by Brad Felver
It was a Saturday in October when she arrived at the store to see him. She told Harold Gutman she had an appointment with a student, and he nodded, suspecting a lie was hidden somewhere. He had noticed her fussing in the mirror far longer than usual. They both knew they were clinging to the threads of whatever they had, like the last day of a vacation that is spent mostly on travel.
Wet leaves painted the sidewalks on Newbury Street. When she entered the store, Gus’s back was to her, but he was the same as ever. Hadn’t gained a single pound, though he’d gone fully gray. He wore carpenter’s jeans and a flannel shirt. As she drew nearer she realized that the pants weren’t just of a style; they were the exact pair he often wore years earlier. She recognized a stain above the left pocket.
How long had it been? She’d become horrible with dates. Twenty years? That sounded about right.
“Jesus,” he said when he turned around. It took him several moments before he could compose himself. Ruth felt absurd. She had hoped that he knew, that he had actively targeted Boston, but Gus seemed truly shocked.
They strolled down Newbury Street. Gus clasped his hands behind his back and took long, loping strides. He glanced over at her and smiled that calm smile she remembered. Strangers often took this for arrogance, but she knew it was just his quiet nature. Silence is something that should be protected, his father used to say.
“How’s the farm?” she asked.
“The same.” He stopped walking and looked up at the roofs of the buildings, tarnished copper and clay tile. He frowned. “That’s not true. I don’t know why I just said that. Queen Elizabeth died,” he said. “Came down in a bad storm a few years ago.”
“No!” she said.
He nodded. “More than a few years ago now, I guess. I built a kiln next to the barn and cured all the lumber I could, some thousands of board-feet.”
“And the desks?”
He nodded. “Bur oak is just about all I’ve worked with ever since.”
“I could tell you still use the handsaw for the dovetails. You always did hate those jigs.”
“You do something one certain way for long enough, and you become incapable of doing it any other way.” It was just like him to say something like that. But it made her feel more like a client than the mother of his dead daughter.
He stepped off the curb to allow a mother with a stroller to pass. Ruth watched the woman and child move away from them, then disappear around the corner.
“I suppose Queen Elizabeth is still in our bodies, isn’t she? Or her atoms anyway.”
Gus looked at her quizzically for a moment, and then he remembered. He nodded but said nothing.
They walked on in silence for several minutes, and then Ruth said, “I hated that doctor. But her story stuck with me. I guess that’s obvious, isn’t it? When I went back to my research after all those years, I tried to calculate it. How many atoms from the dead might migrate to the living. It became this strange obsession, not at all related to my dissertation. It took a long time, but I eventually worked out a reasonable prediction and asked a scientist on campus about it, and he pointed out that my math was generally good, but I’d overlooked one basic error of physics.”
“That it takes far too long,” Gus said. “Centuries for them to dissipate.”
“You, too?” Ruth asked, and Gus touched her arm, telling her yes. She froze, his hand warm on her skin, afraid that the smallest movement might dislodge them.
After a few moments, they noticed they were blocking the sidewalk and had to move on. “So, Queen Elizabeth isn’t actually in us,” Ruth said and paused. “Never will be.”
“No,” Gus said, “but she’ll end up in someone eventually.”
They started walking again. He dug his hands into his pockets and gazed around. She felt a sadness in him that had never been there. A hollow look in his eyes. Whether it was all the talk of death or long-term loneliness or just the general cruelties of life, she couldn’t know. The truth was they had been apart far longer than they’d been together. Could she even claim to know him anymore?
They ended up at an outdoor cafe, drinking tea. Ruth warmed her hands on her mug and sipped slowly. Gus noticed that the table wobbled on the uneven bricks, and so he shimmed one leg with a folded napkin. They both felt uneasy, wishing they’d gone to a bar instead, where it becomes easier for old lovers to ignore how well they know each other’s bodies.
“I can’t believe no one else snatched you up,” she said.
