American Masculine

by Shann Ray

  “I’d like to pay for you to come up,” his father said.

  “I’m a banker,” Devin replied.

  Devin balanced ledgers and paid accounts, justified things from a desk on the eighth floor of the Bank of America building in Santa Monica. Two and a half years ago his wife had left with a friend of his named Beck. She’d taken Devin’s daughter with her, cross-country to shut his mouth. He had nothing to say. He never gave what she desired. He drank more, and since they’d gone he hadn’t slept much. My father knows nothing of me, he thought.

  “I’d like to pay for the plane ticket,” his father said. Then the line went quiet again.

  He’d been calling every Sunday for some months now, so Devin was used to the pauses, how he took his time saying things, then waited for Devin to respond. And Devin had warmed some to him. But saying he’d pay for the ticket, Devin told himself, it’s not how this thing would be done.

  HIS FATHER met him at Gallatin Field near Belgrade, the Montana version of an airport: two gates, one baggage claim. When Devin deplaned, his father stood in a small ring of people at the west door up on the second floor, in among the glass and stone architecture. It was after dark. He moved toward Devin.

  “Nice to see you,” he said, and grabbed at Devin’s hand with both of his and shook it firmly. “Glad you’re safe.”

  “Yeah,” said Devin.

  They descended a cement stairwell, squares of granite embedded in the banisters. A silence set in as they made their way down. Dad will try to find something to say, thought Devin.

  “I think they let the bags in over here,” his father said, and led Devin to a small metal garage door, the rolltop kind, attached to a steel bin that slanted to the floor. A couple of men in light-blue workshirts hoisted bags. Devin lifted his two out. His father took the heavier one. “Thanks,” said Devin.

  “Truck’s out here,” his father said, and he walked into the mostly empty parking lot, off toward his beat-up Ford. The pickup was parked far out on the edge of the square, just outside a cone of amber light cast by a high steel lightpost.

  “Not too clean,” he said as he tipped the passenger seat forward to put the bags in. Behind the seat the space was full of blankets and old coats, overlaid by a .243 and a .22. The cab smelled of deer blood.

  Devin remembered the guns. He noted the .243 had a new scope on it and thought the stock on the .22 was even darker than it had been, smoothed out by the placement of shoulder and cheekbone. Devin’s father put the bag down, carefully lifted out the .243, and handed it to Devin. “Hold this, please,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Devin as he took it in his right hand. The cold feel of the wood and the sheen of the gun barrel were foreign to him now, but still strangely familiar. The gun was heavy. He set his bag down and held the stock and the wood beneath the barrel, and he liked how it brought a good feeling of things that had been gone from his mind for years: early mornings, day trips with his father.

  His father removed the .22 and positioned Devin’s gear flatly in among the mess, then placed the rifles over the bags and pushed the guns down so they wouldn’t slide or bump each other. The way he handled the guns reminded Devin of his father’s third or fourth call, a few months back. Devin could hear how delicate things were for his father then, how near he was to something he both desired and feared.

  “I’ve been thinking a whole lot,” his father had said, “about the man I was to your mother. About the kind of father I’ve been to you.”

  “Uh-huh,” Devin had said.

  “Ugly,” his father said. “Gave your mother hate. Hated myself.

  Didn’t have much guts. No good to you either. I guess I get what I deserve.”

  “I guess you do,” Devin had said.

  “I’d like to make it up to you,” his father replied.

  Devin had gone quiet, his bitterness still charged with his father’s image. Add to it the void he felt over his wife, over the dying they’d gone through and the fortress she’d made of herself and the child.

  “I was wrong to you,” Devin’s father had said. “No kind of man.”

  Devin let the silence be. Then they’d said their good-byes.

  But past 2:00 a.m. he was wide awake in his bed. He lay on his back with his arms straight as he stared at a span of wall about three feet in length between the upper steel molding of the window and the black crease of the ceiling. Finally, he slept, and he dreamed.

