Wilder flexes his fingers inside his gloves to work feeling back into the tips. Four years in Oakhurst’s mountains haven’t beaten the Southern Californian out of him—barely into December, the mornings are sitting steady around twenty-eight degrees, and here he is, six AM, already frozen through. It’s Monday, the last full week of work for the logging season. There is a snow coming.
The rest of the crew relaxes at a separate table in metal folding chairs, unconcerned with the cold or the early hour or Wilder. He sips his coffee and listens to their talk. Preseason basketball scores, betting pools, school starting up after break, bills and wives and family inconveniences. One of Tracy’s kids, his only girl, is puking her guts up every morning, her boyfriend nowhere to be found. The men grow quiet at that, mutter until Tracy changes the subject. He’s looking to sell his ATV—needs to save up. The offers come in fast, generous for a four-wheeler that hasn’t run properly since last season. Tracy doesn’t take the offers right away, doesn’t want to thief anyone out of a paycheck.
Then Corey settles into his chair across from Wilder, mug in hand.
“You have a smoke?” Wilder says.
Corey passes a Spirit across the table, pinched between his pointer and middle fingers. “Think Tracy’s girl will go to Fresno?” he says.
Wilder fidgets in his chair, uneasy. There are doctors in Fresno who could solve her problem. He doesn’t like thinking of it as a problem. He doesn’t like thinking of it at all. Calliope. It takes him a minute to come to the name, still, it feels too familiar. Only met her a few times, in passing at potlucks that capped off the seasons. Little thing, shorter than the five brothers that herded around her, but sturdy like her father. She’d laughed loud enough for anyone at the potlucks to hear, open-mouthed, unembarrassed. She must be sixteen now. Wilder pockets the cigarette. “Tracy wouldn’t let her.”
“Couldn’t stop the girl the first time, what’s different now?”
“He’s trying to make ends meet,” Wilder says.
“Could kick her out,” Corey says.
“But he’s her dad.”
“He is.”
“No man here would do that—kick their kid out like that.”
Corey slants his eyes sideways at Wilder, shoulders stiff in his jacket. “I need more coffee,” Corey says. He picks up both of their mugs and heaves himself up from the table. Corey got like that sometimes, ending conversations before they start.
Corey walks past the other men to get to the coffee, and they shut up when he gets within ten feet. Not like when Tracy talked about his pregnant daughter and they thought, for a moment, about their own daughters. No, this quiet cleaves through the middle of a sentence and settles hard in the set of their jaws.
“Keeping that bed warm again this winter?” Tracy says. He smiles, lips curling smug behind his coffee. The men laugh.
Corey says nothing. Wilder can’t see his face, but he knows it’s smooth, as if he didn’t hear. The rigidity of his movements, spine too straight, gives him away. Tracy turns to Wilder, holds his gaze as if he’s spoiling to hurt him. Wilder is suddenly aware of the cold, how it sinks into his skin and coaxes the hairs along his spine to attention. His fingers tighten reflexively, the urge of a man who uses his fists more than words. Tracy smiles again, with the same kind of smug recklessness as before, as if he’ll take the fight, as if he’ll win.
There is a moment where Wilder can almost ignore the whole thing—write it off as Tracy’s mood, his pregnant teenager, the helplessness of lost control. It would be better to reach for pity, simpler, but he hesitates. That bed. Tracy talking to them both. The eyes of the crew turning to him and away from Tracy. All Wilder has in him is angry.
Then Corey is back with the mugs and nothing else to offer in the wake of Tracy’s words or the men’s laughter. Wilder takes his coffee and presses his palms against the warm ceramic. “You’d think they’d spring for better coffee with the season wrapping,” Corey says.
Wilder nods. “Winter is no time to carry,” he says.
“You’re still on Tracy’s kid?”
“Ain’t nothing else to talk about.”
“Why should either of us give a fuck what his little girl did?” Corey’s eyes flick to the area behind Wilder’s head, to the table of other men. “There’s tough shit all over.” He says it like there’s nothing anyone can do to convince him otherwise. The world is always turning, and Tracy’s kid is just another person left in the spin. “The quicker she figures that out, the better,” Corey says. And that is that.
The men are talking again, but their voices are lower, too low for Wilder to hear. And as Corey stares past him, Wilder knows they’re talking about Corey, and that Corey knows it too.
