West Virginia. Joe Halstead
downward gaze whenever he came to the table told him so. They talked about it a bit, but Jamie couldn’t concentrate on the conversation because he had this feeling that they were being watched by something lurking in the woods, so he looked up and saw only one constellation: Orion the Hunter. Jamie looked up at him. He never changed, never moved at all.
“Was it you that put the farcrackers in the dog’s mouth?”
“All I did was hand Kenny the lighter,” Jamie said. “He was the one who stuck the firecrackers in Rocky’s mouth. Kenny came straight up to me and said, ‘Hand me the lighter.’”
“Why’d you hand him the lighter?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just couldn’t stand to see him actin’ that way.”
“Are you lyin’ to me?”
Jamie looked at him. All he said was “no” in a tone that made it clear he was lying. He wished for a moment he hadn’t lied. Even years later, he wished he’d told the truth.
“Should I believe what you’re tellin’ me? I always have, but now—”
Suddenly their dog, Scout, ran the length of his chain and was standing near them and barking in the direction of the woods. He’d heard something. They stared at the dark woods for a beat and then Jamie furrowed his brow slightly and tilted his head and then lay back on the picnic table, his face covered with his arm, pretending to be bothered by his stomach.
“Think I’m goin’ inside,” he said.
“What’s the matter?” his father said.
“I don’t feel good.”
“Are you sick?”
Jamie shrugged. Scout kept looking into the woods and then he started barking again. Jamie and his father turned around and looked back, and out near the end of the fence they saw a fawn chasing its mother along the fence, trying to nurse, as the mother ran afraid.
Jamie stopped talking to Kenny. He didn’t want to hear about Kenny anymore and tuned out when someone mentioned his name. Kenny was arrested for statutory rape once but then got out because West Virginia is a small place and something like that’d hurt families. Jamie heard he’d gotten married and worked in a coal mine. But he never talked to him again.
After he told the story, Laura talked to him without looking at him, as if absorbed by something invisible in the corner. She talked about work and he was nodding, but the words weren’t adding up to anything, like those books where people mark out all but a few words to create an enigmatic and entirely absurd poem.
“You sound a little nervous,” he said, “or something.”
“I sound nervous?” Her tone became harsh. “Maybe you’d like to tell me more about West Virginia and killing dogs, because you—I mean, I loved that.”
“OK, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve told you that story, OK?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, I just don’t understand why someone would want to do that. Especially these days. I mean, it’s—you know—I just don’t see the point.”
“I know,” he said, frowning as he checked a text from the fashion design student: “just talked to Sara And she said it was cool and I think she just wants to talk and work it out,” and barely a second after it appeared he texted back “OK cool” and clicked off the screen.
Laura’s eyes were half closed and she was buzzed.
“Neither one of us wants to admit that something’s wrong with you,” she said.
Jamie sighed and leaned his head back and looked at his iPhone.
“You’re not a bad person,” she said, “but anyone who tells a story like that without thinking—I don’t know, you’re just seriously messed up.”
He laughed tiredly. “Seriously?”
“I think there might be something wrong with you.”
He turned to look at her face. He felt ashamed, as if something actually were wrong with him and this wrongness were obvious to the world. He decided he was going to give the rest of the conversation sixty seconds. He nodded thoughtfully, as if mulling it over, and then said, “They told me I could be like all the other redneck boys if I put the firecrackers in Rocky’s mouth.” He poured half a glass of wine and sighed. “So I keep that story in the back of my mind for one reason”—lighting a cigarette—“to remind me of who I don’t want to be.”
AFTER LEAVING LAURA’S APARTMENT, he was sort of drunk and knew he should’ve gone home, gone somewhere, maybe back to the fashion design student’s apartment, or maybe to work on work stuff (he was supposed to write three more scripts—one for a baby stroller ad, one for a lobster mac-and-cheese segment for FoodNetwork.com, and one for how to decorate a child’s room for About.com), but he didn’t want to. He walked in the middle of the sidewalk, looking at the New Yorkers as he made them zigzag through their indomitable purpose. They were young. Wearing black, thin. Walking around like they were supposed to be there. Like they could go anywhere they wanted. At some point he turned and walked down Fourteenth Street toward Union Square and he went inside Trader Joe’s and bought a deli sandwich with the rest of his cash. He was cold and he ate the sandwich outside and looked up to see stars but there weren’t any. He walked toward the 6 train station, half a block away, and suddenly had a problem with the constricted space, with people standing too close to him, with tight landscapes, with too much open space, too. It had to do with the sky-to-skyscraper ratio, with space. He swiped his MetroCard at the turnstile and got on the 6 train and it started moving through the tunnel. The train was full for that hour—there was only one empty seat—and he held on to the pole. He didn’t know where he was going. The train made a couple of stops and then he got off at Forty-Second Street and went inside Grand Central and stared up at the decorated ceiling, at the constellations arching high overhead, at Orion, shield raised, sticking to it year after year, never changing, always knowing exactly where he’s going, and the jazz music playing somewhere above as background noise had a meta effect on Jamie and he went back to his apartment.
It was two A.M. He couldn’t get to sleep and then he took Valium and thought about his father and got about two hours of sleep before he woke up, seeing his father dead on the woodpile. He tried to go back to sleep and was able to forget the scene for a while and then the whole cycle of nightmares started again. Sometimes they were of the woodpile. The worst ones were of his father parking his truck and standing on the New River Gorge Bridge.
He was lying in bed and believed he was dreaming when he saw a shadow crossing the window in the kitchen. When he became aware he wasn’t sleeping, he heard a noise and knew it wasn’t his roommate because his roommate had gone to Texas for a week, so he moved to grab a braid of copper wire wrapped in pink rubber that he kept near the door and he walked down the hallway toward the living room, the braid clenched tightly in his fists.
“I’ll fucking kill you,” he said. He sliced wildly and slammed the intruder against the wall, causing her to shout, “Ow, fuck, ow,” and then he realized it was Sara. His grip on the braid loosened and he backed away in the opposite direction of where she now stood.
“What the fuck, Sara? How the fuck did you get in?”
“Ow,” she said, “you fucking hurt me. Jesus, what the fuck is that thing?”
He told her it was a braid of copper wire wrapped in pink rubber from his father that he kept near the door for times when crazy people broke in. Moonlight was streaming through the window and now he could see more clearly. She was wearing a black V-neck T-shirt and tight zebra-print pants and was smoking a clove cigarette that contrasted with the rouge on her lips.
“You are fucked