Hard Mouth

by Amanda Goldblatt

  Remembered then the tower I had seen on the horizon. Thought I knew in what direction it stood. Held on to this cadged certainty. Began to prep. Turned on the lantern and began to disembowel the tubs. Not neatly. Found what I needed: bars, ropes, necessities only, the knives, dry goods. Dry, what a joke. Filled the emptied plastic tub with these and then with water jugs and some other heavy things to drag along. Trussed the tub with a length of cord. Could I be a sled dog, running through the wilds with my sled in tow. Where was I going again.

  Undressed myself in the cold damp. Dressed myself in all the clothes I could find, including Earl John’s overalls. I was in a panic. Put on my boots. Tied them in bald knots. Could not find the wilderness guidebooks. Looked for them, distressed, for a minute. But a compass: I had that, and I took it out with me, and my haphazard tub kit, all into the bolting storm.

  By the time I was in the real outdoors my heavy boots sucked into shit-brown mud. Was it my imagination, how I could feel the mud turning to ice water at my ankles, where the overall cuffs were loose and sopping? I felt my legs and feet acutely: the muscles torqueing themselves into great hard ropes—how when I dug my toes into a mud clot, a sensation of work ran itself up to my butt. My shoulders went asymmetrical with dragging.

  When the torrent stopped suddenly, I thought of doubling back. How long had it been since I left, how far? Then I remembered the ruin of the cabin. There was no place for me there. I required operable shelter.

  The sun was now entirely up. The journey to the tower felt unstoppable. Though every so often my body stopped, to lean against a tree, to survey the motionless woods, while my muscles fizzed. I saw nothing except my own misfortune. Yes my footprints in the mud were lonely. The cat was not with me. I doubled over, sweat. My heaving dumb mortality, my sexless exertion. I walked along a strange river. I checked my compass, wiped its face of condensation. On the horizon I could see the tower, and I ran, clumsily, forward. A new cloud slung itself over me. It began to rain again.

  UP CLOSE I found the tower rusty. In another circumstance it would have been beautiful, standing there like a valiant ruin in a wide plot of ornate weeds. I got under. Beneath its shelter, there in the mud I stood heaving, then sat on the plastic bin to think. The structure was maybe forty feet tall, with three bands of crossbars evenly spaced, each with a thin perimeter of walkway. Between each crossbar, the height of two tall humans. Between the final crossbars and the shelter, there was a ladder. It looked as if there’d once been ladders, too, between the lower measures, but they’d since been removed, metal sawed away. There were snubs of rungs where perhaps my boots would find purchase, or so I hoped. I would need to be able to get myself up each lower section of the tower.

  Each time I untucked my chin to survey the tower above, the gusting sideways rain threatened to drown me. My lip cracked where I had bitten it. The blood was briefly warm, then not. There was no trace of movement but the weather and its beating of the mountain and the valley. I would not be able to bring everything I had brought with me, up. So I packed some of the water, food, and sundries in a flannel and tied it like a rucksack to my back. The wind sounded like a river. My heart sounded like a heart, amplified. It was night. It was still night, or night again, or dark morning. And while it was still dark I made myself stand beneath the tower and drink water and not die. I walked in tight circles.

  I made yet another plan: how to get up. I would use my ropes. I would scrabble up the tower, then simply wait there in secure shelter until the rain stopped. I would be high and impervious to flooding. For now beneath the tower I felt safer. Its structure divided the wind’s momentum and spitting grit. Here, I squatted.

  For some time, I tried to remember how to tie a figure-eight knot, which is something I had learned the single summer I’d been sent away to camp, the summer after Pop’s first sick note. It had been a Jewish sleepaway camp, on a mountain campus populated with plank-cabins and a lake, a dining hall. A taciturn, nonpracticing halfling, I had mostly been ignored. As a result I had learned nothing social, no lessons of friendship. There in the woods and meadows not even a crush crept.

  However at this camp were some short cliffs where, three times a week, a red-cheeked Australian taught us to climb with ropes and harnesses. I had thrown myself into this, up these cliffs, and down them—belay on, and so forth. It had been the most successful element of summer. Though in the intervening time I had not thought of ropes, nor harnesses.

