by John Jodzio
Through the steel door, you hear your father yell. Then there’s the back and forth of a saw. When the sawing stops, there’s more yelling. Then there’s the saw again.
You light a menthol you stole from your Aunt Ginny’s purse and you lift your hand and pound on the door. The saw and yelling stop. You hear boots scurrying over planks, a shotgun being ripped from its rack.
Instead of calling out to your father to stop what’s next, you just stand there. You take another drag off your cigarette. You blow a mint-flavored breath and you close your eyes and wait for it.
Earlier that night, you and Frog and Harder were down by the river bluffs. Frog had stolen two cans of Reddi Whip from the restaurant where he worked and the three of you sucked through the cream to get to the nitrous. When the cans were cashed, you shotgunned the tiny bottles of liquor that Harder had kiped from his flight attendant mom. Each time one of you finished a bottle you dropped it off the cliff, listened to it plinko down through the limestone crags. There were shrooms too. Big hairy looking fuckers that felt like a piece of rubber on your tongue.
You watched as Frog heaved a huge slab of limestone into the river. It splashed down and you saw the water around the splash curl and ripple. You followed that patch of water as it got pulled downstream over the dam. This was the first time you’d hung out with Frog and Harder in the last few months. You suspect you will drift further apart once they decide on a college and you decide whatever it is that you are going to decide.
“So much water,” you said.
You stood there and watched the river flow past you. You thought about jumping, getting a head of steam and hurling yourself out into the water. You thought about taking your wallet out of your pocket and chucking it into the middle of the river.
“Let’s go fuck something up!” Harder yelled before you did either.
Harder had made varsity football in the fall and there was still a rash on his forehead from where his helmet dug into his skull. You watched him pull off a glove with his teeth, rake his fingernails over the rash. It had started out as a red splotch the size of a dime and it had grown throughout the season, annexing more and more skin.
Frog opened his trunk and pulled out a duffel bag. He unzipped it and tilted it toward you to reveal a cache of spray paint, dozens and dozens of different colored cans.
Frog looked like a frog in elementary school, with his bowl cut and his flared nostrils and those puffy lips, but not any longer. His hair was pulled back in a ponytail, his face had narrowed, girls now considered his lips kissable.
“Let’s do this shit,” he said.
For the next hour the three of you drove all over town transforming speed limit signs from a snail-paced thirty miles per hour into a fast and furious eighty. All it took was a couple arcs of spray paint.
The thing that set you off tonight was seemingly insignificant. While you were driving you saw a man riding a bike who looked exactly like your father. The same long grey wad of hair hanging around his shoulders, the same leathery skin. Since your mother died, you’ve been seeing things like this more often. You see men who resemble your dad, women who look like your mom. Usually it is only in small ways—the way their mouth folds when they smile or how they hold a cigarette up to their face or tap their foot nervously on the ground when they are sitting in a booth at a restaurant.
What happened tonight is that when you passed this man he turned and waved at you. It was a strong and hearty wave. Neighborly. The man held his hand up and shook it back and forth as you drove by. The man looked exactly like your dad, but this wave was something that your dad would never do.
“Did you see that?” you asked Frog and Harder.
“Did we see what?” Harder asked you.
And then, nothing.
Or at least not the nothing you expected. The nothing you expected involved a deafening bang and then a gaping hole in your head or gut. In that nothing, there would be vast amounts of blood gushing from the gaping hole and your dad would kneel over your body yelling shit, shit, shit, finally paying you some mind.
Or on second thought—maybe the nothing would be instantaneous. A sudden cut to static like when the TV at your aunt and uncle’s house lost the cable feed.
Instead of either of these nothings, the cabin door flies open and your father stands in front of you, your shoot-first-ask-questions-later father not shooting first and not needing any questions later.
“How many times did we go over the approach protocol, Junior?” he says, lowering the sawed-off. “A million times? And then you forget to push the goddamn buzzer?”
