Refresh, Refresh: Stories (15 page)

There are more dogs than there are bullets in his revolvers, Darren realizes, and suddenly he feels vulnerable. The poodle, a mud-caked mess of hair, moves toward him, looking at once ridiculous and frightening, like some four-legged breed of Sasquatch.

“Sit,” he says. “Sit. Stay. Roll over.” But the poodle keeps coming.

He lifts the revolvers. They seem incredibly heavy in his hands. The poodle lowers its head and begins a sort of hunch-shouldered charge. Saliva swings from its teeth when it opens its mouth to bite him. He puts a bullet in its leg and it screams in a terribly human way before collapsing and rising again and limping fast and far from him, leaving behind a trail of blood.

At the sound of the gunshot—a whipping crack that bottoms out and echoes away—the other dogs scatter, diving down the aisles. Seconds later Darren hears them outside, barking and yowling.

The wiener dog is the only one who lingers, peeking from behind the kiosk. Darren holsters his guns and lifts his arms and says, “Yaaaaah!” and the dog releases a tiny stream of pee before trotting off to join its pack.

Darren looks at the girl and the girl looks at him, looks away, and then gets brave enough to maintain a stare. She wears a too-long T-shirt, jean shorts, and Velcro tennis shoes. He raises his hand—the universal sign for
hey
—and she does the same. They each manage a small smile. “Speak English?” he says.

Her expression does not change and Darren sees in it the same thing he saw in the wiener dog: a mixture of fear and loneliness that at once makes her want to rush forward and back away. He decides to let her settle down a moment, get comfortable with him.

Nearby is Hunting and Firearms. The glass display case has been busted open and looted of most everything except some lousy grandpa-style pocketknives. Behind the counter Darren pokes around and among the mess of broken glass and spilled cartridges he finds what he is looking for: three boxes of.357 bullets and a handful of shotgun shells. He fills his coat pockets and returns to the kiosk.

“Seriously, you gotta come down,” he says. “Down.
Pollado
.” Or is it
derriba?
He can’t remember. He motions with his hand. “Down.
Down
. Before they get brave and come back.”

She doesn’t move, except to blink. She has these eyes, as deeply brown and moist as expensive chocolate. Her eyebrows coming together to form a silent question: is he dangerous?

“No estoy peligroso,” he says. “No kidding. I’m a good guy. Yo estoy su amigo.”

“I’m not stupid,” she says with a soft accent. “I can speak English.”

He puts out his hands as if he has given up looking for something. “Okay. This is a good thing.” When she doesn’t say anything, just keeps staring at him, he speaks to fill up the silence between them: “You’re American then? Or Mexican?”

She gives her eyes a theatrical roll and says, “I’m Latina,” and Darren thinks:
this
is why I hate kids.

“Look,” he says. “Whatever. We need to get going.”

Except to sneeze into her hands she does not move.

“Salud,” he says and kicks an empty Pepsi can and it rattles a few feet down the aisle. “Where are your parents anyway?” He immediately regrets asking and in his chest gets this jab of dread when she scrunches up her face and starts breathing heavily like kids do before they really lose it.

“Forget it,” he says. Before she can second-guess him, he holds up his hands and twiddles his fingers and says, “Come on.” After a hesitant moment, she scoots her butt toward the edge, dangles her legs, and falls into his arms.

Outside the sun has retreated behind some clouds. The dogs are nowhere in sight, but his bike is wet with their urine. You belong to us, bub—they are saying—this is our territory now.

“Jeez,” he says.

“Gross,” the girl says.

He’ll wash it later. For now he wants to get away from here. He feels too exposed, in the middle of this parking lot, with the danger of dogs lurking nearby. A wooded lot neighbors the store and Darren thinks he can hear the muffled crunch of footpads there. He straddles the bike. “Will you sit next to me?” With a thumb he indicates the seat behind him.

She tilts her head, but stays where she is, a couple feet away, staring at the bike and then at him, not afraid—Darren doesn’t think—but shy, or maybe just disgusted by the sour smell. He notices how skinny she is, her collarbone like a bicycle handlebar. “You hungry?” He removes from his jacket pocket a Snickers bar, unwraps it, and takes a bite. When chewing he makes
mmm-mmm
noises.

