You Think That's Bad (23 page)

“What am I supposed to do about the ice?” she wanted to know. I left her and went into the living room. She said, “There's a message from his mother, too. She says she's gonna get a lawyer to hop your ass unless you start sending some money. And somebody else called,” she added, once she was back in front of the TV.

I went out to the kitchen and played the machine. There was only one message and it was from the kid, saying he wanted to wish me a happy holiday. He said, “There was a thing about your unit in the paper so I sent it up to you.” I could hear a little buzzing, maybe something in our phone, maybe something in his. “Let me know if you get it,” he said after a minute, like he was waiting for someone to answer.

I'd been getting a headache that felt like lights going on and off and trying to crack my skull. “Who else called?” I asked. I was still standing there at the machine. The water from my boots was black from all the shit in the snow.

“How would I know?” my mother called from the living room. “She didn't leave a name.”

“It was a woman?” I asked. “She wanted me? Was her name Janice?”

“I just said she didn't leave a name,” she said. When I went back to the living room and stood in front of her, she said, “I can't see,” meaning the television. “You got in
here
fast,” she added, after I sat back down on the sofa. “What do you got, a girlfriend?”

I kept thinking this was my one chance, and then about how Janice could've found my number. Maybe she asked someone at the library?

“You're not answering me now?” my mother said.

“I'm trying to
think
here,” I told her.

She shut up for a while. Then she finally said, “I don't know why anybody would want to give
you
the time of day.”

I was thinking I should get the dog and go over Janice's house, but it was sleeting. I figured I'd do it when it got better out. But I couldn't sit still and my mother finally said, “You're shaking the
whole floor,” meaning with my leg, so I went up to my room. The dog came up to check on me and took one look and went downstairs again.

Then it got so bad I had to go out anyway so I hiked down to the creek and checked some of my traps. I was wearing my field jacket with the hood but I still got soaked. Two of the traps I couldn't find and there was nothing in the third because I don't even know if I'm setting them right but a month ago I found one snapped shut with some blood around it in the snow. When I got back there were police cars all around my house. I hid in the sand pit a few houses down and watched until they went away.

What is
this
what is this what is this?
I was thinking. I was surprised how much it freaked me out. I had some tricks I'd come up with over the years to keep from losing it, and I used them all. I waited a half hour after the cop cars left and lay there banging my chin on my gloves. Who else did I know who'd be in a sand pit in the snow outside somebody else's house?

The sleet changed to rain. It was so cold my head was rattling. One of the medics supposedly training me in the Reserves used to call me TBI, for Traumatic Brain Injury. The first time he called me that I told him I hadn't had any brain injuries, and he said, “Well, maybe it happened when you were a baby.”

Finally I stood up and came down the hill and circled my house on the outside. The backyard was like a lake. The light was on in my mother's bedroom and I went up to the window. On the dresser under the lamp there was a pamphlet that said,
Your Service Member Is Home!
The TV was going in the living room but maybe she was in the cellar. I waited until she came up the stairs and then pushed through the back door.

“They're looking for
you
, boy,” she said when she saw me. Not, You must be fucking freezing. Not, how about a warm shower.

“What'd they want?” I asked.

“They said they had a number of things they wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “They wanted to look in your room and I said, You got a warrant? I told them you'd be back tonight.”

“What'd you say that for?” I asked.

“What was I supposed to tell them?” she said. “That you were out looking for a job?”

I went up to my room to think. There were some issues about prescriptions at the local pharmacy. Some bad checks back in Wichita Falls. There was a girl I'd scared by not letting her past me when we ran into each other in the woods. She'd torn her sleeve when she finally got away. It could've been a lot of things.

“I gotta go,” I said when I came back downstairs. “I'm gonna do some camping for a while.”

“Camping,” she said. “In this.” She put her hand out to the window.

“Don't tell them where I went,” I said. “Far as you know, I never came home.”

“I should be so lucky,” she said.

