Kickdown

by Rebecca Clarren

  “What?”

  “How you push people away.”

  “I do?” She considers the space between them. “I never thought of that.”

  “Look, Dunbar. I don’t need to make out with you, but you got to keep hanging out with me. I can’t play another hand of canasta with my mom.”

  “That’s a compliment?”

  He reloads the pipe. “We can prove Mill wrong.”

  “Mill?”

  “The philosopher? John Stuart Mill. Heard of him, miss smarty-pants? He said that the highest good in life is what produces the most pleasure.”

  “Philosophy is crap.” Jackie waves away the pipe when Tim offers it to her.

  “Like you studied philosophy,” he says.

  “Well no. Do you have any snacks?”

  “See. The pursuit of pleasure,” he says.

  Jackie rolls her eyes but she also laughs, her body relaxed, her ribs less hindered. The night creeps in close and the hard edges of Tim’s face dissolve. She shuts off the radio and there is the creek, the cicadas, her own pounding heartbeat.

  The next morning, Jackie practically dances into Susan’s room. The memory of fishing the river and of the afternoon that became the night simmers under her skin. She’s definitely healing. She can be useful again. She throws open the curtains. Let there be light. Let us be happy. She sends beams of love toward the thin width of Susan’s back, huddled under the covers.

  “It’s cold in here. Scoot over, Chicken.” Jackie straddles the old sweet dog and slides between him and her sister.

  Wearing a sweatshirt and long johns, Susan adjusts, just slightly, so that the Z of her legs and shoulders presses up against her sister.

  “It’s so quiet when you’re not here,” says Susan to the wall.

  “I got home late last night. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  It’s quiet for a while and Jackie settles in closer to her sister.

  “I had a dream we were fishing in Stark’s pond,” says Susan at last. “Do you remember that place?”

  The summer before their mom died, when Jackie was seven and Susan was twelve, they spent the occasional afternoon up there, freed from chores. They rarely caught anything, but they’d swim and play cards and read. They’d complain about how boring it was to live out of town. They wanted to go to the public pool and hang around the baseball field. Now, she sees, it was perfect.

  “What was that game you always made us play?” Jackie asks. “You had to pick a number, and then you’d count through all those lists to see if we’d live in an apartment or mansion or something?”

  “MASH. I haven’t thought about that in forever,” says Susan. “You will live in Durango, marry a basketball player, have nine kids, and wear a green wedding dress. We loved that game.”

  “You loved it. I just wanted to hang out with you.”

  “Who else was I going to hang out with?”

  “I’m sorry I was away yesterday.”

  “You were with Tim the Landman? He talks like a used car salesman.”

  Jackie stiffens. Susan is more like their dad than Jackie ever gives her credit.

  “So he wants to be liked. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Are you sure he doesn’t just want you to sign that gas contract?”

  Jackie rolls away from her sister and onto her back. She stares up at the water spot on the ceiling, another thing that needs fixing.

  “He doesn’t need to convince me. I want to sign. I keep telling you, I don’t see another option.”

  Susan stares at the quilt.

  “There’s got to be another way. Dad thought so.”

  “Look at every other rancher on Dry Hollow Road. They’ve all leased their mineral rights.”

  “I’ll get a job.”

  “Oh really.”

  “I could wait tables. I’m smart. I can do lots of things.”

  “Honey, you’ve been out of it for weeks. You almost never take your meds. I don’t see it.”

  “Stop calling me honey.”

  “No amount of work is going to get us as much as that gas deal. There’s nothing around here that comes anywhere close.”

  Susan sits up in the bed and throws off the covers. She pats the pillow and Chicken comes to her side, the two of them together on the edge of the bed.

  “You’re wrong, you know,” says Susan, petting Chicken, not looking at Jackie. “Money and drugs don’t solve things, not for the long term. You’re being naive where Tim’s concerned.”

  “I’m naive? You’re the one who doesn’t want to sign a very practical contract that will give us money that we absolutely need, for what reason again?”

  “Random terrible things happen to good people and to beautiful places; we’re all entirely vulnerable.” Susan’s voice is measured, quiet. “Life doesn’t have some big purpose set out for each of us.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting God has a plan.”

