Lost Boys

by Darci Bysouth

  Ronan smacks the cooler lid shut. “Cheer’ee,” he says to the bobbing heads.

  The seals turn and roll towards shore and the water ripples behind them.

  “Cheer’ee ma ha.” He raises his hand briefly, then clumps towards the cabin. I look for the place where the seals have been, but the surface has calmed to glass. There’s no sign of them.

  Ronan left before the leaves fell from our hiding place. The salt wind came in from the east and my belly swelled and pulled towards it. My parents went to talk to his auntie. She clasped her hands and said she would do anything she could, but Ronan? What could she do about him? He was never really hers, no matter the blood.

  She sends a card for Dylan’s birthday every year. It contains a handwritten wish and a crisp twenty dollar bill.

  The cabin door slams and Ronan comes to lean over the railing, close enough for me to catch the sharpness of alcohol on him. I’m aware of him watching me. My breath stops, my lips lock tight on the question.

  “Cheer’ee ma ha, my arse,” he murmurs, “Look at you. Not understanding a bloody thing I say, and happier for it.” His eyes darken. “Do you know that, Shell?”

  I flush, and his eyes glint before he looks to the sea. The wind’s coming up. He spreads his fingers to catch it and I see something of the boy in him then.

  “Will I tell you something true?” he says. “Will I tell you about my father?”

  He’s speaking in his old voice now, the words lilting and rolling in the old rhythm.

  Something breaks and splashes behind us, and Ronan glances at the rocks before

  The sea breaks against the boat, whisper soft, and he lowers his voice. My skin.

  “My father wore a bright yellow oilskin. Easy to see, even in the dark.”

  There’s only the shushing of sea and my breath, hitched in.

  They said my father had been clumsy with drink and lost his footing. That my father was gone for good.”

  And then Ronan turns to look at me. Just like he always did, when he knew I was hooked, when he knew I would follow him.

  “He’s out there. I like to think that, you know? Safe with the selkie.” His hand swipes at his eyes and he laughs, short and sharp.

  There’s time then, while the mist comes in and the sea swells and slides, and Ronan lights a cigarette. I slow my breath and he turns away to exhale, his hands resting loosely on the railing. The saltwater has brined them; they could be scaled.

  I tell him what I’ve come to say.

  The mist has fallen by the time we reach dock. A seagull calls out, its voice muted and flat, and I see it sitting on a bollard with one leg tucked into its feathers. “My son,” Ronan asks, “what’s his name?”

  Dylan. He turns it over in his mouth.

  “He’d see you,” I say. “If you wanted.”

  “Maybe,” he says, “maybe.” His hands shake as they light another cigarette. “Ah, I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe you should tell Dylan I’m lost.” He exhales and his gaze floats over me to the village, to the pub with its garish blue sign. It’s late afternoon and he has somewhere to be.

  He leaves me standing on the dock. “Tell him I’ll think of him,” he calls, “when I’m out there. Tell him that.”

  I will. I’ll tell Dylan how the seals look like lost children and how his father can murmur, how the mist comes between that place and ours. I’ll tell him how a selkie slipped from its skin will never hold to land, for all the pretty words.

  My dark-eyed son will shrug and go back to his computer, to the photos I’ve sent him.

  I’ll see how he stares at the sleek heads and velvet eyes, how he rubs at his skin like it itches.

  How his head tilts like he’s listening for something.

  MEAT

  “IS HE SLEEPING?”

  My brother’s pudgy hand stroked the long flank from haunch to shoulder, patted the head as you would a dog. There was a line of crusted blood along the mouth and a dark red cavity where the innards should be.

  “He’s dead, you retard,” I said.

  Alan’s baby mouth trembled and Dad shot me a look. His arm went around my shoulder and I felt its weight.

  “Give thanks,” he said. “He died so we can eat.”

  The deer hung in the barn for a week. I took Alan into the dusty dark to look at the body strung up by the antlers, at the ribcage split open. There was a small hole just under the jaw and the fur had gone black around it. It looked like the stubbed out end of a cigarette.

