Two mismatched men stamp their boots through the hard snow. Kurt, the one in front, is stout and grim, wrapped in a stiff black trench coat with a duffel bag slung over each shoulder. Each plowing stride extends the mile-long trail of boot tracks by another zig or zag, and Kurt’s son Adam, the taller, younger man following him, picks his way through these tracks. Adam wears an armless orange vest over a brown sweater, and his dark springy hair is reined in under a knit cap. With both arms he drags a suitcase on its side over the snow behind him, paving both of their tracks into a wake of flattened, packed slush. They tuck their chins into their scarves. Their faces are slick with the dew of their breath.
Two miles into the walk, Adam slows and stops and Kurt turns to face him. Adam has never lived outside of the city before, has never really been rid of it. He has never understood a place where the land exacts a toll for each footstep, and this (mainly, this) is what Kurt wants him to learn: how to sweat, be exhausted, be consumed outright. Adam is, at least, exhausted. Worms of imagined light curl in the air in front of him, and he is cold and sick and full-feeling, as if he’d drunk a quart of turned milk. Adam rests his suitcase flat and slumps onto it.
Kurt says, “You can sit when we’re inside.”
Adam looks back at Kurt but hardly sees him. Kurt repeats himself and Adam nods, grips the handle of the suitcase, and with jerky, puppetish movements, he regains his feet.
They hike a steep hill, up a stairway whose steps, half-concealed under eighteen inches of snow, appear as a soft terrace like a spine under skin. Kurt toes his way up first, sending little surface slides of powder down the hill behind him, and makes it to the top three minutes before Adam, who takes each stride like an elbow in the stomach. When Adam makes it up, he takes a look behind him and sees the vacancy of the land for the first time: acres of white, aseptic white, stretching so fully in every direction that without the scattered reference of evergreens at the borderlands, Adam would have thought he’d gone radiantly blind.
The house at the top of the hill is small and pine-paneled, crowned with snow and speckled with gray and green patches of all-seasons wood rot and dark mildew that cling to the exterior. Adam stumbles over the leading step of a wooden walk-up as they approach the front door. Kurt removes a glove, sneaks a key from the inner pocket of his trench coat, and fidgets it in the door lock. After the click, he twists and pushes the doorknob, and the door only opens an inch. He shoulders into it heavily, one hard push and then another, and it shunts mere inches at each dig, obstinate, scraping hard against the floorboards inside. Kurt comes in and sets his suitcase down, shakes out his wrists, and Adam tips his head under the doorframe as he follows his father into the room.
“Welcome home,” Kurt says.
“Fuck. Oh my God, that smell. There’s no heat? Oh man. Look at this nasty shit.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks. And of course there’s no heat. There isn’t any power.”
Adam takes a tatter of the wallpaper between his fingers, pulls it, and it comes off in a long strip like wet vellum. “This place is rotted through. You’re saying this is one week’s work? Forget it. We’re not doing this shit.”
Kurt, still holding his bags, walks to the center of the room and turns appraisingly until he faces Adam again. “It’s too late to drive back now, so we’re staying here for the night at least, like it or not. But you will like it. I sent a guy down here last week and he had a look-see around, took the dimensions. When you see what I got planned, you’ll see, it’s going to be good. Anyway,” he said, bending at the knees to set down his luggage, “We’re here. And no better time to start than now.”
Adam sits down on his suitcase again, and Kurt crosses over to him, yanks up the shoulder of Adam’s vest so that he’s back on his tottering feet again.
“As long as you’re up, you can get me a hammer.”
Pages: 1 2