by Brad Felver
It’s Harlow what dies first, takes one from a sniper outside Kien Long. Here’s the part what really sticks to me, though. Harlow gets shipped back stateside to get buried back in Ohio, and when Tuber hears about all this he loses it. His CO won’t give him leave, not even after everything he done in them tunnels, not even for his cousin being dead, his cousin who was Tuber’s best friend. So Tuber goes AWOL. Somehow he manages to get back stateside, and the night before Harlow’s funeral, he breaks into the funeral parlor, jamming that .45 into the mortician’s temple. “I’m needing you to do this on the pronto,” Tuber says to him, and the mortician don’t do much for protest. He sets Harlow’s body up on the table and helps Tuber strip him out of his new suit, all so Tuber can take a razor blade to his cousin’s chest and carve out that swastika, seeing as I guess he couldn’t stand the thought of him getting buried with that still there.
The cops show up, and he don’t make no big scene out of it. He goes quiet, even gives the mortician his .45, like he knew it was coming. Turns out it weren’t even loaded. He gets charged with carving up a corpse and burglary and assault, which sends him inside for a few years. Worst part? Army finds out he gone AWOL and broke into the funeral home, they discharge him too, dishonorable after all he done. Harlow’s sister says Tuber gets the final papers his first week inside. “Did you write him? I ask, and she says, “Yeah, I wrote him most every week,” which is what I was hoping for.
“That’s good,” I say. “You always was a good sister.”
I lean in a little closer so we can whisper through the loud music. I set my drink next to hers, rims almost touching. That’s when she looks at me pretty mean, and I know what’s coming, I been waiting on it. “How long you lived in Windsor anyway?”
“Long time now,” I say, and when she don’t respond, I say, “You know how things was.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I guess I do.”
We chat about the old days for a few more minutes, and then she says she needs to go to the bathroom, and I don’t see her after that. It’s funny what you remember and what you tell people about. Always seems like you end up telling the wrong stories or telling the right stories the wrong way. Never can seem to get it right, and besides, nobody ever hears you all the way through anyhow.
The Dogs of Detroit
Nights, when Polk cannot hunt the dogs, he instead attacks his father. He has grown to crave the hot pain spreading over his face, the bulging of his knuckles when they connect with bone. His father fights back just enough. They roll around on the floor, struggling and grunting, sneaking in shots to the ribs and the temples. When they tire, they each collapse, wheezing, moaning. They rub their flushed faces and lick away the blood pooling on their gums and retreat to their corners. No resentment or words, as if they are not punching each other, not exactly. A narcotic hunger being fed, one which brings no joy but rather is a conduit for torment.
After their fights they lay there, panting, blinking back tears, and only then does Polk confide in his father. He lists off the revenges he wants to take on the universe. He imagines the worst things possible: toddler coffins, flayed penguins, pipe bombs in convents, napalm in orphanages. He hates himself for it, his selfishness, his appetite for sloppy justice. Always he ends up wondering the same thing: Does God hate me more than I hate God?
His father reaches for Polk’s hand, but Polk pulls away. No touching unless it is to create violence. “Patience,” his father says. “We must learn grief.”
After school, Polk hunts. He ranges across the urban wilderness of the East Side, ducks through the cutting winds off Saint Clair. He lugs a Winchester bolt action by the barrel, dragging the stock on the ground, leaving a crease in the snow. He tracks dog prints through the industrial fields, through the brambled grasses and split concrete and begrimed snow. Through decomposing warehouses and manufacturing cathedrals which nature has reclaimed. Hundreds of deserted acres. These are wild dogs he kills, no longer bear any trace of domestication. Few people left, but the dogs—thousands of dogs, abandoned during this great human exodus. There is no Atticus Finch to blast the rabies from them, no little girl to drag them home by the scruff to her father and say May we please? As all else crumbles, the dogs remain.
And then one day: his mother’s tracks, long and narrow, weight on the outside ridges. Keds. She always wore Keds. She has been gone two months now, disappeared. She was there when Polk went to school, sitting at the kitchen table, sucking on a menthol, gone when he got home. But these are her prints. He knows them. They mix in with the dog prints, as if she has joined them. Perhaps has been hunted by them, perhaps something else altogether.
Eventually, he thinks, I’ll whiten the canvas, leaving only her tracks. Eventually, a pattern will emerge. But with each dog he kills, his palate mutates: joy. The heavy thunk of bullet piercing a ribcage. Eliminating a contagion. A growing pleasure to be found in mindless violence. Carcasses left to rot, to ravage by predators. Always there seem to be more dogs, like a muscle in need of constant stretching.
At school, he sits alone. He is a large boy, the largest in the junior high school, his feet flapping on the concrete hallways as if they were made for an adult but then attached to him instead. The art teacher, Mrs. Roudebush, prods him to rejoin the world. More pictures of mom, Polk? More charcoal? Why not try the acrylics? Some greens and yellows and magentas.
“No, thank you,” he says. His face remains placid, all its topography flattened, grown numb, unable to flex. He refuses to look up, and she soon wanders away to check on other students.
