Ten Feet Short of Useful
by Craig Holt
Jerry crouched in a hoarder’s living room, staring down a giant rat. The thing was almost two feet long and shockingly burly, an alpha scavenger. Jerry waved a leather gloved hand toward the open door and said, “Scat.” The rat’s lewd pink nose twitched but it made no move to flee. And why should it? In the weeks since Jerry’s father died, the mice and rats had held dominion over hillocks of sleeping bags and chewed tiny highways through drifts of unopened mail. They slept easy beneath piles of sodden Martha Stewart magazines his father had spent his last years reading, unironically and with great concentration, while sitting amidst the rodents and refuse. He pictured the rat calling for backup, dozens of toothy beastlings rising from the listing stacks of mildewed towels, all claws and brown teeth. His recent run of failures and losses left him indifferent about his survival, but he would not have his face chewed off by rats. He grabbed a baseball from a laundry basket full of sporting goods and chucked it at the furry invader, nailing it flush on its muscled haunch. It barely flinched.
Jerry retreated, following his father’s tortured pathways through milk crates and sagging coat racks, past the forever unopened floaty lounge chair and foot pump by the front door. Out on the front porch he pushed back his hood, pulled off his goggles and ventilator mask, and unzipped the coverall down to his navel. He stood steaming in the rain battered evening, pondering the enormous fenced dog run that ran along the side of the cabin, its origin uncertain and the reason for it having a roof unfathomable. Jerry scanned the crowding forest, imagining all the lantern-eyed predators and larger scavengers sniffing the air for signs of weakness, waiting for the time when they could stroll into the cabin, chase the rats off his fallen body, and make a meal of his broken heart.
Huge evergreens loomed over the cabin on all sides, second growth cedars and firs mostly, moss decked and creaking even in the absence of a breeze, a sound both haunting and vaguely irritating. It reminded him of his father, Bruce, after he went to ground out here, muttering nonsense and sifting through junk. The old man lasted a year before a massive coronary felled him, leaving Jerry to turn the garbage choked cabin into a vacation rental that would, hopefully, generate enough cash to sustain the family’s produce stand.
Jerry and his then-wife Carol (curse her eyes) had both been caught off guard by the melancholic inertia Bruce’s death triggered in him. He was appalled that this could be the run of a life: early divorce, failing business, your body not discovered until it smelled so bad the neighbors came to complain. What broke Jerry’s heart was how little he’d felt for the man. What terrified him was knowing that in the wake of his own recent divorce he was firmly on the same sad path.
Drawn by the river’s liquid rumble, Jerry headed down the gravel driveway, rezipping his Tyvek coverall and pulling up the hood as he went. As usual, he hustled across the crumbling tar and gravel road, leery of logging trucks, bloody minded hunters, and the new crop of dotcomsters checking their phones in the vain hope of reception as they raced to the seven bedroom “cabins” they’d built during the pandemic.
On the river side of the road, down at Bill and Mary’s old place, a door slammed. Wham! Wham! Wham-wham! A man bellowed “Christ on a cracker!”
“Trev!” a woman shouted over the banging, “TREVOR!”
Trevor whammed on, undeterred. Voices were raised in the peevish shorthand of domestic dispute. The banging increased in pace and volume, spiking Jerry’s blood pressure and drawing his diffuse sense of grievance into tight focus. He walked down their short, steep driveway, picturing himself charging the unseen Trevor, sticking the guy’s head in the doorjamb for a final, decisive slam.
His anger had mostly burned off by the time he found the guy glaring at his ill-hung door with naked confusion as he hauled it back for another slam.
“Hey, man,” Jerry said, mildly, “they can hear you in Portland.”
Trevor blinked at Jerry, clutching a hammer like a war club while he took in the hazmat suit, gloves, ventilator, and goggles. “The fuck are you supposed to be?” he asked, more bemused than hostile. He was a handsome guy with good hair and a strong jawline just starting to soften, ten or so years Jerry’s junior. He wore a tight tee shirt that probably flattered him fifteen pounds ago, his gym bulk just starting its sad fall as time transmuted broad shoulders to belly fat. Pretty blue eyes and long lashes, a guy who could walk into any rural bar and walk out two Coors later with a girl in a denim skirt. His smile showed off a goddamn dimple.
Jerry pulled his hood back, hooked a gloved thumb over his shoulder. “Bruce Brewer’s son. I’m cleaning out his place.”
“That fuckin’ guy,” Trevor said, without malice.
“He’s my father,” Jerry said, surprised by the hitch in his voice, “he died.” Why waste tears on a man who bullied him his entire life? He cleared his throat and glared at the neighbor.
“I know it,” Trevor said, “I’m the one who smelled him.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Trevor shrugged, flashed his dimple. Jerry said, “What did the door do to piss you off?”
“Warped or something. Won’t latch.”
Working at his father’s produce stand, the Snappy Apple, Jerry had gained a baseline competence in the contractor’s arts. He spotted the problem at a glance; the upper hinge had worked itself loose, pulled down by the solid oak door. Jerry took the hammer from Trevor’s loose fist and used it to shim the door, then pulled a Phillips head screwdriver from the shiny, mostly empty tool box sitting on the porch rail and tightened the hinge.
Trevor watched all this, nodding as if gleaning deep wisdom from the master. “Okay. Yep. I see what you’re doing.”
Jerry pulled the hammer from under the door and gently swung it shut. It closed with a sigh and a click.
“Nice!” Trevor crowed, clapping Jerry too hard on the back. He shook him. “You want some money? Coin of the realm? I can VenMo you twenty bucks.”
Jerry wriggled out of his grip. “I turned a screw.”
“You turned the right screw.” He spun Jerry and grabbed his hand. “Trevor.”
“So I heard,” Jerry said, “You’re not a contractor I take it?”
“Ad sales for 98.7, young country. The wolf!” He tipped his head back and howled at the rain. “Lemme get you a drink. Or, like, a cookie.”
Jerry told Trevor he had a lot of work to do and not much time, which was true enough. Carol had somehow taken possession of their house after the separation despite the circumstances, so for now the cabin was the closest thing he had to a home. And according to Jerry’s accountant, if he didn’t bolster his cash flow by getting the place rented out within a month or so he would be bankrupt by spring. The only other option was to sell it and the Snappy Apple. Jerry was determined not to be the one to lose the Brewer family legacy, humble as it was.
