by Joe Meno
“Maybe it is a mistake then.”
“Charlene … I was just thinking of how you might feel differently.”
“Maybe you were thinking of how you might feel,” she said.
“Charlene …”
“Don’t,” she said. “Just let it go. Let it go.”
She pulled up in front of the dingy red-brick St. Francis Hotel and closed her eyes. Then I felt my lips trembling and wanted to say it all, tell her everything I ever felt, but it all seemed so wrong and selfish and small that I just turned and kissed her lips and hoped and prayed I’d be able to kiss her again at the end of some other day not too far away.
“Please come by and see me at work tomorrow,” I said. “I don’t wanna screw up the only good thing I have. We’ll work this out. I know we can. I think we can, at least.”
“It’s just …” she muttered, trying to keep in her tears. But they trickled on out and crossed down her face and she turned away, crying into the steering wheel.
“I know,” I mumbled. “Anything is hard that’s worth anything you’d like to keep.”
I kissed her once more, again, not for me or her but for the future a tender touch like that might hopefully bring.
“Good night,” she murmured. “I’m sorry for getting pregnant and tying you down here now. You’re the best thing I’ve ever had close to me and I’ve let you and myself down, too.”
“Charlene …”
She sat on up and wiped her eyes, then stared straight ahead. “If there is a heaven, there’s no gold cradles up there, I swear.”
Then she pulled away and I felt like everything we had dreamt about had suddenly gone dark and faded to gray.
Time takes care of all things, true or not.
There was no baby after all. Charlene got her period a day later and called me up at work with the news and when I asked her if she was relieved she just gave a little sigh and said, “Guess so, I guess.” But it was a thing she didn’t have to say out loud. A little tiny dream between us had ceased to be real, and for all the talking and kissing and hoping and worrying and being afraid, there was nothing to say that would make it all seem like everything was still the same. It had been a fine idea but now it seemed kind of useless and far away. I didn’t mention a thing about my lowly kind of proposal and she didn’t say anything about the two of us running on away, so we just left it all at that and when the phone was hung up on the wall and the receiver put back in its place, I couldn’t help but kind of wish it had all gone the other way and the two of us were about to get hitched and have a kid and a house or a mobile home and be spending the rest of our time together, instead of me standing there in that gas station wishing for it like that, all alone, staring at the hollow blue phone.
No, it didn’t seem fair, it didn’t seem fair or just or good at all. I felt like the two of us had gotten pretty close and now she might be feeling like me, kind of lonely, kind of confused and scared, and when I called her back to try to talk about it all, someone else at the diner answered the phone and said Charlene was tied up. Then it occurred to me. Then I was sure that the death of a little dream is about the worst thing anyone can feel when you’re already kind of low and in need of any good idea or thing with some blessed hope of its own. It’s not something easy to explain. It’s not something I could put right into words. But I was sure. Made sure by the way I had felt holding Charlene in that motel bed for that one single lovely night, made dumb now by the dark empty space it left once that nice little illusion had been put gently to rest.
It stung me right in the hollow of my sweaty white palm.
It stung me as I knocked that poor blue phone off the goddamn wall and clear out of my goddamn sight once and for all.
christ told the woman at the well
A burning secret is made into something much worse once it’s told.
“It is only a matter of time before it muddies us all,” Junior muttered, scratching with the stick.
Junior and I walked on home from the Gas-N-Go, toting a six-pack of beer between us. He had met me at work because he was feeling lonesome. I was feeling as lonesome as hell, too. I was waiting for someone to shoot me in the back of the head. The thing between me and Charlene had been made uncomfortable and strange, a kind of false little play, and neither of us knew what to do now or what to say to make it all the way it had been before, so it was beginning to fade away, fade into something scared and still and cold. I hadn’t talked to her in about a week. All the time I was at work, I thought about her. But it didn’t do any good. I wanted to call her, I held the phone in my hand and dialed it a thousand times, but all the words I thought to say disappeared as soon as it rang.
