Walking Alone

by Bentley Little

Later, after his mom turned off the television, after he heard her get into bed and turn out the lights, he went down to the kitchen—where his mom kept the knives.

  ****

  Glen stood on the cracked cement outside the mall entrance and peered through the glass door.

  “I offed her,” he said, and Daddy smiled and the light in the mall became stronger. Where before had been dimness, Glen could now see stores, wonderful stores, filled with merchandise. A music store with racks of CDs, walls covered with posters, cool tunes blaring from hidden speakers. A food store filled with candy and Cokes. A toy store stocked with every game, action figure and model imaginable. Daddy’s smile broadened. He held his hands out toward Glen, and the dirty glass door separating them slowly opened. Glen felt cool air, smelled spice and food.

  “Then come with me.”

  Glen walked into the mall. He smiled at his daddy, but the smile was not entirely real. That echoing sound in Daddy’s voice was back, and this close it sounded a little bit…scary.

  “We have friends here,” Daddy said. “Lots of friends.”

  In the recesses of the mall, almost visible in the bright light, Glen could see dark figures walking in and out of the stores carrying packages, shopping. He squinted, peering more closely, and thought he recognized some of the figures. Carlos Mondragon’s father. Leroy Washington’s brother. John Jefferson and David Hernandez.

  Dead gang members.

  Glen looked back over his shoulder. The door to the mall was still open, and through the entrance he could see his mom running across the parking lot toward him. Frightened, he faced forward again.

  Daddy’s eyes flashed. “You lied to me.”

  “I couldn’t, Daddy! I couldn’t!” He stepped backward.

  Then Daddy was smiling again. “It’s okay, Glen. It’s okay.” His smile grew broader. “But even though you didn’t kill her, you still don’t want to live with her, do you? In that little teeny tiny apartment?” He gestured expansively. “Wouldn’t you rather live here, with me?”

  Glen’s lips suddenly felt dry. Inside, he felt the same coldness he’d felt yesterday when Daddy had told him what he must do. Behind him, he heard his mom’s voice screaming his name. Her voice was angry, scared, cracked, crying, and to him it sounded absolutely wonderful.

  He took a step backward.

  Daddy looked sad. “Glen?” He crouched down, reached in his pocket, pulled out a candy bar. “I love you, son.”

  Glen turned around. The door to the mall closed just as she reached it, cutting off her cries. He looked toward his daddy, smiling, clean, wearing a new suit, bending down on one knee, holding out a candy bar, then back toward his mom, dirty, sobbing, hair matted and tangled, face red from screaming, wearing her stained and ripped bathrobe. She looked plain and old and alone against the backdrop of the empty parking lot.

  “Glen,” Daddy said warningly.

  He didn’t think. He just ran back toward his mom, away from the pulsing lighted heart of the mall, and he pulled open the mall door and dashed outside into her arms.

  “Glen,” she sobbed. “Glen.” She held him tight, almost hurting him with her hug, but he didn’t mind, and then he was crying too.

  He looked back into the mall. The illuminated stores were already fading, the tropical plants dying, the merchandise disappearing. The lights in the music store winked out of existence. What had been the toy shop became once again a large empty room dissected by two fallen roof beams.

  Glen wiped his eyes and glanced over his mom’s shoulder. Daddy stood, pocketed the candy bar and walked away without even waving goodbye. For a brief second before he turned, Glen thought he saw a terrifying expression of rage and hate on that once familiar face. Then the last of the store lights dimmed, and only a weak shadow remained where Daddy had been, and then even the shadow was gone.

  Glen hugged his mom.

  “It really was your daddy,” she said wonderingly.

  Glen shook his head against her breast. “I don’t think so.”

  “I think it was.”

  He lifted his head, looked into her face and decided not to argue.

  And with the mall at their backs, the two of them walked across the parking lot toward the car.

