I got my dog from the stray facility at Fort Sill when I was leaving. I saw his photo on the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation Web site. The poor little fuck was just sitting there behind the chain link looking at his paws. The adoption fee was fifty-two dollars but that came with rabies and distemper-parvo shots, plus deworming and the heartworm test.
I stayed away a couple days after the turkey incident and when I got back I sat on the porch and cleaned my rifle in the cold. After a while the porch light went on and finally the door opened and my mother asked me to take her shopping. She had the door open only a little, to keep the heat in. “I need some things,” she said after I didn’t answer, like she was explaining.
“Why didn’t you have Owen take you?” I said. She’d had trouble driving since she hurt her back. It didn’t bother her to ride, though.
“He hasn’t been around since you left,” she said. “So you gonna take me or what?”
We went to the Price Chopper and the state package store. “It’s not for me,” she said when she told me about the second stop. “I’m getting stocking stuffers for Daryl.”
I went up and down the AM dial while she was in there. Every single song I heard was what my father used to call a complete and utter piece of shit. “Don’t ask me who Daryl is,” I said to her when she finally came out.
“You know who Daryl is,” she said. She dumped the bags on the seat between us.
“I thought this wasn’t for you?” I said, looking at the Jägermeister.
“I was here, I figured I might as well get something for myself,” she said.
The other bag was filled with little travel bottles of liquor. “I got an assortment,” she said. “He likes those and Peppermint Patties.”
“I think you got that thing they talk about on the news,” she said when we were halfway home. “PTSD. Is that what it is? I think you need to talk to somebody.”
“PMS,” I told her.
“I think you need to talk to somebody,” she said.
“I talk to somebody every day,” I told her. “Believe me, it’s no fucking picnic.”
“Owen said you could file a claim,” she said. “Everyone gets something from the government except my kid.”
“That’s because your kid’s an imbecile,” I told her. “We already know that.”
“All I’m saying is I think you need to talk to somebody,” she said. “And now I’m gonna drop the subject.”
When we got home the poor fucking dog had wrapped himself around the tree with his chain. I don’t know why we left him outside, anyway.
“You’re not gonna help me carry stuff in?” my mother said when I left her in the car.
She showed up in the door to my room a few hours later after I was in bed. “There’s phone numbers and stuff you can find,” she said. “Owen told me.”
“So have Owen call them, then,” I said.
“Owen doesn’t need them,” she said.
“You got enough money,” I told her. “And I been through worse shit in this house than I been through out of it.” And that shut her up for like three days.
When she was finally ready to talk I went back to the woods. I took the dog but of course he ran away. I only found him again when I got back to the house. People like to talk about cancer or strokes but if I was going to get something I’d want to get cholera. I came across it on the Plagues & Epidemics website and they said that it killed 38 million people in India in less than a hundred years. It even sounds like nothing you want to fuck with: cholera.
After Basic at Fort Sill I was in for four-and-a-half active and then four in the Reserves. In the Reserves I trained to be a 91 Bravo, which was a field medic, but I washed out. When they gave me the news they said not to worry, they’d still find me something to do. I ended up working out at the Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Center. “What’d you do there?” my mother wanted to know when I got back. “Oh, you know, a little bit of this, little bit of that,” I told her. I think she was watching The Farmer’s Daughter. Even Owen had to laugh.
You want to talk about sad: even after all I been through, one of the saddest things I ever saw was a year after I got home, when my mother pulled over at a stop sign, it must’ve been ten below, and she’s got the window down and she’s scooping snow from the side mirror and trying to throw it on her windshield to clean it. We’d gone about three blocks and couldn’t see a thing before she finally pulled over. I’m sitting there watching while she leans forward and tosses snow around onto the outside of the glass. Then every so often she hits the wipers.
She did this for like five minutes. We’re pulled over next to a Stewart’s. They got wiper fluid on sale in the window twenty-five feet away. She doesn’t go get some. She doesn’t ask me to help. She doesn’t even get out of the car to try and do it herself.
My hair started falling out. I found it on my comb in the mornings. I could see where it was coming from. Not that anybody gives a shit, but you put that together with the teeth and you have quite the package.
I came in from thirty minutes of sliding slush off the porch and there was my kid’s voice on the machine. My mother was playing it over again and turned it off when I got inside. She went back to whatever she was doing at the sink.
“Were you gonna tell me he called?” I asked.
“You cleaned up all that ice already?” she asked me back.
“I didn’t do the ice. I did the slush,” I told her.
“What am I supposed to do about the ice?” she wanted to know. I left her and went into the living room. She said, “There’s a message from his mother, too. She says she’s gonna get a lawyer to hop your ass unless you start sending some money. And somebody else called,” she added, once she was back in front of the TV.
I went out to the kitchen and played the machine. There was only one message and it was from the kid, saying he wanted to wish me a happy holiday. He said, “There was a thing about your unit in the paper so I sent it up to you.” I could hear a little buzzing, maybe something in our phone, maybe something in his. “Let me know if you get it,” he said after a minute, like he was waiting for someone to answer.
I’d been getting a headache that felt like lights going on and off and trying to crack my skull. “Who else called?” I asked. I was still standing there at the machine. The water from my boots was black from all the shit in the snow.
“How would I know?” my mother called from the living room. “She didn’t leave a name.”
“It was a woman?” I asked. “She wanted me? Was her name Janice?”
“I just said she didn’t leave a name,” she said. When I went back to the living room and stood in front of her, she said, “I can’t see,” meaning the television. “You got in here fast,” she added, after I sat back down on the sofa. “What do you got, a girlfriend?”
I kept thinking this was my one chance, and then about how Janice could’ve found my number. Maybe she asked someone at the library?
“You’re not answering me now?” my mother said.
“I’m trying to think here,” I told her.
She shut up for a while. Then she finally said, “I don’t know why anybody would want to give you the time of day.”
I was thinking I should get the dog and go over Janice’s house, but it was sleeting. I figured I’d do it when it got better out. But I couldn’t sit still and my mother finally said, “You’re shaking the whole floor,” meaning with my leg, so I went up to my room. The dog came up to check on me and took one look and went downstairs again.
Then it got so bad I had to go out anyway so I hiked down to the creek and checked some of my traps. I was wearing my field jacket with the hood but I still got soaked. Two of the traps I couldn’t find and there was nothing in the third because I don’t even know if I’m setting them right but a month ago I found one snapped shut with some blood around it in the snow. When I got back there were police cars all around my house. I hid in the sand pit a few houses down and watched until they went away.