by Torsten Krol
“You’re crazy if you do it,” he says.
“I want a regular paycheck and a career. That’s what they’re offering.”
“Someone big as you, you should get on a football team. Are you fast?”
“No.”
“I bet you could block pretty good, though.”
“I never cared for football that much.”
It’s true, I never did join the team in school, even when the coach kept on at me to be part of something proud. It’s hard to be proud of something when you’re from Yoder, Wyoming, population 2774. And my old man, he wanted me to be on the team so he could have something to brag about. Maybe I didn’t want to do it because of that. Me and the old man never did see eye to eye about a single thing, which is why I left home after school was all over and done with. He told me good riddance, said those very words to me. It hurt when he told me that, but I never did let it show. I paid him back by leaving without saying another word, just got on a bus down to Colorado and worked there awhile in a Denver car wash with a bunch of drop-outs going nowhere. I have never once sent a letter home to him or called on the phone. If my mother was still alive I would have, but not for him, that washed-up son of a bitch. He had no call to look down on me. All he ever was, after he got busted out of the police force down in Cheyenne for reasons he never disclosed, was come home to Yoder and work at the gas station out on the interstate ringing up change. Some big achievement.
We got to the car and he looked under the hood, then said to turn the ignition. The engine rattled to life, then quit again, then restarted. “Sounds like shit,” he said. “Why don’t you drive it on up to the barn. I can’t work on it out in this sun.”
“Okay.”
I kept it firing all the way up the driveway to the yard, where it quit again. He come walking up behind me, shaking his head. Together we pushed it inside the barn next to his truck. On the Dodge’s door it said Dean’s Lawnmowing with a telephone number.
“That you?”
“That’s me, Dean Lowry. Get the hood up again.”
He got a set of tools and started poking around in the engine bay, every now and then telling me to start it up, which it never did. After about twenty minutes he says, “I can’t see where the problem is. You might need a complete overhaul on something old as this, engine rebuild, the works. Probably cost you more than the car’s worth. What’d you pay for it?”
“Seven hundred.”
“Hey, take it to the scrapyard and they’ll give you fifty bucks for the parts, that’s my advice to you.”
“Getting it there’s the problem.”
I looked at the rear of his truck and saw the towbar. He saw me looking and says, “I’ll haul you in tomorrow, it’s too late today.”
“Thanks, Dean.”
When you use someone’s name for the first time it changes things between you, breaks the ice. Frankly, I wanted him to like me enough to let me stay overnight. There was nowhere else for me to go with a dead car anyway. We both looked at the Monte Carlo, him with contempt, me with something like shame, both of us wondering where to steer the relationship next. Finally he says, “Nothing more we can do here. Come on in the house. Did you eat today?”
“Pancakes for breakfast at Denny’s.”
“I hate to cook, but you can help yourself to whatever’s in the kitchen.”
“I’ll do that, thank you.”
“Better bring your stuff inside, you aren’t going nowhere else today.”
A little later I’m breaking eggs and chopping ham with Dean sitting backwards in a chair watching me. “You want some of this?” I offered. “I make a pretty good omelet.”
“I don’t eat pigmeat. I quit that.”
“Just plain then.”
He shook his head and put a cigarette in his mouth. “These are the next things to go, and beer. There’s a sixpack in the fridge if you want it.”
“You on a health diet?”
“You might say that.” He flicked a lighter and squinted at me through blown smoke. I concentrated on the pan, flipping the eggs around and feeling hunger clutch at my guts when the smell got to me. When it was done I dished up and sat opposite him at the kitchen table to eat. He watched me wolf it down like I’m a starving man.
“Someone your size, you must need a big food intake.”
“Just average.” I munched and swallowed and felt bliss rush through me. There is nothing like hunger to make you appreciate being alive to satisfy it. All of a sudden I liked Dean more than before, even if I didn’t appreciate him blowing smoke across the table. Me, I have never smoked, never wanted to.
“You live here alone?”
“Yeah, except for my aunt. This is her place.”
“She’s not around today?”
“Nope, she went visiting.”
“Callisto?”
“Florida. She’ll be there awhile.”
Florida is where The Yearling is set, back in the swamp and piney woods. I felt a little bit envious. “Is she taking in the wild woods while she’s there?”
“She’d only get her ass bit by gators. She likes the beach when she visits. Fort Lauderdale, Miami, places like that with airconditioning, that’s what she likes.”
I finished the omelet and wished I’d made a bigger one. The beer sounded good. “Okay for a brew?”
“Help yourself.”
I got one out of the fridge and sat down again. He watched me pop the cap and start drinking, then he got up and fetched one himself. So much for the health diet.
“I’ll quit tomorrow,” he said, winking. I laughed at that. He wasn’t such a bad guy. We could get along until I was out of his hair and signed up for the Army. He blew a crooked smoke ring and admired it. “So,” he says, “you want to go kill Muslims.”
“I just want a steady job. They’re not so easy to come by without a graduation certificate.”
“You’ve got to have one of those to get in the Army.”
“No, they’re desperate for enlistees, so you just have to sit for a simple test, I heard, to show you’re not a moron.”