His life hadn’t always been so small. Once, briefly, Jerry had been a man of finite but urgent ambition. A few years back he had taken out a huge loan to open a hard cider business a few blocks up the street from the produce stand. This was in the early days of the hard cider craze and for one joyous fall season it was a huge success. Then Covid hit.
Left with many thousands of dollars’ worth of brewing equipment and a five year lease he couldn’t get out of, Jerry started selling six packs and growlers out of the garage of their Crown Hill home. That too was a hit, but then a neighbor reported him to the authorities. With his business license revoked and a hefty fine to pay, Jerry sold his equipment at a loss and crawled back to the Snappy Apple to sort rotten blueberries and lettuces under his father’s increasingly tyrannical and erratic supervision. The bump in his wife Carol’s online psychology practice kept them out of bankruptcy, but the air in their little home grew sour with his depression and her disappointment.
Now, Trevor chucked him on the shoulder, “You worried all those piles of crap are gonna breed if you leave ‘em unsupervised? Squirt out little trash babies?”
“I usually have lunch before I start drinking.”
“Beer’s wheat and hops, dog. Two food groups, plus water. Stop being an asshole and get in my house.”
Jerry suspected Trevor’s clients bought ads out of sheer exhaustion, worn to hopeless lassitude by his bluff insistence. He allowed Trevor to push him into the living room.
The cottage was what the Brewer place wanted to be when it grew up: small but sturdy, the kitchen open to a living room with windows spanning the whole river-facing wall. Skylights punctuated the vaulted ceilings, flooding the room with light despite the steep bank, crowding evergreens, and gray-bellied clouds. Here, the same rain that hammered Jerry’s roof pattered cheerfully on glass. The cabin’s charm was only diminished by the excess of leather furniture and cowboy kitsch. Horse blankets over the couch and chairs, walls cluttered with sepia prints of appaloosas and craggy faced men in chaps who squinted into desert sunsets as if trying to remember where they left their spurs. The couches were piled with throw pillows offering needlepoint aphorisms and exclamations: Cowgirls ride harder, cowboys only, giddyap. Horseshoes hung above every door and a corner of the room was given to a black saddle slung over a varnished sawhorse. A rack beside the front door held no fewer than fourteen pairs of cowboy boots. All this despite the conspicuous absence of horses on their smallish, tree-crowded property.
The bedroom was separated from the living room by swinging half doors, behind which a bottle blonde struggled to shrug jeans up over her strong legs. She won the fight with her pants and straightened, smiling welcome at Jerry. The woman was as pretty as Trevor was handsome, and conspicuously shirtless. “Hey there!” she said, perfectly comfortable to find a blushing stranger in a hazmat suit gawping at her decolletage.
His wife, Carol had been proud of her good looks, too. She had always taken Jerry’s unabashed hunger for her as her due. In bed, she behaved like a queen graciously accepting a peasant’s tribute. Hitting forty, she was more lovely than ever but she’d begun to work at it. She wore more makeup and bought clothes that struck Jerry as being maybe a size too small. She seemed to him then like a late summer flower, blazing for the benefit of bees, desperate to pollinate before fall’s chill. Nectar! her short skirts and low cut blouses screamed, Come and get it! Jerry came. He got it. But in this final bloom her need for sex became ravenous to the point of desperation. She pounced on him nightly, goaded him with insults and begged him to knock her around as she made her long inward journey to orgasm. When she finally came she howled like a gut shot dog. Jerry spent his days chafed and sore, fueling like an endurance athlete. And still he knew he wasn’t giving her all that she needed. Their bed became yet another place where he was not quite getting the job done.
Now, Trevor thumped Jerry between the shoulder blades, launching him back to the present. “Jer-bear, this is Elly. Babe, this’s Jerry from up at the dead guy’s place.”
Jerry said, “That was my dad, man.”
“For God’s sake, Trevor.” Elly smiled apology at Jerry.
Trevor plowed on, “He fixed the door in like two seconds. Jer’s a real handsy man.”
“Aw, that’s sweet!” she gifted Jerry another smile.
Jerry said, “A monkey could’ve done it.”
“Cover your boobs, El,” Trevor said, “There’s such a thing as too much knowledge.”
She flashed Trevor a look of such acid disdain Jerry stepped away from him, out of the blast radius.
Elly pulled on a fuzzy green sweater that made her blue eyes glow and pushed through the doors, coming at Jerry with her arms wide, all sweetness again. “I’m so sorry about your daddy.” She pulled him into a tight hug, whispering, “Poor baby.”
It was too much: the jasmine and clove scent of her, the full body embrace and naked sympathy. Jerry gasped, his grief threatening to break loose. He had known her for maybe thirty seconds. Elly leaned back, holding his biceps. “How are you holding up?” She seemed to genuinely want to know.
Jerry talked about the cabin instead, the work yet to be done, giving her the whole plan: rent it out for a few years, then take it off the market when he got the business up and plaining again. He wasn’t sure he meant any of it, but Elly nodded and made soft sympathy noises as he babbled, rubbed his arms as if chafing heat back into some lost creature brought in from the cold, so he kept on talking. When he finally shut up she told him to pop down whenever he needed a break and said that she was right here if he wanted to talk about it: any time outside the hours of six and four on weekdays, when she worked as a radiation oncologist down at the Peace Health cancer center in Kelso.
Jerry blushed to have taken this physician, a specialist no less, for a honkytonk bar girl.
“Beer’s in the fridge!” Trevor said, pulling Jerry from Elly and muscling him toward the kitchen. He produced three beers, the cheap stuff with animals printed on the can in paired sets of predator and prey: wolves and elk, cooper’s hawks and pheasant, mountain lions and deer.
Calling over his shoulder, Trevor said, “Beer, babe?”
“Kinda early.”
“I’m surrounded by puritans,” Trevor muttered. Raising his voice again he said, “It’s almost two. Have a fuckin’ drink.” Taking her silence for consent, he pulled three heavy mugs from the freezer, the glass blooming with frost as he filled them with reverent focus, staying silent for longer than Jerry had thought possible for such a man. Finally, he grabbed a handle of Wild Turkey and topped each with a generous glug, taking a belt straight from the bottle before putting it away. Off Jerry’s look he said in a scholarly voice, “Fighting a cold. No known pathogen can survive in alcohol.” His breath was like paint thinner.
