Sometimes, after six or so large drinks, it seems like a sane idea to call my little brother on the phone. Approximately since Stephen’s birth, I’ve held him among the principal mother-fuckers of my life, and it takes a lot of solvent to bleach out all the dark recollections I’ve stashed up over the years. Pick a memory, any memory. My eleventh birthday party at Ernstead Park, how about? I’d just transferred schools, trying to turn over a new leaf, and I’d invited all the boys and girls of quality. I’d been making progress with them, too, until Stephen, age eight, ran up behind me at the fish pond and shoved me face-first into the murk. The water came up only to my knees, so I did a few hilarious staggers before flopping down, spluttering, amid some startled koi. The kids all laughed like wolves.
Or ninth grade, when I caught the acting bug and landed a part in our high school’s production of Grease playing opposite a girl named Dodi Clark. We played an anonymous prancing couple, on stage only for the full-cast dance melees. She was no beauty, a mousy girl with a weak chin and a set of bonus, overlapping canine teeth, but I liked her somewhat. She had a pretty neat set of breasts for a girl her age. I thought maybe we could help each other out with our virginity problems. Yet the sight of Dodi and me dancing drove Stephen into a jealous fever. Before I could get my angle going, Stephen snaked me, courting her with a siege of posters, special pens, stickers, and crystal whim-whams. The onslaught worked and Dodi fell for him, but when she finally parted her troubled mouth to kiss him, he told me years later, he froze up. “I think I had some kind of primeval prey-versus-predator response when I saw those teeth. It was like trying to make out with a sand shark. No idea why I was after her to begin with.”
But I know why: in Stephen’s understanding, nothing pleasant should ever flow to me on which he hasn’t exercised first dibs. He wouldn’t let me eat a turd without first insisting on his cut.
He’s got his beefs, too, I suppose. I used to tease him pretty rigorously. We had these little red toads that hopped around my mother’s yard, and I used to pin him down and rub them into his clenched teeth. Once, when we were smoking dope in high school, I lit his hair on fire. Another time, I locked him outside in his underwear until the snot froze in scales on his face. Hard to explain why I did these things, except to say that I’ve got a little imp inside me whose ambrosia is my brother’s wrath. Stephen’s furies are marvelous, ecstatic, somehow pornographic, the equally transfixing inverse of watching people in the love act. That day I locked him out, I was still laughing when I let him in after a cold hour. I even had a mug of hot chocolate ready for him. He drained it and then grabbed a can opener from the counter and threw it at me, gouging a three-inch gash beneath my lower lip. It left a white parenthesis in the stubble of my chin, the abiding, sideways smile of the imp.
But give me a good deep rinse of alcohol and our knotty history unkinks itself. All of the old crap seems inconsequential, just part of the standard fraternal rough-and-tumble, and I get very soppy and bereft over the brotherhood Steve and I have lost.
Anyhow, I started feeling that way one night in October just after I’d crossed the halfway point on a fifth of Meyer’s rum. I was standing at the summit of a small mountain I’d recently bought in Aroostook County, Maine. The air was wonderful, heavy with the watery sweetness of lupine, moss, and fern. Overhead, bats hawked mosquitoes in the darkening sky, while the sun waned behind the molars of the Appalachian range. I browsed the contacts on my phone, wanting to call someone up, maybe just deliver an oral postcard of this place into someone’s voicemail box, but I had a reason not to dial each of those names until I got to Stephen’s.
I dialed, and he answered without saying hello.
“In a session,” he said, the last syllable trilling up in a bitchy way, and hung up the phone. Stephen makes his living as a music therapist, but session or not, you’d think he could spare a second to at least say hello to me. We hadn’t spoken in eight months. I dialed again.
“What the fuck, fool, it’s Matthew.”
“Matthew,” he repeated, in the way you might say “cancer” after the doctor’s diagnosis. “I’m with a client. This is not an optimum time.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Question for you: mountains.”
There was a wary pause. From Stephen’s end came the sound of someone doing violence to a tambourine.
“What about them?”
“Do you like them? Do you like mountains, Stephen?”
“I have no objection to them. Why?”
“Well, I bought one,” I said. “I’m on it now.”
“Congratulations,” Stephen said. “Is it Popocatéptl? Are you putting 7-Elevens on the Matterhorn?”
Over the years, I’ve made a hell of a lot of money in real estate, and this seems to hurt Stephen’s feelings. He’s not a church man, but he’s big on piety and sacrifice and letting you know what choice values he’s got. So far as I can tell, his values include eating ramen noodles by the case, getting laid once every fifteen years or so, and arching his back at the sight of people like me—that is, people who have amounted to something and don’t reek of thrift stores.
But I love Stephen. Or I think I do. We’ve had some intervals of mutual regard. Our father came down with lymphoma when Stephen was four, so we pretty much parented ourselves while our mother nursed our father through two exhausting cycles of remission and relapse.
At any rate, the cancer got our father when I was ten. Liquor killed our mother before I was out of college, and it was right around then that we went on different courses. Stephen, a pianist, retreated into a bitter fantasy of musical celebrity that was perpetually being thwarted—by his professors at the Eastman School, by the philistines in his ensembles, and by girlfriends who wanted too much of his time. He had a series of tedious artistic crackups, and whenever we’d get together, he’d hand me lots of shit about how drab and hollow my life was.
Actually, my life was extremely full. I married young, and married often. I bought my first piece of property at eighteen. Now, at forty-two, I’ve been through two amicable divorces. I’ve lived and made money in nine American cities. Late at night, when rest won’t come and my breathing shortens with the worry that I’ve cheated myself of life’s traditional rewards (long closenesses, off-spring, mature plantings), I take an astral cruise of the hundreds of properties that have passed through my hands over the years, and before I come close to visiting them all, I droop, contented, into sleep.
