The following is an excerpt from the short story collection The Boundaries of Their Dwelling by Blake Sanz. The Boundaries of Their Dwelling is available now from the University of Iowa Press.
◆
Summer, 1964
A wedding! In the gnat-filled heat of a Louisiana backyard, a small-town couple jumped the broomstick. The modest ceremony took place at the newly built house of a family friend, a self-taught handyman who’d made a killing fixing up houses after Hurricane Audrey. The groom professed to love his little lady better than anyone could ever think to do, and the bride countered that he better, because her daddy would never let him live it down if he didn’t! At eighteen, they were the first of the baby boomers in that town to get married. Ben: prone to raising a little hell, first-born charmer of a local Pacific Theater vet. Anne: drum major for the Holden High Hornets and newly minted Avon girl of the Livingston Parish chapter.
A distant uncle had died that spring, and in his will, he left Ben a plot of land at the edge of the river. Ben didn’t question his luck. These were the 60s! Anything was possible! He took the gift as his due and set to building his bride a house. The job would’ve daunted others, but behind his mischievous eyes, Ben possessed the will of a mule. He used old drawings of his father’s childhood house as a blueprint. Before the flood of 1958 ravaged it, that old-timey cabin stood in the swell and sway of fertile land tucked in the gentle curve of Blood River. It was a hidden Eden: satsuma trees in a grove; blackberries on the vine; Katrina and Rita not yet even flutters on a butterfly’s wing.
Like a penitent to Lourdes, Ben pilgrimaged to the abandoned flood site for salvageable wood. Hand-cut relics of oak and cypress lay half-buried beneath the tall grass—shutters and cabinets, hardwood slats and varnished shelves, humble prisms of rural life. He sorted through the debris. Here, a cypress plank from an old kitchen shelf from which his father, the story went, nearly fell to his death at age six. There, a hand-carved post from his old man’s childhood bed, notched with knife slits to mark his father’s growth. From the homestead’s muck and ruin, Ben gathered wooden talismans and imagined new purposes for each: this bedpost could become a stair rail on his porch, that kitchen shelf a floorboard in his new living room. Each slat became a story, every watermark a warning.
For wedding presents, he sweet-talked Anne into asking not for grapefruit spoons and cheese boards, or wine glasses and potholders, but instead for copper wiring, insulation and panes of window glass, nails and glue. What he couldn’t acquire that way, he bartered with local merchants to procure, promising work on their personal projects in exchange for the things he lacked. Even at that tender age, he’d garnered a reputation as a hard and honest worker, and so the materials came. By July 4th, he’d finished prep work. As a plop of cement mix leveled itself into Ben’s self-laid, planked forms beside the river, the stack of found wood from his daddy’s old place stood sentinel, awaiting its chance for rebirth.
◆
That Tuesday in Late Summer of 2009, 4:30 am
Through the pre-dawn, Judah carries his weight in cut wood from the loading docks to the lumber aisle. Other workers haul smaller amounts, but Judah’s pride won’t allow that. Washed in the blue-tinged light of the Home Depot parking lot, he carries boards inside: two-byeights here, four-by-fours there. He lodges the bundles on his broad shoulders like boom boxes, slides the timber into marked stacks before returning to the docks until dawn emerges, mistygrey. Heavy-gaited, he escapes to the storefront and leans against the wall, the weight of the morning’s work pulling him back against the brick.
As he lights a cigarette, a girl approaches. Hat on backwards, she’s dressed in cutoff jean shorts and a graphic tee: “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy.” She recognizes him. She looks familiar. Who is she? Wait—Brennan’s sister. Judah and Brennan used to get high together, throw parties, do tons of stupid shit. He can’t remember this girl’s name, but she was always there. She’d been a freshman then. At the parties, she meekly observed the wide array of illegal goings-on: lines snorted in the kitchen, sex in the bedrooms, who-knew-what outside in the woods. She never told Brennan’s parents anything, never partook either. Once, cops raided the place, caught Judah in bed with this girl’s friend, another 14-year-old. He was 19. This landed him, for the first time, in the parish prison.
It’s been years since he’s seen this girl, or Brennan, or anyone from those days. She must be in her twenties now. She looks so different: mischief in her eyes, an awareness of her body.
She asks him for a light.
“You remember me?”
“You’re Brennan’s sister.”
She smirks. “Come on, Judah. You don’t remember my name?” She looks at his orange apron. “You work here?
“Something like that.”
“I just got fired from the truck stop on I-12. So did Rachel.”
Rachel. The one from the party. Judah gulps. “Yeah? How’s she?”
“She never held that night against you, you know. It’s all good.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear y’all are doing well.”
