Fitting Ends

by Dan Chaon

  The father wins one pack of cigarettes, and Scott takes another from the carton. The light glares down on his cards as he fans them out. He arranges them, and his father speaks ramblingly of an idea he’s had to move his trailer out near the lake. “They say there’s plots in Lewellen that don’t cost too much. Couple years down the road, who knows?”

  “Who knows?” Scott echoes. And here is another happy memory he’s reminded of—he doesn’t understand why there should be so many good things when his father was such a wreck, really—but he can remember being seven or eight and going with his father to Lake McConaughy, fishing. They’d rented a boat, and he thinks of being out on the water, his father telling him that the lake had been made by a dam, and that at the deepest point, which at one time had been a valley, there had been a little town. And sometimes, his father told him, when the lake was very calm and clear, boats passing over could see the steeple of an old church down there under the water. He must have been stone drunk then, Scott knows, but it also seems that he was more whole then than he is now, that something great was happening, and Scott had sat there, believing him, staring over the edge of the boat. He could hear the sound of a radio playing somewhere along the shore.

  Scott lays down his cards, frowning at the memory, and his father taps the table briskly, because he wins again, and he sweeps the cigarettes in the center to his side.

  “Just like the old days,” Scott says, and begins to shuffle. “I used to get such a kick out of you giving me a fifty-dollar bill.” Scott smiles, but his father doesn’t. He looks up as if accused, as if revealed. His brow furrows.

  “You know,” he says, “I’d give anything to have those days back to live over again. I’d give anything to make that up to you.”

  “I didn’t mind. Things were fun for me.”

  Scott’s father shakes his head grimly. “No, they weren’t.”

  It has been an unspoken rule between them that they don’t mention the past. The only things Scott’s father will say are abstractions of some sort, phrases he has obviously picked up in a clinic: “I just had to learn to turn my actions into reactions,” he will say, or “I was looking for approval, and I lost my identity in the process.” His words hang in the air like smoke, and it’s hard for Scott to believe he has said them.

  Scott doesn’t feel he can forget or ignore things the way his father does. He’ll think of the time this girl, Traci, and two of his fraternity brothers and he sat up late playing quarters—the easy jokes; the talk of stupid things that connected their childhoods, like pop songs and brands of candy; the way Traci’s hand kept bumping against his. She was rich and beautiful, and Scott knows for a fact that if it hadn’t been for the alcohol there never would have been that great moment, much later, when they slid loosely into a kiss. He remembers the parties, the night he stood on a chair in front of a crowd of dancing people and raised a cup of beer above his head, shouting a toast: “To Life! To all of us! To me!” And everyone cheered. He was happy then. There aren’t so many nights he regrets. He never did those types of things people spoke of at the clinic: wrecking cars, beating their wives, tearing through their life’s work as if there would never be an end to it. Listening to their stories, Scott had felt ashamed to have such fond memories, and so little desire to start over.

  In the middle of the week the feedlot calls. They would like Scott to start on Friday, and they will train him to drive one of the feed trucks. He wants to say no right away, but then he thinks that maybe his father pleaded with them to offer him the job. He imagines them snorting as his father comes into the office to punch out: “Larry, your kid turned the job down. Does he think he’s too good for us?” Scott doesn’t know how he would explain himself. So he tells them he will be there, seven o’clock sharp. When he hangs up, his whole body feels hollow.

  When his father comes home from work, Scott is sitting in front of the TV, drinking quinine water and eating dry saltines from the box. His father walks in and tosses his work clothes lightly into the closet. “I hear you got some good news today,” he says.

  They go out for a walk, Scott and his father, after supper, down the long dirt road that leads away from the trailer. Scott can tell how pleased his father is from the way he walks, his springing step, as if he’s trying on a new pair of shoes. His father picks up the larger pebbles he finds in his path and throws them over the sunflowers in the ditch, out into the pasture. “I got a pair of coveralls you can use,” he tells Scott. “They’re too big for me. And you can take the car. I won’t need it. I got Fridays off, you know, and I’m just going to work in the shop.”

