N.A.C.L – WINNER of Salty Ink’s 2010 Short Fiction Contest !!!

N.A.C.L. – Al Geehan’s “Feathers and Fur”
WINNER of Salty Ink’s 2010 Short Fiction contest

Big Congrats to Al Geehan. He’s just won his way into Salty Ink’s pending anthology, alongside the county’s finest writers, and a $250 pat on the back to boot.

Click here to read about Salty Ink’s N.A.C.L literary sort-of journal

“Feathers and Fur”

Rob and Truck are watching that ultimate fighting stuff on Rob’s new TV.  The screen is so big I can see the fighters bleed on each other in the reflection on the window over the kitchen sink.  They’re muscled like Greek statues, rolling around in those I-can’t-love-you-so-I’ll-hit-you embraces.  I watch in a kind of trance as the evening song of a robin comes through a small opening in the window. 

            One guy makes the other guy go limp.  Rob and Truck start shouting.  They don’t hear the phone when it rings.   I answer, close the window and take the phone upstairs without them noticing me because Truck is humping the air in front of Rob’s face, pretending his beer bottle is his dick.     

            Hi Nat.

            Um, hi.  Who’s this?

            Kevin.

            Kevin who?

            Clay.

            Really?  Jesus Kevin, how are you?

            Good.  I’m going to be in Boston in a couple of days.

            Really?

            Yeah.  Can I come by?

            Can you come by.  Sure.  Of course.  Of course you can come by.  How are . . . I mean, what are you doing in Boston?

            Can’t talk long Nat, I’m borrowing a guy’s cell phone.  Where can I meet you?

            Um, when are you going to get here?

            Tuesday.  Probably.  Yeah, probably Tuesday night.

            Come to the restaurant, Rob’s restaurant.  It’s on Essex Street.  Downtown.  Do you know Boston at all?

            Don’t worry, I’ll find it.  Rob’s not going to try to punch me, is he?  

            Punch you?  No.  I don’t think so.

            That’s not exactly reassuring, Nat.

            Don’t worry about Rob.  He’s more bark than bite.  Besides, he’ll probably just pretend you’re not here.

            Works for me.  See you in a couple of days.  And Nat, it’s good to hear your voice.

I used to think that a swallow was my totem animal.  That’s why I have a tattoo of one in the middle of my lower back.  It’s a silhouette but it looks more like a giant bug swat against my skin than it does a bird.  Rob thinks it makes me look like trailer trash. 

            When he comes upstairs after the fights I’m changing.  My back is to the door and all I have on are my pajama bottoms.  He sees the tattoo and sticks out his belly and his lower jaw.  This is an old joke.  He puts his arms around me and using his hillbilly voice says, I likes yer tattoo missy. 

            In my ear he whispers, you’re purdy.

 

I don’t tell Rob about Kevin until Monday.  We’re on the turnpike heading to the restaurant. 

            How long’s he staying?

            I don’t know.  He never said.

            How long did you tell him he could stay?

            I didn’t say.    

            I wait for Rob to say something about the time Kevin visited us in New York or even to ask about how he got our number after all this time, but he doesn’t.  A van full of high school or university kids passes us and he gets distracted.  A truck like Rob’s, but newer, passes us too.  This time I see his hands twist on the steering wheel.  He takes a deep breath.  For years I’ve been telling Rob that it’s insane to shout at people who can’t hear him. 

            I reach over to touch his arm, to let him know that I know he’s trying, when a little blue car zips alongside us.  The girl driving it looks over at Rob.  She’s got a ring in her nose and streaks in her hair that are the same colour as the car, which probably irritates him as much as her trying to pass him.  When she pulls in front of us to get to the next off ramp Rob has to tap his breaks.

            Fucking bitchslut!

            He shouts this so loud it almost hurts my ears.

Rob’s a really good chef.  Maybe the best I’ve ever worked with.  The thing is, when Rob and I first met it was because I had hired him to work in my kitchen. 