“Who said I’m doing well?”
“I just thought—”
“I’m just kidding, Judah. I mean, shit. I’m a grown woman now. Look at me.”
He notices her black eyeliner, sunken cheeks. Her eyes are chlorinated pools of blue.
Track marks line her arm.
“So, anyways, I’m here looking for that J-O-B”—this, a phrase Judah used to turn—“but
I can’t work anywhere they drug test. They do that here? It’s like that crazy chick used to sing:
‘They’ll try to send me back to rehab,’ Ha.”
“You’ll say ‘No, no, no?’”
“Super-gay comeback, dude. You sure you fit to work the floor?” She raises an eyebrow, takes a drag. Judah looks back, scratches his whiskers. The sky’s lightened. “Give me your number,” she says. “We could have some fun together. And by the way, dork: I’m Sylvie.”
◆
Fall, 1999
The house’s first disaster was a stealth affair. Through the births, baptisms, and graduations of Ben’s six children, the steady push of Blood River softened the banks atop which he’d built. Then, one evening, a crash. He ran to check on Anne to find the living room floor caved in, down to the river. His wife stood at the precipice, mouth agape. Then Judah entered, a strapping kid of nineteen.
“Daddy?” he said. “What was that?”
It made sense, the appearance of his youngest at a moment of crisis. From Judah’s birth, Ben learned to expect one with the other. As a preemie, Judah clawed for life in the NICU. The sight of him swaddled in his mother’s arms in the hospital parking lot caused an old woman to stop and gush at the exact moment a car sped round the corner and knocked her down. The experience branded Judah. His siblings took to calling him names: troublemaker, whiny-baby, faggot. Faggot, as in prone to vanity. Spoiled. Likely to be raised soft. His older brothers took it upon themselves to harden him up. When he complained about doing work around the house, they called him a pussy; when he took up basketball, they called him part black; when he took to football, they smashed his head in the dirt on every backyard play; said he’d never amount to shit if he didn’t stop his bitch-ass whining.
Meanwhile, his sisters rolled their eyes at his arrogance. Shook their heads at his vanity. When he’d curse out their mother for moving his CDs, when he’d keep his hand on his crotch while watching a game instead of studying, when he’d speak crudely on the phone to girls for the perverse benefit of his sisters’ ears, his eldest sister, Constance, would lash out: “That’s not gonna fly in the real world, boy.” He threw it back at them. Made a mantra out of “You’ll see.” Developed a penchant for explaining how things could’ve been, if only so-and-so hadn’t done such-and-such. To his friends, he claimed to “hate all the drama,” which was precisely how they knew he loved it.
And so, for Judah’s face to be the first thing Ben saw as his wife cried Holy Hell and half the house hung down to the banks of Blood River? That didn’t surprise him. Not one damn bit.
That Tuesday in Late Summer of 2009, 6:02 am
Sylvie gone, Judah flicks his Camel to the pavement, checks his watch. Store’s open now. Inside, he recognizes an old stoop of a man who comes often to chitchat about projects, to solicit advice on whether he should buy this or that cut of wood, to otherwise shoot the proverbial handyman shit.
“What can I do you for?” Judah asks.
After a senile pause, the man smiles wide and rests his hand fondly on Judah’s shoulder.
“What you say, spoke?”
“Doing all right, sir. Any luck with that planter for your wife?”
“Well now. First, she wanted it just for her hydrangeas. Now, she wants it to fit her petunias, too. Just like that. Like it won’t make any difference to how I go about framing it.”
“Gotta keep the missus happy.”
“She’s all I got. We never had kids, you know. I imagine you might be about the right age to start thinking about that.”
Judah guides him to Lumber, recalls how close he came once to fatherhood. After prison for the stat rape charge, during those cloudy years of meth and women, this girl, one of many, informed him she was two weeks late. She was a country knockout who never understood how little he’d cared beyond the physical. “I’m not pregnant,” she’d whispered one night. “Word,” he’d responded. He convened his boys at a bar, got drunk. They joked in crude hypotheticals about what such a sorry infant would’ve looked like. Judah absorbed the ribbing, threw back Coors like water. Not only was the girl not pregnant. Not only had his friends just picked up the tab, but also this: after a stint of probation for a second-offense DUI, he had just one week before his driving record would be wiped clean. Reveling in the thought of what havoc such freedom would allow him to wreak, he turned the key, pulled his truck onto the highway, and drove the thing into a ditch. Within minutes, the cops had arrived.
“Here we are, sir,” he says to the old man. “Just brought in these bundles this morning.”
