Unusual Events: A Short Story Collection

by Max Florschutz

  “Your wife doesn’t mind you being gone all the time?”

  “I’m not married,” Mike said, shaking his head.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “It’s alright. Not like I haven’t had the chance. I just …” He shook his head. “Let’s just say that my last ex could have given the bear down there a run for his money when she got mad. In fact, I think I’d bet on her over the bear.”

  “I see,” Dave said, though the look on his face said he was trying to decide if Mike was being serious or not.

  “How about you?” Mike asked as he looked back down at the man. “You married?”

  Dave nodded; slowly, then with rising speed. “Yes, I am.”

  “You hesitated.”

  “It’s looking a little rocky at the moment.”

  “I see,” Mike said, shifting again. He could feel his right butt cheek starting to go to sleep, pins sweeping across his skin as he moved. “That why you’re up here then?”

  “Yeah,” Dave said, nodding as he looked back down at the campsite. “We’ve been having … issues, and I … she … both of us, decided we needed some alone time.”

  “So you left the state?” he asked.

  “It sounded easiest.” Dave rolled forward on his branch, throwing his arms over the next closest limb and letting his chest press up against it, arms hanging loosely in front of him. He looked, Mike thought, like a picture of misery. Pathetic misery.

  Not that he could say that. Client or not, it wasn’t the kind of thing to say. Not that tactlessly.

  “Looks like it hit you hard,” he offered instead.

  Dave shrugged. “You could say that.”

  “You guys have a fight?” The words were out of his mouth before he could catch himself. Why am I asking? Do I really want this to be our conversation? It was too late now. The question was out. Down below, Dave was chuckling.

  “A fight,” he said, glancing up at Mike and shaking his head. “You’ve definitely never been married. Fights happen in a marriage, Mike. All the time. Sometimes over little stuff, like putting a drink on the wrong side of the fridge, sometimes just because both of you had a bad day. And you know what you do?”

  “What?”

  “You work it out and wake up loving her the next day,” Dave said, looking back down at the campsite once more. “And just to be clear,” he said, giving him a quick upwards glance. “I’m talking about a shouting fight. Not the hitting kind, or the throwing stuff at one another kind. We’ve never done that. Well, maybe a little throwing, but not at each other.”

  “Sounds rough,” Mike said, nodding.

  “No, it’s marriage. You have to work at it sometimes,” Dave said. His words were almost absent, like he was talking to himself as much as he was Mike. “It’s a work in progress, every day.”

  “So what changed?”

  “Kids.” For a moment the clearing was silent.

  “You have a few?” Mike asked.

  “No … and that’s the problem,” Dave said, letting out a sigh. From below there was the sound of tearing cloth, and Mike winced as the bear tore open the side of one of the tents.

  “We’d always planned on having kids,” Dave said. Mike wasn’t sure if he’d noticed that the bear was busily picking apart his tent or not. Maybe he didn’t care. After all, it was brand new, purchased just for the trip … which meant he could probably afford another. “We’d talked about it for years. It was one of the reasons we got married.”

  “And uh … what happened?” Mike asked as the bear pulled its head out of the torn tent with something flat and dark in its mouth. Jerky. I really need to start going over some of these rules more closely before we come out, he thought as the bear began chewing. We’re campers, not a five-star buffet line. Dave still hadn’t noticed. “You change your mind?”

  “No, actually. She did.”

  “She did?”

  “Yeah. Said she didn’t want to have kids anymore, that she didn’t know what we could offer them.”

  “Ouch.” There wasn’t much else he could say. “Harsh.”

  “I know. We’ve been going back and forth on it for weeks, but a few days ago we finally hit a fever pitch, and she hinted that if I was going to be so insistent about it, I could just leave. Then my buddy suggested this, and … well, here I am. Sitting in a tree. While a bear eats my tent!” he said, sitting up with a look of surprise on his face, his voice rising. “Come on! That thing was brand-new!”

