Heathens

by Josh Cook

          Gary axed the last of his framing crew with a curt voicemail. 
          “Reggie—Gary. I’m at Northwest 50th and nobody’s here. I’ll leave your bags by the curb.” The brick-sized phone tapped the dirt when he missed the receiver. He took the four tool belts from the truck bed and flung them into the street. One heave for each of their shared problems. Late. Drunk. Friggin liars. Backlogged child support—probably backlogged STDs too. 
          “Sayonara, you sons of syphilis,” he said, looking at the spray of nails.  
          He was fried—beyond. Ready to hop up onto the fresh floor trusses and take a maul to the whole damn thing. Rip braces and set Bildrite aflame. Charge a ticket to Reno and fuck all. He sat in his truck, opened a Sports Illustrated: Swimsuit Edition, shut it, and threw it in the dirt. 
          The phone tweedled. 
          “Gary, come on, man, my kid had a dentist appointment, and while I was there I had them fix this crown…” Chatterbox Chad. The worst of the bunch. He hit “end” and powered the phone off and drove all the way to Rochester straight to The World of Wheels, where he traded in his rust heap for a flashy new four-by-four with a CD player and separate passenger/driver climate control knobs, endorsing a debt he knew he’d struggle to pay back for years. No matter. While he was at it, he swooped into a place called CD Warehouse on the edge of downtown and bought Boston’s Don’t Look Back because the new truck didn’t even have a tape deck, and he’d worn out his stack of standbys—Reba, Garth, Rod Stewart—so screw it. He bought Whitney and Brooks & Dunn too. 
          Gary relished the new-car smell, hit the cruise control, slipped in the Boston disc, and drove all over Owatonna and Faribault in search of Rita, who’d left him in the mud exactly one week before. He’d shown her an empty lot, and as they stood in front of the fresh footings and foundation, foundation that would eventually become a split level in a new tract development, he’d suggested marriage. She pinched his arm. She hadn’t even met Isaac yet, the big dummy, but Gary wasn’t ready for her to meet Isaac, and he stood there stuttering and making up excuses. She screeched away in her junk Honda. He’d thought of her every day since: her scars from teenage longing, CHUCK and DANBOY carved with a protractor into her thigh, her chirping electronic poker games, her menthol smell, and the way she pinched his ear whenever Mel Gibson came on the screen. When the new truck made a little “bing” indicating low fuel, he came to and felt a tweak of regret, like a popcorn kernel wedged into his gums. 
          He used his backup-backup credit card inside Leroy’s Bait! Gas! Guns! Videos! and stretched his legs, admiring the RiceKrispies wrapper blue of Marilyn—that was the first name that popped into his head—and how she twinkled even in the gray light. The soybean field across the road swooshed. His pits had gone marshy. It was warm for May in Minnesota. He fiddled with his ring and walked toward the edge of the field. 
          He’d been with Rita for two months; Maddie had been dead for four. His friends (his conscience? the guys on his crew?) would say, Holy moly, Gare, what’s your pecker in such a rush for? Would say, Think about the kid, Gare. Or they’d raise their eyebrows and turn in that passive Midwestern way that had been starting to peeve him the fuck off lately. Truth was, he’d grieved the marriage long ago. It had always been a lurch. Much to his shame and the shame of his father, Reverend Walter—always in his head—he’d shacked up with bikini mags and eventually full-on nudie mags around the time Isaac was born fourteen years ago and, till now, ‘til Rita came along, had kept up the habit, hoarding it all in the locked basement closet next to his hunting rifles. He and Maddie: in sickness and in fits and starts. If it weren’t for losing their virginity to one another at Crown Bible College in Jerk-Wad Jeff’s kissing closet, they might’ve gone separate ways from the get-go. She was studious, double-majoring in music and elementary ed. He was diddling around; lifting whole cars into the commons area with Jerk-Wad and Sethy and Richard; getting sick off fatty cigars in the woods behind campus; drawing lewd pictures of dull-as-dishwater profs; having the goddamn time of his life. He lasted one semester. Maddie kept on, though, admiring his growing framing business, his corny jokes, his flirtations with bad-boy-ism. They were lucky she didn’t get knocked up that night in the closet—Crown would’ve booted them. It was against the rules to even hold hands on campus. Once he and Maddie started having sex, they couldn’t stop. They took camping trips to Willow River. Praying for forgiveness with marshmallows stuck to their fingers. Promising this would be the last time. They eventually confessed to campus leaders and church mentors, who urged marriage. Their guilt followed them down the aisle. After they said their vows, the sex turned tentative, dutiful, monthly if they were lucky, clouded with the memory of spoiling their purity and never really getting the chance to know each other.    
