F*ckface

by Leah Hampton

  Walter grunted a yes and touched his hand to the small of my back. I flinched at first; then some brittle wire inside me snapped.

  “We’ve been trying to have a baby,” I said. “I’ve lost two.”

  Walter’s arm circled in tighter. He grimaced at the floor, and his free hand gripped his clipboard. I tried to laugh, but instead I began to shake and blubber. I leaned into him.

  “Howard’s sperm swim just fine, but I can’t seem to catch them right.” I sniffed in snot and grinned, then lost my nerve again and whimpered into Walter’s bicep. “We don’t talk about it.”

  Walter stroked his hand up and placed it onto my shoulder. His hand weighed as much as my marriage, just that small piece of him.

  “It’s hard,” he said. “Of course.”

  “What if Hassel was to kill somebody, driving like he does? They won’t hear. They don’t listen.” I closed my eyes, gripped the thin plastic bottle until it crackled and caved in my hand.

  Walter passed his hand down my arm. My skin had been clay all morning, all year, but now it tingled. My vision blurred as I welled up a second time and leaned harder against him.

  Right then Violet swanned in, backlit, at the end of the hall. Her children skittered past us. As she took in the sight of me curled and weepy under Walter’s care, her shoulders slumped. She blinked and shifted her focus as if she’d seen me unclothed. I recoiled from Walter and walked dutifully toward her. My skin went clay and cold again. I dried my face, stuffed the soda bottle in my purse, and ducked Walter’s gaze.

  Violet’s voice was tight. “We’ve got to get Dad ready. He’s been discharged.” She handed me a white paper bag. “We got you a roast beef. Mabel thought you’d be hungry.”

  She put a hand under my elbow, guiding me as if I were blind, and together we went back to Hassel.

  * * *

  The ward nurse had told us Hassel couldn’t dress himself, so I had good reason when I refused to give him his clothes. Violet was at the nurse’s station asking about pills and doses. She asked me to check on the old man. I reeled through his door still in a dazzle of emotion. The room’s medicinal reek revived me like a smelling salt, and my breath came in gulps.

  Hassel filled up his bed like a hickory stump. I put a hand on my chest and tilted one hip, trying not to face him down too hard.

  “Well, Dad,” I said, casual like. “You gonna make it?”

  Hassel nodded, then flung his torso forward. “I’m ready to go,” he said.

  “They’ll send somebody to help you,” I said. I was still snotty and worn through from weeping into Walter’s muscles. “Just hold on now, and let them get you dressed.”

  Hassel grunted. He rocked his bottom back and forth, inching his feet off the bed onto the cold floor. Sheets and gown swirled around him.

  “I’m not waiting, Tina,” he said through rocks in his throat. “I want to get on home.” He pointed behind me. “Reach me my shirt and pants out of that cabinet and bring them here.”

  “Hassel, you’ve got to have help,” I said. “You heard the PT say you don’t have any balance. You’ll fall over pulling on your underwear.”

  Hassel seared his rheumy pupils at me and pointed again, fist quaking.

  “Pants,” he said.

  I breathed. My arms felt sore and soft, like they feel after chopping wood in the cold.

  “No, sir,” I said.

  My fight hadn’t left me, and Hassel knew it. We stared each other down like frontier outlaws. The room swelled with his ire.

  Hassel didn’t test me further. He would have if I’d been one of his own. Instead, after three tries, he spluttered up off the bed. Once standing, he lowered his chin and glared at me through spidery eyebrows. Fluorescent light pooled around a clutter of charts and bedpans beside him.

  “Fine, then, young lady,” he said.

  Then Hassel Fields, all eighty-three shaky years of him, pulled off his hospital gown with an operatic reveal. His flabby arms swooped up, and after a defiant fumble, he stood before me buck naked, daring me to stop him from seizing his khakis.

  My breath fell out of me in a whoosh, and my hands dropped to my sides. I loosed the Arby’s bag, which flopped to the floor and landed on my foot. I gawked.

  Hassel’s splotched, veiny body was a fearsome map. He had two long, black bruises where The Box’s seatbelt had spared his life—one near his heart, the other across his belly. His ball sack hung low and full like a finch sock. His legs looked scrawny and pale under the bulk of his battered torso.

