Aperçus Quarterly 1.3

I never left Baraga, stuck around to navigate the murk like a bummed mariner. I’m a phone man. It’s a paycheck.This town’s got one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, so I should feel lucky. But when I’mjackknifed in somebody’s grimy crawlspace, tinkering with forty-year-old telephone wire and sweating throughthe band of my faulty headlamp, I don’t feel lucky, or whenever I limp into my house after spending all day troubleshootingin some sweltering attic, cocooned in fiberglass insulation. I’ve worked in just about every building inthe county, running wire through the foulest bedrooms and crawlspaces imaginable. I pulled cat-5 cable the lengthof the Ojibwa Casino’s subbasement, shimmying my way through a froth of foot-deep sump leakage. I crashedthrough the suspended ceiling of Winkler’s Nursing Home while installing a new voicemail system and shatteredmy femur. I’ve been chased down the street by a Saint Bernard, had my calf mangled by a surly beagle, and, aftertussling with a German Shepherd, I almost lost a finger. One time, the power went out while I was stapling wireto the rafters in the basement of a downtown tenement building, and I tripped over a dead cat. Ten years ago, mysenior class voted me “Most Likely to Succeed.” I guess I have.***On March 21st, the official first day of spring, we’re hit with one hell of a storm – freezing rain, high windsand downed tree limbs. The sky is a heavy gray lid, and slush keeps reefing my truck from one side of US-41 tothe other as I drive toward Calumet to check the hum on a line at a Lutheran church. I figure the weather will onlyget shittier up north, so I decide to turn around and can the rest of the day. I go to the Pines and buy a fifth of JackDaniels. I’m standing in line, eyeing the enormous middle-aged checkout woman resting her bulk on two aluminumforearm crutches, and I’m struck with a cold pang that sighs through the atriums of my heart. I seem to beslipping down through the dark strata of routine myself these days. I drink too much, but so does everybody else.I’ve quit working out, too, which used to be my thing. Humping weights around at the gym broke up my day, andrunning myself sick on the treadmill took my mind off things. Life is supposed to work like a sinusoidal wave,full of ups and downs, but recently mine feels like an ellipsis, like I’m idling.After Jessie died, I studied up on suicide. I wanted to understand it or to acquire a frame of reference fordespair of that gravity. I read the statistics, but they meant nothing to me. I perused newsgroups on the internet,browsing the forlorn, oddly matter-of-fact exchanges between depressives and the terminally ill as they formedsuicide pacts before my eyes. Many agreed on pills, like the veterinary anesthetic Nembutal, or stringing a nooseover their bedroom door and letting gravity do the work. Most people shot themselves, and a lot of Europeancontributors hopped in front of a train. But there was one common denominator: they were finished.I keep a Glock 9mm in my underwear drawer. Sometimes I take it out, load all seventeen rounds into themagazine, and feel every ounce of the gun’s blued finish in my hand. Or I fieldstrip it, laying the pieces out onmy kitchen table like a dissected predator. Three weeks ago, I’d had quite a few drinks and I pressed the muzzleagainst my head. The gun wasn’t loaded. I just wanted to know what it felt like.The storm is clearing by the time I pull into my driveway, the whiskey tucked under my arm as if I intendon running it down a football field. I step out of the truck, lose my footing on some black ice and go down. Thewhiskey – thank God – survives the fall, and it’s jutting neck-up out of a small snow bank. I scramble to my feetwith a grunt and retrieve the bottle like I’m lifting it from an ice bucket. Then I notice a small fuzzy caterpillarupon an oblong island of gravel beside my left boot. The thing looks like a black and yellow pipe cleaner, curledup into a sort of defensive position against the cold. I return the whiskey to its ice bucket, as it were, and, gentlypinching the caterpillar between my thumb and forefinger and then cupping it in my hands, I lift the insect to myface. It isn’t moving, so I breathe onto it. I walk into the house, breathing away, and leave the whiskey where itsits.26