Small animals caught in.., p.19
Small Animals Caught in Traps, page 19
“How’d you sleep, Hoss? Bad dreams?”
“They weren’t dreams.”
“No.”
Gray sees the pain on his face. He loved her mother. He’s worried about her father. But she knows that it’s her pain he’s seeing, her pain he’s feeling, which gives her the urge to console him. She holds up the cushion she’s been using as a pillow. Upholstered in offensively gaudy fabric, it’s both cheap and rough, a strenuously outdated brown-and-yellow plaid.
“Anyway, how could I not have bad dreams with my head on something this ugly all night?”
Her uncle smiles, and it feels familiar. She’d almost forgotten what familiar felt like.
“Would you believe patterns like that were the height of fashion in the seventies?” he says.
“Really? How did anyone sleep?”
“Well, we smoked a lot of grass and had a lot of sex.” He pours her a cup of coffee and Gray sits up to drink it. “You want to tell me what happened in the mountains?”
It’s a good question. She barely remembers, it seems so long ago. It’s as if she’s stockpiling grief like firewood and the pile is already alarmingly high. High enough for an inferno. Eventually she’s going to have to put out that fire, she knows. But not right now—not around her uncle. Her tears have caused enough problems already. There’s something wrong with her father, something worse, maybe, than her father being missing, worse than his grief, and she doesn’t know how he can deal with what’s happened starting from such a broken place. Not without her.
“We should get back to the house in case he’s there.” She pulls back the sheets and climbs out of bed. Only then does she remember that she’s wearing one of her uncle’s T-shirts and a pair of his boxer shorts. All the clothes she brought to the Wallowas were soaked through and filthy. Everything else she owned is inside the house she’s unwilling, or afraid, to enter. “I don’t have any clothes, do I?”
“Don’t worry, Hoss. One of the Flying Monkeys brought them to the laundromat. He’ll be here after breakfast.” Most of the Flying Monkeys are Gray’s classmates, high school boys wrecked by puberty.
“Those pimple-faced goons are probably texting each other pictures of my underwear.”
Her uncle shrugs. “Probably.”
She tries to laugh but it comes out wrong, and then she starts to cry. Embarrassed, she wipes her eyes with the palm of her hand, wipes her nose with the hem of the T-shirt she’s wearing.
“You know what, Hoss? Why don’t you keep that shirt.”
Gray half-laughs again and tears up some more.
“You probably have a million questions,” he says.
She nods. Sniffs. Nods again.
“OK. We’ll talk. But first let’s try to find your old man.”
She feels physically sick as they pull onto Greer Lane. Her father’s truck is where he left it, at the end of the driveway, but he’s not there and there’s no sign of him. Confronted with her mother’s death, her missing father, she feels powerless. Adrift. Wherever he is, he needs her. But she needs him, too, and in that moment of weakness, wishes he was there to help her. “Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which makes your garden grow faster,” he used to tell her. Something her grandfather used to say. Like that was supposed to console her.
“Where is he?” She’s overcome with anger. “Why isn’t he here?”
Uncle Fenwick puts a hand on her shoulder, but she shakes it off and clenches her fists, her jaw, every muscle in her body, trying to contain the rage. One moment she wants to put her fist through a wall. The next she wants to curl up in a ball and succumb to the grief and sadness. The conflicting emotions roil her, leaving her unsteady and off balance.
But she can’t surrender to grief for her mother—not yet—because she has to worry about her father. How could he leave her alone like this?
Sensing her mood, her uncle lowers his head. “Whatever you’re thinking about your old man, go easy on him. You gotta give people room to deal with things like this in their own way. Give him time.” His words are reasonable, but Gray hears the undercurrent of anger in them, too, just as she can hear him trying to hide it.
“He should be here.”
“He should.” Swallowing hard, he sniffs deeply and clears his throat, as if physically moving the right words from his brain to his mouth. “But listen to me, and listen good, ’cause I need for you to hear this. Not everyone can survive something like this. I’m being honest as I know how to be, now, so I want you to hear what I’m saying. Not everyone bounces back from this kind of thing.”
Gray looks into his eyes, hard, challenging him. When he does not look away, she realizes he means her father, not her. And that’s a possibility she had not considered—that her father might come back, but he won’t be himself and maybe never will again.
“Is this your pep talk?”
“I’m afraid it’s the best I’ve got.”
“Well, it sucks.”
She stands at the front door for a few long minutes but cannot bring herself to open it. Instead, she crosses the driveway to the garage and lifts open the big bay door, retrieves two lawn chairs from inside, and sets them in the doorway.
“I want to wait for him.” She sinks into one of them. “If he comes back, I want to be here.”
Her uncle takes the empty seat beside her. “Then let’s wait.”
“You don’t have to wait with me, you know.”
“Try and stop me, Hoss. If you’re on watch, I’m on watch. We’ll be tireless,” he says.
Within minutes, he is asleep.
Gray wishes she could sleep too. Better that than sitting in silence, letting the grief and the fear and the rage well up like a chorus of voices in her head. Besides, she has the feeling they’re going to need their strength. Rather than stare at the house, taunting her with its secrets, she stares across the street at the Harrisons’ charmless house. She sees the door open and her neighbors step outside. When Mrs. Harrison waves nervously as they begin walking across the street and up the long driveway, she elbows her uncle awake.
