Refresh, Refresh: Stories
Benjamin Percy was raised in the high desert of Central Oregon. His stories have appeared in Esquire, the Paris Review, Glimmer Train, the Chicago Tribune, Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and many other publications, and the Paris Review awarded their Plimpton Prize to his story “Refresh, Refresh.”
He is the author of another collection of stories, The Language of Elk. He teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
Also by Benjamin Percy
The Language of Elk
Stories
GRAYWOLF PRESS
Copyright © 2007 by Benjamin Percy
Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota; and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art. Significant support has also been provided by the Bush Foundation; Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
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www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
Paperback ISBN 978-1-55597-485-5
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-015-4
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007924769
Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter
Cover art: © Image Source/Corbis
Acknowledgments
Grateful thanks to the editors of the publications listed below for first publishing the following stories:
“The Caves in Oregon” : Glimmer Train
“The Woods” : Amazing Stories
“The Killing” : Salt Hill Journal
“The Faulty Builder” : ReDivider
“Somebody Is Going to Have to Pay for This” was originally published by The Paris Review (Issue 180, Spring 2007).
“The Whisper” : The Cream City Review
“Crash” : Western Humanities Review
“Refresh, Refresh” was originally published by The Paris Review (Issue 175, Fall 2005) and later anthologized by Best American Short Stories 2006 and The Pushcart Prize XXXI: Best of the Small Presses.
“When the Bear Came” : American Short Fiction
Other names deserve to be on the cover.
My parents, Peter and Susan Percy, for starters. If I can ever afford to buy you a cabin on a mountain, as a result of a Lotto scratch ticket or a book deal, you’ll get it. You made this happen by making me fall in love with words. And over the years, when I screwed up, you smacked me on the back of head, helpfully, deservedly. Thanks.
To Fiona McCrae, Katie Dublinski, Mary Matze, and the Graywolf staff, I feel very lucky to have joined the pack. Thank you for lighting the way. I hope to do you proud.
Thanks to Katherine Fausset, super agent, the smartest in the business.
Thanks—a million times over—to Philip Gourevitch, Nathaniel Rich, Radhika Jones, and the rest of The Paris Review crew for believing in my work and curing it of its inadequacies and sharing it with the world. Corny as it sounds, I love you guys. Really.
Thank you to Ann Patchett. I still owe you that pitcher of whiskey.
To Isaiah Sheffer and Sarah Montague at Symphony Space—to Jay Nicorvo at CLMP—to Jane Hamden at WUWM—for their very generous support of my work.
To James Ponsoldt, a hell of a talented guy, for giving “Refresh, Refresh” a new life and audience.
To Michael Williams, Pablo Peschiera, and all of my colleagues at UW-Stevens Point.
Thank you to those who helped me, in small ways and big ways, write these particular stories, through criticism, encouragement, inspiration, friendship, and beer. My sister—the current rock star in residence at Iowa and an all-around genius writer—Jennifer Percy. Dean Bakopoulos. Mark Gates. Peter Straub. Tim Machan. CJ Hribal. Larry Watson. Dan Wickett. Tyler Cabot. Tom Chiarella. Paul Yoon. Laura van den Berg. Daniel Woodrell. Tom Groneberg. Dave and Lynn Dummer in particular, but the larger Dummer and Spielman clans in general. Tim and Jana Dolan. Mark Ranum and Craig Bodoh. Dan Levine. Amant Dewan. Matt Santiago. Allison Joseph. Chad Simpson. Gillian King and Clint Cargile. Mark Vannier. Billy Giraldi. Steve Stassi. David Medaris. David Jasper. John Hennessy. Kris Babe. Dave and Cynthia Moore.
And finally, most importantly, to Lisa, blue-eyed Wisconsin girl, for everything. This one’s for you. They’ll all be for you.
For Lisa
Contents
Refresh, Refresh
The Caves in Oregon
The Woods
The Killing
Meltdown
Whisper
The Faulty Builder
Somebody Is Going to Have to Pay for This
Crash
When the Bear Came
Refresh, Refresh
When school let out the two of us went to my backyard to fight. We were trying to make each other tougher. So in the grass, in the shade of the pines and junipers, Gordon and I slung off our backpacks and laid down a pale green garden hose, tip to tip, making a ring. Then we stripped off our shirts and put on our gold-colored boxing gloves, and fought.
Every round went two minutes. If you stepped out of the ring, you lost. If you cried, you lost. If you got knocked out, or if you yelled, “Stop!” you lost. Afterwards we drank Coca-Colas and smoked Marlboros, our chests heaving, our faces all different shades of blacks and reds and yellows.
We began fighting after Seth Johnson—a no-neck linebacker with teeth like corn kernels and hands like T-bone steaks—beat Gordon until his face swelled and split open and purpled around the edges. Eventually he healed, the rough husks of scabs peeling away to reveal a different face than the one I remembered, older, squarer, fiercer, his left eyebrow separated by a gummy white scar. It was his idea, fighting each other. He wanted to be ready. He wanted to hurt back those who hurt him. And if he went down, he would go down swinging, as his father would have wanted. This was what we all wanted, to please our fathers, to make them proud, even though they had left us.
