|
||||||
 |
I’ve corresponded with editor Kevin Baggett a bit, and I thought I’d give him a plug here. I’ve already begun reading through the stories in Issue I and it looks like it’ll be a good addition to the web. And anybody who likes Larry Brown is OK in my book. The first issue includes Mike Hampton, M. Alexander Bass III, John Solensten, Michael Smith, Brian Tucker, and Jason Stuart. Check it out.
You can find Dickey poems all over the internets, including those much-anthologized and little-read pieces Cherrylog Road and The Sheep Child, but take some time and search some other poems out, like maybe Falling, or this one, with the fire in its last lines nearly embarrassing in its sentiment, nearly being the key word. Adultery We have all been in rooms In the sunrise open wide to the Great Spirit Not far away or there are men driving Among such scenes, and we are alone with it A wrist watch by the bed to see how much Of us: of me with my grim techniques Although we come together, By praying Indians by distant cows historical Never die never die When I’m in town. I will call you We have done it again we are How about that??
D.R MacDonald is a writer I don’t hear much about, and that’s too bad. His novel Cape Breton Road is one I re-read frequently, for the lush descriptions and lean prose, yes, but more for the descriptions of Cape Breton and the characters who inhabit the lonely landscape. Like many of my favorite books, it reminds me in ways of where I grew up in Pennsylvania, the way the woods can look at night as you walk them and listen to the magical noises you can hear when everything else is quiet. Plot-wise, there’s nothing terribly complex going on. 19-year-old Innis is a native of Nova Scotia living in the United States who gets deported for a rash of car thefts he commits in Boston, where he and his mother live. In the company of INS agents, he’s escorted back to Cape Breton to live with his bachelor uncle. Needless to say, the two don’t get along, and Innis’s only hope of getting out is the money he’ll get from the pot he’s planted far back in the woods on this uncle’s farm. The meat of the story begins when his uncle’s girlfriend Claire moves in and both men begin to compete for her affections. The real strength of this book is in the prose style and the eccentric characters Innis runs into, not least of whom is his uncle Starr. There are also highland Scots and whisky priests, sea captains and tv repairmen, all revealed via prose that never seems hurried or less than complex. If the ending is less than satisfying for some readers, that’s okay; it seems true to what I know of 19-year-old men. D.R. MacDonald’s also written a nifty collection of stories called Eyestone, and another novel called Lauchlin of the Bad Heart, which I have not read, but trust MacDonald well enough to get it. You can read some of it via Google Books and look at reviews from the online booksellers. Trust me and disregard the people who gave it ones or twos. At the wake he realized he had never seen her move, never even saw her get up to go to the bathroom. He had only ever encountered her already enthroned, frightful dewlaps unfolding as she reached out and drew him into the goblin luxuriance of her enormous bosom. Her dry lips forcing a horrified kiss. The beige rolls of pantyhose slipped and fallen about her splotched and marble-veined ankles. The dog piss smell of her house, and the rolled-up newspaper with which she swatted at the pissing dog, always just out of reach, a miniature black-and-tan jester, mocking her rule, biting the paper, pulling it out of her hand and tearing it to shreds. She didn’t even look like the same woman with her features flattened out in repose and puffed up by the mortician’s hidden scaffoldings. He knew nothing of how she died, stroked out and drowned in her body’s own fluids, choking on her dying words. Not for years yet. They told him nothing, so he concluded he murdered her, himself, guilty. He was shoved into a friend’s mother’s car and sat in the back seat next to a suitcase. She had died, conveniently enough, on a Thursday morning. By Sunday afternoon, they had filled in her grave. Monday came and there was only the legal work and the wrangling over the estate, the little house on a square of dirt, like all the houses on her street too small and too close to the houses beside it, a litter of broken bottles along the curb, a ramshackle garage honeycombed with dirt dauber nests, and honeysuckle and blackberry vines engulfing the fence in back. The house was empty except for her enormous ghost. They had ransacked her closets and emptied her drawers of their clutter. Empty, the house was stuffed with brooding shadows. For possession of this his mother and aunts threw hysteric fits on the front lawn and were dragged by reluctant apologetic husbands across the sidewalk to a pair of waiting black Mercedes–he didn’t watch as he stood at the window holding GI Joe by one well-muscled plastic arm. He dug a wrinkled stick of Juicy Fruit gum from the back pocket of his jeans. He had a shoebox-full of Juicy Fruit at home underneath his bed, looted from drawers all over the house after she died–his only legacy. He peeled the foil from the warm stick of biscuit-colored candy and folded it into his mouth. It tasted best warmed by his body and already soft, filling his mouth with sweet spit. The flavor reminded him of her, conjured up her ghost like a bell in the dark. He wasn’t afraid of her ghost, but he was afraid of her. She had been an enormous woman, body and presence, bigger than the house that contained her. There never seemed enough room for anyone else. She crowded the den she perpetually occupied, never moving from her chair that he ever witnessed, and her voice, raked by two packs of Winstons a day, penetrated into every corner of the house, back to its dustiest, spider-haunted cracks and mouse holes. He wandered away from the window, kicking his heels against the loose floor tiles, until he found himself before the hall to Ruby’s room. It was long and unlit, and for a moment he stood at its entrance, breathing Juicy Fruit fumes through his nose and wadding his hands into fists. Ruby lived in a room attached to the house behind the garage. His grandmother was the last of that last generation of old cotton families who couldn’t imagine a house without a Negro servant in it, even though the servant was too old to serve. Some years before, Ruby had been bitten on the knee by a water moccasin. Its venom had turned her kneecap to sponge and left her crippled. She was nearly as old and immobile as his grandmother. Ruby had vacated the house upon his grandmother’s death, bundled away to live with a daughter he had never seen until that day. She said his grandmother would still be walking. He didn’t know what that meant at the time. Ruby’s door was brown like the rest of the house. Light escaped beneath it into the dark hall, pooling across the linoleum squares on the floor. He placed his hand against it and smelled the warm lacquered wood, felt the waxy, slightly sticky surface beneath his fingers. He had always knocked before entering. Now there was no reason to knock, but he felt guilty anyway as he turned the crystal doorknob. Ruby’s room was the brightest room in the house. He breathed in the enduring odor of the woman who once lived there. Her walls were painted a dull, smoked-stained gold, while the rest of the house dwelt in paneled gloom. Brighter, unfaded rectangles lingered on her walls where her relics had hung above her bed – the framed portraits of Jesus, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. He didn’t know who they were, except for the flaxen-haired Jesus, but they were Ruby’s holy trinity. She had always kept little red cloth dolls lying about her shelves and pinned to her walls–another thing he never questioned and she never explained. And now, that also was gone, waiting to be remembered. Ruby’s room, like the rest of the house, was empty, but this was the one room in the house where she could not come. The Negro door was an impassible barrier, even in death. As he entered Ruby’s room, he flicked the small hook and eye latch on the door frame. Ruby had locked herself in at night. Where the rest of the house was forever dark and always a little damp, here was freedom and light and safety, in the quarters of a black woman who was not his blood, warmth in her generous lap and in the quilts that covered her bed. He could still smell the oranges she chewed, spitting out the pulp into a newspaper spread on her lap, the spicy smell of the dirt snuff tipped liberally from the tin can into the scarlet, outstretched hollow of her full bottom lip, and the big strong bracing odor of her body. He walked to the window and looked out at the tiny back yard. Her window was at the back of the house, on the south side, the only south-facing window not stuffed with an air conditioner. It looked beyond the yard toward the railroad tracks and the arena where they had wrestling on Monday nights. Sunlight streamed through the greasy, dusty glass, filling the room with golden light. Looking out this window was like looking out of an entirely different house. From here, he couldn’t see or hear his family in the front yard, making the break that would endure until the next funeral, twelve years from now. He noticed his own reflection in the window, the movement of his jaw as he chewed, the reflection of the the open door behind him, and the long dark hall where his grandmother leaned with one hand against the wall to catch her breath. He closed his eyes for a moment and clung to the window sill, not afraid, merely condemning himself because, in a moment of smothering horror gripped to her sagging breasts, he had secretly wished she would die. Terrified by his own power and purpose, he was now afraid to wish her dreadful ghost away. Her wrath and her hoard of Juicy Fruit were all he had left of her. Her house had been stripped bare like the passing of locusts. Ruby’s closet was empty, her bed taken away. Jesus and Doctor King had left their own ghosts upon her wall. Gathering his courage, he looked once more at the reflection of the hall in the window. His grandmother had withdrawn, granting him another shot at forgiveness or escape. He departed, daring the long bleak darkness. He entered the kitchen, paused to look into her empty windowless bedroom where he had never played because of the sewery old woman smell. Then he examined the square of matted, oily dust on the floor where the refrigerator once stood. The dishwasher, which had to be rolled out from the cabinet and a hose screwed to the faucet above the sink, stood in the middle of the kitchen in a puddle of water – the only appliance they couldn’t sell. He opened all the cabinets and found them empty and greasy, all the drawers and the empty pantry stinking of cold grease, but in the enameled metal sink he discovered a dinted pot with the handle broken off. He picked it up and let it drop. At the loud bang, the house seemed to draw up like a snake. Without looking back, he trotted through the den, through the dog piss smell and the air squeezing his lungs, hearing the slap slap slap of her slippers behind him, feeling the touch of her papery fingernails caress his neck, seeking one last kiss upon her bruised and vengeful lips. The back door opened into a weed-strangled yard surrounded by a hog fence. Stacked concrete bricks made leaning steps down to a muddy patch where dozens of feral cats lay heaped in the afternoon shadows. As he jumped down among them, they exploded across the yard and vanished into the honeysuckle and blackberry margins. The screen door slapped shut behind him. The house seemed to swell with the enormity of her malice. He imagined her in the ground, her dead face in the dark, cold and angry at being dead and no longer the center of everything, all her things auctioned off by her daughters, and her grandson’s bitter death wish the cause of it all. Across the yard, chained to a stump and caked with dried mud and shit, her dog, her bereft jester, strained at its knotted chain, barking hoarsely at her ghost. He picked up a disk of ham bone that he found half-buried in the mud beside the fence. It was a ring of sun-bleached bone as big as a half-dollar, the center packed hard with sandy mud. He considered throwing it at the dog, but at the last second, turned and flung it with an angry shout at the house. It cracked against the wall a few inches from the window where she sat glaring from the ghost of her recliner, her goblin face as gray as the ham bone and the paintless clapboards of her derelict abode. “Leave me alone,” he whispered fiercely, but he was glad he had missed the window and the whipping he would have gotten had he broken it. He turned and walked along the fence, breathing the guilty sweetness of honeysuckle and plucking blossoms to suck their drops of nectar. “I wish…” he said a little louder, but stopped himself from condemning her soul to hell. And for a moment, he felt her withdraw. For a moment, it was just an empty house. He lowered his head and walked on. The hard little ball of Juicy Fruit in his mouth had lost its flavor. He swallowed it, heedless of the seven years it would take to digest. He searched the overgrown margins of the garden for blackberries, finding only red ones, red as blood and bitter in the mouth.
