by Brian Hart
“It didn’t sound right.”
“Ready to go inside?”
“Not yet.”
They watch the birds fly over the county road and rise above the low hill on the other side, a rabbit-shaped hill, tucked in and brushy in the folds. For a moment he loses the birds in the sun but the girl points and follows them with her finger until he finds them. The birds circle around and land in the near field again. The girl stays on point like a bird dog and makes another crane call and it’s as if she’s had control of them the whole time, that she’s guided them back to where she wants them, instead of the other way around.
[2]
M<55
CA 96118
He steps from his bicycle and leans it against the side of the funeral parlor. In the shade, with his back to the cinder-block wall, he lets the wobble drain from his legs. Smoke-gray sky, can’t taste the ash any longer. His dismounts used to make her smile. Like a French mailman, she’d say. Bonsoir.
He can hear the dog rummaging around back, plastic on plastic like a tarp in a storm, rooting in the undertaker’s trash pit, trying to get at whatever rodent or food scrap he’s sniffed out. The man gives a donkey whistle and a forty-five-pound Malinois, coyote-lean and sharp-eyed with a black face and golden body, comes trotting from around the corner with a lidless plastic one-gallon container of—the man leans down to read the label—brown gravy in his jaws. Only an inch or so of congealed sludge remains.
“You’re proud of yourself,” the man says.
The dog lifts the jug higher and when the man tries to grab it he dodges out of reach and prances in the dust, high-stepping and tossing his head like a pony. As he comes around again he keeps his amber eyes on the man and presents his prize.
“I’m not playing,” the man says. “Drop it. Pfui.”
The dog does as it’s told but gives the man a sideways look.
“You want to make me feel bad, is that it? OK. It’s your stomach. Go ahead.” He motions the dog closer.
The dog comes forward and gives the jug a swat and nuzzles it around and puts both of its front paws inside the wide mouth. While gripping the upper edge of the jug’s opening with its teeth and giving down pressure with its feet, the dog aggressively twists its head side to side until the plastic rips open. With only a glance at the man, the dog thrusts its muzzle into the hole and settles into his meal.
When he’s finished, the man calls the dog over and pulls him close against his legs and has a little bit of a wrestle and shove and then points at the ground beside his bike.
The dog lowers itself with its front paws close together and presents a recalcitrant profile. The man gives the dog a last jaw scratch and heads for the door.
Bells chime. The air is cooler inside. James Taylor on the radio. Heavy curtains cover the lobby windows but there’s light coming from the wide doorway that leads to the chapel. The carpet is geometrically sun-bleached where the chairs, receptionist’s desk, and wall tables in the waiting room have been removed. The inspirational artwork—pastel boats crossing rivers and stormy oceans, oily sunsets, watercolor fields complete with tractors and cows—have all been taken down. Against the wall, near the door, moving boxes are stacked to the ceiling and there’s a handcart tipped into the corner.
The undertaker comes from the back wearing blue coveralls with his sleeves rolled up, drying his hands on a white towel with red stripes. When he sees who it is he nods and says hello. He tosses the towel onto the back of a chair and they shake hands.
“Glad you made it,” the undertaker says, pressing down the wispy red hairs that remain on his head.
The man nods.
The undertaker finishes with his hair and motions toward the man’s left hand. “How’s the hand? Did you heal up all right?”
The man shoves his hand in his pocket and, as has become his habit, begins rubbing his thumb across the smooth scar where his finger used to be, presses down on the bone until it aches. “It’s fine.”
The undertaker takes a deep breath through his nose and after he lets it out their eyes meet once again. “Right when I thought I’d seen it all.”
“We don’t have to stand here talking,” the man says.
“I told you I don’t do deliveries,” the undertaker says, a touch of playful anger in his voice. “I was beginning to think you didn’t hear me or, worse, you didn’t believe me.”
“I remember,” the man says. “I heard you. I got the note you left at the house.”
The undertaker touches his hands together like a prayer, pink nails on clean freckled hands. “I wouldn’t go without settling this.”
