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Earth, sky, and morning light: naturalism in Proulx’s Wyoming Stories
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Earth, sky, and morning light: naturalism in Proulx’s Wyoming Stories
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Content
Earth, Sky, and Morning Light:
Naturalism in Proulx’s Wyoming Stories
by
Bruce Johnson
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)
May 2021
Copyright 2021 Bruce Johnson
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to offer my sincere gratitude to the Literature and Creative Writing program
at the University of Southern California for its support and flexibility over the last seven years,
which allowed me not only to learn and grow as a writer and scholar but also to complete the
requirements for the PhD on my own terms, across two continents and three countries. Further, I
would like to thank my entire dissertation committee—especially my chair Aimee Bender,
whose encouragement to experiment with shorter, stranger things led to the stylistic variety in
the creative portion of this dissertation, and William Handley, for whom I originally wrote the
paper on “Brokeback Mountain” that was the genesis of the critical portion.
Moreover, many of the stories in the creative portion originally appeared in journals, and
I would like to thank them for their support of my work: Quarter After Eight, Sycamore Review,
Sequestrum, The Cincinnati Review MiCRO Series, Midwestern Gothic, The Able Muse, The Los
Angeles Review, Joyland, decomP magazinE, Gone Lawn, The Adroit Journal, and Cutthroat: A
Journal of the Arts. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Ecuadorian press Cactus
Pink, which translated many of the shorter pieces to Spanish and published them along with the
English versions in the bilingual chapbook Snapshots.
And finally, a special thanks to my wife Brandy for all the support over the years. She
remains my first, last, and best reader.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................................................... ii
Abstract ....................................................................................................................................................... iv
Earth, Sky, and Morning Light: Naturalism in Proulx’s Wyoming Stories ....................................... 1
I. Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 2
Background ...................................................................................................................... 4
II. “Another Thread in the Fabric”: Life in Proulx’s Wyoming ........................................... 16
III. “No Instruction Manual Needed”: A Naturalistic View of Human Sexuality .............. 31
IV. “Playing the Bull”: Sexual Assault in the Wyoming Stories .......................................... 49
V. Conclusion: Proulx’s “Flood of Morning Light” vs. McCarthy’s “Optical Democracy”
....................................................................................................................................................... 61
References .................................................................................................................................... 70
In Case I Don’t Call: Stories ................................................................................................................... 75
There There .................................................................................................................................. 76
In Case I Don’t Call .................................................................................................................... 79
The Knack .................................................................................................................................... 95
Love, Dirt ................................................................................................................................... 102
The Brightmore Problem .......................................................................................................... 120
Snapshots .................................................................................................................................... 137
Chévere ....................................................................................................................................... 140
All The Wild .............................................................................................................................. 155
Semantics.................................................................................................................................... 172
The Repair .................................................................................................................................. 174
Anywhere But Home ................................................................................................................ 185
≠ ................................................................................................................................................... 189
The So-Called Jacob ................................................................................................................. 192
Consider It Saved ...................................................................................................................... 195
Now Nothing .............................................................................................................................. 206
The Slabs .................................................................................................................................... 215
Sayings ........................................................................................................................................ 217
Nothing Is Ever So Simple as Zombies.................................................................................. 222
Nine Point Five .......................................................................................................................... 225
What That Meant in Miles ....................................................................................................... 242
iv
ABSTRACT
In recent years, scholarship on the work of fiction writer Annie Proulx has primarily focused on
her geographical determinism—that is, that the lives of her characters are largely determined by
their geographical environments. The critical portion of this dissertation argues that Proulx’s
three volumes of Wyoming stories are better understood as part of the naturalist tradition in
literature, which entails a certain attention to how geography determines human lives but also a
consideration of how human behavior and circumstance is influenced by other forces such as
history, inherited traits, economic factors, and sociocultural context. Properly understood in this
way, these stories amount to not only an illustration of the effects of geography but a radical
repudiation of several bedrocks of U.S. American culture: the traditional concept of free will; the
way existing discourses on sexuality (even in academia) give rise to discriminatory violence; and
how sexual violence is (or is not) dealt with in rural communities. The tragedies depicted in the
stories thus provide a picture of how violence and discrimination in present-day Wyoming are
largely due to preventable circumstances, and invite readers to consider their own culpability in
this.
1
Earth, Sky, and Morning Light:
Naturalism in Proulx’s Wyoming Stories
2
I. Introduction
Despite the type of early success with novel writing that most fiction writers would kill
for—her first novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and her second won both the
Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award—Annie Proulx has spent much of her later career
writing short stories. Proulx herself considers her three volumes of Wyoming stories to be her
greatest accomplishment (Cox 23), and much of her popular reputation rests on the story
“Brokeback Mountain,” first published in The New Yorker in 1997 and later in Close Range, the
first volume of her Wyoming stories (hereafter, “WS1”).
One of the things that has always attracted me to Proulx’s work, and the Wyoming stories
in particular, is the way that the narration preserves the blunt way people from rural backgrounds
talk: frankly, and pulling no punches. It is something Proulx dials up consciously and
considerably, but its basis in the real way that certain people speak is still recognizable. Of
course, it is no wonder why I am attracted to this style: though I am from Lincoln, NE, which is a
city not a town, both my parents spent much of their lives in small towns. And while I hope my
own voice as a writer has become more distinct and varied throughout my time at USC, I think
that what my wife told me after first meeting my mother still largely holds true: “You write how
your mom talks.”
The bluntness of Proulx’s style is perhaps best seen in how death is narrated and
discussed by the characters. Take, for example, a short passage from the end of “The Bunchgrass
Edge of the World”: a character notices after an accident that “his father-in-law’s head lolled at
an unusual angle,” and he remarks, “‘He is dead, I think. I think he is dead. Yes, he is dead. His
neck is broke’” (WS1 148). The narration is also notable for everything it leaves out, rarely
pausing on a particularly emotional moment to let the reader breathe, but instead barreling ahead
3
to the next beat of the story. An interviewer once remarked that one of Proulx’s stories “is
written in somewhat of the stoic way of these men” (Silverblatt 2006), and Proulx promptly
agreed. There’s something essential about this frankness that Proulx is intent on not losing in
translating her ideas into fiction.
Proulx does not make approaching her work critically especially easy, however. Despite
her subject matter, she seems resistant to the idea that she forms a part of any literary tradition, or
that literary traditions are generally even worth considering. When asked by an interviewer if she
had felt it necessary to become acquainted with the tradition of writing about the American West
before she started to work on the Wyoming stories, she responded in a typically crotchety
manner: “Why the hell would I do that? That’s not a tradition. Writing about the American West
is just like writing about the American East or whatever” (Cox 40).
1
She is also not particularly
amenable to differing interpretations of her stories; in discussing critics or readers who interpret
“Brokeback Mountain” differently than she does, she has said, “They just don’t get it… that’s
not the story I wrote. Those are not their characters. The characters belong to me by law” (Cox
44). It’s hard to imagine a stronger or clearer expression of the intentional fallacy—or a stronger
misunderstanding of copyright law, for that matter.
Nevertheless, critics have looked at Proulx’s work with a wide variety of critical
approaches. The author herself stated that she considers herself a geographical determinist
influenced by the Annales school of historiography (Missouri Review), and many critics have
discussed her work in this context. Proulx is thus usually classified as a “neo regionalist”
(Schweitzer 14), and Stéphanie Durrans provides an exceptionally detailed account of the
1
In an interview a mere year prior, however, Proulx assented to the interviewer’s suggestion that the tone
of Western lore and songs affected the sense of timing, comedy, and brutality in her stories (Silverblatt
2008), suggesting that one should take her later comments with a grain of salt.
4
Annales school’s influence on her. Critics have also productively discussed these stories’ place
within the American Western tradition (e.g. Abele), as well as from the perspectives of feminism
(e.g. Comer; Seiffert), environmentalism (e.g. Hunt), and postmodernism (e.g. Johnson). Though
these different approaches are not incompatible, how they might fit together to form a fuller
picture of her work, especially the Wyoming stories, remains unclear.
In what follows, the case will be made that not only has the existing scholarship on
Proulx often missed her most important stylistic and philosophical influence, literary naturalism,
but that a proper recognition of this influence is necessary to understand the essential insights
into human behavior offered by the Wyoming stories. The essay begins with a review of recent
scholarship on Proulx, specifically how scholars have picked up on her geographical
determinism while not noting the other aspects of her naturalism, before moving on to a
discussion of how Proulx bases the representations of her characters on naturalistic premises,
describing them almost exclusively in terms of natural phenomena like animals, plants, or even
landscapes. It then shows how conceptualizing her characters—and, by extension, human beings
in general—in this way allows her to shine fresh light on the way that dominant discourses
around human sexuality lead to the marginalization of certain individuals and even violence. In
doing so, the stories hint at how such tragedies might be avoided, while at the same time
resolving some of the logical contradictions inherent to the naturalism of the nineteenth century.
Background
As stated above, Proulx’s fiction is best understood as part of the naturalist tradition in
literature. By itself, this statement is not particularly controversial. Several scholars have
acknowledged Proulx’s debt to the naturalist tradition, though the broader significance of this has
5
rarely been examined. Definitions of naturalism vary a bit from scholar to scholar, but early
definitions typically characterized it as sharing all the essential characteristics of realism, but
with a particular philosophical bent, variously referred to as “pessimistic determinism,”
“necessitarian ideology,” or “pessimistic materialistic determinism” (Pizer 1).
In later years, some scholars have provided more nuanced definitions of literary
naturalism. Charles Child Walcutt, for example, acknowledges that naturalism indeed posited
that “all human events may be understood as products of the hereditary, social, chemical,
economic, and historical forces that compel them” (6). However, despite naturalism’s reputation
for “pessimistic determinism,” Walcutt notes that early naturalist writers were “impelled not by
any despairing pessimism but by an almost religious belief that man would be truly free, for the
first time, under the auspices of this philosophy of scientific determinism!” (6). They believed
that, if we could only recognize the forces that shape human lives, then we would be able to then
overcome them, and thus “something equivalent to a devout Christian’s heaven would be
established as a result of the evolutionary application of the scientific method” (8).
In the case of Proulx, the scholarship has defined literary naturalism mostly in more
simplistic terms: a “pessimistic determinism” that almost exclusively manifests as geographical
determinism. Weltzien, for example, recognizes that Proulx is a naturalist, but defines her
naturalism as “an extreme example of ecofiction in which setting domineers characters” (106)
and says her geographical determinism “explains the elevation of landscape imagery to a
dominant, inhuman force, and a corresponding reduction of character to caricature” (100).
Proulx’s type of naturalism, Weltzien seems to be saying, is basically synonymous with
geographical determinism.
6
Weltzien is far from alone in focusing so heavily on Proulx’s geographical determinism
in approaching her work. Generally speaking, while earlier scholarship on Proulx focused
primarily on narrative structure and identity politics, later approaches have coalesced into a
strong focus on issues of region and geography (Hunt 14). It’s easy to see why scholars have
shifted their energy in this way; the fact that the setting of these stories, Wyoming, is included in
the title of the three collections makes it fairly obvious the author is concerned with the
particularities of place. And it’s worth noting that Proulx’s earlier work was preoccupied with
setting as well. The Shipping News, for example, derived many of its distinctive qualities from its
treatment of the Canadian island of Newfoundland, and much of the relevant scholarship has
focused on its treatment of place, especially the cultural accuracies and inaccuracies of its
depiction (see, for example, Whalen). Even the inspiration for Proulx’s first novel came from
thinking about the specific economic situation of Vermont hill farms in the 1930s (Cox 29–30).
For her part, Proulx has also been somewhat more forthcoming about the importance of
place and setting to her work than she has been about its other aspects. She has said of her
fiction: “Everything comes from the landscape. Every single thing I write, I start with the
landscape. I start with the climate, the description, only when that is done—the particular place
that affects what people eat, how they make their livings and so forth—and the story rolls out of
the landscape” (“More Reader” 7). Elsewhere, she has said, “You could say that the place
provides the architecture and the content is provided by the characters and what happens to
them” (Cox 47), and spoken of the work of Faulkner, Cather, and Steinbeck as forming part of a
“golden age of American landscape fiction” in the early to mid-twentieth century (Hunt 16).
She has also made much of the rural-urban divide; if she is a regionalist writer, it’s clear
that the “region” she is most concerned with just might be the rural anywhere in the United
7
States. In her essay “Getting Movied,” which despite its title provides much more insight into her
story “Brokeback Mountain” than the movie based upon it, one can sense a certain reluctance on
her part to give her story over to filmmakers who do not live in rural areas. The word “urban”
takes on an almost pejorative connotation by the end of the essay. It is used to describe the young
filmmaking crew, all of whom suck in their breath when they see a dead rabbit in a house they
are scouting as a possible filming location. Proulx tells us “These urban people just did not get it
that Wyoming has a lot of wildlife and that the wildlife sometimes gets dead… [The film] was
not going to happen, because there were no producers or directors who understood the rural west,
the rural anything” (135). Whether Ang Lee’s crew ended up understanding the dark rural
sensibility Proulx seemed to view as essential is up for debate, but it’s worth considering why it
seemed so essential to her, and why it seemed to her that urban people might not “get” her story.
Elsewhere, she has said that Brokeback Mountain could have been set in any rural place, not
even necessarily in the United States, since homophobia is such an omnipresent rural
characteristic (Cox 47). She has also made clear that part of her motivation in writing her
Wyoming stories was wanting to write not about doctors or lawyers but about the “people
working on ranches or around ranches or with livestock or in the wilderness or moving
through… It was a segment of population I wanted to look at because rural places and rural
characters are given really short shrift in our society. They don’t seem to exist anywhere, so I
was much taken with writing about them” (Silverblatt 2008).
As time has gone on, she has used more and more deterministic language to discuss the
role of place in her work, stating in 2008 that “The fate is in the place. What happens to the
characters must happen to them” (Silverblatt 2008). It’s hard to imagine a much clearer
indication that the author adheres philosophically, at least in fiction, to the tenets of geographical
8
determinism, and scholarship that treats this aspect of her short stories has generally focused on
the negative effects that the realities of life in Wyoming have on her characters. Bénédicte
Meillon observes that notions of geographical determinism are integral to the plots of Proulx’s
stories and often manifest in the depiction of the situation of women’s particular plight: women
in these stories suffer all manner of abuses, including molestation, bullying, rape, and betrayal,
and are unable to fight back or speak out due to the lack of outlets for such resistance in rural
Wyoming (54). Though the universe is less rough in some ways for the men in these stories, we
see geography limiting their lives as well, with the vast majority of the main characters being
men and happy endings few and far between. As Hunt puts it, “characters who for whatever
reason cannot leave their places must resign themselves as best they can to its rigors…
geography shapes and limits characters’ lives” (16).
In recent years, one of the best ways of conceptualizing the particular strain of
geographical determinism present in the Wyoming stories has come from investigating the
influence that the Annales school of historiography has had on Proulx. Proulx herself was the
one to tip scholars off about this, acknowledging her debt to the Annales school in her approach
to fiction both on her website’s biographical sketch (since taken down) and in an interview with
the Missouri Review (Durrans 23). The Annales school broke with traditional historicism by
scrutinizing contemporary society using historical techniques, and by actively questioning the
past through the lens of contemporary society (Durrans 24). It also innovated by emphasizing the
examination of ordinary people's lives through materials such as legal documents, bank records,
technologies, and farming and crafting techniques (Missouri Review 18) rather than relying
solely on official written documents (Durrans 24), and paid more attention to how facts like
population, demography, ways of life, nature, and landscape determined human behavior.
9
Proulx’s description of her writing process bears out this influence; the idea for her first novel
came to her from reading fire marshal reports from the 1930s (Cox 29-30) and much of the
violence in the Wyoming stories is culled from real-life events (Proulx, Missouri Review).
Durrans echoes a common claim among recent scholars when she contends that the
influence of the thinkers in the Annales school has led to what she sees as a de-emphasis on
character and human nature in Proulx’s work. As she puts it, “However, while man undoubtedly
lay at the core of their concerns, human nature was commonly ignored to the benefit of the
individual, enmeshed as he is in the social fabric of his time, and this is a posture which Proulx
readily adopts as her own when she claims to be interested in ‘the individual caught in the
whirlpool of change and chance’” (24). O. Alan Weltzien has a similar reading of the Wyoming
stories, contending that Proulx’s geographical determinism is responsible for elevating landscape
imagery to a dominant force and reducing her characters to caricature (100). Peter Terzian, in his
review of Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 (hereafter, “WS2”) in The Washington Post, observed
something similar but put it much more critically (and melodramatically): “If her prose has a
mesmerizing rhythm that sweeps the reader along, it can also eclipse real human feeling; so
many purple descriptions of terrestrial features leave little room for characters’ souls to bloom.”
Comments like these, along with the somewhat narrow focus in so much recent Proulx
scholarship on her geographical determinism, give one the impression that this is all she is up to
in these stories: interrogating the extent to which human behavior and fate is determined by
environment, and coming back again and again with the answer, “very much so, if not entirely.”
But though Proulx’s geographical determinism forms an essential part of the literary project she
set out on with the Wyoming stories, it is not the only essential part of this project. The
Wyoming stories do indeed contain many landscape descriptions, but this does not make Proulx
10
any less interested in her characters. Nor is Proulx more interested in historical circumstance or
social systems than in other aspects of the individual. Though naturalism, like the Annales
school, seeks to understand the individual as “enmeshed… in the social fabric of his time,” it by
no means believes this social fabric to be the only aspect of human life worth considering.
Instead, a proper, nuanced definition of naturalism entails a certain strand of geographical
determinism but also entails a whole lot more, as seen by the definitions provided by thinkers
like Walcutt. Unfortunately, scholars rarely treat Proulx’s naturalism with much more than a
passing mention, and when they do they tend to rely on overly simplistic definitions. Aitor
Ibarrola-Armendariz, for example, concedes that Proulx represents one of the latest examples of
naturalism in U.S. fiction, but states that the characteristics that typically define this tradition are
a simple pessimistic determinism and the use of detailed representations (133). Moreover,
Ibarrola-Armendariz says, Proulx’s characters set themselves apart from the typical “insect-like”
characters of naturalistic fiction with qualities like courage and personal worth (133). At best,
such statements belittle the depth and breadth of the philosophical assertions of literary
naturalism, as well as Proulx’s adherence to them; at worst, they contribute to an outright
misunderstanding of what literary naturalism is.
The heyday of the naturalistic novel is generally considered to have been in the
nineteenth century, and since then the perceived importance of this genre has diminished,
especially in the U.S. As Walcutt puts it,
The naturalistic novel is a phenomenon — that is, an appearance — whose image is
dependent upon the historical perspectives in which it is seen… It may also be thought of
as a great new tree suddenly bursting from the ground and occupying totally the vision of
readers and critics. As the years pass, one tree after another springs up, and the
naturalistic tree recedes bit by bit into the distance, until it is seen at the end of a long line
of diminishing trees. That is how we see it today — and that is why we may find it
surprising to hear that it once seemed so overpoweringly new. Today it is merely the first
tree in a long line, obscured by the qualities of all the trees that grow larger and larger (in
11
appearance, always) as the observer moves farther down the line, away from the original
tree. (3)
As time goes on, one gets the sense that scholars looking back at this particular tree not only
view it as smaller and less significant than the trees that have sprouted up since, but that it is
something of an embarrassing tree to have once occupied such a prominent place in the U.S.
literary orchard, as shown by Ibarrola-Armendariz comments on naturalism’s “insect-like
characters” (133) and suggestion that Proulx contradicts the tenets of naturalism by implying
there is worth in human behaviors or attitudes (135). Moreover, the way that the scholars above
seem to contend that the only worthwhile aspects of naturalism are those that also belong to
ecofiction and landscape fiction may suggest that they wish to discard those aspects of
naturalism that have not become the defining characteristics of newer literary movements.
However, Proulx’s Wyoming stories beg for the opposite attitude. It’s as if they want to
take readers by the hand and lead them back to this naturalist tree, showing it from a perspective
they have never seen before, highlighting those aspects that distinguish the tree not only from the
trees that came before but also from those that have come since. Or, if taking readers by the hand
is too gentle an analogy for the Wyoming stories, perhaps the stories wish to rope readers like
runaway cattle and drag them back to this tree, forcing them to take a better look.
As mentioned above, thought at first naturalism was often defined by its supposed
“pessimistic determinism” (Pizer 1), later thinkers like Donald Pizer and Charles Child Walcutt
have clarified its philosophical position with greater detail. Pizer in particular argues that the
traditional definitions of naturalism have handicapped thinking about both the movement as a
whole and specific works within that movement (2); and yet, more than half a century after Pizer
first made that statement, we see scholars still relying on such flawed definitions when
discussing new naturalist writers (e.g. Proulx). Pizer, on the other hand, defined naturalistic
12
fiction in terms of two tensions or contradictions that naturalistic works tend to share: (1) the
peopling of the novel with characters from lower classes but at the same time finding in these
characters heroic or adventurous qualities and (2) describing these characters in deterministic
terms while simultaneously suggesting the humanistic value of them or their fates, thus affirming
the significance and worth of these characters’ lives (2–3).
As mentioned above, Walcutt provides his own nuanced definition of naturalism. He first
acknowledges the deterministic aspects of naturalism, whereby human freedom theoretically
disappears “in the concept that all human events may be understood as products of the
hereditary, social, chemical, economic, and historic forces that compel them” (6). But Walcutt
argues that the most significant part of this determinism is the naturalists’ attitude toward it,
populating novels with these forces “impelled not by any despairing pessimism but by an almost
religious belief that man would be truly free, for the first time, under the auspices of this
philosophy of scientific determinism!” (6). This attitude is perhaps best summed up in an
especially on-the-nose passage from the novel Sister Carrie, by the naturalist writer Theodore
Dreiser: “Our civilisation is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly
guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason… [Man] is
becoming too wise to hearken always to instincts and desires; he is still too weak to always
prevail against them” (Ch. 8). The goal of naturalism was thus to help humans “prevail” against
the forces that have hitherto shaped their lives, and the novelist was to play a crucial role in this.
Claude Bernard, for example, a prominent naturalist scientist, contended that a novelist’s process
should consist of simply establishing a character’s setting and hereditary traits, after which the
author would just record what happened given the information provided. Such a novel would not
13
only be scientific but help human beings control their fates by understanding the forces that
determine them (Walcutt 7).
There are two significant points to note here in the definitions of both Pizer and Walcutt.
The first is that human behavior and fate in naturalist texts are influenced not just by geography,
but history, inherited traits, economic factors, and sociocultural context as well; any fiction
writer for whom naturalism is basically “an extreme example of ecofiction,” as Weltzien says of
Proulx (106), would not really fit these definitions. Second, and more importantly, is that both
Pizer and Walcutt define naturalism not so much by its deterministic bent, but by its optimism
and humanism in the face of such determinism. This literally could not be more opposite to the
pat definitions of naturalism that exist in the current scholarship on Proulx, which depend on
“pessimistic determinism” as the defining characteristic. Despite some notable exceptions, just as
scholarship has often not picked up on the optimism inherent in the naturalistic movement as a
whole, it has failed to notice the strangled strain of optimism in Proulx’s Wyoming stories. Faint
as it is, it is a significant aspect, the implications of which have been almost completely missed
or misunderstood by previous scholarship.
Of course, as should be obvious from the descriptions above, some tenets of naturalism
were far from logically sound. The idea that a novel functions like some sort of complicated
Excel spreadsheet where the author need only input certain values into the “setting” and
“inherited traits” columns and what comes out follows logically and necessarily from those
values is ridiculous. (If only it were that easy!) As Walcutt points out, there is no laboratory, test
tubes, or controlled conditions in which the author’s characters exist, and any “fact” that exists in
fiction is typically invented by the author—not to mention that hereditary causes, even in real
life, can never be observed directly but only inferred after the fact (7–8). Moreover, the
14
philosophical implications of determinism run exactly counter to the type of freedom envisioned
by the naturalistic authors of the nineteenth century. As Walcutt puts it, “If all process is material
and chemical, capable of being scientifically charted and described, then it follows logically that
man’s free will and moral responsibility, under the old dispensation, no longer exist” (8). Thus,
“Every naturalistic novel seems to contain and even be dominated by ideas that are completely
contrary to its apparent philosophical base” (9). If this seems illogical, well, it was; the scientific
revolution was new enough at the time that the impact was still not logical (8). Like Pizer,
Walcutt sees naturalism as best defined by the tension produced by its logically conflicting aims.
Reading these descriptions of naturalism after reading Proulx’s Wyoming stories, one
may be struck by just how different Proulx’s strain of naturalism is from the naturalism of the
nineteenth century. The environmental determinism is present, yes, as has been picked up on far
and wide. So are other deterministic factors present in nineteenth-century naturalistic fiction—
social, economic, hereditary, and historical forces all at times play leading roles. And yet, though
there is optimism in these stories, it never comes off as contradictory to their wider philosophical
aims, and it is certainly never presented as an “almost religious belief” that human beings’
situations can be improved to the point of reaching a near-utopia. It’s more like a small clump of
vegetation that suddenly grows in the desert after a bit of unexpected rain, breaking up the sand.
What Proulx has created is free of the philosophical tensions described by Walcutt and Pizer; the
Wyoming stories maintain a hobbled strain of naturalism’s traditional optimism in the face of
determinism, but this optimism is reached by resolving the contradictions found in earlier
naturalistic texts.
This is accomplished by taking the logical implications of the scientific revolution
seriously and following them to their natural conclusions, rather than attempting to ignore them.
15
Walcutt describes how a crucial turning point in the development of naturalism came when the
individual was suddenly understood as “merely another thread in the fabric,” and that all human
events were conceptualized in terms of their social, economic, biological, and historical causes
(6). Proulx takes this proposition quite seriously, and indeed untangles the implications much
more completely than the naturalistic fiction of the nineteenth century ever did. At a discursive
level, these Wyoming stories refuse to speak of human beings as anything apart from nature;
humans are not only described in terms of natural phenomena such as rock formations or
animalistic terms such as cattle, but on every page Proulx seeks to break down the distinctions
between these other things and human beings. In doing so, these stories acknowledge the lack of
free will and agency in a naturalistic conception of the universe, rather than maintaining (despite
all logical arguments to the contrary) that recognizing the contingent nature of human behavior
and characteristics will somehow lead to a hitherto unimaginable era of human freedom.
Nonetheless, in the naturalist tradition, they suggest ways in which the plight of human beings
can be improved by recognizing the contingency of what ails them.
16
II. “Another Thread in the Fabric”:
Life in Proulx’s Wyoming
As Pizer described, one of the defining traits of nineteenth century naturalism is the way
it depicts characters who are typically of the lower middle or lower socioeconomic class, but
finds in these characters something other than might be expected. As he puts it,
His characters are the poor, the uneducated, the unsophisticated. His fictional world is
that of the commonplace and the unheroic in which life would seem chiefly to be the dull
round of daily existence, as we ourselves usually conceive of our lives. But the naturalist
discovers in this world those qualities of man usually associated with the heroic or
adventurous, such as acts of violence or passion, involving sexual adventure or bodily
strength, which culminate in desperate moments and violent death… The naturalist…
discovers in this material the extraordinary and excessive in human nature. (2–3)
At first glance, this may seem like a dead-on description of Proulx’s Wyoming stories. Her
characters are certainly not rich or especially educated; as mentioned above, Proulx seems to
take pride in the fact that she writes not about doctors or lawyers but ranch hands and the like
(Silverblatt 2008). There’s also an unsettling amount of violence in these stories, including many
characters whose lives meet violent ends, such as Jack in “Brokeback Mountain,” the women
Mr. Croom kills in “55 Miles to the Gas Pump,” or the gun deaths at the end of “A Lonely
Coast.” There are moments of bodily strength as well, particularly in the physical prowess of
Diamond Felts riding bulls in “The Mud Below,” or Mero succeeding in smashing a window
because of his healthy diet in “The Half-Skinned Steer” (38).
However, to call these stories “adventurous” would be a stretch. The tone is typically of
horror or tragedy or black, black comedy, not adventure. Likewise, to call them “heroic” would
be simply inaccurate; the moments of sexual exploits are often instances of sexual assault (for
example, in “The Mud Below” or “People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water”), and the violent
acts are typically inflicted upon the main characters, not performed by them. Such moments are
17
depicted as anything but heroic or adventurous. Perhaps the droll statement in “Testimony of the
Donkey” about a woman trapped under a rock in the wilderness, slowly succumbing to the
elements, sums up the dry, downtrodden tone the best: “She had not known that dying could be
so boring” (Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3—hereafter, “WS3”—173).
Typically, naturalism seeks to show “the extraordinary and excessive in human nature,”
even in the lives of everyday people (Pizer 3), or, occasionally, the ordinary that is present in the
extraordinary, such as the quotidian elements emphasized in the seemingly extraordinary and
heroic events of Crane’s Red Badge of Courage (Pizer 12). However, though the Wyoming
stories maintain the naturalistic focus on the forces that determine the circumstances and
behavior of human beings, they seem intent on dispensing with the idea that there is anything
extraordinary about human life in the first place. The first way they do so is by breaking down
the distinctions between the characters in these stories and the animals with which they so often
work.
Perhaps none of Proulx’s stories blur the line between human and animal so completely
as “The Mud Below,” which follows the life and rodeo career of a young bull rider named
Diamond Felts. Diamond is a man seemingly at the whim of his animalistic desires, particularly
his thirst for adrenaline and his sexual appetite, with little regard for anything else.
The reason Diamond first gets into bull riding is for the naturalistic rush of it all. In his
senior year of high school, he helps out at a nearby ranch branding calves, and afterward he and
the other workers take turns riding bulls. Diamond is immediately hooked: “The shock of the
violent motion, the lightning shifts of balance, the feeling of power as though he were a bull and
18
not the rider, even the fright, fulfilled some greedy physical hunger in him he hadn’t known was
there” (49).
This description is striking for its sheer physicality, that there is a “greedy physical
hunger” in Diamond that needs to be fulfilled. The use of the word “physical” seems to warn the
reader not to take this hunger as a metaphor, and suggests that there is something going on at the
chemical level that attracts Diamond to bull riding. The particular chemical is called out by name
on the next page, when Diamond is described as “still on the adrenaline wave” after he
dismounts the bull (50). Elsewhere, we are told that “only the turbulent ride gave him the
indescribable rush, shot him mainline with crazy-ass elation” (67).
Moreover, Diamond’s immediate self-identification with the bull (“as though he were a
bull and not the rider,” 49) sets up one of this story’s central themes, and one that reverberates
throughout these three collections—the equation of human beings with other animals. This is by
no means the only time in this story that he is compared with the bulls he rides, either; one of the
most memorable moments is when, after behaving despicably for much of the story, Diamond is
told by his traveling partner that he should take Jesus as his role model, not the bulls he rides
(70). However, as one would expect from a story by someone with Proulx’s determinist bent, the
prose seems skeptical that Diamond has much control over his actions. He is described as
“bullish” for his sexual appetite for “easy girls” (64), and we are told his thirst for love came
down on him “like an axe and he was slaughtered by it” (54). The comparison of Diamond to the
bulls runs deep, and he is described as having just as little control over his fate; at the end of the
story he drives toward his next bull riding gig despite a nearly fatal injury that took almost all the
joy of riding out of him, and reflects on his life experiences hitherto: “He considered the old
saddle bronc rider rubbing leather for thirty-seven years, Leecil riding off into the mosquito-
19
clouded Canadian sunset, the ranch hand bent over a calf, slitting the scrotal sac. The course of
life’s events seemed slower than the knife but not less thorough” (80). This obviously takes
seriously the traditional determinist ideas of naturalism, as well as the logical implications of
such determinism: that human beings lack free will and are just animals conditioned to behave in
certain ways. Diamond’s life events are and could only have been things that happened to him,
not things he effected through his decisions, and this is emphasized by the way this story equates
humans with animals, which are not traditionally considered to have free will.
Interestingly, in “The Mud Below,” not only are human beings described in animalistic
terms, but animals are also humanized. The first time Diamond considers riding a bull we are
told the bulls looked “murderous” (49). Murder is typically a human concept, applied only to
human actions, but this off-the-cuff description seems to break down that barrier: in the world of
the Wyoming stories, murder and human violence is no different from the violence one finds
everywhere in the animal kingdom, a sort of automatic behavioral reaction to stimulus. Farm
animals are humanized elsewhere in the story as well: when Diamond complains to his travelling
partner that calf ropers talk about their horses the way they would human women, his travelling
partner affirms that he feels that way about his own horse (71). And despite Diamond’s
complaints about the humanizing of horses, he does the same thing in discussing the bulls he
rides, telling his partner, “I ride a bull, the bull’s my partner, and if bulls could drive you can bet
there’d be one sitting behind the wheel right now” (70).
The blurring of lines between animal and human in this story, however, especially the
way that Diamond Felts is depicted as particularly animalistic, does not serve to distance the
reader from him. It accomplishes almost the opposite, in fact. Despite the horrific ways that
Diamond acts in this story—and he does some truly horrific things that will be discussed later—
20
the reader still sympathizes with him, with his issues stemming from his absentee father being
particularly affecting. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the less Diamond is discussed in human
terms, culminating in the description of life’s castrating effect, the more sympathetic he
becomes.
Nor is “The Mud Below” the only story in these collections that anthropomorphizes
animals and animalizes humans. In the first collection alone, a woman is compared to a horse
(18, 20), we are told a man has “simian arms” (155), a wedding cake is topped with a tiny bull
and cow (145), people’s heads are “as yellow as wild canary breasts” (230), and animal-adjacent
names like Lamb, Elk Nelson, Bill Fur, or Ed Egge abound. The later collections too are filled
with character descriptions like the “damn old goggle-eyes snapping turtle who run off” (WS3
85). Throughout these stories, the reader is subtly and at times not so subtly nudged to question
any assumptions that would treat human beings as anything other than animals.
But perhaps the story from these collections that most explicitly begs the reader to
identify a certain character with an animal is “The Wamsutter Wolf.” This is the story, originally
published in The Paris Review, from which Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 draws its title. Here,
we follow the story of Buddy Millar, who moves to a small town named Wamsutter after a string
of bad luck and lost jobs, wanting to find a new, more isolated place with “bad dirt roads” to
settle down in. There, he inadvertently moves next to a couple, Rase and Cheri Wham, who went
to the same high school as he did and now have several kids. Buddy is less than thrilled at this;
his first visit to their trailer is filled with dry, disdainful descriptions, such as “Wads of trodden
gum appeared as archipelagoes in a mud-colored sea while bits of popcorn, string ends, torn
paper, a crushed McDonald’s cup, and candy wrappers made up the flotsam.” His condescending
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opinion of Cheri is also made clear through sentences like “He understood from the tone of her
voice that she considered the cafeteria job a career.”
Who the titular wolf of the story is remains unclear until the very end. The negative
associations of the word “wolf,” as well as the narrative associations to the big bad wolf from the
story of Little Red Riding Hood, likely have the reader expecting the wolf to be the villain.
Which might be Rase, who beat up Buddy when they were in middle school and now beats up on
his kids, eventually breaking one of their arms. Or it might be Cheri, who gets Buddy drunk and
sexually assaults him while he is sleeping, a woman he gets the sense is “picking him to replace
Rase.” Eventually, though, it is made clear that the Wamsutter Wolf is the couple’s friend Graig,
whom the end of the story implies has murdered Rase and usurped his role in Cheri’s household.
Or, as Buddy puts it after being looked at with Graig’s “alpha stare,” “I see you got your own
pack now” (176). There are literal wolves in the story as well, but we are led to doubt their
existence; Buddy believes the howling they hear near the trailers to be that of coyotes, though
Graig insists otherwise (163).
The choice of Graig as the titular “wolf” of the story is more interesting than it would
initially seem. Graig is someone who considers himself to have been born a hundred years too
late, and brags that people tell him he should have been a mountain man (156). However, his
idea of what all this means is heavily based on cinematic and literary depictions of the North
American West. When they first meet, he tells Buddy,
I’m a throwback and proud of it. I live by my wits, see? Trap, hunt, got me a little cabin,
no electricity, get water from the crick. Done it all my life. Only thing different from me
and the old-time mountain man is I ain’t got no squaw woman. I been on the lookout for
one but hell, they are all too civilized for me, just like the rest a the population, got a have
that deodorant and perfume, fancy clothes and go see the hairdresser six times a week.
(157)
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This speech foreshadows (in one of the more offensive ways imaginable) that Graig will end up
with Cheri before the story’s end. However, the way Graig is depicted here makes him seem like
anything but a wolf. As much as he insists he is a “throwback” to simpler times, the phrase
“mountain man” is a pop culture trope, as are his ideas of the “types” of women that he may or
may not want to be with. The story—and particularly Buddy’s perception—continues to make
fun of Graig’s ideas about himself. After Graig tells Buddy liquor is the one concession he
makes to civilization, we are told, “Buddy, glancing at the muddy Power Wagon, the rifle in the
back window, the mountain man’s stainless steel wristwatch, thought Graig made a few other
concessions to civilization and excused himself” (158). These depictions of Graig force the
reader to wonder, then: if Graig’s ideas of how “uncivilized” he is are flawed or ridiculous, what
is it that makes him a wolf? It’s not a lack of civilization.
This is not an easy question to answer. Graig could maybe be considered someone who
has a somewhat ham-fisted brand of cunning about him; the quote about wanting a woman may
indicate he’s on the prowl, so to speak, for a partner, and the story implies he’s flirting with
Cheri as early as their first scene together (158). His usurping of Rase’s familial role certainly
seems sly. But it’s hard to think of cunning as something particularly wolf-like, despite what the
story of Little Red Riding Hood might tell us; deftly executing a well-thought-out plan would
seem to be a decidedly human trait.
Instead, the story suggests that the things that define the lives of wolves are those we
might traditionally think define the lives of humans: social and power dynamics. It is the “alpha
stare” that Buddy equates with Graig’s wolf-like nature, as well as his newfound status as part of
a “pack” (176). This lines up with naturalism’s focus on the role of social forces in human lives.
At the same time, the story’s assertion that these are “wolf-like” qualities emphasizes the animal
23
nature of human beings. The fact that Buddy is somewhat blindsided by what happens to Rase—
and, presumably, could have happened to him if he had taken Rase’s place like Cheri desired—
suggests that the only way to survive as a human is to recognize that that means the same thing
as it would for an animal. It recalls a passage from another story in WS2: “He thought of his cat
and it came to him that wild creatures managed well through the winter” (74). Moreover, the fact
that all the major characters in “The Wamsutter Wolf” are quite aggressive, both sexually and
otherwise, seems to unsettle our own stock ideas of “civilization” just as it unsettles Buddy's.
Other scholars have also picked up on Proulx’s frequent depiction of human beings as
animalistic, though the implications of this depiction are often misunderstood. Seiffert, for
example, remarked on how a secondary character in “The Half-Skinned Steer” is talked about in
the language typically used for horses. Seiffert implies that her status as a sexual object to the
young men, her role as a secondary character, her lack of agency, and the animal language used
to describe her are all linked, that this animal language symbolizes the agency denied her (521–
522). But on the contrary, in the world of the Wyoming stories, people are described as animals
because that’s what they are. Our traditional notions of agency simply do not apply.
Proulx's descriptions blur the line between plant and human, as well. Characters are often
described with phrases like “cross-grained” (WS1 121), or having “buttocks like cantaloupes”
(WS2) or a “face like a pumpkin” (WS2). But perhaps the parodic height of Proulx's redrawing
and eventual erasure of the line between human and plant comes in “The Sagebrush Kid,” part of
the final collection of Wyoming stories. In this story, based loosely on the Czech fairy tale
Otesanek by K. J. Erben (Asquith 44), a station master at the Sandy Skull station on the Overland
Trail to California named Bill Fur is having trouble conceiving with his wife Mizpah. In those
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“fecund days,” this causes them much grief (82). So much so that Mizpah at first sublimates her
maternal urges into caring for a baby pig, which she dresses in a swaddling dress and feeds
cows’ milk from a baby bottle. After an eagle carries the baby pig off, she takes the next logical
step, getting herself a baby chicken, which she dresses in a leather jerkin and a tiny bonnet. After
this is carried off by a hungry coyote, the grief-stricken woman “next fixed her attention on an
inanimate clump of sagebrush that at twilight took on the appearance of a child reaching upward
as if piteously begging to be lifted from the ground” (83). She begins to bring this sagebrush
water mixed with milk, then water mixed with meat juice and gravy. The plant, dubbed the
Sagebrush Kid by Bill Fur, from there takes to eating horses and oxen and eventually people
when no one is looking. Though Bill and Mitzpah are forced to abandon Sandy Skull station, the
Sagebrush Kid continues to grow, and to feed. At the end of the story we are told it “stands out
there still.”
This story has several elements of note. For one, Proulx is hitting her persistent theme of
erasing the line between human and animal in a much funnier and much more on-the-nose way
than is typical in the Wyoming stories. There’s the obvious anthropomorphism of animals at the
outset, when Mizpah swaddles and babies the pig and the chicken. There’s also the attribution of
animal attributes to humans through the names given the husband and wife of the story, “Bill
Fur” and “Mizpah”—since with how delightfully heavy-handed Proulx is being here, it can fairly
be assumed the reader is expected to pronounce this “Ms. Paw.” Another character is named
“Bridle.”
But the most interesting turn in this story is, of course, the sentience of the Sagebrush
Kid. With this story Proulx is perhaps making her most exaggerated and literal depiction of her
thoughts on the universe, that human beings are not so unique as they would like to think. Not
25
only are they nothing more than animals, as the reader is constantly reminded throughout these
collections, but given the lack of free will that Proulx and these stories assume, they may be
more accurately described in the terms we would typically use to discuss plants or ecological
systems than the ones we use to discuss human fate.
There are many jarring and horrifying events in this trio of story collections, often drawn
from real life accounts of violence done by one human being to another. What terms does it
make sense to discuss such events in, the Wyoming stories beg us to consider, and how can we
understand the humans who commit such violence? Certainly not as beings made in the image of
a god, fallen from grace.
2
Better a wild beast, a wolf. Or perhaps even a Venus fly trap, fastening
its teeth around its prey. Taken together, these stories argue that any sense of human superiority,
moral or otherwise, is not only an illusion but simply irrational.
John Watson, the behaviorist, famously said, “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-
formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I’ll guarantee to take any one at
random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist,
merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants,
tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors” (82). It’s interesting to imagine how
Proulx would react to such hyperbole. There is no reason to believe she subscribes to a “blank
slate” theory of the human mind—and the naturalists would be particularly reluctant to disregard
the importance of hereditary factors—but the Wyoming stories do make a powerful case that
geography, environment, upbringing, and instinct are the primary determinants of human fate
and actions. So much so that Proulx adds her twist to this hyperbole with “The Sagebrush Kid.”
2
The inclusion of several stories set in hell in WS3, in which the devil is primarily concerned with
matters such as how to decorate it, pokes brutal fun at non-naturalist conceptions of the universe.
26
This story’s parodic riffing seems to say, “Give me a dozen kids, plus a baby pig, a chicken, and
a plant, feed them all the same things, and they’ll all pretty much end up in the same bad way.”
Additionally, because Proulx holds a patently mechanistic view of the universe, we can
often see her stories describing people as if they were machines or tools. As ever, in doing so she
utilizes the type of language the characters themselves might use and the objects they encounter
every day. Thus, we find characters like “Car Scrope,” who we are told had “broken so many of
his own bones that he was now held together with dozens of steel pins, metal plates and lag
screws” (156). Elsewhere, a sexual encounter is described as being “plowed” (WS3 19), a
person's hands are “the size of hay forks” (WS3 97), a character is like a propane tank (WS1
125), and two sexually compatible people are described as his “block” fitting her “tackle” (WS1
147). Likewise, some machines are described like animals or humans, such as a car that bucks
along like a horse (WS1 36) or a plane that has “feminine curves” (146).
But the funniest and most direct of the stories that toy with the line between human and
machine is “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World,” from WS1. This story tells of the shifting
power dynamics between different generations of the Touhey family living upon a single ranch.
The most relevant portion to our purposes is the story of Ottaline, a member of the youngest
generation of the Touheys, who spends her long lonely hours doing ranch work. The monotony
is briefly interrupted by a sexual relationship with the ranch’s hired man, but that fizzles after
Ottaline begins working more, and she instead occupies herself with listening to cell-phone
conversations on her scanner. Eventually, she is passing through the gravel quarry where her
father dumps worn-out equipment when a “treacherous John Deere 4030” (133) that previously
rolled over on a ranch hand begins to talk to her.
27
The precise nature of their relationship is hard to pin down, though there’s certainly a
sexual tone to the tractor’s breathy whispers of “Sweetheart, lady-girl” (131) and the like, as well
as its coaxing her to sit in its seat (“Plenty a bounce left”) and to scratch the part of its frame
where the paint has blistered up (133). It also informs her that “There’s girls fell in love with
tractors all over this country. There is girls married tractors.” (138). There’s also a patch of rust
on the tractor that it refuses to tell how it got, because it “don’t like to tell a girl something bad
about her daddy” (136), which may have some sort of strange sexual implication due to the fact
that the tractor later refers to her “dirty dad” (137). When Ottaline does eventually climb into the
seat she feels an “awful thrill” (139), and when she takes it upon herself to fix the tractor she tells
it, “I was you I’d lay back and enjoy it” (141), something she heard in her former sexual
dalliance with the ranch hand.