After school, he walks home to their house on the East Side, then through the tunnel of tall grasses, which have swallowed up all but the second story where they never go. Collapsed staircase, plywood windows, a contentedness in allowing it to erode.
These winter days the sun never truly rises. No direct light, no marbled streaks or roiling clouds, just a vast gray slab. Slowly, the night mottles into blued steel as if other colors have not yet been discovered. He grabs the Winchester and sets off, follows the freshest of the dog prints as far as they will take him, across the freeway and toward the old Packard compound, its remnants. He nestles onto a hillside, his favorite perch, downwind. A sniper in Stalingrad. He takes down two dogs quickly, the echoes of the rifle shots ballooning around out in waves. The sun droops. A mangy pit bull trots into the field, and Polk takes it down, the round ripping through the dog back near its haunches, and it stumbles, tries to limp away, dragging its paralyzed legs. For several minutes it struggles forward, and Polk watches. Then it stops moving. Polk trudges home, stomping wide holes in the snow, the butt of the Winchester digging a crease behind him. His mother’s prints, which had been clear the day before, have vanished, taken by the wind.
Mrs. Roudebush introduces tertiary colors: chartreuse, magenta, russet, azure. “These,” she says, “are the gems. The true colors of nature. Turned leaves are not red or yellow or pink. They are citron, plum, vermilion.”
“Hey, Poke,” one boy with shaggy hair and an earring whispers across the table. “Hey, mamma’s boy.” Polk used to know the boy’s name, but he has forgotten it. Usually, they leave him alone, but sometimes he is such easy prey they seem not to be able to help themselves.
The kids at his table whisper just loudly enough that he can hear. “His mom used to smoke crack,” a girl says.
“I know it,” another girl says. “I seen her do it with my stepdad.”
“Poke likes crack too, don’t you, Poke?” The boy leans across the table, but just then Mrs. Roudebush kneels next to Polk.
“This is one of my favorites,” she whispers. She hands him a tube of paint. “Viridian. I wonder if you might try it today.”
Polk feels that this lesson is designed specifically for him. Adults talk differently after tragedy, as if he is suddenly six years old rather than thirteen. He paints a picture of his mother at the kitchen table. The tip of her cigarette is viridian, the smoke coiling off is slate. Her hair is russet, t
he table is buff. The clock on the wall, which is actually yellow, he decides to paint plum so that it barely distinguishes itself. He catches the shadows with gray-browns and blue-grays, and before long the scene emerges from his memory, protrudes through the paper like a hologram.
He paints her teeth, paints the spaces between them, wide enough for a pencil point. Her rotting gums are some mix of gray and brown, like frozen mud. Her foggy eyes tired, unable to focus. Her head rocking as if to some silent melody. He paints his father standing in the doorway, arms crossed. He is half looking at her, half looking at the floor, as if he cannot decide which is more painful.
“Fetch your mother a Diet,” she says to Polk, and he does. It’s warm. Broken refrigerator. She tries to light another menthol, but she shakes too badly. She puts her elbows on the table, leans down toward the lighter. Polk watches her struggle and fail, and then he snatches the lighter, bends down, and lights the cigarette for her.
“You love you mother, don’t you, Polk?”
“Marie,” Polk’s father says. They stare at each other.
“I know it,” she says. “Tomorrow.”
“Time for school,” his father says, reaching for him, drawing him away from the kitchen, out the front door. What he remembers now is that he never answered her question—You love your mother, don’t you, Polk? He went to school instead. Yes, he should have said. Even like this.
That afternoon she vanished.
Polk’s father is waiting for him on the front sidewalk. Polk tries to sidestep him and go in the house and take the Winchester and do his duty.
“Polk,” his father says. “No more guns.”
Polk stares blankly.
“The police called again. They’re done understanding.”
“Have they found her or not?” Polk asks.
“Polk, that’s not—”
“I know what you think.”
“You don’t.”
“I know you don’t miss her. I know that. You never even cried.”
His father sits on the top step. He won’t look at Polk. “I know you feel like you’re stuck with me now. I know you loved her more. I can’t do anything about that.”
Polk points toward the industrial complex. “I see her prints.”
His father squints. “All kind of bums and druggos hide out in that place. What are you doing over there?”
Polk doesn’t answer.
“You can’t trust those. Those could be anything. We both knew her.”
“I can tell when people think I’m lying,” he says.
His father sighs and looks away. “Polk,” he says but then decides not to finish. Finally, he says, “We can’t keep doing this.”
“You don’t believe me. You never believed her either.”
“Polk, I believe you.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Polk, you need to stop this.”
Something in Polk fractures. Can’t compartmentalize anger and pain anymore. They bleed together. He puts his hands on his knees, tries to slow it, long breaths, closed eyes.
His father recognizes the signs. “Can it wait?”
Polk shakes his head, no, and his father nods, alright then.
