by Callan Wink
They ate and drank too much, and then all pitched in on the dishes. Rand watched Stella and Sam as they bantered and snapped each other with dishtowels and talked about their unborn children as if they were not so much possibilities as certainties that just hadn’t happened yet.
Rand rarely wasted too much time thinking about women. He’d spent enough years on construction jobs to know that this put him in the minority among men. There was a Korean massage parlor in Billings that he visited once a month. The women there were probably closer to fifty than forty, but he didn’t mind. They were good-natured, motherly almost. He tipped well and, if they didn’t have another customer right away, sometimes he stayed and had a cup of roasted barley boricha with them. Occasionally, he fixed things around the place that needed attention. He hadn’t had a serious girlfriend in ten years.
After dinner, Rand returned to his empty house. Everything was in its place, and if it wasn’t, it was because he was the one who had misplaced it. That was comfort. The woodstove was casting its glow in the living room and he made himself a whiskey and sat in his recliner. He switched on the TV and watched some sports highlights. He didn’t think his life lacked for much of anything, at least there were no holes that couldn’t be filled by getting a dog. Last spring, his old lab Charlie had gone to chase the big tennis ball in the sky. He thought enough time had passed now and maybe he’d go look at the shelter sometime soon.
—
The day after Thanksgiving, he got to the job site early. He figured he’d be the first one there and do a walk around to see what was what before any of the crews showed up. He was somewhat surprised to see Angel’s truck in the parking lot. It had snowed a bit overnight, just a couple powdery inches, but it was enough to cover the tire tracks in the parking lot. No one had come or gone this morning. He couldn’t figure out why Angel’s rig was there. It just didn’t make sense, really.
There were no tracks to the Porta John, to the lift, to the pallets of stone—no tracks of any kind. A white blanket of snow. Complete quiet, until a jay shrieked in the pines. Rand was out of the truck now, walking fast and then slowing, stopping. There was a dark shape pushing against the semi-opaque plastic around the pillars where Angel’s crew had been working. When he got closer, he could see that the shape had a face. Rand wanted to turn, run, get into the truck and drive, but he forced his feet to move, kicking through the snow. He ducked under the plastic. It was cold. The propane tank must have run empty.
They were all there, three men slumped on the scaffolding, and Angel, sitting, back against the stone pillar, eyes closed as if he were taking a nap. Rand knew immediately. It was impossible to mistake it for anything else.
It was carbon monoxide, they told him. Somehow the heater exhaust had been covered by the tarp, filling the area the men were working in with deadly fumes.
Two of the men—Angel’s cousins—had been illegal after all.
—
There was a delay in the construction, while the situation got sorted out. But then, sooner than seemed decent, they were back at it. A new crew came in to finish the stonework. The carpenters and electricians wrapped up the interior. And, not long after the first of the year, Rand’s trailer got hauled away and the whole affair was complete.
He never actually met the homeowner. The final inspection was handled by the app genius’s wife. She had their young son with her, happily running and sliding in his stocking feet on the new wood floors.
“Donald can’t wait to get away,” she said, leaning against the kitchen island, tousling her son’s hair. “He is so busy right now working on a product launch. He checks the snow report three times a day. He really loves to ski. I like it okay. I’m not very confident, though. This little guy is going to get lessons this year. Donald is adamant about starting him out young. He says a child has to start before he has a real fear of falling. That’s the best way. I didn’t start until I met Don, which was too late, really.”
Rand was nodding. He’d never skied in his life. “So,” he said. “If you don’t have any more questions, I’m going to get out of your hair. I’ll leave you this refrigerator magnet here, it has the company’s contact info and my personal cellphone. If anything, and I mean anything, comes up, please don’t hesitate to call me.”
When Rand turned to leave, she followed him to the door. She stood on the threshold, one hand on the door, perfectly manicured nails tapping on the knob. She looked back into the house to make sure her son wasn’t within earshot.
