It sat unlit at the deadend of our block. There were fist-sized holes in the porchscreen, and the swinging door hung unhinged and groaning. Paint flaked like fishscales from wooden slats on the side of the house, and clumps of dark green sandspur weeds clustered in the sideyard like clenched fists. I knew, going in, I’d have to be quiet. He wasn’t exactly dying to see me.
She holds him in her arms life a loaf of warm bread. His mouth opens and closes and his hidden eyes try to. I run my hand over the bowl of his head, which is as soft as a bruised peach.
“What’s his name?”
They tell me.
“Where we going?”
“To church.”
So we dress, and pile in the station wagon, and they hand him to me, to hold and watch over.
“What’s ‘church’?”
He looks at me in the rearview mirror.
“Hush. Mind your brother.”
His back is turned so I can’t smell his breath. If it weren’t I could smell it and it would smell like the bottom of a bottle. Maybe a bottle of medicine, even.
“What’d you say his name is?”
She turns down the radio and tells me again.
I think about it.
“Oh, ” I say. “It’s a pretty name.”
And I hold him struggling in my arms. He is my brother. But now he is not. Was, is not, isn’t: how I miss him.
“Come on.”
I unlatched the gate leading to the backyard, stepped through, and mounted the stairs to the backporch. The ceiling fan whirled in the glow of a lightbulb, and two spiderwebs hung in either corner of the room, clotted with the bodies of trapped and bandaged insects. A white light bled through the lip of the backdoor, and I could hear the television talking inside. That meant either one of two things: he’d fallen asleep on the davenport in front of the TV, or he’d gone back to bed and had forgotten to turn it off. If he were asleep on the davenport, I would have to get past him. I would have to walk through the living room, up a step to the kitchen, and then to the medicine cabinet. It had a key and a lock, but it was always open. It was always open and it was always stocked.
“Every man has a hobby,” he said, once.
In we walk, quiet as a quick piss and slick as Sunday spittle, and all the people in ragged clothes stand in long lines outside dark wooden boxes. They look wasted and wounded and worse than forlorn. They look dead before their time.
I ask my daddy what’s going on.
“Confession, ” he tells me. “They’re confessin’. They go in dirty and they come out clean.”
“An’ you do that?”
He nods his head.
“I most certainly do.”
“Sir?”
No one answered.
I walked in.
Beside the glittering basin, it happens. Daddy makes a cup of his hands and dips it down in the water. Mama takes him from me and holds him while they let the water trickle. Then he cries and fights and they pronounce his name together. All the ragged people stare. I ask them have they ever poured water over me. I ask my mother and father, both.
“No,” they say. And it is not a lie.
The sports page lay scattered across the floor of the living room and a plate of red beans and rice sat atop the Jai Alai results. A couple Christmases previous they bought me a busted cesta. I didn’t really know what to do with it and had a hard time getting it to stay strapped to my forearm, but eventually I got some use out of it. With a pocketful of shagballs I’d stolen from a driving range, I’d take the cesta down to the K-Mart and practice my shots against the department store wall. Sometimes I got the ball going pretty good, but I misjudged a bounce once and it chipped my two front teeth. My mama and daddy got a big charge out of that. They said maybe they should have given me my two front teeth for Christmas instead of some old Jai Alai cesta. They said it was a question of hindsight over foresight and laughed themselves into a double hernia. I wound up selling the cesta for the crippled remains of a bumper pool table, and they never knew about it.
