Denise punches radio stations with nails that match her lips. I look at my own nails, clear and unpolished.
“Deer.” Denise points out the front window.
I scan the treeline on both sides, look for a deer eating grass or waiting to cross. Then I see it, just short of the median, head yanked from its body and resting a few feet up the berm from the rest of the carcass. Bright pink blood pools on the pavement and loose meat hangs from both segments. I’ve seen dead deer before, contorted or crushed or one portion flattened and mutilated, but the head on the road has a round, black nose and alert-looking eyes under a light brown brow, and the body is full. Headless, it might still get up and bound into the trees.
I look away.
Denise adjusts the rearview mirror. “I’ve never seen anything like that. Wow. What do you think hit it?”
I tilt my head into the wind and laugh. “A fucking big truck.”
She looks at me, then changes the station again and sings along with a song. I close my eyes. The breeze fans my eyelashes and rakes my hair and I pretend the wind is Jake’s fingers tugging at the ends.
She says, “My mother in-law is coming over tonight before she leaves town.”
“Was she here? I didn’t see her in the hangar.”
“Oh, no. She didn’t get to come to the hangar. That’s a rule.” She lights a cigarette and uses her tongue, pointed and flexed, to remove congealed lipstick from the corners of her mouth, then opens her window and asks me to close mine. I crank the knob. “She actually waited at our house for me to get back and made a list on our grocery pad so I could send a proper care package. Then she made sure the shelves were dusted. She said, ‘You must keep the house immaculate.’ In case they come to tell me William’s dead, but she didn’t say that.” She flicks her cigarette outside and closes the window. “Too humid.” She turns on the air. “I don’t think they care what your house looks like, personally. Do you keep yours—” She taps the wheel. “Sorry.”
I wonder, anyway, what they would think of my apartment. Maybe she’s right. Maybe they wouldn’t notice or care. But, maybe they would. Maybe they’d eye the underwear on the floor, or Chancey’s vomit on the cat tree. Their first time doing it, their first time making that walk from the street to the front door, maybe they see nothing but the doorbell while they sturdy-up, prepare themselves for angry tears and wonder whether they’ll be able to push out that first word. When the door opens, maybe they stand there, their first time, and hope they don’t give in to nervous laughter. That they don’t stutter or, in a moment of freak empathy, cry.
But after the fourth or fifth time, maybe they notice the weeds alongside the driveway haven’t been pulled, that the yard isn’t taken care of nearly as well as Mrs. Smith’s, whose house they visited last week, and that some doors have doorbells and some have knockers and others have neither but are thin and hollow and sound like empty cigar boxes, clak, clak, clak—
“Which entrance?” Denise says.
—when they rap them with their knuckles.
“Whichever.”
Denise flits from store—jewelry—to store—interiors—and I follow. The mall is crowded, loud, filled with weekend couples and mall-walkers. A teenage boy and teenage girl stand hand in hand at a belly-ring booth, thin fingers tightly woven—it will kill them to let go—while they choose from the gemstones in a revolving display. The boy’s thumb strokes the girl’s palm and their whole life is about this day and one another and a new belly ring. If one of them were shot where they stood, how long would it take for the other to walk away after their pinkies unlinked?
Denise is looking for a lamp for her hallway table, and she finds one quickly. While she pays I wonder about purchases, new favorite things that will end up lost or broken or taken for granted within the year. It won’t be long before she’ll need something else, some new color.
Denise trails her finger under her lampshade fringe on the way to the car and says something about how the sunlight makes it sparkle. She’s decorated, too. Prettied-up in glinting red dangles and a white cotton tapestry, her legs upholstered in denim. Her new necklace, platinum, dips between her breasts, expensive garland. While the jewelry store cashier rang it up, Denise had winked at me and said, “Hazard pay.”
A passing man in the parking lot smiles at her and Denise smiles back, says “Hi.”
Her “hi” sounds single.
________
I get out of her car into the dark and a cold rain, a prelude to Tennessee’s tornado season. She pulls away and honks before turning the corner.
