[Appears in the Fall 2010 issue of The Threepenny Review]

Two mismatched men stamp their boots through the hard snow. Kurt, in front, is stout and grim, wrapped in a stiff black coat with a duffel bag over each shoulder. Each of his bowlegged plowing strides extends the mile-long trail of boot tracks by another zig or zag, and Kurt’s son Adam, nineteen, drags a suitcase on its side over the snow behind him, paving his own steps into a wake of flattened slush. Adam wears an armless orange vest over a brown sweater, and his springy hair is flattened under a knit cap. They each tuck their chins into their scarves, which traps the dew of their breath and makes their faces slick.

Two miles into the walk, Adam slows and stops. He has never been rid of the city, or understood places where the land exacts a toll for each footstep, and this, mainly this, is what Kurt wants Adam to learn: how to sweat, be exhausted, be prevailed over. And 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 gallon of bad milk. He kicks his suitcase deep into the snow and falls onto it.

“You can sit when we’re inside,” Kurt says.

Adam looks at Kurt but doesn’t see him. Kurt repeats himself and Adam nods, grips the handle of the suitcase, and he gets to his feet with patient disgust.

They hike up a high stairway whose softly terraced steps, obscured by ten inches of snow, look 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 is taking each stride like a slap to the heart. When Adam catches up, he takes a look behind him and sees the complete vacancy of the land: acres of white, aseptic white stretching so full in every direction that without the scattered reference of evergreens at the horizon, Adam would think he’d gone radiantly blind.

The house dominating 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. Adam trips over the first stair of a wooden walk-up as they approach the door. Kurt removes a glove, sneaks a key from the inner pocket of his trench coat, and wiggles it into the lock. The door resists, and Kurt retaliates with one heavy shoulder thrust and then another, shunting only an inch at each dig and dragging against the floorboards inside. When it yields, Kurt enters 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.

“Oh my God, that smell. There’s no heat? Oh my god.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks. And of course there’s no heat. Or power.”

Adam pinches a tatter of the wallpaper between his fingers, and when he pulls it comes off like chicken skin. “We’re not doing this.”

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. Anyway,” he said, bending at the knees to set down his luggage, “We’re here. We start now.”

Adam wilts 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. “Get me a hammer.”

It’s mid-afternoon, the air is stale, and there are blooms of mold streaking the drywall, scraps of blistered wallpaper, water-damaged boards and windowsills, cracked paint, tan and brown stains on the ceiling layered like a contour map. They occupy the living room. Adam cannot adjust to the silence, which seems to press in through windows that are smoggy with dark green dirt on both sides so they almost look like a chalkboard to Adam, who cannot adjust to the silence, which stiffens the air into a low ether and squeezes against the eardrums, a neutral silence that sermonizes, a silence that won’t shut up, to which Adam cannot adjust.

Kurt has not seen this house for thirty-one years, though it had regularly affirmed itself during that time in the monthly invoices he received from a real estate attorney whom he also never saw—Chad? Carl? No matter. The less Kurt had to know about the house’s depreciation, its steady corruption, the better. But he didn’t sell it either.

Now in the ruined den under the stench of the decaying wood, he breathes a familiar wood mold and family ash, rat urine and stale Pledge. The sour wall-bound scent of vegetable oil from supper every evening as Earl Schrader batter-fried cabbages, potatoes, wild mushrooms, kidney beans, anything and everything except animals: I’ve married the only hippie in Montana, Delilah would tease, but she relented when the local free papers ran the feature about the California heroin craze whose hippie cults in the name of Satan ate human flesh and performed sex orgies in public; it was understood that his eating was his religion, exulting in temperance, so words in his presence had to be small and reverential, and from Kurt he brooked no jokes no complaints no foolishness, and Kurt learned to behave as if he was just glad to be there, to be nourished by what he ate, to grow, because the first, the previous, the unthriving older brother—born four pounds, and also named Kurt—had only refused the breast and grown thinner until he failed in the crib, and Earl had blamed the doctor, bad luck, the phase of the moon, but Delilah said to hell with you, it was the house, how was any child supposed to survive in this God-damned cheap old clapboard death-trap, she saw his breath and you ought never to see a baby’s breath, and if they had just lived with her parents like she wanted, if Earl hadn’t insisted on handling all his finances, on making everything his own—

There is a loud creak and the bedroom door pops and swings open, rasping on its hinges, striking the wall so hard it makes the door wobble.

“What the hell was that?” Adam calls from the kitchen.

“The door. Opened by itself.”

“What?”

“Settling, drafts. Old houses do that.”

“Haunted houses do that.”

Kurt empties a duffel bag containing the laminated checklists and floorplans and he arranges them on a dry patch of the hardwood floor. Time vanishes in the euphoria of logistics. Adam roams the five rooms as if looking for a hidden exit, kitchen, bedroom, washroom, toilet, den. He complains about the damp and the cold, the water running from the ceiling but not the faucets, he slides his hands down the bloated walls and takes his palms away dripping, hears an invisible whine.

“Walls or floors?”

“What?”

“Walls or floors, which do you want to do first? Or do you want to double up on them?”

Adam says nothing, paces around the empty bedroom, stretches his bones full of lusty fatigue, rubs his hands on the front of his heavy jacket. He heads to the window, and jerks the frame up to open it but finds it stuck, gives up, sits down on the floor under the window, yawns repeatedly, lets the tears of drowsiness overflow his eyes and run down to his chin, and as he crouches onto the floor he is dazzled—doesn’t remember why he entered the room, a sheen of absentia over his eyes, and he pats his vest, pockets, ass, vest, retrieves a pack of cigarettes and a nicked-up plastic lighter, lights up, draws in, breathes out. The smoke rises in a fan and thickens and turbulates the dust suspended in the window light, and after a minute, Kurt calls from the other room, “Jesus, you smoke now, too?”

“Now and then,” Adam says. “Don’t worry, it’s not a habit.”

[End of excerpt]