by Chris Stuck
I got used to being alone again. I stayed in my room, playing with the butterfly knife, as Rufus the dog slept on my bed. I began to feel as though this was how the rest of my life would be. I realized I’d known Sterling for only three months. It’d felt like more than that. I went back to our bush in the park one day and was startled to find some older kids looking at our things. I told them that it was our spot. They laughed and pointed at Rufus. “Who? You and your dog?” I told them it was my stuff. They said, “Not anymore, gay boy. Go home.”
I began to wonder if my family and I were now finally settled, if this was what was supposed to happen in every other city we’d lived in. Maybe we’d all accepted a certain misery. Maybe we’d adapted. For some reason, I began to hate Sterling for it. He’d gotten out of his purgatory and left me in mine. He’d been rescued. I sometimes dreamed that I’d wake to my family packing all our stuff and leaving in the middle of the night. But in the morning, everything was still the same. My dad was at the dining table slowly smoking a Merit as he read the newspaper. My mother was next to him rubbing last night’s wine from her eyes. Trudy was in the bathroom, curling her hair. I was the only one still holding out hope.
* * *
On the day of school pictures, I came outside to wait for the bus and found Dwayne in his K car parked along the curb in front of my house. We were due for a visit, but this seemed unplanned. I looked down in the window, and he was staring toward the North Hills, looking almost directly at Sterling’s house. His eyes were pink. His buzz cut was a little long and fluffy. His wedding band still wasn’t on his finger, just the tan line. He looked over at me, his head wobbling on his neck. He slid on his aviators and tiredly said, “You and me, buddy.” He slapped the passenger seat. “I’m taking you to school.”
He’d been drinking. It was obvious. I could smell his musky, stale breath in the car. He shook a pile of Tic Tacs into his palm and threw them in his mouth. When he crunched on them, it sounded like he was eating little rocks. I got in.
“So, what’s new?” He gently thumped the wheel with his hand, as though to a song only he could hear.
I said, “Not much. You?”
He touched the base of his ring finger again and cleared his throat a few times. “Same poop. Different toilet.”
I looked back out the window.
“Is everything okay with you guys?” He was suddenly keyed up, as though he wanted a task. “Should I be worried about anything?”
I shrugged. “Maybe we’d be okay if you just left us alone.”
After a moment, he said, “I can’t do that.” He glanced at me shyly. “Besides, I don’t want to. I like you guys. You’re a nice family.” His voice cracked in an odd way as we rode past Metso’s Cocktail Lounge and the Paris Adult Theater.
I asked if everything was okay with him. “You’re acting different.”
He immediately said, “Am I?” as though it was a funny thing for me to say. Then he touched his ring finger again. He held it as if it was broken. Suddenly, his smile melted, and he covered his jaw with his hand so I couldn’t see. “Fuck,” he said a few times and “God, I love that woman.” He crouched over the steering wheel and proceeded to bawl.
After a moment, I put my hand on the shoulder pad of his blazer. I could feel his muscles trembling underneath. I said I was sorry for his loss.
He wiped the tears from his eyes and smiled. “You know, you’re a good guy for saying that.”
When we pulled up in front of my school, there was a line of kids snaking into the gymnasium, where pictures were being taken. I realized this picture would make my life here official. There was nothing I could do. In the yearbook, my face would be next to my new name. It would be me but not me. I wondered how much of my life would be spent pretending. I turned to Dwayne. “Do you think we’re all going to be okay?”
I wasn’t sure he understood, but the way he whimpered somehow made me feel better. “One day, I hope.”
I got out of the car and left him there. I waited in line. When it was finally my turn, I stood on an X in front of a white background. The photographer held up his hand like a conductor starting a symphony. He smiled. I smiled back. In my mind, I could see Sterling on a California beach. I could see my family living happily in New York. I could even see Dwayne. “Perfect.” The photographer lowered his hand and did a countdown. All through that moment of anticipation, I held still. I kept smiling. Even though I knew the flash was coming, I swore I wouldn’t blink.
