Refresh, Refresh: Stories (12 page)

Dwayne watches the bullet blast toward him and screws up his face to absorb it. A softball-size portion of his skull comes off and strikes the wall behind him with a red and gray splatter. He slumps back in his chair and his beer tips over and gurgles across the table in a foaming rush. His mouth gapes open, as if frozen around a silent scream. From it trails a thin ribbon of smoke.

Jim can smell the harsh familiar scent of gunpowder.

It’s the smell that defined his time in the 33rd Aviation. He would fly troops out of Manila and drop them off at the Port of Saigon or Cam Ranh Bay in a CV-2 Caribou. When the troops got off, the bodies got on. The bodies were zipped into black bags. Some of the bags were bigger than others and some of them would leak through their zippers. There would be stacks and stacks of them. And there would be a smell coming from them, the rottenness brought on by humidity. It got into your clothes and hair, like cigarette smoke, so badly that a Saigon whore once refused him until he showered, and even then she kept her face turned away.

His entire adult life he has been surrounded by dead things. That is how he saw the black-bagged bodies and that is how he sees the animals he drains and peels and dries and refigures—as dead things. Dwayne is now one, too. The sight of him creates no more emotional effect in Jim than the sight of an elk with steam rising from the bullet wound in its ribs, like smoke from a secret chimney.

He goes to Dwayne and nudges him forward and his body slumps onto the table and some redness joins the yellowness of the beer. With some difficulty Jim digs the wallet from his back pocket, then goes down the hallway to the bedroom and empties his daughter’s jewelry case. He shoves the tangle of necklaces and rings into his pocket and opens up all the drawers and throws clothes all over the place.

With a damp dishtowel he wipes his fingerprints off everything he has touched. On the television the country song comes on, the one playing from his daughter’s phone, and he pauses in his cleaning to watch. On the screen a weathered Johnny Cash hunches over a piano, singing about hurt.

Jim heads outside, back down the porch, to the lawn, following the dark strip of grass where earlier his feet swept away the dew. The jewelry goes in the river, along with the wallet, but not before he removes the cash from it—a tenner, some ones—to buy the boy some candy on his way home.

Midnight has come and gone by the time he gets home. His daughter has left the porch light on for him. A long time ago, he vaguely remembers, he would come back from the tavern and find the light on and stumble up the porch and crawl into bed and seek out his wife beneath the sheets, her naked body warm and soft, but that was a long time ago. Now he stares at the light so long its afterimage remains in his eyes after he closes them.

He goes directly to the pole barn. The fluorescent lights sputter to life above him when he heads to the back of the studio and withdraws from the fridge the bucket of formaldehyde and unpeels its lid. The smell of stale blood and old fur and powdered latex vanish, replaced by something ammoniac. His eyes immediately water from it.

Alongside his severed foot float the remains of the photograph. The formaldehyde has leached his daughter from the photo paper and flecks of her hang along the top of the bucket and maybe in one fleck he sees what looks like a mouth, smiling or snarling at him, it’s hard to tell.

The revolver is shoved into his pants, just above his crotch, and he removes it now and dangles it above the bucket a moment before releasing it. It descends to the bottom of the bucket and knocks against the beer can and photo frame, making a muted clicking noise like some deadly underwater creature.

He seals the bucket and hoists it up and it makes a sloshing sound with his every step. Next to the pole barn is a carport where he stores the Gator. He straps the bucket down in its bed with bungee cords. He throws in a shovel and fires up the engine and starts toward the forest. The moon makes a milky circle on the hood that slides up and up and vanishes in his lap as he follows the weed-ridden trail to the bone pile.

The engine coughs off and a hush falls over the forest. No frogs drum, no crickets chirp. Frost sparkles across the browned bear grass and the bones in the bone pile give off the kind of pale blue light found in sunlit ice.

He digs a hole as deep as his waist and lowers the bucket into it and after returning the dirt to the hole he neatens it with his hand and sprinkles some pine needles here and there. Then he pulls some bones down from the pile to cover the place where the dirt has been disturbed.

Part of this, but not all of this, has to do with evidence.