“Well,” he said, “I doubt I made it very easy.” He looked away, his eyes training to all the commotion on the street. “When Queen Elizabeth died, it was strange at first not having a tree there, like a pulled tooth when all you can do is trace the gap with your tongue.” He set his tea down. “Then I found myself sweating all the time. It took me over a year to realize that the house itself retained that much more heat with the tree gone. No more shade.” He paused and for a moment seemed ready to weep, but then he coughed and looked away.
“I know what you mean,” Ruth said. “It felt so strange when I moved back to Boston, like I didn’t actually grow up here.” She didn’t tell him how for years she would think about him in the middle of the day, how some silly little thing would happen and she would make a mental note to tell him when she got home, only to remember hours later that she couldn’t.
They went back to their tea, their own thoughts. It hurt Ruth to see the many ways Gus was still the same man, how her absence had not changed that, but it also hurt to see the many ways he was now different, to know that she’d had no hand in shaping his new quirks. He still palmed his mug rather than using the handle, but he took smaller sips now, probably because he moved slower. He was older, but he was also successful, could accomplish fewer things each day. He probably appreciated success in ways that she never would.
“It’s strange seeing me, isn’t it?” she asked. “I can tell it’s strange for you.”
He squinted at her for a long time, and she began to worry that he would never respond. She was thinking of that terrible note she had left him, though she wasn’t certain if he’d even seen it. Finally, he said, “Not strange, no.” But then he stopped talking and grimaced. “It’s like having phantom limb syndrome. I feel you over there, and I know you belong over here, but you’re there and I’m here and there’s no changing that.”
A warmth crept into her limbs, like muscles being stretched. She had forgotten how his words could puncture straight through to her core. All these years separated hadn’t changed him in the important ways. She cried then. It was a dirty, messy sort of cry, not at all dignified. All the grief of her life seemed to surface: a loveless mother and father, an unfulfilling career, dead children, dead relationships. She couldn’t look at Gus. He didn’t reach for her or offer a tissue, just let her have it out as privately as possible.
“I just worked,” he said, hoping to give her more time to recover herself. “Eventually, I could go five minutes without thinking about her, and that was a revelation. I learned how to function without pressuring myself to find joy in anything. But five minutes is as long as I ever got. Never more than that, not even now.”
She already knew that Gus was the only one she could ever talk to about Annabelle, but she realized then it wasn’t that simple. It was all they would ever be capable of talking about. But she also realized that it was the only thing she wanted to talk about, and that would be true for the rest of her life.
When she’d composed herself, she said, “It’s hard to know that you’ve used up all the good parts of your life so early.”
She wanted him to disagree but he nodded. “Thank God we’re still young,” he said, perhaps as a joke, but perhaps not.
They didn’t speak for several minutes after that, and neither of them had any intention to. It was the silence of age, if not of wisdom, and also the silence of those who have weathered the worst long before and now have little fear of the world’s residual cruelties. Occasionally their eyes me
t and lingered, but they managed only to grin at each other as if they shared some private secret that they would never try to articulate, not even to each other. Eventually, the waiter approached and silently placed the check between them—perhaps he saw that neither of them wore a wedding ring and wanted to be proper—and there it would stay, each of them ignoring it, hoping they might sit together just a few moments longer.
Throwing Leather
We were mean kids. We knew it and we celebrated it. We salted slugs in the street and watched them melt. We caught brook trout and plucked out their eyes with a corkscrew, leaving their wriggling bodies for the bears. We slathered each other’s sandwiches with gear grease when no one was looking. When we got hurt or punished, we took it as a sign that we were doing something right, that we were being mean enough. But Charley was always searching for new cruelties. Even his mother was afraid of him, which meant he mostly did as he pleased.