“Well, you look the part anyway. They’ll make you a recruiter maybe.”
“That’d suit me fine.”
“So you don’t care about the Muslims and all that shit over there?”
“We started it, so now we have to finish the job, that’s how I see it.”
“But you know we never should’ve started it.”
“Everyone knows that.”
“Except Bush.”
“I bet he knows it, only he can’t say so out loud.”
“Somebody should kill that guy,” he says, which is treasonous talk nowadays, especially to say to a stranger. “But then we’d get the other guy, the VP with his fingers in the war machine and big oil. Fuck the whole bunch is what I say. Every time they open their mouths another turd flops out. You can’t trust a damn thing they say, not anymore.”
He was probably right. Me, I’ve never trusted politicians in the first place, war or no war, but I didn’t want to get into any political argument with Dean. I was under his roof, eating his food, and tomorrow his truck would tow my Chevy to the junkyard. I lifted the beer. “Victory in Iraq,” I said, sounding kind of dumb but not caring about that with food and beer inside me.
“Whatever,” says Dean, kind of sneering.
Keeping a line of conversation open has always been a big problem for me, as indicated previously, but I wanted Dean to keep talking so the rest of the day would pass easy and friendly. That is always preferable to silences and strain when nobody talks.
“You make a good living with the lawnmowing?” I asked.
“I get by. Got customers five days a week wanting my services. Today’s Sunday so I got no customers.”
Dean took a swig from his bottle. He was watching me close, trying to figure me out the way people do once they get over my tallness and the way my shoulders like to split my shirt sometimes, like when The Hulk gets mad about something
and turns big and green. I have actually done that, split my shirt, but only an old shirt that was washed a thousand times and the material was weak. I am not bragging about this, only telling. Dean was trying to make up his mind if I’m dumb or not. People do that so I am used to it.
“Anyway,” he said, “it’s shut down.”
“What is?”
“The recruiting office. They shut it down a year ago when nobody wanted to go over there and die for a bunch of people that don’t even want us there.”
“No, they’re offering a bonus, I saw it on the news.”
“Maybe in some other town. They shut the Callisto office down.
“Well, I need to see that for myself. That’s bad news if it’s true. My car, it won’t take me to some other town.”
“Take the bus.”
That would burn up the fifty I expected to get for the Chevy at the junkyard. I have never minded overmuch about not being rich, so long as there is enough cash in my pocket for what I need right this minute and never mind next week, which will take care of itself when the time comes. I have always got by with this philosophy, what they call a working philosophy. It worked so far, so I put worry from my mind until tomorrow.
Dean got two more beers from the fridge and we popped them. Today had worked out okay after all, despite car trouble and now this about the recruiting office shutting down. Dean was looking more relaxed with the second beer inside of him and making a decision he could tolerate me. You can always feel when this point is reached with someone, it just kind of passes between you by way of invisible words.
I began to like Dean a little. He had more than me, a house to live in with his aunt, who was company for him around the place, and he had his own small business with the lawn-mowing, but I could tell he was not a satisfied person with his lot in life, just something in his eyes and his twitchy way of shifting around on the chair. I could tell he was wondering what it would be like to be me, tall and big across the shoulders and a free bird able to go just about anywhere I pleased, money or no money. He wanted that, I could tell just by looking, and then I saw that he knew I knew, and his face clouded over. I would have to tread careful with this guy because he was more complicated than you might think, but then the same could be said about me, I guess.
“You don’t want to be going over there,” he said, stabbing a finger at me. Dean was a little bit drunk already, being on the smallish side for alcohol consumption per body weight. “They got their own way of looking at things and their own religion. I know because I read some books about it. They got their own Bible called the Koran with a lot of wisdom inside of it. Nobody reads it, though, over here. That’s why they don’t like us, because we never made the effort to try. You can understand the way they feel. They might even be better people than us, did you ever think about that?”
“Yeah, I thought about it,” I said, more to please him than to speak the truth, because I don’t believe one bunch is better than another bunch regardless. People are people all over, the same old mishmash of good and bad and smart and dumb etcetera, whatever language they talk, that’s my honest opinion. I would still prefer to live in America than any other place, though, so I guess I am a patriot. I wasn’t so sure about Dean, though, the way he talked. But that could just be the beer, so I decided to take no offense.
“Anyway,” he said, swigging another mouthful, “nobody gives a goddamn what I think or you think or anyone that isn’t a powerful rich person thinks. We’re just dirt beneath their wheels.”
“Got that right,” I said, and he did too. The rich and powerful ones own the planet, but I have never bothered to hate them for it because firstly it is a complete waste of time and emotion to be hating them, because they don’t even feel your hatred, it just bounces off of them like raindrops they don’t even feel, that’s the true fact of the matter. And another thing about why I don’t hate them is they don’t even know I exist, which is a kind of protection for me. I know who they are because their names and faces and what they think and decide are on the TV for everyone to see, but not me, nossir, I’m not anywhere they can reach me or even know I’m alive, so how can they hurt me? They can’t, just like I can’t hurt a mouse that’s behind the wall because I don’t even know it’s there living its little mousey life regardless.
