The Burning Ground

by Adam O'Riordan

  “My father took me hunting once and, well . . .”

  Joey looked down at his sneakers. Randall paused. He had come across a magazine about hunting, the pages loose from their staples inside the shiny cover, as he waited in a dentist’s reception room last month. As he read about the recent developments in bow hunting and hunting with dogs, it brought back the frustration and excitement of that trip to Alberta with his father. A numinous set of feelings that on recollection he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at. It must have shown as the receptionist, a Thai girl with her dark hair in French braids, leaned across the counter to offer him a waxed-paper cone of water.

  “It’ll make a man of you,” Randall said, trying to find a voice big enough to fill the statement. He had rehearsed his speech in the car on the way over, addressing himself in the rearview. What had he expected from Joey? A blunt refusal? A direct appeal to his mother, bellowing up the wrought-iron and marble staircase for her to come down and “tell this asshole I don’t have to go?” Some sign of life from his teenage son? But instead Joey just nodded at his sneakers.

  Randall came back a fortnight later to collect Joey. He had had to ask permission from Thelma and Cody to take his boy away for the week. Randall sent an e-mail to them, laboring over the tone of the request in the computer labs after the school closed. Then came a wait of five days, in which Randall imagined the conversations Thelma and Cody must be having, before the reply: SURE. LIAISE WITH KATIA (CC’D). THELMA. Katia, Cody’s secretary, let slip that Thelma and Cody planned to take a week in Colorado to celebrate their anniversary and this at least solved one of their child care problems.

  It was agreed that after a three-day drive to Alberta and three days at the lodge, Randall would put Joey on a plane back to Los Angeles from Calgary. Randall had been tightly bound by the divorce proceedings: his move to San Diego cited as “abandonment,” the small amount of hash he had once been cautioned for possessing ( he had gone out to buy it at Thelma’s request so heavy had her period been that month) an indicator of some larger, more sinister addiction. “Gateway drug,” he remembered Thelma’s attorney, a balding man in a double-breasted suit, who smelled of expensive peppery cologne, solemnly intoning to the judge.

  Randall was feeling hopeful the morning, two weeks later, when he collected Joey to begin their trip. The drive up had been sunnier than he expected and he had stopped and drunk a beer at a place by the ocean watching a group of windsurfers in wet suits struggle with their sails as an instructor bellowed directions at them from the sand. When he arrived at the house Joey was waiting with his bag by the curb.

  “I’ve made some tapes,” Randall said, leaning across to open the glove box. “Stuff you might remember. From when you were little.”

  Joey picked up the cassette box.

  “They still make these?” he said, working his thumb into the case. Randall smiled.

  That first day they drove through Las Vegas, where Joey had never been. Adding a few hours on to their journey to move slowly down the main drag past the hotels and casinos, Las Vegas tawdry and underpopulated in the early afternoon light.

  “Somethin’, ain’t it?” Randall said, craning his neck and resting his chin on the top of the steering wheel the better to see the reproduction Eiffel Tower above the dry tops of the palm trees in the central reservation.

  “Mom and Cody think gambling is wrong.”

  “Well, everything in moderation, I guess.” Randall was relieved to hear the lawyer referred to by his first name and not as “Dad” as Joey had sometimes slipped and called him in the past.

  “Yeah, Cody represented a billionaire who was suing a casino for some bet they reneged on.”

  “Did he?” Randall replied flatly, then lightening his tone, “You ever gamble?”

  “We play poker at school sometimes after class.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Randall. “Ever win much?”

  “Nah, just quarters.”

  Randall smiled.

  “Some guys from class play online. But, you know, that’s pretty dumb.”

  A little before midnight they arrived at their motel in Spanish Fork, just south of Salt Lake City. After they dropped their bags in the room—small and hot and smelling still of the previous occupants—they walked a hundred yards across the parking lot and ate a taco at a Mexican Ranchito that was closing for the evening. The lights were out in all the booths except theirs and a waiter in a stained tuxedo pushed a mop from a bucket of gray water around the floor. Back at the motel Randall took the foldaway and lay awake listening to Joey’s breathing, watching his boy’s chest rise and fall, his lips parted slightly, the circuitry of veins on his eyelids flickering as he dreamed.