  “That’s where the bullet went in,” I said. “Bet you won’t touch it.”

  Alan kneeled, and poked at the little drops of blood spattered on the cement floor.

  I stuck my little finger into the hole, to prove that I could. Scabby, hard, like picking your nose after a bad bleed. Alan wasn’t looking; the ants had found the scatter of blood and were doing a frenzied dance, and he’d settled back on his haunches to watch. I circled the hanging body with my feet Indian soft. My hands cupped a rifle, my eye squinted through the scope and it was real, so real I could feel the buttplate denting my shoulder and my finger tensing on the trigger, so real I could see the five-point buck in the underbrush, all cagey smart. Step, step, and the buck lifted its head, ready to bolt. My finger pulled. Pow. Dead eye and better than Dad.

  Alan stood up. “I won’t eat him,” he said.

  And he didn’t. Mom made him macaroni and cheese while we crammed venison burgers into our mouths, and Dad laughed at the smear of ketchup on my chin and gave me a swallow of beer straight from the bottle.

  The deer fed us through winter. The brown paper parcels thawed on a plate next to the sink and left puddles of watery blood. The black-marked labels were spare as bone. RIB, SHOULDER, HAUNCH. A leathery raw smell filled the house when the meat cooked and Dad told us to breathe deep, for this was an honest stink. You knew what you were eating with deer. You knew it had lived. Alan would gag and refuse, and Dad would insist he join hands and pray anyway.

  For meat. That we should eat when others have none.

  I got my first real rifle the summer I turned thirteen: a pump action Winchester like Dad and his dad before him. The forestock made a satisfying click when I slid it back. I looked through the crosshairs and aimed the empty gun at the fencepost and the cows and my brother. Dad said I was old enough to learn gunmanship and took me to the shooting range.

  My first lesson was a watermelon.

  “Draw a face on it,” said Dad. “Make it look like your brother.” He handed me the Jiffy marker he used when he butchered.

  I squinted up my eyes against the sun and drew long lashes and a lolling tongue, because my brother collected butterflies and studied the stars and he was a total pansy-ass retard.

  Dad propped the watermelon on the target bench while I loaded the rifle. I knew to wait until he was clear, I knew to line up through the notch and down slightly because I clustered high on a target. The heat left wavering lines around the bench and my hands sweated on the gunmetal. A fly buzzed around my ear.

  A crack and echo. The target bench stood empty.

  We retrieved half of the watermelon from the weeds. It smiled up at me, a pulp of red flesh where the eyes should be and the drawn-on tongue jagged and torn. The other half was spattered against the tree trunks. The flies were already clustering. I swallowed down the thing closing my throat.

  “Never aim at another person. You got that?” said Dad. He unloaded my gun and pocketed the cartridges.

  We stopped for ice-cream on the way back. Tiger stripe for Dad and strawberry swirl for me, and Mr Cooper behind the counter asked how’s the hunting and did we bag anything and did we need more ammo?

  “Not today,” Dad said. “We got ice-cream today and that’s enough.”

  Dad took me hunting every October, when the bush had gone quiet and gold and the crunch of twigs underfoot sounded like dry shot. We’d light a fire when the sun sunk low. The water would boil in the old army pot and I’d bitch and moan; whole day gone a
nd nothing killed, nothing. Dad would tell me to wait. That I’d get a deer next time because God knew I wasn’t ready now.

  When I was fifteen I shot a doe. Clean, right above the eye. She dropped like a dream.

  And I was too puffed up to speak when we stopped for ice-cream, and Mr Cooper saw the body strung to the rack and popped a beer, and Dad passed the bottle to me.

  Alan came running when we pulled into the driveway. Hale-Bopp, he was saying, it was all over the news and you could see it without a telescope and Mom said it was okay but ask Dad. So could he? Could he stay up late and watch for it, with church tomorrow and all?