I’m really a person who keeps pretty much to myself, but you’d probably know me as the guy you see all over town pushin’ the old wooden cart. You’d call me a bum, but I’ll get to that later. I have a life, though you might not think it’s much of one—not by your standards anyhow. It hasn’t always been like this, you know. I wasn’t born forty-seven years old pushin’ an old wooden cart everywhere I go—all over this two-bit town. I had a family . . . wife. Things are different now. Every day I do pretty much the same thing, except Sunday. No sir, I don’t push that cart on Sunday. Man deserves a bit of rest. Six days to make a livin’. One day for takin’ a rest! That’s the way I see it. My life’s all that hard, but it ain’t no picnic either. I’ve always been—well, poor, even when I had a family and all. Lived in East town. You know, lots of people won’t even go into East town on account of the colored people. Not that it’s all colored, get me, but they live there. Stay to themselves mostly. I like that. Nothin’ worse than nosey neighbors. Colored ain’t all that nosey, not to me anyhow. Most people don’t trust me a bit. Call me a bum. Some folks run when they see me—lots of kids do—but most people don’t pay me all that much attention. At least that’s what they want me to think. Some folks just don’t trust me. I can see ’em watchin’ out of the corner of their eye. I make my living pickin’ up things. That’s why I need my cart. I pick up things. Sell ’em. Most of the time it’s things people throw away. People throw away some of the damndest stuff. I furnished my house that way. All my furniture—stuff people just throwed away. And it’s not only furniture, I found an old saxophone once just lyin’ out in the alley with the rest of the junk. Or, maybe a kid put it there, I don’t know. It played good. I don’t play myself, never took lessons. But I sold it to an old colored man who swore it was in great shape. Sold it to him for $27. Man, was I livin’ high then! Ate at the cafeteria and ever’thing. Yep, Robert’s Cafeteria. I was standin’ right in front of the cafeteria after I ate myself a fine meal when I heard a couple of guys talkin’. One of ’em was a cop. I don’t know what the other guy did. But they were standin’ there on the curb talkin’, and this guy says to the cop, “You know the difference between a bum and a ’bo?” Lots of ’bo’s still hang out back of the old Frisco Building on Main, especially at night. The cop said he couldn’t see much difference, but the other guy set him straight. “A ‘bo will work for a living!” And he said it like that, too—living! They both laughed real hard. Well, I decided right then and there that it didn’t matter what folks called me. Those fellas laugh like that ’bout anyone who ain’t like them. I work, all right. Real hard sometimes. Lots of folks don’t really know nothin’ about me and maybe not a hell of lot of other stuff either for that matter. Some folks think that they are so damn smart. I never had a whole lot of schoolin’. Education just don’t mean a whole lot to me. I work, and I have a home. Oh, it’s not much to look at, but it’s a home, all right. It’s all I need. I don’t need all that much. Yep, I work, all right. I cover this whole town in about a week. Just about a week. Up and down every street. I don’t really know how many miles I walk in a day, pushin’ that cart. Never even tried to figure it out. Too many. But one thing for sure, I wear out shoes pretty damn quick—even good leather shoes. I get lots of shoes. People throw away real good ones sometimes. Like I said, I don’t know how many miles I walk or even how big this two-bit town really is. Sign says: JOPLIN: POPULATION 38,711. But what does that really tell a guy? I’m a guy who likes my privacy—maybe I said that before—but people all over this town recognize me. I’m a bit of a landmark here, if I do say so myself. Even the kids. I can hear ’em screamin’, “Ol’ Henry! Ol’ Henry!” when they see me comin’. Screamin’ and squealin’ like I was a star out of a monster movie showing at the Paramount Theatre or even the Fox. There’s a group of ’em—two girls, two boys, always together—climb up an old mulberry tree out by the alley in the north end of town. Not way up north where the rich folks live. No, this is before you get to those curvy streets with the alphabet names. About the three hundred block of Jackson or Sergeant. Up near the DeTar Clinic. Just a couple of blocks from the Safeway. The minute those kids see my cart turn into the alley, the girls go to squealin’—even before they even see me. Then up they go into that tree, all four of ’em. They sit there as quiet as kids can sit, which ain’t very quiet, and they eat those mulberries—bugs and all. Bet they eat a quart of bugs every summer! It’s mostly in the summer when I see those kids. I just hold my head up and keep on walkin’—walkin’ and pretendin’ I don’t even know they’re up there. And they sit up there gigglin’ and munchin’ those berries. Bugs and berries—ha! I remember one day last summer, they were up in that tree. I remember that day real well ’cause I turned into that alley on purpose. You see, I found a bunch of bottles of beer behind Jimmy’s. I don’t know who left them there because Jimmy don’t sell no beer in his place. It was a hot day. Anyway I drank about three bottles before I put the rest in my cart. So when I got to that alley, I was wantin’ to pee real bad. There’s a spot down there with a lot of trees—well mostly bushes—but they’re tall enough for a guy to take a quick leak. In my line of work, you learn the value of bein’ quick. Comes in handy lots of times. I just sort of rummage through the trash. Then I slip off for a bit—you know, take care of “business.” Sometimes it’s one kind of business, sometimes it’s another. Well, usually those kids stayed in that tree until I was long gone. But wouldn’t you know it, this was the day they came down. All four of ’em right there behind me. So I had to go on pushin’ my cart two, three more blocks. I was about to bust! In the summertime, I see those kids all over town. I bet some days they cover about as many blocks as I do, but they never go into East town. Except this one time. I saw them over the viaduct at Landreth Park. That’s in East town—well, sort of. Anyway I saw those kids at the swimming pool at Landreth Park late that evening. At first I didn’t take a whole lot of notice ’cause I was on my way home. You’d think those kids would be at Schifferdecker or one of those fancy parks over there, not in East town—not in the swimming pool in East town. But it was those same kids. I’m sure.
Good luck to those of you who qualify to enter. Judges include Ann Pancake, Maurice Manning, and Janisse Ray. Be sure to visit the site and follow the guidelines.