Charley was an angry kid, not overly large but ferocious. He had no interest in anyone our age or their television and video games. When he bothered to go to school at all everyone shied away from him because he smelled like diesel fuel or gunpowder or carcass. He sneered at teachers. He inspired awe even from the most seasoned kids because he would disappear for days at a time, trudging through the unkempt cemetery that bordered our backyard and into the dense woods, and just when rumors started to circulate that he was gone for good, he emerged with crusted blood on his arms and face and never bothered to tell anyone where he’d been or how he killed whatever he killed.
This was Cut Bank, northern Montana, grizzly country, where goofy tourists wore bells on their belts and carried bear spray that claimed to be napalm in a can and was sold at every corner gas station. It was a fine product if you encountered a black bear, but they were basically pets anyway. Trailhead signs even advised hikers to punch them right in the nose, and they would run away, which they did. Grizzlies, though, were part dinosaur, remnants of an earth where animals the size of Volkswagens stomped around and ate goddamned whatever they wanted. Your only hope with a grizzly, the saying went, was to punch its stomach walls enough that it might digest you faster. Even the traps poachers left in the hills looked like medieval torture devices, enough rusted toothy steel to keep a Gulf Stream tethered to the ground. Every couple years, it seemed some determined suburbanite wandered into the wild looking to prove something to his kids or wife or mistress. Within a few days, Charley and I would see the vultures circling high above his heading, swooping around in their cockeyed figure-eight formation, and then a couple days later, we’d read in the newspaper what we already knew.
Cut Bank was a raw world, a place that progress had ignored, and we were fine with it. Everyone was a bit crude, like we had first wandered out of the wilderness only weeks earlier—the men always unshaven and frowning, the women with tangled, knotty hair. A place like Missoula might have been New York City to us. Only our proximity to the national park forty miles west was proof to the tourists that we could behave like civilized folk.
Charley wandered the hills and the streets of Cut Bank with what had been his father’s Winchester .444 and had no fear of grizzlies or tourists or anyone except my father. Even when he stayed with us in civilization, he liked to invent violent games with strict parameters that tested your manliness. “New game,” he would always say, and then we would practice it, fine-tuning the rules to eliminate the nudge—the pussy, the chicken liver, the weakling—which was the worst thing a human could be.
Years earlier, my mother and Charley’s father died in a car accident that left many questions unanswered. (His trousers had been at his knees, and she hadn’t been wearing her seatbelt.) We became a sort of leftover family. Charley and his mother moved into our squat concrete house, which had only two bedrooms. My father never claimed it was something other than the obvious. They shared a room and a bed, and Charley and I did the same, and I suppose this was some kind of misguided justice. Starla, Charley’s mother, was a thin, doe-eyed woman who smoked more than she ate and managed to over-boil a hot dog. When she did speak, it was so quiet that you learned to just nod at things you couldn’t quite hear.
Charley ignored her so casually it seemed Starla could have been his pestering younger sister. She asked little of him—to go to school at least twice a week, not to leave his loaded rifle on the counter, not to talk about her dead husband at dinner—but Charley couldn’t do it. He chose not to. But when he disobeyed long enough or called her something too ugly, my father would step in, telling Charley to apologize or get thumped, and Charley always sneered his sorries and wandered off somewhere. My father took Charley on as an accessory to having Starla move in. Charley dealt with my father because he couldn’t sleep outside during a Cut Bank winter.
“The first one to complain about your mother’s cooking,” my father said early on, “becomes the new chef.” He pointed to Starla when he said “mother” but spoke to us both. “I don’t enjoy thumping you boys, but you know I will,” he added. Starla looked at the ground as if embarrassed that someone would take so much time to defend her. So we never complained.
“New game,” Charley said when we avoided the house. Then we stole bikes from outside the convenience store, tucked push-brooms under our arms, and jousted each other down the middle of the street. First one to get knocked off had to eat a pinecone. First one to complain about soreness in the ribs lost use of his chariot for the next round and had to run down the spray-painted joust lane. First one to bleed was a nudge.