I peered around the corner into the kitchen. He wasn’t there, either. Empty beer cans sat crushed on the countertop, and a heavy black cast-iron skillet lay soaking in the sink. He had a portable radio he carried with him at all times to help him fight his loneliness, and he’d left it running on the kitchen counter. I went to it and picked it up and cradled it in my hand. It buzzed and was warm and I fiddled with the stations. I came upon a madwoman. She was unhappy, she said. She was alone. Her husband had departed and her children were married and she didn’t have the qualifications to land a part-time job. She said she felt worthless and couldn’t sleep nights and was this close to losing her mind. If something didn’t change somehow soon, she’d hurt herself, she swore she would. I didn’t know what the hell she was doing on the radio, a woman like that, taking everybody in the awful world down with her, but then I heard the comforting voice of the talk show doctor she’d called for consolation. First the doctor told her to settle down. “You’re not about to lose your mind,” he said. “You’re not about to hurt yourself.” He asked her if she had a pencil and paper. “Yes,” she told him, “I’ve got my writing things somewheres about the house.” But wouldn’t you know it? She was just too nervous and distraught to go about finding them right then and there. It didn’t faze the doctor any. He asked her if she had an adequate memory and she said yes, her memory was like an elephant’s. The talk show doctor got some mileage out of that; he laughed for the better part of an hour, like he’d never heard anything funnier in all his born days. Then he got real sudden serious again and asked the lady if she had a library card. “Why, ’course I do,” the lady told him, but her voice kind of trembled when she said it, like she might have been fibbing to him. If you were to ask me, she sounded like she’d never even read the phone book, like she couldn’t even read her own pitiful name were some poor sucker forced to scribble it out before her. Truthfully, she sounded like I sound when somebody asks me can I read, which I can’t, or write, which I can’t do none of neither. But the woman just wagged on, saying yes, she had a library card, had had one for years, and it was so yellow from checking out books you’d think that she’d used it to spread mustard. Of course this last remark had the talk show doctor on the goddamn floor, you could just see him choking all over himself, but after he’d recovered he told the lady to pay careful attention. He was going to rattle off a list of highly recommended books. “Are you ready, dear?” he asked her. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I’m ready as I’ll ever be.” He proceeded to run through the titles of ten or fifteen books whose names I could barely figure out, let alone remember, about stuff I’d never in all my life heard of—stress management and the empty nest sin-dome and post man-o’-war depression. Then he asked her if she was still there and she let out a dogwhipped peep of a “yes” and he said “good” and if she had the time she might also want to check out the biographies of Catherine the Great and Queen Victoria and Eleanor Roosevelt and other significant women, but before the doctor could finish listing those she told him about a picture book of the Blessed Virgin Mary she had hidden in the bottom drawer of the dresser in her empty nursery, and would it be all right if she just looked through that every night before she went to bed? That was when the background music welled up and a young guy with a husky voice came on and talked about his girlfriend’s blue-jeans, which was followed by a message sponsored by the Episcopal Church and a brief advertisement for inexpensive abortions. I turned off the portable radio and stared down the unlit corridor that led to my daddy’s bedroom. There was no light beneath the doorway, which meant he was asleep.
“He’s just resting ’s-all. You run on home now and well take care of him for you.”
“If he’s resting, I can wake him up. If he’s sleeping, I can wake him up and take him home on my own. I can drive the truck now and I wouldn’t be beholding to you.’’
They look at each other and their leathered cheeks color.
“It’s
not a question of being beholdin’ to anyone, boy,” says a man tending bar in portly bib overalls. “We just don’t want you to wake him up ’s-all. He looks so pretty, you know, sleeping there.”
A man in the back of the tavern laughs and hoists his beer.
“Yeahl He needs his beauty sleep!”
None of the other men find this funny and I stare at the man with the beer in the back and he stares right straight back through me. He starts to move, closes in, like an angry dog circling something.
“You watch the way you look at me, boy. I’d sooner hurt you than look at you, and I mean it. You gon’ wind up jus’ like your daddy—dead drunk on a piss-wet floor, dreamin’ a heaven and the whore that done left him. So you just watch the way you look at me. I’d sooner hurt you.”
They lead me out by the arm then, the large sad man in the bib overalls swearing that he’ll look after him, that he’ll get him home safe. I get in the truck and yake it to the all-night lot on Cranston. They give me $750. I burn $500 with a match and toss the other $250, bill by bill, into the bay. When she finds out she locks me in my room for a week and brings me meals she wouldn’t otherwise cook. Daddy brings some in flasks and bottles and small paper cups when she isn’t looking. He is not upset about the truck- “It took a fair amount of courage,” he says.