Critics are a bit split on whether the tractor is “really” talking to Ottaline in this story, or
whether her isolation and sexual frustration has driven her insane. Bénédicte Meillon has
suggests the latter (56), while Karen L. Rood contends that this is an example of magical realism
(167). Given the extent of the parody and fantasy of later Wyoming stories like “The Sagebrush
Kid,” which cannot be solely interpreted as any character’s (mis)perception, reading this story as
magical realism seems fair. This becomes especially clear at the end of the story when the
tractor, now long neglected, kills again when the wheel on the airplane of Ottaline’s father is
caught on its iron frame (148).
Taken together, this story’s plot and the descriptions Proulx uses throughout this
collection serve to break down the distinctions often made between human beings and their
machines. In the universe of the Wyoming stories, human beings are devoid of any sort of soul
or free will; like a machine, they have their mechanical (or chemical) properties, and react with a
28
sort of necessity based on these properties and the way that elements in their environments
interact with them. Turn the key on a tractor, it’ll start up. Give the right man the requisite shot
of adrenaline at the right age, and he’ll become a bull rider.
Finally, in addition to breaking down the distinctions between humans, animals, plants,
and tools, the prose of the Wyoming stories also breaks down the distinctions between these
characters and the natural environments they inhabit. Such naturalistic descriptions are
immediately present in “The Half-Skinned Steer,” which opens the first volume. Of the pull the
main character feels back towards his place of birth after his brother’s death: “He would see his
brother dropped in a red Wyoming hole. That event could jerk him back: the dazzled rope of
lightning against the cloud is not the downward bolt but the compelled upstroke through the
heated ether” (23). The character’s early introduction to sexuality is an old Native American
painting of a vulva on a rock, and we are told that for some time “no fleshly examples ever
conquered his belief in the stony structure of female genitalia, the pubic bone a proof” (28). And
natural environments, conversely, are described in decidedly human and animal terms: wind
“bellows” around a house” (24); there is “muscle in the wind… a great pulsing artery of the jet
stream swooping down from the sky” (33); cliffs are like “bones with shreds of meat on them”
(33); badland features “swell” into “massive prominence” (33); and tangles of willow are
“bunched like dead hair” (39). Such descriptions abound throughout all three volumes of
Wyoming stories.
Hitherto, critics’ discussion of such descriptions has largely focused solely on how they
relate to Proulx’s geographical determinism. Weltzien, for example, has said “Proulx’s
geographical determinism, essential to understanding her fiction, explains the elevation of
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landscape imagery to a dominant, inhuman force, and a corresponding reduction of character to
caricature. That landscape imagery contains and belittles, most of the time, characters, defines
Proulx’s aesthetic. It doesn’t inherently follow that big landscapes nurture little people, but
Proulx emplots that formula” (100).
It’s hard to imagine that Proulx would agree with that description of her work. Setting
aside the fact that her landscape imagery is often not “inhuman” but very human, described as if
it were a person, Weltzien’s depiction here maintains the very distinction between human beings
and everything else that Proulx’s work seeks to break down. Perhaps the best way to understand
the universe of the Wyoming stories is not so much that landscape determines human lives—or
belittles them, for that matter—but rather that human beings are just another part of the
landscape. Same as a bull grazing in the distance, a tractor rusting in the sun, a clump of
bunchgrass, or a flash of lightning rising from the plains. This is much closer to the naturalistic
conception of the universe, in which human freedom is swapped for an understanding of the
individual as a product of history, inherited traits, economic factors, and sociocultural context.
But even this framing relies on the type of vocabulary that the Wyoming stories largely seek to
erase. These stories do not consider the individual a “product” of such naturalistic forces; rather,
they refuse to acknowledge that such a line between the individual and these forces even exists.
In this way, Proulx’s Wyoming stories provide a logical continuation, even a possible
endpoint of, the naturalistic project. If naturalism was founded on a set of logically conflicting
assertions (Walcutt 8), Proulx’s work here can be understood as what happens when these logical
conflicts are resolved. There is no freedom in the Wyoming Proulx creates, at least not in the
sense that we normally use that term. She thus resists much of the nineteenth century naturalists’
logically untenable optimism that naturalism would lead to an era in which humans were “truly
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free, for the first time, under the auspices of this philosophy of scientific determinism” (Walcutt
6).
Proulx’s naturalistic outlook colors every aspect of the Wyoming stories, though, not just
her choice of terminology and metaphor. And more than any other area, the Wyoming stories
largely focus on what such an outlook means for human sexuality, unearthing rich and startling
insight about the relationships between sex acts, typical categories of gender and sexuality, and
violence. Some of these conclusions can be read as empowering, and hint at ways that violence
and persecution can be curbed in the future. Others are troubling, even terrifying.
31
III. “No Instruction Manual Needed”:
A Naturalistic View of Human Sexuality
The fact that much of the most radical insight the Wyoming stories’ naturalism has to
offer is about human sexuality may come as something of a surprise, given that sexuality seems
to be one area of life that is already largely discussed in naturalistic terms (at least in academic
circles). Foucault has explained thoroughly and at length how human sexuality is tangled up in
the discourse and power structures that seek to describe and classify it, and that such power
structures excite and direct our desires. This exhibits an obvious compatibility with a naturalistic
outlook that contends that all human events are best conceptualized in terms of their social,
economic, biological, and historical causes. Unfortunately, though scholars tend to accept such
insights on principle, that does not always bleed into the perspectives they bring to bear on
fiction, as is shown by the scholarly discussion of how sexuality is depicted in the Wyoming
stories, and especially in “Brokeback Mountain.”
At the outset, it is worth noting that human sexuality in the Wyoming stories is most
often depicted from the perspectives of male characters. Indeed, one of the first things a reader of
the Wyoming stories will notice is the prevalence of male protagonists, especially in the first two
volumes. Of the eleven included stories in the first volume, only three focus primarily on a
female character, and one of these (“55 Miles to the Gas Pump”) is less than two pages long.
Given this, a reader may be tempted to try to search the Wyoming stories for some sort of grand
statement on masculinity or male sexuality. Again, though, Proulx seems to caution against
reading too much into this, and generally discusses it more as a natural byproduct of her subject
matter and interests rather than a conscious choice. When asked in an interview about the
Wyoming stories’ frequent use of male protagonists, she responded:
32
…it’s for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I'm writing about rural communities. In
rural communities there is a division of labor. Women are in the house doing household
things, generally. Men are outside doing the interesting things, generally. Once in a while
you'll find women out there running ranches or flying planes or whatever.
So there is that natural weight toward the male side, if you're going to write about
rural places. The other reason is because I was the oldest of five girls, and there were no
boys in our family, and I always wished there had been. And the third reason is because I
like men. Men are very interesting to me. (Interview by Detrixhe)
When asked about the same topic elsewhere, she said, “in earlier collections they weren’t in the
center of the story because the major work, whether it’s fishing or ranching or whatever, was
done by men. It naturally falls that men are going to have central positions in stories about
Wyoming. It’s a geography thing more than something based on gender” (Cox 42).
3
The fact that it somehow seems obvious to Proulx that her stories about Wyoming must
necessarily focus on the laborers of the state says a lot about the world that she creates, and the
philosophy on which she bases this creation. It seems that what Proulx has said the people in
Wyoming believe is something she and these stories may hold true as well: that work is the
highest virtue (Cox 31). Even her female protagonists tend to do what would have traditionally
been considered “men’s work,” such as Ottaline being a ranch hand in “The Bunchgrass Edge of
the World” or Dakotah’s position in the military in “Tits-Up in a Ditch” (which Proulx considers
her strongest story; Cox 41).
3
The problematic nature of Proulx’s statements here should be acknowledged. Women in Wyoming may
be blocked from participating in the labor force for any number of reasons, not the least of which is
sexism, so implying that the only lives there worth examining are those of laborers is troubling, as are
Proulx’s assumptions that labor means a job outside the home rather than “household things” and that
such “household things” are themselves not interesting. Moreover, though it is true that most jobs in
Wyoming are held by men and a significant wage gap still exists, the majority of women in Wyoming do
work (Status of Women in the States 2). Ergo, it is not as if there are not plenty of working Wyoming
women whose stories are worth telling.
Whatever Proulx may want to say about the importance of work and labor, one suspects that her simply
finding men interesting is the load-bearing reason there are so many male protagonists in these stories.
Nevertheless, it is still telling that the justification she strains for here is based on labor demographics.
33
This worldview that prizes work above all else runs through nearly every aspect of these
collections, including their treatment of sexuality. We saw above how the people of the
Wyoming stories are typically described and conceived of in terms that a laborer of Wyoming
would be familiar with, that is, in the existing vocabulary for animals, plants, machinery, or the
surrounding landscape. Likewise, in their treatment of sex and human sexuality, the Wyoming
stories are almost exclusively interested in a philosophy grounded in an animalistic, mechanistic
conception of sex acts. Though present throughout these three collections, this perhaps reaches
its fullest expression in one of Proulx’s best and best-known works, “Brokeback Mountain.” And
it is here that critics tend to most thoroughly miss the implications of Proulx’s naturalism.
Despite the popular success of “Brokeback Mountain,” Proulx has been reluctant in
interviews to accept the label that many people have been quick to give it. As she says, “the
urban critics dubbed it a tale of two gay cowboys. No. It is a story of destructive rural
homophobia” (“Movied” 130). Few scholars have taken this claim seriously, however, and most
do not even acknowledge it. One case in point is Daniel Mendelsohn, who opens his essay “An
Affair to Remember” with the following:
Brokeback Mountain—the highly praised new movie as well as the short story by Annie
Proulx on which the picture is faithfully based—is a tale about two homosexual men.
Two gay men. To some people it will seem strange to say this; to some other people, it
will seem strange to have to say it… [T]he story is, as everyone now knows, about two
young Wyoming ranch hands who fall in love as teenagers in 1963 and continue their
tortured affair, furtively, over the next twenty years (31).
Mendelsohn seems unaware of Proulx’s insistence that the story is not a tale of gay cowboys,
and nowhere in his description is the term “homophobia” even mentioned.
But Proulx’s naturalistic outlook resists the impulse to reduce any story about same-sex
love into a “gay” story, or even a story about “gay” characters. “Brokeback Mountain” is
34
something much more radical—an attempt on Proulx’s part to dismantle the sort of essentialist
thinking about sexuality that wreaks havoc in the lives of her characters. In the process, the story
yields rich insight into the spectrum of human sexuality and the discourse surrounding it. In what
follows, I will at times turn to what Proulx has said as a valuable counterpoint to the way that
much of the secondary scholarship has treated sexuality in this story. In doing so, I do not wish
to commit the intentional fallacy by implying that the story should be read a certain way simply
because that was Proulx’s intention, but only to contextualize a reading that is much richer than
the alternatives.
4
One of the striking things about Annie Proulx’s statement that “Brokeback Mountain” is
not a story about gay cowboys but a story about homophobia is that it seems to set up a
dichotomy that is somewhat baffling at first glance. One could reasonably expect the author to
say something like, “The urban critics have dubbed it a tale of two gay cowboys, but in fact it is
as much about homophobia as it is about their love.” Or even, “it is a story whose primary
interest is in investigating the tragic effects of homophobia, not in exploring the love between
these characters.” But Proulx’s objection is much stronger than this. She goes so far as to say that
it is not a story about two gay cowboys but rather about homophobia. It is worth investigating
why she feels this is such an important distinction to make. What is it about the reduction of the
story down to that of two gay cowboys that bothers her so much? Granted, Jack and Ennis are
not technically cowboys, but ranch hands (Silverblatt 2006), but more is at stake for Proulx than
a simple misnaming of the two men’s chosen profession, no matter how important she considers
labor.
4
It also bears mentioning from the outset that this section will provide a discussion of Proulx’s story, not
Ang Lee’s film, and that many of the assertions made here about the former may not hold true for the
latter.
35
The first major problem with the assertion that this story is about “gay cowboys” is that
both the story and Proulx herself seem everywhere resistant to assigning a fixed sexuality to
these characters. The word “gay” is a gross oversimplification of their sexual desires and
behaviors. As Proulx has said in an interview, with “Brokeback Mountain” she wanted “to get
some idea of the complex plurality of human sexuality. The unclear lines, the drifts from one
pasture to another—the back and forth and interplay—instead of this very rigid construct of
him/her, he/she” (Silverblatt 2006). And indeed, these drifts from one pasture to another are
everywhere in this story. If we want to call these characters homosexual, we must be very careful
how we define that term. One proposed definition is provided by Daniel Mendelsohn, who
equates being homosexual with “the bare fact of being erotically attracted primarily to members
of your own sex” (37).
The concept of such a “bare fact” itself seems problematic, however. As mentioned
above, human sexuality is bound up in discourse and the power structures that anchor it, and
these power structures serve to excite and direct our desires, often in unexpected ways, creating
“perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” (Foucault 44–45, emphasis in original). It’s not clear
what a “bare fact” would even mean for a subject as complicated and multifaceted and
unobservable as human sexuality.
Proulx’s explanation of the genesis of “Brokeback Mountain,” on the other hand,
provides perhaps the most valuable prism through which to view its naturalistic take on human
sexuality. In “Getting Movied,” she says the following:
In such isolated high country, away from opprobrious comment and watchful eyes, I
thought it would be plausible for the characters to get into a sexual situation. That’s
nothing new or out of the ordinary; livestock workers have a blunt and full understanding
of the sexual behaviors of man and beast. High lonesome situation, a couple of guys—
expediency sometimes rules and nobody needs to talk about it and that’s how it is… The
complicating factor was that they both fell into once-in-a-lifetime love. (131–2)
36
She also remarks upon the casualness with which an old sheep rancher once told her he always
sent two men to tend sheep rather than one, “so’s if they get lonesome they can poke each other”
(132). The sex act itself that occurs between these two men is, according to Proulx and this sheep
rancher, nothing out of the ordinary, and may not tell us as much about these characters as some
people would want it to.
But if we had to hazard an answer to the question implied by Mendelsohn, what would it
be? Are these two men “primarily attracted” to members of the same sex? Of the two characters,
Jack Twist seems the closest to fitting this definition. Though he is married to a woman longer
than Ennis, by the end of the story he thinks and talks about having sexual relations with men
frankly, as a need he is willing to own and that must be satisfied. He responds angrily to Ennis’s
objections about his trips to Mexico to solicit male prostitutes, because he is “needin it and not
hardly never getting it” (278). His attraction to men is strong enough that he is willing to
structure his life around it; he wants to end his marriage in order to spend his life with Ennis
(270, 277) and, when that plan fizzles, he arranges to split up with his wife and move back home
with “a [male] ranch neighbor from down in Texas” (282). A long-term sexual and domestic
relationship with a man is an intense enough need for him that he is intent on pursuing it, and this
arguably ends up costing him his life by the end of the story.
It is more difficult to say, however, that Ennis is “primarily” attracted to other men.
Textual evidence for this is scarce. He never seeks any sexual relationship with a man, not even
with Jack—it was Jack who initiated their first sexual encounter (261). Ennis’s own spare
comments about his sexuality are ambiguous. Upon their reunion after four years, he says to
Jack: “You know, I was sittin up here all that time tryin to figure out if I was—? I know I ain’t. I
mean here we both got wives and kids, right? I like doin it with women, yeah, but Jesus H., ain’t
37
nothing like this. I never had no thoughts a doin it with another guy except I sure wrang it out a
hunderd times thinkin about you” (268).
This quote is beautifully ambiguous in all the right ways. There are a multitude of
possible readings of the claims it makes, and a good case can be made for all of them. Maybe
Ennis is lying to Jack, as a way to get Jack to say that Ennis is the only man he ever thinks about.
We find out later in the story that Ennis is furious when he learns Jack Twist has gone to Mexico
for sexual encounters, even going so far as to physically threaten him (277), so it’s possible that
in this earlier conversation he is seeking some confirmation that Jack doesn’t ever think about or
have sex with other men. Or maybe he’s lying to Jack because he’s ashamed of his sexual
impulses, or maybe he’s telling the truth and he is so very repressed that his psyche refuses to let
him even fantasize about other men, much less admit these fantasies to someone else. However,
this level of repression on Ennis’s part doesn’t seem borne out in other places of the story:
though Ennis doesn’t initiate their first sexual encounter, he has no problem or hesitation about
throwing Jack on the floor and anally penetrating him almost immediately, and he also seems to
have no problem thinking about Jack while he masturbates or with continuing a sexual
relationship with him. It’s true Ennis has a lot of problems with being perceived as “queer”—
indeed, this is one of the tragedies of the story and it is important not to lose track of it—but at
the same time he seems fully aware of his own sexual impulses towards Jack, and perhaps even
comfortable with them, right from the start.
It is true that elsewhere in the story, in a scene that is chronologically anterior to this
reunion in the hotel room, it is implied in the description of one of Jack’s fondest memories that
Ennis doesn’t want to admit he is comforted by holding a man. We are told of this memory,
“Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face
38
because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held” (279). Since this is told from
Jack’s perspective, however, we can’t be sure how accurate his reading of his lover’s sentiments
is. But even in his description, he seems to emphasize that this is a hesitancy that would later be
overcome by saying “he would not then embrace him face to face.” In any case, by the time they
reunite four years later, Ennis freely admits to both his sexual attraction for Jack and that he
thinks about Jack when he masturbates, with no apparent shame or hesitation about either of
these things.
So maybe Ennis is telling the truth, that he finds himself very much attracted to Jack but
not really attracted to any other men. Maybe what Mick LaSalle writes in The San Francisco
Chronicle about the movie holds true for the story, that “we don’t ever quite know if they’re in
love with each other because they’re gay, or if they’re gay because they’re in love with each
other.” Maybe Ennis doesn’t know this himself. Though Mendelsohn attacks LaSalle for this
quote, accusing LaSalle of suggesting that these characters are less gay because they look like
right-leaning cowboys, this is an unfortunate misunderstanding of what both LaSalle and this
story are really getting at. LaSalle tells us, “It’s possible that if these fellows had never met, one
or both would have gone through life straight.” Mendelsohn wants to deny this, wants to tell us
that sexuality is so clear-cut, so essential, that these characters are simply gay, no matter what
they say, because they are both men who have sex with another man.
In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault describes the revolution
that took place in discourse during the nineteenth century when sexuality was reconceptualized
not as something someone does but as something that someone is. In Foucault’s words, speaking
of the sexuality of a homosexual man from this point on,
Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was
everywhere present in him… It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as
39
a singular nature… Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was
transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a
hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the
homosexual was now a species. (43)
Only very occasionally in scholarship about “Brokeback Mountain” has this important
distinction been broached—such as in James Morrison’s essay “Back to the Ranch Ag’in,” when
he says (speaking about the film version), “Ennis and Jack experience their sexualities in very
different ways… Ennis sees sexuality as something he does, while Jack increasingly comes to
understand that he must accept it as a dimension of something he is” (98). But nowhere have the
important distinctions between these two versions of sexuality been adequately explored in the
scholarship surrounding Proulx’s work, even though the story is practically begging to be read in
this light.
“Brokeback Mountain,” and the rest of the Wyoming stories as well, depict a reversal of
the revolution that took place in thinking about sexuality in the nineteenth century. Far from
assigning Ennis and Jack to the species of homosexual—as both popular culture and many of the
critics discussing Proulx’s work have been so quick to do—it uses them as a cipher through
which to view the problems with such a species classification. If the culture’s general discourse
would like to put all characters—and by extension, all people—into a set number of categories
based on sexuality, “Brokeback Mountain” exposes the cracks in these classifications, the cracks
through which many people slip. Ironically enough, this more enlightened perspective is granted
by delving into a more rural, matter-of-fact view of sex acts themselves, despite the fact that
even Proulx acknowledges that homophobia is a strongly rural characteristic (Cox 47).
The outlook that allows for this reversal comes back to Proulx’s naturalism, particularly
the way in which the Wyoming stories re-conceptualize human beings in a way that emphasizes
their status as animals. From their interactions it seems that Jack and Ennis hold this view as
40
well, especially in regard to sex acts, which makes sense for two characters who, from their
everyday work with animals, would be well aware of the ins and outs of animal sex and
breeding. This outlook is also nearly omnipresent in the prose itself of “Brokeback Mountain.” In
their first sexual encounter, Ennis hauls Jack down “onto all fours” before entering him (261),
and the room they occupy for their big reunion after four years apart is described as stinking after
a while of shit and semen, among other things (267). There are also numerous metaphors that
compare these men with animals, such as when Ennis “felt he could paw the white out of the
moon,” Jack is caught sleeping on his feet “like a horse,” or when Ennis calls Jack what he calls
his horses and his daughters, “little darlin” (266). Even their relationship itself is described as a
horse with no reins (269), and we are told that the smell of old blood and milk and baby shit
were to Ennis “all reassuring of fecundity and life’s continuance to one who worked with
livestock” (264). These are men who have no interest in romanticizing anything. As Proulx has
said, “livestock workers have a blunt and full understanding of the sexual behaviors of man and
beast” (“Getting Movied” 131), and this story’s most important insights come from exploring the
implications of this “blunt and full understanding.”
Zooming out for a moment to look at the Wyoming stories as a whole, we can see that
this understanding of sex acts in purely animalistic terms is threaded throughout the three
volumes. In the prose of “The Half-Skinned Steer,” for example, the girlfriend of the protagonist
Mero’s father is compared numerous times to a horse, starting with: “If you admired horses,
you’d go for her arched back and horsey buttocks, so high and haunchy you’d want to clap her
on the rear” (24). Elsewhere, her hair is compared to reins (26), and Mero wonders at one point if
his brother had ever “got the girlfriend away from the old man, thrown a saddle on her, and
ridden off into the sunset” (25). In “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World,” when sexually
41
frustrated, Ottaline “pummeled her fat flanks” (emphasis added), and when she lost her virginity
her lover “crawled” onto her, smelling of the horses he worked with. When she eventually gets
married, her wedding cake is “topped by a tiny plastic bull and cow” (145). In yet another
example, we have already seen how in “The Mud Below” the protagonist consciously identifies
with the bull he rides; but in regard to sex this identification is also enacted at the prose level,
understanding potential sexual partners in the terms of the bulls he works with. We are told he
“mounted” women in his mind (45), and that after being pressed up against a woman in a
cramped car he is “in a visible mood to ride but not bulls” (54).
However, though this naturalistic, animalistic conception of sex acts is present
throughout the Wyoming stories, “Brokeback Mountain” is the story that dissects the
implications most completely. If Brokeback Mountain—speaking of the fictional mountain itself
now, rather than the story or the film—represents a sort of Edenic paradise for these characters, it
is because it is a place where their sex lives need not be classified, need not be talked about.
Proulx emphasizes that the two characters “never talked about the sex, let it happen… saying not
a goddamn word except once Ennis said ‘I’m not no queer,’ and Jack jumped in with ‘Me
neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody’s business but ours’” (262). Even the description of their first
sexual encounter emphasizes that the sex didn’t need to be talked about: it was “nothing
[Ennis]’d done before but no instruction manual needed” (261). These sex acts are, at least at
first, something that take place outside of speech. Because of its isolation, away from society’s
watchful eyes, we escape through this mountain and this story into a place where these acts are
allowed to exist outside the power structures that would define them as something coextensive
with these characters. Unfortunately, many critics have unwittingly re-committed the turn that
42
Foucault described, taking these two characters and assigning them to the “species” of
homosexual.
With the rush to apply labels to these characters that neither they nor Annie Proulx seem
interested in, the entire spectrum of human sexuality has thus been reduced to a binary that does
not seem to accurately represent the world inhabited either by these characters or its readers.
Though the Kinsey scale of human sexuality is rarely used in its original form in the twenty-first
century (Weinrich 339), Kinsey’s original insight that there is a wide spectrum of human
sexuality hold true. However, in their haste to decide whether Ennis and Jack are “primarily”
attracted to men or women, critics like Daniel Mendelsohn forget to ask some of the important
questions that this story is begging us to ask—such as, what does that word “primarily” even
mean? What work do labels like “gay” and “straight” even do for us, aside from justify the type
of horrific violence this story depicts?
The simple facts that these characters are not cowboys and do not fit many critics’
traditional, pat definitions of “gay” would be enough to explain Proulx’s objection to the idea
that this is “a tale of two gay cowboys.” But still, the vehemence of this objection suggests that
there is even more at stake in this story, and indeed in its place as a cornerstone of the Wyoming
stories. Looking at the three collections of Wyoming stories as a whole, it becomes clear that the
problem is not just that the label “gay” does not apply to these characters; rather, it is that the
philosophical base upon which the Wyoming stories are founded precludes such a simplistic
label ever being fully applicable.
This is especially irksome since these characters and the narration view the sex acts
between these characters as just sex acts, just as an old sheep rancher might: they’re a perfectly
43
natural thing to occur between these two men, and certainly nothing so significant to assign them
to a certain “species” of human being. That the sex acts themselves are almost incidental to the
love these characters share serves to expose the tragedy and logical incoherence of the rural
homophobia depicted, seeking as such homophobia does to persecute a species that, from a
certain perspective, does not even exist. This is made doubly ironic by the fact that Proulx’s
method of exposure involves untangling the logical repercussions of a particularly rural outlook.
At first glance, however, such a narrative strategy may be considered a particularly non-
naturalistic impulse. If, as Foucault explains, human sexuality is bound up in a complicated
interplay between sex acts, discourse, and power structures, then a narrative philosophy that
attempts to strip sex acts of such context, trying to view them in and of themselves, would seem
at odds with a naturalistic philosophy that contends that human behavior and actions can only
properly be understood in the context of all the factors that contribute to them. However, it is
worth remembering that Proulx wanted to write about the Wyoming characters in these three
volumes because they are mostly “people working on ranches or around ranches or with
livestock or in the wilderness or moving through… It was a segment of population I wanted to
look at because rural places and rural characters are given really short shrift in our society. They
don’t seem to exist anywhere, so I was much taken with writing about them” (Silverblatt 2008).
Proulx is intent on writing about the worldview of characters who work on a daily basis with
animals and/or in the wilderness, “away from opprobrious comment and watchful eyes,” as she
said elsewhere of “Brokeback Mountain.” And though she has said that homophobia is “a very
strong rural characteristic” (Cox 47), the events of “Brokeback Mountain” argue something
different, as does the quote from the old sheep rancher. It is in the towns and cities, where people
congregate, that individuals must worry about the eyes of others and the accompanying
44
homophobia, as well as the classifications upon which such surveillance draws its power. In the
deep wilderness, true high lonesome territory, a different outlook emerges, where it may be
possible to disconnect from the dominant discourse surrounding sex and partake in a more
natural, animalistic way of thinking about it. Such an outlook would allow sex acts to occur
without forcing them to stand in as some sort of grand indicator for an essential truth about the
actors.
If this is a story about homophobia, as Proulx insists, it is also about the reductive
discourse that is produced by and in turn produces homophobia. Judith Butler has described the
destructive relationship between discourse and violence in the following way: “On the level of
discourse, certain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized; they fit no
dominant frame for the human, and their dehumanization occurs first, at this level. This level
then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization
which is already at work in the culture” (25). Proulx’s somewhat counterintuitive “solution” to
this is to completely collapse the category of the human itself. With all human beings thus
“dehumanized,” the previous basis for rendering certain lives less livable is dismantled as well. It
is impossible to persecute all homosexuals if the very concept of “homosexual” is shown once
and for all to be untenable, just as it is impossible to discriminate on the basis of what lives are
dehumanized when all lives are dehumanized—that is, when human life is shown to be no
different from other natural phenomena, such as animal life.
Unfortunately, in the time and place in which Ennis and Jack live, the dominant frame for
a man is that he is attracted to and has sex only with women. This frame is expressed almost any
time the men come in contact with anyone else; their wives, their families, other Wyoming
citizens, etc. And, as Butler would attest, we see everywhere in the story how violence is used to
45
enforce this frame and eliminate those who fall outside it. There is Earl, the poor man who is
dragged around by his genitals and beaten to death with a tire iron for publicly expressing his
attraction to another man, and there is also Ennis’s father, who even if he is not complicit in this
murder is damn sure he takes his son to see the body (270). This violence is impressive enough
upon Ennis that he uses it to justify his own refusal to be with Jack, even though they are clearly
in love. Finally, there is the violence that may have taken the life of Jack.
It seems nowhere so apparent to me than in the scholarship surrounding this story and the
film based upon it that even well-intentioned scholars are still disregarding wide swathes of the
human race when they make blanket statements about what it means to be a sexual being. Of
course, it is progress to observe that the previous conception of a man—that he need be attracted
only to women—has been replaced. But it has in some cases been replaced by a new conception
that is still unnecessarily restrictive: that a man must be attracted primarily to either men or
women. It is unclear if there is a place in this paradigm for bisexual men, or for intersex or
transgender individuals. If it seems “strange to have to say” that a story about two men who fall
in love is about two gay men (Mendelsohn 31), then it is perhaps a sign that even liberal
discourse can be too quick to simplify the demands of human sexuality, and to erase many of the
“unclear lines, the drifts from one pasture to another” (Silverblatt 2006) that comprise it. Thus,
violence continues to be done to those that “fit no dominant frame for the human” (Butler 25),
even if the violence is no longer physical. The genius of “Brokeback Mountain” is to use a rural
outlook to step outside the dominant discourse for a moment in order to expose the problems
with it; the fact that the dominant discourse is so powerful that even critics largely miss this point
makes the story doubly tragic. Still, “Brokeback Mountain” illustrates how, at least upon a
46
secluded mountain, away from the watchful eyes of others and the essentialist discourse that
accompanies them, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar can find their fleeting moments of happiness.
It’s worth recalling that Proulx is a naturalist above all else and that—contrary to popular
perception—one of the defining features of naturalism is its optimism in the face of an apparent
lack of free will. Charles Child Walcutt gives one example of how such optimism is possible in
discussing Theodore Dreiser’s naturalist novel An American Tragedy, which elsewhere has been
labelled “pessimistic determinism.” On the contrary, as Walcutt explains:
An American Tragedy is completely deterministic; but the novel lives in an atmosphere of
indignation and hope. It has demonstrated in depth the operation of social values and
laws that have destroyed the hero. It has shown that the hero was helpless against them. It
has therefore shown just what destroyed him and why it destroyed him — and this
knowledge is presented as the tool that man can use to correct the evils of his social
condition. An action depicting the forces that destroy a helpless hero involves the
audience, outside that action, in responsibility, guilt, and knowledge of what has to be
done in order to correct the situation (10).
This is not a perfect description of “Brokeback Mountain”; Proulx would likely object to
moralistic word “evils,” there are no “laws” at work in this story that lead to its tragedy (at least
not directly), and to describe the story’s tone as “an atmosphere of indignation and hope” would
be a gross overstatement. And yet, as has been shown, even before the possible violence against
Jack Twist occurs, the reader is made well aware of how these people’s lives are wrecked by
homophobia and the pat definitions of sexuality that enable it, and how they are allowed to exist
happily when these things are not present. The story thus succeeds not only in demonstrating the
shortcomings of “commonsense” definitions of sexuality and depicting the violence enabled by
such definitions, but in demonstrating how an alternative perspective on human sexuality is
possible. Read in this way, I would argue that Proulx’s depiction of this American tragedy seeks
to accomplish a similar goal as Dreiser’s depiction of his: in the naturalist tradition, it provides at
47
least a step in the direction of “knowledge of what has to be done in order to correct the
situation.”
At the same time, Proulx’s understanding of her characters’ situations is much more
nuanced than the earlier naturalists. It is worth recalling that Dreiser said elsewhere that “Our
civilisation is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by
instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason… [Man] is becoming too
wise to hearken always to instincts and desires; he is still too weak to always prevail against
them” (Ch. 8). Here, he set up some dichotomies that Proulx wishes to dispense with altogether.
For Proulx, humans are, in fact, beasts, and understanding them as such should be part of the
naturalistic project, relying as it does on the notion of scientific determinism. And for Proulx,
crucially, understanding human instinct and desire is not necessarily something done to “prevail
against” these things, but can rather be a means of removing their impediments—such as the
faux-scientific species classification of certain people based on what sex acts they indulge in or
refrain from.
However, even though a strangled strain of optimism is allowed its place in “Brokeback
Mountain,” the setting of Proulx’s Wyoming stories remains a mostly hardscrabble, brutal place.
It’s not for nothing that, in his introduction to a volume dealing with the geographical emphasis
in Proulx’s work, Alex Hunt writes that “For those whose economic class and lack of education
prevent escape… geography shapes and limits characters’ lives” (16). And, as one might expect,
though certain aspects of the treatment of sexuality in “Brokeback Mountain” may inspire some
hope in the reader, the depictions of human sexuality in the other stories often have implications
that are much more troubling. And yet, it is worth keeping in mind as we examine such
implications how naturalistic tragedy “involves the audience, outside that action, in
48
responsibility, guilt, and knowledge of what has to be done in order to correct the situation”
(Walcutt 10), as well as the implicit hope and call to arms involved in such an approach to
fiction.
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IV. “Playing the Bull”:
Sexual Assault in the Wyoming Stories
As explained above, the Wyoming stories take great pains to depict characters whose
perspectives on sexuality derive from the “blunt and full understanding of the sexual behaviors
of man and beast” (Proulx, “Getting Movied,” 131). This bluntness is typically not terribly
flattering or romantic, such as the lovers of “Brokeback Mountain” being surrounded by the
smell of shit and semen in the hotel room they share. But these stories’ bluntness about sexual
acts becomes even more jarring in the moments in which they treat sexual violence. Though
these moments are few, this sexual violence is memorable for the way it often seems to be
glossed over, and frequently occurs at the hands of characters Proulx seems to want us to
sympathize with. Though “Brokeback Mountain” illustrates how the attitudes that come from
working with animals can lead to great insights into human sexuality if unchecked, the stories
dealing with sexual violence emphasize how the realities of ranching communities, rural
environments, and the myths of cowboy masculinity often lead to the opposite: that is, the
marginalization of and violence against women, sexual minorities, and those who do not fit our
traditional categories of gender.
This is first encountered in “The Mud Below” from WS1, which is one of the longest
stories from any of these collections. Throughout, the story emphasizes the primacy of sex and
sexual frustration for the young bull rider Diamond Felt’s life. This is the story where life itself is
described as a castrating knife (80); elsewhere, an elderly man who is presumed sexually inactive
is described as something almost inanimate because of it: “Emanating from him was a kind of
carved-wood quietude common to those who have been a long time without sex, out of the traffic
of the world” (61). Diamond himself is described as a sexually frustrated virgin at eighteen,
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mounting women in his mind (45), and later dives “headlong into easy girls, making up for years
of nothing” (64). And almost immediately after we are told of this headlong dive, we are told
how Diamond meets his traveling partner’s wife Londa and, after she insults his height, rapes her
in retaliation (64).
Here the dry, matter-of-fact tone of the prose makes the event all the more horrifying to
read about. We are told—and be warned that the following description is graphic—that:
Diamond waited with her in the truck, aroused by her orchidaceous female smell… He
thought of what she’d said, moved out of the front seat and into the back with her and
pinned her, wrestled her 36-inseam jeans down to her ankles and got it in, like fucking
sandpaper, and his stomach growling with hunger the whole time. She was not willing.
She bucked and shoved and struggled and cursed him, she was dry, but he wasn’t going
to stop then… he finished in five or six crashing strokes and it was done. (64–65)
This description bears many of the hallmarks of these collections: the co-mingling of different
types of physical hunger, the emphasis on chemical stimuli when he is aroused by her smell, and
the blurring of lines between human, plant, and animal (she is both “orchidaceous” and “bucks,”
like a horse might).
But one of the most surprising aspects of this story is the way the importance of the
sexual assault is immediately downplayed by Diamond, the other characters, and the prose itself.
After the rape, Diamond tells Londa when she starts to cry, “Hush up. It didn’t hurt you. I’m too
damn small to hurt a big girl like you, right?” and laughs (65). He is surprised when the event
bothers her enough that she tells her husband. When the husband asks Diamond what he has
done, Diamond says, “Same thing you did to that wormy Texas buckle bunny the other night”
(65), seemingly drawing no distinction in his mind between rape and (presumably) consensual
sex. Diamond isn’t the only one who downplays the importance of this crime, either. His
subsequent traveling partner tells Diamond he should know that the bulls he rides are not
supposed to be role models, and “if you did [know that] you wouldn’t be playing the bull night
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after night, you wouldn’t get in it with your buddies’ wives, what I’d call forcible entry what you
done, you would be a man lookin for someone to marry and raise up a family with” (70). So even
here, when a character is objecting to the violence Diamond has committed, he discusses it as if
it were roughly as objectionable as adultery, or not wanting to start a family; that is, it is harmful
insofar as it is an attack against the concept of the family unit, not as a horrific crime against the
victim herself.
Moreover, the sexual violence seems somewhat incidental to the story; the wry comment
about “forcible entry” is the last time it is mentioned, ten pages before the end, and it is not even
alluded to in the rest. The prose from the first mention to the last mention of this assault
comprises less than twenty percent of the story, and it has no real effect on the other events.
Diamond Felts remains the protagonist and, if there’s anyone in the story that we are supposed to
sympathize with, it is him. The emotional arc of the story is Diamond’s, and the woman he rapes
is treated as nothing more than a blip in that arc, never even mentioned by name after the scene
describing the assault.
Katie Arosteguy has explained how, in WS1 in particular, Proulx critically examines the
myth of the cowboy and its culpability in many problematic aspects of U.S. American culture.
Specifically, as Arosteguy puts it, “Proulx foregrounds economic, gendered, and racial realities
to suggest that the white masculinity Westerns have mythologized is the impetus for violence
against women and men who fail to conform to accepted notions of the culture of cowboy
masculinity” (118). In “The Mud Below,” she observes,
The brash discussion of using women to empower his self-worth and sex appeal is
unnerving to the reader, especially in the most direct act of violence against women when
Diamond rapes a girl… Diamond seeks out taller women, as if conquering them will help
add inches to his wanting frame and a new dimension to his lacking masculinity. Sexual
violence of this nature makes up for years of virgin life. Here the woman’s body is an
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object upon which the disenfranchised male can act out his fears and frustrations for
perceived lacks of cowboy masculinity. (122)
Though I agree broadly with Arosteguy’s interpretation of this scene—that this rape is
both enabled and caused by a culture that views women as little more than a means to reinforce
values based on traditional notions of masculinity—it’s worth noting that Arosteguy’s reading of
Diamond’s motivations throughout the story, particularly in becoming a bull rider in the first
place, are different from my own. She takes for granted the fact that the short, 18-year-old virgin
Diamond’s decision to get into bull riding is precipitated by his desire to live a traditional notion
of white masculinity, that from the start he “is intent on living the lifestyle of the bull rider
because it gives him a ‘euphoric charge’—a chance to live up to the myth of the great, strong,
powerful man in an otherwise dreary and dead-end space” (119).
However, textual evidence that the euphoric charge Diamond feels comes from tapping
into a mythic perception of manhood is somewhat lacking in the text of the story itself. As
detailed in the second section of the present paper, Proulx describes Diamond’s initial bull riding
experience in the following way: “The shock of the violent motion, the lightning shifts of
balance, the feeling of power as though he were a bull and not the rider, even the fright, fulfilled
some greedy physical hunger in him he hadn’t known was there” (49). This emphasizes the
physical component of what Diamond is going through, as do later passages that describe
Diamond as riding an “adrenaline wave” after riding a bull (50), or when we are told that “only
the turbulent ride gave him the indescribable rush, shot him mainline with crazy-ass elation”
(67). These descriptions all point to the fact that the thrill Diamond gets from bull riding stems
from something simpler and more direct than an internalization of his culture’s myths about
masculinity. The adverb “mainline” in particular seems to preclude the idea that the rush comes
from anything so indirect as such an internalization. Rather, it is the physical, adrenaline-fueled
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rush that initially hooks him, even though his pre-existing conceptions of masculinity may
determine how he subsequently structures his life around chasing that adrenaline.
This distinction is subtle, but important. In Arosteguy’s reading, “The Mud Below” is
largely a story about how Diamond is swept up into the cycle of living out, producing, and/or
reinforcing the myth of white masculinity, at the cost of all else; thus, the rape he commits can be
understood as a means of perpetuating this myth, and retaliating against the suggestion that he
does not live up to it. In my own interpretation, Diamond’s journey is read differently; he gets
into bull riding because of his thirst for a thrill he has never experienced elsewhere, and is
undone by his single-mindedness in the pursuit of this thrill. The rape he commits is not a step in
this journey, but incidental to it, and has no significant bearing on where Diamond ends up.
Arosteguy has also explained how WS1 as a collection and “The Mud Below” in
particular illustrates how male characters use female bodies to refine their masculinity and
participate in a sort of sexual competition to forge homosocial bonds with each other (130), but
this is not how this rape plays out in the story. Diamond doesn’t have any true friends, and
whenever the rape is brought up with other (male) characters it serves to drive a wedge between
them. So it doesn’t lead to any homosocial bonding, either—quite the opposite, in fact. This
again suggests that reading this assault as Diamond’s attempt at participation in this region’s
dominant masculine culture does not quite fit. Rather, it is an expression of how that culture may
pay lip service to caring about victims of such heinous acts, at the same time it enables them and
takes no serious steps to prevent them. In such a culture, such a horrific act occurs in such a
casual way that it can have no serious bearing on the life (or arc, in narrative terms) of the person
who perpetrates it.
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So though Arosteguy’s interpretation of why Diamond gets into bull riding is somewhat
more appealing at first glance—better integrating the rape scene into the rest of the story by
giving it a sort of thematic connection with Diamond’s journey—the reality perhaps makes it
even more horrifying. In Diamond’s story, and even in the discourse of others who form a part of
this bull riding community, such a crime against a woman barely even registers. It is something
of a minor bump in the road, and that’s how the story portrays it, treating this violence as an
almost incidental illustration of Diamond’s state of mind at the time and barely mentioning it
outside the scene itself.
Though “Brokeback Mountain” shows how the logical implications of the truths learned
from working with animals lead to certain empowering insights, this incident shows how the
realities of ranching communities lead to the opposite. This is, of course, what happens at the end
of “Brokeback Mountain” too, if we believe that Jack Twist was murdered for his sexuality. And
even Ennis in that story, at the same time he was suffering from the myth of cowboy masculinity,
was taking part in it and reinforcing its marginalization of women by blurring the lines of
consent in his own bedroom when he worked his wife to orgasm with his hand then “rolled her
over, did quickly what she hated” (264–5). For all the possible hope that certain aspects of
“Brokeback Mountain” might give the reader regarding human sexuality, other aspects of these
Wyoming stories have the opposite effect.
In another story from WS1, “People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water” (hereafter,
simply “People in Hell”), sexual misconduct is given a much more central role in the narrative.
This story describes a sensitive and intellectually curious young man, Ras Tinsley, who leaves
Wyoming in the early years of the twentieth century to see the world. However, after being
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maimed in a car accident that leaves him unable to speak, probably mentally compromised, and
physically repellent to other people, he returns home to live with his parents on their ranch. He
then gets into trouble when he is caught exposing himself to women on neighboring ranches and
pleasuring himself in front of them. Eventually, the Dunmire family that owns the neighboring
ranch castrates Ras with an unclean knife and, at the close of the story, he is dying of gangrene.
Arosteguy has argued that this castration is about policing alternative masculinities in this
community. This argument hinges on the idea that it is Ras’s personality before the accident—as
a lover of books, knowledge, and deep philosophical questions who leaves to try out city life—
that is the alternative masculinity being policed. As she puts it,
In seeking out life beyond the decaying Wyoming of Proulx’s stories, Ras embraces the
alternative masculinity the Dunmires despise—he is smart, adventurous, and desires the
outside world. After his accident, though, he becomes the perfect target around which the
Dunmire men and other men of the community can organize and deepen their ties and
commitment to cowboy masculinity. (125)
It’s striking, though, that the story goes to great lengths to draw contrasts between Ras’s
state after the accident and his former self. His parents’ first sight of him after the accident is
described thus:
They knew it was Ras but how could they know him? He was a monster. The left side of
his face and head had been damaged and torn, had healed in a mass of crimson scars.
There was a whistling hole in his throat and a scarred left eye socket. His jaw was
deformed. Multiple breaks of one leg had healed badly and he lurched and dragged. Both
hands seemed maimed, frozen joints and lopped fingers. He could not speak beyond a
raw choke only the devil could understand.
Even his parents, then, are hard-pressed to recognize the son who left as the man who stands
before them, or even to recognize him as something still human. Elsewhere, his animal-like
qualities are emphasized: he eats constantly, “gnashing through meats and relishes and cakes”
(109), and is described as “a half-wild man with no talk and who knew what thoughts” (110). His
mental capacity has also most likely been affected, judging by the note he leaves his father: “I
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NED GIT OTE A WHILE” (109); this from a well-read person who at one point would certainly
have known how to spell such a simple sentiment. Of his son’s mind, Mr. Tinsley wonders,
“Who could tell how much he understood? When he sat silent and unmoving was he thinking of
the dark breath under the trees or the car bucking off the road, metal screaming and the world
tipped over? Or was there only a grainy field of dim images?” (110). And elsewhere: “But what
did he think now of distant cities and ships at sea, he bound to the kitchen and the porch?” (109).
In this latter line especially, the story emphasizes the differences between the Ras that comes
home maimed and the Ras that left Wyoming in the first place.
