Robert and I drive back past ranches so far off the highway you won’t see the roads leading to them unless you already know where they are.
“Do you live near the ocean?” I ask.
My question probably sounds like it’s come out of nowhere, but I’ve been thinking it since he first mentioned Seattle.
“Not too far,” he says. “I can see the Sound from my office. If I open the window, the salt air comes in, which is so nice but can mess up the computers.”
Salt air.
I’ve never heard of such a thing, and my brain conjures images until I notice we are passing the rodeo grounds. Up ahead is the grain elevator set against the beige rimrocks.
“Mind dropping me off here?” I ask.
“Along the highway?”
I can’t hide my cowardice.
He stops the truck and asks, “Are you sure?”
All that bravado when I first got into his truck, now he knows it was just an act. Once my boots touch the ground, I whisper an apology, but I don’t, can’t, look at him. I look instead toward cattle, wandering the pastures, snow sprinkled on their backs. Many are already pregnant, ranchers trying to get a jump on the market. Robert drives on and takes the turn at the gray tower.
I walk into the wind, my coat tight against my body like someone’s pulling it from behind. I try to at least enjoy the smell of hay, the chatter of livestock, the jolt of crisp air in my nostrils. But mostly, I feel guilt for how I treated Robert.
My face is numb from the wind by the time I turn off the highway. As the sky dims, I notice coats and bikes scattered across the frozen grass outside the grain elevator. And then I hear it, the old game we used to play. Children who weren’t even born at the time of the accident, and they’re in there, singing.
“Sissy, sissy.”
I see them through the gaping hole where the sliding doors have rotted off. They hold hands and march in a circle, wind in their hair. I watch their colored shirts as they spin and laugh and tackle each other.
When I was cast in the younger brother’s role in childhood games of Eddie, my chest used to tighten with shame. I would have rather played anyone else. I would rather play the grain; that was one of the parts you could play, just lie down stiff and let kids step on you.
Time doesn’t seem to dull the old prejudices. They just become unconscious, reflexive, fact. I pass Robert’s truck, long cooled off in the driveway. Did he hear the song, too? Would he have known they were singing about him?
I turn back toward the kids playing in the fading light. I imagine them inside those dark passageways—frayed ropes hanging from the old pulleys, gears and cranks rusted in place, motors quiet. A couple of teenagers have climbed to the top of the tower to sit in the window, cigarettes glowing.
When I walk through the door, I smell my father’s cooking, my eyes still watering from the cold. I see we’ve received our payment from the Mosleys, the kitchen table dark red with elk meat. My father has begun the task of chopping it into meal-sized portions and placing it into plastic bags. The meat takes up the whole table—some of it bagged, some sliced on the cutting board, and a giant hunk of carcass needing to be butchered. A cooked steak sits in the frying pan, the grease still clear.
“Is that you?” my father calls down the stairs.
“Yeah, Pop.”
“Dinner’s on the stove,” he says. “Grab a plate and come to the den. I have the TV trays set up.”
Now that work has slowed—no bodies since Mr. Mosley—Pop sits too much, over the bookkeeping, in front of the TV, and dialing Martha in the fleeting hours between her shifts, each word buzzing with fear, paranoia, ecstasy.
“Get you a beer?” I call.
“If you’ve got a free hand.”
Climbing the stairs, I feel the careful balance performed by my hands, but also by the expression on my face, trying to hide my nervousness for the lies I’ve told and will tell again.
I find Pop in the recliner, gnawing on a bone. I set the beer on his tray and take the armchair. He begins wiping his hands on a paper napkin, using a touch of beer to help clean off the grease.
“What are we watching?” I ask.
“It’s that singing competition,” he says, eyes on the TV.
I think of the singing inside the gray tower, how many emotions are swirling through our town. I pick up my knife and fork and pretend I’m not someone who got dropped off on the highway, not someone who spent the day walking Robert through the very paperwork I promised not to give him.
“You were gone most of the day,” Pop says, passing me the saltshaker.
“I spent some time with a man I like,” I tell him, shocked I said it so straightforward, or at all.
Pop sits up tall. “Well, this is some good news,” he says. “Do I know him?”
And now the conversation feels intrusive. I shouldn’t have shared this private news, this overstated description of my day, as if I’d been on a date. Pop stares at me, awaiting the mystery man’s name.
“We drove around, that’s all. I don’t think it was even a date.”
“I wasn’t trying to pry,” he says. “I’m just interested in who you spend your time with.”
But is he interested, or only when my choices and feelings line up with his? I can’t remember the last time I talked to someone without faking an interest or feeling bored, and I won’t let my father take this joy from me.
A singer belts out a song we don’t know, voice full of power, face contorted, fists clenched, but the music strangely devoid of emotion.
“I’m going to keep him to myself for a bit. But I’ll tell you that we drove out to Brine Lake, and I told him about ice fishing with you.”
“If you call eating chocolate and kicking your heels into a bucket fishing,” he says, laughing.
“I do.” I smile.
Sometimes I feel like we get along best when I tell only pieces of the truth.
The heat turns on, causing a great rattling noise as if men with hammers are in the basement and in the walls, banging on pipes.
“Maybe you and I can go out there with our poles sometime,” he says.
“Maybe, yeah.”
Pop draws on his beer and turns the sound back up when he sees a singer wearing a cowboy hat. “Finally a song I know,” he says, his grin slow and satisfied.
“He has a nice voice,” I say.
“I hope this one wins,” Pop says. “You can vote by telephone, but it costs money.”
Though I am staring at the TV, I’m thinking of the little rain boot hanging from the old battered tree house. I’m thinking of the pile of flat rocks, the dark smell of the leather jacket, the glee of children singing, Sissy, sissy.
Pop looks over at my plate. “Like your steak?”
I take another bite and enjoy the tender meat, its spill of sweet juices, the faint taste of sage that I know is from the elk’s diet and nothing Pop added from a spice jar.
“Yeah, it’s good,” I say.
“I’m glad.” He adjusts the pillow behind his back. “I hope you don’t get sick of it too soon.”
We can’t use elk to pay the bills or fix my van, but the meat is good and will last most of the year if we’re careful. The show is almost over, the singers lined up onstage to see who will go on to the next round. I saw at another piece of meat so mindlessly that, once it’s cut, I continue sawing into the plate.
“You told him about ice fishing?” Pop asks, muting the TV.
He laughs, more to himself than to me. But I have drifted back to the feel of the smooth rocks, the sound of their plunking, and how everything looked sprinkled with sugar.
“You don’t seem like yourself today,” Pop says, moving his tray to the side so he can kick out the footrest on the recliner.
And I’m not. I feel tingly and in flux. “It’s just this lull in work,” I say because this is what we do. We only let each other get so close.