Axe Man
By Austin Ratner
From Massachusetts to Maine, the fear. The car vents seemed to breathe it out in the chill of the air conditioning. My parents were afraid of everything, even a visit to Uncle Red in Maine, but they each saw different hazards there. My mom feared wilderness, my dad feared relatives. My mom said there might be giardia or brain-eating amoeba in the lake. My dad prophesied a towline tangled in the boat propeller, stranding me alone in the dark with Uncle Red, who Dad said was going blind. Uncle Red was not going blind! He’d fished for shiners with me the summer before. My parents were crazy. I would someday soon have to bid them farewell. I had just turned ten years old.
My eyes were not completely closed, and as I leaned my head against the cold glass, I saw the desolation of the Maine woods for myself — the old logging roads, now mere tunnels of leaves and untamed grass leading off into the brush, the shacks with listing Jesus signs, and the empty barns softening and settling back into the earth with broken windows that glowed like dark sockets in a white skull.
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“Just us and the loons,” my uncle said as the speedboat cut across the silence of the lake. “A perfect night to camp out on the island.”
The lake was often silent, but now it was bewitched by the deeper, grayer silence of dusk. The white pines on the opposite side of the lake, straight as needles, made a sort of face at us, like a hideous frozen grin. A few trunks leaned out half-alive over the dark water.
“Can we make s’mores?” I said.
“The light’s going,” he said. Though Red walked with a slight limp, he looked potent and in command, piloting the boat with one hand on the wheel, the other on the throttle. The wind flapped at the collar of his red-and-black-checked chamois shirt, which was buttoned to the throat. His physical being in general had a lovable doubleness about it of hardness balanced by softness: the brawny forearms and soft belly; curly hair on his arms but bald on his head; a thick mustache and thick glasses that shrunk his eyes to little green peas.
“Too late?” I asked.
“Are you worried?”
“Worried?” I said. “No.” The depths of the black lake gave me a tingling in my ears, but I wouldn’t call it worry or even fear.
“I’ve never failed to get a kid his s’mores. Don’t worry! We’re almost there.”
When my dad was a baby he nicknamed his uncle after a red jacket. It was never openly discussed why Uncle Red and Aunt Hil had no children of their own, but Uncle Red had always been a surrogate parent to my dad, coming in steady between Dad’s father, the drunk, and his mother, the corpse. I saw my grandfather drunk in the morning once with red, animal eyes. My father stood between him and myself.
Red, on the other hand, was a successful physician, a scientist who published papers in famous journals. Wasn’t there something “intrepid,” Dad said, about Red studying his own disease? Uncle Red had diabetes. He had mastered many dangers, even the serpent that had taken devious refuge inside his own body.
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I had been to the island once before, but not overnight. It was a child’s kingdom. It was wild, but it was small and safe, protected by the lake as by a moat, and it had a rope swing on a tree limb that reached way out over the water, and a circle of fire-blackened rocks. I helped Red lay out tarps and pitch and fly our tent. While Uncle Red inflated the air mattresses, I adventured around the tiny island in the last rays of light, gathering sticks for the fire. I had a feeling of lonely sovereignty, like the Little Prince on his asteroid.
When I got back, Red was sawing at a dead tree with a jigsaw. He dropped the saw, and he had a hard time finding it in the pine needles. But he did find it and successfully sawed out more logs than we could need, and stacked them by the fire circle.
We grilled the steak by the light of our headlamps and roasted s’mores on two crooked sticks that I’d found near the tree with the rope swing.
Before I slept he told me about watchstanding in the Navy, how he had to guess at the aft horizon in the dark, how sea dragons seemed to weave that invisible seam between sea and sky with scales glittering every color.
As I drifted off I thought of something I once heard my father say, something startling — so startling I wondered if I dreamed it — that Red had killed someone on his ship in Vietnam. Or maybe another sailor had. Or maybe it was a dream.
If I’d dreamed it, it was a good dream. We’d made it all the way to bedtime without blood, after all. And anything else that happened, I thought, would happen in the light of day.
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Andy Julo, Eagle Kite, 2015, cyanotype, 30" x 22".
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That was wrong.
I had only been asleep an hour when lake people came up onto the island with lanterns.
“It’s my island,” someone said from not so far away.
“It ain’t your island,” a woman said in a voice cracked with years and smoke.
“That’s what the fuckin’ permit’s for.” He said it in a Maine accent: That’s wot the fuckin’ pemmit’s fah. “It’s my island tonight. It ain’t theirs.” Theyahs, just like Uncle Red would have said if he were telling one of those “Bert and I” Maine stories that Aunt Hil hated.
Another male voice seemed to come from right outside the tent: “They better be ready for us to raise hell. I ain’t got another day off for two weeks and I’m gettin’ drunk.” That was the Axe Man.