  When he awoke it was still dark. He felt very cold, especially around his wrists, ankles, and neck. He remembered three things: a set of false teeth on a nightstand; the color red; and an image of his child, Bethen, two years old, lying near his dead father. Her cheek was pressed to his father’s cheek and her nose was near his mouth. She inhaled a white vapor, seeming to draw it from his father’s mouth in a long, slow breath. His father’s hand was on her back. Devin couldn’t place himself in the room. But she searched him with her eyes. Her cheek still touched his father’s face. Her small, tender arms were around his father’s neck. She stared quietly at Devin. Watching her, Devin felt she knew his desperate motivations, his frailties. The dream troubled him immensely and he told himself then he would return to Montana.

  THEY ENTERED Bozeman from the west. Devin’s father lived a few blocks south of I-90 in a set of old two-story buildings that lined the edge of an industrial zone. The apartment was on the ground floor, a narrow box with a bathroom just left of the door, then a hallway that opened to a kitchen and living room/bedroom area. “This okay?” he asked and he set Devin’s bag down where the edge-eaten linoleum ended against the dull green carpet of the living space.

  “Okay,” Devin said.

  At the kitchen table, a metal and fiberboard rectangle barely big enough for two, they sat over the potatoes and fried deer meat his father had kept warm for him.

  “I bet it’s been awhile,” Devin’s father said.

  “Yeah,” said Devin.

  “Nice fat doe,” his father said. “Standing right next to a four-by-five over near Big Timber at the foot of the Crazies.”

  His father had taken him there when he was a boy. Devin pictured a big whitetail, the brown-gold rack of horns, four points on one side, five on the other.

  “Bright, sunny day,” the older man recollected. He looked into Devin’s face and placed his hand on Devin’s forearm. Devin wanted to draw back when he did this, but he was struck by his own weariness and by a remembrance of all the late-night walking he’d been doing, down hallways and stairwells, or out wandering Pico, or Wilshire, along the unlit places on Third Street, where he shuffled with his head turned down over his coat beneath the crisscrossed maze of fat electric whir. It was a numbing he went through to get some sleep.

  “Good to have you here,” Devin’s father said.

  Devin noticed his father’s face, the lines and the skin beneath his eyes, the lack of tension in his jaw, the full head of hair, silver and smooth, turned up and back by the way he pushed his hands through it. The bones of his cheeks were hard beneath the loose skin. He was a tall man, awkwardly folded into the short-armed kitchen chair, broad shouldered as he faced Devin, more a man of mountain and stream than the linear structure of the small apartment space. Devin remembered a weekend his father was hunting bighorns on a tag he’d drawn in the Bridgers. A whiteout had swept in from the northern Rockies, down the gap from Glacier through a north-south corridor that lent force and snap to the cold. In little more than a pair of garage-sale wool pants and a hunting jacket, he had spent the night shouldering the slant of a granite outcropping, shielded some from the wind. When he came in late the next afternoon, Devin and his mom had watched him unload his vehicle. He described the night as uneventful. Devin had had to heat the oilpan on his mom’s car that morning. She’d had it plugged in too. “What was it like out there?” Devin asked him.

  “Windy,” his father answered.

  “Where did you sleep?” Devin asked.

  “On that rocky bend near Leland’s p
ass,” his father had said.

  DEVIN’S FATHER moved about the kitchen, attending to him. Devin noticed his eyes. They had an open quality, no longer the brooding or the sharp anger that consumed and concealed. Just a sense of sorrow now, Devin thought, and the tiredness of how he carries himself. It’s hard to find the violence in him anymore or the fear in me.

  “I’M TALKING to Devin,” Mom had told Devin’s father.

  “Get in the car,” he’d said to her.

  “In a minute,” she answered.

  “Now!” he said, yelling at her.

  Devin had turned to him and said, “Shut up.” Small words, but profane between him and his father, something Devin had never said. Devin didn’t want to really, but once he got started he kept going and it was hard to hold back.

  “You’re a fool,” Devin said to him.

