Call Me Home (29 page)

“I could ruin you,” Jackson said. “I could ruin you and your life would never be the same.” He looked at Don, looked him right in the eyes. Don's face was blank, his eyes flat, his face a frozen
half-smirk. He looked weak, Jackson thought, and the fight went out of him. It was useless, he thought. He'd only wanted something back – some sliver of power, of knowing that they had existed together, that he had meant something –
anything
– to Don. It didn't matter, Jackson thought now. It didn't change anything. Instead, he turned and walked toward the edge of the lake, the dark line where the fresh dirt ended and the forest resumed. He tried to walk as though he really had something to do –
like what?
he thought. Gather berries and skip rocks? Sit in the dirt and jerk off? He could feel Don watching him as he walked, faster and faster, the dust making small clouds behind him.

His throat ached and he knew he might cry. He hated it. He lit a cigarette and walked down to the edge of the lake to look at the houses going up. He stood at the edge of the water and looked at the houses, the planes of glass still marked with storm tape. The old town and the old river were gone, and this would take their place. He wanted to remember it like this. It seemed rare, to be able to see the moment when something changed.

IN THE AFTERNOON
, they moved concrete on the biggest house. Big blocks of it, reinforced with wire and rebar, that were going to be sunk into the hill and then backfilled with gravel and dirt to make a terraced garden, a little Idaho Tuscany. It looked to Jackson like a shoddy set-up. The concrete retaining walls would have to be somehow fronted with stone or brick to make them look all right, but what did he know? This whole project was an exercise in fabrication, of creating beauty where there was none, patching it together and hoping the money would follow. One of the guys that Jackson didn't know well, a burly looking guy who used to drive pile in Oregon, was moving the blocks with a forklift. The whole crew was out since they were waiting on electric in some of the newer frames, and besides it was kind of a party. They would sink the retaining walls and start putting in the drainage system. There was piss beer and it wasn't too hot, for once. Don was there and Jackson was careful not to look at him too closely. He had the
feeling that if he could do something right – if he only knew what that was – he would be able to make things go the right way, for Don to leave Eliza, for a letter from Lydia to somehow turn up pinned beneath the windshield wiper of his semi cab, for the things he'd done wrong to become obsolete, erased from his history.

He could feel Don all around him. The whole site seemed to have collapsed to contain only the points between them, the small orbits they made around the site. The sounds around him were light, fly buzz, a hive of bees. “Lift that up – you know, she's working the closing shift, I might just stop by, see if she needs a ride home – Where the hell is Dave? – Hell if I'll be here when the freeze starts, I'm going up to the oil sands, there's better money, get on it while it's early.” Don was helping with the forklift, directing, “A little to the left, that's it.” Jackson kept pausing to watch and then catching himself. A blizzard of panic would blur his eyes and he'd look away.

The pile driver had another block hovering in the air. It was five feet by six feet by one foot, part of the first and tallest level of the terrace. Don was crouched down where the block would be set vertically on edge, measuring with his hands. One day, Jackson promised himself, there would be other hands, more beautiful, that would touch him.

He paused again, watching, and Don looked up at him, and then the concrete was sliding from the metal tusks of the forklift, and the vertical end slammed to the ground and the whole block toppled forward. How much did it weigh? Four hundred pounds? A half ton? More? There was a strange quiet, a drawn-out silence, and then noise, but it seemed like things were out of sync – like the sound happened after the block fell, or maybe he could only notice one thing at a time, and his mind put them together later, the sounds he remembered, the sounds he invented: the shriek of metal on metal. A terrible crunching. Bone against rock.

The picture took a minute to come together, and then a minute for the rest of the crew to understand. Don was in the dirt. One of his legs was trapped under the concrete block. There was Don's
face, and his torso, and then the wide flat block flush against the ground as though the leg had just been obliterated, had disappeared. His face was ashy. His eyes weren't focused, and Jackson heard himself cry out, a strangled little yelp. And then Don was looking at him. Someone was screaming. Was it Don? Don was looking at him. He was holding out his hand, reaching toward Jackson.

