Extraction
“I think I’m gonna end up going just like my daddy.” Peter tells me.
Preview art is Empty Wall by Nick Meyer.
JULY 19, 2010
“I think I’m gonna end up going just like my daddy.” Peter tells me. His voice has a threat of urgency and I can see the tears pooling at the bottom of his eyes. When my eyes widen at the phrase he doesn’t try and bite back, he just keeps staring.
“Don’t say something like that. That’s real serious.” I say lowly. “God might hear you.”
Peter lets out a click from his tongue and runs his tongue over his bottom lip when it begins to twitch. When he puts his tongue back in his mouth he closes his eyes, and there’s a strike of summer lightning that brushes across the night sky.
It was a warm night out, and the humidity tended to sting the skin more than the average summer would with the lack of wind in the night sky. Peter turns over to me and shakes me about half to death and when my eyes adjust to the blue hues his shape softens in my vision. I put my hands on his face to calm his breathing and he just stares, heaving, like there’s something out the window he can’t put a face on. Like he’s scared of it.
I move my hands to adjust myself sitting in the bed upright and feel the sweat covering the linens of where his outline once was. It ain’t raining out like it’s supposed to be. Peter is still breathing heavy beside me with his head sticking out of the window and I’m staring into his sheets like a hole might burn through it, but when I realize it doesn’t work like that I try to grab hold of his arms again. Peter looks at me like something real bad just happened right in front of his eyes and I’m shaking his body to get the bad feeling out. Out the window the clouds are moving real fast like they do up on the mountains, and his beaten Trailblazer is still sitting out there next to his daddy’s even dirtier Silverado.
In the summer months I stayed with him to make the house a living, breathing thing. If I didn’t Peter might as well stay at his desk or in the yard all day, not eating or drinking or breathing like he’s supposed to. This July has been stormier than usual, and the wind picks up more than it probably should be doing in these parts of South Carolina, but Peter insists we sleep with the window open or else. I used to think the noise of the crickets and the cicadas kept his mind whirling enough to finally go to bed, but now I’m not so sure.
“I been getting these dreams and they just hurt me. It’s all hurt, all up in here.” Peter gestures to his heart sheepishly, and moves his hand quickly up to his head and taps his skull twice.
“I feel like I’ll dream it too hard it’ll become real.”
On a school night two September’s ago, Peter called me at around 11:30 P.M. that night to tell me that his daddy had gotten into a real bad accident up past the Pentecostal church near the intersection at their town’s grocery store. I’d continue to remember that night like it was a bad, bad dream. Daddy went and done ran a stop-sign, cops told me they found his truck in the ditch near the four-way. Lights were off. Damn it, I gotta call Mama. I closed my eyes and for a moment it felt like I could see the most pitiful look on his face just by the connection of the landline. When I saw Peter that night his eyes were a nasty bloodshot, a half-empty cup of snot and tears, the boy nearly popped a blood vessel in his eye. In the fluorescents from the hospital lights the blues and reds of his tired face had faded into blotchy pale and tan skin on his cheeks. That night I stayed outside the hospital room for 14 hours before hearing those screams. I’d recall the notes Peter hit that night like a record on repeat. Leaking scents of sterile cloth and routine machine beeping couldn’t drown out that type of pain. Peter drank a lot that night, and most nights during the months that followed.
Jonathan Leroy Harrison died at 47, from an accident caused from driving under the influence. He was as drunk as my Mama used to get in her glory days. Mr. Harrison died in the hospital 15 hours later after the EMS successfully recovered his body from the accident. Doctors told us that night that his heart just couldn’t recover, and the brain damage he suffered from the crash was too severe to treat. There was just no shot of any halfwitted form of recovery for that man. Peter says watching his daddy’s eyes close wasn’t nothing he could put his finger on. When they unplugged that cord it was a lightning strike.
That punch hits him where it hurts the hardest when he catches himself forgetting. Peter would tell me, “If there’s one thing you do for me, make sure I don’t lose sight of what I gotta remember.”
Everyday more and more of Johnny’s old ways sink deeper into that boy. His mama can’t hardly bear the sight of him.
