Small animals caught in.., p.22
Small Animals Caught in Traps, page 22
“Happy?” she asks. “What the hell is that?”
The first few days back test her endurance. She sits through class, eats her lunch, and barely interacts with anyone. She sees her friends, but they pass by as if they’re in a different orbit, and she feels them drifting further away—there are few things less relatable among high school students than a dead mother.
But after that, the days stack up, playing out with a growing familiarity that quickly becomes routine, and like always, she finds comfort in the routine. Each morning she and her uncle eat breakfast together, eggs and toast and meat cooked on the two-burner propane stove. Before driving herself to school in her mother’s minivan, she rouses her father—an act of noise and bravery, a lion tamer peering into the animal’s mouth—and her uncle brings him to the Vatican and leaves him to sulk. After school Gray works a few hours at the shop tying flies and leaders and mapping Terrebonne fishing holes for visiting fishermen. The river is open to trout fishing year-round, and the winter steelhead run draws some out-of-town anglers, but business is slow; she’s mostly there to keep an eye on her father.
The fall rains begin. Weeks pass without a break. The days are liquid, formless, the nights violent and wind-battered. The rain bears the appearance of intent, as if now that it has returned it plans never to leave again. Some days it rains so hard Gray fears the Arrow will float, carrying them away in their sleep like an ark. Except in the story of the ark, the flood was punishment for the world’s sins and the passengers were saved; in their case, the survivors are the ones being punished.
In an RV, as on a sailboat, objects need to justify the space they occupy. The bench seats lift on hinges to serve as storage, the cutting board rests atop the low fridge. Flipped and folded, the couch becomes a table, and from her own bed, Gray can see her father asleep there. Like most nights, he was too drunk or lazy to make the conversion and sprawled instead on the hard tabletop in a swaddle of bear skin. The table is no bigger than a settee. His legs and arms spill off the edges like spare parts in a mannequin factory. She can see her uncle at the galley table, too, and his empty bed at the aft of the cabin, the driver and passenger seats in the cockpit beyond him. That’s the entirety of their little world, encased in a thin metal shell with plastic windows and skylights pounded ceaselessly by the rain.
Even now, more than a month since they returned from the mountains, her sleeping bag still carries the scents of the woods, the sweat, the campfire smoke. Sometimes she smells the smoke in her sleep and dreams about fire, a weak and terrifying counterargument to all the water.
She gets up and fishes a sweatshirt from the drawers beneath her bed, where she keeps her clothes and schoolbooks along with the RV’s jack, flares, and emergency pylons. Then she squeezes past her father, careful not to spill the dregs of the mostly empty bottle of bourbon balanced at his side. Each day it becomes more difficult to justify the space he occupies.
“It’s progress,” Uncle Fenwick says, as if reading her thoughts. “At least he’s not sleeping outside anymore. Hell, at least he’s sleeping.”
Gray takes the coffee he offers. “He’s not asleep. He’s passed out.”
“Progress doesn’t always look like you want it to.” The sentiment is her father’s, something he says often, or used to, as if the Arrow is so small, so cramped, the world the three of them share so finite that they’re forced to share not just space and air but thoughts and words too.
They’ve learned an elaborate choreography of coexistence, stepping around and over each other, brushing body parts in narrow hallways, deferentially ignoring the unavoidable sounds and smells of humanity. Despite their physical proximity, she and her uncle continue to give her father emotional space, though increasingly it feels less like a show of respect than self-defense. With each week that passes he grows more surly, meaner, his sinking mood turning, somehow, more sour still.
Gray wants to see him fight the grief, the sadness, all of it, but instead sees surrender. Acquiescence. Fighting’s always been his nature—maybe when her mother died, he lost the only thing he was fighting for. But what about her? Why won’t he fight for her? Why isn’t she enough? So she tells herself it’s temporary, because that’s what she needs to hear to maintain hope, says it over and over and over: this is temporary; this too shall pass.
