These Heroic, Happy Dead Read online

  I waited for her to leave before I crossed the dirt and dandelion yard. When I reached him, my father was still scowling after her departure.

  “She couldn’t even say hello?” he asked.

  “Where’s Lucy?” I said.

  At last my father looked at me. “Oh, I see,” he said. “Jim killed the dog—is that it? Jim the dog killer? What else has she been telling you?”

  Jim was my father.

  Without inviting me to follow, he went into the house. A minute later, Lucy came plowing through the door. She seemed skinny.

  “Did you miss her?” asked my father. “I bet your mother says she misses her. But then, she was just here, wasn’t she? And she didn’t seem to want to see her, did she?”

  “Hank got us a Doberman,” I said. “A thoroughbred.”

  “What I would’ve given,” my father said.

  “For what?”

  “To’ve seen her face. To’ve seen the look on Linda’s face.”

  Linda was my mother.

  After a while, I said, “What kind of trees are they?”

  My father’s shoulders rose and fell. “Walnuts, Kyle. They’re walnut trees.”

  We sat on the porch. Still preoccupied by my mother’s not getting out of the car, not saying hello, my father was in a grim mood. He clearly didn’t feel like talking. I occupied myself with Lucy, picking a disturbing number of ticks from her hide, wiping the encrusted discharge from her eyes. The sun was starting to set—the shadows of the orchard creeping like a tar spill—when a faint rumble of machinery approached and I felt her tense. Soon, a six-wheel dump truck barreled up the road. Others followed close behind. They were big and loud and traveled at a reckless speed. Debris lifted off their loads.

  “Gravel deliveries,” my father said. “Turns out there’s a quarry over there. Of course, Señor Esteban only showed the house when they weren’t running.” My father laughed, though not in a jolly way. “No surprise there,” he said.

  “Señor Esteban?” I said.

  “Our amigo over at North State Realty.” He pronounced “North State Realty” with a shrill, unrecognizable accent, intended, I gathered, to sound Latino.

  “What about Lucy?” I said. She was still rigid, straining at her collar.

  “She’s got a cage.”

  “A cage?”

  “A kennel. A pen. Hell, Kyle, you know what I mean.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Later,” my father said. He laughed again. “Mexicans in suits! And I didn’t know better?”

  When at last we went inside, I learned the reason for his stalling. He still had not unpacked. The living room was full of boxes—some opened and rifled through, others still taped shut. My father stood amid the mess with his fingers laced atop his head. He looked rueful, and I felt he might apologize.

  “A Doberman, huh?” he said.

  —

  The cage was a cage: small and barren, littered with desiccated turds. That night I let Lucy sleep in my room. In the morning we were woken by the sound of my father’s truck backfiring into the drive. I walked out to the porch and found him unloading several digging implements from the bed. A McDonald’s bag sat on the roof. My father reached inside, underhanded me a wrapped McMuffin, and said, “There are things I haven’t gotten around to doing yet—I’m aware of that.” His manner seemed stilted, as if he were reciting prepared remarks. “The reason is my position at the hardware store,” he said. “It’s managerial. Managerial in the sense that they can’t manage without me. That’s how come I moved up here—the position. I don’t know what Linda told you.”

  My father took a bite of McMuffin, chewed thoughtfully. “Also,” he added, “what I said about Esteban? That was wrong. It’s not a Mexican thing. It’s any man. Don’t trust any man in a suit. And I’m not just saying that because of what’s-his-face.”

  “Hank?”

  “I’m not just saying it because of Hank.”

  I helped him lean the tools upright against the porch. The plan was to build a fence that would give Lucy the run of the yard. My father measured out the perimeter and at each corner held a stake in place while I sunk it with a mallet. He strung a length of twine between the stakes, and we went to work with the pickax and scythe. An hour later, when the brush was clear, my father hooted.

  “Bring on the posthole digger!”

  I approached the tools and reached for a heavy, beveled bar.

  “Nope,” my father said.

  “Which one?”

  “That posthole-digging one.”

  Grinning and wiping his palms on the seat of his pants, my father came over and picked out an unwieldy two-handled contraption with rubber grips and cupped metal blades. I’d rarely seen him so pleased. That grin! On the spectrum of my father’s spirits, this was practically a manic state. “I guess Hank hasn’t taught you everything there is to know,” he said, raising the set high above his head, driving the blades deep into the ground. “I guess there’s still one or two things you can learn from your old dad.” He prized apart the handles and extracted a hefty wedge of earth.

  “Can I try?” I said.

  My father held out the digger. Without letting it go, he said, “Not too handy, Hank, is he?”

  —

  The next morning we visited the hardware store: a squat brick building with an old-timey parapet on a street so wide the cars parked perpendicular. A man stood behind the register, sorting through receipts. Squarish bifocals hung from his neck; a fat carpenter’s pencil was lodged behind his ear.

  “This your boy?” the man said.

  “Kyle,” my father said. “Kyle, George. You remember George.”

  “From the VA,” George said. He smiled at me for half a second. “Cooper’s birthday?”

  “Hello,” I said.

