Dad disappeared the day I got my senior pictures back. Late April. His wallet on the table with everything still in it, empty Heinekens in the sink. I checked the closet and was relieved to see the rifle and shotgun. His truck was still there, key in the ignition, old Copenhagen cans on the floor, orange juice bottles half-full of his spit, SunChip bags crammed into the seats. I touched the chewed passenger’s-side seat belt where Koda had worked on it all the way home from the pound. I pulled out my senior pictures. I was eighteen, but in them I looked like a kid. A dumb, smiling kid, because when people asked me to smile, that’s what I’d do. I spat on the shiny surface, rubbed the water around, and scratched off all my mouths.
Search and rescue never found a body. One member of the search committee, a homeless asshole there for the free lunch, pulled me aside and told me it was “them aliens” who took my father, the ones who doodled on all the trees. He pointed at a larch.
“That’s Dutch elm,” I said.
He nodded. Licked a yellow stain at the corner of his mouth and wiped the area dry with his sleeve. “Nope,” he said. Before he took off, he pressed fifteen dollars and the Snickers bar from his sack lunch into my hands.
The rifle was a gentle-looking black .22 semiautomatic. Polymer plastic blend. I associated it with the peaceful feeling of completing a hunt, the comfort of fresh-cooked meat. I carried it into the living room and pointed it out the window, hoping the cougar would choose this moment to stroll through. I peeled off a sock and clicked off the safety and aimed at my big toe. I stood there for what felt like hours, wondering what kind of hurt could come from something small as a toe. I tried to think about all the places Dad could have gone and might still be. Tried not to think about how he might have offed himself, if that’s what he’d done. I clicked on the safety, turned the gun around, and swung it from the barrel like a golf club into my ankle.
The pain felt like something else in the dark room, dim and sweet.
For weeks I searched the woods, ignoring my busted foot. Hoping to find what search and rescue couldn’t. Koda followed, licking the scabby blood off my ankle whenever I stopped to rest. She started sleeping in my bed at night instead of Dad’s, arranging herself in the center of the mattress at crotch-level, so I’d have to lie on one side around her or else sleep with legs spread. She’d close her eyes but was awake in a way and watching me. Any time I got up during the night, she’d snap open her eyes and follow me to the bathroom or kitchen, making sure I returned to bed. There her rib cage rose and fell slower than I thought possible. Watching her breathe reminded me of the one girl I’d slept with. I used to watch that girl’s belly go up and down and press my hand into it. Her stomach went concave when she inhaled, and my hand was sucked into her by her breathing. It was strange, pressing my hand into Koda’s long white fur and feeling the same thing. That girl now sold eight-dollar coffee in Williston to creepy oil field guys.
A hawk or something that sounded like one made a long, ugly noise in the distance.
In June I went full-time washing dishes at one of Bonner’s worst restaurants, a Chinese place by the interstate. Bonner was an old logging town, population 1,600 and shrinking. Business was usually slow. Even when we were busy it felt slow. And the food was rough. Real rough. Greasy piles of chicken or beef probably slaughtered years ago, thawed and slopped with sauce that left orange residue on the plates. I’d turn down a free ticket to China if anybody ever offered me one. They’d go, “Here, Cal. Round-trip to Beijing. On me.” Thanks, but no fucking thanks. The only places Dad ever traveled were logging camps in Washington and Oregon. Except one time he’d gone to California, where a kid tried to grab his wallet. Hit him in the face with a busted lightbulb when Dad wouldn’t give it up. The bulb nicked the artery in his cheek.
Washing dishes wasn’t bad. You could go the whole day without talking to anyone if you didn’t feel like it. A lot of jobs weren’t like that—you had to bullshit with customers or your coworkers whether you liked it or not. Here you just stuck in your headphones and everything disappeared. Some days, though, I was happy to have company. I’d smoke a cigarette with the old grandma whose son and daughter-in-law owned the place. She chain-lit stale Montanas she got cheap off the rez, squinching her eyes shut and breathing the smoke in deep.
Slow days the owners had me drive trash to the Clark Fork and throw it in. They didn’t want to pay for a dumpster. This got me out of the restaurant, but I hated leaving garbage in such a beautiful place. The river was so blue and clear I didn’t have words for it. Dry heat wagged the horizon. I’d smoke on the muddy bank and stare at the water. Once a moose and her calf were drinking from the far shore. I wanted to shoot them, thinking of the nice, oily meat. The calf walked underneath its mom to get to the other side of her, then looked up at her to see if she’d noticed, but the mom was watching me. Other times I’d see what I thought were probably their heart-shaped tracks on my side of the shore, the toes splayed in the mud. After seeing the moose, I threw the trash in the back of my truck to ditch on my way home from work. I’d toss it in one of the abandoned sawmills, where the flies and bees buzzed so loud in the heat that I could hear them before getting out of the truck.
The owners of the Chinese restaurant, who were actually Korean, kept a quiet shrine on the floor in the corner of the dining room. The shrine had a picture of a sad-looking man with a dented head, a bowl of bruised clementines, and a plastic cat that waved its paw at you. An up-and-down wave. Maybe that was how Korean people waved. The cat waved at you like it was waving away all the stuff you thought about. Like it was urging you not to think, not to worry about being able to buy food or pay rent or feel like you should try to make some friends or have sex again because that was what eighteen-year-olds did. I sometimes stole clementines from the shrine. At home I peeled them and gave half to Koda. She’d accept them and gravely spit out the pulpy mess.
After Dad disappeared, Jenny would come over to pick up the rent. He’d trip on the quartz in the dark and cuss his way up the porch steps. The old Indian had a fat, long, gray rattail that looked like it was feeding on his brain. He lived across the lot in a trailer that was out of earshot but close enough for me to see the shape of him moving around, trimming the bushes around his property, dragging long, limp branches inside for his stove, pounding some skinned animal into the side of his shed. I’d heard Jenny had some kind of cancer, or some other disease. Something eating him from the inside.
“Met these women on the internet,” he told me once, a few months after Dad left. We were on my porch again. He tucked the rent into the pocket of a grimy, striped T-shirt. His armpit skin was tanned and saggy, but the skin on his face was pale and smooth. I didn’t know about meeting women online. Seemed desperate. If I met a girl, I’d want it to be in person. But then again I wasn’t meeting anyone at all.
From the restaurant parking lot, I’d sometimes see Jenny pull into the Super 8 across from the Chinese restaurant and sit at the lobby’s guest computer. What kind of picture was he showing these ladies?
I’d hear music blasting. See the shapes of Jenny and a woman playing a game of naked tag outside like kids. The whitish glow of a woman’s ass in the porch light. Some nights I wondered if they weren’t playing at all, and the woman was trying to get away from him, or if play had tipped into something else. When the campers took off, Jenny would usually come over, tripping on the steps, red-cheeked and reeking of sex. He was usually drunk and happy and had a joint he wanted us to smoke. This happened a couple times a month.