  “Great,” Scott says. The air is electric with things he considers saying and then doesn’t. He thinks of friends who have parted on bad terms, meeting under falling leaves, under a drizzle of rain. He could say, “I really don’t think this job is right for me,” or even, “Dad, will you help me, please?” But then, when Scott looks at his face, all he can see is the glass eye, which is blank as the dark bead of a bird’s. Scott faces him, turning words over in his mind and then discarding them.

  His father smiles at him quizzically. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know.” Scott shrugs, bending down to pick up a rock. He throws it across the ditch. “Nothing.”

  When Scott wakes up on Friday, his father is still in bed. Scott dresses in the dark, and when he goes to the car, the sun is barely staining the rim of the sky. Once he’s driving, his head starts to throb, and he can’t stop himself from feeling that this day will mark an ending place. He stares ahead and can almost see his future in the distance, bearing down on him like dark weather. He lets his foot off the accelerator, watching the speedometer drift down, slower, as he heads into the gray foot-hills. Lots of people are worse off than he is, he tells himself. He thinks of someone his own age, with the same problems, back in the real world, going to work, content. He imagines men his age, not boys, going to war; the pioneers, with wives and kids and complete responsibility at his age enduring all sorts of tragedies and hardships. And yet, as he curves up to the top of the hill and looks down to where the feedlot is, where thousands of cattle cluster like a brand against the pale fields, he stops the car. He sits there until the time when he is supposed to start work has blinked by on the digital clock on the dashboard. Then he turns the key. He drifts past the feedlot, puttering as heavy trucks roar past, his hands clutching the steering wheel like an old man’s, drifting toward the highway, toward town.

  He drives through St. Bonaventure for hours. His car moves slowly down the street where he and his mother used to live, and he pauses for a minute in front of the old house. There is a FOR SALE sign in the front yard. In the corner is the tree he used to stand by when he was waiting for his father to come pick him up. His father would never come to the door, so Scott would lean there against the tree trunk, sometimes for hours because his father was always late. He would gaze expectantly at the street, as eager as if he were going out to a party.

  Beyond the tree is the place that to Scott seems most like his mother: a small fenced-in garden, where he can see a bright flash—a rag, perhaps—tied to a post. He continues on, past his old grade school, past a row of unchanged storefronts, and he almost expects to see his mother come out of one of them, holding a package, rummaging through her purse, which would be stuffed with bills and letters and lists of things she had to do, the little errands and plans that held their life together scribbled out on scraps of paper that she was always losing. She would be looking for her keys, which were always buried somewhere in that purse, and her large, light-sensitive glasses would be darkening as she would step out into the bright sunlight. All this comes to him like a vision, and his hands feel brittle on the steering wheel. He turns the car around and around familiar blocks.

  Scott is almost surprised, in the afternoon, to find himself pulling over in front of a liquor store. He steps out of the car, wobbly on his feet, and when he walks through the door, the electronic chime that announces hi
s presence sends a slow trickle of ice through his stomach. He sets a cheap bottle of vodka on the counter. The saleswoman looks up, and her long turquoise earrings swing sleepily.

  “Party tonight?” She smiles. She has three gold teeth.

  “Yes,” Scott says, and pushes a crumpled bill toward her.

  “Four ninety-three,” she says firmly, merrily. “And seven cents is your change. You have a nice day now.”

  He is not going to drink it: That is what he tells himself as he crumples the bag and pushes it under the front seat. It was just a mistake that he bought it. He looks at the clock and realizes he would just be getting off work about now, had he gone. And then suddenly he wonders if maybe they called his father when he didn’t show up. Suddenly he can picture his father pacing, thinking Scott has been in an accident, calling the police. Or maybe rushing out of the house to search on foot, since Scott has the car, tracing the path Scott might have taken, expecting to find him encased in the bloody wreckage. And then, not finding him, perhaps he begins to realize what Scott has done. He may even guess that Scott would end up at the liquor store. Scott can hear the vodka bottle clink as he turns onto the road. He imagines his father at home, punching the air with his fists—or worse, crushed and disappointed. Waiting. What excuse can be given? Scott wonders. All he can think of are childish explanations like amnesia or kidnapping.

