by Dan Chaon
“I have some important things to talk to you about,” Jonah says.
“Oh,” Loomis says.
“But first we have to look for wood. We have to find enough good, dry wood to keep a campfire going. Doesn’t that seem like the best plan?”
“Yes,” Loomis says. He shifts in his seat as they are driving, fingering the seat-belt strap.
——
They walk along the wooded area behind the tent, picking up sticks and bits of fallen brush. The evergreens slope down to a creek, which apparently feeds into Little Iceberg Lake, and they stroll along its banks in the twilight, listening to the soft, swallowing plunk of frogs as they flee into the water at noisy human footsteps. Jonah’s arms are laden with dry wood, and Loomis wanders out in front, scoping the pathways. They look enough alike, Jonah thinks, that no one will question the fact that they are related. Actually, he thinks, they could be father and son. Loomis looks from side to side and when he sees a bit of fallen wood he strides toward it confidently.
“That looks like a good piece,” Jonah says.
“I think so, too,” Loomis says, and bends to pick it up.
——
Jonah will have to call Troy eventually. Troy will probably be freaked out about it, probably angry, but then he will see the logic of it. Even if they’d parted on bad terms, even if he thinks of Jonah as a liar and a sneak, he will have to recognize that Jonah has done a very loving thing. He has rescued Troy’s son. Whatever else has happened between them, that will have to count for a lot.
They will come to an understanding, Jonah thinks. He’ll explain it all. A few days, a week, and they’ll all meet together.
All this comes to him dreamily, as if it’s a fairy tale he read long ago, some movie he’d seen as a child on “The Wonderful World of Disney.” He vaguely remembers the scene: a little boy and a young man standing with the kindling they’ve gathered, among the Ponderosa pines and their puzzle-piece bark, the crisp carpet of needles beneath their feet, light stabbing through the boughs in milky shafts. The boy and man face each other hesitantly.
“Loomis,” Jonah says. He adjusts the bundle of wood he is carrying, first cradling it and then bracing it against his hip. Finally, he sets it down on the ground. “Listen,” he says. “There are some things I want to discuss with you. I was talking with your grandma, and she, well, she was saying that it might be good if you stayed with me for a while. She’s old, you know, and I think she needs a break for a little bit. Now that you’re out of school for the summer and everything.”
“Stay with you?” Loomis says, at last. “For how long?”
“Let’s get a fire started,” Jonah says, “and then we can talk about it. Okay?”
——
Building a fire is fun. Loomis is fascinated by the process—the biggest log in the center, surrounded by a tepee of branches, the twigs and bits of bark around the circumference. They spend a lot of time building this structure, and then Jonah hands him the box of matches.
“Just drop the matches around the edges, where the kindling is, okay?” Jonah says. He helps Loomis pull the match head along the flint paper on the side of the box, but when the flame sparks, Loomis flinches and drops the matchstick quickly as if it has snapped at him.
“That’s all right,” Jonah says, encouragingly. “It’s good to be cautious. You don’t want to get burned.” Then he takes another matchstick from the box. “Go ahead. Just do it slowly this time, now that you know what’s going to happen.”
Loomis takes the match between his fingers, his brow furrowing, his tongue clenched lightly between his teeth in concentration, reminding Jonah for a moment of Troy bending over his crossword puzzles. “Okay,” Jonah says, and Loomis surprises him with the neat, expert flick of his wrist. A hiss—and then Loomis is holding up the flame, his wide, astonished eyes catching the flicker of light. He grins.
“That’s perfect!” Jonah says, and his breath hitches in his throat, at the purity of Loomis’s pleasure. “Now put it on the kindling. That’s right . . . get that little stuff burning.” He hestitates for a moment, then rests his palm very lightly on Loomis’s shoulder, a shudder of tenderness moving up his arm. “That’s right,” he murmurs. This is the closest he’s ever felt to another person.
——
In the movie, the man and the boy had gone up into the mountains to have a serious talk. He remembers it clearly. The man had a beard and bright blue eyes and wore a flannel shirt. The boy was troubled, moody. They saw a moose crossing a stream. They sat around a small fire in the darkness, and the man played his harmonica for a while.