In front of God and every man on the site, that hand. Don's face was the closest to – and even now he knew it was obscene, all of it, the leg, the screaming – the closest to his face in sex, in orgasm. The hand still reaching for him – No, he thought, and he heard birds, passing overhead, his mother – “Listen,” she'd say, “listen, you can hear the birds going somewhere warm for the winter.” Jackson shut his eyes.

And then they were wedging up the block and hauling him up, his limp leg dragging in the dust, a dark stain coming through his jeans. They heaped him into the truck and sped off to the clinic or farther on to the hospital in Kellogg. The tires kicked up dust and then they were gone.

Don's hand, reaching.

When the truck sped off there was a crescent shape left in the dirt where Don had been. The concrete beside it, like an ancient relic. There was a fog of dust that the truck had kicked up, and Jackson could feel something dark inside him, like a poison in his blood. He wished, more than anything, to be sitting in the rowboat, against the warm, worn wood. He wished he could put his hand out and feel Lydia's small bones, her bird shoulder. There was just the awful smooth coin of the new lake. Don's face in a grimace, his hand reaching up like Jackson could save him.

Lydia in the rowboat, warm soda, the nicked and dusty bottom of the boat. There was a game Lydia liked to play. “How much for your arm?” she would ask. “A million dollars? How much for your leg? What if you had a baby, how much would you sell it for?” Seedpods twirled past them. Jackson would catch them and present them to her. “That won't even buy you my big toe,” Lydia would
say. The men had come to Don, clustering, moving to move the rock, that terrible mountain, and Don had looked at him, pleading. Jackson hadn't moved. He had not gone to him. He felt cold. The September sky was closing around him. It might as well be winter. Lies.

Someone was saying his name.

“Jackson,” Mike Leary said again.

Jackson didn't move. His throat felt raw and he could imagine nothing worse than crying now.

“We're going to be needing you over at the West house,” he said. That was all. Leary knew, and for whatever reason Leary didn't blame him.

“I'm going,” Jackson said, and he stepped over the concrete blocks and toward the truck that would carry him around the rim of the lake. “I think a million dollars for my heart,” Lydia would always say finally. “Yes, I think maybe a million.” His own heart was pounding. The lake was in his eyes. He couldn't see anything.

HE LAY IN
the cab that night with his hands pressed against his chest, against the ache that had settled there. Don would be in the hospital right now, in Kellogg, or Missoula, or maybe lifted to Seattle. Eliza would be beside him, and when he woke, she would lean over him. She would hold him. And even if it had been different – even if Don had left Eliza … what then? Fuck you, he thought. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, and he meant it at Don and not at Don, at everything, at himself, at some stupid small hope he must have always had that it would be easy – that it would be possible – to live his life and to be happy.

In his dream that night, Don's face was hopeful, shining. He was radiant, Jackson thought. He closed his eyes and listened to Don's breathing. Be quiet, he thought. He didn't want to think of anything. He felt himself sleeping, but he pushed it back.

“I love you,” Don said. Jackson reached forward and pulled Don's belt open. He pushed Don's jeans down, careful over the ruined leg, all those scars.

Jackson kept his eyes closed against the leg. Then they were in A-frame B, Don facedown on the pallet, the layers of blankets, the dark crown of his hair. Don pushed against him, and he reached for him, and where the leg should be there was nothing, just a hard knot, like a knot in a tree, and he knew that outside the cabin was a clean white corridor that led to a hospital waiting room, and he knew that Eliza was there,
but she doesn't know the way here
, Jackson kept thinking, and Don's cock was pushing against Jackson's belt.
I have never loved anyone
, Jackson thought,
as much as I love you
, and Jackson could hear the click of shoes, and he knew that Eliza was coming, that in moments she would see them, and he was wild with fear – he was trying to get away before she saw him and before Don could tell her that it was Jackson who didn't belong.