  “No, you were suggesting you have one.”

  “Well someone around here needs to.” It’s not yelling exactly but Chicken gets up, ears perked, and leans against Jackie’s legs, herding her into the wall.

  Susan looks at Jackie and slides out of bed. “I think I’ll take a walk.” Susan pulls her boots on over her long johns. “Come on, Chicken.”

  “Let me get my coat.” Jackie jumps up. “I’ll come.”

  “No, don’t. I want to be alone.”

  After Jackie stares at the wall for a few minutes, considering what she might have said differently, she walks outside and stands on the porch, her hair uncombed, her shirt untucked, everything about her slapdash and undisciplined. Don’t leave. Stop leaving me. She, Jackie, keeps trying and she keeps getting it wrong. The small black arc of Susan’s back gets smaller and smaller until it disappears behind the willows.

  16

  OUTSIDE, SUSAN WALKS AS fast as she can with no clear direction, glad to have Chicken beside her.

  You’ve been out of it for weeks.

  Jackie doesn’t know everything. Her little sister. Arrived on her doorstep in Wyoming unannounced, two days after she didn’t get into medical school. Stayed in bed crying and smoking Marlboro Lights. Susan took her out for drinks and made her dinner and did her laundry, and eventually she got Jackie laughing. Got her convinced to reapply and she did, and look at her now. Not that she ever said thank you. She didn’t even strip the bed. You didn’t strip your sheets, she imagines saying. Jackie’d probably laugh. Laugh at her.

  After her first miscarriage, she had called home, snot-nosed and sad. Dad had spent less than one minute saying he was sorry before asking about the weather up there, the early snow, telling her to make sure she didn’t run the heat too high. Jackie had sent a letter: more than 50 percent of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. It’s normal, she’d written. It’s a good sign you could get pregnant at all. When Susan never responded, Jackie called wanting to know why she was being ignored.

  The watch on her wrist shines in the daylight. The band is too large, a man’s band that she will never replace. Unlike what she had told Jackie, their dad hadn’t actually given it to Susan. She took it from his nightstand while he was comatose. If she wore his watch, she had told herself, he would wake up and ask for it. Of course the jinx failed. But she kept wearing it, hoping it might give her the feeling of being the one he talked about to the neighbors, the one he noticed.

  At Divide Creek, sunlight bends around the ocher boulders and infuses the dry air with weight. Jackie would never sit by the creek and just pay attention. She’d need to skip rocks, to try and get three skips and then have the rock hit the bank. Someone please explain how that’s not crazy. The creek slides down from the mountains, silver and lush, and she can almost hear her dad say Look at it long enough, it’ll be enough. She stares hard at the sky and the water and shoves them into the hurt. Chicken brings her a stick and licks her face, noses his snout into her side until she laughs. “All right, you. I get it.” She rubs his ears. “Bring me
that stick.” He does, his tail scribbling odes of joy into the air. It is only when she tosses the stick into the creek that she sees.

  The water is wrong. It’s like Sprite is coming down from Mount Baldy. Bubbles for as far as she can see, up and down. She looks again. She’s never seen anything like it.

  17

  RAY TAKES A POWDERED donut from the bag and shoves it into his mouth. The fact that there are still things in this country so good and perfect that cost fifty cents is a goddamn miracle. Spring has spread itself throughout the valley and the sagebrush smells strong. The mud makes more work and makes all of it more a mess, but that seems right for a world set on making itself brand new. Up top on the mesa, the rivers will be breaking open; the aspen will be green.

  He pushes open the Dunbars’ door without knocking; it’s gotten to be like that between them. In two months, he’ll be a deputy again, which is good, it’s something his family can depend on; it’s something he can do well again if he can keep himself straight. But he will miss the wind outside, and the heat of the cows in the morning and the feeling he gets from being around the Dunbars.

  Jackie’s at the kitchen table, a thick medical book in front of her; she hardly looks up when he comes in.

  “I didn’t know what you gals liked, so I got one of everything.” Ray clears his throat and sets the white paper bag near her book.

