Austin Bunn - The Brink - Stories

Al squints and cocks his head. “I think we’re talking about different vehicles.”

I flee down the emergency stairs like a grown-up, humiliated, in flight from myself.

Back in her apartment, my mother naps on the couch in her bathrobe, with two cucumber slices over her eyes. She looks like a surprised cartoon character. And in her expression, in the small truth of vegetable matter on her face, I see that my mother has not given up. She is not done, not over, and I must make allowances. I kneel next to her and take her hand.

“Shhh,” she says. “The cream is doing its magic. It’s tingly.”

“I need to leave,” I say. “I need to be alone.”

She kisses my hand. “Go do you.”

I call Scott from the beach, the empty shell basket at my feet, in the surf.

“Thank God you called, baby,” he says. “I’m falling apart here.”

“Remember those shells,” I say, “the ones from that cabinet?”

“No,” he says. “Not really.”

“Wait,” he says. “Maybe. Yeah.”

A wave comes, splashes up to my knee. I feel the last shell brush against my leg as it goes. “The tide just came and took them,” I tell him. “Everything, all at once.”

1.

From the passenger bench of the Origin Resources surveying helicopter, Leland Barr gripped his shoulder belt and leaned over to take in the end of King Mountain. The summit, jutting out of the dissipating fog, looked like a kneecap rising out of a bath. Bright yellow company dozers worked the shale along a series of plateaus and ramps. Draglines pulled spoil rock down the south face. Typically, nothing made Leland feel more executive, more ascendant, than the unmaking of a ridge. Nature always gave, under the fuse. But today, he felt blunted, elsewhere. Merrill had taken the dog.

The chopper eased up over the ridge, and a patch of undisturbed grass came into view, at the far end of the summit. “What’s that?” Leland asked into the headset.

The pilot veered and Leland saw rows of granite and marble stones. At center was a one-room shack with a corrugated tin roof, caked in moss. At the perimeter, an oak tree lay poled out on the ground, root ball lofted in the air.

“Graveyard,” the pilot answered. “Turned up during the raze.”

Nearby, Origin boys in hardhats mixed with some motley group, trespassers probably, and Leland wearily understood that somebody had an opinion he didn’t want to hear. Already, he wanted a drink, his flask tucked into the ruffled pocket of his briefcase.

Six months ago, when Origin first opened King for extraction, Leland’s picture ran on the front page of the Louisville paper. Sometime that night, “MOUNTAIN JUSTICE LEAGUE” was splashed in red paint on his garage in Indian Hills. A pile of tree stumps materialized in his drive, deposited by huffy females and snaggletoothed young men who wanted the country to plug into the Persian Gulf, apparently. As the mountain came down, the vandalism escalated — dozer tires slashed during a site visit, his face with fangs stapled to telephone poles along Frankfort Avenue, the driveway gate padlocked shut. . Corporate paid for the cleanup, but the antagonism had taken its toll. Merrill told him she didn’t “want to live in a bull’s-eye.” She worked for a cancer nonprofit that ushered more pink into the world. She felt above enemies. In the spring, they’d separated and she’d taken an apartment near Cherokee Park, and just this weekend, she’d come back for the terrier. “Something’s broke in you, Leland,” she said on the stoop, Murphy struggling in her arms. “And I don’t think you know what it is yet.”

The pilot set down the helicopter on the plateau near the site office, a row of connected trailers on cinder blocks. Leland grabbed his briefcase, ducked out into the gust of the blades, and the heat hit him. The sun had a rare intensity on shadeless ground — site visits felt like a pit stop on a hot plate. Out from the downdraft, he donned sunglasses and cuffed his sleeves. He would go through the motions of being himself. The soil was cracked and hard-packed underneath him, but small weeds still sprung up. There was always life after a leveling. The site manager waved to him urgently at the open door of the office. The blades of the chopper slowed and Leland heard the rattle of generators, the beeps of the dozers and loaders across the site, and, in the distance, the shouting.

