Copyright © Megan Stielstra, 2011
Published by ECW Press
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Stielstra, Megan
Everyone remain calm [electronic resource] / Megan Stielstra.
Short stories.
Type of computer file: Electronic monograph.
ISBN 978-1-77090-024-0
Also Issued As: 978-1-77090-023-3 (PDF)
I. Title.
PS3619.T53E94 2011 813’.6 C2011-905477-9
Developing editors: Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis
Cover design: David Gee
Typesetting and text design: Troy Cunningham
The publication of Everyone Remain Calm has been generously supported by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
For Christopher
01| Shot to the Lungs and No Breath Left
After Wade Dell Dallas put his fist in my eye on our third date, my father went after him with a .375 Holland and Holland Magnum.
Uncle Jack suggested that might be too much gun, seeing as the last thing it killed was a fourteen-hundred pound bull moose. Every year, my dad and his brothers and all their sons—some fifteen beefy muscled Alaskan guys between the ages of six and sixty—loaded up two weeks’ worth of gear and disappeared into the mountains, hunting moose. Or caribou. Or sheep, goat, elk—whatever had four legs to chase and a head to mount on the living room wall. I tried to imagine Wade’s head up there next to the moose—his big ol’ ears sticking out, the taxidermed skin wind-whipped and ice-burned raw, his stupid blue eyes blank and glassy. “Wade don’t weigh more than one-eighty,” Jack told my dad, who was squatted on the carpet loading up his field-pack. “That H&H’ll spray his face straight backwards through his brain.”
That’s a pretty nasty image, especially for a fifteen-year-old girl in such a fragile emotional state, and my dad looked over to see if I’d lose it or something. What he saw was me on the couch, curled up in a ball with a pack of frozen peas over my left eye, the eye that two hours before had swallowed Wade’s fist in a single gulp, knuckle bone on skull bone and everything went black. My dad turned to Jack then and said, “You see what he did to my girl?” His voice was quiet, the kind of calm that deep down points to crazy. “My one and only girl.” He stuck a six-inch fixed-blade into his backpack. Then a GPS, a 10 x 40 spotting scope, and a meat saw. “Besides, I’m not gonna shoot him in the face,” he said. “I’m gonna shoot him in the lungs.”
In the Lower Forty-eight, kids are taught not to run into moving traffic. Never talk to strangers. Ask before you pet the dog. In Alaska, we’re taught to shoot for the lungs. “Here,” Jack would say, pounding the meat between his chest and his armpit. “You aim here, for the lungs. A high shot’ll hit the spine and a low shot’ll hit the heart—either way, you’re golden.” My cousins and I hung on his every word: kill a moose, field-dress an elk, track a sheep, troll for salmon—we trained for the hunt the way other folks prep for the SATs, all my big boy cousins with their muscles and their rifles and their Suburbans and me, Shannon, the one lone little girl treading water in testosterone. I’ll tell you what, though; they never treated me any different. I was one of the boys: gimme a knife, a gun, and twenty rounds of 300 grain soft points and I’ll hold my goddamned own.
Dad’ll say, “You see that?” pointing to the twelve-point caribou mounted over the sofa. “My Shanny whacked that bastard when she was eight years old, so don’t give me none of that Girls Can’t Do horseshit. My girl put a bullet right through that bastard’s lungs!” Then he’d turn to me, his pigtailed daughter in size XS camouflage overalls with black paint smudged under her eyes to better blend into the brush. “Tell ’em, kiddo,” he’d say—this is how we showed off, me and my dad—“Tell ’em how come the lungs.”
I knew this script better than the Pledge of Allegiance. “When hit through the lungs,” I’d recite, “a moose or game of similar size will bleed out through their muscles until the lungs collapse and the animal can no longer breathe.” I’d seen this happen to every head up there in the living room wall and now—sitting on that couch with Wade’s fist pounding in the back of my brain, the entire left side of my face numb from the peas, my dad loading bullets into waterproof baggies, and my cousins all staring at me ’cause for the first time in our lives I wasn’t one of them—I imagined what would happen to Wade when Dad’s bullet slammed into the meat between his chest and his armpit.
It’s a scene straight outta some Vin Diesel movie: that big, six-foot pretty-boy is hard at work at the petrol plant, loading Exxon barrels onto the back of some truck. Suddenly—a hard, fast whack to the chest, so fast he’s not sure at first if it actually happened. He opens his mouth to speak but his breath is locked so he can’t get out the words, just two hollow gulps of air before his lungs soak red like a wet sponge and slowly, slowly, blood seeps through the canvas of his coveralls. In one fatal, horrible second everything connects: the dark red-brown staining his chest. The airless gasping like some cancer patient with a cigarette. The punch above his heart like a shotgun with too much pull and then, after he’s too empty of blood and air to keep on his feet, my dad walks right into his line of vision, that H&H Magnum pointed barrel to the ground. “Hey there, Wade, how you doing?” he says, and Wade’s stupid blue eyes go glassy and there’s more blood on his uniform than there is in his body and in the last single second of life left in him my dad squats down and whispers: “She’s my girl, Wade. My one and only girl.”
