Rutting Season

by Mandeliene Smith

  * * *

  She woke, sweating, in bright light. There were voices outside, and the noise of heavy shoes grinding against the grit on the pavement. How had she allowed herself to sleep so late? Alarmed, she stood up too fast and had to steady herself on the arm of the couch. She wiped her eyes and mouth with her hand and twisted her skirt back around, ignoring the pressure in her bladder. She had to find her brothers. She fished the gun out of the crack between the cushions and, taking care not to look over at Randall, walked toward the kitchen. Danny and Jason were talking in there, she could hear them. She stopped just outside the doorway to listen.

  “Yeah, I know, but let me handle it, okay?” That was Danny.

  “Oh, like you’ve been handling it so great?” Jason said. “You should have gotten it from her last night when you had the chance.”

  “I should have? What, ’cause you were busy getting your beauty rest? Give me a break. And anyway, if I’d of grabbed it, it would have gone off, ’cause she sure as shit didn’t put the safety on. She probably doesn’t even know it has one.” There was a pause. “Just—just don’t jump all over her. Let me handle it, okay?”

  “Hey,” Amber said, stepping over the threshold.

  “Hey,” Danny said. Jason just looked at her.

  To buy time, she bent down to see the dogs underneath the table. “Come here,” she said, slapping her free hand against her thigh. Axl stretched his paws out toward her and snapped out a curled, pink-tongued yawn, but he didn’t get up. “Come on, you big lazy!” she said. Then she saw: He and Rose were tied to the table legs.

  “Amber,” Danny said, “we gotta talk.”

  She straightened up slowly, her knees gone to sand.

  He and Jason couldn’t afford to be getting in trouble, Danny said. He had responsibilities now—Theresa was expecting; they were going to get married, probably. “And Jason here’s trying to get into the Air Force, you know? He can’t, you know, get himself a record or anything.”

  She listened to him from the side of herself, her gaze fixed on the dusty window above the sink. Pretty little Theresa in a wedding dress; pretty little Theresa with a baby.

  “So—” Danny said.

  “So we got to leave the house,” Jason said. “Like they asked us. Without pulling any shit.”

  Outside, Amber could see the hard, knuckled branches of a few trees, the harsh, white sky. An emptiness. There was nothing out there, not for her anyway.

  “And you can’t take that gun,” Jason said. “Amber, you hear me?”

  She pulled her eyes away from the window. They were both watching her now, and the look in their eyes was the kind the dogs would give her if she had a steak in her hand—a look not to see her but to get around her, to spot the weakness or false move that would give them an opening.

  There was a squeal from the driveway. “UM, AMBER?” A thin voice, cracked and fluty. “THIS IS JULIAN?”

  “Julian?” Jason said. “What the hell kind of name is that?” Then, realizing, “Is that your boyfriend?”

  “No, that’s cool,” Danny said, quickly, “that’s cool. I’d like to, you know, meet him.”

  To get her out of the house; that was all he meant. Get her out of their hair so they could go back to their lives.

  “THEY SAID I SHOULD CALL YOU? SO THAT’S, UH, WHAT I’M DOING?”

  Amber’s heart recoiled. Why did he have to talk like that? He sounded like some kind of wuss. But there was no time to think about this because immediately the phone in the living room began to ring.

  “Go ahead,” Jason said, jerking his head toward the door.

  “Yeah,” Danny said, “go for it. We’ll stay right here. Take your time. Talk things over, whatever. Whatever you want, okay?”

  It was the kind of thing he used to say to her mother to get her off his back: Sure, Mom. Sure. Whatever you want. Amber saw her as she used to look, standing in the doorway to her bedroom, slump-shouldered and pale, her face the infuriating blank of a target.

  You could be that. For your whole life, you could be that.

  The ringing cut off.

  “Jesus!” Jason muttered.

  “Take it easy,” Danny growled. “Amb,” he said in a softer voice, “it’s whatever you want, okay? Whatever you want to do.”

  She didn’t hear him. A crazy pressure was building in her chest. She looked wildly around the room, unseeing. Then she remembered the gun. It was in her hands, heavy and true.