  “We’ll stay up,” said Dad. “No greater church than nature.”

  Dad came to my room later with a flashlight and blanket. I sat up and squinted at him.

  “You’re doing this for a stupid comet?”

  “Not just any stupid comet. Hale-Bopp.”

  “Hale whatever,” I said. “I got a deer today, you remember that? A deer’s real, it’s something you can eat, and you’re letting Alan freak out about a comet?”

  “You’re both my sons,” said Dad.

  But I knew. I knew I was the one he took hunting.

  I failed at school and I was too slow for fast food, and I hated the boredom of working at the mill. But I excelled at basic training. My uniform collar was straight, I marched in time and I could run an eight minute mile in full gear. They didn’t make me do a hundred push-ups like they did in the movies, but I could, and my gun was well-oiled and by my side at all times.

  They let us go home for Thanksgiving before we shipped out to Kandahar.

  I sat at the table in my uniform. It wasn’t strictly necessary; Mom had left my bedroom untouched and the closet was still hung with my old clothes. But I liked what the uniform said about me, that I’d been tested and approved and was now part of something bigger than this family. That I was out in the world doing something important. Alan sat across from me with his nut roast. He was in the last year of his teaching degree and a total save-the-world retard.

  “So,” he said. “You all ready to fight the good fight?”

  “Yes sir,” I said. I spooned a hole into my mashed potatoes and waited for gravy.

  “And the women and children?” he asked. “What about them?”

  “We’re there to protect them. We’re there to bring them democracy.”

  “By carpet bombing them?”

  The sergeant had told us that the civilians wouldn’t get what we were doing.

  Especially the educated ones. “It’s about extremists. We’re going to stop the extremists. You remember that thing called 9/11?”

  “You think that was extremists?” he said. “You think the government didn’t know?”

  And I could have leaned over the table and pinned him face down in his whole-grains, mussed up that gelled hair, knocked some sense into his stupid head. Christ knows I could have but didn’t because Mom said “Stop it boys, not at dinner,” and Dad took my hand. My brother’s wrists were skinny as a girl’s anyway.

  I closed my eyes while Dad asked for God’s grace in this, and in everything we should do away from His light, in the countries of the oppressed and the starving and the violent, in the countries where brother fought brother.

  I managed to get home in time to change into my civilian clothes the next Thanksgiving. The feel of soft cotton against my ribcage unnerved me, and the way the house smelled like laundry detergent made my chest tighten. The pattern of the kitchen wallpaper, the same sunny swirls I’d traced my finger around when I was a kid, seemed to jump at me when I turned my back. I knew I was eating too fast so I cut channels between my turkey and carrots and stuffing. It looked more like a canteen tray that way.

  “Total battle zone,” Alan was saying. He’d begun his first job at an inner-city school.

  “There’s a metal detector at the front door so the kids can’t bring in knives.”

  I nodded. Yeah, I knew about that, about the kids. There was that one came into our camp, a skinny teenager with big dark eyes and reaching hands, saying Please please so that I can eat and Private Johnson tossed him a package of saltines and the boy just stood there looking at us. Then the sergeant shot him in the head and Private Johnson puked and we found the homemade explosives wired to the boy’s skinny chest before we shovelled the sand over him.

  “You okay, son?” said Dad.

  I stopped swirling my food and remembered to bring the fork to my mouth. The taste was good; it was far away from the flies and the canvas and the sand that got everywhere, and it was nothing like the long spells we spent playing Call of Duty and drinking lukewarm Coke before the crack of a rifle snapped us to order.

  “I’m good,” I said. “Thankful.” For this, for meat so that we might eat.

  Alan wrote me letters when I was in the desert. He wrote about the thirteen-year-olds who stole food for their families, and how the eyes of the tough girls glistened at the death of Juliet, and how they all thought Holden Caulfield was a pussy bitch retard. He wrote about the kids finding a fledgling crow and how they fed it scraps from the school canteen and called it Tupac.

