Call Me Home (17 page)

She sat on the porch well into the night waiting, listening to the sounds of the town and the river shifting and settling in the dark. Please Sam, she thought. Come home to me.

EVERY DAY SAM
was gone, she felt her own life in Fannin stretch thinner. The whole town seemed lousy with trenches and cellars, small, dark places where Sam might have gone to lie down. To die, she thought but wouldn't say.

In the end, it was better, she told herself. Sam was so old. She would not have to see him suffer. She tried to remind herself of that whenever her throat grew tight, whenever the grass rustled and she looked for him, her oldest friend, hoping against hope that Sam would come bounding toward her, mouth open, his body shaking with excitement, his tailing wagging madly in the warm breeze. But he didn't. And so, she told herself again, she would not have to see him suffer. And in some small way, she was set free.

Three weeks after Sam disappeared, she called Gary. “Tell me about Seattle,” she said.

They made plans to leave after Christmas, before the New Year. When Amy told her mother, she didn't tell her that they were already married. “I'm thinking of going with Gary on a trip,” she said. “To Seattle.” She didn't say, “to stay,” but her mother looked at her as though it was all already between them, the deceit, and everything Amy meant to do.

“You love him,” her mother said. She looked so small.

On Christmas Day, the day before they would leave, Amy walked the neighborhood a last time, looking for Sam. When he didn't appear, she buried a soup bone near the steps and left the dirt in a tall pile so that he would know. At the last moment, she pulled a handful of purple and yellow johnny jump-ups from the pot on the steps and laid them there. “Oh Sam,” she said aloud. “You were mine.”

Jackson

Silver, Idaho, 2010

SILVER ITSELF WAS IN THE LOWER PANHANDLE, SOUTHEAST
of Kellogg and Wallace, still in the dark mountains. It was the river that had killed the mines; the river that killed what Jackson was beginning, even now, to think of as the
real
Silver, its rocky little heart. The way the men on the crew talked, and the way that the town bore its bad luck without complaint, with familiarity, made Jackson sure that even Silver's boom years hadn't been much, not in the way that you might imagine. Little bars, tired miners. Every penny had been pulled from the earth for more than it was worth. And the river – the creek – that sprawled its way down the mountains, just east of the town, kept flooding. It flooded with determined, manic consistency – no way to know when, just that it was inevitable.

In the mornings, when he didn't have to work, Jackson walked the channel of the old riverbed. The water was slowly disappearing, the ground turning back to flat hard dirt. It was an expanse of strange housekeeping, everything that over the years had been lost. The bright curve of a flip-flop, a muddy radio, scraps of torn fabric, garbage bags still full of waterlogged trash. An armchair, blooming with mud and leaves. There was an old man with shaky arms who was often there in the mornings, trolling the wide ditch with a metal detector in a pair of tall rubber boots. He stopped every few feet, digging in the mud, wearing a pair of yellow kitchen gloves.

A hundred, two hundred years of this town – what all had
sunk down in that sprawling river? Engagement rings, bottles, toys. He'd heard how police had been on hand when the river was diverted in case bodies showed up. Missing persons. But there were only the bones of dogs, cats, a cow, the shell of a 1931 convertible Cabriolet sunk deep in the mud. Jackson liked to watch the old man, plodding slowly along, his metal detector held in front of him like a dowsing rod. His mother would have found the man romantic, Jackson thought. “Oh,” he could imagine her saying, “Look at that. He's digging up the past. Digging up bones. Like the Randy Travis song!” She had kept only a few things from her life before Jackson's father, things she'd brought across the country. Jackson liked to look at them, to try to add them up to something. A glass baby bottle with a thick rubber nipple, a cut china bowl, a yellow leather driving glove. Onto that stratum she added the sentimental detritus of his and Lydia's things. Report cards
(Jackson fulfills obligations but ultimately seems disinterested in engaging with his peers)
, drawings, the head of a baby doll that Lydia had made up with a Magic Marker – deep blue eyelids and a hideous pink grin. The dead walkie-talkie that Jackson had carried for years, intercepting messages from space aliens, benevolent imagined protectors, and Kenny Rogers.

