A STORY by KEEGAN GORE
The Hush
I was sitting on my porch, enjoying the hush of dusk, when Jack opened the gate and sat on my porch steps, facing away from me.
We were best friends as children. Shot each other with BB guns. Caught toads. Set lit firecrackers in mailboxes. Like brothers, we knew each other too well. Time, of course, changed all that.
“Well, the old man is gone,” he said.
“What happened?” I asked, though I knew what happened. His father’s liver had likely tapped out after years of struggle. Twelve Bloody Marys a day for five decades will do that to you.
Jack faced me. “Croaked,” he said. “Finally.”
I thought Jack’s father was a decent man, but Jack considered him about as useful as a hunk of shit. In fact, to Jack, the shit had a slight edge. Shit also fertilizes plants, spreads seeds. My point is, he’d say its impact is ultimately positive, which is something he would not say about his father.
His distaste had to do with an incident regarding Jack’s mother. He never disclosed exactly what occurred, but whatever it was, it was heavy enough that they had both completely cut off contact with him. I told him I understood. I never liked my old man either.
“Well,” I said. “You want a beer?”
Jack shook his head. “No.”
Above Jack’s head, I caught one bright speck of light near the moon. A planet maybe? Its name or nature I could not be sure of.
Behind me I heard the patter of Mary Anne’s bare feet on the tile. She stood like a spirit at the screen door. “Jeopardy,” she said, as if it were a summoning word, and then she receded into the dark cool of the house.
These days she was drifting about, clutching her heart, unable to sleep. She left half-eaten tangerines and stale slices of bread around, her famously frizzy red hair now somehow straight. Her melancholy had become a difficult subject to broach. I felt it had to do with a shortcoming of mine. My inability to bring in more money as a grocery store clerk, for one. The sorry state of our house, now in desperate need of a new roof. A car that required a jump from our cordial (yet religiously fervent) neighbor Tom just to start. A lifetime of bills and dour weather—perhaps the heat seeped into her brain. A few weeks ago, during the commercial break of our second-favorite program, Family Feud, I almost managed to ask, but I choked embarrassingly, spraying beer all over the TV screen, the question lodged in my windpipe.
Jack rose from the steps and brushed the dirt from his jeans.
“You remember when we were kids?” He asked. “And I showed you my father’s gun?”
I nodded.
“Well, that was his father’s gun,” he said. “From the war.”
“Yes,” I said, absent-mindedly.
“And do you know what I did with it?”
“Hm.” I shook my head.
“Threw it in the lake. Watched it sink to the bottom.”
“Sure,” I said. “It was just a gun.”
“No–” He bit his lip. “It wasn’t just a gun.”
“We all did stupid things when we were kids.”
“He asked me what happened to it, and I told him the truth. I said: I tossed it in the lake.”
“I crashed my old man’s Toyota,” I said.
“That ain’t the same.” He shook his head. “He gave you that car. This wasn’t mine to take.”
Inside, I heard the Jeopardy theme song. Mary Anne and I watched it religiously. Although we never knew the answers, it was comforting to see that somebody, somewhere, did.
“My grandfather, you know, he shot himself in the foot with that gun,” Jack said. “Blew his toes clean off. He said he stepped on a mine. In the hospital the wound got infected, and he lost his leg, but they sent him home.”
“Is that right?” I said, half-listening to Mary Anne hum the Jeopardy theme.
“Yeah.” Jack looked up at the same quivering light I had seen earlier. “He was a boy, really, when he was drafted.”
Jack caught my eye. “And he didn’t want to kill anyone. He was a good man. My Dad called him a coward, but I always thought what he did was brave.”
“People say all sorts of stupid shit, Jack.”
“It took balls, you know, to maim himself like he did. He wasn’t scared to fight. He just didn’t believe it was right to kill another human being, no matter the circumstances.”
I nodded. “Mmhm.”
“I don’t know if I could’ve done that–”
I peered inside to see Mary Anne’s face pale in the TV’s glow. I knew she would stay up all night watching it, well after I retired. Amazing to recall how, on our honeymoon, when we drove out of state to stay at some shitty motel (so we could go swimming in a pool at night), she confided in me, huddled as we were in the perfectly cold water, that she had almost backed out. Not for lack of love, she said, pressing her wet cheek against mine, but for a vision she had of her life laid out before her like the long shadow of a casket. Amazing to recall, not because it confirmed my fears, but because we had once been close enough that she could tell me the truth.
“I never apologized for it,” Jack said.
I shrugged and sipped my warm beer. “You did what you could do.”
“But that’s the thing–” he said, his voice trailing off into the ever-widening hush.
We were both silent for a second until a breeze rattled the dusty windchime above our heads. Those three stray notes somehow harmonized with Mary Anne’s off-key rendition of the Jeopardy theme, causing us to snap out of our reveries.
“Well,” he said, stuffing his hands into his pockets as another limp wind tossed the leaves about. “I best be getting back.
He had a family: Tammy, his high school sweetheart, and Jason, my namesake.
“Right.”
Jack opened the gate slowly. Before he walked off into the dark, he stopped and turned.
“Give Mary Anne my regards,” he said.
I cleared my throat and told him I would, but my voice came out all hoarse. When I was sure he was gone, I took a deep breath and reclined in my chair. Looking up, I caught that planet again. It seemed to flicker brighter and brighter.
At night, when the hush fans out into a deep silence, it can feel like you have a long time to think, though in reality it's almost no time at all. Still, I felt myself sink into the dark for quite a while until, at last, I noticed the television click silent, the pads of her feet down the tile hallway, her sigh, and I got up to go inside.
Keegan Gore is a writer from Orlando, Florida. His work has been published in HAD, Moot Point, Five Points, and BRUISER.