Want Not

by Jonathan Miles

  “Serious, man.”

  “Okay,” Talmadge said again.

  “Not if you think what you’re doing can change nothing.”

  With a meek shrug, Talmadge said, “I’m just changing me.”

  “Then don’t be preaching at everybody.”

  “I wasn’t preaching. You asked me—”

  “Know what you are, man? Do you know?”

  This was clearly a rhetorical question though Crabtree granted Talmadge a few unappreciated moments for response.

  “You a provocateur,” he said. “That’s right. A pro-voc-a-teur. And that’s bullshit, you know what I’m saying. Bullshit. That’s nothing.”

  “Due respect, man, I’m just minding my—”

  “Let me tell you something. Provocateur, man. That’s what you are. I was with Bobby Seale in New Haven, you understand? The Black Panthers, man, you know what I’m talking about? New Haven. That was war, man. But this shit”—he waved an ungloved hand at the trash bags on the sidewalk, at the satchel ’round Talmadge’s shoulder—“this shit is worthless, man. You ain’t—you ain’t even got a right.”

  “We all have a right,” Talmadge mumbled.

  “Shit,” said Crabtree, then puffed his cheeks before unloading an aggrieved exhalation. Too cold for this shit, he thought. Too cold for anything. Weather like this, even a polar bear’d be crying for its mama, asking to crawl back in that warm mama-bear coochie to hide. The wind was spinning all those invisible arrows poking from his back, whirling them around in his flesh. He had pills back at the shelter but the pills didn’t work. Reefer worked. Rock worked better. Junk worked best. But all his old nursing aids had been forcibly retired by The People of the State of New York v. Houston Crabtree. “Five dollars, man,” he said blurrily, half to himself, a quarter to God, the rest to the dumbass kid. “I got fines to pay. No job. I don’t pay the fines, I gotta go back to doing a bid.”

  The sudden shift in tone came as a relief to Talmadge, as though a knife had been lowered.

  “I’m on a payment plan, you understand?” he went on. “Got behind six months. Parole officer say, shit, Houston, you can make that payment collecting cans. Cans! But I’m out here all day for five dollars. Shit is right. Ain’t no way to make that payment. Make better money digging graves in Georgia and that’s nothing, man, I did that.”

  Talmadge relaxed his face into a blank expression meant to show empathy. “You hungry?”

  “Fuck you, man. I ain’t eating that shit.”

  “Just asking.”

  “What you need to do—know what you need to do?” Crabtree’s energy spiked again, and he wagged a long brown finger at Talmadge. “Incorporate. That’s how you change shit, man. Not like this. This is just provocatization. You got to twist it from the inside. You gotta get up inside it to where you can cut the wires, you know what I’m saying? You need the initials, man. That’s how you get inside. You got to be a corporation. Nothing happen in this country without the I-N-C-period, you understand?”

  Talmadge didn’t, but he nodded anyway.

  “That’s what I’m gonna do, one of these days,” he went on. “Get myself incorporated. Nobody touches no corporation. Need a lawyer for that, though. Special-type lawyer.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” said Talmadge.

  “Lookit these boots, man,” Crabtree said, kicking out a leg. The boots, made of thin green rubber, appeared to have been designed for a ten-year-old child in an equatorial nation. And when Talmadge looked closer he noticed two yellow dots at the toes of each boot: eyes. Dude was wearing children’s frog boots. “I must’ve walked ten miles in these today. Sticking my hand into every goddamn trash can. Make me sick, man. Got cream cheese all up my arm. Ten miles for five fucking dollars. Ain’t doing that again. My redeeming days is over. I’m done, baby. This motherfucker cooked.”

  “Jesus,” Talmadge said, still marveling at the frog boots.

  “That’s right. You don’t see no corporations walking ’round in boots like this.”

  “There’s a nursing home or something on Henry Street. I can’t remember the name, but I found some totally decent shoes there a few months back—in the trash. You just got to poke around.”

  “Fuck that,” Crabtree said. “I had me some good boots, you know what I’m saying? Fucking soldier boots, man, I could’ve circus-walked that third rail in them, not felt nothing. Some motherfucker stole one of them at the Broadway Mission. That’s why I don’t stay there no more.”

  “Who steals one boot?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Some one-legged motherfucker, that’s who. Don’t think I won’t find him.” To prove his intent, Crabtree squinted up and down East 4th Street. By now the snow was blowing sideways, strafing Talmadge’s pinkening cheeks, and sensing himself loosed from whatever threat he’d feared, he asked Crabtree if he’d mind him finishing up his “shopping.”