Back in the living room Trevor dropped into a worn leather chair big as a throne. Elly, on the couch, patted the cushion next to hers, urging Jerry to her side as if he were some sad old dog. Which, okay. He did as he was told, moving aside a pillow that said Yeehaw!
“You like ‘em?” she said, jutting her chin toward the pillow.
He made what he hoped were affirming sounds.
“I do the stitching myself. It’s my therapy. Meditation.”
Trevor said, “Elly loves her woo-woo shit.”
“And horses,” Jerry said, gesturing to the saddle.
“I like the idea of horses,” Elly said. She patted his thigh. “You work?”
“I have a produce stand up in Ballard. It’s been in the family for three generations. I took over after dad moved down here full time.” He took a long pull at his beer, turned away to release a hot, yeasty belch.
“Business owner!” Trevor said, nodding approval, “Fruit magnate.”
“It’s not like that.”
Elly leaned in to look him in the eye. “What is it like?”
Warmed by spiked beer and Elly’s fierce attention, Jerry gave her the whole story: How the stand thrived for forty years under his grandmother’s care, but withered under his father’s bitter, increasingly unpredictable leadership; how things came to a head two years ago after Jerry caught his dad spritzing the broccoli with his own urine. This led to a diagnosis of vascular dementia that left Jerry no choice but to step in and try to save the business.
Elly rubbed his shoulder, “That must’ve been hard.”
“What’s the problem?” Trevor said, “You ended up with a cabin and a banana empire.”
Jerry said, “Dad mortgaged grandma’s cabin to prop up cash flow for the business. That money’s all gone but the business is still underwater, so I have to rent out the cabin to pay the mortgage and keep the business afloat.”
“Real talk, bro,” Trevor said, as if dispensing deep wisdom, “once the banks have you by the balls all you can do is scream or play dead. Either way you can kiss your nuts goodbye.”
Elly threw a pillow (Hoedown!) at Trevor. “For God’s sake, Trev!”
Trevor casually swatted the pillow aside without spilling his beer. “Fucked is fucked, babe.”
Jerry set his drink on a coaster shaped like a sheriff’s badge. “Better get back to it.”
“Come on, sad sack,” Trevor said, “You can’t have just one beer.”
Trevor’s phone bleeped. Elly flinched.
Trevor glanced at the screen and nodded to himself, putting on a frown. “Guys from Poppers want to meet down in Kelso, talk about the new campaign. Fish on!”
Elly went very still as Trevor hustled to the bathroom. He came back pulling on an oilcloth jacket, his hair shiny with product, smelling of peppery cologne and cheap whiskey, and gave Jerry a military salute, “Don’t be a stranger, stranger.” He leaned down to kiss Elly and she offered her cheek, staring out at the rain.
When he was gone, Jerry stood up. “He loves his job, huh!” he shouted, as if infected with Trevor’s lack of volume control.
“Something like that,” Elly said. She looked up at him. “Stay?”
Jerry fled. He had his own messes to deal with.
To clear his head, Jerry went down to the river. Gunmetal clouds dragged their bellies along the treetops, spilling their icy wet guts. He stumbled over roots and snagged on brambles, bleary from the drink and stirred by the shock of Elly’s attention, her sadness, the unwanted glimpse of their marital dysfunction.
Coming out from beneath the trees he found the river in flood, the water muddy and boiling, freighted with snapped branches and small trees torn from the bank. Its usual lap and patter morphed into the rumble of a mob bent on destruction. Beneath the torrent large rocks tumbled downstream, thunking and grinding.
The river created its own light breeze, damp air pulled seaward at the flood’s instance, along for the ride down to the Columbia River and on to the Pacific. A pair of northern shoveler ducks flew past at eye level, heading upstream, flashes of white, rust and dappled brown behind their metallic green heads, wingbeats frantic with intent. Jerry drew a deep breath and held air in his lungs as though it were vital medicine. He plucked a leaf off the huckleberry bush next to him, ran his hand over the dandelions and rain-flattened sedges, not minding that his ass was soaked as if he’d pissed himself. He leaned to his right to sniff the tiny pink flowers on a patch of heather defiantly in bloom and was not surprised that they smelled like nothing at all.
The river carried other passengers besides the wind: long dead branches bleached gray, a good sized alder torn from the bank and drifting sideways in the center of the current, its broken limbs reaching for the clouds, the pale trunk pushing a small wave of beer cans, water bottles, and plastic bags that undulated like jellyfish. He spotted a beachball riding high on the water’s skin, a five gallon yellow bucket turning cartwheels in the shallows, a pristine Pavati drift boat worth at least ten thousand dollars, oarless and spinning in lazy circles, the property of some clueless dotcomster. Jerry fought a powerful urge to swim to the boat and climb aboard, see where it took him.
“Go,” he said solemnly, saluting the boat, “be free.” It picked up speed in the deepening current at the bend and swept out of sight. Jerry glanced toward Elly and Trevor’s place, worried she might’ve seen him talking to an empty boat. It’s one thing to be pitiable—he’d grown used to that—but he’d prefer to stave off crazy as long as possible.
Upstream, something bobbed in the river, surfacing briefly and going under again. Small and brownish; an animal, he was pretty sure.
Jerry scrambled to the water’s edge, tracking where it might come up next based on the current, his heart thudding and crunching like the river-rolled boulders. The creature broke the surface, nearly level with him, tiny arms slapping the water, its narrow face pointed beseechingly at the clouds. Jerry paced it. “Swim!” he shouted, “Hang in there!” He snatched a cedar branch and waved it at the animal but it came up ten feet short of useful.
Jerry dove into the river.
His body sang with the absolute cold of it, a cellular panic. His Tyvek suit filled with water, pulling him under, but he pushed off the rocks and rose gasping to the surface a few feet from the animal. Jerry flailed his arms in a spastic, sack-limbed crawl stroke and reached again.
Contact.
Thick fur over a rack of small bones, the size of an underfed cat. He pulled it toward him and went under again. Surfacing, he held the thing high as he paddle-crawled for the bank, the animal dangling lifeless. Jerry panicked, sure he’d been too late. Scrambling and gasping he managed to get to his feet a few yards from shore and grab a vine maple branch. A log took him out at the knees, tumbling him back into the current and around the bend. Sinking into the deep water he clutched the little animal to his chest, protective and strangely calm despite his certainty they were both going to drown.