  “Thought I’d clear out that dead skunk in the pipe first thing. And I want to prep handline today. Sue ready to get to it?”

  “She’s mad at me.” Jackie shuts the book and taps her finger against it. “Ray, can I ask your opinion about something?”

  Ray shifts his feet. He always feels a little nervous around Jackie, like every day he has to prove himself over again. That someone as smart as Jackie Dunbar has expectation for him is not unflattering—it makes him want to rise to all occasions, to be better than he is—but on the edge of that is a deep fear that he doesn’t have what it takes. It’s easier with Sue.

  “Shoot,” he says.

  “Do you think life just happens to a person? I mean, don’t you think it’s totally possible to improve your life?”

  “I think it’s good to try. It’s good to help other people out. But some days the wind blows the right way. Some days it doesn’t.”

  “Sure, but you think we have the capacity to change, right? I mean, isn’t that inherent to human nature?”

  “I don’t know, Jackie.” He counts his dead silently to himself. Marcus Wilson. The Iraqi kid driving toward the check point. The woman with the bag of groceries. The little girl on the wrong side of a tank.

  Ray takes another powdered donut from the bag and shoves it into his mouth. He chews for a long time, gets some water from the sink. What he believes isn’t something he knows how to explain, especially not to someone who has never been married or gone to war. He doesn’t know how to say that getting older is about setting down the hope that everything works out if you just try hard enough.

  “You ever read your horoscope?” he says, finally.

  “You don’t believe in that stuff.”

  “I read it in the paper sometimes; honestly, I read it a lot.”

  “You have to know some stoned kid fresh out of journalism school writes those.”

  “I never thought about who writes them.” Ray shrugs, the color rising in his face. “Don’t you ever want to feel like you’re not in charge of everything?”

  Jackie stares at him for a second before her face softens.

  “All the time.”

  She smiles and Ray has the feeling that he’s passed some sort of test and he nods, ready at last to get outside, when Susan runs into the kitchen, her hair flying, her cheeks red like they’ve been slapped. “The creek is bubbling.” Susan’s words are full of air, as she gasps for breath.

  Ray and Jackie look at each other.

  “Doesn’t the creek bubble sometimes in the spring?” Ray asks Jackie. “From the melt?”

  “It’s not the melt,” says Susan. “There were dead frogs. And dead fish swirling in the eddy. Ray, you’ve got to come. Please, I know something is wrong.”

  “Don’t leave me out of this,” says Jackie. “I’m coming too.”

  When they get to the creek, the bubbles don’t stop coming. Just as Sue said, there’s a dead frog with a balloon belly, white, like the end of a fingernail. The creek has never done this, not since Ray can remember. Both Sue and Jackie stand at the bank, far apart from one another.

  “I’ll be right back,” he says and jumps in the truck.

  He returns with a two-liter Diet Coke bottle he’d fished out of the recycling. He cuts the top third off the bottle and discards the rest. He wades into the creek with the homemade funnel and some matches. With the wide part of the funnel on the water, he lights a match and holds it at the mouth of the bottle. The flame shoots straight up. Ray’s hands start to shake. He swears. He starts to sweat, his forehead creased and shiny. He feels like he is drowning though he’s only thigh-deep. Then, somehow, he manages to light another match. This one flares up past his head. As quick as it lights, it dies.

  18

  LATER THAT DAY, AFTER they have left messages for the EPA and the DNR and the Fish and Wildlife people and the county commissioners, after Susan can’t wait another minute for someone to call them back, she walks the ditch. The midday sun is high in the sky and heavy with heat. Susan finds that the noise in her brain is quiet for the first time in weeks. She passes rusted barrels and screens and irrigation wheels and truck wheels and dented pipes, all the old equipment piled up for parts. She crosses the upper field, through the gate onto Johnson’s, until she finds what she came for.

  Behind a string of orange and yellow flags that rope off a sump is a row of well heads and a couple tanks the size of outhouses. A former section of alfalfa, it’s been scraped to dirt as if with a giant spatula. The green water has an oil-slick shine. The wells hiss and clang. The windless day gives no relief.

