Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

—

Carina got in bed. She continued to brush her teeth. She also started to cry.

“I’m sorry,” James said. “I shouldn’t have been talking about all that stuff. It’s been tough for me lately and I’m—”

Carina was shaking her head, pointing at the kitchen. “Can you get me a glass to spit in?” she said, her voice garbled by toothpaste.

When he returned with the glass she spit, handed it to him, and then rolled in bed to face the wall.

“Today Ellen Yellowtail went to the bathroom and sawed through her wrists with an obsidian spearpoint from the early Clovis era. She asked to be excused and was gone for twenty minutes, and I had a weird feeling and I went into the bathroom and there was blood under one of the stall doors and she was in there. James, she was still kind of moving around, slowly, in a pool of her own blood. She was making, like, fish movements or something. Trying to swim through the floor. That will never go away. I will have that forever. And then, on the way home today, I literally caught myself thinking, for a split second, Damn you, Ellen, you little bitch. Do you have any idea what kind of thing you have just lodged in my brain? Can you believe that? What kind of person thinks that in response to something like this?

James was still holding the glass with Carina’s toothpaste spit in it. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “An obsidian spearpoint? The Clovis era?”

“In science class, they were having a prehistoric unit. Apparently, there was a guest speaker from Montana State who brought visual aids. Ellen pocketed it at some point when no one was looking. Last week I asked them to write me a paragraph about some of their writing goals for the summer. She wrote that she had gotten a job at the Dairy Queen and that she was going to carry a little notebook in her waitress apron so she could just jot down observations about all the interesting people she would see. That’s how she put it. She was going to observe and jot things down . No one who jots things down kills themselves.”

James got in bed and put his arms around her. He’d come to tell her that he was leaving. It seemed rather impossible now — the telling, not the leaving.

—

In the morning, Carina still sleeping, he pointed the car south. It was green-up, the best time to be driving through the great swaths of western grassland. Crossing Wyoming was like riding a fresh swell of chlorophyll. He pushed his way into Colorado until he hit the front range traffic on I-25 and then he got a room and ate a bad meal and watched sports highlights before surrendering to the pull of stiff hotel sheets.

He was up early, an egg sandwich and coffee to go. Past Denver, the traffic eased and the land flattened. It was still Colorado, but it could have been anywhere. Eventually he broke out and covered the skinny Oklahoma panhandle in about the time it took to listen to a full Townes Van Zandt album. And then — just as the sun cracked itself down on the vast, oil pump — studded plain that stretched around as far as he could see — James crossed over into Texas.

—

His brother lived in a maze of culs-de-sac and identical two-story homes with two-car garages. The streets were named after trees or Ivy League colleges. James imagined that if you lined up all the kids and golden retrievers of the neighborhood on the sidewalk, they, too, would prove indistinguishable.

Casey’s wife, Linda, met him at the door. She was big and brassy and blond. James had seen her in a bikini once, and she had the Lone Star of Texas tattooed on the small of her back. She pressed a beer into his hand and led him into the study, where, predictably, Casey had deigned to remain instead of coming out to meet James. Like Don Corleone, he had always enjoyed receiving visitors, especially family members, as opposed to just greeting them, like a normal person.

Casey was sitting at his desk, shuffling some papers. He looked up, surprised, as if he hadn’t known James was there, as if he hadn’t heard him talking to his wife in the kitchen. He stood, they shook hands, and then Casey pulled him into an awkward hug, both of them leaning over the expanse of desktop between them.

They hadn’t seen each other in almost a year, and they launched into all the usual topics — last year’s presidential election, weather as of late, the state of the MSU men’s basketball program, their respective health, their mother’s continued descent into Jesus-tinctured battiness.

Linda brought them sandwiches and more beer. When she put the plates down in front of them they each got a smile, a “there ya go” and a personalized heartwarming southern term of endearment. He got “honey” and Casey got “darlin’.”

“Damn it, Casey,” James said while Linda was still within earshot, “why is your wife such a horrible nag?”

“Oh, you stop,” she said. “Ya’ll are too bad. Ya’ll holler if you need anything.” And then she went back to the living room to watch TV.

James had read somewhere that a study done of three thousand American couples found that those engaged in traditional gender roles — male breadwinner, female homemaker — were 50 percent happier than couples who comported themselves less conventionally. He thought about mentioning this to Casey, but decided against it. In general his brother was not a man who needed validation that his ways were correct.

Casey got up and closed the door to his study. He poured two glasses of whiskey from a decanter on the sideboard and gave one to James gravely before settling back into his chair. James knew he was loving this. Casey leaned back and sipped his whiskey.

“Well,” he said. “What’s the deal? You having a bit of trouble?”

Casey was a lawyer. One of the most unsatisfying parts of his life, as far as James could tell, was how infrequently his family members needed legal counsel. It was endearing how ready he was to spring into action, to roll up his sleeves and get litigious to preserve the family honor. “Going to Billings to get a new muffler put on your car, you say? Well if you get in any trouble over there you call me, understand?” At some point, James realized he might have to get himself incarcerated, just to make Casey feel needed.

“It’s not really a legal matter,” he said. “Affairs of the heart and all that.” Casey shrugged, disappointed. Somehow, most of his whiskey was already gone. “Hell, I don’t know, Casey. I just needed a change of scenery. Do you mind if I loaf around for a little bit?”

“My casa es tu casa, brother, you know that.”

“ Gracias, amigo. Let’s drink more of your fancy whiskey.” James watched Casey pour them both more bourbon, man-sized slugs this time, and he thought that Casey seemed more at home here in his den, with his wrinkle-resistant khakis and his big-haired wife in the next room, than any man had a right to be. If it were anyone other than his brother, he might have hated him for it.

They reached across the desk and touched glasses. “Nice to see you, brother,” Casey said.

“It is,” James said.

Casey leaned back and kicked his feet up on the desk. He wore fleece-lined moccasins.

“Nice slippers.”

“They aren’t slippers. They’re house shoes.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The sole on these is slightly more rugged, I believe. One could feasibly spend a short amount of time out of doors with them. Linda got them for me for Christmas. She’s been making baby noises.”

“What do those sound like?”

“ ‘Casey, honey, my ovaries are speaking to you right now. They’re parched. They’re starting to wither. Are you going to fertilize this garden or what, boy?’ ”

“She says that?”