Lookout

Christine Byl

Description

Set in rural Montana, LOOKOUT centers on the dual coming-of-age of a girl and her father amid the natural and cultural forces that shape their family.

LOOKOUT tells the story of the Kinzlers, a complex working-class family firmly rooted in northwestern Montana.

Josiah and Margaret Kinzler have forged an unusual bond marked by both tenderness and distance; their daughters, Cody and Louisa, grow up watching their parents navigate what it means to be true to yourself and what that costs. LOOKOUT offers a gripping dual coming-of-age: Cody’s from stoic ranch kid to hotshot firefighter to resilient woman learning to rely on others, and Josiah’s as he struggles to thrive in a world that has misunderstood him. Bound by their love of the land, the Kinzlers work to bridge the gaps created by what they leave unspoken. LOOKOUT brings to life a family coming out to itself, at home in a new and nuanced American West.

Sujets

• Literary
• Rural
• Rural area
• Campagne
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Deep Vellum Publishing
• Date de parution: 11 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781646052554
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

LOOKOUT
CHRISTINE BYL
Published by A Strange Object, an imprint of Deep Vellum
Deep Vellum is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature.
Copyright © 2023 Christine Byl. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.
The chapter titled “Cody Kinzler” was first published in a slightly different form as a short story, “Hey Jess Mc Cafferty,” in So To Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language & Art (Spring 2008); Sudden Flash Youth (New York: Persea Books, 2011); and Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Byl, Christine, 1973– author.
Title: Lookout / Christine Byl.
Description: Dallas, Texas : Deep Vellum ; Austin, Texas : A Strange Object, [2023]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022046454 | ISBN 9781646052295 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781646052554 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Bildungsromans. | Domestic fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3602.Y45 L66 2023 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220926
LC record available at https://lccn .loc .gov/2022046454
ISBN 978-1-646-05229-5
ISBN 978-1-646-05255-4 (ebook)
Cover design by Kelly Winton
Interior design and layout by Amber Morena
Dedicated in memory of Uncle Lloyd (Lester Lloyd Norwood Jr., 1942–1991)
and to all selves, seen and unseen
Why not now go toward the things I love?
— NATALIE DIAZ , “ GRIEF WORK ”
PART ONE
\\
One response to loss is the remaking of things.
— LIA PURPURA
START SMALL (1985)
THE SUMMER OF THE FIRES started cool and damp. A heavy snow in early May buried pasqueflowers and daffodils and the barely rising shoots that would become the season’s crops, but by the end of the month, the sun lit up like a match. Standing water dried faster than it had in years, and by June the once-puddled ground was hard and hot as a steel skillet. No one remembered the cold.
Midsummer, Cody Kinzler woke to light. Bedtime and morning looked alike, crickets and stars hidden by sun, the only thing visible the strut of day. By the time Cody stirred, dark was hours gone. She lifted her arm against the light between the slatted shades, the back of her hand tanned above her moon-white palm.
In the mornings, Cody’s father was outside. Always. She often ate breakfast alone—Louisa sleeping late and their mother with the hens or in the garden—and Cody looked out the window to see the weather unchanged. Hot. Blue. Bright.
Cody was nine. Old enough to pour her own cereal or make toast, dark and hard, topped with a soft-boiled egg cooling from the stove. Her mother said too much salt, but Cody liked it between her teeth like sand. She practiced wolfing her eggs like her father did, fast so she could help him with the stock before he left for work. Josiah bent around the stall gates and horses’ necks like wire, his hand laid firm on withers or ruffing a satiny neck against its grain. The animals’ morning noises hushed as they fell on their food and the sun shouldered into the dim barn between cracks in the warped boards. When Josiah left for the hardware store, Cody returned to the house to see who had appeared—her mother from outside, her sister from their bedroom, wordless and sticky-eyed. Louisa slept like it was her job.
All morning, Cody roamed. Pasture to aspen grove, riverbank to gravel pit, she ranged like a prospector. The dogs followed close, disappearing in brush after squirrel or scent to emerge again later so reliably that Cody hardly noticed they were gone. She sat on the paddock fence and scratched the horses’ flanks when they pressed her legs. She trapped mice with a baited tin can, held their noses up to hers and let them go. She bounced pebbles at the chickens, which ruffled them into great squawking piles, and then chased them until she could lift one in her arms, light as a loaf of store-bought bread.
Margaret glimpsed her daughter when she thought to look, but mostly Cody’s day slid past in unwatched hours. Louisa darted in and out of her games, less often than she used to, as phone calls and girlfriends and moody hours in her room supplanted their sisterish rhythms. Alone, Cody dug holes, sorted dirt and stones into piles. She rarely threw rocks anymore, not even small ones, since Clint Lindsay put out the eye of a crow by accident. The bird had staggered the schoolyard in circles, its eye a bloody pit, wings spread, croaking angry protest. Cody loved the chickens and would rather have put out her own eye, or Clint’s. She liked to cause a ruckus, not to harm, but sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.
