Alissa Hattman’s short stories have appeared in Gravel, Propeller, Big Other, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. Originally from North Dakota, she now lives and teaches in the Pacific Northwest. More at www.alissahattman.com.
When Hudson first meets Aubrey, they bond over guns. Rifles. At the Elks Lodge, St. Paul East. Brown and tan carpets with swirling kaleidoscopic patterns, walls yellowed from years of cigarette smoke, haze. THANK HEAVEN FOR CLASS OF ’97 banners scotch-taped to the walls next to a flyer for a youth camp raffle and a framed photograph of an Ojibwe medicine man standing outside a cottage near Grand Portage. A poster advertising community clean-up with their high school mascot, a Minuteman, complete with a garbage bag badly photoshopped over his musket like a bindle. Walking into the Great Hall, Hudson feels no small amount of shame for being the only dropout at the graduation party. He stands next to some girl and says hey. She smiles and Hudson takes a breath in their silence, all of the world is sucked into his lungs. Desperate for words, he makes some stupid comment about the Chapuis Double Barrel displayed on the wall, which turns out to be not so stupid because, as it happens, this girl’s father is a collector. The rifles she describes are, in Hudson’s mind, rare works of art. He listens. Can’t even look Aubrey in the eyes—she’s too pretty—just plants his trembling hands into his Carhartts and nods. The star of her dad’s collection is a slick Winchester 52C Sporter, a lightweight 24-barrel with a beautiful stock of figured walnut. Deluxe. Several grand, easy. Hudson’s Rem 700 is fine, but not that fine.
. . .
The chill outside is always finding its way into their apartment. Shoddy window paneling, and the baseboard heaters are fucked, but at least Aubrey is a good sport, joking about their late mornings in bed as their only means of survival. This is the best way to stay warm, she’d say, turning over, her pale arm draped over his pale chest. The heat is a problem, but what really irks Hudson is the crack in the linoleum. It could be an easy fix—just cut a piece to size, paste, slap on some acrylic sealer, and you’re good—but the landlord has insisted against it. Said he’d put down a whole new floor, but that was over a year ago. So, there it is, this morning like every morning, a gash of untreated exposed wood staring back at him.
Already in his orange vest, Hudson scoops Folger’s Instant into two mugs.
“It’s so early,” Aubrey says, standing next to him in a robe and slippers, arms crossed at her chest, hair bunched in a scrunchie. “I can’t even think. I can barely breathe, it’s so early.”
Hudson pulls a blanket from the Papasan and drapes it around her shoulders. “At least it’s cold,” he says, rubbing her arms. Aubrey, unamused, sighs audibly and takes folic acid with Minute Maid.
On the radio, DJs joke about Y2K. The heat kicks on, making a squealing sound that settles into a click, click, click of the tines warming. Aubrey turns the station to classic rock.
“How’s our little corncob?” Hudson asks.
“Fine,” Aubrey says, lowering herself into the chair. “I wish he’d cook faster.”
Hudson hands her a bowl of Frosted Flakes. “You sure you’re up to this?”
“Sure, I’m sure,” she says. “Those pheasants aren’t going to shoot themselves.”
. . .
Hudson finds out about the pregnancy one night at Holman’s, back patio, right corner table. Aubrey is three G&Ts in and halfway through a pack of American Spirit Blues.
“I don’t think I can do it,” she says.
He waves away smoke. “Well, I think we can.”
She tap-taps the cigarette, then lets it sit in the teeth of the tray. Her lips are tight with concern, but otherwise she’s straight and composed. A single blade of grass.
“Aren’t you scared?” she says.
“We’ll be fine,” Hudson says, but he feels something catch when he says it. “I’m almost certified, so it’s good timing. I’ll have something stable once the baby’s here.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she says. “I’m scared of other people,” she says. “Of what they might do.”
. . .
The boy, Cass, walks a highway ditch killing time until his foster father comes home. He passes the fields, newly gutted by pipeline, the day workers with sweaty skin covered in dirt. A hell of a racket, but at least now they have mac & cheese and beef noodle in the cupboards again. Cass squints, can’t tell one man from the next, so he keeps walking until he reaches wheat fields. The sun is fierce, but the breeze makes it tolerable. A beard of grain brushes his arm, a comfort.
