Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned: Stories Page 6

  With the truck loaded, and the skiff rinsed clean, we rode back to the mountain. It was past dinnertime when we reached my place. Our stomachs were yowling.

  I asked George and Stephen if they wouldn’t mind getting started butchering the meat while I put a few steaks on the grill. George said sure, but before he did any more work he was going to need to sit in a dry chair for a little while and drink two beers. He and Stephen sat and drank and I waded into the bed of my pickup, which was heaped nearly flush with meat. It was awful work rummaging in there, but I finally found the short ribs and I hacked out the tenderloin, a tapered log of flesh that looked like a peeled boa constrictor.

  I held it up to show George.

  He raised his can in tribute. “Now there’s a pretty, pretty thing,” he said.

  I carried the loin to the porch and cut it into steaks two inches thick, which I patted with kosher salt and coarse pepper. I got the briquettes going while George and Stephen blocked out the meat on a plywood and sawhorse table in the headlights of my truck.

  When the coals had grayed over, I dropped the steaks onto the grill. After ten minutes, they were still good and pink in the center, and I plated them with yellow rice. Then I opened up a bottle of burgundy I’d been saving and poured out three glasses. I was about to call the boys to the porch when I saw that something had caused George to pause in his labors. A grimace soured his features. He sniffed at his sleeve, then his knife, then the mound of meat in front of him. He winced, took a second careful whiff, and recoiled. “Oh, good Christ, it’s turning,” he said. With an urgent stride, he made for the truck and sprang onto the tailgate, taking up pieces of our kill and putting them to his face. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “It’s going off, all of it. Contaminated. It’s something deep in the meat.”

  I walked over. I sniffed at the ham he’d been working on. It was true: there was a slight pungency to it, a diarrheal tang gathering in the air, but only faintly. If a bowel had leaked a little, it certainly wasn’t any reason to toss thousands of dollars’ worth of sustenance. And anyway, I had no idea how moose flesh was supposed to smell.

  “It’s just a little gamy,” I said. “That’s why they call it game.”

  Stephen smelled his hands. “George is right. It’s spoiled. Gah.”

  “Not possible,” I said. “This thing was breathing three hours ago. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “It was sick,” said George. “That thing was dying on its feet when you shot it.”

  “Bullshit,” I said.

  “Spoiled. I promise you,” said George.

  “No fucking way,” I said. “It was fine when we broke it down.”

  George took a handkerchief from his pocket, spat on it, and scrubbed furiously at his palms. “Well it sure as hell ain’t now. Took a little while to get going, I guess, but now it’s gone, my friend. Goddammit, I should have known when the hide hung on there like it did. He was bloating up with something, just barely holding on. But the second he died, that infection turned loose and just started going wild.”

  Stephen looked at the flesh strewn across the table, and at the three of us standing there. Then he began to laugh.

  I went to the porch and bent over a steaming steak. It smelled all right. I rubbed the salt crust and licked at the juice from my thumb. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said. I cut off a dripping pink cube and touched it to my tongue. Stephen was still laughing.

  “You’re a fucking star, Matty,” he said, breathless. “All the beasts in the forest, and you mow down a leper. Don’t touch that shit. Call in a hazmat team.”

  “There’s nothing fucking wrong with this meat,” I said.

  “Poison,” said George.

  The wind gusted suddenly. A branch fell in the woods. A squad of leaves scuttled past my boots and settled against the door. Then the night went still again. I turned back to my plate and slipped the fork into my mouth.

  EXECUTORS OF IMPORTANT ENERGIES

  The phone rang late, my stepmother again.

  “Do you ever think about all the ones who you didn’t let them have you? I wish I could take a do-over on all of them, even the nastiest. Even the worst. Are you there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m just not sure what you want me to do with this information.”

  “Oh, forget it,” she said. “I just don’t feel very desirable is all.”

  I told her plenty of people desired her. “Well, nobody desires me to my face,” she said.

  “What time is it?”

  “Not bad. Like three here. So it’s two there. I figured you’d be up.”

  “I’m not up, Lucy. It’s four here. Nobody’s up right now.”

  “I am,” she said. “And so is your dad. Down here, there’s plenty of signs of life.”

  “I need to sleep,” I said. “Go upstairs. Go to bed. I’ll be in the shop tomorrow. Call me if you want.”

  “I’m staying right here,” she said, and then came the smoggy burble of her water pipe. “It’s pretty up-and-down with Roger. He’s called the cops on me every night this week. So I just walk and walk until he goes to sleep. I’ve been walking so much, my ass is changing into a completely different thing.”

  “You should have told me,” I said.

  “I’m telling you now,” she said. “Send you a picture if you like.”

  My father’s troubles had started ten years or so ago when his memory started to erode. He lost wallets and sets of keys in increasingly quick succession. He lost his job, after repeatedly stranding his clients alone at the defense table while he wandered the streets, trying to recall which car was his. He’d more or less forgotten me two years ago, and then last month, he woke up from a two-day nap and couldn’t recognize my stepmother. He called the police. She’d had to show two forms of ID not to get arrested for trespassing in her own house.