…
Wilder met Corey four months after moving to Oakhurst when Wilder managed to get a spot on the logging crew mid-season. The guy he replaced, Corey had told him, got crushed when a cable on the skidder shook loose and sent the carcass of a tree tumbling until it hit something solid—a twenty-year faller named Jacob Brooks. Wilder hadn’t known what a skidder was, just nodded and tried to ignore the way his body puckered at Corey’s casual attitude. When he thought about Jacob, Wilder pictured a sausage microwaved too long, casing burst and insides squealing steam into the cold air. When Wilder asked if Corey was scared of the same thing happening to him, Corey laughed.
“If I get hit by a tree, I’ll be dead before I can be afraid,” Corey had said. Wilder can still remember the trees. Huge pines with dark, almost black trunks and a clean, earthy scent he associated with hardware stores and Christmas. They had creaked in the cold, groaned like living things, and Corey had lifted a gloved middle finger into the air. “We’re trying to kill them before they kill us.” He offered Wilder a seat at his empty table.
They fell in step together after that. Same table, same stale coffee, same company before call time. Later, Wilder suggested their winter arrangement. They’d split rent in the off season when they both took jobs in town—Wilder at the Best American, and Corey at the Chevron. Wilder’s cabin was one room, one bed, half bath, set far into the trees off the forty-one that runs straight to Yosemite, just out of the way enough to feel like it wasn’t really part of Oakhurst.
The first two months they lived together, they switched between the couch and bed, but no amount of secondhand, threadbare quilts, or pride could get Wilder through a twenty degree winter. Used to dry, desert heat well into December, he caved. One night, two AM, fully dressed with his boots on, and teeth chattering together, Wilder dragged himself and his blankets across the room and told Corey to move over. Sleeping shoved together in a twin back to back under all the blankets in the cabin and their work jackets was better than risking toes blackened from frost. After that, they shared the bed. More than once they pitched saving for a cot, but rent, beer, Spirits, time, got in the way. Then, faster than they could decide, it was back to work once Spring came through.
…
Corey is already at The Dirty Donkey when Wilder gets there, but the girl next to him grabs Wilder’s attention first. Her little red top sets Wilder’s heart racing. Her hair, deep black highlighted red by the bar’s neon, falls down her back in a thick braid that ends just below the bare strip of skin at her waist. Corey will have to move.
Wilder takes the open seat next to the girl. She smiles at something Corey said, the punchline to a story about the time his father fell asleep beneath a car he was fixing up. For a moment Wilder feels he may be out of his league with a girl who hasn’t looked at him. She
laughs with Corey, her hair sways with her shoulders, and his mind is blank, nothing to say, nothing to offer. Wilder knows from too many nights spent watching girls grow comfortable with Corey’s storytelling that he sees a way in with them that Wilder cannot.
Corey smiles his handsome smile and leans back from this girl, gesturing with his bottle.
“This is my friend, Wilder,” he says. “He’s got better stories than me.”
The girl turns to Wilder, her eyes sweeping down then up with a boldness that forces him to take stock. He knows he is still dirty from the day’s work, hair greasy and sticking out at odd angles from beneath an Oakland A’s cap. There is dirt on his fingers and up his arms, and the bridge of his nose is ruddy with the cold. He thinks Corey is much the same, but maybe more comfortable in it.
“That’s a tall order,” she says. She tips her thumb towards her chest. “Katie.” There is a heat in Wilder’s cheeks as he leans into her scrutiny. He tells himself that this isn’t charity, Corey doesn’t want to take her home.
“Tell her about the opossum we caught in the garage,” Corey says.
“Oh, yeah,” Wilder says. “Thing screamed bloody murder whenever we got close. Bit the shit out of me. Tore clean through to the bone with its little needle teeth, got blood all over the both of us and my truck going to the hospital—looked like my calf had been dipped in chalk by the time we got there. Rabies shots sucked. Still have this gnarly scar if you want to see.”
She pushes the coaster in front of her around with the bottom of her bottle, concentrates on it as if she’s talking to it instead of Wilder. “That’s funny,” she says.
He can see her face: nose wrinkled, mouth flat, like maybe she can smell the day’s work on him. Is she bored or just a quiet drunk? Maybe she’s been here a while. Corey watches them sideways, turned away as if to give them privacy. He swallows around a drying throat.
“You got a bed here in town?” Wilder says. Corey flinches behind her and Wilder feels as if the ground beneath him has suddenly shifted, he has made a decision but he’s not sure how. He didn’t think this through and now he is stumbling. Katie’s face is tight, all of it twisting down towards her pursed lips. “It’s just that it gets cold at night—pretty girl like you shouldn’t have to deal with bad heating.”