It’s not here, not in the shine of day, but in the backwoods where he finds the dead Inca Dove. He pokes at it. Curious. Picks up the bird. Heavy, cold, but not yet hard. The breast feathers come out easily. First a couple, then the whole lot. Once he gets to the cool grayness of the skin, he feels something wet, maybe secreting from the body, he’s not sure. He rubs the dampness into his fingers. It’s clear—not something he can see, but something he feels.
. . .
Hudson and Aubrey pack a borrowed pickup with gear and drive the backroads as the sun starts to rise. With them they carry a jug of water, a thermos of coffee, some food, and Aubrey’s plastic pill box filled with One-a-Days, more folic acid, B12. They have their gloves and hats and three different layers of orange—sweaters, jackets, and blankets—their two shotguns in cases, hunter’s licenses, several boxes of shotgun shells, a pocket knife, and a safety kit for good measure. Driving over gravel, they sway in their seats listening to the radio, broken by occasional static. The flat world stretches in front of them. Just one road.
Aubrey turns off the top-of-the-hour news.
“Afraid of what you might hear?” Hudson says.
“Something like that.”
“Can’t say I blame you,” he says.
Aubrey looks down at her lap. “It’s not that I don’t want to know. I do. But the radio guy keeps handing me all this shit. Like, here, hold this. And then I’m left with my hands full of shit and I’m like, what do you expect me to do with this?”
Hudson laughs. “And it’s not even your shit. It’s someone else’s.”
Aubrey shakes her head. “Yes and no.”
“No?”
“It’s all mixed up. I mean, those kids? They were just going to school.” She glances over at him. “Never mind.”
Hudson’s throat tenses. “Our shit?” he says. “A couple psychopaths in Colorado, and this is somehow my fault?”
“It’s not. But it’s still shit we have to deal with, you know?”
Hudson grips the steering wheel tighter. Stares into the harvested fields, the white-clouded skies.
“Not here,” he says.
“Wait,” Aubrey says, grabs his hand, places it on her stomach. “Feel that?”
His palm sits there for a while, waiting.
. . .
Hudson comes home late after working a double. Aubrey is sleeping in the other room and he tries to be quiet in the kitchen, but the dishes he needs for dinner are at the bottom of the dry rack. He jostles a pan. Two water glasses fall onto a ceramic plate and a lid from a mason jar careens across the floor.
He walks to the other end of the kitchen. Leans over and feels the hot ache of a long work week spread across his lower back. He has to look. It’s right there, next to the lid. Regularly, he catches himself staring at the cracked linoleum, has imagined fifteen different ways it could be repaired. But, the landlord says: Leave it.
Hudson puts the dishes away. What a shithole, he thinks as he pulls a can of chicken chili from the cupboard and lights the range. Click, click. Click-click-click. There’s a panic in the back of his stomach—did he forget again? He looks at the can in his hand. Shaking, he slams it down on the counter.
There’s a burning in his gut as he walks out of the kitchen. Some mysterious pain that he assumes is hereditary. His place is a shithole, yes, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be fixed, or at least the small things could be fixed. It’s all that, but it’s also that he forgot to get the propane tank refilled. They even had the money this time.
In the bedroom, he digs through the dresser drawer until he feels the cool metal. Grips the handle of the handgun and pulls it out. A couple of balled-up socks fall to the floor. Aubrey murmurs, but he’s out the bedroom door before he can hear if she’s up.
As he passes through the hallway, the surging in his chest weakens and the blur just outside his field of vision starts to clear. He steadies. The anger is still there, just concentrated. Focused. It feels ecstatic, singular, instead of the mucked-up nauseating swirl. He raises the gun, points it at the crack in the floor, then at the dead range. Crazy, he knows, but it makes him feel better. Eases the pain in his gut.
He hears Aubrey and feels suddenly clouded again. Dread floods his chest. From above, he scolds himself—what kind of father could you possibly be?
. . .
Hudson kills the engine as Aubrey rummages through their stuff. She pushes herself from the passenger seat and spreads the blanket over the dirt. He sits, opening the bag of lunch and divvying out their portions. The air is crisp with the rotten stench of the sugar beet refineries. They’d remained mostly silent for the five-hour drive from the Twin Cities to Ellendale, where the pheasant hunting was said to be good.
