Regan

Knot Postcard


Bill & Dogs


Knot

Things had begun to unravel for Jake. For years, he had assured himself that his family would never see him again. He tied off his past like a tourniquet. He had gotten into trouble over a few ill-chosen words, and his family was so damned dramatic. He wished that they were less like people than characters, as he thought of them. He imagined this same practice led James Michener to write Caravans. Never a great reader, he had found a few inspiring paperbacks in the dusty barn where he bid his time. The words of Michener and Louis L’Amour were the most straightforward depictions of life as he knew it.

It was less a barn than the bottom floor of a grain elevator. Though it wasn’t meant for habitation, Jake used an old army cot and a thick New Mexican blanket for his sleeping quarters. Though he opposed nostalgia, both items conjured a history he hadn’t personally known. At night, he lay awkwardly atop a rickety aluminum frame and watched birds outside make shadows on the walls. Scent of blackstrap molasses, manure, and hayseed oil filled his head while rats scurried beneath floorboards, lulling him to sleep.

It wasn’t really a grain elevator, more of a silo. The elevator had been dismantled during some war, its wood used as kindling to keep families warm. This was another story Jake repeated to himself as he unlatched a heavy steel door and slid down a concave siphon to his hammock. He told people he had gone to the Caribbean with a lady whom none of them knew, proven by a snapshot of a pretty stranger he’d stolen from a drugstore picture frame. He imagined the dirt roads of that island would be similar to the roads here, so inventing a fantasy was easy enough. He’d never been out of the county before, much less the state, much less the country. He had not seen the world.

The building was actually a cold feed shed, lacking both windows and insulation. The purpose was to prevent infestation. Each morning, before free weights and bench presses, Jake walked the shed’s perimeter, sprinkling chili powder. It gave the place an exotic odor, transporting him away from the present where he insisted on staying. He could not, would not, go back. There wasn’t exactly danger waiting, at least not the criminal kind. Deals had been made. His end of the bargain was to disappear, what he had always wanted to do and had somehow made happen through a series of missteps.

For half his life, Jake lived alone on land that barely needed tending. Animals let him know when they were out of salt, stuck in breach, or engorged with fluid. He had no ambition, little passion, and few skills. Neighbors acted kindly toward him, offering odd jobs and bringing food on occasion. In his thirty-third year, it occurred to Jake that he’d done very little indeed. A world of regret sat upon his shoulders, like a calf carried in from the field, for a future unknown rather than mistakes of the past. He could not see errors in his path, only a place where the road dipped and gave. Making excuses for what he had done seemed to miss the point entirely.

As a child, his fancy for storytelling had been amusing. He understood early on that the wilder the tale, the more people’s eyes lit up and fixed their gaze on him, a heat rising through his extremities. The rest of the time, he had nothing to say about the world, no opinions to give, and shied away from confrontation. In public, he avoided boisterous individuals, though drawn to their fiery spirits. At dinners and other formal-feeling functions, his fingers worried napkins filled with dread. Debate was a family tradition. He could not hold up his side of an argument, but he could distract from topic with intriguing lies.

It had been so many years now that he wasn’t sure what he could do. How was he to know if they had already buried him? He’d buried himself. He went missing, one of the many missing persons not featured on sides of milk cartons or in convenience store windows. During a long and aimless country drive, he had created a fantasy where he was a soldier lost in action. The radio reported that in the endless war there were no MIAs. Each soldier had a chip embedded in him, a Philip K. Dick tracking device, so that members of a unit repelled from cliffs after flying blind into enemy territory to retrieve one of their own. Thinking about the fearless love of strangers depressed him. Family ties were looser now. You left or were left. Either way, whoever remained behind left you there, emergency flairs bright for no one.

