August

by Callan Wink

  August pulled his hand away. “She’s leaving anyway. What does it matter? We like each other. So what?”

  “Oh, Augie. She and I talk all the time. She tells me things. Her guys. That’s what she calls them. One in Bozeman, a lawyer. There’s a bartender here in town, maybe another one occasionally, he’s a fishing guide, I think. What she does is her business. I don’t judge her; she’s casual and having fun and that’s fine, but when it involves my underage son it’s different. I’m going to call her right now. This is done.”

  August knew she was lying. She was saying these things to him as a way to break them up. He was out the door, slamming into his pickup, burning out the driveway, knowing for sure that it was probably all true.

  * * *

  —

  He didn’t speak to his mother for days and then, for a long time after that, nothing more than necessary. She told him that Julie had left early for New York. “She called to apologize to me, and I suggested it to her,” she said. “She told me to tell you that she had shown some bad judgment, and she hopes you don’t think badly of her.” August turned and walked out of the room without acknowledging her words.

  She was on him constantly to complete his application to Montana State. Because he wouldn’t do it himself, she filled out the paperwork so all he had to do was sign. Every morning there was an argument, and finally he acquiesced. He signed all the forms. He took the envelope to the post office and he threw it away.

  * * *

  —

  Football wound down. He started attending the postgame bonfires, drinking whatever booze the guys had managed to procure. He’d ended up having a decent season but not the one his coaches had hoped for based on his junior year. The team finished with a losing record, and on the last bus ride home after the final game, all he felt was relief that from now on he wouldn’t have to suit up for practice or smell the rancid interior of the boys’ locker room.

  For most of his school career he’d gotten comfortable Bs and As without trying too hard. His senior year he pulled a few Cs intermixed with his Bs. Possibly this was due to Julie or the fact that high school was all but over, or that when he tried to do the reading his eyes tended to swim and the slow pulse of a headache would build.

  He occasionally had dreams about playing still, scrabbling toward a quarterback who remained just out of reach, the field shifting and unsteady under his feet. Mostly he had dreams about her. Winter came, and it seemed that since she’d left, a certain quality of light had been bled from the world.

  TO AUGUST, THE FACT that he was born in the Midwest was starting to lose its importance. At some point, the place you’re from takes on an abstract quality. Maybe those were the formative years, but they seem less and less real. He’d always heard that the human body is 70 percent water. When he looked at his hand, he couldn’t see evidence of that any more than he could consider his childhood and determine what effect it had on the current shape of his life.

  Whenever his father called, he made sure to let August know that if he didn’t go to college he’d need to be finding a job, and that he had plenty of work for him if he decided to come back. He never came right out and said that he was struggling to get everything done around the place, but August could tell that he wanted him to think that was the case.

  Of course, August knew his father wasn’t all alone back there. Once when he called, August heard a woman’s voice in the background. It was almost ten at night, and he could picture his father sitting in the kitchen, the old yellow phone’s cord stretched all the way over to the table. He could picture the room exactly. What he couldn’t picture was the woman. It wasn’t Lisa, or at least it didn’t sound like her. He heard her speak briefly in the background. She’d said, Babe, do you want it with butter, or plain? August considered himself an adult, basically, and it didn’t bother him too much. But still, his father had a woman he’d never met making him his popcorn, calling him babe.

  August was starting to think people were inscrutable at heart. He hadn’t forgiven his mother for running Julie off, but eventually they reached a sort of uneasy truce that allowed them to live together. It was easy to think that, because they birth you, you get some sort of access to their inner life. If anything, August thought the opposite was more true. He’d spent nine months next to her heart, and now it seemed like she was going to live the rest of her life with a faint air of embarrassment, covering her tracks, worried about what he might have heard in there.

  August was still fighting with her about college. At this point, continuing with school seemed like handing his mother a victory in the ill-defined battle they’d been engaged in since Julie left. She’d called the Montana State registrar and was furious when they told her no application had been filed under his name. He’d instead decided that he wanted to be a wildlands firefighter or possibly go work in the Wyoming oil fields, like Gaskill’s older brother, who’d returned to town with a brand-new truck. Said he was going back and could get August on.

  This was two years after 9/11 and the military recruiters still came to August’s high school at least once a week, smelling blood. As a senior August could sign up for the National Guard and they’d give him four thousand dollars just as soon as he passed the test. Put your time in, they’d say, just a few years, and then when you get out we’ll pay for your school. You want to go to college, son, don’t you? Of course you do. But how are you going to pay for that? You’re an upstanding young man, I can tell. You expect your parents to foot the bill? Are you going to take out loans?

  August saw through that whole game pretty quickly. Probably thanks to his mother, he had to admit. She still spent weekends with Art, but on weeknights she made August watch Bill O’Reilly with her. She’d sit on the couch, smoking, emitting a small noise of disgust with each drag. When the show was over, she’d switch off the TV, mix herself a drink, and tune in the radio to the NPR station out of Billings. They’d sit in silence and listen to the BBC World News. She never said anything, allowing him to formulate his own opinions.