  Now with pleasurable effort I remembered the Australian’s face. I tried to remember his mouth and the words which had been formed there. I had ropes, and a need to use them. I thought: You have a head for things like this. But in fact I did not.

  This new climb ahead, I worked to perform my old camp vigor. I began to play with a length of cord. By and by I made a knot that looked right enough: a two-headed loop-de-snake. Then I undid it, and snatched out my hummingbird knife, with its carabiner end, and knotted it to the end of the cord and threw it wildly over the first crossbar. It hit the crossbar, which thrummed percussive.

  I knotted again a provisional figure eight, put my boot down and stepped, then hovered there six inches in air for a sick moment. At last I began. I worked upward slowly, holding on to the cord knot for balance. It was not a steady climb, but with the help of the rung snubs, I moved intermittently upward with tortoise confidence. My biceps hollered as I did.

  It was not until I was on the second tier, in the dead middle of the climb, that I remembered I’d lost track of the Thing. This was a new smolder in the ashes of my empathy. The cat would die or not die. My lungs worked like a bellows. I clung to the pole until they slowed. I was, of course by this time, an expert at flicking guilt away into unexplored corners. It was only the realization—come so late—that I’d lost the Thing, which shocked me then. Water dripped into my eye. I squinted until it flushed down my cheek. A serviceable cry for a serviceable animal, now gone. My clothing was saturated, my palms torn to shreds. Yet here I needed only rise.

  And rise I did, feeling the ad hoc rucksack try to pull me back to earth with its heft, over and over. My boots slipped on the nubbins of the sawn-off rungs. I ripped an overall pant leg, revealing the damp thermal underwear beneath. I wiped my face and tasted blood. I was bleeding into the world. The clouds were hemorrhaging still.

  When I got to the highest, final set of crossbars, I allowed myself to look down. There my plastic tub was a dark mirror, already filled with water. Too, the mud ruts marking where I’d paced were brimming. It was not until I’d gotten to the top of the ladder that I tried to look outward and around, across the land. For a moment in my sorry state I was sure I could smell things that weren’t there: musk, citrus, orange blossom. My body working to calm me down, pulling all the wrong stops.

  There was the lake; there were mountain peaks and weeping woods; there was a wet bigness all around me—me, the smallest of motes. I had climbed. In the corner was a silhouette, a shadowed big body boy. Oh, Gene. Oh, sorry me! Escaped from an escape only to find this vintage ogre. I worked to catch my breath. I sat. I counted down from one hundred as if I were alone. And then slept long as I needed.

  WHEN I WOKE it was still raining and someone was blowing in my face. I grunted like an animal. It was only Gene, with his sparkler eyes. “Huzzah!” he said. In some berserker mood he whipped and galloped from one end of the rickety room to the other.

  “Who’s that?” I said: I wanted to lob a blow.

  “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!” he bellowed. “It is I!”

  “Oh you,” I said. “Of course,” I said.

  Once my eyes were open all the way Gene straightened and began to stride about the room, a gentleman down the boulevard. His mood, these days, was mutable as the weather. “You reckon we’ll be flooded out?”

  “No,” I said. “The rain should stop eventually.” I began to strip my layers, one by one, wringing out each article, and draping them across the wood floor.

  “Lady!” Gene said. “Please!”
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  “As if you haven’t seen this.” I continued the most disappointing burlesque this side of any river.

  “We must have our delicacies!” he said. “We must have some assurances between creature and man!”

  “I’m an animal, same as you, Geney,” I said. “In fact you’re not even—”

  “And what of the real animal?”

  “The real—”

  “The kitty?”

  “Gone,” I said sternly, now down to my skivvies. I laid my gear to dry across the floor. “Drop it.”

  “Seems to me—” he began.

  “Drop it,” I said, and, ignoring him, began to inventory my injuries. First, there were my hands, the messes: flesh shreds, and rutted rope burns across my palms. The old scratches broken open, pinkly. The new notch on my shin, purpling. Blisters on my heels, ankles, and toes; some burst into raw newborn craters. The split in the lip and its sexual swelling. A septum raw from sniveling. Never before had I been so busted. It was exhilarating to be a dumb body, unhealed.

