Loudermilk

by Lucy Ives

  The gunman approaches Harry. He wears an undershirt and a simple necklace of wooden beads. He glistens with sweat, all the way out to the tips of his black hair. He assesses Harry.

  “What are you looking at?” the gunman wants to know, and without waiting for a reply gets into a new truck, parked just a few spaces up and painted a metallic green like the head of a mallard.

  Harry watches this person drive off. He recalls, from a dreary senior-year Freud survey, that the sadist is both the source of the law and the one who transgresses it.

  Now Loudermilk is out. Loudermilk wants to know what the goddamn motherfuck that was all about.

  Harry tells Loudermilk that they have neighbors, in case Loudermilk wasn’t aware.

  “Neighbors?” Loudermilk asks. He digs around in the back of his boxers. “That’s awesome, dude.” Loudermilk muses that they really need to get started thinking about their own place. He says that to tell the truth it is a fucking dump.

  Harry says that whenever Loudermilk would like to make a move on that side of things that would be great.

  Harry goes back indoors.

  Anyway, Harry is busy. He has better things to do than observe the homosocial rituals of landlocked patriarchs. He has already started working on the writing project for Loudermilk. He needs to find out how people write a lot of poems, because he’s pretty sure that he and Loudermilk—or, rather, he—are/is going to have to write a lot of them. He’s reading a book titled Singing in the Present Tense: A Critical Anthology. He found this volume—a poetic guidebook of sorts—in a used bookstore in Oswego before they left. “The poem is,” Singing in the Present Tense tells him, “many things to many people. The poem is an expression of what the author of the poem is thinking or feeling, and it may even be both of these at the same time. A poem does not have to be poetic or beautiful. You may be surprised by the number of things a poem can be.”

  A jay outside is making a sound like a laser. Harry turns the page:

  When you are reading a poem, you may not understand it right away. There may be words or names of places and people unfamiliar to you, and sometimes a sentence may seem to go on for a very long time indeed or simply end abruptly, in a fragment. Try not to let this put you off. Use an encyclopedia or a dictionary to find the meanings of words you don’t know. Read the poem through a few times to get a feel for everything on the page. Appreciate the poem as you would a piece of music or a painting or a conversation with a friend. Try to remember that the poem does not have to mean something, but it might. One way to get a feel for poetry is by thinking about the way that words have meaning more generally. Many words have more than one meaning. The word seal can refer to the wax on a letter even as it also means large carnivorous sea mammal. Neither of these meanings does anything to restrict or disturb the other meaning. But here we are just talking about dictionary meanings. There are also meanings that are created by the way people use words. Take the word tall. We might say, “She is tall,” but we can also say, “That is a tall order.” Even words that have only one dictionary meaning may have many metaphorical meanings when we use them in daily life. Poetry is a kind of writing that generally accepts this about words. Poetry minds neither that words may mean more than one thing, nor that they sometimes mean more than one thing at once. This is what causes some people to say that they cannot understand poems.

  Harry is feeling calmer now, but also more bored. He puts the book down.

  He sips instant coffee from a plastic cup, prepared with water heated in a tin can. Loudermilk, meanwhile, performs his ablutions. The shower is on.

  Over the sound of the water Loudermilk shouts, “I’m taking us to the mall!”

  Harry says that he will see Loudermilk when Loudermilk gets back. It’s barely worth saying, and Harry doesn’t really care if Loudermilk can’t hear him. Harry picks up The Sentinel and flips past an image of a man pointing into the interior of a recently bombed shrine. He lingers on an unflattering photo of the Dixie Chicks in concert, seizes his pencil, and begins languorously redacting their sweaty, scraped-back hair and adorable faces contorted by pacifist passion, stroking the newsprint with the eraser.

  Loudermilk shuts off the shower. He climbs out of the tub and displays himself naked on the floor of the living room, drying his shins with a pair of cobalt athletic shorts. “Towels,” Loudermilk says. “Make a note, please, Harrison.” He goes over one thigh. “And a telephone. So your moms doesn’t put out a fucking APB.”

  Harry pretends he hasn’t heard this last remark. He moves on to a photograph of Kobe Bryant.