            It was my third season in the cookhouse at the Kenai Backcountry Lodge and I had been made head cook, which meant I got to help with the hiring.  It took only one phone interview for me to choose Rob.  This was partly because he had been accepted to the De Gustibus Culinary School in New York City but also because I thought he sounded cute. 

            Sometimes I think about this on nights that the Red Sox are playing.  These are the nights I have to supervise the cleaning of the kitchen alone.  Rob and Truck do it on nights when there isn’t a game.  The problem is our staff doesn’t listen to me when those guys aren’t around.

            We finish late again tonight and when I come out Rob and Truck are at the bar drinking beers with our bartender, Julie.  Rob’s already on his third.  He hands me the keys and says, sorry about earlier, then kisses me on the cheek. 

            As I walk away he calls out, don’t forget to back the truck in.

I’ve always been attracted to taller guys.  Kevin was the only exception. 

            At the lodge he was a legend.  He’d been guiding his custom seven-day trips down the Kenai for sixteen years before I showed up.  Because I worked at the main lodge I only got to see him on the first and last days of his trips.  There were other guides and other customers but the nights Kevin was at the lodge were the most interesting.  Everyone wanted to work those nights.

            On the first day of Kevin’s trips a driver would arrive at the lodge with a van full of customers picked up from Cooper’s Landing.  They’d pile out in their new lightweight brand name outdoor clothes to see Kevin standing at the door in an old pair of jeans and a plaid shirt.  On his head would be a faded purple piece of clothed wrapped up like something between a bandanna and a turban.  He’d shake each one of their hands with both of his.  Once everyone was introduced the group would sit down to a meal of fresh barbequed salmon, which is still the only thing I cook better than Rob.

            The first night was always fun because there’d be this air of excitement but it was the last night that was the real event.  Kevin had two traditions.  The first was to show people his hair.  He would unwrap the faded purple cloth and the guests would actually gasp when his four feet of hair tumbled out.  He used to tell me that hiding it was his way of warming people up to the idea of hippies.  And it worked.  These people had spent every moment of the last seven days with Kevin watching his wiry sinewy frame navigate their raft down the icy waters of the Kenai, watching him build fires in any kind of weather.  Listening to him tell wilderness stories.  What the customers didn’t realize is that Kevin never cared about that stuff.  It was a means to an end for him.  All he really wanted to do was to teach people how to love the birds and the trees.

            After everyone got over his hair, the second thing Kevin did was show off this cloak he had put together from the hides of dead animals he had found in the forests, the mountains and along the river.  At first it seemed to creep people out.  It definitely creeped me out when I first saw it.  But Kevin had these stories for each of the patches and as he told them to you — where he found each animal and how he thought each had died — the cloak took on this whole other meaning.  You understood why he called it his totem cloak.  By the end of the night every single guest had their picture taken with the thing draped over their shoulders.  It was never touristy either.  They treated it with reverence.

            What Kevin never told the guests was that he used it for practical jokes.  That’s the other side of Kevin.  His playfulness.  To sort of haze in new employees he would put it on and hide in the bushes along the trail behind the cookhouse.  Someone would take the victim to a clearing next to the river where you could see this abandoned bear’s den in the hollow of a fallen cottonwood.  When the person went over to look inside Kevin would jump out and roar.

            The time he did it to me I kicked him between the legs.

It’s Tuesday morning and I’m awake early.   Rob’s still asleep but he’s on his side so I don’t have to listen to him snoring. 

            On the wires outside our bedroom window are three crows.  They’re close enough for me to see feather patterns in the solid black.  When I get up and go to the window one of the crows notices the movement and cocks its head to watch.  The other two look at me in succession, the last jerking its eye around and calling out.  I can hear the croaking through the glass but open the window anyway.

            Everything outside is still.  This amplifies the sound.  I look back at Rob to see if he hears anything but he doesn’t.  Nothing wakes Rob.  Not even the colossal nighttime farts he blames on me.

            A fourth crow circles above.  I watch its articulating feathers, long black fingers stretching from the tips of its wing, twitching independently.  Against the cloudless violet sky, it makes a striking silhouette.  This one calls out too, but lower, quieter, more guttural than the crow on the wire.  Kevin always told me crows could talk to each other and I can’t help but think this one is sharing a secret. 

