Hummingbird Salamander(48)

Me: Do you know Langer?

>>Who doesn’t know Langer?

Cute. What if this was Langer?

Me: Who do you work for?

>>I work for no man, but every man.

Me: So your boss is a woman? And you don’t like it.

>>Nice try.

Me: Did you kill her?

A pause, then:

>>LOL! Silvina? No.

I found “LOL” and a smiley face emoticon disturbing. So ordinary. I didn’t want to normalize this “voice” on my phone.

Me: Who are you?

>>Now, why spoil the surprise?

Me: I should destroy this phone card.

>>But you won’t. You might need to contact me. In the event.

Me: In the event?

>>They find you before I find them.

Me: Them?

>>Don’t be afraid to use the gun. It’s not a trap. It’s untraceable.

Me: Who’s been killed with it before?

No answer.

Me: What do you really want from me?

No answer.

Imagine a voice in your head you hate, but it’s worse to get rid of it. Imagine you get used to it over time so you miss it if it isn’t there.

When you find the world you live in unfamiliar, alien, it’s nothing to slip into another.





[54]


Shot didn’t just teach me how to handle a shotgun. Shot was a wrestler in one of his prior lives, after the navy. The kind of wrestler who became part of traveling roadshows, more spectacle than sport. He’d been an opponent on the semi-pro boxing circuit, too, and he’d sold clothespins and other house supplies door-to-door. Before he came back to farming. I always wondered what had qualified him at farming other than that our family owned a farm. A last-ditch thing—the last ditch he found himself in he raised himself out of for a time.

That great round, flat head with the broad features, atop an ever-dwindling body. My father said I looked like him, which felt like a curse more than an insult. In the barn, on the good days, Shot would show me exotic wrestling moves that mostly wouldn’t work unless your opponent was complicit.

“You got to pretend you’re a bigger bastard than them,” he’d say. “Bullethead, you got to pretend you’re” a this or a that. A neither or a nor. Different. No problem there.

Problem was my brother wouldn’t pretend; he was just different. Or go along with the wrestling lessons. He had no interest, the kind of teenager elated by a library card. But that’s why I bore the brunt of wrestling lessons. Late in a day, before Mother, or, in later years, Father, called us in for dinner.

There was a great lowing and mooing in the barn near dusk. An audience, of sorts. As he dumped me on my ass, made me enraged as he intended, so anger would be a friend to me.

“What’s the point if you don’t feel it,” he’d say, and half beat his chest. “What’s the point if it just gets away?”

But I never felt safer with him than in those moments. He genuinely wanted to teach me, and he became a different person for an hour or two. Something of his past that meant a standard close to honor or regret or triumph meant he never hurt me then. Even if I did something wrong.

I could tell from my father’s reactions that Shot had never tried to teach him to wrestle, understood on some level that my own father resented me for what I could not control. Maybe why he sided with the rest when my brother died.

We never knew Shot’s wife, our grandmother. She’d died before we were born. No one ever talked about her.

But, then, it’s not like we ever talked about much. Only me and my brother. Until we couldn’t.





[55]


I went for a walk around the circuit that was the derelict, empty office. My mistake.

Another ghost lingered there, caught up with me.

Allie. She looked hollowed out to me. A sag to her shoulders I didn’t like.

“Have you gone to see Larry?” she asked, clutching too many file folders as if for security.

Her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. Her hand on the folders trembled. Almost imperceptibly. But I noticed.

“No. I haven’t gone to see Larry.” I was tired of the question. It felt frivolous, almost laughable. I must have sounded cold.

“Well, I did.”

“Is he better, I hope?”

“Not really. I don’t think he’s going to be ‘better’ anytime soon.”

“Well, I’ll send him some flowers.” That must have sounded cold, too.

I turned to go.

She reached out and grabbed my arm. Like a child. I could barely feel her grip. But I stopped, faced her.

“What’s wrong?” But I knew. By then, I knew.

“Larry says he was attacked. That it was planned.”

“That’s terrible.” My family was being attacked; I didn’t have much left over for Larry.

“They asked him about Silvina. They asked about taxidermy.”

“That’s strange,” I said.

But maybe it was normal, because I didn’t feel shock or panic or any of the usual emotions. Maybe by then I realized I was too far in to quit.

“Is it?” Allie snapped. “You had a bird in your desk drawer.”

Everybody knew things they shouldn’t.