Call Me Home (22 page)

The night before, he had dreamt of Lydia, and in the dream she was crying, calling his name. He woke up sweating and furious at himself. How he wasn't there for her. He met Don that afternoon, down on the old riverbed where no one went. Walking through town, he still felt angry, a bitter stinging anger toward all of it, the kids in town running their bikes up and down the mounds of dirt outside the job sites, his birthday, and what kind of life did he have? He was fucking a married man, and somewhere his baby sister was calling for him.

The old riverbed was a dirty swampland with no clear edges. Mosquitoes were everywhere. Jackson had a hard time imagining that it would ever grow over and become the promised forest, the boreal sketch on the new construction plans. Just about the time the riverbed dried up in the August and September heat, the snow would settle and everything would be condemned again.

“I need a cigarette,” Jackson said. “Where'd you put them?” He felt quietly furious. He hated it all.

Don handed him a cigarette. He pulled out the pint of Rich & Rare and opened it, took a loud smacking drink. He elbowed Jackson and handed him the plastic bottle. Jackson could feel his aggressive cheer in the face of what was Jackson's obvious irritation. “C'mon, Jack,” Don said. “Let's get drunk.”

“Everything's dead,” Jackson said. “And the new things will never grow right.”

“What is up with you?” Don asked. “You pissed off about something?”

Jackson didn't say anything.

“Jackson,” Don said. “I just need a little more time.”

“Please,” Jackson said. He looked out at the pitted trench. “Can we talk about something else, please?” He didn't want to think about the pathetic little hope he had that Don had left Eliza back in Missoula. That he had left in the middle of the night to break her heart and then come back and fucked Jackson out of victory and courage and a good righteous hard-on. There was a rusted out old car sunk in the mud, and he concentrated on looking at it until he noticed something caught in the wheel well. Jackson looked at it hard and made out a dark mat of fur. He felt a wave of nausea. Everything was ragged and matted and dead.

He thought again about that long-ago memory, his mother in the dress, the revolver in her hand. It had been a game – at least that's how he thought of it now, a construction all for him. They were going to shoot a bobcat. Jackson had imagined it in the dark shades beneath trees, the upside-down skirts of roots from where the pasture had been cleared and then gone again to seed. She'd packed them sandwiches, and they'd walked through the woods for what felt like hours. There were slips of movement everywhere. The blinking underside of a leaf was the bobcat's steely eye; a moth was the terrible white claw. He'd believed in the bobcat as completely as he believed in the furniture of that forest – the snaking brambles, fireweed seeded out in purple. They sat to eat their
sandwiches, quiet with their chewing, and Jackson threw the crusts of his bread into the dirt and backed away, hoping the bobcat would smell them.

Time had passed, and he was hungry again; the shine seemed to wear off the day as the bobcat was nowhere. He whined for the house and dinner and his father. And then, just as he'd said, “There's no bobcat. We'll never find it,” his mother had stopped. She showed him the gun, and made him sit away from her. She lifted the revolver with both hands, pointed it at a tree – had she ever really shot a gun in her life? – and fired it. And a bird had dropped to the ground. He understood now that she'd killed the bird, but in his memory it fluttered up again, and flew. She had knocked it out of the sky and lifted it back up as though her hands were making and remaking the world it in front of him.

He couldn't explain it to Don, though he wanted to. He knew that anything he said wouldn't make the sense he wanted it to and that depressed him. He picked up the whiskey bottle and held it to his mouth.

SITTING THERE IN
the late afternoon light getting drunk again, an idea was nagging at Jackson that he was his mother. Not his mother when she had lifted the gun like a Wild West queen or a high forest priestess, but his mother at her weakest, most tractable, and easily convinced: “Never again,” he had heard his father sob raggedly in the aftermath of nearly every beating he'd ever given his mother. “You're everything to me.” And Jackson understood that his mother had wanted to believe him – had needed to believe him. Because how else to live with yourself, to allow the person you want most in the world not to deceive you to do it, again and again? His skin was twitchy and sparking with the heat, the corona of drunkenness fuzzing the edges of his sight.

