Authors: Dale Peck
An old black pickup moves west on Sunrise highway. Something is loose in the bed, and it clanks loudly as the pickup races by. My parents ride in silence. He drives, she reads the pullout section of last week’s Sunday paper. I occupy the seat of honor—perched between my fathers legs, just behind the steering wheel and just before his stomach and chest. I hold his beer. I’m not supposed to let it spill, and I stare nervously at the sloshing liquid and will it to settle down. My gaze is so focused that when my father occasionally reaches for the beer, his huge, black-haired white hand seems like an intruder, and he has to smack my hands away when I cling too tightly. I am five years old.
Something’s gone wrong. I don’t understand yet, but people are talking about how summer refuses to end. It’s November, but the air is still hot, and filled with the scent of overripe citrus. Hot dog vendors line the highway. They sit outside their vans, fanning themselves with wilted newspapers. Nobody
knows what to do. At the beach, hurricane fencing borders the sand, but that’s the only human element defining it. No beach chairs, no gaudy umbrellas, no people. I walk a few steps away from my parents and turn around and around, feeling, for the first time, how big it all is. I’m not sure whether that should frighten or excite me, and I stand on my tiptoes in the sand and look to see how they’re taking it. My mother, shading her eyes from the world with her palm, says, “It’s enough to make a body do things.” My father just says a deserted beach is like being in your own home, and he drops his pants and puts on his swimsuit without even looking around. My mother opens her mouth again, but then she closes it without speaking.
Instead she snaps a sheet in the air, and white flashes: not just the sheet, but my mother’s belly, and her swimsuit, and my father’s butt. Then colors swirl in, mostly reds: my mother’s hair, my father’s chest and arms. He works construction these days, his sunburn comes from working outside without a shirt; my mother’s hair color comes from a bottle. My suit’s red too, from Kmart. It’s pale now, almost pink, but as soon as I splash into the water the color deepens, as if the water had refreshed the dye in the fabric.
It’s my fathers idea that we nap after we’ve been in the water for a while. “Naptime” is all he says, and then he sprawls on the middle of the blanket. Sighing, my mother sinks down to one side of him; she hasn’t swum but only waded in ankle-deep, still reading her magazine and glancing up occasionally to look at me. I lie on the blanket, on the other side of my father. He sighs
now. It’s different from my mother’s sigh, contented. It registers his sense of balance: this is what a family looks like. I imagine I’m in an airplane overhead: looking down, I see the big mound of my father in the middle. The pale heap of my mother is on his right side, face and hair covered by a magazine. The small pile of me is on his left. I’m not as big as my mother yet, but my skin is tanned and my suit is wet and dark red, so I show up better on the sheet.
I fall asleep quickly in the hot November sun, and at first I think the ocean invades my dreams, that high tide washes over my mind. But as I wake up gradually I realize it isn’t the ocean I hear, it’s loud breathing, and as I wake up more I realize that it’s not mine but my father’s. I open my eyes and without moving my head I can see his stomach, falling until ribs show, rising until it seems like a pregnant woman’s. I try to sit up then, but without turning my father puts his left hand out and catches me in the stomach and pushes me back before I get halfway up. But I’m able to see over his stomach for a second, and in that second I see my father’s other hand low on my mothers abdomen, and I see that the bottom of her swimsuit is pushed down as well.
After that I lie with my father’s hand heavy on my stomach. I stare straight up and try to hear just the ocean, which is so loud, so clear with no people around. Still, I can’t help but hear my father’s breathing, and after a while I notice my mother’s too, heavy like his, but faster, and—though I try not to—I can’t help but picture her stomach fluttering under his right hand. His left hand claws my skin, but I know I have to stay quiet, so
I bite my lip. I look down only once, and when I do I think I see my mothers fist pounding the base of my father’s stomach, but just barely—you know how it is when you look at the sun for too long—and I immediately look up, but the sun burns my eyes and I close them.
Then I fall asleep again, and this time the water does invade my dreams. I’m swimming, diving down, looking for the beginning of the ocean, but soon I realize I’ve gone too far, I have to head for the surface or I’ll run out of air. So I start swimming up, using my arms and legs, but even though the sun reflects off the water’s surface just above me, I can’t reach it, it seems to retreat from me. And just when it seems there isn’t any air left in my lungs, that I will drown, my eyes open and I feel my father’s hand pressing down so hard on my stomach that I can’t breathe. Then, just as I start squirming, my father’s hand flies up and he groans loudly. And I want to cry out too, but all I can do is cry
in
, as I suck, vainly, at all the air that his hand has forced out of me; and then, as I hear the sound of labored breathing coming from the far side of his body, something comes to me from my dream, some half-human shape crawls out of the dark water, and I realize that my father has been drowning my mother as well.
