The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (2 page)

“About what you just said,” I say. “About Missy. About the pig.”

“I didn't say anything just now about the pig. I was telling you about my back.”

“Do you have any orange juice?”

She gets up.
Now
, I realize, would be the time to tell her about the gaffing. We have, at long last, ended the conversation about the pig. Now would be the time, I think, if ever there was a time, to tell my mother that her brother is dead, and that I have killed him unwittingly, and that
this
is the reason I have come over to her house on Sunday morning and am sitting in her kitchen chair.

She pours me a glass of orange juice and sits down. She is looking at me.

“You're not a good listener,” she says.

“I'm not,” I say. “This is most certainly true.”

“Your father wasn't a good listener either,” she says. Her lips are chapped. Her charcoal hair is pulled back tightly off her chalk-white forehead in something like a ponytail.

I say nothing. I have nothing to add to this. I don't think it wise to discuss my father, whom she has long hated, at this juncture in the conversation. From my perspective, anyway, we've got enough trouble brewing. And she must sense this too, that she has made a mistake in comparing her dead and unloved husband's name to my own, because she
drops this line of conversation and points to the pig in my lap.

“This one, you know, keeps me up till all hours of the night.”

I smile. “I believe that.”

“My little restless lover,” she laughs, not smiling.

I look down at the pig, because my mother is looking down at the pig when she says this. Its nose is wet. I think I could play with the liquid draining from its nose for a long, long time. I am not gross, I think, for admitting this. The liquid is glistening and fascinating to touch, and that the pig is letting me play with its slimy nose—letting me, in fact, stick my second and fourth fingers nearly all the way up into its nostrils, rotate my fingers in gentle supplications, slip my fingers out, and pull the slickness away from the rim of its gaping and bumpy apertures—only makes it more captivating.

This is a fascination, as I have said, that helps me realize again how universally seductive life is at a distance. Pulling at the pig's nostrils gives me the sense of doing things from a long way away. It is as if I am not, myself, even doing it. I feel as though this pig would have to be conscious of me doing
what I am doing for me to be doing it at all. And this may be what the French call (and really it is just shameful that I say this at all after already admitting my complete ignorance of the French language) the motive or the instinct or the nature of the
voyeur
—

And how I wish I was but a voyeur at that pivotal moment when I, at length, forced myself to sit down, swallow my disbelief, grab the oars, and row my uncle and myself back to shore after the gaffing. I would give or do anything to have been then where I am right now.

And so too would have my uncle, I suspect, because when it came to rowing the boat, Ackvund knew better than anyone else (I can still hear him scoffing) that I had a lead left arm. Since childhood I have had a hell of a time keeping the boat true to its course, and, as a result, Ackvund had always taken it on himself to row us in and out of the vast chop we used to call Big Lake.

There is little doubt in my mind therefore why, when I sat down to take the oars, my uncle began weeping for the first time. To this point, he had been nothing short of Norwegian royalty: not a word spoken, not a tear shed. But then I could see
quite plainly that besides the crying (you really couldn't mistake it) he had just wet his pants. He was crumbling right there before me. Surely he must have thought that my taking over the oars would be the anguished end of us both—

But I will say this in my defense: I rowed hard, as hard as I could and as fast as I could, and followed as best I could the instructions I had heard all my life about rowing a boat—that is, pick a spot on the far shore (tree, cabin) and keep your eyes fastened to that landmark the entire time, so that you are always pulling away from the same place and heading, in theory, to the place directly its opposite, which, for only the most romantic northerner, would be the intended terminus.

God help me, my landmark kept switching from one tree to the next, one cabin to another (no fault of my own, really, given the dire circumstances and the uncanny likenesses of all the trees and cabins in this part of the country). What I was losing in accuracy, I was gaining in unprecedented speed—

Indeed, we might have been clipping along at more than ten miles per hour when I suddenly realized we were not headed toward our own dock, but
the Halvorsteds' dock perhaps a quarter mile off the mark.

To change directions at this point seemed to me a tremendous impossibility. I looked to our dock (and mind, here, that I was craning my neck a full 180 degrees, and at times more, as my body was facing toward the opposite side of the lake, my back to the approaching shoreline and Halvorsteds' dock), and in that very brief moment in which I had turned to calculate the distance from our dock to the Halvorsteds', having established, as I say, so much water speed, we struck the oncoming dock squarely and to my complete surprise. I pitched backwards, but clung to the oars. My uncle, however, had no sense at all of what was approaching—

I heard him shout once, and it was as robust and tortured a howl as I had ever heard in my life from another human. I spun around quickly and the only trace of him I could see were his legs pointing straight up in the air, as in rigor mortis, and my bowing rod, jammed between the inner gunwale and my own seat, its line taught and crystalline and vibrating and still anchored horribly in my uncle's head—

“Just stop doing that!” my mother says to me.

“Doing what?” I slip my finger out of the pig's nostril.

“Thank you,” she says. Her jaw is clenched. “Christ.”

“What?” I say. “She likes it.”

“No, she does not.”

“She isn't
moving
.”

As though it has been cued, the damn pig moves. It stirs in its sleep and looks up at me. It snorts. It rises shakily, because it is standing on my lap, and my thighs are proving to be a less-than-stable platform for its cloven, bowed legs. It wobbles and snorts. This pig is sexy, I'm not going to pretend any longer it isn't so. I'm not going to act as though its stunted proportions and its angled, little mouth do not stir in me some perverse kinship.

I grab its chubby sides and wiggle its fat. It isn't kinky, it isn't grotesque, it's just funny and vaguely erotic.

“Stop it!” my mother shouts. She gets up from her chair and leans over me, to take the pig away.

