Refresh Refresh

by Benjamin Percy

  Which is why, when he called and invited me to join him camping and hunting in the Ochoco National Forest, I surprised myself by saying yes.

  I wasn’t the only one surprised. “You’re sure?” he said.

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “Your mother just thinks . . . I just figured . . .” His voice fell off a cliff here, uncharacteristically uncertain.

  I tried to fill the sentence for him in as diplomatic a way as possible. “Some guy time would definitely be healthy.”

  “Exactly,” he said, relieved, his voice rising to a manly pitch reserved for taverns and locker rooms. “We’ll drink some beers and raise some hell!” Here he paused and cleared his throat and his sober tone resumed. “I can’t remember the last time we talked, you know. I mean, really talked.”

  He hit the nail on the head.

  East of Bend, the uninhabited country begins as immediately as the ocean begins off the shore. This is the high desert. In a beat-up Bronco, my father and I drove through the sagebrush, the flat yellow dinginess interrupted by the occasional pumice or cinder quarry. Though it was October and though by night the temperature might drop into the forties, thick heat waves rose from the road, shrouding the distant Ochoco hills and making them appear unreal.

  I was working in Portland as a software developer and my father was trying to figure out what this meant. For four years he hadn’t bothered to ask about my work except to say, “How’s work?”

  In college, when I announced my decision to major in computer science, he told me flat out he didn’t consider it an honest way to make money. He had not gone to college—“Didn’t see the point,” he said—and worked as a contractor, constructing the luxurious gated communities that continue to sprout up all over Bend, inhabited by retired Californians who moved there for the skiing and golf.

  Now, for whatever reason—guilt or genuine curiosity or something else—he asked me in a loud voice, speaking over the noise of the radio and the engine, what exactly the Internet was, what exactly a computer did.

  My father is a big man—with a beard and a keg-of-beer belly—a man who wouldn’t look out of place in a truck commercial. What he doesn’t understand, he normally labels worthless and sweeps aside with his fist and a few select words. Which is why, when I answered his questions and when I noticed his eyebrows coming closer and closer together in confusion, his knuckles growing whiter at the steering wheel, I decided to change the subject to one he would enjoy.

  “How’s Boo working out for you?” Boo was a lab/retriever mix he bought about a year ago from an alfalfa-farmer neighbor. He had always wanted a hunting dog and he had been training Boo obsessively.

  “Oh, he’s a good boy.” My father smiled and adjusted the rearview mirror so he could spy on Boo where he slept in the backseat in a horseshoe shape. “Boo?” he said. “Hey, Boo bear?” At the sound of his name, the dog perked his ears and lifted his head from his paws and thumped his tail a few times. “You ready to hunt, Boo?” my father said, and Boo barked sharply.

  My father then began to explain at length how raising a dog is no different than raising a child. He claimed a man who fails to sufficiently and constantly train his dog, to test it, to discipline—from its weaning to its death—is in for a rude awakening. “Boo wasn’t even a month old when I first introduced him to water, to various types of cover, and of course to game birds,” he said and ran a hand across his beard, neatening it. “When it comes to dogs, you got to develop their obedience and hunting desire from the get-go or they won’t grow up right.”

  Here he gave me a look full of judgment and love that quite frankly pissed me off, but I pretended not to notice—I kept up my pleasant demeanor—because with him, when things boiled over, it took a lot of time and energy before he would treat you civilly again—and we had a long weekend ahead of us.

  He explained how he first coaxed Boo into water. “I took my fly rod, see?” His hand mimicked casting. “And with a pheasant wing dangling from it, I shot it off into the shallow part of the pond and let Boo chase it and sight-point it.”

  Then he baited Boo with a dead bird, and then a live lame bird. “At first, my pup got afraid when he felt the bottom disappear under his legs, but I got in the pond with him and showed him how safe it was, and now he can, by God, hardly go by a puddle without wanting to jump in it.” I remembered him shoving me off a dock and demanding I tread water for sixty seconds and laughing much as he laughed now, looking lovingly at his dog.

