You Think That's Bad

by Jim Shepard

  There was this girl Janice who I saw a lot at the store. I started talking to her, because it seemed like she was always out, and I was always out. I went to the library a lot, or the store, and I’d see her. She seemed like a good person, and when I was with her I found myself thinking maybe I could do this or maybe that. Sit down at a restaurant with someone and eat like a human being. Take her back to my place and maybe watch a movie or something if my mother would ever fucking leave the house.

  Naturally this Janice had an ex-husband who was a cop. But as far as I could tell she didn’t see too much of him.

  I didn’t need to be near any cops. The last thing I needed was somebody running a check on me.

  My mother and Owen didn’t know about Janice. They didn’t know I had a plan all worked out. That asshole here hadn’t completely given up.

  One of the times I saw her in the library she was taking out like three DVDs about Milo and Otis. I said to her, “So you like dogs, huh?” and she said she did. I asked if she had one and she said yes to that, too. I told her I had one and she asked what kind and I told her. She said when she was leaving that maybe she’d see me walking it and I told her that maybe she would.

  I went over there twice with my dog and couldn’t get myself to go up to the front door either time. The second time I was talking to myself and it still didn’t work. And while I was standing there my dog took a dump on her sidewalk.

  I walked the woods for however many years and know the area better than anybody. Down the end of the logging road where people went to park, on the edge of the state forest, I hid a bag, a big duffel, that had a sleeping bag and two knives and one of my rifles in it. One of the knives was really more like a machete and ax combined. I had some bug spray in there, too. I thought it would be like a survival bag, if it came to that. I had it all in a big plastic garbage bag to keep it dry. Then somebody stole the whole thing.

  I got everything in Wichita Falls at a gun-and-knife show after I got out of the military. I still had the .308 and a .357 Desert Eagle and a lot of ammo, so I started another bag. This one I made sure I hid better.

  Fifth grade we used to play this capture-the-flag game where anybody who got touched had to go stand on the base and there’d be fewer and fewer kids left after one side started winning. Fifth grade for some reason everybody decided it was boys against girls, and they’d pick out who they wanted to get caught by. You had to use two hands to touch and I would always tear free and so I’d be one of the last ones running around. This horrible cold day the girls were looking at their first win if they could just get me. Four or five of them boxed me in and everybody on both sides was going crazy. This girl named Katie Kiely was right in front of me and all she had to do was step forward. I remember not being able to stop myself from grinning. And her expression changed when she saw my teeth, and she couldn’t make that last move. The other girls were shouting at her and then it was like they caught what she had and they couldn’t step forward either. It was like I was a hair in their food. The teacher rang the recess bell and we all just stood there looking at each other. Then she rang it again and we all went inside.

  My dad left the year before, or the year before that. I was in either third or fourth grade. Apparently when he and my mother could still joke around it was always about me coming to a bad end. At least that’s what she said later. Like anybody could tell anything about anybody when they were nine years old. One Christmas she said that as part of the joke he gave her a VHS of Boys Town, the movie where Spencer Tracy’s the priest and Mickey Rooney’s the tough kid who goes straight because he gets a new baseball glove or smells some home-cooked bread or some fucking thing.

  She watched it every year around Christmas. I think it might’ve been the only thing he gave her that she didn’t throw out after he took off. She’d always go, “Your movie’s on,” after she put it in the machine, but she always ended up watching it by herself.

  There was one scene in it I liked, where a kid at one of the big lunch tables at the home tells Mickey Rooney how easygoing the place is, and how if he wants, he can go on being Catholic or Protestant or whatever. And Rooney tells him, “Well, I’m nothin’.” And the kid says back, “Well, then you can go on bein’ nothin’. And nobody cares.” And one of the other kids showing him around says that on a clear day you can see Omaha from there. And Rooney goes, “Yeah? And then what’ve you got?”

  I didn’t think I’d seen the movie that often but I got it in my head so I must’ve watched it a lot. There’s this other scene where they’re about to strap a guy who didn’t pan out into the electric chair. And the guy goes to Spencer Tracy, “How much time have I got, Father?” And Tracy goes, “Eternity begins in forty-five minutes, Dan.” And the guy asks him, “What happens then?” And Tracy goes, “Oh, a bad minute or two.” And the guy’s like, “After that?” And Tracy tells him, “Dan, that’s been a mystery for a million years. You can’t expect to crack that in a few seconds.”

  There were a lot of things I wanted to do about my appearance but only so much could get accomplished until I got certain things squared away. I recognized that. I had a lot of stress. That’s what nobody understood. I was in the military and after that I was working two jobs, and trying to raise a family, and it seemed like even so, living at home and not doing anything, I had even more stress than I used to. Back then I never complained about it, I just did it, but people didn’t realize that I did whatever the average person did times two. I took whatever shit the average person took times four. And I never said anything, never said a fucking thing. I did my job and worked my eighty-hour weeks and knew as sure as shit that whatever I wanted was going to get taken away from me.

  And the kind of thoughts I started to have people had all the time. But it was like everybody said: thinking and doing were two different things.

