by Callan Wink
She pulled the quilt tighter around her shoulders. “Did you know that, Augie? That there are all sorts of words for things in other languages that we don’t have in English? It’s like your soul is tongue-tied when that happens, when you have a feeling or experience that you can’t explain because there isn’t a specific word for it. If you knew all the languages in the world, you could express yourself perfectly, and all experiences would be understandable to you because you would have a word, a perfect word, to attach to any possible occasion. See what I mean?”
August wiped his greasy hands on his jeans. He was pretty sure his mother was naked under her quilt. He wondered if there was a word for that in another language. A word to classify the feeling you get sitting across from your mother, eating a pork chop, with your mother naked under a quilt. She’d made the pork chop for herself, of that he was certain. Also, she had a half-eaten package of Fig Newtons on the counter. He knew she was teasing him about being a breatharian, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of knowing that he didn’t understand the joke.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just because you have a word to put on something doesn’t mean you understand it any better. Does it?”
“Oh, I think so. Definitely. I don’t think things really exist until we can name them. Without names, the world is populated by spooks and monsters.”
“Just because you give something a name doesn’t mean you change what it is. It’s still the same thing.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong, Augie dear. How about death?”
“What about it?”
“What if instead of death everyone called it being born and looked forward to it as the great reward at the end of seventy or so years of slow rot on earth?”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would anyone look forward to death?”
“Maybe you’re too young for this conversation,” she said, coughing into the back of her hand. “That’s an interesting thought. I bet in some language there is a word for the state you exist in now—the state of being incapable of formulating concepts of, or discussing abstractly, death in all its various forms, due to a lack of experience. You need to have someone you love die, and then you get it. All the understanding of the world comes rushing in on you like a vacuum seal was broken somewhere. I’m not saying you’ll ever understand why the world works the way it does, but you’ll surely come to the conclusion that it does work, and that, as a result, it will absolutely someday come to a grinding halt, as nothing can work forever. See what I mean?”
“No.”
“Well, in time you will. I’m sure.”
She picked up her solitaire game and shuffled the cards, splitting the deck, rifling the ends together with a brisk splat and then making the cards bow and bridge and shush back into one. August sat listening, enjoying the sound, thinking, knowing, she was wrong. He had loved someone who had died.
“How’s the job coming?”
“Not great.”
“Motivational issues?”
“No. They’re just fast. I’ve been thinking about a change of tactics.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I don’t know if it will work. Can I borrow some bowls?”
* * *
—
Lisa stayed for dinner again. August sensed that his life was now split in two distinct pieces. There was the part when Skyler was alive, when his father and mother and he had all lived in the new house, and now there was this part, where things were foggy and indistinct. August twirled Lisa’s spaghetti around on his fork and realized, for the very first time, that the whole of his life up until this very point existed in the past, which meant it didn’t exist at all, not really. It might as well have been buried right there in the pasture next to Skyler.
* * *
—
It was dark and cool in the barn, and August switched on the radio for company. He hadn’t been able to sleep, so he’d risen early, before Lisa, even. He hadn’t had breakfast and his stomach rumbled as he climbed the wooden ladder up to the haymow. In the darkness he could see the faint pinpricks of stars through the knotholes and chinks of the barn planks, and then his groping fingers found the pull chain and the haymow was flooded with fluorescent light.
The floor was carpeted with twisted feline forms, tabbies, calicos, some night-black, some pure white, intermingled and lumpy and irrevocably dead. They lay like pieces of dirty laundry where they’d fallen from their perches after the tainted milk had taken its hold on their guts. August coughed and spit, slightly awed, thinking about the night before and the way the antifreeze had turned the bluish-white milk a sickly rotten green. He nudged a few of the still forms with his boot and looked toward the rafters and found them empty except for a calico, its dead claws stuck in the joist so that it dangled there, like a shabby, moth-eaten piñata.
He pulled his shirt cuffs into his gloves against the fleas jumping everywhere and began pitching the cats down the hay chute. As he worked, the voice of Paul Harvey found its way up from the radio on the ground floor.
There’s going to be unrest. There’s always going to be unrest, but things always get better. Tomorrow will always be better. Just think about it: Is there any time in history in which you’d rather live than now? I’ll leave you with that thought. I’m Paul Harvey, and now you know, the rest of the story.
August climbed down the ladder and stepped shin deep into a pile of cats. He got out his jackknife and set to work separating the cats from their tails. He pushed the bodies into the conveyor trough as he worked, and when he was done he flipped the wall switch to set the belt moving. August watched the cats ride the conveyor until all of them went out of sight under the back wall of the barn. Outside, they were falling from the track to the cart on the back of the manure spreader. He didn’t go out to look, but he imagined them piling up, covering the dirty straw and cow slop, a stack of soft, lifeless forms. Tomorrow or the next day his father would hook the cart up to the tractor and drive it to the back pasture to spread its strange load across the cow-pocked grass.