This was Tumalo, Oregon, a high desert town in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. In Tumalo, we have fifteen hundred people, a Dairy Queen, a BP gas station, a Food-4-Less, a meat-packing plant, a bright green football field irrigated by canal water, and your standard assortment of taverns and churches. Nothing distinguishes us from Bend or Redmond or La Pine or any of the other nowhere towns off Route 97, except for this: we are home to the 2nd Battalion, 34th Marines. The 50-acre base, built in the 1980s, is a collection of one-story cinder-block buildings interrupted by cheatgrass and sagebrush. Apparently conditions here in Oregon’s ranch country match very closely those of the Middle East, particularly the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan and Northern Iraq, and throughout my childhood I could hear, if I cupped a hand to my ear, the lowing of bulls, the bleating of sheep, the report of assault rifles shouting from the hilltops.
Our fathers—Gordon’s and mine—were like the other fathers in Tumalo. All of them, just about, had enlisted as part-time soldiers, as reservists, for drill pay: several thousand a year for a private and several thousand more for a sergeant. Beer pay, they called it, and for two weeks every year plus one weekend a month, they trained. They threw on their cammies and filled their rucksacks and kissed us good-bye, then the gates of the 2nd Battalion drew closed behind them.
Our fathers would vanish into the pine-studded hills, returning to us Sunday night with their faces r
eddened from weather, with their biceps trembling from fatigue and their hands smelling of rifle grease. They would use terms like ECP and PRP and MEU and WMD and they would do push-ups in the middle of the living room and they would call six o’clock eighteen hundred hours and they would high-five and yell “Semper Fi!” Then a few days would pass and they would go back to the way they were, to the men we knew: Coors-drinking, baseball-throwing, crotch-scratching, Aqua Velva-smelling fathers.
No longer. In January, the battalion was activated, and in March they shipped off for Iraq. Our fathers—our coaches, our teachers, our barbers, our cooks, our gas-station attendants and UPS deliverymen and deputies and firemen and mechanics—our fathers, so many of them, climbed onto the olive green school buses and pressed their palms to the windows and gave us the bravest, most hopeful smiles you can imagine, and vanished. Just like that.
Nights, I sometimes got on my Honda dirt bike and rode through the hills and canyons of Deschutes County. Beneath me the engine growled and shuddered while all around me the wind, like something alive, bullied me, tried to drag me from my bike. A dark world slipped past as I downshifted, leaning into a turn, and accelerated on a straightaway—my speed seventy, then eighty—concentrating only on the twenty yards of road glowing ahead of me. On this bike I could ride and ride and ride, away from here, up and over the Cascades, through the Willamette Valley, until I reached the ocean, where the broad black backs of whales regularly broke the surface of the water, and even farther—farther still—until I caught up with the horizon, where my father would be waiting. Inevitably, I ended up at Hole in the Ground.
Many years ago a meteor came screeching down from space and left behind a crater five thousand feet wide and three hundred feet deep. Hole in the Ground is frequented during the winter by the daredevil sledders among us, and during the summer by bearded geologists from OSU interested in the metal fragments strewn across its bottom. I dangled my feet over the edge of the crater and leaned back on my elbows and took in the sky—no moon, only stars—just a little lighter black than a crow. Every few minutes a star seemed to come unstuck, streaking through the night in a bright flash that burned into nothingness. In the near distance the grayish green glow of Tumalo dampened the sky—a reminder of how close we came, fifty years ago, to oblivion. A chunk of space ice or a solar wind at just the right moment could have jogged the meteor sideways, and rather than landing here, it could have landed there, at the intersection of Main and Farwell. No Dairy Queen, no Tumalo High, no 2nd Battalion. It didn’t take much imagination to realize how something can drop out the sky and change everything.
This was October, when Gordon and I circled each other in the backyard after school. We wore our golden boxing gloves, cracked with age and letting off flakes when we pounded them together. Browned grass crunched beneath our sneakers and dust rose in little puffs like distress signals.
Gordon was thin to the point of being scrawny. His collarbone poked against his skin like a swallowed coat hanger. His head was too big for his body and his eyes were too big for his head and the football players—Seth Johnson among them—regularly tossed him into garbage cans and called him E.T. He had had a bad day. And I could tell from the look on his face—the watery eyes, the trembling lips that revealed, in quick flashes, his buckteeth—that he wanted, he needed, to hit me. So I let him. I raised my gloves to my face and pulled my elbows against my ribs and Gordon lunged forward, his arms snapping like rubber bands. I stood still, allowing his fists to work up and down my body, allowing him to throw the weight of his anger on me, until eventually he grew too tired to hit anymore and I opened up my stance and floored him with a right cross to the temple. He lay there, sprawled out in the grass with a small smile on his E.T. face. “Damn,” he said in a dreamy voice. A drop of blood gathered along the corner of his eye and streaked down his temple into his hair.
