ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SETH BORGEN studied writing under Lee K. Abbott at The Ohio State University, graduating in 2003. He recently finished the MFA program at the University of Mississippi, where he studied under Barry Hannah and Tom Franklin. His fiction has appeared in the Green Mountains Review.

Astro Pig

By Seth Borgen


On his third marriage, the one he wouldn’t survive, my father took me and his new family to the beach for a week. I was fifteen then. His new family was a stepdaughter, a stepson, both bony and secretive, and a wife, Pam, a lumpy-assed penny pincher who methodically cut her dinners in two and saved the other half for lunch the next day. She brought a purse full of coupons with her and we ate nothing but Subway the entire trip.

“Not this beach,” I explained to my wife, Leigh, “but a beach.”

She was pulling shirts and shorts from out of suitcases, folding and stacking them in the drawers of a cabinet. I examined the clock radio on the nightstand next to our bed and picked an individual grain of sand off my shoe.

“Are you going to fuck me at least once while we’re here?” she said.

“Well,” I said, “when you say it like that.”

She called her two boys—Morgan, seven, and Claude, six—in from the beach. They stood just inside the open screen door, blue-lipped and dripping, facing the dark of the room, sun blasting behind them. Leigh stripped off their bathing suits and dried Morgan with a beach towel.

Morgan’s hated me for several months and, standing there, grotesquely exposed, his mother shammying him in front of me must have been like death and I couldn’t help but think Leigh knew that. Even if I did think of them as my boys and wasn’t made uncomfortable by their nakedness, I would find this unsettling. Claude, though, didn’t seem to notice he was naked. Rocking back and forth on the rounds of his feet, he could have been waiting for a train. Leigh sent Morgan to the shower, a pink blur in the corner of my eye, and put the towel to Claude. I refocused my attention back onto the clock radio.

“Look,” Claude said. “It’s like a joystick.”

Leigh still toweling him off, I glanced up to Claude’s tiny peter, pulsing hard and pointing at me.

“I wish your father knew what to do with one of those,” Leigh said.

“Look, Dad,” he said, smiling like a monkey, knocking his erection from side to side with his hips. “It’s like a joystick.”

Moments later, while Leigh was inside in the shower scrubbing the salt and sweat off Morgan and Claude, I stood out on the deck smoking a cigarette and asking myself what I was doing in this marriage. We were both twenty-nine, Leigh and I. I’d married her a year ago because she was elegant and graceful and I could imagine her in her forties looking like Juliette Binoche and me being the envy of the cocktail circuit because I’m the forty-ish guy who married a woman like that. She told Morgan and Claude to call me Dad and, when we’re not fighting, told me to think of them as mine. But I didn’t and hadn’t slept with Leigh in three months.

“Juliet Binoche, my ass,” I whispered, wondering where in the hell a cocktail circuit was.

I flicked my cigarette over the railing and the butt landed in a cluster of sand grass next to something dead. A guinea pig. I hopped the railing and knelt in the sand for a closer look. I had never seen a dead guinea pig. I had never seen a guinea pig that wasn’t nibbling and twitching inside a translucent plastic cage that smelled of cedar and urine.

He was half-white, half the color of a new baseball mitt, his legs skyward, frozen in mid-lunge, his black eyes wide and mouth gaped in an O as though he died seeing God. White string, tied around what I assumed was his waist, spooled away from the carcass and disappeared in the sand grass. Crabwalking, I followed the string about three feet to a deflated red balloon. I picked up the balloon and stretched it out. Written in black Sharpie were the words Astro Pig.

“Whatcha doing, Dan?” Claude stood on the deck behind me, his wet hair combed and parted like he belonged on a Christmas card.

“Dan?” I said.

“Mom just told us to call you Dan.”

“Did she?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“What do you think about that?”

“Dad. Dan,” he said. “It’s almost the same. Right?”

“Darn near,” I said.

“So, watcha doing?”   

“Why,” I said, picking up Astro Pig by his string and holding him out to Claude like a ten-pound bass, “this is Astro Pig.”

“Astro Pig?” he said.

“Astro Pig.”

“Is he dead?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “He’s dead.”

“Dead things are scary,” he said, squinting, craning his neck forward to get a better look at the thing that was scary.

“Not this guy,” I said. “He died a hero. He died reaching for the cosmos.”

“Cosmos,” repeated Claude. “Cosmos.”

I asked Claude if he wanted to do something and he said that he did. We walked away from the bungalow, Astro Pig swinging to and fro from his string, me thinking about the trip to the beach when Pam and her kids were still called “the new family.” It’s the fourth day that I really remember, me bobbing in the ocean, Pam and her son and daughter wading knee-deep, engaged in private talk. I heard yells for help and, about a football field out, my father was thrashing and waving his arms. By the time I got to him he was barely swatting at the water, his eyes too lolled to focus. I pulled him in. Emerging from the foam and backwash, his arm slung over my shoulders, he walked like a drunk man to our blankets and towels and collapsed.

