T. Johnson - Hold It 'Til It Hurts

They turned back, his father no longer stalking but stomping through the brush, his polyester legs sawing the air, his upstretched arms balancing his rifle across his shoulders. Walking like that, with his head down to watch the ground and his hands up, he looked like a recaptured POW being marched back to camp, his mind preoccupied with dreams of freedom. Did people in Iraq hunt? Did hunters in Iraq wear camouflage that so closely resembled military garb? Achilles wondered if he could really shoot someone. At the house, his father exchanged the rifles for wire clippers and bolt cutters, and led Achilles back to the fence, where they spent the next few hours cutting the fence down. “I guess this is why we haven’t seen any deer running through here lately,” was his father’s only explanation.

Why did he care about deer running across their land? Only the week before, he’d stopped Troy from shooting a six-point buck in the driveway because it wasn’t right to kill them when their natural habitat was being destroyed. Shooting a deer in your yard just ain’t hunting.

It started to drizzle, but they continued working until they had detached the fence along the entire length of the property. As they worked, his father reviewed the advice he’d shared over the years: the night sky is brightest along a river, slow steps and shadows are the next best thing to camouflage, and defeat starts in the mind. Afterwards, he set up some cans and bottles for target practice, choosing a low berm far from the tree line. Shooting a tree isn’t hunting. After that, his father walked him back to the house, his arm around Achilles’s shoulder, telling stories about his days as a Yellow Jacket.

Overalls still on, they went to the VFW. Achilles had only been in the VFW to use the bathroom during the Fourth of July picnics, and each time he did he went the long way around the dimly lit bar so that he could run his fingers over the sawdust-coated shuffleboard table and, if no one was playing, slide a few of the weights around; then he would stab the dart board a few times, right in the center; finally he’d sink the cue ball, winning the big match in his mind, and emerge from the dank wood-paneled bar into the sunlight, hands aloft like a champion. He’d imagined being outside the VFW door at eleven fifty-nine at the end of his twentieth year. When the clock struck midnight, he would go in and play shuffleboard and pool, darts even, while drinking boilermakers — canned PBR with a shot of Jack tossed in. It was an image that meant freedom, but that night it felt like anything but.

His father held the door for him. “Let’s have a cold one, or two, or six.”

Their eyes met as he edged through the door, squeezing past his father’s large frame. “Thanks, Dad.”

“Go on in, son. You’re old enough for war, you’re old enough to have a drink with your old man, I fucking say! When y’all get back, your photos go on the wall with ours!”

When he stepped inside, the customers roared like Achilles was a gladiator entering the coliseum. Some sang old army cadences, some chanted his name. But for the next hour, Achilles fidgeted anxiously as the regulars kept him pinned into his booth, shaking his hand and buying him beers. He appreciated the attention, but the nicer they acted, the more he felt like a visitor, and the more he felt like a visitor, the more he thought about where he was going. That scared him. He was going home that night, but home didn’t feel like home anymore. In his head until then it was always the house at the end of a stretch of slick black asphalt with no dividing line, no lights, no lane reflectors, and a dense tree stand hugging both sides. There was no other traffic on this road. It was always dark, the sky gray, the air wet. It was a straight road that vanished into the distance. Had it curved or rippled, that would have been okay. But in his mind, straight as a rifle barrel. The only landmark was his parents’ home, which up until then had been the terminus, but now felt like a way station because now this road stretched well beyond that house and faded into the horizon where it merged with the night, becoming one undifferentiated question.

So he nodded at the regulars and drank the beers and watched men play pool while, in his mind, that road kept stretching farther and farther out into the distance until a warmth set in, a tingling in his fingers and numbness in tongue as the alcohol went to work and for one split second he thought that he understood why they all drank so much. Jake with the bum arm; Harry the barkeep and his garage full of porno magazines; Terry, who carried pictures of his dead dogs instead of his children in his wallet: each had a road in his head, and they were scared to know where it led.

On the way home, his father stopped the truck on the side of the road and said, “I know why you did it. Thank you. You were always the cautious one, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” His father patted his head, and Achilles loved him so much he would have cried right then if he wasn’t afraid it would ruin the moment.

His father belched. “When your mother flaps her gums about where you’ve been, what do you say?”

“Out with Dad.”

But all she said was, “I hope he fed you.”

That night the family went to Lawrence’s Steakhouse, a chain restaurant with wheelbarrows and old bicycles hanging from the ceiling, and walls covered with old photographs and posters advertising long-forgotten products. They went to Lawrence’s once or twice a year, usually for a festive occasion, but tonight they ate in silence, everyone except Troy pushing their food around on their plates until his mom asked again if they had everything on the list. Achilles and Troy sat on one side of the booth, their parents on the other side, with the list on the table between them. Achilles and Troy nodded. Black shoe polish, small squares of paper, pencils, foot powder, foot cream, eight pairs of black socks, for starters: it was a long list, but they had everything. And stamps? asked their father. Yes, they had those too. Their father nodded solemnly, “During your first week they’re as good as cigarettes in prison. You might even be able to trade them for KP duty.”

He returned to his food, chewing slowly. They rarely ate out, but their father made an exception for Lawrence’s because their filet was, “The best filet your mother didn’t cook. The only time I’ll eat it made by someone else.” He said this repeatedly, even though their mother never cooked filet, or any other cut of steak. After the belt on the bandsaw snapped back and hit him in the face, breaking his cheekbone and four teeth, their father refused to have an implant made because he discovered that his workers didn’t have dental coverage under the new owner’s insurance plans. The mill closed down shortly thereafter, and his new insurance plan through the school didn’t include dental at all. So he ate his steak very slowly, working the left side of his mouth, his chin up so that no one could miss the scar on his cheek he wore like a war wound, his gaze wandering off as if he were thinking back to his own preparations for basic training.

He’d been adamant that they never join the military. On more than one occasion he told them that it was the randomness that nearly drove him mad in Vietnam, asking them to imagine if the Wizard had given brains to the Cowardly Lion and courage to the Tin Man. The cowardly private who hides if he hears a rooster crow triggers a booby trap and the brave officer leading every charge never gets a scratch. The next week, it was reversed. You’ll try to crack the code but there is none. In a large-scale armed conflict, there’s no relationship between how a man lives and how a man dies. He’d adamantly repeated this after Troy came home on 9/11 threatening to do something about this terrorism crap, but when the enlistment contracts showed up on the fridge a year later, affixed by the Lacrosse Club magnet and covering the family Christmas photo, their father limited his comments to practical advice like, “Change your underwear frequently and your socks even more frequently.” Achilles, who until then had limited his comments to “the army doesn’t take virgins,” said nothing.