Call Me Home

by Megan Kruse

  She wrapped the gun in a sweater and put it at the bottom of Jackson’s little green backpack, then added the bullets, two pairs of earplugs from the bureau, an old Coke bottle full of water, and two sandwiches. She picked out jeans and a sweater for Jackson and helped him into his yellow rubber boots.

  There was an old logging road that ran up into the back forty and they walked it until it was rutted and overgrown, and then they cut into the underbrush and started up. It was all mud, held together with a skein of roots and somewhere, underneath, a crag of rock. She lifted long arms of blackberry out of the way, careful to keep Jackson in front of her, steadying him with one hand.

  They stopped to drink water and eat the sandwiches, sitting on a stump thick with moss.

  “Jackson,” she asked as they walked. “Have you ever seen a gun before?”

  “Like in the movies?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Like in the movies. But the movies aren’t real. Guns are very, very dangerous. I want to show you a real gun so that you know what it looks like. That way, if any of your friends, the kids you meet when you go to school, or anyone, ever has one, you will know not to touch it.”

  She reached into the bag and pulled out the bundle. It was a six-shot revolver with a heavy bull barrel. She held it out toward him. “Whoa,” Jackson said. “Whoa.” He was breathing heavily like he wasn’t sure if he was scared or excited. She let him look at it, to touch the smooth walnut. She clicked out the cylinder and let him spin it.

  “This is very serious, Jackie,” she said. “I want you to see this so you will always recognize a gun. I want you to promise me that you will never, ever touch one. This is special because I’m here with you, and I can keep you safe.” There had been so many stories lately on the news, and a boy in town had shot a friend in the face, playing with a gun he thought was unloaded.

  “Can we shoot it?” Jackson asked.

  “When we go up on the hill,” she said. “I’ll show you. I want you to see how powerful it is. You should never just play with something like this.”

  He nodded. “We should shoot the bobcat,” he said. There had been bobcat sightings out this way; someone had lost a dog.

  “This gun belonged to my daddy,” she said. “Like Gary is your daddy, this was my daddy’s.”

  “Where is your daddy?” Jackson asked.

  She fought a stinging guilt. “He’s in Texas,” she said. “Far from here. And my mama is, too. Like I’m your mama, she’s mine. You’ll meet them one day. Your grandparents.” One day soon, she promised herself, after the baby was born, they would go back to visit her parents. And Gary’s too, maybe. Whatever was between Gary and his parents, she thought, whatever drove them apart – it would be different now that they had children.

  “Let’s keep walking,” Amy told him, and helped him over the fallen log. She knew Gary wouldn’t approve of any of it. After the first few weeks of being sick the pregnancy had been easy, but still.

  It wasn’t far, but it was another half an hour before they cleared the hill. There was a break in the trees, and she was warm from the walk, panting. Jackson’s cheeks were pink and his jeans were damp up to the knees from walking through the underbrush.

  “Is it time?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll show you how it works. But first I’m going to give you these.” She handed him a set of earplugs. “I want you to go sit on the stump over there, and then put one of these in each of your ears, like this – so that the sound doesn’t hurt your ears.” She pointed to a fallen tree, overgrown with huckleberry. When he was settled on it, his earplugs in, his hands folded in his lap, she lifted the gun. She pulled out the cylinder and held the gun carefully through the frame, putting the round into place. She clicked the cylinder latch and waved at Jackson. “Ready?” she called, and he nodded. “Put your hands over your ears!” she called, but he couldn’t hear her.

  She pulled back on the hammer and sighted. “Look straight down the barrel,” Lawrence had said, standing beside her on the ranch. “You’ll be fine. Your daddy could shoot the nut out of a squirrel’s hands.” She fired from the top of the hill, through the trees. There was a rustle of leaves. Fifty feet away, a bird fell, a pile of black feathers streaking toward the ground.

  She dropped the gun. “Oh God,” she whispered. She walked slowly backward, watching. Was it possible she had done that?

  “Mama,” Jackson said. “Mama, is it a bird?”