“Last night’s spangles and yesterday’s pearls are the bright morning stars of the barroom girls.” –Gillian Welch, Barroom Girls
Little girls don’t dream of growing up to become barmaids, and Lori Thompson was no different, but now she stands behind the bar at The Bluff, staring into a daydream of neon-lit smoke, while men and women hover close over drinks she’s poured them. The bar is dark, the only window in the place boarded over with plywood and covered in plastic. A small space heater run on an extension cord glows orange on a shelf behind the bar to make up for the aging furnace. Roger Price, the bar’s owner, sits leaning back in a wooden chair, reading a worn paperback. His thick white hair is combed through with pomade, making it the color of iron. Down the bar two men sit with beers in front of them, their eyes sagging, their shoulders nearly touching. They stare up at the tv hung in the corner where men in camouflage hunting gear hold scoped rifles and the antlers of a dead elk on the side of a mountain while thick snow falls around them. “What’re you reading?” Lori says to Roger. “Oh, hell, it’s one of those romance books like you see checking out of the grocery.” “What got you started on those?” “I just picked one up and took it home. Wasn’t long after my old lady left, so I didn’t have a whole hell of a lot to do. But since I took them up, I’ve had more sex than I’ve had in the last ten years.” Lori sips from a white porcelain coffee mug. “I’ll bet.” Roger sits back in his chair and crosses his legs, holding his place in the book with his thumb. “Well, think about it. Who reads this stuff—women. Why—because it’s what they dream of. So once you figure that out, you got something.” Lori starts to ask him what it is that women dream of but figures it best left alone and steps around the bar to wipe down the tables along the opposite wall in preparation for the four o’clock rush when people start getting off work. A woman comes out of the ladies room and sits in front of an ashtray overflowing with crushed butts. Her makeup is smudged black around her eyes, and she dabs them with a fingertip, keeping her back to Roger the whole time. Lori walks over, dumps the ashtray, and sets it back in place. In the dim light of the room, the woman looks not much older than thirty, but the skin on her hands is loose, the veins dark and broken. Her hair runs long and straight down her back, dark and without shine. “What’s the matter?” Roger says to her. “Nothing.” “Don’t look like nothing.” “Well, it is.” “It’s Darrell, isn’t it.” The woman doesn’t answer. “He don’t treat you right, Deb. He never has. And if he were here, I’d tell him that. I’d tell him he was a damn fool. Because if I had you, if I had one goddamn night with you, I’d treat you like a goddess. Like no other.” The woman turns and looks at Roger, and he smiles at her softly. She begins to cry again and wipes at her eyes, but then stops and stands looking at him. “Thank you,” she says, and hurries back to the ladies room. Roger holds up his book in Lori’s direction and thumps the cover with the back of his hand. She shakes her head with a mild disapproval, but he winks at her, and she can’t help but smile. Her mother had taught her early about the ploys of men, hoping to avoid what she considered to be the curse of women in their family—both Lori’s grandmother and mother conceived their first child out of wedlock—so she told her that sex was no real pleasure in life, that it only led to the pain of childbirth and the sacrifice of motherhood, and the sooner she learned to live without it the better. When Lori bought her first pair of heels to wear to the eighth grade dance, her mother sat at the kitchen table while Lori walked back and forth across the linoleum for hours until she could do it without waggling her ass, but even with her mother’s constant pressure, she found herself pregnant a month before her nineteenth birthday. Of course, both her grandmother and mother were married before they started showing, and their husbands worked hard—her grandfather as an oilfield mechanic, her father at the powerplant—to support their families and fulfill their duties. But Lori hadn’t had that fortune. She was still living at home then, going to the junior college with hopes of transferring to study social work. Her mother said, “you better find a way to stay in school because you’re the only one taking care of that baby.” And her advisor showed her programs for working mothers and different financial aid forms and told her it would be tough for a few years but that by doing so, she would be able to provide a good life for her daughter and herself. And Lori knew they were right, yet she never enrolled for the next term because she came to believe she wasn’t one to be counseling others, that she was a failure as a woman—an unmarried unemployed uneducated too-young mother still living under her parents’ roof; the very thing her mother had warned her about happening; another statistic for backwater Matin County Illinois. Lori got a job at the Ben Franklin in town—working the register, cleaning, learning how to frame and matte pictures—but when she spoke to the owners about a maternity leave, they went on about how business had been slow and that they needed to find ways to cut back and that she could work until the baby was born, but after that she wouldn’t be needed. In the fall, a little girl was born, and Lori named her Sierra and for a while was glad for her parents’ help: her mother there for night feedings and colic and laundry; her father with an endless supply of funny faces and rocking chair stories. But as the months passed and the family eased into a routine, Lori felt the balance shifting, felt the lives of daughter and granddaughter melding as her parents treated them more like sisters born twenty years apart. Just after Sierra’s first birthday, Lori knew she had to get out, so she applied to work at nearly every place of business in town, and she filled out paperwork for income-based housing in a new complex that had been built the year before. It took two months for her housing approval to process, and the only job callback she received was from the Bluff. She worked there every night but Monday and Tuesday while her mother kept Sierra, and since she had no real expenses, she was able to save back a first and last month’s rent deposit and was ready to move in the day after they called saying there was an opening. As her father was carrying the last of her things into the apartment, Lori smiled and told her mother that she felt she was finally getting things under control. Her mother smirked and said, “Well it’s good to know the solution to all your life’s problems was learning to flirt and pour drinks, getting on WIC, and finding place in the projects.” “I’m trying really hard, Mom. It’s only temporary.” “I’ll bet you thought it was only temporary when you were out slutting around town, but that little girl you got ain’t temporary, so you better get your act together.” Lori wanted to say, You had it figured out, didn’t you Mom, staying at home cooking and cleaning like a good little woman should, having three kids by the time you were 22 so that you didn’t have to think about your own life, just had to tell us how to live ours, but instead she went over to where Sierra played in a small square of grass between the sidewalk and the parking lot and said with a great smile, “Come on, sweetie, let’s go up and see your new room.” *** Roger is sitting at one of the tables, talking to the woman Deb, their hands nearly touching between their empty drinks. When the hunting program ends, one of the men down the bar turns off the tv, then takes up his stool again. He slaps the man he sits with on the back. “So what’s on that test you gotta take?” He is short and chubby, his cheeks smooth and shiny. “Fractions.” “Do you know math?” The other man sits with both hands on his beer glass. “I’ve worked as a paramedic for eight years. Took the test for that job at the county hospital. It’s all decimals. Not a goddamned fraction on there. Now the city thinks we need to know fractions.” “Fractions is easy.” The chubby man takes a pencil and a napkin and starts writing figures down, while the other man looks over his shoulder intently. Lori wipes through drops of water on the bar with a white rag. As she passes, she hears the chubby man say, “See, point twenty is one fifth. Twenty hundredths makes two tenths makes one fifth. Got it?” “No,” the other man says. “One thing this country fucked up on was not using the metric system.” The door opens and the light from outside is blinding. A tall man in his fifties steps in and shuts the door softly behind him. Lori turns and walks to the shelves of liquor and begins mixing whiskey and 7up. “How you doing today, Sweetwater,” she says to him. The man takes up his seat at the bar. “Any better and I’d have to be twins.” Lori sets the drink in front of him. “Hard day?” “Oh you know, through rain and sleet and dark of night.” He takes a long drink. One of the men from the other end of the bar yells over: “Sweetwater, how’d you get a cushy job delivering the mail, while the rest of us have to work for a living?” He holds his glass toward them in a mock toast. “I passed the Civil Service exam.” Lori fills a small sink with water and begins washing glasses, setting them out to dry. Sweetwater lights a cigarette and says to her, “How’s a nice girl like you ever expect to find a decent man working in a gin palace like this.” “Well, Sweetwater,” Lori says, “you’re in here everyday.” “Yeah, but I ain’t looking for a decent man.” There was a time when Lori thought she had a decent man. Nathan Barnes worked as head of sales in his father’s office supply business uptown, and he took her out for nice dinners in Evansville and bought her little gifts, even let her drive his brand new Mustang convertible to the college a few times while she left her mom’s 78 Malibu parked behind the store, and as she drove it proudly through town with the top down, her mother’s voice rang in her head: Honey, you can marry them rich the same as you can poor. But he had never promised her anything, never said it outloud, though many times when they were parked along the floodplain on the front side of the levee, watching the faint lights of cars passing on the bridge above them, he talked about marriage and kids, and she imagined herself in the role of wife and mother and before long began to believe that’s what he was saying. Then she saw his picture in the paper with another girl on his arm, blonde and tan with pencil thin eyebrows and her left hand thrust forward to show the diamond on her finger. Lori drove to his parents’ house, and Nathan’s father told her that he was out playing golf, that he’d probably come home around dark, but instead of waiting, she drove to the golf course and sat in the parking lot near the ninth green, thinking she might see him, and when she did, she walked out onto the finely cut grass, waving to him. He was with two other friends, and he took her aside and whispered harshly under his breath. “Couldn’t this have waited.” “I saw your picture in the paper.” “What about it,” Nathan said. His friends stood near the cart, drinking beer, their heads leaned together. She started to wonder why she’d come here, why she couldn’t have simply accepted what she already knew. “It just seems a little quick.” “Not really. I met her last year in Texas. We’ve been engaged for six months.” “So I was just someone to pass the time with.” He looked above her head toward the road, started to speak, then stopped with the first syllable so that he sounded like a child trying to sound out a word he recognized but couldn’t say. He