by Dan Chaon
“I was in an accident at a factory,” he said. “If you’re wondering.”
“I wasn’t wondering,” she said, though her expression softened somewhat. She moved her eyebrows in a complex way. “So what if this place is available? How will you pay?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Will you take cash?”
Her face changed again as he took the roll of bills from his jacket pocket, a wad a little bigger than his fist. Her eyes sparked, and her lower lip protruded again as he peeled one-hundred-dollar bills from the stack with shaky fingers. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
“There was a settlement. From the accident.”
“Ah,” she said, and appraised him frankly. “They should have given you a million.” She shrugged, considering him for a moment longer, but she seemed to have made a favorable decision.
——
He’d thought, originally, that the money would last for quite a while. Nearly fifteen thousand dollars, which at the time had seemed like a stunning amount, though he later discovered that houses in most other places, even dilapidated houses, sold for many times that amount. When he left Little Bow, he carried with him 234 twenty-dollar bills, and 100 one-hundred-dollar bills, which he’d tried to hide in various places in the car. A thousand in his wallet, another thousand in the glove compartment, hundred-dollar bills tucked into the pages of books and the pockets of the clothes he’d packed.
This was his inheritance. He had decided, even before his mother’s death, that he would get rid of everything when it came time, and that is what he did. He sold the little yellow house in South Dakota, the plot of land, and all the furniture and possessions that he could get money for. Everything else—so many things—he had stuffed into garbage bags and left for the trash man. Gone were most of the photos of his family, letters, papers; gone were his mother’s shell collection and worthless knickknacks, his own high school yearbooks and childhood drawings that had been saved, ragged quilts made by his grandmother, his grandfather’s collection of Louis L’Amour paperback westerns; gone were piles of newspapers and junk mail and bank statements, canned pears and peas, ten years old at least, that had sat on shelves, never opened; gone were coffee cans full of pinto beans or nails or buttons, a whole closet full of unused cleaning supplies; gone were the horrible accumulations of the last years of his mother’s life, when Jonah and his mother both had lost the energy to discard. He found a plastic mug, forgotten on a shelf in the laundry room, with a layer of dead mold floating on the surface of a half-inch of unfinished coffee. Who knew how old it was? It might have been sitting on that shelf for a year or more. He found a twenty-year-old grocery receipt in a desk drawer, along with a huge collection of pencil nubs and pens whose ink had long dried up. Seven-year-old telephone books. Ancient, pre tampon menstrual belts. Keys and key chains. Melted Tupperware. Worthless jewelry.
The auctioneer, Mr. Knotts, shook his head sorrowfully as the two of them picked through the clutter. He cleared his throat when Jonah pitched a packet of photos into the trash can.
“You should go through those,” Mr. Knotts said softly, but Jonah ignored him.
“People can be rash when they are in mourning,” Mr. Knotts said.
“Yes,” Jonah said. He retrieved the pictures and set them back into a pile of things that he meant to keep, but he did this only for Mr. Knotts’s benefit—as if he owed the old man something.
Mr. Knotts was a solemn little man with a high-pitched Arkansas accent, and Jonah had originally planned to dislike him. Which was to say that Jonah had not liked the way the man kept calling him “son,” on the phone, and he had not liked the man’s looks when they’d met to discuss the “auction process,” as Knotts had called it—there had been something unpleasantly Christian about Knotts’s softly resonant voice, Jonah had thought, and he had grimly noted the various accessories—the cowboy shirt with its flowery pattern and pearly buttons, the string tie, the silver-tipped size-seven cowboy boots, the blondish toupee—all of which seemed to indicate a certain type of oily, Born Again smarminess.
But this wasn’t the case, exactly. “I’m sorry for your loss,” Mr. Knotts had said, but nothing else, no sentiment or piety beyond that. “I’m an honest businessman,” he had told Jonah, surveying the ramshackle yellow house, “but I’m still a businessman, so I can’t promise you much.” Then he offered Jonah his hand.