  HUNTING

  (1994)

  More than anything else, I think, it was the special quality of the air that I loved, those attributes that seemed to exist only when I was out hunting with my father. In town, we breathed the same air everyone else breathed, but in the wilderness it was only the trees, the plants, the insects, the animals and us, and the air seemed somehow cleaner, clearer, fresher, with an identifiable texture unlike anything I’d experienced before or have experienced since. Sound was remixed, important noises magnified, unimportant noises decreased in volume, so that the wind through the trees sounded like the rushing of a raging river and the words of our infrequent talk were muffled and flattened into nothing.

  My father worked for the U. S. Forest Service, so he was always careful to make sure that we hunted in season and obtained the proper permits, but he also knew the land better and more intimately than most of the other hunters in town, and he had an inside track each season on the good hunting spots. No matter how often we went out, though, no matter how long we spent, we never seemed to do much shooting. I can count the number of times we actually bagged a buck on the fingers of one hand. Not that it mattered. Hunting was just an excuse, a pretext. What really mattered was being out there, my father and me, alone in the wilderness. It was the ritual of hunting that was important—the hiking, the making of camp, the cleaning of the rifles, the stalking of the prey—not the actual act of killing itself.

  More often than not, despite our grand plans and stated goals, we’d end up flushing grouse and, on the last afternoon of our last day, shooting enough to justify the time we’d spent hunting—packing the birds in our by-now-empty ice chest and lugging it back to the truck. My mother always exclaimed over our haul, and I was never sure if she was legitimately impressed with what we’d brought back or if she was just playing along with us. Either way, she’d pluck and cook the game birds, and we’d end up eating them.

  I was eleven I guess, eleven or twelve, when my father invited Gary Knox to hunt with us. The Knoxes were friends of my parents, the only friends my parents had, really, and they used to come over about once a month for dinner and bridge, and sometimes the four of them would go out somewhere, getting all dressed up, leaving me with a babysitter. I think I resented my father a little for inviting Gary Knox into what had been, until now, our own private world, but I said nothing.

  The difference was obvious almost immediately. We never talked much on our trips, my father and I. We never talked much anyway. We didn’t have to. It wasn’t until later, when I was older, when I read about it in books and saw it in movies and on TV, that I learned that we were supposed to talk, that we were supposed to act like friends. Back then, he was the father and I was the son and we went hunting and didn’t talk much and both of us thought that we were having a good time and that this was the way things were supposed to be.

  But Gary Knox was a talker. He talked on the drive up the Forest Service trail, he talked while we unpacked the truck and divided up the gear, he talked while we hiked up and over the hills. I don’t know what all he talked about, but it seemed boring and pointless and entirely inappropriate to me, and I found myself hanging back from the two of them as we hiked along the path that would lead us to our campsite.

  We walked for over two and a half hours, Gary Knox talking all the while about work or something he’d read in the newspaper or some other subject that interested him. He seemed to pay no attention whatsoever to the land around us. We moved from scrub oak to ponderosa, the trail transforming from dirt to rock as we climbed Cook’s Mountain and skirted the canyon on its west side. We passed dripping black stains on the side of the cliff, plant rot that had been transformed into distinctive geologic markings, and we looked out at low clouds th
at made the mountains into mesas, capping the canyon with a ceiling of grayish white.

  And Gary Knox talked office talk.

  I tried to tune him out, tried not to listen, but though I could not hear the specifics of his conversation, I got the gist of it from his tone of voice and it depressed me. He was bringing the real world into our sanctuary. The apartness of the wilderness, everything that I loved most about it, that made it special to me, was to him merely background, white noise, meaningless, nothing. The trip had barely started and it was already ruined for me, and I wished more than anything that Gary Knox had not come with us. I looked at the back of my father’s head as we walked, and though he said nothing, I somehow knew that he wished he had not come along either, and that made me feel better.

  We made camp in a grove of poplars just over a hill from the river. The two of them set up the tent while I scavenged for dry wood we could use for our fire that night. They worked quickly, and the tent was up before I’d collected my second armload of kindling. Gary Knox offered to collect the rest of the wood, saying he wanted to scout around anyway, and while he went hiking off into the woods my father dug a hole for the campfire and I rolled the rocks to line it. We did not speak as we worked, and with Gary Knox gone it seemed almost like one of our regular hunting trips.