  Loudermilk is pulling on a pair of ratty, toffee-colored cargo shorts, to which he adds a white polo. He swipes Old Spice. He strokes his chin, contemplating Harry. “To the mall?”

  “See you when you get back.”

  Loudermilk is firm. He says, “Those Orange Juliuses aren’t going to drink themselves, friend.”

  “I don’t feel like it.”

  “But, Harry”—Loudermilk employs humanitarian tones—“trying new things is how we learn.”

  “Thanks but no thanks.”

  “Remember how I’m supposed to be helping you here? Working on your little problem? Can you please just let me do that?”

  Harry frowns.

  Loudermilk drives.

  They go by cornfields, and there is a sound from insects like a low alarm. There looms THE REDVILLE MALL. Contractors have fixed for it a treeless, dusty plateau.

  Loudermilk wants a mattress and linens and an Orange Julius and some panfried dumplings and is getting sort of manic. They move among hearty Alpines and a few Nordics whose genetic traits, Loudermilk loudly proclaims, as if in a bid to have his front teeth abruptly removed by a nearby fist, have been largely selected out of the East Coast pool.

  Loudermilk buys red towels; he buys five, all the same jumbo size. Loudermilk buys navy sheets. He buys two mattresses. He makes Harry go with him to the sporting goods store, where he lights on a pair of plastic camp chairs with built-in beer cozies. They peruse the handgun options and watch as someone with acne receives a miniature duffel across the glass counter.

  “You see, the mall is good,” Loudermilk says. “Look how Zen you are.”

  Harry is pouring the last sweet kernels of a cone of kettle corn into his mouth. He does not respond. They turn into an electronics store where Loudermilk picks out a pair of midrange handheld recorders that take mini-tapes. “For when I go to class—one for recording, one for you to listen,” he tells Harry, indicating that the fancier, digital recorder he already possesses will be reserved for personal use. Loudermilk picks up a cordless for the house and a Sprint PCS Picture Phone with Built-in Camera for himself. He shakes hands with the salesman.

  Near a giant glass atrium that is the main point of entry and exit, on the concrete dais outside, are girls in black jeans and Doc Martens who smoke cigarettes, squatting and jumping and gesticulating all the while, as if it is a form of calisthenics. The girls are in high school and Harry supposes you could believe they have been released from their place of remedial education for the day. They wear band shirts and fistfuls of silver rings and train knowing, kohl-lined eyes on Loudermilk. One leans over and whispers something to another. The other girl laughs, levers herself off the wall. She starts speed-walking toward Harry and Loudermilk.

  Harry can see what’s coming and tries to start pedaling faster toward the safety of the SUV but Loudermilk glances back and is like, “Stop.” Loudermilk even fakes accidentally dropping his keys and spends some time fumbling around, doing something with his wallet.

  “Excuse me! Excuse me!” The girl hails them.

  Harry is cursing under his breath. He pretends to find something extraordinarily fascinating to gaze at on the horizon.

  “Hey!” says the girl. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry notes her Marilyn Manson T-shirt, the singer’s dilated, mismatched eyes gazing balefully up from under her left tit, her chin-length ash-brown hair, her commanding hazel gaze. He
gulps. It isn’t even that she’s jailbait. She’s something way beyond that, an actress in an after-school special with genuine star power, an escape artist, a worthy fucking competitor. Harry tries unsuccessfully not to let himself get carried away.

  Loudermilk is pivoting suavely.

  “Hiya,” the girl says. “I hope you don’t think this is rude, I was just wondering, any chance you guys are in, like, the Seminars?”

  Loudermilk cocks his head. “I wouldn’t put it past us.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s a fact.”

  The girl looks back to her friends and waves her arms over her head. “Yes!” she screams. “Omigod, yes! You skanks so owe me money!”

  Harry monitors the progress of a distant prop plane.

  The girl has already turned back to Loudermilk. “Lizzie,” she says, proffering a tiny manicured hand.

  “Charmed,” replies Loudermilk. He lets her know their names.

  “You guys could totally give me a ride back to town if that’s not a problem!”

  Loudermilk says that he doesn’t see why that should be a problem.

