks . . . I just figured . . .” His voice fell off a cliff here, uncharacteristically uncertain.

I tried to fill the sentence for him in as diplomatic a way as possible. “Some guy time would definitely be healthy.”

“Exactly,”
he said, relieved, his voice rising to a manly pitch reserved for taverns and locker rooms. “We’ll drink some beers and raise some hell!” Here he paused and cleared his throat and his sober tone resumed. “I can’t remember the last time we talked, you know. I mean, really
talked
.”

He hit the nail on the head.

East of Bend, the uninhabited country begins as immediately as the ocean begins off the shore. This is the high desert. In a beat-up Bronco, my father and I drove through the sagebrush, the flat yellow dinginess interrupted by the occasional pumice or cinder quarry. Though it was October and though by night the temperature might drop into the forties, thick heat waves rose from the road, shrouding the distant Ochoco hills and making them appear unreal.

I was working in Portland as a software developer and my father was trying to figure out what this meant. For four years he hadn’t bothered to ask about my work except to say, “How’s work?”

In college, when I announced my decision to major in computer science, he told me flat out he didn’t consider it an honest way to make money. He had not gone to college—“Didn’t see the point,” he said—and worked as a contractor, constructing the luxurious gated communities that continue to sprout up all over Bend, inhabited by retired Californians who moved there for the skiing and golf.

Now, for whatever reason—guilt or genuine curiosity or something else—he asked me in a loud voice, speaking over the noise of the radio and the engine, what exactly the Internet
was
, what exactly a computer
did.

My father is a big man—with a beard and a keg-of-beer belly—a man who wouldn’t look out of place in a truck commercial. What he doesn’t understand, he normally labels worthless and sweeps aside with his fist and a few select words. Which is why, when I answered his questions and when I noticed his eyebrows coming closer and closer together in confusion, his knuckles growing whiter at the steering wheel, I decided to change the subject to one he would enjoy.

“How’s Boo working out for you?” Boo was a lab/retriever mix he bought about a year ago from an alfalfa-farmer neighbor. He had always wanted a hunting dog and he had been training Boo obsessively.

“Oh, he’s a good boy.” My father smiled and adjusted the rearview mirror so he could spy on Boo where he slept in the backseat in a horseshoe shape. “Boo?” he said. “Hey, Boo bear?” At the sound of his name, the dog perked his ears and lifted his head from his paws and thumped his tail a few times. “You ready to hunt, Boo?” my father said, and Boo barked sharply.

My father then began to explain at length how raising a dog is no different than raising a child. He claimed a man who fails to sufficiently and constantly train his dog, to test it, to
discipline
—from its weaning to its death—is in for a rude awakening. “Boo wasn’t even a month old when I first introduced him to water, to various types of cover, and of course to game birds,” he said and ran a hand across his beard, neatening it. “When it comes to dogs, you got to develop their obedience and hunting desire from the get-go or they won’t grow up right.”

Here he gave me a look full of judgment and love that quite frankly pissed me off, but I pretended not to notice—I kept up my pleasant demeanor—because with him, when things boiled over, it took a lot of time and energy before he would treat you civilly again—and we had a long weekend ahead of us.

He explained how he first coaxed Boo into water. “I took my fly rod, see?” His hand mimicked casting. “And with a pheasant wing dangling from it, I shot it off into the shallow part of the pond and let Boo chase it and sight-point it.”

Then he baited Boo with a dead bird, and then a live lame bird. “At first, my pup got afraid when he felt the bottom disappear under his legs, but I got in the pond with him and showed him how safe it was, and now he can, by God, hardly go by a puddle without wanting to jump in it.” I remembered him shoving me off a dock and demanding I tread water for sixty seconds and laughing much as he laughed now, looking lovingly at his dog.

I admit to feeling something like jealousy.

“No,” he said, as if responding to some conversation I wasn’t a part of, “Boo won’t be much help to us deer hunting, but he’s good company.”

I continued to listen and he continued to speak until the final distance—where the sagebrush gave way to juniper and pine trees—became the near distance and the ground began to steadily rise and the evergreen forest filtered the sun into puddles that splashed across the highway. We turned off the air conditioner and rolled down our windows because here the heat was gone, replaced by a pure cool air that made breathing feel like drinking.

My father was a creature of habit and for as long as my family had been visiting the Ochocos, we made our camp along the South Fork of the John Day River, in the Black Canyon Wilderness. Besides the occasional Forest Service truck grumbling along the nearby logging road, we never saw anyone and my father considered the spot his own.

To remember the exact location, he had blaze-marked a pine with his hatchet. “Keep an eye out,” he said, and then, “There!” indicating the tree with the wound scabbed over by hard orange sap. We parked under its branches and tramped through the bear grass and lupin, seeking the cold spring that bled into the South Fork, and next to it, our old firepit, probably with a few weeds growing through its ashes.

We found something else entirely.

Boo ran ahead of us, popping his teeth at butterflies, barking at a chipmunk that chattered a warning from a nearby tree, and then his body went still. “You see that?” my father said, nodding in Boo’s direction. “He’s sighted something there. Maybe a ptarmigan or a grouse.”

It was another thirty feet to where Boo pointed, his body as black and as rigid as obsidian, his snout indicating something hidden among the knee-high grass. “At ease,” my father said and the dog relaxed his pose and wagged his tail, but kept his eyes focused ahead of him.

Here was the cold spring—the size of a hot tub—surrounded by willows and sun-sparkled stones, and next to it, our firepit, and next to it, a body.

The man had been dead a long time. So long I could only identify him as male by his clothes—his jeans and flannel shirt—and even then I could not be certain. The vultures and the coyotes and the flies and the worms had had their way with him. I imagined the coyotes howling when they did it, fighting over the juiciest cuts of meat.

After a stunned silence, I ran. I ran and probably made it fifty feet before I stopped and found my cool and steadied my breathing and returned to my father, slowly.

“This is bad,” he said. He was wearing a John Deere cap and he removed it now and put his hand into its hollow as if seeking an explanation there. “This is a hell of a thing.” He looked like a man who has woken from a nap and cannot find his bearings.

I took my cell phone from my pocket. No surprise: there was no service here, far from any tower. “If we drive to the top of the canyon,” I said. “If we get a little higher, I might be able to get a signal. It’s worth a try anyway.”

“No.” My father put his hat back on and straightened it.

“Excuse me?”

“No,” he said again. “What’s the rush?” He lifted his hand and let it fall and slap his thigh. “I tell you something:
he’s
in no rush.”

I understood this completely and not at all. “Dad?” I said.
“No.”

There was concern on his face, but I genuinely believe this had more to do with having to abandon our campsite than with the dead man sprawled across it. He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed just hard enough so I knew he meant business. “Justin,” he said.