by Paul Harding
Frankie’s father had worked for one of the major airlines for years, as a mechanic, until he’d had an accident—falling off a wing or something like that, I never quite knew the whole story, and Frankie had a knack for being vague about it. Part of the settlement Frankie’s dad had got from the airline, though, was that he and his immediate family could fly wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted, for life, for the cost of the flight taxes. Without his ever getting into particulars, Frankie “went to New Mexico” every other weekend and came back with whatever drugs anyone had ordered. It got so that the first and third Mondays of every month were more or less shot, because Frankie came to work with the stuff everyone had ordered the previous Friday, and before ten in the morning the entire crew was zonked on dope, speed, hash, and the cold beers they all kept in their lunch coolers. The guys would straggle to wherever we were painting a house at about eight-thirty, groaning and exhausted, smoking cigarettes, as often as not with black eyes or split lips from having gotten into fights over the weekend after their races, when they took the cash the rich bankers and doctors who owned the boats paid them for crewing and spent it on booze and mostly lost it playing cards and sometimes dice.
“Frankie, man, gimme the shit; my eye is killing me. Murph sucker punched me and I’m fucking fucked. I had blood coming out of my fucking eye all night. It was sick.”
“Sucker punched you? You called him an Old Town pussy and he laid you out with a little love tap.”
“Fuck you, Rug. Murph was Airborne Golden Gloves. I could get Blazing Bill to bust him for assault with a lethal weapon.”
“Blaze’d kick your ass again and throw you in the tank, you pussy. Shut the fuck up and give the man the money.”
And so on. The guys razzed each other and talked like that all the time. They gave Frankie all sorts of grief, especially by making him get them their drugs without payment up front, but he always managed to supply whatever they wanted. He even got their buddy Billy Kopecky, who was a cop in town, a sack of amphetamines once a month.
“Jesus, Roger Dodger, when are you going to pay me for that last eightball? You owe me like five hundred bucks.”
“Come on, Frankie, don’t bust my balls; you know I’m good. Just front me a gram until I get the bread from Tammy. She gets paid Wednesdays.”
I could never figure out how it all worked, but somehow Frankie got the drugs and all the guys and he stuck together, like they all just happened to spend a couple summers working together with me as their titular boss by common consent so long as I got jobs for us and never did more than plead with them to work faster and more thoroughly and curse them out once in a while. But really it was me just passing through their world. When I thought of Frankie, I wondered if he would still be around Stonepoint. If he was, he’d be drinking at the Ironsides Tap Room.
A few weeks after Kate had died, a check for twenty thousand dollars had come in the mail from an insurance company. The amount was a pittance, what seemed like an insult. I hadn’t any mind to pursue the matter, though, and had mailed half of it to Susan in Minnesota and cashed the other half for myself, which I kept in a shoebox under the couch. Before I went looking for Frankie, I counted out two thousand dollars in hundreds and twenties and crammed the nut of bills into the inside pocket of my jacket.
Frankie was just where I thought he’d be, sitting on a stool next to the waitress’s serving station, smoking a cigarette and scratching at a lottery ticket with a nickel. There was a beer glass with a couple sips of beer left in it, an empty shot glass, and a red plastic ashtray in front of him. He wore a heavy green army coat over a frayed plaid flannel shirt, white carpenter’s pants, and tan work boots. He was covered in plaster dust. It was in his hair and on his arms and all over his boots and pants and shirt.
When I sat next to him and said, “Hey, Frank,” he recognized me but didn’t use my name when he said hello. I realized again that although he’d been on my painting crew, I was an outsider to him and the other guys I’d hired those summers. I suddenly felt humiliated asking him if he could still get drugs.
I said to him, “Hey, Frank, do you still ever, ah, make those trips anymore like you used to?” He looked at me and didn’t answer and went back to scratching the ticket. It struck me how suspicious it might be to him, me coming into this bar after not having seen him in probably ten years and asking him to score. He probably thinks I’m a cop now, I thought.
Before I said anything stupid, like No, man, I’m not undercover; it’s cool, I just told him, “Frank, my kid died and my wife left me and I busted my hand and I’m stretched out pretty thin and I thought that maybe you might still be around and know something.”