When no orchestras called Stephen with commissions, he exiled himself to Eugene, Oregon, to buff his oeuvre while eking out a living teaching the mentally substandard to achieve sanity by blowing on harmonicas. When I drove down to see him two years ago after a conference in Seattle, I found him living above a candle store in a dingy apartment which he shared with a dying collie. The animal was so old it couldn’t take a leak on its own, so Stephen was always having to lug her downstairs to the grassy verge beside the sidewalk. Then he’d straddle the dog and manually void its bladder via a Heimlich technique horrible to witness. You hated to see your last blood relation engaged in something like that. I told Stephen that from a business standpoint, the smart thing would be to have the dog put down. This caused an ugly argument, but really, it seemed to me that someone regularly seen by the roadside hand-juicing a half-dead dog was not the man you’d flock to for lessons on how to be less out of your mind.
“The mountain doesn’t have a name yet,” I told him. “Hell, I’ll name it after you. I’ll call it Brown Cloud Hill”—my old nickname for the gloomy man.
“Do that,” said Stephen. “Hanging up now.”
“I send you any pictures of my cabin? Gets its power off a windmill. I’m telling you, it’s the absolute goddamned shit. You need to come out here and see me.”
“What about Charleston? Where’s Amanda?”
I spat a lime rind into my hand and tossed it up at the bats to see if they’d take a nibble at it. They didn’t.
“No idea.”
“You split?”
“Right.”
“Oh, jeez, big brother. Really? Wedding’s off?”
“Yep.”
“What happened?”
“Got sick of her, I guess.”
“Why?”
“She was hard of hearing and her pussy stank.”
“That’s grand. Now look—”
Actually, like about fifty million other Americans, I’d been blindsided by sudden reverses in the real-estate market. I’d had to borrow some cash from my ex-fiancée, Amanda, an Oldsmobile dealership heiress who didn’t care about money just so long as she didn’t have to loan out any of hers. Strains developed and the engagement withered. I used the last of my liquidity to buy my hill. Four hundred acres, plus a cabin, nearly complete, thanks to my good neighbor George Tabbard, who’d also cut me a bargain on the land. The shit of it was I’d have to spend a year up in residence here, but I could deal with that. Next fall I could subdivide, sell the plots, dodge the extortionary tax assessment the state charges nonresident speculators, and float into life’s next phase with the winds of increase plumping my sails and a vacation home in the deal.
“Anyway,” I went on. “Here’s a concept. Pry the flute out of your ass and come see me. We’ll have real fun. Come now. I’ll be under a glacier in six weeks.”
“And get the airfare how? Knit it? Listen, I’ve got to go.”
“Fuck the airfare,” I told him. “I’ll get it. Come see me.” It wasn’t an offer I really wanted to make. Stephen probably had more money in the bank than I did, but his poor-mouthing worked an irksome magic on me. I couldn’t take a second of it without wanting to smack him in the face with a roll of doubloons. Then he said he couldn’t leave Beatrice (the collie was still alive!). Fine, I told him, if he could find the right sort of iron lung to stable her in, I’d foot the bill for that too. He said he’d think it over. A marimba flourish swelled on the line, and I let Stephen go.
The conversation left me feeling irritable, and I walked back to my cabin in a low mood. But I bucked up right away when I found George Tabbard on my porch, half of which was still bare joists. He was standing on a ladder, nailing a new piece of trim across the front gable. “Evening, sweetheart,” George called out to me. “Whipped up another objet for you here.”
George was seventy-six, with a head of scraggly white hair. His front teeth were attached to a partial plate that made his gums itch so he didn’t wear it, and his breath was like a ripe morgue. At this point, George was basically my best friend, a turn I couldn’t have imagined ten months ago when life was still high. His family went back in the area two centuries or so, but he’d moved around a good deal, gone through some wives and degrees and left some children here and there before moving back a decade ago. He’d pretty much built my cabin himself for ten dollars an hour. He was good company. He liked to laugh and drink and talk about road grading, women, and maintaining equipment. We’d murdered many evenings that way.
A couple of groans with his screw gun and he’d secured the item, a four-foot battery of little wooden pom-poms, like you’d see dangling from the ceiling of a Mexican drug dealer’s sedan. I’d praised the first one he’d made, but now George had tacked his lacework fancies to every eave and soffit in sight, so that the house pretty well foamed with them. An otherwise sensible person, he seemed to fear a demon would take him if production slowed, and he slapped up a new piece of frippery about every third day. My house was starting to resemble something you’d buy your mistress to wear for a weekend in a cheap motel.
“There we are,” he said, backing away to get the effect. “Pretty handsome booger, don’t you think?”
“Phenomenal,” I said.
“Now how about some backgammon?”
I went inside and fetched the set, the rum, and a jar of olives. George was a brutal prodigy, and the games were dull routs, yet we sat for many hours in the cool of the evening, drinking rum, moving the lacquered discs around the board, and spitting olive pits over the rail, where they landed quietly in the dark.
To my surprise, Stephen called me back. He said he’d like to come, so we fixed a date, two weeks later. It was an hour and twenty minutes to the village of Aiden, where the airfield was. When George and I arrived, Stephen’s plane hadn’t come in. I went into the Quonset hut they use for a terminal. A little woman with a brown bomber jacket and a bulb of gray hair sat by the radio, reading the local newspaper.
“My brother’s flight was due in from Bangor at eleven,” I told the woman.
“Plane’s not here,” she said.
“I see. Do you know where it is?”
“Bangor.”
“And when’s it going to arrive?”
“If I knew that, I’d be somewhere picking horses, wouldn’t I?”
Then she turned back to her newspaper and brought our chat to an end. The front-page story of the Aroostook Gazette showed a photograph of a dead chow dog, under the headline, MYSTERY ANIMAL FOUND DEAD IN PINEMONT.
“Quite a mystery,” I said. “The Case of What Is Obviously a Dog.”
“‘Undetermined origin,’ says here.”
“It’s a dog, a chow,” I said.