  August didn’t figure that there was much formulating in him at all until Ramsay got blown up. He had four younger brothers. His mother weighed three hundred pounds and hardly ever left the house. His old man drove long-haul trucks, only came home every couple of weeks. Ramsay had been smart enough to go to college anywhere, for free, probably, but he had to do the weekly grocery shopping for his mom, had to clean up after his brothers. In other words, he wasn’t listening to BBC World News on NPR. He’d taken the four thousand dollars. He’d come back from that first deployment with burns over 70 percent of his body and died at a military hospital somewhere in Texas. August still couldn’t quite figure out what exact part of a National Guardsman’s duty involved riding in a Hummer in Afghanistan. The brochures the recruiting officers gave out showed smiling young men and women in fatigues handing one another sandbags while flood-stricken locals stood by, gratitude written all over their faces.

  After Ramsay, everything seemed desperate somehow. It was as if August and all the guys he knew had caught something. One of their own would never be coming back, and that first encounter with the enemy, that taste of mortality, had left everyone a bit unhinged.

  August never really knew June that well, but she seemed to exist on some higher plane than everyone else in school. Maybe she wasn’t a knockout beauty—she didn’t have one of those austere faces that you see in magazines. She was, however, extraordinarily cute. Small, blond, upturned nose, huge blue eyes. And her voice: not high and girly like you might think from looking at her. It was kind of raspy, soft, but rough somehow. Like she got her full-grown woman’s voice early. She was smart, too, but different from Ramsay, in that she took it seriously. She was valedictorian, and everyone knew that was going to be the case from about the second day of freshman year.

  She might have been small, but she was immaculately formed. She was on the volleyba
ll team, and they wore those spandex shorts. August remembered seeing an unusual number of local guys around for home games, dudes who couldn’t tell you the difference between a set and a spike. They ate popcorn and made jokes about the kneepads while watching June flip her long hair out of her face brusquely and squat low, swaying side to side a little, waiting for the serve.

  At the end of their senior year, she got accepted into Brown. No one was completely sure where Brown was, but there was the general sense that it was prestigious. Most people who were going to college were heading to the state schools in Bozeman or Missoula. But June, she was going to Brown. At one point August looked it up. Rhode Island. A state hardly even as big as Sweet Grass County. She never made a big deal out of it, but it was one of those things that took her out of the town’s stratosphere, placed her in slightly more rarified air.

  * * *

  —

  People used to call him Augie, but as of late he’d been discouraging it, because he thought it sounded like something you might name a small puppy that will grow up to be a useless dog. His mother still called him Augie. His father had always called him August. In a roundabout way, his name was the way he finally met June.

  As far as he knew, he’d been in school for two years before she knew he existed. He was walking back to the locker room from football practice, and she was in her car about to leave. She had a red Mazda Miata. Her dad was part owner of a car dealership in Billings and got it for her on her sixteenth birthday. She had the window down, and when August walked by she whistled to get his attention.

  “Hey,” she said. “August, right? Too bad your name’s not July.” These were literally the first words she’d ever spoken to him.

  “Yeah?” he said. “Why?”

  “Then maybe I’d let you come after me.”

  And then she drove off, a little blond girl in a little red car, hair whipping out the window, laughing hysterically.

  No one would say that June was a complete good girl. There were rumors. Her parents were strict Catholics, and, of course, she was saving herself for marriage. But she had the Catholic knack for finding loopholes.

  “She gives blow jobs,” Gaskill said once while he and August were drinking warm beer, stolen from Old Man Gaskill, sitting on his dropped tailgate by the river. “I’ve confirmed it.”

  “Yeah, who says?”

  “My cousin goes to school down at MSU. I guess she’s been around a little bit down there. College dudes. They don’t put up with that I’m-waiting-for-marriage bullshit. You know what else I heard?”

  “What?”

  “Just because the front door is locked doesn’t mean the back door isn’t wide open.”

  “No way.”

  “Seriously. I heard that. She’s still a virgin, though, technically. It doesn’t count.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “No shit.”

  August didn’t believe him, not really, but still. He’d see her—walking the halls, her girlfriends around her like a protective shell, or at volleyball practice when he was heading out to the football field—and he’d wonder.

  * * *

  —

  What happened was, they had a party for Ramsay. On a weekend, not long after graduation, they draped his casket with the flag and lowered his remains into the ground, and that night there was a bonfire by the river. Gaskill’s dad worked for the phone company and always had chunks of telephone pole lying around. Telephone poles soaked in creosote—there was not much better for building a monumental bonfire. They made a scaffold of poles that was fifteen feet high, and the whole time they worked they didn’t once mention Ramsay. August didn’t know what the other guys were thinking. Personally, he was trying to remember the last thing he’d ever said to Ramsay, but he couldn’t. For some reason August thought that maybe if he could just remember the final words to ever pass between them, he’d be better able to classify what Ramsay’s death meant. Because, as it was, he didn’t know what to think.

