Call Me Home

by Megan Kruse

  He hadn’t known what to say, last night, when Don told him. Jackson had been lying there on the floor of the A-frame, warmth still spreading through his arms and legs: “I’m married,” Don said, and Jackson didn’t say anything, just busied himself pulling off the used condom, setting it carefully next to the shadowy pile of his clothes and the sputtering candle with its flame drowning in its own wax. Jackson felt a burst of shame, thinking of how the candle seemed now – like he’d been trying to make things romantic – which he had.

  “Are you angry?” Don had asked.

  Jackson considered the question. It hadn’t occurred to him to feel angry yet. “No,” he’d said finally, because he didn’t know what to say.

  “Jack.” Don looked at him, and Jackson nodded. That had seemed like reply enough, and they had gone to sleep.

  But now, the nails clicking and screeching against the claw of the hammer, he felt a terrible nagging feeling. What did he want? If he figured it out, would he say it? He had all this guilt inside him all the time. The little things, the big things – they ate away at him with equal, excruciating measure. He’d stolen the candy from Lydia’s Christmas stocking one year and that burned at him – what kind of terrible brother, what kind of brute, stole from a six year old? And then what he’d done to his mother and his sister in the end – he deserved nothing, he thought. No mercy, no love, no kindness. Don didn’t owe him any explanations.

  The site was stirring to life, the men shuffling in, coughing and clanking through the tool locker and someone turning the radio on, fiddling with the bandwidth. Jackson kept pulling nails, his arm a steady piston. He looked back around the curve of the lake toward A-frame B, a stirring in his dick. The man in the house, the man is the house. That rough wood floor was covered deep with scratches and cum and sweat stains, but not so anyone could see but him. It seemed to him sometimes that he was being carried on a wave that had been set in motion a long time ago, a wave of his father, his mother’s fear, his own mistakes. He’d clung to his father’s fist and just loped along, ready to push his mother and sister off a cliff, ready to pop open the next of his father’s shit beers. Whiskey and beer, what his father drank. He had married Jackson’s mother in a yellow suit. He’d given Jackson balsa wood models and then built them all himself while Jackson grew bored. Detail after detail that added up to nothing in particular; all of these things were tied together, and he didn’t know where the string began or ended. The little buzz between his legs. The quiet cathedral of A-frame B. All of these things.

  The sun was burning through the gray haze, and it was going to be a warm day. A good day. Something his mother used to say – “You get up, and you decide. Is this going to be a good day?” It didn’t matter about Don, he thought again. He didn’t have any control over it; they’d stay together or they wouldn’t – get together or they wouldn’t. He knew he didn’t have much say in it. It gave him a lonely feeling.

  Lydia

  Fannin, Texas, 2010

  WHEN JACKSON DIDN’T COME BACK TO THE STARLIGHT Motel, I guessed what he had done. It was as if I expected it all along, and so I waited at the window the next morning. My father’s truck slid up like a shark. He waited in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of our car, smoking a cigarette. He had never laid a hand on me, but I looked at him then and I knew he could. He would, I thought. My mother drove the car home and he took me in the truck to make sure that she followed. All the way home, the truck rattled. I held tight to the cold cracked seats. His fists were on the wheel.

  When we got to the house, Jackson was there. I’d never seen my brother look the way he did then, guilty and sad. I wanted to hate him, the way I hated my father, for what he had done. “Lydia,” Jackson said to me, and I looked at him. I couldn’t hate him even then, but it was like looking through him, or looking at someone I didn’t know.

  All that next week, my father was in the house. His ears were everywhere. His eyes. Out by the shed, my mother waved me over. She crouched close to the ground. “Lydia,” she said in my ear. “I think that you and I should go.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Your brother is eighteen,” she said. “It’s time for him to go out in the world alone.”

  “He’ll stay at home?”

  “He won’t,” my mother said. “He’ll stay with Randy, or he’ll go somewhere. He’ll know what to do.”

