Dirt

by David Vann

  Her bookshelf had the photo albums. He grabbed two of the older ones, the white covers like faded linoleum, and walked out to the lawn.

  Got a couple albums, he said. Memory lane.

  Leave those alone.

  Goats, he said. A lot of goats, right out here in the orchard, and you in your sundress.

  I don’t have copies of any of those, Galen.

  The goats were looking at the camera, posing along with Galen’s mother and aunt. His aunt older, much taller, and with no bow in her hair. She already looked unhappy. His mother smiling her cutest smile, performing, her head tilted a little to the side. You were kind of like Shirley Temple, he said.

  Put those away, Galen.

  Is that who you were trying to be? Is that who you’re being now when you’re all fake and weird?

  Galen waited, but his mother didn’t respond. Never mind, Galen said. I know you don’t answer when it’s anything real. The cute moments are a sacred thing that can’t be talked about. He yanked the page out of the album and crinkled it, the layers of card stock and photo and thin plastic film.

  No! she yelled. You stop that right now.

  This is kind of fun. I like the shed. I can do whatever I like. I hope you have an eyeball stuck to one of the gaps between the planks so you can see all this. I’d hate for you to miss out.

  You’re worse than anything I could imagine, worse than anything I can say. I don’t even have a name for you.

  Try son. The word son might be a possibility. Here’s a photo of the walnuts. The fucking walnuts, and all the drying racks laid out.

  Put that away.

  Grandma and Grandpa aren’t that old here. I can almost imagine them having real lives, being people who weren’t just born old.

  Their lives were real.

  I don’t know, he said, but it does seem possible in this photo. The problem is that there are no answers to anything. Why did he beat her? Why did he work all the time? How did she lose her memory?

  You’re talking about entire lives. No one can explain an entire life.

  Wow. You’re talking with me about your parents, sort of. This is new.

  I’ve always talked about them.

  No you haven’t. You’ve never said anything real about anything important.

  Galen.

  It’s true. Why did he beat her?

  He didn’t beat her.

  See?

  None of it was the way you think it was.

  Well then enlighten me.

  We were a family.

  No. That’s one thing you were not. Because the word family means something special to you, and your family has never fit that word. You know what’s odd about this photo with the walnut racks?

  No answer from his mother. What’s odd, he continued, is that they’re still working. They don’t stop for the photo. They just kind of look up for a moment. But they’re still bent over the racks. And the racks go on forever. That’s what your father’s life was like. Just work that stretched forever in all directions, work for work’s sake, and nothing else. No family.

  I was there, so I’m the one who knows. We were a family, and we didn’t just work. Dad played the accordion, and Mom played the piano, and we’d sing songs together.

  Grandma plays piano?

  Yeah. Almost everything is something you don’t know.

  Okay. So let’s say I want to believe in that family. I still have to get everything to fit. So why did he beat her?

  Damn you. He didn’t beat her.

  Galen ripped the photo from the album and crinkled it up.

  Stop! Her voice broke, ragged and spent.

  Save your voice, he said. The photo’s no loss. None of this happened, after all. He didn’t beat her, and there was no family, and there were no drying racks, no walnuts.

  Galen could hear his mother sobbing now, but he didn’t care. He looked at the other photos and ripped them out, a page at a time.

  Here you are with a new bicycle, he said, and he ripped out that page. Here you are with a dog. What was that dog’s name again?

  Schatze, she said, and this made her sob harder.

  Just a dog, he said, and not much of a dog. Those legs are about three inches high. What kind of dog is that again?

  A dachshund.

  Yeah, that’s right. What a mistake of a dog.

  I loved Schatze.

  What’s the name mean again?

  Mein Schatz is my treasure or dear one or my love.

  Galen ripped the page out. Well there are a lot of photos of my love, but not after today.

  I hate you.

  Yeah, I know. We’ve already covered that. Time to move on to something new.

  I’m your mother.

