by Laura Furman
My dad left the year before, or the year before that. I was in either third or fourth grade. Apparently, when he and my mother could still joke around it was always about me coming to a bad end. At least, that’s what she said later. Like anybody could tell anything about anybody when they were nine years old. One Christmas, she said that as part of the joke he gave her a VHS of Boys Town, the movie where Spencer Tracy’s the priest and Mickey Rooney’s the tough kid who goes straight because he gets a new baseball glove or smells some home-cooked bread or some fucking thing.
She watched it every year around Christmas. I think it might’ve been the only thing he gave her that she didn’t throw out after he took off. She’d always go, “Your movie’s on,” after she put it in the machine, but she always ended up watching it by herself.
There was one scene in it I liked, where a kid at one of the big lunch tables at the home tells Mickey Rooney how easygoing the place is, and how if he wants he can go on being Catholic or Protestant or whatever. And Rooney tells him, “Well, I’m nothin’.” And the kid says back, “Then you can go right on bein’ nothin’. And nobody cares.” And one of the other kids showing him around says that on a clear day you can see Omaha from there. And Rooney goes, “Yeah? Then what’ve you got?”
I didn’t think I’d seen the movie that often, but I got it in my head, so I must’ve watched it a lot. There’s this other scene where they’re about to strap a guy who didn’t pan out into the electric chair. And the guy goes to Spencer Tracy, “How much time have I got, Father?” And Tracy goes, “Eternity begins in forty-five minutes, Dan.” And the guy asks him, “What happens then?” And Tracy goes, “Oh, a bad minute or two.” And the guy’s like “Yeah, I know. After that?” And Tracy tells him, “Dan, that’s been a mystery for a million years. You can’t expect to crack that in a few seconds.”
There were a lot of things I wanted to do about my appearance, but only so much could get accomplished until I got certain things squared away. I recognized that. I had a lot of stress. That’s what nobody understood. I was in the military and after that I was working two jobs and trying to raise a family, and it seemed like even so, living at home and doing nothing, I had more stress than I had back then. Back then I never complained about it, I just did it, but people didn’t realize that I was doing whatever the average person did times two. I took whatever shit the average person took times four. And I never said anything. I did my job and worked my eighty-hour weeks and knew as sure as shit that whatever I wanted was going to get taken away from me.
And the kind of thoughts I started to have people had all the time. But it was like everybody said: thinking and doing are two different things.
After my dog took the dump on her sidewalk, I didn’t see Janice around for like three weeks. I thought maybe she was avoiding me. Or maybe she’d gone to Florida. Or maybe she was dead. I wrote a note, finally, and stuck it in her screen door: “ARE YOU STILL INTERESTED IN DOG WALKING?” And then when I got home I remembered I hadn’t put my number on it. And then I remembered I hadn’t put my name on it.
That third week my dog finally flushed a turkey in the state forest and I blew its wing off. I took it home to my mother and she said, “I’m not cleaning that fucking thing.” And I said, “I bring you a whole turkey and you act like all I’m doing is making work for you?” And she said, “I’m not gonna start up with you,” and went back to her show. So I threw the turkey in our Dumpster. Then when I was walking the woods I thought that was stupid, so I hiked all the way back and pulled it out. I’d give it to some charity or church so some poor kid could have some decent meat. So somebody could get something good out of it.
The guy who sold me my Desert Eagle told me that it was the last of the Israeli ones and that no more were going to be imported. Somebody else told me later that that was bullshit. I got all the extras at the same time and taught myself how to change the barrel length, so the version I had in my new bag had the ten-inch barrel instead of the six. The guy at Gilbert’s Gun & Sportsman kept telling me he wanted to see it again. He called it the Hand Cannon. I joined an owners’ forum on one of the USA Carry Web sites for a little while to get some tips and just talk to somebody. My user name was MrNoTrouble and somebody trying to be funny asked if that was the name my mother gave me and I said yeah. I met some guys online who seemed okay and some of them said they knew what I was going through. One guy, triplenutz, didn’t live too far away and said we should meet up and go hunting together, but we never did. Another guy talked about taking his old toilet out back and letting fly at it with his Eagle from eighty yards. He recommended the experience for all Eagle owners. He said a piece of the flush tank broke the garage window behind him.
I got my dog from the stray facility at Fort Sill when I was leaving. I saw his photo on the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation Web site. The poor little fuck was just sitting there behind the chain-link looking at his paws. The adoption fee was fifty-two dollars, but that came with rabies and distemper-parvo shots, plus deworming and the heartworm test.
I stayed away a couple of days after the turkey incident and when I got back I sat on the porch and cleaned my rifle in the cold. After a while, the porch light went on and finally the door opened and my mother asked me to take her shopping. She had the door open only a little, to keep the heat in. “I need some things,” she said after I didn’t answer, like she was explaining.
“Why didn’t you have Owen take you?” I said. She’d had trouble driving since she hurt her back. It didn’t bother her to ride, though.
