by M. O. Walsh
“I didn’t come out here for no goddamn phone,” the man said.
“Call nine-one-one, you dummy,” she said. “I ain’t going to hell for killing a priest.”
“He’s not dead,” the man said. “Let’s go.”
And with this Pete felt a tremendous weight lift off his body as the man stood up and left the room. Pete tried to roll over but could not yet tell if his eyes were opened or closed, so blinding was the light, nor which way on the floor he could turn his body if he wanted to.
He soon felt a gentler presence beside him, though, like that of a soft animal, and heard the low tones of three numbers being pushed into his phone.
“You weren’t supposed to be a part of this,” the woman told him. “Now look what you made us do.”
Pete felt the phone drop onto his chest, heard the distant ring on the other side of it, and then only the woman’s last words to him.
“I hope you’re happy now.”
29
Saddle in the Rain
Jacob followed the click of his father’s boots down the hallway. He’d turned off Toby’s phone and set it facedown on his desk like a playing card as soon as he’d seen his father standing there. What else was he to do?
He was nervous and sweating and still processing what he saw on the video and so Jacob asked his dad if he could duck into his room and change out of his uniform. He thought this might give him a private second to plan, to make some sort of decisions about the rest of his life, but it did not. Instead, his father leaned against the open doorway and crossed one boot over the other. He watched Jacob contentedly, as if all he was missing in life was a hayseed to chew on. Jacob took off his school shirt and threw on a black tee, swapped out his uniform pants for the jeans he wore yesterday, transferred everything from his pockets, and, as he did this, thought of ways to tell his father impossible things.
The sick trajectory of the video was immediately obvious to Jacob and its existence, unfortunately, not that rare. This unscrupulous form of recording was something a lot of kids at his school did, something kids everywhere did. He’d seen screenshots of his classmates undressed, grainy footage of couples making out beneath the bleachers or through car windows. He’d heard about which guys sent dick pics, which guys got revenge on their exes by saving masturbatory Skype sessions for social blackmail. It was all remarkably uncontroversial, part of the fabric of his generation, he knew, and was yet another way Jacob felt alone in the world. Rather than recording and posting images to multiple platforms, Jacob did not want to see himself at all. He hated the whole idea of it.
The desire his peers had to see themselves reflected in their screens was not only addictive, Jacob thought, but so malignant as to infect its own host. Selfies. Videos. Instagram. Snapchat. Everyone starred in a movie of their life that they mistakenly thought others wanted to see.
Each time Jacob watched a classmate lift up their phone to take a shot of their face in the school hallway, the cafeteria, the coffee shop, he did not look at their phone nor the hands that held it but only the way their face changed when they saw it reflected back in the screen. The way they altered everything about it. Bright smile, now. Chin up. Eyes big. Life, remember, is exactly how we want it to be. And then, after the photo, the way it dropped back into its familiar and unfortunate shape. It was a hard thing to watch. Perhaps these selfies took a bit of the person’s soul, Jacob thought, the way he’d once heard Native Americans suspected cameras might do. Or, maybe, if not their soul, the photo took that person’s smile for good and carried it away from them. And maybe smiles, like breaths, were of a limited number in life. If so, selfies were aptly named, he thought. They were little versions of a person’s self, dolled up and wound from the back like a toy, sent out into the world to lie.
So, just telling his father about the video was not that easy. For Jacob to say something as simple as Hey, Dad, look at this never crossed his mind. This was partly because he knew the image of Toby and his friends, the truth of what they were perhaps doing to Trina, would crush his father as it would crush any parent, but also because he understood the great and guilty confession the video would make about his entire teenage world. His father was not ready for that. It was as if the video were too graphic for him, too mature, like he and Jacob had somehow silently switched places those last few years and now Jacob would be the one having to explain the hard truths. Listen, Dad, he’d have to say, not only is this your son, but this is also not abnormal. This is what kids do. Do you understand? What you’ve always thought happens only elsewhere, in some other town, with some other terrible kids? That is what we call Friday night.
So, Jacob said absolutely nothing as he laced up his shoes and pulled his Latios cap over his head.
“Ready Freddy?” his dad said.
Jacob followed him down the hall, tracing his hands along the walls as if to make sure they were actually there. So many things coming together for him, but he still couldn’t see the whole picture. Trina, now, as the victim in all of this? Her anger made sense to him in a way it hadn’t before. But what about the Twitter page? What about his readout? What did she want with him?
His father led him to the kitchen and took off his cowboy hat, waved it at his face like a fan to cool down. He smiled.
“You said you wanted better victuals,” he said. “Your old man stepped up his game.”
His father raised his eyebrows toward the sink, where Jacob saw an enormous slab of meat sitting propped in one of the basins. It stood high enough to reach the windowsill behind it and was wrapped in plastic as thick as Visqueen, dark purple veins of blood running across the front like rivers on a map. This was definitely not an option at any grocery store Jacob had ever been to.
“What the hell is that?” Jacob said.
“That, Cookie,” his dad said, “is a side of grass-fed, Grade A, American Angus beef. I bought it from Otto’s market today. It’s something to see, ain’t it?”
