Gary pulls him back to the truck and they take off fast. Jim wet in his rain gear, head slumped down into the green rubber, fisherman’s slicker, smell of it and he could be at sea again. Coves in southeast Alaska shrouded always in fog, the water gray, but looking down he might see a hundred salmon, dark bodies aligned and perfectly spaced and without thought. Water so cold and clear. Shadow forms of ridges below them, outcrops, sand and mud and seaweed all indicated differently by shadings at depth, distorted by temperature bands.
This is what he’s always loved, moments of purity, finding remote coves by boat, no one else around, or hiking far along a river with no trail to find a deep pool where steelhead have never been fished. The silence of those places. He wants to retreat now, doesn’t want his children here, or Gary, or to hear the noises of a truck revving and thick tires carving turns. He doesn’t want to think about what he’s done or who he is or what any of it means. He wants to be without responsibility, without attachment, without consequence, without feeling except the basic awareness of sight and sound and smell in a place untouched.
But they won’t let him hide. Grumblings from Gary, questions from David, and the most basic is the most difficult to answer: “What were you doing, Dad?”
The need to account for our lives, for everything we’ve done. What if we didn’t need to? What if everything we’ve done is simply that?
“Song, sung blue, everybody knows one,” Jim sings. “Song, sung blue, da da da da da da. Me and you, a number two, with a cry in our voice, ba dum dum dum dum, is that right?” He can’t remember the words. “Help me, brother.”
But Gary is gripping the wheel in both hands, driving very fast along curves and dips and rises, trying to get to a main road, probably. Hard to be faster than a phone.
“We’ve really got no choice,” Jim continues singing. “We’ve got no choice.” But he doesn’t know if these are the words. Maybe they’re only his words.
“I was crawling too,” David says. “But you were going really fast, like a werewolf.”
“I have to pee,”Tracy is saying, and maybe she’s been saying this for a while, because her voice is at high distress now.
“We should pull over for Tracy,” Jim says. “She has a bladder the size of a peanut. I know from when I moved from Anchorage to Fairbanks. I had to stop maybe fifty times for her each way, and we did a few trips. What a pain in the ass.”
Gary is saying nothing, though, only driving way too fast, concentrated.
“You were just like a werewolf, Dad.”
“Ahoooo,” Jim howls with his head back, and it feels right with the tires slipping and getting air on the rises. He’s never seen his brother drive like this.
“Personally, I don’t care at all if we’re caught,” Jim says. “Because what’s going to happen, little brother? We walked on some guy’s land, and then I crawled in the mud. Wow. What a terrible crime. And if they get really detailed in the investigation, we carved the breast of a scrub jay. I’m sure that comes with a life sentence.”
Gary slows a bit. “Maybe you’re right. I’m driving too fast. This is dangerous.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. I’ll slow down. Normal speed.”
The tires become heavy again, attached to the road, and the turns are without so much g-force, whatever g-force is.
“What’s g-force?” Jim asks. “Does it just mean gravity?”
“Yeah,” David says. “Two g’s means twice the force of gravity.”
“Voilà. It’s been worth it sending you to school. Better than having you work the crops and milk the cows. We had to sacrifice a bit, no Christmas oranges for three years running, and your ma had to make jeans out of wood, but we got by and it shore is worth it.”
David is laughing. Gary is not.
“What’s wrong, little brother? Cat steal your milk? Not seen your Christmas orange in nary a long while?”
“Manic,” Gary says. “This is the manic part. You’re on a high now, and it’s way too high, as in crazy.”
“I took a pill already though,” Jim says. “So I’m saved, right?”
“The pills take a couple weeks, and he warned us they might just make everything worse during these first two weeks.”
“Well that doesn’t sound safe.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“I have to pee!” A wail of despair now from Tracy, who probably is barely holding it in, so Gary pulls over and she hurries out, hopping, gets her pants down, hiding behind the door, and they all hear her water on the roadside gravel, a bonding moment for a family.
“All distress gone,” Jim says. “Taken care of so easily. We just have to find a way to piss out who I am, leaving a happier something else.”
It seems to be more and more true that his utterances are met with silence. Perhaps that’s the clearest sign of crazy. But it doesn’t matter, which is the other sign of crazy. He feels he should make an effort, though.
“Seriously,” he says. “The warnings Dr. Brown gave, they were missing something.”
“What?” Gary asks.
But then Jim realizes he can’t say this in front of his children, can’t talk about the risk of killing others before killing himself. We’re supposed to protect children, right up until whatever terrible moment in which we no longer protect them. Like telling David about the divorce. He was five or six then and still probably knew it was coming, without really knowing. Just announced one morning, sitting in the living room, the view out to Clear Lake, a nice rental on the water they had that year, after leaving Alaska. So much warmer in California, and the lake was glass. Jim was thinking of waterskiing while Elizabeth said the words.
So is this what we all want, to not be told until it’s too late? If he decides to kill Rhoda, should he tell her ahead of time or would she not want to know until the last possible moment, the gun raised and just one word, yep, to confirm it, then pull the trigger?