He stopped scratching the ticket and took a pull on his cigarette and asked me what I had in mind. I told him and he told me an amount of money and when to come back to the bar. The money seemed exorbitant and I got angry for a minute that he’d fleece me in the condition I was in. But I had the amount he asked for, and I looked at him, sitting there alone, covered in dust, covered in ashes, just like me and just as worn out and worn down and as baffled at this life as everyone else and, really, I thought, worse off than me, and I thought, God help us all, and agreed to what he said. He’d told me to come back in a couple hours, so I wandered around the tightly huddled old captains’ houses by the water and watched snow begin to fall over the harbor. I returned and Frankie had what I’d ordered and I gave him the money, right at the bar because no one but the bartender was there and he did not care. I bought Frank and myself a round of boilermakers and swallowed four pills with the whiskey.
“You got to get the aspirin stuff out of those before you take them,” Frankie said.
“The aspirin?”
“It’s not aspirin. It’s some other stuff, some headache stuff. It’ll fuck up your liver. They put it in there so you can’t take too much of it and get high.”
“How do you get it out?”
“You grind up the pills and put a little water in the powder and make like a paste. Then you put it in the freezer for like half an hour or a little more, just so it almost freezes. All the aspirin junk turns into crystal. Then you put it all into a coffee filter and squeeze out the liquid and chuck the crystal stuff. The liquid is the stuff you take. Best way to do it is get one of those syringes they use to give little kids medicine and stick it up your ass and shoot the liquid up there. You get way more fucked up.”
“Up your ass, huh?” I said. “That’s pretty weird.”
“Works every time.”
I talked with Frankie for twenty minutes about the town and who was still around and who had gone. I barely remembered any of the names he mentioned. As the pills started to work I shook Frank’s hand and said how much he’d helped me out and thanks so much and could I come back again if I needed to. He said I could come back but that he was out of town a lot these days.
I said to him, “Okay, Frank, thanks again and I’ll try here again if I need to.”
I left the bar and walked the six miles back to Enon in a heavy snowfall that kept traffic off the road and quieted the world.
7.
LATE ONE WINTER NIGHT, AFTER THE NEW YEAR, WHICH CAME and went without my being aware of it for two weeks, after I had lost track of how much whiskey I had drunk and how many pills I had crushed and snorted, I lapsed into a blackout and awoke nearly frozen in the cemetery six hours later. I was laid out on my side, stopped up against the backs of three closely laid headstones, for three sisters, who had all died on December 12, 1839, at eight, seven, and five years old. I was sure that my toes and fingers had frostbite. By the wind and the barest light in the east, I could tell that it must be after five in the morning. The sky was still full of stars, but they were not the limpid, tame stars of an early summer evening. They were cold, wild, staring, and ferocious. They were stars that had arrived in Enon’s sky from the deepest trenches of space, from terrible, unimaginable beginnings, their light democratized by the present moment, but in fact a va
st, tangled thicket of times, of ghosted universes haunting the hillside with their artifacted light. Their light unsettled me the way the open eyes of a dead person would—because it is impossible to believe that open eyes do not see. Their light blazed in the eyes of Enon’s dead for a moment in false resurrection.
I rose and convulsed from the cold and retched from the poison. I looked over at the snow-covered golf course, where kids sledded every winter, and imagined the dead having sledding parties at midnight, on the back slope of the hill, warming their finger bones in blue fires that they kindled in granite urns, laughing when they held their hands inside the flames. I imagined them melting clumps of dirty ice in a tin bucket over the fire and drinking the hot muddy brew and cackling with glee as it ran off the backs of their jawbones and spattered down their ribs. I imagined them using headstones for sleds. The idea made me nauseated and I repented of it. I had the urge to go to Kate’s stone and kneel in front of it and say, I’m sorry, over and over again, because no matter how much I knew better, I could not stop myself from stepping over the same dark threshold, night after night, trying to follow her into the country of the dead in order to fetch her back, even though she visited me in dreams and never left my waking thoughts. Memories of her feeding the birds and practicing running and playing cribbage were not enough. I was ravenous for my child and took to gorging myself in the boneyard, hoping that she might possibly meet me halfway, or just beyond, one night, if only for an instant—step back into her own bare feet, onto the wet grass or fallen leaves or snowy ground of the living Enon, so that we could share just one last human word.