“Undetermined,” the woman said.
With time to kill, we went over the lumberyard in Aiden and I filled the bed of my truck with a load of decking to finish the porch. Then we went back to the airfield. Still no plane. George tried to hide his irritation, but I knew he wasn’t happy to be stuck on this errand. He wanted to be out in the woods, gunning for deer. George was keen to get one before the weather made hunting a misery. Loading your freezer with meat slain by your hand was evidently an unshirkable autumn rite around here, and George and I had been going out about every fourth day since the opener three weeks ago. I’d shot the head off a bony goose at point-blank range, but other than that, we hadn’t hit a thing. When I’d suggested that we go in on a side of beef from the butcher shop, George had acted as though I’d proposed a terrible breach of code. Fresh venison tasted better than store-bought beef, he argued. Also you were not out big money in the common event that your freezer was sacked by the meat burglars who worked the outer county.
To buck George up, I bought him lunch at a tavern in Aiden, where we ate hamburgers and drank three whiskey sours each. George sighed a lot and didn’t talk. Already, I felt a coursing anger at Stephen for not calling to let me know that his plane was delayed. I was brooding heavily when the bartender asked if I wanted anything else. I told him, “Yeah, tequila and cream.”
“You mean a Kahlúa and cream,” he said, which was what I’d meant, but I wasn’t in a mood to be corrected.
“How about you bring what I ordered?” I told him, and he got to work. The drink was bilious, vile, but I forced it down. The bartender told me, sneering, that I was welcome to another, on the house.
When we rolled back by the airport, the plane had come and gone. A light rain was sifting down. Stephen was out by the gate, on the lip of a drainage gully, perched atop his luggage with his chin on his fist. He was thinner than when I’d last seen him, and the orbits of his eyes were dark, kind of buttholish with exhaustion. The rain had wet him through, and what was left of his hair lay sad against his skull. His coat and pants were huge on him. The wind gusted and Stephen billowed like a poorly tarped load.
“Hi, friend!” I called out to him.
“What the shit, Matthew?” he said. “I just stayed up all night on a plane to spend two hours sitting in a ditch? That really happened?”
Of course, Stephen could have waited with the radio woman in the Quonset hut, but he’d probably arranged himself in the ditch to present a picture of maximum misery when I pulled up.
“You could have let me know you got hung up in Bangor. I shit-canned three hours waiting for you. We had stuff on our plate, but now George is drunk and I’m half in the bag and the whole day’s shot. Frankly, I’m a little heated at you here.”
Stephen bulged his eyes at me. His fists clenched and unclenched very quickly. He looked about to thrombose. “Extraordinary! This is my fault now? Oh, you are a remarkable prick. This is your fucking . . . region, Matthew. It didn’t occur to me that you’d need to be coached on how not to leave somebody in the rain. Plus call you how, shitball? You know I don’t do cell phones.”
“Come get in the truck.”
I reached for him and he tore his arm away.
“No. Apologize to me.” He was red-eyed and shivering. His cheeks and forehead were welted over from repeated gorings by the vicious cold-weather mosquitoes they had up here. Right now, one was gorging itself on the rim of his ear, its belly glowing like a pomegranate seed in the cool white sun. I didn’t swat it away for him.
“Motherfucker, man. Just get in the truck.”
“Forget it. I’m going home.” He shouldered his bag and stormed off for the airfield. His tiny damp head, and squelching shoes—it was like watching the tantrum of a stray duckling.
Laughing, I jogged up behind Stephen and stripped the bag from his shoulder. When he turned I put him in a bear hug and kissed his brow.
“Get off me, you ape,” he said.
“Who’s a furious fellow?” I said. “Who’s my little Brown Cloud?”
“Fucking asshole, I’ll bite you, I swear,” he said into my chest. “Let me go. Give me my bag.”
“Ridiculous,” I said.
I walked to the truck and levered the seat forward to usher Stephen into the club cab’s rear compartment. When Stephen saw that we weren’t alone, he stopped grasping for his bag and making departure threats. I introduced Stephen to George. Then my brother clambered in and we pulled onto the road.
“This is Granddad’s gun, isn’t it?” said Stephen. Hanging in the rack was the .300 Weatherby magnum I’d collected from my grandfather’s house years ago. It was a beautiful instrument, with a blued barrel and a tiger-maple stock.
“Yes,” I said, marshalling a defense for why I hadn’t offered the gun to Stephen, who probably hadn’t fired a rifle in fifteen years. Actually, Stephen probably had a stronger claim to it than I did. As kids, we’d gone out for ducks and rabbits with our grandfather, and Stephen, without making much of it, had always been the more patient stalker and a better shot. But he did not mention it.
“Hey, by the way,” he said. “The tab comes to eight-eighty.”
“What tab?” I said.
“Eight hundred and eighty dollars,” Stephen said. “That’s what the flight came to, plus a sitter for Beatrice.”
“Your daughter?” George asked.
“Dog,” said Stephen.
“George, this is a dog that knows where it was when JFK was shot,” I said. “Stephen, are you still doing those bowel lavages on her? Actually, don’t tell me. I don’t need the picture in my head.”
“I’d like my money,” Stephen said. “You said you’d reimburse me.”
“Don’t get a rod-on about it, Steve-O. You’ll get paid.”
“At some future fucking juncture when I don’t happen to be operating a moving motor vehicle. Is that okay with you?”
“Sure,” said Stephen. “But just for the record, me being colossally shafted is how this is going to conclude.”
“You little grasping fuck, what do you want, collateral? Want to hold my watch?” I joggled the wheel a little. “Or maybe I’ll just drive this truck into a fucking tree. Maybe you’d like that.”
George began to laugh in a musical wheeze. “How about you stop the car and you two have yourselves an old-fashioned rock fight.”
“We’re fine,” I said, my face hot. “Sorry, George.”
“Forget it,” Stephen said.