  She felt the strength flow back into her legs. She was standing between them and the living room door; she could make it if she was quick enough. “Okay, sure,” she said, backing up, “whatever you want.” At the doorway, she whirled around and ran—past Randall, past the white table where the phone was starting to ring again.

  “Amber!” Danny said sharply.

  She saw them out of the corner of her eye, running at her with their arms out, the way they would chase down one of the dogs. But it was too late, she was already at the door.

  She yanked it open with her free hand and stepped out into the brightness. There was a shout from the cluster of SUVs, a uniformed arm waving high. For a split second, she felt herself against the soft air of the morning: the skin of her arms, the roots of her hair standing up as if in joy.

  She raised the gun, slipped her finger through the trigger, and pulled.

  FRIDAY NIGHT

  Her husband called her at work every couple of hours. She would never have gotten away with it before, but now that he was in the hospital it no longer seemed to matter what she did. No one pressured her about deadlines, no one expected her at meetings. She was suddenly exempt.

  The calls were all the same: medical updates, lousy food updates, nurse gossip (“gurse nossip,” he called it). Ordinary calls, conducted in an ordinary tone of voice—no different, if you left aside the subject matter, from all the other daily calls they’d made during their seven years together. Now, though, when he said “I love you,” she didn’t want to say it back. She said it, of course. She watched the words balloon from her mouth, rubbery and hollow, and her heart shrank.

  There were times—alone at night in their bed, for example—when she had the feelings she was supposed to have: grief, love, longing. But the instant she opened the door to his hospital room, all of that vanished. He looked terrible with his bald head and sunken chest, his gray, unhealthy skin. Even his beautiful eyelashes were gone, even his smell, which she had loved. She had an irritable urge to rush into the room and scold: Exercise! Brush your teeth! Get a wig for chrissake! Instead, she sat down beside him and talked with him reasonably, even sweetly, until it was time to go home. It was awful. Every word, every gesture of affection seemed like a betrayal. She was acting what she used to feel.

  One day, while she was idling away the time at work, she learned that a friend of theirs, a man ten years older than they, had qualified for the marathon. The news had nothing to do with her, really—he wasn’t a close friend—and yet she found herself recalling it again and again over the course of the day. The thought of this man, with his firm, lean torso and clear eyes, gave her a feeling of comfort, even elation, as though she had unexpectedly had a stroke of good luck.

  When she got to the hospital that afternoon, she mentioned the news to her husband.

  He snorted. “So? What’s so great about that?”

  “What do you mean, what’s so great? It’s something like twenty-six miles!”

  He raised the muscles where his eyebrows used to be. “Twenty-six miles? Twenty-six miles is nothing. Anyone could do that.”

  Anger swept up in her, sudden and fierce. “Oh, really, anyone?” she snapped. “Like you? You could just go out and run a marathon?” She froze: It was the wrong thing to say, the wrong tone.

  “And why not, may I ask?” His eyes had their old, mischievous glint.

  A joke. She made herself relax back in her chair. “Because,” she said in a lighter tone, “you are too . . .” She searched for something innocuous
. “Prone. You are just too darn prone.”

  “Prone?” he said. “You think I’m prone? Well, we’ll see about that.” He threw off the sheet and got unsteadily to his feet.

  “What are you doing?”

  He held his hand out to silence her. Slowly, with the exaggerated gestures of a performer, he rolled the sleeves of his hospital gown up over his skinny biceps. Then he lunged forward and bowed his arms like a bodybuilder. “Who’s the man?” he said. “Who’s the man?” He turned around to show his back, bouncing and flapping like some gigantic bird. “Who’s the man?”

  She laughed, a nervous bark. He looked ridiculous with his skinny limbs and caved-in chest but also, in a flickering, intermittent way, like his old self. Tall—she had forgotten that, how tall he was. Tall and almost stately, with his long, hooked nose and wide shoulders. The hospital light ringed his naked head like a crown.

  “Tall king,” she said in strange, dreamy voice. Immediately she saw that this was ridiculous, an absurd non sequitur.

