The Journey Prize Stories 27 (15 page)

“I just meant—”

“For fuck sakes, something is wrong with her. Very fucking wrong. You saw her the other day, screaming like that. You know what the crazy thing is? That’s the most sensible reaction I’ve ever seen her fucking have, to anything, to anyone. She started screaming and I’m like terrified, yeah, but also like, ‘Fucking right!’ My life in that goddamned backwoods shithole house, just crazy people and mutes and me.” Paul in profile. Paul serious. Paul on the verge of something, almost in motion. “I need to not be here.”

“Move in with me. The place is big enough. You can raise the animals—well, the goat, I guess, and the rooster. You can keep them alive.”

He turns away from me, facing the pigpen, his anger palpable and overwhelming. “I don’t want to raise anything.” He picks up the knife by the handle, tosses it, catches it by the blade between thumb and index finger. “I don’t want to raise fucking anything. Why the fuck didn’t Mom bring her in somewhere? Wouldn’t you do that, if your daughter was like her? Or would you spend your time watching your other kid die in a crib, like it’s all that exists?” Toss, catch, fingers wrapped around the handle. “What the fuck was wrong with her?” He barely moves, just contracts and lets loose, his arm in close, now extended, fingers fanning, releasing the handle. The blade end over end until it’s buried in or beneath a mass of speckled feathers on the fencepost. There is an explosion of wings and sounds, a frantic baying roar that goes on and on, but the blade is buried in the fence post, not the bird. Paul and I sprint so that we are standing over the rooster whose throat is extended, making a strange, strangled screaming noise,
garbled and electronic, lasting half a minute. Paul crouches down in wonder. “What the fuck was that?”

“I think it was crowing.”

“Jesus, Davey. Well, at least your rooster works.”

We stare at the pasture and smoke our brains out.

When Paul comes back to school we don’t say much to each other for a while. I sit next to him in math and hear him breathe in and out as he methodically pours glue onto his hand, lets it dry, then peels it away like a second skin. We start riding our bikes around a lot, just to listen to the gravel and dirt pop under the tires. If we’re feeling really conversational we’ll stick some cards in the spokes and pedal as fast as we can, the short crackles and hisses speeding up until the wheels sound like they’re purring. When we go through tunnels and under bridges the noise swells into the growl of an engine beneath us, and I can’t believe we have so much power at our feet—that we can propel ourselves places with a roar just by adding a piece of paper.

Our games change. We try to make noise and take up space without any particular goal. We bring bags of ice behind the school and go up to the top of the hill. We stick our hands in until they ache and we can feel it in our teeth. Then we pitch the ice as hard as we can against the brick wall, watch it shatter, then grab another handful and break that too. We play something called scream run, which is where we go up to the soccer field and run its length yelling the whole way, zigzagging so our feet touch every inch.

What Paul likes to do most is ride our bikes to the town limits, just where the light pollution stops and you can see the stars hanging over the highway. If we turn back to look at the town there is an orange fog suspended over everything. The horizon is clouded by people and the things they use to get from point A to point B. We stare at the town for a good ten minutes, then turn and stare at the highway, the way out his brothers chose for the great Estey exodus. We are silent and stand on the side of the road, watching the pavement cut through the hills, slicing the land into great swaths of earth that fall away from the asphalt without protest. We stay there for a long time, like landmarks hovering on the edge of town until there is a shift in energy all of a sudden, and things feel calm, and maybe even all right.

Paul breathes in and out, and if I close my eyes I feel like he’s working my lungs too.

I haven’t heard from him in three days, not since he almost knifed the rooster. The nights have been cool and clear, and when I step out to feed Daisy there are deposits of hoar frost on the ground, the wheelbarrow, the chicken wire around the goat house, trees like rock candy. I go over to the house and light a cigarette. I’ve trained her to come up to me and put her hooves on my shoulder, and she’ll take the butts right out of my mouth. Ah, Daisy, all the company I have: yellow eyed, clever footed, teeth strangely human and square. I almost trip over the axe, and have to grab for the Triple Seven napkin, caught in an updraft, moving in bits of harsh ice in the sunlight. This is what the napkin says:

I bend down and see the top of Daisy’s head in the door, mouth slightly open in surprise, a mound of frost on the visible yellow eye. I blow gently on the crystals and they dissolve into a line of liquid, coursing past her tear duct. I can see her distended sides, pushing the body up so that the legs barely touch the ground. If I try to pull her out I’ll have to break all four of her legs. I bring the axe down as hard as I can on top of the dog house, wood splintering outwards, everything caving inwards, frost and dirt and wood chips drifting onto the body like dust motes. Every last thing from my childhood has crossed the town limits and moved on. The awful, the wonderful, the people who loved me and are dead, the people who never loved me and are living, the people who I love who are alive but unreachable: sealed in carbonite, on the moon, in a different dimension. How to reconcile the smell of phlegm and fungus in a foyer with a small boy crowing hopefully in a superhero shirt. What is behind doors leading to Joanna. What are the best and worst moments. The removal of a goat corpse from the rubble with the departure of your only friend.

Somewhere, something or someone is crowing wildly.

