Making Nice

by Matt Sumell

  It was a little gray-and-brown thing with white in the wings and yellow in the chest, its black legs curled stiffly underneath. Only one of its eyes was closed, and a small amount of blood had seeped out of its head and mixed with the sheetrock dust on the pine floor, making a tiny, silvery-white puddle that resembled mercury.

  “What should we do with it?” Phoebe asked, still teary-eyed and wet-handed, already on her way back from the sink.

  I looked at the cowboy, who was drying his hands on his too-tight jeans.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we should have a funeral.”

  “No,” the cowboy said, “I’ll get rid of it.”

  He came across the room, picked it up with a dirty shop towel, and carried it out onto the unfinished deck. Phoebe and Jason followed, and I stayed inside and watched through the glass door. I could still see the breeze ruffle its feathers, its left wing moving a little before the cowboy took a few quick steps and threw it as hard as he could, all of us watching it arc through the air, a dead bird flying toward two dead trees.

  “So how about that hike?”

  * * *

  Inyo National Forest is roughly three thousand square miles of contiguous wilderness in mostly Northern California, about a million and half acres of protected habitat for all kinds of stuff. There’s black bear, bobcats, mule deer and elk, rattlesnakes and this weird salamander thing, even a few bighorn sheep roaming around. But it was the coyotes that worried me most, on account of their reputation as smart and opportunistic, or as the cowboy once called them: “Jew-dogs.” After I let him hang there a few seconds, he added, “I mean that respectfully.”

  Unlike Jews, coyotes eat pretty much anything, including dumb little pets that run off during late-afternoon hikes and don’t come back. On most hikes Jason would trail a few feet behind me, sniffing away at whatever before playing catch-up. But he seemed extra-excited that afternoon, popping in and out of my peripheral for twenty minutes before sprinting ahead about thirty yards, stopping abruptly to take a dump with this moronic look of worry on his face, then kicking dirt all over it and running a series of frantic laps around a large chunk of volcanic rock. I thought he was trying to herd it on account of, you know, his being an idiot. The next time I looked up, he was gone.

  We all called out for him, the cowboy and Phoebe and me, and when he didn’t show I tried not to panic. I knew only what I knew—that it was getting dark and there were coyotes out there—but then I knew what I didn’t know, because the cowboy told me about a black Chow Chow named Cookie that got itself eaten a few weeks before I arrived.

  “This one coyote wandered down the hill,” he said, “right at dusk, right in the middle of the road. When Cookie saw it he leapt off the porch and chased it up the hill and over the ridge, where a pack of ’em were waiting in ambush.”

  I didn’t call him an asshole. Instead I just kept picturing Jason’s little bowling ball head and his ape eyes, his bat ears and his little paws, the pads of which I liked to pinch when he slept, their prints in mud like fat sand dollars. I thought about his gross tongue and smooshed face, his repeated attempts to dig holes in couches, the look of resentment on his face every time I’d spin him on linoleum floors. I thought about all the close calls: the time he ran onto a friend’s covered pool, stopped in the middle, and sunk; the Christmas he got into the weed cookies under the tree and peed sitting down for three days; when he jumped out of the back of my pickup truck and hung himself from his leash until blood bubbled out of his nose; the earless pitbull he bit in the nuts at the park.

  I wasn’t crying, but I suppose it could’ve looked that way. The cowboy put his hand on my shoulder and said things like, “I’m sure he’s fine,” and, “He’ll turn up,” and, “There was a mountain lion sighting yesterday.”

  “You’re an asshole,” I said.

  “Just telling you what I heard,” he said. “It was on the news this morning. Someone got video of it near the hot springs, about ten miles from here.”

  “I like hot springs,” Phoebe said. “And the dinosaur with the little hands.”

  “T. rex?” the cowboy said.

  “Yeah,” Phoebe said. “T. rex.”

  “You know what I like?” I said. “I like pussy and baseball and having a dog that’s alive. That’s what I like.”

