"For the Sake of Our Bodies" by Austin Ross
Originally published in Pontoon Volume 1 (April 2022)
The first time Gray fired a gun was with his father. Dad’s trousers were bloused overtop his boots as the two of them set out for the deer stand. As they walked, Dad evoked images of life as it used to be: of living off the land, the smell of a wood fire and the taste of cured meat. Cold wind whistled through slats in the boards of the stand. Dad pointed toward the tree line: there, standing in fog just at the edge of the woods, was a seven-point buck. It stared into the distance as though reflecting on some past memory. Gray slid the bolt into place and aimed for the head. He’d felt a swell of happiness and pride that almost hurt. It would be the first life he would ever take.
The only other time Gray had fired a gun was when his son had come home from practice with wet hair. Isaac had been growing it out so that it nearly touched his shoulders. Wet, black strands lay thick and flat against his head. Deborah was nearly finished with the potato salad and had told Isaac to go dry his hair or else they’d be late for the barbecue. After five minutes with no sign of him, Gray went upstairs. The bathroom door was locked when he tried the handle.
“Isaac? Everything okay in there?”
The door opened and there was Isaac, hair dried and combed, or at least a close approximation. He was wearing a shirt with a bison on top of a mountain of skulls—some band Gray had never heard of nor would ever want to. Isaac’s eyes looked a little red, but Gray couldn’t tell if he had been crying or smoking pot. Maybe both. Isaac brushed past, took the stairs two at a time.
No one wanted to lug the potato salad and the lawn chairs and the Kan Jam set, so they loaded those things in the trunk and made the thirty-second trek across the parking lot. They could hear the music before they even started the car, a playlist of mostly Eagles and Jimmy Buffet and Billy Joel. Most of the neighborhood was already there. Gray made a point to thank the host: Coach Vincent, as Isaac called him. There were all sorts of rumors swirling about him—marriage falling apart, wife and kids leaving him to stay with her mom in Jersey, the hinted-at alcoholism and who-knew what else—but he was too good a coach for this to matter all that much. Vincent was keeping it together even if all that were true, and besides: three of the kids he’d mentored had gone on to win the Heisman. Anybody in the world would take those odds if he took a shine to your kid. Most would pay good money for it.
“Great to see you,” Vincent said. His voice was thick and dark like burnt honey. He scanned the room as though looking for someone. “Listen, I just wanted to say . . . I ran Isaac a little hard today. He’s got a lot of potential, but—well, I don’t think he was very happy with me after practice. Just wanted to, you know, clear the air.”
“Oh,” Gray said. “I didn’t . . . I mean, he seemed maybe a little off, but nothing out of the ordinary—”
“Good, good.” Vincent clapped Gray on the shoulder. “I’m gonna get him a scholarship, just you wait and see.”
Vincent drank a lot that night. A little later, after the main course of burgers and dogs, Gray saw him talking to Isaac under the portico on the side entrance. Isaac barely looked at Vincent, who grabbed him by the shirt collar as he spoke. Gray saw then what was what, but he didn’t know it yet.
What happened afterward was an accident, but Gray still ended up being sentenced to ten years for voluntary manslaughter. The adjustment into the system was chaotic in a way that distracted him from reality. Allowed him to adjust without even knowing it, to breathe the incarcerated air and acclimate subconsciously to caged life. Gray more or less kept his head down until release day, despite Johnson getting him pretty firmly hooked on scripts which found their way into the prison through some nebulous method Gray never knew or questioned. Gray just took the pills dutifully, first morphine and then codeine. This was where he stopped. He’d heard enough about fentanyl to not touch it, though the thought crossed his mind every now and then. He lived for a time in constant fear of retribution until he realized that nothing mattered; in this way, he was as free as he’d ever been. Gray’s mother, his last surviving parent, died within the first year. Deborah left him a few months after. It wasn’t because of the money, she said. She made twice as much as he did running social media for her sister’s photography business. She and Isaac would be fine. It wasn’t Gray’s fault the life insurance business had tanked. Nobody bought anything for protection anymore; they couldn’t afford it. They all just hoped for the best, or at least that the thing that took them out was something painless.