“Oh, no, Steve, money man, let’s get you squared away,” I said. “George, my checkbook’s in the glove box.”
George made out the check, and I signed it, which hurt me deeply. I passed it to my brother, who folded it into his pocket. George patted my shoulder. “His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace,” he said.
“Oh, suck a dong,” I said.
“If there’s no way around it,” sighed George. “How’s clearance under that steering wheel?”
“Fairly snug.”
“A little later, how about, when I can really put my back into it?”
“That’s a big ten-four,” I said.
At all this, Stephen tittered. Then, after being such a childish shit about the check, he began a campaign of being very enthusiastic about everything going past the windows of the truck. The junky houses with appliances piled on their porches? “Refreshing” compared with the “twee fraudulence of most New England towns.” Two hicks on a four-wheeler, blasting again and again through their own gales of dust, knew “how to do a weekend right.” “Wagnerian” is how he described the storm clouds overhead. Then Stephen began plying George with a barrage of light and pleasant chatter. Had he lived here long? Ten years? Amazing! He’d grown up here, too? How fantastic to have escaped a childhood in the ex-urban soul vacuum we’d been reared in. And George had gone to Syracuse? Had he heard of Nils Aughterard, the music biographer on the faculty there? Well, his book on Gershwin—
“Hey, Stephen,” I broke in. “You haven’t said anything about my new truck.”
“What’d you pay for it?”
“Best vehicle I’ve ever owned,” I said. “V-8, five liter. Three-and-a-half-ton towing capacity. Carriage-welded, class-four trailer hitch. Four-wheel drive, max payload package. It’ll pay for itself when the snow hits.”
“So you and Amanda, that’s really off?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m so sorry, Matty,” Stephen said. “You were so hot on her.”
Stephen had despised her. Amanda was a churchgoer, and a Republican. They’d argued about the war in Iraq. Over dinner, Stephen had baited her into declaring that she’d like to see the Middle East bombed to a parking lot. He’d asked her how this tactic would square with “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” She’d told him “Thou Shalt Not Kill” was from the Old Testament, so it didn’t really count.
“Anyway, I’m sorry,” he went on. “I know it’s got to hurt.”
I took a tube of sunflower seeds from the dashboard and shook a long gray dose into my mouth.
“To be honest with you,” I said, cracking a seed with my back teeth. “I just don’t see the rationale for anybody owning a vehicle without a carriage-welded, class-four trailer hitch.”
In silence, we rode through bleary, rural abridgements of towns, down a narrowing vasculature of country roads, to the rilled and cratered fire trail that served as a driveway to my and George’s land. High weeds stood in the spine of earth between the tire grooves, brushing the truck’s undercarriage with a sound of light sleet. We passed George’s handsome cedar-shake cottage, I dropped the truck into four-wheel drive, and the Dodge leapt, growling, up the hill.
My home hove into view. I was ready for Stephen to bust my balls a little over George’s fancy trim, but he took in the place without a word.
George ambled off to take a leak in the trees. I grabbed Stephen’s bag and led him indoors. Though my cabin’s exterior was well into its late rococo phase, the interior was still raw. Stephen gazed around the living room. I felt newly conscious of the squalor of the place. The floors were still dusty plywood. The drywall stopped four feet from the floor, and pink insulation lay like an autopsy specimen behind the cloudy plastic sheeting. The sheetless mattress I’d been sleeping on sat askew in the center of the room.
“Feel free to do a little embellishing when you send out the Christmas letter this year,” I told him.
Stephen went to the window and gazed out at the wiry expanse of leafless trees sloping down the basin of the valley. “Hell of a view,” he said. Then he turned away from the window and looked at the mattress. “You got a place for me to sleep?”
I nodded at a sleeping pad rolled up in the corner. “Top-of-the-line pad, right there. Ever get down on memory foam?”
“You didn’t tell me we’d be camping.”
“Yeah, well, if it’s too much of a shithole for you, baby brother, I can run you back to the motor lodge in Aiden.”
“Of course not,” Stephen said. “The place is great. I think you’re making real progress, Matthew. Honestly, I was expecting a modular chalet with tiered Jacuzzis and an eight-car garage.”
“Next time you visit, I’ll strip nude and wear a barrel, maybe get a case of hookworm going,” I said. “You’ll really be proud of me then.”
“No, I’m serious. I’d kill for something like this,” he said, reaching up to rub his hand along a smooth log rafter. “I mean, God, next month I’m forty. I rent a two-room apartment full of silver-fish and no bathroom sink.”
“That same place? You’re kidding,” I said. “What about that condo you were looking at?”
“Cold feet, I guess, with the economy and all. I figured I’d just get rooked.”
“It’s still on the market? You should’ve called me. I’d get you set up.”
“No.”
“But that money, your Gram-Gram cash? Still got it for a down payment?”
He nodded.
“Listen, you get back to Oregon, we’ll find you something. Look around, send me some comps, I’ll help you through it. We’ll get you into a place.”
Stephen gave me a guarded look, as though I’d offered him a soda and he wasn’t sure I hadn’t pissed in it first.
I wanted to get the porch wrapped up before dark, and I suggested that Stephen take a drink up to the summit, where I’d hung a hammock, while George and I nailed the decking down. Stephen said, “Why don’t I help you guys? I’m acquainted with Manuel.”
“Who?”
“Manuel Labò,” he said, and giggled.
So we unloaded the wood and he and George got to work while I stayed inside, slathering auburn Minwax on sheets of bead-board wainscot. Whenever I poked my head out the front door, I saw Stephen vandalizing my lumber. He’d bend every third nail, and then gouge the wood with the hammer’s claw trying to correct his mistake. Water would pool in those gouges and rot the boards, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. Through the closed windows, I could hear George and Stephen chatting and laughing as they worked. I’d learned to tolerate long hours of silence in the months I’d been up here, to appreciate it, even. But it warmed me to hear voices coming from my porch, though in the back of my mind I suspected they were laughing about me.
