Garrett knelt in the pit of the 737, watching Burelli load bags of various shapes and sizes onto the belt loader. There were six ramp agents who worked for Maverick Air, but Burelli was the most sadistic, choosing to load even the bulkiest duffels horizontally on the belt. It was like some diabolical video game. Garrett would kneel at the top of the belt while the bags came at him, one after another, an assembly line of suitcases and backpacks and garment bags, some of them as heavy as slain deer, and in the split second between them decide—depending on the airport code on their tags—whether to stack them with the pieces going through to Houston or to heave them deeper into the pit, where they’d get unloaded in Vegas and carted off to their connecting flights.
That was the idea anyway. Hunched in the bowels of the pit was Félix, a French Canadian who’d moved here from the Magdalen Islands, on the heels of a girlfriend who worked as a ranger at Glacier National Park. His English consisted primarily of the word “fuck.” He did his best to field the volley of bags Garrett threw at him and stack them into successive walls of luggage, greeting each bag with courtly wrath. “Fuck you, Vegas,” he said. “Fuck you, Denver. Fuck you, Boise.” (He pronounced “Boise” to rhyme with “blasé.”) If he couldn’t see the tag, he’d say, “Fuck you, Samsoneet,” and then continue his excoriation of America.
Sweat stung Garrett’s eyes, but he didn’t have time to wipe them. His knees throbbed, he was sick from exertion, he couldn’t swallow from the dryness in his throat. Bag after bag came at him, some upside down so that he couldn’t read the tags; by the time he hefted each bag around to plot its destiny and heaved it in the right direction, another one had smashed him in the face. It was like being buried alive. Eventually he gave up looking at the tags and just started tossing all the bags to the left. If a bag destined for Tucson got stranded in Houston, so be it. Attachment was the root of suffering.
When the belt was empty, Garrett sat back on his ass, panting for breath. His coveralls stuck to him like Kleenex. As a discount airline, Maverick Air prided itself on forty-minute turnovers, but lately to cut losses they’d been scheduling more flights and trying to get them out even faster. Garrett sat there rubbing his knees. He’d left his kneepads in the pit of a Chicago-bound plane and hadn’t had the guts to tell Mr. Purifoy, his boss. His back was killing him too, from heaving bags around on his knees.
He climbed out of the pit and walked down the belt loader to where Burelli was standing. Burelli took off his earmuffs and revealed his bad ear, which he’d damaged in a bar fight before Garrett knew him. It swelled up now and then and began to close, like a tulip at dusk. As usual, when confronted with its source, Garrett’s anger dried up immediately.
“You’re burying us up there,” Garrett said, trying not to look at Burelli’s ear.
Burelli eyed him suspiciously. “You don’t seem too peeved about it.”
“I’m not.”
“Maybe you should be.”
“Perhaps,” Garrett said.
“ ‘Perhaps.’ Jesus. Did you grow up in Wizardpants, England?”
“I grew up in Missoula.”
“You don’t talk like it,” Burelli said.
Garrett shrugged. “I’ll try to enrich my vocabulary.”
Disappointingly, Garrett did not get punched. He put his earmuffs back on and then walked over to the baggage cart, where he’d left his wands. He preferred it inside the earmuffs, where the world had the fragile quality of a dream. It was like wearing a space helmet. He tended to feel this way anyway, as if he were visiting from another planet, but the earmuffs made the feeling especially pronounced.
Garrett sat in the baggage cart, waiting for the passengers to board. Soon the engines would start up and they’d have to unchock the wheels and Burelli would man the tug to push the plane out—but for now Garrett could dream undisturbed. He could see the passengers in the terminal, lined up at the gate and preparing to fly back to Denver or Paris or maybe even Tokyo, carrying whatever they’d unwittingly picked up: bacteria in their stomachs or insects in their luggage or seed pods stuck to their socks. They were redistributing the world’s flora and fauna, creating a single ecosystem like the one that existed in the days of Pangaea, when the earth’s continents were one. Which meant that most of the world’s species were dying off. And, of course, Garrett was helping them. Why? Because it was the only job he could find, given his résumé: a college dropout with an erratic work history, whose most promising reference was the counselor at a halfway house.
Garrett watched the first passengers funnel through the gate. It was a small enough airport that there wasn’t a Jetway, and something about the people parading across the tarmac, half-blinded by the sun, made them seem cinematically doomed. And then it happened. The sky flattened like a TV screen; the people herding toward the boarding ramp began to look funny, bobbing up and down as they walked; a nauseating implausibility washed over everything, as if it were coming not from Garrett but from some cosmic leak in the sky. How outlandish they looked, teetering along on two legs: the bald man with the scabs on his head; the boy with the peeling pink gumdrop of a nose; the pregnant woman waddling along, palming her stomach like a basketball. Garrett took off his earmuffs, but it didn’t help. “Onion,” the people said, chatting on the ramp. “Onion onion onion onion onion.” Snow began to fall. Always the snow: huge flaked, snowier than the real thing, like angels having a pillow fight. It was pretty and abominable at the same time.
