by David Vann
Looks like my little pumpkin is enjoying his breakfast, his mother said.
Mm, he said. I love this. Thanks, Mom.
You need a good breakfast, his grandmother said. You’re going off to school soon. He opened his eyes and looked up at her. She seemed so proud, smiling at him, her eyes glistening.
Yes, he said.
What are your classes?
I’m taking French poetry, he said. Because my year abroad will be in France, in Paris.
Ooh la la, his grandmother said, and elbowed his mother approvingly. She looked happier than she had in years. That sounds wonderful. And you deserve it. You’ve worked so hard.
Thank you, Grandma.
Where will you stay?
Galen had a bite of bacon, the smoky, fatty goodness in his mouth while he imagined where he would stay. The Sorbonne, he said.
Ooh, his grandmother said.
They’re a sister university with my school. And the dorms are all on the top floor, built into those enormous roofs you see in Paris. The windows have wooden shutters from hundreds of years ago, and when you wake up, you can push those shutters open and look out over all of Paris.
I’m so happy for you. My handsome young man. Think of all the people you’ll meet.
The year abroad is a ways off, his mother said.
But there’s no harm in planning now, his aunt said. It really is grand. And you never know what could happen. Galen could become a professor at the Sorbonne if he likes Paris enough. I’m sure they would want him to stay.
Yes, of course, his grandmother said.
Well, his mother said. We have such a beautiful day today, with the sun out. After brekkie, shall we take a walk at Camp Sacramento?
I’d like to hear more about Paris, Jennifer said.
Me too, Helen said.
The year abroad includes a tutorial with a French poet. I have to have my French up to that level by then, so I’ll be working hard over the next two years. Language study is something you have to work on every day.
Well, that will be no problem for you, his aunt said.
Galen took a large bite of pancake and thought he really could do this. He really could study French for two years and then spend a year in Paris and study with a poet. Only his mother was holding him back.
I actually need to send in a check next week, he said. Do you happen to have your checkbook, Grandma?
Oh, his grandmother said, looking startled. Oh yes, I’m sure I have that somewhere. Suzie-Q, where is my checkbook?
Galen’s mother looked punched.
Next week is when Jennifer’s payment for school is due also, Helen said. What a coincidence. You can write both checks at the same time.
Yes, Galen’s grandmother said. Yes, of course. She looked worried. She knew something wasn’t right, and Galen felt terrible for her now. This had gone out of control.
I think we left the checkbook at home, Mom, Galen’s mother said. We’ll have to do that when we get back.
I’m pretty sure you brought it, Helen said. I’ll get your purse and be right back. She got up fast.
Helen, Galen’s mother said, but Helen was gone toward her mother’s bedroom. Galen’s mother got up and went after her.
Galen’s grandmother raised her eyebrows. Oh my, she said. I’m not sure what’s happening.
It’s okay, Grandma, Jennifer said. You’re just writing checks for school, for Galen and me. Fall semester of college is about to start.
Oh. She looked at Jennifer, and Galen realized this was rare that she even looked at Jennifer. You’re in college now? Are you that old?
I’m starting next month, Jennifer said.
You look so young. Where are you going to school?
Stanford.
Stanford. Oh my. How did you get into Stanford? You’re not smart enough to get into Stanford, are you?
I did my homework. You helped me. We spent a lot of hours working together, Grandma. Jennifer reached out and held her grandmother’s hand. Thank you so much for helping me, Grandma.
Oh. And where is Galen going?
Chico State.
Chico State?
Yeah. He doesn’t like doing homework.
Stop it, Galen said. I’ll be right back. He could hear his mother and aunt fighting in the back room, and he knew he needed to help his mother now.
He was almost at the hide-a-bed when they came crashing out of his grandmother’s bedroom. They both had their hands on a tan purse, large and sturdy and old, with big handles. His mother yanked hard, swinging his aunt. He’d never seen his mother like this, her mouth snarling, a strange combination with her happy flowered apron.
Then his aunt yanked and his mother hit the wall, slipped, and went down hard in the narrow gap between wall and bed, arms flailing. His aunt on the hide-a-bed now, and Galen charged, had one foot up on the mattress when she straight-armed and just ran right over him. Her face grim and determined, and he was falling, tilted too far backward, and his head hit and bounced, his skull too heavy, like a bowling ball, and he couldn’t breathe or see. His head revving up inside, a high whine like a jet engine, and he was panicking. Had he heard a crack? Had he cracked his skull?
He didn’t want to move.
Just playing, just having fun, he could hear his aunt saying. Just having a wrestle on the hide-a-bed, like when we were kids. Wonderful fun.
Suzie-Q? his grandmother called.
Galen needed to do something. His mother wasn’t doing anything. Maybe she was hurt too. But his head was so heavy and pulsing. He could hear Jennifer saying something about Stanford, about the cost of Stanford. They were working her together.
Galen could feel his toes, was able to move his feet. And his hands. He wasn’t paralyzed. His breath came back, and he opened his eyes and was still awake and could think. He was afraid to feel his head, afraid he’d find blood or even a crushed bit of skull, but he reached up and felt only a bump, swelling already, but no wetness. Dry hair. He would be okay, maybe.
