Fall Back Down When I Die Read online

  Jackie looped her arm through her friend’s and introduced her to Wendell as Maddy. Then she looked about the bar conspiratorially and leaned forward to whisper. Maddy was just a baby, she said. Still in high school! That private school in Billings—but shhh, don’t tell! They worked together at the Starbucks on Grand, and—let’s see, what else could she tell him?—they were both about the biggest Avett Brothers fans in probably the whole state of Montana. Anyway, when Jackie heard that Maddy had never, ever, not once, been to a bar, well, she knew just the place to take care of that!

  Jackie ducked her head for a sip of her drink and poked herself in the nose with her straw. She snorted, giggled, and buried her face in Maddy’s neck for a moment. Then she breathed, fanned herself with her splayed hand.

  —And Wendell here, gosh, okay, Maddy, let me tell you something about Wendell. When I first moved to Delphia, Wendell was Mr. Big Basketball Stud, and I was such a little nerd, wore these goofy glasses and stupid braids, and one time on the bus Wendell flicked a wad of bubble gum that hit me right in the back of the head—I was so, so, so embarrassed! I mean, it’s the kind of thing my mom would have told me to take to my therapist, but my therapist was back in Boulder, and my parents were too busy with their goats, and I really think that’s why I’m exhibiting so many unsafe behaviors right now, you know, like being underage and drinking in a cowboy bar out in the middle of nowhere.

  Jackie affected a wounded look, dropping her chin and sighing, sipping at her drink, but Maddy looked genuinely angry on Jackie’s behalf, as if she understood something about the story that Jackie was missing. Wendell leaned back against the lip of the bar and pulled his good, going-to-town cowboy hat from his head.

  —I was hoping you didn’t remember that, he said. I was more than a couple parts asshole back then.

  Jackie pretended to pout a moment more, then bounced up on her toes and beamed.

  —I know how you can make it up to me! Get me another rum and Coke?

  Wendell took her glass and turned to Maddy.

  —Fair enough. You want one too?

  Maddy looked Wendell full in the face, studied him. She reminded him for a moment of Lacy, a certain tilt of the jaw, the hard brightness in her eyes.

  —No, thanks, she said. I’m driving.

  The hours slid away. The room filled with the spicy-sweet smell of pine smoke. Someone lined up a run of George Strait songs on the jukebox. Two men Wendell didn’t recognize, probably laid off from the Klein Creek Mine for the season, pulled off their shirts and started slugging each other, though they broke off after only a couple of blows, and one of them grabbed his own shirt to stanch the blood from the other’s nose. Wendell drank more than he’d meant to. Another couple of whiskeys before he switched over to straight beer, and even then he found himself staring at the sudsy bottom of a bottle with seemingly every other swallow. No one had been dancing, but when the songs Jackie had put into the jukebox started up, she squealed and pulled Wendell to his feet, swung him around the woodstove. She scooted right up close to him. The other men in the bar looked on with a mixture of derision and jealousy building behind their eyes. Jackie kept hold of his hand as they wandered back to their stools and then lifted his arm over her shoulder. It felt good and easy—his hand on the bare skin of her arm, the small weight of her against his ribs.

  It wasn’t until Jackie asked about Rowdy, and Wendell told her that Rowdy was eating chicken noodle like it was going out of style and would likely be heading to school next week, that Maddy leaned in. She and Jackie had put their heads together now and again, and he’d caught her staring at him a couple of times, though she’d always turned away quickly and begun singing along to whatever was on the jukebox. But now here she was, listening.

  —This is your son? she said.

  —No, my cousin’s boy. She got arrested. Sentenced today. And turns out I’m the closest relative. It’s either me or the group home.

  Jackie made a soft, sad sound in the back of her throat and hugged his arm all the more tightly.

  —I’m so glad he’s with you. Poor thing must have seen some awful stuff already. You should see him, Maddy. He’s as skinny as a stick but awful cute.

  Maddy frowned, shook her head.

  —Maybe it’s not what he’s seen but what he hasn’t. What he’s missing out on.