“There was one thing,” she said. “I heard about what happened. Those workers. I’ve been handling most of the details about this house. I never even told Don because I knew he would worry. But, I just, well, this might be weird, but I have to know. Were they in the house, I mean, actually inside, when it happened? It shouldn’t matter, it’s such a tragedy, but for some reason I’d like to know exactly where, they were, um, discovered.”
She had a small, fixed smile on her face. Rand thought that this was a woman who was used to being found ridiculous. Her husband, a tediously practical man, was no doubt in the habit of acquiescing to her desires, but not without first patronizing her.
Rand had a brief urge to lie, to tell her Angel and his men had been working on the stone fireplace, that he’d found them slumped right there on her living room floor where the kid was slipping around in his socks. He wanted to give credence to her fears somehow but he couldn’t, because she had that smile, the fragile kind.
“Outside,” he said. “They were working on the entryway. They never even went in the house.”
“God, it shouldn’t matter,” she said hurriedly. “It’s just such bad energy, a horrible way to christen a beautiful new chapter in our lives. And after all the work you’ve done, I mean this place is fabulous, you must be very proud. Something like that is such a detraction.”
Rand shrugged. “It was unfortunate. An accident. They were good workers. I didn’t know them well.”
She nodded and crossed her arms under her breasts, hugging herself. She must have been cold in the doorway with no coat. “I’m going to put up a wreath,” she said. “Right on the entryway there. It’s not much but it will be my own little memorial. I don’t think I’m going to tell Don. It’s not something he’d deal with well.”
Rand shook her hand and got in his truck and never set eyes on the house or its occupants again.
—
After Rand told him about the accident, Sam was constantly inviting him to do things with him and his new bride. Come over for dinner, Rand; Stella is making spaghetti. Meet us out at Jake’s; Stella and I are going to get a drink. Stella and I are going camping; you should come along. Rand managed to wriggle out of most of these invitations. The latest was he wanted Rand to join him in a sweat lodge ceremony.
“This is just what you need, man. It’s purifying. I did one last month and I felt like I’d been wrung out and hung out, you know what I mean? In a good way. I felt light.”
Rand had been avoiding Sam, not returning his calls, and then one evening, as Rand was loading up in his truck to head home after work, Sam pulled in, blocking his way. “Hop in,” Sam said. “We’re going to be late.”
“What? I’m going home. I’m tired.”
“Nope. We’ve got sweat lodge tonight. I told everyone I’d be bringing a friend. They’re expecting you. Let’s go. I brought you a towel.”
Sam drove them out of town and then on a series of ever-narrowing roads that wound back into the low hills. The sun was setting behind them as they pulled up in front of a pale-blue trailer house. There were half a dozen other vehicles parked in the drive. Two paint ponies stood motionless in a corral. There was an elk skull and antlers on the trailer house roof, long tapering lodge poles leaning like massive knitting needles against the porch railing.
“This is Stella’s grandparents’ house,” Sam said. “They raised her. They’re different from most of the people around here. They brought her up the way they themselves had been r
aised. Traditional, you know? They still follow the old ways.”
“The old ways?”
“Yes. Notice, for example, the fact that they don’t have a satellite dish on their roof. Everyone out here has a satellite dish. Stella told me they just got electricity a few years ago. They used to spend the whole summer in a lodge up in the Bighorns. A tipi, Rand. They lived half a year in a tipi gathering berries, fishing, hunting, living. That’s why my wife is so beautiful, right? She was running wild out in the hills as a kid, not drinking Pepsi and watching The Real World and working at a casino, living shabbily off whatever scraps we toss their way.”
“We?”
“Yes. We. Call me crazy but I feel like in small way she and I are doing some sort of small mending in the huge tear that we made in these people’s universe.”
“I didn’t tear anyone’s universe. I don’t want to do this. I’m going to just sit in the car.”
“Nonsense. They’ve adopted me, Rand. I’m family and you’re my guest. It’s going to be great, trust me.”
