Wolfsong (2 page)

Eventually, I took off my father’s work shirt and hung it back up in the closet. I shut the doors behind me, the dust motes still floating in the fading sun.

catalytic converter/dreaming while awake

“GORDO’S.”

“Hey, Gordo.”

A growl. “Yeah? Who’s this?” Like he didn’t know.

“Ox.”

“Oxnard Matheson! I was just thinking about you.”

“Really?”

“No. What the fuck do you want?”

I grinned because I knew. The smile felt strange on my face. “It’s good to hear you too.”

“Yeah, yeah. Haven’t seen you, kiddo.” He was pissed at my absence.

“I know. I had to….” I didn’t know what I had to do.

“How long has it been since the sperm donor fucked off?”

“A couple of months, I guess.” Fifty-seven days. Ten hours. Forty-two minutes.

“Fuck him. You know that, right?”

I did, but he was still my daddy. So maybe I didn’t. “Sure,” I said.

“Your ma doing okay?”

“Yeah.” No. I didn’t think she was.

“Ox.”

“No. I don’t know.”

He inhaled deeply and sighed.

“Smoke break?” I asked him, and it hurt, because that was familiar. I could almost smell the smoke. It burned my lungs. I could see him if I thought about it enough, sitting out behind the shop. Smoking and scowling. Long legs stretched out, ankles crossed. Oil under his fingernails. Those bright and colorful tattoos covering his arms. Ravens and flowers and shapes meant to have meaning that I could never figure out.

“Yeah. Death sticks, man.”

“You could quit.”

“I don’t quit anything, Ox.”

“Old dogs learn new tricks.”

He snorted. “I’m twenty-four.”

“Old.”

“Ox.” He knew.

So I told him. “We’re not doing okay.”

“Bank?” he asked.

“She doesn’t think I see them. The letters.”

“How far behind?”

“I don’t know.” I was embarrassed. I shouldn’t have called. “I gotta go.”

“Ox,” he snapped. Crisp and clear. “How far?”

“Seven months.”

“That fucking bastard,” he said. He was angry.

“He didn’t—”

“Don’t, Ox. Just… don’t.”

“I was thinking.”

“Oh boy.”

“Could I…?” My tongue felt heavy.

“Spit it out.”

“Could I have a job?” I said in a rush. “It’s just we need the money and I can’t let her lose the house. It’s all we have left. I’d do good, Gordo. I would do good work and I’d work for you forever. It was going to happen anyway and can we just do it now? Can we just do it now? I’m sorry. I just need to do it now because I have to be the man now.” My throat hurt. I wished I had something to drink, but I couldn’t get my legs to move.

Gordo didn’t say anything at first. Then, “I think that might be the most I’ve ever heard you talk at one time.”

“I don’t say much.” Obviously.

“That right.” He sounded amused. “Here’s what we’re gonna do.”

HE GAVE
my mom the money to get the mortgage caught back up. Said it would come out of the pay he’d give me under the table until I could legally work for him.

Mom cried. She said no, but then she realized she couldn’t say no. So she cried and said yes and Gordo made her promise to tell him if it got bad again. I think she thought he hung the moon and might have tried to smile a little wider at him. Might have laughed lightly. Might have cocked her hips a bit.

She didn’t know that I’d seen him once with another guy when I was six or so, holding his elbow lightly as they walked into the movies. Gordo had been laughing deeply and had stars in his eyes. I didn’t think he’d be interested in my mom. I never saw the man with Gordo ever again. And I never saw Gordo with anyone else. I wanted to ask him, but there was a tightness around his eyes that didn’t used to be there before and so I never did. People don’t like to be reminded of sad things.

The threatening letters and phone calls stopped coming from the bank.

It only took six months to pay back Gordo. Or so he said. I didn’t understand how money worked all that well, but it seemed like it should have taken longer than that. Gordo called us square and that was that.

I never really saw much of the money after that. Gordo told me he’d opened an account for me at the bank where it would accrue interest. I didn’t know what
accrue interest
meant, but I trusted Gordo. “For a rainy day,” he said.

