Dirt by David Vann

would hear. You don’t get to just not say anything. This is my life. My future. He had a desire to shake her. He wanted to shake her and rip her into pieces.
    You won’t talk to me that way.
    I’ll talk to you however I want until you stop acting like a crazy person.
    The talking had stopped in the other room. They were having her sign, no doubt. He never should have mentioned the checkbook. But he had never thought of it before.
    When we return home, his mother said, you’re going to move out. You’re going to find a job and a place to live. Or just sleep in the streets. I don’t care.
    Galen wanted to scream, but he kept his mouth closed. She wouldn’t make him move out. He hated her power trips. He tried to just calm, stared at the ceiling, this crazy ceiling with the white-painted planks all going diagonal. It didn’t make any sense. He’d never noticed it before. Another sign of crazy, but he’d never looked up and noticed.
    Helen and Jennifer marched past out the front door. He heard the car doors slam and the engine rev up and they drove away.
    Well, he said. I think I’ve had enough family time for today. He rose carefully, his head a big ball of throb.
    Help me up, his mother said.
    Help yourself up, he said, and went out the front door. Smell of dust in the air, so they must have taken off fast. He walked around the cabin on the blind side, away from the kitchen, and up into the trees. The dirt loose, his feet sinking. Something had mounded all the dirt everywhere, ants or moles or whatever else, and it was more sand than dirt, bits of granite forming a kind of dirt-froth. Nothing solid anywhere. He stepped over rotted trunks and limbs crumbling away in what looked almost like coals, a deep orange. Insects everywhere, the place infested.
    He found a stand of smaller pines providing enough cover, braced against the largest of them, leaned over, pushed his finger back hard into his throat, and let all the piggy grease and egg drool and pancake and syrup come out, purged himself, made himself clean again. If only there were some way he could throw up his family and not have them inside him anymore.

Chapter 14
    T he chicken and dumplings. His mother and grandmother began cooking, putting the world back together again. How many times? he wondered. How many times had they put the world back together? And why? Why not let it fall apart and stay apart, why not let the truth happen? It would be easier. They could all relax. Everyone could just say they hated each other and be done with it. But somehow that was not possible, and so his mother and grandmother chopped up two chickens at the sink.
    Galen went down occasionally to watch, peeking around the corner from the stairs, and neither of them acknowledged his presence. He’d become a kind of ghost.
    His mother chopping yellow onions at the sink, his grandmother sitting at the table peeling yellow potatoes. They were drinking wine again, a study in yellow again, even some of their clothing yellow. His grandmother’s sweater, the edges of his mother’s apron.
    The crunch of the knife through onion, the slap of the peeler on a potato. No other sounds, and this was part of what made the world unbearable, the magnification of small sounds in a vacuum. This was one of the signs. Only a world that had been staged could be so flimsy and so annoying.
    They were the same person, maybe, his mother and grandmother, a split image he needed to resolve and bring into focus. They had been created at the same time, in Galen’s first memories when he was three or four, and they had a similar role. They had drifted further apart in recent years as his grandmother lost her mind. She had been left marooned on some positive sense of him, whereas his relationship with his mother had grown steadily worse. Were they the same, though, underneath all that?
    If you’re not doing anything, you can go chop some wood, his mother said. She