Afterwards, he sits on the bumper of the Gator, his old muscles aching, his legs painted with dirt. He can feel the moon looking down on him, through the branches, but he keeps his eyes on the forest, on a possum, already shaggy-coated for winter, climbing the trunk of a nearby tree.

“I’m looking at you,” the moon seems to say, even as he avoids the white unblinking gaze of it, watching instead the possum race along a branch and execute a clumsy leap into a neighboring pine, where it hisses an evil-sounding song.

He stops breathing for a moment and then starts again when the forest shifts in whispers, when the air trembles into a breeze that rises into a cold wind.

Outside the sky, red with morning, is clotted with clouds. For the past thirty minutes his eyes have traced their passage. He can see them from where he lies in bed, on top of the covers, still wearing the clothes he wore last night. He can smell the smell of earth coming off them.

His daughter is awake. He listens to the noises she makes—the muffled roar of the shower, the clatter of a spoon in a cereal bowl, the babble of morning television. The boy soon joins her, his feet pounding up and down the hallway, his voice high and lovely.

If Jim closes his eyes, if he concentrates hard enough, he can imagine himself out of bed, out there, among them. He will read his newspaper and fold it precisely with every turn of the page. He will sip from a mug of coffee—the coffee steaming in his hand like a gun recently fired—until it is just porcelain against his teeth. And his daughter will splash it full of coffee again. And she will cook him eggs, over hard. And the boy will ask him a question and he will answer with a gruffness that belies the smile tugging at the corner of his lips.

Then his eyes snap open and the dream falls apart. There is an engine outside, growing louder, coming up the driveway. A police cruiser, he feels suddenly certain. And all at once, with a panicked gasp that sounds like a pile of logs collapsing into embers, he is thinking about all the things he doesn’t want to think about.

Last night, he must have left something behind—maybe a fingerprint they traced back to his military records—some obvious clue that brings the police to him now. In a panic he rolls over and jumps out of bed. With that first step there is a vanishing beneath him, as if his foot has slipped through the floor. He has forgotten to reattach his prosthesis—and his naked stump comes down painfully against the hardwood. He staggers forward and catches himself against the dresser.

It takes him another minute to fit his stump into its slot, to loop the bands over their hooks—and by this time there are footsteps on the porch, a knock at the door. He hurries out of his bedroom and limps down the hallway and yells, “I got it!”

But his daughter has already answered the door. The latch clicks and her voice calls out, “Hello,” at once a greeting and question.

Just then Jim rounds the corner. He expects to see, in the doorway, surrounded by sunlight, two uniformed officers. He is certain of it. He can already picture them lazily chewing their gum, their hands near their holsters. But no.

It’s Ernie. Ernie Nelson. Of all people
he’s
the one standing there, smiling kindly at his daughter. His NASCAR cap is in his hands. His beard is stained yellow around the mouth from his incessant smoking. It’s been a long time—nine years since Anne played guard for the Mountain View Mountain Lions, since Ernie ran up and down the court in a striped shirt and blew his whistle and made authoritative arm gestures indicating a jump ball, double dribble—but they recognize each other and exchange an awkward handshake along with their Good-to-see-yous.

“So how’d it go last night?” she says.

“Sorry?” he says. “Last night?”

“That elk you shot. Getting it out of that canyon.”

Ernie smiles blankly at her before saying again, “Not sure what you mean.”

Before she can respond Jim pushes his way between them. “Ernie!” he says. “Glad you stopped by!” His words come out with too much spit and he wears a smile not connected to his eyes.

“I was driving by and thought, what the heck, I’ll stop in and ask him about that salmon—”

“Sure, sure, sure.” He takes Ernie by the elbow and begins to lead him down the porch. “Let’s talk in the studio. I’ll show you what I’m up to.”

They’re halfway down the steps when Anne calls out, “The elk you shot, Ernie. The elk you shot last night.”

Jim tries to urge Ernie forward without success, as his friend stops and turns and says over his shoulder, “I’m sorry but I just don’t have the slightest—”

“Ernie,” Jim says.

“It’s just that I haven’t been hunting—”

“Ernie.”

“Not since my knee replacement.”

