The Shooting (4 page)

—What? he says. He looks very sick.

—Look, Lee says.

—God Almighty.

—What's happening to me?

His father sits up, peers in close, forehead furrowed in concern. —Does it hurt?

Lee feels like he should say no, so he says no.

—Good boy. Just a little irritation. Allergy or something. You can see out of it okay, can't you?

Everything Lee sees with it is blurry. —I can see out of it okay.

—Well, if it doesn't hurt and you can see out of it, let's just keep an eye on it and see if it goes away, all right? Getting in to town to the doctor's is such a pain in the ass, we'll be there all day, and we have so much work to do today on the farm. And the medical establishment is a machine, it crushes people, I don't want you entering into it if you don't have to. Look, you can tough it out, right?

—I can tough it out.

—Good man. You're a good tough little guy. Nothing gets to you, does it? A little minor irritation doesn't get to you, does it?

—It doesn't get to me.

He hugs Lee, kisses him. —Daddy loves you.

His mother calls from New York and she sounds very sleepy, and he wants to tell her about his eye but before he can she says she just
called to say good-bye, and he says, —Where are you going? and she says, —I am dying. He says, —What do you mean? Are you sick? What happened? and she says, —No, I mean I am going to die very soon, I am going to kill myself, because you won't come to New York and see me, you don't love me, no one loves me, they have taken everything from me and I do not want to live, so good-bye, I love you, and he yells, —No, stop! But the line goes
click
and he screams for his father, who comes, and he tells him, —She's died, she's dead, and his father just rolls his eyes and mutters, —Dead drunk, and leaves, not caring. For days Lee wonders if his mother is dead. Then one day she calls and says, —Hello, babu, and she sounds bright and happy, as if nothing ever happened, and asks if he misses her and if he loves her and if he will come see her in New York. He says yes but only because he does not want to say no, the truth is he does not want to be anywhere near her.

Things are already beginning to grow in the garden: little hard potatoes, tiny sprouts of greens. —Enough food to feed a city, his father says, standing proudly with his hands on his hips, gun in its holster, observing his dominion. Lee watches him lovingly water the poo-smelling dirt, pointing out to Lee where the tomatoes will soon be coming in, the broccoli, the carrots, the beans.
—Fertile
here, he says happily. —This land
wants
to grow food, it
wants
to feed us, don't it?

It's only Lee and his father in the house now, no staff, his father has fired them, Violet too, who raised Lee from infancy. —We don't need things done for us anymore, his father explains to Lee. He leaves early in the morning with one of his rifles to hunt but returns later in the afternoon with frozen meat in grocery store packaging. They cook the potatoes and the greens and the meat outside over an open flame, and his father seems happy and says things are going even better than expected.

His father refuses to use the phone. Whenever it rings he cries out as though in great pain, —Go away! He does not bathe, spends his days digging and cutting and measuring and hoisting and planting and preparing the farm and his nights in his easy chair reading the
newspapers, keeps red pens nearby to annotate them and argues with the lies they tell him. He carefully cuts out articles and gives them to Lee to read even though Lee is too young to understand. Lee holds the articles before his face pretending to read; his father watches Lee's face, needing something from Lee that Lee cannot give. —Scary as hell, ain't it? his father says. —It's very bad. Very bad. It didn't used to be like this, Lee.

Day after day he goes out to hunt but returns only with frozen meat.

The eye pulsates hot day and night. Lee puts a hand over it and it scalds, has its own heartbeat. He cannot feel his face; in the mirror his face is shiny and fat, but if he could not see it in the mirror he would believe it is not there. A rare sip of air sneaking down his strangled throat and into his lungs is a great pleasure. Wakes in the mornings with little silver bugs in his eye feeding off the thick pink-green discharge. He is sweaty, feverish. —Let me see, his father says, taking Lee's chin in his and tilting up his grotesque little face toward his own. —Look at that! Getting better!

In the mornings before school, Lee traipses around the kitchen and living room in the darkness of dawn, bending down to pick up his father's empty bottles with cigarettes in them and bring them to the trash. When his father appears on the stairs with his rifle and camouflage heading out to hunt, he makes fun of Lee. —Uh-oh, it's the cops. Do you have a warrant officer?

