The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories Read online

  It occurred to me at one point (and I can’t remember if it was on the dock or up by the cabin or just after I had broken through the Halvorsteds’ cabin window after I discovered no one was home) to stop and give Ackvund a more thorough looking over. I studied his face very closely. His cheeks were covered with blood, and both of his eyes were closed, sealed shut with a sheet of golden crust. He was scowling. He wasn’t talking though. As I’ve alluded to, we are not a family of French origin; we are Norwegians, and this silence in the face of sustained anguish was not extraordinary behavior for my uncle or anyone else I know.

  In any case, he must have felt me breathing on his face as I looked at him, because he opened his one eye, the one that of course did not have the hook stuck in it and the hand covering it, and when he opened his eye, I decided the best course of action would be to explain the nature of our predicament to him. I looked him square in that eye and I said very sternly and very clearly, as though he was hard of hearing, “Ackvund, you have a fishing hook stuck in your eye. Don’t worry. We are going to get it out of there.” I formed a hook with one of my fingers and demonstrated for him on my head how and where the hook had penetrated his skull, and how it had come out of his eye and through his finger.

  This was a mindless effort, I realize now. He only looked at me briefly, then closed his eye again. The color of his face faded. I caught him by the elbow just as he began to slouch and the pain in this—as I had grabbed the elbow of his hooked arm—brought him instantly back among the living.

  This pig is remarkably black. It is vividly black. Shimmering black. It is sleeping again, sleeping so soundly in fact that its feet quiver. Its ears are soft on the inside, coarse on the outside. I’ve mentioned this before, I realize, but it’s worth repeating. I do not have hair so distinct. Why, then, should this beast? And does it matter? No, it does not. What matters more is my increasing desire for this animal.

  I put it down on the floor. It is beginning to arouse me—

  I want my mother to return home so that we might continue our earlier conversation. I am finding that in this silence, my recollections of yesterday morning with my uncle are becoming horribly acute. They are lulling me into a sadness I cannot see myself overcoming.

  My mother, I have neglected to say, has left her own house and driven, I suspect, though she did not say this to me, to her brother’s cabin, where she will find his dead body supine on the couch with the television on. She has not yet returned. I imagine she is experiencing something a lot like what I am right now—a sense of peering into somebody else’s bedroom, the door left slightly ajar—

  This is odd. But I have to wonder if something as odd as this was crossing my uncle Ackvund’s mind after I broke into the Halvorsteds’ cabin and found no telephone. His face, when I informed him that I had found no phone, glossed over; a grin flashed, and then his skull appeared to sink. And it pains me to remember what I did then, seeing his face. Truly, I had no idea I could do what I then decided to do—that is, hoist my uncle up, from under his knees, and carry him on my shoulder out to the front of the Halvorsteds’ cabin, and all the way to the road.

  My uncle, you should know, could not have weighed less than 250 pounds at the time, and I had no choice but to put him down several times, leaning him against the side of the cabin while I caught my breath. After nearly one half hour of defying gravity, I was only able to get him as far as the front of the driveway, near the Halvorsteds’ garage. Exhausted, I decided I could carry him no farther, was in fact doing him a grave disservice by trying, and I ran instead to the front of the cabin to look for something, anything, that might aid in my rescue.

  Mercifully, I found a wheelbarrow and pushed it to him, laid him in it, then wheeled him as quickly as I could out to the road—then there was the waiting, much like I find myself waiting right now—

  Its belly, this pig’s belly, is so tender that when I roll it over on its back and press my hand against its stomach, the impression of my hand is outlined quite clearly in its fat, white flesh. It squirms as if I’ve pressed too hard, but it is a good-natured pig, and scrambles to its feet and comes to me again, snorting.