“I don’t even think of it as an affair anymore,” she said one day during visitation. “The real affair is here, right now. With you.” She pushed a strand of graying hair from her face. “I’m selling the house.”
Gray thought: Good luck, and he meant it. He had no ill will toward her. None whatsoever. He still loved her in most every possible way. But nothing good of their family could remain in that house and live. They had bought it in a then-recent development on Bishops Drive, each a carbon copy, differentiated by paint but all the same Craftsman shape, each with the same brick-red shingles. But it was their house, and they filled its three-bedrooms/two-baths with the furniture they’d always dreamed of: expensive wingback chairs and bar stools and an impressive-but-uncomfortable sofa made in Scandinavia. They paid for some of this on credit and some with gifts from their parents. As they settled into their new community, they found their date nights grew further and further apart. There remained, however, a solidity to their marriage, a bedrock they thought could not be easily shaken.
“Did you know?”
Deborah had started to cry; from her bag she produced The Daily Local and held up the front page. An above-the-fold article had a picture of Vincent’s face—an old staff photo from his tenure at Henderson High School—grinning from ear to ear in that familiar sly way. The headline contained depths Gray could not comprehend: SEXUAL ABUSE AND MISCONDUCT ALLEGATIONS IN SLAIN FOOTBALL COACH’S PAST.
Deborah put the paper away before Gray could finish reading. “Did you know?” Gray’s mouth hardened to baked clay. He tried to form some coherence. “Was Isaac involved?”
“You ask him yourself,” and then she was gone, dissolved, the floral print dress he’d bought for their seventh anniversary shimmering as she walked. She’d worn that dress the night they’d gone to Vincent’s house. At home after the argument between Vincent and Isaac, Gray had asked Isaac what was going on, but Isaac hadn’t said a thing and had just gone up to his room. As Gray and Deborah tidied up the kitchen, she asked what was wrong. I don’t know, Gray said. He considered adding to this, but he knew whatever else he might say would amount to much the same thing, so he simply repeated it as he loaded the sharp knives blade-down into the dishwasher.
Gray’s counselor had no real wisdom for him after Deborah left for good. They stopped meeting after a while even though it was state-mandated; no one gave a shit. He assumed this was just as true outside as it was in here, a theory he was able to test when his release day finally arrived. There was no one to greet him when the door closed and he was stuck on the side of the road with a single tan duffel beside him. There was a Greyhound coming soon, or so he’d been told. One finally arrived, though it was not Greyhound but some off-brand monster belching smoke. Around each of the windows were small holes where metal bolts had once been fastened: remnants of a previous life as prison transport.
Gray had managed to find low-income alternative housing, which in this case meant a shitty room downtown for which he would pay one hundred dollars each month. The mattress lay flat on the concrete floor, but Gray was just happy to not have to share the room. There was a single-occupancy bathroom down the hall which he quickly learned always smelled of formaldehyde. During his first shower as a free man, some kind of horrible worm wriggled up the drain and thrashed around on the stained fiberglass before it finally died, curled up in what Gray supposed must have been agony.
He quickly identified which tenants in his building could supply him with cheap scripts. He filled and refilled bottles with codeine and Valium and whatever else he could get his hands on until the source got wary. He switched from Walgreens to Rite Aids to mom-and-pop stores, though he was unable to evade the thought that this version of himself was so drastically different from who he’d always imagined himself to be that he was now in effect living the stolen life of a stranger. He applied for many jobs at the places he scored from and elsewhere, eventually filling out an application at the 7-Eleven down the street. He stood by the Slurpee machine while going through the paperwork; the second page brought him back to the counter.
“What should I put here?” he asked, tapping the paper with his pen. It said: Please list ALL JOBS, beginning with your present or last employer. Account for ALL time periods, including UNEMPLOYMENT, -EMPLOYMENT, and U.S. MILITARY SERVICE.
The night manager, an older man named Joseph with thinning hair, looked at Gray with suspicious incredulity. “Not sure what you mean. You fill it out.”
“I was in prison,” Gray said. “For a while. What should I put for that?”
“Ah,” he said. He stared at something outside Gray could not see. “What for?”