Likewise, when discussing Ras’s crimes, the other members of the community do not
make any allusions to Ras’s former self or any alternate visions of masculinity that he may have
alluded to by leaving Wyoming. The sheriff is the first one to inform the Tinsleys that Ras has
been caught exposing himself to a rancher’s wife, and tells them, “He didn’t have nothin she
hadn’t seen before, but she didn’t preciate the show and neither did her old man. Unless you
want your boy locked up or hurt you better get him hobbled. He’s got a awful face on him, ain’t
it?” (111). Even the Dunmires, the family that eventually fatally castrates Ras, in speaking of
him express their horror for his present state, not his former one. To Ras’s father, Jaxon Dunmire
says, “Thought it might be that crazy half-wit got the women all terrorized wavin his deedle-dee
at them. You hear about that? Who knows when he’s goin a get a little girl down and do her
harm? There’s some around who’d as soon cut him and make sure he don’t breed no more half-
wits, calm him down some” (114). The repetition of the word “half-wit” emphasizes Ras’s
present state, not his former one.
Of course, as in “The Mud Below,” very little consideration is given to the victims of
Ras’s sexual aggressiveness, the women themselves. In fact, none of them are even named in this
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story. The sheriff’s explanation of why they need to prevent Ras from doing this in the future—
“Unless you want your boy locked up or hurt you better get him hobbled”—seems to give more
consideration to the abuser than to the abused. And the justification that Jaxon Dunmire gives for
the eventual castration—to “make sure he don’t breed no more half-wits”—suggests that such
misconduct is to be condemned, as in “The Mud Below,” more as a crime against the concept of
the traditional family unit than as a crime against the female victims themselves. Even the
sheriff’s addendum to the threat of locking the boy up—“He’s got a awful face on him, ain’t it?”
(111)—might imply that the crime wouldn’t be so troubling if Ras’s appearance were more
normal, and that the problem is as much about his appearance as it is about anything else.
Interestingly, Ras’s mother provides something of a parallel for Ras in this story; she is also a
sensitive child (we are told she used to write poetry, for example, on 104) but grows up to
commit a crime against the family unit, when in a fit of madness she hurls one of her young
children who is crying inconsolably into a river (104). Though she immediately regrets it and
makes to leap after the child, the child is already lost.
In any case, Ras’s parents continue to assert his personhood in their dialogue, but through
the precise thing that is seemingly getting him into trouble: his sexual appetite. In his response to
Jaxon Dunmire’s suggestion that his son should be “hobbled,” Mr. Tinsley says, “He was hurt
but he’s a man like anybody else” (114). One possible reading of this strange bit of dialogue is
that if another man, perhaps one with a more attractive appearance, exposed himself to young
women then it wouldn’t be such a problem, and the other character doesn’t challenge this
assumption. In all of this, it seems that Ras’s present state as “half-wild” and not recognizably
human is more to blame for his troubles at the hand of the castrating knife, not his former state as
a sensitive, curious lover of knowledge and art.
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Before the penultimate section of this story when we learn of Ras’s fate, the prose lingers
a bit on Mr. Tinsley’s attention to the farm, specifically some fruit that is struggling in the harsh
Wyoming weather. For some time, he is meaning to talk to his son, to try to get through to him
that he needs to stop what he has been doing, but puts it off because of the duties the farm
requires. A hailstorm damages some melons, and then the lack of water in the well makes it
difficult to provide the tomatoes with the water they need. We are told, “At last the melons—
bitter and small—were picked, the tomatoes began to ripen and the need for water slacked”
(115). By the end of the story, we will understand that this is (in the typical, dry style of the
Wyoming stories) paralleling Ras’s fate with that of the fruit of the farm. At the same time Mr.
Tinsley is harvesting melons, his son’s testicles are being violently removed. His subsequent chat
with his son again reinforces the natural processes leading to Ras’s urges when he says, in fruit-
like vocabulary, “I know, Ras, you’re a young man and the juice is in you, but you can’t do like
you been doing” (115, emphasis added). By this point, however, Ras has already been castrated
and laughs in his father’s face, without Mr. Tinsley knowing why. But the Tinsleys have already
framed the problem in their minds as stemming from Ras’s natural urges; when Mr. Tinsley says
as much to his wife, she tacitly agrees, and even suggests that taking Ras to a brothel would
solve their problem (116).
Like “The Mud Below,” “People in Hell” shows a community that fails utterly to
conceptualize the sexual abuse that is taking place within it. The sheriff hints that Ras’s
appearance is the source of the problem; the Dunmires lament only that Ras’s misconduct may
eventually lead to his siring of children; and the Tinsleys themselves believe that Ras’s behavior
is a natural consequence of a man having sexual urges that he is unable to carry out. Never is the
sexual abuse discussed as a crime against the victims themselves, that is, the young women Ras
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exposes himself to. Rather, it is a problem of the community as a whole, discussed almost
exclusively by the community’s men. That is, how are they to make sense of this thing, Ras? A
man who doesn’t look like a man, a man who (according to some) will not or should not sire
children, and a man who is unable to lead a sexual life?
As Arosteguy observed, this story is about this community policing concepts of
masculinity. However, Ras’s former status as someone who loved art and literature is not the
masculinity that is being policed. Rather, though Ras seems to be attempting to participate in the
sexual violence that serves to normalize dominant masculinity (Arosteguy 121–122), his doing
so troubles the concept of manhood itself; it suggests that one can be a man while not looking a
certain way and not building a family in a region where having male children is “money in the
bank” (101). It’s clear from the dialogue in this story that none of the male characters give a
damn about the women who are the victims of Ras’s sexual abuse; rather, his crime is against
categories. For that, the Dunmires seek to remove the source of the categorical trouble through
castration, and no one but the boys’ parents care that Ras is fatally wounded in the process.
“People in Hell” emphasizes that Ras’s crime is not his sexual behavior itself. If it were, a rapist
like Diamond Felts in “The Mud Below” would meet just as swift and complete a justice, but
there the rape is almost a non-issue. Rather, in the harsh reality of Wyoming ranching
communities, those who do not fit neatly into the existing categories of “man” or “woman” are
doomed, no matter how much they attempt to participate in the dominant culture, and there is no
way for their stories to end but in violence—at least not until the frightful social realities of these
communities are recognized. And even then, there is no indication that Proulx believes, as the
early naturalists did, that a utopian era will necessarily dawn after such a recognition; rather,
recognition would appear to be only the first step in enacting positive change, bound up as such
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misfortune is in a whole host of social, economic, biological, and historical causes that must be
addressed.
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V. Conclusion:
Proulx’s “Flood of Morning Light” vs. McCarthy’s “Optical
Democracy”
“People in Hell” begins with one of the most interesting passages from these collections,
its style standing out as distinct from that of the other stories. Rather than sticking fairly close to
the perspective of a character who lives in Wyoming, it imagines the reader, “you,” plopped into
the middle of wild, empty Wyoming and forced to make sense of it. The passage begins:
You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected
film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the
great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country—indigo jags of
mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of
sky—provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it
is like a claw in the gut. (WS1 99)
What do “you” see here, in this alien landscape? It immediately confounds the senses. You
struggle to connect the visuals with what you know from town or city life; the movement of the
cloud shadows are “as a projected film,” and also immediately anthropomorphized, even
medicalized: they are “queasy,” they create a “rash” on the ground. The air “hisses,” as an
animal might, but even the breeze here brings with it a sense of the cosmic—this hyper-specific
locale’s wind is not really local but comes from the turning of the earth itself, a phenomenon
perhaps present everywhere but only perceptible away from urban life. Meanwhile, the plants too
give one a sense of the cosmic, the eternal, in the “grassy plains everlasting.” Sure, the particular
blades of grass you see may die and be replaced by others, but in this environment that is just a
trivial detail. And when you see the stones lying about, they appear to you as “fallen cities,” a
reminder of the fleeting nature of human civilization in the face of such natural wonder—or
terror. The accumulation of all this is a “spiritual shudder” that you immediately try to
conceptualize given your other experiences or impressions: it is like an inaudible note of music,
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but no, that is nonsensical. It is like a claw in the gut. And it is no coincidence that this is a
sensation you might actually experience if you stick around this landscape too long.
The passage continues:
Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for
nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor
cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate
crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer
courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries,
mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti’d celebration of athletic victory on bridge
overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic
flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a
while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of
morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that. (WS1 99)
In this dangerous, indifferent ground, human tragedy and mayhem are everywhere, but to
you who just arrived the significance of such mayhem is somewhat dwarfed by the landscape
that seems to summon up the cosmic, and the flood of morning light that comes each day
seemingly indifferent as to what it shines upon. You realize, not intellectually but like a claw in
the gut, that other cultures too have camped here a while and disappeared. In such an
environment, “Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light.”
At first glance, this passage seems to undercut what I have argued that these stories (and
naturalism in general) strive for. The prose, in a seemingly straightforward way, asserts that in
this region “the tragedies of people count for nothing” and “only earth and sky matter,”
presumably to the exclusion of human beings (or any other living thing, for that matter). If this
were the only passage of Proulx’s prose you had access to, it would seem inarguable that it
exhibits what Weltzien, for example, calls “the elevation of landscape imagery to a dominant,
inhuman force, and a corresponding reduction of character to caricature” and proves his assertion
that Proulx’s aesthetic is defined by the fact that “landscape imagery contains and belittles, most
of the time, characters” (100).
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As might be expected, however, this passage is not so straightforward as it might seem.
For one thing, the final two sentences appear to throw a wrench in the argument the rest of the
passage is making. The statement that “only earth and sky matter” is immediately emended with:
“Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us
much beyond that” (WS1 99). For all its seeming belittlement of everything human on the altar
of the landscape itself, this strange prologue to the story actually ends with a focus on those very
humans, “us,” as well as a “God”—which whether it is read as a human-created concept or
something supernatural still gestures to something beyond the landscape. Moreover, the idea that
we are not “owed” anything beyond this landscape and the endless repetition of morning light
emphasizes that it should be of some value to us, and even sufficient value, which again brings
the focus back to the humans the landscape is supposedly belittling.
Just as significantly, the passage is actually undercut by the rest of what happens in this
story, the collection WS1 that contains it, and the two collections of Wyoming stories that follow
it. If the reader were to take statements like “only earth and sky matter” and “the tragedies of
people count for nothing” at face value, then it wouldn’t make much sense to read (much less
write) three volumes about the tragedies of the people that populate this region. Any book that
took these assertions seriously would begin with them, not bury them in the middle. Such a book
might consist of a single short passage saying, “Human beings are insignificant, only earth and
sky matter, now let’s all just go outside and stare.”
Instead, the rest of the story immediately fights against this prologue by recounting a
particularly harrowing human tragedy; rather than dwelling on the earth and the sky, it shows the
intricate web of causation that led to Ras’s fate at the blade of the Dunmires’ knife, beginning in
1908, when Isaac “Ice” Dunmire first arrived in Wyoming long before Ras was born. Whatever
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the opening of the story might say, it seems impossible that any reader could (or should) be more
moved by the description of the open sky than the harrowing events that occur beneath it. Or, by
extension, the other signs of “human misadventure”—the deaths on the highways, the crusted
blood at the local Wal-Mart, etc.
Indeed, though it’s tempting to read this passage as a metaphor for the project of the
Wyoming stories as a whole, such a reading is not born out by the text itself. Yes, it drops the
presumably urban readers into this alien landscape and seems to get its kicks from the way they
attempt to make sense of it, mapping their frames of reference (such as movies and medical
terminology) onto it. Significantly, though, this is actually the opposite of what the Wyoming
stories do elsewhere in this collection. Everywhere else, these collections are interested in how
rural people conceptualize the human events that occur beneath this big open sky, based on the
machines and living things they encounter every day, and Proulx has said that a desire to look at
that segment of the population rather than upper class people like doctors was the genesis of
these collections (Silverblatt 2008). The medical terminology of this passage—“queasy,” “a
rash”—may serve to highlight the contrast between this mindset and most of the characters (as
well as the narration) in the rest of these stories. It’s worth remembering Proulx’s disdain for the
filmmakers scouting locations for Brokeback Mountain, of whom she wrote “there were no
producers or directors who understood the rural west, the rural anything” (135). As amusing as
Proulx may find it to imagine a city-dweller teleported into the harsh Wyoming landscape and
forced to make sense of it, there’s little evidence that she gives much credence to the wild
musings that might come from such a feat. She’s interested in bringing the rural mindset to the
urban reader, not the urban mindset to a rural setting.
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Nevertheless, by the end of this opening, the first inkling of real insight may have begun
to creep in, along with a bit of optimism, in a few short sentences it is worth repeating here:
“Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see
that God does not owe us much beyond that.” How a bit of earth and sky and light could possibly
be enough for human flourishing is hard to wrap one’s mind around at first, but perhaps it makes
sense for a naturalist like Proulx. Humans have the ground upon which to make whatever they
want, and the light with which to see all previous human tragedy and all the human civilizations
that have come and gone, as well as a more or less scientific understanding of the mechanisms of
the universe and the human behaviors that form a tiny part of it. Armed with all this, there seems
no inherent reason we cannot do better than a blood-crusted parking lot when the sun rises again
tomorrow morning.
The motif of the morning light reappears toward the end of the story, in the moments
after Mr. Tinsley has discovered Ras has been cut and is dying of gangrene. He shouts at his
wife—“You! Why didn’t you look him over when you put him to that bed?” It seems a lack of
clear vision is what may have done Ras in. The story concludes:
The morning light flooded the rim of the world, poured through the window glass,
colored the wall and floor, laid its yellow blanket on the reeking bed, the kitchen table
and the cups of cold coffee…
That was all sixty years ago and more. Those hard days are finished. The Dunmires are
gone from the country, their big ranch broken in those dry years. The Tinsleys are buried
somewhere or other, and cattle range now where the Moon and Stars grew. We are in a
new millennium and such desperate things no longer happen.
If you believe that you’ll believe anything. (117)
Here the narrator directly mocks the imagined readers, despite any insight they may have
gleaned from their glimpse into this world, as well as any idea they might hold that such violence
is a thing of the past simply because they have spent no time in desperate environments. The
story’s opening address to the readers, in fact, reference instances of violence that would have
66
occurred after the events of this story, which primarily takes place in the 1930s, with the “crust
of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock” (WS1 99; the first Wal-Mart opened in 1962). And in
the rest of these three collections, mostly inspired by “true accounts of public record” (Proulx,
Missouri Review 69), present-day violence is everywhere.
Yet, the narration of this story insists we are not owed much beyond earth and sky and
clear light with which to see what transpires. Yes, horrific events are everywhere in our world,
but people, especially those who live isolated from the natural world, either do not see it or—as
the crust of blood at the Wal-Mart might imply—choose to ignore it until it’s too late. But more
importantly, the Wyoming stories makes the case that the causes of such horrific events are
readily visible for those who look. Causes like homophobia, the reductive discourse surrounding
sexuality, the sexist realities of ranching communities, and the way animal instincts are allowed
to play out in the isolated areas of communities fallen upon hard economic times. For Proulx,
human beings are not so different from the animals they seek (sometimes successfully) to
domesticate, or the crops they grow, or even the machines they build. They are part of a
mechanistic universe, and when we properly understand them as the early naturalists did, “as
products of the hereditary, social, chemical, economic, and historical forces that compel them”
(Walcutt 6), we can understand not only the causes of their woes but also perhaps how to prevent
them. All we need is the right perspective, and the new day that tomorrow’s morning light will
bring.
The opening and close of “People in Hell” brings to mind a passage from another writer
of the North American West that references a concept of light and perspective in an isolated
region. In perhaps the most famous passage from Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy writes of
the Western landscape:
67
In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality
and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to
precedence. The very clarity of these articles belied their familiarity, for the eye
predicates the whole on some feature or part and here was nothing more luminous than
another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes
all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed
kinships. (244–245)
As Dianne Luce observes, this passage is often viewed as a lens through which to interpret Blood
Meridian (64) and used to support non-humanistic or value-free readings of it (68); or, as Russel
M. Hillier puts it, to support the view that “the novel’s philosophy reduces or even erases human
moral values in the face of a harsh naturalism” (47). Luce explains, however, that the term
“optical democracy” was not created by McCarthy but came from the essay “On Point of View
in the Arts” by José Ortega y Gasset, an essay that we know McCarthy is familiar with from his
letters (66). It was originally used as an analogy for contrast with how art typically focuses on a
singular protagonist, thus imbuing the work with a particular perspective and allowing the
audience to see clearly, as when we look at a nearby object; without such focus, however,
perspective becomes more like our far vision, where “Nothing possesses a sharp profile;
everything is background, confused, almost formless” (qtd. in Luce 66). It is a state of confusion,
and in Blood Meridian, the perspectival confusion in the landscape parallels the moral confusion
the characters experience when they lose their moral intuition by heeding the Judge. It is a trick
of the landscape, so to speak, and nothing to be embraced (Luce 68). Hillier has also stressed
elements in the narration both in the passage cited above and in close proximity that indicate the
reader should not take this passage as an endorsement of amoralism, especially the stressing of
the particularities of the landscape that engenders this optical illusion of democracy (“that
terrain… here… such landscapes…”; Hillier 47). Thus, what to many readers appears as an
indication by the narrator as to the true moral nature of the universe should in fact be taken as the
exact opposite.
68
Read in this way, the difference in the respective philosophies of Blood Meridian and the
Wyoming stories is actually quite stark, and this difference provides a perfect illustration of
something that makes Proulx unique among writers of the North American West. For McCarthy,
the sunlight of the harsh landscapes about which he writes serves as a symbol for the state of the
moral confusion of his characters; it leads to a trick of the senses by which all valuable
perspective is lost. For Proulx, the “flood of morning light” that will bring a new day, taken
together with the perspective enabled by examining the lives of characters born into her harsh
landscape, is the solution to the moral confusion of her characters, and perhaps to the moral
inattentiveness of the reader as well.
As we see in her interviews, Proulx is very concerned with the subset of people who are
given “short shrift” in our cultural conversation (Silverblatt 2008), and she has written in
distressed terms about the economic state of Wyoming (“The Cowboy State”). She is concerned
not just with the violence that happened in the “Old West” but the violence that is happening in
the West now: the deaths on highways, the blood-crusted parking lots, and homophobic violence
against victims like Matthew Shephard in places like Laramie, Wyoming (killed the year after
“Brokeback Mountain” was first published). Because if you believe such violence is a thing of
the past, as she puts it, “you’ll believe anything” (WS1 117).
Understanding Proulx’s naturalism—not just the deterministic aspects of it, but the
optimism inherent in the view that human behavior can be successfully understood (and altered)
scientifically—is crucial to understanding the narrative techniques, focuses, and ultimate goals of
her Wyoming stories. They seek to turn the floodlight toward the underrepresented people of
Wyoming, the cultural and economic circumstances that precipitate violence against women,
sexual minorities, and those who do not fit our traditional categories of gender, and the fact that
69
even “liberal” discourse—including the literary criticism of short stories like “Brokeback
Mountain”—can serve to reinforce the faulty binaries that ultimately lead to such violence.
These insights come from describing all phenomena in terms of the things that many Wyoming
people work with every day, such as animals, crops, and machines. Counter-intuitively,
understanding human beings in these terms allows the Wyoming stories to uphold humanist
values at the same time they seem to dehumanize their characters. Properly understood in this
way, the three volumes of Wyoming stories—Close Range, Bad Dirt, and the ironically named
Fine Just the Way It Is—represent a radical achievement in fiction, upending much of what
readers may have thought they knew about everything from human behavior to the roots of
homophobic violence to the naturalist movement itself. It is no wonder, then, that Proulx
considers her short stories, and particularly these short stories, to be her greatest achievement
(Cox 23).
70
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Myth of the Cowboy in Annie Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming Stories.” Western
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———. Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 3. Scribner, 2008.
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In Case I Don’t Call:
Stories
76
There There
The wife wanted a cat, so they got a fish. They called him Bubbles, or Bubs for short. It
was after a character in a TV show.
You go to work all day, the man told his wife. Who would take care of a cat?
The man was having trouble finding good work. He had a master’s degree with a
concentration in 18th century German philosophy, and taught intro courses at the local
community college. He didn’t work that much and when he did work it wasn’t very hard. So they
got a fish and he grew to love the fish. He got it an underwater castle to swim in and out of.
Feeding it fish pellets was a welcome break from his day. Then the fish died, and he was angry
with the wife.
He wanted to say a lot of things, but he didn’t know how. What are we going to do with
an empty fishbowl? he asked her.
She was standing outside the bathroom. The empty bowl was in her hands, the toilet still
running. We should get a dog, she said. Its life span is longer.
Absolutely not, the man said. Dogs are expensive and they slobber all over everything.
Plus we don’t have a yard. Dogs need a yard.
They settled on a box turtle and an aquarium to put it in. The man bought it a large water
bowl and took the castle from the fishbowl and put it in for decoration. The wife didn’t tell him
how out of place it looked, and he was happy for that. They called the turtle Raphael.
Every day the man walked to the pet store down the street and bought a bag of live
crickets. He tossed them one at a time into the aquarium and watched the turtle go on the hunt.
77
When it caught one it extended its neck out of its shell and its beak-like mouth cut the crickets in
half. The man would smile at that and dump another one in.
Then one day the man woke up and there was a small bump on the turtle’s neck. The next
day it swelled bigger. The day after that it was the size of a small grape. They took it to the vet
and it didn’t make it back home with them. The husband was distraught. Now it’s a whole
aquarium! he said, fighting back tears. It seemed such a waste. A glass aquarium in the corner of
the room, empty except for the water bowl and toy castle. An emptiness that stared back at him
stubbornly, after all the trouble he went to making such a comfy home for Raphael.
There there, the wife said.
What she really wanted was a baby, but she knew better than to ask for that just yet. So
instead they got a cat, and named it Kyle MacLachlan. This the husband did not like.
The cat was friendly with the wife, but all day while she was at work it just lazed around.
It would nap on the sofa, then the bed, then the kitchen table. If the husband wanted to sit down
somewhere, that’s where the cat would be napping. He tried to give it treats, and the damn thing
just stared at him. He tried to pet it, and it hid under the bed. The man frowned. What was the
point of a cat, anyway?
Then there was the meowing. Incessant, that was the word for it. When it wasn’t sleeping
the cat would trail him around the house, glaring up at him, letting out short sharp meows like
the barks of a dog. He tried to read. Meow! He tried to grade papers. Meow! He tried giving it
more food, more water, more toys, more anything it could want. Meow! it still said. Meow
meow!
What!? the man yelled finally one day. What do you want from me!?
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The cat rubbed itself against his leg and meowed insistently. Then it hopped up onto the
back of the sofa and stared out the window, still meowing. The man thought he understood. For a
moment he felt very sad. There was a whole world out there the cat could see but never touch,
never smell. Cars zoomed by on the street, planes flew noisily overhead, the sun painted the sky
new colors each day. Leaves grew green on the trees then withered and fell away. A whole world
spun by outside without them.
But he couldn’t let the cat go outside. You can’t train a cat, not well. They won’t wear a
leash. And out there, beyond the window, beyond the home they had made, there were all sorts
of dangerous things. Coyotes, disease, hapless drivers. So many neck growths and empty
aquariums.
Please, just be here with me, the man whispered to the cat. Let me be enough for you. He
put his hand to the back of its neck. For once, the cat let him pet him.
79
In Case I Don’t Call
When they were young, Michelle and her little brother shared a line in the basement.
Their parents got them this line because Michelle insisted, since it seemed all the other girls in
her grade had their own lines. And her parents obliged, because really there was no better
argument Michelle could have chosen—in all matters of parenting, they deferred to what they
took to be popular opinion.
The only one to object was Alan. He was five years younger than she was, and he hated
having to “field her calls,” as he put it, hated having sole responsibility to write down his big
sister’s messages. But what was worse, the thing that really got him yelling, was that so many of
Michelle’s friends mistook him for her. His voice hadn’t changed yet, and countless times
Michelle came home to a yellow post-it stuck to the receiver, a scribbled name and number and
an angry command: Tell your friend I do not sound like a girl!!!
Now Alan wore a red dress and light makeup, rouge on the cheeks, a thin layer of lipstick
that matched the polish on his nails. He served her steak from a cast-iron skillet, bloody, on an
old ceramic hand-me-down plate from their childhood. Baked potato on the side, sour cream and
chopped chives. In the center of the table, a bowl of salad topped with shredded carrot for color.
The women’s clothes were something new, a thing of the last six months or so. His features were
naturally feminine, something she had always been jealous of. Model-skinny, high cheekbones,
pouty lips and long lashes. Though he wore makeup, he didn’t need much.
“I almost made a wine reduction,” he said. “But I remembered you like it plain.”
He set an open bottle of red down in front of her. The table was small and round and just
big enough for the two of them, pushed up against the corner of his kitchen.
She nodded. “Wine’s for drinking,” she said. She poured herself a glass.
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Last week when he called Michelle to invite her to a homemade meal at the small house
he rented, she’d silently ticked off all possible reasons in her head—he wanted to borrow money,
he needed help moving, he had some message for her to relay to Mom and Dad. Once he’d
invited her over under similar circumstances to sell her knives, some Cutco-knockoff he’d started
working for and shot all his money into. Or maybe he had some crazy news to share, some
sudden elopement now that that was legal. She wondered what her reaction to this would be.
Something about family made her frame things this way—as if her reaction were something
outside of herself, outside of her control.
“I want to ask you for something,” was all he’d tell her on the phone.
“Yeah, I figured.”
“You may not like it.”
“I figured that, too.”
Things weren’t always easy between them. An age difference of five years was an
eternity in child-time. Her little brother, her baby brother. When she was in middle school she
railed against her parents when they made her let him tag along with her, and made him pay with
the sort of verbal barbs only an elder sibling can deliver. When he was still years away from
being called fag or queer by kids his own age, she started to make fun of his skinniness, his hair,
the effeminate lilt to his voice and walk. She made sure every one of her friends knew all the
most embarrassing moments from his life so they could make him relive them—the time he had
to be dragged from the theater when he started crying at the start of Finding Nemo, or when he
wet the bed for fear of the ghost she told him haunted the bathroom at night.
She was mortified now to think of all this, all the hard times she’d given him. By the time
she reached high school she’d become fiercely protective of him to compensate and remained so
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on into adulthood. When his ex-boyfriend recently ran around on him, Michelle concocted a
whole list of revenges Alan made her swear not to carry out—slashing the man’s tires, egging his
house, using the key Alan still had to get inside and sell the man’s best possessions on eBay. But
she and Alan still fought often; every time he called she had to think for a moment whether she
needed to act mad when she picked up. And she always picked up.
Now she sat and ate while Alan made conversation to avoid asking her whatever he
wanted to ask. She tried to remember if she’d ever seen him set out cloth napkins before, if she’d
even known he owned any. They talked about her new job, corrections officer at the medium-
security-level jail in Kearney, a job she’d moved two hours away for, away from Lincoln where
they’d always lived. They talked about his new job at a home improvement store, getting things
off high shelves and assembling various pieces of furniture. He complained they wouldn’t let
him wear earrings. He was twenty-two now, she was twenty-seven. They both had half a college
degree. His major had been theatre, hers remained forever undeclared. She wanted to tell him he
should go back to school, but it seemed hypocritical. Anyway, she reminded herself, he was a
grown man now. It wasn’t her place to worry. He got enough of that from their folks.
“Is this what you wanted to talk to me about?” Michelle asked. “Your new job?”
“No, of course not,” he said. “Least not exactly.” But he did not elaborate.
After dinner he put her plate, fork and knife in the sink with a squirt of soap and a thin
layer of bubbly water. She followed him to the living room and sat down beside him on the
couch. He crossed his legs at the knee and turned toward her. His legs were smooth. She felt her
cheeks grow warm when she wondered how much of his body he had shaved.
“So?” she said.
“So. I have a business proposition.”
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“Then the answer is no. Last time you borrowed money it took you three times the
amount of time you said to pay me back.”
He narrowed his lipsticked lips, confused. “Last time I borrowed money I was
seventeen,” he said.
“Still.”
He shook his head. “You don’t need to put in any money. I’m going to pay you. All I
need is for you to check in on me. You work security now, right? I want you to work security for
me. Earn a little extra cash on the weekends.”
He said, “I’m going to be meeting some men.”
He explained her role first, in simple logistical terms. She began to understand some of
her responsibilities and flashes of what she would be doing, with no real grasp of the overall
situation or what he was planning to do. Who were these men? They didn’t sound like friends.
He said he would make a point to have it happen in Lincoln, and she could be at his
house if she wanted, watching TV, eating Fritos, sipping beer. She would have her night stick,
they gave her a night stick at Kearney, didn’t they? And all she had to do was have her phone on.
He would tell her what time he would call, and he would call. Nothing to it.
If he didn’t call, though—which he would, he stressed he always would, ninety-nine
point nine nine percent—then he’d need her to come check up on him. She’d have the address
where he’d be. She’d come check up and extricate him if he needed to be extricated.
“Extricated,” she repeated.
“It means get me the fuck out of there.”
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“I know what it means,” she snapped. “But I don’t understand. Who are these men you’re
meeting? Why are you afraid? Are you in trouble?”
“I’m not afraid. I’m cautious. I meet them online.”
“So they’re dates.”
He opened his mouth then seemed to think better of it and shut it again. He laughed a
nervous laugh that reminded her of their mother and strafed his eyes toward the kitchen, the sink
filled with tepid water and dirty dishes.
“I guess you could say that,” he said.
She looked away, hoping she had misunderstood his meaning.
“I’ll pay you well,” he was saying now, as if that were the issue. “What do you make at
Kearney? I’ll pay you that, or a little more, if you want. I’m sure you can use some extra cash.”
She shut her eyes, literally shut her eyes, so she did not have to look at him looking at
her. “Where do you meet these men?” she asked.
“There are some sites. Craigslist, for one.”
She opened her eyes. Her brother had that cowed look like when he used to get yelled at
as a child, or beaten up at school.
“To think when Mom calls I tell her you’re doing well.”
“I am doing well, thank you. Though I’m surprised she asks.”
“They’ll lend you money.”
“I don’t want their money. I don’t want anything they have.”
“What do you want, then? What is it we didn’t give you?”
She wanted to say Why can’t you just be normal? but stopped herself, ashamed. Michelle
often resented her own slide into normalcy, the slide that seemed inescapable now in her mid-
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twenties, as if she were a grain of sand filing with all the others toward the funnel of an upright
hourglass. She’d moved two hours away for the job at Kearney, not because she was passionate
about law (far from it, in fact) but because jobs for dropouts were hard to find and the money
wasn’t bad. It was the sort of work a sixteen-year-old version of herself would have made fun of,
blowing smoke from a joint out the car window, snarking about all the jerkoffs who worked for
the prison system. Now she couldn’t smoke weed, her job drug tested. The people she met in
Kearney were the small-town types good for a beer and some sports talk and little else, and most
of the time she spent her evenings at home, having a Budweiser and a Hungry-Man TV dinner in
front of some sitcom.
As for her question—what is it we didn’t give you—she knew it was ridiculous. Their
father understood little past the year 2000. A daughter who took another girl to prom, not
because she liked girls but just to piss people off. A son who started crying on the third day of
flag football practice when he was made to run laps with grass-stained knees. At the dining room
table their father complained of having to explain these things to his friends, the other workers at
the rubber plant, saying things like You know Jimmy’s boy, he’s about to skip a grade or Tim’s
girl’s on the pep squad at her school, how bout that. Instead he was stuck with two children who
always got good grades but constantly cut class, then dropped out of college—an offense he took
as a personal affront to all the opportunity afforded them by the long hours he’d worked over the
years. And then their mother, who never had anything to say, who faced the world with a
perpetual look of silent disapproval, who when her husband badgered their son about why he
never had any girlfriends and asked one day in a half-joking but fearful tone if Alan was “queer
or what,” just turned her head and said, “Stop it, Roger, you’ll make me sick.”
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She wanted to ask her brother: What more could I have done? What more could you and I
have done for each other? She felt her anger flare. But we turned out all right is how she ended
every story she told about her childhood, on the rare occasions she did talk about it.
Alan generously ignored her question. “I know people who have done it here and there,”
he said. “It sounds no less pleasant than stocking shelves.”
“It’s illegal.”
“My sister the saint.”
“It’s dangerous,” she said.
“Not if I have you checking in on me,” he said. He took a clove cigarette from a pack
sitting on the coffee table and offered her one. She took it though she didn’t normally smoke.
She needed something to do with her mouth that wasn’t scold.
He lit hers, then his own. He tugged absently at the hem of his dress. “You’ve been
checking up on me my whole life,” he said. “Making sure I was okay. Might as well get paid for
it, right?”
Prostitution was a thing she was not exactly against, not in theory. She was not one to tell
women or men for that matter what they could or could not do with their bodies. She’d heard
stories of the way it was in Europe, state-regulated brothels, everything clean and safe and on the
up and up. That seemed fine. But she knew women here, she’d met them at Kearney, awaiting
trial in their tiny cells. These women’s lives were shot through with heartache and missed
opportunity. Whether they were the ones out in the yard, lifting weights and getting in fights over
everything from tampons to mobile phones, or the ones who rarely left their cells and looked so
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skinny they might squeeze through the bars, they all carried with them an air of hopelessness that
reminded her eerily of her mother.
“If you want to talk about it,” she said, “we can talk about it. But I’ll tell you right now,
one hundred percent, I will not do it. I can’t control you but I don’t have to support you. I won’t
do it.”
“Fine,” he said. He took one last long drag of his cigarette and stabbed it out in the
ashtray. “But I will tell you, then, one hundred percent—” a mocking tone here, the voice they
used to use to mimic mandates from their mother— “I’m going to do it, whether you help or not.
I only wanted to give you the opportunity to help make it safe. I can find someone else. I just
asked you because you’re the biggest badass I know.”
She tried hard not to be flattered. She was a “bulky” woman, that was her mother’s
favorite word for her, in those moments that made her wish that she, like her brother, no longer
talked to her parents. When she was in the fifth grade and had been called fat by one of the more
popular girls, Trish McKinley, she’d handled it the only way she knew how: she beat the shit out
of her. And she wasn’t fat, not really. Her bulk was all muscle. A brief suspension and a stint of
counseling appointments later, she was free of those schoolyard taunts forever.
It was, she’d realized with a stab of unease years later, not far from the jail yard rules
she’d heard batted around Kearney: pick a fight the first day and win, then everyone will know
not to mess with you. Here, too, she saw the line between criminal behavior and normal behavior
grow fingernail thin.
“I know people who have done it,” Alan said again. “Turned tricks.”
She could tell he enjoyed saying this phrase, the kitsch of it.
“I do too,” she said. “They’re in jail.”
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It wasn’t that he needed the money, he told her, at least not in the way she thought. He
had a job, thirty hours a week, the maximum they could give him without offering benefits. He
made rent and paid bills okay, had money budgeted to go out drinking one night a week. It was
the kind of average, comfortable existence she could see terrified him to think could stretch out
for another forty-five years until retirement. He didn’t want this measured life where he had just
enough to scrape by and even build up his savings if he really scrimped, but no money to travel
and no vacation time to take even if he did come by the money.
He seemed to counter her counterarguments before she said them, speaking in the matter-
of-fact way people gave PowerPoint presentations in offices on TV. He had no delusions of
glamour, he wanted to make that clear. He had those friends who did it, and they’d told him
stories. The clients were mostly overweight or elderly. They had eczema patches and wheezing
breath, or some hard to pin down mental handicap. Once one had an oxygen tank with tubes
clipped to his nose, the occasional hiss of escaping air. But time with oxygen tank man would
lead easily to sharp new dresses, a flat screen TV. Lifting a few fat rolls to get at what was
underneath was nights on the town, a fund for early (and more comfortable) retirement. In one
hour he could make what he made in a full day of work. Which of the two was more demeaning,
then? Besides, he said, these people needed people like him. Elderly people paid for all sorts of
companionship, that was natural.
“Listen,” he said, frowning down at a place on his thumb where the polish was chipped,
“I don’t want what you have. What you and Mom and Dad have.” He took a big red gulp now
straight from the wine bottle, all decorum dissolved, and wiped his mouth with the back of his
hand. “I don’t want our parents’ lives,” he said.
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She had all sorts of things she wanted to say to this, meant to explain if not excuse their
parents’ shortcomings, while acknowledging how difficult things were for her and (mostly) for
her brother. That it was not their parents’ fault, not entirely, the world they were raised in was
drastically different than the world now, the perceived needs (or lack thereof) of children a world
away.
Instead she said, “I am nothing like our fucking parents.”
What followed was her dismissal from his house, after the volume and pettiness of their
conversation gradually rose until they were shouting at each other, culminating in a slammed
screen door with her on the other side of it. Alan had told her that, on the contrary, she was
exactly like their parents. Old-fashioned prudishness, a stubborn insistence on the value of hard
work and the American dream, and worse of all the judgment, the unsolicited advice about
everything from what job to take to what men to date. And Michelle had called him lazy, a
fuckup, someone sure to end up in a jail cell somewhere fermenting fruit in the water tank of a
state-owned toilet. A woman in bifocals watched curiously out the window of a neighboring
house until she saw Michelle looking and darted her head back inside.
The first call he made was an angry voicemail he left on her phone before she even got
out of Lincoln. It cajoled her for being a bad sister and homophobic to boot, daring to tell him
what rights he had to do what he would with his own body. The next one, another call she
silenced, came right as she pulled up to her house in Kearney. “I’m sorry,” the voicemail said
simply. The voice was tired, ragged, torn up from tears and cigarette smoke. “Please call.”
She waited a couple days to respond, as long as she dared. She wanted to wait longer. She
had perfected a kind of artistry in protracted silences. Silences that conveyed anger at first, then
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sadness, and eventual indifference. It was then that whomever she was feuding with would cave.
Her mother calling to apologize for whatever comment she had made about her weight, some
friend who’d stiffed her on borrowed money, a lover who had made eyes at one of her friends.
With Alan it had always been that he’d had some emotional outburst, and he’d call to laugh and
say maybe he was on the rag, a joke that offended her mildly but she always let go because she
was relieved to hear his voice again.
But this time she had no such opportunity. She had issue with her brother’s scheme for a
variety of reasons—its legal concerns, its ethical implications, what people would think of him
(and her, she had to admit she worried about how having an occasional prostitute for a brother
would reflect on her)—but the part that made her finally pick up the phone, a breathless feeling
of pride-be-damned panic pounding at the inside walls of her chest cavity, was that she worried
for his physical well-being. Her kid brother was beanpole thin, sexy in a dress, feminine in all the
worst ways. This was only one in a long string of what she considered bad sexual decisions—he
was always going for the biggest, gruffest man he could get his hands on, then acting shocked
when he was mistreated. He needed to be protected, he had that part right at least. So she sat in
her spare living room in Kearney, picking at a hole in the upholstery of her secondhand couch,
and dialed him up.
There was a pause when he picked up and she heard him puff at a cigarette.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” she said, wishing now he hadn’t seen her do so just a couple
days before.
“That’s the strangest start to an apology I ever heard,” he said. “I’ve got a date tonight.
This might not be the best time to talk.”
“A date?” she asked. “What type of date?”
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He laughed. “The old-fashioned kind. Not business, pleasure. Hopefully not too old-
fashioned, you know.”
“And the other thing?”
“I’m still waiting for you to say yes.”
That was good. She had hoped he would say that. She’d thought about it and finally
decided that she’d known her brother long enough to know she wasn’t going to change his mind
with words.
So she took a deep breath and said what she’d planned to say, just as she’d planned to say
it: “All right, then, let’s talk money.” And after arguing for a higher price long enough to
convince him she was serious—Come on, Alan, this is illegal, you’ve got to pay more than my
day job—Alan told her to be in town next Saturday and they hung up.
She had an old pair of handcuffs in her glovebox she intended to use. She took them out
in her brother’s parking lot and tested the key several times, watched them clasp and unclasp,
then shoved them in her back pocket. One of her exes had left them at her house. He had thought
they could use them in the bedroom and she had laughed in his face. It was just the sort of thing
Alan would make a joke about, handcuffs in the bedroom—he loved the sort of risqué jokes you
could tell at parties, those jokes that made her uncomfortable in a way she couldn’t explain.
She knew she couldn’t police her little brother, not anymore, not really. But if he was
going to revert to childishness, to acting out, shortsighted behavior with no nods to adult
responsibility, then she was going to treat him like she did as a kid. Physical restraint, maybe a
good punch or two. She’d make sure he missed his “date.” She hadn’t punched him in over a
decade, and she was sure it would hurt much more now. She had a sense that this was what he
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wanted, had always wanted. Why else would he have told his big sister his plan? He had to have
known her reaction in advance.
He was in his living room putzing about nervously when she arrived, which he stopped
just long enough to let her in and set a bottle of wine and a glass on the table for her, along with a
bottle of mineral water. He gestured to the old tube TV in the corner, said if the remote didn’t
work at first just smack it a couple times. It was after dark and the end table lamp that lit the
room had a light bulb out, so her eyes had to adjust. He started to explain everything to her, how
he’d write down the address where he’d be, it wasn’t far, fifteen minutes away max. He’d call
promptly at 10:00, if it turned 10:01 and he hadn’t called then she needed to come get him
immediately, but whatever happened just stay calm. This was perfectly safe, all just a precaution.
He wore a pair of sharp black jeans and a silk sport shirt. She hadn’t seen him this dressed up
since high school graduation.
He cracked his knuckles nervously and wiped his palms on the back of his pants. He
laughed that twittery laugh that again reminded her of their mother, but this time it was a bit
higher, like he was trying to do an impression of his normal laugh but couldn’t hit the right pitch.
“Jesus,” he said. “I’m nervous!”
She stood between him and the door. She crossed her arms.
“Do you need anything else?” he asked, motioning at the water, the wine.
“You’d better sit down,” she said. She stood as tall and straight as she could, feet slightly
parted, as broad-shouldered and doorway-blocking as she could be. “You had to have known I
wouldn’t let you do this.”
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“You’ve changed your mind?” She could tell by his tone he was annoyed. “Because
we’ve been over this. With you here, there’s nothing to worry about. Oldest profession in the
world, isn’t that what they say?”
“You want me to protect you,” she said, “I’m here to protect you. Sit down.” She stepped
forward and put her hand on the back of his neck, a pressure somewhere between motherly and
hostile. She tried to maneuver him gently toward the couch.
He knocked her arm off. “Hey. Cut it out.”
“Don’t be a child,” she said. “Sit down.”
He shook his head. “Forget it,” he said. “I shouldn’t have asked you. I thought it might
make you feel better, doing the security thing. Keeping me safe. It was for your benefit, not
mine.”
He tried to step around her and she sidestepped into his path.
“Sit down,” she said.
“Come on.” He tried to dart around her and she shoved him up against the wall. His head
slammed and he stumbled, almost fell. “Jesus,” he said, and she saw his eyes flick to the glimmer
of the handcuffs as she pulled them from her back pocket.
He stepped backward, further into the room, and put a hand to the back of his head to
check for blood. She felt a flare of satisfaction at this. He hadn’t hit his head that hard.
“In case you forgot,” he said, his eyes now steadying on hers, “you are not a real cop.
You only handle people who are already behind bars.”
When Alan was young, he’s become briefly obsessed with wrestling after his parents
gave him a used Nintendo system that came with a WCW game. He’d spend hours on the thing
trying different holds, mashing the buttons until the lettering wore away. Then he’d hand a
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controller to Michelle and try to teach her to pull off some new move he’d discovered, shouting
“Up B! Up B!” until, laughing, she’d set the controller aside and lift him up and throw him down
playfully in her best imitation of a body slam.
These were the moments she thought of when she stepped forward to grab him, to wrestle
him to the ground and pin him there as she cuffed him. She paused mid-step, though, as she
realized she wasn’t exactly sure how to do that. How was she supposed to hold both his hands
still, and buckle the cuffs as well? And restrain him too? She cursed herself for not watching a
couple YouTube videos of cops doing this before she came.
While she was deliberating, Alan stepped forward and—in a move all too reminiscent of
that old wrestling game—put his leg behind hers and shoved her to the ground. She’d never been
struck by him, not as an adult, and even with what she was trying to do she hadn’t expected it. It
seemed impossible, even as it happened, little Alan toppling her to the ground. She landed on her
back and felt the wind rush out of her, and an eyewatering pain started to spread across the back
of her head.
Breathless, stunned, she started to lift her head but it was too late. She saw a blur of feet
speed past her, and Alan slamming out the screen door.
At ten to ten she was sitting on Alan’s couch, ice pack wrapped in a dish towel pressed to
the back of her head, watching the muted news. The lump was the size of a small marble, warm
and tight beneath her hair, and the ice didn’t seem to be helping. She sipped a cup of tea, trying
to stay alert, trying not to keep looking at her phone. She had resigned herself to waiting until
ten, to make sure he called. She hadn’t decided yet what she’d do when he returned.
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She’d tried to run after him, out the front door, once she regained her breath. But he was
gone, car screeching out the driveway and up the street. A few minutes later his text came
through. I’m about to walk in! it said, as if nothing at all had transpired between them. Wish me
luck! I scheduled another text message to come your way at 10:01 with the address where I am,
in case I don’t call. I’m putting this on silent, so don’t bother responding.
At five to ten she did what she had told herself she wouldn’t do, crack open the wine
bottle. She wanted to stay alert but her nerves were fluttering so she took a drink, then another,
and started to pace. She knew it would be ten on the dot when he called, or close to it. He’d told
her the man was paying hourly, that after all this trouble he was still on the clock.
Glaring at the phone on the table, she realized that there was a part of her, small but
swelling larger, that she had previously refused to recognize. A part of her that did not want the
phone to ring.
No, she wanted to be right. She wanted to be the one to show up at the supplied address,
to drag the other man (pervert!) from his house by the hair and slam his head to the pavement, to
beat his face to a bloody mess with the night stick she’d refused to use on Alan.
