The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (3 page)

I remember that he was, in a word,
helpless
after I did this, and that I was starting to lose him. I had
begun wheeling him back toward
his
cabin (which I knew was no short distance from the Halvorsteds') when I saw one of the Eckers rumbling toward us in his red combine. I flagged the machine down, and the man inside—Jimmy, I think—offered to let us jump on the back. Foolishly, I took the offer.

For twenty minutes (and I dare say they were the worst twenty minutes of Ackvund's long and loving life) we vibrated, rattled, shook, bumped, and rocked all along the graveled edge of the road—and this was
after
the procedure of getting Ackvund settled onto the back of the machine. Eckers, I might mention, never once stepped out of the air-conditioned cab of his vehicle to offer assistance, leaving it to me to pull the wounded soul up onto the hood of the threshing board by myself.

In any case, it didn't take me all of those twenty minutes to realize I had made a tragic mistake in not continuing with the wheelbarrow—besides what must have been torturous and incessant vibration for my uncle, Eckers refused to drive faster than several miles per hour, with the result that we were going absolutely nowhere in a bloody, blistering hurry. From my uncle's eye, that twelve-inch
bucktail (I can still see it) swayed back and forth like a metronome, ticking—

“Please put her down,” my mother says. She has come through the back door.

“I'd rather not,” I say. I hold the pig away from her. I stand up. “Why do you look like that? You're scaring me, Mom.”

“
I'm
scaring
you
?” she says. “What did you do to him, you monster? Why is he so filthy? Where did you two go?”

There's a look in her eye when she says this that betrays her seduction. Her face has never been so radiant. She is feverish. She demands that I give her the pig. She slaps my back with her open hand. She wants the pig, she wants her brother, she wants answers. She wants in a way she has never before wanted. If only her violent hitting of my back could speak.

“Stop it, Mother,” I say. “Leave the pig alone. Let me just hold it.”

“The police are coming!” she shouts.

“Yes,” I say. “Sure. They should be.”

I am holding the pig away from me, my arms extended, my hands under its warm, hairy armpits, my back screening my mother from taking it away.
The pig is looking over its shoulder, as though it is trying to figure out what I want to do with it. I bring its face to mine, to give it a kiss on the forehead before I put it down on the floor, and it slips its quick little tongue into my mouth like a dart. The tongue flickers into and out of my mouth several times, though my lips are tightly pursed. It's a very narrow tongue and it is very warm. I open my mouth wide and let it in.

My mother gasps.

She takes a cookie sheet out of the drying rack and slams it across my back. Though the pan is flimsy, the edge of the stupid thing catches my elbow—my funny bone—and I drop the pig. It sprawls on the floor and squeals. It looks up at me, confused, and scrambles away.

I lunge after it.

“Get away from her!” my mother shouts. There is a knock at the door. I look up at my mother and my mother looks at the door. She looks the way Ackvund did when I dumped him off the side of the combine into the ditch and ran like hell to get my car; that is, she looks fundamentally torn, split between two sides of a decision.

Don't let me deceive you by way of breeziness here: Ackvund was most likely dead by the time I dumped him off the side of the combine and ran. He had rolled into the slop in the culvert, and when I'd returned with my car, flipped him over onto his back, taken his pulse, and felt for his breath, there was no doubt he was absolutely dead and I couldn't think of bringing him into the hospital as he was, so I drove him back to his cabin only to find his phone was, as I've already said, not working.

The police officer knocks again. My mother goes to the door. I run into the dining room and look under the table for the pig. I want this pig more than I want anything else in the world. I can't explain this. It's under a chair. I go after it, swipe and miss. I chase it through the living room and into the bedroom. I lunge for this precious squalling creature before it can get underneath the bed, and I pull it out by its haunches. It squeals. It struggles. I pull it close. The cop yells at me, but I don't stop. I bring the beast to my face, and I kiss it, and it licks me back, and when it licks my open mouth its narrow tongue is like a fire-hot poker in my throat. The police officer yells, my mother yells, and I am mouth
to mouth with this pig, and I am sucking, siphoning its lungs for air, and its little tongue is searing hot and sour against my gums, and I am seeing myself do this with eyes that are not entirely my own—

They are my mother's eyes, this police officer's, and they are the eyes of a nephew watching the hands of some stranger doing this, holding and kissing a pig, and this is not my mother's pig falling to the ground, and this is not a pig scampering under a bed, and these are not my hands being forced and cuffed behind my back, and these are not my rights being read to me off a list of rights I know nothing about, and this is not my mother weeping and reaching under the bed for her pig while her son is taken away by the police officer, and these are not her hands holding her pig in front of me, taunting me on the front lawn, torturing me in front of the gaping neighbors of my past life as I am led away like some pilloried criminal from another time. As far as I can see, these are the hands of absence and desire and hunting, and these are the hands that all of my life I have been using as my own.

