The New Year

by John McNally

At midnight, party horns blow obscenely, strangers kiss with tongues, and champagne corks fire perilously across the smoky room like a barrage of SCUD missiles. No one here has ever heard of “Auld Lang Syne,” so what they do instead to celebrate the new year is blast the first few tracks off Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz.

Two hours later, half the people have gone home, fearing the approaching snowstorm. The remaining half have coupled, staking out for themselves every bedroom, hallway, and closet in the house. Here and there, men and women copulate—some, discreetly and others as if auditioning for the victim role in a slasher film: lots of panting, then moans, then a high-pitched squeal followed by a howl or scream, then nothing at all.

Dead, Gary thinks.

This is how he entertains himself: absorbing the reality around him and turning it into something other than what it is, something menacing. Only he and Linda remain among the flotsam of the party—cigarette butts rising like crooked tombstones out of bowls of salsa and a slice of pizza dangling like a limp hand over the edge of the coffee table—and Gary, lost in his own private world of the macabre, is listening for the next rising moan, the next victim, when Linda, joint in one hand, vodka tonic in the other, tells Gary that she’s pregnant.

“I’m keeping it, too,” she says, meeting Gary’s eyes and smiling wildly, as if announcing an extravagant purchase she cannot afford, like alligator shoes or a raccoon coat, challenging Gary to tell her No, You’ll have to take it back.

Gary dips his hand into the ice bucket, scoops out the last pitiful shards of ice, and deposits them into a tall glass. He pours himself what he thinks is in a Harvey Wallbanger, a name his father uses freely for all occasions, exclamations of surprise and scathing insults alike, the way another man might say Great Scott! or Son of a bitch! Gary sips the drink tentatively, squinting at Linda while he does so. The first concert he ever took her to was Megadeth in Omaha, and he wants to ask her if that had been the night, in a dark and cavernous loading dock at Rosenblatt Stadium, that he’d unceremoniously knocked her up, but he is having a difficult time summoning the proper words, let alone stringing them into a meaningful sentence.

“Do you mind?” he asks and picks up the four-foot bong he had packed earlier in the night but had somehow forgotten about. He holds it to his mouth as if it were a saxophone, and while Linda leans over to light the bowl, Gary sucks hard on the tube. He inhales for what seems an impossibly long time, and when he finally exhales, he tilts his head back so as not to blow smoke in the face of his girlfriend who is carrying his child.

Over their heads and scattered about the room float swollen clouds of marijuana smoke, thick as doom, and though Gary has long since run out of breath, smoke continues to leak from his nose and mouth. He’s been working out daily at the gym, and he’s amazed at how much his lung capacity has improved in just two short weeks.

“Wow,” he says, amazed at everything—the pending baby, his new lungs—and it’s the word wow, this last puff of smoke streaming from his mouth when he speaks, that triggers the smoke alarm. The alarm is deafening, piercing Gary’s consciousness, one steady shriek after another, like a knife thrust repeatedly into his head, and though Gary wants nothing more than to stop the noise, he has no idea where to start looking.

Four men instantly appear from each corner of the house. They arrive like Romans, bedsheets draped around hips and torsos. One man stands on a chair, disappearing into a head of smoke, and when he rips open the smoke alarm’s casing and yanks free the battery, along with the two wires the battery had been connected to, the noise mercifully stops.

The man steps off the chair, looks Gary in the eyes, and says, “What the fuck?”

Gary shrugs. He’s still holding the bong, resting it against his shoulder as if it were a rifle. Then he tips the bong toward Linda, points the smoking barrel at her stomach, and says, “She’s pregnant.”

At this news, women emerge one by one from the darkest chambers and alcoves of the house. Some are barely dressed, wearing only underthings. Others wear long hockey jerseys or concert t-shirts that belong to the men they have chosen for the night. They surround Linda and gently prod her belly. How far along are you? they ask. Is it a boy or a girl? They move in closer and closer, confiscating her vodka tonic, relieving her of the roach pinched between her thumb and forefinger, until Linda becomes the nucleus, the Queen Bee of the party, pleasantly crushed by a circle of women who “ooooo” and “ahhhh” against her stomach and buzz with spurious tips on prenatal care.

