by Jacob White
I told her hang up the phone and call an ambulance and she said fine but she was going to run over to the vet’s house, about a mile off. She needed help, she said.
Twenty-five minutes later I was turning in to their drive, a narrow crush in the snow bank along an otherwise empty highway. I parked behind his puny pickup with the oversized freezer he’d mounted on the back so he could sell organic chickens at the weekend market: my headlights blared for a moment against the rust and faded ice cream stickers. The pickup had Clare’s car blocked in. When I got out of my car I was surprised by the silence. I often am, up there. I figured the ambulance had come and gone and I’d be lucky to find anyone there. I followed the freezer’s extension chord up the walkway and stoop; it snaked up and in through the sill of a curtained dinette window. I could feel the sheet of warm air. I couldn’t help shaking my head.
I gave two soft knocks on the pane, then entered the kitchen door. Pete was sitting at the dinette table. His sloe eyes looked up without the ironical brow pitch I was used to. A small jagged sheet of wood fanned up from his head along where he parted his hair. It looked almost natural—the flap of unruly hair that greets us in the morning. Part of me saw this as just another symptom of how he managed his life.
“Son, you got a head full of wood there.” I flipped on the porch light so the ambulance could find us. I wasn’t prepared to be the first one here.
“Your sis gone out in the snow, nothing but her slip.” The eye closest to the wound had a slight stigmatism. I noticed, too, some blood caked deep in his black hair; could see where she’d wiped his forehead. “I guess that’s what she done. Her boots and coat is here still.”
“She ran up to the vet’s, Pete.” I sat down at the table. “Get you some help.”
“I mean, I sit up from the floor and she’s gone, and my guitar’s busted to hell. Kicked in.” This seemed some musician’s shorthand for the ultimate callowness. “I don’t really know where she is.” He said this as if about to cry. I realized then that he was angry. I’d never seen Pete angry. He was angry he didn’t know where she was. He was angry at the confusion because he didn’t yet realize it was he who was confused.
“She’s just up at Dick’s, Pete.” I jostled his hand.
He stared at me, my words already lost in the blacks of his eyes.
I looked over his shoulder and saw through a doorway and beyond the darkened dining room the odd upward glow of the den, where a lamp had been knocked over. The mantle was swiped clean. The old sepia photographs of Clare’s and my folks, the clock, the pewter candle holders, his great-granddad’s Swedish fowler—all lay scattered on the floor somewhere. A piano bench lay toppled, shorn of one leg. I saw sparkles of glass.
“Micah around?” I said.
He nodded and put his hand to the black pane. “Feel this, man. Cold. But, like, alive cold.” Then I noticed the bench leg, lying next to him on the table. I reached over and took it, set it on the floor by my chair. He didn’t seem to notice.
I stood up. “I’ll go up make sure he’s asleep.” I walked over in front of him. I put my hand on his shoulder, which I was for some reason terrified of doing, and told him to stay put. Then I headed into the dark dining room and up the stairs.
As usual all the lights in Micah’s room were off except for a flexible plant light. He lay on the floor under its blue-white tent, staring deep into an open book of dinosaurs. He wore blue pajamas and lay perfectly still, his face adult with concentration. Whenever I came to the house I made Micah kiss me on the cheek because he was shy and it embarrassed him. He’d wipe his lips and say “That prickled,” meaning my whiskers. I’d tease him about how hard I was going to make it for him when he got to junior high, and after he figured out I was kidding it made him laugh.
“That grow light’s making you stretch.”
He looked up, startled. His eyes blinked into tired focus. He hadn’t known I was here. He stood up and walked over with the open book in his hand. He stretched back the other arm and yawned, then stood looking up at me. “I’m supposed to be asleep.”
“I know you are. Why aren’t you?” I thought of the ruckus that must’ve waked him, hoping he’d discerned little of it.
“Those are pajamas,” he said, pointing at mine, tucked into my boots. He was amazed, delighted. “You got pajamas on.”
“You too. Now give me a hug and get in bed. It’s three in the morning.”
He put his face in my side and reached an arm around me, still dangling the dinosaur book with the other.
Downstairs I found Pete’s chair empty. The kitchen door was open and a windless cold had overtaken the bottom floor. Pete was sitting out on the snowy stoop.
“He’s out here,” he said as I walked out behind him. “Somewhere. I saw him.”
“Saw who?”
“That one that looks like me. Sneaking around under the snow. Under those bushes there. Soon he’ll crawl up the porch. Try to sneak back in.” Fog puffed thinly from his mouth. I noticed he had the piano bench leg back in his lap, clutching it.
He looked up at me. “I’m going to bust its head, Slim. Kill it.” But he couldn’t keep a straight face. He chuckled—at himself, it seemed. It was as if he didn’t quite believe himself. He’d always been a meek guy, always given this same apologetic laugh whenever Clare had called me over to fix something. Clare and I often agreed that he was in most ways a child.
“Okay, killer. Let’s get inside. I’m turning solid.” I took his arm and he rose and followed me in and sat back at the table. I took the bench leg from his hand, stepped out on the porch and slung it at the woods.