Jonah thinks of this movie as they sit around the fire they have made together. Loomis is roasting a hot dog, proudly holding his long, sharpened sapling over the flames. Jonah hums a few notes, experimentally, then stops. He can’t think of any songs, not really.
Instead, he finds his thoughts drifting toward his mother again, his mother on the day of his grandfather’s funeral, how sane and sober she’d seemed. She’d put on makeup, and plaited her long hair into a single, tight braid that ran down her back. She’d worn a black dress, and Jonah wore black pants and one of his grandfather’s button-up shirts, one of his grandfather’s neckties, which she’d knotted for him. He can recall her fingers moving beneath his chin, the brush of her brisk knuckles against his throat. The gentle finality as the tie was cinched around his collar.
Later, back at the house, they’d sat at the kitchen table together, and she spoke to him as if they were equals, as if they were brother and sister, drinking wine in the late afternoon. She reached out and touched his cheek.
“He loved you a lot, you know,” she said. And Jonah had watched as her eyes grew a film of water, as she looked past his face, out the window. “It’s kind of dangerous, to be loved that much by somebody. It’s hard to recover from it. It’s not as if you’re going to run across someone else who feels that intensely about you.”
“I know,” Jonah said, uncertainly, and she ran the pads of her fingers along the back of his hand, making a sigh that slid into his heart like a fishhook.
——
“Loomis,” he says at last. The silence has been extending for a while by that point, the night pressing down on the little circle of fire. He recalls the bearded man in the movie, the way he took the harmonica from his mouth and sat solemnly for a while, watching orange flecks lifting off from the campfire and winking out in the braid of rising smoke. And then he remembers what the movie was about. He remembers what the man had said. Son, the man had said. I have some bad news. Your father is dead.
“Loomis,” Jonah says, and clears his throat. He tries it out: “Son?”
But unlike the boy in the movie, Loomis doesn’t lift his head. Instead, he focuses on the little stuffed dog, and presses it.
“Heh, heh, heh,” the dog says. “Do it again.”
Sparks rise with the smoke in little eddies above the flaming logs, and Jonah cannot really get a clear sense of Loomis’s expression as the orange light shudders across the boy’s face. Heh heh heh, the dog says. Do it again. And then a pause. Heh heh heh. Do it again. Jonah waits, trying to imagine the exact right words. But Loomis just keeps pressing the dog’s stomach, over and over.
32
June 4, 1997
At first it had seemed ridiculous. The policemen—Kevin Onken and Wallace Bean, the same cops who had arrested him—standing there on his doorstep, shifting earnestly from foot to foot, embarrassed to inform him that his son seemed to be . . . lost.
“Lost?” he said, and he looked at them, puzzled. This was St. Bonaventure, Nebraska; it wasn’t the kind of place where children can get lost for long. “What do you mean?” he said. “You mean he wandered off?” He flicked his eyes from one cop to the other, aware of the suspicious way they were regarding him. Gauging his reaction.
“Oh, I get it,” he said. “You think he’s here?” And he gazed bitterly at them. The first image that struck him was of Loomis running
away from Judy’s place—trekking slowly across the lawns and alleyways and parking lots of St. Bonaventure, making his way toward his dad’s. They would find Loomis halfway between, and for a second he was almost happy. He would talk to his lawyer, telling him how this Custodial Parent who was supposedly more qualified than he was had been neglecting his child. He pictured a courtroom scene, with Loomis at the stand, telling the judge: “I wanted to get away from her. I wanted to live with my dad again.”
Onken and Bean stared at him sternly.
“You guys want to come in and search the place?” Troy said, and stepped back, as if to invite them inside. “I’m sure Judy Keene tried to insinuate that I came over and . . . kidnapped him or something, but I’ve been here all day.” He lifted his pant leg. “I’ve still got the monitor on, guys. You can check and see if I’ve left the house. He may be headed over here, for all I know, but it’s not my fault if he wants to get away from that woman.”