  Nobody had a clear answer for what to do. We had looked into assisted-living places, but it was a ten-year waiting list if you weren’t looking for a shrieking bedlam multiply indicted for filth and abuse. Other than putting up with my father, Lucy didn’t work. She survived on his savings. My father was only sixty years old and otherwise in good health. He could go on absorbing cash and worry for another twenty-five years at least.

  The sound of women screaming came in through my window. This was Thursday, and dance night at the lesbian bar up the block. Afterward, it was a regular thing for the women to stop by and use the west wall of my building to beat each other up against. They broke each other’s hearts on schedule, always in the same indigo half hour of the morning. Sometimes, I’d look out the window and do them the favor of calling to them, so they could unite against me, a common enemy. But I cranked the pane shut and got back into bed.

  “So look,” Lucy was saying, “I’m thinking I’ll bring him up there on the twentieth. The doctor said it might do him good to look at New York and to see you, too. Maybe jog some stuff loose for him.”

  I heard the scrabbling of rats’ nails in the tin ceiling above my bed. “Please don’t come, Lucy. I’ve got a thing to go to. And anyway, he doesn’t even remember my name.”

  “Sure he does,” she said. “He’s been asking about you.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “It is. He was. Just yesterday. He drank a beer too fast, and then you should have heard him going, Burrrt, Burrrt, Burrrt.” She didn’t laugh and neither did I.

  “Please don’t fucking bring him here,” I said. “It’s not a good idea.”

  “Be gentle,” Lucy said, and got off the phone.

  I was ten when my father married Lucy. He was forty-six. She was twenty-one, a secretary at his law firm, a job she’d planned to quit once her acting career took off. Her looks were good enough for it. She had the kind of hungry, large-eyed prettiness around which Japanese cartoonists have established whole religions of lechery. When I was young, before there was hair on my lip, I’d had a hard crush on her, and in some dim way, I was sure that my father was on
ly with her temporarily, that he planned to turn her over to me someday. The particulars weren’t absolutely clear, but I had a hunch that somewhere around my sixteenth birthday, he was going to take me out to a desert overlook where the sun was going down and announce that he was giving Lucy to me, along with his Mustang fastback, along with some Schlitz, and maybe a cassette tape that was nothing but “Night Moves” by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band.

  They had about three years of kindness with each other. Then Lucy met a man her age who wrote music for television commercials and went with him to Quebec. My father felt astonished in his grief—pushing fifty, the silver tufts bursting from his ears, to find his heart broken for the first time in his life. That was the one time he tried hard to be my friend. He had me over on weekends. He’d tell me love was like the chicken pox, a thing to get through early because it could really kill you in your later years. He’d bare his heart to me for an hour or two, and then he’d make me play chess with him, twenty, thirty games a weekend, and I’d lose every time.

  Only once did I come close to beating him. He’d had some cocktails, and he blundered, moving his queen into the path of my knight. I sacked the piece, and he slapped me on the mouth. I ran into the bathroom and punched myself several times to ensure a lasting bruise. When I emerged, he didn’t apologize, not exactly. But he said he’d give me anything I wanted not to tell my mother about it. I said I’d take a computer and a CO2 BB gun. My father drew up a contract on his firm’s letterhead, and I signed. We bought the gun that day. I used it to shoot a pretty lemon-colored warbler, which I stroked, then buried in my mother’s lawn. Then I shot a dove and a chickadee, and gave the gun to the kid who lived next door.

  After four months in Canada, Lucy came home. My father took her back without forgiving her, then went on to betray her many times, believing it was something he owed them both. He installed Lucy in an echoing faux-Tudor keep where all the sunlight in the place would not have been enough to run a solar calculator. Lucy grew depressed. She blamed her body, and punished it with starvation diets and triathlons. At the height of her regime, she was a new kind of creature, a lemur’s head stuck to the body of a springbok. When a late bloom of acne speckled her cheeks, she convinced her therapist to write her a prescription for some drastic tablets, under threat of suicide. The pills took care of her seven pimples but crazed her face, chin to hairline, with little crimson fissures. She’d had to lather up with so many creams and unguents it looked like she was sweating lithium grease. Somewhere in there, I stopped dreaming of Lucy, the fastback, and the back rooms, the alleys and the trusty woods.

  I was in my twenties when my father’s mind began to go. At first, I thought his failure to remember where I was living, or that I’d finished school, was just a deepening of the aggressive indifference with which he’d always treated me, but it turned out to be something that a dozen good neurologists couldn’t figure out. It wasn’t Alzheimer’s or any of the known dementias. His store of recollections just sprang a rapidly widening leak, starting with the short-term memories and then draining the older vaults. Within three years of the first symptoms, he couldn’t recall what you’d told him an hour before. Couldn’t work, couldn’t find his own way home from the grocery store where he’d been shopping all his life. But he hadn’t lost all capacity for deep, or at least medium, retrieval. My father was already forgetting my name when I mentioned to my mother, a few years back, the time he’d slapped me over the chessboard. Yet a few weeks after that, I received in the mail a copy of our old contract, along with a bill for $1,200—reimbursement for the computer and the BB gun, for which my father had kept receipts.