Moments later, Rand stood shivering in his underwear in front of a low, canvas-covered dome. There was a fire going outside, rounded river rocks were piled in the blaze. He could hear talking and laughing coming from the lodge. Sam motioned for him to follow and ducked into the low entrance.
A furious wave of wet heat hit Rand upon entering. He coughed and dropped to his knees next to Sam, sweat already pouring from his face and shoulders. It was dim. Faces periodically appeared in the steam. There were half a dozen men seated around a pit filled with rocks. Rand watched a man, his bare torso shiny with sweat, reach out of the lodge with a pair of metal fireplace tongs and bring a rock from the outside fire. The rock was still glowing faintly red in the gloom, and he placed it carefully on the other rocks in the central pit. He did this twice more, and then squirted water from a two-liter soda bottle onto the rocks. There was a great hiss, and huge gouts of white-hot steam filled the air. Then, a noise like a rifle shot in the enclosed area as one of the rocks split. Rand swore and flinched. There was soft laughter from the shadows. The increase in steam made Rand feel as if his skin were being parboiled from his body.
“Relax, man,” Sam said. Smiling, his blond hair plastered to his skull with sweat. “Focus on your breathing.”
Sam introduced him around. All of them were relatives of Stella. Brothers, cousins, uncles, and the oldest, her grandfather—long thinning gray hair, small compact potbelly and skinny crossed legs. The old man was staring at him. Rand lowered his head and concentrated on taking shallow breaths.
“Hey,” the old man said. “How tall are you?”
Rand looked around. The old man was still staring at him, one eye perfectly black, the other with the scalded-milk skim of cataract.
“Me?”
“Yeah. What, like six-two, six-three, something like that?”
“I’m six-three.”
The old man nodded as if this confirmed a suspicion he’d held all along. “So, you’re a forward? Maybe a small forward? I’m saying that only because you don’t look quick enough to be a shooting guard. No offense.”
“I—what?”
The old man raised his arm and pointed across the lodge. “That’s Nolan, my grandson. He’s going to take us to the championship this year. He’s not real tall but he’s got a quick release. Quickest release off a screen that I ever saw. A leaper too. Nolan can jump right out of the gym. Only a sophomore this year. And college coaches are coming to watch him play. Gonzaga. That’s big time. What do you say, Nolan?”
Nolan scratched his head and wiped the sweat from his face. He looked to be about forty, with a sunken chest and the burst nose of a serious drinker.
“I don’t know, grandpa,” he said. “I’m going to try.”
There was silence in the lodge for a few minutes and then someone on the other side said, “Hey, Sam, you’re looking skinny. My sister’s cooking not agreeing with you?”
Soft laughter. Then, another voice from the steam, “Eh, it’s not the cooking. I got married once. I’m guessing she’s keeping him fed just so she can wear him out at night.”
“Succubus,” Nolan said, pouring water on his face. “All the women in this family. I believe I warned him before they got hitched.”
“Suck-what?”
“Shit, my ex-wife? On my birthday, if I was lucky. You young guys have it better.”
“MTV. That’s what did it. And, all the hormones in the water. Makes women shameless.”
“And Bill Clinton. It’s not even sex anymore.”
Sam was laughing, shaking his head. Rand watched, not saying anything, sweat stinging his eyes. Sam was part of some sort of unlikely brotherhood—a side effect of marriage that Rand had never before considered. It seemed like a good thing, but he didn’t let himself get too sentimental. In reality, while the Stabs-on-Top men adopting Sam into the fold meant friendship, sweat lodges, manly companionship, it probably also included the occasional jailhouse call for bail money.
Eventually, the heat overwhelmed Rand and he had to stumble out of the lodge before he fainted. He stood outside in his soaked underwear, steam rising from his shoulders and arms, his neck craned back looking at the stars. Out here, town wasn’t even a glow on the horizon. As Rand was trying to find the Big Dipper, there was a soft whistling, a flock of mergansers, up from the river, flying low over his head—dark swimmers, moving in formation upstream against the flow of the Milky Way.