Things took a swift turn after that, a lot faster than they needed to. Peter was suddenly taking the reins in a part of responsibility that he didn’t know he’d be doing so damn fast. Life came at him a lot like a river that runs harsh and deep instead of letting him hold his hand out to feel the coolness on the back of his palm. Suddenly he had to go and he didn’t know where, or why. Driving by the scene that night burned waves into his brain of a lifetime that’d cloud his judgment for the rest of his incoming adult years. Years worth of car rides and chopped trees, what it means to make a strong black coffee and get older, shaggier; how to tell the different types of leaves apart by some means other than luck. Johnny made us stronger and for that we thanked him. Peter had a debt he owed to his father that he could now never repay. That grief would snake it’s way up the backs of all the folks that lived in that town.
“What happens in those dreams?” I ask him.
“It’s my daddy, you know, it always is,” He begins, scratching his head real hard. “I’m always in the top floor of some building. It’s all white in there, like, sterile white. It smells like a dentist office but it don’t look like one. You know what a dentist office smells like?”
Peter looks at me earnestly and I nod.
“I’m walked into this room and I got my outside clothes on, and Daddy’s sitting right up on the table. It ain’t like the chairs at the dentist, it’s like some surgery table. You know the metal ones? They got him up on there and he’s sleeping. He ain’t dead, I know he ain’t dead because he’s breathing all normal.”
Peter’s eyes twitch and he closes them real tight before inhaling real heavy.
“But he’s up there and these people are putting scalpels in my hands. Next thing I know I gotta take some teeth out, they tell me he needs something removed and I gotta be the one to do it. I’m the only one who can. So I do.” Peter pinches the covers in between his fingers.
“Once I open that mouth of his, my daddy’s wide awake. I ain’t never seen him so alive. And I gotta fight him on that table, ‘cause I gotta get the teeth out. Damn it, it’s real hard. They really want me to get them so I have to do it. In dreams when you can’t fight back, you know, you just gotta do it. And I do, you know, I do.” Peter finishes his description and pauses to gulp.
“I get the teeth out and he’s kicking me all over. He’s so mad at me but I got the teeth out. It’s like he never tires. Once those people come in again they start clapping, but damn it, he’s still so mad. I wake up after that, you know, I never know what to do.”
I’m looking at him right in the eyes and he’s looking at me and the lightning strikes, shaking the whole damn house. For a second I see his eyes the way God might have intended them to be seen. The fear of a life given to a spine rolling in the ground at every decision he makes begins to slowly get a rise out of him and I think for a second about how small it was, my chances of witnessing this just as it were supposed to be. There is nothing setting me apart from the tragedies surrounding me.
“I never know where to go.” Peter says to me lowly.
“You ain’t got nothing to worry about.” I tell him. “Dreams ain’t real.”
Peter peels his shirt off and pushes the blanket far up over him, shivering. I rest my head back on the pillow and he turns, calm, and breathes out. We sit in silence for a while before he turns over to check the time. 3:18 A.M.
“It’s the same thing every damn night.” Peter says.
When Peter let’s that sentence go the covers fly off him and he reaches over my limpness to grab his smokes. He lights one and stares out the window, gravely, the rain still pestering those poor windshields. I always wonder when they’ll stop. Dreary weather always seemed to slice him in half.
When he takes a drag his inhale is slow and the cigarette stays held out of the window, excess dampness from the rain lightly coloring the paper with its wetness. Peter holds it over me and gestures with his hand that he wants me to take it. I don’t tell him I’d been trying to quit for about a month now but I take it because I don’t know what else to do with these hands while I still got them. I think maybe the cigarette will tell me something he just won’t. I take a slow drag and when I look beside me he’s still intently watching outside the window. I hand it back and he grasps the filter, slowing his index finger smooth over my own to take hold of it.
The smoke always made my throat so dry. Watching the way his fingers shake as he holds it to his lips makes me wonder if the dryness is why he doesn’t say anything. It’d hurt to talk sometimes, I can understand that much. I might have been able to accept it one day, but I just can’t right now.
When I get the cigarette back I stub it out roughly out of the window and I reach over to the nightstand to turn the lamp on, throwing an old shirt on the floor below us over the light to make it less hurtful to the eyes. Peter lays his head down on the pillow, facing me and lets out a sigh. I can’t get anything out of that boy. No words leave the air that exits his mouth but I search for them anyway.
With eyes still closed, Peter asks, “You mind pettin’ my head?” And I oblige because I love him like he’s my dog.
“I don’t like thinking about my daddy as being all mad at me and shit,” He says. “It just don’t feel good.”