            The three crows take off one after the other.  The wire quivers in their absence. 

            On the street below an ambulance with its lights flashing silently zooms towards the city.

Our basement is still unfinished because Rob has these big plans to turn it into a gym and a games room.  He wants to do it himself, him and Truck.  But every time Truck comes over to work on it they end up in front of that giant TV with beers in their hands.  The only thing that they ever got done was to hang this dartboard on a piece of wood.  They nailed the piece of wood to the unfinished beams and the darts are still stuck exactly where they landed the first and only time they used it. 

            I turn on the light and a single naked bulb casts long narrow shadows of unfinished beams across the concrete floor.  They make the basement look like a prison cell, which is just one of the reasons I hate coming down here. 

            In the corner, beyond the shadows are stacks of unpacked cardboard boxes.  They’re filled with important stuff — our camping gear, Rob’s old boxing equipment, my wedding dress — but they’ve been there so long I can’t remember which thing is in which box.  The only one I remember is the one I’m looking for, the one with the word FRAGILE written in big block letters on every side.  It’s Rob’s handwriting.  He did it as a joke because I wouldn’t let the box be thrown into the moving truck with the others.  When I told him there was a box inside of things he had given me he took the box, wrote the word all over it, then put it in the back seat of his jeep and strapped it in with a seatbelt. 

            I take down the box and cut open the tape with a nail Rob or Truck left lying around.  Inside are three smaller boxes.  I take out the biggest one, the one full of the stuff Rob has given me, and put it to the side.  A dull clinking sound comes from the next one.  This is where I keep the ceramic animal figurines my grandfather collected from boxes of tea.  When we lived in New York we used to keep them on the kitchen shelf.  I open it, pick up one of the balls of tissue paper and unwrap it.   A little grey wolf looks up at me, almost smiling.  It feels cold and heavy in my palm.  I wrap it up and put it back.

            The last box is full of papers — notes I used to jot down in Alaska, articles I tore out of National Geographic, brochures with pictures I liked.  I lift these out of the way to get to the bottom of the pile where there’s an envelope with its bottom corner still stained blood red from the wine I spilled the night Kevin gave it to me.

Nat,

            In the ten years of telling my cloak stories you’re the first person to ever ask me for them in print.  If it were anyone else the answer would have been no but because it’s you, here they are.  At least, in part.  Never been much of a writer.     

            Coyote.  He was old and lay down for the last time under a birch tree.

            Red fox.  He was a pup and I could only use part of his rump and tail.  A hawk took him when he climbed out from under the rocks to play with his brothers and sisters.

            Grizzly.  She was shot and charged through the forest wounded.  I followed cracked off branches for more than a mile before I found her.  It took almost three hours for her to die.  The bare spot is where the bullet entered her body.

            Moose.  She panicked when she was startled by a group of hikers and tried to cross the river.  It was spring and the river was flooded.  I never found her calf.

            Wolf.  He had been caught in a poacher’s snare and had to chew off his own leg.  I found him a few yards from the trap, his body half in the water as if he had wanted the river to carry him away.

Tuesday night the restaurant is slow but I still mess up three tables’ orders.  Rob pulls me aside to give me one of his talks and I apologize but what I really want to say is, fuck off.        When the last order is out Rob and Truck get everybody cleaning.  I go out to the bar and sit down with Julie.  Because Rob tells Truck everything and Truck tells everybody else, everyone knows that I have an old friend coming to visit.  After Julie passes me my gin and tonic she says, so he’s cute, right?

            I tell her yes and take a sip.  At least this isn’t as bad as the time Truck told everyone I was baby-crazy, which was stupid because it’s Rob that wants kids.

Kevin didn’t get upset after I kicked him between the legs.  He rolled around on the ground and groaned a bit then told me was I was probably the first person to ever have the right reaction.  To show me he didn’t hold a grudge, he took me on a solo trip down the first section of the Kenai that evening. 