Underneath your parka, you feel your ribcage heaving up and down like bellows stoking a fire. You wanted it, you still want it, but you realize now that there is something untappable inside you that will always cause you to fight it.
“I didn’t forget anything,” you tell him.
“The hell you didn’t. I didn’t hear any buzzer.”
Your father wipes his eyes with his palm. His right eye is rimmed in goo, what you know right away is a wicked case of pink eye.
“I peeped you through the peephole,” he says. “Otherwise, you’d be cooked.”
You’re wearing his old Army parka, the green one with the fur-lined collar and the name “Lowe” on the lapel. The parka was big before, but you haven’t eaten much in the last three days and it swims around you, a noisy sea of green nylon and down.
“Lucky I looked,” your father says.
He’s wearing those half-gloves where the fingers are free. His beard has grown so unruly that you can’t see his lips underneath the hair.
“Lucky you looked,” you say.
- - - - - - - -
After Frog and Harder dropped you off, you went inside your aunt and uncle’s house. You took the keys to your uncle’s truck from the ceramic bowl on the kitchen counter. You told yourself that you were just going to go for a drive to clear your head. But when you started to drive you thought about the waving man and you kept on driving until you turned off the county road and headed north. You took the turnoff to Miller’s Peak and put the truck in towing gear. You found yourself bumping down the loamy ruts that led to the clearing below your father’s cabin. You shoved the truck into park and you tied your shoes and started up the trail.
Inside the cabin, the potbelly stove belches out a thin trail of smoke. There’s a window near the kitchen table where you sit that looks out on the back of your father’s lot. From there, you get the lay of the land. The junipers weighed down by shingles of November snow, the tank of brownish bio-diesel, the chicken coop. When the wind dies down, you hear the hum of the generator.
“Isn’t this a school night?” he asks.
You keep your parka zipped up and your gloves and stocking cap on. Your feet are frozen and you stomp them on the floor to get the blood moving.
“No school tomorrow,” you lie. “Teacher conferences.”
Your father grabs a dishtowel and buries his eyes inside it.
“I’ve been waiting to become a martyr,” he tells you. He yanks the dishtowel away from his face now, like he’s playing peek-a-boo. “I think it’s my big day and then I look through the peephole and it’s my own damn kid.”
He gets up from the table and chucks a piece of wood into the stove. He stokes the fire with the poker, slams the hatch. Truthfully, inside the cabin’s not much better than out. Even though there’s been an attempt inside here to divert the Northerlies—the cracks in between the walls stuffed full of newspaper, porn, empty potato chip bags, and old pairs of your father’s crusty y-fronts—there’s still a high-pitched whistle between the clapboards.
“You need an eye-opener?” he asks. He lifts a bottle of moonshine and holds it up to you. He shakes the bottle, tick-tock, swishes around the piss-colored liquid inside. You nod. Your father pulls two Mason jars off the shelf and carries them to the table. He pushes shotgun shells and copper wire aside and he rolls up a piece of
butcher paper with a large penciled drawing of what looks to be a prototype for a land mine.
“I’m probably contagious,” he tells you. “Just walking in here you probably got what I got.”
Your eyes scan the room. The shelf of canned goods, the boxes of powdered milk, the summer pickles swimming in their brine. Underneath all the foodstuffs are neatly stacked boxes of ammo. On the bottom shelf are the pamphlets that your dad distributes to his mailing list.
Most of them you’ve committed to memory—“Free the Presses! SCREW the Taxman!” “What Your Tax Dollars REALLY Support!” and “Going Off The Grid: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW!” They are written with such urgency, exclamation points and capital letters everywhere. To properly read one of them out loud, you’d have to yell.
You see the torn up mattress then. The white fluff busting from its insides, the wayward springs, the piles of down littered across the floorboards. Things like this don’t surprise you anymore—your father guts furniture all the time. Most times you come up here he gives you the pat-down hug, the kind you get when someone thinks you are wired for sound.