  Covered that point, too.

  You have to let me out.

  And again the familiar ground. I had hoped to get through these albums before going for the earplugs, but I may have to get them sooner.

  You’re a monster.

  Yeah yeah.

  You’re not my son.

  Uh-huh. He looked at another photo of Schatze, by the Christmas tree. His mother in a holiday dress that looked thick, like it was made of velvet, maybe. And the tree huge, out in the main room that was two stories high. Tinsel and hundreds of ornaments and a star on top. A blanket of felt underneath, and all the presents, piles of presents. Schatze with his paws up on her, straining to lick her face, and she had both arms around him, was laughing and trying to get her face away from his tongue. It almost looked like what she said. He could almost imagine the family she was claiming. And maybe they had good times. Maybe the good times stretched on and became most of the time. Maybe the beatings and favoritism and fakery were only occasional, the exceptions to how their lives were. But he would never know. His mother couldn’t be trusted, because she was trying too hard to protect and deny. His aunt couldn’t be trusted because she was trying too hard to destroy. And his grandmother couldn’t remember. These photos were too brief, only moments. They couldn’t describe what a day felt like, how all the hours of even one day moved along. And this was all a distraction anyway, the deepest form of samsara, the belief in belonging, the belief in being tied to a family and a place and time. The final attachment, the one that was the foundation for the illusion of self.

  Chapter 22

  The crinkled pages looked almost like flowers, large and shiny, the whites and darks of the petals, enormous white carnations dyed with ink. Two albums made a bed of flowers much larger than the piles from the junk drawers.

  I’m a gardener, he said. I’m planting a family. And once all the flowers have bloomed, I’m going to pour gasoline on them and light a match. And that will be freedom, finally.

  You’re a demon, she said.

  You’re not even religious.

  I know. But you’re a demon. You’re a force for evil. You’re not a person gone bad. You’re something that had this in him all along. This is your nature.

  You can’t believe in evil if you don’t believe in god.

  I can see the truth. I can see what you are.

  There is no evil. There is only progression through opposites.

  You haven’t even read Blake.

  Who’s Blake?

  Blake is the one you’re parroting with all this crap from Kahlil Gibran and others. If you’d gone to college, you’d know.

  Galen walked over to the table, picked up one of the heavy cast-iron chairs, and flung it against the shed wall.

  That fixed it, his mother said. You’re no longer an uneducated dumbass.

  Galen went into the house, grabbed the rest of her photo albums, and then just stood there in her room. He had let her distract him. He had found his meditation, finally, and look how quickly he had left it and become caught up in something else. This was the problem. She had an unbelievable power to throw him off, like a magnet next to a compass. She could destroy everything just by opening her mouth.

  He let the photo albums drop onto the floor. He ha
d to find the earplugs.

  They weren’t on her nightstand. He looked in her bathroom, in the mirror cabinet above the sink, and found a set of old ones, two dirty globs. He stuffed one into each ear, listening now to the inside of his own head, to his own blood and synapses, and that was where he needed to be. No more distraction. Without sound, she could no longer reach him.

  He found gauze to wrap his raw hands, and he kicked things around in her closet looking for gloves, dumped the drawers of her dresser onto the floor, all her socks and underwear and bras and blouses and everything else, and still no gloves.

  So he marched out to the shed, walked all the way around it to the small toolshed, and looked in there. No doubt she was saying things to him now, but he could hear nothing but the airspace in his own skull.

  His eyes had to adjust after the bright sun, but he found a small shelf along one side, and here were the gloves. He picked a light cotton pair, dark with dirt and grease, and smashed them in his hands to kill any black widows. Then he slipped them on over the gauze. He was going to commit to the meditation now.

  He walked out front to the shed door, stood at the orchard edge with the trees to his back and looked at the dirt he’d mounded along the wall. It was a furrow, he realized now. He was extending the orchard, connecting it to the shed, cultivating something.