“It’s all right. I’m here now. Hell, Larry, I even put on a suit.” The man wipes his hand over the breast of his black tailored merino jacket, touches the collar of his dress shirt. His face is sun-darkened and his greasy salt-and-pepper hair, only slightly shorter than his ragged three fingers of beard, points thickly in all directions as if someone has chopped up a pair of wool army surplus trousers with dull scissors and glued the remnants to his skull.
“It’s better for a person’s grief if they bind it off, close the loop,” the undertaker says. “I believe that.”
The man nods again. “Here I was thinking it was because I didn’t pay you.”
“Nobody has paid me in a long time.”
“I’m ready if you are.”
When the undertaker returns he has a small redwood box held out before him. The man accepts the box, feels the undertaker’s eyes on the shiny scar of his missing finger. The wood has shrunk and the joints look bad. It weighs less than he would’ve liked.
The undertaker lifts the hand towel from the chair back and drapes it over his shoulder like a line-cook might do and goes to the window and hauls open the curtains. “I have a sister in Maine,” he says.
“You’re not going down with the ship then,” the man says.
The undertaker turns and attempts his pitiable and well-worn, somebody-has-died-and-the-service-begins-at-one-sharp smile, but there’s more to his face now, a new muscle group or a dead tangle of nerves, whatever it may be, the end result is a sincerity that—sitting through countless funerals—the man has always wanted to see. It’s his true face, without religious pretension or the motivation of business, just the man. “This ship has sunk,” the undertaker says. “And make no mistake, I went down with it. Same as you.” He wipes his brow on the back of his arm. “I could give you a lift.”
“Thanks, but I’m going the other way.”
“It’s about time.” A smile spreads across his face. “Past time.”
A car drives by outside and somebody yells. With the music on the radio it’s hard to tell what’s said. The man and the undertaker both turn to look but can’t see anything through the dust-caked glass. “Thanks again,” the man says.
“Good luck to you,” says the undertaker.
The door shuts behind him with a jingle and the sun bakes his suit against his body. The dog has disappeared. The tire tracks are fresh in the dust on the blacktop but they turn at the next block, heading toward the elementary school. The man whistles for the dog and waits but he doesn’t come. He takes a deep breath. Another whistle, louder. No dog.
He shoves the box into his pannier, too roughly, and climbs onto his bike. He loses the dog’s tracks immediately but can’t bring himself to circle back. The dog is much better at finding him than he is at finding the dog. He goes slow with a light touch on the pedals.
At the FreshMart, sales placards continue to advertise the absurd: tasty and fresh, low prices, local and organic. A tipped-over water machine crosses the threshold of the double doors and empty jugs litter the parking lot. He whistles for the dog again, yells its name, still expecting it to trot up behind him and lick his hand, the back of his arm, as it always has. He wills the dog to appear and when that doesn’t work he wishes as a child wishes on a star or a birthday cake. Powerball. Hope is a scratch ticket.
He rounds the corner and his skin chil
ls in the shadow of Preservation Hall—concrete-antebellum, scorched lintels, graffiti tagged, the last new building. From there it’s all weedy foundations and trash-filled basements where the houses that were small enough to move were taken away on lowboy trailers years ago. Blackened chimneys tell a different story. Starts with insurance fraud and ends with pennies on the dollar, trash-bag carryalls, and kids’ mattresses on the roof rack. He rolls a bullet-mangled stop sign and takes the last turn toward home. Riding by the abandoned lumber mill, he can smell the ghosts of the trees, their sweet resin.
The road is empty and the only tracks are his from earlier and going the wrong way. The farms are gone, wiped from existence. No hay sheds or barns remain, no animals, just dust. Alfalfa, formerly the dominant crop, is at this point an alien concept, replaced by star thistle and Scotch broom. Above the ag lands, tree stumps stud the hillsides and clear-cuts spread like pale mold in the black of the burns on the mountains. Pedal. Crank. Creak.
