by Jon Boilard
The river is privy to bigger secrets that you will never tell. It shushes you and shoves trout down toward Stillwater Bridge, where fly fishermen in hip boots cast their lines patiently smoking Swisher Sweets, standing in shadows. The river is running high because they’ve let the dam out at Old Squaw Reservoir and it hisses and spits and slithers on its stark white belly across Franklin County, from Bardwell’s Ferry to Bloody Brook to Cheapside.
Then the transitory lullaby of Wingo’s milking machines humming. When you get onto Lee Road the melting sherbet sun drips through the driver-side window and you almost feel it on your tongue. There is something else, too, that tastes like a ten-penny nail. Another electronic click in his steering column signifies the new stop sign just propped up at Route 116 and Lee Road, and he guns the engine, no longer careful. Then the Malibu slows down some.
Sit up now, boy, and fix yourself, he says.
You do as you’re told with Sawmill Plain Road coming up on the right.
Which house is it, he says. Where you stay.
You show him the house your father rents from Ned Karkut.
That’s good, he says. Now I know where to find you.
He licks his fingers like after a Sunday potluck at St. Matthew’s Church and he smooths out his eyebrows. He smiles sluggishly, drunk on something other than liquor, and half-sings:
Six stones down the mountain
Six stones down the mountain
Lonely as it is up there
Looking for a god that cares
The man pats you on the knee, reaches over and opens your door.
Now don’t tell nobody, boy, he says. Or I’ll come back and pop one a them nuts.
But he didn’t have to say those words, you already knew you could never tell.
The Malibu U-turns and throws ghosts from its tailpipe. Your mother’s forsythia bush sobs soft yellow blobs that scatter, the weathercock wrestles the wind. Your father’s pickup is backed up to the long barn, which means you’re late filling Addison’s grain and water buckets. You hurry and check the salt licks in the north pasture. Beyond Ostroski’s patchwork fields the sun slips behind the sawtooth scalp of Sunsick Mountain and the sky is spilled pink lemonade.
Your father turns toward you and in the near dusk his face takes on a blue-metal hue like it’s forged of the same stuff they make shotguns from. Stray cats so skinny they’re just brown bags of sticks hide in the glooms high up on the rafters, and they watch you with vampire eyes.
DARK DAYS
At dawn the sun is staining pulled-taffy clouds various shades of purple and orange and Maureen sits by the aluminum deer stand like Nick told her to. There’s a skinny white dog at her side. Maureen does not see Nick at first because of the angle of his approach but when the dog barks and wags its ass she stands and smiles. Nick walks over to her and she puts his face in her hands. They kiss hard, her tongue still in his mouth when she starts to cry.
The dog sits. Maureen pulls herself together.
I brought this for you, she says.
Nick looks at the dog.
To keep you company, she says. On the run.
Oh, right.
It’s from Malek’s, she says.
Malek is the dogcatcher. He shoots them after ten days and the crazies even sooner. Nick puts his hand down to the dog and she sniffs at his fingers and palms.
My grandma rescued it, Maureen says.
What I’m gone to do with a fucking dog.
Give it a name for one thing.
Is it one of those crazy fuckers, Nick says.
Why would that trouble you.
I don’t need no more crazy.
Running like you done wrong, she says. That’s what’s crazy.
Right.
Ought not pay for your father’s sins.
That’s what you say.
Just ’cause he got Junctioned again.
And this time that fag judge will stick me somewhere too.
You don’t know that, she says. You’re not like them others.
What others.
Your father and uncle and them.
Shit, girl, he says. I’m exactly fucking like that.
Maureen turns her head violently as though she’s been slapped.
Folks say Eddy rescued you, she says after she collects herself.
Nick laughs.
That’s one way to look at it, he says.
You got a place.
We had a place.
She looks surprised and then disappointed.
I thought your uncle had a girl or something, she says. With a place.
That didn’t work out. He ain’t really the girlfriend type.
