Timothy Johnston - The Current

He got his fire going, then clattered a frozen pizza into the oven and sat down at the kitchen table to go over his receipts and his appointments for the rest of the week, and he did not look up again until he smelled something burning—forgot to set the timer, Jesus Christ… and he carried the blackened pizza still smoking on the cookie sheet to the front porch and shucked it into the snow, where it hissed and steamed and went down slowly like a ship.

He found a beer at the back of the fridge and spiffed it open and took it into the living room and sat in his chair with his sockfeet up, drinking the beer and watching the fire play dimly in the dark face of the TV. He held the remote with his thumb over the button but did not push it. As to the question of a second vehicle, as to the question of possible foul play, no comment at this time .

There was a sound, a thump, and he looked to the ceiling. Her room up there, directly overhead. At her noisiest just before she went out again, hopping around to her music, chucking shoes into her closet… and then down she’d come, clock-clocking down the hardwood stairs as some girlfriend or more likely some boy pulled up the drive and whooshing by in perfume and too much leg, See you later, Dad. Don’t wait up, Dad . And there you’d sit all night watching for headlights, listening for the slam of a car door, for the sound of her heels on the porchsteps…

A log popped and whistled and settled onto its bed of coals. Small flames leaping for the flue and vanishing in midair, and he thought of Eileen Lindeman again and the story she’d told him—fifteen years old and getting out of that silver Buick and walking home. Just walking into the house like it was any other day. Going to school the next day. Going to college. Getting married. Getting divorced. Becoming a woman he himself would one day desire, and take to bed.

And the man—the driver of the Buick? Walking into his own house that night with terror in his heart at what he’d almost done, and were the police looking for him at that very second? Kiss the wife hello. Kiss the kids. Sit down to dinner thinking of the fifteen-year-old girl who believed in God. Thinking of what he’d almost done. Almost become. Did that man go back to work the next day, make his money, pay his bills, raise his kids, live his life? An old man now, or dead, and what became of his desire? Did it fade with time, with age? Or did the thing you fought inside yourself just grow bigger, hungrier, until it took you over?

He got up, intending to throw another log on the fire, but instead returned to the kitchen, and from there stepped into the utility room, flicking on the light, and squeezed himself between the washing machine and water heater, reaching back into the webby dark until his fingers touched what they felt for, until he could lift it free of the webs and lay it out before him on the washer. Canvas and leather, padded and heavy. The sound of a good zipper, then the smell of oiled lamb’s wool and metal and walnut rising from the opened case, and, more faintly, the cordite of the rounds that had been fired in the rifle’s chamber. Built into the case was a compartment with a Velcro flap. Just the one box? said the dealer. As if a single box of lethal bullets was not the norm, was strange even. Just the one , said Gordon.

He hit the light switch on his way out and he hit the kitchen switch and he hit the switch that killed the sixty-watt bulb on the porch and he opened the door and put the gun to his shoulder and steadied himself against the jamb. He put his eye to the scope and turned the focus ring until the trunks of the pines at the edge of the clearing stepped forward, weirdly lit by nothing but the light from the snow, and so close it seemed you could reach out and touch them. And with such power of vision he scoped, he searched, panning left, then right in great sweeps, though he moved the rifle itself barely at all. He scoped, expecting any second to see something in the lens other than trees—a shape, a face in the dark, staring back at him with eyes that had no idea what they were seeing, what the man held in his hands in the darkness of the house. That sudden flash of light.

The sound of the shot and the punch to his shoulder and the burst of white in the face of the tree and the great thrill in his heart were all instantaneous, and right away he lowered the rifle and looked for the casing where it had rung like a coin on the porch, picked it up still hot and put it his pocket and closed the door again.

He returned to the utility room and zipped the rifle back into the case and set the case far back in the corner again, and all this he did in the dark. And still in the dark he got into his boots, his jacket, and he stepped onto the porch and turned the deadbolt with his key and went down the porchsteps and crossed the clearing to the outbuilding, and five minutes later he was on the 52 North, and fifteen minutes after that he pulled over to scrape the frost from the inside of the windshield, and “Just what in the hell,” he said, but not to the frost or to the van. “Why don’t you just mind your own business?” And after he’d scraped off enough frost, the frost falling like snow inside the cab, he put the van in gear again and drove on.

SHE STOOD AT the kitchen window staring out at the night, and it was still that night ten years ago, the night her son came home with the wet dog, so that when the dog now shook itself at her feet, clapping its ears and rattling its tags, she looked down absently, unthinkingly, and was shocked by the sight of him—the hunched and wasted body, the whitened muzzle, the filmy eyes turned up to her, searching for her in the fog of his world—and it was the shock that returned her to her place in time, to this kitchen, this farmhouse where she lived now with the old dog and her other son.

She took the dog’s face in her hands and felt his trembling and tried to soothe it from him with her touch and her voice but it was not enough, it never was anymore, and finally she stood again and picked up his vial of pills, shook one into a cereal bowl and began crushing it with a spoon. She folded the grit into a soft dog treat, and when she turned again his snout was already raised, his nose tracking the treat’s descent, his yellow teeth taking it gently from her fingertips.

She watched him chew, swallow, lick his lips.

“Go drink your water,” she said, and he limped over to his bowl and lapped sloppily, then turned to her once again, dripping water onto the floor she’d just mopped. Staring at her with those milky eyes, waiting to see what she would do next, where she would go. Rachel staring back at him, going nowhere, saying nothing. She was back in time again, at the old house, ten years ago. Danny had gone to help Jeff and she’d gone back to bed, she remembered. But half an hour later she heard him knocking about in his room and she’d gotten up again. The door to his room open, Danny hunched over and stuffing clothes into his duffel. Stink of wet dog in the room, and the dog lying on the bed, watching Danny’s every move.

Now what are you doing? she’d said from the doorway.

Gonna go see Cousin Jer, he said without turning. Shoot some birds.

On a Wednesday night?

Why not?

T-shirts, a pair of jeans, purple Vikings sweatshirt.

Danny, she said. It’s two thirty in the morning. Does he even know you’re coming?

Of course he does, he said—it was all set up: he’d be at Jer’s in an hour, he’d sleep a couple of hours and then they’d head up to Uncle Rudy’s cabin. Back by Friday, maybe Saturday…

Rachel stood watching him, confused and strangely heated. As if she’d done something stupid. Something embarrassing.