8.
KATE WAS WITH HER BEST FRIEND, CARRIE LEWIS, WHEN SHE was killed. They were riding their bikes, in tandem, along the curve the road made around Enon Lake. Carrie had been in front of Kate. The last time I had seen Carrie was at Kate’s funeral. She was with her mother, Helen, and her dad, whose name I did not remember. She wore a black dress with her hair pulled back and no jewelry and no makeup. She cried so much and so hard that her parents took her away from the ceremony behind a tree a few dozen yards from the grave site to try to calm her. Her grief undid me all the more, because she, unlike me, had seen Kate underneath the car, mixed up with the wrecked bike. It was impossible for me to get the image of Kate’s shoulders and the split helmet covering the top of her head, framed in bent metal, underneath the front of the car—what I imagined Carrie would have seen—out of my mind. I did not see Carrie at the reception after the funeral. I am not even sure that she came. I did see her mother, though, so maybe her father had taken her home.
Helen Lewis showed up at the house one afternoon in February. I never would have answered the door, but as it happened I was just leaving to walk in the swamp. I was not paying attention and had my head down, probably running through a calculation about how many pills to bring, and I didn’t see the car in the driveway and Helen heading for the back porch. I was reaching for the doorknob when she knocked. She clearly saw me and I had no choice but to open the door.
“Oh, hi, Charlie,” she said. “I’m so sorry to bother you—”
I had not seen myself in a mirror for weeks but it was clear from the expression on Helen’s face that I was in bad shape. She was surprised, not because I looked horrible but because I looked more horrible than she had been prepared for.
“No, Helen. No,” I said. “It’s fine. I’m sorry I haven’t called to see how—”
The conversation was already hopeless. It was obvious why I had not and could not have been in touch.
“No, Charlie, you shouldn’t—I mean, it’s okay. Carrie’s. Well, it’s been rough, but, I mean, you’ve been so much more—” Helen took a step backward and held out a baking dish covered in tinfoil. “I hope it’s okay. I just brought a lasagna—” Idiotically, I raised the dish to my face and sniffed at the foil. I could not smell the lasagna.
“No, that’s so nice of you, Helen. It smells wonderful.”
“Charlie, can we do anything? We’ve heard—I mean, it sounds maybe like you could use—”
“No, not at all, Helen. I mean, I know. I’m a little worse for the wear, but I’m doing good, doing better.” I could not look Helen in the eyes, but I could tell she was sneaking glances into the house behind me. I could tell that she saw the filthy, moldy dishes and the papers and tools and junk piled on the table and the counters and the stove and scattered all over the floor and I wasn’t sure if it actually happened or was just a part of my horror but it seemed as if at that moment some foul gust exhaled out the door and enveloped us and Helen blanched. She took a step back.
“Charlie. I feel like—a few people feel like, that maybe you might need a little bit of—” I put my hands up, like a soldier in a movie surrendering. I realized that Helen was frightened of me. Not because I had been a violent guy or had a bad reputation but because she thought I might be mentally ill, I might be deranged, even capable of harming someone.
“Ah, Helen, you got me; you’re right. It has been bad. Real bad, I guess. But I promise you, it’s better. Corners have been turned. Susan’s been gone, and it’s been real rough. But I think she’s coming back, and I’m coming back, you know, back here. And I know it looks bad—” I felt out of breath, and transparently full of shit. Helen had backed up toward her car. I lowered the volume of my voice, and lowered my hands, and said more deliberately, “I know it looks bad, Helen, but, please. I just can’t.”
“Okay, Charlie. Well, I hope you enjoy the lasagna,” Helen said. She opened her car door and put one foot in. “We’re around. Call if we can help.”
I tried to smile and look upbeat, and said, “Will do!” and waved, but Helen was already looking over her shoulder, backing out of the driveway.
