MORNINGS were heavy. Jim had time on his hands and didn’t know how to spend it. This morning there had been a funeral in his dream, a problem with finding the casket of a relative he’d loved. He’d been wearing a decent suit, running all over town, and he awoke exhausted and worried. The day, so far, had brought no phone call to give him any news.
Maybe he was mourning the loss of news. No longer any letters, no phone calls, just an inbox full of stupid emails about the country’s bad politics and deals on more junk he didn’t need. What did he need?
Maybe it was nature. There was a wind strong enough to slam the windows shut that he’d opened to freshen up the place. Stuff built up in the night; whatever the body didn’t need, it released during sleep. That was a lot of shit to remove. Last night, like most nights, he’d sensed a change in the air once Fran, his wife, fell asleep. He’d lain for hours with her beside him, snoring lightly, back towards his back, and waited for sleep to take him, too.
Outside, Jim found a corner where he could set up his lounger, out of the direct wind. The weather had been strangely hot during the past few days, so he was glad of the breeze, but the sun was still out, and he was also glad of that. All this gladness should have made him satisfied.
He lay in his chair and watched the clouds racing across a book-blue sky as if being hounded by salesmen. These clouds seemed to have internal desires, changing as they passed, from animal to gargoyle to spirals, a bit of pure blue above him before the next morphing creature came along. They made him feel useless, inert as a stick. He closed his eyes. Jim knew it was the wind against his eyelids, but it felt like the clouds were brushing him as they streamed past. Better if he kept an eye on them, to know where they were.
He heard someone yell, “Get out of the car.” His neighbour, Carl.
“Go and sit on the porch and do not move.”
Then he heard whimpering.
Carl shouted, “Are you stupid?”
Crying.
“Go. Sit. On. The. Porch. Now.”
Jim waited to hear a slap. Fran had told him that he would have to wait until there was something concrete to report before he called in a complaint. The system was designed to fix what was broken. What could be seen, like physical damage, damage that left nothing to dispute.
“Owen! For fuck sakes, did I not tell you to bring your bag in?”
Jim closed his eyes and concentrated on the wind. On clouds pressing in on his eyelids. On going deaf.
• • •
Jim’s wife was “still in the market for a kid” as she liked to say. He knew that she thought this kind of teasing was funny, that if she made her longing seem light then he would lighten up, too, and they would get going. This was the thing: he couldn’t come without pulling out. He’d tried—good God, he’d tried—but every time he was close, a bodiless face began to hover over Fran, like one of those baby angels with the big cheeks.
Not just any baby. The baby he’d pulled from the car, just before the explosion, eight months ago. He hadn’t thought about spinal cords or brains or anything other than getting the baby out. He’d seen the baby, he’d acted.
They told Jim the baby would’ve died anyway. Of course she would have: the car exploded. But she’d been alive in his strong arms and then he was running as fast as he could, away from the bomb of a car that was about to go off and toward a house with a big white porch.
He tripped. He fell. He fell on her.
• • •
Carl and his wife had two kids and an ancient white dog they kept tied up to their back porch. The dog spent most days in the shade cast from the shed, in a hole he’d dug into the lawn, and barked whenever anyone passed, and Carl yelled whenever the dog barked. “Jasper! Shut up!” Jim heard the pattern at least a dozen times a day.
More recently the older boy had started yelling at the dog, too. Little voice, big voice, both of them carried easily over their chain link fence, the back lane and Jim’s fence.
The neighbours lived kitty-corner across the shared back lane. Their windows were uncurtained, even at night. When Jim couldn’t sleep, he liked to walk in the darkness, and every time he passed Carl’s house, there were lights on, and Carl was in the dining room, sitting at a table, concentrating. It didn’t matter what time, Carl was there.
So, insomnia was one excuse. He imagined a child could try a sleep-deprived person’s patience. He knew what not-sleeping felt like, knew the sandy feeling in the brain, the cells responsible for common sense eroding with every wave of fatigue.
Money didn’t seem to be the issue. Carl’s house looked like it was trying to be Italian; they had the Tuscan colours, burnt orange, mum yellow, that deep ocean blue. They had a new boxy vehicle, the kind that was supposed to be both safe and good for the planet. Carl’s wife wore nice clothes, on the rare occasions Jim saw her.
What was odd was that Carl didn’t act like he cared about what people heard or saw. He wanted to be noticed, as if he were proud of it all, big man with the family and the house and the pretty wife. Like he had nothing to hide.
About three weeks ago, Jim had started keeping a journal of the things Carl said.
• • •
The kids and Carl had gone inside. All was quiet. Jim opened his eyes to a pair of hawk-eye clouds swirling past. He felt naked out there, stared at by a sky full of menace. The wind was overriding the sun to the point of him feeling cold. He would have to go in soon, and make some lunch, put the morning behind him. He would write: called his son stupid. Said fuck sakes. He had already filled four pages.