  Next I took stock of my surrounds. The room was a cube, with a flat roof, and two windows in each wall. Each window was cheerily mullioned into quarters. The glass was long gone, and though the wind and rain cut through the openings, it did not drown me. The plank wood floor was warped with age into liquid lines and gaps showcasing the mud ground four stories below. Looking down I felt vertigo, as if my chest were being slightly dislocated from my throat. In this dislocation, a feverish flash: I remembered standing in Omar’s living room. I had been this high before. Perhaps this was just another place to crest before a plummet.

  I resolved to stop looking down. Quickly my vertigo thawed into a cleaner awareness. I looked at the room. It was almost empty. On one wall, an old torn map with a rusty pin near its center, which seemed to connote the location of the tower. The land north, east, south, west was wrinkled with water lines, with humps and peaks. I wasn’t interested in where I was however. Except that I saw I had traveled to the edge of the park.

  The notion came like sleet. How surprised I was to be within a formalized territory. My solitude had been undone. This smarted. Then, tasting bile, I leant out the doorway and vomited into the space below. My digestive tract was a two-way street. Over and over, the acid, the silvery tang. I scraped my tongue with my fingernails to find relief.

  “Take it easy, you wild young thing,” Geney said, standing beside me. I looked away from him and closed my eyes, feeling a plummeting inside my innards—or in an emotional concept of my innards, which felt endless.

  “Hey,” he croaked. “Tell me.”

  “Tell me what?” I slurred with woe.

  “Who eats floating fish but flies?”

  “Who eats floating fish but flies?”

  “Who eats floating fish but flies?”

  “Turn it off, you sentimental jerk,” I said, pressing down on an extra bad blister. The pressure issued sentries of focusing pain. I could not say then why it caused me so much harm, hearing him ape and reference the life we had left. However I recognized in this, in him, a repurchased coherence. I wondered what had changed.

  “You wouldn’t be half-bad if you acted like a woman once in a blue moon.”

  I sniveled and glared. “It hasn’t ever mattered whether I’m one way or another to you, has it?”

  “Only in regard to social niceties, Denise. Only in that regard.”

  The rain went on hammering the tower. I wondered, in a self-dramatizing way, if I would ever again stand on solid ground. I looked out, not down, and my chest surprised me: It yowled wild for the cat. The range was struck by the shadows of long clouds, their fleet travel. Gene was rapping a tune on the doorway, looking out on the land: pad-a-whack, tap-tap, pad-a-whack. Then he began to laugh: huh-huh, huh-huh-huh. “I don’t see why you bother with that little nothing. That pipsqueak. That bear snack.”

  I looked back at him, squinted, spit, peeled off a hunk from an energy bar. “What are you talking about?”

  “The cat.”

  “You loved your dogs so much you slept in the same bed as them.”

  “Animals are animals and men are men.”

  “Go on,” I said, looking beyond at the clouds blurring themselves on distant peaks.

  “Denise, I gotta say something.” He didn’t look blue but he did look serious.

  “What?”

  “When I got sick and sad and had to leave the lodge for good—”

  “Was that when you died, after you had to leave?”

  “—the dogs didn’t come with me.”

  “You don’t have to tell me about that.”

  “About which?”

  “You choose.” He didn’t answer. “The dogs,” I cued. “They couldn’t very well fit in your apartment on Wilshire. Marjorie wouldn’t have liked that.”

  He took a pause, then said: “There were too many to shoot them in their sleep.” How could I have been surprised. I did not say a thing. “One woulda got up and started barking and then the others, and well—let’s say it wouldn’t’a been elegant.”

  “Did you poison them?” I was trying to see how I felt regarding this. Could I be sentimental about dogs that had never lived? Sure. I accepted that clawless Thingy had punctured something: me. It was I who’d sprung a leak.

  “I put brandy in their slop. Waited for them to get drunk and bendy. Guess I could have poisoned them but it didn’t seem heroic.”

  “You’ve gotta be heroic.”