Hudson waits to start eating while Aubrey shifts from one hip to another before settling. Between sips of coffee, they eat their sandwiches. The generic peanut butter is chalky and tastes like the candy Hudson hated as a child, but he doesn’t complain. In the wind, Aubrey’s hair sweeps her face as she tries to take bites. She digs in her pocket, finds a rubber band, and makes a ponytail at her neck. Hudson lets himself feel comfortable in the quiet. He studies one of his manuals while Aubrey pages through Better Homes, taking small bites of her sandwich. They let time pass. Pheasants won’t be out until dusk.
. . .
Cass pulls out his pocket knife.
He’s cleaned birds before, but this is different.
On a stump, he sets the dove on its back and cuts the wings from the torso; they pop off easily once he gets past the bone. Then he presses the knife into the top of the breast and follows the skin down. With his thumbs, he starts from the bottom of the breast and pushes up the sides, skin sliding from the meat, easy as opening a coat. He cuts at the bottom of the breast, below and around, tears it from the body. Sets it aside. Then, the boy pokes around the soft organs, discovers something small and sharp lodged in the gizzard. He slides the tip of the knife down the sack and wipes away the mucusy insides from the object. A tiny piece of shiny plastic.
Next to the open dove, wings. The breast, so red and blue it could almost be a human heart. Clean, no blood. No blood except for the boy’s blood—a rush through the body.
. . .
Together, Hudson and Aubrey walk the corn-harvested fields, stalks flattened, husks crunching under their boots, the wind blowing so hard it’s difficult to stay balanced. The gritty-sweet scent of dirt and hay bales fills the air.
“I think we’re SOL,” Aubrey yells over fits and gusts.
Hudson squints at the woods, not far off. “Let’s try over there,” he says, pointing.
By the time they reach the trees, Aubrey is gasping for breath. She tucks some wet strips of hair behind her ear. A line of pink and red studs curve up her earlobe, sparkling in the early evening sun.
“I forgot how heavy this thing is,” she says.
Hudson smiles. “Which thing?”
She half-smirks and looks off into the forest. “I don’t know if we can shoot here.” She signals with her chin. “There’s a house.”
Hudson squints. A roof pokes out between two trees.
“We should try another spot,” she says.
“It’s probably abandoned,” he says. “C’mon. Let’s check it out.”
. . .
Inside smells like every squat house he’s ever lived in—wet cement and piss, clay and bird shit from the sparrow nests in the rafters, vinegar, rot. Hudson’s lungs go tight.
“This is spooky,” Aubrey says, cradling her gun under her arm, looking around.
They wander. Living room, bathroom to the right, kitchen to the left, two bedrooms straight back, and a basement. Wind whistles through the cracks in the windows. Scattered detritus and junk piles of newspapers. Swastikas graffitied over torn wallpaper. Wrappers, leaves, rusted barbed wire, a burn barrel, chicken bones.
Aubrey stops short. “Hey,” she says. “You hear that?”
Hudson leans in. Scraping from behind one of the bedroom doors. His neck tenses.
Aubrey strides towards the room.
“Wait,” he whispers, stepping in front of her. He switches the safety off, lifts his shotgun, opens the door.
. . .
In bed, sun rising.
Both are hungover, but that doesn’t stop them.
From behind, Hudson nets his fingers through Aubrey’s hair and tugs hard. She moans, pressing further into him. He has her by the neck, the teeth, until she finally shudders and he collapses against her bare back, rolls over.
For once, he’s not thinking about the goddamn motherfucking linoleum. He’s not thinking about taxes or if his ripped coat will survive another winter or if he’ll fail as a father. He’s not even thinking about the good stuff. Aubrey. A day off. A home, his own. He’s just there. A singular body. Aubrey turns to face him and all those things he was not thinking about come flooding back in one large wave. Her skin is soft, white as the belly of a diseased fish.
. . .
The bedroom is mostly empty. Damaged wood flooring. A tarp in the corner. Shelving off to the side. The air is still—a sharp chemical stench and something else that he can’t quite identify. Something rotting.