“He hasn’t been around since you left,” she said. “So you gonna take me or what?”
We went to the Price Chopper and the state package store. “It’s not for me,” she said when she told me about the second stop. “I’m getting stocking stuffers for Daryl.”
I went up and down the AM dial while she was in there. Every single song I heard was what my father used to call a complete and utter piece of shit. “Don’t ask me who Daryl is,” I said to her when she finally came out.
“You know who Daryl is,” she said. She dumped the bags on the seat between us.
“I thought this wasn’t for you,” I said, looking at the Jägermeister.
“I was here, I figured I might as well get something for myself,” she said.
The other bag was filled with little travel bottles of liquor. “I got an assortment,” she said. “He likes those and peppermint patties.”
“I think you got that thing they talk about on the news,” she said when we were halfway home. “PTSD. Is that what it is? I think you need to talk to somebody.”
“PMS,” I told her.
“I think you need to talk to somebody,” she said.
“I talk to somebody every day,” I told her. “Believe me, it’s no fucking picnic.”
“Owen said you could file a claim,” she said. “Everyone gets something from the government except my kid.”
“That’s because your kid’s an imbecile,” I told her. “We already know that.”
“All I’m saying is I think you need to talk to somebody,” she said. “And now I’m gonna drop the subject.”
When we got home, the poor fucking dog had wrapped himself around the tree with his chain. I don’t know why we left him outside, anyway. “You’re not gonna help me carry stuff in?” my mother said when I left her in the car.
She showed up at the door to my room a few hours later, after I was in bed. “There’s phone numbers and stuff you can find,” she said. “Owen told me.”
“So have Owen call them, then,” I said.
“Owen doesn’t need them,” she said.
“You got enough money,” I told her. “And I been through worse shit in this house than I been through out of it.” And that shut her up for like three days.
• • •
When she was finally ready to talk, I went back to the woods. I took the dog, but of course he ran away. I only found him again when I got back to the house. People l
ike to talk about cancer or strokes, but if I was going to get something I’d want to get cholera. I came across it on the Plagues & Epidemics Web site and somewhere else it said that cholera killed thirty-eight million people in India in less than a hundred years. It even sounds like nothing you want to fuck with: cholera.
After basic at Fort Sill, I was in for four and a half active and then four in the reserves. In the reserves I trained to be a 91 Bravo, which was a field medic, but I washed out. When they gave me the news, they said not to worry, they’d still find me something to do. I ended up working out at the Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Center. “What’d you do there?” my mother wanted to know when I got back. “Oh, you know, a little bit of this, little bit of that,” I told her. I think she was watching The Farmer’s Daughter. Even Owen had to laugh.
You want to talk about sad: even after all I been through, one of the saddest things I ever saw was a year after I got home, when my mother pulled over at a stop sign, it must’ve been ten below, and she’s got the window down and she’s scooping snow from the side mirror and trying to throw it on her windshield to clean it. We’d gone about three blocks and couldn’t see a thing before she finally pulled over. I’m sitting there watching while she leans forward and tosses snow around onto the outside of the glass. Then every so often she hits the wipers.
She did this for like five minutes. We’re pulled over next to a Stewart’s. They got wiper fluid on sale in the window twenty-five feet away. She doesn’t go get some. She doesn’t ask me to help. She doesn’t even get out of the car to try and do it herself.
• • •
My hair started falling out. I found it on my comb in the mornings. I could see where it was coming from. Not that anybody gives a shit, but you put that together with the teeth and you have quite the package.
I came in from thirty minutes of sliding slush off the porch and there was my kid’s voice on the machine. My mother was playing it over again and turned it off when I got inside. She went back to whatever she was doing at the sink.
“Were you gonna tell me he called?” I asked.
“You cleaned up all that ice already?” she asked me back.
“I didn’t do the ice. I did the slush,” I told her.
“What am I supposed to do about the ice?” she wanted to know. I left her and went into the living room. She said, “There’s a message from his mother, too. She says she’s gonna get a lawyer to hop your ass unless you start sending some money. And somebody else called,” she added once she was back with me in front of the TV.
I went out to the kitchen and played the machine. There was only one message and it was from the kid, saying he wanted to wish me a happy holiday. He said, “There was a thing about your unit in the paper, so I sent it up to you.” I could hear a little buzzing, maybe something in our phone, maybe something in his. “Let me know if you get it,” he said after a minute, like he was waiting for someone to answer.
I’d been getting a headache that felt like lights going on and off and trying to crack my skull. “Who else called?” I asked. I was still standing at the machine. The water from my boots was black from all the shit in the snow.
“How would I know?” my mother called from the living room. “She didn’t leave a name.”
“It was a woman?” I asked. “She wanted me? Was her name Janice?”
“I just said she didn’t leave a name,” she said. When I went back to the living room and stood in front of her, she said, “I can’t see,” meaning the television. “You got in here fast,” she added, after I sat on the sofa. “What do you got, a girlfriend?”