“Voluntary manslaughter,” Gray said. Better to be up front now than found out later. “If you need more inform—”
Joseph waved a hand as though in absolution. “Just list where and how long. I won’t do you dirty like that. I know plenty of people come out the other side of prison. Some of the best employees I ever had. Prison might have hardened you up for a place like this. We’re not exactly puttin’ on the ritz here.”
Gray got the third shift, starting at eleven p.m. Even with the job, money was tight, and along with cash, the easy scripts had more or less dried up. Gray tried going back to booze but it wasn’t the same. What he really wanted to do was talk to Isaac. Isaac had changed his number a long time ago, but Gray managed to get the new one by finding and stalking his son on social media. In March of last year, Isaac had posted his new number to his personal account but had left the privacy settings open. Gray wrote the number on a nearby napkin. He carried it with him for months, neatly folded into quarters. Each time he thought of calling, his heart seized and he gave up.
One night at work, when there was nobody at the pumps and just one guy at the back of the store looking at the sodas, Gray dialed the number. His heart felt like it would throttle him. The phone rang five times before Isaac picked up. His voice was dull, but it didn’t sound like he’d been asleep.
“Isaac,” Gray said. “It’s your dad.”
“Oh,” Isaac said. “Wow. Huh. How’d you get this number?”
“Your mother gave it to me,” Gray said. To slip into a lie was the easiest thing in the world.
The two struck up a simplistic conversation, one that revolved around what Isaac was doing for work (a driver for a rideshare company), if he had a girlfriend (no), if he talked to Mom much these days.
“Not really,” Isaac said. “It’s just—it’s weird, now. Her and Graham. Pretty sure he’s just a couple years older than me.”
“Well,” Gray said. Unsure where to go now there was silence, he added, “The allure of youth is quite strong when you reach a certain age.”
He heard Isaac sigh down the telephone. “That’s really weird, Dad.” Then: “I need to make some real money. You know?”
“You’ve got that job,” Gray said. “Uber.”
“Lyft,” Isaac said. “And there are too many tolls around here. They say they’ll pay them, but I end up losing money.”
“Can’t say I have much advice for you,” Gray said. “I work at a gas station.” Outside, a doe cut through the parking lot in between the cover of trees, followed closely by its fawn. It was almost deer season. “Can I see you? I mean, in person. I’d really like to see you. I don’t want to intrude.”
“I don’t know. You wouldn’t like it.”
“Wouldn’t like what?”
“Place is a mess.”
“That’s okay. I can even help you clean.”
“Let me think about it.”
“Okay. Okay. Think about it, but . . . I’d really like to.”
“I will. I will. I’ve got to go.” Before either could say anything else, Isaac hung up. The way his voice had sounded at the end, tight with emotion, reminded Gray of when Isaac was little and the two of them had gone to the park downtown. His boy had so proudly brought him a praying mantis cupped in the dark between his palms. Its chitinous mandibles poked out into the world beyond as though his son’s little hands were birthing a monster. “Look, Daddy, look,” Isaac said breathlessly, and he opened his hands to show off his captive, but the praying mantis just sat there with its crooked arms and big eyes. Isaac poked at it. The mantis registered him for the first time. It arched its back and held its arms in front like some kind of insectoid boxer. Behind the mantis were splayed its thin, translucent wings; it rubbed its thorax against the wings to create a grating sound, almost like a cabasa, as though it had started playing a very aggressive Latin jazz. Isaac was so frightened and betrayed by this that, crying, he flung the insect to the ground. Gray felt so uncontrollably angry at this insect, that it had reduced his boy to tears, that he immediately stood to his feet and squashed the bug with a horrible crunch. He’d had to scrape its guts off his shoe with a pen.
When Gray called Isaac the next night, itchy from withdrawal, they agreed to a visit in exactly one week, at Isaac’s apartment. Gray got the night off; when the time came he drove down to Isaac’s complex, about twenty miles south of the city. It was not much better than his own, Gray saw as he entered, and the two shared an awkward hug. Isaac had put on weight, perhaps twenty or thirty pounds, and had a poorly buzzed head that seemed to indicate he cut it himself. He looked unhealthy and unhappy, Gray thought, and that above all made him sad. The two of them sat on the cheap black futon and drank cheap beer and watched the Eagles get trashed. Gray realized he could count on both hands the times he had seen his son over the past ten years. Their mutual absence from each other’s lives was something they did not discuss.