  “Suit yourself, ratboy,” he said. This kid was hopeless, Crabtree concluded. Hopeless and stupid like the whole motherfucking world was hopeless and stupid. He remembered, back in the ’90s, stopping at a crackhouse up the Hudson in Newburgh which the police had raided half a day earlier. Outside, on the stoop, broken yellow police tape flapped in the river breeze. Inside he found tweakers on all fours, a dozen or more of them, all of them scratching the floors like yardbirds, crawling from room to room, sniffing for any grit left behind in the commotion. He saw one skinny henpicker, barefooted, in a paisley housedress, licking the carpet. She’d comb it with her fingers, upturning the dust, then lick whatever grains she found. Kitty litter, mostly. Kitty litter was everywhere. For a moment he thought that was who the kid reminded him of, but then he panned out: That’s what everyone reminded him of, himself included. Just a big mess of hopeless fools—or holy goofs, like the kid’s button said—licking the carpet, hoping for that bitter buzz on the tonguetip, the promise of a fix. Money, pussy, cock, fame, the warm and righteous embracing arms of Jesus, a world scraped of all its scabs and scars: the fix didn’t matter. Because most of the time it was kitty litter anyway. There was victory in knowing this, Crabtree knew, because once you figured out that nothing mattered, nothing mattered. Not even five dollars. Not even the cold. He rubbed his palms together, then seared his cheeks with their quick, passing heat. “You got a smoke?” he asked Talmadge.

  “Not the tobacco kind,” Talmadge said, immediately regretting it. Idiot, he scolded himself. It was always like this. He had this insuperable need to distinguish himself, at every flitting opportunity, from normality: from his father’s sprawling, polished Ford dealership and Saints season tickets and rarely used inboard cruiser docked at the Gulfport Yacht Club, his relentless Rotarian striving; from his younger sister’s BFD internship with Senator Thad Cochran, and her scotch-drinking, Phi Delt twit of a boyfriend; from Sherilyn, the forty-three-year-old, Clairol-blonde, hyper-Botoxed funeral-home heiress for whom Dick Bertrand had left Talmadge’s mother midway through Talmadge’s sophomore year at Ole Miss (as if Dick Bertrand had concluded his life wasn’t clichéd enough); from the Joel Osteen/Rick Warren brand of styrofoam Christianity in which his mother had taken refuge after the divorce, which daily sustained her until five o’clock when she shifted to sauvignon blanc; and from the way everyone shunned Uncle Lenord as if he was some sort of anomalous black sheep, some unaccountably redneck outlier, when in truth he was just a mirror image of Talmadge’s father, his baby-boy brother, minus the good fortune of two profitable marriages (Talmadge shunned Lenord, too, but for different reasons). Boneheaded comments like this—“not the tobacco kind,” Jesus—were the frequent result.

  “Baby!” Crabtree yelped, the arrows in his back going boing with excitement. Why not? Nothing mattered, he reminded himself. Except for Friday’s urinalysis: that might matter. “Uh-uh,” he said wistfully. “They got me nailed down so hard I can’t piss anywhere besides a cup. Put my ass in the supermax.”

  Talmadge, who hadn’t been kidding, said, “I was just kidding.”


  “Would do me right, though,” said Crabtree. Unsteady now, thinking about it: “Take that chill off, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Can’t spare a joint?”

  “I was just kidding.”

  “That’s cold, man. That’s cold.”

  “Sorry,” Talmadge said again.

  Did matter, Crabtree decided, surrendering the point. That the prison thermostat never dipped below 70 degrees was an attractive detail Crabtree didn’t presently want to consider. “Look like you got some decent greens there,” he said, pointing at the grid of produce Talmadge was carefully laying out on the snow: spinach so wilted it appeared half cooked; three bananas, their skins tinged with umber; loads of bagged salad mixes, the plastic smeary in spots; a massive eggplant so soft that Talmadge’s thumb punctured it; strawberries in their plastic compartments, the bottom ones fuzzed with ashy-looking mold; broken knobs of ginger root; a sizable mess of collard or mustard greens—despite his Southern rearing, Talmadge could never tell them apart—with crisp brown leaf edges, like singe marks; and six cantaloupes, so wet and spongy that they resembled fresh brains scattered on the snowy sidewalk.