  Through the blear of beer and whiskey, wood smoke and country music, Wendell tried to unwind the threads of her comment. Was she saying he’d already somehow let Rowdy down? That no matter what he did it wouldn’t be enough? That people like him—his mother, his father, Lacy—simply didn’t have it in them? He felt his jaw tighten. He tried to let it go, but the world burned now at the limits of his vision. That same old shame, that fear and rage at being examined, judged, found wanting. Like in the days and months after his old man had taken off, like the night of the divisional championship game, like the last months of his senior year, after Lacy disappeared for the final time, like whenever he had to go to Billings to talk to some guy in a suit at the bank, like every other night he’d been in a bar since he’d found his mother slumped in the front seat of her Cavalier with a garden hose running from the tailpipe to the window.

  —And what do you know about it, Miss Private School? What do you know about my meth-head cousin, her boy that won’t say a goddamned word? You got lots of experience with that? Maybe you saw it on TV? An after-school special? I guess since you’re the fucking expert I ought to start calling you when I got questions.

  —Wendell, stop. She didn’t mean it like that.

  Jackie still held his arm but had put her weight on her own two feet.

  Wendell jerked his arm away from her and knocked over a beer bottle that clanked, rolled, and fell to the floor with thud. He flipped open his wallet and threw a wad of bills at the bar, then spun around and bumped another table. The spill and shatter of cans and bottles. The lights bright and hard in his underwater eyes. He nearly fell over a chair but finally reached the door, which someone opened for him, though that only made him all the more furious.

  When he was eight he had stolen another boy’s replica flintlock pistol. God, but it was a pretty thing.

  The boy, a town kid named Daniel McCleary whose hair was slicked and parted not far above his right ear, had stood up front by the chalkboard and passed the flintlock around for show-and-tell, told about his family’s vacation to the Black Hills—the reptile garden, the water slides, the souvenir shop where his mom had bought him the pistol and a coonskin cap. Wendell ran his fingers along the gleaming wood, the cool, smooth black barrels. He cocked back the hammers and aimed at the chalkboard. Pulled the trigger. Snap, snap. The dual hammers fell like that, one after the other. The girl in the desk behind him poked his shoulder. Wendell gazed a moment longer, then passed the gun to her.

  He hadn’t planned to take it. He’d just gone in at recess to use the bathroom—and there it was, in Daniel’s cubby. His muscles seemed to work at his bones of their own accord. He slid the pistol into the waist of his jeans, pulled his T-shirt over it. Outside, for the rush and noise of the recess yard, no one even noticed when he tossed the pistol into the evergreen bushes in front of the school, which was where, hours later, after the last bell had rung, as kids ran here and there and loaded themselves onto the buses, he slipped it into his backpack.

  That was after a whole day of anguish, though, because when they had all gotten back inside after recess, Daniel—whose father was the Congregational preacher and whose mother was president of the PTA and the Republican Women’s Club of Delphia—had blamed Freddie Benson for the theft. Freddie’s folks had come to town a couple of years before, moved their four boys and half a dozen caged birds and collection of lamps into one of the rotting Victorians that eighty years ago had been some railroad baron’s place. Freddie’s mother, who dyed her hair a startling orange two or three times a year, tended bar at the Snake Pit, the one bar left in Delphia proper, and his father, an enormously fat man, spent most o
f his days sitting in an easy chair on their front porch, where he smoked cigarettes and read Westerns and romances and sometimes fell asleep with his mouth wide open for everybody to see. Freddie often hooked the romances and brought them to school. All the boys would crowd around him at recess, beneath the jungle gym, where they collectively tried to puzzle out the sex scenes. Freddie pilfered his old man’s cigarettes, too, and had been caught stealing candy at the drugstore a couple of times. And once his folks had left him in the care of his older brother, always tinkering with his Trans Am in the front yard, and Freddie had put out bowls of raw hamburger to lure in a bunch of neighborhood cats. The local deputy finally came by and put things to rights, yet rumors swirled about what Freddie had done to those cats before the deputy arrived. Tying them up in pillowcases and dunking them in rain barrels. Duct-taping them to one another. Lighting them on fire.

