by Larry Brown
She stuck the empty in a cardboard case and bent over the cooler for a fresh one.
“Here you go. Dollar fifty.”
I paid and waved away the change. What was wrong with me? No rap at all. My ex-wife was probably getting all the good loving she needed. I couldn’t understand why the male had to court the female. Was what she had better to him than what he had was to her? I didn’t think so. I thought it was an equal thing. And then of course there was the question of homosexuality and lesbianism. Whips and chains, foot fetishes, all that other kinky stuff you read about.
I saw a boy I sometimes painted houses with, and went over and stood by him. Like me he wasn’t much of a talker.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“How’s it going?”
“All right. You?”
“Pretty good. You need a beer?”
“Nah.”
We watched some people shoot pool for a while. I didn’t even know why I was up there. I always expected something to happen and it never did. It wasn’t going to, not to me. I turned to leave and the guy I’d seen earlier was in my face. I’ve had it happen before.
“I don’t like your face.”
“Oh yeah? Tough shit.”
He swung. I ducked. He swung again. I ducked again.
“Hey, man. You’re drunk. Why don’t you fuck off?”
He swung again. This time he hit one of the cedar posts with his fist. I heard his hand break. It took the starch out of him right away. I saw then that he wasn’t some badass who could kick the shit out of anybody he wanted to. He was just a wimp with a broken hand.
He went down on his knees and did quite a bit of howling, holding his hand. I could have kicked him as hard as I wanted to, right on the side of his head, or on the back of his neck. I just stood there and watched him, and enjoyed it, which is one of the negative traits of my character, I suppose.
35
I was up there another night and some old guy was collapsed over the bar, mumbling and muttering to himself. I bought a beer and stood close to him. If you tuned out the television and the guys shooting pool and the stereo and the MTV you could hear what he was saying. He looked about seventy, ragged coat, untrimmed hair, disreputable shoes. Just about what I knew I’d look like in thirty more years if I kept going the way I was going. Have none of my work published and be an old wasted guy, bitter at the world. It wasn’t a very pretty picture.
“Nineteen sixty-six,” he said. He shook his head viciously and stared at his beer bottle with murder in his eyes. “You. Her. Everybody. The whole world. Yeah. The whole world knows. And what good did it do to try? Huh? Three goddamn weeks. Only time when you was little it did any good to try and talk to you. Just one right after another. Keep on hoping and hoping and it don’t do no good. It ain’t no way. Never will be. Grow their hair and smoke cigarettes and run off away from home and get in trouble and call wanting money. Or sell your ass in the street. Just make more like you. Don’t even know how many. Gather em up and send em off to China or Africa or somewhere don’t nobody know you.”
I leaned against the bar next to him. “Emptiness,” I said. “That hollow feeling. The empathy of the whole world or the uncaring glance of a businessman in a car. Trying to sell newspapers with gum stuck on your shoe. Raining. Cold hard snow ice sleet falling from the sky. A biscuit and no jelly to put in it.”
I looked at him. He looked at me. He looked back at his beer.
“She had geraniums,” he said. “Little black notebooks crammed full of em. You couldn’t tell how many.” He shook his head. “I started counting one day at eleven forty-five p. m. and got up to three hundred and seventy-two and the doorbell rang. I went to the door, I was thinking, three seventy-two, three seventy-two, three seventy-two. Guy with a delivery van out there. Had fourteen chrysanthemums for Mrs. Rose Dale Bourdeaux. Small guy, black, little pencil moustache. Sneaky eyes, trying to see all in the house behind me.”
“Drunk,” I said. “That’s where I’ve been. Night after night after night. When even the whole world don’t want to wake up and look at you. And why? Because they don’t like it. Not in their house, not in their car, not in their church. Throw you in the garbage. Pick you up the next morning. Wipe you off and set you down and say, Boy, walk straight, now. Walk the straight and narrow. Walk the straight and narrow arrow.”