          He pitched the ring into the soybean field. He rolled out of Leroy’s and, at the end of the two-block main drag in Medford, spotted Rita’s little white Honda in the back nook of the gravel lot and pulled into Patty Anne’s Beer Hall. The car hunched, swallowed up in prospering corn stalks, tires fitted into divots. Gary sat gazing at the back door, which was scuffed with boot streaks. His pulse hammered in his throat. His mind slid to Maddie’s will. If you take another, Isaac must adore her. Adore, accept—what’s the difference? He waited a moment, as if for a response, and then said, “Thirty-six going on dead here, hell if I’m gonna wait,” and went on potting sunflower shells into an empty Big Gulp. 
          Inside Patty Anne’s, the lights hung low like alien saucers, dimmed in crooked rows over the tattered carpet and high tops that stood straight with the aid of lumped-up napkins. Patty Anne’s was a dump even by dive standards. It wasn’t country music squawking from a tinny boombox in the corner but Ella Fitzgerald’s “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan.” The high warble was piercing, and the lows were so low he could barely hear the music. Ella confessed that Satan was at her gate. 
          On Sundays after church, Maddie cranked Ella and drank Zinfandel and ran the vacuum. Church after church, she’d called it. A few years back, they’d gone Methodist, for which Rev. Walter, a strict Southern Baptist, had all but shut them out. Holiday cards arrived, replete with Bible verses suggesting their imminent damnation. Not a word from his mother but a tiny scrawl: Gloria. Not “Mom,” not “Grandma,” no well-wishes nor invitations to visit. Gary froze in the dark entry hall, blinking away the pinwheels. 
          Rita sat at a high table in the corner. Above her, a taxidermied Muskie. She and Patty Anne were the only ones there, smoking Virginia Slims. In the middle of the table, a half-empty bottle dripped sweat. Behind the usual bar smells, there was something perfumy, like vanilla or butterflies, and Gary kind of liked it, despite the biting ache in his gut and Rev. Walter’s voice condemning the drunks and the reckless—the heathens. He forced a low cough. 
          Rita laid her cigarette gently down in the groove of the ashtray and flopped her arms on his shoulders. He was a head taller, so she locked her fingers behind his neck and pulled him down. 
          He meant to say hello, but the only thing that came out was, “Oh.” Her breath was minty, and he squeezed her well-padded body. Here was a woman. A woman who knew the world and knew what she wanted from it. Free of all the should’s and have to’s that had plagued him his entire life. When she wanted to go for a walk, she said “Shake it, babe.” When she wanted space, she said “Get.” And when she wanted sex? She said, “Giddy up.” Well, not those words exactly, but Gary often imagined her saying them as she kneaded his love handles. 
          Gary eyed the “Janine” tattoo in Edwardian script above her left breast. It was her sister, two years passed from breast cancer. The grayed roots of Rita’s hair betrayed the bleached frizz that fell past her shoulders. He ran his fingers through it. When he caught a snarl, her head jerked back. 
          “Easy, tiger.” She sucked on his neck for a few seconds, and he felt her teeth. 
          “What are you drinking?” he asked. 
          “The good stuff.” She smirked at Patty Anne, and Patty Anne gave Gary the dancing eyebrows. 
          “OK,” he said. He didn’t know the first thing about good stuff/bad stuff.  
          “Jesus, Gare. Sorry about that day,” she slurred. Before Rita, he’d been a teetotaler, and he still didn’t know—was this drunk? Or just playacting, gone slack from a glass or two? 
          He fingered a Post-it note in his pocket. On it, the number for Timeless Developers, big-shot builders who’d been buying up farmland in the name of suburban oasis. Townhomes, tract homes, fresh asphalt. Word had it they’d been looking for contractors. Gary loved cornfields and the great wide open of Stearns County, but he also loved fresh sod and pavement, clean, simple homes that worked, door knobs that clicked into place and twisted instead of falling off every time you reached for the Tums. He opened the Post-it. It’d been there in his lucky jeans since before Rita. He pictured the three of them at a dining table now, a game of Go Fish spread out before them. New carpet smell. Rib-eyes on the cedar deck. No more dinners on TV trays but a proper dining table. A black lab whining at the porch door. 
