And the most important thing was those trees, anyway. Later, when the Missile Crisis was on and everybody was scrambling around digging bomb shelters in their backyards and stockpiling canned goods in their reinforced basements and determining the best place to crouch in order to shield themselves, terrified that the end of the world would fall from the sky while we slept and with a single squeal and a flash of light wipe us clean from the earth, leave it smooth and gleaming as ice, or else fall in irradiated snow over everything, Frank and I weren’t scared. We thought the shadows of the trees would shade us from the obliterating brightness; their leaves and boughs, we thought, would cradle the fallout high over our heads.
Soon as we’d settled in, over his Christmas recess, he walked through the woods to look for trees that had fallen, whose roots had lost their grip on the slippery soil, and dead limbs with big, spongy silver scales and soft bark that crumbled away from the wood underneath when you ran your hands over them. The trunks he sawed into segments, the limbs he piled atop them in the wheelbarrow, precarious and high, though somehow, impossibly, their branches managed to tangle and hold on to one another, so not a twig fell loose though the whole pile shifted and swayed. He split them in an old rotten stump that stood thigh-high in the yard. Insects were forever carrying out its insides, trickled shining down the wrinkles of its bark until what was left of it rose in craggy spires, black and gray and crumbling as ash, around a desiccated pit just deep enough to jam a log into upright and to catch the halves as their strands separated along the maul. He did it for hours sometimes, for entire winter afternoons, split log after log and stacked them against the house, covered over with a tarp in case the wind blew rain under the eaves, until the dry skin on his knuckles cracked and bled, and my fingers couldn’t tell which parts of his shoulders were muscle and which were bone.
He never did have the patience to let them cure long enough, tried to burn them when they hadn’t been split but a month earlier, so it took longer to evaporate out enough moisture that they’d catch than they actually burned. In the evenings that first winter, when the walls were still bare, he sat on the floor in front of the cast-iron wood stove, studying and drinking coffee while he stuffed logs onto a bed of burning newspaper that turned black as the words it unwound as it shriveled, the letters spilling out of themselves, soaking the pages. They didn’t deliver that far out, of course, and we wouldn’t have let them if they did. I picked up the evening edition in town before I came home every night.
He drank his coffee the most laborious way I’d ever seen, poured a splash from his cup into the saucer, then held the saucer to his lips and blew carefully to cool it. The coffee rippled, lapped up just to the porcelain edge but never spilled over, and then he tipped the saucer and slurped the coffee right off, jumping every time a loud crack rang in the stove as a pocket of water vapor heated and burst free, splitting the grain that had been closed around it, wrenching open the tree’s rings. It seemed like such a waste: all that work, all those years of rain and sun and slow growth, and it all amounted to a couple hours of light and warmth. The heat never even made it out of the den—we still had to swaddle ourselves up just to walk to the bathroom, and pile blankets and quilts heavy as six feet of dirt atop us in the bed—but he sat there for hours feeding it, didn’t seem to mind at all, perfectly content to prod page after page into the fire until it could latch onto the logs, while everything that had happened the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that, dissolved into the white-noise hiss of water leaving wood.
That spring he graduated, and instead of applying for the police force, or for any job at all that might justify four years of college education and a degree in American History purchased for him by the American Taxpayer, he got a job in the denim plant, unloading seventy-five-pound spools of thread from the truck that brought them over from the spinners and carrying them to the dyeing racks, where he heaved each one onto its spindle. It was only temporary, he said. Just until he could find something better. Big, burly men ten years younger than him, football champions and weightlifters just out of high school, routinely had heart attacks on the mill floor even in winter, it was so stuffy and hot in there, and in summer they were always fainting like society women overcome at the utterance of a profanity. But Frank, after he’d picked them up and set them down in a chair with a paper cup of water from the cooler, just kept on going back and forth between the dock and the racks, the rolls clutched to his chest and his shirt slung ever wetter and heavier from his shoulders, slapping against his sides. Never even rolled up his sleeves. His cuffs clasped his wrists like manacles.
