Leave the Living

by Hart, Joe

  When he clambered down to the basement, he found its source. An electric heater had been plugged in and was spitting out a meager amount of warmth. The large potbellied stove was dark at the far end of the room, neatly stacked wood nearly overflowing the box beside it. Mick found the matches on the mantel, where they always were, and knelt, opening the stove’s front. In minutes a fire roared behind its gap-toothed grate, and he opened the dampers, letting the steel beast breathe all the air it needed.

  Shrouded to the right sat his father’s chair. Long past its prime, it was threadbare and worn, like its owner had been, but sturdy without a whisper of falling apart. Beside it was a smaller chair, not nearly as used but comfortable in a way that made you want to fold up in it for a nap, especially when the stove glowed and popped nearby. His father had read to him here on freezing nights when the TV was lost to a storm, or sometimes when it was working just fine. The stories of pirates or an adventuring gang of youth never failed to make him see more pictures in the abstract surfaces of the floor, drapes, or ceilings.

  He studied the two seats for a long time. Objects were only that until the person that used them was removed. Then they became memories, or doors to memories you couldn’t shut even if you wanted to.

  Mick left the stove to its burning, the heat following him up the stairs. At the top step, movement flickered to his right and behind him heading for the stairway leading to the second floor. He twisted around seeing nothing, but the creak of a stair overhead came and went like a scream cut off midway through.

  He waited, frozen above the basement. The heat seeped past him while his hands grew colder and his heart stuttered in his chest. Finally he moved forward enough to peer up at the loft holding the hallway.

  Nothing waited in the cool shadows.

  He climbed the stairs one at a time, waiting for and finding the same creak in the second-to-the-topmost step. He put his weight on it several times, listening to the same sound he’d heard moments ago. He stared down the short corridor to where his father’s room branched off. The darkness there was still pure, untouched by the lights from below. Mick reached to the wall, his fingers sliding on wood until they met the switch he knew was there. The overhead lights came on, showering the hall in a yellow glow.

  The door to his father’s room was open.

  Of all the years he’d known him, his door had never been open. Once as a boy of ten, he had ventured inside the bedroom, keen to see what his father had hidden there, because he was sure there was something meant to be kept secret. Mick had been allowed to go into the room with his father but never without. On that occasion he had crept beneath the bed, blowing dust from old hunting magazines. He’d found a picture of his mother, smiling with eyes like an angel’s as she looked back over her shoulder. She’d been wading in either a large lake or an ocean, the skirt she wore pulled up to mid-thigh. Feeling strangely intrusive, like a burglar instead of a son, he’d placed the picture back in the nightstand drawer where he’d found it and made to leave but stopped when the doorway had filled with his father’s form. Only that once had the older man ever hurt him by the grasp on his arm, pulling him from the room and saying in a deadly calm voice that barely held the anger in check to never go in there again—ever.

  But now the room was open, and his father wouldn’t catch him there. But maybe that’s what he’d seen downstairs, what had made the stair creak. Maybe he was waiting inside the room, waiting for him to step in and invade his privacy again. Waiting to grab his arm.

  “Stop it,” Mick said. His words echoed down the hall, falling dead at its end.

  He moved forward, forcing himself to walk naturally, quelling the fear that attempted to rear its head as he came even with the room. Gray light filtered in through a half-curtained window. In its folds, he saw shoulders and the face of a man, but it was only his pictures now, nothing there other than his mind seeing patterns. Mick padded into the room and turned on the light.

  His father’s bed was made, just as he’d always seen it. The laundry basket was full in the corner and a slip of paper sat on top of the bureau. He moved closer and read the slanting script of his father’s hand. Move fish house. Gary was wrong about the new spot. There were a dozen other chores listed above it, all crossed off, all of them complete except this one. Mick slowly sat on the bed, holding the note, maybe the last thing his father had written. The tears came, and he let them fall, being careful not to let any stain the note. When they slowed and then stopped, he moved to the adjoining bathroom and blew his nose before pacing back to the hall. On his way, he paused near the walk-in closet. Its door was ajar. Had it been that way when he came in? Mick stood there, rooted to the spot, racking his memory but couldn’t recall. He reached out to close the door. In his mind, he saw dead fingers stretching out of the dark of the closet to grasp his own, to pull him inside.

