by Brian Hart
One of the militiamen steps forward and gives the dog a command to see if it obeys. “Fuss,” he says in German.
The dog leaves the man’s side and plants its feet and barks excitedly at the militiaman. His hip is bleeding again. This isn’t anger, this is the joy of the working dog.
“Fuckin’ sprechen,” the militiaman says, smiling, hands up. “Sei brav.”
The man clears his throat and points at his side and the dog goes instantly calm and returns to the man and sits.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” the militiaman says, approaching. “May I?” he asks, and the man nods and the militiaman puts a hand out for the dog, pets it, roughs it by the neck. “C’mon, can we keep him, Dad? Can we, please?” The other guys are smiling now, watching the dog.
The one with the phone shakes his head at the screen. “It’s not loading. Sampson,” he says to the dog lover. “Try and get this to work, would you?”
Sampson glances at his pals, slaps his gloved hands together, and takes the phone and begins swiping screens.
“Tell me whose land this is,” the leader says to the man. “Where we’re standing right now.”
The man ignores him, finishes loading the bike. The men around him don’t look familiar but he knows who they are.
“You aren’t getting enough of a signal,” Sampson says, passes the device back to the leader. “We need elevation. It’ll work once we get outta this canyon.”
“I’m not staying,” the man says. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Do I look worried?” the leader says. “We’re not the Jeffs. We’re what the Jeffs were supposed to be, before they were corrupted.”
“STT,” the one called Sampson says with a hip-hop emphasis on the final T.
“Battle of Thermopylae,” the leader says.
“You all look the same to me,” the man says.
“We could put that dog to good use if you want to come with us. We can pay you, help you get where you’re going.”
“No, thanks,” the man says. The dog loads into the trailer and he zips it shut. “I don’t care who you are. I don’t want to join. And I don’t want you to follow me.” He mounts his bike and maneuvers down the hill and is surprised when they don’t try to stop him.
Near the road, three more men with rifles step from the shadows. Two trucks on the road behind them.
“Sei brav,” the one called Sampson yells after them.
The man’s heart is crashing against his chest and he is soaked in sweat. He pedals fast and never looks back. The sun goes red at the horizon and a mile later he can’t see much beyond his front tire. Sei brav. Be good. Be nice. He looks over his shoulder but it’s too dark to see the dog inside the trailer. “You don’t be nice,” he says. “Hear me? No sei brav.”
[16]
R<25
CA 96118
Karen brought her bag in from the mudroom, set it down on the table, and looked at Roy.
“Don’t get mad at me,” Roy said, thinking: This will cheer her up considering Mace just split. “But Mace is just some guy. He isn’t really your family. He isn’t blood. At best, he’s your half sister’s dad who got stabbed in Susanville, a felon. To me, that doesn’t add up to much.”
She dumped the ice from their glasses into the sink and rinsed them and put them in the strainer. “I thought you liked him,” she said, looking out the window. “I thought you had a bit of a man-crush on him.”
“What’re you talking about?” Offended, but desperate not to show it. “I don’t have man-crushes on anyone.”
She turned and faced him. The color was coming into her cheeks. She looked for a dish towel but there wasn’t one so she dried her hands on her jeans. “Just seemed like you two were getting along. He likes you.”
“All I know,” Roy said, “is that we showed up and he left. What does that say?”
She pushed her hair back from her face with both hands and pulled a hair tie off her wrist and put it in a ponytail. “If you can’t see why I’m here,” she said, “and why it kills me that Mace comes and goes like that, like I’ll always be here, like there’s time later when I know there isn’t. I don’t know what to tell you. Really, right now, I don’t think I have the energy to even try and explain.”
“I’m tired too,” Roy said. “You weren’t the only one out there freezing on the road. You were sleeping. I was driving. I’d been driving all day.”
“I know you’re tired, but I need you to take a second and really absorb where we are and what it means to me to have you here. It means I trust you. More than anyone else in the world. I’m with you and I want you to be here with me.”
He nodded in agreement but what she was saying was shot through with so much stupidity and childishness that he felt a bit disgusted. “I came here with you because I don’t want us to split up,” he said, “and just like you, I don’t really have the energy to even try right now, but—”
“Stop,” she said. “If you don’t have the energy or the—” She hesitated, choosing her words. He hated when she took these pauses, like she was the deep thinker of the two of them. Been to college. If you’re so smart, he wanted to say, you’d just spit it out without going over and over it. “Thoughtfulness,” she said, “to be nice. Don’t boombox my window. Don’t say anything. It’s fucking kindergarten.”
“No, listen. I’m being thoughtful. But you’re just climbing into a coffin here. Everybody here, they’re fucking gone, or they suck. Or both.”
Her shoulders dropped and her nostrils flared and—was it relief he felt? He’d hurt her and he couldn’t take it back. Could she ever understand that this was like gravity to him, the water droplet that had to fall?
“And what’s up with you telling Aaron you had a bad reputation?” he said, following his lemmings of bullshit right off of the cliff. “What the fuck does that even mean?”
“I got pregnant. I told you.” She paused. “Just like my mom did.”
