Their customers are generally new homeowners who worry a prior resident will return some night and slide his old key into the lock and find that it fits snugly, so that he might step into the house without a sound and remove all the jewelry and silver and then perhaps step into his former bedroom with a knife in hand and a smile cutting his face. Or someone will lose his keys and suspect them stolen. Or someone will lock herself out of her car or her house and not have a spare key hidden under the geranium pot. Brian makes locks, he defeats locks.
He keys the ignition and drives the truck along a network of dirt roads that spill into wider cinder roads that finally connect to asphalt thoroughfares. The rain begins hesitantly, with a few thick drops splatting his windshield and thudding the roof of his truck, so many seconds passing between each impact, sounding like a conversation that can’t quite find its rhythm. And then, in a rush, the world seems made of water.
Brian slows his speed to forty. He clicks on his headlights. He turns on the air to chase away the fog creeping along the windows. His wipers flash back and forth to carve away glimpses of a gray world. Lightning flashes. Thunder growls.
Most people are wise enough to stay inside, hunkered down in their recliners with a mug of coffee, a newspaper folded across their lap, every now and then standing up to approach the window and say, “Still blowing.” Brian can see them silhouetted in their windows, pulling aside their curtains, as he drives along Highway 97, and then Empire, and then O.B. Riley, on his way to her house.
Through the steady curtain of rain he spots a dump truck, bright orange and flashing its hazard lights and coming toward him, no doubt coming from one of so many developments throughout the city, carrying the rubble of a hill flattened by dynamite or eaten by excavators. When he passes it, its engine growls and its tires tear through a puddle and send up a four-foot wave that hammers his door.
She lives in a wooded neighborhood where each home is set back on a piney lot. The houses are modest. Ranches mostly, with rugged arms of lava rock hugging their bottom half so that they appear to grow from the ground.
The road rises up a hill and loops through a series of basalt outcroppings decorated with streaks of guano and tangles of roots. Aside from a few cars, the road belongs to him alone, so he can afford to take a corner a little too fast. He experiences a moment of weightlessness as the truck hydroplanes, drifting into the next lane—and then the tires find their purchase and the truck stutters forward. To either side of the road, trees sway in the wind. Beyond them he can see the fast-moving gray-bottomed clouds, though barely, with so many fresh drops speckling the window and his wipers only able to swipe so fast.
The house is a two-story neocolonial with a brick facade. He knows this because in a former life he took a history of architecture class at Central Oregon Community College. He still has the books on his bookshelf, from that class and a few others, to paw through occasionally. That was before he enlisted, back when he planned on becoming—he doesn’t know what—something.
She wears pink running shorts, a white tank top, a visor through which her raven black hair rises into a high ponytail. She marches toward him. Her arms pump, her hands made into little fists. The muscles in her thighs, dramatically etched, explode with every step as if trying to shove their way out. “Thanks for coming,” she says, closing the distance between them.
“No problem.”
She is a few years older than he, early thirties, and about the same height. For this he is thankful. He finds it difficult to speak with people, especially women, when they stand much taller than he. He will often position himself on a stair or a curb or the upward lift of a hill so that he can be the one to look down.
He almost extends his hand for a shake, but doesn’t, remembering what his father told him: a woman must offer her hand first or she views it as an invasion. Still, the desire to touch her is strong. He turns away to yank open the hopper and pull down the tailgate and retrieve his toolbox, a big red Craftsman with a mucky rectangle on it, the remains of a Marine Corps bumper sticker he shaved off with a knife and spit.
She moves under the open canopy to shade herself from the rain. She has her arms crossed. She barely manages a smile, her face pinched with embarrassment and anger. “It’s so annoying, paying somebody to let me into my own house.”
“Sorry.”
“No, no, no.” She extends a hand to briefly touch his forearm. A candle flame of warmth lingers there. “It’s not you who’s annoying. I didn’t mean to insinuate that. Obviously it’s not you. It’s my husband.”