“All right, all right,” I say. Gently, I push her arms away from the pig.

“What is wrong with you?” she asks. “Why are you here? What are you doing here?”

I pause. I take in the odor of this old room.

“I killed your brother,” I say.

She makes a face.

“He's down in the cabin,” I say. “Dead.”

She says nothing. She thinks I'm kidding. I shake my head.

“He is,” I say. “I killed him. It's my fault. Go look.”

“Get out of my house,” she says.

“Mother,” I say.

“Get out,” she says again.

I don't go anywhere. Where am I going to go? I have this pig on my lap and we need to call the police. I cannot run away. Running will get me nowhere except further from this situation, and frankly, I'm as far
and
as close to this problem as I want to get. I am in the throes of voyeur fulfillment. I am not in trouble; I am posturing as trouble. I am hovering over conflict like smoke above fire. I am the contour of wrongdoing, the specter of guilt—

And for what it's worth, I tried to call the police from the cabin, when I first got Ackvund back to his
home, but by then it was too late; he was dead. And anyway the phone was dead too, because Ackvund never paid his phone bills, which was, of course, the main reason I was out fishing with him—to give the old guy, who had been losing some of his marbles, a little company and guidance, perhaps remind him very gently to pay his bills and take his medication.

It occurred to me at one point (and I can't remember if it was on the dock or up by the cabin or just after I had broken through the Halvorsteds' cabin window after I discovered no one was home) to stop and give Ackvund a more thorough looking over. I studied his face very closely. His cheeks were covered with blood, and both of his eyes were closed, sealed shut with a sheet of golden crust. He was scowling. He wasn't talking though. As I've alluded to, we are not a family of French origin; we are Norwegians, and this silence in the face of sustained anguish was not extraordinary behavior for my uncle or anyone else I know.

In any case, he must have felt me breathing on his face as I looked at him, because he opened his one eye, the one that of course did not have the hook stuck in it and the hand covering it, and when he
opened his eye, I decided the best course of action would be to explain the nature of our predicament to him. I looked him square in that eye and I said very sternly and very clearly, as though he was hard of hearing, “Ackvund, you have a fishing hook stuck in your eye. Don't worry. We are going to get it out of there.” I formed a hook with one of my fingers and demonstrated for him on my head how and where the hook had penetrated his skull, and how it had come out of his eye and through his finger.

This was a mindless effort, I realize now. He only looked at me briefly, then closed his eye again. The color of his face faded. I caught him by the elbow just as he began to slouch and the pain in this—as I had grabbed the elbow of his hooked arm—brought him instantly back among the living.

This pig is remarkably black. It is vividly black. Shimmering black. It is sleeping again, sleeping so soundly in fact that its feet quiver. Its ears are soft on the inside, coarse on the outside. I've mentioned this before, I realize, but it's worth repeating. I do not have hair so distinct. Why, then, should this beast? And does it matter? No, it does not. What matters more is my increasing desire for this animal.

I put it down on the floor. It is beginning to arouse me—

I want my mother to return home so that we might continue our earlier conversation. I am finding that in this silence, my recollections of yesterday morning with my uncle are becoming horribly acute. They are lulling me into a sadness I cannot see myself overcoming.

My mother, I have neglected to say, has left her own house and driven, I suspect, though she did not say this to me, to her brother's cabin, where she will find his dead body supine on the couch with the television on. She has not yet returned. I imagine she is experiencing something a lot like what I am right now—a sense of peering into somebody else's bedroom, the door left slightly ajar—

This is odd. But I have to wonder if something as odd as this was crossing my uncle Ackvund's mind after I broke into the Halvorsteds' cabin and found no telephone. His face, when I informed him that I had found no phone, glossed over; a grin flashed, and then his skull appeared to sink. And it pains me to remember what I did then, seeing his face. Truly, I had no idea I could do what I then
decided to do—that is, hoist my uncle up, from under his knees, and carry him on my shoulder out to the front of the Halvorsteds' cabin, and all the way to the road.

My uncle, you should know, could not have weighed less than 250 pounds at the time, and I had no choice but to put him down several times, leaning him against the side of the cabin while I caught my breath. After nearly one half hour of defying gravity, I was only able to get him as far as the front of the driveway, near the Halvorsteds' garage. Exhausted, I decided I could carry him no farther, was in fact doing him a grave disservice by trying, and I ran instead to the front of the cabin to look for something,
anything
, that might aid in my rescue.

Mercifully, I found a wheelbarrow and pushed it to him, laid him in it, then wheeled him as quickly as I could out to the road—then there was the waiting, much like I find myself waiting right now—

Its belly, this pig's belly, is so tender that when I roll it over on its back and press my hand against its stomach, the impression of my hand is outlined quite clearly in its fat, white flesh. It squirms as if I've
pressed too hard, but it is a good-natured pig, and scrambles to its feet and comes to me again, snorting.

Its sounds are not at all unlike the whimpering noises my uncle was making as he waited beside me in the wheelbarrow. I found myself ignoring, to the extent that I could, my uncle's wailing while we were waiting at the side of the road for someone to drive past. But County Road H is not a busy thoroughfare, and after ten minutes or so of his anguished weeping, I went to him and put my hands on his shoulders and looked him square in the eye. I spoke to him, and this (that's right, I'm sure of it now) was when I talked to Ackvund as though he were deaf and explained to him the precise nature of all his trouble; this was when I made the little fishing hook with my finger and demonstrated for him, by sticking my finger-hook near my eye, the way in which the hook had come through his temple and out his socket. And this was when, at last, I took the rod from his fierce clutches and clipped the line with my teeth, leaving the lure to dangle and sway freely—freely at last—from his face.