George and Stephen took until nightfall to get all the decking in place. When they were finished, we made our way down to the tiny pond I’d built by damming a spring behind my house. We shed our clothes and pushed off into the pond, each on his own gasping course through the exhilarating blackness of the water. “Oh, oh, oh, God it feels good,” cried Stephen in a voice of such carnal gratitude that I pitied him. But it was glorious, the sky and the water of a single world-ending darkness, and we levitated in it until we were as numb as the dead.
Back at the house, I cooked up a gallon or so of beef stroganoff, seasoned as George liked it, with enough salt to make you weep. A run of warm nights was upon us, thanks to a benevolent spasm of the Gulf Stream, and we dined in comfort on the newly finished porch. Over the course of the meal, we put away three bottles of wine and half a handle of gin. By the time we’d moved on to brandied coffee to go with the blueberry pie George fetched from his place, the porch was humid with bonhomie.
“Look at this,” Stephen said, stomping heavily on one of the new boards. “Man, I put this bastard here. Some satisfying shit. God bless ’em, there’s ’tards I’ve worked with ten years and we still haven’t gotten past chants and toning. But look—” he clogged again on the board. “Couple hours with a hammer. Got something you can stand on. I ought to do like you, Matty. Come out here. Build me a spot.”
“Hell yeah, you should,” I said. “By the way, how big’s that wad you’ve got? What’s it, twenty grand or something?”
“I guess,” he said.
“Because look, check it out,” I said. “Got a proposition for you. Listen, how many guys like us do you think there are out there? Ballpark figure.”
“What’s that mean, ‘like us’?” Stephen said.
Then I began to spell out for him an idea I’d had on my mind lately, one that seemed rosiest after a wine-soaked dinner, when my gladness for the land, the stars, and the bullfrogs in my pond was at its maximum. I’d get to thinking about the paunchy hordes, nightly pacing carpeted apartments from Spokane to Chattanooga, desperate for an escape hatch. The plan was simple. I’d advertise one-acre plots in the back pages of men’s magazines, put up a few spec cabins, handle the contracting myself, build a rifle range, some snowmobile trails, maybe a little saloon on the summit. In they’d swarm, a hill of pals, a couple of million in it for me, no sweat!
“I don’t know,” said Stephen, helping himself to another fat dollop of brandy.
“What don’t you know?” I asked him. “That twenty grand, you’re in for an even share. You’d be getting what the other investors are getting for fifty.”
“What other investors?” Stephen asked.
“Ray Lawton,” I lied. “Lawton, Ed Hayes, and Dan Welsh. My point is I could let you in, even just with that twenty. If you could kick that twenty in, I’d set you up with an even share.”
“No, yeah, I like it,” Stephen said. “It’s just I need to be careful with that money. That’s my whole savings and everything.”
“Now goddammit, Stephen, I’m sorry but let me explain something to you. I make money, that’s what I do,” I said. “I take land, and a little bit of money, and then I turn it into lots of money. You follow me? That’s what I do. What I’m asking is to basically just hold your cash for five months, max, and in return you’ll be in on something that, guaranteed, will change your life.”
“Can’t do it,” he said.
“Okay, Stephen, what can you do? Could you go ten? Ten grand for a full share? Could you put in ten?”
“Look, Matthew—”
“Five? Three? Two thousand?”
“Look—”
“How about eight hundred, Stephen, or two hundred? Would that work for you, or would two hundred dollars break the bank?”
“Two hundred’s good,” he said. “Put me down for that.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I said.
“Matthew, come on,” said George. “Cool it.”
“I’m totally cool,” I said.
“No, you’re being a shit,” said George. “And anyway, your dude ranch thing isn’t worth all this gas. Never work.”
“Why not?”
“First of all, the county’d never let you do it in the watershed.
The ten-acre buffer—”
“I already talked to them about a variance,” I said. “Wouldn’t be—”
“And for another thing, I didn’t move back here to get among a bunch of swinging dicks.”
“Due respect, George, I’m not talking about your land.”
“I know that, Matthew,” George said. “What I’m saying is, you carve this hill up and sell it out to a bunch of cock-knockers from Boston, I’d say the chance is pretty good that some night in the off-season, I’d get a few too many beers in me and I’d get it in my head to come around with a few gallons of kerosene.”
George was staring at my with an irritating, stagy intensity. “Forget the kerosene, George—a hammer and nails’ll do it,” I said, turning and sweeping a hand at the wooden dainties on my gable. “Just sneak up some night and do a little raid with your scrollsaw. Turn everybody’s camp into a huge doily. That’ll run them off pretty quick.”
I laughed and went on laughing until my stomach muscles ached and tears beaded on my jaw. When I looked back at George, he had his lips set in a taut little dash. He was evidently vain about his scrollsaw work. I was still holding my pie plate, and without giving it much thought, I flung it into the woods. A crash followed, but no rewarding tinkle of shattered crockery.
“Ah, fuck,” I said.
“What?” said Stephen.
“Nothing,” I said. “My life is on fire.”
Then I went into my cabin and got down on my mattress, and before long I was sleeping very well.
I woke a little after three, hungover and thirsty as a poisoned rat, but I lay paralyzed in superstition that staggering to the sink would banish sleep for good. My heart raced. I thought of my performance on the porch, then of a good thick noose creaking as it swung. I thought of Amanda, and my two ex-wives. I thought of my first car whose engine seized because I didn’t change the timing belt at 100,000 miles. I thought of how two nights ago I’d lost thirty dollars to George in a cribbage game. I thought of how in the aftermath of my father’s death, for reasons I couldn’t recall, I stopped wearing underwear, and of a day in junior high when the cold rivet in a chair alerted me to a hole in the seat of my pants. I thought of everyone I owed money to, and everyone who owed me money. I thought of Stephen and me and the children we’d so far failed to produce, and how in the diminishing likelihood that I did find someone to smuggle my genetic material into, by the time our little one could tie his shoes, his father would be a florid fifty-year-old who would suck the innocence and joy from his child as greedily as a desert wanderer savaging a found orange.
