by Taylor Brown
The boy set his game-bag on the kitchen table.
“Good,” said his father. “Better get cooking. I’m starving.”
The boy cut a block of butter into a glass dish and turned on the oven.
“Yes sir,” he said.
***
They ate oven-fried dove on white plates with sauteed peas. His father did not look at his dinner. He looked at the television set. The dark pearls of lead shot from the meat, he set them in a tight grouping on the oilcloth table setting. The boy spat his into a wastebasket he’d set near his foot. They ate in silence. On TV, Clint Eastwood sat his horse, squinting. The old set made his skin look orange, the mountains purple.
“Can I borrow the truck tonight?”
The old man sniffed.
“What for?”
“Just to get out.”
“Skylarking. Waste of time and money.”
The boy said nothing. He looked at the television set and spat a nugget of lead into the wastebasket.
***
His father was asleep in his recliner, his mouth a black vent that dribbled moisture. On TV, Clint peeled away his poncho, revealing an iron shield. The boy wondered why nobody had aimed for his head. He slipped out the backdoor and opened the truck door and set the gearshift into neutral. He began rolling the truck down the gravel drive, toward the road.
He cranked the engine a safe distance from the house and headed for the old railroad bridge. The moon was puddled in the dark slink of the river. The stars were out. No clouds. The boys were already on the bridge. Ricco and Troy, Danny and Sal. He could see them sitting up there, their silhouettes huddled against the night sky like dark and enormous birds. They had a case of beer, begged or stolen. The cans were silver. They threw him one as he approached.
“You’re just in time,” said Ricco.
“For what?”
Ricco handed him a rifle. “You know what.”
He sat down next to Troy and propped the rifle on his thigh.
Troy looked over at him. “You’re dead,” he said.
Whit spat.
Ricco pointed at Troy. “You ready?”
“Sure am.”
He pointed at Whit. “You?”
Whit nodded.
“Three, two, one, go!”
Whit and Troy popped their beers and started chugging. Troy finished first. He jumped up, hopped the railroad tracks, and hurled the empty can over the far side of the bridge. Then he jumped back, propped his rifle against one of the bridge’s steel trusses, and thumbed off the safety. He had a fancy autoloader chambered for .308. When the can appeared from under the bridge, sliding downstream, he started shooting. Geysers shot up around it.
“Shit,” he said. “Shit.”
Whit was right behind him. He was slower, smoother. The rifle they’d given him was an old bolt-action .22. When his own empty can appeared, he shot once. A black gape; it started to sink.
“Shit,” said Troy, differently this time. He sat down and groped in the box for another beer.
Whit sat down next to Ricco, handed him the rifle.
Ricco leaned over and bumped him, shoulder to shoulder.
“What’d you get into today, bud?”
Whit cracked a new beer and shrugged. “Went out running a couple of the old man’s dogs is all.”
Troy leaned forward.
“You run that dog for my Daddy?”
“Maybe.”
“He says he didn’t pay for no dog trained by you. Says your Daddy better make sure she’s good-to-go, or he ain’t paying.”
“He’ll pay,” said Whit.
“You sound pretty sure,” said Troy.
“I am.”
***
Whit felt his way back to the truck. Clouds had moved in; he could hardly see. His feet were unsteady, his vision liquid. The other boys were staying longer. It was Friday. He had to be up early tomorrow for chores.
The first beer can hit him dead in the gut as he came through the backdoor. It was full. He dropped to his knees and covered his face. The second beer, a Budweiser, busted his hand against his head. He turned and scrambled through the screen door and rolled down the back stoop.
“I told you not to take my truck, you little son of a bitch!”
A third beer struck the doorframe, hemorrhaging foam.
“Out drinking, that it? Here, have another!”
The last beer tore the screen from the door. Whit was already clawing his way up the back slope toward the kennels, clutching his bruised hand to his chest. He got to the chain-link door of the first one. A wire-haired vizsla, Sarah. He fumbled for his keys. He looked over his shoulder. His father’s shadow filled the rectangular light of the backdoor a moment, then started down the back steps, a case of beer under his arm. Whit got the padlock undone and crawled through the dog-sized door in the chain-link.
