August

by Callan Wink

  August eyed Veldtkamp warily. He had already developed the habit of keeping his left hand jammed in the pocket of his jeans. The stitches had only recently come out, and the stumps of his pinkie and ring finger were still red and raw looking. Dry and scaly on the very ends. If he accidently bumped them against something, a shooting, tingling pain ran all the way to his elbow. The doctor told him this would lessen as time went on—the nerves deadening, getting used to the new terminus point. He pulled his hand out and held it up. “Just part of a couple fingers,” he said. “Not that big of a deal, really.”

  “Well, look at you. Ol’ Stub-Fingers McGee. How’d that happen?”

  “Just a stupid thing with some machinery. A baler fell off a jack. It was my fault.”

  “Could have been worse, I suppose. Could have been your whole hand, or leg, or something.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Could have ended up like Ramsay. Burns over seventy percent of your body.”

  “Everything could pretty much always be worse.”

  “Even with Ramsay. A person might think that dying with burns over seventy percent of your body is about as bad as it gets, but then I’m sure there’s people out there that get burns over eighty percent of their body. You know?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  Veldtkamp passed August the bottle and watched as August took a long swig and handed it back with a cough. “Decent turnout tonight,” Veldtkamp said. “But nothing like last year. Last year was crazy. I guess that’s how it goes when somebody dies. The party gets a little smaller every year, and then at some point there’s not even enough people around that remember to make it worthwhile.”

  “Last year was crazy,” August said.

  Veldtkamp screwed the cap back on the bottle and put it at his feet. He stepped close enough that August could smell the whiskey on his breath. “What does that mean?” he said.

  “What we did.”

  “And what did we do?” He stepped closer so his chest bumped August’s. “What did we do?”

  “Uh-oh,” someone said from the other side of the party. The smattering of conversations silenced.

  “I said, What did we do?” Veldtkamp bumped August’s chest again, and August took a step back.

  “I don’t have to tell you,” August said.

  “I remember getting drunk and celebrating the life of a great friend. That’s what I remember.”

  “June,” August said. “That’s what I remember.”

  “You don’t know a thing about her. About what she wanted. Nothing. You’re making it out to be something it wasn’t. And that says more about you than it does about her.”

  “I know what it was.”

  “You don’t know shit. No one forced anyone into anything. You were right there. Now you’re trying to act like you’re a saint.”

  “I’m not trying to act. I’m just saying it was fucked up.”

  Veldtkamp had August’s shirt bunched up in his fists and was walking him back, August shuffling, trying not to stumble. He slammed August back-first into a cottonwood. They stood this way eye to eye for a long moment. And then Veldtkamp released August’s shirt, shook his head, and turned away, picking up the whiskey bottle as he walked off into the dark at the edge of fire.

  Someone laughed, and someone shouted, “Can’t we all just get along?”

  August followed Veldtkamp and found him sitting on his lowered truck tailgate, bottle between his legs.

  “Can I sit?” August said.

  Veldtkamp shrugged, and August heaved himself up next to him. From where they sat they could hear the music of the party, a blur of indecipherable voices, see bodies passing in front of the fire.

  “I didn’t watch much football this fall,” August said. “But I caught a couple games on TV. I looked for you.”

  Veldtkamp laughed. “Well, you wouldn’t have seen me,” he said. “Unless the broadcast showed the inside of the Rhino Bar. I didn’t really pan out too well up there.”

  “Was it because of that day with the truck? Your leg?”