  I admit to feeling something like jealousy.

  “No,” he said, as if responding to some conversation I wasn’t a part of, “Boo won’t be much help to us deer hunting, but he’s good company.”

  I continued to listen and he continued to speak until the final distance—where the sagebrush gave way to juniper and pine trees—became the near distance and the ground began to steadily rise and the evergreen forest filtered the sun into puddles that splashed across the highway. We turned off the air conditioner and rolled down our windows because here the heat was gone, replaced by a pure cool air that made breathing feel like drinking.

  My father was a creature of habit and for as long as my family had been visiting the Ochocos, we made our camp along the South Fork of the John Day River, in the Black Canyon Wilderness. Besides the occasional Forest Service truck grumbling along the nearby logging road, we never saw anyone and my father considered the spot his own.

  To remember the exact location, he had blaze-marked a pine with his hatchet. “Keep an eye out,” he said, and then, “There!” indicating the tree with the wound scabbed over by hard orange sap. We parked under its branches and tramped through the bear grass and lupin, seeking the cold spring that bled into the South Fork, and next to it, our old firepit, probably with a few weeds growing through its ashes.

  We found something else entirely.

  Boo ran ahead of us, popping his teeth at butterflies, barking at a chipmunk that chattered a warning from a nearby tree, and then his body went still. “You see that?” my father said, nodding in Boo’s direction. “He’s sighted something there. Maybe a ptarmigan or a grouse.”

  It was another thirty feet to where Boo pointed, his body as black and as rigid as obsidian, his snout indicating something hidden among the knee-high grass. “At ease,” my father said and the dog relaxed his pose and wagged his tail, but kept his eyes focused ahead of him.

  Here was the cold spring—the size of a hot tub—surrounded by willows and sun-sparkled stones, and next to it, our firepit, and next to it, a body.

  The man had been dead a long time. So long I could only identify him as male by his clothes—his jeans and flannel shirt—and even then I could not be certain. The vultures and the coyotes and the flies and the worms had had their way with him. I imagined the coyotes howling when they did it, fighting over the juiciest cuts of meat.

  After a stunned silence, I ran. I ran and probably made it fifty feet before I stopped and found my cool and steadied my breathing and returned to my father, slowly.

  “This is bad,” he said. He was wearing a John Deere cap and he removed it now and put his hand into its hollow as if seeking an explanation there. “This is a hell of a thing.” He looked like a man who has woken from a nap and cannot find his bearings.

  I took my cell phone from my pocket. No surprise: there was no service here, far from any tower. “If we drive to the top of the canyon,” I said. “If we get a little higher, I might be able to get a signal. It’s worth a try anyway.”

  “No.” My father put his hat back on and straightened it.

  “Excuse me?”

  “No,” he said again. “What’s the rush?” He lifted his hand and let it fall and slap his thigh. “I tell you something: he’s in no rush.”

  I understood this completely and not at all. “Dad?” I said. “No.”

  There was concern on his face, but I genuinely believe this had more to do with having to abandon our campsite than with the dead man sprawled a
cross it. He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed just hard enough so I knew he meant business. “Justin,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Look. It turned out to be a beautiful day, didn’t it?” And he was right—it was—the kind of bright blue day that bleached everything of its color. “How about let’s enjoy it?” He regarded the dead man and I noticed his cheek bulge, his tongue probing the side of his mouth. “Tomorrow we’ll drive to John Day and tell the police. But not today.”

  Boo crept toward the dead man, his muscles tense, his body low, as if certain the blackened pile of bones and sinew would leap up at any moment and attack. When it didn’t, his movements loosened and he panted happily and waded into the spring to drink.

  “Okay, Justin?”

  I looked at my feet—something I do when gathering my thoughts—and there discovered a weather-beaten pack of Marlboros, the cigarettes that could not kill the dead man quick enough. “Okay,” I said in a voice I hardly recognized as my own. “Fine.”