“Shoot em all,” he said. “Just line em up against the wall and line their goddamn drivers up too and give em forty whacks. What they did to that guy out there in Utah. Made him feel better. It let all that poison out of him. He had that poison in him and it wasn’t no way for it to get out except when he went to the bathroom and then just a little bit at a time. His body was making more poison than it could get rid of. It was making about two quarts a day and this was in the wintertime.”
“They should have bottled it and sold it,” I said.
“What?”
“His poison.”
“Oh no. No no. No no no no no. There ain’t a container made that’ll hold it. It won’t ride in a truck. First thing you know it’ll have done fell off and rolled down the hill and busted open. Then where would you be? Little kids running around stepping in it. No, you best not bottle it,” he said.
I shut up. He wasn’t looking at me any more. He had said his last sentence with a finality that left no room for discussion. I didn’t try to engage him in any more conversation, and after a while, after looking around the whole room fearfully for a while, he hurried out.
36
I started having wet dreams at night and sometimes in the daytime. I’d have these tremendous ejaculations that felt like lumps of lava flowing down my urethra. And it would always be on the verge of putting it in. I never got to put it in. The sight of her titties or something, maybe just her puss, would make me skeet off. Wake up with wet underwear and just moan and turn over. But I often had fantasies about women while I was awake. I would imagine a whole elaborate scene with dirty dialogue, just construct a short erotic film in my head.
I wasn’t hearing anything from my work. I had plenty of money, but not much desire. I was drinking more and writing less. I read the reviews of books in the local papers and noted what was on the best-seller list each week. I dreamed dreams of having my stories published in magazines and having my name on the covers of books, things the people I was raised around had never thought of. I knew people who were illiterate or nearly so and drank with them. One day I rode across the river with a boy who lived near me to get some beer. He was a pulpwood hauler but he knew that I wrote, somehow. He wore a T-shirt thick with sawdust and the cooler in the floor of his truck was full of beer already, but it was Friday and he’d been paid for two loads that day and he just came by the house and asked me to ride over there with him. It turned out he wrote poetry and wanted me to read some of it. The more I talked to him, the more I found out about him. He wasn’t from around here. He’d been educated at Washington University and he had a degree in neurobiology but had decided suddenly that he didn’t want to do that. Now he was cutting pulpwood, risking his life and neck every day for pine logs, and writing poetry at night. His name was Thomas Slade, and he told me he was ready to start writing a novel.
Once we were in the road, he gave me a beer, and I smoked cigarettes and started reading his poems. They had a strange meter and rhyme and his words were good. We didn’t talk while I read them. We drank beer and enjoyed the sunshine and the feeling that maybe two kindred souls were about to come together. The first poem was about his father, who was an alcoholic, and it had some vivid images. It was strong and I told him so. The next one was about a family of children whose father ran over a squirrel in the road, and they all screamed until he stopped. The guts were squashed out of it but it was still alive. The father had to stop and back over it a couple of times to kill it. It was a really good poem and I told him so. He smiled shyly, but I could tell that he was pleased. We had a Stihl 041 Farm Boss chainsaw on the seat between us. Jugs of oil a
nd gasoline were on the floorboard. I was really starting to enjoy myself.
We got pulled over two miles this side of the beer joint by a state trooper. We’d been listening to Patsy Cline on his tape player. It was just sort of hammered into the dash with wires hanging everywhere, but it played, and he had some excellent speakers hung from the roof of the cab with coat hangers. We’d been moving and grooving and wailing with Patsy, God bless her soul, slammed into the side of a mountain so many years ago. My driver had had several beers, which the trooper smelled after he noticed that Thomas had no lights of any kind on his truck. He didn’t have an inspection sticker either. His tires were like soft shit. I knew we wouldn’t get off lightly.
I stayed in the truck while he talked to the man. While he walked the line. While he closed his eyes and leaned his head back and walked a line backwards down the side of the road. While he did ten push-ups and clapped his hands together under his chest each time he came up. After all that the man let us go. Told us to “get them fuckin lights fixed.” Seemed disgruntled that he couldn’t carry us to jail. Well, he had his job, and we had ours.