  The next day they broke their journey just short of the border with Canada. Turning off State Highway 464 to a Motor Inn that served tourists arriving at Babb Airport. The Motor Inn was owned and run by the Blackfeet Nation, the tribe that had historically occupied the plains between here and Alberta. As they approached, they saw the peaks of the Glacier National Park in the distance. It was still light when they arrived and they sat on the hood of Randall’s station wagon in the forecourt. They watched a light aircraft descend to the airstrip. Its wings first dipping left, then right, like the arms of a man on a high wire trying very hard not to fall.

  “Wouldn’t you just love to get up in one of those things?” Randall asked.

  “Yeah, I guess,” Joey replied. Then, after a pause, “Must be a little dangerous.”

  “That’s what they train you for. They don’t let just anyone take the controls.” Randall stopped himself as he found his enthusiasm for the subject overrunning his knowledge of it.

  As Randall checked in, Joey flicked through a brochure produced by the Blackfeet Nation in the lobby of the Motor Inn. Joey was smirking. On the page he had opened there was a photograph of a man in a suit with a diamond-patterned tie and an unfashionably large pair of glasses. The man might have passed for a partner at Cody’s firm, someone Joey was used to shaking hands with at corporate picnics and days out, if it wasn’t for the feather headdress he wore. Its long eagle feathers painted red above the brightly beaded trim. Randall noticed the receptionist looking at his smirking son. He turned and frowned at Joey then immediately regretted it. He saw his boy tense up, all the small doors and passages, the ways of communication that two days on the road had opened up, slammed shut. Joey tossed the magazine on to the table. “I’ll go get the bags,” he said. Joey refused to speak to Randall for the rest of the evening. He went straight to their room, where he lay on the bed in his sneakers, sending messages to friends back in Los Angeles, snickering at their replies, occasionally looking up and scowling at Randall.

  The following morning Joey was still resolute in his silence. He sat with his headphones on in the passenger seat, playing muffled death metal loud enough for Randall to hear. They stopped for gas and Randall came back to the car with a sandwich and a can of soda for Joey. He looked at it blankly then took it, and in acknowledgment left off his headphones for the rest of the day.

  The lodge Randall stayed at with his father had closed down, but online he had found a place an hour away. The first morning was spent on target practice and safety instructions, where Randall had lied nervously about his experience as a huntsman, which extended no further than the single trip with his father. Once Joey got over the sound and the force of the rifle’s recoil he had proved a good shot, first hitting the outer rings of the target and then a large wooden cutout of an elk fifty yards out on the makeshift range.

  “You done this before?” asked the instructor, Kennet, a bearded man with pitted skin in a camouflage baseball cap, whose office was adorned with photographs of himself, his arms draped around the necks of huge dead moose and bears.

  “Nah, it just takes concentration,” Joey had told Kennet as Randall looked on.

  The training had concluded with the issue of luminous orange vests and Kennet distractedly flicking through a book with black
and white diagrams of bears and other animals showing their organs and advising where to aim for a clean kill. Randall had declined the offer of a guide but spoke privately to Kennet about the best hides and spots to head for the next day. Places they were likely to make a kill.

  The next day Randall tried to keep their spirits up as they walked through the woods. The good weather on the road had given way to rain and then to snow the farther north they drove. It was raining now. The rain turned the snow to a slush colour of wet ashes.

  “Well, this is us,” Randall said when they reached the hide Kennet had marked for him on the map a mile or so from the main trail through the woods, “all’s we have to do now is wait.”