He wasn’t a soldier. Soldiers were the new heroes, faceless martyrs, the white bearded Jesus of modern times. They went away naïve and hairless and, if they returned at all, were only half-alive, dead behind the eyes. They fought for something vague and poignant: their country, freedom, democracy. He was one of the flatfooted free whom they fought for, whose liberties extended beyond others’ noses. He had said some things he couldn’t remember, but every phrase came out in newsprint, documented forever like some horrible version of a schoolgirl journal. In a gasoline drum behind the barn, he burned everything from before, kept for years in heavy apple boxes, untouched and unread. No one should or would read his thoughts. He would start anew, unknown Jake.

He had dreams of them that turned his feelings against him, made him feel the soft parts that hadn’t existed for so long. He saw them as they were, not just photographs now made ash. They were caricatures of kindness, touching him gently with fingertips and crooked smiles. Those were no more real than images at sunset, unphotographable pinks and reds. The sky was not romantic, just dry. Rains would surely come, but for a few hours, they would have a sailor’s delight. Knots were made for leverage, to steal the ocean’s supply, to borrow from the larger fish what they would not eat. The little guys get thrown back until they can merit a higher price.

When he awoke from his stupor, Jake would hear pitchy women’s voices, harsh and accusing. He would remember after a short time why he had gone, and the dreams were the same effect as a spicy meal or a heavy cold: delirious, hallucinated, unreal. They considered truth more important than anything else. They didn’t understand context, circumstances that led from one choice to an unintended result, to another choice that was less choice than resignation. It all sounded like excuses to them. He pushed forward in the soldier fantasy just to get to the final event he wanted to see: the death letter came from the Army, telling of his disappearance in a foreign land. They would forget everything and feel something like regret, wishing they had just one more chance to see him. His eyes opened as he swerved on the empty straight stretch that is Highway 2 across Montana. Knees drive. They would want to see the old him, a sweet seven year old with sheepish grin, not him as he was now.

The cot came from his grandmother’s art room. When she died, all that was left were half-finished oil paintings, a second-hand easel, and the cot on which he slept through his childhood, on weekends when his mother came back, close to giving up as mothers secretly feel all too often. It’s blue and too small for him now, unless he rolled into a fetal ball. He sleeps in the same position as he did then, imagining the theme song of the Johnny Carson show just above the cackles of those women, drinking Tab and Jameson, just a swig up to the second arthritic knuckle. It was so easy to blame them for everything. The blanket, thick wool, had patches of his grandfather’s flannel overcoat cut into dozens of denim jeans, present remnants of an old man’s life. It smelled of diesel forever.

Jake’s world was that door jamb, left ajar just enough for memory to peek through, checking to see if his eyes were still open. Children stare into the dark, skittish like vermin searching up from the forest floor for alert owls. They could not see the world from that frightened place, but that was their world. Return was prohibited. He could not get back into that tiny place where love resides, narrower than a hallway, the walls coming down with a step in either direction. He had undone in a matter of months the length of his whole life. He had been reborn, the painful process repeated with his full consciousness and no blood. His father had cut him out after a final indignity of Jake’s lies. There was money involved, and it got ugly with four words:

“You’re dead to me.”

There is a place in the chamber of the heart where the ventricles meet, where arteries cross like freeways in Texas. Cars couldn’t exit the highway for twenty miles, so far outside the city it seemed pointless to turn around. It was safer in the country, where people leave you alone in different ways than they do in the city. They look straight into you and see your past in an instant, like rural gods knowing each soul. The deal given to him, to which he was forced to agree, was to cease existence. His hands were tied. He had hung himself with a rope of words. Go back, and no one would trust him. Only the police would have him on a warrant. Disappear, and he was outside the law.

He had always wanted to be that black hat man. He had written his own ending. Some days it felt like a gift: control. Man has charge of his life, more so than he knows. Even the cows bellow for what they want. Their mouths thirst. Their heads are stuck in the wrong direction. They could die like that, born ass first into the world, suffocated. They are full of water, ready to burst unless touched right. What does it matter? When people die, it’s easier to let go than if they walk away and are still alive out there somewhere. He was twine, unwound and falling.
Open.
Apart.