  The trees at his back a kind of audience. They seemed full of expectation. Grown heavy out of the soil and hanging now in the air, waiting.

  Okay, he said. I’m doing it. And he walked to the corner, where he had only a few feet of wall left. He plunged the shovel and his hands stung. His arms and back sore as he lifted. He’d already cramped up.

  The dirt seemed only dirt, nothing more. It looked and felt and smelled like dirt. The shovel heavy, and the fling too weighted, no fling at all, no suspension to it, only a brutal gravity.

  Come on, he said. He knew that all meditations began this way, uninspired, thick as clay, without connection. A transition from the unalert world to the alert one, a journey through the full thickness of appearance. A kind of burial and trying to dig oneself out, and it always felt impossible. Every time, every single time, it felt as if the thickness would never end, as if the world would never shift again, never slip, never transform and become.

  He was burning, his entire neck and back and arms cooked at the surface, but even that was no transformation. Even that was dead and heavy. It only hurt. And his breath was ragged. He was tired.

  His back hurt so much he didn’t feel he could bend over any longer, but he kept going anyway, kept shoveling, took out the earplugs and tried to listen to the streams of dirt and rock falling off the sides of the shovel, sounding almost like water, and then the heavy whump as he dumped each load. The sharper sound of small rocks hitting wood when he aimed high. He was on the east wall now, partly in shade, working his way toward the lawn. The cool of the shade a beautiful thing.

  What he liked most was the lofting, the moment all that dirt hung in the air. He remembered now that had been his focus in the earlier meditation.

  The day passing, no longer an oven here in the shade, and the halo of heat around his head had broken. The alert world returning. But then he hit harder ground.

  He didn’t want to lose his momentum, but he’d hit the edge of the tilled orchard, hit solid earth, and he couldn’t dip his shovel in and swing. The tip of the shovel buried only a couple inches, and when he pulled up, he had almost nothing. The ground like armor, with bits of rock in it, all compacted.

  So he walked around to the other side, near the toolshed, baking in full sun. A slick all over his body instantly, the wall and ground radiating. He was able to dip his shovel deep into loose ground, pulled up and lofted, focused everything on the feel of that, studied that moment with each shovelful, felt his own body travel through suspension and fall.

  Siddhartha had endured days, months, years in meditation, had sat at the water’s edge and waited, but Galen had found a meditation in action, a much faster form. It was a gift he should share with others. He should perhaps write his own book of meditation, to leave as a sign, as a trail of bread crumbs, or perhaps he would skip that and go right to poetry. He had seen what others hadn’t yet seen, and so even a simple description of his experience would be a poem.

  He could see all the people lining up to meet him, not only at bookstores and libraries but even here at the house. The line stretching all the way down the hedge lane once they found out where he lived. They’d be out here shoveling, and it would take a bulldozer to flatten the dirt each day.

  Damn it, he said. Stop thinking. Just shovel. Just dig and throw and watch the dirt. That’s it. That’s all there is.

  There’s me, too, his mother said, so he stuffed the earplugs back in.

  The dirt had become dirt again and nothing more. Just heavy, and the day had been passing but now it had stalled again.

  Fine, he said, and he dropped the shovel, but then he picked it up again because he remembered there was a purpose to all of this. It wasn’t just a meditation. He was also mounding up dirt so she couldn’t dig out.

  His skin felt itchy. He was hot and burned and itching all over, having to stop to scratch at his arms and armpits and belly and back and crotch. All the sweat in different layers. Jennifer would never do this.

  He threw his shovel, just flung it into the orchard. There was no way to get his mind to steady and focus, no way to leave thought behind. He was thinking of Jennifer now, and that would go on until he jacked off, he knew. That was the only thing that could stop it.

