But he and Walter were members of the same club—broken, bitter-hearted ex-lovers refusing to move right along. Walter’s wife had left him, too, though Sanderson did not care much for that wife. Carolyn was her name, or was it Carol? He knew Walter from work, and Carol treated all of Walter’s work pals like they were responsible for all the things Walter failed to do: come home on time, call when he was not going to come home on time, stop at the third drink, stop by the store on the way home from the bar for milk and diapers, make more money, lose some weight, make her feel that something special she had never felt with anyone else except some boy in high school she could never have snagged. Sanderson thought Walter was better off without the bitch, but he would never have told Walter so, because Walter’s bitterness over losing her kept him on call for ridiculously necessary excursions like the present one.
“I know exactly what kind of car the motherfucker drives, too,” said Sanderson, as if they had been talking about him the whole time.
“He’s here?”
“Not yet. He’ll show, though. Tonight’s the night.” Sanderson had to believe that tonight was the night, for he had this problem with timing. It was off in general, always had been. He’d been born this way, according to his mother, who had him in a hallway of the hospital. Chronically off kilter. The woman he loved used to make him feel so bad for it — she told him once that she left him because she was tired of waiting for him to do the things he claimed he was going to do.
“Hold up,” said Walter. He reached in the side pocket of his bomber jacket and pulled out an envelope. It appeared to be some kind of bill, probably unpaid if he knew Walter.
“What?” said Sanderson.
“Little trick I learned from my own extensive tour of duty in the jungles of heartbreak,” said Walter. “See, whenever you feeling like pulling something crazy, you write down exactly what you’re about to do and why. Then you put it away for a while, come back to it when you’re settled.”
Sanderson thought this too pathetic to acknowledge. He wondered where a guy like Walter would pick up such a lame and useless tactic. He looked over at Walter, drawing lines on the back of his envelope, and wondered if the poor son of a bitch wasn’t better off miserably married to Carol.
“We got two columns here,” said Walter. “One’s for the things you hold him responsible for. The other’s what she done. You got to be able to separate the two.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re two separate things, man. Let’s start with him.”
Sanderson stared at the blinking coming from her bedroom for a long time before answering.
“What do I hold him responsible for?”
“Correct,” said Walter. “Give me some ways he’s screwed up your life. Go ahead and start with the obvious if I were you. Numero uno: he’s boning the love of your days on this planet.”
Sanderson rifled through the drift of bills and receipts on his dash for an open pack of cigarettes. “If it’s okay with you, Walter,” he said, “I’d rather work my way up to that one.”
Walter shrugged. “Hey, it’s your list. Maybe you’re right. Start with the small stuff.”
None of it was small to Sanderson. He made his list in his head, silently, lovingly, and was not shocked to discover that he held the party in question responsible for crimes and misfortunes of many years.
1. Flunking out of college.
2. Two DUI’s in the past five years.
3. Stupid feeling I have when I’m around my family at holidays and it seems like there’s something I’m supposed to say to claim my kinship to them or make them understand who it is I am, but I don’t know the right words and so they pretty much just ignore me. I open presents and eat turkey and get the hell out of there quick.
4. Acid reflux.
5. Failure to do much besides laugh and nod when guys at work like old Walter here start in talking shit about spades and homos.
6. Bottles. Bottles hidden away in crawl spaces and tire wells and toilet tanks of the houses where I used to live. Empties that if lined up in a row would run from Richmond to Shreveport. All the money I’ve wasted on drink and right now the tepid backwash in this bottle I hold in my hands and I blame you too for me liking this particular drink a whole lot better when there was a whole lot more in it.
And another thing: Surely he was the one who had handed Sanderson the coffee laced with bourbon on the night of the fire. Who better to dose him with the very medicine which caused her to leave Sanderson in the first place? He did not see a face, just a gloved hand holding out a Styrofoam cup with a little steam whistling out of the hole in the lid. Some stranger handing it over to him in a moment of need — this was the story he told anyway: that he drank it down in the shock of watching his porch cave in and by the time he realized what it was he was drinking, the alcohol bubbled in his bloodstream begging more. Too late by then, needed more to stave off the tremors, plus the stress from watching his house go up in smoke. His own brother, who had bailed him out of jail and picked him up off the floor of his kitchen and signed him into rehab three times said to his wife that night of the fire, Hell, let him have it, what else has the guy got now?
He thought about how easy it was, the fire. Leave the fire door open, the comforter close on the hearth. In his story to the fire chief he was lying on the floor by the fireplace, went out on the porch for more wood, wasn’t gone but a second or two, and when he came in the comforter had caught fire to the couch, the whole room was smoke and then flames, he barely managed to get Coot, his dog, out of there alive.
Well, he did leave the room. That part of it was true. Left the edge of the comforter in the firebox and left the room to shoo Coot outside and when he came back he had the bottle he’d bought earlier in one hand and the cup of coffee, still hot from the drive-through, in the other.
“Well?” said Walter.
“Let’s go with her first,” said Sanderson after a pause.
“Whichever. Shoot.”
