Refresh, Refresh: Stories (16 page)

Inside the barracks—its windows white, pulsing, as if by some miracle a star had been pulled from the sky and trapped there—he sees Katie. She rakes back her hair in a slick brown pile. She has beautiful hair. He wants to kiss it.

Usually that is enough. Seeing her is enough. An antidote to the hollow feeling in his guts. He returns to his bike and speeds off to his own private corner of the universe until the next time he gets that desperate homesick feeling.

Such as now, when he wakes up with Roxana and Katie coming together in his brain like a constellation he can’t quite figure out. He knows this place is no place for a child. And he knows he is not the best sort of man to watch after a child. He will take Roxana to the perimeter. Katie will know what to do with her.

Darren is flying—he is nothing but air—with Roxana curled tight as a shrimp against his back. The road twists over the Cascades and bottoms out in Central Oregon where they find themselves surrounded by ponderosa forests, the trees’ bark a scraped-skin red. The bike hums beneath him and the wind is like a woman’s fingers in his hair, bearing the smell of sage and sap.

Then he notices a gray cloud of smoke rising in the distance. Too big for a campfire, too indistinct for a burning house or field. And the cloud, Darren realizes, is moving toward them.

He brakes and rolls onto the shoulder with a slurred crush of cinder. Dust drifts up and sticks to their sweat. Roxana says, “Como?” and he holds up a hand that tells her to be quiet. “Something’s coming,” he says. Up ahead the road elbows into the trees. He focuses his eyes there, as if through the crosshairs of a scope, and the rest of the world falls away.

Roxana says, “What’s coming?” and he says,
“Sh.”
He is concentrating. He senses, in a certain vibration of the air and the asphalt, engines. Lots of them.

His throat constricts, a lava-hot rush of blood makes his heart do a backflip, and deep inside him big chunks of black matter, stuff that has been lodged there forever, begins to melt away and infect him with a sick feeling. He can’t remember ever being afraid in his entire life, but this is fear. Unmistakable, remarkable fear.

Not for him, but for Roxana.

All hopped up with adrenaline, he doesn’t quite know how to act, so he acts angry, a state of mind he understands better. He blazes off the highway—into and out of the drainage ditch, its swampish bottom slippery, the bike almost sliding out from under them—and when Roxana says, “Are you loco?” he says, “Shut up! Just shut up!”

Instantly he regrets it and feels his face tighten into a cringe, but he doesn’t have time to apologize. He zigzags through the trees like a rabbit under fire. Stiff weeds and clumps of sagebrush claw at the bike, screeching on its metal, and about thirty feet off the road—which seems too, too close—he brings the bike around a fallen tree and lays it on its side and starts covering it with branches.

Roxana hugs her chest protectively and jogs her eyes between him and the road. He can tell by her expression, a sort of scowl, she wants to be angry, but fear is getting in the way.

The fallen tree is a pine, its needles a crisp brown, its bark interrupted by a jagged black vein made by lightning. When he pushes his way into its nest of branches—getting right up against the trunk—his hair prickles, his veins tighten. It is as if he can
feel
the residual electricity. He says, “Come on,” and Roxana joins him.

By now a faint growl is audible and they duck down—their bodies bent in half like question marks—and listen to the noise get louder and louder still, and then around the corner comes a train of vehicles: motorcycles, jacked-up pickups, Cadillacs with red flames painted along their sides. All of them cough up oil like outboards, their ruined shocks and cracked mufflers and shrieking brakes rolling together to make a musical noise, like some junkyard circus, surrounded by this mystically blue exhaust that rises up and joins the sky.

On top of one Cadillac, bodies are tied down like trophy stags. If they are not dead they are near it. Blood runs off the roof, down the windshield, where the wipers wipe it away. Darren can see the man behind the wheel, hunched over and squinting through all that redness, smiling. A rosary swings from his rearview mirror.

Just five minutes ago the world seemed weirdly clean and calm. Now, in the drifting fog of smoke, engines snarl and horns beep and mariachi music blasts from tape decks and tattooed men grin into the wind and for a second it’s as if the meltdown never happened.