After his shift, Garrett showered at home and then drove out to his father’s place, following the Swan Highway toward the mirage of sunlit mountains in the distance. Even with his sunglasses on, the snowcapped peak of Mount Aeneas blinded him. He had his window down—it was ninety degrees out—and the air smelled dank and viscous, musky from the chartreuse fields of canola. Fences everywhere, undulating like waves; behind them grazed long-necked horses, their heads planted in the grass, so that from a distance they looked like headless, two-tailed beasts. The ranches were all fake these days, owned by one-percenters—Realtors called them “lifestyle ranches”—but this didn’t make them any less beautiful. Garrett had moved here ten months ago and had yet to become hardened to the landscape. Of course, it was tough to separate the beauty of the place from his nostalgia for it. Especially this stretch of road. His dad lived in his grandparents’ old house—Garrett had driven this way countless times as a boy, from Missoula—and so it was like seeing two things at once wherever he looked. It made his heart ache with longing, though what it was he longed for he couldn’t say.
He turned up the road that led to his dad’s house, crunching through gravel that pinged the bottom of his pickup. Garrett rolled up his window to keep out the dust. His father was dying; there was no way around it. Pulmonary fibrosis. IPF: the kind nobody could figure out why you got. Anyone else would have sunk into despair, but fortunately Garrett’s father had no interest in being depressed or reckoning with his place on earth or making amends for the mistakes he’d made during his fifty-seven years on the planet. He wanted to get laid. He’d spent the sixteen months since his diagnosis driving out to Snookums Lounge in Kalispell—the nearest gay bar—and trying to get lucky. More than once Garrett had come out to the house unannounced and been greeted by a potbellied ex-linebacker type with afternoon bedhead. Garrett did not know what to make of this carnal turn, or of the linebackers, except that it made a kind of sense given what was happening to his father’s body.
Garrett parked next to his dad’s Mustang convertible. He’d leased it the day after his diagnosis. Cautiously, so as not to surprise his lower back, Garrett reached behind his seat and pulled out a twelve-pack and a savory pie he’d bought at the IGA in Salish.
“Pie and Budweiser,” his father said, greeting him on the porch. He was wearing a bathrobe at four thirty in the afternoon. “I forgive you.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. For being so much younger than me.”
“It’s a Dorito-and-onion pie.”
“Dorito and onions?”
“It’s better than it sounds.”
“That would be impossible,” his dad said. He took the pie from Garrett’s hands. “Whoa, it’s still warm. Fresh from the oven.”
“Actually, I bought it before work,” Garrett explained. “It was kind of sitting in the truck.”
He made an undistinguished mother, but Garrett was new to the role and so cut himself some slack. It helped that his dad shared these low expectations for him. They walked into the living room, which doubled as his father’s studio—or used to, when he was still painting. The only remnants of its former life were a few drips on the floorboards where the drop cloth hadn’t met the wall. That, and the couch shredded into a hairy avant-garde sculpture by his cat, Barnabas, the most pathetic feline Garrett had ever seen. Barnabas had lost a leg in an incident with a motorbike but didn’t seem to realize he was crippled, meaning that he was forever leaping onto things, then falling off.
His father disappeared into the kitchen with the Dorito pie, stifling a cough that happily didn’t turn into an attack. Garrett had a feeling he was the only man to have visited the house for a while. His father didn’t look his best. He was skinny and slow-moving and his cheeks had started to hollow, as if he were sucking on a straw. Also, a weird thing was happening to his fingers. They were swelling at the tips and beginning to look like miniature tennis rackets. This was not uncommon, apparently. (Dr. Shrayber called it “clubbing.”) The change had seemed gradual at first, but recently Garrett had noticed old acquaintances gawking at his dad or keeping their distance, wondering if he was contagious. His father was convinced half of Salish thought that he was lying about having IPF, that God was punishing him with “gay cancer.”
His father came back with two slices of the pie, and they sat out on the porch with the plates on their laps. The beer was lukewarm, but they drank it anyway. What did you do with your dying father whose midlife coming-out had ruined your mother’s life? Apparently you got drunk. You sat on the porch of the house, as if your childhood had happened to someone else, in a far-off land, and behaved like old friends. It helped that Garrett felt like he was dying himself.
“Tastes kind of like piss,” he said, sipping from his beer.
“Do not insult the king of beers,” his father said. He was a staunch defender of Budweiser. Anything with actual flavor he deemed “hipster beer,” part of his Ironic Cretin act. “Anyway, it tastes nothing like piss.”
