How It’s Gone and Done

Justin Noga

I build my first house. It would’ve been home to flowers and birds and a lone antelope, a home alive with the promise of a harmony that exists across nature—but then Anton comes by. Anton, he blinds all the birds, pricking out their eyes with knitting needles. The antelope he rides into a crevasse, bailing before the burst of flesh and bone. And then all I have left is the house I was asked to build for us, bloodied birds writhing in the sunshine, cracking against the siding.

“Will you at least help me clean up?” I ask Anton.

But he’s singing scales by the pin oaks now, and has already forgotten. I prod him, frown in a way that shows teeth. One look at me, he sniffs and says, “B-but our mother said—,” and lets the silence speak for itself.

The second house I get halfway through before Anton tells me his worldview. When he’s done, it is as if Anton has swallowed the sun.

“You see,” he says, “that’s why it’s always pink.”

The terror I feel seeps into the drywall, the carpet tacks. I can barely keep my hammer straight.

Anton sees an opportunity and lights a fire and follows the fire to the house. In the ashes he makes a kind of wrestling pit for him to wrestle mud crabs. Soon Anton tires of the mud crabs. In the evening, he puts a loose tarp over the pit, fashioning it into something he calls a rub-off tent. “Mom would’ve wanted a house with more panache,” he says, stroking off onto a mud crab. “Think on it.”

I skip the third house to try a fence, just a goddamn fence. Four fingers lost in the first hour.

Anton finds my pile of fingers behind a bush cooling in a bucket. Three go in his pocket, and the pinkie he hollows out to tootle on like a limp kazoo. He glances at the fence, goes back to the kazoo.

“I can never get these things right,” he says, blowing, blowing. “But Mom said it was always about focus, you follow?”

Scratching at my nubs, I don’t follow.

“Jeez, she never told you that, Henry? I’ll be damned.” After he gnaws the nail down to the cuticle, the kazoo finally sounds off. Anton gives me a big smile.

All night I watch the mangled fence from my bedroll by the creek, and think. A mud crab spackled with Anton’s seed clacks by, claws at my toes.

Anton says he’s taken some time off to think about Mom being dead and just wants to watch me at work. “Just don’t think about how she’s dead, OK? Skip it entirely. I’ll do the thinking for us, about her being dead, about her saying you’re in charge.”

To be a good sport, he massages my shoulders as I make the starter cuts.

This fourth house I try to improvise so Anton won’t presume its function and make off with its parts before I’m done. In his deeptissue technique I can feel him trying to unlock my head, parsing the thought before the action.

Anton, by noon that day, has rubbed my shoulders for six hours. Every time I shake him he clamps back on.

“You’re doing good, buddy,” he says. “Real good.”

As the days drag on, the shoulder muscles stay loose but the skin’s worn and blistered. “Just keep going,” he says. “Don’t prove our dead mother wrong. God, think of the look on her face if you did. I mean the look then, when she was alive, not now, rotting in the dirt.”

In the end, it’s a house wormed with wires and holes and it forms a shape that, when Anton tips his head to it, I can only say, “Well, it’s not supposed to …”

“You beefed it, buddy.” And he stops the massage. Leaving for his rub-off tent, he smells his fingertips, intrigued.

Pocking the land are these houses I’m supposed to build for my older brother and me now that we’re on our own, and Anton points to a tree.

“OK,” he says. “Watch me be all casual.”

He hacks at it with a bow saw, and it becomes a live weeping tree, arms and eyelids, wispy curves. Birds congregate in its hair.

“My mother,” the tree says, and cracks at the base from its own terror.

Handing me back the bow saw, he says, “OK, now you try, Henry. Do it from the pink.”

Anton watches me at the fifth house, where I keep it tight and true.

Little box: One door. One window. One lamp.

As I admire my work, my knee slips at the doorjamb. I feel the stringy snap of something complex and inoperable. Lump it in with shredded feet, the herniated discs, the egg-white effluvia leaking from my nubs. Yet through it all the house stands proud in the light.

Anton gives the house an up-and-down. “You think Mom would’ve built something like that if she were alive?” He points to a catalog, page two. “Look, you can just order it here.” Then he’s off to his weeping tree with the mother issues. It has a wound, and he pokes at the wound.

Yells back over: “Mom said always give it a little life. A little life and a little zing.”

House six, I weep in a ball at Anton’s feet and beg him to teach me what Mom never taught me. “I can see it all in my mind—all the wires, all the screws—but it’s like my fingers have their own shit logic they’re following. I want Mom to be proud. I want you to be proud.”

Anton looks down at me. “Sheesh, way to get me to feel the exact opposite.” He’s smiling, though, lifting me, dabbing my eyes with his sleeve. “OK, fine,” he says. We bear hug, thinning ribs on thinning ribs. “Just pay attention this time, you fucking baby.”