  She turned and ran to him and covered his eyes. “Oh God,” she whispered again. His tiny hands reached for hers, pulling them away, and she turned him toward her, pointing to the sky.

  “Mama, is it dead?” he asked. His eyes were wide.

  She pulled him to her, and lifted his chin up toward the sky. “Look,” she said, “Do you see it?”

  He looked hard. “Up there?”

  “It flew, baby,” she said. “It just flew right away.”

  He looked at her with wide, adoring eyes. “I saw it,” he said. “It flew.” He put his little arms around her legs and she touched his soft brown hair. He put his palms flat on her stomach again. “Did the gun scare the baby?”

  “No, honey,” she said. “Let’s go home.” She took his hand and they started down the hill. Tomorrow she would sell the gun, she thought. She didn’t want it around her children.

  3.

  The Fish

  Jackson

  Silver, Idaho, 2010

  “YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW MUCH SHIT THERE IS OUT there. There’s whole communities dedicated to this stuff. I mean, of course you don’t know. You’ve been here for months and you haven’t even been to Garnet Ghost Town yet.” Randy opened his atlas on his lap and looked at it by the light of the fire they’d lit outside the semi cab. “Man, I’m so glad I got out of there. Marysville is shit and everything else is even worse. Skagit County is just a dump. Those guys, man – Ed, he fucking lost it on a turn. He’s in a wheelchair, man.”

  Randy seemed elated by the semi cab. “This is exactly the kind of place I need to get. So I can sleep on the road. I’m going to hit all of these places and then write a book. Haunted Highways or something. An exposé.”

  Randy. Jackson felt so grateful for him as he sat there, pontificating in his ugly trench coat. That same old pocked face. He looked like a little kid when he was excited.

  “And girls – there’s no girls in Marysville, practically. But once I’m out there …” He poked at the fire with the toe of his sneaker. “What are the girls like here?”

  “Randy,” Jackson said. His heart sped up a little. “I like guys.”

  “It’s cool,” Randy said. “I just thought, maybe, you didn’t want to say yet.”

  The relief made him want to laugh. Jesus! All of that. He smiled in the dark. “I figured you knew,” he said.

  “So, you’re seeing somebody here?” Randy said. “You got a boyfriend?” Jackson felt a little flush of pride. Never in his life had he been able to tell someone, yes, sure, that’s my boyfriend. You couldn’t exactly say that when you were jerking off the local swim star or fucking a man for money once a week. But on the back of the pride – the sting of it. The ache, which still hadn’t gone away, even though it had been nearly a month now since Don’s accident. Don would be back in Missoula now with Eliza. He didn’t hate Don, but he never wanted to see him again.

  “I did,” Jackson said. “Not anymore.” He kicked the fire with his own boot and watched the sparks fly up.

  Randy nodded, as though he already knew the story.

  “He was a fucker,” Jackson said finally. The heat had worn off and he felt cold suddenly. He leaned toward the fire. He was glad Randy didn’t ask what had happened. They sat in the quiet, ash settling on them.

  “You ought to come with,” Randy said after a while. “Tour the whole country. See some shit.” He reached a broken stick into the fire and concentrated on burning its end to a glowing point. “You and me, we’re alike, you know. Not the homo stuff, you know, but
alike” – and even though Jackson felt embarrassed he also felt good and he let it be. It grew quiet. The fire was ebbing to coals, spread out and blinking like a city seen from high above.

  “What do you think it would have been like if we were born somewhere else?” Jackson asked.

  “You mean if we hadn’t met?”

  “No, just, if we’d had different lives. What we’d be like.”

  “Wish in one hand, dude.”

  “No really. What would you want your life to be?” Jackson felt silly but he didn’t care. He didn’t talk this much normally, but how long had it been since he’d seen anyone from his old life? The little hobo fire. Randy’s tin-can car looking even smaller next to the semi cab, ready to take him out to all those waiting wingnuts. He’d probably marry some girl with a ghost fetish and they’d have little kids who wandered around tape recording the silverfish in the walls. Jackson felt so happy for Randy in that moment, the older, future Randy.

