by Jack Ketchum
We got to where the grey ought to have been and wasn’t.
“Maybe you missed him.”
“I didn’t miss him. Look here.”
He was looking at a cluster of ferns. I could see blood speckling the leaves, glistening in the sun. Behind them the scrub was all thick briers. The day was hot. Neither of us was wearing much. A short-sleeve shirt for my father, a teeshirt for me.
“We’ve got to find him. You can’t leave an animal like that. Come on. He couldn’t have gotten far.”
We plunged carefully into the scrub, my father plucking the stems away and holding them back for me with his gloved fingers while I did my best to keep them at a distance with the barrel and stock of my rifle.
The briers were thickest down low so we couldn’t try to follow a blood trail. We’d have cut ourselves to shreds trying. We might have had more luck splitting up but he knew I needed him to hold back the briers for me. We searched for well over an hour. By the time my father gave it up my skin felt like it was crawling with small biting insects and my arms and face were streaked with sweat and blood. I washed them in the brook and we headed home.
My mother and sisters had gone to town shopping so the car was gone and the yard was empty. We crossed the field of waving grass in silence. I remember glancing at my father and that his face was grim. He hated losing that squirrel.
I don’t know how it was that I should be the one who saw it first because only a year or so later I’d be wearing glasses and my father’s vision was 20-20 and we were walking side by side. We were about eight feet from the porch. I remember thinking he should have been the one and not me. I don’t know why I felt that way but I still do. That somehow it wasn’t right.
I think I came close to falling then. I know I staggered, that it felt like somebody had pushed me suddenly hard in the chest and that was what had forced the gasp out of me like a silent call for help, my body calling for help where there was none.
“What?” my father said and then looked where I was looking at the blood-trail leading up the three porch steps to the landing, smeared across the landing as with a single long stroke of a half-dry paint-brush all the way to Charlie’s trap door, a direct and determined line to that door he’d painted with the very life of him.
I knew what we’d find in there, that it was impossible for him to have come this far bleeding this much and still be alive and when my father flung open the door and we saw him on the rug, lying on his side and shot in the very same shattered shoulder that once had housed a broken leg, I saw that I was right, though we’d missed him by a matter of minutes only. His body was still warm. I touched him and looked into his glazed open eyes and tried hard not to cry. We knelt there.
“He came home looking for us,” my father said quietly.
I don’t know why I said what I did. It wasn’t anger or accusation and it wasn’t just sadness either but it came out of me like a fleeing bird and it was true.
“He came home looking for you, dad.” I said. “Not us. You.”
I’ll never forget the look on my father’s face that day.
I remember it better than the look on any face I’ve ever seen before or since except maybe this one here on the pillow in front of me, sleeping now but only hours ago curled in on itself and nearly unrecognizable in anger and hurt which is the face I’ll remember when she leaves tomorrow, not this familiar face but that one. She told me early on even before we were married that the one thing she couldn’t handle was if I were unfaithful because that’s what her father was and that was what I was and what I was again and since she knows it now she will leave. She’s as good as her word.
My father never hunted again. The rifle went into the basement to rust away. Something in him changed after Charlie. He went out with my mother more on Sundays for one thing. We were old enough to fend for ourselves by then. And then later he began to drink more.
And later still, once we were in college, stopped drinking. And when he was old and sick became a bitter man.
We’re many things, all of us, blown by so many unexpected winds.
And I have to wonder, who am I now and what will I be tomorrow?
What have I done?
And what will I do with my own Sundays once she’s gone?
For Anush and Misty
Twins
For June and me since our earliest rememberings and except for our years in New York City the world’s always been a hostile place.
So this is nothing new, really.
We were born fraternal twins at three minutes past midnight and ten past midnight respectively on October 31, 1956 in the first windy minutes of Halloween. Mischief Night as it was called then. While we two were screaming our first tiny outrage at being thrust out of someplace wholly warm and secure—that single place on earth I believe in which there’s never any need or any good reason to scream—much older kids were out soaping windows or letting air out of tires or setting fire to brown paper sacks full of dogshit on their neighbors’ porches.
There’s a Scots belief that when a woman bares a boy-child and girl-child together she’ll never have another. Our mother never did.
But that was okay with both our parents. My mother Hanna didn’t care much for sex in the first place. She had us and that was all she wanted. Sex was kids. Period. The act itself was ugly, slippery and revolting. Hanna’s feeling was that enough was enough. And now that my father Willie had satisfied her in the only way she was capable of being satisfied he was happy too. He could fuck around all he wanted on the side. He had a sporting-goods store right down by the lake. A prime location both for business and for poaching because there were more and more tourists coming in every year and all those ladies in sundresses needed all that good advice on bait and rod and tackle.