House six goes up like a dream. Side by side, we’re climbing scaffolding like in the days when Mom was alive. I think of her in the other room calling me for nails and wood, for ideas and takes, and Anton no longer in the basement with the piping but here, now, boosting me onto the planking. How to sand an edge. How to see the micro for the macro.

We finish and do shots on the carpet in the foyer. We joke. I give him my spare bathrobe. “This is nice,” I say. “This is really so nice. I never thought I could do it.”

“I?” He scratches his head.

“Aye-aye,” and I click my heels and salute the work.

Anton, as I haul myself half drunk up the stairs to the master bedroom, he hangs out on the staircase looking at all the old family pictures I mounted.

The moon has crawled away when smoke trickles into my room. The only light’s from the fire chewing at my floor, rolling up the sheets I’ve tangled myself in.

Outside, Anton’s pacing around the yard. I want to ask what happened but I know what happened. This is what he did to our old house after Mom died. Back then he said he’d love to see what I’d do with my own vision.

And now he balls up his bathrobe for the fire, tossing it in with the lawn whimsies.

“You think you tricked me, don’t you?” There are tears in his eyes.

“When did I ever trick you?”

“I’m just here for the grunt work, aren’t I? I know what you two talked about. You the brains? Me the helper mule? You tricked her, and now you think you’ve tricked me.”

I just slump against a tree. Anton spends the night feeding our house to the flames. Two-by-fours and a mailbox, clumps of grass and a plum tree—they all bounce into the flames like sheep to dream to, sheep that snap awake in the pyre.

The next day Anton’s wandering around in the raw, combing his chest hair with my lost fingers. Smirking at House Four. Grimacing at House Two. Sometimes he sticks leaves to his naked body, and if I catch his stare he peels them off to give me a looky-loo.

We keep our distance.

Across the way from the smoldering house I start anew. I go slow and rejigger until it’s time to show Anton. I feel like a newborn turtle, fresh from the egg and racing to the sea before the gulls catch me. I call Anton over, and he goes, “Again with this cookie-cutter shit, Henry?” I can see him seeing me from above, circling.

“Why not give it a looky-loo? I added something Mom showed me.”

“Mom never showed you anything.”

“No, really, go ahead,” I tell him, retracting chin to chest.

And Anton goes into the house. The flooring gives. He drops fifty feet into a long cone I dug out, his legs twining together at the base like ribbon stuffed into a stiletto toe. Mom loved stilettos.

“Poor planning,” he yells up. “It’s not baked into the design.”

I bring in the rocks. Dangling my legs over the edge, I look in and let the rocks tumble down. Rocks can only be dodged so much. He says he gets it, he gets it. He says, “Way to beat that dead horse. Mom would be so proud.”

I hold a rock up, and he says he’s kidding, he’s kidding.

“But really,” he says, and whinnies up through the cone.

I use sandstones. I like how they clap together.

You can picnic atop the filled-in cone to the rhythm of settling rocks, and I do. Waffles, bacon—the full English. After a nap, I stretch oak flooring across the pit, and decide to build a new house over the cone-floored house.

When I’m done, I walk inside the redesign and hear Anton wheezing under the floorboards. He asks, “Got a good paint job at least?”

“You’ll see, my friend.”

“Friend?” He coughs something out I swear I can taste. “Not good to start a house on a lie.”

He sounds parched so I smash a hole in the floor and piss into the cone. I hum him a little ditty while I connect the cone to the chimney. This is the way Anton can hear the new world I create.

“Did you know Mom loved my humming too?” I ask.

The creek goes by and the windows rattle, and I know this silence means, “Of course, buddy, of course. Keep it coming.”

This new house has a door and a roof and a little tilt to the chimney I can say is my own stylistic fingerprint instead of the mortar I overmixed. The house is painted the color of a shining liver. Less and less do I hear Anton echoing up the chimney—no shifting stones, no whispering.

I feel a tug of the heart.

I go to the weeping tree, dry its tears, tell it a joke.

“Oh, you’re such a rag,” it sniffs.

“You saucy flirt, you know what you do to me.”

We bed together. In the woods, in the tent, on my roof beneath the bright moon. The birds in its hair fly off for dwellings less voracious. But I have trouble sleeping. Into the chimney I whisper, “Anton, Anton,” but nothing comes out. I piss into the chimney and put an ear to the trickle.

The tree wakes up, and soon our hands are all over each other’s wounds.

“Bray for me,” I say. “It gets my blood up.”

“Like this, Henry?” The tree tries to bray, but I have to shush it.

“Goddamn it,” I say. I am staying calm. I am staying professional. “For once in your life use at least half your ass, OK? Pay the fuck attention.” I bray loud and long and I can feel my blood shoot up into the unknown. It’s sunrise, and I’m still presenting tone and tenor and the sweet subtleties of my own musicality.

Pushing in a loose shingle, the tree says, “OK. Got it. Let me try.”

I look at the tree, and I know I haven’t gotten through. “You’re still gonna beef it. Listen again, OK? You never listen right.”

Anton, Anton, I wish you could see how my house is now, how it is I do this alone.