Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“I do all right when I’m afraid. You know how I do.”

“You go to shit, girl.”

“Even if my spread goes to shit, Daddy, it’s still two inches at twenty yards.”

“It’s not your spread, and it’s not how strong you are, and it’s not how fast you are, because you have all those things, and you think that means something. That means nothing . It’s something else, kibble, it’s your heart. When you are afraid, you clutch at your life like a scared little girl, and you can’t do that, you will die, and you will die afraid with the shit running down your legs. You need to be so much more than that. Because the time will come, kibble, when just being fast and accurate won’t be enough. The time will come when your soul must be absolute with your conviction, and whatever your spread, and howsoever fast you are, you will only succeed if you fight like a fucking angel, fallen to fucking earth, with a heart absolute and full of conviction, without hesitation, doubt, or fear, no part of yourself divided against the other; in the end, that’s what life will ask of you. Not technical mastery, but ruthlessness, courage, and singularity of purpose. You watch. So it’s fine that you saunter around, but that’s not what the exercise is for, kibble. It’s not for your spread. It’s not for your aim. It’s for your soul.

“You are supposed to come to the door and believe that hell awaits just on the other side, believe that this house is full of nightmares; every personal demon you have, every worst fear. That’s what you stalk through this house. That’s what waits for you down the hallway. Your worst fucking nightmare. Not a cardboard cutout. Practice conviction, kibble, strip yourself of hesitation and doubt, train yourself to an absolute singularity of purpose, and if you ever have to step through a door into your own personal hell, you will have a shot , a shot at survival.”

Turtle has stopped eating. She watches him.

“Do you like your cassoulet?” he says.

“It’s fine,” she says.

“You want something else?”

“I said, it’s fine.”

“Christ,” he says.

She goes back to eating.

“Look at you,” he says, “my daughter. My little girl.”

He pushes aside his plate and sits there looking at her. After a while, he nods to her backpack. She walks to it, opens it, brings out her notebook. She sits down opposite him, notebook open. She says, “Number one. ‘Erinys.’” She stops, looks up at him. He puts one large, scarred hand across the open book, draws it across the table. Looks down at it.

“Well, now,” he says. “Look at that. ‘Erinys.’”

“What is that?” she says. “What does that mean, ‘Erinys’?”

He looks up from the book, his attention is fixed on her, and it is enormous with his affection and with something private. “Your grandfather,” he says, careful, wetting his lips with his tongue, “your grandfather was a hard man, kibble, he still is: a hard man. And do you know that your grandfather— Well, fuck, there is a lot your grandfather never said or did. There is something broken in that man, profoundly broken, and his brokenness is in everything he’s done, his whole life. He never could see past it. And I want to say, well, kibble, how much you mean to me. I love you. I do things wrong, I know I do, and I have failed you, and I will again, and the world I am raising you into—it is not the world I would want. It is not the world I would choose for my daughter. I do not know what the future holds, not for you and me. But I am afraid, I will say that much. Whatever you lacked, whatever I haven’t been able to give you, you have always been loved, deeply, kibble, absolutely. And I wanted to say, you will do more than I have. You will be better and more than I am. Never forget that. Now, here it is. Number one. ‘Erinys.’”

Turtle wakes in the predawn dark thinking about that. Thinking about what he’d said. She cannot get back to sleep. She sits at the bay window and looks out at the ocean, the rose thorns itching at the panes. What had he meant, there is something broken in that man ? Outside, it is clear. She thinks, you will be better and more than I am, reproducing his expression in her mind, trying to get at what he meant. She can see the stars out above the ocean, though when she looks north, she can see the lights of Mendocino reflected in the clouds. She turns, feet on the floor, elbows on her knees, and looks at her room. The beam-and-cinder-block shelves, her clothes neatly stowed. Her plywood platform bolted to the wall, with its sleeping bag and folded wool blankets. The door, the brass doorknob, the copper lock plate, the old-fashioned keyhole. She pulls on her jeans and she belts on Grandpa’s knife and adds a concealment holster, telling herself, just in case, just in case, walking to her bed and reaching under it and pulling her Sig Sauer from the brackets there. She shrugs into a thick wool sweater, and over that a flannel, and walks barefoot through the hall, holstering the pistol.

She climbs down the stairs, but stands on the lowest step, hesitating, soaking up the loneliness of the house in some way, as if it had something it could tell her, the generations of Alvestons who have lived here, and all of them, she thinks, unhappy, all of them bringing their children up hard, but all of them having something to them.

Just down the hall, Martin is in his huge redwood bed, the moon casting the shadows of the alder leaves onto the drywall, and she imagines him there, solid, one hand resting on that enormous chest. She walks into the kitchen and eases open the back door. The night is clear. The moonlight is bright enough to see by. She walks along the joists and stands looking down into the black ferns. She can smell the creek. She can smell the pines. She can smell their curling, dusty needles.

She switchbacks through myrtles and rusty fronds. She comes into the rocky creek and wades up it, her feet numb with cold. The trees rise blackly into the star-glittered vault. She thinks, I will go back now. Back to my room. I have promised and promised and promised and he cannot bear to lose me. To the east, the stream shines glassy from out the riotous dark. She stands breathing, taking in the silence for a very long time. Then she goes.

Turtle climbs out of Slaughterhouse Gulch and comes into a forest of bishop pine and huckleberries, deciphering them in the darkness by the wax of the leaves and the brittle mess of their sprawl, the dawn still hours away. At times she breaks from the woods into moonlit open places filled with rhododendron, their flowers pink and ghostly in the dark, their leaves leathery and prehistoric. There is a part of Turtle that she keeps shut up and private, that she attends to with only a diffuse and uncritical attention, and when Martin advances on this part of herself, she plays him a game of tit for tat, retreating wordlessly and almost without regard to consequences; her mind cannot be taken by force, she is a person like him, but she is not him, nor is she just a part of him—and there are silent, lonely moments when this part of her seems to open like some night-blooming flower, drinking in the cold of the air, and she loves this moment, and loving it, she is ashamed, because she loves him, too, and she should not thrill this way, should not thrill to his absence, should not need to be alone, but she takes this time by herself anyway, hating herself and needing it, and it feels so good to follow these trackless ways through the huckleberries and the rhododendrons.

She walks for miles, barefoot, eating watercress from ditches. Bishop pine and Douglas fir give way to stunted cypresses, to sedges, pygmy manzanita, to Bolander’s pines stooped and ancient, hundreds of years old and only shoulder-height on her. The ground is hard-packed and ash-colored, puzzled over with tufted, gray-green lichens, the land studded with barren clay ponds.