What I Want to Tell Goes Like This

by Matt Rader

  Horse chestnut. That’s the name of the big tree they are standing under. That’s one of the names he’s not stupid about.

  The box weighs as much as a small child.

  A wejack.

  5

  THEN I’M LAUGHING. I’M sitting in the gravel laughing. The poet looks horrified but he’s laughing too. We’re both breathing heavy.

  Everything’s slowing down.

  Slowing down.

  Slowing down.

  Holy shit.

  My arm is tatters of shirt and flesh. Only a poet would talk like that. Tatters of shirt and flesh. Fuck.

  “Wejack,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Wejack.”

  I shake my head. I’m an idiot.

  Dante has no idea what I’m talking about.

  My heart is still jacked. I feel it going off in my chest. I hate feeling my body.

  “Fucking wejack.”

  No one knows a wejack.

  All that heavy light gets in my eyes.

  There’s blood coming out of my arm.

  Once I got my pants torn off by an otter.

  True story.

  Dante is wrapping my arm in his shirt. His own arms are all fucked up with burns. He’s a small man with eyes that remember the South China Sea. Macanese. Raised in the gambling port of the Pearl River Delta. I’d never even heard of it before. Macau. The Pearl River Delta. Now I think about it all the time. I see the river in his burns. I have no idea how he got here, how he got those arms. A man from the flames. A survivor.

  “Did you see it?” I ask, meaning the wejack, the thing underneath the house.

  “Yes,” he says.

  He’s skinny as hell that poet.

  6

  How did they die?

  Fire.

  If the fire could speak to you now, what would it say?

  I loved them so much I made them a part of me.

  That’s what the fire would say?

  That’s what I would say if I was the fire.

  If you were the fire?

  One of the small fires.

  7

  IT’S OUR JOB TO get the wejack. It’s my job. I hired the poet.

  For months I had no work. No creatures damming fields or scurrying beneath the boathouse. No one calling. Nothing to capture. Mornings I’d hitch to the employment office to save the gasoline, standing on the road with the drunks who were always going somewhere at that time of the morning though I never guessed where. We’d all watch the cars roll by until someone who knew me appeared behind the wheel.

  I’d have them let me off at the diner across the street.

  Then I’d cross and go through the office doors, which were the same metal doors with two panes of dark, half- translucent glass that all small office buildings have. Maybe it is privacy or discretion that nothing of the inside can be seen from the outside. Maybe it’s guilt.

  Shame.

  Horror.

  The air killing everyone inside.

  Then, when things were finally over for Beth, when she was ready to simply walk away, make her own escape to daylight after our five years in that house, our seven years together in our own hermetic field of influence, then, as if coincidence and irony had become confused, the phone began to ring.

  A marking perhaps, a recognition of a certain achievement in suffering.

  A month already of solid work.

  Something under the porch, under the woodshed, the kitchen sink; in the attic, the walls; damming the fields; in the engines of old machinery. Every day something hidden that in its hiding becomes a problem.

  Wildlife.

  It’s my job to trap it and take it away.

  Something hidden that in its hiding reveals itself.

  It’s my job to hide it somewhere else.

  I hired the poet because I saw him in the bar and he wasn’t talking to anyone. I like that: not talking. It’s so cliché, men who don’t want to talk. Men who sit alone at bars. So standard. I like standards. They feel like the way things are supposed to be, no hiding.

  I like thinking of myself as I’m supposed to be.

  I could tell he was how he was supposed to be in that moment. When he told me his name, I thought of Virgil. Beatrice. Because that is how it is supposed to be.

  But it made no sense. It wasn’t funny.

  Nothing is as it’s supposed to be.

  We talk all the time.

  We’re not talking now as we walk back to the truck.

  8

  THE TRAPPER MOVES AT a half-run along the edge of the meadow. His snowshoes brain the snow. The snow is a brain. Now it is turning soft. Above him, a glacier he’s traversed several times in summer juts into the sky. When he grasps it in his bouncing vision he remembers what the world looks like from that height and he sees himself standing on its crisp white edge looking across the sheets of white and down over the valley to the other mountains across the sea.

  It is late in the afternoon.

  Beyond the ridge of the glacier, a thin fulcrum of gold the sky and the mountains pivot between.

  He is eighteen years old.

  This is his third winter in these woods. Once he was mostly alone but now new men appear, one or two a month.

  And the men who hunt those men appear too, following the shoreline of the lake in motorized boats, coming ashore, bashing through deer trails a few hundred yards before giving up and turning back. They are weak men, he thinks. Weak men with guns.

  The war in Europe goes on and the war for all able-bodied men to serve at the front, dug into the earth, intensifies.

  It is 1917.

  The trapper knows little of these wars except to stay hidden as his father told him.

  Soon the snow will melt and people will move with a different kind of freedom through the trees and who knows how many men there will be or how many there already are hiding in the hills.

  His steps are loud in his head and he wonders how far the sound travels.

  In the clearing everything is seen.

  He learned to trap in a flat land of lakes and rivers. Here the animals are familiar but different: mink, beaver, opossum, weasel, marten. In the high alpine there are even carcajou, wolverine.