“Boy, it’s a good thing they got rid of Foles,” Isaac said, and imitated jerking off in mockery of the decision to cut him loose. “Bunch of idiots.”
“Foles was just lucky. Wentz kept getting hurt and Foles got the credit.”
“What are you talking about? Foles carried them.”
“I guess we’ll see.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
After another turnover, Gray crushed his can and set it on the ottoman. “What do you want to eat? I’m buying.”
“How generous of you. Pizza?”
“I was thinking Chinese. Why not some of both?”
Isaac crushed his can and set it next to Gray’s. He spoke through a burp: “Probably shouldn’t do both. For the sake of our bodies. Been eating like shit lately. Drinking too much, too.” Isaac paused, ran both hands across his buzzed scalp, and said, “Don’t know how much I’ve got left in me, to be honest. You know?”
“How about Wave Noodle? Nearly four stars on Yelp. Not bad.”
Isaac didn’t say anything; Gray resurfaced from his phone in the silence. The words of his son made their way to him from some distant part of his mind and he realized he had missed a moment—he had missed the moment, the opening through which the two of them could grow closer, could heal and remake their lives. He wanted to apologize, tell Isaac he loved him, to try to rewind the clock. But there were no do-overs, so instead they drank more beer. The game drew to a sad end in front of them as they waited for the food to arrive. They ate in haste, not bothering with the chopsticks but instead using the individually wrapped plastic forks. Gray tossed his son a fortune cookie, cracked his open: Help! I’m being held prisoner in a fortune cookie factory. “What’s yours say?”
“‘The weather is wonderful.’”
“Pretty lame.”
The two of them seemed in that moment to be fully separate beings, no longer tied to one another apart from the obligations of blood. Gray for the life of him could not figure out if this was a good thing or not. He recalled those first moments with Isaac, the utter dependence. Gray had held his newborn son close, the boy covered in slimy amniotic fluid, but it did not matter. Here was his very own son, his progeny, he remembered thinking. He held his beautiful boy and did not know what lay ahead. And if it were up to him, he’d have kept it that way.
“I gotta go take a shit,” Gray said.
Afterward, as he was washing his hands, he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. He was surprised by his gaunt complexion in the overhead light, the dark eyes and sagging skin. He was compelled to open the bathroom cabinet to see what secrets his son was keeping from him. Inside was a toothbrush and toothpaste and razors and deodorant—but also orange bottles of pills that Gray, unsure how else Isaac could afford them, suspected he had gotten under the table somehow: codeine and Valium and amphetamines and a tincture of cannabis oil, a few others. The compulsion to take them for himself overcame Gray. He put them in his pockets and turned toward the door.
He paused. Breathed. Weighed the complications of stealing these from his own son. Instead, he overturned each of the five bottles into his palm and took four pills from each, an amount that he desperately hoped was small enough to remain undetected.
When he came back, he said something about being tired and started putting his shoes on. His gut curled into a tight rope of fat as he leaned over the laces; it was the first time he’d felt this since before prison. Isaac hovered near the fish bowl at the front door.
“You know,” Gray said, and turned.
“Yeah?” Isaac said. There was a glimmer there, a trace of hope in the eyes. Gray considered mentioning the medications, saying something like, We’re all a mess; I’m sorry for all the ways I’ve added to this.
“You really ought to try and branch out,” Gray said instead. He’d done his research beforehand. Felt that this was an important teachable moment from father to son about the value of hard work. “Broaden your opportunities. I’ve been reading about this stuff. Don’t just drive for Uber; do Lyft, too. Add in that other one, what’s it called? Postman?”
“Postmates.”
“Postmates. Add that if you need the cash. Point is, if you’re looking for money, you’ve got to start hustling.”
Isaac poured some fish food pellets into his palm and dropped them in the bowl. “Thanks.”