  Veldtkamp shook his head. “Nah. Not really. I had a deep bone bruise and an MCL strain from that. But I was fine in a few weeks. I mean, I definitely told a few people around here that was the problem. Made it out to be that if I wouldn’t have gotten my leg run over I’d have been an all-American. That was pretty much bullshit. College ball is different. It has a different feel. Everyone’s faster. Everyone’s stronger. I think I was fast enough and strong enough to hang, but it got to be mental. In high school I knew I was faster and stronger, and so I played a certain way. Up at the U, I just couldn’t get that confidence, because I wasn’t much different from anyone else. Does that make sense? I didn’t have the knowledge that I was bigger, so I couldn’t play bigger. Some people can play their size, but I could only be good if I was bigger. Anyway. I figured all that out in practice, real quick. Never even suited up for a game or made the travel team. I could have stuck it out, probably, and seen some playing time in a year or two, but I said fuck it. My old man has the contracting business, and he needs help. Not the end of the world. Could be worse.”

  “Remember in practice, that one time, when Coach had us doing that stupid drill—bull in the ring?” said August. “You cleaned my clock. I was in the middle, chopping my feet, head on a swivel, and Coach called your name, and I remember thinking, Oh fuck, Veldtkamp, here it comes, and when I turned you were already there and I was flat-out on my back seeing stars. Coach about lost it. I think he got off on watching us cream each other like that.”

  “I have dreams about it. A couple times a week while I’m sleeping I still see things through the face mask. I’m always in the middle of a game, and I just can’t get traction. The field is slippery and I’m spinning out. I give out these spastic kicks and then I wake up. When June would stay over she’d always laugh about it.”

  “I thought maybe she’d be here, actually,” August said.

  Veldtkamp reclined until he thumped back on the truck bed. “I doubt we’ll be seeing Miss June around here for quite a while,” he said. “She’s on the East Coast for school. She has an internship or something. Didn’t come back this summer.”

  “Brown?”

  “Yeah, Brown. She deferred her enrollment last year when all that stuff happened. With her dad and everything. We hung out almost every day right up until she left, and we said that we’d stay in touch and I’d maybe go out there to see her and we’d make it work somehow.” Veldtkamp laughed. “Shit. She called me after she’d been out there for about a week. Told me straight up that it wasn’t going to work long-distance. I told her I’d come out there. I’d find a job, whatever. She told me it wasn’t a good idea.

  “I just—I go to work and I come home. I get shitty on the weekends. I go to work and I come home. My dad’s done this for thirty years and she’s out there at Brown and I’m just getting up and going to work and coming home. One time she told me that I possessed the highest level of kinetic intelligence she’d ever come across in a person. Kinetic intelligence. Can you believe that? She was calling me a dumb jock, basically, putting it nice. And now some other fuck probably has her. Out there at Brown. I could hear it in her voice when I talked to her last. She was a million miles away. Like she was so happy she was on a balloon up above me shouting down with a megaphone. There’s nothing harder than a girl telling you it’s over and her voice sounding so happy.”

  “Maybe you deserve that.”

  Veldtkamp sat up quickly and leaned in so his face was inches from August’s. “You think you’ve got some magic ability to tell right from wrong that I don’t have? If you felt so bad about the whole thing, you should have let me beat your ass instead of running me over with your truck like a pussy. The other guys felt bad and they faced it.”

  “Maybe. Who beats your ass, then?”

  “
I’m doing that myself just fine.”

  “Did you ever apologize? I always wondered about that.”

  Veldtkamp shook his head. “You can only solve problems by talking if they were caused by talking in the first place.”

  August hit him then. It was an awkward angle, sitting as he was, but it landed well, and he felt the mash of lips under his knuckles. Veldtkamp went down off the tailgate but came back immediately, a slick of blood on his chin, grabbing August’s boot and dragging him to the ground. His teeth were grinning red and his fists were finding August’s face like falling rocks. August tried to jam his knee up into Veldtkamp’s groin, but he just twisted and kept punching. August covered his face with his forearms and absorbed a few more blows before someone hauled Veldtkamp off. There were people standing around, faces appearing and disappearing in the dust they’d raised. August’s eyes were already swollen to slits. There was a hot slug of blood moving down his throat, and he swallowed. Veldtkamp struggled to his feet and August thought he might come for him again, but he stepped over August’s legs on his way to the truck. August heard him gargle and spit. He dropped to the ground next to August and put the Jack Daniel’s bottle close to August’s good hand.