  He shut the door, letting a long sigh trail out before leaving the room. He closed the outer door also and went down the stairs, realizing only after reaching the kitchen that he still held the list in one hand. He set it on the counter and went to the refrigerator. Inside were a dozen cold beers, and he pulled one free, twisting its top off. The beer was good, better than the tap he’d had with Gary that morning.

  “Hope you don’t mind, Dad, I might just get shitfaced.” He drained more from the bottle, the dark part of his mind waiting for an answer from somewhere in the house. Why was he so disturbed? Here, in this place of fond memories where nothing terrible or traumatic had ever happened? The simple and irreversible fact of death shouldn’t be able to paint black his love for the house and the man who no longer inhabited it. He wouldn’t let it. Death is another journey, his father had told him when he was young and afraid after hearing that a distant cousin had died in a car accident. It’s mysterious and strange and sometimes wonderful, though we don’t know it at the time. It’s the common bond we hold with everyone else in the world. No matter race or age, woman or man, we all die. Then he had given him a hug, holding him close so that he could smell the recent sawdust on his clothes and his fading aftershave. But we all live too.

  “Yeah, I’ll drink to that,” Mick said to the empty kitchen.

  Outside the storm rose another notch, casting flurries in drifting cascades that seemed to walk, like the legs of some giant snow beast trudging through the endless white waste. The wind nuzzled the house, and several creaks and cracks came from the distant rooms. That’s what he’d heard before, he assured himself, just the wind and the cold doing its work on old joints. And the movement was the light filtering in through the blowing snow. Nothing, in other words.

  His eyes fell to the paper again, and he pulled it closer, running his fingertips over the writing. He looked at it for a long time and then tipped the bottle straight up, finishing the beer.

  “Why the hell not,” he said, and moved back toward the entry.

  10

  His father’s coat still smelled like him—the same aftershave, the same wood shavings mixed with a metallic undertone that could’ve been exhaust, perhaps from a chainsaw. But the heavy wool and furry lining withstood the wind and the blowing snow much better than his own thin coat. He wore knee-high Muck boots on his feet, pulled from the back of the entry closet. A stocking cap was drawn down over his ears, and his hands were covered by his father’s thick leather choppers. Mick was sure if someone drove up the driveway right now, they would mistake him for his father. He could almost see the imaginary visitors jamming on the brakes before reversing.

  The thought made him chuckle as he slogged past the Tahoe to the hill that dropped away from the drive. The windswept decline wasn’t buried as deep as he’d thought near its top, but the drifts continued to pile up at its base. A ring of pine and cedar grew on the banks of the lake, their deep green color dark in the failing afternoon light. He walked through knee-deep snow until he felt the change beneath his boots and knew he’d stepped onto the lake.

  It was a field of blowing white, flat and feat
ureless, with only the odd drift rising here and there to break the illusion of its uniformity. Untouched, the lake was always well stocked with fish. And with only his father and perhaps his uncle to fish it, a catch was almost always assured. Mick turned, looking up the hill and could still make out the general outline of the house along with the clearer shape of the SUV. Even on a relatively small lake such as this, the chance of becoming lost in a whiteout was still a threat. More than one man had walked out into the Minnesotan winter, confident and sure of his bearings, only to be found huddled and frozen through, sometimes amid the pathetic makings of a fire that had never burned.

  Mick continued on, the walking easier where the wind had blown the snow away, brushing it into curved piles that he circumvented. One of the beer bottles in his pocket clinked against something metallic, and he steadied himself on a bare patch of ice. He didn’t want to slip and fall and cut himself on a broken bottle, not to mention needlessly spill any beer.