• • •
At 12:30, Fran phoned. Fran’s thing: she had her half-hour of chitchat and lunch with the girls at work, and then called her useless husband to check in. Checking in meant asking how he’d slept, if he’d eaten breakfast, how he was feeling, and a question or two that changed from day to day: would he like chicken for dinner? Did he want to go see a movie? Was it okay if she went to the gym straight after work?
He always made sure to switch on the radio before 12:30, so she’d hear the background noise. She didn’t like the thought of him all alone in a silent house. She’d told him she would go crazy in all that empty space, all that quiet. He couldn’t explain to her that silence was what he wanted, because she would get worried again. She would take it personally and think she was too noisy.
She was too noisy, but he couldn’t hold that against her. Before, he’d loved the sound of her voice. He’d wanted to hear her singing in the bathroom while she put on makeup. Before, he was a regular husband who could carry on a conversation without crying or going mute. He was a man who’d worked. He was a husband who could make love to his wife and not see dead babies floating in the room.
Today she told him about a craft fair she was thinking about going to on the weekend. “They might have those handmade dishcloths we can’t seem to find anywhere else.”
He knew she loved him. She wanted to involve him; that was the prescription. “Good idea,” he said into the phone, without a trace of sarcasm or himself in it at all.
• • •
After lunch, Jim went into the backyard to check on his garden. He’d never been the type, but gardening had turned to therapy, to stick things into the muck and see what good came out of it. He had to admit there was a thrill in watching the first leaves emerge from the soil in his little raised bed or in the flowerbeds alongside the house. He liked to get down on his knees to get a really decent look at the pea shoots, their leaves still tucked tight against the stems. Today the onions were at least two inches tall, which made him feel better than he had all morning. A lightness was starting to replace that stony weight.
“Get your goddamned shoes off my goddamned pants,” Carl yelled.
Jim stood up in time to see Carl carrying his younger son towards their vehicle. He was carrying the child as if he were a bag of stinking garbage. Jim caught a glimpse of the boy’s face before Carl shoved him into his car seat. The kid was scowling.
“Wait for me!” the other boy called, racing around the car.
“Owen!” Carl said. “Get back in the yard until I tell you.”
“But you’ll leave without me!”
“I wish I could. You’re such a little shit.”
Owen started to cry.
“Oh great,” Carl said. “Another baby. Just get in the fuckin’ car already.”
Jim walked back towards the house before Carl noticed him. The seedlings around the other side of the house needed some attention.
• • •
Reframing the situation was supposed to help. Jim tried this trick from therapy, now and again; he wrote down what had happened and how he felt, and then he tried to spin the experience into a positive. But when he tried, I killed that baby, he couldn’t find anything positive. Or else he took the present tense approach—I am here, this is now, nothing else exists. None of it worked. That was the thing about brains: they were as stubborn and unpredictable as drunks.
Maybe that was Carl’s problem. Or was it drugs? Jim had been given so many prescriptions since the accident that he could’ve raked in some serious cash as a salesman. Not one pill had worked, at least not in the five-day trials he’d allowed each of them. Overall, he felt no worse just letting history and time battle it out.
He reframed in other ways. He put Carl and his family in olden-day situations, for example, to see if he was overreacting. Would they be shouting if they were all piling into a covered wagon? Jim tried to imagine kids from a hundred years ago, and wondered if complaining had been an option. Then again, parenting was a different beast back then, too—children were farmhands, servants, mouths to feed so they’d look after the livestock at dawn.
He put Carl in a hundred different scenarios, trying to find a place where he would fit. Prison guard came up roses, or overseer of slaves at a diamond mine, a punishing sun turning everyone mean.
Jim also tried to imagine a situation in which those boys were in the wrong. But even if they wrote on the walls with their own shit, or pulled the antique china down from the shelves, didn’t parenting come down to supervision, rules, boundaries?
Boundaries. Man, he’d never used that word before. Fran would like his learning, the way she loved to see him caring for the garden. She’d never seen that side of him, she said.
It was sexy, she said.
He guessed she’d thought he was only his work self—when he was working—and the working man had not been able to show anything close to what he gave to his plants. Tenderness was not a part of the municipal worker’s world. Gentleness was something seized upon, laughable; his jobsite self had been as leathery as his skin, out there all day, roadside, keeping the whole city running. Keeping the roads as safe as possible.
The baby’s name was Kaitlin. Her mother’s car had met another head-on. No one from the accident was still alive.
• • •
When Fran got home his heaviness had returned. She found Jim in the spare room with the journal in his lap, the growing list of Carl’s infractions.
“A bad Carl day?” she asked him.
He nodded.
She sighed. “We could move, you know.”
He looked at her.
“It’s not impossible,” she said. “You know he’s not going to move, and we can’t live like this. Plus, that’s the good part about renting. We can pick up any time we like.”
“You’ve thought about this,” he said. So had he, but every time he did, the thought of leaving his garden kept him from getting too far down that road.
She nodded. She blushed a little, even. “I just get so upset by all of this, and I don’t know what to do, so I… search Craigslist, seeing if there’s anything better.”