          Patty Anne did the itsy-bitsy spider on his shoulders as she walked to the ringing landline behind the counter. 
          “How about that new Shania?” Gary called out. “Got any Shania? ‘Feel Like a Woman’ or something like that?” 
          “Patty Anne’s, what’s your poison? Hello? Hello? Choke on my muffin top, asshole!” She hung up and started pouring near-empty rail spirits and syrups into a mixing glass, flicking pour spouts into the dirties bucket.
          “Shania? Real sensitive man here, Rita, shit.” She packed the mixer with ice, shook it, and poured the concoction into three glasses. 
          “The hell?” Rita said, holding up the glass to the light. It looked like pond scum.  
          “Suicides,” Patty said. She downed hers and said, “Great-Grandma Doris, that’s good!” 
          The landline rang again. This time, the caller responded, and Patty stretched the cord into the back. 
          Rita was off in la la land, lighting another cigarette and playing her handheld poker game. 
          Gary went over to the boombox and hit play on the tape deck. Tom Petty sang about some girl in Indiana and Mary Jane. He never could stand the guy’s nasally voice, but he let it play. 
          Rita giggled and said, “I’m whacked, Gare. Seven out of ten on the D scale.” He raised a brow, and she said, “D-runk.” She farted, and both of them smiled. The game blooped and she threw her hands in the air. “Twenty thow! Ka-ching!”  
          “You’re ridiculous,” he said. He took the Suicide and drank it all down. His face went rollercoaster tight. The shit tasted like toilet cleaner and pine needles and smoke and bile, but it also unbolted something in him. There was no “adore” or “accept.” It was all a farce. 
          “How about—you want to take that 20K to Vegas?” he said. 
          Rita sang along with Tom Petty.    
          “A girl like you,” he said. 
          “I’m in the weeds,” she said, blowing smoke. The game tweedled and made a crashing sound. 
          “Guy like me—I mean—we—you know—I like gambling.” 
          The game made a mad buzz, and Rita threw it across the room. She betrayed no emotion and sat smoking for a few seconds and then said, “I hate that stupid thing anyway,” and laughed. He laughed with her. She slapped him playfully and said, “Go get it for me!” 
          He got the game and, as he handed it over, said, “You know your ring size by chance?” 
          She choke-laughed, sounding like the engine of a broken-down beater trying to start. 
          “Someday, I mean.” He motioned to Patty Anne—another Suicide. 
          “Jesus Christ,” Rita said. 
          Patty Anne mixed and shook. 
          Rita put one hand on his thick, sunburned neck, and with a crunchy edge, said, “Don’t fucking tweak me around, hon.” She slapped him with a force somewhere between playful and not. 
          Patty Anne set the Suicide in front of him, then went back behind the bar and downed her own. 
          “Gah, that’s good!” 
          Come on, Gary, he told himself. Tap the nail, pound it, drive it home. 
          “Come meet my boy, though. OK?” He sipped and then drank. “I mean, I want you to meet him.” 
          Rita turned squarely toward him, pulled her stool close so their knees were touching. 
          “Last week, nay. And now, yay?” She sucked on her cigarette, mostly ash now. “Are we just fucking around, Gare? Or do you just want to chasten the lynx?” She made a show of licking her lips, and then she reached into the front of her shirt and tugged on her bra strap a few times and snapped it. 
          He took a step toward the door, and Rita got up and put her hands on his chest. 
          “Gary Goo Goo,” she said. She tugged his pinky. Clank of dishes from the back. Static fuzz of Patty Anne searching the radio. Rita grabbed his crotch and made him bend lower. 
          “You just want to fuck around?” she said, putting her tongue in his ear. “Goo Goo, Gare Bear. That what you want?” 
