by M. O. Walsh
“Geoffrey,” he said. “Can you teach me how to play a song?”
Geoffrey leaned forward and put his hand on the case. He closed his eyes, muttered something under his breath.
“Of course,” he said, and looked up at Douglas. “But first you have to learn something else.” He then sat back and crossed his legs, stroked his goatee. “You have to learn how to be willing. How to be open.” He nodded at the case. “Go ahead,” he said. “Take a look.”
Douglas reached down and unlatched the case, raised the lid.
Inside of it, nestled beneath the straps of his trombone case, sat two playing cards that had not been there before, each facedown. The effect of this trick on Douglas was near visceral. He felt goosebumps on his arms, a chill at the back of his neck.
“Okay,” he said. “How’d you do that?”
“That’s not the question,” Geoffrey said. “Turn them over.”
So, Douglas did, and the first card he turned over was a seven. The second one, a six.
Both of them hearts.
“The question,” Geoffrey said, “is how did you do that?”
10
Home on the Range
Jacob was drenched by the time he got home. He’d not even been running. It’s just so damn hot around four o’clock, when it isn’t so much the sun bearing down as it is the heat rising up from the sidewalk. There’s no escape. Stick to the shady side of the street all you want. Walk with an umbrella. Wave a fan in your face. It doesn’t matter. When the temperature and humidity both hit 95, you’re walking around in a sauna. It’s like even your eyeballs are sweating. It makes you wonder why people would live in a place like Deerfield.
Jacob often wondered this, too.
He knew from school that sociologists might argue people don’t notice this type of thing, the peculiarity of their own environment, if they’ve been raised in it. Things like weather, language, attitudes: Why would it seem strange if you’ve never known anything different? This is why people with accents don’t know they talk funny until they move out of town. Why people from Maine don’t know you don’t often eat lobster in Louisiana, why people from Louisiana don’t know you can’t get crawfish in Maine, and so forth. Yet Jacob had lived his entire life in Deerfield and never made peace with the heat. Whereas most kids looked forward to summer—water-skiing out on Lake Maurepas, fishing at Lake Verret—Jacob dreaded it.
The heat made his back break out in a rash. This made him unwilling to take his shirt off, which inevitably made the rash worse, and so, in the lifelong battle of shirts versus skins, Jacob was either shirts or did not play. Toby, of course, was always skins. Jacob’s face, too, in its teenage splendor, stayed greasy and slick and never tanned. His neck itched around his collar, his shorts chafed around his bony hips, and he smelled pretty ripe no matter what he sprayed in his armpits. The saying goes that the heat brings out who you truly are in Louisiana and Jacob knew this expression was true. The problem was, he was not always a fan of this person.
As such, he’d spoken to no one since leaving Trina at the mouth of the trail. He instead shoved in his earbuds and kept his head down, cursed his own life in an increasingly familiar way, and blared whatever playlist he’d already had queued on his phone. He got no pleasure from this music. He was so lost in his thoughts about whatever was happening with Trina that he couldn’t tell you one song he’d played. Something heavy, is all he remembered, before it was interrupted by the ding of a text message that read:
I can still taste you/him/y’all
Jacob did not reply.
What would he even say? He felt so lost as to Trina’s intentions with both him and the world that it frightened him. Ever since he first called her, just a few nights after the funeral, and she began her hinting around about how the dickheads had caused Toby’s death, little about Trina made sense. Even at the most basic level of human interaction. She was edgy and dark from the moment she first came to Deerfield and yet had partnered up with Toby somehow, who was nearly the opposite of this. He was athletic and popular, always surrounded by guys laughing and slapping his back or girls he barely knew grabbing his strong shoulders, as if they just wanted to get a feel of him.
Nobody, up until today, had wanted to feel anything of Jacob’s. And for the first one who did to be Trina? What to make of that kiss? he wondered. Why was it a “problem” for Trina that Jacob resembled his brother? Was she so attracted to Toby that she now found Jacob attractive, too? That was a disappointing notion. And why did someone like her go after a guy like Toby in the first place? Didn’t he have enough attention? Why, Jacob wondered, wasn’t she first attracted to him? What sort of invisible magnet did Toby possess that his own twin brother could be so obviously deprived of? And again, Jacob thought, why wasn’t she in the car with him that night? He couldn’t figure it all out.
And though it was true that this exact form of confusion had basically sustained Jacob the past two months, listening to her plot some vague revenge for Toby’s death, having her pay him such strong attention, letting the whole scenario become a sort of dark and wonderful distraction from his reality, he’d had enough. His plan now was to cut her off completely. He would ignore her texts. He would turn her into the authorities if she didn’t leave him alone. He would have her committed.
Why? Because she was either full of shit or she was batshit. Had to be.
Why had Jacob bought into it? Perhaps it was simply the timing.
In the mad days after Toby’s death, when Trina first suggested Toby’s friends were behind it, forcing him to take shot after shot as if being initiated into the idiocy of manhood, to chase beer after beer just to prove that he belonged on a fucking varsity baseball team, of all stupid things, Jacob was still so angry that his conscience was bent. He acted unlike himself. He kicked a hole in his wall. He told her he hated them, too, all of the dickheads, and wished that they’d driven off the road instead. He bounded between the icy poles of sadness and anger like all of those saddled with loss. And the loss was big, wasn’t it? His brother. His twin. His friend. His competition. His backup. His pride. His nemesis. In many ways, himself. All of them gone in one day.