But her father’s condition wears on and on with no sign of ending. Watching him withdraw into grief and the bottle, Gray worries that all the good parts of him have evaporated until all that remains is concentrated misery.
“Is he ever going to get better?”
“Hard to say, Hoss.” Her uncle’s expression belies the calm patience urged by his words. He’s worried. That makes her worry too.
“What if he doesn’t?”
He reaches over her father’s body to retrieve last night’s mostly empty bottle, sniffs it, and pours the last remaining finger of bourbon into his own coffee. “People will let you get away with almost anything when you’re grieving,” he says. “But that sympathy has a shelf life. There’s a contract. A social contract. You’re supposed to try to get better.”
“What if you don’t?”
“What if you don’t get better?”
“What if you don’t try.”
Her uncle rolls his head, cracking his neck. “After a while it makes people uncomfortable. You don’t have to heal completely. You just have to make progress.”
“What about me? Am I making progress?”
“Come on, Hoss. You know the answer to that.”
When she left her father’s side to go back to school for the first time and he did not vanish or burst into flames in her absence, she felt a kind of liberation. It gave her the confidence to spend a little more time away from him, a little more time on her own. And then one morning she woke up and went for a run before school, tracing a long, winding route along the river and into town. Pushing herself, punishing herself, she gathered strength as she ran, listening to the current, smelling the water and the forest, ignoring the pain in her legs and her lungs and her heart. The wind brought tears to her eyes. Or maybe they were tears for her mother, for her father, for all she’d lost and all she still had left to lose. Outside town she found herself at the cemetery, breezed through the iron gates without stopping, without slowing, her breath coming in heaves, and did not stop until she reached her mother’s headstone, where she collapsed in the new grass in front of it, no longer unsure about her tears. It had felt good to let herself cry. Or a kind of good. It had felt good to let herself mourn, to openly miss her mother without fear of what it might do to her father. It felt good to allow a few minutes of self-pity without fear of disappointing him. It felt good to run, to breathe again, to stretch her legs outside the confines of the Arrow and the limited proximity of her father and Uncle Fenwick.
It felt so good that she did it again the next day and the day after that until it, too, became a routine, another way to seek comfort, waking in the dark RV, dressing in the confined space, and stepping outside into a world she’d almost forgotten existed.
“I don’t miss her any less,” she tells her uncle. “It doesn’t hurt any less.”
“No.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Look, Hoss. If an asteroid hits your yard and leaves a giant fuckin’ hole, you ain’t ever gonna stop noticing the hole.”
“But?”
“Maybe you stop falling into it after awhile.”
All her father knows right now is the hole. Gray wants him to climb out of it. She wants him to want to climb out of it. And with each day that he does not try, she feels herself growing away from him in small, controlled ways. Watching him retreat into his misery and surrender to his grief makes her more aware of her own, and of how she’s coping with it. His weakness is a lever using the fulcrum of her mother’s death to lift her own strength.
When he took her on as an apprentice guide, one of the first safety skills he taught her was how to rescue someone from drowning. How you don’t get too close or they’ll take you down with them. Her father is drowning; her instinct is to save him, but she knows she needs to swim for shore.
“He still hasn’t been to visit her. When I ask him to go with me, he says, ‘That’s not her. It’s just a rock.’”
“Give him time, Hoss.”
“Why is he like this?”
It pains her to talk about her father this way. Especially with him in the room. It’s like he’s a corpse, an inhuman pile emanating fumes of alcohol from his pores, sweat, something sulfuric.
“Grief makes some people mean. Just like there are mean drunks, there are mean widows and widowers too. They think their lives are ruined and they never get past it, so they try to ruin other people’s lives too. Some people are just so unhappy that they can’t stand to see anybody else happy, either.”
“What about him?” She stares at the collection of arms and legs and flannel and bear skin that her father has become. “What do you think?”
