The Ones That Got Away Read online

  The boy nodded, closed his eyes to swallow.

  Because of his frozen pants—the creek—the father had to sit with his legs straight out. “A good sign,” the boy said after the father was asleep.

  The next morning his father pulled another dead branch down, so he had two sticks now, like a skier.

  The boy watched him walk off into the bright snow, feeling ahead of himself with the sticks. It made him look like a ragged, four-legged animal, one long since extinct, or made only of fear and suspicion in the first place. The boy palmed some snow into his mouth and held it there until it melted.

  This time his father was only gone thirty minutes. He’d had to cross the creek again. Slaney was cradled against his body.

  “He was just standing there,” the father said, pouring the meat out for the boy. “Like he was waiting for me.”

  “He knows we need him,” the boy said.

  One thing he no longer had to do was dab the blood off the meat before eating it. Another was swallow before chewing.

  That night his father staggered out into the snow and threw up, then fell down into it. The boy pretended not to see, held his eyes closed when his father came back.

  The following morning he told his father not to go out again, not today.

  “But Slaney,” his father said.

  “I’m not hungry,” the boy lied.

  The day after that he was, though. It was the day the storm broke. The woods were perfectly still. Birds were even moving from tree to tree again, talking to each other.

  In his head, the boy told Slaney not to keep being on the other side of the creek, but he was; the boy’s father came back wet to the hip again. His whole frontside was bloodstained now, from hunting, and eating.

  The boy scooped the meat into his mouth, watched his father try to sit in one place. Finally he couldn’t, fell over on his side. The boy finished eating and curled up against him, only woke when he heard voices, like on a radio.

  He sat up and the voices went away.

  On the crust of snow, now, since no more had fallen, was Slaney’s skin. The boy crawled out to it, studied it, wasn’t sure how Slaney could be out there already, reforming, all its muscle growing back, and be here too. But maybe it only worked if you didn’t watch.

  The boy scooped snow onto the blood-matted coat, curled up by his father again. All that day, his father didn’t wake, but he wasn’t really sleeping either.

  That night, when the snow was melting more, running into their dry spot under the tree, the boy saw little pads of ice out past Slaney. They were footprints, places where the snow had packed down under a boot, into a column. Now that column wasn’t melting as fast as the rest.

  Instead of going in a line to the creek, these tracks cut straight across.

  The boy squatted over them, looked the direction they were maybe going.

  When he stood, there was a tearing sound. The seat of his pants had stuck to his calf while he’d been squatting. It was blood. The boy shook his head no, fell back, pulled his pants down to see if it had come from him.

  When it hadn’t, he looked back to his father, then just sat in the snow again, his arms around his knees, rocking back and forth.

  “Slaney, Slaney,” he chanted. Not to eat him again, but just to hold him.

  Sometime that night—it was clear, soundless—a flashlight found him, pinned him to the ground.

  “Slaney?” he said, looking up into the yellow beam.

  The man in the flannel was breathing too hard to talk into his radio the right way. He lifted the boy up, and the boy said it again: “Slaney.”

  “What?” the man asked.

  The boy didn’t say anything then.

  The other men found the boy’s father curled under the tree. When they cut his pants away to understand where the blood was coming from, the boy looked away, the lower lids of his eyes pushing up into his field of vision. Over the years it would come to be one of his mannerisms, a stare that might suggest thoughtfulness to a potential employer, but right then, sitting with a blanket and his first cup of coffee, waiting for a helicopter, it had just been a way of blurring the tree his father was still sleeping under.

  Watching like that—both holding his breath and trying not to focus—when the boy’s father finally stood, he was an unsteady smear against the evergreen. And then the boy had to look.

  Somehow, using his sticks as crutches, the boy’s father was walking, his head slung low between his shoulders, his sticks reaching out before him like feelers.

  When he lurched out from the under the tree, the boy drew his breath in.

