“What’s a gear?” Copley sobs.
WALKING IN SILENCE THEY PASS family groups, couples in sneakers and jeans and windbreakers, outdoorsy teens in hiking boots with rucksacks. It takes them half an hour to reach Demon Point, climbing a steady path upward through woods until they arrive at a clearing where the yellowish earth is bare and muddy. A sign from the State Parks Department describes the composition of the soil, the balance of clay, sand, and silt, and the landscape visible from the Point, the river basin, the floodplain, the distant hills, the invisible mountains far to the west. Standing near the edge of compressed soil, they look down on the broad river spreading out of its banks, covering farmland for miles, trees poking out from black water, the whole region like a vast swamp except for the steadiness of the current, traveling south and east, broken cottonwood branches and whole trunks of trees caught up in its flow. Imagine all the drowned and displaced animals, the unnamed and forgotten, the homeless sleeping in hollows, unmissed by anyone. When the waters recede there will be bodies.
The boy and his mother solidify their position, separating themselves from him, standing to one side. Although feeling nothing but anger toward his son, Nathaniel fears what life without his wife would possibly mean.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he says, “I was just trying to make you see how serious it is.”
The boy turns away and Julia glares at Nathaniel, her eyes wet, and he mouths it again, his apology, reaching out for her. She shakes her head, wipes her eyes, snaps her body away from him. Other people are watching. He hates to be noticed. They turn around, falling back into their usual order, Copley leading Julia, with Nathaniel at the rear.
Copley insists on looking for the ruined chimney and stairs. They wander for half an hour through trees but can find no trace of either—proof, Nathaniel knows, that the boy is a liar: lies revealed by facts, by empirical evidence.
Light drains out, distances shorten, the visible world closes in, amber leaves darken except where the last sun flames them into gold. As they leave the reserve Nathaniel tries again to pull Julia and Copley closer to his body, feeling as though, at last, some understanding has been reached and their lives will return to the even and regular course that was their character for so many years, but then Julia pulls away once again, taking Copley with her. There are instants, flashes, even in the course of this walk, when he thinks that his and Julia’s lives would have been happier without Copley, that they should simply have carried on childless, focusing only on each other, and that, if by some accident they were childless again, they might start over afresh, newly happy. Grief would mark the transition. He would grieve for his son if he died, for the boy he used to be rather than the monster he has become.
Their rubber-soled shoes make no sound on the compacted earth where fallen leaves have already been ground to dust by the passage of other feet. Nathaniel looks at the path stretching from the sign at the perimeter of the reserve and leading into the heart of their property. Someone else has been walking here—perhaps only Louise, but possibly others as well. It would be worth extending the fence, enclosing the part of the woods belonging to them, posting NO TRESPASSING signs; if people are accessing his property, he could be liable for any illegal activity that might be occurring, even without his knowledge.
The broad tall man steps out of a triangular clump of firs, looking as startled as they are. There is a staggered, collective intake of breath, a yelp from Copley, and a deep bellow from the man, who wears a suit of green camouflage and carries a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. The man is at least a foot taller than Nathaniel; he is lean and muscular, his skin tanned, hair dark and glossy, cuts on his face and bandages on his hands.
“Man, you scared us,” Nathaniel says, trying to smile.
“You scared me,” says the man.
“Huh. What are you doing back here?”
“I was hunting.” The man steps to one side, revealing the carcass of a deer, collapsed on the leaves, eyes wide and staring. The ground is a mess of blood and entrails. Nathaniel feels a loosening of the ligaments in his legs, a hot flush rushing through his calves and thighs, as though he is standing without protection, buffeted by wind, on the edge of Demon Point.
“I can see that. I guess you didn’t realize you were on private property.” Nathaniel keeps smiling as his voice skews high and queer.
“No, I didn’t. I thought I was still on reserve land.”
Nathaniel laughs. “No, no. I’m afraid the reserve ends a ways back there, near the sign. You can’t miss it.”
“I guess I’ll just take my kill, if you don’t mind, and be on my way.”