Uncle Red snored on as lights quivered over the tent and then shone blindingly through the triangular mesh window.
I sat up.
“There’s a kid inside.”
“Then Tommy’s got a playmate,” the woman said, and laughed. Her voice sounded like a rusty bicycle chain.
“You got a permit?” the man said from inside the blinding light and turned his voice away without waiting for an answer. “They ain’t got one.”
“Bring that fuckin’ clam dip out the boat,” the Axe Man said.
Water washed at the sides of the boat, and feet thudded on the dirt, muffled by the thick bed of pine needles. A duller sound thudded right outside the tent.
I shook Uncle Red, but he didn’t wake up. I peeled open the tent and crawled out and stood there in my pajamas and socks on top of some uncomfortable twigs. The tingling that I refused to call fear out on the lake returned to my ears.
The Axe Man had begun chopping up Uncle Red’s fresh-sawed logs with a long-handled axe. The man was so tall that he seemed to waver in the lantern light up among the trees, and every time he lifted the axe over his head, it flashed like a silver bird diving through the dark. The Axe Man didn’t say anything or look at me as he split the logs, each one cleanly, with one stroke. A bottle of whiskey shined in the lantern light near his feet, seeming somehow obedient, like it was his dog.
The other man with the thick Maine accent, a small old man in a hunting cap, dragged gear bags unsteadily up from his boat. The older lady with the craggy voice watched him with an unlit cigarette dangling from her lip. Another woman in a hoodie sweatshirt like the Axe Man pushed a plastic tub up the path from the boat landing. She was younger. There was also a boy, a little bigger than me. He ran up to me with an oddly personal smile on his face, like we had just shared a joke.
“There’s a possum on this island,” he said in a high fluting voice. “I saw the turds. You want to come find it?”
“I have to wake up my uncle,” I said, trying to keep the fear out of my voice. I assumed the boy’s name was Tommy, but it turned out that was the old man with the hunting cap. The boy said his name was Lawler. I’d never heard of anyone named that.
“Will you keep that little idiot away from their tent?” the Axe Man said to the young woman.
Lawler didn’t give any sign he’d heard, and ran sideways into the dark with a peculiar looseness of the limbs, like he was swimming.
“He ain’t my boy,” the young woman said. “Tell him yourself.”
“You dumb bitch,” the man said.
The axe rose and fell in the light of the lantern.
–––
When I went back in the tent and zipped it closed behind me, Uncle Red was awake and kneeling with his headlamp on. He had the glucometer out to test his blood sugar. He pushed the end of his finger with his thumb to make the little red bubble larger, then touched it to the tiny strip of paper on the glucometer.
The Axe Man yelled out, “Where’s the fuckin’ clam dip?”
“They have to go to sleep too,” Red said, sucking the blood off his finger. “At some point.”
“Maybe we should just go home,” I said. “Do we have a permit?”
“I’ve been coming here for 30 years without a permit,” he said, squinting at the glucometer.
I wondered if he could see well enough in the dark to drive the boat home.
The old man sang out, “Dirty little bee, oh you dirty little bee!”
“We’re not gonna let them ruin our good time,” Uncle Red said.
–––
We sat with them at their fire. The young woman offered Uncle Red some whiskey from a bottle on the ground beside her chair.
“Not good enough for you?” the woman said. “Too cheap?” I could see her better now. She looked pretty with light eyes that glowed in the firelight and long blond hair, but her skin was scarred by old bouts of acne.
“It’s after midnight,” Red said. “The boy’s pretty tired.”
“It says cheap right here on the bottle,” the woman said. “Jim Beam. Can’t you read?”
The older man fell out of his folding chair. He crawled around the campfire howling like a dog and pulled the older woman down and started feeding her clam dip off his finger. Her pants were pulled part way down.
The boy Lawler came running up with a fat white worm in his fingers.
“I found a grub, I found a grub!” he said. “Can I eat it?”
The Axe Man convulsed with shame and slapped the worm out of the boy’s hand.
“Why can’t you be more like him,” the Axe Man said and pointed at me. “You don’t see him eating grubs, do you? Are you an idiot?”
The young woman warmed her hands inside her sweatshirt sleeves. She didn’t seem to care about Lawler or about how the Axe Man treated him.
Lawler struck a weird pose with the forefingers of each hand pointing at his temples and laughed incongruously, then went back to the darkness like an actor ducking back into the wings.
The Axe Man leaned back in his folding canvas chair and yelled at the older man on the ground, “You’re lucky you don’t have kids, you old bastard!”
“I love ya, ya woolly bee, I love ya, ya woolly bee!” the old man seemed to be saying. He pressed a thumbful of clam dip into the woman’s mouth and she laughed like a man.