My father wore steel-toed boots, Carhartt jeans, a T-shirt advertising some place he had traveled, maybe Yellowstone or Seattle. He looked like someone you might see shopping for motor oil at Bi-Mart. To hide his receding hairline he wore a John Deere cap that laid a shadow across his face. His brown eyes blinked above a considerable nose underlined by a gray mustache. Like me, my father was short and squat, a bulldog. His belly was a swollen bag and his shoulders were broad, good for carrying me during parades, and at fairs, when I was younger. He laughed a lot. He liked game shows. He drank too much beer and smoked too many cigarettes and spent too much time with his buddies, fishing, hunting, bullshitting, which probably had something to do with why my mother divorced him and moved to Boise with a hairdresser/triathlete named Chuck.
At first, when my father left, like all of the other fathers, he would e-mail whenever he could. He would tell me about the heat, the gallons of water he drank every day, the sand that got into everything, the baths he took with baby wipes. He would tell me how safe he was, how very safe. This was when he was stationed in Turkey. Then the 2nd Battalion shipped for Kirkuk, where insurgents and sandstorms attacked almost daily. The e-mails came less and less frequently, with weeks of silence between them.
Sometimes, on the computer, I would hit refresh, refresh, refresh, hoping. In October, I received an e-mail that read, “Hi Josh. I’m OK. Don’t worry. Do your homework. Love, Dad.” I printed it up and hung it on my door with a piece of Scotch tape.
For twenty years my father worked at Noseler, Inc.—the bullet manufacturer based out of Bend—and the Marines trained him as an ammunition technician. Gordon liked to say his father was a Gunnery Sergeant, and he was, but we all knew he was also the battalion mess manager, a cook, which was how he made his living in Tumalo, tending the grill at Hamburger Patty’s. We knew their titles but we didn’t know, not really, what their titles meant, what our fathers did over there. We imagined them doing heroic things. Rescuing Iraqi babies from burning huts. Sniping suicide bombers before they could detonate on a crowded city street. We drew on Hollywood and CNN to develop elaborate scenarios, where maybe, at twilight, during a trek through the mountains of Northern Iraq, bearded insurgents ambushed our fathers with rocket-launchers. We imagined them silhouetted by a fiery explosion. We imagined them burrowing into the sand like lizards and firing their M16s, their bullets streaking through the darkness like the meteorites I observed on sleepless nights.
When Gordon and I fought we painted our faces—black and green and brown—with the camo-grease our fathers left behind. It made our eyes and teeth appear startlingly white. And it smeared away against our gloves just as the grass smeared away beneath our sneakers—and the ring became a circle of dirt, the dirt a reddish color that looked a lot like scabbed flesh. One time Gordon hammered my shoul-der so hard I couldn’t lift my arm for a week. Another time I elbowed him in the kidneys and he peed blood. We struck each other with such force and frequency the golden gloves crumbled and our knuckles showed through the sweat-soaked blood-soaked foam like teeth through a busted lip. So we bought another set of gloves, and as the air grew steadily colder we fought with steam blasting from our mouths.
Our fathers had left us, but men remained in Tumalo. There were old men, like my grandfather, who I lived with—men who had paid their dues, who had worked their jobs and fought their wars, and now spent their days at the gas station, drinking bad coffee from Styrofoam cups, complaining about the weather, arguing about the best months to reap alfalfa. And there were incapable men. Men who rarely shaved and watched daytime television in their once-white underpants. Men who lived in trailers and filled their shopping carts with Busch Light, summer sausage, Oreo cookies.
And then there were vulturous men, like Dave Lightener—men who scavenged whatever our fathers had left behind. Dave Lightener worked as a recruitment officer. I’m guessing he was the only recruitment officer in world history who drove a Vespa scooter with a Support Our Troops ribbon magneted to its rear. We sometimes saw it parked outside the homes of young women whose husbands had gone to war. Dave had big ears and small eyes and wore his
hair in your standard-issue high-and-tight buzz. He often spoke in a too-loud voice about all the insurgents he gunned down when working a Fallujah patrol unit. He lived with his mother in Tumalo, but spent his days in Bend and Redmond, trolling the parking lots of Best Buy, ShopKo, Kmart, Wal-Mart, Mountain View Mall. He was looking for people like us, people who were angry and dissatisfied and poor.
But Dave Lightener knew better than to bother us. On duty he stayed away from Tumalo entirely. Recruiting there would be too much like poaching the burned section of forest where deer, rib-slatted and wobbly legged, nosed through the ash, seeking something green.
We didn’t fully understand the reason our fathers were fighting. We only understood that they had to fight. The necessity of it made the reason irrelevant. “It’s all part of the game,” my grandfather said. “It’s just the way it is.” We could only cross our fingers and wish on stars and hit refresh, refresh, hoping they would return to us, praying we would never find Dave Lightener on our porch uttering the words, “I regret to inform you . . .”
One time, my grandfather dropped Gordon and me off at Mountain View Mall and there, near the glass-doored entrance, stood Dave Lightener. He wore his creased khaki uniform and spoke with a group of Mexican teenagers. They were laughing, shaking their heads and walking away from him as we walked toward. We had our hats pulled low and he didn’t recognize us.