  Every muscle in me stilled. I couldn’t move. Here was Howard’s source, and here was I refusing it. My secondary brain, a layer of sentience underneath the immediate, compared his body to my husband’s and cast me into the future. If I stay with Howard, I thought, this is what I’ll be contending with in thirty years.

  Hassel advanced toward me, dick wobbling, mumbling in want of a shirt. His breath was even now, like a steam train. I fumble-grabbed a dirty blanket hanging off the chair to my right, but I couldn’t think how to stop his advance. I held the blanket wide and moved weakly to trap him in it, as if he were a beast I had to net. Then his gait hitched. His gnarled toes splayed, and his eyes reeled. He put a hand out into thin air and hunkered weight into his heels to balance himself. I watched his naked body veer toward toppling, then just barely right itself. Hassel gave a little bounce in his knees and lowered his shoulders like a scolded child.

  The tension dropped out of my muscles, and my shock evaporated. I thought about my recent stints in similar sanitized rooms, how nurses force vulnerability upon a woman with their needle drips and saccharine coos, and I felt doused with pity. Hassel was helpless.

  I planted my feet, tightened my glutes, and bent in to swaddle him. I held the blanket aloft, baby blue. I arced my hands and swooped the blanket around him like I was making to waltz. His shoulders were granite, and he still glared, so I tried to chortle and soothe.

  “Hassel,” I said, soft as I could.

  My hands sunk into him. I eased forward. The old man smelled like iodine and mildew. I said his name again and gripped my hands tighter, feeling for his cool flesh through the blanket.

  “Come on now, honey,” I said. “You can show off all you want, but I’m still going to—”

  “Dad!” my sister-in-law gasped.

  She’d come in with the children just in time to see us in our freakish pose, me embracing her father’s front half in a rumpled blanket, his whole back side exposed, both of us a wall facing the other. Little Mabel squealed, and Eric muttered “Dude” and turned his face away.

  Violet flitted up and pushed me aside, livid with modesty. Hassel pointed to his clothes, instructed. I stepped back, suddenly hungry for the sandwich I’d dropped. She did his bidding in a quiet state of terror that made me feel briefly sorry for her. In return, Hassel allowed his daughter to cover him. I gathered up my Arby’s bag, flopped in the Naugahyde chair by the window, and watched them all fuss around while I nibbled on my roast beef.

  While his shirt was being buttoned, Hassel turned toward me. His cheeks softened, and he gave me a slow wink. I stopped mid-chew and raised my eyebrows at him.

  Howard walked in a few seconds later clutching a stack of insurance forms. He stopped sharp, sensing the tension in the room.

  “What happened?” he said to Violet.

  Hassel fanned away his son’s offered hand and eased himself onto his mechanized mattress. His shirt skewed over his top half like a messy kerchief. Unzipped trousers hitched and splayed their pockets over his bottom. His daughter knelt before him, holding a beige sock in each hand. They looked to me like unlubed rubbers.

  “Your wife wouldn’t give me my clothes,” he said to Howard. His nostrils whistled as his left sock went on, and fluorescent light sparkled off a sliver of hazel in his eye. “So I gave her a memory.”

  He stared into Howard’s drooped mouth and told his daughter not to tie his shoes too tight. The air felt dense, and I heard someone r
etch out in the hallway.

  Hassel’s face blossomed into a grin, and he cut the silence with a massive wheeze. Then another. His shoulders clenched and loosened with each rasp. His bruised, tender belly pulled in, then shoved out in quickening contractions. His lips and eyes widened with bitter delight. From my corner, I began to quake in my seat. I threw my head back and inhaled, felt my guts burble, and soon the pair of us synchronized into guffaws.

  We were merciless. We went slack and leaned over howling. We cackled for a solid minute. I wailed, and Hassel let out exhausted whoops and kept wiping his eyes. Violet stood up, pulled her children to her, and filed up next to Howard. The four of them formed a line opposite us, blocking the door. They watched our hysterics with horrified stares. After their silence pushed us back hard enough, Hassel and I settled into hitched giggles, and the Fields gang slowly unclenched. The children were hushed. Howard chopped off the last of our glee.

