Refresh, Refresh: Stories

by Benjamin Percy

  Becca had her head cocked and her hand raised. “Just wait,” she said, and then, “There.”

  And there it was, a scritch-scritch-scritching at the steel door.

  For a long time they simply looked at each other and then she pushed him and said, “Go see what it is,” and he said, “All right already,” and got up from the couch and slowly approached the door and put his ear to it. The metal was cold against his cheek. From here the scratching sound sounded more like the sound of eating, of teeth mashing something into a paste.

  Becca said something he couldn’t hear and he pulled his head away from the door and said, “What?” and she said, “You think it could be a wild animal?”

  “Don’t know.” Right then he opened the door and the bats came rushing in, a dense black stream of them. They emitted a terrible screeching, the noise a thousand nails would make when teased across a chalkboard. They fluttered violently through the living room, the kitchen, the hallway, battering the walls and windows, seeking escape. Kevin screamed and so did Becca and the noise of flapping, of air beaten in many different directions, was all around them.

  Somehow Kevin ducked down and pushed his way through their black swirling color and ran for the front door and threw it open and not thirty seconds later most of the bats had disappeared into the twilight gloom.

  Becca was on the couch with an injured bat fluttering limply in her hair. She did not move, except to part her lips and say, “Holy shit.” She had a hand between her breasts, over her heart. “Holy fucking shit. What the fucking shit was that?”

  The next morning she woke up complaining of cramps.

  Even before she was pregnant she would talk about her pain incessantly, saying her back hurt, her neck hurt, her feet hurt, her head, her stomach. If it were touchable—like, the space between her eyebrows—she would touch it. “I think it’s a tumor,” she would say, completely serious. “Feel this. This does not feel normal.”

  And Kevin would say, “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” was what he said when she complained of cramps, when she limped to the shower with a hand pressed below her belly.

  “My lower back,” she said. “On the right side. I really, really hope I’m okay. I’m pretty worried about the way this feels.”

  And then she began bleeding. A rope of red trailed down her leg. And Kevin, now in a panic, wrapped her in a bathrobe and with shampoo still in her hair drove her to St. Charles where she delivered, with a rush of blood, the baby that looked like a baby, a little girl, only too small and too red, the size of his hand.

  Becca was convinced it had something to do with the bats. Perhaps she had been bitten or scratched and perhaps some parasite with leathery wings and claws traveled through her bloodstream and did ruin to her. When she told the doctor this, vines of sadness trembled through the skin around her eyes. They ran blood tests and found nothing. No, the doctor said. Not the bats. It was just one of those things.

  She didn’t like this. She didn’t like to think that her own body could turn on her, collapse upon itself. So she said, “What does he know? Doctors don’t know anything. One day they say eggs are good for you. The next they’re bad. How can they have the answers when the answers are always changing.”

  Right then Kevin could see the pain between her legs in her face. Still can to this day. Sometimes he imagines a rotten spot inside her, like a bruised bit of peach he wants to carve away with a knife.

  Tonight, after they clean all the blood from the fridge and their bodies, after they buy Chinese takeout and carry it into the living room to eat on TV trays, they find a bat. It is tucked into a corner, where the wall meets the ceiling. Kevin can see its heartbeat pulsing through its thin leathery skin. Maybe it is one of the old bats that never escaped or maybe it is a new bat that somehow found its way inside, its tiny brown body crawling through the heating ducts, the walls.

  Kevin wants to surround it with something—maybe a glass or a Tupperware container—and carry it outside and release it. When he says this Becca looks at him as if she wants to spit. “I hate this house,” she says. “I hate this stupid, stupid house.” Then she grabs the poker from the fireplace and holds it like a spear and jerks it forward, impaling the bat.

  When the metal moves through it, it makes the smallest scream in the world.

  They haven’t had sex in a month and a half, not since the miscarriage.