He slammed into a tree lying athwart the current, the air woofing out of him. He flailed his free hand and caught hold of a thick branch. Pressed into the trunk, he pulled himself, inch by freezing inch, back to shore.
Back on land, Jerry’s legs barely held him, his body shook so hard he worried he’d crack his teeth as he staggered back upstream, bumbling into trees, strafed by devil’s club and dead branches. Climbing through Elly and Trevor’s fence, he dropped his creature onto the grass where it lay like roadkill: a tiny raccoon, very young.
“Hang on!” Jerry demanded, kneeling to push on the fragile bones of its chest with two fingers. He rolled it onto its side and squeezed its middle like a furry bottle of mayonnaise. It drooled a good amount of water which he thought was a positive sign. He sat back and admired its black paws, surprisingly human. Out of ideas, Jerry leaned down to listen for a heartbeat.
The raccoon bit him. A quick, surprisingly powerful chomp at the hinge of his own jaw.
“Asshole!” Jerry shouted, jumping to his feet with the snapping trash panda still attached to his face. He managed to get his hands around its middle and detach it. There was a lot of blood but he felt no mark beyond a few puncture wounds.
The exhausted raccoon struggled weakly as he carried it up to the cabin and straight through to the shower. When the water was warm Jerry stepped in fully clothed, holding the tiny biter away from his body with both hands. It went limp in the steaming water, its little opal eyes fixed on him with what looked like chagrin. “No harm no foul,” Jerry said, his blood pouring down the drain.
He set it in the tub and stepped out, sliding the glass door shut behind him. He shrugged off his drenched clothes with some effort and hustled out to excavate the dog carrier he had seen beneath a pile of mop heads and fan belts. Already shivering again, he brought it to the bathroom.
The raccoon stood on its hind legs with its hands on the glass. Jerry would’ve sworn it was happy to see him again, and a wave of affection washed over him. They had nearly died together, their fates were forever entwined. Still, he covered his crotch with one hand as he got back into the shower and urged his new soulmate into the cage. The bite on his face was bad enough, he wasn’t going to dangle his junk in front of a micro-bear like a lure.
After another half hour in the water, Jerry stopped shivering. He dried off and dressed in three layers of sweatsuits, wrapped the raccoon baby in a fluffy, only slightly mildewed towel. He’d never cared for these overdressed scavengers but this one was pretty damn cute, glossy furred and bright eyed. But as it warmed it began to struggle in his arms, remembering its natural distrust of humans. Recalling a line from an old grunge song, If you want a friend, feed any animal, Jerry held it tight and carried it to the kitchen. The congealed pot of chili he’d left on the stove seemed risky so instead he offered it a ginger snap. Five minutes and several cookies later, the raccoon rode through the cabin on his shoulder as if they were old pals, chirping as though thanking Jerry in the only language it had to express gratitude.
Back in the bathroom, Jerry scratched it under the chin with one hand while dabbing antibiotic ointment on his gnawed jaw. “We’ll be alright,” he said. When he took it to the living room and sat in his dad’s recliner, the raccoon crawled onto his chest and curled up. The place still stunk like a rat urinal, but Jerry’s new friend didn’t seem to mind it so he didn’t either. Together, they slept.
Jerry started the next day cleaning up raccoon poop. The curdled, corpse-like stench of it hauled Jerry from a nightmare of war and mustard gas croaking “Help!” The fecal distribution was broad enough to suggest that his furry pal had acted with ill intent and malice aforethought.
He found the culprit on the kitchen counter next to the pot of yesterday’s chili, which he had consumed in its entirety. All that remained of the spicy glop was a tracery of rust colored pawprints over the piled plates and sour dish towels and a rusty stain around the raccoon’s mouth. This struck Jerry as a teaching moment, a chance to clarify a few house rules (Never eat half your bodyweight in chili! No carpet-bombing the house with poo!) but the little guy sat on his haunches holding a cookie like a steering wheel, looking adoringly back at him. Jerry vowed to establish discipline soon, but for now he wanted to savor the feeling of having someone gaze on him with anything but disappointment.
“Drowning is hungry work,” he said, stepping over milk crates full of flatware to stroke the raccoon’s flossy pelt. “Pretty sure you set a raccoon world record for long distance swimming yesterday.” It chirped and scrambled up his arm to reach his shoulder, where it munched through the rest of its biscuit while holding Jerry’s earlobe with its free hand. House full of wet crap notwithstanding, Jerry was in love.
He named the raccoon Phelps after the great Olympic swimmer. Galvanized by his cross-species friendship and three cups of coffee, Jerry attacked the cabin cleanup with renewed energy, starting with Phelp’s digestive landmines. He found them behind great mounds of forsaken plastic toys, beneath an ancient stereo cabinet the size of a chest freezer, deposited inside the carboard tube of a toilet paper roll within the closed bathroom cabinet. The more he cleaned the more he found. It took him longer than it should have to figure out that Phelps was dropping turd bombs as fast as Jerry could get rid of them, as if this were some diabolical game.
“Dude,” he said, “Not cool.” He carried Phelps out to the dog kennel and locked him inside. In his guilt about jailing his friend he swept the rat turds and debris from the wooden dog house and made it cozy with the dryest of the fourteen sleeping bags he’d found stuffed in a listing armoire. He filled a big zinc tub with water so Phelps could drink or bathe. Finally, he dumped half a loaf of Wonder Bread into a soup pot and set it by the doghouse door. And still he felt like an asshole when he turned back at the front door to see Phelps on his hind legs, gripping the wires, his little face saying, clear as if he’d spoken, Don’t leave me! But the work loomed, demanding his attention.
Jerry turned back to his task with no small amount of resentment, newly disgusted with himself for ignoring his father’s decline and Carol’s unhappiness until everything he thought of as his life had drifted out of reach. This from someone who had built a successful cidery and offered not just a product people loved but a place where they could enjoy it together. He had created a community. When Carol walked into the packed cidery on opening night she had teared up at the goodness of it. They had been happy, he was sure of it. What a clown show of bad luck and bitterness he’d succumbed to since then: finally running aground in this woodland hovel, toweling up raccoon shit and scooping up nests full of quivering pink mouse babies, frantically trying to pull his life back together.
“Waa waa waa,” Jerry taunted himself like his father used to, “suck it up, buttercup.”
