Hide

by Matthew Griffin

  He spent an entire afternoon planting with hand and trowel individual clumps of grass he’d bought from some hayseed shyster on the side of the road, and after one good rain washed them all away, left them piled against the fence posts as though it had been a hurricane flood, he spent a month’s wages on a motorized aerator he pushed like a tiny steamroller across the packed dirt, cutting plugs the size of my thumb he left scattered all over, and laid down those patches of sod that come like squares of carpet with grass for pile, this particular strain of which the woman at the nursery swore could thrive upon the snow-spread peaks of the highest sierra, and doused them with chemicals to make them grow, wearing his gas mask from the war, spraying the chemicals from a long silver wand attached to a tank he carried in the other hand, stopping every minute or so to pump a handle and pressurize the chamber, and for a few weeks that grass rushed up lustrous and plush from the soil, so glossy green it made the rest of the yard look pitiful in comparison, but by May it had turned yellow, and by June it had dried into scrub, and he wriggled on his belly halfway under the twine—even then he didn’t want to set foot on that plot, was afraid his full funneled weight would compact the soil and crush any little fragile life it had left inside it—the string pushed upward by and digging into his back, and ran his hands over the dead grass as though feeling for seams in the earth, for patches that might unhinge.

  It was a Saturday morning, early, warm and wet and gleaming as if it was just created, somebody’s bright new idea before doubt’s had time to dull it. The slanted sun fell in long, heavy blades between the limbs of the maple stretching over the fence. He worked his fingers into the ground and pried up a square. It opened like a door into the earth.

  “What’re you doing?” I said. What I wanted to ask was why he bothered. But after so long, you start to say things you don’t mean, or even believe. You start to ask only the questions whose answers you already know.

  He sat all the way up, his back pushing on the twine until the twine heaved its stake out of the ground and fell away at his feet, and held the square out to me as he lifted it free. It fell apart in his hands, the sod crumbling away from withered blades and roots that had never taken hold.

  “I ought to go to that store and get my money back,” he said. “That sod they’re peddling ain’t worth two cents.”

  “It’s obviously not the sod that’s the problem,” I said.

  “I don’t care what it is, but I sure ain’t going to let a whole load of it sit here useless in dirt that could be growing something.” He flung his handfuls over the fence, toward the trees. They burst into clouds and rained hissing down among the roots. “Even that truck can grow grass,” he said, pointing in accusation at it, parked in the shade beside the house. Its bed had so much dirt gathered along the edges and in its corners that weeds and even a few little trees sprouted in the piles of it, and a mucky black puddle against the cab that never evaporated. It smelled reptilian. “I’ll be damned if I can’t get my own yard to do the same.”

  He lifted the squares one by one, some of them falling apart like the first, others held loosely together by their webbed, stringy roots, sagging between his arms as he carried them to the fence and slung them over.

  “You could help, you know,” he said. He knelt and pressed himself close to the spot he’d just uncovered, a bright blade sliding across his ribs. “Instead of just standing there.” He clawed at the dirt with his bare hands, combed his fingers through the soil and ran the soil through his fingers, squinting at it, examining it for the cause of its uselessness.

  “It’s just one little patch,” I said. “The whole rest of the yard looks fine.”

  He stopped and stared at me, eyebrows reared in shock and dismay. That man could raise his eyebrows a hundred different ways. Took me a long time to learn them all, but I did. Every single one.

  “You want me to just let it sit there like that?” he said. “Like we’re a couple reprobates?”

  “What does it matter? No one’s ever going to see it.”

  He crawled on his hands and knees and ran his palms over the ground as if searching frantically for something he’d lost, brushing dirt away from dirt with a soft, whispering scrape to see what was hidden underneath, only to discover that there was no secret, that there was no answer: that the subterranean was exactly the same as the surface, as far down as you could reach.

  “I will,” he said.

