by Callan Wink
She left, and James was forced to ponder the implications. It had to be bad if a sixth-grade girl could see that he was fucked.
—
Carina lived in a small rental cabin on the river, set back in a grove of old cottonwoods. Once, in a windstorm, he’d lain awake, envisioning whole trees shearing off at rotten points in their trunks, branches punching through the roof, flattening him and Carina in the bed. He imagined them being found out that way.
Carina wasn’t home and he sat on her front step. He was preparing to leave when her car pulled in behind him. She got out and groaned at the sight of him. “I’ve had a bad day,” she said, “I don’t know if I can handle you right now.”
“Maybe I’ve come here to profess my undying love.”
She snorted.
They did it with her bent over the small two-burner stove, her skirt up around her waist. In their frantic movements, one of them nudged a burner switch and soon the cabin was full of a strange odor. James thought for a moment that he was having some sort of olfactory response to imminent ejaculation. And then Carina was slapping him and swearing. A section of her hair had begun to curl and smoke.
—
He sat at the foot of the bed facing her. She was on her back inspecting the ends of her hair.
“God,” she said, “what a day.”
“She’s moving her stuff out right now. That’s partly why I’m here. I can’t really go home for a while. I drove by the house, and she was loading boxes.”
Carina didn’t say anything. She wet her fingertips in her mouth and rubbed at a burnt end.
“Boxes. Moving, dying, breaking up. All life’s great tragedies are marked by the appearance of those goddamn square cardboard units. Such an ominous shade of brown.” He’d thought of this earlier today, and now it pleased him to say it. He wished she’d come to his side of the bed and put her hand on his leg. He didn’t think that was asking too much.
“Fuck,” Carina said. “I may have to get a haircut to fix this.”
“Part of me didn’t actually believe that she was going to leave. We had some serious work-it-out talks. We went camping up on the Stillwater last weekend. We sat side by side next to the campfire. She said the stars above were like a million diamonds. She said that. I almost asked her to marry me.”
Carina was pressing her hands to her face. Her fingernails, as always, were immaculate, painted a brilliant red. Each nail was like a little cherry hard candy that James wanted to crush between his teeth.
“I’m serious,” he said. “I was going to propose. And you know what? Why can’t the stars above be like a million diamonds? And why, when she said that, did I want to tell you about it immediately?” James stopped. There was some sort of noise emerging from behind Carina’s hands, both of which were now clamped over her mouth. Her fingernails were digging into her cheeks and her eyes were screwed shut. And then she rose from the bed and he could hear her retching in the bathroom.
When she emerged, her dark hair was in beautiful disarray. She was brushing her teeth, one arm crossed over her bare breasts.
—
Carina had come from San Francisco on a grant to teach creative writing to at-risk girls on the Crow Reservation. She was writing a book about her experiences. For someone who could be so sarcastic, downright caustic, it surprised James to see the level of earnestness with which she approached her job. She loved it. She loved the at-risk girls—a classification that, on the reservation, seemed synonymous with the general population. She approached each class day with happy anticipation. If he happened to entertain the idea of staying over on a school night, she would kick him out so she could prepare. She was a teacher and he was a teacher, but what she did was something completely different. He fully acknowledged that. She had a passion. He enjoyed the really nice sense of calm that came from having good health benefits.
She sometimes read him sections of stories or poems, written by her girls. James had to admit that some of the stuff was pretty remarkable. There was one he always remembered, the words themselves and the way Carina had read it, in bed, naked, on her stomach with her feet up in the air, her heels knocking together in time with the words. I look at him, the boy that doesn’t love me, and it’s like a badger has climbed into my chest. The badger tramples my stomach while it chews on my heart.
—
Carina got in bed. She continued to brush her teeth. She also started to cry.
“I’m sorry,” James said. “I shouldn’t have been talking about all that stuff. It’s been tough for me lately and I’m—”
Carina was shaking her head, pointing at the kitchen. “Can you get me a glass to spit in?” she said, her voice garbled by toothpaste.
When he returned with the glass she spit, handed it to him, and then rolled in bed to face the wall.
“Today Ellen Yellowtail went to the bathroom and sawed through her wrists with an obsidian spearpoint from the early Clovis era. She asked to be excused and was gone for twenty minutes, and I had a weird feeling and I went into the bathroom and there was blood under one of the stall doors and she was in there. James, she was still kind of moving around, slowly, in a pool of her own blood. She was making, like, fish movements or something. Trying to swim through the floor. That will never go away. I will have that forever. And then, on the way home today, I literally caught myself thinking, for a split second, Damn you, Ellen, you little bitch. Do you have any idea what kind of thing you have just lodged in my brain? Can you believe that? What kind of person thinks that in response to something like this?
James was still holding the glass with Carina’s toothpaste spit in it. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “An obsidian spearpoint? The Clovis era?”
“In science class, they were having a prehistoric unit. Apparently, there was a guest speaker from Montana State who brought visual aids. Ellen pocketed it at some point when no one was looking. Last week I asked them to write me a paragraph about some of their writing goals for the summer. She wrote that she had gotten a job at the Dairy Queen and that she was going to carry a little notebook in her waitress apron so she could just jot down observations about all the interesting people she would see. That’s how she put it. She was going to observe and jot things down. No one who jots things down kills themselves.”