  That morning after recess, Daniel cried and howled and pointed at Freddie, and the teacher called Freddie out into the hall and questioned him and eventually sent him down to the principal’s office. Freddie didn’t protest. Didn’t even look scared. Wendell was terrified. He couldn’t concentrate for the rest of the day and ended up with his name on the board and two check marks by it. His old man had whipped him with a leather belt once—whipped him so hard he had to sleep on his stomach the next two nights—for pocketing a dollar and change left on the kitchen counter.

  That afternoon, with the flintlock heavy in his backpack, Wendell got off the bus, waited for it to disappear down the county road, then hiked into the Bulls. On top of a butte, on a great slab of sandrock, he took out the pistol and laid it in the center of the stone, like an offering. He’d never had a toy as pretty, was sure he never would again. He knew—by his thrift-store jeans, the thin walls of their trailer, the generic potato chips his mother bought—that his family was one kind of poor. He knew, too, that the Bensons were another kind of poor—a sadder, meaner kind. He wasn’t sure what the McClearys were, if they were rich or not, but they sure weren’t poor. They had a maroon minivan and a green lawn, and Daniel got new gym shoes twice a year. They could pass for the kind of people you saw on television. Wendell knew he and his old man couldn’t, likely not even his mother, not even with her shiny hair and recipes from the morning shows. Whenever they drove down to Billings for groceries or to sell a load of culled ewes at the livestock yards, Wendell felt exposed. Scoured and windburned, angled and stiff. He’d been to the mall a couple of times, and he’d seen other kids his age, city kids, and they’d seen him. There were some distances you could not cross, those geographies intricate, shifting, unmappable. That afternoon, atop the butte, Wendell stood there in the wind and touched once more the polished curves of the pistol, then built a cairn over it, placing the rocks just so.

  Years later, after Freddie quit the basketball team and grew his hair long and pierced his ears, after everyone started calling him Fudgepack Freddie, out dragging Main along with everyone else one night, he drunkenly smashed his brother’s Trans Am into and through the front of the school building at fifty miles an hour. Freddie lived, but the shock of it loosed something in Wendell. The next day he tried to find the cairn. He and Lacy hiked around all day, and she kept asking him what it was he was after, and he wouldn’t tell her, and they never did find it. Lacy was pissed. That evening, even though he had a home ball game, she took the LUV into town without him. He had to wait for his mother and was nearly late. On the drive in, he wondered if he’d made it all up, if he’d somehow misremembered. So many things had begun to shift and swirl that he was having a hard time sorting the world into reality and dream, into things wished for and things witnessed. Had he really stolen that pistol? Had Daniel McCleary, now the starting point guard and class president, really cried like that? Was it true that Toby Korenko’s father was about to lose the family ranch? If he drove to Billings, would Freddie be in the hospital with a collapsed lung and alcohol poisoning? Were they really going to win the state championship this year?

  He’d touch his mother lightly on the shoulder as they cleaned up after dinner. He’d bump into Lacy as they hiked the Bulls, their elbows and hips knocking, their fingers brushing. He’d wait for the pass from Toby or Daniel, feel the whap of the ball in his hands, hear the ball snap through the net, the roar of the crowd. And for a moment he’d know it was the truth, and the world would stop its swirl. But it always faded, the knowing, the roar, the touch. The twin barrels of the pistol slick and gone beneath his fingers.

  Days after that night at the Antlers, Wednesday afternoon, as the wind whirled devils of dust, Wendell leaned against the LUV. He rooted in his back pocket for his Copenhagen. Got ahold instead of the silver medallion he’d found in the middle of the kitchen table the morning after he’d run into Jackie and her friend. In his bleary rush to pick up Rowdy at Glen and Carol’s and get the boy back to the trailer before the social worker showed up that Saturday, he must have pocketed it. Now he turned it this way and that in his hand, this silhouette of a howling wolf in a quartered circle. He didn’t recognize the medallion and had the strange thought that someone must have come into his trailer when he was gone and left it there for him. A cool film of sweat broke out along his neck, the length of his spine.

