Dog Run Moon Read online

  Once, he had a dream where he skewered the judge on a giant hook, pushing the point right through her skin, through her ribs and under the spine, and then tossed her in a great blank body of water where she hung suspended under a bobber so big it blotted out the sun.

  —

  Over the course of the two years, there had been visits. For the first few months, they made the drive downstate every weekend. They sat in the communal visiting area and listened to the subdued voices of the other families at tables near them. Other families, with other sons, who all seemed to have a lot more to talk about. During the second year, the visits had decreased to just holidays, an arrangement that suited everyone except Denise, who would have camped in the waiting area had they let her.

  It was June when they let Terry out, and he hadn’t seen his family since Christmas. Terry’s father shook his hand and said, “Welcome back, son. Praise the Lord.” Out in the parking lot, in the bright sunlight, Terry thought Todd seemed older, grayer. He wore a gold crucifix and had his shirt tucked into his jeans. Terry’s mother hugged him and cried. She seemed to have lost some weight. She had dyed her hair to cover the gray, and her nails were painted tomato red. Denise came to Terry last. She hugged him as well, jumping up to get her arms around his neck, practically clinging to him. He could smell her shampoo.

  Terry picked her up and slung her, squealing, over his shoulder, realizing as he did so that she wasn’t his gangly, tomboy kid sister anymore.

  “Jesus, Den,” he said, as he put her down. “I don’t see you for a little while and you get full grown on me.”

  Denise turned red and didn’t say anything and when Terry got into the backseat of the van she sat next to him, her head resting on his shoulder. It wasn’t until they were almost home that Terry’s dad told him about the house.

  “Your grandpa left it to you, his truck too—pretty much everything he had. It was a surprise to us, too. Believe me, no one was expecting that. But the lawyer says it’s legit and a man’s will is a man’s will, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it if he is proven to be of sound mind and body at the time it was drafted. He got it drawn up pretty soon after you went away. Didn’t tell anyone about it. It definitely came as a surprise to us, but, well, I suppose it’s God’s will. You’re a homeowner, son. Eighteen years old and you got a house that’s paid for. What do you think of that?”

  Terry nodded and said he thought it was fine.

  “Could you drop me off there,” he said, “on the way by?”

  “But I planned to make you dinner,” his mother said, turning in her seat to face him, “I’ve had spare ribs in the Crock-Pot all day.”

  “I’ll come over later. I’ll drive the truck over. I just want to look at the place. Have a look at the lake. I guess that’s where I’ll be living from now on. I guess it’s mine.”

  “I just thought we’d all have dinner together,” she said. “It’s been so long. I thought a good dinner would sound nice to you.” She smiled and her lips moved like she was going to continue but Terry’s father put his hand on her arm and she turned back in her seat.

  They dropped Terry off at the house. Denise wanted to stay with him but Todd said that Terry might want some time alone. Terry shrugged. “It’s fine with me if she wants to stay.”

  “See? It’s fine with him.” Denise started to get out of the van but Todd stopped her.

  “You’re coming with us,” he said. “Leave your brother alone.”

  Denise slouched back in the seat with her arms crossed, and they pulled away—Todd with both hands on the wheel staring straight ahead, Janelle waving out the window and exaggeratedly mouthing something that Terry had a hard time understanding for a moment until it became clear. Spare ribs, she was saying. Spare. Ribs.

  Terry stood in the driveway and considered his grandpa’s house. The house where the school bus used to drop him off, the house where he spent every weekend night until he discovered girls, the old white farmhouse that creaked and groaned and had a root cellar and woodstove, glass-globed lightning rods on the roofline, a slight sag in the porch—and his grandpa’s worn overalls in the closet. All of it his now, memories to foundation.

  The lawn was a tangle of green. A knee-high jungle of weeds grew where his grandpa’s tomato patch should have been. Inside, the house was musty and hot. Terry wanted to open the windows but there were no screens—his grandpa always took them down in the fall and put them back up in the spring and Terry used to help, standing on the ladder, his grandpa handing the screens up to him. Here it was, mid-August and no screens. You couldn’t open the windows without mosquitos coming in the house. His grandpa never would have put up with that.

