!Woodsmen
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by Anna @ 2016
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Chapter 2: Waiting for daddy
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It's from watching daddy unmoving in his armchair
looking at the TV most of my life. I come up with
stories that while I was at Mamaw's, or playing, or
at school, he did *something.*
I looked for tracked-in leaves and dirt, scratches
on his hands, a look in his eye that would give away
his secret life. I wanted evidence I come from a
powerful, smart, kind, or adventurous man. He had
tools and old cars. I figured it was proof he used
to do something. I watched the tools, learned their
names, hoped one would move and reveal that when I
was gone he fixed what was broken.
Daddy was the first, but as I grew I listened to
other men. Mama was not too perceptive, but I was
obvious, awkward, lanky, inventing the lives of
grown men with motor oil in their arm hairs, bad
haircuts, and old cars. When I dated, she told me
not to invent a man, her harsh realism against my
fantastic nature. She'd settled with the husband she
had. I wouldn't.
The spring the Challenger space shuttle exploded I
came home from school to daddy watching a Father
Knows Best rerun. I changed the channel to the news.
The world had changed. Our upward thrust had been
rebuffed by the sky. Daddy's secret life would be
revealed---his kindness, his wisdom, his power.
Why you gotta change the channel Katharine, he said
in his pill haze.
The shuttle blew up, I said. Look, look, that's why
I'm home from school. How could it blow up?
He didn't move his head. I watched his slack face as
light played on it for the wisdom about to emerge. I
turned back to the screen, where a plume of smoke
descended.
Those are pieces of it, I said. There was astronauts
in it, and a lady astronaut, Christa McAuliffe. She
was a teacher. And now all the pieces are falling.
Yeah, yeah, I see them falling, Katharine, he said,
slack, vacant.
Tears came to my eyes and I can't say what I was
feeling but it was bad. I looked at him, fierce and
grieving and wanting. These were all the things I
was becoming and would become as a grown woman. He
sighed gently and closed his eyes. It wasn't his
show. He didn't care to see it.
I changed the channel back, left that horrible room,
and closed the back door. I walked a long way down
to Silver Creek holding my tears. Then I sat on flat
rock and water ran on flat rock and tears ran on my
cheeks. After a while I had to quit crying because
it was giving me a headache.
I understood then we'd moved away from Mamaw's so
we'd be close enough to the VA daddy'd get the
medical transportation. I understood he didn't do
shit and never would. I understood any adventures
was going to be mine not his.
I learned to use daddy's tools. I was to stay away
from the creek, so I brought home library books and
puzzled over everything in the garage.
I make up stories about men. If a man can't live up
to my dream, I do. I imagined daddy's hands, not
mine, jacking up the frame on the old Chevy, putting
it on jack stands, struggling with lug nuts.
I imagined daddy's eyes staring at the leaf springs.
Worn out, it didn't matter he never asked about the
grease on my hands. Somebody had to fix things.
Might as well be me.
Mom told me daddy didn't like guns, didn't want any-
thing to do with them anymore. She could shoot, but
wouldn't teach me. Ever since the Challenger blew up
spectacularly on TV, I had my own power. It moved me
into worlds mom didn't see.
In junkyards and winding mountain back roads and
creeksides where I traveled, boys saw me, once or
twice Carley caught me, birds jumped and took wing,
frogs sat still on their haunches, snakes raised
their heads.
When I was about out of high school, Kelly wrapped a
stolen Mustang around a pine tree, ten feet off the
ground. His body was a hundred feet beyond that.
Last time I saw him alive I felt a rifle stock push
me back like the hand of God when it cracked and the
dirt jumped up ahead.
Squeeze, don't jerk, Kelly said. Breathe out when
you pull.
After while I could knock over the beer cans, laugh-
ing openfaced and sweating in the woods. The casings
emptied of their bullets, I laid the rifle on the
blanket and pulled Kelly down onto it with me.
Fuck you you redneck shit, I breathed beery in his
face. He jammed his knee between my legs. I rolled
on top of him and rode his leg, my head on his
shoulder.
Eat my dick, Kelly said. His hands choked my neck. I
punched him hard in the cheek, stood up, and
unbuttoned my blouse. He pulled my legs out from
under me. I fell to my knees. He grabbed my hair and
pushed my face to the blanket. I tried to struggle
free. He forced my face into the dirt.
Kelly got my denim cutoffs to my knees before I
flung him on his back and pinned his sunburned arms.
I kicked my shorts the rest of the way off and kept
his arms pinned with my knees, breathing hard.
Your daddy was trash and you're trash, I said. Make
yourself useful.
I ground my cunt on his mouth, his nose in my ass.
To his mumble, his slight suffocation, I said, Shut
the fuck up and earn this.
He slung me on my back and slapped my face. We
fought. The sky lightened. Checking myself out in
mirror the next day, I found bruises from his hands
and longer, narrower bruises from my body hitting
the 30.06 rifle that shared the blanket with us.
Mom definitely saw the bruises, but she didn't ask.
Nobody could find us by that point.
We never did anything that would matter to the wider
world. We weren't important. We were seen by birds,
snakes, a frog. Then he was dead.
I could see blood from my cunt on his fingers and
knuckles, feel the strength in his arms and hands,
hear the keening of an engine as he tuned it, the
aches he left in my body, the kick of the rifle, the
void he left. He took away my self-consciousness and
anxiety. He lusted after me and hated me every bit
as much as I did him.