  He stopped and looked at her mockingly. “What did you say?”

  It was him. It was her tall, funny husband. But it was him plundered, him eaten away. Where has he gone? she thought. Where is my handsome young husband? Grief burst open in her like a vein. For suddenly she saw: He was being taken, bit by bit; he was being taken and he would not come back.

  “Did you say ‘tall king’?” he said.

  But she was already crying. He stepped over and pulled her up into him and she buried her face in his chest. She cried crazily, choking and spitting, not caring. When her sobs slowed, he took her face in his hands and kissed her forehead.

  “Can we sit down?” he whispered.

  He was shaking. Her tears stopped abruptly, as though a valve had been turned. “Sorry,” she said.

  She wrapped her arm under his shoulders and took his weight for the few steps to the bed. He let go of her and sat heavily; then he reached for her hand and pulled her down next to him. They leaned back against the raised mattress and turned their faces to the window. It was getting dark; the lights in the parking lot were coming on.

  She watched the sharp line of his nose, the familiar bow of his lips. Her lungs were heavy and sodden but her mind was quiet, clear for the first time in a long while. She could feel the warm tangle of their life together, the days and weeks and years. He was alive in her the way her ribs were alive, and yet she would never know how it had been for him, all those weeks alone in bed—how he had thought about what lay ahead, while she was pretending.

  A car started up in the parking lot, then another and another. Shift change, she thought. People going home or out to dinner or who knew where; going back to their lives. She listened to the cars accelerate one by one, thin lines of sound ascending into the darkness.

  “Friday night,” she said.

  “Yep,” he said. He squeezed her hand.

  THE SOMEDAY CAT

  Janie’s brother Eddie said she was cross-eyed and that’s why she wouldn’t get adopted, but she wasn’t; it was just the one eye that went off to the side sometimes. A lazy eye, her mother called it, and anyway it wasn’t the reason. The reason was she was tough.

  “You get any tougher your teeth are gonna come in pointy,” her mother said.

  Janie went to the bathroom mirror to see. There weren’t any new teeth, just the bumpy red ridge where the two front ones hadn’t grown in yet. She stared into her eyes and they stared back the same as always: brownish green with the black centers that opened into nothing, into the secret dark inside her head.

  “Actually,” she said to Jeremy on the picnic table later, “I don’t wanna be adopted.” Jeremy was only four and didn’t matter, but she felt like telling someone.

  “I could get ’dopted,” Jeremy said.

  “A-dopted,” she said. “Go ahead, I’m not gonna. And anyway,” she added, “adoption is for douche bags.”

  “I not a doose bag!” Jeremy cried.

  “Are too.”

  Jeremy swung his feet in the gap between the tabletop and the seat. “Frank got ’dopted,” he said slyly.

  Janie shoved him.

  “St-st-st-op!” he screamed. “Mommmmm!”

  Their mother was inside, watching TV with the baby. They both sat still, listening, but the only sound was the wheezy chug-chug of the air conditioner in the living room window.

  “Ha, ha,” Janie hissed. She shoved him again just to get the itch out of her hands, then she jumped off the table and ran. She was planning to run around the house like an Olympic racer but it was too hot so she slowed to a walk and then to something that was maybe as fast as a bug would go—a slow bug or a bug with half its legs pulled off—but even this made her too hot, and at the kitchen steps she gave up and sat.

  She didn’t want to think about Frank.

  * * *

  She could still see him if she let herself, a tiny picture at the end of a tube, like when she looked the wrong way through the binoculars at school. Frank had been nice to her. He used to let her come and sit on his bed—not Melissa or Tommy or Eddie or Jeremy, just her. She would sit on the end of the bed and he would sit by the pillow and play his air guitar or tell her about the bands he liked or what he would do when he got famous from all his guitar playing, and sitting there, watching the tiny stars of dust float up and down and sideways in the light. Janie would feel everything inside her lie down and go quiet.

