Refresh, Refresh: Stories (19 page)

Then he pulled his mouth away from hers and she was just a body barely breathing in a bed.

His hand began to quiver. He crossed his arms, tightening them across his chest in an effort to stop the shaking, holding himself as it grew steadily worse. But he was unable to stop it.

When he climbed awkwardly onto her bed, he was only vaguely aware that for the second time in as many months his body was behaving beyond his control. Perhaps if his brother had stayed on the farm, if he—Gerald—had been the one to pursue some other trade. Perhaps if he had thrown a suitcase in the back of his pickup and moved far away from here and not had to endure fifty years of watching from a guarded distance a life unavailable to him. Perhaps if he had found a woman of his own—and married her—perhaps that would have satisfied something and rendered the darker parts of him impotent. Perhaps then he would not have climbed the tree—the lush oak whose limbs hung over a busy game trail—and loosened the nails that held the stand in place and waited for the day it would collapse beneath his brother.

He ran his hand along her belly, her breasts, rubbing her, as if to arouse some life from her, but her body remained silent and expressionless. He peeled away the sheet and folded it over the base of the bed. Then he drew back her gown over her knees, her vein-riddled thighs, until he revealed the silver triangle of her pubic hair. He laid his cheek to it, as if it were a pillow, its down tickling him. He could smell her. She smelled like iodine. And his ear, pressed against the soft mound of flesh, could hear the pings and gurgles of her insides. Among them he thought for a moment he could hear a voice calling to him—his brother’s—yelling his name from somewhere up inside her. He imagined pressing his lips to her sex, breathing into the tunnel he had always dreamed of sharing with her, with his brother, moving his tongue and lips, whispering to them both the secrets he had kept tucked away inside for so many years.

He remained that way until he heard the door click open behind him, heard the sharp intake of breath and the thump and slosh of coffee as it fell to the floor and finally the footsteps coming toward him.

The Faulty Builder

What bothers John most is the sight of his own tired face staring back at him in the mirror. His eyes are red-rimmed, watery. His forehead, the broad plain of it, is road-mapped with wrinkles. His skin is a yellow shade of pale. His hair has almost as much gray in it as brown; his wife says it makes him look
ex
tinguished. His lips appear pinched and they shudder now and then as if he were holding his breath to the limit.

This is March, and in Bend, Oregon, that means winter has six more weeks. The snow continues to fall and the snowdrifts continue to pile higher against the windward sides of homes. Windows remain sealed shut with frost so that the world outside appears always foggy, as if seen through a cataract. Icicles the size and shape of spines dangle from gutters. Blue jays and magpies flit from garbage can to garbage can, searching for something to scavenge, while emaciated deer stand, wobbling, on their spindly hind legs to seek out the seed from bird feeders, to peel the bark from low-hanging branches. The air is so thin and dry it makes nosebleeds common, so much so that it isn’t at all unusual to see someone—in the grocery store, on the sidewalk—with blood all over their chest and a Kleenex shoved up their nose like a candlewick, a wet red heat burning through it. And the sky, the permanent cloud cover, bears down with a gray weight, like a low-slanting ceiling that makes John duck his head for fear of bumping against it, giving him a permanent slump-shouldered posture.

He has had enough of winter and enough of his job. He works in the Investment Products Department of Northwestern Mutual. Every day, alongside his coffee and bacon, he gulps down his Lipitor and Ramipril pills and drives to work in an egg-shaped Windstar minivan and settles into a windowless office that smells like carpet glue and doughnut glaze. On the wall hangs a diploma from OSU, and next to it, one of those motivational posters that across its bottom reads, DREAM. Above the word a dolphin leaps out of the sea, carving an arc through the sunset.

Here, in his orthopedic leather chair, he drinks Diet Pepsi after Diet Pepsi while talking to clients, reviewing accounts, typing up contracts and refiguring investment units, taking conference calls with financial representatives, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the IRS. He keeps his Internet browser open to the New York Stock Exchange. His eyes track its numbers, so many numbers, their black shapes swarming through his head like a stirred ant pile. All day long he speaks of things looking bullish and bearish, of tax implications, late trading, market timing. He so often says, “Effective with the close of business this afternoon” or, “Effective at the close of the following business day” that in his mouth the words have taken on a rolling rhythm and become a sort of song.