  It took months of luring and praise and dinner scraps, after he finally gave up, to convince the dog to do her business there. He’d had it roped off so long, and scolded her so bad each time she ducked under the twine to chase a rabbit across it, that even after he tore the rope down and pulled up the stakes, she refused to cross the old boundary. She’d follow him right up to it, but she wouldn’t set a paw in the dirt, and when he cooed her name, she turned away as if she just couldn’t bear to hear it, the string imprinted in the air the way, if bound too tightly round a bird’s body to hold its wings in place while it dries, it leaves deep, permanent creases in the feathers.

  He planted his vegetable garden that next spring, started from seedlings in soup cans I saved for him with holes we hammered in their bottoms for drainage, where the sprouts slowly unfurled under plastic wrap, breathing a thin coating of mist onto its underside as their tender stems struggled with every bit of sunlight condensed to heave up and shrug off clods of dirt no bigger than a bit of fluff you’d pick from an eyelash. He placed the garden so it blocked the dead patch entirely from view, tilled the whole thing with a spade, turning the earth one narrow shovel’s-width at a time, until the plot was wide and deep as if he’d dug out the foundation for another house. He went out of his way, I think, to make every single thing he could as difficult as possible. I thought he was going to have a heart attack before he was done, going out there after a full day at the mill, where they still had yet to install the new air-conditioning system, though they had bricked the windows over to keep the cool air of the future trapped inside, every night for a week and all day long that Saturday, digging long, narrow trenches six inches deep into the earth, and filling each one with the dirt he’d dug up from the trench beside it. All day I listened to the grunt, the muffled strike as the ground split apart, the whispered hiss as he slung soil from the shovel. The surface of the earth was dry and cracked from the sun, but what was just underneath, in the cuts he tore open and overturned, was dark and damp.

  He didn’t come inside until six o’clock, sweat dripping in big beads from his nose, limped slow and stiff toward the bathroom, wincing a little with every step.

  “Are you all right?” I said, leaning in the bathroom door.

  He unlatched the straps of his overalls and peeled his shirt away. It was soaked, made a reluctant sucking noise as it let his chest go. He grunted and dropped it on the floor, didn’t even walk the three steps to put it in the hamper.

  “Back’s just a little sore,” he said.

  It took him the better part of five minutes to slowly lower himself onto the lip of the tub to turn on the water, and I could almost feel the tight muscles in his thighs seize as he bent to untie his shoes. He was breathing heavy and shallow, the birds’ wings clasped so tight around his chest he couldn’t open it enough to get the air in.

  “Why don’t you just buy a tractor?” I said.

  “I don’t want a tractor. I like doing it the old way. Like my daddy did.”

  “The old way was hooking your horse up to your plow.”

  “You want to buy a horse and plow?” he said.

  “If the old way had been how you do it, the human race would have gone extinct from starvation by now. Or exhaustion.”

  He managed to pull his shoes off, and lifted himself just enough to shove his overalls and underwear down his legs. He smelled like mulch, like wood wet and rotting. I used to love that smell, the real smell of him only I knew.

  “This is how my daddy did it,” he said.

  “Then your daddy was not as smart a
man as you’ve led me to believe.”

  He scowled, and I left him sitting on the edge of the tub, staring warily at the rising water as if it were an obstacle to surmount. When I came back an hour later, Fancy was curled up on his undershirt, which she’d nudged into a nest, and Frank was hunched forward in the tub with his elbows on his knees, his head hung down and his eyes closed and his shoulders drawn practically all the way up to his ears, like mountains driven from the earth by centuries of underground plates scraping slowly and painfully across each other, and therefore not inclined to sink back down any time soon. He was too big for that tub anyway, had to fold his legs up so they were barely in the water.

  “Dinner’s ready,” I said.

  He opened his eyes and sat forward a little, water rushing off him. Shadows creased his belly. He’d put on a good twenty pounds in the last few years, and though he carried it well, the animals on his arm had swollen, the buck too distended to hunt, his chest fatted with pride, the whale buoyed up toward shore by its own bloated belly. He cupped water in his hands and poured it slowly over his head, flattening his hair, darkening its blond. It was starting to thin on top. The streams ran branching down his neck and into the bathwater. With him hunched out of it like that, it didn’t fill half the tub.

