Callan Wink: Dog Run Moon

When Dale got there, Jeannette was standing on the back porch, her hands wrestling themselves. The boys were on the couch watching a movie, and she shut the door so they couldn’t hear.

“I put a stick in the ground to mark where it was last night. That was completely dry yesterday. Now look. It’s come up a foot.”

The creek was huge, out of its banks, sluicing through the willows. The low spot in the yard where Jeannette had her rhubarb was completely underwater. There was a small rise and then the ground sloped back to the house. From what Dale could tell, if the water was to come up another foot it would top the rise and come pouring down the back side; there’d be no way to keep it out of the house at that point.

“Shit,” Dale said. “Okay. Well.” She was looking at him. Waiting for something. Dale imagined he could see it in her face, her want of husband writ large. He didn’t know what to do. “All right,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”

He went down to the creek, slogged over the saturated ground, cold water rising above his boot tops. He could feel the trembling in the soil, the bushes rollicking in the flow, their roots trying to maintain their hold. A basketball came bobbing down the flat, turgid center of the creek — obscenely orange against the gray current — it caught for a moment against a branch, and then was gone. The creek that normally meandered sleepily through the backyards on this side of town had come awake, answering the call of the main river, bringing with it for tithe anything it could catch up.

“Don’t get too close,” she said, shouting so he could hear over the roar of water. “It’s dangerous.”

He slogged around some more, looking at the small rise that was the last defense against the rising creek, the stick she had pounded into the ground, trying to calculate how much time they had. It didn’t look good. He went back to stand next to her on the porch. He tried to put his arm around her, but she was too nervous. Pacing up and back on the porch.

“Shit, shit, shit. What else?” she said. “What in god’s name can be next?”

Dale didn’t know what to do. He called his dad.

—

Dale hadn’t told his father about Jeannette. But the town was small, and it hadn’t taken him long to find out. He’d been driving through the park, and spotted them sitting on a blanket, the boys playing in a sandbox, Dale’s head in Jeannette’s lap.

That night Dale’s father had insisted on making dinner. “I’m going to grill some elk steaks,” he said. “You make a little salad or something. We haven’t sat down together in a while.”

Dale was at the kitchen table reading about how to spot the signs of diabetic ketoacidosis. He looked at his father warily. “Why?”

“What do you mean, why? We always run off and do our own thing. I haven’t seen you in a week. You too busy to eat a steak with your old man?”

“No. I guess not.”

“Okay, then.” He went out to get the grill going, and Dale washed some lettuce. They ate on the porch, the elk meat leaking red onto their paper plates, the salad mostly untouched, as if it were existing for memorial’s sake, a small gesture of remembrance for the woman who had been gone from their lives for a long time now.

His father had finished eating, his feet kicked up on the porch railing. He took a drink of his beer and belched. “I saw you got a girlfriend now, eh?”

“What do you mean?”

“Saw you in the park. Now, that was a domestic scene. Got yourself a little ready-made family going there.”

“It’s not like that.”

“I recognize that one. That whole thing was in the paper. He used to be a T-ball coach. A drug addict T-ball coach. Hard to imagine. He was embezzling too.”

“He doesn’t really factor into our equation.”

Dale’s father laughed. “Oh, son. Wetting the wick is one thing. Picnics with the kiddies is a whole different story.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Who said I’m worrying? Trying to impart some advice upon you is all. Pretty soon, you’re going to have fucked the interesting out of her and then you’re going to be in a world of hurt.”

“Save it.”

“I’ll not. You live in my house and you’ll hear me out. All I’m saying is this — women are already a little bit ahead of men, age-wise. So, you start taking up with one who’s got a few years on you, and you’re putting yourself at a big disadvantage. She’s got a head start on you and there’s no way you’re going to catch up, she’ll be lapping you before long and you won’t even know it. There’s damage there. Trust me. When a baby comes out, part of her rational mind comes out with it, caught up in that stuff they throw away.”

“Jesus, Dad.” Dale carried their plates into the kitchen and then retreated to his room. Like his father had some great wealth of knowledge from which to draw his theories about women. As far as Dale knew, there had only been his mother, and god knows that hadn’t worked out too well.

—

Dale went around to the front of the house to make the call where the sound of the rising water wasn’t so loud. When his father picked up the phone Dale could hear voices in the background, phlegmy laughter.

Once a week Dale’s father and a number of his cronies met at the Albertsons for fifty-cent coffee and day-old donuts. It was an hour-long bullshit session. Topics veered, but usually returned and settled comfortably on: the current administration’s latest outrage against common sense, the weather, the elk herd numbers in relation to the burgeoning wolf population, what was hatching on the river, and why it was that the trout were all smaller than they used to be.

Dale filled him in on the situation, and in a few moments he was at the house in his pickup, donut crumbs in his beard. Jeannette was in the driveway, a worried half-smile on her face. Dale’s father brushed off Dale’s attempt at introductions.

“Forget all that,” he said. “No time to spare here. Fairgrounds. They got the Boy Scouts down there filling sandbags. Let’s go.”

At the fairgrounds, the Boy Scouts had a small mountain of sandbags. They were working in pairs, one boy fitting an empty bag over an orange traffic cone with the end cut off, the other boy shoveling sand in the funnel. Trucks were coming in and out, people tossing bags, classic rock turned up loud. It was Dale’s father’s type of scene. He immediately recruited a couple of loitering Boy Scouts and they hoisted the bags up to the truck bed where Dale stacked them. Dale’s father was circulating, shouting good-natured insults and encouragement. He’d found a Styrofoam cup of coffee somewhere and Dale heard him talking to the Scout leader. “Nah,” he was saying, “our house is on a hill. It would have to get biblical for it to touch us. This is for Dale’s little girlfriend. She’s about to get washed away.”

—

They stacked sandbags all afternoon. Dale and his father standing up to their knees in the icy water, Jeannette right there with them, ducking down to balance bags on her shoulder, walking from truck to stack to truck, a slight woman, but surprisingly capable of bearing weight. She dropped a bag with a grunt and went back for another. Dale watched his father watching her. He was a man who valued work above all else. He’d told Dale a long time ago that he wanted the inscription on his gravestone to read: HE GOT HIS WORK DONE.

The three of them stacked feverishly until their wall was built, a three-foot high barrier spanning the low spot in Jeannette’s lawn. When Dale looked up he could see the boys inside, their faces pressed to the sliding glass doors. His dad occasionally made an exaggerated scowl at them, and they ran back into the kitchen.