Darren looks at Roxana: her eyes are burning with tears, her mouth is opening and closing without any sound. He sees in her face terrible fear and hatred. She recognizes these men and Darren knows without a doubt what happened to her family. He unholsters his revolver.

The caboose of the nightmare parade is a semi dragging a flatbed. On the flatbed are couches and chairs, arranged helter-skelter, with many men and women splayed out on them. Beer cans roll around their feet. Mexican trumpets blasting from a boom box overwhelm the noise of the diesel engine. Five men circle a woman in a green bikini and dance—slightly off-kilter from drink or turbulence—their hands outstretched like Halloween scarecrows. They are dirty and they are excited.

At the rear of the flatbed a shirtless man swings logging chains above his head. He is as big as an outhouse. With his revolver Darren sights the man’s chest, where excess flesh ripples down his rib cage, surrounding his guts, as if he has begun to melt after a too-long exposure to Trojan’s furnace. Beneath the noise of the music and the engines, Darren imagines he can hear the chains making a hissing noise, a noise associated with flat tires and snakes, with imminent danger.

Darren’s chest is a drum. Inside the drum, the fist of his heart bangs away and he feels clenched and jumpy and oblivious to the reckless stupidity of what he is about to do. His finger tightens around the trigger—in pure reflex—and the trigger gives. The gun jumps in his hand. Time stops. The mariachi music fades, replaced by a thundering crack. With a blue puff of smoke, the bullet tunnels through thirty feet of air and opens up a tiny mouth just below the man’s left nipple. He doesn’t cry out or clutch his chest—or anything—he just drops. He ceases to live. The physics of the impact work out like this: an ugly twist of limbs thrown from the flatbed, now baking on the hot pavement.

Darren feels certain the semi will grind to a halt—and then the sun will glint off the Night Train’s exposed muffler and the woman in the green bikini will point a finger in their direction and yell, “There!” and that will be it—they will be dead.

But no, the gang growls off into the distance, aware of nothing but themselves.

Nearby a bird shrieks
all clear
and the forest returns to its business, twittering and chattering. With a gush of air Darren realizes he has been holding his breath. At first he feels elated, as if he has found something given up for lost, and then he notices Roxana staring at his revolver, and his body suffers some weird jolt—a power surge of guilt—followed by a draining sensation.

He returns the gun to its holster and she says, “You killed that guy.”

He reaches out and combs some pine dander from her hair. “Sorry.”

There are little gold sunbursts mixed into the brown of her eyes. “I hope you blow all their guts out.” She says this point-blank, without a trace of humor or pity, and then takes a few steps away from him, as if to escape the memory attached to her words.

In the Westerns he reads, the heroes spend a lot of time seeking revenge. If somebody, usually a guy with a black mustache, kills a pal or a family member, it is your
duty
to pay him back in lead. It is the just and courageous thing to do, the
only
thing to do.

He wishes he felt this way about Iraq. He wishes dropping bombs and putting bullets into people felt like the only thing to do.

As if the taste of blood has given him a great appetite, he considers lining Los Angeles up and tearing into them, one by one, reciprocating the pain they have caused. Even if they outnumber him thirty-to-one,
even
if his head ends up on a pike, he feels he owes it to Roxana, he owes it to his parents, he owes it to the people, himself included, seeking some sort of absolution.

Whereas before Roxana struck him as scarily adult, she now looks all of ten, just a child, when she tugs at his hand, tugs him out of his thoughts, and says, “Let’s go. I’m scared.”

He hauls up the Night Train and she takes one of the handlebars and helps him roll it over to the road. They try not to look at the body, the blood pooling around it like an oil slick, as he gets on the bike and she gets on behind him, wrapping her arms tight around his belly, his safety belt. He lets the engine run for a minute, then guns the accelerator, spraying dust and cinder everywhere, and heads due east, his eyes black-bagged and full of pain, like the wounded who return home from a lost war.

Whisper

Jacob lay on the forest floor with something broken inside him. When he tried to sit up, his pelvis shifted and released a moist popping sound, filled with pain, so he kept still, listening to the wind whisper through the trees and scatter the last leaves from their branches.