My father hid in the forest’s shadow with his shotgun. It was twilight, and the evening was further darkened by thousands of crows clotting the sky. Lying in the hammock on the back porch, I could just make out the gun looped through my father’s right arm. His head was tilted back; I didn’t think he could see me. All at once he raised the shotgun and fired once, twice, six times in all, and the crows, whose calls had been loud, started to shriek. Several dark shapes fell to the ground and the dogs ran toward them. My father laughed and a rain of excess pellets shredded the forest’s leaves. Snarling, the dogs fought over the carcasses.
THE CROWS WERE gone the next morning except for scattered feathers. Major, one of my father’s German shorthairs, looked at me wearily, then returned to the mangled paw he’d been licking ever since it had been ruined by one of my
father’s traps two years before. Squire, his replacement, got up, vomited, then followed me to the old barn. The night before, as dinner ended, my father said, “The dogs’ll probably be sick in the morning. Make sure they have plenty of fresh water and give them this leftover liver—and stop picking that thing.” My hand fell from my face, where it had been tracing the crescent-shaped scar that curls around my right eye. I pushed my chair back and started to leave, then waited by the door when I heard my mother sigh at the sink, where she was washing dishes. “Don’t worry him, Henry,” she said. “How would you like being scarred for life?” Her voice stopped when she noticed me still in the room. Without looking at me, my father sighed also, a wheeze like a punctured tire, and then he pushed past me and went to bed. Now, in the morning, Squire followed me so closely that he tripped on my heels. “Get lost, you mutt,” I yelled. He backed away a few steps, looked at me blankly. One of my father’s coffee cups sat on a fencepost, and I grabbed it and threw it at Squire. It missed and cracked loudly on the driveway gravel. I looked up at the house’s gray windows to see if anyone had heard, but the windows returned my stare as blankly as Squire did, and told me nothing.
The old barn seemed to list in a breeze as I walked to it. We’d named it the old barn when my father started talking of building a new one, just before my older brother drowned. Inside, the heat was like July, not mid-September, and dust motes clogging the hundred-degree air were made iridescent
by streams of light poking through holes where Justin had pulled a few planks from the roof. The stench of The Glue Factory’s shit hit me, and I started breathing through my mouth. I couldn’t remember the last time her stall had been raked clean. Squire trotted in behind me, sprayed a fencepost, started sniffing at the ladder leading to the loft. “What’s up, Lassie?” I said. My father hated it when I called Squire Lassie. The dog ignored me; he whined nervously, then stretched his paws up the ladder and barked. Though Squire barked at the loft every other day and I knew it was probably just a rat or a cat, I needed an excuse not to clean The Glue Factory’s stall. I pushed Squire out of the way and went up. A few bales of hay, a layer of loose straw, a pile of dented unmarked boxes: that’s all I saw when my head poked through the loft floor. Then I climbed another step and saw him. A boy. He stared at me where I perched on the ladder staring at him. His eyes were bleary, and a clump of straw stuck to the left side of his face. He looked about my age, sixteen or so. I was sixteen, I mean. He was or so.
“Who are you?”
Something happened then. Though I’d spoken, I realized as soon as my mouth opened that the same question must be on his mind, and for just a second I became him, saw out of his eyes, looked through a veil of straw at a boy with an eye encircled by a pale scar that sliced through his tan. But then, before I could evaluate what I saw, I was back inside myself, looking out. As I watched, the boy glanced around the loft. I
imagined he was looking for an escape route. Turning back to me, he swallowed. “Have you ever ridden in a limousine?” “What?” I said, startled, “I’ve never even seen one.” “Have you ever looked at the world from the top of a sixty-story building?” I didn’t understand his game, but I tried to play. “I’ve climbed the cottonwood in the front yard. Does that count?” I smiled hopefully. “Have you ever fucked?” I looked down, embarrassed. “No.” I heard another loud swallow. “I’m hungry.” “My mother will be cooking soon,” I told him. “Want to eat with us?” He just stared past me with unfocused eyes. I climbed into the loft. “Come on,” I said, looking at the straw all over him. “Let’s brush this off and get going.” His eyes met mine suddenly, and he put a hot finger on my scar. I jerked back. “The Glue Factory,” I said. “Our horse.” “Your horse?” “Kicked me,” I said, and added, “We’d better hurry.” I brushed at the straw on his face. “I’ll tell my mother you’re a friend from school.” The straw stuck to his skin so I grabbed some and pulled it free. One second there was nothing; the next, a thick red line of blood ran from his eyebrow to his chin, closing fast on the buttoned collar of his white shirt. Without a sound, he fell backward in the hay, and the sun coming through the holes Justin had left behind made zebra stripes of light and shadow on his body.