He doesn’t know how to respond to this, and they stand there for a moment, looking at each other. Above them a rain-drenched basketball net hangs like a chandelier. The wind gathers speed and hurls a wall of rain at them, darkening their clothes.
A shiver works its way through her body and she glances over her shoulder and he follows her eyes across the street to a white ranch with green shutters. In the picture window stands an elderly couple, watching them. “My neighbors,” she says. “They don’t have much to do.”
He raises his arm to give them a wave and they retreat from their window as if he just slung a rock at them.
“I guess I’m scary,” he says.
She gives him an appraising look, the corner of her mouth hooked up in a smile. “I guess.” The rain sticks to her eyelashes. Beads run down her bare shoulders.
“Listen,” he says. “You better head back to the nosy neighbors. This might take a minute or it might take thirty.”
“Please hurry,” she says in an exaggerated whisper. “It smells horribly of mothballs over there.”
“Oh, and I thought that was your perfume.” He is not normally clever. The line surprises him.
“You.” She scrunches up her face in mock anger and lifts her fist as if to hit him, then realizes they don’t know each other at all. “Okay. I’m going now.”
He watches her move away from him, her running shoes kicking up tails of water. A varicose vein trails up the back of her leg like a worm nested there.
On the front porch he sets down his toolbox and hunches over it. Nearby sits a wooden bench stenciled with ivy designs, and to either side of it, two clay pots crowded with red geraniums. A withered pumpkin is seated on the bench, left over from Halloween. Its sunken eyes and its sagging grin have black mold in them. Brian can smell the sweet smell of its rotting. A slatted wooden railing surrounds the porch. Beyond it, a half-moon garden of chrysanthemums, autumn crocus, and goldenrod. He imagines her squatting out there, deadheading flowers, pulling weeds. In the rain, mud rises up from the mulch and splatters the side of the house.
He observes all of this while slowly unloading his tools, finally selecting a hook pick. He tries the door. The knob turns freely. He pushes and the door catches against the deadbolt. He slides the hook pick into it. Carefully, like a dentist skimming the plaque off a sensitive tooth, he counts the number of pins within the lock. Then he selects a blank key and polishes the top of it—the part the pins will come into contact with—before shoving it into the deadbolt and turning it, binding it with the lock. He jiggles it several times before withdrawing it. The polished brass carries perpendicular scrapes from the pins. He uses a rat-tail file to etch the key, following the scrapes, carving away only a few millimeters of brass before polishing the blank again and returning it to the deadbolt and repeating the process several times over. Wet weather makes for stubborn locks. After twenty minutes, the lock gives and the door yawns open and he peers into the shadowy foyer before turning to wave his hand, to give the all-clear, only to see her already jogging toward him.
She bounds up the stairs and runs a hand across her face, wiping away the rain. “You’re my savior.” She is smiling. He can’t help but feel there is something joyless about the smile. Her lips are red. Her teeth are long and white; they remind him of bones seen through a wound.
He nods. “I’m your savior.” He can’t seem to stop himself from nodding. She has her head cocked,
watching him curiously, waiting for him to say something else—probably good-bye—but he likes standing on her porch while the rain hisses and the pine trees sway. He likes feeling the heat of her next to him. He likes smelling her sweat mixed up with the dank sage riding the breeze. So he tries to prolong the moment by saying something to keep himself here longer—the first thing that pops into his head: “You like to run?” He barely holds back the flinch he feels ready to seize his face.
“I run every morning.”
“And you like that?”
With almost a frown, a brusque shake of her head. “It makes me feel better.”
His hand begins to rise toward his forehead, to circle the dent there, but at the last minute he stops it, not wanting to call attention to the injury. In the air his hand hangs, as if he were reaching out to her.
Her grip closes around his like a trap, surprisingly strong. She thinks he is offering her a parting handshake. He is so thankful for her mistake he blurts out, “On the house!”
She releases his hand and looks to the roof with a startled expression. “What is?”