  Harry doesn’t comment.

  Loudermilk gallantly offers Lizzie shotgun. Her marshmallow-orchid perfume expands nauseatingly to fill the vehicle’s interior, and as soon as Loudermilk has the key in the ignition she begins messing with the radio.

  Harry stews.

  Lizzie puts on NPR. There is an interview with a nun who loves art. “Omigod,” Lizzie squeals. “Terry Gross! YES!” She leans forward, chin on fists. “I love her.”

  Loudermilk drives studiously.

  When the interview ends, Lizzie switches off the radio. She is all business. “So please pardon my asking but what are you guys up to at the moment? Are we just now settling in?”

  Loudermilk says things are pretty much settled.

  “That’s so good!” Lizzie commends him. “Sometimes people have, you know, kind of, I don’t know, culture shock? I’ve seen it happen before.” Lizzie purses her lips.

  “You seem to know a lot about the Seminars.”

  “Oh, I mean, like, the area. I’m saying, maybe you haven’t realized you’ve come to the vortex, your blood must feed the corn and whatnot?”

  “That’s nice,” Loudermilk maintains.

  “How about you?” She means Harry.

  “Harry.”

  “Thanks, Loudermilk. So what about Harry?”

  “Dissertation,” Loudermilk says. “He’s writing his dissertation.”

  “Oh!”

  “‘Oh!’ is right. This young brainiac studies the history of abnormal psychiatry in the U.S. I mean, it’s way over my head. Very technical stuff. People with congenital injuries and aggravated antisocialism and that kind of thing.”

  Lizzie tells Harry, “I’m still in high school.”

  “Stay in school,” Loudermilk preaches.

  “Excuse me, but I am very much in school!” Lizzie sighs. They’re on a street at the outskirts of town with dying trees, a vacant lot, a funeral parlor on the hill just above them, and train tracks to the left. “Now,” says Lizzie, “roll the windows all the way up, pretty please.”

  Loudermilk obliges. He starts to want to know what Lizzie’s connection to the Seminars is but she interrupts him: “Because you have been so very honorable toward me, I am going to smoke you guys out. How does that sound?”

  Loudermilk shrugs. He unbuckles and settles back into his seat. Harry rolls his eyes.

  Seven minutes later, Lizzie tells Loudermilk to drive them back out into the fields to release the incriminating vapor. She says someone could rat you out, you never know.

  Loudermilk offers languid thanks. His right hand drifts toward the ignition but he only caresses the leather tag dangling from the key. Everyone seems OK with nothing happening.

  “So are we going to the BBQ or not?” It’s Lizzie again.

  “I don’t know,” Loudermilk says. “Are we?”

  “Hello? Do you just not check your email? The BBQ! This is the time when you first get to see everyone? And be seen?”

  Loudermilk shrugs. “Must have slipped my mind! I’m totally so all about the poetry. Sounds crazy, I know.”

  “Not especially,” Lizzie tells him.

  Nine

  Prospects

  Before them is a green. And upon the green are fifty people. And on a table near a grill, beer cans and bottles verdantly glisten. Everyone is standing at least a foot away from everyone else.

  If Harry were called upon to provide some sort of formal appraisal of this gathering, a first impression, as it were, he might choose a word like restrained or muted. But this does not look like a crowd of dreamy masturbators. They may indeed be masturbators, but if so they are masturbators of a weirdly self-aware and not very physical stripe. It is like the “popular nerd” of every North American high school clique known to 1995 has been summoned to this convocation; it’s a hive.

  The tone of the gathering that Loudermilk and Harry are about to join is not lost on Loudermilk, who mutters, “Let’s try and cultivate your ability to be normal.”

  Lizzie is already out of the car and, having slammed her door, skips squealing off.

  Loudermilk shakes his head, produces a gentle clucking sound. He murmurs, “Ready to meet these cock-knockers?”

  Harry loiters beside the Land Cruiser, contemplating the fact that the ground and the sky are two distinct entities that appear to touch each other, here in a neurotically straight Iowan line.