I didn’t like it when it rained.

I HAD
a friend, once. His name was Jeremy and he wore glasses and smiled nervously at many things. We were nine years old. He liked comic books and drawing, and one day, he gave me a picture he’d done of me as a superhero. It had a cape and everything. I thought it was the neatest thing I’d ever seen. Then Jeremy moved away to Florida, and when my mom and I looked up Florida on the map, it was on the other side of the country from where we lived in Oregon.

“People don’t stay in Green Creek,” she told me as my fingers touched roads on the map. “There’s nothing here.”

“We stayed,” I said.

She looked away.

SHE WAS
wrong. People
did
stay. Not a lot of them, but they did. She did. I did. Gordo did. People I went to school with, though they might leave eventually. Green Creek was dying, but it wasn’t dead. We had a grocery store. The diner where she worked. A McDonald’s. A one-screen movie theater that showed movies that came out in the seventies. A liquor store with bars on the windows. A wig store with mannequin heads in the windows, draped with red and black and yellow hair. Gordo’s. A gas station. Two traffic lights. One school for all grades. All in the middle of the woods in the middle of the Cascade Mountains.

I didn’t understand why people wanted to leave. To me, it was home.

WE LIVED
back off in the trees near the end of a dirt road. The house was blue. The trim was white. The paint peeled, but that didn’t matter. In the summer, it smelled like grass and lilacs and thyme and pinecones. In the fall, the leaves crunched under my feet. In the winter, the smoke would rise from the chimney, mixing with the snow. In the spring, the birds would call out in the trees, and at night, an owl would ask
who, who, who
until the very early morning.

There was a house down the road from us at the end of the lane that I could see through the trees. My mom said it was empty, but sometimes there was a car or a truck parked out in front and lights on inside at night. It was a big house with many windows. I tried looking inside them, but they were always covered. Sometimes it would be months before I’d see another car outside.

“Who lived there?” I asked my dad when I was ten.

He grunted and opened another beer.

“Who lived there?” I asked my mom when she got home from work.

“I don’t know,” she said, touching my ear. “It was empty when we got here.”

I never asked anyone else. I told myself it was because mystery was better than reality.

I NEVER
asked why we moved to Green Creek when I was three. I never asked if I had grandparents or cousins. It was always just the three of us until it was just the two of us.

“DO YOU
think he’ll come back?” I asked Gordo when I was fourteen.

“Damn fucking computers,” Gordo muttered under his breath, pushing another button on the Nexiq that was attached to the car. “Everything has to be done with computers.” He pressed another button and the machine beeped angrily at him. “Can’t just go in and figure it out myself. No. Have to use
diagnostic codes
because everything is automated. Grandpap could just
listen
to the idle of the car and tell you what was wrong.”

I took the Nexiq from his hands and tapped to the right screen. I pulled the code and handed it back to him. “Catalytic converter.”

“I knew that,” he said with a scowl.

“That’s going to cost a lot.”

“I know.”

“Mr. Fordham can’t afford it.”

“I know.”

“You’re not going to charge him full price, are you.” Because that was the kind of person Gordo was. He took care of others, even if he didn’t want anyone to know.

He said, “No, Ox. He’s not coming back. Get this up on the lift, okay?”

MOM SAT
at the kitchen table, a bunch of papers spread out around her. She looked sad.

I was nervous. “More bank stuff?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Well?”

“Ox. It’s….” She picked up her pen and started to sign her name. She stopped before she finished the first letter. Put the pen back down. She looked up at me. “I’ll do right by you.”

“I know.” Because I did.

She picked up the pen and signed her name. And then again. And again. And again.

She initialed a few times too.

When she was done, she said, “And that’s that.” She laughed and stood and took my hand and we danced in the kitchen to a song neither of us could hear. She left after a little while.

It was dark by the time I looked down at the papers on the table.

They were for a divorce.

SHE WENT
back to her maiden name. Callaway.

She asked if I wanted to change mine too.