  As he drives up to his father’s trailer, Scott tells himself that he’s going to tell the truth. He pictures the two of them, pouring out the entire bottle. He thinks of his father raising his fist, then changing his mind.

  When Scott opens the door, his father calls out: “Congratulations!” He’s standing in the kitchen, his arms spread out expansively, but when he sees Scott his arms slip to his sides. Scott knows it must be his expression. “I figured,” he says as Scott steps in. “I figured there was reason to celebrate today. You started your new job. You’ve been almost two months without a drink. And”—he pushes a piece of paper toward Scott, who takes it dumbly—“you got some mail from college.” It’s a form letter, Scott sees, concerning preregistration. There are smudge marks where his father has smoothed out the folds, and Scott can see him, reading it, relishing the idea that his son’s life is coming together, nodding the way he does when he finishes welding one of his creations.

  Scott starts to fold the letter, and it is then that he notices the table is set for a party. His father has spread it with a balloon-patterned paper tablecloth, and there is a pitcher of lemonade with real lemon slices floating in it, various kinds of cookies, cheeses and salami, all in wheels and geometric designs, arranged on paper plates. The father puts his hand on Scott’s shoulder and then takes it away, as if it’s a gesture he’s not quite sure of, as if he has found something unsavory there. “How was work?” he says.

  Scott thinks the words “I didn’t go to work.” The refrigerator begins to hum in the quiet. “Dad . . . ,” he says. His father’s jawbone moves vaguely beneath the skin, and the eye drifts blindly. “Things went okay,” Scott says at last.

  “Mmm,” his father says. He’s going to find out sooner or later, Scott knows. The longer it goes on, the worse it will be. But he shuffles his feet and says nothing. “Well, anyway.” Scott’s father looks at the table and frowns. “I don’t know. I just thought it might cheer you up, some stupid little thing like this.”

  “It looks great. Thanks.” Scott can see the moment for telling his father passing by, growing distant. He tries to keep from looking miserable.

  “It’s nothing fancy,” his father says. “I don’t know what people do.” He puts his finger on a square of cheese, then takes it guiltily away, as if he’s been scolded. He puts his hand briefly on Scott’s. “Be happy,” he says. “Just be happy.” Scott nods and tries to smile.

  Late at night Scott wakes, and he is hot and shivering at the same time. He has thrown off the covers in his sleep. They are curled like a body beside him. Scott touches his own skin, and it’s cool and damp as clay. He hasn’t felt this way since the first few nights in detox. His heart pumps in waves, and he lies there, limbs flung out, eyes open. The night sounds melt together: the rattling of tree branches against the trailer’s metal sides, the scratching chirp of a cricket. A cow calls out from the field across the road.

  His father begins to talk in his sleep. At first, Scott can’t quite place the sound; it weaves and curls at the edge of his hearing, barely audible. Then his father lets out a cry, and Scott sits straight up in bed. His father’s words are slurred when Scott presses his face to the wall to listen. His father makes a low sound in his throat, something that is halfway between a bark and a moan of pain; there are several of them one right after another and then more indecipherable words and then a bark so full of misery that it makes the hair on the back of Scott’s neck prickle. He needs to get out of the trailer. He’s got to, and he puts his hands on the glass of the window above his bed, thinking of the bottle hidden under the front seat of the car. He can picture himself, going out to a bar, a party. He drinks tall aquamarine margaritas, dances with sleek women in rhinestone-stitched dresses, stays up all night, the music fast and glittery. His father murmurs again, and Scott gets out of bed. The floor seems to unwind beneath him, like in dreams, as he steps carefully down the hall, past his father’s room, where he can hear him breathing heavily, through the kitchen, and out the screen door. He’s not sure what he’ll do. He stands in the moonlit yard, which is quiet except for the sound of the sprinkler, the water hitting the cement, spraying into the grass, then back, in a sleepy rhythm. He looks at the car and steps dizzily out through the gate to the gravel road where it’s parked. He fingers the handle of the door, lightly, then inches it open. When he looks over his shoulder, he half expects to see his father, framed in the lighted bedroom window, watching. But he doesn’t. Scott lifts the bag out, nervous even at the crinkling of the paper, as if this might wake him. Then he gazes out to where the circle of porch light ends, to where the dark line of road vanishes into shadows. He can hear the cattle call out mournfully as he begins walking, the gravel sharp beneath his bare feet. The crickets purr, whispering from the ditches. He’s gone several hundred yards before he stops to think, Where am I going? He’s in his boxer shorts, no shoes, miles from town. He slows, and then at last sits down in the high sunflowers that line the ditch. The shadows pull up over him like a sheet.