  “Be glad you weren’t in it,” Mike said as Dave slumped once more. Maybe it wasn’t as little a deal as he’d thought. “Small things, right?”

  “Yeah, small things.”

  He nodded. “So you bought your gear and left?”

  Dave nodded, still staring at the bear as it went through what was left of his tent. A snap echoed across the small clearing as one of the tent poles broke. “Yup,” he said, his voice quiet once more. “She wanted me out, so I figured I’d take a few days and do just that.”

  “She told you to leave, huh?”

  “Actually, no,” Dave said with a faint wheeze of laughter. “She’d been hinting at it, but when I told her I was going to, she didn’t believe me. Said I hadn’t taken a day off in nineteen years; why would I start now?”

  “Sounds like you called her bluff,” Mike said, lifting himself slightly as the bear moved towards his own tent. Oh no. Don’t you dare. That is my tent and there is no food in there! He tensed as the bear sniffed at the front flap, mentally pulling up every dirty word he could think of to hurl at the bruin if it moved forward, but then the mass of fur turned away, heading back over to the remains of the cooler. He sagged in relief. I’ve had that tent for almost fifteen years. I do not want to have to get a new one now.

  “Yeah, I did,” Dave said, unaware about or not caring what the bear was up to. “I’ve got to admit though, the victory feels a little hollower than I’d expected.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” He could feel a drop of something—sweat or water, he wasn’t sure which—making its way down the small of his back, stopping every few seconds and collecting itself before making another downward leap. He halted its progress a moment later, his hand pressing into the dusty, dirty back of his coat and squishing the drop into his shirt.

  “Yeah, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. And it’s nice to be out doing this, you know?”

  “Getting close up with nature?” Mike asked as another bit of blue plastic went bouncing across the campsite, the bear playing with its new toy.

  “Well, maybe not so much that part,” Dave said. “But it is pretty up here. And it’s the kind of thing I’d always wanted to do.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah.” Dave looked up at him, a wide-eyed look of wonder on his face. “Your dad ever take you out fishing when you were a kid?”

  He frowned before he could catch himself, though from the look on Dave’s face, the man hadn’t noticed. “No,” he said, keeping his voice level. “No, he didn’t.”

  “Oh,” Dave said, his forehead wrinkling slightly. “Well, you missed out.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “My dad did,” Dave said, not even acknowledging the response. “He was the one who put me in scouts, and he made sure that he came along on every father-son activity. Plus we did a few ourselves.”

  “Cub Scouts, right?” Mike asked. “Just Cub Scouts?”

  “What? Oh, yeah, just the Cub Scouts.” Dave went quiet for a brief moment. “My dad … Well, he died when I was ten.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “No,” Dave said, shaking his head. “It’s fine. Car accident. Drunk driver. Not him. The other guy.”

  “Ah …” He nodded. “And now you don’t drink.”

  “Right,” Dave said. “That’s probably part of it. Anyway, that kind of died out, but I always wanted to do it again.”

  “You never tried again?” Mike looked down at him in surprise. “Not once?”

  “Well, during college a
nd before I started work, yes, but that was with friends.”

  “That’s different?”

  “If you want a father-son campout? Yeah,” Dave said.

  “Ah.” Mike nodded. “I see. And that brings us right back around to—”

  “Having kids, yes.” Dave leaned back, grabbing onto another branch and stirring a small shower of needles from it. Below them, their visitor looked up for a moment before going back to play with the remains of the cooler.

  “So …”

  Mike tightened his grip around the branch he was holding with one hand and brought his other hand around to scratch at an itch on his back. At least we’re both wearing bug-spray. Otherwise they’d be choosing between being eaten alive … and being eaten alive. “So?” he parroted.

  “You know why I’m here,” Dave said, looking up at him and giving him a too-white smile. “What about you?”

  “I live here,” Mike said.

  “Well of course,” Dave said with a roll of his eyes. “I mean why do you live here? What made you move to the middle of nowhere? Or north of nowhere, anyway.”