I told her no. I would make Matheson a good name.

She didn’t think I saw her tears when I said that. But I did.

I SAT
in the cafeteria. It was loud. I couldn’t concentrate. My head hurt.

A guy named Clint walked by my table with his friends.

I was by myself.

He said, “Fucking retard.”

His friends laughed.

I got up and saw the look of fear in his eyes. I was bigger than him.

I turned and left, because my mom said I couldn’t get in fights anymore.

Clint said something behind me and his friends laughed again.

I told myself that when I got friends, we wouldn’t be mean like they were.

No one bothered me when I sat outside. It was almost nice. My sandwich was good.

SOMETIMES I
walked in the woods. Things were clearer there.

The trees swayed in the breeze. Birds told me stories.

They didn’t judge me.

One day, I picked up a stick and pretended it was a sword.

I hopped over a creek, but it was too wide and my feet got wet.

I lay on my back and looked at the sky through the trees while waiting for my socks to dry.

I dug my toes into the dirt.

A dragonfly landed on a rock near my head. It was green and blue. Its wings had blue veins. Its eyes were shiny and black. It flew away, and I wondered how long it would live.

Something moved off to my right. I looked over and heard a growl. I thought I should run, but I couldn’t make my feet work. Or my hands. I didn’t want to leave my socks behind.

So instead, I said, “Hello.”

There was no response, but I knew something was there.

“I’m Ox. It’s okay.”

A huff of air. Like a sigh.

I told it that I liked the woods.

There was a flash of black, but then it was gone.

When I got home, I had leaves in my hair and there was a car parked in front of the empty house at the end of the lane.

It was gone the next day.

THAT WINTER,
I left school and went to the diner. I was on break for Christmas. Three weeks of nothing but the shop ahead, and I was happy.

It started snowing again by the time I opened the door to Oasis. The bell rang out overhead. An inflatable palm tree was near the door. A papier-mâché sun hung from the ceiling. Four people sat at the counter drinking coffee. It smelled like grease. I loved it.

A waitress named Jenny snapped her gum and smiled at me. She was two grades above me. Sometimes, she smiled at me at school too. “Hey, Ox,” she said.

“Hi.”

“Cold out?”

I shrugged.

“Your nose is red,” she said.

“Oh.”

She laughed. “You hungry?”

“Yeah.”

“Sit down. I’ll get you some coffee and tell your mom you’re here.”

I did, at my booth near the back. It wasn’t
really
my booth, but everyone knew it was.

“Maggie!” Jenny said back into the kitchen. “Ox is here.” She winked at me as she took a plate of eggs and toast to Mr. Marsh, who flirted with a sly smile, even though he was eighty-four. Jenny giggled at him, and he ate his eggs. He put ketchup on them. I thought that was odd.

“Hey,” Mom said, putting coffee down in front of me.

“Hi.”

She ran her fingers through my hair, brushing off flecks of snow. They melted on my shoulders. “Tests go okay?”

“Think so.”

“We study enough?”

“Maybe. I forgot who Stonewall Jackson was, though.”

She sighed. “Ox.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “I got the rest.”

“You promise?”

“Yes.”

And she believed me because I didn’t lie. “Hungry?”

“Yeah. Can I have—”

The bell rang overhead. And a man walked in. He seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t think of where I’d seen him before. He was Gordo’s age and strong. And big. He had a full, light-colored beard. He brushed a hand over his shaved head. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He let it out slowly. He opened his eyes and I swear they flashed. But all I saw was blue again.

“Give me a second, Ox,” Mom said. She went to talk to the man and I did my best to look away. He was a stranger, yes, but there was something else. I thought on it as I took a sip from my coffee.

He sat at the booth next to mine. We faced each other. He smiled briefly at me. It was a nice smile, bright and toothy. Mom handed him a menu and told him she’d be back. I could already see Jenny peeking out from the kitchen, watching the man. She pushed her boobs up, ran her fingers through her hair, and grabbed the coffeepot. “I got this one,” she muttered. Mom rolled her eyes.