Inside, dim light falls on a black cat sitting on the first landing, and I recognize it as the one belonging to the woman in apartment three. I’ve seen her take it out to the side lawn and walk with it in the grass on sunny days. I pet it, scratch its chin, and knock on the door and continue up the stairs. The sound of the door opening is followed by laughter, “Hi, Frankie!” and “Paul, look who’s here,” then a clicking latch. Once inside my kitchen, I hear them through the floor talking to the cat, asking where it’s been and why it never called to say it would be late, and more laughter, all of it muffled but intelligible. I try to be happy that they sound happy.
Chancey meows from his food dish and I feed him before turning on the TV. The screen fills with tracer fire blazing over a city in shades of black and green, and a newsman wheezes into his microphone from inside a gas mask. “A serene, quiet day, to start,” he says, “. . .but then, these brave men and women, stoic and professional, closed in on the city. As night fell on the soldiers, the action intensified something fierce, Janie and Tom, with multiple calls for protective and chemical gear. It was a race to the bunker, and, quite literally, it was a race for our lives.” He promises nonstop, twenty-four seven coverage and says, optimistically, that this is just the beginning.
“Stay safe, Joe,” says Janie.
“Seven more killed in the city of—” says Tom, before the station breaks for a commercial advertising heartburn medication.
Jake and I bought a lot of alcohol a week before he left to make sure we drank until we were good and drunk, but we were tired the night we tried and fell asleep halfway into the second glass, head-to-feet on the couch. The next morning Jake said, “We’re a poor excuse for a young couple.”
I should sleep, but I find orange juice in the refrigerator and smell it and check for mold before mixing two parts vodka with one part juice. I drink it, and many more like it, in front of the TV.
________
March 23
Jake,
How am I?
I try noit to lookg at youir pictures. Becaus, what if I jinx thingfs? When all you have is picctures, it starts top feel likje you’re looking at relics or dead relatives, you kwno?
I smell yoru shirt sometimes, but not foten. Ofetn. Often. What if I sujck it all out? It’s the one with the blue stripe anad th
laksdiojanfajgnoiglkjsdf
MARCH 24, MONDAY
Floor heaters warm the smoke-filled, bedroom-sized cabstand at the bottom of the Dunlop Street hill, and the air is thick and stale, trapped by plastic sheeting covering the windows. The door stays closed to keep in Puddin’ and the dramatic lines of an eighties show bounce off grime-coated walls.
I cover my nose with my sweater cuff, pretending it’s for warmth, and eye the remote control sitting by Shellie’s phone.
“It was a long damn night,” says Lenny, a night driver. “Day’ll be worse.” He counts money from one rolled bundle and pulls a separate wad from another pocket. He strips off a few bills and adds them to his fare pile. “Damn crackheads’ll make me broke. They can all get AIDS, every one of ‘em.”
“We must find the size nine shoe,” urges a TV detective.
Paula sets her cigarette in the ashtray and cleans her glasses with her T-shirt. “They get AIDS, they’ll just give you AIDS.”
“Paula, whyn’t you—listen here, Shellie. Don’t be lettin’ ‘em in here no more to sell their shit.” H
ay sticks to the bottom of Lenny’s right sneaker and a condom box squares his shirt pocket. He takes it out and pretends to look for something on top of the file cabinet while tucking the box behind a stack of adult magazines, checking the window when headlights glow outside. Everyone but Paula pretends not to notice. “You get caught with one o’ them whores and Georgia’ll kick your ass and take those kids,” she says.
“I ain’t goin’ to get caught, woman. Whyn’t you mind your own damn business and worry about that kid of yours and how she’s goin’ to find out who her baby’s daddy is.”
Shellie picks up the remote control, turns up the volume, and sets it back down. It’s closer, now. Just at the edge of the table.
It wouldn’t kill her to watch the news for ten minutes.
“Oh, we know who he is,” Paula says, “and he’ll pay up. Believe me.”
“Prob’ly will, poor bastard.”
