by Gregory Ashe
“Give us a minute, please,” Shaw said.
“I’m not sure—”
“I want to talk to North alone.”
Tucker gave him a considering look. The glance he turned on North was both commiserating and reproachful, and Shaw decoded it easily: you got us into this mess, so you’d better get us out. Then he padded down the hall toward the family room and disappeared from sight.
There weren’t any doors to separate them, so Shaw kept his voice low: “What is going on with you?”
“What is going on with me? I’m gone five seconds and find you and Tucker grinding. What happened last night? Did he make a move on you?”
“Are you serious right now?”
“Deadly fucking. Answer the damn question.”
“I can’t. I’m done with this. I’m done with you; I’m done with this territorial chauvinist crap.”
Somewhere in the house, a phone began to ring.
“You’re done with me?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah. I guess I do.”
“I think you should go. I don’t think I can deal with you tonight. Not when you’re like this.”
Something microscopic shifted in North’s expression. “I got a little too rough tonight. Earlier. I’m sorry.”
“You got a little too rough?” Shaw’s laugh surprised him. “Is that what you want to call it?”
“You know I get protective. That guy was treating you like shit—”
“So what, North? Maybe I like it. Maybe I like being treated like shit. Apparently I do, because I’ve put up with a hell of a lot of it from you.”
Floating down from the second floor, Gary was telling them to run, run for their lives, and the phone was ringing, and the hot spot in the shape of a hand on Shaw’s chest had a million ants crawling all over it.
“Fuck you,” North said, huffing a scornful noise.
“Pretty much.”
“I apologized—”
“You’re not apologizing. You’re—you’re reframing the whole thing, trying to make it sound ok, when it was this insane level of toxic masculinity. Why do you do that kind of stuff? You’re so much better than that. You’re smart and good and kind.”
“I told you, I get protective—”
“No. You get possessive. But here’s the thing, North: you broke up with me. You made that decision. And then the last few months have been nothing but you redrawing the lines of what that means whenever it’s convenient for you. And I’m—I’m fucking sick of it.”
“Yeah? You seemed pretty into it as long as your dick was getting some attention.”
The noise is Shaw’s throat was a mixture of rage and disbelief. He started for the stairs.
“Oh, hell no,” North said, grabbing his arm and swinging him around. “We are not finished.”
“What are you going to do? Throw me in a chair? Hit me if I try to get up? Knock me around until I say everything’s ok?”
North released him as though he’d been burned. “Holy shit. The fact that you can seriously ask me that—what the fuck are we doing, Shaw?”
“What are we doing? That’s a great question. Because what it feels like, it feels like we’re on a road to being that.” He drew a line in the air between North and the direction Tucker had gone.
“We’re not—come on.” North’s mouth worked soundlessly. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He finally managed, “I love you.”
The phone was still ringing. Shaw suddenly felt tired. “You loved him too, North. You used to. I thought you used to, anyway. But you know what? I honestly think you’re locked into this—into this prison of trying to be masc, trying to be tough, trying to be strong, and so you can’t forgive Tucker, and—”
“I can’t forgive Tucker because he’s a treacherous, abusive asshole.”
“—and you can’t stand seeing me with another guy, even though you broke up with me. Because it’s shitty of you to tell me we’re just friends and then want me to be your boyfriend without any of the commitment. And the real problem? You’re not willing to change. That’s what you keep telling me, right? People don’t change. Relationships don’t change. Either they work or they don’t.” Shaw wiped his face. “Let’s do this when we’re both calm. I’m going to say something I regret.”
“Don’t stop on my account.” North’s voice was muzzy. “Go ahead; finish what you started.”
“I don’t want to do this right now.”
North swallowed again, and it looked like it was difficult. “What am I supposed to do? You’ve got all the magic fixes. I’m so broken and fucked up, what am I supposed to do?”
“You’re not—”
“What, Shaw?”