  In the back of the closet, on the top shelf, beneath his sweaters, Kevin keeps an old copy of Penthouse. He bought it at a gas station several years ago and sometimes sneaks it down to read when his wife isn’t home. He likes having something hidden from her, something that belongs to him alone, a small betrayal.

  Becca has a rule: if you don’t wear a piece of clothing for a year, you get rid of it, and right now she is going through their closet with a garbage bag, filling it with clothes for Goodwill, when she finds the Penthouse.

  Kevin comes out of the bathroom to find her standing there, with her legs spread apart, the magazine crumpled up in her fist. “What?” she says. “I’m not good enough for you?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  This is a question with barbed wire around it, and when he doesn’t answer she rips the magazine in half and then in half again and throws its pages to the floor and stares at him, panting. The way her anger grows reminds him of an umbrella, a big red umbrella, suddenly sprung.

  “Look,” he says, exasperated. “You want to punch me? Would that make you feel better?”

  Her eyes narrow with anger and he motions her forward with his hands and says, “Come on. Hit me, why don’t you. You know you want to. Do it.” He can see her little hand balling into a fist. And then she draws it back and gives him a glancing blow to the shoulder. “Is that all you’ve got?” he says. “Come on. You can do better than that. You hit like a girl. Hit me like you mean it.”

  This triggers some switch inside her. She makes a furious little noise and charges forward and hits him again and this time his shoulder seizes up with hurt.

  “That’s better,” he says.

  She has a look of complete rage or religious exaltation on her face—he isn’t sure which. She is breathing hard. He can hear the air coming in and out of her nose. “What else do you want me to do to you?” she says.

  “You tell me.”

  She points her finger at him and tells him to take off his shirt. And he does. Bare-chested he stands before her, swaying slightly. She reaches forward and twists his nipples—hard—and when he screams she smiles and pinches between her fingers a clump of chest hair and rips it out, leaving behind a pink place where the blood rises in tiny dots. And he screams again. And their eyes hold together like the pieces of a puzzle.

  She throws him against the wall and kisses him, roughly kisses him through all their laughing. And they tear the clothes off each other and he picks her up and pushes her against the wall and enters her. And she is bucking her hips against his and he can feel himself losing control, can feel the heat rising in him, moving through the tunnels of him and nearing eruption, when all of a sudden she pushes him away and says, “That’s enough.”

  When he asks what’s wrong she absently scratches her bare breast and stares down at her feet as if the answer lies somewhere underground.

  It is easier for Kevin. He can lose himself in the rhythms of his hammer, can smash the frustration from his body. Every day at work he drinks a milk jug full of water and sweats out every last drop of it and it is more than a little like crying.

  Right after the miscarriage he thought a lot about the baby, the little girl they never named. How she might have smiled ridiculously at him making funny faces. Or used the coffee table to pull herself up and take her first teetering steps. Then he drank himself to the very pitch of drunkenness, and that was enough. The baby has almost disappeared from his memory, almost.

  Sometimes he will say something—maybe he will be wat
ching CNN and maybe they will broadcast a dead Iraqi child lying in the middle of the street and maybe he will make some offhand remark about how lucky they are—and only when he sees the crumpled-up look on Becca’s face does he remember and say, “Oh.”

  She cannot not remember. A playground busy with children. A dirty pacifier abandoned in the aisle at Wal-Mart. The purple teddy bear she bought and set among her rocks on the bureau. On a daily basis all of these things fly into her eyes and thump around inside of her skull, like bats, leaving the poisonous dust of their wings. She keeps her lips pursed around the edge of a pain he can only imagine and she cannot seem to forget.

  Midnight. He wakes up to find his wife gone, the shape of her head still imprinted on her pillow. He calls out her name and when she doesn’t answer he gets out of bed and walks down the hall and into the living room where moonlight comes in through the windows and makes the quartz set here and there sparkle.