“Bastard is right.” Her voice is smoke-scratched. She takes a drag from her cigarette and exhales over the table toward Shellie. Behind her on the bulletin board, yellowed edges curled since Shellie’s return after her angioplasty, hangs the notice ordering all smoking to be done outside. “How you doin’, Shellie? How’s your heart?”
“Still tickin’.” She holds up a fare sheet. “Lenny, you only gave me seventy-seven, but on your sheet, here, I got eighty-seven. Now, I can figure it again, but I already done it three—”
He digs in his front pocket and pulls out a ten. “Got stuck in my change pocket.”
“M-hm. Try that again and Lionel’ll get his foot stuck in your you-know-what.”
Paula says, “Shellie, you’re so polite, the way you talk. Come on. Say ‘ass’ for me.”
“I don’t want to say ‘ass,’ or I’d have said ‘ass’,” she says.
“Mia’s sittin’ over there thinkin’ we’re crazy,” says Paula. “She ain’t been around long enough yet to get used to us. Ain’t that right, Mia? She’s used to those college kids. Look at her all curled up on the couch. Girl, I know you gotta be on crack, you’re so skinny. I can hardly see you in that couch. It swallows you up. Look at her, Shellie.”
Lenny drops in a chair and throws his feet up on the table. “She ain’t on crack.”
Shellie winks at me. “You on crack, Mia?”
I have kept quiet because talking makes the sick feeling worse, but I say, “Do you mind if we watch the news?”
Shellie glances up at the TV, then at me, and says, “Well, I s’pose not, but this is almost over. Can you wait?”
A call comes in and she points at me and says, “48 Maple.” I look at the TV. A villain topples over a balcony railing after being punched in the shoulder and Shellie says, “I know’d he was gonna get caught. He stepped in all them tomaters.”
“It’s tuh-may-toes, Shellie. Damn.”
“Tomaters. That’s how I say it.”
I start to reach for the remote. Just two minu—
“Forty-eight Maple, Mia,” Shellie says again, and Charlie—another day driver—says, “Did y’all hear about the Apache that went down this morning? It was just up there, up by Pembroke.”
thank you thank you just Pembroke Jake’s not in Pembroke
“Some kind of trainin’ or somethin’. No one knows what happened.”
They look at me the way people look at the sun.
Charlie plays with a book of matches. “I don’t envy anyone over there, or anyone who’s got someone over there, know what I mean? Too many of them boys don’t come back.”
I grab the cab keys from where Lenny left them on the table and gather my travel mug and fare-sheet clipboard. I pass between them, shoving Puddin’ back with my foot to open the door.
The air smells like snow and soil, and the sky is near black with smears of clouds. A plump moon whitens the treetops and glimmers in the spiderweb crack on the window of car number seven, my car during the day, Lenny’s at night. I climb in and step on hay—there’s hay on the passenger-side mat, too—and turn on the radio and travel through the stations. Music, music, music, news!—but, it’s local. Music. Flip to AM and there’s nothing. I punch the buttons and the ashtray falls open and sitting there inside, a fat, half-smoked joint.
It’s been years, but I haven’t forgotten. Sweet, sweet apathy. Random, fading tangents.
Peace.
I pull it from the ashtray and hold it to my nostrils and close my eyes. It smells like nineteen, like the summer before my sophomore year in college. I would smoke in my living room and walk to the river and lie on my back under the sun. Grass poked through my hair and, behind me, bicycle wheels ticked past and the hum of distant conversations came and—
There’s a loud rap on my window and Lenny’s face is in the glass. “Gimme that.”
I jump. The window doesn’t work with the car off, so I open the door a crack.
“What the hell are you sniffin’ it for?” he says. “You never seen a joint?”
“Is that what this is?” I knock a hand against the window and the half joint breaks into two white stubs, one falling to the floor of the cab, the other dropping on damp gravel.
Lenny says, “Aw, hell, Mia. That’s just great.”
“Oops.”