Peter scoots his head roughly into my lap and I sit there with the covers laying all shaggy on my hipbones. The pressure stops my heart from beating so fast and all I can think about is the crash, and I wonder if it’s all he’s thinking about too, but I put my hand to his temple and stroke slowly down to his ear, twirling pieces of stringy hair in between my fingers. His breathing slows, and my breathing slows. I reach over his body to grab a small pillow crouched in the spaces between the bed and the window to put between my head and the wall. I would take my hand and place it on his shoulder. You know, I seem to not remember very much after that.
MAY 27, 1998
Peter tells me he doesn’t remember how we met that day but I would know it well into the depths of the Earth. By the extension of my very existence I was made to know that boy.
The first time I met Peter Harrison was in the 4th grade. His Mama and Daddy had just gone through a real complicated separation only 2 months beforehand, and his Daddy had went and taken him to the edge of South Carolina, way up into the mountains. Peter walked into my homeroom class that morning with his cowlick sticking high up into the Heavens, and smiling so big anyone could see his missing teeth from a mile away. Peter tells the class he goes where the marshes go and the other kids didn’t understand a word coming out of his mouth because of his lisp.
Finches sing sweetly on the playground outside when Peter and I sit side by side on the swing-set. It was a rusty old thing, I’d know it well because I know him well. These things blend together in my head all the time.
School was just about to be let out for the summer, the days of May used to start so cool and damp and ended up being a heat wave that just dragged us along as far as it could take us. The sweat would sweep his blond hair back into a nest of string atop his lonely head. When Peter gets up from the swing he walks over to me, smiling real wide.
“You wanna see what I can do with this tooth?” He’d say to me, fingers already picking at the sides of his mouth. When I was eight years old I didn’t really know I had a choice. I saw anyway, I’m pretty sure it’s what I had to do.
Peter steps closer and opens his mouth real wide. I remember my head hurting from all the furrowing my eyebrows were doing that day, the smell of mulch getting stronger as my muscles strained. Peter takes two sweaty fingers and clamps his lateral incisor as hard as he can and pulls. At first the sweat and saliva from his mouth just barely nudges the thing. Nothing comes out.
“You ain’t pull nothing.” I said to him.
At this point I was gripping the chains of the swing so hard I knew a hot blister was setting to form the minute I let go. I kicked some mulch under my foot and I watched as Peter wiped his teeth down with his shirt, getting it all dry. Nothing was gonna happen.
“Just wait.” Peter had said, and so I did.
The second time Peter clamps the tooth between his thumb and his pointer, and he pulls real hard, I can almost hear him straining. Telling this story always makes me laugh so hard because I’d say he was damn near about to shit himself. Peter doesn’t though, he just keeps pulling and pulling.
When that tooth pops out, his hand is shaking as he holds the thing, but it sits still right in the palm of his hand. Peter is smiling at me all proud-like, and I can’t believe this was my first time meeting the boy and he just pulled a tooth out right in front of me. I didn’t even see the thing wiggle, I often wonder if it was ever loose at all.
Peter’s grinning ear to ear, he almost couldn’t believe it. Mouth agape, the blood dribbles from his lip onto his shirt.
I’d always remember zoning in on the color of the tooth against the red of his face, the red of his now ruined shirt, I knew blood stains were always the hardest to get out. My Mama used to be so mad at me when I’d come home with my new capris ruined. The Goodwill supplied us with most of our clothes for warmer weather but when those summer dresses came home all skinned at the knees it was a different level of stress in Mama’s eyes. She hated it, I mean really hated it. I couldn’t help but think Peter’s daddy had to have operated on the same level.
Using my feet on the ground to to place myself away from Peter when he walked closer to me with that damn tooth still in his hand, wiping the blood at his face away with the other hand. I remember him giggling up something wicked that afternoon. Like I ain’t never seen a tooth before. Like he would have done this to anybody.
When he takes his final step toward me and I can’t go back no further, my feet itching further from the swing that they would have ended up just in the air, that’s when it hits me. Right from the pit of the resting place for that tooth was where he tried saying something silly to me and the blood hits my cheek. I let go of the hot chain and put my hand up to my face and I felt the warmth, my eyes widening despite the sun pressing deep on my corneas. I squealed louder than I ever had but it just made Peter laugh so much harder.
Our teacher runs over to us and sees the blood on my hand and the newly-placed stain upon my shirt. Peter dropped that tooth and his skinny little body ran like hell. When she came over to me I didn’t look at her head-on quite like I should have, I was too busy staring at the bloodied piece of him that was dropped into the mulch.
Once I finally pick it up, Peter’s all the way across the field. Mrs. Goldberg asks me what in the hell just happened over here, and I didn’t really know what to tell her.