I kept thinking this was my one chance, and then about how Janice could’ve found my number. Maybe she asked someone at the library?
“You’re not answering me now?” my mother said.
“I’m trying to think here,” I told her.
She shut up for a while. Then she finally said, “I don’t know why anybody would want to give you the time of day.”
I was thinking I should get the dog and go over to Janice’s house, but it was sleeting. I figured I’d do it when it got better out. But I couldn’t sit still, and my mother finally said, “You’re shaking the whole floor,” meaning with my leg, so I went up to my room. The dog came up to check on me and took one look and went downstairs again.
Then it got so bad I had to go out anyway, so I hiked down to the creek and checked some of my traps. I was wearing my field jacket with the hood, but I still got soaked. Two of the traps I couldn’t find and there was nothing in the third, because I don’t even know if I’m setting them right, but a month ago I found one snapped shut with some blood around it in the snow. When I got back, there were police cars all around my house. I hid in the sandpit a few houses down and watched until they went away.
What is this what is this what is this? I was thinking. I was surprised how much it freaked me out. I had some tricks I’d come up with over the years to keep from losing it, and I used them all. I waited half an hour after the cop cars left and lay there banging my chin on my gloves. Who else did I know who’d be in a sandpit in the snow outside somebody else’s house?
The sleet changed to rain. It was so cold my head was rattling. One of the medics supposedly training me in the reserves used to call me TBI, for Traumatic Brain Injury. The first time he called me that, I told him I hadn’t had any brain injuries, and he said, “Well, maybe it happened when you were a baby.”
Finally, I stood up and came down the hill and circled my house on the outside. The backyard was like a lake. The light was on in my mother’s bedroom and I went up to the window. On the dresser under the lamp there was a pamphlet that said “Your Service Member Is Home!” The TV was going in the living room, but maybe she was in the cellar. I waited until she came up the stairs and then pushed through the back door.
“They’re looking for you, boy,” she said when she saw me. Not “You must be fucking freezing.” Not “How about a warm shower?”
“What’d they want?” I asked.
“They said they had a number of things they wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “They wanted to look in your room and I said, ‘You got a warrant?’ I told them you’d be back tonight.”
“What’d you say that for?” I asked.
“What was I supposed to tell them?” she said. “That you were out looking for a job?”
I went up to my room to think. There were some issues about prescriptions at the local pharmacy. Some bad checks back in Wichita Falls. There was a girl I’d scared by not letting her past me when we ran into each other in the woods. She’d torn her sleeve when she finally got away. It could’ve been a lot of things.
“I gotta go,” I said when I came back downstairs. “I’m gonna do some camping for a while.”
“Camping,” she said. “In this.” She put her hand out to the window.
“Don’t tell them where I went,” I said. “Far as you know, I never came home.”
“I should be so lucky,” she said.
I changed into dry clothes and put on like twelve layers and got together a rain fly and a cooking stove and a tent and a big pack full of cans of food and other shit and got out of there. “You taking your dog?” she called, but I never heard what she said after that.
It took me an hour to get to the end of the logging road, because I was covering my tracks with a pine branch as I went, and then another hour to find the duffel bag in the snow, and from there I followed a creek uphill way into the forest. I found a spot I already knew that had good cover and visibility and got everything set up and then started going through what I had and just what it was I thought I was going to do.
There was a trail fifty yards below that did a hairpin, and snowmobilers used it and cross-country skiers. Farther down was a waterfall and swimming hole and I remembered a notice on the library’s Christian Outings bulletin board about a faith hike for teens called the Polar Bear Mixer.
I figured, well, if I’m going t
o jail I might as well get something to eat first, so I made some stew. And while I was eating I started thinking that once the cops had me one thing would lead to another and I knew what went on in jail, I’d heard stories. So I emptied the duffel in the tent and got all geared up. I had stuff I didn’t even know I had. A bipod mount for the rifle and a winter-camo wrap for the stock and barrel and scope. Even winter-camo field bandages. When I was finished, I felt like this way I was at least ready for whatever.
But nobody came down the trail. It got dark. I got some sleep. Nobody came the next day, either. I had little meatballs for breakfast and sat around and waited and finally went out looking for rabbits, but the snow was too deep, so I had to come back.
I’d stepped in the creek and even with three layers of socks my feet were freezing. In the credits part of Boys Town right at the beginning there was a kid in an alley warming his hands over a fire in a bucket. I’d forgotten that.
The guy that gets electrocuted is the one who gives Spencer Tracy the idea for the orphans’ home in the first place. When they’re getting ready to take the guy to the chair, the governor tells him he owes a debt to the state, and the guy goes nuts on them. He asks where the state was when he was a little kid crying himself to sleep in a flophouse with drunks and hoboes. He says if he had one friend when he was twelve he wouldn’t be standing here like this. Then he throws everybody but Tracy out of his cell.