“Right,” she says, her beer clunking hollowly against the bartop.
Then Corey has the bartender, pointing to their beers, to Wilder’s empty hand. “If you’re here in town, I know my way about,” Wilder says. “I got a truck. Could give you a lift back to your place. Tell you some stories there.”
The bartender offers three fresh bottles and Katie raises a hand, palm out and flat, as if pushing herself away from a wall. “No, thanks,” she says. Wilder isn’t sure who she’s talking to for a moment, then she pulls out her wallet.
“We got it,” Corey says. He tosses down a few bills before Wilder can.
Katie says, “Catch you some other time.” She doesn’t look at Wilder.
“Get home safe,” Wilder says. Then Katie is out the door and it’s just Corey and Wilder again with Katie’s beer between them.
Corey watches Wilder in the mirror behind the bar, his teeth working over the inside of his cheek. He passes her beer over. “Girls, right?” he says.
Wilder brings the bottle to his lips before he speaks again. Katie sized him up and found him wanting. Now, with her beer in his hands instead of her body, he isn’t sure what he’s done wrong. He has always had this trouble with women. He’s been called handsome, but boyish. When he smiles in the bathroom mirror, his cheeks dimple, and the slight crookedness of his incisors give him the look of a child just beginning to realize he is lost. A mix of trust and confusion. He can never find purchase in a conversation, and it is obvious.
Sometimes, when he says something stupid—maybe he is at a bar and there is a girl and maybe she says something he thinks is funny about how the heel on her favorite shoe broke and maybe he will laugh a little too harshly—it is only when he sees the crumpled look of embarrassment on Corey’s face that he understands and will say, “I’m sorry.”
“She wasn’t that pretty,” Wilder says.
Corey raises his bottle and that settles things.
Most nights during the off season Corey and Wilder meet at The Donkey after work, to drink until the cold leaves their bones enough to survive the cabin. This night, a hard ball of worry sits in his stomach next to the beer. Corey’s silence and the look on Tracy’s face. That bed. They didn’t talk about Tracy’s jab during work. But now, with the way he’s slipping, Wilder has to hold onto something.
Frosty condensation melts into his palm as Wilder grips his bottle. “You’ve been on the crew longer than me,” he says.
“No shit,” Corey says.
“So how come I’m the only one you hang with?”
“If you don’t want to drink we can go home.”
The ease Corey has with the word home sets Wilder on edge. “Nah, it’s not that,” Wilder says. Then, “Don’t you have friends in Coarsegold?”
Corey swirls the beer in his bottle by the neck. “No,” he says. “The beer sucks tonight.” The bartender glances their way and they raise their half-full bottles. She doesn’t smile. Wilder waits for the bustle of the bar to overtake them before trying again. “They don’t like you.”
“You want me to tell you why.’” Corey taps an unsteady rhythm into his bottle with his pinky nail. “You know why.”
It’s true; Wilder knows, and now he’s implicated. Corey carries himself different, takes up less space than the men around him. Always quiet, like a dog taking measure of its surroundings, prepared to bite if kicked one time too many. It’s reactionary, the core of him coiled tight around the possibilities people see in him. He never brings girls home, just plays wingman for Wilder at The Donkey. How many Katies could Corey have taken home? Then there are the men at camp and the way they watch Corey—the way he accepts their watching. Now, they are watching Wilder.
Wilder looks down at his drink, the thing in his stomach growing, pushing bile into his throat. “You didn’t tell them,” he says.
The bartender looks at them again, and Wilder considers calling her over, interrupting the conversation. He wants more beer, enough to swim in, even though it feels like nothing will fit in his stomach.
“Sure,” Corey says. He kills the last of his beer and raises two fingers to the bartender, pointing to his empty bottle and then Wilder’s. “Didn’t have to tell you either.”
Wilder doesn’t stop the bartender from handing him a fresh bottle, but he doesn’t take it immediately either. He stares down at it next to his other, mostly empty one, and thinks about Tracy.
“We only have one bed,” Wilder says.
“You’ve just caught up?” Corey says. He knocks the butt of his bottle against the mouth of Wilder’s, sending Wilder scrambling to stop up the foam. “Stop being so fucking slow.” Wilder wants to hit him, to say “I’m not slow,” but Corey is waiting. There’s a rigidity to his movements, fake casual, slumped forward over the bar with a face gone too smooth. He knows what he’s doing.
Instead, Wilder says: “You gotta find a different place to stay.”