I WOKE UP EARLY one morning on the couch. I woke up every morning on the couch. It felt like the same morning all the time, or like an infinite series of nested dreams from which every day I imagined I awoke but I only ever really arose into another dream. When my mood was not pitch-black, I thought it would be interesting to come up with a Homeric formula for waking up on the couch, an invocation that would ennoble the act, make it more like poetry, less like a monotonous personal apocalypse. The couch as a ship. The couch as a ship sailing to retrieve the lost daughter. Grieving Charles, Crosby Undaughtered, piloting the couch, sorrowdark and stitch-loosed, through all of Oceandeath, forever, until he spies golden Kate, shining and whole, hanging steadfast from the horn of a low moon.
It was early spring or, I guess, very late winter—sometime in the second or third week of March. The sun had not yet risen but was about to. Light was beginning to flood earlier up the shores of the mornings and ebb away later in the evenings, accelerating as the planet pulled alongside the sun in equinox. Despite the gelatinous, nervy pain of the previous night’s drugs, I felt the necessity of watching the sun rise, as if to roll over and tuck my head back into the corner of the couch and sleep through the dawn would be blasphemous even for a decrepit soul like me. There was still a thread, tenuous, strained, barely but still holding, connecting that drugged and bleary consciousness with the mornings when we were fishing in Maine and had to get up early in order not to miss breakfast in the dining hall and my grandfather, who had been up for an hour already, dressing in the cold, washing with cold water from the spring, singing, deliberately provoking me in my warm cocoon of sleep, would finally come to the foot of my bed and sing in his loudest buffo tenor, Ringy dingy!, just ahead of the actual ringing of the bronze bell in the dining hall belfry, and bang the bed’s metal foot rail with the poker from the woodstove and yank the blankets from me, leaving me uncovered in the frost-shot morning. His gusto during those freezing sunrises angered and delighted me. I cringed almost in pain at how sleepy and cold I was, hunched up into myself on the bed, the chilled air piercing me. Sometimes I growled at my grandfather, which amused him more and made me even grumpier. But I admired his heartiness, the spirit he seemed to imbibe from the clean cold tonic northern morning. Althou
gh I had always been gentler about it, I had done the same thing to Kate on cold school mornings in our home—bright autumn mornings, dark winter mornings, rainy spring mornings—when it was then me who had already been up for an hour, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, and reading the morning paper in the quiet left behind by Susan after she’d gone to work. I’d enter Kate’s room and pull the shades up in the windows and sit on the edge of her bed and pet her back and kiss her head and singsong, Oh, Ka-ate; it’s time to get u-up! She’d turn and groan and screw herself up more tightly in her blankets. I’d tickle her behind one of her ears and she’d unsheathe one of her arms from within the blanket and swat at me and growl for me to leave her alone and Stop, Dad. I know, my little Katie-cat, I’d say. You’re all curled up and cozy like a kitten in a den. I know just how you feel. But it’s a new day and life is good and get up and get dressed and we’ll get you some hot grub. This was a gentler version of my grandfather’s stagy, gruff rousings. And I felt such love for my kid in those moments, such a sense of how good it was that she was safe and warm and cared for and healthy, how charming it was that within such larger goodness she was a little cranky, a little feisty. I also felt in those moments how much my grandfather must have loved me when he got me up those mornings for fishing. And I wondered at how when his mother or father had gotten him up when he was a kid it might have been with a love that I and even less Kate hardly could have recognized, because getting up when he had been a kid often enough had been so that no one would actually freeze or starve to death.
I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and sat up and looked for the cigarettes on the coffee table. They were not there. I leaned over and looked under the table. The cigarettes were there and I fished them back with my big toe. I grabbed the pack, but it was empty. This irritated me as much and in the exact same way as before I’d lost Kate and slipped so far into decrepitude. I went to the kitchen to make coffee. There was no coffee. I considered running water through the old grounds, but the water had breached the filter and the grounds spilled over into the filter well and the coffee would be full of grounds and, Shit, I thought. Shit, shit.