  “Tina,” he said. His arms were crossed, and his mirror sunglasses glowed atop his spiky, gelled hair. “Why don’t you go wait in the truck.”

  I rose, slung my purse over my shoulder, and quit the room. In the doorway I looked back at Hassel and pistoled my thumb and forefinger at his chest. The old man closed his eyes. I walked out, tossed the Arby’s bag in a hazardous waste bin, and left the Fields family to bustle like drones over their queen. The tossaway rattled against my ass in my back pocket, and I wished I’d thought to take a snapshot of Howard’s and Violet’s faces.

  The sun smacked into me as I left the building. Our F-350 was parked beside a median of dark Kentucky grass. I walked past the truck, put my back to it, and stopped on the median. I squatted in the hot grass and let it itch my ankles under the cuffs of my jeans. I pulled the camera out of my back pocket and tossed it into my bag. The WPA church across the way faced me. I nodded to it, and the red bricks asked me point-blank whether I wanted a divorce. I shrugged.

  Howard had brought me out of Mingo, saved me when I was just rounding twenty, so I couldn’t fault him. For all that I pined about it, my home county didn’t have anything to stay for or go back to. The mining reclaim sites, scarred like they were, couldn’t imitate old ground. Suits and invaders had dumped toxic dirt onto what they blasted out, leaving the hillsides false, silent slumps. The curving bulge and teem, the mountains we used to stare off to as kids, were now corpses stuffed with dirty packing foam. A new airport. Who needed a plane to nowhere? Mingo was lost, laid bare. Marrying Howard meant I escaped the worst.

  If it came down to it, I saw I’d be the one who moved in with Hassel and kept care of him. Violet was busy with her children and all of Lexington, and my husband was no nursemaid. Hassel and me had the same destiny, and I would wipe his ass and drive us both on reckless errands over white Kentucky roads. There was no other task for me to take on. I had submitted to the same indignities he had, knew the same country. Howard was right; there were similarities.

  We would most likely bed down at the Super 8, then head back to Charleston the next day to regroup. We’d decide there, while his father’s pain settled, whether either of us would say any of what was on my mind.

  I had begun to sweat when Walter the PT swaggered out a side door by the ambulance rank. He stopped some distance away on another grassy median. He turned eastward, away from me and the WPA church, and lit a cigarette under the shade of a small maple. I stood up and slunk against the truck’s bumper. Then I fished my keys out, climbed in the cab on the passenger side, and cranked the engine and A/C.

  A wall of cool pushed me back in my seat. Walter smoked on, and with each puff, his back flexed. My hands found the tossaway in my purse. I pulled it out and set it on the dash. I held back from the viewfinder a whole arm’s stretch, afraid to put eye to lens. I aimed the camera at Walter. I wanted a shot of his arms, his fine feather, his circle of ink.

  I clicked away at him. Between snaps, I could swear I felt an egg slip from me and glide down to the gusset of my lace briefs. I thumbed the nubbly black wheel until I remembered I didn’t know of a Rite Aid back home in Charleston, or in Mingo, or anywhere else, that still developed real film. I’d have to hunt to find somebody who could process the negatives.

  I pulled the camera down off the dash and held it in my lap. The F-350 rumbled and yawned, and I began clicking off shots, photos of nothing. Dashboard, lap, wind, click, to the end of the reel. I’d most likely lay the camera to rest in the nightstand, undeveloped. The truck’s windshield was bug spattered and tinted, so likely my pictures would never come out anyway.

  Walter flicked his butt into a hedge and went inside through the glass doors. His shoulders looked narrower from a distance. Maybe Hassel was tougher than him after all. Kentucky sure was.

  I cracked my window and squeezed the tossaway tight in my right hand for a long moment. Then I flung it out of the cab. The camera twirled in a long arc across the median and landed in a patch of soil under a laurel. The truck idled. I pulled my knees to my chest, balled my body tight, and leaned against the door. I waited for Howard, but I didn’t look for him. I clenched my hands under my chin, and I wished for Mingo to be put back the way it had been, wished Hassel could drive himself home in a grand, fine wagon. Hot summer air seeped into the truck. I curled myself deeper, gripped my shins, and stared hard out my window, waiting to see.