He needs to get away.

Consider this. The other day his doorbell rang at 4:00 a.m. When he went to answer it, his boxer shorts hastily tugged on backwards, his bathrobe billowing open in the cold winter air, he found a policeman waiting for him.

“Do you own a white minivan?” the policeman asked. His eyes were narrow and his shoulders were dirty with snow.

After a foggy second, John told him yes, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Yes, he did. Why? Had it been stolen?

No, the policeman said. It hadn’t been stolen. It had been left running. During the night he had driven through the neighborhood several times, each time noticing the cloud of smoke blasting from the tailpipe.

The policeman moved aside, allowing John to brush by him and step onto the porch. And there, in the driveway, next to the police cruiser, sat his car. Its tank had burned through its fuel. Its headlights glowed weakly under a scrim of snow.

John scratched the back of his head in the way of embarrassed men. “I’ll be,” he said. “I must have—when I came home from work, you see, I was going to jump back in the car—I left the engine running—I was going to go to the supermarket—and I must have—since I decided not to—forgot.”

The policeman removed a flashlight from his belt and clicked it on and studied John a moment before saying, “Are you feeling all right, sir?” with “all right” seeming like a substitute for
drunk.

“Yes.” John raised a hand to shield his face from the light. “I’m fine. Everything is perfectly fine.”

His doctor—a gaunt man with white wisps of hair combed carefully across his scalp—tells him a different story. “You’re fifty pounds overweight. Your blood sugar is all over the place. Your systolic pressure clocks in at 150 mm Hg.”

His doctor sits in a chair with his legs crossed and a clipboard in his lap. Aside from his mouth moving he remains perfectly still, like a propped-up cadaver. “Do you know what that means, John?”

John sits across from him, his legs hanging off the examination table. He doesn’t wear a shirt and his belly rests in his lap like a garbage bag full of warm milk. In response to the doctor’s question his shoulders rise and fall in a shrug.

“To top it off.” The doctor consults the clipboard. “Your triglycerides are up to 260 and your LDL is up to 330.” He doesn’t say these numbers as most would—in quick bursts—as two-sixty, three-thirty. He instead draws them out, laying heavy emphasis on the
hundred.

There is a disapproving silence that John interrupts by shifting his weight, the sanitary paper beneath him crinkling. He tries to find something to concentrate on besides the doctor and settles on his hands, his wrists. He imagines a thin yellow gravy rushing through their pipe-work.

The doctor continues: “I’m only half-joking when I say I have obese seventy-year-olds with numbers not much different than these.”

John tries to sound cheerful but his voice comes out sounding like it has a bad back: “I don’t feel old. I don’t feel age.”

This is a lie. His eyes are black-bagged with exhaustion. His joints feel like pockets of broken glass. The staircase to the second floor of his house leaves him out of breath. His penis, when erect, droops like a scythe.

Because of his belly, the weight of it, his wife, Linda, prefers to be on top. Lately, inevitably, he slips out of her—and they either give up, if she can’t push his softness back inside her, or she makes him finish her with his mouth.

“I don’t feel old,” he says and his doctor recognizes the lie by bringing together his white eyebrows and scraping his teeth across his lip. “I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. You
must
begin eating better, exercising more, working less.” For each of these things he taps his finger against the clipboard.

“Or?”

The doctor gives him a tight smile. “Or.” He slowly lifts his hand to his neck and makes a slitting motion.

Mid-March his wife, a fifth-grade teacher, has spring break—and John has saved up his vacation days to correspond with hers. They will be staying in Depoe Bay, at the Inn at Otter Crest, a mossy-roofed gray-sided hotel that hangs over a cliff hanging over the ocean.

There is something about the ocean. All that blue-green water stretching off into the horizon, uncluttered by flashing lights and concrete buildings and ringing phones. The way you can bring binoculars to your eyes and find, without looking very hard at all, a humpback or a gray whale breaking the surface of the water—a long black U sliding in and out of sight. And the waves roll over with a boom and sizzle their foamy white tongues along the sand. And the spume lifts off the water—and the wind smells of salt and algae—and he could spend all day crouching beside tide pools filled with bright-colored anemones, crabs, urchins.

