Grass Roof, Tin Roof

by Dao Strom

  Hus stared incredulously at the man. A short distance behind the man was Tran on the doorstep of the trailer. She had poured herself a glass of wine and was holding it with both hands, looking at the man’s back. Beside Hus, Thien shuffled his feet. Hus wondered suddenly, how had he gotten himself into this situation, into this life? “If you don’t get off my property, I am going to have to call the police.”

  “Oh, no, I’m not leaving yet,” shouted the man. “I’m not leaving until you tell me yes, my people shot your poor dog, and then you give me some money to repair my damages. I want at least five hundred dollars, you hear me? Five hundred. Because my dog was a rare animal, goddamn it.” The man paced. He then strode back to his truck, reached into the bed, and dragged something out, something that Hus could not see clearly until the man had heaved it over his shoulder, carried it onto the driveway, and thrown it down on the rocks. The large white dog’s body was limp and the bullet wound was visible in the middle of its rib cage, where the fur was stained red.

  Hus glared at the man, furious.

  “I’m leaving her for you now, see? She’s all yours now.” Suddenly, Hus was on the driveway, shoving the man aside and reaching for the dog. He lifted its cold furry body and felt the weight and softness of it against his forearms and chest as he began to walk with it up the driveway.

  The man shouted, “Hey!”

  They all watched Hus. He continued to walk, not knowing himself what he would do, down the road. It occurred to him what he was at that moment: a forty-nine-year-old man carrying a dead dog down a dirt road. How had this ever become an impasse at which he had arrived, and what did it say about his future? Everything he had done—for years—had long been motivated by the wish to separate himself from any risk of conflicts such as these, and from people whose prejudices were based, like this man’s, on fear or rage or spite. This was the consequence of righteousness, it seemed to Hus, his own as well as this man’s. But how could Hus not view this man as a lazy worthless person, after he had thrown his own dead dog on the ground? Surely this was a person not capable of understanding a desire for peace, a man who had allowed his dog to be shot in the first place. As Hus continued to walk, it dawned on him that the man had probably shot his dog himself. Drunk and mad at the dog for harassing the neighbors, or mad at having been accused by the neighbors of some harassment or other by the dog, this man, William Bentley, had probably on an impulse gone out and shot the dog, then regretted it. And by morning, he had convinced himself that someone else must’ve come and shot the dog. This was what Hus believed, the farther he walked holding the dog, as if its contact with him were imparting to him this version of the story.

  The man yelled after him, “You lousy son of a bitch! You go and keep her!”

  Hus stopped in the middle of the dusty road. He looked around at the trees and the brilliant blue sky and the sunshine. He gently set the dog’s body down in the tall, dry grass and star-thistle on the side of the road. Then he turned around slowly, his eyes sweeping over the tangled oaks and pines descending in thickening clusters down the hill on one side; he saw his family and relatives scattered up the road watching him, slowly trailing after him, the man pushing through them and swinging his arms. On the other side of the road was a driveway that led to the Nerwinskis’ house. A retired old couple, the Nerwinskis were nice enough to allow the Madsens to fill their plastic gallon jugs with water from their outdoor spigot once a week or so, and they also had a telephone the Madsens could borrow. In the pastures alongside their long, gently winding driveway, the Nerwinskis’ sheep were grazing.

  The man caught up to Hus and stepped over the dog’s body in the grass without glancing at it.

  “You bastard fucker.” The man slammed his fist into his palm, but Hus did not feel threatened. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I think it’s time you removed yourself and your dog from here. I think you’ve overstayed your welcome by now, don’t you?”

  Hus’s family and the relatives trickled down the road toward them. Thien and two of the cousins came and stood a few feet behind the man, glancing from Hus and the man to the dead dog. Hus saw the girls and Huong holding hands at the back of the crowd. They looked pitifully disheveled in their silly strapless dresses, and they were barefoot now, like urchins.

  “I’ve got something to say to you, Hoss,” the man said quickly. “I’ve seen your boy going by my place on his motorbike before. And I just found out that last week there was a boy out on a motorbike chasing my dog around with a BB gun. I was told that just today when I was out asking questions of my good neighbors.”

