Refresh Refresh

by Benjamin Percy

  The living-room window is an orange square of light. Inside it Stephen sits in a green recliner, drinking a beer, watching Fox News. The screen flashes between Bill O’Reilly speaking forcefully into the camera and insurgents who shake their fists and throw stones at soldiers and fire rifles into the sky.

  David creeps up the porch for a better view. A few minutes pass, and a woman appears next to Stephen, her blond hair in a ponytail. She wears gray cotton shorts and a tie-dyed tank top and she spreads her feet and puts her hands on her hips in a Wonder Woman pose. This is Stacy. David knows because Stephen talks about her nearly every day, sometimes saying things like, “She’s got this peach of an ass. I just want to shove my dick in there and break it off,” and at other times saying things like, “Swear to God, she never stops nagging. I thought I was done with taking orders. But look at me, saying I’m sorry about drying shit of hers that shouldn’t get dried, getting my pubic hair all over the bathroom floor. I mean, Jesus.”

  They met a few months before his battalion was activated, and when he asked her to marry him she surprised him by saying yes. When he came back alive, she was the one surprised. Now she says something that makes Stephen stand up so forcefully the recliner nearly tips over. They yell at each other and make stabbing motions with their hands until Stephen throws his beer bottle against the wall. It explodes in a star of foam and glass that quickly loses its shape, trailing to the floor.

  From where he stands David can barely see the flattening of her lips as she says, “Fuck you,” and stamps her foot down, grinding it into the carpet as if crushing out a cigarette. Then she leaves him, disappearing down a darkened hallway. Stephen stares after her for a time before settling into the recliner again. He brings his hand to his mouth and begins to gnaw at its calluses, spitting shreds of skin onto the floor.

  A moth bangs against the window before fluttering off into the night. The noise draws Stephen from his recliner, his black silhouette filling the window. David crouches down and stays perfectly still, so close he could punch his hand through the glass and grab Stephen by the wrist.

  The next morning Stephen comes to work a paler color.

  “Something wrong?” David says after they snap their seat belts into place.

  Stephen regards him with eyes that are only partially lit. “Rough night is all. Didn’t get much sleep.” He gives a smile that appears to ache from the effort of making it happen. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “I didn’t know you did,” David says. “Smoke.”

  “What do you know about me? I’m not asking that. I’m asking if you mind.”

  “Be my guest.”

  David turns up the heat and puts the car in gear and drives through the back lot. Gravel pops beneath his tires when he crawls past the postal jeeps and school buses and orange construction vans and trucks parked there. He pulls onto the highway and clears his throat. “It’s your girl, isn’t it?”

  “The fuck do you know?” Stephen’s mouth curves into the shape of a scythe.

  “Sorry.”

  “I said it’s nothing and it’s nothing. Mind your business.” Stephen stares at him very closely, hardly moving, with a look of obvious disgust on his face. David feels a familiar panic grip him, hating to see someone seeing him that way.

  “Sorry,” David says and pulls his hat a little lower on his head. “I was just—sorry.”

  For the next hour, Stephen stares out the window while David drives, stealing glances at him. Then, all of a sudden, Stephen brings his fist down on the dashboard and says, “Bitch.”

  David darts his eyes between the road and Stephen, not knowing whether to say anything.

  “Yeah,” Stephen says, as if they have come to some sort of agreement. His face brightens. “You know what? Fuck her.”

  He playfully punches David a few times in the shoulder, saying, “Fuck her,” with every punch. The touch of his hand sends a charge through David that burns inside him and makes him say, “You know, if you ever need a place to crash, you can always crash with me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Whatever. I mean, I’ve got plenty of room.”

  “We’ll see,” Stephen says, but he sounds contented.

  In the middle of Pine, there is a cinder cone, Bald Butte, dotted with sagebrush and rabbitbrush and the occasional stunted juniper tree. A poorly paved road swirls around and around it, all the way to its summit, where teenagers park at night and tourists snap photos during the day and the city fires off fireworks on the Fourth. This morning David drives there and pulls out of the glovebox a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s.