JULY 20, 2010
When I woke that next morning my neck was stiffer than it’d ever been. The house had pieces of water creaking when they hit the wood of the window, and that window was still swinging wide open. I’m shivering with the covers pulled off me. A wasp buzzes by the window and I catch a glimpse of the fog pushing through the weeds outside when I finally slam it fully closed. Reaching over the mess of blanket and quilt makes me realize the bed is emptier than it should’ve been from the night before.
Peter had gone, and to Hell if I knew where he was. Phone and jacket were both left on the chair pulled from his desk, but his boots were gone from the wall. The lamp was turned off when I look over at it. The shirt I’d thrown over it just last night was gone, too. When I finally left the room to make it downstairs the refrigerator door was wide open with the buzz from the light illuminating as much of the room as it can this early in the morning, and the keys to the Silverado were taken from the rack right next to mine.
You know, I knew it wasn’t like him to leave without notice. Not even a note was left on the desk, or the nightstand. Peter never liked leaving town without some sort of notice, proof, or promise he’d be back home that evening. This house was a landing place.
A storm cloud passed over my nervous system as I weighed out where he could be. Peter hasn’t been working, matter of fact he hadn’t even been doing yard work. Walking over to the kitchen sink in that house was so loud with the floors creaking every which way. I let the sounds ring out in my ears as I step over to the window, my breaths feeling lighter and lighter until it feels like there’s no air passing through me at all. Smooth hands pool over the metal sink and I grab a mug from below just to tamper with while I think. I’d always remember Mama telling me how if I kept my eyebrows furrowed the way I always did that it’d stay that way permanently. Once I realized what I’d been doing I tried to keep a blank expression.
Lifting the faucet with my hands I let the water run over my cup and I drink the entire thing in one go, breathing heavily as I place the mug down. The phone rings and I spring up, darting over to the side of the fridge where they kept it. A sweaty palm grasped hold of it and I put it to my ear immediately. I didn’t even check the number.
“Hello?” I said. The room was so dim it almost scared me, and the sound of a mouth moving was on the other line.
“This here Peter talkin’?” The voice said back. He sounded soulless; old. There was a beaten dirt path in the voice box of this man. I could tell.
“This is one of Peter’s good friends. I live at the house during most of the summertime. Peter ain’t here right now, did you need him for something’?”
“Don’t need him, no,” The man begins to speak. “Uh, says here on my calendar he’s supposed to come over to look at some lawn mower part about an hour ago.”
Holding the phone tightly to my ear I walk over to check the time and date. 9:43 A.M. July 20, 2010.
“Was you supposed to see him around 8:30?” I asked the man, rubbing my thumb over the side of the landline.
“Yes ma’am. He ain’t showed, though.” The man says. “Just wondering where he’s at is all.”
My breathing gets heavier, less even-paced, and I look around the kitchen to see what else might be missing. Holding the phone to my ear I walk over to the top cabinets and pull out a bright red Folger’s coffee grounds jar and open it. All 200-something dollars of that jar was gone. With a tear forming in my eye I send him off.
“I’ll let you know if I see him, can I get your number to write down?”
The man on the phone tells me his name all calm-like and I write it down on the back of some envelope, messy scribbles I figure wouldn’t be put to use anytime soon. I tell him “thank you” all swiftly and put the phone back on the dock. Pacing around that kitchen tile sounds like a drumbeat with how heavy-footed I am. I slip on my shoes from the door and grab the phone.
“This is Marty with O&M. What’s up?”
On the phone is Peter’s boss, Marty, a middle-aged man who ain’t too far off from what Johnny could’ve been. After high school Peter had taken this construction job, and since then had become quite close with Marty. He’d always tell me that good things would come to him once he started shutting up on the clock, and after a couple months he’d come home late from drinking over at his house after he’d gotten off work. Marty never caused him too much trouble. Matter of fact, he might have needed it.
“Hi Marty, Peter left home this morning and I ain’t seen him. Mr. Landry from a few streets over called saying he was supposed to come look at a part this morning and didn’t show. I was wonderin’ if you might know where he’d headed off to?”
The plea in my voice felt humiliating as I spoke into the phone.
“I ain’t seen him since he took time off, I’m sorry.” Marty says carefully. “You know when he left?”
“No clue.” I tell him. Defeated. A sigh as big as I was leaves my body when he doesn’t say anything back.
After a moment passes Marty tries to think up different places he could be ran off to, but nothing seems like it’d stick. Peter went about three different places each week and one of them was the house, the other one was work, and the third was normally to visit a buddy or two from the town over. Even then, those visits were sparse and thinly lined up.