Gary backs away from the chatter and smoke. As soon as he is outside, he bolts for his car. His coat, he realizes, is somewhere in the house, but it’s too late now. If he returns, Linda will see him and want to leave as well, and what he wants now is to be alone. What he needs is to think.

Inside the Swinger, where everything is ice-cold to the touch, Gary starts the engine, then rubs his hands together, blowing frequently into the cave of his cupped palms. “Harvey Wallbanger!” he yells. “It’s friggin’ cold.” He yanks the gearshift into drive and pulls quickly away from the party, heading for the unmarked road that will take him home.

Only after putting a safe distance between himself and the party does Gary allow himself to entertain the otherwise unthinkable, that Linda is pregnant. He says it aloud, trying out the feel of it. “So,” he says. “You’re pregnant.” Then he laughs. He laughs until his throat burns and the windows fog up all around him. “Pregnant,” he says, clearing a swatch of windshield. “Yow!”

Other girls he’s known have called it prego, like the spaghetti sauce, or preggers, which sounds to Gary like something made by Nabisco, a new brand of snack cracker. He can’t stop shivering, and the convulsions come stronger each time he thinks of Linda walking around with a smaller, mucousy version of himself inside her. Inside her. The very idea! A person inside of a person! Now that he really thinks about it, pregnancy makes no sense whatsoever, a horror movie where a living organism grows and grows, until, finally, it bursts through an innocent victim’s stomach, a terrible surprise for everyone.

Truth is, Gary knows less than squat about the finer points of the subject. He’d slacked off in Sex Ed, unable to stop himself from laughing out loud at words like fallopian tube and mons glans. And the textbook, with its floating orbs and scary cross-sections, was like some kind of underground Science Fiction comic book, where body parts looked extraterrestrial, and their corresponding names, like vas deferens, were obviously chosen for haunting effect. The one time he ever even remotely touched on the subject of pregnancy was with a kid he knew named Jim Davis.

It had been a peculiar friendship from the start, one that had materialized between seventh and eighth grade because all of Jim’s real friends had gone away for the summer, and because Gary seemed the least harmful of prospects. The subject had come up in regards to Jim’s mother, who was much younger than Gary’s mother, and who doted on her son in ways that Gary’s mother had never doted on him. Jim and his mother played this game, acting as if Gary were not among them: mother and son whispering, pinching each other, always telling the other one how cute they were. Gary never knew where to look, what to do, so he would stand off to the side, rearranging the fruit-shaped magnets and family photos on the refrigerator: a pineapple in lieu of a toddler’s head, a giant banana sprouting from their schnauzer’s butt.

One day, after a game of eight-ball in their basement, Jim Davis made a confession that he had once tasted an eighteen-year-old girl.

Gary imagined a fork and knife, a dash of salt. “When was this?” he asked.

“Birth,” Jim said.

Gary leaned his head sideways, scratched the inside of his ear with the tip of the pool cue. What Jim Davis was claiming was that when he was born, he kept his tongue out the whole time, and even now, twelve year later, he remembered how it tasted.

“You want to know what it’s like?” he said. “Go home and lick two hot slices of liver. I’m telling you, man, that’s it. I shit you not, my friend.”

Gary is on the unmarked road now, and since he is driving into the storm, it’s significantly worse here than it had been on the highway. Visibility is zip. The wind has picked up, and snow swirls about the highway like smoke from a fog machine, not at all unlike the opening of that Megadeth concert three months ago. Liver, Gary thinks. He never touches the stuff. Gary squints for better vision. For stretches as long as fifteen seconds he can see one or two car-lengths ahead, whips of snow wiggling snake-like from one side of the road to the other, but soon they dissolve into dense sheets of white that repeatedly slap the windshield, and Gary cannot see more than a foot beyond his headlights. He doesn’t want a child. Earlier that evening, in fact, he was devising a strategy for breaking up with Linda. Strategy is everything when it comes to breaking up, and what he always strives for is to find a way to make it look like his girlfriend’s idea, and not his. You have to flip-flop the argument, twist words, drag the murky past for minor infractions. It’s an ugly way to conduct business, but sometimes you have to jumpstart the end of a relationship, otherwise it’ll just rot and stink up the rest of your life.

He knows he should ask for advice on this one, but he doesn’t know who to turn to. Gary’s father has his own problems right now: the man hasn’t spoken a word to anyone in two weeks. And besides, Gary was cured years ago of asking his father anything about sex after the day his father pulled him aside to warn him about transmittable diseases.