“That’s fine. No harm done. I’ve been meaning to put up a sign.”
The man nods and smirks.
Nathaniel feels Copley reach out and clasp his hand. He’s so relieved by the contact that he squeezes back, trying to be reassuring, all the while knowing that this man with his gun and knife—the blade flashes at the man’s trim waist, blood smeared on the camouflage pants—could bring down the three of them in an instant. He decides that they should stay there, standing and waiting, watching while the man hoists the carcass onto his shoulder, and stomps away in the direction of the reserve. When the man is out of sight the woods are silent except for the screaming of jays.
“I think that was the man,” Copley whispers when they are safe in the backyard with the gate locked behind them.
“What man?” Julia asks.
“The giant. The man in the basement.”
“For goodness’ sake stop pretending, Copley,” Nathaniel shouts. All the fantasy, the giants, the ruined houses in the forest, stairs leading underground, it is all so exhausting. “It’s not funny to make things up. That man could have been dangerous.”
“I know,” Copley whines. “That’s what I’ve been telling you.”
THE PARTY AT BRANDON AND Azar’s is still going on, music coming from inside the house, the back doors open, spreading a foreign beat through the neighborhood, which Nathaniel knows is against the Dolores Woods bylaws.
The call takes less than two minutes. A woman answers, directs him to give the name—if known—and address of the individual to be reported, as well as a physical description, the nature of the offense, and any other pertinent information. Closed in his study, Nathaniel speaks his neighbor’s first name into the receiver, gives the address next door, describes Azar’s appearance, mentions that he is widely rumored to be an illegal alien who has outstayed his tourist visa, and that he lives with another man and a small child who are, apparently, American citizens.
“And they’re not implicated?” the woman asks.
“The other man isn’t, I don’t think. He’s as American as you or me. The girl I don’t know about.”
As soon as he puts down the phone, realizing he knows nothing of substance about the men next door, a sickness rises in his stomach.
LOUISE RETURNS AFTER DINNER LOOKING shaken. Her hair is untidy from being under the hood of her windbreaker, her skin gray, upper lip cracked. After Julia puts Copley to bed, they sit with Louise in the kitchen and offer her a drink, which she declines. She would prefer a cup of tea.
“Because of the flooding I parked near your office, Nathaniel, and took the bus downtown to meet my friend for lunch,” she says, trying to catch her breath. “Before we reached my stop, the bus was pulled over by an unmarked car. These two men in uniforms got on, but they weren’t police, and then I noticed they were from your company, Nathaniel. I thought they were just checking people’s tickets but they made the bus driver lock the door of the bus. They told everyone to produce some form of photo identification that proved our right to be in the country. I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was a joke and I laughed before I knew what was good for me. One of them came right over and asked for my driver’s license and I reached into my purse to get my billfold and discovered I’d taken out all the cards a
nd left them in my other purse. I just had cash and my bus pass. Other people were showing their IDs to the other man and then he got to this Mexican-looking fellow at the back who didn’t have an ID and the man in the uniform got on his phone and called for backup. I don’t know who he called but another car arrived and two other men got onboard and all this time I’m scrambling through my purse trying to find something to prove I’m as American as I sound. They took the Mexican and put plastic ties around his hands and shoved him in the back of that car and I thought I was in for it too but finally I said to the men, listen, I work for Mr. Noailles, who’s a big shot at EKK. They looked skeptical but I begged them to phone you. There wasn’t any answer so I asked them to phone the company and check to see if there was a Mr. Noailles and they did and that was the only reason they let me go. I was so upset I got off the bus at the next stop and walked back to the car.”
“That’s terrible, Louise,” Julia says. She reaches out to touch the old woman’s arm, the alliance as clear to Nathaniel as ever. “What kind of company are you working for, Nate?”
What gives her the right to call him Nate? She’s never done it before, not in all their married life. He shrugs, looking at them both, and says the only thing he can think to say: “They were just doing their jobs. We have a search-and-detain contract with Immigration & Customs. You can’t fault them for what they have to do. In fact, you might say they failed to do their jobs properly. They shouldn’t have let you go until they could reach me to confirm you work for me. These days, you just can’t go around without carrying ID, Louise. We have to think about national security.”
