A tight rope stretches across the living room, 15 inches above a tangled orange carpet that has always been there. Kenny hops up on the rope, practicing an art, gliding to the end in effortless sways of tension and release.
The rope is not a rope but a wire. The wound steel, an inch in diameter, holds Kenny’s weight – far north in the Maine woods. His sister India can’t balance on it for more than a few seconds.
“Can you get out of the way? I’m trying to see the weather.”
The wire quivers under Kenny. For the last two summers he’s applied to tryout with the oldest traveling circus in the United States.
“Dad’s not home so I’m not going to take your shit,” his sister says.
“Well he gets home soon. His patrol ends at seven.”
“Do you think that we’ll have school tomorrow?” Another commercial for the weatherman from Portland fills the screen. He has yet to deliver.
“Fuck it,” she says, flipping away to something, anything else.
Kenneth switches to one leg, hangs it for a moment, falling, holding. Suspended in perfect allegiance with gravity he smiles. Then in a flash of chaos he reaches out to steady himself. The spell broken, he grabs onto the antlers of a moose – wide eyed and stunned on wall.
“I almost nailed it that time.” The plaster around the animal’s head cracks along fault lines formed in the early days of its captivity.
“Watch it” India warns her brother. “Dad’ll kill you if you break that thing.”
She glances around the room and towards the road, listening for the pickup. Her dad drives slow and careful but the truck rattles along the frozen road.
“Mom always hated that moose anyway.” He grabs at his words with a breath, trying to pull them back. “Besides you shouldn’t kill things without a good reason.”
“Did you get the mail today”
Kenny looks over at his sister. The temperature outside hit an all time low last night.
With another breath he leaps, shuttering the tight rope. “Have you seen my jacket?”
Taking slow and careful terra firma steps, Ken heads for the hall closet. He digs through hangers and worn out parkas. He stares into a cavern full of the smells and textures the past. A thousand tip offs to when they were all younger.
On the top shelf of the closet his hands brush against the cold chrome of a gun box, empty but still padlocked, full of everything he never knew about his dad’s work and time away from home, a relic, an object that had always been in the same spot. Dad never said a word about it. One day in July, just after Mom died, the gun was gone.
He grabs his gloves.
Jacket-less in a white T-shirt Kenny slides into the January sunshine. The wire, still vibrating, buzzes towards an impossible stillness. India sits waiting, flipping – her fingers biting at the remote. Everything outside covered in subtle whiteness.
In the hurt of each shovel full of snow he’s lifted this winter, Kenny senses the length of the driveway. Since his brother left he has had to do it alone, standing out there in 4 foot drifts, clearing out a spot for Dad, digging out the garage. His brother would tell him, “That’s good practice for boot camp.” The Marines were an out for Rob, a circus of pushups and M-16’s.
In the mailbox – a letter from the circus, a large official envelope. Under his sneakers the snow gives way to a layer of ice, forming casts of his feet. When he’s outside Kenny looks around a lot, especially when it snows. Branches break, cracking echoes through limitless woods. It’s nothing but the deer.
When he hits the stairs the friction he counted on disappears and with a step he grabs for a pine tree, his balance lost. The tree, a monument planted years ago, lets go a pile of snow. The cold burns but he rights himself, gripping the doorknob.
Inside, in the smoke of their wood stove, the snow changes to water.
“Anything good?” India asks as her brother passes again in front of the TV.
He skirts the rope, testing it with his left foot, flipping India an electric bill.
“Don’t forget to give that to Dad.”
———————
Six o’clock sounds on the grandfather clock, an heirloom from mom’s side of the family. Ken yells from the kitchen, “You should start dinner. Dad’ll be pissed.”
The kitchen table adds weight to the room. Ken sits in a spot that no one sits in. The letter from the circus reads: All of last year’s performance team will be required to attend tryouts on June 2nd.
“You could do it once in a while.” his sister calls back.
Water starts to boil as he moves back into the living room, watching the windows, stepping onto the wire.
“Get out of the way.”
India leans to her left. Kenny moves right, eyes fixed on the moose. At the end of the line he pivots and turns, focusing on the WWI rifle that his great uncle took off of a dead German.
The weatherman says, “Expect six more inches tomorrow” and India smiles. She looks up at her brother and changes the channel. Two guys are ice fishing.
“A shack, a hole, a hook, and strings. Why’d you and Dad ever do that stuff?” she asks her brother.
“I don’t know, for the same reason we killed that moose.”