We made it on over to the beer joint in good time, considering we’d been messed with by the Troopers of Control, the most motivated, energetic, dead-set-on-catching-folks-like-me highway boys ever farted in a cruiser. There were lots of other folks over there. I latched or tried to latch onto what appeared to be a woman but turned out to be a fourteen-year-old girl and got told right quick by her brother, who was large, that she was underage. He was like seventeen himself. It made me feel old.
I wandered around for a while. I started having a sinking spell. It helped to hold onto posts and stuff. And a whole lot of stuff happened that I don’t remember. People kept handing me beers. I guess old Thomas Slade was paying for them, but I don’t remember. I never did find out, though, since that was the last time I talked to him. While passed out on the seat, late that night, going home, I woke up, saw some lights, heard something hit, and then we flipped over about eight times. I kept rolling around from the seat to the floor. Things were flying and hitting me in the head. I guess some of them were old Thomas Slade’s Patsy Cline tapes. He had about nine of them.
I woke up again as some firemen were pulling the truck apart with the Jaws of Life. There was a long wrapped white bundle on the ground that was Thomas Slade. I, miraculously, was not injured much. Five-inch cut on my wrist, three-inch cut on my forehead. Thomas had his spine broken and his head crushed, and I saw that he wouldn’t be cutting any more pine trees, or writing any more beautiful poetry.
37
I was getting pretty sick of death. It canceled a lot of checks. It snuck up on people who thought they didn’t have time for it, laid families to waste who had just bought a new house. It caused problems miles down the road for children and everybody else. I didn’t know what I was worrying about it for. It was going to get me one day, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Death was going to put the bite on everybody, even if it did sometimes bite before its time. It got Raymond, and I knew he wasn’t ready to go. It made me sick for it to get Gardner, just cruising on his Harley before his marriage. It made me sick, death did. I’d buried lots of my own. I was afraid I might have to bury Alisha. I was afraid they might have to bury me. I didn’t want Alan to see that. I wanted him to go out to Uncle Lou’s and stay a few weeks, learn to rope and ride, trim the horses’ feet, how to brush their hair so it’s most pleasing to them. I had a whole lot of faith, but I hadn’t been to church in a while. God probably didn’t recognize me because He hadn’t seen me in so long in His house. I felt sort of slime ball, sort of scuz bag, sort of piss-complected puke. I felt like I’d make almost anybody barf. So I skipped town for a few days.
38
It wasn’t any better down the road. This place I checked into charged thirty dollars a week rent. But I thought I might really get into the underside of life there and find something to write about. I was sort of undercover. There was a small wading pool out back where guests could sit around in their lawn chairs and drink beer. I did this several evenings. Most of the people there were old, like they didn’t have anywhere else to go, or maybe it was just a decrepit nursing home. I didn’t know what I was doing there with them. I had a home of my own, so why was I sitting around drinking beer with a bunch of old people? Looking at leaves in a wading pool? I knew I needed to go home and check my mail. But I could hardly bear to go back to my loud empty rooms.
After I’d been there two days I saw a fight. Two old guys who couldn’t do much, just pushing and shoving at first. But they were cussing plenty. If they could have fought as well as they could cuss they’d have both wound up in the hospital or the morgue. They were filling the air with oaths that reeked of filth and vulgarity. It nearly embarrassed me myself.
One of the old guys shoved the other old guy down and that ended the physical part of the fight. I looked at the loser. He was sitting on the ground, trying to get up. The victor was walking away. He was swaggering a little. You could tell he thought he was hot shit on toast. I didn’t know what they’d been fighting over. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted the old guy who’d been pushed down to stop cussing so much. He was slinging one motherfucker after another one to the point where it went past ugly. I knew God was up there hearing it. I put my sunglasses on.
After a while the old guy on the ground got up and went inside. I kept sitting there drinking my beer, looking at the leaves in the pool. It needed cleaning really badly, but nobody seemed to want to do it. I damn sure didn’t want to do it.
I vacated the place a few hours later, wondering when things would come to some kind of end. I was restless and couldn’t stay still. I wasn’t happy at home and I wasn’t happy away from home. It looked like there was nothing to do but go home. So that’s where I went, a little reluctantly.