“They don’t put who the neighbours are, do they?”
She pulled her lips in, the way she did when she was holding something back. “No, they don’t.”
“Let me call someone,” he said. “Someone has to help. He just can’t get away with this.”
Fran didn’t want to meddle. Didn’t want to stir the pot. She wasn’t at home, listening the way he was. She only heard a fraction of what went on.
What he wanted to do was watch time-lapse videos of plants growing, over and over. There was goodness in this pastime, being mesmerized as each plant reached for the sun. It was inevitable: they were meant to strive toward light. Their cells went about their business freely, no parents to steer them the wrong way, to mess anything up.
Some days, what Jim saw in those videos made him cry. Every kind of plant he watched moved up from the earth in a slow, waving dance. The petunias had made him sob once, their blooms opening and closing like trumpets of hope. The tomato plant responded to water so dramatically, it was abusive to keep it away; when the plant was dry, it stopped growing. The plant just stopped and waited.
Maybe some people could do it, bring babies up the right way. Maybe parenting did involve studying, although he found that hard to believe. Shouldn’t raising a child be innate? Shouldn’t it be second nature, animals bringing up their own? Survival of the species, all that?
More than anything, Jim was afraid of messing everything up.
But children were resilient, weren’t they? He’d seen that before; a young girl with a double leg cast had crawled past him on the ferry, on her way to getting her hip dysplasia corrected, and her father had seemed unfazed. Jim saw young kids with glasses, too, and shaved heads from lice, and gleaming heads from chemo. They survived way more often than they didn’t. The odds were with them, because of age, and their ability to bounce back—the imperative to keep living. A tree was the same: it could grow around a pretty substantial gash, callous over, just keep growing, as long as its roots were intact.
• • •
Jim awoke the next morning to the dual alarms of screaming and barking. Nothing new. But this morning, Fran had already gone to work, and he’d slept in—and the screams from across the back lane were louder. His heart felt like it was already at a hundred beats a minute before he even moved a muscle.
“I’ll do it,” he heard Carl shouting. “One more word and I’m doing it!”
The boy—or boys—didn’t answer. He heard crying. A syllable. A few more. Nothing recognizable as English.
The day was already hot; Jim had been sweating, drooling, dreaming of a day from when he was a greasy teenager, cooking French fries. Shake, dump, scoop, load, cook, shake, dump… There had been satisfaction in the routine, even though his acne had grown worse and the kitchen was hotter than Hades—
He heard a chainsaw. He leapt from bed and grabbed a pair of shorts and was at his back fence in twenty seconds.
Carl was about to cut down a tree. The one that held the treehouse, the tire swing. He couldn’t hear the boys crying over the saw but he could see them, sitting on the back porch, watching their father do surgery on their childhood.
He himself had done nothing to stop this from happening. Whether it’d been wrong or right to wait it out, he’d done nothing—
Jim opened his gate and ran across the back lane.
Carl looked like hell, unshaven and haggard, as if he hadn’t slept in days. He’d cut off one limb—a non-essential limb—and it was lying at his feet.
Jim pointed at the chainsaw, motioned for Carl to turn it off with a hand slicing his throat.
“What?” Carl yelled.
“Turn it off a sec!”
The boys stared, faces wet and puffy, eyes wild, bodies shaking. The older one—Owen—grabbed his little brother and hugged him. The dog kept pacing and barking, straining against his collar.
Carl turned off the saw, held onto it with one hand. “Yeah?” He looked in Jim’s general direction but not at his face.
“Hey man.” Jim tried to smile but the smile wouldn’t come. “Tough morning?”
Carl’s face was covered in sweat. “Jasper!” he yelled. “Shut the fuck up.” The dog stopped for a few seconds, then started up again.
“Gonna be hard to regrow this,” Jim said. “Pretty good shade tree.”
Now Carl looked directly at him. Jim flinched. Beyond the man’s dead eyes, beyond the grimace and the grime, Jim recognized what he saw. Desperation. A lot of pain. The same thing he faced every day.
But what could he do? Reach out, touch Carl and say, Hey, look at us, buddy, we’re in the same place, doing things we don’t want to do, hurting the ones we love because we’re suffering inside? No. His tenderness had no place here. Or did it?
The last time he’d tried to help someone, he’d killed a baby. But Carl had a chainsaw, and those boys were about to be shattered, again.
The boys were staring at him. The dog, too.
“Carl,” he said. “Man.” He put his hand on Carl’s shoulder, the muscles, hot and alive. He heard the chainsaw hit the ground. When Carl’s fist reached for his face, Jim felt it coming. He’d been waiting a long time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julie Paul is the author of two collections of short fiction, The Jealousy Bone (2008) and The Pull of the Moon, (2014, Brindle & Glass). Her stories and poems have been published in journals across the country and in Coming Attractions ’07. Originally from Lanark Village, ON, she now lives in Victoria, BC.
MORE: Twitter | Website | Facebook | The Pull of the Moon
LF #063 © Julie Paul. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, June 2014.