Two of the four windows in his tack room are broken and shards of glass sparkle yellow and white on the dusty floorboards. He leans toward the window and calls again for the dog. In response, a hot, smoke-tainted wind drifts in and stirs the dust, further dimming the sunlight. He takes the redwood box from his pannier and shoves it into his jacket pocket, does up the buttons.
He doesn’t remember tying the noose but there it hangs. He’s mildly impressed with his effort. Even with nine fingers. His ring finger and the tattooed ring that adorned it, burnt to ash in the box with his wife. Took it off with an inch-and-a-quarter chisel. Four books—two Haynes manuals and a couple of his wife’s poetry collections, Jack Gilbert and Wendell Berry—arranged log-cabin style on the back of his hand held the chisel upright while he brought the mallet down. It came off clean and hurt and bled about as much as he expected. Comparatively nothing.
He knocks the dusty noose around, a slo-mo speedbag workout. The milk stool at his feet was a gift from his eldest daughter to his wife. What happens when the idiot dog comes back? He’s not coming back. He’ll eat your feet, if you’re hanging, whatever he can reach. You should kick off your shoes to make it easier for him. “Gravy-eating shithead.”
The man waits, for what he doesn’t know—a reason, a sign, an excuse, karmic reckoning—to put an end to this. Should he bind his hands? Is this an actual option again? Is this how it ends? Should he write a note? He doesn’t want to change his mind. How would he even bind his own hands? Would a zip tie work? He has a zip tie somewhere. He thinks that no one will ever know, but what if they do? Why did he tie the noose in the first place? What if his girls find out that he didn’t bring their mother to them like he promised because it was too difficult? Insurmountable logistical problems. Sorry. I was too sad. All the fatherly advice he’s given them, examples he’s set, good and bad, and none of it, not a word or misstep, would point to: If the going gets brutish, chop off your finger and hang yourself.
His suicidal calculations, chump math, are suddenly interrupted by the heavy thump of shotgun blasts.
Without thinking, he limps quickly from the barn to the driveway and rips open the passenger door of one of the two burnt-down-to-the-rims-and-shot-up pickups parked there and retrieves his rifle from behind the charred seat where he’s stashed it.
Crouched at the corner of the barn, he checks that the rifle is still loaded. A dirty red pickup with a black fender has left the county road and broken through the fence, driving recklessly across the sunbaked field toward the house. The passenger is hanging out his window with a shotgun, shooting over the hood. The man follows the trajectory of the barrel and thirty yards ahead of the pickup catches the zipper of dust rising from the dog as it runs crookedly toward him, watches as he stumbles, falls, doesn’t get up.
The man braces his arm against the barn, rests the rifle there and fires. Leads him by the length of the hood. The passenger is hit on the second shot and the driver jerks the wheel trying to pull him in and as he does the passenger tumbles out the window backward like a scuba diver. The driver brakes hard and the truck slides broadside and before it comes to a stop the driver is out and circling to the far side of the truck for cover. The driver yells but it sounds tiny like it comes from inside a box and it might as well. “It’s only a fucking dog. You motherfucker. You shot him. You shot him.” The driver leans in front of the truck’s grille and fires seven shots with his pistol at the barn.
After a long minute of nothing but wind, a cloud passes overhead and the air cools in the shadow. Through the scope the man can see the dog isn’t moving. When the driver leaves the safety of the truck and runs toward the passenger in the field, the man brings his barrel around to follow him. The driver pulls on the passenger’s arm and begins dragging him back toward the truck but he must be beyond help because he lets go and picks up the shotgun instead and when he turns for cover, the man centers the reticle on the driver’s chest and squeezes the trigger. He shoots him again when he’s down and that’s it for ammo so he thumbnails the bolt and spins it into the dead weeds and drops the rifle at his feet.
From the barn he crosses the southern corner of what was their garden. Ruined fence, smashed gate. What remains: Popsicle sticks with her handwriting on them, geraniums, his daughter’s trowel because she never picked up her tools, the bottoms of Pabst cans for slugs, torn Visqueen and shattered PVC from the hoop house. Only the slightest hint of the work, the love, that went into this ground. The weeds won. The weeds always win.
