by Brad Felver
“It’s not fair,” his father says. “None of it. I know that.” He tries to massage Polk’s shoulders, but Polk shies away. These attempts are clumsy and practiced now. They aren’t a family; they’re remnants of one. When she disappeared, their tripod crumbled.
There was a time, not very long ago, when they had been happy. He knows this now because he never thought about being happy. They had jobs, his father at the machine shop, his mother in the deli at the Kit Kat. She always brought home bologna that was almost expired, and they would fry it up until it bubbled and popped.
He clings to a single memory. Sledding a small scoop of a hill near baseball fields, dirty snow packed down. He tries to remember where this hill was, but the location eludes him. Was it a false memory? he wonders. Something he has manufactured to cope? His mother would give Polk a big shove, and he would slingshot down the hill, skittering and spinning where it turned into ice and when the speed became too much, he closed his eyes, afraid to see what lay below. Each time he shot down the hill he lost control, but always he would end up at the bottom, face up in the snow, always his father waiting, asking Should we go again? Then walking back to the house, having to wedge himself between his mother and his father because they were holding hands. He remembers her smell, flowers and vanilla. When they got home, he took a shower, but the water had gone cold again. Bad plumbing, dud water heater. When he walked into the front room still shivering and wet his father pulled a towel from the oven and swaddled him with it, and his skin slowly softened, his breaths lengthened until he felt whole and content.
Polk stops going to school, spends the days painting tracks, updating his map. He is meticulous, always bent over a set of prints or making notations. The pattern will emerge, the methods to her movements, this he knows. He plunges deep into the grounds of the Packard compound, even venturing into the buildings when he is feeling brave. Sometimes he sees vandals, other times photographers, but mostly he sees dogs and homeless who share the various buildings in relative peace. He maps and paints, maps and paints. He stops sleeping, just expands the map, growing weary and unpredictable. Everything begins to feel random. It begins to look like a star map, with constellations emerging, glowing at him.
One day, Polk comes home to find Mrs. Roudebush sitting at the table with his father. She clutches her purse and smiles at him, her sad smile like an apology. “We’ve missed you,” she says.
Polk looks down, and his eyes land on his hands, his large and awkward hands smeared with paint. He looks back up at Mrs. Roudebush, but before he is forced to speak, she reaches into her purse and pulls out a paper bag. She sets it on the table. “I was doing some cleaning,” she says. She stands up to leave, hangs her purse from her shoulder. “My husband,” she says, “he died three years ago.”
Polk feels himself flinch and stare at her.
“I used to roll over in the middle of the night, and he was in bed with me. Sometimes I even heard him snore. I swear I did. Sometimes I would wake up, and his radio would be going. I told my sister about it, but you could tell she didn’t believe me. That was hard. I couldn’t understand why it had to be like that. I refused to change the sheets because I thought he was in there somehow. I slept on those sheets for a year, every night hoping to feel him or smell him or hear his snores. Sometimes I did, and sometimes I didn’t. It was all I thought about. I moved the microwave and the television into the bedroom. I lived in there. One day, my sister found me like that, and she made me take a shower and wash the sheets. Do you know what we found when we stripped the bed?”
Polk shakes his head, no.
“A small painting, an acrylic on canvas, no stretcher. At first I didn’t recognize it, but then I realized it was a scene I had done, probably thirty years ago, not long after we were married, my husband thin and clean shaven, me thin and with a long pony tail. We were standing in front of our first house, not far from here. I had forgotten about that painting, but there it was under the mattress pad.”
She looks to Polk’s father. “There’s no explaining that.”
“Did he put it there?” Polk asks.
“I don’t know, dear. I really don’t. But I think the dead teach us how to grieve,” she says. “I don’t understand it, either, but that’s what I think. Sometimes people can be gone and not gone at the same time. They know things we don’t know.” She smiles at him. “God doesn’t hate you, Polk.”