“How would you know?”
His father looked at him.
“On second thought, don’t answer that.”
Barnabas scaled the fence separating the yard from the driveway and started to gimp along the top of it on three legs, making his way to the corner post.
“Bet you he’ll make it this time,” his father said.
“How much?”
“Five bucks?”
They watched the animal totter along the fence. Two-thirds of the way along, he fell off dramatically and landed in a hydrangea bush. Whoever said cats always land on their feet had an inadequate sample size.
“Crap,” said his father, whose belief in Barnabas had cost him a fair bit of money. Barnabas hobbled out of the hydrangeas and then lay belly-up in the sun with his legs splayed in exhaustion. His stump pointed at the fence.
“Do you think he believes he’s a person?” Garrett asked.
“On the contrary,” his father said. “He believes we’re cats.”
“How do you know?”
“He stares at me during my coughing fits sometimes. I swear he thinks I have a hairball.”
His dad went inside again and emerged with a five-dollar bill. Garrett might have felt guilty if he didn’t suspect his father wanted to slip him money. What else was he going to spend his pension on? The restless man had left Missoula and moved up here to his own father’s house, where he wouldn’t have to pay rent and could work undisturbed, though what this disturbance back home consisted of Garrett couldn’t imagine. It wasn’t like he was spending time with Garrett; he’d been a rotten father, or at least an absent one, more interested in escaping his life than living it. He’d taught fine art at the university for thirty years, forever talking about the day he’d retire and move to New York City, where he could get out of “academic prison” and work on his own paintings—“fictories,” his father called them, encaustics of old sawmills and copper mines, layered with wax until they looked ghostly and half-remembered—and yet this had turned out to be another story, a myth in the larger fictory of his life, like the “conferences” he was perpetually running off to or the nights he claimed to be painting but was really out cruising for men, sometimes entertaining them in the studio he’d built in the old stables behind the house. He’d admitted everything, soon after Garrett went off to college. Garrett’s mother—living now in Albuquerque, remarried to a periodontist—would never forgive him.
“I met Charlie Margolis’s fiancée,” Garrett said, pocketing the money. “She’s here for a month, planning the wedding.”
“Where’s Charlie Margolis?”
“In LA. Saving people’s lives.”
His father nodded. “Interesting.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Is she a babe?”
“No. Jesus.” His father used vintage words like this—“babe”—on purpose. It was an older-person joke. “Anyway, I’m officiating the wedding, so her ‘babeness’ is irrelevant.”
His father laughed. The laugh coarsened into a coughing fit, then dwindled to a wheeze before abruptly begetting another fit. You just had to wait it out. Sometimes it took ten minutes for him to weather an attack. Meanwhile, Garrett opened a fresh beer and handed it to him.
“I thought you didn’t believe in marriage,” his father said finally.
“I don’t,” Garrett said.
“What are you going to do? Talk about the anesthetization of the soul?”
“Charlie asked me to do it. We were college roommates for two years. With that whole gang of guys at the Mill. Everyone will be at the wedding.” This wasn’t true, of course—the “everyone” lingered for a second, like an unpleasant smell.
“And?”
“What could I do, say no?”
“The answer to that particular question—‘What could I do, say no?’—is always yes.”
Garrett frowned. It was too late to refuse now: the wedding was in a month; he’d filled out the ordination request form on the internet; he was an official Universal Life Church minister. He had the certificate at home—signed by one Chaplain Br. Martin—to prove it. True, he despised the idea of marriage, but Charlie had asked him so fervently, as if he were conferring upon him some rare and special honor, that to avoid alienating him Garrett had said yes. He didn’t have too many friends left in the world.
“Anyway,” his dad said, “what makes you think you have any ministerial skills?”
“Everyone has a spark of divine wisdom inside them.”
“Says who?”
“The Universal Life Church. Or at least their website.”
“Sounds like a day to remember.” His father picked up the last morsel of Dorito pie on his plate and shoved it into his mouth. “Just download one of those wedding scripts—you’ll be fine. Anyway, it’s only the vows that matter.”
“Like yours and Mom’s, you mean?”
His father looked at him. “I loved your mother,” he said. “That’s not fair.”
Garrett ignored this. It had taken him years of incremental forgiveness to reach this perch of acceptance. He didn’t want to fuck it up now. The fact that his father had married his mother knowing full well he was gay, that he’d lived with her for eighteen years while they raised a son together, pretending all the while he was a happy husband with a libido problem—Garrett could put this into context. It was a different time, the eighties, and we were talking Missoula after all, not as far from Matthew Shepard country as the vegans on Higgins Avenue made it seem. Garrett had seen enough queer bashing at Missoula High to understand why someone might not admit that he was gay, perhaps even to himself. And it did seem that Garrett’s dad and mom had been, if not romantically entwined, entangled. It was one of the reasons Garrett hated marriage so much—that it could force people, basically good and decent ones, to cheat and lie and wound each other for life.