“What’s with the bed?” you ask.
“The bed’s been compromised,” he says.
You sip the moonshine. Your dad moves to the sink. He grabs a Brillo pad and scrubs off the griddle. The bottle is in front of you and you tip it and fill your Mason jar again. You watch your father’s brown cords slide down his ass until you can see the crack. They haven’t been washed in weeks, these pants, they have a greasy sheen on them like bear fur. Your father yanks his pants up again and again as he scrubs, but they never stay where they should.
You think about leaving again, hiding out in the woods for an hour or two and then coming back and knocking on the door unannounced one more time. Maybe this time you’d yell “ATF!” in a deep voice. Maybe that would work.
You slide your belt off and hold the piece of leather out to your old man. It takes a second for your father to figure out that you are giving him the belt to keep and when he does he shakes his head no.
“I am sick of seeing your asscrack,” you tell him. You sit back down and take a pull of moonshine straight from the bottle. Your father stands there holding the belt in his hand like it’s a snake that’s just had the life wrung out of it.
After a while, like you’d hoped, the room starts to spin and then begins to dip and roll. You set your head down on the table, shut your eyes.
You wake up to the back and forth of the saw. You see your father kneeling over the mattress, shirtless now, clumps of down stuck to his sweaty chest. It’s like the man’s molting, morphing into something new.
There’s a big puddle of drool next to you on the table. You rub your eyes, pinch the crust from the corners.
Your father nods and then he turns away from you and resumes his sawing, ZZeeeZZaaa, ZZeeeZZaaa, back and forth.
You stumble over to the sink, cup your hands under the faucet, splash water on your face. You look out on the overcast sky, the clouds blocking the morning light. There’s a hunting knife in the drying rack and you grab onto the handle. A chill spreads up your chest and you have to steady yourself on the kitchen counter.
“You gonna puke?” your father asks. You look at him. His eyes are teary, surrounded by that all pink puss.
“No,” you tell him even though you can feel the salt rising up from your stomach into the back of your throat. “No way.”
You grip the knife and stumble over to the bed. Your father stops sawing and watches you.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
You ignore him. You wrap your fingers around the handle of the knife and then you lift it up into the air and ram it down into the mattress. You twist the blade out and then you slam it down again.
“What are you waiting for?” you ask your father. He nods and then he picks up his saw and the two of you claw and rip and pull and gouge that mattress like there is someone trapped inside it, someone trapped inside that desperately needs to breathe.
SHOO, SHOO
Shoo, shoo, my wife said, but those were not the words. Quite obviously those were not the words. We might as well have thrown a bottle of Jack and a dime bag of skunk weed down from our bedroom window and said, Hunker down fellas, stay awhile. These were jazz musicians and my wife had said shoo.
Earlier that day, we’d gotten the test results. It ended up being both of our faults. Her eggs were bad and my sperm was lazy. We sat in the parking lot of the clinic for about an hour after our appointment, in that car of ours that you started with a screwdriver and stopped by pulling up on the emergency brake. I paged though a glossy pamphlet that made adoption look cool and fun.
“I was ready to blame you and then pretend I wasn’t blaming you,” she said. “I was ready to blame myself and then not believe you when you said it wasn’t my fault.”
“Exactly,” I told her.
“I really don’t know what to do now,” she told me.
“Totally,” I said.
- - - - - - - -
I’d already called the cops. I’d already held the phone out the window and let the police dispatcher listen to the racket below, the joshing and stumbling and bellowing and knee slapping and the occasional horn bleat and rim shot.
“In my neighborhood, noise like that would be welcome,” the dispatcher told me. “I’d love to hear some noise like that sometime.”
I hung up the phone and kneaded my wife’s shoulders, pushing against the braids of her back muscle until I found bone.
“Maybe we could have a miracle baby,” I offered. “One of those against-all-odds babies that never should have happened. Everyone else has them,” I said, “why not us?”