That night Polk lies on the floor. The bag of paint sits next to him. He hasn’t yet opened it, but he knows what’s in there. He wants to go outside right then and use them, take a flashlight and find the tracks and paint them. What are you trying to teach me? he wonders. He finds himself packing a bag of supplies: bottles of water, beef jerky, Skittles, dog treats, extra socks, a Maglite, toilet paper. He rolls his set of maps up tightly.
He walks out into the kitchen, where his father is sitting at the table. He turns to look at Polk, and dangling from his lips is a cigarette butt. Remnants of her. It has been stubbed out and twisted, unlit, hanging limply. His father is startled. “Polk,” he says. “Can’t you sleep?”
“She’s out there,” he says. “Every night, right now, she’s out there. Her tracks are freshest in the morning.”
“No,” his father says. He pulls the cigarette from his mouth and delicately places it back in the ashtray as if it is some fragile treasure. “You’re not doing this.”
Polk shrugs. It’s time, he knows this. If he waits much longer, he’ll lose her.
“I’ve let this go on too long.”
“You have to sleep at some point,” Polk says.
“I won’t allow this.”
“I’ll bring her home,” Polk says.
“She’s not out there, Polk. You’re looking for trouble. You want to join her.”
“You’re just glad she’s gone. You don’t have to help her now.”
His father smacks him then, the flat of his palm on Polk’s cheek. This is by no means the first time his father has struck him, but this time is different—this is anger.
Polk pounces on this father. They tumble over the table, spill onto the floor. They struggle. Polk hears himself grunt and snarl. He doesn’t punch and kick so much as he thrashes wildly. Then he catches an elbow to the eye, and the world blurs. He yelps with the pain, grabs at it with both hands. His father stops, bends over Polk to examine it.
“Let me look at it, Polk.”
There is a cut clean through his eyelid, like a half-peeled orange. It won’t close all the way. Even when he tries, light seeps through the crack. Everything is mottled, ill-defined edges, blurred colors. They put ice on it, then a hot rag, then some ointment. “Polk,” his father says. “Jesus, Polk. I didn’t—”
“It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“You need stitches.”
“Stop.” Polk wheezes and coughs. “It felt good, didn’t it?”
His father looks like he is the one who is wounded. “Do you really think that?” His face is drawn, defeated. He bends and picks up the ashtray and butts and sweeps the ashes into a pile. He doesn’t look up. “If you want to go, I can’t stop you.”
The moon glows full, or near-full, throwing an eerie sort of light, like the structures themselves blush. Polk must cock his head to the side or cover his thrashed eye to see more clearly. Soon he is trolling the site, rummaging from building to building, tracing his way methodically, following his maps. Even after months of scouting dogs, tracking his mother, noting everything, he has explored only a fraction of the compound. It is like a series of cave systems that turn out to be linked, spreading out forever in all directions. But he has supplies. He will mimic her movements for as long as it takes.
He sniffs his way through one building at a time, one floor at a time, scouring every closet, every side room, behind every pile of rubble, his flashlight flickering in every direction. Collapsed staircases and crumbling masonry and bowed walls. Drips through the open roof, frozen like milky stalactites. All abandoned, as if
in haste: filing cabinet drawers thrown open like gaping maws; a ’57 Clipper, no engine block, sitting mute on the line; rebar poking through split concrete; cottonwood trees growing from floorboards, leaning away from Saint Clair’s wind. He shoos away dogs, passes sleeping bodies without a word. For the first time, Polk feels real fear, a coldness clenching his torso. The feeling that he is not alone, that he is the one being tracked now. Until now he didn’t care what happened to him, but the vast quiet of this crypt is too terrifying, the fact that he see shapes and colors more than fully defined objects.
He soon feels that he could map this system for years and still be no nearer to finding her. All night he explores, makes notations on his maps, stoops to examine prints. Prints all over. This is a populated world, crowded with life: dogs, cats, foxes, at least one coyote. Humans. He passes them silently as they lay curled, backs to the wind. Some of them shiver, but most seem not to notice him. He is certain he hears a baby cry at one point. He stands still, waits for the cry to pierce the silence again, but there is only the long quiet, the creaking of the buildings. When he moves off there is a long and shrill howl of a dog, first a single wail, and then others respond, some far off but others nearer, too near. He twists his head to listen. Are they communicating? Pack-mates on the hunt?