There’s a shift, a sudden relaxing of Corey’s jaw and shoulders. He smiles, loose, easy. He waves the bartender over, points out their empties. Corey pulls out his wallet. “We only have one bed,” he says to her, still smiling. “Keep the change.” Corey gets up from his seat and leaves Wilder there. The bartender picks up Corey’s bottles. She’s seen them drunk together so many times. He wants to tell her that Corey is in a bad mood, that he is lying. She’s seen Wilder take girls home. Why can’t she look at him? Slipping—he’s slipping.
That morning Tracy had smirked like he’d take any fight offered. Alone at the bar, Wilder wishes he’d taken the swing.
…
Wilder left the Donkey two beers and thirty minutes after Corey. In the parking lot, next to Wilder’s truck, a Spirit tucked between his lips and two more crushed at his feet, Corey waited. The coals lit his face in orange relief every few seconds. Carved out by the glow and harsh shadows, Wilder thought he looked smug, as if he’d won something just by waiting him out. They didn’t say anything, just piled in and drove off, heater cranked high. The silence lasted until the lights of Oakhurst faded away and Wilder turned onto the dirt road that led to his cabin.
“You don’t have that much stuff,” Wilder says. “It won’t take long for you to get it together.”
“Don’t be such a bitch about it,” Corey says.
“I’m not,”
Corey turns on the radio, switches off Wilder’s only CD. Metallica, Master of Puppets. It was the only one he brought with him to Oakhurst, because the player built into his radio doesn’t open anymore. Usually, if he plays anything, he plays Metallica turned low enough to be covered by the rumble of the engine.
The casters of a local news station fuzz in and out the further into the trees that they drive. It started to snow when they were in the bar, and beneath the static the weather girl talks about sledding season. The more she talks, the tighter Wilder grips the steering wheel.
Winters, they always spent nights lazy. Packs of Spirits strewn on the coffee table. The television on. Sometimes, Corey would read the dogeared wilderness guides Wilder’s landlord had left laying around. They would drink. Ignore each other. Then, go to sleep.
“You didn’t have to tell the bartender that shit about the bed,” Wilder says. “You’re pretty fucked up about it,” Corey says.
“Yeah, and you’re not.”
“It’s just a bed.”
Wilder tunes back to his CD and raises the volume until he can feel the music through the steering wheel. Maybe it’s the beer, maybe it’s the snow or the heater or the way the music pounds against his head, but Wilder’s world feels like it is shifting. He doesn’t slow down, just tries to focus on the headlights and the way the snow cuts across the narrow strip of road. They are close to home. His home.
“Why do you care what Tracy says, then?” Wilder says. It is unfair. He knows it’s unfair. Corey turns to look at him, his arms tight across his chest, and Wilder thinks there is a kind of hurt in Corey’s eyes, a wetness, that he has never seen before. He doesn’t feel bad for the asking. This is important.
“I’m just saying,” Wilder raises his voice above the music, “that I’m the only one you talk to.”
Corey turns off the radio. “You’re not from here,” he says.
“I’ve lived here for years.”
“It’s not like that.”
All his adult life, Wilder has felt he hasn’t quite understood things. The lectures at his community college, how to talk to women, the way Corey fights. Now, with Corey’s sad, self-assured face staring at him, and the creeping suspicion that he’s in the wrong, he takes one, slow breath. “Then fucking enlighten me,” he says.
“No,” Corey says. Then, quieter, “What do you think is going to happen to Tracy’s daughter?”
“I don’t get it.”
“Every asshole here has an opinion. How do you think this works out for her?”
“I don’t know,” Wilder says.
His neck hurts, tense with the promise of a headache. He isn’t sure if he wants Tracy’s daughter—or the idea of her—to have a kid or not. He wants her to make her own decision. He doesn’t want to have to think about what that decision means. It doesn’t involve him and without the threat of Tracy trying to start shit, he feels like a voyeur. The more he thinks about Tracy’s daughter, and having to carry a baby with Oakhurst watching, or pictures her kicked onto the street, the more he’s certain he shouldn’t know the answer. All it does is make him sad. “There’s no good option,” he says.
“There it is,” Corey says. “For once you figured something out yourself.” He sinks back into the seat, body hanging slack. “There’s no version of this where she doesn’t do exactly what she needs to survive,” he says. “Same as any of us.”