          Gary stroked his jaw, hoping it might produce a psalm or proverb. His pseudo-proposal hadn’t buried any uncertainty. His head buoyed. Forecasts flashed like sun off white caps: him, Rita, Isaac—where? Doing what? There’d be no Go Fish, no trips. He was broke till the next big gig, and he hardly cared enough to go looking. Isaac had hardly spoken to him since Maddie died. He held Rita’s Suicide, untouched, to his lips, the liquid giving them a minty cool, but he didn’t tip the glass. Shut up, he told Rev. Walter. Shut up. He set the glass down and stared at the pinball machine: Bride of Pinbot, a cartoon image of a cyborg seductress, her high heel a dagger, eyes lit up in electric blue. 
          Adore, accept. What was the goddamn difference? He massaged the bridge of his nose. 
          “It’s not you,” he said. “It’s not you.” 
          Rita let out a long sigh.  

          He doubted everything. He wanted her now, but would he want her tomorrow? He did, and he didn’t. 
          “Okay,” she said. “How about it? Let’s meet Ivan.” 
          He laughed, laughed into Rev. Walter’s invisible face set before him. 
          “Isaac,” he said. “It’s Isaac.”   
          “Your boy,” she said. “Your son,” she said, dragging out “your” and slurring “son” so it sounded like some unfortunate Swedish name, “Yourzen.” 
    
          Gary drove ten miles under the limit and flipped on the headlights, even though the sun wouldn’t set for another four hours. He felt guilty about the truck, and guilty for wallowing about feeling guilty and about not wanting to do anything but sit in his underwear and watch daytime TV all day, and he vowed to call Timeless Developers first thing in the morning and put an ad out for some new guys. He raised a brow toward Rita, though her attention was lost in a bundle of white cedar and dogwood. 
          She was the caretaker of an apartment complex. As long as the renters weren’t setting fires or clogging sinks, she set her own hours, watched Jeopardy!, did crosswords, read vampire novels. She called herself a Glorified Housekeeper. 
          “If I can get this Timeless job,” he said, “I was thinking about Reno. Reno—Vegas. I don’t know. You know?”
          “You’re bluffing,” she said. “What job?” 
          “What?” 
          “You ain’t got that kind of cash.” 
          He spread his arms, as if to say, look around. 
          “Mm hm,” she said. 
          “What? I got contacts. There’s a few things cooking.” 
          “OK, Gare,” she said. She put a hand on his thigh and started nodding off. 
          He’d framed a new addition just off her complex’s entryway with Chatterbox Chad. That’s how they met: her walking past and commenting lewdly on their tool bags and “big old hammers.” One night, when he was there alone,wrapping up a compressor hose, she put her hand in his tool belt and led him into her apartment and stuck a finger up his back gate. Afterward, she massaged his callused feet, trimmed his yellowing toenails, and listened to him talk about Maddie. 
          “You’re so funny, Gare Bare,” Rita said. “You’re so cute, Goo Goo Bear Gare.” Her head thumped the glass. 
          His lips were numb from the Suicides. He dug some Tic Tacs from the middle console and chewed up ten at a time, checking the rear view and side mirrors. 
    
          The house was quiet, no video game kabooms or baseballs slapping the tarp strung between the two cottonwoods in the backyard. Gary found a note on the kitchen counter. “Hanson’s—back later.” Hanson was a slim farm boy who had the manners of the saints. Rita hung on his shoulder as he eyed the girlish handwriting, the bubbly a’s and swooping k. 
          “Aw,” she said, “bummer, sweetie.” She tongued his neck and slipped into the hallway. She thudded into the wall. The bathroom door clicked shut. 
          He relished the momentary silence and felt his stomach unroll like a blueprint. When did Isaac become such a mouse? It was pathetic. But what was even more pathetic was that Gary hadn’t done a damn thing to prevent it. The toilet flushed. He shuffled some bills into a neat pile on the Formica table. The phone blinked red, meaning the messages were full of a litany of shit excuses from his shit guys. He erased them all without listening. He felt itchy and sticky with sweat and sawdust. He hadn’t showered in days. Everything said and unsaid glued to him like traces of dust and pubic hair. He sensed Maddie as a vague presence, eyeballing this hussy, who’d stumbled from the bathroom and was now belly up on the beat-up wraparound. He went to the kitchen and loaded a cup with ice cubes. Rita began to snore. 