◆
Summer, 2001
To anyone who’d listen, Ben told stories of the catastrophe. Of how the TV dangled from the edge of his den’s ripped floor, hanging by its cord down to the river like one of his wife’s peacock earrings. Of how a bed of water moccasins writhed out of the roots of a cypress near the foundation in the hours after the collapse. Of how the new place he had in mind to build? It was gonna be slicker than owl shit.
This tendency to hold court dated back to high school, when he’d snuck three gallons of Dawn into the town’s fountain, and suds ran into the streets for hours. He spent the next week telling the tale, watching as his friends’ eyes lit up at the story. Every time he told it, he added something: the number of gallons of detergent; the length of time he stayed watching people react; the nature of their incredulous responses. He saw that he was earning a reputation as a charmer, and with that came a certain, unexpected brand of validation.
In his fifty-sixth year, he rebuilt the house. Or, rather, moved it stud by stud across the gravel road, away from the disintegrating riverbank. He enlisted his sons’ help—all except Judah, who was locked up on yet another DUI. Ben’s disappointment ran deep, but he revealed it only by complaining about the impact of Judah’s absence on the rate of construction. Meanwhile, his other sons noted with helplessness the limits of their father’s aging body. He could no longer whip out a wall’s worth of framing in a single afternoon. Couldn’t carry his toolbox without limping. Out of respect, they didn’t say anything, but their silence was all the damnation he could bear.
To compensate, he worked longer days. As his days lengthened, his mood worsened. The sounds of resignation marked his habits. The whack of his hammer thudded more flatly. His grunts were tinged with a wheezy whine. That quiet sigh of knowing he’d have to redo what he’d just done: this, too, came more frequently—not only during the workday, but also at night as he looked over the site aching, replaying the day’s small failures in his head. Yes, the crown molding he detached from the old living room and reattached to the new brick was as perfectly flush as it’d been before; and yes, the hardwood boards were as painstakingly nailed down as he’d managed at eighteen. But the time it took this go-round! The energy it sapped! Thirty years ago, he’d insisted on triple-checking the work of those who’d volunteered to the cause. Now, he just claimed to trust their handicraft. Over months of this, he began to see that there were no more stories to tell, just things to get done.
Through the work, he stayed at his daughter Connie’s house. He saw Anne only occasionally. What would their life look like when they moved back in? What could they look forward to? He was losing the gumption that had attracted her to him. His steel-glinted stare on the level. That sawblade’s edge of corny, country humor.
Truth was, their marriage had begun rotting before the house caved into the river. There’d been fights about Judah. At Anne’s prodding, Ben had confronted the boy about his drinking and indiscretions the only way he knew how: with stewing silences that boiled over into violence. In the morning wash of one of his son’s hangovers, he’d stormed into Judah’s room, pulled the sheets off him, soaked them with turpentine, and made a bonfire on the carpet by the boy’s bed.
Anne acted like it never happened.
Then, the house collapsed. Which had been good, in a sense, because it gave Ben something new to fix.
Now, every Sunday after work on the house, Ben drove to Judah’s prison. On the highway, he entertained dire possibilities he didn’t consider with others around. To hold those at bay, he’d switch on a conservative talk show and reflect beneath the doomsday chatter—on the uselessness of rebuilding, for example, given the region’s propensity for disaster; on Anne’s silence; on the wondrous mechanics of Judah’s descent. In the prison parking lot, the radio’s angry voices would come back into focus. He’d sit there listening for a full hour, staring at the prison gates, then turn the key and go back home.
◆
That Tuesday in Late Summer of 2009, 10:38 am
Judah clocks out, hops in his truck. Blows into the Breathalyzer wired to his ignition. The display registers a blood alcohol level of 0.0; the engine turns over. Between Home Depot and his gen-ed English class at the community college—one of a few credits that will let him transfer to LSU, part of the life plan his father demanded of him—there’s no time for a shower. He changes out of his work shirt, brushes off his jeans, and puts the truck in gear.
This stretch of I-12, he’s committed to memory. Someone could spin him around, lay him in the Tacoma’s flatbed, and on this highway, he’d name their location by the shapes of the pines moving across his line of vision. Though he’s driven this route a thousand times, the view’s changed. A billboard that once advertised for a well-coiffed ambulance chaser now advertises for roof repair. A new exit ramp accommodates the population that’s moved here since the famous storm. A clearing in a field boasts the foundation for what will become the governor’s pet project, a private hospital. Mile markers appear in rhythm. Here is #22, Livingston, where Brennan used to throw parties. Here is #19, Satsuma, where his meth dealer lived. Here is #15, Walker, where Connie rented a studio through nursing school.