James got in bed and put his arms around her. He’d come to tell her that he was leaving. It seemed rather impossible now—the telling, not the leaving.
—
In the morning, Carina still sleeping, he pointed the car south. It was green-up, the best time to be driving through the great swaths of western grassland. Crossing Wyoming was like riding a fresh swell of chlorophyll. He pushed his way into Colorado until he hit the front range traffic on I-25 and then he got a room and ate a bad meal and watched sports highlights before surrendering to the pull of stiff hotel sheets.
He was up early, an egg sandwich and coffee to go. Past Denver, the traffic eased and the land flattened. It was still Colorado, but it could have been anywhere. Eventually he broke out and covered the skinny Oklahoma panhandle in about the time it took to listen to a full Townes Van Zandt album. And then—just as the sun cracked itself down on the vast, oil pump–studded plain that stretched around as far as he could see—James crossed over into Texas.
—
His brother lived in a maze of culs-de-sac and identical two-story homes with two-car garages. The streets were named after trees or Ivy League colleges. James imagined that if you lined up all the kids and golden retrievers of the neighborhood on the sidewalk, they, too, would prove indistinguishable.
Casey’s wife, Linda, met him at the door. She was big and brassy and blond. James had seen her in a bikini once, and she had the Lone Star of Texas tattooed on the small of her back. She pressed a beer into his hand and led him into the study, where, predictably, Casey had deigned to remain instead of coming out to meet James. Like Don Corleone, he had always enjoyed receiving visitors, especially family members, as opposed to just gre
eting them, like a normal person.
Casey was sitting at his desk, shuffling some papers. He looked up, surprised, as if he hadn’t known James was there, as if he hadn’t heard him talking to his wife in the kitchen. He stood, they shook hands, and then Casey pulled him into an awkward hug, both of them leaning over the expanse of desktop between them.
They hadn’t seen each other in almost a year, and they launched into all the usual topics—last year’s presidential election, weather as of late, the state of the MSU men’s basketball program, their respective health, their mother’s continued descent into Jesus-tinctured battiness.
Linda brought them sandwiches and more beer. When she put the plates down in front of them they each got a smile, a “there ya go” and a personalized heartwarming southern term of endearment. He got “honey” and Casey got “darlin’.”
“Damn it, Casey,” James said while Linda was still within earshot, “why is your wife such a horrible nag?”
“Oh, you stop,” she said. “Ya’ll are too bad. Ya’ll holler if you need anything.” And then she went back to the living room to watch TV.
James had read somewhere that a study done of three thousand American couples found that those engaged in traditional gender roles—male breadwinner, female homemaker—were 50 percent happier than couples who comported themselves less conventionally. He thought about mentioning this to Casey, but decided against it. In general his brother was not a man who needed validation that his ways were correct.
Casey got up and closed the door to his study. He poured two glasses of whiskey from a decanter on the sideboard and gave one to James gravely before settling back into his chair. James knew he was loving this. Casey leaned back and sipped his whiskey.
“Well,” he said. “What’s the deal? You having a bit of trouble?”
Casey was a lawyer. One of the most unsatisfying parts of his life, as far as James could tell, was how infrequently his family members needed legal counsel. It was endearing how ready he was to spring into action, to roll up his sleeves and get litigious to preserve the family honor. “Going to Billings to get a new muffler put on your car, you say? Well if you get in any trouble over there you call me, understand?” At some point, James realized he might have to get himself incarcerated, just to make Casey feel needed.
“It’s not really a legal matter,” he said. “Affairs of the heart and all that.” Casey shrugged, disappointed. Somehow, most of his whiskey was already gone. “Hell, I don’t know, Casey. I just needed a change of scenery. Do you mind if I loaf around for a little bit?”
“My casa es tu casa, brother, you know that.”
“Gracias, amigo. Let’s drink more of your fancy whiskey.” James watched Casey pour them both more bourbon, man-sized slugs this time, and he thought that Casey seemed more at home here in his den, with his wrinkle-resistant khakis and his big-haired wife in the next room, than any man had a right to be. If it were anyone other than his brother, he might have hated him for it.
They reached across the desk and touched glasses. “Nice to see you, brother,” Casey said.
“It is,” James said.
Casey leaned back and kicked his feet up on the desk. He wore fleece-lined moccasins.
“Nice slippers.”
“They aren’t slippers. They’re house shoes.”
“What’s the difference?”
“The sole on these is slightly more rugged, I believe. One could feasibly spend a short amount of time out of doors with them. Linda got them for me for Christmas. She’s been making baby noises.”
“What do those sound like?”
“ ‘Casey, honey, my ovaries are speaking to you right now. They’re parched. They’re starting to wither. Are you going to fertilize this garden or what, boy?’ ”
“She says that?”
“And worse. Much worse. That’s the version generally fit for public consumption.”
“You might as well just do it. What’s there to wait for? You’re rich. You could support a small tribe.”