At 9:59, the phone rang. A cheery but embarrassed brother, saying everything went fine
and that he was on his way now. He asked if she was she still there. “Of course,” she said, blood
pounding in ears, eyes threatening tears, war cry stifled in her throat. “Of course I’m still here.”
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The Knack
I once had a friend who could tell you where you were from. This was a hell of a trick for
social gatherings. She’d be in the corner, sipping something with gin in it, and I’d be beside her
drinking beer. Inevitably someone would approach. This was Las Vegas, the best place for this
trick, a city nearly no one was from.
Cheryl worked with me at a small PR firm that handled several clients on the Strip. Like
most men in PR in Las Vegas, I was gay. I am still gay, obviously, though I say ‘was’ because I
am no longer friends with Cheryl, no longer work at that tiny little firm. But back then I loved
this trick of hers, to watch it rankle people. I spent all my time on the Strip, even lived there, in a
small studio apartment on the fourteenth floor of the Cosmopolitan. I took most of my meals at
buffets or trendy burger cafés, watching the yard-high margaritas go by in the arms of women
who were all leg or men all muscle. As a rule, I preferred people in my life to be only passing
through.
The people on the Strip enjoyed her talent the way you enjoy a magic trick, an enjoyment
mixed with stubborn confusion and an annoyance that there are things in the world you do not
understand. We would have these club openings or these red carpets or these media whatever-
the-hells and people (mostly men) would approach and want to talk to her. This was their “in.”
She was beautiful, I suppose, in the boring sort of way straight men seem drawn to. I was happy
to observe this fray from the outside.
Is it true? they would say. Let’s see it.
Cheryl would sip up the last of her drink and hand them her empty glass. Get me another,
she would say, then I’ll do it for you.
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This was an essential part, she told me. She could only do the trick if she had a fresh
drink nearby. She was somehow always right at the end of a drink.
When she got the new drink she’d remove the straw and take a long, thoughtful gulp.
Cheryl was one for theatrics, and it was hard to see where the performance ended and the real
knack began. She would usually shut her eyes. Then she’d put a finger to her temple, rubbing in
small, circular motions. Or she’d fold her hands as if in silent prayer, or rock back and forth on a
stool if she was sitting down. A pained expression would darken her face, a downward tilt to her
features. I was the only one who knew this expression for what it was, an earnest effort not to
smile.
Say something, she’d say. Let me hear you speak.
She’d listen intently as the men rattled off whatever came to mind. Usually empty details:
their name, their position, the make and model of their car. Sometimes some cheesy line about
how she looked that night.
Okay, she’d say, shut up. You’re from Kalamazoo.
Or: Poughkeepsie, New York. Hopkinton, Rhode Island. Chubbuck, Idaho. Grand Forks,
North Dakota.
Sometimes she’d get angry. Chicago, are you kidding me? Give me a real challenge.
People had their theories, of course. Some thought it was an accent game, that she had an
incredible ear for regional accents then just played the numbers. It wasn’t that she never got it
wrong, after all, just rarely—sometimes she’d tell you that you were from a town you spent a lot
of time in as a child, as if something essential from that place had rubbed off on you. Other
people figured she spent time scouring the Internet, studying public records. It couldn’t be that
hard to find this info if one really tried. Half of everyone had their hometown up on Facebook
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anyway. It wasn’t inconceivable that she found this information for people she was likely to run
into at media functions.
Others thought it was a trick of psychology, that everyone somehow betrayed this info in
the way they responded to her question. Like when you ask someone a math question: if they
look up, they’re a visual learner. Sideways means aural, downward kinesthetic. Maybe if you say
‘Speak to me’ and someone scratches their eyelid, they’re from Poughkeepsie. If they pull their
lower lip, Grand Forks.
I begged her to tell me how she did it. She never would.
Though fewer, there were women too who were interested in her gift. Most seemed to
genuinely enjoy the trick, as an impressive talent that didn’t need to be put on trial. But there
were occasional women who were more standoffish around Cheryl, as if they were only there to
see what all the fuss was about. The beginnings of their questions were tentative, often needling:
“So, you’re the one they say can.” Or, “I’ve heard you’ve got a good trick.” These women
seemed to think there was something distasteful, even cheap in Cheryl’s knack, its invasiveness.
Once, near the end of Cheryl’s time in Vegas, an important man named Stilson Dodd
asked Cheryl where he was from. Dodd owned one of the flagship steakhouses on the Strip.
Cheryl and I were sitting on stools by the bar on the rooftop of a casino when he approached,
celebrating a new lucrative concert space.
So, Dodd said. They say you can tell me where I’m from.
Cheryl nodded, and shut her eyes. She knew better than to ask Dodd to get her a drink.
She told him to start talking, and Dodd began to describe the stools at the bar of his steakhouse.
Hand-sewn Italian leather. Exotic wood.
That’s enough, Cheryl said, opening her eyes. You’re from New York, New York.
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Dodd turned red. His nostrils flared. How dare you, he said.
He looked at me. You in on this? he asked. I held up my hands as if in surrender.
You listen to me, Dodd said to Cheryl, finger in her face. My mother was only there six
months. New York was the worst time of her life, of both our lives. Just because I was born there
doesn’t mean I am from there.
I think that’s exactly what that means, Cheryl said quietly. Or maybe you misunderstood
your own question.
Mr. Dodd took the drink from Cheryl’s hand, the drink some man had gotten her, and
threw it in her face. Then he handed me the glass and walked away. I looked over at Cheryl.
I didn’t know real life people threw drinks, she said, bewildered and dripping.
I handed her a cocktail napkin from the bar. Maybe it’s a New York thing, I said.
After that, Cheryl didn’t like to do her trick. She’d seen how the wrong bit of biography
could unsettle someone, and decided it wasn’t worth the headache. She told me in a voice where
I couldn’t tell if she was joking that that’s why she left where she was from, anyway: too many
people with too many drinks, too many people who threw things.
So now people would come up and ask her and she’d say no no no, that’s someone else
you’re thinking of. Or no no, I don’t do that anymore.
Some people would press, though, usually important people: prestigious chefs, owners of
nightclubs, managers of departments or sometimes entire properties. People who loved to hear
things about themselves. People who loved to make her do what they asked of her.
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To these people Cheryl had little recourse. They were powerful, these people. Her job
was PR, after all, which mostly meant building relationships, and snubbing them would be bad
for business. So she’d say, reluctantly, Okay then: talk to me.
Something had changed, though, by then. Cheryl seemed incapable of her old knack, that
simple geographical placement. But she had to say something, so she’d shut her eyes. There
would be a moment where her face was perfectly calm, serene even, and she seemed not to know
where she was. In these moments she’d speak in spite of herself.
You’re from a big empty house, quiet and deathlike—like a museum after closing time,
or a long-abandoned tomb.
Or, You’re from a place that gets very cold at night, and you were always terrified to ask
for another blanket.
You’re from that comment your father made once, the one about if you’d never been
born.
You’re from the folders your father kept hidden in his desk drawer. You’re from the
secret language you made with your sister, the one you only pretended to understand. You’re
from all the places your mother never took you. You’re from San Jose, California, that summer
your brother drowned.
Cheryl quickly became an industry pariah. Anger trumps amazement, and this new phase
of her knack angered people. These events were often packed, the context for these revelations
public. These were things people didn’t want to hear anywhere, especially not in front of friends
and coworkers. That’s not funny was the most common response, by people convinced Cheryl
was playing a cruel trick. It was clear that the most she could hope for in Vegas was to tread
water. She wasn’t long for the world of the Strip, the world of PR.
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The man who had started the trouble, the Not New Yorker Stilson Dodd, took me aside at
another rooftop party one evening. One of our clients, The Cupcake Factory, had provided
cupcakes for the gathering. Dodd said he saw great things for me, or at least good things, if I
knew how to associate with the right people. Before we rejoined the others, we shook hands in
that businesslike way, the way where you try to match the other’s firmness, a perfect pitch of
pressure. Cheryl was waiting in a corner, alone. Someone had asked me earlier how I knew her
and I told them the truth: I didn’t remember. For the life of me, I could not remember meeting
her or ever deciding to be her friend. We worked at the same PR firm, so I guess that was that.
And I was amused by her little trick. Being from Las Vegas myself, I was always interested to
see where others flocked from.
She glared at me, when I joined her in the corner. She’d seen me talking to Dodd. She
was on an action plan by then, to correct her subsatisfactory performance at the firm. She’d made
too many enemies, when her job was to make friends. Within a few weeks, she’d be gone.
I asked why she was glaring at me like that. Why she couldn’t keep her eyes smiling, her
words kind. There was a drink in my hand all of a sudden, and I began to take sensibly sized
sips. When she didn’t answer, I asked her if she remembered how we had met, or why we had
become friends. I told her I could not remember. She shook her head.
Then I asked her where I was from. I knew I had probably mentioned at some point I was
from Vegas, but I wanted a more nuanced answer, like the answers she’d been giving lately. She
shut her eyes and her features went smooth. How unsettling it must be, I thought, to find your
best moments of calm in thinking about other people. She told me to start talking. I told her
about the shirt I was wearing, and started to count the buttons.
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I want to say you’re from nowhere, she said, but that isn’t quite right. It’s more like
you’re from everywhere, all at once. You’re from the high heels your mother had, the back of her
calves. All the people who ever smiled at you, just because. Your father’s cufflinks, the way he
never wore them but still periodically took them in to be shined. The princess movies you loved
as a child. The girlie mags you hid beneath your mattress, in case anyone ever checked. The way
whenever anyone asked your mother she said “Catholic,” though you never once saw her go to
mass. And the time you skipped school to see how far you could walk in one direction before
someone came and found you, then called home from a payphone when no one ever did.
She said it was hard to explain, but it was like everything in me added up to zero. The
way atoms seem solid to the touch when they’re mostly just empty space, particles held to loose
orbit by contrary charge. She said that appearance of being solid was why I was destined for
above-average things.
I nodded, still sipping. And you? I asked. Where are you from?
I said it because it seemed like the thing to say. I don’t remember her response.
On the way out, I helped her carry the leftover cupcakes to her car. We placed them in the
back seat. They would be a gift for the breakroom, for all the worker bees. But instead she forgot
them in her car overnight, and in the morning when she got outside the Vegas heat had melted
them all together, a mound of frosted mush. She put it in the breakroom as a joke. The people
there ate it with spoons.
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Love, Dirt
Charles Darwin hated it here. On the same voyage that would later take him to the
Galápagos Islands, where the abundant wildlife inspired his theory of natural selection, he was
first forced by a winter storm to seek shelter on Chiloé, a Chilean island off the southern coast.
He remarked in his diary on the island’s gloom and ceaseless rain, saying the climate made it “a
miserable hole.”
My father is from here, as he’s happy to tell anyone who will listen. He and my
grandparents moved to Nevada right before the Chilean coup, in 1972, but he is always
recounting his memories of Chiloé, possibly embellished over the decades—loitering outside the
Castro bus station to hear the news of unrest on the mainland, watching his friend’s father chop
through the dense shrubs and forests’ centuries-old evergreen trees, trading tales of ghosts ships
and the warlocks that secretly ruled the island. He bought me an illustrated book of chilote myths
when I was a kid, placing an international call to the printing press in Valdivia for them to ship
us a copy.
In 2005, I’m sixteen and in Chiloé for the first time. My parents and I are staying by an
unnamed beach in an old house my father is helping his friend Yaco fix up and turn into a bed
and breakfast. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other since they were six. Back then Yaco’s
father worked for my grandfather, commuting in his beat-up truck twice a week to Castro to tend
Grandpa’s yard and perform whatever odd jobs were needed—installing new tile, replacing light
bulbs, whatever. In the summers Yaco would tag along, and Dad and he would play outside until
dark fell and Yaco had to head back to his home out in the country.
After they moved, my father begged and pleaded to send letters to Yaco, but my
grandfather told him that any letter Yaco’s family might receive—as unlikely as it was to make it
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to Chiloé in the first place—could spell trouble. There were rumors of disappearances in Chile
after the coup, people blindfolded and sequestered in the night. A letter from abroad could be
taken the wrong way, as some sort of socialist code. Knowing my grandfather, I suspect that
along with any concerns about the safety of Yaco’s family was a distaste for the idea of Dad
mingling with the gardener’s family. In any case, after the dictatorship ended in 1990 (and after
all the worst rumors about the disappearances had proven true), my father and Yaco rekindled
their friendship through the unreliable postal service between the two continents, their letters
sometimes taking months to arrive.
All this is exceedingly present to me as in the upstairs bedroom of the bed and breakfast I
slide my hand eagerly down the pants of Yaco’s fifteen-year-old son and at the same time hear
the front door unlatch and swing open. Mateo is already hard. It’s the first dick I’ve ever felt and
I keep hold for a long, desperate moment, refusing to believe I have to let it go, though I know
the sound from downstairs mean my parents are back early. Mateo shoves me across the chest
and I see sheer terror scrawled on his face. I have not come out to my own parents, but from his
expression it is clear that whatever consequences I fear are nothing compared to what getting
caught would mean for him. My father warned me on the flight here: the island is isolated, rural,
cut off from the rest of Chile. Some areas are still without electricity, and people like it that way.
He said not to even mention the word “dictadura,” they don’t all see it that way.
I jump up from the bed and adjust my jeans—throbbing, nauseous. I hear footsteps. We
are both still visibly aroused and probably reek of weed. Instinctually I pull Mateo by the hand
toward the giant wardrobe on the opposite side of the room. We both scrunch inside, old winter
coats dangling around us and boots clustered around our feet. We angle our bodies away from
each other and listen.
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I am filled with fear but thrilled to be trapped so close to Mateo. He is whispering
something in Spanish I don’t quite catch, then I realize he’s praying.
…
Mateo and I are supposed to be clearing out the attic, dragging the old boxes wet with
mold down to the junk heap on the side of the house, making sure none of them hold anything of
value. This is our punishment for the night before, when our parents caught us sneaking gulps of
chicha from the jarras in Yaco’s kitchen. The adults are supposed to be in the nearby village,
having a decadent lunch and spending the day in town while we settle for day-old empanadas.
We had only gone through one box, full of buttons, thread, and old sheets of fabric, when Mateo
asked in shy Spanish if I smoked pot and produced a joint rolled in a bible page from his shirt
pocket. His slender fingers were barely bigger than the joint.
We smoked on the back deck, balancing carefully on the few boards that weren’t rotted
through, creaking and bowing underfoot. This had been his great uncle’s house, who had moved
to Viña del Mar decades earlier to sell overpriced boat rides to tourists and never bothered to tell
anyone the house was still in the family. Recently he’d died and left it to Yaco. My father was
lending time and money. I asked Mateo if he thought our dads would really get this place fixed
up well enough for a bed and breakfast and he shrugged, took a deep puff and passed the joint to
me.
He said, in Spanish, «Please, with these chilotes? My dad probably just wanted an excuse
to invite yours here. No way they don’t put more into this than they get out of it».
My father would have been delighted to hear himself called a chilote, even after so many
years.
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We smoked fast, knowing we only had so much time before the colihuachos found us,
massive black bugs at their worst that time of summer—a type of fly but unlike any fly I’d ever
seen, aggressive and big as paddle balls. I’d only been in Chiloé a few days and had already
gotten used to them, though I’d been warned they could bite. Later I’d read online that, like all
large flies, colihuachos feed on mammalian blood to produce their eggs, and when they make
love the act begins in the air and ends in the dirt.
One buzzed up into Mateo’s face as we smoked and he tried to burn it with the plump
glowing cherry but missed and almost fell through a rotting board. I put out my arm and he
grabbed it, the most natural motion in the world. He held on just a beat longer than necessary. I
took the joint from him and tried to puff at it naturally, as if I weren’t relishing the white marks
his fingers left on my forearm even as they faded.
Inside, we flopped onto the bed in the master bedroom, the only decent piece of furniture
in the house. It was bought in Castro, on clearance, and hauled there in the back of Yaco’s truck
with my father’s help our first day on the island. A single wood nightstand sat to the left, covered
in white water rings, and in the corner was a ratty old wood wardrobe that I knew had to weigh a
thousand pounds and would be a pain to get down the stairs. There was also a small picture tube
TV, the only one in the house, sitting on a flimsy tray table. It wasn’t hooked up and I can’t
imagine it worked. As Mateo said, it looked like it was «del año uno».
We lay there high as shit and traded questions about where we had grown up. I learned
the internet had only come to this part of the island the year before, when they installed it at the
school in the nearby village, but Mateo was immensely proud to tell me he had used it before
then, at the library in Castro. I told him that yes, Las Vegas really was like the pictures, lit up
neon against the sky, but because of all that you couldn’t see the stars. I told him how much
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quieter it was in Chiloé, no cars, no hum of distant traffic or neighbors. That I had slept better the
past three days than ever before. Something inside me withered, saying that out loud, but he
didn’t seem to be listening. He asked how old you had to be to play at the casinos. I leaned over
and kissed him. I had never kissed anyone before, but I was a whole hemisphere away from
anyone, anything I knew, and that gave everything a dream-like sheen. Mateo kissed me back, as
a dream would.
A few minutes later, in the wardrobe, I think about taking his hand in my own to startle
him into stopping his prayers, but instead leave it dangling limply at my side.
…
Dad slams the door behind him when he enters. It’ll be him slamming the door, yes,
because Mom will come in first, him trailing behind. Then she throws her purse down on the
dusty floor in that exhausted manner she has, only to complain later about the scuffed leather.
“Philip?” Dad calls out to me, in an exhausted tone. “Hey, kid, we’re back early.”
The walls are paper thin, the bedroom door wide open. I hear it all. Even then, I start to
visualize them—their postures, expressions, where they must stand. Dad at the stairwell, one foot
on the bottom step, calling up in that hunched, sheepish posture I’ve seen my whole life. An old
soccer injury makes it hard for him to climb stairs. “Philip!” he shouts again, more impatient. To
my mother—“I don’t think they’re here.”
“Of course they are.” Her eyes roll. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. Where would they
go?”
Dad stays silent a minute, probably scratching at a stain on the wall or pulling at a sliver
on the stairway banister. “You’d be surprised,” he says finally. “Mateo lives here. He’ll know the
paths through these woods.”
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Mom steps past him up the stairs, saying my name halfheartedly a few times. At the top
of the stairway her voice becomes more forceful. I imagine she stands up straighter, trying to
summon whatever energy will be required if I’m not here. It’s her nature to panic, and she’ll
presume me dead before Dad can even get a word in.
The floorboards by the doorway creak. There’s a thin sliver of light that enters the
wardrobe between its two doors, but I don’t dare put my eye to it. Instead I pull back further into
the hanging clothes, wondering how clean they are. Beside me Mateo has ceased his prayers, and
seems to be holding his breath.
We should have just greeted my parents when they got back, I realize, to hell with
whether we smelled like pot, whether they could tell we’re high, how obvious it was we’d been
slacking off all day instead of doing the chores they’d assigned. But after Mateo’s nightmarish
face at the sound of the door opening, the only thing I could think to do was hide, and now if
they open the wardrobe to see us crammed together between these old clothes they’ll know
something significant is afoot.
“Goddamn it, Philip,” my mother mutters on the other side of the wardrobe door. “You
ass.”
For a moment I think this means she somehow sees me. Then I understand she thinks
she’s alone. The resignation in her voice is something I’ve never heard before.
“Is he up there?” Dad calls from below. His footsteps start reluctantly up the stairs.
Mom walks across the room—I can’t see her, of course, can’t see anything, but I hear her
feet on the floor, the floorboards creaking—and sits cross-legged on the edge of the bed, shutting
her eyes. She takes a deep breath. This is her centering technique. It means she’s about to
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explode. Surely they were expecting me and Mateo to be here diligently working, so they could
give Mateo a ride back to his place when we were done.
I hear Dad arrive in the doorway and he hovers there, waiting for her to open her eyes. He
doesn’t want to startle her. He’s a skinny, hunched man even at forty, the scruff on his cheeks he
doesn’t shave often gone prematurely gray. He looks at my mother lovingly, but wearied. His
stomach’s been unsettled since he got here, the combination of jet lag and the change of diet
putting him to the bathroom often and for prolonged periods he knows we all have noticed. This
b. and b. is in much worse shape than Yaco let on in his letters. He has to know he won’t see any
return on his investment for years, if ever. Worse, he knows Mom knows it too.
Mom opens her eyes and lets them drift toward my father. “Your son isn’t here,” she
says, and a smile plays at the corner of her lips. It’s the cliché joke they both enjoy, that it’s
always your son when I do something wrong.
“My son?” he replies, probably with a raised eyebrow. “I haven’t seen any paternity
papers.”
I’ve heard this all a million times. Then his voice grows softer, with a slight lilt upward,
like you might speak to a child. It’s hard not to read this tone as condescending. “You want to
talk about what happened back there?”
The position of his voice tells me he doesn’t join her on the bed but remains in the
doorway, as if the ground between them is littered with mines.
She slips off her shoes and rubs the ball of her right foot. “Not really,” she says, without
looking up.
“I feel like we made a bit of a scene,” he says.
“You should talk. Speaking about Philip that way in front of a pair of strangers.”
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My pulse quickens at the mention of my name. I keep my breath slow, shallow, quiet,
caught between my two desires: for them to leave and to hear whatever happened. They teach
English in the schools here but not well, so I’m not sure what if anything Mateo understands. I
don’t dare look at him because of the sound turning my head might make.
What did my dad say about me? I can only imagine. But I’ll think back on this afternoon
again and again in the years that come, and at times convince myself I have it all figured it out
with something approaching certainty.
…
A couple hours earlier, at the only restaurant in the village, my mother sat down at their
tiny table apprehensively. She usually found Chilean food quite bland, and she had a bottle of
Tabasco stashed in her purse to spice up whatever they put in front of her when Dad wasn’t
looking. It was something I’d insisted she pack for the trip, and up to then we’d both been glad
she did.
But my father had always told us the food in Chiloé was better than that of the mainland,
that they were both bland but chilote food was, “you know, good bland. Simple, pure, authentic.”
Mom was about to learn he was right. They sat outside, overlooking the ocean, smelling the
breeze off the water. There was no menu, the server just rattled off the handful of dishes that
could be prepared, all seafood freshly caught and lightly seasoned with butter, herbs, and lemon.
Mom ordered salmon and could have died at how good it tasted. She drank white wine by the
glass, while everyone else had local beer. She’d wondered aloud our first night in Chile, upon
seeing a drink list, why anyone would order beer instead of some of the best, cheapest wine in
the world.
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It was still early for lunch, only twelve thirty. Thinking of my mother, Dad had requested
they eat at that hour, knowing how accustomed she was to North American mealtimes. I’d heard
him pitch it to Yaco and his wife as a “leisurely” meal the night before, and indeed it was. They
sat a long time after they had all finished their food, telling tales of people the two men had
known back when, my mother smirking at the idea that Dad really remembered all these people
clearly from when he was six. She and Yaco’s wife would interject the occasional question to
clarify, «Now who was that?» or «Is that the man I met when…?», nothing of sincere interest.
Though hers was excellent, Mom was tired of speaking Spanish by then, even with two weeks of
the trip still ahead of her. The half-second pause it sometimes took her to decode the heavily
accented Chilean slang or to organize her thoughts in her second language was often just enough
for her to miss the chance to make a joke or divert the conversation to a topic she could relate to.
During the trip, I’d caught her spacing out more and more as people talked around her. At lunch,
she focused on the unseasonably spring-like climate, the warm sun on her cheeks. She even shut
her eyes a moment, basking in the sunshine, and listened as the conversation ambled towards us
kids.
«Children are given too much leeway these days», Yaco said. «You never caught me
stealing chicha when I was Mateo’s age». His wife murmured her agreement.
Mom opened her eyes to see Dad tip his last bit of beer into his mouth and motion at the
server for another. «It’s the way it is now», he said. «Children the bosses. We might as well be
chauffeurs».
Mom frowned. Dad didn’t have a lot of male friends, and hearing the way he talked to
Yaco, she was glad. Yaco was a large man: part mapuche with broad shoulders, dark skin, and
arms as big as my father’s thighs. Our first night there we saw him hold a chainsaw one-handed
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to chop a tree branch down for kindling. It must have irked him that Mateo was so slender and
quiet-mannered, like his mother. Just as it probably irked my own father that neither he nor I
knew how to help with that fire.
In our family, Dad was the pushover, plain and simple. Whenever I had earned some
punishment, Mom had to be the one to dole it out, lest she risk me talking Dad out of it
altogether. I had learned to go to him if I wanted something, anything from a Nintendo 64 to an
ear-piercing—both real examples, both cases where Mom intervened. Hearing him complain
about whatever leniency they gave me had to have bothered her.
Yaco said, managing a tone that was both apologetic and accusatory, «Usually, Mateo is
not like this. He knows not to disobey».
Mom glanced at Dad, but he was now picking with great concentration at the label of the
fresh bottle of beer the server had just brought. This was a habit he indulged in at home, too, and
Mom was usually the one to throw these peeled-off labels away.
Yaco’s gruffness toward Mateo was apparent to all of us the night before when they had
found us together in Mateo’s bedroom, leaning off each other on the bed, wet-lipped and passing
the jarra between us. Yaco immediately began to bellow but Mom had insisted a day of chores
was more than enough punishment. Now Yaco’s tone was airing this grudge not so subtly. What
would he have done, kept the kids apart for the rest of their trip? Something worse? She
shuddered to think. She’d always made sure that any punishment was administered
evenhandedly, free of anger. As a little boy I’d been overly sensitive, buried in books, quick to
tears, and her perception of me had not yet grown beyond that.
«Usually», Mom said, stressing the word with an uncharacteristic lack of nuance, «we
don’t leave alcohol lying around where any pair of teenagers can get at it». This was true, as far
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as she knew. They had a lock on the liquor cabinet, though at the request of one of my friends I
had made a copy of the key.
Dad reached for her hand where it lay clenched on the table. She drew it away, back to
her lap. She shied away from public displays of affection, even under normal circumstances, but
still he winced at this pulling away, wanting so badly to project contentment in front of this
friend he hadn’t seen in so long. Of course Yaco’s tone would have bothered him too, but he was
the type of man to ignore that, to just sip at his beer and let that flare of annoyance fade, then
listen later in feigned surprise back at the b. and b. as Mom detailed just how badly the barb had
stuck her.
Dad forced a dry laugh and said, against his better judgment, «I’m sure if we did leave it
out Philip would steal it, though».
The server brought a bajativo—a small glass of passion-fruit-flavored liqueur, on the
house to help with digestion. While Dad was still thinking of a toast and about to raise his glass,
Mom downed hers.
She said, «Philip never stole a thing in his life, and has no idea what chicha is anyway.
You think he saw that gross brown jar smelling of ferment and thought, Oh, I want that?
Obviously, it was Mateo’s idea».
Dad’s fingers, which had resumed picking at the beer label, paused at their work. Before
he could finish formulating a response, Yaco interjected jovially: «Say what you will about my
son, but spare my homemade chicha!»
They all laughed. Even my mother smiled. It should have ended there. Then my father
said, in that stubborn manner he had sometimes that came out of nowhere: «No, you’re right,
Yaco. It’s too much leeway we give them. You should see how picky Felipe is with his food. He
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still makes his mother peel his oranges, says the rind hurts his fingers. He won’t kill a spider, he
calls for one of us instead. He fusses with his hair for forty-five minutes every day before school.
Can you imagine that, a kid unable to peel an orange? There were no kids like that when I was
his age.»
Yaco forced an anxious chuckle and shrugged. His wife laughed too, as if my father had
just shared something as innocuous as a knock knock joke. My father’s hands lay limp in his lap,
his shoulders slumped, not meeting my mother’s gaze.
She crumpled her paper napkin and threw it on the table. «Philip», she said. «Our son’s
name is Philip, not Felipe. And I’d like to be taken back now, please».
…
“Look, I’m sorry I said all that,” Dad says, still in the doorway. “About the oranges,
about all the rest. All I meant was I wish you wouldn’t worry over him so much. It’s probably
why he’s afraid to put himself out there, you know? Why he won’t play sports. Why he’s so
quiet around new people.”
My face and neck turn hot with embarrassment. In the wardrobe I hope Mateo can’t
understand, isn’t watching me, doesn’t smell my sweat. I still can’t see my parents, only guess at
their movements.
“Quiet around new people,” Mom repeats. “Like you with my friends.”
“That’s different. This isn’t about me.”
Mom lets out a short, huffy sort of laugh.
“Okay, fine,” Dad says, still at the door frame, probably clenching the jamb tighter now.
“What if it is about me? I thought Phillip might like it here. Might feel some connection. But
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he’s more interested in getting in trouble with Mateo than he is in hearing about Chiloé, than
seeing the island.”
Mom’s hands are likely on her knees now, as if steadying herself. “And what I was
saying was that Mateo probably pressured him into that, into stealing the chicha. Same as he
pressured him into ditching out on the chores here.”
Dad frowns. “Well, then, he shouldn’t let himself be bullied into things.”
Mom is a tall, well-tanned woman, who at her full height towers over my father, but in
anger her posture curls. There on the bed I’m sure she looks as if she might compress into a tight
irate ball he will never pry open. “Last time I checked,” she says, “you’re not such a tough old
chilote yourself. I know more about building a campfire than you. I know how to gut a fish, too.
Maybe I’m chilota, what do you think?”
“That’s not funny,” Dad says. He stands up a little straighter, maybe puffs out his chest.
“I can do those things, too.”
Mom puts her face in her palms, not wanting to look at my father, maybe not wanting to
look at any of her surroundings. I can tell by the muffled sound of her voice. “God, what century
is this?” she says. “I was only joking. It doesn’t matter if you can’t gut a fish, just like it doesn’t
matter if your son would rather talk comics or whatever with Mateo instead of hang out with his
fucking parents and a couple adults he doesn’t know.”
“Would it have killed him to take an interest in something?” Dad says.
She removes her hands from her face and glares at him. “Well, now he has!
Congratulations. He is probably wandering around lost in the forest, communing with nature and
island spirits and about to be bitten by some poisonous bug. Break open the champagne.” She
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mimes opening a bottle, makes a popping sound with her lips. “The nearest neighbor is, what’d
you say, three miles away? That’s three miles of forest to be lost in!”
“It’s kilometers, not miles, and anyway Mateo knows the forests. They won’t be lost.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m from here, too.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Come on, what?”
She shoots him a look that could peel paint. Dad once described to me how they met in
philosophy class in college, how her anger at the other students who wanted to laugh off
Descartes’ thought experiments excited something in him. Now that anger turns toward him.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “but I’m not sure your experience from fucking seventy-two is
really relevant here. Anyway, I’ve seen Castro, the area where you grew up. You weren’t exactly
roughing it, you know?”
Dad says nothing in response. He takes a coin from his pocket and starts to roll it across
his knuckles, an old habit from back when he quit smoking and needed something to do with his
hands. Or no, he puts his index finger absently to his scalp, feeling beneath the hair for the scar
where he clumsily ran into a branch playing tag when I was three. I’ve seen his hand drift there
before.
Or perhaps he just stands there in the doorway, still and silent, like an animal holding its
breath before a passing predator. Mom’s eyes go to the grimy window in the corner of the room.
“You’re right,” he says finally. “I should have come here by myself. I don’t know why I
bothered bringing you. Either of you.”
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“That’s not what I’m saying,” Mom says quietly. She doesn’t take her eyes off the
window. Then, suddenly, like she just thought of it: “You know, I was born in Kalamazoo.”
“Yes,” he says impatiently, “I know.”
She looks at him as if surprised by his response. “Do you?” Then, in a more assured,
angrier tone: “Because I don’t talk about it much. I have friends I’ve known for years that don’t
know that about me. We moved when I was three, for God’s sake. You moved when you were
what, five?”
“Six. And it’s not the same.”
“Six years old. A whole other part of the island. And here you are so confident that
because you never got lost in the forests your son won’t either. Your son who’s barely ever been
outside Nevada.”
“I’m telling you, he’s got Mateo.”
“You don’t know anything about Mateo! You think I’d try telling someone how to get
from one end of Kalamazoo to the other? Or anything about what it means to be a child in
Michigan in 2005?”
“It’s not the same,” he says again. There’s an edge to it now, a raw quality. I can see him
as that six-year-old chilote boy: uprooted, unmoored, clenching his fists and stomping his feet.
“Because I don’t know the first goddamn thing about navigating Kalamazoo. I’d have to
ask for help. Here, the nearest help is three kilometers away.”
“It’s not—”
“I know, I know, it’s not the same. Why the hell not? What’s different?”
“Because you could go back to Kalamazoo whenever you wanted!” he screams, and
slams his fist into the wall.
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Mateo and I both jump. It’s a miracle neither of us bump the wardrobe door open. Now
it’s quiet out there, and I don’t know why. I’m afraid they’ve heard the movement.
“God, Dalton, I didn’t—”
“It’s fine,” he says quickly, in a barely human croak I’ve never heard before. He lets out a
deep, shuddering sigh. He turns and leaves the room.
My mother sits on the bed, collecting herself. Downstairs, the front door creaks open then
bangs shut. After a moment—perhaps just barely too long—she stands up and goes after him.
…
Chile was the last country in the Western hemisphere to legalize divorce, in 2004. Before
that, marriage law was governed by a legal code written in the nineteenth century. But for a
wealthy Chilean couple who could afford an annulment, the process was exceedingly easy. They
had only to claim that a piece of information on the wedding certificate was wrong—their home
address, for example. With that the whole marriage was not just terminated, but nullified, as if it
had never happened. I wonder if there are still Chileans who regret the loss of this ability to
rewrite history. And I wonder if my parents would have been sure enough of their bond to marry
if their culture and class had rendered that decision irreversible.
In 2007, when my father left us, I was convinced that whatever insurmountable barrier
existed between him and my mother had to do with Chiloé: the fight they’d had, the outburst I’d
heard from the wardrobe. After that trip, something shifted in him. He no longer asked for bottles
of imported pisco for his birthday, and he didn’t bother making chilote stew for the Chilean
holidays. His arguments with my mother were less frequent, too. She eventually asked him if he
could sleep in the second bedroom, since he snored, and he consented without a fuss.
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But when he left us, it was not to return to Chiloé. He had met another woman, and
moved to Florida to start a new life with her. They had a son soon after. I’ve only met him on
Skype. I wonder if Dad talks with that son about Chiloé. I wonder if that son can peel an orange.
…
When we are sure we hear no movement in the house, Mateo and I emerge from the
wardrobe. We walk quietly downstairs, to the front door, and peer out. Their car rental is parked
on the lawn, but my parents are nowhere in sight. Beyond the car is the main road, completely
abandoned, to the left a dense thicket of trees. It’s where they must have gone. You can’t see
more than a few feet into it. I hope my dad’s sense of direction is still what he says it is.
«We should start hauling those boxes down», I say. «Tuck that weed into your beltline.
We’ll say we took a break and went for a hike».
«Of course», Mateo says. His expression is quizzical. He looks somehow even younger
than before, positively childlike, or maybe I just feel that much older. «But we did it!», he says.
«We’re safe now». He glances around excitedly, then moves to touch my cheek with his hand. I
block it gently with my own. He looks startled. I am, too. An hour ago I was planning to spend
any moment we had alone for the rest of the trip groping him. But seeing my parents like that,
knives at each other’s necks, and hearing what they had to say about me.
«Their car’s still here», I say again, voice as even as I can manage. «They’ll be back any
minute».
By the time my parents return, most of the boxes have been hauled down. At a certain
point we stopped bothering to really sort through them and decided anything left here this long
had to be worthless. We’re sitting on the porch, our backs against the house’s old wood wall,
legs stretched out before us, taking another break. Mom and Dad come out of the trees, him now
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a couple steps behind her. Mom raises her hand hello. I raise my hand back. Dad’s eyes are on
the ground, the car, the house, the road leading away—anywhere but meeting mine.
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The Brightmore Problem
Jim McFiddle, the mailman, was the first to voice concern. It was six o’clock on a Friday
evening, and like usual he was in Jen’s Tavern, the only bar in Brightmore. He had his blue
mailbag sitting next to him, filled with letters he hadn’t had time to deliver that day. So far Jim
had drunk three beers. He ordered a fourth and while Jen the barkeep refilled his glass he
sprinkled salt on his coaster. He didn’t like it to stick to the bottom of the glass.
“Lately I feel like my days go by faster and faster,” he said to Jen. He took a big gulp of
beer. Out loud it sounded like a small admission, but he felt a great load lift as he said it, a
heaviness he hadn’t even noticed before. His days had indeed been slipping by at far greater
speed than ever before. He was able to deliver less and less mail each day before dark, and each
morning he felt like he’d barely had time to shut his eyes before the clock started to buzz. At
night when he came home and made love to his wife, he could only make her come once before
they had to get to sleep, if even that. But it didn’t seem like he was doing any of these things
slower or less efficiently than usual. He would just glance up at the clock and suddenly realize
what had felt like a half hour was a full hour, what had felt like only a decent start was by now
surely making his wife sore.
Of course, he didn’t say all this to Jen. He just said his days were going faster. To his
shock her eyes got real wide. She took the bar rag off her shoulder and started wringing it
excitedly in her hands. “You know, I feel the same way?” Jen said. “Like all of a sudden time is
evaporating on me.”
There were murmurs of assent along the bar. Sam Kingsley, sitting beside Jim, said he
was able to fix fewer television sets every day. Eleanor Bunker said she practically had to sprint
from gas meter to gas meter to get the right readings. Todd Moss, the kindergarten teacher, told
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them all reluctantly he was teaching their children a little less each day. Last year by this time the
young crop could all spell simple words; this year they barely knew their ABCs.
Jim’s mouth hung open a little. He looked from bar patron to bar patron. He hadn’t meant
to stir up anything, and frankly if it wasn’t for all their faces looking so sincerely astonished he
would have thought they were pulling his leg. “Well, it’s just a feeling I got is all,” Jim said.
“I’m sure it’s nothing.” He was a practical man. If nothing could be done about a thing, he
thought it best not to pay that thing any mind. He shouldn’t have opened his mouth in the first
place.
Jen looked from Jim to the other customers. She started to fan herself with a drink menu.
“Nuh uh,” she said. “That’s no good for me. I’m positively freaked out.” She poured herself a
shot of whiskey with a Coke back, though normally she waited until at least eight before she
started drinking at work.
Sally Huntsberger, the woman that ran Brightmore Shop & Pawn, had hitherto been
quiet. She, like Jim, was a practical person, and had thought at first that all the others were just
pulling each other’s legs. But now she felt like she ought to speak up, even if it made her look
the fool. “I don’t know how to tell you all this,” she said, “but it gets worse.”
Here she pulled an old clock out of her purse and set it on the bar. She knew her eyes
were shot through with red lines, and she hoped she didn’t look too crazy. What little sleep she’d
gotten lately counted for less and less. She’d taken to carrying this analog clock, a small black
boxy thing someone had pawned, around with her and taking it out whenever she had a moment
alone. She figured she was the first to make the discovery. Nobody carried watches anymore,
they just used their phones.
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She asked Jen to turn down the radio. Jen did. Sally let the clock sit there and said she
didn’t notice anything at first. And then when she did, she thought the problem was just this
particular clock. “But it’s not the clock,” Sally said. “It’s every clock, every watch. It’s
happening everywhere. Listen.”
The bar became very still as they all listened. It let out a rough, metallic click with each
second. It seemed strange that anyone would want a clock so loud, Jim thought. It was bound to
drive one crazy after a while.
“My god,” Jen said.
Todd Moss popped his knuckles nervously.
“What?” Jim asked. “I don’t hear anything.”
“At first I thought it was just this clock,” Sally repeated. “But it’s every clock. They’re all
like this.” She started to count along with the beat of the second hand. “One missus, two missus,
three missus, four…”
“It’s so fast,” Jen said.
Sally nodded. “And it’s getting worse. It was so slight at first I thought it was my
imagination. I could get through a solid ‘One mississip’ before we were on to the next second.”
She pulled out her phone and went to time.gov for the official U.S. time. “Look,” she said. “It’s
the same. One missus, two missus, three missus….”
They were all spooked by the revelation. Even Jim, who was still trying to convince
himself that there was some reasonable explanation, that they were making a big deal out of what
had been only an innocent comment. Someone turned on the news and they watched the clock at
the bottom. It lined up perfectly with what Sally’s phone said, and very nearly with what the
pawned clock said. After that there seemed a general consensus that all that could be done was to
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tie one on. There were a couple rounds of top shelf whiskey on the house. They all speculated
forlornly what “aged ten years” could really mean to anyone now.
“It means we’ve all got less time left than ever before,” Todd said sadly. Jim replied that
that had always been true for everybody anyway, at each given moment, and finished his
whiskey in one great gulp.
When Jim got home that night, he was so drunk he could barely stand. He finally
slumped into bed at two in the morning, and his wife Hannah was already asleep. She’d declined
his invitation to join him at the tavern, said she was tired and had a headache. He started to press
himself up against her clumsily and kissed her ear and the side of her neck. She woke up just
enough to elbow him away. “In the morning,” she said. “I’m trying to sleep.”
He lay there a long while staring at the digital clock on his nightstand as his wife snored
beside him. He watched the minutes fall away. He told himself it was all some trick of the clock
in the bar, maybe something Sally had played. Or a bad cell phone connection, bad TV reception.
Something was off in the technology somewhere, that was all. And even if there really was
something off with the time (which there wasn’t) it’s not like anyone could do anything about it
anyway. He tried to count to sixty Mississippi to see if it lined up with a minute on his bedside
clock but he kept losing count. He knew if he and Hannah could just get it on, he could have her
quivering with pleasure in no time, faster than ever. That would prove Sally wrong, he thought to
himself. He shut his eyes and went to sleep.
The next day Jim woke with a hangover that felt like holy judgment on all his misdeeds.
His head hurt something terrible, and his guts were knotted up inside his stomach. He spent his
morning on the toilet, doing all he could not to doze off. Thankfully it was Sunday, so there was
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no mail to deliver. He felt as if he’d gotten almost no sleep at all. That afternoon, when he was
finally feeling right in the head again and had chalked up the revelations of the night before to
alcohol-inspired paranoia, he got a call from Sally Huntsberger.
He was lying on his couch watching reruns of Cheers when his phone started to buzz. It
wriggled its way toward him on the coffee table. He didn’t recognize the number but the area
code was Brightmore so he picked it up and said hello.
“Jim,” she said. “It’s Sally Huntsberger.”
Jim sat up on the couch and looked around. His house was rather large, and it seemed
Hannah was at the other end of it. He thought he remembered her saying something about going
to lie down awhile. That was good. He wanted to put the nonsense of the night before behind
him, and if he could avoid having to explain it to his wife then that was all the better.
“What do you want, Sally?” he said quietly into the phone. It came out harsher than he’d
meant it.
On the other end, Sally laughed. “It’s good to talk to you, too,” she said. Then she
explained excitedly that she’d woken up that morning with, as she put it, “a wild hair up her ass,”
and decided to do a little bit of digging on what she kept calling the “Brightmore Problem.”
He wanted to interrupt her, to tell her there was no reason to let their drunken musings
from the night before get them all bent out of shape, but there didn’t seem to be a suitable pause
in her ravings. And besides, he wanted to be careful not to say anything too specific his wife
might hear. Sally explained that there seemed to be no temporal deviation from the night before
as of yet, things were holding steady around “one missus,” both on the pawnshop clock (exhibit
one) and on time.gov (exhibit two). Then she’d found what she called a “control group” (here
Jim was fairly sure she was not using this term correctly) in little Billy Baptist, who was riding
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his bike on the street. She’d had him count along with the pawnshop clock and he’d also gotten
through “n missus” with each tick of the second hand. This showed the problem was not isolated
to “us older folks.” Like Jim, Sally was in her early forties.
But this is when things got real strange, Sally said. Because this all had her so freaked out
she’d decided to go see her sister Sam, who lived on a farm outside Yawpton, maybe fifty miles
away. She’d arrived nearly incoherent, bursting into tears as she drove up the long dirt drive to
the farmhouse. Her sister’s husband was sure it was something some man had done, and kindly
offered to kick the crap out of whoever that was. And when she’d gotten inside, blubbering
incoherently and unable to speak, she’d pulled the clock out of her purse and tried to demonstrate
her findings to her sister and her sister’s husband. And then, to both her horror and also her great
relief, the clock ticked off the seconds at a reasonable speed, there in her sister’s house: one
Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four.
Now Sally hadn’t known what to think. She’d accepted some tea from her sister and said
it was nothing, the problem was nothing, just man troubles she’d rather not talk about, she just
needed to get away for an afternoon. On her way back to Brightmore, though, Sally had set the
pawnshop clock on the seat beside her. Every so often, she’d count along. Sure enough, the
seconds got quicker as she neared Brightmore. Twenty miles out it was n mississip. Ten miles
out n mississi. Then, as you crossed the town limits, it was back down to n missus.
“It’s Brightmore,” Sally whispered into the phone, her voice betraying fear and wonder.
“The problem is Brightmore.”
Jim glanced down the hall at the cracked door of the bedroom. He rubbed at a knot in his
lower back, a place grown stiff from all his time spent sitting down that day. He was so used to
walking around delivering mail that he didn’t do well with sitting anymore.
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“Sally,” he said, “do you think maybe you’re still a little messed up from last night? That
was some epic drinking there. I’ve been laid up all day.”
“What are you talking about? Go to your computer yourself, watch the time tick. This is
serious.”
“What’s that, honey?” Jim said to the empty room, half-covering the receiver. “Oh, okay.
Listen, Sally, I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go. The wife’s calling.”
With that he hung up the phone, leaving Sally mid-protest.