“What do you want me to do with it?” Jacob asked.
“That’s enough chow to last us a month,” his dad said. “I ordered us a book on Amazon to teach us how to take it apart, too. How to section and store it. Steaks and ribs and brisket and all. I figure I need to know how a cow works anyway, you know. I figured this was something you and I could do together. The book should be here tomorrow.”
Jacob felt as if he might be hallucinating. Who was this man in his kitchen? What life had he lived, before Jacob knew him, to make him this way? What history did he hold inside? Above all, what strange urge did the universe have to pair them together? To make them partners somehow? What was its logic? In this feeling Jacob was like all children are when they finally consider their parents as individuals, when a lifetime’s string of questions gets pulled up and tied into a single bow that represents the only question worth asking a parent:
Who are you?
Jacob looked at his dad.
“Is this what you wanted to show me?” he said.
“Well,” he said. He looked disappointed. “Yes and no. I mean, this is just a start. Come see what else I’ve done.”
“Let me guess,” Jacob said. “You traded your truck for a mule.”
His father winked and placed his hat back on top of his head. “Phil-er-up,” he said, and walked toward the garage door.
As soon as he started down the steps into the garage, Jacob heard music. It was old-time saloon-style music and Jacob thought wretchedly, Oh, God, he’s found a player piano.
Although Jacob saw no piano, he recognized immediately that their entire garage had been transformed since he was last in it. His dad had nailed wood paneling to the walls and, inside the garage door, erected a sort of cattle fence made of 2x4s. In the middle of this fence, now the only entry point to their garage, stood two swinging saloon doors. He’d spread knickknacks all around the place, as well, many of which Jacob d
id not recognize and could not imagine the origin of. Old-looking lamps. Metal signs advertising bygone bourbons and spirits, a “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster with Jesse James pictured on it. On one of the walls, Jacob saw a stuffed possum curled up on its back as if asleep. And at the far side of the garage, a bar probably six feet long, topped with the dark and lacquered wood he’d seen at the bottom of the trailer the day before. At its farthest end, two barstools sat side by side as if already in conversation with each other. His father, Jacob knew, had never been so productive in his life.
His dad turned to him, little sounds like bells coming off his boots, and held out his hands as if to say, Well? As if to say, This is all of me. As if to say, Please be kind.
“You did all of this since yesterday?” Jacob asked.
“I did,” his dad said. “A feller could have used a little help, to be sure. Especially with that bar. I’m afraid I scratched up the bottom of it pretty good.”
“Didn’t you have some sort of important meeting today?” Jacob asked.
“I did,” his dad said, and looked around the place as if he, too, were seeing it for the first time. “I was there, but I wasn’t really there, if you know what I mean. My mind was sort of on the other side of town.”
“I do,” Jacob said, because he felt that exact same way. He knew he should say something nice to his dad. His father looked so obviously desperate for anything in his life to change that perhaps a simple pat on the head would have saved him. But all Jacob could think about was Trina. What did she have planned? As bad as Jacob thought it might be when it was Toby’s life she was avenging, how brutal might it be if it were her own? Why hadn’t he stopped her? Why had he let her entertain it? And soon all of the dark fantasies she’d shared with him while he thought of nothing but the possibility of the two of them together, somehow, moved to a part of his brain that made them appear not as her fantasies at all but, instead, as his own guilty memories, as if what she’d wanted to do to those boys were things he himself had already done.
Jacob said, of course, none of this.
“This is incredible, Dad,” he said instead. “Totally insane, but incredible.”
His dad frowned.
“How is it insane?” he said. “This made me feel, I don’t know, I reckon it made me feel the opposite of insane for a change. I mean, I had a bushel of fun doing this, Son. Maybe a barrel.”
“I’m sorry,” Jacob said. “It’s just not something a person expects to see in their garage.”
His dad looked back at him as if this was the point.
“I think I’m going to call it the Sleepy Possum,” he said. “The Sleepy Possum Saloon.”
“Okay,” Jacob said. “So, should I expect some train robbers in the house? Perhaps a gang of bandits?”
“No,” his dad said. “This is just for us. This is a place for you and me, pardner. This is a place where we can talk like men.”
“Like men?” Jacob said.
What did that mean?
“Come have a seat,” his dad said, and walked to a stool.
When Jacob sat beside him, he saw a gun sitting on the bar.
It was the commemorative pistol from the glass case that he had moved aside the day before, when taking pictures of the blueprints of Deerfield Catholic. The one whose glass his dad must have broken the previous night. Next to it sat the single bullet that it had been mounted with.
His dad picked it up. He held it in his open palms not as if wielding it but as if offering it up for judgment. “This,” he said, “is an 1884 Colt Peacemaker with a Frankford Arsenal cartridge, almost perfectly preserved. I brought it over to McGee’s Gun and Pawn this morning and he oiled it up for me, said there’s no reason it shouldn’t still fire but, you know, I only have the one bullet. They apparently don’t much make them like this anymore.”
He held it out for Jacob to take.