I wanted the sun to rise, to make coffee, to get out in the woods with George and find his trophy buck, to get back to spinning the blanket of mindless incident that was doing an ever-poorer job of masking the pit of regrets I found myself peering into most sleepless nights. But the sun was slow in coming. The montage wore on until dawn, behind it the soothing music of the noose, crik-creak, crik-creak, crik-creak.
At the first bruised light in the eastern windows, I got up. The air in the cabin was dense with chill. Stephen wasn’t on the spare mattress. I put on my boots, jeans, and a canvas parka, filled a thermos with hot coffee, and drove the quarter mile to George’s house.
The lights were on at George’s. George was doing sit-ups and Stephen was at the counter, minting waffles. A very cozy pair. The percolator was gasping away, making me feel forlorn with my plaid thermos.
“Hey, hey,” I said.
“There he is,” Stephen said. He explained that he’d slept on George’s couch. They’d been up late at the backgammon board. He handed me a waffle, all cheer and magnanimity, on his way toward another social heist in the Dodi Clark vein.
“What do you say, George,” I said, when the old man had finished his crunches. “Feel like going shooting?”
“I suppose,” he said. He turned to Stephen. “Coming with, little brother?”
“I don’t have a gun for him,” I said.
“Got that .30-.30 he can use,” George said.
“Why not?” said Stephen.
Our spot was on Pigeon Lake, twenty miles away, and you had to boat out to the evergreen cover on the far shore. After breakfast, we hooked George’s skiff and trailer to my truck, and went jouncing into the white fog that blanketed the road.
We dropped the boat into the water. With Stephen in the bow, I took the stern. We went north, past realms of marsh grass and humps of pink granite, which, in the hard red light of morning, resembled corned beef hash.
George stopped the boat at a stretch of muddy beach where he said he’d had some luck before. We beached the skiff, and trudged into the tree line.
My calamitous hangover was worsening. I felt damp, unclean, and suicidal, and couldn’t concentrate on anything except the vision of a cool, smooth-sheeted bed and iced seltzer water and bitters. It was Stephen who found the first heap of deer sign, in the shadow of a pine sapling stripped orange by a rutting buck. He was thrilled with his discovery, and he scooped the droppings into his palm and carried them over to George, who sniffed the dark pebbles so avidly that for a second I thought he might eat them.
“Pretty fresh,” said Stephen, who hadn’t been out hunting since the eleventh grade.
George said, “Looks like he winded us. Good eyes, Steve.”
“Yeah, I just looked down and there it was,” said Stephen.
George went off to perch in a nearby stand he knew about and left the two of us alone. Stephen and I sat at adjacent trees with our guns across our laps. A loon moaned. Squirrels rasped.
“So Matty, you kind of put a weird bug in my ear last night.”
“That a fact?”
“Not that ridiculous bachelor-campus thing. But this place is fantastic. George said he sold it to you for ninety bucks an acre. Is that true?”
“Market price,” I said.
“Astounding. “
“You’d hate it out here. What about your work?”
“I’d just come out here for the summers when my gig at the school slacks off. I need to get out of Eugene. It’s destroying me. I don’t go out. I don’t meet people. I sit in my apartment, composing this crap. I’m done. I could have spent the last two decades shooting heroin and the result would be the same, except I’d have some actual life behind me.”
I lifted a haunch to let a long, low fart escape.
“Charming,” said Stephen. “How about you sell me two acres?
Then I’ve got twelve thousand to put into a cabin.”
“I thought you had twenty.”
“I had twenty-three,” he said. “Now I’ve got about twelve.”
“You spent it? On what?”
“Investments,” he said. “Some went to this other thing.”
“What other thing?”
Distractedly, he pinched a few hairs from his brow. I watched him put the hairs into his mouth and nibble them rapidly with his front teeth. “I’ve got a thing with this girl.”
“Hey, fantastic,” I said. “You should have brought her. What’s her name?”
“Luda,” Stephen said. “She’s Hungarian.”
“Far fucking out,” I said. “What’s a Hungarian chick doing in Eugene?”
“She’s still in Budapest, actually,” Stephen said. “We’re trying to get the distance piece of it ironed out.”
“That’s sort of the weird part. I met her online.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
Stephen coughed and ripped another sprig from his brow. “Yeah, but, I mean, it was one of these things. To be totally honest, I met her on this site. Really, pretty tame stuff. I mean, she wasn’t, like, fucking people or anything. It was just, you know, you pay a few bucks and you can chat with her, and she’s got this video feed.”
I looked at him to see if he was kidding. His face was grim and earnest. “You and like fifty other guys, right?” I said after a while.
“No, no. Well, yeah,” Stephen said. “I mean, there is a group room or whatever, but if you want to, you can, like, do a private thing where it shuts out all the other subscribers and it’s just the two of you. And over time, we started really getting to know each other. Every once in a while, I’d log in under a different name, you know, to see how she’d act with other guys, and almost every time she guessed it was me! A few months ago, I set up a camera so she could see me, too. A lot of the time, we don’t even do anything sexual. We just talk. We just share our lives with each other, just stuff that happens in our day.”
“But you pay her, Stephen,” I said.
“Not always,” he said. “Not anymore. She’s not a whore. She’s really just a normal woman. She’s getting her degree in computer science. She’s got a little son, Miska. I’ve met him, too. But, yeah, I try to help them when I can. I ought to show you some of her emails. She’s very smart. A good writer. She’s probably read more books than I have. It’s not as weird as it sounds, Matty. We’re talking about me maybe heading over there in the new year, and, who knows, just seeing where it goes from there.”
“How much money have you given her?”
