Before We Go Extinct (9 page)

Sailboats dot the waters with huge ballooning sails full of wind. We pass an island with colorful tents splayed out down a hillside. Kayakers paddle near the shore in bright yellow and red boats that look like bathtub toys.

It's almost ridiculous, how pretty it is. It's pretend. It can't be real. But I know that it is because the air smells green and alive and salty and like forever would smell if it had a scent.

Then suddenly, amazingly (or not), I have an attack of feelings that are the opposite of what I should be feeling. I mean, shouldn't this kind of thing make you feel joy? If nothing else in the world makes you feel joy, this should. All this greenness. Well, this scene just suddenly and totally pisses me off. Like how dare it be so beautiful? The King is dead. I am so angry and sad and empty. I kick my foot against a huge bin labeled
Life Preservers
and my toes crunch in a satisfyingly painful way. Then my eyes tear up again and I put my sunglasses on and stare into the black reflection on my phone, keeping my eyes off everything that is alive and diamond-sparkling on the horizon against the backdrop of the too-blue summer sky.

 

16

The car pulls to a stop at the top of a public dock. The road has narrowed and gravel crunches under the tires. Dad swings the car up into a patch of dirt and grass that isn't quite a parking spot. I have a feeling that parking lots aren't really a thing here. You just … stop. The dock itself is a long, long, long ramp leading to a small landing down a steep plank. It has a railing painted bright red. At the distant end of it, an aluminum boat is bobbing in the swell.

“Well,” says Dad, “you might not talk, but you gotta work. We have to carry this stuff”—he points—“down there.” He unlocks the back door and then has to use his whole body weight to pull it open. The hinges groan reluctantly. “This car.” He shakes his head. “I wouldn't have one if I didn't need to move so much food. They're so terrible for the whole world. Environment. Everything. And this one, well. Piece of crap, really.”

I nod. Can't disagree there. A hunk of rusty metal falls on the gravel from somewhere in the vicinity of the back door. “Yeah,” he says. “Rusty.”

I look at the boxes and bags that look like enough to last three summers: crates and cases and overflowing sacks of food. It takes an hour to drag it all down to the boat, the last part so alarmingly steep that my ankle remembers its injury and starts to throb. “Low tide,” Dad says cryptically. Our bodies are aching and our skin is weeping sweat into our stinging eyes. The boat itself sinks lower and lower into the sea with each load. Up close, it looks questionably safe at best. Patches of rust splay out along its sides like it's been paintballed with the stuff. I don't know much about boats, but nothing about this one screams
seaworthy
. I wonder where Dad purchases his vehicles. The junkyard?

When we finally get going though, it seems okay. The cooler air off the water is such a relief that I'm not even sure I'd care if we sank. The motor vibrates noise around me. The ocean itself looks cold and clear and welcoming. My scalp prickles with sunburn.

The noise drowns out any possibility of talking, thank god, which means even Dad shuts up for a change. The life jacket Dad has forced me to put on is stretching my head away from my body, like those African tribesmen who use rings to lengthen their necks. The boat charges forward, slamming up and down on the waves,
whap whap whap
. Dad is smiling at the horizon. I stare at his profile in the mist of the spray that the boat is creating, pounding into the water like it is.

He's different here.

He's not the bumbling doofus he is in New York. It's like he fills the space differently. He looks okay, solid inside his own skin. Under
this
sky. New York is like a T-shirt he's borrowed from someone else that is stretched out wrong and fits him badly and makes him always look like he wants to scratch at where the tag is rubbing his neck.

Here, he fits.

This is a fact. It doesn't make me like him any more or anything, it's just an observation.

The boat smashes down hard on the wake of a passing cruiser and a bunch of bananas fly out of a box and into the glass-green water. I think about reaching for them, but I don't. Instead, I trail my hand through the water, which is ice cold, spraying up my shirt and soaking me through. I feel for my phone in my pocket. Still there. I reach for it to take an Instagram of the bananas bobbing behind us, but the battery is still dead. The salt spray freckles the screen. I shove it back in my pocket.