* * *
—
It took him a long time to nail the tails to the board, and as he pounded, the last ones were already stiffening. The sky was just starting to take on the milky light of predawn when August carried the board up to the new house. In the mudroom he stopped and listened. There was no sound of his father and Lisa in the kitchen, but he knew they’d be up soon. He leaned his board against the coat rack, directly over his father’s barn boots, and regarded his work as it was, totem and trophy, altogether alien against a backdrop of lilac-patterned wallpaper.
August tried to whistle as he walked across the lawn and down the hill to the old house, but the best he could muster was a spit-laced warble. On the porch he wiped at his lips with the back of his sleeve and looked in the window. His mother was at the kitchen table. She held a card in her hand, raised, as if she were deciding her next move, but August could see that the cards in front of her were scattered across the table in disarray, a jumbled mess, as if they’d been thrown there.
It was May 25, the opening day of trout season, and August was riding in the back seat of Vaughn Thompson’s long brown Cadillac. August’s friend Bob was riding shotgun, because Vaughn was his grandpa and the front seat was his by rights. Bob had been badgering Vaughn every day for a week in the lead-up to the opener, and he’d finally agreed to take them up north to his favorite spots on the Pine River.
Vaughn was a short man, fat, with a fringe of white beard but no mustache. He needed a cane to get around, and August had never seen him wear anything other than massive denim overalls and a buffalo plaid shirt, no matter the season or temperature. He was a heavy-equipment operator. August had asked, but Bob wasn’t sure how old Vaughn was. “I don’t think he’s as old as he looks,” Bob said. “He’s just fat. At work he has one of the other operators raise him up in an
excavator bucket so he can get into his machine without having to climb the ladder.”
Vaughn had his cane propped up on the seat between him and Bob. It was made of dense, heavy wood, the handle carved in the shape of a snake’s head. He called it his lickin’ stick. Bob said that you could unscrew the head to unsheathe a long, thin dagger, and August, from his backseat vantage, was trying to determine if such a thing might be possible. From what he could see, the whole cane looked seamless, carved from one solid piece. Bob was probably August’s best friend, but he sometimes made things up whole cloth.
Vaughn was an extremely slow driver. He tended to straddle the white line on the road’s edge, two tires on pavement, two tires crunching the shoulder gravel. He had a large green Stanley thermos, and he drank coffee and peppermint schnapps from the lid, which doubled as a cup. If he had to piss, a fairly frequent occasion, he did so in a wide-mouthed Gatorade bottle that he kept down by his feet, turning up the radio to mask the sound of his stream, swearing if he missed his target.
The talk at school all week had been about Sam Borden, a kid in August and Bob’s class, who’d found a mummy under a brush pile down by the Little Muskegon. He’d told everyone about it, round-eyed, at the back of the morning bus.
“A foot,” he said. “That’s how I noticed it. A bare foot. Real brown looking with yellow toenails.”
“Yellow?”
“Yeah, yellow. I was going fishing out there. I walked over this big brush pile that I usually just go around. I decided to climb over it for some reason, and then there it was.”
“Like, the toenails were painted yellow?”
“No, like gross old-person yellow. The foot was all dried-out looking. Like jerky. Just sticking out from under a big log.”
“Gross.”
“What did the rest of it look like?”
“That was all I saw. I ran home and told my dad.”
“You didn’t even try to get a better look?”
“Shit. Have you ever seen a dead person’s foot? Any of you? That’s what I thought. Don’t even ask me about why I didn’t try to get a better look. I ran out of there as fast as I could, and that’s what any of you would’ve done, too. So shut it.”
* * *
—
All the guys had spent time speculating about the origins of the body, and Bob was particularly fixated. He had a theory that he was broaching to his grandpa now as they drove.
“I think it was White Cloud,” Bob said. “Chief White Cloud. It just makes sense. Everyone knows he was from around here. He broke out of that reservation back in the day, and then he made his death march all the way back to be buried in his ancient hunting grounds.”
Vaughn snorted and poured more coffee into his thermos top, steam rising to fill the car with a vaguely peppermint smell. “Chief White Cloud, my ass,” he said.
“I’m serious,” Bob said. “Sam Borden said the foot looked like jerky. The toes were like pieces of Slim Jims. That’s not just some ordinary body. Right, August? He said that.”
August leaned forward, still trying to get a better look at Vaughn’s cane. “He did say that. Just like beef jerky.”
“See?” Bob said. “That’s a mummy. Chief White Cloud is the only thing that makes sense. It’s just like the Iceman.”
Vaughn sipped his coffee and turned to look at Bob, a single wooly eyebrow raised in a way that August could never duplicate. “The Iceman?” he said.
“Yeah, Ötzi, the Iceman. They found the guy under a glacier in Switzerland or something. He was five thousand years old. Right, August?”
“Yeah. We watched a National Geographic Explorer show about it in science class. They said the guy that discovered him got a million dollars.”
“If I was Sam I’d be pissed off about that,” Bob said. “No one is talking about giving him anything. Chief White Cloud should be worth a thousand bucks at least.”