“In the old days,” his father began, “when I was your age, if you had the clap, the doctor would make you set your thing onto a stainless-steel table. You know what I’m talking about, right? Your thing. Your Howard Johnson. So you’d do what the man said. You’d slap it down for him to look at, and after you told him what was wrong, he’d reach into a drawer and pull out a giant rubber mallet, and then he’d take that mallet and hit your thing as hard as he could with it, and that would be that. Believe you me, son, you’d be damn particular from that point on where you went sticking man’s best friend.”

Gary is imagining his own thing getting whacked with a rubber hammer when someone or something steps out in front of his car. He is doing sixty or seventy miles-per-hour, the road is slick, and he touches his foot to the brake only after he has hit whatever it is that crossed his path. People claim that these moments always occur in slow-motion, but Gary is so stoned, the opposite is true: everything speeds up. One second he is thinking about his thing getting whacked and the next, he is lying with his head on the horn of his car. He has no idea how much time passes before he lifts his head and steps outside, but it’s still dark when he does so, and the falling snow, sharp as pins, has thickened.

Gary hugs his arms and limps to the front of what’s left of the Swinger. What he hit was the largest deer he’s ever seen: a twelve-point buck. A gem of a kill if he were a hunter, which he’s not—the only non-hunter, in fact, in a long line of men who prefer oiling their rifles and shitting in the woods to smoking dope and listening to Ratt. The deer, apparently, had slid all the way up onto his hood, smashed the windshield, then slid back down after Gary, either semi- or unconscious, brought the car to a stop. It lay now in front of the Swinger, its black eyes eternally fixed on something far, far away. Clots of fur sprout from the tip of the crumpled hood, as if the car itself is in the first stages of metamorphosis.

Gary licks his lips and tastes blood. No telling the damage he did to his face when his head hit the steering wheel. For all Gary knows, his forehead is split wide open and his nose, through which he can no longer breathe, is permanently flattened. He may have a concussion, too, his brain puffy, slowly inflating with blood. But far more pressing than any physical damage is the sub-zero temperature. His entire body is starting to stiffen. He shuffles from foot to foot to keep warm. He rubs his bare arms and yells Fuck over and over. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

Years ago he read a wilderness story in which a man stuck out in the freezing cold sliced open the carcass of a dead animal and crawled inside to keep warm. It was a bear, Gary remembers, and the man stayed inside of the bear until someone discovered him in there. Gary craves warmth, he’s willing to make deals with a higher power, but he’ll be goddamned if he’s going to hang around inside of a dead deer and wait for his worthless friends and neighbors to find him. Besides, it’s a small town, word travels fast, and he can’t imagine any girl ever wanting to date him after hearing where he’d been. The girls he knows, they’ll overlook the fact that you’ve slept with the town hosebag, but there is always a line, and sleeping inside of anything dead is clearly on the other side of it. Gary’s about five miles from home—walking distance, really—close enough, he decides, to make a go of it, even without a coat.

Gary starts to jog, but his legs aren’t working quite right. It’s as if he’s running on stumps instead of feet. He suspects a bone somewhere has snapped in two, so he works on the basics of walking instead, just keeping one foot in front of the other. He hugs himself the whole way, hands secured under his armpits. He’ll have to wake his father when he gets home so they can tow the car before sunrise and avoid getting a ticket. He’d prefer not bothering him at all, but he sees no way around it. Gary’s mother left home a year ago, and for a while Gary thought that this was the worst thing that could possibly happen to his father. Then, two weeks ago, his mother surprised everyone and married his father’s best friend, a man named Chuck Linkletter. And that’s when his father quit talking. He quit going to work at the gas station he owns, and he has quit taking calls. He has, it seems to Gary, quit altogether, like an old lawnmower.

Gary’s ears and fingertips throb, and the snow pelting his face temporarily blinds him. His eyebrows are starting to ice over and sag, as are the few sad whiskers on his upper lip, a mustache Gary’s been closely monitoring these past few months. He wishes he had taken the bong from the party. He’d be standing in the middle of the road right now, his back to the storm, lighting a fresh bowl. And then everything wouldn’t seem so bad—Linda’s news, his car, the pain.

When he finally reaches his house, shivering his way inside, he collapses next to the sofa.

