by Kevin Wilson
Their father was at the house when we returned. One of his friends was sitting in an idling truck and the kids seemed happy to see their dad, who was shoving some of his clothes, and a twelve-pack of beer, into yet another garbage bag. The house, I determined, was 30 percent garbage bags. The kids wanted to hug him, but he turned slightly away. “I’m injured,” he told them. “No heavy lifting for a good long while, kiddies.”
I didn’t want to look full on, but I was curious as to the exact state of his incapacitation. He looked sheepish and a little peeved, but that might easily be his default state. He was a tiny man, skinny to the point of breaking in half, and his teeth had that brown rot of chewing tobacco.
“I have to recuperate,” he told us. “I’m staying with Jerry for a few days, until I can get back to work.”
“What about Cindy?” my girlfriend asked.
“She’s still in jail, I think,” he told her.
“Could we maybe talk about this on the porch,” I said, trying to be a grown-up. “Away from the kids?”
“They’ve heard so much worse,” he said.
“I believe it,” I told him.
“But are you going to press charges?” she asked him.
“Not up to me,” he replied.
“Really?”
“Well,” he continued, “I don’t pretend to be a lawyer. I don’t think it’s up to me, though. She brought this all on herself, so she’s got to clean it up by herself.”
“And what about the kids?” my girlfriend asked him.
“Can’t you just keep watching them?”
“Until when?” I asked.
“Until Cindy comes back,” he said, getting irritated.
“Fine,” my girlfriend said. “Fine, go get drunk and have fun.”
“This is all your sister’s fault,” he said, and then he pushed past us and hobbled outside. He turned, noticed the garbage bags I was holding, and asked, “What’s in those?”
“We washed some clothes for the kids,” I said.
“Did you do any of my laundry?” he asked.
We shook our heads. If there had been a kebab skewer anywhere in reach, my girlfriend would have stabbed him with it.
“Well, thanks a lot,” he said, and eased into the truck before they drove off, leaving us alone, again, with the kids.
The kids fought. They shared the same spaces, made paths in each other’s footprints. It was necessary, to keep your space singular, to place an elbow in someone’s mouth, teeth on an ankle, knuckles digging into someone’s back like rough stones. After twenty or thirty attempts to keep the magnets of their feet and fists from attracting another’s, I gave up and let the ruin come down on top of me. I noticed that this happened without much resistance on my part. This was life, I imagined. Or, rather, this was a terrible life, the way you slowly gave in to your surroundings and let it wash over you. I did not completely notice the smell of the house by this point, honestly.
Finally, what we had been expecting since the moment we entered the house happened; my girlfriend’s sister called from jail. I kept the kids away from the phone, left my girlfriend to her pained privacy. One of the cats peed on a magazine that was lying on the floor and the younger girl picked up the magazine and simply moved it to the coffee table. I noticed that not a single toy of theirs was intact. This was, I began to understand, by design. If you ruined your own toys enough, no one else would try to steal them.
“Okay,” my girlfriend said when she returned only a few minutes later. “It’s complicated.”
I walked into the bathroom with her and she discussed the basics, which was all she could get out of her sister. Bail was set, and the charges weren’t as bad as they could have been, mostly regarding the shit she gave the police who arrested her. My girlfriend needed to come up with five hundred bucks for bail. It was a lot of money for us. I do tattoos and my girlfriend does piercings at the same shop; we’re not rich. But we are not in a single dollar of debt, and the reason for this was that we didn’t put up bail for every idiot we knew who got locked up. Then I thought about the four kids, all of them in our apartment, all the breakfast cereal they would inhale, and it seemed like five hundred was a fair price for our freedom.
“What about the kids?” I asked.
“I imagine she’ll get to keep them for now,” she said. “Maybe child services will be involved at some point, but who knows. I think they get to keep the kids as long as the kids don’t get hurt.”
“I’m happy,” I admitted, “but it still seems kind of fucked-up. It seems like a stabbing should invite some sort of inquiry into your fitness as a parent.”
