August

by Callan Wink

  * * *

  —

  His mother finished her coursework and got her master’s degree in library science. The day it became official, she brought home a large bottle of champagne and let him have a glass with her. She was happy, more animated than he’d seen her in a long time. They had Italian delivered: baked ziti and eggplant parm, garlic bread dripping with melted butter. Halfway through the meal, his mother seemed to lose interest in the food. She poured herself more champagne, looked across the table, and cocked her head, a small, strange smile on her lips. “Do you think maybe it’s time for me to start dating?” she said.

  August was caught off guard. His face reddened. “None of my business,” he said, getting up to clear the dishes. “Do what you want. Are you done with that?”

  * * *

  —

  As the spring came on, she started going for long walks in the evenings. She still didn’t cook much, but mercifully she started doing her own laundry. Her squeezed-out tea bags no longer littered the windowsill next to the chair where she read. One day she accompanied him to the river. She brought a book and sat on a bench near where he fished. Although he would barely admit it to himself, he desperately wanted to catch something for her to see. But, as was often the case, he caught nothing. On the walk home she told him she’d had a great time watching him. “You look so serious while you fish,” she said. “Deadly serious. Maybe if you smiled you’d catch more.” He knew she was making fun of him, and he rolled his eyes at her to let her know that he knew.

  * * *

  —

  His mother was always reading, and at this point she still had hopes that the habit would rub off on him. She started bringing home books that featured fishing. He thought some of the Nick Adams stories were pretty good. Since they were set in Michigan, he could picture the cedar swamps, the clear-cuts, and the colors of the brook trout. He made it through most of A River Runs Through It and thought it was okay, if a little fancy at times. She brought him Robert Traver and Tom McGuane and more Hemingway, and while he occasionally sat on the couch with a book for a while to humor her, he knew that she didn’t actually understand his relationship with fishing. The thing was, fishing wasn’t something he thought about much when he wasn’t actually doing it. He didn’t have a great desire to learn new tactics or fish new places or read about it in metaphysical terms. Nick Adams fished to forget the parts of the war he’d carried back with him, and August thought that seemed about right. Standing on the banks of the Grand watching a bobber ride a current seam was a magic trick. Fishing allowed him to disappear the city, his mother, his father, his friendless school existence; and while he needed it desperately, he also looked forward to a day when it would no longer be necessary for survival.

  At one point during his mother’s fishing literature campaign she brought home the movie A River Runs Through It. They watched it that night, eating wonton soup and pork buns, leaning over the coffee table so as not to spill on the couch.

  “That Brad Pitt,” his mother said, slurping her soup. “Such a naughty grin he has.”

  August decided it was a decent movie. He thought fly-fishing in general was sort of melodramatic. He figured a person might be able to make a movie about bait fishermen, but there was no way they’d put Brad Pitt in it. “God,” his mother said. “Look at that scenery. Montana. That’s not a place you ever really think of, is it? Oh, wow, look at Brad Pitt wading across that river. The way he wears that creel across his chest is just…perfect, isn’t it?”

  “Mom. Shut up so I can watch it, please?”

  When the movie was over, he went to bed. But before he fell asleep he heard the opening music drifting in from the living room. His mother had started the film over again.

  In a million years he never would have guessed that this strange stasis they’d found themselves in would eventually be broken by Brad Pitt, of all things.

  * * *

  —

  Something about Montana, the idea of it, seemed to stick in his mother’s head. Now she read books about the Lewis and Clark expedition. She read Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison, and she brought that movie home as well. It seemed like Brad Pitt had a monopoly on all Hollywood renditions of Montana. “That Brad Pitt looks like he has a real firm hand on the reins of his horse,” his mother said. “I wonder if he can actually do it like that in real life.”

  * * *

  —

  One day he came home from school to find his mother sitting on the couch. She hopped up when he walked through the door. She’d obviously been waiting for him, and he eyed her warily. He went to the kitchen to see if any of the leftovers in the fridge were edible. She followed him, leaning against the doorjamb as he ate cold chicken salad from a carton. “So,” she said, “I have some news.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I have a job interview in a couple weeks.”

  “What job?”

  “It’s a brand-new library. They just finished building it, and they’re going to have two positions available.”

  “Sounds good,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll get it.”

  “Guess where.”

  “I don’t know. Where?”

  “Bozeman, Montana.” She raised her eyebrows. “Big sky country.”

  There was a brief pause, a forkful of chicken salad stalling en route to mouth, before he recovered. He chewed. Forked up another mound of chicken salad. “Cool,” he said, his mouth full.

  Later, he found an atlas and did a little research. State animal: grizzly bear. State bird: western meadowlark. State motto: Oro y plata, gold and silver. It wasn’t much to go off of, but still, the possibilities conjured far outstripped what he’d experienced in Michigan thus far.

