Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley (24 page)

First I thought it was an accident, then I started hearing how on the other side it must of been planned. First I thought it was only our boy pulled the our-side trigger, then started hearing I was at least half wrong. Heat off that woodstove, heat off fourteen scared men, and already five different stories were fighting for what would be said. I
was getting my taters going in some grease out a cup, when the oldest one, Franklin's first son, Bunk, come up on my back. I shifted my head and I looked at him there. “Chester. Ches.” Was all he said.

Aside from Bunk, they brung me only because they could stand my cooking and was always short on people to drive, I knowed that. And because, at sixty-nine, I was still my father's son, them theirs. And because they knowed I couldn't talk good when I could talk at all, and most people thinks what comes out your mouth is one and the same with what runs in your head. Which works against you most of the time, but with them, it usually worked for. Hunting places around here have shrunkt up smaller every year, I needed fresh meat in my freezer. Now Bunk had slumped away from it, into a back-cracked chair between the cookstove and wall, and he dropped that gray chin in his hand.

I got to slicing my onions, the sharp of that odor a-stamping at theirs. Boots and blaze orange and gun cases and guns, they was a-raising a steam with what they thought should be said. Closest to my age were Franklin's three sons—Bunk, Gordon, and Kenny Lee—and them three'd had five sons, and out of their son-in-laws, two who would hunt. And then that bunch had a whole slew of boys, Franklin's great-grands, but only four with us now because a few was too little, and more only hunted on video screens. And some of them argued nasty, and some argued reasonable, and some argued crazy, and some argued half-sweet, but only Ryan, the one the other side'd been after, showed any hurt for them two shot kids. Kids, I heard them say, he knew from school. And other things. He was the youngest with us, Rusty's son, Gordon's grand, Franklin's great, I'd never paid him much mind, him a-surlying around under stringy red hair, fingering spots on his face. But now he was carrying on like a just-cut calf, snotting and bawling where he curled on a cot, until one of em said, “Get out there in that johnnyhouse til you get hold yourself!” Then another one said, “No, just go out there sit in Uncle Kenny's
truck.” I poked the rings out my onions. Felt the thin curl of trigger in the middle of a finger. Before pot, before cocaine, before crack, oxycontin, and crystal metholatum . . . My daddy wasn't a drinking man. Franklin, he wasn't neither.

Started my onions in the skillet next the taters, and they said the boys was a-waiting for theirs, couldn't have known how this family hunts. Because most people these days still-hunt, which would have made the Ryan alone, but this bunch did it the old way, drive and watch, which meant there was all kind of family along that them boys didn't expect. Now Frankie, Bunk's boy, was a-stepping out his coveralls, and he drop-spilled a whole box of cartridges on the floor, and if that didn't rattle em higher. They was big men, I tell you, they got fatter as they went the generations down. They was bear-chested and bullheaded and they knowed more about guns than they did people, woods, or sense. My daddy talked good, walked tall, stood right alongside Franklin even if he never did own not one acre of land. But Chester, he told me, you watch his boys, and that was before the grands come along, and long before the greats.

Now Bunk'd got up, he was trying to talk sense to the younger ones, his brother Gordon was, too. Me with my back to em, moving onions, moving taters, I was hearing more than I could see and smelling more than either. The heat of em was beading water on the winders, water a-starting to drip, and it'd already come to me I was smelling em when before I couldn't, but then it come to me that I couldn't before, because before, they'd smelled like me. I flopped a liver out a bread bag and onto the heat, stepped back when the bacon grease popped high.

“Oh, he won't say nothing.”

And there it was. Me the only one not related by marriage or blood.

“Course he won't say nothing, but he can still tell!” Hothead Rusty talking, even fireder up than usual with the Ryan being his.

“You know what I mean,” that was Bunk again, we'd come up together, him just two years younger. But although Bunk had always wanted different, wanted us to be like Franklin and Daddy, me and Bunk could never be.

“Well, we got to know for sure, and he's got to keep it straight,” another grandson, I couldn't tell which, but I could hear the walleye scare of his eyes.

“Hell, I don't even know if he can remember something for that long,” and one or two snickered despite everything else.

“He's ever bit as bright as any one of you!” That was Kenny, the third and last son. I saw how the liver was colored like the boy's shivery lips, jerking in the pan. Like its nerves not yet shut down.