39
I stayed drunk for a few days and didn’t really notice a lot of what was happening around me. The phone rang a few times, usually while I was in bed. People would try to talk to me and I would try to talk to them, but we couldn’t understand each other, so I’d hang up. I lost track of the days. I didn’t know if a particular day was Sunday or Saturday, or Tuesday. I went to the refrigerator once to see if there was anything there to eat, but there was nothing there, so I crawled back to bed. I left beer in the freezer compartment and it froze and burst and ran down the front of the refrigerator. I put more beer in, overslept, and it froze and burst. I knew I’d have to sober up sometime and clean it up, but I wasn’t ready to yet. I wanted to get that drunk over with and let things go back to normal if they could.
I tried to write a poem about Thomas Slade while I was drunk. The poem was no good. I tried to write two other poems, about Jerome and Kerwood White, while I was drunk, but they were no good either. I rode around drunk, walked around drunk, slept and woke up drunk. I wrote drunk, ate drunk, washed my hair drunk. I watched television drunk as a boiled owl. I went over to Monroe’s house drunk one day to see him while he was at work and his mother didn’t appreciate it worth a damn. I knew better. It was just that drunk had done me in. I considered going to see my mother drunk but I knew that wouldn’t do, either. I thought about going to see Marilyn drunk, but I knew that would just reinforce her belief that I was nothing but a drunk. And I thought about going to see my uncle drunk, but I wasn’t too drunk to know that he’d probably haul off and knock the hell out of me, things being what they were and sacrifices being as valuable as they were, and all the shit I’d blown to him about blah blah blah. I wound up just going back home drunk, drinking some more, and going to bed.
I had a nightmare that night. I was drunk in the nightmare, with a whole lot of other people who were drunk in a large log pen. There were hogs walking around. They had caught all of us out on the highways drunk. The hogs had been in the trailer of a drunk truck driver. All of us had been sentenced to death. Society was going to be rid of this problem with no qualms. We were being killed one at a time,
and the whole world was watching. Some were shot, some were hanged, some were stabbed with long sharp knives. Two guys in front of me got it with axes. There were bodies left and right. Whoever was in charge of the thing was selling beer in there, too, just to see what would happen, I guess. Everybody was sober by then, and the beer stand wasn’t getting much business.
They had a huge slave chained to a tree stump in the line I was in. The people went forward one at a time, after handcuffs were put on them. The slave rested on his axe handle until their necks were across the stump. Then he swung it and grunted and the bloody head of the axe flashed through the air and there was a loud THWACK!
They led me to the stump. My toes were squishing in blood. They handcuffed me and forced me down on the bloody wood. Splinters dug into my throat. I tried to move but they held me down. I turned my head sideways toward the slave. His feet moved, and he grunted, and bloody mud splashed from between his toes.
40
I woke at daybreak. Nighthawks were calling softly in the stillness, and it was cool. I got up. There was one can of frozen orange juice in the freezer compartment, frozen beer all over it. I ran the water in the sink until it got hot and then I thawed the orange juice out partway, holding it under the running water. I found a pitcher, opened the can, and put the yellow lump into it. I took a steak knife and tried to chop it up into smaller pieces. I measured out three cans of hot water and poured them in and stirred it, my tongue so dry I couldn’t lick my lips, or bear to. There were some ice cubes in the trays. I filled a glass with cubes and poured the orange juice over it and got my cigarettes and lighter and went out to the front porch in my underwear and sat in a chair.
Fog was lifting off the river. Crows were rising from the fog. Cars with their headlights on were going down the highway. The trees were mantled with mist, standing dark with their heavy rafts of leaves. I drank some of the orange juice, and it was like a parched man two days in the desert being offered a drink from a well. It was that good. I lit a cigarette, and the smoke hurt my lungs. The things I did to myself were stupid, and without reason, or for reasons that I only imagined, slights I imagined had been done by the world, never my own fault. I knew the kids were sleeping somewhere, their eyes closed, their breathing shallow. In sleep their long lashes were easy to see, faces I’d kissed again and again.