“OK. Maybe you should tell me what happened, like with Aaron’s shitty friends, because hearing all that shit you were saying in his truck, I was like, what the fuck? Seriously, what the fuck?”
She was tired and her eyes, her smile, showed it. She used her hands to show the two sides of her statement. “Women are like, don’t walk on me, and guys are like, but I want to, and then women are like, OK this one time, then guys are like, what’s with all the boot prints, whore?”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“I blew the football team,” Karen said. “All of them.”
Roy leaned back and looked toward the darkened window, thinking: she’s joking while simultaneously trying to remember how many men were on a football team, feeling his masculinity losing power—bad alternator—and in all kinds of trouble.
“I didn’t blow the football team, asshole,” Karen said. “Nobody walked on me. I wanted the attention. I knew what I was doing, mostly I did. They just, you know, all they saw were boot prints. They don’t see you.”
“You got pregnant, though,” Roy said.
“Condoms break. Things happen, sometimes prematurely.” She made a shooing motion toward his crotch. “We know all about that, don’t we?”
Roy nodded, offended, but he was still wondering if the guys on the bench counted or was it just the starters, and did it include special teams too? He was getting turned on but he wasn’t happy about it.
“I’ve told you all of this before,” Karen said. “I had some shitty years. Whip died and my dad split. My mom was a wreck. But Mace showed up and straightened us out a little. He talked to Aaron’s friends, the assholes. He might’ve even smacked them around, I don’t know, and really it was worse after that than when they were acting like I was this huge slut. They wouldn’t even look at me anymore. It was like I was poison.”
“Why do you want to be here?” Roy said.
“I’m not afraid of my past. I’m not afraid of anybody. I used to be pissed at Mace for sticking u
p for me, doing what he did, but now I’m grateful. Not many people do that kind of thing for anyone anymore. If they even have the balls to face the problem at all, everybody wants to talk about it and go to therapy and shit, but not Mace. He put the fear of death into those assholes.” As she spoke she looked frail and childlike and Roy wanted to hold her but didn’t know how to initiate it or what it would mean if he did.
“But you still ran away,” he said.
“It was just what I needed,” Karen said, head up, a bit punch-drunk, teary eyed. “All of it. It makes me who I am. I’m OK with that.”
And before she could take a breath and gather her thoughts, or Roy could repent and they could really make up and move on, get this thing under control, he said: “Let’s get Carl fixed and get out of here. Do something else, something we’d both be into. You know, have fucking fun. Maybe we could come back in the summertime. Then you could have your garden. Or you could sell this house and do whatever you wanted for a while. I don’t want to see you go through this, reliving all this.”
Her body stiffened and her eyes went wide, sadness was replaced by ferocity. “Were you listening to me? I’m not leaving. Where would we go anyway? That’s a good question, isn’t it? What would we be going back to? If we don’t stay here, we don’t have any place to go.” Neither of them had said this out loud yet. This was a vacation with consequences. This wasn’t a vacation.
“I don’t have to do anything.” Backpedaling, don’t touch it—it’s hot. “We don’t have to. We could go see Neko and Yuri in Oakland and if we timed it right, we could catch some NorCal time, get some pre-harvest weed money. Or maybe Neko could find us some part-time something, drink-slinging work. You like the Bay Area.”
“You don’t listen.”
“We could make it a big loop, circle around back to Portland. At least that way I could skate a bit, you know? See if I could shake a sponsor loose. There’s plenty of folks we could kick around with.”
“You’re saying we but you mean me,” Karen said.
“Don’t start that shit. I’m always thinking us.”
Karen shook her head, no.
“This snow is too fucking much,” Roy said. “Icicles? What the fuck are icicles?”
“Besides frozen water?”
“I’m just saying, who knows? It might work out in SF, a new life is always out there, babe.” He smiled at her, held out his good timin’ hands. “There’s always Mexico.”
She was white-knuckling the back of one of the kitchen chairs. “I’m not doing that,” she said. “I’m staying here. If you’re going, I don’t know what to say. I can’t believe you would even bring it up. You haven’t even given me a chance to unpack or do anything.” Her eyes searched his. “What’s wrong with you?”
“OK. Sorry. Forget I said anything.”
She let go of the chair and hugged herself. “I’m still freezing,” she said. “Aren’t you freezing?”
Roy shook his head, no.
“Look, look at my forehead.” She leaned toward Roy and he could see the tiny beads of sweat at her hairline. “I’m sweating and I still can’t get warm.” He reached for her but she stepped back with her hands up. “I’m going to take a bath,” she said. Roy waited for an invitation. “Alone. You had your chance.”
“Can I at least say that you aren’t even trying to see it from my point of view?”
“Oh, but I do. I see you about to cave and I’m praying: not again. Please God, give him enough sack to do the right thing for once.”
“Not again, what? What are you talking about?”
She clenched her fists and shook them in front of her like a pro wrestler declaring his indomitable power. “You know what,” she practically growled the words. “You’re like some idiot hippie that continually wants to tune in and drop out, fucking hokum acid trip dipshit attitude. Flee to Mexico?” She waved her arm and pointed a finger in a direction that Roy was pretty sure was north but he wasn’t about to correct her. She went on: “Freedom, is that what you’re getting at? You wanna be free? It’s on and on with your freedom and your fucked-up ideas about liberty. Skate and fuck everybody else. Be a man, Roy. Stand the fuck up for once. Stand the fuck by me. For once have my back, like I always have yours.”
