Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

Terry stood in the driveway and considered his grandpa’s house. The house where the school bus used to drop him off, the house where he spent every weekend night until he discovered girls, the old white farmhouse that creaked and groaned and had a root cellar and woodstove, glass-globed lightning rods on the roofline, a slight sag in the porch — and his grandpa’s worn overalls in the closet. All of it his now, memories to foundation.

The lawn was a tangle of green. A knee-high jungle of weeds grew where his grandpa’s tomato patch should have been. Inside, the house was musty and hot. Terry wanted to open the windows but there were no screens — his grandpa always took them down in the fall and put them back up in the spring and Terry used to help, standing on the ladder, his grandpa handing the screens up to him. Here it was, mid-August and no screens. You couldn’t open the windows without mosquitos coming in the house. His grandpa never would have put up with that.

From the kitchen, Terry could see out over the lake. The lily pads were as thick as ever, in bloom, the green mat festooned with spiky white flowers. He went to the porch and sat on the step, looking at the lake, the small rowboat overturned on the bank, the splintered old dock half-submerged and leaning into the lake like a broken-toothed smile.

The turtles were out, lined up on fallen trees on the bank, their heads poking out like periscopes around the open water of the dock — box turtles and painted turtles and even a few huge snappers, their backs mossy and ancient, their necks craned to catch the last rays of sun coming down over the tops of the willows.

Terry sat, hunched on the step with his arms around his knees, and watched the turtles. Then he went back in the house and down to his grandpa’s den. Normally, the old rolltop desk was open and cluttered with papers, greasy lawnmower parts, old wooden bass lures, Hula Poppers and Jitterbugs, a cribbage board made from deer antler, spinning reels in all shapes and degrees of brokenness, and always — presiding over this mess like a miniature duke and duchess of chaos — a pair of stuffed fox squirrels that some sophomoric taxidermist had arranged in an eternal act of coitus. Now, the desktop was perfectly empty, not so much as a single piece of paper on its scarred oak surface. It sat in the room like some strange alien craft, sterile and foreign. Terry pulled open drawers until he found keys to the gun cabinet.

Against his parent’s wishes, Terry’s grandpa taught him how to shoot when he was young. Terry’s grandpa shot skeet at the gun club every weekend and liked to wander around out in the fall woods looking for grouse and woodcock. When Terry turned ten he bought him a youth-model twenty-gauge that immediately became Terry’s most prized possession. His parents wouldn’t let him keep it in the house, so it stayed in his grandpa’s gun cabinet, lovingly cleaned and oiled after every use. Terry had outgrown the shotgun in a few short years, and for his sixteenth birthday — three months before he went away — his grandpa bought him a new Benelli twelve-gauge pump-gun. It was a little too much gun for woodcock and grouse, but it was a clay-pigeon-breaking machine. The last time Terry and his grandpa had shot at the gun club he’d gone fifty-five for sixty on skeet, the first time he’d ever beaten his grandpa.

The gun cabinet stood in the corner, and when Terry swung open the door he breathed in the familiar tang of Hoppe’s 9 gun oil. There were boxes of shells in the cabinet drawers, and Terry filled his pockets and loaded his gun, racking the pump action as he climbed the stairs. He strode across the lawn to the edge of the lake, and, in the last few moments before the sun went down, he shot as many turtles as he possibly could, hammering the pump so the foregrip was a blur, spent shells smoking and spinning into the grass, the turtles diving frantically, breaking and sinking, the pieces of shattered shell and beaks and claws and tails and blue-black blood, iridescent and slick like motor oil, fouling the lake’s surface.

—

There were a few beers left in the fridge, long gone to skunk, but Terry drank them anyway. He ran an oil-soaked rag through the barrel of the twelve-gauge and rubbed a little oil on the stock and grip before putting it back in the cabinet. He got out the screens and put them in the downstairs windows, opening them wide, and then he sat in the easy chair in the living room and watched the curtains blow.

When he knew everyone would be asleep, he got his grandpa’s Ford started and drove over to his parent’s house, killing the lights down the drive and coasting the last few yards on momentum. The door was unlocked and he kicked his shoes off, padding quietly down the creaky wood floor in the kitchen. The Crock-Pot sat on the counter, still warm, and Terry filled a plate with ribs, eating and wiping his fingers on his jeans as he headed up the stairs. In his old room, Terry shut the door behind him before flipping on the light. He sat on his bed with the plate of ribs and regarded the changes: the new wallpaper, a stack of vintage suitcases, an antique lamp made from an old earthenware jug, a Shaker-style rocking chair. His dresser was still there, presumably his clothes, and his bed, but other than that? Nothing. His Field & Stream s and Gray’s Sporting Journal s — subscriptions his grandpa had started for him years ago. His football trophies. The mangy raccoon mount his grandpa had given him. And, he got up from the bed and lifted the mattress to check, his Penthouse collection. All of it gone. Janelle had told him about her wallpaper project. She had neglected to mention the systematic eradication of his presence from his own bedroom. He finished the ribs and wiped his hands and mouth on a brand-new four-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton pillowcase. He was lying on his back with his hands laced behind his head — considering the freshly textured beige ceiling — when Denise came in.

“I stayed up ’cause I knew you’d come over eventually.”

She had her hair pulled up on her head in a way he’d never seen before and he was struck again by how much older she looked. She had earrings on, each one made from the iridescent bottle-green eye of a peacock feather. The earrings were huge, and rather ridiculous the way they bookended her narrow face. He wanted to say something to tease her but when she sat down on the bed — solemnly tucking her hair behind her ears — he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He leaned over and flicked one of the feathers with his fingernail.

“Nice,” he said.

“Yeah, thanks. Do you like them? I got them just in time.”

“Sure. What do you mean?”

“The store in the mall. Remember I was telling you about the Indian women who gather the feathers and then make them into earrings?”

“I remember.”

“Well, they shut the store down. I guess the women weren’t just gathering the feathers when they fell, you know what I mean? They were killing all the birds, even the endangered ones, like herons and cranes and stuff. So someone found out and shut them down. I’m pretty lucky I got in there in time. A lot of girls didn’t. I had that rich bitch Macey Simons offer me a hundred bucks for mine. Can you believe it?”

“What did you tell her?”

“Come with two hundred and then we’ll talk.”

This made Terry laugh like he hadn’t in a long time. He laughed until he had to push his face into the pillow to muffle the sound.

—

When he left the house he brought the rest of the ribs with him in a plastic bag. Denise came behind him with her backpack on. She got in the truck and Terry sat behind the wheel with the key in his hand looking at their childhood home in front of them, shadowed and silent. He turned to Denise, her earrings catching the faint glow of the yard light, making the side of her face pale green.