  Hus didn’t believe him. “To be honest with you, it’s probably best your dog was shot. It was most likely mistreated and vicious because of your mistreatment.” He caught sight of Thien staring open-mouthed at the man. Hus felt the pain in his stomach flare to his ribs. He straightened his back and tried to stand taller. He faced Thien with a piercing look.

  Thien’s gaze immediately dropped to his feet.

  The man laughed.

  “The dog was chasing me,” Thien mumbled, “but it was a long time ago. I was on my motorbike one day and I fell off because he was chasing me and he almost bit me.”

  “And then you fired at this animal with your BB gun, did you?”

  Thien shrugged, not looking up, and shifted his feet in the grass. “I didn’t hurt his dog. He made me fall off my bike. And it happened a long time ago.”

  The man stood between Hus and Thien, looking from one to the other triumphantly. He folded his arms and narrowed his eyes with what looked like concentration. Maybe, Hus thought, it was best in life to just suspect everyone of holding out on you.

  “And what were you doing driving around with your BB gun on your motorbike? Don’t you know how stupid that is? That is a stupid, stupid thing to do!” Though he knew he should not berate the boy in front of a stranger, Hus could not contain himself—it was with kids as it was with dogs sometimes, he thought, that you had to punish them on the spot or they might not remember what you had caught them at. Hus leaned toward Thien. “Stupid! I would expect you to know better, Thien. Is that what you do? Answer me. Why were you driving around with your BB gun on your motorbike? Is this something you do regularly?”

  Thien shook his head. His shoulders moved up and down.

  Hus again demanded an answer.

  “Yeah, you tell him now,” added the man. Hus ignored him, but he was irked by the feeling of the man joining him.

  "Do you, Thien,” Hus repeated meticulously, “drive your motorcycle around with your BB gun?”

  Thien muttered, “I wasn’t, I didn’t have it with me. I came back and got it, all right?” He glared briefly at Hus, then looked away.

  Tran was beside them now, trying to step in. “Let me talk to him, Daddy,” she said, addressing Hus as she usually did in front of the children.

  “No, he needs to learn,” said Hus. “So you came back and got your gun. You meant to come back and specifically shoot at this dog. That is what they call premeditated, do you understand? That kind of thinking, and the choice that you made is equal to a crime, do you realize? How do I know you didn’t decide to do this again last night? I can’t be sure of anything now, can I?”

  “No, you can’t,” the man agreed.

  “I fell off my dumb bike, okay? I almost got bit. That dumb dog was trying to bite me. But I never shot him!” Thien’s face twisted up and he crossed his arms tightly over his chest and hunched his shoulders. He began to cry.

  For a moment the only sound was Thien’s sniffling. Hus didn’t know what to say next. He stood staring at the boy with his eyes so fiercely focused, they ached. He stepped back in the grass.

  “You do a thing that stupid again and you’ll be sorry,” said Hus. But he meant it not as a threat—he just wanted Thien to learn something, something about life, this. He said sternly, “You don’t make dumb moves like that. Let me tell you.”

  Thien was crying and wipin
g his eyes.

  “Go on home now,” said Hus, and Thien turned quickly away and shouldered past his mother, who was reaching for him. She glared at Hus, and Hus believed they were all, the relatives and kids, glaring at him in the same hateful manner. Even the man was leering. Hus felt sick to his stomach.

  “Aw, shit,” said the man suddenly. “What the hell are you yelling at him for? He’s just a kid. He didn’t shoot my dog. Sure, I believe someone here did, but it wasn’t that poor kid. You should be yelling at that other guy.” He gestured toward Uncle John.

  Tran spoke up. “Yes, you being too hard on Thien. I think you being unreasonable. We go home now, we forget everything.”

  Hus could hardly believe what he was hearing. He watched as Tran headed back up the dirt road, and Aunt Mary and the cousins started to follow. Hus noticed his younger daughter, Beth, was crying, and Huong knelt beside her. The older girl, April, was glancing between Hus and Tran, and Hus saw her dark hair swinging against her neck. It looked cheerful and nonchalant and so innocent, that motion. Uncle John and a few of the older boys were hesitating, still interested in the conflict.

  “You got some problems,” said the man, “beyond the five hundred dollars you still owe me.”