  From the kitchen, Terry could see out over the lake. The lily pads were as thick as ever, in bloom, the green mat festooned with spiky white flowers. He went to the porch and sat on the step, looking at the lake, the small rowboat overturned on the bank, the splintered old dock half-submerged and leaning into the lake like a broken-toothed smile.

  The turtles were out, lined up on fallen trees on the bank, their heads poking out like periscopes around the open water of the dock—box turtles and painted turtles and even a few huge snappers, their backs mossy and ancient, their necks craned to catch the last rays of sun coming down over the tops of the willows.

  Terry sat, hunched on the step with his arms around his knees, and watched the turtles. Then he went back in the house and down to his grandpa’s den. Normally, the old rolltop desk was open and cluttered with papers, greasy lawnmower parts, old wooden bass lures, Hula Poppers and Jitterbugs, a cribbage board made from deer antler, spinning reels in all shapes and degrees of brokenness, and always—presiding over this mess like a miniature duke and duchess of chaos—a pair of stuffed fox squirrels that some sophomoric taxidermist had arranged in an eternal act of coitus. Now, the desktop was perfectly empty, not so much as a single piece of paper on its scarred oak surface. It sat in the room like some strange alien craft, sterile and foreign. Terry pulled open drawers until he found keys to the gun cabinet.

  Against his parent’s wishes, Terry’s grandpa taught him how to shoot when he was young. Terry’s grandpa shot skeet at the gun club every weekend and liked to wander around out in the fall woods looking for grouse and woodcock. When Terry turned ten he bought him a youth-model twenty-gauge that immediately became Terry’s most prized possession. His parents wouldn’t let him keep it in the house, so it stayed in his grandpa’s gun cabinet, lovingly cleaned and oiled after every use. Terry had outgrown the shotgun in a few short years, and for his sixteenth birthday—three months before he went away—his grandpa bought him a new Benelli twelve-gauge pump-gun. It was a little too much gun for woodcock and grouse, but it was a clay-pigeon-breaking machine. The last time Terry and his grandpa had shot at the gun club he’d gone fifty-five for sixty on skeet, the first time he’d ever beaten his grandpa.

  The gun cabinet stood in the corner, and when Terry swung open the door he breathed in the familiar tang of Hoppe’s 9 gun oil. There were boxes of shells in the cabinet drawers, and Terry filled his pockets and loaded his gun, racking the pump action as he climbed the stairs. He strode across the lawn to the edge of the lake, and, in the last few moments before the sun went down, he shot as many turtles as he possibly could, hammering the pump so the foregrip was a blur, spent shells smoking and spinning into the grass, the turtles diving frantically, breaking and sinking, the pieces of shattered shell and beaks and claws and tails and blue-black blood, iridescent and slick like motor oil, fouling the lake’s surface.

  —

  There were a few beers left in the fridge, long gone to skunk, but Terry drank them anyway. He ran an oil-soaked rag through the barrel of the twelve-gauge and rubbed a little oil on the stock and grip before putting it back in the cabinet. He got out the screens and put them in the downstairs windows, opening them wide, and then he sat in the easy chair in the living room and watched the curtains blow.

  When he knew everyon
e would be asleep, he got his grandpa’s Ford started and drove over to his parent’s house, killing the lights down the drive and coasting the last few yards on momentum. The door was unlocked and he kicked his shoes off, padding quietly down the creaky wood floor in the kitchen. The Crock-Pot sat on the counter, still warm, and Terry filled a plate with ribs, eating and wiping his fingers on his jeans as he headed up the stairs. In his old room, Terry shut the door behind him before flipping on the light. He sat on his bed with the plate of ribs and regarded the changes: the new wallpaper, a stack of vintage suitcases, an antique lamp made from an old earthenware jug, a Shaker-style rocking chair. His dresser was still there, presumably his clothes, and his bed, but other than that? Nothing. His Field & Streams and Gray’s Sporting Journals—subscriptions his grandpa had started for him years ago. His football trophies. The mangy raccoon mount his grandpa had given him. And, he got up from the bed and lifted the mattress to check, his Penthouse collection. All of it gone. Janelle had told him about her wallpaper project. She had neglected to mention the systematic eradication of his presence from his own bedroom. He finished the ribs and wiped his hands and mouth on a brand-new four-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton pillowcase. He was lying on his back with his hands laced behind his head—considering the freshly textured beige ceiling—when Denise came in.