We were real careful. We never went anywhere together, not to the store or out to eat or on vacation, not after that first time. I got all my mail at the shop, and had it listed as my place of residence until I retired, and Frank kept correspondence with his aunts only through a post office box, told them he was doing fine, just fine, and conveniently forgot to respond when they invited him down for a visit, or said how much they’d love to come up and see the new homestead. I learned to distinguish the grumble of his truck on the gravel, the particular speed and pitch of it, from all others, from insurance salesmen and hunters wanting to inquire about deer on the property and other strangers who knocked on our door rarely but still far too often for comfort, so I could huddle in the hallway and pretend not to be home. And in the mill men wore out quickly, came and went and were too winded the short while they lasted to make conversation, and Frank kept to himself, read his pulp novels while he ate his lunch, and not a one of them ever knew. No one had ever known with him. Even in the army, even in the showers, surrounded by all those men in various stages of filthiness and nudity, with aching muscles and grass stains on their knees and the puddle over the clogged drain turning milky with soap as it widened toward their feet, nobody ever knew. Not the slightest inkling. He always prided himself on that.
The secret, he said, was that you had to look a little. Not looking was the most suspicious of all. It meant you cared. So you learned to move your eyes over their bodies without really seeing them, he said, to look just long enough and then away: the way you do to look at the sun, real quick, before it can burn a green hole in everything you’d see after.
I was never quite as adept at it. There was some softness in me that betrayed itself in ways so subtle even Frank couldn’t tell me exactly what they were. My own customers always looked at me a little askance, even as they brought me their pheasant and their fox, as if there must be something wrong with me to want to render this service they themselves wanted rendered, as if I, too, might secretly be dead as the animals on the wall, and just made up to appear otherwise.
In the years that followed, the stories started appearing in the local paper, sporadic at first, then more and more frequent as we passed the middle of the decade, of men being arrested, sometimes in parks, in seedy bars, in public restrooms, sometimes behind the closed doors of homes, behind hotel curtains. Their names and addresses, their places of work and photographs, were printed alongside the stories. At best, they were fired from their jobs, evicted from their homes, and abandoned by their friends and families. At worst, they were sentenced to prison, or sent to the sanitarium, where they might have electrodes taped all over their bodies, clustered like sores on their privates, to deliver a painful Pavlovian shock every time the image of a naked man was projected on the cinderblock wall, or die from hypothermia in a dark basement after having buckets of ice water thrown on them as part of an experimental and exciting new therapy, or simply be strapped to a table and castrated.
In the psychiatric literature, in the diagnostic manuals, they described the pathological disturbance of the homosexual, in Congress they railed against degenerates, deviants, pederasts, subversives, sodomites, sexual psychopaths, in the New York Times it was perverts, it was unnatural relations, but for the papers down here, even that was too specific, too close to describing some actual thing. When those men were arrested, it was for cri
mes against nature, as though they’d been caught kicking up a public flower bed. That’s how truly unspeakable it was: we didn’t have the words.
Now, of course, they’re walking around as if it’s perfectly normal, now they’re ‘proud,’ now they’re marching and chanting and streaming the bright rainbow flag of no nation I’ve ever heard of, spontaneously strutting out of the waves of California beaches like Venus from the foam of her castrated father’s blood in the surf, gazing at their own nakedness in mother-of-pearl hand mirrors while angels and nymphs flutter around trying to get some clothes on them, now they’re romping through the streets and cavorting half-naked in leather harnesses, or in milky sequined dresses glittering like nebulae, groping and fondling each other like a bunch of frenzied Bacchae in the midst of tearing Orpheus limb from limb. It’s no wonder they’re all dying from social disease, acting like that.
