Another Perfect Catastrophe

by Brad Barkley

  “Beautiful car,” he says, as if it’s ours, and I have no response but to agree, shake his hand, introduce us, wish him a Happy etc. His name is Suresh. Tricia keeps leaning to the glass, trying to see what she can’t see. Suresh smiles, tells Tricia she should hire him, then he can drive her anywhere.

  She shrugs at me. “Where would we go?” she says. Her nose sports a dime of smudge from the window. “We don’t have anywhere.”

  “This car here, it has nineteen amenities,” Suresh says. He begins speaking his fluent brochurese. “Luxurious leather seating, full CD stereo, mirrored ceiling, romantic moon roof, discreet privacy divider, wet bar, TV, VCR, wall-to-wall carpet—” He halts his list. “How many is that?”

  “Nine,” Tricia says.

  “Yes. Then there are ten more amenities. Nineteen in all.”

  “I wonder how hard they tried to make an even twenty,” I say.

  “We want to see,” Tricia tells him.

  “Oh, no, please. Paying only,” Suresh says. He folds the front section of USA Today, Charlton Heston smiling, wanting everyone to buy a gun. I open my wallet, pull out ten dollars of our Jacksonville sprint stake money.

  “Here,” I say, pushing the money into his fist. “Now we’re paying. We just want to try it out.” He looks at the money, opens the door for us to sit. He tells us not to touch please anything. The leather squeaks as we slide across, the inside warm, lit a buttery yellow, the smell of champagne and Lysol. Our faces look back at us as Suresh closes the door.

  “Goddamm it, Jack,” Tricia says, her arm brushing against mine. I am counting amenities: laptop computer, cell phone, microwave, tiny refrigerator.

  “They should have tried harder for twenty,” I say. “Twenty amenities. Sounds like a radio jingle.”

  Al Green runs quiet, the engine hums, Tricia breathes through her nose. “Got your ten dollars’ worth yet? Just let me know when,” she says. We sit not touching anything. She slips over, not touching me.

  “That’s just the way with amenities,” I say. “Always that missing one.” I want her to laugh. I want this to be something we did and can remember later and it will always be that, this thing we did one night in Biloxi. Remember that limo? Al Green finds another song to sing, his voice all around us. Ice shifts in the champagne bucket. Tricia checks her watch, pulls her coat around her, asks if the rate is a dollar a minute. I stretch out my legs, lean back, watch us in the mirrored ceiling. My brain roots around for that missing amenity.

  “Tell me a joke,” I say. Tricia looks at her watch again, crosses her legs, her arms, shakes her head.

  “I don’t remember any jokes, Jack. Not without the book.”

  “Sure you do.” I open the refrigerator, take out a little can of V8, pop it open, drink. “A big front porch,” I say.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The missing amenity. A big front porch all the way around the car, and like you said we could live in here and after we grew old we could move out to the porch and sit in rocking chairs and pass away the days together.” Two swallows and I down the V8, put the empty can back in the refrigerator.

  Shakes her head. “Nope. Couldn’t drive around with a porch on the car. You’d be stuck. Sorry, Jack.” She checks her watch. “Hour till midnight.”

  Since the start, she’s been good at being right. Nineteen amenities, twenty, do you no good unless you can carry them with you, haul them around with you the rest of your life. What’s the point of comfort if you’re stuck with it? Al Green sings a sexy song about falling in love, his voice the dark smoke in the glass that surrounds us.

  “Okay, I remember one,” Tricia says. Suresh knocks on the window.

  “Better hurry.” I lean back again, watch my eyes as I listen.

  “An old couple about eighty or so go to this lawyer, say they’ve been married fifty-some years, but now they want a divorce. Lawyer says, ‘Sure we can do that, we can arrange that.’ Says, ‘It’s none of my business, but you two have been together so long, married so long, been through so much together, I have to ask why. Why divorce now?’ The old lady hesitates, looks at her husband, says, ‘Well, we were waiting for the children to die.’”