He takes off his baseball cap and tugs at his hair and puts the cap back on. “You’re lucky I got more,” he says, and I say, “Or what?” but he ignores me and slams my car door and goes back into the cabstand. I pick up the half from the car floor, open the door to get the half from the ground, and put them both in the ashtray before pulling out of the lot. I drive under the tree canopy leading away from the cabstand. In the rearview mirror shine the taillights of Lenny’s wife’s Cadillac parking in the spot I left, his children’s heads silhouetted in the back seat.
Forty-eight Maple is a two-story house in the nicer part of the not-so-nice side of town, so I don’t mind waiting on the street in the dark. Still, I lock my doors.
A shadow appears on the other side of the fogged glass and knocks on the passenger window. I push the lever to “unlock.”
A man, late fifties, maybe, slides in and closes the door. He wears faded jeans and a black T-shirt with a hole in the neck seam. He smiles, says “Mornin’,” and I move my knees left. Fares sit too close, so close I can smell their breath and see the creases in their fingers and the yellow of their nails. This one has clean fingernails, a little long, and the skin on the back of his hand is like paper draped over his veins. I say “Morning” back, and he says, “Mind if I smoke?”
“If you don’t mind opening your window.”
He lights his cigarette. “Smells like liquor, in here. You smell that?”
“No.” I hadn’t woken up with time enough to shower.
He gives the address of a construction site ten miles out. “I’m supposed to be there at seven,” he says, and it’s six fifty-five. “Y’all usually get here faster.”
“There was some confusion with the shift change.”
“Charlie on a run, or somethin’? He usually drives me.”
“I was up.”
He holds his cigarette close to the window and exhales into the wind. “I’m Donny,” he says. “Donaldson.”
“Donny, for short?”
“Nope. Donald Donaldson.” He salutes. “Doctor.”
“Mia,” I say, not curious. I tilt the vents to blow the smoke toward his window.
“You coulda said you don’t want me smokin’,” he says. “I can wait.” He takes a long final drag and flicks his cigarette outside. “This’ll be a good job. I needed it. Been out for a while ‘cause of my back, but it’s time to work again. I was goin’ crazy sittin’ at home, you know? Got to spend time with the wife, but I just had to get out an’ do somethin’. I get stir crazy.”
The sun is in the rearview mirror, a sliver of fire over the trees.
“I’ll finally be able to pay to get my jeep fixed,” he says. “The wife’s car works, but she has to use it, you know. If our schedules worked out better she�
�d drop me off, but she don’t got to be at work ‘til nine, and she gets home real late, sometimes. So she’s tired in the mornin’.”
I say “Mm” and think about where I’m dropping him off, try to remember if there are any shrouded areas, secluded roads, empty lots to park in.
“Next week’s our four-year anniversary,” he says and lights another cigarette. “Don’t feel like it, though. Feels like we just got married. I love that woman to death.” He holds his pack out to me.
“No, thanks.”
“She’s an angel. A beautiful angel. She’s hangin’ in the hallway.” He laughs. “Her portrait, I mean. She ain’t hangin’ in the hallway.” His laughter fades. “You might be pretty, but it ain’t goin’ to do you much good if you don’t got a sense of humor.”
“Pardon me?”
“Pardon you. You didn’t laugh. It was a joke.” He slaps his knee. “You didn’t think it was funny?”
“Sure it was funny.”
“Most people laugh when they think somethin’s funny. What’re you, havin’ a bad day already at—” he looks at his watch, “ten ‘til seven?”
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t get mad,” he says. “I’m happy Donny. Donny Donaldson. Happy.” He smiles and his thick mustache hangs over the corners of his mouth. His hair, graying slightly and curling up over his ears and at the base of his neck, is messy from the open window. Thick lenses magnify brown eyes.
I ask, “How long did you know her before you were married,” and open my own window.
“Forever.” He waves a knobbed hand in front of him. “Friends since we was kids, then started seein’ each other some years back. Used to go out together, you know, to the bars, but after we got married she liked to stay home, didn’t want me goin’ out after work. I did for a bit, but it got to be a hassle. I don’t want to fight with her. She’s my life.”
Homefront Page 2