At first he felt cold. Then a hot ache spread from his middle and leaked all the way to his fingertips. He imagined himself lying there, how he would look to whoever found him. With his white hair and rheumy eyes, with his soft belly, his bowed legs, with his liver-spotted skin and the veins beneath it looking like the burned-out filaments of a lightbulb, he decided he would look exactly like a stupid old man who had fallen out of a tree.

He tried distracting himself. Thinking about the Ducks—their so far 5-and-7 season—though he couldn’t remember a single game. Thinking about his wife, though he could imagine her face only from a distance, as if through the wrong end of a scope. Every time his mind seemed ready to latch down on something, it escaped him, swept aside by a wave of pain.

A long twenty minutes passed. During this time he felt his stomach and legs swelling with blood, growing tight against his jeans, and he wondered how long it would be, a day, maybe two, before they found him, his body.

He had been sitting in his tree stand when it happened, when the wood gave out beneath him and he fell the fifteen feet to the forest floor and broke. He had built it some thirty years ago, a kind of roofless tree house braced by the Y-junction of an oak’s lower limbs. The wood must have rotted or the nails must have come loose and now here he was, fading, like a photograph left too long in the sun. His rifle lay beside him, within reach. He ran a finger along its stock. For a second he considered using it, but only for a second.

Words like
old
and
stupid
and
I wish
cycled endlessly through his head and he began to shiver and rock with the pain, and when he did, the bone splinters branched out into his body like frost across a window. An artery snipped in half. His skin stretched suddenly and painfully against the pressure of blood trying to find a way out, his scrotum swelling to the size of an infant’s skull.

He noticed the weight of flannel against his chest, the smell of leaves. He rolled his head around—his eyeballs wild—as if seeking someone to blame. His brother, Gerald. They had fought the other day. About what he could not recall. Something. It was always something between the two of them.

Not long ago they had spoken of death, when trout fishing, when they joked about how the worms they impaled on their hooks would one day get revenge, sooner than later, tunneling into their old bodies once laid to rest.

Jacob could no longer feel his left leg, but above it, all throughout his groin, his skin pulsed as if from the stirrings of some terrible love. Then this hotness transformed into numbness—and the sensation was a quick and refreshing thing, like flipping his face to the cool side of a pillow.

He watched the branches move, the leaves tumbling down, shades of gold and red, lipstick red, riding the breeze, their motion in tune to the passage of time—quick, slow—pausing against the breath of an updraft, then falling, falling all around him. He tried to snatch one. Against the sky his hand looked as pale and crooked as a winter tree.

This was the way he died. And the next day his brother found his body tucked under an afghan of leaves, his eyes open and staring and cracked from the freeze the night before.

Two days later, Gerald sat in his La-Z-Boy recliner, staring through a scope. He had long ago detached it from his rifle and now kept it handy mainly for bird-watching. Out the window, across the mowed space of lawn, he could see the vegetable garden, with its sunken pumpkins and browned vines, edged by the barbed-wire fence, and beyond this, the pasture, where a heifer was fresh. He wanted to watch the birth.

He had a difficult time focusing because of his hand. It had begun to shake two years ago and since then the shaking had grown steadily worse. He suspected it was the beginnings of Parkinson’s, but preferred not knowing.

Though it was getting difficult to ignore. Sometimes, when he drank coffee, it dribbled over the lip of the mug and burned his fingers. A few months ago he had given up eating anything with a spoon.

The palsy nested in his right wrist. Last Saturday he dropped the offering plate during mass. “Goddamnit,” he yelled when the quarters and bills spilled beneath the pews and the congregation turned to stare at him, their faces pinched with concern.

Now, through the scope, the world shook. The unsteadiness began to nauseate him. When his vision went white, as if from some sudden glaucoma, he pulled his face away from the scope and the world came into focus and he spotted the peacock. It strutted past the window, its head bobbing, its feathers as white as teeth. Five years ago Gerald bought Jacob and his wife, Gertie, two white peacocks as a fiftieth-anniversary gift. “They represent love,” he told them. Though theirs was a habitual love, he knew. Even if they said, “Love you,” each night before bed, it was a tired phrase, devoid of feeling, as normal and easy as “Sure” or “So long.”