Call Me Home (8 page)

Don Newlon was saying something about having been on a trip down in Mexico with some girls – “And they left!” he said, slamming down his beer, the foam spilling onto the stained table. “I had no food and a blown transmission, but hell, I was smiling!” He laughed loudly, and the rest of them joined in. Jackson laughed too. He was drunk. He was happy. He grinned.

A man from the East crew started to tell a story about getting drunk downtown – Seattle? Portland? – and passing out in his car. Somewhere where you couldn't do it, couldn't park. He'd woken up when the tow truck lifted the back end of his rig.

And Jackson must have said something – who was he talking to? – because then their faces were waiting – they wanted some kind of story from him, and small ideas were flipping through his drunk mind like a stack of cards. And he was talking, talking about a kid he'd known in Portland who had tried to steal his shoes – “I woke up,” he said, “and he was unlacing my boots!”

Even at that moment, he knew it was a mistake. It wasn't funny in the same way. There were too many questions hanging in the air – where were they sleeping? Why was he wearing his shoes to bed? But someone – Don? Honey? – started laughing, “Your boots? Jesus, I'd kill him!” and the moment was saved, and the waitress brought another pitcher, and he filled his glass up. He was so fucking thirsty.

HE WOKE UP
at four or five. He'd been having dreams that he'd wet the bed, he needed to piss so bad, and he pushed the door open and pissed a long stream out onto the dirt. He was drunk-dizzy, but steady enough that he knew it would be worse later. He didn't remember getting home, only a brief moment of his face against the cold glass of a car window.

He fumbled around in the cab until he found a gallon of water, opened it, drank half of it down without stopping for air. He had a terrible feeling. What had he said? Did they know he was
queer? The end of the evening was a shadow of a shadow, just those moments – he'd been talking to one of the men. His face against the cool glass. His thankful, horizontal bed. The solid earth. His heart seemed to be beating funny. He thought of his father, who was half-drunk most of the time. Was every waking day like this? The dark lapped at him, and he thought he might throw up, and he wondered how his father had ever been able to stand himself. Jackson felt a nauseous self-loathing that began in his stomach and moved out his arms and legs. Suddenly, he needed air. He got up and walked out into the cold, feeling his way through the wood chips and snowmelt and dirt toward the lake.

He felt better almost immediately, in the dark, walking. In Portland he'd walked everywhere. Hungover or high or straight sober, he would walk those streets at night and feel like he could go anywhere because this was his body, these were his own two legs. The road was always stretching out in front of him, the bridges knitting across the river, one way, back the other. He could hear the soft lap of the lake water now, and he sat down near the slope to the water. The cold earth soaked his pants and he felt better.

In another month, the lake would be full. The old river had been washing the town out slowly, one ruinous winter at a time. Silver was full of sand and gravel deposits, holes where the river had eaten away the topsoil, streets where the concrete was crumbling. According to Leary and the rest of the crew, the river was a loss. Channelizing it would save what was left of that watery dump, and then the lake, instead of being a marshy sprawl with no clear borders, would instead be a carved-out bowl, perfect and shimmering, and the water would spill out of a narrow channel at one end and head down the mountains, neatly continuing on its way. An aerial view of Silver would show a neat dark stamp pressed into the ground, spilling out to the east to become a river again, snaking through the blue-black timber to eventually join the Lochsa.

The particulars of the project were uncertain to Jackson. Mike Leary was someone big on a project that was, in the scheme of things, small. Just a handful of speculators interested in a
pretty jewel of a lake, a necklace of houses. And it was pretty. The A-frames were half-moon clusters at four points around the lake, banks of tall windows reflecting the water. It was summer camp for the six-digit circuit. It gave Jackson a thrill, even in the dark, to see the peaks of each A-frame like a cathedral, the faintest glow of the pale wood. Even as Spartan as it was, he could imagine the kind of high-end lives that would settle into the bare rooms. Stainless steel pans hanging in the kitchen;
New Yorker
copies on the coffee table; expensive shampoo in the bathroom. If the old heart of Silver was a craggy piece of rock, the new heart was a smooth pebble, a skipping stone. Cedar and glass, large porches that stretched, plank by plank, toward the edge of the lake.

He kept having little boy thoughts, his half-drunk mind – how do they make a town? Where do the families come from? But still how goddamn
weird
that you could take a patch of silt and stilt it up and hem it in, sew it like a glove – the lake's fingers, the palm of calm water, the wrist of the lake spilling down dark mountains.

Jackson imagined that in twenty years the cleared land where the new lake sat would be lush again, full of young timber. The old riverbank, now exposed to the tin cup of the sky, would no longer look ravaged. It would become land again, and everything that had surfaced when the water ebbed away would be carried off. The shell of the old pickup, the bottles, the nameless bags of sodden, decomposed trash. At some point, it would all be dragged away or the grass would grow over it.

But still, he thought now, sick all the way to his toes, sitting in the wet dark, there was something about it that wasn't quite right. To take something alive and change it completely.

He got to his feet, shaking his hands in the cold, kneading his numb fingers together. The deep woods here were not so different from the woods he'd grown up in. Idaho was drier, but it had the same density, the same feeling of roiling, tangled life. Thick bark, dense moss, roots that wrapped their arms around the earth. A moth at the window, a mouse at the door. In Washington, the double-wide they'd lived in on Firetrail Hill had been like
a live thing. The cat left a squirrel twitching on the kitchen floor; mushrooms pushed up the carpet in the back room; a raccoon let himself in the front door. For a few years, the whole forest was a treasure chest. Even now his memories were flawed by fantasy – here, he remembered, a witch came out of the tangle of weeds. He and Lydia sitting in the old rowboat rocked by the hand of a giant. The forest floor moving beneath them, spinning them, a leaf trembling in his hand. He had that same feeling now, in the blue dark, dizzy and sick, but still the forest was all around him and he was glad for it. He took deep gulps of air. Scraps of last night were tossing in his foggy head – cigarette butts, spilled beer, the throaty laughter of the men. He'd followed them around the room, through the music and close heat, swinging his arms, pulling out his wallet. He turned back up into the woods, even as above the lake, the sky began to lighten.

