Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

“What are you doing?” he said.

Denise had her arms around her backpack resting on her knees. She didn’t look at him.

“Get out.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“You can’t.”

“Let me.”

Denise slid over in the seat and tried to put her head on his shoulder but Terry shrugged hard, his hands still on the wheel.

“I could come with you. Why not?”

Terry reached over to open her door and when she tried to hug him he grabbed both of her thin wrists with one hand and squeezed until she whimpered. He pushed her out of the truck and she landed awkwardly in the gravel, her hair undone and in her eyes, crying. Terry pitched her backpack out beside her and shut the door.

“If you come over tomorrow,” he said, “I’ll take you out in the boat.”

The truck rumbled to life, and Terry backed slowly down the driveway. He didn’t turn on the headlights until he hit the main road.

As he drove, he remembered the last time he’d spoken to his grandpa, on the phone, a month before his death. He’d called Terry at Saginaw to tell him he’d caught an eight-pound bass, the biggest one he’d ever gotten out of the lake.

“The thing had a mouth on it that you could have stuck a dinner plate down. Didn’t fight worth a damn either, just let me reel her in like a wet dishrag. A big female. Belly on her like a basketball. I think she was full of eggs, it’s that time of year.”

They were quiet for a moment. Theirs was not a relationship that lent itself well to the measured give-and-take of the telephone. Terry would find himself nodding, forgetting to respond verbally, and his grandfather’s speech would often take on a stiff, formal tone that was unfamiliar to him. Often, one of them would rush to fill a silence, his words colliding with the other attempting to do the same thing.

“Well, Terry, that’s about it,” his grandfather said after a while. “I just wanted to call and tell you about the bass. It was a fish of a lifetime and I thought you should know.”

“Are you going to get it mounted,” Terry blurted before his grandpa hung up.

“That might be hard to do,” he laughed. “She’s still swimming around out there I suppose.”

“You put it back?”

“I know. I know. Surprised myself too. You know I always said I wanted a real big one to put up in the den. But then when I reeled it in and the damn thing didn’t even put up a fight — like she knew she was swimming to her death and decided to do it with some dignity — hell, I don’t know. I’ve killed thousands of bass. I’m not sure what came over me. Maybe I’m finally getting soft in my old age.”

“Now no one will believe you. I’d’ve killed it.”

“What? Are you saying I’m a liar, boy?” Terry’s grandpa dropped his voice, pretending he was mad.

“No. I believe you. But, you can’t believe anything anyone says about fishing or their dick, unless there’s proof. That’s what you always say.”

“Yeah, I know what I always say. But you know what else I say?”

“What?”

“My give-a-damn is broke. I don’t care what people think. Anyway, you’re the only one I’m going to tell, so it doesn’t matter. I just wanted to let you know that I caught it and it’s still out there. Maybe you’ll get her when you get back home. I thought maybe that might help you out in some small way in there — knowing that a fish like that can be caught out here.”

Terry didn’t believe in premonitions, not really, but whenever he thought about this conversation he got a sense that his grandpa had known, somehow, that his time was near. He wasn’t sure why, but he couldn’t help but think that if his grandpa had killed that bass, he might have lived another fifteen years. He felt like his grandpa had known this fact as well, and his decision was something that Terry had a hard time wrapping his mind around.

—

The yard light was burned out over his grandpa’s garage. There was a small sliver of moon and the oaks in the front yard cast their towering shadows across the driveway. The house was dark, and, upon entering, Terry had the disconcerting experience of not being immediately able to locate a light switch. It was strange, after all the time he’d spent there, that he should have to grope around to find the kitchen light. It seemed like something he should have known, some simple piece of knowledge that a mere two years spent away should not be enough to eradicate. But, then again, how many times had he ever entered this house as he did then, alone and in the dark? His grandpa had always led the way, or was already inside, the kitchen lit up, the Tigers play-by-play coming up faint and incoherent from the basement as if the house itself were vocalizing its own garbled interior monologue.

Terry eventually found the switch, tucked in between the doorjamb and the windowsill — and the kitchen flooded with light. After the kitchen, he moved around the rest of the house. He floundered through the living room, bathroom, den, dining room, bedroom, finding the wall switches, the pull chains of the lamps; his arms leading the way through the pitch-black as if he were swimming.

When he had every possible source of illumination in the house glowing, he sat on the couch. He’d left all the windows open and the house had taken on the damp odor of the lake. He could smell it in the upholstery, in the curtains. The musty dankness of it rose from the carpet, and, as if heeding its summons, Terry went out across the backyard and stood on the first splintered board of the dock. The moon threw just enough light that Terry could see out over the surface of the water, the lily flowers closed up into hard white buds against the darkness.

The dented aluminum rowboat was next to where he stood in the grass, and he flipped it over. There was a silhouette on the ground under where the boat had been — a sun-starved outline that glowed a sickly greenish white under the moon, like skin on a broken arm after the cast has been removed. Terry fit the old, warped oars into the locks and slid the boat off the bank. He rowed as slowly and as quietly as he could, the pads whispering against the hull, the oars emitting a barely audible squeak with each stroke. The lake smelled different at night, more subdued. The frogs were silent, everything tucked into itself and no longer broadcasting.

He was out in the open water, as near as he could tell to the middle of the lake, when he stopped rowing. The moon, weak to begin with, had finally succumbed to the clouds, and the sky was a dense inkblot above him. There was no wind and the boat didn’t rock or drift. It just hung, as if suspended in a void. Terry found that if he tilted his head back, he could look up into a fathomless universe of blackness, a starless sky so immense that it seemed to pull at his eyes. It was like his pupils were made of small pieces of this same dark matter — broken obsidian shards of it — that he’d been carrying around with him his whole life as if they were his own, only to find out that they were borrowed, and that now their true owner wanted them back.

But then, if he turned around, behind him, the house glowed, an overflow of light spilling from all its windows like a welcoming beacon. And, from this distance, if he squinted his eyes just right, he could make shapes, like shadowy human figures, move across the windows. He could almost convince himself that someone was there, waiting for him to come back inside.

I was lost.

Well, more accurately, my father was lost and I was with my father. Does that make me lost by default? I suppose so. Some would say that it is an inherited trait, being lost, like having blue eyes, alcoholism, or a tendency to see the glass half-empty.