Cowboys
We were supposed to be unarmed security guards, just a couple fellas watching over things, but Ernie carried a gun anyway. He showed it to me my first night working at the museum. We were about to make our rounds when he said, “Hey, Shelton. I wanna show you something.” He hoisted his foot on top of the front desk and drew the gun from a holster strapped to his ankle. He presented it to me on his palm, like it was a mouse he kept in his pocket. The scratched gray revolver was almost as small, the kind corner boys in DC would’ve called a “better than nothin’.”
“My brother, Ralph,” Ernie said, “he’s a bail bondsman, by the way. His wife, my sister-in-law, she’s Black. Myra’s her name. Yep.” He rocked forward and back on his heels and kept looking at me.
I nodded and said, “Good to know.” Then I looked away, hoping he didn’t think all us Black folks knew each other.
Ernie was likable enough for a white guy. I mean, I guess I liked him at the time. We had things in common. He was divorced. Sylvie had left me. Like two stray dogs, we could smell how lost and alone the other was.
Five minutes after meeting me, he said he was a retired cop, which made me a little nervous. But he talked so much about “collaring perps” and “walking a beat” that it sounded more like TV lingo than real life. I suspected he hadn’t “served on the force” for very long, if at all. The only thing I knew for sure was he was forty-three, just a big white dude who was constantly red-faced and sweating. The sour smell of alcohol seeped from his pores. The damp, curled ends of his hair were always glued to his shiny forehead.
“Here, Shel. Hold it.” He gestured at the gun. “See how it feels.”
My being from DC had put ideas in his head. Maybe I harbored a dark past that had gotten by the background check. But I didn’t, nothing that serious anyway. The worst things I’d ever done were shoplift beer or scrawl graffiti as a young’un.
With Ernie watching me, I took the gun and pointed it. I felt I should comment on it, as if I knew the first thing about them. I moved it up and down and said, “Wow, got a good balance to it,” and Ernie beamed like a new father. He was still watching me, waiting for me to do something, so I spun the gun around my trigger finger and handed it back to him like a gunfighter. I didn’t even fumble. A new respect sparkled in Ernie’s yellow eyes. I’d bought a gun recently and still wasn’t sure why. It seemed like a good thing to have, even though I could never hold it for long. A hot second or two, and my hand turned clammy. I’d have to set the gun back in the lockbox in my closet.
As we started our rounds, Ernie walked beside me, watching a wildlife documentary on the cracked screen of his phone. There wasn’t much work to do. There never is, guarding a wax museum. We simply sprayed the mannequins with our flashlights and made sure nothing was moving that wasn’t supposed to be. It was the weirdest and easiest job I’d ever had, during the weirdest and hardest time in my life. After the first day, I wasn’t sure how long I’d last. I wanted to quit after the first hour.
The museum was called the Waxsonian, and it was owned and operated by an older Vietnamese guy who’d reinvented himself when he came to America. He even changed his name to, of all things, Richard Doberman. According to Ernie, he’d been taken in by a white family when he first came to the US and eventually took their last name, even married one of their daughters. “Can you believe that? Dick fucking Doberman. Almost sounds like a porn star, don’t it?” Whenever Ernie found something funny, he wheezed out a few chuckles and then exploded
in a convulsive fit of coughing. “But you gotta respect the man’s hustle. Am I right?”
I said he was right.
Apparently, Doberman had made major bucks in some business or other, enough to make converting an old bank building into the Waxsonian seem like a good idea. Ernie and I could never tell exactly how successful the place was. We didn’t think it was important enough to have a security guard, let alone two. All we knew was it somehow stayed open, housing over three hundred mannequins, most of them pretty close to real. There was Obama and all the other famous presidents, celebrities like Babe Ruth, Marilyn Monroe, and Muhammad Ali. When the museum was dimmed to only security lamps, the dummies displayed in the glass cases looked like people frozen in big blocks of ice.