…
When Wilder pulls into the spot under his makeshift garage, a tarp stretched over a metal frame he bought at the Target in town, they’re quiet again. He kills the engine and Corey doesn’t move, doesn’t unbuckle his seatbelt or unlock the door. He just sits there, staring through the windshield into the dark. If Wilder listens, he can hear the rough hitch of Corey’s breathing next to him. Quiet, down inside his throat and chest like he’s trying to hide it. He hasn’t said anything since they talked about Tracy’s daughter.
Wilder unlocks the doors and gets out of the truck. His boots hit the snow, squeaky and hard like pebbled glass, and cold, so very cold even through the rubber soles. The area around the cabin stretches clear for a ways until it reaches the trees, clumped dense like a natural wall to pen them in on all sides. The trunks, like thick, black fingers, reach toward the sky, and above that the stars are too far and too many between the breaks in the clouds. Then Corey is next to him, eyes wet and furious, and still silent. They stand together, watching the snow touch ground. Wilder shoves his hands into his jacket pockets. His lungs itch, a numbing feeling that spreads down his arms to his fingertips. He wants a cigarette.
It takes less than an hour for Corey to get his stuff. He collects it all in two piles on the porch, away from the snow. He didn’t ask for Wilder’s help as he collected his things, and Wilder didn’t offer it, just waited off to the side, shuffling out of the way when Corey came near. He drives Corey to the bus station; he drives back home. And, like that, he is gone.
It is only Wilder, the cabin, and the storm outside after that. Wind rakes against the house, grows muffled and distant as it pushes more snow against the walls outside. The itching in Wilder’s lungs persists, nags into a burning he can’t ignore. He has one cigarette left, crumpled in the front pocket of his jacket. He lights up and drags it down to a nub. When it’s gone, he tosses it into the ashtray with other, older butts. He showers to keep the pipes from freezing. There is a cold dash to dry and dress in his dirty work clothes. Alone, with the wind and the night, he sleeps until morning.
…
Four days later, it is the last day of the logging season. Wilder passes the management offices on the way to camp, a portable propped up on stilts against the grade of the hill. In the open door, Corey talks to Syd Hale, a sixty-something vet who retired from falling to take over as crew boss. They see each other, and Wilder keeps walking. He hasn’t talked to Corey since Monday night. It’s been quiet enough in the cabin to almost convince Wilder nothing has really changed. Maybe he made the right decision.
Yesterday, Wilder sat across from Syd and watched him cough raggedly around nicotine gum and tried to gauge the weight of how he said “No” to Wilder’s request for a raise. It was just harsh enough to let him know not to ask again. When he asked for more hours at the Best American, he was met with a distant “We’ll see,” which roughly translated to another no. He needed to make rent in two weeks.
That is why he finds Chase Warshum at camp, sitting in a folding chair with a newspaper open to the funnies on his table. Chase is nineteen and the greenest member of the crew. He joined after his father retired a year ago in an acceptable form of nepotism. He is not Wilder’s first choice. Wilder takes a seat, leaving space between them to be friendly. He raises his mug in greeting. Chase nods to him, his face is flat and blank in a way Wilder can’t read. “Winter set to treat you okay?” he says.
“Snow’s going to be a bitch to shovel,” Chase says.
“Sure. Get plenty of that at my place too,” Wilder says.
“Falls all over.”
“Where are you living at?” he says. “Still with your dad?”
Chase cuts a look at him, a mix between suspicion and annoyance. He is big for his age, broad-backed with a neck thick as a trunk. It is his arms that Wilder can’t ignore, roped with veins and stiff from how hard he grips his mug.
Wilder says, “I’m looking for a roommate. Rent is steep, but affordable with two pitched in.” He’s talking fast, his words tripping over each other. “It’s a nice place. One room-ish cabin—out of town a ways. Has cable, a kitchen, fireplace,” his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth behind his teeth, waiting.
“Ain’t living in a one room with you.”
The harshness of Chase’s voice surprises him and Wilder is suddenly aware that he knows very little about Chase at all. He doesn’t know what to do with the red-faced anger in front of him.
“Landlord bills it cheap for a family home,” Wilder says. He draws himself up to accentuate his height, tightens his fists against the way his words fall flat. “Nah,” Chase says. He smiles, dismissive, unkind. “That doesn’t make you right.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Chase laughs, a sharp barking thing that reminds Wilder of the way a tree groans when it falls. Chase stares hard, and for what feels like a long time, there is only the cold air and steam between them, the far off voices of the crew coming to camp, and Wilder’s breathing. He can feel Chase sizing him up, weighing Wilder against what the other crew members might have said.
Chase shakes his head and picks up his paper. “Fuck off,” he says.
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Wilder says.