There, in the wreckage of the paint and the boards is a single gleaming bone, too big for a chicken leg, too small for a dog. Unchewed, unmarked, stripped clean and hopeful, even though it will never turn into anything else or rejoin with a larger body. I put it in my pocket and take a shovel in my hand, Daisy in my arms, and move out to the pasture where the rest of the bodies are buried.

As I break ground, it strikes me that nothing looks so bad if we take the skin off cleanly. Even me out here surrounded by twenty-four corpses of varying sizes. If we take the meat off the skeleton I look happy enough as I bend up and down, digging a hole for Daisy, also smiling contentedly on her side.

My mother at the kitchen table, smiling into her hands as a small pool of salt water collects without explanation below her on the tabletop.

Mrs. Estey, smiling into Percy’s crib, Percy grinning back, immobile.

Joanna on the bus, smiling at the road.

Paul on the bus, smiling westward.

Joanna and Paul in the house on the hill that day, nothing strange or deadening, nothing traumatic or bad, because they are not people at all, but two skeletons of relatively the same size balancing against one another. And I can smile as I see them touch because they are both bent and smiling as their jaws and joints work. They smile steadily, one into the back of the other’s head, and they really mean it.

I
was at work, finishing up for the day, when I got a call from my father. It scared me a little, seeing his name on the screen like that in the middle of the afternoon. Usually I was the one who made the calls, nearly every evening since my mother passed away three years ago. He only ever phoned when he was upset about something, often late at night when his eighty-year-old mind started playing tricks on him, getting him wound up into thinking that so-and-so was trying to take away the house, or that someone else was siphoning money out of his bank account. And so it naturally fell to me to reassure him, often unconvincingly, that everything was all right, that no one was stealing from him, and that certainly no one was trying to take away the old farmhouse he had built more than forty years ago, the house I’d grown up in and where he continued to live.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Something’s got to be wrong for me to call?”

I leaned back in my chair.

“You know what?” he said. “I think I got a girlfriend now.”

Since my mother died he sometimes carried on like this too, crackpot talk of girlfriends and romance, thorny words that jabbed me with something like embarrassment, even though no one could overhear our conversation. He said that one of the personal support workers from Community Care wanted to introduce him to another one of her clients, a woman of similar age and who had also lost her spouse a few years ago.

“I just talked to her on the phone,” he said, “and she sounds like a
real nice lady
.”

My father’s emphasis on these last three words made it seem like an incontrovertible fact. He also sounded so cheerful—a departure from his usual prickly self—that I didn’t want to point out he could hardly consider this woman his girlfriend if he’d not met her yet.

“She wants to meet me this Sunday afternoon,” my father said. “She’s going to come over for coffee. Around three o’clock, she says. And you know what? I’d like you to be here.” He said this last part in such an oddly proud way it was as if he were asking me to be the best man at his wedding. “You think you can do that? You think you can come down for the afternoon? I want you to meet her too.”

I had planned on going to see a play that afternoon (a modern adaptation of an old Oscar Wilde comedy) with Michael, my ex. It was the final performance; I even had tickets. But there was no way I could
not
go home with this potential crisis looming, and so I told my father I’d be there.

“What do you think?” he said. “What would you say if I got hitched up again?”

I hated the way my father talked at times, how he’d say things like “hitched up”—an expression he’d likely picked up from the TV that was on from morning to night ever since he’d quit farming and retired. When my mother was alive, he was the most taciturn man I’d ever known, stiff and emotionless, a product of Hitler’s war and the effect it forever had on him growing up in bombed-out postwar Germany. But since my mother died, he’d become in many ways what I can only describe as a pathetic man: he was often emotional and cried easily, and he nattered on embarrassingly to complete strangers when I drove him to doctor’s appointments or to the mall to get his hair cut. A few times I’d even witnessed him being inappropriately affectionate with the PSWs who came to the house to cook and clean, trying to corner them into hugs just as they were on their way out the door, and I’d have to look away and remind my father afterwards not to do that, that he risked losing the services provided him if he kept it up. “What?” he’d say testily. “I’m not trying to
sleep
with her.”

He’d never been like this when my mother was alive: not once did I ever see a scrap of affection between them, not even a kiss. Theirs was a marriage of quiet indifference and tolerance—very German in its way—and for the last twenty or so years they slept in separate beds, my mother annexing my old bedroom shortly after I moved out to go to school. (Her snoring, she once confided, kept him up at night.) When I think about it now, it’s a wonder I was even born; it must have been a fluke, a one-time deal that led to their only child.

“You wouldn’t like it, would you?” he said. “I can tell. You’re not saying anything.”

He was right. I suppose I had the child’s natural aversion to the idea of a stepmother, even if she was at this point still immaterial. And when I tried picturing her, what I saw was of fairy-tale proportions: a willowy, birdlike woman with thinning grey hair and a hearing aid, the better to hear my father with; bony, talonlike hands, the better to tear him up with; and shiny white false teeth, the better to chew him up and spit him out with. And maybe not so unlike my father’s delusional worries, my own thoughts also wandered down an irrational path. I feared this predatory old woman would take advantage of my father’s slow but progressive descent into dementia to win over his affections and influence him to sign over the property and what little my father had in the bank to her and her wicked offspring.