The two hugged and Gray left. It was raining heavily, so the parting was quick. Gray ran to his car. Part of him wanted Isaac to say something to stop him, but most of him was relieved when he did not. Gray sat in the parking lot for some time, listening to the radio. His heart raced with the idea that he might actually go back inside, might enter once again that sacred space with his son. Talk about the things they needed to talk about. He wanted desperately, he realized as he backed out, to ask his son, What did he do to you? Why did you let him touch you? But he knew the answer to this already, that there had been no letting. He looked one last time to his son’s window, wondering if perhaps he would see Isaac there, waving goodbye—but there was no one.
Gray took three of the Valium as he drove, washing them down with some day-old coffee from a travel mug he’d left in the cup holder. He thought, as he often did, of the Saturday eleven years ago when he’d woken in the middle of the night to the sound of their flower pot crashing on the sidewalk. There had been a man outside their house, pacing and shouting, and in the early Sunday morning darkness it took a moment for Gray to realize it was Vincent.
“I don’t believe it,” Gray said as Deborah sat up beside him. He looked at his phone: it was 3:13 a.m. Lights flicked on across the development; curtains twitched as neighbors peeked out to see what was happening.
“Come down here and say that to my face!”
Vincent, dressed only in a thin white bathrobe and underwear, was looking toward Isaac’s room, which faced the cul-de-sac. Deborah dialed 911 as Gray got the silver box from beneath the bed and then the keys from on top of their dresser. He first unlocked the box itself and then the trigger guard of the .38. He held the weapon like he had seen in police procedurals, his index finger pointed straight over the guard, careful not to touch the trigger unless absolutely necessary. He’d bought the gun on a whim after a sudden bout of anxiety had held him in its grip for two weeks straight, brought about by a series of news stories detailing murders and kidnappings and rapes in the tri-state area. He’d imagined using it many times, but now that it was in his hands it terrified him.
Isaac called to Gray from the top of the stairs. “Get back in your room,” Gray said and emerged into the cool morning air. A fog had settled. The cement walkway that led to their front door extended out ten feet toward the cul-de-sac to leave room for a tiny front yard. Vincent was at the bottom of the steps. A thick vein ran down his forehead. He hadn’t shaved, and even from there Gray could smell the stench of sweat and grease from his clothes. Vincent muttered to himself, and in the silence, Gray could hear the early morning songbirds. Time slowed to a molasses drip. The sound of each shuffled foot on the sidewalk was heightened. Carried on the wind was the faint scent of sugar maples from the opposite side of the development.
“What the hell are you doing?” Gray said, the gun at his side lowered but clearly visible.
Vincent looked strung-out. “I can love,” he said, thumping his fist across his chest with each quiet word. “I want you to know that. I want you to know a man like me can exist. I want you to know.”
“Vincent,” Gray said. “Vincent. Vincent. Look at me. Look at me. Help’s on the way, Vincent.”
“Say it!” The bellow reverberated across the cul-de-sac. “I want you to say it.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“There’s nothing,” Vincent said. His shoulders were hunched forward. “There’s nothing I need from you.” He inhaled sharply through his nose, lowered his head, and moved toward the steps.
“Don’t do it. You come in my yard again, something bad’s going to happen.”
“Like what?”
Gray lifted the revolver, held it now with both hands, the barrel pointed impotently off to the side. A recognition of the threat came from someplace deep inside Vincent, it seemed to Gray—rippled in his eyes—and he said quietly: “Don’t shoot me, don’t shoot me.” Then, louder: “Shoot me.” He stood up, and Gray was acutely aware of the fact that Vincent was impossibly tall, enormous, his physique impressive but slovenly; a man who in many ways had let himself go but could still beat your ass into the ground if he had to.
This was the man that now climbed the stairs. His arms were out to his sides in invitation. “Shoot me.” As he approached, his eyes widened in frenzy. Gray would say later that he was sure Vincent had started to run at him then, that Vincent was looking to break into their home and cause damage to Gray’s property or family. Gray would tell the police that he had fired only in self-defense. He was sure he had shot Vincent in the abdomen—was certain it hadn’t been that bad—but saw when they loaded him into the ambulance that he had shot him in the head at near point-blank range. It was only later, with the horrible benefit of time alone that prison afforded him, that he wondered if, held within the instant before pulling the trigger, he had shifted the gun upwards. That in the hair’s-breadth moment of time before he squeezed back against the trigger, he had actually decided to put a bullet in the man’s head. He couldn’t know. Not really. Not with any certainty. No one could. Right? Gray’s phone buzzed in his lap.
