Out of the Woods Read online

  Out of the Woods

  Stories

  E. Christopher Clark

  © 2017 E. Christopher Clark.

  Cover art includes an interpolation of “Forest, Cape Otway Ranges” by Eugene von Guérard.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review, or by members of educational institutions, who may photocopy all or part of the work for classroom use. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Please visit clarkwoods.com for more information on this and other titles.

  Created with Vellum

  For my daughters, Kaylee & Melody,

  and my wife, Stephanie, as always.

  Contents

  Anything But Pure

  One Player or Two?

  No, I Am

  Where It Hurts

  Parameters

  A Pun in the Punchline

  The Price

  Visitation

  The Rest of the Ritual

  Books & Letters

  Dogs

  Ventricle

  Forks

  Receding

  About the Author

  Join the Mailing List

  E. in Your Ears

  Anything But Pure

  “There have been worse winters,” his grandfather told him, as they stood between snowbanks that towered above him, that rose as high as Grandpa’s chin in some places.

  He couldn’t picture it, and he told Grandpa as much. So, the old man put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and told him to close his eyes.

  The snow was only ankle-deep, Grandpa told him, but it was never the snow alone that made a winter bad. What made a winter bad was what the snow covered, what it sought to hide and to bury.

  “Picture it,” said Grandpa, “snow atop crumbling brick and burnt timber, atop family portraits and toy trains and baby dolls whose pretty dresses were soiled now with soot and worse.”

  The boy began to cry, but Grandpa didn’t stop. It was no use denying the tears, he told the boy. Nothing wrong with crying, even when you were a man, when the memory called for it.

  “Picture it,” said Grandpa. “Picture what the snow was trying to hide from us as we stood there, looking at what our fighting had done. What a travesty it would have been,” said Grandpa, “if we had forgotten what lay beneath that blanket of white, if we had succumbed to the Devil’s call to see purity where there was anything but.”

  One Player or Two?

  It was here. Fifteen minutes ago, it was here on the desk, next to the controller, beside the N.E.S. There was only the one and he’s sure it isn’t one of the coins in his hand because all he sees there is silver. No gold.

  But wait, he thinks, pennies aren’t gold. Even freshly minted, they aren’t. They’re copper, right? Copper.

  Where is it? He checks under the rug again, inside his shoes one more time.

  If the clerk at the Mickey Dee’s was reasonable, it wouldn’t matter. But the girl who works the Sunday night shift is a meth head, complete with missing teeth and runny nostrils and delusions of grandeur. For her, a penny is a penny is a penny.

  On screen, the game he set up to simulate while he was gone is finished. He thinks to pause his quest, find the notebook, and take down the stats, but his stomach roars its disapproval and he keeps on keeping on.

  Someone knocks at the door, one of his housemates, probably the ski bum who’s offered him the ride, but maybe the ski bum’s pigtailed girlfriend instead. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t know either of their names, doesn’t know the name of anyone in the house, and how can he ask for a penny without at least being able to ask them by name? “Hey You, could you give me a loan?” No, that won’t fly. It has to be “Hey, Kurt” or “Yo, Tori” or else nothing at all.

  “You almost ready?” It’s the girl. Liz? Kim? Courtney?

  “Almost,” he says. “Just scrounging up some change.”

  “We can loan you some money, Evan.”

  Evan. Great. She knows his name. And what was that, the bit about scrounging up change? That was as good as asking, wasn’t it? What would Dad think? asks the meanest of the voices in his head.

  Dad’s dead, he whispers to himself.

  “What?” asks the girl on the other side of the door.

  * * *

  As they ride in Victor’s car — Victor, the ski bum is called Victor — Tammy, the girl, asks him what’s the deal with the video game.

  “It’s baseball,” she says. “I get that. But what are you writing down in the notebook?”

  “Stats,” says Evan.

  “The game doesn’t do that for you?” says Tammy.

  “Not really,” he says. “Not in any meaningful way.”

  In the driver’s seat, Victor chuckles. He makes the turn into the McDonald’s parking lot.

  “What’s funny?” says Tammy.

  Victor holds up a hand and shakes his head, staying silent.

  It was Dad’s thing, the stats. A long time ago, when they first got the game, they actually played it, actually sat down on opposite ends of the green and brown couch, controllers in hand, and took each other on. Dad mastered the pitching mechanic, Evan was unmatched in the virtual batter’s box, and Mom, when she played, had a knack for the outfield that brought deep ball players to their knees. They had a blast. But once Dad found the “season” mode and realized you could simulate games in about a quarter of the time it took to play them, he got it into his head that he was going to see how things played out over the careers of their pixelated players, over the lifetimes of franchises not named for their real life counterparts, so as to avoid lawsuits from a league that hadn’t quite figured out what to do with video games yet. He brought the original Nintendo to his office and bought a new Super Nintendo for Evan and Mom to play with in the living room.

