Greg Jackson - Prodigals - Stories

I thought about the reality of these distant countries as I gazed into the woman’s house, the soft lit world beyond its panes. I imagined the woman’s husband returning from the revolutionary tropics, from some grim mission attending to American interests , as they’re always called, coming back to this snow globe world and giving in to the delusion that the two worlds did not exist in one continuous reality, separated only by permeable space. Maybe he was the dignitary she was always expecting. Or maybe the house was just her way of curating that delusion.

Of course I didn’t know the first thing about her husband — whether he was alive, where he was, what he did, if he existed at all. I knew only that she wore a ring, a silver band, and the name she spoke the one time I heard her speak might have been anyone’s — her husband’s, a child’s, God’s. Probably not God’s, but you never know. It was a July night full of plant heat. The day had been suffocating too and crowns of vapor fringed the lights set to burn in the dark. The woman had her windows cracked and when the phone rang the sound passed out into the yard like the trilling of Max’s birdsong. She disappeared and I went around to the other side of the house where, standing on the metal lip of a window well with my hands on the sash, I found her again, a silhouette across the unlit room.

She was standing in a small interior hall, partly obscured by the doorframe and turned away from me so that I couldn’t see her face. Light from the kitchen washed dimly into the hallway. I couldn’t make out her words at first, only what sounded like distress in them. An old distress, I thought, nothing unexpected. An unscabbed wound. I strained to hear, pressed against the mullions, then the window lurched in my hands, opened under an upward pressure, and I heard her say, Gabriel. Gabriel . A pause. Hold on. Hello? she said in a loud, timorous voice. I held still, my head ducked out of sight, waiting, letting the very faintest breath escape me while my heart drummed mercilessly in my chest. In the silence the static of the crickets rose up, so loud I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before. The sound was deafening. It seemed to pulse. I thought I heard the insects humming in the fluid skin above the pond. Then I heard her say, Nothing, I guess. Two dozen? Too many. What about — Well, how does it run? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. She laughed. Karen? No!

A few days later I got a letter from Linda telling me how madly in love with Josh she was. He’s thin, but he’s strong too, she wrote. Sometimes, when the stars are out and everything’s quiet, I rest my head on his chest. I listen to his heartbeat and the frogs by the lake, and I think I’m hearing God. I think, This must be what people mean by God. That the universe is listening, that you’re listening to it. I know it sounds ridiculous but that’s what I think. I think: God is everywhere … Oh, Michaela, what’s happening to me? I almost let my girls retrieve their arrows before everyone was done shooting. Someone could have been shot! I’m distracted all the time. I cry for no reason. I think about marrying Josh …

The letter was eight pages long. I didn’t read the whole thing. I concluded that Linda had gone insane and I put the letter back in its envelope. I considered writing Return to Sender and dropping it in a mailbox or possibly burning it, but in the end I just lost it.

At work Bobby said, What do you think it’s like to kill someone? That depends, I said. Okay, said Bobby. There’s lots of ways to kill someone, I said. You could choke someone to death, look right in their eyes. You could be one shooter in a firing squad. You could get the order to drop a bomb. You could give the order to drop a bomb. You could kill someone by accident … I’m talking about face-to-face, gun to the head, Bam! Bobby said. One second they’re alive, next second they’re dead. I looked at Bobby. He was covered in sweat. Actually, I don’t want to talk about this, I said.

I didn’t realize how much I didn’t until I got to the women’s room and found I was shaking. I felt sick, like a summer flu had exploded inside me. I opened the window. The air was even hotter outside, as sickly moist as dog’s breath. The sun fell through the window like scalding water on my skin.

Fucking, cocksucking, Mellie muttered, banging through the door. When she saw me she stopped for a second. Hey, she said, you know that fucking asshole Randall, the supplier? Fucking spook’s joking around with Radar and Stan, looks me up and down, takes his sweet time, and I’m like, Take a fucking picture, why don’t you? And he says — I don’t even fucking know — some slimy shit, and Radar and Stan and him are all cracking up. I swear Judson would kill that—

I had my hand up. The heat, the shouting — it was too much. Part of me maybe had a crush on Mellie, but just then I could have smashed her head through the porcelain sink. I thought I saw the tragedy of her life in that one instant stretching off like a highway that ends in a hopeless desert. I was feverish the rest of the day. I drank water and imagined it was paint I was pouring into me. An unabsorbable plastic substance embalming me from the inside out. When I went to the bathroom for the fourth time Bobby winked at me and said, Time of the month?

When our shift ended at four o’clock and we’d gathered in our circle I was ready to come apart. You don’t look so good, Carl said. You look, as the saying goes, like death. I feel cold, I said, though I was sweating profusely. I feel terrible, actually. I felt cold inside my bones.

That’s funny, Bobby said, addressing no one in particular. I was just thinking how it’s going to be a wonderful day. He was smiling up at the ceiling like he’d finally lost his mind. I was just thinking how everything’s coming together . How it’s going to be a … a magical, wonderful day! We were all staring at him. He laughed and started coughing. I don’t know when we saw the revolver in his hand, but we must have all seen it pretty fast. You could feel something change in the room, the air come alive with what may, in fact, have been a kind of magic. It was air in which things could now begin and end. There were recesses in the space around us; the space itself had become more capacious. I briefly thought about dancing, there was so much space! The past disappeared. Maybe it’s truer to say it flowed into the present, lingered on around us longer than it should have, until it became self-aware and consumed itself like burning paper on the air.

I feel, Bobby strained to find the right words, just a tremendous sense of hope .

His face gleams as he says this, says, I was watching that Sudden Impact movie the other night. Great film, great film. You know what Dirty Harry says? He says, Go ahead. Make … my … day. Just like that! Isn’t that great? Bobby cocks the gun and points it at Stan. Make my day! He laughs. Stan stares at the floor, eyes like a drowsing drunk’s. Or how ’bout you, bucko? Buddy, buddy, buddy, Bobby says, turning the gun on Carl. Go ahead. Make. My. Day. Carl’s looking off to the side of Bobby. It’s a strange look on his face, like something almost funny’s going on in the corner of the room, and I think I hear a kind of warbling sound come from him, but I’m not sure, and then it’s my turn, anyway, Bobby’s pointed the gun at me and asks me, or encourages me, to make his day, whatever that really means. I look at Bobby. I can’t look down the barrel of the gun, so I look Bobby in the eye and with a particular intensity, because part of me knows this may be the last thing I ever see. Bobby’s face is round and red, glistening in the light. His thin hair rests damply on his forehead. There is a faint colorless fuzz in his pockmarks. It might as well be the first time I’ve looked at Bobby. And then it’s very funny to me all of a sudden that someone like Bobby, on a day like this, a day that means nothing, can hold my life in his hand, in a tiny displacement of his finger: resting on the trigger, squeezed. But the thing I want to say now is that we are all people like Bobby, each day is crucial, meaningless. And I think of my father for the first time in years without hate and wonder if the news of his daughter’s death will reach him wherever he is, and if he’ll care; and that’s when I know I’ll never see him again, even if I don’t die this day, I’ll never see him again, and I laugh to think my mother will cut the hair from my cadaver to feed Mad Max.