Ben Stroud - Byzantium - Stories

“Gotta learn how to cook,” he said, and so like an idiot I went over and took a drumstick and dropped it in. When the oil popped I jerked my hand back and he said, “Scared?”

Right then I knew I’d screwed up, that I should have just kept walking out of the kitchen. He hummed something menacing — a hash-up of Jaws —and grabbed my wrist, forcing my hand to the hot oil until it was just an inch from the fizzing surface. When I finally pulled my hand loose, he said, “Lighten up.”

I didn’t say anything, just laughed like I’d been in on the joke from the beginning.

There’s still a round brown scar on the back of my hand from where the oil spattered.

My stepfather moves the boat over to the bridge to fish for perch. From here you can see the dam. Little orange buoys mark where you’re not supposed to cross. I imagine a boat accidentally drifting in there, its outboard burning against the strain, a whole family with their rods and lunch-meat sandwiches being pulled in, under and through the turbines.

“Kids, I’m so, so sorry,” the father says, on his knees.

“I’m sorry, too,” the mother says.

“We are full of regret,” they both say as they weep.

My mom says, “Why don’t you fish a little?” She puts down her book and picks up her rod.

I tell her there’s no way I’m putting another cricket on a hook.

My stepfather casts his line out. He and my mom married two years ago. When he came into the family, it’s like he saw us as a bunch of softies he needed to toughen up. “Y’all need to get outside more,” he’d say. “See the sun.” But where he tanned, we burned, and even though he took us camping and fishing and paid for us to go on horse rides, none of it stuck. My stepfather must have been surprised when he got me. All along he must have wanted a son to teach all this crap to, and there I was — a chubby kid who’d rather watch The Price Is Right while downing a bag of Cheetos than gut an animal. I can’t say I blame him for being disappointed.

“Put a worm on it then,” my mom says.

I say okay and get one of the rubber worms from the tackle box. I pick a green one with sparkles. Then I cast and the line actually goes out a respectable distance. I take my time reeling it in, stopping and starting the line in erratic jiggles to make my worm more lifelike. It probably makes my worm look like it’s got epilepsy. All part of the plan, I say half aloud. What fish could resist the easy prey of an epileptic worm?

While I’m reeling in, I watch the lake. It’s pretty new, only about ten or fifteen years old. There aren’t any real lakes in Texas — they’re all built with dams. People used to live on the bottom when the lakes were still farms and ranches. It must be awkward for their ghosts, I think. To find fish swimming in and out of where they used to sleep.

My science teacher, Mr. Homeniuk, says Texas was covered by a sea in prehistoric times. So maybe all these new lakes do belong here. Maybe we’re the ones in the wrong place.

At school, I get good grades. Like, really good grades. I mean, I’ve still got five years to screw up, but my grades are good enough that some of my teachers are already talking college.

In math class I don’t have to listen too much because the work comes easy. One day I was bored and playing around with my textbook and accidentally marked one of the pages with my pen. So I took my pencil and — careful, hiding what I was doing from Mrs. Pickett so I wouldn’t get into any trouble — erased the pen mark. It came off, but so did the lower half of a fraction. Where the ink and denominator had been, there was just blank page. I erased the other numbers. They disappeared. Without a trace.

At first I was scared. This was tampering with school property, the thing our principals are always getting angry about. But then it was like, hey, they’ll never catch me. They still don’t know who set the practice field on fire.

During class I erase more numbers. Not too many — not enough to tip off the next poor kid who gets the book, whose little world won’t add up. And you have to do it right. Like if the number’s 14, you don’t erase the 4. That’s just stupid. You erase the 1. Sometimes I turn to the answers and erase a couple numbers there, too.

A month ago we were at a barbecue at one of my stepfather’s friends’ houses. These people bred Rottweilers in their backyard, and while we were there the barking never stopped. “You get used to it,” my stepfather’s friend said. He was a short man without a neck, like a movie gangster, and he called all of the dogs Beauty. He was showing them off when one of the dogs, Beauty number 4, bit at me through the cage, her teeth snagging my shirt.

I could already hear my stepfather’s comment. “Guess she likes fat.” So I acted like I didn’t even notice and picked up a stick and poked at the dog through the cage’s wires, just to mess with it, to show I knew which side of the cage I was on. It was the kind of thing my stepfather would do, I thought, but before I could even touch Beauty’s side he came and grabbed the stick out of my hand and asked what the hell I was thinking. Then he shook his head like I was stupid and walked away.

Later, when no one was looking, I grabbed a hotdog and set it outside the cage where Beauty couldn’t reach it. I watched as she pressed her nose against the wires and whined, like that would make the hotdog roll closer. She strained and strained, and I didn’t do anything to help her.

My line catches and for half a second I think I’ve got a fish. But then there’s no pull and I reel the line in, dragging up a beard of hydrilla. I tug it off the hook and throw it back into the lake. Hydrilla’s like seaweed, except it grows in the lake. So lakeweed, I guess. It’s not supposed to be here. It accidentally came in on someone’s boat, or someone brought it here to kill off something else, and now it fills the lake, wrapping itself around outboards, fishing lures, your legs and arms if you actually go for a swim in this toxic dump.

“Okay. I fished,” I say.

“You see that,” my stepfather says to my mom. And through her to me, of course. At first I think he’s talking about my defeatism, as he calls it, and going to say something about how kids today (meaning me) need more discipline, but then I see he’s pointing at the shore. He does this a lot, wherever we go. Spots wildlife like he’s our hunting guide. Part of that whole toughening-us-up scheme, I guess. So if me and my mom ever have to survive on our own in the woods or something, we can spot animals. Which will comfort us, I suppose, as we die of starvation.

“I don’t see it. What?” my mom says. She’s got this stupid pink hat on — like a baseball cap but with an oversized bill — that ties in the back with a bow, and the bow jiggles as she jerks her head looking up and down the shore.

“A nutria,” my stepfather says. “By that log. Now it’s gone into the water.”

I don’t even know what a nutria is.

“Oh, shoot,” my mom says. She’s always disappointed when she doesn’t see something my stepfather points out, like it’s this big deal. And for half a second I think, hey, maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m the idiot for not paying attention. Maybe I should be staring at nutrias after all.

Not long after my dad moved to Shreveport, he quit his job and started selling belt buckles and canteens at reenactments. He said it was his dream. He grew a beard, started dressing up like he was in a tintype and working on a book about some guy named Corporal Edwards who fought in the Civil War. He told me all this in a letter, said he was going to Xerox the book himself and sell it for five dollars. But I haven’t seen it yet.