He fished another Budweiser from the twelve-pack, aware that his dad was watching him.
“That’s your third beer already,” his father said.
“Would you like to see some ID?”
“I’m just worried about you. Look at your hat.”
“What’s wrong with my hat?” Garrett said.
“Just be careful, all right? You don’t want to end up like one of those college dropouts whose best friend is his dad.”
This was so obviously already true—that Garrett’s dying father, who’d deserted his mother twelve years ago, was his best friend—that they didn’t dare look at each other. His dad coughed, once, like a normal person. Garrett suspected it was to hide his embarrassment.
“Look,” his dad said, clearing his throat. “I know you’ve had a rough time. Your friend dying like that. I can only imagine. And all the…trouble you had in San Francisco. I can understand wanting to get out of there.”
Garrett peered into the keyhole of his beer can.
“I mean, it’s not like you moved here just because I did.”
Garrett blushed. He could feel his father’s eyes upon him.
“You did get the job at the airport first, right?”
“That’s right,” Garrett lied.
His father looked relieved. “Good. Because I feel some”—he held up his clubbed fingers—“urgency about this. I want to make sure you’re okay.” He stared into his own can now. “I didn’t do the best job of that, when you were younger.”
“You were…distracted.”
“I should have gone to more Little League games.”
“One would have been nice. Like when we made it to regionals.”
“You made it to regionals?”
“Wow. You could at least pretend to know that.”
“I taught you to ski,” his father said defensively. “You’re a damn fine skier. We had some nice times out on the slopes, didn’t we? I used to stick hand warmers in your boots to keep them warm in the Jeep.”
“I think Mom stuck those warmers in my boots.”
Garrett said this to annoy him—also, it was true—though in all honesty he’d loved those ski trips and looked forward to them more than anything. They were the one time he felt close to his father—or that he had a father at all. (And the skiing too; the skiing! How harmless it had seemed, like dreaming you could fly.) But he was feeling a bit hurt. Shouldn’t his dad feel, well, touched that he’d settled ten miles from his house, in a crappy apartment in Woods Bay? Grateful that his son was around to check on him? Instead, his dad seemed worried about him, Garrett, as if he were one of those thirty-year-old shipwrecks who move back in with their parents.
His father coughed for real this time, covering his mouth with his fingers. Much to Garrett’s dismay, the world began to flatten again, that cosmic disgust settling over the porch and making his dying father seem like a facsimile in a museum. The angels resumed their pillow fight. It was his dad’s fingers—their strangeness—that had sent Garrett over the edge. Hümanz! In the inpatient ward, he’d been surrounded by them twenty-four/seven, these revolting creatures who’d made him sit in their onion-groups and say onion onion onion. It had snowed from the ceiling, for weeks, though not enough to make them shut up. Depressive psychosis, they’d diagnosed it as—or psychotic depression, one of those fun terms you can reverse like a belt. Curable, supposedly, thanks to Eli Lilly and Company. Comparatively speaking, he was as sane as a cheerleader. And yet the episodes persisted; they’d never gone away entirely; the only full cure, it seemed, was to avoid his fellow species.
His father stood up (outlandish) and then walked over to the railing (outlandisher) to spit into the bushes. Even Barnabas, marooned on his back in the yard, seemed less alive than the grass he was lying in.
“I worry about you, that’s all,” his father said, sitting down again. “You wear that hat and you’re not always the, I don’t know…sunniest guy to be around. I think you scare people.”
Direly, Garrett crunched his beer can and threw it at Barnabas, who startled from his nap and rolled onto his legs. The snow evaporated.
“See?” his dad said. “Even Barnabas is afraid of you.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s the hat.”
“He sits in my lap!”
“Strictly out of pity.”
“It is not pity! He purrs with delight.”
“Let’s see whose lap he chooses right now,” Garrett’s dad said. “Yours or mine. Bet you a ten-spot.”
“Barnabas,” Garrett called, taking off his hat.
Barnabas, responding to his name, hobbled closer.
“Here, Barney!” his father called. “Come on, kitty! Meow.”
“Meow meow.”
Barnabas mounted the first step to the porch. In the distance, looming above the house, Mount Aeneas began to take on that magic-hour glow that seemed brighter than the sky, illuminated somehow from within, as if the earth were using it for a lantern. Barnabas paid no attention to this. He looked at the two enormous cats on the porch, meowing at him. He wanted nothing to do with them and scoped a path to the house that would evade them both. The sick cat, Fills the Bowl When Scratched, had sudden retching fits. Plus his lap was bony. But the other one, the healthy cat, gave off something strange. Barnabas could smell it from the steps. A tang of fear, as if he expected to be eaten.