  “Breakfast,” he says, and they each throw back a mouthful of the dark liquor. It tastes like gasoline, but it seems right to drink, as if they are celebrating something, or mourning something. They get out of the van and climb onto its roof and watch the town redden under the sun, the shadows dissolving, while they pass the bottle back and forth for half an hour. “You must be pretty bored,” David finally says. “After all you’ve been through—over there—this job must bore the hell out of you.”

  They sit there, comfortably silent for a long time, before Stephen says, “Actually, that’s not the case at all. It’s kind of familiar. The driving. Feels like that’s all I did over there. Drive. And wait. Wait for somebody to shoot at me, wait for an IED to go off, wait for my commanding officer to tell me some bullshit.” His voice has that sincere wistful quality men normally reserve for taverns and locker rooms. “Being over there, it’s just a job—with bullets, of course—but still, it’s just a bunch of sitting around, trying to figure out what’s next, what the fuck’s the point.”

  Weeks pass. Fall deepens. The birch trees go gold, and in the failing light the world seems to take on sharper angles. In early November a water main breaks. Joe comes on the CB and sends them over to help. It is one of those new ­neighborhoods where all the houses look like they came from the same box and BMWs crawl the freshly paved roads.

  When they park at the end of the block, a guy wearing a yellow polo shirt tucked into his khakis bangs open his front door and starts down the driveway. He moves with a prowling intensity that betrays his anger before he starts yelling. They can hear him from where they stand across the street as if he were right next to them. “I called two hours ago,” he says.

  He spells it out for them: a) he tried to take a shower and now he smells like somebody else’s shit; b) he started up the dishwasher and now his plates and glasses are streaked with mud; c) he just put sod in and now his front lawn is a fucking swamp.

  He is wearing boat shoes—no socks—and he brings down his right foot for emphasis. A crown of water splats up around it. “Somebody is going to have to pay for this,” he says.

  David could probably break the man over his knee if he wanted, but he presses his mouth into an apologetic frown and casts his eyes downward, toeing through the grass until he finds the cap to the water valve. He flips it open and goes to the van to retrieve the key, a long metal rod that reaches deep into the earth. He fits it into place and spins it, and with a rusty creak, the water ceases to flow.

  A truck full of Mexicans arrives. They wear jeans and orange reflective vests spotted with flecks of tar. One of them sets to work with the jackhammer while the others huddle around and watch it bite through the asphalt. Then a semi pulls up with a backhoe resting on its trailer bed. One of the Mexicans climbs into its cab, and it growls to life with a clattering of metal and diesel. It rolls down the ramp, and its shovel peels away the blacktop, the gravel, and the dirt just a few inches at a time, taking care not to strike a gas line. “It’s guesswork,” David explains to Stephen, his voice nearly lost under all the noise. “Nobody really knows what’s underneath us.”

  Once the shovel strikes metal—with a cling—the backhoe quits digging and scoops up a ten-by-ten steel brace to lower into the soggy square hole it has fashioned. This is to keep the walls from caving in on David and Stephen and the rest of the men when they climb down and
set to work with their shovels, exposing the main so they can apply a clamp over the crack.

  David digs deep with his shovel, dragging the blade through the mud, tossing it over his shoulder, enjoying the damp smells of the earth. In the cool November air his breath puffs out of him in short-lived clouds, and his sweat gives him a chill. The effort feels good, the blood burning through his body. It feels substantial, like his job is a real job.

  While they work, the polo guy paces back and forth, smoking his way through more than a few cigarettes—menthol, by the smell of them. When David and Stephen climb out of the pit for a water break, he says, “Done? I hope so. For your sake.”

  He flicks his cigarette in their direction. It arcs through the air and lands on David, on his forearm, just long enough to burn him. He brushes it away hurriedly and says, “What’s wrong with you?” his voice coming out genuinely hurt.

