Bret Johnston

Crimson flyers feather the mailboxes on both sides of Up River Road. There are acres of tall blue-stem grass sprawling between the houses, but the emptiness seems to have contracted with the chilled air. November in Texas. In the morning sun, the hills are ochre and rust and dry green. My husband is already at work, an hour’s drive away. My son and I have come out to scatter corn and sunflower seeds for the deer. They’re waiting in the brush, over a dozen of them, mostly whitetail doe and their fawns, but also bucks and dark, huffing Sika. Maybe Uno is with them, maybe not. When Old Man Landry drives by in his pickup, the flyers lift and fall like they’re on disturbed water. If he waves to us, I miss it.

The wind carries in cedar smoke from a faraway chimney and the flyers twist. They look to be affixed with a single piece of tape. Tomorrow is the deer harvest. There was a notice in our weekly paper, the Comfort Compass, reminding everyone not to feed the deer or go outside until the shooting ends at dusk. A mile down the road, the flyer on the Ulrichs’s mailbox flaps loose and floats over the patchy grass into the stand of elms.

Travis, our son, turned four last week. He’s wearing a karate gi and his father’s boots, clomping behind me, dispensing deer corn from a plastic pitcher. He fusses if he’s not the one to feed them. Flat slabs of limestone line our property. Travis calls them deer plates. He takes care to distribute their food evenly. After pouring each mound, he steps back and assesses his work like a painter.

I’m halfway to the mailbox before I can read the flyers. Everything seizes up. It’s as if the world has turned its full attention on me. A ragged cloud passes over the sun. Somewhere, the thin odor of kerosene. Then Travis is bounding beside me, then ahead, chopping and kicking the air like a miniature ninja. He does a lopsided cartwheel and one of his father’s boots flies off. He cackles, smiling like he planned the move. I laugh, too, for him. Our voices carry.

I snatch the flyer from our mailbox. The words above the headshot are bolded black: Sex Offender Alert.

Travis jumps up and down, trying to see. He says, “Is that for my party?”

“Not this time, chalupa,” I say. “Your birthday was last week, remember?”

His party was a karate-themed affair, a huge success; all the neighbors brought their kids. Ever since, he’s been wearing his gi and breaking twigs with hi-yah chops.

“Then what are they for? All the mailers have them.” He calls mailboxes mailers.

He surveys Up River Road, the rutted gravel and the flyers that, without a breeze, hang like drying meat. He says, “Are there a million of them?”

He nods once, slowly, which makes him seem uncomfortably wise.

Then he yells, “Karate chop!” and whacks the flyer out of my hand. In the brush, the deer watch us. Their ears twitch.

Travis picks up the flyer and studies the picture, then says, “Papa!”

“Papa’s on all the mailers! Papa, Papa, Papa!”

“He sure is,” I say. “Right there for the world to see.”

Most people around here will say we live outside of Comfort, or in the Hill Country, but really it’s just the middle of nowhere. Unless you count the Dairy Queen inside the truck stop on the highway, the nearest restaurant is thirty miles away. When Travis starts kindergarten, it will be a ninety minute roundtrip drive. My big plan is to volunteer as a teacher’s aide or get a job at The Dollar Tree. I go into Kerrville once a month for groceries; we have an extra freezer in the garage. If we run out of aspirin or peanut butter, I bolt for the truck stop. It’s also where we rent movies and buy salt blocks for the deer. There’s a minor emergency clinic an hour away, but for big trouble, people out here use HALO flights. When Wild Bill Garza accidentally shot his nephew in the leg last year, the helicopter landed in the scrub behind our house. For the rest of hunting season, the Comfort Compass was inundated with letters to the editor complaining that the chopper had scared away all the game. We lived in Corpus for years, but the city felt claustrophobic. We wanted acres between us and our neighbors.

