BENJAMIN PERCY (b. 1979) was raised in the high desert of central Oregon, the setting of much of his fiction, including “Refresh, Refresh.” This story was inspired by a newspaper article about a rust belt town that lost over a dozen men when their National Guard unit was ambushed in Iraq. Percy transposed the tragedy into his own back yard, writing about the battleground at home. The title refers not only to the longing the boys feel as they refresh their e-mail, hoping to hear from their fathers, but also to the generational refreshment of troops, the inheritance of violence.
Percy attended Brown University for his BA and Southern Illinois University for his MFA. He has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and at the MFA program at Iowa State University and Pacific University. He is the author of three novels, The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding, as well as two books of short stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. His fiction is often said to defy easy categorization, blending together elements of literary, detective, sci-fi, western, and horror fiction. He says he is “neither fish nor fowl, both a literary and a genre writer, occupying a borderlands in between.” He has also written for film, television, and comics.
Percy’s fiction and nonfiction have been read on National Public Radio, performed at Symphony Space, and published by Esquire (where he is a contributing editor), GQ, Time, Outside, Men’s Journal, the Wall Street Journal, Glimmer Train, Tin House, and Ploughshares. Percy is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Plimpton Prize, and two Pushcart Prizes.
He lives in Northfield, Minnesota.
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WHEN SCHOOL LET out the two of us went to my backyard to fight. We were trying to make each other tougher. So in the grass, in the shade of the pines and junipers, Gordon and I slung off our backpacks and laid down a pale green garden hose, tip to tip, making a ring. Then we stripped off our shirts and put on our gold-colored boxing gloves and fought.
Every round went two minutes. If you stepped out of the ring, you lost. If you cried, you lost. If you got knocked out or if you yelled stop, you lost. Afterward we drank Coca-Colas and smoked Marlboros, our chests heaving, our faces all different shades of blacks and reds and yellows.
We began fighting after Seth Johnson — a no-neck linebacker with teeth like corn kernels and hands like T-bone steaks — beat Gordon until his face swelled and split open and purpled around the edges. Eventually he healed, the rough husks of scabs peeling away to reveal a different face from the one I remembered — older, squarer, fiercer, his left eyebrow separated by a gummy white scar. It was his idea that we should fight each other. He wanted to be ready. He wanted to hurt those who hurt him. And if he went down, he would go down swinging as he was sure his father would. This is what we all wanted: to please our fathers, to make them proud, even though they had left us.
This was in Crow, Oregon, a high desert town in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. In Crow we have fifteen hundred people, a Dairy Queen, a BP gas station, a Food4Less, a meatpacking plant, a bright green football field irrigated by canal water, and your standard assortment of taverns and churches. Nothing distinguishes us from Bend or Redmond or La Pine or any of the other nowhere towns off Route 97, except for this: we are home to the Second Battalion, Thirty-fourth Marines.
The Marines live on a fifty-acre base in the hills just outside of town, a collection of one-story cinder-block buildings interrupted by cheatgrass and sagebrush. Throughout my childhood I could hear, if I cupped a hand to my ear, the lowing of bulls, the bleating of sheep, and the report of assault rifles shouting from the hilltops. It’s said that conditions here in Oregon’s ranch country closely match the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan and northern Iraq.
Our fathers — Gordon’s and mine — were like the other fathers in Crow. All of them, just about, had enlisted as part-time soldiers, as reservists, for drill pay: several thousand a year for a private and several thousand more for a sergeant. Beer pay, they called it, and for two weeks every year plus one weekend a month, they trained. They threw on their cammies and filled their rucksacks and kissed us good-bye, and the gates of the Second Battalion drew closed behind them.
Our fathers would vanish into the pine-studded hills, returning to us Sunday night with their faces reddened from weather, their biceps trembling from fatigue, and their hands smelling of rifle grease. They would talk about ECPs and PRPs and MEUs and WMDs and they would do pushups in the middle of the living room and they would call six o’clock “eighteen hundred hours” and they would high-five and yell, “Semper fi.” Then a few days would pass, and they would go back to the way they were, to the men we knew: Coors-drinking, baseball-throwing, crotch-scratching, Aqua Velva — smelling fathers.
No longer. In January the battalion was activated, and in March they shipped off for Iraq. Our fathers — our coaches, our teachers, our barbers, our cooks, our gas station attendants and UPS deliverymen and deputies and firemen and mechanics — our fathers, so many of them, climbed onto the olive green school buses and pressed their palms to the windows and gave us the bravest, most hopeful smiles you can imagine and vanished. Just like that.
Nights, I sometimes got on my Honda dirt bike and rode through the hills and canyons of Deschutes County. Beneath me the engine growled and shuddered, while all around me the wind, like something alive, bullied me, tried to drag me from my bike. A dark world slipped past as I downshifted, leaning into a turn, and accelerated on a straightaway — my speed seventy, then eighty — concentrating only on the twenty yards of road glowing ahead of me.
On this bike I could ride and ride and ride, away from here, up and over the Cascades, through the Willamette Valley, until I reached the ocean, where the broad black backs of whales regularly broke the surface of the water, and even farther — farther still — until I caught up with the horizon, where my father would be waiting. Inevitably, I ended up at Hole in the Ground.
A long time ago a meteor came screeching down from space and left behind a crater five thousand feet wide and three hundred feet deep. Hole in the Ground is frequented during the winter by the daredevil sledders among us and during the summer by bearded geologists interested in the metal fragments strewn across its bottom. I dangled my feet over the edge of the crater and leaned back on my elbows and took in the black sky — no moon, only stars — just a little lighter than a raven. Every few minutes a star seemed to come unstuck, streaking through the night in a bright flash that burned into nothingness.
In the near distance Crow glowed grayish green against the darkness — a reminder of how close to oblivion we lived. A chunk of space ice or a solar wind could have jogged the meteor sideways and rather than landing here it could have landed there at the intersection of Main and Farwell. No Dairy Queen, no Crow High, no Second Battalion. It didn’t take much imagination to realize how something can drop out of the sky and change everything.
This was in October, when Gordon and I circled each other in the backyard after school. We wore our golden boxing gloves, cracked with age and flaking when we pounded them together. Browned grass crunched beneath our sneakers, and dust rose in little puffs like distress signals. Gordon was thin to the point of being scrawny. His collarbone poked against his skin like a swallowed coat hanger. His head was too big for his body, and his eyes were too big for his head, and football players — Seth Johnson among them — regularly tossed him into garbage cans and called him E.T.