  Loudermilk is making signs that they must progress toward the social scene. But Harry is no longer capable of comprehending his friend’s suggestions. Harry hears only a high-pitched hum he assumes must be the abstract music of his own blood. Ages pass, Paleolithic eons, fossils form whitely on Harry’s lips and drop softly to the earth, his eyes dry up and blow away, yet at last Harry is moving beside Loudermilk, is somehow walking.

  Loudermilk has pretty much been keeping up his end of the bargain. So far, basically, so good. Few questions have been asked, and only Evelyn, their new landlord, whoever she is, native Cretan, serial monogamist, hovel mogul, has even come close to confronting Harry’s odd lot. What’s unusual is that Evelyn’s query happened at such an early point in their acquaintance, and early on it’s very much Loudermilk’s responsibility to ensure that dialogue of this nature is kept to a minimum. If the person behaving in an inquisitive fashion isn’t really going to become a major part of their lives, what’s the point? Harry’s situation is on a need-to-know.

  When Harry was younger, he read the word agoraphobe somewhere. It, as they say, resonated with him. But Harry’s not afraid of open spaces or large groups of people, at least not chiefly. He does not suffer from an overdeveloped sensitivity to human cruelty, nor does he live in constant fear of persecution by his fellow man. Rather, his sensitivity is carefully calibrated, his fear intermittent if pretty pronounced. He respects the possibility of cruelty; he largely accepts that he’s destined to be persecuted by individuals bigger, richer, and stupider than he is. Agoraphobia was mainly of interest to Harry, when he first came across the term, in an existential sense, since it seemed antithetical to the very project of enduring a human life span. It was an incorrect way of thinking and feeling that was not just a mistaken opinion or species of hate. Rather, in Harry’s estimation, it was a general disposition toward the future, a mode of mentally assessing what was to come that significantly limited one’s prospects, which is to say, one’s ability to exit a room or, maybe, bed.

  Harry thinks about himself in these terms. But his problem is not, again, primarily with other people. Yes, Harry dislikes and fears most other men and women, but the central and insoluble problem for Harry is that he, in a nonmetaphorical sense, hates the sound of his own voice.

  It rises in him. It enters his own ears, and after this Harry will “hear” how it sounds to others.

  It’s not that he can’t speak. It’s that he doesn’t want to.

  Loudermil
k maintains that this is totally normal. That’s the Loudermilk line and Loudermilk, since he is Loudermilk, will not be dissuaded. Loudermilk says that it’s probably a phase. He says that there is nothing so remarkable about Harry’s voice anyhow, once you get used to it. It’s a bit unique is all, a little in between and out of bounds of normal registers.

  But the thing Loudermilk does not realize, the finer detail that is somehow constantly lost on him, is that when Harry speaks what comes out of his mouth sounds nothing like what he hears in his own head. So the voice is ugly and sometimes shrill and sometimes bass and otherwise ludicrous and very incongruous and unpleasant, but the major thing about it is that it is not even his. And this makes all the difference.

  The need to communicate on some rudimentary level necessitates a friendship of the kind he shares with Loudermilk. Things have been a lot easier, since.

  However, why or how Loudermilk manages to comprehend as much of Harry’s condition as he does remains something of an enigma. Loudermilk’s decisions about when and where to exercise his limited capacity for empathy are cipher-like at best and often resemble the whims of an oversexed, nihilist god.

  Loudermilk’s own freedom is remarkable. It’s brilliant, irresistible. Proprieties, doubts, fears, and so forth are simply not part of his makeup. If Loudermilk is constrained by anything, it’s by the lack of any sense of limit on his agency. Loudermilk believes that he is capable of anything and that, pursuantly, anything he is capable of is pretty much permitted.

  Given his looks plus blinding self-regard, Loudermilk has to actively choose and/or struggle not to glide along the path of least resistance. As a person with a surfeit of emancipation, he has no fear of being labeled lazy and will only consent to make any kind of effort at all if he can be sure that the whole endeavor will take the form of an enormous obscene joke cum high school science experiment.

  “Hello?” Loudermilk is demanding.

  Harry stares at Loudermilk, taking in for a moment his friend’s inhumanly symmetrical features, shaded by the hot-pink novelty trucker hat.