  FROGS

  “A decade ago, summer was full of their mating calls. But now—” The naturalist tilted his head. His long neck sprouted wiry cords of muscle, and his voice sank into the soft dark.

  “He’s really feeling it,” Frank whispered in his sister’s ear.

  “Hush,” said Carolyn. “I can’t hear.”

  The naturalist’s hands were long-fingered and delicate. He swooped up with his right one to make a grand gesture at the clear twilight sky lowering like a blanket over the forest, while his left hand kept his flashlight pointing downward. Under the milky strands of emerging starlight, his hands looked like bat’s wings—fine boned, claw-like. His whole body was thin, his eyes large and dark. The naturalist was altogether like a bat.

  “But as we have discussed in our previous lectures, for those of you who attended…” Here the naturalist paused for effect.

  Frank and Carolyn looked at the ground. They had not attended any of the previous lectures at the biological station, and everyone seemed to know it. An earnest-looking nine-year-old girl with two crooked braids twisted up her mouth and gave them both a long, disapproving up-and-down. Frank and Carolyn did not have the proper clothing or tools; they did not know where to stand. They did not smell of the organic ginger bug repellant all the other attendees used.

  “… if you recall from those previous discussions, the ongoing calamities visited upon the biodiversity in our region have hit the families Hylidae and Ranidae hardest. We hear far fewer frogs than we used to. Our nights are quieter than they should be.”

  The naturalist paused again. Something rustled in the bush behind him and let out a small, doleful peep.

  He pointed a solitary finger in the air to acknowledge the peep, which had the effect of holding everyone in silence for some moments. The trees at the edge of the clearing held still and thick for him, too. For no discernible reason, except that in groups of people, random subgroups often form and move together, five or six of the twenty souls present looked upwards and pondered their altitude. Carolyn was among them. She clutched her brochure to her chest and traced her eyes along the inky border between the tops of trees and the night sky. She listened for frogs while Frank shifted and yawned behind her.

  The biological station sat at five thousand feet, secluded at the top of a mountain ridge far above the small university that operated it. The school purchased the hundred acres of high-country forest land in the 1950s, and it had been used as a research site ever since. According to the program brochure and the assorted gossip of regular visitors to the station, the naturalist was an adjunct botany instructor at the university, but he spent most of his time waiting for t
he school year to end. He would then abandon the valley of tenured outsiders and frat houses to return to the mossy, misty solitude of the station. He was its longest-running resident; no one could remember him not being here.

  Twice a week, from late April to mid-August, there were lectures on various topics. Members of the public were invited if they registered in advance and made a donation. Students and university faculty got in free. The naturalist would, during these visiting hours, summon the energy to be barely sociable. Otherwise, for the rest of the summer, it was him, a few graduate assistants, and the amphibians, mammals, birds, trees, and plants of the Southern Highlands. His longevity at the biological station and lack of outside commitments resulted in a general consensus that the naturalist was a genius, and that he had earned the right to hold forth on matters even outside his area of academic expertise.

  Those who attended lectures were respectful of the station’s wild inhabitants, and of the naturalist. Few spoke. The children who came here were often escorted by stolid grandparents who suppressed the children’s giddy wiggling. Sometimes the children themselves dragged their parents in a fit of juvenile scientific curiosity, and so were better behaved than their elders. Hardly anyone poked the turtles or picked the flowers. The naturalist often remarked that he believed the effort it took to get here weeded out the people who would do such things. The station and the narrow road that ended at its gravel parking lot were rugged, only partially plotted in GPS devices and online maps. The signposts were small, minimally informative. Nature thinned the herd. Only those who had the persistence to find the station, and the quiet certainty to hike the steep, dark trail up from where they’d parked, ever made it here.

  Frank slapped his arm and cursed. In the broken silence, someone handed him a bottle of organic bug repellant. He squirted himself and stuck his now ginger-scented hand back out into the darkness for someone to reclaim their bottle. It disappeared mysteriously, in such a gentle way that Frank did not speak his thanks.