  He would like to be closed up, that’s what he thinks: surrounded by brick and mortar; the mouth, the ears, the eyes stuffed with sawdust. He lies back, and it’s then, through the stems of weeds and sunflowers, that he sees a bone-white face, bobbing in the dark, floating there, gazing with hollow eyes. His throat forms a gagging, voiceless cry, that superstitious sound familiar to him from horror movies, and for a moment he scrambles in the dirt in terror.

  And then he realizes that it’s a cow. The cattle, having noticed him, have come to the edge of the fence. Scott hears one low curiously, then snuffle. They’re hungry. They believe I’m bringing them food, Scott thinks. Their spectral faces nod in the darkness, staring expectantly. Kneeling in the wet grass, he clutches the paper bag in his hand, and they press closer to the fence. The cattle raise their voices again, in a deep chorus, and he can feel his hands shaking. He sinks down. Everything seems to press toward him, and he would like to believe that he’s like a drowning person, that he’s submerging, drifting down and down until the dim porch light and the trailer and the sunflowers above him and the moon and then finally even the pale masks of the cattle recede, grow distant and blurry, and then go out, one by one.

  SPIRIT VOICES

  I turned twenty-seven on a quiet Saturday in April, shortly after the birth of our second child. The day was dull and ominous: it had been raining off and on since I woke up, and I spent most of the morning working on our taxes. My birthday gifts had been practical—socks, underwear, shirts in a style that made me feel that I wasn’t really young anymore. When I went out for a drive in the late afternoon, the light
drizzle began to turn to sleet, and the houses, the telephone poles, the street signs, became sharp-edged and spectral against the gray sky. Dark birds lifted out of the bare trees as I passed.

  I had only meant to go to the drugstore, but as I turned onto the quiet main street, I thought I saw my brother-in-law’s wife, Rhonda, the one my wife’s family hated, driving alone in a long white car. Though I knew it was foolish, I couldn’t help but follow.

  We’d known for a week or so that she was back, but I hadn’t seen her. In that dark weather, I couldn’t even be certain it was her—I’d caught only a glimpse of the face, the pale skin and short black hair. I drifted behind the car as it headed out toward the edge of town.

  The town we live in is small by most standards, little more than a cluster of trees and buildings in the middle of the Nebraska prairie—a main street the teenagers drive up and down at night, with a few storefronts in the center, the town wisping away at both ends into gas stations, motels, and then open road. The car was going under the viaduct, to the west side, where I knew Rhonda was staying.

  Rhonda lived in a low-income tract called Sioux Villa, and most of the residents there were pretty bad off—destitute elderly, single mothers, alcoholics. If there was a murder in St. Bonaventure, it usually happened in Sioux Villa. The apartments were in rows of six, so that the place looked like the old one-story stucco motel my family had owned until I was seven, when my father bought the more elegant Bonaventure Motor Lodge.

  I didn’t know which apartment was Rhonda’s, so I cruised in and out of the rows until I saw that white car parked in front of one of the unnumbered doorways.

  I stopped the car. That was all—I didn’t have any plan in mind. I idled the car outside, listening to the rain, to the rhythmic wing-beat of the windshield wipers. The defroster was on high, and the car smelled heavy with it.