So, he was justified in these feelings and, like any person adrift in anger, had so many options as to who to get even with. He could take revenge on God through antipathy. Revenge on Toby’s friends through action. Revenge on the whole damn town. Yet he was out of his mind in those moments, it was true, and Trina fed into it all. He had taken her initial promise that “This is not over” to mean their talk of Toby was not over and used it as a selfish way to stay close to his brother. Jacob understood that now.
But as the weeks have passed and his anger has dulled, how every interaction he’s had with Trina inevitably made him feel worse instead of better, Jacob was finally starting to feel like himself again. Things were becoming clear.
Trina was not mentally well. This was a fact.
The first piece of evidence for Jacob was that the closer he physically got to her, the farther away she seemed. This feeling shared no kinship with the way he felt about other girls he’d tried to come close to. They were easy enough to understand. He liked them but they did not like him. That is the simplest math. So, it wasn’t because Trina was especially coy or aloof but, rather, Jacob feared, because there wasn’t anyone at the core of her to know. This also frightened him. And yet the kiss, he had to admit, the strange physical attention she’d paid to him these last weeks, was another story. Perhaps it, too, was about his brother, in some twisted way, about remaining close to him through Trina or maybe even stealing something from him. Or maybe it was because of the generic her, the fact that Trina was a female and Jacob was a male and the way he thought of her was much like the way he thought of other females of his age and it was nice and curious and natural and so why shouldn’t he like it? Why should he always have to be different? Why should he have to
feel guilty about something nearly everyone else of his age was doing? He shouldn’t. He wouldn’t.
Still, he was headed for trouble with Trina. He knew that.
So, it would be simple. He would cut her off. He would ignore her. He would back out. He would not give her what she wanted.
That was the plan.
When Jacob rounded the corner at Oxbow Street, he saw the door to his garage standing open, a truck he didn’t recognize parked in the driveway. It was an old Ford pickup, white with a brown stripe down the sides, and had a flatbed trailer attached to it.
Whatever this was about, Jacob had a feeling it wouldn’t be good. His dad had been off his rocker since doing that stupid DNAMIX machine. His readout was ridiculous and his reaction to it pitiful, Jacob knew, but it was hard for him to blame his dad for anything these days.
His father was a man who’d now lost both a wife and a child, not to mention his parents, years before, and was not yet sixty years old. All he had left was Jacob. All he had left was the mirror. How much can one person take? Life had been hard for Jacob, too, but even he knew that losing a brother did not equal losing a child. There are no equal signs for that.
Jacob walked up to the trailer and studied it. It was full of wood scraps, one large stack piled up as if tossed there. He took off his Latios cap and wiped his head. It looked like simple wood paneling, most of it, the kind you see on men’s room walls at a restaurant, already used and scratched up. Beside this laid a pair of swinging doors off their hinges, a row of 2x4s. Beneath it all, one long piece of something nice, oak or cedar, maybe, stained to a deep lacquered red.
In the front yard stood a pyramid of plastic tubs that Jacob did recognize. These were the bins he and his dad bought at Walmart, when the two of them finally tried to organize Toby’s stuff. They didn’t get very far, packing only some of the clothes from his dresser one afternoon, his baseball mitt and cleats, before his dad went quiet. Jacob looked up to see him fingering the green Ziploc bag the police had given him on the night of the accident. It was full of Toby’s minor possessions, he figured, the stuff from his pockets, and his dad did not open it. He instead simply turned it over, where it sat on Toby’s desk, as one might do the page of a book they weren’t sure if they wanted to read. He then said only, “Son, I need a break,” and went off to his room alone. Later that night, Jacob heard his father moving these bins to the garage, where most of them remained empty. After this, he heard him close Toby’s door for good.
Now, though, Jacob heard a different noise. It sounded like a shelf coming down, some breaking glass, and so he took out his earbuds and walked to the garage to see. He found his dad standing there, in full regalia, twirling a lasso over his head. On the floor behind him, a broken blue vase lay shattered across the concrete.
“That,” his dad said, “was an accident.”
He then hurled one end of the lasso across the room. It hit off the wall and fell gently over Toby’s old television, which was sitting on a wooden chair.
“Yaw!” his father said and pulled the rope tight. “My best go yet.”
Jacob looked him over.
Hank Richieu was built like his sons. You could see Toby in the shoulders, strong and physically capable like Toby had been, and yet Hank stayed as skinny as Jacob in the gut, no matter what he ate. He had the kind of posture that made your hips poke out in front of you, your back stay straight. He looked like a person you could trust, and you could. There was no one in the world, in fact, that Jacob trusted more than his father. And today, as he had for the last several days, Hank wore faded blue jeans and cowboy boots. He had on a western-style shirt with pearl buttons, one of a set of twenty he’d recently ordered online, with a leather vest on top of it. On his head, the enormous cowboy hat he’d taken to calling “Phil.”
