Dinner Early in The Millennium

Kenny’s not bothering anybody but someday he might. He soaks and pushes the bore clean, carefully brushes against fouling and rust. He has some ideas about war, the taking of life. Saturdays he sits in the trees behind their house. He climbs high in the branches and takes careful aim at cats, birds, squirrels, children passing on the street. Deer that occasionally wander near, always on their way somewhere else clearer, kinder. Kenny holds steady with the sites and only lowers the gun again when he’s sure he could pull the trigger but doesn’t need to. He’s two years shy of enlistment and closer still to the fight. It’s in him, he thinks. Cheyenne shrieks. She bounces up and down on her knees so hard she rattles the bed against the wall. Debbie promises her Chad Tucker is going to ask her on a date. She pictures Chad sliding from behind the wheel of his red, raised pickup and dropping that extra four inches to the ground. He wears boots and an ironed, plaid shirt. His smile’s like chrome or sunshine or candy, something really, really sweet. Whatever. He’s hot.

But this comes with expectations, Debbie tells her. Certain standards to meet. Nichole Street, Debbie whispers, and Cheyenne knows just what she means. She imagines the dead-end pavement, the empty cul-de-sac in the field where they never finished the subdivision, never really started. People line their cars up and down the street at night, lay back their seats. She thinks about stretching across Chad’s truck, its bench seat. She pulls her fingers across the inside of her thigh, think of holding, touching, kissing, and her mother breaks in on the line. Off, off, off, Pam says. Cheyenne wonders what all she’s heard and slams the handset on its cradle. Pam clicks the cordless receiver to a dial tone and tries her parents. They don’t answer. She imagines them on the beach, or along the slow lines of a wintertime orange grove. The sun disappears in blood, the gentle froth of an outgoing tide. She pulls the potatoes off the hot eye and peeks at the chicken. Ten more minutes.

Someone told her today the city’s going to be hiring. Receptionists, assistants, the people who sit in cubicles inside city hall and do she doesn’t know what. Their suits and ties and business skirts, and Pam thinks she’d blend in right alongside them. She can’t remember who told her it was happening, doesn’t know exactly who to call. The baby fusses, and she shouts for Willard to get everyone washed up for dinner. He turns up the TV’s volume. She tries her parents again. They’re probably only asleep. She ducks into the laundry room to change a diaper. Willard turns the TV back down. He knows guys at the plant, boys from high school, who toured Iraq the first time and came home unable to sleep, or to eat, or sometimes just walk. Or couldn’t make it through the day without a headache they said split their face like light. They were sometimes good for nothing, even if they wanted to be. He watches the newscast draw a tiny green circle of a target across the belly of the Middle East, Baghdad buttoned at its center. They could bomb anywhere they pleased. Willard runs a finger over the knuckles of his left hand. He fiddles with the wedding ring. They’re going to do it. The end is coming. It’s like knowing someone’s about to throw a punch. You see it, but there’s nowhere to go.

Pam screams. There are nearly tears in her eyes, and it’s all hot on the table. She drops halfway into her chair and feels a subtle rock, a tiny wave, carry her the rest of the way. Willard shouts for the kids. He watches a segment from Israel and mutes the TV, but he leaves the broadcast playing. Upstairs Kenny loads the five long cartridges back into his rifle and shuts it back into its case. There’s nowhere to go today. Cheyenne strips to search herself in the long mirror hanging behind her bedroom door. She shrugs into shorts and a sweatshirt when she doesn’t find anything. She knows exactly where she’s going. They all come down together, arrive close enough to count, to name, to reach. They eat.