  But one day that spring Frank had gotten into a fight with their mother’s boyfriend. “Duane Lame-ass,” Frank had called him, and everyone had laughed because it sounded so much like Duane Larasse, his real name. Then Duane had gotten mad and tried to hit Frank, but Frank had gotten tall, and when Duane tried to push him up against the wall, Frank put his hands around Duane’s neck and shoved him into the fridge until Duane’s face turned a fat-looking purple.

  A few days later Janie came into the kitchen to find her mother reading something off a piece of paper. “ ‘I am a single, white male with a steady job and a farm in the beautiful state of New Hampshire.’ ” She looked up at Frank. “A farm! Don’t that sound nice?”

  “What’s that?” Janie said, grabbing for the paper.

  Her mother snatched it out of reach. “Something Duane got off the computer. Get off!” She slapped Janie’s hand away and kept reading. “ ‘And I have room in my heart and my home for a young boy who needs a father. I lost my son to cancer two years ago and want to raise another boy to be a Godly and a Responsible young man.’ ”

  “What boy?” Janie said. “Who got lost?”

  No one answered. Her mother was looking at Frank; Frank was looking at the floor.

  “I bet he’s loaded,” her mother said. “I bet he could buy you anything you want.”

  “I bet he could kiss my Godly and Responsible ass,” Frank said, and Janie, relieved to see it was a joke, barked out a high, hooting laugh.

  But when the farmer came a few days later, Frank didn’t say anything at all; he just went upstairs and put his things in the plastic grocery bags Janie’s mother gave him. In the back of the farmer’s truck there was a new washing machine and a dryer in big cardboard boxes. Duane and the farmer dragged them off and pushed them down some boards into the basement; then Frank came out with his bags. Janie stood by the stairs to say goodbye, but Frank never looked back—he went to the truck and put in the plastic bags of his stuff and then he got in and shut the door without looking. Later he sent a picture of himself on his new bed. The farmer had bought him a guitar; you could see it in the picture.

  Sometimes Janie would think she saw him and her heart would jump, but it was always just Eddie or a shadow or a lump of dirty clothes on the bed that was Jeremy’s now, and for a second, standing there, she would feel all the color bleach out of the world.

  Janie’s mother told her to forget about him. “He ain’t your brother anymore,” she said. “He’s got a new family now.” She was feeding the baby in the kitchen.

  Janie watch
ed her stir the stinky baby cereal. A question was pressing inside her, heavy as a stone. “Let’s get Jeremy adopted,” she said.

  “Nah, Jeremy’s too little.” Her mother put another spoonful in the baby’s mouth. “Yum!” she said in a baby voice.

  “Then who?”

  “I dunno,” her mother shrugged. “I guess it’d be Eddie, if it was anyone. Eddie or Melissa. They’re oldest, anyhow.”

  “Not Tommy?”

  “Did I say Tommy?”

  The stone pressed in Janie’s throat. “Not me?” she croaked.

  “Did I say you?”

  “Why not me?”

  Duane put down his beer can. “Because you’re such a little shit, that’s why,” he said.

  “So?” Janie said, a bubble of relief blowing out, out in her chest. “So, you big fatso?”

  Duane reached his arm out to smack her but Janie ducked out of the way and ran for the kitchen door yelling, “Fatso! Fatso!” and from the corner of her eye, she saw her mother’s mouth curl up into a smile.

  “You can’t scare Janie,” her mother said. “She’s a tough ass like me.”

  * * *

  That was back in the spring, when the air smelled sweet and the yard was covered in bright, soft grass. Now it was all just dirt and the only smell was the sour diaper stink of the garbage cans.

  Janie stood up. The picnic table was deserted; Jeremy had gone inside. To tell on her probably, the big crybaby. She walked over and climbed onto the table’s splintery top. Once she’d played pirates with Tommy on that table, and Marines down in the woods, where they could sneak up behind the mall and throw stones at the loading dock. But Tommy was twelve now and didn’t play anymore. He was always with his girlfriend, Ashley, or down at the school yard playing basketball with his friends. He never even talked to Janie now unless she bugged him, and mostly what he said then was “Shut your face,” like Eddie.