Homosexual. That one’s still the worst of all. Sounds like another species, a big-skulled, low-browed ancestor of decent men, dragging its knuckles through the dust of evolution.
At the end of each summer, he walked the perimeter of the yard, his hands on his hips, and scanned scowling for places where the world tried to squeeze itself through in innocuous glimmers among the leaves, shifting and dimming for no apparent reason, like stars will. To those spots he carried pine saplings from the back of his pickup truck, their root balls wrapped in burlap, got down on his knees, and planted them in the cracks, packing the dirt tight around their slender trunks to hold them firm in just the right spot, where they swelled, slowly spreading their needles, and sealed us off like a splinter the skin’s grown over.
TWELVE
We’re outside, bundled up in our jackets, filling the bird feeders while Daisy paces the fence for deer. Frank reaches up, maneuvers the feeder off the crook in the gutter, and holds it out while I work the top off and pour nyjer thistle, tiny and black like splinters of old, rotten wood, out of an iced tea pitcher and into the long tube, trying to keep the stream lined up with the opening as it wobbles in his hands. Dust drifts through the mesh. It’s real fine, so the slivers don’t fall out, and it doesn’t have any perches, so only the finches and the other little birds are light enough to cling to it and reach their long, thin beaks inside. He stretches his arms overhead to hang the feeder back on its crook, and his rumpled pants fall halfway down his behind before they find some hook of bone to grab on to and keep them from pooling around his ankles. He hauls them up by the belt and holds them around his waist, the way teenage boys on the television who are trying to look tough do.
And I’ve added more salt. I’ve added more butter to our rolls and more dip to our barbecue, but it doesn’t make a bit of difference. Once in a while he’ll snack on some toast, or a bowl of cottage cheese, but every meal I put in front of him of any substance goes entirely untouched. I might as well deposit his Social Security check directly in the trash, the way we throw food away in this house.
“That fashion statement you’re making came from prison, you know,” I say. He keeps missing the hook. “It signifies that you’re a rapist.”
“If you were a rapist,” he says, “you wouldn’t be out to signify it to everybody. Then they’d know to watch out.”
“You need a new belt. Or some new pants. Before you moon the whole neighborhood.”
Finally he manages to latch the feeder on the crook. Above it, the sky’s pulled tight, its blue strained thin and pale, so thin it barely holds itself around the earth, with scratched into it some faint cirrus clouds, like the ripples in skin stretched beyond its natural inclination.
“My belt’s fine,” he says.
“At least let me put a couple new holes in it,” I say. “Come on.”
He sits down by the back door and takes off his shoes. I make him leave them there on the newspaper all the time now, rain or shine, after he tracked Daisy’s mess all over the floor. The house is filthy enough as it is without having feces smeared over everything. He hasn’t cleaned in months. Bathtub porcelain’s dingy and clouded, and there’s enough dust and dog hair gathered in the corners and drifting along the edges of the rooms in tumbleweed bolls to knit a throw with. All the side tables and bookshelves and picture frames have grown a thin coating of dust, and the deer are so covered in it their glossy noses have dulled to matte. I don’t think I’ll ever get it all out of their fur.
I take some scissors to the living room and turn on the noon news. They’re doing their “Intimate Debbie” segment, which consists of several people with alarmingly tenuous connections to her divulging ‘shocking new details about her private life.’ A worker at the battered women’s shelter says Debbie and Larry spent two weeks there at the start of the year, when he was just a couple months old—despite the fact that, by Debbie’s own admission, his daddy hightailed it out of town as soon as he found out she was pregnant and she hadn’t been able to get a date since—that she’d never seen a mother more devoted to her son, and that Debbie cheered up the other battered women by doing a song-and-dance routine from back in her pageant days.