  Its sounds are not at all unlike the whimpering noises my uncle was making as he waited beside me in the wheelbarrow. I found myself ignoring, to the extent that I could, my uncle’s wailing while we were waiting at the side of the road for someone to drive past. But County Road H is not a busy thoroughfare, and after ten minutes or so of his anguished weeping, I went to him and put my hands on his shoulders and looked him square in the eye. I spoke to him, and this (that’s right, I’m sure of it now) was when I talked to Ackvund as though he were deaf and explained to him the precise nature of all his trouble; this was when I made the little fishing hook with my finger and demonstrated for him, by sticking my finger-hook near my eye, the way in which the hook had come through his temple and out his socket. And this was when, at last, I took the rod from his fierce clutches and clipped the line with my teeth, leaving the lure to dangle and sway freely—freely at last—from his face.

  I remember that he was, in a word, helpless after I did this, and that I was starting to lose him. I had begun wheeling him back toward his cabin (which I knew was no short distance from the Halvorsteds’) when I saw one of the Eckers rumbling toward us in his red combine. I flagged the machine down, and the man inside—Jimmy, I think—offered to let us jump on the back. Foolishly, I took the offer.

  For twenty minutes (and I dare say they were the worst twenty minutes of Ackvund’s long and loving life) we vibrated, rattled, shook, bumped, and rocked all along the graveled edge of the road—and this was after the procedure of getting Ackvund settled onto the back of the machine. Eckers, I might mention, never once stepped out of the air-conditioned cab of his vehicle to offer assistance, leaving it to me to pull the wounded soul up onto the hood of the threshing board by myself.

  In any case, it didn’t take me all of those twenty minutes to realize I had made a tragic mistake in not continuing with the wheelbarrow—besides what must have been torturous and incessant vibration for my uncle, Eckers refused to drive faster than several miles per hour, with the result that we were going absolutely nowhere in a bloody, blistering hurry. From my uncle’s eye, that twelve-inch bucktail (I can still see it) swayed back and forth like a metronome, ticking—

  “Please put her down,” my mother says. She has come through the back door.

  “I’d rather not,” I say. I hold the pig away from her. I stand up. “Why do you look like that? You’re scaring me, Mom.”

  “I’m scaring you?” she says. “What did you do to him, you monster? Why is he so filthy? Where did you two go?”

  There’s a look in her eye when she says this that betrays her seduction. Her face has never been so radiant. She is feverish. She demands that I give her the pig. She slaps my back with her open hand. She wants the pig, she wants her brother, she wants answers. She wants in a way she has never before wanted. If only her violent hitting of my back could speak.

  “Stop it, Mother,” I say. “Leave the pig alone. Let me just hold it.”

  “The police are coming!” she shouts.

  “Yes,” I say. “Sure. They should be.”

  I am holding the pig away from me, my arms extended, my hands under its warm, hairy armpits, my back screening my mother from taking it away. The pig is looking over its shoulder, as though it is trying to figure out what I want to do with it. I bring its face to mine, to give it a kiss on the forehead before I put it down on the floor, and it slips its quick little tongue into my mouth like a dart. The tongue flickers into and out of my mouth several times, though my lips are tightly pursed. It’s a very narrow tongue and it is very warm. I open my mouth wide and let it in.

  My mother gasps.

  She takes a cookie sheet out of the drying rack and slams it across my back. Though the pan is flimsy, the edge of the stupid thing catches my elbow—my funny bone—and I drop the pig. It sprawls on the floor and squ
eals. It looks up at me, confused, and scrambles away.

  I lunge after it.

  “Get away from her!” my mother shouts. There is a knock at the door. I look up at my mother and my mother looks at the door. She looks the way Ackvund did when I dumped him off the side of the combine into the ditch and ran like hell to get my car; that is, she looks fundamentally torn, split between two sides of a decision.

  Don’t let me deceive you by way of breeziness here: Ackvund was most likely dead by the time I dumped him off the side of the combine and ran. He had rolled into the slop in the culvert, and when I’d returned with my car, flipped him over onto his back, taken his pulse, and felt for his breath, there was no doubt he was absolutely dead and I couldn’t think of bringing him into the hospital as he was, so I drove him back to his cabin only to find his phone was, as I’ve already said, not working.