  In front of the army-beige tanks is a sign. She reads it twice. Something hollow inside her fills with air. An old feeling, one she used to listen to. She needs a pen. Real reporters always carry a pen.

  “What’s doin, Sue?”

  She spins to see Ray walking toward her, wind-burned and brown. In the weeks since he’s been working cattle, his face has lost its puffiness, his hair has grown out; he looks less like a deputy, more like the boy he’d been. She waves, her hand is spastic. She is too excited, too glad to see him. She pins her arms to her sides.

  “I was seeding alfalfa in the upper field and saw you leave the gate open; you all right?” He’s been tracking her. Worried she’s fragile as a leaf.

  “I had to see all this.” She nods at the mess of well heads.

  “Place is the same, you know,” he says, nodding beyond the well pad at Grass Mesa and the rough-cut mountains. From the fence line to the hills had been Stark land for all their growing up. “Look past all that and it’s still real pretty.”

  Unthinking, she touches the wool of his work shirt and they stand there hinged to one another, quiet in their own lost thoughts.

  Where does one story end and another start? Ray’s dad sold this field to Johnson, the day after Ray’s grandpa died, without asking Ray his opinion in the matter. Ray, out to spite his pacifist father, joined the guard the next week. And then Johnson leased the mineral rights, and now twelve wells puncture the fields where Ray once rode horses into the wind.

  Now there is a sign that Susan can’t stop reading.

  “You have any pen and paper?”

  Ray digs a pencil and a receipt out of his jacket.

  Her handwriting is bad. Shaky. She keeps writing.

  Danger! Extremely Flammable. Long-term repeated exposure may cause cancer, blood and nervous system damage. Contains benzene. Overexposure may cause eye, skin, or respiratory irritation or damage, and may cause headaches, dizziness, or other adverse nervous system effects or damage, including death.

 
; “My arms are burning.” Her T-shirt is thin. Her skin pale. “Ray, are your arms burning?”

  Inside the house, she heads straight for the bathroom.

  Including death. All the people in town who’ve died from cancer: Shorty’s sister Trish who worked at Why Not Hair, Pastor Charlie, Millie Ramirez, Lydia Allen’s mama, and then her daddy three months later, Kim Mobaldi, Sharon Haire, Liz Amos, Uncle Ellis, Dad.

  The water is warm and she stands in the shower for a long time. Dad needed help with his bath at the end. His skin sagged. It was ashy and dry, like the skin of an old person. Make it stop, Susie honey. Give me all of them pills. He had said this as she drew the curtain around the tub. Needing help was not in his genetic code.

  Dad, you’ve got a fever. You’re just loopy from the pain. You don’t mean that.

  Please.

  There are so many things she would do different in life, but that part with him at the end—someone else would’ve done better. The water pours over her face, her arms. She stares at the showerhead and suddenly it strikes her: this is creek water. The tanks aren’t at all far from the creek. Her skin starts to itch. She looks for bubbles but the flow’s too strong. She shuts the shower off, steps out with shampoo still in her hair. She scratches until red welts form across her arms, her belly, her thighs. The tile floor is not cold enough to calm her down.

  When Jackie calls her name from the hall, when she opens the door and finds Susan wrapped in a towel, hair wet, sitting on the floor, she doesn’t ask what’s wrong but she sits down and puts her arm around her, Susan’s wet hair getting her shirt wet.

  “Everything’s going to be fine, honey.”

  “But it’s not.” Susan pats the wet spot on Jackie’s shoulder with her towel. “The water isn’t safe.”

  “Let’s try not to be too dramatic. We’ve called the state and the feds. We’re going to get this tested. We’ll find out.”

  Again, the hollow feeling in Susan’s gut fills with air, as if it were being blown open by rusted levers and pulleys. This is the feeling of a good lead. You’re Silt’s own Erin Brockovich. Dad said that once. She sits up straight. Tucks her hair behind her ears. If she does some shoe-leather reporting, if the Sentinel runs it, if she can start stringing for them again, then maybe, just maybe, everything can be different.