I sat down next to him Indian style. With every few breaths he would choke on the air, but the rising and falling of his chest soon evened. Then, lying there, a calm seemed overtook him. A calm like I’d never seen before. Like a man fresh out of mysteries.

“You know what I didn’t do?” he said to me, his shaking hand reaching out for my knee.

“What?” I said.

“Try floating for a while.” He said this and smiled. And then I smiled. I don’t think his eyes needed to be open for him to know that it was just me. That the new family was still in the water and hadn’t noticed a thing.

Claude beside me, we stepped out onto the almost empty beach, the setting sun sprawling the shadows of umbrellas and abandoned buckets ten, fifteen feet. I set down Astro Pig gently and flattened a patch of sand with my foot.

“Can you find me some rocks?” I said, holding out my fist. “About this big?”

“How many?”

“Just make a pile.”

Claude made his pile and I gathered up dead grass, a McDonald’s bag, some handbills advertising full-body massages, anything that would burn. I tore it all up and made a bed of tickertape in the center of the flattened patch.

“Do you need more?” asked Claude, dropping two chunks of asphalt onto his pile.

“No,” I said. “You did great.”

With the rocks, I made a circle around the bits of paper and grass. I lifted up Astro Pig by his string, laid him in the center, and shrouded him with his balloon.

“Do you know what a Viking funeral is?” I asked Claude.

“A funeral for Vikings?”

“It’s a noble farewell to a noble soul.”

I lit the paper in four places and stepped back. White smoke thinned out into the air, the orange fire hollow in what was left of the daylight. Crackling, then sizzling, the balloon blackened and twisted to reveal Astro Pig’s fur smoldering into feathery golden rods.

“Viking funeral!” Claude shouted, running in a circle, kicking up sand.

“Viking funeral! Viking funeral!”

Try floating for a while. When my father said that, I thought I knew what he meant. It didn’t take me long to understand that I didn’t. That night, to celebrate his new lease on life, we ate Subway again, Pam wrapping half of her sandwich in cellophane. As did my father, which I’d never seen him do before.

“Do we eat him now?” asked Claude, Astro Pig a black potato inside the dying fire.

“Do you want to eat him?” I asked.

He shrugged. I looked down at the top of his head, rested my hand on his shoulder, and knew that I would be the first person that he hated. His world today was the size of four people and, in his mind, we’re all happy. That won’t last. Six more months, tops. Then this new hate will come crashing in on him like the head of a new poured Guinness. Because I don’t make his mother happy. Because his dad, his real dad, is never coming back. I wanted to tell him that I was sorry.

“No, we’re not going to eat him.” We sat down together. I could smell the burning rubber, fur, paper, and grass all at the same time, each one distinctly. “We’re going to leave him here. We’re going to go out to dinner, come back, watch a movie and, tonight, while we’re all asleep, the ocean is going to come up and carry Astro Pig away.”

“Where’s it gonna take him?”

“Valhalla,” I said.

“What’s Valhalla?”

“It’s like heaven, but better.”

“And that’s what you get when you die reaching for the cosmos?”

“You better fucking believe it, Claudy.”

He thought about this, then nodded. “That sounds good,” he said.

I sometimes get the sense that Morgan and Claude’s dad saw all of this coming. When he figured out what it was that he had with Leigh, that it was no way to live, and that it was going to take getting the hell out of there to find a way that was, that’s exactly what he did. And if he’d stuck around and if he had seen what Leigh pulled back in the bungalow, using Claude like that, maybe he would have killed her. What he wouldn’t have done was stand there like an idiot, go out onto the deck for a cigarette, and then spend the rest of his life with this woman.

“Dan,” said Claude, “are you going to leave us?”

“Why would you think that?” I said.

“Morgan said you are.”

“When did he say that?”

“All the time.”

I wasn’t. Some men just don’t have that in them. Leaving. Even when it’s the right thing to do. Not my dad, no matter what he thought while in the fist of that current, shouting for help, staggering back to his blanket, using his son like a cane, imagining all of the ways his life was going to be different from that moment on. I wish I had told him that I knew he didn’t want to die alone and that a marriage was a lonely place to be when that’s all you wanted from it. But I didn’t know that then.

“No, Claude,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“When you die,” he said, “are you going to have a Viking funeral? Like Astro Pig?”

“Well, I’d have to become a Viking first,” I said. “Wouldn’t I?”

He agreed that was true. I mussed his damp hair and, right then, I didn’t just like Claude. Liking him was always easy. I loved him. I loved him because he was not my son and because he never would be. He was the son of a man who had the guts to walk away from bad love. And for that, for Claude, I was grateful.



Published July 2009