Jacob shook his head. “I don’t want to touch it,” Jacob said, and this was perhaps the most honest thing he had ever said. “I don’t want to touch a gun.”
“Okay,” his dad said, and set it back down. “I understand. I was just thinking this might serve as a sort of symbol for us, you know.” He moved his chin a bit to get Jacob to look him in the eye, which Jacob did. “I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately, pardner,” he said. “About the two of us.”
Jacob felt his throat tighten in the same way it had in Toby’s room, as if it were his body reminding him that he had not yet let anything out. That all of his fears and his grief were still waiting inside of him, that they weren’t going anywhere until he let them.
“I’ve had this thing just sitting on the wall in my office for years,” his dad said. “This thing that still works, that still functions. I’ve just had it hanging on the wall. Hung up and taken for granted. And I guess what I’m coming around to is the notion that I feel like you and me have sort of become that same way. It’s just us now, you know. It’s just the two of us left out in this tremendous field. This endless prairie. And there is so much work to do. So much herding and mending. And it is raining, Son. Do you understand what I’m saying? Right now, it is raining on us.”
Jacob looked down at the floor. He saw his father’s boot prints in the sawdust. He thought, for one brief moment, that he could hear the rain.
“But I’ve been acting like I’m all alone out here,” his dad said. “I know I have. I’ve not been a good father for you lately. I’ve not been a good hand. Ever since your brother,” he said. “I feel like I’ve just had you hung up on the wall. I’m sorry, Son. I want you to know that I’m sorry.”
Jacob’s eyes began to well as he knew without a doubt that his father was not the one who should be apologizing. And, above all the terrible things he had done lately, above and beyond what he had talked about with Trina, Jacob felt the impression he’d given his dad that he was somehow letting him down, not being there for him, was perhaps the worst crime of all. The idea that he had caused his father, a man who’d already suffered so much, any additional pain killed Jacob inside.
“I was thinking that we are sort of like this gun, in a way,” his dad said. “That we can still work together, you know, if we stop taking each other for granted. If we start to talk about things. Like Toby, for instance. Like your mother.”
“Dad,” Jacob said. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
His dad held up his hand. “If you’ll oblige me for one more second,” he said. His dad picked up the bullet off the bar, rolled it around in his fingers. “I think the reason I’ve not talked to you as much as I should, Jacob, I want you to know, is that I’ve always been sort of afraid of you.”
Jacob lifted his head. The comment confused him as he’d spent a lifetime, he thought, as all children do, hiding from his father the parts of himself that should scare anyone.
“Afraid?” Jacob asked.
“Heck yeah,” his dad said. “Your brother was always sort of easy to understand, you know. He was sort of simple, I guess I’m saying. Not dumb, but just sort of easy. I’ve met a thousand people like Toby in my life. In some ways that was a comfortable thing about him. That was a thing to love. But you? I don’t know. You’ve always seemed like more of a puzzle to me.”
“I’m not a puzzle,” Jacob said.
His dad again held up his hand. “And I think the reason for this,” he said. “Is that you remind me so much of your mother.”
There it was again, yet another train car of emotions ready to pull out from the station in Jacob, ready to set off from his body into the larger world. His mother, who was only photos to him, only some mysterious and untouchable DNA. He could not remember the last time they had spoken of her.
“The greatest tragedy of my life,” his dad said. “And I’ve had my share. Is that you boys never got to meet her.”
“Dad,” Jacob said, but he did not know what els
e to say. He was torn completely between a desire to end this conversation and to extend it into a lifetime and so Jacob noticed instead only that the light had shifted in the short time he and his father had been in the garage. He looked outside and past the saloon doors to a sky both purpled and glowing with change and knew that there was a phrase for this time of day that he had learned in photography class but could not recall the name of. Yet he understood it as he looked back at his dad to see him in what seemed like a higher definition than he had ever seen him before. The way the light lit up the days-old stubble on his chin, the lines around his eyes and mouth, the veins along his hands on the bar. He looked to Jacob, in that moment, like a picture of a man.
“Did I ever tell you the story,” his father asked him, “about that time your mom saved a mosquito?”
His father had told him this story, had told both he and Toby this story when they were younger, but it had been years. It was from a time before both he or Toby existed, when his parents lived in a small rental house. And, as he had done before, his dad recalled for Jacob the way he’d watched his mother follow the mosquito around from room to room, standing on chairs and tiptoes as the thing bounced dumbly from wall to wall without allowing her to touch it. He could remember what she was wearing that day, he told him, could remember so clearly what she looked like in that state of their lives together. How beautiful and strange he found her, and the point of the story was always the same.
“I thought she was trying to kill it,” he said. “But the whole time she was trying to save it. The way she cupped it in her palms and walked it outside the screen door. It was like she was saving a bird. A mosquito, of all things. And I just laughed and laughed and she had this look on her face when she walked back inside. She was her own entire person, I knew, and she smiled as if to say to me, in a way, that I am going to do what I want to do, mister. And you are going to love me for it. And I’ve never loved anything more, I don’t believe, than I loved your mother at that moment.”