  George returned his attention to the receipts. He used the bifocals like a magnifying glass, holding them by the frame just above what he was reading.

  “We’re picking up some posts,” my father said.

  “Took some tools yesterday?” George said. He dropped the glasses.

  “Borrowed,” my father said. “I borrowed a couple of tools, George, yes.”

  “Travis says the shed is half empty.”

  “Travis,” my father said.

  “Well?” said George. “You know the policy. Or don’t you?”

  The bell on the front door sounded and a customer walked in. George and my father both greeted the man good morning. They watched him turn down the plumbing and irrigation aisle. George said, “Can’t keep making exceptions, Jim.”

  “This is Travis,” my father said.

  “Travis didn’t take the tools,” said George.

  “Stop saying ‘take,’ ” my father said.

  “Take, borrow. Point is, there’s a policy. Point is, the shed’s half-empty.”

  “Jesus, George,” my father said. “First you Jew me on my OT—now this?”

  George glanced with alarm toward the plumbing and irrigation aisle. “What did I say about that kind of language in the store?” he said.

  “OK, OK. But Travis—”

  “Travis didn’t take the tools,” George said again. “And know what? Travis didn’t leave the gate open. Travis didn’t tip the forklift. Travis—”

  “I’ll tell you another thing Travis didn’t do.”

  George held up a hand. “Not now, Jim, please.”

  I suspected that whatever George didn’t want to hear about had to do with the army, Cooper, or the Persian Gulf, and I was about to make myself scarce when the customer reappeared and set two copper fittings on the counter.

  “Get your posts,” said George. “We’ll talk about this on Monday.”

  “I’m off Monday,” my father said. “Remember? My kid is here.”

  George dropped the fittings in a paper bag and told the customer the price.

  —

  It took us the rest of the weekend to set the posts, install the rails, the pickets, a
nd fashion a gate over a footpath from the gigantic mailbox to the porch.

  “I think she’s got more room here than she did at Linda’s,” my father said as we watched Lucy get her bearings. “How about you?”

  “It’s nice,” I said.

  “Nice?” my father said. “She’s got more room here, Kyle, by a long shot. There’s nothing wrong with saying so.” He picked up a rock and flung it across the road.

  “Yeah,” I said, “she’s got more room.”

  My father spat. “Come on, let’s clean George’s goddamn tools.”

  —

  The lumberyard sat behind the store, a sprawling archipelago of building materials—pallets of cinder blocks and sandbags, stacks of treated pine, banded-together decking. When we arrived, a sinewy man in a hoodie was expertly handling a forklift. He darted here and there with ostentatious, adroit maneuvers. We parked outside of a low-slung shed, and the man zipped over, picking his nose with his thumb.

  “This your kid?” he said.

  “Do me a favor, Travis,” my father said.

  “George know he’s back here?” Travis said.

  “Will you do me a favor, please?”

  “George says no kids in the yard, is all.”

  “Don’t worry about George,” my father said. “Don’t worry about my kid. Just try worrying about yourself, for once, think you can handle that?”

  Travis closed his mouth to swallow, after which it fell back open. Open was default, seemed.

  “So this is your kid.”

  “Can you handle that?” my father said.

  “Only telling you what George says.”

  Travis reversed away, forklift beeping.

  The shed was lit by shop lamps spliced into an orange extension cord that drooped from the rafters. Steel racks lined the walls, loaded with cuts of wood. Between the racks stood the saws. My father ran his finger down the top sheet on a clipboard. He handed me a pair of safety goggles and bulky earmuffs. I could see that he was agitated; the encounter with Travis had upset him. Without a word to me, he leaned down and turned a handled crank beneath a metal table. A circular blade ascended through a slit. When my father flipped a switch, a motor jerked to life and the blade squealed into a silver blur.

  “Stand over there,” he said.

  I watched him position a sheet of plywood so that it lay flat and flush on the table, and as he pushed the sheet into the blade, vivid yellow sawdust spewed onto his hands and arms, sticking to the hair. He turned off the saw.

  “OK?”

  “OK what?”

  “Got it?”

  He put a fresh sheet on the table, flipped the switch, and stepped away.

  No, I guess I didn’t trust him; I guess I never really had. Still, I slid the sheet toward the blade and was amazed by how easily it cut. The sheet advanced almost on its own, moved forward by the slight catch of the teeth. When just a few inches remained, my father signaled me to let go and pulled it through from the other end. He held up the bisected pieces, smiling. His mood had changed again.

  We did a couple more cuts before the door swung open and Travis walked in. He took exaggerated notice of me standing at the saw, and then he said something to my father. I pulled the earmuffs down and heard my father answer, “Right now?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  My father turned to me.

  “Don’t touch anything,” he said.

  —

  The cut was going pretty well, and I was feeling almost cocky, when I reached the last couple of inches, the place where my father had pulled the previous sheets through from the other end. Without him, the weight of the split ply hanging off the far edge of the table, tilting like a lever on a fulcrum toward the floor, caused the remaining uncut portion to ride up on the blade. I had to lean down mightily just to keep it on the table. The entire apparatus began to buck and tremble. The wood binding on the metal produced a strident screech—a sound that was altogether wrong. Afraid my father, George, or Travis might hear that awful noise, I gave the sheet a quick, panicky shove to end it.