  “Hey,” the cowboy said, but stopped himself there, instead picking Phoebe up over his head and placing her on his shoulders. She grabbed two fistfuls of his thick, full hair before sliding her hands down onto his college-ruled forehead. “It’s starting to get dark,” he said. “I should get her home.”

  She stammered a protest but the cowboy interrupted. “Don’t worry, Pickle,” he said. “Jason’ll turn up. Then he can come over and eat dinner with us. OK?”

  She whined a series of noes until I got sick of hearing it and suggested that maybe Jason had wandered back to their house, was waiting there for someone to let him in. “Would you go and check for me,” I said, “let me know?”

  “But I wanna stay,” she said.

  “I know you do,” I said.

  “Odds are you won’t,” the cowboy said, “but if you do run into that mountain lion don’t run and don’t play dead. Just make eye contact and act big. Be loud. Grab a stick or a rock, cover your throat.” Then he wished me luck and walked off in the direction we came.

  For a while they were still in earshot, and each time I called out for Jason I would hear Phoebe call out for him right after, each time echoing me from somewhere else in those wild woods, each time getting quieter and quieter, until I called out and heard nothing after.

  * * *

  After forty or so minutes of stumbling around in the semidark, the temperature had dropped to where my breath was visible in front of me and I had to hug myself from the cold. My voice was all but gone and my boots on pine needles sounded—for a second, with my eyes closed—like Jason eating the microwave popcorn I’d drop for him on the floor. And so, with no one around to judge, no little kid to scare, I did what came natural: I prayed to my dead mom to help me find my dumb dog and kicked pinecones until I hurt my toe after mistaking an unfortunately shaped rock for one, then quietly cursed my way out of the woods. Eventually I limped onto John Muir Road, a narrow, winding strip of patchworked concrete that switches back on itself four or five, maybe six times. The house was somewhere in the third switch, and I huffed my way up there, my pace quickening the closer I got, eager to put a drink in myself and get warm. Beyond that the plan was to grab a flashlight and a jacket, call the cowboy then head back out.

  I was a few steps from the door when a feeling more than anything I saw caused me to stop and turn my head toward the dark corner of the porch. After a few seconds of my eyes adjusting—focusing and refocusing—I could just make out his small frame: back legs back, front legs front, sprawled out and unmoving. I took a step closer and could see that his fur was matted with something, possibly blood, but there was no way to be sure in that light. So I just stood there, unbreathing, listening. When I didn’t hear a snort or snore or exhale I said his name, just once, like a question. He didn’t move, and I knew what I knew.

  In my ears a white noise like radio static turned real low. My heart a pond in a hailstorm, concentric circles of cold radiating out. I thought my chest might implode. I felt thirsty for sand. But that doesn’t do it—I don’t have the words for the wild vagueness of the pain I felt.

  I suppose country singers have tried to quantify suffering—beers drank, tears counted. Doctors and nurses rely on numeric pain scales, lawyers and actuaries on compensation schedules (a lost thumb, say, is worth about seventy-five weeks of your salary). Even poets resort to measuring, be it in coffee spoons or metric feet. So I have to wonder then if it could be better explained with numbers, if there’s some equation, some formula that could calculate the force by which my mother’s death impacted me. So shattered was my spoiled-white-kid understanding of the world by it that I’m convinced momentum and mass somehow com
e into play. Maybe an algorithm could better explain how her suffering and dying divided time into before and after, could calculate how precious my dog became to me as a result, could communicate how his loss seemed like a loss compounded, interest earned on a previous injury. Maybe math could help me understand why—after suffering for so long—I don’t get better at suffering. But I don’t. Every time, I don’t.

  Of course, in that moment none of this was going through my head with any clarity. Even my vision took on a white, hazy quality that moved from the outside of my eyes inward toward my nose. My hearing went weird like I was underwater. I felt—not woozy—unstable. I put a hand against the house to steady myself. Took turns staring at the ground by my feet and the hand starfished on the wall in front of me.