  So he trudged around the shed across the lawn past the pile of crap that he’d already forgotten about, something he needed to burn later, and went up to his room, grabbed a Hustler, and walked into his mom’s room. He was so dirty, he didn’t want to lie down on his own bed, and she wouldn’t be needing hers. It was all going out to the pile to burn anyway. He’d be taking her blankets and sheets out there and her pillow and even the mattress. Everything was going to burn until this room was bare. It was going to be only wood and wallpaper.

  He dropped his shorts and underwear, and his crotch looked so white against the sunburned, dirt-covered rest of him. A boner already just from thinking about Jennifer and the Hustler. The opening at the tip like an eye, watching him, knowing everything about him, all his secrets, everywhere his thoughts had gone.

  He took off the cotton glove, unwrapped the gauze, and his hand stung. It really hurt in the open air, the broken, exposed blisters. He tried grabbing on to his boner, but he couldn’t use his full palm. Only thumb and fingers, but it was hard to do much that way. It wasn’t very satisfying.

  But he did his best. The man in the Hustler had just arrived in town, thirsty and with a boner. Even his horse had a boner. It was eyeing the camera.

  This man wore spurs and stood at the bar downing a whiskey while a woman in red petticoats blew him. The man hardly noticed. Then she was bent over a table, and this was where Galen focused. High heels and fishnet stockings and legs spread, exposed and waiting, looking back to see what was coming. This was what Galen wanted. He’d never had Jennifer from behind. Something about this position was just more exciting than any other. He closed his eyes and tried to see her like that, tried to see what she’d look like in this dress. They’d get a small place out in the desert somewhere, let the dust blow in and cover the floor, and he’d wear spurs and bend her over an old wooden table. He’d drink a whiskey while he did it.

  Galen had to grab on with his full palm. Otherwise it just wouldn’t work. His hand stung terribly and his mother’s bed was too springy. He was bouncing around, which was distracting. It was kind of weird, also, to be jacking off in his mother’s bed. He felt like she was watching, almost, so he opened his eyes and expected her to be standing right there, but she wasn’t. He was in here alone. He needed to focus and come and get this over with and get back to his meditation.

  He was all distracted now, though, and he felt tired, incredibly tired.
It had been a long day, far too long, starting at the cabin with breakfast and his mother rushing them out of there. Everything that had happened since had been insane, totally insane.

  He had to look at the magazine again, at the woman spread over the table, and then at the man riding her from behind, drinking another whiskey. The man wasn’t even looking at her. He was looking up at the ceiling. He was the man who had never seen anyone he’d done. It was distracting. Galen closed his eyes again and tried to remember what it had felt like inside Jennifer, silky he remembered, hot and tight and wet and he sped up his hand and went full tilt, did his best to make himself come, but his hand hurt and he couldn’t focus and finally he gave up.

  Fuck, he said. I can’t come, and I can’t stop thinking about sex. This is hell. His hand was throbbing in pain.

  He curled on his side on his mother’s bed and rested. Eyes closed, his breath heavy, just a few minutes of rest and then he’d go finish shoveling. His chest falling in great exhales, so much more exhausted than he’d thought, and he was sinking. He tried to rise up out of it, but somehow that made him fall even deeper.

  Chapter 23

  An enormous grassland, and Galen walking. The earth volcanic, dark pumice covered in lichen. The yellow grass very sharp, growing in tufts like spines, growing from the rock itself.

  Heat waves visible in the yellow and black and red, making mirages. Lone trees and cacti always at a distance, no shade. His feet and legs were not flesh and blood. They were more like pencil erasers, wearing down. As he walked, he was becoming gradually shorter, and so he had to hurry. He had to cross before he ran out of eraser.

  Shadows of birds flying past, birds of prey with enormous wingspans, but he could never see the birds themselves. He squinted up into the sun, and then he tripped and threw out a leg and woke kicking at the bed.

  Uh, he said. Uh. He had trouble throwing off the dream, felt he was still crossing that desert. He was in his mother’s room, on her bed, cool with sweat and covered in dirt. Uh, he said.