  When he returned, he announced that he was going to go fishing. “The river’s full of ’em,” he told us. “I could see ’em jumping up, just itching to be caught.”

  My father loved fishing more than hunting, and even though we hadn’t brought our poles, I expected that we’d tag along. Especially if the fish were jumping. But to my surprise, my father looked at me and said, “You catch us enough for supper, then, Gary. We’re going to do a little tracking before the big day tomorrow.”

  Gary Knox grinned as he rummaged through his equipment for his fly hat. “I’ll catch us enough for supper, breakfast and dinner.”

  I stared at my father, grateful, and he smiled at me and winked.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon following two trails that wound along the base of the hill and around a ridge. We saw spoor but no game, but it didn’t really matter. We were out here, alone, and the air was the way it was supposed to be and I could hear the thunder of the river and couldn’t hear Gary Knox’s talking, and everything was perfect.

  The second trail ended just this side of a sloping meadow, and after the trail petered out we crossed the last line of trees into the grass. Clover was mixed with ferns here, stretching away from us in a natural bowl shape, and the ground smelled as though it had just rained, although it hadn’t rained for several weeks.

  We saw a doe in the trees across the meadow, standing stock still and staring at us through the low branches. I spotted the animal first, and I was proud of myself because it was the first time I’d sighted anything before my father. He clapped me on the back, and we watched as the doe bolted away from us through the trees.

  When we returned, Gary Knox was frying up the fish he’d caught, cooking it on a flat skillet he’d laid over the top of the campfire. He breathed deeply, looked over at my father and grinned. “Smells like a woman, don’t it? Ain’t nothing like the smell of a woman, is there, Steve?”

  My father shook his head. It was clear that he felt uncomfortable, and he changed the subject and started talking about that doe we’d seen.

  I took a deep breath, sniffing the air, and looked at Gary Knox, puzzled. I didn’t smell anything but fish. I didn’t smell perfume or bath oil or any of the other scents I associated with women, and I thought that the reason my father had wanted to change the subject was because he was embarrassed that his friend had said something so ignorant. I knew what that was like. I was friends with Marty Dailey at school and Marty wasn’t real quick, and I was always a little embarrassed to talk to him around other people. It was fine if we were by ourselves, but I was kind of uncomfortable being with Marty around normal kids. Maybe my father felt the same way. I myself had never thought that Gary Knox was especially bright.

  Or maybe his wife really did smell like fish.

  The thought of that made me laugh, and though both of them looked at me quizzically and asked what was so funny, I just shook my head and kept laughing.

  We hunted the next day, although none of us got anything. We saw the doe again around midday and Gary Knox shot at it, but he missed and scared the animal off. I was glad. My father and I shot only at bucks, and though my father didn’t say anything about it, only pretended to be sorry about the shot, I thought it was wrong to try for a doe.

  By the end of the third day we still hadn’t gotten anything, hadn’t even seen anything besides skunks and birds and rabbits, and on the morning of the fourth we went back to a marshy pond we’d found, flushed some grouse and packed the birds up along with our gear the way we usually did.

  Gary Knox talked all the way back to the truck, the way he’d talked all the way over to the campsite, the way he’d talked all the time we’d been hunting. My father talked with him, joked with him, and when we all piled into the vehicle and started back toward town, they both told each other what a great time they’d had and how they should do this again.

  The funny thing was that Gary Knox did not really seem to like my father. He pretended to, but I could tell that he didn’t. The entire trip, he’d kept getting in little digs when he could, making fun of my father’s clothes or his gun or his camping gear, but my father either didn’t notice or decided to ignore it, and he said nothing. On the way home, after we’d dropped him off at his house, I asked my father if he liked Gary Knox, but he wouldn’t answer me directly. He would only say, “Yes, your mother and I like the Knoxes.” I told him that I didn’t think Gary Knox liked us all that much, and I asked him why someone would go on a trip with people if he didn’t like them. My father looked at me, shook his head and sighed. “Adults have to do a lot of things they don’t want to do,” he said. I didn’t know what he meant, but I pretended that I did and nodded.