I put the cold can of Pabst Blue Ribbon to my lips and tried to drown it all. Junior mumbled something to himself and I stared at him with a frown.
Poor Junior was feeling pretty low on his own. He was already pretty drunk when he arrived at the Gas-N-Go. He had been mumbling something to himself all night. Now that crazy fool was composing a poem in the dirt along the side of the road as we stumbled along.
“Tonight I can seeeee,” he murmured, and scratched into the dirt with the end of a long narrow stick. “Pearls and plums of heaven and splendor solid as your precious white teeth. Left in the dust. In the d-u-s-t.”
“Now what the hell does that mean?” I asked, taking a long slug from my silver beer can. “To who the hell is this one addressed, may I ask?”
“Here are the ends of your tiny toes all along the edge of this narrow, narrow road,” he mumbled, and scratched some of that in the dirt, too. “All the things we could have loved have turned to mud. Mud, mud, mud.” He stopped, finished off his beer, and crushed the can in his hand.
“That’s not such a romantic sentiment.” I frowned. “Not at all.”
Junior shrugged his shoulders and scratched the stick into the dirt some more, mumbling the rest to himself. I could hear him breathing. There was no other sound around. We walked on. Some yellow headlights appeared behind us, moving steadily shining golden and bright. Junior and I stepped aside, down into the dirt of the shoulder of the road, as the yellow headlights flashed right upon us, then stopped. It was a dark black Chevy. It idled right there, kicking up some dust, until the doors flew open and a kind of fire poured on out.
I knew it. I knew just what was about to unfold upon our lowly skulls. Four or five bastards with masks tied around their faces ran right for us, carrying planks of wood and baseball bats.
“Christ,” I heard myself mumble. One of the men in a red mask hit Junior in the shoulder with the side of a thick wooden baseball bat. Louisville Slugger. The name echoed in my teeth. Junior grunted, then swung and smacked the man somewhere beneath his red mask, knocking the bastard off his feet. Another one of the men clipped Junior in the back of the head with the end of a wood plank. Junior staggered forward, then held the spot where he had been hit. Some thick red blood flooded out through his fingers and down along his back.
“No!!” I shouted, and lunged for one of them, digging my fingers into a soft white throat. Someone cracked me in the eye with the side of a board. I turned to take a swing at him, but someone else knocked me in the back of the head with a bat and sent me down into the dirt. He hit me again in the head and I felt my ear ring with pain as I slumped to the ground on my back. Junior grunted something, then cracked one of them in the face with the six-pack. Some blood flickered through the night. Junior dropped the cans and grabbed one of the men around his throat. He squeezed hard until some other man hit him in the side of his head with a wooden board. Junior let out a howl and turned, knocking the board out of the man’s hand, just as some other bastard jumped up on his back and wrapped his thick forearm around Junior’s portly throat. The other four men began hitting Junior in his wide chest with their boards and baseball bats, until Junior began coughing up blood and fell to his knees, then his face, twitching and spitting up bits of crimson in the dirt.
“We got the story on you
both. Heard you cut up a poor little girl in Colterville.”
Someone swung a baseball bat against Junior’s tiny little ear. Just then, Sheriff Fontane spun down the road in his squad car, lights flashing. The five men got back in the black Chevy and pulled away quick. Sheriff Fontane hurried beside us and began praying quietly.
I couldn’t move. Junior rolled on his side, holding his bleeding ear, then pulled himself beside me.
“Luce …” he whispered. “You OK?”
I couldn’t make the words come out right.
“We need to get him out of the road,” the sheriff whispered, holding my hand.
Junior pulled himself to his feet, wobbling at the knees. He coughed up some vomit and blood, then pulled himself up straight again. He kept coughing and wheezing as he bent over and grabbed me under my arm, pulling me to my feet. I couldn’t stand. My goddamn knees were too weak. All the blood in my head felt like it was leaking out one end.
“Sweet Jesus, Luce,” Junior mumbled through some blood. “Your goddamn eyeball is half outta your head.”