No light at the lip of the door. No sound of unsleeping from inside. And the air was suffused with a sweet hot smell, like the air in the LB&T, like the smell of anything bleeding fresh.
“You leave him the hell alone! Keep your goddamn hands off him!”
“You can’t talk that way to me. I’ve got this piece of paper.”
“I don’t care what you got! I’ll talk to you any way I damn well please!”
“No you won’t, son”—looking at me—“your mama won’t hear of it.”
I rush him. His fist falls across my face two times quick. I am bleeding, but barely.
“Goddamn you! Goddamn you!”
“You can’t talk that way to me.”
“Goddamn you!”
“ Why, I’ve got this piece of pa—”
I rush again and meet the floor. It is hard and black and I am beside my father. The shape of the man looms weaving above us, a piece of white paper hanging from his hand.
“Read it.”
“He can’t.”
It is my daddy, rising.
“Read it, son.”
“I said he can’t, you son of a bitch! He can’t read ’cause he’s illit—”
And the man doesn’t even look at him. The fist with the piece of paper in it lands hard and fast across his face. The blood flows from his lip and draws a crescent on the floor. There is blood on the piece of paper and the man looks at it as if he’s going to cry.
“Take it like a man, Bohannon,” one of them says. “It’ll hold up in court, all right.”
But he only shades his head and holds the paper before him. It seems to bleed of its own accord in the glare of the overhead light. Some of the drops fall to the floor. They fall slowly. The man is rocking on the balls of his feet and moaning. His face is wrung with sweat and exhaustion.
“I wanted him to read it for himself. I wanted him to read it and know. But now it’s tainted—look at it bleed. It’s tainted with blood and ain’t no one ought to read it.”
He leaves.
And I was not his son. And he was not my father. And I was not his brother. And she was but a whore.
And what I’d always been before became now somehow different, and those I’d always known and loved were each no longer there. It was as if a hand had taken my name and erased it, and there in the place where the name had stood was a space all black and empty. And I thought, “So this is how it feels. So this is what it’s like.” And I remembered how it used to be, a while back, when it wasn’t. Life was a filled-up feeling then, a thing you carried around in your arms like a ten-gallon jug of icewater. But one day my mother came and took the jug and drank—and it was half-full. Then another day my daddy came and tipped the jug to his mouth—and it was fully empty. And I spent what seemed the better part of my waking moments searching for someone to fill the jug up, but nobody did; it was permanently hollow. So I dreamed of the days when she’d bathe me in the sink, and I’d long for the nights when we’d sneak out to fish, and at last when he came I tried to carry his jug for him, to keep them from drinking any or him from spilling his share, but it was no use. The world came along with a hammer on its arm, and both of us fell shattered on a piss-wet floor.
“Daddy.”
“Daddy?”
“Daddy,” I said.
I opened the bedroom door and waited, but there came nothing—nothing save the sweet stench of poor wine spilled. He lay in bed, on his back, wrapped in a purple robe, and his head and arms dangled over the lip of the bed where the darkness reached. All I could see, mostly, were his parched feet. They were as yellow and broken as a turtle’s underbelly, and his stomach hung frozen in midbreath like the swollen body of a drowned animal. He was dead drunk, I could tell. Nothing I might say could wake him now.
I studied him.
“Daddy. Wake up.”
He didn’t respond.
“Wake up, Daddy. Come on, get up.”
Carefully, I sat on the edge of the bed, at his feet.
“Pssst! Daddy! It’s me, you son of a bitch. Wake up and look at me. My face, my eyes. I’m drunk and bleeding and out of my head. That’s proof enough that I’m yours forever.”
Still, no response came.
“Possum!” I swore. I prodded his foot, and through his calluses and plantar’s warts I was sure he couldn’t feel a thing, so I got up and went to what used to be my mother’s vanity. I found a pin cushion in the bottom drawer and I took it and went back to my daddy and sat beside his feet. Then I drew a pin from the cushion and stuck it in him.
I imagined I heard a moan, but it was only the wind in the palms.
I cursed him.