  We sit in the absence of laughing, the tick of ice shifting in the bucket, Al Green fading toward silence. Suresh, standing where my porch would be, tries the handle. He pops the door, dome lights all around us, the wash of cold air evaporating the heat, champagne, Lysol. Evaporating the joke, the porch, the cell phone and V8 and moon roof. He shakes our hands, gives us his card. We move across the parking lot toward midnight. At the corner sits a Greyhound bus, parked on its steady hiss of air, the light inside a pale mossy green, a few scattered passengers: a man eating a sandwich, a woman in a knit hat leaning her head against the window. Tricia points—you see that?—and I do: Tricia’s Blitz stretched out twenty feet along the side of the bus, metallic, silver-blue, lithe and muscled, ears pinned back in full run.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say.

  Tricia looks at me. “Well, I guess if you’re into buses.” She pushes back her hair. “Thing is, I’m thinking maybe of getting on one when we hit Texarkana. I mean, I don’t know, Jack.” I look at her, then again at the bus, try to see it as just that: a bus. Diesel burns, gears turn, it moves off toward some next thing in Texas.

  I nod, waver inside. “I don’t think you want to do that.”

  She shivers, shoves her hands inside her coat. “I don’t think you know what I want. You know this whole thing is getting old, Jack.”

  “So we skip from too new to old, just like that. No in-between.”

  She thinks about this. “Well, you know, honey, about all we skipped over was indifference.”

  Suresh drives past us, honks, waves, his passengers hidden behind the glass. I let the wind blow, let the bus idle on gray fumes. “We can let him out if you like. Tricia’s Blitz, if that’s what you want.”

  “I would like that, sweetie. But.” Her sigh is a white breath. “I’m not much of one for gestures.” She checks her watch again, and I wonder if we have missed midnight, slid right past it into next year.

  We make it down the iron steps and across the parking lot hauling the plastic crate between us, Tricia’s Blitz whining inside, shifting, off balance. Tricia sweats, her face shiny in the dark, my hands stiff with cold.

  “I don’t see why you couldn’t let him out in the room. Just walk him down to the car,” Tricia says.

  “He’s not a pet, Tricia.” I breathe, walk, stumble, shift. We pass the Dumpster, load the carrier in the back of the wagon. I open Tricia’s door, fire the engine, turn the heat as high as it will go. I dig two tiny brandy bottles out of the sack and pass her one as we edge out into the bloat of traffic and slip down along the side streets until we find a high school, chains across the door handles, baseball field lit by a streetlamp. We carry the crate out to the pitcher’s mound, and off in the distance I can still make out the sounds we’ve left behind us. Tricia stands in the batter’s box and pretends to swing for the bleachers. The bases are all gone for winter. She takes off her heels so she can run, adjusts the toes of her stockings while I open the wire door, hook the long lead to Blitz’s collar, unsnap his headstall, and remove his muzzle. Simple actions without words. I hook the lure (an old Davy Crockett hat, fishing weights sewn inside) to a short lead and give it to Tricia. A familiar drill: she begins running a circle around the mound and I am the point that tethers Blitz, turning with him on his lead until I spin myself into dizziness. Tricia shakes the lure—“C’mon, boy!”—then runs from me kicking up small feathers of dust as the lure hops and twists behind her, bouncing in the air, and Tricia’s Blitz moves, three bounds before he’s on her, Tricia laughing and calling, tugging the lure from his mouth and trailing it across the infield, circling back in a loose orbit away from me. The lead pulls me from center, and Blitz tangles himself in it; Tricia runs with the blue folds of her dress lifting around her knees, stockinged and pale, her thighs working,
loose hair laced across her jawline, breath in short bursts. She slows, quits, moves toward me, Blitz behind her carrying the lure, awaiting more play.

  “Can we let him off?” she says. “Just let him go this one time?”