Lydia

Women's Shelter, Alamogordo, New Mexico, 2010

FIRST, GATHER EVERYTHING. THE CREDIT CARDS AND
your birth certificate. The bank statements. The social security cards. If they are gone, it's because he has taken them. This will make things harder, but not impossible. You will be lighter that way. You will make everything new. Go to a place where no one knows you. The closer you are to home, the more careful you will have to be. Close to home, you must walk quickly through the streets with your eyes on the ground. The world is big. It's best if you keep going.

We drove for four days to get to New Mexico, through the mountains, the red Utah canyons, the flat sand. I watched the lava fields and they were ghostly as the moon. At the shelter there was a room with a sink and a tall window I couldn't see out of. We sat for hours in a little room talking to the caseworkers.

“He could find us anywhere,” my mother said. “He could always do that, track you down in seconds. We'd make these plans and it was like he knew before we'd even left.”

It was a small town, they told us. He knew the car. He might have had surveillance equipment. They told us that it's different, now.

You will need to sell your car. Choose something that he wouldn't expect. Choose something that doesn't look like you. Try not to think about times you felt that you were being watched. Instead, think about the life you want. Imagine that soon you will have a new house, and all
of your new friends will come to visit. They'll be the best friends you've ever had, even better than the ones you had before.

We would stay for two months at the shelter in New Mexico, before leaving again for our new life. “Texas,” my mother said. “But not Fannin. That's where I met your father.”

In the caseworker's office, we called my mother's mother, who I'd never met. Her voice through the receiver was as clear as if she were in the room.

“Amy?” The voice was scared. “Amy. Where are you?”

“Shh,” my mother said. “Shh. Everything is all right.”

“Amy, listen to me,” the voice said. “You come here. You live with me.”

“It's not safe. People know us there. People know G there.” Even in the shelter, she wouldn't say his name.

“Exactly,” the voice said. “If they see him in town, they'll kill him.”

I looked at my mother and at the woman. “That's where I want to live,” I said. It said it loud.

“Smart girl,” the voice said.

Try not to think of the times when things were not what they seemed: when your mother carried in a bowl of yellow pears that had been eaten to lace by insects, and how you watched her from the kitchen window as she cried, wondering at her despair. Or the long week she stayed in bed and no one said why. You knocked and knocked, but your brother led you away. He fed you whatever you wanted, straight from the cupboards. Don't think of these things. Let them be over or they will break your heart.

It was as if I went to sleep and woke up in a dry and brittle country, and I was older, with a different name, and I had no brother. The dreams started, that my father was coming for us. On those nights I practiced everything I knew.
To truly disappear, you must change everything. Forget your habits. Choose a different life. Understand that who you have been is gone and will never come
back.
I said it to myself over and over: My name is Lena Harris, I am thirteen years old, I've lived with my mother, right here, since the day I was born.

Jackson

Silver, Idaho, 2010

THE CREW BOSS WANTED TO SEE HIM. SLOW HONEY DELIVERED
the message to Jackson from the window of his pickup, just as Jackson had pulled up to the sawhorse to start in again, slowly splitting the beams the way he'd been taught. Shit, Jackson thought. He'd spent the whole afternoon praying he didn't fuck up, and now he'd fucked it up anyway. It had something to do with the night at the bar – he could feel it in his gut. What had he said – something about shoes. Too much innuendo for that crowd, that's for sure. He might as well have just told them he'd sucked cock for cash – that he'd do it for free! – and then let the chips fall. This was much worse, to have to answer for something he'd only insinuated. Where next? Who did he even know? Back to Portland? Back to Washington? His father in his armchair, the TV dinners he must be eating now. The new girlfriend he'd be fucking on the terrible worn mattresses.

He put all of the tools away, stacked the wood he'd been about to work with in a neat pile. Everything in its place. “You want a ride?” Honey asked.

To where? “Where's he at?” Jackson asked.

“East side,” Honey said. It was worse than he thought. He was going to the rich side of town to be fired.

“Yeah.”

Honey drove him in Riley's pickup, which made him think that maybe Honey wasn't as slow as they said, to be allowed to drive that shiny, expensive car. Everything's relative, sure, but Honey seemed just fine.

“Lots of metals out here,” Honey said. He hauled metal from the sites to Kellogg on his own trailer. It saved Jackson and the rest some of the work, and Honey made enough to live on, selling the bulk for a few cents on the pound, dragging a magnet to separate the pure weight from what was more valuable – aluminum, copper.

“You make good money?” Jackson asked.

“Sure.”

There was a long silence; Honey moved the truck around deep potholes, steering it expertly with one hand.

“Friend of mine,” Honey said, “put siding on his whole house. Corrugated metal. Didn't spend a dime.”

“Wow,” Jackson said. Maybe he could haul junk with Honey when they kicked him off the crew. “Hey, do you know what he wants me for?”

“Nah.” Honey bumped the truck over the potholes. “Bet yer scared, huh?”

“What did I say, Honey?” Jackson asked. Scrubby branches squeaked the windows. “Did I do anything really stupid?”

“What do you mean?” Honey asked, and Jackson began to understand why everyone called him Slow.

“I'm scared,” Jackson said.

“Don't worry. They're just probably needing more help on this side.”