George Saunders - Tenth of December - Stories

Two different guys were there, younger than the earlier two. They might have been high schoolers. I handed over the MiiVOXmax tag.

“Oh shit, snap!” the one guy said. “We were wondering where that was.”

“We were about to call it in,” the other guy said, bringing over espresso and cookies.

“Is it valuable?” I said.

“Ha, oh, boy,” the first one said, and got some kind of special cloth from under the counter and dusted the tag off and put it back on display.

“What is it?” I said.

“It’s more like what’s it for, is how I’d say it,” the first guy said.

“What’s it for?” I said.

“This might be more in your line,” he said and handed me the MiiVOXmin tag.

“I’ve been away a long time,” I said.

“Us, too,” the second kid said.

“We just got out of the army,” the first kid said.

Then we all took turns saying where we’d been.

Turned out me and the first guy had been in basically the same place.

“Wait, so were you at Al-Raz?” I said.

“I was totally at Al-Raz,” the first guy said.

“I was never in the shit, I admit it,” the second guy said. “Although I did once run over a dog with a forklift.”

I asked the first guy if he remembered the baby goat, the pocked wall, the crying toddler, the dark arched doorway, the doves that suddenly exploded out from under that peeling gray eave.

“I wasn’t over by that,” he said. “I was more over by the river and the upside-down boat and that little family all in red that kept turning up everywhere you looked?”

I knew exactly where he’d been. It was unbelievable how many times, pre- and post-exploding doves, I’d caught sight, on the horizon, down by the river, of some imploring or crouching or fleeing figure in red.

“It ended up cool with that dog, though,” the second guy said. “He lived and all. By the time I left, he’d be like riding right up alongside me in the forklift.”

A family of nine Indian-Americans came in, and the second guy went over to them with the espresso and cookies.

“Al-Raz, wow,” I said, in an exploratory way.

“For me?” the first guy said. “Al-Raz was the worst day of the whole deal.”

“Yes, me too, exactly,” I said.

“I fucked up big-time at Al-Raz,” he said.

Suddenly I found I couldn’t breathe.

“My boy Melvin?” he said. “Got a chunk of shrapnel right in the groin. Because of me. I waited too long to call it in. There was this like lady party going on right nearby? About fifteen gals in this corner store. And kids with them. So I waited. Too bad for Melvin. For Melvin’s groin.”

Now he was waiting for me to tell the fucked-up thing I’d done.

I put down MiiVOXmin, picked it up, put it down.

“Melvin’s okay, though,” he said, and did a little two-finger tap on his own groin. “He’s home, you know, in grad school. He’s fucking, apparently.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said. “Probably he even sometimes rides up alongside you in the forklift.”

“Sorry?” he said.

I looked at the clock on the wall. It didn’t seem to have any hands. It was just a moving pattern of yellow and white.

“Do you know what time it is?” I said.

The guy looked up at the clock.

“Six,” he said.

14.

Out on the street I found a pay phone and called Renee.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Sorry about that pitcher.”

“Yeah, well,” she said in her non-fancy voice. “You’re gonna buy me a new one.”

I could hear she was trying to make up.

“No,” I said. “I won’t be doing that.”

“Where are you, Mikey?” she said.

“Nowhere,” I said.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“Home,” I said and hung up.

15.

Coming up Gleason, I had that feeling. My hands and feet didn’t know exactly what they wanted, but they were trending toward: push past whatever/whoever blocks you, get inside, start wrecking shit by throwing it around, shout out whatever’s in your mind, see what happens.

I was on a like shame slide. You know what I mean? Once, back in high school, this guy paid me to clean some gunk out of his pond. You snagged the gunk with a rake, then rake-hurled it. At one point, the top of my rake flew into the gunk pile. When I went to retrieve it, there were like a million tadpoles, dead and dying, at whatever age they are when they’ve got those swollen bellies like little pregnant ladies. What the dead and dying had in common was: their tender white underbellies had been torn open by the gunk suddenly crashing down on them from on high. The difference was: the dying were the ones doing the mad fear gesticulating.

I tried to save a few, but they were so tender all I did by handling them was torture them worse.

Maybe someone could’ve said to the guy who’d hired me, “Uh, I have to stop now, I feel bad for killing so many tadpoles.” But I couldn’t. So I kept on rake-hurling.

With each rake hurl I thought, I’m making more bloody bellies.

The fact that I kept rake-hurling started making me mad at the frogs.

It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.

Years later, at Al-Raz, it was a familiar feeling.

Here was the house.

Here was the house where they cooked, laughed, fucked. Here was the house that, in the future, when my name came up, would get all hushed, and Joy would be like, “Although Evan is no, not your real daddy, me and Daddy Evan feel you don’t need to be around Daddy Mike all that much, because what me and Daddy Evan really care about is you two growing up strong and healthy, and sometimes mommies and daddies need to make a special atmosphere in which that can happen.”

I looked for the three cars in the driveway. Three cars meant: all home. Did I want all home? I did. I wanted all, even the babies, to see and participate and be sorry for what had happened to me.

But instead of three cars in the driveway there were five.

Evan was on the porch, as expected. Also on the porch were: Joy, plus two strollers. Plus Ma.

Plus Harris.

Plus Ryan.

Renee was trotting all awkward up the driveway, trailed by Ryan’s mom, pressing a handkerchief to her forehead, and Ryan’s dad, bringing up the rear due to a limp I hadn’t noticed before.

You? I thought. You jokers? You nutty fuckers are all God sent to stop me? That is a riot. That is so fucking funny. What are you going to stop me with? Your girth? Your good intentions? Your Target jeans? Your years of living off the fat of the land? Your belief that anything and everything can be fixed with talk, talk, endless yapping, hopeful talk?

The contours of the coming disaster expanded to include the deaths of all present.

My face got hot and I thought, Go, go, go.

Ma tried and failed to rise from the porch swing. Ryan helped her up by the elbow all courtly.

Then suddenly something softened in me, maybe at the sight of Ma so weak, and I dropped my head and waded all docile into that crowd of know-nothings, thinking: Okay, okay, you sent me, now bring me back. Find some way to bring me back, you fuckers, or you are the sorriest bunch of bastards the world has ever known.

Once again it was TorchLightNight.

Around nine I went out to pee. Back in the woods was the big tank that sourced our fake river, plus a pile of old armor.

Don Murray flew past me, looking frazzled. Then I heard a sob. On her back near the armor pile I found Martha from Scullery, peasant skirt up around her waist.

Martha: That guy is my boss. Oh my God oh my God.