  The father’s pants were tatters now, and his legs too, where he’d been carving off the rabbit meat, stuffing it into the same skin again and again. He pulled his lower lip into his mouth, nodded once to the boy, then stuck one of his sticks into the ground before him, pulled himself towards it, then repeated the complicated process, pulling himself deeper into the woods.

  “Where’s he going?” one of the men asked.

  The boy nodded, understood, his father retreating into the trees for the last time, having to move his legs from the hip now, like things, and the boy answered—hunting—then ran back from the helicopter forty minutes later, to dig in the snow just past their tree, but there was nothing there. Just coldness. His own numb fingers.

  “What’s he saying?” one of the men asked.

  The boy stopped, closed his eyes, tried to hear it too, his own voice, then just let the men pull him out of the snow, into the world of houses and bank loans and, finally, job interviews. Because they were wearing gloves, though, or because it was cold and their fingers were numb too, they weren’t able to pull all of him from the woods that day. Couldn’t tell that an important part of him was still there, sitting under a blanket, watching his father move across the snow, the poles just extensions of his arms, the boy holding his lips tight against each other. Because it would have been a betrayal, he hadn’t let himself throw up what his father had given him, not then, and not years later—seconds ago—when the man across the desk palms a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth all at once, then holds his hand there to make sure none get away, leans forward a bit for the boy to explain what he’s written for a name here on this application.

  Slade?

  Slake?

  Slather, slavery?

  What the boy does here, what he’s just now realizing he should have been doing all along, is reach across, delicately thump the man’s cheek, and then pretend not to see past the office, out the window, to the small brown rabbit in the flowers, watching.

  Soon enough it’ll be white.

  The boy smiles.

  Some woods, they’re big enough you never find your way out.

  Till the Morning Comes

  It was supposed to stop after that summer. My mom told me it would, and when she told my dad about it—him just home from third shift, his whiskers all grown back in already, eyes hungry for something none of us ever had for him—he just licked his lips and told me to get on back in there. That he wished he had the luxury of being scared.

  Because my mom couldn’t help me then, because all she could do was sit on the couch, I’d do it, I’d walk down the hall to my room. Or, our room then, mine and Nicholas, my little brother, who my dad called Señor Accidento, like the Spanish was supposed to hide what he meant.

  Before Easter that year, it had been my room and only mine. But that Good Friday, Uncle Jamison was at the door, smiling a guilty smile. He was just turned twenty-six. I only knew it because I heard my dad say to my mom that twenty-six was too old to be living like he was. My mom didn’t disagree, but still, Jamison was her little brother, and he didn’t have anywhere else to go. And anyway, his plan wasn’t to stay forever. He was just going to work for a couple of months, maybe get enough bread saved to move on to the next thing, whatever that was going to be.

  I know I should have idolized him or something, let him be everything I planned on being, but
already with Jamison you could tell he was a walking public service announcement. I guess I should thank him, really. I might never have gone on to college without the warning he’d been.

  But I’m not going to thank him.

  For his room, the one that had been Nicholas’s—the one that my dad had had pool table plans for, before Señor Accidento—Jamison unboxed all his old high school stuff that my mom had been keeping in the attic for him. It was mostly old crackly posters and flags and T-shirts too ratty to wear anymore, but—his words—”good for display,” to remind him who he was, to show that he was still being loyal to his old plans.

  Four years after what happened happened, I’d find one of those memory T-shirts in the rag box in the garage, and hold it to my face and not let myself cry.

  As for his posters, though, they’re gone. I burned them myself, especially the velvet ones that felt like the fur of some animal not quite from our world. Band posters, from when Jamison had been on the road, all over the country. They had intricate, stoned designs all over them, and always skeletons, skeletons, skeletons.

  That summer I was twelve. The skeletons were the reason I was afraid to go back to my room anymore. To mine and Nicholas’s room. They didn’t glow, quite, but they held the light from the hall in a way that made me want to look away.

