Wide streets in Santa Rosa, lots of trees. They climb into small hills, Hidden Valley, go up Oak Hill Drive and the house is on the left. His son, David, playing basketball in a short, curved driveway with a hoop too low. Blond hair, too long, parted down the middle and feathered back, his son looking like a girl, a pink plastic comb in the back pocket of his bell-bottoms, which are too tight.
“We never looked like that,” he says.
“It’s fine,” Gary says. “They all look like that now. My hair is long too.”
“Well I don’t like it.”
They pull into the driveway, and David comes running for Jim’s side of the truck, smiling, and that does make Jim grin. There’s nothing like how your children love you, no matter who you are or what you’ve done.
“Dad!” Such a simple thing.
Jim opens his door and his son gives him a hug, then his daughter, Tracy, is there, too, unbelievably cute, only eight years old, wisps of blonde hair held in butterfly barrettes, wearing a pink sweater. She feels so soft and small when he picks her up.
“I made you a present,” she says.
“Oh really?” he says. “What’s that?”
“Hiya, Jim.” It’s Elizabeth, his ex-wife, come out to the driveway also, standing a bit farther away. She looks happy and healthy, wide smile. They’ve gotten along fine in all the years of their divorce, never fighting in front of the children, which is good.
“Well,” Jim says, feeling overwhelmed. Tracy is a bit heavy to hold now, so he lets her down.
Then everyone seems to be talking at once. He can’t focus. Elizabeth asking how his trip was, his son asking if they can go hunting, his daughter wanting to show him the present, Gary saying something about this evening. It’s all too much, and he can’t tell what he feels. Like being buried and flying at the same time.
So he stands in the cool air, under clouds massed and gray, heavy but not dumping rain at the moment, and he keeps one hand on the hood of the truck for balance, warm from the drive. He can smell the engine.
What’s odd is that his children don’t know. They don’t realize how far gone he is. All the adults know. Even Elizabeth, whom he hasn’t really talked to, is looking at him strangely, understanding something, but David is focused only on hunting, going today, right here in Santa Rosa.
“I don’t think there’s anywhere to hunt here, sweetie,” Elizabeth says, but David is insistent.
“We’ll just use the pellet gun,” he says. “Just go for quail.” Thirteen years old, so young he’s not quite real. Hard to believe there’s a mind in there working independently. Changing so fast he’s a stranger now to Jim. How did the David from three months ago, at Christmas, become this David? There have been changes, and Jim wasn’t there. He must have a secret life too. Jacking off all the time, no doubt, just like Jim, but his face looks so innocent and smooth it’s hard to believe. Are his thoughts of girls, or hunting, or homework, or friends, or his father, or something else? Jim wouldn’t know.
What Jim wanted was for them to have a year together, his son coming up to Fairbanks for the school year, but David said no. So every visit will be this way, with something changed and lost and never made continuous or believable, never known.
“We can do it,” Jim says. “Why not. We can drive into the hills and pull off somewhere to hunt for quail.”
“It’s all private land around here,” Gary says. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
“We’ll just do it,” Jim says. “Get your pellet gun and make sure you and your sister have your rain jackets and hiking boots.”
“Yeah!” David says, excited, and he’s running into the house. Tracy is hopping up and down, excited but probably not knowing what’s going on.
“Jim,” Elizabeth says. “You can say no. This doesn’t sound like a good plan.”
“It’ll be fine. It’s only a pellet gun. We won’t end up in prison.”
“We’re planning to have dinner tonight at Mary’s,” Gary says. “There’s a full moon tonight if the sky clears, so we can get out the spotting scope. There’s not much light where Mary lives. It’s pretty clear.”
“When will they be back?” Elizabeth asks.
“How about by nine?” Jim says.
“Okay. And Jim, are you alright? You seem low.”
“Yeah,” he says, but his chest feels so tight he can’t say more than that. Why didn’t he stay with her and have his family? There was a time it seemed impossible to stay. Now he wonders why it was so hard. She loved him and thought all was good, some kind of fairy-tale fantasy he disrupted. He had felt his life closing in too fast, having a second child, a house in Ketchikan, living in a small community and everything known by everyone, and most of all the emptiness, sitting with her at dinner in the evening with nothing to say. Terrifying how slow and empty and small that felt. But still, look what he would have now if he had stayed. A family, his kids old enough to talk to, share things with, probably no emptiness now, their lives too busy for that, if only he had waited.
