by Megan Kruse
When he moved his hands, he was calm again. He walked toward his truck and climbed back in. “I hope we can get through this,” he said. “I really hope we can.” He turned the key, started the truck, and left her there to finish walking home in the dark.
Long into that night, in her twin bed, she’d cried. What had she done? She felt sick with sorrow and frustration. She woke up the next morning and remembered and cried again. The feeling stayed with her for the next few days; she couldn’t stop crying. She cried with relief when Gary’s truck appeared the morning they left town, cried while she said goodbye to her mother, feeling a guilty relief for both the fact that her mother didn’t know what had happened and that Amy appeared so convincingly heartbroken to leave.
After they’d loaded the truck and pulled out onto I-10, the tension had finally seemed to fall out of Gary. He squeezed her hand in his, pulling her close to him in the cab of the truck, kissing her head. And the relief she felt! Never again, she thought. Never again will I ignore this person who I love so much, and who loves me so fiercely in return. She’d let that night escape from her mind, existing there only as a quiet warning: do not forget your power, do not take for granted all that you have. Driving away from the Lake Goodwin bar, then, six years later, she was confused at first. Why? Why bring this up now? She watched the speedometer, the bright and comforting lights of the dashboard, and steered as carefully as she could. And then, slowly, it began to dawn on her what was happening. She thought, he’s picking a fight.
“Gary,” she said slowly, the headlights sweeping the undersides of leaves, “that was a long time ago. I said I was sorry.” She felt too drunk. Don’t do this now, she thought. She just wanted to get them home.
“You aren’t, though,” he said. “You aren’t.” He was leaning toward her; she could smell the alcohol on his breath. His voice was soft but it was mean.
She had been sorry, she thought. And hadn’t she paid for that? The way she’d spent the night crying, and her last hours with her mother were not about her mother at all but the storm of regret and fear still bearing down her.
“You aren’t,” he said again. It felt like he was poking her. All those days of being careful and quiet, of not wanting to piss him off, were swelling in her chest. She was so fucking careful all the time. She was so fucking tired of feeling like she was doing something wrong. She wanted to scream but instead she gripped the wheel tighter and made the turn onto Firetrail Hill. She just wanted to get home. She pressed her lips together and willed him to let it go, to not say anything. They were supposed to be having a fun night. They were supposed to be being in love.
He was quiet for a moment and then he leaned toward her again, one hand on the console. “You were never sorry,” he said. He reached out and ran one finger across her cheek.
Her throat tightened. She was holding the wheel so tight her palms stung. “Fuck you,” she said. She had never sworn at him before. “Fuck you, Gary.” The lines on the road were weaving in front of her and his face was close to hers. “What is wrong with you?” he was saying, his breath hot and mean, and she leaned away from him and he grabbed for the wheel as it jumped her hands, but the branches were slamming up against the windshield, and then there was a long, loud crushing sound and the truck slammed back.
Her nose was bleeding, but where had she hit it? Gary was beside her, moaning. She needed to call an ambulance. Someone needed to call someone. Please, she thought. Please. The windshield, the slap of the leaves against it, the dark inside of the car, the silence. How long did they sit there? “I’m sorry,” she kept saying. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She opened the door and ran out onto the road, one of her shoes slipping off on the gravel. Later she would find little pitted cuts on the bottom of her foot. There were no cars. The bar was four miles one way, the house four miles another.
Gary followed her out, crashing through the bushes, looking at the truck where it had plowed through the underbrush and into a pine tree. He reached for her and held her by the arms, the same way he had that night on the Fannin road.
“Listen,” Gary said, “you listen to me. You’re going to get in the car and drive us home before the cops show up and take your drunk ass to jail. You understand me, Amy?”
She did understand. She nodded and picked her way over the brush and climbed back into the driver’s seat. There were branches coming up off the grille and one of the headlights was busted out. The truck shuddered a little as she reversed it onto the road. She held her breath. She put it back in drive and she drove them home.
When she pulled the truck up the gravel drive she sat there in the dark while Gary went in and paid the babysitter, and then she went in and held Jackson beside her on the sofa while he drove the babysitter home. Thank god it was dark and no one would notice the banged-up truck. She didn’t look at the girl and she didn’t let herself think about how Gary was drunk, too. She kept holding Jackson long after Gary had come back in and gone silently to bed. She whispered into his hair and he slept slumped against her while the guilt washed over her hotly, the relief and the shame.
She was sick the next morning. The drinks, she thought, and the stress, but she was sick the next day, too, and then she was pregnant with Lydia all along.
It began after that, the change in Gary. Later, she would see how simply those events had fallen in line in her mind: her error at the Legion, so long before. The accident and everything that had happened beforehand – how cruel she had been to him. He looked at her differently now: she who cursed him when he was weak and wanting, who could have ended both their lives, orphaned their child. How simple it was for her to believe that these things were connected by the thread of her mistakes. How simple it was for him to make her believe she was to blame for the way he looked at her now, for what she began to believe was his hatred of her.