  From faraway came the sound of a diesel horn, a logging truck rocketing along a distant highway, reminding me that no matter how much this felt like the middle of nowhere, it wasn’t.

  We made our camp twenty yards upstream from the dead man. While Boo splashed along the banks, chasing the silvery flashes of fish, I set to work digging a new firepit and my father unloaded from the Bronco our rifles and fishing poles and cooler and duffel bags and his old army-issue canvas tent. It leaked and smelled like mothballs and mildew and every night I had ever spent in it, I woke up swollen and sneezing.

  That Christmas I had bought him a new tent from REI—one of those fancy waterproof, windproof four-man deals with a lifetime guarantee and a screened-in ­moonroof.

  “Dad?” I said, and he said, “What?”

  “What happened to the new tent I bought you?”

  “This has been a good tent for us.” He patted it fondly. “I like this tent.” He did not look at me, but set to work unfolding the canvas and planting the stakes.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” My voice went high and I tried to control it. “That tent cost me nearly three hundred fucking dollars and you’re just going to let it rot in the attic?”

  He finished hammering a stake into the ground and stood up and straightened his posture to accentuate his six-foot frame. Beneath his stare I felt as if I had shrunk a good five inches, as if my chest hair and muscles had receded—and I became seventeen all over again.

  That was the year Mom and I bought him a bicycle for his birthday, an eighteen-speed Trek. “Boy,” he had said when he ran his hands along it. “Wow.” That night he stripped off every gear except the hardest and from then on rode it all up and down the country highways with a terrible grimace on his face.

  A grimace similar to the one he wore now, eyeing me with a hand resting on his belly. “I didn’t ask for the thing,” he said, “and I didn’t want it.” He began to rub his belly as if to summon his anger from it like a genie. “And when are you going to learn that quality doesn’t always come with a price tag? Just listen to you. You’re as bad as a Californian.”

  Just then Boo came trotting over to us, grinning around a femur bone with a strip of denim sticking to it. My father said, “Release,” and took the bone and stood there, holding it, staring at it, not knowing what to do. Boo wagged his whole body along with his tail and my father looked at me. What he was feeling then, I didn’t know. His emotion was masked from me, hidden behind his beard.

  We plopped our lines in the South Fork and came away with five rainbow trout, each the size of my forearm. We gutted them and threw their heads in the river. We fried them in a pan with a few strips of bacon. We ate and drank and sat in silence. The only sound was the rushing of the river and the occasional crack of an opened Coors can. My father was like a still-life painting, his hand on Boo’s head, motionless and watching the fire with a detached ­expression.

  I wanted to shake him and hit him and hug him at once. I wanted to get back in the Bronco and return the way we came. I considered sleeping on the bare ground, but the gathering clouds and the nearness of the dead man drove me inside the musty tent.

  I woke to absolute darkness and the dull even noise of rainfall. The entire world seemed to hiss. I clicked on my flashlight, revealing a tent that drooped and breathed around me with many damp spots dripping and pattering my sleeping bag.

  Have you ever noticed, when you lay your head to your pillow and listen—really listen—you can hear footsteps? This is your pulse, the veins in your ear swelling and constricting, slightly shifting against the cotton. I heard this now—a sort of undersound, beneath the rain—only my head was nowhere near my pillow. I had propped myself up on my elbow.

  There it was. Or was I only imagining it? The rasping thud a foot makes in wet grass—one moment behind the tent, the next moment before it, circling.

  Before I went to bed, as a sort of afterthought, I had tied shut the front flaps. Now they billowed open with the breeze, the breeze bearing the keen wet odor of rabbit­brush, a smell I will always associate with barbed-wire fences, with dying, with fear.

  Perhaps the knot had come undone with the wind or perhaps my father had risen to pee. Outside, thousands of raindrops caught my flashlight’s beam and brightened with it. I imagined something out there, rushing in—how easy it would be—its shape taking form as it moved from darkness into light.