  He observes the steel door hanging open—and there, surrounded by blackness, a palpable blackness, strange and horrible, that seems to ooze into the house, stands his wife.

  He goes to her. If she hears his footsteps, if she feels the weight of his hand on her shoulder, she gives no indication. She wears one of his T-shirts and nothing else, her feet tight together, her arms at her side.

  From the door a cool wind blows, bringing cave smells, of guano and mold and sand and stone. He closes the door and hoists up his wife and cradles her in his arms and carries her to the bedroom, to bed, where she finally comes alive and says, “No,” and jumps up and goes to her dresser and opens its drawers. She steps into her panties and zips up her jeans and pulls a fleece over her head and asks, as she begins lacing her boots, whether he is coming or not.

  Their flashlights are the only lights. There is no moon down here. Beyond the cones of yellow light there is nothing, everything utterly black. Dark as only a cave can be dark. The longer they walk, the closer the walls seem to get, the narrower the passage.

  Becca leads the way—her body tense, her shoulders bunched up nearly to her ears—down a series of unfamiliar corridors, taking a right at each junction so they will know to always take a left when returning. Around a bend, among a pile of rocks, a pair of red eyes brighten, then vanish, and Kevin spends the next dozen yards sweeping his flashlight back and forth, waiting for something to materialize and come rushing toward them.

  Becca moves her pale hand along the basalt, steadying her passage and crumbling away the green-and-gold patterns of lichen growing there. Occasionally she pauses, close-lipped, contemplating something visible only to her, before continuing forward. Her flashlight makes giant shadows that seem to knock against each other.

  Then the channel opens up into a space as big as a banquet hall. The floor is strangely clean, absent of rocks. From the ceiling hang roots, like capillaries, groping for purchase. He gives one a tentative tug and when it doesn’t give he tries swinging from it and it carries his weight and he flies from one side of the cave to the other, like something out of a Tarzan episode.

  Becca has a small smile on her face when she walks the room, touching the walls and looking all around her, as if committing the space to memory. And then she locks eyes with Kevin and brings the flashlight to her face, throwing shadows across it. They seem blacker than the darkness of the cave.

  The light clicks off and she becomes a gray shape in the near distance.

  He waits a moment, surrounded by his own ball of light, before clicking off his own flashlight. And the next thing he knows a cloud of darkness settles around them. He can hear her feet whispering across the cave floor and then her voice playfully calling out to him, “Marco.”

  He can hear the saliva popping in his mouth when it rises into a smile. “Polo,” he says and moves toward her voice with his hands out before him, his fingers like the snouts of moles, routing through the dark. When he touches stone he hears her voice again, saying, “Marco,” behind him now.

  This continues for a few minutes, with her always eluding him. He can hear her voice and her footsteps and by the time he races to where she was, he knows she is already gone, but not where, not exactly.

  All this time the roots startle him, coming out of the dark to lick his face. More than once he screams. And this is how she finds him. He can feel her hand at his elbow. It squeezes him and rises to his chest and pauses there. “Hey,” he says and she says, “Got you.”

  Both of them click on their flashlights at once. They blink painfully, seeing a yellow light with a few filaments of red running through it. The black liquid of the cave oozes at the edges of their vision as the world takes form and they stare hard at each other for a long time. Then, as if something has been decided between them, she grabs a fistful of his shirt and pulls him down to the sandy floor where she brings her mouth against his. And this time she doesn’t stop him when he peels off her pants and explores the slickness between her legs with his hands before climbing on top of her.

  Together they move slowly, with the rhythm of a sleeping chest, until they are finished—and this takes a long time—so long that their flashlights begin to dim and eventually black out. And they are alone in the dark, huddling together with the cold creeping into their bare skin.

