Refresh, Refresh: Stories (11 page)

Some twenty feet wide, the river here crashes into a basalt wall and elbows off at a forty-degree angle. They park at the crook of the elbow. The roar of the water fills up the forest and becomes the only sound after Jim kills the engine and they step from the Gator and stand on the bank and watch the river hurry over boulders. The force of its passage makes the water white and makes the air misty with tiny droplets that swim in the streams of sunlight pouring through the branches of the trees around them.

Jim hands the boy a pole and the boy takes it and holds it out before him and slashes at the air, as if brandishing a sword. The weights loop around the pole, tangling the leader. The boy looks at Jim with a frightened expression as if he expects a knuckled fist to come down on him.

But Jim only shakes his head and says, “You know better than that.” He takes back the pole and goes to work untangling the monofilament. “When’s the last time you been fishing?”

Anne answers for him: “Whenever it was you took him last.”

It’s been nearly a year. Since she moved in with Dwayne their visits have been so short, so infrequent, they have little time for anything but a meal, a lazy conversation on the porch, before night falls and morning comes and they pack up their toothbrushes and dirty laundry and follow the Santiam Pass back the way they came.

Jim looks at his daughter directly when he says, “A boy ought to go fishing.”

Now the pole is ready and he leads the boy to the river where glacial till lines the bank and makes a chewing sound beneath their boots. He props himself against a log and the boy stands next to him, listening as Jim explains in a fatherly voice the bright-colored rooster-tail spinner, how the current will pull it and make it twirl, how the fish will hurry toward it like moths to flame. He further explains that fall is one of the best times for fishing, as the trout are aggressively trying to fatten up for the winter. Then he asks the boy, if he were a fish, where would he hide—and the boy studies the river a moment before pointing to a fallen pine that interrupts the current. Here the water is still and dark and quiet, separate from the nearby violence of whitewater, and maybe the boy sees in it something that reminds him of the place beneath his bed, the back of his closet.

Jim wraps his arms around the boy and knits together their fingers so that when they cast they cast as one—and the line sizzles—and the lure travels in a long arc before entering the river with a plunk, just above where the water eddies, where the current will take it and spin it.

“Now I’m going to let go and let you take it. If you feel a little tug, give a little tug. And if you feel big pull, hold on tight.”

It’s cold here, next to the river. The spray dampens their skin and their hair. They pull on wool caps and drink hot cocoa from the thermos. They stamp their feet and bring their hands to their mouths and blow into the cup of them, thawing them. Jim can particularly feel the cold in his stump, where the blood wants to go. There is an itching, needling sensation there, as if several dozen mosquitoes have suckered onto him at once.

His daughter has hiked a short distance upriver to fish. She gives a shout now, barely heard over the noise of the rapids. She has a strike. Her feet are spread apart and her pole is bent into a parabola. She alternates between pulling back and lowering her pole, like Jim taught her to, reeling immediately after lowering the pole, when the fish has moved toward the sudden slackness of the line.

Jim hurries, as best he can, along the riverbank to help his daughter net the fish. It’s a Dolly Varden, a seventeen-, maybe nineteen-incher. Pulled from the dark water its belly is as pale as a tuber pulled from the black soil of a garden.

“That’s a wall-hanger all right,” Jim says and grips the fish—the cold slippery muscle of it—and rips the hook from its mouth. The fish flaps violently in his hand. He takes out his knife and clubs it on the back of the head, once, and then again. Blood comes out of its eyes. Its body goes still. He hands it to his daughter. “That’s definitely a wall-hanger.”

In her hand the fish comes alive again, with a twitch of its fins, a spasm of its tail. Water droplets fly off it and catch the light before returning to the river or dampening her shirt. Then it is done.

And something happens. Jim is filled with a sense of well-being he doesn’t want to let go of—and she must feel it too. Because she’s smiling at him. Smiling so broadly that she opens up the scab binding her bottom lip. Even as blood begins to come out of it, red trailing down her chin, she continues to smile.

Late afternoon, he stands in his taxidermy studio, alone. The fluorescent lights buzz hungrily above him. He can smell the fish, gutted earlier, puffing off his skin. And he can see a scale fused to the fabric of his sleeve. It winks at him under the light when he dismantles the Colt revolver and set its parts on the stainless-steel counter before him.