  No one said anything, and seeing the excitement was over, people started filtering back to the fire. There was a loud laugh, and someone turned the music up. Veldtkamp sat back with a groan. “You tagged me good,” he said, probing his mouth with a finger and spitting. “I think you put my teeth damn near all the way through, you fucker. Might need to get it stitched.”

  August tried to stand, but it was too much and he thumped back down. Eventually Veldtkamp got to his feet and extended his hand to pull August up. They sat on the tailgate again, blood on their shirts, dirt on their jeans, watching the party die in front of them. “I know it’s pathetic,” Veldtkamp said. “But I’d give a whole lot for one more practice. High school practice, not college. Just all of us guys out on the field after school. Coach screaming his stupid head off, making us do laps around the baseball field. Bull in the ring. All of it.” He uncapped the whiskey, took a wincing drink, and reached it toward August. When August shook his head, Veldtkamp shrugged and had another drink himself. “Our boy Ramsay,” he said. “Way to do it. Die young and you’re a fossilized hero. Leave the rest of us to muck it out down here.”

  August’s mother came home and made him pork chops—seared in a cast-iron pan on the stove top, swimming in herbs and butter. She served them with thin-sliced red potatoes fried in bacon grease and a wilted spinach salad that August only picked at. She sat across from him at the table, drinking a glass of iced tea, clearing her throat loudly several times but not actually saying anything about his fading black eyes. When she picked up her glass, her new engagement ring clinked on the rim. Several times he’d caught her looking at it when she didn’t realize he was watching. Her lips would be slightly pursed. The beginnings of a frown, or her own peculiar grin, it was hard to say.

  August finished his pork chop and polished off the potatoes. He wiped his mouth and drained his glass of water and handed the pork chop bone to the pup, who’d been staring at him imploringly from the floor near his chair. She retreated under the table, and soon the sound of her sharp little teeth working on the bone filled the room. He’d named her Sally.

  August did the dishes and then went upstairs to his room to get the papers he’d been puzzling over all afternoon. His mother was at the table listening to the radio, and he put the stack of computer printouts on the table between them. “I can’t make heads or tails of it,” he said. “I think I need your Social Security number. Dad’s, too. It’s a FAFSA.”

  She sat up a little straighter. “Oh? Well,” she said, “let me get my glasses. And I’ll put some coffee on.” This last bit from the kitchen—she was already at the sink, running water into the carafe—she nearly sang it out.

  When his father called, August was pondering the bewilderingly abundant contents of the refrigerator. His mother kept bringing home groceries, even though he’d told her repeatedly it was unnecessary.

  “How you feeling?” his father said.

  “I’m doing all right. Hot day here. Might go jump in the river later.”

  “That sounds good. Indian summer is always nice. We had a bit of a cold snap here this week. Hard to believe, but it already feels like fall is in the air.”

  “Last week they forecasted snow above six thousand feet. Never happened, but still. Got cold for a day.”

  “You able to feel that in your fingers? The change of weather? My old man’s brother lost the tip of his thumb in a log splitter, and he could always feel it there when the barometer changed. I’ve heard that’s pretty common.”

  “No. It just feels weird all the time. It hurts but also something different. I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.”

  “Well, hopefully your little lady, June, is around treating you nice and helping you with things you need helping with.”

  “I guess that’s over.”

  “Oh? What happened? Seemed like you two were getting kind of serious.”

  “It’s basically like you said. She was out there at school, doing all the extracurriculars. She called me and told me it wasn’t going to work out, the long-distance thing. Probably she met someone else. It seems like she’s real happy out there, and even though she grew up here she doesn’t like it the way I do. I’m glad she’s happy, though.”