“Wait,” he says to Aubrey. “Stay there.”
The floorboards groan under Hudson’s boots as he walks. A single thumping pulse in his neck. He glances at the industrial shelving, then stops. Turns his whole body.
All the parts are displayed neatly. Wings widespread. Brown and orange feathers. Bleached-white beaks. Three-pronged feet cut at the ankle, talons curled. A head, lopped off at the neck. Mason jars with guts, livers, hearts, gizzards, beady yellow eyes.
“What the hell?” Aubrey says. She’s standing behind him.
Hudson peers at the display. The bird head, severed neck curled. Craters for eyes.
“We should leave,” Aubrey says. “This person, they’re around. We should go.”
He nods, turns to face the door. Then they hear a scuttle, scraping from under the tarp.
Hudson walks toward it. With the nose of his gun, he lifts the cover.
A cage, packed to the gills with a dozen pheasants, maybe more.
“Jesus,” Aubrey says.
Maimed, all of them. Wings lopped off, tail feathers missing. One with a bloody stump for a foot. Another plucked bald with burn patches covering its body. A couple of birds start screeching and violently pecking another bird. One with an eye gouged out. The dark pink skin. A ring of pretty white feathers around the neck.
Hudson feels an intense pressure, like being trampled, crushed. His brain is frantic, spinning. Why? Experiments? No. That doesn’t explain the burns, the lacerations. These birds are like the ones he’s shot before, like the ones he’s cleaned and eaten. But this. What the hell’s he supposed to do with this?
“C’mon,” Aubrey says, pulling him by the arm.
Just outside of the house, Hudson stops. He can’t explain it. He knows she’s right. They should leave—for their safety and the safety of the baby—in his mind, he knows this. But his body won’t move.
“I can’t,” he says. “This needs to be, you know. Fixed.”
“Fixed how?” she says.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I can’t just leave.”
She stares at him. “Fine,” she says. “But I’m going.”
. . .
Aubrey follows the flashlight beam through the tall grass. Rain pummels the hood of her jacket, hard, like tiny pebbles. She breathes in gasps, tongue thick in her mouth. Her boots sink into the wet earth as she scans shadows on the crosshatched ground.
When she looks up, she sees headlights on the dirt road and beelines it through the beet fields next to the highway, shotgun still cradled over her left arm. She’s gasping, darting through a ditch until she trips over some garbage, nosedives into the dirt.
She turns over onto her back, shines a light on the pile—a busted open Hefty bag full of beer cans, soiled diapers, a reel of house insulation, a pink plastic thing that was maybe an air freshener—soggy, in the upturned earth. She rubs a hand over her belly, breathes.
“What are you doing here?” a voice says.
Aubrey aims the flashlight at a boy, standing next to the highway. Short, pale, thin. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Green UND jersey with the word Sioux across the chest. His wearied expression is odd—somewhere between confusion and contempt. He’s left on the high beams of his bashed-in Datsun 210. Aubrey stands, wipes her dirty palms down the legs of her soaked overalls.
“Pheasant hunting with my husband,” she says. “He’s not far.”
The kid looks at her body, then at the gun, then back to her body. His face is pock-marked, a speckled spray of acne.
“You by yourself out here?” Aubrey asks, hoping to appear calm.
“Not no more,” he says, steps closer. Reeks of B.O. and something chemical.
Her pulse races.
“Are you pregnant or something?” he asks.
“Twenty-four weeks,” she says, glances up at the car. “It’s not good, running the engine like that.”
The kid shrugs. “Can I touch it?”
She looks at him—there’s sharpness there, a longing behind the eyes. It’s fine, she thinks, convinced he hasn’t shown her otherwise. He’s just a kid, she reminds herself. You’re an adult. You have a gun.
He takes his glove off with his teeth and places his palm on her stomach. Even through her layers, Aubrey can feel the warmth of his hand. He stares up at her, a limp glove dangling from his mouth like caught prey.
She takes a step back. “I should catch up with my husband.”
The kid slips his hand back into the glove.
“You should,” he says, a forced softness in his tone. He scratches a neck zit, scratches and scratches. “I’ll drive you,” he says.