My dad—he loves me like crazy. You can’t hate that hard if you don’t have love.
My cousins ran around helping Dad pack—flashlight, binoculars, plastic moose call, nylon rope—all trying their best to avoid my eyes ’cause, really, what would they do then? Say Sorry? Get me more peas? Pet my forehead the way a mom might’ve done?
One by one, the women in my family disappeared, sneaking down to California where water waved instead of froze and the sun only shone for half the day. My dad and Jack and their brothers blamed the light—twenty hours of sun in the summer made you jumpy as a carton of Red Bull and twenty hours of dark in the winter was like living under a rock. “It takes some kinda woman to handle this life,” they’d say, and my mother wasn’t the kind they meant. One day I came home from elementary school and found her squatted on the sofa, talking to the caribou head. Another time, she bought me an Easy-Bake oven and all the guys—uncles and cousins and even my dad—started laughing. “What do you want Shanny to do with that?” he asked. “She’s a killer, my girl!”
Not long after that she was gone.
All that happened ten years ago, and my dad still won’t talk about
it—just loads up his gear and heads to the mountains; trailing, tracking, searching for something, always something. That day he went after Wade, once they’d all took off and I sat alone in the living room, I tilted my head back and talked to those heads, the moose and the caribou and the big ol’ curly horned sheep. I said how I miss her. How I still have that toy oven, hidden in my closet under a box of tackle. How sometimes I hate being one of the guys, how I want to put on some of those fancy shoes they sell at Coles and go out to dinner, and that’s why I liked Wade Dell Dallas and his stupid blue eyes and his Hey, sweetheart and his big, mechanic’s hands—because he is the only man I’ve ever known who’s made me feel pretty damn great about being a girl, even when the sonofabitch caught me right between the chest and the armpit, that shot to the lungs that stole the breath straight outta me.
02| Incredible
How it ended was, I got drunk. Like falling off the bar stool. Like lying on the floor and laughing at nothing. Like getting pulled to my feet by some random guy and falling over again, so he had to wrap his arms around my waist to keep me up. “Thanks,” I slurred. And, “You’re really ssstrong!” And, “You’re cute, too. You got a ssshaved head, and a sssweater, and that’s a lot of sssss’s.”
So of course I took him home, and we were making out in the street in front of my apartment—pawing, groping, chasing each other up the stairs, kissing on the floor in the hall, and there we were at the front door, slobbering all over each other—good drunken anonymous fun that always makes sense at the time and he said, “Should we go inside?” He had me pressed against the wall and I couldn’t stop laughing. “We can’t,” I remember saying, sliding my hands down the back of his pants and nodding sideways towards the door. “He’s in there.”
“What?” the guy said, pulling back. “You live with your boyfriend?”
“Oh no,” I said, still laughing. “There’s no boyfriend anymore!”
“Well then, who?”
“You’ll never guess,” I said. “Guessss.” I was really cracking myself up.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Tell me,” he said again.
“Tell me!” he insisted, so I said, singsong, “Okaaay. But you’re just going to think I’m dru-unk.”
He waited, and I leaned in close to his ear and whispered, “The Incredible Hulk lives under my bed.”
He pulled away and looked at me, one eyebrow raised.
“I’m serious,” I said. I squeezed his butt and tried to wink. “You wanna come see?” And then I was laughing and we fell through the door and clothes started flying as we stumbled down the hall: jacket, jacket, skirt, shirt, jeans, tights, all in our wake across my floor. I stopped in front of the bedroom and turned to face him in just my underwear. “Look,” I said. “I haven’t been in here in two weeks.” I was trying to be serious but I had the whiskey giggles. “You see,” I explained, “we had a fight.”
This guy, he doubled over like that was the funniest thing in the goddamn universe. All he had on was socks, and I watched him laugh, and then I was laughing, but I also wanted to cry, and run, and touch him, and all these feelings bubbled, sixty-proof, in my stomach. “Just remember I warned you,” I said, and then I opened the door.
It was dark in there, but enough moonlight was coming through the window to illuminate everything—silhouette of a dresser, outline of a closet, bed in the far corner, naked guy in socks. He tiptoed across the room and squatted down beside the bed. “Here?” he asked, rooting around beneath it.
Now, maybe it was the liquor, but I swear I heard music then, that Uh-oh, something’s going to hap-pen track, like in the movies when the pretty girl opens the basement door. “I’d get your hand outta there,” I said. The music was getting louder, beating at the back of my skull. “Are you scared?” he said, and the music got louder, louder, and as I opened my mouth to tell him Get back, just back away! a long, thick, green hand shot out from under the bed, grabbed this guy around the ankle and yanked, his heavy, naked body disappearing in one smooth pull. The bed started shaking then like it was possessed, the blankets lifting up and falling down, the springs squeaking and groaning, the headboard slamming into the wall and there was yelling and growling and screeching, and then—just as suddenly—silence.