  “Dinner’s ready.”

  “I’m too sore to move,” he said to the rippling water. He didn’t seem to be able to lift his head.

  “Don’t be a baby.”

  “Who’re you calling a baby?”

  “I don’t see anybody else in this room.”

  “I would storm out of this house right now,” he said, “if it didn’t necessitate moving.”

  “And who’d feed you? You’d starve to death.”

  “I’m in terrible pain,” he said, suppressing a grin, “and you see fit to joke.” Probably he was exaggerating the whole thing. He did like being the recipient of some tender ministrations once in a while.

  I rolled up my pants and sat on the lip of the tub, in the corner where it met the wall, slid my legs in on either side of his back—the water was already turning cold—and pressed my fingertips into the hollow between his shoulder and collarbone. He grunted, his shoulders forcing themselves even higher: the darkness between the stars widened, the empty sky spread apart. The muscle was hard and static at first, like clay when you peel away the plastic, so brittle you pull on a corner and it breaks clean off, but gradually it began to spread against the warmth of my hand, into malleability. I kneaded it the way, when I was mounting that mountain lion for the museum, I shaped the muscles of the clay model one by one, in wet, shining layers that turned dull as they dried, and worked the hollow into the muscle of its hindquarters, pushing down toward the wooden bone, feeling the cool clay smear and condense under my thumb until it took a shape I believed was true.

  “You’re working yourself too hard,” I said.

  “We’ve got to eat, don’t we?”

  “That’s what the store’s for.”

  Languidly he tapped the surface of the water with his fingertips, watching the seaweed on his forearm sway underneath it.

  “You work all day. All week. You shouldn’t come home and work more.”

  “I like being good and worn out when I lay down at night.”

  “I don’t see how there’s anything left of you to wear out.”

  “I come from working stock,” he said. “We’re bred for labor. Like oxen.”

  “Oxen die quick.”

  Water slapped against the sides of the tub.

  “You’re exhausted.” I said. “I can tell.”

  “The best cure for exhaustion is work,” he offered hopefully. “It’s invigorating. It’s bracing.”

  “You’re an awful liar.”

  Without even turning his head, he raised his eyebrows in skepticism. The best lies, we’d learned, don’t ask you to say a word. They practically tell themselves.

  “You have to rest,” I said.

  He stared at his palms. Dirt was etched into every wrinkle, and blisters bubbled across the tops of them, just underneath his fingers, where the shovel had rubbed the skin loose.

  “I don’t believe I know how,” he said.

  I dipped a washcloth in the warm water, wrung it out, and laid it carefully across the back of his neck like a strip of burlap, dipped in plaster and pulled between my fingers to squeeze away the extra liquid, that I pressed into the mold of that mountain lion, working it into every groove of engorged vein, over every bulge of a muscle’s hollow, smoothing away the bubbles. If there’s any air, any empty space at all between the layers, the weight of the skin flattens the contours. That kind of mount you can only afford to do for a museum. It’s long work, slow and full of waiting, shaping your way from the outside in, laying just a couple layers of burlap and mesh at a time so they don’t sit there soggy too long and rot. Some days you go to lay down the next one and can’t tell that the last three are even there, and with each one, the details of the surface become less and less distinct, and you wonder if that shell will ever be strong enough to hold up the hide. And then you lay down the next layer anyway.