          He threw a few socks in the laundry, watered the already-dead plants in Isaac’s room. Sorted through the recycling—for what? There was a lone bird chirp outside. The untouched Star-Tribunes on the table. A streak of grime on the fridge handle. His ears rang. He couldn’t focus. He stood on the threshold between the kitchen and living room, watching Rita. She took her sleep in forceful breaths, whistling and snorting. He told himself to keep moving, but what was there to move toward? All throughout their affair, he’d been waiting for the right time for Isaac to meet Rita, and now that he was ready, he didn’t want it. The wrongness made his legs feel leaden, the way they felt each morning on the job site, as he dawdled around the kitchen. 
          He sat, and in a moment he was up again. He rushed out to the truck and drove ten minutes to the Salvation Army off Main Street, where he’d dumped Maddie’s stuff weeks earlier, and he began buying back everything he could find. He clicked through hangers and found item by item, all different sizes, charting her sickness and battles with weight loss. Before her liver and spleen had begun to swell, before she’d even been diagnosed, she’d dropped nearly fifty pounds on a headlong diet of pills and Lean Cuisines. Here, heaped in the cart, was the extra-large blouse with epaulets. The large denim button-up she wore pulling weeds, with its grass stains and rusty half-moons under the arms from sweat. The plain tank tops in which she’d looked fragile as an eggshell. He lifted a shirt to his face. It was dank and mothball-y. He pawed at the pile, hoping to find at least one garment with a hint of her smell: fresh apple and conifer, a subtle tang of sandy beach and the funk of potting soil. He scooped up necklaces, bracelets, dumbbells and jump ropes and Halloween costumes, and when he filled one cart he grabbed another, his cross trainers chirping as he took tight corners. His broad shoulders rammed into shelves, knocking housewares off hooks. When he checked out, the kid at the counter said, “It’s a little early for Halloween,” in a deadpan manner, and Gary took his “ring for service” bell from the counter and threw it across the store. 
          Back home he checked on Rita. Her breathing had gone steady and quiet like a baby’s. Her hair draped around her, golden and gray in the lowering sun. He kept on. 
          He shoved the crate of jewelry and knick-knacks under Isaac’s bed. He unloaded the bags and placed the items back where they were before Maddie died. The vases, handkerchiefs, photo albums, movies—American Gigolo, Days of Heaven— the jazz cassettes, everything. In the garage he hung garden tools next to the stuff The Salvation Army hadn’t accepted in the first place: poster boards and dried-out markers and half-used sheets of smiley-face stickers from her second-grade classroom, the cards from parents of former students, who said she was “the best teacher ever,” filled with stories of how she’d stayed late or gone the extra mile or made a kid feel special. He’d only read a handful and jammed the rest in a pail from Isaac’s sandbox days. He couldn’t take it: her life at the school was a life he had never really known nor cared about, and he kicked himself for it but went on ignoring it anyway because it was too late, and his daydreams had flung too far into the future. There were dusty packets of marigold, day lily, foxglove. He assembled the mannequin from her sewing days. He rigged up the fishing rod he’d bought her that she never used, snipping the slack in the line after tying the lure. He went back inside and, upon seeing Rita still passed out on the couch, said to no one, “What are you doing?” 
          He set about clearing everything he’d just replaced, boxing it up again, shoving it into the back of his truck. He opened the fridge. For four months he’d pushed aside the too-sour feta, the vinaigrettes, the Lean Cuisines and fruit popsicles and the blueberry mineral water in the pantry, letting them either expire or grow green hair. He decided he didn’t need the heart-shaped cake pans, pie pans, roasting pans, crock pots piled up beneath the all-important skillet, grill, and griddle. He cleared the salad tongs, the Mother Goose cookie jar, the embroidered oven pads, and—plunging back into the fridge—black lettuce wrapped in plastic, spicy pickles, imitation mayo, and something so nasty and puke-smelling wrapped in foil that it made his butthole pucker. Lastly, a Tupperware dish of lasagna, the last vestige of her cooking. He opened it up, put it on a plate and, despite the mossy black and green hair on top, slid it into the microwave. When it was heated, he stuck his nose close, lifted the top sheet of pasta, and poked his finger into the mixture of tomato sauce and sausage and ricotta. He considered downing the whole slab as one last toast, even grabbed it like a sandwich and opened his mouth, but just then, when Rita murmured about ordering delivery from Carmela’s on Main, Gary came to. What was he doing? The energy of her hands and the precision of her touch. She’d always sampled, seasoned, and stirred as she cooked. All that effort and she would only eat a bite, declare it perfection, pop another diet pill, eat a yogurt. He’d ignored her sickness like he’d ignored her diet binges. Rita stirred again. He swallowed, slapped himself a few times, dropped the lasagna in the trash, tied the bag, and tossed it into the barrel outside the back door. 