  The police officer knocks again. My mother goes to the door. I run into the dining room and look under the table for the pig. I want this pig more than I want anything else in the world. I can’t explain this. It’s under a chair. I go after it, swipe and miss. I chase it through the living room and into the bedroom. I lunge for this precious squalling creature before it can get underneath the bed, and I pull it out by its haunches. It squeals. It struggles. I pull it close. The cop yells at me, but I don’t stop. I bring the beast to my face, and I kiss it, and it licks me back, and when it licks my open mouth its narrow tongue is like a fire-hot poker in my throat. The police officer yells, my mother yells, and I am mouth to mouth with this pig, and I am sucking, siphoning its lungs for air, and its little tongue is searing hot and sour against my gums, and I am seeing myself do this with eyes that are not entirely my own—

  They are my mother’s eyes, this police officer’s, and they are the eyes of a nephew watching the hands of some stranger doing this, holding and kissing a pig, and this is not my mother’s pig falling to the ground, and this is not a pig scampering under a bed, and these are not my hands being forced and cuffed behind my back, and these are not my rights being read to me off a list of rights I know nothing about, and this is not my mother weeping and reaching under the bed for her pig while her son is taken away by the police officer, and these are not her hands holding her pig in front of me, taunting me on the front lawn, torturing me in front of the gaping neighbors of my past life as I am led away like some pilloried criminal from another time. As far as I can see, these are the hands of absence and desire and hunting, and these are the hands that all of my life I have been using as my own.

  CHECK THE BABY

  The grandest joke about the baby is who goes up to check on him. Because whoever goes up always wakes him, and no one wants him woken, not at three weeks, not ever.

  We’ve started promising sexual favors to the one who goes up—the one who wakes him and therein coddles, swaddles, bottles—you see, your entire life sucked as by some insect, pest.

  The stakes are not low, I might add. I have 4,027 blowjobs coming my way someday, it’s not exactly clear when; and my wife has roughly fourteen hours of French-style kissing.

  These favors might accumulate without realization until the cows come home. And I hate to say it, but at a certain point the stakes climb so that the thing being wagered against tumbles into the ridiculous and you have no idea what you’re really facing or avoiding. At which point, I am confronted about my drinking.

  When my wife cleans house, she’s surgical: “I think you’re drinking because if you’re drunk you know I can’t trust you to go upstairs and check on him.”

  “That’s flattering,” I say.

  “I also think you’re no longer interested in the sex we’ve been bartering.”

  “Is it really a form of fair trade, what we’re doing there with that?”

  The grandest joke about the baby isn’t the sort of joke one laughs at. But when I’m offered sex at the grocery store by a strange woman, the entire child-rearing phase of my life looks rather like a farce.

  “I have a child,” I tell her, and she says she knows this, has solicited me for this very reason. “But you would never see the child,” I tell her. “Under no circumstances.”

  But she just wants the smell of them. Can’t actually stand children, but she loves their smell, wants to eat the smell.

  “You’re a fine lady.”

  But we live in one of these new communities that orbits a single, fantastic, oversized grocery store, and I keep passing her in the aisles—Shoes and Pets and Car Gear. I smile to be kind, and she keeps saying things like, “Hey, offer’s still on the table.” Or, one time she boldly whiffs the air and says, “Three . . . no, four weeks. Right?”

  I shudder, but I’m a little drunk on four vanilla bottles from Baking, so at some point I titter—

  Yes, I commit adultery against my god, my wife and son, and every time the blowjobs and French-style kissing are mentioned I’m nearly vomiting, and I don’t mind saying my journeys upstairs to my silent-asleep son, just to make sure he hasn’t inexplicably stopped breathing, hurt.