  “Well, that’s tough. But look at it this way; now you’re free to play the field and mingle, which is what you should be doing anyway. There’ll be plenty of time for the shackles later. My advice is to stay busy. And put yourself out there, too. Introduce yourself to one woman a day, old, young, pretty, ugly, it doesn’t matter. Just get used to talking to them. You start doing that, and it won’t seem like much but eventually it will start to snowball and you’ll have your hands completely full. When it rains, it pours, that’s how these situations go. So keep your chin up.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  “How’s the dog coming along?”

  “Good. She seems smart. Doesn’t give me any trouble.”

  “What are you going to do with her when you’re in class?”

  “I figured she’ll just sleep in my truck. That’s pretty much what she wants to do anyway. I think she knows that if she’s in the truck, then I can’t get too far away from her.”

  “She a chewer?”

  “Nah.”

  “Barker?”

  “Nah. Hardly had any accidents in the house or anything like that, either. She just kind of follows me around and looks at me. Who knows, maybe she’ll all of a sudden turn difficult as she gets older, but I think I lucked out.”

  “Sounds like it. But it’s probably not luck, actually. I always had a theory about dogs. Seems like dogs kind of take on the personality of their owners, you know? I just have a really hard time picturing you having a dog that’s high-strung, or neurotic, or a pain in the ass. You’re too levelheaded to rub off on a dog that way.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I’m just saying that I think you’re on track is all. Seems like you got things figured out, more than I did at your age. You work hard and your head is on straight. I’m proud of you, kid.”

  “Thanks. So how are things going back there? Is Lisa good, and everything?”

  “She’s fine. We’re doing fine, mostly. We’re going to the lakeshore next weekend. She rented us a little house on the water, and we’re just going to go up there and hang around. Although I don’t doubt she has things planned for us to do. That girl has all sorts of plans. More and more I’m figuring that out.”

  “You check the forecast? Weather supposed to be decent for you?”

  “Looks pretty good. Partly cloudy on Sunday, but Friday and Saturday are all sun and hardly any wind. There are a million things I should be doing around here, but Lisa
wore me down. She’s got her brother and cousin coming over to take care of chores while we’re gone. Twenty percent chance of storms on Sunday, but then a storm at the lake isn’t the worst thing. I remember going with you and your mother that one time, and it was stormy every single day. The waves came up big and the water was actually warmer than the air.”

  “I remember that. We had those inflatable rafts and we swam out a ways and kind of rode them in on the waves. We had a fire on the beach, too.”

  “We did, that’s right. I think you ate about a dozen s’mores and fell asleep on a blanket in the sand.”

  “I haven’t thought about that in a long time.”

  “It was quite a while ago now. Lisa would probably like it to be hot and sunny so she can work on her tan or whatever. But either way, I don’t really care. If it storms, I’ll get one of those rafts and do a little body surfing with it for old times’ sake. I’ll let you know how it goes. And, while I’ve got you, I’m sorry about what happened to your hand. Seems like you’re doing okay, but I just wanted to say that.”

  “Could have been worse.”

  “Sure. Of course. Still, for some reason I feel slightly responsible. You’re a grown-ass man now, and I’m a thousand miles away, but I feel a little to blame. I sometimes think about you out there in Montana, alone in that field, under that baler, and I don’t like it at all. I can’t help but feel that, in a roundabout way, something about the way I was with you as a kid led to you being under that machine. It’s ridiculous. But there it is.”

  “Wasn’t your fault. You did fine.”

  “If you’d have been working here it wouldn’t have happened. Even though you might not want to hear it, I feel like I need to mention it.”

  August didn’t say anything for a moment. He’d taken the phone out to the porch and was sitting on the steps. Sally had come to lie down next to his leg, and he rubbed her behind the ears, her tongue lolling in the heat. From where he sat he could see the gray haze of smoke from a fire that had been burning for weeks in the Bridgers. The news said it wasn’t threatening any homes and so the fire crews were just keeping an eye on it—letting it go until it burned itself out or the snow blanketed it.