The vizsla had been curled in a ball; she had her head up now, watching him. Her eyes were almond, white-rimmed with alarm. Her ears were perked. She jumped up and came to him, sniffing him, her nose light against his skin. Inspecting him for wounds, for blood.
His father stood lopsidedly at the fence. Whit could smell him.
“Come out of there, you little son of a bitch!”
Whit held his hand to his chest, said nothing. The dog stood looking at the old man, rigid. His father grabbed hold of the chain-link and rattled it, violently.
“You hear me, you little—”
The dog exploded with fury, snarling, her wolf-teeth bared, her ears back.
“No!” said Whit.
He reached out to the dog, to pull her to safety. She was whelmed with power, quivering. He got her by the haunches. He was afraid what his father might do. But when he looked up, his father had stepped back from the fence. There was something strange in the old man’s face: surprise. He turned and staggered slowly back to the house.
***
Dawn. The sky was red, like a fire just over the horizon. He rose stiffly from the concrete floor. The vizsla looked up from her bed. Her head was cocked at him, her eyes wide, as if asking him a question.
“Good girl,” he told her.
He ruffled the scruff under her chin. Then he unlocked the padlock from inside the kennel and crawled through the door. The lights in the house were already on. He could see his father moving in the kitchen. He walked through the back door. His father’s hair was slicked back, clean. His overalls were pressed. He was cooking breakfast.
“Morning,” he said.
Whit said nothing.
“I’m cooking breakfast.”
“I saw.”
They sat at the table. Eggs, sunny-sided, and microwave sausage patties. Whit was hungry but forked his food around the plate.
“Last night—” said his father.
“Let’s not talk about it,” said Whit.
This was not the first time, not the last.
“But this time—” said his father.
Whit got up and walked to the bathroom and turned on the shower.
***
The phone rang. Whit was just in from feeding the dogs. The sun had just cleared the trees. His father answered.
“Parker’s Gun Dogs,” he said. He listened.
“Sarah, you say?” He shot a quick glance at Whit. Whit gave him no indication. “Sure,” said his father. “She’s ready.”
***
They pulled up an hour later, Troy and his father. They drove a big Dodge, black, with camouflaged rocker trim. It had metal dog-boxes in the bed and a whip antenna steadied with a tennis ball. Troy had on his hunting bib, blaze orange. He had a dip in. He spat in the driveway while his father rubbed his hands together and asked to see his new vizsla.
“We wanna run her this morning,” he said. “Get us some quail.”
“You won’t be disappointed,” said Whit’s father.
When they left, Whit went to clean out the empty kennel. He removed the plaid bed and dog bowls. He swept it out and hosed it down. The other dogs wa
tched him, nervous. When he went inside his father was depositing the cash in the small safe in his office. Whit went to the freezer and got a frozen pack of peas. He needed to ice his hand.
***
It was noon when the Dodge returned, rattling down their drive at speed. It bounced over the red ruts and skidded to a stop. Whit was standing on the jump-dock, launching deadfowl dummies for a pair of German short-hairs they were training. He quickly ordered them back to their pens. He locked them up and turned around in time to see Troy jump from the truck on one side, his father from the other. They left the doors open. His father dropped the tailgate and grabbed a dog by its collar and slid it out of the bed. It dropped slackly to the dirt. It was the vizsla, Sarah. Troy’s father stood over the body, hands on his hips. Looking at the house. Troy reached in through the passenger side and honked. Whit wanted for something scoped. He would have used it.
His father came ambling out of the house. His face was red. Whit started down the hill, fast. The shouting had started, the finger-pointing. He went straight to the dog. Her front leg was bent strangely, like it had an extra joint. A red shard was visible at the break. Blood pooled on the ground. Her head lay on the ground, her one eye watching all this. Whit looked into it. In its wet orb he saw the shadowy violence reflected, the boot-stamping and black-mouthed curses. He turned around.
“Goddamn bitch bit me,” said Troy’s father. He held out his arm. It was neatly vented at the forearm, red punctures crowned in bruise. The man’s mouth was wet.