Maybe you’re thinking I was just drunk. But it was for real. I swear.
How it started was my mother threw the television off the back porch. We were up on the fourth floor then, and I remember standing on my tiptoes to peek over the ledge and look down at the shattered TV on the pavement below. I don’t know why she did it—I was five then and didn’t understand their fights—but every time my dad came home with a new TV, my mom would wait until he left the apartment, calmly unplug it, push it out the back door, onto the porch, and over the ledge. No yelling or threatening or retaliation worked, so my dad did the only thing he could—he hid one. When my mom would leave on Saturday mornings to go shopping, Dad would unlock the cabinet where he kept his hunting rifles, take out the secret television, twist aluminum foil around its rabbit ears, and we’d watch The Incredible Hulk. When David Banner would turn into the Hulk, his muscles all flexing and ripping through his clothes, my dad would roar and run around the living room pounding on his chest. He’d pick me up in the air and toss me all around, saying, “I’m that tough, aren’t I, baby? I’m as tough as the Incredible Hulk!” He loved the Hulk, my dad, so much so that when he took off on Mom and me, he promised that I never had to worry, because “The Hulk’ll take care of you, sweetheart. He’ll always look after you.” He was sitting on the edge of my bed as he said this. It was the middle of the night and from the light in the hall I could see suitcases packed and ready to go. I was six years old, and that was the last time I saw my father.
But true to his word, every time I had a problem the Hulk would appear. I got picked on in the schoolyard, and suddenly he was there, big and green in split red pants, picking up bullies and tossing them over jungle gyms. I took a really hard test, and there he was, squashed into the kiddie desk behind me, whispering answers over my shoulder. I got into a fight with my mom, and he’d be standing just behind her, sticking his green tongue out, doing the chicken dance with his fingers up his nose, anything he could to make me laugh. It was like I was some celebrity with a bodyguard, how he followed me around all the time, right up until I met Jerome my second year of high school. Jerome wore Birkenstocks and woven shirka parkas and beads made out of fimo clay, so not long after I started dating him I had flowy drawstring skirts and dreadlocks. See, I was love. That’s what Jerome said all the time: “Shelley, you are love. I don’t just mean I love you, I mean, you are love,” and I’d say, “Because of you.” Jerome and me, we were all those things Shirley MacLaine talks about. I was going to meet him over and over again, life after life, all through the eternal wanderings of my soul, so you can imagine how I must’ve felt when he dumped me our first year of college. We were sitting across from one another at the Bali Café, drinking herbal tea, and he reached across the table and took both my hands between his own. His voice was very serious. “With you, I laugh, but not all of my laughter,” he said. “I cry, but not all of my tears.”
I said, “Huh?”
He said that institutionalized education was the displacement of the higher mind and he was going to Paris for real intellectual didactic.
I said, “What?”
“I don’t want any negative energy, Shelley,” he said gravely. “What we had—”
Had?
“Was—”
Was?
“A real connection and—”
“I thought we were love,” I said.
Jerome brought his hands together in Namaste and said, “I think we should just . . . be . . . friends.”
I’ll tell you what: I didn’t feel much like love after that. I felt like bitter burning hatred, like sending anthrax to retirement homes, like giving machetes t
o babies, like pushing tourists off the Sears Tower observation deck and watching them fall like sinking stones through the atmosphere until they hit the pavement below and splattered grossness on everything in a ten mile radius, that’s how I fucking felt! I ran back to my apartment, grabbed a pair of scissors, sat down in front of my mirror, and cut my dreads off one by one. When they were gone, I sat there with stubs growing out of my scalp and watched myself cry.
That was when I heard it—knocking from under my bed.
I sat perfectly still.
A few minutes passed, and then, again. Like knuckles on a doorframe.
“Hello?” I said. Nothing. I waited, then slowly stood up and walked to the edge of my bed. “Hello?” I said again.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
I stayed frozen for what felt like a long time, and then, slow-motion-slow, got on my hands and knees and lowered my head ’til my cheek was on the floor and I was staring underneath my bed.
Nothing.
And then, before I could stand up, there was a hand grasping my wrist and another hand locked around my ankle and I was yanked into the darkness beneath my bed, beneath his body, chest to chest with I didn’t know who, his legs pinning mine down, one of his hands pressed over my mouth to muffle my screams and the other wrapped around my neck. We were eyeball to eyeball and I struggled under him, but it was too tight down there, he was too big, and the hand around my neck let loose and started moving down, over my chest, my stomach, down, down, his eyes still boring into mine and everything seemed to change all of a sudden, like the thermostat got turned up ’cause it was getting hot and when I realized what he wanted I stopped struggling against him and tried to help him get there: I lifted my hips up so he could get my jeans down, underwear off, all the time staring at him, and then he took his hand off my mouth and we were kissing and rolling and pressing and then I felt it—I gasped—and was blinded by a lightning flash of bright green light.
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