Vaughn shook his head. “The Iceman was under a glacier. Frozen. This asshole your friend found was under a pile of cut brush. I have no idea how he got there, but a mummy he ain’t. Hate to break it to you kids. My guess is his name is Tony Spicoli from down in Detroit, and no one that knew him shed a single tear about his disappearance. You boys have breakfast? No? That bag on the seat has donuts, August. Pass me up a powdered sugar.”
They ate their donuts in silence, and when Vaughn was done he wiped the powder from his chin with his sleeve and cleared his throat. “Saw a truck was parked at your mom’s house this morning, Bobby. That guy still hanging around?”
August saw Bob’s shoulders rise and fall. “I guess.”
“What’s his name again?”
“JT.”
“He give you any problems about anything?”
“Nah. He’s all right.”
Vaughn shook his head. “Your mother. Don’t know what it is in her that makes her go after every little thing that seems different from the place she came from. I’m just saying. Down in Detroit, I worked with blacks and Mexicans and red and brown and yellow people, whatever. None of it matters to me as long as you show up to work on time. Still, your mother was my firstborn, and I swear to God she’s made it her life’s mission to piss me off. First your dad and now this guy. Never mind. Pass me another one, August. Chocolate frosted this time. Chief White Cloud, my ass. Let’s go fishing.”
Vaughn drove them down a winding gravel road and then finally turned off on an overgrown two-track with fiddlehead ferns and purple skunk cabbage tongues growing up in the center. They went culvert hopping, getting out at every point the road crossed the creek and taking turns dropping their lines from the embankment, sending their hooks, baited with red angleworms, drifting on the slow current. They caught brook trout, mostly hand sized or smaller other than one that Bob hooked, a fifteen-inch standout that made a hard run and jumped to the other side of the culvert. Bob stood on the upstream side with his rod bent double trying to pull the fish back up to him, his grandpa, still sitting behind the wheel with the door open, barking orders.
“Don’t horse him, Bobby.”
“I’m not horsing him.”
“He’s going to break you off on the side of that culvert if you’re not careful.”
“I know. I know.”
“You’re going to have to do something, Bobby. That fish is kicking your ass.”
August had a flash of inspiration. He scrambled down the steep bank and waded out into the bottom of the pool, kicking and thrashing, the trout a dark shape darting this way and that before it shot back up the culvert to the other side where Bob was able to scoop it with Vaughn’s old green mesh hand net. Bob hooked a finger through the trout’s gills and held it aloft, stern faced, for his grandpa’s appraisal.
“I’ll be damned, son,” Vaughn said. “That is a fine one. You’re lucky August is a quick thinker. You boys got your knives? Okay, you know what to do.” Vaughn reached over and rustled around in the Cadillac’s glove box until he came up with a folded sheaf of newspaper. “Use this,” he said. “Do it right on the hood. Make sure to get that line of dark stuff off the backbone, now. Leaving that on there will ruin a trout quick.”
“I know,” Bob said.
“And make sure you rip the gills out, too. Leaving those in there will make it spoil. Rinse them out in the creek.”
“I know how to do it,” Bob said. “You taught me last year.”
“Believe me, you wouldn’t be the first person to forget something I told him how to do.” Vaughn nodded at August, standing there wet-legged with a small involuntary shiver starting to brew. “Hurry up, before that kid gets hypothermia.”
When the trout were cleaned, they wrapped them in one final piece of newspaper and put them in Vaughn’s battered Igloo cooler. August was trembling now, the sun starting to lower behind the tangle of maples and birches. Vaughn had the heat on full blast i
n the Cadillac, and before he started for home he dug up a Styrofoam cup from under his seat and blew the dust from its interior. He poured a sizable slug of his coffee-schnapps mixture and passed it back to August.
“Your lips are blue, kid,” he said. “Drink up. Don’t tell your mom on me.” Vaughn turned and saw the look Bob was giving him and sighed. He poured his thermos top full and handed it over to him, saying, “And you’d damn well better not tell your mom on me.” August drank the coffee—only lukewarm now, slightly minty and sharp from the schnapps—and drowsed in the back seat all the way home. Vaughn thumbed through classic-rock stations on the stereo and, with dark coming on, drove even slower.
When Vaughn dropped August off at home, he said his thanks and goodbyes and squelched across the drive in his wet shoes, his rod in one hand, a small, sodden newspaper-wrapped parcel of brook trout in the other. The lights were on in the new house, Lisa’s Jeep parked next to his father’s F-150. August stomped up the porch steps and opened the door, “I’m home,” he shouted into the foyer. “Good night.” He slammed the door, stomped back down the stairs, and headed across the yard to the old house.
He sat at the kitchen table while his mother heated oil. At her insistence he’d shed his wet jeans and wrapped his legs up in a quilt. She sprinkled the trout with salt and pepper, and squeezed a lemon. “Look at how pink these are,” she said. “There’s nothing as good as a wild trout. The ones you buy at the store are all soggy and white. It was nice of Bob’s grandpa to take you boys. Did you have a nice time?”