Half emptied of junk, the living room looked even worse. Air sighed through gaps in the chinking and the plywood flooring beneath the recliner his father died in was buckled from the old man’s leakage, the pieces pulling away from each other as if in disgust. A tripping risk at best, at worst a bio hazard; a sliver would inject you with God knows what sickness. In Jerry’s experience, the worst outcome was the most likely: contracting corpse fever, dying alone and crazy in the woods, your wife deciding you are simply not enough.
Around noon, Jerry collapsed into an overstuffed armchair he’d excavated from a four foot high pile of extension cords and aux cables. Back aching, trembling with exhaustion, he limped into the kitchen, grabbed a box of Saltines and a fizzy water, and went out to check on Phelps.
He was disappointed to find Trevor in his yard, sipping a beer and watching the raccoon mistrustfully through wraparound sunglasses. Jerry, seeing the sun in Trevor’s mirrored lenses, realized that the rain had let up while he labored and now the broken clouds drifted in a sea of blue sky. The temperature must’ve risen twenty degrees so that it was, by the standards of this northern forest, downright balmy. Trevor wore camo print surfing shorts and a tight tank top the headachy yellow of a highlighter pen, the whole getup a crime against fashion and logic.
“Yo,” Trevor said, tipping his beer toward the kennel. “Coon snuck into your doghouse.”
“I put him there,” Jerry said, eager to tell the story, “We had a bit of an adventure together yesterday.”
Trevor inverted his beer, arching his back and shaking it above his mouth. When no more drops fell, he straightened and stared longingly into its mouth before tossing the can into Jerry’s huge dumpster. He pointed to Phelps. “Nasty fuckers. Things’ll eat your face off.””
“Phelps is alright,” Jerry said, covering his chewed up jawline, “Just a baby.”
Trevor jutted his chin toward the cabin. “Progress?”
“Wouldn’t know to look at it but yeah.”
“Still smell like a dead guy?”
Jerry said, “Good meeting?”
“Come again?”
“Yesterday,” Jerry glanced at Elly’s place, lowering his voice, “at Poppers.”
“Ha! Okay, yeah.” Trevor grinned, “I closed that deal. Nailed it.”
“You must be so proud,” Jerry said with more pepper than he’d intended, remembering how, in the wake of his cidery’s failure, Carol began offering evening therapy sessions at her office, or going straight from work to the gym, coming home late at night reeking like a lioness in estrus. On weekends when she went out “for drinks with friends,” Jerry was not invited. The few conversations they had back then revolved more and more around her sense that Jerry wasn’t fully supporting her and didn’t appreciate what she did to pick up the financial slack since he lost his business. She felt, she said, abandoned.
Here at the cabin, Trevor snapped his fingers in Jerry’s face. “Now what, raccoon man? Working all day or taking a break to let your giant rat baby suckle your man titty?”
Phelps clutched the bars, beseeching. In the sunlight the kennel seemed more prison than enclosure. “I was going to head down to the river, dig up some plantings for Phelps’ cage.”
Trevor pulled off his douchey glasses to give Jerry the full weight of his concerned look. He pointed to the raccoon. “This is Phelps?”
“No one else around.”
“Weird.” He clapped his hands. “Let’s do this.”
Jerry grabbed the wheelbarrow and two shovels from the shed.
Passing through the gate at the bottom of Elly and Trevor’s yard they passed beneath a row of second growth firs to emerge in a world transformed. The sun rode a sky so blue that looking straight up Jerry saw the darkness of space behind the thin skin of atmosphere. Water still glistened on the Oregon grape, devil’s club, and holly, but the only real sign of the weeks of deluge was the brown river, which had already receded to expose a few feet of beach, round stones steaming in the munificent light.
Inspired, Jerry stepped out of his boots and shucked off his protective jumpsuit. He closed his eyes to draw a deep breath: damp earth, chlorophyll and, unpleasantly, his own oniony sweat. Sun warmed his shoulders. He pulled the shirt over his head, stepped out of his pants.
Trevor said, “This gonna get weird?”
“I smell like a goat.”
Trevor leaned on the shovel, watching Jerry with scientific curiosity.
Jerry glanced toward the house. He couldn’t see Elly in the big windows but kept his boxer briefs on just in case. He tiptoed over the slick rocks, his feet tender as a child’s.
Trevor said. “You’re gonna frostbite your dick.”
Jerry ignored him, moving upstream to an eddy where the bottom was more sand than stone. He took a deep breath and strode into the water, getting in knee deep before the pain buckled him. He doubled over with his hands on his thighs, the ache of it like fever, the water gelid as freezer vodka and the sun’s heat nothing but a rumor at his back.
Behind him, the shuffle of clothes. Trevor said, “Someone’s gotta retrieve your body.” Jerry glanced at Trevor’s sagging pecs and burgeoning gut. Gravity always wins.
Jerry dropped into the water face first, his skin stinging from the shock of it. A word flashed in his mind, white block letters on a black background. DEATH. He screamed into the river, his howl reduced to a weak burble in the hushing current. With his arms and legs starfished out from his body he floated face down, curious to see where the river might take him. Caught in an eddy he spun in a circle, thinking about the empty drift boat heading out to sea and recalling the last few lines of a poem Carol read to him in bed during her brief literary phase. Something about a sad guy lingering in the chambers of the sea. At the time, Jerry thought the guy was just a quitter who wanted out of his pathetic life. Now, he could see why Prufrock wanted to pack it in. He spun in place, trying to remember how long it takes to freeze to death in cold water. It happened pretty quick: one minute, maybe two.
A scream pulled him back into the world.
Elly charged down the trail, her eyes huge, barefoot in a jog bra and Lycra hot pants.
“Jerry’s a masochist,” Trevor called to her, “only a danger to himself.”
She shoved past him, jabbing a finger at Jerry. “Out! Right now.”
Trevor grinned at him, “You fucked up, bro-stein.”
Jerry did as he was told, reaching the saw grass just as Elly did. Her beauty made Jerry ache worse than the frozen river. He marveled at Trevor’s indifference to the sight of her, though the same coolness had grown between himself and Carol toward the end. Jerry longed again for the river, the distant sea.
Elly slammed into him and held him tight, her body a furnace against his river cold skin. “I thought you were dead, jerk.”