It takes a half hour or maybe less until Dad slows the engine, and then he is nosing the boat onto the shore of a pebbled beach, the aluminum crunching hard against the rocks. He jumps off the bow and pulls the rope, shifting the whole boat from floating to grounded. The muscles in his arms ripple.

Above us, the face of a cabin peers down through the foliage like a shy kid. Reflecting in the late-afternoon light, the glass seems to appear and then disappear in the shadows. It's up a flight of steps that are made out of driftwood, oddly angled and steep. I think about the huge pile of boxes and bags in the boat and sigh.

No wonder Dad has muscles.

A dog barks from inside, followed by more barking, as though Dad has the entire SPCA camped out in his living room. All around, the trees are making dappled shadows that splay over the pale pebbles of the beach, mottle the stairs, freckle the water.

It's so pretty. There is no explanation for why I feel like punching a tree trunk just to feel pain. I have to shove my hands in my pockets and will myself not to do that. Make myself feel less crazy. Is this what going crazy is like?

I have never seen trees like these. Some are squat and stunted in permanently bent positions, like the wind has blown them sideways and they never bothered to right themselves. Some are huge and obviously ancient, their bark so gnarled and twisted they make me think of the skin of old people, leathered and thick. The treetops vanish into the dusking sky. Looking up makes me dizzy. Scattered among them are smooth-skinned trees that look almost soft. Dark green waxy leaves, red papery bark feathering down to the ground in the wind.

“Arbutus,” Dad says. I reach out and touch one and it feels firm and smooth, like cool human flesh. I pull back. Hands into pockets. Pretend not to be weirded out. Pretend not to be weird, in general, I guess.

“The boys are saying hello,” Dad says. “Come on. Let's go up and let them out before they break through the glass door. We'll haul the stuff up in a few.”

I follow him up the long stairs. He keeps a running description of everything we can see: types of trees, a passing bird. I wonder if there will be a test at the end.

“Salal,” he says. “Dried seaweed we use as fertilizer. Douglas fir. Bald eagle.” My legs feel funny, like they are someone else's legs, which makes sense, because this is someone else's life. Someone else's forest. Someone else's crooked steps, grass and moss growing on the rotting wood. Someone else's cabin, lopsided and saggy.

But unfortunately not someone else's dad.

“It's not really a house,” he says. “More of a cabin. Don't expect much. I mean,
I
like it, but I get how it might be a shock to you, city boy.”

I pretend to not be shocked, but I guess he's right and I am.
Rustic
doesn't even begin to cover it. I follow him inside, past the front porch where a molding floral sofa sags depressingly toward the boards. A hammock with an assortment of empty beer cans scattered under it swings in a cold breeze. There is a table with four typewriters in various states of disrepair: partially pulled apart and rusty looking. Shells sit in rows along the balcony. A sign on the door says,
PLEASE COME IN, UNLESS THE DOOR IS LOCKED, IN WHICH CASE, STAY THE ^*&! OUT.

Everything smells unfamiliar and wrong, that's the first thing I notice. Not just the dog smell, but everything. And the dogs themselves look like wolves, three of them, stepping on and over one another to get to me and Dad, their ice-colored eyes fixed on my face, fur bristling.

I can feel myself starting to scrunch up inside, anxious, like I used to when Mom would take me to that group diligently once a week to help me try to figure out why. The old feeling of panic catches me off guard. I'm not much used to dogs. Not dogs like these, dogs that look like they should be pulling sleds through miles of snowy tundra in a movie, not big huge northern dogs licking my kneecaps like I'm a steak dinner, their lips sneering back to reveal sharp yellowing teeth.

Canines.

A mosquito lands on my arm and I slap it down in time to see a blob of my own blood spilling free. In my pocket, my phone is as still as death. I want it to vibrate. I want, at least, for Daff to text me so I can feel like I'm still at home, still connected to somebody, somewhere, somehow, even if only through a bunch of texts that I'll never answer. I clench the phone in my hand, just to feel it, solid and familiar in my pocket, while I look frantically around the open space for a place to go that isn't here.

The dogs are snuffling and hot-breathed, pushing too hard against my legs. There seem to be too many of them all at once, and without thinking, I drop to the floor, rolled up in a ball. I think I say something.

I think what I say is
no
.