  “Quiet, boy,” said his father.

  “No,” said Devin. “Someone disagrees with you and then you think you’re God. Not anymore. Not with me.” They stood over the hood from each other on the far edge of the dirt parking lot above Worthington Arena. Some strands of cloud skirted the sky’s most distant edge. The mountains seemed small out there. It was just after graduation from Montana State, and Devin knew his father had hated the whole ceremony. His face bore the length of it, the tedium. He never cared, thought Devin, about burdening me and Mom with things like that. His agenda above all, as if it were her fault or mine how inept he was at celebrating someone. There were a few families near, getting in their cars. Devin despised him.

  “You’ve said enough,” Devin told him. “You’re done.”

  People stared at them now, Devin’s father tall and broad backed in his weathered Stetson, and Devin almost skeletal, still in his gown. Devin had notched himself up to get physical if it came to it. But what could he do really, twenty-two years old and so threadlike next to him.

  “Get in the truck,” his father said as he stared at Devin’s forehead, eyeing the boy.

  Devin gave the people a helpless look and shrugged at his father like he was crazy. But he got in the truck. His father glowered while he drove and Devin stuck his hands under his legs and stared out the window. Touching neither of them, his mother sat between them with her neck tight, her face like something made of glass pointed at the road. They’d done this before.

  They were silent the whole way home, and mostly silent as they settled in, but seven days later Devin’s father made sure the backtalk would stop. They lived off east of Bozeman then, in a thin-walled trap of a ranch house near the break toward Livingston. This time they stood face-to-face in the kitchen after Devin’s father had criticized his mother again.

  “Shut up,” Devin said, an echo of the parking lot exchange at MSU. “You’ve got nothing to say to her.”

  After coming in from driving hay Devin’s father had cussed her for failing to get milk.

  “Back at it again?” Devin’s father asked him, still glaring at Devin’s mom. “Keep it up.”

  Devin thought later he should have heeded this.

  Instead he said, “I suppose it’s none of my business how you sneak around on her either.” At this, his father’s face angered so suddenly the roots of his hair stood like white whiskers at the red edge of his hairline.

  “For your own good, you better shut your mouth,” he said.

  “Like hell,” Devin said. The boy’s voice sounded high and weak. His mother was in the corner of the room in a vinyl-backed chair. She had her arms crossed. Her eyes were teary. “Back in Colstrip, you think no one knew?” Devin said, “We all knew. You shamed her whenever you got the chance. Came home drunk and sexed-out like a male whore. Smelled of it every time you stumbled down the hall. Everyone knew.” They’d moved out here when he found work with one of the big ranches, and maybe he’d stopped what he’d been doing in Colstrip. But Devin didn’t care. He’d have his say.

  Devin’s father grabbed him and hauled him to the couch and shoved him down in the corner of it.

  “Probably doing more of the same to her here, aren’t you?” Devin continued. From her place in the chair his mother’s voice made a small, pinched sound, like the sound a cat makes when it gets squeezed.

  Devin’s father was on top of him then, his hands working to grab Devin’s face and shut him up. But he couldn’t stop the boy.

  “Why else would you treat her like a dog?” Devin said. “You’re the dog, not her. Everyone knows it.”

  “Stop, Devin,” his mother said.

  Devin’s father put the boy’s neck in the crook of his arm while he dug the heel of his free hand into the boy’s lips and teeth and threatened him. But things kept spilling from Devin, pent-up things urged on by the precision of how he released them. His words were sharp, bred from seven days of silence, sent now in a clean blade of articulation. “You’re a reservation dog,” Devin said, stealing one of his father’s own phrases, a phrase taken from the half-dead, mange-infested hounds that roamed the streets in Lame Deer, over by Colstrip, and humped everything that moved.