  When they finally untangle themselves and rise from the cave floor he takes off his belt and runs it through his back belt loop only, so that it serves as a sort of leash. She grabs hold of it and follows him as they continue back the way they came. They can hear dripping sounds of water and the hushing sound of wind and the booming sounds of rocks falling somewhere deep in the cave. But they aren’t afraid so much as they are resigned to making it home. Kevin reaches his hands before him and moves them in a slow scissoring motion as if clearing the cobwebs from the air. And he lifts his feet high and brings them down carefully and when necessary warns Becca: “There’s a big rock here, about knee-high, so don’t bang into it.”

  Every time the cave walls fall away he follows the left passage, groping through the dark, and eventually they find the staircase. They climb it and close the steel door behind them. The air is warmer up here. It feels soft. A patch of dawn sky is visible through the living-room window.

  Becca goes to the kitchen and pulls out a gallon of milk and before pouring it into a glass stands there, backlit by the fridge, her face in shadow, looking at Kevin as if wondering, in mystery, how they found their way back.

  The Woods

  My father wanted to show me something, but he wouldn’t say what. He only said I should get my gun, my thirty-aught-six, and follow him. This happened just outside Bend, Oregon, where we lived in a ranch house surrounded by ten acres of woods. I was twelve at the time: old enough to shoot a gun, young enough to fear the dark.

  The moment we stepped off the porch, as if on cue, a sound rose from the forest, as slow as smoke. It sounded like a woman crying. I felt my veins constrict and a needle-jab of dread in my chest. “What’s that?” I said. “What the hell is that?”

  “Don’t be a pantywaist,” my father said over his shoulder. By now he was several steps ahead of me and moving across the lawn. “And don’t say hell.”

  When he reached the place where the grass met the trees, he perceived I was not following him, and turned. “Come on,” he said.

  In silence, he motioned me forward with his hand and I clutched my rifle a little closer to my chest. Then the noise began again, sharper and louder now than before, reminding me of metal rasping across a file. Even my father cringed.

  Once we entered the forest the pines put a black color on things, and through their branches dropped a wet wind that carried with it the smell of the nearby mountains. It was that in-between time of day, not quite afternoon and not quite night, when the air begins to purple and thicken.

  We walked for some time along a well-worn path, one of many that coiled through our property like snakes without end. Sometimes loud and sometimes soft, the screaming sound continued, like a siren signaling the end of the world.
It overwhelmed my every thought and sensation so that I felt as if I were stuck in a box with only this horrible noise to keep me company. Everything seemed to tremble as it dragged its way through the air.

  We hurried along as fast as we could, less out of wonder or sympathy, I began to suspect, than the urgent need to silence it. I hated the noise—its mournful mixed-up music—as much as I feared it.

  Then, between the trees, I saw the inky gleam of its eyes, and its huge ears drawn flat against its skull, and then I saw its body. Blood trails oozed along its cinnamon color.

  “Man alive,” my father said.

  It was a four-prong mule deer and it was tangled in our barbed-wire fence, the barbed wire crisscrossing its body like fast handwriting. I remember the blood so clearly. It was the perfect shade of red. To this day I want a car—an old-time car—say a Mustang or one of those James Bond Aston Martins—the color of it.

  The deer, bewildered, let its head droop and took short nervous breaths before letting loose another wail, a high-pitched sound that lowered into a baritone moan, like pulling in a trombone. A purple tongue hung from its mouth. Its muscles jerked beneath its hide.

  I stood behind a clump of rabbitbrush as if to guard myself from the animal. The bush smelled great. It smelled sugary. It smelled like the color yellow ought to smell. By concentrating on it so deeply, I removed myself from the forest and was thereby able to contain the tears crowding my eyes.

  Then my father said, “I want you to kill it.”

  Just like that. Like killing was throwing a knuckleball or fixing a carburetor or tying a necktie.

  To this day, some fifteen years later, when I lie in bed in a half-dream, the deer sometimes emerges from the shadows, snapping its teeth, retreating back into shadow as quickly as it appeared. To this day, I dislike the woods, I dislike hunting, I dislike my father.