I suspect my father died happy.
That summer we were six years old. For some reason unknown to us Hanna decided to visit my father at the shop around lunch-time and brought along June and me and I remember seeing a big ruddy-faced man in a cowboy hat standing at the counter with Pete Miller the hired help, the big man sighting down an over-and-under shotgun while Pete placed upon the counter a yellow box of shells, Pete looking worried at my mother as we passed through the store and saying something to her and she just waving back at him and marching us down the aisle to the back storage room where my father would be taking his lunch. Which he sort of was.
She was a long lean brunette with the biggest breasts I’ve seen in all the years since and my father Willie had one of them in his mouth, or a part of one, his face buried in her flesh and her legs wrapped around his butt which was naked and slamming her back against the wall with the Playboy calendar hung from it and the drapes pulled to and my mother and June and I just stopped and stood there looking, June and I thinking it was funny, smiling, because there was my father naked with this strange naked woman doing something to one another, the two of us starting to giggle and I don’t know what my mother would have done if she’d had the time but whatever it might have been she didn’t because the big man in the cowboy hat pushed past her striding into the room, little Pete behind him pulling on his arm and the big man just shrugging him off and raising the shotgun and I remember my father turning at the sudden commotion and the scared open-mouthed look the brunette was wearing like she’d seen a view of the world that was intolerable just before the man screamed son-of-a-BITCH and fired. One barrel was all it took at that range and both their heads were blood and bone and scrap against the wall.
The man later said that he wished he’d aimed slightly to the left.
She was a whore but he’d known worse.
My mother took over the store and kept it running well enough to put us both through college but she was never the same after that.
Neither were we.
We’d always been special, June and I. Somehow we were aware of that from the beginning. Like old married people we’d finish each other’s sentences. Even before we were old enough to fully form
decent sentences. We’d be out playing in the woods by the lake. Henry, she’d say, I wanna . . .
. . . go pee, I’d say. Me first, I’d say and we would.
There’s another belief that twins possess such uncommon bonds of sympathy that each will know immediately when danger or misfortune threatens the other even when separated over long distances. Likewise that any particularly special state of happiness or wellbeing in the one will be reflected in the other. Until college we were separated for hardly moments but both beliefs were certainly true of us as kids. My mother said that as infants we would quit squalling and fall asleep in our cribs at exactly the same moment, then wake together mornings and begin wailing for the breast as though our internal clocks were precisely one. We learned to walk the same day. June’s first word was mama and mine was papa but they came out of our mouths within fifteen minutes of one another one Sunday afternoon while we were playing on the living room floor, my father in front of the TV set and my mother ironing and my mother’s somewhat sexist explanation for why the words were not the very same word was that it was natural each gender should gravitate toward its own and her reasoning on the order of the words was that like a good boy I was just being polite.
Until the hour my father was shot naked in the back room we had little curiosity about our bodies. We bathed together of course and knew full well we weren’t made the same. It wasn’t a problem for us. In most other ways we felt exactly the same.
We’ve discussed it over the years.
We’ve come to the conclusion that it was as though we lived in two worlds at once back then. There was the world of June and Henry along with everybody and everything else. Then there was the world of June and Henry. The first world was by turns fun and new and confusing and it needed to be learned. The second was known from the start.
Before my father died our bodies belonged to the second world. Known and completely accepted. But each of us had seen something else that afternoon beyond the sudden splash of blood and death that lingered. Something linked to the dying but not directly of it.
Because when my father was shot he was still inside her.
We saw that clearly as he turned at the noise behind him from where we stood to one side in the doorway. The thick pole of his cock half in and half out of her and how that was possible we had no idea but when he fell our attention was still there, on his cock and not on the gore spewed across the wall and ceiling, on his swollen glistening flesh dwindling and falling to his thigh like a flower parched and dying.
Only then did we even seem to hear Hanna screaming beside us or truly see the ruin wreaked upon the bodies or become aware of the big man shouldering Pete aside and heading for the front door.
It was only when the flower died.
And after that, alone in the woods down by the lake or at home in the bath or the bedroom, we were pretty curious indeed.
A few times Hanna caught us. And that was a problem bigger than it might have been because once the fact that my father had gone to his Maker with his pants down got to be common knowledge around town my mother developed a sudden Baptist streak which went not only to churchgoing but to pamphleteering and preaching to anybody who’d bother to listen. It also went to severe punishments for little boys and little girls who said they were just playing doctor while the Lord knew and she knew that what they were really doing was carnal and sinful and damned.