Jerry had never been much of a hugger and her easy physicality was disorienting, though there was nothing romantic about it. He felt the warmth of her concern, sure, but not passion. She seemed to view him as a long lost older cousin, the two of them instantly united by the shared DNA of loneliness. It was nice, if slightly emasculating, to be considered so trustworthy and sexually harmless.
“I’m okay,” he said.
She pulled back and held his face in her warm hands. “There’s a lot of real estate between you and okay.”
Trevor said, “We gonna play grab ass or dig up plants?”
“You’re a gardener now?” Elly’s voice was spiked.
“Jer opened a petting zoo. I just work here.”
Jerry told her about his adventure with Phelps, her breathless attention wrapping around him like a hospital blanket. When he finished she said, “Is he just too cute though?”
“He poops a lot.”
Trevor nodded, philosophical. “Everybody poops.”
“You should let him go,” Elly said, “His poor mama must be worried sick.”
Jerry blushed. He hadn’t spared a thought for the mother raccoon, caught up as he’d been in their shared orphanage, the relief of not-alone.
Trevor said, “What? He’s supposed to nail signs to trees? ‘Found raccoon. If you’re his mama, call this number.’”
Trevor looked as surprised as Jerry when this got a grin from Elly. She said, “It won’t hurt to fix up his little house in the meantime, I suppose.”
Elly put on shoes and one of Trevor’s flannel shirts and they spent a few hours stepping through the undergrowth, debating the merits of different plants. Elly and Trevor stuck together, whispering and laughing as they moved through the understory, having reached some silent truce as they worked. He slipped his arm around her waist as she leaned to look at a huge red amanita mushroom and Jerry hurt to see the fondness in her eyes, her secret smile. Trevor dug up a pair of small sword ferns. Elly chose the pink blooming heather Jerry had admired the previous day. Jerry chose a strange plant, new to him, that looked like white asparagus stalks curled at the tops to form tiny pale flowers. It reminded him of bleached bluebells, their pallor broken by hints of blackish purple at the joints and the edges of the blooms.
“Corpse flower,” Trevor said, “Good get.” He scooped it up and loaded it into the wheelbarrow.
They were nearly to the road when Trevor said “Look!” Jerry and Elly turned back to see a bald eagle flying upstream at eye level with them. Shockingly huge at this distance, glancing at them disdainfully as it cruised past.
“Beautiful,” Elly said.
“Scavengers,” Trevor said, “dump’s filthy with them. They eat dirty diapers.”
Elly said, “No one’s paying you to ruin everything.”
Jerry marveled at how easy it is for things to go sour between two people. For Jerry and Carol it had happened very slowly, then all at once.
Not long after his father’s rat gnawed corpse was interred, Jerry left the house without his wallet, so at lunchtime he popped back to the house to retrieve it. He smelled the problem before he saw it: cloying aftershave, a familiar gamey funk, frantic whispers.
Carol rushed from the bedroom, disheveled. “Hey!” she said, her voice an octave too high.
“So,” Jerry said, wishing he could muster anger instead of this leaden resignation, “Who’s the lucky guy?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Carol said, putting on a good show of outrage given the circumstances.
“Carol, honey,” he said quietly, resting a gentle hand on her shoulder, “You have come in your hair.”
In the aftermath, Carol lawyered up and came after him as if he were the one caught styling his hair with a lover’s spunk, and somehow Jerry was kicked out of the house. With nowhere else to go, he left his employees in charge of the Snazzy Apple and crawled down to the cabin to try to salvage something from the trash midden of his life.
Now, he grabbed the wheelbarrow. “Thanks, guys. I got it from here.” He fled to the cabin, worn out by the weary push and pull of their unhappy love.
Back at his place, Phelps chattered and climbed the wires, overjoyed at the miracle of Jerry’s return. Thinking of the raccoon’s grieving mama as he opened the gate, Jerry half expected his new friend to make a break for freedom. Instead, Phelps leapt onto him and climbed to his shoulder, needle claws pricking Jerry’s legs and arms. The planting could wait. Grinning, rope-a-dope with relief, he let Phelps ride along as he headed inside to get some lunch. It was good to have at least one relationship in his life that wasn’t falling apart.
Phelps only crapped twice before they went back outside to put the plantings in the kennel.
Over the next few weeks as Jerry emptied and repaired the cabin, he also filled Phelp’s enclosure with plants, climbing structures, and toys, beautifying by deletion and addition. He made the kennel a haven of mock orange, buffaloberry, cascade sunburst, pink flowering hardhack, and pulled wheelbarrow loads of loamy soil from the woods behind the cabin. He avoided Elly and Trevor as much as possible, seeing them only when one of them (Elly) came to check on him or (Trevor) to test the limits of Phelps’ appetite for rotten food. Other times, Jerry gave in and asked him for a hand.
One weekend, Trevor and Jerry rose at three in the morning to catch the tail end of the Columbia River smelt run. Trevor planned to smoke most of his share, Jerry to put his in the chest freezer he’d discovered entombed within a mound of sodden paper towels. The smelt would be, he imagined, handy meals for Phelps. He chose not to think about the fact that he was considering a life in the woods with a raccoon.
When Elly came over to witness Phelps’ first smelt lunch she marveled at Jerry’s hard work in the raccoon habitat, telling him he could be a landscape architect. She pulled a smelt from the cooler and handed it to Phelps, who held it in his hands like a subway sandwich, gazing at her lovingly as he chewed the fish’s head off. She admitted to Jerry that as a girl she’d dreamt of being a zookeeper, and Trevor teased her about the distance between being a “monkey wrangler” and a cancer doc. Jerry got it, though; her drive to care for the trapped and the damaged. He understood, with prickling discomfort, what drew her to him.
Later, over at their place, Elly dipped whole smelt in egg and milk, rolled them in flour seasoned with salt and pepper, and fried them in an inch of boiling oil. They piled the fish, transformed into golden brown treats, on plates and carried them out to the porch. They ate with their eyes on the river, which had retreated to its normal course, running clear and green as bottle glass. Jerry bit the head off a smelt, watching Elly with such admiration it made his elbows itch.
Catching his gaze, she smiled. “You’re a good man, Jerry. There’s a lot of love in what you did for Phelps.”
“I’m just trying to make the best of what I’ve got left.”
Elly shot Trevor a sour look. She’d had a couple of his whiskey beers by then and her voice was loose and brassy. “It’s nice to see a man appreciating what he has. Rare.”
