The Coward

by Jarred McGinnis

  We worked quietly beside each other. The cat slept on me, unbothered by the occasional splats of potting mix I spilled on him. The pain was creeping up on me but not enough to end this moment.

  ‘Jack, I want to thank you for helping me out these past months. A lot of what happened is on me. I was a stupid teenage boy ready to burn down everything.’

  ‘Sometimes literally,’ he said without looking up from examining a tangle of finger-thick roots below a splay of leaves like green bunny ears. ‘But no – I failed you, your mom, us.’

  I couldn’t have him still holding on to the guilt, shame and doubt teenage me dumped on him.

  ‘Jack, you remember when I said I was going to run off the night before you picked me up. That wasn’t true.’ As I told him about trying and failing to kill myself, his eyes went wet. Chewing on his bottom lip, he considered the distance beyond the greenhouse to keep himself from crying. I told him about the humiliation of the driver pushing me back into the hospital without acknowledging me. I told him how cruel I felt for calling him earlier that day and having him drive down to Houston to find me dead after not hearing from me for ten years. My need to see him again and say sorry saved my life.

  We had stopped working. Jack composed himself before he looked at me. He nodded and said, ‘Thank you.’

  30

  The morning after Jack took me to his AA meeting and I ran away, I was making breakfast for myself. Jack was surprised to see me in the kitchen pouring cereal into a bowl.

  ‘Hey, want to go get donuts with me?’

  I raised my bowl and took another mouthful.

  ‘Right. Tell you what. I’ll buy you a pack of smokes as well and we won’t mention what happened last night.’

  I shrugged and put my bowl in the sink.

  At the donut shop, a woman was trying to calm her toddler. His butter-yellow knuckles and red fists pulled at his own hair. He choked for breath between cries, pouring snot, spit and tears.

  ‘Hey, kid! Quiet down for a second. You’re killing us over here.’

  The mother and the child, still hiccupping cries, looked at Jack.

  ‘Cute kid,’ Jack said and turned back to me. ‘Did I ever tell you about my ditch approach to parenting? I’m going to write a book one of these days. Make my millions. Here’s the idea. When you have a kid, you dig a six-foot ditch. Six by six by six feet. You put said kid in the ditch. Give him everything he needs. But he stays in the ditch. About the time the kid is big enough to climb out of the hole, it’s about the same time kids are ready to rejoin humanity. It’s like prep school for poor people.’

  ‘Your genius is wasted on me.’

  ‘That’s the truth.’

  We sat, both of us waiting for him to say what he really wanted to say. ‘It’s too late for rules. You’ve been running around doing dumb shit, drinking, smoking god knows what. But it’s not too late to have a dad.’

  I rolled my eyes.

  He took a bite of his donut, staring his blank, hard-eyed stare that still gave me pause.

  ‘You’re right. Let’s cut the crap. This world doesn’t give a damn about you.’ He paused, letting the weight of his sentence be felt. ‘The world will be just fine with one more ignorant pothead who has nothing more to his name than a Waffle House uniform and a bong collection. The good news is you are your mother’s son. I want you to have more from life, certainly more than I can give you. I’m serious here, look at me.

  ‘What matters to you? Anything you don’t roll your eyes at? You’re a teenager for Christ’s sake; you should be nothing but passion and hormones. What are you doing that doesn’t require police intervention? What would you show Mom if she was here?’

  He only invoked Mom’s name as a last resort, as if afraid her memory would become a cheat for parental discipline rather than the last bond between us. It was a magic phrase like ‘open sesame’. To Jack’s credit, he used it rarely.

  I shrugged, but the door between us was opening.

  ‘You’re already that boring? Sitting around, smoking, talking bullshit is what you should be doing when you’re my age—’

  ‘I don’t know . . . Art. I like art.’

  ‘Art. I don’t know day one about art. Tell me about it.’