Maureen and Nick climb the wood ladder up to the elevated metal shack and the dog barks as they ascend. The door hangs on a single hinge and Nick pulls it aside with one hand and knocks down cobwebs with the other. She follows him inside. They sit on a dirty old mattress and she makes a face and sneezes. She has healed up nicely from the attack—he tells her again the details of how he settled things with those boys that had done her like that. It’s clear that he gets more from the telling than she does from being told. Then they lie back and touch each other until she feels better, but he can tell her parts are still tender.
The dog is barking like crazy down below.
How long we gone to do this, she says.
Oh, I’m almost done.
She laughs, says, I don’t mean this right now.
Nick knows what she means. He doesn’t say anything for a little while and she goes back to work on him. Then he’s finished and she kisses him fast on his mouth until he pulls away. He closes his eyes. It’s a rare moment of comfort that he’d like to stretch out for a while.
So, she says.
Fuck, he says. So what.
Can’t just hide in the woods like some hermit.
All right then.
Not with that wildfire.
Right.
Hot embers every-fucking-where.
I know, he says. I seen them.
My daddy says it’s like Dark Days.
Shit, he says. That was a long time ago.
The hills are burning.
It’s a bad world, he says. I’ve told you that.
That’s what I’m saying.
I mean, crossing the street can be dangerous.
Whatever, she says. Got half a mind to bring Westy next time.
Nick throws her a look and she knows she has crossed a line. He pushes her off his lap and stands and fixes his pants and belt.
That’s a fucked-up thing to say, he says. Take it back.
I take it back, she says. I truly do.
She reaches up and gets hold of Nick’s hips. I said I didn’t mean it, she says. Please, Nick.
You can’t even play like that, he says. Or we’re through.
Don’t ever say we’re through. And she cries. It seems to Nick like she is always crying about one thing or another. She stands up, too, and he gets her to calm down a little bit, but she is shaking now like some kid. She snaps her pink bra and tugs her T-shirt down over it.
Jesus fucking Christ, he thinks. Maybe my uncle is right about females. Come on now, Nick says. Stop it.
I’m sorry.
Don’t be sorry, he says. You just can’t do like you said.
I know.
This here is some shit, he says. Some real shit.
I know it.
All right then.
But the damage is already done. Nick sees trust as a length of firewood and when Maureen threatened to bring the local police, well, it was like she chopped off a piece of it with an axe. She doesn’t say anything else and they hold each other for a while, but he has to get back so that his uncle doesn’t get suspicious. There is a cow behind an electric fence switching its coarse black tail at fat black flies. He watches the bovine over the top of Maureen’s head until she speaks.
Well, she says. Maybe I can run with you.
Nick laughs, can picture how th
at would sit with his uncle. He rests his chin on her scalp and softly exhales at the flakes of dead skin in the dark roots of Maureen’s dyed-blond hair where today she has parted it straight down the middle. Out the rectangular plastic window, in the near distance, is a cool-eyed timber wolf already with its thick winter pelage. Gray brown and stiff-legged and tall; the word regal comes to mind. It’s looking back and forth between the cow and the barking dog with its ears erect and forward, and Nick runs his fingers along the scabs on Maureen’s arm.
______
Uncle Eddy boils river water in a metal can that is balanced on some rocks over an open fire. He sits on his haunches and watches it start to boil. He pokes at the flames with a stick. There is a frying pan off to the side so he can cook up the half-dozen eggs they stole from Len Boulanger’s henhouse by the apple orchard. He has not looked at Nick for a long time and he will sure as shit not look at Maureen, who is next to him, wrapped in an old wool blanket. Eddy pulls the sleeve of his flannel shirt down a little so it covers his hand, takes the metal can from over the fire, and rations out the boiling water into three chipped cups. He rests the metal can in the dirt where Nick had cleared it with some hemlock branches.
Come on now, Eddy says. Get you some. Spitting into a pile of saw-logs he indicates Maureen with a backhand wave.