The men were laughing in the lodge, and then he could hear Sam’s voice rising up a little above it and then it was quiet. He knew they had been talking about him and he thought it was ridiculous of Sam to bring him here. He decided he wasn’t going to go back in. He stood shivering, listening to the horses breathing in the corral.
—
“The poor old guy’s got Alzheimer’s,” Sam said in the car on the way home. “It’s an unfortunate thing. Sometimes he’s perfectly clear. Everything is clicking. He tells stories, about his childhood and older ones, you know, legends and stuff, the history of the people. It’s really great. And then sometimes he gets on his basketball kick. He used to be a coach. Just ungodly what it does to a person. Anyway, I’m glad you came with me tonight. Stella and I, you know, we worry about you, man.”
“I’m fine.”
“It was her idea about the sweat lodge. And, she thinks you need a girlfriend.”
“I’ve been thinking about getting a dog.”
“Well, there you go. I’ll tell her that.”
Sam dropped him off back at his truck, and when he drove away Rand walked across the parking lot down to the new job site. They were building a massive ski chalet–style dentist office. They had the floors poured and the walls framed in. The roof was still an empty framework of jutting steel beams. He overturned a bucket and sat with his back to a wall, looking up at the moon coming up a bloody egg-yolk orange. He thought, behind the roof joists like that, it looked like some sort of mottled internal organ, a pulsing lunar heart lodged between the ribs of a giant skeleton.
For some reason he couldn’t stop thinking about Nolan. The basketball star. The great leaper with the quick release. The obviously ruined alcoholic. Had he led the Hardin Tigers to the state championship all those years ago? Maybe in the finals game he’d choked, missed the potentially game-winning free throw, and then started his downward slide—no championship banner, no Gonzaga, no longer any reason to stay in shape, the new dedication to drinking, puking in cold frozen fields, pickup games at the dingy rec center gym where that free throw went in every time.
Maybe some people wouldn’t think something like that was possible, that such a small event could precipitate so great a fall—everything in a man’s life hanging on a hoop, a net, the soft spin of the pebbled leather kissing the fingertips goodbye on the release. Rand was not one of those people.
—
Summer. From his desk, in the mornings, he could see sandhill cranes stalking the fallow field across the roa
d. Rand watched their stilted movements against the rimrock hills. The dentist’s office job was coming to an end. A month or so more of loose ends and then they’d come and haul the trailer away, and Rand would be embarking on a whole new project. He wasn’t sure exactly what yet, the company had put an aggressive bid in on a small, high-end, ski chalet–style strip mall in Bozeman. He was having a hard time drumming up enthusiasm for a new job.
The site was in a small wooded area just off the freeway, and Rand took his lunch out into a thicket of pines and immature aspens and ate his sandwich sitting on the ground in the shade. He brought his pup with him most days. He was a small block-headed black lab mix whose existence revolved around food, searching it out, devouring it as quickly as possible, and retrieving sticks. On his lunch break Rand would let the dog out of the trailer to run around cadging treats from the guys.
On the weekends, he ran his boat upriver. He was fishing again. One day he caught his limit of walleye in an hour. The puppy hadn’t been fond of the water at first. Eventually Rand caught him by the collar and tossed him off the dock. After a few moments of thrashing, he figured it out.
Mostly things were going okay, and it seemed that the events of the winter would eventually fade—the sharp edges ground away by the simple everyday adherence to routine. He walked the dog in the early-morning dark. Made coffee and went to work. Put in a full day. And then he went home, walked the dog, and made dinner, watched TV—his dog on the floor next to him. He could hang his hand over the edge of the couch and rub the dog’s ears.
Occasionally, something would come to him. Sitting out in the thicket on his lunch break maybe, chewing his dry sandwich while the dog sat impatiently waiting for the crusts. He’d remember a simple thing, like the way Angel’s crew used to cook their lunch outside. They’d bring an electric skillet and set it up on an overturned bucket. Someone would have a plastic bag of marinating beef and someone would have tortillas, and they’d throw together simple tacos, filling the air with the scent of seared meat.
