Not for the first time Jim feels a vast distance from his daughter’s life. It is so unmistakably hers. She destroys it and shapes it as she wishes—her mind busy with decisions he cannot begin to understand—and what he says does not matter, not at all.
And so, when he welcomes his daughter inside, he can only give her a tight-mouthed smile that is like an accusation.
Jim cannot sleep, nor can he stay awake, so he lies in bed, lost somewhere in the black canyon of the night, a place where his daughter’s face emerges from the shadows to smile at him, and then to hiss. Muddled voices babble in his head and he more than once mistakes the sound of his own heart as a threat—as the ragged report of an assault rifle, as enemy troops stampeding toward him—and he is seized by a terrible panic where the air feels too warm and thick to breathe, like a sick green jungle fog that fills up his lungs and then his skull.
Near dawn he rolls to the edge of his bed and dangles his legs over the side. The stump of his left leg burns, as it always does in the morning, when he sits upright and the blood wants to go where it cannot. He pulls on the flesh-colored shaft that fits his prosthesis onto his leg. He knocks on it and it makes a hollow noise.
He brews some coffee and eats a banana and goes to the living room and clicks on the television and watches CNN. When it begins to loop through the same footage of Iraqi insurgents firing a rocket launcher at a Marine convoy, he gets up and walks down the hall to the closed door behind which she and the boy sleep.
He opens the door and a wedge of light falls into the room, onto the bed. She is lying on her side, on top of the covers, her back to him, with one arm thrown over the boy. She must hear him because she rolls over. He can see her bad eye, the white gleam of it, surrounded by purple tissue, watching him.
“Can’t sleep?” he says.
“You know what it’s like when you’re totally exhausted,” she says, “but your mind keeps going around and around in circles?”
“I know what that’s like,” he says. “But you don’t need to think about any of that right now. Just rest.”
He stands on the porch and watches the horizon redden. The redness creeps higher into the black bowl of the sky, taking it over. And then the sun arrives and throws light and shadows across the meadow. With its arrival, the air instantly warms, though not enough to melt the coldness in his stomach.
A low cackling draws his attention skyward, where he spots a flock of geese passing overhead. Their spearhead formation, headed south, seems to suggest that change is possible and necessary.
So he clomps down the porch and moves along the right fork of the gravel path to where she parked her car. He lays his hand on the hood as if over a slain animal before popping it open. He removes a jackknife from his pocket and thumbs open the blade. It gleams, catching the light. He leans over and locates each spark-plug cable where it enters the engine block at the piston site—and then he slices through them with the same precision as when he slices through a band of cartilage, a knot of ligaments.
Her cell phone has been going off all morning. She has her ringer set to play some sad country song he recognizes from the radio. Sometimes she ignores it and sometimes she answers it, and when she answers it she usually ends the conversation by snapping shut the phone and looking around, as if hunting for a cradle to slam it down on.
They are sitting at the kitchen table, drinking mugs of coffee, his third, her second, while the boy plays in some far corner of the house. The heavy silence between them makes his mouth go dry, so he brings the mug to his lips and drinks. The heat of it, its bitter blackness, burns down his throat, a welcome distraction.
Anne has both hands around her mug, as if she is cold and trying to steal what heat from it she can. The cell phone sits between them, like a big bullet, squared at one end and rounded at the other, gleaming silver.
It comes to life. She is bringing the coffee to her mouth when the noise of the ringer startles her. Coffee spills and races down her wrist. She brings the mug to the table in a hurry and shakes the heat off her hand, hissing through her teeth. She looks at Jim and Jim looks at her. She closes her eyes when she snatches up the phone and brings it to her ear.
Dwayne does most of the talking. Jim cannot hear what he is saying, but he can hear the changes in pitch and volume, the whines that interrupt the growls.
“All right,” his daughter eventually says. A pause, and then: “I said all right, Dwayne, all right?” She snaps shut the phone and bangs it softly against her forehead a few times.