  IN LAPLAND

  On Thursday my wife returns from work and says she needs some color in the house, can’t live in this cell-hole another minute, what have we done to bring ourselves to this way of living at our age, we aren’t twenty-five-year-old twits, not anymore. Country Rill is the green she shows me in a magazine. “Look at that,” she says, thrusting the glossy in my face, “and tell me it wouldn’t change everything.” I cannot tell her this. It’s time to do something, truly. We are in agreement. It is time. We have waited a long time, and at our age we can no longer afford to wait to do anything. Everything must be done last month, when there was time.

  On Saturday we compare Country Rill prices at four stores—none of the Country Rills green the way Country Rill greened in the magazine. A woman at one of these places is juggling the questions of five other customer couples, each team looking plaintive and positioning themselves for sustained explanation of paint application.

  The woman fielding these questions has no time for this. She is a rough sort of woman, a person made hard by excessive painting, I think, and not the person to articulate the ways of reducing such hardness. She is saying to another couple, “Look, paint isn’t permanent. It can always be fixed. You just go and you just do it and you can do it again.”

  When she turns a few minutes of her time to us, she studies her store’s litmus-looking paint sample against my wife’s picture in the magazine. “Same thing,” she concludes.

  “No,” my wife says. “Not at all the same.”

  The woman brings the paint litmus and the magazine up closer to her face, lifts her glasses off her nose, props them on her forehead, and seems almost to smell the Country Rill. She is very serious. “No,” she finally says, “not the same. But they’re as close as can be.”

  “You have thousands of paints,” my wife says. “Can’t you mix a blend to get it to look like this?”

  The woman looks up, hands the magazine back to us, and studies my wife’s face. “Yeah,” she says, “but it still won’t be what you want.”

  There is silence. My wife is looking at me. She wants me to confront this woman. I think about what to say to coerce her to make the color. Then the woman speaks again. “Look, if I mix this paint for you, to try to get you this color, you won’t like it. Trust me. You have to just get a color and like it. This”—she points to the magazine in my wife’s hands—“this isn’t your paint. It’s someone else’s, and you cannot have it. That’s the way it is with paint.”

  This enrages my wife, who contends that she has never heard anything more ridiculous in her life. “Color is a science, not an art. Paint is not unique. Color can be manufactured to a precise and desired specific quality. We aren’t dealing in the subjective,” she says, and I agree. But because we’re both originally from the Madison, Wisconsin, area, we’ve reserved all this direct outrage for the car ride home and really let the car windows have it.

  All day Sunday we�
�re on broadband scrolling over online paint resources. By sunset we have selected a Country Rill from a company in Pennsylvania and had it shipped overnight to the house. We pay an ungodly figure to overnight this paint, but there is no looking back: when it comes to paint, when it comes to everything at this point in our lives, cost is negligible. We charge it. We have no time for savings. All the saving we’ve been doing, all that’s over. For the first time that weekend, we eat dinner without rushing. We have even turned on the television. It’s the last supper.

  We lie awake and talk about timing. How long does it take to paint trim? Can you paint in the evening, or should you paint in daylight? Does daylight diminish the quality of the paint, does direct sunlight undermine the integrity of the pigments? Should we paint every night of the week, or wait and complete the paint job all in one weekend?

  I say, “I don’t think I could do that, physically.”

  My wife reaches across my nude chest and seizes the telephone to call her sister. I can hear her sister’s answers to the questions.

  “You’re freaking out. You’re freaking out about nothing. Do whatever you want. Paint a little, paint a lot. People with a lot less education than you—people in Lapland—paint all the time and have no problem with it. Don’t make it a problem. Paint when it feels natural to paint. There’s no right way to paint. When our house got painted, we didn’t even want it painted. It just happened. We were like, ‘Well, I guess we’ll have a painted house now.’”

  Her condescension is a wet metal rod—a horse bit—in my mouth.

  When they’ve finished and phone is back in cradle, I remind my wife that her sister has a cardiologist husband to pay for a professional job on their house, that it was a luxurious position to say it didn’t matter what you did with paint, luxurious to believe you could do whatever the hell you wanted with the trim and all things would come out right in the end. Of course things will not come out right if you do not do them deliberately and thoughtfully.