The anger in him is warm, burns from his stomach up to his cheeks. He thinks, in the way he sometimes does when he is drunk, that he could fight. A couple of lucky punches and careful footing would set the record straight. He wouldn’t have a fix for the rent, but maybe he would prove what his words could not. Then he thinks of Corey and how the crew instigates. Corey waiting, ready to snap, until they lose interest, until they come back again. No one ignores Corey’s existence. They can’t. Across the table, Chase sits behind his paper. It is quiet. The snow creaks. Trees groan. When Wilder gets up, he says nothing.
…
At the end of the month, with three days until rent is due, Wilder finally goes to the Chevron. He walks in and turns down the first aisle and doesn’t look at Corey behind the register—he doesn’t want to look desperate. He spent the last day of the season in the quiet, aware of the way the other men didn’t watch him. They still watched Corey. That night in bed, he thought again of Tracy’s daughter and wondered if she still had a place to sleep. If, in the stillness that took hold in the winter nights, Corey wondered the same thing, or if he just knew.
Browsing takes time, first down past the chips, then the candy with their neon packages, and back to the refrigerated section with sports drinks and soda and alcohol. He takes things as he goes: Abba Zabba, jalapeno-flavored chips, Pepsi, twelve-pack of Pabst. He brings them all to the front and dumps them in a pile in front of the register.
Corey reaches between them and takes things from the pile, first the candy bar, then the chips, and scans them one by one. The Pepsi doesn’t scan right. It clunks against the counter under the red strip of light until Corey has to punch the item number into the register.
“Cold day out,” Wilder says. Corey puts the Pepsi between them and reaches for the beer. He scans it through and hits a few buttons, his mouth a thin, hard line. “Almost payday.” He holds up the Pepsi and waggles it, smiling for longer than is comfortable.
“ID, please,” Corey says.
“Really?” Wilder spreads his arms and looks down at Corey’s outstretched hand, and when neither of them has anything to say he pulls out his wallet.
Corey doesn’t look down at the ID, just turns back to the register “Sixteen eighty-three,” he says.
“Rent’s due soon,” Wilder says.
Corey makes a sound not unlike humming back in his throat, his hand outstretched for the money. He looks like he’s waiting again, like he was that night in the truck, but now his tension is gone. Like he knew where this was going the moment Wilder’s truck pulled up outside. There is a smell to the Chevron Wilder hasn’t noticed before, like cooking meat and pine cleaner, and now it works into his nose and makes him feel sick. They both know what he’s going to say. “I’m gonna be short this month,” Wilder says.
“You’re gonna be out in the cold,” Corey says.
That pulls Wilder up short. He makes a hushed, wheezing sound, like the winding down of a tired engine.
Corey keeps going. “Tough shit, ain’t it,” he says. His face is smooth and Wilder can hear the harshness of his breathing.
“You needed it too,” Wilder says.
“I did—now I don’t.” His voice goes soft then and he looks to the glass doors of the Chevron like he hears something and can’t find the source. “I got a promotion,’” he says. “Equipment operator.”
There’s a feeling in Wilder, white and electric as it slips down his spine and into his legs in the place of words. The way Corey looks at him, with an indifferent kind of sadness, sets his jaw tight until his teeth grind together with a wet, creaking feeling. “You’re kidding me,” he says.
His face pinches together, a slight furrowing of his brow, as if he doesn’t believe what he says next. “Got a little place in town.”
Wilder makes a fist, then relaxes it. That feeling is still in him, the urge to take hold of the Pabst and break it across the floor. Maybe Corey can sense it. His eyes are on the beer and on Wilder’s hands, and he is still, like he got with the crew. Wilder hurries his hands into his pockets. There are things he wants to say, half-formed behind his teeth. Questions that he knows the answers to.
“You’re living in Oakhurst now,” he says. Then, “That’s good.”
They stand there together, looking at each other with the counter between them. From somewhere near the pumps Wilder hears the distant sound of a car door closing. Past that, the sky is fat with clouds, thick and gray and dark, and further on, down the forty-five that runs out of town, past the trees, is Wilder’s cabin. Just out of the way enough to not be part of Oakhurst at all.
Daniel Mazzacane is a writer and poet currently studying at the University of California, Irvine. His work has appeared in The L.A. Times, the performance series Unheard L.A., and Waxwing Magazine. Born and raised in Riverside, CA, he writes towards his roots, the intersections of poverty and queer identity. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram @DanMazzWrites
Photo by ☼☼Jo Zimny☼☼ on Foter.com