  “What’s wrong with your face?”

  David looks at him uncertainly for a second, and then at Stephen, who does not return his gaze, but squints across the expanse of mud at the man as if at a target.

  Then Stephen leaves them standing there and climbs into the backhoe. He keys the engine and fiddles with the levers, not so different from the levers of a tank. With a roar, the backhoe comes alive. It crushes a path across the sidewalk, the driveway, the lawn, eating up with its tread the grass and mud.

  When the man tries to intervene, waving his arms in a fury, the backhoe swings around like a scorpion, its shovel knocking him down. An accident, everyone agrees.

  The first day of deer-hunting season in the fall is an un­official holiday in Deschutes County. Stephen invites David to hunt on his father’s property, out near Sisters, twenty acres of big pines that run up against the Black Butte wilder­ness area. They set off early in the afternoon, wearing jeans and blaze orange jackets. The sky is a copper color, and the air is sharp enough to make their breath ghost from their mouths.

  The forest swallows them, whispering and snapping, before disgorging them in a clearing of fireweed and browned strawberry beds. They head toward a cluster of thick-waisted junipers that surrounds what looks like a clubhouse on stilts. Ten or so feet off the ground, it has a slanted steel roof and a camouflage paint job. This is a high seat, the penthouse of tree stands. Beneath it is a trough, baited with salt licks, rotten apples, corn.

  They climb a ladder and push through a trapdoor. Inside there are army cots, a cooler filled with Coors, a wood bin, a wood­stove, and aluminum chairs set before sliding-glass windows. On the wall is a poster of a big-breasted woman in a bikini bent over the hood of a Camaro, both the woman and the car oozing with soap suds. And next to the poster, the charred corpse of an animal is nailed to the wall. It is the size of a small child, its legs curled up against its torso and its teeth visible in a small snarl. When he was eleven or twelve, Stephen explains, he baited a steel-mesh cage with jerky and trapped a raccoon that had been getting into their garbage. He released it, but only after dousing it with gasoline and sparking a match. There was a foomp sound, and the coon took off like a comet, zigzagging through a dry field of crabgrass, setting it aflame in strange orange designs Stephen stomped out with his foot.

  When his father discovered what he had done, he nailed the coon to the wall of the high seat as a reminder. “That way maybe you’ll think twice before you pull the trigger.” Never firing off a round out of boredom—at a jaybird, a jackrabbit, a doe—hungry to kill something, anything, as boys often are.

  “Jesus,” David says.

  Stephen breaks the silence by kicking a folding chair. “Best seat in the house,” he says. The chair faces a window that opens up into the forest. “All yours. Just keep your eyes on that game trail.” He winks. “Fish in a ­barrel.”

  They take their chairs and cradle their rifles in their laps. They don’t speak for a while, their silence deepening with the shadows in the woods. Then Stephen gets up to pull a beer from the cooler and offers one to David, who pops the tab and, after slurping at the foam that comes boiling out of it, says, “Hey, did you know a whale penis is nine feet long?”

  Stephen gives him a blank look. “I’m the one who told you that, man.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” David feels his grip tighten around his beer, the metal giving way. “Things any better with Stacy?”

  Stephen returns to his window and looks out it. “So-so.”

  “Just so-so?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” he says, keeping his voice at a low volume. “Are you still good on that offer? If I needed to, I could crash at your place?”

  “Sure.” David tries hard to control his voice. If there is too much excitement in it, he can’t tell.

  “Just in case,” Stephen says.

  “You’re always welcome. Stay as long as you like. There’s plenty of room.”

  Stephen twists the tab on his can until it snaps off. “Good to know.”

  They fall silent again. David finds it difficult to concentrate on the woods and throws a glance over his shoulder every few minutes to check on Stephen. It feels different, sitting here with him and not moving, not listening to the engine hum, not watching the world slide by. It feels good—permanent.

