My Abandonment

One


Sometimes you're walking through the woods when a stick leaps into the air and strikes you across the back and shoulders several times, then flies away lost in the underbrush. There's nothing to do but keep walking, you have to be ready for everything and I am as I follow behind Father down out of the trees, around a puddle, to the fence of the salvage yard. It's night.

"Caroline," Father says, holding open a tear in the fence. "You come through here."

He begins to sort and scavenge. He wants rebar, metal to support our roof. I watch the road, the gate and also behind us where we came through. Cars and big trucks rush and rattle past on the highway, the people inside staring straight ahead and thinking about where they are going and what will happen next and probably things they've done before but they're not thinking of or looking at us. There are no houses near the salvage yard. An electrical station humming inside its own fences and then on the other side Fat Cobra Video, which Father says is a snake store but I don't think it is. In the window are pictures of ladies with their shirts off, holding their breasts in their hands.

Now he is pulling out the long thin metal bars, setting the scraps of sheet metal aside. I hold Randy, my toy horse, in one hand. If I set him down it's never for long. Randy and my blue piece of ribbon are always with me.

"You see, Caroline," Father says, "all the work I'm doing here for these people, organizing all these different things. This is how we are paying them back for what we're taking."

"Yes," I say, squinting across the highway to the dark trains in the railyard, the tiny lights of the cars on the bridge over the river.

The rebar and wire are happy to be with us since we will put them to better use and not forget them to rust in a pile. Father bends back the fence so you'd never know we were here. In one hand I carry a roll of wire that will help hold up the roof or which we can bend to a hanging shelf or another secret thing he might make and in my other hand is Randy softly rattling with the things I put inside his hollow body. My finger is over the round hole in his stomach.

"Caroline, don't lag."

"I'm right here," I say.

Father keeps backtracking since it's hard to carry the long pieces of rebar through the trees in the dark. They keep snagging on things, turning him sideways.

"If you look up at the sky," I say, "you can see the spaces between the trees that way and see where to walk."

"Thanks," he says. "Who do you think taught you that?"

At night the air smells less dry, the coolness in the trees. A branch clatters down, becoming a stick. Squirrels up there? An owl? Everything in the darkness reaches out, in its way and at night we wear shoes so it's harder to feel how things are. We go deeper into the forest park, further from the edge where the city leans in. I know where we are. I know the way home and where I would end up if I walked thirty minutes in any direction through the forest. If I hold my breath and let Father walk away I can't even hear his footsteps, even in his shoes. That's how good he is.

Then the air is thick and rotten. Father's hand is on my arm. I hear the click and then his headlamp is bright and round on his forehead. He holds back a tangle of blackberry and I step through and on the ground is a deer with its neck bent back and its eyes missing and blood on its black nose. The light is a five inch white circle sliding across the deer. Its head, its hooves, its tail. The deer is about the size of me, its tan fur smooth, flies bouncing and buzzing. Its stomach is open and some parts are missing.

"That's her liver," Father says, pointing with a stick, sharp black against the light. "Lungs. Heart."

"The dogs did this?" I say. "The smell."

"Hold your breath," Father says. "I doubt it was dogs, or coyotes. Someone might have shot her, or disease, or she could have even fallen down here and broken her neck. Even animals can fall down sometimes."

"I know that," I say.

"Look carefully, Caroline. There's a lesson here. It's better homework than being in school, that's for certain."

Father turns his neck to look at me before I can shut my eyes against the brightness and it blinds me. I hear the switch so I know it's off but still the light is in my eyes and they take a moment to clear and we can walk again.

A little further on Father stops at a good place where it is finally not so steep and sets everything down. He pulls up the ivy around and over it even though almost no one would come here or find or want or be able to carry it.

"There," he says. "We've done it again, Caroline."

We step only on the stones, closer to home. I on every one, Father on every second one. To not beat down the grass. We come around the side and carefully he takes away the branch across the front door and then we sit on the edge of the mattress for a moment before he strikes a match and lights the lamp. The lamp is made out of a glass bottle with fuel in it and a string stuck through into it. Its light shines and deeper back in the cave the gold letters on my encyclopedias shine back. I only have up to L but I haven't read past E. I go into F or G or the future ones when something's mentioned that starts with that letter. My dictionary is there, too. It is a paperback book and smaller.