  Micah would have taken nearly all of it—she had a much higher tolerance for defects and rot, having been at this much longer. She also liked fruit and vegetables—helpful, since she was a strict vegan—whereas Talmadge, with some exceptions, mostly enjoyed the idea of them: the forkfuls of ideology he gulped down nightly, the bittersweet gratification of his adopted asceticism, the heroism of his caloric risk and sacrifice. When he swigged spinach like Popeye, it wasn’t to inflate his own muscles—it was rather to bolster the earth’s. Or to knock out the Bluto-sized idea that the earning and spending of currency was the sole means of survival for her hapless and swarming inhabitants. Or something like that—Micah could explain it all better. He could never confess to her, though, that sometimes, in bed, he’d close his eyes and fantasize about the roast beef po’boys at Lil’ Ray’s in Gulfport with an ardor that was almost sexual in nature; more than once, in fact, he’d sprouted an odd erection.

  “Them grapes don’t look so bad,” Crabtree was saying, as Talmadge dug his hand farther into the bag. He’d been hoping for winter squash and/or sweet potatoes—it was Thanksgiving, after all—but he reckoned they’d been selling too swiftly to get chunked. Not to mention they had the enduring shelf lives of Twinkies. Whatever. Micah would make do; she always did. He just hoped Matty wouldn’t be too turned off by her meatless wonders—Matty had all the tact of a hydraulic log-splitter, something Talmadge credited, not altogether incorrectly, to Matty’s New Jersey upbringing. Back when he and Matty had lived together, in college, they’d more or less subsisted on the fried-chicken-on-a-stick at the University Avenue Chevron. The few potato logs on the side—those were strictly for ballast. Momentarily sidetracked by that reverie—him and Matty sprawled on their dorm beds at Deaton Hall, tripping on liquid LSD, then hiking to town through the brittle chromed aftermath of an ice storm to score some chicken-on-a-stick and lukewarm beer—Talmadge wasn’t paying close attention to what he was unloading from the bottom of the bag until he noticed Hunch’s boots go skittering backward—the frogs recoiling, their yellow eyes appearing to widen in shock—and heard Crabtree let loose a thunderous howl.

  “A rubber!” Crabtree was shouting. Jumping up and down, he motioned for Scatman to come see. “Check this out, fool. They’s a used rubber on the boy’s lettuce!”

  Which there was: a droopy, gelatinous sac of semen-stuffed latex clinging to the crown of a small pale head of butter lettuce.

  “Hoo boy, don’t that ruin supper,” Crabtree said, clapping in delight. Because there it was, proof positive: the kitty litter on the carpet. The pot of shit at the end of every rainbow, the five-dollar cash-coupon at the back-cracking finish of a long day’s redeeming. “Some stockboy getting it on in the back! Cleanup on aisle two, baby!” He waved to the fat-faced Mexican employee huddled in the flower stall outside the store entrance. “Yo, man, check this out! Y’all having a good time in there, ain’t y’all?” He pumped his hips suggestively then, doubling over, clapped his hands again. “Getting fresh in the grocery store! Living it up, baby! That’s what I’m talking bout. Love on the clock!”

  Scatman, still plugging his Evian bottles into the redemption machine, ignored it all, but the Mexican slid through the plastic flaps of his flower stall to come see. He looked grimly bemused, as if surmising that Talmadge had been seeking some particular treasure in the store’s trash bags and this gooey item was it. Two teenaged girls in matching furry boots paused to see about the fuss; through her scarf, one of them muttered, “Gross,” multi-syllabically, before the pair moved on. Cursing quietly, his face flushing, Talmadge corralled all of the produce back into the bag with the obvious exception of the butter lettuce which his fingers were in no mood to revisit. Violating Micah’s code of etiquette, he left the plastic bag untied—as with virtuous backpackers, the scavenger’s dictum was to leave no trace—as he pushed it, with his knees, back into the base of the pile. He wanted to say something to Crabtree—to tell him to pipe down, to stop laughing; that this was freakish, shit like this hardly ever happened; that the slop dished out at the burger chains along Third Avenue contained enough rat turds and body hair and pesticides and stray hormones and chemicals and various other effluvia to make a wadded-up condom seem as tasty as pizza cheese; that there was more at stake than just this, these two square inches of random spoilage, that we were gnawing the planet alive, all of us, that the entire mass-produce, mass-dispose system was like some terrible, endgame buffalo hunt, a horror-show of unpicked carcasses, and that this—this tube of driveled semen, flicked mindlessly onto food enough to feed a family—was Exhibit A, an ideal example of our blindness, of our pampered disregard and twisted self-indulgence, of the great unconsidered flush that defined civilization—but Talmadge realized it would be futile. Crabtree was in tears, flagging down passersby, performing an endzone-style two-step in his frog boots.