  A wailing brought me back. When I opened my eyes I was mortified to discover that it was me, those wails were mine. My father held me in his arms, squeezing a shop rag around my hand. It was wet and red.

  George and Travis stood in the doorway. Travis somehow appeared equal parts triumphant and appalled. “I told him no kids in the yard,” he said. “Damned if those weren’t my exact words: ‘George says no kids in the yard.’ ”

  “Shut up, Travis,” George said. Then he told my father to put me in the van.

  —

  The blade had chewed almost two inches into the seat between my thumb and index finger, severing the tendon at the meaty base of the palm. In the emergency room, I was given Vicodin and told that because of the tendon an orthopedic surgeon would need to do the suturing. My father sat in a chair in the corner, caked with sawdust. A nurse brought him papers to sign. I felt I watched them from afar, and a tenderness swelled within me, a warm longing to close the distance between us.

  “What about Mom?” the nurse asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Were you able to contact his mother?”

  “Do I need to?”

  “Well, no. I just meant—”

  “OK, then,” my father said.

  The next day, I found my hand splinted and bandaged. While I was out, George had taken my father back to get his truck. As we drove through the orchard country, I gazed at the bucket on the floor. Inside the bucket was a pair of canvas work gloves, a plastic thermos, some hats, shirts, a leather tool belt full of tools, and a portable AM/FM radio with a handle and analog tuning dial. Even in my delirium I recognized the items. They were the items my father had kept at George’s Hardware during the three-odd months he’d managed its lumberyard.

  —

  One morning a few days after returning from the hospital I woke and fumbled for the bottle of Vicodin, and when I shook two into my mouth I could have sworn that some were missing. My father was still in bed. In the living room I plucked a slice of pizza from a box and brought it to the porch.

  Our new gate stood ajar and Lucy was nowhere in the yard. I called her. I was still calling her when my father came out.

  “What’re you yelling for?” he said.

  “Lucy’s gone.”

  He rubbed his eyes. He looked haggard.

  “Someone left the gate open,” I said.

  My father sighed. “Let me get dressed.”

  We drove slowly up and down the long straight roads, shouting her name. My father shouted loudly and angrily. At a farm, a pack of dogs came rushing out from behind a barn; I saw the hope on my father’s face. It wasn’t far from there that we found her. Whatever had run her over must have been large. A good portion you would’ve had to scrape free with a spade. My father carried what he could to the bed of the truck. When he got back in, he had the smell on him.

  He sat there with his hands on the wheel, and I figured he was trying to formulate the appropriate remark. Instead, without a word, he started the engine and pulled back onto the road. He didn’t turn around; he continued in the direction we’d been headed. I figured he was going to make a full loop of the orchard and circle back to the house—was wrong there too. At the next intersection, my father kept driving. We passed three, four more orchards before I understood where we were going.

  At the turnoff, a No Trespassing sign was nailed to a telephone pole, and shortly thereafter the road descended abruptly into a gorge. As we made our way down, there rose a heavy clatter, metal belaboring stone. At the bottom was the quarry, a semicircle of sheer cliffs surrounding hillocks of broken-up basalt. Cranes moved material. My father and I were sitting in the truck, watching a backhoe scoop up a bucketful of gravel, rotate a hundred and eighty degrees, and dump the gravel into the rear of a six-wheel hauler, when a man in a blue hardhat appeared at the window.

  “Can I help you?” He had to shout.

  “I
’m looking for the foreman,” my father said.

  “Steve? Steve should be in the office.” He pointed at a mobile trailer raised on blocks. Then he said, “Maybe I can help you.”

  “No,” my father said. “It’s Steve I want.”

  He parked beside a motorcycle under a nylon cover and told me to wait in the truck. He walked up a ramp and into the trailer without knocking.

  A few minutes later, my father emerged with another man in a hardhat. This man was older and wore a long-sleeve denim shirt tucked into dungarees; his hardhat was plastered with faded stickers. My father led him to the bed of the truck.

  “That’s your dog?” Steve said.

  “Was.”

  Steve reached into his breast pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. He shook one loose and lit it and returned the pack to the pocket. “See it happen?”

  My father hesitated. “Yes.”

  “Where? When?”

  “An hour ago. On Route Sixteen.”

  Steve inhaled a long drag. He stepped over to the window and grinned at me. “What about you, Bud? Did you see it happen?”

  “Get away from him,” my father said.

  Steve continued grinning at me a moment longer, and then he moved back to my father. “Sorry about your dog,” he said. “I don’t think it was one of ours, though. In fact, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. Did you get a plate number?”

  “Did I get a plate number? No, I didn’t get a fucking plate number.”

  “Hey,” Steve said.

  Suddenly, the man in the blue hardhat, the one who’d directed us to the trailer, was there. “Everything all right here, Steve?” he asked.

  “Everything’s fine. Except this gentleman says one of our trucks killed his dog. Says he saw it happen. An hour ago. On Route Sixteen.”