  I take the lure from Blitz, unsnap him from the long lead. He noses around his crate, peering inside. Tricia stands over home plate, swinging away at imagined fastballs, then tosses her brandy bottle in a high arc down the third base line. I hear it whistle, watch it flash in the dark, can’t tell where it lands. I let go of Blitz’s collar and Tricia starts toward first base trailing the lure and Blitz streams out in a gray explosion of flesh, pouncing after the lure as Tricia looks back laughing, rounding first base and Blitz bounding behind, and I think of the greyhound painted on the side of the bus, how in two days it will be like this: Tricia moving ahead, that other greyhound ten feet behind her as they move together across Texas, as if she is already there and this movement now is that, and together they make this bus that I can’t see other than her motion and the painting of a perfect greyhound, one that is not five years old and too far gone for any more wins, and as they round second I try to see them this way, to fill in around them the diesel fumes and moss green windows and old ladies in hats, let my mind make a bus of the two of them, so that most of what will carry her away will not be invisible to me if I don’t let it, and just as I start to see it they are rounding third and Tricia hits the gas, thighs pumping toward home, racing Blitz and laughing, swinging her arms as if there will be a close play at the plate, only there is no base, no catcher, no umpire, no one there and watching, and I wonder, who will say if she is safe or out? Who will make the call?

  Mistletoe

  Nelson Dillard hauled water bottles to a dusty corner of the Laundromat, one on each shoulder, setting them down hard to watch the bubbles float up bright as dimes. His mother, Myra, followed him from the delivery truck, along the rows of washers, to the vending area behind the pay phone. She moved stiffly now, the disease seeping into her leg muscles, each movement like some decision she’s forced to make.

  “You’re sure those’re distilled water, not spring water?” she asked, for the third time. She was so careful now, mindful of every detail. Nelson pointed to the label on one of the pale blue bottles: PURE MOUNTAIN VALLEY DISTILLED WATER. Myra squinted to read, then nodded, fingering the amethyst crystal she wore on a leather cord around her neck. Last month she’d given Nelson a similar necklace, along with a paperback book she said explained the ways that crystals realign the body’s chakras to restore energy and vitality. She used words like “vitality” all the time now, with her new friends. The crystal and book ended up in the back of his kitchen drawer where he kept dead batteries and broken screwdrivers.

  “Will it do any good to say that you ought not be working?” Nelson asked. In the corner of the Laundromat, a TV soap opera competed with a table radio playing a commercial for the Bryloff Foot Clinic. Above them, a large, gray fan slowly oscillated, trailing threads of cobwebs.

  Myra waved away the question. “Do you remember Mary Alice’s place, out by the fire hall?”

  Nelson wiped his face on his sleeve and nodded. “Used to deliver heating oil to her. Did that house finally fall down?”

  “Oh, no, she’s still there.” Her hand pressed his shoulder as she leaned down to whisper. “Nelson,” she said, “the woman has mistletoe in her yard.”

  “Probably has everything else in her yard, too. That place hasn’t seen hedge clippers in twenty years, I bet.”

  “But mistletoe, Nelson. Mistletoe doesn’t grow around here. Too cold.” He looked at her, still unable to accustom himself to the short, severe haircut she’d recently acquired, a drill sergeant’s haircut. When he’d told her that she looked like a man, she said she was moving beyond gender. That’s how it was now, like she’d traded in all her old words and sentences for new ones. What he didn’t say was that she looked more like a cancer victim than what she really was. He could never remember the doctors’ name for what she had, only that it was also called Lou Gehrig’s disease. That seemed a lousy way to name something; a man plays over two thousand consecutive games and hits .340 lifetime, but it’s for this everybody remembers him.

  “Mistletoe, huh?” Nelson said. “I thought you quit Christmas.” With a Q-tip, he cleaned the taps on the watercooler, avoiding Myra’s gaze, her crew-cut hair, her wasting limbs.

  “You know it’s not for Christmas and it’s not for kissing. Nobody is about to kiss some dying old bitch.”

  Nelson winced, tossed the dirty Q-tip in the trash. Beside them, two women smoked cigarettes and argued about the best way to stuff comforters and pillows into one of the big Dexter double-load machines.

  “What then?” Nelson said, not really wanting to hear the answer.