“A boy wouldn’t be too bad. I’d like that, actually. But a girl, I don’t know if I could take it. And this isn’t something I can talk to Linda about very well.”
“What’s wrong with having a girl? Girls love their daddies. You wouldn’t have to fight with her like you would a boy. Linda would get to have all the awkward talks.”
Casey took a drink of his whiskey and swished it audibly around in his mouth. He swallowed and grimaced. “One time I was involved with a gal that liked me to put my hand around her throat and squeeze. I mean, she liked me to choke her, James. Now, can you tell me what happens to make a little girl grow up to become a woman who wants something like that?”
James laughed and then he saw that Casey was serious. “I’m not sure,” he said. “But, how’d you handle that situation? I mean, did you, you know?” James made a gripping motion with his hand.
Casey shook his head. He drank the rest of his whiskey and set the glass down carefully on a coaster shaped like a bass.
“Shit, man, I did more than that. I married her.”
—
It was mid-June, and North Texas was a smoking hot plate. In the cotton fields outside of town, farmers were doing something to raise the dust. There was nothing to see and you couldn’t see it if there was.
In the late evening James sat on the back porch drinking a beer, half-reading a newspaper, sweat dampening the pages. He watched the sun turn red as it sunk through the dust. The houses and roofs and backyards of the neighborhood were cast in a blood-dusk glow. A martian suburb awash with the smell of a thousand barbecues being lit.
James finished his beer and finally, mercifully, it was dark. A few degrees cooler, maybe. There were fireflies blinking on and off in the yard. He hadn’t seen a firefly in a long time. There were none in Montana as far as he knew. Maybe it was too cold. Years ago, he’d been camped next to an old hippie couple in Yellowstone and they’d told him that once, in Iowa, they’d dropped acid and went out and gathered a whole jar of fireflies and then rubbed them all over their naked bodies and then had luminescent sex in a moonlit cornfield. Their obvious happiness at relaying this story gave him a shiver. He saw in them all the couples of the world for whom the past held more promise than any potential future. Relationships based largely on reminiscence of things come and gone. Was this what it meant to be rested, content, settled in love? Or, were the old hippies, and all others like them, just wound-up machines, running on memories? Was it inevitable?
—
After a week of loafing at Casey’s, the dust and feedlot smell of Amarillo started to wear on him. Casey worked long hours at his office. Being in the house all day with Linda—she did yoga in the living room, she constantly wanted to feed him sandwiches—was making James uncomfortable. The probing questions from Casey at the dinner table made him feel like an underachieving son, stalled out after college, living in his old bedroom.
James found himself a job. An unlikely one at that. It was a ranch-hand position at an outfit outside of Austin, in the hill country. The job description in the classifieds was spare.
WANTED:
SEASONAL RANCH LABORER.
NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY.
BEAUTIFUL LOCATION. REMOTE. HARD WORK. FAIR PAY.
James called. He talked to a man who occasionally let out clipped groans, as if he were in pain. Their brief conversation was punctuated several times by loud birdcalls. In less than fifteen minutes, he was hired. He had two days before he was to start and he’d forgotten to ask about pay.
When James left Amarillo, Casey shook his hand and wished him luck, as if he were shipping off to basic training. Linda gave him a hairspray-scented hug. “Y’all take care now, darlin’,” she said.
He pointed his car south into the fiery bowels of the Summertime Republic of Texas.
—
Outside of Austin, the land began to show some contour. The pure flat of the north gave way to wrinkled hills and canyons wi
th cream-colored limestone walls. He was pleasantly surprised. He’d never known Texas to look like this. He admired the swells of oak-covered ridges, the white caliche ranch roads, glowing under the sun.
Two hours and several wrong turns later, he pulled up to a low ranch house tucked under a grove of pecan trees. There was a small pond and a windmill. A red heeler with a gray muzzle came out from under the shade of a parked truck and eyed him without approaching. Peacocks scratched in the gravel, bottle-green feathers resplendent. James stretched and looked around. His shirt was stuck to his back with sweat.
A man came out of the house. He wore a straw hat and had a cast on one of his legs—ankle to mid-thigh. The leg without a cast was jean-clad and it took James a moment to figure out that the man had apparently taken a pair of his Levis and cut one leg off three-quarters of the way up. He’d put a double-wrap of duct tape around the shortened pant leg to keep it snugged down over the cast. On the foot with the cast, the man wore a large rubber galosh. On the uninjured foot, he had a cowboy boot. Some folks with a full leg cast in Texas in late June probably just wore shorts. This man was obviously cut from a more rugged cloth.
“You James?”
“Yessir.”
“That’s good. I’m Karl. We’ve talked. Montana, eh?”
“Yes.”
“I been there once. Saw Old Faithful. It could have been worse. Montana’s better than a lot of places. But, you know what they say?”
James thought about telling Karl that Old Faithful was actually in Wyoming. He didn’t. “What do they say?”
“In Montana, they make cowboys. In Texas, they make men.” Karl laughed and wiped at the sweat on his face with his shirtsleeve. “Montana, I got a broken leg here.” He pointed at the offending member. “Usually I do everything here myself but as you can imagine, this has got me limited. How’s your back?”