That was one thing that bothered him about the new lake – on the surface, it seemed like a kind of forgiveness, to make newness and beauty out of the splintered wreckage of the old dam, the watermarked town. An offering of grace. But at the same time, wasn't it a falsehood, to think you could just move an entire river, make a new lake, and everything would fall into place? A litter of wild dogs, displaced by the flood, ran in and out of the woods, through the alleys in town. In the absence of more certain landmarks, birds flew woozily into the windows of the new houses. One morning, Jackson had stood in an empty house frame while the wind whipped through, watery and sharp smelling. One of the carpenters had left his lunch sitting in a paper sack on top of a sawhorse. When Jackson turned around one of the stray dogs was there, rangy and skittish, eating the sandwich in choking bites.
The dog finished the sandwich and stood there shaking, tonguing up crumbs. His fur was matted. He looked at Jackson with hungry, lost eyes.

AFTER DON TOLD
him about his wife, Jackson didn't see him for three weeks. The work had picked up, and Don was back and forth to Spokane, to Missoula. Jackson was full of a sick uncertainty – was it over? Would he know if it was? Did it even matter? And then Don came to him on a Tuesday afternoon, when there hadn't been much to do and Mark Davis, someone Jackson understood to be in at least moderately in charge, told him to cut out early. Jackson had just finished taking a shower – five minutes in the narrow plastic stall, the trickle of cool water from the snaking showerhead, the curtain sticking to him and water spilling out onto the floor of the cab. Now he was trying to get warm again, half-reading a shitty thriller that had been left on the free shelf at Mary's. He heard sticks cracking outside the cab and froze, waiting. He had a knife, that was all, and he reached for it, wedged beside his mattress and the wooden frame. He held its cool weight and his breath. “Jack,” Don whispered. “Let me in?”

Jackson swung open the creaking door and there was Don. Pretty, big-eyed Don with that shock of black hair and a shadow of stubble that raked Jackson's face when they kissed. Don was wearing jeans and a jean jacket – Jackson pictured Randy, stoned, delighted,
A Canadian tuxedo!
– but on Don it looked right, loose and easy. He had his arm threaded through two lawn chairs and a bottle of wine in his hand. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“I thought,” Don said, setting everything down in the dirt and stepping up onto the first steep step into the cab, “that you might want some chairs. It's getting warmer out these days.” He looked at Jackson. “You're wet,” he said. “And so clean. I probably shouldn't kiss you, being so dirty myself.”

“You're probably right,” Jackson said, and he reached for Don, pulled him up and into the cab of the truck, onto his tiny bed,
on top of him. God, Don's mouth. Jackson's skin was electric with wanting, all of the wanting of the last three weeks rising up in him, hard and nearly painful.

“Stop,” Don said, sitting up, nearly hitting his head on the ceiling of the cab. “I wanted this to be romantic. I brought chairs.”

“That
is
romantic,” Jackson said. “Are they real plastic?”

“You're a brat.”

“They're beautiful.”

“And ungrateful.”

“So well made.”

“Shut up and help me.” They climbed out into the five o'clock June light and carried the chairs – pink and green, made of clear plastic that reminded Jackson of Lydia's old jelly shoes – through the underbrush, to a break in the trees where a swath of the lake was visible, and the rusty blast furnace, the skeleton of an old factory. They planted the chairs in the dirt side-by-side, and sat. Jackson had the feeling that Don had brought him here for a reason, and he waited. When he was seeing Eric, Jackson had come to understand that this was how to talk to men – to pretend you weren't talking at all. Eric would move from talking about his lunch of scallion salad to his certainty that the other managers thought him a fool, his bitter jealousy of other men, his aching fear of death, while Jackson lobbed soft noises of interest at him from beneath the cloud of the feather duvet.

“So,” Don said. “How have you been?”

“I've been working,” Jackson said. “
Where
have you been?”

“Point taken.” Don peeled the tin from the top of the wine and unscrewed the top. He passed it to Jackson. It was cheap and sweet.