I’M TRYING TO tell it the way he would: one minute he’s in a barn, a stranger picking at his face, the next he’s in a bed;
the skin of his face tingles and a stiff bandage covers his eye. His shirt is gone. He smells, close by, soap, and farther away, food: toast, eggs, frying bacon. Then a big fussy woman dressed in a man’s work clothes enters the room with a platter. “Here now,” she says. “I’m Bea. Don’t try to talk yet. Just eat, and I’ll be back for the tray in a bit.” I think I know how he felt: I remember waking in the hospital, and the first thing I saw with my uncovered eye was an ugly shirt patterned with blue flowers. I tried to remove it, wondering vaguely where my T-shirt was, but my eye started to hurt and I became tired. When I awoke the second time, I remember, the hospital gown seemed familiar.
THE KITCHEN TABLE and a coffee cup separated my father from me. Dressed for work in stained jeans and a T-shirt distended over his stomach, he held his coffee at arm’s length. “You just found him there?” he asked, addressing the cup. “Yeah. Squire was nosing around the ladder, so I checked it out.” He tapped his cup, and the coffee rippled with waves. “He say anything? His name, where he’s from, anything like that?” “Nothing.” The phone rang and my mother answered it. Then, pressing the receiver to her chest, she said, “It’s Mr. Johnson. He wants to know—” “Tell him I’m on my way,” my father said, and started for the door with his coffee. As my mother hung up, he told her, “We’ll discuss this more tonight. For now, just keep an eye on him. And
you”—he pointed to me. “Finish your chores before you’re late for school, and don’t skip out on The Factory’s stall.” He stepped outside and the screen door banged shut. My mother was at the sink by that time; she stopped washing dishes for a moment and rested her weight on her elbows. Pausing on the top step, my father looked into his cup. “Squire was sniffing around there, huh?” “Yeah.” He sipped from his cup. “Damn good dog,” he said, and then he walked to his truck, climbed in, and drove away.
When my father entered the house that evening, the screen door announced his arrival just as it had his departure, and his voice was like a second slam. “Bea!” he hollered. Drying her hands on her pants, my mother bustled in from the bathroom. I slipped in behind her. I’d eaten earlier and had no reason to be in the kitchen, but the door’s sound reeled me in like a fish. “Quiet,” my mother said. “You’ll wake Martin.” My father grabbed a beer from the fridge and snapped it open. “Martin,” he said, his voice only slightly quieter. “John tell you his name?” “No, Martin did.” My mother set a plate at my father’s place and hastily arranged the silverware around it. “You get his last name?” my father said, sitting down and picking up his fork. “Just let me stir this up a little and it’ll be ready to go,” my mother said from the stove. She worked a spoon into the stew we’d eaten for dinner, then pulled four biscuits from the oven. “They got a little hard,” she said. “Sorry.” She ladled three huge dollops on my father’s plate and crowded the biscuits around. “He didn’t tell me his
last name.” My father harrumphed. “No one at the pool hall knew anything about a runaway or a lost kid,” he said, already eating. He stuffed his mouth, chewing only once or twice before swallowing. “You want something besides that?” my mother asked, wiping her dry hands on a towel. My father swigged his beer. “This is doing me just fine.” My mother pulled a glass from the cabinet, set it on the table, and emptied the can into it. It clinked as she tossed it with the other aluminum under the sink. “John honey,” she said, still bent over, facing the cabinet. “This box is almost full here. Are you going to empty it sometime soon?” I didn’t look at her. “I had a busy day,” I said. “Nope, no one’s heard of a Mar-tin at all.” My father broke the word in half as if sounding it out, then forked another bite of stew. My mother set a small plate and fork in front of me. Her fingers tapped the table once, and I looked up and met her gaze, and then my eyes darted between her and my father several times, and then I just stared at my plate until she turned away.