  Time passes and his vision blurs and the forest falls away as he imagines the two of them as young boys, dirt under their fingernails, carrying in their hands slingshots and BB guns, darting through the trees, headed toward where they heard a chipmunk chattering minutes ago. The false memory makes him feel so close to Stephen, his friend, he wants to reach out and touch him.

  He glances over his shoulder then, just in time to see Stephen snap off the safety and bring the thirty-aught-six to his shoulder. He rises from his chair, slowly, the metal complaining only a little. David follows the line of Stephen’s rifle. There, at the edge of the meadow, less than thirty yards away, a buck untangles its antlers from the forest and moves cautiously toward the trough.

  Halfway there it pauses. It swishes its tail. It raises a hoof and puts it down again. Maybe it smells them, or maybe it smells the blood in the grass. David holds his breath, anticipating the shot. When it doesn’t come, he says, “What are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t know,” Stephen says.

  David gently pushes him aside and nestles the stock against his cheek and sights the buck through the scope. Right then it raises its head and looks at him. The blood in his ears buzzes, like a wasp loose in his skull. The rifle kicks against his shoulder. The gunshot fills the world.

  The buck jerks its head around in a half-circle, as if curious where the shot came from, and then it collapses and a flock of swallows swirls from the forest, over the meadow, dappling it with shadows.

  A few minutes later, they stand over the body. When David nudges it with his boot, its hind leg quivers, then goes still. Since the gunshot, the air has gone quiet except for the rhythmic knocking of a woodpecker’s beak against some distant tree. The woods are softly colored with the gloom that comes with twilight. The hole David has blown in the deer’s side is big enough to put his hand in, and he does. Hot, moist. It reminds him, with a sick kind of pleasure, of a woman. When he withdraws his hand, gloved in blood, it steams a little. He smears its redness against his left cheek and says, “There. Now I match.”

  Stephen laughs as if he is trying not to. “I’m glad you took the shot,” he says, his smile fading. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with you.”

  Some blood oozes into David’s mouth and he spits it back out. It occurs to him then—with blood on his lips and the woods darkening all around them—that he has never been happier.

  The next Monday morning, David arrives at work fifteen minutes early and waits for Stephen on the loading dock, an elevated concrete platform with a steel ramp leading up it. Nearby, a poplar, stripped of its leaves, shakes against the wind that comes howling down from the Cascades. A rime of frost coats its bran
ches. With the sun still low in a sky full of torn clouds, the air has a gray quality that carries little warmth. David paces back and forth and stamps his feet, trying to keep the cold out of them.

  Eventually Stephen pulls up in a Chevy Cavalier with an Army National Guard sticker on its bumper. Rather than park along the chain-link fence, next to David’s truck, he kills the engine at the bottom of the ramp and hops out.

  “Hey, Stephen,” David says, and Stephen says, “Hey.” He steps onto the ramp and pauses there with David hanging over him, obscuring him with his shadow and a big breath of mist.

  “Something wrong?” David says.

  Stephen brings his hand to his mouth and chews hungrily on it. “Maybe.” He sighs deeply, and in a halting voice that seems bothered—by nervousness or excitement—explains that he has been asked to be part of a task force. He and fifteen other soldiers will work as an embedded training team to mentor the Iraqi Army.

  “What do you mean?” David says.

  “I mean I’m not working here anymore,” Stephen says. “I’m going back.” He examines his palm. Blood and saliva dampen it. He wipes it on the handrail. “Next week, I’m on active duty. I just came to say my good-byes and pick up my paycheck.” He studies David a moment and irritation creeps into his voice. “Well, aren’t you going to say anything?”

  David doesn’t know what to say, so he says, “What about Stacy?”

  “What about her?”

  “You can’t just leave her again, can you?”

  “What do you care?”

  “I don’t know.” His voice has a fine crack in it. There is a pain in his forehead. It makes him think of insects eating away at the space between his eyes. He squeezes the bridge of his nose.