  I told him. I didn’t know anything either, but that never stopped a teenager. I thought I was very clever for liking the Dadaists and the Surrealists like every other arty boy my age. I did have a passion. Although I wouldn’t have expressed it that way, I spent whole afternoons hiding in the bathroom stalls at school to pore over stolen coffee-table books, dog-earing pages, scribbling notes, tearing out pictures to give to girls. A few times, I convinced one or another to take the three-hour Greyhound trip to go to the museums in Houston.

  He drank his coffee and studied me. ‘Would you want to take painting classes?’

  ‘Yeah. That’d be cool.’

  ‘There’s a guy from the programme – he used to be famous or something – he was talking about needing an assistant. If you work for him, I bet we can arrange painting lessons or something. He’s pretty easy-going. An old hippy. What do you think?’

  31

  The phone call and the job offer that came while I was in the hospital was a temporary placement doing general office work. The HR woman had put me in an office of cubicles. Someone had printed ‘Temp Section’ in Comic Sans on a piece of paper. Each morning there was a list of to-dos on my desk. It was monotonous data entry, but I could listen to music while I worked. My desk overlooked an apartment complex. Throughout the day, I liked watching the windows and people going about their days. When I finished my to-do list, I hunched over a book and read or sketched the apartments on pilfered printer paper until five p.m.

  An email pinged into my inbox from the front desk receptionist whom I filled in for when she went on her breaks. It was a reminder for a company lunch to celebrate the release of a new product. I wrote a reply.

  Dear Mrs. Jones,

  I can think of no better way to celebrate this momentous achievement than free sandwiches and soda eaten in the foyer with my esteemed colleagues. I have only been at the company for two weeks, but I am confident that this new version shall crush all competition in the world of logistics facilitation. Our children’s lullabies shall be the lamentations of their women.

  Drive safely,

  Rev. Jarred McGinnis, Esq.

  A response came immediately.

  Jarred,

  I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to email that to you. I’m afraid the lunch is for employees only. Technically, you are employed by the agency. I’m afraid you can’t have any sandwiches. If there are any leftovers, you can have those. ;)

  Barb

  Stacks of pre-made sandwiches beside bags of potato chips and rows of sodas rested on patterned paper tablecloths. I waved at the receptionist, took a bite of a sandwich, and returned it to the pile.

  I popped off the sidewalk and wheeled through the newly planted pansies. A plastic sprinkler crunched angrily under my tyre.

  Jack greeted my return home with, ‘Something’s wrong with your cat. He had a fit. I’m taking him to the vet.’

  ‘Do you want me to go with you?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s your damn cat.’

  ‘I think I might have gotten fired today.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it in the car.’

  We were sitting in the vet’s office when Jack asked, ‘So, what happened with the job?’

  I told him.

  ‘Not your finest moment, but you should go in tomorrow anyway.’

  ‘Mister Shakey McGinnis,’ the vet called.

  The cat was passive as the vet examined him. He held the cat with one hand, petting him with the other. The grey tail swished across the examination table in slow arcs.

  ‘How long have you had him?’ he asked.

  Jack looked at me.

  ‘Not long,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll see what comes back with the bloods. The attacks sound infrequent and
they’re relatively non-severe. At this stage, you just need to keep an eye on him, watch what he eats so we can exclude allergies or accidental poisoning. If the attacks become more frequent or severe, you should bring him back.’

  ‘Thanks, doctor,’ Jack said.

  ‘Doctor, could you have a look at Jack? He’s been having chest pain but likes to be a hard ass and won’t go see a people doctor,’ I said.

  ‘All right, all right. Knock it off. Thank you for seeing us on such short notice.’

  ‘No problem, Mr. McGinnis.’

  The next day, Jack banged on my bedroom door and told me to go to work. I arrived late, not in a big hurry to be fired and have my wages docked the bite’s worth of a tuna sandwich. No one said anything and Barb at the front desk gave me the same perfunctory hello when I arrived. A man from HR arrived at our cubicles and told one of the other temps that Mr. Ghosh wanted to show him something.