  “We all getting the same thing?” asks Victor, braking just shy of the Drive Thru.

  “One patty melt,” says Evan, handing his change up front.

  Victor tosses the change into one of his cup holders, where it mingles with the quarters he keeps there for the tolls he pays to go home on weekends — he lives in Vermont; that much, Evan does remember. Victor holds out his hand to Tammy. From her purse, she produces a crisp twenty, depositing it into his palm.

  Victor pulls forward, then orders.

  * * *

  The patty melt is a thin slice of hamburger, covered in Cheese Whiz and diced onions, on a soggy rye bun. There is nothing appetizing about it, and Tammy and Victor are saying as much. They can’t understand why Evan was so anxious to get one.

  “Because they’re only here for a limited time,” says Evan, parroting the commercial he hears five times an afternoon while tucked away in his dorm room between the end of classes and the start of dinner. “You never know when they might be gone for good.”

  “Not a minute too soon,” says Victor, dabbing at his lips with the wrapper, then tossing it out the window.

  “Victor!” says Tammy, slapping at his arm.

  “I couldn’t stand the smell,” he says. “You should get
rid of yours, too.”

  “I will,” she says, “in a trash can, when we get home.”

  Victor adjusts his rear view, as if to look Evan in the eye by way of the mirror. “Is this another of those family traditions?” he asks. “Did you and your father go out for shitty fast food every Sunday?”

  Tammy hits him again, this time with a closed fist instead of an open palm. She knows — they both know, apparently — how much Evan is missing his father.

  “Only when there was something new on the menu,” says Evan. “Like, last year, when BK had their Italian chicken sandwich,” he says, though that was one he had more often with the girlfriend who worked at the Dunkin Donuts across the street, the sandwich it had felt weird to eat with Dad, because of the things he and the Dunks girl had done in the BK parking lot after eating, the parts of her he’d put in his mouth, the parts of him she’d put in hers.

  “You must really miss him,” says Tammy, reaching back, opening her fist, and then taking Evan’s hand into her own.

  * * *

  They fuck once or twice, Evan and Tammy, just after she breaks up with Victor and just before she hooks up with the painter she will marry after school is through. It’s even fun, except for when she fakes her orgasms, which she seems to do for his benefit, maybe because she wants him to feel like some part of him isn’t broken, which she knows is a lie, which is why she fucks him in the first place: in the hopes that her lips will heal him, or her cunt, or maybe even just the look in her eyes as she looks up at him and sighs his name.

  But he is broken, all of him. It is the fourth of October, a year since Dad’s brain seized up for the last time, like the game is seizing up now, and he is still balling his eyes out on a daily basis. Evan takes the cartridge out and blows into the end of it, trying to get the dust out, wiping at his leaky eyes as he does. Tomorrow is his birthday. Maybe he’ll buy a new game, assuming he can find a place that still sells them for this old junker, now that there’s not only the Super version to contend with, but the N64 as well. Maybe he’ll ask Tammy to come over again. After all, things with the painter can’t be that serious, not yet. And it is his birthday, after all.

  He slips the cartridge back into the N.E.S., pushes it down and into place, and then hits the power button. They are back in business. He grabs the notebook. He blows his nose.

  * * *

  He and his mother celebrate at the Friendly’s up the road, just over the New Hampshire border. She orders a hamburger, plain, well-done — the only way she’ll eat it. He gets the patty melt, for comparison’s sake. It is good, delicious even, but he hates every bite. Just like Mom to take him some place that ruins a memory of Dad. She was going to leave him and she’s still pissed off that she never got the chance.

  “How’s school?” Mom asks.

  He says nothing, stabs a French fry into his pool of ketchup instead.

  “Have a favorite class yet?”

  Damn, he thinks. The fries are better, too.

  “Met any girls?” she asks.

  “One,” he says. “She slept with me because she felt sorry for me. I don’t think she feels sorry anymore. Or, well, maybe she is sorry still, just for different reasons now.”

  His mother nods along, sprinkling her fries with salt. She has never enjoyed his candor, believes he has a disorder of some sort that keeps him from keeping his mouth shut when he should. She brought him to a doctor once, to have him tested, but his father swept in at the last minute and took him out for ice cream instead. Dad had black raspberry, Evan orange sherbet.

  “What did you want to get for a present?” she asks, handing him the card he knows is filled with one hundred and eighty dollars in cash, ten bucks for every year of his life.

  He shrugs, opens the card. He stuffs the wad of tens into his pocket without counting it, without really looking at it at all. “I was thinking of visiting Dad’s grave,” he says.

  “No,” she says. “It’s your birthday. That is too morbid, even for you.”

  He shrugs, soaks up the last of the ketchup with the last of his fries.

  “There isn’t anything you want?”