He grabbed me tight under my arm and held me close and dragged me into the sheriff ’s car. We made it to the St. Francis Hotel.
“I’ll go fetch a doctor,” the sheriff said. “The best thing you can do now is take the next bus out of town. I’m saddened to say it, but you two ought to leave as soon as you can,” he added, then sped away.
Junior pulled me up the stairs and down the hall. I could feel him dragging me over the soft red carpet, pulling me along my back toward my room at the end of the hall.
The door across the hall from mine opened wide as Junior fumbled through my pockets for my keys.
“Hell!!” L.B. shouted. “What the hell happened to you boys?”
Junior let some blood roll over his teeth as he unlocked my door and dragged me inside. L.B. followed, looking down at me, whistling as Junior wrapped a dirty T-shirt around my swollen eye.
“That boy is a mess,” L.B. whispered. “Looks like you caught some of it, too.” He smiled to Junior, running his pink tongue over his empty upper gums.
I opened my eye just once and saw L.B.’s empty pink gums, then covered my face with the rest of the T-shirt. I woke up when the doctor arrived. This doctor had a big silver head of hair and small foxlike eyes and a black medicine bag, and he whistled at me when Junior uncovered the bloody shirt from my eye.
“Sweet lord,” the doctor mumbled. “What happened to this man?”
“Ran into his past.” L.B. frowned, scratching his chin. He gave a little grunt, nodding to himself. The doctor cleaned out the wound around my eye and put a white cloth patch over the socket and some salve along the side of my face and did the same for Junior, who sat by my bed the whole time. Old Lady St. Francis came in and muttered some prayers and shook her head and kissed my hand, then Junior made her leave and I rolled over on my side and tried to keep my eyes shut tight.
I fell asleep for a while but woke up in the middle of the night, my head throbbing and humming dully with a low kind of pain. It kept humming in my head and ears. Then I realized it wasn’t the pain. I was mumbling last names. I was trying to figure out all the men who had been there. I was sure one of them had been Earl Peet.
The thing I couldn’t figure out was how they found out about Junior like that. I mean, myself, I had been born in that town. But Junior, no one knew about his past. Someone had told them. Someone had let them know.
Then it hit me. It hit me right straight in my eye as I was finally falling back asleep.
The board across my teeth. The sound of Junior busting someone’s cheek.
“We got the story on you both. Heard you cut up a poor little girl in Colterville.”
Those missing teeth. Those grinning gums.
L.B.
He had told them everything. No one else but me and L.B. knew that much about Junior Breen. Junior had known L.B. to be another con and had trusted him with the truth of why he had been sent to the pen, and that L.B. had let it all out.
I pulled myself out of bed in the middle of the night and staggered across the hall. I knocked once, then fell against the door.
“Christ, Luce, whatcha doing out of bed?” L.B. mumbled. He pulled me to my feet and helped me back across the hall and into my own bed. “Now stay put, you dumb bastard.”
“It was you, wasn’t it?” I mumbled. “It was you.”
“What?”
“It was you who told them about Junior, wasn’t it?” I asked.
“Didn’t tell anyone a thing but the truth.”
I gritted my teeth.
“They were supposed to only rough you boys up a little.”
“You don’t know what you just did,” I mumbled. “You don’t know what you did.”
“That big fool started this whole thing. He took my goddamn teeth. My goddamn teeth!! Hell, I didn’t know those boys were gonna do this to you. You gotta know that’s the honest to God truth.”
“Those are kind words,” I muttered, spitting as I spoke. “Awful kind words.”
L.B. slammed my door closed and I climbed back into my bed. I buried my face in the sheets and tried to fall asleep, shaking and shivering through dark silent dreams.
buried treasure
I lay on my back in my bed, trying not to ever open those awful peepholes again.
The whole lousy thing that had happened made me miss my poor mom and dad. Wish I had some blood of my own to care for me. Someone I loved to watch over me. I wouldn’t let Junior get a hold of Charlene. I didn’t want her to see me all busted up and her to think it was somehow her fault. But then I was alone the whole day after our beating took place. Junior was at work and both my folks were far and gone and I was all alone feeling like I didn’t have anyone to fall back on.