  After my dog took the dump on her sidewalk I didn’t see Janice around for like three weeks. I thought maybe she was avoiding me. Or maybe she’d gone to Florida. Or maybe she was dead. I wrote a note, finally, and stuck it in her screen door: ARE YOU STILL INTERESTED IN DOG WALKING? And then when I got home I remembered I hadn’t put my number on it. And then I remembered I hadn’t put my name on it.

  That third week, my dog finally flushed a turkey in the state forest and I blew its wing off. I took it home to my mother and she said, “I’m not cleaning that fucking thing.” And I said, “I bring you a whole turkey and you act like all I’m doing is making work for you?” And she said, “I’m not gonna start up with you,” and went back to her show. So I threw the turkey in our Dumpster. Then when I was walking the woods I thought that was stupid, so I hiked all the way back and pulled it out. I’d give it to some charity or church so some poor kid could have some decent meat. So somebody could get something good out of it.

  The guy who sold me my Desert Eagle told me that it was the last of the Israeli ones and that no more were going to be imported. Somebody else told me later that that was bullshit. I got all the extras at the same time and taught myself how to change the barrel length, so the version I had in my new bag had the ten-inch barrel instead of the six. The guy at Gilbert’s Gun & Sportsman kept telling me he wanted to see it again. He called it “the Hand Cannon.” I joined an Owners’ Forum on one of the USA Carry Web sites for a little while to get some tips and just talk to somebody. My user name was MrNoTrouble and somebody trying to be funny asked if that was the name my mother gave me and I said yeah. I met some guys online who seemed okay and some of them said they knew what I was going through. One guy, triplenutz, didn’t live too far away and said we should meet up and go hunting together, but we never did. Another guy talked about taking his old toilet out back and letting fly at it with his Eagle from eighty yards. He recommended the experience for all Eagle owners. He said a piece of the flush tank broke the garage window behind him.

  I got my dog from the stray facility at Fort Sill when I was leaving. I saw his photo on the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation Web site.
The poor little fuck was just sitting there behind the chain link looking at his paws. The adoption fee was fifty-two dollars but that came with rabies and distemper-parvo shots, plus deworming and the heartworm test.

  I stayed away a couple days after the turkey incident and when I got back I sat on the porch and cleaned my rifle in the cold. After a while the porch light went on and finally the door opened and my mother asked me to take her shopping. She had the door open only a little, to keep the heat in. “I need some things,” she said after I didn’t answer, like she was explaining.

  “Why didn’t you have Owen take you?” I said. She’d had trouble driving since she hurt her back. It didn’t bother her to ride, though.

  “He hasn’t been around since you left,” she said. “So you gonna take me or what?”

  We went to the Price Chopper and the state package store. “It’s not for me,” she said when she told me about the second stop. “I’m getting stocking stuffers for Daryl.”

  I went up and down the AM dial while she was in there. Every single song I heard was what my father used to call a complete and utter piece of shit. “Don’t ask me who Daryl is,” I said to her when she finally came out.

  “You know who Daryl is,” she said. She dumped the bags on the seat between us.

  “I thought this wasn’t for you?” I said, looking at the Jägermeister.

  “I was here, I figured I might as well get something for myself,” she said.

  The other bag was filled with little travel bottles of liquor. “I got an assortment,” she said. “He likes those and Peppermint Patties.”

  “I think you got that thing they talk about on the news,” she said when we were halfway home. “PTSD. Is that what it is? I think you need to talk to somebody.”

  “PMS,” I told her.

  “I think you need to talk to somebody,” she said.

  “I talk to somebody every day,” I told her. “Believe me, it’s no fucking picnic.”

  “Owen said you could file a claim,” she said. “Everyone gets something from the government except my kid.”

  “That’s because your kid’s an imbecile,” I told her. “We already know that.”

  “All I’m saying is I think you need to talk to somebody,” she said. “And now I’m gonna drop the subject.”

  When we got home the poor fucking dog had wrapped himself around the tree with his chain. I don’t know why we left him outside, anyway.

  “You’re not gonna help me carry stuff in?” my mother said when I left her in the car.

  She showed up in the door to my room a few hours later after I was in bed. “There’s phone numbers and stuff you can find,” she said. “Owen told me.”

  “So have Owen call them, then,” I said.

  “Owen doesn’t need them,” she said.

  “You got enough money,” I told her. “And I been through worse shit in this house than I been through out of it.” And that shut her up for like three days.

  When she was finally ready to talk I went back to the woods. I took the dog but of course he ran away. I only found him again when I got back to the house. People like to talk about cancer or strokes but if I was going to get something I’d want to get cholera. I came across it on the Plagues & Epidemics website and they said that it killed 38 million people in India in less than a hundred years. It even sounds like nothing you want to fuck with: cholera.

  After Basic at Fort Sill I was in for four-and-a-half active and then four in the Reserves. In the Reserves I trained to be a 91 Bravo, which was a field medic, but I washed out. When they gave me the news they said not to worry, they’d still find me something to do. I ended up working out at the Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Center. “What’d you do there?” my mother wanted to know when I got back. “Oh, you know, a little bit of this, little bit of that,” I told her. I think she was watching The Farmer’s Daughter. Even Owen had to laugh.