We drank our way through those second beers, then Dean got a troubled look on his face. “There’s one more apiece, only it’s the last liquor I got in the house.”
“No problem, there’s a three-quarters bottle of rum in my car.”
I said bottle, but really it’s one of those big flagons with the glass handle for easy carrying. His eyes lit up and he smiled for the first time since I met him. He had got these crooked teeth, so smiling for Dean was not something that made you think him handsomer for it, but even so it’s better to see someone smile than not, because a smiling person is easier to deal with, I have found.
“No shit,” he says. “Go get it, man.”
So I did that, and pretty soon we’re watching the sun slide down the sky from the rocker on the porch with little shot glasses of Captain Morgan in our hands. My glass had gold around the rim and said Souvenir of Kansas City on it, and Dean’s had Colorado Springs on it, so someone in the family had been outside of Callisto County sometime. Dean liked the Captain and I told him it’s the special Caribbean spices makes it taste so good, a real pirate’s drink I kidded him. By the time it started getting dark across the yard we were trading life experiences and so forth, hard luck stories if you want the truth, with family problems and lousy fathers and that kind of thing, but we weren’t pissing and moaning about it, no, we made it all sound funny as hell with all the misfunctional bits the funniest part. By the time it’s night and we could see fireflies flitting around under the trees Dean and me were like old buddies that grew up together on the same street almost.
Drinking makes you hungry after a while, so I offered to make us more omelets or maybe French toast because I saw he’s got a loaf of sliced bread in the kitchen, but Dean says forget that, he’s got a whole freezer down in the basement full of frozen dinners which he says Aunt Bree buys by the trolleyload whenever they’re on special for the discount prices. He went down and got us a couple TV dinners with roast beef and potato croquettes and peas and gravy, a complete meal and easy made in the microwave or oven, either one, but he’s got no microwave so it took a little longer waiting for them to cook. Those TV dinners were the best, Dean said, and the best part was you don’t even have to eat them watching TV to appreciate the taste. That got us both laughing like maniacs ho ho ho, pretty drunk by then I have to admit, but that is no crime except when driving a vehicle.
We were drinking five or six hours before the Captain Morgan bottle stood empty on the kitchen table, both of us very snookered by then, especially Dean with his smaller weight affecting the outcome. He says to me, “Okay, thassit, bro, I’m headin’ for the barn . . .” Only that wasn’t where he’s headed, of course, being a figurine of speech, no, he’s headed for bed, which he forgot to tell me where mine is, and I had to snoop around upstairs to locate another one. But there’s only a second bed in a room that’s obviously a woman’s room with lacy bedcovers and whatnot and feminine things on the dresser so it’s his Aunt Bree’s room where I had no right to be. Back downstairs I went, almost tumbling over my legs doing it, craving sleep now like a drug, and dived onto the living room sofa which was plenty soft enough for me, believe it.
TWO
It has been said that youth suffers less the morning after a bout of drinking, but this is a lie. I woke up with an axe buried between my ears and for a minute did not even know where I am. Then the old-fashioned high ceiling swum into view and I recollected it’s Dean’s place where I am at. I sat upright and moaned out loud, that’s how bad I’m feeling, and only after I thought about it a long time could I get on my feet and go through to the kitchen for a glass of water followed by two more of the same, which gave some small relief from all that
pounding inside my skull.
The TV dinner trays were on the table like giant scrunched-up silver cockroaches. Just thinking about food made me feel sick so I turned away and went outside, which was a mistake because of the early morning brightness waiting out there. I tolerated it long enough to take an everlasting evil yellow piss in the yard, then I felt my way back inside to the sofa and lay down on it again, regretting I ever left it in the first place.
That was my first awakening. The second one happened a few hours later and was not so painful. What woke me this time was the sound of Dean clumping downstairs one slow step at a time he’s so hung over. He eased himself into the kitchen and sat down at the table, then let his head fall into his hands while he moaned. I got him a glass of water and set it down in front of him but he took no notice, just kept right on moaning and groaning, truly pitiful. “You should drink that, Dean,” I told him, but he couldn’t speak back to me at all, no way. After awhile I noticed the grandfather clock striking the hour, but I couldn’t keep a straight count so I had to go over and stare at it close up to read the time. Then I said, “Dean, it’s nine o’clock. Didn’t you say you had business to do today, lawns to mow, huh?”
“Fuck it . . .” he croaks. He still hadn’t touched the water. He looked bad, his face all shriveled up like an old man at death’s door. I saw for the first time that he was already starting to lose his hair on top, the way he was slumped over the table. I felt sorry for him. It was my booze that did this so I am partway responsible for his terrible condition, so you could say that it was guilt and nothing more that made me offer to mow his lawns that day while he rested up and pulled himself together. I had to make the offer twice before he understood, and it was not till after I made coffee for us both that he said okay, go do it if I wanted, the schedule was on the dashboard and there’s a Callisto street map in the glove box. I hadn’t really been expecting him to take up the offer, frankly, but that’s okay because I needed distraction from my own head, still thudding along nicely like a pile-driver.
