Refresh, Refresh

Stories

Benjamin Percy

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Epub ISBN: 9781407014050

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Published by Jonathan Cape 2008

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Copyright © Benjamin Percy 2008

Benjamin Percy has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by

Jonathan Cape

Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

London SW1V 2SA

www.randomhouse.co.uk

Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780224084802

Acknowledgments

Grateful thanks to the editors of the publications listed below for first publishing the following stories:

“The Caves in Oregon”: Glimmer Train

“The Woods”: Amazing Stories

“The Killing”: Salt Hill Journal

“The Faulty Builder”: ReDivider

“Somebody Is Going to Have to Pay for This” was originally published by The Paris Review (Issue 180, Spring 2007).

“The Whisper”: The Cream City Review

“Crash”: Western Humanities Review

“Refresh, Refresh” was originally published by The Paris Review (Issue 175, Fall 2005) and later anthologized by Best American Short Stories 2006 and The Pushcart Prize XXXI: Best of the Small Presses.

“When the Bear Came”: American Short Fiction

 

Other names deserve to be on the cover.

My parents, Peter and Susan Percy, for starters. If I can ever afford to buy you a cabin on a mountain, as a result of a Lotto scratch ticket or a book deal, you’ll get it. You made this happen by making me fall in love with words. And over the years, when I screwed up, you smacked me on the back of head, helpfully, deservedly. Thanks.

To Fiona McCrae, Katie Dublinski, Mary Matze, and the Graywolf staff, I feel very lucky to have joined the pack. Thank you for lighting the way. I hope to do you proud.

Thanks to Katherine Fausset, super agent, the smartest in the business.

Thanks—a million times over—to Philip Gourevitch, Nathaniel Rich, Radhika Jones, and the rest of The Paris Review crew for believing in my work and curing it of its inadequacies and sharing it with the world. Corny as it sounds, I love you guys. Really.

Thank you to Ann Patchett. I still owe you that pitcher of whiskey.

To Isaiah Sheffer and Sarah Montague at Symphony Space—to Jay Nicorvo at CLMP—to Jane Hamden at WUWM—for their very generous support of my work.

To James Ponsoldt, a hell of a talented guy, for giving “Refresh, Refresh” a new life and audience.

To Michael Williams, Pablo Peschiera, and all of my colleagues at UW-Stevens Point.

Thank you to those who helped me, in small ways and big ways, write these particular stories, through criticism, encouragement, inspiration, friendship, and beer. My sister—the current rock star in residence at Iowa and an all-around genius writer—Jennifer Percy. Dean Bakopoulos. Mark Gates. Peter Straub. Tim Machan. CJ Hribal. Larry Watson. Dan Wickett. Tyler Cabot. Tom Chiarella. Paul Yoon. Laura van den Berg. Daniel Woodrell. Tom Groneberg. Dave and Lynn Dummer in particular, but the larger Dummer and Spielman clans in general. Tim and Jana Dolan. Mark Ranum and Craig Bodoh. Dan Levine. Amant Dewan. Matt Santiago. Allison Joseph. Chad Simpson. Gillian King and Clint Cargile. Mark Vannier. Billy Giraldi. Steve Stassi. David Medaris. David Jasper. John Hennessy. Kris Babe. Dave and Cynthia Moore.

And finally, most importantly, to Lisa, blue-eyed Wisconsin girl, for everything. This one’s for you. They’ll all be for you.

Refresh, Refresh

WHEN SCHOOL LET out the two of us went to my backyard to fight. We were trying to make each other tougher. So in the grass, in the shade of the pines and junipers, Gordon and I slung off our backpacks and laid down a pale green garden hose, tip to tip, making a ring. Then we stripped off our shirts and put on our gold-colored boxing gloves, and fought.

Every round went two minutes. If you stepped out of the ring, you lost. If you cried, you lost. If you got knocked out, or if you yelled, “Stop!” you lost. Afterwards we drank Coca-Colas and smoked Marlboros, our chests heaving, our faces all different shades of blacks and reds and yellows.

We began fighting after Seth Johnson—a no-neck linebacker with teeth like corn kernels and hands like T-bone steaks—beat Gordon until his face swelled and split open and purpled around the edges. Eventually he healed, the rough husks of scabs peeling away to reveal a different face than the one I remembered, older, squarer, fiercer, his left eyebrow separated by a gummy white scar. It was his idea, fighting each other. He wanted to be ready. He wanted to hurt back those who hurt him. And if he went down, he would go down swinging, as his father would have wanted. This was what we all wanted, to please our fathers, to make them proud, even though they had left us.

