Call Me Home (10 page)

Jackson glanced up quickly and Don was looking at him, smiling a little. He felt immediately grateful. It was the worst party he'd been to since he'd gone to one of the cross-country parties three years ago, where everyone had eaten pasta and talked about shin splints. In fact, this might be worse, Jackson thought, but at the same time he was enjoying it, watching the men, deciding who was good and who was bad, who was liked and who wasn't. Then men stood around the card table, putting their dirty hands into the chip bowls. A small group had gathered at the window and was looking out at the lake, talking about the eventual town, the new Silver. The rest slumped around, leaning against the raw wood walls. He kept thinking about the kid with his broken ankle. And those poor smashed birds. He drank the terrible whiskey as quickly as he could and hung around another young guy named Greg, listening to him talk about a band he was starting. There was some question about whether or not Jackson could play bass, which he couldn't. Finally, someone brought up the Longhorn.

The trip to the Longhorn was made in several pickups. Jackson found himself in the back of Bill McPhee's Toyota with two of
the contractors, both drunk. He was drunk, too. He lit a cigarette and realized too late that the windows were closed; he kept smoking it. His father had done that, smoked with all the windows rolled up so that the smell stayed in all of their hair for the rest of the day.

Jackson didn't see what car Don had climbed into. Probably his own truck, weaving drunkenly down those dark wet roads. Jackson was glad; he didn't even want to think about how to talk when he was this drunk; everything he said was sure to be wrong.

There were a half-dozen cars in the Longhorn parking lot. Some of them looked to have been there for a long time, judging from the leaves on the windshields, the ruts under the wheels. The Longhorn, Riley explained to him, was for the working lonely, the tired. It was a bar full of men and the women they dated, but the conversation was about the town and the project. It was a drinker's bar, for people who held their liquor. On the other end of the strip was Mona's, for the heartsick, for people temporarily in trouble. The music at Mona's was slow and sorrowful, one sugar-sad ballad after another. Pete's was a little shanty of a place, shoehorned into the middle of the main block, and that was where you went if it was all you had, your life in a bottle.

He looked around the Longhorn more freely this time, since he was no longer worried about getting in. It was a squat building with a chicken-wire roof and a strand of perennially blinking Christmas lights. The walls were papered with B-grade bikini models, and the ceiling was festooned with lingerie – lingerie that might have been donated by patrons but that Jackson suspected had been placed there by the owner to make the Longhorn seem sexy and exciting, to make it feel wild, like you might just turn around from your game of darts to find the woman next to you unhooking her bra.

The owner was a stocky man who seemed to have been in Silver all of his life. The men who'd been in Silver back when the river was still creeping into basements told stories of the early days of the bar, when the owner had cared for most of the men of Silver like a mother, nursing their furies, phoning their wives. Before the
rerouting, on hot nights, someone said, he would open the back door and the men would strip down to their underwear and swim, their beer glasses raised above their heads.

Jackson was conscious, the whole time, of Don next to him, of the occasional drunken, accidental touch of his thigh under the table. He wondered for a minute at how stupid it was, to like someone only because they paid you five minutes of attention. What did he know of Don, besides that black hair, that smile?

He sank into his beer, waiting out Don next to him, trying not to speak and not to be too quiet, listening, making little noises when he should, laughing. The conversation was tumbling around, over him:
The concrete guys aren't pulling their weight, they never do. They spend most of the morning in the bar, that is proven fact. That new bartender down at Mona's, Lori, is that her name? Have you seen that ass? Seems like she wants to talk, but it seems that way to everybody who goes in there. Levi on the East side quit. Levi's brother Mac on the West side got crabs, and not from Lori but someone else from Mona's, watch yourself there, you never know.

Now out of the noise came Don's hand, heavy and warm, on Jackson's shoulder. “So you've never shot a gun,” Don said.