“Did you go to work today?” Jacob asked him.
“A fine howdy-do to you, too, pardner,” his dad said.
Jacob rolled his eyes in a way so well rehearsed it looked as unremarkable as his breathing. He watched his father loosen the rope, flip it off the TV, and reel it back in at his hip. He had obviously been practicing. He was wearing what looked to be a holster.
“Did you at least go to the grocery?” Jacob asked.
“I rustled up some victuals, I reckon,” Hank said.
“Dad,” Jacob said. “This isn’t healthy.”
Hank stopped looping his rope and looked over at his son. And in the time that they considered each other, any manner of conversation could have sprouted between them: long-overdue talks about Toby, perhaps, about the mother Jacob never knew, about what seemed like bad luck all around them. But none of these conversations happened. The space was there, and Jacob could feel it, but he cut off the opportunity.
“Whose truck is that?” Jacob said.
“It’s mine,” his dad said. “I traded in the 4Runner, even steven. It’s a beauty, isn’t it?”
The truck could have been thirty years old. It had rust on the hood, an empty gun rack in the cabin. The antenna was bent. The hubcaps were dirty. His father, Jacob knew, had turned in a perfectly good family vehicle for a much worse option. “It looks like the world’s crappiest Hot Wheel,” Jacob said.
It was the kind of truck Jacob could imagine being interesting to collectors, maybe even a valuable antique if you fixed it up, but it was wholly impractical. It was reminiscent of a different era, where people used pickup trucks for work instead of style, and Jacob figured that’s what this new version of his father liked about it, too. This meant ironically, though, that his father was also going for style when he made this trade, cruising around town to project a different personality than the one Jacob loved so much and this infuriated Jacob in one of the few meaningful ways a father can ever truly anger his child; it made his father seem pathetic.
Jacob looked at him. “For the last time,” he said. “You are not a cowboy. This is not a ranch. It’s time to get over it.”
“Well,” Hank said. “That may be true now, but you know what they say. A cow’s ass ain’t its head, either, until you cut it off and put it there.”
“Literally no one says that,” Jacob said. “That has never been said by a single person.”
“And now it has,” his dad replied. “That’s my point.”
“I’m going inside,” Jacob said, and walked toward the door. “You might want to turn that lasso into a noose, though. You’ve got company coming up the street.”
Hank looked out through the garage door and saw Deuce Newman’s truck pulling up to the curb. It was an enormous and new Ford F-250, black and gleaming like it had just come off the lot. Despite how new it was, though, as if by nature, Deuce had already done a few things to decrease its value. It had a tall CB antenna mounted to the roof, a bumper sticker that read “If It Flies, It Dies” on the back window, and a pair of rubber testicles hanging from the trailer hitch that swayed obscenely as he put the truck in park and stepped out.
Hank turned back to Jacob and tipped his hat. “Much obliged, Son,” he said.
Jacob shut the door.
Once inside, Jacob slung his backpack on the table and headed for the kitchen. There was homework to do, some math, some reading for History, but it could wait. Jacob was thinking of dinner. He walked to the fridge and opened it up to where the contents produced a familiar dismay. As it had that last week, the shelf contained only four primary food groups: A gallon of milk. A six-pack of Lone Star beer. A pack of sausage. Two T-bone steaks.
Jacob shut the door and went to the pantry. This also looked similar to previous days. On the middle shelf, a row of about twenty cans of pork and beans. A bag of rice. Some baking potatoes. Cartons of oatmeal. Beef jerky. On the floor, a jug of Texas-style BBQ sauce. This was undoubtedly a cowboy paradise. It was also Jacob’s new hell. He was going to need to work for some flavor.
He walked
to the sink and washed his hands and through the kitchen window saw Deuce Newman waddling up their driveway. He had a long garden hose slung over his shoulder and some sort of machine in his hand, a camera, maybe, a projector. Deuce was, in Jacob’s opinion, the town asshole. There was something about his ubiquity that unnerved him. Deuce was at every high school event, at every restaurant and around every corner, it seemed, and came to their house at least twice a week to gripe to his dad about something Deuce claimed his father was doing wrong. It was, in all, creepy, and his complaints about Jacob’s father were unfair. Town halls, Rotary Club dinners, Sewage and Water Board meetings, ribbon cuttings, church on Sundays: The demands on a small-town mayor were constant, Jacob knew, and his father tried hard to keep up.
It seemed, however, that Deuce was taking Toby’s death as an opportunity to usurp his father’s job. In a way, Jacob understood his reasoning. His dad had clocked out just when the town needed him most. Jacob couldn’t give two shits about the bicentennial but knew it was a lot on his dad. The phone rang constantly, even at home, from unusual callers. People looking for permits to set up food stands and shops, locals lobbying him for improvements from the general fund, people asking where the expected profits would go, people complaining about the noise in town. One time, Jacob overheard an hour-long conversation with someone debating whether Mylar or plastic balloons were more appropriate. What man could stay sane in such a routine? If he and his father had anything in common those days, Jacob thought, it was that they were both waiting, both begging, really, for something to be over.