His hands look like the knuckly oak trees common in the western half of Oregon, but they move with surprising deftness, moving between the bottle of solvent, the bottle of lubricating oil, the cleaning rod and silicone cloth and bore brush, swabbing and scrubbing, preparing the gun.

All this time he whistles.

Then he reaches under the counter and his hand slides through the jugs of formaldehyde until he finds what he is looking for, pulling out a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He takes the bore of the revolver and stops up its bottom with his finger. Then he pours whiskey into it and brings the muzzle to his lips and drinks. He licks the spice off his teeth and begins to put the Colt back together again.

This is what he tells his daughter:

“Ernie Nelson—you remember Ernie?—the old guy with the beard and the palomino horses?—used to ref basketball?—he just shot an elk at the bottom of a canyon. Big sucker, so he says. Six-point. I’m going to go help him haul it out.”

He is standing in the shadows of the hallway and she is sitting on the couch with the boy in her lap, watching
Jeopardy
on the TV. She looks distractedly at him and then returns her attention to the screen. “I didn’t hear the phone ring,” she says.

“Well,” he says. “It rang.” Next to him hangs a hat rack, every knob the polished end of an antler. He selects a hat from it, the camouflaged hat he wears bow hunting. He runs his ponytail through the hole above the plastic snap-band when fitting the hat snugly on his head.

With her eyes still on the screen she says, “I thought we were going to watch a movie.”

“You go on and watch it without me.” He has a backpack slung around his shoulder and he adjusts its weight when he starts across the living room, to the door. “Have fun.”

“What is a gargoyle?” his daughter says at an almost scream.

Jim freezes, his hand halfway to the doorknob. “Pardon?”

On television one of the contestants rings in and says, “What is a gargoyle,” and Alex Trebek says, “That’s correct. Which puts Steven into the lead by four hundred dollars.”

At that his daughter pumps her fist in the air and the boy readjusts in her lap so that he can observe her. On his face is a look of wonder, his eyes big and soft, as if his mom is the smartest person in the world. It’s a look Jim recognizes and misses, a look absent from his daughter when she settles her gaze on him now with worried disapproval.

“Doesn’t this Ernie guy have a son? Somebody else?”

“He called me, so I suppose I’m it.” Her eyes weigh so heavily on him that he suspects he will fly when he gets out of her sight. “Don’t wait up. He’s way up in the foothills, past Black Butte. We might make a night of it, depending on the how fast we butcher and how cold it gets”

“You’re getting too old for this kind of stuff, Dad.”

He settles his hand on the knob and turns it. “I’m going to go help,” he whispers, a hurt in the whisper. He steps outside, where the sun has disappeared and the trees and the meadow are lost in gray shadows.

On the Santiam Pass, the pines change over to firs and the road grows steeper and the snow piles higher along the shoulder. It is blackened with exhaust and scalloped from the constant wind that makes Jim correct his course with little jerks of the steering wheel. Here and there, draped over the guardrail or glimpsed among the roadside firs, deer lie in misshapen postures of death, some of them split in two by the grills of semis. His eyes jog back and forth, scanning the darkness beyond the reach of his headlights, ready for something to come scuttling toward him.

The farther he drives the more the world seems to narrow around him—the blackness of the sky bearing down—so that it feels as if he is hurtling along a dark conduit. He maintains his concentration on the road while at the same time drifting off to some dreamlike place where the puzzle pieces of his life are rearranged for the better, like the bones of a broken animal he might cast together with screws and glue.

Two hours pass in the black blur of an instant. And then his right signal is flashing. And he realizes he has to follow it, exiting near Turner. The moon has risen and he can see the surrounding countryside: the gray-lit pastures, the silhouettes of Holsteins, barbed-wire fences, and beyond all this, in the distance, the glow of Salem and the steady stream of cars on the interstate heading toward it.

He has been here once before, to pick up the boy. The trailer sits off the road a ways, down a long winding driveway bordered by blackberry vines and thistle. He drives slowly past it and after fifty yards hangs a right down a dirt road that opens up into a clearing next to the river. There isn’t another house in sight. A pyramid of half-burned logs and the scattered litter of beer cans and potato-chip bags reveal this as one of those secluded areas where teenagers come to drink and smoke and screw. A pair of panties hangs from a nearby thatch of willows. Spent cigarette lighters catch the moonlight and glow like iridescent beetles.