  As the other temp stood to leave, I whispered, ‘Don’t you do it, then he’ll want to see yours.’ The HR man turned to me and said that I had been assigned to Bruce’s team and I could find him in the fourth-floor kitchen.

  Bruce’s middle-aged paunch threatened to burst from his plaid button-down shirt worn dull by years of washing and wear. He sat at the table, drinking coffee from a thermos lid and eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. His hands constantly disturbed the red-brown tuft of hair on his head. A smear of peanut butter had given him a cowlick.

  I pulled up to the table and watched the television with him. Bruce smelled of soured milk.

  ‘There’s a five to ten per cent chance I know that guy on that rope,’ he said as he took a bite and nodded at the television showing a commercial for the Army. Heavy metal music followed a serious-faced man climbing down a rope from a helicopter into a frothing sea. The next scenes showed grainy images of armed men yelling and running through muddy puddles.

  ‘Any chance you know those guys too?’

  His reply was an unintelligible spray of sandwich. Once he swallowed, I asked about his military service. He proudly talked about developing the meeting-room planning system used in every Army base in the world. I asked Bruce if he was shitting me. Bruce assured me that he was not shitting me.

  ‘Do you know the president? Have you petted his dog?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I do not. No, I have not.’

  The conversation meandered from topic to topic by segues known only to Bruce. He had a son and a daughter, and he did not like bananas. With Bruce to entertain me, I thought I might be able to behave enough to keep this job.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m the temp. HR said I should ask you what you need done.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I need someone to do web design.’ Bruce nodded excitedly then rapidly listed things that needed to be done. Company jargon flew at me in Bruce’s clipped sentences.

  ‘Do you know HTML? CSS?’

  ‘No, I do not.’

  ‘You need to learn.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Do you know Photoshop?’

  ‘No, I do not.’

  ‘You don’t have any web design experience, do you?’

  ‘Not a dot.’

  ‘You have a lot to learn.’

  Bruce’s enthusiasm kept me there and nodding patiently, but I was already seeing all the ways I would fail.

  ‘We can do this,’ Bruce announced.

  I smiled and said, ‘When this project is done, they shall sing our praises in the hills for generations to come.’

  Bruce walked out. I had already gone too far. I slapped my head just as Bruce popped his head back into the kitchen.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  ‘Now?’ I followed him to his office. Bruce described software, passwords, access privileges et cetera that I was going to need. Halfway through, Bruce stopped. He ran his hands through his hair. One side of his part said twelve and the other pointed to twenty past.

  ‘Where’s your paper and pencil? Aren’t you taking notes?’ He opened a drawer full of office supplies. Everything inside was perfectly ordered, packed neat and tight. It reminded me of Jack’s fastidiousness. He wrenched free a writing pad and tossed me a pencil. Bruce sighed and began again.

  ‘First you have things to learn. I’ll give you a day.’

  Despite myself, I enjoyed working for Bruce. Each night, Jack and I talked about our work. My days flew past, and I slept the blessed sleep of the exhausted.

  When Bruce was happy he did a fist pump and said stuff like ‘nailed it,’ which made me laugh. If Bruce thought something that I did was terrible, he threw his hands to his head, pulled at his hair, and said, ‘Oh man, that’s terrible,’ with real mourning in his voice. I wanted to do well for him. Only once, in the middle of divvying the day’s action points, did he mention my wheelchair, as if only noticing it at that moment.

  ‘Why don’t you use an electric one?’

  ‘I don’t need to. My arms are fine. Electric wheelchairs are expensive, heavy and, if they break or the battery dies, I’m stuck.’

  ‘Why’s that widget so close to the thingie? Move over.’

  Some able-bodied people try to pretend the chair doesn’t matter. They kneel on their haunches to be at your differently-abled eye level, because they once read wheelchair people like that. For other people you are the embodiment of the stick figure painted on parking spaces and bathroom doors: a curiosity, a subject of gossip or a cypher for disability itself. Finally, there are people like Bruce who, for whatever reason, don’t include it as part of their calculation of you.