  “You know, man. My weird shit. That’s what I like. What do you want?”

  He considered his own question. What did he want? A life without his father, where his father had never existed. But mostly he wanted Lydia. “My sister,” he said. “I fucked up. Bigger than anything.”

  “You’ll see her again.”

  “I don’t know.” He’d sold them out, and even if they wanted to find each other, how would they? And he’d done it all on purpose. All those days in the woods sitting between the seats of the wooden rowboat, the cool rough wood on their skin, pushing berries into Lydia’s bow-shaped mouth. There was the truth – sometimes he’d dreamed a life without her. Sometimes he imagined the berries were poison and that when she died he would finally be free of her. That she was the thing holding him back.

  “Listen, how hard is it to find someone? That’s right up my alley, man. We can find them together.”

  “Randy, it’s not that easy. I’m sure they changed their names. They could be anywhere.”

  “So we start with the people who’ve changed their names. There’s records of all this shit. Don’t you know anything about the Internet? Where do you think they would go?”

  “If my dad hasn’t found them yet, then they haven’t left any records.”

  “Jack,” Randy said. “Your dad is a stupid shit.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if they’re still in Washington. Maybe Texas, but I doubt it. My dad would know to look there.”

  The best years he remembered were Lydia’s baby years. A summer when she was one or two, just a baby, and his memory must have changed things, distorted them, or maybe it was because he was so small – that summer, he remembered lichen moths taking over, on the walls, on the grass, a thick blanket of them. He’d been rapturous and terrified, following the blizzard of their flight, afraid to touch them, to knock the dust off their wings, to hurt them. Long afternoons walking carefully through the snowy grass, the wings beating around him, Lydia bobbing behind him on a blanket. Another season, that year or the previous or the next, his mother had pointed to fine gray threads in the sky and showed him where it was raining far way. Even the ordinary wonders – powdered milk that transformed beneath the faucet, the tiny hole where a beetle had bored through a leaf – captivated him. What around him wasn’t magic?

  “Jackson,” Randy said. “If you want me to find them, I will.”

  “I do,” he said.

  Jackson made Randy a bed on the dinette cushion with his head by Jackson’s feet. “What’s that?” Randy asked, pointing to the little Chinese herb, the Winter Worm, in its plastic packet on the counter.

  “Nothing,” Jackson said. It looked ugly to him now, mean and gnarled. There wasn’t any life in it. Just Lydia, pushing it into his hand, her face closed to him. The last time they would touch, and he hadn’t known. He pushed it into his pocket and finished making up the bed.

  It was warm in the cab, and comfortable, Randy snoring lightly at his feet. It came back to Jackson then, just before he slept himself: ten years ago, twelve years. “And here I am, king of all this,” his father says, coming into the kitchen where he and Lydia are on their hands and knees playing horses. “I work all my life and all I have to show for it is this shithole and you assholes.” It hurts Jackson to hear him even then, at seven or eight, with his sister’s pink hand – her hoof – in his own. This mountain is theirs, Firetrail Hill, stretching up into the dark night, and somewhere on it is at least the single light from this kitchen. Somewhere on it is all that Jackson knows.

  “King of all of this,” his father says again. He is probably drunk, though Jackson doesn’t know it then. The tiny light from the kitchen barely leaking from the window onto the grass. His father is swaying above them, and he is waiting for them to look up and see how worthless they are, but Jackson keeps kneeling with his sister.

  HE LEFT RANDY asleep in the morning and went down to the work site. He was early. There was the new terrace, the place where Don’s accident happened. Over the last three weeks the project had gone on; the terrace hadn’t been backfilled yet, but the stones were in place. Jackson could only pick out the concrete block that had fallen if he looked for it, and that surprised him, that it wasn’t marked in some way. That it didn’t jump out at him, blood-stained, foreboding. It was just one more rock.