I won’t say much on the topic, he says. But I will say this.
Nick and Maureen look at him.
She shouldn’t fucking be here, he says.
Maureen looks at Nick and Nick looks at the fire. He kicks dirt at the fire with the steel toe of his boot, and the dog barks.
For the record, Uncle Eddy adds. Not happy about the dog, either. But at least we could eat the mutt.
He doesn’t look up when he says it. Then he puts his cup to his mouth and rises and blows a little and takes a sip and closes his eyes while standing still. Nick gets up, too, and walks over to get his and Maureen’s drinks.
Maureen pulls her sleeves down and holds hers like that and she closes her eyes and the steam floats up into her face. Nick stands next to where she’s sitting and puts his hand in her hair.
Uncle Eddy looks at her and then he looks at Nick. This ain’t no life for a pretty little thing, he says. That’s all I got to say on the matter. Then he turns to fixing the eggs. Well, that and also she might’ve been followed, he says. He looks straight at Nick when he says it. Which I warned you about.
He puts the pan over the pit, resting on the same two rocks he used before and after a minute he spits into it. When his saliva sizzles and snaps away he cracks the eggs two at a time into the pan and chucks the shells over his shoulder. He turns them with a stick and puts them over the flames until they thicken just enough and pop yellow and white. He lifts the pan out and puts it in the dirt to cool—the damn dog sniffing at his legs the whole time. Uncle Eddy, Nick, and Maureen sit together and rest atop a carpet of leaves under a blue-lavender sky. They eat with their fingers and the dog whines and yips at Maureen.
Then it’s as though somebody turned out the lights.
Eddy looks up.
Fuck me, he says. We’re deep in it now.
Nick follows his uncle’s upward gaze and Maureen does the same.
With tiny dappled shadows on their faces, they can see that the sun is being blocked by black ashes, falling from heaven like the delicate feathers of a thousand scattershot birds.
STORM CHASER
I pressed plates at Cedar Junction for fifty cents an hour. It could’ve been worse and I didn’t complain much. There were blacks and Puerto Ricans who hated me. I hated them, too. I threw hands enough to get some respect but not so much to cause me any real trouble. Dope smoking was forbidden although easy to do and that’s what got me through. Plus my girl would visit my dreams now and then. I still call her that, even though I know it’s not true anymore. Cassie couldn’t wait for me and I don’t blame her one single bit. She was a dancer when I met her and we’d hit it off right away. It was a place in South Hadley called Anthony’s and I did a million deals there—mostly small-time stuff which was my bread and butter. I wasn’t greedy but I had a certain territory to protect. Sometimes things got rough and I usually came out all right. Cassie worried but you know how it is when you’re on top of the world; nobody can tell you anything. Then somebody dropped dime on me and my cousin Mick swore it was Cassie but I refused to believe it. Upon my release, I drove by her trailer against my better judgment. There was a boy playing in the yard, he looked nothing like me and that hurt like hell. That’s when it hit me what those years in the Junction could take from a bad man, had taken from this one.
The boys are on the beach blowing up GI Joes with firecrackers. They use seashells and bottle caps to hide the miniature bombs. I drink Jack Daniel’s and watch from the porch. A hurricane is coming, and fishing boats and lobster traps are already washing up on the shore. Seagulls dart and nervously flick themselves at the rickety old wood-rigs named Shirley and Abigail. Then the thin German swimmer from next door cuts a razor-straight and smooth-stroked swath to No Name Island, past catamarans upended and dinghies and Timothy Donovan’s latest Boston Whaler.
My father bangs on the upstairs window with his fat hand. He’s telling me to call the boys, to get them into the house to safety. I ignore him. I always ignore him and have since I was a kid. I know they’ll be all right. They’re always all right. No matter what terrible shit we do to them. I finish the bottle and stand the dead soldier on the rail.
Then I burn about half a joint down to a nub.