She never feared for Jackson, but holding Lydia, something stirred in her, a suspicion about that night. That they were complicit, in Gary’s eyes: behind the wheel, her baby smaller than a seahorse and her own unsteady hands, and that for the rest of her life she would pay for it, and her little girl would possess for him a darkness that Amy would spend her life trying to hold at bay.
NOW, IN THE shelter, the bright New Mexico moon drove its light through the glass and wire windowpanes, through the wooden slats of the blinds. They would stay here for two months. An eternity, she thought. Long enough to make Gary believe they had disappeared completely. Long enough to change their names, to trade the little car in for something else before they went back to Texas, before they tried again to start a life without Gary. They would stay with Amy’s mother, in the house Amy had grown up in, and Amy couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to be back there. What would it be like, to go home? And her father was gone; when Jackson was eleven and Lydia five there had been the call that he was dead. The only call from Amy’s mother she’d had in Washington – her mother didn’t believe in long distance, in the same way she didn’t believe in cabs or airplanes or designer clothes. The luxuries of the rich. Amy had answered the phone, and when she hung it up again she had been afraid to tell Gary because she was afraid to tell Gary anything then. He had been uncharacteristically kind when she did tell him. She wondered now if her mother would forgive her – for leaving, for never calling, for receiving the phone call that her own father had died and still not coming home. Amy wasn’t sure if she deserved to be forgiven.
Amy lay on the hard, narrow bed in the shelter watching the rise and fall of her daughter’s back, turned away from her in the bed across the room. She imagined her mother standing by the dusty windowsill in Texas looking out on her own small kingdom, that square of scraggled Fannin land. There was her mother, here was her sleeping daughter, and somewhere, far from her, was her beautiful son. She thought, Please. Please, this night, later, all your life, believe me that I’ve done what I can.
Lydia
Tulalip, Washington, 2005
WE BUILT FORTS. WE BUILT
LITTLE HOMES FROM BLOW-DOWNS in stands of alder. We sat crouched in nests of sword fern eating red huckleberries. We took off our shoes and wrapped maple leaves around our feet like moccasins until they tore, and then we walked barefoot through the black piney loam and leaf-fall. Our skin stung from nettles and the air smelled of skunk cabbage and rain.
We followed the creek and knew each of the ponds that pooled beside it. We ruined our shoes. We collected sticks and handfuls of dry pine needles from the pockets beneath roots and rocks, where they were shielded from the rain. We made rings of stones and tried to light fires with the sticks, the dry needles, the paper and lint in our pockets. The fires smoked and our old hall passes curled under the lick of flames and then went dead.
We used our thumbnails to split the blisters on the trunks of pine trees so the pitch spilled out and stained our palms. We told stories, about the wolfboy who lived in the woods and the Firetrail ghost who would run beside your car and grab you in the dark. We told secrets.
“Lydia,” my brother told me, “the way that girls feel about boys is the way that I feel about them. Like I might marry a boy someday.”
“Like gay?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a homo?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
I thought for a minute. Jackson was looking at me. His hands were shaking, pulling an alder leaf into pieces and letting them drift to the ground.
“I understand,” I said, and I did.
Between us, we knew everything already.
We practiced survival. We stripped the leaves from fireweed and chewed them to a bitter cud. We found tangles of blackberry and drank straight from the creek. We sat in an old rowboat that was abandoned in the woods. In heavy rain we turned it upside down, curled underneath it in the dirt and salal.
We lured a stray dog through the woods with pieces of stale bread and talked to him in low voices. He was skittish and thin and we named him Green for his eyes. When we whistled for him he would appear, a moving shadow between the trees. When we touched his fur with cold, careful hands we knew that he was meant for us.
When we heard voices from the house we went deeper into the woods and looked for bleeding hearts and trilliums on the mud-slick slopes on either side of the creek, and when we found them we did not pick them. We knew how rare they were, how beautiful, and how quickly they would wilt in our hands.
“I hate him,” I told Jackson. “I wish that he would die. I wish he would go to jail. I wish he would move far away and never come back.”
“Sometimes,” Jackson said, “I still love him.”
My brother could look so sad sometimes.
“But I don’t think I should,” he said.
I imagined that if our father disappeared then we would move into the forest, Jackson, my mother, and me. We would have the whole woods, and the creek, and the leaves would flash and spin around us. We would have everything.
In spring, when the brush was thick, we followed the creek for three miles, to an old trailer camp. The trailers were empty in the winter, and maybe all year round. Through the windows we saw the dirty kitchens, the stacks of books, the bare mattresses. I imagined that each one was a different life waiting for us. I imagined that somewhere in the woods I would find the right one. I imagined that it would find me. That it would call me home.
If it was a good day our mother would come into the woods and crawl into the fort. She would pour us invisible coffee from the curl of a leaf.
I was eight years old. Jackson was older, and I understood that all of this was for me, and that my brother was better than most brothers. I drank from my leaf, lying in the crooks of their warm arms. “You were born for just this,” they whispered. They held me between them. “You were born for happiness, for great things. You were born so we could love you.”
2.