stood with his golf club resting over his shoulder and said softly, “Kelsie’s mom and dad are shelling out twenty grand for the wedding, plus a honeymoon to Cancun, and her dad has offered me a job with his company.” He smiled as if he’d forgotten who he was talking to, let his excitement slip just a moment. “He owns a truck accessory shop. Camper shells, tonneau covers, light bars, lift kits. It’s huge.” He turned to his friends standing at the cart, and they all nodded, and one of them held down his two middle fingers with his thumb in a heavy metal salute and said, “Hell yeah.” Lori stood with her arms crossed in front of her chest and said deadpan, “Well, how could you pass that up? In line to be the next Muffler King of East Texas. It’s a no-brainer.” She was breaking apart on the inside, but all she showed was hardness. Nate said, defensive, “It’s accessories. Not mufflers.” “Excuse me, your highness.” That was all she had left, middle school comebacks, and turned away. Nate called her name, and she stopped to see him standing with both arms outstretched, teeth showing in a smile that held nothing but spite. He said, “What’d you expect, sweetheart,” and could have left it at that, but decided to dig deep. “There are girls you marry and girls you fuck.” Lori felt like throwing up and made herself walk to her car, even though she wanted to run sobbing with her face in her hands. She pulled from the curb, passed the city pool, then sat for nearly five minutes at the stop sign where Park Road crossed College Drive until a car moved up behind her and honked. She screamed and floored the pedal, never letting up until she realized she was doing sixty on a residential road, tears running down her face in black streams of mascara. She pulled into the tennis courts behind the college, shut off the car, and stared at herself in the rearview mirror until she was blank of all emotion. She told herself she could handle a broken heart, said it over and over, and in the following days came to believe it. And then she missed her period. *** Lori finishes washing the few dirtied glasses and puts them away under the bar, leaving one out in front of Sweetwater. She makes him another drink and pushes it toward him, taking away his empty in a single movement. A few more patrons come in, two city workers and a woman who is a clerk at the water department, and Roger walks to the other end of the bar where they sit, pours their drafts, and starts a conversation. Lori wipes down her end of the bar, which is empty now, except for Sweetwater. “So do you have big plans tonight,” she says to him. “You’re looking at it. Only I hope I’m a lot drunker by the end.” She smiles at him, thinking it was a half-joke, but he isn’t looking at her. She stands for a moment, listening to the furnace’s blower slowly crank up, then starts to walk away to the other end of the bar where the hum of people talking and laughing grows louder. But as she walks past Sweetwater, she feels his hand on her arm. “Two years ago tonight, my son died.” His grip is strong, almost hurting her wrist, but he doesn’t realize this. His eyes hold no malice, only pain. “I’m sorry,” she says. Then after a short pause: “How did it happen?” He drains his glass, leaving only the whiskey soaked ice, and says, “That’s the real shitter of it all. He wanted to join the Marines, and I told him he better make no mistake about what they do for a living. Well, he went on about serving his country and about me being at Khe Sahn and this and that, and I told him, if I hadn’t been drafted, ain’t no way in hell I’d volunteer for that shit. The only thing I did to serve the country was duck my head for damn near three months, thinking it would be over once the shrapnel hit my brain. My luck just held out longer than the gooks.” Lori stands looking sad and confused, trying to figuring out what war Sweetwater’s son could have seen. She started to ask, then thought it was a dumb question. Sweetwater didn’t seem to notice and kept talking. “He joined up right after graduation, did real well in his training, kept a head on his shoulders, wasn’t some gung-ho idiot, and I began to think maybe he’d done the right thing. Then in ’96, he was part of the outfit sent to regain control of the Liberian embassy. It was a small action. Most people probably don’t even remember it. But when he came home, he had a really hard go. He tried to talk to me about it. I Guess when they went in, most of what they were up against were little kids with AK-47′s, which never set right with him. They would have killed him. He did what he had to do. But saying it that way doesn’t change what happened. He finished out his enlistment, but was drinking pretty heavy by then and had come close a few times to getting kicked out. I tried to step in as best I could without making him feel worse than he already did. But after a few months, it seemed like he’d started to get things together a little, at least on the surface; he even talked about going to college, getting something worthwhile out of the situation, and then one night driving back to his apartment, he was going through some road construction where they’d taken it down to one lane over a bridge—it wasn’t late, there weren’t any other cars, and the autopsy showed he wasn’t drunk. He just lost it.” Sweetwater holds his palms up, shaking his head. “The paramedics said he died instantly, but I don’t know if they just say that so you don’t think they suffered or if it was really true.” He looks up at Lori, pushes his glass toward her with one finger, and tries to make a smile. “You think I could get another?” She nods and says, “Sure thing, babe,” then takes the bottle down and mixes his drink heavy. For a moment she feels like crying. Not for his son, though she’s saddened by the story, but for Sweetwater. From the day she met him, she didn’t believe he could ever be beaten by anything, and yet here he sits, his eyes red and bleary, his face heavy and aged by grief. She places the glass in front of him and says, “I’ll be right back,” touching the back of his hand lightly with her fingertips. “You be okay for a minute?” He changes his voice, trying to sound more like his usual self. “If the whiskey gets low, I’ll just reach across and pour my own.” Then he squeezes her hand, lifts it to his lips. She smiles and walks through the kitchen to the back entrance and pushes open the heavy steel door. Even with the gray half-light of late afternoon, she squints after being in the dark of the bar. She perches herself on an iron railing along the walk and dials her cell phone. The wind cuts through her clothes, and she realizes it has snowed, though nothing more than a thin powder over the surface. Her friend Shauna answers on the third ring. “I know everything is fine,” Lori says into the phone. “I just needed to check.” The sound of the television plays in the background. “Sure thing, girl.” Shauna’s voice is light, indicating her smile. “We’ve eaten and now we’re watching Mulan. No problems.” Not long after Lori moved out on her own, she became friends with Shauna Palmer, a divorced twenty-three-year-old cosmetologist who lived in the apartment across the hall, and one afternoon, while Shauna was coloring Lori’s hair at her kitchen table, she offered to keep Sierra at her place overnight so that when Lori came home from the bar at 3 am, she could sleep late into the morning and yet be close by if Sierra needed her. It was the final step of independence from her parents, and she accepted on the spot. Lori lights a cigarette and says, “I just needed to call.” Bits of grass sticking through the snow shudder with the wind. “You doing okay?” Shauna says. “As well as can be expected. Tell Sierra goodnight for me, and I’ll see you in the morning.” Lori hangs up and stands for a moment, watching an endless black cloud of starlings overhead, seeking roost for the night. The trees along the riverbank are already full with them, as if the limbs had budded a pestilence, and the world becomes quiet, nothing but the hush of a million birdwings, the scratch of the snow blown against the building. *** By last call, Sweetwater has reached his goal of oblivion and sits hunched on his stool while younger people crowd to the bar to order drinks. Lori has been watching him all night, always sure to ask him how he is, and in the midst of the loud music and drunken laughter, he never fails to meet her eyes and smile sweetly. As the bar begins to clear out, Lori leans in close to his ear and says, “Hang around a minute. I’ll take you home.” The hardest thing about her job is coming home to an empty apartment. When she was a little girl, she always hated being in empty places without the noise of some human presence other than her own. On the worst nights, she goes home with some young man who’s sweet or handsome or just quiet and alone, and sometimes she sleeps with them, though she doesn’t always have sex with them, and then she awakens early and checks their wallets for whatever money they have leftover from drinking and takes what she can without cleaning them out completely. She doesn’t see this as stealing or whoring but as taking a tip, no different than the money she’s taken across the bar all night. And least that’s what she tells herself. Deep down, she fears that it’s some kind of warped act of vengeance against Nathan Barnes and any other man that sees her as a girl to fuck and nothing more. She keeps this money in an empty coffee can in her freezer, one hundred eighty five dollars so far, and tells herself when there is two thousand, she’ll pack up everything and take Sierra from this place for good. At five minutes till closing, Roger tells her to go on home. She walks out the back entrance to the parking lot where Sweetwater stands leaning against the fender of her car, smoking the last of a cigarette. He says in a clear voice, “I’m fine, really. I left my car at home and walked up here.” “Well what are you doing standing around out here in the cold for.” “I guess if something were to happen to me, I’d be an unsettled ghost knowing it was on your conscience.” “Just get in the damned car.” He tries to open the passenger’s door but it won’t budge. “You got me locked out, darlin.” She climbs in and reaches across the seat to pull the handle. He sits slowly, hanging onto the top of the door as he lowers himself against the cold vinyl seat, and she turns the key. Streetlights shine through the layer of snow on the windshield. Their breath fills the car. She clears the glass with the wipers and backs out of the lot. They don’t speak other than Sweetwater’s brief directions to where he lives, and soon she pulls in front of an old shotgun house near the railroad tracks that cut through town. He opens the door, and Lori says suddenly, “Can I walk you in?” He sees this as nothing but concern for a drunken old man, but the truth is she’s not ready to be alone. They walk through the front door of his house, and Sweetwater flips on the lights. The front room is bare, save for a couch and a small tv set on a coffee table. She’s surprised at how neat the place is, though it’s obvious a single man lives here: magazines in a stack beside the tv; a large ceramic ashtray on the floor with a few filters lying amongst the ashes; dust over everything. An open doorway leads to the next room where a single bed sits pushed against the far wall opposite a wooden dresser. Past that is the bathroom and then the kitchen. True to it’s name, a gunshot would sail through the front door and out the back without touching anything. Sweetwater walks slow, reaching a hand out for steadiness, his eyes barely open. Lori takes his arm and guides him through the doorway to the bedroom and helps him sit