This was Tumalo, Oregon, a high desert town in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. In Tumalo, we have fifteen hundred people, a Dairy Queen, a BP gas station, a Food-4-Less, a meat-packing plant, a bright green football field irrigated by canal water, and your standard assortment of taverns and churches. Nothing distinguishes us from Bend or Redmond or La Pine or any of the other nowhere towns off Route 97, except for this: we are home to the 2nd Battalion, 34th Marines. The 50-acre base, built in the 1980s, is a collection of one-story cinder-block buildings interrupted by cheat grass and sagebrush. Apparently conditions here in Oregon’s ranch country match very closely those of the Middle East, particularly the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan and Northern Iraq, and throughout my childhood I could hear, if I cupped a hand to my ear, the lowing of bulls, the bleating of sheep, the report of assault rifles shouting from the hilltops.

Our fathers—Gordon’s and mine—were like the other fathers in Tumalo. All of them, just about, had enlisted as part-time soldiers, as reservists, for drill pay: several thousand a year for a private and several thousand more for a sergeant. Beer pay, they called it, and for two weeks every year plus one weekend a month, they trained. They threw on their cammies and filled their rucksacks and kissed us good-bye, then the gates of the 2nd Battalion drew closed behind them.

Our fathers would vanish into the pine-studded hills, returning to us Sunday night with their faces reddened from weather, with their biceps trembling from fatigue and their hands smelling of rifle grease. They would use terms like ECP and PRP and MEU and WMD and they would do push-ups in the middle of the living room and they would call six o’clock eighteen hundred hours and they would high-five and yell “Semper Fi!” Then a few days would pass and they would go back to the way they were, to the men we knew: Coors-drinking, baseball-throwing, crotch-scratching, Aqua Velva-smelling fathers.

No longer. In January, the battalion was activated, and in March they shipped off for Iraq. Our fathers—our coaches, our teachers, our barbers, our cooks, our gas-station attendants and UPS deliverymen and deputies and firemen and mechanics—our fathers, so many of them, climbed onto the olive green school buses and pressed their palms to the windows and gave us the bravest, most hopeful smiles you can imagine, and vanished. Just like that.

Nights, I sometimes got on my Honda dirt bike and rode through the hills and canyons of Deschutes County. Beneath me the engine growled and shuddered while all around me the wind, like something alive, bullied me, tried to drag me from my bike. A dark world slipped past as I downshifted, leaning into a turn, and accelerated on a straightaway—my speed seventy, then eighty—concentrating only on the twenty yards of road glowing ahead of me. On this bike I could ride and ride and ride, away from here, up and over the Cascades, through the Willamette Valley, until I reached the ocean, where the broad black backs of whales regularly broke the surface of the water, and even farther—farther still—until I caught up with the horizon, where my father would be waiting. Inevitably, I ended up at Hole in the Ground.

Many years ago a meteor came screeching down from space and left behind a crater five thousand feet wide and three hundred feet deep. Hole in the Ground is frequented during the winter by the daredevil sledders among us, and during the summer by bearded geologists from OSU interested in the metal fragments strewn across its bottom. I dangled my feet over the edge of the crater and leaned back on my elbows and took in the sky—no moon, only stars—just a little lighter black than a crow. Every few minutes a star seemed to come unstuck, streaking through the night in a bright flash that burned into nothingness. In the near distance the grayish green glow of Tumalo dampened the sky—a reminder of how close we came, fifty years ago, to oblivion. A chunk of space ice or a solar wind at just the right moment could have jogged the meteor sideways, and rather than landing here, it could have landed there, at the intersection of Main and Farwell. No Dairy Queen, no Tumalo High, no 2nd Battalion. It didn’t take much imagination to realize how something can drop out the sky and change everything.

This was October, when Gordon and I circled each other in the backyard after school. We wore our golden boxing gloves, cracked with age and letting off flakes when we pounded them together. Browned grass crunched beneath our sneakers and dust rose in little puffs like distress signals.