2.

Kyle watched Squirrel from the far end of the chain of people, glad to be at maximum distance from the conflict. His stomach pitched and rolled, unhappy with the maybe-not-entirely-cooked tofu scramble Squirrel had made for the action team at dawn. A delirium had set in, and it occurred to Kyle that vomiting was not out of the question.

“There is supposed to be a fifty-foot green perimeter around this!” Squirrel yelled, pulling the chain of people forward. “How many times do we need to say it? That is the law !” Squirrel’s face was flush and blotchy, his hair tucked under his “lucky” blue bandana and his beard gone pubic, giving him a mutinous zeal. Kyle had wanted to bring baseball caps, something for shade, but Squirrel nixed them. He looked over Kyle’s collection — like the one that had a unicorn and “Meet Me at the Creation Museum!” on it — and pronounced them “off message.” “There might be media,” Squirrel explained solemnly, which Kyle knew meant a person with a cell phone and laser-printed media badge. Kyle was still learning to get “on message,” still deciding if he liked it.

Kyle watched Squirrel’s boots sink into the cracked earth in front of the bulldozer and wondered how much longer any of this had to last. The fight, this action, his relationship to Squirrel, all in the mix of the nausea. The older woman next to Kyle, wearing an oversized T-shirt with a picture of her cat on it, vice-gripped his hand. It was the only thing keeping Kyle upright.

“Which part of private property don’t you dipshits get?” yelled back one of the miners in an orange vest. His hand rested on the wheel hub of a bulldozer. “This is a fucking work zone. It’s not safe.”

An argument in the full-bore sun, miles from Squirrel’s truck and cell signal, and hours from the city, was the opposite of safe. Squirrel had asked Kyle to come join the action, to be “a witness for the mountain,” which Kyle had assumed meant s’mores and maybe a tent-bound blowjob. But there were no tents. There was no camping. There was, however, much yelling. He’d been dragged here, and now he had a low-grade dysentery for the cause.

Kyle wasn’t political. He’d moved to Louisville to work as a designer for the alt-weekly, which promptly went out of business, and in the spiral of his funemployment, he fled his apartment and took long walks along Bardstown Road. He’d seen Squirrel inside the Justice League storefront, leaning almost horizontal in a chair, wearing a knit vest and that blue bandana and smoking a corncob pipe, like you could just do that and not look ridiculous. It was the case that Kyle had always had a thing, unspoken and alarming in its power, for the guy on the Brawny paper towels. Kyle went inside and asked for “some literature,” trying to seem both curious and manly with indifference. The pink triangle on Squirrel’s squalid messenger bag was all the proof he needed.

“You want to know about the corporate skull-fuck of the planet?” Squirrel said, and pointed to a television, where footage of landslides ran in a loop. Mud slurry paved its way down mountain slopes. “How much literature can you handle?”

Squirrel was, as it turned out, the literature. At the start, Kyle loved listening to him, the long filigreed monologues of invective, the precision of his authority. Undoubtedly, Kyle had enjoyed the minor and probably imaginary cachet of sleeping with a bisexual local activist who played the mandolin and read constantly, whose immodest, uncut penis Kyle considered, privately, the only virgin hardwood worth caring about. Squirrel’s behaviors — shitting with the bathroom door open, eating a single spoonful of sugar for dessert — fascinated Kyle zoologically. But dating Squirrel, a boy named Daniel who answered to Squirrel, was like sleeping with a stray. Squirrel would disappear for action weekends and return with a pinecone. The fact that the dollar store didn’t have vegetarian black beans might set him off. He carried with him a caustic tea-tree extract that he used to bathe and wash dishes. It was awful to think, but maybe the nausea gave Kyle a certain clarity: he had to break it off before it turned bad, before Squirrel decided girls were where it was at or went off to sleep in the woods.