“Oh. My. God,” he says. “I made it.” His voice, a croak in the dark, sounds like the voice of nobody he knows. Now that he’s home and out of the cold, he’s thinking maybe he won’t wake his father after all—towing the car no longer seems so dire—but then the light in his father’s bedroom comes on, the door swings opens, and his father appears as if from one of his own nightmares: sleepy but crazed, thin hair crooked atop his head like bad electrical wiring. This is how the man has looked ever since learning the news of the marriage, and though Gary is starting to wonder if he should seek professional help for his father, they live in a town of two hundred, and the only people around who claim to be professionals of anything either strip and refinish wood work or groom dogs.

Gary himself holds no grudge against his mother. As far as he’s concerned, she’s been a good mom. When Gary was in the third grade and his father refused to bring him a cat from the pound, his mother took Gary outside with several spools of thread. “You have to use your imagination,” she’d told him. It was summer, and while Gary captured a few dozen grasshoppers, holding them captive inside of a Hills Brothers coffee can with holes punched in the plastic lid, his mother made several dozen miniature nooses with the thread. “Here,” she said. “Let’s see one of them.” Gary gently pinched a grasshopper and held it up for his mother while she slid a noose over the insect’s torso, then tightened it. “What’s his name?” she asked.

“Fred Astaire,” Gary said.

Later, while Gary walked thirty or so of his grasshoppers down the street, old man Wickersham stepped down from his front stoop, stopped Gary, and asked him what he was doing.

“I’m taking my pets for a walk.”

“Oh,” the old man said.

Near the end of summer Gary had caught several hundred bumblebees, and over the next month, using his mother’s tweezers and suffering through one painful sting after another, Gary managed to tie each surviving bee to one of his mother’s nooses, and when he finished, he took all of them out for a stroll. The bees droned overhead, following him like a dark cloud. Old Man Wickersham burst out of his house, yelling, “My God, son, they’re after you,” and Gary, not realizing the old man meant the bees, let go of the strings and took off running. For days after that, people in town—and as far away as North Platte—reported getting tickled by mysterious airborne threads.

“Dad,” Gary says now. “I totaled the car. We should probably tow it home before the police find it.” Then Gary tells his father the story, omitting the pregnant girlfriend, the endless kegs of Old Style, and the four-foot bong. What he focuses on is the deer.

“You should see this thing,” he said. “It’s gargantuan. A twelve-pointer. Swear to God, I thought I slammed into a bulldozer.”

His father puts on a coat and disappears through a door in the kitchen that leads into the garage, reappearing seconds later carrying an ax.

Gary, unable to stop quivering, the night’s deep freeze still trapped in his bones, slips on leather gloves, zips himself into his father’s wool trenchcoat, and pulls on a ski-mask that covers his entire head except for his eyes and mouth. They take the new pick-up, Gary’s father skillfully navigating the vehicle at high speeds through miles of virgin snow. Amazingly, they cover in less than ten minutes the distance it took Gary an hour-and-a-half to travel on foot.

His father parks in front of the dead deer and the demolished car, illuminating the scene with the pick-up’s high-beams. The deer is already dusted with snow. Outside, towering over the carcass, Gary’s father reaches down, takes hold of the base of the rack, and lifts the deer’s head. He jiggles the head a few times, then crouches to get a better look.

“What do you think?” Gary asks through the ski-mask. “Should we drag it by the horns or just back it ass-first into the ditch?”

His father doesn’t answer. He walks to the pick-up. He returns with the ax, lifting it over his head and taking aim.

“Dad,” Gary says. “What are you doing?”

The blade comes down hard, slamming into the deer’s neck. The deer's head rises off the ground, as if looking up to Gary for help, but it’s the force of the blow causing it to do this, and the head falls quickly back into the snow. His father swings a second time, then a third, each time hitting a different part of the animal, though keeping within the general vicinity of the neck. It slowly creeps up on Gary that what it is his father is trying to do is chop off the deer’s head. “The car,” Gary says. “Maybe we should, like, shift our focus?” He points at the Swinger, but his father plants his foot onto the deer’s ribs, jerks free the ax, then lifts it again. Each time his father lands a blow, Gary’s fingertips and ears throb, a jolt of pain pulsing through the thousands of miles of nerves that twist and wind throughout his own body. In a few weeks, when Doctor Magnabosco asks Gary why he waited until the frostbite had progressed to this point before seeking help—this critical point, he’ll add for effect—Gary will have no idea where to begin, nor will he know how to tell the story of this night in such a way that his father won’t end up looking like a madman, and so Gary will simply shrug.