Gordon was thin to the point of being scrawny. His collarbone poked against his skin like a swallowed coat hanger. His head was too big for his body and his eyes were too big for his head and the football players—Seth Johnson among them—regularly tossed him into garbage cans and called him E.T. He had had a bad day. And I could tell from the look on his face—the watery eyes, the trembling lips that revealed, in quick flashes, his buckteeth—that he wanted, he needed, to hit me. So I let him. I raised my gloves to my face and pulled my elbows against my ribs and Gordon lunged forward, his arms snapping like rubber bands. I stood still, allowing his fists to work up and down my body, allowing him to throw the weight of his anger on me, until eventually he grew too tired to hit anymore and I opened up my stance and floored him with a right cross to the temple. He lay there, sprawled out in the grass with a small smile on his E.T. face. “Damn,” he said in a dreamy voice. A drop of blood gathered along the corner of his eye and streaked down his temple into his hair.

My father wore steel-toed boots, Carhartt jeans, a T-shirt advertising some place he had traveled, maybe Yellowstone or Seattle. He looked like someone you might see shopping for motor oil at Bi-Mart. To hide his receding hairline he wore a John Deere cap that laid a shadow across his face. His brown eyes blinked above a considerable nose underlined by a gray mustache. Like me, my father was short and squat, a bulldog. His belly was a swollen bag and his shoulders were broad, good for carrying me during parades, and at fairs, when I was younger. He laughed a lot. He liked game shows. He drank too much beer and smoked too many cigarettes and spent too much time with his buddies, fishing, hunting, bullshitting, which probably had something to do with why my mother divorced him and moved to Boise with a hairdresser/tri athlete named Chuck.

At first, when my father left, like all of the other fathers, he would e-mail whenever he could. He would tell me about the heat, the gallons of water he drank everyday, the sand that got into everything, the baths he took with baby wipes. He would tell me how safe he was, how very safe. This was when he was stationed in Turkey. Then the 2nd Battalion shipped for Kirkuk, where insurgents and sandstorms attacked almost daily. The e-mails came less and less frequently, with weeks of silence between them.

Sometimes, on the computer, I would hit refresh, refresh, refresh, hoping. In October, I received an e-mail that read, “Hi Josh. I’m OK. Don’t worry. Do your homework. Love, Dad.” I printed it up and hung it on my door with a piece of Scotch tape.

For twenty years my father worked at Noseler, Inc.—the bullet manufacturer based out of Bend—and the Marines trained him as an ammunition technician. Gordon liked to say his father was a Gunnery Sergeant, and he was, but we all knew he was also the battalion mess manager, a cook, which was how he made his living in Tumalo, tending the grill at Hamburger Patty’s. We knew their titles but we didn’t know, not really, what their titles meant, what our fathers did over there. We imagined them doing heroic things. Rescuing Iraqi babies from burning huts. Sniping suicide bombers before they could detonate on a crowded city street. We drew on Hollywood and CNN to develop elaborate scenarios, where maybe, at twilight, during a trek through the mountains of Northern Iraq, bearded insurgents ambushed our fathers with rocket-launchers. We imagined them silhouetted by a fiery explosion. We imagined them burrowing into the sand like lizards and firing their M16s, their bullets streaking through the darkness like the meteorites I observed on sleepless nights.

When Gordon and I fought we painted our faces—black and green and brown—with the camo-grease our fathers left behind. It made our eyes and teeth appear startlingly white. And it smeared away against our gloves just as the grass smeared away beneath our sneakers—and the ring became a circle of dirt, the dirt a reddish color that looked a lot like scabbed flesh. One time Gordon hammered my shoulder so hard I couldn’t lift my arm for a week. Another time I elbowed him in the kidneys and he peed blood. We struck each other with such force and frequency the golden gloves crumbled and our knuckles showed through the sweat-soaked blood-soaked foam like teeth through a busted lip. So we bought another set of gloves, and as the air grew steadily colder we fought with steam blasting from our mouths.

Our fathers had left us, but men remained in Tumalo. There were old men, like my grandfather, who I lived with—men who had paid their dues, who had worked their jobs and fought their wars, and now spent their days at the gas station, drinking bad coffee from Styrofoam cups, complaining about the weather, arguing about the best months to reap alfalfa. And there were incapable men. Men who rarely shaved and watched daytime television in their once-white underpants. Men who lived in trailers and filled their shopping carts with Busch Light, summer sausage, Oreo cookies.