  I knew they were just pictures, paintings, whatever, but still, the way Jamison had them on either side of Nicholas’s bed, like guards, they were always looking at me when I walked past, their mouths somehow smiling like they didn’t care at all about this being dead thing.

  I’d tried walking close to Jamison’s side of the hall then just darting across at the last moment for my room, but it didn’t help. And running—that was the worst. The one time I’d tried, I’d been sure those long spindly fingers were just skating down the back of my shirt, waiting for a bunch in the fabric to grab onto, pull me in.

  I’d started wetting the bed again, yeah. After two years dry.

  Every time it happened, Nicholas would be sure to announce it at the breakfast table. My dad’s bleary eyes settling on me, some Spanish name for me forming in his head, I knew: El Pissorino, Pancho Yellowpants, Señor Wetsheets.

  I hated him.

  But, my mom said, she’d had the same problem until fifth grade herself. It would pass, it would go away, and everybody would forget.

  And Uncle Jamison, he was on her side about it, almost by default, just because my dad was tolerating him so poorly. Making such a show of it, how encumbered he was. How much he wanted to be playing pool. Every day he’d circle classifieds or advertisements for eight-foot tables, and leave them where we could all see how put upon he was being here. How Jamison was just one more nail in the coffin of my dad’s dreams.

  But I’m not stupid, either. He was just a dad, like all the rest. You check your dreams at the door, pretty much.

  Uncle Jamison, though.

  The job he got, from his time in the army, it was driving an ambulance. In a perfect world, he’d have worked the day shift, so been gone when my dad was home, then been home when my dad was working. But they both worked nights that summer. And every breakfast—dinner for them, in their backwards world—after Nicholas had announced that I’d “tee-tee’d the bed,” Jamison would draw what attention he could away from me, regale us with stories of the last night’s calls.

  There were home abortions, there were knife fights, and, twice, there was a woman standing on the median with a human ear in a plastic baggie, like she was just the delivery girl.

  But the story I remember most is about a family.

  The call Dispatch got was second-hand somehow, just that somebody’d seen some headlights dying way down the hill, like maybe a drunk had missed the turn. But that was over by the tracks, where the ground just fell straight away like cliffs in the movies. You didn’t drive down there, you slammed down there, and only came back up on a towrope. According to Jamison, when the cars nosedived off there, after the riders had been declared dead, they’d wait until the car’d been winched back up to even peel the people up from the seats and headliners.

  Anyway—you’ve got to picture Jamison telling it, his spoon full with eggs (he hated forks), the way he’d lean forward, his hair shaggy, his eyes hot and staring at all of us, trying to make it real—Jamison took his paramedic Robbie out there, and they found the headlights like they didn’t want to, and it was an old VW bus, all painted paisley with flowers. Hippies. Deadheads. Jamison’s old running buddies, pretty much. Where he was headed, anyway.

  “And?” I heard myself saying, even though I had to pee again, bad.

  He smiled, had me.

  It wasn’t a busload of Deadheads at all, as it turned out. Well, just one, one who’d grown up, got out, had kids now, but just had never sold his old three-hundred thousand mile bus, because that would be like cashing in his past, trading it for a used dishwasher. Not all dads leave their dreams at the door, I guess. Some hide them in the closet. And, Jamison, he was talking about this dad, sure, this Deadhead, but he was really making an argument for his posters, that he insisted to my mom would just scare me more if we packed them away with the sheets and towels. Better to leave them out on the wall, let me get used to them, let me beat them, learn to walk down that hall, right into manhood.

  “You mean to tell me some of you actually and really grow up?” my dad said then.

  Jamison grinned and looked the opposite direction.

  It wasn’t a real grin. Not at all. More like he was giving my dad this one free, just because it was morning, just because the sun was shining.

  My dad snorted and threw his balled-up napkin down onto his plate, clattered off to the morning news, the volume jacked as high as it would go.