“I don’t know. I know you hate hearing about this stuff, but there are…there are whole schools of therapy built around how perceived and imposed gender roles, internalized gender roles, affect relationships. Especially romantic relationships. I think it would help you resolve some stuff with Tucker—”
“I don’t want to resolve stuff with Tucker. Jesus Christ.” North spun in a half circle, casting about for something. His eyes settled on a vase, and he slapped it off the accent table where it stood. It crashed against the boards, spraying ceramic shards across the entry hall. Some of the pieces spun to a stop against Shaw’s espadrilles. Shaw’s eyes came up again. North’s chest was heaving, and he barely choked out the rest of his words: “What don’t you fucking understand about that?”
“Well, you have to.” Shaw was screaming. He was distantly aware of the fact that he was screaming, and pulling himself back from it was like trying to raise an anchor from the seabed. “You have to forgive him, and you have to resolve things with him! Why can’t you see that?”
North was chalky in the chandelier’s light. In a move that was strangely intimate and childlike, he pulled up the hem of his tee and wiped his face. His eyes. Then he let the shirt fall again and walked down the hall.
“North, wait.” Shaw swallowed against the rawness in his throat. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t have time for this fuckery. And someone’s got to answer that goddamn phone.”
Shaw hurried after him, not quite willing to close the distance between them. They were halfway down the hall when the ringing cut off. When they reached the family room, Tucker stood near an end table, the receiver in one hand, listening. He looked scared to death, and he cleared his throat.
“It’s for you,” he said, holding out the phone.
North reached for it, but Tucker shook his head. Shaw accepted the receiver.
“Hello?” he said.
“Hello, Shaw, my lad.” It was Ronnie’s voice, hale and hearty. North’s Uncle Ronnie. Who had tried twice to manipulate them into helping him steal billion-dollar biotech from Aldrich Acquisitions. Who was supposed to be in jail awaiting trial. “How’s tricks?”
“What do you want?”
“Who is it?” North asked. He touched Shaw’s arm and then yanked his hand away. “What’s going on?”
“Is that North? Tell him hi.”
The pause dragged on. Shaw tried to work moisture into his mouth. “It’s Ronnie.”
“Let me talk to him,” North said, but when he reached for the phone, Shaw shouldered him away.
“What do you want?” Shaw asked again.
“I want to talk to that fucking troll,” North said.
“Stop it,” Shaw whispered, elbowing him back.
“Let me—”
“Did you not hear one fucking word I said? Did you not hear anything?”
North dropped back, face blank. Poleaxed was the word that came to Shaw’s mind. A slaughtering term.
A soft laugh came from the phone. “Sounds like trouble in paradise.”
Shaw gave North his back, pressed the receiver closer to his ear, and said, “Whatever you want, you can fuck off.”
“When I was growing up, Shaw, I had
a redbone hound. Do you know the kind of dog I mean?”
“I’m hanging up.”
But Ronnie kept talking, and Shaw felt paralyzed by the jocular tone and the smooth patter. “She was a pretty good dog. Red, we called her. Not too creative, but we were simple folk. Salt of the earth. When Red got older, she started to get confused. And one day, she bit me. Got me pretty bad, high on my thigh. I was maybe twelve. Well, that was that. You didn’t mess around back then. None of this sentimental nonsense you see today. Even with my leg all banged up, I knew what I had to do. I took Red out back, and I got a shovel, and I beat her brains out.”
Run away, run away. The song was still playing. How the fuck could it still be playing?
“Now, Shaw, listen very carefully, because I want to make sure you understand what I’m telling you. Are you listening?”
Shaw’s throat was too dry for words. He managed a preverbal sound, something that might have been assent.
“I do not care about Aldrich Acquisitions anymore. I do not care about the little games we’ve been playing. All of that’s over with. There’s only one thing I want now. North came into my home. He threatened me. He put a gun in my mouth. I can’t let that stand. So tell me, Shaw, if I was willing to take the dog I loved out back and beat her to death with a shovel,” his voice warped with shrill fury, “just what the fuck do you think I’m going to do to you?”
A crash came from the other end of the line, and then the call disconnected.