During his most recent spell in lockup, she visited. “What you say, boy,” she’d offered.
“Just doing my thing. What’s up with y’all?”
“You know daddy. Working like a fiend. Overdoing it.”
“Somebody needs to watch him.”
She nodded. “What about you? You need anybody watching out for you?”
“Shit ain’t like you hear on TV, Con. My ass is tight and dry, if that’s what you mean.” “Judah, that’s gross,” she said. He smiled. She cut the silence with a complaint about their mother, how she wasted so much effort worrying about Daddy. They weren’t doing so well, she let slip. “Maybe once this latest rebuild is done.”
“I want to make it right, Connie. When I get out.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that, Judah.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Now that daddy’s about to finish on the house yet again, they’re gonna give you some thought. My guess? He’s gonna see about getting you a job somewhere. Maybe Home Depot, since he knows everybody there. I bet Momma’ll even try to convince him to let you live rentfree, help you get on your feet. But don’t think for a second that—”
Judah took his sister’s hand. Started crying.
“They’re old, Judah. Especially Daddy. You can’t imagine what all this work is doing to him.”
“I just wish—”
“What I’m saying is, when you get out of here, you need to start flying right. Let them enjoy each other. Why else you think Daddy is going through all this trouble?”
Judah pictures his father as a young man. Young Daddy must’ve had no idea how the river was softening up that riverbank. In retrospect, the house collapsing was just the start. This most recent hurricane damage, it was much worse. As Judah drives into Baton Rouge where I-10 and I-12 merge, the Interstate’s exit numbers reset. He’ll get off at #1. Here, near the community college, exit numbers are just numbers and the highways aren’t conduits to the past, just things that get you from one place to another.
◆
Summer, 2008
Another goddamn hurricane. Fourth in three years. Ben lay propped up in bed beside Anne, shaking his head at the howling wind. As the joints of the new house creaked, safety didn’t enter his thinking, only frustration at his own shoddy work. He looked up at the skylight.Its frame was slightly askew, its facing not quite square to the glass. He noted the wide groove he’d cut into the wood, into which the beveled edge of the glass should’ve fit snug. This accounted for the vibrations he heard, the sense of uncertainty creeping through the skylight’s thin veil of shelter. Beyond it, clouds swirled like milk in a coffee-colored sky.
Water oaks in the backyard groaned. Out the window, the wind moved through in solemn waves. It bent the trees so that the highest branches reached down to the eave of the new house and kissed it, as if the storm were a golfer lining up a drive. In a single, shearing burst, the ground exploded as roots tore through the earth, spraying mud and sand. An oak crashed through his skylight. Landed beside the bed. The spray and roar of the rain flung them into chaos. Adrenaline pulsed through them as they jumped upright. Ben hurried Anne to the den in time to watch another oak pummel the roof and crush the sofa. He took her by the arm, hurried her to the garage, where the wind raged louder. Looking at the felled oaks lying atop his TV and fireplace, he thought with contempt of Judah, sitting safe at that moment in the well-constructed fortress of his prison cell.
◆
That Tuesday in Late Summer of 2009, 11:12 am
Judah enters the classroom late. Heads turn as the door clicks shut behind him. He slinks into a seat in the back. For today, the class has read “The Storm” by Kate Chopin. Discussion has begun. None of the characters, the professor says, seem to have acted out of anything but selfinterest, but they all seem better off. The cheating wife sees her husband in a better light. The cheating husband fares the same. The husband is washed in the glow of his cheating wife’s guilty ministrations. The storm has passed, and life has not only returned to normal, it has mysteriously made things better. Is it possible that good things can result from a series of randomly destructive and selfish acts? This is what the professor wants to know.
◆
Fall, 2008
Ben climbed over twice-destroyed walls and waterlogged furniture to inspect the damage. To salvage what he could. He gathered pieces and laid them on the wet grass in rows, careful to turn the nails face down. Kept an inventory of each board, labeling them by length and origin and story, by type of wood and functions served in this house and the one before that, and in his father’s before that. By the light of an oil lamp, he drew thumbnail sketches of new bedrooms and bathrooms, porches and foyers. He taped them to the garage wall and looked out in the moonlight at stacks of wood soon to be on their fourth use, gazing back and forth from woodpile to sketch, imagining how one might become the other.
Over weeks, he leafed through books with pictures of rural houses. Photos of porches, vaulted ceilings, crown molding insets, inlays of hand-carved doors. When he saw a photo he liked, he noted the address and drove to inspect it. He’d study the curve of a porch post, pass his hand over the carving of a built-in bookshelf. He took photos. Asked questions. Measured the widths of bay window sills. Nodded at fluted baseboards. Balked at prefab track lighting. Thus prepared, he sketched plans. His own rebuild, he envisioned in the Spanish Colonial style, with French doors and a porch across the front. A high-pitched roof with a central beam running the length of the home.