Frank shuffles in. The soles of his blue, swollen feet are edged with grime, look like he’s stomped in a fireplace. “Hand it over,” I say. Reluctantly, he undoes his belt and gives it to me. “Pull your waistband out.” He does, and he could fit Daisy, glutton that she is, in the empty space between it and his belly. She sits a few feet away and watches him with her head hung just ever so slightly downward now, not as bad as it was in the shelter but still so she has to look up at him in what seems to be a combination of terrible shame and disapproval. When he glances at her, she turns her nose up and her face away from him, real haughty. She doesn’t want him to know she was watching.
“If you don’t start eating something,” I say, “you’re going to end up right back in the hospital, getting fed through a tube. Like a baby.”
“They don’t feed babies through tubes.” He chuckles a high, airy chuckle I’ve never before heard from his throat.
“They do when they’re too stupid to eat the food that’s offered them.”
“I thought I was supposed to watch my diet,” he says. “Lose weight. Open up my arteries.”
“You are,” I say. “But you’re not supposed to starve yourself.”
“Oh, I’m fine.”
Daisy turns her stare right back to him, looking even more serious and shamed than before. She can’t go very long without looking at him.
“You may not have noticed this,” I say, “but you only say things are fine when they are in extremely dire condition.”
He holds up his britches with one hand while he lowers himself into the chair. The whole thing, creaking, tilts a little to the left. I wanted to get us both the new kind I saw advertised on television late one night, with a button you hit makes the whole seat lift up and push out to help you stand, but he won’t agree to that until this one collapses right out from under him. Why he’s got to be such a cheapskate I don’t know. We’ve got plenty of money and nobody to leave it to when we go, but he insists on walking around here like a pauper.
Daisy shoves her head between his knees and strains her nose toward his crotch. She’s barely tall enough to do it, rests her chin right on the chair. He squeezes her skull between his legs while he spreads her big ears flat across his thighs and massages them. Calls it ‘making pancakes’ for how her ears spread out. Her broken tail swishes back and forth the whole time, and when he stops, she shakes her head so her jowls fly out and make a wet slapping noise against her teeth, their undersides flashing pink, and jams it right back in. She can stand there like that for hours.
I pull his belt over one point of the open scissors. The black’s worn off from the tan underneath, and the leather’s brittle, permanently warped into the shape it’s held over the pin and under the buckle. If we’re lucky, the strain of getting a new hole punched in it will go ahead and rip it apart. I dig the point of the scissors into the strap, twisting as I go. The leather bends around it until a pimple
raises on the far side, where the skin crackles and turns pale as the blade strains to push through. I flip the belt over and poke the scissors into it from the other side, push the pimple back in.
“What do you want to eat?” I say. “There’s got to be something that sounds good to you. Just tell me what you want and I’ll fix it.”
He starts absentmindedly digging clods of dirt out of his stolen vacuum and placing them into a trash bag, both of which have been sitting beside his chair for weeks, half-full. The very next morning after Daisy charmed him out of bed, the first thing he did was drag that thing back up from the curb. If I was smart, I would have waited a few more days for the trash truck to come before I went and got her.
On the TV, a fat woman with a tight-coiled perm and big, watery eyes stands in front of her trailer while two children cry on the stoop and a chained-up spaniel lunges at the cameraman, choking itself half to oblivion, and says her son saw Debbie on what she imagines could have been the very night of the murder, when Little Larry was still bobbing face-down on the sudsy surface of his bathwater, that she was wearing a real short red dress down at Buck’s Bar, drinking tequila and dancing up against multiple strangers.
“They say her daddy abused her,” the woman says, real low, drawing the word abused out long and sagging under the weight of its own implication. She tugs her floral blouse down over her belly and asks when people in this world got so mean.
Daisy starts whimpering and squealing and running frantic around the house, snuffling at the floorboards and vents and window frames. All week she’s been doing it, clawed half the paint off the windowsills trying to get through them. Bucks are in the woods, ready to spar. She can tell it by the smell of the rut, of aggression and unbearable desire and newly hardened antlers scraping their velvet across the trees, ready to lock.
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