He had a hand that was misshapen in a way that wasn’t quite visible until Jonah shook it. Then Jonah realized that the pinkie finger was permanently stiffened, that the other fingers were oddly abbreviated and stubby, so that Jonah felt as if he were closing his hand over an ape’s paw or a flipper. Mr. Knotts did not meet Jonah’s eye with a serious, significant look; he did not say anything further. He simply let Jonah clasp his malformed hand, and something passed between them. Jonah had felt a rush of warmth for the man, a stranger.
Later Jonah thought it would have been good if Mr. Knotts had been his father. They would have had a steady, quiet, gently melancholic relationship, Jonah imagined. They wouldn’t have been close, but he would never have felt unloved. Mr. Knotts would have been the kind of father who hovered, awkwardly tender, at the periphery of a son’s life, attentive and formal in a folding chair at a band concert, lingering for a moment before he turned off the light at bedtime, the kind of father who closed his eyelids lightly as he kissed his child’s forehead, the kind of father who would clear his throat often and grow misty-eyed. It would have been, what?, lasting, Jonah thought.
Mr. Knotts watched as Jonah stowed the urn containing his mother’s ashes—her “Cremains,” the man at the funeral home had called them—into the passenger seat of the car. Perhaps Mr. Knotts knew that Jonah had not given his mother a funeral. Who would have come to it, after all? There were no relatives, no friends. There was no reason to waste money on a casket and a gravestone and all the rest that the undertakers had tried to sell him.
But he couldn’t tell this to Mr. Knotts. “Who doesn’t deserve a funeral?” Mr. Knotts would wonder, though he wouldn’t say it. Mr. Knotts would identify with Jonah’s mother, of course. His eyes would grow gloomy and distant as he reflected upon his own funeral, presided over by his weeping children; his own gravesite, kept neat for years and years by his children and then by his grandchildren. He wouldn’t speak of it, but the sight of the urn created an awkward space in the air into which all of these feelings rushed and solidified.
“Is that your momma?” Mr. Knotts said gently, and together he and Jonah stared at the urn that had been balanced on the passenger seat.
“Yes,” Jonah said. And he wanted to come up with some sort of explanation. He wanted to say that she wanted her ashes sprinkled over some beautiful landmark, like the Grand Canyon, or the Atlantic Ocean. But he couldn’t force the lie into his throat.
“Yes,” Jonah said. “That’s her.”
“God bless her,” Mr. Knotts said. “Poor woman.”
“Yes,” Jonah said.
——
In the weeks and months after he arrived in Chicago, Jonah found that he remembered that moment frequently—the two of them, he and Mr. Knotts, standing there looking at the urn, at his packed car at the end of the long gravel drive that led to the now empty house.
It could have been a nice memory, he thought, a conclusive memory: God bless her, poor woman.
But then he would also recall the way he’d stopped the car along the side of the road, only a few hours after he’d left Mr. Knotts behind. His heart was beating furiously, and he’d stumbled out of the car with the urn. He’d dumped the contents out into the weeds in the ditch.
Jesus, he’d think, as he sat in the dining nook of his efficiency, as he walked down a busy Chicago street, as he stood in line at a movie theater. Jesus, why had he done that?
He didn’t know. Something had come over him, he guessed. A fear, a panic. He had been driving without thinking for a long while, his hands on the steering wheel and his eyes on the white li
nes on the road, dashes he was feeding into the body of the car like he was playing a video game. And then he had become aware, for the first time, of the music emanating from the radio. It was a wispy, somnambulant rock song, a high-voiced choir of men sighing disconnected phrases: “Time . . . to the sea . . . good-bye my love . . .” and his skin prickled. He was aware of how light-headed he felt.
The sun came out from the dark clouds with a kind of insistence, almost violent. There were stubble fields lined with barbed-wire fences and telephone poles on both sides of him, and he let the car drift slowly, ten miles per hour, on the berm for a while before he stopped. The tires went kathump, kathump against the uneven gravel shoulder and he thought he might be having a heart attack. There was a soft explosion that radiated from just beneath his breastbone, something like the pins-and-needles sensation of stepping down on a foot that has fallen asleep—only inside him, rippling outward. He felt the sensation wash over his eyes, blinding him for a second, his vision clouded by thousands of vibrating pixels, television static, and then the feeling slipped up his forehead to his hair, a scuttling of insects. A low-level buzzing remained with him as he brought the car to a complete stop, edged crookedly onto the side of the road.
