Call Me Home (20 page)

Don moved his hand and Jackson wished for it back. “Best trout rivers in the world,” Don said. He held out a handful of shimmering tufts, pierced with wire. “This is a dry fly,” he said. “It skims the top of the water. This one is elk hair – it's a natural imitator. This one is a nymph – it drifts down by the bottom.” Jackson nodded. “If there's nothing up top, then we go nymphing, but there's hatch right now, so we try the flies first.”

Jackson didn't care about the fishing, but he liked listening to Don's low voice, watching him throw the line, standing in the water in his jeans. Missoula was in a deep valley, and the brown hills rose up all around it. He felt held, tucked safe in this bowl of the earth. It seemed as though the things that separated the human world from the natural one were missing, as though you could walk from the road right up into the bare, unfenced hills and keep walking forever.

They spent most of the day at the river, then ate at a gas station café near Harold's Club. When it grew dark, Don drove them up above town. “This is the Rattlesnake,” Don said. “The best seats in the house.”

They hiked up the brown scrub until Don stopped and they nested down in the dirt. He had his face buried in Don's jacket when the fireworks started. The buttons against his cheek, the warm smell of sweat and struck matches. “Hey,” Don said, and touched his hair. He slipped his fingers under Jackson's chin and tilted his face toward the sky. “Hey, Jack, you're missing it.”

The hill was a silvery stage for the half-hearted displays down in town, dusty Roman candles and the smell of sulfur. Don lifted Jackson's cheek from his jacket and toward the sky, the colored sparks and smoke. “You and me,” Don said. They had a bottle of cheap wine that Don tipped up to his mouth. A shower of sparks lit his face in carnival pinks and blues.

Don handed the bottle to Jackson. “A sweet little boy and a bottle of wine,” Don said. “That's what it takes to make a honky-tonk time.”

“Is that what it takes?” Jackson pushed his face against Don's neck.

“George Strait,” said Don. “One of the greats.”

It wasn't George Strait. It was Dwight Yoakam. Originally Johnny Horton, but Jackson let it go. Don's neck smelled like aftershave and cigarettes. It was the worst fireworks display Jackson had seen in his life. Three or four wilting rockets gave off an uneven spray of sparks. He remembered watching the fireworks in Everett last year, sitting down by the water with Randy and a stolen fifth of gin. That all seemed very far away now.

Don kissed the palm of his hand, held his lips there. Jackson watched the smoke fall, drifting down like streamers from a party. It was beautiful, he thought. All of it was beautiful because here they were, together. That old trick – love makes the world new. Trite conceits, sugary lies – and still. Always he had thought of his life as if it was waiting somewhere else, a party that he might finally arrive at, late, breathless, taking off his coat. It nagged at him, that maybe no one was waiting anywhere at all. But now – Don pushed Jackson's hand up under his shirt and held it there, against the broad plane of Don's chest. Down the hill Jackson could see shadowy figures and sparklers dripping bright, brief rain.

When the last stray fireworks had faded to smoke hanging over the valley they made their way back to the truck, walking gingerly in the dark. Don drove them back to the motel.

JACKSON WAS ASLEEP
, deep asleep, and when he woke up it took him a long time to remember where he was. The springs of the bed creaking, the dark like a heavy fabric over him. The cheap, slick feeling of the motel blanket. Don was moving around in the room. Jackson reached for the light.

Don was dressed, pulling on his coat. “What are you doing?”
Jackson asked. The coarse sheets and the smell of cigarettes were all around him.

Don walked over to him, switched the light back off. “You're tired,” he said. “Listen, you just get some sleep, okay? I'll be back.” He was out the door before Jackson realized exactly what had happened, or maybe he was too surprised to say anything.