  He shakes his head. She drives him back to his dorm. When he gets out, she forgets to hug him. She doesn’t realize, it seems, until he’s almost at his door. Then she hurries herself across the grass, her heels sinking into the muddy lawn on every other step. He stands still while she wraps her arms around him, lets her do what she think needs to be done.

  * * *

  The cab from the college to his hometown costs him more than he’d imagined it would, but there is still plenty left over for the sandwiches and the ride back. When the thought strikes him that he could have asked Victor, he brushes it aside, telling himself that good old V is still mad about Evan and Tammy, even though he knows full well that Victor hasn’t thought about Tammy since they broke up and has, in fact, moved on to the Asian girl who lives upstairs, a computer exec’s daughter who loves buying him breakfast only slightly less than she seems to enjoy waking the whole goddamned house with her harpy’s wails at two in the morning.

  Evan has the cabbie drop him in Drum Hill, at the Burger King. He buys a pair of Italian chicken sandwiches — they’re just back in season, while supplies last — and then he walks across town with them under his arm, to keep them warm.

  It’s dusk when he gets there and there’s an old man by the supply shed, a ring of keys twirling around his index finger. Evan waves at him, then walks up the hill, toward the back of the cemetery.

  He sets one of the sandwiches atop Dad’s grave, then cops a squat on the grass in front, opens the notebook, and begins to run down the numbers. He pauses for a bite now and then, but doesn’t really eat until he’s caught Dad up on the game.

  “The cartridge is crapping out on me at least twice a day now,” he says. “I was thinking…”

  But saying it, even to a hunk of granite, is harder than thinking it. Asking for permission, even when there’s no one left to grant it —

  Evan cries. He tries to stopper the tears by dabbing at his eyes with the only thing he has, the sandwich wrapper, but all he manages to do is smear melted cheese and cooling tomato sauce across his cheeks.

  “I was going to buy something new,” he tells his father’s tombstone. “But I had to ask you first. And now there’s nothing left, so it doesn’t matter anyway.”

  Evan stands, runs away. He doesn’t answer when the man with the keys asks, “What’s that on your face?”

  * * *

  It isn’t until he’s back in his dorm room that he realizes he left the notebook behind. He empties his pockets onto his desk to see if there’s enough, but there’s barely enough to get across town, let alone across the state. And then, what about getting back?

  He flips on the TV. Another season is complete, ready for him to document it. He slams his fist down on the game console and the TV screen goes black. The game’s load screen flickers back for a second, then blinks dark again. Flickers, then goes dark.

  Evan hits the N.E.S. again and the flickering stops. From the console’s cartridge slot pops something small and copper. It lands on the desk, heads up, Mister Lincoln in profile.

  “So that’s where you were,” says Evan, picking up the penny. “So, that’s where.”

  He crosses his fingers as he hits the reset button, hopeful, ready to start over. The load screen comes up, stays constant. Evan does not reach for paper or a pencil. He reaches for the controller. Then, he plays.

  No, I Am

  I find him at his desk in the night, the glow of his computer screen like a halo around his head. He’s turned from it, staring at the painting of ships in the harbor that he thinks his muse, looking for someone waiting on the waves to tell him a story.

  Waiting, like I am.

  When I tell him I’m scared, a stuffed animal in my arms, he jumps in his chair and shouts “Jesus!” before he can stop himself. He turns around and asks me what I’m doing up — what am I thinking? — and
as I look down toward my feet I can see his chest heave in panic. I watch him huff and puff, and I’m so sure that he’s going to blow my house in that I start to cry.

  “Shit,” he says. “Shit, shit, shit.” And then he gathers me up in his arms like the burden that I am.

  I weep softly into his t-shirt as he runs his fingers through the tangled hair I forgot to brush before bed. As I close my eyes, I think of the photo of us from the day I was born: my tiny body pressed against his chest as he holds me and smiles for the camera. He held his cheek against the top of my soft head while I searched with my open mouth for the only true thing I’d yet found in this cold, cold world. He held his cheek there like he’s holding it there now, and, as the story goes, he told me he was sorry. A preemptive apology, Mom told me, because that was his thing, had always been his thing, because maybe he knew how often he’d need to be forgiven, because maybe he knew what was broken inside of him better than we ever could, better than he’d ever let us know.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him now, my tiny voice muffled by his barrel chest and his beating heart.

  “No, I’m sorry,” he says, kissing my forehead once and then again.

  “No,” I say, “I am.”

  Where It Hurts

  Janet learned to hate her feet on the first day of second grade, when she wore flip-flops to school and Lizbeth English teased her about her big toe, how much bigger it was than the others. Lizbeth teased her about the hair on her legs too, and her My Little Pony t-shirt, which was so last year, but for Janet it all came back to the toe. If she hadn’t worn the flip-flops, Lizbeth wouldn’t have found her opening and would have picked on Mary Russel instead, whose legs were just as hairy and who was wearing a Dukes of Hazzard jacket besides, which wasn’t so much last year as it was last decade.