It went on for three or four days, both of them at an impasse, until finally she screamed at him and, when he refused to scream back, left the house. He watched the door clack shut behind her. How long would she be gone? Long enough, he hoped.
He got the shotgun out from under the bed and leaned it against the sofa. He dialed 911.
“What’s your emergency?” a woman’s voice responded.
“I’ve just killed myself,” he told her. “Hurry, please. Cover the body before my daughter gets home.”
But it didn’t come out like that. This had only been what his mind was saying, his tongue uttering something else entirely.
“Excuse me?” said the operator.
He tried again, his voice straining with urgency.
“Is this a prank call?” the operator said. “This isn’t funny.”
He fell silent, tried to gather himself.
“Sir?” said the operator. “Hello?”
He looked desperately around the room. The dog was now regarding him intently, ears perked. He picked up the shotgun, held it one-handed near the receiver, and fired it into the wall behind the sofa. The kickback hurt his wrist and made him drop the weapon. The dog skittered out of the room, yelping.
He put the receiver to his ear again. The operator was talking more urgently now. He hung up the telephone.
After picking up the gun, he sat down on the sofa. He hoped that they would come soon, and that it would be soon enough, before his daughter’s return. He leaned back and closed his eyes, trying to gather himself.
When he was calm again, he braced the stock of the shotgun between the insoles of his feet and brought the barrels to his face. Carefully, he slipped the ends of the barrels into his mouth.
It was then that his daughter chose to return. He heard her open the front door and then she came into the room, her face pale. It was clear she had been crying. She came in and saw him and stopped dead, then stood there, her face draining of blood. They stayed there like that, staring, neither caring to be the first to look away.
He waited, wondering what words he could use, what he could possibly say to her. How could he ever talk his way out of this one?
“Daddy?” she said finally. “What are you doing?”
And then the words came to him.
He lifted his mouth off the barrels and licked his lips. “Insect,” he explained as tenderly as he possibly could. “Grunion. Tent-pole motioning.”
An Accounting
I have been ordered to write an honest accounting of how I became a Midwestern Jesus and the subsequent disastrous events thereby accruing, events for which, I am willing to admit, I am at least partly to blame. I know of no simpler way than to simply begin.
In August it was determined that our stores were depleted and not likely to outlast the winter. One of our number was to travel East and beg further provision from our compatriots on the coast, another was to move further inland, hold converse with the Midwestern sects as he encountered them, bartering for supplies as he could. Lots were drawn and this latter role fell to me.
I was provided a dog and a dogcart, a knife, a revolver with twelve rounds, rations, food for the dog, a flint and steel, and a rucksack stuffed with objects for trade. I named the dog Finger for reasons obscure even to myself. I received as well a small packet of our currency, though it was suspected that, since the rupture, our currency, with its Masonic imagery, would be considered by the pious Midwesterners anathema. It was not known if I would be met with hostility, but this was considered not unlikely, considering no recent adventurer into the territory had returned.
I was given as well some hasty training by a former Midwesterner turned heretic named Barton. According to him, I was to make frequent reference to God — though not to use the word goddamn, as in the phrase “Where are my goddamn eggs?” “What eggs are these?” I asked Barton, only to discover that the eggs themselves were apparently of no consequence. He ticked off a list of other words considered profane and to be avoided. I was told to frequently describe things as God’s will. “There but for the grace of God go I” was also an acceptable phrase, as was “Praise God.” Things were not to be called godawful though I was allowed to use, very rarely and with care, the phrase “God’s aweful grace.” If someone were to ask me if I were “saved,” I was to claim that yes, indeed, I was saved, and that I had “accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior.” I made notes of all these locutions, silently vowing to memorize them along the route.
“Another thing,” said Barton. “If in dire straits, you should Jesus them and claim revelation from God.”
So as you see, it was not I myself who produced the idea of “Jesusing” them, but Barton. Am I to be blamed if I interpreted the verb in away other than he intended? Perhaps he is to blame for his insufficiencies as an instructor.
But I am outstripping myself. Each story must be told in some order, and mine, having begun at the beginning, has no reason not to take each bit and piece according to its proper chronology, so as to let each reader of this accounting arrive at his own conclusions.
I was driven a certain way, on the bed of an old carrier converted now to steam power. The roads directly surrounding our encampment — what had been my former city in better days — were passable, having been repaired in the years following the rupture. After a few dozen miles, however, the going became more difficult, the carrier forced at times to edge its way forward through the underbrush to avoid a collapse or an eruption of the road. Nevertheless, I had a excellent driver, Marchent, and we had nearly broached the border of the former Pennsylvania before we encountered a portion of road so destroyed by a large mortar or some other such engine of devastation that we could discover no way around. Marchent, one of the finest, blamed himself, though to my mind there was no blame to be taken.
I was unloaded. Marchent and his sturdy second, Bates, carried Finger and his dogcart through the trees to deposit them on the far side of the crater. I myself simply scrambled down hand over foot and then scrambled up the other side.
To this point, my journey could not be called irregular. Indeed, it was nothing but routine, with little interest. As I stood on the far side of the crater, watching Marchent and his second depart in the carrier, I found myself almost relishing the adventure that lay before me.
This was before the days I spent trudging alone down a broken and mangled road through a pale rain. This was before I found myself sometimes delayed for half a day, trying to figure how to get dog and dogcart around an obstacle. They had provided me a simple harness for the dog, but had foreseen nothing by way of rope or tether to secure the fellow. If I tried to skirt, say, a shell crater while carrying the bulky dogcart, Finger, feeling himself on the verge of abandonment, was anxious to accompany me. He would be there, darting between my legs and nearly stumbling me into the abyss itself, and if I did not fall, he did, so that once I had crossed I had to figure some way of extricating him. Often had I shouted at him the command “Finger! Heel!” or the command “Finger! Sit!” but it was soon clear that I, despite pursuing the more dangerous of the two missions, had been disbursed the less adequate canine.
Nevertheless, I grew to love Finger and it was for this I was sorry and even wept when later I had to eat him.
But I fear I have let my digression on Finger, which in honesty began not as a digression but as a simple description of a traveler’s difficulty, get the better of my narrative. Imagine me, then, attempting now to carry Finger around a gap in the road in the dogcart itself, with Finger awaiting his moment to effect an escape by clawing his way up my chest and onto my head, and myself shouting “Finger! Stay!” in my most authoritative tone as I feel the ground beginning to slide out from under my feet. Or imagine Finger and me crammed into the dogcart together, the hound clawing my hands to ribbons as we rattle down a slope, not knowing what obstacle we shall encounter at the bottom. That should render sufficient picture of the travails of my journey as regards Finger, and the reason as well — after splicing the harness and refashioning it as a short leash for Finger — for abandoning the dogcart, the which, I am willing to admit, as communal property, I had no right to forsake.