“Everything okay?”
“Yes.” With the back of her hand she roughs a tear from her eye. “No.”
“Maybe I should talk to him.”
“No. Not on your life.” She holds the phone away from him as if he planned to grab it from her. “I can take care of myself.”
“You and I both know that’s not true.”
Again her phone chirps to life. Before she can answer it Jim stands and walks to where his daughter sits and grabs her wrist and squeezes it until she releases the phone into his other hand.
“Don’t answer it,” she says. “Please, please, please don’t answer it.”
He walks from the kitchen, through the living room, the front door—in his slow clomping way—out onto the porch. The phone continues to ring and fill up the morning with its shrill song. He adjusts the weight of it in his hand and in a windmill motion pitches it across a good thirty yards of meadow to where it strikes a tree and shatters into many silvery pieces.
His daughter screams no and grabs at his arm and he turns and sets his gaze on her with such force that she lets him go and begins to cry freely. “I need to get out of here,” she says and brings her hands to her face. “I need to go home.”
He is surprised by the severity of his voice when he says, “This is home.” He points to the porch for emphasis. “This is home.”
Thirty minutes later Jim is sitting on the couch and the boy is sprawled out on the floor, coloring in his coloring book. The fire is going, a fresh log recently set over the flames hissing and shuddering as the water inside it boils out.
The Today Show is on and the camera is trained on an anthropologist with a peppery beard who wears his glasses perched at the end of his nose. His new book has just come out and he is talking about it, about men and the fine line that separates them from beasts. One of his chapters is about New York in the late 1980s. He refers to this time as “The Wilding” and he tells Katie in a solemn voice about the mobs of men who haunted Central Park, their dark shapes scarcely glimpsed between the trees like wolves ranging for food. He talks about the female jogger who was attacked and raped, whose skull was crushed in.
Jim lowers the volume when his daughter emerges from her bedroom, her duffel bag in hand. She crouches next to the boy and pets his head before kissing the top of it. “Mommy is going to go now,” she says. “She’ll miss you.”
The boy does not stop coloring. If anything his crayon moves faster, disregarding the lines on the page, making red everywhere.
Anne stands then and runs her hand through her hair, pulling it back to study Jim with her bruised face fully revealed. The swelling has gone down and the bruises at first glance appear black, but have actually taken on the deeper, greener color of a horsefly. “If things aren’t okay, I’ll come back. Okay?”
Jim doesn’t nod or say okay, as she might read that as some kind of approval. He only lets his eyebrows rise a little on his forehead to acknowledge he heard her.
And so she leaves them—only to return a few minutes later, her footsteps pounding roughly on the porch before the door swings open. She rushes through it. “My goddamn car won’t start.” She throws down her duffel with a thump and holds out her hands, palms up. “It won’t even make a goddamn noise.”
“Huh,” Jim says.
“It’s like it’s completely dead. It won’t even make a sound.”
“Weird.”
“Well. Are you just going to sit there? Or ar
e you going to give me a jump?”
He holds out his hand and says, “Help an old man up.”
Outside the sky is a wash of pale blue with a few cirrus clouds interrupting it, the clouds so thin and white, like fish bones.
His truck is parked beside her car, each of their hoods propped open with cables running between them and clipped onto their batteries. He has put on a good show for her, cranking the key, staring with concentration at the engine.
He is leaning under the hood when she creeps up next to him and tucks her hair behind her ears so she can see what he sees. “Any ideas?”
With his thumbnail he scrapes some black crud off the carburetor. “Far as I can tell everything looks all right.”
She makes a fist and brings it down on the battery. “I wonder what’s wrong with the stupid thing.”
“It’s an old car. It was an old car when you bought it.”
“I guess.” She blows a sigh out of her nose. “This is the last thing I need.”
“We’ll take it into the shop tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? Today.”
He unclips the cables from the battery. “Today I’m going to take you fishing.”