  And I thought of writing back. I thought about telling him about the boy and the saltines and how the sunset in the desert was as red as blood and bigger than any of us, and maybe there was something in that but I couldn’t get what. I thought of writing but I never did.

  Nothing looked right the next Thanksgiving. The swirls on the wallpaper bored into my eyes, and the edges of people’s faces blurred when I turned my head too fast. I concentrated on the meat on my plate, on sawing it into smaller and smaller pieces.

  The doctor said it was normal. Detachment after an incident, the numbness after deactivation. She said I should keep busy and focus on finding a job. The sergeant said that I shouldn’t think about it; war was a different country and shit happened and nobody back home was going to understand that. Christ, he would’ve done the same if it was him that had been fired on, wouldn’t have stopped to think about it, either. And take the pills. The pills were going to help in the days to come.

  I said no to the turkey and yes to the stuffing because it tasted more green than rusty like blood, and Alan’s girlfriend smiled at me. She was too skinny, with glasses and straight brown hair, but pretty when she smiled.

  And Alan was talking, something about thirty faces filled with hatred because he was The Man coming in telling them how to live, the ones at the back saying go home bitch with their t-shirts raised to show metal, and he wanted to, he wanted to just pack up and leave because didn’t know what he was doing there anyway. Yeah, he should just let them be, with their illiteracy and bad attitudes and homemade blades, and if they wanted to call that freedom so be it.

  So Dad said the world has always been troubled and love will persevere, and Mom whispered amen and passed the gravy. And Alan knocked over his beer and the bottle hit his knife with a crack and my trigger finger pulled air.

  The sergeant said it could have been anything, that crack and rattle, it could have been a Kalashnikov and it sounded just like it, and he would have done the same. That war was all about things lining up and no time to think, because thinking gets you killed damn quick. So the things that lined up that day — the sheet metal dumped by the building crew, the goats clambering over it — were nothing but they could have been something and what was a damn goat herd doing in the middle of a risk zone anyway? Still, it was some piece of shit. About the girl.

  The beer puddled and dripped. Alan’s girlfriend wiped away the stain.

  “It’s okay,” she said, “it’ll wash away. Don’t cry.”

  I got my old job back at the mill. I edged and trimmed the boards into lengths, and I kept my earmuffs tilted so the noise of the saws could scream through my head and cut out everything else. I ate my sandwiches by the river when the weather was good. My ears hummed and I thought of nothing, and I guess I was okay.

  Alan didn’t write as much. I got a few ema
ils saying how the gangs had come in and how their tags got spray-painted on the canteen walls by kids with stolen guns. How he’d been asked to speak at two funerals and the teachers were walking the corridors in pairs, how they talked in the staffroom of Rugers or Glocks and which was best to carry, and how he wanted neither. I sat by the river and looked at his words on my phone, and sometimes I said them out loud because I liked the way they sounded.

  The foreman motioned me over one Monday morning. I saw the look on his face and thought of the girl with the goats, I thought that he’d found out somehow and he figured my hands were too dirty for all that pale wood. But then he dropped his eyes and told me to go home, that my family would need me at a time like this.

  Mom was in bed, sleeping off whatever the doctors had given her. Dad sat at the kitchen table, his hands folded together but his mouth silent. He nodded when I said I would go, that I should be the one who sees to Alan. I took my garment bag from the closet and unzipped it and put on my uniform.

  The bus had a miniature TV screen mounted from the ceiling. The news came on and someone stood in front of a school, mouthing words. The camera swerved, slid over the parking lot and stopped on a car door hung open, its window glass shattered. No sound, but the words looped and spooled across the bottom of the screen. Caught in the crossfire one police officer and three civilians. A few armed guards, a crying woman with the tagline calling her a colleague, then a march of banners and placards from some other day, a sunnier place. Blood on your hands, stop the NRA.

  And I closed my eyes because I couldn’t see what any of this had to do with Alan.