  Hus looked at him with pity. “You take your animal and leave now. You disgust me. You are a low and common form of human being.” He gestured toward the driveway across the road. “I am going to go call the police. You can decide what you’re going to do next.”

  Hus stepped over the dead dog and crossed the road. The man didn’t stop him. The fight was over for both of them. Hus walked up the Nerwinskis’ driveway. The sheep grazing in the pastures raised their heads briefly as he went by. He stepped onto the Nerwinskis’ porch and rang the doorbell. The wind chimes dangling from the eaves tinkled like water rippling—and for one second an image of a snow-covered mountain meadow crystallized in his mind with excruciating clarity. Mr. Nerwinski let him in, nodding pleasantly. The TV murmured in the living room and Hus could hear the sound of some crockery being set down in the kitchen, could see a section of the sheep pasture through the open front-room window, as perfect as a painting on the wall itself. Mrs. Nerwinski came out of the kitchen to join her husband.

  Sweaty and dusty, Hus’s clothes emitted a bad odor. “There’s a man harassing my family” was all he could say. “May I use your telephone?”

  The old couple directed him to the phone and he tramped across their clean floor, tracking clumps of dirt from his boots.

  As he laid his hand on the phone, he caught sight of the dirt. His stomach turned painfully and he abruptly moved his hand to it, frowning. The couple looked alarmed, and Hus could not answer immediately when they asked what was the matter. Mr. Nerwinski brought Hus a chair. It was a simple, sturdy wooden chair, Hus noted as he sat down, leaning back and breathing heavily. He was unable to thank them or apologize right away, either. Mr. Nerwinski went back to stand with his wife, and Hus saw them, the old couple, in the middle of their living room, watching him with wondering eyes. He saw them among their weathered furniture and full bookshelves and framed pictures on their walls, pictures of children young and grown, and a strange melancholy washed over him. He remembered then an incident from his youth. It was winter, and he was at the train station awaiting his father’s return from a business trip, when an older boy approached and began taunting him about his family. Hus had become so angered he had beaten the other boy until all he could see was the blood red against the white snow, and his own hands bleeding and red from the cold. Slowly, the roll of pain in his stomach subsided.

  “It’s nothing,” said Hus. “I’m very sorry. I’ll be just a minute.” He tried to chuckle to ease his awkwardness.

  Mrs. Nerwinski smiled tenderly and shook her head. “Poor young man,” she said.

  Hus raised his chin. “No, no, I’m fine,” he said and nodded briskly. He sat with his back straight and reached for the phone again, but knew he would not make the call. He laid his other hand on his thigh, and tried to keep his face from clouding.

  The man and the dog and all of Hus’s family were gone when Hus came down the Nerwinskis’ driveway. He walked back up the road home by himself. He felt drained and mentally exhausted, but there was peace in the tangles of wild oats that grew beside the road and in the sound of sparrows in the trees.

  When Hus reached the top of his driveway, Tran and the others were standing about the trailer. They stopped talking when they saw him. April and Beth ran to him, exclaiming, “Daddy’s back!” and he patted their heads and said, “Yep, we’re all home now.” He picked up Beth and carried her on his hip. When he reached the trailer he set Beth down, nodded briefly at Tran, and went inside. He poured water from the gallon jug by the sink over his hands and rubbed them together, then wiped them dry on his jeans. He spotted the bottle of wine on the counter and thought they should probably throw it out.

  Outside again, his family and the relatives were gathered around the front of the trailer. They all looked at him, their eyes dark and blank, except for the girls, who were bumping hips in the dirt and twirling their dresses around their legs. Thien was standing with his arms crossed, staring off down the hill even as Hus spoke.

  “Everything’s all right now,” he said, and gave a reassuring chuckle. He wondered if they still cared what he thought or not, and half hoped they did not. “He won’t be coming back, that man,” he said, feigning confidence. Then he added, addressing the girls, “It’s time to feed the animals now. There’s no reason to forget that.” The girls ran to get the dog dishes and he added, “Make sure you give them fresh water, too.”