“No, I can manage,” she says.
“Fine,” the kid whispers.
“What?”
“I said—” and then he lunges. Pushes her into the tall grass.
Aubrey lands on her side. Scrambles to her feet.
“Hey—” the kid says.
She looks back. Her own gun aimed at her head.
“Get in.”
. . .
Hudson is lodged in the moment, can’t leave.
Alone, he’ll have to deal with these things. He looks at them moving together—a mass of skin and feathers and eyes. That’s what they are, things. What once marked them as birds has been cut out. Hudson paces the room, trying to organize it in his head. Should he go after her? Should he wait until the guy comes back and then what? Talk to him? He glances back at the cage, feels a flush of embarrassment for the poor things. The once beautiful birds. Maybe it’d be best to just put them out of their misery, cover the cage, and walk away.
Hudson starts to count them—an effort to make order—but there are too many and they keep moving, one falling over the other. The bird with the eye gashed out hobbles into another tripping and squawking, while another tears burnt skin from its back. It’s so gruesome, it’s almost comical. He’s surprised at how quickly it happens, sitting there watching the show. How soon it starts to feel normal.
Wheels on the gravel drive. A Datsun.
Hudson hides behind the open bedroom door until he hears footsteps. Peering through the crack near the hinge, he sees some guy—just a kid—with Aubrey’s gun pressed into her back.
“Keep walking,” the kid says.
Aubrey eyes the bedroom, but keeps her stride, heads to the basement.
Hudson’s body is a pulse. Blood thrumming behind his ears. His feet start to move, though his mind says no. Stop.
One foot after the other. Exposed insulation in wall paneling, a dented coal shovel lodged behind a two-by-four. Cobwebbed vent above. The bone, skin, arteries of the house. Walk the steps. No railing, a hazard. Step. Graying paint over decaying wood. Step. Black mold. Lungs tight. Step. The years at his back. Step, stop.
Aubrey, facing the wall, her wrists already tied to an above drainpipe. A whooshing sound—the kid at the utility sink. Aubrey’s gun leaning against a work bench of small sharp devices.
Thrumming. All but the kid is a blur.
Aim, fire. Like that, everything goes white.
. . .
If he could trace a line leading to this moment, it would run straight through the town where he grew up, through their home—his and Aubrey’s—through their first conversation at the Elks Lodge, and back through his father, bruised and shivering, on the cement floor of a condemned warehouse, to the time when Hudson first shot a bullet through a bottle—the breaking so loud he could feel it in his teeth. If he could trace that line it would lead back through the kid and whatever he felt when he bled his first bird, the power he found there, back through factory toxins and wastewater, it would reach back. Way back. Back into a mutilated greatness ripped clean from the body. If only life were a line, then maybe it would be possible to trace, find the knots, loosen the chokehold.
. . .
Aubrey screaming.
Hudson blinks and his vision clears.
Water fills a utility sink. A tool bench, splattered with blood. Kid on the floor. More blood.
Aubrey wheezing, hyperventilating.
“Breathe,” Hudson says, an instinct.
Together, they take a slow deep breath like they learned to do in Lamaze.
Hands trembling, Hudson fumbles to untie her wrists. His fingers feel large, heavy, like wearing thick gloves. Aubrey’s belly heaves against his ribs. He can feel the body behind him, on the ground. There’s a trickling sound that he first thinks is the blood, but it can’t be. It’s the water spilling over.
The rope around her wrists, it won’t stop shaking. His vision starts to close in.
“The knife,” Aubrey says.
Hudson blinks, digs in his jeans. Cuts with one swift motion.
“Fuck,” she says, rubbing her wrists.
He can hear her, but her face has gone fuzzy. A wash. His bowels release and the stench of it fills his sinuses. He leans over and vomits onto the cement floor. Falls to his knees, the world swirls.
He’s done. Can’t bear to continue fighting for this life—his, hers, the child’s. He’s ready to die in that house on that land with the rest of the bodies. Just let it end.
“C’mon,” Aubrey says, pulling him up.
It doesn’t feel like the sweet hands of his wife. Doesn’t really sound like her either.
She yanks him to his feet. “Go on,” she says. “Move.”
•