Hector, my husband, works at Holiday World, selling rifles and propane and camper trailers. In Corpus, he sold lumber, then meat at a butcher shop, then used tires. “Wetback work,” he called it, jokingly, because he’s Mexican. On his drive home every Friday, he stops at The Dollar Tree and buys gifts for us: plastic fire trucks, boxes of chocolate, compilation CDs. One time he showed up with three Styrofoam pith helmets and we wore them all weekend. “Let’s go on a safari,” he said. We drove the back roads and handed each other binoculars to look at mules and squirrels and a red-tail hawk flying with a dead snake in its talons. Hector loves animals, especially wolves. At least half of his T-shirts have wolves on them. He also tends to anthropomorphize things. Eighteen-wheelers remind him of whales, and pump-jacks in oil fields make him think of whinnying horses. Before we left Corpus, we carried what we couldn’t fit in our car and truck to the curb, and he made a sign that read: Free To A Good Home. As if the old armchair and chipped plates were kittens. He’s a decent man, a good man. Trust me.

The law requires convicted sex offenders to register with the county when they move. Hector is religious about it. He heads to the courthouse and files the paperwork, almost impatiently, as if he’s working toward a prize. As if he thinks someone will notice his vigilance and admit the whole thing was a mistake and strike his name from the hideous list. Really, people just look at him aslant. They assess him, memorize his eyes and gait and wolf shirts, seeking out all the ways he seems comfortingly unlike them. They whisper and put their hands on their children’s shoulders, as if he might lunge for them. Hector has never lunged at anything in his life. I’m the lunger. In each new place, I ask him not to register. I beg him to just lay low and coast, to give us a chance. He never budges. Then some bored housewife or unemployed Republican goes online and searches the database. Then the flyers appear. Then the phone calls start. Then the bricks crash through our windows. Then we move, foolishly thinking the next place will be safe.

Mark Ulrich. My bet is he’s behind the flyers. He comes on like the mayor of Up River, leading the deer harvest and policing the neighborhood to see who’s watering their grass during the drought. Ulrich’s a welder who tucks his camouflage T-shirts into camouflage pants and wears mirrored sunglasses and chews on cinnamon toothpicks. He and Lynette have seven-year-old twins, Dallas and Houston; at Travis’s party, he took them aside to practice roundhouse kicks in a way that seemed hateful. Lynnette and I are close by default. Neither of us works and we’re about the same age. She’s told me she’s getting him a radio-controlled helicopter and an embossed bible for Christmas. “Those things only last about a year over here,” she said, and I couldn’t tell which one she was talking about. Ulrich hosts a prayer group on his patio every Wednesday night, requires his boys to call him Sir, and recently installed a massive flagpole in his front yard. Every morning he hoists two flags: one for Texas and one for POWs.

When we moved in, the Ulrichs brought us a loaf of Amish friendship bread and the HALO kit. The kit consists of paperwork you fill out with your family’s medical history and a large Ziploc bag to hold it. You store the kit in your icebox. When the HALO crew arrives, the first thing they do is rush to the fridge to grab your information, checking for drug allergies and such. After the Ulrichs left, I told Hector that Mark would be the one to stir trouble.

“Not a chance,” Hector said. “He’s probably running, too. He’s probably got a safe-room filled with canned food and gas masks.”

Travis is standing at the window, watching the deer blend into the brush after eating. Soon the turkeys will come to peck at what’s left behind. The birds are the size of German Shepherds. I’ve started thinking of them as a gang of grotesque hooligans, the way they strut around with their terrible heads held high. They scare Travis.

I wipe the counter with a sponge. I glance outside, and now that the sun is higher, the flyers seem a more lurid shade of red. When I look away, they stay in my vision. Like I’ve stared into an eclipse. The flyers will sink Hector. They always do.

“Uno must not be hungry yet,” Travis says. He’s pressing his forehead to the windowpane.

Uno is a small buck with one three-point antler. Hector named him. We tell Travis stories about him at night and he draws pictures of him that we hang on the fridge. At his birthday party last week, there was a present from Uno. I wrote a card that said To Travis, Love Uno and beside the name, Hector drew a hoof print. I saved it. We haven’t seen Uno in days.

“He might be sleeping,” I say, “or he might be off having adventures.”

“Uno only has one horn,” he says, mashing his cheek to the glass. “There are a million deer in the world, but they don’t look like Uno.”