Sally was in her shop, watching a couple customers poke around, making sure they didn’t
steal anything. “It’s not like this is just you and me,” she said to the empty line, not realizing Jim
had hung up. “Todd, Jen, Eleanor, Sam. They all heard it too. It’s our lives being stolen here.
Second by second. Seconds add to minutes. And besides,” she said, cupping her hand so she
could whisper right into the microphone, “this could be huge. This throws a wrench in the whole
works. It revises our whole conception of space and time and all that.”
Her attention was drawn back to her customers. Aside from pawned goods, the shop sold
a small selection of snacks and groceries. Her customers, a young couple that lived down the
street, were trying to decide between a full gallon or half gallon of milk. They tried to do the
math to figure out the price difference. “How many pints in a quart?” she heard one say. “So this
is, like, eight beers’ worth?”
On the other end of the phone, there was silence. Sally looked down at the screen and
saw the call had ended. She put the phone down on the counter and stared at the boxy black
clock beside it. She wondered what was the last thing Jim had heard. She waited impatiently
while the young couple abandoned the milk plan and bought a carton of cigarettes instead and,
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when no one followed them in after they left, she wrote Gone for a beer on a loose leaf of
notebook paper and taped it to the outside of the shop door.
Sally walked across the street to the tavern. Jen was behind the bar again, and Eleanor
was there too, eating a hamburger. “You folks remember what we talked about last night?” Sally
asked them. “The clocks and whatnot?”
Eleanor shifted in her seat uncomfortably. Jen ran a rag over a glass and held it up to the
light with one eye closed. Sally watched them share a glance. “We were mighty tipsy last night,”
Eleanor said simply.
Sally took out her phone and showed her time.gov. Eleanor shrugged. “If that’s what they
say it is, that’s what it is,” she said.
Sally would have no better luck later that day, when she visited Todd at the school during
afternoon naptime. “Must just be us getting older,” he said, shrugging when he had to wake the
children up off their baby blue blankets after what seemed like no time at all. She tried to tell him
what had happened at her sister’s house, but he interrupted her to say he didn’t have time for this.
They both winced at his choice of words.
Part of Sally was unsurprised at this lack of interest for what she had to say. The thing
people liked about Brightmore was precisely how unremarkable it was. The same shops opened
and closed at the same time each day, the same people crowded Jen’s Tavern Friday nights for
the fish fry, the same roads led the same nowhere places. People left, sure, especially the young
ones, but it was rare that they did not return sooner rather than later. There was a sense among
Brightmore folk that you could go anywhere in America (save the big cities) and find the same
sort of people, the same flavors of fried fish, the same sun-faded brick. In this way life in
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Brightmore was a comforting lull. Time stood still, at the same time the clocks told Sally how
fast it was galloping forward.
Back at the Shop & Pawn later that evening, Sally logged onto what she thought of as
“the office computer.” She didn’t have one at home, but she spent most of her time here anyway.
The store had started off as something just for groceries, like a convenience store but a little
cheaper than the Gas N’ Dash on the corner up the road. But over time Sally had realized that so
many people in Brightmore had things they wanted to discard. Things they wanted a home for.
Clothes their children had outgrown, old guns and spark plugs, old textbooks they had no
problem selling though they were property of Brightmore Public, jewelry they inherited but had
no occasion to wear.
Now Sally opened up a browser and, typing with her two-finger method like a hen
pecking seed, pointed it to Google.
Sally had no head for research, but she did her best to scour Wikipedia articles for
possible explanations of the problem in Brightmore. She read until her eyes ached, and even
considered donning the pair of bifocals someone had exchanged for a new stapler to see if that
helped. Instead she went to the liquor shelf and popped the cap off a bottle of Kessler. She filled
the cap and sipped at the thimble-sized shot, deep in thought.
From what she could tell, there was little chance of the U.S. government’s clock having
been corrupted, though the definition of a second was a thing she couldn’t quite grasp yet.
Something to do with the speed of a certain particle behaving a certain way. The government had
big fancy machines that measured this behavior. Besides, she’d cross-checked with the
Greenwich Mean Time, and the Brits’ clock gave her the same problem. What’s more, the
problem was Brightmore, only in Brightmore; that meant it couldn’t be the measurement
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apparatus in some remote place, it had to be something there in her hometown, right before her
unbespectacled eyes.
Most modern clocks ran on electricity somehow, either a phone picking up radio signals
or the electrified materials in a clock vibrating at a certain regular frequency. Could it be that
electricity itself somehow behaved differently in Brightmore? But then, this was the twenty-first
century. Time was relative, they’d known that for almost a hundred years. Perhaps space-time
was curved some certain weird way, bunching around Brightmore like a frumpy dress might pile
up around your midriff. But then, why wouldn’t the clocks themselves be caught up in that
space-time frumpiness, why wouldn’t they have the same time-sense as Sally and the rest of
them?
Then there was the final possibility, the one Sally didn’t much care for. That somewhere
along the way she’d gone bonkers, and this was the world’s way of letting her know. That
through some strange vibrations she was giving off she’d caused a sort of localized mass hysteria
the night before at the pub, and through the power of suggestion and the haze of alcohol gotten
the others to go along with her in her madness.
No, Sally thought. It was Jim, not her, he brought it up. And besides, listen to the clock
there now. One missus, two missus. She counted along with it, the tick a gentle assurance of her
sanity, a gentle assurance that it was the world, not her, that was unintelligible.
In high school, the blue Science Fair ribbon had always been Sally’s for the taking. And
not just because there were only a few others who entered each year; science and math, those
were her things. She was sure these skills would have served her well if she had bothered to go
on to college. Though she never had children—never had much luck with men either, having
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been told she was too “opinionated”—she had toyed with the idea of adoption, because damn if
it wouldn’t be a treat to help a kid with a Science Fair project.
Now Sally unearthed this long-buried interest. People who came into the store from that
point on consistently saw her slouched over her keyboard at the counter, pecking away.
Occasionally someone would ask what she was working on. She’d glance at them, startled, and
blink rapidly a few times like she needed to refocus her eyes to see something that wasn’t words.
She’d learned her lesson, though. People didn’t want to hear what she had to say, and she didn’t
want to be labeled “eccentric.” (Though despite her caution, she was well on her way to earning
this label.) Her fake answers would vary widely and included “fan fiction,” “a romance novel,”
“letters to the editor,” “slam poetry,” and “the great American novel.”
Here’s where her interlocutor would nod slightly, hands in pockets, not meeting her eye,
and say something noncommittal, something like, “That sure is something, Sal.” Sally would nod
absently, eyes already back on the screen. Every so often, she would still pick up the phone to
call Jim. He seemed like the one person who might listen to her, the one person who was at least
observant enough to have voiced his sense of things. She would give him updates, like that the
speed seemed to have settled at n missus, showed no further signs of speeding up. But he would
always just say that whatever the clocks said the clocks said, there was no use paying it any
mind. So eventually Sally stopped calling.
It wasn’t long before the speakers at scientific conferences started trading snickers and
pointed comments over a paper almost all of them had received. Invariably it had made it out of
the slush pile and into the hands of an editor, not for quality but for sheer gall and unintentional
humor. Entitled “The Brightmore Problem” and riddled with errors of spelling, grammar, and
logic, the paper was clearly a (poorly perpetrated) hoax. It described a town in the middle of
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nowhere no one had ever even heard of, and how “space-time itself” seemed to behave strangely
there. On the best days one of these presenters would have a copy of the paper with them, and
they’d all take turns reading lines aloud and laughing hysterically.
When after several months Sally hadn’t heard even a peep from the journals she had
written to, she tried writing letters to newspaper and magazine editors. She drove diligently into
the city every week to find the largest newsstand she could and flipped through the pages of all
these publications to no avail. Her letters never appeared. So under the judgmental eyes of the
newsstand owner she would buy herself a candy bar and make the long, silent drive home alone.
A year to the day after having that fateful conversation with Jim McFiddle and the other
regulars at Jen’s Tavern, Sally closed the shop early and hid herself inside to upload all her
evidence to the Internet. This was a thing she had been putting off for some time. Sooner or later
someone from Brightmore would find these things, she knew, and she did not look forward to
that day. Her experience discussing the problem with Jim and Eleanor and Tom and the rest had
soured her on anyone from Brightmore ever taking her or her observations seriously. People in
Brightmore just wanted to pass their days in obscure relaxation. It pained them too much to think
there was something strange about the only town they’d ever known. That by remaining in the
town they loved they were actively choosing to lead truncated lives.
Included in the evidence she uploaded was her paper, “The Brightmore Problem,” along
with videos she’d taken with various clocks, cell phones, and official times. Always she was on
screen counting along, one missus two missus. She’d long ago noticed that cameras weren’t
subject to Brightmore time; the videos she uploaded would have counters at the bottom that said
little more than thirty seconds, but there would be Sally on the screen, counting up to a full sixty
missus along with time.gov. Or Sally in front of the Brightmore town limits sign, counting to
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forty-five mississi. She uploaded all these things. Then, while she waited for the comments and
emails to start coming in, she walked out to the front of the shop and taped up the For Sale sign
she’d had prepared for some time.
When the shop sold to Kelly Biggleton, owner of the Gas N’ Dash, Sally moved to the
nearest big city and bought a new shop. There she sold general goods and pawned items at a
much higher markup than before. She found she liked the big city, the bars she could go to
wrapped in a comfortable layer of anonymity. She could get drunk every night of the week and
never visit the same bar twice. She found a man in one of these bars and pretty soon she moved
in with him and they lived together for many years. He didn’t laugh when she told him about the
Brightmore Problem, though he didn’t seem all that concerned either, and she was afraid if she
pressed it he’d think she was crazy.
Every once in a while someone would come into her shop to talk to her about
Brightmore. She knew from the number of hits on her YouTube page and blog that many people
had seen what she posted. Many of these comments were mean-spirited. Others applauded her
effects work in making the clocks appear off, and wondered how she accomplished this. Some
called it “interactive fiction,” an attempt at bringing a little sci-fi color into the real world. She
should start a Kickstarter, they told her. Surely her goal was to make a movie, right? And then
there were the types who visited her shop sometimes, mostly younger people, people she called
the True Believers. These people took her posts for what they were: real-life, unedited
documents of a phenomenon she was unable to explain. They’d tracked her down based on her
YouTube username, so similar to her real one. These people praised Sally for her courage.
Sometimes they had visited Brightmore themselves. Often these conversations took an
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unfortunate turn when the visitors began to speak in lowered tones about government
conspiracies and illuminati and evil lizard people waging secret wars.
Nevertheless, Sally was happy. She’d more or less given up on getting anyone other than
a select few to believe her. She’d tried everything she could think of, and learned to content
herself with that. The years rolled on at a comfortable pace—still a bit faster than she might have
preferred, perhaps, but comfortable nonetheless. The man she was living with moved out and
another moved in, and with that new man she had a wedding though by that point they were both
in their late fifties. She stopped posting new videos and never sent her paper anywhere else. The
number of hits on her web page stalled, and her YouTube subscribers started to fall. Sally didn’t
think about these things much. She forgot the password for the email associated with her
YouTube and blog accounts, so she stopped getting any messages regarding them. Occasionally
a True Believer would wander into her store, maybe someone who said they’d been to
Brightmore, observed the phenomenon. Sally would shrug and smile politely. Invariably these
people left her store acting as if they’d somehow been cheated, like Sally’s lack of enthusiasm
had dampened their own.
When Sally’s brother-in-law died, she drove out to her sister’s farm with her husband.
The wake was at the farm. Sally was well aware of some strange looks she got as she walked in
and she smiled to think about all the time she’d spent trying to avoid the label “eccentric.” Most
of these people had family in Brightmore, family who were aware of and none too happy with
those mean, slanderous things Sally had posted what seemed like only yesterday. Sally shook
everyone’s hand and gave her sister her condolences. Then, after all the hangers-on had left,
Sally started to feel an old tingle in her knees and fingers, an itchiness to satisfy a long-forgotten
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curiosity. So she discreetly told her husband to stay there with her sister, she was going to make
a quick trip into Brightmore.
Jim was sitting on his living room couch with a beer in his hand when the doorbell rang.
He called to his wife to see if she would get the door, but there was no answer. She was probably
lying down. It was a Saturday afternoon and Jim had his feet propped up on a red and white
cooler full of beer. His legs ached all the time now. He didn’t want to stand up. He called to
whoever was at the door to come on in already, it should be unlocked.
A woman roughly his age, early sixties, walked in tentatively. “Jim?” she asked. “That
you?”
He eyed the woman and took a long, suspicious drink of beer. He said yes, it was him,
and how could he help her.
“It’s me, Sally,” she said. “Sally Huntsberger.”
Jim squinted. The woman’s hair was streaked with gray, her skin mottled and bunched up
in weird ways around her face. But it was Sally all right. The years had been rough on her but not
so rough as on some. “So it is,” Jim said. “Haven’t been round in a while, eh?” He shifted
uncomfortably in his seat, hoping his wife wouldn’t mind him talking with this woman alone. He
moved his feet and started to root around in the cooler.
“Beer,” he said, and handed her one. He’d meant it like a question but it had come out a
statement. Sally smiled and popped the tab and said thanks. She sat down.
“You been busy,” Jim said. “I saw your videos.”
Sally felt an excited tremor in her fingers as she brought the beer to her lips. She nodded.
It felt strange to talk about this thing again after so long, though that was precisely why she’d
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come to see Jim. “I wanted to thank you,” she said. “I don’t know if you remember. It was
something you said. We were in Jen’s Tavern, is that still around? It was something you said that
got me thinking maybe I wasn’t just crazy.”
Jim smiled toothily. Sally winced to see he’d lost a couple and hadn’t bothered with
fakes.
“It’s cause of you I ended up leaving Brightmore,” she said. “I just wanted to say thanks
is all. I’ve got a husband now. Not that I don’t respect your decision to stay.”
“A husband,” Jim said. “How about that.” He took another drink. He was about six beers
deep on his buzz and he was starting to feel lightheaded, like it was hard to keep up with what
this woman was saying. “I saw your videos,” he said again. “On the internet, a long time ago.”
Sally smiled and gazed down at the rim of her beer can, determined not to look too long
at the gaps between Jim’s teeth.
“How’d you do that?” Jim asked. “With the clock, I mean. How’d you make it run so
fast?”
Something plummeted inside Sally. She’d been imagining this moment for some time,
and it had always played out with some knowing comment of validation from Jim, something
that showed there was at least one person in Brightmore who thought she was sane. She looked
across the room at him. The beer in his hand, the puffy wrinkled skin around his eyes, the tinge
of pink round his pupils. The red and white cooler and his crossed ankles on top of it, showing
off the holes in his faded black socks. She strained to see the man she’d known so long ago,
buried beneath the missing teeth and the wrinkles and all the years in a different stream of time.
She shook her head. She stood up, drained her beer and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Maybe I’ll tell you sometime,” she said. “Anyway, thanks for the beer.”
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#
For a long while after Sally left, Jim sat watching TV. He called to his wife but she was
who knew where and didn’t answer. He wanted to tell her Sally had stopped by. She was
something of a Brightmore celebrity now, though perhaps more infamous than famous. He
hadn’t followed all that about him having said something long ago. He had trouble anymore
following people that weren’t Brightmore people. Like these folks on the TV, Norm and Cliff
and all them Cheers folk. He used to love this show, but now it was so damn fast-paced. People
zoomed in and out of the shots, babbling so fast you could barely catch the jokes. The images
flitting by on the screen started to lose all meaning, just a pleasant stream of shuffling photos too
fast to assign a story to. He drank his beer and narrowed his eyes and concentrated so hard on the
images and the lips and the garbled words that he started to get a headache and finally had to turn
the damn thing off. He went to the window and looked out onto the street, wishing he’d known
Sally better, Sally and her strange celebrity. Part of getting older, he guessed, to feel the world
was passing you by. There at the window he finished his beer and watched the occasional car
pass, the occasional child at play, as overhead the clouds galloped across the sky and the sun
made its hasty descent toward the horizon.
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Snapshots
At a certain point, I realized I wanted to have children but not to raise them. So I packed
up and moved myself to a hotel room across town. My wife, Rosie, sent me pictures in the mail.
Our daughter Cynthia smiling against the wall, hair in a neat part down the side. Jacob in his crib,
face soft and content with some happy dream. This is what you are missing, her notes said.
I wasn’t sure how she found me. I’d suspended my cell phone service and changed my
email address. Nearest I could figure, she had called every hotel in the book, asking to be put
through to my room and waiting for one that didn’t say it had no guest by that name. Two days
before the first photo, the phone in my room let out a single sharp, angry ring and fell silent.
She didn’t call again, and she didn’t come to the hotel. She just sent these pictures, each
one stranger than the last. I started to look forward to them, to seeing what she might see fit to
send. Here was Jake in his highchair at the kitchen table, orange muck on his face and bib.
Cynthia, the part in her hair now mussed, red-faced and screaming in the kitchen, waving a
wooden spoon in the air. What a shot, I had to admire. I imagined my wife snapping the photo
right then, mid-screaming-match, the nerve that took. This is what you are missing, the photos
still said, red ink scrawled in block letters at the bottom.
Then came one of Rosie leaned back on a heap of pillows, spreading herself open wide, a
look of tussled angry ecstasy on her face. Who’s holding the camera? she must have wanted me
to wonder. In another she glared out at me, hands at her sides forming fists, nude but for a
tampon string hanging out of her.
I eBayed an old camera and walked the hotel grounds with the strap around my neck,
snapping pictures. I wanted something to send in return. The ice bucket in my room, plastic liner
inside, holding a shallow pool of water from the night before. The laundry room they left open,
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white sheets spinning, the indifferent Romanian woman there reading a book. The teen at the
front desk with acne like spider bites, the piece of carpet with a stain like blood, a dog relieving
himself in front of my door. It got so I’d snapped hundreds of these, but nothing seemed to say
what I wanted.
I called her just so she could hear my voice, how even it was, how it didn’t ask about who
held the camera for her photo.
She sounded sleepy. “Who is it?” she said.
“Me. I thought I should call.”
Silence a moment while she considered this.
“The children miss you,” she said. “I can’t for the life of me tell why.”
“And you?”
Here the line started to crackle. I tried to push the end of the cord more firmly into the
receiver, thinking the connection was loose. She was saying something, but I couldn’t hear. Her
voice was like a fighter pilot on the way down, spitting static at me.
“I can’t hear,” I said. “Are you yelling?”
I put the receiver down to press some buttons on the dock, to fiddle with the cord there.
By the time I picked it up again, the line was dead.
“Rosie?” I said. “Rosie?”
I tried to fix it for a long time, plugging and unplugging the jack, shining the number pad
with spit, pressing and unpressing the lever that hung it up, but whenever I listened to the line
even the dial tone was raspy with static.
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I took a picture of the phone to send to her, my way of apology. But then I couldn’t tell
what it showed, and knew she wouldn’t be able to either: a phone fallen to disrepair despite all
the best intentions, or a phone that would work just fine if her husband bothered to try it again.
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Chévere
I only ever came to Cheyenne because this girl, this woman she would correct me, urged
me to. Chevy. I already know what you are thinking, and yes, she was named after a truck. Her
dad likes to joke she was conceived in back of it. She and I knew each other from way back
when, and yes, we slept together. Not just once but a couple of times.
That was high school, though. Then last November, in a Facebook message, I complained
to Chevy about the dust in New Mexico, the constant layer of grit on your skin. You should move
here! she said. Less dust and a hell of a lot cooler in summer.
Looking back, it’s the type of thing you’d say to anybody, just to have something to say.
But I was aimless in Albuquerque, had been for years, so part of me—a very old part—wanted it
to mean more. Pretty soon I found myself a job at a Cheyenne car dealership, and was making
arrangements. Then I got here and Chevy already had a boyfriend she’d neglected to mention.
And somewhere along the way, she’d become a woman where that meant something.
So six months later I’m sitting on my front porch, moving back home. Chevy and I don’t
talk much now, not after I got drunk and told her I didn’t like her boyfriend. But a friend of hers
who works at the same bar is supposed to drive me to Albuquerque for two hundred bucks plus
gas. Now he’s fifteen, twenty, pretty soon forty minutes late. I give him a call.
On the fifth ring he picks up in a voice that sounds like it’s smiling at my expense. I ask
him where he is.
“You said end of the month. The thirty-first.”
We’ve only spoken over the phone, never in person. I wish I could picture who to be
pissed at.
“I said towards the end of the month, the twenty-eighth. There is no thirty-first in June.”
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Silence on the other end. Then, “Well, what’s the thirtieth, then? I can’t today.”
I cuss him out and hang up: one more bridge burned. I smoke my cigarette to the filter
and light another. Then I make the call I know I have to make.
The plan is to ask Chevy to hitch up her own trailer and pull me over to Albuquerque. I’ll
pay her the two hundred, just like I would the other guy. She can spend the night and be back for
work the day after next. But suddenly on the phone with her, I panic. I know she’ll say no. So
instead I say the guy who was supposed to move me can’t be here for another few hours, and I'm
all alone in a boxed-up house.
“Condo,” she corrects me.
“Right. You want to come by for a beer? Maybe a pizza? I don’t want to leave things the
way we did.”
“I don’t know,” she says.
Stan asks her something on the other end. No one, she says in reply.
“Fine,” I say, “Forget it. I’ll be out of your hair in a few hours.”
“Oh, don’t be dramatic. I’ve got to take Samwise for a walk. I’ll be over after that.”
“Okay, great. It’ll be good to see you again.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she says.
There’s nothing to do while I wait. The place is small and everything’s already packed,
including the TV. My couch is by the curb for anyone that wants it. I never even bothered to
hang anything on the walls. So I have a beer on the living room floor and watch some old SNL
sketches on my phone. Then I take a nap with the back of my head against the wall.
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When I open my eyes she’s standing over me, looking down. She must have got the spare
key from the flowerpot by the front door.
“I’m here but don’t look at me. I’m not wearing makeup.”
She looks great, though, even though the simple black tank top and grass-stained jeans
suggest she might be trying not to. She glances around at all the stacked boxes, upturned
furniture, and bits of crumpled newspaper. “What time is what’s-his-name coming?”
I climb to my feet, still squinting against the light. “I guess he’s not,” I say. “Now he says
he can’t do it.”
“Did you call U-Haul?”
“They’re all out of trucks. Short notice or whatever.” The truth is I don’t think I can
afford whatever U-Haul’s charging.
“I thought your lease was up.”
“It is.”
She throws me a look like rough gravel. “You’re unbelievable.”
Here I’ll spare you some back and forth. She says I only asked her there to help me move.
I say no, I asked her there because I wanted to see her. She says it’s funny how I didn’t want to
see her until the guy canceled. Which, okay, fair enough. It’s on and on like that, until pretty
soon she’s pacing back and forth with her arms crossed, saying you can never be straight with
me, I’ve got better things to do than haul your ass across state lines.
I touch her elbow gently. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Don’t help me move. I’m out of options but
I did, I really did want to see you.”
She looks down at my hand. “You ever want to beat off again, I suggest you move that.”
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I laugh and step away. What else can I do? “Fine. Don’t move me. I’ll just, you know,
live on the street.”
She puts her hand to her mouth to cover the smile. “You’re such an ass.”
“No, really, I’ll just leave this stuff here for the next tenant. I’ll go live in the park. Seems
like a small price to pay. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience my oldest friend for a few hours.”
“Oh,” she says, “so now you’re calling me old?”
When I tell her I’m out of options, I mean it sincerely. I don’t have anyone else to call.
Now, you might say that’s no one’s fault but mine. And you would be right. But no one asked
you.
In the end she agrees to stick around a while, though not necessarily to move me. It’s
only early afternoon so I have some time to convince her. While we wait for the pizza, we drink
beer on the floor and play a card game where you guess numbers and suits and after wrong
answers drink accordingly. We used to play it as teenagers. When the pizza guy comes Chevy
asks him if he wants a beer and you can see he doesn’t know if she’s joking.
We eat at the kitchen counter because I can’t find the plates. Chevy starts to rummage for
a fork in the boxes on the counter. I tell her how excited I am to move back to Albuquerque,
where there’s more to do than drive out to the country and shoot up old paint cans.
“Finally!” she says. She holds up a fork, smiling, in front of one eye. She shuts the other
and watches me through the tines.
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yeah. But I like it here.” With the fork she starts to scrape the cheese and pepperoni off
a piece of pizza. She piles them in the corner of the box, then cuts off a bite-sized chunk. This
she pops into her mouth.
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“Okay,” I say, “I give up. What are you doing?”
She puts down the fork and chews thoughtfully, the movements of her mouth slow and
rhythmic. She moans a little with pleasure. She swallows. “This is how I eat it when no one’s
around.”
“Should I feel privileged or offended by that?”
She shrugs. “Stan’s never seen.”
“I still don’t know what you see in him,” I say quietly.
“No, you wouldn’t.” She starts to scrape the cheese off another slice, not meeting my
eyes. My gaze falls to the claw marks the fork leaves in the dough.
In high school she went by Chévere. It started as an in-joke among friends. But it got to
where even the teachers called her that. Chévere. It meant “cool” in Spanish, or something like
that. One day during a pep rally she’d blown the Puerto Rican kid in the bathroom by the gym.
She said she liked his accent. He said that word while he was buckling up, and it stuck with her.
Chévere. It sounded so majestic.
“But what do girls get from something like that?” I asked her one day. She was in my
room, looking through my CD collection. My parents were downstairs watching the news. Every
so often she would scrunch her nose at something. It meant, I knew, she didn’t like what she saw.
“Nothing,” she said in response to my question. “A salty aftertaste.”
“No, I mean it. You go into a bathroom stall and do something for someone else, then get
nothing in return. Why? What’s the point?”
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She hopped up onto the flat surface of my dresser. There was a brief flash of red material
beneath her skirt as she crossed her legs. I felt myself blush. I was a virgin, then, and dying to
pull Chévere close. I was in awe of these men who got blowjobs in bathroom stalls.
“Why does anyone do the things they do?” she asked.
I wanted to say: I have no idea. You’re the one doing these things. Having them done to
you. If I knew why, maybe you and me would be doing them right now.
But instead I just sat there on the edge of my bed, cheeks burning, sure I was flunking
some test by not having an answer.
She took my virginity a couple months later. It was, appropriately enough, in the back of
a truck. We were drunk at a bonfire out in the country, and we found the first surface we could. I
lasted three pumps and an emasculating shudder. She gave me a couple more chances but I guess
I couldn’t hack it. She started seeing other people. But it was the end of the year then anyway.
She went off to college, graduated, and moved to Cheyenne to help a friend open up a bar. I
stayed in New Mexico, started and stopped college a few times, then got a job at the motor parts
plant. I hated it but never bothered to find anything else. Until her message about moving to
Cheyenne.
A few more beers. A couple more slices. Chevy makes me try a forkful of cheese and
pepperoni. I haven’t done that since I was a kid. It’s so goddamn good I want to cry. “Not bad,” I
say.
Here we are a couple of buzzed kids again. We start saying things maybe we shouldn’t,
like passing references to our shared sexual past. Her bra strap’s showing and she doesn’t seem
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to mind, her hip thrown out to the side like she used to stand in high school. There’s that rough
woman I used to know. After a few beers, everyone is always right where you left them.
She starts to touch my arm when she speaks. I slip up and call her Chévere. She laughs.
“Oh my God,” she says. “I forgot. I forgot all about that.”
I laugh, too. How can you forget a thing like that? “You were such a whore back then!” I
say.
I don’t say it to be mean. I’m thinking we might look back at those people we once were,
far off in the hazy distance, with wonder. Thinking, how ridiculous it was to have once been so
young. So full. A million roads branching out before us, all of them equally feasible.
But one look at Chevy and I know she isn’t there with me. Her eyes are fire. She slaps
me, hard as she can, then goes back to eating her pizza.
I stumble back a bit, blinking away tears. Already I feel the hot, painful swell of a palm
print on my cheek. Here’s another glimpse of the old Chevy, the one from high school, big on
sudden gestures. Once she spat on a girl who said her hair smelled like cigarettes.
“What the crap was that?” I say.
She puts down her fork. “That’s no way to talk about your oldest friend.”
“Christ. It was years ago.” Now I’m getting mad. About it all—the guy who didn’t show
up, the lack of life here, her suggestion to move in the first place, this whole damn asshole of a
town.
“You were a whore, Chevy. And so what? At least in high school you were a fucking
good time.”
I go to the fridge and get another beer. I slam the door closed. I wrap it in an old dish
towel and put it to my cheek.
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Chevy’s standing over the counter and looks suddenly sick. She shuts the pizza box and
puts her hands in her pockets. “I should go.”
“Don’t. Look, I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes,” she says. “You did.” And like always, she’s right.
We go back to the living room and sit on the floor. I tell her I’m sorry, that I shouldn’t
have said those things whether I meant them or not. The problem isn’t her. It’s me. “I shouldn’t
be here,” I say. “There’s nothing for me here.”
“Yeah, I knew that.” She starts to smile then suddenly stops, like she just remembered
something. “And still when you said you were moving here I didn’t say a thing. I know I’m no
fun anymore. I like being reminded I used to be.” I put my hand on hers and for once she lets me.
A few minutes later I’m in the bedroom, searching. I reach into a tall box and sift through
the contents. Nothing. Some loose wire, an old Nintendo controller with a broken B button, a
Playboy I stole from my friend’s dad when I was ten. I dig into another box.
“All right,” Chevy says, watching me from the doorway with her arms crossed, “I give
up. What are we looking for?”
“Wait for it,” I say.
“I’ve never been in here,” she says, stepping forward. The bedroom is impossibly small.
The door hits the dresser if you open it all the way. But I’ve had the same bed since I was
seventeen. She should recognize that.
“Ha!” I say. “Found it.” I pull out what looks like a wad of old newspaper wrapped in
duct tape. I sit down on the edge of the bed.
She sits down beside me. “Congrats. You found a ball of trash.”
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I start to tug at the tape. Nothing doing. I’m half drunk and it’s been on there for years, a
remnant of the move I made three moves ago. “Hand it here,” Chevy says. She takes out her
pocketknife and slashes at the tape. She lets the paper fall to the floor. Inside is a small bottle of
bourbon, a brand they don’t make anymore.
“Tell me what I’m seeing here,” she says. “Because I know you didn’t bring me up here
to show me an old bottle of shit whisky.”
I take it from her delicately. There’s a smashed red ribbon tied around its neck. “You
gave this to me,” I say. “When I got accepted to UNM.”
I tilt the bottle and the murky brown liquid wobbles sideways. It’s clearer round the
edges. The price tag is still there: $3.99 stamped on a faded pink label stuck to the glass.
“You kept that all this time,” she says.
“I figured we’d drink it together someday. But then we were never together that long.”
A crunching noise as I crack the plastic seal. “What are we drinking to?”
“Not being sober,” she says.
I pause. After all these years, it seems it should be something more. Still, I take a drink. I
pass it to her. She takes a drink and passes it back. We sit there silent a moment, throats burning,
eyes watering.
“That is without question the worst whiskey I’ve ever tasted,” Chevy says.
“Agreed,” I say. I take another drink.
After a while Stan calls. We’ve been drinking whiskey a while by then and Chevy has
started to slur her words. She tells him she has to drive me down to Albuquerque. That Jim never
showed and now it’s too late to get anyone else but she’ll be by soon to get the trailer.
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I hear him ask if she’s been drinking. “A couple beers,” she says. “That’s all.” She hangs
up the phone and looks over at me.
“The whiskey’s not so bad,” she says. I kiss her. She kisses back.
Most of my bad decisions I seem to make with Chevy as my witness. That time I tried to
jump Solverson creek on my dirt bike to impress her. The time I asked Jenna Beasley out in front
of all her friends because Chevy dared me. That time we were doing whip-its in my living room
and my mom came home early to find us blue-lipped and laughing in deep, monstrous voices.
The exception was quitting college. That I did all on my own.
“Hold on a sec,” I tell her. “Just a minute.” We’re on the bed now wearing nothing but
underwear, and I’ve pushed hers aside. My fingers are inside her, doing the Lord’s work. She
moans. I pull my fingers out and wipe them on my leg. “What are you doing?” she asks.
I go to the corner of the room and push over one of the boxes. A mess of tangled clothes
and bedroom knick-knacks spill out. I pull them apart. “I’m not sure where I packed the
condoms.” I dump out another box.
I know Chevy isn’t on birth control. She told me months back she stopped taking it,
convinced she didn’t come as hard when she did. “Poor Stan,” I’d said. “Using condoms till the
day he dies.”
She sits up in bed. “Get the one out of your wallet,” she says. “Don’t men keep them in
their wallets?”
“I read somewhere you’re not supposed to. They get worn out or something.”
I shut my eyes and put my fingers to my temples. Where the hell could they be? Think.
Think like a sober person. What place makes sense to put condoms? In with the toiletries? The
extra sets of sheets?
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“So it’s better to have a box somewhere else,” Chevy is saying, “where you don’t know
where it is?”
“Not the time for a lecture.”
“We’ve got to get on the road soon. Albuquerque’s what, eight hours?”
“I realize that. Just give me a damn minute.”
“What kind of man doesn’t have a condom in his wallet?”
“What kind of woman isn’t on the fucking pill?”
I kick a small box up against the wall and a mess of old CDs spills out. The room goes
quiet. I glare at them. I grab the whiskey from the nightstand and take a drink. “Who even listens
to CDs anymore?” I ask no one in particular.
“Just come here,” Chevy says quietly. “Stan will wonder why we’re taking so long. I’ll
take a morning-after pill.” She pulls me onto the bed. I lie back and shut my eyes as she pulls
down my boxers and goes to work with her mouth. I’m drunk and have to concentrate to stay
hard. Spotify, I’m thinking. That’s where it’s at. What I would give to have invested in Spotify.
A while later I hand her a towel to wipe off with. She uses it and tosses it to the floor. I
feel empty, like a pumpkin at Halloween time, insides scraped clean. Suddenly I want to cry. It’s
just the whiskey, I tell myself. That taste would put anyone in a foul mood.
“Well, well,” Chevy says beside me. “You have certainly gotten a lot better at that.”
Around us, the room has changed. The light is weaker somehow, the corners draped in
shadow. My belongings are in disarray across the floor. I feel a pang at the thought of that poor
cheap whiskey, lying half-drunk and forgotten under the bed. Boxed up for years and years just
to be drunk without a proper toast.
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“You know you can’t ever give a compliment without also saying something a little
mean?” I ask Chevy. I’m thinking about that “you got a lot better” comment. I look over at her.
She doesn’t respond. Doesn’t even look back at me. I want to take her hand or something, but it
doesn’t seem appropriate. So we just lay there side by side a while. Then she gets up to get her
clothes.
When we get to her place I watch Stan kiss her hello and wonder if she seems different. If
maybe he won’t smell or taste something strange about her. It’s foolish, I know. She rinsed off in
my shower before we left, and I watched her eat toothpaste over the bathroom sink. Still, I turn
away when he kisses her. My heart is pounding. He’s going to taste me, I think wildly.
He doesn’t. Nothing happens. I wonder for the first time if she feels guilty. But I always
got the sense that to her Stan was just part of the Wyoming landscape. Maybe we all were. You
don’t pity a rock. You don’t pity a tree. Or a tumbleweed, rolling through.
By the time we get back to the condo and load everything in, we’ve mostly sobered up.
We drive slow, one eye on the mirrors. On the highway, the wind catches an old pair of boxers
from a box in the truck bed and carries it back out of sight. I tell Chevy, who laughs. She likes
the idea of my boxers flying across some poor sap’s windshield. Maybe he’ll turn on the wipers,
and they’ll get caught in the blades, streaking back and forth across the windshield. “That’s
mean,” I tell her. “That’s mean to laugh at.”
We get to Albuquerque after midnight and the key’s under the mat like the landlord said.
We drag my stuff inside, piling it in the center of my new living room. The half-empty bottle of
bourbon sits in the middle of it all, a small wicked centerpiece. Then Chevy says she’d better get
going.
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“You can’t be serious,” I say. “You’ll have to drive till morning.”
“I know,” she says. “I’ll get a hotel on the way. I want to know I’m on the road when I
wake up. I’ll feel better that way.”
Better than what? I want to ask. But I don’t have the nerve. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I
understand.
~
A couple years later I’m standing behind a Geek Squad desk in Albuquerque, and who
walks in but Stan. He has a gray laptop under his arm and he’s wearing what looks like a new
navy-blue suit. His hair is longer than before, and slicked back. “Stan!” I say. “Stan, over here.”
“Hell,” he says, walking over, “Look who it is.” He asks how I’ve been and I say I can’t
complain. I pull at the collar of my polo shirt and ask if he likes the new digs. He laughs.
I tell him I’ve been working here over a year and I like it all right. Good quiet work, bent
over a torn-apart motherboard with a screwdriver. Worst part is having to smile for the
customers. “But you,” I say. “What are you doing here? Long way from Cheyenne.”
He nods. “I’m up for a job here, actually. More money, better title. Having trouble with
the laptop so here we are.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“Won’t turn on.”
“That’s trouble, all right.”
I play around with it a bit. Seems like a bad battery. I tell him under my breath to order a
new one online. With this model he could replace it himself for much cheaper. Funny thing is,
Stan was always good with gadgets. He should know all this.
“Great,” he says, “thanks for the help. By the way, you talked to Chevy lately?”
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Here it is. I shake my head. “I see her posts on Facebook. Sorry to hear about you two.”
Once I moved back to Albuquerque, Chevy and I lost touch again. We talked on the phone a few
times but a deep silence punctuated each sentence. Too many things best left unspoken. I heard
she broke off an engagement with Stan to get engaged to someone else.
Stan gives a well-rehearsed shrug. “It happens,” he says. “I was hoping you still talked to
her. Just so you could tell her for me, you know, no hard feelings.”
I nod. I know what Stan really wants me to tell her, and it’s more than “no hard feelings.”
That’s textable. He wants me to tell her how good he looked: new suit, gelled hair, up for a new
job with more money. And why not? Yeah, I’ll tell her, if I see her.
He puts his laptop back in its case and zips it up. He starts to straighten his tie and, in his
best impression of a man who just thought of something, tells me, “Hey, before I go, I want to
ask you something.” He rubs at his jaw absently, as if to check if he needs a shave. “I just want
to, you know, get things straight in my head. I hate to ask this. But did you and she ever, you
know...?”
I see in his eyes how much the question means to him. They search mine, terrified at
what they might see. We’re all still high schoolers at heart, I know, no matter how many new
suits we buy.
“Yeah,” I tell him, suppressing a smile, “we fooled around a bit.” I let that sit there a
moment, and watch his eyes widen almost imperceptibly. Then I continue. “We were real young
then, though. We barely knew what we were doing.”
Stan lets out a sharp laugh, like steam escaping from the smokestack on a ship. His eyes
relax. “Yeah, I figured,” he says. “You can only know someone so long without that happening.
Especially when you’re young.”
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He asks me if he owes me anything. I say no, no charge. I shake his hand and he walks
off. My manager comes over and asks what the deal is. I tell him it was just some guy who
needed a new battery but wasn’t sure yet if it was worth the money. The type we see all the time.
He’d check in with at least two other stores then end up back here, buying our battery all the
same.
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All The Wild
“Is it always so boring?” I asked my brother. It was hunting season, and we were sitting
outside on a pair of old buckets we’d used to carry our blankets and ammo. There was plenty of
gunfire in the distance, but our own rifles rested unused against their respective trees. We’d been
waiting there for hours in that cold strip of woods for a deer to wander through our line of sight.
“Look around, man,” Mick said. He waved his hand in a broad motion, a motion meant to
indicate the whole world laid bare before us. “You’re out in the thick of it. This is what the world
is. Trees, patience, light. You want something from it you have to wait.”
More minutes passed. I fished some hardboiled eggs and bacon from the sack Mom had
packed. I took a bite of egg and swallowed dryly. It needed salt. “I don’t think you answered my
question,” I said.
Mick sighed. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s always this boring. Don’t tell Mom. Dad and I usually
play cards, but I didn’t bring any.”
After several seasons of bad luck hunting, that year my dad had decided he was done.
He’d sat me and Mick and Mom down at our kitchen table and said he wouldn’t be going out
that year, he just couldn’t justify the time away from the restaurant. You would have thought
he’d told us we were going to be giving up electricity and living like the Amish.
“But you have to go!” I said. “I’m only thirteen!” Nebraska state law said I needed an
adult with me to hunt. And I’d heard from all the older kids you didn’t want to be the one boy in
the grade who didn’t go out hunting. No one was so merciless as middle school girls.
“So this is what it’s come to,” my mother said to my father. “I’m to raise two kids that
can’t even shoot a gun.”
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“We’ve talked about this,” my father said.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” she muttered, “with a husband who hasn’t shot anything in
years.”
This was my mother’s way of arguing, like she was talking to herself, even when we were
all around. It was no surprise she objected. Hunting was sacred to her. All the men in her life had
always gone. The way you hollowed out a deer after a kill and the entrails lay there in the field,
steaming—it said everything about life and death she didn’t know how.
“Why don’t I take Graham?” Mick asked. “I’ll borrow the car and drive us out there. We
can take the cell phone. If we get anything, we’ll call Dad and he can come out and say he was
with us.”
I frowned at Mick’s wording. We can go together, he could have said, instead of Why
don’t I take him? But that was me, Graham. I hated the name. The other kids called me Cracker,
though we were all equally white.
“Will that make you happy?” Dad asked Mom.
Mom said yes, it would, though we all knew it would not.
Back then, people had a hard time believing me and Mick were brothers. Even at sixteen,
Mick was built like the trunk of a redwood tree. His rough hands looked made for laying brick,
all deep lines and cracked skin. Meanwhile my hands were unlined and delicate as a spring day. I
was tall for my age but scrawny, the jumpy type of kid you could push over with a feather. I was,
Mick informed me when I turned ten, a city slicker at heart. I couldn’t help but agree. I was
quick to tears, and I disliked the cold small town air. It made my eyes itch. In my free time I did
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crossword puzzles and math problems. Hunting was, I knew, Mick and Mom’s way of schooling
me in the ways of the small town. The season before Mick had shot a buck big enough to fill our
freezer for the better part of a year, and I was sure anything less on my part would be considered
disappointing, if not unexpected.
I felt the same way around Mick that I felt around most adults back then, at least the men,
and many of the kids my own age: namely, that they just didn’t know what to do with me. I was
a child in Nebraska, a boy for Christ’ sake, who didn’t like football or raising livestock or
growing vegetables for the county fair.
The spot we hunted was on a farm that belonged to my Dad’s friend Harold, in a line of
trees between Harold's farm and the next one. Harold had only lived there a few months, and he
was uneasy at first about the two of us being out on his land unsupervised. My dad had
convinced him we were mature for our age.
In the middle of the trees ran a muddy, half-frozen stream. Around us was the sound of
trickling water and the crackle of squirrels scurrying through the trees overhead.
“You made too much noise walking in,” Mick told me. “That’s why we haven’t seen
anything.”
“Please,” I said. “The way you drive, we’d be lucky if you didn’t scare off every deer in
the county.”
We sat in silence for a while. I nodded off with my head against a tree. We’d had to get
up early to be in our spot by sunrise.
“You think Mom will let us keep the meat this year?” I asked Mick when I woke up. The
year before Dad and her fought about how much she’d given away. Practically every time she’d
gone to a friend’s house she’d brought some sausage or some venison as a gift. Dad said it
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wasn’t fair to the kids, we loved the deer meat. But even I knew it was also about money. The
restaurant we owned wasn’t doing that well, and giving away perfectly good food wasn’t going
to help things.
Mick said he didn’t know.
Another beat of silence.
“I almost don’t want to get anything,” I said. “If we do Mom’s just going to make Dad
feel bad. ‘See, look at all that meat we almost missed out on!’”
“Of course you want to get something,” Mick said. “Don’t be a pussy.”
Mick pulled a pack of Marlboro Reds out of his pocket. He’d bought it from a friend who
worked evening shifts at the gas station, a friend who was known to sell things to people cheap.
Forties, liquor, you name it. Even toilet paper, if you asked him right. His dad owned the place,
but was bad with numbers. Inventory was a constant confusion, whether his son was stealing or
not.
So my first cigarette I smoked with Mick, out there in the trees. I hated the taste but liked
the rush of it. The invincible feeling the buzz gave me. I grew four feet in an instant, stood tall
over the world, death held in breath-sized chunks between my fingers. The burn in my lungs, in
the air. I finished it quick and asked for another. Mick laughed. “No, you don’t smoke them like
that. Sit and wait a while. You won’t buzz again if you don’t wait.”
So while we waited I made up a game where we each picked a person from town to
describe with one-sentence clues, and the other one guessed. It didn’t take long for the game to
get mean. This person wears the world’s worst hairpiece. This woman has whiskers like a cat.
This kid’s bottom teeth are all sideways. This kid sucked his thumb until third grade.
Then Mick made a pick that made me mad. This was always the thing with Mick, the
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thing with older brothers. They lift you up to their level just long enough to throw you down in
the mud.
“This kid’s as jumpy as a grasshopper,” he said. When I said I didn’t know he went on.
“This kid wet the bed at age six... This kid’s so bland his nickname suits him.... This kid’s
delicate as a newborn kitten.”
“I don’t want to play anymore,” I said.
“Come on,” he said, smiling. “Guess.”
I stood up. “I’m going to go take a leak.” I took the pack of cigarettes, and walked off
into the corn field.
The piss puddled in the dirt by a row of corn, steaming. After I zipped myself back up I
lit a cigarette with a match, tossed the match on the ground, and headed back towards the road. I
had half a mind to just walk home. It would take a while, but I was done with hunting. I could
always just go back to school the next day and lie, say I already shot something.