Mom? he called.
Yeah, she said.
Why aren’t you doing anything?
I hit my tailbone, she said. It hurts. But I also just can’t fight anymore. They’ll take some money, and maybe that’s okay. If they try for more than fifty, it won’t clear. I can’t fight them anymore. I can’t fight you anymore, either.
There’s enough money to take fifty thousand and it wouldn’t matter?
Stop.
I can’t believe this. Why didn’t I go to college?
You could have gotten a job. You could have gone. But you wanted to be taken care of.
Just like you.
Fine. I don’t care what you think of me. Think anything you want.
You don’t make any sense. How could I think anything about you? You’re in crazyland. We have all this money available, and we aren’t using it. Why are we living off the housekeeping and gardening checks?
No response from his mother.
Tell me, you piece of shit, Galen said in a low growl that only his mother would hear. You don’t get to just not say anything. This is my life. My future. He had a desire to shake her. He wanted to shake her and rip her into pieces.
You won’t talk to me that way.
I’ll talk to you however I want until you stop acting like a crazy person.
The talking had stopped in the other room. They were having her sign, no doubt. He never should have mentioned the checkbook. But he had never thought of it before.
When we return home, his mother said, you’re going to move out. You’re going to find a job and a place to live. Or just sleep in the streets. I don’t care.
Galen wanted to scream, but he kept his mouth closed. She wouldn’t make him move out. He hated her power trips. He tried to just calm, stared at the ceiling, this crazy ceiling with the white-painted planks all going diagonal. It didn’t make any sense. He’d never noticed it before. Another sign of crazy, but he’d never looked up and noticed.
Helen and
Jennifer marched past out the front door. He heard the car doors slam and the engine rev up and they drove away.
Well, he said. I think I’ve had enough family time for today. He rose carefully, his head a big ball of throb.
Help me up, his mother said.
Help yourself up, he said, and went out the front door. Smell of dust in the air, so they must have taken off fast. He walked around the cabin on the blind side, away from the kitchen, and up into the trees. The dirt loose, his feet sinking. Something had mounded all the dirt everywhere, ants or moles or whatever else, and it was more sand than dirt, bits of granite forming a kind of dirt-froth. Nothing solid anywhere. He stepped over rotted trunks and limbs crumbling away in what looked almost like coals, a deep orange. Insects everywhere, the place infested.
He found a stand of smaller pines providing enough cover, braced against the largest of them, leaned over, pushed his finger back hard into his throat, and let all the piggy grease and egg drool and pancake and syrup come out, purged himself, made himself clean again. If only there were some way he could throw up his family and not have them inside him anymore.
Chapter 14
The chicken and dumplings. His mother and grandmother began cooking, putting the world back together again. How many times? he wondered. How many times had they put the world back together? And why? Why not let it fall apart and stay apart, why not let the truth happen? It would be easier. They could all relax. Everyone could just say they hated each other and be done with it. But somehow that was not possible, and so his mother and grandmother chopped up two chickens at the sink.
Galen went down occasionally to watch, peeking around the corner from the stairs, and neither of them acknowledged his presence. He’d become a kind of ghost.
His mother chopping yellow onions at the sink, his grandmother sitting at the table peeling yellow potatoes. They were drinking wine again, a study in yellow again, even some of their clothing yellow. His grandmother’s sweater, the edges of his mother’s apron.
The crunch of the knife through onion, the slap of the peeler on a potato. No other sounds, and this was part of what made the world unbearable, the magnification of small sounds in a vacuum. This was one of the signs. Only a world that had been staged could be so flimsy and so annoying.
They were the same person, maybe, his mother and grandmother, a split image he needed to resolve and bring into focus. They had been created at the same time, in Galen’s first memories when he was three or four, and they had a similar role. They had drifted further apart in recent years as his grandmother lost her mind. She had been left marooned on some positive sense of him, whereas his relationship with his mother had grown steadily worse. Were they the same, though, underneath all that?
If you’re not doing anything, you can go chop some wood, his mother said. She was standing at the sink chopping carrots now, and didn’t turn to look at him. He wasn’t sure how she even knew he was here.
Okay, Galen said. His head hurt, but he liked the idea of getting away from the kitchen and his mother, and he liked chopping wood.
He went out the front door, walked around the deck to the toolshed. About the size of an outhouse, and older, even, than the cabin. No light inside, and he had to let his eyes adjust. Shovels, picks, several axes, as if this were a mining camp. All the tools old, the wood handles dark and polished from use. The fishing gear was in here, too, old wicker baskets and ancient poles. He didn’t know how to use any of it. In all the times they’d come to the cabin while his grandfather was still alive, his grandfather had stayed in Carmichael and worked. Never retired. Had a stroke, finally, went to the rest home, and died. He’d been a civil engineer, designing highways and even that bridge in Sacramento that his grandmother was always mentioning, but what did that mean?
Galen pulled out the smallest axe and grabbed a wedge from the floor. Cold heavy steel, the edges of it dented and smashed from years of blows. Then he pushed the door shut with his foot and went to the chopping block behind the cabin. He dropped the wedge in the dirt and swung the axe over his head into the block. He loved the feel of that swing, of the weight on the outer arc, his right hand slipping down on the smooth handle.