At this point I was worried most about my sister, who I pictured running barefoot through the mile of snowdrift forest between their house and the horse vet’s. I’d find out the next day this never happened. That she’d taken off the other way, running downhill toward the lake, through the steep of pines and powder and out to where the ice stopped, and couldn’t help loosing a whoop as she hit the heavy water. Enough at three in the morning to wake some lakeside retiree who came shuffling out onto the ice in time to snatch up her arm just as she’d pulled herself out. He knew who she was—knew our folks, maybe—and slapped her. He put a coat around her, took her up to his trailer. She cried for an hour before he finally made out she’d killed her husband, which is when he phoned the police, fetched a shotgun from his bedroom, and sat back down opposite her in his recliner. She fell into me sobbing with this story the next day when I picked her up from the police station. I wasn’t much surprised by any of it.
Pete was pushing salt around the tabletop with his fingertips, muttering some ballad about strawberry wine. It had been about twenty minutes and no ambulance or even police had arrived. And then I got to thinking I’d better put in a call myself.
As I was on the phone Pete stood and walked out of the kitchen. I was struck when I saw the back of his denim shirt, soaked in blood, a great tribal gush of it, reminding me again that something larger was among us, that this night was a shelf we were all about to slide off. He disappeared into the darkness of the dining room, where he seemed to be standing still. The room’s hard surfaces resounded with a cough.
The dispatcher told me no one had called, that an ambulance was on the way, that I shouldn’t try to remove the object, that the victim should remain immobile. The victim. The word reminded me of how all this would be written up tomorrow.
I hung up and walked into the dining room just as Pete was heading up the stairs. I followed him up. His arm stiff on the banister, he lifted his right leg higher than he needed for each step. I told him it was best if he stayed sitting. He said nothing. I said, “Pete.” I don’t think he knew I was there.
We went into the bathroom and Pete sat backwards on the closed toilet seat. He lifted the tank’s lid, set it aside, and reached down to fix the stopper and chain. He replaced the lid, stood, then turned sid
eways so to get by me and walked out.
In the bedroom he made his and Clare’s bed. Then I followed him across to Micah’s room. Micah still lay on the floor under his lamp, not looking up as Pete stepped over him and began to make his bed too. I was surprised by the expert tugs at Micah’s Star Wars comforter that told me he’d done this before. His shirt cuffs were still wet from the toilet and his fingers left faint pink smudges where he touched the sheets.
As Pete leaned over the bed his head cast an absurd shadow on the wall—a Roman soldier, a punk rocker. Micah gave a habitual glance back, squinting from his tent of light and seeing, it seemed, nothing.
Pete stepped back over his son, walked out of the bedroom and down the hall. He sat down on the top stair and vomited, then stood up. He had some trouble getting down the stairs. I sidled next to him, my arm around his waist.
We veered away from the funhouse-lit den and back toward the kitchen. He stopped at the dining room table, which, in the darkness, seemed a depository for years of unpaid bills. He took up one of these bills and walked into the kitchen. He sat back at the dinette, placed the bill face down, and began writing on the back of it, his hand pencil-less, his words invisible. For five minutes I watched the beak of his fingers hover across the page as happens when we’re trying to figure out how to begin.
“What you writing there, Pete?”
No answer. I watched him a while longer.
Then I decided I should go bring Micah down. Maybe it was a bad idea. But it was his father, after all, and it was maybe now or never.
Heading up I noticed a few dark dimes of blood on the stairs.
“Come on down and visit a bit,” I said into his doorway. “Long as you’re up.”
Micah squinted, then got up and walked over to me, looking now heavily sleepy. He allowed himself to be picked up and carried downstairs. As we walked into the kitchen I held his head into my neck so he wouldn’t see the back of Pete’s shirt. I sat him at the table, in the chair between his father and me. “Uncle Slim’s got on pajamas,” Micah said. Pete seemed to be staring at the backs of his hands. He didn’t acknowledge either of us. Micah stared up at him. At his head, his face, his head again.
I should have prepared him somehow. I should’ve told him what he’d see.
“Micah,” I said. I didn’t know how to finish. He wasn’t listening.
We sat there.
After a while I got one of Pete’s nonalcoholic beers from the fridge and sat back down. “You know any jokes?” I asked Micah, popping the tab.
Micah nodded and sat up in his chair. His eyes were holes. He put his hands in front of him, interlocking them in a sort of shadow hawk, then popped off his thumb and put it back on. I widened my eyes and he jerked his hands back under the table, smiled, and swung his legs, looking at his father, then back at me. Pete was mouthing something to himself. I asked Micah to show me again, and he did, more slowly this time, showing me the stubbed knuckle, the thumb he held in the fingers of the other hand—working hard to hold his hands just right so I couldn’t figure out the trick. I asked him to show me how.
Some minutes later the sheriff shuffled into the kitchen without knocking. He was in a parka and jeans and looked about as tired as the rest of us. He was near sixty and his hair stuck out wild when he pulled off his knit cap. I was giddy with exhaustion and nearly laughed. Micah did laugh. The sheriff glanced at Micah as he walked over and took Pete’s head in his hands, holding him with his fingers by the chin and the nape, peering thoughtfully into the wound. Then he pulled out a penlight and leaned across the table between me and Micah, on his elbows, holding the light into each of Pete’s eyes.