They stomp through the high grass and dirty snow of the front yard, tamp down a wide circle that feels like a cage. Polk tackles his father but can’t bring him down. He yanks and twists a leg, secures it under his armpit until his father finally goes down, knees to the snow. They’re trundling around then, back and forth like a rolling pin, neither gaining position. Polk takes an elbow to the sternum, which knocks his breath loose, and he rolls to his back. He kicks up, punches, his father smacking his face raw and red. Polk feels the meat of his fist half connect with something but doesn’t know what. White noise and blur. His nose gets mashed, and the tears come then, no stopping it. He bucks, loosing the last bit of his anger, exploding up, pivoting at his hips, and driving his father down, then hammering his fists into chest. He clasps his fists together and churns his arms down like a piston, boring his way down onto his father.
And then it’s over. No more energy, no more anger. They exist together. For several minutes they hardly move, just pant and cough. This is the normal trajectory. Soon, they will rise to their knees, then stand and move into the house.
“Syringe Ebola into baby formula,” Polk says. He’s gasping, the words pulsing out in blurred waves. “Hack a newborn giraffe with a machete.”
“Okay.”
“Dynamite the Statue of Liberty.”
“Enough now.”
“Grocery bags full of puppy ears.”
“Polk.”
Polk stops sleeping in his bed. Too soft, too warm. Goodness to be found in small miseries: cold floors, festering splinters, fingertips burnt on light bulbs. He lies on the floorboards, no pillow, no blanket.
Outside the wind ravages the old house. The dogs, he can hear the dogs, howling and snarling, and then more snow comes, dampening the yelping echoes and covering old tracks. There is no sleep, not anymore, only an untended aggression that needs fed.
She is near, he knows this. He begins smelling her perfume, flowers and vanilla. More than once he moves her old ashtray from the table to the counter only to have it moved back by the morning. His father does not smoke. And of course, her prints. Is she too ashamed to come back? Is that it? Or is she angry with him because he didn’t say he loved her?
He sees her tracks again one morning, fresh tracks in the fresh snow. Not twenty feet from the front door, pacing around the grass cage where he fought his father. Keds, very clearly Keds. They slither through the tall grass, around the north side of house, up to each of the front windows. There they shrink and push deeper into the snow. On her tiptoes, peering in. He feels her lingering presence, as if they are trying to occupy the same space, as if she is trying to make sense of what has happened since she left. He examines each print, follows them out the backyard and through the split chain links. He tracks them north, fifty yards into the fields, the longest he has ever been able to track her, but then they enter into a depression of ice and evaporate. He circles around looking for an exit point, but there is none. Gone again.
Nearby is the pit bull mix that he shot the week before. It has a distinctive brindle pattern to its coat. Dilutions of gold on a black base crawl as if trying to escape. He is exposed, vulnerable without his rifle. Its stomach has been opened up, devoured. The other dogs, hungry for whatever protein still exists in this wasteland. And he thinks for a moment of the oddity of it all, how he kills the dogs and leaves them to rot, how the other dogs eat their pack-mates to survive. He hunts them and hunts for them. This canvas will never whiten. He isn’t sure what all this means, but he does know that the natural order of things has been upended, that he is caught up in it somehow.
Polk steals paint from school, tertiary colors, fills in every set of prints that might be hers. He squeezes paint into each print, filling it fully, cleanly, spreads it over every contour, and then moves on to the next print, and soon her trail glows, emerging from the snow and mud like collapsed stars. The paint will harden, freeze, will remain fixed there for as long as it takes for Polk to make sense of them. No more disappearing trails. He uses his stash of paints to categorize them by color, by direction, by timeframe, then draws a tape measure around the expanse of compound, slowly, from one set of prints to another, even measures stride lengths. He notes everything.
The dogs eye him but keep their distance, curiosity and mockery. Like an undertaker gazing at a body, perhaps. Polk doesn’t feel hunted exactly, but he feels something at the base of his skull, their lurking curiosity, feels how little he now belongs in this place. It belongs to the dogs.
Nights, he sits at the kitchen table. He moves the ashtray with her menthol butts to the counter, begins drawing a scaled map, every feature of the area, every print of hers, every color noted. He feels like a scientist tracking the migration patterns of some near-extinct species of bird. In time, her own patte
rns will emerge, her location. They must. For the first time since she disappeared he feels a goodness in himself, a warmth not from violence.
“What’s this?” his father asks.
“I’m not allowed to shoot the dogs anymore.”
His father sits next to him, looks the map over for a moment. “These are places you’ve seen her trail?”
Polk nods.
“This many?”
Polk keeps drawing, tracing a pencil across a ruler. Slow, precise movements.
“Polk?” his father says quietly, but Polk ignores him. He spends all evening drawing a map of the area, each set of prints noted and appropriately colored to indicate a timetable.
“My little cartographer,” his father says, but Polk ignores him still. This is more than a map. This is a timeline, a psychological study.
The next day, her ashtray is back on the table again. There are cigarettes in it, menthol butts that do not seem new but that he can’t recall seeing before.
He begins to see her footprints everywhere, glowing at him. They emerge from his father’s eyes. He sees them in headlights and oddly thrown shadows; during art class; in his dreams when he sleeps in short, hateful spurts. Sometimes the dog tracks morph as he stares at them, become longer, narrow, deeper on the ridges. Sometimes they are large and sometimes small, but they are all hers, this he knows.