“Wake up, raggedy doll! Get on up, goddamn it.”
I drew another, longer needle and pierced the fleshy part of his other foot. He didn’t even bleed none.
“Come on, you sad sorry son of a bitch. Wake up, now. Come on.”
But he wouldn’t stir, he wouldn’t even flinch, and the needle sagged inside his flesh almost as if it were being drawn down deeper. That was when I realized that there was nothing I couldn’t do to him, that I could’ve put a kitchen knife through his side without him so much as smacking his lips.
Out of curiosity, I took the longest needle I could find and stuck it in my own hand. Because I could feel it hurt I knew I needed some, and I ran from the bedroom, down the hallway, to the kitchen. That was when I saw that the medicine chest had been opened.
It was like somebody had been there and left, like a ghost or something had ransacked through it. The terrycloth towel my daddy’d put there to hide the stock from plain sight had been ripped and it hung in two halves, and there was no medicine to be found in the cabinet. It was obvious that my daddy’d drunk every drop dry, and I was sure if I went out to the backyard, I’d find a stack of empty bottles. But I didn’t have the time to look, so I shut the swinging doors of the cabinet and walked back down the darklit corridor.
Walking, I had the strangest feeling. It was that the house and everything in it had died. I didn’t know why I felt the way I did; it must’ve been a couple things that set it off. There was the quiet without the TV, and the quiet without the radio, the quiet of the night, and the quiet of nobody talking. There was also the great beating heart of the air conditioner, which was still, and the silence of the refrigerator, which wasn’t working right no more. What I noticed most was the lamp on the frontporch. I didn’t know if it had blown a fuse or was just short a lightbulb, but it didn’t cast nothing but darkness. It made me feel sort of blue looking at it through the window near the pantry, on account of that was the light that kept the night off me when I was little, that was the light that had warded
off burglars and welcomed-in company and thrown checkerboards of light across my chest and shoulders and face and arms when I slept in the bedroom that bordered it. But now the lamp was gone and had that look of being unlit forever. The front of our house faced the street blind.
I was convinced the house had died when I heard the noise coming from the unopened doors of the hallway pantry. It was a sound like bones rubbing slowly together, and as I opened the pantry doors I imagined I might see two skeleton joints coming together to spark a furnace. But what I saw was worse.
There, pouring out of cereal boxes and skittering across non perishables, were more roaches than I’d ever seen gathered in one place in my entire life. They were quick and fat and covered with what looked like powdered sugar, and with their crooked legs and dark eyes they resembled pieces of moving chocolate. Usually, whenever I’d come across a couple roaches nosing through the cupboards, they’d run like hell to get away from me, but not these fellers. They swarmed in and out of bags of corn starch, stood double-decked on top of one another sniffing at unopened jelly-jar lids, and burrowed their way as deep as they could through paper sacks of packaged sugar. It was like they were organized, and I stood there watching. The noise they made was crisp and brittle, like a cat working its teeth around a yardbird, and I supposed the noise came from the way the bugs were packed in so tight together. Now and then a pair of roaches would light from the shelf and settle on my arm, and though at first only a few were brave enough to leave the sugar shelf, when they realized I was friendly the rest came to call. Some found their way up my shirt, others gamboled about in the forest of my hair, and a few dozen came to form a pointy crown around my forehead. After a while I grew sort of heady with the unbelief of it all. I tried to brush the roaches off with my hand, but it wouldn’t do no good. It was like the critters were made out of air, and my hand brushed right through them. I decided I couldn’t beat them, that there were just too many, and I fell to the floor with my arms at my sides while the roaches covered me over like a pile of dirty laundry. I imagined that when I rose up I might be nothing but a stack of bones, all picked clean by the bugs on top of me, but when I finally stood myself back up I saw that the roaches had gone. I even checked the pantry and they weren’t there either. What’s more, the bags of corn starch and canned goods and packages of sugar looked like they’d never been touched. That was when I realized I had imagined it all, and I reached for my daddy’s fishing knife on the topmost shelf, because I didn’t know what I might imagine next.
Life in the Land of the Living Page 9