  There are always mysteries too, the things that shouldn’t be here. Like himself. Like the refugees from the draft board with their dungarees and bandanas. Like the red songbird that burned across his vision two mornings ago, the head of a torch, ablaze. He sees the colour now not as a memory but as a scar, a redness marking his sight. It is inexplicable, such a bird, but he imagines some dumb hand and some dumb cage in the coal town beyond the lake, some moment of neglect, some flaw in the handling followed by the bird’s furious, suicidal escape.

  And here he is moving at the edge of the light-hammered snow and the frozen dimness of the treeline, a fleet of clouds sliding like great ships across the sky.

  Here he is in his own breathing.

  His ears full of snow. The sound of snow.

  And then a dodge into the trees, into the dimness.

  And the explosion. The thrashing yellow eyes. The hissing, fiery teeth.

  The empty trap closing on his leg like time.

  9

  THERE ARE TWO WAYS we can do this.

  We were told something’s been eating the chickens. It is always the fucking chickens.

  The rooster watches us from the fence. How come they never eat the rooster? But they do of course. Everything gets eaten. How well can a rooster see?

  I feel my arm humming underneath the shirt-bandage. All that blood rushing to help. All that blood slaughtered on the cotton.

  Blood cells on blood cells on blood cells.

  I’m sick and tired of farms. I’d shoot everything even the bison.

  I once saw a one-ton bison clear a six-foot fence from a standstill. When he landed the ground turned into four furrows of mud. Every bison is called Goliath or Samson or Hercules.

  I haven’t spoken to Derek. That�
�s the name of the fella who owns this shithole. He wasn’t here when we arrived the first time. He wasn’t here when we came back.

  It’s not really a shithole. It’s beautiful. I can’t tell you how.

  Acacia trees along the driveway. Lilacs by the big front windows. Lilacs are from the olive family. Those are two other things I’m not stupid about: lilacs, acacia trees.

  They don’t even have bison here.

  10

  THE DAYLIGHT WAS COMING apart when Beth disappeared down the street, stashing itself in the foliage, slashing rooftops, going red.

  Slowly the light was becoming something else, its opposite even, a radiating darkness spilling out of parked cars, juniper hedges, shrubs and shrubs and shrubs of a meticulously aging neighbourhood in the north Pacific. In an old coal town where there were once men who rarely saw the sun. In the kitchen, hanging from the windowsill like liquid.

  He stood at the kitchen sink watching the darkness pool on the counter, underneath the chairs, along the slats of the blinds. He wanted to know what was missing, what she’d taken with her, but the room seemed so strange to him now that every presence—the silver kettle squatting on the stovetop, the blue dishtowel, the clock radio with the mad, blinking time—was unfamiliar. It made it impossible for him to recreate the room as he remembered it and then compare the two rooms—the one in his memory and the one he stood in—for absences.

  Something surrounded him, cleaved to him, moved with his movements: a gap, an imperceptible space in the exact shape of his body.

  11

  THIS IS HOW SHE’D come into his life: across a gap, through a moment of rupture. That third day of his four “days out,” still drunk from the two days and nights before, they’d watched the West Virginia mine disaster unfold on CNN.

  She was smart enough, he thought, not to ask him how he felt, being a miner.

  It didn’t need to be talked about.

  Later, when he watched her blonde body sleeping, he wondered if it was stupidity and not intelligence that had been at work. She was someone he’d known less than forty-eight hours. Someone he’d met at the Prince George Motor Inn drinking Coors and watching her dance to AC/DC like she didn’t know where she was or where she’d been. Someone he’d lost himself in.

  Thinking of it as a choice even, his benevolence to see her as intelligent or stupid, made him feel small.

  He sat at the round Formica table by the window watching the television. It was doing its aurora borealis thing on the curtains.

  She’d passed out on her stomach on top of the motel bed around 10 p.m., wearing only white underwear, her right arm and leg stretched out and her left arm and leg bent almost ninety degrees at the elbow and knee.

  He turned off the sound.

  If it weren’t for her peacefulness, the calm swell of her chest, she might have been climbing out of a pit or up the face of a mountain.

  The miners were still trapped. Thirteen men. If they were lucky, they’d made it to one of the refuge areas and were breathing with regulators.

  They were like divers now underneath the earth.

  There had been no reported contact with the surface.

  12

  THE KITCHEN WINDOW WAS open and a warm breeze slithered through a pot of pansies and dead long-grass on the porch. A few hot days and already things were dying. He listened to the late-day machinery of birds and frogs: the ratcheting fan belts, the code labs, the evening ticker of sounds scrolling through the neighbourhood. They surprised him. He remembered hearing these noises before and he remembered remembering them at earlier times, remembered being surprised that he could be surprised by sounds that he knew occurred everyday. He had no idea when those times were, when he’d been surprised and when he’d remembered that surprise. He felt very far away now in time and space.

  13

  THEN, JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT CNN reported the men had been rescued. Twelve of thirteen alive. It was a biblical number. It felt impossible. So impossible he couldn’t help but believe it. Whatever the feeling was inside him—relief, wonder, gratitude—it made him stand up.