CHECK THE BABY

T
he grandest joke about the baby is who goes up to check on him. Because whoever goes up always wakes him, and no one wants him woken, not at three weeks, not ever.

We've started promising sexual favors to the one who goes up—the one who wakes him and therein coddles, swaddles, bottles—you see, your entire life sucked as by some insect, pest.

The stakes are not low, I might add. I have 4,027 blowjobs coming my way someday, it's not exactly clear when; and my wife has roughly fourteen hours of French-style kissing.

These favors might accumulate without realization until the cows come home. And I hate to say it, but at a certain point the stakes climb so that the thing being wagered against tumbles into the
ridiculous and you have no idea what you're really facing or avoiding. At which point, I am confronted about my drinking.

When my wife cleans house, she's surgical: “I think you're drinking because if you're drunk you know I can't trust you to go upstairs and check on him.”

“That's flattering,” I say.

“I also think you're no longer interested in the sex we've been bartering.”

“Is it really a form of fair trade, what we're doing there with that?”

The grandest joke about the baby isn't the sort of joke one laughs at. But when I'm offered sex at the grocery store by a strange woman, the entire child-rearing phase of my life looks rather like a farce.

“I have a child,” I tell her, and she says she knows this, has solicited me for this very reason. “But you would never see the child,” I tell her. “Under no circumstances.”

But she just wants the smell of them. Can't actually
stand
children, but she loves their smell, wants to eat the smell.

“You're a fine lady.”

But we live in one of these new communities that orbits a single, fantastic, oversized grocery store, and I keep passing her in the aisles—Shoes and Pets and Car Gear. I smile to be kind, and she keeps saying things like, “Hey, offer's still on the table.” Or, one time she boldly whiffs the air and says, “Three . . . no, four weeks. Right?”

I shudder, but I'm a little drunk on four vanilla bottles from Baking, so at some point I titter—

Yes, I commit adultery against my god, my wife and son, and every time the blowjobs and French-style kissing are mentioned I'm nearly vomiting, and I don't mind saying my journeys upstairs to my silent-asleep son, just to make sure he hasn't inexplicably stopped breathing, hurt.

IN LAPLAND

O
n Thursday my wife returns from work and says she needs some color in the house, can't live in this cell-hole another minute, what have we done to bring ourselves to this way of living at our age, we aren't twenty-five-year-old twits, not anymore. Country Rill is the green she shows me in a magazine. “Look at that,” she says, thrusting the glossy in my face, “and tell me it wouldn't change everything.” I cannot tell her this. It's time to do something, truly. We are in agreement. It is time. We have waited a long time, and at our age we can no longer afford to wait to do anything. Everything must be done last month, when there was time.

On Saturday we compare Country Rill prices at four stores—none of the Country Rills green the way Country Rill greened in the magazine. A woman
at one of these places is juggling the questions of five other customer couples, each team looking plaintive and positioning themselves for sustained explanation of paint application.

The woman fielding these questions has no time for this. She is a rough sort of woman, a person made hard by excessive painting, I think, and not the person to articulate the ways of reducing such hardness. She is saying to another couple, “Look, paint isn't permanent. It can always be fixed. You just go and you just do it and you can do it again.”

When she turns a few minutes of her time to us, she studies her store's litmus-looking paint sample against my wife's picture in the magazine. “Same thing,” she concludes.

“No,” my wife says. “Not at all the same.”

The woman brings the paint litmus and the magazine up closer to her face, lifts her glasses off her nose, props them on her forehead, and seems almost to smell the Country Rill. She is very serious. “No,” she finally says, “not the same. But they're as close as can be.”

“You have thousands of paints,” my wife says. “Can't you mix a blend to get it to look like this?”

The woman looks up, hands the magazine back to us, and studies my wife's face. “Yeah,” she says, “but it still won't be what you want.”

There is silence. My wife is looking at me. She wants me to confront this woman. I think about what to say to coerce her to make the color. Then the woman speaks again. “Look, if I mix this paint for you, to try to get you this color, you won't like it. Trust me. You have to just get a color and like it. This”—she points to the magazine in my wife's hands—“this isn't your paint. It's someone else's, and you cannot have it. That's the way it is with paint.”

This enrages my wife, who contends that she has never heard anything more ridiculous in her life. “Color is a science, not an art. Paint is not unique. Color can be manufactured to a precise and desired specific quality. We aren't dealing in the subjective,” she says, and I agree. But because we're both originally from the Madison, Wisconsin, area, we've reserved all this direct outrage for the car ride home and really let the car windows have it.