“He’s got it easier a hundred ways,” the Axe Man said.
“Hell yeah, he does,” the young woman with the acne scars said.
Uncle Red stared at the fire. The flames did an irregular tiny dance on his wet eyes.
“He barely has to work with that fat pension,” the Axe Man explained to us. “Me, I ain’t never had a union job, ain’t never wanted a union job. But I can’t make payments for a fuckin’ truck with 100,000 miles on it!”
Uncle Red smiled briefly. I could tell he was thinking deeply on something and not listening to the Axe Man.
“What about you, old man?” the Axe Man said. “I saw your boat. Mighty pretty machine. How much did you pay for it?”
“A patient sold it to me used.”
“Sure he did!” the Axe Man said. “Probably drive a nice car, too. What do you drive? An Audi? I bet he drives an Audi.”
The pretty woman’s face acquired some mean signs of life from the dancing flames, but she didn’t say anything.
“How you make all that money? What are you? A lawyer? A doctor? That’s it, a doctor! You gonna be a doctor like your pa, boy?”
“He’s my uncle.”
“Will you be my uncle?” the Axe Man said, and wet his lips with the bottle.
“When you figure you’ll pitch your tents and go to bed?” Red said.
I had seen Uncle Red explode a few times when his blood sugar was low. You could feel it coming like you could feel thunder coming after a lightning flash.
“When I’m tired,” the Axe Man said. “You got a permit? You don’t. See, we do. So if you don’t like the hours we keep, why don’t you and your boy get back in your fancy fuckin’ boat and shove off.”
“Watch your mouth in front of my nephew, will you?”
I noticed the other boy then. Lawler had come back to the edge of the firelight chewing something with a silly, pleased expression on his face.
“You eating a grub?” the Axe Man shouted with disgust.
He looked at the unchanging silly smile and whacked the boy across the face with the flat of his hand as though to knock the grub out of his mouth. Lawler fell to his hands and knees and opened his mouth as wide as possible in a soundless wail, a long thread of saliva hanging from his dark mouth. The Axe Man kicked the boy in the ribs, and he collapsed into a pathetic lump, too hurt to make any sound but a high-tension squeal. I could hear the low bleating voice of the old man over by the rope swing, oblivious and full of ceaseless nonsense like Popeye rambling into his spinach can.
Uncle Red held up the long-handled axe, fingers wrapped around its wooden neck just under the axe head, except for his index finger, the one he’d poked in the tent to test his blood sugar. It pointed along the axe blade at the man and woman by the fire. A terrible thought came into my head about my parents and my aunt, and another and another until I envisioned Uncle Red and Aunt Hil’s house by the lake with total clarity: the strong, good smell of wet wood and cheap shampoo, the slightly damp quilts, the widow’s walk where my sisters and I had played.
“You ain’t never hurt a fly,” the Axe Man said, grinning. “Ain’t never had to.”
“Lotta dead Viet Cong say otherwise.”
“You think I give a shit about you, Doctor Vietnam? You and your fuckin’ big-shot nephew here. I don’t give a god damn about neither of you. You think you bother me? You don’t bother me. I don’t care.”
The Axe Man lunged forward and grabbed onto the axe handle with both hands. Uncle Red grabbed hold with his other hand, and for a moment they played tug-of-war with the axe. Uncle Red gave one last tug and then released it.
“Know what I’d like, old man?” the Axe Man said. “I’d like a ride in that fancy boat.”
“Goodnight,” Uncle Red said to the Axe Man, then Red turned to me. “You go in the tent and I’ll be right in after you.”
“Is your blood sugar OK?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “Have I ever let you down?”
“That’s right,” the Axe Man said. “Put the boy to bed and let’s you and me finish our conversation out on the lake just you and me.”
“Trust me,” Uncle Red said. “You go to sleep while I quiet him down and then I’ll be right in the tent.”
“OK.”
In the tent, my ears quested after the sound of the motor on Red’s boat, but all I could hear was Popeye rambling his ugly sweet nothings to the woman who laughed and coughed and hacked. I never knew that about a campsite: you can hear the intimate noises of other bedrooms without ever leaving yours. You hear all kinds of things without seeing them.
More faintly, I could hear Red and the Axe Man’s voices over by the water. When the motor on the boat did start up, I pressed my face to the mesh window of the tent. Red’s boat pulled away. I could see the light of the fire through the trees but not any people.
Red’s boat roared past the island. I came out of the tent and walked across the pine needles to the clearing where the fire had by now collapsed into a dim pile of coals. The Axe Man’s girlfriend’s cup fell to the ground. She was asleep in her chair. The axe was stuck in a tree, and I carefully worked the handle up and down to dislodge it. As it came loose, I saw Lawler peeking out from behind a tree, watching me.