  I almost fell over when Jason woke himself up with his own fart and spun around trying to bite the smell. Halfway through his second spin he caught sight of me, blinked, and wagged his tail nub, then sauntered over like nothing at all, sleepy and dumb as ever. After I’d spun him and flipped him and inspected him for whatever mortal wounds he might have and found none—there wasn’t a thing wrong with him, except that he was covered almost completely in bear shit—and after he mistook this inspection for play and rolled on his back, kicked at my hands, and licked his lips, only then did my eyes well up and spill.

  * * *

  The next morning I duct-taped exes on the big windows to warn the birds, packed the truck with whatever and the dog bed, and drove across town to tell the cowboy I’d had enough. He made that face people make when they’re trying to divide up a dinner bill. “Well that sucks,” he finally said, reaching for his boots. “Phoebe really likes your dog.”

  “I know,” I said. “But I miss the water, need to check the boat.”

  “We got lakes,” he said. “You been to Convict? Unbelievable.”

  “I’m sure it’s nice,” I said, “but it’s not the same.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s not the same. LA Harbor looks like the fucking apocalypse.”

  He wasn’t wrong about that, but I didn’t like hearing it from him. Especially after he smiled his smile and offered me a raise.

  “It’s not the money,” I said, then told him about some imaginary family problems and a few real ones, like how my old man filled out his crossword puzzle with numbers and tried to make a phone call with the TV remote.

  “Christ,” the cowboy said. “Sorry to hear that. When—”

  “Already packed,” I said.

  It should have ended there but didn’t, because the cowboy told me about Phoebe’s field trip to a ghost town for ten minutes before we settled up and shook hands and I made my itchy way back to the coast, Jason beside me in the passenger seat, his head out the window between parking-lot pee breaks and long naps.

  * * *

  It was summer going into fall then, and thanks to that and the Santa Anas, there was hardly anybody around. Most nights I’d lie awake listening to the sound of all the slack halyards banging on all the aluminum spars. When I got tired of that and of staring at the big bolts that connect the deck plate to the hull, or the water stains underneath the leaky portlights—when I got tired of being tired—I’d get up and walk around the corner to this rundown office building with a somewhat flat and windowless wall and a decently lit parking lot and toss a blue rubber racquetball against it, play catch with myself and think about spring. Tommy said I could get some more hours on the dock then, when it’s warmer and busier, when the bioluminescent algae blooms, the kind that lights up in disturbed water like antifreeze. “And maybe sooner,” he said, “depending.”

  I asked on what, and he said test results.

  “Finally took the GED,” I joked.

  He laughed smoke out one nostril and died five months later.

  After the funeral some of us went to a bar and after the bar some of us went to another bar and after another bar some of us fell off stools. Others hung around and made passes at Whatsherfaces, but I headed back to the boat and sat on the deck with Jason, listening to all those halyards that were sure to keep me up at least as much as what was banging around my brain, so I cracked a beer and glanced around the harbor—at the lit-up suspension bridge connecting San Pedro and Terminal Island, at the lit-up port and its lit-up mega-cranes, at the parking lot lights and all the stars I couldn’t see. Eventually I ducked below and grabbed the keys.

  We motored out, past the yachts that never leave their slips, past the gas dock and the rundown marina, the bait barge and its barking behemoths. Past Cabrillo Beach and Mike’s in the main channel, the buoys and the break in the rock wall. Past Angel’s Gate Lighthouse and the Chinese container ships waiting offshore with their containers and whatever they contain. Past where there’s anything else to pass. Out there, away from the land and the lights, I raised the main and killed the Yanmar, sat back and enjoyed the quiet pleasure of progress made under wind power alone.

  I sailed straight out, and over the course of an hour or two, watched the coast shrink and disappear over the horizon behind me. I briefly considered turning back, then looked at Jason curled in his little dog bed and just kept sipping and sailing until a few hours before dawn, when the wind dropped into a twirling, seaweedy breeze before quitting completely. I watched the main luff for a good half hour before lashing it down, then toggled off the nav lights and sat at the helm wrapped in a damp, wool blanket and fell into a dreamless, twenty-minute sleep.