“I've never shot a gun,” Jackson said. That far-off day with his mother, the .38. “I'm showing you what this does,” she'd said, “and I never want you to touch one again. Promise me.” She'd sold it shortly after, and he suspected it was because she was afraid. Later, he'd grown to hate the idea of guns, had checked the house periodically. If his father had one – just one moment, he thought. Just one second that you couldn't take back. Any time his father left he prowled the house like a thief.

“Well, fuck, let's go,” Don said. “I've got a .30 –.30,” Don said. “And an empty whiskey bottle. We're gonna shoot some whiskey skeet.”

He followed Don to his truck and climbed in. The seatbelt was like a long loose rope he was trying to tie around his waist. He was squinting one eye and he felt embarrassed, wished he could hold his liquor – where was Don taking him? Then they were in a
field and Don was handing him a gun, steely and cold. He held the barrel up and squinted again and couldn't see a thing. His hand on the trigger – suddenly Don was pressing into him – “Against your shoulder!” he yelled, his arms around Jackson from behind, pulling the butt of the gun into Jackson's shoulder, his chest. “Put it – It'll punch your shoulder right out –” and they were kissing. He let the gun fall down at his side.

They couldn't go to Don's trailer because it was directly in the thick of crew housing, and they couldn't go to Jackson's cab because it was just too sad and small. “Here,” Don had said, “follow me,” and led the way, the two of them crashing around the lake on foot, and then – from nowhere! – Don's pickup; Jackson made a move to say he shouldn't drive, but then laughed instead and climbed into the front seat. His neck felt loose on his shoulders. The truck lurched forward, narrow road between the trees, black against black sky. The headlights tossing against silver leaves; the branches whipped the windows; he reached his hand across the cab and rested it on Don's jeans, on his hard cock.

Don stopped the truck down the road from A-frame B and they climbed out into the cold night air. Don pulled a sleeping bag from the back of the cab and they were stumbling, half-drunk, up the stairs of A-frame B. When they made it inside, Jackson sat on the raw wooden floor. The ground was so comfortingly solid beneath him.

Don half-fell against him; Jackson unrolled the sleeping bag and pulled him back against it and they were kissing. Don's mouth was rough and hot and his tongue thick and powerful against Jackson's own; he could feel himself shaking with nerves and want. Don groaned and reached for Jackson's cock and Jackson tried to undo Don's jeans. It was dark, and he wished he could see Don better, wished that he wasn't fumbling with the button on Don's jeans. Don reached down to help him. Jackson jerked himself, waiting for Don to get the jeans off, and finally there were Don's warm, bare legs; Don reached out and touched him and gasped. “Oh fuck, Jackson,” he said, his voice thin.

Jackson didn't have a condom – of course he didn't, but now it seemed so
stupid
– and so he grabbed for Don and took him in his mouth.

Don was gasping, bucking his hips, his cock sliding in and out of Jackson's mouth, hitting the back of his throat. Jackson was drunk and he wanted to cry, he was so happy. Here was this man he wanted so badly, and he was here, his bare skin, his clutching hands, and Don pulled out and shot across the bare wood floor and his cum was a silver shadow. Jackson's balls ached; he wanted to hold Don and kiss him; he buried his face in his neck – in all of the spinning dark, there was this steady place. “Oh, god, Jackson,” Don said again, and reached for Jackson's cock. He stroked it slowly, lazily, then faster, and Jackson lay back and let himself come, and he wanted to tell himself something about sex and his life and how this was different than beating Chris off, or fucking Eric, or anything, but he let it go, and his own cum was hot on his bare stomach. A wind picked up and there was the sound of waves on the lakeshore, tiny spills over the rocks. Jackson's mouth was dry and he crawled up beside Don and pulled Don onto his own outstretched arm.

Even on the thin blanket, even with his arm beneath Don's heavy head, he must have slept the whole night through – already it was early morning. Don stirred beside him. His chest felt full, still aloft on what had happened the night before.

Still drunk, he thought, and closed his eyes, following the delicate spin behind them. Don stirred, snored, his eyes fluttered open. He cleared his throat and coughed raggedly once, twice. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

He cleared his throat again and sat up, focused his eyes on Jackson. “I mean, hey. Good morning.” He put one hand on Jackson's back, awkwardly. “What time is it?”