On my way back I had to pass Harold’s house, and a woman I assumed was his wife
came out onto the back porch to say hello. She wore a blue and white checkered shirt and had
blond hair pulled back in a bun. I was lucky to have just ground out my cigarette beneath my
heel. She looked like the type who would tell Mom. I felt my cheeks turn red as she looked me
up and down. She was very pretty.
She crossed her arms in the cold. “You must be Graham,” she said. “Where’s your
brother? You’re not out here by yourself, are you?”
“I wish,” I said. I spat on the ground. It was the angriest, manliest gesture I could think
of.
I watched Betty try to suppress a smile. That made me all the more angry.
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“I don’t even want to be here!” I shouted suddenly. “Mom made me come.” This was a
thing I hadn’t realized until then. In a house like mine, you didn’t always know a thing until you
yelled it at somebody.
Betty looked startled. “Oh,” she said. “Um. Do you want to come inside?” She said it in a
way like she was more than a little terrified at the idea. But I nodded yes and followed her in.
Betty led me to the kitchen table and pulled a chair out for me. “You want anything?”
She asked. “A pop? Some milk? I think I have a slice of pie.” She opened the refrigerator door
and stared in. As she bent down to look I took a strong interest in the view I had. Since the
summer before when I’d started discovering the things my body was capable of, I had gotten
very good at recording images like this for future use.
I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything. My mind was balled up with anger at
Mick and fatigue from the early morning. When I didn’t respond Betty set a slice of pie and
some milk in front of me. “Eat this,” she said. “You’ll feel better.”
I picked up the fork and shoveled a bite into my mouth. It was so cold it made my eyes
water, but it was good. She’d put in cinnamon and you could tell the apples were fresh. This was
a woman who made homemade crust. Hell, she probably picked the apples herself.
Betty took a seat across from me and folded her hands on the table. She had a vibrant
beauty that clashed with her surroundings. “You’re having a bad time out here,” she said.
I nodded. I took another bite of pie. I couldn’t remember the last time Mom had made me
pie. Usually she slapped my hand away. Cut it out, Graham, that’s for the customers.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” I said. “I’m short on sleep.”
“Do you want me to call your mom? I bet she can come get you.”
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I shook my head. “No, she’ll make me go back to school.”
“I liked school when I was your age.”
“Yeah. I think that’s a girl thing.”
She laughed. “So what’s the boy thing, waking up at six in the morning to go sit in a cold
field? Doesn’t sound like fun to me.”
“No, I guess not.”
I looked around the little house. It was all immaculate. White countertops scrubbed clean,
spotless linoleum, a water bowl by the kitchen sink for some animal that looking around you’d
swear never shed. I could see into the living room at an angle. There was a TV with rabbit ears,
and a small shelf full of books. “Where are you coming from?” I asked her.
“I’m from Kansas City, originally,” she said. “Harold grew up around here. It was always
a dream of his to come back and buy a farm. We just got here a few months ago.”
I shook my head. “Once I escape,” I said, “I’m never coming back.”
“Oh, it’s not so bad,” she said. But the way she looked around the little house as she said
it, as if searching for some sort of evidence, made me think she wasn’t so sure.
We decided to let Mick sit out in the field a while and worry. At least I wanted to think
he was worried. Let him think I walked on home to cry to Mom. Let him think he had a whole
heap of trouble waiting for him at home. I was enjoying my time with Betty. It felt strangely
invasive to be inside someone else’s home, invasive in an exciting way, eating their food and
watching their TV. But there was something sad about it too, this woman all alone with nothing
to do until her husband got home. Their harvest was all done, and Harold was up at a neighbor’s
farm helping out for some extra cash.
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A little before sunset I headed back out to find Mick and get my rifle. Sunset was best for
spotting deer, I’d heard. It’s when they wake up and maybe feel a bit hungry, a bit thirsty. Head
out for a tasty nibble of corn from the stalks, or to wet their snouts in the river. We could shoot
until a half hour after the sun went down. I walked quiet as I could back to our spot in the trees,
careful to avoid fallen cornhusks.
Mick heard me coming up behind him. He craned his head around. “Look who it is,” he
whispered, also careful not to make too much noise.
“Go to hell,” I said. I sat down. Mick had his gun across his lap. I left mine leaning
against the tree.
“Where you been?”
“None of your business,” I whispered back. “You killed anything yet?”
“Sure. Loads of em. Look at all these dead deer.”
He motioned at the empty ground in front of us.
“Seen anything at least?”
He shook his head. “Around four I got bored and shot up a fence post pretty good.”
“Great,” I said. “Maybe we can mount that and put it on the wall.”
The woods grew darker.
“I was worried you went home,” Mick said.
“Not worried enough to go looking.”
He blew warm air into his hands. He looked like he wanted to say something. The air was
getting cold again. I put my gloves back on and pulled a spare blanket out of the bucket and
pulled it up onto my lap. The deep yellow sun touched down on the horizon line. The air was
hazy with cold dust, blowing off of the fields, so that the sun appeared to shimmer. I felt the grit
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in my eyes and squinted out at it, biting at a flap of dead skin hanging from my lip. It had started
to smell like snow. Like hell would I be back the next day if it started to snow, I thought.
About fifty yards out, from where our line of trees curved westward and shot off onto the
neighboring land, something stepped out into the field. Something big, with two littler
somethings trailing behind. The rack on the one in front rose up into the sky.
“Mick,” I whispered.
“I see it.”
He shouldered his rifle and looked through the scope. Mine was leaning against the tree. I
was terrified to move for it. I didn’t want to attract the deer’s attention. Them there in front of
me, it seemed a thing delicate as a smoke ring. I was afraid if I breathed too hard they might
disappear.
A sudden flush of indignation filled me. Son of a bitch, I thought. Mick’s going to get the
kill out of sheer dumb luck, having his rifle on his lap. Easy as shooting up a fence post.
“Well,” I whispered, “go on already.” But Mick just sat there, scope to his eye. In the
field, the deer moseyed along the cornrows. A buck and a doe and a fawn. A moment later, Mick
lowered his gun. Something was churning behind his eyes and lips. I saw a trembling there. “I
don’t know,” he said.
“What don’t you know?” I hissed, a little too loud. “Shoot it already.”
The buck stopped and looked in our direction. The other deer stopped too and all of a
sudden the whole world was stock-still, looking at us, what we were going to do.
“It’s a family,” Mick said. “A mother and a father and a fawn.”
What’s that got to do with anything? I thought wildly. Slowly, looking the buck dead in
the face, I leaned forward on my bucket and wrapped my fingers around the barrel of my rifle.
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Then I leaned slowly back, taking the rifle with me. There you go, be still now, I thought at the
deer. I put the stock to my shoulder and peered out through the scope.
He was right, I supposed. I centered the crosshairs on the baby deer. It was small enough
it couldn’t be out on its own. I drifted the crosshairs to the right, over the ridge of the mother’s
spine. She was a medium-sized doe, nothing special. Then the buck. I counted three points on
each antler. He was standing with his great brown body perpendicular to us, his head craned our
way, watching my every move. I trained my cross hairs on his heart and flipped the safety.
“He’s a father,” Mick whispered. There was something weak and raw in his voice. I took
one deep, calm breath. Then I pulled the trigger.
There was a great boom and I felt the gun jump back against my shoulder. Without
leaning away from the scope I pulled the bolt back to eject the casing and sent another one into
the chamber. It wasn’t necessary. I watched the animals scatter off through the field. The doe
first, followed by the fawn. The buck bounded forward a few steps, then fell down into the corn
where we couldn’t see him anymore.
I let out a hoot of joy. “I got him!” I said. I stood up and put the safety on and slung the
gun back over my shoulder. I smacked Mick on the back. He looked stunned.
“Buck up,” I said, not intending the pun but not exactly minding it either. I think I saw
him wince. I grabbed my rifle and a bucket of supplies and took off. After a moment, I heard his
footsteps trailing behind.
The buck was on the other side of the stream, so I had to go down onto the muddy bank
and leap across it. There was a sucking sound beneath my boots but I barely noticed. I was full of
light, even as it faded from the field. The whole forest and everything in it, all the wild earth, it
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was all for me.
We found the buck on the ground on his side, head cocked back at an impossible angle. It
looked like he’d hit the ground still breathing, judging by the bloodied scuff marks in the dirt,
then started to kick his legs and scooted back a few feet across the ground. His great body was
stretched back forever in one deep breath. He’d taken half a dozen stalks of corn with him,
cracked down in his final fight with the darkness falling around him. It was a good, clean kill, I
saw with pride. Right through the chest.
I stood there a moment, admiring my handiwork in the fading light. “We’ve got to call
Dad,” Mick said beside me. “He’ll have to say he was here. You need an adult present.”
“Yeah, all right, call him then.” I laid my gun down in the dirt.
Mick took the cellphone out of his pocket and punched in the number for the restaurant.
My fingers and lips were numb with cold. I half listened to Mick talking to Dad, stuttering out
the words, and put my tag on the thing’s ear. Mick must be in awe of me, I thought. A six point
buck my first year. That will show him. Everyone else, too.
“He’s an ugly one, huh?” Mick said quietly as he hung up the phone. He motioned with
his gloved hand at the antlers. One of the tips was cracked.
“You don’t get that big without having some fight in you.”
“Well, Dad’s on his way. He’s got to call around to find a ride out here.”
I looked over at my brother. He was holding his scarf to his mouth, staring down at the
dead deer.
“It’s getting dark,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“We won’t have any light to dress him by.”
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“Dad’s on his way.”
I took a couple deep breaths, real attentive to the cold air surging in and out of me,
looking at the red hole torn into the buck’s lungs. I felt like a lucid dream, all power. “We won’t
have any light,” I said. “And the damn thing’s bleeding on my meat.”
I left Mick standing there, staring dumbly at the thing, and I set off back to the line of
trees to find a good stick. I saw a decent branch right away and jumped and grabbed it with both
hands, pulling down with all my weight. It snapped off. Then I broke it again over my knee. I
carried the better half back to Mick.
“Help me move it,” I said.
“What for?”
“We’ve got to dress it while there’s still light. Help me turn it on its back.”
“Like hell.”
“Come on, the meat will spoil.” I got down on the ground and started tugging at it. It was
impossible heavy. All dead weight. I grabbed its front feet and back feet all together and pulled.
It barely moved an inch. I looked up at Mick and he shook his head. Something was wrong with
him. He looked sick. I tugged at the thing’s feet some more. I rose to mine and heaved with all
my strength, enough to slide the thing off the flattened stalks of corn and onto the dirt. I got
down on my knees and put my hands under it. Its fur was still warm. I pulled up with everything
I had, feeling a deep burn in my muscles, but nothing happened. “Come on!” I shouted at Mick,
and after a moment he got down on his knees and helped. The thing slumped over onto its back,
legs splayed out. I looked up at its head and the antlers were tracing new lines in the dirt. Its eyes
were black. Its lips were slightly parted, showing its soft pink tongue and yellow nubby teeth. I
put the branch I’d grabbed between its hind legs, propping them open wide, and wiped the sweat
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off my forehead with the back of my sleeve.
I pulled a flashlight out of the bucket and clicked it on. I handed it to Mick. “Hold that,” I
said. Then I grabbed the buck knife and flipped it open.
This was a thing I’d seen my dad do a couple times, when I’d ridden my bike out after
school to meet Mick and him here during deer season. He would always gut Mick’s kills, and
explain himself as he did it. He said it was best done right away, otherwise you could lose meat. I
put the blade tip to the animal’s fur just below the rib cage. I pressed against it gradually, until
there was a release of pressure and it slid in. Then I started carving downward. There was a
sound like tearing fabric. The thing opened up and in the beam of the flashlight Mick held I saw
steam rising from the hole I’d made. I cut around the genitals and pulled out the bladder, slicing
at the top as I did. Then together we rolled the buck onto his side and watched his organs spill
out. I helped them out with my hand, slicing gently at the connections there were between them
and the rest of the carcass. The wet organs were slippery in my hand. “Keep the light still,” I told
Mick. I looked up and he wasn’t even looking at me. His eyes were off at the edge of the field.
“Graham,” he said queasily. I followed his eyes. There at the edge of the field on the
south side, along another line of trees, was the fawn, watching me work. I stood up and looked at
him. Suddenly burning at him, the brazenness. Wasn’t he scared of me? I wiped at my runny
nose with the back of my forearm because my hands were covered in blood. “Go on!” I shouted.
The thing didn’t move. I picked up my gun.
“Jesus, Graham, no, he’s just a kid,” Mick said. He grabbed the gun from me, careful to
keep the barrel pointed away, off into the trees. He wiped the blood off the stock with the sleeve
of his flannel. His eyes searched mine the way you’d search the wreckage of a battlefield.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said.
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I got back down on the ground to scoop the rest of the blood out of my buck. “I was only
going to scare him is all,” I said. I wondered idly if that was true. There wasn’t much on my
mind when I grabbed the gun, to be honest. Just a flash of white-hot power and rage mixed up
into a little ball, and that dumb deer staring at me with those hurt eyes.
“Just hold the damn light already,” I said. “And blast a couple shots into the air to get that
fawn out of here.”
By the time Dad got there the field was pitch black. We heard him calling to us from the
other side of the stream. “Over here!” Mick called. He waved his arms in the air, though there
was no way Dad could see. A flashlight beam shot dimly through the trees, breaking into pieces
between the trunks. “Hell of a kill,” he said when he found us and trained the flashlight on the
deer. He frowned. “You could have waited to gut it. I would have helped you.”
“I didn’t know when you’d get here,” I said.
Dad got down on his knees and peered into its parted torso with his flashlight, pulling on
one of its legs to open it up. “You shouldn’t have done that without me,” he said. “You could
have ruined the meat.” I clenched my fist at my side. Was he being serious right now? I felt like I
deserved a gold medal in deer dressing. He knew how easy it was to pop the bladder or puncture
the stomach wall, and I’d done neither. He stood up and scratched at his beard. “I guess we better
go talk to the Neukirchs. You shot the thing off Harold’s land. If they ask, say you shot him back
there and he ran through to the other side.”
My dad shined the flashlight beam on me and laughed. “You look like one of your
zombie shows,” he said. Blood covered my shirt and hands.
On the way back to the car, we walked by Betty’s house. The lights were on in the living
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room. I saw her part the blinds to look out at us, traipsing as we were out of the field, the back-
porch light shining onto our buckets, our faces, our guns. The blood on my shirt. I grinned at her
and waved with my free hand. She drew the blinds closed sharply without smiling back or
returning my gesture.
The next Sunday, my mom baked Betty and Harold a pecan pie. She insisted I needed to
show some thanks to them for letting me hunt their ground. “Go ask your father to drive you out
there,” she said. Things at home were tenser than ever. She and Dad weren’t speaking. “Your
father” was the closest she’d come to saying his name.
The day after I’d shot my deer, we’d decided to sleep in rather than head back out at first
light, even though we had another tag Mick could use. Mick said he wasn’t feeling well, and
anyway we’d made enough noise the night before that it was probably better to give it a day or
two for the deer to return. Mom was so thrilled at that point at the glut of meat set to fill our
fridge she didn’t even make us go to school. She said we deserved a day of rest.
But then that evening Mick said he didn’t want to go back out at all. He’d had his fill of
freezing his balls off in some field, he said, and anyway the meat from my deer would be plenty.
Something in the way he said it, a flash of that uneasiness he’d shown in the field, and I knew it
was more than that.
“You’re going to let your little brother be the man of the family then,” my mom said. We
were at the dinner table, and she’d had some wine with her food. “You and your father. Christ.”
This was the first shot fired in a long argument that stretched into the next day and settled
into a cold spell between the three of them. Mom wanted Mick to man up, Dad wanted Mom to
lay off, Mick wanted to be left alone. I may as well have not been there at all.
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So when I went out to bring Betty that pecan pie, it was by myself. Dad wouldn’t drive
me, said he wanted nothing to do with anything of my mother’s, including pie. So I rode my
bike, slowly, holding the pie on top of the handlebars with one hand and steering with the other. I
may have tried to get out of this errand if I hadn’t been eager to see Betty again. That afternoon
in her house, it was the first time in a long time I’d felt right at home.
But when she ushered me in her manner was cold as the air outside. She didn’t look at me
when she asked if she could get me anything. Harold was with her now, and he shook my hand.
“Get the boy some hot cocoa,” he said. “Make it with milk.”
He and I sat down at the kitchen table. “Your dad said it was a hell of thing, that buck
you shot.”
I nodded. I pulled out some pictures we’d taken before we drove it to the butcher. There
was my deer strapped to the trunk of the car, a thin trickle of blood at its mouth and its great
horns intertwined with the luggage rack.
“Hell of a thing,” Harold said again, fanning out the pictures. For a moment Betty stood
over us, peering down at them, then looked away. There was that uneasiness again at the sight of
the deer, the one I’d seen in Mick. My child’s mind registered this as a sort of betrayal. My eyes
followed her to the stove, where she was heating some milk. Something in my chest tightened
like an angry fist. Her back was to me now. It felt like I could wait there my whole life and she
would never turn around.
When I got home, Mick was in our room sitting on the edge of his bed, staring down at a
biology book. He was taking notes on a yellow legal pad. I asked him what he was doing and he
said, “What’s it look like I’m doing? Mind your own business.”
I laid down on my bed in a huff. He knew I was into all that stuff. Books, math, biology.
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In his better moments in the past he would tell me to come sit beside him and explain what he
was reading best he could. It was way more advanced than what they had me studying in school.
But he didn’t do that now. And I got the sense then that lines had been drawn in the sand,
and without realizing it I’d drawn a small circle right around myself. I curled up wordlessly on
the bed with a black pen and a book of crossword puzzles, waiting for Mom to call us down for
dinner.
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Semantics
When my daughter developed a new verbal tic, my wife was sure the fault was mine. I
tried to deflect the blame, or at least spread it around a bit. “When have you ever heard me talk
like that?” I asked her. “She must have heard it on TV. Or from that little friend of hers, the one
with the hair. I never liked that kid.”
Cindi, my eight-year-old, had a new favorite word: porn. Imagine my wife’s surprise. She
came home late from work and Cindi was on the floor playing with trains. When my wife asked
where I was, Cindi said, “He’s in his room watching pet porn.”
My wife thought—well, what would you have thought? What did that mean, pet porn?
Was it some new thing men were into, that she’d now have to form some opinion about? Why
was her husband watching it, instead of looking after their daughter? And what would she see
when she walked through that cracked bedroom door?
She knocked tentatively, and I told her to come in. I was on my laptop, looking at pictures
of animals for the ESL class I taught. Dog. Cat. Fox. Bear. She laughed and said, “Oh thank
God.”
The next day, the call came from the school. Cindi was in the principal’s office, and she’d
just been pulled from class. One of her classmates had asked her about some new movie, and
she’d replied she wasn’t into “superpower porn.”
When she got home, we sat Cindi down and explained to her that this was not a nice word
for eight-year-olds. She asked us what it meant, and we told her not to worry about that, not yet.
But my wife and I couldn’t help it, we cracked up as soon as we put her to bed. The flustered
principal fretting, wringing her hands. My wife’s worry about what the hell pet porn was. Cindi
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seemed to understand the word had something to do with pictures, surfaces, screens. This meant
she was perceptive, yes? Should we be proud?
We began to use the word more frequently ourselves, and with time realized we already
used it in the sense Cindi meant. The pictures my wife took in restaurants: food porn. The
movies I watched, where all the annoying teenagers received their comeuppance: torture porn.
But there was more, too. The West Elm catalogue my wife liked, that was new furniture porn.
The tech blogs I read were gadget porn, and the pet adoption ads on the TV were philanthropy
porn. Even the pornography we watched together one night, that was “would you ever…?” porn.
My wife’s LinkedIn inbox was filled with messages, asking her to apply. She read every
one. These messages were better money porn, better benefit porn, new school district porn, porn
of being somewhere else, someone else. I told her we could talk about it. She told me she had no
intention. “We have Cindi,” she said, as if that settled something, settled everything. “I just like
to look.”
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The Repair
Melanie opened the door and it was Jerry, eyes puffed up like he’d been crying. “I
thought you were the plumber,” she said. She stood on tiptoes and looked into the hallway over
his shoulder, as if the plumber might be hiding somewhere behind him. “We’ve got a leak in the
bedroom.”
“Just me,” Jerry said. “Marty home?”
“He will be soon.”
They kissed each other on the cheek. Jerry stepped inside but hovered by the doorway.
“Shoes off?” he said.
“Your call.”
He left his shoes on and pulled a stool up to the kitchen island. Mel took a liter of beer
from the fridge without asking and set it down in front of him, along with a glass and a bottle
opener. He popped the top and took a big drink straight from the bottle.
It was a small, one-bedroom apartment. The seals on the windows were shot and they
lived on the tenth story, so the floors were always grimy from the dirt that blew in. The kitchen
sink clogged at least once a week and the water was rarely warm. The owner spoke English,
though, and it was furnished, which had sold Mel and Marty on it. It wasn’t worth buying
furniture. They still didn’t know how long they wanted to stay in Chile.
Jerry rocked his rear from side to side on the uncomfortable stool. “It’s not like I’m not
trying,” Jerry told Mel. “You know I’m trying.” He guzzled more beer.
Mel took a long look at him. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” he said with a grimace, as if the word tasted sour. “You know Tiff.
She gets in these moods is all.”
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Mel said nothing. She did know Tiff, and it bothered her when he talked that way.
Whatever Tiff was mad at, it wasn’t nothing.
He went on. “When she got home she was mad at me because she got a promotion. Most
people would be happy about that, but not her. She gets in these moods and she’s not happy for
anything. It’s like living with a stick of dynamite. She says she’s tired of me at home all the time,
doing nothing, earning nothing. I’d made tuna noodle casserole for dinner and while she yelled at
me it was in the oven getting burned. We were halfway through the argument before she even
told me about the promotion. She’s senior risk analyst now. We don’t even need another
income.”
Another long drink, like he’d just run a marathon and it was the first water he’d had. “It’s
not like I’m not trying,” he said again. “I only drink liquor on the weekends now. During the
week, just beer and wine.”
Mel picked up the bottle cap and pretended to study it, not sure what to say.
“Maybe champagne,” Jerry continued, “if there’s some around.”
Mel, Marty, and Jerry had all come to Santiago around the same time, and met in the
same English-teaching course. They were all in their listless mid-twenties then, recent graduates
looking to put off full-on adulthood for another year or two. That was four years ago. Now what
had started as a brief prelude to adult life had turned into adult life itself.
Before Santiago, Marty had lived his whole life in Kansas City. He always wore button-
up shirts, even to the beach. When Mel met him, he confessed he’d only recently stopped using
chewing tobacco. They started sleeping together, then dating, then eventually got married. Jerry,
on the other hand, had come with a girl, but she left a few months later and he took up with Tiff,
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a recent graduate in international business there to learn Spanish. At first Tiff was just in Chile
for the summer, then the year, then indefinitely. Eventually, Jerry either quit or got fired from the
institute he worked for, it was never entirely clear.
Whenever a new expat asked her for advice, Mel would say, “Visit home early and often.
Otherwise you’ll never feel at home. Not here, not there.”
Mel still remembered her first visit home to California, a harder shock than anything she
experienced in Santiago. It was like sliding into what one thought was a warm bath and instead
was freezing cold. For her Chilean friends, work was a mere distraction from life, the chore you
had to endure before getting to what really mattered. Each moment outside work was wrung for
every last drop of fun, whether it was traveling to the beach or mountains over the weekend,
enjoying too many two-for-one Thursday night drink specials, or passing long hours playing
soccer in the park. Meanwhile, her friends in San Diego rarely traveled, rarely went out during
the week. All they talked about were people they were dating, new movies, job titles, salary
hikes, celebrities they wanted to sleep with. These things now seemed so trivial to Mel. She was
learning a new language, a new culture. She’d travelled extensively. But nobody wanted to talk
about any of that. The closest she got was when one of her friends asked her, after half a
margarita, “What do they speak there in Chile?”
Mel started visiting home less frequently, and for shorter periods. Then people started
having babies. Pretty soon that was all anybody ever talked about when she Skyped. She’d get all
the info about Jillian’s first steps, or Jacob’s first words, and little else. “But what are you up to?”
she’d sometimes ask. “How are you?” Her friends would look at her with confusion bordering on
concern. The most they’d offer was that work was going well.
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I climbed a volcano! Mel wanted to sometimes scream. I slept on an island made of
folded reeds! I’ve seen penguins out in the wild, close enough to touch! You want to tell me
about Jillian’s bee sting!?
But then, she was an outsider here, too. Gradually all their gringo friends left to head
back to wherever home was, until only Jerry and Tiff remained. The new expat arrivals began to
blur together, until it hardly seemed worth making friends with people who would probably be
leaving soon too. She started to lean heavily on Marty, perhaps too heavily. And lately he
seemed just as world-weary as her friends in the U.S.
Jerry and Mel were still at the kitchen counter, now trading off on sips of beer, when they
heard the rough sound of a key in the lock. The front door opened and Marty stepped inside.
Mel swiveled on her stool. “Jerry’s here,” she said.
Marty set down his bag. “Hey, Jer.” He took a few steps forward and they shook hands.
This South American nicety had bled into all his interactions, even with other gringos.
“I see we’re drinking,” Marty said.
“Only beer,” Jerry mumbled. “It’s a weeknight.”
Marty raised an eyebrow at Mel. “Can I talk to you a minute?” he asked.
She followed him to the bedroom, and shut the door behind them.
“I thought we were going out tonight,” he said, trying to keep his voice low.
She was wearing jeans and an old tee shirt she usually only slept in. Her hair was pulled
back.
“What,” she said, “for sushi? It’s up the street. We can go there any night of the week.”
“Keep your voice down. What’s he doing here?”
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“Tiff kicked him out.”
“I don’t want him staying here.”
“He hasn’t asked to. Anyway, we can’t go out. The plumber hasn’t shown yet.”
She motioned past him, toward the ceiling, and as she did he heard the plop of water into
water. He turned and looked up. There was a wide wet spot where the liquid was pooling above
the white paint, and a big blister in the center was dripping steadily into the bucket beneath. It
was worse than when he’d left. Newer, smaller blisters had started to form beside the bigger one.
“I called the landlord,” Mel said. “She called him and called me back to say he was on his
way, but he isn’t here yet.”
Marty had woken up the night before with water in his face. They’d already pushed their
bed to the opposite corner. They’d have to move it to the living room if the leak kept getting
worse.
“We can’t live like this,” he said, no longer bothering to keep his voice low.
She wasn’t sure what he meant. The leak, maybe, or Jerry in the other room. “Lots of
people do,” she said.
When Mel came out of the bedroom, Jerry was still at the counter, spinning the beer
bottle cap across it. A nervous habit of his. It kept falling down and he kept picking it back up for
another spin.
“More beer?” she asked. She went to the fridge and popped open another, not waiting for
his response.
“Marty doesn’t want me here.”
“We’ve got this leak in our ceiling is all. He’s on the phone with the landlord now.”
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Jerry cocked his head to the side and listened to Marty in the other room. “Your landlord
speaks English? Lucky. Anytime anything goes wrong in our place I’ve got to get out the
dictionary before I call.” Like Marty and Mel, Jerry’s Spanish was good but still not perfect.
After a short conversation Marty opened the bedroom door. Mel saw his neck was red
and blotchy. He got that way when he was mad, as if anger literally heated his blood. He teetered
there silently in the doorway, staring down at the phone in his hand like he might just snap it in
half.
“No luck?” Jerry asked, and Mel could have killed him.
Marty said no, no luck, the owner didn’t know what had happened to the plumber but
she’d try him again tomorrow. He didn’t look up from the phone. Mel feared he was barely
keeping it together. Being from the Midwest, his emotions got all snarled up inside him, hard
even for him to untangle. She knew he wanted nothing more than to just sit in silence and pout.
But here was Jerry at the kitchen counter, drinking beer.
“This would never happen in the U.S.,” Marty said. “I’d be on the phone with my
lawyer.”
Jerry said, “That wouldn’t do you any good. Not unless your lawyer knew how to fix a
leak. Let me take a look. My uncle’s a plumber.”
Without waiting for a response, Jerry went to the bedroom. Mel and Marty followed. The
dark wet spot was about a meter across now, and three bubbles in the paint were now broken
open and dripping. Jerry stood up on the bed and rapped his knuckles against a dry spot. He
moved his hand to the left and knocked again. The same tough, dull thud. “That’s cement,” he
said. He hopped down off the bed, wobbling a bit on the landing. Mel almost reached out to
steady him.
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He turned to Marty. “This is a problem for the people upstairs,” he said. “You can’t drill
upward through cement; they’ll have to fix it from up there, drilling downward. What’s on the
other side of that wall? Another apartment?”
Mel hated the way Jerry was talking to Marty. It made her feel small, and it’d be even
worse for him. They weren’t good at this stuff. All the other adults here, Chileans and gringos
alike, seemed to know things they didn’t. Jerry and Tiff had previously balked when they called
their landlord about replacing a stuck lock rather than just doing it themselves.
“If the layout upstairs is the same,” Jerry continued, “it’s either the apartment right above
or the one next to that. It’s got to be coming from someone’s bathroom or kitchen, up on the
eleventh floor. The pipe to a toilet or sink. It’ll be them who has to make the repair, not you. You
can’t do it from here.”
“We’ll see what the plumber says, thanks,” Marty said, neck reddening.
Jerry pulled at his lower lip. “I’m just trying to help. You might want to tell your
landlord.” He glanced over Marty’s shoulder, toward the beer on the kitchen counter, like he was
afraid it might have gone somewhere.
“It’s not our job to know this stuff,” Marty muttered. From his expression, you would
think he were being asked to live with a leaky ceiling for the rest of his life.
Around 8 o’clock the doorbell buzzed and Marty got the door. It was the plumber, two
and a half hours late. He was younger than them, college-aged perhaps. He carried no tools,
nothing to fix anything with. Maybe his tools are in the car, Marty thought hopefully.
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He led the plumber passed Jerry and Mel to the bedroom. The plumber gazed up at the
leak with his hands on his hips. He took off his shoes and stood up on the bed. “Cemento,” he
murmured as he knocked on the ceiling.
Yeah, we already know, Marty said in Spanish. Can you fix it, please?
The man shook his head. He said it would have to be the people upstairs. A long, messy
job. He asked if they knew their neighbors and Marty said no. Then he followed the plumber up
to the eleventh floor where they rang their neighbor’s buzzer again and again. No one answered.
When he got back downstairs Marty set the plumber’s card on the counter, uncapped the
last bottle of beer from the fridge, and took it to the bedroom without a word, shutting the door
behind him. Through the thin wall he heard Jerry ask if they had any pisco. He said as long as
they mixed it with something it was no stronger than beer.
Marty was the only one of them still teaching English, but he no longer worked for an
institute. Instead he taught private classes, traveling around the city. The money wasn’t great, but
his classes were in the afternoon and evening so he got to sleep in every day. Lately he was
making mistakes, though, as if teaching just couldn’t hold his attention anymore. He’d started
forgetting bus routes, what time his classes were, which student was in what book. One morning
he was halfway to Parque Arauco before he remembered that the student he taught there had
ceased classes six months ago, he was going the wrong way. He was tired of traipsing around
office to office in the hot sun, wearing a backpack full of textbooks. It made him feel like a kid,
and not in a good way. Then home to this apartment so much smaller than any apartment he’d
imagined living in at this stage of his life: a bedroom with room for only one nightstand, a bath
where his wife couldn’t fully extend her legs, a kitchen with a half fridge and a stove with only
two burners.
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Mel, meanwhile. She was thriving as a curriculum coordinator at one of the English
schools. She loved poring through textbooks, bookmarking blog posts online, reading books on
the correct way to teach diphthongs and gutturals and fricative consonants. Once she left him a
note in the phonetic alphabet to see if he could decipher it. “Just for kicks,” she said, filled with
the enthusiasm Marty had to fake on a daily basis.
Marty lay in bed a while, watching the ceiling drip. He was wearing his clothes under the
covers, beer bottle wrapped in part of the bedspread to keep the cold from burning his fingers. It
reminded him of the first time he drank beer, as a kid of fifteen in a park at night, out of a forty
covered with a paper sack because that’s what he and his friends had seen on TV. Marty didn’t
admit to any of his friends that he hated the taste. He suspected they all did too. It was a thrill
just to be out after their parents were asleep, stumbling around as they all acted drunker than they
could have possibly been. He remembered looking up at the night sky, the stars, the moon, and it
all seemed brighter, fiercer than ever before. Marty couldn’t remember the last time he’d found a
thrill in something so simple as a plain night sky. Even the thrills in South America hadn’t felt
that electric.
He shut his eyes, listened to the plop plop of water into the bucket. Tried to imagine he
was somewhere else, on a boat on a lake perhaps, and that the sound of water was the waves
lapping at the side of the vessel. He took a drink of beer and grimaced, the weak, bitter taste
sticking to the back of his teeth.
He opened his eyes and looked up. The dark spot was wider now, and there were even
more bubbles forming at the edge. They weren’t dripping yet but would be soon. “Just call her,”
he heard Mel say gently in the next room. “I’m sure it will be fine.”
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A moment of silence while Jerry dialed. Then: “Tiff, listen. I want to come home. We
should be celebrating your promotion, not fighting… I know, look, Mel said she’ll ask around at
work and see if there’s openings… No, not in teaching, I don’t want to teach. Someone’s got to
do their site, right? It looks like something off GeoCities… I’m not going to tell her to ask
because I don’t want a teaching job… It’s not like a marketing degree expires… Why don’t I
come home and we can talk about this?”
Marty listened numbly to the long silence. He both respected and hated Jerry for sticking
to his guns, for not deigning to teach. It was only a matter of time.
“She hung up,” Jerry said.
“You have a key, right?”
“Sure I do. But there’s a chain.”
That night they dragged the bed into the living room. The couch wasn’t big enough for
anyone but a child, so Jerry offered to sleep on the floor in the corner of the bedroom, curled up
with a spare blanket. Marty surprised himself by saying no, we can’t let you do that, you’ve
already had a rough enough go of it for one day. The bedroom was a minefield of bowls and
buckets, and the splatter from the water was sure to get him. “The bed’s big,” Marty insisted, as
much to himself as to Jerry. “It’s the one nice piece of furniture. We might as well take
advantage of that.” He wanted to believe he said all this to be nice, not out of obligation, not out
of pity, and not because if he didn’t he suspected Mel would.
So they lay side by side, Mel in the middle, waiting for sleep to overtake them, all trying
to imagine they were anywhere else. Marty put himself back to that park, sucking beer with his
friends. He wondered what that fifteen-year-old version of himself would think of him now—his
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leaky ceiling, his bed in the living room, shared with two others. He wanted to tell that kid: The
headache you will wake up to tomorrow is only the beginning. It’s one long headache going
forward. Across the bed, Jerry started to snore.
Beside him Mel remembered a hostel in Peru, where they’d stayed the night before going
on to Machu Picchu, a room so cold they’d kept warm by making love and holding each other
through the night. And that good was good not in spite of the bad but because of it: the dark,
frigid air driving her and Marty closer together rather than further apart. She wondered if Marty
would still hunker there with her in that room or instead go to the front desk and demand a space
heater, more blankets, a warmer room. She knew he resented her instinct to hold on to their
friendship with Tiff and Jerry, this dysfunctional pair. But there was no one else.
In the middle of the night she awoke with a start. Confused, she heard movement beside
her and instinctually shifted toward it, resting her cheek on Jerry’s chest. She knew instantly
from the unfamiliar smell of his shirt that it was not her husband. But she rested her cheek there
just a moment longer, imagining that it was indeed a young Marty, and that the unfamiliar smell
was from the detergent in the laundromat near that Peruvian hostel. Under her cheek Jerry
pretended to be asleep, though from his shallow breaths she could tell he was not.
After a moment she pulled away. She lay alone in the middle of the bed, listening to the
leak, gazing up. She had to pee but the furniture was rearranged, the path to the bathroom littered
with bowls. Best to wait for her eyes to adjust to the dark.
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Anywhere But Home
Larry Ebeler and his wife were right outside city limits when his high beams caught the
glint of the other car, about a half mile off, sitting in the ditch by the side of the road. He was
trying to get back to their house in the country quickly and discreetly after two Long Island iced
teas at dinner. Cops were cracking down on drinking and driving, which was good but
inconvenient. Not everyone could handle their liquor like him.
The other car’s dome light was on. He slowed down, and the bumpiness of the gravel
road woke Maureen, who had been napping beside him. “What’s this now?” she asked.
“Abandoned car?”
“Can’t be abandoned. The light’s on.”
“Don’t stop. It could be a robber.”
He laughed. “Why would a robber be sitting by the side of the road?”
She didn’t respond at first. “There’s no need to laugh,” she said finally.
They came to a stop and Ebeler put the hazards on. Maureen rolled down her window.
The other car’s windows were already down, and inside were two teenagers smoking cigarettes,
a boy and a girl.
“You folks all right?” Ebeler called out over his wife.
The boy watched him through the smoke. “Yes sir,” he said. “Just fine.”
Something in the boy’s bored tone bothered Ebeler. “What are you doing out here? You
should put on your hazards.”
“We ran out of gas,” the boy said. “We were getting ready to walk to town. There’s no
reception.” He held his cell phone up as if to demonstrate.
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A few minutes later, after a conversation where neither Ebeler nor the kid, Thomas, was
happy with the outcome, Thomas rolled up the window and pulled the key from the ignition.
“The fuck you say we were out of gas for?” Cheri asked.
His heart was pounding. “What was I supposed to say? We’re out getting drunk in the
middle of nowhere?”
Earlier Cheri had stolen some Old Crow her mom kept under the sink and put it in an
empty Coke two-liter that gave the liquor a slightly sweeter taste. This was now resting half
drunk on the passenger floor mat. Cheri and Thomas were both eighteen, been dating two
months, but they both lived at home so if they wanted time alone or time to drink it had to be
somewhere else.
Cheri was right, though: it was a dumb thing for Thomas to say. Because the man had
replied the only way he could, that he would give them a ride to the gas station so they could get
some gas and bring it back. Reluctantly, they got into the other car. The man introduced himself
as Ebeler, his wife as Maureen. Ebeler had an empty gas can in the trunk, because of course he
did.
They rode in silence. Everyone was mad. Thomas that the car had stopped, Cheri that he
said that about the gas, Maureen because of Ebeler’s testiness, and Ebeler at the sheer
inconvenience of it all. He could smell that liquor stink from the back seat, and it was obvious
they weren’t of age. The Ebelers’ house was on the way to the gas station, and Maureen asked to
be dropped off. Ebeler obliged, now even angrier that their date night had been so uprooted.
At the gas station, Thomas moved at glacial speed filling the gas can—dragging his feet
over to the pump, sliding the card into the reader twice before it took, fumbling with the keypad
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so slowly it was like he’d never seen numbers before. When he sloshed gas onto the cement, it
was all Ebeler could do not to drive off and leave him there.
On the way back to their car, Ebeler drove in a rushed, huffy silence. The Long Island
iced teas had left him drowsy, unalert. Thoughts of Maureen, probably waiting at home ready to
give him an earful, tugged at the edges of his attention. Thomas was looking out the back
window at the corn stalks flitting by when he noticed Ebeler start to drift across the yellow line.
“Hey,” Thomas said, alarmed, “you all right? You’re in the middle of the road.”
Ebeler, furious, swerved back into his lane. “These roads are wide open,” he said.
Thomas wasn’t sure what he meant by that. Ebeler flipped the turn signal on when they
neared 120th, and Thomas had to remind him that no, it was the next one. He looked at Ebeler’s
eyes in the rearview. They were soft, old, unfocused.
When they got back to the car, Cheri shuffled over to the passenger seat while Thomas
dumped gas into the tank. It was already half full. Ebeler waited in his own car, still running,
impatient gaze fixed to the dark road flanked by tall trees.
Thomas got in and started the engine. He rolled down the window.
“Seems good,” he said to Ebeler. “Thanks.”
“Are you okay?” Ebeler asked. “To drive, I mean.”
Thomas lit a cigarette. “Are you?”
Ebeler didn’t answer. Instead, he shifted into gear and drove off, tires throwing gravel.
Cheri picked the whiskey up from beneath the seat. “You want some more?”
“No,” Thomas said, “I do not.” He put the car in drive and pulled away from the side of
the road, mind empty, barely aware of Cheri beside him. He tried to quell the urge he felt deep in
his bones, the urge to just drive, drive, drive, anywhere but home. He got her home and kissed
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her goodbye, then glanced at the clock on the dash as the front door closed behind her, pissed at
the Ebelers for spoiling the whole night, at the taste of whiskey still stuck to the back of his teeth,
at himself for not getting any action. Most of all pissed that where he was going seemed just as
unappealing as where he was.
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≠
I wanted magical powers, so I started to sleep in the cupboard. I’d seen the first twenty
minutes of Harry Potter on TV. I was very young then and didn’t do so well with cause and
effect. My parents tried to explain to me: correlation ≠ causation. Also, movie ≠ reality, and the
first Harry Potter = the worst one anyway.
I told them to be mean to me, like the Dursleys, meaner than they’d ever been. It all had to
line up if I wanted my powers. There was no cupboard under the stairs, so I made do with the
one beside the kitchen sink. Mom cleared out all the old appliances. The cupboard curved at a
right angle to follow the wall and when I bent my legs at the knee I fit this curve perfectly, as if I
were an appliance designed to fill the space. This was my mother’s favorite kind of game, the
kind where I was quiet and didn’t ask for anything.
They would not send me to bed without dinner, so I refused to eat. I’d found a ratty picnic
blanket in the closet that smelled of grass and wild earth, and I had a stuffed bear with one
scuffed black button eye I used as a pillow. I turned away from the cupboard door when Mom
opened it with a plate of Kraft mac and cheese with hot dog chunks. It’s your favorite, she said.
Eat it. I pulled the blanket up over my head and fell into restless sleep until morning.
Normally I would have had Kindergarten the next day, but this was spring recess. Even
Dad was home from work, having taken a personal day after Mom said he didn’t spend enough
time with me. I watched him through my cupboard’s cracked door.
What is it he wants, exactly? he said to my mother, in a tone that said Can’t you just give it
to him already?
Shh, my mother said. He can hear you.
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My father’s favorite hobby was to saunter around the house, turning off the lights in the
rooms where we no longer were, asking us if we were done in that room, knowing the answer
before he asked.
My mother’s was to tell him she’d be to bed in a minute, then sit up late with a bowl of
corn flakes watching whatever channel the TV was tuned to when she clicked it on.
When she made me sandwiches she always cut the crust off, and a few weeks earlier I’d
opened the fridge to see all these crusts on a plate covered in cellophane, my name written on top
in black sharpie. Each week the pile grew bigger, and I was afraid. Were they saving all my
crusts for me to eat when I was finally old enough? Or was this somehow how they thought of
me, the cellophaned plate, the crusts within?
Because I would not eat, they called Dr. Belzer. We had a long chat over the phone, my
mother holding her cell phone up to the cupboard door on speaker mode. At the end of it I
begrudgingly agreed to eat regular meals if I could continue to sleep in my cupboard. But no
dessert! I squealed at my mother triumphantly.
Shazam! I’d shout at my pet turtle each morning, a spell I’d worked out to grant him the
power of speech. Then I’d lie on my belly and stare deep into his coal-colored eyes, unsure
whether my spell had misfired or if he simply refused to speak to me. On some days I was sure I
saw a cold black intelligence there, spitefully silent for reasons I did not understand.
Because of my parents’ incessant pleading, Dr. Belzer started to make house visits. He
came in the early evening and sat in the living room easy chair, explaining in a soft murmur
meant to relax me that TV was TV and real life was real life, never the twain shall meet. There
was rustling behind the curtains. I knew my parents were perched there, listening.
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I pointed the wood ruler I used for a wand at him. E pluribus unum! I cried, hoping the
spell would make them all leave me in peace.
My parents took me to a special remedial school for special children like me. The teacher
had a big tub filled with plastic blocks he dumped out on the floor, then he took notes on a
yellow legal pad. For a while we clawed viciously at each other, each in competition for the best
blocks. Then we each retreated to our own quiet corner, building whatever we wanted. One girl
built a castle with high spires and archers to ward off dragons. (The teacher didn’t see it, but the
rest of us did.) Another girl built a monster truck rally, since no one was there to say it was not
for little girls. Then a little boy built a jail cell where he could put all the bad people he ever
encountered.
I built a small house with a simple fireplace and a thatched roof. Then I lay down in the
middle and went to sleep and dreamed beautiful dreams. At the end of play time the teacher
woke me up and said it was time to go home. I shook my head and started to cry. I tried to
explain to him: home ≠ home. But he did not understand.
Back at the house, my mother asked me about class through the cracked door of my
cupboard. Her breath smelled of sour milk and the skin around her eyes crinkled into a forced
smile. Why are you smiling? I asked. My question confused her. I’m always like this, she said.
This is the way we are. This is the way you will be, too.
The next day I sat on the floor, staring into the aquarium of the pet turtle and watching him
walk ceaselessly against the glass, the invisible barrier between him and the rest of the world. I
sat and watched and ate the crust off the plate from the fridge, some of the pieces blue-green
with mold, no longer wondering why he didn’t bother to speak.
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The So-Called Jacob
It was my son’s first day of daycare, and I was waiting in line to retrieve him. I’d arrived
a little late, and the line already stretched almost to the door. At the front a bored twenty-
something sat behind a desk. A sign nailed to the wall behind her read Retire su hijo aquí—get
your kid here.