He kills the engine. Even though his leg, the stump of it, aches from sitting too long, he remains in the truck with his hands on the wheel and his seat belt fastened around his chest. For a time he watches the constellations wheel above him, and then the windows fog over with his breath. Without anything to look at but his hands, their white-knuckled grip around the steering wheel, he feels more fully, awkwardly aware of himself, forced into conversation with the backpack beside him, the gun inside of it.

So he unbuckles his seat belt and pushes open the door and steps into the night. The air is cool and damp, so different than the thin dry air he is accustomed to breathing. It makes him feel as if he is drinking, drowning a little, with each breath. The river hisses nearby. White wisps of mist trail along it.

He waits another thirty minutes. During this time nothing makes a sound, nor moves, except a great horned owl that swoops past him with a huff of its wings and is gone.

He unzips the backpack and withdraws the gun and holds it before him. It seems heavier, somehow, than he remembers it. Its metal gleams blue. Its chamber gives off the faint smell of whiskey. And he is moving toward the river, following the trail trampled along it. The mist, thicker now, creeps through the cattails and gropes for his legs and in his passing swirls and rearranges itself.

His prosthetic comes down stiffly and regularly as he makes his way toward the trailer, its noise out of place in the cool still night, clocklike in the way it ominously ticks off his approach. And he can see now, through the moss-laden trees, the glow where the trailer will be, though not yet the trailer.

Then he sees it. The windows are squares of flickering light cast by the television. Jim waits a minute and when he sees no movement starts forward.

This is one of those luxury trailers—if you could call it that—a double-wide with a lawn that Jim walks across and a porch that he climbs up and a sliding-glass door he approaches and slides aside. The air has an electric snap to it. A sulfur smell teases around his nostrils.

He is standing in the living room. There is a green loveseat and a vine-patterned couch and a big-screen television tuned in to CMT. Alan Jackson is singing about the Chattahoochee, how it gets hotter than a hootchy-kootchy. The living room runs into a dining area that runs into the wood-paneled kitchen dark with shadows. The only light comes from the TV and from the moonlight streaming in the windows.

Jim notices Dwayne maybe a dozen feet away from him. He sits at a Formica table with peeling edges. He is as dim as a ghost in the blue shade of moonlight. He has a bottle of Miller High Life in one hand and a cigarette in the other. His eyes are closed and his chin rests against his chest. His cigarette is a long red ash crumbling onto the table.

Jim carefully closes the door behind him and moves across the living room to where the carpet gives way to linoleum the color of an old man’s teeth. Here he stops and studies Dwayne. He has a thin wiry body and a square-shaped face and a thick broom of a mustache. The mustache has a bead of beer or sweat dangling from one of its hairs. It is odd to see him like this. For so long he has been faceless, bodiless, a dark nebulous force, like a storm cloud that occasionally descends upon his daughter.

His head appears loose on its hinges when he raises it to look at Jim. His eyes are too close together, muddy with drink and confusion. “Who’re you?” he says.

There is a shaft of blue moonlight hanging between the two of them. Cigarette smoke ribbons through it. And through the haze Dwayne looks at Jim like he can’t quite figure out if he’s dreaming or not.

Jim raises the gun. His finger fits over the trigger but doesn’t pull.

Right then Dwayne seems to mimic him, raising his own hand, the one with the cigarette pinched in it. He brings it to his mouth. Its ember burns bright when he drags a breath from it. That hand. Jim imagines what it has done and remembers the misery that defined his daughter’s voice when she called the other night.

“Who,” Dwayne says with the anger rising in his voice. “What the hell are you—”

“Shh,” Jim says. And pulls the trigger.

He experiences, in these long subsequent seconds, between the time when the trigger gives and the hammer falls and the revolver jumps with the force of a bullet discharged, a dangling sensation, like the cartoon characters experience when they discover they have stepped off the edge of a cliff, that instant of weightlessness, suspension in time, before the world comes crashing down.