Trevor said, “Something to say, babe, just say it.”
“I’m complimenting Jerry, sweetheart. No need to be defensive. Or am I missing something?” Her smile was all teeth.
Jerry flicked a smelt tail into the bushes, his interest in other people’s disasters somewhere south of zero. “I’m heading back to Seattle in a few days,” he said, surprising himself. “Cabin’s as close to presentable as it’ll get.”
“What about Phelps?” Elly said in a small voice.
“Take him with, I suppose. Build a habitat behind the Snappy Apple.” In truth he hadn’t considered the logistics of transport, much less Phelp’s ongoing care back in Seattle. His only thought now was that for once he wanted to be the one to walk away.
The next morning he drove to the new baseball fields down by the confluence of the Kalama and Columbia Rivers, where he had enough cell reception to call Carol. Sunny as it was up at the cabin, he descended into a thick fog that rendered the bleachers and backstops ghostly. Her phone rang a long time and every burbling tone sent a jolt through him, a tiny surge of longing.
“Jerry,” Carol said, finally picking up, her voice warmer than he’d had reason to hope.
“You’re not in a session, are you?” he asked.
“Are you alright? I’ve been worried about you.”
Another pleasant surprise. “Busy. Must’ve pulled eight thousand pounds of crap out of dad’s place. Sanded and refinished the floors, re-chinked the logs. Still looks a bit tired, but the varnish masks the mouse piss. It’s as good as it’s going to get.” He babbled like a first grader after a field trip, getting it all out before his parents went back to work.
“That’s great, honey!” she said, too eager. “Think it’ll be easy to rent?”
“Hard to say,” he said, taken aback. He hadn’t thought she’d listened to his litany of complaints after his father died, his laments about the mortgage and the difficulty of keeping the business afloat. Also, she hadn’t called him honey in three years. It was possible she was hoping to reconcile, an idea as ridiculous as it was thrilling. Until now, he hadn’t realized he was holding onto the idea of getting back together.
“Jer, I’m glad you called,” her voice was all honey, “My lawyer says you haven’t signed the papers.”
The little bubble of hope growing in his chest popped. He should’ve known that all she wanted from him was a signature to finalize their divorce. His heart slammed like a broken door. Wham! Wham! Wham! “Are you enjoying my house?” he said, biting off his consonants, “Have you doinked your client in every room yet?”
“Jerry,” she said, her voice hardening, “I was hoping—”
“You should make sex part of the treatment, rebrand. Primal Cream Therapy: hump your way to happy.”
“You’re hiding behind your anger,” she said, retreating into her matter-of-fact therapist’s tone, “but this doesn’t have to be a fight.” She told him she was sorry but she’d felt for a long time like she was living alone. She said she saw now how much he’d been hurting and that she understood she had been selfish, thinking only about how his grief affected her. Calm as an auditor, she told him she admired his ambition and understood the pain of his bad luck, but that she clearly needed more than he could give.
It was a hell of a speech, and she seemed to mean it in her dry and inward way. Jerry listened, grinding his teeth. As Carol droned on, a rat emerge from the garbage can near the backstop, gnawing on what was either a burned hot dog or a dry turd.
“You blamed me,” he said, cutting her off.
She sucked in a breath as if he’d slapped her. “I was confused.”
“Confused is ‘How do I cancel my cellphone contract?’ You gave a client a blowjob in my bedroom and blamed me for your dick breath.” He had never talked like that in his life. He would hate himself for it later, but right now the ugliness of it shocked and thrilled him.
Carol, who had always encouraged candid dialogue, took a while to find her voice. Finally, spitting out words like a foul taste, she said, “God, how you love to play the victim.”
She sounded just like his father.
He hung up on her.
Late that night he woke in the cabin to the sound of Elly whispering “Anybody home?” She shuffled unsteadily into the bedroom and fell onto the bed wearing nothing but wet sneakers and an oversized tee shirt.
Jerry said, “Oh, God.”
Still on top of the covers she threw an arm and leg across him and nuzzled into the crook of his neck. “Nothing dirty, I’m just lonely,” she said, her breath like spilled whiskey.
“Trevor will think you were abducted.”
“Trevor Schmevor, He’s off gallivanting.” She slapped Jerry’s chest. “Client meeting my ass.”
Jerry pushed her leg from his belly, slid her hand off his heart. “I’ll get you some water.”
“Mm,” she nodded, eyes closed, “You’re so sweet.”
In the kitchen he filled a large glass at the sink, nearly dropping it when Phelps launched himself at the kennel fence a foot from his face, begging as always to be let into the house. Jerry’s beloved prisoner.
When he got back to the bedroom Elly was under the covers, snoring like a long haul trucker. Jerry eased her upright and she woke just enough to cry as she drank. He rubbed her back while she sniffled, told her lies about everything turning out alright. When she finished her water she made him hold her hand until she fell back asleep. He pushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear and went out to sleep on the couch.
He had just closed his eyes when Trevor threw the door open, breathing hard.
“Where is she,” Trevor growled.
Jerry pointed to the bedroom. “In there. Schnockered.”
Trevor frowned like someone doing higher math in their head. “You two aren’t fucking?”
“Not everyone is an asshole.”
Trevor collapsed into the armchair and turned on a lamp. He looked somber, puffy eyed. Without his smile, he seemed ten years older. “Meeting ended early,” he said, talking to himself. Rehearsing. “Didn’t finish my steak, so I put it in Phelps’ cage, in front of his little house. Nice and rare.” He scrunched up his face. “This chair smells like a mouse toilet.”
“Only so much I can do.”
Trevor stared at the tips of his cowboy boots, staying silent for so long Jerry thought they might be done for now.
“How do you know?” Trevor finally whispered, “when it’s over?”
“You both stop trying.”
Trevor turned off the light. Ten minutes later, he padded into the bedroom.
Even with two stinky pillows over his ears Jerry heard their angry whispers and crying, the rustle and sigh of their reconciliation, the moans that sounded so much like grief.
Sometime in the night Jerry rose to open the window, hoping to ease the stink of Elly and Trevor’s détente and the beany funk of their booze sweat. What felt like moments later he woke to the sound of a struggle and opened his eyes to see a giant rat’s ass wedged in the window’s narrow opening. Apparently, it had gotten hung up at the hips while trying to escape the inhospitably clean cabin and now its tail lashed, its hind legs scrambled on the sill. Watching the monstrous rodent extrude itself though the one inch opening, shitting itself into the world, he felt a grudging admiration. There was a survivor for you.