The old woman shakes her head. “All I know is I haven’t been treated like that since the sixties. And I thought those days would never come back.”
Louise excuses herself and thuds up the back stairs to her bedroom while Nathaniel and Julia stand in silence. She loads cups and plates into the dishwasher, avoiding looking at him until she has no choice. There’s an expression on her face he hasn’t seen before. When she opens her mouth, her lips pull tight and her chin trembles.
“Who are you?” she says.
“It’s been a long day,” he says, “you’re tired.”
“I’m not tired. I’m—in shock. I don’t recognize you.”
“I’ve just been saying what’s true. We have to stop living such soft lives.”
HE SWITCHES ON THE TELEVISION in the den and turns up the volume so everyone knows what he’s doing, flicking from news to weather before settling on Saturday Night Live. For an hour he laughs as loud as he can, even when nothing funny is happening on the screen, and only turns it off after midnight. When he comes to bed he finds the door locked, light seeping out from the threshold into the dark passage. He jiggles the knob, knocks, calls out in a low voice to Julia but she never answers. As the light goes off he kicks the door at its base and rakes his fingernails down the wall.
He makes out the couch in his study and locks himself inside. Just let them try to wake him up in the morning. He’ll spend the day alone, ignore them all, show them what it means to be ostracized.
When he finally sleeps he dreams of the man in the woods with the gun and the deer. The man has him on the ground, prone, Nathaniel’s hands tied behind his back with a plastic cord, and the man is pulling the jeans from Nathaniel’s body. He struggles against the man’s grip, trying to squirm away as he feels a cord looping his feet, twining in and out around his bare ankles as the man huffs and grunts, smelling of gasoline and sweat and cut grass. Nathaniel looks up to see a deer hanging from a tree, suspended over a ruined chimney, smoke wafting up as the carcass turns, slowly roasting, its two front legs huge, engorged with blood and throbbing. He feels the man pushing into him, the hard sharp shock of pressure slamming up through his body, skin against his skin, rough and slick.
His father never took him hunting. His father does not hunt. His father would never know what to do with a gun or a deer except to chart the social and manufacturing history of the gun, the legacy of hunting deer and their place in the American diet, the law passed down from Deuteronomy that sanctioned their eating and sacrifice as a species. He opens his eyes to find it is already light—or at least dawn, gray and fog-choked. The dream, like so many of his most vivid nightmares, occurred in the shallowest period of sleep, when his brain was already half awake, mulling and stewing. His father is no hunter.
It is only six but he gets up, goes to the adjoining bathroom, puts on the clothes he wore yesterday after sleeping all night in the nude. There is a stain on the fitted sheet covering the foldout mattress. He removes the sheet, balling it up, and sees that the stain is dark, still wet, and appears to be spreading, turning the pale blue mattress a deep navy. He returns to the bathroom, moistens a towel, and tries to scrub away the stain, succeeding only in making it larger, wetter, more incriminating. Placing a dry towel over the spot, he folds up the bed, putting the cushions back in position. At some point he will need to replace the mattress, although there is no urgency; no one else is going to sleep on it, no one else will bother to open it.
Mulling over the events of Saturday, he feels close to remorse, if not for the intention behind his words and actions, then for the way they were expressed. Aggression has never been his style; if anything, he has sought to bleed aggression from his interactions with other people as a way of being less like his father. He sees now that yesterday was a slip, brought on by fatigue and stress. As much as he wants to believe in the new work he is doing, he suspects it is wrong. He knows that what happened to Louise is wrong, that the right of EKK employees to pull over city buses and detain, however briefly, law-abiding American citizens, demanding they prove their right to be in the country of their birth, on public transit, is at best a legal gray area, although one not without some precedent. The problem is one of style and tone, the overbearing aggression, which is, he fears, poisoning his own way of being in the world. The white leather couch stares back at him and he can see the dark navy stain rising up from the cloth and metal innards, surfacing and spreading along the bleached hide, a blue so deep it is almost black. He runs his hands across the cushions, feeling for moisture, sniffing his fingertips for the ozone smell of his own fluids. Nothing. Dry. Odorless.