“The deeper you get into this shit,” my girlfriend said, “the more you realize that nobody is keeping anyone else from fucking things up.”
I bought a boatload of pizzas and brought them back to the house, where I found the kids helping to straighten up the living room. There were eight garbage bags filled with detritus and old food and what may or may not have been actual shit. There was a landfill of cheese curl dust between the cushions of the sofa. Heavy objects like broken furniture and boxes of rain-diseased textbooks had been moved from the middle of the room, like hostages in a negotiation, and pushed against the walls as if to keep the house propped up. It gave space to the room and allowed some measure of air to circulate. My girlfriend emptied the remains of a can of Febreze into the air and the room just swallowed it whole.
In their newly laundered clothes with their hair combed, the children merely looked like freaks in a carnival show instead of wild animals. They were on the floor, huddled around the stack of pizza boxes like it was a campfire, and the youngest one said a short blessing that started off as a prayer and ended as a death metal intonation, the other kids simply kneeling on the floor as if expecting benediction, against all signs that suggested the opposite. We ate and it felt, for the first time, like an actual family and not adventurers in an inhospitable, unstable region. We smiled and our teeth were not scary. They were just the quickest way to show happiness. I imagined my girlfriend and me ten years down the line, the faces of the children replaced with those of our own design. It made me long for the future, which I never, ever, did in real life.
The same routine as the night before, my girlfriend got the middle kids ready for bed. They lined up and gave me a hug. They smelled like kids, powdered sugar and belly lint, and it made me tender toward them. They scrambled into their bedroom and it wasn’t long before they were asleep. I rocked the little boy against my chest until his head lolled to the side and I transferred him awkwardly to one of the sofas. He twitched like his foot was keeping a kick drum time to his own unsteady heartbeat. His dreams, I could not imagine.
My girlfriend and I sat on the floor and watched the oldest do her thing with the video game, finding no weapon to her liking, eventually giving in to her inevitable and quick death. She wanted, I now understood, to be stronger than anything evil. But she never would.
Eventually, my girlfriend yawned and retired to the bathtub. I kissed her and continued to watch the oldest kid nervously scroll through the weapons for the millionth time: an arc welder, a Molotov cocktail, a Bowie knife. It would never end, the possibilities for ruination. She eventually chose the Bowie knife and tried to hack a zombie into bite sizes, but it got the jump on her and it was game over.
“Fuck,” she finally said.
“This is a hard board,” I said without conviction.
“No duh,” she responded. “It’s the hardest board in all video games. I got the cheat code off the Internet just to get here. I used some of my own money to buy all the weapons that don’t even come with the actual game. I’ve done all the shit I’m supposed to and I just keep getting ass-killed like some chump. Nobody on the message boards will even talk about this board.”
“What are you supposed to do?” I asked.
“Not get killed.”
“That’s it?” I asked.
“I guess so.”
It ma
de sense enough to me. Surrounded by death and decay and no hope of anything getting better, all you could hope for was not to fall into the same fate.
“Just run,” I finally said.
“Yeah, okay,” she said, making a wanking motion with her free hand.
“I’m serious,” I said. “Don’t fight them. Just run as fast as you can.”
She considered this, wondered if she was being mocked. “I do have some boots somewhere in this game that make me run really fast.”
“Use them. Just run and don’t stop running.”
She got the boots from the inventory and restarted the game. Before the zombie dropped out of the tree, she was already digging into the earth and pushing herself forward. The zombie fell out of the frame.
“Shit,” the kid said, alive for as long as she’d ever been alive. “Fucking shit.”
“Keep running,” I said. On the little map in the upper left-hand corner, I could see a swarm of red dots forming behind her. They moved not quickly but with singular purpose.
“I’m running,” she said. She ran and ran and ran, and the territory evaporated under her feet. She jumped over any nonliving impediment. Anytime her route was cut off, she changed directions and kept running. It was like the Pied Piper, trailing an unending line of zombies. She ran and ran and scorched the earth behind her until, finally, nearly an hour later, there was nothing left.