And then there were vulturous men, like Dave Lightener—men who scavenged whatever our fathers had left behind. Dave Lightener worked as a recruitment officer. I’m guessing he was the only recruitment officer in world history who drove a Vespa scooter with a Support Our Troops ribbon magneted to its rear. We sometimes saw it parked outside the homes of young women whose husbands had gone to war. Dave had big ears and small eyes and wore his hair in your standard-issue high-and-tight buzz. He often spoke in a too-loud voice about all the insurgents he gunned down when working a Fallujah patrol unit. He lived with his mother in Tumalo, but spent his days in Bend and Redmond, trolling the parking lots of Best Buy, ShopKo, Kmart, Wal-Mart, Mountain View Mall. He was looking for people like us, people who were angry and dissatisfied and poor.

But Dave Lightener knew better than to bother us. On duty he stayed away from Tumalo entirely. Recruiting there would be too much like poaching the burned section of forest where deer, rib-slatted and wobbly legged, nosed through the ash, seeking something green.

We didn’t fully understand the reason our fathers were fighting. We only understood that they had to fight. The necessity of it made the reason irrelevant. “It’s all part of the game,” my grandfather said. “It’s just the way it is.” We could only cross our fingers and wish on stars and hit refresh, refresh, hoping they would return to us, praying we would never find Dave Lightener on our porch uttering the words, “I regret to inform you . . .”

One time, my grandfather dropped Gordon and me off at Mountain View Mall and there, near the glass-doored entrance, stood Dave Lightener. He wore his creased khaki uniform and spoke with a group of Mexican teenagers. They were laughing, shaking their heads and walking away from him as we walked toward. We had our hats pulled low and he didn’t recognize us.

“Question for you, gentlemen,” he said in the voice of telemarketers and door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses. “What do you plan on doing with your lives?”

Gordon pulled off his hat with a flourish, as if he were part of some ta-da! magic act and his face was the trick. “I plan on killing some crazy-ass Muslims,” he said and forced a smile. “How about you, Josh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Kill some people, then get myself killed.” I grimaced even as I played along. “That sounds like a good plan.”

Dave Lightener’s lips tightened into a thin line, his posture straightened, and he asked us what we thought our fathers would think, hearing us right now. “They’re out there risking their lives, defending our freedom, and you’re cracking sick jokes,” he said. “I think that’s sick.”

We hated him for his soft hands and clean uniform. We hated him because he sent people like us off to die. Because at twenty-three he had attained a higher rank than our fathers. Because he slept with the lonely wives of soldiers. And now we hated him even more for making us feel ashamed. I wanted to say something sarcastic, but Gordon was quicker. His hand was out before him, his fingers gripping an imaginary bottle. “Here’s your maple syrup,” he said. When Dave said, “And what is that for?” Gordon said, “To eat my ass with.”

Right then a skateboarder-type with green hair and a nose-ring walked from the mall, a bagful of DVDs swinging from his fist, and Dave Lightener forgot us. “Hey, friend,” he was saying. “Let me ask you something. Do you like war movies?”

In November we drove our dirt bikes deep into the woods to hunt. Sunlight fell through tall pines and birch clusters and lay in puddles along the logging roads that wound past the hillsides packed with huckleberries and the moraines where coyotes scurried, trying to flee us and slipping, causing tiny avalanches of loose rock. It hadn’t rained in nearly a month, so the crab grass and the cheat grass and the pine needles had lost their color, dry and blond as cornhusks, crackling beneath my boots when the road we followed petered out into nothing and I stepped off my bike. In this waterless stillness, you could hear every chipmunk within a square acre, rustling for pine nuts, and when the breeze rose into a cold wind the forest became a giant whisper.

We dumped our tent and sleeping bags near a basalt grotto with a spring bubbling from it, and Gordon said, “Let’s go, troops,” holding his rifle before his chest diagonally, as a soldier would. He dressed as a soldier would, too, wearing his father’s overlarge cammies rather than the mandatory blaze orange gear. Fifty feet apart we worked our way downhill, through the forest, through a huckleberry thicket, through a clear-cut crowded with stumps, taking care not to make much noise or slip on the pine needles carpeting the ground. A chipmunk worrying at a pinecone screeched its astonishment when a peregrine falcon swooped down and seized it, carrying it off between the trees to some secret place. Its wings made no sound, and neither did the blaze orange hunter when he appeared in a clearing several hundred yards below us.

Gordon made some sort of SWAT-team gesture, meant, I think, to say, Stay Low, and I made my way carefully toward him. From behind a boulder, we peered through our scopes, tracking the hunter, who looked—in his vest and ear-flapped hat—like a monstrous pumpkin. “That cocksucker,” Gordon said in a harsh whisper. The hunter was Seth Johnson. His rifle was strapped to his back, and his mouth was moving, talking to someone. At the corner of the meadow he joined four members of the varsity football squad, who sat on logs around a smoldering campfire, their arms bobbing like oil-pump jacks as they brought their beers to their mouths.