He had remembered something that his mother once told him. “When I die, I want you to bury me under the floorboards,” she had said. He’d been something like ten or eleven years old at the time, but even then he had known that this was her idea of a joke. “Cut me up in little pieces and put me in the crawl space,” she said. “I want to haunt the shit out of whoever lives in this dump after we do.” He remembered sitting there in the dark. She was angry because the power was out, and the tip of her cigarette bobbed. Outside, the rain came down in sheets, and the shadow of the rain and the windblown curtains moved on the wall behind her, a shadow like a giant jellyfish, waving its gentle tentacles.
The ashes sluiced out of the urn and onto the ground. Some of the ash drifted smokily in the air and powdered the leaves of the weeds. Jonah stood there, breathing, then carefully put the empty urn down on the ground beside the pile of ash, and it made a hollow, metallic tunk against the earth, like a coffee can. A single sparrow watched him from a telephone wire. He looked around, trying to identify the place—as if he might, in the future, come back here and try to retrieve the ashes. It was completely anonymous. A breeze rustled down a long field of corn, and he remembered his grandfather telling him once that as a boy he used to wake to the sound of the corn growing. “You could actually hear it growing,” his grandfather said. “It made a creaking sound, like a rusty hinge.” Jonah picked up the urn and waded through the high sunflower and pigweed toward the fence that surrounded the cornfield, walking cautiously in case of rattlesnakes. He put the urn upside down over the nearest fence post, fitting it over the top of the post like a hat.
No one would remove it, he thought. It would still be there, a marker of sorts, if he ever had to come back.
——
For a while, during those first months in Chicago, Jonah even considered calling Mr. Knotts to tell him about this. He wanted to explain to someone that he had to leave, that he had to throw everything away. He wanted to tell someone: I am going to be a new person, and to have them answer—
Yes.
Yes, of course you are.
6
Saturday, June 15, 1996
Troy dreams that his child has died, and he wakes up suddenly, suffocating. He wakes because he has stopped breathing. His throat has closed and he sits up abruptly, making a glottal sound like a dog choking on a strip of meat. His hands flail for a moment and he sucks in breath, coughing, disoriented.
It takes him a moment to realize that nothing has happened. This is his house, the house he has always lived in, and his son is not screaming. It is a morning in early summer. He puts his hand to his face, rubbing it dully. He is on the couch in the living room, where he fell asleep the night before, still in his jeans and stockinged feet and unbuttoned white shirt, blinking his eyes under a tent of mid-morning sunlight and lazily drifting dust motes. The television is going, the sound of Saturday morning cartoons, and Little Man is in fact sitting cross-legged on the floor eating dry cereal from a box, completely absorbed. Not screaming. Not dead.
“Shit,” Troy says, grimacing, and Little Man turns to look over his shoulder as Troy clears his throat again. Phlegm.
“ ‘Batman’ is on,” Little Man says. “It’s a new episode. You’re missing it.”
“Oh, really,” Troy says. “Cool.” He sits there for a moment, staring slackly at the television as the superheroes and supervillains fight one another. He feels muffled, sluggish, fairly hungover. The long night comes back to him slowly—a party at the tavern where he works as a bartender, the honky-tonk music from the jukebox and the smoke that still clung to his clothes, sitting there drinking with his cousin Ray and some people Ray had just met, a girl from Denver who Troy had kind of liked, who kept covering her mouth with her hand; he remembers spritzing himself with Refreshing Citrus air freshener, trying to disguise the smell of alcohol and marijuana from the teenaged baby-sitter when he came in. He hoped he wasn’t too wobbly. He was two hours later than he’d said he’d be, and he knew she was a little irritated as he counted money into her hand—he remembers that much, and then he’d been sitting on the couch after the baby-sitter had left, drinking one last beer and watching a late-night movie, Vertigo. He must have simply fallen asleep. He tries to remember. Had Little Man been screaming in the middle of the night? Things have begun to blur together lately: the days, the nightmares, and it takes a moment for the facts of his life to arrange themselves. It is the day after his thirtieth birthday. He is a father, a grown man with responsibilities. His bladder is full, and after a moment he stops casting about for solidifying thoughts and gets up, pads crookedly toward the bathroom.