  “Well, according to the book, the berries are highly toxic and produce a peaceful death. The Druids worshipped mistletoe, Nelson. They thought it was sacred. Navajos made amulets from it.”

  He opened the clean tap and let the water flow out, big bubbles gurgling up through the tank as he wiped his hands on his thighs. “Navajos and Druids.” He shook his head. “That goddamn book.”

  “That’s right,” she said, her voice uncertain. “That goddamn book that’s going to see me through all this.”

  “See you out of it, you mean.”

  “That, too. Are you coming to my party? This is the eighth time I’ve asked you.”

  “And the eighth time I’ve said no. Getting the message?” He stood, taller than her by a foot, his own close-clipped hair brushing the yellowed cardboard sign dangling by its string from the ceiling fan. He knew without looking that it advertised All-Brite Powder. It had been hung there thirty years prior, when Nelson was nineteen and his mother and father had bought the Laundromat, and within a week the salesmen came swarming around with their brochures for washing machines and vending machines and soap powders, with their posters and free samples and business cards. All that excitement and new money, everything bright and shiny and clean, and Sunday evenings were fried chicken and The Ed Sullivan Show and TV trays in the den, Nelson living in the apartment his father had fashioned above the garage, where two years later he lived with Jennifer after their marriage at the Baptist church. Now Jennifer had moved off into a new marriage and real-estate sales, his father had been dead eight years, and his mother had slowly drifted away from everything Nelson thought of as normal, as though his father’s existence had been a paperweight, anchoring Myra to a regular life. He thumped the All-Brite sign with his finger. “Don’t ask me again,” he said.

  Myra lifted her hands and watched herself flex them, as if they were kitchen gadgets she had not yet figured out how to work. He tried to imagine how it must feel to her, the disease filling her bones, emptying her muscles.

  “I won’t ask, Nelson. Thank Goddess that Roxie will be there. You’ll hate yourself someday.”

  “Do you have to say that?”

  “It’s true, you will. I know a few things after sixty-eight years.”

  “I mean the ‘Goddess’ part. I hate that.”

  She fingered the fringes of her choppy hair. “Like that’s the worst of my problems, what you hate.” He couldn’t face another gathering, what she insisted this time on calling her “bon voyage party.” The plan was to say good-bye to everyone, give away her things to friends, celebrate her life with alcohol and snack mix, and then within a week or two dig out of that book some quick and easy way to kill herself, as in earlier years she might have found a recipe for pound cake. At the first party she announced her decision to “embrace her death” rather than fight it, and all her friends applauded and kissed her. She introduced one of them as a “midwife,” whose job it was to assist Myra as she delivered herself from this world and into the next. He’d just stood there, hearing them speak this way.

  She sighed. “If you won’t come to the party, at least promise to get the mistletoe for me. Be some use to me. And it’s not like I’m askin
g you to be there when the time comes.” Myra reached in her smock and automatically brought out a handful of quarters for the little boy who approached them with a dollar wadded in his fingertips. He was a skinny, pinkish boy who looked to be about seven years old, wire-rimmed glasses low on his nose. His other hand held a baby doll with a missing arm and matted blond hair. His grandmother helped out at the Laundromat three afternoons a week.

  “Get the mistletoe? Why don’t I just get my shotgun?” Nelson’s face heated up.

  “Lower your voice, please,” Myra said, nodding at the boy, who stood with his pale mouth slightly open, eyes wide behind the quarter-size lenses.

  Nelson looked at him. “No, it’s okay, I’m not going to be shooting anybody.” He felt his pockets for something to give the boy. “Tell me your name again, son.”

  “Earl.” He chewed his lower lip. “My daddy’s name, too.”

  “Earl is our little helper-outer,” Myra said.

  Nelson found a key-chain bottle opener with RUSTY’S LIQUORS printed on the side. He gave it to Earl, who looped the chain over the head of his doll for a necklace. He shook the doll to make the necklace swing back and forth, then ran off toward his grandmother behind the front counter. Nelson looked at Myra. Her blouse, her pants, shoes, all her clothes had been altered to fasten with Velcro.