            As we floated he rolled a joint.  He did this with one hand, keeping the other on an oar, which he used like a rudder.  When he was done he never asked me if I smoked.  He never said anything.  Just handed it to me once it was lit.  I’d never been high before. 

            It was an hour or so later, as we came around the last bend, that the swallows came out.  We watched them swerve through the air, iridescent blues and greens glinting in that strange northern evening light.  I knew that a swallow was a bird but I’d never actually watched one, never paid attention to what they were.  I couldn’t stop talking about how gracefully they flew or how they skimmed just above the surface of the water.  At one point there were so many flying around the boat I almost got dizzy trying to watch the white blur of their bellies.  As my head spun I remember trying to tell Kevin something about what it would be like to be inside a cloud  — if clouds could sing.

            That was about when he said, maybe swallows are your totem animal.

When Kevin doesn’t show up at the restaurant Rob drives us home.  He’s in a good mood and takes the long way, driving on the other side of the Charles so we can look at Boston all lit up.  Towers of blue and orange lights blur together while I try to imagine the Kenai River lined with dark spruce and the silver green flecks of creeping juniper.

            Rob kind of reads my mind.  Don’t get too upset babe, he says, that guy was always a flake. 

            I don’t say anything so Rob keeps going.

            Remember when he jumped out and tried to scare me in that filthy old bear suit?

            I nod. 

            I was there when Kevin got Rob.  I was the one that lead him to the spot.  Rob actually screamed, though he’d never admit it.  When he heard Kevin laughing beneath the cloak, he put up his fists and called Kevin a cunt.  Kevin just threw back the cloak, gave Rob a big friendly smile and said his line. 

            Welcome to Alaska.

The phone is ringing when we open the door.  I resist the urge to rush in.  This is partly because Rob is there and partly because I can’t help being angry with Kevin. 

            Let me answer it, Rob says as he kicks off his sneakers. 

            Instead of hello I hear him say, so, still dicking around up there in Alaska?  I can’t make out the next thing he says but as he brings me the phone I hear, in real life people do the things they say.

            Nat?

            Kevin.

            Listen Nat, I’m real sorry.  I . . . well . . . plans change.  You know?

            Where are you?

            Maine.  In a town called Monson. 

            Maine?

            Yeah.  I took the summer off to hike the Appalachian.

            You always wanted to do that.

            Yeah, it was incredible but I finished it a month early.  And I was up here thinking I wasn’t that far from you . . . but I ran into these two guys who are hiking all the way back to Georgia.  Not too many people get to do a round trip all in one year.  This will probably be my only chance.  You know, not getting any younger and all that.

            Sounds incredible.

            Maybe after Georgia I’ll come back up this way.

            Sounds good.

            It’s nice to talk to you again Nat.

            You too.

The first time I saw Rob’s parents’ house I understood why he kept telling me not to worry about money.  It’s in Hyannis, in the same area where the Kennedys grew up.  We had driven there from New York for a pool party because his parents were out of town. 

            All of his friends from the cape showed up, including Truck who was a big deal back then.  He had just come third place in some national boxing championship and practically had an entourage.  He came up to us and gave Rob one of those guy hugs where they have to shake hands before they can touch each other in any other way.  I was about to say something like, nice to meet you Rupert, when he saw my tattoo.  The first thing he said was, what the fuck is on your back?

            I didn’t even try to explain. 

            Later, when Rob and I were fooling around on his parents’ bed, he stopped to close the canopy curtains.  The small space it created felt intimate, safe.  For the first time, I told him about how I thought swallows were my totem animal. 

            You’re drunk, was all he said before he squeezed his hand past the tattoo and into my swimsuit bottoms. 

            The next thing he said was, you’re purdy.

Rob can be an idiot when he thinks he’s being funny.  That’s why the trailer trash joke never really bothered me.  What got to me was that Rob has a tattoo that’s way worse than mine.  Right where his triceps used to be is this dark blue smudge that’s supposed to be a bulldog wearing boxing gloves.  The thing is, Rob only boxed for two years.  He got the tattoo after his first fight, which was the only fight he ever won.

            Not that it matters.  After a while, a tattoo becomes just another spot on your skin.

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