“He’s mighty fine,” Travis says. “We just don’t know where he is anymore.”

Old Man Landry drives by again, heading up the hill. There’s a .308 with a scope on the rack in the truck’s rear window.

“The turkeys are coming.” His voice timid and small.

Then I hear them, their noises like something being choked.

For most of the morning, Travis and I play a game he invents on the fly; it amounts to my chasing and apprehending him, then him busting loose with a karate flourish and leading me into a different part of the house to begin again. In each room, I can’t stop myself from considering which things Hector and I will cart to the curb before we move. Louisiana? Florida? Or somewhere with snow. Colorado or Utah or Wyoming. When Travis gets tuckered out, I set him up on the couch with a DVD Hector’s parents sent us. The cartoon follows a stowaway mouse and a peg-legged pirate and a whale, but beyond that I’m clueless. It’s in Spanish. I turn up the volume and dip into the kitchen. I call Holiday World, but Hector’s with a customer.

The hang-ups from blocked numbers commence after lunch. Travis naps in our bed, and I pick up each call before the second ring to keep from waking him. After the first few dial tones, I answer every call by saying “Longoria residence, go fuck yourself.”

“Somebody must have gone to finishing school,” Lynnette Ulrich says on the line. Her voice rattles me. I stopped checking caller ID half an hour ago and hadn’t expected anyone to speak.

“I have a GED in etiquette,” I say. Then, because the joke sounds so forced, I say, “People keep calling and hanging up. Travis’s asleep.”

“Y’all should’ve told us,” she says. “That’s the consensus in these parts.”

“He registered with the county. That’s the requirement.”

“Everyone is thinking about the birthday party, how Hector was in such close proximity to the children.”

“No one had anything to worry about.”

“I guess whoever printed up those flyers disagrees.”

“How is Mark?” I say before I can stop myself.

“Mark? You think Mark had something—”

“Is he excited to wage war on the deer? Is he organizing an emergency bible study to pray that we’ll hit the road?”

“You’re in no position to cast stones, Rhonda. I called to be neighborly, to give you a head’s up.”

“Just that everyone’s in a lather, and to remind you that y’all are all alone and the cavalry has to be flown in by helicopter.”

“We don’t need the cavalry. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I probably agree with you,” she says, sounding gentle, conciliatory. “But there’s a bunch of hairy-legged men who see it differently, and come tomorrow morning, they’ll be creeping behind your property with rifles and hollow-tipped bullets.”

This year’s goal is to harvest forty-two white-tail doe and twenty-seven Sika. Those numbers came after a wildlife management team surveyed the soil and vegetation, factoring in the drought and the weights of deer that were tagged last season. Then they ran an ad for volunteer harvesters in the classified section of the Comfort Compass and put Ulrich in charge. He’s the one who sent out the notice about not feeding the deer in the days before the harvest. By depriving the deer of our food, we’ll force them to venture into the shooting lanes. Another harvest goal is to target any “inferior” white-tailed bucks. I told Hector that they might as well have printed Wanted posters with Uno’s picture on them. That was weeks ago, and even then, I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth. Even then, I knew I wouldn’t be able to outrun their sad echo.

The last time I called Holiday World more than once in a day was the afternoon I found a rattlesnake coiled on our porch. The thing had a slow black tongue and was longer than a fencepost. Travis and I ate waxy slices of cheese in front of the window, watching the snake soak up the heat. I called Hector with hourly reports.

So when I call again today, he’s worried.

“Flyers,” I say. “Every mailbox.”

“And a lot of hang-up calls,” I say. “I’m sure jackass Ulrich did the flyers.”

His composure surprises me. It needles me. I wonder if his boss is nearby. I say, “I talked to Lynnette. She says people are worried about Travis’s party.”

“That makes sense,” he says. “I still don’t think we can jump to conclu—”

“The conclusion I’m jumping to is that tomorrow’s the harvest and I don’t trust where these good old boys’ll be aiming.”

“I’ll stop by the Ulrichs’s tonight. I’ll explain everything. No problemo.”