  The wind dropped in pitch, coming down from a tortured howl to a moan. And as the snow calmed, he spotted the dark shape of his father’s portable spear house. It was secured beneath a small drift that had stacked against its western side. It was roughly the size of a compact car, its steel bones covered by a tough, black canvas skin that flapped in the icy breeze. A scoop shovel protruded from the bank outside the little house, and a long ice saw stood beside it, its ancient teeth hooked and flecked with frost.

  He gained his bearings and realized his father was right. They always put the house on the edge of the drop-off, which was another fifty yards at least from the spot it sat now. The water couldn’t have been over seven feet here, not as prime as the border of deeper water where the larger fish liked to glide. He unzipped the small access and stepped inside.

  The space within the house was a mere eight-foot square. An extension of the fabric that covered the rest of the frame layered the floor, giving way to a wide patch of exposed ice that was used to spear through. The ice was skimmed over but not more than an inch thick. Without thinking about it, Mick plucked the heavy ice chisel from where it rested against the wall and began to punch the hole open. In less than a minute, the block was free, and he pushed it beneath the ice, shoving it out of the way. The water was clear and cold. It radiated a chill even from a standing distance. He wondered what it would be like to fall into its biting embrace, how the sting of liquid would be so cold it might seem hot. The bottom was as close as he’d estimated, and he shook his head, wondering why his father would ever agree with Gary to move the house here.

  Mick stood there and took inventory. Everything was present to begin spearing. The wind shoved at the hide of the house, and he considered just leaving it at its current location. It would be some work to move it the fifty yards to the better spot, not to mention cut the new hole. He could sit down right now, fire up the gas sunflower heater in the corner, drink his beer, and toast his father. The slanted writing on the sheet of paper still lying in the kitchen floated through his mind, the last chore not crossed off. What would he do with it when he climbed back to the house? Throw it away? Burn it? He imagined them both, hesitating for only a moment before turning toward the door to gather up the equipment.

  Within a half hour, he had the house moved and the hole cut. A lone white pine that soared above the others lining the bank could still be seen through the haze of snow, and it was this that he used for a landmark to place the house. With a shove of the chisel, he pushed the much more considerable ice chunk down and out of the view of the lake bottom. The freezing water flooded the area for a moment, soaking into the snow and melting it away before beginning to solidify. When it had drained back, he situated the house properly and secured it down, throwing shovelfuls of snow against its sides to bank the structure solid. When he at last stepped inside, his face was numb and his fingers were beginning to tingle though the rest of his body was overly warm from the exertion. With a flick of a switch, the heater began to redden at its top, pouring heat into the little hut.

  It was already dark inside and became like midnight when he zipped the door closed to the prodding weather. The open hole glowed and threw translucent light up onto the black walls as if he were somehow suspended upside down in a cave and it was the promise of escape seeping inside the oily gloom. Mick situated a small chair beside the open water and sat, picking up a pail of large potatoes. After a moment of searching, he came up with a folding knife in one of the coat’s pockets, most likely the object that had tapped against the beer bottle. He began to slice the potatoes into thin discs that he dropped, one after another, into the water. The bright flesh of the vegetable flashed and flipped over and over until it reached the muddy lake bottom where it rested, allowing him to see if a fish passed between him and where they lay, shining through the murk like huge cataract eyes.

  The space was beginning to heat up, even as the wind punched the side of the house with the ferocity of a prizefighter, and he removed his jacket, sliding one of the nearly frozen beers from the pocket. Somehow the familiarity of where the fish house was now felt right, like he’d finished something much more important than the simple task. The space to his right, the place his father always sat when they fished together, was too empty. Mick raised his beer, holding it so that he could barely make out the shape of his hand and the bottle in the dark.

  “To you, Dad. It’s freezing here, so I hope you’re somewhere warm where the beer’s cold.”

