“Good,” he said. “I’m glad you’re serious, because I’m just fucking around. I’m just out here for the fun of it.”
Jenna had slowed her crying some and I looked down and told her that everything was going to be fine.
“It’s okay, Sweetgirl,” I said.
Portis grunted something awful then, grunted loud and long and then screamed out as the bridge wood crackled. I sat holding Jenna and watched the woods over the river.
“Portis,” I said. “Are you out?”
He didn’t respond, but I could hear his boots clomping, and when he finally joined me on the other side he was drinking deeply from his whiskey bottle.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Compared to what?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Your usual self.”
“Compared to my usual self I am just fine. Though less drunk than I may prefer.”
Portis had torn through the left leg of his snowmobile pants. I put my flashlight on him and there was a brightly bloody gash that ran up and down his thigh.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “That might need stitches.”
“It’s fine,” he said.
“Do you need to take a break?”
“You are welcome to,” he said. “But I will keep walking.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’d like to put a little distance between us and what’s on the other side of the bridge,” Portis said. “I believe I’ll feel better when we are relaxing in the warmth of my shanty.”
“How much further is it?”
“A few klicks.”
“What’s a klick?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“We need to take a break soon,” I said. “Don’t walk us all the way to the shanty if it’s much further.”
“Well,” he said. “I guess I’ve been told.”
“I’m serious, Portis.”
“That was established on the bridge,” he said.
Portis turned and kept walking and I was heartened by his rudeness, which was in keeping with his character and calmed me some about his leg. I was also glad to see that he was not favoring it too noticeably as I followed him onto what appeared to be a foot trail.
The walking was much tougher in the thick woods and all of it was at an incline. There was barely room to spit, yet alone travel by sled, and that was fine with me. We followed the short beams of our flashlights and I felt a little bit safer with each step we took away from the Three Fingers.
I walked and was glad to be with Portis and to have slipped right into the old, easy way we had always known together. I hadn’t seen him since the summer but when it came to Portis and me it was always like no time had passed at all. As a little girl I used to hope the good parts of Portis would beat out the bad, and I believed all these years later that they had.
I was seven the year we lived together and could still picture that Portis clearly, the one with a trimmed beard and black locks of hair spilling from the sides of his baseball cap.
He moved into the little apartment we had on Petoskey Street and after school me and Starr would come home to find him sprawled on the couch with his Viceroys and the television. He loved Welcome Back, Kotter, and when he wasn’t bringing us up to speed on Barbarino’s antics or reenacting one of Horshack’s punch lines, he used the commercial breaks to regale us with stories of the summer he spent in Mexico. Mex-ee-co, he called it.
There had been lots of boyfriends, especially then, before Mama really turned. I could barely keep one man straight from the next, except for Portis, who was funny and harmless and forever combing his fingers through his bushy mustache.
Carletta didn’t tell me or Starr shit about our own father. Only that we shared the same one and that he had left us high and dry when I was still in the womb. Carletta guessed he had moved back to Colorado, where she said he likely continued to not give a damn about anything but himself.
Starr said you had to take everything Carletta said with several grains of salt. Starr said we were born five years apart and how could we have the same father if Carletta never stayed with anybody, other than Portis, for longer than a few months? And did Mama think Starr wouldn’t remember a daddy that had hung around for five years before suddenly bolting for Colorado?
I’m sure Starr was right, and what did it matter anyway? If anybody was my father it was Portis, and he only lasted a year before the night Mama kicked him out. I can’t remember what they fought over and I’m sure it doesn’t matter, but I remember looking out at the rain after he left—beading on the windows and falling fast through the yellow light of the streetlamps.
I marked the moment as the beginning of Mama’s unraveling, though Starr said its significance existed mostly in my mind. Starr said I only remembered that night because I was so young and because we had liked Portis so much. Starr said Mama had been unraveling long before he split.