  In college, I studied physics, engineering, and industrial design. I thought I would make airplanes, but after graduation I took a job drafting clock radio housings for the Emerson Corporation. Emerson put a great emphasis on anonymous roundness and dull curves, as though the idea was to slip our clocks unnoticed past the consumers’ vision, like well-greased pills for your eye. After six years of that, I went out on my own. You could say I’d had one real success, a machine that melted down your spare plastic grocery bags and poured the rendered plastic into interchangeable molds (golf tee, pocket comb, bicycle tire lever, etc.). The device ranked high on a “Great Green Gifts” list in a major magazine, and since then the in-flight catalogs and shopping channels had picked it up. I wasn’t getting rich off of it, but it was keeping me afloat. I had a studio apartment in the West Village, which people were impressed by until they came up for a look. The place was the architectural equivalent of a biscuit dough remnant, a two-hundred-square-foot waste shape of crannies and recesses left over when the rest of the building had been sectioned into proper places to live.

  The day my father and Lucy were due to arrive, I’d booked myself a booth at the Service and Hospitality Expo in Westport, Connecticut. I went there to flog a device I was calling the Icepresto. It was basically a commercial coffee cistern with a copper heat-transfer coil in the base so you could brew a fresh pot of tea and pour it right away into a glass without melting your ice. I was hoping I could sell the patent for a hundred thousand or so and then hurry to the Gulf Coast to cram a pontoon boat and a big-titted stranger into the hollow places in my heart. But all day, I brewed and poured iced Earl Grey into Dixie cups for men in pleated slacks. They kept one hand in their pockets so I couldn’t snap my card into their palms.

  At the reception afterward, I tried to earn back my booth fee at the open bar. I went on the dance floor and got close to a young woman.

  “Let’s go have a look at the moon,” I said.

  “It’s three o’clock,” she said.

  I walked back toward the train. The first hard snap of autumn was in the air. I felt the ache of it, rumbling toward the city with my cistern in my lap.

  I got a message from Lucy telling me to meet them in Washington Square Park, where my father was watching chess. I rode the subway to Astor Place and walked west under a load of mounting dread. I hadn’t seen him in fifteen months. I imagined him perched on a railing, with dusk coming on, craning at the Rollerbladers, drug merchants, and guitarists, like Rip Van Winkle come down from the hills, his hair a mess, a diaper smell coming off him, possibly.

  But I found my father sitting at a table, looking fine, especially compared with his company, an obese chess hustler whose face was the gray-green hue of roofing slate. My father’s hair was trimmed and combed in a tidy swale across his high forehead. He wore a clean white shirt and a crimson tie beneath an overcoat I’d never seen before: knee-length, clam-tone suede with a collar of black fur, a coat for the czar of the Wild West. I didn’t go right to him. I stood ten feet away and watched him play. From that distance, you couldn’t tell there was anything wrong with him, though his position was a losing one, his king on the back rank, pinned down by two bishops and a knight. Then my father threw up his hands and said something to the hustler. They laughed loud and long, like old friends, and I was glad. A love of strangers, a fearlessness with them, had always been one of my father’s gifts. A connoisseur of the chance encounter, he would have tried to speak the language of cockatoos if one touched down beside him. He shook the man’s hand, and they began setting up the pieces once more. I went to him before the game got under way. “Dad,” I said, and wished instantly that I’d let him be. The pleasure left his face, and his eyes went vague with suspicion. He cowered slightly, seeming to recognize me not as son but as some unremembered person come back from his past to pelt him with something.

  “Dad, it’s Burt,” I told him.

  He touched his finger to his ear. “Can’t hear,” he said.

  “It’s Burt,” I said. “It’s your son.”

  The news sent him into his familiar tic, a trembling reverse yawn that seized him in moments of perplexity. The movement of his jaw behind his closed lips lent an illusion that he lacked a full set of teeth.

  “Right, right, nice to see you,” he said. He reached out and brushed his fingers again
st my abdomen, as though to be sure I wasn’t a ghost. Then he cast a nervous eye at the hustler, as though, above all things, my father didn’t want to let the stranger in on the secret of his deteriorating mind.

  “Burt, Wade,” my father said gruffly, gesturing at the large man, who was scratching the thatch on his neck with a dirty nail.

  “Dwayne,” the man said. I shook his hand, which, despite the cool weather, gave off a feverish warmth. He smiled. His front tooth was broken at an angle, a tiny gray guillotine.

  “Wade is a murderer on the chessboard,” my father said. “A lethal tactician. But you watch, Burt. I’ll return from this slaughter and prevail.”

  “You’re the shark here, Roger,” said Dwayne. “I’m just a little fish, trying to get a nibble where I can.”

  My father glared at the board. The black pieces were before him. “Now hold on here, I’m white.”

  “Uh-uh, Rog. You were white last game. Don’t think I forgot. I got a mind like a steel trap.”

  “Have it your way. Hit the clock.”

  Overhead, a large blue violence of storm clouds had begun to swell, but my father took no notice. He hunched to the game, giving me his broad sueded back.