“Let's go back,” Jackson said. He didn't want to try to talk, didn't want to hear Don get cheerfully drunk. “I'm tired.”

Don obliged, tossing the bottle into his truck and fiddling with the radio on the way back around the lake. Jackson stared out
the open window all the way back to the semi cab. Don pulled in and turned to him. “Jack,” he said. “we're not going to do this forever. I'm going to leave her.”

Jackson looked at Don. He was half-smiling, the dark hair in his eyes again. His arm was draped over the back of the seat. He looked loose and easy and oblivious. The anger chewed at Jackson's stomach again. “It's fine,” he said. “You'll leave her, and we'll be happy.” He climbed out of the truck and shut the door behind him. He didn't look back until he was inside his little semi cab with the summer air tight around him.

HE LAY IN
the semi cab until seven or eight, until he couldn't stand to think of any of it anymore, his mother or Don or Lydia, and then he walked to town with loose arms and legs, stumbling a little. The café in town was full; between the soda signs and taped-up notices on the windows he could see the crowded backs of families, the movement of the waitresses like bees over the flowers of the tables. The Longhorn parking lot was full with the drinkers who hadn't gone home to dinner yet and the ones who had come early for the night rush. The air of the bar hit him, a hot breath of liquor and cigarette smoke. He didn't go to bars often, mostly because of his age but also because the people who tended to hang out at bars seemed to be able to see it on him, his queerness. In a little bar in Everett, his junior year, he'd managed to get a drink, but in the first half an hour someone had called him a faggot and he'd had to leave out the back. Here, no one gave him a second glance.

He looked different these days. He looked like part of the work crew, and he had some muscles for the first time since the season he spent running cross-country, which he'd done mostly to get out of the house and because then he was still doing anything he could to fill his days, to pack whatever he could around the dull, creeping sense that there was something about him that was different. He remembered an unreasonable fear of the clammy, tiled locker room. He sometimes thought of the years in Tulalip,
in his parents' house, as a series of grisly snapshots: Jackson at sixteen, deeply shy, caught with a porn magazine. His father throwing a glass that shattered beside his mother's head. A senior at the high school fractured Jackson's cheekbone in the empty locker room because Jackson was rumored to have been watching him change. His father drank too much and threw his mother down in the drive outside the house; the gravel made a pattern on her cheek. During those months, Jackson shoved enough coke up his nose to start sneezing a buckshot pattern of blood into his own hands. He chewed his lips until they bled, and started missing school. He remembered his father pulling him aside at home and saying, “You can't buck city hall, son. Don't try to buck city hall.”

The Longhorn bartender brought over a beer before he asked, bought for him by someone he recognized vaguely from the work crew. He picked it up and tilted it briefly toward the man at the bar. A birthday drink, he thought to himself. There were still three or four hours of his birthday left, and he pretended for a minute that the man had bought him the beer for that occasion.

He drank and started to feel better, evening back out to his early drunk. He needed to remember to get groceries soon. He had money now, yet he was still living like he was homeless. He thought of Ida, the social worker – Mike Leary's kind, plain daughter. “Get food stamps,” she'd told him, back when he was living on the street. “No matter where you are, if you have no money, apply for food stamps. You don't have to tell anyone anything. You don't have to owe anyone.” A quick rush of gratitude – his life might be fucked up still, but it was fucked up in a less obvious way. He finished that beer and ordered another.

He felt boozy and warm in the dim light. The table was a round of wood on top of a barrel. The surface was pocked and scarred:
Hott Girlz; Bills a pussy; I Luv Rick 4Ever 4Realz.
He was feeling a kinship to everything around him, to this little town where he'd landed. The drying lakebed to the west, studded with lost things. The new lake to the east, clean and full of promise. The bar, with its fans humming, its sweet-faced waitress. He fished
around in the pockets of his winter coat with the halfway hope of digging up an old baggie that he could scrape a line out of. He knew the pockets were empty but he checked anyway. Nothing. The lining had worn through and his hand slipped into the batting. He ordered another beer.