“Come home,” I say, surprising myself. “Say Travis’s sick. Or say I am. Say you have to leave right away. I can start packing and we’ll be gone by midnight.”

“Hush,” he says. “I’ll visit with them and everything’ll be mighty fine.”

We grew up in Goliad, Texas, which is flat and poor and if it’s known for anything, it’s The Hanging Tree—a thick sprawling oak where hundreds of men were hanged in the Cart War. Hector and I used to climb the tree as kids. We also shared a pediatrician and school teachers, caught chickenpox the same year, and raised goats in the 4-H Club. A black and white picture of the 4-H Club hangs in our hallway, and in the bottom right corner of the frame, we’re standing beside each other with our goats. Hector likes pointing this out to guests—last week, he showed it off at Travis’s birthday party—and because the camera caught him looking vaguely in my direction, he says he already had his eye on me. People smile hearing this. Women elbow their husbands, meaning, Why can’t you be that romantic? He’s twelve in the photo; I’m nine. In high school, when everything fell apart between my parents and me, I stayed with Hector’s family. I slept in his sisters’ room. After he graduated, we made our way to Victoria. Then to Pleasanton. Then San Antonio, where a judge pronounced us husband and wife.

“I always thought we’d get married in Goliad, at the church in the square,” Hector said one night in Corpus. I was pregnant with Travis. “I’m sorry that didn’t play out.”

“Maybe we’ll renew our vows there,” he said.

“And maybe the town’ll start using The Hanging Tree again.”

“The Hanging Tree,” he said, his voice wistful. “I haven’t thought of that thing in years.”

“I think about it all the time,” I said. “Every time I see a big oak, I wonder if the branches would hold a noose.”

Once I’m off the phone with Hector, the hang-ups begin again, so I disconnect the line. Travis is still napping. I pace the house. My chest tightens. My veins tingle like there’s sand in my blood. I move from room to room, peering through each window and then shutting the blinds.

“Why is it night now?” Travis asks. His gi is hanging open like a robe and his hair is standing in a sleep Mohawk. He’s emerged to find the living room in shadow.

I’m on the sofa, feeling like I’ve crept into a house, a life, to which I have no claim. For a moment, I recognize nothing: the crayons and sheets of paper with half-started drawings on the coffee table; the television with the three happy faces traced in the scrim of dust; the framed poster of two wolves with the caption True Love is Found in the Hearts. Earlier this morning, these things stood as a kind of proof. Now they’re remnants of a dream.

“I wanted to know why it turned to nighttime.”

“I thought it would be fun to feel like the house didn’t have windows,” I say and click on a lamp.

“What if we played your game again?” I say. “Or drew a picture. Or finished your mouse movie.”

“Papa says Uno will come home when he’s good in hungry.”

“Good and hungry,” I say. This is, I think, the first time I’ve ever corrected him, and it nauseates me. Usually, I revel in it. After Wild Bill shot his nephew and the HALO flight scared away all the deer, Travis called helicopters “no-winged planes.” He refers to lightning as “scratches” and blue jeans as “long-sleeved pants.” Oh, I just melt.

“I know,” Travis says now. “When Uno gets good in hungry, he’ll be back.”

I expect him to rush to the window, but he squats at the coffee table and draws a series of pictures in which Uno looks like a cross between a snowman and a bug. Every couple of weeks Hector mails one of these pictures to his parents back in Goliad. I assume my parents still live there, too. But maybe not. Maybe my mother’s smoking bloated her lungs with tumors and she suffocated; maybe my father’s heart gave out while he cleaned a mare’s hooves. Hector used to worry I’d regret not telling them they’d become grandparents so, to appease him, I finally sent a postcard. It read, “Hector and I have a son. You’ll never see him.”

Now, when I peek through the blinds, I’m surprised the sun has gone down. The sky is vast, cloudless. The brush is dense with deer. They’re hungry, antsy. That they don’t know what’s coming in the morning feels shattering. It makes me want to cry, to break every plate in the cupboard, to shoot the poor animals myself. Travis slips into his father’s boots and we go outside.

Bret Johnston

Bret Johnston

Fiction

Winter 2016 - Danger

To A Good Home