In this way, he swung into a manic phase that carried him through the tasks of rebuilding yet again with an ebullience that was not real, but that would pay real dividends. Where the move across the road had been marred by his depression, the storm’s destruction of the new house had jolted him into frenzied action. Awake at night beside Anne in the garage, which had been spared and where he insisted he and Anne stay together as he worked this time, Ben obsessed. What was he missing? How much would it cost? Where could he save? What would insurance pay for? Mornings after no sleep, he rose and took to the swamps to see what timber he could find.
◆
That Tuesday in Late Summer of 2009, 1:04 pm
Class is dismissed. A shuffle of rustling bags fills the room. Judah wants to explain his lateness, but the professor’s engaged with another student, so he gathers his books and leaves.
Walking to his truck, a pretty girl strides up beside him.
“Hey, you’re the guy who always comes in late,” she says. She’s blonde and tan, young.
He offers his hand. Hers is soft. The look in her eye as she squeezes it unsettles him.
“You worried about the midterm?” she asks.
“I reckon it’ll be okay.”
She complains about their class in the context of her larger workload. Segues into her plans to become a nurse. The readiness with which she shares her dreams fascinates him. He takes her in: mousy blonde, petite, the sort of submissive girl he’s always gone for. She’s organizing a study group. Would he be interested?
“Just think about it, okay? Let me give you my number,” she says. “The more we band together on this thing, the better off we’ll be.”
Judah nods and considers saying something about himself—about his own plan for his future, the one his father’s made for him—but decides against it. He looks at the girl’s number, back up at her. She hugs him goodbye, and he knows she must smell the scent of lumber on him.
“Thanks,” he says. Heads for his truck.
◆
Fall, 2008
Ben drove I-12 away from his own rubble, toward the chaos beside the highway, where fallen pines lay like pick-up sticks. The radio mumbled, aghast—talk of the aftermath—but he kept it turned low. North of the lake, he guided his truck beside swampland soaked with rainfall and exited on a ramp that descended into the muck. That road took him to a T, where he drove over the curb, over bumps and dips in the grass, between cypress and pine that somehow still stood. When he couldn’t four-wheel it any farther, he killed the engine and walked on foot into the woods. Beside a fallen trunk, he knelt down to pass his hands over its soaked bark. He was looking for something, some sort of strength. This wasn’t quite it, but close. The ground squeaked as he sank his boots into the squish. The sticky shade didn’t feel like shade, and though no sign of the storm lingered in the sky, woody refuse everywhere marked its indifferent passing.
He gaped at how the wind had repositioned this backcountry. Why did this tree stand? Why did that one fall? Even puddles of still water dotting the forest looked to be created by the hand of a careless painter. The random arrangement, as arbitrary as his own suffering, held until he reached the lake’s edge. There, he saw something seemingly placed for him alone to discover: a thick, imperfectly round trunk of cypress. Half in the water, half out. The muted gray of its grain. How it spanned the lake and the shore—this made it look like it was emerging out of the dark water for some new purpose. Ben felt a rush of hope. He sensed that no one else had yet witnessed its potential. This, he thought. This could hold the new house steady.
◆
That Tuesday in Late Summer of 2009, 2:30 pm
As part of Daddy’s recovery plan, Judah drives home to cut his parents’ lawn. Once inside the new house, he looks up at the vast, vaulted ceiling. The living and dining rooms stand together as one big, unwalled area encased in a throng of lumber his father had gathered from across the parish. Judah focuses on the beam supporting it all. He’s been back from prison living in the garage a few months, and even after all the rest of what’s happened since then, every time he enters, his father’s creation overwhelms him, reminds him how he had no part in the work. Before cutting the grass, Judah fixes a quick lunch. Everywhere, his father’s hand is inescapable: getting plates from the cabinet (ash from Springfield); retrieving silverware out of the drawer (cherry from Ponchatoula); sitting at the dining room table (birch from Lake
Maurepas). He passes a reverent hand over the sanded grain of a chair, sits down to eat. Outside, he fills the mower’s tank. He pulls the starter cable, the engine catches, and he pushes it into the naked sunlight, his own stink covered by the smell of gasoline. He walks the mower in a rhythm, snaking back and forth from road to house, house to road. Near the shoulder, he can see Blood River beyond, where the old house used to stand. The engine vibrates the handle, sending oscillations up through his arms. Dips in the lawn sharpen his attention. He tries not to burn the grass. On his final pass, his phone vibrates in his pocket. Sylvie: Wanna party 2night? 😉
Judah flips it shut, cuts the engine. He abandons the mower and rushes to the garage. He puts in earbuds and takes off his shirt, smelling of sweat and gas and wood. In his work pants, he gets into push-up position and holds it for the duration of the Pantera song. It’s a song from the old days with Brennan and Rachel. Sylvie. In the pulsing of his veins and the pounding of his heart and head and his sweat dripping to the concrete floor, the song hits its stride. Heavy bars, thrumming with reverb, match the rhythms of his shaking body. He has a vision. He pictures himself from above, driving a highway, driving his father’s old truck headed west, and west, and west, until he’s somewhere that reminds him of those old Westerns on TBS late at night, a place where hard-asses go to rob banks and live free. It’s so real it seems like a memory, different from how his mind used to work on meth, or coke. His mind churned then, too, but this isn’t so flitting, so falsely sheen. He can barely make out his own eyes through the grime on the windshield. He sees the lines on his own, young face, something no drug has shown him before. The song ends. Judah drops to the floor, his body a heaving mess of flustered youth on the concrete.