“I got another person ringing the work phone, I’ll call you if I see him? Okay?” Marty says, and the line ends up echoing out until I place it on the dock again. The silence radiating off the house seems to swallow me whole.
I held my keys like daggers in my hands, running out to my car. Hearing the critters in the ground chirp and speak to me until I slam the door and twist the key in the ignition, leaving the land and home I have known for my entire life. Dreams ain’t real, Peter. I wished that I could hold his face in my hands and shake him like wet dogs do in the summertime. I wanted to scream it in each ear thirty times a minute. I wanted to drill it in him. Hard.
Dirt kicks up on my tires as I spin out trying to leave the yard. Damn this storm, damn all this horrid weather and the unfairness that comes with days when the sun refuses to shine. Damn the sun, even. Damn his Mama for kicking him all the way over here and damn him for being important. Damn the clouds in the sky. These were all the things passing through my mind as I make my way down the end of the road. Pulling up to the stop sign I began scanning the fields and ditches in front of me trying to see any sign of a little rascal boy wearing cargo pants and hiking boots.
Kindly, I ask the grass to give me what I want and it doesn’t listen.
I pull the car left and follow the road signs that lead me to the graveyard when Johnny resides. Passing the construction site, the truck isn’t there, and in my mental I check off one less place to look. As I drive by the site I pay close attention to all the men, young and old, and how their bodies move so carelessly through this July humidity. They have no worry here. The dirt kicks up as pieces of metal are moved from A to B, and it becomes a kicked-up swirl of dirt in my rearview.
Pulling up to the graveyard is a soulless type of squeeze, and it makes the pit in my stomach develop to a small meaningless fruit when I realize Peter isn’t even here. The willow tree sways in the morning wind and I watch as little pebbles of rain retract off the windshield of my car.
Chewing on the inside of my lips hurts with the dryness, and once I turn myself back into the reality I have to live in I pull my car around to the side closest to Johnny’s grave. It wasn’t nothing special, it was just a headstone with a cool, smooth engraving of his name and birth year followed by the death year. I walk over to the headstone, as if to search for any remnants of the boy, and land upon nothing. The flowers that Peter had taken for father’s day had wilted, some missing petals like children miss teeth.
A left turn and a couple miles up the road was the spot where Johnny’s life had been taken just years beforehand. The beats skipping in my heart hurt like hell when I realized where Peter might have taken off to. I can’t fix it, I know that. I just can’t. These are things you don’t talk about, I knew that.
The instant I had gotten into my car I felt the thunder clap, and boy, did it pour outside. The harshest rainstorm I felt I’d ever been caught in in my life. The car fights hydroplaning as I squirm out onto the road. Pitter-patter. Pitter-patter. The beat down onto my windshield makes time with the racing in my chest. Pitter-patter.
When I begin to see the ditch from the distance, although it was blurry out, I knew the moment I laid eyes on it. My blood turned cold. All parts of myself had frozen over, the extension of what it meant to live a life worth being active for had turned off. There was nothing so relieving about knowing it was never going to end how I wanted it to. When I pieced together what was happening I remember my hands shaking, violently, and I remember getting sick off my own vomit.
I’d seen the truck, then I’d seen the smoke, and then I’d seen the body. I couldn’t hardly stand. Hell, I couldn’t hardly look. But it was all I wanted to do. My eyes couldn’t look away no matter how hard my body was fighting the otheredness of seeing him lie there. Breathless. No one tells you what to do when you get there. No one tells you that you have to be there, anyway. I left the car in the middle of the street as I walked toward it.
The ringing of the sound of my door wide open beat like a drum in my head. It was a mantra of sorts as I walked. I couldn’t feel my hands, but when I think back on it I couldn’t feel my head or my heart either. I was breathing and not breathing and speaking and not speaking. I didn’t know what I was touching. Hell, I was touching all of it. I shouldn’t have and I know that now but I did because I had to. There was no other way.
It was a strange morning. I crept up on him like he was sleeping. I knew I didn’t want to wake him up, I remember feeling so horrible about thinking about waking him up. I’d seen the drivers side, and then I’d seen the blood. Splotchiness all over, wet goop tainting parts of the car I didn’t think would ever be touched. My mouth was so dry.
When I peered my head into the window the only thing next to the gun in his lap happened to be four baby teeth hanging from the mirror, put into a plastic bag, and wrapped neatly with twine.