I took my eye from my scope and noticed Gordon fingering the trigger of his thirty-aught. I told him to quit fooling around and he pulled his hand suddenly away from the stock and smiled guiltily and said he just wanted to know what it felt like, having that power over someone. Then his trigger finger rose up and touched the gummy white scar that split his eyebrow. “I say we fuck with them a little.”

I shook my head, no.

Gordon said, “Just a little—to scare them.”

“They’ve got guns,” I said, and he said, “So we’ll come back tonight.”

Later, after an early dinner of beef jerky and trail mix and Gatorade, I happened upon a four-point stag nibbling on some bear grass, and I rested my rifle on a stump and shot it, and it stumbled backwards and collapsed with a rose blooming from behind its shoulder where the heart was hidden. Gordon came running and we stood around the deer and smoked a few cigarettes, watching the thick arterial blood run from its mouth. Then we took out our knives and got to work. I cut around the anus, cutting away the penis and testes, and then ran the knife along the belly, unzipping the hide to reveal the delicate pink flesh and greenish vessels into which our hands disappeared. The blood steamed in the cold mountain air, and when we finished—when we’d skinned the deer and hacked at its joints and cut out its back strap and boned out its shoulders and hips, its neck and ribs, making chops, roasts, steaks, quartering the meat so we could bundle it into our insulated saddlebags—Gordon picked up the deer head by the antlers and held it before his own. Blood from its neck made a pattering sound on the ground, and in the half-light of early evening Gordon began to do a little dance, bending his knees and stomping his feet.

“I think I’ve got an idea,” he said and pretended to rake at me with the antlers. I pushed him away, and he said, “Don’t pussy out on me, Josh.” I was exhausted and reeked of gore, but I could appreciate the need for revenge. “Just to scare them, right, Gordo?” I said.

“Right.”

We lugged our meat back to camp, and Gordon brought the deer hide. He slit a hole in its middle, and poked his head through so the hide hung off him loosely, a hairy sack, and I helped him smear mud and blood across his face. Then, with his Leatherman, he sawed off the antlers and held them in each hand and slashed at the air as if they were claws.

Night had come on and the moon hung over the Cascades, grayly lighting our way as we crept through the forest, imagining ourselves in enemy territory, with trip wires and guard towers and snarling dogs around every corner. From behind the boulder that overlooked their campsite, we observed our enemies as they swapped hunting stories and joked about Jessica Robertson’s big-ass titties and passed around a bottle of whiskey and drank to excess and finally pissed on the fire to extinguish it. When they retired to their tents we waited an hour before making our way down the hill with such care that it took us another hour before we were upon them. Somewhere an owl hooted, its noise barely noticeable over the chorus of snores that rose from their tents. Seth’s Bronco was parked nearby—the license plate read SMAN—and all their rifles lay in its cab. I collected them, slinging them over my shoulder, then I eased my knife into each of Seth’s tires.

I still had my knife out when we stood outside Seth’s tent, and when a cloud scudded over the moon and made the meadow fully dark, I stabbed the nylon and in one quick jerk opened up a slit. Gordon rushed in, his antler-claws slashing. I could see nothing but shadows, but I could hear Seth scream the scream of a little girl as Gordon raked at him with the antlers and hissed and howled like some cave creature hungry for man-flesh. When the tents around us came alive with confused voices, Gordon reemerged with a horrible smile on his face and I followed him up the hillside, crashing through the undergrowth, leaving Seth to make sense of the nightmare that had descended upon him without warning.

Winter came. Snow fell, and we threw on our coveralls and wrenched on our studded tires and drove our dirt bikes to Hole in the Ground, dragging our sleds behind us with tow-ropes. Our engines filled the white silence of the afternoon. Our back tires kicked up plumes of powder, and on sharp turns slipped out beneath us and we lay there, in the middle of the road, bleeding, laughing, unafraid.

Earlier, for lunch, we had cooked a pound of bacon with a stick of butter. The grease, which hardened into a white waxy pool, we used as polish, buffing it into the bottoms of our sleds. Speed was what we wanted at Hole in the Ground. One by one we descended the steepest section of the crater into its heart, 300 feet below us. We followed each other in the same track, ironing down the snow to create a chute, blue-hued and frictionless. Our eyeballs glazed with frost, our ears roared with wind, our stomachs rose into our throats, as we rocketed down and felt five—and then we began the slow climb back the way we came and felt fifty.