          He found a small bottle of tequila in Rita’s purse. Settling into the rocking chair where Maddie had nursed Isaac, he watched Rita smack her lips, coming to. If he were going to be wrong, he might as well be drunk. He choked down the tequila. He felt a hot gush in his face. He took his pants off. Rita’s eyes shot open, and she cackled. “Get over here with that thing,” she said. “You big dummy.” 
          “Fuck off, old man,” Gary said to Rev. Walter, who was gripping Gary’s face now with his paddle-like hands and shaking him, saying in the name of Jesus, in the name of Jesus! 
          “The hell?” Rita said.     “You look like a fever.” 
          He sprinkled the last of the tequila in his palm and licked it and climbed on top of her. “You and me and the devil makes three,” he said. “Can you do me a favor?” 
          “Long as you don’t yack on me. You sure you’re OK?” 
          “Can you say ‘giddy up’?” he said. 
          She studied him. “Alrighty, cowboy. Nice and slow.” 
          They kissed, and, without warning, the side door creaked open and slapped.  
          “What the Sam Heck?” Gary said.  
          Rita let out a great rasping laugh. 
          “Shit, shit, shit,” he said. 
          “Oh, that was too good! Your hairy ass all willy-nilly in the air.”
          Gary jumped into his pants and tossed the tequila bottle in the trash. There was a blast of music from Isaac’s room: raucous screams and fuzz. 
          The clatter of drawers opening and closing. Warblers peeping away in the birdfeeder, pecking at the last of the seed. 
          Gary would continue to shell out for Isaac, who’d find his own way in the world. He showed little interest in Gary’s pastimes. And what interest he had shown was fickle. They’d fished for walleye in Devil’s Lake and smallmouth near the Canadian border and hunted mule deer at Rev. Walter’s ranch in Montana. But even at fifteen, Isaac had a slackened grip on the .30-06 and a lazy flick to his cast, which made Gary wonder when the boy’s mousy appetite for the world would turn more ravenous. What would he say to him now? Nights, five minutes into Law and Order or The Wonder Years—which used to be the boy’s favorites—Isaac would go into his room and shut the door. He claimed homework. Enough to keep them in separate rooms for what seemed a lifetime. Gary never saw Isaac making notes or flipping flashcards, only piles of books, papers, pencils—evidence that he shared a house with another living being. Sometimes, though, he felt their silent exchanges through the walls.  
          Rita shrugged, saying it was no big deal, blooping away on her poker game, saying everyone’s seen their parents do it, kids will be kids.  
          He paced. When Rita asked for water, he grabbed two lukewarm Diet Cokes from the pantry and handed her one.  
          “I don’t know how to talk to him,” he whispered. 
          She motioned for him to sit. She slid her hands up his shirt and played with the hair around his belly button. He skirted free, went to the kitchen, grabbed a glass from the cupboard, and dropped it. 
          “Jesus H,” Rita said. She came to him, her hands on his shoulder making little circular patterns like he was a sad kitten. Part of Gary wanted to lie down in the bed of broken glass and let Rita walk all over his back, and part of him wanted to lean into Rita, allow her to coddle him and tell him everything would be OK. She would allow neither. She was neither motherly nor sadistic, and he supposed that’s what he liked about her. She was practical, no-bullshit, middle-of-the-road. She took the magnet from the fridge and dialed Carmela’s from the landline, tucking the phone into the crook of her neck as she swept the glass. “Supreme good with you?” she asked. 
          “I hate olives,” he said. 
          She rolled her eyes and shooed him. “Go talk to him.”   
          He went out to the garage and climbed into the captain’s chair of his Alumacraft. Chatterbox Chad’s band saw sat in the corner. Everyone in his life was a magnet of want, all pulling on limbs he couldn’t even feel.