  Joey threw down his backpack, then flung himself on top of it. The trees dripped clear water from their branches. The finches and the warblers sang. Father and son took turns to keep lookout. At one point an elk froze before them on its thin legs. They watched it stay perfectly still, then suddenly break into the woods. Afterward Randall dozed for half an hour. Nothing much was said between them, the occasional “You OK?” from Randall and the occasional “Yeah” from Joey. Around midday Joey quietly unwrapped their picnic. Last night in the store at the lodge, Joey, unknown to Randall, had bought two energy drinks, a bag of potato chips, a foot-long sandwich to share and a box of plums. Joey unpacked the food with care and great seriousness, placing each item on a hand towel from the bathroom of the motel near Babb Airport.

  “What?” Joey asked when he caught Randall looking at him.

  “We’re going to need food, right?”

  “Right.”

  As the afternoon passed, the rain eased off, the weak sun slowly wheeled around above the woods. Their drowsiness after eating offset by the tension of waiting for the bear to appear. “We’re not going to see one,” Joey told Randall repeatedly over the course of the afternoon. “Let’s wait and see,” Randall said, though he was far from convinced and with every hour that passed felt a mounting tension. When the bear finally appeared, it was smaller than either of them had expected: a young cub of a hundred pounds, the size of a sheep or large dog. It caused Joey, at the opening of the hide, peering down the rifle’s sight, to freeze.

  “There, Joey, there,” Randall hissed, stabbing the air with his forefinger, “pull it, shoot, shoot.”

  Randall saw Joey’s hand tremble, then his thumb take off the safety catch, his body hunched tightly over the rifle that now seemed much bigger than the boy who was holding it.

  The sound of the rifle discharging caused the birds to scatter from the branches, their wings beating like a round of halfhearted applause, a dusting of snow falling to the ground. The animal let out a low yawning mewl, then collapsed on its side, crashing through a pile of brittle wood above the snow line. The clear air was hung with sulphur. Joey looked down at the bullet casing on the floor of the hide. A few yards away the animal lay dying in the snow, its body crumpled from the impact of the bullet that entered cleanly through the chest cavity behind the front shoulder. Randall took a step toward Joey, putting his arms around his son. He listened to the sobs as he pressed his face into the folds of his anorak. “You did good, son, real good,” he said, stroking the back of Joey’s head. Things would be all right now, Randall knew it.

  The Burning Ground

  Alannah would always come at two o’clock as she had on her first visit. But they never talked about how they might exist outside of the confines of the studio. Then at Easter a fortnight passed without her visiting. He had delayed his own trip to see his sister in Harrogate. By the third week, when two o’clock came he was pacing the studio, snapping the slats in the battered brushed-metal blind, peering down onto the parked cars on the street below. He had first met Alannah and her husband at the same party. He had dismissed the husband: a tall man, in his thirties, in a striped shirt and red braces, whose boyish good looks had begun to slacken. He was explaining to an acquaintance the difference between a bull and a bear market. There was a touch of French or Swiss to his accent, which seemed an affectation. He might have dismissed the man’s young wife too: timid, pale, unexceptional, had a mutual friend not shepherded them together and on to the common ground of his former tutor at the Slade. She seemed impressed that there was anyone alive who could still remember him, let alone who had been taught by the great man.

  After their first meeting he did not think again of Alannah until the friend who had introduced them phoned to ask if she could pass on his details. She explained about the monograph Alannah was working on and how he might lend some important insights. He agreed but that first afternoon her visit slipped his mind. The sound of the buzzer jolted him from his work. There followed a difficult conversation over the intercom as he failed to recognize her name wrapped in the little loop of static and feedback. Only once she was standing in his studio did he recognize her from the party and recalled the arrangement made via e-mail a few days earlier in the Internet café where twice a week he went to pick up his messages. As they talked he noticed how her skin reddened in uneven patches on her neck and across her décolletage and the hard, level confidence of her stare, a poise he had not noticed at the party.