on the edge of the bed. He looks up at her and manages a smile, then eases down on his side, using his elbow to support his weight. “Do you want your boots off,” she says. “You don’t have to do this.” He closes his eyes and his breathing becomes even, as if he’s fallen asleep in that instant. She waits a moment to see if he’ll awaken, but he doesn’t stir. His boots are laced to the top and double knotted. Lori tries to undo them gently, but she becomes frustrated and tugs at the laces until finally they come loose. When she slides them from his feet, she expects the smell to be overwhelming, but to her surprise it’s not. Just boot leather, a faint smell of sweat. She sets his boots together near the closet and then digs around until she finds an old quilt folded in the bottom drawer of the dresser. She covers him, pulls a chair into the room from the kitchen, and keeps vigil as one would over the sick and dying. A sound like rocks being dropped on the roof grows loud, and she says to herself, “Snow’s gone to ice.” After a while, she goes to the front room and smokes a cigarette on the couch, crushes it out with the others in the ashtray. Then, without wanting to, she falls asleep. When she awakens, the sky has lightened, though the sun won’t be up for another hour. She smokes again, trying to wake herself up, then leans against the arm of the couch and dozes until the sunlight coming through the window forces her eyes open. Lori stands and looks out, a hand-edge flat against her brows. The trees and powerlines and eaves of houses look as if they are encased in glass. The chainlink fence running along the sideyard seems made of spider’s webs. Tree branches like black blood running through veins of crystal. She puts on her coat and steps back into Sweetwater’s room. For a moment she can’t tell if he’s breathing and stands listening like she did for the first months after her daughter was born, longing for a cry so she would know the baby was alive. Finally, Lori moves beside the bed and puts her hand on his back. It’s warm, and soon she can feel the slight rise and fall of his breathing, and then without a thought, she tucks the stray strands of hair at his temple behind his ear and rises to go. When she crosses the threshold into the living room, he speaks hoarsely: “In the box, on the dresser.” She turns, startled for a moment, and sees his face above the cover, nodding toward the opposite wall. She walks over to the painted wooden jewelry box sitting on the top of the dresser, which she assumes had been his mother’s, and opens the brass hinged lid. Inside is a plain white envelope with the word Savings printed in ink on the front, thick with money. She goes to the bed and lays it beside him, but he reaches out and takes her wrist gently. “I don’t need it.” His eyes are dark and clear. “You do.” She steps back. “I can’t.” “You’re a beautiful girl, Lori, but there’s more to life than what you’re living.” He raises the envelope and holds it there until she takes it. She can’t look him in the eyes any longer and turns her head toward the front door. “Now listen,” he says. “You take that, and you do more with it than just pay the cable bill or buy your little girl some new clothes. Seems to me it oughta get you a good start on finishing up your schooling. I know other things seem more important right now, but your daughter won’t remember what you buy for her now. She will remember what her mama does for a living.” Lori starts to cry and turns to go, but she stops in the front room. His voice comes from behind her, low and calm. “I know that was hurtful. I don’t mean for it to be. But I want to say this to you, because I feel there won’t be another chance.” She goes to speak, but her voice cracks. She clears it and wipes her cheeks. “You’re right, Sweetwater. But it’s pretty goddamned harsh.” “I know it is, honey,” he says. She waits to hear him rise from the bed and come to her, wants to feel his arms slide around her, but they don’t. It seems a long time before he speaks again. “They told me that my son’s death was an accident, but I’ve been around too long for that. You never want to believe how much people lie to you, even the ones who love you. That was no accident. I know how he was feeling, been through it, and still I couldn’t say or do anything for him. He saw that concrete bridgeside, and he knew exactly what it would take. They said he was going full speed when he hit. There were no skidmarks.” She feels cold standing in the bare room, even in her coat, and suddenly wants to leave. “I need to get home,” she says without turning around. “Take care of yourself, Lori. And don’t waste your worry on me. You’ve got too much living ahead of you for that.” She opens the front door and the cold burns her lungs. She half expects him to say more before she goes out, but he doesn’t, and she shuts the door behind her. A few starlings walk across the ice-crusted snow, pecking into the surface for food, and a cardinal sits in the branches of a forsythia bush at the corner of the house, bright against the colorless world. The wind stirs the frozen trees, and she thinks it sounds like bones rattling. Inside her car, as it’s warming up, she opens the envelope and counts the money. Thirty-three hundred dollars. She looks back toward the house and tells herself she can’t keep it, then closes the flap and puts it in her purse. She backs into the road and tries to pull away without spinning the tires, but they slide easily on the ice, so she lets off the gas and feathers the pedal until the tires grab, and she drives toward her apartment thankful the sun is rising behind her so that she can see. *** When she walks into the Bluff that night, the place is already beginning to fill up. She scans down the bar, looking for Sweetwater, but doesn’t see him in his usual place. Roger makes a motion with his head as he mixes a drink, letting her know she’s needed right away. Then he smiles as if out of pity and looks away. She doesn’t pay this much attention and quickly gets to work behind the bar, opening beers, making drinks, picking up empty glasses. An hour passes before she has time to notice that Sweetwater still hasn’t come in, and she begins to make excuses for him: maybe the mail was heavy today, or he had car trouble, or because of the tough night, he got a late start. A man at the far end of the bar waves his arm at her and whistles. “You think I could get a drink down here, or should I do it myself.” She doesn’t answer, only reaches into the cooler and pries the cap off a bottle. As she approaches him, she hears his conversation with the man sitting on the next stool, the paramedic who was worrying over his exam the day before. “I wonder when they’ll advertise his position,” the paramedic says. “I figure it’d have to be soon.” The man turns to take his beer from Lori. “Thanks, sweetheart. Next time you’ll have to tip me.” She turns without giving it a thought, numb to comments from jerks by now, then hears over her shoulder: “It’s like they say—the mail must go through. Somebody’s going to have to deliver it.” Roger is fiddling with the blender, trying to make a frozen daiquiri, and she stands close beside him. She says, “Have you seen Sweetwater today?” He presses a button on the blender and the noise from its motor drowns out the jukebox and the people’s voices, and when it shuts off, the regular noise from the bar could be mistaken for silence. “Wait a second.” Roger takes the daiquiri to a woman wearing a black Harley Davidson shirt a size too small. When he comes back to Lori, he takes her by the arm, and they walk through the swinging doors into the kitchen. “You haven’t heard.” From his face she knows that something has happened and is not surprised. Roger looks through the round plexiglass window in the door, then back to Lori. “They found him dead around noon.” She tries to keep her face from changing and can’t tell from Roger’s expression if she’s done so. “What happened?” She had tried to speak quietly, but the sound of her voice is shocking to her. “When he didn’t show to work this morning, the post-mistress called his house, and when there was no answer, she called his sub, then went by there over lunch. His car was in the drive, and she knocked for a while, then tried the knob. It was open.” Lori thinks to herself, Yes, I didn’t lock it, but knows enough to not say anything. Roger’s face becomes strained. “He hung himself. Did it with an extension cord.” And at this, Lori begins to cry. Roger looks on as a man would in this situation, as if he’s gone to far in what he said, that he should have known a woman couldn’t handle that type of detail. But it isn’t that. She’d been there with him, and once again she had failed to give the right comfort, the right counsel, and it pushed her to a point of despair where she could no longer hold in her tears. Roger puts a hand on her shoulder, and she apologizes and wipes her cheeks. He pauses for a moment, looks out at the crowd again, and says, “I guess I better get back out there. No rest for the wicked.” He squeezes her shoulder to let her know he is only trying to lighten things. Lori lets out a small laugh. “And the righteous don’t need it.” Roger shakes his head and returns to his post behind the bar. Lori watches him, then goes to the back door and steps outside. The air has warmed a little, the wind shifting out of the south, and the ice has all but melted, leaving a heavy fog over everything. She leans against the slick railing, then stands quickly, so the damp doesn’t soak through her pants. A car pulls into the lot and parks, and a man and woman climb out. He is older than her, balding, pudgy in the middle, but still he walks confidently beside this young beauty whose hips move so seductively, high heels clicking on the wet asphalt. And though Lori has never met her, she knows her. Thinks, That’s your future, Lori, and grips the railing with both hands. Then whispers, “Shit, girl, that’s you now.” Lori unties her apron and drapes it over the wet iron, wondering how far away she and Sierra could go on three thousand dollars. Somewhere with mountains, so that wintertime is beautiful, even with the cold and the snow. She lights a cigarette and pulls out her phone, holding it in her palm. The wind raises needles in her cheeks. The slow bass-thump of a country song bleeds through the walls of the bar, and she closes the phone again without calling and walks to her car. On the road to the apartment, the fog is thick, dotted with the haloed stars of streetlights, and Lori imagines loading up her car with her and Sierra’s things and driving west like modern day pioneers, seeking a new start in valley town between snowpeaks. And then she realizes she’s missed her turn. She slams on the brakes and jerks the wheel, thinking she can make it, but overshoots and bumps up onto the curb and onto the sidewalk. For a moment, she simply looks out the window, listening to the soft hum of the engine idling. She rolls down the window to breathe the cold air, and listens to the quiet, and she thinks of the starlings who clouded the skies and filled the air with the screaming, and wonders where they are now. Wonders if they fly all day with no destination other than to find food and drink and a roost for the night only to do it all over again tomorrow, and then she sees herself standing behind another bar in another town while Sierra stays with someone else every night. The view out the window is lovely, but the view inside is the same. And so she moves the shifter into reverse and pulls into the street, trying to calculate rent and tuition in her head, then slowly on to where her daughter waits for her to come home from working at the Bluff for the last time.