One night Lee wakes up in bed smelling smoke. Calls out for his father but he does not answer. He goes through the smoke to his father's room and sees his father in his bed, asleep. He calls to him but he does not wake up. Goes into the kitchen, it is on fire. His father left a burner on. Lee stamps out the flames with the lid of a pan, and when his father wakes up hours later—having slept too late to hunt—he asks Lee why it smells like smoke, but Lee shrugs and never tells him how he saved both their lives.

He and his father are at Safeway a day or two later for more meat. Lee's eye is dripping slime. His father has given him a straw to stick between his lips so he can breathe. People are staring. His father
is red-faced, muttering to Lee that they all need to mind their own damned business.

—Poor little boy, a woman says.

His father smiles falsely and says, —He's okay, just a little infection, it'll clear itself right up.

—I don't know, she says, —it looks horrible.

—Looks worse than it is. He ain't in pain, and he can see out of it just fine. Still grinning he turns, the smile vanishing. Lee keeps lagging behind. —Come on, now, Lee,
walk.
You have to get the blood circulating otherwise your system won't fight off the infection. Christ, you must think you're the first buckaroo ever to get himself a little pinkeye. Come on, we're successful homesteaders, let's start acting like it. If this were the range, we'd have put you in the stockade for being so damned difficult. We'll get some sunlight today when we're working on the farm, that'll help. Sunlight is the best disinfectant—ain't you ever heard that before?

They go straight to the meats and fill the basket with beef. Every trip to Safeway is mechanized, because his father hates Safeway and believes maybe, if he is mechanized, Safeway will somehow know that he hates it. In and out in ten minutes flat is the goal. No cart—a hand basket provides greater maneuverability for darting around the old ladies standing about clogging the aisles, nothing to do with their lives, he says, but peruse a daggone grocery store, picking things up and putting them down and fussing and fretting over every trivial little thing and getting in men's daggone
way. —
These people are cattle, they're sheep. They're
sheeple,
is what they are, he says. The word sticks in Lee's brain and never leaves. His father carries the gun on his hip. The sheeple glance at it, give him space and respect, think he must be a police officer, which he likes. At the checkout he is sweating. He smiles through his sweat at the teenage cashier.

—Howdy, li'l darlin', he says. He seems to forget Lee is there. —My you're pretty. Though you'd be a lot prettier if you smiled a little bit.

She acts like she has not heard him. She is looking at Lee, his eye. —Whoa, she says, —what happened?

Before Lee can answer his father says, —Just a lil' bug bite, darlin'. Comes with working the land like we do. It'll clear right on up on its own. Pay it no mind. Now the polite thing to do when someone pays you a compliment like I just did is say thank you and smile.

She smiles halfheartedly, mutters thanks. His father wipes the sweat off his forehead with his hand, takes the bags, handing the one with only bread in it to Lee to carry. In the parking lot, crossing to their car, his father is saying, —Come on, Lee, we gotta get home, we gotta work, there's a lot to be done yet today. He's way ahead of Lee, who's trying to go fast and keep up. A pickup truck backs out of a space as Lee is passing by. The driver pulls up hard but hits him, the high bumper striking the side of Lee's head, on the side of his bad eye. Driver jumps out, a young man, high school.

—I'm so sorry!

His father comes hustling back for Lee, smiling, waving the young man off. —He's fine.

Lee is on the ground, dizzy, face in the pavement. —He almost killed me, he says as he climbs to his feet.

—Hell he did.

—I'm so sorry, the driver says again.

—Nothing to worry about, Lee's father says to him.

—I hit him, is he okay?

—You missed him, it's fine.

—He didn't miss me, Lee cries.

—He missed you. You fell, you tripped over your own feet. Anyway you should have been paying better attention to your surroundings. His father turns to the high school boy. —Does it all the time. He's as reckless as hell and one day he's going to get himself killed. I've been telling him but he ain't listened. Maybe now he will.

Lee is staring at his hellish mangled reflection in the silver bumper of the truck, an inch from his head at eye level.

—Doesn't he need a doctor for that eye? the young man says.