  I got sick from that trip, sick with the flu, and my mother kept me home from school for two days, feeding me toast and tea, chicken soup and crackers, letting me watch game shows on TV. I was in heaven, and though I couldn’t go out and play in the afternoon like I usually did, missing school more than made up for it, and my friends came over with comic books and the homework they’d picked up for me, and I thought that it was almost like having servants.

  On the second day, after lunch, after “Andy Griffith” had ended and the afternoon’s endless spate of boring soap operas had begun, I was sitting up in bed next to the window, pretending to look at the math homework I was supposed to be doing, when I saw Gary Knox coming up the walk to the house. His car wasn’t in the driveway or on the street, and I wondered how he’d gotten here. I watched him, humming to himself and smiling, and I suddenly felt strange. Uncomfortable, and for some reason a little bit scared. I ducked behind the curtains. I’d seen him but he hadn’t seen me, and for some reason I didn’t want him to see me. I wondered why he was coming over. Didn’t he know that my father was at work?

  There was a cheerful shave-and-a-haircut knock on the doorframe, and I heard the screen open. “Elaine?” he called. “Elaine?”

  He was coming into the house by himself! He had never done that before. No one had ever done that before except Grandma and Grandpa.

  “Elaine!”

  Where was my mother?

  “Wait!” I heard her call from the bathroom.

  The toilet flushed, and then I heard her running quickly down the hall to the kitchen, her bare feet slapping against the hardwood floor. I held my breath as she passed the closed door of my bedroom, not wanting her to hear me, thinking childishly that if she could not hear me she would not know that I could hear her.

  The south wall of my room was the north wall of the kitchen, and I pushed aside my books and scrambled to the foot of the bed, pressing my ear against the wall. I heard the two of them talking in low voices, and a moment later I heard
Gary Knox say in a too-loud voice, “I’ll come back when Steve’s here then.”

  I moved back to my position by the window at the head of the bed, hiding behind the drapes, peeking out at Gary Knox, who glanced toward my window as he walked back down the driveway. I heard my mother’s footsteps in the hall, and I quickly laid down, closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. I had a hunch that she was going to check in on me, and I didn’t want her to know that I was awake.

  She did check on me, and I heard the door to my room open, heard her whisper my name, then heard my door close. I heard her walk back down the hall to the bathroom.

  When my father came home that evening, she did not tell him that Gary Knox had stopped by. I had not expected her to, and somehow that made me feel even worse. I kept wanting her to tell my father, to just mention that Gary Knox had been over so that I would know that everything was fine, everything was normal, but she said nothing.

  It frightened me that she kept his visit a secret.

  Gary Knox did not return like he said he would. Not that night nor any night that week. He did not even call to talk to my father, and though he might have called the ranger station during the day, somehow I did not think he had done so.

  The next weekend, the Knoxes came over for bridge. My father and Gary Knox got drunk, and both my mother and Mrs. Knox ended up getting mad at them. I was supposed to stay in my room, but I snuck into the kitchen a couple times to get a drink of water, and I heard my dad and Gary Knox laughing, heard my mother and Mrs. Knox lecturing them.

  I fell asleep listening to them argue.

  When I awoke it was late, after midnight. I did not have a clock in my room, but the house felt different to me—quieter, colder, darker—and I knew that I was awake later than I had ever been before. Usually, I fell asleep while my parents were still awake, watching TV in the living room, and I slept until morning. But all the water I’d drunk had filled my bladder and awakened me with the need to pee.

  I got out of bed and walked across the dark room, opening the door and walking down the hallway toward the bathroom. I’d thought my parents were asleep, the house seemed so quiet, but in the hall I heard the monotonic sound of private conversation. I walked slowly across the carpet, trying not to make any noise. Their bedroom door was open, and I could hear them talking inside. My father said something low and inaudible. “No,” my mom said in response, and there was disgust in her voice.