Then somebody's chair legs went a-scudding crosst the boards, and “Make em write it down!” and then they was thrusting for paper. Slamming through kitchen drawers and outturning dirty pockets, and they ripped off part of the tater bag, but decided that was too small. Bunk fell back into the chair, I seed him. I seed his gray face spider-held in his hands. My back still to em, water dribbling down the winder insides, and guess drug dealin' and deer huntin' don't mix too good, I wanted to say, but never did.

Finally one fished a doughnut box out the garbage, and another grandson took a knife to it, and that gave them some room. Somebody grabbed my arm, “Write it down!” and I heard my spatula hit the floor. He turned me around, and then I seed them all, but their faces had done run away, they was stubble, they was glasses, they was orange and camouflage caps, and I could feel in his arm he was still holding back. He slammed my hand on the box piece, and one stubble-cap turned into Gordon and turned away, and with a nub of a pencil out of somebody's pocket I wrote, “I won't say nothing.” That's what I said.

“Naw! Naw! Put, ‘I'll say exactly like they want'!”

I felt me swaver a little on my feet. Them winders was a-swimming, they took no reflection, they let in no night. I steadied myself with my left hand on the table edge, pressed down hard to keep the mark from wiggling, and how little you all are a-knowing, I said in my head. Then it got so quiet, all of them watching my hand, you could hear the sugar crust crunch under the tip. Quiet enough you could hear Kenny or Gordon a-walking away up the stairs, I could tell it was a son by the slow in the step. Then I laid the pencil down, stepped back best I could with them all around, when Rusty yapped out “Put ‘I swear'!” How little you all are a-knowing. I pulled the pencil to the very edge. I squinched the “I swear” in. How little you are knowing, and nothing about said.

Rusty grabbed the scrap, jammed it in the thigh pocket of his canvas pants. And for about three seconds, they all of them looked at me there. For about three seconds, all of them's faces come back, each one clear, and dark, and at a great far away. And I seed Franklin, Gordon, Kenny, I seed Bunk, even in the by-marriage ones, I seed. Then they turned from me and back on themselves. A-arguing again over what would be said.

I picked my spatula up off the floor. I lifted that liver out, still bleeding a little, and I laid it on a plate. Shoved the taters on a back burner, figured if they scorched, the eaters wouldn't notice much. Then I walked to the door and out of the said.

My daddy'd been a few years older than Franklin; I was older than all his sons. Old enough to listen. Old enough to not have said. Franklin called that an accident, too, but only one man pulled the trigger then. And that story didn't have to get made and straight, because the woman didn't just get winged and she couldn't run away, and she was from back in the hills anyway, her good looks didn't save her there. And no one seed it happen but Franklin hisself, and just one
man, Franklin's tenant farmer, my daddy, seed it after, as he helped to clean and cover up.

My daddy told only me. Me a wee little boy, but already understanding way ahead of where my mouth would ever get. Somehow Daddy knowed that then. He said to me just oncet what happened, but he said to me the other many times more. That he never knowed forever afterwards if he was a friend or a debt.

I grabbed me a broom, dropped Kenny Lee's tailgate, felt it sharp in my knees when I swung up in. I waited a second for the pain to ease. Then I walked the bed to the cab.

The Ryan laid crumpled on the bench seat there. Teary face part up and his hands between his legs. He looked at me out of an eye and a half, and I looked at him. Then I turned, set my broom between the liner ridges, and swept the deer blood out. Nothing yet said.

SUGAR'S UP

T
HE SAUSAGE BISCUIT
at McDonald's was supposed to cost ninety-nine cents, but Calvin Bergdoll saw they'd raised it to a dollar twenty-nine. He knew they were using the county's Bygone Days celebration as an excuse for the hike, and he knew, too, that they thought nobody would notice when it stayed upped afterwards.

“They got their prices up so high now I don't know if we can eat here anymore,” Calvin said in a stern voice to Theodore Munney, putting enough loud in it that not only the cashiers would hear, but also the day manager Eddie Sloan, there in his saggy McDonald's pants juggling the drive-through headset, two sleeves of hash browns, and a drink cup the girth of a steer's neck. Theodore Munney already had his biscuit bit into and was grinding along as they walked to their table, bearing down hard on the sausage's gristly parts. Theodore was fifty-six, and his back teeth were eroding, but Calvin Bergdoll knew from a career as a mental health social worker that you'd be surprised what all people could eat without teeth.
Took that one boy out of Weston, and he ate a whole pizza first stop we made
. Cal toured his own teeth with his tongue, all but two in their places despite their daily labors, and he flashbacked to the second Italian sub he'd taken on while the boy he
was ferrying home from the state mental institution polished off that twenty-two-inch pepperoni and mushroom.