He lay in the dark, not sleeping, a sick feeling coming over him about what he suspected Don was doing, and how, in the moment when Don walked out the door, Jackson had let him go. Like a dirty little callboy, he thought. Like a nobody, and now Don was probably unlocking the door to his house, probably fucking his wife – what other explanation was there? And Jackson had let him go without saying a word. It felt familiar. All of his life, he thought, he'd wanted the people around him to feel good. He'd not wanted to start a fight. And where had that gotten him, the not speaking? The not fighting? He thought of his father: Still-drunk mornings, when he would roar around the house. Sheets sweated through. Lydia on his shoulders, shrieking and giggling, happiness and fear.

The first time he'd seen his father beat his mother, his father had come home late. Carpenters were being laid off. They were coming for him, he said. In two weeks his job would end, and who knew how long it would take until he found a new project? He had a drink in his hand by the time he'd crossed the kitchen from the back door, and by eight he was reading the same page of the newspaper again and again, talking to himself. He said something to Jackson's mother that Jackson didn't hear, and she was crying, covering her face with both hands. A murky little memory, just his father trying to lift her up from her chair, but she would not stand. “This is my home!” he cried suddenly. “You are my wife! This is my son!” He looked at Jackson while he shook her. “Stand up!” he cried. “You are my wife! This is my chair!”

Because he was seven, because he knew the power of possessions, it did not occur to him to wonder what it all meant. He
was scared, only, and he understood that his father's ownership over them, over even grief itself, was absolute.

His mother did not stand. He lifted his hand and struck her across the face. Her lip split and she stopped crying but she did not say a word. She would not look at him. In the back of the house, Lydia started to cry.

His father put down his hands. He pressed his face to Amy's breastbone for a long time, and then he stood and led Jackson to the truck and together they went out to town. And so, Jackson thought, he had been complicit all of his life. He couldn't explain why, but he had the same feeling now.

He drifted through a light and restless sleep, sick to his stomach, the clock blinking through two o'clock, three o'clock, four. He was half-angry, and half-hating himself. His heart darted around in his chest. When he finally heard steps outside the door, the fumble of the key card in the door, he kept his eyes closed and his face turned into the pillow. Jackson heard Don come into the room, but he didn't say anything. It was four thirty? Five? The light was just this side of dark. “Jack?” Don whispered.

Jackson didn't want to talk, or ask, or know anything. He heard a bottle smash out in the parking lot. What had he told his wife to get away so soon, at such a dead hour? A supply run? Had he told her nothing, just slipped back out again?

Jackson thought of the Garth Brooks song, the famous one, where the woman is pacing in her flannel gown, waiting for her cheating husband to come home. He'd put Eliza in the gown since he'd first learned of her, and now it was him, had maybe been him all along.

Don sat lightly on the edge of the bed and was touching his back, lay down beside him and Jackson could feel Don's cock hard against the backs of his bare thighs. He let Don kiss his neck, his back. He didn't turn around.

Finally, he rolled over, suddenly and onto his knees. He pulled Don over onto his stomach and undid his jeans, pulled them down, sucked his own fingers and pushed them slowly into
Don's ass. Don groaned and pushed back against him and Jackson pulled his hand back, pushed his own hard cock in. Was he angry? He didn't know. He was hard, his whole body ached; he wanted Don, but he didn't know why or how, wanted him like this, down on his knees. Don was touching himself, groaning. The window blinds let in only small gray swatches of daylight, and Jackson pushed himself in and out slowly, holding Don's hips. He wanted to cry and at the same time he just let it wash over him, the sweetness of being wanted, that warm, wanting body beneath him. Don groaned again and shot off against that terrible plastic comforter, and then Jackson was coming, deep inside Don, and the whole room was still – a place, Jackson thought, built for stillness, for secrets, a place alone, for those parts of your life that could just as easily be beautiful or shamed.

Amy

Tulalip, Washington, 2009

SOMETIMES SHE WOULD DO SOMETHING ON PURPOSE TO
make him angry. She could stand whatever Gary did more easily than the anticipation of it, the way the air hummed tight as a wire. When he had done it – broken the window, or pushed her down in the dirt, or kicked her until her ribs felt splintered – there were weeks or even months of respite, of his remorse. She could imagine they were any family. Always, though, the rooms grew close again. They began to walk more softly.