  He wasn’t going around saying that Ramsay had been his best friend or anything like that—unlike some other people. After this whole thing, he’d have to say that nothing increased your popularity like dying. What did he know about Ramsay, really, when it came down to it? He was a tall, skinny kid. So pale his nickname had been Casper. He’d been on the football team, a mediocre wideout. He’d run track, too, and had been better at that. The truth was, Ramsay and August had just hung out together occasionally. It might have been easier if they had been close; at least then August wouldn’t have had to wonder how much grief was enough.

  At the time, their telephone-pole monument seemed like an appropriate act of memorial to their friend. Everyone agreed that Ramsay had always loved setting shit on fire. They waited till dark, doused it with gasoline, and then torched it. The blaze came up taller than the cottonwoods, and people couldn’t stand within twenty feet of the thing without the heat curling their hair. Flames licked at the treetops, toxic clouds of creosote smoke shifted and pulsed—it was magnificent.

  Everyone came. Kids no one even knew were there. It was the only party August could remember from that summer where the cops didn’t show up to harass them. It was like the town itself had decided to let the kids get Ramsay out of their systems the only way they knew how. And they did some of that, August figured, but mostly everyone just got drunk as monkeys.

  Veldtkamp was back from summer practices in Missoula—he’d gotten a full-ride scholarship to U of M. He was staggering around with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, shouting, “Calvin Ramsay was an American hero.” Trying to fight several people who didn’t display what he thought was a proper level of enthusiastic agreement.

  Richards burned the shit out of himself trying to jump over the flames shooting from a fallen pole, and some guys had to tackle him to put out the fire that blossomed on his shirt.

  It was sometime during this that June showed up. She was with a guy no one recognized. He was older, midtwenties at least. He had a faint look of disdain on his face and refused to shotgun a beer, and it wasn’t long before the taillights of his car were seen fading down the river road.

  But June stayed. She was wearing a dress and her bare legs were tan, red-brown in the firelight. August watched her standing there with some of her girlfriends. They were all laughing and talking loud, everyone was; the fire burned with a low roar that people had to shout over to be heard. But even so, it seemed that June was overdoing it somehow. Her laughs were the loudest, lasted the longest.

  “What the fuck?” he heard her say once, her head thrown back and her eyes half-closed, an incredulous look. “I mean, really, what the fuck?”

  A few guys had gone in on a half gallon of Southern Comfort one hundred proof. They filled a cooler with ice and dumped in the whiskey and mixed in a few cans of pineapple juice. Gaskill stole his mother’s turkey baster, and he and August walked around the party with the cooler, offering up shots.

  They got to June’s group, and the girls tilted their heads back one after another so Eddy could shoot a turkey baster’s worth of the booze down their throats. Laughing, coughing, swearing. Everyone sticky with pineapple juice. When it was June’s turn, she said, “For Ramsay,” the way everyone had been doing all night long. For Ramsay, for Ramsay, for Ramsay. It was a mantra, a chant, a motto, a rallying cry, a failed attempt to raise the dead. August had taken the baster from Gaskill so he could do June, and she tilted her head back and he could see the cords of her throat work as he squeezed the bulb. Her head was at his shoulder, her hair full of static, reaching out, clinging to the hair on his arm.

  When it was done she wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand. “One more,” she said, smiling, juice glistening on her chin.

  * * *

  —

  There was drunkenness, screaming, laughing, dancing. Dust rose and swirled in angry red columns across the fire. In the g
eneral devolution that followed, August saw June kiss one of her girlfriends, on the lips, while everyone watched. Then a while later she kissed Veldtkamp, then Richards, then Gaskill, and then Veldtkamp again. By now her girlfriends had faded away. She was sitting on the ground, laughing maybe, or crying. No, definitely laughing. And then Veldtkamp had her over his shoulder, and she was giggling, and then she was limp, her hair almost dragging into the dirt.

  The fire was at the back now. They were underneath the cottonwoods, the soft midnight sounds that cicadas make. August could smell the river moving out in the darkness, damp and black. Veldtkamp had lifted June and just started walking, and a few guys were following, and then he swore and dropped her. August could see a yellow line of her vomit trailing down his back. He took off his shirt and threw it into the bushes.

  She was sitting, legs spread, her hair in her eyes. Her dress was pushed all the way up on her thighs, one of the straps fallen off her shoulder. The guys all stood around her. August was there, too. She was making a noise, moving a little, scooting, maybe trying to get up. Veldtkamp knelt next to her, bare chested, weight-room-inflated muscles popping out all over the place. He pulled the top of her dress down and exposed her breasts. There was nervous laughter.

  “Holy shit,” someone said.

  June made no move to cover herself. She wiped at her mouth with the inside of her elbow, said something unintelligible. Veldtkamp was still crouching next to her. His hand was up under her dress, moving between her thighs, and she groaned and slumped so she was leaning back on her elbows. And then Veldtkamp was standing unsteadily. Looking around as if noticing the spectators for the first time. He weaved a little and fumbled with his zipper.