“They say that’s how animals often do, right? They prefer to be alone.”
Alice nodded. “It’s a wild instinct; they’ve got it in their blood. See, chemicals given off by a dead body can be toxic to the ones left behind. Nature knows it’s better for the pack if the dying one makes their way off quiet in the night. Anyhow. That was Jake. Now, Finn . . . Finn was a bad dog,” she said. “Growled at little kids. Pooped and peed all over my house. Like it was his job. Tore up every piece of furniture in the place, destroyed every pair of shoes I owned, never did learn to sit or stay. He ate a bird. He barked incessantly. He was so stupid. You know I loved him, Mikey, that dog was the love of my life, but my God, he was a bad dog. And then all of a sudden, before I knew it, Finn was an old dog. Poor thing, his insides were just stalling out. Inoperable. Last week, a couple nights in a row, Finn got up from his bed in my room in the middle of the night, where he always slept, and made his way out of my bedroom and over to the front door, like he had someplace to go. I knew what was happening, what he was trying to do. I knew it was time. But I didn’t want him to be alone in his final moments, like Jake, even if that’s what nature was telling him to do.”
Alice swallowed and closed her eyes before continuing. “Yesterday, before the vet put the needle in Finn, I held him there, hugged him and rocked him over the table. I hadn’t planned out what I would say or do or how it would go because I just couldn’t bear to think of it before the time came . . . But . . . when the time came, I held his tired gray face in my hands and I said, You are the perfect dog. You are perfect. You can rest now. You were always the perfect dog.”
Alice stopped speaking and Mikey didn’t know if this was the whole story, but she seemed to be done telling it. She cried a little bit, and he held her.
Chapter 30
Several weeks later, Mikey was picking up gloves, a trowel, and a five-gallon bucket from the Bed Bath & Beyond in Tona-wanda. Alice, who now lived in the area, was planning to take him worm-picking as soon as the ground thawed. She had instructed him on what materials to bring for himself. She had told him to get a mask if he thought the smell of earthworms would bother him—she knew he had a weak stomach—but Mikey said he thought he’d manage.
It was gray outside, very cold and very windy. Early March. Mikey wasn’t technically supposed to be driving anymore, with the recent changes to his eyesight, but he made exceptions for himself and avoided highways.
The wind swirled around Mikey and hollered in his ears.
While he loaded these materials into the backseat of his car, his eye fell on the vehicle parked next to his. An old teal Chevy Chevette with rusted-out wheel wells, one of its back windows punched out and replaced with tarp that was sloppily duct-taped to the outside of the door.
Mikey gazed at the shopping cart parked at the back end of the Chevette. The cart was positively stuffed full and overflowing with fake flowers. Massive plastic tiger lilies, silk peach roses, polyester peonies, way-too-blue baby roses on green strings, lightweight plastic pots with fake soil units.
Mikey stared at the flowers, then at the woman who was now unloading them into the trunk of the Chevette.
The woman wore a puffy black coat over gray sweatpants and little pink sneakers. Her yellowy-gray hair was very thin, parted in the center and pulled into a low ponytail. Her skin looked both incredibly shiny and incredibly dull, and she had a little burr of a face. Everything about her had a gray hue, including her pale, creamy eyes. Her posture was bent and humpbacked, and it took Mikey only a moment to recognize the woman as Corinne.
Mikey stared at Corinne, unwilling to allow the word mother to enter his mind, as she continued to unload the fake flowers into her trunk, moving painstakingly but with purpose. Corinne was focused on the task at hand, untangling a length of rosebuds on a string before gently placing them in the trunk.
Mikey tried to picture Corinne unloading all these plastic plants into the home she had shared with Sally on Ingram, just several houses up from his father’s. That sad little gray house, its siding faded and splintering off, roof tiles practically shredded, the lawn an absolute disaster of overgrown ryegrass and bull thistle.
Mikey tried to picture Corinne carrying these fake flowers into that home, using them to replace the wilted flowers she would have received around the time of Sally’s death. He wondered if Corinne had already disposed of those dead flowers and the vases full of foul and cloudy water. He wondered if, in this collection of plastic flowers, Corinne had gotten an exact replica for every single one she had received at the time of Sally’s death, and would arrange them the exact same way in her home. He wondered if she intended to spend the rest of her life in a static and unchanging version of grief, these flowers collecting dust but never dying. Never even fading.
Mikey didn’t have a clue what Sally and Corinne’s life together had been. How much there might have been between them. Love or other stuff. He had not a clue how they lived. His thoughts flickered briefly to his own biological father. Not a clue about this man either. Not a clue how his own life might have been different had Sally’s biological father stuck around to be a father to her, or if Mikey’s biological father had stuck around to be a father to him. Not a clue how things would have been different if he hadn’t wandered out of Corinne’s house and up the street that sunny afternoon. Or if he had ended up on a different front lawn.
There were things that Mikey’s heart simply didn’t have the energy to even try to imagine.
Corinne had finally loaded all of her plastic flowers into the trunk and was struggling to reach the door to close it, the strain of stretching out her bent back causing her to grimace.
Mikey said, “You need a hand?”