She put Jackson and Lydia on the bus for camp at the end of May. It was a weeklong program for the middle school and high school, an approximated summer camp during the school year. Leadership games, night hikes, teachers patrolling the cabins, keeping the high school students in their own bunks. In the school parking lot that morning, she watched Lydia climb the bus steps with both arms around her sleeping bag. Lydia turned and looked back at her and Amy waved, smiling as wide as she could. One of the other mothers stood beside Amy, waving at a face in one of the bus windows. “I just worry,” she said to Amy. “I'm just a mom, I worry. What if they get homesick? What if something happens?” She rubbed her folded arms against the chill; it was a gray morning, ruthlessly cold.

Amy wondered what it might be like to be that woman. To sink into a week of occasional worry for her children and relief at the time alone. Amy did feel relief but for a different reason. Things had been building for weeks and now that the kids were
gone, she knew. The wave would break over her at any moment, but then it would be over. Jackson and Lydia would come home and it would be over, for a while. She smiled pleasantly and nodded at the woman, watching the bus pull slow as a barge out of the school parking lot.
Take me with you,
she'd wanted to say. At the same time she wanted to run after the bus, knock on the windows, remind them:
Be children. For five days and four nights, be children.

Jackson was hardly a child. He was seventeen; beautiful, moody, defensive. He was still easy with her, kind and caring, always looking out. In the moments when he did lash out at her, it was worse than any physical pain Gary could have inflicted. Lydia was twelve, and Amy worried about her. She was quiet, vastly internal, smarter than she let on. Amy worried that Gary might turn on her. With Jackson, it was different; the things that put him in danger in the outside world kept him safe at home. He'd come home one day with a broken cheekbone that he wouldn't explain, but it was as clear to her as if she'd been there – someone wanted to teach him a lesson, for being the way that he was. For the same reason, Gary wouldn't touch him, talk to him. Jackson existed in a cold and separate circle from her husband, and for that she was grateful.

That night, browning hamburger over the stove, she asked Gary how work had been.

“Fucking Lou is talking about layoffs again,” Gary said that night, pouring four fingers of whiskey into a glass. Without the kids, he would be hiding his drinking even less than usual.

“Layoffs,” she said slowly. “What does that mean?” She knew what it meant, and what it meant on top of the lost job, the tight money – long weeks of Gary at home, pacing the house, watching her.

“What the hell do you think it means?” He wrenched open the refrigerator and took out a can of beer. “No fucking work.”

“There'll be something else.”

Gary didn't say anything. He pulled the tab off of his beer and flicked it hard against the wall. It clicked on the linoleum.

She breathed slow and deep.
Get it over with
, she told herself.
Just let it be done.
She took another breath, and said quietly, “Why can't you even take care of your family?”

If there was a moment between her words and his response, she didn't hear it. The pain was red, with blue edges behind her closed eyes. She let it roll over her. She pictured herself running, far out of reach – branches and wet leaves slapping her face, plummeting between trees, rock, the dark of the sky against the darker leaves. The explosions of silver sparks seemed to come from somewhere deep inside of her.

It was the clavicle, the doctor said. He'd wrapped her tightly in a sling while the nurse looked on. She was waiting for her prescription when the nurse slid the linen curtain back open. She was young and blonde with a square jaw and a nervous look. They'd given Amy a shot of something and there were shivering halos around the lights, around the nurse's yellow head.

“Listen,” the nurse said. Her voice was unsteady. “If someone did this to you – you, you should call the police.”

She knew it was the drugs that made it seem funny, but she wanted to laugh. The police? They were so far from town. The time between dialing the number and the police showing up on the gravel road – what could happen in that much time? But more than that, she understood – she had always understood – that if anyone else was involved, if she said anything, then all deals were off. Gary had never touched the children, but she knew, without him ever saying, that they were a card up his sleeve; if she gave him reason enough, she was certain that he was capable of hurting them to destroy her.