We wore crampons and ascended in a zigzagging series of switchbacks. It took nearly an hour. The air began to go purple with evening, when we stood again at the lip of the crater, sweating in our coveralls, taking in the view through the fog of our breath. Gordon packed a snowball. I said, “You better not hit me with that.” He cocked his arm threateningly and smiled, then dropped to his knees to roll the snowball into something bigger. He rolled it until it grew to the size of a large man curled into the fetal position. From the back of his bike he took the piece of garden hose he used to siphon gas from fancy foreign cars, and he worked it into his tank, sucking at its end until gas flowed. He doused the giant snowball as if he hoped it would sprout. It did not melt—he’d packed it tight enough—but it puckered slightly and appeared leaden. When Gordon withdrew his Zippo, sparked it, and held it toward the ball, the fumes caught flame and the whole thing erupted with a gasping noise that sent me staggering back a few steps.

Gordon rushed forward and kicked the ball of fire, sending it rolling, tumbling down the crater, down our chute like a meteor, and the snow beneath it instantly melted only to freeze again a moment later, making a slick blue ribbon. When we sledded it, we went so fast our minds emptied and we felt a sensation at once like flying and falling.

On the news Iraqi insurgents fired their assault rifles. On the news a car bomb in Baghdad detonated, killing seven American soldiers at a traffic checkpoint. On the news the president said he did not think it was wise to provide a time frame for troop withdrawal. I checked my e-mail before breakfast and found nothing but spam—promises of great mortgage rates, cheap painkillers, increased erectile performance.

Gordon and I fought in the snow, wearing snow boots. We fought so much our wounds never got a chance to heal and our faces took on a permanent look of decay. Our wrists felt swollen, our knees ached, all our joints felt full of tiny dry wasps. We fought until fighting hurt too much, and we took up drinking instead. Weekends, we drove our dirt bikes to Bend, twenty miles away, and bought beer and took it to Hole in the Ground and drank there until a bright line of sunlight appeared on the horizon and illuminated the snow-blanketed desert. Nobody asked for our ID and when we held up our empty bottles and stared at our reflections in the glass, warped and ghostly, we knew why. And we weren’t alone. Black bags grew beneath the eyes of the sons and daughters and wives of Tumalo, their shoulders stooped, wrinkles enclosing their mouths like parentheses.

Our fathers haunted us. They were everywhere. In the grocery store when we spotted a thirty-pack of Coors on sale for ten bucks. On the highway when we passed a jacked-up Dodge with a dozen hay bales stacked in its bed. In the sky when a jet roared by, reminding us of faraway places. And now, as our bodies thickened with muscle, as we stopped shaving and grew patchy beards, we saw our fathers even in the mirror. We began to look like them. Our fathers, who had been taken from us, were everywhere, at every turn, imprisoning us.

Seth Johnson’s father was a staff sergeant. Like his son, he was a big man, but not big enough. Just before Christmas he stepped on a cluster bomb. A U.S. warplane dropped it and the sand camouflaged it and he stepped on it and it tore him into many meaty pieces. When Dave Lightener climbed up the front porch with a black armband and a somber expression, Mrs. Johnson, who was cooking a honeyed ham at the time, collapsed on the kitchen floor. Seth pushed his way out the door and punched Dave in the face, breaking his nose before he could utter the words, “I regret to inform you . . .”

Hearing about this, we felt bad for all of ten seconds. Then we felt good because it was his father and not ours. And then we felt bad again and on Christmas Eve we drove to Seth’s house and laid down on his porch the rifles we had stolen, along with a six-pack of Coors. Then, just as we were about to leave, Gordon dug in his back pocket and removed his wallet and placed under the six-pack all the money he had, a few fives, some ones. “Fucking Christmas,” he said.

We got braver and went to the bars—The Golden Nugget, The Weary Traveler, The Pine Tavern—where we square-danced with older women wearing purple eye shadow and sparkly dream-catcher earrings and push-up bras and clattery high heels. We told them we were Marines back from a six-month deployment and they said, “Really?” and we said, “Yes, ma’am,” and when they asked for our names we gave them the names of our fathers. Then we bought them drinks and they drank them in a gulping way and breathed hotly in our faces and we brought our mouths against theirs and they tasted like menthol cigarettes, like burnt urinal pucks. And then we went home with them, to their trailers, to their water-beds, where among their stuffed animals we fucked them.