  You want to talk about sad: even after all I been through, one of the saddest things I ever saw was a year after I got home, when my mother pulled over at a stop sign, it must’ve been ten below, and she’s got the window down and she’s scooping snow from the side mirror and trying to throw it on her windshield to clean it. We’d gone about three blocks and couldn’t see a thing before she finally pulled over. I’m sitting there watching while she leans forward and tosses snow around onto the outside of the glass. Then every so often she hits the wipers.

  She did this for like five minutes. We’re pulled over next to a Stewart’s. They got wiper fluid on sale in the window twenty-five feet away. She doesn’t go get some. She doesn’t ask me to help. She doesn’t even get out of the car to try and do it herself.

  My hair started falling out. I found it on my comb in the mornings. I could see where it was coming from. Not that anybody gives a shit, but you put that together with the teeth and you have quite the package.

  I came in from thirty minutes of sliding slush off the porch and there was my kid’s voice on the machine. My mother was playing it over again and turned it off when I got inside. She went back to whatever she was doing at the sink.

  “Were you gonna tell me he called?” I asked.

  “You cleaned up all that ice already?” she asked me back.

  “I didn’t do the ice. I did the slush,” I told her.

  “What am I supposed to do about the ice?” she wanted to know. I left her and went into the living room. She said, “There’s a message from his mother, too. She says she’s gonna get a lawyer to hop your ass unless you start sending some money. And somebody else called,” she added, once she was back in front of the TV.

  I went out to the kitchen and played the machine. There was only one message and it was from the kid, saying he wanted to wish me a happy holiday. He said, “There was a thing about your unit in the paper so I sent it up to you.” I could hear a little buzzing, maybe something in our phone, maybe something in his. “Let me know if you get it,” he said after a minute, like he was waiting for someone to answer.

  I’d been getting a headache that felt like lights going on and off and trying to crack my skull. “Who else called?” I asked. I was still standing there at the machine. The water from my boots was black from all the shit in the snow.

  “How would I know?” my mother called from the living room. “She didn’t leave a name.”

  “It was a woman?” I asked. “She wanted me? Was her name Janice?”

  “I just said she didn’t leave a name,” she said. When I went back to the living room and stood in front of her, she said, “I can’t see,” meaning the television. “You got in here fast,” she added, after I sat back down on the sofa. “What do you got, a girlfriend?”

  I kept thinking this was my one chance, and then about how Janice could’ve found my number. Maybe she asked someone at the library?

  “You’re not answering me now?” my mother said.

  “I’m trying to think here,” I told her.

  She shut up for a while. Then she finally said, “I don’t know why anybody would want to give you the time of day.”

  I was thinking I should get the dog and go over Janice’s house, but it was sleeting. I figured I’d do it when it got better out. But I couldn’t sit still and my mother finally said, “You’re shaking the whole floor,” meaning with my leg, so I went up to my room. The dog came up to check on me and took one look and went downstairs again.

  Then it got so bad I had to go out anyway so I hiked down to the creek and checked some of my traps. I was wearing my field jacket with the hood but I still got soaked. Two of the traps I couldn’t find and there was nothing in the third because I don’t even know if I’m setting them right but a month ago I found one snapped shut with some blood around it in the snow. When I got back there were police cars all around my house. I hid in the sand pit a few houses down and watched until they went away.

  What is this what is this what is this? I was thinking. I was surprised how much it freaked me out. I had some
tricks I’d come up with over the years to keep from losing it, and I used them all. I waited a half hour after the cop cars left and lay there banging my chin on my gloves. Who else did I know who’d be in a sand pit in the snow outside somebody else’s house?

  The sleet changed to rain. It was so cold my head was rattling. One of the medics supposedly training me in the Reserves used to call me TBI, for Traumatic Brain Injury. The first time he called me that I told him I hadn’t had any brain injuries, and he said, “Well, maybe it happened when you were a baby.”

  Finally I stood up and came down the hill and circled my house on the outside. The backyard was like a lake. The light was on in my mother’s bedroom and I went up to the window. On the dresser under the lamp there was a pamphlet that said, Your Service Member Is Home! The TV was going in the living room but maybe she was in the cellar. I waited until she came up the stairs and then pushed through the back door.

  “They’re looking for you, boy,” she said when she saw me. Not, You must be fucking freezing. Not, how about a warm shower.

  “What’d they want?” I asked.

  “They said they had a number of things they wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “They wanted to look in your room and I said, You got a warrant? I told them you’d be back tonight.”

  “What’d you say that for?” I asked.

  “What was I supposed to tell them?” she said. “That you were out looking for a job?”

  I went up to my room to think. There were some issues about prescriptions at the local pharmacy. Some bad checks back in Wichita Falls. There was a girl I’d scared by not letting her past me when we ran into each other in the woods. She’d torn her sleeve when she finally got away. It could’ve been a lot of things.

  “I gotta go,” I said when I came back downstairs. “I’m gonna do some camping for a while.”

  “Camping,” she said. “In this.” She put her hand out to the window.