After a while I noticed the guy ahead of me was holding a pink piece of paper with a
large, official-looking stamp. I asked him where he got it and if I needed one myself to get my
son. He nodded, pointing to a small wood door in the corner. A handwritten note taped to it read
Documentos de paternidad. “You are new here?” he asked me in English. I wasn’t sure what he
meant—new at the daycare, new in the country, or maybe something more general, like whether
I was born yesterday.
I tried not to let all this strike me as strange. I had moved here with my wife and son for
an adventure, with no knowledge of the daily costs of acclimating to a new language, a new
culture, a new sense of self. Every small task was a new opportunity for ineptitude. Still, all the
expat blogs assured me that just because something was different didn’t mean it was bad.
Besides, Jacob was probably having the time of his life back there, playing with the other kids,
making friends.
So I slumped through the little doorway into a smaller, stuffier room full of tired-eyed
parents. Some were in line, some just milling about. Most had brought a magazine or an iPad to
pass the time. I asked someone what the line was for, and she pointed to a faded red contraption
in the corner like they used to have in pharmacies, with a spool of paper and a numbered slip
hanging out like the tongue of an exhausted dog. She explained that after you took a number they
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eventually called you up to Ventanilla 5 to show your ID, then after that you stood in the line to
retrieve your pink piece of paper.
I wanted to say, Who the hell thought of that! But my wife had assured me this daycare
was the best of the best. So I calmly took a number, leaned against the wall, and waited to be
called.
An hour later I reached the front of the final line. I handed the woman behind the desk
my proof of paternity. The room was now almost empty, save for three or four people in line
behind me. The tile floor was littered with remnants from those who had passed through: empty
cola cans, gum wrappers, a pair of shades, even an empty aguardiente bottle. The woman studied
my piece of paper. I smiled. She frowned. Then she went into the back, and a few minutes later
brought out Jacob.
At least, she said it was Jacob. She led him out holding his hand, which was weird. My
son was very shy for a child of two, and hated holding hands. What’s more, he was walking
differently, as if his left foot was heavier than his right, and held his jean shorts up by a belt loop.
The woman slid back behind the desk and asked me in perfect English to sign a Receipt
of Child Form. I didn’t move.
“We just bought those shorts,” I told her. “They should fit perfectly.”
“Maybe he lost weight,” she said.
“In a few hours?” I knelt down, eye to eye with the boy. “Jacob,” I said, “How was
daycare?”
The face looked like that of my son but the eyes were different, simple brown instead of
hazelnut flecked with green. And the hair, before parted to the left because of a cowlick that
made something simpler impossible, now lay flat. He didn’t answer my question. I stood up.
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“This isn’t my son,” I said.
She nodded, unconcerned, and pulled a piece of paper from her desk drawer. She
explained in a terse rehearsed speech that this was a form acknowledging that I had received a
child, ID number 3041, but that I was not yet ready to acknowledge he was mine. She showed
me the tag on his shirt that confirmed the number. “Take him home. Talk to your wife, if you
have a wife. Tomorrow we will straighten this out.”
At home, I put him up on the kitchen counter, on display for Daphna. He stood very still,
eerily so, but wouldn’t talk. I showed her his mud brown eyes, how his hair lay flat, how slender
his waist was. She glanced at her watch and said something about dinner. When I told her about
the form I’d filled out, she scolded me.
“We’ve been over this,” she said impatiently. “Things will be different here. Even Jacob.
Especially Jacob.”
In the morning, when I dropped him off at daycare, there was no mention of my
confusion the day before. And when I returned to pick him up, I knew to get there early.
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Consider It Saved
It’s five o’clock Christmas evening, and I’m sipping eggnog with my ex-fiancé’s whole
family. Jan’s adopted kid brother is on the floor, tearing violent handfuls of wrapping paper and
letting them fall. Her mother Helen rests her hand on her husband's thigh and watches the kid
with a smile. She just beat cancer. When she thinks no one’s looking, I catch her feeling the
place her left breast used to be.
They don’t know Jan dumped me three weeks ago.
“Honey?” she says to me, “Will you hand me the scissors?”
She snips the ribbon on the present I gave her and pops open the little black box. It’s a
pair of earrings she originally saw airborne, when I threw them at the wall. She’d just told me
she was leaving me for our friend Lily, in a voice so cold and well-rehearsed it was like reading a
block of text.
Now she squeezes my knee. “Honey, they’re perfect.” I shut my eyes and feel her
fingertips linger.
This is the first time we’ve seen Helen since she found out she was fine again, after a
year of lost hair and panicked trips to the bathroom. I was the one Jan’s dad first told. It was the
night of our fight. She had locked herself in the bathroom, her cell phone buzzing incessantly on
the nightstand until I picked it up. I stopped beating the heel of my palm against the bathroom
door. I’d never heard a man Harry’s age cry.
When she came out, I told her the news. We cried and hugged and hatched the big plan
not to ruin Christmas.
#
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Her folks live on a beef farm outside Omaha. The first few hours of the day, I helped her
dad with the chores. We moved bales of hay to the feeders for the cattle and used a
sledgehammer to crack the layer of ice covering the pond so they could drink. The cold wind
rippled over the white, lifeless landscape. Harry told me how excited Jan had been watching him
blow the creek open with dynamite when she was a child, begging for him to do it again. When
we came back inside, Helen brushed away the icicles dangling from his beard and gave me a cup
of hot cocoa.
After we open presents, Harry shows me his collection of deer rifles for the millionth
time. I nod along, pretending to understand the gun lingo he uses. He runs a clean rag across his
favorite and tells me how glad he is I could come this year. When we get back to the kitchen,
Harry Jr.’s setting the table.
Before dinner, we hold hands and say Grace. I swear I feel Jan’s heartbeat through her
fingers. I peek out during the prayer, and Jr.’s got his eyes open too. I cross my eyes and stick
out my tongue. He giggles.
Harry clears his throat. “For food and family,” he says. “Amen.”
“Amen,” we say.
We stuff ourselves silly: great gobs of gravy heaped on mashed potatoes and turkey,
green bean casserole made with real cream, lettuce wedges with grape tomatoes and ranch
dressing. We told Helen we’d cook, or at least bring something from Boston Market, but she
wouldn’t hear of it. Best way to celebrate she could think of was cooking for her family.
Jan fiddles with her left earring. I ask her if there’s something wrong. She shakes her
head impatiently, ignoring my question. She asks Helen how she’s feeling.
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Helen puts her fork down and leans back. Her hair’s just now coming in again, a layer of
thin gray fuzz stretched over her skull. “That’s the only thing anyone’s asked me in months,” she
says. “Who cares? I’m old. I’m supposed to hurt. How are you two? Have you set the date yet?”
Jan taps the table impatiently with the tines of her fork. “I told you, we’re waiting until
we finish school.”
“You’d be surprised how much it takes to plan a wedding,” Helen says. There’s an
impatience in her words I know bites at Jan.
“I know, Mother.”
Helen leans in close to Jr. “I’m starting to think you’ll be married before those two.”
The kid makes a puking sound. “No kidding,” Sr. mutters.
“Excuse me,” Jan says. She talks the way you might to a stranger blocking your path. She
gets up and grabs her purse. I hear her phone buzz in the little pocket just inside, rattling her
change. “I need to take this.”
Got to be Lily. I tear off some more turkey and try to remember if there was a time she’d
interrupt a family dinner to take my call.
Jr. says he wants coffee with his pie, so he can be like me. It’s just about more than I can
take. Helen winks in my direction. She goes to the kitchen to check if there’s any instant decaf.
Harry asks how I think final exams went. I shake my head. I spent finals week drinking
beer with breakfast and blasting sad music from my dorm room speakers. It doesn’t look good. I
excuse myself, and wander off to find Jan.
She’s outside the guest bedroom, where we’ll sleep tonight. Her smile breaks when I see
her. She holds a single index finger up at me. “I have to go,” she says into the phone.
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“Me too,” she says. I wince.
“It’s the middle of goddamn dinner,” I hiss as she hangs up the phone.
“Don’t curse at me.”
“They’ll know something’s up.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “We just wanted to talk two seconds. It’s Christmas.”
I shut my eyes. “I don’t want to hear this.”
I feel her hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re embarrassing us.”
“Why should I be embarrassed? It’s my family.”
Her words clamp my throat like a vice. I open my eyes. “Right,” I say. “But how do you
think they’d react if they knew what I know?”
Her voice softens, like it used to with Jr. when she cooed at him as a baby. “Hey—”
“Dessert is getting cold,” I say.
Helen picks up her fork and looks down at her plate, smiling. There’s a piece of
cinnamon apple pie looking back up at her, topped with a big dollop of vanilla bean ice cream.
“The thing I missed most,” she says, “was my taste buds. Chemo made everything taste
the way IV tubes smell."
Harry curls his fingers through those of his wife. “Take the first bite, honey. You deserve
it.”
Jan’s phone buzzes in her purse. I poke her in the side and mouth at her, Turn that thing
off.
Don’t tell me what to do.
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You’re being rude.
I’m not going to answer!
She steps on the toe of my shoe. I slap the table in frustration and everyone looks at me,
startled. I clear my throat.
“Sorry,” I say. I smile. I take one of Jan’s hands from her lap, where they are wringing
each other frantically.
Harry stands up. “Jr., let’s get you an extra scoop of ice cream,” he says.
When he leaves the room, Helen swallows her bite and dabs a cloth napkin against her
lips. “You two are acting strange,” she says.
Jan sighs extravagantly. “Mom, we’ve got something to tell you.”
I put my arm around Jan and give her a hard, sloppy kiss on the cheek. “We’re getting
married in August,” I say. “We just didn’t want to steal your thunder.” I take a deep, petulant
swig of eggnog.
“Oh, that’s wonderful!” Helen says. She claps her hands together, and stands up to get
Harry. Jan sits white-faced with shock and bewilderment.
I can’t stand cigars, but when Harry offers me one I take it. He came to me first, I
noticed: the kid scampered back from the kitchen to jump up into Jan’s arms, but Harry crossed
to me and gave me one of his hugs where it’s so tight you think his thin arms might just snap off.
He whispered he was so happy, and I peered over his shoulder, miles deep into Jan’s worried
eyes, and smiled.
“Save the date, Harry,” I told him.
“Consider it saved,” he said.
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Now I’m beside him, winter air slicing in through the cracked window as I put the cigar
to my lips. My hand shakes. The end sizzles. There’s a burning sensation on the roof of my
mouth when I suck the smoke in.
Jan’s on the floor, cross-legged and texting Lily. Jr.’s beside her, rolling the wheels of
his new dump truck in deep furrows through the carpet. Helen’s telling us how she added sour
cream to the piecrust dough this time. Everyone’s all smiles except Jan. Helen asks if we’ve
thought about the venue yet. “We can do it here,” she says, “if you want to push the date back a
bit. The garden flowers are beautiful in spring.”
“Oh, no,” I say. I puff my cigar. “We don’t want to wait any longer. Do we, honey?”
Jan puts her phone down. She grins daggers at me. “Of course not. Honey.”
“Real traditional,” I’m saying. My thoughts swirl like the rocks in my brandy glass. I’m
drinking it straight now, don’t mind if I do, thank you Harry. “In a church with one of those, one
of those pointy things, a steeple?
“Honey,” Jan says. “Maybe you should take it easy.”
I burp. “And a white dress.”
Helen laughs. “Who’s going to wear that?”
I laugh too. In a few minutes, Helen goes to the kitchen to rummage for a camera. We see
her pulling out old junk and knickknacks onto the counter: empty photo frames, jumbles of tissue
paper, an old watchband. She comes back with the digital camera we got her for her birthday last
year.
She motions for us all to scoot together. I pull Jan into my lap, and rest my hand on hers.
I give her a kiss on the cheek.
“Come on,” I say. “It’s a party.”
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She turns her head and looks at me for a sec, then rolls her eyes. She turns back to Helen.
“Cheese,” she says.
Between pictures, I slide my fingers into hers and shut my eyes. I feel her muscles tense,
then relax. I picture my hands running up beneath her shirt, then under her beltline, the dip where
her stomach ends. I start to get hard. I nestle my nose into her hair, feel my breath warm against
her neck. I breathe deep, my lips a millimeter away from her skin.
After the camera’s last click, she sits back down on the floor with Jr.
Just after sunset, as the last bits of red light fragment through the trees that line the farm’s
edge, I see a family of deer hop from the tall stalks of corn into the woods for the night. I call Jr.
over to point them out, but they’re gone by the time I lift him up to see. I swallow the last finger
of my drink, and cough against the burning at the back of my throat. “I wanted you to see,” I
croak. I feel dumbfounded. I don’t know where to put my hands. I turn to the others. “I wanted
him to see!” I say.
“Honey,” Jan says. “Sit down. You’re drunk.”
Sr. laughs. “So what if the boy’s a bit drunk? It’s just us.”
Helen shushes him.
I sit down. “So what if I am,” I repeat. The words feel strange on my tongue. I say them
again and again. I watch Jan, texting furiously. There’s a dirty smile at the corners of her lips and
eyes. Here we are with her parents, for God’s sake.
“Jan’s got friends getting married,” I say suddenly, like I just thought of it. “Brad and
Jason. They’re on their way to Vegas right now. While we’re celebrating Christmas.”
Jan’s looking real hard at her hand, at a speck of fingernail polish that’s chipped away.
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Harry pulls at his mustache. “Whole country’s going to hell,” he says. “A wedding. My
God.”
“Quiet, you two,” Helen says. “You’ll make me sick.”
Jan stands up. I’m leaned way back in my chair now, and she looks so beautiful I could
get on my knees and beg for just one kiss. There’s hate in her eyes, though. It must have been
there all day, just waiting to claw its way up to the surface.
“I’m going to put Jr. to bed,” she says. “And then I’m going to bed myself.”
“Wait up for me,” I say.
“No, thank you. You three have your fun.”
I try to stand up, but my feet won’t cooperate.
“What, no kiss?” I say. The words slip away from me unintended, and I picture myself
trying to grab them back with all my strength. She’s already gone, clambering up the narrow
stairs to her old room.
In an hour or so, when the air coming in through the cracked window has turned to a cold
rough as sandpaper, Helen stands up and kisses Harry and me good night. She thanks me for
coming. I hug her delicately, not sure how fragile she is, trying not to touch my chest to hers.
She laughs. She says, “Cancer’s not contagious, you know.” When she pulls away, I tell
her how proud I am of her for making it through the last year. I wipe at my eyes drunkenly while
I say it. I want to tell her to wait just a few minutes, stay with me just a little longer. She kisses
me once more on the cheek before going up to bed. “Take it easy, son,” she says.
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Harry and I throw some wood into the fireplace, and shove handfuls of newspaper
between the cracks. I light them and watch the ink-colored smoke drift up the chimney as I warm
my hands.
“Did Jan ever tell you about Jr.’s parents?” he asks me. He’s ashing his cigar on the floor
now, a thoughtful smile on his face, just begging Helen to scold him in the morning.
“Only that they were friends of yours,” I say. “That they named him after you.”
He nods. “I knew Bill from when I used to work part-time at the rubber plant. He was
twenty years younger, but those things don’t matter when you’re working that close. I helped
him open his bar, he made me godfather. Then one day he and his wife got t-boned running a
stop sign on a road outside Waverly.”
“Jesus,” I say.
He looks somberly down into his half empty glass. “Actually,” he says, “Bill’s
grandfather was named Harold.” He clears his throat. “I guess we just thought Jr. would like
being named after me better.”
“Are you going to tell him when he’s older?”
“Are you crazy? Jan doesn’t even know. This is just between us boys. He’s my kid now.
Bill’s gone. The story’s changed.”
I say nothing. My head’s clearer now, drying up like a damp rag that’s been wrung out
and hung on the line, and I don’t like this new secret. Harry and I sit and watch the fire, the
flames lapping at the logs so they sizzle and snap like popcorn in oil. When Harry drifts off to
sleep, fingers still curled around a glass of watery brandy, I gently tap his cigar out on the hearth
and go upstairs.
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I shut the door as quietly as I can behind me, not wanting to wake anyone. Jan’s lying on
the bed, flipping through a magazine.
I sit down next to her. “Hey. Hey, I’m sorry. That was so far out of line.”
I touch her leg gently through the covers. “I acted like a jack-ass all day.”
She nods emphatically.
I move my hand away and look at the dresser. It’s cluttered with old cassette tapes,
crumpled pink tissue paper, and a tube of black lipstick from her high school goth phase. In all
the years since she left home, her parents haven’t moved a thing.
“We shouldn’t have come,” she’s saying. “I shouldn’t have asked you to.”
“I’m glad we did. It’s always nice here.”
“Nice? Hmm.”
“How’s Lily?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer for a moment. “Good,” she says finally.
I swallow hard, vaguely aroused and infuriated by the picture of them together that flits
across my brain. “Good,” I say. I take off my jeans, remembering how self-conscious I was the
first time I undressed in front of her. I slide under the covers. Harry’s snores rumble up through
the floorboards, and the TV blares news in Helen’s bedroom up the hall. I click off the light and
stare up into the pitch-black air. This is the last time I’ll fall asleep beside her, I realize.
“Was there anything I could have done?” I ask.
She pauses for a beat. “No,” she says. I don’t press her. I shut my eyes and try to believe
it.
Outside, the cold air whips through the frozen cornfields. Tree branches tap against the
window. I try to picture an August wedding, filled with light and blooming flowers, Jan in a
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white dress dancing with me in a church garden. The roar of the wind brings my mind back to
the farm, to the poor cattle feeding on dead corn stalks and half-frozen water, then huddling up
for a night in the barn. The roof creaking under the weight of the snow. It needs a new one, I
know, but Harry can’t afford that. He’ll be up there alone come spring, cattle lowing below,
patching it once more for the coming winter.
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Now Nothing
I wanted to say, wanted to insist, that I was a good man. I was three drinks drunk on a
mix of strong white wine and pineapple ice cream, at a dive bar off the yellow line. They called
the drink a terremoto—an “earthquake,” for how unsteady the ground felt after you had a couple.
I had yet to try to stand.
My then-girlfriend, later-fiancée, now-nothing was at home with her old DVDs of Sex
and the City. She was also drunk, quite verbally so, but on something thoroughly North
American. Whiskey, I think, mixed with Coca Cola she bought at the botillería around the
corner. Lately she’d become impossible, and she said the same of me. We’d been in Chile for
three months by then and the culture shock had chewed us all to hell. The language, the different
social mores, the lack of air conditioning. She’d reached the point where she didn’t want to go
out anymore, she said she couldn’t go to one more restaurant where she had to keep her purse on
her lap or else someone would steal it. I’d started stockpiling takeout menus from nearby
restaurants, organized by which ones were most patient with nonnative speakers when you
called. We were everywhere baffled, even at home, and when the opportunity arose we tore into
each other.
I’d left in a huff after a fight about nothing and now across from me was a chilena named
Meryl, after the North American actress. She looked about my age, mid- to late-twenties. She
wore black jeans and had her legs crossed with her ankle on her knee, like a man. I had
mistakenly tried to confide in her, and she was now telling me that all men were dogs, worse
than dogs. She said she felt sorry for my woman, but not for me. She felt sorry for all women
everywhere. Men were impossible, always impossible. Then she told me this story.
#
207
When Meryl was younger, she had worked as a street prostitute. From age eighteen she’d
spent her weekend evenings in Parque Forestal or on Vikuña Mackenna, finding clients then
walking to one of the nearby hoteles de amor that charged hourly.
My god, I said in Spanish. I am so sorry.
I am not one of those men, I added.
She said to shut up and listen.
One day a woman approached Meryl in Parque Forestal. She had blond hair, clearly a
gringa. It was winter but you could see her bangs poking out from beneath her hat. Get out of
here, Meryl told her. I don’t do women.
In broken Spanish the woman said it wasn’t for her but for her boyfriend. Her fiancé. She
started to cry.
They were standing next to a stone sculpture of a horse, rearing up on its hind legs. There
were two other women standing not far off from Meryl, also waiting for customers, but when the
gringa started to cry they moved deeper into the park, to another well-lit place untainted by the
sound of this woman’s sobs. I am weak, the gringa was saying. Why has God made me so weak?
Meryl stayed out of stubbornness, not willing to give up her usual spot, wanting to insist
that it be the gringa who left instead. In her start-and-stop Spanish shot through with tears, the
gringa started telling Meryl about how her boyfriend had just proposed. He’d bought a cheap
ring off the street, promising to buy her a real ring next time they were in The States.
That’s where we’re from, The States, the woman said. You have to understand, he did not
want to, how do you say, be cheated here. We know there is always a special price for gringos.
The gringa tried to laugh. She wiped at her eyes.
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All this time Meryl was watching the periphery, scanning for potential customers. She
was afraid the woman’s blond hair, even mostly covered, would draw attention away from her.
Congratulations, Meryl said, unsure what else the woman might be looking for, hoping
this might be the end of it.
No, listen, the gringa said, stepping closer. I am weak. I don’t believe him when he tells
me things, when he buys me things. I think, what might he be hiding?
Despite herself, Meryl stopped watching the edges of the park and glanced at the woman.
She was now very close, close enough to kiss. Her words were hard to follow, jumbled as they
were with tears and emotion and misconjugations. But Meryl got the general idea, and soon she
was genuinely intrigued.
The woman wanted Meryl to seduce her potential husband. Or rather, in an ideal world—
which I must now interject this world surely is not—to attempt to seduce him. To confirm that
even if women threw themselves at him, he would turn them away. That the gringa was all he
wanted.
I want you to be the opposite of me, the gringa said. Men like women helpless, no? I am
not helpless. Do you speak English?
A little.
Do not speak any English.
The gringa had stopped crying. She asked Meryl for a cigarette, and as Meryl leaned in to
light it for her she saw an indignant fury in the gringa’s eyes under the reflected flame. The
gringa took a long full puff and started to cough.
Be helpless, the gringa said again.
#
209
Meryl met the man at a new hipster bar in Lastarria. It had high walls covered in
reproductions of ironic art. The waiters wore black aprons and t-shirts of American sports teams.
She sat down beside the fiancé at the bar. She’d been shown his picture, and was told he’d be
there around nine. He gave English classes down the street, and always stopped for a glass of
wine after. He was a plain looking man with an early gray streak at his temples, but he spoke
Spanish well. Almost no accent. Better than the gringa’s.
Meryl had learned to act many different ways in front of men. In front of women she
could only be herself, but in front of men this was impossible. She was too used to reading their
desire and acting accordingly. So it was easy for her to tell the man, blush rising to her cheeks,
that she had left her wallet at her office. She was a receptionist there, and the doors were now
locked.
I don’t know what I’m going to do, she said. I don’t have my metro card, I have no way
to go home. Would you buy me a glass of wine? It helps me think.
The man bought her a glass of wine. He even offered her his metro card. It only cost a
couple thousand pesos. He could always get another. The man was very generous.
Meryl told him her name was Marcela, and said he spoke Spanish well, though too
formally to be Chilean. She asked him to tell her about himself. After that he wouldn’t shut up.
He told her all his big gringo plans. He wanted to start a shelter for the stray dogs on the
Santiago streets. He wanted to volunteer teach next summer in the poorer regions of Patagonia.
Meryl nodded along generously with all his ideas, as if she understood why someone would care
so much for the neighborhood dogs, many of which were fat on the scraps people left for them.
As if a couple English classes would solve the problems of the poverty-stricken in Patagonia. As
he talked he crumpled and uncrumpled the cocktail napkin that had come with his drink. He said
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he wanted to write a book in English about the aftershocks of the Pinochet regime, to share the
voices of the missing and the dead. He was no writer, he said, but there were stories that needed
to be told.
They shared several glasses of wine. He asked about the place she said she worked, a
copper mining company with locations up and down Chile, but he seemed at a loss for ways to
pursue this line of conversation. He did better discussing himself. He waved his hand
dismissively when Meryl said thank you, a thousand thank yous for the wine. Meryl had a high
tolerance for wine. Men liked to watch her drink it, liked to buy it for her, and she knew how to
act tipsy, or “happy” as they say in Chile.
After a while the man said he had to get home. Still he made no mention of any fiancée,
and Meryl thought that this was a bad sign. She’d begun to root for her gringita, for the idea that
two people could belong to each other in a way that wasn’t sordid. She wanted this man to
politely rebuff her advances, not offer to walk her to the metro, which was what he was now
doing.
Outside the metro stop, Meryl leaned against the railing next to the stairs leading down to
the train. Above her was a glowing red M for metro. Give me a minute, she said. She touched
two fingers to her temple. I think I’m drunk, she said.
I’ll put you in a cab, the man said. The metro will close soon.
Meryl shook her head. The man touched her shoulder and asked was she sure. She leaned
in and kissed him gently, playfully, on the lips. He said something and started to back away. She
gave him another kiss, acting hungrier now, tugging gently at the hair on the back of his head.
The man kissed back, just for a moment. Then he pulled away.
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For the first time now his Spanish was less sure. He was visibly aroused and stuttered a
bit and said he couldn’t, he was engaged. He offered again to give her cab money.
Meryl laughed. I don’t want your money, weón, I want you. The man turned red and
walked away, hands in his pockets.
In a grimy bar many years later, I smiled happily over my drink, though I knew from
Meryl’s initial comments that the story was not over. There was some spin she would give it, the
way a bowler applies spin to his ball so halfway down the lane it veers off at a new angle, toward
some less obvious destination. Maybe the point Meryl had extracted from all this was the way
the gringa’s doubts lingered, the impossibility of ever trusting anyone else. Or that the gringo
had a hard-on and in that moment kissed her back, his body betraying him at a biological level,
showing its thirst for more than his fiancée.
I was sure that somehow Meryl had missed her own point: that people can be true to each
other. I thought of my then-girlfriend, back at our apartment. I wanted to go home and bury
myself in the crook of her neck, the hem of her dress, and cry for all the moments we’d ever
spent apart, in doubt.
You see, I said, there are good people out there.
She gave me a look of deep disgust. Oye, weón, she said, the story is not finished. I saw
that woman again, months later, walking rapidly at night through Parque Forestal. I yelled after
her, angrily, and chased her. The gringa tried to run but couldn’t run fast enough.
Meryl explained the deal had been that the gringa would pay half up front and half after
she did or did not fuck the husband-to-be, a high sum because in all things there is always a
higher price for gringos. But the gringa had never returned. Meryl had imagined the gringa had
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forgot all about the other half of the money when her fiancé had arrived home unsoiled. Perhaps
a guilt-filled roll in the sack had wiped her mind and conscience clean. Or perhaps she was so
shamed by her doubt that she couldn’t bring herself to return to Meryl with the money. Whatever
the reason, Meryl was now annoyed. So she grabbed the gringa’s sleeve, and the gringa started to
cry. Dios mío, she thought, the tears with this one.
But this time the tears wouldn’t stop. The gringa sat down on the sidewalk, still crying,
looking around like she was unaware how to stand back up. Cars passed on the street. A couple
male voices shouted come-ons from half-cracked windows zooming past. Meryl started to back
away, to leave the woman there, and now the woman grabbed her arm with both hands. Don’t
leave, she said, please don’t leave me. I’m sorry I didn’t return. It was too painful.
She explained that when the fiancé arrived home, he said nothing about Meryl or her
alias, Marcela. For a while after work he’d sent texts explaining he was at the bar, was going to
stay for one more drink, it had been a long day. No mention of anyone else. Then he went silent
for some time, almost an hour, before a final text that read simply Omw. The gringa’s mind
swelled with all the possibilities, all the things that might transpire in a lost hour.
When he got home she asked where he had been. Drinking, he said simply. Cell phone
reception was weak in the bar. He asked her what was wrong. She locked herself in the bedroom.
The gringa assumed the worse. Why else would he lie? Why that night of all nights
would he stay so long at the bar, ignoring her texts? A silence came to sit between them, a
silence that began as an ache at the back of her throat and as days passed grew to fill their entire
apartment. One night he leaned in to kiss her and she turned away, unable to unimagine his lips
intertwined with Meryl’s. The gringo exploded. He yelled he did not know what was wrong with
her lately. He demanded an explanation and she told him, yelling and pointing a finger into his
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chest, that she’d sent that chilena there to test him. That he’d failed, obviously, and now he
thought things could go on as they had before.
She continued to thump her finger into his chest and the man shoved her, sent her
sprawling back. Pain crackled through her tailbone and hands where they impacted the floor.
Water rushed to her eyes but she willed herself not to cry. She looked up at him, looming. There
was a menace to his posture she’d never seen before, his whole body taut like a cord about to
snap. She was afraid to move. The way he clenched his fists frightened her. I never fucked that
chilena, he said. From her space on the floor she watched him gather a few changes of clothes,
and when she finally found her voice she hated herself for begging him to stay.
When I got back home, my then-girlfriend was asleep on the couch. Her face was awash
in blue light. On the TV, the episode selection menu hummed the Sex and the City theme song. I
woke her up and as I did so I told myself it was for her, not for me. That she would want to know
I was home, that she would want me to move her into the bedroom to sleep. She didn’t ask me
where I’d been. She was either afraid what I would say or trusted me or didn’t give a shit
anymore anyway. In bed I told her I had missed her, and she started to snore.
When she woke up in the morning, I tried to be better. I tried to open up, let a little light
in, tell her what I was feeling instead of sectioning off my little corner of the world apart from
her. Sometimes I succeeded and it felt good. But I didn’t tell her Meryl’s story. I was afraid
she’d see through me. I was afraid she’d wonder which one was I, the one who would accept the
advances or shun them then hurt her later, more cruelly. We all have rough edges to press into
each other. Meryl’s story would unmake us, I feared, one way or another.
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But I wanted to tell the story to someone. Now I guess I have. Three last lines occur to
me. I know they can’t all be true.
One. Secrets between people are like infected wounds, needing to be lanced.
Two. It’s the truths we withhold that make love possible.
Three. The worst violence in this story is the one I commit here now, in making it about
myself.
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The Slabs
The subjects are in their rooms, and it’s Jenna’s and my job to watch. There’s a hidden
camera looking in on each one. All we have to do is press the red button on the console if we see
any emergencies. Jenna and me each get a slab too. The buttons and touch screen are disabled.
The company wants to see what people will ask these things to do, when they have to ask.
We pass the time making fun of the subjects. There’s the husky bald guy who’s got the
biggest dick you’ve ever seen and won’t stop touching himself. There’s the teenager who’s
constantly sending videos. In one she pulls up her bedspread, pressing her palm against the
resistant mattress. She tells the slab, “Caption: I miss my mattress topper.” She points the slab at
the park outside her window. “Take a video. Caption: That dog just shit on the sidewalk.” Then
she plops out a breast and says, “Caption: Does this look like a lump to you?”
And there’s the eight-year-old, who is the most comfortable being in a room with the
slab. He’s having the time of his life. He watches cartoons with the thing, has it read him stories,
tell him jokes, show him pictures of naked ladies. He names it Mom. “Mom, you’re my best
friend,” he tells it, and the slab thanks him. The final subject just lies in her bunk with her face to
the wall, crying.
We explain all this to the men in lab coats at the end of each day. “Signs of cabin fever?”
they ask. “Loneliness? Psychological hardship? Difficulties in device navigation?”
For the crier, sure, all the above. But each night the lab coats revise the software based on
the day’s failed commands and push out an update. This overjoys the subjects, that they can now
do things that didn’t work before.
The lab coats have us look through a printout of commands from the subjects’ slabs, to
see if there’s anything the devices misunderstood.
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The sheet says, among other things, Show me guys with no shirts. Click send. Dictate
message to Matt Guy from Finnegan’s. Click friends list. Send WhatsApp to Tim saying you
better not be with Lisa. Hide this post from Dad. Look up popular gifts for sixty-two-year-old
mothers of three. Tell me, why does it feel so good to let glue dry on your hand and peel it off?
Send a message to Steve, The lady next door won’t stop crying ha ha. Message to Derek, It was
lonely here at first but not anymore, not with this thing they gave me. Tell me, is there intelligent
life in the universe? Show me pictures of cute cats. Are any of them still alive? Download this
pic from Insta and put me in it. Send sandwiches to my kids for dinner. Tell me a joke. Tell me a
story. Tell me why Tamara from school doesn’t like me. Vibrate. Vibrate harder. Don’t stop
vibrating, goddamnit. Tell me, Will I ever find love? Is Brad happy now, away from me? Tell
me, how did Darwin form his theory? When will the sun cool? Where in the world are leaves
reddest in autumn?
Jenna and I start sleeping together, doing our best to stave off boredom. Her slab shows
us some lurid videos, and we try some things we see. But when cabin fever starts to bite at us
both, we bite at each other in turn. She tells me I have a fat ass. I tell her she should learn to
shiver better in bed. By the tenth day we barely speak, except to the slabs. When we happen
upon a command they cannot perform—which is rare, increasingly rare—we decide it must not
have been that important anyway.
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Sayings
After an especially petty argument with my wife, I became obsessed with the power of
cliché. We had been arguing a lot lately, about a long list of hypotheticals in regard to the
protuberance that was just starting to tent the shirt beneath her breasts: what would be the
protuberance’s name, would it attend private school or public, would it be circumcised or un-,
would we make it take piano lessons like my parents made me, etc.
But the particular argument in which inspiration hit was over what to watch on television.
I was in favor of Tiny House Hunters, thinking mistakenly the title referred to the size of the
hunters not the houses, and she was for So You Want to Be a Princess. Neither of us felt strongly,
but by that point argument had become our default mode of interaction.
I had been taking Xanax for anxiety, half a pill three times daily, and in the evenings I’d
chase it with a splash of red wine drunk from a coffee mug. It left me with a pleasant hazy
feeling, and through this haze I had started to think perhaps there was more to the world than
what I saw: perhaps the laws of the universe weren’t so steadfast as they seemed, and the people
who got ahead did so because they knew how to ask the universe for whatever it was they
wanted.
And in argument with my wife it occurred to me that maybe the way of asking could be
found in cliché, that these oft-repeated phrases weren’t like some scratched up kitchen cutlery,
dulled with age, but like a cast-iron skillet that gains flavor each time it’s used. That the ritual
chant of these phrases over decades or centuries might have imbued them with magic.
So I ceased shouting at my wife and instead stood up and spoke calmly, firmly: “We are
watching Tiny House Hunters. That is final.” As I said this I stamped my foot down on the floor
as hard as I could. I even ground it into the carpet for good measure.
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“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m putting my foot down.”
She started to laugh, so I stomped my foot down again, even harder. The jolt of it pained
my knee and lower back.
Her laugh and smile faded. She looked down at my foot and frowned. Finally she said,
“Look, whatever, watch what you want.”
I sat down beside her on the couch and took the remote in hand.
The next day I went to a gun store and bought a bullet. I told the camouflaged man
behind the counter I wanted only one, but he made me buy the whole box. So I bought the whole
box and buried all but one in the back yard.
From then on every time I had to do something unpleasant I would take the bullet
discreetly from my pocket and slip it into my mouth. For instance, coming home from work,
standing outside our apartment door, readying myself to insert my key. I would slip the bullet
into my mouth and bite down thoughtfully. Thus having bit the bullet, I figured, I was ready to
accept whatever lay on the other side of that door. And when it opened and there was my wife
with a pamphlet in hand, ready to recite what she’d found about the best breathing exercises, or
formula versus milk, or a book I should read to her belly at night, or some new pain in her body
that needed to be rubbed, I found these things easier to accept. The lingering taste of metal filled
me with a short euphoria, a tiny high, that dampened the immediacy of these household matters.
At work I kept the bullet in almost all day. My job was telephone customer service, and
the customers thought I had some slight speech impediment. No one noticed my mouth bullet.
When after a while the bullet’s effect decreased, I unburied the box and extracted one more
round. From then on I had two bullets to bite down on, sometimes simultaneously, whenever
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needed. I became an expert at rolling these slowly around my mouth with no one noticing, gently
wedging them between my teeth. I was careful to keep them from the back of my throat, after
once I ran to the bathroom gagging in the middle of an argument with my wife, having nearly
swallowed.
The time bomb in her stomach continued to tick. I love my wife. But that swelled gut
jutting out at me began to seem like some line of argument she was trying. How could I defend
myself, any idea of mine, when she held in her belly the only thing nearly certain to outlast us
both?
One night she rebuffed my advances, saying she didn’t like the way she looked anymore,
and swatted me away like some insistent fly. I knew that this would be the way it was for the rest
of the pregnancy, another four months with no physical affection, and I excused myself from the
room to go stand in front of the kitchen sink as one by one I cracked and emptied the contents of
an 18-pack of eggs into the whirring garbage disposal, bullets in mouth, trying to concentrate on
the proverbial omelet.
I let a million little rituals fill my life. To ease my anxiety at home, I ordered a heart-
shaped box filled with expired Valentine’s Day candy. I tried to eat a piece, a small square thing
filled with nougat, but the chocolate had turned tough and bitter. So I threw away the candy and
kept the box in my nightstand. I would feel right at home, I reasoned, because home is where the
heart is. When it worked for only a matter of days I went to the butcher shop in the center of
town and bought myself a beef heart, which I kept in the bottom drawer of the fridge where my
wife never looked. I replaced it with a new one every week and as I did felt a swell of welcome
fill the house.
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At work I started drinking Kool-Aid at my desk, which I brought in a small thermos. I
was trying to be, like the other workers in my soul-deadening position, grateful for the
opportunity to work for such a benevolent corporation. And drinking the Kool-Aid did indeed
help, though it’s impossible to say how much of this was real acceptance of my lot and how
much was a mere sugar high. My passion for upgrade sales was applauded, when the supervisor
saw me vigorously putting my foot down again and again, stomping the carpet as I spoke into the
headset. The supervisor said he was happy to see me be more passionate, “but tone it down a
little,” so on future calls I dropped my voice a half octave. The customers liked this new voice,
and soon I had the leading numbers on my team.
My wife was ecstatic. This meant an easier career path, a bigger bonus. “You’re like a
whole new person,” she beamed, and pulled me into the bedroom, where I tried not to be
bothered by how much me being someone else excited her.
When the baby came, I was with her at the hospital with a mouthful of bullets clenched
between my teeth. My wife by then had discovered my habit, and accepted it as one of my
stranger but more innocuous shortcomings. As she pushed, and screamed, and cried tears of fear
and anger and joy, I remained silent, eyes shut, jaw afire with the strain from biting down so
hard. I knew I couldn’t handle what would be waiting when I opened my eyes. The most
important piece of me out there in the world, screaming.
My wife’s screams seemed far away, tamped down by the pain in my jaw, then all of a
sudden they were up close, right beyond the thin veil my eyelids formed between me and her.
The room was filled with the smell of her fluids, and machines beeping, and the stink of
sanitation chemicals, and nurses swapping jargon with the doctor. I wondered what would
happen if I never opened my eyes again. Like a vow of silence, a sort of celibacy. A vow of
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blindness. Would my wife lead me through the world by the hand? Would I come to know her
face by a particular curvature of bone against my fingers? This, maybe, would not be so bad. I
would turn a blind eye, turn both blind eyes. Four senses were more than enough to have to
handle.
On the other side of my eyelids there was the shriek of a newborn child. Instinctively, I
opened my eyes.
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Nothing Is Ever So Simple as Zombies
I know you love the things now, the way they are on TV. But they won’t be so popular if
they come for real.
They won’t be evil, simply misguided. Not bloodthirsty, just wanting of a little human
company. You will wake up and there’s your mother at the door, your mother who’s been dead
ten years or more. Maybe even me, looking lost. You will know that me and Marie are dead, but
won’t want to be rude, so you’ll have no choice but to open the door. You’ll sit us down at the
table with your family. You’ll be eating rehydrated bread or nutrient pills or whatever the hell
people eat by then. You’ll say to your kids, “You remember Grandpa Tom. You remember Nana
Marie.”
We won’t say anything in return, because our vocal cords will be long since decayed.
You’ll wonder, What did we ever say to each other anyway? Were their eyes this lifeless before,
or is that new? What about the smell, the sunken gums? You’ll have a hard time sitting there,
trying to sort out the parents you remember from the ones that are there now. This will be
anything but simple.
Your mother will make a whirring sound in the back of her throat like a malfunctioning
garbage disposal, and your kids will try to imitate this sound. Your wife will hiss under her
breath for them to stop, not to be rude. Soon, your children will be sauntering all around the
house making this noise, “speaking zombie.” This will annoy you to no end. You’ll sit them
down and try to impress upon them that it’s not polite to make fun. When they say they’re not,
they’re just trying to be closer to Grandma, you’ll say, Some things are best left distant.
Though I always pictured a house in the country for you, big and affordable with a creek
out back and maybe a chicken coop, you’ll probably live in the city, or at best a house in the
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burbs that looks like all the other houses. I’ll make that sound like a broken garbage disposal at
you and I will mean, You should have lived out in the country. In the country you could put up
chicken wire to make sure your mom and me don’t wander off and scare the neighborhood.
You’ll have no choice but to shut us up in the attic with all the boxes of crap you didn’t get
around to sorting through after we died. You’ll tell your children, Don’t worry, they like it up
there. There are other parents in other attic windows, and they can wave to them, and they will
wave back.
But we will be zombies, after all. You’ll start to notice things after a while, things that
make sleep difficult. Pained moans in the night, strange shufflings at all hours, the sound of
fingernails scraping against the front door, like someone’s trying to get out. You’ll tell your
children, Make sure you lock your door at night. Then there are the things we will leave behind,
starting small: a blue tip of finger here, a pile of yellow teeth there. Finally a dark, withered ear
found in the cookie jar, like the person who lost it felt ashamed and tried to hide it. You’ll put a
lock on the attic door and your wife will get mad. She’ll say, This is a natural part of life. How
will you feel, if when we’re old and zombied our children lock us up in the attic?
And when you wake up in the middle of the night and there I am, gnawing on some
exposed part of your arm, you’ll smack me with a folded magazine and tell me to shoo. It’s just a
phase, you’ll say to yourself as I lumber out of the room, like a child teething. How long can
parents stay zombies? And anyway, how much damage can they really do? He barely drew
blood. You’ll try not to think of those movies you watched when you were young, where if you
were bitten that meant you were soon to turn.
The next night you’ll show your children how to barricade the bedroom door, just in case.
Just like in the movies, the ones where zombies attack—some two-by-fours from the
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construction yard, scrap metal from the garage, various riffraff from around the room. It will be
fun, this parent-child bonding, in a bittersweet way. But this memory will loom in their minds,
not as a memory about their grandparents but about their father, you, and how you handled me. It
will be a lesson in the protections needed against family, and how to build walls when the time
comes.
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Nine Point Five
Mom and I sat mute at the kitchen table, staring down at the poker cards in our hands
while Dad and Jim yelled at each other on the front porch. We could hear them through the
screen door. Though a fight between them was nothing new—they were friends from back
before I was born—the sincerity of the anger in their voices was, and so were the personal
accusations they leveled, referencing loyalty and courage and responsibility. The rubber plant
where they worked was on strike and Jim had come over to tell my father he was crossing the
picket line. He was trying to explain: he had two kids in college, a mortgage, car payments, all
the rest. He couldn’t live off the scraps the union provided. He had to think about his kids.
You want to talk to me about bills? Dad said.
What was also new was the way my father must have looked to Jim. I’d watched him
shrink down over the last three months since the diagnosis, skin hanging loose around his face
and neck like bunched up cloth, his skin yellowed, his face and scalp and even eyelids bald.
Now was a hard time for us to be without Dad’s salary, and Jim knew it. The union gave
us a check each month in compensation, but it was a fraction of what the plant paid. Mom and I
hadn’t had any luck finding work ourselves, and no one was going to hire Dad with him looking
the way he did. Then there was the issue of insurance, which Dad would lose if the strike went
on much longer. He could buy coverage through COBRA, but that was hundreds of dollars more
a month.
Jim tried again. He started to talk about stock prices and shipping costs and mechanized
production and overseas distribution deals. Everybody knew the plant was doomed, he said, look
at how many workers they’d laid off already. The union was holding onto something that wasn’t
there anymore.
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I’m not a scab, Dad said.
Damn it, Daryl, you can call yourself whatever you want, Jim said. All you’ve got to do
is cross the line, work a week or two, then file for medical disability. Now’s not the time to play
martyr.
At the kitchen table my mom asked for two new cards, not wanting to enter into the
argument herself, not even wanting to overhear it. I dealt her what she asked for, marveling at the
game’s simplicity, where if you didn’t like your cards you just asked for new ones.
When Dad first got the job, the plant must have seemed like something invincible. All the
strengths of capitalism embodied in a huge squat building smelling of hot rubber. Forklifts
stacked crates impossibly high, machines molded and tested the belts and hoses, tires with
varying treads lined the walkways. It was a place where the human beings, the small dots flitting
between the piles of rubber goods, were not the main movers. They were part of something
greater.
He wasn’t looking for a factory job, though. After ten years of watching the small,
family-owned farm dragged to the brink of extinction, him and Mom had sold theirs in time to
make a little money and move to Lincoln, where he was studying to be a vet tech. Their budget
was tight and he hated the science textbooks he had to study but damn if he wouldn’t be good in
two years when he got the degree, if they could just hold on that long. He’d lived and worked
with animals his whole life, milking them and feeding them and delivering their babies. He’d
learnt their anatomies not from books but from the precise curve of the butcher knives he’d used
to carve out their meat for his family. He must have found it deeply satisfying, perched at the
edge of fatherhood, to trade that butcher knife for a scalpel.
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When the call came inviting him to interview at the factory, he thought it was a wrong
number. Who are you trying to reach? he asked. The woman on the other end, not bothering to
hide her annoyance, repeated his name back to him.