Yeah, he said.
The wood was stacked along the back wall of the cabin, with an overhang from the roof to keep it dry. Gray-looking because it’d been here so many years. Their visits were never very long. Galen grabbed a log and worried about spiders. He didn’t have any gloves. He upended the wood on the chopping block and took a large swing with the axe. The blade glanced off the edge of the log and buried into the ground a few inches from his left foot.
Whoa, Galen said. He stepped back, the handle standing up, and looked behind him, as if someone might have seen. He had this dizzy feeling like tottering at the edge of a cliff, the air pulling him downward. Holy crap, he said. He looked at his old Converse sneakers, dirty canvas, so thin, and just couldn’t believe how close he’d come to losing his foot. He had this awful feeling he could still lose it. He shook his arms, shaking off the heebie-jeebies, then picked up the axe again.
Anything could happen at any time. That was the truth of the world. You could just lose your foot one day, and after that you’d be a guy missing a foot. You could never know what was coming next, and that was true for even the smallest things. You couldn’t know what thought you’d have next, or what someone would say in conversation, or what you might feel an hour from now, and this effect was always amplified by his mother. His conversations with her could go from zero to crazy in a few seconds. He didn’t know why that was true only with her. She could be calling him pumpkin one minute and threatening to throw him out on the street the next. And when he felt angry at her, it came from some terrible source, something you’d never know about, never suspect, and then suddenly he was drowning in it.
Galen wanted peace with his mother. He wanted peace. But as soon as he came near her, he wanted to kill her.
He was more careful to keep his feet wide, stood farther away and focused on the top of the log as he swung. A satisfying chock this time as the blade hit. He used the wedge in the gap and swung again, split the wood in one stroke. Brighter flesh inside, the wood yellow instead of gray.
Okay, he said. And he worked into a rhythm, log after log, focusing carefully on the target, enjoying that swing, the high weightlessness of it, the feel of the muscles in his arms and back, the sweat on his skin, the sound of the blows muffled in the trees.
Earthly labor. That was perhaps the fastest path, because you could forget yourself, forget everyone, and feel only the swing. The key to getting through the world was to find a way to forget that it existed. A shadow in a shadowland, biding time.
Galen flung the axe up the hill. Just an impulse. End over end through the air, whumping into the earth. He hiked up to it and flung it again, the blade and handle flipping through branches and bouncing in the dirt, spraying small grains of granite. Puffs of dust like smoke. The axe-flinger. He didn’t know what it meant, but it felt good. It felt right. He threw the axe as hard as he could, hurled it with both hands. He was like Thor, splitting the air itself. Tearing through appearances, ripping the fabric of the illusion.
Galen glanced quickly behind to see the wake left in the air, any swirl or disturbance at the edges of where he had passed, but his eyes were not trained to see. Troughs and rips and back eddies, and all of it hidden from the naked eye. But the axe might cut through quickly enough. If he focused just behind it as it flew, he might see something.
He threw again and everything was just too fast. Even the flipping of the handle rotating beyond the speed at which he could isolate an image. He needed to learn how to slow the world down in order to see it. His blood pounding now from running after the axe. The dust in his nostrils. His feet sinking in the tufted earth, bogging him down.
If he could throw and get the blade to stick into a tree, the sudden halting might reveal something. He might catch the eddy just behind the shaft as it washed
over. The abruptness might allow vision.
So Galen held the axe behind him, hefted it a bit in the air to gauge its weight, its balance, stepped forward and flung at a trunk twenty feet away. But the axe went wide and bounced end over end in the dirt.
Galen walked instead of ran, getting tired. But he could hear the wind rising in the pines all around him, clouds moving over and the day become darker suddenly, and he felt he was at the edge of something. A tree farther ahead had lower dead branches covered in a bright lime green moss. Glowing arms in the overcast, muted light. They were emanating, luminous. They looked unreal.
Galen stood with the axe before this tree and tried to know the trunk, tried to lock it into place in the air and feel its pull, and when he flung, he felt the flipping end over end until the axe hit, handle first, glanced off into dirt and ferns.
Close, he said. I’m getting close here.
He retrieved the axe, walked back again to his position, and opened himself to a universe made almost entirely of empty space. Neutrons and protons, or whatever, swirling around, electrical and magnetic connections all that was holding us together, and no reason that couldn’t be cleaved in an instant, revealed. He threw the axe with all his might, end over end through emptiness, slowing and seeing, and the blade connected with trunk, abruptly halted, the handle frozen in place, the eddy of air washed over the handle, the seam in what had been cleaved, but it was already memory, already gone. He just wasn’t fast enough. He needed to be able to pause in a moment like that and travel around in it, float for a while, and that never happened. His axe hanging from the trunk, the bright green arms above, all of it a perfect moment, and all of it passed and gone, as if it had never been.
Chapter 15
The mafia didn’t return until late afternoon. Galen’s mother and grandmother on a walk at Camp Sacramento, the stew pot in the oven, smell of chicken and onion in the air, and Galen settled upstairs with Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