He woke up and it was dark in the cab. He was sweating and he could see even in the dark that a cluster of insects was beating against the screen, crawling up and down.

He pushed out the screen, let the moths and beetles fly free, took gulps of air. I never loved anyone as much, Jackson thought. Even then he knew how fleeting it was, and how no part of it was a lie.

Amy

Tulalip, Washington, 1996

THE LAND IN WASHINGTON WAS NOTHING SHE HAD
known before, nothing she could have imagined. The outside came in on their shoes and in their coats. A black mildew knit up the corners of the window glass and clots of wet leaves marked the carpet. And the woods – when she walked there she had the feeling that she was being swallowed by something alive, alive in a dark way, wet and fecund and powerful. She would slip under the trees behind the little mobile home and stand in the shadows there, the trees keeping the rain out, the moss thick under her feet, the light all but squeezed out. And then, occasionally, a day like this one: Amy woke up that morning and the sun was burning through the fog, already spilling across her bed, lighting the corners of the room. She stood up and looked out at the yard, early summer overgrown, and then went to the closet and reached behind the ticking water heater.

It was a beautiful gun. A .38 Special with a four-inch barrel and walnut grips. Her father had bought it for her mother before he left for Vietnam, and when Amy was fifteen her father's old friend Lawrence had taken her out to his ranch and taught her how to shoot. When she left for Seattle her mother gave it to her with a box of bullets buried in a bag of sanitary napkins. She'd never told Gary about it. It sat cradled in that nest of maxi pads for years, and it seemed stranger and stranger to mention as time went on. But this morning she wanted to teach Jackson something. She also
wanted to shoot it again, if she admitted it. She remembered how it had felt in her hands.

She left the bag with the gun in the closet for now and pulled on old jeans and a sweater. Jackson was waiting in the hall for her when she came out. He was five now, and she was five months pregnant. He put his hands on her belly. “I can feel it,” he announced. “It's swimming.” She laughed and bent down and kissed him. Her beautiful boy. Gary had been different lately, tired from work, tense. She avoided his gaze and turned to Jackson instead, so ready to accept her love, to love her back. It would pass, she thought. When there was more money, and when the baby was born. Gary would come back to her.

“Breakfast time, Jackie,” she said, and led him to the kitchen.

“Breakfast,” he echoed, and she poured him a bowl of cereal.

“Do you want to have an adventure today?” she asked him. She took the gallon of milk from the refrigerator.

“I hate milk,” Jackson said.

“No milk,” she said, and put it back. She turned on the radio that sat on the kitchen counter. When she and Jackson were alone she played the old country station. “So, do you want to go out in the woods with me?”

It was June. There was the whole long summer before Jackson would have to start taking the bus to kindergarten. She couldn't stand to think about it, the creaking bus that would take over an hour each way. It didn't seem right to make him ride that long for a few hours of coloring.

“Can we go to the creek?” Jackson asked.

“We can do that,” she said. “Or we can go up on the hill. I want to show you something.”

“Show me something,” Jackson said. “I want to go up on the hill.” His pajamas had airplanes on them, and his face was still marked from his pillow. She kissed the top of his head.

“Finish your breakfast,” she said. “And then we'll get you dressed.”

Their plot of gnarled roots and underbrush was hemmed by
forty steep acres that sloped down toward farmland on the opposite side and seemed to belong to no one. Because it was untended there were occasionally families who set up camp there, picking chanterelles or just waiting out hard luck. They sank trailers into the loam and their trucks made deep ruts through the woods that filled with rainwater and dark leaves. Mostly, though, it was abandoned, and she thought of it as belonging to her and Gary and Jackson.

She wrapped the gun in a sweater and put it at the bottom of Jackson's little green backpack, then added the bullets, two pairs of earplugs from the bureau, an old Coke bottle full of water, and two sandwiches. She picked out jeans and a sweater for Jackson and helped him into his yellow rubber boots.