He looks almost peaceful. Most nights his sleep is troubled, not even sleep so much as whiskey hammering him into blackness. When he tosses and turns, the Arrow rocks on its springs. Some nights he yells out. Others, he cries like he did in the mountains. She knows her uncle has heard it—the space they share is too small for him to not have—but they do not acknowledge it, do not talk about it. Instead, they talk about her father’s body odor, about his breath, about his constant flatulence, which rises in the night from his sleeping form and hovers like a cloud, whiskey atomized by his gastrointestinal system, each roar a resounding thunder strike that echoes throughout the tiny RV. Now, even as they watch, he erupts again, and her uncle winces.
“What do I think? I’ll tell you what I think, Hoss. I think that bastard is trying to poison us.”
39
Her uncle asks her to watch the shop while he runs errands. Gray jumps at the chance. The claustrophobia of the Arrow has begun to grate on them all, three restless animals pacing their cage, and she’s grateful for a little time alone. Her father, too, is off on his own somewhere. She doesn’t know where, and she is uneasy not knowing—the unfamiliarity of worrying about a parent discomforts her—but in the queue of her emotions awaiting a reckoning, that one is nowhere near the front of the line.
She’s often found joy in fly-tying since her father taught her the basics when she was younger. Left alone, she sits at the shop’s tying bench hoping to summon it now.
The bench itself is just a simple desk her uncle rescued from a yard sale. There’s a tray for the tools—bobbin, bodkin, whip finisher, hackle pliers, and scissors—spools of thread on pegs, and a bookshelf stocked with feathers of all kinds, skeins of hackle and fur, and plastic bags filled with beads, weights, and wire. The cork blotter on the desk reeks of his cigarettes and spilled coffee. Gray doesn’t mind the smell.
Each fly pattern has its own recipe and ingredients. Her uncle has pinned handwritten instructions for the most common flies to the wall, but she knows most of them by heart. Each has its own name too. The naming conventions seem to follow certain patterns. Those that sound like fraternity brother nicknames: Stinker, Chaser, Egg Sucker, Leech. Those named for people: Adams, Kaufmann, Clouser, Wulff. Those named for the bugs or baitfish they are meant to mimic: Caddis, Stonefly, Hopper, Midge. And those that read like a taxonomy of sex toys: Muddler, Stimulator, Articulated Magnum, Green-Butted Skunk. Like most guides, her father has personalized a number of patterns over the years, variants on common flies he adapted for the Terrebonne and named for their predominant characteristics: the Tycho Brahe, with its weighted lead nose; the Liberace, a glittery streamer laced with ice dub; and the Ringo Starr, with its generous mane of black feathers.
The act of tying is a kind of moving meditation, a simple, repetitive act that helps her focus when she’s amped up or unsettled. For the past few weeks she’s been nothing but. So she bends to the task, focused, intense, losing herself in the work to distract from her sadness and grief. She wraps thread around the hook shank in tight loops, working it like the beads of a rosary; ties in wings or marabou tail feathers; glues on eyes. When she finishes a fly, she takes it from the vice and embeds the hook in one of the foam panels tacked to the wall over the desk until it looks like a swarm of brightly colored insects has descended upon the workstation.
She’s so intent on her work that she does not hear the door open, even with the bells lashed to the handle, does not notice that someone has entered the shop. She does not even notice as he stands behind her, watching over her shoulder as she puts wings on a Stoat’s Tail and knots off the thread.
“You’re really good at that,” he says.
Gray jumps to her feet, tipping the chair over. It crashes to the floor.
“What the hell?” Since her mother died, her anger has lurked just beneath the surface, like a submarine mine waiting for something to float across it. Being startled is all it takes to detonate. “What’s wrong with you?” Her voice is the force of the blast. Her sudden and unexpected rage startles him in turn, and he retreats so fast that he trips over a bench and falls to the floor.