Fall, 2008
Once Ben mounted the cypress log onto the stanchions he’d built to support it, the remaining tasks fell into place. He allowed himself to imagine how much longer it would take. Months, most probably. His manic high was wearing off. Visions came, unsummoned, of various methods of self-mutilation. At night he wallowed in them. In his worst moments, he imagined his exit a retribution. To whom, for what, he couldn’t say. On site, he put aside these visions, but as work drudged on, he felt a slackening of energy, a slowing of the mind. Despite his outright dismissals of the problem, the mirror at night showed him the effects of his mood plainly.
Anne noticed. After he went two weeks straight without saying nearly anything, she set him up with a psychiatrist, a family friend who promised to charge half her usual rate. Despite his resistance, not wanting to seem ungrateful, he acquiesced.
For Ben, the psychiatrist’s office was as foreign as Iraq had been to his eldest. Laminated certificates and diplomas lined her prefab walls. A fake potted plant in the corner reached out to him like a leper from Numbers. An electric fountain cycled water over plastic rocks. With hair permed like the eighties and giant glasses hiding her eyes, the psychiatrist sat behind her desk. It was lacquered but cheaply made, which shaped his impression of her as a person who cared more about appearances than quality. Still, he’d been taught better than to judge on first impressions, and so he sat down opposite the desk with an open mind.
“Welcome,” she said.
Ben nodded.
“Anne told me what’s going on, but it’d be better if I heard it from you. Okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
To his surprise, Ben unloaded the most intimate of his troubled thoughts, ones he’d never shared. He talked about his problems with Anne, the pain of rebuilding over and over. With that grind soon to be finished, he wondered aloud: What would be his use after that? Days when he had no strength and the pains in his knees kept him laid up, his mind would wander. He envisioned the shapes of tools hanging from the garage walls, the dark forms of chainsaws and miter saws, the machete resting against the workbench and the nail gun hanging from its knob. Figuring a certain kind of talk might force this woman’s hand, he didn’t add how these images gave rise to a variety of grim possibilities. How, ultimately, his rifle would work just fine. When she asked about suicide, he didn’t say anything.
She changed the subject. “What about Judah? Don’t you have use in his life?”
“He might could use somebody,” Ben allowed. “I’m gonna let him stay in the garage when he gets out of prison this time. I could get him to cut the grass, do odd jobs. Having him around might help me, but I damn sure know it’ll help him. He needs all the help he can get.”
Anyhow, Ben allowed, that was some ways off. His boy’s latest sentence wouldn’t be up for two months. He looked at the psychiatrist’s desk, couldn’t help but wince at the sight of its unevenly leveled top.
◆
Late Winter, 2009
The day Judah got out of prison, Ben was waiting for him with two rifles in the back of his truck, ready to take him hunting. They drove to the woods west of the lake. These were Ben’s father’s lands, up near Blood River’s origins, where Ben had hunted since before he could remember. As a teen, Ben built a deer blind near here that still stood, and he made for it now. In a half hour they pulled onto a grassy clearing beside a dirt road. Ben parked in front of a concrete slab overgrown with weeds, where his father’s childhood house had once stood. They walked a half mile into the woods following a trail until they came upon the blind. Judah climbed up into it. Ben had brought a camouflage jacket, and he threw it up to Judah, who put it on. Ben climbed up, wearing his own camo and an LSU hat. He set the rifles down and they slumped in the blind and leaned against its wooden wall, ankles dangling over the railing’s edge. From his pocket, Ben offered his son a peanut butter sandwich in a Ziploc. “Just half,” Judah said. Ben ripped it.
