the phone, asshole. Pick up the phone. I’ve had it with this. You’ve got to talk to me. You’re my brother, my father, you’re all I’ve got. Pick up. You motherfucking asshole. Pick. Up. The. Phone. Or wait. I get it. You’ve offed yourself, haven’t you. You’ve finally pulled the trigger. You’re lying there dead on the floor. You’ve blown your own brains out. Well, if that’s what you’ve done, then hear this. I will never forgive you. In fact, I’m coming over there. I’m coming over there and when I get there, you crusty motherfucker, I will kill you all over again.
Rudy’s message cut out. The chickens teemed, hungry. We would feed them, but not yet. It was very cold. We sat side by side on the floor, where it was coldest. “Aldi,” Rudy said. “How could you? How could you leave me?”
But the first feeling that came to me, when feeling came back, rushed in strong and undeniable, from no source that I knew. His choice. He can do this if he wants to. It’s a mystery. It’s his mystery.
We didn’t want to call the sheriff. We knew Aldi hated the sheriff. We knew he wouldn’t want to be dragged to the funeral home, manhandled by a bunch of strangers, but we couldn’t see what else to do. So we called, but before the sheriff came, we unplugged the answering machine and we hiked it down to the truck. We buried it beneath the chain saws.
When it was all over, when our statements had been taken, when the ambulance—why did they need a fucking ambulance?—had come and gone with Aldi’s body, when we had fed the chickens and waded back down through the dripping, warming slush, we sat in the truck dumbly.
“What now?” Rudy asked.
“Where should we go?” I asked.
“I don’t want to be separate,” Rudy said.
“Me neither,” I said. “I don’t want any more separation.”
“I want the opposite of separation,” he said.
“What’s that?” I said.
“What’s that?” he said.
“Take me home,” I said. “Go fast.”
I can’t explain what happened next except to say that the opposing magnetism that for years had pushed Rudy and me decisively apart turned around and sucked us toward each other. I was near him so hard, I was against him and he was against me and then I was caught because he had always been against me and I had always been against him, but this was a different kind of against. We didn’t need to talk, because we’d spent years talking and we knew everything. We knew we were no good for each other. We knew we were built for lifelong loggerheads. We were grieving so hard, we were grieving so bad, we were so hard for each other. I don’t remember why we didn’t just fuck right there in the truck, and I don’t remember how we made it home, how we pulled each other up the pipeline and into the wall tent. Rudy kicked aside his boots and dirty socks, his multiple editions of The Count of Monte Cristo, that classic tale of revenge, his yards of burlap, shoe grease, chewing tobacco, lamp oil, the chili can. He threw his wool army blanket onto the floor. He pushed me or I pulled him down onto the blanket. Whatever it was it felt violent, rough, and clumsy, two people who hadn’t done this in a while. Can I fuck you now, he said, can I fuck you? I said, You’d better. He said, Fuck, you don’t let me go. I’m not, I’m not, I can’t, I said, and we didn’t feel the cold and we didn’t feel the snow and we didn’t feel the heat from the fire and when two bodies come at each other that hard they reach terminal velocity and liquefy upon impact and we did.
And when he was inside me, I felt Aldi Birch, saw his exploded caved-in face. But also, I saw before that explosion, saw his eyes beneath his brow, his willow legs, felt the ways he and I had petted each other softly, as if we were only touching ourselves.
16
KAREN
I had something to report. I had a reason to call home. High-pressure fracked gas, a whole fresh hell, was on its way to our place, would be shot through the repurposed pipeline beneath Rudy’s nursery, would flow alongside the spring. I thought of vintage pipe, fissures, seepage. I thought of what Jay had said. Blast zone of two miles. I spent long days in