  I woke to something ten yards off starboard, a green shape like a giant firefly in the seeming nothingness—five, six, maybe seven feet long—moving underneath the surface like an electric thing, its wake all lit up and glowing. Another breached behind us, then another in front, then another and another, until there were more than I could count. I leapt around the cockpit from rail to rail, wondering if I’d drunk too much or rubbed my eyes too hard, then best-guessed that we were caught in an upwelling of the California Current—these oceanic verticals that bring nutrient-rich sediment and plankton up from the deep-down depths, attracting all kinds of life. Whatever it was that I was witnessing, though, I figured I should get busy witnessing it, so I cracked another beer and sat back, slung my arm on the rail and watched in quiet amazement: dozens of sea things zipping this way and that, bursting bright greens that billowed like underwater auroras. After a while I looked down at Jason, who blinked at me from his bed until I made the kissing noises he likes, and he hopped onto my lap where he curled like a mini-heater. We drifted that way for the better part of an hour, and the whole time I just felt so lucky to be there to see it. And when a few of them splashed close enough to get us wet, Jason let out his little bark—which in that dark quiet sounded not so little at all—and all I could do was spit beer and laugh and say, “That’s right, buddy. You tell ’em! You tell ’em!”

  I’M YOUR MAN

  Woke up to a smokin’-hot strawberry-blonde catwalking down the sidewalk with her dog, a terrier or something, I don’t know, it was small and it was tan and it was a dog, a small dog the color of sand, wet sand, Caribbean sand, Saint Barths or Croix or Whatever fucking sand, man, you know, the tropical beach shit, and if that’s not a terrier then I don’t know what a terrier is—and I don’t. I do know, though, that it was a dog, I’m sure of that much, and that it was about as big as a dog that’s a terrier, maybe twelve inches at the shoulder and fifteen pounds, and that the girl was all slow going in high heels and tight jeans that went up and over her great hips and higher, like past her belly button higher, as high as her lowest ribs even, so high that they definitely must have been designer. I said, “Hi High Jeans,” then gave her this look I saw in a JCPenney ad once, a closed-lipped smile with the left side of my mouth but not the right kinda thing, but she just glanced at my feet all icy-style and stuff and I thought this one’s Nordic for sure, a real ice queen, ancestors from someplace like Superman’s hideout or something, maybe France. But wherever great-granddad was from I’d for sure French kiss his great-looking great-gran
dkid with my lips and tongue on her lips and tongue and breasts and vagina, and maybe, I thought as she catwalked all slowly away, I’d even French her maybe-French asshole, not that I’m into that kinda business, at least not on purpose anyway. One time over beers a good pal once said about asshole licking: “Oh yeah, it’s the way, they go fuckin’ crazy bro, you gotta try it.” I told him no, I wouldn’t, I’m afraid of it tasting like a double-A battery that smells like shit. He said, “No bro, it doesn’t. Girls are cleaner. It smells like grass clippings.” I said I could deal with grass clippings and he said, “Yep,” then recommended I check out b-holelickers.com for examples and inspiration. I did, and it was horrible.

  But I have to admit: she did look clean, real clean, like the kind of girl that has a loofah in the shower and runs soap up her cracks and then loofahs them, then, afterward, spends time in front of a mirror with a towel wrapped around her body and another around her hair while she puts on expensive creams that smell nice and have names like Melon Mist Cucumber Time and Raspberry Aloe Hydration Butter, like the kind of girl that gets the Miami Beet mani-pedi special every three weeks at this place called Angel Tips and isn’t afraid of the future ’cause she’s young and good-looking and has an anus people would like to lick if only she’d let ’em. Way I see it, she’s so pretty and has such great jeans that she probably gets more propositions in a single week than I ever will in my single life—plus like five other guys’ single lives—so I bet she’d be into it if just as a sort of litmus test, like, “If you like my at this point stretched-out and slightly discolored asshole, then you must really like me,” but in a French accent. And well, that’s one test I’d like to take, because basically I’m just an old-fashioned fella who wants to have relatively spontaneous relations with an attractive lady who has few expectations and who simply likes me for me and wants to express those likes in the nude. If that sounds like something you’d like, too, attractive ladies of the world, well then … I’m your man.