  No, no one would break in just to leave this trinket, and he hadn’t noticed anything missing. The rifles, the only things worth much in the whole place, were all still in his closet—he’d seen them there this morning. Maybe the boy had rustled it up from some corner of the trailer. It might have been his old man’s, or even his from when he was a boy, something he’d traded for on the playground. It was a pretty thing. Wendell rolled it between his thumb and forefinger, the wolf turning over sage and greasewood. In the distance, dust rose from the road, the first orange glint of the south bus out of Delphia, ferrying Rowdy home from his third day of school.

  The social worker had emphasized that this was a critical time. Rowdy had transitioned well, better than she might have guessed, to living with Wendell, but starting school, while necessary, would put renewed stress on the boy. He’d need Wendell to be steady, to be there for him. Wendell had jammed his hands in his pockets and nodded along. He didn’t mention that the very night before, blackout drunk, he had forgotten to pick Rowdy up from Glen and Carol’s. Or that when he finally got there in the morning, Carol had met him in her bathrobe and told him that Rowdy, once he realized he wasn’t going home, had begun to knock things over and hit himself, that the boy hadn’t screamed himself out and fallen asleep until well past midnight. Carol looked Wendell up and down and smelled, he was sure, the stale booze rolling off him. She held her robe closed at her throat and turned and went back in, sent Rowdy out. The boy stood there on the step in his stained T-shirt and blue jeans. He blinked up at Wendell and shivered for the chill of the morning. The boy seemed fine, seemed as he always was, and the whole of Wendell’s chest seized and all but cracked open for the sadness of it, for his own shame. How many nights had Rowdy waited for Lacy to come home? How many nights had Wendell himself wished his own father would crawl out of the mountains? Not one more night, he swore to himself, standing in the pale light as the boy drummed his fingers across his cheeks. Not one fucking more.

  In a fist of dust the bus ground to a stop before him and the doors folded open. Rowdy came hopping down each step and raised his own little cloud of dust as he hit the ground and ran for the LUV. Wendell turned to follow, but the bus driver—bald now and even fatter than Wendell remembered from when he’d been a south-bus kid—called to him, heaved himself partway out of his seat, and held out a folded sheet of paper. The principal wanted to make sure Wendell got this, he said. Wendell stepped up into the bus, that same old smell of Naugahyde and sweat, took the note, thanked the driver.

  The bus groaned away, and the wind came hard across the road, lifting bits of gravel. Rowdy was already bouncing up and down in the pickup bed. Wendell opened the note.

  At dinner Rowdy drummed his cheeks, jerked himself aroun
d in his chair, knocked his milk over. Then he closed his eyes, screwed up his face, and commenced screaming. Screaming and rocking back and forth and kicking.

  —Hey, it’s just milk, bud. Just an accident.

  Rowdy pulled his fingers from his cheeks and began slapping the tabletop. Knocked his plate over and spattered ketchup on the wall, spilled tater tots across the floor.

  —Ah, Jesus. Christ Jesus.

  Wendell scooped the boy up and fell into the easy chair with him. Rowdy screamed some more and bucked against him. Wendell held him hard. Rowdy battered at him with his elbows, slammed his small, sharp heels into Wendell’s shins. Wendell sat there and rocked and held the boy.

  He was supposed to go to Delphia tomorrow to meet with the principal. That was what the note had said. Some boys had been teasing Rowdy at the early recess, and at the noon recess Rowdy had snuck up behind one of them and pushed him headlong off the jungle gym. The boy broke an arm, and before the teacher got there, while the boy was crying on the ground, Rowdy straddled him, cocked his finger, and—Pewwhg! Pewwhg!—pretended to shoot the boy in the face. In the office, he’d done it again. Looked right at the principal and fired. You couldn’t do a thing like that these days. Not even way out here.

  Rowdy’s breath slowed and his hands stilled as his thousand small, furious muscles began to relax. Wendell rocked the boy. He wished he didn’t know how a thing like this happened, but he knew exactly how. A teacher needed a cigarette or was getting a divorce or just didn’t want to deal with it and turned away, let a bunch of kids tease a boy like Rowdy because it was easier in the moment. But the easy thing was damn near always the wrong thing. His old man used to say that. He recalled his father looking him right in the eye, and, in a way, Wendell was proud that Rowdy hadn’t taken the easy way out.