  I knew she was right, but there was more. “I need your help,” she said, “to make sure Jackson doesn’t notice. I need your help to make sure we get away.” Once I’d agreed I knew that if there was a hell I’d burn in it. Once, I had told my brother everything. Now, I told myself, Jackson deserves this. He deserves this for what he did, and he deserves to be free from you.

  In the car, driving away from my brother, leaving him behind, my mother said, “I’m sorry that you were the one who got less than. I’m sorry that you’ve had to be afraid.” I remembered that dog. Green, we called him, for his eyes. I remembered how Jackson would always tell me, “If he loves you, he’ll find you again.”

  The night before, I’d sat in front of the woodstove. I’d thought, if only they’d burned me when I was born. If only I hadn’t been. I held my hands as close to the stove as I could. The pain was sharp and then it faded. I knew what I would do the next morning, how I would betray Jackson. He was beside me, watching me, and it was as though I was holding a gun. There’s a bullet in there, I wanted to say. You just can’t see it yet.

  The bullet took us over the mountains in the dark. It took us across red hills to New Mexico, where for weeks there was no color at all, just the sad faces of the other women, the story we told again and again, the word wait. Finally, it took us down the bare highway again, to Fannin, where my grandmother opened the door.

  The sink leaked, and the wind whipped off the field and right through the living room, and the screens were torn by secret claws in the night. Things from the outside kept trying to get in, and I had dreams of thieves at the windows. There were mice, but the traps we set only caught geckos. In the mornings and evenings there was a smell of rot, “of oil,” my mother said, “of money,” and pointed to the derricks like birds dipping their beaks to drink.

  The first week, as we were sitting out in the dry heat, a man passed the house. He looked at us through the dark for a long minute, and I felt the fear like a hot knife in me. I didn’t move. I tried to look like nothing at all.

  He walked closer. I could feel my mother beside me. We were two stones. “Gary could find us anywhere,” my mother had said when we were still safe in the shelter. No, I thought now. No no no no.

  “Amy Merrick?” the man called. We stayed still.

  My grandmother banged out on the porch. “Jim,” she called. “Get up here.”

  The man was short with a round belly. He was holding a can of beer in one hand and wearing work boots like my father wore. He put his big arms around my mother.

  “Amy Merrick, you are just as beautiful as the day you left. I don’t believe it.”

  “This is my daughter,” my mother said. “Lena.” She touched my hair. “And I go by Ann now,” she said. “Ann Harris.”

  “You got a little girl? I don’t believe it.”

  The man shook my hand. He sat down on the dusty wood of the porch beside my mother. She was laughing. She looked happy, I thought. She looked beautiful. She took one of his cigarettes and I watched it weave like a firefly through the dark.

  She used to have a life here, I realized for the first time. Before the little house in Washington, before my father put his big hand against her cheek and promised her a hundred lies. Before they were driving west in the little pickup, my mother just eighteen and the sky white as a cup of an orange peel, the road a wire. My eyes were heavy and nothing mattered. I could hear an owl behind the house and above the field a dark cloud lifted like a wave and became a hundred birds, chattering.

  “Girl, I haven’t been out to the clubs in Austin since I stopped drinking that
Crown.”

  “You don’t look a day older. Not even a day. And this house is just the same. I can’t believe it.”

  “Eva, Eva is working at Zarapes now. She has a little girl that age. No conoces a tu abuela, queridita? Ah, esta cansada. Esta dormida.”

  I listened to the voices with my cheek against the rough nub of the chair’s upholstery. The words were soft and round shapes in the dark, and I imagined this man young and my mother younger, a bright planet, their orbits. All of them hurtling through the dry air, circling this oceanless beach of a town.

  “He tries to come here, he’s a dead man. He is nothing.”

  “Don’t talk about that. It’s over now.”

  “Still. You’ll be safe here.”

  I slept on and off in the chair on the porch and no one made me leave. The heat was like a blanket over my shoulders. The hot wind was in my mouth, and that moon. Here we are, I thought. There’s nowhere left to go.

