Ray gripped Mother’s icy hand as a child would, and sucked in a lungful of air to swear at her stubbornness. He held his breath, and then it whistled out through tight lips. She could have waited for him to fill the birdfeeder. Closing his eyes, he imagined flinging himself off the edge of nearby Runaway Canyon, his bulky body forming a snowslide, as it tumbled five hundred feet into the creek. Maybe that would please Mother.
He should have answered the phone when she called that morning, but he was tired. Her heart hurt, her bowels were acting up, her left eye wouldn’t focus, and her right hand felt numb, the usual. Ray half-listened to her messages and twisted the wiry hair in his beard. He bumped his kitchen table and concentrated on the concentric circles trapped in his coffee cup, hoping that the extra strong brew would alleviate his whole body ache. Because the early February light bothered his eyes, he swallowed three extra-strength aspirin chased by a slug of coffee. Earlier in the week, Mother had mentioned that he was getting another sinus problem. She could tell by the hollow below his eyes and at the flatness of his thin face. She had picked up the telephone to make a doctor’s appointment, but Ray covered her hand with his and pressed the telephone back into its receiver.
Ray squatted by Mother and let his back absorb the winter morning sun. He lifted her body and carried her inside to her bedroom, placing her on a tangle of embroidered covers. Ray hated her log cabin. When his father left, Mother told Ray that the cabin’s amber colored logs and the tan chinking hurt her eyes. After his father left, she painted the sanded and finished logs charcoal gray. Each afternoon when he was little, she forced him to play alone in the kitchen while she locked her door and closed the thick cotton curtains, claiming that she needed rest. Too dark for a cabin in Alaska. Too dark for a home.
As soon as Ray could drive, he had chauffeured Mother to doctors in their small Alaskan town, taxied her to Anchorage, and had flown with her to Seattle to visit specialists for her varying aliments. Most doctors proclaimed her in fine physical health, though several mentioned the possibility of mental illness. After an unsuccessful appointment, Ray would hunch over her, smoothing the skin on her hands, and whisper to her that he’d find a better doctor. When she convinced a doctor to prescribe another medicine, Ray cleaned up her vomit or forced her to stay in bed waiting for the effects of her toxic brew of medicines to wear off. Her medicines were neatly arranged in a chunky wooden box that Ray built in high school for this purpose.
Ray knew that he should call someone, the undertaker, the hospital, the police. He backed away from Mother’s body on her bed and forced his eyes closed to think. Her room smelled of urine, dust, and floral room freshener. He felt like he was falling, so he opened his eyes and stood still until the world righted itself, and then he walked outside. Her body had melted an impression into the snow, and he stepped over the indentation and headed toward the forest. Bushwhacking through a short forest of elderberry, he reached the trail he’d cut as a kid that led to Runaway Canyon. He poked his index fingers into his ears because he could feel his footsteps in his teeth. He slowed down and heel-toed, crushing individual grains of snow. Following an old moose trail, he stretched his steps to meet each track, though his steps fell short. A few minutes later, he stood on the canyon edge and imagined how it would feel to lean over and fall. He waited for the cold air to chill him, but his body’s fire kept his skin hot. He shed his coat. He knew that he should go back; call the hospital, the police, maybe the undertaker.
A magpie perched at the edge of the canyon screamed. Ray registered its call without looking up. He liked to shoot magpies, to watch their black and white feathers explode, and then drift lazily to the ground. When he shot them, he’d leave their carcasses in the yard, and claim that the neighbor’s cat killed them. Mother loved magpies. His one little act of rebellion. When he shot a magpie, he imagined how it would feel to shoot a down pillow - the mix of sudden violence, then peace. As he grew older, with each magpie he shot, he imagined Mother’s sudden death, and the instant relief he would feel.
Ray ripped a blade of dry bluejoint grass above the snow and crushed the stem with his teeth, spit, then broke off a segment and started again. His saliva tasted like blood. He’d bitten his lip. He chewed the grass until he reached the seed head. He stripped the few remaining seeds off, rolled them in his hand, and scattered them over the canyon’s edge. “Bang,” he said, aiming at the magpie. He grabbed a handful of grasses and snapped them at the snow line. He whipped them against a tree branch and watched them splinter and blow away.
