Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

“It wasn’t there, man,” he said, shrugging.

“The moose or the truck?” I must have said, since I heard myself saying it, even though it wasn’t my voice.

“Third gear,” my dad said back, snuffling a laugh out, and like that, I had crossed to him right through the dead fire, was kneeing him in the face. He rolled backwards out of his trashed-out lawn chair and I went with him, my arm a piston, my fist the hammer at the end of it.

Dad, though, he wasn’t even fighting back. That was the thing. He just kept holding his hands out to the side, saying this was okay, he deserved this, do my worst. It was like—it was like he knew who was inside this Junior. Like he couldn’t fight back, since it was his son. Like he knew he deserved this for what he hadn’t even done yet. Like he knew I’d dove into a sink miles and years away, come up in the shallows of this lake.

I don’t know what he thought, finally. I don’t know what he knew.

Just that I had to save Dino. No matter how much it hurt.

I pushed Dad back as hard as I could, and he sat down in the shallows of the lake, was still kind of laughing.

“What are you… What are we doing , Junior, man?” he said, shaking the wet from his fingertips, his mouth running blood down onto his chest.

I stood there in front of him, the cold water lapping over my feet, and knew this could end now. That it should end here. It was just a truck.

But—maybe this is the way it had always been, every time this happened.

For the truck, Junior was just going to deal out a beating, a shaming.

To keep Dino safe, I was going to have to wade farther out.

That’s why nobody ever got sent up for it. This is why Junior never told anybody about this—even whoever his girlfriend had been eight years ago.

Because he didn’t know about it.

He didn’t know the why of it.

He was sleepwalking.

There were just two people here in the shallows. Not three. Me and Dad. Me finally getting to see him as he was, as I’d always wanted to see him, as I’d always dreamed of seeing him. And then having to step forward, knee him hard enough in the face that a line of blood slings up behind and above him.

He falls into the water, and the blood goes out farther.

And then I’m on him, my knee to his chest, my hands to his face, to push it back, to push it under the surface.

It’s for leaving us. It’s for coming back.

I’m screaming right into the top of the water, and his eyes are open inches away, his hair floating all around, and then, right at the end, he opens his mouth, breathes in what he can’t.

I hold him there for longer, to be sure. And then for longer after that, hugging him to me, which is probably a blurry image the other Junior still remembers in jagged bits. And then I push him out like a raft, and I slam my hand into the top of the water over and over, the splashing droplets stinging my face harder each time, but never hard enough.

What floats in around me, from behind me, are porcupine quills, and feathers, and plastic beads.

I stand away from all that, and when I look back—

—it’s to an empty kitchen, miles and years away from then.

But there’s water on the floor where Dad was standing.

I edge closer to it, then rush past it, sure that where he’s retreated, it’s to Dino’s room, because he can fix all this, because it’s not too late.

Where he is, it’s through the back door, the wooden steps wet with his staggering footprints. Where he is, it’s facedown against the packed dirt, his hand reaching ahead of him.

This is what it’s like to kill your father.

This is what it’s like to kill everything your father could have been, if only the world hadn’t found him, done its thing to him.

“Don’t come back again,” I said down to him, my throat filling with tears like I was drowning too, and then Dino was standing beside me in his nightshirt, his expression emptier than it should have been. Even if he didn’t recognize Dad, still, there was a dead man in full fancydance regalia lying dead in the dirt four feet from us.

It was all the same to Dino.

“One, two, three, four,” he said, one side of his mouth smiling.

He said it again—“ Four ”—and I tracked where he was wanting me to look.

Standing just past where Dad was dead, there were the shapes of four dogs.

The yellowy-white one padded forward, pushed its nose into Dad’s neck, and I breathed in fast, let go of Dino’s hand so I could put my palm to his chest, to keep him from trying to pet the pretty dogs.

They were anything but.

Not only had they died weeks ago, but when they’d come back together, it had been in a pile, in whatever pit the deputy sheriff had dumped them in.

The yellowy-one had the front leg of the black-and-tan one and the body of the brindle.

They were all like that, their legs just enough different lengths to make their movements awkward.

But they got where they were going. And they remembered who had done this to them.

Like all animals, they went for the soft pieces first—the gut, the tongue—and when Dad’s porcupine-quill bustle was in the way, one of them grabbed it in its jaws, pulled it away. Instead of coming untied, it peeled from the muscle.

The regalia wasn’t ornament, it was part of him. It was what he’d been growing.

Maybe when he just started out, when he was just an impulse, coming back, all he’d had to go on was that dim shape of what he’d meant to be. No clear lines between what he was wearing and what he was.

He really could have been anything.

What he was, though, it was dead. Again.

When the dogs started dragging this feast deeper into the night to take some time with it, pull muscle from bone and tilt their heads back to help it down their throats, I stepped Dino and me back, closed the door as quietly as I could, pushing with my left hand up high, my right hand pulling on the knob, slowing this down.

It didn’t matter.

Mom was already there, sitting at the kitchen, her head ducked down to light a cigarette, her hair a shroud over that process.

“What is it?” she said.

I looked out the door again, at the impossible thing happening out there, and then back to Mom, waiting to mete out punishment for whatever was going on here.

“A moose,” I told her, and this stopped her second roll on the lighter’s wheel.

She stared at me through her hair.

Had Jannie—we used to call her “Jauntie”—told her the truth of what happened to Dad? Had she been carrying this alone for all these years, promising herself to move us away from the stories, so we would be sure never to hear that one?

I should maybe say that we were down in the flats, here. Not that moose are only on the reservation, but they’re for sure not all the way down here where they’d be taller than everything.

It was then that I cued in that I was soaking wet.

Mom had noticed too, was about to say something about it, it looked like, when Dino cut in.

“One two three four !” he said.

Mom redirected her attention over to him, then back to me.

“You two are the most amazing things I’ve ever seen,” she said, her cigarette still not lit. “I’m—I’m not sorry, I would do it all over again… your dad. Everybody told me to stay away from him, that he’d break my heart. But it was worth it, wasn’t it? It was all worth it?”

At which point she was sweeping forward to gather us in her arms, in her robe, in her hair, and I think this is where a lot of Indian stories usually end, with the moon or a deer or a star coming down, making everything whole again.

Those stories were all a long time ago, though.