  I pushed back from the computer to let Bruce at his troublesome widget and thingie. He hunched over the keyboard, muttering suggestions as he proceeded to implement them himself by banging at the keyboard and violently jerking the mouse.

  I teased him and said, ‘I liked the sans serif. It gave a warm feeling to the text. Especially when in bold.’

  Bruce turned dramatically, looking behind him. ‘What is wrong with you? Warm feeling?’ He stood and faced me. I tried not to giggle. His hands ran through his hair creating a different topiary with each pass. We argued. He refused to discuss fonts in nonsense terms like warm and cold. I nodded, conceded his points, and agreed that there was never an appropriate time or place for Helvetica.

  ‘Why do you like this stuff?’ I asked.

  He tilted his head, furrowing his brow, and gave a quick tug at the tuft of forelock. ‘It makes sense to me,’ he said.

  ‘But it doesn’t really matter. I mean this company doesn’t even make stuff. We help people sell stuff that they didn’t make either.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter? What matters? Listen, you’re weird.’ He pointed a quick jab of the finger before his hand returned to his head. ‘That’s okay. You’re a good worker. Can you stop talking and do some work?’

  ‘Yes, I can.’

  That night Jack brought home Chinese takeout.

  ‘I didn’t know what you liked so I kind of got one of everything.’

  He unpacked the paper bags until the dinner table was littered with Styrofoam containers full of glistening food, soy and sweet-and-sour sauce packets and fortune cookies.

  ‘How’s your Pow Pow Chicken?’ Jack couldn’t remember what he ordered so he made up the names.

  ‘Delicious.’

  ‘How was work today?’ He stabbed a piece of chicken with his fork.

  I told him about Bruce and his pronouncement about finding something and making that something matter.

  After a bite of his Kung Fu noodles, he said, ‘But keep it to yourself, because no one else cares.’

  ‘That sounds about right.’

  ‘Wise and handsome. My blessing, my curse. Now what shall we do to celebrate your first pay cheque?’

  ‘Pay some bills! Pay some bills. Rock ’n’ roll. Rock ’n’ roll. Rock ’n’ roll. Pay some bills,’ I sang, banging on the table with a chopstick in each hand.

  32

  ‘Where have you been?’ Sarah asked.
‘I haven’t seen you in a while.’

  ‘Up the hill. Working for the man.’

  ‘How’s that going?’

  ‘Meh.’ I shrugged.

  ‘Amen. How’s Incredible Mister Shakey?’

  ‘Furry. We had to take him to the vet but he didn’t seem too worried.’

  I sat in my usual seat with a view of the counter. Sarah brought me my coffee and sat beside me. She set down a legal pad.

  ‘I’ve developed a questionnaire for us to fill out. How do you spell your name?’

  I spelled it out for her and watched as she wrote my name down at the top of the paper. She had two freckles on her neck where Dracula’s bite would be.

  ‘Sarah with an H.’ She pointed to herself. ‘Give me your personal motto.’

  ‘“We laugh to save ourselves from crying.”’ I took a sip of coffee, but it was still too hot. I played it off poorly.

  ‘That’s a good one. Mine is: “You only get one life so you might as well live it.”’ She wrote our mottos on her notepad.

  ‘Golden rule? Mine is “Try everything once.”’

  ‘“Whatever it is, don’t put it up your ass,”’ I said.

  The tip of her tongue peeked from between her lips as she wrote my answer. She was playing serious and I ate it up. She read the next question, ‘Secret pleasure? I was going to write putting things up my ass, but I guess I’ll go with “petting alley cats”.’

  She was flirting. A woman was flirting with me. A beautiful woman named Sarah was flirting with me.

  ‘Something you miss the most?’ she asked.

  I flinched. I wasn’t sure if she was bringing up the wheelchair, but it seemed an innocent question. Still, there were too many real answers to that question.

  ‘I miss the sing-alongs at the men’s urinals.’ I hid my grin with another sip of coffee.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, disabled toilets are off on their own. I miss the fun of men lined up and pissing against the same wall.’