I changed into dry clothes and put on like twelve layers and got together a rain fly and a cooking stove and a tent and a big pack full of cans of food and other shit and got out of there. “You taking your
dog
?” she called, but I never heard what she said after that.

It took me an hour to get to the end of the logging road because I was covering my tracks with a pine branch as I went, and then another hour to find the duffel bag in the snow, and from there I followed a creek uphill way into the forest. I found a spot I already knew they had good cover and visibility and got everything set up and then started going through what I had and just what it was I thought I was going to do.

There was a trail fifty yards below that did a hairpin, and snowmobilers used it and cross-country skiers. Farther down was a waterfall and swimming hole and I remembered a notice on the library's Christian Outings bulletin board about a faith hike for teens called the Polar Bear Mixer.

I figured, Well, if I'm going to jail I might as well get something to eat first, so I made some stew. And while I was eating I started thinking that once the cops had me one thing would lead to another and I knew what went on in jail, I'd heard stories. So I
emptied the duffel in the tent and got all geared up. I had stuff I didn't even know I had. A bipod mount for the rifle and a winter camo wrap for the stock and barrel and scope. Even winter camo field bandages. When I was finished I felt like this way I was at least ready for whatever.

But nobody came down the trail. It got dark. I got some sleep. Nobody came the next day, either. I had little meatballs for breakfast and sat around and waited and finally went out looking for rabbits but the snow was too deep so I had to come back.

I'd stepped in the creek and even with three layers of socks my feet were freezing. In the credits part of
Boys Town
right at the beginning there was a kid in an alley warming his hands over a fire in a bucket. I'd forgotten that.

The guy that gets electrocuted is the one who gives Spencer Tracy the idea for the orphans' home in the first place. When they're getting ready to take the guy to the chair the governor tells him he owes a debt to the state, and the guy goes nuts on them. He asks where the state was when he was a little kid crying himself to sleep in a flophouse with drunks and hoboes. He says if he had one friend when he was twelve he wouldn't be standing here like this. Then he throws everybody but Tracy out of his cell.

I spent the afternoon keeping the stove going and sitting on a tarp and squeezing my head with my hands. The difference between where I was and my mother's house was that where I was I didn't have to listen to TV.

I had everything I needed in front of me and I still couldn't let well enough alone. That night it sleeted again and the next morning my stove was covered with ice. I washed my face and changed my socks and got my Desert Eagle and hiked back down to the road and through the woods to the culvert that led the back way into town. It was sunny and I was sweating like a pig by the time I climbed out of the culvert at the turnaround at the end of Janice's street, but I didn't want to hang around for too long so I stood there for a few minutes with my field jacket open, flapping it to dry myself off, and then went up to her house and rang the bell. The
Eagle hung in the big inside pocket like a tire iron and I thought,
I don't know what you brought
that
for
. A guy swung the door open like he'd been waiting for me. He had to be the ex-husband. He looked me up and down and said, “What can I help
you
with?” But I let it go and just said, “Is Janice here?” And he gave me another look and I remembered how sweaty I was and that I was wearing four shirts under my field jacket. Collars were sticking up all over the place.

He said, “Yeah, she's in the back. What can we help you with?”

I stood there bouncing my leg for a second and reached under my coat like my Eagle might've fallen out. Then Janice came up behind him and I saw her get a good look at me. And I just said, “Nothing. I'll come back,” and I left.

“Hey,” the guy called from behind me, and I heard Janice laugh. Halfway down the block I cut through somebody's yard into the culvert. My heart was going so fast I was sure I was having a heart attack. She was probably still laughing. He was laughing with her. It was a comedy. I crouched at the bottom of the culvert and stepped around like a midget taking a walk. Even my outside shirts were soaked. I can never believe how fast I sweat through my clothes at times like that.