  The early morning light was gray. He lit a cigarette and stood there. He might just stay the winter, he thought. There would be work if he wanted it. This was no different than any other town, really. Just one more place that people gather on this earth. But then – he thought of Randy’s offer. “If you want me to find them, I will. Come with me.”

  He looked out at the lake, at the rows of new buildings. In six months or a year, he thought, all of the sorrow of Don’s life would still be stretched out before him, but around this lake, framed in these windows, would be a hundred different futures, all beginning. He understood, too, that he had been spared. In everything that had happened, he had been able to go on. He started walking around the edge of the lake. He didn’t know how early he was, how much time he had, but it didn’t seem to matter. He didn’t want to look at the concrete block. He didn’t want to think of Don anymore.

  When he came to the dam, he crossed it, following the water to where it washed up against the old baseball diamond, the dusty lots where teenagers would have parked once, sliding damp hands into each other’s shirts. It felt good to walk. He thought about the pits that needed burning, and his station by the skill saw where Dave Riley yelled down measurements for him. He kept walking. What if he did go with Randy? Was that crazy? He could hear a truck in the distance. He could hear all of them going to work. Since the accident he was careful, avoiding the eyes of the men who must know, or suspect. If he let himself think about it he was full of a cold fear. Don’s hand reaching toward him was the reaper’s scythe, the owl calling his name.

  He stopped when he was as far from the work site as you could get. He stopped where he had a good view of the lake and sat down in the grass, the damp of the ground soaking through his jeans. The little herb was in his pocket, and he took it out. Whatever life was in it was so deep inside. He didn’t want it. It was a consolation prize, a reminder of how he’d fucked everyone over. He could think about it all of his life, he thought, and he wouldn’t understand why he had done it. He used one hand to make a cold little flat of grass, breaking and smoothing it. He opened the cellophane packet and spilled the Winter Worm into that nest, letting the grass fall back around it, hiding it. He could stay, he thought, or he could go. He could go with Randy. That was something his mother had given him – the ability to go where he wanted.

  “So let’s go,” he said aloud. Why not? he thought. He couldn’t think of a single reason why he shouldn’t, and a hundred why he should. “Let’s go,” he said, and this time the words sounded electric and sweet, carrying across the water in the still of the morning.

  The sun was breaking through the fog, the faintest warmth on his arms. He felt li
ke laughing. He stood and stretched his legs. Even as he thought about leaving, it was as though it had already happened, and there was no way that it couldn’t. He was shaking Mike Leary’s hand. He was closing the door of the semi cab. The dashboard was glowing; Randy was drumming a beat on the wheel. Somewhere, Lydia and his mother were waiting for him, and he believed Randy when he said he could find them.

  “Let’s go,” he said again. He pushed through the woods, catching branches on his bare arms, and thorns, but he was imagining the radio, the painted lines of the road slipping past, the signs for towns they’d find or forget, and he walked faster. Happiness was rising in him, he was running up out of the woods, and it felt like the future was just beyond the trees, shining. It was offering itself to him, he thought, and all he had to do was step forward. All he had to do was take it.

  Amy

  Watermelon Thump, Luling, Texas, 2010

  SHE POINTED OUT LANDMARKS TO LYDIA AS SHE DROVE: the boarded up library where she used to take out books; the roadside stand that was miraculously still in business, selling pickled okra and chow-chow; the secret path down to the river. She parked the car in Luling in front of Andy’s Lounge; the sky over them was dark, trapping the heat as though they were under a galvanized bucket. She was excited. It shouldn’t have meant anything; it was just a fair, once a year when the streets were loud with Tejano music and shouting, singing, popcorn that stuck to the soles of your shoes, card tables with stacks of foil-wrapped burgers, fabric roses glued to safety pins, and whirligig carnival lights striping the streets. The Watermelon Thump. She’d been on a blind date here, long ago, and danced with different boys from Fannin High and Luling, and once she’d kissed Scott, even though he was with Jennifer. They had big bottles of wine weighing down their backpacks and nothing meant anything, it was all just sweet and damp; wet mouths, cheeks pressed to hers, her own hands between her hot legs.