Speaks for itself, no?
A weak rain fell and settled across Route 6 like a worn out bed sheet so that oil and grease left from the occasional car and several short-bed coal trucks rose back to the surface of the blacktop. The road would stay slick with the reborn oil until the rain picked up and washed it away. Until then, most of the vehicles slowed down, taking it easy through the horseshoe curve that hugged past Peaceful Murphy’s truck garage. Most drivers, the ones leaning into the steering wheels of their cars and mini-vans, slowed down to a crawl through the curve. They knew the old oil mixed with the first sprinkles of new rain was worse than black ice. So they drove like it was midnight in December. The short-beds blew past Murphy’s loud and hard, spraying bits of coal the size of quarters from beneath loose tarps. Paid by the load, these drivers with call names like Spider, Grape Ape and Wild Bill didn’t care if the road ahead was coated in napalm. When a rogue chunk of coal bounced across Route 6 and skipped to land at the tip of Hank Clayton’s boot, he picked it up and tossed it at a stray dog huddled near the edge of the garage. “Hank! That anyway to treat a dog?” It was his granddaddy, Burl, crossing Route 6 from his house atop the hill on Beauty Street, a short walk to the truck garage and adjacent building, which he owned. Hank threw his hand up, formally, apologetically, and Burl waved him over to where he stood like a totem pole of flannel and khaki in front of the brick-broken building. Checking the garage for Murphy or drivers and mechanics and finding it empty, Hank crossed the bramble thickets that separated Murphy’s and his granddaddy’s building by less than ten feet. When he made it over, Burl didn’t move his gaze from the sagging top of the building. “We’ll need to start on the roof first,” Burl said and then looked to Hank. He adjusted his suspenders. “Gonna remodel this building. It’s about time, and I need your help. Particularly on the roof.” Hank shielded his eyes from the sun with the back of his hand and studied the roof. The building was two stories and even from the ground he could see boards peeking up from the edge like driftwood, split and blackened, soft as sponge. “I’m working over here for Murphy now, granddaddy,” Hank said, and motioned to the garage. “What? With that bunch? That’s just tinkerin. What’s Peaceful got you doin?” “Spraying down trucks and doing some repairs and so forth,” Hank answered. “Doin some repairs, you say?” Burl went to the side of the building and placed his hand there, like a nervous father checking to see if his newborn was still breathing. “I shoulda taught you weldin,” he said after a time. “Well, all the same, I don’t mind to help, but it’ll have to be on my days off,” Hank said. “I’m just working three days a week right now.” “That gives us three other days to manage with, then,” Burl said. “Four,” Hank corrected. “Three. We don’t work Sundays.” *** Like always, the rumbling crunch and hitch of his neighbor’s car grinding to start woke Hank at just after 7:00 a.m. Since renting the place more than a year ago, he had yet to use an alarm clock. Just went back to sleep on days off and got out of bed with the sound of the gutted car engine for days when there was work. Today there was work. Soggy boards to be pulled up and replaced and God only knew what else. He went to the kitchen in the barely light of morning and poured a cup of coffee from half a pot left from yesterday. A microwave would be nice, he thought, gulping down the cold coffee quickly and cleaning out the cup at the sink. But then he should have just made a new pot, but granddaddy would be waiting at the building soon and he was a ten minute drive away. Skipping a shower Hank dipped his head under the sink instead, wetting down the rat nests that had twirled into his hair during sleep. He toweled off with a dish rag and combed hurriedly with his fingers, thinking of the ladder, double extended to the roof, a dread settling into his stomach. He’d never said a word of it aloud, but the building was pretty much a shit hole. At one time, there was a couple nice apartments upstairs and one downstairs, and a barber shop beside that. But that had been years and his granddaddy had bought it after all that was gone. Whatever plans he had, they were put on the shelf a long time ago. That was until yesterday. Burl was there before Hank pulled in and work started right away. It was just after 7:30 a.m. When a light drizzle started just as they had the ladder positioned alongside the building, Hank secretly began to wonder if he might get a little money for helping. Some pay could go a long way in covering the rent and utilities and other debts he thought about less specifically, the ones that nagged him especially hard. Then the drizzle lifted off, back into the clouds, which moved away in a slow bulk across the ridge and dissipated like a swarm of colorless wasps. The building was a shipwreck raised to the surface just off Route 6 and left alone, no treasure to speak of, no fine discoveries. From the roof, Hank could see into to what was once the top floor bedrooms, spyglassed through holes that looked as if they might have been the result of boulders falling from the nearby heavens of John Attic Ridge. There were more than ten of these busted out sections, the roof an opened mouthful of wooden cavities. And the rot inside was that much worse. Hank lowered himself steadily through one of the holes during a break, mindful of rusty nails and countless other objects left in dangerous shards from the constant, pushing weight of weather and wind. Below was a bleached out dresser and he tested it with first one foot then the other until he was positioned solidly. He did the same with the floor of the old apartment until he was standing in a kaleidoscope of light from the outside world distilled through thousands of hidden cracks in the filmed over windows and plaster-curled walls. People had certainly lived here. Families. In an area that served as a kitchen there were four chairs that seemed blown about the room. Two tilted against a far wall and the others sat upright but on opposite sides of the room. There were dishes in a cancerous sink. Everywhere the floors were trap-door weak. Hank gazed up at the hole through which he had left the unfiltered sunlight behind as he made his way down a hallway running the length of the apartment. Not more than five steps in, he moved with caution through a doorway leading to what was once a bedroom. Claustrophobic in size, it was a child’s bedroom, he figured. A rectangle of cleaner hardwood suggested a place where a bed might have once been. In the corner he found odd toys, action figures, arms twisted and gnawed from where rats had rushed through and tested the items for food. Hank stood for too long examining the toys. For a crazy moment he wished he might just stay in the room, sleep nights on the clean rectangle, the negative exposure his place of rest. At dawn he would arrange the toys in the room and sit quietly in the kitchen while the morning opened up the light show through the cracks in the walls. “Hank! Let’s get back at it!” The sound of his granddaddy’s voice ringing out from above, the shuffle of his boots overhead, muted but insistent, pulled him backwards from the bedroom. He went up through the broken section of roof and spent the next couple of hours forgetting the toys and kitchen chairs. At lunch, they drove to the IGA for hot dogs with chili made from fresh hamburger and sloppy joe sauce. By dinner, Hank thought his granddaddy looked tired and finished, and with about an hour of daylight left, he called it a day. The ladder was retracted and tied to the back of the Datsun truck. Of the thirty or so squares needed to repair the roof, they had stripped about four and replaced just two rotted boards. The work with his granddaddy had been uncustomary in its slowness, easy-going and a surprise to Hank. With the extra time and a decent well of energy left, he decided to drive straight to Jimmy Cole’s poker game on Thompson Fork Road. *** He had stowed away twenty dollars for the buy-in and took the bill out of his shirt pocket as soon as he walked in the door to Jimmy’s tool shop, a rickety structure originally envisioned as a two-door garage which eventually became the poker room and general hideaway. He was greeted by familiars when he placed his twenty on the table in the center of the room. “Sure Shot Clayton,” Jimmy said as Hank pulled up a chair. Hank’s dad had shot a man in the kneecap during a poker game once when the deed to somebody’s house was folded into a large pot in a no-limit hand. Since all these men had known his dad, Hank had inherited the name Sure Shot right off, the first night he played in the game. “Who’s winning?” Hank said, counting chips out in four denominations of green, black, red and blue from a silver case on what would have been a fine, metal workbench. He had noticed Peaceful Murphy sitting in, but left it alone in his thoughts. This was poker. Not work. “Thing’s already started,” Jimmy said. “Okay if I take a hit on however many blinds and jump in?” Hank asked. Jimmy looked at the others and they agreed by offering a silent disregard to the question. Murphy snorted lightly into the air. The game usually went far into the morning with a tournament style Jimmy implemented after becoming a huge fan of the World Series of Poker on television a few months back. Before that it was straight money games and dealer’s choice. Now it was tournaments with timed blind increases and payouts to first and second place. And always no-limit hold ’em. “This game’s the