He took a breath and wiped his nose. “I haven’t added it all up. Seven grand? I don’t know.”
I didn’t say anything. My heart was beating hard. I wasn’t sure why. Minutes went by and neither of us spoke. “So, Stephen—” I finally said. But right then, he sat up and cocked an ear. “Hush,” he whispered, fussing with the rifle. When he managed to lever a round into the chamber, he raised the gun to his shoulder and drew a bead on the far side of the clearing.
“There’s nothing there,” I said.
He fired, and then charged off into the brush. I let him go. The shot summoned George. He jogged into the clearing just as Stephen was emerging from the scrub.
“Hit something, little brother?” George asked him.
“Guess not,” he said.
“At least you got a look,” he said. “Next time.”
At noon, we climbed back in the boat. There wasn’t another craft in sight, and the loveliness of the day was enough to knock you down, but it was lost on me. The picture of gaunt Stephen, panting at his monitor as his sweetheart pumped and squatted for him, her meter ticking merrily, was a final holocaust on my already ravaged mood. I couldn’t salvage any of the low glee I’ve wrung in the past from my brother’s misfortunes. Instead, I had a close, clammy feeling that my brother and I were turning into a very ugly pair of men. We’d traced such different routes, each disdaining the other as an emblem of what we were not, only to fetch up, together, in the far weird wastes of life.
The boat plowed on. No planes disturbed the sky. Swallows rioted above the calm green lid of the lake. Birch trees gleamed like filaments among the evergreens. I was dead to it, though I did take a kind of comfort in the fact that all of this beauty was out here, persisting like mad, whether you hearkened to it or not.
George steered us to another stretch of lakefront woods, and I went and hunkered alone in a blueberry copse. My hands were cold, and my thighs and toes were cold, and my cabin would be cold when I got back, and to take a hot shower I would have to heat a kettle on the stove and pour the water into the rubber bladder hanging over my bathtub. The shower in my house in Charleston was a state-of-the-art five-nozzler that simultaneously blasted your face, breasts, and crotch. The fun was quickly going out of this, not just the day, but the whole bit up here, the backbreaking construction hassles, and this bullshit, too—crouching in a wet shrub, masquerading as a rugged hardscrabbler just to maintain the affection of an aged drunk.
Off to my right, I could hear George coughing a wet, complicated, old-man’s cough, loud enough to send even the deafest herd galloping for the hills. I leaned out of my bush to scowl at him. He sat swabbing his pitted scarlet nose with a hard green hankie, and disgust and panic overwhelmed me. Where was I? Three months of night were coming on! Stuck in a six-hundred-square-foot crate! I’d probably look worse than the old man when the days got long again! Sell the truck! Sell the cabin! Get a Winnebago! Drive it where?
The sun was sinking when George called out, and the three of us slogged back to the soggy delta where we’d tied the boat.
Glancing down the beach, I spotted something that I thought at first might be a driftwood sculpture, but which sharpened under my stare into the brown serrations of a moose’s rack. It was standing in the shallows, its head bent to drink. Well over three hundred yards, and the moose was downwind, probably getting ready to bolt in a second. I was tired. I raised my gun. George started bitching at me.
“Goddammit, Matthew, no, it’s too far.” I didn’t give a shit. I fired twice.
The moose’s forelegs crumpled beneath it, and an instant later I saw the animal’s head jerk as the sound of the shot reached him. The moose tried to struggle upright but fell again. The effect was of a very old person trying to pitch a heavy tent. It tried to stand, and fell, and tried, and fell, and then quit its strivings.
We gazed at the creature piled up down there. Finally, George turned to me, gawping and shaking his head. “That, my friend,” he said, “has got to be the goddamnedest piece of marksmanship I’ve ever seen.”
Stephen laughed. “Unreal,” he said. He moved to hug me, but he was nervous about my rifle, and he just kind of groped my elbow in an awkward way.
The moose had collapsed in a foot of icy water and had to be dragged onto firm ground before it could be dressed. I waded out to where it lay and Stephen plunged along after me.
We had to crouch and soak ourselves to get the rope under its chest. The other end we looped around a hemlock on the bank, and then tied the rope to the stern of the skiff, using the tree as a makeshift pulley. George gunned the outboard, and Stephen and I stood calf-deep in the shallows heaving on the line. By the time we’d gotten the moose to shore, our palms were torn and puckered, and our boots were full of water.
With George’s hunting knife, I bled the moose from the throat, and then made a slit from the bottom of the ribcage to the jaw, revealing the gullet and a pale, corrugated column of windpipe. The scent was powerful. It brought to mind the dark, briny smell that seemed always to hang around my mother in summertime when I was a child.
George was in a rapture, giddy at how I’d put us both in six months of meat with my preposterous shot. “We’ll winter well on this,” he kept saying. He took the knife from me and gingerly opened the moose’s belly, careful not to puncture the intestines or the sack of his stomach. He dragged out the organs, setting aside the liver, the kidneys, and the pancreas. One strange hitch was the hide, which was hellish to remove. To get it loose, Stephen and I had to take turns, bracing our boots against the moose’s spine, pulling at the hide while George slashed away at the fascia and connective tissues. I saw Stephen’s throat buck nauseously every now and again, yet he wanted to have a part in dressing it, and I was proud of him for that. He took up the game saw and cut off a shoulder and a ham. We had to lift the legs like pallbearers to get them to the boat. Blood ran from the meat and down my shirt with hideous, vital warmth.