He walked less carefully back to the cabin, stopping in Mother’s shed. Feeling for the light switch, he knocked over a pile of canning jars, and fell to his knees. Once the dark shed was light, he located a can of paint and a fat paintbrush. He would start in her bedroom. Mother’s bed was covered with a dozen flannel pillows so that she could prop her head when breathing was the day’s trouble. He painted over the gray wall, methodically painting each round of logs white. He’d have to paint several coats to lighten the room. He knew that he should call someone, but his feverish body forced him to paint. He finished the first wall and sat cross-legged on the floor, a little dizzy.
After the white paint ran out, he went to the shed for another light color, fretting that he didn’t answer the phone when she called. He found two almost full cans of aqua paint. After poking through the congealed skim with a piece of scrap metal, he remembered this paint from his early childhood bedroom, when Mother was well. He painted the three walls of Mother’s bedroom with the streaky old paint. He stopped when he heard something outside. A scraping sound. He focused on the door to the next room. Had he heard someone? He stood silent. He slashed on a few more strokes of paint. He stopped, held his breath, and then went outside.
He stalked about, and finding only snowshoe hare tracks, returned and painted more logs. He entered the bathroom and dumped her multiple medicines into the toilet, wondering what the mix would do to her ancient septic system. He returned to her bedroom, sat down on the bed and covered Mother’s body with her sheets. It was becoming hard to breathe in the room full of paint fumes, so he stood at the threshold and bounced on the balls of his work boots while he considered what to do next. Call the police, the hospital, the undertaker. With every bounce, he winced, but he continued bouncing.
Ray remembered her bedroom before Mother became sick. Perched on the edge of her lacy bed, she spun stories of travels with dad to the Grand Canyon, to Old Faithful, to Yosemite. Each year his parents planned a new place to travel and saved for it. Snapping his paintbrush a final time, Ray spattered the last of the paint onto the floor, then dropped the brush, leaving a comma shaped smear.
Ray thought of the roses he had cut for her. It was about that time, when she was thirty and he was eight, that her hands ached too much to use cutting shears. The year before Dad left. His father left a handwritten apology taped to their kitchen table asking Ray to care of Mother.
G
Ray called the police. Rubbing his temples to stop the pounding, he sat at the kitchen table and poked at his mother’s cold toast and scrambled eggs with a toothpick from his pocket. The officer arrived, the arrangements were made, and Ray explained the wet white and aqua paint as best he could. Mother’s body was carried away. The officer suggested that Ray make an appointment at the clinic because he didn’t seem well.
Once alone, Ray walked outside and circled the cabin, kicking pieces of junk in the yard. He pulled his truck near the cabin and heaved brush, bedsprings and tires into the truck bed as sweat rolled down his back. When the truck was stuffed full, he dropped a shovel head onto a pile of tubing, threw a tarp over the truck bed and then X’ed a fat rope across the load. Lanky copper tubes and twisted rebar poked out of the sides of the tarp, but Ray climbed into his truck and revved the engine. He took a bite of a pulpy apple that was sitting on his dashboard. The mealy texture reminded him of meals Mother had cooked, never one to throw away food that she deemed eatable. She’d survived the Depression by eating anything short of rotten, she’d claimed. Ray chucked the apple into Mother’s driveway ahead of his truck. He meant to run it over. He noticed the intensity of his sweat and hoped that his fever had broken.
Ray adjusted his tiny glasses to check the truck clock. Three p.m. A new sound in the engine meant that it needed oil, and then he ran over the apple, imagining the pop as his tires began to roll. He drove directly to the restricted area of the dump where the red and white sign read, “No unauthorized access. No salvaging.” Ray scanned the dump to see if anyone was looking. The sole other human being was running a bulldozer up the commercial demolition pile.
After unroping the tarp, he heaved chunks into the demolition pile, then backed up to the brush pile. He hurled the last branch into the pile, then slumped into the driver’s seat, and spilled his coffee in the cup holder. The bottom of the cup holder was filled with sticky change, odd nails and screws from old carpenter jobs. He heard the nasal call of a magpie, mag, mag, mag and looked up to see six or seven magpies straddling a scrap of meat, iridescent wings and tails flashing green and purple. Ray made his index finger and thumb into a gun and fired, pulled back and fired again. The sudden violence of a pillow shot, then the calm. o
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