“Make them go away.”
There’s a solicitousness to their voices that annoys her, an exaggeration of respect that comes across as condescension. They don’t stay long. Her uncle walks them to the end of the driveway and chats with them for a few minutes before sending them home.
“I don’t want them tiptoeing around me,” Gray tells him when he returns to his chair.
“They’re just being polite.”
“I don’t like it. It’s creepy.”
“Well, get used to it. What happened to your mother? It will change everything. Everyone who knew you before is gonna treat you different now. So will everyone else you meet, too, once they find out what happened.”
What happened. It’s still too new and unthinkable to even name yet.
“Even you? Are you going to treat me different too?”
Her uncle lights a cigarette. A long, thin cloud of smoke hangs in the air, heavy and vaguely translucent, a half-hearted ghost. “’Fraid so.”
The air is still as brick. When the cloud of smoke fails to dissipate, he drops the cigarette in the driveway and crushes it beneath his boot.
“You know they’re still watching, right?” Gray nods across the street. Her uncle follows her gaze. The Harrisons’ faces are crowded together in a downstairs window, pale streaks behind the glass.
“Yeah, well. I asked them to keep an eye on you while I’m gone.”
“Gone where?”
“To look for him.”
“I don’t need babysitters.” She kicks a stone across the driveway. It skids under the boat trailer and rattles against the steel frame. “Where are you going to look?”
“The river. The Salt Lick. The streets. He’s on foot; he can’t be that far.”
They stand side by side, unsure what comes next. It’s a new world. Their compasses are still spinning, looking for magnetic north. New maps will have to be drawn.
“You gonna be OK?” Seeing something in her expression, he hurries to clarify. “I mean, while I’m gone?”
“I’ll be fine.”
But as soon as he leaves, she wonders if that’s true. She wonders if she’s made a mistake. Left alone, she’s wide open, with no choice but to think about what happened. Her mother is dead. Her father is missing. When she remembers him sobbing in the dark, rifle in his hands, she feels the sickness rising inside her again, the wave of voices fleeing her head for her stomach, and runs for the grass as her stomach lurches. The darkness begins at the edges of her vision and races toward the center. She sees the Harrisons’ door flashing in the sun as it opens. It’s the last thing she remembers.
Her uncle bends over her with an expression of amused concern, his eyes red, his breath horrific.
“How you doin’, Hoss?”
She breathes in deeply, squinting into the sun. “Just fine, thanks. Why do you ask?”
“’Cause you look like you’ve been shot at and missed, but shit on and hit.”
“Ouch?”
“If you’re feeling up to sarcasm, you must feel better than you look.”
A little embarrassed, and a little confused, Gray sits up. Slowly. Her gut feels hollowed. Her head aches resoundingly.
“I thought you said you were going to treat me differently now.”
“I didn’t say it was going to be better.”
She smiles. It’s as close as she can come to a laugh. Her uncle punches her on the arm.
“Good for you. It’s good to act human even when you don’t feel it. Your old man has never really learned that lesson.”
“Maybe he’s not human.”
“That would explain a lot of things.”
“You didn’t find him?”
“No sign, even.”
He looks around the yard, as if her father might be there. As if they’ve simply overlooked him. “Harrison says you went down like a ton of bricks, but that you aimed for the grass and stuck the landing. Gave ’em a hell of a scare. I don’t think he and the missus are used to much excitement beyond a fluctuating stock market or a new brand of toilet paper.” He nods over his shoulder, a little surreptitiously, and Gray looks past him to see the neighbors standing nervously at the driveway’s edge. When they wave, tentatively, she waves back. “In other news, I brought you lunch.”
He drops a greasy paper bag into her hands. Triggered by the smell of food, Gray tears it open to find a stack of burgers on a bed of fries. She devours the first of the burgers at an alarming rate, without any pleasure, as if someone has removed the taste from the food in a lab. Her hunger surprises her. Her uncle withdraws a burger for himself and a second for her, which she takes without hesitation. It’s the first real food she’s eaten in days. No wonder she fainted.
“I put the word out around town,” he says between bites. “The guides are watching for him. Disappointment’s a small town. He’ll turn up.”
“What about the police?”
“It’s too soon, officially, but I put a word in with a friend and the sheriff’s department is keeping their eyes open.” He stares at her long enough to make her uncomfortable. “So what do you want to do, Hoss? You want to stay here tonight? You want to stay at the Arrow?”
Wherever her father is, she does not want to let him down. She does not want to disappoint him.
“What would he do?”
“I’ve been wondering that myself.” Her uncle wipes his face with a greasy hand. “This is out of character for him. It’s not like him to run from something. It’s not like him to leave you. And if I’m being honest, it’s pissing me off.”
She’s angry too. The anger has to compete with the grief that pushes at her skin from within, like an infection, so that everything pulses and throbs and hurts to the touch. When she remembers the Wallowas, how he couldn’t get out of his sleeping bag, couldn’t stop crying, she knows that he came into this grief already disadvantaged, and the worry hits her like a fever.