I worked my way up the culvert to Janice's backyard and then ran up to their window but it was too high to see in so I just reached up as far as I could and squeezed off four rounds. From that angle, I probably just hit the ceiling. The Eagle's so loud that at first your ears can't believe it. Somebody yelled something but I couldn't tell what. After the last round I was booking back through the yard for the culvert. I could hear somebody whooping from the next house over. They probably thought it was fireworks. And while I was hauling down the culvert to my path through the woods I got to hear sirens from every cop car in upstate New York.

The whole way back through the woods and up into the hills I thought,
You're
going to be hard to track. I mean, the snow was three feet deep. Even the town cops weren't going to be able to screw this up.

I had to rest on the logging road and again along the creek but finally got back to the tent. I pulled out my sleeping bag and threw my rifle and the Eagle and all the rounds I had on top of it. I could hear guys on the logging road already, the sound carried that far.

People talk about, Oh, this kid's sick and that kid's bipolar and this and that and I always say, Well, does he piss all over himself? And the answer's always no. That's because he
chooses
to go to the bathroom. Because he
knows
better. He
controls
himself. People
control
what they do. Most people don't know what it's like to look down the road and see there's nothing there. You try to tell somebody that but they just look at you. I don't know why people need to hear the same thing ten thousand times, but they do.

Guys are breaking through the brush down below to my left and right, which tells me they're not only coming but they're coming in numbers. I can start to see them even through the trees.

I haven't cleaned the rifle. Mr. Logistical Planning. Even when I try to make lists for myself I can't follow the lists.

At least I tried, though. I tried harder than most people think. But what I did was, in life you're supposed to leave yourself an out, and I didn't.

I can hear even more sirens, off in the distance. The cops down below have stopped short of the hairpin. They're keeping their voices low. They might be starting to catch on. I dig deeper into the snow, wipe my eyes, and put my face back to the scope, sighting back and forth. I don't even know if I'll open fire. I never know what I'm going to do next. They'll probably just come up here and pull me to my feet and push me all the way down the hill. Another scene that always got me in that movie was when the kids were waiting for Spencer Tracy to bring something home for Christmas. Of course he didn't have any money so all he can pull out and show them is a package of cornmeal mush. And this one little kid just stares at him. And then the kid finally says, like he wants to kill somebody, “What
else
you got in that bag?” And when Tracy has to tell him that he doesn't have anything else, the kid goes, “I thought you said that if we were good, somebody would help us.”

As a child who could barely hold myself upright without tottering, I was steeped in my mother's belief that our tumbledown farm was serried about and tumid with devils. In my mind's eye they stood in a ring and clasped one another's taloned hands and leered in at me while I slept. My fourth summer was the year that Sophie, the stonemason's daughter, was seized with a helplessness in her limbs until her father conceded her diabolic possession and took her to the Church of Our Savior, where the priest found five devils residing inside her, whose names were Wolf, Lark, Dog, Jolly, and Griffin. The devils confessed they'd conjured hailstones through her by beating the surface of well water with her hands and that they'd additionally concocted the tinctures and ointments she'd used to blight her neighbors' apple trees. They said they'd requested, and been denied, a special grease that would have turned her into a werewolf. When asked of whom they'd made their appeal, they said only “The Master.”

When I was twelve, the man from whom we rented our pastureland—a lifelong bachelor whose endless mutterings were his way of negotiating his solitude, and whose imagination extended only to business; the sort who milled his rye without sifting it, so it might last longer—was found in the middle of our lane one winter morning, naked, his feet and lips blue. He said a demon had appeared to him on a pile of wood under his mulberry tree, in the likeness of a corpulent black cat belonging to the house next door.
With its front paws the cat had gripped him by the shoulders and pushed him down, and then had fastened its muzzle on the man's mouth and would not be denied. The man claimed that for nearly an hour he'd remained that way, swooning, speechless, and open to the cat's searching jaws, unable to make even the Sign of the Cross and powerless to diminish the urgings of its tongue. He had no memory of where his clothes had gone, or how he'd ended up in the lane.