“How’d she break that leg?” asked Whit’s father.
Troy sniffed. “Daddy kicked the bitch for biting him,” he said. “That’s how.”
“You’re damn right I did. Put her down is what I should of done.”
Whit’s father looked at the two men. Then he looked at Whit, sideways. Something flickered in his eyes: light.
“Well,” he said. “She never did like assholes.”
Troy’s father hit him in the jaw with a closed fist. You could hear the crack. Whit’s father went down to his knees, and the man hit him again, again. He held him by his shirt so he couldn’t go down. Whit’s father turned his head. His mouth and chin were messy and wet, his face bright-bearded with blood. His nose bubbled. His teeth were red. Troy’s father hit him again.
Whit looked at Troy. The boy leaned and spat. Smirked. Whit leapt across and feinted a punch. Troy covered. Whit kneed him in the groin. The boy dropped, face twisted with pain. Troy’s father had a pistol holstered at the small of his back. A fancy nickel-plated Colt with trick grips. It wiggled when he punched. Whit looked at it a long moment. Then he looked at his father, his face purpled and leaking. His jaw slack, like he was laughing. This man beating him, he was not going to stop. He was breathing hard. His face was flushed. But you could see it in his eyes. He wanted blood. Whit reached over and ripped the gun from its holster. He worked the slide and fired a round off into the sky.
Everything stopped.
“Get off him.”
The man dropped Whit’s father. He pulled his son off the ground. The two of them walked backwards to their truck, slowly.
“You little son of a bitch,” he said. “You’ll pay for this. The both of you will.”
“Maybe,” said Whit.
They tore off down the drive in a fit of smoke. Whit watched them a long time. He wanted to make sure they were gone. The truck disappeared down the far bend. He decocked the pistol and turned around. His father was not where he’d been. The ground was red-streaked where he’d crawled. He was curled next to the whimpering dog. He was whispering to her. Petting her.
“Good girl,” he was telling her. “You’re a good girl. We’ll get you fixed up, I promise.”
Whit stood over them. Their blood was mixed in the dirt. His father’s. The dog’s. The red earth darkened like molasses. His father looked up. The old man’s face was monstrous, misshapen, a storm of bruise and blood. But his eyes, they rose wide-welled and quivering from the damaged flesh. Hoping. Pleading. Not for help. For something else. Something harder to give.
Whit looked down at him a long moment. He worked his jaws. Blinked. He looked away. He started inside to call the vet. To get his father the bag of peas.
BLACK SWAN
She started over with one out of three sons and a buried pile of sweet potatoes. The other two of each were scorched, litter and staple both. Gunpowder and flambeau had rent a scar across the republic, clay and flesh red-gaped. Her heart hardened to a fist.
A month after the march, two night riders debouched from the wood to have their way, hungry and carnal. Confederates. Tied him, her lone remaining, to an amputee oak and cornered her in the burnt pantry. She soul-mined them both, armed with shears. Never so much blood, it came black as Texas crude. She put them in the ground, caparisoned in soot-streaked grays, teeth yellowed. Her lone remaining, a boy full of shrapnel, dug a two-man grave in the soft spot where the sweet potatoes had been. She dropped her crusted shears into the yawning earth beside them, story thus entombed.
A century later, great-grandson Winston was born disfigured, his feet curled club-like, purple and mean as twin bludgeons. But the orthopedists un-contorted his destiny in the modern fashion. Staples, pins, and fasteners riveted conformity from malleable flesh.
Thenceforth, he was preoccupied with underpinnings. A tripper of metal-detectors and wielder of his own. He had a top-shelf model, long as two sabers and heavier. Summer of his twentieth year, this wand went crazy in his own backyard. First exhumed was a pair of antique scissors. A corrosive like rust—but darker—froze the action. Big as veterinary shears, they couldn’t be pried asunder. Winston limped over to the clapboard house and laid them on the porch planks. There was no longer anyone inside to tell him what story this was. Mother had passed. Never a father.
“What’s down there?” he wondered aloud.