The Longhorn was a half a mile from Don's trailer, and when he paid up at the bar he started walking there. It was ten, and he'd had three beers; he felt better. He liked the idea of watching Don from a distance, of seeing him for the first time. The way you might enter a party and see the person you love lit up from across the room, completely absorbed in everyone but you. He had the feeling that if he could see Don, just watch him for a while without being noticed, that he might answer a question. He might know what was going to happen between them. And he felt sorry for the way he'd been earlier. For not trusting Don, for pushing at him like a teenager. Like a child. Part of him wanted to see Don to apologize, to make it right.

The worker's trailer camp. Chili pepper lights, beer cans, dirty floor mats reading
Go Away, Just Wipe It, Oh Shit Not You Again
. He'd never been inside Don's trailer, but he'd walked past it enough. Someone had used silver reflective tape to spell out “Newlon” on the siding beside the door. It was nicer than most of the trailers, bigger, and Don's truck was parked in behind it. The back windows – the bedroom, he thought – were dark when he walked up, but he could see a glow around the side and he hung back in the underbrush, making sure that he wasn't in the light.

He walked quietly around to the front of the house, where the kitchen and living room lights, in a neat row of windows, were blazing. He hung around the shadows, just beyond where the squares of light were falling on the grass. He could see into the kitchen. It was bright and empty, the counters bare except for an open wine bottle. Jackson liked that about Don, the wine thing. One of those faggy details that reminded him of how different their lives were and inexplicably turned him on. Food in the fridge. Landscaping. The carefully wound garden hose, the ball games on
the weekends, chain restaurants. The strange asexuality of all of it – but it drove an ache down deep in Jackson's stomach to imagine Don in the forest glen of cul-de-sac he'd grown up in, a suburban wood nymph, thirteen and his cock pressing up against the slick and expensive sheets.

The living room window was a shade dimmer than the kitchen; he could see the outline of a table lamp, hear the faint sound of music. He stood just outside of the line of light. There was a stand of weeds and he tripped for a minute, then caught his balance and moved closer.

Don was on the couch, a glass in front of him. He was watching television, blue ghost shapes flickering across his face. God, Jackson thought, he was handsome. Just sitting there, and he was still the most beautiful man Jackson had ever seen. He watched Don for a long minute or two, leaning back, lifting the glass to his mouth, rubbing his forehead. Jackson must have moved. He must have turned his head or fumbled in the grass, because Don looked up and caught his eye.

Don stood up quickly and went to the door. For a minute, Jackson imagined that he would come inside. They would sit together. They would go to bed. Don craned his head toward Jackson. “What are you doing here?” he hissed. His voice was cold and sharp, and he put his foot in the doorframe, as if Jackson might try to push his way inside.

Jackson felt too drunk, suddenly. “I –” He looked at Don, pleading with him. “I just thought –”

“This isn't a good idea,” Don said. “What if someone saw you? Are you drunk?”

Jackson felt like he'd been slapped, that same old feelings of anger and sorrow fighting each other for which would rise to the surface. “Jack,” Don whispered, “you have to be more careful.”

“Forget it,” Jackson said. He wished he could take it all back. The bar, the walk, the bushes. His stupid stumbling feet. “Sorry.” He turned and left, his whole body blazing with humiliation. It was
still his birthday. He was nineteen. The moon pale and graceful above him in a way that made him want to punch it, to black it out.

HE WENT DOWN
on Tuesday morning to burn the pits. A-frame A. There was construction material blowing all over the place – enough to build a whole house, he thought. The house up in Tulalip – his parents' mobile home – had it even had a quarter of all of this shit? And now he was supposed to burn it.