The skiff sat low under the weight of our haul. The most substantial ballast of our crew, I sat in the stern and ran the kicker so the bow wouldn’t swamp. Stephen sat on the cross bench, our knees nearly touching. We puttered out, a potent blue vapor bubbling up from the propeller. Clearing the shallows, I opened the throttle, and the craft bullied its way through the low swells, a fat white fluke churning up behind us. We skimmed out while the sun sank behind the dark spruce spires in the west. The gridded rubber handle of the Evinrude thrummed in my palm. The wind dried the fluids on my cheeks, and tossed Stephen’s hair in a sparse frenzy. With the carcass receding behind us, it seemed I’d also escaped the blackness that had plagued me since Stephen’s arrival. The return of George’s expansiveness, the grueling ordeal of the butchery, the exhaustion in my limbs, the satisfaction in having made an unreasonably good shot that would feed my friend and me until the snow melted—it was glorious. I could feel absolution spread across the junk-pit of my troubles as smoothly and securely as a motorized tarp slides across a swimming pool.
And Stephen felt it, too, or something anyway. The old unarmored smile I knew from childhood brightened his haunted face, a tidy, compact bow of lip and tooth, alongside which I always looked dour and shabby in the family photographs. There’s no point in trying to describe the love I can still feel for my brother when he looks at me this way, when he’s stopped tallying his resentments against me and he’s briefly left off hating himself for failing to hit the big time as the next John Tesh. Ours isn’t the kind of brotherhood I would wish on other men, but we are blessed with a single, simple gift: in these rare moments of happiness, we can share joy as passionately and single-mindedly as we do hatred. As we skimmed across the dimming lake, I could see how much it pleased him to see me at ease, to have his happiness magnified in my face and reflected back at him. No one said anything. This was love for us, or the best that love could do. I brought the boat in wide around the isthmus guarding the cove, letting the wake push us through the shallows to the launch where my sturdy blue truck was waiting for us.
With the truck loaded, and the skiff rinsed clean, we rode back to the mountain. It was past dinnertime when we reached my place. Our stomachs were yowling.
I asked George and Stephen if they wouldn’t mind getting started butchering the meat while I put a few steaks on the grill. George said that before he did any more work he was going to need to sit in a dry chair for a little while and drink two beers. He and Stephen sat and drank and I waded into the bed of my pickup, which was heaped nearly flush with meat. It was disgusting work rummaging in there. George came over and pointed out the short ribs and told me how to hack out the tenderloin, a tapered log of flesh that looked like a peeled boa constrictor. I held it up. George raised his can in tribute. “Now there’s a pretty, pretty thing,” he said.
I carried the loin to the porch and cut it into steaks two inches thick, which I patted with kosher salt and coarse pepper. I got the briquettes going while George and Stephen blocked out the meat on a plywood-and-sawhorse table in the headlights of my truck.
When the coals had grayed over, I dropped the steaks onto the grill. After ten minutes, they were still good and pink in the center, and I plated them with yellow rice. Then I opened up a bottle of burgundy I’d been saving and poured three glasses. I was about to call the boys to the porch when I saw that something had caused George to halt his labors. A grimace soured his features. He sniffed at his sleeve, then his knife, then the mound of meat in front of him. He winced, took a second careful whiff and recoiled.
“Oh good Christ, it’s turning,” he said. With an urgent stride, he made for the truck and sprang onto the tailgate, taking up pieces of our kill and putting them to his face. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “It’s going off, all of it. Contaminated. It’s something deep in the meat.”
I walked over. I sniffed at the ham he’d been working on. It was true, there was a slight pungency to it, a diarrheal tang gathering in the air, but only faintly. If the intestines had leaked a little, it certainly wasn’t any reason to toss thousands of dollars’ worth of meat. And anyway, I had no idea how moose flesh was supposed to smell.
“It’s just a little gamy,” I said. “That’s why they call it game.”
Stephen smelled his hands. “George is right. It’s spoiled. Gah.”
“Not possible,” I said. “This thing was breathing three hours ago. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“It was sick,” said George. “That thing was dying on its feet when you shot it.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
“Contaminated, I promise you,” said George. “I should have known it when the skin hung on there like it did. He was bloating up with something, just barely holding on. The second he died, and turned that infection loose, it just started going wild.”
Stephen looked at the meat strewn across the table, and at the three of us standing there. Then he began to laugh. I went to the porch and bent over a steaming steak. It smelled fine. I rubbed the salt crust and licked at the juice from my thumb.
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said.
I cut off a dripping pink cube and touched it to my tongue. Stephen was still laughing.
“You’re a fucking star, Matty,” he said, breathless. “All the beasts in the forest, and you mow down a leper moose. God, that smell. Don’t touch that shit, man. Call in a hazmat team.”
“There’s not a goddamned thing wrong with this meat,” I said.
“Poison,” said George.
The wind gusted suddenly. A branch fell in the woods. A squad of leaves scurried past my boots and settled against the door. Then the night went still again. I turned back to my plate and slipped the fork into my mouth.
Wells Tower’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, The Washington Post Magazine, The New York Times, and elsewhere. The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and the Plimpton Discovery Prize from the Paris Review, Tower was named Best Young Writer of 2009 by the Village Voice. He is the author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. He lives in North Carolina and Brooklyn.
Here’s a remarkable swindle: somehow I managed to persuade the excellent and otherwise undupable people at McSweeney’s to publish “Retreat” two times. In the first go-round, the younger (and in that draft, more sympathetic) of these two unhappy brothers was telling the tale, but when it came time to revise it for publication in a collection, an emotional niggardliness seemed to pervade the story. A brief synopsis might have read, “A smug narrator perceives his brother to be obnoxious, and his perceptions are ratified when his brother ultimately ingests a ration of possibly lethal moose flesh.” The story aspired to stingy ends, a kind of glib, just-deserts satisfaction at best. So I took another stab at it, tasking myself with a mission of greater narrative generosity, a more complicated balance of sympathies, fewer cheap tricks. It struck me as a sadder and more interesting story if we could get to know Matthew as a plenary human being, an aware, discerning narrator who nonetheless can’t stop alienating people despite what he believes are his best intentions. Amazingly, McSweeney’s took that version, too: the old mechanic’s hustle of doing a crappy job on somebody’s head gasket and then getting a second paycheck to fix your own shoddy work.