It’s always been that way for him. Nights, when he plops down on the couch and cracks open a can of Coors and sips from it, he often watches the Discovery Channel. He likes to see the sharks darting through schools of tuna, the squids blackening the water with their ink, the whales calling to one another. He likes to imagine himself floating someplace deep underwater, an underworld where fish would slither over his back and brush by his belly, where hunger would be his only concern.

Next to his bed he keeps a sound machine. It has all sorts of different settings. Birds chirping. Frogs drumming. Thunder booming. Waves crashing. And he keeps it tuned in to this, the ocean setting. It’s on a timer so that for fifteen minutes every night waves turn over next to his head, easing him into sleep. His wife complains that the waves don’t sound like waves at all—they sound like paper torn slowly, she says—but to him they sound like the most beautiful thing in the world.

He doesn’t know why he feels this way, just as he doesn’t know why he used to eat dirt as a toddler. Certain people just feel drawn to certain things. And for him the ocean represents a kind of afterlife. The mere thought of it—the days he ticks off the calendar as his vacation time approaches—helps get him through his workweek. His dreams are there. Lost hopes and romantic possibilities and forgotten memories are there. Peace is there. Everything missing, everything he can’t explain about his life, is there, washed up on the sand.

Which is why, the day before they leave for Depoe Bay, when Linda calls him into the living room and bumps up the volume on the television and points to the screen where the Portland weatherman talks about a major storm system moving toward Puget Sound, the
slight
possibility of it sliding south and coming to a head against the Oregon coast, he says, “So?” with some hatefulness in his voice.

“I think we should cancel,” she says. “I don’t think we should go.”

“We’re going.”

“There’s a 24-hour cancellation fee. That means we’ve only got—” she glances at her watch for emphasis “—another couple hours.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“What if it isn’t? Some vacation that will be. Sitting inside some moldy motel room all day. We could go to my mother’s instead. I’d really like to see her. She’s so lonely these days.”

“Linda.” Here he holds up his hand as if to block the words coming from her mouth. “I said it’ll be fine and it’ll be fine.”

The next day they drive toward the wall of the Cascades. John can barely make out the mountains from the sky, the mountains covered in snow and the sky full of slow-moving clouds. Sagebrush lines Highway 20. Their white huddled shapes remind him of the ghosts of dwarves. He is happy to see them go, when near Sisters the trees thicken and the road steepens and the Windstar begins its slow crawl up the Cascades, toward the saddle-shaped dip between the North Sister and Mt. Jefferson that will mark the beginning of their descent into the Willamette Valley, where spring has already started.

Snow falls. Old-growth firs—sixty-, seventy-feet tall—loom close to the road and the snow weighs down their branches so heavily that blobs of white fall and splat against the minivan’s windshield, swept away a moment later by the wipers. The wind blows, pushing the minivan toward the centerline. Ice crystals rise in whorls off the drifts and the sun catches them and makes them glitter.

Every now and then a blue sign will appear—advertising the Metolious River Recreation Area, the Hoodoo Ski Bowl—and a road will branch off the highway, a quick glimpse down it revealing cross-country skiers, snowshoers, snowmobilers, people dressed in bright-colored parkas from REI, people who spend so much time in ski goggles they have raccoon-like tans, people who enjoy winter. John doesn’t understand them.

Semis park along the shoulder to put on chains. Enormous plows, like prehistoric beetles, scrape the snow from the road with their broad steel shovels and drop cinders behind them, making the road appear dusted with paprika, helping tires find purchase on the slick asphalt.

Linda yells at him, tells him he’s going too fast. And he is. He can’t seem to help it, his foot weighed down by the desire to leave all this behind.

Eventually they rise over the hump of the Cascades and follow the long winding highway down and down and down—and then something happens, the changes begin. The water begins to run off the icicles and the ice in the river breaks apart and glimpses of green emerge from the snowdrifts and eventually take over. He notices leaves unfurling from the branches of the oaks and ash and maple, and among them, clusters of trillium and bloodroot and white wild onions. Songbirds flutter between the trees.