She holds out her hand and says, “Please,” like a kid at a supermarket checkout. He breaks off a piece and tosses it to her. She snatches it from the air and eats it with smacking open-mouth chews. “You want the rest?” Darren says, “You got to get on the bike.” She surprises him with a smile, her teeth just a little buck. Something like agreement or acceptance passes between them. He tries to make his smile as genuine as hers and finds it isn’t hard. “What’s your name anyway?”

“Roxana Primavera Rivera,” she says in a proud careful voice like she might have once used in front of a classroom.

Once again he motions to the seat with his thumb. “Hop on board, Roxana.”

This time she does just as he says and gets on the bike, wrapping her tiny hands around him, looping her fingers through his denim belt loops. When the engine growls alive she releases a little scream and buries her head into his back.

They ride—out of the parking lot, out of the town, into the Willamette Valley—and the clouds open up and pieces of light drop down and skitter across the asphalt. He looks for Mexicans, for someone to drop off the girl with, but sees nothing except overgrown fields, tangled vineyards. An hour passes and the low-slung sun burns the horizon into a shriveling purpley brown piece of hot plastic. Night rises from the mountains like smoke, fingering its way across the sky.

In the morning, Darren decides, I’ll find someplace for her then.

Just outside St. Helens a mule deer bounds across the highway and springs into the air, so impossibly high, hurdling a barbed-wire fence with a white swish of tail, disappearing into the forest, where the shadows fuse together.

“Did you see that?” Darren yells over his shoulder. She gives him no response, her head still burrowed into his back, a warm heaviness, a nice feeling. “That was beautiful.”

Darren spends most nights in an underground concrete bunker the size of a rich man’s closet. His father built it in their backyard—in case the capital-B Bomb ever dropped. That he might drop the bomb never occurred to him. The bunker is dark and dank with a thick lead door and Darren figures it’s as good a place as any—it’s home, anyway—and down here the Geiger only reads thirty microrems per hour.

Here, in the absolute quiet of underground, he reads himself to sleep with a flashlight tucked between his neck and pillow. He has loads of books—Westerns, science-fiction stories, even romances—stolen from houses and libraries and stores, and he finds in them not just entertainment, but comfort, the comfort of reading about smart people who say all the right things and in the end figure stuff out.

Katie is like that, like someone out of a book. Always saying snappy things that ought to be written down, such as when she told Darren, “If you don’t have a home, you’ve got nowhere to hang your heart.” She was right about that. Nights he spends elsewhere, away from the bunker, sleeping under the stars, a vast black continent stretched out above him, he feels lost, erased.

The bunker is where he takes Roxana.

There is no electricity—he uses propane for cooking, candles for light, and a battery-powered stereo for music—and there is no running water. He boils and bottles what he drinks and he bathes in a nearby stream. The water is cold, white with minerals, and comes from the old glaciers way up in the Cascades. When he bathes, huge fish, salmon the size of dolphins, curl around him, flapping their tails as if they own the river. Sometimes they taste him, taking his toes or fingers into their prickly mouths, chewing, and he finds the sensation strangely pleasant. They dart all up and down the river, their reddish scales glowing beneath the water like the magic woods outside Trojan. For a time he worried whether the water was cleaning him or dirtying him—the radiation washed right off the mountains and into his skin—but then he stopped worrying.

He keys the bunker’s deadbolt and holds open the door like a bellhop, giving Roxana a little after-you-ma’am bow. She doesn’t budge from the top of the stairs. Her expression belongs to someone who just swallowed a bitter pill. “It’s no palace,” he says with an apologetic shrug, “but hey.” He leaves her there and goes about lighting candles, making the place more welcoming, and eventually, when the black bug-filled air gets to be too much for her, she makes her way down to join him.

With the perfect stillness of the bunker air and the red glow of the candles and the awkwardness of sharing a small space with a stranger, a little girl no less, Darren feels weird. He wants to turn on the stereo or get the hell away. When she goes to the bed and plops down on it, he squats in the far corner and examines his hands.

For a long time there is a silence between them until finally she says, “I’m starving.” She holds her belly for emphasis.

“Okay,” Darren says and goes to a shelving unit stacked with flour and sugar and canned vegetables and soups. “I’ve got some stuff here I could warm up. Do you like chicken-noodle soup?”

“I want cookies. Do you have chocolate-chip cookies?”