——
He feels a little more oriented after he’s patted some water onto his face, though he’s still a little unnerved. There is something about the dream that lingers. It was as if the dream had been going on for hours before he woke, and it weighs heavily on him, a feeling of grief that weaves its way through his insides as he stares at himself in the mirror. In the dream he had been looking for Little Man, calling for the child through long hallways and rooms full of ominous hums and flutterings, catching glimpses of running shapes. He remembers that in the dream he had stumbled out into the open air. It was the backyard of the house.
This is what Troy recalls most vividly: the small backyard of the house, with its patch of grass, a curled garden hose, a child’s shoe near the trunk of the old elm tree. There was a yawning roar of an airplane, a shadow pulling across the ground, and when Troy looked up, startled, he saw that Little Man was sitting at the very top of the old elm tree, perched in the netting of bare boughs. Little Man was crouched on his haunches with his arms around his knees, his feet resting on a thin, quivering branch barely strong enough for a bird. Yet somehow Little Man balanced on it. Somehow, impossibly, it held Little Man’s weight, and the child’s silhouette hung precariously balanced at the top of the tree. He would fall, Troy knew. Troy could sense that Little Man was already falling even as he tried to run, holding his arms out. Little Man was already plunging through the air, the thin branches snapping and whipping as his son plummeted. There was that awful sound that Little Man was making, a high, fading wail, a falling-scream, a death-scream, which now Troy has in his head and can’t shake.
“Shit,” Troy says. He gathers up some of the dirty laundry that is spilling out of the overflowing hamper behind the bathroom door and tries to stuff it in. Too full. He puts his foot inside the hamper and steps down hard, compressing, packing it in tighter, so there is enough room to close the lid. He stands there, frowning at it, and his face feels pale and cold with sweat.
——
He would like to think that things have been going well. He wants to be a good father, that’s the thing, even though he doesn’t always suc
ceed. Little Man has been living with him for about three months now, and Troy tries not to think of the potential mistakes he’s making. It’s mostly good, he tells himself. It’s mostly happy. They fit together, he thinks, not only as father and son but also as companions. Troy and Little Man, Little Man and Troy.
And really, despite his occasional bad dreams, despite his occasional fuckups and inappropriate behavior, he believes that single fatherhood has come pretty easily to him. Little Man is a quiet, uncomplaining child, and he doesn’t seem overly traumatized to be separated from his mother, though of course the child misses her, thinks about her often. “When is Carla supposed to call?” he asks Troy, and “Do you think Carla will come see us this summer?” and he nods grimly when Troy says, “I don’t know.” He seems to understand, and Troy loves him for that. Troy loves the boy’s stern expression, his deep-set, observant eyes, his oddly upright posture. He loves the way Little Man takes things seriously, the way he will sit on the edge of a creek holding a fishing pole, watching the motionless bobber floating in the water with a sharp gaze, seemingly impervious to boredom, the way he appears to enjoy road trips, out to look at cows and horses, his face turned attentively to steadily passing fields and telephone poles and weed-filled ditches. He loves the way Little Man will tell the waitress his order when they eat at the old truck stop out at the interstate oasis, the way he will hold the menu and pick out words he recognizes, like “egg” and “ham.” He loves the silent clutch of Little Man’s arms as they ride Troy’s motorcycle down the thin, rutted cowpath trails that run through the hills north of town, the way Little Man presses his helmeted head against Troy’s back. It is even fun to go shopping for groceries, Little Man pushing the cart proudly, despite the fact that it’s taller than he is. Troy taking various items off the shelves and holding them up for Little Man’s approval, juggling the boxes of macaroni and cheese in the aisle or menacing Little Man with a package of plastic wrapped tripe from the meat section. “Hey, Little Man, how about some of this stuff?” and Little Man frowning thoughtfully, saying, “Dad, I don’t think so!”