  Amy

  Fannin, Texas, 1990

  HER BEST FRIEND’S BOYFRIEND HAD SEEN THE BAND before. In Houston, at Fitzgerald’s, a month ago. He leaned into the cab of the truck pushing aside the empty cigarette packets and beer cans, the wax paper Coke cups, and shrugged. “They’re legit,” he said. “This is only the beginning.”

  Jennifer climbed in first, surrounded by the damp fruit cloud of her perfume. Amy slid in next to Jennifer on the creaking plastic seat. Exclamation, lilies and oranges. Jennifer shoplifted it from the Walgreens by putting the little black and white bottle deep between her breasts and tugging the zipper of her jacket halfway up her cleavage. Amy had watched her do it, right in front of the sales clerk, who was sixteen and covered in acne. He blushed beet red and was too embarrassed to say a word.

  “That show was some shit,” the boy said. “I hope this one isn’t lame.”

  “Shut up, Scott,” Jennifer said.

  He gunned the truck through the main streets of town and southwest toward the highway, toward San Antonio. It was eight o’clock. There was a little clutch of cars outside of the American Legion and Amy ducked down. Every Saturday night her father’s old friends went there to eat catfish and drink. They had their own table.

  “Fuck this place,” Jennifer said. She pulled mascara from a pocket inside her jacket and unscrewed it, leaning close to the rearview mirror and opening her eyes, expertly sweeping her lashes, leaning her head back, and shaking her hair.

  Amy had spent all night getting ready for the show. Jennifer had loaned her a pair of blue pumps, and she tried on each of her outfits until she found one that was okay, a little skirt and a T-shirt with a plunging neckline. She had arms like a stevedore, she thought, but her legs looked good in heels and her ankles were narrow. Sometime in her freshman year of high school she’d suddenly come into D-cups, one of the better surprises of her life. Still, she was no fashion model. Her hair was the weak brown of burlap – the same color as Fannin, she thought, as though the town had already claimed her – and she had a crooked front tooth. When she was young she would press against it with a finger until her gums ached, but nothing had changed.

  She sprayed her hair up, trying to make it look as full and untamed as Jennifer’s. She didn’t know anything about the band. “You heard them,” Jennifer had said. “I play their tape like all the time.” Jennifer liked them. Jennifer liked her; that was something in itself. Jennifer wore tight Palmettos that lifted her ass into a valentine and followed her long, thin legs to the deadly points of her stilettos. Jennifer led every boy at James R. Fannin High School on an invisible leash and had sucked off the student teacher in the teacher’s lounge. “God,” she’d said, “it wasn’t like it took much. He was, like, ready to blow.”

  San Antonio was full of souped-up trucks. Drunks were weaving over the dusty streets, and Mexican workers were still sweating in long sleeves, working into the night. It was Fannin, she thought. It was a hundred times bigger but it had the same sad heart.

  Scott threw the truck into park behind a warehouse and they picked their way across a gravel lot toward the club. Amy’s ankles wobbled in Jennifer’s pumps.

  There wasn’t any sign of Scott’s friend – Amy’s blind date, Jennifer’s idea – when Scott pushed them through the double doors and paid the cover, when her eyes adjusted to the smoky dark. “He’ll be here,” Scott said. The band was on the plywood stage, pounding and tweaking their guitars. “That’s not them,” Scott said. “That’s just some shitty opener.” He pushed his way to the bar and came back with three plastic cups.

  “Thanks,” Amy said. She wanted Scott to like her. At least, she didn’t want him to start wondering why she couldn’t bring her own date. Not that Scott seemed to notice either way. When he looked at Jennifer it was like she was occurring to him all over each time; he would grin and throw a heavy arm around her and kiss her hungrily, and then one of the boys on stage would throw out a loud note on a guitar and he’d reel up from her lips and bounce toward the stage. Jennifer took a long drink from her plastic cup and rolled her eyes.