  With Devin’s last string of words his father pummeled a knee into the boy’s chest and straddled him. He blocked Devin’s flailing arms with one hand and slammed his forearm into the boy’s face. They both heard the crunch of Devin’s nose as it broke, the sound like a bootstep on fresh snow. It was the kind of broken nose that bled freely and it’s likely they both thought Devin’s father might stop then, but he pushed Devin’s face into the thick twill of the armrest and held him down until Devin lay spent, his breath heaving as the blood made an oblong stain beneath his mouth.

  When Devin’s father got up and went outside, his mother came and knelt by Devin, her body shuddering over the curve of his ribs.

  All this time Devin had convinced himself he needed to say what he’d said to his father. But he didn’t know anymore, seeing him as he was now.

  When it was all finished, Devin’s father had shut him up all right. But Devin just bided the hours to morning and when he walked out the front door he never looked back.

  It took Devin’s father seventeen years and a few months of calling before he apologized. When he did, Devin was alone in Santa Monica, sitting on the edge of his bed with the phone pressed between his shoulder and his jaw. He had his face in his hands as he stared down through his fingers to the floor, to his feet and the way the veins moved when he lifted his toes. Tiny upraised rivers. Rivulets bending over ligaments, bending around bones. Devin’s father had called late, and it was taking him some time to get to what he wanted to say. Devin had the light off. From the window, the city put a faint line on the floor, an oblique angle from behind Devin’s heel to the far corner of the room.

  “I’d like to ask you to forgive me,” his father said.

  His voice had a fine quality, thought Devin, wonderful in its way, but Devin couldn’t give back to him. Devin held the phone out and squeezed it with both hands until his fingers hurt. His face felt pinched, his eyes like knots in his head. He put the phone to his ear again. His jaw trembled.

  Devin said, “I’ve got a long day tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” his father replied. “Probably be good to get some sleep.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” said Devin’s father. “Good night,” Devin said.

  “Good night.”

  Devin listened, but he didn’t hear his father hang up. Devin slipped his hand over the receiver.

  “I’ve been learning a lot these days,” his father went on, starting them up again.

  Devin stood and stared out the window thinking how odd it was to be listening to this. It was what Devin had been unable to do with his wife, he knew it, what she had hoped he’d do just once instead of fueling his words with criticism, instead of shutting her out.

  “I’ve been wondering about how to be different than I’ve been,” said Devin’s father, then he waited for Devin’s response.

  “It’s been on about five years now since I started in on those meetings,” Devin’s
father continued. Quiet on the line.

  “Haven’t missed yet, and don’t plan to. Keeps me sane.”

  More quietness. Devin’s father breathing, Devin breathing.

  “Keeps me from craving like I did,” he went on. “Holds me back from wanting to get ugly.”

  “I’m not sure I’d like to hear about it,” Devin told him.

  When Devin was young his father’s father had died with a bottle of Jack Daniels under his pillow. Ended it in Colstrip, isolated from everyone who knew him, angry at them all. His throat had collapsed. A passing tenant found him after he’d been dead three days. He was nothing to anyone.

  “I’m busy,” Devin said. “I need to put in sixty hours this week, maybe seventy. I gotta go.”

  “Okay,” said Devin’s father. “Take care, son.”

  They hung up the phones.

  The exchanges had built to this. Him talking of the man he was trying to become as Devin pretty much closed him down and talked over him or ended the conversation, at times just flat condescending to him. A feeling of loneliness and dark intent always accompanied the calls, but Devin wasn’t going to stop, even if he knew his father’s voice had changed. The tone had lessened in power, and softened. He’d brought it back to what it was when Devin was a boy, in the times they’d had together. Devin convinced himself not to think about it.

  DEVIN’S FATHER relaxed in the kitchen chair. He wore an old western shirt frayed at the cuffs and patterned with fine crisscrossed lines.

  “Thank you for coming up, Devin,” he said.

  Just peace now, thought Devin, there among the creases around his eyes, looking out as he does, looking in. Seeing him that way, Devin thought it odd he wasn’t at the wedding. Devin hadn’t invited him, didn’t even tell him until a couple of years had gone. But seeing him, Devin knew Cherise would’ve liked him and wanted him there.