  “Jamison,” my mom said then, when it was safe. She was warning him about this story, about his audience here—us—but he held his hand up that it was harmless, that this was nothing.

  “And when I turned the ambulance off, we could both like hear it,” he said, “coming through the window and all. Singing. Somebody down there was singing, man, just real light, real perfect like.”

  “Singing,” Nicholas repeated, as if tasting it, hearing it like Jamison had.

  “But when we got down there, that’s when we saw it,” Jamison went on, his voice dropping to a whisper now, because my mom was all the way over at the sink, with my dad’s dishes. “The two kids, this old reformed hippie’s two kids, they were in back, seatbelted in like they should have been, not hurt at all, hands in their laps just like they were at church, man.”

  “ ‘Who was that singing, y’all?’ my medic Robbie asked,” Jamison said, his face somehow even closer to us now, then he nodded, getting us to already believe the next part: “ ‘It was Dad,’ the kids said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.”

  Only, as Jamison told it, the dad here, this old freeze-dried hippie out to show his kids the way it used to be, he’d been dead-on-impact five or six hours ago, the steering wheel coring his heart right out of his body.

  But the song.

  Here Jamison started snapping, just slow at first, and then humming it in his chest, and when I heard my own voice falling in—I knew the song from somewhere, must have heard it leaking under his door once—I pushed away from the table, tried to swallow whatever was in my mouth, and stifflegged it back to mine and Nicholas’s room, only—

  This is the part I hate.

  As I passed Jamison’s room, trying to avert my eyes from the posterspace above his bed, I saw something stepping neatly into his closet, something only still there because I wasn’t supposed to have walked down the hall as fast as I had.

  A heel, bone white, no sound at all.

  My heart fell into my stomach and I peed myself right there, started crying until my dad came back to stand over me, disappointed again, enough that it came off him in waves.

  For the next week, I slept maybe four hours total, each minute of that by accident, so that I woke shuddering.
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  “Was it real?” Nicholas asked me once—Jamison’s story about the sing

  ing dad who was already dead—and I told him no, and then he asked why I was doing that, then?

  “What?”

  “With your—” He did his throat to show: I was humming. The song. It was the only way to keep myself awake.

  Because Jamison worked at night, his room was empty, and because of the air conditioner in his window, my dad wouldn’t let my mom keep his door closed, so all night, sitting in my bed, I could see his room with the light off. Part of the room.

  If it would have been school, my grades would have dropped, but as it was, the only thing that fell off was my eating.

  “He’ll snap out of it,” my dad told my mom, staring at me over her shoulder because it wasn’t a prediction he was making here, but a threat.

  “Sixth grade will be here before you know it,” my mom promised, whenever he was at work.

  I hummed to myself instead of answering, and Jamison—sent by my mom—made the effort, tried to sit me down, tell me he’d just been joshing, that of course the music never stops, that it had probably been the radio, some old 8-track or another, the kids had been confused, in shock from losing their dad, but it was too late. I already knew the song. The words had even started to come to me, some, from a place inside me I didn’t even know I had.

  Nine days after the breakfast story, deep in the watchful night, something crossed again, moving from alongside the bed to Jamison’s closet.

  I couldn’t even pee myself this time.

  And then my dad was standing there in the doorway.

  He’d been drinking, was home early, too early.

  He just stared down at me, lying there breathing all wrong, so obviously not asleep.

  Nothing crossed behind him.

  I wanted to sneak out, sleep in the living room, and did once, but woke to Nicholas tugging on my blanket. He’d got scared.

  I went back and we both slept in my bed together, front-to-back, instead of him in the cot, and in the morning he told on me again, about having an accident, and this time I hit him. It was supposed to be on the side of the head but caught him on the neck. He held the pain down under his hand and glared at me, his lips tight, but didn’t tell. It was the end of him crawling into my bed, though. The end of me using him as a shield. The end again of anything like sleep.