She retreats from him. “Dad. No. I need to get back to Dwayne.”
“The hell you do. You’re staying right here. And we’re all going fishing. You and me and the boy.”
“His name is Cody.”
“I know what his name is.”
Every week Jim excises the bones from animals and tosses them into a twenty-gallon garbage can. And every week he drags the garbage can from its corner of the taxidermy studio and straps it to his Gator—a glorified golf cart with six wheels and a diesel engine—and drives the hundred yards into the woods to the bone pile.
There are thirty years of bones in the bone pile. Skulls of all sizes, of elk and deer and bear and dogs and cats and birds, all of them with shadowy eye sockets and hairline fissures zigzagging along them. Crows have picked apart the spines into individual vertebrae, hollow white cups the rain runs through. Chipmunks scurry among the slatted rib cages. And there are pelvises, broken antlers, thighbones gnawed in half by coyotes hungry for the marrow. The pile reaches ten feet high in its center and stretches thirty feet wide.
This is what they drive by, when they huddle together in the Gator, on their way to the river, the Deschutes River, which rushes and purls through the eastern edge of his property. His daughter sits beside him and the boy sits behind them, in the bed of the Gator, among the poles, the cooler and thermos and tackle box. They follow a dirt road, rutted and washed out from so many years of snowmelt. They rattle across dry creek bottoms where the hoarfrost remains in the shadows and hollows. Pines loom all around them, and every now and then they duck their heads to dodge a low-hanging branch, as they twist deeper and deeper into the forest and finally arrive at the river.
Some twenty feet wide, the river here crashes into a basalt wall and elbows off at a forty-degree angle. They park at the crook of the elbow. The roar of the water fills up the forest and becomes the only sound after Jim kills the engine and they step from the Gator and stand on the bank and watch the river hurry over boulders. The force of its passage makes the water white and makes the air misty with tiny droplets that swim in the streams of sunlight pouring through the branches of the trees around them.
Jim hands the boy a pole and the boy takes it and holds it out before him and slashes at the air, as if brandishing a sword. The weights loop around the pole, tangling the leader. The boy looks at Jim with a frightened expression as if he expects a knuckled fist to come down on him.
But Jim only shakes his head and says, “You know better than that.” He takes back the pole and goes to work untangling the monofilament. “When’s the last time you been fishing?”
Anne answers for him: “Whenever it was you took him last.”
It’s been nearly a year. Since she moved in with Dwayne their visits have been so short, so infrequent, they have little time for anything but a meal, a lazy conversation on the porch, before night falls and morning comes and they pack up their toothbrushes and dirty laundry and follow the Santiam Pass back the way they came.
Jim looks at his daughter directly when he says, “A boy ought to go fishing.”
Now the pole is ready and he leads the boy to the river where glacial till lines the bank and makes a chewing sound beneath their boots. He props himself against a log and the boy stands next to him, listening as Jim explains in a fatherly voice the bright-colored rooster-tail spinner, how the current will pull it and make it twirl, how the fish will hurry toward it like moths to flame. He further explains that fall is one of the best times for fishing, as the trout are aggressively trying to fatten up for the winter. Then he asks the boy, if he were a fish, where would he hide—and the boy studies the river a moment before pointing to a fallen pine that interrupts the current. Here the water is still and dark and quiet, separate from the nearby violence of whitewater, and maybe the boy sees in it something that reminds him of the place beneath his bed, the back of his closet.
Jim wraps his arms around the boy and knits together their fingers so that when they cast they cast as one—and the line sizzles—and the lure travels in a long arc before entering the river with a plunk, just above where the water eddies, where the current will take it and spin it.
“Now I’m going to let go and let you take it. If you feel a little tug, give a little tug. And if you feel big pull, hold on tight.”
It’s cold here, next to the river. The spray dampens their skin and their hair. They pull on wool caps and drink hot cocoa from the thermos. They stamp their feet and bring their hands to their mouths and blow into the cup of them, thawing them. Jim can particularly feel the cold in his stump, where the blood wants to go. There is an itching, needling sensation there, as if several dozen mosquitoes have suckered onto him at once.