“Are you OK?” I said.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he withdrew behind the tree as though he were not quite real and just a figment of my imagination.
The boat roared by in the darkness again.
I carried the axe to the tent, got inside and waited.
The sound of the motor eventually drew closer, churning at a lower gear, and my hope burned brighter and more desperately, something like a prayer. I heard men’s voices. Red unzipped the tent and ducked his head inside.
“I told you,” Red said, “you can always trust me.”
“Did you have a fight?”
“No, I gave him a ride in my boat like he wanted.”
“Where is he now?”
“Going to bed, I think.”
I could hear the clinking sounds of tent poles as someone erected a tent out there in the dark.
“Now you go to sleep too,” Uncle Red said, and he crawled into the tent and began to pull off his boots.
I couldn’t fall asleep, but Red did. He started snoring so loud it made me afraid the lake people would come after us again.
“Like a fuckin’ pig!” I thought I heard Popeye say from inside his tent.
Sometime after that, I don’t know when, I slipped into a mercifully soundless dream.
Andy Julo, High Altar, 2015, digital photograph, 11" x 17".
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When the sun rose and X-rayed the mosquito hawks caught between the tent and the fly, Red was not in the tent. The close, yellow-colored air of the tent had two odors in it: the smell of the damp, yellowish parachute fabric and a sharp bodily tang of an unwashed man. The axe was gone, and I assumed that Uncle Red had taken it out. Whenever we stayed with him at his house in Maine, he went to sleep the earliest and got up the earliest. I did not let myself consider any other reason for his absence.
The tent zipper was loud in the early morning quiet of the miniature kingdom; it seemed to echo across the lake where mist drifted out over the reeds.
My urine steamed and smelled as it pelted the long grass. I did not hear anybody or the sound of a fire or a boat. Nothing.
Slowly, I allowed myself to survey the campsite. The other tents were gone. All that remained of the lake people were wet cigarettes, empty bottles of Jim Beam, a plastic container labeled “CLAM DIP” and filled with dew, a bra, a bathing suit, a dirty towel, and a white shirt, bunched and stiff with dried blood.
“Uncle Red?” I said over an inner resistance that refused to let me make a sound.
The island kept a haughty silence.
Both boats were gone. I was alone.
–––
I don’t know how long it was before my mom and dad showed up for breakfast in a canoe. Maybe it was an hour, maybe it was three, before they paddled up and waved in a leisurely way, unaware that anything had gone wrong. They couldn’t see or hear me at first. When they got closer, my dad jumped out of the canoe so fast, he nearly capsized it, and my mom fell on the rocks in the shallow water.
“Thank God,” my father said, hugging me very, very tight. Then he let go and started charging around the island.
“Uncle Red! Uncle Red!” my father shouted. He seemed to shout it at the tree with the rope swing. I had never seen him cry before.
My mother squeezed me even harder than my father had, squeezed until it hurt. Her knee was bloody and covered with dirt and pine needles.
“I’m sorry!” I cried. “You were right, and I was wrong!”
They had named every conceivable danger except for the one that came to pass. In the coming days and years, my mind would return again and again to that moment when my parents approached in the canoe, that moment just before they realized anything had happened. They were still oracles in a religion of darkness I did not believe in. Now I too saw the dark.
Austin Ratner is author of the novels In the Land of the Living and The Jump Artist, 2011 winner of the Sami Rohr Prize. His short fiction has been honored with The Missouri Review Fiction Prize and his essays have appeared among other places in The Wall Street Journal, LitHub, The Millions, and The New York Times Magazine, which selected his essay “Sidewalk Phantom” in 2017 as one of their all-time best Lives columns. He is former editor-in-chief of The American Psychoanalyst, where he now serves as contributing editor. He received his M.D. from Johns Hopkins, attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a father of two, husband of one, and generally a nervous wreck.
Andy Julo is an artist/educator currently based in Tucson, Arizona. Julo’s work is influenced by the multi-sensorial dramas of Roman Catholicism, roadside display, and vernacular expressions of fondness. Frequently memorializing everyday objects once used in play, festivity, or ritual, his work meditates on the varied ways humans “make special.” Working across alternative photography, printmaking, installation, and collage, he investigates memory, disposable materiality, and cultural record. Julo was the founding director of the Verostko Center for the Arts at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. At present, he is pursuing a PhD in Art & Visual Culture Education at the University of Arizona, researching studio practice as a strategy for empowerment among community members currently experiencing homelessness. His work is available at Rubine Red Gallery (Palm Springs, California) and Weinberger Fine Art (Kansas City, Missouri).