David Vann - Dirt

He took off the cotton glove, unwrapped the gauze, and his hand stung. It really hurt in the open air, the broken, exposed blisters. He tried grabbing on to his boner, but he couldn’t use his full palm. Only thumb and fingers, but it was hard to do much that way. It wasn’t very satisfying.

But he did his best. The man in the Hustler had just arrived in town, thirsty and with a boner. Even his horse had a boner. It was eyeing the camera.

This man wore spurs and stood at the bar downing a whiskey while a woman in red petticoats blew him. The man hardly noticed. Then she was bent over a table, and this was where Galen focused. High heels and fishnet stockings and legs spread, exposed and waiting, looking back to see what was coming. This was what Galen wanted. He’d never had Jennifer from behind. Something about this position was just more exciting than any other. He closed his eyes and tried to see her like that, tried to see what she’d look like in this dress. They’d get a small place out in the desert somewhere, let the dust blow in and cover the floor, and he’d wear spurs and bend her over an old wooden table. He’d drink a whiskey while he did it.

Galen had to grab on with his full palm. Otherwise it just wouldn’t work. His hand stung terribly and his mother’s bed was too springy. He was bouncing around, which was distracting. It was kind of weird, also, to be jacking off in his mother’s bed. He felt like she was watching, almost, so he opened his eyes and expected her to be standing right there, but she wasn’t. He was in here alone. He needed to focus and come and get this over with and get back to his meditation.

He was all distracted now, though, and he felt tired, incredibly tired. It had been a long day, far too long, starting at the cabin with breakfast and his mother rushing them out of there. Everything that had happened since had been insane, totally insane.

He had to look at the magazine again, at the woman spread over the table, and then at the man riding her from behind, drinking another whiskey. The man wasn’t even looking at her. He was looking up at the ceiling. He was the man who had never seen anyone he’d done. It was distracting. Galen closed his eyes again and tried to remember what it had felt like inside Jennifer, silky he remembered, hot and tight and wet and he sped up his hand and went full tilt, did his best to make himself come, but his hand hurt and he couldn’t focus and finally he gave up.

Fuck, he said. I can’t come, and I can’t stop thinking about sex. This is hell. His hand was throbbing in pain.

He curled on his side on his mother’s bed and rested. Eyes closed, his breath heavy, just a few minutes of rest and then he’d go finish shoveling. His chest falling in great exhales, so much more exhausted than he’d thought, and he was sinking. He tried to rise up out of it, but somehow that made him fall even deeper.

An enormous grassland, and Galen walking. The earth volcanic, dark pumice covered in lichen. The yellow grass very sharp, growing in tufts like spines, growing from the rock itself.

Heat waves visible in the yellow and black and red, making mirages. Lone trees and cacti always at a distance, no shade. His feet and legs were not flesh and blood. They were more like pencil erasers, wearing down. As he walked, he was becoming gradually shorter, and so he had to hurry. He had to cross before he ran out of eraser.

Shadows of birds flying past, birds of prey with enormous wingspans, but he could never see the birds themselves. He squinted up into the sun, and then he tripped and threw out a leg and woke kicking at the bed.

Uh, he said. Uh. He had trouble throwing off the dream, felt he was still crossing that desert. He was in his mother’s room, on her bed, cool with sweat and covered in dirt. Uh, he said.

No light at the edges of the curtains. Darkness. And so it was no longer day. He had slept, and for how long? She could have dug her way out by now.

He got up quick, pulled on shoes and shorts and stumbled down the stairs through the kitchen to the back lawn. Moonlight, the shed lit up in relief, a dark hulk outlined in white, the bone trunks of the orchard arrayed behind. The sky enormous above. He listened but heard only the ringing of his own blood and breath and realized he still had the earplugs in. So he yanked them out and ran closer to the shed, heard wood hitting wood.

He was panicked, couldn’t focus on where the sound was coming from, but he saw a plank sticking out, a long slat protruding several feet at the bottom, still attached at the top.

The plank next to it sticking out a few inches, and she was hammering from the inside. The planks wide enough she could slip out if she freed two of them. Very close to making her escape.

No, he said. But she was pounding more quickly now, probably using one of the wooden walnut screens.

He ran around to the toolshed, stumbling through pits he’d made in his shoveling, the earth soft and caving, and when he opened the shed, he couldn’t see a thing in there. He needed a hammer, but the tools were a jumble. He felt wooden handles, but everything too big. Damn it, he said.

He ran back around the shed, the dirt itself wanting to slow him down, the entire planet conspiring against him, and he tried to push at the plank she was freeing, tried to push it back in with his hands, but he was too soft. The jolt of her hammering from inside. He kicked at the bottom of the wood, slammed his shoulder, pounded with his fists, but it was hopeless.

He tried the other plank, the one freed except at the very top, and pushed that back in, grabbed the edges of it with his hands, but the nails wouldn’t line up with their holes and he couldn’t see. And then she mashed his left hand.

Galen screamed. His fingers mangled. His mother yelling a kind of war cry. He held his wounded hand and tried to look at it in the moonlight. The fingers still there, but she’d crushed them with something hard, the corner of a walnut drying rack, and it hurt so much he couldn’t breathe. The pain rising like fire.

He tried not to run. He walked fast and carefully into the house, into the bathroom off the kitchen, flicked on the light and could see all the way to white bone on his middle finger. No, he said. He was sobbing, his face wet with tears, and he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t call anyone.

He tried to move his fingers, and that made him yell again in pain, but they did move. Nothing severed, but he could see bone and ligament and there was blood and the skin all bunched up to the side and he felt like he was going to faint. He leaned against a wall and looked away from his hand. Don’t look, he told himself. Hang on.

She was going to escape. If he didn’t get out there and nail those planks down, she was going to escape. He didn’t have time to do anything for his hand.

A flashlight, he said. I need a flashlight, and then I need to find a hammer.

He had dumped all the drawers from the kitchen and pantry and entryway, so any flashlight would be out in the pile on the lawn. Shit, he said.

He went out there and it just seemed hopeless. A huge pile of crinkled photos and all the crap underneath. He felt around with his good hand, held his left hand in the air, a horror of pain, blood dripping down his arm. So many shapes in the pile. Things plastic and metal and rubber and paper, and the moonlight no help at all. Kneeling here on the lawn, his mother hammering, about to escape, his hand destroyed, he was doomed. He was going to prison. There was no way out of this. Then he remembered she kept flashlights in the trunk of the car.

He ran to the kitchen, where the keys were hanging, got to the car, opened the trunk, and felt around in her box of emergency supplies. The jug of water, food bars, emergency blanket, and two flashlights. He grabbed one, flicked it on, and ran around the house past the fig tree. The beam jagged, the world revealed in patches.