“Dad, what the fuck?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know what it’s about. The pills. My medicine. I need those. Did you take them?”
“Pills? Are you taking pills?” Gray could feel it deep in his soul: the shame, unutterable. Shit shit shit.
“Do not. Do not even.”
“I really don’t know what to tell you.”
“Come clean with me. Just do that. If nothing else, do that. Either you took them or you didn’t. They were all here before you got here and now they’re gone.”
“They’re all gone?”
“Did. You. Take. Them.”
This was the moment. Gray could feel the words bubbling up within him: a moment of honesty. A spirit of integrity filled his soul. The words that were necessary: I’m sorry. I love you. I’m sorry. As though guided by an unseen force, he could feel the energy needed to say them.
A deer jumped across the lane in front of him. Gray jerked the wheel and his car moved onto the shoulder to try to go around it, but the deer, startled, turned back. Gray ran into it head-on, its carcass thumping across the top of his car, spidering the windshield. The car hydroplaned as he wrenched the wheel in the opposite direction. The front of his car left the road and smashed into a tree trunk, spinning him even more until he crashed through the guardrail and down into the muddy embankment.
At some point Gray realized he was upside down. The deer, he thought. There’s a deer. Couldn’t quite remember why. He’d missed the kill shot, after all, and when Dad had found the poor thing again, its bloody belly rose and fell with each wheezing pant. Dad handed Gray the knife, but he just—he couldn’t. Dad had wordlessly slit the deer’s neck in one great spurt of blood and struggle and field-dressed it while Gray sat on the toboggan a few yards away, softly crying. They dragged it back to the truck and the disappointment from his father rippled outward. A thing to be measured in decades.
Gray unbuckled his seatbelt and fell in a crumpled mass of pain. He was still able to open the door and stood panting by the side of his car. He just needed to speak to Isaac; he needed to talk to his son. There was something important he needed to tell him, or perhaps it was something he needed to ask him. He couldn’t quite remember. His phone was somewhere in the mud. There were no sirens yet, he realized, but they would be here soon. They’d want to stop him. They’d make him stop and check if he was all right but there wasn’t enough time for that. There was no more time.
Someone, another driver, stood at the top of the embankment with a flashlight so bright it left Gray blind even after he looked away. “Are you okay?” the voice said. “Are you all right?”
Gray moved away from the voice, following as best he could the road to where Isaac was waiting for him. As he walked he heard the voice say, “Wait a minute—help’s on the way.”
“It’s all right,” Gray shouted up the hill toward the voice. “I’m just going back. I just have to go back.” The man shouted something else but Gray ignored him. In the other car’s headlights he could see the doe’s carcass slumped over the guardrail. If he’d done nothing, if he’d just stayed in his lane, it would have lived. He’d be on his way back to see Isaac right now. He remembered what it was he needed to tell Isaac. Repeated it to himself as a cadence while he walked: I’m sorry. I love you. I’m sorry. I love you. He endeavored to remember the words but in the confusion his mind soon shifted to how his good intentions had only ever made anything worse; how they had only made everything so much worse. Gray knew then that he had squeezed the rest of his life into the blank space between aiming and firing. Had settled into the moment and let it hide him. It was in that space—no longer than a single quick pulse of blood— that he could find some sort of peace. There wasn’t room in here for anybody else. It was just a second, but it made all the difference. It was here that the life he was living was just another possibility, another unmade choice among all the other made and unmade choices that stretched out in front of and behind him: a gunshot, a marriage, wet hair. A cold deer stand and a shaky aim. He followed the road back toward his son, but in the mud and rain and dark he could not tell if he made any progress.
Austin Ross’s fiction and essays have been or will soon be featured in Literary Hub, Hobart, Necessary Fiction, Lost Balloon, and elsewhere. He is an editorial consultant at CRAFT Literary and lives near Washington, D.C., with his family. Visit austinrossauthor.com for more.
Pontoon volume 1 available now. Features short stories by Austin Ross and nine other fantastic writers, poems by Leigh Chadwick and Tiffany Belieu, and an interview with MM Carrigan, editor of Taco Bell Quarterly.