Together, they ate. It was mid-afternoon, and the sky was grey and the air was damp and cold.
The easiest entry into conversation, Ben figured, would be LSU football. He complained about Les Miles’s propensity for taking risks. He had a talented enough team. How on earth did he think fake field goals and going for it on fourth downs would continue to work? The irony was that none of his gambles had failed yet. This frustrated Ben. It went against his notions of hard work. Faking a field goal against a better team felt like cheating. It would be more dignified to get beat.
“He’s an outlaw, Daddy. It’s just his nature. You used to be that way. Don’t you know you can’t do nothing about that?”
“One day, it’s gonna come back to bite him,” Ben offered.
“Maybe. But until it does, let’s just enjoy the ride, huh?”
So much for that as a starter. Maybe Ben could try something else. “I’m just about finished with the house,” he said. “We’ve been sleeping in it for a week now.”
“Yeah?”
Ben offered the canteen. Judah drank. “Not much else has changed, though.”
Judah nodded. Ben had the urge to put his hand out to the boy, bring his head into his arms, but he didn’t.
“Your momma’s got me seeing a psychiatrist,” he offered.
Judah laughed. “Yeah? What’s that about? You been working yourself too hard again?” “I suppose.”
Judah took his father’s squint-smile as a sign of his father’s enduring will. He offered the old man a playful pat on the shoulder. “Same old Daddy,” he said.
Ben guffawed. “I reckon,” he replied, though he knew it wasn’t true. “What about you?
You the same old Judah?”
They talked, but Judah had long since mastered the art of telling his daddy what he wanted to hear. Ben had no way to tell if Judah would stick to any plan of recovery.
“I know I can’t ask for nothing,” Judah said. “I’m day to day. I know the kind of people I need to stay away from.”
Ben had no new advice. “I guess time’ll tell, won’t it?”
Like Connie had predicted, Ben proposed an arrangement: the Home Depot job, free rent in the garage, the rest of it. “But I swear,” he added. “I catch you red-eyed, I’ll beat your ass.”
Judah smiled. “Yes, sir.”
They sat in silence in the blind, watching and waiting. The air cooled as twilight approached. Ben’s bones stiffened. His back tightened. Near dusk, a crunching of twigs: a doe, by itself. With silent glances, they debated whether to take a shot. Such a tiny thing, no great prize. But Ben wanted to take something away from this trip, a head on the wall to commemorate his boy’s return. Not for himself—he’d already planned when and how he’d do it (this very shotgun, that very weekend)—but for the boy: a reminder, always, of the way they were at their best. Ben lined up the animal in his sights. “Say the word,” he whispered. For a single beat, the doe raised its head and chewed, unaware. A moment later, Judah said now.
That Tuesday in Late Summer of 2009, 10:30 pm
The garage’s heat swells. Judah’s exhausted but he can’t sleep: Sylvie. Should he text her back? Was she serious this morning about a job? Did she know he’d be there?
He rises from his mat, walks blind through his parents’ yard to the main house. Since the murder-suicide, since that morning he found his parents’ bodies, the house has remained empty.
He could sleep there and no one would say anything. Technically, it belongs to him as much as it does to any of his siblings, but that wasn’t part of the plan. His father’s plan was black and white: live in that garage, boy. Mow that grass. Take those classes. Work that job. Build you some character, maybe stop being such a dip-shit, maybe get yourself a goddamn education, and maybe, just, maybe, one of these days, this house could be yours. He’s not there yet.
With a spare key beneath the mat, he enters to silence. Walks through the dark living room, avoids furniture by memory. Heads to the kitchen, grabs a case of beer. Brings it to his father’s study—first time in here since that night. Closes the door, cracks open a can, notes the room’s odors—the sappy pine of the unpainted door; the dingy smell of grease, like the mechanic’s shop where his father got Judah’s truck fixed before his release. Sits down at the desk, another Daddy original, made from a salvaged door found on the curb of a rich man’s house. Looks about: tacked to the bulletin board, invoices from Home Depot for rebuilding materials; beneath the keyboard, a calendar scribbled with reminders—notes, for this very month, for appointments with a Doctor Salinski. Dosages, too, for drugs he can’t pronounce— Clonazepam, Zyprexa, Trazodone—scribbled in the daily squares.