“Cookies,” he says. “Are you kidding me?”

She scratches her arm as a response.

Making cookies, to Darren, is like wearing cologne. An extravagance he never would have considered. The world falls apart and who wants to play hopscotch? Who wants to plant a flower garden? Who wants to make cookies? But now that he thinks about it, the other day he
did
collect some bird eggs—he
does
more or less have every ingredient—so he says, “All right. What the hell. Let’s make cookies.”

She says, “Yay,” and tucks her hair behind her ears and gives him a hundred-watt smile.

He doesn’t know why, but when he goes about mixing the flour and sugar and Crisco, chopping a Snickers bar into tiny bits, lighting the camping stove, he grins like an idiot. He grins so big his cheeks ache.

The last time he smiled like this, he realizes, was months ago, with Katie, when he told her about this dream he had. In it his parents drove around the Dead Zone on Vespa motor scooters, wearing sombreros and Hawaiian shirts, and when he tried to flag them down, they waved enthusiastically but didn’t stop. “You’re missing out on all the fun,” they yelled, their voices riding the wind.

He asked Katie what she thought about that. She said she thought he was sweet and funny and maybe, just maybe, his parents had a point.

Now he and Roxana make hungry noises and hunch over the camping stove and watch globs of chocolate-chunked dough melt on a pan, and for the first time in a long time he feels something akin to the warm swelling of the cookies.

She takes the bed and he takes the floor. The Pendleton blanket over concrete isn’t very comfortable, but that’s not why he can’t sleep. He rarely sleeps. Nights, a dead man comes to visit him.

Here is the story of the dead man: Darren was working a Karbala traffic checkpoint near the U.S. Embassy when it happened. The day was hot as only the desert can get. He had been searching cars for eight hours, and he was angry and tired and unfocused, until a pistol appeared from behind a rolled-down window. The man screamed something in Arabic and squeezed the trigger. It jammed. Darren’s did not. He remembers the man looking up at him, wide-eyed and surprised, his mouth a black O, the kind of look Darren’s father no doubt wore when the reactor came apart all around him.

Darren wonders what the Iraqi man saw, what he felt? The cold rush of metal into his mouth. The internal blossoming of blood as teeth and gum and bone evaporated, as the back of his head opened up and ejected what looked like a handful of rotten watermelon. Did he feel the wind whistling through his newly rendered cavity?

Darren killed many others, but none whose faces he saw so clearly.

So whenever he falls into dreams, the dead man emerges from the dark, and Darren wakes up with an asthmatic gasp, squeezing his hands into fists so hard the fingernails cut into his palms little half-moons of blood.

Lying on the floor, he recognizes a similar sort of haunting in Roxana. In her dreams she wails, sometimes softly, sometimes at the top of her lungs, like some air-raid siren.

For a while he just lies there, listening. Then he gets up and paces the bunker, back and forth, back and forth, running his hands through his hair like an expectant father. Every few minutes he stands over her and squeezes her shoulder and whispers, “Roxana? You okay?” But she won’t respond. She goes on moaning and he goes back to pacing.

Finally, in a wave of desperation—he wants so badly to silence and comfort her—he scoops her up and holds her in his arms, tight against his chest, rocking her, saying
shhh
. He doesn’t know if she wakes up or not, but she calms down. Her moaning softens to a sort of purr and her muscles relax and after a good fifteen minutes he sets her down and covers her with a blanket and falls asleep kneeling beside her.

Darren occasionally gets the feeling—this dread surging through him—that he is never going to find what he wants, even though he doesn’t know exactly what he wants. Before, every goal was so material: I want a fast red car, I want a sexy wife, I want a house with a field out back where I can play catch with my kid. Now every need—besides those of hunger and shelter—has become an abstraction. When he gets like this, usually lying in his bunker with all the lights off, he is left with a carved-out soreness he recognizes as homesickness.

Fed up with the silence and the loneliness, he rides to the perimeter, parking his bike some three miles away. He waits for nightfall and hikes to the checkpoint, keeping to the blue-black shadows when he can, hunkering down behind a moonlit sagebrush. With his binoculars he peers into the barrack windows. The people inside them are like characters on a television screen, drinking and playing cards and Ping-Pong, so unreal to him. Times like these he thinks what he thought when he first pulled up to his St. Helens home: I used to live here.