He wants it to be like in the Dirty Harry movies. In the hotel room, she should be wearing lingerie and standing by the bed or even on it. She should take off her bra and her tits hanging there and he shoots one of them, the one over her heart, and a hole just appears, neat. Better if it’s in a pool, more exactly like the movie, but that won’t be possible, because if you kill one, why do you not kill others? Aren’t his parents responsible also? Don’t they deserve a visit? And what about his brother? A lot of open questions.
“Not much time,” Jim says. “So much to think about. The big questions. And I mean the really big ones.”
“Are we going to eat the scrub jay?” David asks.
Gary puts his hand on Jim’s shoulder. “Slow down, Bud. That’s all you have to do. You don’t have to think about anything. Just let it all go. Nothing to worry about.”
“Are we?” David asks again.
“Yeah,” Jim says. “We’re going to fry it up. We’re going to Mary’s now, right?”
“Yep.”
“So yeah, we’ll have dinner, and in one little skillet I shall personally prepare the noble breast.”
David is laughing, but now Jim is thinking of porn and noble breasts. He’s getting a boner and wants to jack off. He wants to be left alone. He wants to fuck Rhoda, but that’s not happening this evening, so he needs a magazine at least. He has a couple in his duffel. He keeps his chin down inside his rain gear and can avoid conversation that way.
What is a body? Slick with sweat and rain, feeling hot and chilled at the same time, an ache in his groin. He puts his hands together in his lap, as if he’s curled in close for warmth, but he’s pressing against the boner. No one will know. Sex always secretive.
His shoulders feel strong, pumped from crawling, but the joint in his left elbow feels out of whack. And his knees are sore, crushed, and the pain in his forehead pulsing and soreness all around his eye caves, a tiredness there from months and months of not sleeping well, a deep fatigue. But Gary is right about the high, the euphoria. He’s still riding it, a feeling that he could do anything, even step outside the truck at speed and fling it into the air. He can feel it in his veins, a chemical rush making him stronger, and this is nothing compared to what it does to the part of him that is not his body.
He wouldn’t call it a soul, because that’s a tired thing shuffling around in chains and having to sing hymns and attend potluck dinners. The closest he can come to naming it is to remember those moments fishing in Alaska. When he was alone on his boat in a cove and the world stood still. He could hear individual drips from the trees and the cool air offered no resistance. Some part of him was able to travel then, to fill larger spaces. He feels the power of that now, some force in him that can grow without limit.
The problem is that there’s no goal, nothing to attempt. There’s only sex, because there’s nothing else. Sex is what’s left, always. It will never end, and so perhaps it should be called the soul. Jim rubs at his boner in a way he hopes no one will see, and the hot ache of it makes him want to do terrible things, right now. He wants to stuff this into her mouth and cunt and make her swallow, and he wants to punish and master and make it known that he did not choose any of this. It was chosen for him and he objects.
“In the name of the father, the son, and the holy sex,” he says.
“What the hell?” Gary asks.
“Just thinking of what is truly eternal, and that is our copulatory urge. That is what remains beyond us, our finest and highest calling.”
“Think of your audience here.”
“But I am. David should know. He should know as early as possible. He’s already a man.”
“This is only the euphoria.”
“Euphoria is clarity, truth. Naming what can never be destroyed. Finding what it is in us that lives.”
“Are you talking about sex?” David asks.
“Yes,” Jim says. “Talking about the sacred. You won’t find it in church. Everything there is dead and has been a thousand years. But you get a girl to come to your room when your mom’s not home, and when you first feel her with your finger, how wet and soft and silky she is, that’s when you come closest to what has made us.”
“Stop, Jim. Tracy is hearing this too.”
“I’m talking about source and origin. Reaching inside is reaching back. And the fact that you can be with girls only thirteen, or even twelve, just beginning, that’s the most incredible thing. You’ll never have that freedom again the rest of your life. So forget about everything else. I spent so much time on my homework and working at Safeway and going to church, being a good boy, but I should have been doing what your uncle did, just hanging out down at the pier at night with friends and beer and girls and putting all my life’s effort into getting inside. It’s the only goal, the only goal that matters.”
“David,” Gary says. “You have to understand your father is not well right now. He’s not thinking straight. And Tracy, none of this is for you. Don’t listen.”
“Don’t take away the only thing I have to offer. Right at the end, the truth. It’s the gift of all the failure. I know now what doesn’t matter, because I spent my whole life on it.”
“Jim.”
“Money, too, completely worthless. All I’ve made as a dentist. You need to know that, both of you, David and Tracy. Don’t make yourselves slaves to money. And don’t care what others think. Another worthless thing. Everything we’re told, all our lives, ignore all of it. Listen only to me right now, your father trying to help you.”
But of course they won’t be able to hear, because that’s the truth also, that we can offer nothing. No one can believe anything they haven’t already learned. There’s no transmission possible, no shortcut.
“We should take them back to their mother,” Gary says. “Just have dinner ourselves tonight.”
“No. I get my full time, crazy or not. Especially at the end. Don’t take things away from me at the end.”
“This isn’t the end.”
“I think you know.”