After they slid into the booth, Calvin eyed the McDonald's receipt with indignation, but also with a calculating concern. The truth was, if Calvin could no longer eat at McDonald's, he was out of breakfast places in town. He'd gotten into a tussle with Irene, the head lady at the Hilltop Truck Stop, when he marched behind the counter and turned down the music she was playing too loud, and he'd been banned from Rita's Diner for ordering Rita to reheat for him a couple bacon strips abandoned on a plate by a departed customer.
Well, I hate to waste
. Such skirmishes had become more and more common for Calvin in the past couple years. Times and tides had changed, people on edge and quick to seize the upper hand with tender-hearted types like him.
I am no fighter
. He underscored this proclamation with a throat-clogging swallow of biscuit. Yet the second the proclamation came, there whirlpooled to the top layer of the sediment he carried in his brain a sentence he'd overheard his wife say on the phone the other day: “When his sugar's up, there's no telling what he might do.”

From within his biscuit absorption, Calvin half-noticed hobbling towards them the well-dressed midriff of an elderly woman. “Well, hello Cal.”

Cal looked up. Miss Dola Wysapple, an esteemed Presbyterian lady and one of his late mother's younger cronies. This recognition brought with it the taste of Miss Dola's covered-dish-dinner-famous Mississippi Mud Pie. Calvin cleared his mouth and wiped his hand on his napkin, gathering himself for what might come next. He carried within the cylinder of himself a half dozen smaller cylinders, reminiscent of chambers in a handgun. Each cylinder housed a different personality, and Calvin was never entirely sure which personality would present itself, making moments like these a kind of character roulette.

“Good morning, Miss Dola!”

The tone was solicitous and grand all at once: the Courtly Gentleman. A fortuitous appearance. Struggling to his feet, Calvin took Miss Dola's cold hand, and Miss Dola, wedging her cane between her knees, placed her other spotted hand on top of his. Now she was gazing at Theodore Munney with the small, quizzical smile a person offers when waiting to be introduced. The Courtly Gentleman took a step back and swept his free arm towards the booth.

“This, Miss Dola, is Theodore O. Munney,” Calvin announced, and although at that point his mind stopped, his mouth kept going. “My gun-bearer.”

Miss Dola's friendly smile passed into one of bepuzzlement. She nodded, lifted her free hand, and gave her cane a trial tap. “You and Theodore have a good Bygone Days,” she said, and she clapped Cal lightly on the shoulder before she staggered on.

Calvin sidled back into his yolk-colored seat, took up his sandwich, and smiled at Theodore Munney, who immediately averted his gaze.
Gingerly, gingerly
. “Well, Theodore,” he began in a tone one might use to suggest a joint business venture. “Would you like to cut a little grass today?”

Theodore Munney squashed a few biscuit crumbs on his fingertip and popped the finger into his mouth.

“Looks like nice grass-cutting weather,” Calvin tried again. “And we'll stop down at the trailer and pick up your laundry.”

“RealbadwreckupSlanesvillelastnight.” Theodore wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve.

Based on the absence of sour in Theodore Munney's response, Cal decided to interpret it as a “possibly,” which was more than Theodore had given up in several days. Calvin had a good acre of lawn that needed mowing weekly in the early part of the season, and since his
children had mostly moved away, finding a reasonably priced grass cutter had been a trial. In past summers, Theodore had seemed to enjoy the tranquilizing orbits of the riding mower, but recently, something had been afoot in Theodore Munney, something that had caught Calvin off guard. This complicated even further the diagnosis he'd been trying to pin on Theodore since he'd taken him into his oversight two years ago after his former charge, Nutley Randalpin, had died on him. Suddenly Theodore jerked to his feet, tray in hand, and dumped biscuit wrappers and senior-sized coffee cups down the garbage chute. Calvin scrabbled after him—
learning initiative, yes, he's maturing
—and then the two of them were snarling the Bygone Days traffic in the parking lot on their way to Cal's eighteen-year-old Blazer, Blackie.