My father is behind me now; I can feel his angry breath on my neck. With the folded-up sports section of the Boston Globe he fans the air around my head, making a real production out of it, letting me know that he doesn’t approve of the marijuana as well as most of the other things I do. But I stopped seeking his approval a long time ago.
He coughs and spits.
That’s some real fucking weather out there, he says.
My court-appointed therapist calls that keeping the lines of communication open. Too little, too late as far as I’m concerned. My father and I haven’t had an actual conversation in a decade.
I’m going for a walk, I say.
He dry coughs into the inside of his elbow.
I descend the spiral metal stairs at the end of the porch and cross the yard to the cement wall that will soon fight the rising tide. Johnny Cash is coming hard from Paul Calupetro’s condo and Paul salutes me with what I would guess to be his sixteenth highball as he and his wife of forty years dance like young honeymooners on their new deck that’s about to be decimated by a cyclone named after a famous whore. There’s a strange sense of urgency that comes over a coastal town when a big storm is brewing, as though everybody is trying to compress their pathetic lives into the span of a few hours.
Super Cop is making the rounds on foot, busting balls, trying to get people indoors. He’s got a bullhorn and a long flashlight. He sees me and so I cross the street because a run-in with him is the last thing I need—that fucking guy has been arresting me for years.
The tough young dudes at the pier smoke long Kools from Cumberland Farms and flex sunny muscles for a polished blond girl from the Bath and Tennis who sips diet soda through a straw and giggles. She’s beautifully oblivious to the danger that looms. Beneath them in the shadows a brackish and blackening tide slurps and slaps hungrily at the barnacled and tar-stained posts that strain against the weight of time. The high whine of an outboard motor and the sharp smell of gasoline cut across the cove and disappear blue past Cunt Cave and then around the point. The haunted house is leaning north and east there, one-dimensional, featureless against the low-hanging fog, a missing piece in a too-complicated jigsaw puzzle. Slow-tracing the horizon, a tanker slogs toward Beantown, hauling cars or sugarcane, a sooty plume dangling in its wake.
I round the corner at the old Amoco sign that swings noisily from a chain, past the commune and the Crab Pool. I catch my breath on a rocky edifice and Super Cop t
aps me on the shoulder, which startles me.
Hey, Storm Chaser, he says. What’s it doing.
The nickname catches me off guard. I haven’t been called that in a while.
Fuck me, I say. You shouldn’t sneak up on people.
Super Cop laughs. His actual name is Brady Fillmore.
Brady and I came up together and were pretty tight until around junior high, when he started going pretty fast in one direction and I had already gone too far in the other. In seventh grade we’d skipped school, broken into my father’s liquor cabinet, and spent the day drinking vodka with orange juice in front of the oversized, fake-wood-framed television. There was a show on that afternoon about a man who lived in his van and followed hurricanes up and down the East Coast—measuring wind speed and rainfall, keeping notes, taking pictures and videos for the sake of posterity. He referred to himself as an amateur storm chaser.
Even in our inebriated condition, we were intrigued. We watched the entire show.
That’s what I’m going to call you from now on, Brady had said to me when it ended.
What’s that.
Storm Chaser.
Fuck you say.
The way he positioned it was that instead of running away from storms, which is what most sensible people do, this guy on television would run toward them. It was all in the name of research, but it seemed he was innately drawn to trouble. Going against all human instincts. In my case, he noted, there seemed to be a similar need to thrust myself into the middle of shit.
Minus the scientific purpose and humanitarian motives, of course.
Earth to Sean, Super Cop says in an attempt to return me to the here and now.
I was just thinking on the good old days.
I suggest you find a safer place to do that, he says. This one is a real bitch. Then his walkie-talkie cackles as he gets called away to break up a domestic dispute. It sounds like the address of Paul Calupetro’s condo, and I picture his wife of forty years wielding a kitchen knife. I imagine Paul throwing a metal chair through a window. Domestic discord at its finest.