He trudged back for more, his lurching gait like a ball and chain manacled to his ankle. Shirtless and pale, he bore into the red earth like a mite, shoveling on and on into split raw palms. Six deep, the shovel hit upon a metal tube, long and curved with an ovate throat: a scabbard vacant, but nevertheless full of wonder. Winston toiled on, inspired, and next excised a white bone, ambiguous. Then tatters of cloth. Other relics. Soon the shovel was insufficient for what lay beneath.
“More firepower,” he told himself.
The backhoe was a Komatsu, yellow as a Tonka truck. It rented by the hour for half what he earned per. The front-end loader scooped out troughs of earth for sifting, and Winston could work it well. Slowly the carcass of history accrued on the front porch: the shears, scabbard, a broken saber, a belt buckle, fabric scraps, the frame of a six-shooter, more shards of bone. Then, finally, he uncovered a ribcage and two white bulbs of empty skull—imbedded fragments exhumed as if from an opened scar.
The porch became his autopsy table. Under the naked bulb heroes were assembled. Soldiers arranged out of excavated miscellany. Empty cranium atop scraps of uniform, armament hung low from no hips. Skeletons construed of artifact, fleshed of imagination. Cavalrymen. Last-standers before the onslaught of Sherman. Relations. Sons come to defend home and hearth from scorched policy, or so imagined. Winston reconstructed them gutless on the planks.
Twilight gathered and he hobbled back into the thirty-foot-wide bowl, ravenous, with him the metal detector. Below his feet lay the bygone scrap heap of history, soon to be resurrected. So prophesized the device, quickening his heart over treasure-rich soil. Surgical metal tripped it, his own. He did not know then that he dug for his own architecture.
The backhoe and he descended like tunnel drillers, earthmoving deep into the night. They pushed on and on, past six feet, past prudence, and found nothing. And then farther. Deeper. Dredging the russet soil in profound swaths, heedless. Winston wanted more than scant slag. He wanted the joinery between.
He found nothing and went to bed by the moon’s last wane. As he slept, disinterred brethren bivouacked in his cranium, begui
ling him. Fire-ingestive and bellicose, with swords aloft. Tomorrow he would unearth the bones of their warhorses, surely. And the clapboard house, once white, weathered silver—he would repaint it bright as the day ancestors died defending it. Least he could do. Its pitched frame the iceberg tip of a war beneath the soil, and thus imbibed of grandeur. For such he yearned.
He woke to a foul stench. Outside, the dug bowl brimmed with sewage. In the dark, the bulldozer had ruptured a pipe, precipitating the slow accumulation of black sludge beneath starlight. He walked over to the septic tank and tapped. Hollow. One thousand gallons bled dry. Winston turned to look upon the backyard pond he’d fashioned.
“Shit,” he said.
A shape floated atop the septage. Winston fished it out with a freshwater rod. It was a bird. Dead. Drowned in a lungful of feces and urine, thinking only of rest. And not just any winged migrant, but a swan. Trumpeter or Tundra he didn’t know. Neither anymore. A swan stained black. Divorced forever from its mate. They were monogamous, Winston knew that much. He knew the pain of rupture too. He brought it over to the house and hosed it down, but the feathers would never be white, the stain too deep.
Twenty years old, Winston clutched the polluted bird to his chest, tight. The bone-structure was more delicate than that of his hand, and hollow. Filled not of marrow or blood or steel, but air. Light enough for flight. Perhaps the truest creature to arc the sky, and its death, his doing. He, club-footed and clumsy, had drilled for the world’s framework, eager for stature and stainless girding, and struck only this.
He slogged to the other side of the yard, the soles of his warped feet carving half moons into the soil. There, far from cesspool and leech field, he dug a proper grave, double wide, and in it reburied the soldier pair, or what there was: articles of metallurgy and ivory. He did his best to lay the remnants properly, shears included.
Into the chest cavity of one skeleton he placed the despoiled swan. Razor-bobbed ribs clutched the creature like a heart transplanted. This seemed good to Winston. The sullied creature fit cozy in the man’s ribcage, and was protected. A museum may pay for such plunder, but Winston believed himself the better curator. Now he knew what ground he stood.