  When I was a younger man, I dreamed of all sorts of fantastic mounts in lush museum dioramas, of Komodo dragons locked in combat on burning coastal sands, of lions tugging a zebra down by one hind leg into snapped savanna grasses that flattened themselves to a single dimension as they crossed onto the painted backdrop and stretched away to some periwinkle horizon, but I must have mounted twenty buck for every one of any other animal, wound from wood-wool and twine into clumsy approximations of themselves, rote variations of the same three poses distinguished only by the angle of the head. In the fall, when the cold air and dark afternoons dried up their soft antlers like the leaves, turned them bloodless and brittle, there were so many of them some days that I had to pile sacks of salt and alum on top of all my freezer-lockers, each one big as four seafaring trunks, just to hold the lids shut against them, and stay there long into the night, peeling their skins away until my hands were chapped and sore, and come home to a dark house, to Frank already fast asleep.

  “Anyway,” he said, “it’s done now. The rest is easy.”

  In the mornings, before work, he watered the garden by hand, out of a can shaped like a swan, from whose beak the drops dribbled sputtering onto the leaves, walking back and forth to the spigot every few plants to refill its bladder. He ate his supper each night quick and silent so he could get out there as soon as possible, patrolled for weeds and, later, for fruit, anxiously pacing the rows. The ripe he tugged free and tossed into a sack hung from his wrist, the split or rotten he threw to the ground in disgust, as if they were a personal affront. From the back door, from the window above the sink, I watched his pale, bent back dwindle and disappear into the dark.

  They did taste fine, though, those tomatoes. Flavor practically burned your tongue. I never tasted a tomato with as much flavor as those, that first summer, full of his ache and sweat.

  The washcloth, as it dried, stiffened and took on the shape of his spine, cupping his vertebrae. I still long sometimes for the feel of plaster, thick and cold like mud, like life in your hands. In my memory, everything he touches, everything that brushes against him, reminds me of something else, something that never seemed to matter at the time, when it was really there.

  After a while, when the water was so cold we both had chill bumps, he gathered the courage to very slowly sit straight up, then very slowly lean back against my leg. The water rose around us, surged up to soak the cuffs of my pants and draw them heavily down. I leaned over him, cupped it in my hands, and pulled it over his stomach and chest, the way the moon pulls waves across the shore.

  He ruminated on the big knuckles jutting from his clenched fist. The birds on his chest folded and unfolded their wings, flying always toward his heart and always getting nowhere, while his shoulders, still standing rigid guard against the pain long after it had vanished, finally surrendered. He breathed deep and rested his he
ad on my thigh. I wished that we were young again, that we didn’t know a thing about each other, when just the brush of my lips to those birds’ trembling bodies was enough to drive them to the sky.

  I kissed his closed eyes. They felt smooth and hard, like pebbles under their thin, soft lids. We all ought to have gone blind by now, with so little to protect them.

  SIXTEEN

  And here’s what he’s reduced me to at last: I am cleaning the house myself. At least I’m trying to. By the time I’ve given the books on the shelves and the remotes on the coffee table my best imitation of a good dusting, I’m already exhausted, and that’s before I drag his stolen vacuum out of the closet and down the hall. Thing’s so heavy you’d think the dust chamber was filled with concrete. Daisy crams herself under the coffee table when she hears it coming. The table’s down so low she has to lay on her belly and drag herself by her forelegs to get under it, hunkers there like she’s waiting for the sky to start tumbling round her.

  Frank’s no help at all, of course. Just sits there watching the TV while I stand here bent over, all the blood rushing into my head, and make a fool of myself trying to figure out how to pull the extension hose off the side of the vacuum so I can clean the animals. The hose itself comes loose if I pull on its accordion plastic, but the nozzle on the end’s snapped into the side of the vacuum and won’t yank out. I try pushing it down, I try jerking it up, I try tugging on the hose until the plastic’s stretched pale, I try slapping the side of the vacuum in rage and considering that I should go ahead and give up now and settle for the satisfaction of having tried, and then I see there’s a tiny button up against where the hose nozzle tucks into the vacuum, so small it’s almost not there. I press it down, and the whole thing pops free. It’s no wonder the neighbors threw it away, with little mechanisms like that you can’t hardly see to use. If we’d paid for the thing, I’d write a letter of complaint. I may do so anyway.