Corinne stepped back, giving Mikey room to help her with the door. She did not seem to recognize him. Mikey gripped the door and slammed it into place. He patted the bumper of the Chevette. Before getting into her car, Corinne gazed briefly at Mikey with a face that was utterly stricken. So much pain Mikey had to look away.
Mikey watched, a frosty wind biting at his face, as the teal Chevette pulled out of the parking lot. He wondered if Corinne had been over the Skyway since, or if, like him, she still took the long way around. He watched as her car, far away now, inched slowly north, from one gray land to another.
Chapter 31
It was nearly a month later before the ground had fully thawed. Alice picked Mikey up at two o’clock in the morning on the first Sunday of April. She told him she’d need his help, so he’d better not sleep through his alarm. He wore an old Carharrt work jacket belonging to his father, jeans, boots, and gloves. She drove them thirty miles east, to the woodlands near Corfu.
Alice wore a headlamp and carried a shovel. Mikey had a five-gallon bucket hanging from his elbow, a trowel, and a knit cap in the bucket.
The world crunched beneath their feet.
Mikey’s vision was deteriorating very quickly now, with a noticeable change almost every day. It was especially poor in the dark, so Alice held his hand as they made their way up a narrow trail, and she watched for obstacles in his path. The only sounds aside from their own footsteps were of faraway night birds, and leaves muttering against one another when the wind stirred.
At one point, Mikey said, “You sure this is safe for us to be out here, middle of nowhere, middle of the night like this? You sure we’re not gonna stumble onto some wacko’s private property?”
Alice said, “Safe?”
“Have you seen the movie Deliverance?”
Alice snorted. “Mikey, you really need to get with the times.”
Alice used a GPS to pinpoint the exact location that had been recommended to her by a fellow local fisherman, who she had met while scouting out locations for her marina.
Mikey had accompanied Alice on a number of these trips, up and down the Outer Harbor, by the Erie Basin, near the Times Beach Nature Preserve. Although h
e couldn’t see well enough to offer much of an opinion on the location and structure of the buildings she was considering, Alice liked to get his take on the “sentiment” of the place. The first time she had asked Mikey what he made of the sentiment of a certain location, he’d misheard the question. He sniffed the air and answered, “Dead fish. Cigarettes. Boat gas. They all smell the same.”
“Not the scent, you dummy,” Alice said. “The sentiment.”
“What do you mean?”
“How does it feel to you?”
“The air? Damp. Cool. Fresh. Fishy.”
“What does your heart feel?”
“My heart? Aside from the obvious, I rarely know what my heart feels.”
“What’s the obvious?”
“Just that it’s still working.”
Once the GPS indicated that they had reached the proper spot, Alice told Mikey to sit tight while she dug in with the shovel. The ground gave easily beneath the blade of the shovel and made gentle fwoomp noises as she lifted out shovelfuls of wet soil, until she hit limestone and a loud clash sounded. She continued to dig around it, grunting with the effort, then she paused to assess. Mikey could hear her fingers combing through soil.
The night air smelled of evergreen and overturned earth and iron.
“They weren’t lyin’,” Alice said.
“Lots of worms?”
“Yuh.”
Mikey said, “What do you want me to do?”
“Hold the bucket for me,” Alice said.
Mikey stood next to her and held the bucket while Alice rooted around on her hands and knees, and soon she started depositing worms into the bucket with little plops.
“Good, good, good,” Alice murmured. “Fatties.”
The air was very cold on Mikey’s face. Faraway, an eastern screech owl bawled into the night. Mikey’s sense of smell had continued to intensify with the loss of his sight, and he wished now that he had taken Alice’s advice and brought a mask. The ripe, raw scent of earthworms being pulled from the ground was making him a bit sick to his stomach. He could feel movement in the bucket. He nosed under the collar of his shirt, breathing in the scent of laundry detergent. Some small animal rustled in a nearby bush, then bounded swiftly away. He could hear it moving for a long time.
The screech owl sounded again, and Mikey’s thoughts turned to a conversation he’d had with Sally when they were children. She had told him about the strange and unpredictable migration of various solitary animals she had learned about in her science class, including the snowy owl. Mikey didn’t know what migrate meant, so Sally explained, “It’s a long journey that an animal takes.”
Mikey said, “To find food?”
“Sometimes,” Sally said. “But sometimes they go for reasons the scientists don’t understand. Sometimes . . . well . . . it’s like sometimes nature just puts something in their heart that makes them need to go, and so they go.”
Eventually, the bucket Mikey held began to grow heavy.
He said, “Why am I holding this thing, anyway?”
“Huh?” Alice stopped her work, and he could tell vaguely from the flash of her headlamp that she had turned to face him.
“Why am I holding this bucket?” Mikey set it down on the ground next to his legs. “There’s nothing for me to do,” he said. “I can’t drive, can’t dig, can’t follow a GPS, can’t see the worms to pick ’em. And there’s no reason for me to be holding this bucket. Why am I here? Why did you make me come? I’m not helping you.”