On the monitor, the digital stars of a screensaver fly at Judah a million miles an hour. No doubt they’ve been scrolling by since the gunshots two weeks earlier. A simple move of the mouse will show what’s behind that façade. Does he want to see? Sitting here still feels like snooping on a crime scene. He taps the spacebar. First, an amateur builder’s blog, lined with pictures of houses constructed in various styles. Behind that, a supplier’s website with insets of brackets and hinges for purchase. Behind that, a weather site tracking storm threats. The page reloads to reveal a hurricane gathering right now over the Virgin Islands.
It’s too much. Judah clicks way, lands on a spreadsheet with financials related to the rebuild. He follows the columns, reads the numbers: government loans from FEMA, tax credits—oh, how his father liked to brag to anyone who’d listen how that Obama was paying for all this work!—amounts from Home Depot, purchase orders for items bought on credit, invoices for friends and family who’d helped. Finally, a large, red number at the bottom of the screen. Reaches for another beer.
Five beers later, Judah’s still at the computer. Having circled back to the weather, his mind’s lost in a sea of numbers and images of the new storm gathering in the Gulf. Latitudes and longitudes, wind speeds, expected storm surges. Too much. He wades into a desktop folder labeled Kids. It’s filled with photos his mother had collected of Judah and his siblings through the years. A pick-me-up for Daddy in his depression. There are more of Judah than the rest, mostly from early high school before he’d begun using. He can hardly believe he ever looked that innocent. No tattoos, no stubble. The clearness in his eyes is nearly enough to make him cry.
Too much. He clicks over to the animated gif of the approaching hurricane.
Again, too much. He leaves the room, returns to the garage. Feels in the dark along the wall until the small teeth of the chainsaw bite into his skin. Moves his rough hands downward to its handle, pulls it off the wall. Its weight surprises him, sends him stumbling backwards in a drunken stupor. He takes it to the yard, sets it down beside the one water oak still standing. Goes to the shed for a gas can and a funnel. Fills up the tank and returns for a ladder, which he carries out to the oak and lays against its trunk. Chainsaw in hand, he climbs up to the first branch. Stars shine in the new moon night. He places the chainsaw in a crevice between trunk and branch to secure it while he pulls the starter.
Before the motor catches, he hears car wheels on the gravel road. No headlights. A Pontiac Sunfire turns the bend. Its dark form inches forward. Sylvie. Did she get his address from Brennan? Had she always known where he lived? She kills her engine. She gets out and leaves the door ajar, the car’s inside light shining. That constant beep. Blind to Judah in the tree, she heads for the garage. Judah calls out to her in a shrieked whisper.
“Sylvie! You’re gonna wake the neighbors.”
She freezes in the middle of the lawn. “Damn, Judah. What the fuck?” She walks beneath the oak and looks up at him. “I got something for you.” She takes an Altoids box out of her back pocket and opens it. Shards of meth shine in the starlight like geodes. “Is that a chainsaw?” she asks.
Judah looks back toward the house. A yellow square of light appears. A silhouette rises in its frame, walks toward the window and raises it. Daddy’s face appears in the square. He looks out on the yard.
“Judah!” he yells. “That you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What you doin’ in that tree, boy?”
“Saw the weather report. Storm in the Gulf. Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d cut down some branches. Keep this oak from falling on the house.”
“Boy, you crazy as all get-out. Go to bed ’fore I come out and whip you. I don’t hardly know what else to do with you, son.”
“Yes, sir.” Ben lingers at the window a moment, then shuts it. His silhouette disappears as the yellow light goes black.
Sylvie looks toward the house and back up at Judah. “Who the fuck are you talking to?”
“Hush up, ’fore he hears you.”
“Before who hears me? Jesus Christ, Judah.”
“What?”
“All I’m saying is, it looks to me like you could use a pick-me-up.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll just leave this here,” she says. “Give yourself a break. You’re gonna work yourself crazy. Shit—maybe you already have.” She places the Altoids box on a root at the base of the tree, walks back to her car. “Call me when you figure yourself the fuck out,” she says.
Judah hears her ignition turn, the roll of her wheels down the gravel. Silence. From his perch, he looks back at that perfectly square window. Just a spot of black surrounded by gray. No sound. No movement. He hangs his head, wanting to cry, but his eyes light upon the Altoids box resting on the tree’s roots. Its crystal offering shines like diamonds. He closes his eyes to escape the sight. In the blackness of those passing moments, visions come of the pixelated white stars of Daddy’s screensaver. Behind them a dozen, pitiless windows await perusal. If he’d have looked closer at them, what would he have found? Crouching in the still embrace of the stolid oak, eyes clenched shut out of fear, he watches the infinite constellation fly past him at a million miles an hour, a mirage soon to be dissipated by the faintest hint of a hurricane gust, the slightest movement of his eyes, the least twitch of his body in any direction.