Cody lay on her back in the grass looking at the sky and the mountains pushed against it, flat as paper shapes in the harsh sun. By noon, the air shimmered. The Kalispell daily on the kitchen table said ’85 Western Montana’s Hottest Summer in Years. The dogs panted even in the shade.
“Cody,” Margaret said, “she’s our dreamer.” Cody didn’t call it dreaming. She called it pretending. Or thinking. When she saw a red-tailed hawk, she practiced her call. She could imitate a barred owl, a handful of songbirds—robin, meadowlark, chickadee—and a great horned pair calling back and forth. Raptors were her recent interest. Cody preferred fierce to pretty.
ON THE FIRST MORNING when smoke hazed the eastern horizon, Cody went out to the barn and Josiah wasn’t there. The wide doors loomed shut, the iron bar slotted into its groove. She entered the side door to vaulted dark. The horses and mules shifted in the stalls with soft and windy noise. Even in the building, she could taste faint smoke. She patted her horse’s nose.
“Where’s Pop, Daisy girl?”
The door at the back of the stalls stood ajar but the rear shop was empty, too. In the dark, the logs and boards and Josiah’s half-built projects looked asleep. The table saw was covered with a tarp and Cody lifted an edge and crouched to peek beneath. As a littler girl she constructed forts under the table saw—an ominous, noisy roof—until her father told her he didn’t want her too comfortable near a dangerous tool. Now she counted the rough planks stacked against the wall: four shelves, she knew, for the wardrobe he was building.
Cody found her mother on the side of the house pulling snap peas from the snaked vines. Her hair was tied back with a knotted navy kerchief.
“Where’s Pop? He’s not in the barn or the shop.”
“Upstairs,” Margaret said. She bit an end and spit it out before chewing the rest of the pea. “Sleeping.”
“He’ll be late for work. The horses aren’t fed.”
Margaret trimmed another pea with her teeth and handed it to Cody. “He isn’t feeling well. Let him rest. Can you tend the stock?”
Yes, she could. Cody swung the barn doors wide and, with the cement block, propped them open to give the horses light. Pulled apart a bale and loaded fresh hay in troughs. Filled each water bucket with the hose and rewound it properly on its metal wheel. She fed Daisy by hand, first the pea and then a clump of hay, the horse’s warm muzzle peeled back to blocky teeth and shining gums. A bee drifted in and buzzed like a low plane.
Upstairs, her parents’ bedroom door was shut but not latched. Cody pushed it open with her finger, a crack to peer through. The room was as dark as the barn. Josiah lay in bed, a lump beneath the quilt, curled to face the wall. Too hot for covers, she thought.
“Pop,” she whispered. The quilt moved up and down while he breathed.
“Pop,” a little louder. He didn’t answer. Cody had never seen her father sleep during the day. Not once. She closed the door and twisted the handle so it latched without a sound. The hallway was roasting and she escaped down the stairs and outside in such a hurry that the back door slammed behind her and bounced.
All day, he was quiet and she was loud.
THE NEXT MORNING Cody went out to the barn and was relieved to see the doors standing open. From outside she could hear boot heels clacking against the planked floor. She leaned in to look before she gave herself away. Josiah wore clean Wranglers and his summer straw hat—store clothes.
“Are you all better, Pop?”
He turned toward her. “I’ll be fine.”
AFTER LUNCH Bobby Watson stood outside the back door with his freckled runny nose pushed up against the screen like a tiny pig.
“Can you come out?” Bobby asked. He lived across the road not quite to the T. The Kinzlers’ nearest neighbors were the Lindsays, who shared the fence line and were more like family than friends. The Lindsay boys, Clint and Nate, teased Cody for playing with Bobby, who was grubby and unkempt in a different way than regular ranch kids. Not dusty jeans and hat hair, but a pallor to his yellowish skin even in summer, a smell like cooked onions hanging on his clothes, from living in a one-room cabin where the bed was next to the stove. The kids at school said Bobby was dirt-poor. Not one of them was rich, not even the Lindsays, certainly not like TV or the kids from Whitefish High with their fancy uniforms for sports. But Bobby was something else. Cody knew his father had lost his job when the sawmill all but closed, but really, Bobby had never had more than he did now. His shoe soles flapped at the toe and he brought a sack lunch that you could tell was almost empty even from across the room. Other kids ribbed him. But Cody’s mother always said play with anyone unless they’re mean. In that case, leave them alone.
At the river, the wind stirred up the air and the smell of smoke drifted in and out while Cody and Bobby threw bits from their pockets into the water. String, lint, paper, chicken feed—the current pulled it all under and down, skidding in and out of the eddies that cupped the rocks. The river was fast here even for the dry season. Cody wore her bathing suit under her shirt, but knew better than to swim without a grown-up. A girl from