Shaw’s hand was shaking; he fumbled the receiver as he tried to return it, and it clanged against the end table. Tucker grabbed it and hung it up. Shaw looked around, but the front door banged shut, answering the question before he could ask it.
North was gone.
Chapter 23
NORTH WENT FIRST TO the two-story house in Maplewood, but it was empty. The same blue-check wallpaper in the kitchen. The same floral border along the top of the walls. The same furniture with its blue microfiber upholstery—albeit dusty now. But no Ronnie. He called every number he’d ever used for Ronnie in the past. None of them worked. Bits and fragments of the fight with Shaw kept flashing at him. It was like rolling downhill in a barrel full of glass.
He drove to a gas station, bought a bottle of Burnett’s from the cooler case, and tossed a twenty under the bulletproof glass so he wouldn’t have to wait in line with the tired mom holding her kid and the old man clutching scratch-offs. He thought about starting here, now, in the suffocating dark heat of the GTO. But he was shaky enough already, and he didn’t trust himself. It didn’t matter much. He reminded himself, though, that he might hurt someone else. So he tucked the bottle between his legs, the chill good there, and drove until he was on Winona, in the flickering light of the old streetlamps. He worked the cap open. The vodka was cheap shit, and it burned like hell. After a few hits, though, the streetlights steadied out, and his hands weren’t shaking anymore.
He took a few more swigs, eyes closed against the sting. Then he recapped the bottle and got out of the car. Around the side of the house. Up the steps. Into the sunroom, where a wall of cigar smoke waited. A desk fan churned the air mindlessly next to a jalousie window. Two dark blobs streaked past him, out through the open screen door. Jasper and Jones had appointments to keep.
After setting the screen door on its latch, North made his way into the kitchen. More cigar smoke met him, of course. But also a mouthful of Lysol, and the tang of urine at the back of his tongue. From the front room came the flicker-wash-flicker of television light. Andy Griffith was sounding patient; you just knew Don Knotts had fucked something up, but Andy was patient as hell about it. That was something, wasn’t it? North knew it was the alcohol starting to talk for him, but that was something too. Maybe everybody ought to take a page out of Andy’s book. Maybe everybody ought to be a little more patient when someone turned things to shit. It’s not like poor Barney meant to be such a screw-up.
Later, he realized he was leaning on the kitchen counter, the Burnett’s open and smelling like rubbing alcohol. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been gone. He wasn’t sure where he’d been. Wherever it was, it was deep, and he could tell the vodka was doing some more talking for him. He tried to straighten, but the room had gone curved and wobbly, and he had to clutch the counter to steady himself. His eyes focused on the counter. He saw what he was seeing.
His mom’s battered red purse lay on the counter, the leather cracked, the brass tarnished. A wad of tissues spilled out onto the laminate, along with a lipstick—Koral Kult—and a mother-of-pearl compact and a flattened five-stick of Doublemint gum. A bloated paperback, pages wrinkled from water damage, lay open and flat. Along the cracked spine ran words in a zany font: 551 Great American Things. North picked it up.
It was open to an entry on the Grand Canyon, with a faded color photograph dominating a third of the page. Ready for one of the grandest of our Great American Things? If the Grand Canyon doesn’t knock your socks off, we don’t know what will! In the margin, in painstaking D’Nealian script, was 21.5 hours, Amarillo KOA, leave early—N sleep? North flipped pages. Other entries had similar annotations—directions, schedules, names of relatives who lived along the way. Occasionally, a long-tailed checkmark indicated, North guessed, completion. Mount Rushmore. The Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library—One of the 8 Wonders of Kansas!—and Cahokia Mounds, of course. Had his parents—had he?—really been to the Grand Ole Opry? North thought he would have remembered, and he felt vaguely cheated. Inside the front cover, Mary McKinney was written in the same careful script.
He lay the book down, open again to the Grand Canyon. He considered the purse. He’d thought it was gone, her stuff. He’d thought it had all gone to Goodwill or the dump or wherever it was supposed to go. The vodka was talking pretty hard for him, and he clutched the counter and pinched the bridge of his nose. In the other room, Barney was about to lose his mind, but not Andy. Andy was cool as a cucumber. We could all learn a thing or two from Andy, North told himself, groping blindly for the Burnett’s.