  * * *

  —

  He went up to the farm when his mother flew to Montana, and she called him the evening after her interview. From the tone of her voice he didn’t even need to ask. He knew she’d been offered one of the positions. She was talking fast, breathless. “The mountains,” she said. “It’s unreal. The air smells different, kind of sagey, or maybe it’s pine, or juniper, or something, I’m not sure. The building is beautiful, state-of-the-art. The people seem great. I haven’t seen Brad Pitt yet, but I’m keeping the faith. Thoughts?”

  He was silent for a moment. “Congrats,” he said. “I figured you’d get it. You told them yes, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” she said. “Yes, I did.”

  “Well, then, that’s that, I guess.”

  When she hung up, he went out to watch some TV with his father. He thought he should probably tell him the news, but for some reason he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He stared at the TV unseeing, tried to imagine what his life might soon be like.

  * * *

  —

  School let out, and there was a flurry of packing. He went up to the farm one more time before the move. On his last night there, Lisa said she had somewhere to be and so August and his father had dinner, just the two of them—frozen pizza and a salad that neither of them really touched. August’s father laughed about that. “If ever you needed proof of a woman’s moderating presence in your life, there it is,” he said. “She’s not even here, and we still make the damn salad. A woman gets to be like your external conscience. That’s why you need to make sure you end up with the right one; otherwise you’re a rudderless ship. Despite our differences, your mother was always good for me in that way.”

  “How can someone else be your conscience?”

  “Would it make sense to you if I said that I think the best part of a man lives in a woman? Or, maybe, the best part of a man lies in the ideas his woman has about him, what he could be or how he might act if only she could get him to realize his best self. A good woman might be a man’s only hope for salvation on earth. Get me?”

  August shrugged. “Not really.”

  His
father wiped pizza grease from his fingers with a napkin and leaned back from the table. “You’re just about fifteen now. You’ll be having experiences soon. You’re going to be moving across the damned country, and we’re not going to be seeing each other much for a while. I don’t like it, but it is what it is. I feel like it’s the appropriate time to give you some advice. I’ve got two pieces for you. Ready?”

  “Sure.”

  “When it comes to women—this is very important; no one ever told me this and I had to learn the hard way—when it comes to women, you need to be respectful above all, but at the same time you can’t let them bend you to their will. Does that make sense? As a man you need to have at least a part of you that’s unyielding; if not, you’ll get the paper-clip treatment.”

  “The paper-clip treatment?”

  “Yeah, it’s just like it sounds. What happens when you bend a paper clip too many times?”

  “It breaks.”

  “Exactly. Keep that in mind. No woman is going to respect a paper-clip man. If you have some unyielding place within you that thwarts her efforts to bend, she may hate you at times. For sure, she will hate you at times. But she will also love you for it, despite herself. Okay, second piece of advice, very important: When you start shaving, don’t skimp on razors. Don’t go cheap. Also, do the first stroke with the grain, rinse, and then do the second against the grain. Use as hot of water as you can stand when you rinse the razor, then, when it’s done, wash your face with as cold as you can stand. It closes the pores and that way you won’t get razor burn. Got it?”

  “I guess.”

  “And don’t even try to grow any facial hair until you’re in your early twenties. Just shave it all off. As much as you think that wispy little mustache makes you look older, it really just alerts everyone to the fact that you’re still a punk.”

  August finished his pizza and sat back, arms crossed over his chest. “Skyler’s been gone for over two years,” he said. “What if I got a pup now, before I left? I’m not going to know anyone out there.”

  His father stretched and scooted his chair back. He rose and started gathering up the dishes. “The timing has to be right on these things,” he said. “I’m taking you back down to your mom’s tomorrow and then you’ll be leaving, and having a puppy in the mix for all of that might not be a good idea.”

  “But I wanted your help deciding. You know more about dogs than I do. You’d make sure I got a good one.”

  His father stopped gathering the dishes to consider this. He shook his head. “As an adult, dogs come to you,” he said. “As a kid, you might have needed my help picking one out, but not anymore. You’ll find the dog when it’s right. I firmly believe that. At this point, the dog I choose for you probably wouldn’t be a good fit. I personally think you should start sniffing one out the minute you get there. But maybe this exact moment is not the best time. See what I mean?”

  August shrugged. Picked at something stuck to the tablecloth.

  August’s father laughed, balled up his napkin, and tossed it at August’s head. “Don’t be a sad sack. I’m kind of envious. You’re about to get turned loose on a new adventure. The Wild West. Going to see things your old man has never seen, that’s for sure. Let’s get these dishes cleaned up. The Tigers are down in Chicago tonight. I think the game will be on soon.”