They had walked a good twenty minutes from where Alice had parked in order to reach this particular spot, and Mikey could tell from the sounds and from the texture of the air here that it was very thickly wooded. Spongy and pungent. He could hear no evidence of human civilization; no cars, no voices, no white hum of electricity. The air felt old and cold and alive and haunted.
“I’m not helping you,” he said again.
“Yes, you are,” Alice said.
It was quiet for a while; then Alice returned to her work, humming as she tossed more worms into the bucket, which now rested on the ground. Plop, plop, plop.
Far away, the screech owl sounded. A scream in the darkness. Mikey wondered if the thing was waiting for an answer or just howling to howl.
Mikey said, “You are my best friend.”
Chapter 32
John Callahan was admitted to St. Mary’s Hospital on a Tuesday afternoon in May after experiencing pain in his chest. He was released within hours when his EKG returned completely normal, but the doctor advised that he retire or find other work that involved less heavy lifting. John did not want to stop working altogether, so Mikey offered to help him look for job postings on Craigslist. By the time he accepted Mikey’s help, John had already been hard at work on his own résumé, using a sloppy and outdated template that, inexplicably, he had paid some website $2.99 to download.
The two of them sat together at Mikey’s kitchen table one evening, and Mikey listened as his father read aloud the entire contents of his résumé: the date that he graduated high school followed by a single paragraph describing his duties at the meat plant.
Mikey helped his father respond to ads online for cashier positions at the Home Depot, Tops, and Walmart.
His father seemed quickly exhausted by this, so they decided to call it quits and drink a beer together. It was a mild spring evening, and they took plastic chairs out onto the porch. Up the street, a push-mower buzzed back and forth across a small lawn, children chafed the sidewalk with skateboards and rollerblades, and the air smelled as green as could be.
Mikey’s father said, “Hell of a sunset.” He glanced over at Mikey. “You seein’ any of that?”
Mikey squinted out across his lawn, over the darkness of the tree line to the west. “Little bit of pink,” he said, “little bit of blue. That’s about all I can make out. Colors are all thin and faded to me now. Like the whole world was washed in too-hot.”
His father was quiet for a bit, then he said, “There’s pink, and there’s also purple, and blue, and yellow, a strip of gold, some more pink, almost like tiger stripes, against purple . . . and also . . . orange.”
Mikey was struck by the peculiar idea that he and his father were trying to become friends.
His father said, “You had a thing about skies, didn’t you? You remember that solar eclipse when you were a kid?”
Mikey nodded. “Happened when I was in school.”
“You were all charged up about it,” his father said. “I’d never seen you so excited for something. They must’ve really got you worked up about it in your science classes. You made me promise that morning that I’d go out on my lunch break, so I’d see it, too.”
Mikey said, “Did you?”
“No,” his father said. “I forgot all about it, worked straight through the afternoon.”
They sat in silence for a while longer. As Mikey sipped his beer, he was suddenly rewarded with a clear and distinct memory of the solar eclipse. He let the memory sail into him, and he grabbed at every detail.
The students had spent weeks preparing for the eclipse with their science teachers. They learned how, in ancient cultures, a solar eclipse was attributed to the supernatural and thought to be a bad omen, but these days, of course, they knew better. They learned that the diameter of the sun was approximately four hundred times that of the moon. They learned the definition of corona, umbra, and annulus. They learned about the dangers of exposure to sun even at this great distance. The teachers explained that they must protect their eyeballs while viewing the eclipse, so that they wouldn’t burn their retinas off. Anyone who didn’t use their pinhole viewing box could go blind, the teachers said. So each student had been given their own cardboard box, uniformly sized and without a bottom seam. Each box had the name of the student Sharpied big and black along the side.
On the aftern
oon of the solar eclipse, the children were arranged outside by grade, which meant Mikey was separated from his friends, who were all one grade above him. The principal was giving instructions over a megaphone.
It was late fall, and a dry wind spun through the schoolyard.
Now they were told to put their box over their head.
Mikey shivered inside his box. He had reminded his father about the eclipse that morning, and his father said he would try to take his lunch break at that time so he could be watching it, too, at the same time.
A strange, holy silence settled over the schoolyard.
Mikey couldn’t help himself. He lifted his box back up over his head and set it at his feet. He did this carefully and silently, making sure he did not brush against the students on either side of him. He then gazed across the schoolyard, a massive labyrinth of brown boxes held at different heights but identical upward-tilted angles. All those brown boxes with all those names written across them, all those little heads inside watching and waiting for the beautiful thing to happen.
There were his five friends, all next to one another, several rows away. He knew them by their shoes and pant legs and postures, without even reading the names on their boxes. Alice was either dancing or stamping her feet impatiently. Everyone else was still. Sally’s words from several weeks earlier returned to Mikey’s mind. It might be the most beautiful thing we’ll ever see in our whole lives, she had said of the eclipse.
It was a clear, cold November sky above the schoolyard, with just a few thin smeary clouds, like hurried white brushstrokes, and Mikey stared right up into the brilliant amber sun as the moon moved into place. It was not like Mikey to break the rules, but now that the beautiful thing was happening, he could hardly bear not to feel it on his whole face.
The Gunners Page 22