  My father released a violent snore. I spotlit him with the flashlight, wanting to tell him shh. His fingers twitched like the legs of the dreaming dog he draped his arm over. His mouth formed silent words, his eyeballs shuddered beneath his eyelids, and I wondered what was going on in there, inside of him.

  Morning, a sneezing fit woke me. And after I wiped the gunk from my eyes and pulled on my jeans, I discovered outside the dewy grass trampled down, and before the tent, a boot. Its leather was badly torn and discolored, as if it had passed through the digestive tract of a large animal. I stepped around it, keeping an eye on it, on my way to the firepit. We had stored some wood in the tent with us and I kindled it now with newspaper and boiled water for coffee.

  The smell of the grounds woke my father. He emerged from the tent in his white T-shirt and his once-white BVDs. He stretched and yawned dramatically and the noise brought Boo from the tent. Boo promptly picked up the boot with his teeth and presented it to my father as a cat would a dead mouse. “Goddamnit, Boo,” my father said and picked up the boot and shook it at him. “Bad dog. Bad dog.” Boo yipped once and cocked his head in confusion and my father examined the boot before hurling it into the river, saying, “Thing looks like a hay baler got it.”

  About last night, I mentioned nothing, asking instead if he wanted bacon.

  We set off with our rifles strapped to our backs. The rain had left the world dewy with its after-breath, and in the shady spots, a light mist clung to the ground, coiling around our feet, soon to be burned away by the sun. We followed the South Fork until we found a game trail bearing many hoof­prints, rain-blurred but recent, and we pursued them up and up and up until we gained the rim of the canyon.

  We paused here to get our breath. A small fire—no doubt triggered by lightning—had not long ago burned through this plateau, making the trees sharp and black at their tops like diseased fangs. When I leaned against a pine, its shadow stuck to me.

  A basalt cornice jutted from the canyon wall and my father climbed out on it. Far below him, in the spots the sunlight had not yet warmed, vapors floated up and fingered the air. He coughed something from his lungs and spit it over the edge and followed its fall and laughed softly. He was so natural and fearless, standing casually at the edge of a hundred-foot drop, eating his trail mix and peering through his binoculars and cursing the big stags for hiding from him, the goddamned chickens.

  Whereas I—with my freshly deodorized armpits and my $100 safari jacket with Velcro compartments and all sorts of zippers and buttons and hooks for hanging knives and compasses—did not fe
el nearly so comfortable. Add to this the dead man wandering through my mind like a tumor, distracting me, and you have a hunter who hardly knew which end of the rifle to point away from his body.

  The trail we followed, after crossing through a dense pine forest, dropped halfway down the canyon and ran into a willow and cottonwood thicket. Spring­water made the ground marshy here. This, combined with the forty-degree angle, made me place every footstep carefully—though my father marched along at a fast pace, unaware or unafraid of any danger. Birds called from an unseen place ahead of us and their music had something dark in it. They grew louder, croaking and cawing, and in a small bear-grass meadow we finally came upon them, nearly two dozen crows and magpies and buzzards.

  Boo sight-pointed them and my father said, “At ease,” and then, “Sick.”

  With one fluid motion Boo shot forward, barking fiercely. The small birds cawed their surprise and flapped up into the high branches, complaining down on us with their rusty voices. The buzzards remained—hissing, opening their wings—until the last moment, when Boo lunged at them, and then they rose above the treetops, where they wheeled in a tornado formation, but did not depart. Something fell from one of their claws, a rag of gray flannel, and it fluttered between my father and me like a piece of ash.

  We knew what it had come from. We did not want to know, but we knew.

  This dead man was fresher than the other, no more than a few days old. He lay splayed out in a sort of bloody X. I cannot tell you if he was blond or brown-haired, if he was fat or skinny, because I could not focus on the body for more than a second. I did not cry, nor did I run—but I closed my eyes and pressed my hands to them until fireworks played across my retinal screen.