“Fucking shit,” she said, looking over at me. The game suddenly shut down and the screen had returned to the title. “I beat that shit,” she said. For the first time, I could see a radiance inside of her.
I offered her my extended hand for a high five, but she just smirked and shook her head. She restarted the game and went back into her inventory. I knew what was coming. Even when you’ve smashed through the people who want to fuck you over, you still want to keep tabs on the things that might keep you safe. I stood up, my bones popping. “Good night,” I said, and she nodded, her eyes that blue glaze of reflected screens.
I walked into the bathroom and knelt over the tub. My girlfriend was asleep but just barely. It was easy enough, just with my presence, to bring her back to me.
“It’ll be fine tomorrow,” she said, still half asleep.
“Not for them,” I said.
“I guess not,” she replied.
After a few moments of silence, she said, “I asked my sister and she said that they had never finished the paperwork for custody.”
“So what does that mean?”
“The kids don’t go to me. They go somewhere, and I guess it could maybe be me, but it’s not the law.”
She adjusted her body, pulling tighter into herself, and I kicked off my shoes and squeezed into what was left of the tub. We were jammed into each other, sharing a foxhole, and we held each other tight against the constant presence of unhappiness that infiltrated the air around us. We would tear out our fingernails digging our way to something good. The world would try to fuck us and we would stab it with whatever weapon was available to us. We would make every object a weapon that would protect us from anything that tried to convince us that we would not live forever in happiness.
Housewarming
Mackie’s son needed help with the deer. “It’s in our pond,” Jackson said to his father, “and we’ve got a housewarming party tomorrow afternoon and this damn deer is in our pond. It’s dead, by the way. I don’t remember if I told you that.”
“I assumed that,” Mackie said. “This is the first I’ve heard of a housewarming.”
“It’s just some people from work,” his son said without pausing. “It’s no one you would want to be around.”
“How did it die?” he asked.
“Well, it drowned, I guess. It’s floating in our pond. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“You want me to come up there?” Mackie asked.
“Why do you think I’m calling?” his son replied, and both of them hung up the phone without saying another word.
Mackie had driven the route from his own house to Jackson’s cabin over a dozen times in the last month. Since Jackson and his wife, Cindy, had bought the house in November, Mackie had been coming by to help renovate, make it livable.
Two weeks after closing, his son called during his break at the factory and told him, “Cindy says we should put new tile in the kitchen before we move in, since we’re doing all these other projects at the same time.” Mackie showed up at the empty cabin—Cindy was staying with her sister until the repairs were finished—and found the boxes of tile waiting in the kitchen, the old linoleum pulled up and curled in the corner of the room. He started mixing mortar, snapped on his knee pads, and got started. The house smelled of new paint and wood chips, and Mackie wished he’d brought a mask for his face. When his son got off work, his truck winding down the long driveway, headlights flickering through the trees, Mackie was cutting tile with a wet saw he’d brought from his own house. With each cut, the water shot into his face like sparks, his eyebrows dripping wet. “We’re making good progress,” Jackson said, peering inside the house at the kitchen floor. “We are,” Mackie replied, drying the re-formed tile with a towel, touching the new shape along the smooth edges.
Mackie’s knees ached from the constant kneeling, fitting the tile into place. His son was standing over him, his pockets filled with foam dividers to place between the tiles. It was good to work together, Mackie feeling his son’s eyes on his hands, learning how to make things work. Another piece had to be cut and he did not want to stand again, to walk to the front porch and lean against the saw. “Jackson,” he said, “hand me a tile.” Jackson walked gingerly to the box and brought one back. Mackie took out his red pencil and marked off the section, handing the tile back to his son. “Make that cut,” he said. Jackson went outside and Mackie listened to the whine of the saw as it started, the sound of metal touching ceramic, and then he heard his son shouting, “Goddamn it all.” Mackie shot up, immediately blaming himself for not doing it to begin with. He was already hoping for the best of the worst, just a finger, not his thumb.