Cadillac of poker, boys,” Jimmy said, a cigarette hanging from his lip like some enormously long tooth busted loose but hanging on. He had just pulled in his third straight pot. “Lucky tonight, Jim.” Still stacking his chips even, Hank could tell it was Murphy’s voice offering Jimmy comment. Jimmy was one of Murphy’s drivers. The tone, sarcastic and accusatory, irked Hank, and he found himself wishing he would have went on home. This might not be work, but it was Murphy, and he couldn’t afford to toss away twenty dollars just for getting rattled at the table. When Hank turned to the table with his chips balanced in both hands he saw Jimmy had already folded his buy-in with the rest, a wound tight roll of bills on a unvarnished table inches, always inches, from his elbow. He was in the game now whether he wanted to be or not. “Drove by today and saw you and Burl on that old roof,” Murphy said as soon as Hank was in his seat. Hank didn’t say much, just agreed, and the game went on in a ruffling of worn out cards and the clacking of clay chips. Jimmy was getting the best of it, but Hank had built a small stack, picking his spots and laying low. When Murphy spoke to him again, it wasn’t about the game, no attempt to rattle him from his conservative, grind-it-out approach. But what Murphy said rattled him all the same. “Tell Burl I’ll give him ten thousand for that buildin,” Murphy said in a bored voice, the voice he used when doing business. “As is. Not ten or twenty months from now after you all finish piddlin with it.” It was Murphy’s deal and when Hank didn’t answer he stopped the rainbow movement of cards, placed the deck in his left hand and looked directly at Hank. Hank had hoped to let the comment go, just idle talk he had no real stake in. Murphy’s continued stare told him that was not to be the case. “It’s not mine to negotiate,” Hank said. Murphy snorted again, resumed shuffling. “Who can talk to Burl about anything these days?” Four hands later, Hank busted out and drove home thinking of how he should have checked kings on the river instead of pushing against a possible flush, thinking of how to mention ten thousand dollars to his granddaddy. *** Alzheimer’s. Or Old Timer’s, as the old timers called it. Early onset, in his granddaddy’s case, but getting worse. And fast. On the roof the next morning, Hank worked and thought of what it must feel like to lose memories. He imagined it would be better in some ways. But with his granddaddy, it only seemed to be recent memories that were gone. He remembered everything about his distant past, his days welding to build tipples or fixing machinery on contract at this mine or that mine. It was the daily things that were slipping. Mentioning Murphy’s offer was a daily thing, and Hank wondered how it would be handled. He decided to mention Murphy’s proposal as they loaded into the Datsun, eating their hotdogs as they went. “Why would I want to do that? No sale,” Burl said, and pointed to a drop of chili on the seat between Hank’s knees. “Looks like that hotdog run straight through you.” Hank wiped away the chili with the back of his sleeve. “That’s a good amount of money for a building that’s in bad shape,” he said. “You’ll spend more fixing it than Murphy’s offering to give.” “I welded the gas line all across this ridge, all the way into Fischer County,” was the only response. “I even stayed in Fischer County, a town called Viper, through the week for more than a month. Came home on the weekends.” The moment had passed. Until they arrived back at the building, the present moment was for his granddaddy what Hank imagined must have been a light sandstorm across a memorized landscape, like a room stirred in dust. A kaleidoscope where objects once sacred were left behind to be fought over by vermin. *** The phone rang before he made it to the couch that evening. It was Angie. Her voice seemed distant and thick in the receiver. In the background, the muffled sound of drumming music told him she was somewhere with a live band. It was Saturday night and she was asking about child support. “I’m behind. I know that,” Hank said tiredly, reclining onto the couch and closing his eyes. “Tomorrow’s Sunday. Murphy pays Monday. I’ll send it to you then.” Behind closed eyelids Pearl played in the front yard, washed out images almost gone in his mind except her smile and the way she held onto the handlebars so tight her knuckles were white as clean chips of porcelain. Her smile was his happiness, her fear the knot in his stomach. Behind closed eyelids he held gently to the small of her back, the tiny muscles tightened there, moving across the bumpy terrain of the overgrown yard, all bravery and joy. And then her laughter, soaking the outside world in beauty and purpose. Life in fading images, a scrapbook in his mind sharp at the edges with the shrapnel of his slow-beating heart, images fading not from overexposure to light, but from a dark so deep it glowed in places like the transparent skin of creatures that would never see a morning unfold, never feel a breeze across a summer yard, the clenched embrace of another living thing more important than their own buried existence. “You there, Hank?” Angie asked, the drumming beat louder as he figured she was making her way back to the entrance of the bar. “I’m here,” he said. “Just send the money to Mom’s address.” He opened his eyes in the dark. “When can I see Pearl again?” “When you get some groceries,” she said, and pushed a dial tone through his ear. *** Murphy didn’t speak of his offer the next day at work. He was gone for most of the day. In and then out, but mostly out. Hank went about his business as usual, but noticed his granddaddy’s building more than before. No longer was it something his eye passed over. It loomed against the valley’s ridge line as jagged, still, as the bushy treetops in the backdrop. His granddaddy never wondered down from Beauty Street and so the building sat undisturbed and mute. Hank let his thoughts wander during work about the building. He rekindled the image of the kitchen in his mind, remodeling it there with the Formica table top and only two chairs near the middle of the room just off from the sink, now a fine, shiny white with a silver-finished faucet and knobs . One for himself and one for Pearl. As metal clanked in first one tone then another, as air pressure released and the sharp barking of the metal and high hissing of the air mixed with other sounds emitting from the truck garage, Hank moved on to the bedroom. Pink would burst loose here, onto the walls and then, a shade darker, along the crowning and trim. The clean rectangle was covered again with Pearl’s canopied day bed and pictures and designs adorned the walls, flowers and butterflies, clowns and kittens. But most of all Hank placed toys throughout the room. Stuffed animals and porcelain tea sets, dolls of all sizes, a vanity with a tiny chair for pretend preening, stacks of story books and more stacks of coloring books, an entire corner of the room devoted to these books, complete with a dandelion-colored bookshelf. The room would always smell of freshly washed hair, the aroma of a bubble bath perpetually lingering, an unseen misting of newness. Hank rubbed grease across the knees of his pants and nodded to Spider as the trucker crossed the garage on his way to the front office, a shuffle and stomp of girth, his buzz cut hair slicing through the air before him like thousands of tiny razors. He returned quickly, swinging the connecting office door just hard enough for the hinges to stretch and give simultaneous pops before relaxing back into place. “Where’s Murphy?” “Not sure,” Hank answered. He pushed a truck tire upright and started wobble walking it to a short-bed parked sideways at the entrance. “Goddamit,” Spider muttered. “Owes me money. I’ve held off on payday like this enough. He’ll have to ask somebody else next time. Just cause I ain’t got kids don’t mean I can always be the one he asks to hold off when things get tight. You tell him if you see him he owes me money.” When things get tight? The comment surprised Hank. He eased the wheel to a stop and propped it against his side and turned to Spider. “Murphy has money problems?” Hank asked. Spider laughed at this and rubbed the top of his head. “It’s not exactly that kind of situation, even though I guess it might’ve sounded that way. Just tell him. He’ll know just what it is by exactly the way it sounds.” Laughing again, this time more to himself than out loud, Spider started to the back of the truck where he had wedge-parked his own. “What kind of situation is it, then?” Hank called to Spider, but the trucker was already climbing into his cab, cutting off an oncoming suburban as he pulled onto Route 6 and slow-geared away. Hank rolled the wheel, standing about four feet high between his clutched hands, and leaned it against the parked short-bed. The driver was a man by name of Caudill, but everybody, like everybody else in turn, used their call names instead. Caudill’s call name was Torch. When Hank started on the wheel, Torch appeared from behind a stack of fuel barrels and called across the lot. “Let Mackey do that, boy,” Torch said. He was waving his hand. “Murphy ain’t paying you no mechanic wages. Why in hell would you offer em up?” And then to some indistinct distance behind him he called out, “Mackey! Wheel’s ready!” Mackey, a thin man with a patchy beard who had worked for Murphy for more than twenty years, in turn appeared from a corner of the garage. Hank saw Mackey throw a half-smoked joint into a pile of discarded metal fixings, rub his eyes and quicken his pace until it was just him and Hank standing beside the