“Troy,” Wallace Bean said, and shifted his hams. “Mr. Timmens,” he corrected himself, and it was the shift into formality that sent a sudden prickle through Troy’s mind. He watched the movement of Wallace’s jaw beneath the skin.
“I think this might be turning into a serious situation,” Wallace said.
——
He sat in the back of the police car, with his hands folded tightly in his lap. It was ridiculous, he told himself. St. Bonaventure wasn’t the kind of place where some crazy comes along and snatches a child out of a backyard. It wasn’t even the kind of place where you could wander that far—a twenty-minute walk in any direction would lead you to the edge of town, to the hills and fields and prairie that surrounded the town for miles upon miles. They had told him they’d brought in trail dogs, and the air in the back of the car had begun to feel thick. There was no handle on the inside of his door, no knob that would unroll the window.
“Loomis doesn’t like dogs,” he said, even though it seemed beside the point. “He’ll just hide from them.” He looked through the metal netting that separated him from the men in the front seat. “Look,” he said, “maybe someone should be at my house. That’s probably where he’s going. He’s probably just trying to work his way back home.”
But they didn’t say anything. He stared at their heads. The shaved, tapered hair, the inner tube folds of flesh that were stacked up on the back of Wallace’s neck, and he suddenly remembered that horrible story, that kid who was killed—What was it? Ten years ago?—knocked in the head and dying of hypothermia in the basement freezer. Joshua Aiken. What a stupid way to die! But Loomis was a smart kid, Troy thought, and cautious. He wasn’t going to fall down a well or get hit by a car or eat some poisonous berries or something.
Loomis was fine, he told himself. He wasn’t the type of kid who would be lured into a car by some stranger. Troy breathed steadily through his nose, in and out. “This is ridiculous,” he said aloud, flinching at the memory of an old dream: Loomis at the top of a tree, perched impossibly on a thin branch.
And then he thought: Jonah?
——
It had been almost three months since he and Jonah last talked. He even remembered the date—March 18—because it was, Jonah claimed, his birthday.
It was one of those late March days—neither winter nor spring, as if the seasons were fixed; the days muffled, melting into one another, the rain and snow mixing together.
Jonah appeared to be a little drunk. He wasn’t quite stumbling, but when Troy let him into the kitchen he held up a bottle of bourbon, hesitating as he set it in the middle of the table, as if he were trying to center on some particular target.
“Hey,” Troy said. He hadn’t heard from Jonah in some weeks, and he wasn’t sure what to make of this. He watched as Jonah sat down and took a little sip from the bottle. Without thinking too much about it, Troy went to the cabinet and drew out a highball glass. He picked up the bottle and poured three fingers of the bourbon into it, set it down in front of Jonah, who blinked at it, nonplussed.
“Thanks,” Jonah said. He put his fingers around the glass, but didn’t bring it to his mouth. “Guess what?” he said, his voice a little thick. “It’s my birthday. Did you remember?”
“Well,” Troy said. “Not really. I’ve had a lot on my mind, man.” He cleared his throat, then warily settled down into the chair opposite, their old position since the beginning. “How old are you?” Troy said. “What? Like, twenty-six?”
“That’s exactly on the money,” Jonah said with strained cheerfulness. He took a sip of the liquor and shuddered at the taste. “Twenty-six,” he said, hoarsely, then took another swallow. He was clearly not used to drinking such stuff, and Troy wasn’t sure whether to intervene or let things play out. When Jonah set down his glass, a kind of moody, melancholy hostility emanated from his downcast face.
“Well,” Troy said, “happy birthday, man. I guess I should have gotten you a card or something.”
“Ha,” Jonah said.