After I said this, my wife got up and put on her robe. I watched as she began to drag our dresser across the bedroom floor. It was huge, this dresser, claw-footed, an heirloom, passed down from her grandmother and her grandmother’s grandmother before that.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
I watched as she lifted the dresser on the windowsill and then pushed it out the window. There was a loud crash, then a clattering of instruments, then voices yelling out below. My wife walked across the room and lifted up a bedside table and then tossed that out as well.
The musicians had run off by then, gone to wherever it is jazz musicians go when people get tired of their shenanigans, but my wife kept on—the good silverware, the coffee pot, those super sharp knives I bought off TV.
I got up and went into the bathroom. I took wet toilet paper and stuffed it into my ears. I laid down on the linoleum floor. I closed my eyes and listened to my heart echo all around me.
THE EGG
Scott lived on the point of a lake. The lake was part of a chain of lakes that from above looked like fingers on a hand. Scott and his father usually swam in the lake, except when there was heron shit on the beach and they were forced to swim in their indoor pool. If you screamed in the pool it echoed off the walls, but if you screamed on the banks of the lake the pine trees swallowed up the sound. Scott’s father often told Scott that lake swimming was one of the simple joys that everyone, no matter what their station in life, could enjoy.
One thing his father enjoyed more than swimming in the lake was firing people. Two summers ago, Scott canoed across the lake and burned down a cemetery and his father had fired Scott’s nanny. Another time Scott’s boa constrictor, Rusty Jones, died choking on their neighbor’s pet rabbit and his father fired Scott’s other nanny. Last summer, Scott’s older brother, Donald, had climbed up on the roof above the pool to break into the house to steal money for needle drugs and he had fallen through the roof and drowned. The morning after, Scott’s father fired everyone: the pool man, his security firm, his handyman and Scott’s new nanny, Pilar, who’d only been taking care of Scott for two days.
Sometimes Scott’s father went swimming in the lake even when there was heron shit all over the beach. When his father did this, he came inside and itche
d himself raw. Sometimes his father soaked in the hot tub to stop the itching and moaned Donald’s name loud enough to wake Scott from sleep. When this happened Scott wished that his father would just go down to the beach and moan there, where no one would hear or care.
As far as Scott was concerned, he was having a good childhood. His mother had died from a brain tumor shortly after he was born, but since he did not know her, it did not make him particularly sad. He knew that his mother was pretty and he knew that he resembled her in the way his eyelids sank over his dark eyes and in the way his upper lip curled. He looked like Donald in the way his chin clefted and his curly brown hair cowlicked over his forehead.
Scott was sadder about Donald’s death than about his mother’s death, but he was not horribly sad about either of them. Scott was much younger than Donald and most of the time Scott had spent with Donald recently involved Donald nodding off in the middle of a story or tearing apart Scott’s room looking for Scott’s secret money sock.
What Donald and Scott usually spoke about before Donald had died was their dad. Donald blamed him for everything in his life that had gone wrong. He would sit in Scott’s computer chair and drool onto Scott’s computer keyboard and tell Scott about how their father was going to ruin his childhood.
“Really?” Scott asked.
“It’s inevitable,” Donald told him. “He’s cursed and he makes sure that you share in his bad luck.”
“He seems fine to me,” Scott said. “Better than fine.”
“He’s an absentee parent,” Donald said. “He hides his love away like it is some sort of treasure.”
Scott did not agree with his brother that his dad was ruining his childhood. Scott’s life that summer consisted of eating anything he wanted and playing video games for hours on end. He could paddle his canoe out to the small islands in the finger lakes and spear birds or fish with the spear he’d found in the garage. He could also shoot birds or fish with the pellet gun he’d gotten last year for his birthday. Just as long as he did not burn anything else down and just as long as he buried anything endangered that he shot or speared, he would not be in any trouble with his dad.