  “Sure,” he said, seeming not to catch my near-dead deadpan. “I think as a kindness I meant to shoot Lucie first. As you recall she was my favorite. Except when I got the rifle out, this crazy stud, this setter mix, got excited cause he thought we were going hunting. He was one of the bigger ones and I guess maybe he didn’t get as soused as the others, who were wobbling out back in the yard. But he started to bound toward me, Denise, and I let the rifle go off, shot him square in the brain. Small mercy,” he laughed. “Small, small mercy.”

  I got off my duff and began to approach him. The floor announced me, keening.

  “Once I got the first cap off I shot them quick as I could. Bap-bap-bap,” he explained. “Course Lucie looked at me, the small, wet-eyed little bitch, and I shot her too. You should have seen the yard. Some died quickly. Miserable stuff. Others I had to kick their heads in.” Gene was sweating and I saw this as I moved closer.

  I am a woman of average height, and he a man of average height, so when I got very close to him my eyes were aligned with a deep parabolic fold in his thick neck. There the skin was pink with a sallow undertone, and visibly damp.

  “They were just mutts, Denny. Just animals,” he said, in that dissolving gravel voice of his. “Just goddamn dogs.”

  I’ve heard people say they can’t stand a sad animal story. I can. But this was something about decency. I set both palms on his sodden leviathan chest, pushed.

  Wrestling is the natural way of fighting in this county—as boxing is too quick and requires much thinking and concentration.

  CARSON McCULLERS, The Ballad of the Sad Café

  When I pushed Gene from the tower it was not an exorcism. Nor was it heroic. I watched him plummet but he was gone before the ground, evaporated up. Later that day the rain stopped. I did not and do not connect the two.

  I gathered up my things. I dressed, in a shirt and overalls and boots, all only slightly dank. I wasn’t sad. What I was, in this new absence, was finally alone. By the time I was ready to descend the tower the rain had started up, again, harder.

  So I waited. In a tantrum of boredom I threw my carbon steel blade into a post beam and it stuck there. It may be there still. I had a whole angry standoff with the hole I’d ripped in Earl John’s overalls. The sucker had nothing to say. Soon, shiftless, I fantasized that on the plank floor sat a bowl of gleaming oranges. I wanted to eat one like an apple, sink my teeth through the oily peel and bitter pith, down into the popping pulp. Did I wonder if Gene would come back? At the time I assumed he would. I d
idn’t spend time or hurt on it, not then. Rather I dedicated my heart to the cat. Though I assumed it was dead, or halfway to Tipperary.

  The rain stopped, started again, poured then drooled then spat. At last it stopped and seemed to stay stopped. I waited to see if it would start again. I waited half a day, then through the night, wondering if another storm would roll in. By and by—as I watched the light once more surge into the crevices of the valley—I began to think about how I would fix the cabin. Whether I could find some way to call Earl John. I recognized: I had an unwillingness to call Earl John. I had an inability to fix the roof. But I would return to the cabin and figure things out from there.

  Perhaps my first plan was the best: I would return and set about securing the tarp—and perhaps some blankets and other things as insulation—against the cabin’s gash. Then I would return to swimming, return to my ecstatic ignorant lonesomeness. When it got even cooler I would cease swimming and search for peace inside, I mean, indoors. Perhaps at last I’d learn how to tie those knots properly, should the need again arise. Then I could expire as scheduled, in some new future quiet.

  Softly I remembered the push of my hands through air. In the end Gene was the Lucie and I was not.

  It was dawn and then sunrise and then day: the sky stayed a markless blue. In this day I was not anything to anyone but myself. Only briefly did I reflect on the desire for faith: prayer beads, powders, herbs, a god. I had felt this want in clawing flashes. I am not a person of faith. I believe only in fumbling cause, only in stinging effort.

  Now I was myself only. The boards of the tower whined low. I looked out across the mantis-colored weeds and the darker thicket of bushes and the trees in their enflamed autumnal state, and the far peaks’ angles cutting up the smooth line of clouds, when, in the spreading daylight, something down below the tower moved. There a fleet shadow darted. A heat flushed through.

  At first it was merely a moving shadow; it could have been anything. But as the sun rose the vision was revealed. Wouldn’t you know it was that cat, making a last-act hullo. It seemed to me a possibility, and therefore, in my state, a probability.