Then a crawling sensation, like the shock from a nine-volt on the tongue. Then the smell: his mother’s perfume, flowers and vanilla.
He spins around. No one. He narrows his eyes like an eagle, glares into every crevice of the room, tilts his flashlight at every angle, sees nothing, no one. He tilts his head, uses his good eye. Nothing. He sniffs deeply: menthols.
“Are you here?” he says. The first words he has spoken all night. Then: “Why here?”
This is when he would usually attack his father, loose that confused anger onto the world where it might dissolve. But there is no one here, no violence he can inflict. He tries to think of brutal things to do to the world, but none come to him. It is as if some awful weariness has flattened him. How long has he been here? When did he last sleep? Everything is tertiary colors pulsing from a fuzzy black background, moonlight, haze.
When he moves away from the wall, it is green moss everywhere. Where there was snow, now there is moss. Plush, spongey. Her prints stamped into it. They should be his own prints, but they are hers. The deeper trenches at the ridges, the veiny webs on the soles, the short span between each heel strike. They are hers. He follows them, careful not to trample. They lead up a grand staircase, through a series of offices, over creaking wood floors and concrete ground into gravel. Silence, all silence and the cutting reek of menthol.
He follows the trail, follows the smell. They tug him along as if he wears a belay line. Soon he is trotting, climbing upward, ignoring the stomping noise he makes, the commotion of disturbing a closed system. He emerges on the roof, a surface so vast it seems like he is back on the ground. He meanders among a grove of cottonwoods that poke through the concrete. They are leafless, their icy limbs shaking in the wind, clattering and creaking. The tang of menthol grows stronger. He coughs and has to wipe away the hot seep from his eye. He doesn’t trust this, none of this. To the east, a small breech in the darkness, the sun climbing toward the horizon, the moonlight diffusing. The scent dissipates. He turns and looks behind him. No moss, only snow, pure and untouched but for his fat mashed footprints. He gazes around, everything blurry like he is under water. There is nothing here, not his mother, not even traces of her.
Another high-pitched wail, closer this time, washing over the whole rooftop. Silence for a few heartbeats. Silence. And then the response, an answer that seems to emanate from the cottonwood grove behind him. The limbs clatter in the wind, camouflaging its stalkers.
Polk walks on the sides of his feet to dampen the sound, but his commotion still echoes about. He moves to the edge, looks down at the vast fields below. Then he sees it: glowing prints. The paint. Whether it is the foggy haze, moonlight, and sunrise occupying the same world, or perhaps his own split eyelid distorting things, or if it is perhaps God himself, he does not know. But those painted tracks glow. All those tertiary colors erupting from the ground. Colors that do not belong to this season or to this place.
Polk sits on the edge, his feet dangling. He stares at the painted prints. It is the prettiest thing he has ever seen, he cannot look away, like staring into the belly of a fire. New colors. He loses track of time, just stares, his breaths coming quicker. They seem alive, crawling tracks, blurry emissions from the core of the earth.
“Is this what you wanted me to see?” he says aloud, his voice bleating through the hush. He waits for a response he knows is not coming. After all this? Mrs. Roudebush was wrong.
Polk hears the soft padding of paws before he sees the dog. A thin squeaking sound, fresh snow being tamped down. Not so much a palpable noise as an echo with no architect. He is afraid to turn around, to see what he already knows is there. When he does turn, he first notices the ribcage bulging through skin and fur. Such hunger. That distinctive brindle pattern, writhing, uncoiling around the torso. The low rumbling of anger, not a simple growl but slow-burning fury surfacing. Behind it, more movement in the cottonwood grove, a slow swaying not caused by wind. Polk stands slowly, his heels hanging over the edge of the roofline, afraid to make any quick movements. Is this about survival? Or is it revenge? The pit bull encroaches like a lurching shadow, deliberate and menacing steps, its muscled haunches tightly drawn and trembling. Polk edges along the roofline, but there is no retreat, no escape.