Midafternoon and it was already full dark. On our way to The Weary Traveler, we stopped by my house to bum some money off my grandfather, only to find Dave Lightener waiting for us. He was halfway up the porch steps when our headlights cast an anemic glow over him and he turned to face us with a scrunched-up expression, as if trying to figure out who we were. He wore the black band around his arm and, over his nose, a white-bandaged splint.

We did not turn off our engines. Instead we sat in the driveway, idling, the exhaust from our bikes and the breath from our mouths clouding the air. Above us a star hissed across the moonlit sky, vaguely bright, like a light turned on in a daylit room. Then Dave began down the steps and we leapt off our bikes to meet him. Before he could speak I brought my fist to his diaphragm, knocking the breath from his body. Right then he looked like a gunshot actor in a Western, clutching his belly with both hands, doubled over, his face making a nice target for Gordon’s knee. A snap sound preceded Dave falling on his back with blood sliding from his already broken nose.

He put up his hands and we hit our way through them. I sucker-punched him once, twice, in the ribs while Gordon kicked him in the spine and stomach and then we stood around gulping air and allowed him to struggle to his feet. When he righted himself, he wiped his face with his hand and blood dripped from his fingers. I moved in and round-housed with my right and then my left, my fists knocking his head loose on its hinges. Again he collapsed, a bloody bag of a man. His eyes walled and turned up, trying to see the animal bodies looming over him. He opened his mouth to speak and I pointed a finger at him and said, with enough hatred in my voice to break a back, “Don’t say a word. Don’t you dare. Not one word.”

He closed his mouth and tried to crawl away and I brought a boot down on the back of his head and left it there a moment, grinding his face into the ground so that when he lifted his head the snow held a red impression of his face. Gordon went inside and returned a moment later with a roll of duct tape and we held Dave down and bound his wrists and ankles and threw him on a sled and taped him to it many times over and then tied the sled to the back of Gordon’s bike and drove at a perilous speed to Hole in the Ground.

The moon shined and the snow glowed with pale blue light as we smoked cigarettes, looking down into the crater, with Dave at our feet. There was something childish about the way our breath puffed from our mouths in tiny clouds. It was as if we were imitating choo-choo trains. And for a moment, just a moment, we were kids again. Just a couple of stupid kids. Gordon must have felt this too because he said, “My mom wouldn’t even let me play with toy guns when I was little.” And he sighed heavily as if he couldn’t understand how he, how we, had ended up here.

Then, with a sudden lurch, Dave began struggling and yelling at us in a slurred voice. My face hardened with anger and I put my hands on him and pushed him slowly to the lip of the crater and he grew silent. For a moment I forgot myself, staring off into the dark oblivion. It was beautiful and horrifying. “I could shove you right now,” I said. “And if I did, you’d be dead.”

“Please don’t,” he said, his voice cracking. He began to cry. “Oh fuck. Don’t. Please.” Hearing his great shuddering sobs didn’t bring me the satisfaction I hoped for. If anything, I felt as I did that day, so long ago, when we taunted him in the Mountain View Mall parking lot: shameful, false.

“Ready?” I said. “One!” I inched him a little closer to the edge. “Two!” I moved him a little closer still and as I did I felt unwieldy, at once wild and exhausted, my body seeming to take on another twenty, thirty, forty years. When I finally said, “Three,” my voice was barely a whisper.

We left Dave there, sobbing at the brink of the crater. We got on our bikes and we drove to Bend and we drove so fast I imagined catching fire, like a meteor, burning up in a flash, howling as my heat consumed me, as we made our way to the Armed Forces Recruiting Station where we would at last answer the fierce alarm of war and put our pens to paper and make our fathers proud.

The Caves in Oregon

THIS AFTERNOON, A hot August afternoon, the refrigerator bleeds. Two red lines run down the length of it—and then a third, a fourth—oozing from the bottom lip of the freezer. This is what Kevin finds when he returns home from his job at the foundry and flips the light switch repeatedly without success, when he stands in the half-light of the kitchen and says, “Shit.”

Already he can smell it, the blood. And when he draws a steadying breath he imagines he can taste it, too—the mineral sourness of it. He is a big man—a man who spends most of his days with his hands taped, swinging a fifty-pound sledgehammer—and he must bend his body in half to observe the freezer closely. The seal of its underside has gone as red as a tendon. Little droplets are gathering there, swelling fatly, and then, too heavy, they break from their purchase and race for the floor.