It is time to start fresh, to make coffee and waffles for everyone, set them all on a new course. “I am Nathaniel Noailles, head of the house, leader of my family, captain of the ship.” A good leader admits fault: he will apologize if what he said upset or frightened Copley, and find a way to rephrase his exhortation, explaining that he is only concerned about his son’s long-term health and livelihood and wellbeing since he is such an obviously intelligent and sensitive child. He loves his son—no, of course he does.
Thoughts catch and tear; these are the things Julia will want to hear, will perhaps even expect to hear if he has any hope of mending the situation. Put it right, Nate, get it back together. Don’t be so small, don’t be such an insect.
But when he opens the door to the hall, he knows he will not be making waffles and he will not be apologizing to anyone. All along the floor and rising up the walls, scrawled in red crayon, in handwriting that could only belong to a child, are the words GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY.
The graffiti covers the doors of his study and the master bedroom, the floor and walls of the landing to a height of four feet, and on the door to Louise’s
bedroom, surrounded by the storm of GO AWAY, there is another word, a single utterance, blocked out in black marker:
NIGGER
The only surface untouched by graffiti is Copley’s own door.
Nathaniel feels the pressure rise again in his chest, the old rage expanding.
“Copley!” he screams, “Copley! Out here now! COPLEY!”
The door to his son’s room opens and the small white face appears, hands trembling. He feels nothing but hate for this boy, wants to obliterate the monster he created, make him disappear, or transform him into something else altogether.
“Stand with your back against the wall,” he shouts. Copley gapes at the vandalism, looking surprised, such a good, mincing little actor. “Raise up your arms,” Nathaniel says, as Copley starts to whimper. The boy’s arms reach above the line of the graffiti. Julia and Louise are standing in the hall now, idiot jaws slack. Nathaniel’s hands shake, he watches himself telling his son to go to his room, hears himself tell his wife that something serious is going to have to be done. After the warning he gave Copley yesterday, to have this shit thrown in his face is too much, never mind the offense directed at Louise. The camel’s back is broken, this is a hundredweight of straws. Even Julia, he can see, who has been the kid’s champion from the beginning, looks at Copley now with confusion and disappointment. Doors slam. Rage pumps him full, fills his veins, his lungs; his temples throb, he sees meteoric silver stars everywhere he looks: the red wax, the time it will take to clean it off, Nathaniel’s whole body shaking, his chest inflated, bursting, and then, arising from deep in his gut, a howl that flies out of his mouth, flies and fills every room, shaking the house into silence.
6:20 AM: He sits on his bed, sniffling although he is trying to stop. He hears his father shouting in the hall, “I hate that kid, I’m gonna kill him.” He believes what his father says and starts to cry, waiting for his mother or Louise to come, to bring him his breakfast. His father is going to kill him, but first he hears him go downstairs. There is shouting in the kitchen, his mother and father, but he cannot understand what they are saying. The door opens and Louise comes in, closing it behind her. “You didn’t do it, did you?” she asks. He can’t speak, he chokes and hiccups and sobs, shaking his head. “Hold on to yourself,” she says, “and don’t worry. It’s going to be okay. We’ll fix it.” She rubs his back for a moment and then leaves him alone again. He knows it is the man in the basement, the man they saw in the woods with the gun and the deer. He has tried to tell them in every way he knows. He has showed his mother the hatch in the pantry and even then she did not believe him. While he is thinking about how he can convince them he is telling the truth, he lies back down and begins to fall asleep, thinking of the shock he felt when they arrived at the barbecue yesterday and Austin was standing in the middle of the neighbors’ backyard. He dreams that Austin pushes him off the diving board and out into space, and as he is falling, he looks down, only to see there is no water left in the pool.
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