“Take it easy. I just said Mexico because we’d talked about it before. Don’t call me a fuckin’ hippie, either.”
She came over, straddling the chair his feet were on, and got right in his face like she might climb up and give him a kiss or do a striptease. “I can’t call you a hippie? What can I call you, sweetie? Sir Roy the Bravehearted?” She smacked him on the forehead with her palm and the back of his head bounced off a cabinet.
“Call me fucking later if you’re gonna be like that,” he said, and he wanted deeply to hit her back. “Call me fucking gone.”
“This is just like—”
“What? This is just like what?” He was yelling now, wide open, and in that way it was nice to be out of their apartment. He didn’t have to worry about someone calling the cops out here.
“I told you, I don’t even want to bring it up.”
“Sure you do. You can’t help yourself. Go ahead, say whatever you want to say. I don’t give a fuck.”
“How about you making us skip out on going to San Diego to your mom and Steve’s for Thanksgiving? How about that? Because that was fucked.”
“That was different.”
“Yeah, how?”
“Because it was a fucking sad drunken summer that crashed into an epically shitty fall,” Roy said. “I was jellied by the time it got cold.”
“You don’t get to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Bring up my abortion to defend yourself.”
“I’m not. Jesus. It wasn’t easy for me but I know—I’m not comparing anything. Remember all the fun shit we did, though? I tried to make it normal again.”
Karen gave him the look she saved for when she was explaining what Roy had done while he was blacked-out drunk. “You had some fun,” she said. “But mostly I was alone, working, saving my money to fix Carl, like we agreed we would. Then you and your buds would come in the bar and drink for free and you wouldn’t even stick around until I got off work.” She held up her index finger. “Never tipped,” she said.
“C’mon,” Roy said, weirdly proud of not tipping.
“You let me walk home alone a lot. That’s what I remember. Twenty-five rapey blocks, me and my pepper spray.”
“We went to the coast,” Roy said, feeling himself sinking into the quicksand. “I tried to teach you how to surf.”
“You left me standing up to my tits in ice water to be pummeled by the waves while you duck-dived your way past the breakers and hung ten with your surfer brahs, your fucking Jack Johnsons.”
Roy laughed a little. “They’re more Perry Farrells than Jack Johnsons.”
“I thought I was going to drown. Stuck in that stupid giant wetsuit with the hood. I couldn’t even move.”
“That’s how you learn, though,” Roy said, not joking; it was how he learned at least, minus the wetsuit and the ice-cream-headache cold water. Surfing in Oregon was different in that way than surfing in So Cal. “I should have stuck with you.”
“Yeah, you should’ve.”
He wanted to reach for her, to take her hand, but he still couldn’t make himself do it. “What about when we went to Lincoln City—and to Bend—for those skate contests,” he said. “That was a good time, right?”
“I didn’t go to Bend with you. I had to work. And in Lincoln City, after the contest, you fucking ditched me and took off with the pro dudes on some Beach Boy vision quest.”
“I did? No, you came with us. We were at the beach together all night.”
“No, we weren’t. You were an asshole to me in front of your friends and I went back to the motel and watched Sigourney Weaver kick alien ass, and you showed up at like four in the morning covered in mud and sand, soaking wet and cold, with pupils tha
t looked like fucking black olives.”
He gave her a quizzical look.
She continued, “I let you have the bed and I watched you toss and turn until you fell asleep. Then I went to the office and talked the lady at the desk into letting us check out late. I finally got you into the shower and got you a hamburger and a Coke and then I drove us back home. You didn’t even remember that you won the fucking contest until I told you.”
It was coming back to him now. He didn’t have an argument. He had to stop arguing. “OK, listen, I don’t even remember deciding not to go to my mom’s. I don’t. I remember apologizing to you about it, though.”
Karen kicked the chair out from under Roy’s feet and he pitched forward and slid off the counter and she got right back in his face and Roy almost told her that she was beautiful when she was angry, because she really was, and he felt awful about what he was doing to her right now. He tried to touch her cheek but she smacked his hand away.
“You made me call your mom, and Steve,” she said, shaking her head. “That fucking colostomy bag of a man answered the phone and you—I can’t believe you, telling me you want to leave right now. Fucked is what that is. Your mom even offered to buy our tickets so we could fly out, but because you made me lie we couldn’t even accept charity, when charity was exactly what we needed. It’s so fucked how much of a pussy you are when you pride yourself on being this strong-type guy, a tough motherfucker that can take a hit.” She did a little muscleman pose and mean-mugged him.
“Things aren’t black and white. You always pretend they are but there’s more to my deal with Steve and my mom than you give me credit for. It’s complicated.”
“It isn’t black and white? So things are colorful. Like tie-dye. Like a freak flag.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
She looked hard into his eyes and he looked back into hers and he could see the rims of her contacts. “I love you but you have absolutely no focus and that makes you hard to trust.”