“Me.” He crouches on the ground and begins collecting his tools. In the distance thunder rumbles. “This service, I mean. The unlocked door.”
“Oh. You scared me for a second there.” She gives a nervous laugh and puts a hand to her breast. “I thought you meant—are you sure? I’m happy to pay. It’s my fault after all.” Her smile falters. “My husband’s.”
He drops the lid and snaps the clasp in place and stands up. The weight of the toolbox makes him lean to one side. “I wouldn’t feel right about it.”
“Why in the world not? This is your business.”
“It’s my pleasure.” He gives her a nod before clomping down the porch, into the rain, where he runs his thumb along the teeth of the newly sharpened key before sliding it into his pocket.
The rain surges, blending the world into a single gray element. Thick tongues of mud lick their way across the road. Windblown branches paw at his windows. It is always this way in the fall. The parched yellow summer gives way to a sudden gray as the storms crawl over the Cascades carrying bags of water drawn from the Pacific.
Which means the blasting white of winter will come soon enough. How he hates winter. Everything hurts more in the cold. A fingernail caught on the head of a raised screw. A knee banged against an ice-cobbled sidewalk. A knuckle scraped over asphalt when changing a tire, losing your grip on the tire iron. His head. Especially his sunken head.
He imagines the inside of his body as a cave with a red river flowing through it, and when the temperature drops, the river hardens into a red ice floe and red icicles hang from every corner of his insides, so that when he knocks into something or something knocks into him, the ice cracks, the icicles bite. And in a place like Bend, where winter glooms the sky and frosts the roads for the better part of five months, there’s a lot of hurt.
Today feels like the beginning of the hurt, a throbbing reminder of what waits around the corner. A severe thunderstorm and flash flood warning is in effect until early evening. The temperature hovers around sixty but the wind makes it feel like fifty. Three inches of rain have already fallen—with two more inches to come before the storm lurches into eastern Oregon, where it will steadily lose power, falling apart in the desert.
This is what he hears when he flips the radio stations—the excited voices of weathermen talking about changing pressure systems, wind flow patterns, surface temperatures, and dew points—interrupted by syrupy pop songs. Nothing about Iraq. There never is.
He fingers the dent in his forehead. It has begun to throb, as if his pulse has focused there all the blood in his body. In the corner of his right eye he sees a flashing he at first mistakes for lightning. But no thunder follows. And the flashing—a white flashing that blinks in and out of sight—continues, worsens. He navigates the road with one hand while using the other to press into the dent, trying to relieve the pressure there, trying to think about something pleasant—the woman, Karen—but the rain and the winding road and his head, his aching head, prevent him. This is how his migraines always begin.
Soon his mouth will taste like metal. Soon the nausea, a sour turning in his belly, will boil over. Soon his right eye will go completely white as if veiled by a holy cataract. The pain, beginning behind his eyes and slowly clawing its way through his body until it hums at the ends of his fingertips, will grip him completely.
Ahead he spots a BP gas station, the familiar green shield floating out of the rain-swept murkiness. He snaps off the radio. He slows the truck to a crawl and grips the wheel with both hands and concentrates so intensely on an empty parking space that he doesn’t see the black BMW pulling away from the pump. He cuts it off and the driver brakes with a squeal and lays on the horn and yells something fierce out his window that Brian cannot register.
He yanks the gearshift into park and pops the glove box and withdraws a bottle of Excedrin. He thumbs it open and shakes three pills into his palm and jams them in his mouth and chews them down into a bitter paste, wincing at the taste but knowing the medicine will work its way into him that much faster.
A shadow appears in the driver’s side window—a man, Brian realizes as a face comes into focus—the man from the BMW. He wears a yellow polo shirt dotted with rain. “What’s wrong with you, you fucking prick?” he says and slams his fist against the window and leaves behind a smear of rainwater. “What’s wrong with you?”
Brian makes no response and the man retreats from view and the rain drums and the truck rocks and the windshield appears scalloped as the wind dashes over it. He closes his eyes and waits for the pain to pass or arrive in full.