Gary watches his father through the tiny slits of the ski-mask, and still unable to breathe through his nose, he starts gasping for air. His father is crying. He keeps slamming the ax into the deer, each strike harder than the last, and Gary realizes that he, too, is crying. He chokes out one breath after another, large plumes of air, ghostly in the truck’s headlights, spewing from his mouth. He’s about to say something to his father, a word or two of consolation, when a car approaches, slowing at the sight of them. The car hits its own high-beams to see what’s the matter, and what they see is a wrecked car, a dead deer, a weeping man holding an ax, and another man wearing a ski mask and a trenchcoat, glaring back into the eyes of the driver. In this moment, seemingly frozen in time, Gary spots Linda in the backseat, mittened hands cupped over her mouth. He starts walking toward the car, but the high-beams blink off and the car speeds away, disappearing into thick swirls of snow, the red glow of taillights dissolving into two pinpoints, then nothing.

When Gary turns back to his father, he sees that the deer’s head has finally come detached. His father lifts the head by the rack and carries it to the pick-up where he heaves it up and over, into the bed. As for the other carnage—the headless deer, the wrecked car—they leave it all behind.

Once they are inside the truck’s cab and on their way home, Gary experiences a surge of adrenaline, a genuine rush, and he can’t wait to call Linda. He wishes he could hug his father, he wishes he could say, Shit, man, what the hell just happened back there? but his father is driving more cautiously now, both hands on the steering wheel, and any impulsive move on Gary's part may cause his father to drive them into a snowdrift.

Why another man’s misery—his dad’s, in particular—inspires Gary to want to call Linda and make amends, he’s not sure, but he feels suddenly pumped, as though he has just had a great workout at the gym, his best workout ever. He feels almost possessed, but possessed by what he doesn’t know. He’s still too messed-up to put his finger on it, to understand how one thing in his life could possibly be connected to another, but after he gets some sleep, he’s going to call Linda and tell her that he has come to a decision. He, too, wants to keep the child.

“Fuckin’ Aye, Dad,” Gary says. “We took the bull by the horns, didn’t we? And now we’re bringing home the head to prove it.”

His father laughs. His mood has taken a dramatic turn for the better. He is chipper, even. “We’ll mount it,” his father says. “We’ll mount it and we’ll send it to your mother and that son of a bitch she married for a wedding present. What do you say? You want to give me a hand with it tonight?”

“Tonight?” Gary asks. The sun is about to rise. Tonight, as far as Gary can tell, is over. It’s already tomorrow. “Don’t we have to get it taxidermied first?”

“Oh no,” his father says, smiling. “Not this one. They’ll get it just like this, nailed to a sheet of plywood. And I want to ship it off, lickety-split. I want to Fed-Ex this baby right to their front porch. I’ll show those two Harvey Motherfucking Wallbangers I mean business.”

Gary removes his ski-mask and touches his face experimentally. His flesh is disconcertingly spongy, and each time he presses down on his cheek or forehead, he leaves behind the soft imprint of his fingertip. “I think I’ll pass,” he says. “I’m sort of beat.”

“Suit yourself,” his father says. “But mark my words, this is going to be the highlight of the year. You can bet your ass on that.”

Gary nods. He reassures himself that all of this is a good sign. At least his dad’s talking again. Surely that’s a step in the right direction.

They drive the rest of the way home in silence, the deer’s head rolling around behind them, antlers clawing the truck’s bed. Though the storm has ended and the sun is peeking over the tree-line, the wind is still fierce, and Gary stares blankly at the snow whirling across the highway. His surge of adrenaline is on the wane now, the rush of exhilaration over. He’s falling asleep, slipping into that precarious crack between consciousness and unconsciousness, but for a moment, before he drifts completely away, Gary pretends that he and his father have been in a fatal collision, and that although dead, they are still puttering along in the pick-up, maneuvering it through swirling clouds instead of snow, and they are having the best time they’ve ever had together, father and son floating high above the rural roads and farms, two men no longer of this Earth.