Read Online Call Me Home by Megan Kruse - Free Book Online Page A

his father’s cans of dishwater and whatever he could get on the street. Ed had strong arms and bowlegs, and Jackson liked him.
    â€œI was driving a quad, two guys beside me,” Ed was saying. “I just looked ahead of me and there was a killdeer in my path and she got up on her legs and wouldn’t run, got up on her wings in my path, then, and one of the guys gets a rock. He says, ‘I’ll kill it,’ and I say, ‘I’ll kill you.’” He took a long drink. “Can you imagine being that small, and something as big as us comes around, and standing your ground? Jesus.”
    Jackson felt a kind of humming in his chest, a tender relief, the beating of invisible wings. The bird in the path. The brave bird and the tender guard. “That was one of hell of a bird,” Eli said, and the other men nodded in agreement. They weren’t like his father, he thought. They weren’t like his father at all.
    Really, when he looked back on it, he had decided to get drunk. “Fuck it, let’s get drunk,” he said. And everyone had raised their glasses up like, Of course , but also like he had made a wonderful new suggestion, like he might in fact be their leader – or, if not their leader, he amended, in the bathroom, staring at the penis someone had carved into the wall above the urinal – at least one of them. One of the guys. He swayed a little at the urinal and laughed at himself. There was something he was supposed to be thinking – something he had been thinking – about the kind of person he was, the kind of person that he had been. All his life and none of it made sense together. He was a construction worker. A cleanup boy, but still. A construction cleanup boy. A construction cleanup boy out with the guys. And the Longhorn had such good music! And such good people! He shook and zipped and launchedhimself toward the table and this new fortune, his little family of outlaws, his friends.
    Don Newlon was saying something about having been on a trip down in Mexico with some girls – “And they left!” he said, slamming down his beer, the foam spilling onto the stained table. “I had no food and a blown transmission, but hell, I was smiling!” He laughed loudly, and the rest of them joined in. Jackson laughed too. He was drunk. He was happy. He grinned.
    A man from the East crew started to tell a story about getting drunk downtown – Seattle? Portland? – and passing out in his car. Somewhere where you couldn’t do it, couldn’t park. He’d woken up when the tow truck lifted the back end of his rig.
    And Jackson must have said something – who was he talking to? – because then their faces were waiting – they wanted some kind of story from him, and small ideas were flipping through his drunk mind like a stack of cards. And he was talking, talking about a kid he’d known in Portland who had tried to steal his shoes – “I woke up,” he said, “and he was unlacing my boots!”
    Even at that moment, he knew it was a mistake. It wasn’t funny in the same way. There were too many questions hanging in the air – where were they sleeping? Why was he wearing his shoes to bed? But someone – Don? Honey? – started laughing, “Your boots? Jesus, I’d kill him!” and the moment was saved, and the waitress brought another pitcher, and he filled his glass up. He was so fucking thirsty.
    HE WOKE UP at four or five. He’d been having dreams that he’d wet the bed, he needed to piss so bad, and he pushed the door open and pissed a long stream out onto the dirt. He was drunk-dizzy, but steady enough that he knew it would be worse later. He didn’t remember getting home, only a brief moment of his face against the cold glass of a car window.
    He fumbled around in the cab until he found a gallon of water, opened it, drank half of it down without stopping for air. He