When his eyes are closed, when the world is dark and he has nowhere else to retreat except the caverns of his mind, he thinks of Iraq: outside Ramadi, in Al Anbar Province: 2nd Battalion, 34th Marines. He was a staff sergeant. He has difficulty remembering days in particular. They swirl together and become flits and flashes of one big maddening day in which nothing changed and everything was bleached of its color. Same watery potatoes slopped on a tray for chow. Same games of euchre, five-card stud, seven-up. Same rusted bench press in the fitness tent. Same desert cammies with salt stains around the collar and crotch. Same Humvees growling and helicopters stuttering and mortar rounds snarling and small-arm fire popping. Same conversations about pussy and basketball and action movies and pimped-out cars. Same three-hour outpost guard shift—chewing his fingernails and smoking Camel cigarettes and flipping through porno magazines and kicking a hole in the ground and jerking off into it and watching the cum soak into the sand—leaving him half stunned with boredom. Same nosebleeds and cracked skin. Same Porta-Johns with flies and shit-soaked heat fuming out of them. Same sandals, robes, turbans, beards. Same eucalyptus trees and elephant grass and prayer mats and crows on telephone wires. Same black eyes floating from behind black hijabs, a sea of black ghosts swirling in and out of sight. Same everything. And everything with sand in it, from his Diet Pepsi to his M-16 to his pubic hair.
Of course there were moments that punctuated the even passing of the days, that punched holes in his cyclical memory of Iraq. The boy in a tattered brown robe hurling a rock at him and darting down an alley. The old woman who touched his face with her hands and spoke what sounded like an angry song. The camel shot with a flare as a joke, its hindquarters on fire, braying and galloping in circles, trying to outrun the burning. The deaf man flex-cuffed and hurled to the ground because he wouldn’t respond to their commands. The charred carcass of a Chinook chopper trucked into the outpost with the body of its pilot still melted into his seat.
The bomb that opened up in his skull.
There were bombs everywhere. Tucked under cars, overpasses, trash piles. Buried beneath a dirt road. Sewn into a vest. Stuffed into the carcasses of dead dogs. They were soaked in napalm or packed with black powder or gummed with plastic explosive. They were decorated with nails and stainless steel balls that tore through a
body like buckshot through a stop sign.
That day is like a series of broken images, a torn film strip flapping through a projector. Forty clicks west of Baghdad. Fallujah. Two Humvees. Eight men, Brian among them. They were carrying supplies to the base under construction there, growling through a blond-colored collection of buildings that might have been carved by the shamal winds from dunes. The day had been quiet, the streets relatively empty. Whenever they did pass a car, he remembers holding his breath for a minute to survive the dust it threw up, making a game of it. He did not hear the explosion nor did he see it. One moment they were driving. And the next moment they were not. One moment the sky was a pale blue—and the next moment, red with fire, black with smoke.
He remembers slumping away from the Humvee and sitting down in the middle of the street and watching his shadow grow darker with the blood leaking from him. He remembers looking at the twisted snarl of flaming metal and seeing the bodies hanging out of it and crawling from it and thinking somebody ought to do something. He remembers the sound of distant gunfire that could be for a wedding or could be for a funeral or could be from another patrol. He remembers the rotorwash of the Blackhawk that sent the dust swirling from the street and the flies buzzing from his head as it touched down to carry him to the CSH in Baghdad. The IVs, the damp towels, the white sheets, the fog of painkillers.
He was lucky, they told him. He wasn’t dead. And he wasn’t like Williams, who suffered a spinal fracture and will spend the rest of his life limp in a motorized chair. He wasn’t like Jones, who was unable to pull himself out of the gun turret and whose skin melted away in a rush of flaming gasoline. He wasn’t like Carlson, who lost his legs and who gets around on prosthetics known as C-Legs with microprocessors that sense movement and adjust hydraulics.
The Wilding: A Novel Page 4