Hummingbird Salamander(43)
Me: Leave me alone. Or I’ll call the police.
>>Oh, by all means. Go right ahead. Shall I tell them about your contraband? Or about breaking and entering?
The man who I’d beaten up on the hill wouldn’t give me a gun, either.
Me: What do you want?
>>I just want to help.
Me: Right. What do you really want?
>>I took care of the guy watching your house, didn’t I?
That made me pause. A jolt like I’d had to hit the brakes at a sudden stoplight. First one cigarette butt, then a half dozen. The almost comical layering of boot prints, erasing the shoe prints. And the weight behind the fence? Was the texter Langer or was Langer dead? But I couldn’t bring myself to ask that.
Me: I don’t want help like that.
>>Hellbender thinks you do want help like that. Hellbender thinks you need help like that.
Me: Stay away from my house.
>>Oh, I have. If I wanted to be in your house, I would.
Me: Just stay away!
I waited a minute. Two minutes. No reply.
A neighbor was mowing their lawn. A leaf blower sounded somewhere in the distance. A bird was singing from a tree above me.
I picked up the gun, hid it under my jacket until I could stash it in Shovel Pig. Along with ammo clips.
I don’t know what army Hellbender thought I would be fighting, but it was a lot of bullets.
[49]
Staring at the gun, I felt my grandfather closer than ever. I had good reason to push his ghost away—and I worked at it the hardest when I was around my daughter. I couldn’t relax knowing he lived within me. We called him “Shot” behind his back. He called me “Bullethead” to my face. He liked to shoot bottles and deer. He went off like a shot. He was shot. It rhymed with his real name, and maybe reducing him to triteness felt like containing Shot in a box. His father’s father had established the farm, a homestead specializing in nothing and in doing everything ground down to nubs in a world of modern machinery and specialization. One hundred acres become fifty in a generation. As if Shot’s anger kept choking the land. Shot’s brand of stupid, which felt so unnecessary. My father wasn’t stupid, but he let Shot make unwise decisions.
What made things worse: we were surrounded by normal farm families, doing normal, understandable farm things. Not given over to stupid schemes, like the time we tried to grow boutique crops for hipsters because some rep convinced Shot to “give it a shot.” Or the idea we could lead tours of the farm and charge cash money. Or … so many things.
Even though Father was a grown man, Shot set the schedule forever and a day. Chickens, cows, crop rotations. Because he never passed all the knowledge down. Weak men know they’re poor in virtue and take their self-knowledge as evidence others will plot against them. So they want to be the only ones who know things.
Shot drowned a chicken in a water trough more than once. For crimes unknown. Always some excuse. The inchoate argument that led him to the act forgotten in the memory of the dead eye and waterlogged feathers. The stink that rose soon after.
He sure liked to hunt, Shot did, and to get really drunk doing so. If you think that’s a stereotype, you don’t know the area, because that was kind of universal. There were places you didn’t go because of drunk poachers, and you never ever thought about reporting it to the police.
When I went limp and he had to drag me, my father stopped him. But I’d already stopped him with the tactic. When I grew big and tall, muscle suited to me, Shot liked to joke that Father must’ve “done it with a cow, Bullethead.” That was his level. Slapping, hitting, and mental abuse. Shot’s idea of a good time.
By the time Shot dragged my brother to the water trough and our father had to stand in his way and physically restrain him, we all realized this sickness was transferable. Because Dad had begun to cross the line. Threaten to slap us. Punished us by overturning our cereal bowls in our laps if angry about something. To allow Shot’s energy to break him down. And by then Mother just wasn’t really there. And we had no defense for this new source of abuse, had spent our energy erecting barricades in the other direction.
Shot took his cues from an idea of nasty men, things he read in the old noir magazines he’d once collected or bad shows on TV. Where he was reading or seeing things from the villain’s point of view. If he’d been a generation younger, we would’ve at least been spared the theatrical nature of his dysfunction. Maybe gotten something more original.
Then a kind of freneticness, or fit, would come upon him, and he’d be the one half in, half out of the water trough. Find it hard to move properly. Scream out for Father to help him. The convalescence meant we heard him more but saw him less. But if we didn’t attend to him, in his bed, he would let us know about it when well again. Nor did he want to go to a doctor.
Shot made my brother read to him when an invalid. The racy, uncomfortable stories in those magazines. The ones with the ripped-bodice women on the cover and some steely-eyed private eye in the backdrop. Lots of leg and no sense. I meant to burn those magazines if I could, but I never summoned the nerve. What would it have mattered anyway? They already lived in his head.
I was beginning to feel my grandfather surging up inside me. All of that rage, that energy, and it had to have someplace to go. Just the parts I could use. If you could harness such a thing.