I listened off and on to the British dude narrating the documentary on Ernie’s phone. He talked about the “seamless coiling” of a running cheetah. How there’s a certain point in its stride when none of its paws touch the ground. I walked alongside Ernie, watching the animal hang in the air. The British dude then started talking about the cheetah hunting a wildebeest, how it swats the back legs, trips the prey, and goes in for the kill.
Ernie stopped midstride and watched. Bored, I wandered over to the cowboy display. Doberman had a thing for westerns and dedicated a whole section of mannequins to those movies. There was Clint Eastwood, squint-eyed, biting down on a cigarillo. Gene Autry, holding a white guitar to his chest. And Roy Rogers, also with a guitar, but standing next to a golden horse. Out of all of them, the John Wayne mannequin looked the most realistic. I caught myself staring at it, half expecting it to wink at me. Then I noticed the mannequin of a Native American behind him like Tonto, set decoration.
That was when Ernie sidled up next to me. “I bet you don’t know what happened to cowboys, do you?”
I said I didn’t really care all that much, but I guess he didn’t hear me.
“It’s an easy one. Barbed wire.” Ernie selected another video on his phone and waited for it to load. “Cowboys used to keep the cattle together in herds, but when barbed wire fences came along, no one needed cowboys anymore. They lost their families. Some of them became outlaws. There are still some around, like in Wyoming and Texas, but they ain’t real cowboys.” Ernie tugged at his belt and hitched up his pants. “Now they’re just guys on horses.”
* * *
Around seven in the morning, quitting time, Mr. Doberman walked in the door, happy. He sported a toothy grin, slick black hair parted on the side, and he was threaded in his usual JCPenney’s finest: a western shirt, boot-cut slacks, and cowboy boots.
“Everything go all right last night, fellas?” His English was flawless. He sounded more American than we did. If you closed your eyes, you’d swear he was from down south somewhere, Alabama or Georgia maybe.
“Yep,” Ernie said. “All was quiet on the home front.”
I was the new guy, so I never knew what to say to the dude. I only ever stared at Doberman, unable to reconcile his voice with his ethnicity. Most Asians I’d come across in DC were voiceless people behind corner store glass. They didn’t speak a lick of English, much less sound like a country star. “Great,” Doberman said. “Why don’t y’all get outta here and get some sleep. I’ll see you boys tomorrow.” He always dismissed us like a sheriff did his deputies, and Ernie and I walked out to our cars.
After my first shift, Ernie invited me to hang out with him in his beat-up minivan for a while, which quickly became our routine, since neither of us liked going home right away. He opened his glove box, and I spotted a bag of weed and a pint of Virginia Gentleman among a wad of old papers and parking tickets. He said, “Ain’t too early, is it?” and dug out the bourbon. As he tipped back the bottle and took a few gulps, the brown liquor glugged softly. A string of fat bubbles rose to the top. I’d acquired a bit of a drinking problem growing up. When Ernie passed me the liquor and I felt the bottle in my hand, I couldn’t resist. I looked out at those leafy suburban streets and thought of Sylvie. I took a quick swig just to get it over with. The sweet burning liquid swept through my chest in a wave. I licked the warm walls of my mouth. I hadn’t taken a drink in three years, a stretch of time when I used to have nightmares about relapsing. During better times, I was so happy to be over all that, but now here I was. I took another swig, and looked out the window again, knowing this was the beginning of a long, ass-ugly binge.
Ernie shook his head and laughed. “Don’t be scared. This is the suburbs, brother. No one’s gonna arrest us. We own this damn place.” I wasn’t sure who he meant by “we.” He let out a hoot and then rolled down his window and fired a glob of spit into the air like a cannon. He wiped his mouth with his wrist and laid the pint down between us. I lit a cigarette and shook one out for him since he’d killed his whole pack during our shift.
“Menthols?” Ernie grimaced. “What is it with Black guys and menthols?”
“They’re stronger,” I said. “They taste better, too. They leave your breath minty fresh.”
“Well, damn,” Ernie said, “you ought to do a commercial.”
We passed the bottle a few more times, watching the sun get brighter. The liquor started hitting me. I smiled for no reason at all and watched Ernie squint so hard against the sun that he reminded me of some down-and-out philosopher.