“What’s wrong, Jim?” she asks.
“Just everything,” he says. “I’m sorry we’re not a family. I’m sorry I wrecked everything.”
“Jim, that was a long time ago. You have to forgive yourself for that. You’re a good person, a good father.”
He realizes Tracy is holding his hands, swinging his arms a bit from below. He kneels down and she collapses against him in a hug that’s just pure love.
“I love you, Daddy,” she says, as if on cue, as if she knows this is the time to save him, but the truth is she knows nothing and also can do nothing to help him. She’s far away. She won’t be there each night when he can’t sleep, and his thoughts would be unimaginable to her, monstrous. Her daddy so much worse than anything she could imagine from a fairy tale.
“I love you too,” he says. “I love you and your brother more than anything.” But he wonders about this. It’s true he feels an ache whenever he leaves them. It feels wrong every time they say goodbye. And he thinks of them and has some abstract sense that they are most important. But he thinks of Rhoda more. She’s the one he misses late at night and even right now. This may be his last trip seeing his children, and still he can’t focus.
He holds one hand on the back of her head. “Tracy,” he says. “I hope all of your life is good, that you never feel terrible, that you’re never lost.” But he realizes what he’s going to do to her, what she’ll feel when her father is gone so suddenly. And since David is older, he’ll feel it more, probably, though who can know?
“Jim,” Elizabeth says. “She’s eight years old.”
“Sorry,” he says, and lets Tracy go and stands back up. “I’m not myself really.”
Elizabeth steps closer and puts a hand on his back. “It’s okay. You’re going to get through whatever it is. You have so many people who love you.”
Then David is back out with his pellet gun and the rain jackets, smiling. Lopsided grin just like Jim’s. “I brought all the pellets,” he says. “And my slingshot too.” He’s carrying a Wrist Rocket, aluminum frame and surgical tubing for the bands, so much more powerful than anything from when Jim was a kid. Steel ball bearings for ammo. “You have to see the crossbow I made.”
They all walk through the garage to the backyard. David’s crossbow is a piece of wood with another nailed at the end in a T. Thick surgical tubing leading to a pouch of leather. Jim steps closer to examine, and it’s pretty good. A long groove for the arrow, a thick nail that acts as the trigger.
“Pretty nifty,” Jim says. “Let’s see it in action.”
David smiles, obviously proud. He has a target arrow with a rounded metal tip, meant for a bow. When Jim first gave him this, David was only eight or nine years old and practiced in the walnut orchard where Jim lived in Lakeport. Jim saw his kids every weekend then. He probably shouldn’t have moved back to Alaska. But what he remembers most is that David shot his arrows straight into the sky to see how close they would land. Jim never stopped it, because he thought it was funny. Real risk, possible death seemed so much further away then.
David raises the crossbow to his shoulder, takes aim at their fence, and fires. It’s too fast to see. The arrow stuck in the fence, hard sound of wood, and a memory of flight.
“Holy shit,” Gary says and laughs.
“I didn’t realize,” Elizabeth says. “That’s not good. I thought it was just a toy, something that would kind of lob it in the air a bit.”
David is looking at Jim, proud, waiting for his father’s approval. Is everything we want and need this clear, in every moment, if only we could see?
“Hey hey,” Jim says. “That was something. You would have been useful back in medieval times.”
“Sir Darvid of Van Amberg,” David says, and sweeps his arm as he bows. So strangely similar to Jim’s own grand gesture of exit earlier today. Are we all controlled from somewhere else, puppets without visible strings? How could these two gestures happen, and only today, never before? He has no memory of either of them doing this in the past.
“My brother,” Tracy says. Pride at eight years old, and what is that? What the fuck are any of them doing here?
“Well,” Jim says, and then he doesn’t know what should follow. What’s the plan?
“Wanna try?” his son asks, and this seems perfect, a distraction, something to do.
“You bet,” Jim says, and he takes the crossbow, which is fairly heavy, pushes up the nail trigger and pulls the bands, which are like Jim himself, stretched and held back. The feeling of all that potential energy. When he holds the crossbow, he can feel it, physically, the tension. A lightness to the power. He wonders about the physics of it. Does something under tension actually lose weight?