Right then he hears his wife, Becca, her car grumbling up the driveway, as she returns home from the community college where she teaches. He hears her keys jangle, her footsteps on the porch, in the hallway. She calls out his name and he says, “In here.” She begins to say something, something about the garage door failing to open, her voice cut short by a sharp intake of air when she sees the bleeding fridge.

“Power’s out,” he says and she gives him a tight-faced look that trembles at the mouth from her teeth taking tiny bites from her cheeks. He can sense her anger coming and it makes him feel as if he is shrinking, small enough to put in his own pocket. “I just got home,” he says, his voice coming out in an almost whine. “Like, five seconds ago. I was just about to start cleaning.”

She hurls down her keys. Against the Formica counter they make a noise like bottles breaking. “Great,” she says. “That’s just great. That’s just what I need.” She lifts her arms and lets them fall and stomps her way from the kitchen, into the hallway, bringing down her high heels as if to stab something with every step. He can hear her muttering to herself as she burrows roughly through the closet. A moment later she returns with an armful of beach towels. She throws them down at the base of the fridge and tells him to get the cooler.

“The cooler?”

“Yes, the fucking cooler,” she says. “You know, the cooler.”

He retrieves it from the garage and with some hesitation sets it on top of the towels, watching his wife as he does so, hoping this is where she wants it. She says nothing. She will not look at him. All her attention, this radiant anger he has come to know so well, is momentarily focused on the fridge. For this he is thankful.

These days she is always angry, it seems. All it takes is a dropped dish, the wrong word, heavy traffic, and a switch goes off inside her that sends blue electricity sizzling through her veins.

He retreats from her and crosses his arms, his hands tucked into his armpits. For a moment his wife stares at the freezer, her head cocked, as if listening to something in the far distance. He watches her back, the rigidity of it. A long brown ponytail curls down her spine like an upside-down question mark.

And then she suddenly brings her hand to the freezer door and pulls. At first it resists her, and so she brings her other hand to the handle and leans backward. Then, with a sort of sucking, sort of gasping noise, it opens.

The sight of it reminds Kevin of the time he had his wisdom teeth removed. His dentist had given him an irrigator, a plastic syringe. Twice a day he filled it with salt water and placed its needle into the craters at the back of his mouth—and from them, in a pink rush, came scabs, bits of food. That is what the freezer looks like when its door opens and the blood surges from it—all down the front of the fridge, dampening their photos, glossing over their magnets, until the front of the fridge has more red on it than white.

Becca makes a noise like a wounded bird. She turns her head away from the mess and squints shut her eyes. Her pants, her shoes are splattered with red. A tremble races through her body and then she goes perfectly still.

Kevin goes to her and places a hand on her shoulder and her shoulder drops a little from the weight of it. He feels as if he is touching a banister, a rifle stock, something hard and unbending. “Let me do it,” he says. “Please.”

The kitchen is loud with the noise of dripping.

“I hate this house,” she says, her voice a harsh whisper. “I hate, hate, hate this house.”

“You go sit down and I’ll take care of it. You rest. You need your rest.”

She raises her arm, long and thin, her hand gloved with blood, like a stop sign. She will not speak to him, mute with a kind of fury.

“Sorry,” he says and his hand falls away from her when she bends over to reposition the cooler. And then, with her arms out as if to hug, she reaches into the freezer. There is a surprising amount of meat in there and she hooks her arms around it, the pile of it, and slides it out all at once. The T-bones, pork chops, bratwursts, chicken breasts splat into the cooler, one on top of the other, a mass of meat along with two ice trays and a sodden box of baking soda. A hamburger patty misses its mark and plops on the linoleum, making a red flower pattern.

By this time Kevin has removed from beneath the sink a sponge, a roll of paper towels, a Clorox spray bottle. His wife watches him when he tears off five lengths of paper towels and lays them in the freezer to soak up the blood pooled there. “That’s not enough,” she says and snatches the towels from him and lays down several more sheets. “Just let me do it.”

He pinches shut his mouth and drops his eyes and holds up his hands, palms flat, as if pressing them against a wall. “Okay.”

She plucks the photos and magnets from the fridge and tosses them in the cooler. Then she kneels with a bouquet of paper towels in one hand and the bottle of Clorox in the other. At first, when she sprays, when she wipes, she only smears the blood, making it pinker, making swirls like you see in hair and wood grain. Then the blood begins to come away and the fridge begins to look like a fridge again.