We were locked in closets—separate ones—for hours at a time. We were spanked, pinched and knuckle-jabbed where it wouldn’t show, denied dinner or breakfast or lunch or sometimes all three of them together. There was a braided knotted rope left hanging on the door to the attic at all times to remind us of those other times when she’d used it. We were raved at, sermonized, forced to pray. We would be taught a lesson.
We never did learn.
We wanted to see the flower rise. The only problem was the when and how. We knew it would eventually.
We wanted to see just what would go inside her and how far.
I remember her first orgasm as well as I do my own. I think I might’ve even shared it in a way. It was the summer of 1967 and we were eleven. The Summer of Flowers was what the hippies were calling it. The day was sunny and we were down by the lake, a fairly secluded spot you could only reach by boat since the woods were still thick for acres behind it. The owner believed in rabbit and deer hunting, not real estate and was considered a goddamn lunatic by most everyone else in town as a result.
We’d go skinny-dipping. Almost always we were the only ones around.
That day as we lay naked in the sun on an old beat-up checkered quilt I had two fingers inside her and she was wet and slippery of her own accord which was new over the past year and fascinating to us and she showed me how to guide the fingers on the outside too, in and out and up with what must for her have been a final understanding, a final access to expertise in her own nature. When she began to shake I withdrew, frightened that I was hurting her but she said no no no and pressed my fingers back to her and shut her eyes and worked the fingers as though they were her own.
She arched her back and moaned and I could feel her shudder all the way up my arm and began to shake myself as though some sudden breath of December had moved across the lake.
She fell back laughing, trying to catch her breath and then I was laughing too.
“My god,” she said. “What was that? I want to die like that, Hank! God I do. And Mama thinks there’s something wrong with this? Hanna’s crazy!”
We laughed some more and she reached up to tickle me, she was apt to do that all of a sudden and I squirmed over on top of her and tickled her back and we rolled around that way off the quilt and on again. We lay down exhausted.
“Put your fingers back in me,” she said. “Leave your hand there. I want us to fall asleep that way. Okay?”
“Okay.”
It was nearly noon and the blue sky unbroken by any cloud anywhere and we slept in no time at all.
We woke to somebody saying shit, look at that! and laughing and somebody else saying Jesus, that’s Hank and June! and we saw Danny Beach and Phil Auton heading toward shore in Danny’s old rowboat, two kids in our class at school for godsakes, both of them laughing and yelling our names now that we were awake and sitting up staring at them, June with one hand between her legs to that spot mine had just deserted and the forearm of her other arm across the wide pale nipples and her breasts only just beginning to show.
Perverts! Fuckin’ queers! they drifted toward us shouting, the last of which of course made no sense at all. I scrambled into my jeans and tossed June hers along with her tee shirt and she stood with her back to them while they yelled nice ass, Juney! turn around, babe! and pulled them on. We slipped on our U.S. Keds and I grabbed my shirt and the blanket and we ran off into the woods. It was the only thing we could think to do. Just to get away from them there.
We were shaken. Now everybody’d know. We walked along the deer-paths, June in the lead, going nowhere in particular, just moving deeper into the woods. After a while she turned.
“D’you think they’d sink the rowboat on us?”
“Wouldn’t dare,” I said.
“Do you think they saw where your hand was?”
“I dunno.”
But I did know. I’d seen Danny Beach staring directly at it. Staring between her wide-open legs. And it was as though she read my thoughts again, was completing yet another of my sentences.
“But you’re pretty sure they did, huh.”
“Yeah. I guess. Pretty sure.”
“Okay. Then we’re screwed,” she said.
We walked a while in silence.
“I don’t care,” she said finally. “Let them tell their parents. Let them tell the whole goddamn school, the whole goddamn town. What we did was nice. And we’re doing it again, aren’t we.”
She looked back at me for an answer and I had to laugh and shake my head, it was so much June.
“Sure we are,” I said.
We were twelve.
Hanna was in church where lately we had refused to go and we were big enough by then and Hanna sufficiently small beside us so that rage hell and damnation though she might she had no choice but to accept our decision. Besides, she now knew what the whole town knew. I suspect she was secretly glad we stayed away.
We were on my bed. We had made the flower grow.
I slipped into her as easily as a finger into a jar of jam and just as sweetly and began to spasm within only a few thrusts, June bucking up to meet me. It seemed I’d never stop coming—for a terrifying moment I thought I was hemorrhaging, pumping out blood inside her—these rythmic pulses so blinding and electric and soon she was rising from a pool of me.
We lay side by side in each other’s arms, not caring a damn about the glistening sheets beside us. Each of us smiling, the curtain behind us fluttering in the cut-grass-smelling summer breeze.