Safely through to the window ledge it turned back, looking slightly aggrieved. Jerry saluted. “Good luck, buddy.”
When he rose in the morning to make coffee he failed to stop himself from looking in on Elly and Trevor. Their sex funk was worse in here; it had texture, personality, punishing intent. Trevor lay in the fetal position with one hand loosely balled against his mouth, not quite sucking his thumb but remembering the comfort of it. Elly had wrapped herself around him, possessive even in sleep. Jerry backed away, wondering why some things stuck and others fell to pieces. He supposed it was a matter of effort, a refusal to let go.
He drank his coffee over the sink, admiring what he had achieved with Phelp’s habitat, not allowing himself to worry about how he might put his life back together. His rhododendrons and bluebells glistened with dew and the whole place was lush and welcoming, a garden of Eden untroubled by men and women with their scritchy desires and ill-advised ambitions. His gaze traveled over this safe haven to the far end of the enclosure.
The door hung wide open, the plants around the entrance were trampled.
At the far edge of the yard, in the yellowed grass where the dumpster had stood, lie a small, furry shape.
Jerry ran from the house, only vaguely aware of his own terrible keening.
Phelps lay on his back, his arms spread and mouth open, head canted at an obscene angle. Bite marks punctuated the white fur of his belly, trickling blood. He had been shaken, broken, and tossed aside. Jerry stormed from the body into the kennel, tearing up plants and hurling them at the fence, cutting his hands on branches and tearing his fingernails. He churned his way to the dog house, which came apart surprisingly easily, the old boards and framing soft as balsa wood. A prop house, no shelter at all. He kicked it apart, stomping the wreckage to mush.
When everything was ripped out or smashed, he turned to see Elly and Trevor huddled together at the mouth of the kennel. Trevor said, “What the fuck, bro?”
Jerry’s mouth twisted with the urge to howl and spew blame but he produced only a raw groan. The place where his hate should have been held nothing but a dull remorse. A wet heat drew his gaze to a two-inch nail half sunk into the back of his left hand. He pulled it out and watched a surprising amount of blood pulse out of him, splattering his bare feet and soaking into the dirt. Finally he swallowed, painfully. “You left the gate open last night.”
Trevor looked stricken. “Where’s Phelps?”
Jerry pointed past him, to the broken body. “Something must’ve smelled your steak after you came inside.”
Elly ran to Phelps. “Oh baby. No no no no no.”
Trevor stammered, “He’s always hungry. I thought—”
Elly wheeled on him, “There’s coyotes out here! Cougars!” The look she gave her husband was more pitying than angry. “What is wrong with you, Trevor?”
“It’s okay,” Jerry mumbled.
“Okay my ass,” Elly said, stroking Phelp’s forehead.
Trevor’s chin wobbled, “I fucked up and this cannot be unfucked. I’m sorry. Aw shit, Jerry. I’m so sorry.” His voice broke. He put his head in his hands and wept like a little boy, his broad shoulders heaving.
“Come on, man,” Jerry said, “you didn’t do it on purpose.” But he made no move toward Trevor, could not bring himself to reach out and give comfort.
“We have to bury him,” Elly said, wiping her face, “have a proper funeral.”
Trevor nodded, mustering a watery smile. “A headstone, a little casket.” He sobbed again, his hands loose at his sides.
Jerry watched all this as though from above, saw himself standing dead eyed in the wreckage of Phelps’ cage, Elly whispering over the raccoon’s body, Trevor barefoot in the grass making big plans and talking through his tears. The whole shitty mess of it made sense to Jerry now. The coyotes, Trevor and Phelps, himself; all stuck in that perilous, unsightly place in the food chain between predator and prey. Scavengers, their survival conditional on weather, luck, and the appetites of those smarter, swifter, and sharper of tooth. Barely hanging on. He said, “I’ll put him back in the river.”
“Viking burial.” Trevor said, brightening, snot bubbles in his nose, “A little boat. Flaming arrow!”
Elly came over to wipe her bloodied hands on Trevor’s shirt. Her voice soft with fondness she said, “You are a child.”
Jerry retrieved a cutting board from the house and scooped Phelps’ body onto it, surprised at how little he weighed in death. Elly and Trevor followed him down to the water, recalling favorite memories of Phelps as though they’d shared a lifetime together rather than a few weeks. They speculated whether or not one could buy a pet raccoon, if people bred them for sale. If so, they would buy one for Jerry, help him rebuild the habitat.
“You could make it bigger,” Elly said, “maybe adopt a pair, boy and girl.” She tugged at his elbow, “They could have little babies. So cute! Can you imagine?”
Jerry could not.
At the beach, he waded in up to his knees and lowered the board until the water closed over Phelps. He let go.
Jerry watched the current a while before stumbling ashore, pushing past Elly and Trevor with their murmured condolences and apologies, and went to retrieve the floaty armchair and foot pump he’d shoved beneath the bed.
When he returned to the river the doomed couple watched in silence as he inflated the big silvery recliner. Nor did they question him when he set it in the shallows and climbed aboard. For a moment he clung to a large boulder, unsure. Then he took a deep breath and let go.
Jerry let the river do the work, occasionally dipping a hand into the freezing water to paddle away from a snag but mostly just drifting. An hour downstream the valley opened up and the current eased. He passed a new home sitting proud on a huge lawn, river-facing walls all glass, the whole place a kind of fishbowl, the beautiful couple inside on full display. A young man with great hair set a plate of steaming flesh in front of his beloved. He smiled, proud and fond, his teeth unnaturally white, wearing a fitted polo shirt and laughable white jeans that somehow looked great on him. The woman was resplendent in a silky gown suitable for the red carpet, slit to the hip and tight as a sheath. For all their glossy façade they looked at each other with real warmth. And why not? They seemed to have a life worth hanging onto.
The man caught sight of Jerry and pointed him out to his darling. They waved, happy to be seen, delighted as if Jerry had set himself adrift for the sole purpose of bearing witness to the possibility of luck and love. He smiled back, raising his own hand in greeting, benediction, farewell. Still smiling, he dropped both hands into the water and paddled to the center of the current, heading for the sea.