  “Technically, it’s south of nowhere,” Mike said, wrapping his hands about around the tree once more and shifting to give himself a better view of the sky through the thick foliage. “Nowhere would actually be a bit farther north.”

  “Wait,” Dave said. “That’s an actual place?”

  “You tell me,” Mike said, lifting one eyebrow as he brought his gaze back down towards Dave. “What do you think?”

  “I think … I think you might be joking,” Dave said. “Then again, you might not be. What were you looking at?”

  “The weather.” He turned his attention upwards once more, picking out the mixed grey and blue of the sky through the thick, bushy, needled branches. “We’re already damp, sweaty, and itchy up here. The last thing I want to be is wet.”

  “Rain?”

  “Liquid sunshine.” He leaned forward, bending a branch out of the way. “Still, it doesn’t look like we’re going to get that unlucky.”

  “Uh-huh,” Dave said in a tone that suggested he didn’t see exactly how different that would make their position. “So back to what I asked …?”

  “What? About why I came to Alaska?”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “Nothing big,” he said, adjusting his position as pins and needles began to crawl across his butt once more. “I wanted to get away from home, for one.”

  “Why?”

  His shrugged, his coat making a faint zip sound as his elbows rubbed against his sides. “It’s a city. Millions of people. All concrete, all cars. The only thing I ever liked about it was Central Park.”

  “That’s it?”

  He smiled, old memories swelling in his mind and making his mouth water. “Well, no. They had amazing pizza. Nothing like a New York pizza. Especially not out here.”

  “Anyway,” he said, leaning forward slightly and making eye contact with his client. “That wasn’t enough to make me want to stay there. I was always begging my parents to let me go to summer camps, go visit my grandparents in Jersey, anything I could, really, to get out of the city.”

  “Was it just because you didn’t like the city?” Dave asked. “Did you know what you were missing?”

  “Of course,” he said, giving him a flat look. “I might have been stuck in the city, but we had libraries. I always loved Central Park, and the moment I could read I was finding books about survival, adventuring. My Side of the Mountain, the Boy Scout Handbook, stuff like that.”

  “Sounds like you really took to it.”

  “I did,” Mike said, nodding. “I read every survival and wilderness story I could get my hands on. Guides, books, magazines, you name it. I practiced knot-tying, whittling … I even started a few fires in the park, just for practice.”

  “Fires?”

  “Nothing out of control. Practice fires, the kind you make with limited tools,” Mike said, lifting an eyebrow. “Me and a few friends might have done a few of the others, but never for long. Getting in trouble was … not an option.”

  “So you learned all that?”

  “Yup. Wanted to go to camps in the summer, or on vacations.” He leaned back, bracing his shoulders against a nearby branch and intertwining his hands behind his head. “That’s all I wanted to do. Just go have some fun in the woods.”

  “And I’m guessing you didn’t get to?”

  “Yeah,” he said. His voice felt slightly quieter. “Yeah, I didn’t.” He twisted, looking at Dave with just one eye. “You know what it’s like. Investments, I mean. There’s never time to take a day off. And you know? I get that, I really do. My dad was a busy man, he earned a lot of money …”

  “But?”

  “But … he kind of lived in that world, you know?” Mike said, turning his eyes back upwards, staring into the thick branches overhead and catching scattered glimpses of blue and grey sky through the needles. “His job was his world to him, and there wasn’t anything outside of that. No, there wasn’t a life outside of that. To him, investments, Wall Street, all that stuff? That was all there was. He didn’t care about my interest in nature … as long as I didn’t let it get in the way of what he saw as important.”

  “He didn’t like you bothering him about it?” Dave asked.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “More than that. He let me do it as long as I kept my grades up and did everything he asked of me—which for the most part was becoming another version of him.”

  “Oh … yeah,” Dave said, and there was a rustling sound from below as the overweight man moved on his branch. “Projective parenting? When the parent just pushes what they want to be onto their kid? Something like that?”