  Hus looked at his wife. She was pulling on the galoshes she used to walk in the chicken coop. She didn’t like to walk on the chicken droppings in her good boots. Hus waved at her. The relatives had begun to talk again among themselves; Hus wondered whether they were discussing him. He needed to keep busy, to get away.

  “No, no, Mom,” he said, making a face. “I’ll do it. I’ll feed the chickens today.” Outside the coop, he scooped up a cup of poultry feed and entered the chicken pen. As he scattered the yellow kernels around his feet in handfuls, the chickens surrounded him, scratching and clambering frantically over each other and the tops of his boots. He closed his fist, stemming the flow, then stepped over their backs to another part of the pen to scatter the rest of the feed.

  3. ON THE HEEDLESSNESS OF TREES

  —and what is apparent about trees, I think, is only the apparentness of trees (trunk, arms, leaves, life), and it may be presumptuous to attach a quality such as looming, or portentous, or swaying, even, for that would be more telling you, truly, about me: that I was afraid. That I had allowed certain aspects of nature to represent the fear of my own unknowing. It was when I was almost eleven, I remember, that things began to change. I began to be afraid of the trees. I remember walking home after school on some rainy days, and how for a moment (with the blue-gray gravel crunching under my feet and the hunger of afternoon in my belly) I would get this feeling: I am returning home after a long time gone, although I had, in fact, never left home for any extended period as far as I knew, and in that moment I would see the familiar trees and gentle winding road and naked dark brown branches against the gray sky — with a forlornness. Suddenly there was something doomed about life, I could feel it, but I had no parameters by which to interpret it besides a rather general fear of death. In my youth several trees did fall. Our father felled one, a sixty-foot-tall digger pine, the digger pines being less elegant than the lusher pines because of their wayward, curving, peeling trunks. It was for our safety, he said (such language only reinforces a child’s trepidation), for if it had fallen on its own it might’ve landed on the house, across our brother’s bedroom. And once during dinner on an ordinary quiet summer afternoon, we heard a great boom outside. We ran out of the house. It took some minutes of searching, of scanning the familiar landscape, to notice that there was now one pine tree less—it was another digger, ad
mittedly — on the hillside of the empty horse pasture to the east. But trees are heedless. I realize that now. It is only humans who worry over the necessity of being heard.

  TREES, HANDS, LEAVES

  I

  In August it rained for two weeks straight and the gray sky made it seem as if it were already fall. The long yellow grass dying on the hills all summer was wet and bent. Usually dry in the summertime, the creek that ran through the ravine at the bottom of our property filled with water. One afternoon I explored the ravine. I went across the creek and through the berry vines and manzanita trees and up the hill on the other side. Should I say this now about the trees? The hillsides where we lived were so steep the trees on them grew at precarious angles, slanting and leaning almost sideways out of the slopes, trying very hard to grow upward, perfectly, toward the sky, but not quite making it because of the pull of gravity from the valley below. The pine trees especially looked strange because their trunks were tall and straight and rigid. They looked frozen in the middle of falling.

  I climbed to where the hill leveled into a meadow of thin yellow grass and scattered boulders. From here I could see the mountains and the American River winding quietly along the bottom of the Coloma Valley. This was the view my father had built our house to look out on. The only sound I could hear was the creek running. I opened my mouth to scream into the silence then, and I tried to make myself sound like a red-tailed hawk. It was a game Cody Walker and I had been playing lately. We used the sound to call to each other—our families lived just over the hill from each other. Sometimes you could not tell the difference between us and real hawks, and that made me proud. That day, I let out a couple of sharp cries, pretty high-pitched, and after a few seconds I heard a cry come back to me. I knew it was Cody. He came walking up out of the trees at the same place I had, wearing jeans and his father’s boots that were too big for him and a ratty knit sweater that hung to his knees. His blond hair was thick and messy and fell over his forehead like a pony’s forelock. Cody Walker and I were both almost eleven, but we were only friends, really, in the summertime and after school; I had skipped a grade, and so we were in different classes. The other truth is that home and school were two different worlds and in school Cody was popular, so popular he did not have time for me when we were there, though sometimes he stuck up for me. Cody Walker was the only kid in school who knew what I was like at home (sometimes I wished this could be more widely known)—how I was more adventurous and talented than others might think, how I was not just a little brain.