Jackson wiped his mouth. “No,” he said. “I mean it. I haven't seen you in a while, is all.”

“There's been a lot to do.” Don lifted his legs, in those dirty work boots, and set them on Jackson's lap. “I've been driving everywhere and, god, it's hell.”

“Did you go home?” He tried to make his voice sound light, easy.

“Some. It was shit, actually.”

“Why?” Clean laundry, Jackson imagined. The smell of detergent, the sports channel, Don's jizzed up socks in the back of the closet, his wife blow-drying her hair. He imagined they must have had a church wedding. Tastelessly expensive. Did she have any idea? Jackson wondered. Could she even imagine Don with him, here?

“Eliza is unhappy,” Don said. “I'm unhappy.” He raised his arms. “Is there anybody in the whole word who
is
happy? Are
you
happy?”

Jackson ignored the question. “Where is she now? Home?”

“Missoula. In our house.”

“You miss her?”

“Yes. No. The idea of her.” He sighed, shrugged, and adjusted his hands on the steering wheel. “This is not my beautiful house – remember that song? You're too young.”

“So,” Jackson said. What was there to say?

“So.”

Over the empty last three weeks, he had imagined asking Don a dozen questions – Do you fuck her? Hold her? Spend all day in bed on Sundays? Do you love her? – but now they were ebbing out of him. He saw how he would sound, how pathetic he would seem. He took the wine and drank from it instead.

“This town was never meant to be a town,” Don said. “It was Kellogg's dirty little barefoot mountain cousin.” He looked at Jackson. “Where you from, Jack?”

He shrugged. He felt embarrassed at how little he and Don knew about each other, even after he'd been inside of Don, had pressed his hand against his broad chest, his heart. At the same time, he liked the idea that Don knew nothing about him, about what he was or what he had been. Just for a moment he imagined how Don saw him, untroubled and young. A blue-collar kid who probably had a hot girlfriend back in a small town, Superior
maybe, and two parents who didn't make much money but kept a nice house.

“Come on,” Don said.

Jackson picked at the top of the furnace and peeled off a rust-red sliver of corroded metal. “It's not a good story,” he said. “It might make you sad.” Did that sound interesting or pathetic? What, he thought, would make Don want to kiss him?

Don looked at him. “I've never in my life felt good,” he said.

“Really?” Jackson asked. At five, with his mother – “Am I good?” he'd asked her, and she'd said, “The best in the world,” and he'd whispered it to himself, “The best in the world,” until its meaning was lost and only the warm comfort of it remained.

“Maybe when I was younger. A kid. A teenager.”

Jackson felt a pinch of annoyance at Don, at his hound dog expression. Don had never had to suck an old man's cock for money, he thought. Don had surely never watched his father kick his mother in the ribs. What was Don, thirty? Thirty-five? Jackson suspected that even for all that not feeling good that he was talking about, Don hadn't exactly hoed a hard road. At the same time, there was Don's strong neck, the cords of muscle that sloped down to his shoulders. Let him have his little misery. “So, what happened?” he asked.

The lake was invisible from here, and Jackson imagined that they were somewhere else entirely, and that Don had brought him here on a date. The only dates he'd ever had were at Eric's table for twelve, set for two. The little dance of what was and wasn't real.

“Eliza, I suppose,” Don said. “I had a year at Montana State and then we got together. We just – it wasn't her, exactly. I don't know. Ten years of shit and things get a little murky.”

This, Jackson thought, was not exactly the turn that a date should take.

“I've been terrible to her,” Don said. “She was a drinker. I was a drinker. We were drunks together. You know. We'd drive anywhere, drinking. That was the point. Go from one bar to another, and then we'd just drink and scream at each other.”

It didn't sound that terrible to Jackson. It sounded like his parents at their worst and best. Romantic and ugly, the fights that could go either way and you didn't know if they'd all be eating take-out and laughing or packing the car for a motel. Besides, all the drinkers he had known were alone with their microwave dinners, their sagging faces and cancer coughs. None of them were young and beautiful and coltish. None of them had their boots up on his lap when there were a hundred other places to be.