“Motherfucking, son of a bitch,” his son was screaming, down on one knee, facing away from Mackie. The wet saw was turned over, the dull gray water pooling around it. When Mackie knelt by his son, Jackson stood up and pushed past his father, back into the house. Mackie looked around for a digit, blood, but he didn’t see anything. He ran back to the house and found Jackson in the bathroom, water running, examining his face. “A goddamned piece of tile popped up and hit me in the face.” Mackie looked at his son’s reflection in the mirror; a small cut was bubbling blood just under his right eye. “I could’ve been blinded,” Jackson said, staring angrily at Mackie. “Don’t we have any son of a bitching goggles?” Mackie shook his head. Jackson turned off the water, took out his handkerchief, and pressed it against the cut. “Well, I’m driving to the Walmart to get some, then.” His son was out of the house, into his truck, and pulling out of the driveway, while Mackie stood on the porch, lifting the wet saw upright. He worked until midnight, waiting for Jackson to return, and finally gave up. He rolled out his sleeping bag and slept in his clothes, waiting for morning, listening to the house settle around him.
The next day, Jackson showed up with a bandage covering the wound, a pair of goggles resting on top of his head. “Got to be safe,” he said. “We can’t get hurt anymore.” Mackie nodded and they worked into the evening, finishing the job.
When he got to the house, Cindy was waiting on the porch. “He’s waiting for you,” she said. “It’s awful, that deer. You can see it from the house, just floating in the water. Its eyes are open.” She hugged him and then pointed toward the trail, which led down to the pond. “Don’t let him get too angry,” she said. “He takes everything so personally. This isn’t his fault, of course.” Mackie nodded. “I know,” he said.
Jackson was throwing rocks at the deer, which was floating about ten or fifteen feet from the shore, its swollen belly rising above the surface of the w
ater, a small island. Mackie stood and watched his son for a few seconds without making his presence known. His son had surprisingly good aim, the rocks cutting through the cold air and thumping against the belly of the deer. “Fucking deer,” his son said to no one. Mackie wondered if Jackson was trying to sink the deer, trying to get it fully underwater and hidden. He stepped out from the trees and waved to his son. Jackson nodded, then threw another rock. “This isn’t going to be pleasant,” Jackson said. “I know,” Mackie responded.
Jackson had come back to Tennessee last year, to stay, Mackie hoped. After high school, Jackson had left to work as a mechanic in Huntsville, and then moved around the southeast for the next eight years, never staying long in any one place, Mackie’s letters to him bouncing back with no known forwarding address. He would wait until Jackson’s next phone call, locating his son for the time being. Sometimes he would get calls from jail, Jackson asking his father to post bail and Mackie would be in the car, driving for hours to Louisville or Mobile or Daytona Beach to retrieve his son. This particular time, Jackson had shot out the tires of his neighbor’s car. “He’d cut me off a few days before,” Jackson had told his father on the drive back from the police station. “Cut me off and nearly made me slam into him. I yelled at him and the son of a bitch smiled. Smiled.” Mackie could feel his son’s anger vibrate within the car, as if the event was happening all over again. “Well,” Mackie said, “he probably don’t remember that.” Jackson smiled, his face white from an oncoming car’s headlights. “I know that,” he said. “That’s why I shot his tires. To remind him.”
We need a boat,” Jackson said. Mackie agreed with him, but they didn’t have a boat. He walked toward the edge of the woods and dragged a fairly long branch back to the shore, something to work with, a tool. He sat down on the ground, which was wet from the melting frost, and took off his shoes and socks, rolling up his pant legs. Jackson was still staring out at the deer, as if waiting for it to show signs of life, to swim to the shore and jump into the woods. “Okay,” said Mackie, but Jackson still didn’t move. “Okay,” he said again, “here’s what we’ll do.” Jackson turned and saw Mackie, barefooted. “Good lord, Dad, it’s thirty degrees out here.”