truck. “Murphy gone for the day?” It was the first words Mackey had spoken to him in the three weeks Hank had worked at the garage. Usually he just finished his work, motioned his hand for another part, which Hank was always expected to intuitively know, and then returned behind the garage. He smoked joints the entire shift and was the only garage employee who could get by with such a thing. The drivers, it seemed to Hank, did whatever the hell they wanted on the road. Better for tracking along that napalm and getting another load. “Murphy gone for the day?” Mackey asked again, this time louder, upset at having to repeat himself. “I don’t know,” Hank replied. He didn’t like Mackey’s tone. “How am I supposed to know?” Mackey stared at him hard for four or five uncomfortable seconds and then laughed hard and started on the wheel, motioning with his hand when this or that was needed and Hank complied without comment until Mackey finally settled back and, peering about the lot, took a joint from his shirt pocket and held it lovingly beneath the orange flame of an ageless Zippo lighter. Hank settled beside him, sitting directly on the ground even though Mackey had made the changed and busted tire his own personal recliner. “Why would Spider think Murphy is having money problems?” Hank finally asked. He waited patiently, watching Mackey take a long drag on the joint, hold it for so long when he exhaled there was nothing in the air but air. “The hell you talkin bout?” Mackey said breathlessly. “Spider said he was tired of waiting on his paycheck. Said Murphy shouldn’t always stick him short when the money was tight,” Hank said. Mackey laughed hard again, raising his legs into the air and wiggling his filthy boots, the tongues flapping without the benefit of laces. “What?” “What, shit,” Mackey said. “I forget you’re green, what a month into the job? I guess I forget because of your Papaw and all. Burl could weld and do electric like nobody.” He stopped and took another long drag and then said again, “Like. Nobody.” Just as he was expected to know instinctively what tool or part Mackey might need next, Hank felt that something was coming, a further explanation. He waited for the harmless old burnout to finish. But there was a long silence and Hank stared evenly at Mackey, watched him take a last draw from the joint and crush it carefully underfoot. The old mechanic looked first at Hank and then around the lot again. Still nobody around. “This might be some information useful to you, now that I think of it,” Mackey said after the long pause. “Old Spidey’s woman, Charlene, she’s a whore. You might get in a lick or two for the right price. I’ve had a shot or two when times were, you know, rough, like you got.” Hank stood up, dusting off the back of his pants, feeling metal shavings peel into the palms of his hands. The metal shavings might have slipped beneath his very skin and made him invisible. The thought of pulling good timing Mackey off his rubber recliner and knocking him around some passed through his mind, a fleeting fantasy, a daydream, the place he’d been most of the day anyway. Instead he lazily shook his head and started back to the face of the garage. “Bullshit,” he said, resting himself now in the dankness of the garage. Mackey smiled and grabbed a variety of tools, turning back to the wheel for a beat or two and then turned back to Hank. “Don’t believe me? Call her up then, greenhorn. Number’s in the book under Michael and Charlene Hall. That’s Spider’s real name. Michael.” *** Dusk settled across the house slowly and Hank watched it fall across the kitchen and then the couch and then the living room floor until he sat in near total darkness. He was satisfied to see the darkness overtake the room. The room, the dormant items within the room, brought pain like he’d never felt. A blue and pink trimmed toy playpen for dolls, Pearl’s dolls, in the corner, now obscured by the dying dusk, was an open nerve in the daylight. In the daylight he watched over and over again Pearl leaning carefully over the edge and placing her dolls in, tucking them so gently and then pulling them out again to feed and fuss over them, rock them in her skinny, motherly arms, smiling at her gentleness and care. Ten thousand dollars would bring Pearl back. Angie would take the money and let him have Pearl. She didn’t want her anyway, and her parents were tired and old and couldn’t care for a child. They’d be happy to see either of parents take her in. Angie would go for it. Ten thousand dollars would be the shining light of God across this dying room of dusk and pain. Ten thousand dollars would be his salvation. Draped across the couch, Hank rubbed his forehead, hoping it wasn’t the pain and hurt making him think crazy. He looked again, squinting now through the full darkness to make out the toy playpen across the room. All of Pearl’s toys were still in their place since the last time she came, more than a month ago. A stuffed animal, a dog she had named Spotty, a toy purse and a pair of princess slippers, a purple plastic microphone left dead across the coffee table. He picked up the phone and, instead of turning on a light, flicked his lighter, brought a cigarette to life and then flipped open the phone book. He found Murphy’s number and dialed quickly. He focused on the open nerves, driving him forward in the dark.
This was the Dixie circuit–it was nothing for a Peterbilt to pull off the interstate with a six hundred pound rat, two-headed goats or a Donkey Woman nursing horsey-faced twins. Leviathan was the first whale me or Jimmy’d ever seen, coated in a slick layer of cottage cheese looking stuff. It just lay there. No posters of living whales or Shamu with a beach ball on his nose or instructions on how to behave in such a beast’s presence. Just a bloated whale in a bed of formaldehyde, getting hauled through towns like Lonoke, a skinny boy standing on a plywood platform barking, “See Leviathan, Monster of the Deep. Today only.” Right there in the Knight’s Grocery parking lot on a Friday afternoon, people cashing pay checks, pushing silver carts right up to the ticket booth to lay money down and see. This was springtime, and every barbed-wire fence in Lonoke County was blown over with honeysuckle. I was sixteen, getting driven around in Becky Mallison’s Gold Grand Prix, ZZ Top playing out the moonroof. She was a senior cheerleader with cold black hair, and my mother had hit the ceiling when she’d showed up at the front door in cutoffs and nipples showing through her halter top. “Would you like to drive around?” she asked through the screen door, the car keys jingling in one hand. 1976, the year the great tornado ripped the roof off our post office, so mail got up in the jet stream and they found our stamped letters on the glittering ice fields of Canada. I said, “Can I, Mama?” O.W., my stepfather, was dead-heading home, his truck emptied of slaughterhouse turkeys. “Okay,” she said. “If Jimmy goes.” Becky said, “Fine,” and the three of us walked out and got in her Grand Prix, drove over the railroad tracks and there it was on the left, a slate grey trailer with a scarred head painted on its side. We cut into the parking lot, cruised into a parking place and pulled the E-brake. “Want to see?” she asked, and smiled this wide smile. One of her halter straps had slipped and she was tan already, and her teeth were white and even. My kid brother and I got out, followed her up to the folding table where the truck driver sat with a cigar box, twenty-five cents magic markered on the flap. My pockets were empty. “Here,” Becky said, and passed over a dollar. “Go first.” I climbed the steps, Jimmy at my heels. Leviathan’s arrival was an annual deal. Somehow it’d got out that the thing could commune with the spirit world, so everybody and their momma came to stand in line. Jimmy pointed. “These idiots believe it talks to dead people.” A lady up ahead of us lay down talking to the whale’s head. She’d got down on her hands and knees, put her mouth up close to one of the filmy eyes. “Daddy?” she was saying. “Can you hear me? Are you listening?” “Shit,” Jimmy said. “Who’d p-pay for that?” Behind us, Becky said, “Me.” The woman on her hands and knees was crying–the grief was hard on her, you could tell. I wondered what I’d have to say to the whale’s head when my time came. I was thinking about the other-worldly feel of getting your ass kicked, how Momma’s face looked like inside the car the time O.W.’d killed it on a railroad track, got out, shut the door and walked away, how Momma’d sat there and hummed “Moon River.” until he disappeared. “They sing,” Becky said, the three of us up to the twin blow holes now. Above, a sign said Leviathan was also known as Devil Fish, Gray Back, Mussel Digger and Rip Sack. The fifty-foot cow was permanently blind, the sign said, from swimming over mussel beds on her side, scraping up Goliath mouthfuls. “They can hear each other for a thousand miles.” Jimmy and I looked at each other. Outside, somebody racked off muffler glass-packs– O.W.’s Chevy, it sounded like. The woman cut us a hard look. Then she turned back to the whale, put her lips to the fetid face and kissed it. “I know. I know you didn’t mean to, Daddy. I fer-gid you.” It was embarrassing, the whale’s eyes like greasy saucers. We didn’t talk on the way home. The car was quiet and hot. Summer was on us. I had a job in concrete–a car was in the works. O.W. was mowing the grass when we got home–that look in his eye. Becky let us out. “That lady was bonko,” she said, looked me square in the face. “Calling that thing Daddy.”
|
|||||
|
Copyright © 2010 Fried Chicken and Coffee - All Rights Reserved |
||||||