  Three weeks after Easter when eventually Alannah arrived, she was forty minutes later than usual. There was a pause as she stood before him in the doorway. He wondered if she had second thoughts. If time away with her husband reminded her of the fullness of her life and the extravagance of her time with him: the painter whose reputation had been in decline for two decades now. He imagined her in her car, parked a few streets away, her hand hesitating on the key in the ignition. Standing there before him she seemed smaller, tanned, changed by her time abroad: carrying the mood of the French town whose name was printed on the calico bag that held her tape recorder. The tape recorder she had continued to bring with her to his studio as evidence, if an alibi were needed for her husband. He stood for a moment registering the ways she had changed since he last saw her: a new leather bracelet, her hair now parted at the side with a tortoiseshell comb, a little more makeup than she usually wore.

  They did not speak. He set about reclaiming her, first lifting off her jacket, then digging his nails in hard below her shoulder blades, pressing through the fine linen of her camisole as they kissed. Pushing her against the crossbar of a racing bicycle that had sat unused in the entrance way for the best part of a decade. Her teeth clashed against his dry lips, drawing blood. He tasted it ferrous and metallic at the corner of her mouth as they kissed.

  They made love at first on the camp bed and then on a patchwork quilt laid on the cold linoleum floor, an old horse blanket by their feet. Gripping at the curves of her hip bones as the gas heater burned on nearby. Looking down at his own body; slackened with age into folds of formless skin, its contours of tightly packed wrinkles and puckering. The sounds of a London afternoon outside, schoolchildren shouting excitedly as they waited for the bus and the sound of the fast train passing on the bridge. Afterward, he traced the outline of her bathing suit across the soft flesh of her lower back before she rolled away from him and sat up, pulling the quilt over her knees. She was tense after they had made love, as if she had arrived intending not to, running her forefinger and thumb through her hair, rapidly working from strand to strand; searching out a single hair coarser than the others, she would then lift it gently from her scalp, twisting it between her fingertip and the pad of her thumb. He had learned from Alannah that in her teens she had been in the habit of pulling out her hair. A trichotillomaniac, she had said, carefully enunciating the word, making the term seem almost comic. At the clinic her parents sent her to for treatment she learned about the associated, much rarer, condition trichophagia, what they called Rapunzel syndrome, where sufferers would pull out their hair and swallow it, causing, over time, the tail of a hairball to reach down from the stomach into the intestines. She told him how the image had been enough to arrest her own relatively mild condition. Though the habit of searching out the coarser hairs still remained i
n times of anxiety. He watched her kick the quilt from her legs then walk, without speaking, to the windowless shower room at the back of the studio.

  When occasionally they did meet in the world—at gallery openings and once at a party for a mutual friend who was recovering from breast cancer—Alannah was warm and cordial and calm; indistinguishable from how she might greet any other senior artist she had worked with or interviewed. He accepted he had no right to claim her, hoping in time her visits would increase, that she might begin to feel the necessity of their intimacy. Knowing that if he challenged her, or invited this, she might disappear from his life altogether. There had been other women over the years of course. Married and unmarried, some younger, some older. The married made fewer demands or rather different demands, demands he found easier to fulfill. He had been married himself once, in his twenties, the year after he left the Slade. It hadn’t lasted and they had lost touch. She had died. He came across the obituary by chance in The Times. It seemed to him surreal, to think that thirty years ago they had lived together, shared a bed, made a home as best they knew how. Her daughter, who was eager to learn more about her mother’s early life, came to visit him at his studio a few months after she died. She had her mother’s features but was much taller than the woman he had married. But after thirty years without contact, the dead woman in The Times was a stranger with whom he had shared a brief part of his remote past. He had been attracted to her daughter and sensed an attraction on her part to him.

  Remembering his afternoons in his studio with Alannah, there were certain images he would return to; faint rain pooling in the grooves of the corrugated-plastic skylight, the radio at the foot of the camp bed, the barely audible voices, Alannah’s clothes in an untidy pile. In darker moods he wondered how many other studios she had visited with her tape recorder stowed in her bag, if every artist she had interviewed was afforded the same treatment. That everything that followed her climaxing—those short tight breaths she drew in through her front teeth as she came—was make-believe or self-deception. He looked for proofs from the past as a holy man might rake through the entrails of some dead animal.