* * *
Even though the town house I’d rented was a damn sight more expensive than I’d counted on, I took the security guard job to forget about Sylvie leaving me more than to pay the bills. I was twenty-six and had my head up my ass. Being a security guard at a wax museum almost made sense with the trajectory my life was taking. The only other job I’d ever had was at a DC hardware store, where I worked since the twelfth grade. I went from cashier to head clerk pretty fast, almost made manager. Then I got the bright idea to move out of the city. We’d lived in DC all our lives. I thought Virginia would be different, even if it was just twelve miles away.
After two months in the suburbs, though, Sylvie wasn’t having it. She was a city girl. She wasn’t built for the burbs, she kept saying. The girl barely left the house, and when she did, she usually got lost. She spent more and more of her time lounging around in our La-Z-Boy in one of my old football jerseys, one leg draped over the arm of the chair. She looked like she just woke from a nap, her eyes always tired and wet. I’d already run out of comforting things to say. What do you say to someone who can’t stop crying? Best I could do was to tell her she needed to get out more. “You’re in here hibernating like a bear,” I said. “Let me take you out.” But she still stared at the TV. So You’re Having a Baby and A Baby’s Story on the educational channels were her favorites.
It was our second crack at the whole living-together thing, and the shit wasn’t going well. Whenever I went out to look for a job, I’d come home to find all the furniture rearranged back to the way it was in our old place. Every night while Sylvie slept, I’d un-rearrange it, knowing she’d put it right back when I was gone.
Eventually, she moved back in with her mother, and the mail was all I had to come home to after my shift at the museum. It was always just junk mail, but occasionally I’d get a sympathy card, one or two stragglers still being forwarded from our old address. Some of them actually mentioned the pain of losing a child, and I’d wonder when they’d stop coming. I’d heard of people getting twenty-year-old letters that had been lost in the mail. I thought I’d still be getting the things in my fifties. On top of that, once a week I got a bill from the funeral lending company with PAST DUE stamped on the outside. I had the nerve to open only one of them. I saw the balance, twelve thousand dollars and one cent. That one cent always bothered me. I couldn’t open any of the others. I just put them in a box in my closet and crawled into bed with my uniform on, shoes and all.
* * *
At the Waxsonian, Doberman didn’t give us much in the way of entertainment, nothing to take our minds off our pitiful lives. There were no security monitors or cameras to mess around with, no high-tech control
center with blinking lights. The museum was pretty low budget in that sense. I mean, we weren’t guarding plutonium or a nuclear reactor, but the dude could’ve given us something to tinker with. All we had was our phones and each other’s corny stories to keep us company.
By the second week, I had the sneaking suspicion that I’d been hired to keep an eye on Ernie more than guard the museum. Most nights, we shot the shit for a few hours and then dozed off after lunching on microwave burritos and a few beers. Then we’d wake up and shoot the shit some more. On Friday and Saturday nights, car headlights would sweep into the parking lot and rouse us from our naps. Catholic school kids trying to get some booty in their parents’ BMWs. We spent those nights chasing them away, Ernie always waiting until the girls had at least a titty out before he tapped on the window.
Occasionally, when he was especially lazy, I’d do rounds by myself. I’d walk the halls of the museum with my flashlight, scanning each mannequin’s face. Obama. Frank Sinatra. Richard Nixon. A young Elvis and an old Elvis in dueling poses. I would stroll along, bored out of my mind, and suddenly catch myself in front of the female mannequins. Diana Ross. Dolly Parton. Even Nancy Reagan’s old ass.
Though I said I’d never treat the mannequins like people, once or twice I did touch them. The hair on their heads was surprisingly soft and realistic, but their clothes hid broomstick limbs locked into hard, narrow bodies. Even their molded heads were as hollow as pumpkins. I suppose if they’d felt more natural, a less sane man would’ve planted a kiss on one of them. I wasn’t that far gone, but occasionally as I walked around the museum, I did get an eerie sense that the world had stopped, and I was the last person alive.
