Austin Bunn - The Brink - Stories

“What part of cemetery don’t you get? These are graves ,” shouted another activist, followed by a chorus of agreement. Kyle’s stomach foamed again. The older woman next to him looked over skeptically. She lived in the hollow at the base of the mountain, in a ramshackle house with a washing machine full of green water out on the front lawn. That morning, she had led the group up the mountain, intuitively moving through the woods like Leatherstocking in blown-out Velcro sneakers. They’d passed a sign tacked to a tree, “DANGER BLASTING.” She’d given it the finger.

“Young man, you’re tilting, you know that?” she said. “Do you need to sit?”

Her hand was tough and dirty and Kyle was working at not thinking about that, because thinking about it seemed to lift his breakfast up and out. Puking would definitely be off-message. “I’m fine,” Kyle said.

A miner lifted himself into the cabin of the dozer and the engine chugged to life. Black smoke belched from the exhaust. Squirrel stepped up and onto the blade, in full revolutionary mode. Kyle had seen this before, when Squirrel straightened his back and startled people with his ardor.

“Until the site ceases being in violation,” Squirrel declared, “we will not be going anywhere.”

Up the ridge, two men, one in a dress shirt and carrying a briefcase, made their way down. A negotiator, Kyle hoped, since he, personally, was not planning on wilting much longer. Even if it meant bushwhacking by himself back down to Squirrel’s pickup somewhere down the mountain.

The foreman spat a slug of tobacco at Squirrel’s feet and nodded to the driver up in the dozer. “I don’t get paid enough for this bullshit.”

The next few seconds Kyle saw in a kind of glare, an admixture of heatstroke and mild arousal at his boyfriend’s leadership skills. The dozer jumped when it went into gear and Squirrel’s ankle failed. He slipped, hands wheeling, and the side of his head slammed into the edge of the metal blade. His body crumbled as though someone had cut his strings. The crowd gasped and Kyle bent over and yawned up breakfast, the last thing Squirrel would ever give him.

3.

Leland turned off the television in the sunroom and let the whir of the crickets fill the house. All the windows open with the central air gusting: his preferred climate. Outside, the line of plants, a hydrangea and magnolia and something Merrill had mocked him for not knowing, brushed against the screens in the evening breeze. From the recliner, he could see out to the backyard, the grass gone to seed, the gazebo where they’d had drinks in its dappled shadows all of once, when, for a moment, they took renewed pleasure in each other’s company. Now, the lattice and structure was buried under the growth, a trophy some vine had claimed.

Since Merrill’s departure, the sunroom had become the whole house for Leland — office, bar, bed, kitchen, throne. A hole he’d fallen into. Evenings, he worked from here, whiskey on the TV-dinner stand, next to the corporate laptop. Murphy’s empty dog bowl remained at the base of the cabinet, where a population of liquor bottles awaited their god, the maid.

Leland was letting things go. He was seeing where they went.

He rose and dumped a half-eaten carton of Chinese into the sink. There, on the countertop, next to his computer, was the boy’s blue bandana, folded into a square. The maid had washed the blood out. He picked it up and noticed lettering in the material, barely legible, made with a ballpoint pen: “The end of every civilization begins with the end of the trees.”

The evacuation had been Leland’s decision. The haul roads down were too rough, the trail too uneven and long, to carry the boy out. So they got him on a stretcher and back up to the Origin chopper while he fell in and out of consciousness. Leland got in, followed by another young man — the boy’s friend or handler, with some kind of ill-advised moustache. Later, he would discover that his briefcase had gone missing in the chaos and wonder, acidly, if the awfulness had been staged. On the ride, the young man with the moustache gripped his friend’s limp hand. The gesture was careful and tender, and Leland found himself staring. Homosexuals, albeit unkempt ones. The pilot raised University Hospital on the radio, and the moment they landed, emergency medics whisked the body inside. But the young man remained on the chopper bench, uncertain.

“What do I do?” he asked.

The question surprised him. Leland answered, “You go look after him. That’s what you do.”

It was only later, back at Bowman Field, that Leland discovered he still had the bandana in his hand. And the awful moment returned: the boy, looking up at Leland with astonishment and single bloodshot eye before he drifted. A week later, the boy remained at the hospital with a skull fracture. Of course, without insurance. Origin would cover the substantial costs. The newspapers had not yet bit on the story, and certainly would neglect to mention the corporate beneficence.

The doorbell rang. Leland wondered if he’d ordered food twice and forgotten. Under the porch light, the young man from the helicopter, the handler with the eyebrow along his top lip, dawdled on his front step. His face seemed sharper, less comedic, and he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a squidlike monster throttling the city skyline. Below it ran the words “Release the Kraken!” In his hand, he had Leland’s briefcase.

“I think this is yours,” the young man said.

Steadying himself on the doorframe, Leland accepted it with what he hoped was unbleary firmness. The weight seemed correct, though the flask would certainly be missing. There’d been nothing of consequence inside: everything that mattered was on his laptop.

“I assume it’s been thoroughly pawed?” Leland said.

The young man shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not part of them. You should have it. It’s yours.”

“How’s your friend?” Leland asked.

“Still in the hospital. There’s swelling. On his brain.”

“All right then.” But the moment hung between them. The boy’s face summoned up the last time they’d been together, on the roof of the hospital, when he looked to Leland with needfulness. He and Merrill had never had children — the treatments had impeded her fertility — but with the young man now in front of him he felt an odd calling. The night suddenly seemed to require a charity that Leland could just about deliver.

“Have a nice life,” the young man said, and turned to walk up the drive.

Later, Leland would understand it had been a mistake to allow the boy this close, to permit him to study his privacy, but the months of drinking had sanded down his discernment. And he’d come all this way, miles into the county, simply to return what was his.

“Hang on just one a moment, son,” Leland said. “What do you drink?”

4.

Kyle sat bolt upright in the lawn chair, as though he might be graded. The interior of the gazebo was a green cave — lights strung up along the lattice made him feel like they’d crawled inside the private heart of the plant. Barr had hacked their way inside, tearing at the vine, wrestling with something prior and clearly still present. Kyle hesitated before he followed. The guy was half off his face, marinating in alcohol, and curious about all the wrong things. Did serial killers like plants?

“And just what is a ‘kraken’?” Leland Barr asked. “And why do you want it released?”

“The kraken is a monster,” Kyle said. “It’s supposed to be funny.”

Kyle sipped his drink tentatively — Barr had made them both bourbon and coke with “two jiggers” of liquor — and checked the time on his phone. He felt trapped, though Barr was harmless.