David hands him the arrow and Jim fits it in the slot. Gary should stand against the fence, and Elizabeth in front of him, in close, then David in front of her, and Tracy. Jim will set the crossbow in place, tie a string to that nail and go join them, in front, to feel the first piercing. They can all be linked, held together as one body, a family. In order to include Tracy, the arrow will have to come in low, at his belly.
Jim lifts the crossbow to his shoulder. He likes this too much, the feeling of power. When nothing can be controlled inside, that’s when a trigger is most beautiful, most perfect. The .44 magnum takes only the lightest touch to release all that powder behind a heavy slug, a kick that feels like it could break your wrists. The slug will stop a grizzly at close range, knock it back and tear a hole in its chest.
The crossbow has no sight, the leather pouch resting too high, making it impossible to see the arrow. And a nail is not as satisfying as a trigger. Jim realizes that if one of these bands ever fails, it’s going to snap back into the shooter’s face and probably blind him, but he knows that won’t happen right now, because he’s cursed with an empty world without event. Nothing will take over and determine what he should do or who he should be. All the world is only waiting.
He aims at the fence because where else would he aim, and he pulls that nail down and the arrow is there in the fence again. Such a strange release, the opposite of a gun. No kickback but instead the bow pulled forward. No punishment but a load taken away.
“Can I try?” Gary asks. “That thing’s a trip.”
“Do you like it?” David asks.
Jim wants to respond, but he feels lost. He hands the bow to Gary, and nods to David, hoping that will be enough. If he speaks, he’s afraid his face will break and show too much. So he stands and watches his brother shoot, and he wants a time mover, something to make it all pass smoothly, something to keep him out of it. He shouldn’t be responsible for its workings.
“You haven’t seen my present,”Tracy says.
He’s happy to have a reason to move.
“I can see now,” he’s able to say.
She grabs his hand and tugs, pulling him through the garage into the house, to the living room with its brick fireplace and low ceiling, a sliding glass door looking out to pine trees.
“Close your eyes,” she says when he’s sitting on the couch, and he closes them gladly. You don’t have to respond if your eyes are closed. Everyone will let you have a blank face, a nothing face. It’s the only time we can be free around others. A gulf banded with leftover light and he’s sliding to the side, falling in waves of pressure, his pulse. The heart could be only a foot away or this could be on the scale of planets, rings of Saturn and such. Impossible to measure distance inside, no reference, only our sense of things, insanely variable.
“You can open now,” she says, and when he does, he sees a drawing of the two of them, walking slanted in a world where there is no ground. His body without flesh, made only of sticks, and his face simple, a circle, happy to match hers. Their stick hands joined in a jumble of crayon, and this must be what we feel when we touch someone we love. It would look like that if it were visible.
“I love it,” he says, and he does. He’s always lied about his children’s art, but this time he does love it, a gift of the depression, that there are moments of clarity, of purity, and he can respond more directly to the world than he ever has before. “I love that there’s no ground,” he says. “Just the two of us, holding hands. Not coming from anywhere and not going anywhere. There’s only the sun and the feeling we have when we hold hands.”
“I love you, Daddy,” she says and wraps her arms around his neck. The innocence of it makes him feel so sad. He closes his eyes and clings to her.
“Jim,” Elizabeth says.
“You’re crying, Dad,” David says. “Why are you crying?”
“Sorry,” Jim says, and he lets go of Tracy, stands up, wipes his eyes. “I just haven’t been sleeping enough. Just tired.”
What’s true is that he has no control now. Different feelings are getting him all day and night, and never any warning, no idea what will be next. It’s terrifying to have no control, especially in front of his children. He doesn’t like at all that they’re seeing this.
Elizabeth is beside him, holding his arm. “Would you like to lie down and rest?”
“No. No. I’m fine. Let’s go hunt for quail. Red-eye?” He tries to say this last bit to David with more energy. David nods but still looks worried.
Jim starts walking toward the front door. If he can make it outside, that will be better, the ceiling too low in here and also the air too warm and closed.
“You forgot your present,”Tracy says, so he turns and she hands him the drawing and he takes it in both hands to keep it safe, makes it down the hall and out the front door. The sky still heavy. He wants to rise up into it, wants to not be held to the earth.