The Dog
Jackson
Silver, Idaho, 2010
WHEN HE WOKE UP IN A-FRAME B, DON WAS ALREADY gone, due at a job site a mile down the road. Jackson lay there for a minute and then he made himself get up, find his clothes, roll up the sleeping bag, and stow it back in the tool locker. He walked to the dam and stood there smoking a cigarette, shaking out his arms and legs, rolling his neck. The new dam was fresh wood and steel, shivering against the bowl of the lake. He was so fucking tired. In his jeans pocket was a note Don had left him: “Dear Picklepuss, I want you little, I want you mighty, I wish my pajamas were next to your nighty. From, the squirt who is your pal and public enemy no. 1.” He unfolded the note and folded it again, then put on his jeans and jacket and boots and started the walk around the lake to his site.
He had slept with Don three times now. The first time was after the Easter party, when they were both reeling drunk. After that there were four excruciating days of seeing Don at the job site, watching Don leaning against a sawhorse or chatting amiably with the carpenters while Jackson shuffled around the tool truck, his face burning. That was all it was, he kept thinking. Drunk sex. Except that it was drunk sex with his boss, whom he didn’t know. Who knew he was a faggot. Don could tell on him, Jackson kept thinking through those four long days: He could tell he could tell he could tell. Jackson knew enough about fear to understand what men did to save themselves from suspicion.
Then, on the fourth day, and just about the time that Jackson was deciding he might want to quit the crew, Don had strode over to where he was piling wood scraps to burn later, and cuffed him lightly on the shoulder. “Jack,” he said. “Come by the A-frame tonight. I need your help with something.” And of course he’d gone, embarrassed at how excited he was, getting just a little drunk beforehand, and then waiting down the road in the dark so he wasn’t too early. It was still drunk sex, but this second time felt important – Don still wanted him, right there on the floor of the same half-built cabin; Jackson himself was something worth repeating; he hadn’t been a mistake.
The third time was last night, and after Don had begged him to come inside of him, and Jackson had, breathless, tears at the back of his throat, holding Don’s hips, Don had told him that he was married.
Sex was still this giant mystery card, anyway, so what did it matter? All his life Jackson had been puzzling at it from afar. In elementary school, he hung out with girls and boys indiscriminately. He wasn’t unpopular. That hadn’t been decided yet. It was a poor town. Every kid’s jacket was a little short in the sleeves. He touched the little penis of a boy named David and a girl named Martha’s flat nipples. That was the sum of all the sex he knew.
And then middle school – those were the years he’d spent mostly with Lydia. He was a late bloomer and a weakling, and on top of that there was a year where he was both weak and chubby, somehow looking both frail and fat. He had a little girl’s roll around his hips. He had noodly arms. He had a tiny wasteland of pubic hairs that grew as slow as old-growth.
And finally, high school. Or the first three years of it, at any rate. All of those kids were still there, sweating it out under the fluorescents. He’d gotten prettier. The fat disappeared and he was tall and bony, something girls liked. Did gay men like it? He didn’t know. Sex was all wound up with a million other things to him, too – the Marysville roller rink. Licorice whips. A game of foosball with a pimply junior who everyone called Burger – later someone would shit on the foosball table, that was what kind of place it was. Octopus legs, smooth linoleum. He wanted that boy who flipped the little soccer men around. He wanted to be in the middle of all of these small-town boys, these pale, asexual guys – Randy; the wormy little M-P tennis coach; his father’s sketchy, nervous friend Larry. Feverish masturbation, cum spilled into pale petal hands, body against fish body. There was the thing with Chris, but Chris was just a confused opportunist who let Jackson jerk him off and who probably had a girlfriend by now anyway. Other than that crush, other than the chlorine smell and the trail of cum across the wet concrete pool deck, all he’d had was Eric, during what would have been his senior year. Jackson had
sucked Eric off again and again, and then leaned his face into the pillow while Eric fucked him, but that was all – he was Eric’s bottom; that’s who he was paid to be. He had sometimes hated it, and mostly just endured it because he knew what it meant: cash. Equals food, equals pills, equals everything. And the truth was that some of the time it even felt good – there was a small, plain warmth, almost tender, to having Eric inside him that many times, week after week.
But now here was Don. Beautiful, married Don. Jackson had never fucked another man before – never been the top, and now he felt it electric inside of him: to have stood over this man, to have watched him beg, to have thrust inside of Don until the noises they both made were indecipherable from joy or sorrow or anger. In those moments Jackson could imagine that the road outside only curved back to the cabin, as though there was nowhere else in the world they might possibly go.
He made it to the site twenty minutes early, and one of the men gave him a hammer and had him pulling nails out of a stack of planks. He liked the feeling of knowing exactly what he had to do, of following orders. He had a job and he could follow orders. He had a place to sleep; it smelled like motor oil and there was sawdust and mud from his boots scattered across the metal floor, but it was a door and a room and bed, and it was free. What did it matter what happened with Don? He wasn’t stupid enough to think that they were going to run off together. He wasn’t stupid enough to believe that Don could just walk away from his wife. There were papers, furniture, trappings. Heavy things. He imagined a wedding ring alone could be heavy enough to hold you down.