Jackson looked at his watch. “Nine thirty,” he said.

“Shit. I'm late.”

For what? he wanted to ask. It was Sunday, two weeks after
Easter, and they lived in a work camp. Still, he said, “Okay,” and Don was smiling, gathering his clothes, pulling his jeans on over his lean, muscled legs.

And even after Don had left, when the truck had pulled out and there was nothing to do but lie back on the bare pine, he felt happy. What was there to do? A memory of an Easter with Lydia – “What is it for,” she'd asked him, “Easter?” And he'd unwrapped a piece of chocolate for her and said, “God and rabbits.”

Finally, he stood and began the slow walk to the construction site. No one would be there, and it was a chance to get ahead. No one had said anything, but Jackson knew he was a slow worker. He had left a pile of scrap, plywood ends and cardboard and wood chips, and he needed to burn it down. Besides, he wanted to work and let himself think of Don, to tease out what was just sex and what might be something, the way Don had sighed, the feeling of his mouth pressed tight to Jackson's own.
God and rabbits.
The sun was trying to burn its way through the clouds. And then he had left, Jackson thought. He had left him there in the morning on the bare wooden floor and hadn't said a word. The happiness was bleeding away from him, and in its place was a feeling he couldn't name, a feeling that meant being left alone in a still-warm bed by your boss, somewhere in the Idaho mountains, on the day after an Easter party, on a day that isn't Easter. Jackson pulled a jerry can from the back of the storage locker, then tipped it out over the scrap pile until all the trash was doused. He left a sopping trail and lit it and he waited.

Amy

Women's Shelter, Alamogordo, New Mexico, 2010

THE NEW MEXICO SUN WAS A FLAT DISK, THE CLOUDS
high above in the hard blue sky. The house was the same as all of the others in town – a brown stucco box, bleached to a bone color in places. Inside was a long hallway with six doors and part of a family behind each one. The mailbox was always empty, and it bothered her the way the mail car drove right by. Wasn't it a giveaway? It seemed like an obvious thing to overlook when you were trying to make a building look like a home, like a place that held any whole family instead of six or seven approximations: what was left of families, after. The backyard was a scrabble of dirt and rock, where Lydia sat with a little boy against the tall wooden fence while Amy was inside talking to the caseworker.

“You can't blame your son,” the woman kept saying to her. “You can't blame him, and you can't blame yourself, but you were right, you needed to go without him. You couldn't take the chance that it would happen again.” The woman's eyes were watering, in danger of spilling over. “This happens with teenagers,” she said gently. “They get angry at their mothers. They want their fathers' love, and their fathers manipulate them just like they manipulated you. You had to make a decision for your safety and your other child's safety.” She waited, but Amy didn't say anything. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

Her head felt thick. The woman didn't understand. Who would? The idea of trying to explain made her feel like she was trying to walk through thick mud with aching, bone-tired legs. He
was safe, she knew that. Jackson was always the self-sufficient one, the big brother. But that was the problem – he rarely seemed to need his mother, but he needed Lydia, and Lydia him. From the time Lydia was an infant he'd watched his sister, held her, fed her, protected her. Amy had at times almost resented their closeness, Jackson's hovering, for the way it implicated her, proved what Amy knew: that Gary was dangerous. In some ways, Amy thought, Jackson considered Lydia to be his, and she couldn't blame him for it.

She hadn't chosen one over the other, she told herself now; she had not. It was the right thing to do. Jackson had a life ahead of him that shabby Tulalip, Washington, could not give him, and she knew with as much certainty as she knew her own love for him that he would leave that town, that he would make his own life and see his father for what Gary was. And to take Jackson – to bring him to this new life, when he was supposed to be starting his own – wasn't right.

“He'll be better than the rest of us,” Jackson's best friend Randy had said to her years before, and she'd been worrying it like a stone ever since, hoping it into existence.