But Sanderson made the same silent list. What he could not bring himself to say aloud was this: that she was making him feel like he had taken some medicine intended not for him but for someone who maybe gave a damn, and this medicine had acted on parts of him he did not know he had. For this he should be grateful?
Sanderson cranked the car, slid it into drive, eased away from the curb. His quiet, careful movements made the low idle of the Ford sound surreptitious. He felt like he was getting away with something until he remembered what he was letting her get away with.
“Let me think about it some while we drive,” said Sanderson.
“Naw, man,” said Walter. “Big mistake. Don’t go thinking about it. You ain’t done nothing but think about it night and day. Tell me about it, I been there, all I could think about was her. Ate slept and drank her for months. I tell you, it was hell.”
“Carol left you for someone else?” Sanderson knew the answer to this: who would have Carol? She hung on to Walter long as she did for just that reason, because he was all she could get, and when she figured out he was just going to take whatever she gave him she left him.
“No,” said Walter. Almost a whisper. “Won’t nobody else.”
“So you don’t know what this is like, buddy.”
“Well,” Walter started. Sanderson looked over and down at him. He was slumped in the seat; the shoulder harness seemed the only thing keeping him from melting onto the floorboard. He appeared dejected, humiliated to be confronted with an aspect of suffering at which he was not expert. Kicked out of the club.
They were quiet all the way back to the bar. They chose a seat in the dark this time, way back by the jukebox. Away from Cynthia, a matrimonial near miss from Sanderson’s younger, wilder days, who refused to serve him no matter his current pitiable situation. Sanderson had to order from Ed, her husband, who would serve whisky to a six-year-old. Ed seemed to like Sanderson better drunk than sober. Less of a threat? Earlier they’d been sitting at the bar and Hol
lis Edgerton from work had ambled in with his darts team and walked right up to Sanderson, swept his shot and beer back out of reach and said, “Hold up now, Sandy, yo, what the hell is this?” Walter had dragged Hollis down bar where their whispers carried: girlfriend left him, some other fucker, house burned down. Let the poor boy be. Hollis had apologized, hadn’t heard, man, shit, bro, sorry to hear it, he’d tried to buy him a shot of Wild Turkey and for his trouble had gotten hammered by Cynthia who said for all the bar to hear that buying a drunk a drink is a fucked up way to be somebody’s friend no matter what he’d been through. Sanderson smiled at her as she blasted Hollis, took note of her concern, translated it into desire. He saw himself behind her, her elbows splayed out across the bar, bangs in her eyes, her jean skirt hiked up over the metal drink cooler so shiny so cold to the touch. She must have read his thoughts, for the look she gave him told him to go home and forget all about it, fat chance, don’t hold your breath, when hell freezes over, all these tired sayings one right after the other, on and on in one quick scornful look in his general direction.
Ed served Walter, and Walter bought two of everything, claiming that he was Noah about to climb aboard his ark. Sanderson made him punch up not once but twice the only song that worked for Sanderson anymore, Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (to Stop Now),” and he waited for that meteoric moment when Otis begs his darling, I’m down on my knees please don’t make me stop now. They drank the hours away in their dark corner. People in the light, friends of Sanderson’s, nodded his way, offered sympathetic frowns, raised their bottles. After a couple of drinks, Walter went to the men’s, and Sanderson got up and walked slowly to his car.
Alone in the night and the Ford was floating, taking the streets between the bar and her house so knowingly he hardly had to steer. As he took corners, his new life, which he’d managed to collect since the fire — clothes and cans of food, a tent, a Coleman stove — shifted about in the backseat. He’d been living in his car. There were plenty of people willing to take him in, lend him a guest bed, considering his circumstances, but he preferred the martyrmobile, itself a gift from a car-flush uncle. He liked not having to talk to anyone in the a.m., liked the fact that in the Ford the bar was open twenty-four/seven.
“Bingo,” Sanderson cried as he swung onto her street and spotted the beat-to-hell Toyota pickup in her drive. The bike sculpture was lit up from the porch light left on, no doubt, for her lover. Studying it, Sanderson felt himself become it: parts ancient and rusty, other parts shiny and new, past and present welded into something altogether different that did not work at all.
He inched the Ford into the drive, and as his bumper nosed the trailer hitch of the pickup, he felt an odd lifting, strange and sudden and unsettling, and when he realized what it was — joy, pleasure, maybe even bliss — he shook with a silent, tearless crying. Drunk, cold, smelly, his woman left him for somebody else, his house burned to the ground, and what did he feel but oh so free and happy.
He knew he ought to stop right then and there. Toss an empty into the yard, maybe fuck the sculpture up somehow, let her know he was still alive and not well. Then bolt, head over to Umstead Park, set up his tent. Maybe there were some nurses camping out over there tonight. A threesome of nurses who would cook for Sanderson and wash his clothes in a creek and dry them on stones by the fire while the four of them warmed themselves in his new domed tent.