“Ambulance right behind me,” he said, clicking off the penlight. “Cayuga Medical’s socked in. Said it’d be faster to send one up from Schuyler. But I don’t know.”
For some reason Pete’s face turned bright red and began to spill tears. “I don’t know where she is,” he said. “I’m sorry.” Then as quickly his face went blank again.
The sheriff looked at me for the first time, eyes squinted behind his glasses. “You got somewhere to take the boy?” He tilted his head at Micah, who stared into his lap.
I nodded and took Micah upstairs. In his bedroom I gathered up his parka and school books, and together we went through his drawers, putting clothes in a duffel.
When we came back downstairs the sheriff was squatted in the wrecked den. He’d turned on the overhead and was staring at what I hadn’t seen before, a long sticky lake of Pete’s blood. Nearby was the busted chaff his mahogany guitar—a papery thing of laminate and wire. He exhaled. “Ahh Pete.” Again I was careful to keep Micah’s face against my neck. We headed toward the kitchen.
Only as I turned away from the living room did I become aware of the smudges across its walls—the ones that told how he’d swiped the mantle and wheeled swinging through the room, a life’s worth of anger risen up in him and in a short minute spent. The thought of it filled me with an unexpected sweep of fear and helplessness. My chest had begun to flutter, and as I walked through the dark dining room I held fast to the back of Micah’s head, pressing his face hard into my collar.
In the kitchen I saw the sheriff had put a woolen plaid blanket over Pete’s shoulders, something I should’ve done. His dad’s back covered, I set Micah down in the doorway. But something kept us from walking in. Pete was leaned into the wall; the good side of his head rested against the pane. Its reflection showed the little wing of wood. It was clear he had died.
Trying to sound casual, I called into the den—“I guess we’re off.” I was already guiding Micah toward the door.
“I got it. You all get on down the hill.”
At the door, though, I stopped and looked back at Pete. I took Micah’s duffel and told him to hug his dad goodnight. The boy walked over and hugged him without looking at his face, the way kids do when they’re tired, then dragged his too-big boots back toward me and out through the door, which I held open for him as I pretended to tell Pete good night buddy.
Walking out to the car I heard the siren—distant, quietly invading. I backed out of their drive and could see the red pulses coming up from the west. I was glad to be heading the opposite direction.
Later I would make a pallet on the floor of my den, something I’d done once before for Micah and that he’d liked. After a few nights, though, he’d start sleeping on the couch, and by spring I would have us a larger apartment, Clare would be in a home over in Albany, the house sold, and we would all of us know what it meant to become people we’d never have recognized. For now, though, tonight, no one knew a thing about what it meant. We didn’t understand yet.
We rode down the hill together. The car was soon filled with asthmatic heat and the scalpy smell of old parkas. I drove slowly and watched for the eyes of deer.
“Help keep an eye out for deer,” I said, “till we hit town.”
Everyone here’s hit a deer. You expect it. I hit a wolf on this road eight years back, the first I’d seen my whole life of living here. It had shot out low and smallish across the road and for some reason I remember the sight of its pinned-back ears just before I felt it under my car.
Micah yawned and closed his eyes. Then he opened them, said, “All right,” a world of uncertainty behind the words, or maybe tiredness. Before us my high beams opened into a swallow of darkness. I began to think about what I’d say to the kid when he walked into my math class a few years from now. I didn’t know what I’d say. I didn’t know what I’d say when we got to my apartment. And whatever he knew, it was enough to keep him from falling asleep, and so we sat there together, looking ahead, waiting for the lights of Ithaca.
7. Maintenance
I had a wife almost. Then I had a cinderblock house with palms. I had a dog. At night I had the hours. The dog wandered room to room, paws ticking, until one night—a taut absence of ticking. I sensed
the dog by the bed staring at me in the dark. Mouth open, tail going. I sat up to rub her ears and put my feet down in a half inch of water. I bore it for a moment. Then we both slapped through the house and out to the backyard where I could sit and splay my feet in the dry airy grass and look at what stars were still there. I was in my underwear, skull hooked over the back of a plastic chair, dog off somewhere.
Wrenches, I thought. Where are my wrenches? The Yellow Pages. Broken something. The water broke. The star I was staring at started moving around a little, like my pupil was greased and nothing could sit still on it. In the corner of my eye some other stars slipped around too, slipping outward. It was discouraging.
Here it comes, I thought. The great sliding loose, quiet landslide of sense. I was recently thirty-two and already demoted to the back halls of my life, the back offices. There were channels to addressing the water and I did not know them. When did I go from being president of myself to being, like, vice president? And from vice president to janitor, then to something beneath vocation altogether, wandering the back halls and back offices, for years wandering? I had been wandering these back halls and back offices looking for some work to do but not really looking because there was no work; the offices had been abandoned, file cabinets gaping, desk drawers overturned on the floor. There was only the wandering, this lurking around corners or more often standing still, staring down another long hallway under the drum of air ducts in the ceiling.
