Winter Loon(17)

On occasion, he’d open the door to my bedroom after I turned out the light to sleep. Mostly he would loom backlit in the doorway, though twice he’d sat on the end of the bed, not speaking at all. I felt bad for him, missing his daughter that way. Still, though, I didn’t utter a word, preferring to fake sleep and hope the moment would pass unmarked. He brought the feed store home on his skin and, had it not been for the mix with cigarettes and alcohol, it might have smelled natural and good, a bale of hay or a full grain silo. But with his bad habits layered on top, his smell was suffocating and foreign. The smell of him is what woke me in that week after the funeral, images from the envelope still fresh in my mind, dirt fresh on her grave. He lifted the blankets and lay down in the bed next to me, shifting me off balance. I wanted to tell him to get away but I didn’t know how. All I could manage was a shriveled whimper as I willed Gip away, willed myself to disintegrate. His big paw was on my shoulder in the next motion. He flung his leg over me and pinned me down.

In my ear, he whispered my mother’s name, pulled me closer to him than I’d ever been. I felt him rise and harden against my backside. I squirmed to get away. “Gip. It’s me. It’s Wes.”

He stood more surely than I would have thought possible, and I scooted against the wall. I could just make out that he was staring at me like I was the one who didn’t belong. He came at me quickly, one knee on the bed, one foot on the floor. The bridge of his thumb and forefinger pressed against my throat, sticking me to the wall like a trophy buck. He watched me squirm and struggle to breathe, then dropped his hand. He retreated to the end of the bed, his back to me, saying my mother’s name over and over, asking her ghost where she’d gone. I waited with him for the answer.

Though cowardice and fear gripped me, fantasies of murder, of cords and wires, of kicking and pummeling stoked my boiling blood, sickening me even more. Finally, wordless and spent, he walked back out. I jumped up quick, slammed the door, pressed my body against it. I felt like I’d let go of a live wire, fear and anger vibrating through me, skin to marrow. His hands were off my neck, but I felt stuck anyway, a bug on a pin. I tried to fight my imagination—Gip’s shadow in the doorway, the girl who used to sleep in my bed—but those ugly pictures cropped back up like weeds. How many nights had she been trespassed upon, in that same bed with the yellow-and-pink bedspread that suited her, not me? What lurked in that room that drew him in?

There was a time before—before my mother died, before she and my father screamed at each other constantly and slammed doors and furniture at night—when my mother would tuck me in, kiss and hug me, and say, “You’re my favorite boy in the world, Wes Ballot.” Now, I slept in her old bed, under a quilt that still smelled faintly of her, in a room covered in posters with quarter-fold creases slicing through faces of teen idols I didn’t recognize. Those smiling boys with white teeth and clean hair didn’t seem to care that the girl who used to sleep in my bed was gone.

I waited until I could hear asphyxial gasps and exhales snoring through the thin walls. Then I gathered the last of her clothes out of her side of the closet and out of the only drawer I’d given her in the dresser we shared. I pulled the posters of the watching boys down off the wall and crumpled them in wads, tossing the works onto the bedspread. Could I ward off evil by removing the temptation of her entirely? I lay down on the floor and pulled all that was under the bed out—sweatshirts and empty shoeboxes, magazines, lipstick, a leather knife sheath, and candy wrappers. I found the empty medicine bottle and tossed it on the pile and reached deeper, making sure the last remnants of her were out from under me. I heard a heavy clank and figured the 1x4 board that kept the mattress on the metal frame had fallen. I stretched my arm under the bed, feeling in the dark for what had dropped.

My hand grazed cool steel and knuckles on horn. I closed my fingers and sat back in the cubby between my bed and the wall, quieted by my find. Moonlight came in through the window, glinting off the blade as I turned the knife over in my hand. The elk-antler handle was smooth and the nodules worn. The blade curved in an upward sweep, good for unzipping an animal, good for skinning. I held still, trying to sense whether that knife’s rightful owner—whoever that might be—was standing over my shoulder. I dared to glance. I was alone. I shifted it from hand to hand, feeling its weight and balance in my palm.

I rubbed the blade with my fingertips and ran it against my palm, conjuring a fearsome genie emerging in a wisp to grant dark wishes I harbored. I set the knife down next to the picture of my mother and stared at her from the stripped bed.

We called it spooning, what she did, wrapping herself around me, all arms and legs. My dad would say, “Stop humping him, for shit sake. You’ll smother him,” which only made her nuzzle more. I can honestly say I hadn’t quite outgrown her affection. But almost. I do remember feeling the greater need shift from me to her. I’d taken already to denying her access to me—rejecting her attempts to hold my hand, turning my cheek to her when what she wanted was a kiss on the lips. My father called me a mama’s boy and he was right about that. His coming and going didn’t help, not for me or her. It was only my dwindling adolescence that disrupted the team we were, that and her dying. Now what solace I could take in the memory of her loving on me was blackened by my grandfather and what I gleaned in his intent.

She was staring back at me, that girl she was before there was me or my father or the sister, Daisy, I never met. That was the only picture I had of her, that and the ones shoved in the golden envelope. I dug those other ones out from the back of a drawer and without looking at them again threw them on the pile, bundled it all with the bedspread, opened the window, and shoved the works into the night. I put on a sweatshirt and jeans, snapped the sheathed knife onto my belt loop, then climbed out the window. If I’d been seen, someone would have thought I’d robbed the place and was making my escape, dragging my loot behind me down the railroad tracks.