  “I stayed up ’cause I knew you’d come over eventually.”

  She had her hair pulled up on her head in a way he’d never seen before and he was struck again by how much older she looked. She had earrings on, each one made from the iridescent bottle-green eye of a peacock feather. The earrings were huge, and rather ridiculous the way they bookended her narrow face. He wanted to say something to tease her but when she sat down on the bed—solemnly tucking her hair behind her ears—he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He leaned over and flicked one of the feathers with his fingernail.

  “Nice,” he said.

  “Yeah, thanks. Do you like them? I got them just in time.”

  “Sure. What do you mean?”

  “The store in the mall. Remember I was telling you about the Indian women who gather the feathers and then make them into earrings?”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, they shut the store down. I guess the women weren’t just gathering the feathers when they fell, you know what I mean? They were killing all the birds, even the endangered ones, like herons and cranes and stuff. So someone found out and shut them down. I’m pretty lucky I got in there in time. A lot of girls didn’t. I had that rich bitch Macey Simons offer me a hundred bucks for mine. Can you believe it?”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Come with two hundred and then we’ll talk.”

  This made Terry laugh like he hadn’t in a long time. He laughed until he had to push his face into the pillow to muffle the sound.

  —

  When he left the house he brought the rest of the ribs with him in a plastic bag. Denise came behind him with her backpack on. She got in the truck and Terry sat behind the wheel with the key in his hand looking at their childhood home in front of them, shadowed and silent. He turned to Denise, her earrings catching the faint glow of the yard light, making the side of her face pale green.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  Denise had her arms around her backpack resting on her knees. She didn’t look at him.

  “Get out.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Let me.”

  Denise slid over in the seat and tried to put her head on his shoulder but Terry shrugged hard, his hands still on the wheel.

  “I could come with you. Why not?”

  Terry reached over to open her door and when she tried to hug him he grabbed both of her thin wrists with one hand and squeezed until she whimpered. He pushed her out of the truck and she landed awkwardly in the gravel, her hair undone and in her eyes, crying. Terry pitched her backpack out beside her and shut the door.

  “If you come over tomorrow,” he said, “I’ll take you out in the boat.”

  The truck rumbled to life, and Terry backed slowly down the driveway. He didn’t turn on the headlights until he hit the main road.

  As he drove, he remembered the last time he’d spoken to his grandpa, on the phone, a month before his death. He’d called Terry at Saginaw to tell him he’d caught an eight-pound bass, the biggest one he’d ever gotten out of the lake.

  “The thing had a mouth on it that you could have stuck a dinner plate down. Didn’t fight worth a damn either, just let me reel her in like a wet dishrag. A big female. Belly on her like a basketball. I think she was full of eggs, it’s that time of year.”

  They were quiet for a moment. Theirs was not a relationship that lent itself well to the measured give-and-take of the telephone. Terry would find himself nodding, forgetting to respond verbally, and his grandfather’s speech would often take on a stiff, formal tone that was unfamiliar to him. Often, one of them would rush to fill a silence, his words colliding with the other attempting to do the same thing.

  “Well, Terry, that’s about it,” his grandfather said after a while. “I just wanted to call and tell you about the bass. It was a fish of a lifetime and I thought you should know.”

  “Are you going to get it mounted,” Terry blurted before his grandpa hung up.

  “That might be hard to do,” he laughed. “She’s still swimming around out there I suppose.”

  “You put it back?”