Hearing this Anne doesn’t so much blink as snap shut her eyes. “Oh,” she says and settles her gaze on Jim. “I must have mixed you up with somebody else.”

Jim says, “Come on now, Ernie.”

They move along the pea-gravel path. Their footsteps make crunching sounds that sound like coyotes gnawing through bones “What’s she talking about anyhow?” Ernie asks.

“It’s like she said. She’s confused.”

“I should come back some other time?”

“No. Don’t you pay any attention to that.”

“You’re sure?” Ernie fits his cap back on his head and rounds the brim with his hands. “Everything’s okay?”

“More than okay.” Jim thumps him on the back and sends him in the direction of the pole barn. “You go on ahead. I’ll catch up with you. The Coho should be on your left, on the counter. I’m about halfway through with her.”

Ernie runs a hand through his beard—and a smile appears there, like a card suddenly sprung from a magician’s fingers. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”

“She is.”

Ernie starts toward the barn and Jim starts back toward the house and as he does the shadow of a cloud passes darkly over the meadow. He flinches and looks up as if he discerns in its shifting shape some enormous sharp-taloned bird that will swoop down on him. But it only drops a few snowflakes before hurrying on to someplace else. All around him the flakes melt and leave behind damp freckles, like a spattering of tears, on the soil.

He keeps his eyes on the ground before him until he reaches the top step of the porch and finally faces his daughter.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” she says.

He holds up his hands, palms up, as if to say
don’t shoot
. Her eyes focus in on them and her eyebrows come together. He notices his fingernails, how the cracks that crisscross his knuckles and palms are scabbed over with a reddish dirt that looks more than a little like blood.

He hurries them into his pockets and feels something there—the Snickers bar he bought last night from the gas station. “I got something here,” he says and removes the candy bar from his pocket and holds it out before him. “Something for Cody.”

She lets his hand hang there without acknowledging it. Her mouth purses around a question she hasn’t yet figured out how to phrase. Her eyes are probing his. Her eyes are midnight blue and he sees the remnants of last night reflected in them.

And they, father and daughter, look at each other, they simply look at each other, with Jim standing on one side of the doorway and Anne standing on the other, with the clouds coming together in the sky above them, bringing a dark color to the air.

Meltdown

November 23, 2009 was a bad day. At 8:00 p.m., the crew at Oregon’s Trojan Nuclear Power Plant—in accordance with new antiterror legislation, in response to recent al-Qaeda threats—ran a test to see how long the turbines would spin if their electrical supply vanished. Not long, it turns out. Within twenty minutes everything went off-line, including the automatic-shutdown safety mechanisms.

At quarter past eight, the coolant water stopped altogether, the heat increased sharply, and Trojan’s managing operator, Rick Townsend, decided to do something about it. He brought the system back online and in doing so caused a sharp power surge, caused a steam explosion, caused the nuclear-containment vessel’s 2,000-ton cap to dissolve. Just like that.

Air rushed in, igniting the graphite insulating blocks. Three hundred control rods melted, along with Rick Townsend, and the plant’s radioactive core lit up the night sky, replacing the stars with a cranberry glow.

Soon thereafter the president declared the Pacific Northwest, and then the West Coast, and then the Upper Midwest, in a state of emergency. Parades and bowl games and turkey dinners across the country did not happen. Giving thanks was the last thing on people’s minds as they drove as fast and as far away as they could, or moved underground, or flew to other countries for extended vacations, afraid of the deadly thing they could not see, could not smell, could not feel, many of them dying weeks later when the poison completed its slow crawl through their system.

You can never really extinguish graphite once it starts to burn. Fourteen days and 20,000 tons of sand, water, clay, and boron later, the fire was controlled, but not out. During this time a hot wind blew east and spiked the atmospheric radiation as far away as Maine.

Five years pass and five million people are dead, the fire is still smoldering, and Darren Townsend, on his Harley Night Train, rips along the mostly abandoned roads of Oregon and Washington with a Geiger counter strapped between his handlebars.

Though radiation will stick to the Pacific Northwest for the next 50,000 years—the government says—give Mother Earth another 1,000 to heal, to purge and dilute the most dangerous elements, and humans can safely begin repopulating the area. In the meantime—the government says—
stay out.