  August and his mother left Grand Rapids in a U-Haul with her Nissan trailered on a dolly behind. August thought that if he didn’t know her—say, if he just saw her on the street—he would have thought her much too young to be the mother of someone his age. It seemed that the farther she got from the farm, the better her spirits. With Janis Joplin on the CD player and her hair tied back with a scarf, she appeared to be not so much driving westerly as steadily ascending into orbit.

  The industrial landscape down through lower Michigan and across Chicago was uninteresting to him, with the exception of Gary, Indiana, where the smokestacks and power lines and alien-spacecraft refinery complexes were enough to inspire a certain queasy awe. He started on the stack of magazines he’d brought for the journey, and somewhere, on a monotonous tree-confined stretch of Wisconsin highway, he read an article in National Geographic about the Iceman. Since their initial discovery, scientists had spent vast amounts of time and energy analyzing everything about him—what he ate, injuries he’d suffered, the state of his molars, the peculiar shape of his tattoos. It wasn’t just scientists, though. The Iceman had captured the attention of the world, and the article even mentioned that several women had come forth, volunteering to be made pregnant with his sperm, should any of it still be viable. August figured that this was something Bob would have appreciated and for a while he thought about trying to send the article to him, but he had no idea where Bob was, and anyway, it had been too long since that fishing trip.

  * * *

  —

  Bobby flagged a diesel down, just before it rained, Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz, looks like everybody in this whole round world they’re down on me. His mother had that Janis Joplin CD on repeat and they listened to it nonstop, until the songs started to lose their individuality, the whole album melting into one long undulating series of pained croons and harsh wails. When they finally crossed the Mississippi near La Crosse, August put the magazines aside and didn’t pick them up again for the duration of the trip. Face to the window, he watched the cloistered trees grudgingly give way to the great expanse of grassland. Somewhere in the Dakotas he saw his first antelope. They stopped at a rest area near Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and there was a buffalo grazing on the lawn. He’d never been this far west. He’d never seen a mountain. He and his mother stood together next to the U-Haul, watching the buffalo let loose a prodigious stream of piss, then proceed to drop heavily to the earth and roll in its own urine, emitting deep guttural noises. They were close enough they could feel the ground shaking under their feet. His mother laughed and nudged him with her elbow. “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, “but that there ain’t no Holstein cow.”

  August’s mother had made an offer on a house, sight unseen, after talking on the phone with the owner a few times while they were still back in Michigan. The house was in Livingston, a small town near Bozeman, and his mother was slightly concerned about the commute over a mountain pass, but eventually she decided the deal was too good to pass up. It was a small bungalow, one of four nearly identical homes in a line on the same street. It was almost one hundred years old, but it had been recently refinished so everything still smelled like new paint and fresh laminate flooring.

  They’d been there for only a couple of days when August noticed the plaque on a post at the end of the block. It was a national historic registry marker featuring a short description of the town’s small red-light district. The four identical homes had been brothels for many years, until the early 1970s, when the prostitutes were forced to move outside the city limits in the lead-up to Montana’s outright ban on prostitution.

  That night they ate their Chinese takeout sitting cross-legged on the floor amid the stacks of moving boxes. August poked through his cashew chicken, eating around the broccoli. “You know we’re living in an old whorehouse, right?” he said.

  “Excuse me?” his mother said, chopsticks pausing in mid-arc to her mouth.

  “This house was a brothel. Part of the red-light district. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places.” She insisted that he take her out to see the plaque, and so they went, still holding the take-out cartons. She read, shaking her head, lips pursed. “I’m not a superstitious person,” she said. “But, man, talk about bad energy.”

  “It was a long time ago,” August said. “It’s all been remodeled anyway.”

  “Sure. Of course. Nothing exorcises the demons like new stainless steel appliances. Whew. Getting chilly already. Zero humidity here, have you noticed that? So dry. My hair is a damn mess, and I’ve used a
whole tube of lip balm in three days.”

  “I got a bloody nose yesterday,” August said.

  “We’ll adjust, I’m sure. We’re just a couple of old sponges, finally getting that nasty Midwest damp wrung out of us.”

  The next day, as they were unpacking, his mother burned sweetgrass, a small rope of it smudging and smoking in a bowl on the floor. August made a show of coughing and waving his hand in the air, but really he thought it smelled better than the new paint.

  “It’s purifying,” she said. “Deal with it.”

  He got his clothes put away and helped her move bookcases and dressers, but when she started unpacking the kitchen she waved him off. “It’s a beautiful day,” she said. “Get out and explore. The girls and I have things to say to each other that aren’t meant for the ears of young men.”

  “The girls?”

  She shrugged, a mixing bowl in each hand. “The painted ladies with whom we’re cohabitating.”

  “I haven’t met these ladies.”

  “Well, they’re a hoot, let me tell you. One of them definitely had her eye on you, but I told her that she’d better keep her cold wraith fingers off my darling son.”