The dog’s hide is ragged and he has buckshot puckers in his hip, his fur matted with blood to the dewclaw. The man kneels beside him and holds the dog’s head in his hands and talks to him, runs his thumb over the handsome ridge of bone above his eye.
As he lifts the dog to carry him to the trespasser’s truck, the dog lifts his head and licks the man’s face. The bleeding is a steady trickle from the buckshot wounds, not arterial. He can’t feel any broken bones. The dog smells strangely like the inside of a car tire, like an inner tube. “Did they run you over, bud?” he says. He could shoot more. He wants to shoot more. “You’ll be OK. I got you now.”
He sets the dog down gently on the passenger floorboard and pushes the button and kills the motor. Behind the seat he finds a water jug and pours some into his cupped hand. He continues talking to the animal as it drinks. When the water is gone he searches the truck for some sign of militia affiliation but there’s none to be found, not a sticker or a beer coozy or anything.
The passenger is sprawled on his stomach, arms out, palms up. The exit wound has shattered the right shoulder blade. Bone is visible through the hole in the shirt. A bloody piece of flannel tied in a knot partially covers a ragged dog bite on his left forearm. The man rolls him over, industrial-grade acne and a plastic gold grill, fake diamond bling. His shirt says: failed state—california caliphate—89/97—no surrender. He was militia, Jeffersonian. Could be worse.
The driver is older, bald, scars on his head and face. His T-shirt is a crude map of California with a double-bitted axe splitting the state longways. the line been drawn, it says. At the approximate location of Redding, the shirt has a small oblong hole in it the size of a disposable foam earplug. No other visible wounds. Must’ve pulled the second shot. Stomach is beginning to bloat or he had a hernia. Not lifting the shirt to see. Cured what ailed you. Two fingers are missing on his right hand. The man places his damaged hand over the dead man’s. The passenger could’ve been his son, or maybe they were brothers or just pals. The pistol is empty but the shotgun has two shells in it and he saw more under the seat in the truck so he takes it with him, leaves the pistol in the dirt.
He starts the truck and U-turns, parks as close as he can to the bodies. It’s like wrestling pigs getting them into the truck bed. He says cocksucker and dumb fucking dickfors. Idiots. Dead idiots. His arms and chest are slick with their blood. He drives out of the field and down the driveway to the barn. He isn’t going into the house again. He hasn’t been in there more than a handful of times s
ince she died, months now, half a year. It’d taken him that long to get well, gather the courage to pick up her ashes.
His daughters send messages to the TNK unit, they call it tink, in the neighbor’s barn a mile down the road, essentially a souped-up HAM radio. It can be vector-adjusted to use Birkeland currents and dynamic-array satellite guidance to encrypt correspondence. At least that’s how the neighbor pitched it to him. A piece of expensive government hardware turned militia hardware once the neighbor walked off the job with it. But the neighbor and his wife, former Jeffersonians themselves, are dead now. Their cases upon cases of Mountain House meals and polytanks of drinking water remain, along with a filtration system and a wonky-at-best solar system, enough to run the tink but not much else. There used to be a few cows and a small garden and a laying flock of chickens, but once he was alone he’d butchered and made jerky out of the cows, then dutch-ovened the birds one after the other. He’d left the garden to die because green made him a target. Besides, he couldn’t put his hands in the dirt without thinking of his wife. He didn’t need more reasons for his various failures. He had all the reasons he could handle.
The tink is only a messaging system. He can’t actually talk to his girls or hear their voices, and that’s probably for the best. They’re better off where they are. They made it. They said that the drive up wasn’t so bad. People weren’t violent, just worried and restless, tired.
You don’t have to worry, he’d punched into the tink’s miniature keypad that morning, after he’d put on his suit jacket and tied on shoes, I think we’re ready.
Yay! UR coming? How’s mom?
We’ll be leaving soon.
Is she all right?
——
Dad?
We’ll be OK.
J wants to know if you fixed the truck.
Not sure yet. Don’t worry.