We got the number from your parents, she said. They told us you moved.
Dad stayed silent a moment, thinking back to before they’d sold the farm, vaguely
remembering a job application he’d driven to the post office in his old Ford. He’d put his folks’
number because he knew his would be changing soon.
We’ve got a long application list, the woman said. Are you still interested in the position?
He looked at my mother across the table, my tiny feet kicking at the inside wall of her
belly. They were living off what little money remained from the farm sale. His pride wouldn’t
allow them to accept state assistance, even though they qualified.
A steady paycheck, he must have thought. Not two years from now but now.
All right, he said. Yeah. I’m still interested.
Dad continued to work at the plant right up to the start of the strike, thirty-two hours a
week because that’s all he could fit in around his chemo schedule. Though I never told him, I
was glad when the strike began. It meant he didn’t spend those hours withering away in the plant
with stiff muscles and bones, excusing himself (as I knew he must have) every so often to go
puke in the plant toilet, a mess he’d probably clean up with crumpled toilet paper himself
because he didn’t want anyone else to have to. His whole life Dad had thought of providing for
his family as a simple matter of keeping his head down and his mouth shut, so by the time he
admitted to Mom and his doctor that something was wrong, that he was in pain, it had been too
late to operate.
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We didn’t hear from Jim for several weeks after their fight. We survived on what little
the union sent us. Sometimes we went to the union hall for our meals, where people from other
unions dropped off casseroles and lasagnas to show their support. We ate off paper plates and
left as soon as the men started to talk politics. The union leaned left and everyone liked to talk
about what was wrong with America, the things that needed to change, and Dad wouldn’t hear of
it. Sometimes someone would ask him if he still talked to Jim, and he’d just shake his head.
Then came the roses. A dozen white ones, bundled up and placed in a pretty blue vase
left on our doorstep.
What kind of man sends another man flowers? Dad asked when he read the tag, and left
them sitting there on the porch.
I thought that would be the end of it, until a few days later Jim turned up on our doorstep
himself. It was afternoon and I’d just gotten home from school. Mom and Dad were at chemo.
The doorbell rang and I opened the door and there he was with a bottle of Johnnie Walker, a red
bow fastened to its neck. As if to match he was wearing a red tie of his own for what must have
been the first time in a long time, a thing so faded it looked pink.
Your dad home? he asked gruffly, eyes cast over my shoulder into the house, squinting
into the bright winter light that filled it.
I shook my head. They’re at the clinic.
Oh, he said. He looked down at the bottle he held, his ungloved hands clenched against
the cold glass. He held it out to me. Can you give this to him, then?
I can if you want, but he can’t drink whiskey anymore. It binds him up too much.
Ah hell. What about your mom?
Doesn’t drink.
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Jim looked down again at the label, brow knitted as if searching for some hint of possible
action, then looked past me again through the doorway. Against the backdrop of his broad figure,
the bottle looked practically toy-sized. He lowered his voice.
You’d tell me if your dad was home, now, wouldn’t you?
Yeah, I’d tell you.
He picked nervously at the corner of the label with his thumbnail. I asked him if he’d like
to come in.
Pretty soon we were at the table on the back patio, sipping scotch even though it was only
half past three. He knew Dad let me drink sometimes when we had company, and anyway he’d
added enough water to mine that it was several shades lighter. I watched him ash a cigarette on
the mound of snow that filled the ashtray.
Daryl says you want to be a writer, he said.
Yeah, something like that.
What do you want to write?
I don’t know. Books, I guess.
He took a long drag of his cigarette, trying to decode my answer. This was a man who
dealt with physical products, things with tangible uses. Car tires, conveyor belts, rubber molded
to whatever shape the bosses deemed fit. I might as well have told him I wanted to sell pixie dust
for a living.
Your dad’s some piece of work, you know. Stubborn as all hell.
I watched him crack his knuckles nervously, cigarette balanced in the corner of his lip.
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All he’s got to do is cross the line, work a few days and file medical disability. Then he’s
got a steady paycheck and health insurance, and he doesn’t even have to work for the plant. I
know your dad. He won’t be happy leaving you and Diane with nothing.
I know him too, I said. Well enough to know he’s not going anywhere.
His face softened, like he’d just remembered something. He slapped me on the bicep.
Hey, of course. I’m talking long term here, twenty years from now. So he’ll have
something left when he’s good and ready to retire.
I drained my glass and looked out into the yard. It was small but well-kept, snow
unmussed and smooth on the ground, pine trees overhead neatly trimmed. Jim’s comment had
spoiled its peace.
I think you better get out of here, I said. Before Mom and Dad get home.
Sure, Jim said. Just let me finish my smoke.
On the way out he insisted on washing his glass with soapy water and setting it to dry in
the rack by the sink, even though there was a dishwasher. Then he took mine and did the same,
looking around the small kitchen. It wasn’t much. A couple cabinets hung open, displaying their
meager contents. Stacked cans of Walmart brand soup and beans, some ramen noodles, plain-
looking bags of generic pasta. He drummed his fingers on the counter.
He turned back to me. You like whiskey, huh?
It’s all right.
Well, I got a whole cabinet full of liquor and no one to drink it with. Your parents got
chemo same time next week? Maybe I’ll stop back by again.
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It’s a free country, I said, and led him to the door. After he left I sat at the kitchen table
and poured myself another glass, no water this time, hands trembling with the feeling that the
whole white snowy world was about to swallow up our little family.
When Jim showed up a week later, it was with two paper sacks of groceries. Standing out
on the front porch, breath fogging in the cold, he told me they were filled mostly with canned
goods and boxed meals. A little pickled herring, because he knew it was my father’s favorite.
Nothing fancy, he said. Nothing Diane will have to fuss over.
No way, I said. Dad will kill me.
I tried to shut the door but Jim stuck his boot between it and the jamb.
Hold on, he said, just listen a minute. I’m not taking this stuff back. So you got to either
throw it in the trash and it all goes to waste, or help me take it inside and you and your family
have some free food. You don’t have to say it came from me.
I stood there a moment with my hand on the door, trying my best to glare him off the
porch, but he wouldn’t budge. So finally I said all right, fine, just get in here before the neighbors
see. Together we unpacked the sacks, and when we finished we sat at the kitchen table and
shared a drink.
From then on Jim came by with groceries each week. I told Mom and Dad that kids at
school had taken up a donation for us, which Dad grumbled about but didn’t refuse. Fresh salads
in a bag, gallons of milk, hot dogs, sliced meat, hamburger helper, canned chicken, canned chili,
sauce for sloppy joes, even charcoal and lighter fluid for the grill. Normally I think they would
have gotten all sorts of donations like these. Friends coming by with casseroles and pies, tins of
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lasagna, etc. But most of their friends were either workers at the rubber plant or the wives of
those workers. All on strike except Jim. Times were tight all around.
By the time Christmas neared, we had all agreed not to buy presents. The idea of our
insurance premium quadrupling was seeming less and less like a threat and more and more like
an eventuality. Dad had spent his whole life minding every dollar, so the idea of dipping into
what we had saved for my college to pay our monthly expenses didn’t sit well with him. He was
intent on pinching what pennies we could, and that meant no presents.
Mom did what she could to look for work. But she hadn’t had a job in a long time, and
was finding it hard to break back into things—and hard, I suspect, to leave Dad at home alone.
Still she looked halfheartedly in the Classified section every day for an opening for a
housekeeper or a line cook or anything janitorial, anything where she didn’t need to know how to
use a computer. She knew how slow she typed. But she got so nervous for the interviews that
every time she had one she pitted her shirts before she even left the house, a nervousness that
couldn’t have played well in the interviews.
I was writing these short pieces back then, I wouldn’t even call them stories. I’d be
walking to school and some detail would grab me, a dog sticking his snout out at me between the
blinds of a neighbor’s window or the way some pale green weeds poked through a crack in the
sidewalk. I’d write these things down in a pocket-sized spiral notebook I kept under my bed and
stare at them, trying to decipher what they meant to me. This notebook is the closest thing I have
to a diary of this time, these pieces that contain nothing about anything going on in my family,
and in a way the silence says all there is to say.
#
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Christmas came and went, small and sad. Jim hadn’t been by with groceries for a couple
weeks because he had family in town for the holidays. When he finally did come he said he
wasn’t feeling too well in the gut, he wasn’t sure he could take any whiskey. I quietly suspected
he’d begun to feel guilty for supplying me liquor, diluted though it always was. I got a couple
off-brand Colas from the cabinet and poured them over ice and sat down at the kitchen table. I
began to describe Dad’s latest doctor visits. I didn’t look up at him. My eyes ached, and the
words had a velvety feel coming out of my mouth.
His belly’s getting bigger, I said. He looks like he’s nine months pregnant with this thing.
I went to the doctor with him last time and saw him with his shirt off, lying on his back on the
table while the doctor felt around on him. His arms and neck are skinny as an old man’s. And his
liver isn’t filtering fluids right, so his legs are so swollen it hurts to walk.
The doctors know what they’re doing, Jim said. They’re doing the best they can.
It’s not just the pains though, I said. He dozes off mid-sentence now. Sometimes he
forgets who he’s talking to, or he’ll get confused by the simplest things we tell him.
It was here that we heard the automatic garage door rumble through the walls, the creak
of it being hauled up the steel tracks Dad had said a long time ago he intended to oil, back before
problems like a creaking door began to seem trivial.
We knew with that rumble we were caught. Jim made some frantic, futile attempts to get
out the front door before they came in. He pulled on his work boots and fumbled at the laces
until they were tied. He pulled on his coat from the back of his chair. Then he grabbed his glass
of Coke and stood up, meaning I guess to run to the kitchen and throw it in the sink so Mom and
Dad wouldn’t think twice about why there were two glasses on the table instead of one. But by
the time he got to his feet Mom and Dad were walking in from the garage, Dad’s arm looped
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through my mom’s as though he were being steadied in every step, a reversal of the way they
used to walk. I watched Dad’s eyes sweep the room, see Jim, see me, see the groceries on the
table, comprehension widening then narrowing his glossy eyes.
Dad’s voice had grown hoarse and ragged, more so than I had realized, but that did not
stop him from raising it at Jim. It was the first time I’d heard him yell at his friend where Jim did
not raise his voice in turn. There was a horrifying sort of humor to the scene— my dad looked
positively alien standing there with swollen legs and gut, head and face completely bald but for a
few straggly gray hairs, screaming in a ragged voice that he did not need Jim’s help. Jim glanced
at me and I looked away, to my mother, then my eyes followed hers to the floor.
When Dad was done, I stood up and walked Jim to the door. I didn’t look at Dad but saw
him slumped in the periphery, chest heaving. I let Jim out and said I was sorry, a sentiment that
seems laughably insufficient to me now, though I still don’t know what I would rather have said.
Dad went into the bedroom to lie down. I went to the kitchen to help Mom unpack the
groceries. Together we stacked soup cans in the cupboard, threw out the old spoiled vegetables
from the crisper to make room for the new, and set some frozen drumsticks running under cold
water in the sink to thaw for dinner.
It’s not fair, I said quietly. The way he’s treating Jim.
Mom kept unpacking and said that wasn’t our call to make. I watched the water in the
sink slide away pink from the spots of frozen blood near the bone while in a flat voice she told
me the reason she and Dad were home early from treatment was that Dr. Berg said the chemo
was no longer working. They needed to try a new mix of drugs. I asked her if they thought that
would work. If she thought that would work. She said she didn’t know.
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On New Year’s Eve I took some steaks out of the deep freeze in the garage, steaks we’d
been saving, and a salmon fillet for Dad. I put these things on the kitchen counter. He could no
longer eat beef, but he insisted that Mom and I did.
I sat in the corner of the living room with a collection of short stories I was rereading
distractedly, underlining lines I liked, marking up the margins, looking at Dad every time he
shifted position with a pained look on his face. He was reclined in his chair, eyes shut, Fox News
on the TV turned down to a low murmur to lull him to sleep. Mom flipped through the Classified
section. She hummed something tuneless to herself and stared at the screen and every so often
glanced over at her husband.
In the early evening Dad’s sleep got more restless. He rooted around side to side, hands
on his belly. Eventually his eyes opened and he asked for more pills. I ran and got them, willing
my heart not to pound so loud. He slept another fitful thirty minutes, then stood up. He began to
pace, hand on his lower back, swollen legs plodding heavily. Eventually he turned to me and
said, I think you’d better start the car.
The world was bright white. Snow piled in drifts on either side, cars so covered they
looked like giant mounds of snow. Slick ice underfoot and under the wheels. I drove because my
eyesight was best. Dad sat in the front seat, leaned way back, eyes closed. Mom was in the back
middle seat, leaned forward so she could keep her eyes on Dad. The wipers batted furiously at
the snow. Frost and fog crept in from the corners of all the windows, gradually shrinking my
visible field.
Racing down 56th street towards O, maybe a mile from the emergency room, a light
turned red and I floored the brake pedal. Nothing happened. I felt the brakes kick under foot,
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skipping across the surface of the ice like a flat stone on a body of water. We just kept barreling
toward the intersection, one of the busiest there was in town, blurred headlights crisscrossing our
path. I had enough time to glance over at Dad and see he was asleep, then I jerked the steering
wheel sharply to the right and jumped the curb into a parking lot. The brakes caught traction. We
skidded to a stop. I got out of the car and heard the hiss of air escaping tires.
I stood outside with Mom, flakes of snow swirling against our hair and faces. Dad was
still reclined in the front seat, looking out at us, trying to hide his discomfort. Is it bad? he asked.
A couple of flats, I said. I breathed warm air into my cupped hands, trying to regain
feeling. The hospital was still a mile away, and there was no way Dad could walk.
We’ll never get a cab, I said. I think we need to call 9-1-1.
Dad looked at the dash, chewing the inside of his cheek. Do you have your phone? he
asked my mother.
She nodded yes.
Son of a bitch. Give it here.
She handed it to him through the open window. I watched him flip it open and punch in a
number from muscle memory.
When Jim arrived the snow had stopped. We were sitting in the car with the heat on full
blast, waiting, and we all piled into his pickup. I sat cross-legged in the back seat so Dad could
lean his seat back. Were you at home? Dad asked. Jim said no, he was at work. He’d told the
supervisor Daryl needed his help and they’d let him go with no questions.
In the emergency room, the doctor hooked Dad up to an IV and felt around on his belly.
He gave Dad a button to squeeze if he needed more morphine. He was amazed at the size of the
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liver. They were trying to reach Dr. Berg, who had the day off. He looked at the notes my mom
had of the medications my dad was on, the doses and the time he had to wait between the doses.
The medicines he was to take as needed. He asked Dad to rate his pain.
Nine, he said. Maybe nine point five. He squeezed the button.
Dad detailed his medicinal routine for the doctor. He explained how the pain had been
getting steadily worse. He said that each day he hurt a little more, tried to distract himself with
the newspaper or the TV and just, you know, tough it out. This was all news to me. I knew he
was hurting, but not how serious the pain had gotten. Dad usually talked about it the way you’d
talk about a mild headache, some minor irritation. I listened as he told the doctor he didn’t like to
take the pills deemed ‘as needed.’
I wouldn’t say I need them, he explained, pressing the button in his hand absently. The
doctor asked him if Dr. Berg knew these things he was saying and he said no.
The doctor was sitting in a chair beside the bed. He put his clipboard down. He looked
around at the rest of us. An alarm sounded nearby, and there was the frantic shuffle of nurse’s
feet in front of our door. The doctor had on his face a mixture of confusion and impatience. He
looked back to my dad. You have cancer, he said. You’re going to be in pain. What we can do
for you is we can give you medicine, then you take that medicine, and if you need more you tell
us you need more.
He stood up. We’ll tell you when we talk to Dr. Berg. He will prescribe you new,
stronger medication.
After he left Dad shut his eyes and his pupils began to tremble beneath the lids. I could
tell from how tight his lips were pursed he wasn’t asleep. I could see the trepidation there, the
embarrassment, the fear. And I knew that in his position I wouldn’t have said anything about the
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pain either. That I had that piece of him in me, the piece that would rather let the pain eat at me
than grant it the power of a name.
Mom and I stood outside in the hall, sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups. We watched
the nurses walk by in blue scrubs. A man with one leg balanced on a crutch to fish money from
his pocket for a fruit juice. Jim was in the room with my dad. They’d asked for a moment alone.
Mom and I made small talk. I blew on my cup of coffee, watching the black liquid ripple,
the steam rise. Every little bit seemed significant now: the bright lights, the man with one leg, the
sign on the juice machine indicating they were out of orange. I was drowning in the details. Mom
asked me about school, if I’d kept up with my homework. Her questions dazed me. I couldn’t
remember the last time we’d talked about something that wasn’t Dad.
I interrupted her. This is bad, right? I said. This new pain?
She looked away, blowing carefully at the surface of her own coffee. A small, simple task
she could easily understand. I nodded gently to myself, as though she’d said something
profound.
Down the hall, a fluorescent light flickered above Dad’s cracked hospital door. Through
the crack I saw Dad’s foot at the end of the bed, shifting listlessly under the white sheet. I wanted
desperately to be in there with him, to hear what he and Jim were saying. To be able to say here
now what he said to Jim in that room. But this isn’t my story. I am in the hallway, trying to peer
in.
A week before Dad died, the strike ended and the plant reopened at reduced capacity. The
workers with a lot of years beneath their belts got better benefits, better pay. Their jobs were
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protected. But the new hires, the next generation, had none of this. They made barely better than
fast food money. And a few years later, when the plant was sold for a pittance to some foreign
company, the few senior workers who stayed on were reduced to this low wage as well.
Dad was barely aware it was over. After the trip to the emergency room, we didn’t read
the paper or turn on the news. Maybe we let a compact disc spin in the corner, a crisp digital
sound. Maybe we left the TV on, tuned to the nature channel or something soothing like that. For
a few more weeks we tried chemo. Then they told us it wasn’t working and sent us home with a
prescription for liquid morphine to make him more comfortable. Dad ate less and less and slept
more and more. One day he woke up long enough for us to tell him we loved him, then he
stopped breathing.
We later learned that five weeks before his death Dad’s life insurance policy was up for
renewal, with the option to double down on the amount. He had happily signed. He must have
been aware that this renewal was looming, if he could just hold on that long. It was a surprise
going away present we found out about when a nice letter came in the mail from the insurance
company. It said they were sorry for our loss. So now Mom could take her time finding a job, if
she even wanted one. The money for my college was in the bank. We were touched and elated
and furious, baffled by what we had gained and lost.
~
A decade later, I ran into Jim in the Denver airport on my way to a conference. We were
both coming from different parts of the country, there for a quick layover, just passing through
on our way somewhere else. I offered to buy him a glass of Johnnie Walker and he said sure, he
didn’t drink much anymore but what the hell.
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We sat in a cramped back booth of a bright-lit airport restaurant, fluorescent lights garish
as a hospital room. After half a drink I leaned the side of my head lightly against the big bay
window and looked out onto the runway at all the passing planes. Jim said he’d recently quit
smoking again and I said congratulations.
I still think about your old man, he told me. About them last couple months.
I nodded absently. I do too, I said. Though some of it’s getting fuzzy.
He said he was sure I’d remember what was important.
I drained my last bit of scotch, grimacing. I’d never had the heart to tell Jim I didn’t much
care for the stuff. I’d invited him to a drink because I wanted to ask him what they talked about
in the hospital room that night, but I’d lost the nerve. Suddenly I felt like that scared teenager
again, and I didn’t know if I could get the words out without my voice breaking. At a certain
point, I thought, it must be better to let a wound heal poorly then to open it back up again. So I
slid my empty glass to the center of the table and told him I had a flight to catch.
We stood up and shook hands. Jim said he had one last question, if I didn’t mind.
Anything, I said. He asked what we did with the ashes, since we hadn’t had plans yet at the
funeral. I told him we scattered them on the first day of spring, at the farm where I was
conceived. He nodded approvingly. I wish I knew him back then, he said. Before the rubber
plant.
At the gate I wheeled my suitcase to an empty seat on the row facing the runway. I
glanced up at the screen above the airline counter and saw the flight had been delayed. I wanted
to get some reading done—because somewhere along the way that’s what reading had become
for me, a thing that needed to be “got done”—but I didn’t have the energy. Instead I sat and
watched the other people at the gate. Men and women in suits squinting at their laptop screens.
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Children with boxes of crayons going at coloring books with all their might. The woman at the
counter leaning into the microphone to make her crackly voice better heard. Outside planes
zoomed in for a landing or heaved themselves up into the air, impossibly heavy metal heaps
made to fly, while inside air traffic controllers tabulated the data.
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What That Meant in Miles
Midge stumbled a bit, and almost fell forward onto the footholds the guide had stamped
in the ice. Sixty-six years old, she was already fatigued, not even a third of the way up. Each step
toward the volcano’s summit deepened the dull but persistent pain in her calves, and every breath
of cold air ripped at the inside of her lungs. She regained her footing, paused, and looked towards
the bottom of the steep slope. The idea of tumbling down that white, frictionless sheet made her
palms sweat, at the same time she was invigorated to see how far they had come.
Her husband, Henry, was several steps ahead and hadn’t seen her stumble. But the
Russian hiker behind her cleared his throat. “Are you all right?” he asked.
She was startled by how confident his English sounded. “Yes, I’m fine. I was just taking
it all in.”
At the front of the group, the head guide Felipe fashioned their path. For each step, he
formed a foothold by slicing his pickaxe down into the ice and kicking the incision. Behind him,
Henry watched in admiration, imagining Felipe’s life best he could. He asked the man in Spanish
how often he made this ascent and he said cuatro veces por semana. Imagine that! Four times a
week up the face of an active volcano. Waking before dawn, at the summit by noon, then back
down and having a drink before sunset. A hell of a life to lead. Henry would never tire of a life
like that.
There were nine of them in all, trekking single file in a zigzag pattern up the slope: a
younger guide whose name Henry didn’t know, him and Midge, the Russian, and four Swiss
girls. Henry had meant to be further back, with Midge, but in his eagerness had fallen in line
right behind Felipe. Before they began Henry had tried out what German he knew on the Swiss
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and had done all right, he thought, until they started talking back. Midge had been on him lately
to get a hearing aid, but he’d dismissed this advice.
Henry was keeping up with Felipe just fine, though the vibrations from the pickaxe were
starting to bother his hand. He held it like the guide had said, driving the spike down into the ice
with each step, always on higher ground so if he fell he could hang onto it rather than be
impaled. Deaths on the volcano were rare, but not impossible. There was nothing to grab onto
once you started rolling down, no way to stop the terrible inertia.
He wanted to pause for a moment, to squeeze his hand into a fist. This sometimes helped
the arthritis, to let a little air into the joints. But he didn’t want to hold up the others, and it was
too soon to start taking breaks just yet.
Midge’s breathless spell had passed quickly. Her throat was dry and the small of her back
ached, but her feet fell steadily again. No more stumbles. After a while the guides let them stop
on a flat space next to three gray boulders sticking out of the snow. They were told in English to
sit down. Midge took off her sunglasses and looked out onto the landscape. The sky was brighter
blue than anything she’d ever seen, and all the surrounding mountains, their solid masses
straining up into the sky, seemed intent on reminding her how much longer they’d be around
than she would.
Henry sat down beside her on one of the boulders. “My god,” he said. “That Russian has
no sleeves.”
“Shh. He speaks English.”
“It can’t be more than twenty degrees out here. Where are the boy’s sleeves?”
“I’m sure he’s used to the cold.”
“What is that in Celsius, anyway? Twenty degrees.”
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Midge tried to calculate. “Ten below, maybe? I don’t know. Give me some water.”
Henry took the bottle out of his pack. “Here. You better have a cereal bar too, if you’re
half as hungry as I am.”
“A cup of coffee, that’s what I could use. Why didn’t we bring the thermos?”
“You must have forgotten to volunteer to carry it,” Henry said, and winked.
Felipe clambered up the tallest boulder. Cupping his hands dramatically around his
mouth, he called out that in five more minutes they’d move on.
“He can’t be serious,” Midge said. “We just sat down.”
Her face was covered in sweat and she shivered when the cold wind hit it.
“Try not to think about it,” Henry said. “Here, let me get your coat.”
Henry leaned over and dug in her backpack for the puffy jacket the tour company had
provided. She put out her arms and he helped her get it on. “Funny how you don’t notice the cold
when you’re moving,” he said. Before they’d been fine in just sweatshirts.
“How’s your arthritis?” she asked.
“Hush,” he said. “You don’t want these people knowing I’m an old man, do you?” He
kissed her on the cheek. “I’m going to go ask the guide a question. I feel like speaking Spanish.”
Midge smiled and shivered and looked out at the view. The way the clouds jutted up
against the white snowy summits made it look like pieces of the taller mountains were floating
away, becoming clouds.
The air here was a hell of a thing. It was thin and cold and pure. She felt like it could cure
anything. Like she could bring a jar of it back to the U.S. and tell someone who was feeling sad,
“Here, just take a deep breath of this.” Poof! Their depression would disappear. Midge knew this
was silly but still half-believed it. At first she’d been reluctant to attempt this climb, but now was
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sure it was just the type of thing they’d been missing for so many years. For a long time they’d
been saving every penny so they could travel the world when they retired. This three-week trip
through Chile was just the start. And why not? They had nothing tying them to any one place.
The Russian came and sat down beside her. He still hadn’t put on his jacket. He
introduced himself as Vlad.
“Midge,” she said. “Aren’t you cold?”
“We will be moving again soon. How are you feeling?”
Her cheeks grew suddenly warm. “I’m fine,” she said. “I think I just needed water.”
“You are very strong. I hope I am climbing volcanoes when I am your age. You have
children?”
Midge looked down at her feet, as if she were studying the way the laces lay on her boots.
She felt a familiar pressure, as if her rib cage were suddenly pressing in on her heart and lungs.
This was not a conversation she wanted to have. But after all these years she still didn’t know the
graceful way to avoid it. I used to have a son is not a thing people let slide by without questions
and condolences. So she said what she always said.
“No. I don’t have children.”
As they trotted up the great white slope, it filled with other trekking parties. Most were
bigger than their own, and many moved faster. Each group had its own color jacket. Midge and
Henry’s were sky blue, the color of baby clothes.
Henry was disappointed their group had no Chileans. Four Swiss and a Russian, that was
no good. “Dónde están los chilenos?” he asked Felipe.
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Felipe motioned gruffly toward a cluster of red jackets, and responded in English. “If they
are here, they are in the big groups, not the small ones. Cheaper that way.”
Behind them, Midge listened and started to feel dizzy. Her throat was suddenly dry and
her head hurt again. She concentrated on setting one foot in front of the other, pickaxe point
pressed firm into the ice.
Henry tried again to get Felipe to speak Spanish with him. “Ustedes tienen un país
hermoso.”
Again Midge stumbled, worse this time. Her boot overshot the foothold and skidded
rightward, down the slope. She let out a cry. Clinging tight to the cold pickaxe handle, she tried
to regain her balance, but her other knee began to buckle. From behind, two large, gentle hands
steadied her under her armpits. She squeezed her arms tight to her sides and it was like when she
was a child, a thermometer under her arm, her mother telling her Keep it tight against your body.
She felt unbearably light, like whoever was holding her could just swaddle her and carry her
easily to the summit.
“Careful,” Vlad said in her ear. “You feel sick?”
Midge nodded. She shook the Russian off and sat down in the snow, suddenly surrounded
by concerned faces. She took off her sunglasses, but it was too bright so she put them back on.
Then Henry was crouching on the snow beside her, asking what was wrong, was something
wrong?
“I think she’s dizzy,” Vlad said. “She almost fell.”
She looked up at the Russian and he was the age of her son, the age her son was, when.
“We should go back down,” Henry said.
“No. I’ll be fine.”
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“Baby, we’re not even halfway up.”
She smiled. She loved this about him, that after all these years he still called her baby.
“I’ll be fine. I have some aspirin in my backpack.”
Though she was sitting in snow, she couldn’t feel the cold through the snow pants they’d
given her. Henry dug in her backpack for the aspirin. He handed it to her, along with some water
to take it with.
“You need to drink a lot of water,” Felipe said. “For the sickness.”
“Will she be all right?”
“She will be fine. But maybe she should try to climb another day.”
“There is no other day. Tomorrow we’re off to Punta Arenas, then Torres del Paine.”
“It can be dangerous if she is dizzy. And we are losing time.”
Henry looked around the slope. There were still groups below them, but fewer than
before. They were being overtaken. The younger guide said something to Felipe and gestured
toward the peak.
Henry looked down at his hand and squeezed it into a fist, trying to loosen the joints. This
had been his damn fool idea, this climb. Midge had said it might be too much for them, but he’d
refused to believe it. It was the sort of thing they’d put off for so long. A lifetime, it seemed. And
now the time had passed. What was he doing here, crouched on the side of a volcano with aching
knuckles and a poor wife he’d made sick by being so stubborn?
She took his hand. “You go on ahead. One of the guides can take me back down.”
“Like hell.”
“It’s okay. Really. I’m just as happy to wait at the hotel.”
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Henry stood up. “And then what? I go for another half hour then get dizzy too and go
down by myself? No, you were right. We shouldn’t have come.”
He looked up at the sky. Two distant mountains cradled the sun, as good a view as he was
going to get. He took the camera out of his jacket’s breast pocket, snapped a picture, and turned
to the younger guide. “Puede bajar con nosotros?”
The guide nodded yes, he could take them down.
“Listen to me, will you?” Midge said. “I want you to keep going.”
He put the camera back in his pocket. He sat down beside her and put his head on her
shoulder. Her jacket was big and bulky and soft on his cheek. “No, I don’t want to. It’s no good
without you. If we can’t go up together we can at least go down together.”
She looked around at the other travelers. The Russian had put on a coat. The Swiss girls
were standing with their arms crossed, speaking German to one another in low tones. One
glanced at her then looked away with an expression like she’d just sniffed sour milk. They
wanted to get moving again. Part of Midge wanted to go with them. A large part. A part she
forced herself to ignore.
For some minutes the guides spoke to each other in machine gun Spanish too fast to
follow. They seemed to be arguing. The younger guide kept pointing up to the peak and Felipe
was shaking his head no. Felipe said something into his walkie talkie and listened to the crackly
response. He nodded his head, his eyes on the younger guide. “Vale,” he said. Then he addressed
the tour group: “I’m afraid we cannot take Midge back down, not yet.”
He explained that their boss was very strict, and that climbing higher with the rest of
them would mean too many hikers to a single guide. Instead, Felipe would continue on with the
Swiss while the other guide, Pato, stayed behind with Henry and Midge and Vlad. That group
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would move slower up the mountain, with more breaks, so another guide could catch up with
them. Then if Midge and Henry still needed to go down they could.
Midge felt bad for Vlad, for making him hang back. She told him so.
Vlad shook his head. “Altitude sickness is common. It can happen to anyone.”
“It didn’t, though,” she said. “It happened to me.”
When they started up again, Midge walked up front, behind Pato. She watched his slow,
methodical work with the pickaxe. After a while he stopped, turned his head slightly, and called
back over his shoulder. “Everyone okay?”
She didn’t like that. She knew it was a question for her, and she knew Henry and Vlad
knew it too.
“I’m fine,” she called back. “Thank you.” When he started walking again and she was
sure no one would see, she stuck her tongue out at him.
When Henry had first brought it up, Midge had been nervous about the climb, sure it
would make them feel their age. She had pictured her and Henry trailing behind a bunch of
twenty-something body-building backpackers who would barely break a sweat. But by the time
they’d arrived in Chile, the volcano had transformed in her mind into something of pure beauty,
a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The night before the climb, this had excited her to no end. She
had been outright giddy, and she and Henry made love for the first time in ages. She laughed as
he fumbled with the childproof cap on the prescription pill bottle. “Here,” she said, “let me.” He
turned red. “At least we don’t have to use condoms, right?” she said. He smiled and nodded and
kissed her deeply. But when he pushed her back on the bed and started to undo her belt, fingers
growing surer, she looked up at the chain dangling from the ceiling fan and felt strange
250
remembering how long they had used condoms after they were first married, how excited they
were when they stopped so they could start trying for Billy. When they finished she was sure he
saw the tears in the corners of her eyes.
She heard Henry behind her now, and knew he was hurting. The pain in his hands. The
pickaxe would be hard to hold. She’d lived with him living with his pains so long they felt like
her own. His legs would be aching too, but he’d be too scared to say so. He wanted to be the
strong one, to impress her and the guide and poor sweet Vlad, who’d had to stay behind with
them. So let Henry be the rock. When they got back down he’d confess his hands and legs had
been hurting, and she would say, Oh! I had no idea. This was the story of her life with Henry.
His hidden pains, her bleeding out in the open despite all her best efforts.
They walked for some time with no break. Henry was in the back. He wanted to be
watching Midge, to make sure she was all right, but he had to keep his eyes on where his feet
were falling. He had to trust the guide, the Russian, the grips on Midge’s shoes. He knew she’d
stop if she needed to. She’d be embarrassed, but she would stop. And he knew that Vlad would
catch her again if need be, and damn it if he wouldn’t do a better job than Henry ever could.
Anyway, it seemed her spell had passed.
Eventually they rested on a big rock and had lunch. They were now the only group on
this part of the volcano; everyone else was further up, and many would be at the top already.
They made small talk while they waited for the other guide. Henry took Midge’s hand. It was a
strange sensation, holding someone else’s gloved hand with his own, the material bunching
between them. A touch without warmth, like resting a hand on the body in a casket.
251
After a while Pato took out his walkie talkie and started talking. Something staticky
answered back. “¿Cómo?” he said, again and again. “Sí, sí, OK, entiendo.”
He put the walkie talkie back in his bag.
“The other guide isn’t coming,” Midge said.
Henry looked from her to Pato. “Is that what they said?
“We do not have enough workers today,” the guide said. “They have no one to send.”
“So what do we do?”
“We keep moving. We hope your wife is okay. If no, we all go down together.”
Before they started moving again, Midge went off with Pato to find a place for her to pee.
As private a place as one could find on a wide-open slope above the tree line. The guide walked
ahead of her, carving out steps in the snow until they found a flat spot half-hidden between some
large rocks. He stood with his arms crossed and his back turned as she unbuckled and squatted,
steam rising around her.
Meanwhile, Vlad and Henry shared an energy bar and an awkward silence. Henry felt
unmanned by Vlad, who had kept his wife from falling.
“Your wife is a good woman,” Vlad said. “How long have you been married?”
“Forty-one years.”
The Russian whistled. “I cannot imagine knowing someone so well. All that time, just the
two of you.”
Henry licked his lips. “What do you mean?”
“Midge says to me you do not have children.”
Henry trained his eyes on the interweaving sets of footprints leading up, unable to tell
which were theirs.
252
“That’s only half true,” he told Vlad. He licked his lips again, flaps of dead skin chapped
from the cold. This was the conversation he never wanted to have but always ended up having
anyhow. He felt suddenly a bit lightheaded himself, and took a deep drink of water.
They had had a son once, Henry wanted to say, but that didn’t seem like the type of thing
one said. Not there, trapped with this man at who knew how many meters above sea level or
what that number meant in miles anyway. A million little interventions he might have made, that
was what Henry would always remember. Especially that answering machine tape, that last
message Billy had left, and the cassette player that ate it: Henry with his clumsy arthritic fingers
and bad vision made worse by tears, tugging desperately until the ribbon ripped. They’d never
thought to make a copy, wouldn’t have known how without Billy. One last failure to intervene,
one last loss chocked up to bad luck. Just one of those things. Everything was always just one of
those things.
When Billy was born it was blue-faced and not breathing, umbilical cord wrapped around
his neck. Henry was stuck in an airport in Pennsylvania, traveling for business like usual, pacing
back and forth. Something in the way the clouds hovered outside the bay windows told him it
was all wrong. The first and only birth Henry had witnessed was as a child, a prolapsed mother
heifer at his uncle’s farm in Norfolk, her insides turning inside out as the calf was born. A bad
omen. He was not religious nor superstitious but he wasn’t blind either. They unwrapped the
cord immediately but the boy was never quite right. Stole a car at sixteen just to show he could,
abandoned it still running in an Osco parking lot. Sold the younger kids at his school spray paint
to huff. They knew the drinking was a problem, and the driving too, but it was just one of those
things.
253
But Henry didn’t tell the Russian any of this. Instead he found himself telling him about
the tape and the damn machine that ate it. Midge had been on him to get a new cassette player
for the bedroom. It was as old as Billy was when the accident happened, the geometric symbols
on the gray buttons all but smudged away. Some nights, when Midge could sleep and he
couldn’t, Henry would pop in the tape and watch the white spindles rotate. Here came Billy’s
voice, “Hey ma, it’s Bill, just wanted to say, you know, thanks for everything...” It was from the
night following the intervention, when after a lot of tears and fessing up and hand wringing he’d
sworn off the bottle. There was something in his voice on that recording that Henry couldn’t stop
going back to. It was shaky in all the right ways, filled with a worn, tired kind of perseverance
Henry had never heard before.
“I remember thinking,” Henry said, “that this is what hope sounds like. This is what I
need to carry forward. But now for the life of me I can’t hear it in my head. I can’t remember my
own son’s voice. I remember hearing it, and what I thought at the time, but I can’t hear the thing
itself. Not now that the damn machine ate the tape.”
Midge came crunching back across their boot prints from before. Over the rhythmic steps
came Henry’s voice. As she got closer she started to pick out some words and she understood
what he was talking about. What, though maybe not why. Something about that tape, it tore at
Henry. She’d tried so many times to tell him it was bound to happen. A cassette tape was not a
permanent medium. Nothing was. But it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t hear her.
“Henry—”
She was standing next to the guide now, a few feet away from Henry and Vlad, who sat
together on a small boulder. Vlad had an all-too-familiar look on his face, full of pity and deep
discomfort. He glanced at her for a moment then quickly looked away.
254
#
Soon they were moving again. She didn’t know what to say to Henry nor to Vlad, so she
didn’t say anything. They were all but alone on the slope now. The cold air bit at her lips and
eyes and her whole was body sore, fatigued. Sweat pooled in her armpits and slicked the palms
of her hands. The air grew thinner and thinner, her breath more ragged, the exertion more
exhausting. She watched her steps fall, trying to block out all else. They had been walking for so
long but she was certain if she stopped she would not start again. She started to feel dizzy and
she told herself, No. This is not what happens here. The guide said we were close.
Henry was behind her, wheezing. Ahead, the Russian grunting. She beat back the urge to
look up at the sky. She had to be careful where she put her feet. One wrong step and down you
went. One wrong step was all it took. But her thoughts felt lighter up here in the thin air. Like
lily pads floating down a stream. In her mind’s eye she saw herself trip and fall sideways, losing
her grip on the pickaxe, tumbling down the slick white surface. How many years would that cut
her life short, anyway? Twenty, thirty? Maybe ten, or even less? They wouldn’t call that tragedy.
Somewhere along the way she’d reached the age where death became unfortunate, rather than
tragic.
She tried to let her mind clear, to let her senses carry her. She heard her husband
wheezing behind her, Pato whistling up ahead. Her ragged breath sliced into her like a hand saw,
pressure building in her kneecaps until she was sure they would burst. How long had her knees
been aching? Maybe forever.
Glancing down she could not tell where she was on the volcano. It seemed like the same
stretch of footprints they’d been walking for hours. We’re going in circles, she thought wildly.
They’ve tricked me. They’ve found a way to always move up but never reach the top. Then she
255
felt a strange quaint certainty that if she turned around she would not see the gray-haired Henry
who shared her bed last night and almost every night these last four decades, but the hippie with
a long black beard who first winked at her at age twenty-one and offered her a drag off his
cigarette. It was not an altogether unpleasant thought.
“Henry?”
He huffed along behind her.
“Yes, I’m here.”
“I don’t feel so well.”
Henry looked up. He saw that he and Midge had fallen behind. The others were ahead by
a couple dozen paces or more.
“Okay, Midge, stop there.”
She slowed, but took another step.
“Midge, baby, it’s okay. Wait where you are.”
“Do your hands hurt?” she asked.
He squeezed his right hand into a fist. It felt like a small explosion of white-hot pin pricks
between the joints.
“I guess they do,” he said.
“It’s strange how you don’t notice the pain after a while. Unless someone brings it up.”
She took another step.
“Midge, cut it out!” he said. He took hold of the back of her coat with his free hand. The
other held fast to his pickaxe speared into the slope beside him. “Just stay still a minute,” he said.
Midge turned and twisted her body back toward him the best she could without stepping
outside her footprints.
256
“What’s wrong?” she asked. She let her pickaxe go and grabbed onto his arm gently with
both her hands.
“Here, sit down,” he said.
“Did you know you look like Billy? I suppose you don’t notice.”
“Listen, I’m sorry I brought it up. Blame the altitude. No, blame the Russian.”
“He’s a good boy you know.”
“The Russian? I know. I’m just joking. Listen, sit down a minute.”
“Not the Russian.”
Henry’s mind stuttered. “Who do you mean, honey? You mean Billy?”
Midge half fell, half sat down in the snow. She looked around, lost.
“Henry. Henry’s a good boy.”
Up ahead, Vlad and Pato had stopped. Henry couldn’t see the expressions on their faces
but Pato was pointing back at them. Henry held up a single finger. One second. Just wait one
second.
“Who did you say? Who’s a good boy?” He sat down beside her. He took her hand. If he
could just bide time. Wait for her to get her bearings before they tried to move.
“Henry. I know you don’t like him. His hair is too long.”
“Midge, who do you think I am?” he whispered.
Confusion crept across her face, written in the folds that formed as she narrowed her
eyes. Her lips moved slightly, as if reading a set of complicated instructions. Still she clasped his
hand. Henry’s heart galloped along faster and faster as she studied him.
“¡Amigo!” he heard Pato call. “¿Todo bien?”
“¡Esperen!” Henry called back. “Wait one minute, damn it!”
257
He looked back at Midge. She wiggled her hand in his and giggled.
They’d seen this sort of thing in both their mothers, at the end. But this was too soon, just
too soon. Sure, Midge could be spacy. They both could. He’d noticed her water the plants twice
in one day, or unlock the front door when she thought she was locking it. Once she’d tried to
make an appointment with the dentist and called their old dentist, from years prior and several
states over. She hadn’t realized her mistake until halfway through the conversation, then hung up
the phone red as a beet without a word. They’d both eventually laughed at that, though, thought
nothing of it. Now a million similar instances jumped to his mind, a tapestry he’d refused to see
as a whole.
He looked into her eyes and tried not to see an icy glimmer of things to come. “It’s just
the altitude, Midge,” he said. “You’ll feel better in a minute.”
She nodded. “I’m starting to feel better now.”
He glanced up to where Pato and Vlad were standing, watching and waiting. Then, for
the first time, he noticed that there was hardly any more mountain above them.
“My god,” he said. “I think that’s the top. Right over that ridge there.” He called out to
Pato, pointing. “Is that the peak?”
“Sí, claro,” the guide shouted back, hands cupped around his mouth, “we are almost
there!”
Henry looked at Midge and she was looking back at him. She dug into her pack and
pulled out a bottle of water. Smiled. And with that it was her, Midge was Midge again.
“Billy loved this about you,” she said. “This stubbornness.”
Henry wasn’t sure what she meant. “Pato says that’s it, right up there,” he said.
258
She took a long gulp of water. “Remember when you bought Billy that Nintendo, then
stayed up all night with his friends helping them beat Super Mario?”
Henry smiled. “We thought the damn thing was broken at first. We were sure it couldn’t
be so hard.”
They fell silent. The sounds drifted down from the peak. They could hear the other tour
groups now, whooping and hollering in several different languages.
“I think I’m ready,” Midge said, and handed him the bottle of water.
Further up the slope, Vlad watched Henry help Midge up. She seemed shaky. At first
Vlad wished he’d noticed sooner that they were falling behind, and stayed down there with them.
Then he was glad he hadn’t.
Beside him, Pato muttered something that sounded like profanity. Vlad didn’t understand
Spanish. As he watched, Henry guided Midge’s hand to the pickaxe she’d left standing in the
snow, then grabbed his own pickaxe, holding onto the back of her jacket the whole time. Midge
took a shaky step forward, then Henry took one too. After Midge took a second step, surer now,
so did Henry.
“Chucha,” Pato said to Vlad. “We will be here forever.”
Vlad waved his hand dismissively. He took a flask out of his pocket, figuring they were
past the hard part, and while he drank he decided to return to this volcano when he was Henry’s
age, to prove that he could still do it, too. All around them, the wind whistled across the hardened
snow.
Below, Henry and Midge wound their way up the volcano. Vlad and Pato watched the
old couple in silence, and after a while it was impossible to tell who was helping who, Henry
259
holding Midge aloft by the back of her coat or Midge guiding Henry forward, one wavering step
at a time.
Abstract (if available)
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Johnson, Bruce
(author)
Core Title
Earth, sky, and morning light: naturalism in Proulx’s Wyoming Stories
School
College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree Program
Literature and Creative Writing
Publication Date
04/13/2021
Defense Date
01/22/2021
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
Brokeback Mountain,creative writing,Fiction,naturalism,OAI-PMH Harvest,Proulx,short stories,Wyoming
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Bender, Aimee (
committee chair
), Diaz, Roberto (
committee member
), Everett, Percival (
committee member
), Handley, William (
committee member
)
Creator Email
brucejohnson2101@gmail.com,bruwjo@gmail.com
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-441540
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UC11667833
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etd-JohnsonBru-9436.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-441540 (legacy record id)
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441540
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Johnson, Bruce
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texts
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
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Tags
Brokeback Mountain
creative writing
naturalism
Proulx