His father snorts. —No, he's fine. All right, Lee. Apologize to the man.

—He doesn't have to apologize to me, the driver insists.

—Don't tell my son what to do, please. He nudges Lee. —Lee. Apologize.

—You don't have to, the driver says.

—I'm sorry, Lee says.

The young man sighs and throws up his hands, then turns to get back into his truck, looks at Lee once more. —You didn't have to do that, he says, and closes the door.

They walk off and get into his father's truck. It is quiet. His father keeps looking at him. After a long time, his father says, in a voice that sounds different, even more like a cowboy than usual, —Hey pardner, did I ever tell you about the time your daddy got himself bit by a rattler out in Oklahoma? Hoooo, doggy! You think you're bad, you should have seen your daddy. His foot was as big as your entire body, God's honest truth. They gave your daddy last rites. The carpenter was fixing him up the coffin. They were out there diggin' the grave. Know what your daddy did? I'll be damned if he didn't get himself up off that plank they had him on, limp over to where they were diggin' the grave, grab him a shovel, and pitch in! Dug twice as much as any healthy man there too! Put them all to shame, your daddy did. Sweated that poison right out. That's where you get your toughness, son. You're a tough son of a bitch, Lee. Tougher than any boy I know. I was the same way at your age. That's the kinda people we are. You're just like me. I see a lot of myself in you. It's eerie sometimes, I have to say. Downright eerie how much I see myself in you.

He pulls out, drives home, telling Lee all about it, forgetting again about Lee, who sits with his face pressed against the glass of the window as the box he is locked inside zooms past the sunshine world outside.

The fences are up, the barn is raised, the troughs are in—but the food is dying. The little hard potatoes still grow, but the tomatoes never appear on their vines and nothing ever comes up through the places in the dirt where things were supposed to come up. And some of the greens turn yellow then brown, became brittle and now tumble away in that foul wind. Lee watches his father squatting to examine the dead leaves and wilted buds, picking up the dirt in his hands and watching it run through his fingers. He squints up at the sky,
the sun, as though appealing to the gods. —Must be dry this year, he says. Lee starts to ask what they will do but he cuts him off: —I don't know. Dammit, I don't know what we'll do, stop asking me what we'll do, you're always asking questions, so many goddamn questions, go find something to do, go fix us some supper.

—We don't have any meat.

—Well, mash up some potatoes or something then.

—We don't have any potatoes, we don't have anything.

—Well then, dammit, order us a pizza I guess then, I don't know. He kicks the dirt and walks away and Lee goes inside to order a pizza. Then he calls his mother in New York, but a man who answers says she is not home and he doesn't know where she is or when she will be back. The man says she will call him but she never does.

Lee likes to go inside the new barn, which is still empty, and climb around, hide out. He likes the fresh smell of the wood, the way the light of midday comes in through the little windows and seems to bake the wood, seasoning it with the dust motes moving down through the light beams. Soon there will be pets here. He will name them and ride them and be nuzzled by them and talk to them. They will be his friends. There will be a pig. He will name it Porky. Soon the men will come with Porky and the cows and the chickens. He will name them all. —When? he keeps asking his father. —When are they coming?

—Soon, soon. Next week maybe. Depends on the guy.

—When is next week?

—I don't know. Five days maybe. Five sleeps.

Five sleeps.
In five sleeps Lee will have Porky. That was yesterday, he thinks now, in the barn. So four sleeps now. Four. He cannot bear to wait four sleeps.

A force shuts the door and the windows too and Lee is suddenly alone in hot blackness. He pushes against the door but it does not open. He pushes harder and the door seems to push back against him. He can see nothing. It is very hot, he cannot breathe, he is a pig, dying. —Help! he cries, pushing and pulling on the door, the door rattling and pushing back.

A voice on the other side mocks him with oinks and snorts and high whining echoes of his own crying. —Where that piggy at? That piggy in there? Knock, knock, little piggy! Little pig, little pig, let me in!
Heeee! Heeee! You gon' squeal, piggy! You gon' squeal! Heeeeeee! Heeeeeeee! HEEEEEEEEE! HEEEEEEEE!