He turns away, looks back down at the glowing prints. He can see very far, miles, can see the individual glass panes of windows in the skyscrapers downtown and the mossy roofs of hundreds of houses on the East Side. All the city is out there, yawning itself awake. He looks down. Is it far enough to kill him? Or just to maim? To break his body apart. He pictures this for a moment, tries to feel the swelling terror in his gut as he plummets, the piercing ripple shooting through his legs, collapsing his body into an accordion when he strikes ground. Would this be the moment of relief? He wonders when the pain would strike, how long after impact? One second? Five? Never? He wonders about the precise instant when life stops and death starts. He wonders about that moment for his mother, for all the dogs he has killed.
The low rumbling draws closer, so close it seems to emanate from Polk himself. He squats down, his back to the pit bull, cinching his body into a defensive crouch. He squeezes, fights against trembling. And yet some strange joy tempers the fear, like a return to the world. He closes his good eye and waits, several ragged breaths he waits.
When he opens his eye again he sees in the distance the baseball field, the chain-link fence of its backstop. That small scoop of sledding hill next to it, so much smaller than he remembers. There it is, no so far away, a handful of blocks to the west. Has it been there this whole time? His mother pushing him down, his father dragging him back up. And then he is falling, skittering downward, spinning in some wobbly oblong orbit, the pull of gravity on his stomach. He will crash, he can feel it, he is moving too fast, out of control. Once unleashed, gravity takes over, no stopping it. Blood pulses into his head and he clamps his eyes shut and multicolored stars pour over him like a meteor shower. A piercing throb. His breath catches and he clenches, hardening muscle into concrete, bracing for impact, and when it comes, it jars the breath loose from him, and all seems lost until his father pulls him up and brushes the snow from his face and says, Should we go again?
Acknowledgments
“Queen Elizabeth” was originally published in One Story 218. Also, this story is forthcoming in Laura Furman, ed., The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 (New York: Anchor Books, 2018).
“Throwing Leather” was originally published in Ascent (September 2010).
“Evolution of the Mule” was originally published in Beloit Fiction Journal 25. Also, this story was anthologized in Joe Taylor, ed., Tartts Seven: Incisive Fiction from Emerging Writers (Livingston, AL: Livingston
Press, 2016).
“The Era of Good Feelings” was originally published in Midwestern Gothic 20.
“How to Throw a Punch” was originally published in The Adroit Journal 6.
“Unicorn Stew” was originally published in The Minnesota Review 78.
“Stones We Throw” was originally published in Wilderness House Literary Review 8, no. 4.
“In the Walls” was originally published in Atticus Review 2, no. 34.
“Out of the Bronx” was originally published in Zone 3 20, no. 1.
“Hide-and-Seek” was originally published in Sequestrum (Spring 2015).
“Country Lepers” was originally published in The Summerset Review 41.
“Praemonitus, Praemunitus” was originally published in Ostrich Review 4.
“Patriots” was originally published in Harpur Palate 14, no. 2.
“The Dogs of Detroit” was originally published in Colorado Review 41, no. 2.
Writing and publishing a book is such a collaborative effort, though it always seems that the author gets all the credit. I’ve had hundreds of people guide me over the years, and while I can’t thank all of them here, I would like to offer a few words of thanks.
To my mother for reading to me as a child, for showing me the value of hard work, for pushing me to be a person of substance in a world so infatuated with flash. And to my father for encouraging me to write stories long before I had any business doing so.
To Drue Heinz for her many years of supporting the literary arts. You left behind such a profound legacy. And to Lynne Sharon Schwartz for selecting this manuscript. It’s surreal to see my name anywhere near yours.
To Katie Grimm, my super-agent and partner and friend. I’m so grateful that we’re doing this together.
To Karen Heath for her distinctive blend of intellect and grace. You always took my writing seriously, which convinced me to take myself more seriously too.