  “Yeah, pretty much.” Something flew past overhead, the small patches of sky flashing in and out as whatever it was passed between the top of the tree and the clouds above it. From the speed and coverage of the shadow, it had been low. Probably a raven, drawn by the activity of their visitor.

  “As long as I kept my grades up and took the classes he wanted, we were good,” he continued. “But I couldn’t go to camps. He wouldn’t let me. He saw all the outdoor stuff as a waste, good for people who couldn’t ‘earn a real living’ or something like that.”

  “Sounds like a situation ripe for disaster.”

  “Now that,” Mike said, sitting back up, “is an understatement.”

  “What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “We had a fight. A big one, right around the time I was ready to graduate. I’d already been getting pressure to go to Harvard Business School or any of the other schools on my dad’s approved list. He had the whole thing planned out for me in his head.”

  “Did you go?”

  “No,” Mike said, shaking his head. “I turned eighteen two months before I graduated, and the day after I graduated I … Well, I walked out.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.” There was no reason to go into any detail. He’d walked out all right, but it hadn’t been that easy. There had been a lot of shouting. A lot of yelling. Questions about his future, his plans. And insults. Can’t forget the insults. Yeah, that was a hell of a day.

  “So what happened then?”

  He gave Dave a shrug, though he wasn’t sure that he was watching. “Nothing of note. I had enough saved to get myself to Seattle by bus, and from there work a few quick jobs until I could afford a ticket north on one of the ferries. At the time I just wanted to get as far away as possible, but it worked out in the end. I got to Alaska, loved it, and made it work. It took a few rough winters,” he said, looking down at Dave once more. “But I grabbed myself a job on a boat and got settled in quick enough. I might have been green, but I knew my knots. A kid with a dream.” He turned away, stealing a quick glance at the campsite before putting his hands behind his head once more. “And the rest? Well, it just worked out. I kept working, got a place, and found a way to make money doing what I loved.”
>
  “What about your parents?”

  He felt himself twitch. “We’re on good terms now, mostly,” he said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. “They got over it.” That was.

  “No regrets, though?”

  He shrugged. “If I let my regrets hold me back that much, I’d drink a lot more than I already ever do. It happened. I’m happy with where my life is now. I like being able to go hunting and fishing, doing all that stuff I could never do when I was in New York and stuck under the thumbs of my parents.”

  “They ever visit?”

  “No.” That was also true. “I call sometimes, but that’s it.” Mostly to talk to mom. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to his dad.

  “That’s surprising,” Dave said. “Most people always say they want to visit Alaska.”

  “Not my dad,” Mike said, shaking his head again. “That’d require taking a day off from work. I don’t think he’s taken a day off since before I was born. Kind of like you before you came up here.” For a moment the tree was silent, and he sat up, looking down at his client. Dave was staring out into the forest, his brow furrowed. “You all right?”

  “Just thinking,” he said, shaking his head. “About what you said.”

  “What?” Mike said, running over the last few things that had spilled out of his mouth. “Oh.” Shit. He’d screwed up. Said too much. “You mean about you not taking any days off? Sorry, that was just me—”

  “No …” Dave said, shaking his head and looking up at him. “You’re right. I don’t. Or didn’t. That’s what Joy—my wife—that’s what she told me. I hadn’t taken a day off in nineteen years.”

  “Now look,” Mike said, spreading his fingers. He could feel a call for a refund coming. You could only be so insulting to a customer, if at all. And you just pushed it. “I’m sorry, it slipped—”

  “No!” Dave shouted, and Mike froze as the man looked up at him. He was grinning. The shout had been happy. “No, you’re right! Joy was right! That’s what the problem was! It was me!” He didn’t even seem to care that his shouting had attracted the bear’s attention once more.

  “I don’t follow,” Mike said. “What do you—?”

  “I’m the reason she didn’t want to have kids anymore,” Dave said, shaking his head and then slapping his open palm against his forehead. “I work all the time. Just like your dad—no offense.”