When we tired of bike jousting, we took up cat hunting. I used a pry bar; Charley used a hatchet. Whoever brought home the most cat tails won. No time limit. If you tried to pass off roadkill and got caught, you had to eat it. If you came home empty-handed, you were a nudge.
The first time we played, I killed three—all mangy, hopeless-looking things—and came home at dark. Charley stayed out all night. He shook me awake before sunrise with eleven cat tails dangling from his belt loops.
When my father found the cat tails under our bed, he thumped us. At first, Charley stood with him, tried to make an honest showing of it, but my father was a large man, a real bruiser, and Charley ended up with a fat, red face. “Wherever the bodies are, boys,” my father said, “go find them. You kill it, you eat it.” So, we trudged back out, both on the same team, to find our cats. We skinned and gutted them, then tossed their bones and guts into a shallow pit in the cemetery. We roasted the rest until they tasted like charcoal, both to burn the rot out of them and because neither of us wanted to know what cat tasted like. Charley cursed my father under his breath, but he also ate his share.
We hid our cat tails better after that.
At night, when we couldn’t compete, we closed our bedroom door and pretended, smoked Winstons and set up hypothetical scenarios to root out the nudge. That we had to disagree for the game to work was understood.
You’re in a cage with another man. Do you want a .22 with only one round or dull pirate sword?
You’re interrogating a terrorist. Do you want a scalpel or a jar full of lava?
The neighbor’s dog keeps barking all night. Do you kill the dog or the neighbor?
What wild animal would Starla be? On this alone we agreed: pigeon.
Then my father brought home a set of boxing gloves and taught us to throw the leather. He could only afford one set, so one hand threw the leather and the other hand threw the flesh, which hurt a lot more. At first we just attacked each other like wild dogs, but we soon learned that you couldn’t keep up that sort of pace for more than a minute or so. Those fights ended early, before there was a clear winner and a clear nudge, and so we had to learn a more measured approach.
It was humiliating at first. Nothing natural about throwing a punch. Range of motion is too loose, too many options that beg to be combined and leave you wide open. You have to commit to one, be precise. Speed and precision over power, always.
The second week Charley caught me high on the neck, right o
n my Adam’s apple. “Christ, Jack,” he said when I sat on the ground sucking air in between rounds, “your neck’s the size of a watermelon.”
I hadn’t felt anything before that. There’s no pain during a fight. That usually surfaces in the morning. Charley ran inside and took Starla’s makeup mirror and showed me. It was already red and bulging, and when I opened my mouth to talk, the Adam’s apple bobbed around as if loose from its hinges.
When I told my father I couldn’t eat dinner that night, he thought I was getting smart with him. “We had the talk about your mother’s food,” he said. “Sit.”
But then he saw my neck, laughed and told me to sit still, someone had plucked my apple and that it wasn’t all that uncommon for fighters. He looked over at Charley, smirked.
He felt around the swelling, and I gripped the table ledge until the blood drained from my hands, and then all of a sudden he jostled it in a quick movement, and I felt a click like a kneecap sliding back into place. “There,” my father said and turned back to his chicken.
In a couple days, the swelling eased, and we went back to tossing punches as hard as we could and gassing before we bloodied each other. My father stood watching us, shaking his head. The injury had piqued his interest. We knew he’d boxed in the marines, and that earned him some respect. “Keep your chin down and elbows tight,” he said and demonstrated. “Pivot at the hips. Bend your lead knee. Twist into him to dodge. Don’t lean back or you’re wide open, and if the other guy knows what’s what, he’ll pancake you.”
Our hands turned rough, leathery, and our exposed knuckles bulged like old tree roots and dislocated often enough that it stopped hurting. We snapped jabs and didn’t pull punches, not ever. Charley’s nose pudged flat from my straight right, but he didn’t mind once my father told him he looked like Primo Carnera. After this, he led more with his face, daring me to pancake him, which I did.