  “I know. I know. Surprised myself too. You know I always said I wanted a real big one to put up in the den. But then when I reeled it in and the damn thing didn’t even put up a fight—like she knew she was swimming to her death and decided to do it with some dignity—hell, I don’t know. I’ve killed thousands of bass. I’m not sure what came over me. Maybe I’m finally getting soft in my old age.”

  “Now no one will believe you. I’d’ve killed it.”

  “What? Are you saying I’m a liar, boy?” Terry’s grandpa dropped his voice, pretending he was mad.

  “No. I believe you. But, you can’t believe anything anyone says about fishing or their dick, unless there’s proof. That’s what you always say.”

  “Yeah, I know what I always say. But you know what else I say?”

  “What?”

  “My give-a-damn is broke. I don’t care what people think. Anyway, you’re the only one I’m going to tell, so it doesn’t matter. I just wanted to let you know that I caught it and it’s still out there. Maybe you’ll get her when you get back home. I thought maybe that might help you out in some small way in there—knowing that a fish like that can be caught out here.”

  Terry didn’t believe in premonitions, not really, but whenever he thought about this conversation he got a sense that his grandpa had known, somehow, that his time was near. He wasn’t sure why, but he couldn’t help but think that if his grandpa had killed that bass, he might have lived another fifteen years. He felt like his grandpa had known this fact as well, and his decision was something that Terry had a hard time wrapping his mind around.

  —

  The yard light was burned out over his grandpa’s garage. There was a small sliver of moon and the oaks in the front yard cast their towering shadows across the driveway. The house was dark, and, upon entering, Terry had the disconcerting experience of not being immediately able to locate a light switch. It was strange, after all the time he’d spent there, that he should have to grope around to find the kitchen light. It seemed like something he should have known, some simple piece of knowledge that a mere two years spent away should not be enough to eradicate. But, then again, how many times had he ever entered this house as he did then, alone and in the dark? His grandpa had always led the way, or was already inside, the kitchen lit up, the Tigers play-by-play coming up faint and incoherent from the basement as if the house itself were vocalizing its own garbled interior monologue.

  Terry eventually found the switch, tucked in
between the doorjamb and the windowsill—and the kitchen flooded with light. After the kitchen, he moved around the rest of the house. He floundered through the living room, bathroom, den, dining room, bedroom, finding the wall switches, the pull chains of the lamps; his arms leading the way through the pitch-black as if he were swimming.

  When he had every possible source of illumination in the house glowing, he sat on the couch. He’d left all the windows open and the house had taken on the damp odor of the lake. He could smell it in the upholstery, in the curtains. The musty dankness of it rose from the carpet, and, as if heeding its summons, Terry went out across the backyard and stood on the first splintered board of the dock. The moon threw just enough light that Terry could see out over the surface of the water, the lily flowers closed up into hard white buds against the darkness.

  The dented aluminum rowboat was next to where he stood in the grass, and he flipped it over. There was a silhouette on the ground under where the boat had been—a sun-starved outline that glowed a sickly greenish white under the moon, like skin on a broken arm after the cast has been removed. Terry fit the old, warped oars into the locks and slid the boat off the bank. He rowed as slowly and as quietly as he could, the pads whispering against the hull, the oars emitting a barely audible squeak with each stroke. The lake smelled different at night, more subdued. The frogs were silent, everything tucked into itself and no longer broadcasting.

  He was out in the open water, as near as he could tell to the middle of the lake, when he stopped rowing. The moon, weak to begin with, had finally succumbed to the clouds, and the sky was a dense inkblot above him. There was no wind and the boat didn’t rock or drift. It just hung, as if suspended in a void. Terry found that if he tilted his head back, he could look up into a fathomless universe of blackness, a starless sky so immense that it seemed to pull at his eyes. It was like his pupils were made of small pieces of this same dark matter—broken obsidian shards of it—that he’d been carrying around with him his whole life as if they were his own, only to find out that they were borrowed, and that now their true owner wanted them back.