I took the bus on out to my old house. My left eye was bandaged up and the other was bruised and gray. People kept staring at me as they climbed on the bus, so I got off a few stops early and walked the rest of the way.
My house looked nice and white now. Someone sweet had moved in, you could tell. There were flowers planted out front and a few bicycles left in the yard and a nice front porch swing hanging in place along the white wood porch. It looked nice. It looked like it meant something to somebody.
I blinked my right eye and gave a little cough. I leaned against the nice fence and covered my mouth. Both my eyes were still sore as hell. They still felt ready to pop on out. I stared over the fence with my right eye and into my old backyard. It hadn’t changed much in all these years. The people living there still kept hogs, but now there was a soft-bellied cow and a few chickens scurrying around scratching in the dirt.
I looked down at my own hands. I looked down at the dull and fading tattoos that were inked along my wrists. The sacred heart burned there, fiery and still. I had gotten that when I was sixteen. On my other arm was an Oriental dragon. My friend, a con, Nathan Beavers, had done that one with a tattoo gun he had made from a Walkman radio while we were in jail. That dragon was black and poorly done but it still meant something to me. Its jaws were open, baring its teeth, and fire was racing all around its wings. He had done it for me for five bucks and a pack of cigarettes. He had done it because we were both locked away and needed a sign that we were still both free. I thought about those tattoos. I wondered now if they made me doomed, if they showed what kind of lowly desperate man I really was. I thought about Clutch’s tattoo. He had a nice voluptuous hula girl in a green grass skirt right on his forearm. It made him seem kind of free. It made him seem closer to something that wasn’t tied down or ignorant or full of fear. It made him seem closer to the truth all right, and some kind of well-deserved pride.
I stared at that old white house for a long time, leaning against the rickety white wood fence, until a towheaded kid came outside. He had a dirty face and was missing a few teeth and was laughing to himself and started rolling right in the dirt.
“Hey, kid, there’s a big glass jar of pennies buried right und
er that porch. If you can find ’em under there, they’re all yours,” I said. I had saved all the pennies I could find for three summers and buried them under the porch in case I ever found myself in an emergency. I had never dug them up. They were still sitting under there, waiting to be set free. It seemed good as any other time. It seemed time to me.
This kid pulled himself to his small awkward feet and scratched his face for a while. “A jar of pennies? Is that true, mister?”
“Sure is.”
“Thanks!”
His tiny blue eyes lit up like magic as he crawled under the porch and began digging, singing some made-up song to himself. He plowed right through the soft dry dirt with a long narrow stick, moving his head from side to side as he whistled and hummed and smiled. I stood there a moment longer, until I could very nearly hear my own mother calling me on inside. I needed to do what was right. I needed to be a man. Do the thing that was hard and make a stand. It didn’t make all that much sense to me. But it wasn’t a choice I had to make alone. There was Junior and the sheriff and Charlene and Clutch, they’d all stand by me to judge a man on his past. A past he served, a debt he paid. Maybe it isn’t all as simple as time in jail. It hadn’t been for me. Maybe it’s a debt you can’t ever repay. When it came down to it, it wasn’t about the things we had done, it wasn’t about the crimes we had laid with our own hands, it wasn’t even about us, it came down to what kind of men believed they had the right to lay judgment.
I spat hard in the dirt and began the walk back to the hotel. The sun had gone completely from the sky. This was not a matter of pride. It was a matter of hope. The hope to be redeemed.
There was nothing else this town could do to me now.
last words at the bus depot
I walked into the Starlite to tell Charlene what I had decided. We still weren’t reconciled. I refused to see her. I couldn’t stare into her sweet face and have her staring back at me with a busted-up eye and bruises up and down my chin. So she kept calling me at work, crying, telling me how it was all her fault, me getting hurt, but the both of us knew it just wasn’t true. I had gotten myself into this predicament and there was no one else to blame but me.