“I think he’s really sad.” She’s unsure how much to tell her uncle.
“The saddest. We all are.”
“I mean, I think he was sad before. In the mountains.”
He looks at her for a long few seconds, as if trying to gauge something, but she can’t tell what. “Your old man was sad long before that, even. It goes way back with him. Long as I’ve known him.”
“What do you mean?”
“There was a time, years ago. You were just little, I think. Maybe you weren’t even born yet. I can’t remember. Your mother called me up, asked if I could take care of his clients for a couple days. Said he couldn’t work.”
“Was he sick?”
“Well. It’s a kind of sickness.”
It’s the first time she’s heard the story. She never knew her father to miss a day of work. He’s too stubborn to get sick.
“Some people,” her uncle says. “They live in a shadow and they just can’t get out of it, no matter what they try. It’s not their fault. And it don’t matter how strong they are, or how tough, ’cause it ain’t the kind of thing you can fight off.”
Gray hears what he’s saying. She knows what it’s called. She’s never heard anyone call it that at home—not about her father. Her mother never talked about it, and now it’s too late to ask her.
Just thinking about her mother makes her heart quicken and stall. It must show on her face, because her uncle looks away respectfully to give her a minute to steady herself.
“I’m worried about him,” she says, remembering the rifle bolts still in her pack.
“Me too, Hoss.”
“No. I’m worried he’s . . . I’m worried he’s going to . . . to hurt himself.”
He looks at her closely, weighing her words. “Don’t worry. We’ll find him and we’ll help get him right. We can be mad at him later. Deal?” He reaches out a hand that’s still greasy from the burger.
Gray takes it and rises to her feet, grateful for the assist.
35
Still not ready to step back inside the house and unwilling to leave Greer Lane in case her father comes back, they spend the night in the garage with the bay doors open to the world. Gray sleeps curled on a camp mat, woken by every wind-dropped twig and every yard noise real or imagined, her uncle upright in a lawn chair. He snores until the daylight reaches him and then wakes complaining that he didn’t sleep a wink.
Morning brings overcast skies and the scent of rain, but no sign of her father. Her outlook sinks. Until now she’s been able to convince herself that he needed time to react, time to grieve alone, but he’s been gone long enough that she’s worried something truly bad has happened. Though her uncle’s eyes tell her that he suspects the same, neither gives voice to their fear.
She boils hose water for coffee on the camp stove she fetches from her father’s truck. Through the trees they see lights go on at the DeLongs’ house, at Roy and Iris Boothman’s, the world and the people who inhabit it rising to face another day and its myriad challenges. The coffee is bitter going down. It scalds her throat and roils her stomach.
“I could murder some bacon and eggs,” her uncle says. “What do you say we go inside and I’ll whip something up?”
She shakes her head. No.
“Well, we shouldn’t be drinking this rocket fuel on an empty stomach, Hoss. How ’bout we go into town? We could eat at the diner and then drive around looking for him.”
“What if he comes while we’re gone?”
“You should take a break. We both should. If you won’t go inside here, let’s at least go back to the Arrow and shower. We can change clothes and eat something, then we’ll come back and wait together some more.”
“I’m fine.”
Her uncle looks ready to argue. Before they can reach an impasse, Mrs. Harrison renders their debate moot, appearing in the driveway with a basketful of muffins and a carafe of coffee. She greets them with a forced brightness as her husband follows dolefully with a tray of mugs, cream and sugar, ramekins of butter and jellies.
“Any sign of your father?”
The spread they’ve prepared, like the gesture itself, is at once simple and elegant, and it moves Gray almost to tears. But that makes her feel foolish, and she changes tack, overcorrecting.
“Does it look like he’s here?” Hearing the abruptness in her own voice, she’s unsure which is worse, the initial show of emotion or the fact that it embarrassed her. Uncle Fenwick turns her way and she sees the worry in his expression.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I think I’m just hungry.” She smiles sadly at her neighbors, a proxy apology Mr. Harrison returns with a nod.
“Is there anything I can do? Perhaps I could lend my energies to the search party.” His wife puts a hand on his back, lending support to his bravery. Though it’s just 6 a.m., he’s already in a crisp collared shirt and starched jeans, shoes shined like they were enameled.
“Appreciate that,” Uncle Fenwick says. “I reckon we’ll let you know if we get a posse together.”
Mrs. Harrison looks at Gray. “You poor girl.”
“I’m fine,” she says, the edge returned to her voice.
“Thank you for breakfast,” her uncle says, both releasing and protecting the neighbors. Happy to be excused, they walk briskly down the driveway, his arm over her shoulder, her head bowed dramatically beneath the weight of the moment.
The muffins are a chore, pumpkin with seeds, a dry lightness that tastes like dairy substitute—a distinct lack of sweetness—but the coffee is good, and Uncle Fenwick pours them each a second cup. The bottle of Old Crow on her father’s fly-tying bench has two hands’ worth of fingers remaining in it. Though it’s still early morning, he retrieves it and waves it around like a priest’s thurible.