She stands over him with her hands clenched at her sides. When he tries to stutter out an apology, he looks so forlorn, so pathetic, that it dissipates her anger, and just like that she’s laughing at his clumsiness.
“I’m sorry.” He sounds confused.
“Who are you?”
“Exley. I’m Exley.”
“Exley? What kind of name is that?”
“It’s a family name.”
“You scared the shit out of me, Exley.”
She reaches out a hand and lifts him to his feet. He’s about her age, or a little older, and a little taller, with hair the color of a paper bag. He looks familiar, somehow, but she can’t place him. Maybe he’s one of her uncle’s Flying Monkeys.
“I just came in to buy some flies,” he says. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” Her grip is stronger than his. He looks at his hand when she lets it go. “You tie good flies.”
“They’re OK. I’m inconsistent. Sometimes they come out just how I wanted them to, but a lot of them look pretty beat up.” Some tiers are artists, their flies exceptional, but Gray’s are asymmetrical, with ragged lines and rough profiles. She’s gotten better with practice, but true mastery seems to require a patience of which she is incapable.
“My uncle always says that perfect flies don’t catch more fish,” Exley says. “They just catch more fishermen.”
“My uncle says the same thing.” Customers don’t like to buy the ugly flies, but the fish don’t care. Flawed flies mimic injured bait, which makes them more attractive. Predators always target the weak because it takes less effort and there’s less chance of failure. Nature rewards efficiency. “But I think he’d rather I tie the ones that sell better.”
“Your uncle is the Pope?”
Gray studies him, trying to remember if she’s seen him in the shop before, or at school. He’s friendly in a way that most guys she knows are not. A lot of guys want you to know how tough they are, or at least how tough they think they are. Gray is tougher than most of them, but they’re always trying to prove themselves, like that’s what girls really want.
“My dad’s a guide too,” she says. “How about your uncle? Is he?”
“No. But he fishes a lot. He’s been teaching me since I moved in with him and my aunt. I’m not very good yet, but I’m trying to learn.”
And then she knows where she’s seen him—hopelessly tangled in his own fly line, leashed to the willows on the banks of the Terrebonne.
Poor bastard.
“Why did you move in with them?”
His smile vanishes. “My mom died last year in a car accident.” He looks down at his feet. “It wasn’t her fault or anything. She was driving home from work at night and some drunk driver hit her head-on.” He lifts his head again but can’t seem to hold eye contact, and he looks past her, into the distance. “I never knew my dad, but I was always close to my uncle. I used to spend a lot of time here, visiting every summer. He got me a job doing landscaping, so I’m living with him and my aunt for a year. Then next fall I’m going to Oregon State.”
When he looks at her again, she’s crying, her tears as consistently accessible as her anger, always there, always looking for some weakness to breach. The fear returns to his face and another apology stutters its way to his lips.
“It’s OK,” she says. “It’s not you.” She takes a deep breath. “My mom died too. Last month.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“No, I’m sorry. I hate this. It feels like all I ever do anymore is cry. It’s stupid. I can’t even eat a sandwich without remembering how she used to make them for me, and then I’m crying again like an idiot. And when I’m not crying—”
“You’re pissed off. All the time. Mad at everything and everyone.”
Gray nods. “I feel like a freaking psycho.”
“Yeah.”
“When does it start to get easier?”
Exley bites his bottom lip.
“I’ll let you know,” he says. “At least you still have your dad.”
The next day she goes for a run to burn off emotional energy. When she returns to the Arrow, her uncle’s truck is gone, a dry rectangle of dirt in the muddy driveway where he’d been parked. Gray steps inside just as the sky opens up again. Hail pelts the metal roof like gunfire, filling the RV with a relentless, echoing din. But her father—sitting at the galley table, drinking—does not seem to notice, nor does he notice her arrival.
“This is what it must be like inside one of those stovetop popcorn things.” She watches for his reaction to judge his mood, like licking her finger to measure the wind.