His daughter has hiked a short distance upriver to fish. She gives a shout now, barely heard over the noise of the rapids. She has a strike. Her feet are spread apart and her pole is bent into a parabola. She alternates between pulling back and lowering her pole, like Jim taught her to, reeling immediately after lowering the pole, when the fish has moved toward the sudden slackness of the line.
Jim hurries, as best he can, along the riverbank to help his daughter net the fish. It’s a Dolly Varden, a seventeen-, maybe nineteen-incher. Pulled from the dark water its belly is as pale as a tuber pulled from the black soil of a garden.
“That’s a wall-hanger all right,” Jim says and grips the fish—the cold slippery muscle of it—and rips the hook from its mouth. The fish flaps violently in his hand. He takes out his knife and clubs it on the back of the head, once, and then again. Blood comes out of its eyes. Its body goes still. He hands it to his daughter. “That’s definitely a wall-hanger.”
In her hand the fish comes alive again, with a twitch of its fins, a spasm of its tail. Water droplets fly off it and catch the light before returning to the river or dampening her shirt. Then it is done.
And something happens. Jim is filled with a sense of well-being he doesn’t want to let go of—and she must feel it too. Because she’s smiling at him. Smiling so broadly that she opens up the scab binding her bottom lip. Even as blood begins to come out of it, red trailing down her chin, she continues to smile.
Late afternoon, he stands in his taxidermy studio, alone. The fluorescent lights buzz hungrily above him. He can smell the fish, gutted earlier, puffing off his skin. And he can see a scale fused to the fabric of his sleeve. It winks at him under the light when he dismantles the Colt revolver and set its parts on the stainless-steel counter before him.
His hands look like the knuckly oak trees common in the western half of Oregon, but they move with surprising deftness, moving between the bottle of solvent, the bottle of lubricating oil, the cleaning rod and silicone cloth and bore brush, swabbing and scrubbing, preparing the gun.
All this time he whistles.
Then he reaches under the counter and his hand slides through the jugs of formaldehyde until he finds what he is looking for, pulling out a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He takes the bore of the revolver and stops up its bottom with his finger. Then he pours whiskey into it and brings the muzzle to his lips and drinks. He licks the spice off his teeth and begins to put the Colt back together again.
This is what he tells his daughter:
“Ernie Nelson—you remember Ernie?—the old guy with the beard and the palomino horses?—used to ref basketball?—he just shot an elk at the bottom of a canyon. Big sucker, so he says. Six-point. I’m going to go help him haul it out.”
He is standing in the shadows of the hallway and she is sitting on the couch with the boy in her lap, watching Jeopardy on the TV. She looks distractedly at him and then returns her attention to the screen. “I didn’t hear the phone ring,” she says.
“Well,” he says. “It rang.” Next to him hangs a hat rack, every knob the polished end of an antler. He selects a hat from it, the camouflaged hat he wears bow hunting. He runs his ponytail through the hole above the plastic snap-band when fitting the hat snugly on his head.
With her eyes still on the screen she says, “I thought we were going to watch a movie.”
“You go on and watch it without me.” He has a backpack slung around his shoulder and he adjusts its weight when he starts across the living room, to the door. “Have fun.”
“What is a gargoyle?” his daughter says at an almost scream.
Jim freezes, his hand halfway to the doorknob. “Pardon?”
On television one of the contestants rings in and says, “What is a gargoyle,” and Alex Trebek says, “That’s correct. Which puts Steven into the lead by four hundred dollars.”
At that his daughter pumps her fist in the air and the boy readjusts in her lap so that he can observe her. On his face is a look of wonder, his eyes big and soft, as if his mom is the smartest person in the world. It’s a look Jim recognizes and misses, a look absent from his daughter when she settles her gaze on him now with worried disapproval.
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