Refresh, Refresh: Stories by Benjamin Percy Page B

wore now, eyeing me with a hand resting on his belly. “I didn’t ask for the thing,” he said, “and I didn’t want it.” He began to rub his belly as if to summon his anger from it like a genie. “And when are you going to learn that quality doesn’t always come with a price tag? Just listen to you. You’re as bad as a Californian.”
    Just then Boo came trotting over to us, grinning around a femur bone with a strip of denim sticking to it. My father said, “Release,” and took the bone and stood there, holding it, staring at it, not knowing what to do. Boo wagged his whole body along with his tail and my father looked at me. What he was feeling then, I didn’t know. His emotion was masked from me, hidden behind his beard.
    We plopped our lines in the South Fork and came away with five rainbow trout, each the size of my forearm. We gutted them and threw their heads in the river. We fried them in a pan with a few strips of bacon. We ate and drank and sat in silence. The only sound was the rushing of the river and the occasional crack of an opened Coors can. My father was like a still-life painting, his hand on Boo’s head, motionless and watching the fire with a detached expression.
    I wanted to shake him and hit him and hug him at once. I wanted to get back in the Bronco and return the way we came. I considered sleeping on the bare ground, but the gathering clouds and the nearness of the dead man drove me inside the musty tent.
    I woke to absolute darkness and the dull even noise of rainfall. The entire world seemed to hiss. I clicked on my flashlight, revealing a tent that drooped and breathed around me with many damp spots dripping and pattering my sleeping bag.
    Have you ever noticed, when you lay your head to your pillow and listen— really listen—you can hear footsteps? This is your pulse, the veins in your ear swelling and constricting, slightly shifting against the cotton. I heard this now—a sort of under sound, beneath the rain—only my head was nowhere near my pillow. I had propped myself up on my elbow.
    There it was. Or was I only imagining it? The rasping thud a foot makes in wet grass—one moment behind the tent, the next moment before it, circling.
    Before I went to bed, as a sort of afterthought, I had tied shut the front flaps. Now they billowed open with the breeze, the breeze bearing the keen wet odor of rabbitbrush, a smell I will always associate with barbed-wire fences, with dying, with fear.
    Perhaps the knot had come undone with the wind or perhaps my father had risen to pee. Outside, thousands of raindrops caught my flashlight’s beam and brightened with it. I imagined something out there, rushing in—how easy it would be—its shape taking form as it moved from darkness into light.
    My father released a violent snore. I spotlit him with the flashlight, wanting to tell him shh . His fingers twitched like the legs of the dreaming dog he draped his arm over. His mouth formed silent words, his eyeballs shuddered beneath his eyelids, and I wondered what was going on in there, inside of him.
    Morning, a sneezing fit woke me. And after I wiped the gunk from my eyes and pulled on my jeans, I discovered outside the dewy grass trampled down, and before the tent, a boot. Its leather was badly torn and discolored, as if it had passed through the digestive tract of a large animal. I stepped around it, keeping an eye on it, on my way to the firepit. We had stored some wood in the tent with us and I kindled it now with newspaper and boiled water for coffee.
    The smell of the grounds woke my father. He emerged from the tent in his white T-shirt and his once-white BVDs. He stretched and yawned dramatically and the noise brought Boo from the tent. Boo promptly picked up the boot with his teeth and presented it to my father as a cat would a dead mouse. “Goddamnit, Boo,” my father said and picked up the boot and shook it at him. “Bad dog. Bad dog.” Boo yipped once and cocked his head in