But the thing with these dogs is that they don't let up. A head pressed to my chest, another one in my face, licking licking and in the background, Dad laughing and laughing, like the funniest thing he's ever seen is his own kid, drenched in panic-sweat, under a thousand pounds of dog, on his plywood cabin floor.

 

17

I sleep between Spider-Man sheets in a loft that I get to by stairs that are so steep they are almost a ladder, a fact that doesn't stop the dogs from following me up and filling the available space with their breathing. It's a place that Dad had clearly been using for storage, and to “get it ready,” he simply shoved the cases of cereal and wine and beer and soup to one side to make room for a bed for me.

I dream of something dusty and wake up sneezing. “Cleaning” is obviously a low priority for Dad, along with “home decoration” and “hygiene,” which makes him the opposite of Mom in yet another way. She would have a heart attack if she saw this place. She'd be bleaching the dogs, whose hair drifts around on surfaces like it's hoping to eventually weave itself into a new dog. The dogs themselves are sprawled widely, like men who spread their legs open on subway seats. They sleep heaped up on the floor. And when they are up, pacing around, they are too big for the space, their claws clattering on the scratched hardwood, their breathing taking up all the air. I hiss at them between my teeth and one looks at me and thumps his tail on the floor.
We aren't friends
, I tell him with my eyes, and he sighs like he gets it.

“They're friendly,” Dad says. “They're the best dogs. You're going to love them. Man, I wish I'd had dogs when I was younger. They teach you so much, you know, about how to be human. They were sled dogs. It's a terrible story, how the owner rounded his dogs up and shot them when his business failed. Someone managed to save a few and I took these three. They are so so so great. They are the best. You've got to love them.”

I nod and shrug. The nod-and-shrug being my primary way of communicating with Dad.

Their eyes glisten pale blue like a sky with the richness frozen out of it. They follow me around the main area of the cabin, which is kitchen/living room/dining room/every room. Dad's bedroom is stuck on the back, like an afterthought. There's no bathroom.

Like he's reading my mind, Dad goes, “Oh, yeah, I don't know why you didn't ask yesterday, ha ha, but there's no bathroom, it's an outhouse down the trail. Or, you know, pee behind a tree or whatever. Like I guess you did. Unless I should worry about kidney failure! No biggie. There's no one around.”

I stare at him. Okay, sure. Fine. An outhouse down the trail. Why not? I think of our bathroom at home, the way Mom cleans between the tiles with a toothbrush soaked in Tilex. The way the water drips rustily into the drain, leaving a sad orange mark, like tears on the white face of a clown and how every day she's scrubbing at it with a Magic Eraser until every mark of it is eradicated again.

I whistle between my teeth and Dad jumps. The dogs don't shift.

“Yeah?” he says. “Did you say something?” His face is so hopeful. I hate him. There's a lump in my throat. I want to slam my hand in the door, or worse. I don't know what I want. I press my foot hard into the ground so my ankle predictably aches.

I snap my fingers and then the dogs come to me, giant heads nudging my legs, tails wagging.
Good dogs
, I say silently.
Good boys.
I don't know who I'm reminding. Me, or them. Maybe I just want to be the kind of guy who understands dogs in some profound way. Maybe I want to be a guy dogs like.

Why not?

Dad lies on the floor and they lick his face, paw his chest, rest on his legs.

I fight the urge to kick him. Getup, getup getup. You aren't five. He laughs like he doesn't care how stupid he looks. Grabs a dog and rubs its belly hard. The dog's eyes practically roll back in his head from joy. Man, those dogs love him.

I was five when Dad left. Mom has made a real effort to never say anything bad about him. She says things like, “He tries his best.” And, “He just doesn't know.” And, “We weren't right for each other.” And, “He was never right for New York and it wasn't right for him.” I try to imagine what really happened between them. Did he cheat? Lie? Drink? Hit her?

Did she hit him?

It's not like I'm going to ask.

I don't remember much about it. But I do remember how Mom's voice would curl sharply up into the air like cut glass when she was angry. I remember how his edges seemed dulled and floppy in comparison. The way he'd slink out of the apartment, hunched and folded, and not come back for hours or days.