——
In retrospect, Troy thought he might have been more careful, more gentle. But he was used to seeing people drink. He had spent a large portion of his life as a bartender, a professional presiding over the drowning of sorrows, and this particular stage of things was quite familiar. Jonah was intoxicated—depending on his tolerance, depending on how quickly he had been consuming the alcohol, he’d probably imbibed anywhere between four and eight ounces of bourbon. Not a lot, in Troy’s estimation, but enough so that Jonah was now on a cusp, and Troy understood his hesitation. Soon Jonah would lack control. A few more swallows and he would make a firm commitment to true drunkenness; certain kinds of mental regulation and inhibition would become elusive—straight lines of self-consciousness would become more and more difficult to walk down, heel to toe. By Troy’s estimation, Jonah was about three gulps of eighty-proof liquor away from this altered state. Okay, Troy thought. This had been going on for too long, sitting across the table from each other in these circling conversations. It connected in his mind with the circumstances of his parole, the days and days alone in this house, the empty rooms, the television playing in the background. He lit a cigarette, folded his hands expectantly.
“Okay,” Troy said, “so,” he said, and carefully poured a little more into Jonah’s glass. “So . . .” Troy said. “What’s been happening? I haven’t heard from you in a while.”
“Not much, really,” Jonah said, and then he sighed thickly with his lips, like a horse. “I guess I’ve been trying to figure out what I’m doing here.”
“Uh-huh,” Troy said, and gave him a small, ironic smile. “Tell me about it.”
——
He felt a soft spasm of alarm, remembering this, sitting in the police car. He could picture the look that Jonah had given him, a kind of icy, endless gloom that he hadn’t completely understood. Then he remembered Crystal telling him—When? Back in May?—that Jonah had called her house, that Jonah had been asking about him. He wondered now what she had said. Had she told him that Judy had gained custody of Loomis? He would bet that she had.
“Wallace,” he said now, speaking to the back of Bean’s head as they traveled through the underpass toward Euclid. “Listen,” he said. But then he realized that it was a very complicated thing to explain.
——
There’s this guy who’s kind of my half brother, he thought, and he could picture Jonah settling heavily into the kitchen chair across from him, the way they faced each other as they’d been doing for months, awkwardness emanating in thin, invisible waves. Except that now, without any apparent reason, Jonah had seemed so angry.
“I’ve been thinking about leaving town,” Jonah said, as if this were something that would shock Troy, or make him feel guilty.
“Oh really,” Troy said. “That doesn’t seem like a bad idea. Back to Chicago?”
“Probably not,” Jonah said. Troy observed as Jonah steeled himself to finish the last warm bit of whiskey in his glass. “Do you have any ice? I think maybe I’d lik
e some ice in this.”
Troy got up wordlessly and went to the freezer.
“I think . . . I think I just want to travel around for a while. I don’t even know where.” He paused as Troy dropped three ice cubes into his glass, observed as Troy poured another three fingers of bourbon over it. “There’s nothing for me in Chicago,” Jonah said. “I don’t know whether there’s anything for me anywhere.”
“Hm,” Troy said. He had known for a long time that it was best to remain neutral toward this kind of self-pity—a good bartender neither argued with it nor sympathized, but simply listened, simply asked noncommittal questions.
Jonah said that he might go to New Orleans, which had a lot of interesting history. Maybe he’d try Seattle, which he’d heard was a good city, and he’d never seen the Pacific Ocean. Maybe Arizona. Maybe he’d go back and visit Little Bow, South Dakota, where he grew up. “Make sure the graves are still there,” he said. “Ha!”
Troy watched uncertainly as Jonah rolled the ham of his hand against his forehead. He was fairly drunk, in Troy’s estimation, and the weight of his head slowly slid along the plain of his palm. “Listen, Jonah,” Troy said. He thought for the first time in months about the letter that he’d tried to write to Judy, that pathetic, groveling letter, propped between the salt and pepper shakers on the table, along with the month’s bills. For a moment, he half considered thrusting the letter into Jonah’s hands, making him read it. This is what it feels like to be really screwed, he wanted to say. This is what it feels like to be really trapped. At least you can drive away!
But the letter wasn’t there. He couldn’t remember where he’d put it, and his face darkened. “Listen, man,” he said. “I don’t quite know what you want from me. I mean, let’s say we’re brothers. Half brothers. Whatever. What is this supposed to lead to? I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, if you haven’t noticed, and you sit there like I’m failing you, or something. What do you want? Just tell me what you want.”
He watched as Jonah shook the ice in his glass. Head down.