  He found himself standing there in the dark room.

  It was early morning on the television, still very dark in West Virginia.

  Then he woke her. He shook her gently, rocked her torso, his hand on her bare back. She felt warm and heavy.

  “What?” she said, surfacing from deep inside herself. “What?”

  “They rescued them,” he said. “They’re alive.”

  “Who?” she said.

  Maybe it was stupidity. Or indifference.

  “The miners,” he said.

  Then she sat up and began to cry.

  14

  HE HADN’T SAID ANYTHING before Beth left. Not a word. This seemed strange and later it would seem unthinkable, impossible even.

  There was so much to say about what had happened underneath the house.

  What could he have said?

  Then his anger came back to him like panic, in heavy waves.

  He grabbed a black-handled knife from the knife block and threw it out the open window.

  Then the next knife and the next.

  The knives had no weight. He hurled mugs and bowls and plates. He threw them without thinking, quickly, as if trying to live within the moment of the force of his anger as it was transferred to the object, as the anger careened out of his body and into another body.

  The yard was littered with dishes. It looked like the aftermath of a childish tea-party raid where the celebrants were carried off into the diffuse and failing light never to be seen again.

  What had gone on here had happened in a hurry.

  15

  IN THE MORNING WHEN he awoke in the motel she was sitting at the table where he had sat the night before. The television was on, the sound still turned off. There was a strange inscrutable expression on her face. Her eyes were red and puffy but he could tell the tears had subsided a long time ago.

  Then he looked at the television.

  There’d been a terrible mistake.

  “They’re all dead,” she said. “All but one.”

  HIS THIRD PLATE MISSED and shattered the kitchen window. Glass confettied the sill and the sink.

  THAT HIS FATHER HAD died the day after the miners in West Virginia was a kind of poetry. That the cage that was meant to lift him to daylight became the metal trap that pinned his body to darkness.

  It was too much.

  After the fury it felt quiet in the room.

  Then the fridge kicked in with its laboured, obdurate purr.

  16

  WHEN THE FIRE TELLS his story what do you see?

  I see it wash over them. It’s blue. It’s orange and crimson and yellow. It’s translucent. It sweeps up my wife’s legs. Pushes her hair back like the wind. She looks amazing, untouched in the fire. There is nothing more alive than fire.

  My wife is so calm and my children are calm. They all sit perfectly still as the car fills with light. They are alive in a different time from the fire. Their lives are moving at a much slower speed.

  The fire cannot believe its luck to find such beauty and the fire is frustrated because that beauty—my family—does not exist where the fire exists. And that is why the fire thrashes. That’s why the fire goes cloudy with smoke. Why it seethes.

  I’m standing on the road. My arms are burning. There are bodies closing in around me and there are acres and acres of harrowed field stretching out in all directions.

  Steam rises from the warm asphalt.

  Steam is a ghost letting go of a body. Smoke is the body letting go. Those are my thoughts. That’s what I’m thinking.

  How boring.

  Then I’m on the ground and the ground is rolling. Or I am rolling on the ground in a heavy grey blanket.

  Or the sky is a heavy grey blanket.

  17

  WEJACK. PEKAN. PEQUAM. BEAST of many names.

  Gone.

  We snake the camera through as far as it w
ill go—3.2 metres. Nothing. We listen. There’s a breeze we hear moving through the trees but it’s faint and we don’t even know we hear it. The bright sounds of smallish birds. Little eruptions of light made noise. Flashes. We are listening for something darker. Closer to the Earth. The Earth in space is silent. We hear nothing.

  We stand up. There’s a hawk circling overhead.

  “Cooper’s hawk,” Dante says.

  “I’m stupid with birds,” I tell him.

  Because I’ve seen it in movies and because I don’t know what else to do, I want to smoke now. I see me and the poet leaning against the hood of my truck, cigarettes in our hands, watching the hawk and the burnished fields and our silence connecting us to the weathered shed that is the same colour as the grey horse in the fields, alone and perfect.

  He just has the name of a poet. I have the name of a Pharisee.

  I don’t smoke.

  There is no horse.

  The hawk is gone.

  “Got bored,” Dante says.

  Then I’m under the house again.

  Breath.

  Breath.

  Breath.

  18

  ON CLEAR WINTER DAYS when the sky was an austere blue, he’d take the warm, grey birds from the dovecote and put them, huddled in their feathers, into a wooden box strapped to a small trailer, hitch the trailer to his bicycle, and ride twenty-five miles from his father’s home to a farmer’s field that looked as if it had been stamped on the earth by the winter light, a flattened stretch of land going on into the mountains.

  In the dovecote the birds could take flight, circle, trade places, but the trailer box was too small for this and pulling the birds those miles he sometimes imagined they’d all died, that their stillness was the signal of death.

  He was fourteen years old.

  Each bird wore a small rubber ring inside a metal band. The band was fixed to their right legs. When he opened the door and slapped the side of the box, the birds came back to life and flowed out into the cool air, small sparks of sunlight glinting off the metal.