  When the headlining band came on stage they were loud and angry as the tune-up had sounded. Death metal. It wasn’t her thing. Amy loved Nelson, Bon Jovi, Warrant, Extreme. She had a crush on Gunner Nelson. She sang alone in her room to “More than Words” and Poison. Jennifer wouldn’t approve, and neither would these murky, sinister boys.

  She wandered from the front of the bar to the back, where it opened onto a cement floor, tacked-up plastic walls, beer signs. Jennifer was somewhere inside, dancing in an easy way, grinding her hips against Scott. The drink was syrup and it made her teeth ache. She tried to sway to the music, imagining the way that she looked: a girl alone in the back, half-dancing. She wanted to look graceful, but the music was loud and angry. She wasn’t right for this place.

  “Ames!” Jennifer pushed through a group of college kids who were laughing loudly, bobbing forward and back, straining to hear each other’s shouted words. Jennifer’s face was flushed and there was a shine of sweat on her upper lip. “Ames, Gary’s here. You have to come meet him.” She reached up and brushed Amy’s hair with her fingers. “He’s cute.”

  Amy followed her back through the crowd. Scott was standing with a tall boy with dark hair that curled around his neck. One of his ears stuck out. He was cute, she thought. “Amy!” Scott put an arm around her and pushed her toward the boy. He shouted over the music. “This is Gary!”

  Gary smiled at her, and she smiled back. She stood next to him, but it was too loud to talk. Some of the boys in the front were throwing themselves back and forth in front of the stage, and the girls were behind them, looking perfect, dancing half-drunk, looking the way she’d imagined that she might look, in another world, another life.

  She hadn’t expected that he would talk to her much. It was loud, and wasn’t a blind date to a place like this just an excuse to spend the night kissing someone you wouldn’t have to see again? Still, Gary led her back out to the patio and they jumped the fence to the parking lot and his truck, which he presented to her proudly.

  “You like Dead Horse?” Gary asked her, when they were settled on the tailgate.

  “Dead Horse?” she asked.

  “The band,” he laughed.

  She grinned. “They’re my favorite,” she said. “Can’t you tell? I’ve been waiting for this for weeks.”

  “I don’t like them, either,” he said, laughing.

  Gary did like Chris LeDoux. Dwight Yoakam and Vince Gill. He sat around the ranch where he worked for his father listening to George Jones and drinking Pearl. The things he liked were a holy list that he delivered to her as they sat in the back of his pickup: Pearl and his Remington hunting rifle and long days working when he could count the money he was making into triple digits. The West Coast, where the mountains and the ocean bridled up against each other, which he had seen in a Reader’s Digest coffee table book called America the Beautiful. The things he disliked had even more gravity: people who didn’t work enough, people with no
ambition. School, which he had finished last spring, and which insulted his understanding of the world. His father was on both lists – he owned a ranch with two oil wells, where Gary had grown up and now worked and lived, and Gary admired him mightily, almost angrily. “He’s done well for us,” Gary said. “And no one, no one can tell me he hasn’t.” He knocked the ash of his cigarette into his open palm and then tossed it onto the ground. He turned to her suddenly. “God, you’re beautiful.”

  Her face was hot. “You are,” he said. “Beautiful.” He reached into the back of the truck and pulled out a squat blue bottle of Mad Dog and took a long drink. “Where do you live? Fannin, right?”

  She felt a sting of disappointment. He thought she was beautiful and interesting and now he was going to see her for what she was, another girl from a shitty town with nothing behind or ahead of her. “Oh, I hate Fannin,” she said.

  “I’ve been out there,” he said. “There’s not much.”

  “Exactly,” Amy said. Fannin had been built on the old Sunset rail, but the railroad had given way to an oil boom in the twenties. Now it was an oil town, but a poor one. Everyone worked long hours and then drank it away.

  “The ranch is in Geronimo,” Gary said.

  “That’s nice,” Amy said. “It must be nice to work with your family.”

  He turned quickly to look at her. “It’s fucking not,” he said. Everything about him seemed to darken. “My father’s a fucking prick and I’d kill him if I could.”

  Amy felt stung. “I’m – I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think – about how it might be hard.”