  He blinked away the tears and poured two swallows of brew down his throat, washing away the lump that had formed there. He sat, staring into the lake’s depths, remembering. Images shuttered past in the darkroom of his mind. His father teaching him to ride his bike down their long driveway, the wheel wobbling while his dad tried to help him steer. The time they’d had a fight about what he’d wanted to pursue as a career, the bitter words slung with disregard until they stormed to opposite ends of the house to sit in acidic silence. Only later did his father come to his room to apologize, saying the only reason he’d disagreed was because he knew the schooling that was required wasn’t anywhere nearby. I’m being selfish, Son, he’d said. I just don’t want you to leave. But I don’t want you to end up like me either, with nothing but my hands to rely on for a living. Follow your talent; you’ve got something that others don’t. Remember that. Now he could see his dad in a tuxedo, standing beside him as his best man while Cambri walked toward them on the arm of her own father. The soft grip on his shoulder as his father leaned closer, whispering in his ear, She’s a treasure; don’t ever lose her.

  Mick sighed and leaned forward, resting his face in his palm. Don’t lose her. But he had. He’d lost her amongst his work, lost her within the pictures he saw everywhere that gave him new fire for his career. He’d lost her even though she was asking for help, not for herself but for their marriage and for Aaron. He’d lost them both. And just as she’d walked toward him all those years ago, she would do the same tomorrow afternoon, on the arm of her father once again, but toward another man. Someone better who was going to fill her life with the joy and love that he hadn’t seemed to be able to provide, at least not while they were married. And Aaron. Aaron would have a new father that wouldn’t be distracted most of the time, someone who would get the benefit of spending all week and several weekends a month with him. Someone who he would eventually call ‘dad.’

  The beer bottle dropped from his hand and bounced hollowly on the icy floor. The remaining dregs pooled out of its mouth and slipped into the clear water, tainting it with the deep red hops that looked almost like blood. A small Perch darted into and then out of the hole’s view, a torsional twist of its striped body and it was gone. The propane heater guttered, spitting its remaining fuel out like that of the beer bottle and sputtered once before going silent.

  Mick turned to look at its fading glow, and within the wires guarding the heating surface, he saw a face.

  It was only the outline of a bald head with two burnt patches for eyes. Its mouth was a red
rictus pulled back from a set of slanted teeth. It grinned at him, the waning heat from the burning propane giving it the illusion that it was sinking back into darkness, enveloped by the gravity of whatever abyss it had crawled from. It diminished until only the silhouettes of its soulless eyes remained, and then even they vanished into obscurity.

  Mick stared at the afterimage that floated in his vision. The closest thing to a premonition he’d ever had was seeing the ghostly smile that resembled the Mona Lisa’s when he was just a child, and even that had seemed explainable to his mature mind when he’d discovered art and come up with the idea of creating it within everyday objects and surfaces. There had been no warnings or significance to the pictures he saw over the years, just random lines forming landscapes or the gentle curve of a figure where others only saw blotches of paint. But the face within the heating element stirred something inside him. It shifted there like a snake curling itself comfortable in the bowels of some dead thing.

  All at once, the fish house walls were too close, the air too warm. He needed to get out, out of the cloistering space that darkness had set claim to. With trembling fingers, he found his father’s coat and shrugged it on, pausing only to button the first several snaps. He fumbled with the gloves and almost left them there when he dropped one, sure if he tarried much longer in the dark, the glow would return to the cooling element on its own, the face rising into life to stare out at him with unbridled malice. Mick struggled to find the zipper to the door and finally closed his fingers around it, tearing it upward in relief.

  The air struck him and washed away the warmth like a cold douse of water. It peeled the heat from him and sent it sprawling away in the clutches of the wind. Even in the short time that he’d been inside the fish house, the day had drawn down even more, the light in the west barely a veiled glow of gray behind the skeletal trees. He made to take a step forward and stopped, gazing through the blowing snow at the encrusted ice.