Too much, maybe; his stomach was doing loop-the-loops. The bottle skittered along the countertop when he tried to set it down. The chirruping noise was funny, and barely catching the bottle was even funnier, and North burst out laughing and then covered his mouth.
From the front room came the sounds of stirring and then, “Aw, shit.”
“It’s me, Dad.”
More swearing. “What the fuck are you doing? Could have scared me to death.”
“Drinking. Not drinking. Catching bottles. Are you going to the Grand Canyon?”
Whatever David McKinney said next, it was too quiet for North to hear. Then, more loudly, his dad called, “Plant your drunk ass right there. Don’t come in here.”
An elbow on the counter helped North stay upright. The gray-blue light from the front room was like a lunar transmission. His dad was making pained noises, grunting, and swearing in a near-constant stream.
“Dad?”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, damn, hell.”
North made his way to the opening that connected the rooms. His dad was struggling to rise from his recliner, his knobby hands clutching the walker, his face contorted with the effort. As North watched, he sagged backward, swearing breathlessly. It might have been a trick of the light, but his face was all charcoal lines, smudged into a grayscale of sweat and exhaustion and what might have been fear.
“You all right?”
“For fuck’s sake, what did I fucking tell you?”
“You want a hand—”
“Get your ass back in the kitchen, for the love of Christ.”
The tang of urine was stronger here. Overpowering. And then North saw the raggedy blue towel hanging off the recliner’s seat. And maybe it was the vodka talking for him, but he started telling himself, be cool, be cool, play it the way Andy would play it.
“Come on,” he said, taking a step into the room. “We’ll get you into the bathroom and cleaned
up. You’ll feel better.”
“No, no, no, no.” The word was mechanical and savage. “Stay over there, put your ass—”
“It’s no big deal. You think I haven’t done it for Tucker? Plenty of buddies, I guess. You drink enough, you’re in a frat, you do it a million times. No big deal. Even done it for Shaw a couple of times, although he’s a lightweight, so it doesn’t really count.”
When he reached for his dad, the blow caught him by surprise: a slap to the hand that made North pull back. The booze muffled everything, and it took him a moment to shake out his fingers.
“I said no.”
“Dad, it’s not—”
“Get out of here. Get out of my house. What the fuck is wrong with you, coming around here whenever you’re feeling sorry for yourself? Just a pathetic, no-good drunk fag. That’s what you are. Looking for a shoulder to cry on. Well, I’m tired of it. Fuck off.”
North wove on his feet. He reached out, tried to steady himself on the TV, but it slid along the console and he had to grab the wall. Poor Barney had the laugh track in stitches. “Hey, come on. I get it. It’s embarrassing. But it’s no big deal. You don’t have to—”
“I said fuck off. What don’t you get about that? You come back when you’re sober. Come back when you can do what I tell you to do, for once in your goddamn life.” David McKinney’s cheeks had a mottled blush that was ashy in the weak light. North moved, and his dad struck at him again, catching only air when North drew back. “Get out!”
A flush prickled all over North’s body. He touched his hand, even though the blow hadn’t come anywhere near him. “What the fuck?”
David McKinney’s eyes were wild, his cannula askew, his wispy gray hair a cloud of flyaways. “Get out. You don’t understand that? Get the hell out!”
“You’re being stupid. You need someone to help you, and I’m the only one here.” North’s voice was rising. He was standing taller, one finger drilling down toward his father to emphasize the words. “And I’m fucking sick of taking this fucking shit. Now come on. We’re going to get you out of that piss-soaked chair and—”
He caught his dad’s arm and pulled. The first strike was glancing, and North mistook it for hesitation. His dad’s fist scraped the side of his head. A low heat started up, reminding North of carpet burn, and he thought maybe this was a joke. Roughhousing. While the Burnett’s was still talking for him, the second blow caught him square on the ear. That one was solid. His head cracked sideways, and something seemed to pop inside his ear, pain roaring in like the 3:10.