Problem was, he’d burned his house down and she had not come back. He had taken a drink, which was far worse a fate: a domicile wasn’t so hard to come by as a liver. He missed his high school yearbooks and his Mott the Hoople albums, but this was all about sacrifice. He’d lit a fire to his old life, watched it rise above the rooftops and blow away, and there had not even been a single phone call from her. He kept looking for her to break through the crowd the night of the fire. He was wrapped in a purple blanket, some neighbor lady’s, and he kept looking for her to break through and join him up under the neighbor-blanket. Soon after the breakup he had managed to get to her good friend Debbie with his side of the story, and the day after the fire he called up Debbie to give her the news. She’d heard already. I am so sorry, Sandy, what can I do? No mention of Her. Sanderson had to finally suck up and ask: had anyone told her?
“Oh, she’s out of town,” said Debbie. “Went somewhere with that guy.”
“What guy?”
“That new guy she sees.”
“What’s his name?”
“She never said.”
“What did she say, Debbie?”
Debbie clammed up, seemed embarrassed to have said anything at all, which left Sanderson to sneak some on his own. He staked out her house after work. It wasn’t hard to go unnoticed in his uncle’s big pitiful Ford Fairlane. He found a spot a few houses down where he could see but not be seen, and many a night he’d spent there, drinking and listening to talk radio or a baseball game, eating from cans and bags of chips, if at all. Her lover came for the first time three days after he began his surveillance. She was with him — they both climbed out of the pickup, he even went round to open the door for her, something Sanderson had never seen the point in himself, especially if you were driving a beat-to-shit death trap with muddy tires. They walked arm in arm to the door, kissed on the porch, lingered there underneath the light as if putting on a show for Sanderson. It was a sight, damn sure was. He could have lived another hundred years and not seen anything so grisly but he could not turn his head, no way.
So far he had merely observed. He mounted evidence, which he documented in a pocket-size spiral notebook he kept on the dashboard of the Ford along with all his other vital paperwork. When the time came for action, he would know it, and now it had come, tonight was the night. Here he was in the driveway, had the fucker blocked in. No way out, he wrote in his pocket spiral.
He reached beneath the seat for a fresh pint, broke the seal, and sat back in the sprung seat to sip himself up for the moment. He hadn’t really planned anything to say, for he would forget it all anyway in the heat, and besides, what did it matter what he said to them? They knew why he was here, what he wanted. They probably knew that better than he did himself.
It got late and the pint got low, then empty. Sanderson cracked the seal on his backup, turned the radio on, and listened to a talk-show host berate his callers for their stupid opinions. Beside the Ford, cigarette butts heaped in a pile in the grass. There were no other cars out, only cats slinking and screeching, and once he spotted a possum waddling around the side of the house where she kept the trash cans, and he was glad to share the night with these stealthy creatures who did their business in the dark. He spoke to them warmly, and they offered their condolences, as if they knew just from looking at the angle of his repose in the front seat of the Ford how much misery he was shouldering.
He did not mean to nap, but even when the policeman woke him with the butt end of a flashlight tapping on his window, he did not think it a terrible idea, given the weight of what lay ahead.
He cracked the window an inch. The policeman was standing in a gray, sickly light, which took Sanderson a few seconds to realize was dawn. Mist rose from the lawn. He heard a paper slap pavement down the street.
“Step out of the vehicle, please,” said the policeman.
Sanderson squinted to read the officer’s name tag. His name was Britt and he was bulky and very black-skinned. He had no hair at all. Sanderson was glad he had ditched Walter, who would have had things to say about this officer Britt, none of them too respectful.
“Good morning, Officer Britt,” said Sanderson.
“I asked you to step out of the car, sir.”
Officer Britt leaned toward the crack in the window. Sanderson smelled coffee on his breath, which reminded him of his own breath, and the fact that he was quite possibly breaking more than one law this early in the morning. It didn’t seem fair at all to have been waked from what was surely a dream of reconciliation into a world where you were guilty before you
were even allowed to brush your teeth.
Sanderson climbed out of the car slowly. He wobbled a little and grabbed hold of the door to steady himself, and Officer Britt inquired as to how much he’d had to drink, and Sanderson said he couldn’t really say, he’d just woken up, give him a minute to get his head clear.
“You got any weapons in the car?” said Officer Britt.
“Not unless you count a tent pole,” said Sanderson.
“Put your hands up on the car, spread your legs.”
Sanderson did as he was told. Officer Britt was light-fingered and even though it was crazy, Sanderson thought how good it felt to be touched by someone, even a black, a man, a cop.
“Okay,” said Officer Britt when he had frisked Sanderson up and down. He asked Sanderson his name and checked his driver’s license and his registration, which was in his uncle’s name, his own car, Sanderson explained rather patiently to the officer, having been burned up in a recent fire, which claimed also his house and all his worldly possessions.
“Sorry to hear about that,” said Officer Britt.
“Oh, I set fire to it myself.”
“That won’t too smart,” said Officer Britt. He was checking over the registration, and Sanderson got the feeling he did not believe much that was coming out of Sanderson’s mouth. This hurt a little.
“See, she left me. I wanted her to come home.”
“Which home was it you were wanting her to come home to?”
“Say what?”
Officer Britt spoke slowly and bit his consonants, as if he thought Sanderson did not speak English.
“I asked how she’s going to come home to you if you burned your durn house down?”
Don't Make Me Stop Now Page 12