          Isaac came out, head down. He was short for his age, and he’d been on this oversized clothes-wearing kick, so, with his shaggy hair and increasingly skinny frame—and was that some kind of choker?—he looked like a slacker Muppet boy drowning in black. Didn’t even look like a ball player. Didn’t even look like a man. He looked, Gary thought, like a pussy. There it was, that word he’d been shoving down for years, that word the guys on his crew used easily and often. 
           Isaac stood in the yard clutching a duffle bag and kicking dandelion heads. 
          “Leaving?” Gary called. 
          “Night game at Hanson’s, then a bonfire. I’ll be staying over.” 
          “Need a ride?” 
          “Did you see my note?” 
          “Sure,” Gary said. 
          Cottonwood fluff fell around them. He’d gotten out of the boat and was looking around for something to occupy his hands. He shuffled to the garden hose and unwrapped it and started re-wrapping it. 
          “I was wondering if I could go to Hanson’s,” Isaac started. “For the summer, I mean. They’ve got a cabin and his mom—she asked me.” 
          Gary struggled with a kink in the hose.
          “It’s by Bayfield. Way up by—”
          “I know where it is.” 
          “Well, they’re going all summer and—yeah.” 
          The hose had become a snake in Gary’s imagination. It swiveled and reared up at his chest.  
          Eventually, Isaac said, “You’re gone a lot, anyway, so,” he shrugged, “I don’t know.” 
          “I don’t know,” Gary said back. “I thought they had a farm. How do they keep up a cabin if they have a farm?” 
          “Not them. Their grandparents. Matt just helps out.” 
          Gary grew impatient with the particulars. He said, “Was thinking you could help out on the job site. Had to cut my guys loose. You remember Chatterbox? Come on and make some money and we could take a trip somewhere.” 
          Isaac looked at him blankly. 
          “You complain about them anyway,” he said. “All the time. It’s, like, all you talk about.”  
          The snake reared again, settled, waited. 
          “They’re all losers,” Isaac said. “Why do you hire losers?”  
          Gary snatched Isaac’s arm, torqued it, and said, “Don’t be a prick. These guys have families.” Gary was about to twist harder, but Isaac’s animal eyes made him loosen his grip.  
          Isaac snapped away, flapping his hand as if burned. The hose wobbled to Gary’s feet. Over his shoulder, Isaac said, “Asshole!” and “What is your freaking problem, dude?” Then the door slapped and Gary stood in the quiet. 
          The boy’s arm was all squish and bone. Where had he gone? He’d once been a medium-framed kid, strong with a powerful chest, and he would lift four, five, six two-by-fours at a time on the job site with Gary on the weekends, grinning and saying, “Think I could do more, Dad?” Gary’s lungs ached. There was no salvation, no redemption. It was just the blind self leading the blind self. The silence opened up before him. The snake had come for him, and he had let it swallow him whole. This was as close to a physical fight as he’d ever come in his entire life, and shame spread across his entire body in a rage of heat. Rev. Walter came to mind: slap of pigskin against his naked ass. Slap of pigskin against the backs of his legs. Slap of gilt-edged Bibles on the lectern. He felt pulled behind the shed, and he beat his fist on the aluminum siding until an ache numbed his entire forearm. He slid to the ground. A diesel engine chugged up the driveway. The screen door slapped. The engine revved, faded. Isaac was gone. 
          He went in and sat on his bed until the glow behind the curtains dimmed. Rita came in and leaned into him. There was a tear-away calendar of inspirational Bible verses on the dresser. “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility.” He buried his face in her breasts. Rita led him out to the living room, where she sat with him in the cold glare of the TV.     
          Later, they drank Diet Coke and ate some awful metallic-tasting pizza loaded with olives. A movie about a private investigator searching for something or other. Gary woke at 2:17 AM from the couch and turned off the TV. Rita was gone. He went into Isaac’s room and studied the baseball memorabilia. He thought of his own baseball days, pick-up games with his cousins on the farm and playing catch with Rev. Walter on the sprawling dirt driveway. The funk of the infield when it rained. Later, construction crew softball games and Maddie in the bleachers, Isaac in her lap, and him, thinking how he couldn’t wait to toss the ball around with that little bag of blubber. What seemed like an hour passed as he flicked Isaac’s goofy blue lava lamp off and on, off and on. When he turned, he nicked his ankle bone on the crate poking out from under the bed.