  As Talmadge slid away toward Avenue A, the wind crunching against his face, he could hear Crabtree calling after him. “You see?” he was shouting. “I may be homeless, motherfucker, that’s right, but I ain’t making salad dressing outta some stockboy’s jizz! You hear me, motherfucker? You hear me?”

  2

  HE NEVER HAD TIME TO BRAKE. By the time Elwin saw the deer, trotting across Route 202, it was three feet from his halogens, its final oblivious moments irradiated by the klieg lights of his Jeep Cherokee. Ker-thunk: Elwin’s head and shoulders rocked forward as he hit the deer broadside, an improbably perfect T-bone that sent the deer sliding, on its side, far far down the road, in a straight line for a while, its splayed-out body whirling on the asphalt, and then finally, as the force of the collision dissipated, to the snowbanked highway shoulder like some tragically weak gutterball. Elwin didn’t realize he was stopping until he was, in fact, stopped; some alternate self, his adrenalized Other, had pressed the brake pedal and turned the wheel, beaching the Jeep on the roadside. His chest was pressed tight against the steering wheel, his eyes fixed and unblinking, the sole evidence of his own continued existence the tiny smears of fog his breath was spraypainting onto the windshield. As his senses resumed, he heard a tinny clatter from the front of the Jeep, like that of a fan shredding plastic. He started to shut off the engine, then stopped himself—he worried it might not start again. Bleached by his headlights, the deer lay motionless, its alabaster belly facing him. Please, Elwin thought. Don’t move. Be dead. Be dead.

  In his thirty-eight years of driving, the last three of them in the deer-swarmed New Jersey suburbs, Elwin Cross Jr. had never hit a deer. He couldn’t remember even swerving to miss one, though he saw them almost nightly on his commute back from Newark—grazing the road shoulder, or hightailing it across the Morristown golf course in such vast sovereign herds that the word Serengeti popped to mind. With a rifle, and later a compound bow, he’d killed a dozen or
so in his lifetime, but that was years ago, back in his graduate school days when he was living in a commune—of a sort, anyway—in Pennsylvania’s Skippack Valley, doing his slipshod Thoreau imitation, brushing his long hair out of his eyes while studying the Foxfire books as if they were Talmudic scrolls. About 150 pounds and 300 haircuts ago, he figured.

  He got out of the idling Jeep to assess the damage. The front grille was munched and one of the headlights was dangling from its socket but the overall scene was better than he’d feared. He patted the hood as if congratulating a good dog. A plow truck zoomed past, trailing a slushy salted wake, then a sedan, but Route 202 was unusually quiet tonight. Or rather this morning, Elwin realized, not happily, after checking his watch. It was almost one.

  He hadn’t intended a late night—just a chummy, intradepartmental dinner with Fritz at a Portuguese restaurant in Newark’s Ironbound, to discuss Fritz’s Terascale Linguistics Initiative. But then Fritz had announced, over appetizers, that he and Annette were splitting, which had transformed dinner into a four-hour therapy session overlubricated with two bottles of midrange Douro red that Elwin was now fiercely regretting. He’d been drinking too much lately—sloppily, stupidly, the way his students drank; though, unlike them, mostly alone—and he’d been looking forward to an evening of sociable moderation. A glass of wine, a plate of potatoes and bacalao (of which he’d planned to eat just half, as his current diet book counseled; that plan had failed, too), some harmless shoptalk with Fritz whose notoriously boring company posed no danger to Elwin’s ambition to be asleep by ten-thirty at the latest. But then the sudden declaration: “Annette left me.” Followed by the questions: first from Fritz, “How do I deal with this?” then from the waiter, “Another bottle, gentlemen?”

  This marked the second time in a month that he’d been forced to play marriage counselor: On Halloween, his assistant Rochelle had barged into his office, sobbing, because her estranged husband had switched his Facebook relationship status from “Married” to “Single,” digitally squashing her hopes for a reunion. She’d been dressed like a witch that day, pointy hat, etc., and as she daubed her tears she piled tissue after tissue on his desk, diminishingly smudged with green pancake makeup. At one point, hoping to fish a tonic laugh out of her, Elwin said, “You’re melting,” but she’d just stared at him, with her lips puckered, sighing through her semi-green nose. The most helpful takeaway she gleaned from him was something like “things will work out,” which, aside from being banal, was probably untrue. It was, however, the best he could offer: to Rochelle, and then tonight, to Fritz. All Elwin could figure was that he was now considered the departmental expert on marital collapse, owing to his and Maura’s ongoing, downgoing separation. But this was absurd esteem—like saying the deer in the snowbank was now an expert on collisions.